Original subtitles

A cold case is a term

that I don't really like

because it brings the connotation that nobody

is paying attention to it,

which just isn't true.

It's an unsolved case.

I recall getting the old VHS tape

out of evidence.

What really stuck out to me in the Krashoc case...

...was actually watching that on the screen...

...You see the snow-covered mountains

in the background.

There's snow in the parking lot.

There's a dumpster just next to the building.

And then right beside the dumpster,

there's the body.

I remember Darlene's hair moving in the breeze

with her naked body laying out in a parking lot

with a bunch of snow.

For me, that's when the brutality hit.

The way she was treated and killed,

you knew you had a monster on your hand.

I was a homicide detective with CSPD for nine years,

and the last three years,

it was strictly assigned to cold cases.

I recall getting the Krashoc case

September of 2016.

We knew it was different than the other case

we had seen before.

Darlene Krashoc's case file was significant in its length.

The pages were in the thousands easily.

An immense amount of work had gone into that case

with phenomenal amounts of physical evidence.

It never ended for 32 years.

Cases that either Lieutenant Kenda

touched as a supervisor or as a detective

30 years later,

looking through this case file,

Jim Isham and I knew that there was no stone left unturned.

The man is, uh, you know, a giant.

I worked in my father's business

when I got out of college and I wound up hating it.

And I said I wanna be a policeman.

So I applied to several departments

and Colorado Springs was

the first one that made an offer.

My wife, Cathy, and I, we took Horace Greely's advice

and we went west.

And it was wonderful.

So I was very busy being a policeman.

I didn't like it, I loved it. I would've done it for free.

It's always been my greatest concern about

my career that I did not solve 8% of my cases,

of my 387 cases.

Victims who never got justice in court.

But the only case that has no statute of limitations is homicide.

The most important part of homicide investigation

is to never, ever give up.

That early morning was about 5:20 in the morning.

We're probably about almost an hour away from our shift being over.

It was a bitter, bitter cold day.

I had made the decision,

"Let's check some of the local bars,

make sure we don't have any,

you know, body passed out in their cars in this freezing weather."

So we turn to the back, behind this establishment,

and we both saw something laying next to the dumpster

behind one of these businesses.

Is that a mannequin?

And as we were closer,

we saw that it was a female.

That's a real person, uh, and when you see that,

it takes you back for a minute.

Of course, they showed you horrific pictures of

people that had been shot, or stuff like that, in training academy.

But it's different when you come across it yourself.

I don't think anyone's ready for that.

And at that time, dispatch probably woke

every one of them up when I came over the air and said,

"We have a D.B.", meaning a dead body.

It's about 5:25 in the morning,

and the phone rings.

And it's the PD Communications Center.

So they had patrol officers on the scene

of a discovered body at the rear of the Korean Club.

In 1987, I'd been in the police department for 14 years.

I was a sergeant in Homicide.

It's completely and totally unpredictable.

There is no routine.

Every case

is absolutely unique.

The CSPD Homicide unit, they were the blue-ribbon,

um, homicide unit in my opinion.

The sergeant on scene

happened to be Joe Kenda,

and I appreciated his dedication.

He really wanted to do right by the victims.

This is one of the most violent crimes I've ever seen.

I've seen many things, not many this extreme.

What always sticks with me in cases is

the crime scene itself, the appearance of the victim.

The images of that never stop, never go away.

We talk about words like,

uh, it was horrible and it was terrifying,

but you don't really understand the meaning

of that until you're

knee-deep in the human perversion

that is rape and murder.

The body was nude,

other than her jeans were on one of her ankles.

A shoe was laying off to the side.

There was a diamond ring on the ring finger

of her left hand.

Single stone, small. But it has value.

It isn't removed.

This isn't robbery that goes south somehow.

So that eliminates one motive almost immediately.

Looking at her face,

she has three coat hangers

made into a bridle you would see on a horse.

My God.

At the back of the head,

these wires are twisted together

to form a handle where someone can control

the movement of her head.

The wires cut into the joints of her cheeks

and into the flesh of her face.

It's very disturbing.

Very disturbing.

She had bite marks on her body.

One of the nipples had been bitten off.

I was really amazed by the savagery

committed by someone who has all been reduced to a hyena.

Incisor wounds from his teeth into a dead body.

Removal of a nipple by biting it off.

Savage crime.

It wasn't a random, quick,

impulsive action.

Someone that had a monster inside him

had spent considerable time torturing her.

The body looked so cold

and so alone.

First off, you gotta figure out who this victim is.

In this particular case, lo and behold,

her driver's license was laying on the ground

next to the body.

It turns out that she's an active soldier.

She, uh, belonged to a unit out at Fort Carson.

Colorado Springs in 1987

was a military town.

So we know that she's Darlene Krashoc

and she's 20 years old.

She's active duty military.

She's young, has her whole life in front of her,

and somebody took it from her in the worst possible way.

But it puzzled me why he would display the ID.

It's as if he's taunting us.

Here's who she is,

but you don't know who I am, do you?

Charles Green is our crime scene technician

Technician Green was a very competent guy.

Charlie was a meticulous evidence collector,

photographer.

He was so careful and so attentive

to every little detail.

There was three cigarettes

on the asphalt next to the body.

It made me wonder why

they were so close to the body.

Is it an employee sneaking outside for a smoke break,

or is our perpetrator admiring his work?

So when we collected this evidence,

We did so with the best possible methods.

