Original subtitles

Cold cases can haunt a detective forever.

And, in 1996, that detective was me.

The murder of Annie Ross

is one of the oldest cold cases in America.

Annie's so sweet, she's so lovable.

You know, it sent chills down my spine.

When you've just heard that your best friend's murdered,

everybody is a suspect.

Was it somebody in her inner circle of close friends?

There were as many as 50 suspects.

We hit brick wall

after brick wall after brick wall.

I was getting to a point where I had retirement in my binoculars,

but I felt a connection with her.

You chose to start this,

and now you see it through to the end.

There's somebody walking the streets right now

that committed a crime all these years ago,

and never had to answer for it.

If this guy does something really bad again,

the blood's on our hands.

I broke the mold with my family,

I was the first to become a police officer.

I became interested in law enforcement

during the time spent in the Navy.

I was befriended by a current LAPD officer.

He took me on a ride-along,

and it was nothing like I ever thought.

He acted with compassion, he was dedicated,

he spent his career helping people.

It was at that point

when I knew I wanted a career in law enforcement.

La Palma is a very quiet bedroom community, safe.

I was raised right down the street from La Palma.

People here are genuine and very friendly.

I became a full-time police officer

with the La Palma Police Department in May of 1991.

I started working for the patrol division,

that's what everybody has to start out with.

Wally Davis was my first field training officer.

I remember riding around in a black and white with him.

On my first day on patrol,

Wally told me about the city's only unsolved homicide.

The murder of Annie Greenthings.

Annie's case haunted every single investigator.

Since 1974, this case has been a legend

with the La Palma Police Department.

Every single detective that went through the bureau,

they took a crack at it, going,

"Who could have possibly done this?"

But 22 years later,

when I rotated into the detective bureau,

the case was still unsolved.

In 1996, here I am, a new detective.

I had something to prove.

I wanted to be the one who solved this case.

I had asked the sergeant at the time

if I could go through the Ross case.

And he goes, "Go knock your socks off."

So, I go in there,

walking into that evidence room

and looking on that third shelf,

and then seeing the last name of Ross

in '74,

and I just dug right into it.

First thing I see in there was a brown purse

with all the contents still inside.

It was like going back in time.

I found an address book, her sunglasses.

I found journals, I found letters,

I found her wallet

with her driver's license in it.

And I saw her jawbone that was collected as evidence.

And then I pulled out another item,

it was a Kodak camera.

We got those pictures developed.

I went through every single picture.

I felt a connection with her,

and I felt as though she's looking down on us right now,

asking us, begging us to find who was responsible for this.

And then I see the original report

from the responding officer, Jim Wells.

Something in here could, basically, tell us who did this.

December 11th, 1974,

I was working swing shift in La Palma in patrol.

I had only been a police officer a little over a year.

There was no 911 back then.

A call would come in on a regular business line,

and somebody would report a crime.

I got a call of a death

occurring at one of our apartment complex.

So, I responded and went to the door.

It was your typical '70s apartment.

You walked in,

and off to the left would be a small dining area,

behind that, the kitchen.

Off to the right would be the living room area.

And you walk straight through the small hallway,

that was the bedroom

and then, off to one side, was the bathroom.

So, it was just the four little rooms

that comprised the apartment.

And I went back there, and that's when I first saw Annie.

She was laying face down in the bed, her head tilted to one side,

part of her body was covered by bedding.

Her arms were out

and she appeared to be nude at the time.

There were no immediate signs of violence

or anything on the body.

It didn't appear that a crime had occurred,

so it could have been,

unlikely as it was for her age, natural causes,

but it could've been an overdose.

So, we proceeded to handle the case

as it unfolded in front of us

as death in the field.

It wasn't till waiting for the coroner and looking into this

that a small amount of blood was found,

not much more than a couple of drops.

And then somebody in the room noticed

that a small dog had been put in a dresser drawer.

That's when we said, "There might be more to this,"

and that's when investigators were called in.

Detectives had come in

and they immediately hit the ground running,

and they found a number of things.

They found an unknown blood smear

on the comforter on the middle dresser drawer,

right above the bathroom light switch,

and also on the bedroom window.

Those blood samples were collected

and booked into evidence.

But there was no information

regarding fingerprints that were collected.

There were no signs of forced entry.

They noticed that there were some puncture marks

on the side of the victim's neck.

They could tell that there were some

potential strangulation signs.

The fingernails were bent upward.

Someone who gets strangled,

the thing you're gonna do is, you're gonna grab

and you're gonna try to forcibly take that off,

which would cause your fingernails to move upward.

It looked like, based on the scratches on her neck,

that she was violently trying to free hands from her throat.

And that's when investigators knew

that this was not a natural death.

This was a homicide.

It is just unfathomable,

that sheer terror, that must have been going through her.

Detectives noticed that her big toe,

I believe it was on her right leg,

had a laceration.

They also noticed one leg was shaven and one leg was unshaven,

which would indicate that she was possibly accosted by the suspect

when she was taking her shower, shaving her legs.

Another thing that they found

was that she was violently sodomized,

there were some internal injuries to her anus,

but they were able to determine

that there was no semen present.

She was most likely alive when that trauma to her anus occurred.

And the object used in the sexual assault was never found.

Annie's murder was exceptionally brutal for the city.

La Palma had never experienced a murder scene like that.

That was why people didn't forget about it.

It was because of the nature of the crime and the brutality involved.

Within the months leading up to Annie's murder,

Annie was looking for a new lease on life.

She was 31 years old, she was recently divorced

and she moved from Tucson, Arizona,

to Southern California.

She got a dog.

She made many friends very quickly.

Everybody that knew her liked her.

She was quiet, but very good-natured.

She was searching, and she was searching for happiness.

I knew Annie from Annie Greenthings,

a plant shop.

I was interested in houseplants at that time,

and I found her shop

and I went in there to buy some plants.

When I walked in, there was just a ray of sunshine

in the back of the counter.

