>> his clothing was the key to the case. if the detectives had not asked him to remove his clothing, we could never have convicted him of a crime. he definitely would be walking free today fest. >> and at some point, he was >> that was definitely a staged scene. >> one of the best defense lawyers in san antonio, texas, was leslie vaughn. >> leslie was a workaholic. if you know anything about guys who tried to reach that status of perfection, leslie was a perfectionist. he really was. >> not surprisingly, as a

defense attorney, vaughn's practice also included problem clients. >> he did have clients involved in the drug trade. he did have clients that were -- identified themselves with, like, different organized crime groups. >> on the night of november 10th, 1998, leslie's wife was working the night shift as a nurse at the local hospital. leslie and his two sons were home that night. around 1:30 a.m., 16-year-old brian said he heard a loud bang coming from his father's bedroom. when he tried to get in, he discovered the door was locked. >> he hears some more alarming noises in the nature of gurgling or breathing and he can't get into his dad's room and that concerns him. >> in a panic, he calls 911. >> 911, what's your emergency? >> i think my dad was shot.

>> what happened? >> a shot went out upstairs and in his room, the door is blocked. >> have you heard from him? >> a shot rang out in the room. i cannot get in the bedroom, the door's locked. >> after the call, brian took his 11-year-old brother to his neighbor's house. >> he indicated it might have been maybe somebody in the house, and that's why he was getting his brother out, to make sure his brother didn't get hurt. >> when paramedics arrived, they broke down the bedroom door and found leslie vaughan dead. there was a single gunshot wound to his head. there was a limestone rock on the bedroom floor and broken window, the killer's apparent point of entry. >> the french doors opened to a balcony. one of the doors had a very large, gaping hole in it. someone had thrown a rock through the doors.

the size of the breakout in the glass could accommodate a grown person walking through that opening. >> right off the bat, i was pretty sure we were dealing with a murder scene. >> there was a spent shell casing on the floor and the spent bullet was found in the pillow, under vaughn's head. >> the bullet had six grooves with a right twist, which would commonly indicate a smith & wesson semi-automatic handgun. >> the motive for the murder was unclear. >> the television was on. there was a remote control still in contact. no indications of doors opened, where somebody ransacked, was searching for something, whether be jewelry or money. no indications at all of a burglary. >> leslie vaughn was just 44 years old. >> my first thought was this was a hit. >> just a day earlier, a federal prosecutor overheard vaughn say he feared he would be targeted

for violence. that is sometimes the risk you take when you lose a client who happens to be a drug dealer. >> what went through my mind is maybe it was a client, somebody who's mad at him. >> homicide detective alfred damiani broke the news to leslie's wife, madeleine. >> i've made a lot of those notifications and after the initial gasp of shock and then how did it happen. she never asked that. she never, ever asked that. >> and they found another surprise on the 911 call. a wor of two young boys life could be hectic. angie's list saves me a lot of time. after reading all the reviews i know i'm making the right choice. online or on the phone, we help you hire right the first time. with honest reviews on over 720 local services. keeping up with these two is more than a full time job, and i don't have time for unreliable companies.

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prosecutors and law enforcement came together with drug dealers and felons to mourn his death. >> you have these grown men that, by society's standards, they are thugs, but they were actually reduced to tears because leslie vaughn was in that box about to be put in the ground. >> in a search for the killer, the vaughn family told police they were getting harassing telephone calls in the weeks leading up to the murder. >> the family had picked up the phone up, nobody would say

anything. they were basically just dead air. >> unfortunately, phone records couldn't determine the origin of the calls. for investigators, their first test was to eliminate the victim's wife, madeleine, as a possible suspect. hospital records confirmed she was working on the night of the murder and had never left the premises. >> madeleine was grieving. she was stunned. she was in shock. she was all of the things you would expect her to be. >> remember i showed you the pictures of leslie and madeleine and they looked happy. does that look look a picture of somebody knocking each other out? that's what i saw. >> on the night of the murder, as a matter of routine, police swabbed brian vaughn's hands for gunshot residue since he was in the house when the crime occurred. >> these are small microscopic particles left behind when a gun

