[serene music]
* *
- The beauty of Orange County
is that you can be whatever you want to be here.
* *
Particularly for refugees coming from another country...
* *
- These communities became a haven
as immigrants came in pursuit of the American dream.
* *
- For many people coming to America,
Orange County represents
a better life for their family.
* *
But for one child of Vietnamese immigrants,
that dream became a nightmare.
- They brought a picture, and they put it on the table,
and my dad looked and let out a huge scream.
- This young man was stabbed brutally.
- What kind of monster would do this?
- A roommate of his believed that Thien
had owed him rent money.
- How many murders are caused from somebody over money?
- But then we received a letter.
It's sort of a play-by-play of the homicide.
- This letter supercharges activity
at the police department.
Was this a hate crime?
- It was chilling to the bone.
- The Vietnamese community was terrified.
- And what we found out-- he was a fugitive
from the State of Missouri.
- I started thinking
this is headed towards unsolved.
[dramatic music]
* *
[suspenseful music]
My name is Tom Tarpley,
and I worked at the Tustin Police Department
for 25 years.
And I worked in the homicide unit
for five years as an investigator.
* *
On Monday, January 29, 1996,
I was just getting ready to come into work,
and at 7:55 in the morning,
I was notified by my department
that there was a homicide at Tustin High School.
* *
- My name is Bruce Williams.
I'm an investigator with the Tustin Police Department
since 1988.
January 29th was actually the day after the Super Bowl.
We were told that the body had been discovered
on the tennis courts,
and we were told that the body
was very badly abused.
* *
- Tustin detectives arrive at the high school,
where patrol officers have already sent students
and school employees inside.
So investigators enter the tennis courts
through a chain-linked fence
and begin carefully examining the victim.
- He was a young Asian male, probably in his 20s.
He was stabbed brutally.
* *
You couldn't see the skin of this man
because he was covered in blood.
He was dressed in a pair of shorts.
He had a sweatshirt on.
There was a ball cap laying next to him.
And he was wearing a set of black in-line skates.
His throat was cut both sides, as if they were attempting
maybe to cut the jugular vein.
- There were abrasions to his face,
which could have been from being punched.
He had no identification on him.
* *
My thought, looking at the body,
was that he had been confronted,
had been knocked to the ground, and once knocked on the ground,
was stabbed multiple times.
What I call a blitz attack.
I did not see any defensive wounds.
- This was done with sincere hate and passion.
The kind of violence that was behind this--
was this an attack by several individuals?
- While the police don't have an ID for the victim,
they hope that whoever stabbed this young man so savagely
left behind some clues about their identity.
- Did that clothing have DNA on it?
Did his fingernails have DNA on it?
- While the CSI unit collects blood evidence,
investigators discover another important lead.
- There was a key next to the body.
- We didn't know if it came from the person
who attacked this young man
or whether it belonged to the young male.
- Detectives bag the key and search the area
for a murder weapon.
As they do, they pick up on a grisly clue
that the perpetrator left behind.
- There was a blood trail that went from the body
across the tennis court
and towards the football field.
We thought it was blood from the murder weapon.
And we made, at that time, a decision
to bring in a bloodhound.
The dog did appear to pick up a scent,
but it stopped because the blood eventually ran out.
So we never found the murder weapon.
- The sheer brutality strikes investigators as a crime
perpetrated by someone with a deep-seated anger
toward the victim.
But who is the man who's been so ruthlessly murdered
on the tennis court?
- Nobody could identify him at the scene there.
We had nothing.
- Then, at 3:30 in the afternoon,
detectives get an unexpected phone call.
- There was a call
that was received by the watch commander
from a local person who claimed that their brother
had been missing.
- The caller is 22-year-old Lily Ly,
and she lives with her parents on Owen Drive,
less than a mile from Tustin High School.
* *
- We essentially were going to go through the process
of taking a missing persons report,
although we knew there was a possibility
that this was our victim.
- My name is Lily Tran.
The police came over fairly quickly.
My dad and I greeted them.
