Original subtitles

Leach: I feel that nobody helps these souls

that are lost out there,

and somebody´s got to do it.

Why can´t that somebody be me?

Schroeder: Shocking.

In 30 plus years, never come across something like this.

And I hope the good Lord never lets me do that again.

His entire life went missing --

everything he owned down to his toothbrush.

There was a stain found on the cup.

May: And that´s when we immediately

knew something was terribly wrong.

Leach: I was obsessed with finding this person.

There are just so many places to hide a body.

Where do you begin to look?

Leach: This was one that I had to solve.

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

I´m Ellen Leach. I live in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Been here since 2001.

I met Chip online, so he kind of made me move.

She was living in Lake Jackson or Clute,

if you will, south of Houston, and I was living here.

We´d talk on the Internet.

Internet relationship, if you will.

Days turned into weeks, turned into months,

turned into [indistinct]

It´s just the two of us.

We have a dog named Loki and two cats.

Glass: She was a girl to ride the river with.

She´s just got a good heart.

I... I couldn´t want anything else.

♫♫

In 1994, I got a phone call from my mom,

and she said my cousin´s boys were missing.

My cousin -- his name is David.

His wife, Susan, and they had two boys --

Michael and Alex.

In South Carolina, the evening drive that turned

into a mother´s nightmare.

Federal authorities have launched

a nationwide search for a carjacker.

According to his victim, he not only stole her car,

he stole her children, too.

Leach: I couldn´t be there to help with the search,

so the only thing I could do was go online

and try to look around,

trying to find some kind of clue.

The mother, Susan, told the police that a Black man

had kidnapped her kids and hijacked the car.

I would like to say to whoever has my children...

...that they please,

I mean, please bring them home.

Leach: Something wasn´t right.

And the police caught on to that.

They knew she was lying.

Susan Smith has been arrested and will be charged

with two counts of murder

in connection with the deaths of her children --

Michael, 3, and Alexander. 14 months.

Barbara Walters: The jury voted

for Susan Smith to face life imprisonment.

In South Carolina, that means 30 years.

That devastated my cousin David and -- and my uncle Dave, too,

as he lost his grandbabies.

And that´s how I started sleuthing.

When I was looking for my cousin´s boys,

I stumbled across the site called Doe Network.

It had missing persons.

It had unidentified bodies.

We were the people that took the information, put it online,

processed it for law enforcement,

and then brought tips back.

Leach: I got to see how many people were missing

and how many unidentified were out there.

It had a personal effect on me.

I saw all these missing persons on this website

and I thought, "Somebody has got to help them.

I know what they´re going through.

Somebody has got to help them.

They need to find their loved ones."

And that´s when I started looking more and more into it.

I prefer to work on the harder cases,

the ones that not many people look at.

I´m sitting in front of my computer.

I´m scrolling through, looking at missing persons,

and I came across a skull in a bucket of cement

in Kearney, Missouri.

It said it was a male, Caucasian, 50s to 60s,

and there wasn´t much else there.

That was all the information they gave.

Reporter: Police who searched this area around the truck stop

when the skull was discovered

theorize that the cement cylinder was dropped off

at this truck stop and the actual crime scene

where the murder took place is elsewhere.

It could have happened anywhere

with 535 running through here.

You know, we´re looking anywhere from Canada to Mexico.

Reporter: Kearney Police Chief Tom Carey wants to find out

the man´s identity to help bring closure

to a family somewhere who is missing him.

Matthews: In August of 2001 in Kearney, Missouri,

somebody at a truck stop

finds a plastic bucket full of concrete,

and eventually it contains a human skull.

Imagine the surprise of that.

It´s a John Doe.

You´re looking at the possibility

this is somebody that was murdered on purpose.

You´re not looking at just somebody

that just walked off and went missing.

Leach: Who´s gonna put a skull in a bucket of cement

and leave it at a truck stop?

This was one that I had to solve.

It was a puzzle that had to be worked.

♫♫

My name is Shannon May.

I live in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

This is the town I grew up as a child.

It´s a small, little Midwestern town.

People are very friendly. It´s a tourist town.

It´s just about an hour and a half north of Chicago

and about 45 minutes south of Milwaukee.

This is a beautiful spring-fed lake.

There´s lots of activity going on here.

