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The Killer in the News Footage · Crime Night

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So I want you to picture the scene. It is
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: May twenty two, nineteen eighty five, in New York, Pennsylvania. Okay,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: it's one of those gorgeous, like sun drenched Wednesday mornings,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: just before noon, the kind of day that practically begs
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: a teenager to be outside.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, the perfect weather to skip.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: School exactly, And two local high school boys decide to
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: do just that. They play hooky. They slip away from
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: the teachers. They cut across town, and they head down
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: to Cadorus Creek.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Right into the cool shadows beneath the West Princess Street Bridge.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. They're just goofing off, you know, tossing heavy
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: rocks into the water, competing to see who can make
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the biggest splash. Normal teenager stuff, right, But then one
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: of the boys wades a bit into the mud. He
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: reaches for this particularly large flat rock to heave into
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the creek. He pries it up from the muck, and
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: as the suction breaks, he sees a piece of dark
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: plastic underneath. Oh man, a garbage bag, and there is
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: human hair sticking out of a tear in the plastic.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: He rips it open a little further, and that innocent
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: sunlit afternoon just absolutely shatters because he is staring directly
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: at a human skull.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: I mean, put yourself in the shoes of those kids
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: for a second. The sheer paralyzing panic setting in right
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: for a split second, they actually debate just running away,
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: you know, pretending they never.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Saw it, just sneaking back into algebra class, so they
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: don't get grounded for skipping exactly.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: But the gravity of what they're looking at quickly overrides
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: their fear of detention. They scramble out of the creek
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: bed and run straight to the police.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: And that split second decision under a bridge in nineteen
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: eighty five sets off this chain of events, a series
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: of fumbled leads, a shifting cast of suspects, things we
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: are still trying to untangle forty years later.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a massive, tangled web.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: So welcome to our deep dive for today. Our mission
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: is to wade into the murky waters of this unsolved mystery.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: We're going to examine the timeline, the terrifying psychology of
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: the suspects, and a jaw dropping piece of accidental evidence
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: that well, it completely rewrites everything the least thought.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: They knew, it really does, because what the York Police
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Department found hidden under those rocks tells a very specific,
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: incredibly grim story.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, when investigators arrived at Codorus Creek, they were confronted
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: with the remains of an eighteen year old woman in
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: an advanced state of decomposition, and through dental records, they
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: identified her as Tina Knob.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: The physical condition for remains is a critical starting point here.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Over the fifteen months she had been missing, the creek
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: waters had repeatedly risen.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: And fallen right, constantly submerging her body again and again.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this was a body subjected to the corrosive, relentless
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: power of nature. But she wasn't just left exposed to
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: the elements. She was deliberately concealed beneath two to three
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: feet of heavy rocks.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: And I really want to pause on that, because the
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: physical reality of that burial is just staggering. When you
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: actually break it down.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: It's intense.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, moving that many large water logged rocks is
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: not a quick job. It is backbreaking, grueling physical labor.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: It's like do doing heavy farm labor for hours.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: You're dealing with wet, slippery stones, right.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Fighting the mud in the current. To build a mound
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: two to three feet high over a human body requires
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: immense physical effort, and you know, hours of uninterrupted time.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: You don't just kick a few stones over someone and
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: walk away, which.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Tells us volumes about the psychology of the killer. In
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: criminal profiling, when a body is left out in the open,
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: like dumped quickly in a ditch or a forest m
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: it usually points to a stranger on stranger crime.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Because they just want to get away exactly.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: The killer wants to distance themselves rapidly because there is
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: no obvious immediate link between them and the victim. But
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: when an offender takes hours to painstakingly conceal a body
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: to build a literal stone tomb in the mud, yeah,
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: it typically means they are absolutely desperate to ensure she
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: has never found. They know that the moment her body
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: is discovered, the evidentiary trail points straight back to.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Them, and that desperation to hide her is magnified tenfold
