March 4th, 1980.
Um, I had just... was finishing a graveyard shift working patrol.
My partner and I, we're about to get off,
and we got a call of a possible body down at RAT Beach.
It was a beach accessible through Malaga Cove.
You get the call of a possible body on the beach,
right away you start thinking, "We have a drunk."
"Somebody that stumbled and fell. Might have an injured person."
I wasn't prepared for what we found.
This was an unsolved homicide case,
a complete whodunit,
complete mystery with zero witnesses.
Thirty-three years later, I was assigned the case.
You have to wonder what the person who did it has been up to
for the last 33 years.
And you don't know what else they've gotten away with.
The LA County Sheriff's Department
is the best of the best.
Some of the highest-profile cases are tried in Los Angeles.
You have to be dedicated 110%.
This is murder. There's no more serious crime.
It boils down to a passion and a sense of duty.
Justice comes from finding the truth.
In 2013, I went to my team lieutenant.
I said, "I would like to catch some cases."
So he had on his desk, sitting there, a case from 1980.
I was hooked just reading through the reports on this case.
Anytime a female's victimized, I think of my daughters.
I start reading through the reports,
thinking, "This is gonna take me to a lot of different places."
'Cause I gotta find all these people in the original reports.
And I find David Byington, the first responder.
We talk on the phone. What a great memory he had of this case.
He remembered this case because,
back in 1980, he was a rookie on the department.
In 1980, I'm a police officer for the City of Palos Verdes Estates.
Palos Verdes Estates is a little suburb south of Los Angeles.
Beautiful cliffs, mansions.
High-income folks live there,
and most houses there go well into the multi-millions,
even back in the '70s.
As far as murders in Palos Verdes Estates,
they were rare if ever.
At the time, I was 21 years of age.
I had been actually on my own for only a month or two in patrol.
When I responded to the scene and realized that we actually had a potential homicide,
I started shaking.
There was a female found dead on the beach at Palos Verdes Estates on Malaga Cove,
and she apparently had been sexually assaulted,
and she had been beaten about the head.
A surfer had found her purse, which had her identification in it.
We were able to learn right away she was Teresa Broudreaux from Wilmington,
just 12 miles away,
and she was only 20 years old.
We tried to check for signs of life, and I remember I had initially tried.
The body was warm to the touch,
but I could not tell if I was getting a pulse
or if I was feeling my own pulse.
I think part of that was nerves.
I could see that the young lady was completely nude
except for a pair of knee-high socks.
She appeared to be posed in some position where her feet were facing the ocean.
She had a large amount of blood covering her face.
Her hair was matted down in the blood.
It was difficult to see her face completely without moving the hair.
She had what appeared to be a laceration on her forehead
as well as some bruising and fresh injuries on her abdomen.
Ultimately, the beach is a crime scene.
The tide was coming in so quickly
we had to pick her up physically and move her away.
As we did this, my partner was trying to support her head.
As we moved up the beach, my partner told me,
"Oh no, my hand just disappeared in her head."
She's got a large wound to the back of her head.
We knew that this was not an accident.
Ms. Broudreaux was my first homicide victim.
It's the ultimate crime, the taking of another human life.
The last thing you want to do is mess that up.
The Palos Verdes Estates Police Department's a smaller agency.
The sheer magnitude of this crime
mandated that we would reach out to an agency
that could adequately handle a murder investigation,
and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, they were known to be the best.
When the Los Angeles sheriff's homicide unit showed up,
I was taking note of everything they did.
Any prosecutor will tell you
our job isn't just to convict people.
It's also to make sure that the procedure that you go through
to investigate a case is done correctly.
You're left having to turn to...
surveillance cameras, or witnesses, or scientific evidence.
And in 1980, you didn't have anywhere near
as much of... or as many of those things as you do now.
The victim had no clothing recovered anywhere in the scene.
We found a bottle of alcohol and a couple glasses.
One of 'em still had, it appeared, some alcohol in it,
near where this purse had been apparently dumped.
That would lead me to believe at that time
that there was obviously someone else there
that was drinking with the victim prior to the murder.
