>> i'd say one in a million. like i said, it's a miracle. by the grace of god, you know, they found it. a murder in australia had everyone baffled especially police, but in a bizarre twist, a device in the victim's body record vital information that made forensic history. tasmania is a tiny island off the coast of australia considered to be one of the most unspoiled and remote spots in the world. in the city of lefroy, there are only a handful of residents. >> the people that live in lefroy are people that just want

to be left alone to some degree. they're not employed most of them. i would guess that probably 20, 25 people at the most probably live in lefroy, and that includes small children. >> early on the morning of october 9th, 2000, ivan jones went to his cousin's house to ask for a ride. while his cousin got dressed, jones took his dog for a walk and found one of the neighbors dead. the victim was identified as 72-year-old david crawford, a retired veteran of the royal australian navy. >> the way that mr. crawford was dressed was a fair indication that he had been in bed. he was wearing pajamas and had been awoken at night and had left the house to see whatever confrontation it was that awoke him. >> forensic pathologist dr. rocket kelsall went to the crime

scene and tried to determine when crawford was killed. >> the time of death is actually quite tricky, but at the time i measured the body temperature and noted the air temperature. >> dr. kelsall estimated the murder took place sometime between 4:00 and 7:30 in the morning when the body was discovered. neighbors told police they heard dogs barks just before dawn, but that wasn't unusual. >> with the wildlife around the town, it may be that it was kangaroos that spooked the dogs or dogs may have smelt a person. >> police found no signs of forced entry, but crawford's wallet was missing from his bedroom. there were no signs of a struggle inside the house and no foreign fingerprints either. in the front yard, investigators found what looked like a blood

stain. they waited for nightfall and then sprayed the area with luminol. seconds later, a clear, unmistakable image appeared. >> you can see it appear at night with the luminol. it was pretty amazing. >> the image was so clear investigators could determine what type of ax it was. >> the particular type of ax was a canadian ax where the head goes down in the form where the bottom edge is a point then forms a arc with the bottom of the head. >> with only a few dozen people in town, the killer was probably someone that crawford knew. >> really, i mean every able bodied man who could swing an ax or woman who could swing an ax in the town could have been a suspect at some stage. david crawford's death was a blow to everyone in lefroy,

tasmania, who knew him to be a on my count. the one where you step up and save the day? make it happen. (crowd) oh no... introducing verizon xlte. hey guys, i got it right here! we've doubled our 4g lte bandwidth in cities coast to coast. so take on more. with xlte. for best results, use verizon.

david crawford's death was a blow to everyone in lefroy, tasmania, who knew him to be a kind and generous man. >> he helped people out in the

township of lefroy. the elderly people. he used to take them out and about, shopping and to doctors and things like that, but he wasn't one that had partys or had heaps of people in. he was happy with himself going to see his grandchildren and quite happy doing things like that. that was his life. >> the blood stain discovered on david crawford's lawn was unmistakably the outline of an ax. the forensic pathologist believed that an ax was most likely the murder weapon. dna testing revealed the blood was crawford's. the ax, however, was gone. >> obviously a little town like lefroy would have a few axes around, but if we were able to find the ax with blood on it and match it up, we're well on the way to getting a conviction. >> as a former mining town, lefroy was riddled with mine shafts, many of which were under

water. they were perfect places to hide a murder weapon. this is an actual police video of those searches. >> there's a lot of shafts and you use underwater cameras and some fairly derelict old shafts and we drained a substantial dam on the township and with the hope of locating the ax, but we had no luck with those searches. >> with crawford's wallet missing, police assumed the motive was robbery. historically tasmania has had very little crime, but many retirees kept a lot of cash on hand. >> in tasmania, the people, especially elderly people, keep money in their homes, and that rumor, if you live in a small town, that rumor soon gets around that such and such got a lot of money they keep it under the mattress or in a jar or something. and this goes on. >> then police learned of another interesting coincidence.