is fired. if a person fired a weapon within a 24-hour period, it is very likely that i will be able to find gunshot residue. >> but under the scanning electronic microscope, magnified up to 10,000 times, the tests on brian's hands were negative. investigators suspected the killer somehow climbed up to a second-floor balcony, broke through the french doors, and then shot vaughn in the head with a .9 millimeter gun. the balcony was about 15 feet from the ground. >> this is a balcony without access to the ground level. there's no stairway. there's no other way to access this balcony except through those doors. >> i think someone could have scaled that balcony. i would say that someone who did that would have to be pretty fit, in pretty good shape. i don't think it would have been an easy thing to do necessarily, but it could be done. >> but when investigators looked at the dirt below the balcony, they couldn't find any evidence

of a ladder or even any foot impressions, despite three days of constant rain. >> how did this person get up here? how did this person climb up here and get up to the second floor of this wooden deck and gain entrance to this residence? >> if the ground had been disturbed by heavy footprints or a ladder or equipment, it should have shown up in the soil. >> and investigators felt it would have been impossible to throw the rock from the yard. it weighed close to 10 pounds. >> that person would have to be very strong to throw that rock from the bottom floor and to make it go right through that glass. >> we found no evidence that there was any activity, anybody walking around back there. absolutely no evidence of it. >> and investigators found another inconsistency. there was broken glass all over the bedroom floor and all over leslie vaughn's body, as well. >> the rock that was thrown

through that window didn't even faze him. didn't even wake him up. >> the obvious conclusion that you have to draw from that is the guy was probably dead already. >> toxicology tests found no drugs or alcohol in leslie vaughn's system. so there was no evidence he was unconscious before he was killed. next, investigators sent the rock to the forensic lab for testing. >> i talked to a scientist and asked him if there was a process in which he plans to use to attempt to raise these latent prints. >> the process is called superglue fuming. heated superglue produces fumes that adhere to a fingerprint, and the adhesion is greater than fingerprint powder. >> you want to preserve anything that is on that rock, as far as latent prints, or fingerprints. you want to make sure there is no way, by using a brush, that it's going to come off. >> unfortunately, the surface of the rock was too jagged.

the test was unsuccessful. then, investigators found an inconsistency in brian vaughn's story. brian called 911 to report the shooting at 1:46 a.m. >> what's your last name? >> vaughn. >> anybody else there with you? >> i took my brother down the street to the neighbor's house. >> but brian took his brother to his neighbor's house 20 minutes earlier, at 1:24. >> brian told the floyds he had already placed the 911 call and he was going to the house to wait for the police. >> when i asked mr. and mrs. floyd what time it was, they said it was exactly 1:24 a.m., according to the clock they had in the bedroom. >> brian arrived at the floyds' house at 1:24 a.m. did not call 911 until 1:46. >> what was brian doing for these 20 minutes?

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there were only three people in the house on the night of leslie vaughn's murder -- the victim and his two sons. a background check reveals 16-year-old brian had a previous arrest. >> he got into an argument with one of the security guards at the bowling alley who was actually an off-duty bexar sheriff's county deputy. in that altercation, he ended up striking the deputy and evading from the scene. those were pending charges at the time that leslie was murdered. >> investigators also learned that brian's car caught on fire three months before his father's murder. the origin was suspicious. >> there was an emergency call. the vehicle was totalled and had to be put out. there's some question as to whether or not brian was responsible for starting that fire or being there when the fire started. >> whether leslie vaughn suspected this or not is uclear, but he offered to buy brian a used car to replace the one ruined in the fire. apparently, brian wanted a new one. a car salesman told police he witnessed a heated argument between the two on the afternoon of the murder.

>> his academic grades were poor, which is the reason why his father wouldn't buy him the car in the first place. >> according brian's younger brother, chris, the argument continued when they got home, up until the early evening hours of the night of the murder. according to chris, brian retaliated by threatening to quit his high school basketball team, relinquishing any chance of a college scholarship. >> in chris' statement, he said there was a heated exchange between him and his father in brian vaughn's bedroom, that this thing occurred about 11:30 at night. >> investigators dusted the entire bedroom for fingerprints and found no foreign prints, only those of family members. but on the french door with the broken window, investigators found only one set of prints, brian's. >> to have your own prints in your own house is not that

significant, but given the fact that we have this story about what happens and the door is really clean otherwise, it's just one more piece to the puzzle. >> investigators found shards of glass in the hallway outside the bedroom, leading towards the bathroom. it was easy to see it was from the killer. >> there's some trace evidence, some transfer blood and tissue by the door that exits the bedroom and that's significant. >> we followed the glass shards to the bathroom and then inside the bathroom, we found an additional glass shard, and then we found two black hairs in the sink area. >> all of the hairs from that bathroom were sent to the forensic lab for analysis. >> these hairs had a very dense pigmentation pattern. they contained overall characteristics of what one would conclude as being a negroid hair. >> finally, investigators

