A Jane Doe, viciously murdered
and left by the side of the road in Brooklyn...
She was taped from the top of her head
to the bottom of her face.
Nobody could survive that type of punishment.
Leads NYPD into one of the most
high-profile cases in decades.
A young female out drinking, having a good time,
found dead in a different part of the city.
This was front-page headlines across the country.
A college student with so much future ahead of her.
She was working to pursue
a career in legal and justice issues.
The path she chose is to make a difference in the world
and to help people.
You want to give that family justice.
All of New York City was desperate for the NYPD
to solve this murder.
Is there somebody driving around the city,
snatching up girls?
This wasn ' t just an isolated incident.
This is a serial predator.
He's done this before.
We can't let this happen to another victim.
♪
New Yorkers are known to be remarkably tough, but in 2006,
we had a case that sent the city spiraling in panic.
The victim, a brilliant 24-year-old
criminology student.
The tragic irony of someone learning to catch a killer
was herself caught by one.
Imette St. Guillen was devoting her life
to helping victims when she became one herself.
Fear permeated downtown bars and clubs.
People were terrified to go out alone.
Women, afraid to get into a taxi at night.
With a violent predator loose on the streets,
in an eerie connection
to a crime that rocked New York in the '80s,
the NYPD worked around the clock.
Hell-bent on solving what would become
one of the city's most notorious murders.
♪
Police operator 2000, what is your emergency?
In February of 2006, I received the radio call
from the 911 system to respond to Fountain Avenue,
An area of East New York, Brooklyn,
that is very desolate.
This is a really bad neighborhood.
Personally, when I've been there reporting,
I won't stay there past sundown.
I exit the vehicle with a flashlight,
started walking closer...
And observed what appeared to be a body
wrapped in a blanket.
I do remember, you know, checking for a pulse.
The body was definitely ice cold.
When we opened up the blanket,
we found a young girl who was taped
from the top of her head to the bottom of her face.
The first thing you're looking for
is the cause of death.
Obviously, being that her face was taped,
it was most likely through asphyxiation.
Her hands and her feet were tied together with zip ties.
She was not wearing clothes.
She has no identification.
We don't know who the person is.
The first thing I thought of, it was a prostitute
that was dumped there.
Nearby, you have the Strip,
which is a place where sex workers frequent.
But a closer look at the body gives them pause.
She seemed well-nourished.
She didn't have any track marks in her arms.
Well-groomed.
It just didn't fit right.
CSI does an inch-by-inch grid search
of the garbage-strewn area.
A snow brush was found near her body on the ground,
and that was considered to be potentially of interest
just because of the proximity of that brush to the body.
Other than the snow brush, Fountain Avenue
is such a desolate area.
So there wouldn't be, like, stores to canvas
or video to pull.
At the dead-end, there's a construction company,
but at that particular time of night,
the facility is closed.
So the crime scene was pretty limited
to the areas surrounding the body that night.
But the medical examiner finds something noteworthy.
On the zip tie, there was a speck of blood.
Very small; you'd barely see it with your eyes.
The droplet could be, of course,
the victim's own blood, but if it's not,
we most likely got DNA of the perp.
And that's a huge get in figuring out
who committed this atrocious crime.
The blanket she's wrapped in is also key.
It could contain a wealth of evidence
invisible to the human eye, and, of course,
the biggest piece of the puzzle,
Jane Doe's body.
The next day, we do an autopsy.
When they took the tape off of her,
there was a sock that was inside her mouth,
which pushed her tongue in backwards.
And unfortunately,
the ME saw that she was sexually assaulted.
The cause of death for this victim
was the asphyxiation.
Nobody could survive that type of punishment.
When they pulled the tape off of her face,
they found fibers on that tape.
There was these kind of reddish fibers.
The red fibers could be from something
the murderer had been wearing, or picked up from the location
where the Jane Doe was killed.
The red fibers, the tape,
the blanket were definitely of interest
in trying to figure out what potentially happened to her.
Fingerprints were taken,
maybe they were arrested in the past.
She didn't have a criminal record.
