An ambitious, popular young restaurant manager.
She was a tremendous young person
who had unlimited potential.
We always thought she'd just light the world on fire.
Is found beaten, stabbed and suffocated.
The person who did this absolutely wanted
to guarantee that she was dead.
Whoever did it ransacked the safe.
Something that brutal had to be more than just a robbery.
Detectives uncover a history
of workplace conflict.
He didn't like to be told what to do.
He scared me, I was uncomfortable around him.
For me, that was a red flag.
With the community on edge,
another attack leaves them living in fear.
It was such a similar homicide,
a lone female employee and the use of a knife.
You don't know if somebody is lurking out there,
and they're gonna do it again.
And new evidence
confirms disturbing suspicions.
The lab informed me that there was a match.
I just couldn't believe what was happening.
Like, when am I gonna wake up?
Terri's murder wasn't what it appeared to be.
Falls Township, Pennsylvania
is a family friendly
suburb with blue collar roots.
Falls Township is a community
in lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
It was built up around the U.S. steel mill in the 1950s.
Steel workers moved out here
from different parts of the country
and it was a nice community.
Although we're a suburb of Philadelphia
and we're right across the river from Trenton,
violent crime is relatively unusual in the Falls.
That all changes one Saturday morning
with a gruesome discovery at a fast food restaurant.
On the morning of February 4th, 1984,
the manager arrived to open the restaurant
and upon entering discovered
that someone was laying outside the kitchen area
and obviously deceased.
The manager recognizes the woman
as the restaurant's night shift manager,
25-year-old Terri Brooks.
He observed Terri Brooks laying on the floor
in a pool of blood with a knife stuck in her neck.
And he phoned the dispatcher and stayed on the phone
until officers got there.
I was told that they had a homicide
at the Roy Rogers restaurant on Route one.
So I was there pretty quickly.
Her body was positioned near the kitchen,
it was a butcher knife sticking out of her neck.
She had black and blue marks and bruises everywhere.
And it looked like hand marks around her neck
like she had been strangled.
It was thought that she was still alive
until the bag was put over her head.
Because of the moisture in it from her breath.
She looked like she had blood under her fingernails
and blood on her hand and that was wrapped
in an evidence bag and secured.
There was a rectangular kitchen prep area,
that's where you can see both her shoes
that were against the wall.
To my mind,
that was probably the first act of violence that took place,
that she was literally pushed right out of her shoes
and that a struggle had taken place right there.
Moving around the corner is where the body was found.
It looked like her body had been dragged on the floor
to where she laid.
Terri had her winter coat on
and her bag was also on the floor
like she was getting ready to leave.
Further examination
of the scene reveals evidence of another crime.
In the office, the safe was open.
There was a register drawer on the desk.
The coins were scattered all over the floor.
It just appeared that whoever did it ransacked the safe.
There was money taken.
It had all the earmarks of a robbery homicide.
It was fairly easy for the restaurant
to get a count of what was missing.
And it was around $2,500.
Looking for more clues,
detectives speak to the manager who discovered Terri's body.
When the manager of the restaurant
arrived around 6:00 in the morning,
he found the inner vestibule door locked.
The door to the interior of the building was locked.
But the drive thru window was partially open.
It appeared that the killer had left
through the drive thru window,
because the metal pipe that was laid in the track
as the kind of security measure to lock it up,
had been removed and laid to the side.
But there was no sign of forced entry in the restaurant.
Police believe Terri was killed
sometime after midnight when the restaurant had closed.
As detectives continue to process the crime scene,
Terri's family discovers
that she never returned home from work.
The morning of the murder, Scott, the victim's fiancee,
knocks on the door to the Brooks family home.
At the time, Terri lived with her parents.
We hear a banging at the door.
And it was Scott standing there,
and he's like, Terri's car's not in the driveway.
He tells them that he was driving
by their house on his way to work
and that he noticed Terri's car wasn't there.