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: when you look at the geography of the crime, right
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: the location, because the West Princess Street Bridge is not
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: some isolated logging road out in the wilderness. It is
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: in the bustling town of York. It's right near a
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: high school, a public park, in a police station.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: The foot traffic alone, exactly.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: The level of risk involved in spending hours moving heavy
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: rocks in a highly populated area in nineteen eighty four
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: is astronomical. Someone could look over the bridge at any second.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: To take that kind of massive risk, the killer had
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: to be terrified of her body being found.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: That brings us to the physical evidence that survived the creek.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: Tina was found wearing corduroy pants which were notably unbuttoned
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: and unzipped.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: Which is a huge detail.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: It is. She also had a windbreaker jacket on. Yeah,
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: and she was wearing sneakers, but there was a very specific,
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: chilling detail about those sneakers. They were completely missing their shoelaces.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, And we also have to address the garbage bag
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: real quick. The teenagers who found her said she was
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: in a bag, and early police reports mentioned it right,
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: the dark plastic. Later down the line, the lead investigator
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: on the case, Detective Barry Bloss, stated categorically that there
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: was no bag found at the scene.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: That's such a weird discrepancy.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: It is whether the boys misremembered a piece of heavy
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: plastic debris in the creek as a bag in their
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: sheer panic, or whether the details got twisted in the
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: initial chaos of the crime scene, it remains this blurred
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: piece of the puzzle.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, memory under trauma is.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: Tricky, but that detail about the missing shoelaces, that is
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: a massive red flag. And to understand why we have
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: to rewind the tape fifteen months before that sunny day
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: at the creek, we have to go back to February
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: That is the day Teina vanished. She was an eighteen
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: year old, unemployed mother of two young children right and
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: the very last person to see her alive around ten
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: pm that night was her nineteen year old boyfriend, John Rutissil.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: He was the father of her children and their relationship
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: was by all accounts highly volatile.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Just a pressure cooker of youth and financial stress and infidelity.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: John was actively cheating on Tina with the woman who
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: lived in their very same apartment building.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: And to give you a glimpse into the well the
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: emotional detachment there just six months after Tina vanished, while
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: she is still an active missing person, while her parents
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: are frantically plastering the town with flyers. John married the
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: woman he was having the affair.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: With, wow, and statistically speaking, investigators always look closest at
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: the romantic partner in a disappearance. John's behavior certainly draws
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: scrutiny definitely, but it is what he freely admitted to
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: the police about that final night that just sends a
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: shiver down the spine. He told investigators that he and
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Tina had a massive explosive fight.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: That evening over her wanting to go out right.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: She wanted to leave the apartment to go to a
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: friend's house, and he wanted her to stay home and
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: watch the kids.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: And John confessed that to stop her from leaving, he
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: physically trapped her inside the apartment. And the method he
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: used is just hauntingly specific.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: The shoelaces.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he admitted that he took the shoelaces out of
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Keena's shoes and use them to tie the doorknob to
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: the dead.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: Bolt, which is terrifying if you picture.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: The mechanics of an apartment door. If you lash around
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: doorknob tightly to the fixed lever of a dead bolt
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: above it, you create a physical anchor. The tension prevents
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: the knom from turning at all. He pulled the laces
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: incredibly tight, essentially turning their own apartment into a locked cell.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: And then fifteen months later, Tina's body is pulled from
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: the rocks wearing her sneakers, sneakers that are completely missing
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: their laces.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: It's too much of a coincidence.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: It is a highly specific physical detail that connects a violent,
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: controlling domestic dispute directly to the state of the victim's
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: body at the time she was hidden. Now, John claims
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: he eventually relented, untied the door, and let her leave
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: for her friend's house around ten PM, and that he
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: never saw her again.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Tina's mother, Ada, understandably refused to buy that story. She
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: proposed a theory to investigators about how John could have
