after garcia was dismissed from creighton. it got him his next job, which he got a month after two months after he left creighton. reporter: for his part anthony garcia seemed bored by it all. cameras were not allowed inside the courtroom, but if they had been, they would have shown what jurors saw anthony garcia napping. he slept quite a bit during the trial. i d say half the trial. you know, and how do you think that that plays off to a jury? reporter: the 2008 case of tom hunter and shirlee sherman was the most straightforward for the defense. there is no direct evidence against my client. there is no smoking gun. there is no dna. it s all pieces and they are trying to put together this puzzle. reporter: on the stand, none of the prosecution s eyewitnesses could i.d. anthony garcia as the man they d seen eight years earlier. as for the silver honda crv, the defense pointed out that not one of them ever mentioned the big spare tire that was on the back of garcia s car
for a place of employment or licensure as a physician in another state, creighton university would get notification of that because they would get a request to verify dr. garcia s time that he had spent there. and creighton would respond, usually dr. brumback or dr. hunter, yeah, he was here. he was dismissed. he didn t do a good job. right. and so that kept coming back to haunt dr. garcia, that experience right. at creighton. how many times did that happen? i want to say at least seven or eight different times. reporter: to mois, professional failure and the need for revenge could be a powerful motive. now, the detective needed to know if garcia had the means to commit murder. said, we have records of dr. garcia purchasing specifically a smith & wesson sd9 nine millimeter shortly before the brumback murders, well, obviously that s very significant to us.
existence, uh, almost ridiculously simple. reporter: dr. william hunter, known as bill to friends and colleagues, ran the pathology residency program at nearby creighton university. his wife, claire, also a doctor at creighton, was in hawaii that day attending a conference. her husband had to break the awful news to her from the police station. how is your wife? crushed. sh she going to be okay? she has a work mate that s with her. so she s not alone? no. that s that s that s good. reporter: the hunters had four boys, two grown, one in college and tom. jeff, a student at the d university of nebraska in lincoln at the time lived closest. he says it was about 8:00 that night when he happened to check his phone. i had all these missed calls from friends, family. so obviously i knew something was up, and i couldn t get a hold of my dad, couldn t get a
knock down the theory that anthony garcia killed two people in 2008 and two more in 2013 out of revenge. we ve got to get rid of her stupid quote. who? what quote? the shakespeare quote, shall i not revenge or whatever. reporter: according to the defense team, anthony garcia had no motive to kill anyone. what s wrong with the prosecution theory that anthony garcia blamed the people at creighton for everything bad that had happened to him since he left creighton and the idea that when people would check out his resume, they would inevitably get back to creighton and they d get a bad report about him. the problem with the state s theory is that anthony garcia would ve been unaware of those communications. they don t let people in on those communications. reporter: on the other hand, they pointed out, dr. hunter had actually handed garcia this short letter of recommendation
when detectives reinterviewed him, they wondered if they were missing something. could their primary person of interest have somehow slipped in and out of omaha undetected? reporter: any indication that he was in omaha? none. none. reporter: for his part, belenky told the cops he had nothing to do with the omaha killings, in fact, he denies ever saying he was glad dr. brumback was dead. in the end detectives had to scratch dr belenky off their list. back to the drawing board. if the suspect wasn t michael belenky, detectives figured it had to be someone else with creighton connections. we knew that we had to look at everybody in the pathology department, all of the staff, everybody there. reporter: that means there are, what, maybe a thousand, a couple thousand persons of interest all going in different directions? yeah. reporter: four days after the