and two people with impaired minds do things that normal people wouldn t do. and their solution to that was to kill her. reporter: the woman who d been sitting out in the front yard told the jury how the two men had been laughing and joking when they arrived, but later when she saw them backing their truck up to tara s front door breaking that small palm tree in the process. it was almost like they had a mission, that they had a plan. and one went straight to the tailgate and put the tailgate down out the truck and the other went went straight to the front door. all business? all business. reporter: that, said the prosecutor, is when they cleaned up and took tara s body in a bed sheet, loaded it into the truck, and waited for dark when one or both of them dumped her body in the woods. but to tell that story took two long trials, each peopled by witnesses the jury might not think were very credible. we raped and killed the girl.
was found in the possession of phil barr. reporter: and anyway, barr told investigators, tara was fine when he and his helper left her house that afternoon. but questions went on and on. and phil barr, who had a business to run, didn t appreciate that kind of attention. barr complained to a local nbc reporter about it. it s been very stressful. i realize the police are doing their job and they re looking into things, but nonetheless i feel like, you know, i ve been harassed. reporter: and several times, he himself confronted the detectives. insisted he was innocent, all the talk was unfair. i am telling you the truth. i have nothing to do with this girl s disappearance. i m getting the [ bleep ] shaft here. reporter: it was a problem. detectives certainly had their suspicions. but evidence? there was none. and most everyone they questioned who knew barr was, well, a bit shady. hard to believe. prosecutor feinberg concluded he simply didn t have enough to make a charge stick
that was collected from the residence either came back to the family or was not relevant to this case. there was no indication that the perpetrators had left blood or body fluid at the home. reporter: and so cases typically go cold when you run out of leads and when you run out of information and you run out of ideas. reporter: tara s mother, sharon, again and again, demanded to know what, if anything, was going on. prosecutor feinberg had no choice, he said. he couldn t tell her. the frustration was clear. you could see it on her face. you could hear it in her voice. the family was devastated and they wanted answers. and i can understand that. you can t as a prosecutor and you can t as a detective give all those answers. you can t put that information out there. reporter: still, sharon continued to ferret out what she could. we just never gave up.
find out the killers and make them pay for the crime. reporter: prosecutor dan feinberg got the autopsy results. they were not helpful. only half of the bones in her body were recovered. and some of the more important bones like the hyoid bone which would show whether or not there might been a choking or strangulation was not recovered. reporter: the medical examiner, though, found evidence that four of tara s ribs were fractured. a perimortem fracture, a fracture that occurred at the time of death. so there s a big, big slam into her ribs somehow. the medical examiner clearly found that there was evidence of a violent struggle. there was evidence of blunt force trauma and that would contribute to her death. reporter: detectives scoured the woods, looking for anything that might tell them something. they found a belly button ring near the bones. the kind tara wore, sharon confirmed. and the remnants of only one piece of clothing that belonged to her, a pair of panties.
but then, a year later, 2009, punta gorda got a new sheriff. and he thought some of the unsolved cases in town needed a new look and called upon the retired detective mike gandy. and these two, who had been detectives up north before they, too, retired and moved to punta gorda, mike vogel and kurt mehl. i moved to florida and came down here to hunt and fish and play golf and go boating and go to the beach and just relax. and that lasted a couple months. i got very bored. reporter: and so three bored ex-detectives put on badges again to form the sheriff s very first official cold case unit and decided early on they d work on tara s case. prosecutor feinberg was finally optimistic, sort of. i always felt that this was a case that could be solved. if it had a new set of eyes, it