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NARRATOR: For hundreds of years,

victims of murder went to their graves unavenged.

Their tortured screams went unanswered.

The dead took their secrets with them to the grave.

This changed by the turn of the century

when the forensic scientists began to understand

the language of the dead.

Today he has the tools to interpret their language

with amazing accuracy.

Now we can enter this world...

a world both fascinating and forbidden.

It is the world of forensic pathology...

a world where the dead reveal their secrets to the living

through the mysteries of the autopsy.

On March 14th, 1985,

a woman living in this apartment building

made a frantic phone call

to the police in Cobb County, Georgia.

WOMAN: We just heard a girl screaming on the top of her lungs.

It sounded like somebody tried to rape her or something.

Operator, she screamed so loud...

I've never heard anything like that in my life before.

[Siren]

NARRATOR: As police rushed to the building,

they received a second phone call,

only this time they heard the agonized moans

of the dying victim.

By the time police arrived,

the victim, Belinda Wood,

whose groans they had heard on the radio just moments before,

was dead.

MAN: We first went into the kitchen

where the body of Miss Wood was found.

She was lying on her back...

found with the phone lying on the floor next to her,

in a pool of blood.

At that time no one knew exactly

how many wounds were to the body

or what kind of injuries she had.

Detectives began to gather evidence,

trying to figure out

who had committed such a brutal murder.

TRESSEL: We then went to the bedroom...

following the footprints, backtracking it.

There was a fair amount of blood in the area of her bed.

It was obvious that the initial attack on Miss Wood

occurred in the back bedroom.

In looking at this scene

we did find a filet-type fishing knife

lying on the floor of the bedroom

just adjacent to her bed.

It had blood on it about halfway up the blade.

There appeared to be a handprint on the doorknob.

As detectives continued their investigation

an unexpected event suddenly attracted their attention.

TRESSEL: I was in the bedroom

when we heard a comment from a police officer's voice

that I recognized from outside the apartment saying,

"Is your apartment on fire?"

My first thought was, "What do we have now?

Now somebody set fire to this building?"

Within minutes

the apartment building was enveloped in flames.

TRESSEL: As we walked out onto the balcony

you could see the flames coming up

from the apartments below.

By the time we got to the ground,

the whole back end of the building was ablaze and in flames.

By the time the fire was brought under control,

the building was virtually destroyed.

The evidence that had been found at the crime scene

had gone up in smoke.

The fingerprints on the knife found in the bedroom

were destroyed.

All that was left was the charred body of Belinda Wood,

now covered with the rubble of a collapsed ceiling.

Her hands still appeared to be reaching for the phone

to call for help.

Later that morning, Belinda Wood's body

was taken to medical examiner Dr. Joseph Burton.

BURTON: We had the body placed in a sterile sheet, a body bag.

It was brought to the autopsy facility in Marietta

and about 10:30 in the morning, on March 14th,

I first saw Belinda Wood.

I did the autopsy and I discovered

that she had been stabbed in the back,

right inside the right shoulder blade

by a knife that was a little less than an inch wide

and at least six inches long

because I measured the depth of her chest

to be about six inches

and this knife had been driven all the way from her back

to the number two rib in the front

and broke her rib in the front of her chest.

NARRATOR: Dr. Burton also noted

that the nails on Belinda Wood's right hand

were shorter than the ones on her left hand,

indicating that she had been right-handed.

This subtle detail

would later become a vital piece of evidence in the case.

But for now, the question remained:

who had murdered Belinda Wood,

the attractive 30-year-old mother of two children?

By that afternoon,

fire inspectors had located the origin of the fire.

In an apartment on the first floor,

a large, deep, circular burn

was found in the middle of the bed.

Nearby, on the floor, was an empty rum bottle,

indicating that alcohol was probably used

to ignite the fire.

Police arrested the renter of the apartment,

a 26-year-old hospital technician named Donald Catchings.

He was brought down to the Cobb County jail

and charged with arson.

Once that fire started,

and the fire started in the middle of his bed,

is when everybody, myself included,

the homicide investigators on the scene all said,

"Why start a fire unless you have something to hide?"

Trying to destroy evidence.

NARRATOR: Donald Catchings now became the prime suspect

in the murder of Belinda Wood.

