you re giving yourself a 70% chance of being a goat. it had to be perfect. we were going to try. he put together investigators, even called the first detective on the case, daron wyatt to see if they wanted in. i said, let me do what we can to help. you know, i felt like, hey, this is going to be good. the phoenix p.d. also provided scores of officers. by game day he had close to a hundred cops working the case. i reminded them of the mousetrap game you played when you were a kid. this huge ball bearing was going to have to go through a tremendous amount of obstacles that were kind of thrown together in order to lower the trap and catch the mouse. anywhere along the line there could be a snag, something that we hadn t planned for that could throw the ball completely off
problems in the past with boyfriends. reporter: then there was the second interview the day cathy s body was found. detective wyatt studied that tape, too. there was one thing that was important that sam didn t display, that you would expect to see in a case like this. which is? emotion. he showed more emotion over the contents of the coke can. he picked it up when they left the room. and he s reading the coke can and ingredients and the number of calories. and then at one point, he puts that down and he picks up a baseball hat that he had been wearing and he sees some dirt on it and he brushes it off and he starts swearing about the fact that there s dirt on his hat. oh [ bleep ] but he never shows any emotion about the fact that his gal has been brutally murdered. no emotion whatsoever. and that s a big red flag. it s huge. reporter: daron went deeper into sam and cathy s relationship. there were a lot of things that brought them together. they had dated in high
investigators in 1994 took blood, hair and fingerprint samples from xavier, 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 xavier lopez to the crime lab. reporter: daron sent xavier 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: xavier 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 xavier s. and the detective found there was something else another major piece of evidence investigors had initially overlooked. when you look at the crime scene photos in the trunk of the car, something jumped out at me.
even when he arrested xavier in 1997 for the murder of cathy torrez, he thought xavier s real role was helping the prime suspect xavier s cousin sam lopez. tina montelongo, sam s then-wife and xavier s friend, wasn t buying it. can you conceive of xavier going through with a murder or being involved in it because of his loyalty to sam? no. i don t see that if sam did it, would xavi help him just because they re close family? i don t see that. reporter: neither did the d.a. who decided there was not enough evidence to file charges. how do you tell mary bennett, we had xavier, but we had to let him go? it was extremely difficult. there was a lot of crying on both sides. reporter: daron knew exactly what releasing xavier really meant. what walks out of the jail along
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? and she 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 him, are you you know, you re joking, you re, you know, this is not, you know, what are you talking about? are you serious? reporter: remember, cathy was seeing another guy. albert. who, only days later tried to kill himself.