Rubber gloves, masks, everything,

in order to preserve it for subsequent identification.

We see tire tracks right next to this body...

...which indicates the body transported to that location.

There was no question in my mind this crime occurred somewhere else.

Where did it occur? We don't know.

The question is who is responsible for this death?

Where is he now?

He's a ghost.

He's a puff of smoke.

He's a shadow in the night.

How am I gonna figure this out?

"After Sgt. Kenda arrived,

closer examination was made of the body.

The body is that of a White female

laying partially on her back.

There were three cigarette butts

located on the ground.

These were each picked up

and a sample of the soil under the body."

The evidence they collected had been packaged,

categorized just like we would today,

and what that does is preserves that evidence.

If we didn't have the evidence that they collected in 1987,

the case goes nowhere.

So I'd leave that crime scene area

and I wanna go talk to the people in the Korean Club.

Could this have occurred inside the bar

and the victim dumped outside?

That's one of our first things to look at because

of the location of the body.

So we show this ID photograph

to all the employees.

No one's ever seen her before.

But the bartender does provide one useful piece

of information in terms of timeline for our crime scene.

He's able to say he was the last person out.

It was right around 2:00.

He didn't notice anything.

5:20 in the morning, that's when the victim

was first identified.

That narrows our timeline down to 3 hours and change.

That's important.

Darlene, where were you for those 3 hours?

And with whom?

When we got to the morgue and the body thawed,

the violence became even worse.

The autopsy performed on Darlene told us a lot.

Not only was she beaten, uh, she was sexually assaulted.

She was sodomized.

She strangled on the wires around her neck.

Fighting for air to breathe,

unable to do so.

That's what actually killed her.

You look at this and you think,

My...Who are we looking for here?

The cold temperatures can trap liquid that comes from a perpetrator.

Seminal fluid or other such things...

...that's recoverable when it melts

and drains onto the table.

So all those things can be useful.

Most homicides in the United States occur

between people who know each other.

So you have to find out who Darlene Krashoc is

before you can possibly find out may wanted her dead.

I answered the door.

It was a sergeant from the Army.

And he said, uh...

...your daughter Darlene has been killed.

And I said, "Killed?"

I said, "What happened?", and he said, "A homicide."

And I said, "A homicide?

Somebody killed her?"

At that point, there was disbelief.

They had it wrong. Um...

There was no conflicts going on, so...

She shouldn't be dead. She couldn't be dead.

Quite honestly,

I was a basket case.

Nobody wants to see their child go.

And then it's like, "Why? What happened?

Course, nobody had any answers.

When reality really set in,

your world just fell apart.

My world fell apart.

It left an empty hole in the middle of you.

Mr. and Mrs. Krashoc come in

to deal with the loss of their child.

Darlene was born in Baltimore, Maryland.

She was a good kid.

She was very outgoing.

She was very caring.

It was more than mother and daughter.

You know, we were kinda best friends.

She was a tomboy.

She wanted to work on big trucks.

Darlene wanted to join the military.

She had in her head her dream of wanting to drive tractor trailers.

So she joined to get the Army to teach her.

Her serving... Of course it made me proud.

We asked them about something we noticed at the crime scene.

That Darlene was wearing, what looked to us, like an engagement ring.

Did they have any knowledge of that?

Oh, yes. They did.

She was actually married once

to a young man who was in the Army.

A Glen Gerringer.

I really didn't know anything about him.

She and Glen hooked up and decided to get married.

They could live off post and...

You know, which I didn't agree with, but, uh,

she was gonna do whatever she wanted to do anyhow.

19, 20, I mean...

You don't know what you wanna do.

I mean, come on. You think you do, but you don't.

They were not compatible for each other.

They filed for divorce and her divorce would have been final,

uh, a few days after she was killed.

Now, divorced husbands always intrigue me.

We already know that whoever did this crime hates women.

Sometimes a divorcee can hate their ex-wife.

Really hate her.

So this young man has emerged.

He's at the top of our list.

Gerringer was also a soldier out of Fort Carson.

The benefit of working with Fort Carson

was the immediate access of their soldiers.

If we needed to talk with somebody,

CID, or their military police, would go pick those people up

and make them readily available to us.

Well, Glen. Who are you?

How'd you feel about this divorce?

Were you angry enough to kill her over it?

You can always tell someone who is lying and trying to look emotional.

Trying to fake as if they're sobbing.

But that wasn't Gerringer. He was genuine.

He was very emotional about the loss of Darlene Krashoc.

He goes on to explain

that even though they were divorced, they were friends.

He was asked were he was at the night before.

He's got a new girlfriend in his life.

He was with her all night the night before.

They hadn't seen each other in months.

Totally cooperative with us, has an alibi.

We took hair samples, we took blood, and we looked at his teeth.

They in no way match the bite mark evidence we have from the victim.

We move on.

So who is Mr. X?

We still don't know.

Everybody we talked to, we took a blood sample from and preserved it

to create a database of biological samples.

The process to do that was complicated.

And it was expensive.

And I argued, let's do this.

And it may never come to anything, but it could come to everything.

So we did it.

So everybody we spoke to in this case, I had their blood.

The storage of that evidence, over time, so that the DNA doesn't deteriorate,

and could still be used for comparison, 30 years later,

was phenomenal.

In 1987, DNA was really not even part of our conversation.

The first DNA case was in England in 1986.

It was something that we thought,

"Wow, that sounds pretty cool. I wonder if someday we'll be able to use it."

