♪
These two women had just come back
from the Fourth of July holiday weekend,
and they were viciously attacked
in their Brooklyn brownstone.
I got a phone call.
Amanda had been shot,
Sylvia had been shot and killed,
and I almost dropped the phone.
The community was very, very afraid,
and they wanted results.
There was a fellow known as the Park Slope Rapist,
and he had not been apprehended yet.
But our main suspect was someone closer to home,
the only known witness.
To the police, none of her story is making sense.
You see someone shot,
you have to make a determination.
Was the person shot, or could it be self-inflicted?
We were outraged, telling them,
"No, no, no, no, no.
"You're barking up the wrong tree.
Go find the guy who did this."
Just the facts of the case makes you kind of
shake your head and say, "I didn't see that coming."
♪
Through all its reputation as a big tough place,
New York is a city of tightly-knit communities.
People often choose their neighborhoods
by which community best suits them.
Neighbors become family,
and they watch out for each other.
After 35 years in the NYPD,
I retired as Chief of Detectives,
and I've seen countless homicides
throughout this city.
Some still haunt me to this day.
This is one of those cases. It was hard to crack.
It tore the neighborhood apart,
and the community was demanding justice.
♪
Every year, like clockwork, noise complaints
flood our precincts on the Fourth of July,
including reports of gunshots
that turn out to be illegal fireworks.
But on this one Fourth of July in 1995,
that 1:00 a.m. call to Brooklyn's 84th
turned out to be the real deal.
911, what's your emergency?
This was one of the most
disturbing 911 calls I've ever heard.
The woman is completely hysterical.
She's describing that a man has forced his way in,
she's been shot, she's been raped.
So you go there hell's bells
and you get there as fast as you can.
♪
Was it a shooting out of a jealous rage
or the boyfriend or girlfriend?
Was it a robbery?
There could be a shooter on the scene.
♪
They have no idea what awaits them inside.
So the adrenaline level of everybody is very high.
They're knocking,
and they're hearing screaming in the background.
Add to that the first EMT who's arrived
recognizes the apartment
as belonging to her friends Amanda and Sylvia.
♪
Amanda is screaming, "Come in, come in!
Help me, help me!"
She has to drag herself
through the apartment to the door
because she's too badly injured to get up and walk
and kind of climbs up her own door,
unlocks the door so they're able to come in.
There's blood everywhere.
♪
Amanda has been shot once in the leg
and Sylvia twice in the head.
When we first talked to Amanda,
it was hard, because she was shot.
So she was in a lot of pain.
Sylvia is lying
kind of in the threshold to the bedroom.
She's bleeding profusely.
She's not conscious, but she's still alive.
When you see someone shot,
you have to make a determination.
Was the person shot, or could it be self-inflicted?
We know a gun has been shot in that apartment
at least three times.
♪
Three shells tends to indicate it's only three times,
but there's no gun.
And the initial question was, "Where has that gun gone?"
And also, there's no forced entry.
There's no damage to the door.
The victims could have known the perpetrator
and would allow the person to come in,
and then this--this happened.
The victims, 34-year-old Sylvia Lugo
and her girlfriend, 28-year-old Amanda Leach,
are rushed to Bellevue Hospital.
While our investigators notify their families,
Sylvia is put on life support.
After we got the call, we all went to the hospital,
and I remember us being
all put into a room, uh, the doctor coming in
and telling us basically that it didn't look good.
I kept saying,
"It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be difficult.
"It's gonna be a challenge.
"Who knows how long
"rehabilitation may have to take.
But she's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine."
Talking to the family is a little difficult
because, remember, they're upset, they're angry.
We have to approach them very delicately.
But we talk to the family as soon as possible
to unearth more information from them that we don't know.
Sylvia and I were born and raised in Park Slope.
The perfect home, three floors, big backyard.
You know, the schools were great.
Mommy and Daddy had eight children.
And Sylvia is the third in line.
Hi, honey!
Sylvia was kind, loved animals.
Anybody who would ever meet her
would not have a problem with her.
She would give you the shirt off her back.
She was always just so unaffected
and just sweet and caring and wonderful.
Sylvia came out when she was 18, 19.
She was totally comfortable with who she was.
And that was her coming out. She came out to everyone.
Sylvia and Amanda met
playing softball on a neighborhood team.
I remember when Sylvia introduced Amanda to us.
And my initial impression was she's a very nice woman.