We also saw there were tire tracks.
They believed that this was tire tracks from the suspect's vehicle.
But the tire was somewhat balding.
The tread depth was not deep enough.
So they couldn't cast the tracks.
The LA County sheriff's homicide detectives
immediately hit the ground running, trying to contact family members,
people closest to your victim,
and find out anything that could lead you to a potential suspect,
that you could start following those leads.
And they determined she was married to a gentleman named Ronnie Fematt.
When I met Teresa, she was maybe 18, 19. I was about 20.
Me and my friend were on the east side of Wilmington, just hanging out, whatever.
And one of the girls brought Teresa.
And when I saw her, I just went, "Whoa."
She was very independent, very strong-willed.
I don't know what she saw in me.
Me and my friends, we started doing drugs.
You know, dabbling in it.
But when me and Terri got together, she gave me an ultimatum.
Said, "Hey, buddy, you gotta stop."
I...It was a no-brainer.
Two and a half years we're together, and then I thought,
"This is the girl I want to marry."
I wanted her. I wanted to have a family. I wanted to settle down.
So I did. I married her.
Then she got pregnant shortly after.
They said, "It's gonna be a girl."
So I was elated.
The manner in which Teresa was killed was extremely upsetting.
It was a violent death with her head bashed in,
and likely sexually assaulted.
And to then find out that she was several months pregnant,
there was yet another life that was also derailed and ended,
is incredibly sad.
On top of that tragedy, she actually already was a mom.
She had a four-year-old daughter named Linda.
March 4th, 1980 was one of the worst days of my life.
My grandmother told me my mother drowned at the beach.
And that she was going to Heaven with the angels.
And she wasn't gonna come back.
I became too much to handle.
I didn't want to be with my... my aunt.
I didn't want to be with my grandmother. I didn't wanna be with my dad.
I just wanted my mom.
And I couldn't understand why she couldn't come back.
It felt like the only person that ever loved and protected me was gone.
And now there was nobody left to love me.
When I first met Linda, she was probably two years old.
She was still baby talk, you know? She wasn't too vocal.
Cute as a bug, you know? She really was.
Being that she wasn't mine, it didn't bother me.
Didn't bother me one bit.
We used to play "cafe." She would take my order,
then go to the kitchen, act like she made me food.
She was a good kid.
I just used to love it. I used to make the menu with Ronnie.
Then I used to take it to my mom.
She was like, "How many do you want, ma'am?"
And I would be like, "Two, please."
And she'll just be making my little grilled cheese by candlelight.
I don't know why... I don't know why it was candlelight, but yeah.
Ronnie married this woman, allegedly loved her,
was raising her... her daughter as his own.
But that doesn't exclude him from being a suspect.
He could have snapped, had a bad moment, bad week. Who knows?
Ronnie was one of the first people
the sheriff's homicide detectives spoke to.
The sheriffs, they interrogated me,
and I answered everything.
On March 3rd, I was attending Harbor College.
Not taking anything special. I was doing art. I was good with art.
I came home. I said to my wife,
"Come on. Let's go to my friend George's house."
We used to hang out in the garage, drink and smoke.
We went.
She didn't participate.
She was pregnant.
She didn't want to stand up all night in a garage.
So I understand she wanted to go home.
We went home.
I told her, "I'mma go back." She goes, "I don't want you to go back."
"You can't go back." I go, "I'mma go back."
"No, you better not go." I go, "Terri, I'm going back."
That's when I went out the door.
I went this way toward my friend's house.
I heard the door slam and I turned back. She was going toward the alley.
We had a gate in the alley that would take you to the other street.
That's where her sister lived, down the block.
I go, "She's mad."
"She'll go to her sister's, and complain, and talk shit about me."
"She'll be okay."
But then...
I never seen her again.
How many times does a wife disappear and the husband says, you know,
"She left. I don't know what happened to her."
And nine times out of ten, that's bullshit.
It's gonna be the husband.
They asked to take my shirt off.
They're looking for scratches or defensive wounds, and I had nothing.
They kept asking, "You didn't do it?" "No, I didn't do it."
