Rob and I wrote letters back and forth while he was in Travis County Jail.
He had a lot of time on his hands so he would write us long letters.
This is the first one he wrote to us.
"Dear Claire,
when you're in jail, time is weird.
Some days a second takes all day, and others a day takes seconds.
When you're in a cell, 23 hours a day, time stretches to infinity.
I read a lot.
I read the whole Dune series.
That's probably one of the greatest sci-fi fantasy series around,
and I consider it a classic.
I'm not much into puzzles."
I think I sent him some puzzle books or something.
"But I do listen to NPR, although I prefer the BBC News.
I've used this situation to grow into a better person
in the last nine-and-a-half years.
You can't see it since you've only known me
for about a week, but ask my mother or even my father.
You may even have them on film talking about this already.
I have no clue what you've gotten so far.
I've grown in so many ways it's impossible to explain.
Please write back soon. Sincere best wishes, Rob."
That was his first letter, and we wrote back and forth a few times
before he got released on bond. Yeah.
To hear that my sentencing had been overturned was huge.
Oh man, I was standing
at my cell door when-- 'cause the officer comes to you,
because it doesn't come at the normal time of mail.
Legal mail is different.
They bring it to you, and I'm like, "Hey, what's this?
It's from the Court of Criminal Appeals." And I opened it up and went, "Oh, wow!"
What they overturned our convictions on was a Sixth Amendment violation
of a right to confrontation specifically.
In Springsteen's trial,
they took my written statement and they had
an officer read parts of it into the record.
In my trial, they took excerpts out of his video interrogation.
The Constitution says, "You have an absolute right
to confront your accuser."
I refused to get on the stand at his trial.
He refused to get on the stand at my trial.
So, where in there were we allowed
to confront our "accusers"?
This was sort of a gray area of the law.
And while this case was on appeal,
the Supreme Court of the United States came down with a decision
that really totally changed the law and made it much more black and white,
which got this case reversed.
New developments today in one of Austin's most notorious crimes.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled
that Michael Scott got an unfair capital murder trial
in Travis County.
They say his confession was improperly introduced to jurors
and he didn't get to face Robert Springsteen,
one of his accusers.
Scott's and Springsteen's convictions were overturned.
The appellate court ruled that the men's constitutional right was violated.
Every time I hear those words,
that their rights were violated, I don't...
Our girls were murdered.
The highest court in Texas decided on a vote of five to four.
So, four of the justices said,
"Nope, it didn't make any difference," but it just takes a majority.
Five of them said it did, so they're going back for a new trial.
Six-and-a-half, seven years.
That's a rough guess on that one.
One of the things that people don't get is the sequence of events.
The crime happened in '91.
All right? In '99, Michael Scott confesses, Springsteen confesses.
Springsteen loses his case, Scott loses his case.
One gets death, one gets life.
Seven years later, both cases are reversed and they come back for new trials.
So the district attorney decided
that since the confessions indicate that the girls,
or at least one of the girls, was raped,
they might find DNA evidence to use for a new trial.
At the first trial, they had already done profiling,
and there was no foreign DNA on those swabs.
That's because at the time they needed globs of liquids.
But now, they tested it by kind of a new technology
called Y-STR,
which can find much smaller amounts of DNA.
The state had gotten knowledge of this new Y-STR testing
and thought, "This could be it,
'cause now we're not allowed to use these confessions against each other.
We're going to prove with science that he did it."
There's an X chromosome, and there's a Y chromosome.
If you're XX, you're a female. If you're XY, you're a male.
Y-STR, what it does is it ignores the female DNA.
We get a call from the judge's office saying,
"Hey, can you come and meet right now?"
When we got there,
prosecutors said, "We have found
a full Y-STR profile in Amy Ayers."
"And it doesn't match any of your defendants.
Your two or the other two, either."
The most important thing the DNA stands for is it's someone else.
It is not any one of these four boys.
And so I suppose the state of Texas now is going
to say that there were really five boys there instead of four.
Never mind that is inconsistent with the theories
they used to try them the first time.
