>> forensic science in this particular case is 110%. it's the reason wilson saintil is in prison, and without it, he would be a free man today. unsolved for years. >> the case always bugged me. we wanted to find the clown that did that. >> police couldn't understand why the victim's husband didn't report her missing. >> every time i hear i didn't call it in because we had an argument, i always wonder how could anybody believe this? >> could new forensic testing solve a 20-year-old case? >> you've got to treat every single case like it's the crime of the century. >> when rod and julie estes started their life together in jacksonville, florida, as husband and wife, they had to figure out, like most couples, how to support themselves.

rod drove a truck for a plastics company, but the only job 21-year-old julie could find was working the late shift at a convenience store near their home. >> she had graduated from high school, but she was a recent transplant to the jacksonville area and needed that job to put food on her table. >> convenience stores and gas stations were really the only things at night that were open that people would rob. >> i imagine sitting in that convenience store without any kind of modern-day surveillance or protection or panic button, that she must have been fearful. >> julie normally worked afternoons and evenings and closed the store at 11:00 p.m. but one night, a customer noticed the store was closed at 10:30, a half hour earlier than the closing time posted on the door. police were asked to check it out. >> we shined our lights in the windows. there was absolutely no signs of foul play. nothing was disrupted.

nothing was overturned. it just looked like somebody left the store. so, we went back to work and went about our normal shift. >> the next morning, the daytime clerk opened the store and discovered it had been robbed. >> the floor safe had been opened and appeared to be empty, and that the power appeared to have been cut off the night before. >> according to the owners, around $500 was missing from the safe. police tried to find julie, but she wasn't home. surprisingly, julie's husband said she never came home from work, and he admitted he hadn't reported her missing. >> he told me at that time that they had had a small argument before she left for work, and i'm like, well, you didn't call the police when she didn't come home for, you know, eight hours? >> every time i hear that story of somebody saying, well, i didn't call it in because we had an argument, i always wonder, how could anyone believe this?

>> later that morning, four miles from the convenience store, police found julie's car in the woods stuck in mud. the key was still in the ignition. >> one of our helicopters spotted that blue camaro, not a long distance away, but in a wooded area that's known for vehicles dumped or parked, whatever, out there. >> they saw what they perceived to be drag marks leading away from the vehicle. and then they followed the drag marks. >> a few hundred feet from the car, under some cardboard, was julie's body. >> julie's body was found with her arms tied behind her back with her very own shoelaces. her shirt was pulled up with her breasts exposed. her pants and panties were pulled down to her socks. >> the details of the crime just really go right through you. they make you realize how, you know, how much she really went through.

>> julie's husband said he had an alibi, one police had heard dozens of times over the years. >> rod estes had explained that he was by himself all evening, had watched a football game and had fallen asleep. and no one was with him all night. >> not the best alibi in the world if a policeman thinks you might be responsible for your wife's disappearance, but that's all he had. >> and investigators had another problem. they suspected julie had been murdered elsewhere. ♪ ♪ so you can get out of your element. so you can explore a new frontier and a different discipline. get two times the points on travel and dining at restaurants from chase sapphire preferred. so you can be inspired by great food once again.

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visit floodsmart.gov/pretend to learn your risk. as investigators searched for julie estes' killer, they began by looking for clues inside her car, which was found stuck in mud in the woods near her body, and the evidence told a story. >> julie herself was a tall girl. she was approximately 5'8", 5'9". the seat had been moved all the way up. so, it was apparent that someone other than julie had been the last person to drive that car, and, in fact, that that person probably was shorter. >> and they also found blood drops in the trunk.

tests showed it was the same blood type as julie's, an indication she was injured elsewhere, placed in the trunk, then driven to the woods. >> initially, they weren't sure whether that was the scene of the murder or that was simply a dumpsite. >> that type of development makes investigation that much more difficult, because now you've got two crime scenes to worry about. >> unfortunately, there were no foreign fingerprints found on or in the car, and investigators found no useable footprints in the mud and dirt. julie's purse was discovered at the scene with no money inside. the convenience store's money bag was there, but it, too, was empty. julie's killer had removed the laces from her shoes to tie her hands, but her shoes were missing. >> julie's shoes were distinctive even back in 1985 because they were purple.

