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Hi cold case listeners. I'm Marissa Pinson and if you're enjoying this show, I just want to remind you that episodes of Cold Case Files as well as the A and E classic podcasts, I Survived, American justice and City Confidential are all available ad free on the new A and E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple plus for just $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. And now onto the show. This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners listening to Listener discretion is advised. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's April 16, 1992. Ron Horowitz is a crime scene investigator for the city of Houston.
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I was in the homicide office when the call came down that there was a DOA behind a Dairy Queen on Westview. The young lady's body was laying approximately right here.
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On a spring morning, he responds to a murder call.
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Her panties are dropped, pulled down to her knees.
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The victim lies in the drive through lane of the local Dairy Queen.
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And she had this little rope tied around her neck with a piece of, I believe, dowel or wood.
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Horowitz documents the scene on film, then turns his attention to physical evidence. Investigators recover semen from the young woman's mouth and scrapings from under her fingernails and begin with a simple who is the victim? One hour later, at 11am 23 year old Rosa Agreda turns on a local news broadcast. The lead story is about the woman found dead at the Dairy Queen. Rosa spots something familiar about the victim whose feet are peeking out of the sheet that covers her.
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I looked at the TV and the only thing I could see was her shoes.
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Rosa recognizes the white and gold shoes as identical to ones owned by her friend Maria del Carmen Estrada. Maria was supposed to meet at Rosa's house earlier that morning but never showed up. Now Rosa sees the shoes and wonders.
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I said no, it's not her, it's not her. She gotta do. She's probably doing something else and she forgot to tell me.
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Rosa gets in the car and searches for her friend.
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First place that I started looking for her was right here, this place. That was the store. I came in there and I said, well, she probably went to the store to buy something. This is the street that she walked.
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After 10 hours of searching, Rosa comes up empty. And at 10 o' clock she approaches a detective at the crime scene.
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He showed me some pictures. I just started crying a lot and saying it's not her. It's not her. Then he asked me again because I was saying that, are you sure it is her? And I told him it is her.
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Rosa Agreda identifies the body of her best friend, Maria Estrada. Houston Homicide investigates, questioning the victim's boyfriend, who has a solid alibi. Next, they turn to a list of known sex offenders, eliminating each in turn. Six months after her body was discovered, Maria Estrada's murder remains unsolved and her evidence is shifted to permanent storage among the cold files.
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I got called at 12:48am I was at home in bed, asleep.
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Two years later, on August 8, 1994, a call comes into the Houston Police Department. The body of a young girl has been found in an empty parking lot on the city's near north side. Bob King is a homicide detective.
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It looked like her body had been carried and then laid on its right side. All she had on was the T shirt she had been wearing when she left her house. It was a Halloween T shirt with a black cat and a pumpkin and a bat.
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The nine year old is IDed as Diana Reboyar. Twelve hours earlier, she had left home on a walk to the grocery store to buy some sugar for her mother, Virginia.
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And so Diana walked from her duplex northbound along North Main here to the Wing Fong Market. And people saw her as she went along her way. She bought the bag of sugar and she was on her way back. A man sitting on his porch saw her pass in front of him. Another man stopped and said, go home, mijita. And she said she was.
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Diana was two blocks from her home when she simply vanished. The child has been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
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The ligature was peculiar in that it was a tourniquet, a nylon cord which turned out to be parachute cord tightened with a bamboo stick.
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King believes the tourniquet could be a signature unique to this killer. He shares photographs of the Reboillard crime scene with other detectives.
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Sergeant Rick Maxey said, well, whoever killed Rebiar killed Estrada. And I said, who's Estrada? And he said, well, we call her the Dairy Queen girl. She was murdered in April of 1992.
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King pulls the cold file on the Estrada case. And the more he reads, the more similarities he finds between the murders of Diana Reboyar and Maria Estrada.
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Both had been strangled. The same peculiar tourniquet style ligature. They were both Hispanic, they were both small in stature and young. Diana Revillar was 9. Maria Estrada was 21, but she was very small.
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King orders forensic testing on the Rebuillar case. But there is no useful evidence. Semen from the Estrada case, however, provides a limited DNA profile.
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We brought in many potential suspects who provided samples of their blood, their hair, their saliva for us to compare to the DNA in the Estrada case. But none of them ever managed.
