Original subtitles

To choke somebody to death requires.

A great deal of intent.

An innocent victim.

She was very much a social butterfly,

and everybody knew her.

A dark mystery with multiple suspects.

Love triangles are powder kegs.

They are very unstable.

We said, "hey, we think she's dead.

Did you kill her?"

If she's telling him it's over,

he really has nothing to lose financially

by killing her.

The truth will be revealed.

Boom... this is the guy who did it.

Now we just have to prove it.

Every day in North America,

dozens of people are murdered.

The key to solving the toughest of these homicides

lies in the final 24 hours of the victim's life.

To crack the case,

detectives must reconstruct that critical timeline,

the minutes and hours containing evidence

that can help unlock the mystery

and catch the killer.

Anna Maria island,

a seven-mile strip of soft white sand

in the Gulf coast of Florida.

What's unique about Anna Marie island

is it's just naturally beautiful.

It's got wide beaches, soft sand.

It does attract a lot of tourists.

But the community has been able to stay free of

corporate tourism.

It has that old Florida feel where

the buildings are still low to the ground.

There's not major signage everywhere,

so it's really a gem.

The criminal activity of Anna Maria island relative to

the rest of manatee county is pretty low.

Murders are extremely rare.

It's early morning, November 2008.

Two patrol deputies pull over

a white convertible for a broken taillight.

But when they approach the car,

the driver takes off running.

First thing that pops into their head is probably

a stolen car.

So the first person you go after is the driver.

The deputies give chase and eventually apprehend

Robert corona,

a two-bit criminal known to local police.

He's a car thief,

and he had had several convictions for that type

of offense.

However, he did not have any violent convictions.

When we first talked to him, he said,

he met this woman and a man in the gator lounge bar,

and they wanted some crack,

"so she loaned me her car to go get it."

And not having the whole story,

we said, "okay."

When investigators run the license plate of

the convertible,

they see it belongs to 49-year-old hotelier

sabine musil-buehler.

Sabine is a native German, and she was in the tourism

business there,

and so she came to Anna Maria and fell in love with it.

She was very much a social butterfly,

and sort of everybody knew her.

She met her husband, Tom,

and they decided to buy a hotel together,

which turned out to be Haley's motel,

a nice little popular spot that people really loved.

So I came out to Haley's motel

where sabine lived with her husband

to make notification that her car has been impounded.

And I said, "well, it was impounded

"and in east bradenton, off 14 street."

Bradenton is just nine miles

east of Anna Maria island.

But in every way that matters, it's a world apart.

The area is not the best part of town.

There is a certain amount of street crime that occurs there.

Her husband, Tom, says that she doesn't go there.

She doesn't drink. She doesn't smoke.

She doesn't do anything like that.

She was not out there.

There's prostitutes and bars,

and she had no interest in either.

Tom says he hasn't seen sabine in two days.

Tom advised US that they were estranged,

they had been estranged for quite a while,

and that she was living mostly half

a mile away at her boyfriend's apartment,

bill cumber.

Tom directs investigators to bill's

apartment, but sabine isn't there, either.

When we went to cumber's residence and was talking

to him, he said the last time he saw sabine

was like about 10 o'clock November 4th.

It was election night, and she had left

to go to a party celebrating the election.

Well, she never showed up.

And she was very enthusiastic about

President Obama's candidacy.

So that was kind of a tip off

right then that something might be wrong.

In my experience, it's very rare for someone to disappear

off the face of the earth and not come back within 12 hours,

24 hours, 48 hours.

And knowing that their car had been stolen,

and they were nowhere to be found,

that's very quickly a situation that

becomes suspicious.

Tasked with investigating

sabine's disappearance is detective Peter rampone.

There's a lot of steps that have to be taken to establish

that someone who is missing is indeed dead,

and it's very difficult.

We checked all of her credit cards.

We checked airline flights.

But there was no paper trail of

her having done anything after 10 o'clock,

election night, November 4th.

Detective rampone impounds the car

and calls in the forensic team.

There was evidence in the back of the car,

which indicated that something had happened.

The back seat was cluttered with newspapers,

and there was some Halloween stuff back there

and some kind of a stuffed bird

thing laying in the back seat.

