HENDERSON: She was badly, badly beaten,
and she also was stabbed all about the body.
Definitely, somebody is very angry.
It seems to be very personal in nature.
That throws the entire case into a downward spiral.
MANOCHIO: Diane was a fun-loving family woman.
Everyone loved her.
GARDNER: Who could have done such
a brutal thing to somebody in their family?
We requested a DNA sample, which he refused.
HENDERSON: You know the feeling you get when you talk
to somebody, and the hair
in the back of your neck stands up?
Something is not right.
NARRATOR: Every day in North America,
dozens of people are murdered.
The key to solving the toughest of these homicides
lies in the final 24 hours of the victim's life.
To crack the case,
detectives must reconstruct that critical timeline,
the minutes and hours containing evidence that can
help unlock the mystery and catch the killer.
Elizabeth is a port city in Union County, New Jersey,
just across the Hudson River from New York City.
Elizabeth, New Jersey, has always been an industrial
and manufacturing town.
Great school systems, great businesses,
great restaurants.
It's a great town to live in.
There's some residential areas, and there
are also some commercial industrial areas.
It's a good mix.
It's a quiet working community.
NARRATOR: November 18, 2010, is a typically quiet
morning in the Elizabeth suburb of Union,
but not for Victoria and Samuel Zaleski.
They can't reach their adult daughter, Diane.
Diane's sister-in-law had a 10 a.m.
doctor's appointment that Diane was supposed to
take her to, and she didn't show up.
So they came to the house to check on her.
MANOCHIO: When the elderly parents enter
the home using the house key,
they see a blood trail that led to
a basement area of the home.
Diane was at the bottom of the cellar stairs.
MANOCHIO: She was unresponsive, lying face-up
in a pool of blood.
Miss Zaleski, the mother, called 911,
and she thought her daughter had fallen.
NARRATOR: The dispatcher relays the information to
first responders.
HENDERSON: When the police officers arrive,
due to the amount of blood,
they knew right away that it wasn't just a simple fall.
HENDERSON: They backed out of the house,
and they just waited for us to arrive.
NARRATOR: Detective Rob Henderson
and Lieutenant Mike Manochio
are investigators with the Union County
Prosecutor's Office.
HENDERSON: When I arrive on scene, there is
blood splatter and cast off on the walls,
a lot of blood on the floor.
All the real heavy blood was all in that one area,
the foyer.
NARRATOR: Detectives follow the trail
of blood that leads to the basement.
MANOCHIO: We observed the victim lying face up.
She was badly, badly beaten,
and she also was stabbed.
GARDNER: The victim is identified as Diane Zaleski.
NARRATOR: The legal secretary lived alone.
MANOCHIO: There appeared to be defensive wounds,
as if there was a struggle.
One sock was off, the other sock appeared to be coming off.
So she might have been dragged
down the staircase by the suspect.
A pair of black underwear were lying
on the floor next to her head.
HENDERSON: We think she has been sexually assaulted.
MANOCHIO: We noticed cleaning products,
so we were considering if parts of her body might have
been wiped with household cleaners to possibly cover up
sexual assault.
HENDERSON: The medical examiner could not really determine
a cause of death, because she was stabbed 44 times.
She was beaten so severely.
It was very horrific.
GARDNER: This is a very brutal assault.
Definitely, somebody is very angry.
It seems to be very personal in nature.
NARRATOR: Who could have committed such a brutal attack?
Detectives search the house for clues.
MANOCHIO: What we noticed immediately
that there was no forced entry,
no broken windows, no broken locks.
GARDNER: None of her personal items were ransacked
like you would typically see in a robbery,
MANOCHIO: Her pocketbook was there,
her house keys, her car was in the driveway.
GARDNER: It suggests that Diane knew who the suspect was
and that she let him into the house.
NARRATOR: Detectives want to know
who came knocking at Diane's door.
A first look at the crime scene
suggests the attack began in the foyer.
We did observe dozens of puncture wounds in her head,
neck, and upper chest area.
