>> it was very gratifying that the physical evidence established at the initial scene on the initial day eventually is what ended up absolutely placing her within the scene and being the thing that convicted her up next, a beautiful, young woman is found dead under a bridge. >> did she jump from that bridge or did somebody push her? >> and police learn she had a secret life. >> she was dancing under the name roxanne and they were calling her foxy roxy. >> police find a surveillance image of a truck near the bridge on the night she disappeared. >> you can see an apparent body in the back of the pickup truck. >> but who is driving the truck and what is the motive? >> there was something more going on than just a woman leaping from a bridge for no apparent reason.

>> it was early on a saturday morning underneath a bridge in burlington township, new jersey, when an atv rider found the body of a young woman. he assumed she'd taken her own life. >> we just see a young girl, she looks like she's about 20 to 30 years old, about 100 pounds. she had no i.d. on her. >> the damage to her body was consistent with a drop of about 12 to 14 stories. >> insect activity indicated she'd been dead several days. but who was this woman? police released a description to the media. >> her manager from work called in, an ex-boyfriend called in saying that they recognized the description of the jewelry she was wearing. >> from the victim's butterfly pendant, she was identified as 21-year-old rachel siani. >> i kept telling myself that it wasn't true, and i told myself

that all the way up until her funeral, until i actually went up and looked at her. >> nancy knew something about her cousin, rachel siani, that few other people knew. rachel was a college student by day and an exotic dancer by night. >> she was only doing it just to pay her way through college, and the way she described it to me was that she was dancing in an extremely skimpy bikini. >> rachel worked at a place called divas international gentlemen's club across the bridge in pennsylvania just three miles from where her body was found. her stage name was roxanne. >> divas is your typical gentlemen's club, where guys go in, mostly guys, and you know, sit down and have some drinks and watch the girls. >> rachel's friends and relatives could not believe she had committed suicide.

they said she exhibited none of the typical signs of depression. instead, she was focused on a career. >> she was studying psychology because she said she really wanted to focus on that and help people. >> and rachel had a good relationship with her family, despite some disagreements about her employment. >> her father absolutely did not approve of it. they obviously loved her very much as a daughter, but i think that they had resolved themselves that rachel had to find her own way through life and figure out what was going to be best for rachel. >> but was this a suicide? evidence on the bridge revealed a disturbing clue. >> there were some fibers that were consistent with the sweater that she had on, but there was also some bloodstains on the outside wall of the bridge. >> if the blood on the bridge was rachel's, then this might have been murder.

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in a small town on the outskirts of philadelphia, a young exotic dancer found dead beneath a bridge was front-page news.

>> i mean, if she worked at an ice cream stand, it wouldn't have said, "ice cream girl," you know, "murdered." it was unsettling because everything was "exotic dancer murdered" or "stripper thrown off bridge." it was never her name or that she was a bucks county community college student. >> since rachel was found at the bottom of the bridge without shoes, wearing clean socks, investigators suspected she had been carried to the bridge and thrown over the side. >> up on top of the bridge there were no shoes. there was no car. there was a lot of road debris and other dirt that would have become embedded in her socks if she was walking around up there. >> fibers from her sweater wedged in the concrete of the bridge also made it clear she didn't jump. her body scraped along the side of the bridge.

dna testing on blood found near those fibers confirmed it was rachel's blood and that she was bleeding before she hit the ground. >> so, the police had to work backwards. they had to find out, you know, how did that blood and how did that fiber get on the pennsylvania turnpike bridge rail. >> there were no marks on rachel's neck, so investigators didn't believe a ligature or even the killer's hands were used to strangle her. >> if it's a large surface like a forearm pressing against a neck or a large just flat of the hand pressing against the neck, you're going to get bruising. >> significant internal bleeding told medical examiners rachel was still alive when she was thrown from the bridge. >> the victim had blood spatters on the side of her face, and it wasn't consistent with a fall from the bridge. >> two broken fingernails made it clear she tried to defend herself.