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: moved her daughter's body the furniture box. Yeah. Ada told
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: the police that there was a large, heavy furniture box
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: in the apartment that mysteriously went missing right around the
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: time Tina vanished. Her theory was that John killed Tina,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: stuffed her body into this massive box, and carried her
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: out of the apartment building under the guise of moving
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: furniture in the middle of the night.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: Which you know, it is a desperate theory from a
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: grieving mother trying to find logic in a senseless situation.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: But if we pull back and look the actual logistics
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: of that scenario, the physics of it are incredibly problematic
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: for the investigation.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: The logistics completely shatter the furniture box theory.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: If you asked me how so.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: Well, the apartment was several blocks away from the West
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Princess Street bridge. Carrying a refrigerator sized box filled with
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: over one hundred pounds of dead weight across town on foot.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: That's just as conspicuous as carrying a body over your shoulder.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Someone is going to notice a teenager hauling a massive
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: box down the sidewalk toward a creek in the dead
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: of night. So there's a missing puzzle piece here. Did
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: he have a car? Because without a vehicle, the mechanics
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: of moving her from the apartment to the creek, navigating
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: that steep embankment, and burying her under hundreds of pounds
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: of rock, it doesn't work. It simply does not compute.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: For a single nineteen year old operating on foot.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: The physical transport of the body is the absolute gaping
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: hole in the case against the boyfriend. He had the
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: clear motive, he had the opportunity, and he admitted to
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: a violent act involving the exact shoelaces missing from the
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: crime scene right but without a vehicle getting her to
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: the crete undetected. Seems almost impossible. That logistical nightmare kept
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: the investigation stalled for weeks, And just as investigators are
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: banging their heads against the wall trying to force the
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: boyfriend to fit the crime scene, a bizarre piece of
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: evidence drops into.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Their laps, the phantom call. Shortly after Tina's body was
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: discovered under the bridge, the York Police Department received an
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: anonymous phone call. A woman's voice on the line, sounding rushed, breathless, terrified.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: She says she knows who killed Tina.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Out of nowhere.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: She tells the dispatcher that they were all at a
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: pop party then night Tina disappeared. She specifically names two men,
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Stephen and Wayne, and says they got into a violent
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: fight with Tina and then click, the line goes dead.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: This call completely upends the narrative. It shifts the scene
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: from an isolated domestic dispute in a locked department to
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: a drug fueled party with multiple unknown individuals. Police immediately
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: hauled John back in and question him about these names.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Does he know a Stephen? Does he know Wayne?
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: Right? And John claims he has absolutely no idea who
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: these men are. Think about that from a psychological standpoint,
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: that's strange. If you are the prime suspect in a
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: murder investigation and the police literally hand you two alternate
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: suspects on a silver platter, human nature dictates you would
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: do everything in your power to point the finger at them.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Oh, totally'd be like, yes, Stephen and Wayne, they always
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: hated her exactly.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: But John doesn't. He adamantly maintains he doesn't know, which
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: gives him.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: This weird, counterintuitive layer of credibility in that specific moment,
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: it really does. The problem is the police couldn't trace
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: the call. In nineteen eighty five, telecommunications infrastructure was incredibly
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: primitive compared to today. Automatic number identification or what we
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: know as caller ID just wasn't standard, right, No instant
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: tracing to trace a callback. Then you had to keep
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: the caller on the line for several minutes while operators
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: literally traced physical circuits through the phone company's switchboards. A
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: quick hang up met the caller vanished into thin air,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: so Stephen and Wayne remained ghosts.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: And the investigation goes cold. Four years past, it is
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: now May nineteen eighty nine. A news cameraman at the
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: local television station WGL is doing a completely mundane archival.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Task, just going through old tapes.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he is reviewing his old b roll footage from
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five. He's watching the raw tape he shot
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: the afternoon Tina's body was pulled from Cador's Creek, preparing
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: to log it into the station's life library.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: And as he is watching the footage of the police
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: trudging through the mud, the camera pans up to the