She was very gregarious, she was friendly.

After a few months of knowing Annie,

we became best friends.

We could confide in each other.

I would go to play with the puppy that Annie got.

That puppy was very, very protective of Annie.

We'd sit and have wine and just... total girl gossip.

You know, she was just a caring,

friendly, trustworthy, very wonderful person.

And then, all of a sudden...

she was murdered.

And I just sat and cried.

Who would wanna do something like that?

When the investigation opened up,

detectives immediately talked to everybody who was there.

Neighbors that lived right across from Annie,

they talked to the neighbors that lived directly above her.

Above, and to the side.

And they were able to establish a timeline

by those interviews.

Investigators were able to get information

about the dog and about the dog's barking.

Those people that lived there knew the routine.

When Annie walked in, door opened, door shut,

it would be unusual for the dog to be barking.

But there was a period of time,

a period of about a half hour...

where the dog was barking.

Then they heard the sounds of muffled barking,

so they were able to narrow a timeframe down.

5:00 p.m. to 5:45.

So that was a very important window of time.

But none of the neighbors saw any suspects

coming or going during that time frame.

It was quite remarkable

how a suspect could enter an apartment

without being heard, without being seen,

murder Annie, and leave nothing

but a little bit of trace blood in the apartment.

The residents of La Palma and the police force

were terrified by the fact

that this phantom could snuff the life out of a young woman,

who was going to begin a new life, for no reason.

Just take her life and leave.

Like most homicide cases, there was theories.

Was it somebody in her inner circle of close friends?

You think about everybody that she knew

or that you knew mutually,

and I didn't think anybody that we knew could kill her.

So, the day of the murder,

Annie spent most of the day at her business...

and she was supposed to go

to a housewarming party at 6:00 p.m. in Seal Beach.

Her friend Bob Johnson,

and Rod Walters, and Shari, were at Seal Beach.

Shari was dating Rod, and Annie was dating Bob off and on.

Annie was supposed to pick up pizza

and be over there about 6 o'clock.

So, 6 o'clock comes, and Annie isn't there.

So, about 6:15, I said to Rod,

"I'm surprised Annie's not here yet."

And I said, "I'm gonna start calling her."

So, I started calling her every five minutes

for a very long time, probably an hour.

At 7 o'clock, Annie's still not there.

Now, I'm really, really worried

because this is not like her.

If she was gonna be late, she would have called us.

Annie and Shari had a close enough relationship

and Annie felt comfortable to give Shari a key to the apartment.

So she told Rod,

"I need you to go backtrack the route Annie would have taken to come down here.

See, perhaps, if she broke down. Who knows?"

So he did, and he went straight to the apartment complex.

He approaches the door.

The doorknob is locked.

The apartment is completely dark, black.

He calls out for Annie. There's no response.

He makes his way to the bedroom

and noticed that Annie lay there motionless, completely nude.

He checked her pulse and there was no pulse.

So he called the La Palma Police Department

that got us to respond to the residence at that time.

About maybe 8 o'clock, the phone rang,

and I picked it up and it was Rod,

and then he told me that Annie was dead

and that she was murdered.

To find out that somebody that you loved has been murdered,

I can't even explain the feeling.

It's like everything in your body

just goes out, and you're numb

and you just sit there, like, "Is this real?"

"Did this really happen?"

And... it's awful.

We just couldn't believe it.

And after that, we went to the police station in shock, all of us.

Rod was questioned

as part of the investigation

and based on the timeframe of the murder

and when he arrived at the apartment,

he was quickly cleared.

For the same reason,

Shari was at the Seal Beach get-together, so she had an alibi as well.

Rod was able to provide the timeline.

Shari was able to provide a timeline,

but it was a little bit different with Bob,

who Annie had been dating on and off.

Apparently, Bob left the party early on

to go play basketball at John F. Kennedy High School,

which, by the way, is in La Palma,

not even a mile away from Annie's apartment.

Now, why would he go play basketball

when they were supposed to have a party?

When Bob did come home, he had a big gash in his head,

and I said, "Bob, what happened?"

Then he said, "Well, I got elbowed at the basketball game."

Now, at the police station, I'm going, "Oh, my God!"

The first thought is, "How did he really get that gash in his head?"

Shari is kinda putting two and two together,

"Okay, Annie's dead, Bob left..."

She's thinking, "Could he have done this?"

You're scared at that moment

that if Annie was murdered,

was there somebody that you knew

that was gonna come after you, like Bob?

After the police station, I was afraid to go home.

When you just heard that your best friend's murdered,

everybody is a suspect.

The original investigator at the time, Sergeant Vince Giampa,

he did so much work on this case.

And I remember the first conversation I had with him.

I asked him, "Well, who do you think did it?"

"What's your gut tell you?"

And he always said, "Bob."

He always said Bob.

The Brookside Apartments put up barbecues

so that all the residents in the apartments

could get together and meet each other.

Annie met Bob at one of the barbecues.

Annie was dating Bob off and on for several months.

But she was dating several people at a time.

Annie was not committed to Bob,

and investigators questioned the fact that, you know,

could Bob have been upset because Annie didn't wanna have a relationship with him?

So, they had their suspicions about Bob.

Why was Bob away from Rod's residence

when they're supposed to have a party?

He was playing basketball.

When investigators asked Bob,

"What was the name of the opposing team, and who won?"

He was not able to answer either of those questions.

These are things that any normal person would remember.

He's gone at the time of the murder,

and then he shows up at Rod's apartment with a gash over his eye.

The investigators did quite a bit of work.

In the first 48 hours,

they got a hold of the team captain

and some other players on the team.

Detectives were able to verify that, yes, a game took place, yes.

Bob's team played another team,

and they confirmed that Bob was actually there playing basketball.

He could not have murdered Annie

and then gone back to play basketball.

So they cleared him at that point.

