you can follow me on twitter, like us on facebook, or find us on the web on cnn.com/unguarded. and join us next friday night on "unguarded." -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com when firefighters found an entire family dead inside their home, it looked like a murder/suicide, but there were several inconsistent clues in the rubble. could ballistics, a time card and some secret audio tapes unravel the mystery? just before daybreak on august 29, 1994, firefighters in venton, virginia, were called to a house fire on virginia avenue. when the fire was extinguished,

rescuers found the bodies of all four members of the hodges family. 41-year-old blaine hodges, his 37-year-old wife, teresa, and their two daughters, 11-year-old winter and 3-year-old anna. >> i think it's hard enough to lose one family member, but once you lose four, the numbness and the grief that comes over you is unbearable. >> teresa hodges was on the sofa downstairs. she had been strangled to death. an empty diesel fuel can lay nearby. upstairs, the two little girls were in bed. both had been shot to death. blaine hodges was dead from a gunshot wound in the master bedroom. a .22-caliber pistol was on the floor by his side. >> it looked like blaine hodges

had killed his wife and two young daughters and then set the home on fire and got in bed and killed himself. >> blaine hodges had recently had some difficult times. he had been fired from his job at the post office for allegedly stealing $4,600. >> he had been convicted of an embezzlement charge and was on the verge of going off to jail for a short period of time, so when he found that out, that would fit into the motivating fact that he maybe wanted to kill his family and take his own life. >> blaine was about to begin serving a six-month prison sentence for that crime. he had also been ordered to make restitution of $9,200, a sum he apparently did not have. was it possible that the prospect of jail and the large financial payment caused hodges to snap? at the autopsy, the medical

examiner, dr. william macello, made a startling discovery. blaine hodges didn't have any soot in his lungs or breathing passages, which would have been present had he set the fire before killing himself. and blaine's body revealed even more telling information. >> mr. hodges showed signs of what we called decay, which were more consistent with his having been dead for many, many hours or even days when compared to the others. >> i thought at first that he was just pulling my leg, because i had known him so long. then when he said, barry, i'm serious.

>> there was no way blaine hodges could have killed his family if he was already dead. >> that forensic determination from the autopsy enabled the police to know, we don't have a murder/suicide. you know? the girls couldn't have shot themselves through the head twice. teresa could not have strangled herself and set herself on fire. >> in order to buy time, police did not reveal any of these forensic details to the media or to family members. >> they had stated that there had been a fire and that they had died in the fire. and that was all. basically, it was just we didn't know very much at this point in time. >> police hoped this minor deception would give them time to find the real killer. it starts with little things. tiny changes in the brain. little things, anyone can do. it steals your memories. your independence. insures support. a breakthrough. and sooner than you'd like... ...sooner than you think. ...you die from alzheimer's disease. ...we cure alzheimer's disease.

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police were investigating a suspicious house fire that at first appeared to be a murder/suicide. the forensic evidence revealed someone from outside the home murdered all four members of the hodges family before setting the fire. the evidence also revealed that teresa hodges had struggled with the killer. patches of her hair were still on the staircase. the fire had started near her body.

since teresa's stepbrother had problems with the law, police wondered whether the crime was some sort of payback. >> the reason that they got the idea from that is because one of the father's children from a separate marriage, who teresa was not raised with, he happened to be in prison, and he was an ex-dea informant. so that's where the drug relation came into play. >> and police had another lead. an elderly woman reported seeing a red pickup truck leaving the hodges' driveway shortly before the fire. police interviewed all of the hodges' relatives, as well as the man who spent more time at the hodges' home than anyone else, blaine's best friend and former high school track coach, earl bramblett. >> everyone that the police came in contact with said, if you want to know what's going on in that house or what has gone on in that house, go find earl bramblett.

he is the closest friend to the family. he is always over there. he is always doing things with blaine. >> bramblett told police that he went fishing with hodges the day before the fire and that he had no idea who would have wanted to harm the family. but bramblett said something revealing about blaine hodges during the interrogation. >> he called him an s.o.b. and said this s.o.b. had a beautiful family. he did them and did himself. >> newspapers reported only that the family died in a house fire and said nothing about a murder/suicide. >> when he said that, suspicion turned. >> a background check revealed that bramblett had previous brushes with the law. in 1977, he had been a suspect in the disappearance of two roanoke girls whose bodies had never been found.