They thought they were going to get a Y-STR result
and hammer the point home.
Instead, they got the truth and they can't deal with it.
The theory comes up by the state of Texas,
what must be contamination.
Something had to happen to this sample.
It could be contamination or it could be another person involved.
So, the crime scene collection procedures in 1991
with the lab processing procedures
and handling procedures.
Y-STR can pick up cast-off skin cells.
So, anybody that had contact, was even close to these swabs,
could have contaminated the evidence.
You've got to think of the crime scene.
And you've got, I don't know, four inches of water that has flooded.
You've got naked girls on the floor with water.
It could be anything. It could be...
I mean, it's a restaurant. People are in there all the time.
So, they began testing every firefighter
that was there on the scene, over 50 of them.
Any of the officers that were there, any other law enforcement personnel,
the medical examiner. They test Amy's father...
brother...
anybody who else that they think it could be.
After testing more than 200 men
who just even looked at this body, were anywhere near this body,
there's nobody else,
except for maybe somebody that's not in this pile,
i.e., the real killer.
The idea that it could be contamination, yes.
It's a possibility. Is it probable? No.
A full profile inside a vaginal swab of the youngest victim?
No. That's not contamination. That's your killer.
Since the original trial of this case,
new developments in DNA technology have become available.
Currently, it is clear to me
that our evidence in the death
of these four young women includes DNA from one male
whose identity is not yet known to us.
Given that, I could not in good conscience
allow this case to go to trial before the identity of this male donor
is determined and the full truth is known.
For the first time in the history of criminal justice in the state of Texas,
two young men were released on personal bond
on four counts of capital murder.
I determined I couldn't keep those defendants in jail any longer,
so I let them out on personal bond
and gave the state a deadline to be ready to go to trial.
I remain confident that Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott are both responsible
for the deaths at the yogurt shop.
I can assure this community that we're going to continue to work
on this case until we take it to trial again.
First thing I told Robert
was that I was sorry it took so damn long for this day to come.
He hasn't been free for over ten years.
The promise I made him is that he's never going back.
We're going to win this case, and I don't care how that's done.
Trial, dismissal, whatever.
What does it feel like to be out?
It's wonderful, and I'd like to thank God and my families and my attorney
for this opportunity. Thank you.
Knowing that it is a possibility a match
may never be found doesn't bother this mom.
The case is a good case. We didn't need the DNA in the first place.
They are going to pay every day of their life.
And if I were there, I would probably just stay in the jail.
It's safer for them because there's a lot of people who are upset over this.
This case is very simple.
It's about a bad interrogation
in which interrogators crossed the line
into using the kind of tactics we know cause false confessions.
They suffer from something called confirmation bias,
which means that they're looking
for any evidence of guilt because that's what they already think.
So, this is Carlos Garcia, and I think what he's doing here
is practicing his opening statement
for the retrial that would have come up in,
I think it was 2008, 2009 he was doing this.
Trying to get Michael to remember details.
And Michael gets scared, and he can't remember.
Well, he's going to start going, "That's the gun, ain't it?
Come on, tell me."
Michael will say, "Yeah, that's the gun. The gun he shot the girls with."
Paul Johnson knew, as he's watching on that videotape...
He's sitting in some other room close by, watching this stuff go down.
And Paul Johnson knows at that moment that that's not the gun.
Because Paul Johnson had had it tested.
And the Austin Police Department ballistics person says,
"It's very unlikely this gun you have is the gun that killed those girls."
I don't think quite enough emphasis
had been put in the first trial on the fact
that the gun did not match,
that there was really no physical evidence linking these boys to the crime.
APD knew that the gun did not match,
even though they're indicating in Michael Scott's interrogation
that they had the matching gun.
In 17 years since this crime was committed,
not one single atom of physical evidence
connecting these boys to that crime scene has ever been found.
Not one.
How long was that?
- Forty-eight minutes. - Okay.
Yeah, that needs to be cut down by 20 minutes.
Man.
In my own opinion, Johnson screwed it up.
Not only did he screw it up, he hid things that did not fit.
