was to, let s try to bring in a couple of detectives. let s go with female detectives who are much less threatening, much more disarming. and, in fact, davis happened to know two women cops who seemed perfect for the job. savvy, cool, attractive, both had a knack for helping suspects calm down and getting them to open up. sheryl comstock and diane harris. by lying from the very beginning about where he was, it showed that he had a guilty conscience, and that s very significant. so harris and comstock went to work, studying the case and learning all about arturo gutierrez. he should have said something to the investigators because you d think he d want to help who
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. there s an instruction that jurors are given that basically says that any unrecorded statement of the defendant you are to view with caution. you know, that s a hurdle. perhaps even a jury hanger, especially given the circumstantial nature of this
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? no. and with that, the christie fleming case went cold again, and would stay that way unless davis could find something, anything, that would help solve the mystery. for that, it would take eight more years until a clever plan was hatched to trap the killer.
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, who s 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. but there was, remember, that one very important factor, the strange list twist that first attracted deputy d.a. john lewin, christie s compulsively obsessive neatness. at trial lewin presented a theory of what happened. that gutierrez came over late
them, the family made sure that the old home phone number never got changed. the house she knew stayed in the family, just in case one happy day, she turned up at the front door. one thing that had changed by the early 90s was the name of the town. gritty sounding east detroit had been re-dubbed the more upscale, eastpointe. in the police station, though, nothing had much changed with the cindy cold case file. it had been handed down to officer to officer over the years for a little defrosting, mostly chasing down tips of cindy sightings around the country that went nowhere. but after the family s candlelight vigil spurred media interest, a new detective named daniel davis took a look at the file and decided to reclassify it as a possible murder. and officially, that would allow it to be opened. one of detective davis first questions was to find out what cindy s teen crush back then, the boy named scott, knew about her disappearance.