Original subtitles

She had been strangled,

her body tossed off the old bridge.

PETRILLO: He was taking young women off the freeway,

down into a dead end.

We always told Cara, if she needed help to go to

a policeman, that's who you trust.

It does haunt you. How could it not?

FLEMING: He was making excuses for the suspect,

but police officers do not make excuses for murderers.

I'm Sheriff Gary McFadden.

I was a homicide detective for 20 years.

I've worked more than 800 homicides in my career.

But even for the most dedicated detective,

there's no one harder to stop than a killer with a badge.

CYNTHIA: On December 27th, around 8 or 8:30 at night,

my younger sister, Cara, called home.

She was on her way home from her boyfriend's house.

An hour and a half, two hours later,

my dad jumped up and said, "Where's Cara?"

And he knew that something was dreadfully wrong.

We started to go into motion.

My dad took one route, and I took another route.

Three, four in the morning,

we found her car.

Driver's side window was rolled down.

Her bags were in the backseat.

It was as if she stopped,

rolled down her window, and then disappeared.

911, what's your emergency?

When officers arrived at the scene,

they initially found some blood on the door.

They ultimately checked the old bridge near

the scene, which had been turned into a bike path.

JARVIS: Cara's body was thrown off

and landed in the dry portion

of that creek bed below the bridge.

20-year-old Cara Knott was a junior at San Diego State.

She dreamed of becoming a teacher.

CYNTHIA: Cara was very interested in education.

Growing up, she would take

our youngest brother, John, and teach him

multiplication tables and read.

JOYCE: She was very special and kind.

She was just a real pleaser,

so she wanted everybody to be happy.

It was just horrifying.

I was watching from a distance while

the officers got gloves from their car

and walked underneath the bridge.

You could visualize what was happening,

but mentally, you can't process it.

You just, like -- this isn't happening.

This isn't happening.

JOYCE: We basically just fell apart.

All of us.

NULTON: I was at home and received a telephone call

from my sergeant.

I became a police officer because, uh,

I kind of followed in my dad's footsteps.

I wanted to give back to the community

and have a good impact on individual people's lives.

Now we had a young woman that had

been found off of the Interstate 15 freeway.

It appears that she had been murdered.

NARRATOR: Investigators can see that someone attacked

Cara before she fell from the bridge.

The body had started to bruise.

There was a ligature mark around Cara's neck

and a bruise on Cara's face.

It actually looked like someone hit her with

a flashlight.

NARRATOR: Technicians find tissue under Cara's fingernails

indicating she scratched the killer

trying to fight him off.

McFADDEN: When you enter a confrontation with someone,

you're going to fight for your life.

One of the training methods is, if you don't have keys,

use your fingernails -- as they say,

gouge their eyes out -- finding the fingernail scrapings

underneath the victim's fingernails

is crucial to this case.

They did find blood on one of Cara's boots.

There were some fibers

and hairs collected from the bridge itself,

and it appeared a car had been stopped

at the bridge and left a skid mark.

We were able to measure the width of the tire itself.

You have to remember this is a bridge only used by bicycles,

so this is another piece of key evidence that

could link the tire of the killer to this case.

There's also a gas receipt in the front seat of Cara's car.

It had a timestamp on it.

It had a location, and we were able to backtrack

and find that she put gas in her car

at a Chevron gas station before getting on the freeway.

The attendant said it just seemed like a normal stop.

She gassed her car.

Nobody bothered her at that time that he could see,

and she was on her way.

NARRATOR: It doesn't take long for camera crews

to arrive at the scene.

A murdered college student is big news.

MAN: It was three days after Christmas 1986,

a deserted lonely area under the I-15 freeway.

In 1986, San Diego was mostly, uh,

considered that vacation town

that you always wanted to live in.

There was crime, but nothing that

would have made national news.

Not until Cara Knott.

The media loves a homicide

when the victim is young, attractive, and innocent.

WOMAN: 20-year-old Cara Knott's body was

found in a deserted area off the old Highway 395 bridge.

They will go on a feeding frenzy for this case,

and they're gonna put pressure on law enforcement to solve

this quickly, so the best place for the detectives

to start now is with the victim's family.

We were separated.

They talked to us individually, one-on-one,

away from each other.

They took photographs of our shoes and, you know, clothing.

You're realizing, wow, you know, we're --

we're a suspect.

For the first 48 hours, everybody is a suspect.

NARRATOR: Cara's family can easily account

for her last 48 hours.

Cara's boyfriend, Warren, came over for Christmas on the 25th.