But then, fast-forward 30 years.

We knew Darlene was an active duty soldier

stationed here at Fort Carson.

So I became in contact with a CID agent.

And that was agent, Jessica Veltri.

As a special agent for Army CID,

I investigate felony-level crimes where the Army has an interest.

And, as part of that role,

I requested some cold cases to take a look at.

I was then introduced to Detective Isham

and Detective Somosky, who were also working on the cold case team

with Colorado Springs Police Department.

There was a lot of evidence, from the victim's clothing...

To cigarette butts found near the body.

The bite marks.

The hanger, the ligature.

And so they actually got the DNA tested and uploaded to the system.

Initially, the first piece of DNA evidence

that had the best profile was a cigarette butt.

Well, is that cigarette butt related to my crime scene?

Or is it just trash that was in the parking lot?

The lab examiner was able to confirm that the DNA profile

on the cigarette butt matched a DNA profile

that was all over the victim's clothes.

The phrase "Unknown Individual Number 1"

came from the DNA lab report,

where they identified a profile and it didn't match any other samples

that had been submitted to the lab.

And so then we knew, with confidence, okay, this was the right guy.

It's just who is he? And where is he?

I get a call from CID.

New information comes forward.

There is a female soldier whose name is Carolyn Smith.

She's active duty military.

And she's sitting in an interrogation room, awaiting my arrival.

I get there and start speaking with Carolyn Smith.

This girl is Darlene's best friend.

We are well-aware that 20-year-old girls

tend to bump their gums with their friends.

What can Smith tell us about Darlene and her associates?

She had spoken to Darlene about 2 o'clock

on the afternoon before she went missing.

She indicated then, Darlene was gonna go out

to Shuffles nightclub with a couple of guys

from her unit, there at Fort Carson.

Shuffles bar had a dance floor, music. And a young crowd.

Darlene says, "Sgt. Lord is gonna take me."

That's her sergeant who's in charge of her platoon.

And she says another fellow, Tim Robinson, is gonna go with them.

So Lord and Robinson, they're probably the last ones to see her alive.

The thing I always say of CID, God bless them,

they don't mess around.

The civilian authorities say he might be involved in a murder,

they will put your nose in the dirt, and handcuff you,

and drag you from wherever you are to an interrogation room.

And CID, in typical fashion, whips them up in 30 minutes.

Lord and his friend, Robinson,

obviously know that Darlene Krashoc is dead.

Everybody in Fort Carson knows.

Why wouldn't they come forward with the fact that they were with her that night before?

So when I walked in to talk to Erik Lord, I took his handcuffs off.

I said, "We're not gonna need these, are we Erik?"

"No, sir." I said, "Okay, let's get them off."

He'd look at ya, and you could tell he was in charge.

Joe Kenda asked us very pointed, very specific questions

trying to find out whereabouts, who were we with.

I mean, just about every single detail

he could have imagined, that day.

I was smoking like a freight train. I was nervous.

We left work, and Darlene says she wanted to go out and have some fun.

And so, I said, "Yeah, sure." You know.

"Uh, I'll take you to B Street."

Robinson was dancing with Darlene,

and, you know, was having a good time.

Darlene danced with a couple of the guys in the bar,

and I said, "Okay. It's time to go."

And she said, "No, I'm not leaving."

I said, "Yeah, you are, 'cause I'm you're ride. I'm responsible for you."

And we kinda got into it a little bit.

And there was a guy at the bar that she was drinking with.

Darlene doesn't introduce him, so he doesn't get a name.

But Lord describes him as a young GI, doesn't know him,

never seen him before.

You can usually pick a soldier out.

Just by the, you know, the way they walk.

By the way they carry themselves.

And he remembers looking at this guy,

and he thought he was unusual-looking.

Okay, what does that mean?

The person that I saw had beady eyes, you know?

It's very hard to translate someone's impression of a body part

when you really don't know what he's talking about.

What means beady eyes to him may mean something else to you.

She says, "He'll give me a ride."

I said, "We have to make formation."

You know, there's no way around it.

You know, and it was getting late.

And she says, "No, don't worry about it."

"I'll be there." Last time I ever saw her.

We, of course, considered that from the very beginning,

that the killer in this process is probably military.

That's the most likely scenario.

To think that, even then, they knew that it was possibly a soldier,

um, so somebody who you're supposed to be able to trust,

um, and work alongside with.

As a special agent for Army CID, I didn't want to give up on that.

In 2017, the technology called phenotyping,

that was the most advanced DNA technology we could do at that time.

Early in 2017, I came across this company called Parabon.

And I saw that they had the ability to take DNA

and identify, with a certain probability, what color eyes this person might have,

what skin tone they might have.

We learned when we got the phenotype,

the individual that the DNA belonged to was a white male.

Northern, western European descent.

Brown hair, hazel eyes.

The evolution I was so fondly looking forward to,

has in fact happened.

The ghost is alive.

We have Sergeant Lord,

the last man to see Darlene Krashoc alive.

At the time, Erik was trying his best to convince this girl to come out of this bar.

It wasn't enough. He got tired of that, and he left.

And then, uh, next day she didn't show up.

And... You know, I was...

I said, "Okay, maybe... She'd been drinking."

I said, "Let's give her some time."

And then we had found out that there was a girl found. A girl's body was found.

I said, "Oh, my God! That's it. That's her."

And, literally just... Whole world just caved in.

Erik had some degree of survivor guilt. It's common.