We think she died there, and then
he dragged her body down to the basement.
NARRATOR: As investigators move through the rooms,
there's further evidence the perpetrator
was familiar with Diane's home.
MANOCHIO: As I entered the bathroom,
I noticed that the nozzle of the shower was dripping.
Somebody had just taken a shower.
MANOCHIO: In and around the laundry room,
there was blood on the washing machine and dryer,
and we felt that this individual attempted to clean his clothes.
HENDERSON: In the kitchen,
we find a pot of macaroni on the stove.
We learned that Diane was a cook.
You know, she just wouldn't make macaroni.
She would have never made that.
So we knew whoever made that meal wasn't Diane.
STOCKDALE: The killer chose to remain at the crime scene,
taking their time, even preparing a meal.
They must not have felt rushed or concerned
that someone was going to come back and interrupt them.
Must be familiar in some way to the killer.
NARRATOR: There is mounting evidence
Diane knew the perpetrator.
The forensics team makes more discoveries
that may help reveal his identity.
MANOCHIO: The living room area had a bay window with curtains,
and on the drawstring to open and close the curtains,
there appeared to be blood.
Knowing this was a struggle,
I thought maybe she had cut him, and that
might have been our suspect's DNA blood on the curtain.
It was an important piece of
evidence that we wanted to test immediately.
HENDERSON: In the kitchen, there's a computer.
GARDNER: We start doing
an analysis on the data that's on her computer.
NARRATOR: As the team waits for results,
detectives reach out to Diane's family
to find out more about her life.
MANOCHIO: Diane was identified as a fun-loving family woman.
Everyone loved her.
She was working for a large pharmaceutical company,
and she took an early retirement package.
The reason why she moved to that portion of Union
was her elderly parents
lived around the corner, and she felt the responsibility of
taking care of her parents.
She had a very close relationship
with all of her family.
They were communicating on a daily basis.
MANOCHIO: Diane was very close to her brother, Pete,
and Pete's wife.
There was a time where Diane lived with them
while she was purchasing a new home.
We were advised that she was loved by all,
and no one advised us that
she had any enemies.
NARRATOR: Who would want to kill such a well loved,
family oriented woman?
To catch the killer,
detectives must now put together
the last 24 hours of the victim's life.
MANOCHIO: On November 17th at approximately 1 p.m.,
Diane Zaleski calls her elderly mother.
Diane says she'll be home all
night doing laundry and watching TV.
They discuss Diane picking up her sister-in-law
the next morning to take her to a doctor's appointment.
NARRATOR: It's the last call Diane will ever make,
and she never arrives to pick up her sister-in-law as planned.
On November 18th, at approximately 10 a.m.,
Diane's sister-in-law, Debbie, calls
Diane several times without an answer.
[distant phone ringing]
At approximately 1 o'clock, Diane's parents find her at
the bottom of the stairs and call 911.
NARRATOR: Detectives know that Diane was killed
sometime between her parents discovering
her body and her phone call to her mother 24 hours earlier.
Although the medical examiner is unable to establish
the cause of death,
he is able to narrow down when it occurred.
He takes the temperature of the room.
He takes the temperature of the victim's body,
and he calculates time of death
between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. the night before
NARRATOR: Back in the kitchen,
detectives note an odd detail that further
confirms their suspicion that the killer knew Diane.
HENDERSON: The garbage can from the kitchen is
nowhere to be found, but the garbage can from
the outside of the house is at the sidewalk, empty,
and we discovered that it was garbage day.
So we thought that was very interesting.
GARDNER: The fact that the garbage was put out that night
indicates to me that the suspect knew
the area, he knew when garbage pickup would be.
NARRATOR: The suspect may not only be someone Diane knows,
he may even live nearby.
We were asking the neighbors
if they had heard anything suspicious.
One neighbor that was asked if she had seen anything and said,
"Well, I didn't see anything unusual.
"All I saw in front of the house that
"day were two young African-American kids
playing football,"
but she didn't think anything of it.
