Up next, her murder stuns even hardened New Yorkers.
It was a pretty horrific homicide,
and we knew that the suspect's perpetrator
was still on the loose.
We begin tonight with the latest developments
in a crime that has shocked this unshockable city.
The life cut short, way too short--
that should have never happened.
The killer has attempted
to strip all identification from his victim.
We didn't know the cause of death at that point.
We didn't know who she was.
I can't find out who killed you unless I know who you are.
Detectives finally I.D. the dead woman...
and are led to a killer
with a seemingly limitless capacity for violence.
It's just beyond belief.
It's like a Jack the Ripper kind of guy.
You know, just absolute animal.
Away from the glare of the lights
and gleaming skyscrapers of New York City
are some little-traveled byways,
notorious to locals and to police,
for being dirty, desolate, and dangerous.
On Saturday, February 25, 2006,
a body turned up in one of those places,
about 20 miles from downtown Manhattan.
First responders came upon a horrific scene.
The victim was a young female, probably in her 20s.
This victim was naked and wrapped in a blanket
and was bound with twist ties behind her back,
which basically held-- used as handcuffs.
The victim's head was wrapped with packing tape.
Some sort of cloth had been shoved down her throat.
A chunk of her hair had been cut away--
one of a number of apparent attempts by her killer
to cover up his crime.
He knew enough on how to clean up the scene.
He cut her fingernails down,
so there was no DNA underneath underneath her nails.
There were no surveillance cameras in the area.
There was no identification on the victim.
But her body still gave investigators
some basic information.
What stood out to me is she had specific tan lines on her
and she was Latino.
So, middle of February, in the cold,
she either just came from somewhere warm
or was not from the area originally.
A snow brush was found near the body.
No one was sure if this had anything to do with the murder.
48 hours after the body was found,
a woman called police
to say her friend, Imette St. Guillen,
had gone missing.
And one thing she said was
that Imette had just returned from Florida,
you know, the day before she went missing.
And that immediately struck a chord with the detective,
because there was a tan.
Tonight, the sad irony.
New York's top detectives
are furiously investigating her murder
as they search for a killer on the loose.
24-year-old Imette St. Guillen, a Boston native,
was two months away
from a graduate degree in criminal justice.
She was fabulous.
Fabulous young woman.
It's a tremendous loss.
In this case, when your child dies, you die.
There's a part of you that will never,
ever be resurrected again.
Imette's autopsy made it clear
her murder was even more gruesome
than first responders originally thought.
There was definitely damage to her private areas,
indicating it would seem as though
there was a forceable sex crime of some sort going on.
McTighe: I believe it was a sock that was in her mouth
actually pushed her tongue in backwards.
That was the cause of death.
So we're not looking for a weapon.
We're not looking for ballistic evidence in this type of case.
Incredibly, no foreign DNA was found on the body.
Assaulting his victim
and then removing all his DNA from her body
would have taken hours,
which meant Imette's killer
had to have a safe place to do all this.
And that location wasn't where her body was found.
It was so time-consuming with the zip ties
and the wrapping and the cord and the blanket and the tape.
It'd be too much time for the person to do it there.
If this case was going to be solved,
detectives needed to find out
not only who did the murder, but also where he did it.
Investigators were stunned
to find that Imette St. Guillen's killer
was able to remove all foreign DNA from her body.
But he couldn't remove everything.
The tape and blanket used to wrap her body
were rich sources of trace evidence.
Analyst Nick Petraco found red carpet fibers on both.
A cheap-colored nylon fiber.
Carpet fibers.
And I happen to know what those red rug fibers
look like on that particular carpet,
because I've seen that kind of carpet many times in casework.
Petraco's microscopic search also revealed animal hairs.
I'm finding mink hair,
so there's a mink coat around there somewhere.
Rabbit hairs of the type used in coats were also found.
A tiny drop of blood was found
on one of the plastic ties used as handcuffs.
And some DNA was recovered from the snow brush
found near the victim's body.
The sample that came off of the snow brush was touch DNA.
And so that is basically DNA that is deposited
when someone handles an item.
Analysts paid particular attention
to the blanket that wrapped the body,
hitting it with ultraviolet light
in an attempt to expose possible bodily fluids.
And in a major potential break,
what turned out to be a semen stain
luminesced when hit with the light.
The semen profile was very degraded,
so we knew right away that the semen profile
was likely to be pretty old.
Detectives now turned to Imette's final night.
It was a Friday, just days away from her 25th birthday,
and she was celebrating with friends,
including her best friend, Claire.
And it was getting late in the night.
It was almost like 4:00 in the morning.
They had been on vacation.
Claire was ready to go home.
"Come on, Imette. Let's go."
Imette wasn't ready to go.
McTighe: Claire's trying to almost pull her in the cab
and convince her to go home.
Imette doesn't want any part of it,
and she starts to walk down the block.
Police hoped surveillance cameras
would give them some idea of where Imette went.
These days, they're on practically every street corner
and every shop.
Not so in 2006.
And so they got no video of any help
in determining where she went.
