Latest / Crime Night / The Silent Streets of San Miguel

Transcript

The Silent Streets of San Miguel · Crime Night

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine trying to keep a secret in an eight hundred
0:02
Speaker 1: person town. If you've ever lived in a place that small,
0:05
Speaker 1: you know exactly what I'm talking about.
0:07
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the rumor mill is usually instantaneous.
0:10
Speaker 1: Right, You sneeze on main Street and by the time
0:13
Speaker 1: you get home, like three neighbors have already called to
0:15
Speaker 1: offer you chicken soup. A town that size operates like
0:18
Speaker 1: a giant acoustic chamber. Every single action creates a ripple.
0:23
Speaker 2: It's an ecosystem where everyone is hyper connected, which is
0:26
Speaker 2: why this case is so well, it's completely baffling.
0:30
Speaker 1: It really is. Imagine the secret isn't harmless gossip. Imagine
0:34
Speaker 1: it's the abduction and murder of two little girls in
0:36
Speaker 1: broad daylight on a Saturday morning. And imagine that acoustic
0:40
Speaker 1: chamber keeping that secret dead silent for forty five years.
0:44
Speaker 2: It completely defies everything we know about community dynamics. Yeah,
0:48
Speaker 2: you know, the statistical probability of no one seeing anything
0:51
Speaker 2: for half a century is virtually zero. Yet here we.
0:54
Speaker 1: Are welcome to the deep dive. Today we are opening
0:57
Speaker 1: up the files of a forty five year old mystery
0:59
Speaker 1: that is absentsolutely haunted the State of California.
1:02
Speaker 2: We're looking at a massive stack of sources today, original
1:05
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty police transcripts, autopsy files, and some really cutting
1:11
Speaker 2: edge forensic lab reports that are actually making headlines right now.
1:15
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. We're taking you back to May seventeenth,
1:18
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty. We are in the tiny, sun drenched town
1:22
Speaker 1: of San Miguel, California. And this isn't just a tragedy
1:25
Speaker 1: the masterclass in how a chaotic, botched investigation can completely
1:30
Speaker 1: freeze a case.
1:31
Speaker 2: And how modern science is finally methodically unfreezing it. But
1:35
Speaker 2: setting the scene of San Miguel in nineteen eighty is
1:37
Speaker 2: just it's so crucial for understanding how this unfolded.
1:40
Speaker 1: Paint that picture for us. What did that Saturday morning
1:42
Speaker 1: look like?
1:43
Speaker 2: It was idyllic? Honestly, a busy Saturday morning on Mission Street.
1:47
Speaker 2: You have five year old Teresa Flores. She goes by
1:49
Speaker 2: Terry and four year old Martha Mezzo, who everyone called Marty.
1:53
Speaker 1: Two little kids on a weekend exactly.
1:55
Speaker 2: They'd had a sleepover the night before, and by ten
1:57
Speaker 2: forty five in the morning, Terry's and Virginia brings them
2:00
Speaker 2: into town to run errands. They needed a birthday present
2:02
Speaker 2: for a party later that day.
2:04
Speaker 1: But first and Virginia has to drop something off at
2:06
Speaker 1: the post office. And I mean think back to being
2:09
Speaker 1: four or five years old.
2:10
Speaker 2: Oh, standing in line at a post office is pure
2:13
Speaker 2: torture for a kid.
2:14
Speaker 1: It's a prison sentence. So the girls are bored, obviously,
2:17
Speaker 1: they ask if they can just walk a few doors
2:19
Speaker 1: down to the local market by themselves to get some candy,
2:22
Speaker 1: and the ant says.
2:23
Speaker 2: Yes, which, hearing that today, our modern brain starts screaming, right,
2:28
Speaker 2: red flag, red flag.
2:29
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you just don't let a four year old walk
2:32
Speaker 1: down a street alone now. But we really have to
2:35
Speaker 1: look at this through the lens of nineteen eighties small
2:38
Speaker 1: town freedom.
2:39
Speaker 2: That is such an important point. It wasn't considered negligent
2:43
Speaker 2: back then. In a town of eight hundred people, children
2:46
Speaker 2: were basically viewed as a collective responsibility.
2:48
Speaker 1: Right. If a kid tripped, a shop owner would put
2:51
Speaker 1: a band aid on it before the parents even heard
2:53
Speaker 1: about it.
2:53
Speaker 2: So n Virginia didn't hesitate. By eleven, she comes out
2:57
Speaker 2: of the post office and finds the girls waiting there,
3:00
Speaker 2: totally happy, clutching their freshly bought market candy.