Um, but he was -- he was under

the weather, he felt like he had the flu.

So they left the next day,

then went up to Escondido, and then she took care of him.

NARRATOR: When Warren starts to feel better,

Cara calls home to say she's on her way,

but she never arrives.

JOYCE: I stayed home waiting for her.

I started calling the hospitals to

see if there had been an accident.

I remember spending hours standing at the kitchen

window, waiting for her car to pull up.

CYNTHIA: Throughout the night, there were phone calls back to

my mom and my other sister.

They were like the command center.

Cara's mother calls 911.

I said, "We can't find her, can we file a missing report?"

And they said, "Well, you can't file

a missing person's report for 48 hours."

McFADDEN: Back in the '80s, you could not file

a police report until it's 24 to 48 hours.

That's valuable time lost.

And when the police officer does not search for the victim,

who's going to search for them? The family.

NARRATOR: The Knott family continues to hunt

along Cara's route throughout the night.

Nothing,

until her sister exits the interstate

and looks down a barricaded road.

By that point, it had probably been seven or eight hours

of, you know, constant checking.

And we had just, like,

a gut feeling, like, we've checked everything else.

It was so foreboding.

Down the road, we found her car.

Once we got closer, we realized she wasn't there,

and it was this dark, tomb-like area.

It's just the most horrifying...

memory still to this day.

I think about it, I just...

it's heartbreaking.

NULTON: There was just nothing down there

in the middle of the night.

It would have been extremely dark.

The location where this car was found is key.

What about this location

make the killer says, I'm gonna take this person here.

What about this location makes the killer safe?

NULTON: She was directed down there by someone

in authority or she met a friend,

family member, that she trusted.

NARRATOR: Or is it something else entirely?

At the time,

the infamous Green River Killer is on the loose,

targeting young women in Oregon and Washington State.

WOMAN: The Green River case has posed special problems for

investigators since it all began back in July of 1982.

NARRATOR: By 1986, he's killed more than 40 women.

I'm thinking to myself, do we have

something like that here in San Diego now?

I couldn't think of any reason why a woman would be --

be found murdered off the freeway like that other than

what was going on up north.

If you have a case like the Green River Serial Killer

going around at that time,

that is a big what if.

San Diego detectives confront

a frightening possibility.

Could Cara Knott be the Green River Killer's latest victim?

The Green River Killer was killing prostitutes,

drug addicts,

and like a lot of serial killers,

would find the people on the edges,

because there would be less hue and cry.

Even if you aren't a prostitute or a drug addict,

you never know when you can be mistaken

for somebody just walking across the parking lot.

It was very scary.

NARRATOR: But detectives determine Cara

doesn't fit the profile.

Cara's personality was just sweet.

She seemed to get along with everybody.

She exuded warmth.

Um, she wanted to be everyone's friend.

As a teenager,

I never gave her a bit of worry

because she would let me know where she was.

She seldom got into any trouble.

I mean, she just wanted to always please.

NARRATOR: Her family made sure Cara was always cautious.

CYNTHIA: We took a self-defense training class

days before she was murdered.

We learned how to defend ourselves as women.

Go for their face, primarily, going

for the eyes and scratching the face.

We always told Cara to drive with her car doors locked,

and if she needed help, to go to a policeman.

That's who you trust.

JARVIS: Cara would not have stopped for

somebody that she did not know.

But if she saw someone that she did know and it looked like

they needed help, she would have stopped.

They learned that Cara was very careful.

She was trained to protect herself.

So then that means that it's either somebody

she trusts or somebody she just gave into.

Once you finish interviewing the family,

you're gonna move on to the boyfriend.

It's not inconceivable that he could have

got into a car and followed her,

and she would have pulled over for him.

NARRATOR: Cara's boyfriend, Warren Jenkins, tells

police he was still sick in bed after Cara left.

His sister confirms it.

CYNTHIA: They were high school sweethearts, they met in track.

He was, you know, around for most of the holidays.

He was just a real kind person.

You could see that the two of them would be great together.

Cara and her boyfriend had no problems

at all, and we knew that immediately.

He was destroyed by the information

she had been found dead.

NARRATOR: As the investigation expands, media attention grows.

MAN: She had been strangled,

her body tossed off the old Highway 395 bridge.

The Cara Knott case

really caught people's attention.

It was Christmas time.

It was cold, so people were more indoors.

People paid attention, and women were freaking out.

People were coming up to us saying, "Have you caught him?

Do you know anything?"

