keith morrison (voiceover): three months after the bombing, the fbi dive team found the electrical box in which the bomb had been placed. but after months of sitting in water and mud, there was no trace of dna or fingerprints. the only story this peeled metal told was this case is going nowhere. keith morrison (voiceover): now, with little hope of finding that key piece of evidence that would put the case away, the detectives tried that good, old fashioned tool of policing shoe leather and tire tread, round the clock surveillance of peter and paul moore, aided by tracking devices, with a particularly helpful app. dave salm: but they re called geo-fences. i put a geo-fence, a pretty big geo-fence, around where i live. i put a geo-fence around the sheriff s department. keith morrison (voiceover): protection he felt he needed after someone targeted law enforcement with those spikes on the road. dave salm: if the vehicle or the gps monitor
this is a video from their wedding day. a messy divorce followed a few years later. dave salm: so david and susan moore came into our office. keith morrison (voiceover): susan moore is dave s wife. keith morrison: what did they say when they got into the office? the first thing they told us was a wiretapping incident. wiretapping? yes. keith morrison (voiceover): dave and sue claimed paul tapped his wife s phone to spy on her during divorce negotiations. and sure enough, here are the court documents. in 1997, paul was arrested on four counts related to tapping both his wife s and in-law s phones. he pleaded guilty to one count of electronic eavesdropping, a felony. the other charges were dropped, and paul served no jail time. but the wiretapping story was just a prologue to what they were really there to talk about.
cartel, or a crazed assassin. and now they had another lead to work on. dave salm: somebody made an anonymous call to the sheriff s department and said the caller basically stated, you need to be looking at paul moore and, um paul, not peter? paul, not peter. keith morrison (voiceover): for all the produce that comes rolling out of colusa county, california, its population of humans is small, just 22,000. everybody seems to know just about everybody here. so when a would-be anonymous tipster called the sheriff s office, it turned out he wasn t anonymous at all. the detective who took the call recognized the voice and phoned him right back. says, hey, you need to come in and talk to us. keith morrison (voiceover): the caller, as it turned out, was this man, dave moore, cousin of roger and gus, with a multimillion spread of his own and a passion for warbirds. dave s stepdaughter had once been married to paul.
from paul moore, but the scientists couldn t say it was a 100% match. and while the dna didn t match anyone else in the family, including peter, the fact that paul couldn t be excluded was nothing that would hold up in court. dave salm: it was beyond frustrating to hear that we have an almost match, but we can t say for sure. keith morrison (voiceover): still, it did give them an idea. they d get one shot at it, might work. lester holt: coming up. that got my attention right away. exciting doesn t begin to describe. elated maybe? dave salm: the most amazing thing in the world, this is the smoking gun. lester holt: a killer seemingly revealed by a blank sheet of paper. i got chills going on the back of my neck. i m like, this is not happening right now. lester holt: when dateline continues.