there was a loud pounding on our door. reporter: tina montelongo remembers it clearly. when i opened the door, there was about five police officers there. the one in the middle was wyatt. he put us against the wall and patted us down. reporter: what was sam s demeanor while all that was happening? he was calm, you know. he really was. i was freaking out. reporter: he wasn t worried? no. no. reporter: maybe he had no reason to be. police didn t find anything in the house linking sam to cathy s murder. they even sprayed his truck with luminol looking for signs of blood. we took the seats out, we did everything we could. and there was nothing. 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
reporter: and now you really are back to square one? yes. reporter: is that the end? to some people. reporter: but not to him. and not to mary. you put a lot of faith in daron. i put a lot of faith in god. daron was his tool. reporter: but for the time being, it seemed daron s hands were tied. after all, the case had been rejected by the d.a. s office twice before. this case getting a lot of baggage over the years? yeah, it did. reporter: and so if you go ahead with it, you re not only going ahead with the case, you re also kind of insulting the d.a.? yeah. reporter: years went by. the cathy torrez case grew colder by the day. and so did the marriage between cathy s sister tina and sam s brother armando. you and armando got divorced. yes. reporter: this have something to do with that?
i mean, the guy is the evidence whisperer. another nickname for him is st. larry. reporter: larry sees things other people don t see? larry sees things that many people don t see, yeah. and he looks at it from a different perspective. reporter: they both felt the key to the case lay in sam lopez s own words, his taped interviews with the original detectives. and they thought the perfect man to listen to those interviews was the evidence whisperer. guilty people have tells, just like in a poker game? absolutely. they don t have that innocent mindset, and they they have other fears. they fear being caught. they can t get their stories straight because there s too many details. reporter: montgomery spent months carefully listening and re-listening, watching and re-watching, hours of sam s interviews. looking for the tells. how long have you guys been dating? it s it s an off-and-on thing. on-and-off thing. okay. reporter: tell number one, how sam talked about his r
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 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.
she would never harm anybody. she was such a sweetheart. that s all for this edition of dateline extra. i m craig melvin. thank you for watching. for watcg she was a mom looking for her baby, and her baby hadn t come home. reporter: cathy s week had been nothing but trouble. she couldn t tell me what happened. she was so upset. reporter: it was about to get much worse. my mom would say if you find the car, you ll find cathy. you didn t want it to be dark because you wanted to keep looking. she was stabbed multiple times. there was blood within the interior of the car. she was a targeted victim. reporter: who killed cathy? we had no witness. we had no confession. we had no dna. reporter: 20 years went by. i still had to keep looking for what i had lost. reporter: but cathy had her.