And when I found out that she was a social worker
and worked with kids, I'm like, you know,
that for me is making a contribution in the world,
someone who's trying to do good.
And I liked her.
♪
But after fighting for her life throughout the day,
Sylvia Lugo succumbs to her injuries.
You know, no, no.
♪
Um, you know, not--not Sylvia, so...
Sylvia was-- how can you not be--
she was--sorry.
- No, that's okay. - It's just--yeah.
This thing goes high!
♪
Ah!
We were all banded together.
♪
We lost our dad a few years earlier.
Sylvia's father had been killed
when he was the victim of a robbery.
The prior history, that was heartbreaking.
We've been through a family member
being robbed and murdered.
We've been through it already.
So we have to keep make sure Mommy's all right,
and just, you know,
shaking our heads in--just in disbelief
and wanting to know what happened.
Amanda has just lost her girlfriend
and is still recovering from surgery to her leg,
but she tells investigators about the fateful night.
They were unloading the car to bring their things
back into the apartment.
Then they were set upon
by an unknown male that forced them and himself
into the apartment at gunpoint.
He forced Amanda to tie Sylvia up.
But she tied her so loose
that she would be able to break free.
♪
He then took Amanda into the bedroom and raped her.
She said that Sylvia broke free
while this guy was raping her.
After Sylvia burst into the room to save Amanda,
the assailant shoots her in the head.
♪
Amanda says Sylvia fell to the floor
and then stood up only to get shot
a second time in the head.
During the course of that struggle,
he fired the gun, striking Amanda in the leg.
And then she said that the attacker
pointed the gun at her
and tried to fire again and that the gun jammed.
Amanda recalled that the perpetrator
grabbed the car keys to the rental car
and grabbed some jewelry and then left the apartment.
A BOLO, "be on the lookout," is put out for the rental car.
And Amanda's description of the assailant,
a Latino male around 5'5", 150 pounds,
wearing a baseball cap with a pencil thin mustache
is used to create a composite sketch.
Five days after the murder,
detectives receive Sylvia's autopsy
and are surprised by the results.
It's at that point that the investigation
suddenly takes a disturbing new turn.
One of the key pieces of information
was the autopsy results from Sylvia.
According to the medical examiners,
it was just physically impossible for Sylvia
to get up after she was shot once in the head.
And at that time, Amanda recalled that Sylvia
was shot once in the head, fell down,
and then got up again and was shot a second time.
One of the things that police do,
it's standard police procedure,
and it's something we do in our own lives,
is if someone has told a story
that you just don't quite believe,
you go back and ask questions again.
♪
Coming up...
We started to go around to do a canvass,
and we talked to neighbors.
We talked to people that live next door.
It's the most important thing
to see what was going on
in the victim's life prior to the homicide.
And having somebody that threatened her life
is the most paramount person to speak with.
♪
[siren wailing] - Soon after Sylvia Lugo dies from gunshots to the head,
detectives notice inconsistencies
between her autopsy report
and her girlfriend Amanda's story about what happened.
What the medical examiner
told the investigating detectives
was Amanda's story that Sylvia was shot, got up,
and was shot a second time and went down
and stayed down was a medical impossibility.
After either injury to her head,
she would not have been able to get up.
NYPD detectives know traumatized witnesses
can misremember details.
But that inconsistency stands out even more
after they take a look at Amanda's hospital records.
The police are really starting
to scrutinize Amanda's story
as it goes to Amanda's leg injury.
The angle of the injury would have been consistent
with Amanda holding a gun
and pointing it towards her own foot.
♪
The possibility that Amanda shot herself
is damning enough,
but then came the results from Amanda's rape kit.
They are inconclusive.
Rape kits are usually pretty dependable.
However, they aren't always foolproof.
But in this case, Amanda's results
along with her troubling inconsistencies
raised a red flag that could not be ignored.
To the police, none of her story is making sense.
So now there's a little bit more suspicion.
Is Amanda really telling us the truth
as to what happened here?
♪
We started to go around and we talked to neighbors,
we talked to people that live next door,
people that might live in the neighborhood
to see if they heard or if they saw anything.
The picture they're getting
is that Amanda wasn't always very nice to Sylvia.
Our detectives find a neighbor in the building
who says the couple sometimes quarreled
and that he heard them arguing the night of the murder.
Amanda was definitely appearing
to be an angry girlfriend,
and that's just going to feed
this suspicion that she committed the crime.
