happiness is powerful flea and tick protection from nexgard. nexgard kills fleas and ticks all month long. and it comes in an easy-to-give tasty chew. and that makes dogs and owners happy. no wonder vets love it too. reported side effects include vomiting, itching, diarrhea, lethargy andack of appete. see your vet for more information on flea and tick protection you and your dog will love. nexgard. the vet s #1 choice. reporter: prosecutor matt murphy thought daron wyatt s investigation of cathy torrez murder was compelling. but he knew that making the case against sam lopez wouldn t be easy. the d.a. s office had declined to try it twice before. so murphy called for help from a detective whose legendary skill with cold cases has earned him a
done on big samples like blood spatter. but in the years since analysis became possible for touch-dna the microscopic calling cards many of us leave behind just by putting our hands on something. if sam and xavier did place cathy s body in the car s trunk maybe, thought larry, there would be touch-dna on her clothes. search for dna in the areas that might be grabbed. especially areas that might be grabbed that don t have blood on em from cathy. so you looked, what, on the ankles and under her arms? ankles,rms, i thinknder daron wyatt sends out the evidence for touch dna, you optimistic? or are you thinkin , shot in the dark? no, i was not optimistic. i was not optimistic. because because what? because on this particular case, it seemed like for the beginning phases, everything that could go wrong pretty much went wrong.
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. now daron wyatt focused on xavier.
cathy s case. 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 it just it hit me like i got punched in the face, was there was arterial spurt on the sidewall of the trunk panel. reporter: meaning only one thing cathy was still alive when she was placed in the trunk of the car. so, if xavier put her there, he could be charged with murder. why not grab xavier up that day and say, okay, your dna and fingerprints were at the scene. we didn t know that until just now. you re going away for murder unless you start talking. ? well, let s say that we did that and we bring him in and he says, well, yes, my fingerprint was there because i helped her push her car out of the street a week before. or when i was helping her change a tire. i cut my finger and i bled on it. reporter: so instead of approaching xavier, daron wyatt spent nearly five months carefully watching him and sam. he learned the two cousins were unusually close. sam lived in a one-bedroom little bungalow with his wife and his baby at the time, yet xavier was there all the t