To Kill Again | FULL EPISODE | The New Detectives

serial

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er in texas goes undetected for 11 years police identify suspect but his case must be pulled out of the trash investigators hope new forensic techniques can establish a link between the murders and put an end to violent violence in california that A missing person case provokes

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to a secret cemetery at a Sacramento boarding house. An unlikely suspect becomes the focus of a mass murder investigation. Can science help unmask the

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er hiding behind a friendly face? ? Homicide investigators discover that things are not always what they appear to be. Seemingly insignificant clues may expose a pattern and put police on the trail of a killer whose compulsion is to kill

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on the morning of December 21, 1984 in Wichita.

Falls, Texas, Lisa Boone returned home from her job at a local hospital and found herself locked out. Lisa asked her landlady. To open the apartment, she had given the keys to Terry Simms, a friend and co-worker who was spending the night, but Terry did not answer the interior door. The women discovered that the apartment had been ransacked. Lisa called Terry but got no answer. The landlady noticed blood on the floor and followed the trail that led to Terry Simms' body. Wichita Falls Police Department officers responded to the scene upstairs and found the 20-year-old victim dead on the bathroom floor.

She was naked except for the socks she had in her hands. She was tied behind her back the police processed the scene looking for any clues that could identify the murderer they collected blood samples a pair of white tennis shoes with the laces still tied and a woman's hospital uniform they also recovered a blood stained bedspread and sheets in the police station location Lisa told

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that she and Terry Sims left the hospital together after working the 3-11 shift. She explained that she was also a part-time student at Midwestern State University and that she had an exam the next day.

Terry would stay the night. at Lisa's apartment to help her study in the morning, but Lisa said the hospital was short staffed that night, so she volunteered for an extra shift, dropped her friend off at the apartment around 12:30, She gave Terry the keys and went back to work, Lisa told police, she came home around 7:00 am and knocked on the door, she had no idea who could have murdered her friend. An autopsy was performed on Terry Sims and the cause of death was determined to be multiple stab wounds to the chest and back while there were no signs of forcible rape.

Biological evidence was collected from the victim's body. Most murder victims know they are murderers, so Wichita Falls police began interviewing Terry Sims' family and friends. They quickly focused on his ex-boyfriend. He denied his involvement. Investigators had little evidence

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st him. him, but they had a new forensic tool in their arsenal in 1984. DNA profiling was in its infancy and had the potential to link a murderer to his crime through biological evidence left at the scene, but large amounts of evidence to success

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y test, hoping Samples recovered in the Terry Sims case could identify his killer. The police sent them to the genetic analysis laboratory in Dallas, but their hopes were soon dashed.

There was not enough material for DNA testing. No compelling evidence linking the suspect to the murder. The investigation stalled and the case remained unsolved on February 15, 1985, two months after Terry Simms was found murdered. A power company employee was working on a transformer just outside the Wichita Falls city limits. He made a horrible discovery. He came across the body of a woman and called 9-1-1 officers. The Archer County Sheriff's Department arrived at the scene in the woods and found the victim nearby. They recovered a leather jacket, a blood-stained nurse's uniform and a pair of sneakers with the laces still tied.

A search of police databases found a missing person who matched the victim. description an autopsy confirmed his identity as tony gibbs a 23 year old nurse from wichita falls reported missing by his brother a month earlier the pathologist determined that he died from stab wounds to the chest and abdomen biological evidence was collected from the body of the Victim: Archer County investigators developed several suspects and soon zeroed in on a man named Danny Wayne Rislin. He was the last person seen with Tony Gibbs. He had also been arrested on suspicion of rape in Kansas City, Missouri less than a year earlier.

Loughlin denied having Killed Tony Gibbs but three separate polygraph tests suggested deception. At the request of investigators he provided blood and hair samples for DNA testing, although the results were inconclusive the police believed they had the right man. he tried again the gibbs case remained open october 10, 1985 a maintenance worker was cutting grass along a road in wichita county in the brush he discovered the body of a woman he called the wichita county sheriff's department wichita when officers responded they found the body of a woman naked except for a child there were no clues to the identity of the victim the police searched the surroundings and found her clothes nearby they also recovered a pair of sneakers with the laces tied an autopsy was performed but advanced decomposition made it difficult to determine how the woman died.

