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tv   Forensic Files  CNN  June 11, 2014 12:30am-1:01am PDT

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bringing to each of these two crime scenes the most compelling evidence that would be used to convict him. there was a shooting in an upscale neighborhood in oklahoma city. ballistics identified the use of two different guns which meant at least two shooters. these small marks on a shotgun shell, some singed fibers and a crime reconstruction revealed a plot more twisted than anyone could have imagined. to outsiders, it looked as if rob andrew had everything anyone could want. he had a high-paying job with an advertising agency, lots of friends and a growing family whom he described as his source of strength.
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>> rob andrew, salt of the earth. i mean, this was a christian man, attended church all the time, loving father. just a great guy, very successful businessman as well. >> two days before thanksgiving, rob andrew left work to pick up his children. they planned to spend the holiday weekend with his parents. on the way, rob called his best friend. >> rob had called my house around 5:30, telling me how hurried he had been all day and that he was looking forward to picking the kids up and spending a long weekend with them for thanksgiving. >> rob didn't plan to stay long, so he parked his car in the driveway. >> i heard the overhead garage door start up and then rob paused and said, "hey, i'm going to have to let you go." >> as he walked into the garage, his wife, brenda, asked him to relight the furnace because it had gone out earlier in the day. then there was a commotion. brenda said two masked men with guns appeared out of nowhere.
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[ shots ] and then they fled. >> i've been shot! my husband's been shot! >> okay. you and your husband have both been shot? >> yes. yes. >> who shot you? >> i don't know. i don't know. they had on black masks. i don't know. >> 43-year-old robert andrew was pronounced dead at the scene. >> mr. andrew was shot two times, once to the right side of the body, once to the left side of the body. and they actually occurred from two different locations, so that also tells us that two shooters, it's a possibility. >> brenda andrew suffered a gunshot wound and was rushed to the hospital. >> her wound is in a fatty portion of her left upper arm. >> the bullet that hit brenda went through her arm and lodged in the wall of the garage. it was from a .22 caliber pistol.
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police found a spent .16-gauge shotgun shell on the roof of brenda's van, an indication there were two different weapons used in the attack. the empty cans on the garage floor indicated rob saw the gunmen and grabbed the bag of empty cans as a shield. >> as the second gunshot wound is about to be inflicted on him, he is looking up and looking at the face of his killer. >> the motive apparently wasn't robbery. >> his wallet was not taken. in fact, some of the pellets from the shotgun went through his wallet. >> the andrews' two children were upstairs in their rooms unharmed. the attack had all the earmarks of an execution. yet, no one could think of a reason why robert andrew would be targeted for murder. with no motive, no leads and no description of the killers, investigators hoped the autopsy would provide the clues they needed.
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news of rob andrew's
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execution-style murder was a shock to the residents of oklahoma city, since crimes like this were extremely uncommon. >> rob and brenda were a loving couple, they appeared to be. the pictures showed the perfect family, the smiling, happy, loving couple with these two great little kids. >> the couple were active members of their church. brenda taught sunday school and rob performed missionary work in south america. early in the investigation police learned there had been a prior attempt on rob's life. just one month earlier, rob called police to report someone had tampered with his car. >> oklahoma city police department. >> hi there. i'd like to report a crime. my brake lines have been cut. >> oh. >> that sounds like attempted murder, don't you think? >> a few hours later, rob was getting his brakes fixed when he received a call from the hospital. the caller said his wife, brenda, was critically injured in a car accident and suggested that he come to the hospital right away. >> you hear a man's voice saying
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that his wife is in the hospital about 30 miles away, that she needs him and he needs to get down there as fast as he can. >> now suspicious, rob called the hospital back and learned the previous call was a hoax. apparently, the same person who cut rob's brake line wanted him to race to the hospital. >> he took it as an attempt on his life. he realized that, in fact, he was being set up to drive down there and at a high rate of speed, and hopefully, get into an accident. that's the obvious conclusion. >> several days after rob's murder, his next door neighbors returned home from vacation and realized someone had broken into their home. >> we unpacked our suitcases and started putting things away. when i opened my closet door, i discovered that a little shoe rack that i had had was no longer there. then we decided to look around the other bedrooms. that's when we discovered the
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spent shotgun shell in one of the bedrooms. >> the shell was from a .16-gauge shotgun. it was immediately sent to the forensics lab for testing. an analyst placed it under a microscope to compare it to the .16-gauge shotgun shell found in the andrews' garage. he looked specifically at the brass casings at the base of the shells. when casings are ejected, each gun creates a unique mark on the brass. >> and depending on the amount of correspondence and the preponderance of these matching striations, an examiner can come to the conclusion as to whether these were fired by the same firearm. >> there was no doubt, both shells were fired from the same gun. >> also in the neighbors' attic, police found several unused .22 caliber bullets, the same as those used in the second gun in
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the murder. >> it was as if they were basically accidentally dropped along the way. they didn't appear to be placed in any type of a pattern but like they were in a pocket and fell out as someone crawled through. >> this suggested that the killers hid in the neighbor's home after the murder so they could make a clean getaway later. >> apparently, someone went up in that attic, and they were either trying to climb up in the master closet access, or they came down and landed on that shoe rack and broke it to pieces. it wasn't sturdy enough to hold them. so they tried to hide evidence of that in a feeble attempt by putting it under the bed. >> and since the neighbors' home had no signs of forced entry, it meant one of two things -- either the killers were professionals or they had a key.
