>> forensic evidence, without it, we had nothing. it would have been just a bunch of hearsay and rumors. but the forensic evidence it was all the nails in the coffin. it was the hammer that put everything away. it was one of the strangest cases in canadian history. a squashed piece of fruit and a tiny pinpoint reflection in a picture was the only evidence. but was it enough to catch a killer? on june 19th, 1989, there was a thunderstorm in callingwood, ontario. but the rain didn't stop 33 year debbie tinlock from venturing out that night. >> she was a pretty vivacious woman that loved to ski and had a sailboat in the harbor.

she liked people. >> debbie, a single mother, left her 6-year-old daughter lacy at her parent's home for the night. >> debbie and a few of her friends went to a local restaurant where they visited with each other. and it was later in the evening when debbie and her friends said good-bye to each other in the parking lot. >> her friends said debbie left alone and presumably went straight home. at 3:25 in the morning however, she phoned police to report she had been attacked. >> she indicated she had been assaulted. i don't believe she was in total understanding of what had occurred. she was struggling to stay conscious. >> but by the time police arrived, it was too late. >> when i entered through the door of the apartment, i could see that there was an unclothed female body laying on her back next to the couch. >> beside her left arm, which was outstretched, was the hand

set of a telephone. there was a great deal of blood on the floor. >> it was like, something like this couldn't happen, you know. it's a small town and why, you know. >> investigators followed the trail of blood through the hallway and found a pair of metal-frame eyeglasses and a woman's shoe, both covered in blood. >> upon entering her bedroom, we noticed blood on the water bed, blood on different articles of clothing, and sheets as well as a comforter that were either on the bed or on the floor. there was also bloodstains and some blood spatter on a head board of of the bed. >> investigators also found evidence of activity in the kitchen. >> the kitchen was dishevelled. it appeared the entry was through the kitchen window, which was a ground level apartment.

there had been disturbing of dishes and that type of thing that had been in the kitchen sink. >> outside the kitchen window was an area partially hidden behind some greenery. on the ground, investigators noticed a tomato. >> debbie tinlock had a tomato on her window sill ripening. it had likely been dragged out onto the ground when the suspect pulled the blinds out of the window. >> we noticed there was a partial footwear impression on the tomato itself. >> they photographed it then put it in debbie's refrigerator to preserve it. police found no foreign fingerprints in the apartment and there were no valuables missing. so investigators had to ask, who would have wanted debbie dead? that question produced a few troubling answers.

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at debbie's autopsy, the medical examiner found she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. >> she died of a stab wound to the heart. he also found that there was a stab wound to the back which penetrated her spinal cord. >> the pathologist concluded that debbie was paralyzed from the waist down when she crawled to the telephone to call police. >> i believe when debbie is told by the ambulance help is on the way, she responds, thank you, and i believe at that point she died. >> in the search for debbie's killer, investigators found a possible lead. four years earlier, debbie lived with a man named ron osborne who had been involved in a drug smuggling ring. >> in 1985 ten persons were investigated for attempting to smuggle drugs from the united states into canada. >> authorities had evidence that

osborne transported illegal drugs in a boat from jamaica to florida. at osbourne's trial, debbie reluctantly testified against him. >> debbie testified that ron osborne had told her he had been on a boat for a two-month period. this boat was the one that was subsequently found to have storage compartments where the drugs had been stored. >> osborne was in prison at the time of debbie's murder. but investigators checked to see whether any of the other defendants might have killed her. >> transcripts of the drug smuggling case were reviewed along with interviews of the investigating officers to determine where the players actually were and how the entire investigation unfolded. >> detectives concluded there was no connection to debbie's murder. as a matter of routine, police also interviewed debbie's ex-husband. the couple had been divorced for

four years and shared custody of 6-year-old lacy. >> was a an amiable divorce. both parties had gone in different directions. and the ex-husband of debbie was alibied up. he wasn't home that night. >> so investigators focused on the evidence left at the scene. the pair of eyeglasses and the tomato with the foot impression. >> we knew right away that we had a pattern in the tomato and we knew right away it was a herringbone pattern. >> when the film was developed and analyzed, the flash in the photo created distinct shadows. >> we could see that along with the herringbone pattern, there was a second pattern or more detail than we had been first able to see, which was an "s" shape that came through the tomato. >> next investigators analyzed the eyeglasses. they found debbie's blood on the glasses which told a story.

