A writer in the vibrant art scene of early 1980s SoHo
is found dead in a parking lot.
It was hard to go from this ethereal,
beautiful, productive, imaginative woman
to this body.
We knew at the time it was going to be, definitely,
a sexual assault, homicide, rape case.
She was last seen en route to meet her husband.
He said he was supposed to meet his wife
at the Puck Building right around 5:00,
and he went there.
And from what I understand
they must've missed each other.
This is 1980s New York-- not really a time
you want to be caught out after dark alone.
Detectives questioned
if her husband could have been involved.
They're zoning in on him and they're saying,
"Who is this guy Richard?
Can we really believe his story right now?"
Their relationship was on and off.
They got together and then they separated
and then they got back together again.
Ironically, it's her missing wedding ring
that provides a major clue.
Whoever sold this ring,
maybe they tried to get money for it.
If we found that ring,
we'd probably find who was responsible for this.
This guy's getting out of town.
There's something wrong here.
♪
New York City has many iconic neighborhoods,
but there is one that stands out
for its beauty and culture: SoHo.
The neighborhood in Lower Manhattan is called SoHo
because it's South of Houston Street.
The cheap loft spaces of the '70s attracted artists
who could live and do their art
on a starving artist's budget.
By the early '80s, SoHo was leading an art revolution,
and those loft spaces turned galleries.
It was here that an ambitious young artist from San Francisco
came to make a name for herself.
And the fact that this talented woman
was on the verge of doing just that
when someone violently took her life
is what makes this case so tragic to me.
Elizabeth Street in Lower Manhattan
runs from the heart of SoHo through Little Italy
and then into Chinatown.
Every block is its own little universe
with its own culture and history.
This was especially true in 1982,
when Detective Paul Pace was working in the 5th Precinct.
About 7:15, 7:30 at night,
we got a call about a female DOA
in a parking lot on 128 Elizabeth Street.
She was missing some items of her property,
a boot, her gloves.
That's known in the police parlance as a dump job.
She was Asian, late 20s, early 30s.
We saw that her pants were down
and her underwear were down below her knees,
definitely a sexual assault, homicide, rape case.
It appeared that she had struggled.
There was injuries to her finger
which would indicate something being pulled from your finger.
Upon closer examination,
she apparently had been strangled.
There are signs of somebody being close and it's physical.
It's not a gunshot from 10 feet away.
This was somebody,
hand-to-hand, that had killed her.
She has no identification on her.
She has no wallet on her.
And the police are stumped.
Who is this woman? What's her name?
How did she end up here?
♪
A Jane Doe is hard.
You have to know who the person is.
That way, you can start piecing things together
like where were they? Who knows them?
Are they from this area
or are they from somewhere else?
After processing the area where the body was found,
detectives return to the station
and get to work trying to figure out who she is.
When we first found her body,
we had no idea where she came from.
You're going to have to be relying on fingerprints
that are taken in the morgue, maybe dental records,
and then hopefully someone would come forward
and say that this person is missing.
Detective Pace was still working late that night
when a local SoHo resident, Richard Barnes,
shows up at his desk.
It was early Saturday morning,
I'd say 2:00.
He came in and he said,
"I want to report my wife missing."
They were supposed to meet for dinner.
She didn't show up.
He thinks that,
"Well, maybe she got caught up with some work.
"She got caught up with some friends.
She decided to do something else."
He meets up with friends for drinks.
And as soon as he told me what his wife was wearing
and what she looked like, I knew I had bad news for him.
I had a Polaroid, and I showed him the Polaroid,
and that was it.
He identified her.
And I could see, in his eyes and in his face,
how he was just out of it for a while.
Detectives no longer had a Jane Doe.
The victim's name was Theresa Cha.
I got the call, and it was 6:00 in the morning
on Saturday, November 6th.
I answered the phone. It was Richard.
My first thought was, "Why is he calling me?"
And he finally said, you know, she was dead.
When you first hear the news,
it's like those projection machines.
It goes, click, click, click,
and it goes on like that.
And that's what I was seeing.
Her image as a child, that's what I saw.
All this different clicking of these images.
You don't really know what to think.
You have a sense of this raw,
wild, pure emotion.
♪
We were a very close-knit family.
