Original subtitles

Few details are being released in what deputies

are now calling a homicide.

Several women are ripped from their loved ones

by an unknown suspect.

He wrapped a belt around her neck and submerged her

in a half-filled tub.

Somebody waited for the right opportunity to make their move.

The subject was trying to not leave any DNA behind.

Who do you think did this?

I have no idea.

Officials are now working together

to see if any links exist between the deaths

of an elderly couple in North Carolina

and a woman in Florida.

There were similarities between these cases.

She was dating this man. I was very concerned.

He had said, "I got away with it once before,

I could get away with it again."

This story hits close to home

for me, because I grew up in Florida.

I think about my grandmother and my mother,

who could have been targeted by this killer.

And that is especially haunting.

This picture does mean a lot.

I believe I was around 30, so that makes her almost 50

in this picture.

She wanted to get her high school diploma

because she had never done that.

And so she went to night school.

She felt like she succeeded at something.

We were really proud of her that she was able to do that.

My name is Jacquline Byrd.

I'm the daughter of Judith O'Steen.

I've never spoken publicly about my mom on television.

It was, I guess, kind of a traumatic experience.

My mom was 17 when she had me.

We kinda grew up together, I believe,

because my mother was a young mother.

I did not know my real father,

so she was extremely close to me.

She loved with all of her heart

the people that she really cared about.

My mom would give you the shirt off of her back.

Still as close as ever, in the early 2000s,

Jackie is 36 years old and living in Jacksonville,

while her mom, Judith, lives a couple hours away

in remote Dixie County.

Dixie County is a very rural part of Florida.

It's about 800 square miles.

A lot of it is not habited by people.

It's a lot of waterways, swampy woods.

In the 2000s, my mom met Charles Carr,

owned his own business, Carr's Furniture.

They started dating, and it wasn't long

before she ended up moving with him,

right there where the furniture store was.

So she helped him with his business,

and she was very happy with him.

He always looked out for her.

He wanted to make sure that she was OK.

In 2004, she was his fiance.

Even though they had not gotten married,

Charles felt as if she was his spouse.

That was before everything happened.

and said, "We'd had a homicide at Carr's Furniture".

A male by the name of Jimmy Lawrence

was burglarizing Carr's Furniture.

And when he went in, he was gunned down.

Judith O'Steen, his fiancé, called the sheriff's office.

The next morning, I turned on my phone.

I had a ton of messages from my mother, very upset,

telling me what had happened.

Driving as fast as I could to get to Old Town

to be with her.

It was a really tough situation.

It was traumatic for her.

It was hard to even acknowledge that that had just happened.

My mother stayed with me for a little while

in Jacksonville,

and she was trying to get through the trauma of it.

And then she wanted to move back.

I was very concerned, but she felt safe.

Once she was settled in, she had her older sister,

Catherine, come move in with her.

My Aunt Catherine was the oldest.

She was a little developmentally delayed.

My mom knew that her older sister needed a place to stay,

and she wanted to help her with her health needs.

It takes years, but by December 2007,

60-year-old Judith has gotten into a routine,

taking care of her sister and focusing on her business,

buying and selling antiques at local flea markets.

She even starts dating again.

I talked to her on the phone.

I just remember that she was excited because the guy

that she was dating was coming to see her.

I mean, that's-- that's the last time

I remember talking to her.

In the early morning hours of December 16, 2007,

one of our deputies responded to a gas station

in reference to an abduction.

When deputies arrived, they find Catherine,

who was terrified and has a head injury.

She's with a woman, Judith had hired to come

and clean the house who had arrived at the home,

and she found Catherine in her room hiding.

She took Catherine to the gas station,

down the street from their house to call for help.

Catherine reported that a man came into their house

and took the night before.

Catherine said she was laying in bed asleep

and Judith was in her bedroom next door.

Catherine said she was awoken to this man

that she did not know, pulling on her... leg.

He drug her out of bed,

and she hit her head on the table.

Catherine screamed for help, and Judith came into the room

and told the intruder to leave Catherine alone.

The intruder picked her up and carried Judith out the door.

Just walked right out with her.

And that's the last she's seen of Judith.

Catherine said the man told her that he'd be back for her,

he would kill her and feed her to the gators.

Catherine was terrified. She didn't know what to do.

Her sister took care of her.

So she hid for the rest of the night

until the early morning when the housekeeper arrives.

Detectives press Catherine for a description

of her attacker, but still in shock,

she is only able to give a general description of the man.

He's white, middle-aged, and with a large build,

and she's never seen him before.