But by tracing Imette's credit-card activity,
detectives found she paid for two drinks at a bar
called The Falls.
The receipt was recorded within 15 minutes of 4:00 a.m.,
just before bars in New York City
are required to close.
This would be 17 hours from when her body was found.
Detectives needed to find out what happened during this window
and faced some daunting problems.
There were multiple crime scenes.
At some point, Imette's killer needed to subdue her,
and no one knew where that happened.
He took his time to assault her, kill her,
and remove his DNA from her body.
Where that happened, no one knew.
And he most likely needed a vehicle
to get to and from all these spots,
and no one knew where that vehicle was.
There was really very little evidence
to point in any direction.
The investigation is really just the body at that point.
You don't have any items or a location
that you can focus on or use in investigating that crime.
Detectives hoped people at Imette's last known location,
The Falls bar, could provide some answers,
but got yet another setback.
First of all, do they have any video?
They don't have any video inside.
But the bartender at The Falls remembered Imette.
She told detectives closing time was 4:00
and Imette wasn't ready to go.
And she didn't want to leave
because she still paid for her drinks.
This bartender said her boss,
bar manager Danny Dorrian, saw what was happening
and told the bartender to get a bouncer
to escort Imette from the bar.
But Danny Dorrian denied that ever happened.
McTighe: Danny Dorrian was not very forthcoming initially.
He claimed not to have any recollection of her.
And I remember the detectives coming back,
and they're like, "Yeah, we went there.
We spoke to this guy, Danny Dorrian,
and we think he's holding back on something."
And I just remember thinking, "Wait a minute. Dorrian?
I know that name. Why do I know that name?"
It turned out that in New York City,
a lot of people knew the Dorrian name.
Dorrian is a famous name in New York City.
There is the eerie connection between The Falls
and another infamous New York watering hole,
the one where preppy killer Robert Chambers met his victim.
In 1986, 20-year-old Robert Chambers
was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend,
18-year-old Jennifer Levin.
It became infamous as the "preppy murder case."
It was the highest-profile case in New York,
probably in that entire decade,
and everyone knew the name Dorrian.
Why?
Because the last place Jennifer Levin was seen alive
was at a bar owned by Danny Dorrian's family.
Was there a possible connection
with this latest high-profile murder?
No one knew.
But one thing not in question was that Danny Dorrian,
bar manager of the last place
Imette St. Guillen was seen alive,
was telling police a story they did not believe.
In the 1980s, a New York family, the Dorrians,
got caught up in the infamous "preppy murder case."
They owned the bar where the victim spent her final night.
Now, in 2006, there was a possible connection
to yet another gruesome murder.
The Dorrian family's bar, The Falls, was the last place
murder victim Imette St. Guillen was seen alive,
and bar manager Danny Dorrian told police
he'd never laid eyes on her.
That wasn't what police heard from people working the bar,
and that was a big problem for Danny Dorrian.
We get a phone call to report to police headquarters
right away to the chief of detective's office.
Now, it's very strange to get a phone call like that,
especially in the middle of a case.
So we get there, and it turns out
it was Danny Dorrian and his attorney.
Turns out he did know that she was there.
He doesn't know how she died,
but he's now able to put her there in the bar.
Danny Dorrian's problem wasn't any connection to the murder.
He was alibied.
His problem was his bouncer, Darryl Littlejohn.
Danny Dorrian was not a good bar manager,
and the evidence that he was not a good bar manager
is who he hired to be his bouncer,
or one of his bouncers, which was Darryl Littlejohn.
And he did so without any attempt
to check his references and see how legitimate or not he was.
41-year-old Littlejohn was a convicted felon.
He'd served more than eight years
for robbery and drug offenses.
So he violated his parole.
He should not have been working in any place that sells liquor,
and he should not have been working at 4:00 in the morning
while he's on parole.
Littlejohn told police that on Imette's last night,
he did what his boss Danny Dorrian told him to do--
He got her out of the bar.
This made him the last known person to see her alive.
Now, that caused the police
to obviously take an interest in him.
Because Littlejohn violated his parole,
detectives had no problem getting a search warrant.
The trail left by his cellphone on the morning of the murder
put him at his house, and, ominously,
near where Imette's body was dumped.
Does that mean that he killed her? No.
But it means now he's at the crime scene
where we found Imette.
So now everything is now focusing on Littlejohn.
Police here in New York
now say they've got compelling evidence
connecting a barroom bouncer
to the murder of this promising young woman
who spent her final hours at his bar.
Trace evidence teams descended on the home
Littlejohn shared with his mother,
and also his van, searching for anything
that could be tied back to Imette's body.
One of the first things
that the crime-scene investigators noticed
was about a dozen empty bleach bottles
in the garbage outside the house.
What do you use a dozen empty bottles of bleach for?
Well, if you know how to destroy DNA evidence,
you know bleach does it.
Every inch of the house and van was searched.
Incredibly, just as with Imette's body,
no foreign DNA was found.
Absolutely no DNA.