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with no solid leads, police ask themselves, who would benefit most from rob andrew's murder? rob's friends told police that his wife, brenda, had the most to gain. >> we found that the marriage was rocky off and on. they had a few periods of separation. and we also found that brenda andrew was involved in several extramarital affairs.
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>> mr. andrew was convinced at this point that his insurance salesman, mr. pavatt, and his wife were having an affair. >> 48-year-old james pavatt taught sunday school with brenda, and they flaunted their relationship, even in front of rob's children. >> james and brenda had a very interesting relationship. i mean, even prior to rob's death, the two of them went on a vacation together down to texas with the children. i don't know of any husband who would willingly just say okay to his wife going down to mexico with a complete stranger and taking his kids with them. >> just a few months before his murder, rob demanded that brenda end her affair with pavatt. brenda refused and filed for divorce. rob immediately changed the beneficiary of his $800,000 life insurance policy. >> mr. andrew made the beneficiary, i think, his
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brother, for the benefit of the children. since the children were minors, he had to have an adult as the actual named beneficiary as the trustee of that money. >> after rob's death, police were surprised to learn that brenda was again the sole beneficiary. >> police were immediately suspicious, and they arranged for a handwriting expert, david parrett, to authenticate rob andrew's signature on the insurance policy. >> a signature is produced with style and speed. it's the thing that you probably write the most in your entire life. in my analysis, i looked at 13 years of rob andrew's handwriting and writing his signatures, 136 signatures. >> not surprisingly, it was clear that rob andrew's signatures changed over the years. >> over time, rob andrew's signature had become more
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ornate, more artistic. >> and 2 1/2 years before his death, rob added an extra element to his signature. >> it was in the bottom right-hand corner of his signature. i then began looking at signature after signature after signature. and that fish was there. >> this was a christian symbol. the ichthys. rob added it to his signature as a sign of his faith. but it wasn't on the change of beneficiary form. >> i know that symbol is very significant because he repeatedly used it in the more formalized signatures that he wrote, such as in business documents. and that symbol was not in the questioned document. >> and there was another discrepancy in the life insurance policy signature. >> rob andrew had a characteristic of connecting the "n" and the "d" in the last name andrew.
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>> but it wasn't signed that way on the insurance form. so, parrett concluded it was a forgery, but he was unable to determine the identity of the forger. police knew that brenda andrew had the motive to make sure she was the beneficiary of her husband's $800,000 life insurance policy, and her lover, james pavatt, had the opportunity. he was the life insurance agent who sold the policy. police now suspected brenda may have been involved in her husband's murder. so, ballistic experts took a much closer look at the photographs of her wound and the bullet hole in her sweater. they found black rings, gunshot residue around both. >> it is actually the unburned and partially burned powder and soot and hot gases that exit the barrel right behind the
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projectile. >> using an identical gun, investigators ran tests to recreate the gunshot residue patterns. >> my observations of those patterns and of the sweater and of her wound allowed me to conclude that she was shot at somewhere between actual contact and approximately two inches away from her arm. >> this contradicted brenda's statement that she was shot by someone 15 to 20 feet away. police now knew that brenda andrew was involved in rob's murder. but was she the killer? every day, people fall. from a simple misstep, to tripping over a rug, to just losing their balance. and not being able to get up from a fall can have serious, lifetime consequences. being prepared is important.