I'm driving, and there's a phone call

from Scott Harden,

Dixie County Sheriff's Department.

He told me that my mother had been abducted.

It was hard for me to grasp.

I went to see my Aunt Catherine,

and she was devastated, because of what had happened,

and she was scared.

The investigators had a statement, and that's it.

I mean, you don't have a lot to go off of.

The best thing to do is to go to where the crime happened.

Scott, back in '07, was this Judith's driveway?

So you could see their house from the road?

There was no forced entry or anything?

OK. There was furniture and stuff.

Yep.

It really is.

Any evidence that something took place?

She just completely disappeared.

We don't know what happened to her,

where she went when she left the house,

who she went with.

She just was here one minute and gone the next.

There was a lot of evidence recovered from Judith's home.

They collected light switches, cigarette butts, soda cans.

All of those were sent to the lab

to see if we get any DNA matches.

Investigators also take Judith's computer

to look into her recent communications.

Nothing in the house immediately points

to who could have abducted Judith.

They looked around the yard.

There were no tire tracks. There were no footprints.

The next step was a grid search of the local area.

There's always a chance that you might find

Judith injured in the woods.

We stomped the woods out,

you know, all behind the property,

all around the property.

I was frantic, very upset.

Some of the family members had all come to that house

to help look for her.

We walked the property.

We went near the lakes to see if we could find anything.

But we didn't see anything or hear anything

of her whereabouts. She was just gone.

Now police really start to take a deep look

at what is on Judith's computer.

The investigators,

they went through her online history,

emails, phone calls,

and discovered that she had been going to a website

called Adult Friend Finder,

and meeting men online.

She lost her fiancé. She was lonely,

and Dixie County just doesn't have,

you know, a lot to do here.

The Internet brought a whole new world to Judith.

attention was back then to Internet safety,

and probably telling your kids to, you know, be careful...

The investigators ended up with over a dozen names

of people she had recently been in contact with,

and these people weren't in Dixie County.

With the clock ticking and a potential pool of suspects

extending far beyond the Dixie County line,

investigators need to narrow their gaze.

They show the list of names to Judith's family,

and one of the men stands out.

I met with the police and told them

that she was dating this man,

and he was actually supposed to come and see my mom

on the 17th, the day after she was abducted.

The man had come from Pennsylvania.

We wanna know if this guy flew into Jacksonville

at any point in time,

surrounding those days of the abduction.

Still didn't rule him out completely,

because he could have driven down here.

He could have flown into... Orlando or anywhere else.

They were able to confirm through his phone records

and other resources that he wasn't in the area

at the time Judith disappeared.

He's ruled out, so where do we start now on this list

of... females and acquaintances?

The investigators would determine where these men lived,

and they got their bank records

to see if they had been traveling.

And then they would contact law enforcement

in the jurisdiction where these men lived

and ask them if local law enforcement

could place them at home

at the time Judith's crime occurred.

They were able to clear all of them.

As the days pass and investigators are able

to rule out all of Judith's recent contacts,

detectives turn their attention to Judith's past

to see if she has any possible enemies.

Jimmy Lawrence had been put away in prison.

My mother had to testify against him.

The investigators looked at, could this be a retaliation

against Judith for her part in his conviction?

...to see if any of these people

that he'd been in communication with...

And there's nothing tying him... to this.

The investigators worked really hard,

but they weren't able to find any connection.

At that point, they were left with basically a blank canvas.

But you just do everything in your power

to try to find out who did this to Judith.

But then there's a twist in the case

on New Year's Day 2008.

400 miles north in a state park in Georgia,

a woman disappears while she's out for a hike,

and a man named Gary Hilton is arrested

for her murder several days later.

Shortly after his arrest,

he's linked to several other crimes in the region.

Officials from Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina

are now working together to see if any links exist

between the killing in Georgia and the deaths

of both an elderly couple in North Carolina,

and a woman in Florida.

Gary Hilton,

at the time was a suspected serial killer

who had committed a homicide

in Leon County, in December 2007,

and then traveled to Columbia County, Florida,

where he had been camping.

Dixie County is between those two areas.

So at the time that Judith went missing,

he would've been in our area and possibly in our county.

The investigators went out to his campsite,

which was an hour drive from Dixie County.

They collected everything that was left behind.

Police scour Gary Hilton's campsite for any clue

that he had anything to do with Judith O'Steen.

They find nothing.

His attacks were taking place there on the trail.

...it didn't fit.

Hilton generally won't talk with law enforcement,

unless there's a plea deal on the table,

so they don't get anywhere with him.