When they moved the bird, we saw the hole.

The seat cushion was cut out,

and the seat padding underneath of it,

and it was like you could see the floor of the...

The vehicle.

Investigators conduct a luminol test

on the back seat.

Luminol, which you spray on it,

and if it turns a certain color, like blue,

then it's human blood.

It's definitive... there's blood all around

the cutout patch in the back seat.

So they took DNA swabs from around that circular patch,

both the inside of the patch and then around it,

and then they sent that evidence off for DNA testing.

They also find drops of blood

on the exterior rear left door.

We believed at that point we felt pretty certain

that she was dead.

We just didn't know where.

A no-body homicide or a suspected murder

but with no body, these are cases

that overwhelmingly point to that there is no other

conclusion other than that someone has been murdered.

And in the absence of a body,

you really need to build that evidence through other means.

To find out what happened

to sabine musil-buehler,

detectives must unravel the last 24 hours of her life.

It's extremely important, especially when you have

a whodunnit kind of thing.

You want to establish a timeline so that you can

place people where they were or weren't during that period,

and you go through and rule them out or add them in.

Their first suspect is the man caught driving

sabine's car in the early hours of November 6th,

Robert corona.

The first person you go after is the driver,

because they're more culpable to being involved in a crime.

So we decided to go back and talk to Mr. Corona.

The potential theory would have been that sabine

had somehow driven into the city of bradenton,

encountered Mr. Corona, that he had killed her

and taken her car.

Corona had initially told them that sabine had

lent him the car to go buy drugs.

It sounded plausible, but that was before they found

the blood.

So he's confronted, and he's told, "look,

"this is... this is basically a homicide investigation.

"You better be straight with US about

how you came into possession of this car."

We said, "hey, um," we think she's dead.

Did you kill her?"

And he readily admitted that he stole the car at

that point, that the drug thing was made up by him.

And he immediately gave US another story,

that he was checking cars behind the businesses.

He found one at the gator lounge with the window

open and the keys in it,

how convenient, and drove away and got stopped and arrested.

In an attempt to verify corona's story,

detectives head to the gator lounge in bradenton.

They show the night bartenders a picture of sabine

and a picture of her car and ask if they've ever seen

either before.

And they both said, "no, we've never seen her before."

And I asked about the camera

in the back of the bar, and he said, "it's fake.

It's just there for looks."

So we said, "okay," but the bar manager did say that

when she left after the bar closed,

she saw sabine's car parked in the southwest corner of

the building, and it was just sitting there.

And that fit what Mr. Corona was saying.

So at that point, we pretty much eliminated corona.

With corona's account believed to be true,

detectives are now able

to narrow down the timeline of

sabine's disappearance.

The bar manager would have seen sabine's car in

the parking lot after 2:30

because that's when the bar was officially emptied, closed.

Corona

said he went through the parking lot,

walking down the back of businesses,

and that was the only car in the parking lot.

And the time he got pulled over was

just minutes after he took the car.

The fact that the bar manager sees the vehicle

there in the early morning hours of the sixth

tells the investigators that sometime between 10 and 11 P.M.,

when cumber says he last saw her alive, and the time that her

vehicle is first observed at

the gator lounge, she's likely been killed.

With corona ruled out,

investigators are looking at just two main suspects.

One of the things you do when you have a homicide,

the first thing you look at is

the immediate circle of family and friends.

And in this case, you know, Tom was there,

cumber was there,

and really nobody else was there.

In cases where a female spouse is the victim of homicide,

we logically think of intimate partners.

And in this case, you know, you have the husband, who is

a business partner.

And then we also have a current boyfriend with some

potential motivation, as well.

We got a lot of phone calls

from friends of sabine, and some people said, "well,

Tom did it. Tom did it."

You know, other people were saying bill cumber did it.

So it's... it's a mind game.

With little physical evidence to work with in

the no-body homicide of sabine musil-buehler,

detectives are looking at both her husband and her boyfriend

as possible suspects... they start by

interrogating her boyfriend.

Tom and sabine had been married for years

at the time of her disappearance,

but the new element in her life was William cumber.

Bill cumber's 39 years old,

and he's known as quite a charismatic guy around town.

