I'm Craig Melvin,
and this is "Dateline:
Secrets Uncovered."
A beautiful woman
at the heart of
a generation-old mystery.
- I can still
hear them crying.
- A young mom torn between
her photographer husband
and her photographer lover
found dead in her own home.
- It was just
blood everywhere.
- But it would take years
before science could unlock
crucial DNA left
at the crime scene.
- It has a story to tell.
- And then, there was
this diary.
It, too, had
a story to tell.
- Everything she knew
about him was a lie.
- A husband under suspicion.
- You start getting
more convinced
that he was part
of that crime scene.
- A lover the subject
of speculation.
- All of a sudden,
he has a motive.
- After more than
a quarter century,
would this family
get justice?
**
- Hello, and welcome to
"Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
Kit Mordick was a young mom
launching a new career
when she was found
brutally murdered.
After decades
with no arrest,
hope of solving
the case faded.
What did not fade
were specs of DNA
found at the crime scene.
All these years later,
could it reveal the secret
to her killer's identity?
Here's Keith Morrison
with "Haunting Images."
- Boyd Underwood was back--
back here where
he always belonged.
He probably shouldn't have
retired in the first place,
born detective like Boyd.
Now the buzz cuts
and shark suits all around him
were a generation younger,
with their high-tech gear
and their fancy
new Anaheim P.D.,
but who else had
the experience
to make sense
of what was in here,
this room of lost causes,
so many cases gone cold,
justice denied?
Like this one,
the one about her.
Though, God knows back then
when they gave it to him,
it didn't look so hot.
- It was like, "We sure we're
gonna get involved in this?"
You know?
In hindsight,
I'm not sure that's the thing
I should have done.
- Maybe not, but then Boyd
opened that file,
and what a story
he found there
of the beautiful woman,
the curious lies,
and those strange books
with their long-ago,
private thoughts.
But was he obsessed?
Should he have let it
consume more than
a decade of his life,
follow him into
retirement?
The woman he found
in there was Katherine--
"Kit", as people called her,
and certainly,
to an idolizing little
sister named Donna,
she was something.
- Everywhere she went,
she was just this bright smile
that brought light
into a room,
and you just
gravitated towards her.
- Donna and Kit shared
just about everything.
- And she's just shining.
You know?
She's just gorgeous,
and she's just Kit,
and there's gawky
little Donna, you know?
And she's just--
"Come on. Let's go, kid.
"Let's go have fun."
- And then the fairytale.
It began in, well,
the happiest place on earth.
Isn't that what
they call it?
It was 1974.
Kit landed a job
at the "It's a Small World"
attraction at Disneyland.
It's where she met
who else?
Prince Charming.
- It seemed like a fairytale.
She was really happy.
And we were happy
for both of them.
- His name was
Gregory Mordick.
He was a foreman on
"It's a Small World,"
and he was gentle
and easy.
One of a kind,
really.
That he loved to cook
was not so unusual,
but he also loved sewing,
and she liked that,
liked it also
when he told her
about his college degree
and his service in Vietnam.
And so, the wedding
in 1977 was magic.
Kit was happy,
and before long, pregnant.
First with Elise,
then Brianna,
and then career.
Kit had studied
home economics,
and so launched her dream
to become a food stylist,
which means she
was the person
who'd make it all look
so wonderful in the ads.
- It's something I don't
have an eye for,
'cause all those corn kernels
look the same to me.
But when you're
a food stylist,
it's your job
to find the best.
- Was she good at it?
- Very. Very.
- Her sister Donna still has
food photographs
Kit designed before
some of Boyd Underwood's young
detective buddies were born.
These were published back
in the early '80s
by the "LA Times
Home Magazine."
And that's when the strange
story really began.
Maybe it was the fact she'd
been married four years.
Was she bored?
Or maybe it was
the close quarters,
the long hours
with the photographer of
the food she prepared.
There was an affair.
Kit was in love,
and she was Catholic
and consumed with guilt
and confessed it all
to her husband.
- She went to him and said,
"I've been with another man"?
- Yes, that night.
- The very night it happened?
- That's what she told me.
- Gregory seemed
prepared to forgive.
They both still swore they
cared deeply for each other,
but marriage
is tough enough for two.
there wasn't enough room
for three.