When they interviewed Ronnie, he was concerned, he was nervous.
When your wife is found murdered...
either you're gonna be devastated, in shock, et cetera,
or terrified they're gonna figure out you're the one who did it.
After I left the sheriff's, I went back to my house,
and there's cop cars stationed around the block.
They're looking at my house.
Very quickly, he became concerned that he was the suspect,
and he was.
I called my uncle, Henry Salcido, criminal lawyer.
And my uncle just told me, "Don't talk to 'em, avoid 'em."
So that's what I did.
My father was absent, so when my mom got married to Ronnie
and I found out I was gonna have a sibling,
I immediately thought we were gonna have a full and complete family now
with Ronnie, the new baby, my mom, and I.
So I was super excited.
So excited.
But when everything happened with my mother,
I did not stay with Ronnie.
My dad's family came and got me right away.
I really missed her when they took her. It destroyed me.
During the autopsy, essentially, a rape kit was taken.
But a rape kit back in 1980 is nothing like it is today.
There were clippings taken from her fingernails,
because it appeared that there was material underneath her fingernails,
and they could potentially compare that to blood type.
There was also swabs that were taken,
which we're not testing for DNA, but could test for the presence of sperm.
They brought her to the mortuary.
I went back there and asked to see her, 'cause I had to make arrangements.
They pulled back the thing. They only got the sheet halfway,
and I already just... My knees buckled.
I just couldn't believe what I saw.
As far as her features, there was none.
It was just total darkness, a big hole for a face.
And right away, I told the people, "I want this casket closed."
"And I want the baby swaddled and put in her arms,
so they're together for eternity."
The investigators spoke with a lot of friends, a lot of family,
and that's really all they had to go on.
They learned that the last person to see Teresa was her sister.
She gets to her sister's house.
Her sister wanted her to stay there, and she didn't.
Teresa Broudreaux left her sister's house middle of the night
and started walking down the street.
There was a cousin who remembers that, that day of, before she was found dead,
she wanted to go to the beach.
Neither Teresa nor Ronnie had a car.
It wouldn't be unreasonable
that she would hitchhike to go get to the beach.
They were really at the mercy of anybody seeing anything,
and it happened at night, and she was discovered early morning,
and so there were no witnesses that ever came forward.
There wasn't a whole lot of investigative tools
that could be used to figure out who her killer was.
They were looking at Ronnie, Teresa Broudreaux's husband,
as a potential suspect.
After a thorough investigation, they were able to determine
that Ronnie had an alibi.
Ronnie had been in a friend's garage with several eyewitnesses
on the night his wife had been murdered.
And that basically cleared him from the murder of his wife.
And even though the police investigators might exclude Ronnie,
you can't unring that bell with family members and loved ones,
that thought and belief that he was responsible
for their daughter, their mother, their sister's death.
When I was about eight or nine years old,
my cousin and I were going through her mother's boxes, her drawers,
and we found the autopsy of my mother.
And I'm like, "What? They said she drowned!"
And I'm still, you know, in that mode where they said she drowned.
I'm like, "All this happened to her?"
Everyone in her family was saying Ronnie's the one that killed my mother.
I believed it right away because they used to fight a lot,
and I was there to see all of that.
I was right there watching every single day.
They made their choice that I wasn't a suspect, sheriffs did.
But they had nobody else, so everybody thought I did it.
Couldn't explain how many times I got shot at
'cause people thought I did it.
Whether it be her family or friends, I don't know.
Nobody ever shot at me before until after her death.
I was so traumatized, I didn't want to live.
If your wife disappears in the middle of an argument,
and we don't have any evidence
pointing to somebody else who did it,
and what you have is an alibi by people that you are close to,
either that's a legitimate alibi or it's not,
but you have no other suspects.
We didn't have an eyewitness.
We didn't really have any... any evidence at the time that could be used.
There wasn't anything else they could do.
Ultimately, the Teresa Broudreaux murder was never solved.
It was put on the back bench as a cold case for decades.
When I was little, I used to cry for my mom.
And I'd ask questions over the years.
There was so many questions I had that no one was willing to answer.