>> the next day, investigators got a potential lead. >> police got a call from a man who had been kind of scrounging around behind another convenience store when he came upon a purple pair of shoes. >> the purple shoes are almost certainly julie's. the laces were missing. a bowling bag and some receipts with julie's name left no doubt the items were hers. the site was just a half mile from the convenience store where julie has last seen alive. >> we found evidence that things were taken out of the trunk of her car. and she was probably forced into the trunk, then she was driven five or six miles away from there, where her body was found. >> normally, the evidentiary value of the items would be significant, but not this time. >> the civilian that had found those items had at first taken them home.

>> this meant all the evidence at what may have been the murder site was compromised. >> somebody's been there, moving things around, and it just makes the investigation a lot more difficult. >> in the meantime, it didn't take long for investigators to eliminate julie's husband as a suspect. >> when he was perfectly willing to take a polygraph examination, kept in contact with the officers trying to work this case, i think all suspicion was erased. >> but julie's autopsy did provide some important information about the killer. the medical examiner found evidence of sexual assault. a rape test kit recovered biological evidence, presumably of the perpetrator. unfortunately, dna testing wasn't yet available. >> crimes in 1985 were a lot harder to solve, just based on technology. there are certain things that we could yield dna profiles from today you wouldn't be able to get back then.

>> as the weeks went by and the number of leads started to dwindle, investigators continued to search for julie's killer, knowing full well they had no forensic evidence to identify him. but it didn't stop them from trying. >> at this particular time when this incident occurred, some weird things were happening in that area. >> seven months before julie's murder, the body of a missing 15-year-old girl was discovered just three miles away. her body was so badly decomposed, the cause of death couldn't be determined. and two months before julie's murder, a 10-year-old girl was found dead, hanging in a tree in the woods just two miles from julie's convenience store. since these crimes happened within a radius of only three miles, investigators had a hunch they might be connected. there's a saying around here,

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investigators wondered whether julie estes' murder might be connected to several other crimes committed in the area. unfortunately, investigators had no evidence to link them.

>> right now, by today's standard, physical evidence is one of your top factors in reviewing a case. it's very significant, very important. they make the case. >> with no leads, no evidence and no suspects, the trail of julie estes' killer turned cold. julie's family started to believe her murder would never be solved. >> after a couple of years, we just gave up. i said, well, we're up here and they're down there. nobody cares. >> the case always bugged me. she went missing on my watch, and it bugged me. i mean, every time i drove by that store, i thought of her. >> after a few years, patrolman frank mackesy was promoted to chief of detectives with the power to recommend cases to the cold case unit. >> mackesy always had a strong desire to solve this case. this is a case that stuck with him, stuck in his mind through

his whole career. >> so, when the cold case unit got involved, they broadened their search. they looked at every sexually motivated crime in the region and got a break. just two months after julie estes' murder, 30 miles away, in another jurisdiction, there had been another convenience store crime, almost identical to julie's, except, in this case, the victim survived. a 19-year-old convenience store worker, carla nobles, had just closed the store and given a ride to a young man she met in the parking lot. >> sure, get in. >> thanks. >> she voluntarily let him in the car, having no idea what he was capable of. she did a quick drive to the post office, where he said he wanted to go. >> before they got there, the man pulled a knife, forced her to drive to an isolated field and sexually assaulted her. he then forced her to drive

away. she was sure he was going to kill her because she could identify him, but then she saw the only chance to escape, a police officer directing traffic. >> what are you doing? >> drop the knife! >> the man was identified as james elmen. he was convicted for the crime and was currently serving a 22-year sentence in a nearby prison. and cold case investigators learned another startling coincidence. elmen had a close connection to the 10-year-old girl found hanging in the tree near julie's store two months before julie's murder. >> the 10-year-old was a half-sister of elmen.

>> investigators now wanted to test the biological evidence collected from julie's rape test kit to see whether james elmen was her killer, but there was a risk. the test would consume all of the evidence. >> unfortunately, sometimes you have to make a choice. you might have to run the entire bit of sample. but at the time, you're thinking this is the best technology available. >> investigators decided the gamble was worth it. >> they consumed all of the semen that was contained in those slides trying to get results, results that, unfortunately, never showed who the killer was. >> this was a devastating setback. >> it's just shocking. it feels like you're hit with a ton of bricks. then you've got to start over. it's like going -- starting from scratch again. >> but investigators refused to give up. >> elmen has a rough history, and people around james elmen tend to die.

>> unfortunately, if elmen was julie's killer, there was no longer any dna to prove it. latte or au lait?