It was over.
That Christmas of 1982,
Kit's big brother
Joe O'Connell
saw how it was
with the new guy.
- It was obvious that they were
very happy with each other.
Very, very happy.
- His name was Henry,
had his own photography studio,
and Donna dropped by
one morning
when Kit was there.
- She was happy,
and she was in love
to someone that
treated her really good
and was in love with her.
They would have
made a great family.
- Kit was bursting
with plans,
announced that she was moving to
Los Angeles from Orange County
to be closer to
her food styling work.
And then that weekend.
It was January 1983.
Decades later,
what happened that weekend,
the mystery of it,
was in a file on
Boyd Underwood's desk,
and a family was
thinking back,
trying to piece together those
incomprehensible events
starting with
that first call.
- I called her at home.
It was slightly before
10 Saturday morning.
- Did she pick up?
- Nope.
You know, I didn't think
anything of it.
She's just gone for
the day already.
I missed her.
- She was supposed to come
on Saturday night,
and we didn't
hear from her.
She didn't come
and didn't call.
- Older brother Joe
remembers how he figured
she was just busy
with her move
from Anaheim up to LA.
No cause for alarm.
It wasn't until Sunday night
they decided to check on her.
So Joe says he
and Kit's boyfriend Henry
drove down to Anaheim
to Kit's house.
- There were no lights on in
the house that we could see.
So we started to walk away,
thinking everything is fine.
And then, as we turned to
leave and walk off the porch,
Henry just looked
into the garage.
We saw her car,
and that's when
panic started.
- It was a blur
from that point on.
Everything frantic then.
Joe wrapped his jacket
around his arm, he remembered,
getting ready to
punch his fist
through the window
off the porch.
He saw Henry
run around back,
and, within moments, heard it--
Henry's scream.
Henry had managed
to get into the house
through an unlocked
patio door.
He opened the front door.
Joe stepped inside
into a nightmare.
- I saw her lying there.
It was just blood
everywhere.
She was dead.
She was murdered.
- Coming up...
- Kit's brother and boyfriend
get grilled by police.
- Was he questioned closely?
- Oh, yeah, we both were.
**
- How violent was that scene?
- Her head was almost gone.
- The case was old and cold
when he found it.
But before long,
Detective Boyd Underwood
was sucked right into
the puzzling mystery
of what happened to the
beautiful young food stylist
back in January 1983.
Kit's brother, Joe O'Connell,
told Boyd about
finding her body,
about having to tell
their parents.
- One of the hardest things
I've ever done
was to call
my mom and dad
and tell her
what happened.
I can still hear
them crying.
- Joe remembered how,
having heard
not a peep from Kit that
weekend in 1983,
he and Kit's boyfriend Henry
drove through
the Sunday night dark
to check on her,
how they found her
in the dining room
lying in a pool
of her own blood.
Her throat
had been slashed.
She was nude from
the waist down.
- We were both crying,
both of us out of control.
- Maybe Kit's killer
was out of control too.
The place was a mess,
the TV haphazardly placed
near the front door,
the speakers
ripped from the walls,
a potted plant
fallen on the floor.
The chaotic scene, her skirt
and underwear pulled down
like somebody had
raped her, killed her,
started to burglarize
the house
and then left
before he was done.
But to the police back then,
it looked phony,
like things had
been staged somehow.
No sign of forced entry,
just the rear sliding door
slightly ajar.
The same entry,
by the way,
that Henry slipped through
to find her body.
Back then, at the end of
that weekend in January '83,
police set out right away
to interview people
in Kit's inner circle,
including Henry.
- Was he questioned closely?
- Oh, yeah, we both were.
- Of course, detectives also
called Gregory,
by then Kit's
estranged husband.
- I got a call that
Kitty was dead.
- More than a quarter century
later, he said,
the memory
still haunts him.
- I remember sitting
at the table shaking.
- Just shivering?
- Shivering, I was just upset.
- In a flash, says Gregory,
his whole world
flipped upside down
after that call.
As Kit's estranged husband,
he, too, was treated
as a person of interest,
of course.
And just like they did Henry,
police interviewed Gregory.
