some more ordinary smoker might have left it there for an hour or a day or more. 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.
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 was 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.
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. the jury wouldn t be able to hear gutierrez tell his incriminating lie.
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. 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?
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. i guess he got upset with her over something, flew off the handle. he was described as having a really bad temper. pushed her down on the floor, grabbed a pillow, put it over her face and tried to smother her with it. davis then re-interviewed gutierrez. he gave the same story, denying