Original subtitles

When a murder's committed, it's always a race against time

to find the truth, to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer

and to make sure that justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr Richard Shepherd

and I've spent my career as a forensic pathologist,

performing nearly 23,000 autopsies,

including on some of the most high-profile cases of recent times.

I've learnt that the dead don't hide the truth and they never lie.

Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim.

From a state-of-the-art laboratory, with ground-breaking technology

that uses digitally scanned sample bodies,

I'll investigate a series of intriguing murders

where, from the victims' bodies,

I'll be revealing to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.

(camera shutter clicks)

On the 1st of July, 1997, in Oakland, California,

police found the dismembered body of a woman.

'The house had been attacked by arsonists just two weeks earlier.'

'But who was the victim?'

'And what could her body reveal about its own death?'

East Oakland, not a bad neighbourhood.

A lot of people had been in that neighbourhood for many years.

There were a lot of kids in the neighbourhood

and a lot of people seemed to know each other.

Residential neighbourhood,

but like everything else...

...it had its share of problems.

It was predominantly African-American

and what I would call a working-class neighbourhood.

'But on the 15th of July, 1997, a grim discovery was made.'

I was the crime scene investigator on the scene,

the primary one that was in the field.

I was called in the morning

and was told to respond to the address

on 50th Avenue in Oakland

and I was there to search for evidence

and a body.

The canine units went in first

and searched the basement as well as the home.

'It wasn't long before they were on the scent.'

I get to the scene and I'm trying to get my equipment out of the car.

The guys were yelling for me to hurry up and come on in the house.

So, I just grabbed my camera and ran up into the house

and they took me into the kitchen area

and propped open a floor freezer.

It was very dark inside

and I reached into the freezer to see what was in there.

And it was... It appeared to be plastic, like, garbage bags.

From one of the garbage bags, I could, um, feel an arm...

...and elbow.

I told everybody to be quiet and be still.

And I tried to feel for a pulse, but there was none.

We secured that area and I asked everybody to leave,

because now I've got a dead body in a freezer box.

We had to figure out how we were going to transport the body

to the coroner's office.

A few discussions occurred and it was finally decided

that we would transport the body, fully and completely,

inside the freezer box.

We had to get a truck, we had to get a dolly,

we had to get some duck tape

because I wanted to make sure that the box was secured.

I was there at the coroner's office

and I photographed the beginning of the autopsy.

The body wasn't burned.

It was starting to decompose,

but, um, her legs were cut off.

Her torso was cut.

There were four body parts that came out of those bags.

'The body parts were found in the home of local woman Stevie Allman.'

'So they assumed she was the victim, but they needed to be sure.'

The first job of a pathologist is to identify the body.

The body goes through a number of stages after death,

which aren't particularly time dependant,

but they usually start with discolouration of the skin,

then blister formation, then bloating and liquefaction.

And all of these changes are environmentally dependent.

You can see here on this sample body on the digital table

how rigor mortis occurs after death

when the muscles stop receiving oxygen.

And that's a change that starts immediately someone dies

and is present in the hands and the feet in about four hours

and spreads the whole of the muscle mass of the body at about 12 hours.

Here, they were posed with a problem.

This body was quite severely decomposed.

In fact, the body was so severely decomposed,

the crime scene investigators couldn't work out

if it was a man or a woman.

Now, to make an identification you need to compare records

that were made before death

with those that were discovered at the autopsy.

We know the body was found in the home of Stevie Allman,

but who was she?

Stevie Allman was very kind, a very giving person

and wanted to do good

for mankind, for her neighbourhood,

for the people that she loved and cared about.

'Stevie lived with her sister in a small bungalow

at 50th Avenue, Oakland, California, where she grew up.'

'She came from a big family with ten brothers and sisters.'

Most of the kids had already moved out of the house

and were long gone and started their own families.

While Stevie lived in this small white bungalow.

(man) Stevie Allman was a hard-working woman, had a career.

I think she was an accountant or some administrative position

that she had earned a 20-year retirement from.

'Two weeks before the body was found,

a 911 call had come in from a neighbour,

saying there was a fire in Stevie Allman's home.'

(sirens wail)

'When firefighters arrived at the scene,

they rescued a woman at the front of the house.'

So when firefighters arrived,

they asked her what happened and of course what was her name.

She identified herself as Stevie Allman

and she said that drug dealers had surrounded the house

and had thrown firebombs into the house.

And that they were firebombing the house

because they had been videotaping the drug dealers in the area.