- He'd just seen Kit
that weekend,
he told police,
when he'd gone to her house
to fetch their daughters
for the weekend,
a moment that lives on
in his memory very clearly,
he told us.
- I got to the house about
10 o'clock in the morning
to pick them up for
a birthday party.
- He and Kit chatted
briefly, he said,
and while the girls finished
getting ready,
Gregory remembered going
back and forth from the house,
loading up his VW Bug with
presents for the birthday party
along with the girls' car seats
and overnight bags.
- I got to the car,
rearranged things a little bit,
put them in, made sure
the gate was closed,
drove off,
and went to a party.
- By the time Gregory had
his chat with detectives,
the autopsy report
had come in,
and it pretty much
eliminated him
as a viable suspect.
It said Kit was killed
during PM hours on Saturday.
Gregory had already
taken the girls
to a birthday party
by then.
So if not Gregory,
then who?
Police wanted to know
if Gregory had seen
anything unusual that day.
Could somebody
have been lurking,
waiting for him
to drive off?
- They'd made an agreement
about that
after they separated,
said Gregory.
- Police poked around
the crime scene.
All they gleaned was
it looked somehow staged,
but no physical evidence
to point
who would have wanted
to misdirect the police.
Oh, except there was
this one curious thing--
a letter in
her handwriting,
and the intended
recipient
was sitting right
in front of them.
- Coming up...
- There was more
than just a letter
that might provide
a clue in this case.
There was a diary, too.
- Everything she knew
about him was a lie.
**
- Looking back
on it now,
with the benefit
of 21st century technology,
cold case Detective
Boyd Underwood
could see the murder of that
beautiful young mother
in Anaheim Hills,
California
could quite possibly
have been solved.
After all, there was blood
all over the crime scene.
Probably, that blood
had a story to tell.
But back in
the winter of '83,
DNA was still science fiction,
so the cops back then
worked the few leads
they did have,
the sort of thing
that might, they hoped,
produce some circumstantial
evidence of something,
like the unopened letter
lying on the dining room table.
Kit Mordick had written it
to her estranged husband.
"I'm ready to go forward,"
the letter says.
"I don't want to be
disgruntled or angry.
"I want you to know
I forgive you for everything
"and ask your forgiveness
"for the very deep pain
I put you though".
So pain, forgiveness.
But for what?
Gregory himself offered
one possible answer.
His dream while
they were married--
Kit's, too, he said--
was to launch a business,
food photography.
She would prep it.
He, an aspiring photographer,
would shoot it.
- It would have been
an easy home-based business.
- Why wasn't it?
- Well, she decided
to go out
before I was ready,
And that's when
she met Henry and started
doing food photography
for-for him.
- Ah, yes, Henry,
that other photographer.
So she did exactly
what you wanted to do,
only she did it
with a different guy.
- Yeah.
- And then you two
would work together.
- We'd work together.
- But that never happened.
- It never happened.
- It never happened because,
well, you already know
the other thing that happened,
the affair with Henry,
the guilt,
Kit's confession.
Gregory wrote about it
in his diary.
This is from
August 31, 1981.
"Kit had an affair
with Henry.
"The act has not
diminished my love
"or devotion
to her one bit.
"I'm truly in love
with a special person.
"I find myself
surprisingly acceptable
"to this whole situation.
"Now let's get on with
our love and life
"and anyone
who will join us,
"as long as the joiner
does not try to hurt
"what Kit and I have."
It was like you were
kind of accepting the idea
that there'd be two men
in this relationship.
- You know, it wasn't
so much accepting
as it was going,
all right, this happened.
She's a wonderful person.
I could see why somebody
would be attracted to her,
but we could move on.
- But?
- Then we moved on,
but separately.
- Separately
because of Henry,
but also because
of that diary.
Kit's sister Donna
knew Gregory kept one.
She recalled asking
Kit about it.
- And I remember for years,
"Why don't you ever read it?"
And she said,
"Oh, no, that's his.
"You know, that's
his private work."
- But there it was,
and temptation won.
Gregory was out of town.
Kit read
those private pages
and discovered the man
she was married to
had lied to her.
Whopping lies about
graduating from college,
about serving in Vietnam.