3:03
Speaker 1: And this is where the timeline gets so granular, right,
3:06
Speaker 1: because they ask if they can walk ahead to Marty's house,
3:09
Speaker 1: which is just down Mission Street.
3:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, just down the main drag, and for Gina says, sure,
3:12
Speaker 2: go ahead. So they start walking and from here investigators
3:16
Speaker 2: were able to map their movements almost minute by minute.
3:20
Speaker 1: Because they were so visible. I mean, they even make
3:22
Speaker 1: a pit stop at the local dive.
3:24
Speaker 2: Bar, the Elkhorn Bar. Yeah, kids pop it into a bar.
3:27
Speaker 2: Sounds wild now, but it was just a place to
3:29
Speaker 2: grab asda from the bartender back then.
3:31
Speaker 1: Right, they try to buy a coke they're short on change,
3:33
Speaker 1: and some guy sitting at the bar actually pays for it.
3:36
Speaker 1: They chat with them, turn around and leave.
3:38
Speaker 2: They step back out into the bright California sun. On
3:42
Speaker 2: the sidewalk, they literally bump into Terry's uncle. They have
3:45
Speaker 2: a completely normal chat with him, and then what They
3:49
Speaker 2: turn start walking toward Marty's house and that's it. It
3:53
Speaker 2: is eleven thirty am, broad daylight, main intersection of town
3:57
Speaker 2: and they simply vanish off the face.
3:59
Speaker 1: Of the It's terrifying that half hour window. I always
4:03
Speaker 1: think of an eight hundred person town like a massive
4:05
Speaker 1: family reunion. In the single rented hall. Someone had to
4:09
Speaker 1: see something. You can't just evaporate in a room that small.
4:12
Speaker 2: You really can't. The physical space between the uncle and
4:15
Speaker 2: Marty's house was just a few hundred yards. Someone intercepted
4:18
Speaker 2: them in a window of time so tight it feels
4:21
Speaker 2: almost orchestrated.
4:22
Speaker 1: But because everyone felt so safe, no one panicked immediately,
4:25
Speaker 1: right exactly.
4:27
Speaker 2: The miscommunication buys the killer crucial hours. Marty's mom assumed
4:32
Speaker 2: they stated Terry's. Terry's family assumed they were at Marty's.
4:36
Speaker 1: So when does the dread actually set in?
4:38
Speaker 2: Later that afternoon, when the sun starts getting low and
4:41
Speaker 2: the families finally coordinate, they physically retrace the road. They
4:44
Speaker 2: checked the schoolyard at the old Fakant Grainary and.
4:47
Speaker 1: This seleem is riverbed right because older kids played down there. Right.
4:50
Speaker 2: They find absolutely nothing, So they finally called the police,
4:53
Speaker 2: and the response from law enforcement is just it's a
4:56
Speaker 2: massive rapid escalation.
4:58
Speaker 1: It really is. I mean, within hours, leepy, little San
5:00
Speaker 1: Miguel practically turns into a militarized command center.
5:03
Speaker 2: They bring in twenty local officers instantly. By Sunday there
5:07
Speaker 2: are one hundred and fifty people doing grid searches.
5:09
Speaker 1: They even call in the National Guard from the nearby
5:12
Speaker 1: Camp Roberts Army base. You've got helicopters chopping through the sky,
5:16
Speaker 1: people on horseback, daver dogs. It was a full scale invasion.
5:19
Speaker 2: It was desperate. Police were knocking on doors, searching homes
5:22
Speaker 2: without warrants. The urgency just completely overrode protocol.
5:26
Speaker 1: But despite turning the town upside down, days tick by
5:31
Speaker 1: and they find nothing, which means they aren't just looking
5:34
Speaker 1: for lost girls anymore. They're looking for a predator.
5:36
Speaker 2: And that casts this horrific shadow over the town. Suddenly,
5:40
Speaker 2: every neighbor, every familiar face at the grocery store is
5:44
Speaker 2: a suspect.
5:44
Speaker 1: And that massive search effort is exactly what makes the
5:48
Speaker 1: discovery twelve days later so completely baffling. So it's May
5:52
Speaker 1: twenty ninth, right. Some men from Camp Robbers are taking
5:55
Speaker 1: a break by the shallow sandy banks of the Salinas riverbed.
5:58
Speaker 1: They hear this unusual heavy buzzing of flies and there's
6:02
Speaker 1: a terrible smell.
