he's not smarter than all that. >> if the forensics hadn't advanced from 1990, jennifer's death would have gone in the same file as dolly hearns did for 14 years we would have never solved it. love you! >> a 13-year-old girl went missing from her colorado home with little evidence to explain what happened. the investigation dragged on for two long years, until an alert fingerprint examiner found a serious flaw in the system. >> september 7th, 1991 was like >> september 7th, 1991 was like most other days for the church family. diane church got the kids off to school, ran errands, went grocery shopping and planned to spend a quiet evening with her family. >> the plans for that night

originally was to be at home and just do whatever we do, probably read them stories and that kind of stuff that moms do. >> then diane remembered her older sons had a boy scout meeting that night. diane's other children, 5-year-old sage and 13-year-old heather, wanted to stay home. >> heather didn't want to go and hang out with all those crazy boys, and so she asked if she could baby-sit that night, and so, we said sure, fine, whatever. and we took off and went to the cub scout meeting. >> heather had taken babysitting classes, so diane had no qualms about leaving her in charge. [ ringing ] later that night, diane called home to check in. >> i guess it was right before 8:30, and i heard the tv on in the background, and i said, oh, what's going on? and she said oh, mom i let him stay up a little bit. i'll put him to bed.

>> diane and the two boys returned home around 10:00. the house was dark, and for some reason, the front door was unlocked. she assumed heather and sage were asleep. sage was in bed, but heather was not. >> she was so little, and she had such a big fluffy comforter that i just figured she was under her comforter, so i said, go look again. so, he goes and looks again and comes back and goes, no, she's not in there. so i went and looked and she wasn't in there. and then that's when, it all fell apart. >> diane and her children searched the house and their five-acre property. they found no sign of heather, so diane called police. >> and they said well 98% of these calls turn out to be runaways. and i just said, oh, well, this is the other 2%. [ sirens ]

>> when investigators arrived, they found the property full of friends and relatives. for forensic technicians, this was a potential problem. >> when there's a multitude of people that have been there for a prolonged period of time, pretty much everything and anything that could be touched has been touched. footwear impressions, tire tracks, anything at all that might be more unusual is more difficult to identify. >> there was no apparent sign of forced entry or foul play or even of a struggle. >> the only thing taken or person taken was heather. she was the only thing missing from the scene that we could identify. >> the search continued throughout the night. and still, there was no sign of heather. the next morning, diane church noticed that the screen on her bedroom window was askew,

evidence technicians found three fingerprints on the outside of the screen's frame. >> the prints themselves were very fresh in this particular case on that particular screen, they were very distinct prints. >> but these fingerprints could have been left by anyone. dozens of people had been in and around the house. >> this was a busy household just like many of our households. there were hundreds of prints throughout the house. >> it was a process that would take day, perhaps weeks. and they were no closer to finding heather. >> what happened to heather dawn church became the mystery for this entire region. people were talking about it, people were worried, people were scared.

what's your favorite violin song to play? >> "the devil's dream." >> yeah, that's a good one. i like that one. >> the possible abduction of 13-year-old heather church was unusual for colorado springs, colorado, a community with very little crime. >> i think it heightened all the concern about taking safety measures with your children and making sure they understood, you know, stranger danger concerns and things like that.

>> diane church and her family lived in a sparsely populated area, which meant the kidnapper could have abducted heather without drawing much attention. >> it was this 13-year-old girl who was home, and yet, her brother was left behind. she disappeared and her brother was just still sleeping in his bed. it all was a very suspicious situation right off the bat. >> an fiber profiler agreed. since there was nothing missing from the home and no signs of violence, the profiler suggested heather's abductor might be someone familiar with the family and their routines. >> it's a very high percentage of crimes of that nature that the family members are involved, so you always look at the parents. you always try to check out their alibi or check out their motive and see if there's any evidence of bad character at all.