And of course, we couldn't say

anything back, because we knew nothing.

There's absolutely no way that we could put words to it

that would give anybody a sense of peace

or even that we had control over it.

NARRATOR: Police urge the public to be careful on the roadways.

When you have a case like this, fear sets in to the public.

So what you want to do is go on TV and give them the truth.

We don't know who the suspect is.

So in order for us to be safe,

these are the things you need to do,

but you definitely need to tell the public there is

someone still out there.

NARRATOR: Calls flood the police tip line.

One stands out...

a man stopping motorists near the gas station

where Cara was last seen.

NULTON: There was a tip about a hitchhiker

who had been up on that road.

We canvassed the area.

We did get information about a gentleman

driving a truck who picked up

a hitchhiker in another location and dropped him off

in that area.

So we're thinking, well, maybe that was the -- the guy,

but it still didn't give us any information

as to who he was.

NARRATOR: Officers search for the hitchhiker,

but there's a limit to their manpower.

Chasing a hitchhiker is like chasing dust in a windstorm.

That's the needle in the haystack.

You know it's there,

but you're gonna have to go on, because everybody wants to help

the family, especially when you have a victim like this.

NARRATOR: Investigators continue to look for leads.

And so does Cara's family,

beginning a day after her body was found.

We made the flyers, we blanketed San Diego County.

Crimestoppers in San Diego put out a $1,000 reward.

We added to that, made it $10,000 for any

information leading up to the arrest of her murderer.

NARRATOR: Detectives try to keep the family updated on

their progress,

but they can't share everything.

The reason that homicide keeps a closed mouth is because

they don't want people to find out what they're investigating

so things don't happen that would harm the investigation.

I think it's a very common thing.

One of the worst things we do in homicide is having to go

back to the family and repeatedly tell them

that we have few leads,

but the detectives have to be careful.

You never know.

The killer could be listening at any time.

NARRATOR: One week after celebrating Christmas,

the Knott family gathers for Cara's funeral.

I just remember walking out of, um, the chapel part, the --

the gravesite and, like, hundreds of people there.

There was not enough room.

People were crowded outside.

The outpouring of support was was amazing,

just caring and loving.

It was just...

so surreal

and heartbreaking.

NARRATOR: One mourner in the crowd attracts attention.

We got information that Bill Smith, uh,

was a family friend at the funeral,

extremely distraught.

You know, over the top -- we became

interested in what's his relationship with Cara?

So we had to sink our teeth into that.

All detectives know that you have to go to

the funeral, because the funeral is like fishing in

a pond of suspects.

Mr. Bill is a fish that you need to catch, because

he's not smelling right, and you need to bring him in.

NARRATOR: On the same day as the funeral,

four days after Cara was killed,

officers get a call to the crime scene.

There was a highway patrol officer who was there

detaining a couple of people

who had been off-roading it down in the area.

Highway patrol investigate accidents.

If what the highway patrol officer is detaining someone

for falls into the purview of what police do,

then they call us.

I received a radio call to meet the California

highway patrol officer near the scene where the murder was.

So when we arrived, I saw his unit parked on the dirt side

of the road, and I saw a truck with two males

standing outside.

I asked him, "Do you think these guys are good for it?"

And he said, "No."

And I said, "Do you think they're up to something?"

He said, "No."

I said, "Then why are we doing this?"

And he said, "Well, they were at the scene," and I said okay.

NARRATOR: The highway patrol officer starts

asking questions about Cara's murder.

FLEMING: "What are the homicide detectives telling you?

"What are they telling you?

I want the scoop," and I didn't feel that it was

like a law enforcement officer talking to a law

enforcement officer -- he was very excited

and then so desperate to find out something that...

it was as if he was, uh,

somebody who had never been to a crime scene before.

She has this patrol officer talking to her,

and he's saying some strange things.

He's asking too many questions, he's poking the bear,

and she's thinking, why do you want to know all of this?

And then he said, "I heard they found, uh,

an earlobe in her mouth."

I said, "I don't know about that."

And he then grabbed his earlobes and went,

"Well, I got both of mine."

And I looked at him, I said,

"I don't think you have anything to worry about."

And he goes, "Well, what else could they get?"

And I said, "Well, you know, they're --

they're doing an autopsy."

And then he asked, "Well,

what could they get in a -- in an autopsy?"

And I said, "Well, they could get scrapings

"from under her fingernails.

"They could possibly get blood type.

They could get all sorts of stuff."

And he starts cleaning his fingernails!