My thought was, they'll get some information
that can help me look for him.
And in my head thinking that we would find him.
- Lily tells investigators that her missing brother
is 24-year-old Thien Ly.
- Investigator Tarpley began to ask questions
about their son and their brother,
asked for a picture.
- When detectives examine the photo,
it bears a striking resemblance
to the murder victim on the tennis court.
But to be sure, investigators ask permission
to search Thien's bedroom,
hoping to find something
that might tie him to the crime scene.
- His wallet was there, his identification.
Car key was there.
Lily told us
that the only thing that he took with him
besides his clothes and the roller blade
was that single key.
* *
- And then the police officer took a heavy sigh.
He said--he said,
"There's no easy way for me to tell you this,
"but we found a body of a young man
"this morning.
We think it may have been your brother."
So they bought a picture, and they put it on the table.
I didn't want to look, so my dad looked, and--
and my dad let out a huge scream.
I knew--I knew it was bad.
Then that's when we kind of, like, let it sink in,
but it was, like, frozen, you know?
We--shock.
- In order to find the killer, investigators ask the family
to help them nail down a timeline
for the hours leading up to Thien's murder.
- Lily told us Thien had gone to a Super Bowl party that day,
had come home,
and he was gonna go to Tustin High School
to go rollerblading.
- I glance up, seeing him smiling at me,
and he just rollerbladed out,
and that was the last time I saw him.
- My name is Thai Ly,
and Thien Ly is my older brother.
I was in school at UCLA.
I got the phone call, picked it up,
and it was my uncle.
* *
"Your brother's been assassinated."
I was like, "This is a joke. This can't be right."
Didn't really hit me until I came home.
Pulling up into my parents' house in Tustin,
seeing my family members there already,
it was when it really hit me was like, this is not a joke.
- My parents couldn't come up with any scenarios
of why or who would have killed Thien
because he was a good person.
Everyone loved Thien.
[soft music]
[birds calling]
- The Lys are Vietnamese natives.
In the 1970s, Thien grew up
with his two younger siblings
in the Central Coast village of Tuy Hoa.
- We were poor.
It's just like a farm town.
It was a normal life for us.
[ominous music]
- During the Vietnam War, their father, Thi Ly,
fought for the South Vietnamese Army.
After the Fall of Saigon marked
the end of the war in 1975,
Ly was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese Army.
- My dad was in the political camp
until'81.
They kept him there for six years.
- After his release, the Lys fled Vietnam in 1982
for a better life in America and landed in Tustin.
- Everything that we came from,
we were living the American dream.
My parents worked really hard.
- They came here with basically nothing,
and they saved enough to build a small business.
Before Thien went to college,
he worked at the store as well.
He was very intense.
He worked really hard.
- What we found out about this young man
is that this man was driven.
He was a double major at UCLA.
He goes on to Georgetown University,
gets a double master's.
He had eyes on going to law school, perhaps,
or even medical school.
* *
- The story of the family's early roots in Vietnam
strikes up a chilling theory.
- One of the family members asked whether it could be
a retaliatory murder for something
that their dad had done.
- He had been a fairly high-ranking officer
in the South Vietnamese Army.
* *
- In the eyes of some North Vietnamese immigrants,
the South Vietnamese fighters
were a rebel group that threatened
their communist way of life.
- Thi Ly had made a lot of enemies
because of his fight of communism.
We knew that there is retaliation for things
that happened over in the homeland,
that that does happen here.
We thought maybe they couldn't get to the father,
so they got to the son.
[dramatic music]
* *
- The letter is a horror show.
"Walked right up to him, and he was scared.
I had a knife."
- He took the identity of his deceased brother.
- He had just the blackest eyes you've ever seen.
He's pure and utter evil.
* *
[suspenseful music]
[suspenseful rock music]
* *
[soft music]
- One day after the vicious slaying
of 24-year-old Thien Ly,
investigators in Tustin have no viable suspects,
but they do have a possible motive.