So with no way to find out who she is,
we go to the media.
As they wait and hope for a hit,
they head back to Fountain Avenue,
speak with the only business in the area,
the construction company.
We ended up finding a security guard
that worked on the overnight shift.
He remembered seeing a van parked on the side
of where we found that victim.
And he said that somebody was definitely in the car.
His head was lit up because the cell phone was on.
The guard couldn't see the driver
but provides a description of the van.
It's a lead, their first.
And just then, a phone call comes in.
The 7-5 Precinct called me and said
they have a cousin that hadn't been home in over 24 hours.
They're worried it might be the person
that was in the paper.
Detectives rush back to speak with her.
♪
I showed a photograph of the victim,
and she identified her.
Now I have an investigation that I could run with
because I know who it is.
The victim is 24-year-old Boston transplant,
Imette St. Guillen.
I was at work, and I got a phone call from a friend.
I was told what happened.
I was just in complete shock.
It didn't seem like it could possibly be real.
Just devastated.
You know, someone that was so important to me was taken away.
I don't know if I can describe the first time that we met.
We had lockers near each other.
You know, hit it off.
Imette went to Boston Latin,
one of the best high schools in the country.
She's outgoing and fun-loving,
and she loved to dance.
Like whether it be a school dance or at a club,
she was up there dancing the whole time,
and if there was a friend that was being a wallflower,
she would pull them in and get them
to start having fun too.
She would have everybody up dancing.
She was just that loving of a person
that you want it to be like, "Yes," and you got up.
There was no questions asked, you know, you got up.
Imette was definitely the life of the party,
but she also grew studious
and in the top ranking of the class.
She went to George Washington University,
where she graduated magna cum laude,
then decided to come to John Jay to study
as a master's student.
Imette talked about New York as if she was born
and raised in New York,
and Boston was just a visiting place.
She exemplified the John Jay student:
ambitious, smart, passionate about justice.
Even with a heavy school schedule,
Imette finds time to volunteer at a rape crisis center.
The path she chose was to make a difference
in the world and to help people.
We talked to the family that day.
We talked to the mom, the stepdad, and the sister.
They were obviously distraught.
The family was tight-knit, tight-knit.
You knew that they had a bond.
Imette and her sister, Alejandra,
were very close to each other.
They lost their dad at an early age.
It was just always, "My sister and I,
my sister and I."
They were, as they would say, thick as thieves.
After speaking to Imette's family,
you want to give that family justice.
We gotta solve this case.
Her sister tells detectives Imette had been out
the previous night with her best friend, Claire.
Of course, as part of their investigative procedure.
They're going to interview the people
that Imette was last with,
and Claire was one of those people.
They call her and learn she's actually downtown
doing her own canvas looking for Imette.
Claire is going bar to bar, "Have you seen this girl?
It's my best friend, I haven't heard from her."
Detective Brooks breaks her the news.
I've done hundreds of notifications like this,
and I can't say it ever gets easier.
She was hysterical.
Claire was blaming herself for everything that happened.
Claire clearly has information
that is vital to the case.
They need to know what happened that night.
Claire goes to the station.
When you go to the police, it becomes a lot more real,
and I'm not sure Claire was really ready for that.
She kept saying that,
"I should have stayed with her.
I shouldn't have let her go by herself."
They had to find out what Imette did on her last night.
What the hell happened?
Coming up...
When we walked in, it was kind of crowded,
and it was almost like the music stopped.
He had been flirting with her.
She rebuffed his attempts.
Is this guy involved, not involved?
We knew we were in the right place,
we just didn't know who the players were yet.
♪
Detectives investigating the horrific murder
of 24-year-old criminology student
Imette St. Guillen
have just tracked down her best friend, Claire,
to a bar downtown
where she had been conducting her own search.
Claire tried to give us as much information as possible.
She was very, very upset and in a world of pain.
♪
Claire and Claire's sister, and Imette,
and some other friends
all went out to celebrate Imette's birthday,
Which was just a few days away,
so it was an early birthday celebration,
and they were just bar hopping around the Bowery area.