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After a year long investigation, Detective King has come up with no viable suspect.
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This kind of case can take a heavy toll on you. And if you don't find him, it's going to keep on and more girls are going to die. So it becomes a life and death matter. It would be the first thing I thought about when I got up in the morning. The last thing I thought about when I went to sleep at night and all hours during the day.
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The two murders would continue to haunt King until one day in 1995 when a phone rings in a newsroom. And at the other end of the line is a serial killer.
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And then I asked him, I said, I am talking to the killer.
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And he hung up. Barbara Magunya works the assignment desk at KPRC in Houston. Among her duties is handling calls on the station's tip line.
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I said, this is the tip line. He said, I have a tip for you. I said, what would that be? And he said, there's a serial killer on the loose. I said, okay, well, how can you know? How can you prove this? He said, I'm going to prove it to you. I'm going to tell you where you can find a body.
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The caller directs Magunya to a vacant field just beyond the city limits where he claims police will find a woman's body.
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I had asked him specifically, point blank. I said, I'm talking to the killer. He didn't answer. He just kind of like. It was almost like a breath, almost like a sigh, almost like a relief sigh.
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And then I asked him, I said.
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I am talking to the killer.
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And he hung up.
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There was nothing here. It was vacant. Weeds were approximately knee high or better. And we started back in this area searching and didn't find anything.
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Roger Wedgeworth is a homicide detective with Harris County. Acting on Magunya's tip, he searches the field hoping the whole thing is a hoax.
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So we went to the northwest part of this vacant area and as we were walking down, smelled a foul odor which we recognized to be decomposing flesh. And we followed that smell up to this area. Right in here.
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Bedded down in the grass, is the severely decomposed body of a woman. Around her neck is a rope tightly bound with a toothbrush. The makeshift tourniquet warrants a call to Houston Homicide and Detective Bob King.
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We had made the detectives with the Harris County Homicide Division aware of our cases that we were looking for any murders involving maybe a Hispanic victim who has been strangled with a tourniquet.
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Detective King has worked two similar cases. The 1992 murder of Maria Estrada and the 94 murder of Diana Reboyar. The latest victim is 16 and ID'd as a local girl, Dana Sanchez.
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These girls are all strangled. They're all strangled with a tourniquet style ligature. They're all young, 9, 16, 21 years old. They're all very small in stature. They all have long hair, which we considered a factor for control. The conclusion was these three cases are linked up. So once that decision had been made, then the management decided to look. We need to pool our resources and work the cases together.
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Sergeant Danny Billingsley leads a task force of city and county investigators, including in the hunt for the tourniquet killer.
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Well, you know, there was no doubt in our mind this guy was going to hit again. And we were just waiting for that to happen. I mean, our biggest fear was before we could get up on him, he was going to kill another woman. For the suspects, that looked really pretty good. Myself and other detectives would go out, find him, try to get his cooperation. The sex offenders that lived in the area, all those sort of things were run out and checked.
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The investigators on the case have more than 50 years combined field experience. After six months, however, they have nothing to show for their efforts. With newer crimes on the rise, the task force is disbanded and the murders of three young girls are returned to the cold files. In 2002, seven years after their work on the task force, detectives Harry Faqueris and Roger Wedgworth are still tracking killers and haven't forgotten about the one who likes to use a tourniquet.
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You won't ever forget about a homicide that you've worked on, but especially this case, because you know that there's a serial killer that was responsible for these people. So it's always there and you're always wondering, well, when is he going to strike again?
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Now, working in Harris County's cold case unit, Faqueris and Wedgeworth begin with the murder of 16 year old Dana Sanchez.
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When her body was found, she was not clothed, and the only thing that was on her person was a ligature around her neck and a toothbrush that was used to tighten up that ligature. It was just one of those shots, you know, in the dark, hoping that we could get something out of that.
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Harris County Sends the ligature to Orchid Cellmark laboratories for DNA testing.
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That was the only evidence that we had that we could process at all. And then, of course, whenever we sent it off, we found out everything was too degraded. But then again, we knew that the city had some cases, so we started talking to them about processing some of their evidence. With the new technology, Detective Bob King.
- [12:39]
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Pulls material from the other two tourniquet cases out of Houston's evidence locker.