the man who found crawford's body, 19-year-old ivan jones, reported seeing a suspicious man casing the neighborhood. >> he claimed he told mr. crawford that someone was stalking him and someone had been seen by jones with a torch around the house on an evening -- both before -- well, several evenings before the murder. >> jones told police what he initially told crawford. that he did not recognize the man lurking in the neighborhood. on a hunch, investigators asked jones where he was at the time of crawford's murder. jones said he was home with his sister and her boyfriend. >> his alibi was that he was asleep in his sister's house. he was asserting that he had been asleep between the hours of 1:00 and 6:00, which covered the period of the murder. >> jones' sister confirmed his alibi and said as far as she

knew, he never left the house. next, police interviewed jones' cousin, darcy mcclain, who found crawford's body along with jones. mcclain said he was asleep in his home around the time of the murder, but since he lived alone, there was no way to corroborate it. then darcy gave police two very useful pieces of information. first, he claimed that someone had stolen an ax from his home. second, he said that his cousin, ivan jones, behaved suspiciously on the morning of david crawford's murder. >> from darcy mcclain, we were led to believe that it was unusual for ivan jones to go to his house at 7:30 in the morning and ask for a lift to his

parents' place. he never asked darcy mcclain to do that before. so yes, it was unusual in that respect. >> but ivan jones had an alibi. darcy mcclain didn't.

david crawford's autopsy took place in the royal hobart hospital the day after his body was discovered. the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. most likely caused by an ax or similar implement. crawford had been a healthy, 72-year-old man except for some heart trouble. >> he had a condition called cardiomyopathy, which simply meant that he had heart disease of unknown cause. >> then dr. kelsall made a discovery that would change the course of the investigation. he found that crawford had a heart pacemaker implanted in his chest. >> a pacemaker is a way of stimulating the heart. it delivers anything from about two to five volts into the heart to make it pace, that is,

contract. >> i was vaguely aware that pacemakers have a recording unit inside them. >> if so, crawford's pacemaker might reveal the exact time of his murder. unfortunately, pacemakers hold information for only a short time before it's recorded over. the autopsy took place almost 30 hours after the murder, which meant the pacemaker memory might have already been erased. >> we knew that we didn't have a great deal of time, that we were running out of time. >> the hospital's pacemaker specialist quickly scanned it to gather the pacemaker data and load it onto a computer. in an unbelievable turn of events, this particular pacemaker had something very few pacemakers had at the time. a computer chip that had what's called an event memory. >> this is unique to this product and, is in fact, was hardly ever used. and by sheer chance, the pacemaker technician involved

recognized that it was going to be any information, it would have been on the event record. >> the software produced a detailed graph that yielded a spectacular array of information. >> the interesting part that we could work out is that we could tell exactly when the patient awoke, when the patient went outside and was being assaulted and finally when the patient had died. in between that time, there was a period when the patient was unconscious and bleeding to death and at that point the pacemaker went back to its dormant state. >> the event record showed that david crawford went to sleep shortly after 10:00.

at 4:46, he woke up. at 4:54, his heart was beating well over 100 beats per minute, which is when he was attacked. the confrontation was over at 5:04 and david crawford laid bleeding until his heart stopped pumping at exactly 5:34 a.m. scientists retrieved this information with only hours to spare. >> it was about to be wiped. within an hour or maybe two hours, that information would disappear. >> and investigators discovered why crawford would have gotten out of bed. crawford's neighbor, who lived across the street, was in the hospital and had asked crawford to keep an eye on his house until he was released. >> everyone knew that he would be in hospital, and the neighbor was presumed to have money in his house as well. >> according to his son, he was that sort of person that if he heard a noise, he would get up and investigate the noise.

>> all police had to do now was find out who didn't have an alibi for 5:34 that morning. >> it reminded me of a quote of eleanor roosevelt who said that many people will walk in and out of your life but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart. in this case, we had a pacemaker. thanks to dr. robert kelsall and his quick response to the readings on the pacemaker found during david crawford's autopsy, investigators now knew the exact time of crawford's death, 5:34 in the morning. but it won't cause me discomfort. exactly, because it's milk without the lactose. and it tastes? it's real milk! come on, would i lie about this? [ female announcer ] lactaid. 100% real milk. no discomfort. come on, would i lie about this? so i use lactaid® members are cottage cheese. ry. it's 100% real dairy without the lactose. so i can make these creamy dishes my family enjoys without discomfort. discover more delicious lactose free recipes at lactaid.com

thanks to dr. robert kelsall and his quick response to the readings on the pacemaker found during david crawford's autopsy, investigators now knew the exact time of crawford's death, 5:34 in the morning. >> having these time lines, we have the perfect witness. there's no way that that in court could be discredited. >> ivan jones and darcy mcclain, the two cousins who found crawford's body, were the prime suspects. darcy mcclain said he was sleeping at 5:34 on the night of the murder. he lived alone so there was no way to corroborate his alibi.

