I was just listening to the radio,
and apparently, they found a girl
by the side of the road.
It was the impression of the most experienced officer on the scene
from the get go that it was not a hit and run.
The jacket that she was wearing had no blood on it.
[Jason] It appeared to have been
maybe placed on her after whatever happened to Laura.
There was no way in the world
that Laura would leave Samson
and go off in the middle of the night.
[man 1] It's hard to describe it.
It was just completely shockingly evil
that a person would do this.
I just couldn't comprehend that two people were dead.
My heart stopped.
My whole world froze.
One of the things that an investigator needs to ask,
"Okay, who benefits from this murder?"
[narrator] October 26, 1996,
Kahoka, Missouri,
a small city in the northeastern corner of the state
not far from the Iowa and Illinois borders,
a young mother is left for dead
on the side of a road in the middle of the night.
[Bruce] Somebody done something to her.
They killed her.
[narrator] The tragedy triggers a desperate search for her killer
and leaves a heartbroken family
struggling for answers for decades.
This case won't be solved until somebody decides to talk.
I think it's unfortunate that 25 years later,
we don't know more about what didn't happen as well as what did happen.
I wouldn't rule out anything in this case
because there isn't anything that explains all the facts.
[narrator] Born in 1975,
Laura Van Wyhe is a brilliant young person
who loves life and excels at just about anything she puts her mind to.
When Laura was a child, she was very exuberant.
She had her hands in just about everything.
She loved animals. She loved dance, theater.
Laura was extremely unique.
She had her own sense of everything.
She was very funny and had a goofy sense of humor as well.
[narrator] Growing up in Iowa City, Iowa.
Laura's intelligence sets her apart at a young age.
Her standardized testing was beyond belief.
She was just off the charts,
and she just wasn't made
for the usual grind of...
of study.
[narrator] Feeling unchallenged by high school,
Laura drops out and gets her GED,
achieving the highest score in Iowa State history.
She moves in with her sister
and soon starts dating a man named Donnie Knight.
I guess she was probably 17 or 18,
and they had a pretty whirlwind romance.
At some point, they ran off to California together
and then Hawaii for a while.
[narrator] Laura and Donnie relationship is bumpy,
but they keep getting back together.
At 19, she becomes pregnant.
Her relationship with Donnie wasn't very stable at that point,
but she really wanted to have the baby.
And... and she did.
[narrator] In 1995, she has a son named Samson.
She was so over the moon about Samson when he was born.
She was the most devoted mother
that you could ever imagine.
[narrator] Soon after Sampson is born,
Laura and Donnie's relationship ends,
seemingly for the last time.
Laura moves in with her mother in Iowa City.
In the fall of 1996,
Laura celebrates her 21st birthday.
A few days later, on October 25th,
her ex-boyfriend, Donnie's family
throws a party at their home in Bonaparte, Iowa.
So Donnie picks up Laura at her mother's house in the afternoon,
and they drive to Bonaparte.
[narrator] They arrive at Donnie's parents' home around 7:30 p.m.
Shortly after 11:00,
Laura and her 14-month-old son leave with Donnie's sister
and brother-in-law Sarah and Tony Bergman
to spend the night at their trailer in nearby Kahoka.
They got to the trailer in Kahoka,
and they decided to set up a bed on the floor of the trailer
for Laura to sleep in with Samson and their older daughter.
Tony goes to bed.
Sarah says she stays up with Laura
for about half an hour and then she goes to bed.
[narrator] When Sarah gets up at 6:50 the next morning,
Laura is gone.
She comes out to the living room of the trailer,
and she sees, first of all, no Laura.
And she does see Samson,
and she describes quite vividly
Samson's naked bottom.
Samson's not wearing a diaper.
[Anne] Sarah stays behind and gets the kids ready
while Tony goes to try to track down Laura.
So he goes to Ayerco, which is a convenience store gas station
a few blocks from their house.
And he asks if anybody's seen Laura, no one has.