People blame themselves for something they didn't do,

that resulted in terrible things happening to someone.

You know, the fact that, um, I was Darlene's ride that night,

and I left her behind, I...

Um.

I should've pushed her in the car.

And why I didn't.

You know, it's, uh... Hard to deal with.

One little motion, I could've changed...

I wouldn't be here right now talking to you.

Met a lot of people I didn't want to meet.

And in this case, that much rage, it's not unlikely

that the suspect also has some kind of marks or injuries on them.

So when we're interviewing people, we're gonna ask and we're gonna look

to see if they have any kind of marks on them.

And then they said, "Take your shirt off."

He's perfectly clean, doesn't have a mark on him.

We still take blood and hair from him, with his consent.

They looked at my teeth. Actually took bite impressions.

It was very involved.

The story Erik Lord tells is perfectly reasonable.

The best person to confirm that story is Tim Robinson.

Because he was there too.

So I go next door, to where Mr. Robinson

is being interrogated by somebody else.

Tim and Erik provided very consistent information

about their association with Darlene on that night.

Everything is going along swimmingly in this interrogation.

Then we asked him to take off his shirt.

And he is covered in scratches.

He has them on his back, his chest, and his arm.

Mr. Robinson,

you suddenly have some serious explaining to do.

He's got scratches all over him.

Well, Timmy, where'd you get those?

He's one of the last to see her. He's got some marks.

This is starting to look pretty good.

Robinson gets very upset.

He knows the Army has a habit of hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer

when you get accused of a crime.

I looked at him and asked him, "Can you explain the scratches and marks all over you?"

And Robinson said, "I know this girl,

and I went to see her that night and all these marks came from her."

Well...

Something you don't hear everyday, but there are people who do that sort of thing.

He's in a relationship with a gal who gets a little physical.

His story panned out.

I still take hair and blood samples from him.

And I ask to look at his teeth.

When I do look at his teeth,

they in no way match the bite mark evidence we have.

So Mr. Robinson has an alibi.

At this point in the investigation,

when your leads are just running out

and you don't have anything, you start to reach.

In this particular case,

the victim is in a nightclub involving perhaps as many as 100 people.

It's a very difficult thing to analyze, after the fact.

To think that a bartender was going to remember an individual

that just walked up, grabbed a drink, went out and danced.

Trying to identify an individual at a bar is a very daunting task.

As a homicide detective, you engage in a process of elimination.

This was 1987. No cellphones.

No surveillance cameras.

This is old-fashioned gumshoe detective work,

relying on people's limited memories.

People who had been drinking for six or seven hours.

It makes this very, very difficult.

The case file is every document

associated in any way to the event in question.

All police reports, the autopsy report,

laboratory examination results, the list goes on.

Anyone can pick up and learn everything that needs to be known

about this investigation.

That is a case file.

The 30-year anniversary of Darlene's death was on March 17, 2017.

With the DNA composite sketch, we got a reward approved for $10,000

for any information leading to the identity, arrest, and conviction

for the person responsible for the death of Darlene.

The Parabon snapshot...

Can give us predictions.

Ethnicity, race, hair and eye color.

The first they one they give you is at age 22,

and then you can do a photo enhancement

for, uh, the same person at age 50.

That's really when it kinda opened the door.

It's the 26th of March,

1987.

Nine days in.

After all of this frustration, all of this effort,

that's gotten us nowhere,

suddenly, out of the blue, a lightning bolt arrives.

Army CID, they call me, they say, "We have this individual in custody,

his name is Brian Jackson.

He is charged with some sexual assault offenses."

And he says that he's responsible for the death of our victim.

Well, hallelujah, there is a God.

We're on our way.

When CID starts a little bit of their investigation,

we find out that, yes, he has a truck.

We believe that she was transported in a truck.

The Army has the ability to search

people's vehicles without their consent.

We don't. But they do.

They searched his truck.

Guess what? There's a coat hanger in the truck.

We have physical evidence that could match

what was used in this crime.

We have him making these statements.

He's active duty military.

He's charged with sexual assault.

Everything says the stars are coming into alignment.

That this very well is our guy.

I go there.

And everybody and his brother begins to show up.

The Staff Judge Advocate General for Fort Carson is there.

The Commanding General of the 4th Infantry Division is there.

The Chief Judge of the court is there.

And of course, all heads turn towards me.

When I first meet Brian Jackson, he's well-aware of how much trouble he's in.

He's gonna be a nervous wreck.

We'll see where this goes.

Brian Jackson says he's responsible for the death of Darlene Krashoc.

He has some promising attributes.

He's in custody for sexual assault.

This is a sexual assault crime.

That fits.

He's made some veiled statements

about how he's probably responsible

for Darlene Krashoc's death.

Does that add up to proof beyond a reasonable doubt?

No.

It rises to the level of further inquiry.

So, Jackson, he's been in the Army 12 years.

He's an infantry guy.

He is married.

Jackson is currently charged

with two counts of sexual assault

against female soldiers in his company.

He is in the trouble of his life.

That can lead people to say things that otherwise aren't true.

Looking for leverage, looking for a way out, looking for something.

Turn out, Mr. Jackson is precisely that person.

Lots of things about him that he needs to explain, for sure.

Let's talk about it.

"Do you know Darlene Krashoc?"

"Well, no, I don't really know her."

"But you say you are responsible for her death.

Why would you say that?"

"Well, I just think if I would have been there..."