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to find out what role, if any, brenda andrew played in her husband's murder, investigators sent her blood-stained clothing to tom bevel, an expert on blood spatter analysis. bevel noticed that many of the blood stains on her jeans had an elongated shape, consistent with blood dripping from her arm on to her pants. >> we have some low-velocity blood drips, that would be blood that is breaking away primarily
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due to gravity dripping down on to the jeans. >> dna tests confirmed this blood was brenda's. but bevel also found mist-like blood spatter on brenda's jeans below the knee, which had penetrated deep into the fabric. >> it is from a high-velocity occurrence, such as a gunshot, in this case, multiple gunshot pellets that has spattered the blood traveling back from him, referred to as back spatter, and then subsequently, landing on her clothing. >> dna tests confirmed that this was rob's blood. this proved that brenda was standing only a few feet away from rob when he was killed. >> the back spatter on the pants, i think that gave us that one bit of evidence we needed in order to put that gun in ms. andrew's hand. >> prosecutors believe brenda planned her husband's murder for
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months. she may have forged rob's signature on the life insurance policy, making her the beneficiary. her first attempt on rob's life involved cutting rob's brake lines. police believe it was james pavatt who called rob with the fake story that brenda was in critical condition at the hospital. when that didn't work, the couple devised an elaborate shooting scenario. they planned to kill rob when he came to pick up the children for the holiday weekend. on the night of the murder, pavatt hid behind the van in the garage. when they heard rob's car, they set the plan in motion. rob walked into the garage expecting to see the children. instead, brenda asked him to fix the furnace while she got them ready.
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>> pavatt fired the first shot from behind the van. then handed the rifle to brenda. the blood spatter on brenda's pants proved she was less than two feet away. pavatt used a .22-caliber pistol to shoot brenda's arm, but he fired it from a couple inches away, leaving the burn marks. >> i've been shot! my husband's been shot! >> brenda called police with the fake story of the two masked men. pavatt hid in the empty house next door. the homeowners had given brenda the key for safekeeping. pavatt stayed there for at least a day until police were finished at the scene. he ejected the spent shotgun shell when he heard the homeowner's son walk into the house to pick up his parents' mail. fortunately, the man didn't go
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upstairs or he might have been killed, too. investigators never found the murder weapon, but they did find some important information. >> during our investigation, we also found that mr. pavatt had purchased a .22-caliber pistol at a local gun store with the use of a credit card about a month before the homicide. >> everything was a piece of a puzzle. all of those little things out there by themselves meant nothing, but when you started laying it all out, clicking the pieces together, making the matches, it just started pointing. there's no way this woman couldn't have been involved. >> brenda andrew and james pavatt were both charged with first-degree murder and were tried separately. pavatt's trial was first. >> we the jury having heretofore found the defendant james pavatt guilty of murder in the first degree. fix his punishment at death.
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>> in brenda's trial, prosecutors portrayed her as a heartless sociopath. the jury saw photos of her vacationing with pavatt and the children while she was married to rob. they also heard the messages brenda left on rob's telephone answering machine in which she belittled rob for his parenting skills and other perceived slights. >> hey, it's brenda. you halfway dad. can't even return calls about your children? you ought to call me if you care one little ounce -- oh, that's right, you don't. we've been able to figure that out. >> and the jury also heard this call between rob and brenda's mother before the murder. >> she does not like me. it makes it really hard to live there. i mean, i look at her, and i just want to break down and cry because i love the girl so much, and i have loved her for a long, long time. and the one thing that i knew that brenda liked was money.
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>> brenda andrew was also convicted of first-degree murder. the forensic evidence was impossible to overcome. >> we the jury impaneled and sworn in the above entitled cause do apply our oath having hereto found the defendant brenda evers andrew guilty of murder in the first degree. fix her punishment at death. >> she is now the only woman on oklahoma's death row. prosecutors describe it as one of the most cold-blooded murders they've ever seen. >> the complexity of the case was a problem. it's a hard case to talk about in a short amount of time. there's so many different pieces of evidence. but in what we believe, any juror wants to hear is what happened at the key moment. >> the physical evidence will
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tell a story. and it's just simply up to the person that is trying to put this together to understand what the physical evidence is saying when a person is cremated, the heat usually destroys any evidence of foul play. at least, that was the theory until a scientist in texas found a way to test cremated remains. and in so doing, made forensic history. san angelo, texas, known for its oil, cotton fields, and extremely hot weather. >> it's great country. there's a lot of rural area to it.

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