>> the first suspect on the list was heather's father. at the time, he was separated from diane church and living on his own. >> the fbi wanted to talk to me for about four hours. i had the, like you see in the movie, the good guy/bad guy scenario, fbi agents asking me all these questions that some of them were really hard to imagine. they were very, very personal. things that, how i felt about my daughter. >> but mike church said he had an alibi for the time heather went missing. he attended a support group meeting for divorcees with plenty of witnesses. he left the meeting at 9:30. >> there was a short time gap from the time he left the workshop to the time he was called at his residence.

that gap had to be filled in. >> he also passed a polygraph test. >> one of the detectives did come to my work and he asked to see me. at that time, i said, am i still considered a suspect? and he says, mr. church, yes, you are. and i said, well, i think that you need to look somewhere else. >> diane church was also considered a suspect. >> they gave me a lie detecter test, a horrible thing to go through to go to the police station and be fingerprinted and lie detecter test and all this kind of stuff. >> the only potential evidence at the scene was the fingerprints on the bedroom screen. the prints were compared with those in the database of the colorado state bureau of investigation. there was no match. next, the sheriff's office sent the prints to the fbi and their

automated fingerprint identification system or afis. it's one of the largest fingerprint databases in the world, at the time containing over 45 million prints. >> our impression at that time was that if we submitted those fingerprints to the federal afis system, that we were covering the broadest spectrum that could be accessed. >> again, there was no match. >> as a father, i felt like i should have been there, and i wasn't. so, i went through, i was going through a failed marriage and then i wasn't there as a father for my children, so i blamed a lot of that on myself. why wasn't i there? >> my biggest wish was that somebody had taken her who had lost a kid of their own, and

that was what i clung to.

the investigation into heather church's disappearance dragged on for months, then years. the fingerprints found on the bedroom window screen didn't match any in the state or national databases. despite this, the family never

lost hope. >> i think that's got me from one day to the next. and then i have those days that i would see her up in the mountains somewhere, alone and calling for me. it was agonizing. so, i had to put myself in a right frame of mind, and i tried to get out of those type of situations. >> exactly two years after heather went missing, the family was told that a hiker had found a human skull near pike's peak, just 15 miles from their home. >> the skull was recovered in a pretty remote area of el paso county off of rampart range road, about, over 7 miles from

town by a hiker in a pretty steep ravine about a 400-foot ravine. >> the skull was that of a young caucasian female. >> the news came on, and the reporter was holding the skull, and was saying this body has been found, yada, yada, and all the details. and about, and this had happened to me so many times since she went missing. it's amazing how many bodies are found. >> dental records identified the victim. it was heather church. >> at the beginning, i didn't want to hear it. for like 24 hours, i kept on saying, "are you sure?" i must have said that 100 times. >> the autopsy revealed the manner of death was homicide. >> the medical examiner was able to conclude that heather died of blunt force trauma to the right rear of the head.

>> in the area where the skull was found investigators discovered a pair of girl's pajamas, but surprisingly, her mother said they weren't heather's. with no other clue, it looked like the case might go cold again. but before that could happen, the newly elected sheriff of el paso county made the heather church case his first priority. >> and one of his main topics that he wanted to work was the heather dawn church case. and he asked me if i would look into it. >> when lou said he was going to open the case up, i said, i thought to myself, what good is this going to do? you know, what are you going to find out that these other police officers and detectives didn't know? >> detective lou smit turned to the only possible clue to the killer's identity, the three

fingerprints found on the bedroom window screen at the churches' house. at the same time, latent print examiner tom carney took a fresh look at these prints, too. he was new to the el paso county crime laboratory. he came from miami where he learned something not many others knew. the fbi's fingerprint database did not contain the prints of everyone in the united states who was convicted of a crime. >> he knew right away that they had not, all these afises out there had not been searched. to the best of my knowledge only two afis systems had been searched. >> i just assumed that it was a centralized network and tom carney was the one that really opened our eyes on that. >> generally, the fbi stores only the fingerprints of criminals convicted of major crimes, not those convicted of minor crimes like burglary or theft.

so, carney needed to identify every database that had fingerprints which were not on file with the fbi. >> i just contacted every state and tried to track down every system in every state, including canada and even mexico. >> carney identified 92 fingerprint databases in north america that hadn't been searched for the prints from the heather church case. >> i left a note for our photographic lab saying please make 92 sets of the heather dawn church crime scene latents and i'm going to mail them out, and that's what i did. >> four weeks later, tom carney got a surprise. [ male announcer ] this is the cat that drank the milk... [ meows ]