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Now, the Harris county homicide detectives on the cold case squad said, we exclusively use Orchid cell Mark to test our evidence. And there is an analyst up there named Katherine Long who is just great. And she can find this evidence. If there is DNA to be had, she will find it, dude. Once we open the fingernails, place them in a tube and pour or place liquid on top of them.
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In September of 2003, DNA analyst Catherine Long receives evidence from the Houston homicides. Long begins her testing on fingernail clippings from Maria Estrada.
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Once we get the debris off of the fingernail, basically what we're doing is just opening up the cells and taking the DNA out, purifying it.
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Long identifies an unknown male DNA profile from underneath Maria's fingernails. Most likely skin from her attacker.
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When we finally got something that was male, especially under her fingernails, that's a pretty intimate sample, and it was a good feeling.
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Long sends the profile through codis, a national database of DNA profiles taken. Taken from criminal offenders. An hour later, she gets a call. CODIS has a hit.
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The DNA profile actually matched somebody who was in the CODIS database, and that was Tony Shore. I know with this profile, it, you know, I just feel in my heart that it's going to be a conviction. At that point.
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The new suspect is 41 years old with a criminal history that includes molesting his. His two daughters. The more Detective Wedgeworth hears, the better the chances for a conviction.
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Oh, I think somebody's going to jail. That's exactly what I think.
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Well, I was just on patrol and a homicide sergeant in an unmarked unit got on the radio and asked for backup.
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On October 24, 2003, less than two hours into his shift, Houston police officer Robert Farmer responds to a call for assistance on an arrest.
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He just told me the man standing down the street wearing a black T shirt is wanted for murder. Let's go get him.
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The suspect is a convicted sex offender named Anthony Allen Shore. He has been linked by DNA to one murder and by MO to two others. Police approach Shore at the wrecker yard where he works and tells him he's under arrest.
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I told him to put his hands behind his back to handcuff him, and I noticed he had A cigarette in his hand. I told him to drop it and he wouldn't drop it. So I cracked him on the knuckles with a flashlight to knock the cigarette out of his hand. And after that there was no further resistance. He was sitting in a chair against the wall. Calm, cool collective, so to speak.
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Houston homicide Sergeant John Swaim is known as a master interrogator and is brought in to talk to Anthony Shore. The interview takes place in a 10 by 12 foot room.
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So I showed him the scene photos, basically all of them, all of the scene photos in the Estrada case. I was looking at him to see what his reaction was to the photos, whether he was going to have a reaction to the photos, which he did not, which concerned me, which, you know, I'm thinking, well, you know, it's going to be a long night.
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For over an hour, Swaim questions Shore about Maria Estrada, under whose fingernails Shore's DNA was discovered about 9 year old Diana Reboyar and about 16 year old Dana Sanchez, both of whom were also raped and strangled. For over an hour, Shore offers nothing. Then, close to midnight and for no apparent reason, Anthony Schorr decides to talk.
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He puts his hand on the photos of the three cases we knew he did and he says, John, I'm going to tell you about these cases and I'm going to give you a couple of bonuses. What do you think about that? And of course I think that's great, that's wonderful. And he's kind of looking down the floor and then he looks up, looks right in my eyes and says, does the name Laura Tremblay mean anything to you, John?
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The name means a lot to Detective Swaim. In 1986 he was the lead investigator on the Laura Tremblay case. A 15 year old girl who was raped and strangled to death. It was a case Swaim could never solve.
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You could have probably hit me with a feather and knocked me over because, you know, this was another case that I had worked on for many months, you know, and never had a clue who did it. Let's start with, at the start and just tell me. First was Lori Ann Tremblay. And he's kind of got this little gleam in his eye like he knew that I investigated the case. I undid her bra, Everything got out of hand. She freaked out and we got into a fight. I tried to knock her out because I, I just really freaked out. It's not right. Took this cotton cord and I tried to make sure that she would never ever tell anybody. And I strangled Her. And the cotton cord broke more than once. It wasn't working. That's all I had. Did you just use your hands, or do you use some kind of. This is a cord. Look at your. Yeah, no, but I mean, did you use them? Yeah, my hands.
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I.
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Their finger. My fingers up. Well, it was my first one. He said, actually, I put my hand in there and twisted it. And when I did, I injured my finger. And so I decided I better start doing something else. And so that's basically why he used the tourniquet.
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Later on, after confessing to the murder of Laura Tremblay, Shore moves on to another victim. Police have never connected to him.