However, based on the available evidence, the medical examiner concluded that the cause of death was undetermined homicidal violence. Wichita County sheriff's deputies determined the victim fit the description of a woman reported missing a month earlier. She was identified as Ellen Blau, 21 years old. They interviewed two suspects who had been with her the night she was last seen, but the agents did not have enough evidence to charge them after several months, the case remained unsolved while the three cases were investigated by different police agencies, all were under the jurisdiction of the Wichita County District Attorney's Office, Barry. maca had recently been elected district attorney and took office just days after the murder of terry sims the unsolved murders haunted him the absolute terror they went through in the last minutes of their lives motivated me to find the person responsible for their deaths investigators In each of the cases they had exhausted all their leads and there was nothing more Maca could do.

It would be more than a decade before there was a break in the unsolved murders. In 1996, it had been more than 11 years since the Terry murders. sims, tony gibbs and ellen blau in texas Police still had no viable suspects in any of the murders, but improved forensic procedures led the Wichita County district attorney to request a reexamination of evidence from two of the three murders. Some of the evidence was sent to Glenn Unash, a latent print examiner at The Texas Department of Public Safety's crime lab in Austin found a partial print on a sneaker recovered from the scene of Terry Sims' murder that had not been detected.

It did not belong to Terry Simms, however, there was not enough detail to do a

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analysis because blood darkens as it absorbs light. He expected more ridge features to emerge under the laser light. I was disappointed because there was one more option, a dye stain technique, but there was a risk that the dye stain technique could destroy what was there, so the print was photographed before once I got that photograph back I examined it to make sure I recorded all the features and was now ready to try the dye staining process. He saturated the print with amino black which reacts to proteins and blood and turns them dark blue or black, but the process did not develop further details.

The improvement in evidence he had hoped for eluded him over the next three years. He examined a series of suspicious prints provided by the Wichita County District Attorney's Office and compared them to the one found on Terry Sims' sneaker. I didn't identify any of the suspects they had sent me. I informed them that the print appears to be partial from the second third joint or another area of ​​the palm. They started sending me some palm prints. I made those comparisons and I still haven't done it. identify the print at the same time that DNA testing of biological samples from the Sims and Gibbs cases was being re-tested at Jean Screen in Dallas.

New PCR analysis technology could provide forensic scientist Judy Floyd with more conclusive results than previous tests. The requirements were not strict. and therefore we were able to use this very old and very degraded DNA and obtain a genetic profile of the perpetrator. The new DNA process eliminated all previous suspects, including Danny Wayne Laughlin, who had been tried for the murder of Tony Gibbs a decade earlier, but surprising evidence turned out: the biological samples recovered from both victims came from the same individual. . Emerging technology and improving forensic science had linked two seemingly unrelated cases. There was now evidence that a serial killer had claimed the lives of Terry Sims and Tony Gibbs.

Barry Maca, the district attorney, asked. If some of the other unsolved cases were related, he began to look more closely at those files. One caught his attention: that of Ellen Blau Maca, he noted that the circumstances of her murder were similar to the Sims and Gibbs homicides, right down to the laces of the still tied sneakers found by her naked body on January 12, 1999. Maca asked his investigator John Little to review the three cases and try to develop a suspect. He also gave Little a possible lead, although the victims had been discovered in three different police jurisdictions and all lived within a relatively small geographic area.

In the proximity area I felt that the person responsible for their deaths had some connection to that neighborhood, so I emphasized this to John and asked him to look through the files and see if he could find anyone with a connection to the neighborhood who might be involved in the little cases he started investigating commonalities between the women, it didn't take him long to find them, he noticed that they all shared several physical characteristics, all the victims were about the same age, more or less the same build they had. all were about five feet tall not much taller all weighed 120 pounds or less all seemed to have more or less the same characteristics a distinct pattern was emerging that suggested all three women had been murdered by the same person and then a name was found in the ellen blau introduced a man named faryon wardrip while he was being held on a murder charge in 1986, wardrip had told the police he knew blau, that didn't mean anything to the police at the time, he didn't wonder if it meant something now that he learned that wardrip had worked as an orderly. at the same hospital as Tony Gibbs and records show that he had left that job four days after the first victim, Terry Sims, was found murdered.