They then looked in her room and saw that,
in fact, she wasn't home.
And then Scott picked up the phone
and dialed the Roy Rogers.
And he goes, "This is George Brooks,
Terri Brooks's father.
She didn't come home last night, is she okay?"
And they said, no, she's not, she has been murdered.
I was shocked they told him over the phone.
I just couldn't believe what was happening.
When am I gonna wake up,
it's a horrible thing.
I was getting ready to go to work when my phone rang.
I was getting a call from her stepmother to tell me
so that I wouldn't see it on the news
and my heart just sunk.
Terri brooks grew up
in Warminster, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children.
My mom and dad divorced, Terri was in eighth grade
and she took over the mother role after that happened.
Out of all of us she was probably the most ambitious.
We always thought, Terri would have her own business one day
and just light the world on fire.
Terri took jobs in the restaurant industry,
and earned a reputation as a hard worker.
I worked with Terri at an Italian restaurant.
In the beginning, she was a server, I tended bar.
She became management after working there for a while.
She really, really took pride in her work
and how she dealt with people.
Soon after her promotion,
she began a yearlong romance with her co-worker,
Scott Keefe.
She met Scott at the restaurant.
He was the head chef.
They had a good time together.
Terri just came home one day with a ring on her finger
and we were all like, oh, my God.
While Terri planned her dream wedding
for the upcoming summer,
her career also started to take off.
It was her dream to move forward
to bigger things in the hotel business.
And she had looked into getting a job
with the Marriott Corporation.
The position she accepted with the Marriott was
to be a manager of a Roy Rogers restaurant.
I first met Terri
when I started working at the Roy Rogers, she was my boss.
She was always happy.
She was very excited about her wedding
and she was excited to go dress shopping.
I know she put the down payment
on the honeymoon to Hawaii,
and she was talking about the bridesmaid dresses.
Terri and Scott were apartment hunting.
There was a lot to do.
It was at a time when
all new things were happening in her life.
Now, detectives must determine
who could have killed this ambitious young woman
just a few months before her wedding.
They ask the family about Terri's movements
in the hours leading up to her murder.
Mr. and Mrs. Brooks last saw Terri the day before,
Friday, February 3rd, 1984, when she left for work.
Usually her fiance Scott would make sure
that he went and closed with her every night.
And her father was glad that Scott would go
and close with her and be there to keep her safe.
Scott was worried about Terri's security
at the restaurant.
He would go and sit with her
while she finished everything up.
Scott tells police
he wasn't with Terri the night before.
He had stayed home because he was working the early shift
the following morning.
Neither Scott nor Terri's parents are able to provide police
with any leads.
The family was really cooperative with the investigation.
And it was just nothing that they could volunteer or give us
that would indicate that they knew anything about the case.
It was completely out of the blue.
There was no reason for them to feel
that she was in any danger or in any jeopardy.
I couldn't think of anybody who really disliked Terri
and I can't imagine anybody would dislike her that much
to kill her.
Investigators turn their attention
to Terri's coworkers.
It looked like it could possibly be a robbery.
But the deeper we looked into to see
how brutally she was murdered,
it had to be more than just a robbery.
Detectives wanna know
how Terri was thought of by her colleagues.
Terry was a young woman who was very staunch
about the procedures, and she enforced them strictly.
She was a buy the book person.
And as long as you did your work
the way you were supposed to, there were no problems.
When police ask
if Terri's management style made her any enemies,
one name keeps coming up.
Steve Daly was an employee,
that didn't adhere to the procedures.
He was a little hotheaded.
Steve scared me, to be honest.
He was very rough, quick to anger.
I was uncomfortable around him.
Detectives learn
that just weeks before the murder,
the tension between Terri and Steve hit a breaking point.
He ended up getting fired and wasn't too happy about it.
You've got this former employee who had a clear animus
towards the victim and is fired by the victim.
And add to that, here's an employee
who knows how the restaurant operates,
who knows the security procedures.