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Talk about another case that y' all don't know about. Okay. That there's a reason I want to talk about this.
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Okay.
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I said, well, Tony, what's important about him? Why do you want to tell me about this? He says, well, I didn't kill her. I fought off the evilness, and I was able to do so, and I didn't kill her. So it's important to me. Got her cooperation and tied her up with electrical cord and raped her. I thought that I was gonna do this again, but I promised myself that I wasn't gonna take any more lives, no matter what. Sick and up as it sounds, I really, really, really was trying to get better in a really sick, demented way. I don't discount it. I'm not stupid. But I was trying not to do what I promised myself I wasn't going to do.
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Shore provides the name of his victim. 14 years old at the time of the attack, and says that it occurred in 1993, a year after he killed Maria Estrada. Shore admits that he didn't stop there, going on to kill Diana Rebilyar. And finally, Dana Sanchez.
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I was driving around. I saw this girl. She had this look that she was angry and obsessed, and she was at a pay phone. He sees her on the phone. She hangs up. He can tell she's trouble, something's wrong. Trying to get to my boyfriend's house, jump right in. And we went driving. I started flirting with her and petting on her. She was joking like, no, no, no. I got a boyfriend this and that. So I grabbed her, pulled her into the back of the van. She was fighting so hard, and I didn't want it to happen. And once again, I knew that I couldn't stop. I knew there was nothing I could do to get out of this, and I used a ligature.
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Eight days after killing Dana Sanchez, Shore says he called the anonymous tip line at local 2 news and told them where her body could be found. With five confessions on tape, Shore claims he has told all there is to tell.
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He told me, John, I told you I gave you 100%. I told you what I did, and that's all I did. And I'm giving you 100%. Anthony Shore is a psychopath. He had for years permitted himself the pleasure of indulging in those psychopathic desires.
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And it was time to put an end to it. Prosecutor Therese Boust decides to charge Anthony Shore only on the case with the strongest DNA evidence, the case of Maria del Carmen Estrada. On October 21, 2004, a jury finds Shore guilty of capital murder in the penalty phase. Boos seeks a death sentence and brings before the jury all the other victims to clinch her argument.
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They had no idea that they were.
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Going to be hearing about a serial killer. Boos strategy works. After less than an hour of deliberation, the jury sentences Anthony Shore to.
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It's like, finally you're seeing some justice, you know, finally. And justice has been served with him. He's on death row and that's where he belongs.
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Despite the conviction and Shore's confession tapes, investigators are not convinced they have it all and believe there might be more victims in Shore's past.
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If you've got a female strangled ligature, you got evidence. Check it against Shore. That's all I can tell you. The plan is that after he has been on death row for a while and he's forgotten and lonely, that maybe that he'll want to talk to us and open up about any other crimes he might have committed.
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Anthony Shore was executed by lethal injection on January 18, 2004. 18. Ben Grassmuk is an officer for the California highway patrol. On January 4, 1997, just before midnight, Grassmuk sweeps his beat a quiet stretch along Highway 99 in Madera County.
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We're on State Route 99 and we're in the area where Fresno county and Madera county meet. And when we're still on the freeway, I happened to glance over there and I saw a fire.
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Grassmuk follows the flames into a nearby olive orchard, where he discovers a body.
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The torso was on fire and I could see her. I'll never forget her two legs sticking up out of the fire towards me. I immediately knew it was a woman and I immediately knew she'd been murdered. It appeared that she was relatively young.
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Detective Kathy Starr responds to the scene.
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There was extensive burning to the body. The victim was lying on her back. Her legs were up and open. There aren't any homes in this area. It's not a widely traveled road here. So to come in here, dump a body, set the fire. Very unlikely that you're going to be noticed.
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Starr combs the orchard for clues and happens upon some footprints in the dirt.
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There were two sets of footprints. One appeared to have been wearing socks. The other was clearly a bare footprint.
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The prints and nearby tire tracks are photographed. Meanwhile, at the morgue, the pathologist determines the victim was shot twice in the head.
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This would be the first gunshot wound that exited here. This was the second gunshot wound where the.25 caliber bullet was recovered.
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Star believes the victim was shot dead and then set on fire in an effort to cover up the crime. Next, Star sets out to ID the victim.
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If we didn't know who the victim was, we weren't going to find out who the suspect was.
