Original subtitles

I dig all the graves at Riverside Cemetery

in Blue Earth.

I've been digging graves since 1966.

And I still is.

I buried Jane Doe's body back in 1980,

a few days after they found her.

That was the first time I have ever buried anybody

that did not have a name.

It made me sad because I knew there was somebody out there

looking for her and wondering what happened to her.

She had been buried for 34 years

when they asked if I'd dig her back up.

Putting people in the ground is one thing,

but diggin' them back up

is a lot different.

That's the thing about the dead.

When you start pulling them back up...

...you never know what you're gonna find.

It all started out about 45 years ago.

It was a bright, sunny day.

I had just started the day shift at 9 o'clock

that morning.

And Sheriff Fletcher just said,

"A farmer, Gilbert Shewe, called,"

and we'd gotten about five inches of rain

two days before that.

And a farmer found something floating in a drainage ditch

east of town.

Usually that drainage ditch is pretty empty,

but at that time,

it was probably seven or eight feet deep,

and it was clogged up with old corn stalks

from the previous fall.

I don't think anybody was really too worried

about what we were gonna find.

We had no missing persons from our county

or anything like that, so...

Well, when I got there,

I was the first one on the scene.

Walked down the grassy area.

And all of a sudden, I saw the body.

You just kind of catch your breath

and realize it is a body.

The victim was floating on his back

amongst all the corn stalks.

It was starting to decompose, and he was kind of swollen.

I couldn't tell right away if he was a man or a woman,

even though he was nude.

Once we got out of the water,

then you could tell it was female.

And there was a gray-colored cord around the victim's neck.

The cord around her neck indicated

ligature strangulation.

She looked like a younger lady,

probably anywhere from 20 to 30 years old.

We noticed that she had no hair except for a small tuft

in the back.

The one thing that was interesting was there was

no fingernails at all on either hand.

The reason for no fingernails was that they had been

ripped off.

I mean, that's torture.

All you can think of is, "What is this poor woman

going through?"

I just imagine she just probably died of fright, too,

you know?

After the body was taken away,

I walked along the drainage ditch,

seeing if I could find any type of clothing

or anything of interest.

The rain washed away everything.

A good tire track in dirt would just be completely washed away.

As you can imagine, anytime a murder occurs

in a small town, word spreads like wildfire.

It was all over the newspapers. It was on the radio.

It's not every day you get a murder in a small town

like this, especially one where it seems like it wasn't

just the elements that erased the scene.

It looked like it was a deliberate attempt

to clean up after a crime.

This was a case where somebody knew what they were doing.

And whoever did do this, they're still out there.

We started calling her Jane Doe

because she was unknown.

We had no idea who she was.

We took X-rays of her teeth and hoped to find

the dental match somewhere.

But the only hope we really had of any type of identification

was one fingerprint, which indicated we had nothing.

Once you find out a person's name,

then you can go back 24 to 48 hours and find out

where they've been, you know, who they were with,

what they were doing.

It's something you have to have.

Blue Earth got its name from the Dakota phrase,

which means "the river where the blue earth is gathered."

Somebody was digging down about 16 feet,

you'll hit blue earth, kind of like a blue clay.

And that's how they named it Blue Earth.

They even used to give away little bottles

at the gas stations for souvenirs

with Blue Earth in it, a keychain deal.

This area was sacred to the Dakota people.

They would use the blue earth

as body paint to ward off evil spirits.

In a small town like Blue Earth,

murders like this don't happen.

It's a friendly town.

Everybody seems to know everybody.

It's just a nice place to live.

I was born in Blue Earth, and I'll be there all my life,

and I won't be leaving no place.

News travels fast in a small town.

I heard it.

Some of my good friends pulled Jane Doe

out of the dredge ditch.

In 1980, when they discovered the body,

Blue Earth had a population of just 4,500.

It was a very safe community.

People left their doors unlocked.

The film "Friday the 13th" had just come out

a few weeks prior, and everyone around town

was talking about it.

Some dates have a certain weight about 'em.

Friday the 13th figures bad luck

and everything like that.

And I remember seeing that movie.

It was a great movie. Everyone loves

a good horror movie.

But now there was somebody out there doing

real-life horrible things.