Thien's father, Thi Ly, we got the background
that he was a fairly high-ranking officer
in the South Vietnamese Army
and had made a lot of enemies
because of his fight of communism
and his involvement with the South Vietnamese Army.
- Thi Ly left Vietnam with his young family
and got them to the safety of Southern California,
but the former prisoner of war
might have unknowingly brought danger with him.
- During the course of the Vietnam War,
you had a lot of refugees,
because of the political instability in Vietnam,
that ended up coming to Orange County.
This could be enemies of his from the North Vietnamese Army
that could possibly have killed the son.
We knew that that does happen here,
so we had to definitely go down that road.
- Nearby Westminster is a historic refuge
for many Vietnamese families
seeking a better life in America.
- Westminster Little Saigon is really
the Ellis Island of the West Coast
for the Vietnamese refugees.
- Tarpley and Williams call the Westminster Police
to help them gather intel from the streets.
- We knew that Westminster,
being the receiving center for these refugees,
had informants at the police department.
They work with Little Saigon and with the Asian gangs.
- They hear things that we wouldn't hear.
What were the rumors in the Vietnamese community?
- But word from Westminster PD's informants
brings them no closer to a killer.
- The Westminster Police Department
was sure through their informants
and their contacts
that this was not a vendetta.
I think that any time somebody has a vendetta,
they want someone to know about it, right?
The Vietnamese community is very tight.
They would have known whether this was a vendetta.
- If our murder was as a result
of the father's military activities,
the children generally are not the victims.
It's kind of a taboo with that.
- With the military lead on the shelf,
police scour the autopsy report
for new clues
to help them track Thien's killer.
- The pathologist who did the autopsy
estimated that the murder was between midnight
up until the discovery of the body.
Kind of a seven-, eight-hour window.
- It also provides more details
on the brutal nature of the attack.
- Autopsy shows that this man was stabbed in the back
and in the front, piercing the lungs,
the heart, the kidneys.
- There were 26 stab wounds to the upper body area.
- The weapon was a jagged 1-inch blade,
that he'd went as deep as 4 1/2 inches
into this young man's body.
- This was an overkill situation.
If you were trying to kill this person,
you didn't need to do as much damage as you did.
Particularly those wounds to the neck,
it appeared that someone was trying to almost cut
the head off of the victim.
- This man was already dying when his throat was cut,
and he bled to death.
- This was a personally motivated homicide.
- The coroner's report paints a vivid picture,
but it doesn't offer any clues
about who committed this vile act.
- There was nothing on the victim's body
in terms of DNA that helped us.
- The investigation is back to square one,
but then, the day after the murder,
detectives are contacted
by an acquaintance of Thien's.
- I got a call
from the watch commander at my desk
and he told me that he had a person on the phone
who was friends of our victim,
and would you like to speak with him?
And I told him, you know, "Absolutely.
Transfer the call to me."
His first name was John, and John told us
that Thien was a former roommate of his
from UCLA, that he lived up in Santa Monica,
which is probably about 50 miles,
and that he had some background
about Thien Ly.
So we went up there and sat down with him.
* *
- John was a tall, well-built man.
Very articulate.
I would say in his late 50s.
So right off the bat,
that was a pretty significant age difference,
but in the academic environment,
it's not unusual.
- John has no idea who had it out for his friend Thien
and tells police he's known him for four years,
since 1992.
- John was a teacher's assistant
when Thien was a student.
So they became friends,
so much so that he moved in with John.
- Thien needed a place to stay while he was up there,
and John was needing the money.
So they had been roommates for some time.
- But when investigators ask John why Thien moved out,
he becomes agitated.
[dramatic music]
- John believed that Thien had owed him rent money.
* *
- Rent money?
How many murders are caused from somebody over money?
So now John becomes more interesting to us.
* *
- We did ask him for an alibi for that night.
- He took offense to it and bristled a bit and said,
"I was at dinner with a friend in Los Angeles."
- You can't dismiss that type of information.
You have to look into it.
[suspenseful music]
* *
- Within three days of 24-year-old Thien Ly's murder
in Tustin, California,
detectives are speaking to a person of interest,
Thien's ex-roommate from UCLA.