No one wanted to talk about her.
No one wanted to talk about what happened.
No one told me anything.
They would tell me to be quiet. "She's not gonna come back."
I kinda got used to not having any parents.
The void from my mother has never been filled.
I don't think it'll ever be filled.
I went through years of people pointing,
and avoiding me, or talking behind my back.
I didn't deal with it.
I didn't think about my daughter. I didn't think about Terri.
I'd work just to get high,
so I didn't have to deal with all the pressure
of people walking around town going, "Hey, that's him. He killed his wife."
As I got older,
I used to see him sometimes walking around.
I did not want to talk to Ronnie. I didn't know what to feel, you know?
I was like, "Did he really..."
"Could he have really..."
I started questioning people, 'cause they were the ones telling me.
I seen them fighting a lot, but could he really kill her?
When I got the case, the cultural background,
there was a connection there.
In the '80s, culture in Wilmington was very much the same
as culture in East LA, the area I grew up in.
It was predominately Hispanic,
lowrider culture, gangs, crime.
Seeing sometimes how my parents were afraid...
They were afraid to call the police.
1980, I'm 13 years old. I'm in the eighth grade.
If you would've told me I was gonna get involved
in a homicide investigation that happened in Palos Verdes Estates,
which was a world away from East LA, I would've told you you were nuts.
I never was a kid who said, "I want to be a cop."
That was the last thing I thought I'd be.
The passion really came once I started the job
and started to notice the difference that you could make.
Ralph's was more of a subdued, subtle kind of approach.
He challenged himself and made a name for himself.
Ralph never wanted to promote. He wanted to be a damn good detective.
People always ask me, "What is this job like, working homicide?"
It's like juggling balls in the ocean.
You don't want to drown, but you don't want to drop the ball.
When you look at a cold case,
there are so many different things that you have to... to overcome.
Investigations change after ten, 15, 20 years.
Different techniques evolve. Different thought processes evolve.
Ultimately, you have to do a little gumshoe detective work, right?
You gotta go and find people, find witnesses.
But technology is a tremendous, tremendous asset for us now
on these unsolved cases.
In this case, in 1980, that was years before DNA.
There's different investigative avenues that can be explored.
Now we can go back, and we can take that evidence,
and we can develop DNA profiles.
There were several items of evidence that had been kept from the scene.
We knew that there were enough there
that there were things we could potentially test.
The sheriff's department had a criminalist who was excellent.
As the criminalist is working on this evidence
and trying to determine if there's enough genetic material,
what we're realizing is she has very little to work with.
The fingernails turned out not to be as helpful as we were hoping they'd be.
The other evidence at the scene also was not as helpful.
There were no prints or DNA on the bottle of alcohol.
Only Teresa's fingerprint was on the cup.
And contrary to what you see on CSI, the TV shows, you know,
unfortunately, people don't sprinkle their DNA everywhere
at whatever crime scene they go to.
So we had to pivot.
We had to think of a different way to try to identify her killer.
That's when we turn to the coroner's evidence.
The coroner's office was able to obtain the DNA found on the victim.
The criminalist took the pubic hair combings
and basically washed them.
And from that washing, she's able to put it into a centrifuge
that spins and essentially churns out a pellet.
And from that pellet, she's able to look at it microscopically
and determine if there's any genetic material in the pellet,
and she found one sperm head.
And so that's what she was able to end up testing for DNA.
The goal there is that they would be able to develop an actual DNA profile.
'Cause sometimes you can have bodily fluid,
but that doesn't mean you have enough to come up with a complete DNA profile.
Sometimes you have a partial profile. Sometimes you get nothing.
If there's not sufficient evidence there, it's a dead end.
Detective Ralph Hernandez got my case and gave me a call.
I felt at ease that he understood me.
He knew my style of life, what I've been through.
You know, the addiction, the gangs, the everything.
'Cause being from East LA, you're familiar with that stuff.
Being a cop, you're more familiar. You probably see it more than I see it.
He treated me just like he would anybody.
Wasn't 'cause I was Chicano. He treated me 'cause I was human.
So I talked to him, and I let him know I have some more information.