the cause of death was blunt force trauma, a skull fracture. >> the fracture extends from one ear canal to the other ear canal. >> rachel's car, a battered, old lincoln, was in the parking lot of divas, the gentlemen's club where she worked. >> there was food and money strewn about in the car, which led us to believe that her demise was not a result of a robbery. >> fellow dancers told police that a former cook, 26-year-old jason woods, had been bothering her. >> he seemed to have somewhat of a fixation or obsession towards rachel, where he actually told people that rachel was his girlfriend. it wasn't true, but he told people that. >> in fact, jason had been fired just a month earlier, and when police found out why, they knew they had a solid suspect. >> he was infatuated with her, and he was subsequently terminated because of his

infatuation with rachel siani. >> when questioned by police, jason denied any involvement in rachel's murder. >> he was believable, but we still couldn't rule him out. we always have to keep that individual in mind. he could be a good actor. >> then homicide investigators got a break. on the last night rachel worked at divas, she was in the parking lot talking with a friend after the club closed, and a man, obviously drunk, started banging on the door of the club. a local police officer witnessed the incident. >> go inside divas. there's a guy banging on the door here. ask him if he has a problem or something. >> the policeman offered to help. >> one of the owners or managers came out, said it was okay, they knew jack, he was a regular customer. >> jack was john denofa, a 35-year-old businessman who been

in the club earlier that night. according to divas' manager, rachel offered to walk denofa to the motel located right next door to the club. >> maybe she thought he had had too much to drink and she wanted to take care of him, help him perhaps get to his room. her friend had asked rachel if she was okay, and rachel indicated to her, it's just jack, i'm fine, i'm okay. >> motel records indicate denofa checked into room 223. the hotel clerk remembered that rachel helped denofa up to his room, but he didn't recall seeing her leave. denofa contradicted that. he claimed rachel left and that he went up to his room alone. >> he said that he was with her and she just went her way and he went his way and that was it. he said he had absolutely nothing to do with her demise whatsoever. >> but to investigators, something just didn't seem

right. >> i didn't like the guy.

the prime suspect in rachel siani's murder was the last known person to see her alive, jack denofa. he was married with no children and owned a sign company. employees say, like clockwork,

denofa visited divas every tuesday night. rachel was his favorite dancer. >> she had mentioned jack, and she said that, you know, she wouldn't even have to work that night if she didn't want to because he would just give her money to sit there and talk to him, and she said that, you know, he seemed like, just like a lonely guy, and that he was basically paying for her friendship. >> we had never discovered any evidence of any kind of sexual relationships. we asked the girls that, and we have no evidence at all that rachel ever engaged in any kind of activity like that with him or anyone else for that matter. >> jack had a previous drunk driving arrest, so it wasn't unusual for him to stay at the motel connected to the dance club. >> he would rent a motel room himself, and if he was too drunk to drive, sometimes the divas management would comp him a room. the weird thing about that was his wife was cool with it, and

she would actually drive him to divas and drop him off. >> jack denofa had no criminal past and was well liked. >> if you could pick your neighbors, you would pick jack denofa, because there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for you. he came from a good family, was a workaholic, ace pool player, back-slapping guy, you know, chairman of his high school alumni association. great guy. >> on the night of rachel's murder, witnesses saw rachel accompany an inebriated denofa to the motel next door to the club. jack denofa didn't deny that. he simply said she left without going to his room. >> we knew jack denofa was in there, but we wanted to find out, we wanted to place rachel in that room. >> four days had passed since denofa stayed in the motel room, and it had been cleaned repeatedly, but analysts got a break. on the outside windowsill they

found white fibers, and there was a tiny spot of blood in the shower stall. andrew nardelli compared those fibers to fibers from rachel's sweater. >> one of the main types of characteristics that we would look for first off would be color, and a number of the fibers from the window were a different color than the types of fibers that were from the sweater. >> though superficially similar, the fibers did not match. investigators now compared the blood sample from the shower stall to rachel's dna and got another setback. >> with the swab from the shower stall, there was no dna detected. i ran the sample twice. i tried to concentrate the sample. however, it was a small, very weak blood swab, so no dna was detected from that swab. >> on denofa's hotel registration, he said he was