6:03
Speaker 2: They follow it under a bridge and that's when they
6:05
Speaker 2: see a small hand protruding from the sand.
6:07
Speaker 1: They know instantly what they found. They back away, call
6:10
Speaker 1: the police, but when investigators get there, the scene is
6:13
Speaker 1: just it's jarring.
6:14
Speaker 2: It was in a deep grave, There was no hole dug.
6:17
Speaker 2: It was what we call a surface burial. They were
6:20
Speaker 2: just laid in a depression in the sand and loose
6:22
Speaker 2: dirt was pushed over them.
6:24
Speaker 1: And the autopsy detailed the cause of death as asphyxiation.
6:27
Speaker 1: The killer used these maroon cloth ligatures, basically strips of
6:31
Speaker 1: fabric tied tight around their necks.
6:34
Speaker 2: But the crucial thing the medical examiner noted was the
6:37
Speaker 2: state of decomposition. It indicated they were killed very early
6:41
Speaker 2: on likely the day they vanished.
6:43
Speaker 1: Okay, but wait, if dogs cleared that exact spot in
6:47
Speaker 1: the riverbed days earlier, the killer kept them hidden right
6:50
Speaker 1: under the noses of one hundred and fifty searchers, how
6:53
Speaker 1: is that even possible?
6:54
Speaker 2: That is the logistical nightmare of this case. Cadaver dogs
6:57
Speaker 2: detect gases from early decomposition. If the bodies were there
7:01
Speaker 2: during the initial search, the dogs would have hit on
7:04
Speaker 2: that scent cone immediately.
7:06
Speaker 1: So they weren't in the riverbed. The killer had a
7:08
Speaker 1: staging area precisely.
7:10
Speaker 2: They held them somewhere else for days, a basement, a shed,
7:13
Speaker 2: a car trunk, and then navigating a town crawling with
7:17
Speaker 2: cops and helicopters, they carried the bodies down to the
7:20
Speaker 2: riverbed and dumped them in a spot.
7:22
Speaker 1: That had already been searched. I mean, the wrist tolerance
7:24
Speaker 1: that requires is.
7:25
Speaker 2: Off the charts, and the local knowledge you have to
7:28
Speaker 2: know exactly where the searchers had already been.
7:30
Speaker 1: But it gets weirder. The very next day, fifty yards
7:33
Speaker 1: away from the burial site, police find a green trash
7:36
Speaker 1: bag hidden in the brush. This is the evidence dump, and.
7:40
Speaker 2: The items inside are completely unhinged.
7:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have the girl's clothes and shoes, but they
7:45
Speaker 1: are neatly, almost perfectly folded. And then there are items
7:49
Speaker 1: that have absolutely nothing to do with the victims, right,
7:52
Speaker 1: like a.
7:52
Speaker 2: Random potted plant, a blue towel covered in blood and
7:56
Speaker 2: unknown hairs.
7:57
Speaker 1: And the most baffling thing, a pair of women's blackfred
8:00
Speaker 1: of Hollywood thong underwear with a silver dragon on it,
8:03
Speaker 1: which contained traces of seamen.
8:05
Speaker 2: The psychological profile from that bag is just a mess.
8:08
Speaker 2: The neatly folded clothes suggest someone highly methodical, maybe military,
8:13
Speaker 2: but the bloody towel and exotic underwear, it's chaotic.
8:16
Speaker 1: It's a forensic gold mine. Though you'd think this would
8:19
Speaker 1: point a giant arrow at the killer, especially in a
8:22
Speaker 1: town of eight hundred people.
8:23
Speaker 2: You would think so, but the demographics of the area
8:27
Speaker 2: were a lot more complicated than police initially realized.
8:30
Speaker 1: Because just twenty minutes south was a Tascadero State Hospital,
8:33
Speaker 1: which in nineteen eighty was a maximum security facility housing
8:37
Speaker 1: severe offenders, including violent sex offenders.
8:40
Speaker 2: And San Miguel had very cheap housing, so it became
8:44
Speaker 2: this dumping ground for individuals parolled or released from a Tascadero.
8:48
Speaker 2: The town was practically infested with them.
8:50
Speaker 1: The victing's families even called the town's population sidewalk commandos.
8:55
Speaker 1: Young women were constantly being harassed, so instead of a
8:58
Speaker 1: small suspect pool, police are drowning in potential predators.
9:02
Speaker 2: And reading through the original nineteen eighty interrogation transcripts, it
9:06
Speaker 2: is so frustrating to see how they handled these suspects.