So, every test from the lead,
from the bullets that were in the girls, they can't say it really did come
from Maurice's gun or for sure that it didn't.
What Maurice had said was,
"This gun that I was arrested with is the gun
that Forrest took to kill the girls."
But we have always known that Maurice had access to other guns.
So, even though we couldn't get a positive identification,
it still wouldn't have cleared Maurice because we knew he had other guns.
This gun that he was arrested with,
it would only be a match if you believe Maurice.
I think I'm an honest person.
I tell the truth.
I think I'm honest in everything I do,
and I think my investigation was done in an honest way.
And to me, the convictions confirmed what I had always thought,
that not only had they done it, but that we proved
beyond a reasonable doubt that they had done it.
Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen
have walked into court dozens of times before,
but this was the first time they walked in as free men.
Both men have been out of jail since June,
when State District Judge Mike Lynch released them on bond,
and said prosecutors had to put up or shut up by today.
Courtroom, come to order, please. Everyone rise.
167th judicial district court of Travis County is now in session.
The honorable Mike Lynch presiding. You may be seated.
Good afternoon. We're on the record.
In August, the court issued an order
due to the unique nature and circumstances of this case
that set today as a date for the parties to announce to the court
whether or not they'd be ready to begin a jury trial.
As the court is well aware,
the state is conducting testing to identify the male donor
that we uncovered through some Y-STR testing
from one of the vaginal swabs of one of the victims in our case.
So because of that, Your Honor, given the fact
that we have not yet identified the male donor,
the state sees no other viable option at this point, Your Honor,
but to file a motion with the court
for dismissal pending further investigation
of this matter into the identity of this male donor.
- Anything else from the state? - No, sir.
Apparently having no objections, the court will grant the motions
as to each indictment, as to each of the two tenants.
When the state wasn't ready by that date because of these evidentiary issues,
I pretty much forced them to dismiss the case without prejudice.
I think we were just enforcing the law and doing what was fair.
I can see how most everybody is unsatisfied...
Excuse me.
...with there being no final determination.
But I'm assuming the defendants
are very happy to be out of jail and not under charge anymore.
Mr. Springsteen, can we talk to you?
No comment right now, please.
There is no victory here.
The primary question in this case has still not been answered.
Who committed these crimes?
Where are those people? And we need to find them.
But most of all, I think we should reserve our sympathy and our concern
for the families of those girls.
You can go to court, but you can't get justice.
All you get is the law.
Justice to you may be different than justice to me
or anybody else down the street.
- Yeah. - Justice may be revenge.
Make no mistake...
this was a difficult decision
and one I'd rather not have to make.
But I believe it is the best legal and strategic course to take
to ultimately retry both Springsteen and Scott.
There is no database for this particular type of profile.
This is a Y-only profile, and there's no database for that.
Can you talk about what this means for the justice system?
Because either you've let two murderers walk out of court today,
or the wrong guys have been locked up.
How should people have faith in the justice system
when neither one of those seems to be a good outcome, is it?
Twenty-four citizens of Travis County have heard this case
and have convicted both of these men before.
This is just a new turn of events.
We need to keep searching for the donor of this DNA.
I don't, as I said, believe it would be fair to give it to a jury now.
Just ask them to guess or surmise.
And so we'll wait.
- Congratulations. - Thank you.
But just now you looked confident today. You looked like... You looked confident.
So, this is his first day as a free man.
Mostly free, out of prison anyway.
You look great. I mean, I think you look good.
I think you look healthy...
Even though the charges have been dropped against you now,
you're very close to having been exonerated in the public view.
I've not been exonerated.
My charges have only been dismissed.
So, I went...
kind of from one jail to another.
Shit.
Fucking 100-dollar pair of pants and the damn belt won't fit in the loops.
It wasn't an exciting thing that I guess a lot of people
would think that it would be
because you can't not think about it.
There's always that question, "Will I ever be exonerated?"
- Hi! It's nice to meet you. - Producer with us.
Make yourselves at home.