'She also said that she intended to hand this evidence into the police.'

'Stevie was taken to Alta Bates Medical Centre

for treatment of her injuries.'

The Oakland Police Department put out a $50,000 reward

and that was later doubled by the governor of the state of California.

And so there was $100,000 reward,

uh, for anyone who could give any information

on the drug dealers

who allegedly firebombed the house.

"When we have a citizen of this type

who gets out and fights for the peace of the community,

then we need to all rally around her and this police department

to solve this crime."

'Stevie told investigators that on the night of the fire

while she was in the living room, she heard a crash in the kitchen...

(crashing)

...followed by a one-gallon-sized glass jar hitting the kitchen floor

and breaking into pieces.'

(smashing)

'That was followed by glass jars being thrown into the living room...

(smash) ...the bathroom... (smash) ...and the front bedroom.' (smash)

I was called into this case.

It was getting a lot of publicity from the media, politicians.

You know what I thought? Everything was legitimate,

that was it somebody who was doing something for the community.

'Stevie claimed she was targeted

because she was trying to catch local drug dealers.'

So, I thought there's good reason to investigate

who's, who's, uh, committing these crimes.

'Having spent a week in hospital, Stevie issued a news statement.'

'"I have no doubt they intended to murder me

and burn the house down on top of me."'

'"Their warped minds thought the act would clear the way

to do their dirty dealing

and at the same time scare everyone else along 50th Avenue and beyond

into a submissive, terrified, slave state."'

Everyone was talking about this family that had been firebombed,

because they were taping drug dealers.

And as a result, there was an outpouring of public support

for Stevie Allman and donations began pouring in.

The donations totalled $4,700.

Several contractors offered to rebuild the, uh...

Stevie Allman's home.

'But while investigating the arson attack,

Sergeant Gregory was beginning to feel Stevie's story

wasn't adding up.'

We kind of walked around the scene and things didn't look right to me.

I'm led to believe that dope dealers

carrying large ice tea jars with gasoline in them

had thrown them through the windows.

Well, this is not the way you retaliate against somebody

out in the streets of Oakland.

For one, I would be worried if I was carrying that jar of gasoline

that I'd be doused with some of that gasoline my own self

and it would take a minimum of four people to do this,

because one would have to carry the jug,

one would have to light it on fire, and we had two different locations.

So, you're talking four people minimum.

'However, there was no evidence of anyone running from the house

on the night of the fire.'

They were ice-tea fragment jars,

because you could see glass fragments on the ground.

What I thought was suspicious from the very beginning

was the fact that they were on the outside of the house.

If they were thrown from outside of the house

into the house through a window,

the projectile would go through the window.

Instead, these were on the outside of the house.

Meaning to me, they came from inside, out.

'Forensic investigations concluded the same thing,

that the fire had most likely been intentionally set

with a flammable liquid from inside the property.'

We did a complete canvass of the neighbourhood that day

and very little information was developed.

One of the things that myself and other officers did

ask neighbours, "Are you aware of the dope dealing going on?"

"Yes, of course."

"Were you aware that she was videotaping these dope dealers?"

"No, not so much."

But there wasn't really feeling on the neighbour's part

that she was being targeted by any of the dope dealers.

We had gone through probably a week of interviewing drug dealers,

prostitutes, neighbourhood people, and it just wasn't coming together.

Dope dealers had told me,

the hardcore dope dealers had actually told me in an interview,

"If she was that much of a problem to us,

we wouldn't use fire or gasoline,

we'd just put a bullet in her head."

Which to me,

that's the way problems were dealt with out there on the street.

'Further investigations revealed

that only two weeks earlier there had been another fire

when firefighters had been called to Stevie's bungalow.'

'But investigators weren't getting closer

to finding out who was starting them.'

Even after my canvass, talking to all the other investigators

that interviewed people in the jail, I had nothing.

Nothing to substantiate that there was anybody else burning them out.

It was, "Oh, yeah, I heard that she was being burned out

by dope dealers."

But they're hearing this third hand, from somebody else.

Nothing to substantiate any of that.

The Oakland Police Department had not received one tip

as a result of that reward money that was put out there.

And, you know, the reality is in Oakland,

most of the people will turn their grandmother in for $100.

Whereas in this case, they had a $100,000 reward out there,

and that was very unusual in Oakland

to not receive not one tip,

uh, with that kind of money being out there.

It was clear to many of them

that there was something strange going on in this case.

'Stevie's accounts of the fires just weren't adding up.'

