August 20th, I get a phone call from Bruce,
and he tells me that his wife, Jana, has been missing since that morning.
And did I know where she was?
I was a very close friend, almost like a sister to Jana,
and I said, "No, I... I haven't seen her."
"I have no idea where she could be."
I said, "Bruce, is there anything I can do for you?"
And he broke into sobs and said,
"You can tell me where my wife is."
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.
On August 20th, 2001,
Bruce Koklich called Lakewood Sheriff's Station
to make a missing persons report on his wife, Jana.
Bruce said, "We have a real estate office
at the north end of Long Beach,
and Jana was supposed to, you know, come to the office,
and I don't know where she is."
Bruce and Jana, they had a real estate business in Bixby Knolls.
The office in the city of Long Beach was not far from the port,
and not far from their residence in Lakewood.
The next day, on Tuesday, August 21st,
Bruce has indicated Jana's not here.
She hasn't returned.
So there's a heightened interest as to...
"Where is she? What has happened to her?"
We all sat around wringing our hands
trying to figure out what could have happened.
Bruce was a wreck.
He was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands,
just bawling like a baby,
and he gave us as much details as he could.
That, you know, the car was missing,
and that he was trying to think of things that he could do,
where he could start searching, could hire helicopters,
could employ teams of searchers.
I know, as a missing person's investigator,
99.9% of the people return within 24 hours.
There's a number of things law enforcement is looking into
after the first 24 hours,
when it becomes more likely that something may have happened to 'em
besides just running away.
Could they be a victim of a crime?
Could she have been carjacked? Could it have been an accident?
We checked the hospitals and checked for traffic accidents.
So we knew that it probably wasn't that.
I was tasked to go to the Koklich residence.
And so I decided to call in a homicide team,
because it is gonna take a lot more time to investigate,
and one of the investigators was Karen Shonka.
When I was a young girl trying to think of what I wanted to do,
I thought, "I want to be a police officer
so I can drive around and speed everywhere."
I was hired by the LA County Sheriff's Department in 1986.
Being a woman in law enforcement in the mid-'80s was a little difficult.
I felt like at times I had to prove myself.
I would go above and beyond
what a male deputy or detective would have to do.
I would just really want to work my cases
and make sure that I was doing a phenomenal job.
Karen worked her ass off.
God bless her for it.
She wasn't gonna let anybody stop her from doing what her dreams were.
Bruce and Jana had a home in Lakewood,
just north of Long Beach,
which was on a golf course.
Beautiful home.
Once we arrived at the Koklich home, we spoke with Bruce.
Bruce told me that on Monday morning,
he gave Jana a kiss goodbye at around 6:00 a.m.
They were partners at a real estate agency.
And typically Jana would arrive at the office at 9:00 or 9:30 a.m.
10:00, maybe 10:30, Bruce said,
"I asked around with the other real estate agents,
'Where's my wife?' They said, 'She hasn't come in yet.'"
Bruce and Jana have a business partner, Chris Botosan,
that was at the office,
and Chris decided to go with Bruce to the home to find out if Jana was there.
Her car is gone.
Her purse is gone. Cell phone is gone.
Even the alarm on the house was on.
So he was kind of suspicious. "Where could she have gone?"
This is a missing adult. You have to look at all the possibilities.
Maybe she ran away.
Maybe there was an extramarital affair that was occurring.
You have to investigate all that.
What's her mental state? Are they on medication?
Those kind of things can tell us where she's at.
And in this case, something doesn't seem right,
seems suspicious.
Bruce told me that, on Friday night,
Jana had gone to a concert with her friend Nini.
And that Jana had probably arrived home after midnight.
Bruce said that he and Jana wanted to have a "mellow, chill weekend,"
just the two of them.
On Monday, Bruce said his wife has disappeared,
and no one has been able to determine what has happened to her.
It's just completely out of character for her.
You know, it's like she just disappeared off the face of the earth.