I can start another pot of coffee. We got Gatorade and Diet Dr. Pepper
- and, of course, water. - Very sweet. We're good.
I think we just want to get a little bit of B-roll,
just like sort of what are you doing on a daily basis now?
This here is my kitchen, so to speak.
I've got a little toaster oven. I've got a microwave.
I've got a skillet.
Robert Springsteen, now 35 years old.
He never expected to spend the past ten years in prison.
There's been a lot of hoopla and madness going on here the last several years
and I would like to get some of the records set straight on this
and have the people know the truth.
Were your fingerprints ever found
- anywhere at the yogurt shop? - No.
- Your blood? - No.
- Your DNA? - No.
- Any hair? - No.
But he does have trouble explaining why, after denying for hours he was involved,
that he finally confessed to the police.
How does that happen?
I don't know.
There's psychological aspects to it that I don't understand.
In a way, yes, and in a way, no.
I've talked to several attorneys and several experts,
and they've all said, "You know, it can happen to anybody."
And people are just now really starting
to find out the truth about false confessions
and coerced confessions.
Good? Yeah. Kill him, Belle.
Hello, Miss Belle.
I've told you all the line, right?
That John Wisser asked me what line of poetry
I would use to characterize the end of my case.
And I told him it was T.S. Eliot, you know?
I mean, it's dissatisfying.
It's simply over because science doesn't have an opinion.
And here we sit.
And there you go, by God.
You want a cigar?
No, I'm good, thanks.
I was just talking to Judge Lynch this morning.
I mean, this case is over, but it's never gonna be over.
And that was one of the things we talked about.
He asked about you and I told him.
He thinks you're gone.
You know, I just said, "You're in West Virginia and I told you
that you're never coming back to Texas."
The DA's office believes you're guilty. The cops are almost rabid about it.
If they could catch you behind the wheel, you would not make it out of Austin.
They would find a reason to put you in jail.
That's what I'm saying.
Even if the charges were dropped,
it would be a sensational news story.
You know, yogurt shop defendant. Belle, honest to God.
Belle, I am going to stick you...
No! No, I don't care what you think.
I really like Texas. I hate to leave,
but it's the best thing to do right now, so...
Well, we don't know for sure that it is,
but it gives the appearance of being pretty bad,
and we just don't want there to be any issues, you know?
So it's better to be safe than sorry.
Eastbound N2. There's a parking lot here.
EMS 10-18, I've got an officer down.
What started as a routine traffic stop ended with the shooting death
of a man that had a history with Austin police.
The officer managed to fire a single round
that did strike the suspect.
We are discovering the man killed was Maurice Pierce.
Police say Pierce ran through a stop sign
and started jumping over fences to get away
through this neighborhood.
When Wilson finally caught up with him...
The officer was attempting to control him and get him in custody.
He said he felt something wet.
He realized that Maurice had gotten
the knife off of his belt and had cut his throat.
Officer Wilson is in stable condition.
Minutes later, neighbors called police,
saying the attacker was dead in a yard down the street.
Maurice Pierce is the name many Austinites know well,
connected to that infamous yogurt shop murders.
Members of Pierce's family say
that past followed him, saying he didn't trust police.
Senior Sergeant of the homicide detectives,
the next morning, he called me and I chewed his butt out.
I said, you should have come and got me that night.
I don't want to hear Maurice Pierce dead. I want to see Maurice Pierce dead.
What I had always hoped was going to happen,
that we would get evidence
to get him to trial, and it'd be for capital murder,
and he would get a life sentence.
So when
I found out that he had been killed,
it really didn't bother me, which may sound harsh, but it's true.
Over the years, Maurice Pierce kept talking to the cops,
like, they'd interview him, and he would always talk to them.
Pierce was always afraid of the cops.
They kept bothering him, 'cause he was always that prime suspect.
Johnson would go up and bother him and talk to him, and he would always talk.
Pierce died because of his PTSD.
I have no doubt.
If Maurice Pierce doesn't decide to take a gun to the mall
on December 15th 1991, he'd still be alive
and none of us would be here right now talking about this.