And, you know, some people would say

he was a good-looking gentleman.

Mr. Cumber was very candid about his background.

He said he had a history of getting

angry at women and doing violent acts when scorned.

He confessed to that and was convicted of that

and went to prison for that.

But he insists that he's a changed man.

Okay.

Bill credits sabine with giving him

the new start he so desperately needed

three years earlier.

Bill cumber showed up at Haley's motel

one day and told a story of how he had

just gotten out of prison and was looking for work.

He said, "I am coming from a difficult past

"where I have been in prison. I'm very handy with things.

"Is there anything I can do around your hotel

for a little walking money?"

So he began to do little projects,

because they're very welcoming,

you know, heartfelt people

who saw a guy they wanted to help.

Bill tells detectives that what started as

a friendship between sabine and himself soon became

something more.

He was a craftsman.

He was an excellent woodworker.

Saw some of the things he had made

and they were just astounding.

And I believe he was an artist, as well.

So she was kind of receptive

to those traits that this guy

portrayed and possessed.

Bill's criminal past is viewed as suspicious,

so investigators ask him for a detailed breakdown

of the last day he spent with sabine.

He said they had gone to the dentist in the afternoon,

sabine and cumber,

and she was paying for him to have some dental work done.

And I think she left him for a time and then

came back to the apartment on magnolia Avenue

where they had dinner.

According to Mr. Cumber, he made vegetarian spaghetti.

She drank wine.

Mr. Cumber claimed that he had not spoken

to sabine since then.

He had been attempting to reach her by phone

several times.

He then went over to Haley's motel on the morning

of the fifth to confer with Tom buehler about

her disappearance.

Mr. Cumber claimed Tom buehler had told him that sabine

sometimes just went off on her own and,

would reappear.

He didn't seem upset.

He didn't appear to be

in any frantic hurry to help look for her.

Detectives subpoena bill's phone records

to see if he's telling the truth about

trying to reach her.

There were no calls. Nothing.

After 10 o'clock on November 4th,

there's no record of him calling anybody,

and that's a big red flag.

While they can't rule bill out,

detectives struggle to find a reason why he might want

sabine dead.

She was taking care of him completely.

She was renting the apartment, providing the food.

Um, she was the money person.

And so that didn't really add up very well.

This relationship was serving many needs for bill.

He gets out of prison. He has nothing.

He has somebody who's willing to cultivate

a relationship with him and even financially support

that relationship.

Mr. Cumber obviously was a suspect,

given his prior history,

but police were never able to find any

ultimate motive that established him as

the perpetrator.

He was losing a great deal with her,

with her being gone.

He's still on the list, and we're watching,

but evidence and interviews and situations

took US in a different direction.

When asked who he thinks

would want to hurt sabine,

bill points the finger directly at her husband,

Tom, insisting he was jealous of their relationship.

Love triangles are powder kegs.

They are very unstable.

You introduce jealousy, you introduce resentment,

you introduce humiliation,

and those can be powerful motivators for someone

who needs to be in control.

Then, out of the blue, investigators get a call

that a fire has broken out at Haley's motel.

When the fire broke out at the hotel,

it was such a second shock

that immediately people believe

that the two are related... Her disappearance

and the fire and whether Tom maybe set it

because the hotel was struggling.

Fire is always a great eradicator of evidence,

that's why when it shows up in an unusual

or suspicious circumstance,

you always need to dig deeper in terms of was the fire

the main crime?

After a fire rages through Haley's motel

just 12 days after sabine's disappearance,

investigators hone in on her estranged husband, Tom buehler.

To me, the obvious or intuitive reasoning

behind why Tom may have

burned down the hotel is obviously, number one,

to potentially destroy evidence.

Number two would come back to money... fires

equal insurance settlements, for the most part,

and in this case, you could have that double whammy.

With heightened suspicions about

Tom's involvement in sabine's disappearance,

detectives subpoena the motel's public

financial records.

There was some financial problems.

The business wasn't doing that well,

and Tom had a buyer from Europe, Germany

to be specific, who was interested in buying the place.

And with sabine being gone,

Tom gets all the money.

With money being a possible motive,

detectives ask Tom whether or not he had

taken out an insurance policy on sabine's life.