He goes to his parents' house
and a cousin of his is over at the house and tells him,
"Hey, I was just listening to the radio
and apparently they found a girl by the side of the road."
[narrator] The girl is spotted on a local highway
at 1:50 a.m. by a trucker
who notices something strange on the side of the road.
He stops and dials 911.
Police arrive at 2:00 a.m.
and find a woman lying on her side unresponsive
but still alive.
Emergency responders rush her to the hospital,
but she dies 3 hours later.
When Tony gets to the police station at 9:00 that morning,
he sees a full description of the victim.
And what jumps out at him about this description
is that it describes a black satin jacket
with Mike Sanders Masonry written on the back.
Tony knows immediately that that's his jacket and says,
"I think the person you found is Laura Van Wyhe."
[narrator] Tony tells police
that the jacket had been hanging in his closet the day before.
He and Sarah head straight to the morgue
to identify the body.
It's Laura.
Samson's father Donnie drives to Iowa City later that morning
to deliver the devastating news to Laura's mother.
When he walked in...
I said, "What's wrong?"
And he said, just flat out, "Laura is dead."
And my reaction was, "That's impossible.
I had just seen her and now she's dead?"
You know, my mind could not accept that.
[narrator] It appears she's been hit by a vehicle,
given where she's found.
But from the beginning, officers sense something is off.
It was the impression of the most experienced officer on the scene
from the get go that it was not a hit and run.
[Leanne] The officer immediately told me
that something was very wrong about this,
that there was...
a...
mystery.
[Bruce] The scene didn't look like
what we would call a typical traffic accident.
There was no debris, whether it be vehicle debris
or parts of the body along the roadway whatsoever.
[narrator] One of the first things police notice
is that Laura is wearing an extra layer of clothing over her own.
So she's wearing size 16 burgundy sweatpants,
which I don't think those were hers.
And this black satin jacket, which we know isn't hers.
She's found with her left hand,
lightly grasping a bottle, a sip-top bottle.
There's a baby blanket stuffed under her jacket.
There is also a folded paper plate with rice on it.
And then in her right jacket pocket,
Laura was left-handed, but in her right pocket,
there is an open pocketknife.
[narrator] As police try to make sense of the strange scene,
they received some potential leads from the public.
A mechanic in another town
calls the police and says,
"I've got a car here that looks like it hit a person.
There's blood on it. Its fender's all dented up."
[narrator] But investigators quickly determined the driver hit a deer.
Then a tip comes in from a hospital worker about a patient
who visited the emergency room the morning Laura died.
The owner of a local radio station,
he shows up in the emergency room
with a serious stab wound in his leg.
The doctors stitch him up,
but the police, knowing that Laura had a knife in her pocket
at the time she was found,
are clearly quite interested in this.
[narrator] Police interview him.
But it's another dead end.
Turned out to be just a coincidence.
But it's a coincidence that takes up a lot of law enforcement time.
[narrator] Meanwhile, an autopsy reveals
the brutal extent of Laura's injuries.
The autopsy did find that
she had died of blunt force trauma to the head and legs and massive blood loss.
[narrator] Investigators are stumped.
If Laura lost so much blood, where is it?
The jacket that she was wearing had no blood on it.
We actually checked the scene
for a quarter mile each way from where Laura was lying.
I can tell you, she never lost a lot of blood along that highway whatsoever.
[narrator] Her clothing doesn't appear to be scraped or dirty,
including the black satin jacket.
Had she been struck by a vehicle and knocked to the ground,
there would have been abrasions on the jacket.
There was none found.
It appeared to have been maybe placed on her...
after whatever happened to Laura occurred.
[narrator] The evidence leads law enforcement
to a chilling conclusion.
It did not appear that her injuries occurred at that scene whatsoever.
[narrator] Police are now investigating the case as a homicide.
They comb the area
near where Laura Van Wyhe's body was found for more clues.
Next to her body, they find a branch from a cocklebur bush.
And burs are found in one of the pockets of her jacket
and on her waistband.
It's determined that the branch comes from a cornfield
on the other side of the highway,
but they find no evidence of blood there either.