Bruce gave us a consent to search the home
and to look around for any clues we may find.
We were going through trash cans, everything in that house,
to try and figure out what happened with Jana.
I remember going through their answering machine at their home.
I was writing down the caller ID information.
Bruce did say they didn't want to answer any phone calls for the weekend
because Jana was still disturbed about this unknown male voice
that was leaving messages on their answering machine.
Bruce asked them, "Would you listen to this tape recording?"
"It sounds like somebody threatening."
It was directed to Jana.
It was a male's voice,
and it says,
"You know me. You need to call me."
Bruce said that he and Jana both found it very disturbing,
that they did not recognize the voice.
You know, we've had most of our acquaintances listening to it,
and nobody can identify it.
We asked, "Who'd wanna hurt her? Did she have enemies?"
Bruce said, "Because of Jana's father,
someone may have abducted Jana."
Jana was Jana Carpenter-Koklich.
Her father was a state senator,
a very prominent politician in the state of California.
Jana's father, State Senator Carpenter,
was very popular with the community.
However, he got mixed up in some criminal activity
later on in his political career.
And he got prosecuted for it. He even went to prison.
Two years before Jana's disappearance, he was released.
So there was a lot of attention by the media
that this must have something to do with her disappearance.
Could there be some type of revenge
for all the actions that he had done through his political career?
This unknown male voice that was leaving messages
could be the possible kidnapper.
Bruce let us know that they do have repo'd property
in gang areas throughout LA County.
Jana may have gone over there and was abducted around there.
That was Jana's job, at times, to go out and collect the rent.
So she had a gun.
She was afraid
that somebody might try to rob her when she was trying to collect the money.
That adds another level to the investigation.
In many cases, if people aren't willing to use a gun,
it can be easily taken from them and used against them.
She's been missing for a day, which is unlike her.
She's a very prompt and professional woman that I love most deeply,
and hope to have her return as soon as possible.
Bruce's demeanor was very forthwith.
He wanted to give us the information that we needed.
Bruce said they had been married for 11 years,
and they were in a very loving marriage.
Bruce and Jana had similar goals in life
and started building a real estate business together
that was really very, very successful.
They were really tied to their business,
but they were enjoying their life.
I could tell she loved him.
Bruce and Jana spent a lot of time together,
almost all their time together.
They never made decisions without consulting each other,
and they always talked about
where they were going and how they were gonna get there.
We sat up last night very late trying to figure out motivation.
Why would anybody do this?
We definitely have the clock ticking.
Jana may have been abducted, and we've already lost time.
She could be in distress somewhere.
So we want the media to get her picture out there,
picture of her car, the license plate.
We need the public's help to try and find Jana Koklich.
We figure if we find the car, more than likely we'll find Jana.
We fully expected there would be a ransom note,
or something to let us know she was still alive,
and we continued to hold on to that hope.
Time goes by.
Jana doesn't come home.
Jana doesn't call.
Nothing.
And the police are interviewing people.
Nothing became of the political theory with Jana's father.
It was checked out and cleared.
But a name that came up while we were interviewing Bruce Koklich
was Chris Botosan.
Bruce said he came home with Chris while he was looking for Jana.
Chris was a business partner of Jana and Bruce's
in a software company that they were just starting.
I think there was a situation
where something happened between him and Jana.
Bruce never really told me anything about that,
but it just became apparent
in the couple of times I saw them all together
that Jana wasn't really enamored by this guy.
She wasn't really happy with him.
Chris, being a partner of Bruce and Jana,
he would benefit from Jana's disappearance.
In this business,
if Jana is eliminated, Chris gets a bigger piece of the pie.
The cops told us maybe Chris had something to do with it.
Then we heard that he left town.
So that, all of a sudden, was like a red flag to the sheriff's department.
We were able to locate Chris Botosan
and confirm an alibi for that weekend,
where he was hanging out with a girlfriend.
Chris Botosan was eventually cleared as a suspect.
We did speak with Jana's friend, Nini.