Tom told one of my detectives that he has

an insurance policy out on her for $100,000.

Tom volunteered that

he forgot about the $300,000 policy

he had taken out years before,

um, and that concerned US, as well.

Not only that, investigators discover

that he had recently filed court papers

to have sabine officially declared dead.

And as that played out, people started to

dig up those possible feelings of, well,

if they haven't found her,

why would he want her declared dead at this point?

You know, maybe there's still hope she's alive.

This is kind of strange.

With their suspicions deepening,

detectives question Tom about his whereabouts between 10 P.M.

On November 4th and 2:30 A.M.

November 6th, the window in which they believe sabine

was killed.

Tom said he was attending an election party

and was there with his girlfriend,

and there were several people

that would have attested to his whereabouts

during the time of her disappearance.

Alibis can be tricky in that just because you were

at a certain place at a certain time doesn't

necessarily mean that you couldn't have also been

somewhere else immediately

thereafter and returned to the original place.

We may be dealing with a large,

as we are in this case, window of time,

where you have the opportunity to literally be in multiple

places not at once, but in immediate succession.

Detectives search Tom's house, looking

for any evidence of foul play.

Tom had an injury on his head,

a small scratch, and we asked him about it,

and he said, "I was hanging some blinds in my bedroom,

"and when I was hanging them,

they fell on me and struck me in the head."

So we went and looked at the blinds,

and they were kind of askew,

and there's a little drop of blood on one of the blinds,

which is consistent with the story he had told US.

So he didn't hide it, you know, he told US right away

what he... where he got it.

And when the fire marshals tests Tom's hands for

accelerant found in the motel's debris,

they find nothing.

Finally, detectives confront Tom about bill's claim that

he was jealous of his wife's extramarital relationship.

Tom said the romantic aspect of the relationship

had ended years ago,

but they remained friends and business associates.

They had the house divided.

He lived in half, she lived in the other.

The kitchen was in the middle. That was neutral.

That way both stayed out of each other's way.

Tom had a girlfriend, so the idea that somehow

he suddenly became enraged

and jealous at this particular point didn't seem very likely.

But despite the fact that detectives aren't able to

conclusively rule out Tom or bill at this point,

there just isn't enough evidence to charge either

of them in sabine's disappearance.

I only have heard of one case where they prosecuted

somebody without a body, and they got a conviction,

and we had to... We really had to get a body.

The sheriff's office brings in cadaver dogs to search

a section of the beach near Haley's motel.

We felt pretty certain she had

been buried out at the beach somewhere.

We started using...

Dogs, ground-penetrating radar.

Then we used a bulldozer, and we would scrape very little,

and if they hit a branch or something, they'd stop,

dig around it and find, "no, keep going."

And we dug up...

A mile of beach, very wide

and went down as deep as you could.

But they come up empty-handed.

It got to a point where no, nobody's dragging a body

this far.

Then a tip comes in.

There were two women who claimed to have

seen someone who looked like sabine at the airport.

There's cases of missing persons who go on vacation

for, say, a month and don't tell anybody,

and they come back from their vacation,

and everybody's wondering,

you know, where they've been.

So it was raised as a distinct possibility.

Could she have gone somewhere

and not returned? Or maybe she'll show up.

But she would have to use some form of money to survive on,

and we couldn't find a trace of that.

There was no record of sabine having taken any flight.

Also, video camera footage from the airport was reviewed,

and there was no image

of sabine at the airport at the time the women claimed

to have seen her.

You have to chase every lead until you hit a wall,

and then you go to the next lead, and you're chasing

that one until you

gather every... enough information.

Detectives finally catch a break in the case

when they get a call from

a neighbor of sabine's who lives on the beach.

They have a sidewalk, which is just wide enough for, say,

a golf cart to go down, and it runs

parallel to the beach.

There was a little jut of wooded area that came

off that sidewalk towards the beach with trees,

and the neighbor,

he was out clearing out some stuff,

and he moved some logs or debris,

and he found a purse in there.

He did open it and looked, and it was sabine's purse,

with her ID and some, I guess, credit cards and cellphone.

Whoever disposed of it there had to know the area kind of

to be on that walkway that's,

you know, only accessible by

side streets,

and this wasn't near a side street, it just...