Now any thought of saving
the marriage was done,
and caught in his lies,
Gregory took refuge
in his diary.
This is what he wrote
on September 8th, 1982.
"All of my deceptions
have come to light.
"No service in Vietnam,
"did not graduate
from college,
"and a few more to cover
an escape route
"from this relationship."
Why would you have
said those things?
- Again, it goes back to
this guy who liked to sew,
who didn't fit in
at Disneyland very well,
wasn't invited
to the parties.
So I decided to embellish
my life a little bit,
and all of a sudden,
people liked me.
- But there was more.
As Kit read
her husband's diary,
she discovered
a list of women's names.
Were these women
he had slept with?
Gregory denied it,
said these were the names
of women he admired.
He'd never slept
with any of them, but...
- How do you read
someone's diary and you go,
everything she knew
about him was a lie?
- Months later,
Kit filed for divorce.
And so, when she
was murdered,
just six days before the divorce
was to be finalized,
it wasn't long before her family
pointed a finger at Gregory.
But the police just didn't have
enough evidence to arrest him.
- Somebody left that house
with a lot of blood on them,
and here I leave the house
and go straight
to a birthday party.
It's not like I
disappeared for hours.
- And you're saying you had
no blood on you
because people
would have seen it?
- No blood, no cuts.
- These are pictures
from that birthday party.
The man at the edge
of the picture there
in the red plaid
is Gregory.
The host of the party said
Gregory was one of the first
guests to arrive
and was his normal
helpful, happy self.
Still, in the weeks
and months that followed,
the suspicion took its toll
and Gregory finally moved.
He left Southern California
for Spokane, Washington,
with his girls, naturally.
And gradually,
the investigation petered out.
The case went cold.
But as the years passed,
the O'Connells
relinquished hope
that there would ever
be justice for Kit,
which, of course,
is where Boyd Underwood
entered the story,
snooping through
that old dead file,
those forgotten
private lives.
If he just dug
a little deeper,
what secrets might he find?
- Kit's cold case
is about to heat up
as old evidence
plus new science
starts to yield some clues.
- Coming up...
- All of that
taken together
would certainly ratchet it up,
the case against him.
- On the sliding door,
there was a mixture
of her blood and his blood.
You start getting
more convinced
that he was part
of that crime scene.
**
- Welcome back to
"Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
It's been said that time
heals all wounds.
Not so for the family
of Kit Mordick,
whose 1983 murder
remained unsolved
more than a decade later.
Time, however, would
prove more helpful
to investigators.
New DNA technology was
about to reveal secrets
from the crime scene.
Here's Keith Morrison
with "Haunting Images".
- Gregory Mordick
wanted a fresh start.
He was now the single father
of two small daughters.
And bringing them up among
suspicious in-laws
in the town where
their mother was murdered
was increasingly
unappealing.
So Gregory set up house
here in Eastern Washington
in a middle-class home
in Spokane,
and he went about
organizing a normal life.
He was, it is generally
agreed, an excellent father
to his two little girls.
- They had security.
They had a parent that was
very involved in their life.
- And for himself,
Gregory went back
to his first love,
taking pictures.
He set up a studio
in downtown Spokane,
Photography by Gregory,
and Kit's dreadful death,
a thousand miles south
in California,
faded into history,
except for a family,
Kit's family,
convinced, right or wrong,
that her killer was,
in fact, Gregory.
They had, after all,
witnessed the shouting
and shoving matches,
the acrimony that preceded
the breakup and the murder.
- By 1985, pretty much
we-we knew
that he'd gotten
away with it.
- Did you ever give up
on the idea
that someday
there would be justice?
- Sure.
In this world, I did.
- It was 1999, long after
the family had given up,
when Boyd Underwood
came along.
- One of the, uh,
administrators asked me
if I would look at
this case in particular.
- And if anyone could break
the case, maybe Boyd could.
Anaheim cop since 1964.
Rose up the ranks
to homicide detective.
Was even assigned
to protect President Nixon
on a visit during
the '68 campaign.
He'd heard about Kit's murder
back in 1983, but by then,
he'd gone to work at
the D.A.'s office
where he retired in '95.
So what was he doing
snooping around this old file
years later in 1999?
Simple, Boyd wasn't
the retiring type.