And I'm looking at him,

and I'm thinking, that's a very strange response.

NARRATOR: The patrolman asked Sergeant Fleming what she's heard.

FLEMING: I know that she got thrown over at this side of

the bridge.

And he said, "No, you don't know what you're talking about.

She went over this side of the bridge."

Why would he say the other side of the bridge,

and he has nothing to do with this investigation?

And this is something that only

the killer and the detectives would know.

FLEMING: And I said, "If you know so much,

why are you asking me?"

And he got very mad,

and I said,

"You know, you obviously read up more than I did."

And he says, "What do you think is gonna happen?"

And I said,

"To be honest, I hope they find him

and hang him by his."

And he gets furious at this point, says,

"You don't know what you're talking about it.

"It could have been an accident.

"It could have gotten out of control.

"It could have been something that --

that was just not planned."

And he turns around, and he goes

to his car quickly, and he floors it.

McFADDEN: This is some strange behavior.

If this was me, I would tell the other detectives

and the other officers, "We need

"to pay close attention to this guy, because we believe

his cheese has slipped off of his cracker."

FLEMING: Had this man not been in a marked unit,

I would have questioned if he was law enforcement,

because of his reactions, because of his behavior,

because of his questioning.

He was making excuses for the suspect.

Police officers do not make excuses for murderers.

Back at the station,

Sergeant Fleming writes up what happened.

FLEMING: I took the report after my shift to the homicide office.

The detectives explained that they were really getting

a lot of calls, and they were incredibly busy,

but that he would take it, and he would turn it in.

And I said, "I really think we need to look at this,"

and he said, "I promise you, Jill, it'll be looked at."

I always found Jill to be very smart,

and I did attach some very

routine significance to her talking to me.

When the detectives follow up,

they find out the patrol officer's name is Craig Peyer,

and he's considered one of CHP's best.

Peyer was working the night Cara was killed,

and they're told his log book shows

he was miles from the crime scene.

The fact that a young lady was found and thrown off a bridge

under his watch,

he may be feeling a little guilty.

Guilt will set in as a law enforcement officer,

especially when a murder happens in your district.

With potential leads drying up

and little hard evidence,

detectives head back to the bridge

and spot someone who shouldn't be there --

Bill Smith, the same friend

whose behavior at Cara's funeral seemed so strange.

NULTON: We actually saw him walking across the bridge.

Uh, my partner and I spoke with him, and he said

he was just looking around to see if he could find anything.

You have to ask yourself, why is Bill at this bridge?

Why is he just walking around?

Does he feel guilty, or is he the killer

returning back to the scene of the crime?

NARRATOR: Investigators look further into Bill Smith.

They realize the car registered to him

could be connected to a tip

that's come in about the night of Cara's murder.

NULTON: A man was seen pushing a blonde woman

down on the passenger side of this car,

and it wasn't too far from Mercy Road and Interstate 15,

which was the crime scene.

We had to see if he had a similar type of car.

So I went up to his house very

early morning hours and took a picture of it

so we could use it to show

people that maybe could help identify it.

NARRATOR: It turns out Smith's car is the wrong color,

but detectives still want to talk to him.

Smith tells them he's known the Knott family

for years and is especially close to Cara.

NULTON: It was quite apparent to us that him showing this grief

wasn't so unusual based on his relationship with the family

and with Cara.

NARRATOR: Smith insists he was at home the night of the murder.

He did have a clear alibi.

He had people that could vouch for him.

When you have a case like this, a lot of leads will come

in, and after following all those leads,

a few leads would dry up, and then you're gonna come down to

only a few leads and none of them are promising.

But the media believes that all leads are promising,

and the media is gonna continue

to put pressure on the detectives.

With the public in an uproar,

the California highway patrol has one of its

officers do a ride-along on the evening news.

OFFICER: And once you get into a car with somebody,

anything can happen.

Uh...

being a female, you could be raped,

robbed, all the way to where you could be killed.

NARRATOR: Calls start coming in from women

who recognize the CHP officer on TV.

PETRILLO: So they said, "He pulled me over for

a bouncing headlight" or "Your tail light's flickering."

He was taking young women off the freeway

and down into basically a dead end,

no lights, and talking to them about weird stuff.

The officer in the video...

Craig Peyer.

Once you get in that other person's car,

you're at their mercy.

FLEMING: I had seen him on the news and said, "Wait a minute,

that's the guy that was weird with me on that stop."

There was something in me...

as a woman that was like, no.

Had I not been in uniform with a gun

on my hip with a cover unit right there,

I probably would have been frightened.

