body in blood, i mean, what's that telling you except he was there, he has handled that body some time after there was blood on it. >> two young women were brutally murdered on halloween, but the killer left behind his dna. finding him was another thing. it was close to midnight on halloween in napa, california. trick or treat had been over for hours. and 26 year old lauren went to bed around 11:00.

her dog chloe slept in her room. at 2:00 in the morning, the dog started to growl. and lauren heard noises. at first, she thought one of her roommates came home with a boyfriend. but then she heard a fight and screams. when she looked out, she saw a man run down the stairs and jump out of an open front window, but she didn't see his face. when she went upstairs, lauren found her two roommates, both had been stabbed repeatedly. >> 911 emergency. what are you reporting? >> oh, my god. we got attacked. please help. i think they're dying. >> when police arrived, they found 26 year old adrienne and 25 year old leslie kid.

>> it was a very bloody crime scene. it's the most bloody crime scene i've seen in my career. >> one was a beauty queen who worked in a department store. adrienne was a civil engineer. >> it was horrible. there aren't any words to describe that. it's almost as if you just go completely cold. >> bloodstains in the house provided investigators with critical information. >> he had gone into the house, up the stairs, into leslie's bedroom first where he attacked her. apparently the commotion woke adrienne up in her bedroom, and she turned on the light, and he proceeded to her bedroom and then attacked adrienne. she had reading glasses either on her face or in her hand that

were cut with the knife. she fought hard. she fought for her life. >> the blood trail led to the front window and continued on to the aluminum siding on the outside of the house. investigators found three cigarette butts. two at the front of the house, the other in the back yard. >> anytime i see cigarette butts at a crime scene, i will collect them, because they are an excellent source for obtaining dna. >> all of the blood was collected for evidence. >> this particular case really surpassed most of what we see in the laboratory. >> police searched for motive and found one. when they discovered some plastic zip ties underneath the front window. >> in police work, we use the same type of ties to hold prisoners in riot situations or

crowd control. it appeared to us that this person had come in with a plan when they came in and part of that plan would have been to bind these girls. >> the next morning napa valley residents awoke to the news of this horrible crime. and the terrible possibility that a serial killer might be in their midst. >> this was a violent crime. i got real uneasy. we have never had a serial killer in the city of napa. and this was my first taste of a possibility that we were dealing with a serial killer. wow, this hotel is amazing. oh no. who are you? who are you? wrong answer. wait, daddy, this is blair, he booked this room with priceline express deals and saved a ton. yeah, i didn't have to bid i got everything i wanted. oh good i always do.

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three young women lived together in this house in napa, california until halloween night. when an unknown assailant broke in and murdered two of the three roommates. >> my god, we've been attacked. please help. >> hearing those calls, my heart really went out to lauren for what she had been through. i could hear the panic and the fear, the grief in her voice.

>> the surviving roommate, lauren, told investigators she had no idea who would have done this. nothing was stolen, and lauren didn't think either victim had any enemies, or at least none she knew about. it appeared that leslie was attacked first. it wasn't clear whether this was because her room was closest to the stairs or whether she was the intended target. >> the evidence in her room indicated that she had been in bed when the attack happened. and so it appears like she was probably asleep at the time the attack occurred, didn't have a chance to even understand what was happening to her or defend herself. >> a background check revealed leslie was being pestered by the father of one of her ex-boyfriends. >> that was leslie's last full time boyfriend that she had before she moved out here to california. >> and her ex-boyfriend's father continued to call her, even

after she moved to california. >> we looked at phone records for the house and cell phone records, and we learned that leslie had received several phone calls from the father of her ex-boyfriend. that, that night on halloween. >> leslie's ex-boyfriend and his father had alibis for the night of the murder. they were both in south carolina, thousands of miles away, and witnesses confirmed it. another potential suspect was a handyman who had worked in the house on the day of the murders, but he, too, had an alibi. in all, police interviewed more than 200 potential suspects and came up with nothing. >> there was no information coming up after the murders. no one was saying anything. we all thought that it was someone who had high tailed it out of here immediately after the crime. >> two weeks after the murders, friends organized a candlelight