After Bob,

detectives quickly moved on

to the next portion of the investigation

with the leads they obtained during the initial investigation.

The neighbors described

one of the people who would visit Annie

was a tall, skinny, dark-haired guy with a moustache

who drives an El Camino.

They were able to determine who this person was,

and that was Mike Greene.

Annie was introduced with Mike Greene

not long after she moved out here to La Palma.

The two were set up on a blind date.

It never moved beyond that, but they remained friends.

So, they decided to do a joint venture in a plant business,

Annie Greenthings, out here in La Palma.

Annie loved plants,

and Mike Greene was more into partnering up

and kind of letting her run things.

After six or so months of trying to make it at the plant shop,

things were just not going well financially.

Mike Greene and Annie,

they knew that the business wasn't going anywhere.

Annie was, she was working without a salary.

Mike Greene wasn't able to put the time he needed to,

so they both mutually agreed to sell the business.

So on December 10, Annie and Mike

were meeting two potential buyers.

Annie hosted a get-together at her apartment.

They had agreed to purchase Annie Greenthings for $3,000.

So, arrangements were made the following day,

December 11, for Annie to go to the business

and help the new owners do an inventory.

So, early in the morning,

she's there with the two buyers,

and Annie tells the new owners that she had to get going

because she had a hot date that night,

but it might turn out to be "lukewarm."

She made a phone call to Mike Greene,

They talked about, you know, how things were moving on

and that they're finishing up the inventory.

She left the plant store at 5:00.

And when she left, that was the last time anybody heard from her.

So, investigators started looking into Mike Greene and his potential motives.

Might it be because

the blind date didn't work out?

Was he upset that the business didn't work out?

Was he upset at the fact that Annie was the recipient

of most of the money of the business?

All these things point to a motive.

Of course they thought I was a suspect.

I'm not.

I think anybody who was in that situation would feel the same way.

I would think that like a ex-husband,

an ex-boyfriend, an ex-partner,

I'd be thrown right in that mix.

So, I went the next day at 8 o'clock in the morning and met with the police.

My first reaction was, "No, it couldn't be!"

You know, "Annie's so sweet, she's so lovable.

How could this happen to her?"

And the thing is, they wanna talk to you,

and they already know quite a bit about what happened.

And I knew nothing. You don't know the time.

And so you're trying to pin down your times as best as you can.

And I remembered going to dinner, what I had for dinner.

I remembered the server we had, her name was Lana.

And I'm to find out they checked on all that stuff.

I had nothing to hide, I was innocent.

Detectives were able to confirm

Mike Greene's alibi fairly quickly.

And he was eliminated as a suspect.

As far as who would have killed Annie,

I had no idea who it could have been.

I just knew her as a sweet girl.

And I thought, horrible enough

that here's this beautiful young lady being strangled to death,

being so helpless,

this killer savagely attacking her,

and it just broke my heart that it would happen to her or anybody.

And so, it just hurt very badly.

So now, what are the investigators gonna do?

They're gonna start branching out a little bit.

It's routine for investigators to look at close family

because most victims of a homicide occur by a close family member.

Annie had married Frank sometime in 1963.

She was still hung up on her ex-husband, Frank.

She wanted children and he was not able to have children.

The marriage didn't last very long.

Her and Frank divorced, and Annie wanted to start a new life in California.

Although Frank stayed in Arizona,

they maintained a good relationship.

He even put up $5,000 of his own money for anyone with information.

And investigators were able to clear Frank as a suspect

because he was able to verify what he was doing at the time of Annie's murder.

After investigating Annie's friends,

her inner circle, her family,

and ruling out any of them as potential suspects,

the probability of solving this homicide began to dwindle.

Investigators can only do so much.

They've talked to everybody that knew her,

they've got their timeline,

and they pretty much cleared everybody, a person of interest.

Detectives talked to, I know originally, in the infancy of the investigation,

more than 50 people.

Investigators had done a lot of work,

and they just hit brick wall

after brick wall after brick wall.

So they developed flyers

that they had sent to numerous police departments in California,

but no major leads came in.

So, the investigation went cold.

In the early years, I thought, you know,

"Somebody may have gotten away with this,

and are not gonna be held accountable."

When you know that somebody you loved has been murdered,

and they cannot solve the case,

it really makes you sick.

And you wonder

how the person can even live with themselves.

Although Annie's case was cold,

it was never forgotten in La Palma.

Throughout the years, every new generation of detectives

took a crack at this case, looking for a new clue.

And in 1996, that detective was me.

At that point, I felt like I had an obligation.

Because as I learned, early on in my career,

"Do not leave anything unfinished."

You chose to start this, now you see it through to the end.

And now I have a chance to be a part of something really big,

and maybe, just maybe, find something,

and then that's gonna help me solve it.

So as I'm going through the evidence, I'm pulling out envelopes,

and I'm looking at these things going,

"Unknown blood smear on bedroom window,

blood from kitchen cabinet.

Blood from above light switch.

Blood found in the bathtub."

I'm thinking, "Oh, my gosh, we have DNA."

Back in the 1970s, DNA didn't exist,

but the investigators at that time

had enough foresight to collect blood evidence

and preserve it for a future time.

Now, fast forward to 1996.

DNA was new,

but it was going to be better than fingerprints and we knew it.

So, we have this new technology now, boom.

Let's go start from square one.

If this blood is not Annie's, then we may be onto something.

A short time after that,

Orange County Sheriff's Department,

the crime lab, sent out a memo

going, "If you have cold cases with blood, send it to us."

So, we submitted it.

In those days when I was a new detective,

it took a long time to get those results,

because DNA technology was so new.

It took a long time, but we got results.

The blood came back with the Y chromosome,

which indicates blood from a male.

And that was the first break in this case.

After that DNA came back, we had it submitted in the CODIS

and we knew at that point, it wasn't a matter of "If,"

it was a matter of "When we were gonna find our suspect."

