and it s easier than ever to get your projects done right. with angi, you can connect with and see ratings and reviews. and when you book and pay throug you re covered by our happiness check out angi.com today. angi. and done. on october 31st, 2012, darren galas was charged with the murder of his wife, sandra. he pleaded not guilty, was released on bail. 6 1/2 months later, on may 15th, 2013, sandra s dad larry and mom toshie held this memorial dedication service outside kauai s domestic violence center. chief perry was there, as was bryson ponce. but darren stayed away, as did sandra s
and nobody saw him? it was still dark. ponce also found this e-mail sandra sent her lawyer just three weeks before her murder. darren started asking me about my boyfriend, as he calls him, ryan. he got really upset and started swearing at me. he started shaking me, telling me to tell him the truth and don t ever call him again. ponce worked the investigation for close to a year. but as he weighed and reweighed the evidence, he always came back to darren, who lacked an alibi, who called in sick to work, who gave conflicting accounts about the morning of the murder, who left blank the diary entry for the 25th. who failed a polygraph. who was jealous of ryan. who never called sandy to find out why she didn t pick up the boys. ponce delivered his final report to chief perry and prosecutor neseri and a handful of investigators. we all believed it was proof
child. chief perry was struggling to tell us that he did know what it was like to lose a child. he came out of retirement and took the job as head of the kauai police department after the sudden death of his 26-year-old son erickson. i feel in a way that i m working through him, that he motivates me. i believe that things happen for a reason. and in fact, i told larry this. i told him, there s a reason why we met. i don t know what the reasons are, but i m here for you. so after meeting with larry, chief perry sent sandra s file to a couple of friends in honolulu, investigators with the state attorney general s cold case unit. i asked them to see if they can find anything else that we may have missed. and they did indeed find something, using what was breakthrough science for that time, early 2009. cold case investigators extracted touch dna from sandra s shirt and bra. chief perry called larry with the news. and he said, they ve got
million dollar settlement to family of stephen clark, black man shot and killed by police in 2018. they chase the 22-year-old into his grandmother s backyard and shot him at least seven times. now, back to dateline. w, back to dateline. welcome back to dateline. i m natalie morales. three years after sandra galas s murder the investigation had stalled. enter chief darryl perry. like sandra s father, larry, chief perry knew the pain of losing a child. motivated by their shared grief, he asked state investigators to take a look at the file. and remarkably, they found new evidence. but in a case full of twists there was another one just around the corner. here again is keith morrison with the other side of paradise. it took a scientific breakthrough to finally get larry mendonca the breakthrough he was looking for. touch dna,
no breaks, no leads, no arrests. and 2010 was no different. same for 2011. nothing. it s fair to say asandra s murder investigation was very much cold. so 2012 now, six years after the murder and three years after that dna test, chief perry gave the case to a new detective, named bryson ponce, who reexamined the physical evidence like sandra s car, undisturbed since the day she was murdered. she was sitting down in the driver s seat, and the from her waist up was pulled, slouched over into the passenger seat. you said pulled. did it appear it had been yanked over that way? it appeared that way, yeah. we believe that there was a struggle outside of the vehicle in the garage, and that s due to some evidence that was on the outside front of the vehicle.