have mary bennett and the family, who s persistent, who are very well known and very well liked within the community, it did give me a lot of leverage when i went forth and said, hey look, i need time to concentrate specifically on this case. reporter: daron pored through the files and hunted down new leads. and then a tip came in, seemingly out of nowhere. so a guy from a repossession company calls the police and says, hey i repo d this car earlier today, and there was a folio in the trunk of the car. and as i m going through the folio, there are articles in there about this murder in placentia from 1994 and there are receipts from sav-on. reporter: sav-on. the drugstore chain where cathy was working at the time she was stabbed to death. that had to make everybody sit up straight. it did. reporter: there was more. the guy whose car had been repossessed had recently been released from state prison and was now in custody for threatening someone with a knife.
cause when you re depressed you do things. remember, this interview happened while cathy was still missing. sam seemed to be implying she might have hurt herself or that another boyfriend might be involved. i mean, look, she, she s had, i know she s had a lot of problems in the past with boyfriends. reporter: then there was the second interview, the day cathy s body was found. detective wyatt studied that tape, too. there was one thing that was important that sam didn t display that you would expect to see in a case like this. reporter: which is? emotion. he showed more emotion over the contents of a coke can. he picked it up when they left the room and reading the coke can and the ingredients and the number of calories. and at one point he puts that down and picks up a baseball hat he had been wearing, sees dirt and brushes it off and starts swearing about the fact that there s dirt on his hat. oh [ bleep ]. but he never shows any emotion about the fact that this gal h
no. no. he would try to tell me to ignore it. reporter: i mean, was this like the hatfields and the mccoys? what happened? there was no communication, no associations with them, you know. that that was basically it. that they became estranged. reporter: which made it difficult for tina, who was still married to sam s older brother, armando. police continued to work the case, but the fact was, they had no solid leads. they weren t even close to arresting anyone. but then two years after cathy torrez was murdered, an unexpected meeting put this investigation in the fast lane. an explorer scout with a familiar last name inspires a renewed search for a killer. that is a weird convince coincidence. we don t believe in coincidences.
don t receive botox® if there s a skin infection. tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. with the botox® savings program, most people with commercial insurance pay nothing out of pocket. talk to your doctor and visit botoxchronicmigraine.com to enroll. back in 1994, police suspected sam lopez of killing his sometime girlfriend, cathy torrez, but they couldn t make the case. one big reason sam s cousin, javier, who told detectives he was with sam the night of the murder. javier was sam s alibi. so he wasn t suspected of being part of the murder, or even being at the crime scene. that s right, yeah. they were looking at javier
if you have any information regarding the homicide of cathy torrez reporter: and scoured placentia for clues. by studying her car and her body, investigators got a sense of what happened. first, cathy was completely clothed. no sign of a sexual assault. and one more thing also seemed clear. most likely the attack started in the car. there were pieces of the gearshift that were broken, pieces of the center console that were broken, as if a struggle had occurred. and then there was blood within the interior of the car. reporter: orange county prosecutor matt murphy later reviewed the case. he noted blood on everything the killer must have touched the steering wheel, above the glove compartment, the driver s side armrest and, of course, the trunk release. but one noteworthy place where there was no blood? the driver s side seat lever. 4 11 cathy drove her car with