As investigators dug deeper, they discovered more connections between Wardrip and the three women he had lived with in a downstairs apartment at Ellen. Blau that apartment was two blocks from the residence where Terry Sims was murdered when Ellen was murdered blau wardrip no longer lived in her apartment complex she had moved to a residence across the street from the substore where she worked the authorities had He placed wardrobes in the neighborhood and established links between himself and the victims, they were a long way from proving murder, but now they felt like they were finally on the right path.

A background check confirmed that Wardrip was a convicted murderer. He had confessed to killing a Wichita Falls woman in 1986, according to records. He had fled to Galveston but turned himself in to police there during the 11 years he was imprisoned. There were no murders in Wichita Falls that were similar to those of Sims Gibbs or Blau and I felt he was a very strong suspect, but the only way to know for sure if he was responsible for these murders or not was to obtain a DNA sample although Circumstantial evidence pointed to the locker room. It was not enough to obtain a court order to force him to provide Maka DNA samples and Little decided to try to collect them surreptitiously, his plan would require surveillance.

Investigators contacted Wardrip's probation officer for information. They learned that Wardrip lived in nearby Texas, where he taught Sunday school and worked at a window screen company, according to the probation officer. Wardrip was beingelectronically controlled. They watched him and restricted him to his apartment complex unless he was at work or church. They appreciated it. Be careful and that posed problems for researchers. For three days they observed Wardrip working behind a closed metal fence. He seemed to be out of reach, but on the fourth day they had a break on February 5, 1999, the fence was open and Wardrip was outside.

He was with his wife eating crackers and drinking coffee out of a disposable cup when he threw the cup into a trash can just inside the door. It was the opportunity for them. He had been waiting as the undercover investigator approached Wardrip and asked if he could get a tobacco spit cup. Wardrip told him to help himself that any evidence obtained by investigators would be admissible in a court of law. He recovered Wardrip's cut. Investigators hoped to now have his DNA sample, but would a few drops of coffee and cookie crumbs be enough to prove murder?

More than a dozen years had passed since the murders of Terry Simms, Tony Gibbs and Ellen Blau in Wichita Falls, Texas, investigators had finally gathered physical evidence that they hoped would prove variable. The closet was the killer now it was the turn of the genetic testing lab in Dallas Judy Floyd carefully wiped the rim of the glass to collect the saliva from the closet, when she compared it to DNA samples recovered from the Sims and Gibbs murders, she was able to establish a match and there Furthermore, he discovered that Wardrip's profile was unique. He had not one but four very rare markers in his genetic profile.

His profile was so rare that one would expect it to occur only once in several thousand times the Earth's population and, indeed, we were able to say that we have established the identity of this particular individual due to the evidence involved in the Miss cases. Sims and Miss Gibbs. Investigators didn't stop. There, at the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab, Glenn Unash compared Wardrip's fingerprints to the partial print found on Terry Sims' sneaker, which matched, in addition to making a positive identification, Younash could explain much more. I can also determine how that shoe was held or when that print was found. left on that shoe and was in a direction in which the defendant was holding the shoe or was removing the shoe from the victim's foot something similar to this, which would be consistent with removing it from a victim's foot.

The patience and ingenuity of the researchers had paid off. When it came time to arrest Wardrip, they again requested the cooperation of his probation officer under the pretense of a meeting. Wardrip was summoned to the probation office on February 13, 1999 when he arrived, police arrested Ferry and Wardrip and charged him with the murder of Terry Simms based on evidence, police believe Wardrip saw Terry Simms in the door to Lisa Boone's apartment after breaking in, tied her hands behind her back, and then raped her and killed her ferry and Wardrip pleaded guilty to the capital murders of Terry Sims, Tony Gibbs, and Ellen Blau.

He was sentenced to death in the Sims case and received life sentences in each of the others. Wardrip also confessed to one additional murder in total. He had taken the lives of five young women in Texas. a serial killer's guilt was contained in a disposable coffee cup but on the west coast police would have to dig deeper for evidence of murder on november 7, 1988 in sacramento california social worker judy moyes contacted the Sacramento police about one of her clients, Bert Montoya, 52, said that Bert had disappeared from the boarding house where she had placed him. His landlady seemed unsure of his whereabouts.