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Starr puts out an APB on her Jane Doe and then waits.
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There are a lot of missing persons cases. It's Fourth of July weekend, so we were real uncertain as to how soon we were going to be able to identify this victim. I know, like, I started to feel.
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Like something is wrong. Ruth Pimentel has an uneasy feeling. Her best friend, Andrea Bourne, is missing. Annie called me at seven and said she was on my way to my house, our house, and she was with Jay and she never came home. And I think Jay's done something to her. Jay is JL Travis, Andrea's boyfriend and the last known person to see her alive. I knew his history like I knew he was in jail.
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You know, I knew that he had.
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Guns and that he held them to Annie's head in the past and that she had told me that. So I really, I really thought that something was wrong and I told that to the police. Fresno police take down the missing persons report and compare the details to Starr's bulletin about the burning body.
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They have here is a white female adult in her twenties, five, nine, blue eyes, blonde hair, and that matched the information that we had taken so far in our Jane Doe.
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Dental records confirm the body to be that of Andrea Bourne.
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B
You just kind of like your mind can wrap around this and say, okay, this is what happened to my beautiful, happy, sweet daughter.
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Gloria Barnes is Andrea's mother. On July 9, Detective Star tells her that her daughter is dead.
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She said, well, we have made a positive identification on the body, and I'm really sorry to tell you that it is your daughter. Annie and I just started to cry. They said, well, her body was burned beyond recognition and I just totally lost it.
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As Gloria deals with the loss of her daughter, Kathy Starr turns her attention to Andrea's boyfriend, J.L. travis.
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B
Okay, the date is July 6th. My name is Detective Kathy Starr.
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In a small interview room, JL Travis tells detectives he he had nothing to do with Annie's disappearance, insisting he took her to a pool party on the 4th of July, then dropped her safely at home. Detective Terry Ginder assists in the interrogation.
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So I kissed her, and she got out of the car, and she shut the door. After that, she started walking to her door. She opened the door up, and I drove off. He was avoiding eye contact. His body language suggested that he was not wanting to open up and be truthful with us. It was very hard to believe him because he wasn't consistent. Even when he was trying to act as though he was grieving for his lost girlfriend. It was so transparent, it was almost laughable how little he cared.
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Detectives Starr and Ginder questioned JL for hours, probing his story and searching for a motive. Eventually, Jael tells detectives that just weeks earlier, Annie had met someone new.
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You had become aware of Annie's involvement with another person. Can you tell me about that? I had paged her because I put I love you in her pager. Then she paged me back and she told me, don't pager no more because she have a new boyfriend and he don't appreciate me paging her. And I said, oh, I didn't know you had a boyfriend. Jealousy. I think the victim was going to leave jail, and I think he was having a hard time coping with that. Jealousy make makes people do some strange things.
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But detectives will need more than a theory to arrest JL Travis. Starr then asks to look at JL's feet.
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B
I was looking for anything on his feet that would be consistent with walking out in that orchard. As you can see, we have abrasions in his feet and small puncture wounds, which could very well have been made by the debris in that field.
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Along with the abrasions, the size and shape of Travis's feet match the bare footprints found in the orchard.
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There were similarities? Yes. The shape of the toes, the way the toes overlapped here and here. The size of the big toe.
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With the evidentiary trail heating up, Starr decides she wants to examine Travis's car.
- [32:15]
B
We compared the tire tracks, and they didn't match in size or tire impression to what we had at the crime scene. There was no blood, even on the windshield. It was negative for blood.
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Detectives have an intriguing circumstantial case. But not enough for an arrest. After more than 12 hours of questioning, Star releases JL Travis.
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We knew we had our guy, and now it was just building the case so that we had enough evidence that we could convince the jury of that. We continually were trapping him in lies and inconsistent inconsistencies. He was just not trustworthy.
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JL Travis has talked at length about the day that Andrea Bourne was killed. Now Starr takes his statements and tries to find any holes in his story.
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He had mentioned to me that after leaving the pool party and driving Annie home, his cousin Kevin Mitchell was with him. So we went looking for Kevin Mitchell.
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Mitchell repeats the same story J.L. travis told, except for one small detail.
- [33:21]
B
He was the one that initially told us that they were in Traci Devares car. Traci is JL's other girlfriend. He has two children with her. There was no reason to not think that she had been murdered in that car. Even if she had been transported in that vehicle, there would have been trace evidence that would have been left.