There was a lot of kids in the neighborhood who would
actually help Diane in her home, either throwing out the garbage,
shoveling her driveway in the wintertime.
Directly across the street from Diane's house,
the owner is Ms. Yearwood.
MANOCHIO: We asked her who she lives with,
and the only individuals that she identified living
in her home was herself,
her daughter, and her grandson.
Nobody had seen anything, nobody heard anything.
They didn't pay any attention to anything.
So that led us to a dead end.
NARRATOR: None of Diane's other neighbors saw
or heard anything out of the ordinary either.
Then detectives receive news
that narrows their suspect search.
MANOCHIO: It was a male profile that was
on the curtain of the bay window.
So right then and there, we knew we had
what we believe would be the killer.
NARRATOR: Now detectives need to find
the person who matches it.
So they focus on the men in Diane's life.
She didn't have a primary boyfriend, but she did
go on the dating scene a lot.
She liked to go out, she liked to party,
she liked to have fun.
MANOCHIO: She had several hundred contacts
in her cellphone.
While searching through Diane's phone contacts,
we locate the name of Bob Bass.
He had a 20-year relationship with Diane
He actually asked her father for her hand in marriage.
I guess he didn't give it, because they eventually
broke up.
Diane and Bob Bass had a very tumultuous relationship.
They tended to argue all the time,
and he was a very angry individual.
You're looking for somebody who does have a temper,
who is angry, and who does have a reason to murder Diane.
Right then and there, we knew that this could be our guy.
NARRATOR: When investigators discover Diane Zaleski
murdered in her New Jersey home,
their suspicions turned to her ex-fiance, Bob Bass.
Their relationship had been tumultuous
before Diane ended the engagement.
MANOCHIO: We ran Bob Bass's phone number
through Subscriber Information,
and we discovered it was a completely different name.
So we find out that his name is Roberto Bennett,
and it appears he's got a criminal record.
HENDERSON: He was divorced,
and he'd been arrested for domestic violence.
We speak to his wife, his former wife.
Turns out, he actually sat on her chest
and pummeled her in the face with closed fists so bad that
he broke her eye orbital.
Putting two and two together, Diane is beaten badly.
We think this is our guy.
The number-one predictor of future violence is
past violence, so when it's learned that
Bob's been domestically violent in relationships,
it increases the odds that he
could escalate and commit a murder.
NARRATOR: Investigators have a prime suspect.
Now they have to find him.
MANOCHIO: He was not at his job, he was not at his home.
We tried calling him, he wouldn't come in.
He wasn't being cooperative.
We dug a little deeper into his driver's license,
and we realized that he had several DWIs
in the state of New Jersey,
which required him to do weekend jail time
in the Union County jail.
So me and detective Rob Henderson went out there on
a Friday, and that's when we got to talk to Roberto Bennett.
We bring Roberto Bennett into the interview room,
and we stated that we were investigating a death in
the township of Union,
and the victim's name is Diane Zaleski,
and he denied knowing her.
I don't know who she is.
I don't know why my phone would be in her phone.
I said, "Are you sure that you don't know Diane Zaleski?"
He goes, "I'm positive."
So we had a color photograph of Diane, and we put it in front
of him, and he goes, "I still don't know that girl,"
which we felt was kind of ballsy, because not only did
the family tell us that he wanted to marry her,
that they dated for several years in a crazy relationship,
he also rented an apartment to her prior to her
moving into her permanent residence in Union Township.
NARRATOR: Detectives know Roberto is lying,
but to prove he's the killer,
they need him to provide a DNA sample to compare with
the blood sample taken from the crime scene.
GARDNER: Mr. Bennett is also refusing
to give us a DNA profile.
He finally agrees to give us a sample after he's
threatened to be held in custody longer than
his weekends.
MANOCHIO: We compare that DNA sample to
the DNA sample collected at the crime scene,
and unfortunately, it was not our guy,
and that was like a punch in the stomach.
ARNTFIELD: This is one of those cases whereby you have
a suspect on paper who ticks all the boxes,
and yet ultimately, DNA science,
the physical evidence, confirms that they're not the one.