It´s a quaint, little, very friendly, neighborhood town.

Growing up here was a magical time.

Every day was a new adventure.

We had the lake to go fishing on, sailing,

which we often did with our father.

So many things to do. We flew kites.

My dad loved to do that.

There were a lot of things for kids to do here

that just makes for a very Norman Rockwell happy childhood.

I´m the daughter of Greg May.

I was just 2 years old

when my father set up his first tattoo shop.

My father was a very good artist,

and he was just drawn to tattoos for some reason.

It really appealed to him.

He could really master it.

His work was very well recognized,

so he really made a name for himself over the years.

My father, you know, his business was his business

and on his off time, it was his business

and he kept trying to keep his family separated from that.

He didn´t even let anybody in town know where he lived.

So we were never allowed to tell anybody

exactly where we lived because at that time,

tattooing was still kind of the --

the little bit darker side of life, I would say.

A lot of people, they thought, "Oh, this tattoo artist,"

they expected somebody covered in tattoos,

scruffy, probably, you know, stained T-shirt.

You would never find him wearing tennis shoes, say.

So he was always either in cowboy boots.

And he really liked his cowboy hat.

I think, because it was appealing to him --

the Old Wild West, you know,

the Jesse James stories, things like that.

He actually went so far as to iron his jeans,

which I always thought was funny.

He would go to the library every day

and read "The Wall Street Journal."

You´d hear the buzzing of the needles in the tattoo shop,

and he would have the stock market on the radio.

He sort of looked like Buddy Holly when he was younger.

And then as a little bit older,

he kind of looked like the Marlboro Man.

And being a tattoo artist

afforded him to what he really liked to do,

which was an avid antique collector.

Not just any antiques.

He really honed in on the Civil War.

His collection was estimated, we thought about $250,000.

He really loved American history.

♫♫

So I started searching for who this skull could be.

And I searched and I searched.

I was obsessed with finding this person.

Back then, there wasn´t any Twitter or Facebook

or anything like that.

You had to type in "State of Iowa missing persons"

or "State of Texas missing persons."

Once I see a listing, I look at it and you think,

"Who is this person? What did they do for a living?

What did they like to do?

What´s their family like?"

You want to find out more about this person,

and it takes a lot of work.

There are, at any given time,

around 80,000 missing-persons reports

that are active in the United States.

We know through a lot of surveys

that we´ve conducted over the years

that there´s possibly up to 40,000 unidentified bodies.

That´s the silent mass disaster.

Leach: I´ve learned that the remains usually aren´t far

from where the person went missing.

So everything is gonna be closer than you think.

First, I look within a 20-mile radius

to find any missing persons that might be attached to that.

If the characteristics don´t match, like age,

hair color, height, weight,

I eliminate them from that list

and then I move on to a bigger radius --

30 miles, 40, 50 miles, up to 500 miles.

When I´m doing this,

the possibilities are endless.

You just have to put out the initiative to do it,

to say, "I´m gonna do it and get it done."

You´ve got to have the willpower

to keep going at something like this.

May: My parents separated and divorced in 1977,

but they always remained friends.

When I was a teenager, we moved to California.

My father came out every holiday.

We would talk on the phone very often.

Met her dad, and I had

gotten tattoos from him when I was younger.

So then when I came to him, he was like,

"Yeah, I´ll show you." He ended up taking me in

and then I worked for him for a few years

and then he wanted to retire.

So then we had worked out a deal

where I was gonna buy the shop.

My dad was gonna lend me the money,

and he passed away.

So I remember -- I´ll never forget the day

I called Greg from the hospital, and I said,

"Hey, I ain´t got the money to buy the shop."

And he said, "Don´t worry about it."

You know, he was really, like, caring.

And he said, "Just do what you have to do.

Take care of your family.

When you´re done, we´ll sit, we´ll talk."

And I said, "Okay." And I´ll never forget it.

In essence, you know, he gave me the shop

and for him to do that was pretty epic.

He was like a second father to me.

After working hard all his life,

he finally afforded himself to retire at a young age.

He was 54 years old when he was retired.

He had ended up across the Mississippi River

in a little town called Bellevue, Iowa.

♫♫

Bellevue´s population is about 2,360 people.

We´ve actually grown.

I call it a bedroom community,

where people come here to actually live,

but they work outside, maybe up to an hour or so away.

