and this is dateline. i can t believe that their baby is lying there lifeless. she was everything to me. she was so sweet everybody. state troopers said bonnie had died in a hiking accident. the said she fell off a cliff. her mother said, they were wrong. i was screaming to them, these are defensive wounds. no witnesses, no weapon. nothing left behind by a stranger s dna. we no longer have some accidental death. this was a homicide. they had no suspect. but for years, her mother kept fighting to find bonnie s killer. bonnie s mother continues her own crusade. then after more than a decade of searching, a phone call. i just got information, there was a match. can we get a conviction on just the dna? and there was something else. something about bonnie herself. it was almost like she knew something hello, and welcome to dateline. we often see headlines about dna evidence exonerating the innocent. it seems we hear less about how dna from an unknow
her mission. so how many names did you have? about 2,300 names. could cutting-edge technology crack an ice-cold case? i was like, no way. i believe in the devil, and people that don t believe in the devil, i think, they re in for a big surprise. hello and welcome to dateline. michella and jenni were just like most kids their age. they loved riding bikes, and playing outdoors. the fun-loving girls didn t know each other. but they would be forever connected, through tragedy. decades later, a detective would leave no stone unturned, on a quest for justice. and in the process, uncovered a twist that left investigators speechless. here is keith morrison with evil was watching. again and again, she came here. stood under the ancient canopy. walked the damp, narrow paths, to the places the killer used to hide what he had done. as if looking, once more, after all these years would tell her something. as if the dense undergrowth would part and finally reveal a name
keith morrison: it had been five months since 22-year-old 22-year-old chelsea bruck disappeared from big mike s annual halloween party. her costume had been found. it was found ripped underneath an abandoned building. this was interesting. it happened to be a hundred yards from the trailer park where harlan byrd had lived. what did you think when you saw that? the hair on the back of your head kind of stands up. coincidence? the detectives didn t think so. the first thing we did, we called harlan byrd in for another interview. you thought we ve found our guy here. yes. because you had been kind of wonky about him before, right? yes. things looked like they had been adding up. harlan came back to the station, this time with an attorney. how do you explain the items being found so close to your grand grandma s house? i can t explain it. do you have any thoughts to why some of her clothing would be found? none. a half mile from your grandma s place? n
it does. it s amazing this is a man who got away with murder for a long-time. he would completely scot-free if someone did put the dna into codis. it s really remarkable. which became it turned out the subject of karen s new campaign at the time. she joined the alaska state troopers and other law enforcement agencies trying to persuade every state to enter dna into codis. the national databank upon arrest. after a push for a change of alaska, the state now enters a suspect s dna when he or she is arrested for a felony just as it records mugshots and fingerprints. more than 30 states have laws in place to take dna from arrestees. we need all of them to collect it. dna doesn t lie. you get to the truth so much sooner. it saves money. it saves lives. samantha channeled her grief. she became a 9-1-1 operator. 9-1-1. what s the location of the emergency? when you have someone on the other end of the line who is calling him because they just found out somebody had died and th
the mystery of who killed michella and jenni haunted two families for nearly-30 years. all they knew, or thought they knew, was that some, unknown man, assaulted and killed those little girls. this man, who had killed once, had killed again. absolutely. there couldn t be two monsters in tacoma. but they were wrong. dna doesn t lie. and the male dna found on jenni s swimsuit. did it match the other case? no. there wasn t just one killer. there were two. i was absolutely dumbfounded. yeah. i don t think i could speak. i was like, no way. i think we were all just we had to kind of take a moment. sure. to regroup. yeah. because all this time, you re looking for one thing. and it s actually something else. uh-huh. but it was exciting, at the same time, because now