He came back to work
in a new unit
in the Orange County
D.A.'s office.
Trackers, they called it.
Its mission?
Revisit cold cases
and close them.
Here he was, the last
faint chance for justice.
It would probably
go nowhere.
But then something
caught his attention.
A piece of evidence found
back in 1983 in Kit's closet.
A plastic bag.
- The criminalists
at that time
just identified the evidence
on the plastic bag
as being human blood.
It was not the same type
of blood from the victim.
- In fact, in the early '80s,
that's all science
could tell them,
that the blood on the bag
was a different type
than the victim's.
Bit silently, patiently,
that DNA waited.
And in 1999, it was
a whole new scientific world.
- Back in '83, they had
obtained a blood sample
from the husband.
We got a match.
That was his blood that was
found on this plastic bag.
- Inside a closet.
- Inside the closet.
- Though, of course,
that was also Gregory's closet
for more than four years.
He'd only been out of
the place a couple of months.
Boyd decided to have
all the evidence retested.
And now, Gregory's DNA
turned up in several places.
A tiny spot on
the closet doorknob,
on a rear
sliding glass door,
and in a powder room sink.
But the amount was minuscule,
so perhaps it meant nothing.
Gregory could have
left it there
when he lived
in the house, except...
- The bathroom sink
had her blood
and his DNA mixed.
On the sliding door,
there was a mixture
of her blood and his blood.
You start getting
more convinced that, um,
he was part
of that crime scene.
- Then Boyd listened to
the old police interviews
from 1983
and something jumped out.
On the day Gregory saw Kit
and picked up his girls,
he said, he'd put them
in their car seats
then gone back
toward the house
to close the front gate.
And when he returned to
the car, he told detectives,
his elder daughter
asked him a question.
- I'm thinking,
why would he want
to put that in there?
- Remember, Gregory had
said he never went
back into the house
after strapping the girls
into the car.
But if his daughter complained
he was gone too long,
maybe he did go
in there
and took the time
to kill Kit.
All-in-all, decided Boyd,
there was
enough evidence by 2001
to warrant a little visit
with Gregory up in Spokane.
- And he was, as he
had been years earlier,
perfectly cooperative.
He even let them search
through his house.
So, Boyd and colleagues
offered Gregory
a chance to confess.
- But Boyd didn't charge him.
Couldn't.
Because the prosecutor
told him
he just didn't have enough
to make a case.
The interview and search
did produce a few old diaries.
Gregory had never
thrown them away.
But it wasn't enough.
- Did you think about
just giving up on it?
- No.
- There was something there.
- I've always thought so.
- Yeah.
- I don't think I could
ever give up on her.
- And then, summer of 2007,
Boyd was grousing
to one of the young guys
he felt like he had a case
but how could he sell it
to the D.A.'s office.
And, well, Boyd's been
around for a long time.
More than DNA science
has changed.
- I was working with a fellow,
I call them Propeller Heads,
because they're
sort of computer, uh--
they're a step or two
ahead of me anyway.
So, he suggested why don't
you do a PowerPoint.
And I said,
what is a PowerPoint?
- He learned fast,
and finally,
the evidence assembled
in that Power Point
presentation,
bits of Gregory's blood
in the house,
his and Kit's DNA mixed
on that rear slider
and the bathroom sink,
and Gregory's diaries
persuaded the D.A.
Still, to solidify their case,
it might be wise,
the D.A. decided,
for Boyd to pay Gregory
one last visit in Spokane,
see if he could turn up
some fresh evidence,
perhaps, with luck, to puncture
Gregory's consistent denial
that he'd gone
back into the house
after putting
their little girls in the car
that long ago
Saturday morning.
So, in 2008,
25 years after the murder,
Boyd took one last shot.
Two colleagues
conducted the interview
and used an old,
if unlovely, tactic,
perfectly legal, mind you.
They told Gregory a lie.
It was, in more polite
parlance, a ruse.
- The detective told
Gregory that his DNA
had been found on
the waistband of Kit's tights.
He pushed Gregory to explain,
how could it have gotten there?
Remember, it wasn't true.
His DNA wasn't found
on her clothes.
But listen
to what Gregory says.
- And you heard it,
Gregory changed his story.