vigil to keep attention focused on the case. >> the majority of the people we looked at early were boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, co-workers who were close to the girls who would have had that ongoing type of relationship. >> then police got a break. dna testing found blood at the crime scene that wasn't from the victims. >> there was an x and y peak detected so we knew we were dealing with male blood on the outside of the house. >> it appeared the killer cut himself while stabbing the girls when the knife slipped in his hand. >> he probably had the knife in his right hand and when he hit the wall, the blood that was on his right hand and on the knife was cast off onto the wall. >> investigators now turned to the three cigarette butts found at the scene. two were in front of the house.

the other in the back yard. dna from the saliva on two of the cigarette butts matched the dna from the bloods on the stairs. it also matched dna from skin cells on the rubber band holding the plastic zip ties. the dna profile was entered into a national database of 4 million known offenders. there was no match, again, police had to consider the unthinkable, that they were dealing with a serial killer who had successfully eluded them. >> that's the worst kind of crime to try to investigate, because there's no known link to the girls. then you have a larger pool of potential suspects, obviously. >> however, a second look at the cigarette butts provided a possible lead. >> on the white part of the cigarette, there was a gold pattern. it kind of looked like little gold birds, kind of drawing all

the way around. no name, no words. so we had no idea what the brand was. >> investigators did some research and learned the cigarettes were a brand known as camel turkish gold. they were relatively new and had only been on the market for a very short time. >> not every store even carried them. and the stores that we talked to, they would let us know, maybe they sold one or two packs a week. >> investigators asked the surviving roommate for a list of everyone she knew who smoked cigarettes. perhaps one of them was the killer.

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solving the double homicide of adrienne and leslie proved to be far more difficult than police ever imagined. >> it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. >> and we wanted to find out who did this, and we wanted to put them where they belonged. and that's why the community came together with a $100,000 reward. >> but investigators knew something about their killer. bloodstains on the stairway wall were on the right side, indicating he was probably right-handed. and he smoked camel turkish gold cigarettes. to find out more, investigators

asked a doctor if the killer's dna could provide any information useful to the investigation. and the doctor told them about a new forensic technique he developed that could determine the killer's physical characteristics. >> it's really important that you be able to narrow down your focus, because otherwise, you have no information with which to work. and you're sort of flailing around. >> since 99.9% of all human dna is alike, the doctor focuses his attention on the remaining one tenth of one percent and compares these polymorphisms to the citizens of other countries. this can identify the killer's ethnic identity. >> the donor was primarily of northwestern european ancestry and no middle eastern or south

asian mixtures. so you, for example he wasn't hispanic or african-american. so that certainly narrowed down the focus of the investigation in terms of who they should be looking at. >> and the. >> found a marker in one of the killer's genes that indicated he had blue or green eyes and most likely light colored hair. >> i'm grad they had done it. it made me more hopeful that eventually they would be able to determine who the perpetrator was. >> police released this new information to the public, hoping someone in the community would recognize him. >> tonight, there's a new development in the murders of two napa women. >> and there was a man living just two miles away from the murder scene who was listening to every word. >> they say he's white, has

blondish hair and most likely has green eyes. >> he now knew two things, that he made too many mistakes and the dna technology had advanced far beyond anything he could have ever imagined. the same time police asked the surviving roommate if she knew any one who smoked this brand of cigarettes. >> she'd let us know, well, the only smoker i can think of at this point is eric koppel. >> 25 year old eric koppel was a land surveyor and a friend of one of the victims. but before police could question him, koppel walked into police headquarters and confessed. >> i'm just getting done with dinner, and i get a phone call at home. someone's here at the police don't, and they want to confess. >> koppel said he knew adrienne and sonya. >> it was that cold feeling that

came over me. i didn't know what to feel or at that moment. i really didn't know. >> we want to make sure that he knows details about the crime and the things he's telling us match up with what we already know about the crime scene. want to make lure it's information that hasn't been released to the media. >> although eric koppel confessed, he wouldn't tell police why he did it. >> he always claimed he didn't know what he did with the murder weapon, which, again, to me always suggested to me that he wasn't telling the truth, because it seemed to me that that would be something he'd be able to tell us. >> eric was very elusive as far as the question of why the crime happened. we could never get him to say i did this because of x, y, and z