He's got the kind of knowledge
to be able to commit this crime.
So this is somebody who now rises to the top of the list.
Coming up, police zero in on a suspect.
Fingerprints were found on one of the murder weapons.
At that point,
he admitted he took the money from the office.
But conflicting statements
frustrate detectives.
It was completely a misdirection, a diversion.
How could somebody do this and get away with it?
Until the investigation
takes a jaw-dropping turn.
The polygraph operator said he was lying.
It caught me by surprise.
I remember him all of a sudden blowing up.
It was the turning point in the investigation.
Police investigating the fatal stabbing
of 25-year-old restaurant manager Terri Brooks have learned
that a disgruntled coworker lashed out at Terri
before he was fired.
If you threatened somebody and they end up dead,
you'd have to look at them and look at them seriously.
Steve Daly, was a former Marine
and had a difficult personality.
He didn't like to be told what to do.
Just weeks before the murder,
Terri and Steve had a major blowout.
There was an occasion at work
where Steve Daly was told to make a hamburger for a customer
and he had just closed out that workspace.
So he didn't wanna reopen the workspace.
And I remember him all of a sudden blowing up.
Steve lost his temper, was screaming and yelling.
He became explosive, at one point,
even calling Terri a bitch.
Terri was alarmed by Daly's behavior.
Terri, in a situation like what happened with Steve,
she wouldn't tolerate it.
She didn't waver.
So I think that was the frustrating thing
for Steve is he couldn't break her.
And she was like, you need to go home.
You are done for the night
and you will talk to the boss the next morning.
Daly storms out of the restaurant.
And the next day, Terri talks to her manager,
tells him what had happened.
Which, of course, led to Daly being fired.
That did little
to stop Steve's aggressive behavior.
Even after he was fired,
Daly would return to the restaurant
and buy food and have meals there.
He went back just to annoy her, just, here I am.
You can't throw me out now.
It was very upsetting to her.
So given his personality and his conduct,
that certainly seems to provide a motive.
Did Steve Daly's harassment escalate
into a fatal act of revenge?
Police bring him in for an interview.
When we tracked Daly down,
one of the first things he tells us,
that he knew at some point the police would be coming
to talk to him.
Daly said that he didn't get along with Terri
that they clashed often, in fact,
he said that if she'd been a man he would have punched her.
Daly's excuse for why he was going back
to the restaurant was that he was dating somebody
who worked there.
I don't know that I buy that, but that's the reason he gave.
Investigators ask
where Steve was the night of the murder.
He says that he was trying to get into a club,
and that he was not permitted access to the club.
So then he just drove around for several hours.
Investigators go to the club,
they look at the security footage,
they can't find any footage of Daly being denied entry
so this is not a hard alibi that can allow you to say,
okay, this person's eliminated.
Just the opposite.
With no way to prove his whereabouts
when Terri was killed, police ask Steve to take a polygraph.
So a polygraph is a useful investigative tool.
It can help us rule people in or out.
So Daly agrees to take the polygraph,
and without question, he passed.
This guy looks like a good suspect.
So when you have momentum build like that
and then it crashes to a halt, it's hard to swallow.
Police can't verify Steve's alibi,
but with no evidence against him, he's free to go.
Steven Daly was pushed down lower on the list of suspects.
But you never eliminate somebody
until you make sure that they are completely not involved.
Investigators turn their focus
on the Roy Rogers staff who worked with Terri
the night of the murder.
During the investigation,
we knew that we had to interview the employees
to see what the atmosphere was when they left,
if there was any arguments.
Everybody consented to have their fingerprints taken.
The evening that Terri was murdered,
there were four employees that she was working with,
Patricia, Ron, Barb and Dan.
And each of those employees was identified
and interviewed separately.
Patricia tells investigators
that just before closing,
Terri discovered that money had gone missing
from Barb's cash register.
The employees got in an argument
and there was $40 that was supposedly missing.
Terri was gonna get to the bottom of this.