Just enough.
he put himself in
the murder scene,
alone with Kit.
And with that,
a quarter century
after the murder
of his estranged wife,
Gregory Mordick
was arrested and charged
with first-degree murder.
Boyd called
Kit's brother Joe.
- I think he said
we've arrested him
and I didn't know
what for.
Honestly.
Remember, I'd given up.
Why did you arrest him?
- Why, indeed?
DNA from an uncertain time,
a few ambiguous comments
in a private diary,
and a cop's trick
that produced
a slightly edited story.
Was it anywhere
near enough?
Maybe not.
- Coming up...
- I don't remember
closing the door.
So, um, if that's
how far I closed it,
that's how far
I closed it.
- The focus was
about to fall
on the other man
in Kit's life.
- If the relationship
wasn't working out
and he was
going to lose her,
all of a sudden,
he has a motive.
**
- 26 years later,
here he was,
older, grayer,
so hard of hearing
he wore earpieces
in court,
Gregory Mordick,
mild-mannered photographer,
sat at the defense table
and listened
to the prosecution
accuse him of murdering
the lovely young wife
who'd rejected him.
But was this
going to be easy?
No, it wasn't.
- I was just convinced
by the evidence
that this case
was provable.
- Dan Wagner was the prosecutor
assigned to the case.
He believed in it,
mostly because he believed
in science and the DNA.
- It just waits
in the locker room
in the dark, waiting.
And, you know,
this modern technology
brought it out
and it has a story to tell.
- Here's what he
showed the jury.
Tiny drops of Gregory's blood
on a closet doorknob,
on this plastic bag
found inside the closet,
a mixture of Gregory's DNA
and Kit's blood
on a rear sliding door.
And the piece-de-resistance,
the one piece of evidence
that, according
to the prosecutor,
inextricably linked Gregory
to the murder.
It came out of the bowl
of a bathroom sink,
Kit's blood mixed
with Gregory's DNA.
- Given the separation,
that he hadn't been living
in the house for months,
there's no innocent explanation
for his DNA remain
on that particular spot
on the sink.
- Then the medical examiner
who performed Kit's autopsy
all those years go
took the stand,
the very one who signed off
on the autopsy report
that said Kit was killed
during PM hours.
Now, a quarter-century later,
he told the jury,
he'd reexamined his report
and decided it was possible
Kit was killed
as early as 10 a.m.
when Gregory
was at the house.
And as for motive,
there were these diaries,
the ones obtained by
Detective Boyd Underwood.
- When I first saw them,
they were, uh, downstairs
in what I would call
a storage room.
- Boyd sat
in the witness stand
as Prosecutor Wagner read
through Gregory's diary,
painting a picture
of a rejected man
who seemed tormented
by the possibility
he'd lose his children
in the divorce.
- The hardest part is
saying goodbye to my girls,
not tucking them in.
This will be devastating.
This is almost incapacitating.
- The diaries were important.
They gave us some insight
into the defendant's mind,
uh, particularly how
he was, uh, very attached
to his daughters,
more so than, uh,
the average parent, let's say.
- But there was more
in those diaries,
said the prosecution.
Gregory confessed
in this private place
that there had been violence
in that marriage breakup,
the last incident only weeks
before Kit was killed.
- Goodbye, Kitty.
Kitty and I had
a fight this evening.
She struck me, I lost
my temper and struck back.
- Then there was
that police interview
in which, reacting
to a planted police lie,
Gregory appeared to admit
he was in the house
with Kit alone
on the day of the murder.
So, said the prosecution,
opportunity, motive, and DNA
all pointed to Gregory
as the murderer.
But was that
evidence enough?
- When you get into the details,
uh, it becomes--
then you see all the problems
that were there.
- Not nearly enough, said
Defense Attorney Jack Early.
That vaunted DNA sample
of Gregory's blood,
police had a little
storage problem with that.
- When did you discover
that, uh, Mr. Mordick's
vial of blood
had broken in, uh,
the evidence room
and spilled on other items?
- I don't think I was
aware of that
until maybe 1999 or 2000.
- Gregory's blood sample
had leaked
onto some of
the evidence packaging
and that, said the defense,
hopelessly compromised
the integrity of the DNA.