BURTON: The detectives and the district attorney asked me

if I would look at a suspect named Donald Catchings.

They said he had some injuries on him

and they wanted me to look at these injuries

and see what I thought about 'em

and to draw some blood for an alcohol determination.

On his left wrist he had several bruises,

some of them sort of round,

one of 'em with a very small abrasion next to it,

consistent with someone trying to hold off his wrist.

It was his left wrist.

So if he is facing the victim

and her right hand has short fingernails,

and she grabs his wrist with her right hand,

she leaves little circular bruises

with not many fingernail marks

'cause they're short on her right hand.

Interestingly though,

he had what we call "friction burns"

on the insides of both of his right and left forearms

below the elbow,

like if you scuffed your arm across a rough surface

and you got a rug burn or scuffed it on the concrete

when you fell and hurt your knee or something like that.

NARRATOR: Dr. Burton returned to the crime scene

to see if Donald Catchings could have climbed

from his first floor apartment

to Belinda Wood's third floor apartment,

as the police theorized.

BURTON: I told Lt. Morris that I can climb up the building myself.

I jumped up, caught and grabbed the board

above the first floor

and pulled myself up to the balcony rail,

stood on it and showed that I could very easily

have gone on up to the third balcony rail,

where the door had been jimmied by something

like a screwdriver or a knife

and surmised that Mr. Catchings entered the apartment.

During that climbing over the cedar boards that were there,

when I got down, I noticed my forearm was burning

and before we left the scene

I could see an abrasion on my forearm.

The minute I saw it a light went off and I said,

this is the same abrasion in the picture

that was taken of Mr. Catchings on March the 14th, 1985,

the day that Belinda Wood was killed.

NARRATOR: Donald Catchings came to court

believing that authorities had little,

if any evidence, to convict him.

But when Dr. Burton took the stand,

he had a little surprise waiting for the defendant.

BURTON: I got a board that was part of the apartment complex siding.

In front of the jury, I abraded my arm,

waited a few minutes, and in front of the jury

there appeared on my arm the same mark

that they could see in the photographs

we had made of Mr. Catchings.

You're always looking for a smoking gun...

and this was pretty close to a smoking gun in this case.

NARRATOR: In October of 1985,

Donald Catchings was convicted of arson

and the murder of Belinda Wood

and sentenced to life in prison.

New Orleans is a city that celebrates death as well as life.

It is a city with many strange stories to tell...

but none quite so bizarre as the true story

of Lucy Mae and Alan Robichaux.

The Robichauxs married when they were in their 40's,

and for the next 30 years lived a simple life

in this small house on Franklin Street.

But in 1973,

Lucy Mae returned home from visiting her in-laws

and discovered that her husband, then 72 years old,

was missing.

Days later his abandoned car was found

several blocks away from the house.

His family was convinced

that he had been kidnapped or murdered.

No sign of Alan Robichaux was ever found.

Ten years later, after having lost hope

of ever seeing her husband again...

Lucy Mae sadly put up her house for sale

and moved away.

Through the years the house on Franklin Street

passed through the hands of several owners.

In 1991,

the family living there developed a termite problem,

so they called in an exterminating company.

The men started their work in the basement,

looking for termite nests.

During the search

one of the men noticed a metal plate on one of the walls

and thought there might be termites behind it.

When he removed that plate, to his surprise,

he saw the entrance to a small room.

As his beam of light traveled around this small space,

he saw something strange...

something that looked like a human skull.

Terrified, he scrambled to his feet

and ran upstairs and called the police.

Detectives, with the help of the fire department,

cut a hole in the back wall of the porch

to create a larger opening.

When they looked inside they saw,

propped up against the wall,

the skeletal remains of a human being.

Incredibly, he was still wearing his socks.

His other clothes had turned to dust.

BADEN: When forensic anthropologist Mary Manhein

examined the skeleton,

she found a hole in the skull,

probably caused by a large caliber bullet.

The issue now became,

did he commit suicide or was he murdered?

Police returned to the crime scene

and they sprayed the small space with Luminol,

looking for traces of dried blood.

They didn't find any blood,

until they sprayed a small piece of broken mirror

that had fallen to the ground.

The Luminol revealed a blood spray pattern

typical for a gunshot wound.

This told police that the shooting had occurred

while he was in this small, dark place.

