Original subtitles

- We got a call from a citizen that had found body parts.

- A woman had been dismembered.

Her remains showed up across Brooklyn

in three black plastic garbage bags.

- The whole neighborhood has been pulling together

to see if we can figure out why.

- The cuts in the body, they were very precise,

like somebody had taken a knife and just went like this.

A serial killer.

He appeared to be more and more threatening.

- And they find a message on her answering machine

very sexual in nature.

- She always felt that she was being harassed by someone.

- They do get information that he is reported

to be in Albania.

- That whole region at the time was civil war.

[artillery piece fires]

There's not a lot of ways to track him in a war zone.

Then we have this victim in Albania

who was killed much in the same way

as the woman in Brooklyn.

We were out at a lake

and found body parts floating up on the shore.

- The victim in Albania was found in a plastic garbage bag,

and our victim was found in a plastic garbage bag.

I could see this is a very similar case.

It was exciting to think, "Oh, my God.

This could be something."

[dramatic music]

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

♪ ♪

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

[indistinct radio chatter]

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

♪ ♪

This is "FBI True."

[dark music]

- Kristy Kottis is a 15-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs, crimes against children,

as well as human and drug trafficking.

Kottis was the supervisor

of the FBI's Threat Response Squad

overseeing the bureau's response to terrorism threats

in New York City.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

- What I think is very interesting here

is that you both worked on the same case, and yet,

this is the first time you two are meeting...

both: Yeah. - Face-to-face.

- That's right. - We've only talked

on the phone and-- - On the phone.

- And endless emails

and everything else under the sun on this case.

- Do you feel like you know him just from the phone?

- I do. He's so familiar to me.

- You both worked this case at different times.

- We did. - A cat known as

the Butcher of the Bronx?

- The Bronx Butcher in the media, yeah.

- Mike Clarke became a police officer

in New Jersey at age 18.

He was eventually recruited by the FBI,

where he worked with narcotics and SWAT units

before moving into overseas investigations.

♪ ♪

- Back in 1990, a woman had been dismembered.

Her remains showed up across Brooklyn

in three black plastic garbage bags.

- Barb Daly was the first woman

to supervise an FBI armed robbery unit.

She spent ten years working with expert profilers

in the bureau's Behavioral Analysis Unit.

- So the first bag, when it was found,

it was sort of in the way,

so the woman who found it, actually, went to move it

and noticed that there was blood coming from the bag,

so she called the NYPD.

♪ ♪

Then later on, a second bag was found

with additional body parts,

and then the third bag was found with--

I believe it was just the torso.

- They recovered everything except for--right?

- Except for the head-- both: And the hands.

- The other thing that was unusual was

her breasts were cut off and placed in one of the bags

along with, I think, parts of one of her legs,

which is unusual. - Yes.

- That's not something that's necessary to kill somebody,

it's not something that's necessary to dispose of a body,

so that in and of itself tells you a little bit about

the behavior of the individual that committed this crime.

And the cuts were described as "neatly dismembered."

I remember that it was described to me

as like butcher cuts.

So initially, nobody knew who this person was.

- How'd they figure it out?

- There was a missing person's report filed

on a white female from the Bronx.

Her name was Mary Beal. About 61 years old.

- She always felt that, you know,

that she was being harassed by someone.

I don't know who that someone was.

I couldn't really tell you.

When she went out, she always said,

"If I'm not back in my store

by two days, come look for me."

- Mary's nephew had filed the missing person's report.

- With our assistance,

the whole neighborhood has been pulling together

to see if we can figure out why.

That's the main reason.

- And he provides some identifying information

about Mary, including an X-ray of a broken ankle that she had,

and that broken ankle ends up matching up

with the body parts that were found.

- Police are now confirming that the body

cut into pieces and stuffed into two plastic garbage bags

found in this lot near the Brooklyn Navy Yard last month

is indeed that of 61-year-old Mary Beal.

- We feared the worst when we found out

that she was missing.

- According to many of the residents

in this Bainbridge neighborhood,

Mary Beal was quite a fixture around here,

having lived and worked here for the past 25 years

as a real estate agent.

She was also a widow and a native of Yugoslavia,

and we understand she spoke

as many as ten different languages.

- The detectives go to Mary's house in the Bronx

once she's identified,

and they start looking at her house,

and they find a message on her answering machine

from a guy called Smajo Dzurlic.

He said some things that puts them onto the fact

that they were having a relationship.