he also claimed that an ax was missing from his home. a search of his house revealed nothing. ivan jones said he was asleep in his sister's home until he woke up at 6:00 a.m. but jones' sister provided a slightly different timeline. she said she last saw ivan at 3:00 a.m. when he asked her for a cigarette and then not again until 6:00 a.m. when she heard him in the shower. so no one could confirm his alibi between 3:00 and 6:00 a.m. and police believed that ivan's 6:00 a.m. shower was no coincidence. >> the man has been involved in a violent murder. one would also expect there to be blood on his body and, of course, the investigation found that he had a shower, almost a bath, by 6:00 and that his

clothes had been washed and that bleach had been used in the washing machine where he washed his clothing. >> in a search of ivan's home, investigators found a possible link to the murder. >> one of our detectives located a torch in a hole in the foundation of that residence. it was very clean. it was not covered in dust. it hadn't been there for any great length of time. >> to put a flashlight under the house is something way out of the ordinary. not something anybody would do unless they had something to hide. >> there was no fingerprints on the flashlight, so forensic analyst debby mccool looked for possible dna evidence. >> i didn't find any obvious blood stains. i took a swab from the outer surface of the torch. i removed the batteries and swabbed those as well.

>> and she made sure to swab the one place that's easy to overlook, the area underneath the on/off switch, hoping to find dead skin cells. >> dna can get on an object just by handling it, and by swabbing the item, we can often obtain a dna profile. >> amazingly, there were enough skin cells to develop a dna profile. the skin cells in the crevices of the on/off switch were not ivan jones' or darcy mcclain's.

they were the skin cells of the murder victim, david crawford, proving it was his flashlight. investigators believe that jones planned to burglarize the empty house across the street from david crawford. to break in, jones stole the ax from darcy mcclain's home, but when he got to the house, a neighborhood dog started barking and woke david crawford. he got up and grabbed his flashlight to investigate. crawford saw jones, and that's when jones attacked. crawford laid bleeding from his wounds yet was still alive. jones dropped the ax, went into crawford's home and stole his wallet. then he picked up the ax and crawford's flashlight and fled. david crawford's heart stopped beating at 5:34 a.m. jones disposed of the ax and crawford's wallet but for some reason kept the flashlight. to establish an alibi, jones made sure his sister and her boyfriend heard him taking a shower around 6:00 a.m.

in an attempt to further shore up his alibi, jones went to his cousin's house at 7:30 that morning and he arranged to find crawford's body with his cousin there as a witness hoping the discovery would eliminate him as a suspect. but jones didn't know about the pacemaker. had he waited to call police just a little while longer, the pacemaker's memory would have been lost long before the autopsy. >> it's possible that in the court of law he may have been found not guilty in that there was insufficient evidence. this was the absolute perfect evidence to put away this man. >> this case marked the first time in the world that data from

a pacemaker was used in a murder trial. in october of 2001, ivan jones was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. the pacemaker was a silent witness, but it told the jury all they needed to know. >> i'll carry it with me for the rest of my career. i encourage other investigators to give that consideration to pacemakers because time of death is not known and you never know what you'll get from data of a pacemaker. >> these things were never heard of years ago in solving crimes like this, and i think it's marvelous that something like that technology was able to do that. >> seems very ironic that this man had a pacemaker which actually outlived him because it was designed to keep him alive,

of course, but nevertheless acted as a real witness to what's happened, an external machine, if you like, which saw what was happening when nobody else did. for 12 long years, the murder of a young hospital worker went unsolved. police had their suspicions but little proof. but an old, used tissue told a story far better than any eyewitness. >> from the moment she was born, laura wynn was fighting the odds. >> she weighed 1 pound and 14 ounces, 3 months premature, but she was so determined to live that she made it. and they took her home. and she was blind in one eye from the incubator at that time and she also had paralysis on her right side.