The size of the space was only big enough for one person,

and this indicated that he had taken his own life.

Several days later detectives found,

under six inches of dust and dirt,

the gun that had killed him...

a rusted .38 caliber revolver.

In order to identity the body,

Mary Manhein took the skull to her laboratory

and slowly began to reconstruct the head.

After five weeks,

the face of Alan Robichaux emerged...

the man who had mysteriously disappeared 20 years before.

From the objects found in this tiny space,

a spray can, a candle, and small ceramic statues,

it appeared that Alan Robichaux had led a secret life.

This small, cold room had been his second home,

unknown even to his wife.

Alan Robichaux had created his own crypt,

one in which he watched himself take his own life.

In the summer of 1974

a young woman from Chicago

drove into a remote part of the Colorado Rockies

to take photographs.

It was beautiful but desolate country,

with heavily wooded rough terrain.

But 25-year-old Michele Wallace

had taken many trips like these.

She told her parents not to worry,

that she would call them in a few days.

Michele knew how to take care of herself.

She was strong.

She could size people up pretty well.

I had no worries.

I expected her to call any minute.

But Michele never called.

A police search turned up nothing.

She just seemed to have disappeared

somewhere in the vast forests of the Colorado Rockies.

But one week later

her abandoned car was found a thousand miles away

in Amarillo, Texas.

Several days after that, police in Pueblo, Colorado,

arrested a man by the name of Roy Melanson

who was suspected of dealing drugs.

In his possession

they found Michele's wallet and driver's license.

Police also found receipts leading to a pawn shop

where they located her camera,

with a roll of film still in it.

On the roll of film were several pictures of her dog, Oakie,

who had gone with her on her trip.

When the last negative was processed,

slowly and to the amazement of the police,

the face of Roy Melanson emerged.

He had brazenly stolen her camera

and had taken his own picture with it...

directly implicating himself

in the disappearance of Michele Wallace.

Police believed that he had murdered her,

but without a body,

they felt they could not press charges.

By December, the severe Rocky Mountain winter had arrived

and continuing the search became impossible.

Margaret Wallace was now sure

that her daughter would never be found

and she became more and more despondent.

My wife was non-functional.

She was just sort of robot-like...

spaced away from the world and me.

Margaret became obsessed with the loss of her daughter,

the little girl she had watched mature into a young woman.

As the years passed they had grown even closer.

But now that Michele was gone,

life for Margaret had become unbearable.

On a cool fall evening

George Wallace and his wife had dinner together,

then went to bed.

The next morning George Wallace awoke early.

I woke up and I said...

good morning.

She was sort of upright on the pillow.

Just one white speck was on her lip...

and I felt her and she was cold.

Margaret Wallace had taken an overdose of barbiturates

and died in her sleep.

She had left a note by her bedside which read

"If you ever find our daughter, please bury her next to me."

Within a period of six weeks,

George Wallace had lost his daughter

and his wife of 34 years.

As the years passed,

the disappearance of Michele Wallace

was considered a mystery that would remain unsolved.

But 15 years later,

one person in the Gunnison Police Department,

a curious young detective by the name of Kathy Young,

decided to re-investigate the case.

I moved to Gunnison, Colorado, in 1975,

and in living in the Gunnison community

I had heard about the Michele Wallace case.

Whether it was playing a softball game

or one of my friends was gonna go hiking,

the issue would come up of Michele Wallace

and the unsolved disappearance.

So when I was promoted to the position of investigator,

I was interested in reviewing that file

and finding out what it was all about

and why it still remained unsolved.

Kathy Young went down to the evidence room

of the Gunnison Sheriff's Department

to find the old files on the Wallace case.

There, Kathy noticed an unmarked box.

When she opened it, she made a startling discovery.

I discovered a mass of human hair...

that included two twelve-inch braids

with hair that attached the braids

and some human tissue.

The hair had never been identified,

but Kathy Young made an immediate connection

to the photograph of Michele

with those long, distinctive black braids.

The scalp had been found on an old logging trail

five years earlier...

but there were other questions to be answered:

had it come from somewhere else?

And where was the body?

Hoping the plant material collected with the hair

would offer a clue,

Kathy sent the hair to forensic botanist Vickey Trammell.