She said that Jana seemed happy on Friday night,
that Jana didn't want to stay up late that night.
She only had a half a glass of wine at the Eric Clapton concert
because she had to get up early the next day
for a gym appointment with Dean, her personal trainer.
Dean told me that he had been training her one-on-one
for the last four, five years.
She never missed an appointment, and she was never late ever.
Every Saturday morning, around seven o'clock,
they would go jogging down by the beach.
The detectives wondered,
"Could there have been a romantic relationship?"
She's starting to really change her outward image.
She had had her teeth done.
She had lost weight.
Jana shared one of her personal training days
with a good girlfriend of hers, Connie.
And Connie said that there was no sexual tension
or anything between Dean and Jana.
Everything was very professional.
Jana was just very obsessed with her workouts.
We verified his story, and checked his alibi,
and he was cleared as a suspect.
There was nothing going on between Dean and Jana.
As well as I knew Jana, there was no possibility
that she had gone off with some other lover.
It just wasn't possible that this was something of her own doing.
Something definitely had happened to her.
Dean relayed to me that Jana missed the appointment
on Saturday at seven o'clock in the morning.
He said he called the house phone, no answer.
He called her cell phone, no answer.
He was very surprised that she didn't show up.
She also had a scheduled massage appointment
on Saturday at 2:00 p.m. with Nini.
Nini said, "Jana did not show up."
Even as the weekend went on, she tried to contact her,
but got no answer.
Nini made calls to Bruce's voicemail.
There was never any answer from Jana or Bruce.
That definitely set up a red flag.
I did ask Bruce, "Why would Jana not answer those phone calls?"
He just says, "We just wanted to blow everything off for the weekend."
They are professional real estate agents,
and I found that very strange that they wouldn't answer phone calls.
Investigating these type of cases, you want all the information you can get.
Housekeepers can be very informative.
They see what's going on. They're the quiet eyes around a house.
I talked to the housekeeper.
Her name was Consuelo.
She said her routine was, every Tuesday,
she would change the bedding in the master bedroom.
She said that when she made the bed the week prior,
it was a white and black sheet with some cursive writing on it.
There was messages on the sheets.
"Happiness," "love," and, you know, beautiful messages.
But on Tuesday 21st,
when I see the bed,
it was not the same sheets.
The sheets that she had put on the previous Tuesday were gone.
And now there was only a full-size flat sheet on the bed,
and the bed is a queen size.
In the nine years I worked for the Kokliches,
they never changed the sheets.
I'm the one who do it every Tuesday.
They never do that.
And she added that the sheets were nowhere to be found in the house.
Not in the washer, not in any of the other rooms,
so she was very concerned about that.
She also pointed out a towel was missing from the bathroom.
One of the pillows was also missing.
This was very unusual.
There was a theory that Jana was abducted from her bed
by the anonymous male calling for Jana at the home.
But Bruce told us there was no signs of forced entry.
All the doors were locked. The alarm was activated.
Everything looked secure in the home.
It has to be somebody who knew Jana or knew of her, I feel,
because they had to be aware of her movements
and the fact that Bruce had left the house.
We had no leads in her disappearance.
And then on 27th August,
we received a phone call that Jana's '96 Pathfinder was located
off California Street in Signal Hill,
and this is huge information for us in this case.
The initial view of Jana's Pathfinder,
we weren't able to find her purse, gun, or cell phone in there.
However, we did check the cargo area of her Pathfinder,
and we were able to see a feather in the back.
The feather in the back cargo area
was really important based on her pillow missing from her bed.
And then we found what appeared to be a large bloodstain.
Working a missing persons case,
when you find a significant amount of blood somewhere,
that's where you kind of cross the line that, "Okay, this is not good."
She's a very sweet, friendly girl.
No reason for anybody to do this.
There's a little chance they might find her alive,
but I'm prepared for whatever happens.
I've got to know, get some closure.
Now you go into recovery mode.