There were five of us.
Theresa was third and I was the oldest.
We immigrated from Korea.
Just like any other immigrant family,
struggling to assimilate.
When she was young she didn't speak too much.
She was, you know, to herself.
It turns out that she is
quite expressive.
San Francisco library system had a portrait contest,
and she won the portrait contest.
And she ended up trilingual,
fluent in Korean, English, and French.
Theresa's love of language and art led her
to the University of California, Berkeley.
She quickly fell in
with a community of artists and writers.
She was an undergrad, and I was a graduate student.
And one of the things I remembered most about her
was her voice, which was like breath.
She emanated a kind of kindness
and a kind of spirituality that's just otherworldly.
Her friends were all artists and poets.
That's the crowd that she sort of felt close to.
Very accomplished.
Theresa's future husband, Richard Barnes,
was also studying at UC Berkeley.
She met Richard in Berkeley.
And I think he came to one of her shows.
He helped her quite a bit
producing her video projects and photography.
By the end of the '70s,
Theresa felt like she'd outgrown the Bay Area.
Her friends from Berkeley,
they were all moving to New York,
and she wanted to be a part of that
and she definitely saw New York as the destination.
It's obviously a place
where people from all over the world come.
So if you're looking for inspiration,
there's really no better place.
SoHo in the 1980s is not the SoHo of today.
There were clubs everywhere, galleries, writers, poets,
artists, photographers.
It was the place to be.
But the cheap rents that attracted artists
to the neighborhood also attracted a different element.
SoHo was an up-and-coming art community,
but it was inundated with drugs back in the early '80s.
It was a vibrant but gritty neighborhood
that attracted Theresa to New York.
It was where she lived and where she died.
Detectives get to work learning as much as they can
about Theresa's final hours.
Back then, you were really on your own wiles
to try to solve a case.
There was no GPS.
There was no tracking this woman's whereabouts
or street cameras.
After the initial meeting
with Theresa's husband, Richard,
our detectives bring him back for more questioning.
Their relationship was on and off.
They got together and then they separated
and then they got back together again.
He said he was supposed to meet his wife
at the Puck Building right around 5:00,
and he went there,
and they must've missed each other.
And he went home and he called a few people and asked
if they'd seen Theresa, and nobody said anything.
This is 1980s New York.
Not really a time you want to be
caught out after dark alone.
When it got later during the night,
that's when he decided to come into the precinct
to report her missing.
They're zoning in on him and they're saying,
"Who is this guy Richard? Who is his wife?
Can we really believe his story right now?"
Coming up...
She might have been murdered in the Puck Building.
He notices that her wedding ring is missing.
Whoever stole this ring,
maybe they tried to get money for it.
If we found that ring, we'd probably find
who was responsible for this.
The day after aspiring artist
Theresa Cha is found dead in a parking lot,
detectives of the 5th Precinct in SoHo
are questioning her husband, Richard.
The husband or wife in a missing person case
or death of a spouse
is always going to be someone that's on the radar
because they're close to them.
The fact that Richard went out drinking
with friends
was viewed with some skepticism and some suspicion.
Richard defends himself, saying he has no idea
what happened to Theresa.
Detectives grill Richard about everything that happened
the day Theresa was killed.
He tells them that the last time he saw her
was in the morning
when she left for work from their SoHo apartment.
When detectives press Richard to describe her outfit
for the day, they get their first lead.
She was wearing a beret, gloves,
a red leather coat.
Theresa was also carrying
a red bag from the Met.
And when her body was ultimately found
in the parking lot on Elizabeth Street,
her gloves and her beret were missing.
If detectives can find Theresa's missing clothes,
it will be a huge piece of evidence.
Richard also tells detectives about where Theresa
was supposed to be before she met him.
He said Theresa went to work at the Met.
At about 3:00,
she made her way to a gallery
called the Artists Space
and met with some folks there
relative to an upcoming show
that she was going to have there.
Richard's account of Theresa's work schedule
is confirmed by her boss.
While Richard is still on the investigators' radar,
detectives now question the people
at the artists' gallery
about Theresa's visit there.
A photographer named Kenji Fujita saw Theresa
at the gallery that afternoon,
and he reveals an important detail.
Kenji was a photographer.