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: west Princess Street bridge. Standing at the railing looking down
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: at the crime scene is a small crowd at about
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: eight gawkers, just ordinary citizens watching the grim spectacle unfold below.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: A pretty normal scene at any major police activity.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but in nineteen eighty nine, one face in that
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: crowd makes the cameraman's blood run cold, because he recognizes
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: the man leaning over the rail. It is a teenager
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: named Quinterio Poncho Smart.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Oh wow.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: And the only reason the cameraman recognizes him is because
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: just one month prior, in April nineteen eighty nine, the
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: District Attorney's office had plastered smart space all over the
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: evening news Quinterio Poncho.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: Smart wasn't a random bystander. He had just been convicted
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: of the exceptionally brutal October nineteen eighty seven murder of
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: twenty nine year old Judy Anne Kederman, and.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: The parallels between Judy and Tina.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Are horrifying, truly horrifying. Judy was also a young mother,
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: She was severely beaten and sexually assaulted, and the location
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: of her murder along the east side of the exact
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: same Codoras Creek, just a.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Fifteen minute walk down the trail from where Tina's body
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: was concealed under the rocks.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: It gives you absolute chills. A convicted killer is standing
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: on the bridge, calmly watching the police pull Tina's body
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: out of the water. Smart was not just a one
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: time offender either. He was also convicted of robbing and
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: sexually assaulting another woman in the same geographical area.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: And didn't he talk about it?
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he had allegedly boasted to people on the street
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: that he.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: Had killed before the psychology of that videotape is terrifying.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, why was Smart standing on that bridge?
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: That's the million dollar question. Was he admiring his own
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: handiwork soaking in the chaos he caused? Was he returning
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: to the scene of the crime to assess the police
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: competence to see if they were going to find any
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: clues that linked back to him?
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Or perhaps even more disturbing, did watching the police painstakingly
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: investigate Tina's murder give him a sick, twisted inspiration for
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: his future crimes?
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's dark.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Did he see how long it took them to find
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: her body and realized that the creek was an incredibly
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: viable secluded hunting ground. It's definitely possible, and this massive
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: revelation forces us to look back at the physical evidence
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: at the crime scene, specifically the clothing. Detective Bloss, the
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: lead investigator, always held onto the theory that John the
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: boyfriend was the killer. Right. Bloss rationalized the fact that
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Tina's corduroy pants were unzipped and unbuttoned by theorizing that
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: John had tried to dress her post mortem to cover
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: up the crime. He believed John struggled to zip up
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: her tight wet jeens after she was dead and just gave.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: Up, And that theory attempts to explain a very specific
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: anomaly at the crime scene while keeping the focus squarely
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: on the primary suspect. It tries to force the evidence
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: to fit the boyfriend.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: But I have to push back hard on that theory.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: Look at the rest of what she was wearing. She
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: was found wearing John's windbreaker jacket.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: If John had just murdered her in a fit of
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: rage and was frantically trying to dress her to move
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: the body across town, why on earth would he put
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: her in his own own, highly identifiable jacket.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes no sense.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: It makes absolutely zero sense to permanently tie a dead
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: body to yourself with your own clothing. It is vastly
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: more logical to assume she was cold, grabbed his big
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: windbreaker off a chair on her way out the door,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: and was wearing it when she was intercepted and attacked
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: by someone else.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: Entirely someone waiting outside or down.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: The street exactly. And if we look at the unbuttoned,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: unzipped pants, that points directly, almost cleanly to Quinterio Smart's
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: established m of sexual assault.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: It is a profoundly compelling argument. Yeah, you have a
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: known sexual predator and murderer operating in the exact same
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: geographical footprint, utilized the exact same creek, caught on tape,
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: survailing the crime scene, so right there. Yet, despite this
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: massive visual revelation, the gears of justice somehow ground to
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: a complete halt. The tragedy of this case is how
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: many times it almost broke wide open, only to slip
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: back into the shadows due to technical failures or bad timing.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Tracking those fumbled leads is heartbreaking. In nineteen eighty seven,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: before the videotape was discovered, police really turned up the