They drive back and forth.

Oh, the Mississippi is a great draw.

I´ve been here for 31 years on this job here.

I worked up the ranks from patrolman to assistant chief,

and now I am the chief of police.

May: Seventh, eighth grade,

that´s when I first met Douglas DeBruin,

and he went by the name of "Moose,"

so I only ever knew him as Moose.

He was a big guy.

He was -- I think he was about 6´3".

And he was just very broad shoulders,

you know, short, kind of curly hair.

He was just always a guy that was at the shop

or my dad would go and have maybe a beer

with him afterwards.

Eventually, after Moose hanging around

the tattoo shop for a while,

my father, you know, actually took him under his wing.

He offered to show him how to tattoo

so that he could have a trade.

So as time went on,

they did develop some sort of a friendship.

My father had moved to Bellevue.

Moose didn´t have a place to go, I guess,

so my dad told him he could stay in his basement

until he could get on his feet.

When new people come to town, they just get your -- your eye.

They kind of say, "Ooh, who´s that?"

So you tried to make contact with them on a nice way

because that´s what -- We´re a friendly town. We are.

I did meet Greg and Doug down on Front Street.

Probably a block away from where they lived.

Didn´t talk shop or nothing. Just little small talk.

I think Doug and Greg were good buddies.

I mean, I would compare them to a couple of my friends

when we go out walking or going to eat or whatever.

You know, they seem like they were buds.

♫♫

Buman: I was out one night and Greg come in

and he sat down next to me and was sitting there talking

and he bought me a drink.

The first impression I got of Greg,

is when I --

I looked at him and I thought,

"Oh, God, he ain´t too bad-looking."

And then next thing you know, he says,

"You want to go to another bar?" I said, "Sure."

And then maybe the next day, he got ahold of me

and he called me

and seemed like we just started going out together.

Greg told me he was divorced

and he had two kids -- Don and Shannon.

The reason he come to Bellevue as because

he said he liked the Mississippi River.

It was right next to the Mississippi River.

Yeah, Greg loved it here, but he hated the wintertime.

He hated being cold and he wanted to move down to Florida.

And he asked me if I wanted to go, and I said, "Sure."

Me and Greg was gonna start our life together.

I was happy.

I was happy that Greg asked me.

I was ready to go.

I was ready to get out of this winter, too.

Leach: I do my calculations and I´ll write down,

"This one looks good or this one looks good,"

and then I narrow it down by age, timing, things like that.

And when I narrow it down, I´ll have two or three left.

Glass: She spends a massive amount of time at it.

If she´s -- if she´s awake and not at work, she´s doing that.

She´s got a big heart. She worries about people.

She´ll fret about it at night.

In the middle of the night,

she´ll say something that maybe she had forgotten

that evening or something or something she want to look at

or a different resource that she needed to try.

Leach: I found a man in Chicago.

His age was about right -- 50 to 60.

I then looked at the mileage.

It was 451 miles.

It was a little on the higher range,

but it was still under 500 miles.

So I said, "Well, maybe. Let´s give it a shot."

And the timing was right.

He went missing right before the skull was found.

I thought it was a mob hit.

It reminded me of something a mob would do.

The Doe Network, they´ve got administrators for each state

that get their cases.

If you have a possible match you want to turn in,

you have to go through them.

They don´t want to send bad matches.

They send only the cases they think will work out.

Matthews: And there´s hundreds,

maybe thousands of cyber sleuths out there

that have theories and that can become deafening,

that can actually become overwhelming

for law enforcement.

And Ellen was not 100% happy with this

because she felt like

she should have more direct contact with law enforcement.

Leach: So I have this match in Chicago,

and I think it´s a good match.

And I had narrowed it down.

So I e-mail it to the Doe Network.

I had a long shot.

♫♫

May: My father would normally come out

and visit us every Christmas.

So when I asked him, "Are you still planning to come out?"

He said, "You know, I´m getting so close to moving.

I think it´s better if we just wait.

Why don´t we wait until I get settled down in Florida?"

Buman: And I come back to Bellevue,

and I tried the door.

♫♫

And the door was locked.

♫♫

This shade was up a little bit, so I looked in.

I seen Greg sitting there on the chair.

So I went down to the bar and I called up here and...