Back in the '70s and '80s,
the Bowery was where vagrants, sex workers,
and drug addicts would hang out.
It had CBGB's.
It's one of America's most famous
dirty punk rock clubs.
But in 2006, the neighborhood
is going through the early stages of revitalization.
It's one of the most happening parts of Manhattan,
lots of young people.
It's just a really fun place to be.
Imette and her girlfriend, Claire,
had a little black book of restaurants and bars.
What they would do is go to visit
a different restaurant and bar every time they went out,
and they would just cross it off the list,
and they'd move on to another one.
Claire told us about drinking heavily.
And it ended up just being Imette and Claire
by themselves at a final bar, which was Pioneer.
It's, like, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning at this point.
In New York, the bars close at 4:00.
Claire was ready to go home.
Imette wanted to continue partying
because it was her birthday.
Imette is like, "No, let's stay 20 more minutes.
Let's have another drink," and you know, Claire obliges,
and then again, she tries to get her to go home.
No matter what Claire said, she wanted no part of it.
And after a little bit of an argument,
Claire says, "I'm going home."
So shortly after Claire left, of course,
she's worried about her best friend,
so she gives her a call.
They spoke on the phone,
and Claire could tell she was either back in that place
or at another bar because of the background noise.
She's pleading with her to get home,
and Imette promises her that she will.
♪
Claire tells detectives that she had called Imette
later that morning,
and it went straight to voicemail.
Please leave a message.
She rang friends. Nobody's heard from her.
She called Imette's roommate and learns chilling news.
Imette never made it home.
Investigators dig into every aspect of their night,
and one thing she says stands out.
Claire tells us that while they were out partying,
one of the bartenders at the Pioneer bar
was hitting on Imette.
She rebuffed his attempts.
One of the first things you're gonna look at is,
like, who were the people that she spoke to that night?
She also told us that Imette was using her credit card.
We notify the credit card companies
to find out last purchases.
What was the last time the card was used,
and where was it used?
As detectives begin chasing down these leads,
news of Imette's murder spreads through the city.
This became a front-page story in New York.
The newspapers identified her by name,
spoke to friends, spoke to family.
Imette was one of those rare people
who brightened the lives of everyone she met,
making anyone she was with feel valued,
feel loved, and special.
♪
Armed with Claire's timeline of the night,
detectives head over to the last place
the women had been together, Pioneer bar.
Claire told us one of the bartenders at the Pioneer bar
was hitting on Imette.
Imette wasn't interested.
At that point, it gives a reason
to talk to that bartender.
They speak to that bartender.
"What did you guys talk about?
"I heard that she rebuffed your attempts;
how did that make you feel?"
You know, we try to read people.
Whether we know the truth or not,
you could tell kind of how somebody responding to you.
He told us Imette wasn't interested,
and that was the last of it.
He didn't come across as, he was hiding anything.
After speaking to him,
we knew that he wasn't involved.
At this point, you got a victim
who was drinking heavily and alone.
It seems very likely someone noticed this
and took advantage.
So you gotta find out who she left with.
We had several teams of detectives,
and we actually went to most bars in that immediate area.
You're doing canvas for video,
and you're doing canvas for witnesses.
We weren't able to get video footage.
Managers would make excuses that,
"Well, the person that gets the video isn't here,"
or, "It's only good for 24 hours."
A lot of systems that don't work or are fake.
They have them up for show, but they don't tape.
And no one they spoke with seemed to have seen her.
At the same time, detectives also pursue another avenue.
Any time we have a death of a female,
the people we're gonna look at initially
is gonna be boyfriends, ex-boyfriends.
They speak with Claire again,
this time about Imette's relationships,
and learn something that piques their interest.
Molly, Imette, and Claire were still out before Claire
had went home to notice that Imette was texting somebody.
And it was her ex-boyfriend.
♪
News of the gruesome murder
of brilliant criminology student
Imette St. Guillen has spread beyond the city.
This was front-page headlines across the country.
You know, a college student with so much future
ahead of her.