- We did ask him for an alibi for that night.
January 29, 1996, between midnight
and 8:30 in the morning.
He told us that he had gone to dinner with a friend,
and then John returned to his residence
in Santa Monica.
He gave a plausible story, but we couldn't dismiss this.
- While investigators look into John's alibi,
the unsolved murder ignites paranoia
in the city of Tustin.
- My name is Geoff Boucher.
I worked for the "Los Angeles Times"
Orange County edition in the mid'90s.
The Ly case was a really wrenching thing
for a lot of people.
The Vietnamese community was terrified.
You look at the encroaching influence
of white supremacists, the brutality of the crime,
they're wondering, was this a hate crime?
- We were scared because we didn't know,
why was Thien targeted?
- This could be the first of a sequence.
Is there a killer on the loose?
- That fear didn't stop Thien's friends and family
from holding an impromptu vigil.
On the evening of Wednesday, January 31st,
mourners gather at the Tustin High School tennis courts.
- Because the crime was so jolting and unsettling,
it was major news.
So the candlelight vigil is one that has
a lot of media coverage.
There's a lot of emotion.
- It was really hard for me.
It was denial and shock.
Is this a nightmare I'm in?
Am I gonna be waking up from this?
But being in the vigil,
it's really nice to be distracted
by all those people.
- I admired him as a multifaceted,
multitalented individual.
- Everyone talking about him, learning aspects of his life
that we really didn't see.
And so it was nice to have people around.
- One person that catches the eye of detectives
is Thien's ex-roommate John.
Police are still looking into his alibi,
but his behavior at the vigil strikes them as odd.
- John goes to the candlelight vigil
and tells the people at the vigil,
"Don't talk to anybody else because the murderer
could be here."
- Is he trying to create a bond between him
and this grisly crime
just to make himself seem important?
Or is he showing the kind
of unfiltered, aberrant behavior
that a killer might show?
- When a candlelight procession begins,
his erratic behavior continues.
- People are walking and marching,
and John's part of that.
And every time he passes by this bank of cameras,
he obscures his face from the camera.
It's very suspicious.
- Odd behavior doesn't make a person guilty,
but detectives need to do their due diligence.
So they do a background check on John,
and what they discover gives them pause.
- He had a long-term girlfriend.
There had been prior domestic violence,
which we were able to find a police report for,
so it did appear
that John would lose his temper at times,
which was obviously of a concern to us.
- As questions arise around John,
Tarpley and Williams need to corroborate his alibi
for the night of Thien's murder.
- We had to find out whether what John was telling us
was true about having dinner in Los Angeles.
- We talked to people that were there.
John went up there, and they had dinner,
and then John returned
to his residence in Santa Monica.
Where the coroner was telling us that this murder occurred
sometime between midnight and 8:30 in the morning,
from his own statement, John was back home
in Santa Monica at about 11:00 p.m..
Could there have been enough time
to get from Santa Monica to Tustin?
It certainly was possible,
depending on how long Thien was out there for.
At that point, John was definitely our best,
and really, our only lead.
There really wasn't any physical evidence
that he was involved in this homicide,
but as an investigator,
you can't dismiss any of these theories.
- On February 5th,
Thien's family holds a memorial service
in neighboring Santa Ana.
- At the beginning, I didn't want to see
my brother laying there.
And I did.
That image just kind of, like, stuck in me.
He looked like a wax figure.
He had a beautiful soul, and it's one of those realities
that I didn't want to face.
Sorry. - It's okay.
- Detectives Tarpley and Williams
attend the service to show their respect.
- These are always emotional events
for everybody.
It was just the utter devastation.
And I mean, these are people who did all the right things,
and their life will never be the same ever.
[suspenseful music]
- For the next few weeks, detectives
continue investigating John.
Then, on March 1st, five weeks after the murder,
Tarpley and Williams obtain a search warrant
for John's apartment.
- The day we're going to go
and execute this search warrant,
the phone rings.
