flirtatious, very routine. and so on a bright saturday morning in march, harris and comstock hit the road, driving to the desert outside los angeles where gutierrez now lived. we had one chance to get this done, because once he finds out that he s being focused on in the murder investigation, he s not going to talk to law enforcement. he s going to get an attorney, and then we ve lost our only chance. harris and her partner, calm as they can muster, walk up the path to art gutierrez s front door. one chance to make it happen. when we get there, yes, our adrenaline is pumping. this is a homicide suspect. her fear. if they don t get this right, the investigation is finished, art gutierrez walks. justice for christie fleming and her family, out of reach forever.
and then he asked me for a ride. she said, where s your car? he said, i don t have a car. i don t have a license because i have warrants. warrants? no car? no license? maybe art wasn t quite as successful as he claimed he was. and according to janice, he told christie something rather strange. i remember this so clearly, her telling me, art s still telling stories. he said, you know, christie, god punished me. i could never have children because of you having that abortion. what she certainly did not know was that art somehow failed to mention he was actually married, and he had three children, and they were all living together, he and his wife and their kids, at his mother-in-law s house, conveniently close to christie s condo. apparently this art gutierrez had a habit of showing up at her apartment at 2:00 in the morning, all kinds of late hours. christie had casually mentioned it to a few friends, but she apparently wasn t annoyed enough to turn him away.
fleming case, yesterday s news, faded from view. weeks passed, months, years. the more time that goes by, the more you feel like it s never going to happen. it s just hopeless, and you re going to just have to live with not knowing. and it wasn t made any easier when the lead detective retired. he hated leaving without solving the case, especially this case. he told me one day, he said, i ve got this old case that i d like for you to be responsible with because i d like to see this case solved. so that s how i got interested in it. and once i got interested in it, i was hooked. davis pored over it all, all the obsessive habits, the staged crime scene, cigarette butts, the secret return of the old boyfriend, art gutierrez. the solution seemed tantalizingly possible, yet just out of reach. and then three years after christie s death, davis heard about a disturbing incident involving gutierrez and his wife.
for whatever reason, she always let art in, and on occasion, he even spent the night. whatever the relationship was between the two of them was a secret from a lot of people. sure. did you even know about it at the time? i had no clue. she had not told you anything? no. detectives brought gutierrez in for questioning, and he was cooperative. he even admitted seeing christie for a while, but they had broken it off two or three months before the murder, he said. as for the night christie was killed? art insisted he was nowhere near the condo, and he could prove it. he had been with his wife that evening, that they had, i believe, gone to a party with some people. and his wife backed up the story. he was asked to take a polygraph. he did not want to take a polygraph. he refused. gutierrez did, however, submit a saliva sample which was sent off to the lab for testing. and, indeed, it did match the saliva found on the butts of those cigarettes.
but not christie fleming. they sent those butts to the sheriff department s crime lab, ordered the most sophisticated tests available and waited. and this time the result was perfectly clear. it positively identified art gutierrez as the suspect. without any doubt. without any doubt. and again, it comes back to her habits and customs. when art was talked to originally, he said he hadn t been there for two to three months. now, maybe at my house cigarette butts would be in the trash can for two to three months, but not christie. uh-huh. those were there that night. but there was still one little problem with this case. the cigarette butts only placed art gutierrez at the crime scene. they didn t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he actually killed christie fleming. the d.a. and the detective needed something else to hang the murder on him.