He paid attention to lighting conditions
in his occupation all the time
and had a picture in his mind's eye
of Theresa leaving
and it being light out.
Theresa left the Artists Space sometime before sunset.
We believe it was sometime around 4:30.
Richard and Kenji's account line up.
Theresa should have been at the Puck Building
by 5:00 p.m.
We don't know which route she took.
There's numerous blocks.
She could have went here
then made a left or a right here
to get to the Puck Building.
When Theresa didn't show up at 5:00,
Richard left to meet friends.
He told detectives he expected to meet her later.
Her family in San Francisco knew that New York after dark
was not a safe place.
New York can be rough sometimes.
And I think the homicide rate
was pretty high at that time.
We questioned it, you know.
"Sis, why are you going to New York?"
This environment of concrete and grittiness,
of course it could have a strain on your marriage
or on your relationship.
And to make it harder, neither Theresa nor Richard
were making a lot of money.
If you don't have a breadwinner of the family,
if you don't have someone with a stable income,
it can be hard.
She's always starving, you know, artist.
That expression doesn't come idly.
She'd work part-time jobs and anything
to support her artwork.
She just constantly needs money,
and so we send her money whenever we can.
She wanted to establish herself
as an artist
and live that life of an artist.
Detectives wonder if the young couple's
financial insecurity led to conflict.
And then they discover that when Theresa was killed,
her career was about to take off.
Her first book, "Dictee," had just been published.
"Dictee" came out and was published
before she was killed-- days before she was killed.
The first time I saw the book,
she mailed it to San Francisco,
and the book arrived on the day of her funeral.
She had mailed it on November 3rd.
You know, two days before she was killed.
It was like
she was talking to us.
Detectives have to look closely
at Teresa's husband, Richard.
Evidence of a physical struggle
would be critical to the investigation.
Spouses are involved quite a bit.
I figured she had to have put up a fight.
And that whoever did this
would definitely have scratches
on his face or his arms.
Detectives investigating the murder of Theresa Cha
are looking closely at her husband,
Richard Barnes.
I knew what happened to his wife,
how she was beaten,
which I know, more or less,
that whoever did this would have some sort of laceration
or scratches on their face or arms.
And when I looked at his face
and I looked at his arms, there was no scratches.
His lack of visible injuries leads detectives to believe
he is most likely not the killer.
Although detectives have not ruled Richard out
they have to start looking elsewhere
to try to solve Theresa's murder.
The murder probably didn't take place in the parking lot
because it wasn't that long after dark,
and I'm sure that there was somebody walking by
on that street or a parking lot attendant
who would have seen it.
The lack of physical evidence
found in the parking lot also tells detectives
that the murder probably happened somewhere else.
The fact that Theresa was supposed to meet Richard
at the Puck Building led investigators to believe
that she might have been murdered in the Puck Building.
It's an old building.
It's an historical landmark in New York City.
The Puck Building is the beginning
of the West Village-- the East Village.
In the fall of 1982,
the huge building was being renovated
and the interior was a maze of half-finished rooms
and construction zones.
So they did search the Puck Building.
♪
You're going to have teams of people
that are going to be assigned to search certain areas.
You're looking for signs of a homicide or a struggle
or maybe one of her missing items of clothing.
And if you don't readily see it,
you would have to look around till you found something
that drew you to that area
to say that this is likely where the murder occurred.
A K-9 unit is brought into the building.
And ended up hitting on an area in the basement,
the pump room, I believe it was called...
And started acting up the way dogs are trained to do
when they come upon that scent.
The K-9 dog went wild.
The dog got very excited
and appeared to be hitting on a scent...
But the crime scene
was not located at that time.
There is nothing more disappointing than a K-9
signaling they found something,
and it turns out to be a false alarm.
It looks like a dead end for the detectives.
As the investigation continues Theresa's husband, Richard,
is struggling with the aftermath of her murder.
Richard was very emotionally broken up.
It was hard to go from this just ethereal,
beautiful, productive, imaginative woman
to this body.
It was horrible.
And to make it worse for Richard,
Theresa's family was not only mourning her death,
they were not happy with him.
My parents were angry at him
for failing to look after her.
Where was he? What was he doing?
Why didn't he protect her? There were a lot of questions.