- What kind of messages is he leaving? Like--

- Very sexual in nature.

- The detective described it as angry,

and every time he called and left a message,

he appeared to be getting more and more intoxicated

and more and more threatening.

- She had been the court translator

during his divorce from his second wife.

- Yeah, she spoke fluent Serbo-Croatian.

- So that's how they met.

She was also friendly with Smajo's sister as well.

- And Smajo had borrowed, right, $10,000

from Mary-- - Yes.

- They conducted a search at Smajo's house...

♪ ♪

And found out that he had contracted

to have his entire floors redone in his house.

It's a telltale sign of some cover-up

if the dismemberment was done at the apartment,

done in the living room or the floors.

He's trying to get it cleaned up.

- They did pull up those floorboards

and they found there was blood present

underneath the floorboards in his apartment.

- There was blood present in both the bathroom

and the living room under the floors,

which would be a logical place where he would

maybe dismember her. - Right.

- It's circumstantial, but it's pretty powerful.

Not to mention that Smajo had disappeared

and with his third wife and fled.

Nobody knew where they were. He's in the wind.

♪ ♪

- We've got blood in the living room.

we've got blood in the bathroom.

Are we calling the prosecutor at this point?

- Well, they had a great circumstantial case,

but the King's County district attorney's office

didn't have enough evidence

to file an indictment on Smajo Dzurlic.

The investigation was reassigned,

as many cold cases are, to a new investigator,

and eventually, the sister was interviewed,

and she basically told the detectives

that Smajo had confessed

that he had killed Mary Beal with a hammer.

♪ ♪

And those were very powerful statements

that, combined with the circumstantial evidence,

the warrant's issued. - So at this point,

the warrant is issued.

- That's correct. - State warrant.

- At this point, does the lead go cold?

- At this point, once he's out of the country,

it does go cold, you know?

They get information over the years,

the NYPD, receives different, you know, calls.

They receive different tips.

At one point, they do get information

that he is reported to be in Belgium.

At one point, it was believed that he was in Italy,

and then at some point, it gets reported

that he might be in Albania.

- That's where they lost him, and it's not unusual

because that whole region at the time was,

you know, civil war.

[explosions]

So Yugoslavia, his home, is disintegrating.

[dark music]

There's not a lot of ways to track him in a war zone.

♪ ♪

- So fast-forward about 12 years later.

In 2005, I was selected by the director

to go open up a brand-new office

that covered the Balkans,

and it was for Bulgaria,

Macedonia, and Albania.

And our goal is to work cases.

In that area, it's mostly counterterrorism,

organized crime, human trafficking.

All that have a nexus back to the U.S.

And when we go into these countries, right,

we want to establish liaison,

we want the cops to trust us and work with us.

The office itself was situated in Sofia, Bulgaria,

in the embassy.

And I was over in Albania at one of the police precincts

and they said, "A couple weeks ago, Mike,

"we got a call from a citizen that had found body parts

in a lake," which is about a mile north

of the capital city, Tirana, "Floating up on the shore,

and we recovered them."

And divers found other garbage bags,

which contained body parts.

And they were able to put together

that it was a female,

but they didn't have any clue

of who she was or what had happened to her.

And that was unusual for the Albanians, right?

And I could tell by the looks on their faces

that they were really worried about this.

- So this shook them? - It did.

They had done everything. They don't wanna come

and ask for help, but when they did,

I got the sense that they really thought

they had something that they didn't see a lot

in Tirana.

- So they bring the body out.

- Yep. - And where do they go with it?

Like, how do they handle it?

- So the first thing I did is I went up

with the police and we looked at the lake.

And I asked them to please preserve the crime scene.

And I knew they really hadn't.

And then we went down to the morgue,

where they had brought all of the body

that they had recovered.

♪ ♪

And on this particular day,

the morgue didn't even have refrigeration,

so this body is deteriorating.

It's been a few days. It's turning into goo.

And when I looked at her--

and I'm not a forensic expert--

but it was obvious they hadn't

stitched the body back correctly.

One limb was on the wrong foot, was facing the wrong way,

and it just didn't look like

it was correctly stitched back together.

- What else were you noticing when you look at this corpse?

- She had injuries to her lip, her face, and--

- Like, what kind? - It was like a tear injury,

like somebody had taken a knife and just went like this.

She had definitely blunt force trauma

to the back of her head and her shoulders and neck.

And then what struck me was the way the cuts in the body

were--they were very precise.

It also looked like there was more than one instrument

that was used on her.