9:09
Speaker 2: It was a completely botched investigation.
9:11
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the three main guys they zeroed in on. First,
9:14
Speaker 1: you have a sixteen year old kid named Greg Hickey,
9:16
Speaker 1: known locally as Crazy Greg.
9:18
Speaker 2: Greg actually babysat the girls sometimes, but on the morning
9:22
Speaker 2: they vanished, He took their older siblings to the riverbed,
9:25
Speaker 2: got disproportionately enraged over something minor and screamed at them.
9:29
Speaker 1: And a few hours later he gets into a fistfight
9:32
Speaker 1: with Marty's half brother. Plus his living situation is a
9:35
Speaker 1: massive red flag. He lived in what cops called a
9:39
Speaker 1: party house.
9:40
Speaker 2: And when a detective casually asked his sister what color
9:42
Speaker 2: their bathroom towels were, she said blue, matching the bloody
9:46
Speaker 2: towel in the trash bag.
9:47
Speaker 1: But the cops never get a warrant. They just write
9:49
Speaker 1: it in their little notebook and walk away, and it
9:51
Speaker 1: gets worse. Greg's alibi was that he was with his
9:55
Speaker 1: friend Cal.
9:56
Speaker 2: Right, and weeks later, when police finally start asking questions
10:00
Speaker 2: about Cal's vehicles, one of Cal's cars mysteriously catches fire
10:04
Speaker 2: and burns to the ground.
10:05
Speaker 1: While he and Gregor supposedly driving it. It's a mountain
10:07
Speaker 1: of circumstantial smoke.
10:09
Speaker 2: Yet they couldn't definitively link them to the crime, so
10:12
Speaker 2: they move on to Mario Escalante, the regular at the
10:15
Speaker 2: Elkorn Bar.
10:16
Speaker 1: Right, the guy who witnesses, including the bartender, swear bought
10:20
Speaker 1: the girls that coke on the morning they vanished.
10:22
Speaker 2: But when police bring Mario in, he completely lies, denies
10:27
Speaker 2: buying the soda, denies even seeing Terry or Marty that day.
10:30
Speaker 1: If you're innocent, why lie about a public interaction dozens
10:33
Speaker 1: of people saw. You're just trying to distance yourself from
10:35
Speaker 1: being the last person to see them.
10:36
Speaker 2: Alive, exactly. And then there's a third main suspect, Eugene Capers,
10:41
Speaker 2: an ex military neighbor living right behind Marty's house.
10:44
Speaker 1: Eugene had this overly emotional, erratic response when the bodies
10:48
Speaker 1: were found, sobbing in public, going to the local mission
10:52
Speaker 1: to pray alone.
10:53
Speaker 2: Which naturally warrants an interview. But the detective assigned to
10:57
Speaker 2: him happens to be an old army buddy.
10:58
Speaker 1: Unbelievable. The guy literally gives him a free military pass,
11:02
Speaker 1: clears him with a tiny paragraph in the file just peak,
11:06
Speaker 1: good old boy network obstructing justice.
11:08
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, you see
11:10
Speaker 2: a police force suffering from tunnel vision and absolute procedural negligence.
11:15
Speaker 2: They hit dead ends because of their own incompetence.
11:18
Speaker 1: And just when you think they might regroup, the entire
11:20
Speaker 1: case gets derailed by a guy sitting in a Texas prison,
11:23
Speaker 1: Henry Lee Lucas.
11:24
Speaker 2: For listeners who don't know, Henry Lee Lucas was a
11:26
Speaker 2: notorious serial confessor. He figured out he could get special
11:30
Speaker 2: privileges fast food TV if you just claimed unsolved murders
11:34
Speaker 2: all over the country.
11:35
Speaker 1: And cops were so desperate to clear their books they
11:38
Speaker 1: lined up for it. So in nineteen eighty three, Lucas
11:42
Speaker 1: claims he killed a girl near San Miguel.
11:45
Speaker 2: The lead California investigator flies out to Texas and what
11:48
Speaker 2: happens next is just a devastating case of confirmation bias.
11:52
Speaker 1: The Texas rangers literally tell the California cop to let
11:55
Speaker 1: Lucas take the lead, keep giving him cigarettes. And this
11:58
Speaker 1: is the worst part. They laid out crime I photos
12:00
Speaker 1: right in front of him.
12:01
Speaker 2: They spoon fed him the visual data. So months later
12:05
Speaker 2: Lucas suddenly has an epiphany and says he remembers everything.