[phone ringing]
- It's from Alamogordo, New Mexico.
- I'm thinking, how is Alamogordo, New Mexico,
related to this case?
And it's the Alamogordo, New Mexico, Police Department
saying, "We received a letter."
The letter is kind of a play-by-play
of Thien Ly's homicide.
[suspenseful rock music]
[uneasy music]
* *
- While investigating
the horrific murder of Thien Ly,
Tustin detectives are unexpectedly contacted
by police in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The cops there tell them they've just received a letter
that reads like a confession
to the murder of Thien Ly.
- A sergeant from the Alamogordo Police Department.
He said, "You might be interested in knowing we have
"a letter here that describes in detail
"a murder that took place in your city,
January 29th, 1996."
- The recipient of the letter is named Robert Delaney,
who lived in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The person that's writing this letter
was Jerry Lindberg.
- Delaney's family, who saw the letter,
took it to the Alamogordo Police Department.
* *
The letter was dated February 23, 1996.
- The murder was on Monday, January 29, 1996.
The watch commander started reading the letter to me.
It was chilling to the bone in the sense
that you have somebody that is taking credit for this
and describing in great detail
in how the murder was committed.
- Very descriptive,
to the point where they described
how many times he was stabbed in the front
and how many times he was stabbed in the back.
It also describes another person
that was at the scene of the homicide,
and his name was Dominic.
- The letter seems authentic, but Thien's murder
has received national news coverage,
so investigators need to make sure
it's not a false confession.
- The author of the letter wrote
that when he approached the victim,
he thought he was going to get robbed,
so he took out a key and said,
"All I've got is a key," and he held up the key.
We had withheld from everybody that there was a key
found at that crime scene.
The only person that would have known
that there was a key there, besides the family,
was the killer.
- If the letter describing the murder
was, in fact, written by the killer,
one thing is made perfectly clear.
The motive for the rage unleashed on Thien Ly
was hate.
- When I was covering this case,
I got a chance to see this letter,
and at first, it starts so casually.
And then, in the middle of the letter,
it takes a sharp turn into the macabre.
"Oh, I killed a [...] a while ago.
"Seen this guy rollerblading, and I had a knife.
"I walked right up to him, and he was scared.
I stabbed him to death at Tustin High School."
The letter is a horror show
that was propelled by racial bigotry.
- The tone of the letter is almost congratulatory
for what a great job the killer did
and what a great time he had killing Thien Ly.
[dramatic music]
* *
- This letter supercharges activity
at the police department.
It also raises the stakes.
They can't let the author of the letter get away.
This is obviously a deranged killer.
* *
- The letter was signed Jerry Lindberg.
There was an address, but we had been told
that he had moved out.
- Tarpley sends detectives to New Mexico
to grill Robert Delaney
about Jerry Lindberg's whereabouts.
In the meantime, he runs Lindberg's name
through the police database
and finds a criminal record for him in Monette, Missouri.
But when he contacts police there,
he uncovers a detail that sends the investigation
in a whole new direction.
- We spoke to the Monette, Missouri, police department,
and we said, "Do you know who Jerry Lindberg is?"
to the corporal,
and the corporal said, "Yes, I do.
He is deceased."
And I'm like, "Okay."
I immediately start thinking
this is headed towards unsolved.
And I explain the circumstances of our case,
and I said, "We have this homicide,
"and the person that's writing this letter
says he's Jerry Lindberg," and he says, "No," he goes,
"that's Gunner Lindberg."
- He said on Gunner Lindberg's 18th birthday,
his brother Jerry committed suicide.
And then Gunner took the identity
of his deceased brother.
- He said, "Gunner Lindberg is
"a well-known violent criminal here,
and he is now currently wanted here in the State of Missouri."
- Tarpley and Williams learned that Gunner is pretending
to be his brother because he's been running from the law
for over a year.
- Gunner Lindberg was a fugitive
from the State of Missouri for attempted murder.
- And then he fled the state, and there was
an unlawful flight to avoid prosecution warrant
from the FBI.
