suspicion, but no evidence, to charge elmen with his half-sister s murder. but after 17 years, there was plenty of dna evidence to charge him with julie estes rape and murder. it just was unbelievable that it would be the socks that would hold the true identity of her killer. faced with a possible death penalty, elmen decided to plead no contest to julie estes rape and murder. in return, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. how do you feel about everything? how do i feel? mm-hmm. the overall picture? i think this sucks. the lesson for criminals would be no matter how long ago you did the crime, the forensics has the capability of solving it. if it wasn t forensics in this case, with the dna and everything, i don t think that they would ever solve it. we always talked about if he ever got out, we d be counting bodies. we believed he was that bad. you ve got to treat every single case like it s the crime of the century. what i mean by th
is part of the celebration of the hero. tomorrow the congressional gold medal, one of our nation s highest civilian honors, will be bestowed to raul wallenberg and accepted his by his still living half-sister who flew over to accept it in the rotunda and asking and answering that question on the fate of wallenberg is an important part of the story. it is also the case that when president obama was in stockholm on the historic visit to sweden last september he was asked by the still living half sister of raul wallenberg to follow up on the fate of wallenberg and i m very pleased to say that at a very high level the white house did follow up in moscow. no response has been given yet and we re waiting for an answer but it s imperative for us to follow up on the fate of raul wallenberg because that s part of the legacy of the importance of not being indifferent. ambassador, the legacy also
authorities had plenty of suspicion, but no evidence, to charge elmen with his half-sister s murder. but after 17 years, there was plenty of dna evidence to charge him with julie estes rape and murder. it just was unbelievable that it would be the socks that would hold the true identity of her killer. faced with a possible death penalty, elmen decided to plead no contest to julie estes rape and murder. in return, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. how do you feel about everything? how do i feel? mm-hmm. the overall picture? i think this sucks. the lesson for criminals would be no matter how long ago you did the crime, the forensics has the capability of solving it. if it wasn t forensics in this case, with the dna and everything, i don t think that they would ever solve it.
half-sister of elmen. investigators now wanted to test the biological evidence collected from julie s rape test kit to see whether james elmen was her killer, but there was a risk. the test would consume all of the evidence. unfortunately, sometimes you have to make a choice. you might have to run the entire bit of sample. but at the time, you re thinking this is the best technology available. investigators decided the gamble was worth it. they consumed all of the semen that was contained in those slides trying to get results, results that, unfortunately, never showed who the killer was. this was a devastating setback. it s just shocking. it feels like you re hit with a ton of bricks. then you ve got to start over. it s like going starting from scratch again. but investigators refused to give up. elmen has a rough history,
away. she was sure he was going to kill her because she could identify him, but then she saw the only chance to escape, a police officer directing traffic. what are you doing? drop the knife! the man was identified as james elmen. he was convicted for the crime and was currently serving a 22-year sentence in a nearby prison. and cold case investigators learned another startling coincidence. elmen had a close connection to the 10-year-old girl found hanging in the tree near julie s store two months before julie s murder. the 10-year-old was a half-sister of elmen.