12:08
Speaker 1: They fly him to California like a vip He walks
12:10
Speaker 1: in through the riverbed describes the ligatures perfectly, because duh,
12:14
Speaker 1: they showed him the pictures.
12:16
Speaker 2: And the investigator was so desperate for closure. He followed
12:19
Speaker 2: a report saying there was no doubt Lucas did it.
12:22
Speaker 2: They wasted two agonizing.
12:23
Speaker 1: Years on this until a national task force proved Lucas
12:27
Speaker 1: was running a scrap metal business in Florida on the
12:29
Speaker 1: exact days of the murder. He couldn't have abducted girls
12:33
Speaker 1: in California and driven two thousand miles in a beat
12:36
Speaker 1: up car in two days.
12:37
Speaker 2: It was a total fabrication. Yeah, but the damage was done.
12:41
Speaker 2: The media ran headline saying the case was solved, the
12:44
Speaker 2: town exhaled, the families eventually moved away.
12:48
Speaker 1: Broken by nineteen eighty seven. The files are just tossed
12:51
Speaker 1: in a box cold and it stayed frozen for.
12:54
Speaker 2: Decades until the science is all.
12:55
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, entered Detective Clint Coal
12:59
Speaker 1: in two thousand eighteen. This guy is legendary. He cracks
13:02
Speaker 1: the Kristen smart case and he comes out of retirement
13:05
Speaker 1: specifically for Sam.
13:06
Speaker 2: Miguel because he knows he has a tool. The eighties
13:08
Speaker 2: cops didn't have advanced DNA tech, specifically PCR testing polymerase.
13:15
Speaker 1: Chain reaction right because they tried testing the semen on
13:17
Speaker 1: those weird Fredericks of Hollywood underwear in two thousand and six.
13:20
Speaker 1: But the tech wasn't there yet.
13:21
Speaker 2: Older tech needed a huge pristine sample pcr let scientists
13:26
Speaker 2: take a microscopic, degraded sample and copy it millions of
13:29
Speaker 2: times until they can read a full genetic fingerprint.
13:31
Speaker 1: And they get it. They extract a full DNA profile
13:34
Speaker 1: from the underwear. Cole immediately tracks down the surviving suspects.
13:39
Speaker 1: He swabs Greg, he swabs Mario. He checks the atascad
13:42
Speaker 1: Aero Parolis.
13:43
Speaker 2: And the results rule them all out. It wasn't Greg,
13:46
Speaker 2: it wasn't Mario. The physical evidence completely contradicts the circumstantial suspicions.
13:50
Speaker 1: So Cole pivots to genetic genie analogy. This is what
13:53
Speaker 1: caught the Golden State killer. You upload the unknown DNA
13:57
Speaker 1: to public ancestry databases to find distant cousins and build
14:00
Speaker 1: family trees backward and forward.
14:02
Speaker 2: The genealogists find that the suspect is a man who
14:05
Speaker 2: is roughly seventy five percent African American. Now, Eugene Capers
14:09
Speaker 2: was the only black suspect in the.
14:11
Speaker 1: File, the military neighbor who got the free pass right.
14:14
Speaker 2: Eugene had died, but Cole tests his children's DNA to
14:17
Speaker 2: reconstruct his profile, and it's not Eugene. The DNA belongs
14:21
Speaker 2: to a totally unknown individual, which.
14:23
Speaker 1: Makes sense in a town next to a transient military base.
14:26
Speaker 1: But that's only half the story, because in twenty twenty,
14:29
Speaker 1: Cole has the labry test the actual murder weapons, the
14:32
Speaker 1: maroon ligatures, and.
14:34
Speaker 2: They pull a second, entirely different, unknown DNA profile. The
14:39
Speaker 2: person on the underwear is not the person who strangled
14:42
Speaker 2: the girls.
14:42
Speaker 1: This changes everything. Cole's working theory now is that this
14:46
Speaker 1: wasn't one organized serial killer. The evidence is too chaotic.
14:49
Speaker 2: He theorizes it started as a twisted prank or a
14:52
Speaker 2: kidnapping to scare the families, but then the National Guard
14:55
Speaker 2: rolls in. Helicopters are flying and the perpetrator's panic.
14:59
Speaker 1: They murder the girls to silence them, and because there
15:02
Speaker 1: are multiple DNA profiles, Cole thinks they called in favors
15:05
Speaker 1: to help move the bodies and dump the.