NARRATOR: Roberto Bennett is not Diane's killer.
Detectives must continue to sift through her personal life.
So at this point, we started contacting every male profile
that we can come up with, in her phone and in her dating
websites, and it was over 80 men.
HENDERSON: Mike and I literally were there
for hours and hours and hours every single day,
contacting the people, setting up interviews.
MANOCHIO: These individuals, they came in voluntarily.
They wanted to know about Diane.
They were humble about it.
A lot of guys broke down
in the office, crying about Diane's death.
They volunteered to provide a buckle swab.
All of those acquaintances were all ruled out as suspects.
No DNA matched.
NARRATOR: Investigators hit a wall -- to climb over it,
they look at a different piece
of evidence from the crime scene.
MANOCHIO: We have Diane Zaleski's pocketbook
in our evidence locker.
We go through her pocketbook, and we identify
a business card with the name of Marty Oppenheimer on it.
So we contact this Marty Oppenheimer, who
comes down to our office for an interview.
He is very aggressive.
His statement is very awkward.
He didn't appear to be as genuine
and open as the other 80 individuals that
we interviewed.
He acknowledged that he knew Diane,
but he stated that that's not the type of woman
he would target.
Target?
You're calling a murder victim
a target?
Marty's use of the word target is suspicious, because it almost
implies that he's going out and preying on potential women
or victims, and so this is something that would
cause investigators to wish to follow up.
What does he mean by using that term?
You know the feeling you get when you talk to somebody,
and the hair on the back of your neck stands up?
That's exactly what I got with Marty.
Something is not right.
NARRATOR: When detectives ask Marty to provide a DNA sample,
he refuses.
He said, "I don't care. You can get a court order.
I'm not giving you anything."
We continued to talk to him for a little more.
But in the meantime, we provided him
with a bottled water.
A common technique used by police to
collect DNA is what's known as DNA cast off,
where food or refreshments are offered,
and then once the suspect is through with them,
they're collected and submitted for DNA.
They've provided a sample, and they don't even know it.
HENDERSON: When the interview was over,
he took the bottle with him.
He knows what's going on.
NARRATOR: Marty Oppenheimer is the prime suspect
in the murder of Diane Zaleski.
He refused to provide a DNA sample
to New Jersey investigators,
but he has a water bottle that
holds his DNA, which investigators hope to retrieve.
So we followed him.
I followed him several blocks, and in
one of those blocks, there's a railroad overpass,
and he reached up
and put the water bottle on
the inside of the railroad overpass and kept walking.
My unit responds to the scene where the bottle of water is.
We document and we collect it
and submit it to the lab for testing.
MANOCHIO: We got DNA from the spout of the water bottle,
but it was not a match for our suspect,
and that was another punch in the stomach.
NARRATOR: But the lab softens the blow with
new analysis of Diane's clothing from the scene.
The lab finds dried sperm. It's in the underwear.
That DNA semen
was a match to a male profile
for someone in Diane's family.
So we contact her brother, Pete,
and a couple of nephews, we obtain the buccal swabs,
we submit it to the lab.
The lab comes back,
and the DNA belongs to her brother,
Peter Zaleski.
Now we have DNA linking the brother to Diane's
underwear -- that throws the entire case
into a downward spiral.
Everyone's wondering, like, what the...?
Diane was having
inter-family sex with her brother?
Looking into incest is one of the hardest things,
because you're questioning
very sensitive family dynamics, and there could be lots of
shame and guilt.
So it would be really hard to even broach the subject,
but then get any information in regards to that sensitive
type of offense.
NARRATOR: Detectives haul in Diane's brother, Peter, for
questioning, but Peter doesn't yet know what detectives know.
Everyone in the office wants to
be present to watch this interview.
They think it's just gonna be explosives.
NARRATOR: They want to see his reaction in person
the moment they reveal what they found.