Made US think, well, I know who knows

this area pretty well.

The discovery of sabine musil-buehler's purse

buried near the beach provides

the first solid clue to who might be responsible

for her murder.

Its location is critical, because it's just a couple

blocks down from Mr. Cumber's residence on magnolia Avenue,

and it just keeps pointing back to

Mr. Cumber, that he is the person responsible.

With that in mind, detectives take

a closer look at bill cumber's prison record.

A few years before,

Mr. Cumber met a woman,

um, felt that she had rejected him,

and so he set fire to the residence that she was

residing in at a time

she and several other individuals

were inside the house.

Now knowing that bill's history includes

an arson conviction,

investigators question him directly about the fire

at Haley's motel.

Fire marshals said there was an accelerant used.

Um, at some point, I believe the fire marshal

spoke with cumber.

They did some kind of test,

and he had some kind of accelerant on his hands.

And cumber explained that away, as at his workshop,

his lock was stuck, and he sprayed wd-40 in there.

Mr. Cumber does allow them to search his apartment.

They looked for any kind of gasoline containers.

They examined the area of

the apartment for traces of an accelerant,

but they weren't able to find anything

to definitively link him to the arson.

But they find, um,

blood on the couch inside the apartment,

which they then take swabs of and submit for DNA testing.

Then detectives notice something else.

I noticed on his hand, he had

a wound right in the center of his palm.

And I asked him, I said, "where did you get that?"

And he goes, "I was riding my bike, and I skidded,

and I fell into the shells, and I scraped my hand."

No, I've done that my entire life as a kid.

You don't get a blister in the middle of your hand.

That blister on his hand was from a shovel.

Detectives bring cumber down to

the station for a more serious sit down.

What they see solidifies their suspicions.

We had him come into the office,

and detective alvarado and detective kenney

interviewed him.

I was watching on a video,

and they questioned him for quite a while,

and they asked him what about the cut in the seat,

something to that effect.

And he made an up and down motion like

he was holding a knife and making a circle

and cutting out the seat cover.

So for him to have made that gesture indicated

he knew the shape that had been cut out of the seat.

I was watching the video,

and I'm like, "my gosh,

that's how the seat cover was taken out."

Mr. Cumber would have had no means of knowing that other

than having been the person who cut out the piece

of upholstery.

And in our minds then, boom, this is the guy who did it.

Now we just have to prove it.

Detectives decide to force bill

into showing his hand.

Police will often bluff suspects by presenting them

with claims of evidence

that they don't actually have in hopes of

getting an admission.

Detectives know that the camera at the back of

the gator lounge,

where sabine's car was found, isn't functional.

It's a fake, but bill doesn't know that.

When we interviewed cumber the next evening,

we mentioned to him,

"well, there's a camera out behind the gator lounge.

"We haven't got the tape yet,

and then when we do, we gotta process it."

Which is nonsense, "but,

whoever dropped that car off is gonna be on that video."

That led Mr. Cumber

to go to the gator lounge and confront

the manager and ask, in fact,

whether they had video cameras trained on the parking lot,

which only a guilty person would have done.

No innocent person would be concerned

that he had appeared on a video.

So that was one of the most telling aspects

of the case that pointed to Mr. Cumber's guilt.

That was an indication that we're on the right track,

you know, we got him. We just got to get him.

While investigators wait for the lab

to process the blood found in bill's apartment,

they uncover an important clue.

November 4th, sometime after 10,

sabine's car had been parked out on the beach,

a quarter of a mile away from the apartment she shared

with William, and that raised concern.

And the reason we found that out is because

a deputy was driving around that night, and he saw

a car parked in a no parking zone,

and he wrote it a ticket.

The discovery helps illuminate sabine's movements

on the night she disappeared.

The timeline we had was

sabine's last known to be with Mr. Cumber

between 10 and 11 according to his statement.

Her car is documented two blocks away

by the parking ticket

at 5:10 A.M. on the 5th, so roughly six hours

after he last said he had been with her.

Well, it's only two blocks away from where

Mr. Cumber lives.

It would make sense for him to want to place

her car somewhere other than their residence

if he's killed her.

And then, of course, he can easily walk

the distance back to his residence that evening.