Detectives have their own questions
and very little information to work with.
And you have to remember, too,
in those days, there was no DNA.
There is no iPhones, you know,
very little technology.
This is going to require
some boots on the ground gumshoe work.
When detectives show Richard the list of possessions
found with his wife, an important clue emerges.
He notices that her wedding ring is missing.
She had a ring that was custom-made.
It was a silver band with a black stone in the middle
and I think two red stones on the side.
And his ring was silver metal
with a red stone in the middle
and two black on the side.
They were identical to a point,
but they were opposite colors.
Detectives recall the injuries
found on Theresa's fingers and wonder
if her ring had been violently removed.
Finding this ring could be the key
to solving this murder.
We had a picture of the ring.
We went to all the pawnshops.
Whoever stole this ring,
maybe they tried to get money for it.
If we found that ring, we'd probably find
who was responsible for this.
On Monday morning,
three days after Theresa's body was found,
some of the detectives fan out into SoHo,
while others hone in on the Puck Building.
Monday is when people started to come into the building,
the construction workers and so forth.
That's when the investigation really vamped itself up.
Detectives ask workers in the building
if anybody had seen anything unusual
the Friday Theresa was murdered.
And it isn't long before a plumber speaks up.
This plumber who comes in, and he sort of barges in,
and he's got to get something off of his chest.
And he thinks he knows who killed Theresa.
Coming up...
Then he doesn't show up Saturday night.
He took some money, $1,000, and a piece of jewelry.
This guy's getting out of town. There's something wrong here.
Three days into the investigation
of Theresa Cha's brutal murder,
detectives now believe
she was killed in SoHo's iconic Puck Building.
But a thorough search is disappointing.
No evidence is found.
So detectives interview the workers
who are there every day.
That's when one of the plumbers comes forward
with some interesting information
about his roommate and brother-in-law,
Joey Sanza.
Peter Philbin was working at the Puck Building
as a plumber.
According to Peter, Joey came home from work
at the Puck on Friday night acting agitated.
Peter's wife, Kathy, who was also Joey's sister,
had just finished taking a bath.
Kathy Philbin is just exiting the bathroom.
Joey said, "Can I use your water in the bathtub?"
Kathy said, "Why would you want to use my water?
I just took a bath in it."
Joey Sanza gets into the bath,
which had not yet been drained by Kathy.
That was very notable to Kathy
and obviously very strange.
But why would you jump into somebody's bathwater?
Peter also tells investigators
that Joey was supposed to go to work the next day,
but he never showed up.
Then he doesn't show up Saturday night
to sleep in Brooklyn,
nor does he come back Sunday night to sleep.
He took some money from Joey Sanza's sister
and a piece of jewelry.
Peter goes back to work on Monday and finds out
that Joey is still not there, and then he says,
"Geez, somebody was killed here and Joey is not around.
We're missing money and jewelry."
Right away, that would make a strong signal
to a detective that there's something wrong here.
But nobody knows where Joey Sanza had gone.
After hearing the plumber's story,
detectives go to Brooklyn and question his wife,
who is also Joey Sanza's sister.
She tells them that in addition to acting strange,
the night of Theresa's murder,
Joey was wearing an unusual ring.
His sister noticed the ring
and commented that it made him look feminine.
They were able to describe it in enough detail
to lead us to believe conclusively
that it was the ring that had been taken
from Theresa's finger.
And that's when the investigation
went full-hearted into the guard, Joey Sanza.
According to Joey's sister,
he had only been in the city for a few months.
And that's when Peter Philbin got him a job
as a laborer in the Puck Building.
Joey had recently been promoted to security guard.
Detectives interviewed his supervisor.
We had his time card that he punched out, I think,
at 5:00-something on the 5th of November.
That is the exact same time
that Theresa was expected at the Puck Building.
Sanza's supervisor reveals another detail.
Joey Sanza had access
to a van.
He was asked by one of the managers
of the restoration project to clean out the van
and was given the keys to do that.
Sometime later, at around 5:45,
Joey Sanza returns the keys
to that manager.
And certainly, there was enough time
to take the body in the van,
dump the body in the parking lot,
and drive back to the Puck Building
and return the keys.
Sometime around 8:30 or so,
Joey Sanza returned to the Puck Building.
