reporter: kenia s father tony made himself a public fixture on local media. but privately, he conducted his own very lonely investigation. i went dumpster diving. i was looking at trash cans for her body. up and down the alleys, all over. and yet you couldn t tell maria. i couldn t tell her. i could not share what i was feeling because that early in would have removed the only thing that right now everybody had. and that one thing that everybody had was hope. i was hoping that she would pop up and say here i am. but as time went by and she wasn t contacting anybody and i knew it was bad. reporter: he also knew that the key to finding kenia was finding travis forbes. the denver police had no idea
him with. reporter: but even if they could arrest travis, first they had to find him. because not long after that tv interview travis forbes disappeared. coming up travis gone. i put out a teletype saying you find any bodies, give me a call. and then another surprise. my lieutenant said, grab your search warrant for his dna. so i hop a plane that night. when dateline continues. lo. when dateline continues some things should stand the test of time. long lasting eylea hd could significantly improve your vision and can help you go up to 4 months between treatments. if you have an eye infection, eye pain or redness,
a college town, remember. in the old town bar district young people gathered around favorite watering holes. plenty of young women, carefree, drinking, celebrating a weekend, unaware. unworried. but this time the police were watching because they were very worried. we had the surveillance set up on him over the weekend. we were not going to let him out of our sights. so we had teams that were rotating while we were waiting so we could actually make an arrest. reporter: all weekend surveillance teams followed forbes as he cruised the nightclub district. he had a bottle of whiskey he d been carrying around with him all night. he didn t go into any of the bars. he basically just walked around and he was trolling. trolling. yeah. that s a good way to put it. reporter: late at night the undercover cops spotted travis following a young woman walking home alone. so without revealing the surveillance team one of the cops approached him, and travis gave him a fake name, called him
when he didn t return it, she went to the police and filed a report. which more often than not would have led nowhere at all. except a policeman in austin with a little time on his hands decided to check up on an out of state license plate he just happened to notice. and discovered first the report for the missing car and then travis forbes. so my lieutenant said, grab your search warrant for his dna and head to texas. so i hop a plane that night. reporter: a few hours later gurule was face to face with travis forbes again. you know what? they sent me to texas because they think you re running to mexico. what would i do in mexico? he d call me nash, i d call him travis. it was similar to you and i just talking.
suspect was still out there somewhere on the street at large, potentially targeting his next victim, and it would stay that way unless detectives could prove that the attacks were both the work of travis forbes. there was one possibility and really only one. sitting at the denver police crime lab were several swabs of travis s dna, which detective nash gurule had obtained when the two talked in texas. we needed that obviously quickly to compare it to what had been collected from lydia tillman when she was transported to the hospital. but she d been sprayed with bleach and every and she d been burned. i mean, was there actually any dna left? there actually was. it was pretty amazing. it s amazing how resilient dna is. reporter: so on a friday evening just four days after lydia s attack the dna found under her fingernail and the sample taken from forbes were taken to the colorado bureau of investigation for processing to see if they matched. i didn t sleep.