Craig Peyer was a real ambitious officer in the field.

He was considered a hot pencil.

Uh, he'd write a lot of tickets.

He was a training officer and viewed

as a good officer doing his job.

McFADDEN: This officer is respected by the agency.

So detectives have a very difficult job to do,

but that shouldn't matter at this point.

You should kick the pedestal from under this officer

and continue your job,

especially when you're talking about a homicide investigation.

NULTON: It was routine for him to be stopping people,

particularly young women,

directing them underneath the freeway.

SACHS: He's got them pulled over, and he's talking

to them for up to an hour, getting them out of

the vehicle so he can check them out,

see what they look like, and maintain control over them

so they could not leave.

McFADDEN: All of these females said that they received

this creepy behavior from

the same patrol officer who was asking too many questions

on the crime scene.

I do not believe in coincidence.

Coincidence don't happen in a homicide case.

Twelve days after Cara's murder,

detectives asked Peyer to come in for questioning.

Yelled across at me

in my office,

"Lieutenant Jarvis, how the hell are you?

I see you on TV all the time."

Either this guy is a hell of an actor

or he's covering his tracks now.

NULTON: The initial interview was the --

the usual, "Tell us about your routine.

"Tell us specifically what you did that night.

And did you kill Cara Knott?"

And he denied it, and he said

that he would never do anything like that.

NARRATOR: Then Peyer asks a question of his own.

He says, "But if I did do this, what will happen to me?"

That is pretty much admitting to the crime.

But you want to know if I go forward with this,

what will really happen to me if I tell you the truth?

That is a huge red flag.

Peyer was super cooperative.

If I were a police officer being accused of murder,

and I did not commit a murder,

I would say, "Tell me what you got.

I'm out of here." I'd be angry about it,

and that wasn't the case with him.

He was, you know, "What can I do for you?"

It was bizarre to me,

his demeanor.

NARRATOR: Peyer agrees to take a polygraph.

NULTON: He failed this test in a deceptive sort of way

more so than any test I'd ever seen.

We were particularly interested in speaking

with officers that worked with him.

And it was real eye-opening.

We learned about some scratches on his face,

and Craig told his supervisor it occurred while

he was gassing his vehicle at the gas pump,

and he fell forward into a chain link fence.

NULTON: To me, it seemed ridiculous.

I mean, you don't fall face first into a fence without

trying to break your fall, uh, in --

in some other manner besides your face.

McFADDEN: He had scratches on his face.

We have to remember that the victim scratched her

assailant because they found the fingernail scraping

underneath her fingernails.

His story is that he fell into a fence.

Well, he should have began with, "Once upon a time."

Detectives find a new angle.

The highway patrol all use the same dry cleaner for

their uniforms,

and Peyer made a drop off there two days after Cara's murder.

And what does he tell the clerk at the cleaners?

"Could you pre-spot these pants for blood?"

When we looked at Craig's car, we found nylon rope.

And we asked numerous highway patrolmen,

"Is that a standard piece of equipment?"

And they all said no.

NARRATOR: Cara Knott had ligature marks around her neck

when she was found, showing she had been strangled.

Even though they got strong information,

his log book is gonna give him his alibi.

The log book will show that he was miles away.

Detectives need to take a close look at that log book.

Can we find anything in that log book

would help us trap this killer?

Peyer's log book shows an alibi

for the time of Cara's murder.

He wrote that he stopped and provided assistance

to this motorist and called him a tow truck.

NARRATOR: Detectives know this alibi is the key to the case.

They send the log book out for forensic experts to examine.

SACHS: There was actually, like, erase marks in

the log, and there was an hour and 20 minute gap.

What happened?

What does he do?

He backdates another stop that occurred after

he murdered her to that time period.

They pretty much had him dead to

rights on that particular piece of evidence.

He believed that his fellow officers would never go

to this length to look at his log book.

They would trust him as a law enforcement officer.

I'm happy to know that detectives in this case was not

going to let him being an officer

stop them in this case.

NARRATOR: As more evidence comes in from the forensic testing,

it points again and again to Craig Peyer.

SACHS: The blood spot

on Cara's right boot matched Peyer's blood.

The patches on his highway patrol shirt were determined

to be consistent with fibers that were collected from her.

And the forensic orthodontist identified ligatures, without

a doubt said that that piece of

rope in the trunk of that car made those marks

on Cara Knott's neck.

And there's more.

The tire track measurements taken at the crime scene

match Peyer's patrol car.