[ Telephone rings ]

...and I got the answering machine.

So I come back up here, and I look back in the shade

and nobody answered the door and -- and I didn´t see anybody.

And so it was so cold out that night, about 20 below,

so I just got in my car and I left.

I was really hurt.

I just couldn´t figure out why he´d do that to me.

I knew something was wrong, you know,

but I didn´t know what to do.

♫♫

[ Telephone rings ]

May: I believe it was a Sunday that I called him

and a woman I didn´t know answered the phone

and I immediately said, "Hi, who´s this?"

I thought maybe I had the wrong number,

but I mean, I knew his number. I wouldn´t dial it wrong.

She said, "This is Julie."

And I said, "This is Greg´s daughter, Shannon.

Is he there?" And she said, "No."

Oh, this is Julie, Moose´s girlfriend."

I said, "Well, he´s called me a couple of times.

I don´t want him to think I´m not calling him back.

Will you please let him know I called?"

She said, "Well, he´s gone to Chicago for the day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I´ll let him know."

After about two or three days, I alerted my brother.

I said, "Hey, something is wrong.

I´m trying to call Dad, and he´s not answering.

It´s been a couple of days now," so my brother kept trying

and we both -- just alarm bells going off with both of us.

If my father decided to change his number,

he would have told us.

I mean, as it was, he kept records of everything.

He was very precise, extremely organized.

But the next day, his phone was disconnected.

And that´s when the alarm bells went off.

So my brother knew that my father´s friend Gary Germaine

lived a short distance from his house.

My brother was able to get ahold of Gary and asked him,

"Can you please go over to the house

and see what´s going on over there?"

So Gary says, "Sure." He went over there.

He called us back and he said, "You know, the house is empty."

My father´s car wasn´t there.

And that´s when we immediately knew something

was terribly wrong.

I received a call from Greg´s son, Don,

about his father possibly being missing.

We went over to the neighborhood,

to his house to knock to see if he was there.

You have to find out, is he still in the area?

Did he leave? What the case may be.

My brother and I decided to book a trip to the Midwest

and come see for ourselves what was going on.

This is the house in Bellevue

where Gregory May lived since last May.

His children believe that some items

from his antique collection are missing from the home.

Authorities continue to investigate this

as a missing-persons case

and say they´re exploring every avenue.

While investigating, a neighbor eventually did come forward

to tell us some information about what he´s seen

that Doug DeBruin and his girlfriend, Julie,

were moving items that he thought were antiques

out of the house into a cargo-type moving van.

And he thought that was kind of suspicious.

May: When my father first went missing,

we knew Moose was living with him.

But in the very beginning, I thought,

"Did they take off somewhere?"

And we all questioned each other,

between my brother and my mom and I,

"Would Moose hurt my father?

Would he be capable of that?"

And we thought, "No, he liked him. Why would he do that?"

Schroeder: When we do an investigation,

we have to ask a lot of questions.

We have to figure out where he went,

who he went with, why he went.

And we have to talk to a lot of people to get these answers.

An ordinary person does not just fall off the face of the earth

when he has a past history of being organized,

making contact with family members.

His banks, the ones we talked to,

were -- there was nothing, no activity.

That´s just another one of the pieces we put together.

May: We stayed in town for a little bit.

We tried to drive around, tried to find people that he knew,

went and talked to Gary.

We just were kind of at a loss.

After a few days,

the chief of police in Bellevue, Iowa, called in the DCI.

Our small town of five officers are not gonna be able

to handle a missing-person case.

So we have, within the state, it´s called the DCI,

which stands for Division of Criminal Investigation.

Their main job is to assist other agencies with big cases.

So what they do is they have a special agent assigned.

We told them that Douglas DeBruin

had been staying with him

and I explained the phone call about Julie Miller.

I didn´t know who she was.

♫♫

The beginning, you´re a mess. You don´t know what to do.

You´re running in all different directions.

You´re talking to many people as you can.

And so we just had to let the story unfold.

It was very hard to leave Iowa and let the police do their job

and take over the investigation

because you want to feel like you´re doing something.

May: After the DCI were involved and we´re waiting for answers,

everything was very surreal.

I remember driving down the road and thinking to myself,

"How can the world keep moving right now

when my life is completely and totally still?"