When I looked at the braids,

because I was expecting a dark hair color,

I was surprised to see

that some parts of it were lighter...

like it was sun bleached.

To me it looked sun bleached.

And the fact that they were very clean

indicated to me that they had remained on the surface

and had never been buried.

NARRATOR: Dr. Trammell then separated out all of the dirt,

rocks and plant material

that had been found in the braids.

TRAMMELL: I mainly concentrated on the needles,

and I identified only one Engelmann Spruce needle.

It told me, number one,

that we're in a forest above 9,000 feet.

But since I only found one,

it told me that the hair had spent its time

on a more moist north-facing slope.

Because had it been more southern facing slope and drier,

I would've found more Engelmann Spruce needles.

NARRATOR: Dr. Trammell's research confirmed

that Michele Wallace's body was probably not buried,

but still lying somewhere on the surface

of the northern slope of Kebler Pass.

Six months later,

when the snows of the Rockies had begun to melt,

Kathy Young and a team of scientists called NecroSearch

went into the mountains and began the arduous task

of locating the body of Michele Wallace.

YOUNG: I felt that finding any remains of Michele Wallace

in the mountainous slopes of the Colorado mountains

was almost impossible.

It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

NARRATOR: The search in the mountains had gone on for a day and a half

without much luck

until the afternoon of the second day,

when one of the searchers noticed

an object glittering in the sun.

YOUNG: The sun was hitting on a gold tooth

within a cranium, and it was twinkling,

and I looked at it and for several seconds.

I was kind of dazzled and amazed that it was real.

Dental records confirmed that after 15 long years,

Michele Wallace had finally been found.

YOUNG: It's elation because you've found

what you're looking for,

but it also brought the reality home

that Michele Wallace was dead.

As the team of forensic scientists excavated the area

they began to find more and more of Michele's body.

WOMAN: In this particular case we were very surprised

to find as much of the skeleton as we did find.

We found a tremendous amount after 18 years,

especially in this kind of terrain

and especially with these kinds of scavengers in the area.

The evidence pointed to her being just driven up to the site

and her body tossed out of the car.

Seven months later Roy Melanson

was brought back to Gunnison, Colorado, to stand trial.

There, he was confronted by someone

he thought he would never see again...

the prosecution's most important witness,

Michele Wallace.

YOUNG: Mr. Melanson, who normally sat stone-faced

and failed to respond to anything,

his hands started to shake in front of him

and he turned directly at me and kind of smirked, if you will,

which told me that he was shocked.

Roy Melanson, now 56 years old,

was convicted of murder.

Labeled by the judge as a "waste of humanity,"

he was sentenced to life in prison.

In 1994, 20 years after her disappearance,

the remains of Michele Wallace

were finally brought back to Woodlawn Cemetery in Chicago

and buried next to her mother, Margaret.

The small, picturesque town of Summerside

on Prince Edward Island

has always been known as a vacationer's paradise,

but in October of 1994

a local resident, 32-year-old Shirley Duguay,

mysteriously disappeared.

Volunteers from the town helped police search for her

in the woods and fields surrounding her home.

But it wasn't until several months later

that they found her skeletal remains

buried in a shallow grave in the woods.

The police continued their search,

hoping to find some evidence

that would lead them to the killer.

Finally, they found, several miles away from the crime scene,

a plastic bag containing a man's leather jacket,

spotted with the victim's blood.

BADEN: When the leather jacket was brought back to the crime lab,

the forensic investigators there found,

in addition to the blood stains,

white hairs adhering to the inner lining of the jacket.

At first the police thought they were human hairs

that could lead them to tell who the owner of the jacket was.

But on microscopic examination,

they turned out to be cat hairs.

The detectives were initially disappointed

until one of them remembered

having seen a white cat named "Snowball"

at the home of Shirley Duguay's ex-boyfriend,

a man named Doug Beamish.

The police realized

that if the cat hairs belonged to Snowball,

then Doug Beamish was the owner of the jacket

and that Doug Beamish was their killer.

But to prove it wasn't going to be easy

because the only way to prove

that the hairs came from Snowball

was by DNA matching.

And no one had ever done DNA testing

for forensic purposes on cats.

The police couldn't find anybody to do this testing,

or who had been familiar with it,

until they contacted Steven O'Brien in Maryland,

who was an expert in cat genetics.