listened to the entire conversation between brian and the 911 operator on the night of the murder. brian said his father's bedroom door was locked, but he told the operator one small detail that only the killer would know. >> i think my dad's been shot. i have been calling him. no answer. he's bleeding around the mouth area. >> did you go inside the bedroom? >> how did you know he is bleeding from the mouth area? >> a shot rang out in the room. >> you're telling me you can't get in the bedroom, right? >> i cannot get in the bedroom, the door is locked. >> so how do you know he is bleeding from the mouth? >> i don't know that. >> there is no way that brian vaughn would have known that his dad would have been shot if the door was locked and he could not gain entry. >> the biggest evidence against brian vaughn was brian vaughn. >> investigators suspected that brian used a .9 millimeter gun

from his father's own collection. >> we believe from talking to his friends and his office manager that he would have had a gun in his night side table. and on the night of the murder, no gun was found there. we understand that he had .9 millimeter guns in the past as well and leslie was killed with a .9 millimeter. the gun was, in this case though, never found. >> finally, investigators interviewed the only other person in the house at the time of the murder, brian's younger brother, chris. >> we asked chris if brian would kill your dad, and chris answered, i don't know. we asked him, would brian kill your dad? i don't know, which is an unusual response as opposed to no, he wouldn't do it, no, he couldn't do it, no, he would never do it. >> brian vaughn was arrested and charged with his father's

murder. but would the jury convict on so little evidence?

three months before leslie vaughn's murder, prosecutors believe that his son, brian, may have set fire to his car as a ploy to get a new one.

but his father refused, offering to buy him a used car instead. apparently, they fought about this and other issues, like his grades in school and how he was jeopardizing his chances for an athletic scholarship to college. according to chris vaughn, the two argued until close to 11:30 on the night of the murder. prosecutors believe brian waited until his father went to sleep, then woke his little brother and took him to the neighbor's house. he told his neighbors that he heard a noise from his father's bedroom and that it might have been a gunshot. he said he already called 911, but that was a lie. prosecutors believe he used the time to return home and shoot his father in the head. [ gunshot ] to create the illusion this was committed by an intruder, brian went out on the balcony and

threw the rock through the window. the glass landed on top of his father's body, proof that this happened after he was dead. the evidence suggests brian locked the bedroom door and tracked shards of glass through the hallway on his way to the bathroom to clean up. where he disposed of the murder weapon and his bloody clothing is unknown. 22 minutes after taking his brother to the neighbor's, brian finally called 911. the call was full of inconsistencies. >> he's all bleeding around his mouth area. >> okay. did you go inside the bedroom? >> i can't. the door's locked. >> okay. so, how do you know he's bleeding from the mouth area? >> in january of 2000, brian vaughn went on trial for the murder of his father, and he was

tried as an adult. >> i don't think that you can be in your right mind to pull off something as horrendous as that was if you were in your right mind. >> the defense said an intruder committed the murder, but the lack of mud on the balcony outside of the bedroom made it clear that the shooter came from inside the house. and brian's fingerprints were the only ones on the broken french door. brian also lied about the 911 call and clearly knew information only the killer would know. the jury found brian vaughn guilty. >> we, the jury, assess the punishment of defendant brian vaughn to confinement for 33 years. >> he will be eligible for parole in 2017. >> this is a kid that probably

would have figured out a way to do well enough in school to graduate high school and probably would have had a college career playing basketball. and instead, he's spending his life in jail. >> few people can imagine a child killing a parent, but the evidence at the scene and evidence missing from the scene clearly showed what happened. >> forensics played a big role in this, but not in the normal sense. the lack of it, in some ways, was kind of compelling. >> it's something he probably just thought of either days before, or that night, just planned it. and -- but he slipped, and he wasn't able to cover his tracks. >> he provided all the necessary pieces to convict him. and, in fact, he provided evidence that was so strong that you could not find him not guilty.

>> it takes days and weeks of investigation, okay? it takes lives that you destroy. and you don't realize that when you are pulling the trigger. because once you pull that trigger, you can't take that bullet back. >> and at some point, he was population. >> was it a random murder or jealousy? >> if he couldn't have her, nobody else could. >> for decades, the case went unsolved, until now. >> he was a cold-blooded killer. >> they wanted to solve this. >> at the end of a long day in may of 1984, a farmer in tennessee made a startling discovery.