jacksonville, florida, as husband and wife, they had to figure out, like most couples, how to support themselves. rod drove a truck for a plastics company, but the only job 21-year-old julie could find was working the late shift at a convenience store near their home. she had graduated from high school, but she was a recent transplant to the jacksonville area and needed that job to put food on her table. convenience stores and gas stations were really the only things at night that were open that people would rob. i imagine sitting in that convenience store without any kind of modern-day surveillance or protection or panic button, that she must have been fearful. julie normally worked afternoons and evenings and closed the store at 11:00 p.m. but one night, a customer noticed the store was closed at 10:30, a half hour earlier than the closing time posted on the door.
male. one was julie s dna. the other was the dna of the killer. they were able to identify that dna profile as the exact match to james elmen. we were all ecstatic. i mean, it was an unbelievable feeling. and that s the reward of cold case, when you have that piece that you never had before and you re able just to put that one thing together, and, you know, you ve got the entire case. investigators confronted elmen in prison with the evidence. and i m telling you that your dna, that your semen, is in the murder scene of this murdered girl. i m telling you i wasn t there. i don t know anything about this girl. if you re not there, how does james elmen s semen get in the damn crime scene? that s one of those things that you could deny until the cows come home. with technology the way it is today, there s no getting around it. james elmen is a monster that now sits behind bars. i always knew that there was going to be a day that they were going to say, we got it. this ca
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. 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
police were asked to check it out. we shined our lights in the windows. there was absolutely no signs of foul play. nothing was disrupted. nothing was overturned. it just looked like somebody left the store. so, we went back to work and went about our normal shift. the next morning, the daytime clerk opened the store and discovered it had been robbed. the floor safe had been opened and appeared to be empty, and that the power appeared to have been cut off the night before. according to the owners, around $500 was missing from the safe. police tried to find julie, but she wasn t home. surprisingly, julie s husband said she never came home from work, and he admitted he hadn t reported her missing. he told me at that time that they had had a small argument before she left for work, and i m like, well, you didn t call the police when she didn t come home for, you know, eight hours? every time i hear that story
in the meantime, it didn t take long for investigators to eliminate julie s husband as a suspect. when he was perfectly willing to take a polygraph examination, kept in contact with the officers trying to work this case, i think all suspicion was erased. but julie s autopsy did provide some important information about the killer. the medical examiner found evidence of sexual assault. a rape test kit recovered biological evidence, presumably of the perpetrator. unfortunately, dna testing wasn t yet available. crimes in 1985 were a lot harder to solve, just based on technology.