Investigators slowly widen their search
and another unusual clue turns up on the property
next to Tony and Sarah Bergman's trailer.
A bag of hers is found in a tree,
and that bag has more baby items in it,
some of her clothes in it.
[narrator] Everyone is left wondering
if Laura placed that bag there herself when she left the trailer.
But the biggest question
is why she left in the middle of the night
in the first place.
Tony and Sarah both speculate
that perhaps Laura had left to go buy diapers.
[narrator] But Laura's loved ones are doubtful.
The Bergmans had a one-year-old themselves, Sidney.
So if Laura had needed a diaper, especially around midnight,
I think that her first resort
would have been to take a diaper from Sidney.
[narrator] The investigation soon shifts focus
to that small party at Donnie's parent's home
the night before Laura disappeared.
That's when investigators learn about an argument
Laura had with a friend of Donnie's mother.
And when Laura sees this man on the front porch,
she gets very animated,
and she accuses him loudly of having raped a friend of hers in Iowa City.
Donnie comes out, Donnie's mother comes out.
They sort of separate the two.
And the friend of Donnie's mother
who was being accused of rape essentially says, "I don't need this."
And he walks away.
[narrator] Minutes later, Laura leaves with Tony and Sarah
to spend the night in their trailer in Kahoka.
Investigators look into the possibility
that this man tracked Laura down after the party.
They receive a tip about a woman wearing a black jacket
who was seen walking on a Kahoka sidewalk just after midnight.
[Anne] And a car was following her.
And a woman yelled out, from the car,
some curse words at the woman walking.
[narrator] If this encounter has anything
to do with Laura and the man she confronted at the party,
police never make the connection.
It's hard to connect the dots
between this person and Laura in a trailer in Kahoka.
He somehow has to get her out of the trailer
without Tony or Sarah knowing.
It seems completely implausible
that Laura would just quietly slip out of the trailer
with somebody a few hours
before she'd been yelling at and accusing of rape.
[narrator] Investigators turn their attention
to the one person they theorize
could persuade Laura to step outside.
It's the same person Laura's loved ones say has been violent
with her in the past, her ex-boyfriend Donnie.
[Anne] I saw Laura in August.
At the time I talked to her,
she was very resolute that they were broken up.
She was adamant that her child would not grow up
in any sort of atmosphere of domestic violence.
There's no direct evidence
that Donnie left the house in Bonaparte.
There's no direct evidence
that Donnie went to Kahoka that night.
And frankly, there's not even much circumstantial evidence.
[narrator] With every new theory they chase,
investigators hit more brick walls,
including when they look into a rumor
that Laura got drunk at the party.
So one possible theory is that she was inebriated
and she went for a walk and got lost.
As part of the medical examiner's report
is they do a toxicology test.
She has no alcohol in her system,
she has no marijuana, no other drugs.
Given what I knew about Laura at that time,
that doesn't surprise me.
She was still breastfeeding. She was a total Earth mother.
[narrator] Weeks go by and investigators struggle to piece together
what little they know.
They discover footprints in the field
with cocklebur bush
that appear to be a match for Laura's shoes.
They theorize she left the trailer
and walked into that field,
which is situated in between the highway and the Bergman's trailer.
What they don't know is if she brought Samson with her.
The family has no doubt.
There was no way in the world
that Laura would leave Samson naked
on the floor of their trailer
and go off in the middle of the night.
There was no way that that baby was alone
in that trailer from midnight
to 7:00 in the morning
without crying for his mother, crying to be fed.
It seems much more likely that
Laura left the trailer with Samson,
which means somebody had to bring Samson back to the trailer.
[narrator] That leads investigators
back to the only people they know for sure
could get inside that trailer.
Her ex-boyfriend's sister and brother-in-law,
Sarah and Tony Bergman.
On the morning that I interviewed both Tony and Sarah Bergman,
I thought they were not completely truthful with me
during those interviews.
So they knew more than they were saying.
There are key parts of their story
that are inconsistent over time,
including what Laura is wearing.
