killer was still on the loose. no, it s not always a hollywood ending. sometimes you don t get any results, cases still go unsolved. so, 16 years after julie s murder, the jacksonville police department sent julie s clothes to the u.s. army crime lab in forest park, georgia, one of the most sophisticated labs available. the item in evidence included socks and her shirt and jeans, as well as other items from her sexual assault kit, which included, like, fingernail scrapings and other swabs. scientists there were discouraged. all but one of the items had been analyzed and tested. the socks had never been tested, probably because nobody expected to find anything useful on them. the idea that forensic evidence could have transferred onto julie s socks was remote. nevertheless, analyst brian higgins examined the socks with light sources that cause genetic material to fluoresce. i was kind of like, wow, could these be semen stains? i was kind of surprised, actually, because it
got a potential lead. police got a call from a man who had been kind of scrounging around behind another convenience store when he came upon a purple pair of shoes. the purple shoes are almost certainly julie s. the laces were missing. a bowling bag and some receipts with julie s name left no doubt the items were hers. the site was just a half mile from the convenience store where julie has last seen alive. we found evidence that things were taken out of the trunk of her car. and she was probably forced into the trunk, then she was driven five or six miles away from there, where her body was found. normally, the evidentiary value of the items would be significant, but not this time. the civilian that had found those items had at first taken them home. this meant all the evidence at what may have been the murder site was compromised. somebody s been there, moving things around, and it just makes the investigation a lot more difficult.
of somebody saying, well, i didn t call it in because we had an argument, i always wonder, how could anyone believe this? later that morning, four miles from the convenience store, police found julie s car in the woods stuck in mud. the key was still in the ignition. one of our helicopters spotted that blue camaro, not a long distance away, but in a wooded area that s known for vehicles dumped or parked, whatever, out there. they saw what they perceived to be drag marks leading away from the vehicle. and then they followed the drag marks. a few hundred feet from the car, under some cardboard, was julie s body. julie s body was found with her arms tied behind her back with her very own shoelaces. her shirt was pulled up with her breasts exposed. her pants and panties were pulled down to her socks. the details of the crime just really go right through you. they make you realize how, you know, how much she really went through.
there are certain things that we could yield dna profiles from today you wouldn t be able to get back then. as the weeks went by and the number of leads started to dwindle, investigators continued to search for julie s killer, knowing full well they had no forensic evidence to identify him. but it didn t stop them from trying. at this particular time when this incident occurred, some weird things were happening in that area. seven months before julie s murder, the body of a missing 15-year-old girl was discovered just three miles away. her body was so badly decomposed, the cause of death couldn t be determined. and two months before julie s murder, a 10-year-old girl was found dead, hanging in a tree in the woods just two miles from julie s convenience store. since these crimes happened within a radius of only three miles, investigators had a hunch they might be connected. investigators wondered whether julie estes murder might be connected to several other crimes committed in
scratch again. but investigators refused to give up. elmen has a rough history, and people around james elmen tend to die. unfortunately, if elmen was julie s killer, there was no longer any dna to prove it.