-- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com two young women were brutally murdered on halloween, but the killer left behind his dna, and a groundbreaking new test identified his eye color, his hair and even the color of his skin. but knowing what he looked like was one thing. finding him was another. it was close to midnight on halloween in napa, california. trick or treat had been over for hours, and 26-year-old lauren meanza went to bed around 11:00

p.m. her dog, chloe, slept in her room. at 2:00 in the morning, the dog started to growl. and lauren heard noises. at first, she thought one of her roommates came home with a boyfriend, but then she heard a fight and screams. when she looked out, she saw a man run down the stairs and jump out of an open front window, but she didn't see his face. when she went upstairs, lauren found her two roommates. both had been stabbed repeatedly. >> 911 emergency. what are you reporting? >> oh, my god. we got attacked. please help. >> who attacked you? >> i don't know. my roommates are upstairs. i think they're dying. >> when police arrived, they found 26-year-old adriane insogna and 25-year-old leslie

mazzara dead. >> it was a very, very bloody crime scene. it's the most bloody crime scene i've seen in my career. >> leslie mazzara was a former beauty queen who worked in the sales department of a local winery. >> and good evening. a senior at the university of georgia, i am leslie mazzara. >> adriane insogna was a civil engineer. >> it was horrible. there aren't any words to describe that. it's almost as if you just go completely cold. >> bloodstains in the house provided investigators with critical information. >> he had gone into the house, up the stairs, into leslie's bedroom first, where he attacked her. apparently, the commotion woke adriane up in her bedroom, and she turned on the light, and he proceeded to her bedroom and then attacked adriane. >> she had reading glasses

either in her hand or on her face that were cut with a knife. she fought hard. she fought for her life. >> the blood trail led to the front window and continued on to the aluminum siding on the outside of the house. investigators found three cigarette butts, two at the front of the house, the other in the backyard. >> any time i see cigarette butts at a crime scene, i will collect them, because they are an excellent source for obtaining dna. >> all of the blood was collected for analysis. >> we received 71 pieces of evidence. one or two is average. up to four or five possibly. this particular case really surpassed most of what we see in the laboratory. >> police searched for motive and found one when they discovered some plastic zip ties underneath the front window. >> in police work, we use the same type of ties to hold

prisoners, especially in like riot situations or crowd control. it appeared to us that this person had come in with a plan when they came in, and part of that plan would have been to bind these girls. >> the next morning, napa valley residents awoke to the news of this horrible crime and the terrible possibility that a serial killer might be in their midst. >> this was a violent crime. i felt real uneasy. we have never had a serial killer in the city of napa, and this was my first taste of the possibility that we were dealing with a serial killer.

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three young women lived together in this house in napa, california, until halloween night, when an unknown assailant broke in and murdered two of the three roommates. >> my god, we've been attacked. please help! >> hearing those calls, my heart really went out to lauren for what she had been through. i could hear the panic and the fear, the grief in her voice.

>> the surviving roommate, lauren meanza, told investigators she had no idea who would have done this. nothing was stolen, and lauren didn't think either victim had any enemies, or at least none she knew about. it appeared that leslie mazzara was attacked first. it wasn't clear whether this was because her room was closest to the stairs or whether she was the intended target. >> the evidence in her room indicated that she had been in bed when the attack happened. and so, it appears like she was probably asleep at the time the attack occurred and didn't have a chance to even understand what was happening to her or defend herself. >> a background check revealed leslie was being pestered by the father of one of her ex-boyfriends. >> that was leslie's last full-time boyfriend that she had before she moved out here to california. >> and her ex-boyfriend's father continued to call her, even

after she moved to california. >> we looked at phone records for the house and cell phone records, and we learned that leslie had received several phone calls from the father of her ex-boyfriend that night on halloween. >> leslie's ex-boyfriend and his father had alibis for the night of the murder. they were both in south carolina, thousands of miles away, and witnesses confirmed it. another potential suspect was a handyman who had worked in the house on the day of the murders, but he, too, had an alibi. in all, police interviewed more than 200 potential suspects and came up with nothing. >> there was no information coming up after the murders. no one was saying anything. we all thought that it was someone who had high-tailed it out of here immediately after the crime. >> two weeks after the murders,