he was also accused of molesting a young girl in 1984. with a warrant, police searched bramblett's home, which was nothing more than a room in a nearby motel. inside, they found numerous crime novels and textbooks. >> he had one book in his possession about forensic science and the techniques used by forensic science to do different things. >> police also found a detective magazine featuring an article about a murder committed with a pistol with no barrel. coincidentally, the gun found next to blaine hodges' body had no barrel. bramblett owned a pickup truck, but it was white, not red, like the one seen leaving the hodges' driveway. but in the back of bramblett's truck were several .22-caliber cartridge shells.

police then visited bramblett's employer to see if he was at work on the day of the murders. on bramblett's time card for that day, one of the entries had been blacked out. and police found a pair of bramblett's blue jeans soaking in a back room sink. could forensic scientists tell whether any of these items were somehow related to the murders? and if bramblett was involved, what was his motive?

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a team of forensic scientists at the western virginia crime lab analyzed the items found to their prime suspect's home. using a process known as the charcoal tube method, arson investigator tom simpson placed samples of earl bramblett's stained blue jeans in a can and then heated it. the vapors were trapped in a tube filled with charcoal, then fed into a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, a device that can analyze the precise chemical composition of a stain.

even though bramblett's jeans had been submerged in water, simpson discovered the stains were diesel fuel, the same accelerant used to start the hodges' fire. the blacked-out entry on bramblett's time card presented another challenge. forensic documents examiner gordon menses used a video spectral comparator with various light sources in order to attempt to see underneath the black ink. slowly, the information came into view. >> i was able to come up with an original entry that was 5:08 m, which would have been 5:00 in the morning on monday, according to what i understand about the time clock. >> 5:08 in the morning was only 20 minutes after neighbors reported the fire at the hodges' home. coincidentally, bramblett's work place was only a 20-minute drive

from the hodges' home. and there was no doubt about whose writing was on the time card. >> yes, i concluded that the handwriting was also earl bramblett's. one of the first things you notice with bramblett's handwriting is a very outsized lower case k. it almost looks like a capital r. >> forensic handwriting analysis also solved another mystery. in the dumpster behind bramblett's workplace, police found a page torn from a desk blotter with some unusual drawings. >> drawings of stick figures with arrows pointed to the head and little flames drawn around the body of somebody it looked like laying on the couch. >> police believe the arrows represent gunshots. the circle around the neck represents the strangulation.

once again, this was information only the killer would know, since it hadn't been released to the public. the handwriting at the bottom of the page was consistent with bramblett's known handwriting samples. firearms expert van roberts compared the bullets from the murder victims to the gun found next to blaine hodges' body. even though the gun had no barrel, it still had its firing pin. under a comparison microscope, you can see the unique marks made on the shells from the gun's firing pin. the firing pin marks from the gun at the crime scene matched the spent casings found in bramblett's truck and the casings found in the hodges' home. the fbi conducted an elemental analysis on the bullet fragments

removed from the bodies. this analysis proved that the bullets from the victims' bodies were made from the same batch of molten metal as the unused bullets found in the home of earl bramblett. but one thing troubled investigators. why did the witness identify a red pickup truck leaving the hodges' driveway around the time of the fire? this is what a white pickup truck looks like under the sodium vapor lighting near the hodges' home. it makes the white truck look like a red truck. the forensic evidence tied earl bramblett to the murders. but it was bramblett himself who unwittingly revealed the motive. in bramblett's trash, police found a late notice for a storage locker rental near his home.

>> ironically, the name of the place was winter's mini-storage, spelled the same way as winter hodges' name. >> inside were boxes and boxes of audio tapes. >> i'm going to do the best i can to keep a daily record on tape on this little panasonic of everything that happens to me. >> and what he said about 11-year-old winter hodges was chilling. >> she wants to get me excited, and she knows how to do it. >> it was very damaging to mr. bramblett as far as what his motivation factors were with little winter. the pedophilia implications that he had towards her. and i won't discuss that garbage here. in pursuit of all things awesome, amazing, and that's epic, bro, we've forgotten just how good good is.