So we don't find any evidence
that shows that she was there at all.
If Darryl Littlejohn was Imette's killer,
he'd done an unusually thorough job
of cleaning multiple crime scenes.
But a forensic dogma called the Locard Exchange Principle--
it dates back more than 100 years,
to the very beginning of crime-scene investigation--
holds that's it's impossible
to completely clean a crime scene.
If you could go back to the guy named Edmond Locard,
a doctor from France--
his principle states
that there's always materials to be found.
Someone always leaves something.
Ultimately, what it's saying,
"If you don't find it, it means it's your fault.
It's there."
And sure enough, tiny clues remained
that finally told the story
of what happened to Imette St. Guillen.
Among the key pieces of trace evidence recovered
from Imette St. Guillen's crime scene
were red carpet fibers
and animal hairs from a mink and a rabbit.
You're trying to use these bits of evidence
to help you figure out where it happened.
Once Darryl Littlejohn emerged a suspect,
crime-scene techs were on the lookout
for these hairs and fibers.
That's the beauty of this stuff,
and it helps you reconstruct the whole event.
It's really powerful.
One red carpet fiber by itself wouldn't mean a lot.
But you get two, three different materials
that are all associating in one place,
it means a lot more mathematically
as far as the probability it happened there.
When Darryl Littlejohn's house and minivan were searched,
a red carpet was found inside the house,
and fibers from it were micrscopically consistent
with fibers from the dump site.
Littlejohn's mother, who lived with him,
owned a mink coat,
and those hairs were also consistent,
as were hairs from a coat of hers
with a rabbit-fur collar.
And there were also shoes he had.
On the bottom of the shoes,
there were red carpet fibers attached to it.
So that's probably how they got into the van.
The mother probably wore the mink coat
to go to church on Sunday,
and she leaves a couple hairs from the mink coat on the seat.
This evidence definitively tied Darryl Littlejohn
to Imette's body.
But there was a problem.
So far, prosecutors could only prove
that he'd gotten rid of Imette's corpse,
not that he'd committed her murder.
It created, or it left some degree of doubt
as to whether he was actually the killer.
And Darryl Littlejohn, who had a very good lawyer,
said he was no killer.
I'm truly sorry what happened to this young lady,
but they have the wrong person.
Forensic analysts now turned
to the degraded semen stain on the blanket
used to cover Imette's body.
The DNA results delivered a bombshell.
And I took another look at the semen sample
and thought it looks similar to Darryl Littlejohn's DNA--
similar enough that it could be a relative.
Now, as it turns out, Darryl had a brother who did die
while in custody in the Queens house of detention,
awaiting trial on a double murder.
He died of some sort of asthma attack.
This happened 11 years earlier,
which would account for why the sample was so degraded.
They've also tested, I understand,
the blanket in which Imette's body was wrapped.
What have you learned about those tests?
There was semen on the blanket,
but unfortunately, the semen on the blanket was somebody else's.
But in the end,
just as a famous French criminalst stated
nearly a century earlier,
you can't completely clean a crime scene.
The touch DNA from the snow brush
near Imette's body matched Littlejohn.
But it was the trace evidence--
what analysts call "innocent transfer"--
that linked Littlejohn to Imette's body.
All of this was confirmed when his DNA was lifted
from a small blood stain on one of the zip ties.
It remained despite what even analysts admit
was an incredible job of attempting to clean the scene.
He might be thinking about blood and semen and spittle
and that kind of thing, or even his hairs.
But he's not thinking about
the stuff that's around him all the time--
the red carpet, the mink coat, the--
He's not thinking about that stuff.
And that's the stuff that ultimately helps to nail him.
Investigators believe
that when Littlejohn was told to get Imette out of the bar,
he'd found an easy mark.
She'd had a lot to drink.
The streets were nearly empty.
Once outside, he subdued her and got her into his van.
Where he took her next is the subject of speculation.
What's clear is that he spent hours assaulting her,
then bleaching her body and the scene.
But he was unaware of the fibers and animal hairs
that had simply become part of his environment,
all of which stuck to his victim.
It appears that at some point in this assault,
Imette might have fought back.
It's possible she injured Littlejohn
and his DNA got on her hair.
That could be the reason he cut part of her hair away.
He also cut her nails in another attempt to eliminate DNA.
Now, with the murder done and the cleanup apparently complete,
he had to get rid of the body.
Soon, he was outside,
exposed and in a hurry to get away.
The snow brush from inside his van, with his DNA,
got tangled up with the body as he dumped it.
But a small blood stain on the zip tie
left absolutely no doubt he was the killer.
In June of 2009,
Darryl Littlejohn was found guilty of first degree murder
and was sentenced to life without parole,
all on the strength of evidence he tried to clear away,
but never saw.
No one walking into that bar would have had any reason
to think they were gonna meet their killer that night,
whether intoxicated or sober.
It really is a case
that's totally made by forensic evidence.
So between the phone records, the DNA,
and the hair and fiber evidence,
together, that's a trifecta of evidence
that is the thing that proved him guilty.