Things like this that are just so bizarre and out of the norm.

This is what horror movies are made out of.

'On the 15th of July, 1997,

a dismembered body was found in the freezer of Stevie Allman's home

in Oakland, California.'

'Who was the victim and what secrets could the body reveal?'

'Two weeks earlier, a woman identifying herself as Stevie

had suffered horrific injuries after her home was firebombed.'

Although badly burned, she survived,

and she was showered with support and money

by local public and politicians,

after she said she'd been targeted by drug dealers.

But it wasn't long before detectives became suspicious

and wondered how much of her story was actually true.

'When Stevie was injured in the firebombing,

it was all over the local news.'

One thing that was brought to the attention

was that when the news media took photographs

of Stevie being put into an ambulance

and sent up to the hospital,

word got back to me that that wasn't Stevie at all.

(sirens wail)

'Stevie's older sister, Leotta Belleville,

told the police that the injured woman was actually Sarah Mitchell,

another sister who lived with Stevie.'

And she made it very adamant to me

that that was Sarah that was put into the ambulance, not Stevie.

Stevie was always what you would call a homebody.

Stevie would just go to work and then come home.

She was a very private person.

If she wasn't at work, then Stevie was at home,

and so it was very unusual for the house

to have suffered this fire damage

and for Stevie to not be present

after several days.

And family members began asking, "Where is Stevie?"

'Leotta called her sister Sarah

to see if she knew where the other sister Stevie was.'

The first time she asked her she said, "She's in Reno."

Well, a little bit later in the conversation,

the sister asked her again, "Well, where is Stevie?"

And when she answered the second time,

she said, "I told you, she's in Lake Tahoe."

Leotta said, "Well, wait a minute,

the first time, you told me that she was in Reno

and now you just told me that she's in Lake Tahoe. So, what is it?"

'Leotta then immediately filed a missing persons report.'

Then it's time to call out all the stops

and bring Sarah or Stevie into the office to interview them

to find out who in fact they are.

I wasn't able to get a hold of her at the hospital

because she was confined to the burn unit

and the burn unit has to stay very, uh, antiseptic.

'Over a week later, the injured woman was released from hospital

and officers located her at a hotel in Alameda

and brought her in for interview.'

So I wanted to know who I was speaking to,

because even during our interview, I was referring to her as Stevie.

I have my suspicions about the fire.

She had frontal burns, which told me that she was in front of the fire.

She had a full head of hair but the hair wasn't burned.

Nothing on her back.

She had burns, burns, all frontal burns,

which is unusual, because to get frontal burns

you're not running through the house screaming

as it follows you out of the house. You're in front of the fire,

as opposed to it being behind you, if that makes sense.

'Still assuming she was Stevie,

he wanted to know where her sister Sarah was.'

And then when questioning her about the whereabouts of Sarah,

she said, "Oh", nonchalantly, very cavalier,

"She's off in Reno with her boyfriend."

It was, like, "When's the last time you talked to her?"

"Oh, I don't know, a few days ago, maybe a week ago."

That just seemed totally out of the realm

of being realistic to me.

'So, Sarah had told her family that Stevie was in Reno,

and this woman claiming to be Stevie

was now telling the police that Sarah was in Reno."

She had multiple identifications on her.

I mean, she had Stevie's identification on her and Sarah's.

You know what I'm thinking? If Sarah is off in Nevada,

what are you doing with Sarah's identification?

'They found in her purse a cheque made out to Stevie Allman

by the Alta Bates Hospital for $2,744.'

So she's got a lot of money on her in her purse.

"Where did you get the money, Stevie?"

"Well, I got this from donations while I was in the hospital

from people to get by."

'Still unsure as to whether she was Stevie or Sarah,

Gregory decided to take fingerprints to confirm her identity.'

And luckily for us, Sarah had a prior criminal record. Very minor.

She had been arrested for prostitution

for quite a few years before that.

But the fingerprints did come back and confirmed

that the person that we rolled were that belonging to Sarah.

'It was now clear that it was Sarah Mitchell, not Stevie Allman,

who had been burned in the fire.'

'Sarah was pretending to be her sister Stevie.'

'She had Stevie's ID on her

and had a large cheque made out to Stevie on her person.'

At that point, we arrested Sarah for forgeries.

'If she had lied about her identity, what else had she lied about?'

My suspicion was was that Stevie was dead somewhere.

My feeling was that she would be at the house.

The search warrant was prepared

and we were told to put it on hold the next day.