- [33:41]
A
Starr pays Tracy a visit and asks to see her car.
- [33:45]
B
Her story is, well, I'm sorry my car was stolen. How convenient that her car is stolen three days after Annie's homicide and that she forgot to mention to us the fact that she had loaned that car to jail that night.
- [34:00]
A
Detectives don't believe Tracey Tavares any more than they believed her boyfriend. Starr sees Tavares as a jealous and perhaps a violent girlfriend.
- [34:10]
B
She wanted Annie out of the way, and we felt that she had the influence over jl that she could make that happen. I think we tried every tact we could take with her to try to get her to fess up, to crack. She was, I felt, very much gonna stand by JL no matter what. Yeah.
- [34:30]
A
Detectives believe the best way to crack Tracy is to find her car. Within weeks. The vehicles recovered in the garage at Kevin Mitchell's mom's house.
- [34:41]
B
We're thinking, we've got our car. We're going to find the trace evidence in this car. When we searched the car, this car was pristine. It was cleaner than anything you would get off a showroom floor.
- [34:53]
A
Tracy Tavares car yields no connections to the murder. And after three months, Star gets pulled off the case and onto more recent homicides.
- [35:03]
B
It was very difficult to let go. Yeah. Especially being so close. Being so close and having to let go of it.
- [35:10]
A
Andrea Bourne's murder falls into the cold files where it will stay for three years until J.L. travis cousin Kevin Mitchell resurfaces.
- [35:21]
B
We were just driving and I heard Jay, you know, and that's when he shot her. Foreign.
- [35:32]
A
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- [38:18]
B
Every case deserves attention. This one cried for attention.
- [38:22]
A
Vince Zavala is a one man team working the oldest and toughest cases in the cold files.
- [38:29]
B
Well, whenever fresh eyes look at a case, they may see something that the original investigator didn't see.
- [38:36]
A
In 1999, Zavala picks up the unsolved murder of Andrea Boy and digs in.
- [38:42]
B
The Madera County Sheriff's Department had focused on three individuals. Jacob Lee Travis, Kevin Mitchell and Tracy Devarez. When I reviewed the case filed from the Madera County Sheriff's Department, naturally those three people jumped out at me as being primary suspects.
- [39:00]
A
In 1997, the three were caught in a web of lies.
- [39:04]
B
Travis and Tavares had been interviewed on five different occasions and given five, five different stories. Kevin Mitchell had been interviewed once and gave a completely different story.
- [39:15]
A
Zavala begins the process of re examining evidence and tracking down leads. Two months later he gets his first break.
- [39:23]
B
I later discovered by interviewing several people that Jacob Lee Travis by his own admission did in fact possess a.25 caliber handgun. So he had the same type of weapon that was used to murder Andrea Bourne in his possession less than 24 hours before she was murdered. This began to put the wheels in motion.
- [39:47]
A
Next, Zavala turns to Tracy Tavares car. Tavares claimed it was stolen just days after the murder. Police at the time believed the theft report to be made up. A set of prints la from the vehicle however, provides Zavala with an opportunity.
- [40:04]
B
The prints were recovered during the initial investigation, but they were never compared to anyone. So we compared them to Kevin Mitchell.
- [40:11]
A
The prints belonged to Kevin Mitchell, putting him in line for a potential charge of grand theft auto unless Mitchell is willing to talk.
- [40:21]
B
And they were like well you're wanting for grand theft auto. And I'm thinking oh my God. I just start calling, crying. And I was just told him look, I'm going to tell you guys the truth. We look for the truth. Kevin, of his own free will that wants to explain the truth as he knows it. Am I correct Kevin?
- [40:38]
A
On March 15, 2001, Kevin Mitchell sits down with cold case detectives and begins to talk.
- [40:45]
B
He was very willing to talk, in my opinion. On one hand, he was relieved to get it off his chest. And of course, on the other hand, he felt if he was truthful and cooperated with us, perhaps the arm of justice wouldn't hit him as hard.
- [41:03]
A
Mitchell tells Zavala on July 4, 1997, he went to a pool party and then caught a ride home with Andrea Bourne and J.L. travis.
