Transcripts for CNN Forensic Files 20150503 05:07:30 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
happy to oblige. i did not know who she was showing the property to. she just wrote, 11:00 and then the address. usually, our routine would be to write down who it s with, the phone number and the address, but that day, it just didn t get done. a few hours later roxanne called her business partner michelle abdill and asked her to come pick her up. she said her car battery was dead. in response to the call and not knowing exactly what was said, but i m sure, you know, something to the effect that i need of, and that s all it took and she was on her way. no one heard from either woman after that call. i probably called 30 times on her cell phone. she had a cell phone and a pager. and i paged her probably the same amount of times. friends and family called police to report the two women missing. police found michelle abdill s car in the parking lot of the
investigators suspected that the killer might have left fingerprints on the duct tape he used to bind the murder victims. it s difficult to handle tape without touching the sticky side. so analysts treated the tape with gentian violet, a chemical dye. when the tape is immersed in the gentian violet, the dead skin cells that are pulled from the fingers of palms of the hand will then react with the gentian violet and you get a nice, dark image of the latent prints. just as they suspected, the killer left behind two clear prints. when he was binding the ladies, he was touching the sticky side of the tape. the prints did not match the cable repairman, and he was eliminated as a suspect. next, investigators tried to identify roxanne s 11:00 a.m. appointment.
the apartment where they were bound with duct tape. the killer left his prints on the sticky side of the tape. the garage was attached to the living area, so the killer could have put them into the truck without being seen. there was a gash on the calf of roxanne ellis s leg, suggesting the killer cut her binding so she could get into the truck. he most likely killed them in the garage with a .25-caliber weapon, using something with blueish-green fibers as a silencer. he also left his shoe impressions on the bumper. he left roxanne s truck in a parking lot about three miles away, and it wasn t found until three days later. all police had were the killer s fingerprints, a shoe impression and a composite sketch. several days passed with no leads.
apartment complex where she went to pick up roxanne. i knew something awful had happened. she always locked her car. and to have it open and a nice leather coat laying there on the seat, you know, camcorder in the car, her purse. i knew something was definitely wrong. the whole thing just stunk. it stunk big time. and we actually put detectives on that case that night. roxanne ellis s vehicle, a silver toyota pickup truck, was nowhere to be found. inside the rental property police found no signs of a struggle and no evidence of violence. there was no biological evidence. there was no blood. there wasn t anything to the visible eye that we really had to go on. several days passed without any word from either woman. their church held a vigil to keep attention focused on the case. it all started to be almost surreal. they were gone. very unlike them. so, it was panic, i guess, you know. it started to feel a little bit