Arguments might indicate a domestic dispute motive.
The police, one of them, he asked me,
"Did Sylvia and Amanda fight? Did they argue?"
And I told him, "No, I had never witnessed that."
And I asked him, I mean, "You don't think Amanda
did this, do you?"
Amanda Leach has now become
a suspect in the murder of Sylvia Lugo.
♪
The police are telling us
this is what they think happened.
They think that it was--it was a lovers' quarrel
and Amanda shot Sylvia.
Amanda was very, very adamant.
She said, "Look, I'm not involved in this.
I had nothing to do with this. You guys have to believe me."
But the information that we had
just pointed towards her at the time,
where we just couldn't rule her out as a suspect.
♪
Sylvia's funeral was just a few days later.
Amanda came to the funeral,
and I remember, it was so awful.
That was the first time we'd seen her since.
I don't know if Amanda was immediately aware
that we were told that she was a suspect.
It was very awkward.
We were looking at her as the cause of this,
um, and it was-- it was difficult.
Amanda was in a wheelchair, just sobbing.
She was a mess.
And so I grab her hand as she's passing by.
I couldn't do more than that because my family,
I felt like, you know,
I couldn't--I grabbed her hand,
I looked at her, you know, I let it go.
And then, you know, she left.
♪
After the funeral, the news of Sylvia's death
and Amanda's injuries
circulates among their friends.
I got a phone call from my friend
that Amanda had been shot
and that Sylvia had been shot and killed.
I mean, I almost dropped the phone, I think.
My girlfriend at the time saw the horror on my face.
I knew Sylvia and Amanda
from the Prospect Park Women's Softball League.
And everyone thought they were an adorable couple.
♪
I moved to Park Slope
because half of the lesbians in New York City
lived in Park Slope.
There were just all kinds of people living there.
The shockwaves of this crime ripped through the community.
We were outraged when it first came out
that the detectives involved were thinking
that maybe Amanda had something to do with this.
♪
Members of Park Slope's LGBTQ community
believe our investigators' focus on Amanda
is keeping them from finding the real killer,
especially when they learn a seria linking this manwas no
to Sylvia's murder,
detectives need to investigate any possible connection.
While a parallel manhunt
for the Park Slope Rapist continues,
so too does the search for new leads in the Lugo case.
There is a lot of pressure.
Want to be close to solving the case
because if it gets older, it gets cold.
Our detectives discover a possible link to the murder
when questioning members of Sylvia
and Amanda's softball team,
a woman named Trelane McKinney.
Trelane McKinney was a woman that lived in the community
who had dated Amanda.
They had been seriously involved.
And then, according to Trelane,
Sylvia had come along and started dating Amanda
and broken up the relationship between Trelane and Amanda.
Trelane wasn't very happy about it
from what we heard during our interviews with people.
A few weeks after the breakup,
tensions flared at a softball game
that Trelane was umpiring.
Trelane said to Sylvia, "I will hurt you.
I will kill you."
♪
This was another possibility that we had to look into
to see if this was fact true and that could Trelane
be involved with Amanda in Sylvia's death?
Maybe Amanda employed or had Trelane come take the gun.
Maybe Trelane committed the crimes
and they're covering it up,
so, you know, Amanda and Trelane
can get back together.
Amanda's friends are adamant
that these accusations don't make sense.
But still, investigators must follow up to see
if there could be any truth to these theories.
It's the most important thing to see what was going on
in the victim's life prior to the homicide.
And having somebody that threatened her life
is the most paramount person to speak with.
♪
Trelane was definitely a person of interest
in this case.
So when officers learn
that Sylvia and Amanda's rental car,
which Amanda had reported as stolen by the killer,
was discovered near Trelane's apartment,
our antenna went sky high.
♪
[dramatic music] - A month after Sylvia Lugo's murder,
NYPD detectives were investigating
if she'd been the victim
of a love triangle gone wrong,
involving her girlfriend, Amanda Leach,
and Trelane McKinney.
♪
Finding the rental car a few blocks from her house
just added to the suspicion
that Trelane could be involved in this homicide.
If we did find fibers or anything
that linked Trelane to that vehicle,
then our suspicions would have been raised a lot more.
If anyone could find evidence in the car,
it was the NYPD's world-renowned crime lab
with over 200 forensic scientists
and their cutting-edge techniques.
