detectives were called to new crime scenes, and the christie fleming case, yesterday s news, faded from view. weeks passed, months, years. the more time that goes by, the more you feel like it s never going to happen. it s just hopeless, and you re going to just have to live with not knowing. and it wasn t made any easier when the lead detective retired. he hated leaving without solving the case, especially this case. he told me one day, he said, i ve got this old case that i d like for you to be responsible with because i d like to see this case solved. so that s how i got interested in it. and once i got interested in it, i was hooked. davis pored over it all, all the obsessive habits, the staged crime scene, cigarette butts, the secret return of the old boyfriend, art gutierrez. the solution seemed tantalizingly possible, yet just out of reach. and then three years after christie s death, davis heard
about a disturbing incident involving gutierrez and his wife. i guess he got upset with her over something, flew off the handle. he was described as having a really bad temper. pushed her down on the floor, grabbed a pillow, put it over her face and tried to smother her with it. davis then re-interviewed gutierrez. he gave the same story, denying everything. only his body language was a little more forthcoming. he acted about as squirrelly as you could possibly get. and by that, i mean, he was nervous. he didn t want to be there. he couldn t wait to get the interview over with. and after talking to mr. gutierrez, he stood out like a sore thumb. davis got a warrant to draw a blood sample. dna testing was possible by then but still not quite precise. and once again the saliva on two of the cigarette butts in christie s trash can could have been gutierrez s could have been. at that time it wasn t even as good as a fingerprint. no, it wasn t. did you arrest him?
this is our guy. there s no question about it. and just like that, a dead, old case was fully reborn. now the man steve davis had been chasing all these years could finally be arrested. you re a free man. you think you got away with it, and then all of a sudden, they drop the hammer on you. it was davis who called christie s sister, rhonda, and her father, bud. i mean, i just can t even describe to you what a feeling that was for both of us that that had happened. in fact, the very day the detective called me and said, we just picked him up. he s under arrest for murder, unbelievable. but even though art gutierrez was sitting in jail, awaiting trial for murder, davis felt obliged to warn the family that convicting him might not be so easy. a circumstantial case is a very tough case to get a conviction on. i mean even with the dna it didn t suggest necessarily that he was the murderer.
she was just 25 when she was killed. now all these years later when christie fleming would have been approaching middle age, her family got astonishing news. the long stalled hunt for her killer was on again. i didn t want to get my hopes up, but i thought, wow! this is just incredible. but there was still a potentially fatal weakness in the case. dna certainly put art gutierrez, christie s former boyfriend, in her condo, and her compulsion for neatness strongly suggested art s visit occurred just before the murder. but that by itself didn t prove he killed her. one thing that could help persuade a jury that gutierrez was, indeed the killer, and that was a suspected lie he had repeated to detective davis. the last time he saw christie, he had said, was about two to three months before her murder and never once after that. trouble was, none of that was on tape. the jury wouldn t be able to hear gutierrez tell his incriminating lie.
the business about the crush on scott jumped out to him as essential to about what he needed to find out to advance the case. and the whole case really intrigued me. why? i read all of the statements that detective davis had filled out. all of the interviews she conducted. there was some things that were popping out at me that were substantial. one thing really stood out, the lead that linda bronson, the mother of cindy s boyfriend, had given detective davis. it was a bombshell. after thinking about it for a short time, i realized that art was involved in this girl s disappearance. and who was art? he was scott ream s father and linda bronson s ex-husband, a carpet installer with a warehouse business. but what he also was according to the ex was a man who preyed on young girls. a search of the records revealed a sex crime in art ream s past, 20 years earlier in 1975, he d been convicted and locked up for three years for taking indecent liberties with a minor.