the only reason why he would lie like that is if he had something to do with the murder. when we walked away, it was, yeah, we got him. this is our guy. there s no question about it. and just like that, a dead, old case was fully reborn. now the man steve davis had been chasing all these years could finally be arrested. you re a free man. you think you got away with it, and then all of a sudden, they drop the hammer on you. it was davis who called christie s sister, rhonda, and her father, bud. i mean, i just can t even describe to you what a feeling that was for both of us that that had happened. in fact, the very day the detective called me and said, we just picked him up. he s under arrest for murder, unbelievable. but even though art gutierrez, who s sitting in jail awaiting trial for murder, davis felt obliged to warn the family that convicting him might not be so easy. a circumstantial case is a very tough case to get a conviction on.
she was just 25 when she was killed. now all these years later when christie fleming would have been approaching middle age, her family got astonishing news. the long stalled hunt for her killer was on again. i didn t want to get my hopes up, but i thought, wow! this is just incredible. but there was still a potentially fatal weakness in the case. dna certainly put art gutierrez, christie s former boyfriend, in her condo, and her compulsion for neatness strongly suggested art s visit occurred just before the murder. but that by itself didn t prove he killed her. one thing that could help persuade a jury that gutierrez was, indeed the killer, and that was a suspected lie he had repeated to detective davis. the last time he saw christie, he had said, was about two to three months before her murder and never once after that. trouble was, none of that was on tape.
this was no big thing. to keep it simple, they decided, casual, slightly 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.
soon skipped off to embrace some fresher outrage, overloaded detectives were called to new crime scenes, and the christie 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.
but even though art gutierrez, who s sitting in jail awaiting trial for murder, davis felt obliged to warn the family that convicting him might not be so easy. a circumstantial case is a very tough case to get a conviction on. i mean even with the dna it didn t suggest necessarily that he was the murderer. but there was, remember, that one very important factor, the strange list twist that first attracted deputy d.a. john lewin, christie s compulsively obsessive neatness. at trial lewin presented a theory of what happened. that gutierrez came over late that evening, that christie, as usual, let him in, that they shared a couple of smokes and beer, but then, said lewin, something happened. an argument. an accusation. christie confronted him with the fact that she knew that he was married or believed that he had lied. which is when, said lewin, gutierrez lost his temper. i think that art hit her. he was faced with a choice of what he was going to do. and i think he made the c