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. 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. 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
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 case is solved. based on the dna evidence, prosecutors believe james elmen was probably walking by the convenience store where julie estes worked around 10:30 and noticed there were no customers inside. hi, there. he shut off the store s
when rod and julie estes started their life together in 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. police were asked to check it out. we shined our ligh
julie s husband said he had an alibi, one police had heard dozens of times over the years. rod estes had explained that he was by himself all evening, had watched a football game and had fallen asleep. and no one was with him all night. not the best alibi in the world if a policeman thinks you might be responsible for your wife s disappearance, but that s all he had. and investigators had another problem. they suspected julie had been murdered elsewhere.