I try not to keep a lot of cop stuff in my house.
I take my shoes off at the front door, just try to leave it as much as possible.
But then I come home and work from home for a couple hours every day.
So I guess it's kind of a moot in some sense.
When I was in the homicide division, I solved a hundred percent of my cases.
I left there with no open casework.
Maybe I jinxed myself, came over here and like,
"Oh, you think you're good? Well, here's yogurt shop."
O.J. Simpson, he needed a ton of blood for DNA back then.
That's when DNA became kind of a household thing,
was the Simpson trial.
And now we're talking picograms,
which is like a thousandth of a nanogram,
that you can't even see with the naked eye.
And it seems like each time you talk to these labs,
they're able to do more with less.
Be real careful.
There you go.
So this is reconstructed from the crime scene photos and video.
And, of course, this is the front where all the customers would sit
and then the back where the fire started and the girls were.
That is the first thing we see 'cause we have all the girls up here
with a biography about each one.
And this is...
Yeah, it's the first thing you see every morning.
So, it's a reminder that these girls have histories,
have families, have faces and had lives.
And it's not just a case.
It's much more than that.
We have some of the original yogurt shop material here.
These two filing cabinets is full of original material.
And then there's multiple other filing cabinets at a different location.
So, just again, the vastness of this case,
this is only a portion of some of the hard copies.
Here it is. So we still have all the original VHS.
I mean, this is interviews, this is in-car camera,
this is like the original VHS,
and I guess if we wanted to watch it, we'd have to find a VHS player somewhere.
So we have this unknown DNA,
and I gotta figure out who that is. That's goal number one.
It could be contamination, or it could be another person involved.
What's the probability that it's contamination?
We have the original '08 profile that went to one lab.
And then as early as 2017 and 2019,
we're finding that profile in other places.
A different-- totally different lab.
And totally different, unrelated pieces of evidence.
So how would you have contamination
when you've got different areas of the crime scene,
different people with different chains of custody,
and these items going to different labs in different time periods?
It would be like winning the lottery repeatedly,
like the chances of somehow samples that are unrelated
and handled by different people in different labs
at different time periods somehow got contaminated
by the same male profile?
That does not exist.
So, I suppose the state of Texas now is going
to say that there were really five boys there instead of four.
It's not contamination by, like, lab personnel or anybody on the scene,
but to say that that is our fifth person,
or it shows that the four were not there at all,
it's some other person, like,
until we figure out who that profile belongs to,
like, that's just speculation.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
- Yeah. - I'm...
staying out of it until I figure out who that person is.
It could come back to somebody totally unrelated to this case,
like their DNA got transferred for a totally normal reason, right?
Like a friend or something.
Or it may be a complete dead end. We still don't know.
We can't think of DNA as proving guilt or innocence.
DNA is something that says, "I have a sample
and I may be able to tell you who is the source of this sample
or who's not a contributor of the sample."
But how it got there, when it got there,
that's up to the whole investigation and all the other factors in that.
Anytime you do a DNA test,
you have to take some of the sample and use it.
Once we use it, it's no longer there.
So when you have a DNA sample and there's very little,
you may only have one shot at it 'cause you may have to use all of it up.
And then there's no going back after that.
Here they got a Y profile from Jennifer Harbison.
In a lot of ways, you're pushing the envelope here
to cutting-edge technology, if not bleeding-edge technology.
So we don't know if this is going
to get the answer we want, which is something,
or it's going to just be a waste in that
because no one's done this on this kind of work before.
It's a last effort because there's nothing else the case can use
to try to solve the murder.
Okay, so we, y'all, we're going to call, bear with us,
because I'm sorry, we may be able to solve crimes,
but we can't solve technology, just saying.
All right, so this is my crew right back here. I told you about.
And they're all so excited to meet you
'cause I've been bragging on you.
Okay, we have a bunch of questions,
but I think that where we want to start is,
what would you do different, knowing what you know today?
I would have continued investigating
the creek people,
Mac and the people that were hanging out in the creek there with Mac.
Not to look at them as suspects, but just to get any other information
because there were tons of tips about Maurice.