driving a 1996 red dodge pickup truck that was parked in the hotel parking lot. if he did cross the bridge that night, surveillance cameras would show it. >> they show clearly a 1996 red dodge ram pickup truck with a motionless body in the open bed with clothes similar to rachel siani's going through the toll booth at 13 minutes after 3:00 on march 29th. >> 25 minutes later, the truck returned with nothing in the back. >> what the tapes don't show, clearly, anyway, is who's behind the wheel of that truck. >> the license plate was impossible to read, but police now had probable cause to search denofa's truck. they discovered it had been thoroughly cleaned. >> we thought we possibly lost any trace evidence of rachel

being in that truck. >> the first search didn't turn up any fibers, fingerprints, or blood from rachel, but part of the truck might have withstood multiple washings. a plastic bed liner in the same area where this surveillance image showed what looked like rachel's body. >> what had happened was the black bed liner was not connected properly to the bed. >> when the bed liner was removed, analysts found what looked like blood. dna showed it was rachel siani's. >> i couldn't wait to hear how he would ever try to explain that rachel siani's blood was in the back of his pickup truck. >> when questioned by police, denofa had an incredible explanation. he said someone else must have driven his truck. >> what am i missing here? am i the dumbest prosecutor on earth that this guy really thinks he can win this thing?

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this is the last known picture of rachel siani, taken by a girlfriend just hours before her murder. >> for some crazy reason, she had a camera in the car. i guess this girl, as young girls will do, she pulled out a camera and snapped a picture of her right opposite her in the car. >> surveillance photograph showed what appeared to be

rachel's body in jack denofa's red pickup truck as he drove over the bridge into new jersey on the night of the murder. according to friends, rachel was denofa's favorite dancer at divas gentlemen's club. >> rachel knew him pretty well, and she told people that she thought he was a loser. a sucker is what she called him. he would give her $100, $200, sometimes $300 just for sitting next to him at divas. and so, his money did not buy her heart, but it did buy her trust, and that would prove fatal to rachel. she thought he was harmless. >> on the night of rachel's murder, denofa stayed in room 223 of the motel next door to the club, but investigators found no forensic evidence in the room, so they tracked down the guest who stayed in the room directly below denofa's room that night.

>> there was a man staying in the room. about 3:00 a.m., he reported hearing a noise outside his room, a thud or a thunk. whatever it was, it was odd, but he did not get up to check it out. >> their rooms face the back of the hotel where there was little traffic late at night. on the sidewalk below room 223 investigators noticed a dark stain. >> we thought that it could be oil, and we thought that it was odd that someone was changing oil or that their oil leaked up on the sidewalk, because it was -- the sidewalk was very close to the building. i took a white piece of paper and rubbed the stain, and when i looked at it, it was red. >> a presumptive test showed this was human blood. a dna test showed it was rachel siani's. >> something went south in that room that night. >> so, what happened to rachel siani on the night of her

murder? prosecutors say that tuesday night was like any other. the regulars were at the gentlemen's club, including jack denofa. after the club closed for the night, while rachel and her friend were talking outside, jack returned, obviously drunk, and knocked wildly on the door. rachel offered to walk jack to the motel next door where he usually stayed after a night out drinking. the evidence shows she walked him to room 223. prosecutors believe jack may have made some type of advance towards her, one that was rejected. enraged, he choked rachel until she lost consciousness. denofa may have thought she was dead and tried to get rid of her body by putting her on the

awning below his window. this way, he could lower her into his truck. but investigators believe rachel slipped from his grasp and fell to the sidewalk, leaving the bloodstain later found by police. denofa threw rachel's body in the truck, and her blood seeped underneath the plastic lining of the truck bed. he drove over the bridge into new jersey, where he was photographed with what looked like rachel's body in the back. with little traffic on the bridge that time of night, he threw rachel's body over the side, thinking her death would be ruled a suicide, but her blood and the fibers from her sweater were found on the side of the bridge, proof she was injured before she was thrown