It wasn't a minor event.
She took it very seriously.
She began questioning different employees.
Where did it go?
Why is it missing?
Terri played everything by the book.
If there's any money missing
and you are caught being the person
that's been hitting the till.
There's no tolerance for stealing.
Terri cared about her employees
but some people didn't like her
because she could be tough when she needed to be tough.
Patricia, indicated that this wasn't the first time
something like this had happened,
and if you're stealing money from Roy Rogers
and you're an employee there, that's a fireable offense.
So did this provide a motive for murder?
As Terri attempted to unmask the thief,
the employees began to point fingers.
Barb told Terri that she thought Ron did it.
So he's now being confronted with the idea
that he took this money
and he actually turned his pockets inside out
to prove that he didn't have any cash on him.
Could Ron have killed Terri in a rage
after being accused of stealing?
As detectives look closer at Ron,
fingerprint analysis provides crucial new evidence.
The employees who worked that night clean up
before they closed.
Working the later shift you had to clean up everything,
wash all the equipment, sweep and mop the floors,
wipe down all the tables, stuff like that.
So I thought that whoever was in there after closing
could have possibly left fingerprints.
We began matching up fingerprints that they'd lifted
from different surfaces to elimination prints they'd taken
from different employees, and it was discovered
that Ron's fingerprints were found on the drive thru window
and on the trash bag that was wrapped around Terri's face.
Here we go.
This is somebody that we need to look at.
Investigators working
to solve the Terri Brooks homicide have just got a match
for fingerprints left at the crime scene.
The evening that Terri was murdered,
there were four employees that she was working with,
including an employee named Ron,
and Ron's fingerprints were found on the drive thru window
and on the trash bag that was wrapped around Terri's face.
Detectives ask Ron
how his fingerprints ended up
on the bag used to suffocate Terri,
and on the drive thru window,
the killer's likely escape route.
Ron said that one of his responsibilities
at the restaurant was to take care of the trash
so his fingerprints would have been on that bag
because that was part of his job there.
Ron also said that he had covered for some other employees
for their break time at the drive thru.
So that's why his print was there on the window.
Police aren't able to determine
if the window had been properly cleaned at closing,
so Ron's excuse is plausible.
Still, detectives wanna know his whereabouts
after he left work.
Ron said that he left the restaurant shortly
after 1:00 in the morning with coworkers
and that he got home about 1:15
and talked to his mom before he went to bed.
We checked out Ron's alibi,
discovered that he had indeed gotten home
and stayed home all night.
With Ron all but cleared,
police get new details from another employee about the money
that had gone missing from Barb's cash register.
We learned the $40 that was supposedly missing,
it was found at a later time.
The missing money had mysteriously reappeared
in the drop safe.
I think it's fair to say that Terri might have thought
that it was Barb who had taken this money.
My impression was that Terri was suspicious of Barb.
Police also learn that it was Barb's duty
to close down the drive thru.
Those two things combined, the missing $40
and the fact that it was Barb's responsibility
to lock that drive thru window
and that ultimately it's found unlocked
and it's believed to be where the killer left,
puts her at the top of the suspect list.
According to the work schedule,
Barb and Terri were the last two employees
at the restaurant.
The policy of Roy Rogers for employees
that we're gonna work past the end
of their shift was that they would lock the doors
and that there would be a minimum of two employees there.
Could an argument between Terri and Barb
over the missing money have turned deadly?
Barb said that she was sent home early by Terri.
And she was insistent that she closed the window
and placed the pipe in the track to lock.
And in looking into Barb's whereabouts,
we discovered that she was picked up by her boyfriend,
so she had an alibi.
So it's conceivable that Terri was alone in the restaurant,
working into the early hours of February 4th,
doing inventory.
Police later confirm the alibis
of every employee who worked the night of the murder.
When the autopsy report arrives,
investigators hope it will give them a new lead.
The pathologist found that Terri had been strangled
and the bone in the back of her neck was severed
from the stab wound.