We thought he was gonna turn up fairly quickly,

but the CODIS database was new, it was still growing.

So, we knew we had to be patient with that.

While waiting for the DNA hit to come back from CODIS,

we developed a few more leads.

We had thought, you know, that it could be Ted Bundy that was involved.

That was during his reign of terror.

At that time,

Ted Bundy was operating on the West Coast.

Annie fit the description of a number of his victims,

as well as the injuries found on Annie.

The pathologist who was performing the autopsy,

said he believes there was a bite mark on the victim.

That was Ted Bundy's MO.

However, 22 years later,

DNA was able to officially eliminate Ted Bundy as a suspect.

So now, at this time, all the leads went dry.

We hadn't got a match on CODIS,

and then I had to drop the case.

So, La Palma, being a small city,

you can't hold a permanent position as a police officer.

One of the reasons being is,

you have to give everybody a chance to rotate through the different opportunities

that the La Palma Police Department had to offer.

So, typically, each position would be a three-year rotation.

So, I knew going in 1996, that I would be rotating out in 1999.

It's been three years that we developed DNA evidence,

and we haven't got a hit.

So here I am now,

rotating out of the detectives.

That was hard, that was really rough.

I spent the next six years out of the detective bureau.

I made sergeant.

So as much as I wanted to,

I didn't have any time for detective work,

especially for a 25-year-old cold case.

There was not a day that went by

that I didn't think about Annie

and solving this case.

I never felt quite complete, as a law enforcement officer and detective,

having not solved this case.

I rotated back into the detective bureau in 2005.

We were busy, I mean, there was a period of times where you're either

really, really busy or then you're not so busy.

Well, we were busy, we had a number of robberies, we had a couple of homicides.

Right around the first part of 2007,

I was frustrated because here we had blood evidence,

we had a male profile, and we've had nothing all these years.

Ten years have gone by from the time we had a DNA profile, male,

and nothing had come to fruition out of this.

And the DNA is sitting in CODIS,

and it will remain there until a match is made.

And I know that, you know, I probably have another year in detectives.

And now we have a whole new wave of investigators

that have been trained on the new technology.

We can have a fresh set of eyes

looking at this case from a different angle,

and bring something to the table.

If we're not gonna get a DNA hit,

then maybe this is what we need to solve this case.

So, as supervisor of investigations,

I made the decision that we are gonna reopen this case.

On the day we officially reopened the case,

I put some three-ring binders together of all reports.

I gave everybody their copy and I said,

"Take it home on the weekend, look at it on your own time.

I'm gonna do the same.

Because our suspect is in these binders.

I know it, I know in my heart.

The investigators way back in 1974 talked to so many people.

This person's in here."

One of those new investigators that came in

was Paul Bracciodieta.

I sat in on the detective interviews.

Paul stood out.

He was like a law-enforcement encyclopedia.

This guy had answers to everything.

Relating to search warrants, relating to laws of evidence, relating to the court process.

I was so impressed,

I recommended that he join the team.

He was brand-new, and I was getting asked

why the heck am I having him involved with this.

And I said,

"Because I know that he's a key to solving this case."

And let's just say this.

Paul was the first big break that we had on this cold case.

Many investigators can go their whole police career

without ever having an opportunity to work a cold case.

So, as a brand-new detective,

I looked at the opportunity that Jim was giving me

as too good to be true, that I wasn't gonna pass up.

I was willing to do whatever it took to help him,

and our unit, achieve that goal.

Paul Bracciodieta is like a sponge.

Paul would do things

that no other investigators wanna do.

He would get into the weeds.

He didn't care about getting dirty.

I'm pretty meticulous.

Things might jump out to me that they might not to other officers or detectives.

I have the attention span and discipline

to really pore through her case.

I think that's, overall, my personality.

Not just as a cop, but specifically as a detective.

If I told him to bring five things to the table,

Paul would bring 50 things to the table.

That weekend, one of the first things I did

was go into the La Palma PD evidence room

and start examining and re-inventorying evidence items.

The one thing that stuck with me and continues to stick with me

throughout this case, and even to this day,

was the one human remain of Annie

that we still had in evidence,

was literally her jawbone in a glass case.

They kept Annie's jawbone

just in case if a suspect was identified,

if she perhaps bit the suspect,

we'd be able to match Annie's dental records.

When you look at the pictures of Annie in life,

up until the time of her death,

it was difficult to reconcile.

You have this beautiful 31-year-old woman

whose life was snuffed out for no apparent reason at all,

and all that we have remaining of her is her set of jawbones.

She deserves much better than this,

to honor her memory, to try to find her killer.

So, when Paul came back on Monday,

I knew that he had spent a lot of time, more than anybody else.

He spent a lot of time going through that binder

and he says, "Sergeant Engen, I've got a couple of people here.

One in particular, this person's name came up in a transcribed interview,

and I can't find anywhere where this person was talked to."

And I said, "That's what we're looking for!"

In that interview transcript, Annie's girlfriend, Shari,

mentions that Annie had a casual sexual relationship

with a doctor named Fred Bisson.

I had, at one time fixed her up with a doctor friend of mine,

and they did have a few dates.

Annie definitely wanted to get married again.

She was more of a homebody,

and I don't think that relationship

worked out that well.

We looked into Fred Bisson's criminal history

and found he had no record.

He was a orthopedic resident in the Long Beach area,

and that he and Annie would get together once every few months.

We verified that nobody had followed up,

or identified Fred Bisson at the time,

or tried to talk to him.

So, I said, "We definitely need to go speak with him.

You ready? And he goes, "Let's do it."

In January 2008,

Jim and I interviewed Fred Bisson

at his residence in Los Angeles.

So, we get there, knock on the door.

He answers, and he's in his scrubs.

Reach out, shake his hand, and as I shake his hand,

his hand's already cool and clammy.

So he invites us into his house,

we sit down in the living room at the table,

and I've got my briefcase with me,

with all of Annie's photos when she was alive.