Did Laura have her bags or didn't she have her bags?
People are inconsistent all the time.
But I think there are certain things
that do get burned into our brains
because of an event that happens.
[narrator] The Bergmans refuse to take a polygraph,
but investigators can find nothing to tie them to Laura's death.
You would think that they would reach out to me
and give me some sort of personal condolence,
but all they did was they said a few words at her memorial
and never, ever contacted me.
You know, supposedly, she's one of their own
and she's my daughter.
You would think they could even send a card.
Nothing.
[narrator] Within months of Laura's death,
the case goes cold.
For many years,
I could not speak about this.
It took seven years after her death
before I could even mention it to anyone.
[narrator] In 2008,
12 years after Laura was killed,
there's a stunning development.
[Jason] A judge in Missouri gets a letter from an inmate.
He says that he has information about Laura's case.
And he says, "I know that a woman was found by the side of the road.
I have information about that case."
And then he says, "Don't reveal who I am because I'll be killed."
That informant observed a confrontation between two men and a woman,
and that during that conversation
he heard the woman
accuse one of the men of rape.
We know Laura did make an accusation like that that evening.
[narrator] According to the inmate,
these two men are the ones who killed Laura.
The informant's story changes slightly with each telling,
and it can't be corroborated.
But there is one detail
that makes law enforcement pay close attention.
And he says one of the men has a hand injury of some kind.
He has a large bandage on his hand and he's bleeding.
This prompts law enforcement
to go back to the evidence locker
where they still have Laura's clothes
to see if there's a sign of anybody else's blood on her clothes.
And lo and behold, they find somebody else's blood.
[narrator] This discovery gives new hope
to Laura's friends and family
that the agonizing mystery of her death
can finally be solved.
They do a DNA lab test
and initially back in 2008,
what they could determine is that it's human blood
and that it's from a man.
[narrator] Investigators obtained DNA samples from every man
who had some connection to Laura the night she's killed.
They track down the truck driver that found her,
they contact the police in Southern California,
where Laura's son, Samson is living,
and they get a swab from him.
They get swabs from Tony Bergman,
from Donnie Knight, from everybody else.
[narrator] The DNA from the new blood
is also entered into a centralized FBI database,
which includes millions of DNA profiles,
including anyone convicted of a felony nationwide.
And they get no hits.
They get no hits on any of the DNA samples
that they take from people connected to Laura.
Doesn't come from anybody in the federal penitentiary system
or even in the state systems convicted of major crimes.
[narrator] After more than 25 years,
there's never been a suspect named in Laura's case.
Her loved ones feel like their desperate search for answers
lies in fading memories and fragments of DNA.
In the beginning, we felt that it was going to be solved quickly.
About two years after she died,
they said this case won't be solved
until somebody decides to talk
because the evidence is such a crazy quilt...
that no one can figure out...
how it happened.
[narrator] Laura's childhood friend Anne Champion
still wants answers desperately.
She's now a nationally prominent lawyer
who raises awareness of the case
through the website Champion for Laura.
I just think that we all deserve to know
what happened that night,
and it is unfortunate that we may never know.
I mean, this may not work.
You know, we may never know. And I've made peace with that.
But I am still determined to try to figure out
what happened that night.
[narrator] Laura's story is also the focus
of Jason Stavers' podcast, Bonaparte.
It's really easy for us to see a news event,
to read a magazine piece, to watch a TV show
and put people into buckets, snapshot people.
But if I'd had 60 hours,
I'm not sure that I could have fully told the story
of who Laura was, who Donnie was,
who all these other people were,
and how they collided with one another.
It has just been such a devastating affair, you know?
So, please, if you know something,
please say something.
[Anne] She was so smart.
She was so creative.
I just think she would have done incredible things.
She would have been remarkable.
I have no doubt about that.
[Leanne] Twenty-five years later,
I'm able to be very calm...
when I think about her life and her death.
And I'm able to have this weight inside of me...
that I can't get rid of.