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after nearly two years of investigation, roanoke county prosecutors finally had enough evidence to arrest earl bramblett for the murder of the hodges family. >> i think we basically had everything we needed after a year and a half to a year and eight months. >> earl bramblett was ready, too. >> i just want this to be fast. let's get to a trial.

>> that was one of the few times bramblett ever spoke in court. but jurors heard his voice many times on the audio tapes. at one point, bramblett said he feared blaine hodges was out to get him. >> blaine is trying to buy his [ bleep ] way out of jail by using his daughter in some kind of sexual enticement towards me. >> his focus, when you listened to those tapes, was that the family was trying to use the oldest daughter as sexual bait to entrap him in a situation so he could be prosecuted for that, and that would somehow get blaine hodges out of trouble. >> he said blaine hodges never tried to reduce his prison term on the embezzlement conviction by trying to entrap bramblett. leach believes it was all a figment of bramblett's imagination. >> quite frankly, his paranoia fed that to the point that i think that's a factor -- a huge factor in why he committed the crime.

>> on the day of the murders, earl bramblett had plans to go fishing with the hodges' family. he probably used some ruse to speak with blaine alone inside the house and then shot blaine to make it look like suicide. bramblett then went outside, telling teresa and the girls that blaine had decided to stay home to do some chores instead, so bramblett took them fishing alone. a park ranger said he saw bramblett, teresa and the two girls at the lake that day. when they returned home, bramblett may have wanted teresa or one of the girls to discover blaine's body, confirming it as a suicide rather than murder. but something went wrong. teresa may have found blaine's body and believed it was murder, not suicide.

as she came downstairs, a struggle ensued on the staircase where teresa's hair was left on the railing. bramblett strangled teresa to death. he then went upstairs, retrieved the gun, went into the children's room and shot them to death. bramblett removed the barrel of the pistol before planting it to complicate ballistic testing. but it raised serious doubts that a man would commit suicide with a pistol with no barrel. bramblett returned to the hodges' home later with diesel fuel. he poured the diesel fuel downstairs to start the house fire, but it didn't burn the house enough to prevent forensic analysis. >> had earl bramblett been as

good an arsonist as he was a killer, we never would have prosecuted him. >> bramblett then drove to work where he made a number of mistakes. he punched the time clock, either from force of habit or greed, so that he'd be paid for coming in early. it placed him in the vicinity of the hodges' home around the time the fire was reported. bramblett tried to remove the diesel fuel stains from his blue jeans by soaking them in water. but forensic testing easily identified them. bramblett unwittingly revealed his complicity by drawing the injuries on stick figures on a piece of paper at work, later matched to bramblett by handwriting analysis. in addition to the forensic evidence, prosecutors also had bramblett's audio tapes. >> i've listened to this tape. it's pretty impressive.

i'm impressed. if you deal with the truth, then there is not a whole lot you have to be afraid of. >> any time you can get words coming from a defendant's mouth and they are about the subject of the crime, and here they were about the hodges family, it can be extremely important. i think that was very effective with the jury. >> it took the jury about one hour to convict earl bramblett of capital murder. bramblett was sentenced to death. he was executed on april 9, 2003, in virginia's electric chair. >> i've heard several people make the statement that if they're murdered, they want barry keese on the case because he won't stop until the case is solved. he's like columbo on tv. he's a hound dog, a bulldog. >> had it not been for forensic science, we would not be here today talking about earl bramblett being convicted and executed for killing the hodges family.

it's just that simple. >> forensics, forensics. everywhere you look, every avenue you look at this case, forensics, forensics. but in this case, it is the forensic files, no doubt about it. with no forensic evidence found at a murder scene, investigators were baffled. but they suspected that the victim's dog had witnessed the crime. if she had, forensic scientists needed some way to find out what the dog had seen. north liberty, iowa, is such a small town, it doesn't take much effort to know your neighbors. but one resident the townspeople