And then it was months after that

that one of my father´s really good friends

called up my brother and he said,

"You know, I got a flier in the mail

for a place called the Rock Island Auction House."

Schroeder: And he come across this catalogue

that had a bunch of antiques

that was getting sold in Rock Island, Illinois.

And he told Greg´s kids that these got to be Greg´s stuff.

There´s no way there´s two separate items like this,

collections that Greg has.

Somebody else has the same collection.

May: The DCI and the chief of police drove over

to the Rock Island Auction House

to inquire about how they got this auction.

So the investigation took us up to a woman called Mary Klar

that put these items on the auction.

Well, turns out Mary Klar was actually Julie Miller´s mother.

So what a coincidence that was.

Julie is the girlfriend of Douglas DeBruin.

While interviewing Mary Klar, we found out that Julie and Doug

were in some type of a trailer down in Flagstaff, Arizona.

♫♫

♫♫

When the investigators went inside the trailer,

we found a lot of Greg May´s possessions.

So the question is, "What are they doing here?

How did they get here?

What are they gonna do with them?

And where is Greg at?"

There were photos of them found on the truck

having the time of their lives.

Laughing, carrying on,

little fugitives on the run.

God knows what was going through their head.

Every time I looked at him,

he always had that mean look on him.

You know, I -- I was kind of half scared of him,

you know, mean-looking, you know.

But then Greg told me one time that he never trusted Julie.

And I told him, I said, "I never trusted Moose either."

And he said, "Why?"

And I said, "I don´t know. I just don´t trust him."

My name is John Kies,

and I was the county attorney in Jackson County.

The chief of police in Bellevue at the time

called me up early one morning

and he said, "John, it´s probably nothing, but..."

And then he began to tell me about a missing person --

Gregory May.

He wasn´t the kind of person to call me about nothing.

So I knew something was going on.

♫♫

Douglas DeBruin and Julie Miller denied

they had anything to do with the theft

of the Civil War collection or the murder of Gregory May.

They simply denied it all.

They just tried to basically play dumb.

Kies: When investigators began to go through the van

and separate out the different items of evidence,

one of the things they located was a large jacket,

and it was believed that that jacket

belonged to Douglas DeBruin.

So the jacket was taken to the DCI Laboratory for analysis.

There was a stain found on the cup.

May: There was a green jacket that belonged to Moose

and there was a spot of blood on there.

So they did a reverse DNA search with my brother and I,

where they swabbed our cheeks

and they sort of do the DNA in reverse from the children

to the parent to see if it belonged to him.

And through DNA analysis,

the blood was determined to be Gregory May´s.

May: Once, you know, when you´re waiting for somebody

who´s been missing for a long time,

you live on hope. You live on hope and fear.

And then once you finally get that confirmation

that all hope is lost,

then that´s when you really start the steps of the grief.

I couldn´t even say the word "murder" for months at a time.

I literally could not say the word "murder."

We believe that they´ve murdered Gregory May.

But there are just so many places to hide a body.

Where do you begin to look?

Leach: I had sent it into the Doe Network --

the man in Chicago

I thought the skull in the bucket belonged to.

Ellen´s original match was to a missing mobster in Chicago.

So it seemed like a good opportunity.

All the hallmarks of a mob hit -- a dismembered head

in concrete in a bucket.

You know, it looked like that was gonna be

a real possibility, but it wasn´t.

Leach: So they come back and say,

"We don´t like that match. It´s not a good match."

It´s disheartening.

It makes you want to back away from it for a while.

But then you think,

"No, I´m gonna beat this" and you jump in it with two feet.

She´s precise to the point you don´t want to be wrong.

You don´t want to cause anyone unnecessary emotion

or stress or whatever, and she´ll research it to death.

She´ll archive newspapers for hours

hunting stories or hunting clues

or something to tie cases together.

Leach: On weekends, we go to the casino.

We have a little fun.

It just reminds you that things are alive.

With all the sadness going on,

there´s still life out there.

There´s still happiness out there.

Being at the casino reminds me that you never know

when your luck is going to come in.

A few months had passed on.

I´m still working the case,

so I go to Doe Network and they have an update.

They have a reconstruction of the head.

About a year after Kearney police actually submitted

the case to Doe Network, they didn´t have any leads.

