once seen can never be unseen. amber belkin sprawled in death in the back office of the video games store. her head wrapped in a plastic bag. mariano dialed 9-1-1. his mind a horrified confusion. he stared at amber s assistant manager, brandon. i was upset. and then i m looking at brandon like, i don t understand how this happened. you know, i don t want to blame anybody but your first thought is, who was around. who can you look and see? maybe he had something to do with it? it s got to be a pretty shocking thing to discover. i mean, it is hard to describe. you just have 1 million emotions running through. you don t know what to do. the police came. took one look and called raymond ray bob roberts.
mom and dad. pleading for help. crime stoppers put up a lot of money. nothing. i was hoping, you know, money talks. 100 grand reward. a hundred grand reward is a lot. but nothing. we put flyers up all over san antonio. we wouldn t let it go. but as months went by without a single solid lead, detective roberts sank through frustration into a kind of despair. this little girl, she looked like my girl. and she resembled my daughter. same build, same color hair. her amber s favorite book is if i read that to my daughter 1 million times. you know, you do this for an extended period of time, you try to distance yourself. for sure, you have to. and the worst mistake you can make is getting too close to it. i got close to the family, mentally, physically.
i m natalie morales. brandon biel believed he was gonna be charged with the murder of game store manager amber belken. but detectives verified his alibi and phone records placed him miles from the crime scene. police initially played out a hunch that the culprit must have had a game store connection. now, a call from an anonymous tipster was about to breathe new life into that theory. once again here is keith morrison with everything she knew . that brandon biel did not kill his boss amber belken was, very clear. which meant that the detective ray bob roberts had a big problem. we had everything going against us. didn t have witnesses, no video, no dna, didn t have fingerprints. nothing. he went public then, had to. we held a big news conference with the parents,
my knees just buckled and i just my whole world just died right there. it s a pretty dreadful feeling? it s the worst feeling in the world because you totally realize no one can fix this. nobody can bring her back. not for them. not for her friends. and then everything just stopped. disbelief. disbelief. your earth shatters. i sat on the curb and cried. everything around me was just a blur. inside the store, detective roberts had a look around. there was a bunch of dvd games on the ground. where the cash register was at the front, the till was open, door was open. some change was laying around.
and while detectives search for more clues in amber s death. then one day in late january 2007, as she watched tv, she saw the news of amber s murder. and i said, look at this. wow, isn t that crazy. and he just looked and said, wow he mirrored my reaction to it. said wow, i can t believe it. i never thought for one second he just acted normal that whole time. that is until after the police knocked on their door in the fall of 2007. after joe reported geovany. after detective roberts got that search warrant for geovany s dna. we were asleep. it was early in the morning and then we hear a pounding at the door. boom, boom, boom. that will cut up. that woke me up. he got up first and went to go check. that then he returned and told her, it s the police. i think they think i killed someone. i said did you. what s it like to hear that? i was shocked and mortified. he says, it s because i did