I had had a friend of mine bring a cadaver dog from San Mateo County.

It sniffs, it smells blood, body tissue.

'Whilst waiting for the search warrant to come through,

the cadaver dog was outside the property when nature called.'

He ultimately let his dog relieve itself in the backyard,

and the dog promptly went right to a Skilsaw blade.

The dog started licking the Skilsaw blade.

That told me that there was blood residue on the Skilsaw blade.

So, that told me that we were on the right path right there.

Later on, other homicide detectives and myself

went ahead and served the search warrant on the house.

'A week after Sarah's true identity was revealed,

the dismembered body was discovered in the freezer

at the home of Stevie Allman.'

Police were now sure that two women lived in the house.

There was Stevie Allman, aged 52

and her sister, Sarah Mitchell, aged 47

and they looked very similar.

The same body shape, the same height, the same appearance.

So much so that neighbours sometimes thought that they were twins

and that's what made identification even more important.

Three ways of identifying a body were present.

First we'd use now was DNA, but it was still in its infancy then

and probably wasn't used.

The second was fingerprints. They can be really valuable,

but only if somebody has a criminal record

and their fingerprints are stored by the police.

But fingerprints can be lost through decomposition

and so not be reliable.

Finally, there are the dental records,

but only if somebody has dental records

that are available for comparison.

So when we look at this lady on the digital autopsy table,

we can see she's got the changes in her mouth

that are really important for a dental identification.

Loss of teeth in the upper jaw, but marks of where the teeth had been.

Scant teeth in the lower jaw with evidence of dental work

and this is what's important

in making a positive dental identification.

'The dental records proved the body in the freezer was Stevie Allman.'

Why was her sister pretending to be Stevie?

And why would anyone want Stevie Allman dead?

In California,

police were dealing with a strange case of confused identities.

They had a dismembered body

which had been clearly identified as Stevie Allman,

but they also had a very-much-alive woman

who was insisting that SHE was Stevie Allman,

even though her fingerprints had identified her as Stevie's sister,

Sarah Mitchell.

'When the body was discovered at the home of the sisters,

police moved in on Sarah.'

And it was that point...

..Sarah Mitchell was charged with the murder of her sister.

But there was still a lot of investigation

that needed to be done,

because at this point,

it was a completely circumstantial-evidence case.

'To try and uncover the truth,

investigators wanted to find out more about the sisters.'

It was Stevie, Sarah and the mother that lived in the house

and when the mother passed,

it was just Stevie and Sarah that lived in the house.

Both of them were very similar probably in height.

I would say not tall women, 5'6", 5'7", maybe.

And within a few years of each other.

They tended to comb their hair the same way.

Straight back a lot of times. To me, they could be very well twins.

'Despite looking alike,

they were said to have very different personalities.'

Stevie Allman was very hard-working, very industrious,

um, the kind of person who always had a job,

and was always a provider, uh, for her family.

Stevie had a retirement. She was responsible.

She was maintaining the upkeep of the house.

She was doing everything that she could

to be a good person and a neighbour like that.

Whereas Sarah on the other hand was the exact opposite.

Some would even go as far as to say Sarah was absolutely lazy.

Never wanted to work.

She always was looking for someone else to take care of her.

It's my understanding that Sarah

had just been kind of living there rent-free,

just taking and taking and taking.

Sarah had gone through her share of boyfriends.

She was addicted to prescription medication

and was always trying to get over on somebody.

You know, rather than earn a living herself and do the right thing.

Stevie thought that, you know, it was time for Sarah

to be a responsible adult, take care of herself, go and get a job

and that she wasn't willing to carry the load for Sarah.

I would describe Stevie and Sarah,

the good sister and the bad sister, really.

'But was Sarah really bad enough to kill her own sister?'

'When the dismembered body was recovered,

it was hoped it would be able to reveal the truth

about its murder at autopsy.'

If the murderer was trying to hide the evidence by starting the fire,

they'd failed, because the body was protected within the freezer.

And so the whole of Stevie Allman's body was available for autopsy.

And when they looked at the head,

they found areas of over 20 separate injuries.

On the skin, many of them had a tram-line or rail-track appearance.

Two parallel lines of bruising, consistent with a linear object.

Internally when they looked,

there were extensive fractures to the face and also to the skull.

So, fractures of the cheek bone, of the jaw,

of the forehead, of the skull all over.

But more importantly,

there was evidence of haemorrhaging around the brain.

And the haemorrhaging would have occurred inside the skull,

around the fractures, but also on and within the brain,

and that would have been the cause of death.

