of things that reporter: and he s all, oh no, no, that s would reporter: that s all true. i m a million miles away from her ? right, right separated himself. reporter: but in so doing, javier ruled out any innocent explanation for finding his dna and fingerprint on her car. so when police told him that s exactly what they had found it was like vapor lock. and then all of a sudden he said, well, you know, this one time i was at the video store, and i saw sam and cathy there together. and i went and i sat in cathy s car and sat in the backseat and waited for them. and they came out and then i left. and that was really his only contact that he could give us with cathy s car. reporter: but he doesn t fold up like a house of cards and say, all right, fine. you got me. you re right. but josh, you ve watched probably thousands of these interviews. and sometimes what people don t say is just as important as what they do say. reporter: what javier either would n
back in 1994, police suspected sam lopez of killing his sometime girlfriend, cathy torrez, but they couldn t make the case. one big reason sam s cousin, javier, who told detectives he was with sam the night of the murder. javier was sam s alibi. so he wasn t suspected of being part of the murder, or even being at the crime scene. that s right, yeah. they were looking at javier solely as an alibi witness who was lying to cover for sam. reporter: that s why, as detective daron wyatt now discovered, even though investigators in 1994 took blood, hair and fingerprint samples from javier, they d never had those tested. they had sent all of the evidence related to sam lopez to the crime lab, his fingerprints, his hair, his blood. but they hadn t sent anything related to javier lopez to the crime lab. reporter: daron sent javier s
but when police asked sam about that, he denied it. you didn t ask her to marry you, then? no. reporter: later he changed his story but seemed to say getting married was cathy s idea. a lot of people hit me up already. they said that that that we were supposed to elope, okay? this is what she okay, but look. she had a crazy idea to go to mexico, okay? just the two of us. reporter: then there was sam s claim that cathy never tried to contact him after she disappeared. i thought she was going to page me on friday. she goes somewhere, and she never paged me on friday. we know that cathy s mom paged him 20 or 25 times in a matter of at least a couple of days, trying to get him to contact her because he s so close to cathy and she s missing. reporter: montgomery noted a key detail about those pages. mary s home phone and cathy s home phone are the same number. they re the same numbers. reporter: so, seeing that number on his pager, how did sam know it wasn t cathy?
he didn t sound like a killer. we re here about kathy. later on video. after her body was found. he had always been cooperative. he voluntary gave hair samples. blood sample. and fingerprints. and said whatever i can do, i ll do. as he read the file, he learned there were other things sam didn t do. for example. sam lived right down the street. he never stopped by during the whole frantic week when they were searching. he did speak with police. i don t think anybody thought he was telling lt truth. remember he told detective ts kathy came to him looking for
would know he got 20 or 25 pages from cathy, or at least think that. if he s guilty and he killed cathy, he knows those 20 or 25 pages were not from cathy. reporter: that was tell number two. then montgomery noticed how, in his second interview, sam referred to cathy s murder. you know? but then this happened and shoot. he doesn t use the word murder, doesn t say anything like that. it s like, this happened, as if it s small. it s not that big of a deal, it s not horrendous. he doesn t want it to be horrendous because he did it. reporter: tell number three. and then larry caught something else in the interview sam did before cathy s body was found. listen carefully. so you went out with her the saturday before the thursday? right. okay on, and where did you go? in other words a week before she was she disappeared. reporter: did you hear that? a week before she was she disappeared. reporter: before she was. what? dead? murdered?