...and let in the dog that woke the man who drove to the control room [ woman ] driverless mode engaged. find parking space. [ woman ] parking space found. [ male announcer ] ...that secured the data that directed the turbines that powered the farm that made the milk that went to the store that reminded the man to buy the milk that was poured by the girl who loved the cat. [ meows ] the internet of everything is changing everything. cisco. tomorrow starts here.

finally, after two long years, colorado law enforcement officials got the break they'd been hoping for. they compared the fingerprints from the heather church case with 92 databases not connected to the fbi's afis registry, and their efforts were richly rewarded. >> actually, it was my wife. we were standing at home. and the phone rang and it was the department saying they had just made a match. >> the fingerprints matched 42-year-old robert brown, who

had been arrested in both louisiana and california and served time in prison for car theft. >> he had a criminal history in both of those states. nothing for murder, but we knew he was a felon. >> brown's fingerprints didn't make it into the fbi's database, because his offense was comparatively minor. >> when louisiana notified us that they had matched the prints to a subject named robert brown, we immediately went into our files and our databases to find out where robert brown lived and we found that he lived just a quarter mile away from heather church. >> brown worked as a tree farmer and was married with one grown son. colorado officials put brown under surveillance and arrested him walking out of an art supply store. when questioned, brown denied any involvement in heather's murder. >> why are your fingerprints out there, robert? >> my fingerprints weren't out there. >> i'm guaranteeing you that i

ain't lying to you. your fingerprints are there. >> prosecutors believe brown's motive was burglary. [ ringing ] on the night of the crime, heather church was babysitting her brother, sage. her mother called at 8:30 to check on them. after her mother called, heather put her brother to bed, turned out the lights and went to sleep herself. brown arrived at the churches' home some time after 8:30. the house lights were off and there was no car in the garage, so he probably thought no one was home. brown entered the home through a window into one of the empty bedrooms.

he most likely wore gloves, but when he had difficulty removing the screen, he took them off and inadvertently left three prints behind. prosecutors believe heather heard the noise and went to investigate. when brown saw her, he realized heather could identify him, so he struck her in the head with a blunt object, killing her instantly. he carried heather's body out through the front door, which he left unlocked, loaded her into his vehicle and drove to the mountains where he dumped her body in a ravine. to avoid the death penalty, brown pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. >> just, i think, just a scary

prospect to all of us, that people can do these things and at least for a while get away with it. >> had it not been for an alert fingerprint examiner, brown's print might never have been matched. >> the afis systems have to be organized into one central location where all fingerprint files are kept so that you don't have to go through so many different agencies in order to find out the answer sometime. >> once in prison, robert brown made a shocking revelation. he admitted that heather church wasn't his first murder victim. he said he killed another colorado springs woman named roseau sperry, who'd been reported missing in 1987. he said he put her body in a trash dumpster. >> the sperry case was a classic cold case. it was a missing person.

wasn't really investigated as a homicide. >> eventually, brown confessed to 48 murders, including one he committed while serving in the u.s. military in south korea. investigators around the country are still trying to corroborate brown's claims. if true, brown may be one of the most prolific serial killers in american history. and he might still be free if it weren't for the local fingerprint databases in louisiana and california and the investigators who knew where to look. >> you just don't know sometime how just a little clue, just a little fingerprint and, will, will lead you right directly to the killer. >> they wouldn't have been able to find brown without those forensics. that fingerprint was the thing that nailed the nail in the

coffin for him. i mean, without that, after over a year, i don't know how that could have, how anything could have evolved out of that. a brutal murder, lots of suspects and conflicting evidence. but the forensics were clear on one thing. the killer knew his victim. and that alone gave investigators a head start. for many young women, the allure of the stage, theater and the arts is difficult to ignore. 19 year old heather stigliano thought she might have what it takes to succeed. >> she liked to pose and model and be on-stage. and she had a beautiful voice. >> after high school heather planned to pursue her dreams but put them on hold for ar