Dr. O'Brien found enough DNA

in the root of one of the cat hairs

to compare it to the DNA isolated from a blood sample

taken from Snowball.

The test proved that the DNA was identical.

It was a perfect genetic match,

proving conclusively that the hairs had come from Doug Beamish's cat.

But then Dr. O'Brien wondered,

what if all the cats on the island were so inbred

that they had the same DNA?

He had the police collect many cats from all over the island

and he analyzed the DNA in each of these cats

and found that they were all separate and distinct.

On July 19th, 1996,

the DNA evidence was used by the prosecution

to convict Doug Beamish of second degree murder,

and Snowball went down in forensic history

as the first cat responsible

for bringing a criminal to justice.

Possum Kingdom Lake is a large body of water

forty miles outside of Dallas, Texas.

With a large deer population,

it is a favorite spot for hunters.

It was in January of 1996

that a man walking in the woods adjacent to the lake

thought he spotted what looked like a dead deer.

But as he got closer,

he realized that it wasn't a deer at all,

but the mutilated torso of a human being.

MAN: The head had been removed at the shoulders,

and the legs removed along with the buttocks.

We saw tracks left by a vehicle

possibly that could've been pulling a trailer.

It appeared to all the officers

that this probably was some dope-related killing.

The fact that the head and hands were missing

indicated to us that certainly whoever did it

did not want the body identified.

NARRATOR: Only two months before, another body with the same M.O.

had been found outside Dallas.

It too had its head and hands missing.

The killing at Possum Kingdom Lake

seemed to fit the same pattern.

In order to help identify the victim,

police sent the body to forensic pathologist

Dr. Joseph Prahlow.

PRAHLOW: The body was decomposed.

There was skin discoloration,

skin slippage.

I also found on the body several cactus spines,

which were embedded in the skin of the abdomen.

I also found, while examining the back,

a furrow mark or an indentation of the skin,

which was caused by a rope,

which to me says

that a rope was used to transport the torso.

Whoever had done this

probably had done a similar thing in the past,

not necessarily to a human, but probably to an animal.

The only thing I was sure of was that it was a homicide.

NARRATOR: Several hundred people had been reported missing

in the state of Texas.

Only one person was missing from the local area,

a man by the name of Casey Elliot.

But the description on his driver's license

indicated he was much thinner than the large torso

found by the police.

WOMAN: They said, "We don't believe that this is your son

"because this person is probably

between 250 and 300 pounds."

And they were looking at his driver's license,

which he'd gotten when he was 16 and never changed.

And I said, "Oh, no,

Casey was 6'6" and pretty close to 300."

And I saw the Texas Ranger look at Carey Pettus

and when I saw that look pass between 'em

is when I knew it was Casey.

It was the first time.

NARRATOR: But police found that 27-year-old Casey Elliott

had no history of drugs.

His only passion had been the rodeo

where he had been roping and riding

since he was a teen-ager.

At the time of his disappearance,

Casey Elliott had been living with a widow named Helen Moore

and her three children, who looked up to Casey

like the father they had lost.

He was teaching them to be cowboys

and what it was like to compete on the rodeo circuit.

MAN: He loved kids.

He took a lot of those boys under his wing.

Tried to keep 'em out of trouble

and tried to teach 'em to rope,

first one thing and then another

to try to keep 'em out of meanness.

He was the only father, really, that they've ever known.

NARRATOR: One week later, the toxicology report came back.

Police were surprised to learn

that the torso contained lethal levels of morphine.

Not only had Casey Elliott been dismembered,

but someone had also poisoned him to death.

Police using cadaver dogs now expanded their search

in hopes of finding other parts or his body.

PETTUS: Something led both of us to believe

that we should go to this bridge.

I don't know what,

but we went to this bridge and looked

and saw a trash bag some 200 feet east of the bridge

and discovered that it contained a head.

PRAHLOW: Because we had the teeth in the head still

and Mr. Elliott had had previous dental treatments,

we were able to call in our forensic odontologist

and we were able to make a positive identification

by dental comparison.

When we tested the brain from the head

we also found lethal levels of morphine.

NARRATOR: Detectives began to question anyone

who had been close enough to Casey Elliott

to poison and dismember him.

Among the people questioned was Helen Moore,

his girlfriend of five years.