Mrs. Moyes told the police that the boarding house Dorothea Puente was a shelter for homeless people, many of them with a history of alcohol and drug abuse. It seemed ideal for Bert, a street person with nowhere to go. She had her own room and television and was happy there after years of living on the streets, but after a few months Burt started saying he wanted to leave. Judy Moyes hadn't heard from Bert in three months. Mrs. Puente finally explained that Bert had left. She went to live with her brother in Utah. That didn't make sense to Judy Moyes.

She knew that Bert Montoya had no family. She asked the police to investigate the matter. The officers went to interview Dorothea Puente. She seemed like a funny, charming woman who was eager to cooperate. He said that Bert had left to live with his family in Utah, one of the boarding house residents corroborated the story. I know who he is, but as the officer was leaving, the residents passed him a note that he wanted to talk and he told the police that he had seen some strange things in the house Burt wasn't the only one who went missing another tenant Ben Fink had two and there were others but their social security checks kept coming he also described a terrible smell around the boarding house he said he had once worked in a morgue and recognized the smell of death the police officer filed a missing person report on bertmontoya to the detective John Cabrera of the Sacramento Police Department was assigned to the case the name Dorothea Puente was familiar to him she was known as a defender of the dispossessed she was well respected by everyone of her charitable things she had done for the Hispanic community there were people who visited her from other countries who came here to praise her and talk to her and she was known in the hispanic community as daktora which in spanish means doctor now detective cabrera requested a background check on dorothea Puente based on her reputation, it was not what he expected, learned that the kind grandmother was actually only 59 years old and had a criminal record for preying on elderly people;

She had previously been convicted of multiple counts of social falsification. security checks and had served four years in prison for investigators, her mom was shocked and she was receiving these checks by putting harmful drops in these individuals' drinks and of course when they passed out she took the check and signed it. Dorothea Puente's parole conditions were barred. Four days after Bert Montoya was reported missing, they met with Judy Moyes in hopes she could provide them with more information about the pension, he said. That most of the residents were poor, forgotten elderly who existed on the fringes of society, but Dorothea Puente always had a place for them and had a reputation for treating the tenants like family.

Moyes stated that several other social workers began to notice that His clients sometimes disappeared from the house, never to be seen again. Bert Montoya was the most recent. Perhaps some of the tenants had simply moved away or family members had decided to take care of them. Investigators decided to find out later that morning. Police met with Dorothea Puente although they did not have a warrant she kindly gave them permission to search one of the upstairs rooms, the police found prescription drugs, a sedative in the name of dorothy miller, she was a relative, Mrs. Puente told them that she belonged to a relative who had been staying with her for a while, the investigators asked if they could investigate in her backyard.

Mrs. Bridge not only gave them permission, but offered to take people to dig for them, which didn't seem like the right thing to do. action of a person with something to hide, the investigators rejected his offer and began digging themselves after finding nothing in three holes they began to make. They thought they were wasting their time, but in the room they found corrosive lime, which is often used to mask odors and accelerate decomposition. They decided to continue digging. To their surprise, they discovered what appeared to be a human leg bone in a nursing home run by 59. year-old dorothea Puente Sacramento, police discovered human remains, we need to obtain forensic evidence here, the owner's office of the car and a crime scene unit were sent to the scene source agreed to accompany the police to the station to make a statement, she was very cooperative and seemed genuinely surprised. that bones were found in her yard, she said she had been living there for a little over a year, perhaps the previous owner could explain the bones, but Puente's criminal past could not be ignored.

The police asked her directly if she had killed her missing tenant. One-year-old Bert Montoya Dorothea Puente calmly denied it since there was no evidence of any crime. Investigators took Mrs. Puente to her home the next morning. The search at the guesthouse continued as more police and excavation teams arrived. Onlookers and journalists began to gather outside the house. 9 45 Mrs. Puente asked if she could go to the coffee shop on the corner, since she had been very cooperative and the detectives had no evidence of her involvement in any foul play. She was let go 15 minutes later, at 10 a.m. m., forensic technicians discovered a second body wrapped in a tarp buried under a slab of cement.