- Generally speaking, when you are dismembering a body,

it's a very difficult process.

It could take several different weapons,

so there's a lot of trial and error,

especially if this is the first time that you're doing this.

So we see sometimes with what's called "hesitation cuts"

because they don't know exactly where to cut,

either on the joint or on the bone.

It could take a long time.

You know, it's a very messy process.

- There was enough there to see--

to make me wonder, one, was this poor victim tortured

then killed and then dismembered?

Was the dismemberment part of her torture,

or did she die from blunt force trauma?

You know, Albania, cops are very well-intended.

Some of 'em were extremely competent and smart,

but they don't have any resources.

I knew we had to get somebody there that was experts

to look at this before the body deteriorated completely.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

I called right back to our, you know--

the unit you were in, International Operations...

- Okay. - Division.

And I said, "Hey, here's what I got here,

"and I think this is gonna-- I don't see a U.S. nexus

"right now, but this is a good opportunity for us

"to build liaison and to do the right thing,

"and for the Albanians to hopefully, you know,

solve this mystery."

♪ ♪

Quantico sent a three-man team to Albania.

Craig Ackley is a behavioral analyst special agent

who's an expert in victimology.

Dan Birmingham was also a BAU special agent.

- These guys are profilers. - Yes.

Then there was also Gary Reineke

who was the crime scene exploitation expert.

We all agreed that we had to get the body out

and then go back to the United States

and do a real thorough examination

of the victim and try to figure out,

you know, how was she killed.

We arranged the body to be flown out.

I drive back from Tirana to Sofia.

And it wasn't more than three or four days later

when I get this call from Craig,

the BAU special agent.

And I couldn't believe what he told me.

I could tell by his voice he was very excited.

He tells me that he was at Quantico

with some agents from New York

and a team of New York City cold case detectives.

So yeah, Barb, you probably--

tell me--tell me exactly how that conversation went.

- I was down at Quantico at the BAU on another case

with NYPD cold case detective named Jim Osorio.

And then during one of the coffee breaks,

Jim had said to Craig, "Hey, you working

on anything interesting?" And Craig says, "Yeah,

I've just come back from Albania."

And he said, "We had this woman who was found in a lake

and she was dismembered."

And so I see Jim's face from across the room

like, "Oh, interesting,"

because Jim and I are also working on this other case

involving a dismemberment.

And they mentioned that the victim in Albania

was found in a plastic garbage bag,

and our victim was found in a plastic garbage bag.

The more he talks about the way this particular body

had been dismembered and disposed of,

the more I could see this is a very similar case.

- He went through all of the details

of the Mary Beal murder, and they have a suspect.

His name is Smajo Dzurlic.

[dramatic musical sting]

He's from Yugoslavia.

And I said, "Huh, well,

Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore."

And I go, "What city?"

And he said it was Plav, Yugoslavia.

You look on the map, Plav's right over

the Albanian border... - Mm, okay.

- In Montenegro.

- It was exciting to think, "Oh, my God.

This could be something."

Mike reached out for me and basically walked me through

some of the things that we could start

to put into place, including an Interpol Red Notice.

- Who do you ask for for help

to help you run these leads down?

- The FBI has this wonderful program

called the FBI National Academy,

and it trains police officers in the United States,

but it also does it on an international basis.

And just by coincidence, we had a Yugoslavian--

country didn't exist anymore--

National Academy--a graduate--

by the name of Miodrag Stijovich.

We call him Miki for short.

Miki's Miki. - We'll call him Miki too.

- So I just dial him up, you know, out of the blue

and I said, "Miki, this is Mike Clarke.

"I'm the new FBI head of office in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I need your help with a case in Montenegro."

And Miki, I'll never forget it, on the other end, he goes,

"Michael"--in perfect English--

"I have been waiting for this call my entire life."

- That's fantastic.

[suspenseful music]

- I drove back across the Accursed Mountains

from Bulgaria to Albania,

and then up to the Montenegrin border,

and Miki met me

with a contingent of police officers.

- That's nice. - We talked about

all the particulars of the case,

and Miki leans over from his coffee,

and he goes, "If he's here, I will find him."

If he's in Plav,

Miki's probably gonna be able to find out

if he's still alive and still there.

Still in my heart, I'm like,

"It's just too good to be true."

That night, I get the call from Miki, "I found him."

He's found an individual that's the right age,

living in a different name, living in Plav.

He had been to the United States.

And I go, "Well, Miki, you know, that sounds good."

