reporter: because they complain publicly about other wings of the family or at least complain in such a way that people complain in a way that other people found out about it. reporter: and the two cousins? pete i ve known for years almost since i ve been here. had a reputation for being a real hothead. a lot of mouth. he couldn t back it up. but he had a lot of mouth. without hardly an effort pete could piss you off. reporter: so when paul came to the authorities and said, i think pete is responsible for this, did the suspicion seem plausible? yes. reporter: yeah. it did. we knew pete didn t get along with his family. we knew pete had a hot head. we knew pete had access to the property. reporter: and for paul to denounce peter who was like his brother, sad perhaps, but made sense to the d.a. s office, which signed off on the warrant to have pete s house searched. it was just a few blocks away. went out to grab a bite to eat. when we came home we saw them all at t
three months after the bombing the fbi dive team found the electrical box in which the bomb had been placed. but after months of sitting in water and mud there was no trace of dna or fingerprints. the only story this peeled metal told was this case is going nowhere. reporter: now with little hope of finding that key piece of evidence that would put the case away, the detectives tried that good old-fashioned tool of policing, shoe leather and tire tread. round-the-clock surveillance of peter and paul moore. aided by tracking devices with a particularly helpful app. they re called geo fences. i put a geo fence, pretty big geo fence around where i live, i put a geo fence around the sheriff s department. reporter: protection he felt he needed after someone targeted law enforcement with those spikes on the road. if the vehicle or the gps monitor travels into those locations you get an alert.
did a thorough search. so he cobbled together a team of investigators from various law enforcement agencies. before we served the search warrant we had a briefing. reporter: one of the cops helping him was a detective from a neighboring town, jose chuy ruiz. actually showed us a diagram of the bomb and that s pretty much what we were instructed to look for. reporter: anything related to that. yes. exactly. anything related to bomb making. reporter: they arrived en masse right after daybreak. unannounced of course. paul waited outside while each investigator took a piece of the house. and in they went. i found some manila envelopes, copier, and also a printer. reporter: the problem, though, was that paul s home, owned by the moore family, doubled as the farm office. there were printers and copiers, envelopes, expected to be there, too. as you went around and found those things what were you thinking? we really want that one really, really good piece of
shakes. so i think about that. did he or did he have somebody else do it for him? then i would think the same thing about paul. by working side to side with the guy, i could see that he was smart. super smart guy. reporter: by the time the rice crop came in the first couple weeks of october the whole case had gone into a kind of stall. atf agent brian parker was particularly frustrated. while the door of the electrical panel had been recovered the box itself, where the bomb had been placed, was still missing. the most logical place where that remains of that panel was was in the river that was directly behind where the explosion occurred. reporter: so they called in an fbi dive team which spent days mucking through the bottom of the canal next to where the bomb had gone off. agent parker, who had been monitoring the search, had a
i think someone being older wouldn t be able to handle it as well as my brother did. reporter: it was pretty amazing, wasn t it? to run all that way. i wouldn t have been able to run that much. i wouldn t have known what to do. to stay strong the way he did. i just i wasn t there and i couldn t control myself. i don t know how he did it. reporter: farm accidents are as old as the wheel. bad things just happen sometimes. still, sheriff s investigators scoured the area, taking photos and collecting every bit of debris they could find, whether it looked like it was from an electrical box or not. one of our jobs for the jurisdiction is to investigate all industrial accidents. reporter: because, said the sheriff s detective, in colusa county the sheriff does double duty as the county coroner. osha eventually will take over that investigation if it is determined to be that type of thing. reporter: there was an