But this church-going mother of three

seemed like an unlikely suspect

to be capable of slaughtering a man

almost three times her size.

There was a good deal of concern over whether

Mrs. Moore could do something like this.

On further investigation into her background

we found that Mrs. Moore's third husband

had died of cancer

and had received large doses

of both oral and injectable morphine.

After his death, Mrs. Moore retained custody

and control of a certain amount of morphine.

NARRATOR: Suspicious of the fact

that Helen Moore had access to morphine,

Sheriff Pettus obtained a warrant to search her ranch.

There they found prickly pear spines

in the tires of her truck...

identical to the ones Dr. Prahlow had found

on the torso of Casey Elliott.

They also found that paint chips from her trailer

matched paint found on a log at the crime scene.

More importantly, police found that the blood

on the floorboards and axle of her trailer

matched Casey Elliott's blood.

Police also found that Helen Moore

had taken out a $130,000 life insurance policy

on Casey Elliott just four months before his murder.

PETTUS: All of this taken together led us to believe

that we had enough probable cause

for a search and arrest warrant.

We obtained the arrest warrant

and executed it on the evening of March 19th.

NARRATOR: Soon after her arrest and faced with the death penalty,

Helen Moore confessed to the murder of Casey Elliott.

MAN: She told me everything that happened

but she wouldn't tell me why she did it.

She said that Casey had been sick,

he had been taking 30 milligrams of morphine for headaches

and she said they ran out of those

so she substituted 30 with 60 milligrams.

And I asked her if she knew that would kill him,

and she said "yes."

Although she was small,

Helen Moore always bragged she was the equal to any cowboy,

capable of butchering 2,000-pound steers on her ranch.

It was something she had always been proud of.

Apparently she had used those same skills

to murder and dismember her boyfriend,

Casey Elliott.

OAKERSON: I don't know what caused her to do what she did.

She was not mad about anything.

Every time you talked to her she was joking and laughing.

She had no problem being in jail here.

She did tell me

she's gonna write me and tell me why she did what she did.

FATHER OF CASEY ELLIOTT: She is a person that

you don't know whether she's devil-possessed or what.

She is just a very different person.

You'll never see nothing or anybody like her

again in your life.

She's just vicious and mean...

to put the bottom line on it.

NARRATOR: There are swamp-like lands, treacherous and dark,

called "peat bogs."

They are made up of dense vegetation

which has decayed for thousands of years.

It is in these treacherous marshes

that strange petrified bodies have been turning up

in Europe for hundreds of years.

Called "The Bog People,"

they are the most perfectly preserved bodies in the world.

In Denmark, a man was found in such pristine condition

that he seems to be frozen in time...

still wearing his leather cap.

His mustache looks perfectly groomed.

But despite the amazing conditions of their bodies,

forensic scientists estimated the age of these Bog People

to be more than two thousand years old.

The tannic acid found in the peat

has preserved the Bog People down to the last detail.

The bodies share a common but horrible fate--

they had all been violently put to death.

The rope around this man's neck

indicates he was strangled to death.

This man had his throat cut from ear to ear.

Who were these men and why were they put to death

in such a horrible way?

The answer to this mystery came when forensic scientists

closely examined the body of a man found in England

called "Lindow Man."

Although his face has been crushed

by the pressure from the bog,

the rest of his body reveals much about his identity.

An examination of his skull tells us he was a young man,

about 30 years old, when he died.

His polished fingernails have remained unblemished.

Like the others,

he appears to have the hands of an aristocrat.

More importantly, when forensic scientists opened his body,

they found in his intestines grains of mistletoe pollen,

sacred plants of a Celtic religious cult

called the Druids.

Offerings like this carved bowl that were found in the bogs

indicate that the bogs were considered sacred places to the Druids.

They believed that these dark, watery places

were gateways to the supernatural world.

The Bog People had given up their lives willingly.

To them, sacrificial death was an honor

reserved only for the aristocracy...

for those chosen few who were worthy

of representing their people to the gods.

And now after 20 centuries they have returned

to speak to us from their watery graves.

Whether death occurred yesterday or 2,000 years ago,

the dead's long-silent voices return

to answer the questions put to them

by the forensic pathologist.

For him death is not the end of the story,

but just the beginning.