Original subtitles

LATART: On January 6, 2002,

Tim Arnold, who was

Christa Worthington's last boyfriend,

was going to return a flashlight.

Tim gets out of the car,

and he walks up to the back door.

He can see Christa Worthington on the floor.

- Her baby daughter was next to her.

She said to him,

"Mommy fell."

- The phone rang.

All I hear at the other end is sobbing.

"It's Christa, Christa!

She's been killed!"

[dramatic music playing]

NARRATOR: Three years after moving to Cape Cod,

Christa Worthington was found dead in her home.

- There had clearly been a big and violent physical struggle.

MANSO: Christa was splayed out

on the floor of the kitchen.

CARROLL: She had been stabbed twice.

Once, so deeply that

the knife had gone through her neck and nicked the floor.

LATART: She was beaten and bloody.

REPORTER: A single mother found dead.

According to investigators,

blood spattered around the house.

And by the victim's side,

her two-year-old daughter, unharmed.

- For the first time in generations,

the people of Truro began to lock their doors.

CARROLL: The police were

not used to handling murders.

They left fingerprints, they didn't properly

secure the scene.

- There were ten to 20 people that had

been walking around her house

during the investigation.

And even first responders used one

of her personal blankets

and then one of their own blankets

to cover her body,

not realizing that they were

actually contaminating the scene.

Police found nine fingerprints around her body.

The problem that they ran into was, a lot of the blood around

the house had been moved around by Ava

during the 24 to 36 hours that she was alone

with her deceased mother.

MANSO: And Ava had been attempting to wash

the blood off Christa's body.

- You could tell that she had tried to revive her mother.

And just the idea that this happened to a child

is heartbreaking.

NARRATOR: Investigators had little evidence to go on.

No murder weapon, no usable fingerprints,

no clear motive.

But there was one key discovery that

shed light on her final moments.

- DNA was found on Christa's breast

and there was semen inside her vagina.

This leads police to believe

that she had previously had sex up until the murder.

NARRATOR: Immediately, police look

at the men in her life as main suspects.

Tim Arnold, the man who found her body,

and the father of her daughter, Tony Jackett.

- Doesn't worry me at all, only because I've,

you know... didn't do it.

NARRATOR: But both Tony and Tim had alibis,

leaving the police with little to go on

and their own assumptions about Christa's sex life.

DENNIS: It is presented by investigators that

Christa Worthington was

promiscuous.

- They were looking for somebody who fit into their narrative.

Any man who had come

across Christa was a potential suspect,

because investigators believed Christa

was having sex with every man

that she came across in her daily life,

which was clearly wrong.

- Good afternoon, everyone.

MANSO: Mike O'Keefe,

who was the most powerful elected official

on Cape Cod, as the district attorney,

he was widely quoted.

- Let me just read another excerpt if I could.

"The-the more I look at her--

Worthington-- the uglier she gets," O'Keefe says.

"She was an equal-opportunity employer.

"She'd have sex with the husbands of her female friends--

the butcher or the banker."

REPORTER: There are several people who know this woman,

who think that her character has been

besmirched by this investigation.

- Well, you know, these cases are very difficult.

- [reporters clamoring] - Thank you.

NARRATOR: With O'Keefe's statements,

the tone for Christa's investigation was set.

But the narrative around town was even worse.

- I was at a local filling station,

and it wasn't, "Hi," it wasn't "Good day,"

it was simply, "I didn't fuck her.

Did you?"

That was the response of many men in Truro.

- They wanted to know if they could take

a DNA sample to help out a little girl.

- To in-invade everybody's privacy

in the town is just a bit ridiculous.

- I mean, I have nothing to hide.

- ♪ Who are you? ♪

CARROLL: Three years after Christa's

body is discovered, investigators

still really don't have any leads.

They're setting up

random DNA testings with basically

every man in the town.

- ♪ Back against the wall ♪

- They screen hundreds of men.

- Which is basically like saying, "Okay,

"all the guys here that could have

"slept with her, give us your DNA, so we can figure out

which one of you did and which one of you didn't."

CARROLL: They're really kind of just

grasping at straws.

They still have not tested the rape kit.

MANSO: And the ACLU, of course, filed a lawsuit.

SPOKESPERSON: People who want

to assert their constitutional right to privacy,

uh, somehow should become a suspect in a murder case.

CARROLL: This all goes back to the idea of Christa

as this sexually voracious

femme fatale.

♪

NARRATOR: Amid the war on her character,

police were eyeing a new suspect.

And when they finally test the DNA from Christa's body,

there was a match.