Ronnie tells us the story
about how this female acquaintance from the neighborhood
approached him one evening and said, "Hey, I feel bad."
"I held on to this for a few years. I want you to know."
In the late '90s, I was still spiraling out of control,
and I was in a bar.
One of my friends walked in who I hadn't seen in quite a while.
She came up to me.
"Ronnie, I know who killed your wife."
People's lives continue on,
and they remember vivid details
of what traumatically happened to them in the past.
They realize, "You know what?"
"This has caught up to me. I need to tell somebody."
When I met Detective Ralph Hernandez, I had been sober a while.
For so long I've been feeling so bad about this.
I thought it was time I could handle some answers.
She was my homeboy's old lady.
She'd been gone so long I wondered what happened to her.
I didn't know because I didn't keep tabs on her.
We started talking, she started crying, she goes, "I know who killed her."
And then I was just like, "What do you mean?"
She said, "I was abducted by two guys and sexually tortured."
These guys picked her up. They told her, "Put some of this on your tongue."
She said immediately when she put that liquid on her tongue, she went numb.
She said she could hear and see, but couldn't move.
She's, like, paralyzed.
They tortured her, sexually abused her,
and then she told me that she heard 'em say,
"What are we gonna do with her body?"
"We'll take her where we dumped Terri."
But she jumped out the window of the car while it was moving,
and a passerby stopped and helped, and they took off.
The person she mentioned, I knew him.
Knew him well.
With some of his characteristics, it fit.
It's secondhand information, right?
This girl's told Ronnie. Ronnie's telling us.
We need to find this girl.
I had some addresses that were listed in the original reports
of people who lived in the neighborhood.
So I knocked on a few doors.
I find out that she's living out of state.
I come up with a phone number and we start talking.
And she was very, uh, very cooperative,
and willing to meet with us,
which is huge.
We fly out to her.
Ralph actually went to Texas to go talk to her.
That right there at that moment let me know,
"This guy's gonna do whatever it takes."
And I felt really good about this.
I definitely felt that, after 33 years, I finally had somebody in my corner.
We had just flown in, and I get a phone call from the crime lab.
The crime lab's telling me,
"We got a hit in CODIS for your evidence for DNA from your scene."
That was incredible.
But it was a little confusing
because it wasn't the person that we thought
that we were being steered toward
from the information we were going to get from our informant.
It was a completely different person.
Thanks to the criminalist, we now had a name.
It came back as a match to a man named Robert Yniguez.
Who was Robert Yniguez? Where'd he come from?
What did he do? Where was he? Where was he 34 years ago?
Robert Yniguez was nowhere in the file.
He was nobody who had been interviewed.
He was no one whose name had even been mentioned.
There were a ton of names in those original reports.
His was not one of them.
But it was very exciting.
So we get back from our out-of-state trip and interview with the informant,
which turned out to be a dead end.
We quickly begin to conduct
a background investigation on Robert Yniguez,
and I also pulled crime reports from his previous arrests.
And in 1981, Robert Yniguez was arrested for rape.
The victim in that case had been a hitchhiker that he picked up,
and he proceeded to rape her.
That victim reports it.
He gets arrested immediately after that rape.
He was charged in court.
He was held to answer on preliminary hearing.
The victim actually came to testify.
And some time before the trial,
it became difficult to find the victim,
and the case was dismissed, and he was let go.
Then fast-forward to 1982.
He was arrested for another rape
in which he was actually convicted, and he went to prison.
And that conviction is what actually brought his DNA into the CODIS database.
Because the CODIS hit is only an investigative tool and lead,
we're ethically required to get what's called a "confirmatory sample."
We needed to try to get a DNA sample from him in order to confirm
and run it against the evidence found from the coroner's kit.
So our next step had to be locating Mr. Yniguez.
Detective Ralph Hernandez asked if I knew who this Robert Yniguez guy was.
And I said no, but I was very hopeful.
The DNA always catches the bad guy.
And now there was DNA.
Now they just had to find the guy.
Sex offenders are required to register on their birthday.