He was seen
with the red bag from the Met.
And that stood out in the mind of the witness
who saw him return to the Puck Building
at that time.
Detectives are confident that Joey is their man,
but they have two problems: they don't know where he is
and they don't have any evidence
to tie him directly to the murder.
And then a month after Theresa's murder,
there is a breakthrough in the investigation.
And it comes from an unlikely place
when Theresa Cha's brothers visit New York
to settle her affairs.
My brother, James, and I,
we went to the basement of the Puck Building
looking for the crime scene
because the police didn't find the crime scene after a month.
It was just a thought I had.
I wanted to look, you know, where the crime took place.
We did think about the possibility
that somebody followed her into the building
and chased her.
So we looked at all these different places
down in the basement.
There was a small stairway going down to the sub-basement.
It's a huge room.
It's got a huge compressor,
all the machineries for heating the building.
We looked around. I mean, it was pitch black.
And what we saw
was on the columns.
They were numbered 710,
711, 712.
When I saw them, they reminded me
how our mother said she had a dream.
Theresa came out and showed up, in the dream,
and told my mother, "I am here.
I'm right here."
And three sevens showed up.
And so when I saw those numbers,
I knew this is the place.
So we kept looking...
♪
And we saw her hat.
She was wearing a French Beret,
and it was on the floor,
blood caked all around it,
and then her boot was there.
And that's where the crime scene was.
The investigation into Theresa Cha's murder
has led detectives to SoHo's iconic Puck Building.
♪
When Theresa's brothers conduct their own search,
they find the crime scene.
We were surprised 'cause myself
and an entire police department missed that room.
I called Crime Scene again
and we did another search of that room.
This was a unique case,
and it is odd that they were the ones that found it.
It's crazy, it's crazy,
but I think she wanted us to see that.
My parents, I mean, they went through a lot, you know?
Korean War, and then, you know,
to have this happen to Theresa like this
after surviving the war,
it really didn't make much sense.
The life, it was just so abruptly,
meaninglessly cut short.
It's just part of that process you go through.
Disbelief first,
and then you become angry.
You know, "Why did this happen?"
♪
Lots of tears. Lots of tears.
The discovery of the crime scene ended the mystery
where Theresa had been killed,
but their primary suspect, Joey Sanza, had disappeared
and when detectives start to search for him
in the National Crime Information Center,
they discover there is more to him than they imagined.
He's gone by multiple aliases in the past.
Back in those days, it was a lot easier
to get a fake identity than it is now.
Even driver's licenses back in those days were paper.
Sanza had an extensive criminal record in Florida.
He has a history of sexual assaults.
Accused of crimes in Florida.
And this is a security guard who works in the building
that Theresa was supposed to go to
to meet her husband.
To not be able to locate somebody is frustrating,
obviously,
but good detectives find ways to find things.
Suspecting that Sanza is back in Florida,
detectives reach out
to authorities across the state.
And, hoping to find the missing ring,
they go to Florida themselves to look for it.
We went to all the pawnshops...
♪
And it never turned up.
The investigation hits a brick wall.
I thought for sure that we would find that ring
in a pawnshop in Florida.
And then, six months after Theresa's murder,
they get another break in the case.
Sanza slips up.
Joey Sanza is already wanted in Florida,
but he commits an additional rape in Florida
and is ultimately apprehended
by the Pompano Beach Police Department.
With Sanza in custody for sexual battery,
detectives head down to Florida to interview him.
You hope that, if everything goes well,
he's going to give it up.
But that's not normally the case,
and especially a guy like this who uses aliases,
he's committed numerous crimes,
is not apt to be the guy
that's going to give you anything.
He's going to try to fool you
and make you think you don't have anything
and you're looking down the wrong road.
But the New York City detectives who travel
to Florida are not easily fooled,
and they have a trick up their sleeve
for when they meet Sanza...
A photo of Theresa's wedding ring.
You look for a physical reaction in somebody,
and you know he's hiding something.
When he looked at the ring, his eyes just popped open,
like, to say, "Where did you get that?"
And then he said something to his attorney,
and his attorney said, "That's it.
Not talking anymore."