Under the bridge where these people were hanging out,
that's where Maurice told Polanco they're storing the communal gun.
This communal gun is what we suspect would've been the .380.
I never knew that all that was said. That is insane. Yeah.
I don't even know how to respond to that.
But, I mean, you know, we said the guy,
Mace, who lived in North Cross Apartments with his mom, I mean,
he's got to be talking about me.
Yes, I would have been in this apartment, but on the other side.
This exactly?
I don't know that anybody else lived in North Cross Apartments
with their mom that was me, you know,
"skinhead," whatever.
I never thought I'd be back here again. This is...
Yeah, I feel like my childhood's coming to haunt me.
I feel like this was the spot.
Yeah, the yogurt shop's what, a two-minute walk right over there?
What is it, a couple thousand yards? I mean, really, really close.
The mall is just on the other side of these apartments, pretty much.
But I feel like there's been a lot of erosion.
I think it was...
I think we would have just been down here to hide and drink beer.
- Yeah. - That's it.
- That is complete horseshit. - I've been asked about that.
That is so ludicrous.
And they also asked me for a current DNA sample
'cause I think they said they lost the original one, so...
So number one, we didn't have money, right?
So, if we had the money to purchase said gun,
we weren't leaving it in the creek.
So, this idea of some shared community gun is absolute absurdity.
I think we had a lot of bravado
and we wanted to be tough and cool, but we weren't.
You know. We weren't evil. We never hurt anybody.
And yeah.
In my experience, people don't want to hear
that there's inherently evil people in the world
and that the vast majority of us
are neither good nor evil, but we'll kind of go whatever way,
which may in part explain what happened up there, right?
Somebody was evil and somebody went along.
I think the part I struggle with is how did
that person who went along never, ever spill the beans, right?
How did they never, ever come clean?
Because yeah, somebody was evil,
but I tend to believe people will kind of go whatever way.
I don't ever want to be one of those people.
Everyone, I think a really nice, good circle all the way around.
Everybody join hands, please.
We thank you, man up above.
We are so grateful you've brought us here.
We ask that you keep everybody here healthy
and that today we find some peace and closure.
- In Jesus's name, amen. - Amen.
Let's pull this away because the capsule, I could tell, is there
because look, watch.
- Oh yeah. - So, it's there.
So, let's move this over there. Be careful.
We'll put it back where it was.
- Was it concrete or was it a box? - I can't remember.
I remember them doing it.
There's something there. I don't know what it is.
I don't know if that's it or not.
- You don't remember? - I don't remember.
- That year was a whole fog. - Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
With all these roots here, I don't think it's going to be here.
I don't either. Maybe it's over here.
- I wonder if it's under here. - Doesn't make any sense...
Yes, she thinks it was off to the side of the courtyard.
And even the parents are not very sure,
so do you think you know? Can you help me?
"Best buds always," yeah.
Amy Ayres, 2/21/92, Mr. Sun's yearbook sponsor.
Here we go.
- There we go. Damn! - Watch out.
- Oh man. What a mess. - Newspaper.
Something's in a plastic bag in there.
Bring that trash can over here and we...
The ribbons? That's off the tree.
- Oh, wow. - That's what those are.
The ribbons off the tree when they planted it. Uh-huh.
I do see some names there.
Yeah, they tied them on there when they planted it.
- We will not forget. - Right.
This was the box.
I think it's nice for them to know that they weren't alone in all of it,
even if they felt that they were.
'Cause it's obvious that a lot of people really loved her
and thought of her a lot.
That's her.
Because one time when we were at elementary school,
I don't know if she ever...
If it dries out, you can tell more about it.
I remember not knowing pieces of it,
but I feel like I've always known about it.
At my grandparents' house, they have a pillow and it has her on it.
And I'd always wonder who she was.
And then they have a whole hallway, and the whole hallway
has a bunch of different things with her on it.
I don't know, you see how it affects them.
Dad doesn't really talk about it a lot.
It's usually Mom yelling at people about it, but...