HENDERSON: I'd interviewed the brother probably twice
up to this point,
just for general background information,
and we're very friendly, because I'm helping his family
get to the bottom of who killed Diane.
There was the document from the DNA lab explaining
the mixture,
and we put it in front of him, and we let him read it.
I've never seen a reaction like that before.
You know, the jaw drops, the eyes open wide.
He's totally speechless.
And then he -- he actually asks a question.
Like, are you telling me I killed my sister?
No, I'm just saying that the DNA,
the sperm that's in her underwear,
is yours.
Can you explain that?
He couldn't explain it at all.
MANOCHIO: He was floored. He was upset.
He started crying.
We let him go home and explain it to his wife,
how could this be.
Our next plan of action was to bring in his wife.
We did show her the crime scene photograph
of the underwear that was collected
next to Diane,
and she identified that article of clothing as hers.
HENDERSON: She explains how Diane lived with them
just prior to her buying the house.
MANOCHIO: Her and Diane are the same size
and have the same interest in underwear.
They would go shopping together.
Diane, even after she bought her house,
would come over and do her laundry there.
There must have been a mix-up in the laundry
with the underwear, and Diane probably had
Debbie's underwear in her new home.
Somewhere in the mix of things,
their underwear got mixed up.
That's how she's explaining it.
NARRATOR: Detectives find the story hard to believe,
so they turn to science to confirm or refute it.
The chemist explains that -- these are her words --
our little swimmers are very active and vibrant.
They could stay in underwear for months at a time,
numerous washes.
MANOCHIO: So right then and there,
we cleared up the whole mystery
of why Pete's male DNA was in his sister's underwear.
Turns out it was just really a laundry accident.
NARRATOR: Despite the expert's opinion,
investigators still have their doubts.
There's one surefire way to confirm whether
Peter was responsible for his sister's murder.
We requested that Pete's profile be compared to
the other male blood profile that was collected at
the scene.
NARRATOR: While Peter's semen found inside the underwear
could be explained away,
a DNA match to the male blood found at the scene
would help prove that Diane's brother stabbed her to death.
NARRATOR: Peter Zaleski's DNA was found inside
women's underwear at the scene of his sister Diane's murder.
Now investigators await results of whether his DNA is
a match for the killer's blood discovered in Diane's house.
There were two different profiles.
So we knew the killer was still out there.
NARRATOR: After nearly 12 months of investigation,
detectives are no closer to solving Diane's homicide.
They decide to turn to the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit
in Quantico, Virginia, for help.
In cases that are challenging,
investigators may reach out to experts in human behavior,
such as psychologists or psychiatrists, to help look at
the behavioral patterns present.
HENDERSON: You lay out all your evidence,
people you've interviewed, everything you've done,
and everybody brainstorms.
NARRATOR: To build a profile
of the likely killer, FBI agents focus on activity found
on Diane's computer.
At 1 a.m. on November 18th,
11 hours before her body is found,
someone was surfing the web.
He had tried to purchase an Apple iPhone,
an iMac -- their thinking was, the killer was probably young,
into high-tech stuff.
NARRATOR: His attempted purchase also suggests to
agents that the killer may be local.
He might be a neighbor who was able to watch
the house to see if there were deliveries being made.
The individual also accessed some porn sites.
HENDERSON: They also thought he might have been black,
because of the Lexington Steele porn.
Lexington Steele was a black man from Union Township.
NARRATOR: But the FBI analysis can't account
for all of the killer's behavior.
A normal person who's thinking rationally is not going to go
on to a computer and watch
pornography after he's killed somebody.
A normal person,
after doing all of these things, isn't going to take
a credit card and try to buy items off a computer.
The thinking process wasn't
the same as somebody that is cognizant.
MANOCHIO: What they concluded was the individual responsible
for this was a drifter, a loner, a drug addict,
someone with no friends,
no career, someone who wasn't doing well in life.
Probably not a serial killer,
probably didn't mean to kill Diane, either.
This was a crime of opportunity,
and a crime of chance.
NARRATOR: Now with the killer's profile in hand,
detectives can narrow leads from the general public.