over, proof that it wasn't suicide. in november of 2002, jack denofa was found guilty of first-degree murder and given a sentence of 30 years to life in prison. it was a bizarre murder. two crime scenes were extensively cleaned, but a few spots of blood survived and pointed directly to jack denofa. >> they didn't have much to work with, in their defense. they produced no experts because i'm sure they couldn't find any that could attack the validity of the dna or any of the other evidence. >> the evidence and the eyewitness accounts kept pointing back to jack denofa. it would have been criminal for us to not look at him. >> jack denofa certainly wasn't the big-shot he pretended to be. he wanted to be a big-shot in

the worst way, you know. he wanted to own divas when he walked in there, and he is just a small little man and perhaps the most incompetent killer that bucks county's ever seen.

and his car was out front, and i knew his car hadn't been moved because it was dry underneath his vehicle when everything else was just drenched. >> the door was padlocked. his son knocked on the door. but got no answer. >> i climbed up on the rail with a flashlight trying to shine the flashlight into that dark office to see if dad had a heart attack or something had happened. >> mark saw his father on the floor. >> i saw dad laying against the door. and he was just laying face down, you know, not moving. >> paramedics and police declared darrell north dead at the scene. he had been stabbed repeatedly, blood was spattered everywhere. >> it was an absolutely brutal crime scene, as would be typical with any case where there is multiple stab wounds. there was a tremendous amount of blood. >> there was blood in two of the three rooms.

it was obvious a life and death struggle had taken place. >> there was also a hole punch that was discovered in close proximity to mr. north's body that was bent that would lead me or any other investigator to believe that either mr. north may have been struck with that hole punch or mr. north may have struck his assailant with that hole punch. >> there was a trail of blood from the filing cabinet to darrell's body. then, to a desk. on top, police found a machete. the type used to clear brush from construction sites. it was perfectly clean. >> it actually wasn't blood-soaked, but we didn't know if it might have been used and then cleaned off and placed there. >> darrell north's secretary told police there were normally two machetes in the trailer. >> there was a second machete that had gone missing. >> police assumed this was the one used in the attack.

>> the extra wounds on the back of the head, which almost decapitated him, indicated a tremendous desire to make sure that the person was deceased. >> darrell's wallet was still in his pocket, nothing had been stolen, there was no sign of forced entry. this and the level of violence indicated a very personal crime. >> out of the 40 cases that i've worked, this was the only one that had that type of rage exhibited. >> darrell hired many contractors, so his decisions could either make or break some of them. someone's anger had spiraled out of control. but police and darrell's family had no idea who it was.

darrell north's autopsy revealed he had been stabbed 46 times. with two different weapons. a clear case of overkill. >> overkill as we define it is wounding a person way beyond what would be required to kill a person.

so we frequent see not just a few wounds, but many, and all indicative of rage that is going on between the two involved in the assault, the victim and the assailant. >> a machete missing from his office was believed to be one of the murder weapons. the other was believed to be a knife. >> a blunt agent. we can predict that it was a larger knife, some of the wounds were at least an inch, inch and a half in width on the body surface. >> the family tried to help investigators by identifying anyone who night have had a reason to harm darrell. >> i thought it must be a stranger, you know, that maybe was robbing him or something. i could not, in my wildest imagination, you know, believe that someone would do that. >> darrell's secretary told police that everyone left the

construction site early on the day of the murder because of the severe rainstorm. she said darrell stayed behind to meet with a contractor named curtis pope. >> curtis pope was a pool contractor. darrell was basically mentoring curtis into the construction business. he stayed approximately 20, 25 minutes. he left darrell, darrell said he was going to wait out the rain, and let the traffic die down before he headed home. >> darrell's wife told police, curtis pope could not be the killer. >> curtis pope had done some repair work on our pool. i said, please don't spend your time looking at curtis pope. he did not kill darrell. please, you know, spend your time looking for the person that did.

