it twice before. this time though, something different happened. a prosecutor unfamiliar with the case agreed to take a fresh look. his name is matt murphy, and he noticed one thing right away. the first thing you see when you look at the file is a big rejection from really good lawyers who reviewed it individually and as a group. reporter: which means they tried very hard to make a case and they couldn t do it? they tried very hard. that s right. and they figured, based on their review, that they couldn t do it. reporter: and some of the reasons were apparent from the get go when you look at it on its face, this case is a real tough one. reporter: for one thing, there was so much evidence they didn t have against sam. there was no murder weapon here. we had no witness. we had no confession. we had no dna. so, you can look at it that way, in a conventional review. and, yeah, it looked really tough. reporter: but what really made this case a prosecutor s
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 gonna 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 cathy s. but then, while combing the case file detective daron wyatt learned something shocking. there were blood and hair samples that had never been sent to the crime lab. and when those samples were analyzed, they pointed to a whole new suspect.
javier was there all the time, sleeping in the same essentially the same room. reporter: eventually, daron wyatt felt he had enough new information to get a search warrant. 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.
that is a weird coincidence. we don t believe in coincidences. reporter: to daron wyatt, it felt more like fate. and just months later, in january 1997, his lieutenant suggested daron apply to the homicide unit. so i ended up putting in for that job and being selected. reporter: it wasn t long before he cracked open the doors that housed the homicide files. and i open the cabinet and i see the torrez case. and i remembered the incident with debbie from about a year earlier. so i pulled it out and i started reading just on free time, just reading it a little bit. reporter: by then, the cathy torrez case had been cold for a good three years. and essentially no work had been done on it for at least the last two years. reporter: from the beginning, police had suspected cathy s one-time boyfriend sam lopez had something to do with her murder. but they had nothing connecting him to the crime. no witnesses. no dna. and sam had that solid alibi.
spoke with sam for 90 minutes before he asked them a single question. and when he finally did so did you do you guys know how she was killed? uh, yeah, we do. reporter: larry noticed a telling statement. thought you were never going to ask. well, i didn t want cause i don t want memories to come back, you know? well, that s an interesting statement, i don t want memories to come back. what memories does he have that he doesn t want to remember? if he s innocent, he has memories of cathy, good times, what they did. reporter: people would want those memories to come back. yeah. if he had a memory that he killed her, that certainly is a memory he doesn t want to relive. reporter: after listening to the interviews time and again, the evidence whisperer had no doubt sam killed cathy. but could the team prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? ultimately in cold case murders, time becomes one of our friends, because technology changes.