So on the one-year anniversary of Diane's death,
investigators reach out to the media to help them get
the word out.
ARNTFIELD: As time marches on, and cases remain cold,
it's important for investigators to
consider releasing some additional information
that can provide renewed context,
keep the case in the public eye.
You can't expect the public to provide
information if it's only a one-way street.
MANOCHIO: This time, we put a little more details in to
alert the readers and the media of what we have.
We told the public that a meal was prepared,
that he had eaten something while he was there,
and that we had DNA, which we hadn't said before.
Maybe somebody that didn't see something a year ago,
maybe they remember all of a sudden -- in doing that,
I also put out my cellphone number,
so if anybody had anything, they could call me.
NARRATOR: But the media blitz produces no new leads.
HENDERSON: I had an entire desk full of the Diane investigation.
Five-inch binders,
probably 10 of them, crammed with interviews,
background investigations for all the people,
all the guys I'd taken buckle samples from,
and my boss said, "We're getting a new detective Monday.
You're gonna have to clean the desk."
It was the worst day of my life, that I had to put Diane on
the shelf, because when you put something on the shelf,
it turns into a cold case, and we all know how cold cases go.
NARRATOR: Diane Zaleski's case sits on the shelf
for half a year.
Then, out of the blue, Detective Henderson gets
an odd call from 230 miles north of New Jersey.
I'm sitting at my desk, and my cellphone rings.
It's a woman from Boston who found
my phone number online in a newspaper article.
And she explained to me how she is Facebook friends with
this guy, and he had pretty much
told her that he has a body on him in New Jersey.
NARRATOR: Having a body on him is street slang
boasting about a murder.
They've never met.
They're like big sister, little brother
type relationship,
she explains it, and he tells her a lot of things,
probably some that he shouldn't.
He gets into specific details on how he did it,
what he did inside the house.
HENDERSON: She's telling me that he was sitting around
in his underwear for hours,
waiting for his clothes to dry, because he washed
his clothes.
Nobody knew that -- it wasn't out on the press release,
and it wasn't out on the media blitz the year after
the homicide, so...
all my antennas are up right now.
She tells us his online moniker is E.L. Yearwood.
One of the guys in the unit
goes on MySpace and puts in E.L. Yearwood.
A picture of a black male in front of a house pops up.
The numbers of the house are
10 away from Diane Zaleski's address.
NARRATOR: FBI profilers suggested Diane's killer might
be a young black male, possibly a neighbor.
Now, detectives have a photo of
a young black man standing on Diane's very street.
We had a picture, and we had a name now.
E.L. Yearwood's actual name is Arnell Yearwood.
The police determined that the suspect was Arnell Yearwood
and that his parents actually live across the street
from Diane.
We had to track down Arnell Yearwood.
That was our guy.
We go through our case notes.
We find out that when we did a prior canvass of
Diane's neighborhood,
we spoke to a Mrs. Yearwood that lived right across
the street from the house.
NARRATOR: Detectives return to the victim's neighborhood.
Our next plan of action is to go back to the house.
We do it sort of hush-hush on the down low.
We make it seem like
we're canvassing the entire neighborhood again.
But we just go to Mrs. Yearwood's house.
I speak to Mrs. Yearwood again, and I ask her
how many children are in the house.
She tells us the same thing
she told us the other times we spoke to her -- her,
her daughter, and her 10-year-old grandson.
That's it, and then I asked her, I said,
"Do you have any other children that aren't living here?"
And she said yes.
And she told me her son's name was Arnell Yearwood,
but he never lived here.
He was staying with his father at the time.
Where does his father live?
Oh, I don't know, he's homeless.
He lives in the East Orange somewhere.
The mother may have suspected something,
you know, once she saw the police at the house.
So like any parent, she's going to
attempt to deflect any unwanted contact with police.
NARRATOR: With Arnell's mother deflecting
and no known address for their suspect,
Arnell Yearwood could be anywhere in the world
a year and a half after the murder.