Although Sanza didn't confess
to Theresa's murder, his reaction
at seeing the picture of Theresa's ring
was enough for detectives to confirm
the suspicions of him.
It's a great feeling when you get
that "Aha!" moment, like, "Now we know we have you."
But now we have to be able to put everything together
good enough where he can't get out of it.
He can deny it all he wants, but there's enough evidence
to really tie him right to the crime.
While detectives and prosecutors put together
the case against Sanza in New York, back in Florida,
he is convicted on 12 counts of sexual battery
and sentenced to prison.
In each of those three rapes
in South Florida,
Joey Sanza had taken a ring
either from the finger
or from a jewelry box of those victims.
I believe the way that Theresa was killed
was that she walked
from the Artists Space to the Puck Building,
she entered in the entrance
that Joey Sanza was guarding,
and Joey Sanza,
seeing the opportunity,
forced Theresa to the basement
and raped and killed her there.
♪
She used to do Tai-Chi,
and I would think
that when he was beating her, she probably, you know,
tried to deflect the blows
with her Tai-Chi moves.
I mean, this is all my imagination now.
And he just went berserk
and choked her to death.
Sanza never confessed, and he never gave any account
of what may have happened that day.
I am 100% sure
that Joey Sanza murdered
and raped Theresa Cha
in the basement of the Puck Building.
When Sanza is brought to New York for his trial,
everyone is confident that he will be convicted,
but justice for Theresa Cha would not be swift.
At the time of the trial, the case
that we had against Joey Sanza
was totally circumstantial.
Sanza's trial...
ends in a mistrial.
There was forensic evidence that was recovered
from the body of Theresa Cha, but none of it
was able to be linked conclusively
to Joey Sanza.
The decision was surprising, beyond comprehension.
New York City homicide detectives have gathered
an impressive array of evidence against Joey Sanza
in the murder of Theresa Cha,
but it isn't enough.
During the trial when we brought the women
from Florida to New York,
they testified that Joey Sanza
was "polite" during their rapes.
It sounds almost crazy in today's world,
but that was their testimony.
The local papers dubbed Sanza
"the gentleman rapist".
That became somewhat problematic.
Certainly, with respect to Theresa,
Joey Sanza was anything but a gentleman.
When the first trial ends in a mistrial,
Joey is sent back to Florida
to continue serving his sentence for rape.
I knew that Sanza was the man.
All I felt was anger.
It's like I exploded inside.
And, you know, I wanted to go
to, you know, Florida myself and get him.
But prosecutors don't give up,
and they prepare for a second trial.
What we need as prosecutors for a jury to do
in a circumstantial case
is to use their logic,
their common sense.
It excludes any other conclusion
other than that Joey Sanza
was the killer and rapist.
But amazingly, a second trial ends
in a mistrial as well.
The whole ordeal, you know,
from start to finish,
it took five years.
I think I probably missed a whole entire decade of 1980.
It's a blank.
♪
In 1987, Joey Sanza was prosecuted for a third time.
This time, a surprise witness emerges,
Joey Sanza's girlfriend.
She revealed that on the night of the murder,
or soon thereafter, Joey Sanza had called her
and told her that-- words to the effect of,
"This time, I really screwed up.
I killed someone."
This time the verdict comes back,
he is found guilty
of second-degree murder and rape.
He is sentenced to 25 years to life.
Joey Sanza is
still in prison in Florida.
If Joey Sanza is released from prison in Florida,
he will then be brought to New York
to serve 25 years to life.
Theresa Cha's family finally has the justice they sought.
Theresa's husband, Richard, ultimately left New York
and remarried years later.
I ran into him in San Francisco once,
you know, after the final trial was over,
and after that, we didn't stay in touch.
In many ways,
I am able to carry on my conversations with her
because all the artwork she had left behind.
And all her work is being archived
at Berkeley Art Museum
in University of California, Berkeley.
We do have this sort of collection of her work.
For her family, it's a little bit of solace
knowing that she sort of lives on in her work.
In particular, Theresa's book "Dictee"
has continued to inspire artists and academics
for almost 40 years after it was published.
I'm thankful that she had left behind
all of this artwork,
and it's like she's-- she's still here.
And I would urge people,
do more art,
because that lingers and stays behind
and gives, you know, joy
to common folks like us.