asked her what she knew about him, what she thought about him. and that s when she told me that he they were he was the one that they suspected. reporter: in the murder of cathy torrez? yes. reporter: he hadn t told you that? he hadn t told me that. that was in the first couple of weeks that i was dating him. reporter: sam emphatically denied any involvement in cathy s murder. but just the idea spooked tina. so she made up a lie. i met him and i told him that i was dating somebody else. reporter: which was not true? which was not true. reporter: you were a little freaked out by that? well, yeah. reporter: but the spark that drew her to sam was too strong, and though tina had only known him a few short weeks, something in her heart said sam was innocent. so i gave him a call. and i started dating him again. reporter: okay. i mean, you re an attractive woman. i have trouble believing that there were not guys available who weren t already suspects in a murder
parking lot. the other for failing to stop at a stop sign. the cop who pulled sam over for not stopping said sam flew through the intersection, and when he approached the car, the cop said it looked as if sam and cathy had been arguing. but he did say cathy looked fine. nobody was quite sure what happened after that, except they apparently parted company. sam in his car, cathy in hers. then cathy arrived home, too out of it to realize she d been driving on slashed tires. tina saw the tires the next day. i just kept saying, who what happened to your tires? who slashed your tires? reporter: and she d say? and she d say she didn t know. she she just knew that she had gone out with sam that night. reporter: daron wyatt now believed sam drugged cathy, possibly assaulted her, and slashed her tires. the next day, cathy called tina with more details about her strange night with sam. he had told her let s run off, let s get married. let s run off and let s elope. and she told
it s it s an off-and-on thing. on-and-off thing. okay. reporter: tell number one, how sam talked about his relationship with cathy. see, i was going out with somebody. and then she would call me up. and we would just, like calling each other, going out to eat, places like that. nothing serious at the time. sam definitely was trying to limit his connection with cathy, give the impression that it s not that big of a deal. reporter: remember cathy s sister tina had told detectives sam had proposed to cathy just days before she disappeared. but when police asked sam about that, he denied it. you didn t ask her to marry you, then? no. reporter: later he changed his story but seemed to say getting married was cathy s idea. a lot of people hit me up already. they said that that that we were supposed to elope, okay? this is what she okay, but look. she had a crazy idea to go to mexico, okay? just the two of us. reporter: then there was
solely as an alibi witness who was lying to cover for sam. reporter: that s why, as detective daron wyatt now discovered, even though investigators in 1994 took blood, hair and fingerprint samples from javier, they d never had those tested. they had sent all of the evidence related to sam lopez to the crime lab, his fingerprints, his hair, his blood. but they hadn t sent anything related to javier lopez to the crime lab. reporter: daron sent javier s samples, now three years old, to the crime lab. two months later, the phone rang. they had positively identified a fingerprint on the trunk of cathy s car, left there by somebody closing the lid of the trunk. reporter: javier s print was on the trunk of cathy s car? yes. reporter: weeks later, another call from the lab. a bloodstain on the car had tested positive for both cathy s dna and javier s.
who, only days later tried to kill himself. tina says cathy thought about sam s proposal all that week. ultimately, cathy decided, says tina, that she was so broken up about albert she was going to tell sam the answer was no. she s crying, and then she said, i m going to tell him this saturday that i m not gonna take off with him, that i will not elope. that was wednesday. and then saturday she never came home. reporter: sam s admitted jealousy, cathy s doting on albert, a rejected proposal. all of it seemed to add up to motive. but motives don t prove murder. there was still no physical evidence tying sam to the crime. all the blood on the car had been tested, and it was all