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after years of searching for julie estes' killer, investigators were convinced

they'd found him. he was serving time in prison for a similar crime committed 30 miles away. his name was james elmen. >> elmen was the worst of the worst. we talk about he's the poster child of antisocial. it's a clue when the public defenders are afraid of him, when the doctors are afraid of him, when the people at the medical treatment facility are afraid of him. >> i was convinced if james elmen hit the streets of jacksonville again, women were going to start dying again, and i wanted to make sure that those cold case detectives had everything that they had to make sure that we could make the case. >> but investigators wanted to be sure elmen was responsible for julie estes' murder. why? because if he wasn't, julie's killer was still on the loose.

>> no, it's not always a hollywood ending. sometimes you don't get any results, cases still go unsolved. >> so, 16 years after julie's murder, the jacksonville police department sent julie's clothes to the u.s. army crime lab in forest park, georgia, one of the most sophisticated labs available. >> the item in evidence included socks and her shirt and jeans, as well as other items from her sexual assault kit, which included, like, fingernail scrapings and other swabs. >> scientists there were discouraged. all but one of the items had been analyzed and tested. >> the socks had never been tested, probably because nobody expected to find anything useful on them. >> the idea that forensic evidence could have transferred onto julie's socks was remote. nevertheless, analyst brian higgins examined the socks with light sources that cause genetic material to fluoresce.

>> i was kind of like, wow, could these be semen stains? i was kind of surprised, actually, because it's not one of the more common places we would find semen. >> the areas were removed then analyzed with a new dna test that needed only a very small amount of genetic material. miraculously, the tests generated a mixture of two dna profiles, one female and one male. one was julie's dna. the other was the dna of the killer. >> they were able to identify that dna profile as the exact match to james elmen. >> we were all ecstatic. i mean, it was an unbelievable feeling. and that's the reward of cold case, when you have that piece that you never had before and you're able just to put that one thing together, and, you know, you've got the entire case. >> investigators confronted elmen in prison with the evidence.

>> and i'm telling you that your dna, that your semen, is in the murder scene of this murdered girl. >> i'm telling you i wasn't there. i don't know anything about this girl. >> if you're not there, how does james elmen's semen get in the damn crime scene? >> that's one of those things that you could deny until the cows come home. with technology the way it is today, there's no getting around it. >> james elmen is a monster that now sits behind bars. >> i always knew that there was going to be a day that they were going to say, we got it. this case is solved. >> based on the dna evidence, prosecutors believe james elmen was probably walking by the convenience store where julie estes worked around 10:30 and noticed there were no customers inside. >> hi, there. >> he shut off the store's electricity, held julie at knifepoint, forced her to open

the safe. then, he made her drive a half mile away to an area behind an unoccupied store. he used her shoelaces to tie her wrists, then raped and killed her. he removed items from julie's trunk to make room for her body. elmen drove to the woods where he hid her body under some cardboard. the biological evidence from the attack was embedded in her cotton socks. elmen probably wanted to keep julie's car, but it got stuck in the mud and he had to escape on foot. authorities had plenty of suspicion, but no evidence, to

charge elmen with his half-sister's murder. but after 17 years, there was plenty of dna evidence to charge him with julie estes' rape and murder. >> it just was unbelievable that it would be the socks that would hold the true identity of her killer. >> faced with a possible death penalty, elmen decided to plead no contest to julie estes' rape and murder. in return, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. >> how do you feel about everything? >> how do i feel? >> mm-hmm. >> the overall picture? i think this sucks. >> the lesson for criminals would be no matter how long ago you did the crime, the forensics has the capability of solving it. >> if it wasn't forensics in this case, with the dna and everything, i don't think that they would ever solve it. >> we always talked about if he ever got out, we'd be counting

bodies. we believed he was that bad. >> you've got to treat every single case like it's the crime of the century. what i mean by that is you've got to make sure that you don't take any evidence for granted. up next, he made lots of money and liked to show it off. >> it wasn't a phase with him. that's how he lived. >> he was known to gamble, sometimes too much. >> he had had some gambling debts. he had some problems with the irs. >> when he ends up dead, his two ex-wives and a girlfriend are all suspects, but someone was sloppy. >> you can plan and plan and plan, but you'll never plan for everything. >> around 2002, the real estate market in the dallas/ft. worth area of texas was booming, and david nixon made a fortune.