Besides, hadn't Gregory lived
with Kit almost five years?
Of course, his DNA
would be in the house,
said the defense.
And would have mixed
with his wife's.
But one place Gregory's DNA
was not found,
said the defense, was anywhere
on Kit's body or clothes,
something you'd
expect to find
if he'd slit her throat
and pulled off her clothes.
Besides, said the woman
who threw that birthday party
Gregory went to
after seeing Kit,
he certainly didn't look like
he'd just killed someone.
- Now, when he was there,
did you notice
any injuries
to Mr. Mordick?
- No.
- Did you notice,
uh, if he had any blood
on him in any manner?
- Oh, my goodness, no.
- Did he-- was there
anything unusual
about him at the party?
- No, not at all.
- But if not Gregory,
then who was the killer?
Well, wait for it.
Through this testimony,
the defense made
a stunning implication.
- Did she tell you that
things weren't working out
with someone named Henry?
- Um, I believe
that she indicated
that there were
some problems with him, yes.
- Henry?
The man Kit left
Gregory for?
What motive could he
possibly have had?
Well now, the implication
got much bigger.
- Well, if the relationship
wasn't working out
and he was gonna lose her,
all of a sudden,
he has a motive.
And it's very important
that he moves onto Donna,
the new sister,
shortly afterwards.
- Well, yes,
it's true, at least,
that Henry
and Kit's sister Donna
did fall in love
after the murder.
Donna wrestled
with her emotions
in the beginning,
she said.
- I don't deserve this,
you know?
You're my sister's guy.
You know, this is weird,
but it's not.
Because when it's him and I,
it's normal.
- They married a year
after Kit's murder.
The defense saw
an opportunity and pounced.
Remember that
rear sliding door
that Henry went through
to find Kit's body?
Henry had left the door
slightly ajar,
the same way the killer had,
the defense pointed out.
- Let me ask you, do you
only partially close doors
when you go through them?
- I don't remember
closing the door.
So, um, if that's
how far I closed it,
that's how far I closed it.
- There is as much evidence,
as much things about Henry
as there is about Greg
that don't make sense.
- Ludicrous,
said the prosecutor,
and pointed out Henry
had an alibi anyway.
He was a two-hour drive
away in San Diego
the day of the murder.
So, now the defense
played its final card,
Gregory Mordick himself.
- Did you kill your wife?
- No.
- Why put Gregory
on the stand?
One main reason,
to answer for
that final police interview
when he'd reacted
to that ruse
by appearing
to change his story
about going back
into Kit's house
after he picked up his kids
the day of the murder.
- After you put Bree in
and went and closed the gate,
did you ever go
back into the house?
- No.
- What did you think
when they told you
about your DNA being
found on her clothes?
- I was going,
there's no way.
I didn't touch Kitty
that morning.
- He was shocked, confused
by the detectives' ruse,
the defense told the jury.
But what about those diaries,
asked Prosecutor Wagner
in his cross examination.
The diaries
that seemed to outline
a real motive for murder.
- And you-you wrote
at various times
that it was almost
more than you could bear
thinking about
that separation?
- I'm-I'm sorry
I wrote that down.
- Why?
- Because it's come
to bite-bite me now
instead of being
true feelings at the time.
You're trying to
make it bite me.
- He might never
had been charged
had he just thrown
those diaries away.
- Why did you keep them?
- There's nothing in there
except my history,
our history together.
What was to be thrown away?
- Well, what they did
was they looked back
and said, look,
he-he was involved
in these violent incidents.
And, in fact,
he even admitted
that he was violent
in his diary,
so he must have been
violent enough to kill her.
- Yes, yes,
and Kitty started--
And Kitty started every one
of them, unfortunately.
I got tired of being hit
so, I grabbed her arms.
And I'm the bad guy.
- Well, was he?
After nearly a month
of testimony
and 26 years
since Kit's murder,
the jury retired.
And guilty or not?
Hard call.
- Coming up...
The jury returns.
And to the prosecution,
it...
- Was just like a gut punch.
All the wind went out.
**
- In the fall of 2009,
a jury in
Santa Ana, California, puzzled
over the case of
photographer Gregory Mordick,
charged with killing
the wife who'd left him
more than
a quarter century earlier.