15:07
Speaker 2: Evidence, a multi person cover up, and this aligns perfectly
15:11
Speaker 2: with a huge tip they got recently. Shortly after Cole
15:14
Speaker 2: interviewed Greg Hickey in twenty twenty, Greg passed away.
15:17
Speaker 1: But weeks later Greg's surviving girlfriend calls the police. She
15:20
Speaker 1: says Greg confessed to her that Back in nineteen eighty,
15:23
Speaker 1: someone asked him and his friend Cal to dispose of
15:25
Speaker 1: a bloody carpet.
15:27
Speaker 2: And Greg claimed they dumped it off a highway.
15:29
Speaker 1: Overpass, the same cow whose car mysteriously burned down when
15:33
Speaker 1: police were sniffing around. The pieces are interlocking, a network
15:37
Speaker 1: of locals was involved in the aftermath.
15:39
Speaker 2: But to prove a cover up in court, Cole needs
15:42
Speaker 2: a definitive link. He remembers the blue towel from the
15:46
Speaker 2: trash bag, the one with the unknown hairs on it.
15:49
Speaker 1: With today's mitochondrial DNA advancements, those hairs could crack the
15:53
Speaker 1: whole thing open. But when he calls the State Lab,
15:56
Speaker 1: they give him the worst possible news.
15:59
Speaker 2: They say they don't have them. For nineteen years. The
16:02
Speaker 2: lab insists the hares were lost to history, a tragic
16:05
Speaker 2: reality of cold case evidence storage.
16:08
Speaker 1: But Cole and his partner refuse to take no for
16:10
Speaker 1: an answer. They badger the lab for years, demanding physical audits,
16:14
Speaker 1: and finally, in April twenty twenty five, just months ago,
16:17
Speaker 1: the lab calls back.
16:19
Speaker 2: They found them misfiled in an envelope and a drawer
16:22
Speaker 2: for two decades.
16:23
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable, and those hairs are being sequenced right now.
16:26
Speaker 1: The genetic blueprint of the people who hid that evidence
16:28
Speaker 1: is probably sitting in a centrifuge today.
16:30
Speaker 2: It's a miracle of persistence, but we have to remember
16:33
Speaker 2: the human steaks here. This isn't just a science experiment.
16:36
Speaker 1: No, it's an agonizing reality for the family. Terry's older sister, Christina,
16:40
Speaker 1: is battling a terminal illness right now. She recently bought
16:44
Speaker 1: a burial plot next to her little sister in San Miguel.
16:47
Speaker 2: She's fading her final months, furiously raising reward money. She
16:51
Speaker 2: watched her parents die broken hearted, and she is raising
16:54
Speaker 2: the clock so she doesn't suffer the same fate.
16:57
Speaker 1: The science is so close, but time is running out
17:00
Speaker 1: for her.
17:00
Speaker 2: It's the brutal human cost of a delayed investigation.
17:03
Speaker 1: So just to recap the insanity of this journey, we
17:07
Speaker 1: started on a sunny morning in nineteen eighty two girls
17:11
Speaker 1: Vanish We watched a botched tunnel vision police force waste
17:15
Speaker 1: years letting a serial confessor derail everything.
17:18
Speaker 2: And now, thanks to advanced PCR testing and genealogy, we're
17:22
Speaker 2: staring at a multi suspect genetic puzzle on the absolute brink.
17:26
Speaker 1: Of being solved, I want to leave you with the
17:28
Speaker 1: final thought today. For forty five years, time was the
17:31
Speaker 1: killer's best friend. Time erodes memory, washes away footprints, Burry's witnesses.
17:36
Speaker 1: The perpetrators relied on time to get away with this.
17:39
Speaker 2: But it's a double edged sword.
17:40
Speaker 1: Exactly because that same passage of time allowed technology to
17:43
Speaker 1: evolve past the need for human memory at all. The
17:46
Speaker 1: decades they thought were protecting them were just a waiting
17:48
Speaker 1: period for science to catch up.
17:50
Speaker 2: The evidence never forgot, and.
17:52
Speaker 1: That brings up the accomplices burden. Given Cole's theory of
17:55
Speaker 1: a cover up, it means someone in that tiny town
17:57
Speaker 1: or their descendants has walked those same streets for forty
18:01
Speaker 1: five years, knowing they helped conceal a nightmare picture. That
18:05
Speaker 1: sunny street again, the laughter, the candy, the sudden silence.
18:09
Speaker 1: That silence has held San Miguel captive for half a century.
18:12
Speaker 1: But I have a feeling it's about to get very,
18:14
Speaker 1: very loud.