And he wanders off in this weird, sort of, discussion.

And you begin to realize that this guy is trying to use

the murder of Darlene Krashoc

to show him mercy in his situation.

Had he been at the bar, he would have prevented

Darlene Krashoc from being killed.

And because she was killed, he feels responsible for that.

Oh, please.

What's his alibi? Where was he at the night that this happened?

Well, the alibi just totally threw him out of...

Out of the water there.

He couldn't have killed Darlene.

He wasn't even near Shuffles that night.

Mr. Jackson is not the sharpest knife in the drawer,

and he's reaching for any straw that he can get hold of

to provide him some mercy from the system.

We take blood, we take hair.

We also look at his teeth.

His teeth no way match her bite marks.

He's not the guy we want for Darlene Krashoc.

He's just a guy.

So, this great feeling of euphoria

has turned into yet another disappointment.

That's why a murder investigation can drive you crazy.

It's so good, and then, suddenly, it's so bad.

Uh, you're back to square one again.

And at this point, we don't have a whole lot of other direction to go.

You add parts to that investigative file every day.

It begins with page one.

And before you know it, you're opening page 401.

Despite our efforts, despite everything we've done,

we have been unable to identify any other suspects.

We are at a dead end.

At some point, you have to say,

"For now, this investigation cannot move forward

'cause there is no place for it to move.

It is now an inactive homicide investigation."

Nobody wants to quit. We want to get the answers.

I felt I had done everything in my power

to find out who killed her.

And I didn't do it.

I didn't find out.

There's a price you pay for that.

Nightmares.

All sorts of fun things.

But reality sets in.

There are other mothers that have lost loved ones that need our attention.

Krashoc was an active-duty soldier stationed at Fort Carson.

No suspect was identified.

You have to tell the parents that.

Ugly business.

Betty had a hard time.

She fell into a deep state of depression.

Put her under doctor's care.

Like any other mother, she would just, uh...

cry. Cried a lot.

I just had to know. I want to know.

Find him. How hard could it be?

You know, that's me, and that's any parent.

You have to understand their position.

They're in an emotional nightmare that they can't wake up from,

that someone like this is walking around loose,

and we don't know who he is.

We have no idea who he is.

But people who commit crimes forget something

that's extremely important.

The police do not forgive, and they do not forget.

And some day, your knee is gonna touch the ground.

And on that day,

a policeman's gonna be standing over you

to handcuff you and remind you of your past.

That's the day I always look forward to.

We are going to identify the ghost.

In the case of Darlene Krashoc,

there is no one left to investigate.

I would come into work early every morning.

I'd make a cup of coffee.

I'd walk to the doorway of the cold-case library.

And I'd look at every book.

And then, I would beat myself up for being a dumb

who doesn't know who killed those people.

Then I'd go sit down and start looking over reports

of the current homicide cases.

I carried on after we closed the active status

of the Krashoc case

until 1996, September 1st.

Then I returned.

Life goes on, retirements happen.

Things in the country change, new Presidents are elected.

But you never forget. I never did.

And I was still always hopeful

that someday something would come to light

in the Krashoc case by some method or means.

And resurrection could be had finally.

You know, I just felt like nobody was doing anything.

I just felt like everybody had forgotten her.

But, uh, I've got boxes of e-mails.

I would e-mail every detective.

I'd type up letters.

I even sent letters to the President of the United States.

You never forget, and it never goes away.

Has he ever done it again?

Has he hurt somebody else's child?

Has he destroyed somebody else's family?

Betty, bless her heart,

she was running interference for Darlene

and making sure that it was getting done.

We decided we'd come back to Colorado.

We did flyers.

We had T-shirts made up with her picture on it and hats.

I even wrote a poem.

"In the vision of man, but it's just deceit.

For there's a demon on your streets.

You may know his face. I know it well.

He left behind some clues to tell.

I'm only waiting for the clock to chime,

for soon, he'll pay for his heinous crime.

I know the secret, I know the truth."

The most important thing you can take away from a crime scene

is the physical evidence.

Well, the crime scene investigators,

even back then, had specialized training

in collecting that evidence.

Now we have the benefit of video and technology

and getting into people's social media and cell phone accounts,

that actually help solve cases.

But Joe Kenda, especially, came from an era

where you had to find evidence.

Those guys are absolute heroes.

At the initial onset of the investigation,

they collected all the evidence

maybe, at that time, for blood typing

and to see what the future might bring.

It is fascinating, because they didn't know

what they were preserving it for.

Um, it just goes to show

the foresight and the dedication

to, to advancements that were coming.

And knowing that we still had that evidence, I just, I felt very confident

that there was a chance that this case could get solved.

The suspect's DNA profile had been entered in CODIS,

a nationwide, uh, system.

And as of 2018, there had been no matches.

Which told me that since 1987, if no one's DNA

had been entered into the system, it was very unlikely,

and getting less likely by the second,

that that was ever gonna happen.

It blew me away that even though we had

a really solid DNA profile in the national DNA index,

we still didn't have a suspect.

After the phenotyping was done,

we got a visual depiction of what the shape of the face may look like.

Social media just blew up.

We were getting calls from other countries,

based on seeing stuff on Facebook,

saying, "Maybe I know this person."

Social media brought us tons of leads.

Unfortunately, not a lot of them really led anywhere.

You know, it's disappointing.

That composite sketch, I had it posted on my desk.

Just, I stared at it every day.

Like, who is this guy, where is he now, is he alive?