I don't know, you kind of wonder how they'd be,
how he'd be, if it hadn't happened.
Well, another chapter closed.
There's so many ways the loss of my sister, 30 years later,
shows up in my adult life.
My name is Sonora, and I'm a therapist.
I'm in private practice in Massachusetts.
One thing that really drew me to this kind of work
is that I've spent so much of my life trying to heal.
In the very beginning when you lost your child,
I want to look at a little bit
about what that initial experience was like for you.
I think there's benefit to telling the story
in different settings, in different ways.
I wanted to give you a chance to write a letter to your child.
It could be what's happening in your life in this moment.
But I don't think the trauma ever loses its potency.
Like when you ask me, "Can I remember the yogurt shop?"
Like, I can feel my body changing
when I have that memory, you know?
And so... I don't-- You know, that may never change.
Well, it's 31 years and we're still talking about this stuff,
and I try not to.
Quite frankly, I probably wouldn't have
- if I weren't talking to you. - Right.
But I needed that connection with you.
Yesterday, we were talking about
living through this experience, you begin to know
things that other people don't know.
And I don't think it works that way for everybody.
No.
Because some people
that I know in my family became more cynical.
I can't quite find the words for it,
and I've been trying to find the words for myself too,
like, why these tragic experiences opened me up to love people more.
Because it could do the opposite.
By the way, they both happen.
Yeah, tell me about that.
- Both of those things happen. - Yeah.
You do get really bitchy and cynical about stuff,
but then you also, you feel like you're on the other side.
You got closer to the love.
It's amazing the tools that we have to use to heal ourselves, and we rarely use them.
We get so close to the pain that it's more comfortable to be there
than it is to go to the light, to where the freedom is.
Yeah, I hear that a lot in the trauma groups that I work with.
"I don't like this,
but I'm afraid I don't know what else there is.
And this is something that I know. I know how to do this.
I know how to hold on to this pain.
I know how to live with this pain."
I have this saying that when I die
I hope I'm brave and that I can jump into it.
I want the freedom to fall into that next thing, whatever that is.
- Right, to let go of the fear. - Let go of the fear.
I think one of the hard things, and I'm realizing 30 years later,
is figuring out how to live your life
and live the life you want to live after all this.
You know, not that you shouldn't care,
not that you shouldn't, whatever, but you know you gotta
figure out what you love to do and what you want to do.
Right.
Yeah.
And it's really hard.
But I think it's very important. I mean, I went back to school
ten years on.
Went into engineering, which I love.
And I think the hard part
with homicide is you get tied into the whole investigation.
Right.
And is it good? Is it bad? Did somebody screw up? Blah, blah, blah.
You know, it wasn't until I went to an actual
focused grief group that I really liberated myself.
And I was invited because my dad had died that year.
And it's like, well, that was pretty trivial.
I hate to say it. He was 85. He'd been sick for a long time.
I spent the whole grief group talking about Eliza.
And that was very liberating, to actually focus on the grief.
And I think you deny that in the homicide stuff.
- Right. - Which is all necessary.
- But it's not necessary for us to do it. - Not necessary for me to do it.
- Yeah. - Right.
I agree with that so much
because we thought we were doing the right thing
to be in public with this
because we needed to keep it out in the public
so that we would still have the support
of the community and they could love us
and help us find these people.
You know, every time anything happened, we had cameras.
And as time goes on, it takes a toll on you.
It's been 31 years.
I would not do it the same way.
I would retreat
and go far away and have some quiet time with God.
But the thing that we have to be careful about,
because ours has been so public,
most people don't have the support of the community.
Their brother gets killed and no one ever speaks to them about it.
They don't use his name anymore.
You need that love. You need to be held when you're suffering.
That was the double-edged sword of the public.
We got a lot of attention early because it was hot news.
Four white girls got killed.
And the case, well, we don't know about the case.
What do we know about the case?
Whatever they tell us, we take it for face value.
Because it's...
Yeah, I would have taken a step back a little bit more,
I think, but I felt such an obligation to carry this thing out.
Okay.
- These two? - Just us two.