We'd check around the area for women in the age-group

of 20 to 30 in the Blue Earth area.

And we couldn't find out anybody like that.

Nobody had any missing person reports.

We knew they were all accounted for,

so we were sure it wasn't somebody that was local.

We started looking for any missing

25-to-30-year-old females

anywhere. In the United States.

We also had dental records to try to match Jane Doe.

We got several hundred leads and still came up empty.

I can remember watching the news that night

with my family.

I can remember feeling afraid and scared.

We were within a five, 10-minute walk of I-90.

We didn't know who the killer was.

It just put fear in everybody's mind.

Nobody knew if the killer was still here,

lurking around town, looking for who could be next.

About two weeks later, there were two teenage boys,

age 13 and 14, walking along the river

under the I-90 bridge near Blue Earth.

You know how it is when you're that age,

you wanna try and scare each other

by going by a creepy bridge and doing something dangerous.

That's what these kids were probably doing.

But they got more than they bargained for.

This Jane Doe case.

This was a case that our department

just couldn't let go of.

We had no name,

no killer's name.

It was just a big mystery.

It was gonna be next-to-impossible for us

to solve.

And that's when we found out,

that a couple of kids in July of 1980

found some clothing under a bridge

in the Blue Earth area.

What they found tucked underneath

a piece of Styrofoam...

was a golden white-striped sweater with bloodstains on it.

And right next to it, someone's ID card.

The ID was a Texas issue ID

for a woman with brown hair and brown eyes.

And they don't understand what they found,

but they know it shouldn't be here.

And that's when detectives get a call

from one of the boy's fathers.

It was a big deal.

Well, being it was an identification,

you know, all of a sudden you have a name

and an apparent address and birth date to go by.

So you can do some checking on that to see if anything

pans out on it.

Maybe it could be connected to our Jane Doe case.

Maybe we could find out who she is.

Unfortunately, the lab determined that the blood

on the garment was animal blood.

And the ID was fake.

So these items were not helpful.

That, to me, was very disappointing.

But it did give detectives a new theory

on potentially who this person could be.

Figured, possibly this person was a hitchhiker

on the interstate,

and somebody had abducted her.

Just a couple of weeks after the body was discovered

The state trooper came in

into the sheriff's office there to use the copy machine.

He says, "Well, how are you guys coming on the Jane Doe case?"

And I kind of threw my hands up and says,

"We can't identify her, we have no real crime scene,

the only evidence we have is the body itself."

And I says, "We're kind of stuck."

And he laughs and says, "Well, I'll make it

easy for ya."

"I did it."

And I says, "Not funny, Bob."

And he says,

"Just messing with you."

Then, he walked away into the other room

to use the copy machine and he was laughing.

A lot of cops have a morbid sense of humor,

you know.

But I'm sure there was a lot of curiosity.

Everybody felt pressure from the public

because we couldn't identify her.

And it's caused a lot of concern

from the law enforcement aspect.

At the time, in 1980,

my kids were still in high school.

Just, uh, it affects you as a parent

to see somebody's young daughter is missing somewhere,

just hiking down the road.

This is a scary time for Blue Earth.

Lot of back roads, lot of country roads.

One of the things that happens in a small town

when you don't have a suspect, you don't know who did it

in a case like this is parents get nervous.

They get scared, you don't know what steps

you have to take to keep your family safe.

It was like everybody was waiting for something

to happen.

But the truth is, it already had.

We started looking outside

of our immediate county to surrounding areas,

to see if there's any type of crime

which could possibly be connected to ours in some way.

Backup requested.

And we found something.

Joann Bontjes was last seen leaving the American Legion bar

on October 3rd, 1975, at about 12.30 AM.

She was supposed to be going home,

where she lived with her parents.

But she never made it.

Investigators scoured the area,

found her car

two miles outside of Fremont.

Inside her vehicle,

the keys were still in the ignition.

Her purse was in the car.

And the most chilling detail were the tire tracks.

It looked like somebody had pulled her over.

And then they couldn't find her,

and all sorts of people were out searching for her

here in Martin County.

And then all of a sudden, everybody went to eat, and--

we got a farmer that finds the body, right?

Where a bunch of the other people had

just checked the area.

That seems strange.