With Mr. Yniguez, his birthday was about four months away
from when Detective Hernandez learned he was a potential suspect.
So the easiest place to find Mr. Yniguez
was going to be when he went to register.
Yniguez is at Harbor Station getting ready to register as a sex offender.
At that point, I want to find out more about him.
We wanted to confirm where he lived,
where he'd been, who his family was, who his friends were,
because maybe there is some connection to Teresa.
Also, I want to obtain a sample of his DNA.
And so I told him who we were, where we were from,
and he was willing to talk to us.
- You went to prison in '80 or was it-- - I think it was '80.
Before prison, where were you living?
Hmm.
I believe I was living in Wilmington at my...
my stepmom's house with my dad.
I didn't know too many people from Wilmington.
I mean...
I would cruise around there, but...
I didn't really know anybody over there.
I actually didn't really have a big game plan.
My first thought was just, "Be yourself. Talk to him, put him at ease."
And it just kind of evolved from there.
- Did you ever go partying at the beach? - No.
- Never used to go out there? - No.
And you've never been to Malaga Cove, Palos Verdes Estates?
Mm-mm.
Ralph's approach was to be very...
non-confrontational.
So he tries to get Yniguez to be comfortable,
and then he tries to go through the information that he has
and to see if he can lock him in to a certain story.
Tell me about that case when you got arrested.
Took her to Redondo.
- And, you know, we had sex. - Mm-hmm.
Yeah, she refused, but then...
after that she gave in, and...
- And they charged you with rape. - Yeah.
You got off because she didn't show up.
- Mm-hmm. - Okay.
Does Teresa ring a bell to you?
- No. - No? Nothing at all?
I could see it in his chest.
Kind of the heavy breathing people describe.
They see people pounding their heart rate,
or their heart's beating through their shirt.
You could see the deep breaths, and he was obviously nervous.
Let me show you some pictures.
Okay.
Do you know that girl right there or remember her at all?
- No. - No?
Mm-mm.
This lady was found dead on the beach.
You sure she's nobody that looks familiar to you?
Teresa Broudreaux.
- No. - And this is 1980, March of 1980.
No, not at all.
The denials were so important because we had such powerful DNA evidence.
If he came to us and said,
"I... I dated Teresa behind her husband's back,"
"I had sex with her that night,"
it would have complicated our case.
No. Mm-mm.
- No? - Mm-mm.
That's why the denial was so much more powerful.
Would there be any reason for your DNA to be at the scene?
Not that...
No, there shouldn't be.
- Shouldn't be? - Yeah.
We're here.
We know you can help us.
Because your DNA was at the scene.
I don't know... I can't see how.
I don't even know that girl.
If you want good rapport with your suspect,
you gotta give 'em something.
I had information for him, and he needed to know that information,
and it might stimulate something for him to say something
to help us get to the truth, right?
Because what if he had a plausible explanation?
What if he didn't do it, right?
So, 100%, you're not gonna have any issues with your DNA there?
- No. - And so then...
you'd be willing to give us a sample of your oral swabs?
Okay.
And so I appreciate that.
I came away from that interview with Yniguez
firmly believing that we had our guy,
but it was more important to build a case and to know for sure,
"Okay, this is our guy," and then go out and arrest him.
Getting a buccal swab of DNA from Mr. Yniguez
allowed the sheriff's department to do confirmatory testing.
He was in fact a match,
and the match was proven through a statistic,
which was one in 82.5 trillion,
and there's only seven billion people on the planet.
So to be one in 80-something trillion
is quite a significant match.
In this case, it's very clear that he's your killer.
So now it's a question of,
"What can you do to make the case even better?"
The rape case in 1981 was extremely important
because Yniguez came upon a female
who was in Wilmington at the bus stop and offered her a ride.
We had the fact that Teresa was last seen in Wilmington,
and there are potential similarities in the MO,
and, luckily, I was able to locate and interview
the victim from the 1981 rape.
When I met the guy, I wasn't hitchhiking. I was just walking.
He pulled up in his car and asked me if I wanted a ride, and I said yeah.
The circumstances she's telling us
is similar to what we believe happened to Teresa.