So, we started questioning him about Annie.

He said, "The name doesn't ring a bell."

Mr. Bisson was adamant that he did not know her name,

had never heard of her.

Basically, claimed to have had nothing to do with her at all.

At one point, he had to stop the interview

and go in the kitchen for a minute.

He had asked us if we wanted coffee or, you know,

water or whatever, but...

And he spent an awful lot of time in that kitchen.

And I, you know, nudge Paul and go, "Okay, be ready.

Hopefully he's not gonna, round the corner

with a deadly weapon in his hand."

He returned to the interview,

and there was a couple other times where he had to stop, excuse himself and leave.

Throughout the whole interview,

Mr. Bisson was extremely nervous,

to the point where his hands were shaking.

It looked like he was looking at a ghost.

He says, "You know, I pride myself on my memory

and she doesn't mean anything to me."

He goes, "She must not have been very important

because if she was important, I would've remembered her."

At the end of the interview, I couldn't wait to pop the question to him.

I asked Dr. Bisson if he would be willing to submit

to a "Voluntary elimination swab."

That's how I worded it.

He goes, "No, I'm not planning to volunteer a swab.

You do whatever you gotta do."

We left his residence at that point.

Shortly after that, we received notification from an attorney

that had been retained by Mr. Bisson

that he was no longer gonna answer questions

about or cooperate in any further way

with our investigation into Annie's murder.

Throughout the entire investigation,

he was the first person of interest

who did not want to cooperate ever so slightly.

He's hiding something.

At that point, our guts were telling us

that Mr. Bisson deserved further investigation

and that he likely had more information that,

for whatever reason, he was unwilling

to provide to us at that time.

In my mind, this is our guy.

So, our job now with him was to get his DNA and solve this case.

So I called the DA's office, and we have this meeting.

We gave him the whole scenario.

And I asked, "Do we have enough for a search warrant?"

He said, "No, you don't have enough for a search warrant

because you have to find something independent, a tie-in,

other than this person's name that came up in a transcript."

And then he said, "Well, you know,

you don't have to get a search warrant,

but there are other ways you can get his DNA."

I was like, "Yep."

So that night, we drove up to San Gabriel,

where he worked,

and we launched our plan on surreptitiously collecting his DNA.

The first thing we did was, went to his vehicle,

where he parked his truck, and waited for him.

Shortly after, we see him leaving work, off for the day.

He gets in his car, so he takes off, starts driving, so we follow him.

During that time, we were extremely hopeful

that he was gonna discard something

that we thought might provide a comparison DNA sample

to run against the profile we had in CODIS

for the suspect in Annie's murder.

And then he went to a liquor store.

So now we're thinking,

"Gosh, okay, hopefully he's gonna discard something."

As a brand-new detective

who had never done surveillance before,

I was worried in the back of my mind

because despite all the excitement,

despite the euphoria of a possible new break and a new suspect,

I had the fear of being discovered

and having him know what we were doing, and that we were onto him.

So, we see him drinking.

We just talked to him the other day, and now he's...

Gets off work and he drinks? Is this his normal routine?

Paul and I are thinking, "This is the behavior of somebody

who's thinking about something."

Then we see him smoking

and we could tell that he had dropped a cigarette butt.

So as he drives off and leaves,

we go straight to where he dropped the cigarette butt.

We book it and we submit it to the crime lab.

We were more than hopeful

this would be our break.

So, we're thinking this.

"We already had Dr. Bisson in a sexual relationship with Annie,

we had him refuse to voluntarily provide DNA,

then Bisson retained an attorney,

he's saying he will not answer any questions, anything at all."

So, what we did believe was that

he was afraid his DNA was gonna show up in that apartment.

So we were confident he was our guy.

We were excited at that moment

because after 34 years and the amount of detectives

and time that was put into all this,

Jim and I finally had the chance to resolve this case

that had remained unsolved over the past few decades.

And it was about two weeks after that, we got results.

A DNA comparison from Mr. Bisson

to the unknown CODIS profile was a big, fat negative.

The initial blow...

that was hard, that was really rough.

I was absolutely crushed and disappointed.

I wanted the crime to be solved,

I wanted him to be our guy.

It was disappointing, but we just had to regroup.

In the months following reopening this case,

going through 2008, we got pretty busy again.

We couldn't spend as much time on duty

working on the cold case.

But now, here, we felt like we had momentum

and we didn't wanna give that up.

So, we decided at that time, "Hey, we're gonna have to work on this off-duty."

So, we both started taking copies of the case file home,

and we both became, for lack of a better word, obsessed with the case.

Reading it backwards and forwards.

Once, twice, several times over,

and then calling each other on the weekends,

on our off-hours to discuss,

"Hey, why don't we look at this?"

Or, "Did they talk to this person back in the day?"

And make notes.

And then Monday was the day we would come back to the office

and commiserate about it.

And it was from that,

spending all our off-duty time together

investigating this case, when we realized

how much we had in common.

And Paul and I would become friends along with coworkers.

Jim mentored me,

and he was an older, more-experienced supervisor

mentoring a younger, less-experienced detective.

And that, the professional aspect, developed into a personal friendship.

We were both driven to the Ross case,

to see it through to the end.

Paul and I had the exact same goal in mind.

And so, I knew,

"If Paul is willing to put this time in it,

and I'm willing to put this time in it,

we're gonna get this thing solved."

So, Jim and I redoubled our efforts

into what else may have been overlooked over the years,

not only by prior investigators,

but, "What are we missing? What are we not seeing?"

And during one of the many go-arounds in the case file,

I saw, on page 34,

something that stood out to me.

Not because there was a lot of information in the case file, it was the exact opposite.

It was lost in the background noise of the rest of the case file.

And it was a first name and last name, Larry Stephens.

Nothing else.

No date of birth or address listed.

And that's what, the lack of information, stood out to me.