- When detectives interview Robert Delaney,
the recipient of Gunner's letter,
he tells them he has no idea where Gunner is.
And the more Tarpley and Williams
find out about Gunner,
the more desperate they are to locate him.
- He had a prior list of crimes
in California as well,
from beating a farm worker
to breaking in an elderly woman's house
and hitting her in the face.
Gunner is a seasoned criminal, no doubt.
- We needed to find Gunner Lindberg.
[dramatic music]
* *
[suspenseful rock music]
[suspenseful music]
- Investigators in Tustin, California, are on the hunt
for a violent criminal named Gunner Lindberg,
a man they suspect brutally murdered 24-year-old Thien Ly.
So they searched the Tustin Police database
to see if Lindberg's had any recent run-ins
with local law enforcement.
- Gunner had assumed his brother's identity.
So when we checked Jerry Lindberg
in our database,
it showed that there had been a field interview
conducted on December 29, 1995,
by a patrol officer at Tustin PD.
- He was obviously doing something
that caused an officer to ask him who he was.
- They had stopped him. They had questioned him.
- The traffic stop was four weeks before the murder.
Police at the time found no reason to hold Lindberg,
and the driver's license he gave them
provides Tarpley and Williams with no clues
as to his whereabouts.
- The police report also indicated
that he had a companion in the car.
- The name listed in the report
is 17-year-old Dominic Christopher.
Detectives recall a Dominic referenced
in Lindberg's letter.
- When we did the background, we learned
that Donald Christopher was working at K-Mart
with Gunner Lindberg,
and that's how they became friends.
- Unlike Lindberg, Christopher provided an invaluable piece
of information during the field interview:
a local PO box address.
[suspenseful music]
- We got to the post office,
we got the box holder
for that post office box,
which came back to a residence
here in Tustin on Pasadena Street.
- It was Gunner Lindberg's uncle who had the apartment.
We were able to put together a search warrant
for their apartment.
There were people who were assigned
to surveil what we thought was the location
of Dominic and Gunner.
- Around midnight, the surveillance team
saw both subjects going into apartment number 18.
- On March 2, 1996, Tustin Police call in
an Orange County Sheriff's Department SWAT unit.
They quietly move into position
outside the apartment building
and wait.
- We figured that they would be asleep.
We didn't want to give them any opportunity
to arm themselves.
* *
- Tustin Police officers,
along with Orange County Sheriff's Department SWAT,
took the door down.
We arrested Gunner.
He was asleep.
Dominic jumped out of a window and ran down
the back of the apartment complex,
where he was caught and arrested.
- When I walked into the apartment,
I looked at Dominic Christopher.
I saw essentially a scared kid.
When I saw Gunner Lindberg,
he had just the blackest eyes you've ever seen.
- While Lindberg and Christopher
are taken to the Tustin City Jail,
detectives search the apartment
and are alarmed by what's inside.
- My name is Debora Lloyd, and I was the prosecutor
on the Gunner Lindberg case in 1996 and 1997.
When Tustin police department did their search warrant
of Dominic and Gunner Lindberg's apartment,
they found a treasure full of evidence.
This--mostly a white supremacist.
There were swastikas all over the place.
There were papers
in Gunner Lindberg's handwriting saying,
"I love to kill the meat.
Kill, Kill, Kill" in big letters.
- And detectives find more than circumstantial evidence
in the apartment.
- Also in the room was a box,
and it was called Gunner's box.
- It was a cardboard box.
There was drugs in there,
but there were also black leather gloves
that appeared to have blood stains on them.
- Investigators bag the gloves for evidence
and zero in on a single question:
does the blood belong to Thien Ly?
While they wait for results from the crime lab,
detectives waste no time interviewing
their two suspects,
and one of them quickly comes clean.
- It didn't take long for Dominic to tell the truth:
that he was there.
So after the Super Bowl, the boys go home,
they smoke a little dope, they get hungry,
and they go to a fast food place about 8:00,
that whole time talking
about how they wanted to kill somebody.
