suburb, rio rancho in this home with his wife and three young children. he had worked as a mechanic and fisherman and had worked all over the united states. a fluent spanish speaker, he also lived in mexico. but the man who appeared in family photos as the ever-smiling attentive father also had a dark side. six months before, his wife had taken out a restraining order against him, reporting he had choked her. the first time i saw him, i remember thinking it was as strong a reaction that i had had to richard ramirez. ramirez is the notorious night stalker, convicted of murdering more than a dozen people in the 1980s, now awaiting execution on california s death row. prosecutor theresa watley once crossed paths with ramirez in the courtroom. he actually made the hair on my arms stand up because he was so evil. the only other person that has done that to me was joel courtney. when you first read the reports about this case, what went through your mind as a prosecutor? that this
that she doesn t have any clothes on. that s kind of weird, you see a naked woman running across the street. yes. we were watching her run into the restaurant. my daughter was ready to jump out the car. i m like, no, no, no. wait. we ll go over there and see what s going on. it was clear, she says, the young woman was in trouble, frantically trying to get help from someone inside the restaurant across the street. no one helped her because we pulled around there and my daughter got out of the car and met her at the door and brought her over to the car. to your car? and that s when she said, he s got a knife. he s trying to kill me. the woman said she had been kidnapped but had escaped. i told her, get in the car, lock the door, that i wouldn t let anybody hurt her. how scared were you? my tire iron is in the front seat of the car. my kids are in the car. i m not going to let anybody hurt us. but then the young woman saw something back out in the street that made he
brooke s disappearance, another search in a dramatic middle-of-the-night raid captured on videotape taken by police, an oregon state police s.w.a.t. team blew open the front door of the home that kim shared with his parents. 15 officers stormed inside to serve a search warrant looking for physical evidence. hair, body fluid, or more, evidence of kim s possible involvement in brooke s disappearance. they found no physical evidence but what they did discover drew their attention. on kim s computer, investigators found tens of thousands of photos and thousands more videos, what police termed a vast collection of pornographic images, including a small number of staged scenes depicting tortured, raped, and mutilated women. then there was this, a document labeled osu, as in oregon state university.
incredibly detailed description of the man and of his car. she described the car seats down to the detail. she described the tinted windows. she described the fact that the car was two-door, that it was red. and the victim remembered something else, a small, stuffed animal on the car side window. enter albuquerque police officer ed taylor. he showed up at the scene, ready to help track down the bad guy. first stop, the apartments where the victim escaped from her kidnapper. so you go to the door of the apartment. who answers? it s a female. but we went inside the apartment and right off the bat, you could tell she was not going to be helpful at all. not cooperative? not cooperative. she did tell us that she knew him as joe and he spoke spanish and that was about it. the name joe, he spoke spanish, would it be enough to find him? and four states away, as you re about to see, would it be enough
through the cracks. but it was healthy dissension, it was healthy challenging. i d have to characterize it that way. because when the day was done, we were all working together to try to figure out how to solve this case. at what point do you start thinking, maybe it s not sung koo kim? i don t know that we were at a point where we thought it was sung koo kim. we felt it was our job to investigate that, to see where it led us. any comment about being a person of interest? it took months but authorities officially cleared kim. kim s family filed a lawsuit claiming excessive use of force in that night raid. the state of oregon, without admitting any wrongdoing, eventually settled with the family, paying them more than $330,000. there was a lot of pressure to try and save this young woman. undoubtedly, the officers were hoping that they could find her and hoping that they could find her alive, but they really didn t have many facts here. and the search was done in a