And in the investigators' report at the time,

this Larry Stephens was connected to a guy named Paul Williams,

who lived in the apartment directly above Annie.

And Paul Williams' name raised red flags

with the investigators at that time,

because a few weeks after the murder,

there was a female neighbor on the floor above Annie,

who reported a suspicious incident

where she's inside her apartment, her door's shut,

but she sees and hears what she thinks

is somebody rattling her door handle from the outside.

Naturally, she goes to see, opens the door,

looks outside the hallway, and she sees two guys walking away.

And this woman is pretty sure that the two guys came from Paul Williams' apartment.

So, Detective Powers talks to Paul Williams,

Paul Williams says, "I don't know what this lady is talking about,

I don't know anything about anybody,

I didn't touch her door handle."

But he does mention, "Yeah, I got my buddy, Larry Stephens,

he stays with me occasionally."

And that's about the extent of it.

From that point, we couldn't find any follow-up.

So, we decided, "Well, there's our next contact.

We need to go talk with, with Paul Williams."

So, we did some homework, we knew that

Paul was living out of state in Arizona.

And I knew that we had to fly to Arizona

and get this interview done.

But, right around that time, we're going through some budget cuts.

Here we are in 2008, the country is experiencing a major financial crisis,

and the last thing that the department could afford

was to spend money working on a 34-year-old cold case.

You know, we were running short on resources.

One of the things that the chief said at the time was,

"We're not paying you to fly over there."

I said, "You're not paying me for anything."

So I'm a licensed pilot, I have my own plane.

For just the cost of fuel, we can turn a long trip into a short trip.

I told Paul, I go, "Hey, we gotta do this on our own time.

So, hey, let's go talk to him, we're gonna get my plane.

We're gonna go fly to Arizona and get this interview done."

We got a rental car and we interviewed Paul.

When we spoke to Mr. Williams in Lake Havasu,

he remembered Annie Ross.

Although he did not know her very well personally,

he remembered she lived in the apartment below his.

He remembered she had a small dog and,

most importantly he remembered,

in 1974, that she had been murdered.

He had an incredible memory.

In fact, we almost thought too incredible.

Because he remembered, on the day, that it was a Wednesday

and that for some reason he left his apartment at 5:00 p.m.

That was right at the start of our time frame,

that was 15 minutes before Annie got home.

And by the time he came back,

there were police and a lot of activity in Annie's apartment,

he found out later that she was murdered.

And then we asked him,

"Would you provide us with a voluntary DNA swab?"

And readily said, "Absolutely."

So, we continue to question him.

I said, "Do you recognize this gentleman right here?"

He goes, "Yeah, that's just Larry Stephens."

We learned that Larry Stephens and Paul

went to the same high school, they became close friends.

After they graduated in 1967,

they continued to remain good friends

up until the time, later on down the road,

when Paul moved from La Palma to Lake Havasu.

And we asked him, "When was the last time you saw or talked to Larry?"

And he said, "Right around the time of the homicide."

"Really? You never kept touch with him after that?" He goes, "No, not really."

So, we go, "Okay.

So, you know, how would you describe him?"

And he said, "He's harmless, he wouldn't hurt a fly.

You know, he just loved to smoke his marijuana.

He didn't wanna be bothered.

He just, he wanted to smoke his marijuana. That's all he liked to do."

So, we asked, "Well, tell us more about Larry."

And he had told us that he would,

he would come by and stay at his apartment,

and that he was married before and divorced.

And he remembered the wife's name, Francis,

and that they all went to the same high school.

And when he showed the picture of Francis

in the high school yearbook,

one of the things that stood out,

and it was a little eerie,

she bore a striking physical resemblance to Annie.

We got her last name,

and that was not documented in the original report.

So, we had that lead,

we knew we had another area to go on.

Later on, we found out that Paul Williams' DNA swab

did not match our suspect sample.

At that point, and I was confident that,

Paul was not a person of interest.

We knew we had to focus on Larry Stephens.

The thing was, Paul Williams didn't know where he was,

we didn't have his date of birth,

and Larry Stephens is a very common name,

there's thousands of Larry Stephens,

but now we did have the name of his ex-wife, Francis.

We quickly identified her and where she was living.

So, the next logical step was to talk to Larry Stephens' ex-wife.

One day I was sitting there and I hear a knock,

and there's two

La Palma policemen

standing at my door.

The key thing that I'll always remember and never forget,

the look on her face when we said the name "Larry Stephens."

Instantly turned to stone.

And she looked like she had seen a ghost.

And, boy, did she paint a different picture than Paul.

I met Larry when I was in the 12th grade.

I graduated from high school in June,

and then we got married the next January.

And everything seemed to be okay then.

And in the September of '69, that's when he got drafted,

and he had to go to Vietnam for a year and a half,

was very hard for me because I was pregnant with our first child.

When he got back from Vietnam,

that's when things started changing.

His anger came out.

He was verbally abusive.

He tried to strangle me.

He wasn't a good husband, he wasn't a good dad.

He wasn't good at anything.

I came home to work one day,

there was a splinter in my finger,

and I went in the bedroom to get it out.

And he followed me and said, "Where's my dinner?"

I said, "As soon as I get the splinter out,

I'll help you get dinner ready."

I got a black eye.

That happened on Mother's Day,

and I went and saw a lawyer the very next week.

We get a divorce.

And then after that, Larry started stalking me.

He'd be looking in my windows to see who I had in my house.

If he saw a strange car in the driveway,

he had to come see who it was.

And I had a .22 gun, and I chased him down.

I never saw him again after that.

Talking to Francis,

Larry Stephens went from a person of high interest

to a very, very viable suspect for the murder of Annie Ross.

And my gut was telling me this is gonna be our guy.

Who knows a bad guy better than their wife?

Nobody.

And I asked, I had asked Francis,

"Is he capable of murder?"

And I told him, "Yes. He could kill somebody."

I told Paul, "This is it.

This is our guy. Let's do our homework,

let's get everything we can possibly get on him."