NARRATOR: Nearly 17 months after the murder of
Diane Zaleski, detectives have a prime suspect,
26-year-old Arnell Yearwood,
but he's nowhere to be found.
Detectives talk to Arnell's sister, who lives across
the street from Diane's -- they hope she might
reveal more than her mother had.
MANOCHIO: She admits to us that, "Yeah,
my brother does live here from time to time," and we asked her
specifically around the time of November 2010.
She goes, "Yeah, he did used to live here
around that timeframe, and he lived in the basement."
NARRATOR: But Arnell isn't living there presently.
Searching for a current address,
investigators learn Arnell has an outstanding arrest
warrant for failure
to pay child support -- from that booking sheet,
detectives get his height, weight, and photograph.
Arnell was five-foot-one and 120 pounds soaking wet --
was about the size of a 10-year-old.
So going back to the statement that the one witness had of
children playing outside,
it finally matched.
NARRATOR: Is it possible the witness had misidentified
Arnell as one of the kids playing football?
If it was Arnell who later entered Diane's home,
it makes sense that there was no sign of forced entry.
She was familiar with him.
He was a neighbor who lived right across the street.
MANOCHIO: Maybe she let him in the night of the murder.
He had no address attached to his name -- again,
he was a drifter, he was homeless.
NARRATOR: But Arnell Yearwood has one thing --
a cellphone -- detectives enlist the help of
the New Jersey State Police Electronic Eavesdropping Unit.
This is where it got a little tricky.
We ended up doing a trap and trace on it.
NARRATOR: Like an advanced version of caller ID,
a trap and trace device records the telephone numbers
of inbound callers to a suspect's phone.
Once the target phone receives a call or text,
the target phone's electronic signature is captured.
They're telling us, well,
now it looks like the phone is in Union Township,
in the Vauxhall area.
So we start heading to the Vauxhall area.
NARRATOR: The electronic sleuths triangulate the location
of Arnell's cellphone
based on its position relative to cellular towers.
They literally tell us, okay,
the phone is at this address on the second floor.
So we all get there, surround the house for
surveillance purposes, we get eyes on the house.
Next thing you know, a really short kid walks out of
the house.
We think that's got to be him.
So we roll up on this guy, get him in cuffs.
Sure enough, it's Arnell.
NARRATOR: Investigators arrest Arnell Yearwood
on his outstanding child support warrant,
but they need more evidence to charge him for the murder of
his former neighbor, Diane.
HENDERSON: Bring him back to the office for an interview.
He's talking to us, he admits he knows the lady.
He doesn't tell us that he kills her.
Arnell denies having any involvement in the homicide,
and he also refuses to provide a DNA sample for us.
NARRATOR: But investigators provide Yearwood
with another option.
They offer him pizza in the hopes he'll inadvertently
leave enough DNA behind.
After the interview, he left the crusts for us.
That crust was then submitted to
the DNA lab, where they got a DNA profile.
HENDERSON: So Sunday night, Easter night,
I'm home, about seven o'clock at night,
I get a phone call. It's my boss.
It's a match.
Your DNA from the crime scene is Arnell Yearwood's DNA.
It's him.
NARRATOR: After 18 months, detectives have finally
captured the killer.
Arnell Yearwood is formally charged with the murder of
Diane Zaleski.
To avoid a life sentence,
Yearwood's legal team negotiates a plea bargain
that will see him serve
30 years before being eligible for release.
During a plea, you have to
give a truthful statement to the judge.
The judge wants to know that you're actually
guilty of what you're saying you're guilty of.
And you have to describe your part in the crime.
The way Arnell described it was,
he would provide drugs to Diane, and they would have
a sexual relationship.
MANOCHIO: He said he was high
at the time, and he said he couldn't get sexually aroused,
and apparently Diane laughed at him,
and he didn't take that too well.
So he stated he grabbed the only thing he could find at
the time, which was a pair of scissors,
and he started stabbing her,
and he doesn't remember anything after that.
That's what he said.
And we didn't believe that for one second.