There was serious brain hemorrhage
that was the result of her head being repeatedly banged
against that hard concrete floor
and looking at that stab wound to her spine
it was likely she was conscious but paralyzed
when the plastic trash bag was wrapped around her head.
The autopsy report lists each
of Terri's severe injuries as potentially fatal,
but indicates asphyxiation as the likely cause of death.
There was no indication
that Terri had been sexually assaulted.
You can't help but look at the way that Terri was killed
and not think that the person who did this
had such a high level of rage
that they absolutely wanted to guarantee that she was dead.
Material was collected from the knife
that was left lodged in Terry's throat,
and under Terri's right ring finger
where the pathologist had identified a defensive wound.
At the time of this murder in 1984,
there was no DNA technology,
analysis of blood was really relegated to blood typing.
By today's standards, the evidence was limited.
As the investigation continues,
Terri's loved ones struggle to make sense
of her violent death.
The funeral home called the morning of the viewing.
And they said, could somebody come down
and take a look at Terri.
And they had her laid out in the casket,
and she didn't look good.
You could see the cut marks in her neck.
And you could see the bruises on the back of her hand
and they had makeup on her too and you could still see.
It didn't look like Terri.
I said when I got home to my dad,
I think we should keep the casket closed,
we didn't want people to remember her looking like that.
As the Brooks family prepares
to bury their eldest daughter,
Falls Township lives in fear
of a brutal killer still at large.
It was a young person that was killed at her job.
So I think the community as a whole regarded this
as a frightening homicide.
It caused quite a bit of fear due to the fact
that it was so violent.
And most people in this area would think,
this shouldn't happen in our town.
I just really just thought
yeah, it probably was a robbery.
Unfortunately, they killed her
instead of just robbing the place.
But you don't know if somebody is lurking out there,
and they're gonna do it again.
Less than two weeks after Terri's murder,
the town's worst fear appears
to become a horrifying reality.
At another Roy Rogers,
an assistant manager was attacked
coming out of the bathroom.
She was hit in the head.
She fell to the floor
and the actor ran away before she can identify.
The restaurant manager survives.
But just a week later in nearby Scranton,
there's another brutal attack.
A male attacker waited in the parking lot
until there was a lone female employee,
then made entry into the restaurant.
But the money from the restaurant had already been dropped
into the safe.
So he took the female employee's money
and then stabbed her to death.
Detectives fear they have a serial killer
on the loose.
When you take a community that was already stressed,
it made it even worse.
And if you've got an individual
who's going from restaurant to restaurant
and just robbing people and they have no personal connection
to the victim, it's terrifying, it took it up a notch.
Three weeks after the murder of Terri Brooks,
police have learned another restaurant employee
has been stabbed to death in nearby Scranton.
Scranton is just up the turnpike
and it's not really that far from us.
So anything that would indicate a violent armed robbery,
we would have to look into.
It was such a similar homicide,
a lone female employee inside a restaurant,
a male attacker and the use of a knife.
Investigators learn
that a suspect has already been arrested.
Could he also be Terri Brooks' killer?
The person that committed this homicide
in Scranton was a man named Steve Duffy.
We sent investigators to go to Scranton
to attempt to interview Duffy.
And by the time we arrive, he has lawyered up.
But we got a warrant to obtain his fingerprints
and compare them to the fingerprints from the scene.
But in the end, the fingerprint comparison indicated
no connection to the homicide at our Roy Rogers.
Police are also unable to identify a suspect
in the assault of the manager
at the other Roy Rogers location.
You go through this cycle of building momentum
and then you hit a wall.
It's disheartening.
It's been a month
since Terri Brooks was found dead,
and the killer is still at large.
Something that brutal and that terrifying,
you have to try to solve it no matter how long it takes.
But when the leads start running out, you get awful upset.
As weeks turned to months and you identify suspects
and then eliminate them over and over again,
the case went cold.