Being the fact that the two victims are

approximately the same age

and they're both dumped in a ditch,

it seemed kind of coincidental.

We had our case,

and Martin County had their case.

We're wondering,

"Is there a serial killer out there,

or is it just coincidences, or what?"

And you realize this was something far worse

than they ever imagined.

Not just one murder, but a pattern.

Three years later, four years later,

we were still no closer

to finding the killer of Jane Doe.

But then early 1983, we heard about a serial killer

that was talking about murdering

several hundred people,

one at a time picking up hitchhikers

and strangling them.

The notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confessed

to killing a hitchhiker on Interstate 90,

the same road...

where Jane Doe was picked up.

We thought, "This is our guy."

Everything seemed to match.

He was a trucker and picking up hitchhikers

all over the United States.

So we were very hopeful.

Henry Lee Lucas earned the nickname

"The Confession Killer" because he confessed

to killing 600 people.

He would always tell his victims,

"Hop in, where are you headed?"

but they never would get where they were going.

At that time, he was incarcerated,

and nobody had talked to him yet.

My investigator was the first one to interview him.

He talked about he killed a lady in Minnesota.

But he said that he's sure that he didn't kill

the one in Blue Earth.

It was not ours.

He was admitting to several other murders,

and so he basically had nothing to lose

by admitting to ours but...

he definitely denied killing Jane Doe.

It turns out he was very good about researching cases

and knowing all the publicly available information

about the cases,

but when police questioned him about things

that were not publicly available,

his story fell apart.

He was only ever convicted of killing three people,

his mother, his wife, and an elderly woman

that he lived with.

It's like being a movie star.

You're just playing the part.

Make out that you're the worst serial killer in the history

of the United States.

And that's what I did.

Lucas was somebody who wanted the world to believe

he was more dangerous than he really was.

It was disappointing.

You don't have your killer, and the case goes on.

In a small town like Blue Earth,

everybody's worried.

Until the killer is captured, nothing's the same anymore

until there's a resolution.

And in this case, it took a long time for that to happen.

Let's find out who may have done it.

But as of February 1988, eight years have passed

since Jane Doe was discovered.

And then detectives got a call from the Smith County

Sheriff's Office in Texas

In February, 1988.

I got this phone call, and it said,

"This is J.J. Smith down in Smith County, Texas,

"and I've got a fellow here that I got in jail right now,

"and he's confessing sexually molesting his kids,

"and he's talking about the possibility

that he thinks he also killed someone in your district."

So he said, "I think you maybe better come

down here and talk to him."

We recognized the name,

realized it was somebody that was from in our area

and that would be familiar with the case.

This was a guy that we all worked with.

You know, he had access to the front office

where we kept the copy machine, where he would use

the photocopier for some of his reports and that.

Turns out he was the guy that asked me

how we were coming on the case,

and he kind of laughed.

He said, "Well, I can make it easy for ya.

I did it."

It was just like somebody hits you with a ton of bricks.

Son of a bitch! That [bleep] told me

he did this!

Do you know?

His name was Robert Nelson,

a Minnesota State Patrol officer from 1970 to 1985.

He was stationed in this district,

which included the city of Blue Earth

when Jane Doe was discovered.

He had a bad temper.

A trigger temper

Nelson, from what I have heard,

was not a well-liked police officer in this community.

At one point, he quit his job as a police officer

and moved to Texas.

Pastor Bernier from the church that Robert Nelson

belonged to in Texas had come in with Robert Nelson

and wanted to talk to the sheriff.

Nelson had been molesting his children.

Nelson also started talking about the killing in Minnesota.

When I walked into the room, we just exchanged greetings

like we'd known each other for 20 years,

which we had.

It felt unbelievable.

Somebody that we'd know and somebody

that we'd work with,

just unbelievable.

He was one of our own, you know.

You just don't expect it.

He was a little bit nervous.

One thing we did notice, he was a very fussy individual,

very neat in appearance, and he was wearing

his prison jumpsuit,

and he kept picking little pieces of lint off

of his jumpsuit, just a nervous chick.

Our first question was about the Bontjes murder.

She's well known over there, family's well known

in Martin County, and they want blood.

There were just so many similarities

between the two that we considered Bob Nelson to be

a person of interest, a very strong interest.