- [41:14]
B
They were always talking. I mean, I couldn't hear them because the music was up loud and they're in the front. And could you see if it was a normal conversation? You know, I mean, it didn't seem like they were arguing or anything.
- [41:27]
A
According to Mitchell, the conversation between Andrea Bourne and J.L. travis appeared to be normal until J.L. pulled a gun.
- [41:36]
B
It was. It was all. It was like within a split second, he won. When he had got the gun and it was close to her head, she tried to move his hand and she, like, screamed, jay. And then it was too late. I can't stop him. That was basically the defining moment in the investigation. This pretty much is the last nail. We have a strong circumstantial case. Nice. Now we have a witness to the murder of Andrea Bourne. I'm just basically like, I don't know what to do right now. You know, I was pretty scared. And he shoots her again. I was just sitting in the car, and she was still alive at the time. And, you know, she had this very, very distinctive, like, breathing going on. I couldn't do anything to save her life. I couldn't do anything. I wanted to, but I couldn't because I was scared for my life.
- [42:38]
A
As Andrea Bourne lay dying in the front seat, Mitchell says Jael drove to the olive orchard.
- [42:44]
B
He laid her down and he poured gas around her and then on her and then set it on fire. And we left. He had this, like, this look in his eyes. I won't forget that look. It's just like the stare that you stare down a victim, and if you say anything, you could be one, too.
- [43:04]
A
Four days later, Mitchell says JL And Tracy Tavares were back asking for a favor.
- [43:10]
B
They called me over and they said, kevin, I want you to get rid of the car. They said, don't worry about nothing. You know, the insurance to take care of it. You said at some point, Tracy gave you the key. Yeah, she took her key off her key ring and gave me her key. That. That was an important statement because we knew that Andrea Bourne had been murdered in Tracy Devares vehicle. Now Tracy Devares, Jacob Lee Travis and Kevin Mitchell have made plans to dispose of the vehicle in an attempt to.
- [43:46]
A
Hinder Mitchell tells Zavala he hid the car at his mom's house and then left town. After two years of legwork, Zavala believes his case is made. He has an eyewitness to the murder. And finally an arrest warrant in hand for J.L. travis.
- [44:04]
B
I didn't find it unusual that he was still with Traci Devarez. In my opinion, he felt safe that he was never going to be arrested for the murder of Andrea Bourne. They were living out in rural Fresno county on a piece of property owned by Tracy Devares family.
- [44:21]
A
On March 20, Detective Zavala brings Travis to the Madera County Sheriff's Office and charges him with murder.
- [44:28]
B
He was shocked initially, initially when I interviewed him he was very remorseful and at that point I thought he may confess. And then he then snapped out of it and denied any involvement.
- [44:44]
A
J.L. travis is sent to jail to await trial. Meanwhile, Zavala turns to the woman he believes to be his accomplice, Tracy Tavares.
- [44:54]
B
Worst case scenario, I think she was involved. Least case scenario, she knew what happened and she was not truthful with law enforcement.
- [45:01]
A
Zavala books Tavares on insurance fraud for falsely reporting her car stolen. But she takes a plea and will serve no time.
- [45:10]
B
It's frustrating, but we can only do the best we can with what we have.
- [45:15]
A
Kevin Mitchell is never charged with a crime. J.L. travis, however, does not get off so easy. On February 20, 2003, he pleads guilty to a charge of second degree murder and receives 15 years to life.
- [45:30]
B
He wanted the best of all worlds. He wanted this young, beautiful, intelligent woman, Andrea Bourne. He wanted the mother of his children, Tracy Devares. He wanted his cake and he wanted to eat it too. I think he realized that he was losing her and rather than if he couldn't have her, no one was going to have her. And so that was the motive for killing her. When you're the victim of this kind of crime, you don't have any closure.
- [46:00]
A
Gloria Barnes lives alone, surrounded by fragments of her daughter's life.
- [46:05]
B
It just never goes away, you know, it just kind of eats at you and you try to go on with your life and you try to find some happiness and then it just, it's like you're going through the motions. This October, Fear is free on Pluto TV with horror movie collections from Paranormal Activity, the Ring. You will die in seven days scream and from dusk till dawn this is my kind of place and don't miss the man made nightmares in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the world ending chaos in 28 days later.
- [46:49]
A
There's something in the blood.
- [46:51]
B
All the scares all for free. Pluto TV stream now pay never.