>> pope was distraught over darrell's murder. >> he came through the receiving line, crying, and i thought he was so touched by darrell's death, and he said, i loved darrell. he was better to me than my own father. >> pope was 40 years old, married, with a young daughter. he did, however, have a police record consisting of arrests for petty theft. since he was the last known person to see darrell alive, he was automatically considered a suspect. pope agreed to take a polygraph examination. and passed. >> it is not likely that somebody could come in and intentionally be untruthful and still pass the polygraph test. >> the next suspect was bob johnson, a roofing contractor. darrell fired johnson just two weeks before his murder.

>> he was upset that he wasn't going to continue to work there because according to him, darrell had promised him continued work. >> darrell's family never met johnson. but they had heard of him. >> darrell had mentioned that he had had some problems with him. he usually didn't bring his problems home, and so since it was something that he had shared with me, i thought it was probably serious. >> incredibly, just two days after darrell's murder, johnson called asking to get his job back. >> the superintendent felt like it was odd that bob johnson was calling there, when can i come to work, after the fact, after darrell's been murdered, because his belief was that darrell didn't want him there. >> johnson said that on the day of the murder, he was with his child in a dallas hospital. this was verified. but he still had time to commit the murder. >> the alibi wasn't sufficient

enough, in my mind, to totally exclude him. >> but like curtis pope, he too passed a polygraph examination. >> the polygraph is just a tool, it is not 100% reliable. that's why it is not admissible in court. >> if it hadn't of rained, maybe we could have gotten fingerprints but you can't focus on what you could have had. you got to find what you do have. >> investigators needed forensic evidence to solve this crime, and hoped to find some of it at the scene.

darrell north's murder was so violent that forensic tests were needed to make sense of what happened. >> we had numerous types of blood stains. they included passive blood drops. we had smears, transfers, and frankly there was so much blood, that you would be hard pressed to try to classify some of it as to how it got there. >> we took many samples. various different parts of that crime scene. >> they first had to determine if all the blood had come from darrell north. >> when the assailant is wielding a knife, and he stabs a victim, oftentimes that knife blade hits bone and it stops. and, oftentimes, the killer's

hand continues moving and it slides down the blade and can cut the assailant. >> the other clue they looked for was shoe prints. with so much blood, both the killer and the victim would have stepped in it. crime scene technician jim varnen found several shoe prints and tried to enhance them with a special dye. >> amino black works because it stains proteins. and it is applied to protein stain, in this case a blood stain. >> in several of the enhanced prints, analysts could clearly see the word justin, a well-known brand of texas-made boots. >> we knew these footwear impressions in blood that had the pattern of a justin heel was most likely going to be from our assailant because it did not match the only other bleeder at that crime scene, which was our victim.

>> unfortunately, these boots weren't unique. >> how common are they? you're probably not from here if you don't have a pair. >> and it was impossible to tell the size of the boot from the print. >> in a justin boot heel, it is possible that you're going to have one physical size that would overlap into several different boot sizes. >> nevertheless, investigators asked both suspects, bob johnson and pool contractor curtis pope, if they owned a pair of justin brand boots. bob johnson owned a pair. but the heel of his boots was larger than those at the scene. curtis pope also owned a pair of justin brand boots, which appeared to be new, and willingly turned them over to investigators. >> in this case, my result was inconclusive. i could not eliminate or identify the boot as having made that mark. >> when investigators talked with pope about his boots, they

noticed something they hadn't seen before. some bruising under his eye. >> there was no cut, but it was a slight bruising. >> a background check revealed pope's business was faltering. >> he had a reputation of just not being very good at what he did as far as the construction of the swimming pools. >> pope's business records indicated he was deeply in debt, wasn't able to pay his suppliers, and the only big client he had left was darrell north. if darrell fired pope during their meeting, it would have been the end of pope's company. >> pope's finances were in terrible shape. he was on the fine edge of disaster all the time. >> with a warrant, investigators searched pope's home computer and found something suspicious. >> someone on that computer had visited a website on how to beat

a polygraph and had, in fact, paid money to download a book on how to beat it. >> as testing continued on the blood stains on the floor of the crime scene, investigators noticed one blood drop on darrell north's pants that they had previously overlooked. >> there was a vertical drop on the back left pant leg of darrell north, while he's laying on the floor. >> the shape of the drop was perfectly round, meaning that the origin of the blood was stationary, and hit the fabric at a 90-degree angle. >> the significance of such a drop falling and hitting the pants perpendicularly while mr. north is on the floor is that it would mean that the assailant is standing above him, bleeding on him, after he has been attacked. so it puts a sequencing to the events. >> max courtney cut out the stain and submitted it for dna testing.