We knew that Robert Nelson carried an old shotgun

in his car at all times.

We knew that she'd been killed with an old shotgun

because of the paper wadding that was embedded in her.

From talking with the deputies, I'd heard that this gal

wasn't the type to pull over for just anybody on the roadway.

People felt like it was a police officer that pulled over.

But he said, "No, I did not have anything to do with that.

And I'll tell you, I don't wanna talk about that murder."

We went through several interviews with him,

and eventually brought him back to Minnesota,

interviewed him again on the Jane Doe murder case.

Started to feel like you're talking to the devil

in your own mind, and wondering what in the hell happened.

When we first started talking to Robert Nelson,

our first question was about our murder,

Jane Doe in 1980.

He knew that what he had done was wrong,

and he knew that it was him that did it,

but it wasn't the real him.

Well, he talked about, like, two people.

"There's me, the good guy, and me, the bad guy."

It's like a reflection in the mirror, back and forth,

like a split personality.

He readily admitted it.

He admitted that he had killed the person

that we had been calling Jane Doe.

Nelson approached the young woman

and asked her where she was going,

and she said she was going nowhere,

and he asked her, "You want a ride?"

When he told them about pulling

the fingernails out of her,

that wasn't released to the public.

Nobody knew about that other than Roger and Jerry.

We had a killer that's with us all the time,

interacting with us.

Here he was hiding in plain sight.

We just didn't know it.

Based on Robert Nelson's confession,

he was ultimately found guilty

of and pled guilty to sexual assault

and first-degree manslaughter.

Robert Nelson was sentenced to 86 months in prison.

He will serve that time in a Texas facility

concurrently with his Texas life sentence.

And we always thought

that if we could find out who killed her,

that person would know who it was.

But it wasn't the case.

We were no closer to knowing who she was

than when we'd started.

It was still Jane Doe.

There was no name.

We had gotten several thousand leads,

some of them looked good and some of them were

immediately thrown out.

After many years, we could narrow it

down to nothing.

Just a nameless victim,

and a trail that has gone cold.

When I first heard about the Jane Doe case,

I was at a bar--

...with my husband and a friend of ours who was

a Blue Earth City police officer.

And I asked him if he had any cold cases or things,

just kidding him, and...

this one time, finally, he went,

"OK, you want one?"

And he goes, "There's a woman buried in a cemetery

that's never been identified."

And I said, "What?"

And he goes, "Yeah, she's just buried under stone,

says unidentified woman found May 30th, 1980."

So I immediately went out there to see it.

And it was there. I couldn't let it go.

This woman deserved more than just an unmarked grave.

She was a human being, and I refused to believe

that they are throwaway.

So I started asking questions and trying to find out

any information I could get, and I requested and...

many, many times demanded access to the records

that they had on this Jane Doe.

People just ignored me,

and some of the official agencies,

they wouldn't deal with me because I was a private citizen.

And then, finally, someone that still worked there,

an old timer, that said, "Oh, yeah, we do

have the records."

So we set up a time, and I went to the courthouse.

It Was kind of after hours.

He took me down into the basement, and he said,

"I got some stuff to take care of for a little while.

When I come back, you're done."

And under the stairs was a crate.

I immediately just started paging through it,

taking pictures of every page I could as fast as I could.

And he came back within 15, 20 minutes,

and I had gotten 99% of it.

The moment when I got access to the file,

I was just beside myself

'cause I was able to start seeing

what they had done, what they hadn't done.

And the Sheriff's Department had worked on that case hard.

They cared. They did the best they could.

But there wasn't DNA.

There wasn't databases, you know.

But they did try diligently to give her her name back.

It just wasn't the resources there are now.

It wasn't too long, and I realized that getting her

exhumed was gonna be the key to getting her name.

And so I had to convince the Sheriff's Department

to exhume the body.

You know, as a young child, knowing about this case

from six years old,

this case was lingering always in the back of my mind.

Every time I would drive by or ride my bike by I-90,

I'd often think about, who was this young lady?

How did she get there?

And then May of 2007,

when I became an investigator,

the Sheriff came to me and said, "I'm gonna assign

the Jane Doe case to you."

So I was very excited, I remember telling my parents,

and they were excited for me too.