>> both of the arms were folded which to us we believe had fallen out of someone's pocket. debbie had dragged herself to the phone from the bedroom and had actually dragged herself over those glasses. >> since debbie didn't wear glasses, investigators assumed they belonged to the killer. the pair was inexpensive and the lenses didn't fit properly in the frame. >> the lens itself didn't exactly match the contour of the metal piece at the top, so creating sort of a gap in the appearance of the lens. >> it was clear they'd been worn for some time. and there was a size discrepancy between the two lenses. >> it was as if a portion of the lens had been ground off so that

they just weren't the same shape, which is highly unusual. >> then investigators got an important lead. they learned that debbie's former next door neighbor was 23-year-old james brown. a one-time olympic hopeful. >> brown had had some success in the sport of wrestling. and had actually been to japan where he'd hoped to further that and maybe have a shot at an olympic spot on the team. >> debbie told friends that brown had made advances towards her. >> he did have a criminal record. he had been convicted of a number of offenses in the past. many for assaults, thefts and break and enters. >> that is why brown came on the radar screen quite rapidly. he had done some time in jail, but never more than three months. >> questioned, brown denied any involvement in debbie's murder and said he was out of town on the night of the crime.

>> he indicated that he had been at a hotel where he was assaulted by persons unknown. as a result of that, he went to the ground and woke up on the side of the road several miles away. >> brown had scratches on his face which he said came from the assault. given his size, detectives were skeptical of his story. >> he was a man, some 6'3" in height, large structure, about 350-some pounds. wide shoulders, extremely wide fists. >> and detectives noticed something else. in his mug shots from a previous arrest, brown was wearing glasses.

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the prime suspect in debbie tinlock's murder was her former next door neighbor, a convicted criminal, jim brown. during questioning he was wearing glass although he admitted owning a pair for reading but claimed he lost them. this gave detectives an opportunity to tie brown to the glasses found at the murder site. they removed debbie's blood from

the glasses and had an officer pose as a nurse and offer them to brown. >> let us know whether their yours or not or what we do. >> no, they're not. >> jim smelled a rat. he looked at the glasses and said they were not his. >> it doesn't mean they're not his, it just means that we haven't got that connectivity yet. >> police search brown's apartment and his car. >> we found a pair of blue canvas running shoes on the floor of the rear right passenger side of the vehicle. >> we believe they were manufactured in czechoslovakia and were actually purchased by the ontario government and were provided to inmates in the provincial system who were doing time. >> they also appeared to have the same distinctive tread pattern as the print on the tomato outside debbie's window.

>> there was a specific part of the design, which i'll refer to here as an "s" shape or a stylized 7 that became very apparent in the photograph. that really piqued my interest. >> but forensic investigator jerry webb had a problem. he needed to know if the weight of a 350-pound man created a different kind of a shoe impression on a tomato than one that you get by copying a shoe impression on paper or a transparency. so webb designed an experiment. >> i had a person that wore size 13 shoes put on a bomb suit and i added weights to the bomb suit in trying to increase the weight of this person to be more close to the weight of the suspect in this case, jim brown. >> webb sprayed water on tomatoes to simulate the rainstorm on the night of the murder.

then had his 350-pound model step on each one wearing the suspect's shoes. webb discovered that the test impression on the tomato was virtually the same as the one taken directly from the shoe and the photo taken at the crime scene. >> i was able to take those two overlays and put them over top of a photograph of the tomato itself and be able to illustrate that, in fact, that the pattern matched up on the tomato impression. >> although the size of brown's shoe and the tread pattern was the same as the shoe impression left at the crime scene, there was no way to tell if this was the actual shoe. >> the impression on the tomato could have been made by the left shoe of jim brown, or it could have been made by another left shoe that had the same specific design and size.

