Forensic Files (2011)
Saisons & Épisode
In this episode of Forensic Files, a young mother is murdered after years of domestic abuse. There are clues at the scene: bloody footprints and DNA from the victim’s rape kit.
Threatening emails, a missing person and an abandoned truck lead police to a home where they believe a murder was committed. The evidence is overwhelming and investigators are sure they have the killer. What they don’t have is the body of the victim.
In 2000, Kristine Fitzhugh failed to show up for her music class and her husband Ken found her dead at the bottom of the stairs of their Palo Alto home. Upon further investigation, luminol reveals evidence of murder in the kitchen. As detectives investigate the crime further, they uncover a long-held family secret that provides motive.
As she left choir practice, the woman was gunned down in the church parking lot. Her husband became the prime suspect – particularly when police learned he found out just a month earlier that his wife had been cheating on him for three years.
In 2007, the Florida mobile home of Effie and Michael Ratley catches fire and Michael heroically rescues his wife and infant son. A month later, his wife is found beaten to death in a bedroom of his parents' home. The cut window screen points to an intruder, but the lack of supporting evidence compels investigators to look within.
In 2005, David Castor suffered a slow, agonizing death over a period of days. His wife Stacey maintained it was suicide, even though it was done with antifreeze. Police were skeptical, especially when they learned Stacey's first husband Michael Wallace died when he was only 38 years old and she refused to consent to an autopsy.
In 2008, college co-ed Jenna Verhaalen was found dead in her Bryan, Texas apartment and petechial hemorrhages in her eyes indicated that she was strangled. The victim's boyfriend, a neighbor and the apartment maintenance man Jeremy Rosser are all suspected, but it takes DNA evidence to identify the killer.
In 2003, Kathy Lorick was murdered on a Concord, California jogging trail in the middle of the day while talking to her husband on her mobile phone. The leads from Kathy's cell phone records and search dogs go nowhere. Nine days later, a witness tells police about a chance encounter and cigarette butts contained the killer's DNA, which was eventually linked to Robert Ward Frazier.
In 2008, Colorado real estate developer Alan Helmick was found shot to death at home by his wife Miriam, who then became the prime suspect. Police have a wealth of evidence against her, but it is circumstantial. The case will turn on a .25 caliber bullet fired 20 years ago from the now-missing murder weapon.
In 2001, Michelle Harris went missing from her Owego, New York home. Since they were going through a contentious divorce, her husband Cal was a suspect, as well as several other men that Michele had been in contact with before her disappearance. But, no arrests were made until one of the men made an incriminating remark.