I had high hopes that I would find a name for Jane Doe.

Deb and the previous investigators had talked

about exhuming Jane Doe,

trying to get new DNA, new leads.

Sheriff Gormley and I, we made the decision

to exhume her body.

Generally, you hear of Friday the 13th

as a possible spooky day.

You know, it's like a full moon.

But yet, on this Friday the 13th,

the past refused to stay buried.

So on August 12th, 2014, the exhumation was scheduled.

And it was a beautiful sunny day, actually.

They had closed the cemetery, but I had a personal invite

from the Sheriff's Office.

It was kind of surreal.

It was really quiet.

But there were lots of people there

with jackets on, like from the Bureau

of Criminal Apprehension and the Sheriff's Department.

And my friend Gary Sunken was there with his equipment,

and they were digging the hole.

She had been buried for 34 years, and...

we're just...

trying to get to the truth, what happened to her

and who she was.

I didn't know what to expect.

I'd never been in this situation before.

They pulled the cover off, and a lot of it was

just dirt and debris.

We could see that she was in there, and you see

a perfect body, but she was in the body bag.

I've dealt with hundreds of dead bodies in my career,

but I've never honestly dealt with a body that was

this severely decomposed.

A lot of it looked like dirt,

ashes to ashes.

And I saw her skull,

and they lifted her out, and then put her in a van

to take her to have the DNA extracted and have an autopsy.

I didn't know what I was gonna think or feel,

but, um--

I don't know why I'm getting choked up now either.

I did feel like she had become my friend in some way,

like she gave me a purpose.

In my in my mind, this was, after this many years,

gonna be the final step.

If we do not get a match, will we ever find a name

for Jane Doe?

When I got the phone call, Sheriff Gormley was

just walking by my office. I yelled his name to come back.

The agent then said, "We have a match to Jane Doe."

Both of us were absolutely ecstatic.

Not too long after the exhumation took place,

a few months,

I check my messages and I hear this woman's voice

and she says, "This is Marla Busha

and I'm looking for Debra Anderson."

And I called the number back.

I said, "Hi, this is Deb Anderson.

Can I help you?"

There was a voice on the other end of the phone

that said, "Are you the woman that's been

taking care of my sister all these years?"

And she said they were sure that the DNA had come back

and it was her sister.

Michelle.

And this is Michelle Busha

She was from Bay City, Texas.

It was very surreal to finally find out who she was.

I think, I was kind of in some kind of shock

for the first day or two.

We're here today to announce that a murder victim

has been identified.

Michelle Busha was 18 years old

when she disappeared from her family's home in Texas.

Her family had never stopped looking for her.

Her father didn't wanna change his phone number

or his address in case she ever tried to come back.

Michelle was a beautiful young woman

just at the beginning of her life.

She was the middle child in a family of five.

Michelle left home to travel cross-country with her friends.

She was calling home every two weeks and checking in,

and then the calls stopped, and her family filed

a missing-person report on May 9th, 1980.

This was the same day the film Friday the 13th had come out.

These horror movies seem like fun and people are

fans of them and everything, when they're at a movie theater

or whatever, but this was real life.

This was a real human being, somebody's child.

It's a sad ending, because I'm sure that they

always maintained a little bit of hope,

but at least now they know.

We'd all been waiting for this.

And here it turns out, 35 years later,

it took to identify her.

Michelle Busha wasn't from here,

but I think this community sort of...

calls her one of their own.

She's a part of the lore

of Blue Earth and Faribault County,

and so is Deb Anderson.

Her name was the key to her life, to her death,

to the man who took it all away.

One of the things that was unique about this situation is

the film Friday the 13th had just come out--

...on May 9th, 1980.

Michelle's family reported her missing on May 9th, 1980.

And on Friday the 13th, the truth came to the surface.

And Michelle got her name back.

It was just kind of mind-blowing.

Nelson wasn't just a child abuser,

he was a serial predator.

And because he had a badge, he had power over anybody

he would pull over, including and especially women.

He wasn't protecting people, he was hunting them.

It's supremely awful.

Not even just what he did to Jane Doe,

but when you get into the court documents,

you see what he's done to other people,

including voyeurism, exposing himself in public,

harassing people he would stop.

This is indeed a monster.