friends organized a candlelight vigil to keep attention focused on the case. >> the majority of the people we looked at early were ex-boyfriends, current boyfriends, co-workers that were very close to the girls, who would have had that type of ongoing relationship. >> then police got a break. dna testing found blood at the crime scene that wasn't from the victims. >> there was an "x" and "y" peak detected for some of the samples, so we knew we were dealing with male blood on the outside of the house. >> it appeared the killer cut himself while stabbing the girls when the knife slipped in his hand. >> he probably had the knife in his right hand, and when he hit the wall, the blood that was on his right hand and on the knife was cast off on to the wall. >> investigators now turned to the three cigarette butts found at the scene. two were in front of the house,

the other in the backyard. dna from the saliva on two of the cigarette butts matched the dna from the blood on the stairs. it also matched dna from skin cells on the rubber band holding the plastic zip ties. the dna profile was entered into a national database of 4 million known offenders. there was no match. again, police had to consider the unthinkable, that they were dealing with a serial killer who had successfully eluded them. >> that's the worst kind of crime to try to investigate, because there's no known link to the girls. and so, then you have a larger pool of potential suspects, obviously. >> however, a second look at the cigarette butts provided a possible lead. >> on the white part of the cigarette, there was a gold pattern. it kind of looked like little

gold birds, kind of drawings all the way around. no name, no words, so we had no idea what was the brand was. >> investigators did some research and learned the cigarettes were a brand known as camel turkish gold. they were relatively new and had only been on the market for a very short time. >> not every store even carried them. and the stores that we talked to, they would let us know, maybe they sold one or two packs a week. >> investigators asked the surviving roommate, lauren meanza, for a list of everyone she knew who smoked cigarettes. perhaps one of them was the killer. what's your favorite kind of cheerios? honey nut. but... chocolate is my other favorite... oh yeah, and frosted! what's your most favorite of all? hmm...the kind i have with you. me too. so, if you're what ysleeping in your is youcontact lenses, ask about the air optix® contacts so breathable

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solving the double homicide of adriane insogna and leslie mazzara proved to be far more difficult than police ever imagined. >> it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. >> and we wanted to find out who did this, and we wanted to put them where they belonged. and that's why the community came together with a $100,000 reward. >> but investigators knew something about their killer. bloodstains on the stairway wall were on the right side, indicating he was probably right-handed, and he smoked camel turkish gold cigarettes.

to find out more, investigators asked dr. tony frudakis if the killer's dna could provide any information useful to their investigation, and dr. frudakis told them about a new forensic technique he developed that could determine the killer's physical characteristics. >> it's really important that you be able to narrow down your focus, because otherwise, you have no information with which to work and you're sort of flailing around. >> since 99.9% of all human dna is alike, dr. frudakis focused his attention on the remaining 0.1% and compares these polymorphisms to the dna of citizens of other countries. this can identify the killer's ethnic identity. >> the donor was primarily of northwestern european ancestry,

very small amount of southeastern european ancestry and no middle eastern or south asian add mixtures. >> so, we knew, for example, he wasn't hispanic, he wasn't african-american, so that certainly narrowed down focus of the investigation in terms of who they should be looking at. >> and dr. frudakis found a marker in one of the killer's genes that indicated he had blue or green eyes and most likely light-colored hair. >> i was glad they had done it. it made me more hopeful that eventually they would be able to determine who the perpetrator was. >> police released this new information to the public, hoping someone in the community would recognize him. >> tonight, there's a new development in the murders of two napa women. >> and there was a man living just two miles away from the murder scene who was listening to every word.

>> they say he's white, has blondish hair and most likely has green eyes. >> he now knew two things, that he made too many mistakes and the dna technology had advanced far beyond anything he could ever have imagined. the same time, police asked the surviving roommate, lauren meanza, if she knew anyone who smoked this brand of cigarettes. >> she had let us know, well, the only smoker i can think of at this point is eric copple. >> 25-year-old eric copple was a land surveyor and a friend of one of the victims. but before police could question him, copple walked into police headquarters and confessed. >> i'm just getting done with dinner, and i get a phone call at home. someone's here at the police department and they want to confess. >> copple said he knew adriane insogna.