♪
While they wait for forensic results,
our detectives rush over to the post office
where Trelane works.
One of the detectives knew my supervisor.
And she called me into the office,
and she allowed them to take me out of that job
in handcuffs.
I'm like, "I didn't do it. Why am I getting arrested?"
And they said, "We'll talk to you down at the station."
♪
Trelane tells investigators that she met Amanda
on the Park Slope women's softball team.
Amanda had came to a game.
I'm like, "Hey, she's kind of cute."
And I found myself a little bit more mesmerized
as I kept watching her.
So I went up and introduced myself.
And when we finally got together, it just took off.
Our detectives learn that Amanda and Trelane
had been dating about three years
when Sylvia Lugo entered the picture.
Amanda brought her home, brought her to our home.
And...that was a lot for me
to take on that she wanted to be with her.
And I moved out.
Trelane admits she threatened to kill Sylvia
but claims it was empty words.
I was angry, hurt.
Sylvia was a big part of the breakup.
And my thinking was like, "If you hurt Amanda,
I will--I will hurt you back."
♪
And I end up having Sylvia's game.
And I called her out.
♪
And then she comes up in my face.
And I'm, you know, like, saying, "Back off, back off."
The next thing I know, I said,
"I will ----ing kill you. I will hurt you."
♪
You know, last words said
are the words that come back and haunt you.
♪
After the interview,
the police certainly couldn't prove
or have any hard evidence whatsoever
that Trelane was involved.
It's not like they had somebody who saw her
go into the building
or leave the building at the time of the crime.
So with the leads up to this point going nowhere,
our detectives hope their luck would change
when the forensics from the rental car come in.
♪
But there was no latent prints, nothing recovered.
With no evidence found in the car,
detectives no longer consider Trelane a person of interest.
Instead, they are left with the puzzle piece
of how the victim's car ended up there.
♪
Five weeks after Sylvia Lugo's homicide,
we still hadn't made an arrest.
But we are unable to rule out Amanda Leach as a suspect.
The police have nothing to back up Amanda's story
that there's an outside attacker.
Waiting every day for news, for an update.
♪
And so we're thinking, "Okay, if you guys suspect this,
why is Amanda not arrested?"
♪
The investigators ask Amanda Leach
to come down to the precinct.
We had to sit down and interrogate her
and go back with her and go at her
so that maybe she could break
and tell us what really happened
because sometimes, in these cases,
when you talk to individuals sometimes,
after several hours of interrogation,
sometimes they want to tell the truth.
♪
Amanda Leach says that because
she was heavily medicated so soon after surgery,
she may have misremembered some details,
but she is adamant that she and Sylvia were both victims.
She even agreed to take a polygraph test
to tell us that she was telling the truth.
♪
Amanda aces the test, but detectives
still aren't ready to rule her out as a suspect.
Polygraph results
are not admissible in court in New York State.
And it's because they're not considered 100% reliable.
When word gets out in the LGBTQ community
that Amanda is still a suspect while a serial rapist
remains on the loose, all hell breaks out.
I think, at one point,
they were considering arresting Amanda.
And we just decided that there was no way
that we would let that happen.
We protested.
We marched.
It really did feel like, because we were women,
because we were lesbians, like,
"Let's wrap this up right away.
Amanda did it, and put her in jail, and we're done."
♪
The LGBTQ community and the police department
had a fractured relationship.
There was distrust,
there were marches, and this is horrible,
because you want to work with people.
You want to gain their confidence.
But the NYPD learned from it and improved.
We formed a bureau to better serve the LGBTQ population.
If we had that resource back in 1995,
Sylvia and Amanda Leach's case
likely would have gone much more smoothly.
♪
There was a rapist out there in Brooklyn.
We did, as a group, constantly keep at the police department,
the detectives, and telling them,
"No, no, no, no, no.
"You're barking up the wrong tree.
Go find the guy who did this."
♪
Although Amanda is still considered a suspect,
the community perhaps doesn't realize
that the NYPD is also vigilantly continuing
to hunt for the Park Slope Rapist.
When you have two parallel cases like this,
any community, understandably, is frightened and aggrieved.
In fairness to the police at that time,
both cases were being worked very hard.
♪
Two months after Sylvia and Amanda's attack
and just a half a mile from it,
a stranger follows another young woman
into her apartment building.
Police were at the right place at the right time
when they arrested 26-year-old Tony Harrison.
