i didn t know him until two years after the assault took place. i don t even know what to say right now. this is insane. this is my friend, there is no way. this is the wrong guy. reporter: so, from elation you went right back down again? yes. reporter: this is the guy you confided in. exactly. reporter: the guy you trusted, you re good friend. it was a mistake. i was convinced that it was a mistake. he wasn t capable of that. reporter: sam moon? sensitive, compassionate, sam? her former housemate, so good to her and her son gave, this was the person who did that? and if all that wasn t bad enough, now amber had to deal with something far more difficult, something detective seymour asked her to do. call him, confront sam moon on
could finally tell her the news, that the man who had long years till this moment in amber smith s apartment, where detective siobhan seymour could finally tell her the news. that the man who had raped and beaten and bound her up in red duck tape had been found. so, i have exciting news. okay. we got a hit. i showed her the picture and she said, oh my god. she said i know him. reporter: for a moment it didn t seem to register because that was her old friend, her gentle confident, her housemate. that man in the picture was sam. sam moon. but, it didn t compute. and then suddenly dawned on her what this picture could mean. it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room. she said, no, you don t get it,
reporter: the suspect was arrested and booked, and swab, all routine, just one more dna sample to drop into that massive cota system. which of course held the samples taken from amber smith. and? well, you can t make up what happened next. coming up a call from the crime lab. i was excited to say to her, you are not going to believe what happened today. melissa was like, we got him. reporter: later detective seymour has big news for amber. but it s nothing she is prepared for. i showed her a picture, and she said, oh my god. reporter: when dateline continues. ne continues. remember the three p s. what are the three p s? the three p s of life insurance on a fixed budget
she suffered from a broken jaw, brain bleed. one of her eyes was almost swollen shut. she had these ligature marks on her neck where you can tell she had been strangled. reporter: strangled like someone was trying to kill her? yes, absolutely. she had a hard time speaking because her jaw hurt so badly. reporter: detective seymour pushed ahead, had to. but, medicated, exhausted, traumatized, amber struggled to remember. coming everything that you saw. i don t know. i lost consciousness because then the the next thing i know, i woke up with my eyes taped and make it. reporter: what shape or she unemotionally? she was afraid. she didn t know who did this. she had thoughts of who might have done it, but she wasn t sure. reporter: she had been with a guy, they had been drinking. but they were in a different part, not the one where she was found. and, the guy was a friend of hers. she got out his name.
people extracted what evidence they could. we did a sex assault examination on her, she was processed forensically for dna. her hands were processed, her face was, her neck. any area that we believe the suspect may have come into contact with was examined. reporter: the attacker had left his semen behind. and, may be, touched dna. they swab every inch of that red duck tape. as investigators tried to fathom the motive. the brutality of this was unlike anything that i had heard about. why would you attack somebody and brutalized them to such a degree if you didn t know them, or have a grudge against them? this didn t seem like a stranger thing to me. reporter: and detective seymour knew there was one person she needed to get a look at right away. the last person amber remembered being with, her friend, aric vanagunas.