So I called back to Barb,

and Barb checked if we had any prints.

- So the only prints we have are the ones

that were taken when he first came to the United States.

They were old, and we had copies of copies of copies,

so they had really degenerated over time.

They were not good enough to make the identification,

so we had to enhance those prints.

- And then we had to get his prints.

So once we got those,

then we could send 'em to Barb,

Barb would run 'em through CJIS,

and we'll see what-- - That's right.

- If they match up. I'm like, "Wow.

Okay, Miki, how are you gonna get his prints?"

You know, so he figured out a way to do it,

you know, probably sitting in a bar.

- Mm-hmm. - Had somebody watch him,

had him, you know, watch the beer glass,

got the prints, rolled them,

and then I sent them back to Barb.

- And then we had to get the old prints.

So those prints had to be compared.

And but it was probably only, like, a week or two,

and then we get the results back.

- Was your heart pounding?

- For lots of reasons, but yeah, no,

my heart was definitely pounding.

It was very exciting to be able to call

and say, "This is it. This is the guy.

It's the same person." - Yeah.

CJIS called Barbara. Barb called me and said,

"Mike, you're not gonna believe this.

That is Smajo Dzurlic."

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- And now what are you thinking?

You're like-- - It's off to the races.

We gotta figure out a way to get this guy arrested,

and that was a big dilemma, 'member?

- Yes, yeah. - So Montenegro,

they had helped us out so tremendously,

but they have a law.

They don't extradite their own citizens...

- Mm-hmm. - Ever, but because Montenegro

was a new country, they were concerned about rule of law.

They wanted to prove themselves.

Eventually, the decision was made to execute the Red Notice,

give it to the Montenegrins.

- And then once that notice was in place,

then that gives the mechanism to at least apprehend him

and swear out what is an unlawful flight

to avoid prosecution warrant.

- We coordinated with local law enforcement in Plav.

The police kept him in pocket

until we got everything in order and all the approvals,

and then they arrested him.

♪ ♪

He did not fight. He didn't show any emotion.

He was defiant, stoic.

- So Mike, they've arrested him.

They're charging him with the death of Mary Beal.

- Yes. - What happens then?

Basically, it's called

an "extraterritorial prosecution."

- Barbara, how did that work? - It was really

kind of an unprecedented case.

It had never been done before. - First time.

- So this was decided

that the prosecutor, Jon Besunder,

from Brooklyn district attorney's office,

was going to be allowed to essentially try the case

via video to provide evidence and make his case that way.

- It's just like a regular trial

except it's on video, and it's really taking

the evidence from the district attorney's office

and bringing it over via video

to a five-panel judge in Montenegro.

- Were you listening to that? - I'm getting updates

every day. - How long did that last?

- It was seven days?

- Yeah, it wasn't a long trial. - Seven or eight days.

The judges listened to all the evidence

and under Montenegrin law, they found him guilty.

- So he's convicted. - Yep.

As far as why Smajo may have murdered Mary,

we know that he reportedly owed Mary some money

and that there was possibly an intimate relationship

between them, but the precise motive

for the murder was never clear.

- The Albanian case, what happened with that,

with the woman floating in the--

- Although the similarities between the victim in Albania

and Mary Beal in New York were very compelling,

there wasn't enough additional evidence

or witnesses to bring charges against Smajo Dzurlic

for the murder of the Albanian victim.

We put out all of the information we have

on that victim to all of the regional countries

through our [indistinct] office and through Interpol

and through everything else.

To date, it is still an open unsolved murder.

- What did that mean? When you heard

that he was guilty,

and here it did--came all the way back around

and you had such a crucial role

in getting this monster convicted.

- I mean, it was incredible, you know?

It just--stuff like that never happens in that way,

and then hearing from the NYPD

when they got to give her family the information

about his capture, and his apprehension,

his conviction.

You know, it was amazing.

They were very grateful for what,

ultimately, the NYPD did and for what the FBI did

to further this case along.

[dark music]

♪ ♪

[soft percussive music]

- This is the first time you two are seeing each other.

What's it feel like to actually sit here next to each other

and talk about this case? - I mean,

it's so good to finally put a face with a name

and, you know, it just brings back, you know,

unbelievable productive energy that we had working this case

together, and it's just a fantastic experience.

- Mike never made me feel that I didn't know,

you know, what to do, like walked me through it

every step of the way, so I'm always grateful

for that experience. It's wonderful to meet you.

- And we did some good.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