>> since the shoes were prison-issued, they were unusual, although not uncommon. >> i feel that we need much more evidence to convict the person responsible for debbie's senseless murder. >> so they turned to the eye glasses found at the crime scene. dr. graham strong, a professor of optometry at waterloo university, was asked to determine whether the crime scene glasses were the same as those worn by jim brown in a police mug shot taken several years earlier. >> the problem that we had with the mug shots is that they really weren't a frontal mug shot. he was angled relative to the plane of the film. >> to solve the problem, dr. strong mounted the glasses on a styrofoam head and tried to approximate the angle in the mug shots. >> we didn't get it quite right. it was compelling, but it didn't

rise to a level that was significant in our mind. >> then, dr. strong enlarged the mug shot photographs and noticed something important. tiny white dots, reflections from the photographer's flash in brown's corneas. >> you actually use the reflection from the front surface of the eye to make a very standard measurement when you make a pair of glasses. namely the distance between the two eyes. so what you do is you measure the difference between the reflection from the right eye to the left eye and that's the interpupillary distance. >> from medical records, dr. strong knew that the distance between brown's pupils was 72 millimeters. so now he had a scale by which he could measure the exact size of the frames and the lenses for comparison to the glasses from the crime scene.

>> we're getting 20-odd identical measurements and observations related to the glasses. so there's a bit of a eureka moment when that happens. bottom line, the glasses in evidence were of the one of the accused and were the glasses in both of the mug shots we analyzed. >> we believe we have brown's glasses covered in blood in debbie's apartment. >> if they were true, why were the frames in the mug shot gold and the frames analyzed by the expert brown? okay buddy, what's your favorite kind of cheerios? honey nut. but... chocolate is my other favorite... but apple cinnamon is my favorite too... and fruity... oh yeah, and frosted! okay, but...what's you're most favorite of all? hmm... the kind i have with you.

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after thousands of hours of police and forensic investigation, prosecutors now knew what happened in debbie tinlock's apartment the night she was murdered. it was a very warm night. and the evidence shows that when debbie returned from an evening with friends, she opened the kitchen window to help cool her apartment. then she went to sleep. it was a ground floor apartment. the kitchen window was low. the motive was unclear, but the evidence shows james brown

entered debbie's apartment and knocked the tomato off the windowsill, then stepped on it leaving the impression of his prison shoes. brown attacked debbie in the bedroom. assaulted her, stabbed her twice with a knife and left her for dead. on his way out, he dropped his glasses in the hallway. debbie, most likely paralyzed from the waist down from the stab wound, crawled over those glasses on her way to call police. she died before she could identify her attacker. but her blood on brown's glasses did it for her. >> i believe debbie died on the telephone knowing she had done her job. >> i recall the day that dr. strong came to our office in berry like it was yesterday. it was a piece of evidence that was individual and it truly was a high five yahoo moment.

>> the final hurdle for prosecutors was to explain why gym brown's glasses were gold in the mug shots, but dark brown when shown to the jury. >> a decision had been made by the investigators to deliver jim brown's glasses to him at the jail. prior to doing that, they wanted them cleaned of the blood that was on them. in that process of cleaning the blood, part of the laminate from the temples of the glasses was rubbed off. >> in january of 1992, two and a half years after debbie was killed, james brown went on trial for murder. the trial lasted two and a half weeks and relied on the shoe print left on a tomato and mathematical calculations from a re, for example, from a flashbulb. >> the jury deliberated for six

hours and came back with a finding of first-degree murder. in canada, a first-degree murder conviction carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years. >> this case ranks among the most unusual in forensic history. >> i have been policing now for 28 years and 20 years in the forensic business. i have never before or again had an impression in a tomato. >> it was amazing how dr. strong, based on a grainy mug shot of not great quality was able to determine all the nuances of these glasses and able to mathematically determine the chances of being another pair like that in this world. >> when i first entered into the forensics field, i attended coroner's court in toronto, and there is a sign that is on their

wall that says that we speak for the dead. i've made that my motto over the last 20 years. recognizing that that crime scene is now the voice for the dead. a high school teacher mysteriously disappeared. did she go on vacation without telling anyone or was she taken against her will? could forensic science find the answer? not all students do well in traditional schools. for teenagers in san antonio, texas,s robins academy is an alternative for high school students who need extra help. >> they take two kinds of students. students who just don't do well