Where is she? Where's her body? We need to find her.
A search team was created of about 140 people
to search the petroleum fields.
If you do discover something,
we need you to back away from it, and don't touch anything.
Jana's car was found right next to the Signal Hill oil wells.
And all that area, there's a lot of giant, big, deep holes
that were dug when they were trying to explore for oil.
We were out there for quite a while, and nothing was found.
It was very disappointing,
because we wanted to bring closure to the family.
Now we have to start from ground zero.
We still didn't have a body,
and the truth of the matter is,
we're homicide detectives.
As far as a "no body" case,
they're extremely difficult to prove in the state of California.
We were able to secure another search warrant on the house
and conducted a luminol examination.
There was a drop of blood found in the master bedroom
on the carpet near the bed.
We got DNA samples for Jana from her hairbrush.
The several spots of blood that were found in the bedroom
and that blood that was in the back of the Pathfinder matched Jana's DNA.
Evidence is still being put together,
but with that amount of blood in the back of her Pathfinder
would lead anybody to believe she's been murdered,
and her body was placed back there at some point.
I think that we could classify this from a critical missing over to homicide.
At this point in our investigation, her husband, Bruce,
was the only one that had access to her.
Bruce was the last person that saw her alive
and really has no other alibi,
other than he was alone with her over the weekend.
So now we're starting to focus on Bruce, her husband.
From the detectives' standpoint,
Bruce is claiming Jana was alive and with him the entire weekend,
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning.
And then they talked to Bruce and say, "Would you be willing to do a polygraph?"
"We just want to verify your story."
And Bruce said, "That's fine."
He asked investigators if he could preview the questions beforehand.
Um, it's not our policy to provide those questions.
He's been given a lot of advice by a lot of friends,
in the law field and even law enforcement,
and, uh, has heard all kinds of horror stories
about how they use tricky questions.
He had an attorney, and the attorney advised him,
"No, you shouldn't do a polygraph."
Bruce was frantic about doing something.
He couldn't just sit there and not do anything.
I'm doing whatever I can to get my wife back.
I know that he called the TV stations and made an appeal.
My name is Bruce Koklich,
and I'm currently looking for my wife of 11 years,
and I'm offering a $100,000 reward for her return.
The $100,000 reward still stands.
I want my wife back.
Whatever it takes to get her back, I'm willing to do it.
Bruce had come out and gave interviews.
Then as time went by, there were several ladies
who saw those interviews
and contacted the sheriff's department.
They indicated that Bruce contacted them about maybe going out on a date.
There was a lady at the bank.
Bruce came up and said,
"Would you be willing to go out to dinner with me?"
She didn't think much of it
until she saw the TV interview that his wife was missing.
There was another lady who worked at an escrow office.
She didn't wanna have anything to do with him.
And then there was one of the neighbors.
And she got a note on her windshield.
And it said, "From Bruce Koklich."
"Would your granddaughter be willing to go out with me?"
She thought, "That's strange."
"Why would he put a note like that wanting to meet my granddaughter?"
Right before and after Jana's disappearance,
he's asking all these women out,
and they all turned him down because of his creep factor.
Bruce was interested in going out with other women
while he's giving TV interviews,
how much he misses his wife,
and he would do anything to have his loving wife back.
What is going on here?
This is not a grieving spouse.
This looks suspicious.
It's starting to get a little more concerning.
As the investigators got deeper into this case,
they found out from friends, relatives
that Jana was dissatisfied with her life.
Jana told me that they were going to adopt.
She wanted a family so bad.
They had already filled out the papers,
and we were both real excited.
One day, she shows up for dinner,
maybe a month or so before she disappears.
And I said something about, "How's the adoption going?"
And she said to me,
"There will be no adoption."
Now I'm wondering if maybe it was something else with her and Bruce.
I just could never see Bruce adopting a child,
because it definitely would take Jana away from the business
if she had become a mom.