>> it was that cold feeling that came over me. i didn't know what to feel or at that moment. i really didn't know. >> we want to make sure that he knows details about the crime and the things he's telling us match up with what we already know about the crime scene. we want to make sure that it's information that hasn't been released to the media. >> although eric copple confessed, he wouldn't tell plice why he did it. >> he always claimed he didn't know what he did with the murder weapon, which, again, to me always suggested to me that he wasn't telling the truth, because it would seem to me that that would be something he'd be able to tell us. >> eric was very elusive as far as the question of why the crime happened. we could never get him to say, i did this because of "x," "y" and "z." ♪ turn around

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25-year-old eric copple walked into police headquarters and confessed to the murders of adriane insogna and leslie mazzara. dna tests confirmed that eric copple's blood was at the crime scene and that his saliva was on the cigarette butts found outside. >> i don't know if i exactly remember the moment when i got the news. i just knew i was elated. i was very happy to find out that on a rare piece of evidence

that we had, we had the suspect's dna. >> copple was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. investigators learned that copple blamed adriane insogna for the breakup of his engagement to lily prudhomme. >> it appeared that some people and possibly adriane, were telling lily that she could do better and that she shouldn't any longer be involved in this relationship with eric copple, that he wasn't good for her or right for her. >> on the night of the murders, copple went to a halloween party and ran into his ex-fiancee, lily prudhomme. according to witnesses, the two argued. copple wanted to set a new date for their wedding, but lily wasn't interested. >> can you just leave me alone for the rest of the night? please. ♪

>> after the party, copple returned home. he admitted to police that he was drunk. the fight with his ex-fiancee only added to the anger and bitterness he felt towards adriane insogna, so he took revenge. prosecutors believe copple stood outside the house where adriane lived with her two roommates, casing the place and smoking cigarettes. he used a knife to pry open the window and accidently dropped the packet of zip ties on the floor with his dna. leslie's bedroom was the first room at the top of the stairs, and he killed her first. [ screams ] he then went across the hall to adriane's room. she fought back aggressively.

at some point, he cut his hand and bled profusely as he rushed out of the house. >> at that point, based on what he's told us, at least, that he took his clothing and burned them in a fire pit that he had in his backyard, went back to sleep, and then the next day went to lily's house to console her, after lily called him to tell him that adriane had been attacked. >> no one knows why copple spared lauren meanza. some think he didn't know about the downstairs bedroom. >> i don't know whether or not copple knew that there was a room there. and i don't know whether or not he knew that there was a person in there. >> i just had a reckoning with myself and really understood that adriane was the target and somebody really wanted my child dead. and then i thought, how stupid was i? of course, adriane was the

target. of course, we all know it's someone in the inner circle. >> if we had known those kind of circumstances earlier in the investigation, i'm sure he would have come into our radar sooner, but again, we can always look back and wish we had done things differently. >> a few months before he confessed, eric copple patched things up with lily prudhomme, and the two married. in a bitter irony, the couple asked arlene allen, adriane's mother, to be part of the wedding with ceremony. lily claims she never suspected eric was the killer. in december of 2006, eric copple pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. had he not pled guilty, copple would have been eligible for the

death penalty. >> and i think that was a very real possibility. accepting a life without possibility of parole plea was probably the best deal he was going to get. >> were it not for a few drops of blood, two cigarette butts and some skin cells on a rubber band, eric copple might have gotten away with murder. but ever advancing dna technology provided a profile so accurate, it was only a matter of time before he was exposed as the killer. >> this case turned on those cigarette butts. >> things that would have not been considered 20 years ago as evidence are very crucial to cases nowadays. and again, the sensitivity of these testing analysis, dna, it's just incredible what we can find in crime scenes now. >> every homicide that you see, there's always a twist to the case that's a little bit different from the next case. and so, that's sort of what makes this work so interesting and so challenging. >> it was the dna.

it was the cigarette butts. so, once again, at any crime scene, it's very crucial, very crucial to do a good job and collect all the evidence. and most crimes, most crimes are solved by the physical evidence.