investigators found five other drops of blood at the scene perfectly round in between darrell's body and the door. >> i said, why not let's just test these five particular drops of blood that we know are -- we feel like didn't come from darrell north. >> tests confirmed, the blood was not darrell north's. there was only one question that remained, who left the blood? one of the two suspects or someone else?

this tiny drop of blood on the back of darrell north's pants told an important story. since the blood hit darrell's pants at a 90-degree angle, it meant the killer was standing over darrell's body while he was bleeding from his own wound, and he continued to bleed as he left the scene. >> when we observed those vertical drops of blood leading away from mr. north's body, that was a very significant thing for us to find because we knew then that the killer's dna was going to be present on that scene. >> and there was a possible explanation for how the killer was injured. the dented two-hole paper punch unit found near darrell north's body. darrell may have used it to

defend himself, causing an injury, a facial cut, or nosebleed. to identify the killer, dna samples were collected from the two suspects, bob johnson and curtis pope. dna testing revealed it was curtis pope's blood at the crime scene. >> if darrell north had not taken some steps to defend himself, this case wouldn't have been solved. >> would have never dreamed that, you know, firing somebody would cause somebody to, you know, go postal. >> darrell's family couldn't believe that the man whom darrell had mentored in business and treated in many ways like a son could have done this. >> not until the day they came out here to the house and told me that it was his dna that had been identified did i really believe. >> the bruises police noticed under pope's eye were probably the result of the fight.

>> and i was able to examine his arms and his hands for injuries. he didn't have any. there was no cuts. >> on the night of darrell north's murder, the dallas/ft. worth area was hit with a driving rainstorm causing flash floods and power outages. the storm was so bad, darrell sent his construction crew home early. but he stayed behind because he had a 5:00 p.m. appointment with curtis pope. they were going to discuss quality problems with the swimming pool pope was installing at the hotel. pope was having financial problems, his company was headed towards bankruptcy, and darrell north was his only large client, although it's unclear whether darrell knew this. no one knows what the two men said to each other. but prosecutors believe curtis pope snapped and attacked

darrell with a knife. darrell was caught off guard, and struck pope in the face with a paper punch, causing the nosebleed. pope stabbed darrell over 40 times. as he lay dying on the floor, a drop of blood from pope's nose fell on to darrell's pants. >> there's no way he could have explained the way how his blood was dripped on to darrell north's pants. >> we knew we had eliminated any possible innocent explanation for his blood being at the scene, and we felt like we had him. >> curtis pope was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. he posted bail, but on the first day of his trial, pope didn't show up. >> we learned through an informant that he was headed toward canada.

>> that afternoon, police in watertown, new york, just 25 miles from the canadian border, stopped a car from driving the wrong way down a run one-way street. it was curtis pope. he tried to run. but was arrested at a shopping center. curtis pope was returned to texas. he stood trial and was convicted of first-degree murder. he was sentenced to life in prison. it was an unusually bloody crime scene. but darrell north unwittingly provided the evidence needed to convict his killer. >> he probably bloodied curtis pope's nose. we have always thought darrell helped to convict curtis pope. >> the forensic evidence in this case was absolutely the linchpin of the entire case. >> this case stands out to me because it is one of the best of the uses of dna, combined with

blood stain pattern analysis where working together, the two show who the blood came from and provide a scenario about which it possibly got there. up next, a woman fears for her life. >> judy was afraid. >> she expected something to happen to her. >> he was waiting for her in the house! >> does she know who shot her? >> the evidence shows it was an ambush. was it someone she knew? >> possibly a murder-for-hire type situation. >> or a random attack, the hardest to solve? >> most screwed up in the head defendant that i have prosecuted in my 15 years as a prosecutor.