nowhere. i ran out of agencies to go to. reporter: do you ever get discouraged? i do. sometimes i do get discouraged. reporter: do you ever think, i m just going to stop it? i ve never once thought that i need to stop or that i should stop or that i have to stop. it s never it s never entered into my mind. reporter: she didn t know it, but her relentlessness was making a difference. turns out her barrage of phone calls eventually got the case handed off to the u.s. marshals service. and not just any would become involved but one who came from the same mexican-american neighborhood as she did. my father actually had a couple mexican restaurants, real small mexican restaurants in southwest detroit. reporter: taking charge of the investigation was deputy aaron garcia, nicknamed ponch, a nod to eric estrada s highway patrol office in the old tv show
chips . reporter: not a bad name to have. he was a good cop. so that s a good thing. reporter: he was in his downtown detroit office where he s member of an elite unit, the detroit fugitive apprehension unit. our job is to locate and arrest the most violent fugitives in the world, in the city, state, out of state, in the world. reporter: one of his supervisors gave him a yellow piece of paper with a few notes and the name, theresa ramirez. he said, hey, ponch, i think this is the case for you. see what you can do. reporter: and what he did could be turned into a major motion picture. this story is just incredible, thomas, with its twists and turns. why did it take so long to get this reopened? reporter: i was actually working in detroit as a reporter when this murder occurred. and it was one of, you know, a dozen homicides probably that weekend, and it got put aside. it wasn t an easy one to solve. they did have a suspect, but he was in mexico.