Was Jana tired of the domination of Bruce,
who was always there telling her,
"We gotta make more money, more money, work harder"?
Control was important to Bruce.
He had to control the business situation.
He had to control personal relationships.
That's how he was built.
We learned that Bruce Koklich has a long history
of asking women out, making rude comments to women,
grabbing women, doing certain things.
Obviously, that's a problem in a marriage.
He was womanizing while he was married.
Jana knew about some of it.
We don't know exactly what was going on in Jana's mind,
but we know she was trying to improve herself,
make herself more independent,
where she could go out on her own if she wanted to.
Looking for a new life, something different.
I believe that she may have threatened him with divorce.
If Jana said, "We're done, you don't want the same things I want,"
I can see Bruce not being able to handle that well.
He was very ambitious
and very much money-driven and goal-driven.
If they get a divorce, he would have to share half of everything.
I honestly believe that he killed her over money.
He just didn't want to part with it.
We learn Bruce and Jana both held $1,000,000 life policies.
She most likely has been killed for financial gain.
During that time, we were able to speak neighbors that said
early Saturday morning they heard what sounded like arguing
between a man and a woman,
and the other one described it as maybe moving heavy furniture.
I mean, this picture just keeps getting brighter and brighter as it goes on.
A call came in that a witness saw
what they believed to be a white Pathfinder
parked in front of a home there on California Street in Signal Hill,
but they weren't sure it was Jana's car.
A person said that they saw the car parked there
the Sunday before she's reported missing.
They looked, and it was a white person with a white dress shirt on,
and he's just sitting there in the alley,
and it seemed suspicious to this individual.
The sheriff's department thought, "Could it be Bruce?"
We put together three separate six-packs, or mug show-up folders.
One that had Bruce in it, one that had Dean, the personal trainer,
and the other one had the business partner, Chris Botosan.
This witness looked at all three different folders
and picked out the one
where Bruce was identified as being that person in that car.
That put Bruce in that area on a Sunday
when he said that he and his wife were home alone.
Bruce wanted somebody else to be blamed for his wife's disappearance,
and it appeared that he purposely took her car,
put it in a very poor neighborhood
with the keys in the ignition, with the windows down...
just hoping and praying that somebody would take it,
make it appear that somebody else had kidnapped or carjacked Jana.
Signal Hill is just north of Long Beach.
The Kokliches had some of their apartment complexes in the area.
We were able to get some information from some residents in Signal Hill
who said they saw the neighborhood kids getting in Jana's car,
taking the car for joy rides around the neighborhood,
and parked in a garage.
It was becoming apparent, not only to us,
but family members and friends of Jana
who were starting to have their doubts about Bruce.
I had trust in Bruce and had no reason to not believe
everything that he had told us up to this point.
Now I had to look at everything, and I had to think,
"Was my trust misplaced?"
"Is there actually a lot more that's going on
that Bruce isn't telling me?"
"Is there another side to him that I didn't know existed,
that I didn't think was possible?"
We put together a timeline of 18th and 19th August.
According to Bruce, 12:30-ish, Jana returns from the concert.
Early Saturday morning, neighbors across the street
heard arguing between a man and a woman.
When the detectives were asking more questions with Bruce as to
"Where were you guys all weekend long?"
Bruce had told 'em,
"Saturday, we read some books, we watched some television."
"Then on Sunday, we walked around. We talked to people in the neighborhood."
When detectives talked to those neighbors, the neighbors said,
"We never saw them."
But Bruce kept coming by and asking,
"Remember? Remember I talked to you on Sunday? Remember?"
And they said, "No, we... we didn't."
We weren't able to corroborate anything that Bruce said.
He didn't even remember what they were wearing.
Bruce Koklich was planting a seed
that somebody out there had it in for Jana.
He was directing the investigation right from the beginning.
He thought it was a carjacking, was a kidnapping,
or it was that person on the voicemail.
All those things have to be looked into, and they were,
but they were all excluded.
Bruce had a motive. Bruce is the only one.