The condition of the tarp indicated that this body had not been underground for long. A police officer was sent to pick up Dorothea Puente in the cafeteria she wasn't there we sent people there To find out who had seen her, if anyone had talked to her, what was going on, they went there and made sure she had gotten in a taxi and left Sacramento. Police tracked the taxi and learned that it had taken her to Stockton. bus station 50 miles away they learned that she boarded a bus to Los Angeles without knowing where she was going. Investigators launched a nationwide search for Dorothea Puente.

She was now wanted on suspicion of murder at the boarding house. Authorities continued to investigate the search for a missing person. Bert Montoya had unearthed the human remains of one victim and a second buried corpse. Aware of claims that several residents had disappeared, the police feared that Mrs. Puente's patio could hide more unpleasant secrets. The second body had been discovered under a slab of cement that seemed out of place they now realized that several more sheds, slabs and planters were situated strangely, they soon discovered the reason why laura santos, sacramento county deputy coroner, supervised the search under each of these things that seemed strange, like the sink, there was a body under the badly poured piece of concrete there.

There was a body next to the shed that seemed hastily assembled There was a body After three days The excavation finally came to an end Seven bodies had been discovered in Dorothea Puente's yard The police were dealing with a mass murderer It seemed impossible that seven people They could have been buried right under the neighbor's nose without anyone seeing anything. Waiting for information or witnesses. Detectives began interviewing Mrs. Pointe's neighbors. It was difficult to find anyone with anything negative to say about her. It was like fighting an uphill battle. above the community in the first place did not want to accept the fact that this little gray-haired woman who was loved so much and who had given so much to the community was responsible for this horrific task of putting these people in the yard while investigators went around the neighborhood in the grim task of identifying the seven victims.

Three men and four women were on the march at the Sacramento coroner's office. All the bodies were x-rayed and then forensic pathologists performed autopsies on them. The coroner started with the victim who most closely matched Bert Montoya's description. He began by carefully removing the layers of wrapping and documenting each of the The body, like many of the others, was wrapped in a characteristic manner that suggested a methodical but twisted mind. Sheets wrapped with tape, then quilts were sewn, blankets, then more sheets, more tarps. I remember there were blue tarps in a couple of boxes and then in each one.

The cape would be secured somehow with twine or tape or, in fact, sewn with thread and then the entire package, perhaps held together with tape, the wrappings concealing advanced decomposition that made it impossible to establish a cause of death for anyone. of the victims, except due to circumstances. all were declared homicides, the condition of the bodies also prevented pathologists from immediately identifying any of the victims, as Dr. Santos explains, most people are identified by fingerprints, first by dental records and then by other media. Four of the seven bodies were too decomposed to be identified. Decent fingerprints on none of them had teeth, so the usual methods by which we make an identification couldn't be used.

Tissue samples were sent toforensic laboratories for further analysis to assist in identification efforts. Investigators attempted to locate the people who had disappeared from the boarding house. They found Ben Fink's brother, 55, one of the tenants believed missing, but he told police he hadn't heard from Ben in three months. Investigators feared they had already found Ben Fink to build his murder case against 59-year-old Dorothea. Puente police needed physical evidence linking her to the victim's death. Investigators searched the rooming house again and found duct tape and a coffee can with the word lie written underneath. Police found dozens of bottles of the primary sedative prescribed for dolls that did not appear unusual. in a boarding house full of elderly people, but investigators noted that the doll's name, although prescribed by several different doctors, was in the name of Dorothy Puente.

When details of the investigation became public, police began hearing from witnesses who They helped them reconstruct an account of Dorothy Apuente's daily routine. It seemed that she had a penchant for gardening before dawn and she would get very angry if she was interrupted. They also learned that she insisted on personally collecting the mail every day, especially at the end of the month, she was always there to receive the mail because, of course, the mail. she had the checks and she would accept the checks and maintain control of all the money. Investigators found that no one had questioned that control, since most of the boarding house's residents had problems with drugs or alcohol, it seemed a logical way to prevent them from falling back into their old habits.