They make their way through Tustin
to the tennis courts.
[suspenseful music]
* *
Dominic.
He said he had, in fact, kicked Thien
in the head several times.
But that Gunner Lindberg had killed him.
- Dominic Christopher was 17 at the time,
and Dominic was kind of following
in Gunner Lindberg's footsteps.
In fact, even in the letter, Gunner Lindberg said,
"I'm teaching Dominic to be like me."
- On March 21, Dominic Christopher is charged
with first-degree murder.
A hearing is scheduled to determine
whether he will be tried as an adult.
With Gunner Lindberg still holding out,
prosecutors are well aware
that the entire fate of their case
could hinge on a single pair of bloody gloves.
- This was a big piece of evidence.
So did those gloves have the DNA from Thien Ly on them?
[suspenseful music]
[suspenseful rock music]
- When Tustin detectives find a pair of bloody gloves
in Gunner Lindberg's apartment,
they hope it's the piece of evidence
that finally solves the murder of Thien Ly.
- It took about a month to get the results on the gloves,
and when it came back, it was a mixture of blood
from Gunner Lindberg and Thien Ly.
- In April 1996, Lindberg is arraigned on charges
of first-degree murder
with a special circumstance of attempted robbery,
but the prosecution wants to add
a racially motivated hate crime charge
to increase the likelihood of a death sentence.
- In order to convince the jury that this was
an actual hate crime, you had to just use
all of the evidence.
And Robert Delaney was so important.
- Robert Delaney is the person Lindberg sent
the letter to in New Mexico.
- My name is Carl Waddell.
I'm a retired investigator for the Orange County
District Attorney's Office.
When I interviewed Robert Delaney,
he told me that after he received the letter,
he called Gunner.
Gunner told him that he killed Ly for the racial movement.
Gunner was a white supremacist.
This kind of evidence,
when it gets introduced to a jury,
is very compelling
because it shows Gunner Lindberg was a racist
and that he would kill again and again
because he got a thrill out of it.
- In May 1997, Dominic Christopher
is convicted as an adult of first-degree murder
and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
That summer, Gunner's trial begins.
- I wanted to be in the courtroom.
I wanted the jury and I wanted the killers to know
where Thien came from,
that he wasn't just a face.
He had a life, he had a lot of things going on for him,
he had family that loved him.
- I didn't understand how vicious the attack was
until the trial.
That's when all the details came out.
I tried to create an out-of-body situation
where it's just my body sitting there
because I had so much anger.
- The senseless crime angers
the men and women of the jury as well.
They agree it was a hate crime
and convict Lindberg of first-degree murder
and hand down the maximum sentence.
- On December 12th of 1997, the judge pronounced
the death sentence for Gunner Lindberg.
- Lindberg's legal team appeals the punishment
without success.
- On August 28, 2008, the California Supreme Court
upheld and confirmed the conviction of the murder,
the attempted robbery, and the hate crime.
This was the very first hate crime death penalty case
in California.
I think one of the important things about this case
was definitely the hate crime allegation
where we did get the death penalty.
I think that's important to the community.
- 27 years later, this crime was a hint
of some of the challenges we have today.
- We have many people who are in the public eye
are overtly racist and overtly supporting hate.
And it's getting that support in many aspects of America.
- One of the saddest ways to frame this case
is that on a dark tennis court in the middle of one
of the richest counties and the most populous state
and the most industrialized country in the world,
the American nightmare killed the American dream.
[soft music]
* *
- After he was cremated, we decided
to spread his ashes in ocean,
to let them float away to other parts of the world
that he would have wanted to see.
My brother was a free spirit,
so every time I travel somewhere,
I think about him.
* *
- My husband and I have two girls.
I remind them of Uncle Thien.
I feel sad that they don't have a chance to know him.
They miss an opportunity to learn,
to know how a great person he was.
He always write notes.
These are his journals.
"I live in today and not very far into tomorrow.
"I do my best every minute of the day,
"and when it's over, I know there's more to come.
I just move on to the next one."
[somber music]
* *