We dug up police reports from around

2007 to 2008 on Mr. Stephens,

and we found out he had a new wife that he was also abusing.

There are police reports of Santa Rosa

documenting physical abuse up to and including,

and this is what struck us, strangulation.

We didn't have any DNA,

so we needed to get a sample from him.

We knew we had to figure out, "How are we going to do this?"

We have to go follow him around,

and surreptitiously collect his DNA.

We were able to determine

that Larry Stephens was currently living in Santa Rosa,

700 miles north of La Palma.

After that,

I couldn't wait to get up there

and start asking him questions.

However, at that particular time,

we are hit with more significant budget cuts,

our department size is reducing.

Unfortunately, a decision was made higher up

that, because of the department priorities,

we weren't gonna be able to put any more resources into this case.

So, the decision was made to put a pause, indefinitely,

on the Ross murder investigation until further notice.

There was internal conflict

and there was a lack of support from management to continue on with this case.

Paul and I had talked a lot

about just going up to Santa Rosa,

but the thing of it is I was a sergeant,

I was told to cease and desist.

And we have to take steps properly,

otherwise we can ruin the chances of solving this case.

The best way I can describe it,

you're in a marathon race and I can see the finish line,

and then somebody physically stops

and holds me back and moves the finish line

miles and miles down the road.

So far that I can see it on the horizon,

but it's a long way off.

You feel as an investigator.

"Here we have a person of interest.

If this guy does something really bad while we were waiting...

the blood's on our hands."

There was not a day that went by

that we didn't think about this case.

That was hard to deal with

because I was getting to a point

where I had retirement in my binoculars.

My wife, Laurie, convinced me to keep on going.

Laurie was aware of this investigation

and I told her, "There's gonna be a lot of work to do."

And she said, "You need to wait this out. You need to see this through."

I knew at that point

that this case is gonna be closed and set before I retire

and there's no question about it.

And then May 13th, 2015,

a call from the Orange County Sheriff's Department changed everything.

So, I was in a hotel room in Napa,

I think it was early afternoon.

I saw there was a voicemail from Jim

and a text message from Jim saying,

"Paul, call me." It was pretty short and to the point.

He got back to me relatively quickly and I said, "Are you sitting down?"

He says, "What's going on?" I go, "Guess what?"

Jim tells me,

"Orange County Crime Lab called me,

and we have a CODIS hit for the Ross case."

He goes, "Are you serious? Are you kidding me?

And I said, "Guess who?"

And he tells me it was Larry Stephens.

And my immediate feeling was a feeling of vindication.

So, this is validating all the hard work, the setbacks,

and all the criticism we got from peers,

or superiors over the years that this was a dead end, it was a waste of time.

So that's a phone call in the day I'll never forget, May of 2015.

The reason that we got his DNA

was because he was involved in an incident with his wife

and he was arrested for a felony,

and his DNA was collected.

Back in March of 2015, he and his current wife at the time, Susan,

had been drinking in the afternoon

and Larry started screaming at Susan.

He strangled her, punched her in the face and, I mean, drew blood.

Luckily, Santa Rosa police were called.

And Larry had gotten a butcher knife.

As they arrived, he's outside with the butcher knife saying, "Come and get me."

And they tase Larry, and Larry immediately gave up.

So he was arrested for a felony,

and he had his DNA taken and it was submitted

to the CODIS database and tested and matched

to a sample collected from Annie's crime scene.

That faceless, unknown DNA profile,

that phantom that was haunting the city of La Palma...

there was finally a name and a face put on that,

and the face was Larry Clark Stephens.

So now, this 40-year-old cold case just turned hot.

We were given all of the resources needed

by the city to bring this case to a successful conclusion.

Well, it was time now, we needed to go talk to Larry.

On June 1st, 2015, Paul and I headed up to Santa Rosa.

We knew Larry was out on bail because he had this felony over his head.

And our entire drive up there was strategizing on how we're gonna do it.

Our strategy turned out to be,

"We hope he denies knowing anything about Annie."

If we show him a picture, he's gonna say, "I don't know who this is."

More importantly, was he ever in any other apartments

besides Paul Williams' in that complex?

And if the answer is no, that's good.

And the strategic thinking was "Okay, now he has to explain

why his blood is all over her apartment

and even on the comforter where Annie's dead body was found."

So, Paul and I drove to the front entrance

of Sequoia Gardens Mobile Park.

And as we pulled in, I said, "Okay, we're on. Let's go."

Test one, two.

One, two, three, four.

So, we get out of our car

and there he is, there's Mr. Stephens,

first time we're seeing him in person.

It's exhilarating, but there's a lot of pressure for everything to go right.

So, we began that conversation,

you know, "We were up here looking into some old crimes."

He was unexpectedly calm...

polite.

It was creepy.

I felt he would be able to outwit us.

One of the first things I asked him was, "Do you know Paul Williams?"

And we started asking him questions about where he was living,

was he familiar with the Brookside Apartment complex.

Then at that point we asked him,

has he been in any other apartments

besides Paul Williams' in that complex? "No."

"Has he ever been in the apartment

below Paul Williams' back in 1974 that belong to Annie?"

Larry denies ever knowing Annie,

ever being in her apartment, completely.

So, we end up getting exactly what we want

out of this poolside conversation with him.

And after a couple other questions,

we show him a picture of Annie when she was alive.

And then he looked at it close up and then far, and we could see at that point

that his behavior was changing,

and his hands were shaking a bit.

He said that photo reminded him of Samantha,

A neighbor of Samantha Stephens from the show Bewitched.

And we go, "Well, no, not quite."

And it was, you know,

"We're showing you a picture of someone

who we believe you murdered 41 years ago."

He knew that the gig was up at that point.

I said, "Paul, I think it's time to wrap this up."

Paul handcuffed him. He didn't even resist.

He didn't even ask why we were arresting him.