So they commissioned Frank Bender, a forensic artist,

to actually re-create the skull

so that we´d have a face of the victim.

So it wasn´t just a description, it was a face.

And that´s really important in those John and Jane Doe cases.

You have to have a visual.

Reporter: Today, they unveiled

this reconstruction of the victim created by Frank Bender,

the same artist who sculpted a bust of Precious Doe

for Kansas City, Missouri, police.

Bender says it took him two and a half months

to complete the reconstruction.

The only features that I had was the skull itself,

and there was plenty of information there.

It was a very good skull.

There is often so little opportunity to create evidence.

It´s the only opportunity to actually show

what a person might have looked like.

Kies: So when Julie Miller and Douglas DeBruin are arrested,

we knew that their story was gonna be that Gregory May

had given them the Civil War collection.

That was gonna be their defense, essentially.

They were gonna argue, one, Gregory May´s still alive.

And how can you prove that he´s dead?

And, two, that he gave us his Civil War collection

for whatever reason.

And the third argument we were anticipating was,

even if you can convince the jury that Gregory May´s dead,

how in the world are you convince them he was murdered?

♫♫

♫♫

And we had Gregory May´s Civil War collection.

So we have a motive and we have Douglas DeBruin,

a man on federal release with a criminal record.

We weren´t pressured to file murder charges against him.

He was out of the public. He was in a safe place.

Julie Miller´s case for first-degree theft was coming up

as the investigation into the disappearance of Gregory May

was still going on.

Prosecuting a murder case without a body sets you back

two places from where you normally start.

Normally, you start being able to show the jury

there was a death

and the circumstances indicate there was a murder.

Here, we had to start by convincing the jury

that there was a death in the first place without a body

and that the death was wrongful.

And then we had to begin with where you normally start --

trying to prove that Douglas DeBruin was the murderer.

One of our strategies

other than just hoping that remains show up,

was to work on Douglas DeBruin and Julie Miller.

May: Before the trial, we talked to the prosecutor.

They said, "Well, they´re both gonna deny it.

So we´re gonna give her immunity for her testimony."

They had to make a deal with the devil.

So they make a deal with her, which is a good and bad thing.

The good news is it made our case stronger

because it´s very difficult to prosecute a murder case

without a body.

But the bad news is now Julie,

who was actually part of this crime,

is not gonna get a severe punishment.

Kies: She admitted that Douglas DeBruin

had killed Gregory May.

She said it was strangulation.

She admitted being present when it happened.

And she admitted going with DeBruin

to dispose of the remains.

♫♫

She told us that Gregory May´s remains had been dumped

off a bridge into the Mississippi River.

We never believed that was true.

The records of the ice thickness in that year

were easy to obtain, and we knew that was impossible.

Of course, nothing was found.

And we made the decision to issue the arrest warrant

for the murder to get the case ready for trial.

We just didn´t think it was gonna get any better.

Buman: Now that I think back on it,

I think that night when I was over there,

that´s the night that they killed Greg.

You know, having a friend that many years, you know,

why would you kill somebody like that?

May: My father was such a generous man.

For somebody who he took under his wing,

he gave him a friendship

and this is the way he repays him.

It´s just pure evil.

Kies: We were absolutely determined

to prosecute the strongest case we had.

We´re gonna present what we have in front of a jury.

May: In the state of Iowa,

they had never had a conviction without remains.

I mean, this was gonna be unprecedented for that area.

But there´s always that greatest fear.

We don´t have everything we need.

♫♫

Leach: I was looking at the face

and I had seen it before, but I couldn´t remember where.

So I had to go through all the sights again,

probably 150 sites to try to find out

where I had seen this man before.

So in the world today, we are familiar

with human facial recognition.

The airports do it, everything.

Ellen is a human representative of that.

She had to use memory

to go back through things that she had searched.

There was no way of indexing it.

She was literally just going back through databases

that she had looked at before

to try to find the image that she recalled.

♫♫

Leach: I came across the Iowa Missing Person Clearinghouse,

and that´s where I found the picture of Greg May.

My gut feeling told me that this was the man.

This was the John Doe.

I went through and I looked at the photos

and compared different features,

and I was sure this had to be the skull.

The picture of Greg May --

they had his age.

They showed him with a full head of hair.

Good-looking man.