Bruce had a lot to gain from Jana's death.
The potential million-dollar life insurance policy,
all the properties,
that beautiful home that they had there on the golf course.
If he was able to avoid divorce, he would get all of it.
Do police consider you a suspect?
Not that I'm aware of.
I'm doing whatever I can to get my wife back.
Bruce didn't have any characteristics of grieving.
His wife is missing, and he's going out trying to meet women
and trying to have sexual relations with them.
It seemed like Bruce wanted to be single.
Bruce wanted to be the real estate mogul,
the guy with the money and the property,
and Jana was in the way.
So he came up with a plan to get rid of and murder his wife.
I believe that Bruce killed his wife early Saturday morning.
Bruce wraps her body up in the sheets with the pillowcase or towel
and moves her body into the back of the Pathfinder,
which was in the garage at the time.
For the amount of blood that was in the back of her Pathfinder,
it could be purge.
A body starts purging as it's starting to decompose.
So I'm wondering,
"Did he keep her in the garage Saturday and Sunday?"
And then moves her body,
dumps it somewhere in between their home and Signal Hill,
because, Sunday night,
the Pathfinder's seen in Signal Hill
with him in the driver's seat.
And then he walks home the four miles to Lakewood.
The whole team did a great job
of clearing any other possibility.
All roads lead to Bruce Koklich.
When you add up all of those really significant, incriminating things,
it was enough evidence for the DA's office to file an arrest warrant.
Once we learned that Bruce had been arrested for Jana's murder,
all those little pieces finally fell into place for me and my wife,
and we were saddened to have to think
that Bruce did have something to do with it.
There was a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests Bruce isn't innocent.
I thought, "This is great."
"He'll just sit in jail until, you know, his trial comes."
But, boy, was I wrong.
He got out on $1,000,000 bail.
I love my wife. I mean, I hope that she's found.
And, um, I'm most wholeheartedly not guilty.
After many months, almost a year, we got to trial.
To get a conviction, we're gonna have to prove
he is the one that caused her disappearance by killing her.
But the problem is our best evidence, meaning a dead body, we don't have.
As far as the search for the body, it's ongoing.
This case was an eye-opener for all of us
because nobody had really had a "no body" case.
There wasn't too many of those that they were getting convictions on.
We were stuck with circumstantial evidence.
It's a major task for the prosecutor to convince all 12 jurors
there is no reasonable doubt.
The danger in "no body" cases, there's always a doubt.
Jana had a $1,000,000 life insurance policy.
Bruce could collect on the life insurance.
The prosecution needed to prove that there was a financial motive.
The prosecution had a lot of good witnesses
that wanted to come in and testify on behalf of Jana.
It was my responsibility to do it.
She was the sweetest lady in the world.
She doesn't deserve this.
And when I see Bruce, he was not nervous at all.
Bruce wanted to testify, which was kind of a surprise.
Most of the time, when a defendant takes the witness stand,
they will do more harm to their case than benefit.
However, the defense put on a strong case.
There's absolutely no motive,
either personal between the two of them or monetarily, as has been suggested.
Bruce Koklich testified he and his wife had a good relationship.
His legal team displayed photographs of the couple's vacations.
They also showed the jury birthday and anniversary cards
the pair had exchanged over the course of their marriage.
He painted a different picture of what was going on.
And the question was, "Was a jury going to buy it?"
As a detective, you always feel like,
"I put this picture together, and they're gonna judge it,
and all it takes is one person to not like it."
There goes your case.
After all the evidence was presented,
the judge read the instructions to the jury,
and they went into the jury room to deliberate.
There's one day, and nothing happened.
Another day, another, another. It went on and on.
When it goes beyond a day or two,
I would start to worry.
On this case, the jury deliberated for six days.
There was seven for guilty and five for not guilty.
They could not come to a unanimous verdict.
The judge declared a mistrial, and it was declared a hung jury.