Distraught family members are desperate
to find out the person who killed her.
She was a beautiful girl.
She was, I mean, beautiful inside also.
She was kind. She was loving.
She wouldn't hurt anyone,
and she wouldn't want anyone else to be hurting.
Detectives are chasing a lead.
An ex-boyfriend she'd been texting with
the night she disappeared.
You have to go to him and figure out,
"Were you there? You were texting her.
Did you guys meet up? What happened?"
The ex-boyfriend, he was picked up
to come to the precinct, and we talked to him.
He was a fellow student at John Jay College.
He tells detectives that he and Imette met
in a police ethics class, and immediately hit it off.
They dated for a short stint
before realizing they were better off as friends.
Imette's ex-boyfriend still cared about her,
and then to tell him that she was deceased
was beyond something you can comprehend.
Seeing how heartbroken he was, there was absolutely no reason
for us to think he had anything to do with this.
Despite his emotional reaction
and his willingness to submit DNA,
you need an alibi,
and her ex has one at the ready.
He was with his new girlfriend,
and of course, you know, we let them talk
because everything he says to us,
without him knowing, we're gonna try to verify.
So the first thing we do when he leaves is,
we find the new girlfriend.
We speak to her, not even telling her
that we spoke to her boyfriend, and everything was exact.
Times, places, where they were, what they were doing.
We did two cell phone pings on his phone to verify
that he is where he's telling us he was
and it wasn't just a story they both made up.
The cell phone records showed that he was nowhere
near the area at the time Imette was killed.
Her ex returns to John Jay,
where news of Imette's murder has spread like wildfire.
The environment and the mood
and the weight of the emotions from the students,
it was a very somber time.
Imette represented the best of us.
She was just so vibrant and vital,
and somebody off to do good work in her life.
Layered on top of this tragedy
was the loss of someone who
was working to pursue a career
to improve the system that ultimately failed her.
♪
There was this classic New York impulse:
"What can we do?
"How can we hack to this in a way
that is also affirming?"
We have expertise at the college.
At John Jay, all students become familiar
with lifting fingerprints,
identifying fibers, blood spatter.
I remember being in touch with the people
at the police department just to say,
"Anything you need,
we'll make available to you to help solve this case."
And in Boston, where Imette grew up,
just days after what should have been
her 25th birthday celebration,
her family instead holds a massive funeral.
♪
There was not a place to park.
There was not a place to stand or sing.
And I never knew a love like that
until I was there.
You knew that Imette affected people by the crowd.
She made an impact on a lot of other people's lives.
You have to give her kudos for that.
I'm sorry.
♪
Imette's mother, she ends up going in front of the room,
and she cried and begged for more information.
"Please come forward; please speak to the police
so that this doesn't happen to your daughter."
Obviously, I really wanna do something for this family
because you can see how much they're hurting.
More motivated than ever,
detectives scour their databases,
looking for recent cases with similarities.
We started looking at all sexual assault cases,
and we came up with this victim in a cab.
There was a girl who had taken a cab.
It wasn't a yellow taxi.
In New York, there were kind of unofficial cabs
that can be driven by anybody.
They're not subject to the same regulations,
and she was assaulted.
Viciously assaulted, and, like, thrown out of the cab.
The location the victim was dumped,
less than a mile from where
Imette St. Guillen's body was found.
Is that case connected to Imette?
Is this the same person?
You have to see if there's a link.
To everybody who's taken the cab in New York,
is there somebody driving around the city
snatching up girls and then killing them?
♪
Just days into the investigation
of the brutal murder of 24-year-old
criminal justice grad student Imette St. Guillen,
detectives have found a possible connection
and are in pursuit of a predatory cab driver.
We have this person that abducted another girl.
It could be similar,
it could not be, but you have to address it.
We found that people don't wake up
and commit a crime this horrific.
They start smaller--
like kidnapping or sexual assaults
before escalating, building to murder.
So in this case, if there are survivors out there,
this could lead us to find Imette's killer.
We brought that victim in.
We were able to get a detailed description.