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: heat on John. They pushed him hard, but he immediately
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: lawyered up and explicitly refused to take a polygraph test.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: Which is his right, but it stalls things.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: So the investigations stalled out. In nineteen eighty eight, crime
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: Stoppers offered one thousand dollars reward, but it didn't shake
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: a single useful tip loose, and then came.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: The catastrophic missed opportunity. In October nineteen ninety, Detective Bloss
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: fought hard to get Tina's case featured on a nationally
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: syndicated television show called Crime Stoppers eight hundred.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: Oh this part is so frustrating.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: They even read the transcript of that anonymous pot party
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: phone call on the air, pleading for the terrified woman
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: to call back. Okay, their absolute best chance at national exposure.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: But the broadcast was a mechanical disaster.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: It went wrong.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: The show featured two different missing persons cases on the
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: exact same broadcast. The national switchboards were flooded with calls,
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: and the operators taking the tips confused the details of
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: the two cases. No way, Yes, tipsters calling in about
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: Tina had their information logged under the other crime cross
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: contaminating the data. The tip line was rendered completely worthless.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: The momentum was destroyed by a simple logistical error in
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: a call center.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: That is just devastating. And then finally forensic science catches up.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: It's two thousand and five. DNA testing is now sophisticated
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: enough to pull a microscopic genetic profile off almost any surface.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Finally, some hope, right, the.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Police take a soda can that was found at the
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: crime scene, buried deep in the rocks, right next to
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Tina's body, and they send it off to the lab.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: They are hoping for just a few skin cells, a
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: microscopic clue left by the killer, But the creek had
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: the final say.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: The environment completely neutralized the science. Fifteen months of rising
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: and falling creek water isn't just about things getting wet.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: The constant submersion in water causes osmotic pressure that makes
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: cellular structures swell and burst.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: The relentless flow of the creek literally washed away the
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: nuclei of the cells where DNA is stored. The biological
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: evidence was completely decimated. There's absolutely nothing left for the
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: lab to test.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: It's like the creek was working against them the whole time.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Time and nature are the ultimate enemies of every cold case,
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: and the toll it takes on the families left behind
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: is immeasurable.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: It really is. Detective Barry Bloss, who carried the weight
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: of this case with him for decades, passed away in
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty three without ever closing it. Tina's father Tim
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: passed away in twenty eighteen, her mother Ada passed away
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one. Her sister Debbie also passed away.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: Oh that's just tragic.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: An entire family wiped out by the passage of time.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: Going to their graves without ever knowing who stole Tina
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: from them or why she was buried under those rocks.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: And John the boyfriend is now divorced and continues to
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: firmly maintain his innocence to this day. He has stated
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: publicly that he desperately wishes the case would be solved
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: so a forty year dark cloud could finally be lifted
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: from his life.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: I can't imagine living with that if you're innocent.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: Right, and somewhere out there someone knows the exact truth.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: The York Police Department is still asking for anyone with
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: information to call them at seven one seven eight four
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: six one two three four. Someone has carried this dark
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: secret for four decades.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: It really makes you look at the world differently. We
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: live in an era now where every single moment is
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: documented on our smartphones in four K resolution, instantly uploaded
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: to the cloud, and analyzed by millions of people in
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: real time.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, true crime sleuths are everywhere online now, right, but.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Think about the nineteen eighties. Think about how many local
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: news broadcasts, how many family camquarter tapes, how many dusty
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: VHS cassettes are just sitting in cardboard boxes and attics
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: and basements across the country is.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: A chilling reality. Yeah, how many more cold cases might
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: have accidental evidence hidden in the deep background.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: Exactly how many killers are staring back at us from
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: a crowd standing at a bridge, just waiting for the
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: right person to brush off the dust, hit play, and
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: finally recognize the monster standing in plain sight.