Police believe that by persuading residents to sign their monthly checks to Mrs. Puente, she would ensure that the money would continue to come even after the tenants disappeared; In fact, she received 10 to 12 federal aid checks each month, some for people who hadn't received it. Lived at the boarding house for years Police believed money was the motive for the murder, but they still needed to find the suspect Despite the manhunt Dorothea Puente was still on the run on November 16, less than a week after she fled, the Investigators received a tip that Dorothea Puente was In a Los Angeles motel, an elderly man called the police when he saw her photo on television.

He had recognized her as the woman who had struck up a conversation about her social security benefits. She wanted to know things like "Do you know how much she makes?" getting and was taking, you know a benefit, the full benefit of receiving the money and of course you know that he was curious, but she had told him that she knew how to raise her allocation of money, even as a fugitive she couldn't resist the opportunity to collect. In her greed it had finally caught up with Dorothea Puente. She was finally in custody, although they believed they knew her motive for the murders.

The police had no physical evidence linking her to them. Additionally, the victim's identities were still unknown. A latent print examiner was brought in. He compared known samples with fingerprints from three of the bodies, confirmed that one of the victims was Bert Montoya, he would soon also identify Ben Fink and Dorothy Miller, science had deceived Dorothea Puente, but there were four victims left without names, the Police had compiled a list of 60 people who had received social security checks at Dorothy Apuente's pension. They tried to track down all the names on that list. They found that most of the people were still alive.

They had moved out of the house for a variety of reasons. , but some were still missing. They then gathered the medical records of each missing person, the files were sent to the Sacramento coroner's office, there the forensic pathologists began the painstaking task of comparing the x-rays of each body found in the yard with medical records of each one of the missing people looked for distinctive characteristics in the records that could be linked to each victim, we found anomalies in the bodies, abnormalities such as one person had had skull surgery and had evidence that they had a craniotomy and another person had irregular characteristics of one of his collarbones and he had also had some lower jaw fractures in the past and using that information from the bodies we were able to begin to make comparisons with the medical records that we had obtained from this list that social security had provided to us they had finally identified all of them. victims, but police were still missing a crucial piece of the puzzle of how they died Until that question could be answered authorities would find it difficult to prove murder they hoped a forensic toxicologist could give them answers in November 1988, police who investigating the murders of seven people in a Sacramento boarding house had the help of toxicologist William Phillips of the California Department of Justice, without an obvious cause of death, they hoped he could determine if drugs or poisons had ended the lives of the victims.

She began by analyzing tissue samples from the seven victims with a radioamino acid or ria test that is sensitive to classes of drugs. The test results showed that all samples contained the sedative fluorescepan, which is widely used in dalmato, the drug found in Dorothea Puente's boarding house. a powerful sedative often prescribed for the elderly was the first physical evidence linking Puente to the deaths of the seven victims. Phillips then subjected the samples to the tandem mass spectrometer, the only one on the West Coast at the time; the device uses negative ion detection to find the characteristic profile or fingerprint of individual drugs, as well as detecting the presence of fluorazepam or dalmaine.

In each sample, he also measured the concentration of the drug, but because the bodies had been underground for different periods of time, those concentrations did not necessarily reflect the levels present at the time of death. Some of the drug could have leached into the body. So the domain of the drug was present in all the samples, but the concentrations were so varied that no one could say whether or not the drug caused their death, but I was able to link all the samples all the tissues the brain the liver tissues from all of these Victims of Dorothea Puente Investigators believe they had enough evidence to charge Dorothea Puente with the murder of her seven tenants based on evidence that police believe she would charm the residents into giving her control of their money if they were Reluctant, the He would invite them into his private rooms and give them a drink laced with drugs, then methodically wrap the bodies and hire men to dig holes in his backyard.

During her pre-dawn gardening chores, the 59-year-old woman managed to bury her. victims on August 15, 1993 Dorothea Puente was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder the jury was unable to reach verdicts on the other four counts she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Serial killers are methodical and skilled at covering their tracks to continue killing, but even the most intelligent predators cannot avoid detection for long. Today, forensic scientists using sophisticated technology are helping police arrest deadly criminals intent on killing you again.