It gave US a timeline,

told US where the vehicle had been

as opposed to the gator lounge,

and it just kind of all fit.

When detectives attempt to arrest bill,

they find that he's left town.

He was making a getaway, trying to disappear.

Fleeing is kind of a good indicator of guilt.

As investigators zero in on bill cumber

for the suspected homicide of sabine musil-buehler,

he's apprehended fleeing the state.

He's heading up north towards i-4,

and he had a taillight out,

and he shouldn't have been driving... he's got no license.

And he's on probation.

Well, normally, violation of probation, you know,

you may get a little bit of jail time, or...

You can get before a judge who finds out that there's

a murder investigation going on,

and you can get 13, 14 years,

which is what he got, so he's on ice.

That gave US all some breathing space to try to

continue the investigation without having to worry that,

you know, he could potentially kill somebody else.

Meanwhile,

the detectives finally get the forensic results

from the blood taken from sabine's car.

DNA is perhaps

the most persuasive physical evidence you can have.

We had Mr. Cumber's DNA on the driver's seat area

and also in and around the area that had been cut out

in the back seat.

And we have sabine's blood in the area that's been cut out,

keeping in mind that Mr. Cumber

supposedly had never driven that car.

So we decided we had all the evidence we were going

to get... we were probably not gonna find her body.

And so, ultimately, the decision was

made to charge Mr. Cumber with murder.

As they prepare their case against bill cumber,

detectives put pressure on him to confess.

We hounded him for years and years.

We just didn't let up.

And he just was exhausted, and knew he was

gonna be in jail for a long time,

and he just gave up.

Cumber finally tells detectives exactly

what happened to sabine musil-buehler

in her last 24 hours.

She took him to the dental office

for him to get some dental work done,

and he was observed to be in ill temper.

They then watched the election returns.

She drank a bottle of wine, and somewhere in

the area of 10 to 11, he tried to smoke a cigarette.

She found out about it and basically told him it was over.

He then wrapped her up in a blanket,

put her in the back seat of the car,

and he decided he was gonna Bury her out on the beach.

The following day, he takes the car,

he drives it into bradenton.

This is now November 5, 2008.

And he leaves it at the gator lounge with the keys

in the ignition in the hopes that someone will take it

and thus become the prime suspect

in Ms. Musil-buehler's disappearance.

He takes the last bus back to the island

and goes back to the apartment that they had shared.

I don't think Mr. Cumber planned to kill her

prior to the evening of November 4th.

I believe he was angry at

the loss of what she could provide for him,

financially.

Having been denied something he wanted,

he chose to kill her.

However, to choke somebody to death

requires a great deal of intent.

It's not a split-second act like shooting a gun

in the heat of the moment.

It requires a sustained effort,

which shows some intent to kill.

In exchange for a reduced sentence,

cumber agrees to reveal the location of sabine's grave.

Mr. Cumber then got in a law enforcement vehicle

and took the police to the location,

which was a couple blocks away from Haley's motel,

under a covered area where people can

sit on a bench and look at the beach.

He was somber.

He kneeled down at the burial site,

supposedly said a prayer.

He affected remorse.

Whether he actually felt it, I don't know.

Investigators begin digging for sabine's remains.

We started finding items associated with sabine

roughly three feet down from the surface of the sand.

Her clothing was with her.

I believe a piece of jewelry was with her.

The remains were completely skeletonized.

I think finding the body provided the family with

a measure of relief and certainty

that they had lacked.

I think ultimately, this was

something that gave them some peace of mind.

Bill is sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He will be eligible for parole in 2029.

The timeline is important in all murder cases,

but in this case, because she initially wasn't found,

we had to come up with a convincing narrative,

potentially to a jury that, in fact, she is dead,

and this is why we know she's dead,

and the timeline was basically

the critical aspect of that narrative.

But the victory is bittersweet.

You never forget the family members of the victims.

You never forget their trauma.

It's the ultimate act of violence, and it disturbs

a family typically.

And in this case, it disturbed an entire community.

You gotta weigh closure against sorrow and loss, you know,

and that's a difficult thing to measure.

For the family, can't ever really be closure,

'cause you wake up every day and you know they're gone.