which called into question sam s story. it does. reporter: and daron noticed another inconsistency in sam s account of the days right before cathy disappeared. mary, however, says sam was the one calling her home looking for cathy. he called how many times? quite a few times looking for her. reporter: mary says sam sounded okay at first, until she told him where cathy was. i said she was at the hospital and she wasn t back yet. reporter: at the hospital, visiting albert, her boyfriend, who had attempted suicide. sam okay with that? fortified. emerge everyday with emergen-c. packed with b vitamins, electrolytes, antioxidants, plus more vitamin c than 10 oranges. why not feel this good every day? emerge and see.
and the physical evidence seemed to confirm it. sam s dna was not found anywhere on cathy or her car and his clothes, the ones he gave voluntarily to police, had no dna of cathy s on them. but that behavior of sam s which bothered cathy s family, also bothered police, and they focused on him. however, when investigators took their suspicions to the orange county d.a., the outcome was not what they expected. coming up, sam has a new woman in his life who soon discovers his old life. you were a little freaked out by that? well, yeah. love. only activia has billions of our live and active probiotics. love. a delicious way to enjoy probiotics every day. with 20 years of devotion to gut health. activia. like no other.
were in high school, lived across the street. cathy s older sister was married to sam s older brother. reporter: they had this long on again/off again relationship in which what, he couldn t let go of her or she couldn t let go of him? i think a lot of it was mutual. reporter: even after cathy started dating albert and sam had another girlfriend, too, they continued to see each other. and daron found evidence that in sam s mind, his relationship with cathy was far from casual. mary gave me a shoe box full of letters that were written between sam and cathy, and the content of these letters showed a very jealous guy. a guy who would get angry any time somebody flirted with cathy. reporter: sam didn t try to hide the fact that he was prone to jealousy. she knows, every time she mentions some guy s name, i get pissed off, okay?
at that point you want to yell and scream at them and tell them, that s not true. you don t know, not my cathy. reporter: the torrez family was not going to wait for police to catch up to what they already knew that cathy was not someone who d just disappear. they went to reporters. mary spoke to knbc in los angeles. this is one thing that nobody should have to go through. reporter: and took the search into their own hands. the police department wasn t receptive. so i told my mom, okay, give me a picture. reporter: tina was in charge of flyers. mary worked the phones at home. and younger brother marty kept watch in front of sav-on. hi, did you guys receive a flyer? reporter: soon it wasn t just the torrez family searching for cathy. we know god s there for you. reporter: police did jump on the case, and it seemed as if all of placentia did too. we had strangers, people coming to the house asking, what can we do? where can we take the flyers?
and yeah, it looked really tough. reporter: but what really made this case a prosecutor s nightmare was the fact that all the physical evidence pointed away from the man they thought was the killer. any defense attorney would ask, if police found javier s dna and fingerprint, why would they charge sam? were you surprised you didn t find sam s dna there? yes. reporter: he thought newer, better tests might find sam s dna, but it was too late for that. cathy s family had sold the car. the case against sam would have to be entirely circumstantial. murphy felt the key to that was somewhere in those interviews sam gave to police. but here, too, there was a problem. when you look at the interview, everything that sam lopez said seemed logical at the time. and everything seemed to make sense. reporter: picking apart those interviews would be critical. this is one of those cases where you have to look at the details.