The pathologist couldn't be certain as to the weapon used,

but he said that it was elongated, with a hard edge, like a metal bar.

Well, it appeared that the body had major trauma to the head.

So, we were asked to go and go back to the scene

and see what we could find.

I didn't know if I was looking for a hammer, a crowbar, a pipe.

We just didn't know. So I was collecting a lot of possibilities

that may have had some blood or hair transfer on it.

'The investigators were also looking for evidence of how and where

the body had been dismembered.'

I know the crime lab recovered

the trap in the bathroom tub.

Blood gets washed down.

There's always some type of residue of blood that's left

and you can use what they call a luminol,

which is a liquid or a spray that can spray it on there,

use a black light and it'll just pop right up.

We were able to also discover some cut marks in the bathtub.

I recovered saws and knives and blades and a crowbar and hammers

and, like, tools on the back porch area as well.

Crime lab established that she was killed in her bedroom,

possibly in her bed while she was sleeping

and then the body was, um, moved

from that room into the bathroom,

where her body was dismembered.

'A neighbour told police they saw Stevie and Sarah together

in their backyard on the 15th of June,

four days before the first fire.'

'This was the last time Stevie Allman was seen alive.'

'Could the body help them establish a time of death?'

Estimating the time of death in a decomposing body

can be a real challenge,

but it's especially complicated where the body was initially frozen

and only started to decompose when the freezer stopped working

after the second fire.

Estimations suggest that Stevie had been dead for around a month.

And that fits quite well with her being seen on the 15th of June.

'There was nothing to suggest

why Sarah Mitchell would want to kill her sister, Stevie Allman.'

'So, investigators looked into her financial situation

to see if that would provide any clues.'

What we found was that every one of her accounts had been emptied.

Uh, Sarah Mitchell had cleaned out her bank accounts, her mutual funds,

her retirement account and had withdrawn all of the money.

And for every transaction,

there is a photograph or a video of the transaction.

On every transaction, there was Sarah Mitchell,

uh, disguised as her sister and using her sister's ID

to obtain monies from her sister's accounts.

We had one of the top forensic handwriting experts

in the United States, Lloyd Cunningham,

and confirmed

that the signatures that Sarah Mitchell signed

in the name of Stevie Allman

were forged signatures by Sarah Mitchell.

By assuming Stevie's identity,

the cheques would be coming in to Stevie.

All the good things that Stevie did, Sarah was mooching off of that.

I mean, that's just total greed.

'But Sarah didn't stop at emptying Stevie's bank accounts.'

'Only 24 hours before the second fire,

she received a visit from an insurance adjuster.'

I believe it was the next day that she burned the whole house down.

And that if she burned the whole house down,

she could also get the insurance proceeds for the home.

And we think that was the motive for her burning the whole house down.

You know, this case took so many bizarre twists

that it was crazy.

Police had been investigating the murder of Stevie Allman,

whose body had been dismembered

and put in the chest freezer in her home.

They'd discovered that her sister, Sarah Mitchell,

had stolen her identity and was stealing her money,

yet Sarah continued to maintain her innocence.

'Despite this, police had charged Sarah Mitchell

with the murder of her sister, Stevie Allman,

but now they had to build the case. Could the body give any more clues?'

'The body had revealed

that Stevie Allman was killed by blows to the head,

using an elongated instrument with a hard edge,

that caused haemorrhaging inside the skull.'

And the body had also been dismembered.

Dismemberment murders are quite rare.

It also adds a huge psychological overlay

to the type of person who would commit that murder

and then go on to cut up a human body.

I can show you where the body had been cut apart.

First cut was through the knees

and the lower legs were missing.

The second cut had been through the waist.

And both arms had also been cut off.

I think the murderer stopped at this point,

because she'd got the body small enough to fit into the freezer,

which was only 4ft long.

The one thing in the investigator's favour

was that all parts of the body were present.

Now, I know from personal experience

that dismembering a body can be a really difficult task,

even for someone with specialist skills.

But in this case, evidence from the body showed

that the person had struggled to cut through all of the joints

and it became clear that she must have used a saw

to cut through many of the bones.

This must have been a terrible end.

The forensic pathologist took photos

of the areas where the cuts were made.

You could tell by the smooth cuts

that it was done with an electric saw,

because if it was a hand-held saw,

you would have a more jagged cut

and then it was consistent with an electric Skilsaw,

because there was blood everywhere in the room.