They put out a sketch about this cab driver
who had assaulted this girl in the same area
around the same time as Imette.
He's a 5'7" man in his mid-30s.
It's essential we find this guy,
but it throws the city into a state of terror.
♪
When the public starts to hear that somebody had been
violently assaulted in a cab right around the same time
that people are trying to figure out who raped
and murdered this beautiful young girl, you get scared.
Not long after the sketch went public,
police get an unexpected visitor.
♪
The driver, he came forward.
He went to the police station.
The cab driver admits his role
in assaulting a woman on February 12th,
but swears he had nothing to do
with the murder of Imette St. Guillen.
He was very honest and forthcoming
about the entire thing,
and he claimed that he was in New Jersey.
He provides detectives with his DNA,
as well as the contacts
for those he drove that night to verify his alibi.
The NYPD has a unit that will help facilitate contact
with the cell phone providers
to help ping that person to a location.
It turns out the cab driver's phone...
Doesn't come anywhere near the crime scene.
But as one door closes, another opens.
Imette's credit card statement comes in.
And they were able to see the last place
that she'd used her debit card before she died.
She had made some purchases at The Falls.
The Falls is a five-minute walk from Pioneer bar,
where Imette had parted ways with her best friend.
When we walked in, it was kind of crowded,
and it was almost like the music stopped.
We went to the manager and said that there was a girl
that we were interested in finding out
if she was at your bar.
The manager recalls seeing Imette
but didn't take much note of her.
He tells them he didn't see her leave,
that he was likely downstairs counting money at the time.
I said, "Do you mind if we speak
to all the people that work here?"
He goes, "We're very busy.
We don't really have time to talk to anyone."
He was very standoffish and not cooperative,
is the best way to put it.
It just didn't feel right.
He wants us out of there as fast as we can.
But detectives have a job to do,
and immediately begin inquiring about Imette.
We talked to everybody-- the bartenders,
the female bartenders, customers, the bouncer.
The bouncer didn't recognize the picture.
And we're like, "Are you sure
you've never seen this girl before?"
He goes, "I've never seen her before."
But another bartender remembers serving Imette
and says she was there alone.
And she bought two rum and Cokes
because it was the last call.
The female bartender went downstairs to cash out.
Shortly after, the manager passed by and mentioned
that the girl wouldn't leave.
But when the bartender got back upstairs,
Imette was gone.
For some reason, the way the bartender and people
that work there looked at us, we knew there was
something more that we had to delve into.
It just didn't feel right.
Detectives began looking into the manager,
and his name catches their attention:
Danny Dorrian.
Once I heard Dorrian, immediately I thought
of Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin.
Danny Dorrian is the son of Jack Dorrian,
who runs the famous Dorrian's Red Hand bar
on the Upper East Side.
And in the 1980s,
Dorrian's Red Hand was at the center
of one of the most famous, salacious,
all-around "never forget" type of murders
that happened in New York: the Preppy Murder.
That's the bar where Robert Chambers met up
with Jennifer Levin, and after they left that bar,
he strangled Jennifer Levin in the park.
Is it possible that this is some kind of connection?
Is it possible that Danny's involved
more than we're being told?
So now we need search warrants for The Falls
and Danny's office to look for tape and zip ties,
and what kind of carpet fibers does he have in his office.
But before they get to sign off,
Detective McTighe gets an unexpected call.
We got a phone call to go
to the police headquarters right away,
and it ended up being Danny Dorrian and his attorney.
So now I'm thinking, "Man, this guy,
did he just kill her, and he's confessing everything?"
I thought the case was over with that,
but it turns out he was telling us
that he wasn't truthful with us in the beginning.
He did, in fact, see Imette leaving the bar that night.
♪
Six days into the investigation of the murder
of 24-year-old grad student Imette St. Guillen,
bar manager Danny Dorrian shows up at the precinct.
What Danny told the police is that Imette was there,
and it gets to be closing time,
and he's telling her to get out,
and she doesn't want to get out yet.
She wants to finish her drink.
You know, they kind of get into a little
back-and-forth about it.