How sure are you that this man forced you... raped you?
100%.
I stopped resisting because he started threatening to kill me.
She was threatened. She gave in.
Teresa was beaten and killed.
I believe Teresa fought back,
and Yniguez followed through with his threat.
So that was extremely powerful,
and just tied our case that much more together.
Whenever I am looking at a cold case,
I always want to sit down with the suspect if I can.
I want to myself evaluate them.
I want to see how they respond to my questioning.
I want to see if they're gonna end up making things worse.
What are they going to admit to? Where are my issues gonna be?
It's the only chance that I will ever have to have a conversation with them.
Once the case is filed, I can't talk to them.
Robert Yniguez told Ralph Hernandez that he had never met the victim,
he never had sex with her,
that he'd never been to Palos Verdes Estates,
and Malaga Cove, and that beach.
The more adamant he was gonna be in denying it,
the better it was gonna be for the case going forward,
because I could prove that that just wasn't true.
John wanted to come with me to interview Robert Yniguez again.
So we both went and talked to him.
Hi, I wanted to talk... I need to talk to Robert, please.
Who are you? - My name's Ralph.
He knows who I am.
And this is John.
That second interview was not ideal.
Part of it was his wife and his daughter were there.
His family's there.
Come on in.
Thank you.
You guys look like you're gonna arrest him.
God, no. We're gonna... - Okay.
No, we're gonna leave here. I just was hoping for ten minutes.
And maybe just a little bit of privacy if that's okay with you.
Why? He ain't got nothing to hide from me.
I don't have nothing to hide. - Nothing.
We tell each other everything.
We wanted to give him the respect of being able to talk to him
without other people here if that's what he wanted.
- But if this is how-- - No, she can be here.
It was highly unlikely that he would have told his wife,
who was not with him at the time of the murder,
"By the way, you realize I raped and murdered people
prior to our relationship."
So we wanted to do it in private,
and no matter how much we suggested it,
his position was, "No, we have no secrets," et cetera.
So we had to do the interview in front of her.
Hear me out. - I had nothing to do with that case.
Robert, just hear me out.
He doesn't want to admit all of this in front of them,
and when John began to press him in a bit more detail about the incident,
he starts to deny.
He became very defensive.
And I'm gonna stay with that story. I do not know her.
I've never seen her. I never met her.
John did, in the interview, accuse Yniguez of committing the murder.
You said you never met this girl. - No!
So what do you think of yours...
What kind of DNA do you think we found?
Probably my sperm.
Yeah. So can you tell me how that could possibly be, Robert?
It shouldn't be, because I don't even know her.
I never met her. I never seen her.
Robert-- - I had nothing to do with that.
We've got your semen on the pubic hair of this dead woman.
This dead woman was picked up near the same place
where, within a year of that time, you picked up Lori [bleep].
This woman had her head bashed.
Pressing him just led to more denials,
but John got him to admit he wouldn't believe his own denials.
So it kind of came back full circle.
He had a look on his face of resignation
that he knew where it was going.
I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna go back to prison for something I didn't do.
Okay, so, listen.
Your DNA--
I know what you're saying. My DNA is on her, but I don't know how.
Are we done? This is starting to piss me off.
Yeah, I'm gonna get a lawyer. We're gonna get a lawyer.
Wait. Listen. - Are we finished?
- We're finished. We're done. Robert-- No, listen to me.
There's nothing more to say.
If you tell me that you want us to leave, we'll leave.
Yeah. - Yeah.
Ma'am, I'm talking to him.
- I want you to leave. Okay.
All right. That's your option.
We were confident at that point that we had enough.
We had the DNA. We had Yniguez's denials.
We have some of his admissions. We got him.
September of 2017, we finally make our move.
We have a surveillance team follow Yniguez away from his home.
We get a black-and-white to make a stop.
And they place him under arrest for murder.
He didn't say much, but it didn't matter at that point.
We had quite a bit of evidence and quite a bit of information to present.
I still remember walking out and calling Ronnie.
The phone rings. It says, "Detective Ralph."
I go, "Oh, shit."
"It's too early."