There was blood splatter on all four walls of the bedroom

and that she was unable to clean all of the blood evidence.

So, rather than clean all the blood off of the walls,

she lit the room on fire.

There was no evidence of anyone breaking into the house.

Even when they did the arson investigation,

it was determined that the firebombs were consistent

with having been ignited from inside the house,

because there was no broken glass inside the house,

indicating that any kind of firebomb had been thrown through a window.

'Investigators now believe

Sarah staged the fire to conceal the murder

and the burns on her body were splash burns,

which can happen to an arsonist when they set a fire.'

'And they discovered she had stolen Stevie's identity

even before she had killed her.'

We found evidence of her engaged in

financial theft from Stevie's accounts

even before the murder and the firebombing.

And we also did think that that was part of why

she also killed her sister,

because there had been previous incidents of theft

from Stevie's accounts and Stevie had also warned her

if there was a repeat incident of her stealing from Stevie,

that Stevie was going to throw her out of the house.

So I think that once Stevie Allman made that demand

that Sarah would need to go out and get a job

and really take care of herself,

I think began the breakdown of the relationship

between Sarah Mitchell and Stevie Allman.

And it was at some time during that period

that Sarah Mitchell determined

that she was going to kill Stevie Allman

and assume her identity and take all of her assets.

And then we found several cheques that had been fraudulently cashed

on Stevie's account prior to the murder.

So that was where we eventually concluded

that the motive for this whole case was financial gain.

'In November, 2000,

Sarah Mitchell faced trial at Alameda County Superior Court

for the murder of her sister, Stevie Allman.'

Sarah had two attorneys and these guys were top-notch.

They were outstanding defence attorneys.

But, you know, good representation doesn't change the fact

that the evidence of her guilt was overwhelming,

despite it being only circumstantial evidence.

And so, you know, during the trial, you know, she would smile some days

and some days she wouldn't smile,

because she's heard evidence

of just the brutality of her crime.

The cruelty of it.

Those were hard days even for her to deal with.

'After a three-week trial, the jury delivered their verdict.'

'Sarah Mitchell was convicted of first-degree murder,

with the special circumstance of intentional murder

carried out for financial gain.'

'The special-circumstance clause

made her eligible to die by means of a lethal injection.'

In America, the jury's verdict has to be unanimous.

So there are 12 jurors.

If one juror votes not guilty, then the person is not convicted

and in this case, it was all 12.

All 12 people indicated that Sarah Mitchell is guilty of murder.

I looked over at Sarah Mitchell...

...and I saw absolute relief

on her face.

You would think if you'd just been convicted

of a special-circumstance murder, that the person would be upset.

Instead what we saw on her face

was absolute relief that the trial was over

and it was at that point that both myself,

and later we found out that for many of the jurors,

that when they saw her expression after the verdict was read,

everyone in the courtroom knew that she was guilty.

They were going to give her the death penalty,

but one of her other sisters did not want to pursue the death penalty.

They'd already suffered a big enough loss.

They asked the district attorney, Terry Wiley,

to ask for a life sentence for her,

which is probably better in the end.

Make her suffer a little bit, you know.

'Sarah Mitchell was given a life sentence

without the possibility of parole.'

At the end of the day, Stevie's not coming back.

And neither is Sarah.

So, I suppose justice was served.

Never had a case with a more depraved heart

than Sarah Mitchell had.

I mean, it's just... It was just a depraved heart.

It was very complex,

because you have the two sisters that look so much alike.

Money, greed, jealousy

and evil.

This woman was evil.

She wanted everything she couldn't have.

So she just thought I guess she'd take it from her sister.

I mean, who could do that to a sister? To a blood relative?

To any person for that matter,

but to a sister that you've grown up with your entire life?

It... I can't even imagine it at all.

You know, this case was all about greed

and one sister feeling entitled

to be taken care of for the rest of her life by her sister.

And as soon as the sister indicated that she was not willing to do that,

she murdered her.

And she tried to take her money

and she tried to erase her sister from the face of the earth.

And it just showed someone who had an absolute lack of character.

I was glad that we were able to

give the family some sense of justice,

because although they did not want her to get the death penalty,

they DID want her punished

for what she did to a very valuable member of their family.

Sarah Mitchell had gone to extreme lengths

to try and hide the murder of her sister, Stevie Allman.

She'd dismembered the body

and hidden it in the freezer at their home

and then committed arson on the home twice

to try and get rid of the body.

But bodies never lie,

and by literally piecing Stevie back together,

the truth behind her murder was revealed.

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