There was evidence after evidence,

but then the smoking gun in this case,

the most telling evidence, were the fresh scratch marks

on his face.

He's got all kinds of scratch marks on his face that

he can't explain except he says it happened from a fence.

It was obvious as a sledgehammer that

he was the one who did it.

NARRATOR: Before detectives arrest Craig Peyer for murder,

they visit Cara's parents, Joyce and Sam Knott.

JOYCE: They told us then that they were arresting

a police officer, and my poor sweet daddy,

he just fell to the floor.

He was such a believer in law and order, and...

it just knocked the wind right out of him.

I don't think it was so shocking to Sam.

Almost all along,

he thought it must be an officer.

Who else could have pulled her over?

They knew who Cara was.

They knew that this is one of the only things that could

make any sense as to why her life was taken that night.

I got called into the office and told the homicide division

is about to make an arrest of

a California highway patrol officer.

And at that point, I knew that he was the monster.

I know. I didn't even do it.

NARRATOR: Craig Peyer is arrested on January 15th,

1987, 19 days after Cara Knott's murder.

This is an officer that took advantage of his position.

He forced women in these deserted areas,

terrorized them, where he knew that they would never get help.

NARRATOR: Detectives believe Cara's murder started the same

way as all of Peyer's traffic stops.

The officer saw the pretty blonde driving on the highway

and flashed his headlights, directing her

to the barricaded road.

NULTON: Craig Peyer was doing his routine

chit-chatting, and she wasn't buying it at all.

I think she started to look around.

This is getting really creepy, and I think he reached out,

touched her, tried to comfort her,

you know, "Relax, don't get upset,"

and her self-defense training kicked in,

and she scratched him,

and she started to fight for

her life, because she was feeling threatened.

And he hit her across the forehead

with his flashlight and knocked her out.

SACHS: And he saw his whole life flashing before his eyes,

his whole police career ruined,

and made the conscious decision to murder her.

NULTON: He went to the trunk of his car,

he got that piece of rope out, put it around her neck,

and he strangled her, and then...

he's got to decide what he's gonna do at that point.

And he drives out to the center of the 395 bridge,

and he pushes her up and over

the side and down into the creek bed.

NARRATOR: Fifteen months after Cara Knott's murder,

Craig Peyer goes on trial for the crime.

SACHS: Prosecutors made sure that every I was dotted,

every T was crossed, so not only was it

proof beyond a reasonable doubt,

but it almost became proof beyond any doubt that he was

the one who did this crime.

NARRATOR: Dozens of women tell the court about Peyer's

predatory behavior.

Sergeant Fleming also testifies.

FLEMING: Sam Knott would come up to me, and he would

put his hand on my arm, and he would thank me for being there.

And he said, "I know it's hard

to testify against one of your own."

And I always said to him, "He's not one of mine.

He's not one of mine, and he's not one of ours."

NARRATOR: Craig Peyer is convicted of murder

and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

SACHS: He's the billboard for someone who

does not deserve to be released.

He was a Jekyll and Hyde, and the Hyde that came

out was the individual that did all the dark,

monstrous deeds.

It does haunt you.

How could it not? If you're a living, breathing,

caring, human being, and most police officers are,

it'll be with me the rest of my life

until I'm not breathing anymore.

Just so senseless, and not only is it senseless,

but it's perpetrated

by a person from the fraternity.

And it's beyond me that a law enforcement person

would do something like that.

I had a daughter about that age, and I just think,

you know, this could have happened to me.

I miss her all the time.

Not just once a day, every minute.

I want Cara remembered for the good that

she brought to the world in her short time,

not for the way she died.

NARRATOR: Cara's father, Sam, never recovered from her death.

Twelve years after her murder,

he suffered a massive heart attack as he drove away from

the memorial garden he had planted at the site.

It destroyed my dad.

At the end, he died of a broken heart,

and he was only 63.

The monster murdered him just like he murdered my sister.

She was shot in the back of the head.

Everbody was a suspect. Who would do this?

You hate to think that we've got a brother officer

involved in a murder, but you can't leave anything unturned.

This killer wants total control over their victims.

I just had a feeling that something wasn't right.

A lot of people didn't believe the official story.

The real truth is

nobody wants to get rid of bad cops more than good cops.

He was the ideal officer.

His exact words were "You're gonna get yourself killed."

If this is a bad cop then we are in a whole other league.

Who would know how to stage a crime scene

better than someone who investigates crime scenes?

They found who killed my sister and I just couldn't believe

it was a freakin' cop.