I get nervous, and my... my feet start tapping.
I answered.
He goes, "Ronnie." I go, "Ralph, what's up?"
He goes, "Are you sitting down?" And right then, my heart went boom.
I tell him, "We got him."
"We're charging him."
I just cried.
I sat in my car and cried and cried, 45 minutes.
It was a very emotional phone call for us.
I get a phone call saying,
"In one hour, we're gonna do a press conference."
"They found the person that killed your mother."
And I just started crying. I couldn't believe it.
They were like, "We need you in downtown LA now."
I couldn't make it there.
But my stepdad was there, of course. He was there for everything.
The press conference really was for Ronnie
to be able to tell the story to the press
and let them know what he had been through.
Detective.
Thank you.
The day of the press conference, you can see me in the back.
I'm sort of edgy.
I was sweating, and I was starting to look like Rudy Giuliani up there.
At this point, we wanted to introduce Ronnie Fematt,
who was married at that time to Teresa Broudreaux.
- Ronnie. - Thank you.
Hello.
It's been 37 years... longer than 37 years,
and I've been waiting a long time for this day.
I want to thank my family for always believing in me,
always being by my side, and I want to thank these people here.
'Cause without them, I wouldn't be here today.
It's been a long time for what I've been through.
And the noncertainty of not knowing why or how, you know?
And, uh...
I'm just glad this day came.
Thank you very much.
Now everybody knows it wasn't me.
They took the burden off me.
Now people knew the truth.
It was important for me for Ronnie to have that.
Once they told me it wasn't him, this other guy did it,
I was like, "Oh, my goodness."
We did try to build a relationship.
But...
Yeah, things don't always work out.
On October 2nd, 2017,
I filed the complaint against Robert Yniguez.
The first count was murder, and the second count was rape.
Based on the circumstances, the law, and evidence at the time,
we weren't able to file a charge for the baby.
Before we could pick a jury and try the case,
the defendant, through his attorney,
indicated that he wanted to enter a plea agreement.
He was willing to plead to second-degree murder,
which carries a sentence of 15 to life,
and admit that he had in fact killed Teresa.
My feeling is that he probably did not want his wife
and his stepdaughter to hear all of the details of the crime.
So, if you're in his position, and you're gonna get convicted either way,
then you maybe choose an option
where you can maintain your innocence in your private conversations with them.
Yniguez was sentenced in October of 2019.
You're talking 37-and-a-half years,
40 to the day he got convicted.
And I live with torment every day.
Had the defendant been convicted at trial,
there would have been a mandatory sentence of life without parole as the minimum.
With a plea and pleading to 15 to life,
he will be eligible for parole.
But because you never know what's gonna happen with a jury,
it's a risk.
I figure at his age, 15 to life...
he ain't getting out.
Now I get to sleep at night
knowing he's not gonna be around to hurt anybody else.
I was very relieved when it was all over with.
It was very overwhelming for me.
Now I can, um, start healing.
I made arrangements to have a flower shop close by Malaga Cove
to make her a real nice wreath in a cross.
I picked it up. Everybody, we caravaned all the way over there.
We're with the family. They're putting up this wreath,
and on the banner, it says, "It's over."
It was a weird feeling to be there.
I'd been there a couple of times, but now we had Yniguez convicted.
We had answers.
Ralph Hernandez, he did me right.
He did me justice.
He gave me everything I needed to put this behind me.
I can't thank him enough for the hard work he did.
He's a Chicano done good. I go, "That's you, Ralph."
"You should be proud of yourself."
I'm very proud.
It felt great to be able to get answers for the family.
It was, um, very satisfying,
'cause you realize the fruit of your hard labor,
all those hours, all those years...
You made a difference.
All missing person cases come through Homicide.
If you're missing, the big question is...
"Why?"
Father of three, the 6'6"-tall Smith has disappeared.
Gavin Smith was a Fox executive.
He was larger-than-life.
It was highly irregular that somebody like him
would just vanish into thin air.
- There's some weird stuff going on here. He was in turmoil.
Gavin had a pretty torrid affair.
It's a mystery, but somebody out there knows something.