An investigator by necessity has to move on to other cases.
But for a family that loses a loved one to a homicide,
they don't move on.
When it first happened,
you just assumed that it was gonna be solved.
You think, oh, how could somebody do this
and get away with it?
My dad's hair turned white within a year.
He lost weight.
He just, it just destroyed him.
It was hard for Terri's family having
to process the heartache of losing their daughter
and not having closure over it.
I couldn't imagine not having answers.
There are no significant developments
in the investigation for nearly 14 years.
Then, in 1998,
Falls Township's new police chief orders a fresh look
at the Terri Brooks murder,
and a local prosecutor is assigned to the case.
One of the primary reasons
that the police chief put this renewed focus on this case,
was that there had been developments
in DNA technology during the 1990s
and part of the point of my assignment
to have someone come in with a fresh point of view.
It was just a matter of reviewing all of those reports
and reviewing all the physical evidence.
It caught me by surprise a bit when I opened up the bag
that contained Terri's wallet.
I found that you could still clearly smell Terri's perfume.
And because I wasn't expecting it,
it's one of those things that sort of triggers your emotions
and brings you closer to the victim.
A team is assembled
for the renewed investigation.
Lori said take a look at this homicide.
And she asked me what I thought
and apparently my answers were well enough
to get me assigned to work on it.
At the time that the homicide occurred,
other robberies at fast food restaurants
in the area caused law enforcement
to form the initial theory
that it was likely to have been a robbery.
We had the advantage of knowing
that the robbery homicide track didn't work out.
So, we could start with a different theory.
There were two things that really jumped out,
one, that we could conduct victimology interviews
and talk to some people who weren't interviewed
back at the time.
And two, develop some forensic signature for the killer.
As the lab works to extract the killer's DNA
from crime scene evidence,
investigators learn more about the victim, Terri Brooks.
Victimology essentially means,
learning everything you possibly can about the victim.
Everybody who we spoke to described Terri Brooks
as intelligent, ambitious, friendly,
well-loved by her family and friends.
Detective Whitney spent a lot of time with the family
to gain their trust and to reassure them
that we were working on the case diligently.
Nelson and Lori did seemed like the power couple.
Both of them are extremely intelligent
and they were driven to get this solved.
Detectives hope new interviews will bring
to light crucial details that could help the case.
You just never know
when you're going to get some new piece of information
that's gonna put us on a track to identify who did this.
Some of the people who we spoke to,
they were quite young when this homicide occurred,
in their late teens or early 20s.
And having more life experience were a bit more open
than they might have felt they could be in the 1980s.
Detectives reach out to people
who weren't interviewed in the 1984 investigation,
including those who worked with Terri
before her employment at Roy Rogers.
I got a call from Falls Township Police.
They wanted to speak to me about the Terri Brooks murder
and they just said to me,
we'd like to hear your thoughts on it.
Cindy knew Terri well.
They worked together.
And Cindy laid out what was going on in the victim's life.
During her interview with investigators,
Cindy drops a bombshell.
What Cindy told us presented a completely different image
of this homicide.
It turned out Terri's murder wasn't what it appeared to be.
And now you couldn't help
but conclude everything is pointing to one person.
14 years after the murder of Terri Brooks,
cold case investigators have just received
shocking new information from a friend
and former coworker of Terri's.
We asked what things did Terri share
with Cindy as a friend?
And I said to them, Terri and her fiance Scott,
their upcoming wedding
at first was exciting for Terri.
But I proceeded to tell them
that the week before Terri had been murdered,
she wanted to call off the wedding.
She just realized that's not what she wanted.
We knew Terri and Scott had just put down a deposit
on their honeymoon and their wedding was upcoming,
and in the initial investigation,
the officers that conducted it came away
with the impression that they were a happy couple.
There hadn't really been anything
in the reports that indicated there were any problems
in Terri Brooks' relationship with Scott Keefe.