I remember The New York Times article

about a cold case that was solved with genetic genealogy.

So I started to follow how it was being applied in law enforcement.

With the popularity of people testing their own DNA

to find out where they're from...

more and more people are entering their DNA into these databases.

What forensic genealogists can do

is start to trace back that family tree,

and see what ancestors they have in common,

and the law enforcement can, kind of, work with the genealogists.

They find out where the DNA intersects

between this family member with a shared DNA

and the individual that you're trying to identify.

I reached out to Parabon,

who had previously done the phenotyping.

So, the genealogy, it was new for their company,

and they said, "We'll run it through the database once a week.

And if get something that looks workable, we'll reach out."

It was probably about a year.

And that whole time, I'm just like, "I know it's coming."

It was 2019 when I got the call.

"We've got a possible match,

a familial match, um, with the suspect.

It equates to about a third cousin."

And so this is something that we can work. It's workable.

Agent Veltri called me and said,

"We have a match to the unknown individual number one

in Darlene Krashoc's case."

I remember, I looked at Detective Somosky,

and I just told him. I said, "I think we got our guy."

And he said, "Are you sure?"

And I said, "I'm not sure, but the science is sure."

The very next communication was,

"Hey, we'd like to brief you on the results."

I mean, I remember being in the office.

Jim was on the line.

I had a sign on my door, like, "Do not disturb."

Um, and we're just all sitting there.

For 32 years at CSPD,

I've been trying to identify a ghost,

and, finally, after advances in science,

willingness to pursue,

that ghost that's out there running around loose...

he has a name.

This is what we've been looking for.

Michael Whyte.

Michael Whyte.

Michael Whyte was tentatively identified from the genetic genealogy.

His name is Michael David Whyte.

We'd never seen the name Michael Whyte come up in that case report.

I'd never seen the name before.

All the people that we interviewed,

the suspect's name never surfaced.

2,000 pages...

and Michael David Whyte never appears.

We never heard of him, nor did anyone else.

Who is this guy?

In doing some research, we confirm that he was a soldier.

He was assigned to Fort Carson.

During that time...

and public records did confirm, he lived

not far from where Darlene's body was found.

He has zero criminal record.

He got a parking ticket once.

For all intents and purposes, he is Mr. Boring Suburbia.

We need to know for sure.

We need to surveil this guy.

We knew that he was stable.

Married, with a home in an affluent suburb in Denver.

And working in a pretty good job

in the telecommunications industry.

We needed to get ahold of DNA to confirm

that he was the person matching

unknown suspect number one's DNA.

A fugitive team did sit up on Michael Whyte.

These are guys that do this for a living.

So you'd never know you're getting followed.

They just keep tailing off, trading off.

They're good at it.

So they go, and they start surveilling him.

And this particular day, he's out running errands.

But he pulls into a hamburger place

to get lunch.

He sits there, he enjoys his lunch.

And he has a red Solo cup.

He drinks from the cup.

The cup is now the focus.

That's gonna have his saliva on that cup.

What's he gonna do with it?

He gets up and leaves.

So we didn't need a warrant.

He technically has no privacy rights to that piece of trash

he's just discarded.

Some agents came down from Fort Carson

after, uh, Agent Veltri called them.

Jim and I transferred the evidence to them.

The scientists working the case communicated with us,

"We're gonna work this 24x7 until it's... Until it's resolved."

There were some tense moments,

some dallying, if you will.

But again, you know, witnesses lie,

I've even had victims lie,

but one thing I've found in 32 years of law enforcement,

the evidence doesn't lie.

The results from the DNA came back in,

I honestly want to say two-and-a-half to three weeks,

which is, kind of, unheard of in DNA cases.

That it was a confirmed match to unknown person number one.

My, my, my.

It is him without question.

He is the only guy who deposited his DNA

on and inside the victim in this case.

We were now in a position, after only 32 years,

to arrest Michael David Whyte for the murder and rape of Darlene Krashoc.

It's time to go to jail, Michael.

I remember, it was June 13th, 2019.

One of those days, it's kind of hard to forget as a law enforcement officer,

made numerous arrests in my career,

this one, kind of, rises to the top.

I called Agent Veltri and said,

"The warrant's been issued for Michael Whyte's arrest."

I wanted to give them the opportunity to be there,

because without them, we couldn't have had that result.

It was insane. We hadn't eaten, we hadn't slept.

And then, next thing you know,

we're in the car, and we're heading to Denver.

We met at a park in Thornton, Colorado,

and a plan was devised.

The fugitive units and myself were to make contact

with Mr. Whyte at his residence.

We knew that there was at least one other adult living in the house,

identified as his spouse, and we didn't want to put anyone at risk.

You know, this guy is a trained soldier.

You know, someone is not a threat

until they're faced with being arrested

for a crime the committed 30 years earlier.

It was a matter of knocking on the door, asking for Mr. Whyte.

After he identified himself,

our fugitive team told him that we did have arrest warrants

from the Colorado Springs Police Department.

It was, kind of, a textbook arrest.

There was no fighting, no screaming.

He said, "Okay," while he was transported in.

After the arrest, I went in with Detective Jim Isham

to speak to Michael Whyte's wife.

His current wife was just taken off guard.

She said Mr. Whyte had never laid a finger on her.

There was no violence.

She was truly shocked.

She described Michael Whyte as her hero.

She told us that she had stage four esophageal cancer.

And that he was her lifeline.