But there's also the remembering of the good times
and the great person that she was,
and that helps ease the grief.
I think about her every day...
and sometimes, it's with a laugh and sometimes it's sad.
[narrator] Police have been unable
to solve a triple homicide in Powder Springs.
A mother and her two daughters were beaten to death.
Her only son survived.
[Lucy speaking]
As I went to go put my foot into the door,
that's when I saw a pool of blood on the floor.
I'd attended hundreds of death scenes.
The assault on Jane Kuria
was one of the most vicious that I had seen.
[narrator] Originally from Kenya,
Jane Kuria moved to Georgia in 2002 with her three children
following the death of her husband the year before.
In 2007, Jane and her kids,
19-year-old Isabella,
16-year-old Annabelle,
and 7-year-old Jeremy are living in Powder Springs near Atlanta.
[Lucy speaking]
My mom and my sisters were very good people.
My mom was very hard working.
She loved everyone.
Isabella was a really calm, cool, collected individual.
But she was also very funny.
My cousin Annabelle, we were the same age.
Because she came to this country before I did,
I like to say that she was the one that gave me
a quick orientation of the US.
[narrator] July 29, 2007, seems like a normal Sunday.
The Kurias' cousin, ten-year-old PK,
is visiting from Kenya with his mom.
She drops him off to spend the day with the family.
Jane is busy cooking and talking to her sister-in-law Lucy
about a new job.
PK and Jeremy spend the whole day playing outside.
We went to sleep on that day early.
I think we were just tired from all the playing that we did.
[narrator] The next day, Jane's sister-in-law Lucy
is unable to reach Jane.
[Lucy speaking]
[narrator] PK's mum Pauline also can't get ahold of Jane
or anyone else at the house all day.
By Wednesday, she senses something is very wrong.
Pauline came to my house.
She asked me if I could take her to Miss Jane's house.
[narrator] When they get to the house in Powder Springs,
Jane and her daughter Isabella's cars
are both in the driveway.
Pauline tries the front door.
Diana goes around the back of the house.
I noticed the sliding door was still slightly open.
I opened the sliding door.
I pushed the blinds, and it was total darkness.
And as I went to go put my foot into the door,
that's when I saw a pool of blood on the floor.
[narrator] Diana calls 911.
At her side, Pauline is in a state of stunned panic.
Neither one fully understands what has happened
inside the house.
The first officer on the scene quickly calls for backup.
Within a few minutes, all these cop cars, fire trucks,
ambulances, everybody kind of showed up.
[narrator] The responders arrive to find a massacre.
Jane Kuria has been murdered,
so have her daughters, Isabella and Annabelle.
The young cousins, Jeremy and PK
are both unconscious, clinging to life.
All five victims had been brutally attacked
with multiple blows to their heads.
The assault on Jane Kuria was one of the most vicious
that I had seen.
And then seeing what had occurred
with Jane's daughters
and then what had happened to the little boys.
It's hard to describe it.
It was just completely shockingly evil
that a person would do this.
[narrator] Police break the devastating news
to the rest of the family.
Well, at first, it was a lot of disbelief
because I didn't understand it.
I just couldn't comprehend that three people were dead.
I'm just trying to think how, why, who.
[Lucy speaking]
[narrator] Investigators work to secure and catalog
the crime scenes at the Kuria house.
They note that there are no signs of forced entry.
In the kitchen area,
I discovered the area where Jane had been assaulted.
The blood evidence on the scene indicated to me
that she had put up quite a struggle.
We discovered Isabelle on the landing.
She had been at the top of the stairs near the kitchen
when she was first assaulted.
Annabelle simply stepped out of her bedroom
into the hallway when she was assaulted.
Her injuries were much the same as Isabelle's and Jane's.
It became apparent to me that Jane was the primary target.
[narrator] The two boys, PK and Jeremy,
were attacked in their beds.
They were asleep when they were assaulted
and their heads were on soft enough objects, a mattress, a pillow
that allowed some give to the strikes to their heads.
And that's why they were able to survive their injuries.