But we did learn that Terri confided
to some of her friends that she wasn't entirely sure
she was going to go through with getting married.
Mr. and Mrs. Brooks felt close to Scott.
He was the young man that was going to marry their daughter.
To her parents, Scott was this loving, caring fiancee
who would check on Terri and drive by
to make sure she was safe and give her rides.
Some of Terri's friends
had a very different impression of Scott.
Cindy Bradney told us that there had been some problems
in the relationship.
For me, that was a red flag.
I think through time and her changing jobs,
and the fact that she was moving on and going for her dream
and he was stuck where he was, his jealousy became an issue
and he was very possessive.
Scott would not let Terri stay alone.
She was afraid to tell him she didn't wanna be married.
She was afraid to call it off.
She didn't know what she was going to do,
to the point where she was in tears.
Police get further insight
into Terri and Scott's relationship from Terri's siblings.
When she started dating Scott,
we were all scratching our heads like,
what is she doing with him?
He was just not the kind of guy she always dated.
He wasn't fun loving,
all he wanted to do is sit there and drink,
and that was just unlike her.
It just seemed like he wanted to keep us away
from her and him.
It just makes you think back
like maybe he did have signs
of an abusive person.
But at the time, I just really thought it was a robbery
and she was killed during the robbery.
Detectives have a new perspective on Scott,
and how the supposedly grieving fiancee
might have avoided suspicion at the time of Terri's death.
My dad thought Scott really loved Terri
and he thought if she loved him, I'll love him too.
Mr. Brooks was a very kind man and in fact,
George bought Scott the suit
that he wore to Terri's funeral.
Her father just had such a big heart
that I don't think he believed
that someone that his daughter fell in love with
could harm her.
And I believe Scott played on that.
Scott becomes someone that we think may have done this.
Examining the crime scene through the lens
of what if Scott did this?
Okay, that's how he got in.
She let him in.
We were told that he had a practice
of going to the restaurant and sitting with her
while she worked after hours.
And it's personal, it's rage.
And then the action of placing that bag over her face
to kind of depersonalize her
is a telltale mark of what someone does
when they've killed somebody that they're close to.
Now it becomes a priority for us to see
if the forensic track, if the evidence points that way.
Investigators hope the killer's DNA
can be extracted from the crime scene evidence collected
back in 1984.
It was a potential concern
that they might not be able to find any usable DNA due
to the amount of time that had gone by.
Luckily, the knife that was left lodged in Terry's throat,
and the material collected
from under Terri's right ring finger
where the pathologist had identified a defensive wound
to that area yielded an unknown male DNA profile.
It was highly unlikely under the circumstances that
that DNA material would have come
from anyone other than the perpetrator.
The next thing we had to do was obtain a DNA sample
from our suspect.
Scott Keefe did not have a criminal record at that time.
He didn't have any DNA samples on file
with an agency such as the FBI.
One of the things that we learned from the laboratory expert
was that cigarette butts are an excellent, potential source
of DNA because they have saliva on them.
And at that point, we actually knew
what kind of cigarettes Keefe smoked
and we knew where he lived.
Police hatch a plan to secretly obtain a sample
of Scott Keefe's DNA.
We didn't at that point want to obtain a subpoena
to obtain DNA from him directly
because we wanted to interview him first.
We wanted to set that up
in the most advantageous possible way.
And we were concerned that he was a flight risk.
It was very important to us to be very careful
about who knew he was a suspect
and who we shared that information with.
And it was also very important to us
to not be caught doing surveillance.
In 1998, Scott's life had kind of come full circle
from where it was in 1984.
In 1984, he was living at home with his parents.
He had gone on to live with a girlfriend and then marry.
They'd had a child together,
but then they split up and got divorced.
And in 1998, he was back home living with his mom.
Under Pennsylvania law,
trash was considered to be abandoned property
once it was put out in front of the house for collection.
So Detective Whitney immediately took custody of it,
took it directly to the laboratory
that was doing the DNA analysis.