Based on victim IDs, our investigators believe
they finally caught the Park Slope Rapist.
Now we had an individual who went around
accosting women in this community.
The more that we looked into it, the more we had
to try to get as much information as we could.
♪
matic music] - Our NYPD detectives have been looking
for Sylvia Lugo's killer for over two months.
The only witness, her girlfriend, Amanda Leach,
was also shot in the vicious attack
but was still considered a suspect.
Other suspects were in short supply, though,
until the arrest of the Park Slope Rapist.
♪
Tony Harrison was raping many women
in their apartments after midnight
in that Park Slope area.
And the police were looking for him
for ten months during this time.
Harrison's victims said that he was armed with a gun
and threatened to kill them if they screamed.
It seemed like the same MO as Sylvia's attacker.
But then, with Amanda Leach's description in mind,
our investigators take a closer look.
The investigators for Sylvia Lugo
were looking for a thin-built Hispanic man
with a pencil-thin mustache.
What Amanda described was totally different,
because the Park Slope Rapist was a Black male
who was taller, maybe a little bit heavier,
not as short as the one that Amanda described.
So after the detectives
intensively interviewed Tony Harrison,
they believed that he was the Park Slope Rapist
but he had nothing to do with Sylvia Lugo's homicide.
♪
It's a huge setback for detectives
and for Amanda Leach's supporters.
Although Amanda remains a suspect,
she strongly maintains her innocence.
Amanda was very convincing
that she was a victim and so was Sylvia.
And she knows that it looks like maybe she was involved
from what--all the information that we gathered about her.
But she had told us several times that she didn't do this.
And we wanted to believe her.
With no hard evidence against Amanda,
the department announces a reward for information
leading to the arrest of Sylvia's killer.
There's a 10,000 reward for that person.
That will entice people to come forward
and say who this guy is, who this individual is,
and that would possibly help us in the case.
Hello, Times Square!
But despite the reward,
as 1995 turned into 1996,
Sylvia's case remained an unsolved mystery,
and her friends and family have little to celebrate.
It was the absolute worst to think that
somebody--somebody who did this to Sylvia
was out there every day,
was going to sleep a free person,
was closing their eyes at night
knowing what they did.
This is something I thought about every night,
you know, when I went to bed.
♪
It was difficult, but a lot of us thought
that the best way that we could honor
Sylvia's memory was to make sure
Amanda didn't wrongfully go to jail for her murder.
I think it's probably a really tough job
to be a police officer, to be a detective,
to sift through evidence, but you can't give up.
The community was very, very afraid.
They wanted results.
Just after midnight, about eight months
after Sylvia Lugo's murder,
a young woman named Gabrielle Kearns
is sitting in her car.
A man with a gun approaches her
and demands everything she has.
He tried to take her vehicle.
She wouldn't give it to him. She put up a fight.
And he shot her in the head.
♪
Fortunately, we have officers patrolling the area.
A man by the name of Alex Villanueva
was arrested shortly thereafter.
He had a semi-automatic handgun on him
when he was taken into custody.
Now we have a gun.
Let's send that gun to ballistics to see
if it matches other crimes that he may have committed.
Miraculously, Gabrielle Kearns
survives the shooting.
But right now, the focus is on 19-year-old Alex Villanueva.
He was a drifter.
He didn't have a place where he stayed.
So he was more or less running in the streets.
He had to be brought into custody.
It took detective work to sit him down
and get him to cooperate
and to develop a rapport with him
in what we call the box.
We had to put him in the box and talk to him.
It was eight months since Sylvia's murder
that Alex Villanueva was arrested.
It took a long time.
And it just needed to be done the right way.
When our guys get a good look at Villanueva,
they compare it to the police sketch of the killer
taken from Amanda Leach's description.
♪
They are stunned.
He has an uncanny resemblance.
♪
The Sylvia Lugo case didn't really make much sense
that it was related until I saw the sketch.
When I saw the sketch, I knew that this had to be my guy.
He was slim-built. He had a pencil-thin mustache.
He was Hispanic.
He even had the baseball hat on that Amanda described
at the scene of the homicide of Sylvia Lugo.
Our investigators believe Villanueva was not only
Gabrielle Kearns' shooter, he was also capable
of a coldblooded killing like Sylvia Lugo's.
♪
The shooting of Gabrielle really lit up the case.
It changed things. She was shot in a car.
So it was a little different than the home invasion.