He was everything to her.

And so that was sad. That was really sad to hear.

And also, just confusing.

'Cause this is also the same person

who brutally murdered Darlene Krashoc 32 years ago.

A killer looks like everybody else.

What does he look like?

Like the guy behind you at the grocery store.

There is no profile, there is no appearance.

There is none of that.

We went to the police station

to get ready for the interview.

I observed the interview from another room.

And that was, like, the first time I really laid eyes on him.

We knew that, uh, you know, this is someone

who might want to try to tell his side of the story.

Might try to explain it away.

Person that committed this crime

didn't make it through life,

uh, just settling for whatever got handed to him.

He did waive his right to speak with us,

so we started the interview.

I remember him making a comment,

"So old cases that haven't been solved?"

This is a well-educated, upper middle class man

who absolutely knows what he's done or what he hasn't done.

Um, and you don't get sat in front of a couple of detectives,

uh, without knowing exactly what you're there for.

And I remember sliding Darlene's picture on the table.

And after a big gulp from the water,

he looked at it

with a pained expression before stating that...

...she looks like his ex-wife.

And he said, "But I know it's not her."

Once I showed the picture, it seemed like he wanted

to disassociate himself with the table, the picture.

Once I laid Darlene's photograph on the table,

his demeanor, kind of, changed.

It was definitely an eerie feeling, watching the interview.

And I do remember, specifically, him saying...

"I had sex with lots of women,

but I never killed any of them."

He denied ever seeing her.

Or even knowing about the murder,

which, to me, is unbelievable.

And at that time, he opted to invoke his right to remain silent.

And I remember standing up to leave the interview room,

and he looked at me, and he said,

"How do I defend myself against this?"

I just thought to myself,

if someone would accuse me of this heinous crime,

and I was completely innocent,

I wouldn't have the attitude of sipping my water

asking, "How do I defend myself?"

Before leaving the room, the cops get impressions of Whyte's teeth.

However, it's 30-plus years since this murder happened.

Teeth impressions aren't very meaningful over that period of time.

He had a pained expression on his face.

You could tell that he was fighting back tears.

It was almost a combination of extreme anguish and disbelief.

To me, it was the face of someone who worked hard

to prevent this day from ever occurring, and here it was happening.

I'm very proud of the detectives in the Cold Case Unit,

Isham and Somosky.

They took an oath.

They did what they said they would do.

It was not until after we attempted the interview,

I made the call to the family.

You have the defendant in custody,

then you tell the family.

And Somosky was privileged to make it.

Something you don't often get to do.

I answered the phone.

He said, "Paul?" And I said, "Yes."

And he said, uh, "Jo Somosky."

And it was like, "Well, hello, detective. How are you doing?"

He said, "I'm doing extremely well."

So, I asked him to please go to where his wife was.

He said, "Would you get her next to you?

I've got something I want to tell you.

And I want you both to hear it at the same time."

Paul said, "Come here. You've got to hear this."

He said, "I waited 32 years to tell you this."

And I told them,

"The Army CID and Colorado Springs Police Department

have made an arrest for the homicide

of their daughter, Darlene Krashoc."

And that's when we heard they've made an arrest.

They got him.

And I know all they could hear was me screaming.

That was the best day of my life.

They got that sucker.

I found out.

I was asleep on the couch.

My wife came, she woke me up,

I'm like, "What's going on? Why you waking me up?"

And she says, "They found him! They found him!"

I said, "Who? Who did they find?"

And she holds up the telephone.

My eyes focus on him. Oh, my God.

That's him, with beady eyes, you know?

Those eyes have been burned in my head for, for 32 years.

I thought to myself, "You son of a bitch.

You've been sitting there all these years, and you're right there."

Mr. Whyte comes across as intelligent, calm, even arrogant.

Understands DNA.

Maintains, "You got the wrong guy.

You made a terrible mistake."

He wants to go to trial.

Let's do it. Let's go to trial.

I'm talking with the defense attorney,

he told me, "Michael White will consider no offers.

He doesn't... He doesn't want a deal."

And I asked him, "Why?"

He said, "Well, frankly, you're not getting the evidence in."

Our biggest challenge in trial, without a doubt,

was making sure that our evidence was going to be admitted.

Charlie Green, who was the evidence tech at the time,

was no longer alive.

The coroner himself was no longer alive.

We'd lost several other detectives.

We have to find a different way

to have that evidence admitted at trial.

So, we had lead detectives who were present on scene.

When I got a phone call from the District Attorney's office,

I was filming episodes of American Detective at the time.

And I told my producer, I said, "Well, that's pretty interesting.

We're here talking about somebody's else's case."

My mind just rolled up.

I'm going back to court.

And when I testified in the trial for Michael David Whyte in June 2021...

I looked at him as I walked by the defendant's table.

And I thought, "I've been looking for you for a long time.

And here you are."

When I walked into that courtroom,

because of my current notoriety,

you could hear a pin drop.

Every head in the jury box is looking at me.

Every head in the gallery is looking at me.

The only one not looking at me was Michael Whyte.

He was looking straight ahead.

My nerves, really, rested with the victim's family.

Paul and Betty had been struggling

with unanswered questions, uh, for 30-plus years.

I think there was some concern there what was gonna happen

when I first laid eyes on him.

And we did lock eyes.

And he knew exactly who we were.

Hmm.

Really...

Nothing. I don't feel anything for him.

I don't.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, indeed.

Yes, I did.