I knew I was gonna get a definitive answer one way
or the other.
It could be him, could be somebody else.
It was that anticipation
of I'm going to get a final result here
that's going to matter a great deal in this investigation.
Police investigating the 1984 murder
of Terri Brooks have secretly collected a DNA sample
from her fiancee, Scott Keefe.
We had to obtain a DNA sample from our suspect.
So we collected cigarette butts that were in the trash.
The sample is compared
to DNA found on Terri's body.
I'll never forget the phone call I got
where the doctor at the lab informed me
that there was a match from Scott's cigarettes
to the crime scene evidence.
It was the turning point in the investigation.
That was the point at which we knew we would be able
to prove that Scott Keefe was the killer.
Although, we had very solid physical evidence against Keefe.
It's always better if you have an incriminating statement
from the defendant.
We asked Mr. Keefe to come to the police station
as one of the friends and family members
that we were interviewing as part of our investigation.
We believed that he would cooperate with us.
We believed that he would come across as wanting to help,
that he would try to sell us the same story,
that he was the grieving fiancee,
that he'd been telling people for 15 years.
As predicted,
Scott agrees to cooperate with police.
We had a strategy to conduct that interview
on the anniversary date of the murder.
People pay attention to dates.
It could raise a person's anxiety level
and make them more apt to make mistakes.
The interview begins
and Scott tells a familiar tale.
He told us the same story that he had told others
over the years that they were happy,
this was the love of his life
and that somebody else had taken her away from him.
If we came on too hard,
if we were too aggressive in our questioning,
we felt he would lawyer up and stop the interview.
So slowly we built towards the question
of whether Scott had anything to do with this
or any knowledge of it.
And once we got to that point,
we asked Scott if he would take a polygraph.
You can never force anyone
to undergo a polygraph examination, but he agreed to that.
The polygraph operator said he was lying.
So now Scott started to say things like,
I didn't mean for this to happen,
and then he caught himself and said, but I didn't do it.
But over time, that culminated at one point in him saying,
she came at me first and that was the first time
he put himself at the scene.
Investigators keep the pressure on,
and finally Scott breaks.
He admitted that she essentially told him
that she wanted to break up with him.
And he was enraged because of that.
At one point he punched her in the face.
They struggled for a while in that kitchen prep area.
A knife had fallen onto the floor
and he knocked her down and straddled her,
choking her and banging her head repeatedly
against the floor.
But then he grabbed the knife and stabbed her with it
and it stuck in her throat.
Then, in his words, he bent over to make sure she was dead.
He saw that she was still breathing.
So he grabbed the trash can liner to wrap around her face,
to make sure that she would, in fact, die.
And he said he didn't wanna look at her face.
At that point,
he admitted he took the money from the office.
He said he exited through the drive thru window
to make it look like a robbery.
Scott told us that the reason he went
to the Brooks family home the morning of the murder was
to make him look innocent.
So he's surrounded by her family
when the crime is supposedly discovered.
It was completely a misdirection,
a diversion that worked for 15 years for him.
Scott is charged with first-degree murder.
I was elated.
I was like, thank God, they finally nailed him.
We waited a long time getting the answers
of who killed my sister
really gave my dad some comfort.
But I think he was still in disbelief that Scott did it.
We were just so happy we could tell her family
that the person who had killed their daughter was in prison
and we were confident he was going to be convicted.
At trial, Scott Keefe is found guilty
and sentenced to life in prison.
Terri was a tremendous young person
who had unlimited potential.
She had good relationships with her family.
It's really a terrible tragedy that her life ended this way.
It's just so sad that somebody so young
because of standing up for themselves
and wanting to move forward in their lives
gets their life cut short.
Terri would have had a very bright future,
and I'm sure she would have had a ton of kids
and we'd be hanging out right now.
Terri would love to be remembered with those big eyes
that smile, her kindness in her heart.
And a person with a goal.
She was truly a lovely, lovely person.