25 year old eric koppel walked into police headquarters and confessed to the murders of adrian and leslie. dna tests confirmed that eric koppel's blood was at the crime scene and that his saliva was on the cigarette butts found outside. >> i don't know if i exactly remember the moment when i got the news. i just knew i was elated. i was very happy to find out that on a rare piece of evidence that we had, we had the suspect's dna.

>> koppel was arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder. investigators learned that koppel blamed adrienne for the breakup of his engage. to lily. >> it appeared that some people and possibly adrienne were telling lily that she could do better and that she shouldn't be any longer involved in this relationship with eric koppel, that he wasn't good enough for her or right for her. >> on the night of the murders, koppel went to a halloween party and ran into his ex-fiance, lily. according to witnesses, the two argued. koppel wanted to set a new date for their wedding, but lily wasn't interested. after the party, koppel returned home. he admitted to police that he was drunk. the fight with his ex-fiance

only added to the anger and bitterness he felt toward adrienne. so he took revenge. prosecutors believe koppel stood outside the house where adrienne lived with her two roommates, casing the place and smoking cigarettes. he used a knife to pry open the window and accidently dropped the packet of zip ties on the floor with his dna. leslie's bedroom was the first room at the top of the stairs and he killed her first. he then went across the hall to adrienne's room. she fought back aggressively. at some point, he cut his hand and bled profusely as he rushed out of the house.

>> at that point, based on what he's told us, at least, that he took his clothing and burned them in a fire pit that he had in his back yard, went back to sleep. and then the next day went to lily's house to console her. after lily called him to tell him that adrienne had been attacked. >> no one knows why koppel spared lauren. some think he didn't know about the downstairs bedroom. >> i don't know whether or not koppel knew that there was a room there. and i don't know whether or not he knew that there was a person in there. >> i just had a reckoning with myself. and really understood that adrienne was the target. and somebody really wanted my child dead. and then i thought, how stupid was i. of course adrienne was the target. of course we all know it's someone in the inner circle. >> if we had known those kind of circumstances earlier in the investigation, i'm sure he would

have come into our radar sooner, but again, we can always look back and wish we had done things differently. >> a few months before he confessed, eric koppel patched things up with lily and the two married. in a bitter irony, the couple asked arlene allen, adrienne's mother, to be part of the wedding with ceremony. lily claims she never suspected eric was the killer. in december of 2006, eric koppel pleaded guilty to two counts of first degree murder. he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. had he not pled guilty, koppel would have been eligible for the death penalty. >> and i think that was a very real possibility, accepting a life without possibility of parole plea was probably the best deal he was going to get.

>> were it not for a few drops of blood, two cigarette butts and some skin cells on a rubber band, eric koppel might have gotten away with murder. but ever advancing dna technology provided a profile so accurate it was only a matter of time before he was exposed as the killer. >> this case turned on those cigarette butts. >> things that would have not been considered 20 years ago as evidence are very crucial to cases nowadays. and again, the sensitivity of these testing analysis, dna, it's just incredible what we can find in crime scenes now. >> every homicide that you see, there's always a twist to the

case that's a little bit different from the next case. so that's what make this is work so interesting and challenging. >> it was the dna, it was the cigarette butts. so once again, at any crime scene, it's very crucial, very crucial to do a good job and collect all the evidence and most crimes, most crimes are solved by the physical evidence. first, he threatened murder. then there was a murder. >> whoever had done it, had been almost a maniac. front page. >> he was convicted and put away for life. but he always claimed his innocence and was determined to prove it. >> he literally solved his own murder case from prison. >> he convinced them that wait a minute. we have an innocent man here. on the night of may 23rd, 1991, a fire broke out in a rural farmhouse in upstate new york. by the time firemen got there, it was entirely engulfed in flames.