But it shows the recklessness of the individual,
how violent and how volatile his personality was.
The MO was that this guy would shoot first.
It was just like in the Sylvia Lugo case.
He always shot in the head.
He's a dangerous person that we had to get off the streets.
But in a city of eight million people,
a sketch and a similar MO is not nearly enough to say,
"We got our guy."
We know it's gonna take a lot more digging.
Coming up...
This person just came out of nowhere.
So he explained the unexplainable.
♪
After nine months of hunting for Sylvia Lugo's killer,
our NYPD detectives are finally headed
in a new direction in their investigation.
When their latest suspect, Alex Villanueva,
is brought in for questioning,
he seems unusually eager to cooperate.
Alex, for his own purposes,
decided he wanted to talk.
He called himself Little Gotti
because he saw himself as untouchable,
like the criminal John Gotti was at the time.
Villanueva unexpectedly confesses
to another unsolved murder.
♪
It was an execution-style shooting
two months before Sylvia Lugo's death.
For almost a year,
the stalled case had haunted Detective Parker.
The reason I got the case is I was in the homicide team
in the 81 detective squad.
I'll tell you exactly what happened
with this case that I had.
When we got to the crime scene,
we found a male victim named Michael Turrell.
Apparently, someone put a pillow over his head
and shot him through the head and killed him.
♪
Alex Villanueva described at first
and said that Mike Turrell was going to assault him
and then admitted it was really
just a simple robbery and murder.
♪
Michael Turrell appeared to be the victim of a robbery
and was shot in the head
just like Gabrielle Kearns and Sylvia Lugo.
It is looking increasingly likely that Villanueva
was the person responsible for Sylvia's death,
not Amanda Leach.
When we finally ask him about Sylvia's murder,
our suspicions are confirmed.
He told everything in quite strong detail.
He was actually proud of what he did.
That's an investigator's dream come true
when you have a braggart like that.
He explained,
when he described Sylvia Lugo's murder,
he said that he wasn't targeting anybody
but he was in the area
and saw them, had a gun, and decided, "Why not?"
♪
And once Villanueva started singing,
he didn't stop.
He described, in the Sylvia Lugo murder,
how it was a crime of opportunity,
how he had been out on the street,
saw these two women pull in and pull up
and get out of their car
and knew he could rush behind them
and force them into the building
and into their apartment.
He described how Sylvia was tied up, at his orders,
by Amanda,
how Sylvia burst in while he was actually raping Amanda
and how he shot Sylvia...
And how Amanda grabbed him
and they struggled over the gun
and how Amanda was shot.
And then he admits to stealing
Sylvia and Amanda's rental car,
which fills in the blanks on why the car was found
near the home of Trelane McKinney,
Amanda's ex-girlfriend and a former suspect.
He said that he took the car, drove away,
and that he had wiped it down,
and that, a few weeks later,
he had to visit his probation officer
and that he parked the car near his probation officer.
And when he was walking back to the car,
there were some police cars around,
so he walked away from it.
So he explained the unexplainable.
This person just came out of nowhere, nowhere.
Like, they stumbled upon him.
Incredible. Incredible.
But what really needs to seal the deal
is the ballistics report.
Ballistics are like fingerprints.
Every gun has its own rifling inside the barrel.
So every bullet that comes out has distinct markings.
It's irrefutable as forensic evidence.
So when our guys get the word
that the ballistics are in, we hope against hope
that we don't run into yet another roadblock.
♪
The ballistics results from the gun
used in Gabrielle Kearns' shooting come up as a match
with the shells found at Sylvia's murder scene.
That evidence was great because the sketch
that Amanda provided to the detectives
and with the ballistics evidence
that we had from the shooting,
we were able to match it together to say
that this was the person that was responsible
for these shootings, which was Alex Villanueva.
In the Sylvia Lugo homicide, the police realized
that Amanda was telling the truth about what happened.
Amanda was giving you the narrative,
the truthful narrative of exactly what happened,
in what sequence, what the perpetrator looked like,
and what the perpetrator said.
Amanda Leach is no longer a suspect
in the murder of Sylvia Lugo.
Everything she said was true.
It was--everything she said was true.
I was completely shocked.
Now the focus is on Alex Villanueva.
♪
First, you have Michael Turrell,
who gets killed.
Then you have, several months later,
the murder of Sylvia Lugo.
Then after Sylvia Lugo, then you have Gabrielle Kearns.