They had his height and his weight.

I was positive it was him.

She was asking me to look at it and see what I thought.

And due to the fact that Kearney, Missouri,

was Jesse James´ hometown, Civil War era,

and him being a Civil War collector,

I -- I couldn´t do anything but agree with her.

I immediately wrote the area director

for Iowa for the Doe Network,

and I put in the possible match with Greg May.

And I pushed send...

and I waited.

Kies: January of 2005.

Douglas DeBruin´s defense team asked for a delay.

They argued that with the new evidence that we had,

Julie Miller´s testimony,

they needed time to come up and process the new information.

At the time, I was so vexed.

It turned out to be pretty fortunate for us as well.

♫♫

Leach: I was so sure about Greg May.

I had done all the work on him.

And then I just had to lose control of the case

and hand over to Doe Network.

She was almost feeling helpless because red tape or whatever

was too long to satisfy her.

Finally, in March 2005, three months after I had made

the submission, the area director from Iowa

got back with me.

She told me it was a positive match,

and I just kind of melted.

That was my first match.

So it was a happy moment and a sad moment.

And when she got that match,

it vindicated what she´d been doing.

So she was happy.

Leach: I had finally done it. I had I.D.´d him.

♫♫

We had a skull.

So we could do a dental match with a local Bellevue dentist

that Gregory May had gone to.

He had all the records.

So we didn´t have other parts of the body,

but we had the one piece

that absolutely identified Gregory May beyond a doubt.

Now we have this incredible new piece of evidence.

We could not only prove scientifically

that Gregory May was dead,

but the fact that his head was found in a bucket

means that death was wrongful.

So this was absolutely enormous. This was absolutely huge.

It was only later that I learned about how it all came together.

And this screeched in at the last possible minute.

We had no idea.

So often, cyber sleuths are running a race against time

that we don´t even know about.

Kies: The trial of Douglas DeBruin

lasted almost exactly two weeks,

and the jury came back with a verdict of guilty

to first-degree murder as charged

on April 20th of 2005.

He showed absolutely no remorse.

Julie Miller -- she´d been lying to the police for so long.

And she first told them that,

"Oh, maybe he´s in the river.´ My father´s the river.

"Maybe he´s here, maybe he´s there."

The judge threw the book at her for perjury

and gave her the maximum of five years,

which honestly, really wasn´t enough

for a cold-blooded murder.

♫♫

You know, now the trial is over, you know, all we can do

is live the life that he didn´t get to.

And so I try not to think about them.

I try not to give them any of my thoughts or day or time.

What Ellen did was everything.

Without her, I don´t know where we would have been.

I didn´t even know people did that at the time.

Leach: I was happy because he finally had his name back,

but I was sad for the family.

They had to know what happened to their daddy.

That was a horrific crime.

But I provided them with a sense of closure.

That was a big weight lifted off my chest.

Some people never get those answers,

and those are the people I really feel sorry for.

I can´t imagine going years without ever knowing.

Buman: One thing I miss about Greg is,

you know, the good times we used to have,

you know, go out -- go out and have a few drinks

and talk and laugh

and, you know, just have a good time.

I always thought we got along really good.

I was looking forward

to spending the rest of my life with Greg.

Schroeder: Little Bellevue, Iowa.

Shocking.

Why is it happening here?

I´ve never, in 30 plus years,

never come across something like this.

And I hope the good Lord never lets me do that again.

May: Here comes along an amateur sleuth on her time off,

not getting paid for it, just wanting to help.

She pieces together the key that held this case --

the key that made this case.

And got justice for mine and my family.

Ellen Leach is one of the heroines of the case,

one of the unsung heroines, really,

working behind the scenes.

This is a letter I got from John Kies.

It´s the Jackson County attorney.

It starts out, "Dear Ellen, I want to personally thank you

for your efforts to match the remains of Gregory May

in the murder investigation of Douglas DeBruin."

It thanked me and the other volunteers

that have tried to solve these cases.

That means a lot.

She´s blossomed right into what she is.

Her success has bred confidence.

But I can´t say I´ve got a hand in any of it.

I just try to keep her happy.

Leach: It could be anybody out there.

Anybody could do this if they put their time

and energy and heart into it.

Anybody could find somebody.

♫♫

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♫♫

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♫♫

♫♫