it too. he was still living in the same home police had searched after cathy s murder. a search that had turned up nothing. and sam was also moving on with his life. in may 1994, just months after cathy s murder, sam walked into a local restaurant. he walked in with his friend. and i just remember thinking that he was cute. reporter: tina montelongo was a hostess then. so, i offered him some free food. and then we started talking. reporter: she felt the spark right away. i did think i would marry him when i first saw him. that was, like, the words that came out of my mouth. i m going to marry that guy. reporter: you were taken with him right away? i was. uh-huh. reporter: sam and tina started dating. but in a small town like placentia, it wasn t long before tina heard the whispered rumors. i found out that my sister went to school with him and i
i m sure there probably were. but there they didn t have my attention. reporter: they dated for a year, and then married. i was ready. i was, this is it. this is who i want to be with. this is who i want to grow old with. this is who i want to have kids with. reporter: and they did. a year later came a baby girl. and sam embraced his role as dad. he was like mr. mom, you know. he stayed home and took care of the baby while i worked. reporter: if sam had anything to do with cathy s murder, he certainly didn t act like it. he stayed put. living with his wife and baby right down the street from cathy s mom, mary. she would sit outside and stare at us, and i felt like she was doing it to make me uncomfortable, and probably him, too. but i m sure she didn t want him to be happy if she thought that he had anything to do with what happened to her daughter. reporter: sam say anything about mary?
reporter: police briefly detained sam, but he was back home by morning. now daron wyatt focused on javier. and we really approached it very low key. we think that you can really provide some great information for us. would you mind coming down with us and talking. reporter: they brought him down to the station and listened patiently as he distanced himself from cathy torrez. he d never been shopping with her, never changed a tire on her car, never carried groceries. we went through the whole litany of things that reporter: and he s all, oh no, no, that s would reporter: that s all true. i m a million miles away from her ? right, right separated himself. reporter: but in so doing, javier ruled out any innocent explanation for finding his dna and fingerprint on her car. so when police told him that s exactly what they had found it was like vapor lock. and then all of a sudden he said, well, you know, this one time i was at the video store, and i saw sam
cause when you re depressed you do things. remember, this interview happened while cathy was still missing. sam seemed to be implying she might have hurt herself or that another boyfriend might be involved. i mean, look, she, she s had, i know she s had a lot of problems in the past with boyfriends. reporter: then there was the second interview, the day cathy s body was found. detective wyatt studied that tape, too. there was one thing that was important that sam didn t display that you would expect to see in a case like this. reporter: which is? emotion. he showed more emotion over the contents of a coke can. he picked it up when they left the room and reading the coke can and the ingredients and the number of calories. and at one point he puts that down and picks up a baseball hat he had been wearing, sees dirt and brushes it off and starts swearing about the fact that there s dirt on his hat. oh [ bleep ]. but he never shows any emotion about the fact that this gal h
sam s claim that cathy never tried to contact him after she disappeared. i thought she was going to page me on friday. she goes somewhere, and she never paged me on friday. we know that cathy s mom paged him 20 or 25 times in a matter of at least a couple of days, trying to get him to contact her because he s so close to cathy and she s missing. reporter: montgomery noted a key detail about those pages. mary s home phone and cathy s home phone are the same number. they re the same numbers. reporter: so, seeing that number on his pager, how did sam know it wasn t cathy? if he knew she was alive, he would know he got 20 or 25 pages from cathy, or at least think that. if he s guilty and he killed cathy, he knows those 20 or 25 pages were not from cathy. reporter: that was tell number two. then montgomery noticed how, in his second interview, sam referred to cathy s murder. you know?