He's like, "Then I call over my bouncer,
Darryl Littlejohn, and I have him escort her out."
Darryl Littlejohn and Imette went through the side door.
He heard some kind of scuffle and some kind of yelling.
I mean, you hear, like, a woman
getting into an altercation with a man outside
while she's, like, completely intoxicated,
and you don't think that something's wrong?
That's something that, like, should set off
a red flag in your head.
Like, is she safe? Is she okay?
Do I need to call her a cab? Don't you care?
And you had to take anything to Danny says
with a grain of salt because he wasn't truthful
and forthcoming from the beginning.
We don't know anything about who was involved in this
until we vet everyone out.
When detectives had showed that bouncer Imette's photo,
he told them he hadn't seen her.
So we start looking into the background
of Darryl Littlejohn,
and we find out that he had several aliases.
So why is he changing his names?
To me, that screams "career criminal."
And we then found out that he was a career criminal.
He'd spent more time in jail,
arguably, than he spent out of jail.
He was on parole for a previous crime that he had committed.
Detectives pay Littlejohn a visit at The Falls.
When we spoke to him the first time,
he said that he didn't recognize the picture.
He explains that it wasn't until the following day
when he saw her in the paper that it clicked.
He was very forthcoming.
His thing was, "I walked her out of the bar,
and I went my way, and she went her way."
♪
Had no problem trying to prove to us
that he wasn't the guy.
We still didn't know, is the guy involved?
Is Dorrian involved?
We knew we were in the right place.
We just didn't know who the players were yet.
But then a finding sharpens their focus.
A team from my office located a homeless person
not too far from The Falls bar that remembers seeing Imette
and getting into a van.
And when we questioned Littlejohn,
we had asked him, how did he get back and forth to work?
He said he has a van.
This matches with the description
of the type of car the security guard
had seen parked where Imette's body had been found.
But detectives don't have enough evidence yet
for an arrest.
We were under a lot of pressure to get him,
take him off the street.
We can't let this happen to another victim.
We proved him to violate parole
because in his parole agreement,
he was supposed to be in his residence
by 10:00 at night.
We have him at The Falls bar
bouncing at 3:30, 4:00 in the morning.
♪
With the parole violation,
they're able to put Littlejohn behind bars.
Locked up on Rikers,
he emphatically asserts his innocence.
From the little bit that I've been told about it,
she was a brilliant person.
She was going on with her life to become, you know,
somebody in this world.
And I'm truly,
truly sorry what happened to this young lady,
but they have the wrong person.
Detectives worked quickly to gather evidence.
They start with a court order
to track his cell phone movements.
We have Littlejohn on his phone at his house,
on the Belt Parkway, traveling westbound
at the site of where Imette was found...
Or around the time of when the body would have been there.
But he could just be the getaway driver
and dumped the body.
So we get a search warrant for his house.
When detectives pull up, they immediately see the van.
It's an exact match
for the description given by the security guard.
And they aren't the only ones taking it all in.
There was news cameras everywhere
because they monitor our radios.
So they were photographing what we were doing.
Detectives head inside,
and the first thing they see raises a red flag.
As soon as cops got to Littlejohn's house,
they saw a red carpet.
When they had pulled the tape off of Imette's face,
they found reddish fiber is on that tape.
At the same time,
Forensics is processing the evidence
from where they found Imette's body
and comparing it to the DNA of Darryl Littlejohn.
And we were looking for blood, potentially semen,
and then even interested in touch DNA.
DNA coming from your actual shed skin cells
on some of the items,
especially the snow brush handle.
The touch DNA from Darryl Littlejohn's hand
was on that brush, another thing to place him
at the scene where he said he wasn't.
And we were able to isolate the blood on the zip ties.
We generated a DNA profile that ended up matching the suspect,
Darryl Littlejohn.
♪
And when the fibers from the tape come back
as a match to the rug from Littlejohn's apartment,
it's clear that this was the original crime scene.
That sealed the deal for our case for sure.
We believe that Imette was murdered at his apartment,
wrapped up, placed in his van, and dumped in East New York.