[narrator] While the family grieves,
investigators comb through the physical evidence to find out
who could have carried out these vicious assaults.
I could tell the item that was used as a weapon
was at least 12 or 15 inches long,
something that was not very large in diameter.
The injuries also showed that
at least one end of this tool
that was used as a weapon was forked.
[narrator] Police interview family and friends
and scrutinize phone records
to build a timeline of what happened
in the days leading up to the murders.
We went through 60 days of phone records.
[narrator] Something catches the interest of police.
The number of calls between Jane and a friend from church named Patrick.
Patrick and Jane communicated by phone
seven days a week
during that two months.
There were sometimes 10, 12, 15 calls a day,
sometimes more than that.
Either Jane calling him or Patrick calling Jane.
[Mark] I just thought that they were just good friends.
I didn't think anything other than because he had a wife...
but he was always around.
[narrator] Detective John Dawes notices a suspicious pattern
or lack thereof,
starting with the evening of the brutal attacks on the Kuria family.
On the date of June 30th...
the last call between Jane and Patrick was about 10:00 p.m.,
and that was the last phone call between them.
But he didn't call her on July 31st.
He didn't call her on August 1st.
It was completely alarming to me.
I said, "Man, why didn't you call Jane on July 31st?"
"I don't know."
He would interview
and he would freely and openly talk about many things.
But when it came time to answer questions
that were really important...
I just didn't get any satisfactory answers.
[narrator] But Patrick does have his own theory
about what might have happened.
He volunteered to me
that I needed to look at the Mungiki gang.
[narrator] The Mungiki gang is often referred to as the Kenyan Mafia.
Patrick told me that Jane had shared with him
that her husband was murdered by the Mungiki gang
in Kenya years earlier.
[narrator] Investigators obtained a death certificate for Jane's husband.
My Uncle Kuria didn't die from being murdered by anyone.
My uncle died from pneumonia.
I felt like it was an obvious ploy
by Patrick to get me working towards something
that had nothing to do with this case.
[narrator] Meanwhile, the family shifts focus
to the two survivors of the massacre, PK and Jeremy.
Jeremy was in a coma at the time
and PK was also in a coma.
All I wanted to really know was
how they're doing and when can I see them.
We had service and prayers for days on end.
We had a huge fundraising
because we knew we had to transport three bodies to Kenya.
[narrator] Jane's sister-in-law Lucy plans for the bodies of Jane,
Isabella, and Annabelle to be flown back to Kenya for burial.
She spends the rest of her time in the hospital
at the bedside of her nephews Jeremy and PK.
PK regains consciousness a week after the attacks,
but he doesn't recall any details of the incident.
Jeremy remains unconscious for another few weeks.
[Lucy speaking]
[narrator] For Jeremy, now 23 years old,
the feeling is one of bewilderment.
After a fun day of playing with his cousin,
he looked forward to a peaceful night of rest.
My next memory after going to bed is just waking up in the hospital.
I can't speak. I can't move.
[narrator] Amid the family's grief and struggle,
they noticed that a friend of Jane's Elizabeth has taken charge.
I remember one particular day
I was going to go and identify the bodies and she called me.
She was like, "Oh, no, you don't have to come.
I'll handle it for you. You can go back home."
She presented herself to the community
as a spokesperson for the family.
[narrator] The family is confused
by the prominent role Elizabeth is taking.
Culturally, it was completely bizarre for Elizabeth to step into that role.
But at the time, I was only 22.
I couldn't question that.
[narrator] When Jeremy's Aunt Lucy returns from a trip to Kenya with her mother,
Jeremy's grandmother,
she discovers something disturbing.
[Lucy speaking]
[narrator] Meanwhile, Elizabeth has gained
the trust of Jeremy's other grandmother, Jane's mother.
Elizabeth has leveraged this relationship
and has removed the rest of the family
from Jeremy's paperwork without their consent.
Things between Jeremy's guardianship moved very, very fast.
When Jeremy got out of the hospital,
he started living in Elizabeth's house with his grandma.