There were no drugs in Diane's system of any kind.
I think maybe he propositioned her for sex that night
and she probably
did laugh at him and turned him down,
and that's what set him off.
But I don't think they were having a relationship,
by any means.
STOCKDALE: I wonder if this is a fantasy seduction gone wrong.
The fantasy may have been that Arnell goes to Diane's house
and makes a sexual or romantic
overture towards her, and he doesn't get the response that
he expects to get in his fantasy.
When he's met with that rejection,
it escalates into panic, and he feels like a failure,
and so this results in aggression and the homicide.
But still, he seeks to live out other elements of the fantasy,
like having dinner, watching pornography.
And I think that's why you see strange things
that aren't necessary for the commission of the crime.
NARRATOR: Investigators are finally able to piece together
the events that led to Diane Zaleski's murder.
On November 17, 2010, at approximately 12 noon,
neighbors identify Arnell Yearwood with his nephew
playing football in front of
Diane Zaleski's house -- because he's so small,
they mistake him for one of the kids in the neighborhood.
GARDNER: At approximately 1 p.m.,
Diane calls her elderly mother, Victoria.
They discuss picking up her sister-in-law and taking her to
the doctor the following morning.
MANOCHIO: Diane says she'll be home all night,
doing laundry and watching TV.
Approximately 10 p.m.,
Arnell knocks on Diane's door, and she lets him inside.
We think Arnell made a romantic pass at Diane,
and she declined.
Arnell could not handle the rejection,
and he turned violent.
NARRATOR: The medical examiner concludes the time of
death was between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.
After stabbing and choking
Diane Zaleski, Arnell Yearwood dragged her body down
to the basement and just left her there.
NARRATOR: Based on log-in times on Diane's computer,
investigators determine Arnell remained in the house
until seven o'clock in the morning on November 18th.
He prepared a meal, washed and dried his clothes,
while he shopped for electronics and surfed porn.
GARDNER: On the morning of November 18th,
Diane's neighbors report seeing trash cans outside of her house.
MANOCHIO: At approximately 10 a.m.,
Diane's sister-in-law,
Debbie, is still waiting for her to pick her up to take her
to the doctor's office.
Worried, she calls Diane several times without an answer.
HENDERSON: At approximately one o'clock on November 18th,
Victoria and Samuel Zaleski find Diane lying in a pool of blood
at the bottom of her stairs and call 911.
STOCKDALE: A crime of opportunity is when
it happens spur of the moment.
So it's not premeditated or pre-planned,
but somebody may just go ahead and act upon impulse.
And so for people lacking in emotional control, this can
really lead to aggression or violence quite quickly,
even though that wasn't the initial intention.
That is a person that's enraged, is out of control,
which just goes to show how dangerous he really was.
In a short time,
he went from the kid playing football
out in the street to a convicted murderer.
NARRATOR: On April 11, 2014,
Arnell Yearwood pleads guilty to first-degree murder.
He is sentenced to 30 years
in prison without the possibility of parole.
GARDNER: Diane just had so much more life to live and so much
more love to give her family -- everybody who knew Diane
loved her, cherished their friendships with her.
She was everybody's friend. She was a social butterfly.
She was taken too young, and this didn't need to happen.
This is a case that really illustrates
the unpredictable nature of police work.
You've got an ex with a violent past
and a pattern of domestic abuse,
and you've got DNA on a set of undergarments
potentially pointing to
the victim's brother, and ultimately, in the end,
it's a completely random player who happened to gain
access to her home.
A victim's family needs finality.
We got lucky on this case that, you know,
we put it out in the media,
and social media was there for people to communicate,
which communicated down to us, which helped us solve the case.
I spent 18 months on this case, never wanted to put it down,
because she's a true victim,
and you want to do your best to try and bring
that person to justice.
Some people call it closure.
I don't call it closure, because there's
no way you could ever close out
somebody being ripped from a mother, a father, a sister,
a brother, ripped from their lives so violently.
It's not closure.
It's just...peace.