Newscast after newscast shows the NYPD
combing through the house and van
of their prime suspect, Darryl Littlejohn.
This girl, Shanai Woodard, is at home,
and she's watching the news unfold,
and then something clicks for her.
She had seen that van before.
She had been victimized by the same person.
He's done this before.
This wasn't just an isolated incident;
this is a serial predator.
♪
NYPD detectives have found irrefutable evidence
tying 44-year-old bouncer Darryl Littlejohn
to the murder of criminology student
Imette St. Guillen.
And then a college freshman watching the news
spots Littlejohn's van and contacts the police
to let them know that van
is connected to a terrifying incident
that happened to her four months prior.
Shanai Woodward was walking home from New York College,
and who she believes to be Darryl Littlejohn
jumped out of that very same van,
and he was wearing a hat
that said, like, "Fugitive Patrol."
Littlejohn's MO was that he was a U.S. Marshall,
and in the trunk of his car,
he'd have a bulletproof vest, handcuffs, raid jackets.
So he stopped there,
pretending he was the law enforcement,
handcuffed her, put her in a van.
And you know, she realizes something is terribly wrong.
It's incredible the courage that she was able to exhibit
in a moment like that.
She kind of sidles over to the door
while her hands are handcuffed behind her back.
She finds the handle, and she--it actually opens,
and she tumbles out of the car...
And that's how she gets free.
She'd reported it, but the case remained unsolved
until she saw the van on the news.
And Forensics immediately find evidence
tying this new case to Littlejohn.
I actually found a saliva stain on the seat of the van.
We were able to get a DNA profile from her
that ended up matching that saliva.
♪
In 2008, Daryl Littlejohn
is found guilty of kidnapping Shanai Woodward
and is sentenced to 25 years to life.
A year later, he goes to trial on charges
of first-degree murder, kidnapping,
and unlawful imprisonment of Imette St. Guillen.
The defense's argument was that Darryl Littlejohn
didn't kill Imette, that he just dumped the body,
And that Danny Dorrian was involved.
They have the wrong person.
Despite the strange connection
that both murders happened
after the victims had been at this family's bars,
detectives found no evidence
that Danny Dorrian had anything to do
with the murder of Imette St. Guillen.
There was no evidence.
Nothing came back to Danny in that regards.
And when the prosecution brings out
Littlejohn's previous victim, it solidifies their case.
It's important that people see this,
"Look, he's done this before,
and who knows the things we don't know about."
Imette St. Guillen's family also gets the chance
to confront the monster who killed their loved one.
And on July 8, 2009, the verdict comes in.
He's not gonna come out of jail the rest of his life.
That was one of the proudest days of my career.
This was a case that shook New York.
A victim so full of promise on the verge
of getting her master's from John Jay
and embarking on a career in criminal justice--
a career in which she could have become one of our own.
A crime so notorious that in the aftermath,
legislators take action, enacting Imette's Law.
What Imette's Law did is,
required bouncers to be licensed
with a really rigorous background check.
And legislation that would require cameras at the entrance
and exit of cabarets and dance halls.
And Imette's legacy
is now immortalized at John Jay College.
There's this fund
that will forever award scholarships in Imette's name
to students who are in their educational journey
exactly where she was.
Graduate students committed to justice.
I received a phone call that I was the recipient,
and I remember a high-pitched shriek,
and then I remember hysterical crying.
And in June 2006, four months after her death,
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
awards Imette St. Guillen a posthumous degree.
An award was being accepted on behalf of someone
who should have been walking across that stage.
Her sister and her mom, they held up her picture,
her graduation picture.
The place erupted with applause.
I jumped up. They jumped up.
There's a tear coming down.
It happens, you know, several times a month
that she's on my mind.
I've tried to remember who she was as a person.
What were the amazing qualities about her,
and how can I try to be more like that?
Her future was just as bright as the stars.
It was just about how long it would take for us to see her
on television, you know, bringing someone into justice.
It was never about if that would ever happen.
We knew that that would happen.
And that would've made a huge impact on the world.
♪