Unfortunately, they could never link Gary Hilton

to Judith O'Steen's disappearance.

I actually called Scott and asked him,

"Had there been any updated information on my mom?"

But there was no new information.

So it was devastating for me,

thinking that my mom was gone.

My Aunt Catherine was eventually moved

to a nursing home where she would be safe

if the man came looking for her.

But she was very scared

and nervous about the whole situation,

because her sister was taken in front of her

and never came back.

Weeks later, detectives get all of that evidence back

from the crime lab, and they're really dismayed

to find there are no hits.

The case is at a standstill.

So now police are thinking, "OK, let's go back to Catherine,

our only eyewitness,

and let's do something maybe out of the box."

When the investigations absolutely ran out of leads,

the investigators took Judith's sister, Catherine,

to see an agent in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement

that had a specialty in hypnosis.

While she was under partial hypnosis,

she was able to provide enough information

for the FDLE agent to sketch out a drawing of the suspect.

The completed sketch was of a heavyset man in his 40s

with bushy eyebrows and a round face.

Once we had the sketch,

we were able to take it to the family and friends,

really, the entire county.

"Can someone ID this guy?"

Unfortunately, we weren't able to identify anybody

just based on the drawing.

Detectives send out the sketch

to other sheriff's offices across Florida

but no one recognizes him.

I had dreams for a few months

that my mom was shot.

I would go out by myself, sit by the lake,

trying to... just stay calm.

It was a very tough thing for me to deal with.

But over time, I realized that she probably was murdered.

And that, you know, we may never see her again.

Years pass with no further leads in the case,

but then in 2018,

Major Scott Harden gets a call from an agent

at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement...

with a new potential lead.

I'm like, "Who's Michael Porter?"

Now, 58-year-old Michael Porter was arrested

after a Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office investigation

in August of 2013 for a murder,

sexual battery, and burglary in Bell.

...the one that's like, "Man, the shoe fits."

...except Michael Porter.

When I heard about Michael Porter,

I did pull his picture of what he looked like in 2007,

and he did resemble the sketch that was made with FDLE.

Just the fuller face, you know, the full chin here,

kinda tucked-away ears.

When Harden gets the tip,

58-year-old Michael Porter is awaiting trial for a 2013 crime.

It was the home invasion and murder of 55-year-old

Joyce Burrow in nearby Gilchrist County, Florida.

You know, Catherine was not well,

as the crow flies,

it's probably less than ten miles' distance

between Judith O'Steen and Joyce Burrow.

It was just like a ray of hope. Here we go.

This is probably the last picture

of all three of us girls together.

It's Joyce, myself, and Diane.

She was so happy to finally get a grandchild.

Diane was the oldest sister,

and then Joyce was seven years older than me.

She was the responsible one.

And I was probably the wild child.

We were a very close family. We did everything together.

Joyce was a big West Virginia fan.

They were all big West Virginia fans, .

When I met my husband John's family,

I right away noticed the closeness.

When they were together, they were hysterical.

I mean, all they did was laugh.

Joyce was John's aunt,

and she was just the most kind-hearted person

I had ever met.

She wanted to always give back, give back to the community,

give back to her family.

Joyce and I, we always had a closeness.

In 2013, we found out

that we were gonna have another baby.

Joyce decided that she was just gonna move

right next door to John and I to help us with the baby.

She was filling that void

of both mother, mother-in-law, you know, aunt as well.

When I was actually awoken

to what sounded like someone doing donuts,

there was just something about that noise

that I knew something wasn't right.

I patted John and I said,

"Something is going on outside."

He quickly jumped up and he grabbed his pistol.

I remember holding the house phone in my hand, just waiting.

John came to the door and he said, "Call 911.

Joyce has been raped."

So I immediately dialed 911 and...

...continued to run outside.

She was laying in the middle of the road.

So I approached her...

and...

laid in the road with her.

She didn't have any clothing on

except for a nightgown around her neck,

and it was tied tight.

I pulled that article away from her neck as much as I could

to allow her to continue to talk and breathe.

At that point, you couldn't really understand

what she was saying.

But it wasn't long after that, EMS had arrived.

They took over from there.

I arrived at the hospital and they immediately took me

into a family counseling room.

I sat there waiting on...

uh, someone to come and talk to me

and tell me what was going on.

As doctors do everything they can

to save Joyce's life,

deputies from the Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office

and agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement

arrive at her house.

When you're looking at the crime scene,

you're listening to what's she has said on the 911 call,

you're trying to piece together what happened.

