her friends and family were frantically calling and texting her. and look at this surveillance footage. looks like giselle is sending out text messages. and at that moment, as records show, michelle s iphone was welcome back. on a tip from police, michelle s pinging off a nearby cell tower. to ritchie it seemed quite clear. giselle esteban was the one using michelle s phone to send family and friends were combing those creepy text messages to worried friends and family and through a rugged canyon east of to him. and giselle did all this while on a shopping trip with her san francisco still hopeful they daughter. would find her. and she s on that phone roughly the same time that she s but officials were investigating too and they had declired the getting text messages from the case a homicide. now they were willing it show us classmates and family members. the bloody crime scene and share and things like that. and then i sent her a second a crucial clue. this case was about to heat
ex-boyfriend could be her next target. scott turned over more than a thousand pages of alarming texts and e-mails from gisele. he even shared a secret recording made as she threatened both his life and michelle s. but without a body, prosecutors knew they needed more proof. here again is keith morrison. reporter: all saints catholic church in hayward, california. hardly the sort of place a detective would expect to get a hot tip in a murder case. but that s exactly what happened. it was the priest who called the police, wound up talking to inspector ritchie, and told him a story about an odd encounter with a young woman who came to see him seeking solace of some kind. it was actually outside of an office in a patio area. he asked her several times, do you want to go into a confessional? she said no.
that s why he was able to talk to us about it. and he said she was wearing a medical type scrubs, same physical build, characteristics of giselle, and she was asking for forgiveness for something that she had not yet done. wait a minute. she asked for forgiveness for a sin that s what the she hadn t committed? that s the interpretation the priest had got. that was roughly at 3:00 in the afternoon the day that michelle went missing. ritchie was convinced giselle esteban killed michelle le. so was prosecutor butch ford. but they didn t know how she did it or when she did it or where she did it. or more important, what she did with the body. if you don t have a body, it makes the case more difficult. reporter: and so ritchie and the other investigators with the hayward p.d. continued the tedious work of building a murder case without a body.
amber dubois had been kidnapped and murdered in san diego two years earlier. and like marc klaas before her, carrie formed an organization to help find the missing. she brought her new search dog with her. a search dog in training. and she was acteding weird, she was jumping all over the place, she was barking, wanted to get away from me. and as i buckled her up, she took off from me and ran. so i started running after her. and she comes back and she jumps up on me and takes off again. and i followed her and she was just standing still. i reached down to put her leash on, and i noticed some twine, rope sticking out of the ground. and then some bones next to it. reporter: it was the skeletal remains of a young woman, unidentified. michelle s cousin krystine was back at the command center. i remember brad dennis took a break and he looked at me, said babe, i ll be right back. he never leaves the search center. so he left.
welcome back. were you able to make a judgment it was a remarkable discovery or about what would have happened was it? when she got to her car? in a breathless call to police, gisele s ex-boyfriend said he found michelle s iphone in the she was attacked most likely backseat of his car. here. police were convinced gisele was because from the looks of it, it looks like she ended up being involved in the disappearance, placed in the back seat. but did she act alone? there was a bloody confrontation here and then there s more blood back there. that you can see here it s been moved around a bit. it s a little bit smeared up. and there s more than one location. detectives were about to bring reporter: clearly a very violent and physical assault. scott in for questioning. but even they did not expect the who could have done this? a fresh look at the surveillance tapes may offer a clue. bomb shell he was about to watch what michelle does as she share. walks to her car, parked to the far ri