The case was largely
circumstantial,
a smidgen of possibly
tainted DNA,
a story that seemed
to change,
and those sad,
possibly desperate scribbles
in a private diary.
In a hallway
outside the courtroom,
Kit's family paced
nervously.
Her little sister Donna
held out hope.
- Oh, there's no way
that there's anything.
They'll be back
in a few minutes.
- In fact, it was days.
But the jury did come back.
Family members
braced themselves, and...
- My understanding is
that, uh, the jurors
are, at this point
in time, hung.
Is that right?
- That's correct.
- They were hung.
Not just hung,
split six to six.
- Six to six was just a--
like a gut punch.
All the wind went out.
- He recovered his poise,
told the judge
he'd try Mordick again.
- I was attached
to the victim's family.
Uh, in some respect, I felt
a certain duty, um, to them.
- And them September 2010,
the O'Connells
filed into court.
Prosecutor Wagner
stuck to the science,
Gregory's DNA in the house.
How could his DNA be present
when he hadn't lived
in the home
for more than two months?
- I lived there for 4.5 years.
- Yeah, but you'd
been away for months.
- For two months.
Two months to eradicate
all your DNA?
- But if she--
- A few months--
- If she cleans up
the house once in a while,
yeah, it probably would.
Did she?
- Kitty was a terrible
house cleaner.
Even the police said
they'd never seen
such a filthy house.
- The defense, it turned out,
had been busy.
It had retested
the blood evidence
on that rear sliding door,
the one that showed
a mixture of Kit's blood
and Gregory's DNA.
And the result was
quite stunning.
Gregory and his daughters shared
an identical blood protein.
- We were very excited
because we were hoping just one.
And as-as it ends up,
both daughters had that.
- So, it was impossible,
Defense Attorney Jack Early
said, to be absolutely certain
it was only a mixture
of Gregory's DNA
in Kit's blood
on that slider.
It could have been a mixture
of the entire family
piled on over the years.
And then, after weeks
of testimony,
another jury
left the courtroom
and the waiting began again.
- Based on the results
of the first trial,
I didn't have the same sense
of confidence the second time.
- Gregory, however,
was confident
as Thanksgiving weekend
approached.
- And everybody was going,
hey, we'll see you
over the weekend.
- Then, after two days,
the jury rang the bailiff.
- We, the jury in
the above-entitled action
find the defendant
William Gregory Mordick
guilty of murder
in the first degree.
- And Gregory,
before the shock set in,
thought he'd simply
heard it wrong.
- And I just couldn't believe
I didn't hear the word "not".
I kept on looking at
the court clerk going,
there's a word missing.
- But when Prosecutor Dan Wagner
finally heard those words...
- It's a rush.
It's a relief.
Um, think about
the people behind you,
what they had been through,
how this much--
what this will mean to them.
Um, justice for the victim.
- At the sentencing hearing,
Kit's family pronounced
the words they'd stored up
nearly 28 years.
- There's a hole
in our lives,
a hole left by this murder.
- I wish her children
had an idea
of what they've missed out on
in their life.
- Oh, but they do,
said Gregory in reply.
They all do.
- The O'Connell family
thinks they're the only one
who has missed Kitty,
and that's not true.
She is missed by
my family, myself,
my two beautiful daughters.
- Daughters who,
throughout it all,
have been staunch defenders
of their father.
In court, the elder
of the two spoke
for both her parents.
- My family and now--
I have now been sentenced
to another 25 years
of pain and agony.
I miss my mother very much,
but it's not fair that
my father's being taken away.
- For a long time.
The sentence,
25 years to life.
While he sat in jail
waiting to be transferred
to a new prison life,
I asked him
about his daughters.
And Gregory said...
- At least I've got
their love.
- And Kit's family?
What do they have?
- I think she's in my soul.
Even though she's
not here physically,
she's with us.
- And finally,
one determined Detective
officially retired again.
This case, for him,
was, well...
- Very emotional.
- Was it worth all that time
you put on this thing?
- Oh, yeah.
Sure.
- The case Boyd Underwood
came back for.
The case of his life
is closed.
- That's all for this edition of
"Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Thank you for watching.