- Actually, no, y'all two. - She needs a wide lens from just us.
Wasn't he sweet? He's so good.
I knew I was better if I did it.
Yeah, and when he wants to share what his experience is--
- And he did. - But he's scared, yeah.
- I was glad. It made me feel good. - Yeah, I know. I'm so glad. Yeah.
I just...
Just put all this away for a while.
It's been a tough couple of days just to get going through all this again.
But I love you and I appreciate the opportunity to do it.
You have given me a huge gift.
By talking to me the last few days, I cannot thank you enough.
I learned so much from you.
- I hope all this helps somebody. - It helps me.
- That's the only person I care about. - Yeah, it helps me a lot.
I'm just so grateful that you're sharing your experience with me.
I don't have my mom to talk to, but I can talk to you.
Well, one crazy-ass old lady to the next one.
- It should blend really well. - Right? Yeah, exactly.
It should be the same person.
Right.
- All right. Are y'all done with this? - Did you get the wide shot?
All right, we're here.
It's just hard to see.
The pictures on the wall, these are some of the cases
that we've solved over the years.
How old were some of the cases? Very old?
Yeah, most of them are from the '80s and '90s.
I'm sure you've heard the same different kind of spiel
from every detective for the last 30 years about "we're working hard," you know,
"we're working on it," and I'm just the newest guy,
but I want you to know that I'm throwing everything I can at this.
The DNA is really the crux of where we're going with it.
We're continuing to reevaluate every piece of evidence
because what may have been
untestable a few years ago because of what it's made of,
or its condition, or whatever,
may or may not be something we can do now.
We've got a finite amount.
It's my decision as the lead detective, but I'm not making it alone.
I'm bringing in people way smarter than me when it comes to DNA.
Some of the experts across the country that provide advice to make sure
that when we move forward
with trying to test something or trying
to use some DNA up, that we're at the best odds.
And if we don't have great odds, then we'll just hold on for a little bit.
If there's any questions you have for me,
of course, I'll be happy to answer them best I can.
It's nice to get some...
some info.
We've said this over the years
is that it was always nice to have fresh eyes on it.
We can communicate as family members and police department
and hopefully solve this at the end of the day.
I'm very hopeful.
I am confident that technology is moving at a pace
that we will be at a point where we can take a sample to a lab,
items that were unable to be tested before,
with a realistic expectation of developing a profile sooner than later.
We are going to solve this case someday. I want the public to know that.
You'll have your own pain and your own way and your own time.
You don't need to visit this one.
At a certain point, the project ends
and, hopefully, the film is finished and you let go.
This was a different kind of thing because I didn't finish.
It was really complicated.
I couldn't see all the angles, all of the storylines,
all of the people.
So, the basic feeling was a feeling of failure.
And the larger feeling was just that I had let people down.
I felt like I had let people down,
you know, who gave me a lot of trust.
But I knew that it was worth preserving.
And I'm glad that this footage is finding a home
that feels like a way
of honoring the folks that let me film them.
As the years go on,
it's still sitting out there unsolved.
I used to hide every December 6th.
Couldn't find me. I'd take off work,
even when I was still at PD, and I did when I was at Metro.
December 6th, you couldn't find me.
And I was off in a corner by myself.
It's my version, I guess, of a day that will live in infamy.
Yeah, I mean, and it'll probably be that way as long
as it's still unsolved.
Sometimes, I think I have a memory, but it's a photograph,
and it's a photograph that I've seen many times,
and I sort of create a story around it.
I don't think it matters whether the memory's accurate or not,
because it's your memory.
So, you’re asking, how do we deal with traumatic memories
and change them or heal them, right?
So, yeah, there is like this big school of thought that says like,
"We just tell the story over and over and over again."
But I think some other things need to happen
in telling that story over and over and over again.
I think we need to have a lot of support in doing that.
And to have the compassion of other human beings around us
as they're witnessing our story.
There's a real benefit for both teller and audience member to telling that story
and to hearing that story.
I think that can change how the memory lives inside of you.
Look, there's Eliza!