It was apparent that Joyce

was trying to get to John and Heather, her family,

to get help.

And the suspect had seen what was going on

and hit her with a vehicle.

There was tire tracks in the yard of her residence.

Some of the tire tracks showed down the dirt road,

then into the yard, almost like it was turning around.

And after hitting her, come back and hit her again.

Seeing the tire tracks, we noticed that the tires

on the suspect's vehicle did not match each other.

These tire tracks wouldn't be just

any type of vehicle. We were looking

for a vehicle that had some distinguishing tread

and mismatching tires.

So we knew what we was looking for.

Just south of the residence, there was evidence of a vehicle

being parked there with some fresh cigarette butts,

which led investigators to believe

that somebody was watching her and waited

for the right opportunity to make their move.

Inside, all matched what she was saying.

But whatever happened in the residence at that point,

somebody was trying to clean up the crime scene.

The subject responsible

was trying to not leave any DNA behind.

But investigators found some sheets,

some underwear, lingerie and a sponge.

That's all taken straight to be processed.

At the hospital, I remember John was calling Denise

and just telling them that something bad had happened.

My husband answers his phone,

and he says, "it's Heather.

Something's happened to Joyce, and it's bad."

And then we started getting a little bit more details.

When I finally realized that she had been raped,

I just, ugh, you never think something like that's

gonna happen in your family, never.

We waited for what felt like hours.

Eventually, the doctors tell us that...

they had-- they weren't able to save her.

They told us that we couldn't leave the room,

and then I was surrounded by investigators.

They were asking us questions. "Who do you think did this?"

I couldn't even think of one person

that would do this to Joyce.

When I returned home that day, I was scared to death.

I had a fear that this person was watching me...

that this person was gonna come back and harm one of us.

Few details are being released

in what deputies are now calling a homicide.

55-year-old Joyce Burrow was found dead

near her home, early Wednesday.

It's not a sprint, but it's a marathon,

and we're going to exhaust any and all resources

that are available.

Just a week after the murder,

investigators get a DNA hit on the yellow sponge they found

in Joyce's home.

The DNA came back to somebody who had

previously had law enforcement interaction,

and his name was Michael Porter.

We found out that he had a sexual assault case

in South Florida.

Quickly, we're pulling up everything

that they possibly can on this person.

Michael Porter is a truck driver,

and in 2013, he's 53 years old.

As it turns out, he works 20 minutes

from where Joyce Burrow lives.

Drove to a trucking company outside of Branford, Florida,

where we learned that Michael Porter's vehicle

was parked at.

As we arrived, we walked around to the back

and identified Michael Porter's late-model Ford truck.

I walked over to the vehicle

and noticed the tire tracks matched identical

to the tire tracks left at the crime scene.

There was some mismatched tire tread from the crime scene.

This had oddball tires on the truck as well.

This is the vehicle. We were looking for it.

With no sign of Porter near his personal vehicle,

officers across Florida are on the hunt for a 16-wheeler.

Finally, on the afternoon of August 3, 2013,

agents from the Florida Department

of Law Enforcement intercept Michael Porter

at a truck stop near the Florida-Georgia state line.

I remember my phone ringing,

and it was the sheriff. They asked us

if we knew a person by the name of Michael Porter.

I have no idea.

Never even heard that name ever in my life.

Michael Porter is arrested for the murder of Joyce Burrow,

but it turns out he had actually been arrested

for a similar attack years before.

An investigation into his criminal record

revealed Michael Porter was convicted in 1988

of several charges, including sexual battery,

in Pasco County.

On June 26, 1987,

50-year-old woman named Morton Young

was watching TV in her bedroom at the LaRue Motel

in Holiday, Florida.

At about 11:30, when she heard a noise,

she went to see what was going on,

and she was shocked to find a man standing there.

He wrapped a belt around her neck

and raped her while he submerged her

in a half-filled tub.

When he's done, he orders her to wait 30 minutes.

The man leaves,

and then she runs for help to a nearby gas station.

A deputy sheriff found a Marlboro cigarette

on the floor where she had been attacked.

And as it turns out,

Porter's DNA was found on that cigarette butt.

...gets his conviction overturned and gets released.

In 2002, Porter was set free

when an appeals court found his due process rights

were violated when several police reports

were not given to him during the trial.

In the decade after his release in 2002,

Michael Porter faces domestic violence charges

and pleads guilty to an assault and battery case.

Porter does serve time in prison during this period,

but he is out when Judith O'Steen

is abducted from her home.