She gets shot.
So there were three victims
from this young perpetrator's rampage.
This guy, Little Gotti, Alex Villanueva,
was a bad kid.
It was a race against time
to get him behind bars where he belongs.
This kid should never come out in the streets ever again.
There is still more detective work to be done.
Amanda Leach was the sole witness
to the murder of her girlfriend, Sylvia.
And now we hope she will help us ID Villanueva.
Even though you have ballistics,
if you have a statement, you still want
an ID of the perpetrator,
so having Amanda view a lineup
was really paramount to the investigation.
For Amanda, this was a step forward that detectives
finally believed that she was a victim.
We do a lineup in the city every day.
Somewhere in the city, several a day.
And each time, you understand that the victim,
if it is the victim and not a witness,
is reliving that horrible experience
that she wants to block out,
and it requires enormous strength.
It's very emotional for a witness
to actually see the perpetrator
on the other side of the glass.
Every witness is really frightened to do a lineup
because they're afraid
that they're gonna remember it wrong
or pick the wrong person out.
As Amanda approaches Brooklyn's 84th,
she readies herself.
How would she react
if she found herself face to face once again
with the man who caused her so much heartache?
♪
After a nine-month investigation,
Alex Villanueva has become our number one suspect
in the shooting death of Sylvia Lugo.
Amanda Leach, who had been the prime suspect,
has insisted all along that she and Sylvia
were the victims of a deadly shooter
matching Villanueva's description.
♪
Now she will have the opportunity
to possibly ID him.
♪
Amanda viewed a lineup,
and she identified Alex Villanueva
as the man who had attacked her
and killed Sylvia back in July.
♪
The day she identified Alex Villanueva
as the man who had destroyed her life and Sylvia's
was really the day she began to get her life back.
♪
Just over a year after Sylvia Lugo was killed,
the Kings County District Attorney's Office
charges Alex Villanueva
with attempted murder, murder, and rape.
I think we were all, you know,
blown away probably by the fact
that Amanda was innocent and the fact that the person
who killed our sister had also attacked other people.
The news spread like wildfire.
And we all rejoiced.
It was a huge relief for Amanda.
The stress and trauma
of being thought of as the prime suspect,
it was a horrible year while they investigated her.
Although she had a lot of people on her side,
she had an awful lot who weren't.
She was blamed, really turned into a pariah.
♪
Even a year after the shooting,
Amanda still had serious leg injuries
and was unemployed.
You know, looking back on it,
of course, you know, it's horrible.
I mean, I couldn't--I can't imagine being in her situation,
you know, being attacked, witnessing what she did,
and then not having the love and support
that Sylvia had around her.
♪
Amanda, she lost her dignity, okay?
I mean, she wasn't the same after all that.
♪
I guess, in my little way, like, representing my family,
I wanted to extend, you know, an olive branch
or just, you know, an acknowledgement, at least,
because, you know, anybody in that situation deserves that.
I don't think one detective would say
they would do anything different
about how they handled this case,
especially with all the evidence
that sort of led them towards Amanda.
And all you can do is go back and apologize and say,
"Look, we're very sorry.
"We hope this brings you
some kind of closure, especially for the community."
Trelane McKinney suffered too.
She lost her job and was shunned
by her own community.
You know how paper blows in the wind?
That's how I felt. I felt useless.
Just let it take me away.
It just hurt a lot that people I've been friends with,
they believed that I did it.
I still have flashbacks of the incident
and what I went through every time July 5th comes around.
♪
In a Brooklyn courtroom, days before his trial
was about to start, Alex Villanueva
stuns prosecutors and even his own attorneys.
He pleads guilty to second degree murder of Sylvia Lugo,
Michael Turrell, the attempted murder of Gabrielle Kearns,
and the rape of Amanda Leach.
Almost two years after Sylvia's death,
Villanueva is sentenced to 50 years to life.
♪
That's really, you know,
relief in terms of, "Oh, justice.
"Sylvia's killer is no longer walking around there
just doing whatever he wants."
That's good, but also,
he won't be hurting anybody else.
I would just like Sylvia to be remembered
just as she was a great person.
And I know she could have been even greater.
♪
Look at Daddy, Danielle!
We talk about her constantly, every day.
No more!
Just keeping her spirit alive,
and it's--you know, it hurts,
but it makes us smile thinking about it.
Just because somebody is gone,
that doesn't mean their memory is gone.
♪