The only thing he said was,

"Are you gonna go tell my wife?"

Undeniably, my overriding emotion upon

taking him into custody was the achievement of a goal

that Jim and I had been working on for the last eight years.

Once we got the cuffs on him,

the satisfaction was overwhelming

because, you know, after all these years,

we're gonna get this thing solved.

But now we have our work cut out for us even more,

because now we have to prove this in a court of law.

That blood we had

for not days, not months, but years.

There's a big gap there.

Well, if I was a smart defense attorney,

I'm gonna attack that evidence

'cause if you can attack the evidence

and make the evidence inadmissible,

you don't have a case.

I started in the DA's office in March of 2000,

and I received the Annie Ross case in January of 2017.

This case holds a special significance to me personally because I had also worked

as a sexual assault victim counselor

for a short period of time.

And so that's when I formed my real desire to become a sexual-assault prosecutor,

which I did for about seven years

before going to the homicide unit.

So, I was thrilled to get the Annie Ross case.

What happened to Annie,

that she was violently sodomized,

was not something that we were used to, here, in La Palma.

This was horrific.

And we knew that we need to bring justice for Annie.

The biggest challenge in a cold case

is the loss of evidence.

We had people who had died,

we had witnesses that were not available.

You have evidence that becomes not able to be reprocessed.

So for instance, in this case,

some things become disintegrated.

That was one of the defense arguments.

"Well, this blood has disintegrated."

We had to find a new coroner that could review the documents,

we had to make sure that all the crime-scene evidence was...

A proper foundation was laid, and the older it is, you lose that information.

There were challenges, but she was confident.

She believed in this case.

She was determined,

and you know, she was a bulldog.

I asked that the court designate

retired captain, Jim Engen, as my investigative officer

to sit with me during the trial.

He's had the case longer than me.

Even though I have read everything and prepared it legally,

factually, he's been there from the earliest point.

We did not have the confession,

but when you have a DNA case,

sometimes it's more helpful when they don't confess,

because they gave him an opportunity

to put himself in that apartment,

and he continued to deny ever being in there.

But his DNA was.

We do know that her dog, Jody,

had some kind of interaction with defendant Stephens

because he eventually put her in a drawer of the dresser.

She likely bit him because we had blood evidence on the comforter

and on the windowsill.

The blood is essential. It tells the story, too.

It's how he had to close the window

to quiet the crime and not attract the neighbors,

and not be further attacked by Jody

while he was attacking her owner.

The complete denial of being there

was very compelling evidence,

but also we had the defendant's letters

he wrote to his wife, Susan,

once he was in jail for having finally been arrested for this crime.

And I read the defendant's words to the jurors.

"June of 2015,

I really regret not killing myself

the night before those detectives showed up.

I had awakened at 2:20 a.m.

thinking about the domestic violence issue.

I had never thought about the DNA swab.

If I had, this would all be over already.

Should have followed my gut instincts."

In a letter dated July 13, 2015,

the defendant wrote,

"If I had known that DNA swab was going to result in a cold hit...

How? I don't know,

I'm sure I would have taken my life.

This is the lowest point in my life, ever.

They keep it so damn cold in here.

I'm just so pissed they have me.

I should have never let them get their hands on me,

and I only have myself to blame for that, too."

These letters show no surprise,

no shock, no disbelief.

"Why am I here? I didn't do anything, I'm innocent!"

Those weren't his words.

His words were, "I wish I'd known about DNA.

I wish I had taken my life.

Being in jail sucks."

He wasn't sorry, he was sorry he was caught.

The ability to do such a violent act,

to strangle and sexually assault and kill and then,

after living with it for decades,

still have no remorse, speaks to...

the evil in that person.

In my closing arguments,

I remember talking to them about those final moments,

how terrible they were for Annie.

In order to strangle someone,

you're looking at at least three minutes to effectuate the killing.

And if you sit for three minutes in silence

and know how very long three minutes is

to have someone's hands around a person's neck

and be squeezing the life out of them...

The horror that must have been for her fighting for her life.

That's the reason why Annie deserves justice.

So, while the jury deliberated,

we're down at the DA's office and we're just in suspense.

And then the phone rang.

Jennifer says, "They have a verdict."

He could either be spending the rest of his life in prison,

or he can walk out of the courtroom.

As they're getting ready to read the verdict,

I reached and held Jennifer's hand.

And they came back...

"Guilty."

Larry Stephens was convicted by the jury

of murder in the first degree.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

That was when I just took that deep breath and that sigh of relief.

Because we did it.

I mean, this is it, we did it.

When I heard "Guilty,"

it felt so nice to know that this person,

who's had all of those years of freedom

and still had no remorse

and still felt sorry for himself,

could hear that those 12 people

knew what he did.

Our theory, we believe

that he was not killing Annie,

but he was killing his ex-wife, Francis.

After talking with Francis,

we learned that there had been some alleged infidelity

which ultimately led to the breakup.

And Annie had arrived at her apartment,

and we believe he saw her, and he saw Francis, not Annie.

Annie was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jim called me, and he told me that Larry was convicted.

And I just started crying...

You know, I was very happy to bring this all to an end.

It'd be equal justice for what happened to Annie

only if the same thing happened to him in prison.

And I would not shed a tear if that had happened to him.

The murder of Annie Ross

is one of the oldest cold cases solved in America.

For over 41 years, her killer walked free,

but the diligent work of the original investigators

and the thousands upon thousands of hours

put in by generations of detectives

brought this case to a close.

I was happy for everyone involved on the law enforcement side,

but most importantly for Annie's spirit,

'cause I think she was in the courtroom the whole time

watching and waiting for justice to be done.

She was definitely with us that day.

Yep.

You can tell how much this case meant to you.

Yeah. It meant a lot. It meant a lot to all of us.

I remember driving home that night,

going, "We didn't give up, Annie".

I knew that Annie was...

I knew that Annie was looking down on us going, "Thank you."