Mmm. I don't wanna say.

I went and took the stand and explained,

at the time this crime occurred,

I was a sergeant and supervisor in Homicide.

Joe's primary role in all of this

was to help paint the jury a picture

of what detective work looked like back at the time.

Joe testified that DNA was in its infancy,

and they didn't know exactly what it was.

They just knew that there was a chance that this futuristic technology

might one day exist, and they wanted to be careful

in the event that they would be able to use that information.

We then proceeded to discuss the tagging and marking of evidence.

How and where it was recovered, and by whom.

And by what method was it marked and eventually restored.

He was able to illustrate for the jury

the level of care Charlie Green was notorious for.

Charlie Green wasn't somebody

who was known for making mistakes or cutting corners.

I had no difficulty testifying to this,

because I was confident we had done the right thing,

because we always do the right thing.

And following that testimony, I was excused.

And we got some pushback from the judge.

I think Ben and I lost years of our lives

wondering what that ruling was going to be.

There was a lot of stress

going into that bench conference.

While the judge was considering that, it was eerie quiet.

If the judge had ruled that those items of evidence

would have been excluded from the trial,

that would have been the end of the trial.

And when he admitted that first item of evidence,

I took my first relaxed breath.

I think we were pretty certain that Michael Whyte would take the stand,

just because there's an arrogance about him.

And when he took the stand, he was adamant

that he didn't remember Darlene Krashoc.

I found that hard to believe because this case was all over the media in 1987.

He testified on the stand,

"I did not kill Darlene Krashoc."

He didn't know anything about it. And I thought,

"Really? Fort Carson, and you didn't hear?

Mmm. No."

Michael Whyte's statement to his attorney, essentially, was,

that it's possible he could have come in contact with her,

and that he would have sexual encounters

sometimes in the bathroom of the bar,

sometimes in his car.

Their theory was that this DNA had all gotten on Darlene

through transferred DNA.

But that evidence came in the form of the clothes hanger

that was wrapped around her neck and mouth,

and fashioned like a horse bridle.

The secret buds, obviously, that were found at the scene of the crime.

Certainly, there's no good answer

for Michael Whyte on the cigarette butts.

The defense tried to argue that this was transfer DNA.

That theory is debunked when you combine that

with the three cigarette buds

that are found next to her body.

Because the person who randomly decided to rape and kill her,

without leaving any of their own DNA,

wouldn't have had Michael Whyte's

three cigarette buds from that night.

In 1987, nobody knew what the hell DNA was.

So there was no way that they could make that argument

that somebody was trying to frame him

by placing his cigarette buds at the scene of the crime,

because they would have had no way of knowing that DNA was even a technology

that the police could have investigated at that time.

In a case like this, obviously, one of our biggest hurdles

is that we don't know exactly how this all went down.

Because this investigation has been completed,

we are now in a position to say

on the 17th of March, 1987, St. Patrick's Day,

Darlene decides, "I'm going out tonight to Shuffles with two friends."

We can say, with some degree of certainty...

that when Mr. Whyte sees her, he dances with her.

Lord is a guy that remembers things.

And he sees the picture of Michael Whyte, and he identifies him.

"That's the guy with the beady eyes." Instantly.

I'm sure. 100%. That's him.

Later, she doesn't have two men with her, she's alone.

He either convinced her he would give her a ride,

or asked her for another drink.

Who knows? We don't know.

But she probably willingly went with him.

And then, somewhere along that line, something went very wrong.

Michael Whyte said during interrogation,

"She looks just like my ex-wife."

Was that his attraction to her?

Was that the foundation of his rage towards her?

You can say that, you can't prove it.

But it does make you wonder.

We don't know the crime scene, location.

But Mr. Whyte loses control.

Does terrible things to her body.

A bridle around her mouth from twisted coat hangers.

Applies enough pressure to kill her from asphyxia.

He then dumps her body next to a dumpster.

One of the things that's surprising about that crime scene,

three cigarettes consumed, down to the filters,

all three contain his DNA.

It takes a few minutes to smoke a cigarette,

but he smoked three of them.

What was he doing?

Admiring his work?

Calming down?

Try to stop his panic?

At the very moment that he was having those thoughts

that no one's ever going to know,

there was a British research doctor at work on a DNA analysis tool

that would allow people to identify Michael David Whyte

over 30 years later.

Nobody expected a quick verdict.

In this case, they deliberated for about three hours.

And the judge brought the jury in.

"Have you reached a verdict?"

She said, "On the first count of first-degree murder,

with deliberation...

we, the jury, find him guilty."

Guilty.

And that's all we needed to hear.

Guilty.

It was like the world lifted off of our shoulders.

A flood of emotions.

Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Michael Whyte was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

But given Michael Whyte's age,

I don't think he's going to be able to make it to his parole.

Three decades later, an arrest was made,

and a jury convicted Michael Whyte of first-degree murder.

Her parents say, "Justice has been served."

The crime he committed was one of enormous violence,

savage behavior.

Worst I've ever seen in a sex crime.

And now, Mr. Whyte is gonna pay for that,

and he will die in a 6x9 concrete room,

where he belongs.

Um...

commitment to Darlene.

Can't undo that.

But you gotta do what you can.

I love you, baby girl.

I always called her my baby girl.

And she knows.

Mr. Whyte didn't realize something that's quite significant.

He believed that that moment in his life passed by...

and he survived it.

He got away with it.

But there were always footsteps behind him.

Always.