And we saw Jeremy maybe once or twice after that.
[narrator] Elizabeth sells Jane's house, car
and all the family's belongings.
[Lucy speaking]
This was really, really sad
because he had no support from any family member who he knew.
We wanted to just be there to comfort him.
There's nothing that I could do at that time.
No one can come and see me without her knowing
what was taken and...
and put into the trust accounts.
I've never had access to it.
When I ask about it,
I'm told that I'll tell you later.
One of the things that an investigator...
needs to ask himself on the scene of a murder is,
"Okay, who benefits from this murder?"
[Lucy speaking]
Elizabeth wasn't a mother figure to me.
What she was was like a principal that I can't do anything
without having her permission.
[narrator] Investigators explore possible connections
between Elizabeth and Jane's friend Patrick.
The only link that I could find
between Elizabeth and Patrick
is that they were, in fact, acquainted through church, mainly.
[narrator] While members of the Kuria family say
they've been confused and hurt
by Elizabeth's actions
and they don't trust her,
she has never been named as a person of interest in the brutal murders.
Is there someone else who would have benefited from Jane's death?
The answer may lie in something found
on the dining room table in the house
where the massacre took place.
There were some handwritten notes on a piece of paper
that included some numbers that were added up and totaled.
One of the things I came across is that
Patrick had requested a loan from Jane in the amount of $5,000.
It just so happens that the handwritten note
on the dining room table,
the numbers written down there totaled right at $5,000.
[narrator] The investigation once again
turns to Jane's close friend Patrick.
In asking Patrick the very simple question,
"Did you owe Jane $5,000?"
And he said, "Yes."
And I said, "Had she been pushing you about that?"
And he said, "No, there was no pressure."
[Lucy speaking]
I interviewed Patrick thoroughly.
Patrick's demeanor was calm.
He wasn't a person that showed any anxiety
in talking with the police.
I would have loved to have been able to throw
some physical evidence in there
to put with that circumstance and see where we could get.
[narrator] While the hundreds of items of physical evidence
gathered from the crime scene in 2007
didn't yield any leads at the time,
there are a few clues that offer tantalizing hope for answers.
A person perhaps two miles away
from this heinous triple murder
saw a couple of hand towels lying in the ditch
and they were covered in blood.
And those bloody hand towels did go to the state crime lab.
And we have a full profile from that blood on those towels.
[narrator] Retired detective John Dawes
believes these towels are from the crime scene.
Civil liberties protections prevent investigators
from running the profile found on the towels through the database
that contains the DNA profiles of convicted felons.
But the science of DNA continues to evolve.
Even though I'm retired, that's what I'm pushing for now,
to go back into the physical evidence
with the latest and greatest technology, that's...
There are a lot of things that can be defeated in a criminal court,
but physical evidence isn't one of them.
And we went out of our way to collect it and preserve it.
It's still there.
[narrator] Investigators find a fitting workaround.
The DNA will be tested and entered into a genealogy database,
the same process that identified the Golden State Killer
Joseph James DeAngelo.
Results are expected by the end of 2022.
Until then, the family and investigators
can only speculate who and why.
[Lucy speaking]
She didn't have any recent deposits.
She didn't have any recent debits of significant amounts of money.
There was some information
that came along within a year or so
that that Jane was expecting
to be receiving a significant sum of money.
I never found the fact of that,
although we couldn't go into her account that she held in Kenya.
[narrator] The aftermath of these horrific murders
and the suspicions they've raised continue to plague the family.
[Lucy speaking]
It's just been really difficult to get over the loss of three people.
And you still don't have any answers on what really happened.
I always find myself with the rest of my family
and we're having a good time,
and there's always that one moment where I freeze
and I imagine my aunt and my cousins just being around
and us just laughing and having a really great time.
And it makes me very sad that they're not here with us.
Still hurts to know that my mom's not still alive to call...
to call my son grandson and my sisters
are not alive to see their nephew.
And now I have a family of my own,
I want to give my family everything that I didn't get.