It's hard to swallow,
especially knowing that we had seven that believed what we presented.
I couldn't believe Bruce got away with it.
He killed Jana and he gets to walk.
The DA's office had to take a serious look at it,
and then it was decided we could do it again,
but we have to take another approach.
I was asked to come in and create
what was called a "visual trial,"
where we would present all that circumstantial evidence in a slideshow.
We would have charts.
We're not gonna emphasize killing Jana for the life insurance.
We were gonna concentrate on the timeline.
The sheets, the setting up of the car,
all of that pointed to Bruce's guilt.
At the end of the trial, when the jurors went in to deliberate,
I felt very good.
Jury was out for only several hours.
It was less than a half a day,
and they rang the buzzer, meaning they had a verdict.
The jury came out and the jury verdict was read.
Bruce Koklich was found guilty.
I remember I sat there and cried.
It was the culmination of everything.
Now we can plan a memorial for Jana.
And I just wish we could've gotten him to tell what he had done with her.
The perpetrator has family too, and they're...
you know, the disappointment and shame.
There was really no reason why Jana had to die.
It is especially devastating not to know where her body is
so that we could have the comfort of a final goodbye to her.
Bruce, you took away your wife who loved you.
You took away all that Jana was and could have been.
You took away a daughter. You took away a niece and a cousin.
You took away her father's will to live and the only thing that gave him comfort.
You'll be imprisoned in the state prison system
for the term prescribed by law,
which is 15 years to life.
When the judge pronounced what Bruce's sentence was gonna be,
he turned, looked at me, and said, "Don't worry about me. I'll be okay."
And they handcuffed him and walked him off.
He's an egotistical manipulator
and thought that he could charm his way out of this somehow,
and it just didn't work.
Bruce could not outsmart bulldog homicide detectives.
Everybody has a lot of pride working homicide.
You get a case, and you work that case. You're not gonna let go.
Even though I still communicate with Bruce,
I don't have any sympathy for him and his situation,
but I can't punish him any more than he's already being punished.
I really do feel for Jana, her mother, and her father,
not knowing what happened to their daughter.
That's very sad and that breaks my heart.
I miss Jana every single day.
It still hurts.
She was a lovely person.
Yes, I miss her very much.
I'm sorry.
Being able to put this puzzle together,
and then take it to court for 12 people to look at it,
and for them to unanimously agree
with what myself and my team put together,
it's so rewarding to be able to do that.
As I look back and reflect on it
now that I'm no longer a homicide detective...
I've only been retired 32 days now, so it's kind of...
After 42 years, I'm wrapping my head around it still.
I was very depressed when I left Sheriff's Homicide.
It's like leaving my family.
I miss the excitement, the challenge of solving a case,
so, um, I thought about it a year,
and I just had to go back.
I just couldn't handle retiring.
I cried.
I did. I... I mean,
I was just so conflicted with leaving, and I didn't feel it in my heart.
Karen Shonka retired but decided to go back to work.
She's a workaholic.
Crazy girl went back.
There's a very small percentage of people that come to Sheriff's Homicide Bureau
and stay there for, let's say, more than a decade.
I think that that takes a special person
to see and deal with the trauma that we deal with.
There is no other job like ours,
even law enforcement in particular, working homicide.
I think that's where it becomes a family.
You gotta remember, in that room, there's different ideologies.
Different religions, different races,
different political parties, if you will,
but you come together
for the job.
You were a small part of something much bigger.
It's a whole shitload of responsibility on your shoulders.
But it is kind of fucking cool, right?
To show up and you're the shot caller, big baller.
I would say if I miss one thing, it was the people that I worked with,
and the fun that we had,
and the time to get serious, and the time to play.
Deep down, you always will be a cop, and you'll always be a detective.
If I had to go back and do it over again, and I was 25 or 30 again,
and I knew, "This is what's ahead next 35 years,"
I wouldn't change a goddamn thing, not a thing.
I wouldn't change anything. It was the greatest ride of my life.