There were similarities between these cases.

They were committed against women of a similar age.

And there had been entry made into the woman's home.

In the Judith O'Steen case,

And then out pops Judith, which is like,

"Now you've disrupted..."

...and off we go.

What's the odds of having more than one serial rapist

that liked to rape older women?

Investigators don't have any physical evidence

connecting him to the abduction of Judith O'Steen.

But prosecutors in Gilchrist County

move forward to try him for the rape and murder

of Joyce Burrow.

It was five years after Joyce's murder.

The time was coming that we were gonna have a trial.

And knowing what we know about his past,

I was scared to death that he was gonna get off.

As the trial starts, the judge issues a decision.

There should be no mention of the 1988 trial

involving 50-year-old Morton Young before the jury,

as the case had been expunged.

When I saw Porter the first time in court,

my heart was pounding.

All I could think of was what joy thinking that night.

I couldn't even hardly look at him.

On the second day of testimony,

the trial takes an unexpected turn.

They put one of Michael Porter's cellmates

on the stand, and he had said that Porter told him,

"I got away with it once before, I could get away with it again."

But he wasn't supposed to mention the first case,

because it had been a sponge, that resulted in a mistrial.

I was just... heartbroken,

thinking that he's gonna get off.

Finally, a new trial for Michael Porter

is scheduled for October.

We went back for the trial,

hopeful this time that everything would go well.

Porter would look at us, smile at us, wink at us.

Made us very uncomfortable.

He was so cocky sitting there.

First time I heard the 911 call was at the trial.

Heather asked Joyce questions, "What happened?"

And you could hear Joyce say, "He ran over me."

I do remember the gasp in the room from the jury.

She was a witness to her own murder

and was able to speak at her own trial.

That was huge.

Testimony wraps, and both sides rest their case,

and the jury begins deliberations.

We were nervous

that there wouldn't be justice for Joyce's murder.

The jury, they deliberated for four hours,

and we got a call that they had a verdict.

58-year-old Michael Porter was accused of killing

55-year-old Joyce Burrow back in 2013,

and tonight a jury has found him guilty.

I'm not gonna say it's closure,

because there's no such thing as closure.

I was, I was so glad I didn't have to look at his face again,

and that none of us had to go through that again.

It was a relief,

but not a closure. There's no such thing.

Five years after Joyce Burroughs' murder,

Michael D. Porter is sentenced to life in prison

on charges of first degree murder,

burglary, assault, and sexual battery.

There's always still that fear.

He'll file for an appeal and get off.

But I think justice was served.

I just hope everyone will remember Joyce

as just the wonderful, kind-hearted person she was.

I miss her.

Life is not the same without her.

Your family stories,

I've got no one to share them with,

because we thought we was gonna grow,

be old ladies together.

So I miss-- I just miss her.

Police still don't have any evidence

linking Michael Porter

to Judith O'Steen's disappearance.

So everything's still in question.

I think Porter is a habitual rapist.

I think he's done it before he did Joyce.

I think it might be many people out there.

But with Michael Porter, it seems like shoe sure fits.

Michael Porter remains a person of interest,

and "People Magazine Investigates"

has reached out for an interview.

But to date, he has not yet responded.

There's enough similarities

between the two cases,

and the fact that he does resemble the sketch

makes him someone that we wanna talk to now.

I retired from the Dixie County Sheriff's Office in 2021.

Right now, I'm the lead investigator on the case.

And with me coming in 17 years later,

everybody's fresh to me.

This is the evidence that was on file at the sheriff's office

for the Judith O'Steen case.

There was DNA that was collected at the house

from various locations.

There's some doorknob swabs

and cigarette butts that are all housed in here.

They have already been sent and processed through lab.

So far, none of the DNA from the scene

has been matched to Michael Porter

or any of the other suspects.

Investigators never forget their previous cases,

and it's the same with the cold cases.

Once you open that box, it's your case.

You don't ever let it really get too far out of your mind.

I hope that people remember Judith,

and I hope we can find out what happened to Judith.

My mom was a wonderful person,

a good person.

At the end of the day, she saved her sister's life

to give up her home.

My Aunt Catherine, she's no longer with us.

She had Alzheimer's at the nursing home,

before she passed.

There's so much that has been taken away from our family.

How do you deal with the fact that your mom has been abducted

and murdered, and it's never going to leave your mind?

After all of these years,

I wish I could find out exactly what happened to her,

because we don't have anything concrete.

So I just pray that someone will come forward

and give some information that can help solve this case.