>> it was probably the cleanest crime scene as a detective i'd ever been handed. >> he took everything with him. >> for years the case went cold. then he struck again. >> someone just left my house that raped me. >> okay. do you know who it was? >> no. >> he had selected me and planned it. >> while the killer may have gone dormant, science did not. >> my jaw dropped when he told me the name. i was floored. i was just floored. >> clearly, dna made this case. it not only identified the suspect in the case, but it exonerated someone else. when tammy tatum first met

jim meadow in longmont, colorado, they were instantly attracted to one another. it wasn't long before the two moved in together and decided to start a family. >> what tammy wanted most in life was to be a wife and a mother. >> tammy gave birth to a healthy baby girl they named sadie, but soon after the baby's arrival, the couple's life took a downward turn. >> jim meadow had a major substance abuse issue. he would get drunk and get into scrapes. he had numerous duis. >> jim also got into a serious altercation at a local food store. >> he was drinking. he got into a fight with a customer at that store. actually tried to choke the customer. >> jim was charged with

disorderly conduct and soon his violence was directed at tammy. >> according to friends, there was often abuse in the relationship. jim meadow getting intoxicated and striking out at tammy. there were actual reports also of him strangling her. >> it was a very violent, abusive relationship. and you know, she had confided in me and talked to me about this before. my mother was aware of it. my mother told me about it. >> after his fourth dui arrest, jim was sentenced to six months in a drug and alcohol treatment center that was within walking distance of their home. >> it's a residential facility where folks can live and work and check in and just be in a structured environment and follow court orders. >> jim had to live in the treatment center, but tammy would pick him up every morning and take him to his auto mechanic job, but one morning tammy didn't show up. jim later told police he walked

to their apartment to find out why. found the door locked and kicked it in. >> 911. do you have an emergency? >> yeah, could you come out here to my house real quick? i think my wife's dead. >> okay. calm down. tell me what's happened. >> i stopped by and the door was locked. she's naked. she's cold. >> her arms were above her head, which is not a natural position, especially when someone is defending against a strangulation. it really looked like the body had been posed after death. >> the couple's baby was unharmed. the medical examiner estimated that tammy had been strangled several hours before her body was discovered. investigators had no doubt about the killer's motive. >> this was a sexually motivated crime. there was injuries around the breast area as well as the

vaginal area, but there wasn't any clear evidence of a sexual assault. >> the cause of death provided a possible clue to the killer's identity. >> the act of strangulation is a very personal crime. >> we felt that whoever killed the victim probably knew the victim very well. >> and that made jim meadow the primary suspect. >> her friends had seen her with black eyes. black eyes as soon as 30 days before the homicide. >> when i heard that she had been murdered, my first thought was she told him she was leaving, and they got into a massive argument, and it ended up in a murder. >> one of jim's fellow inmates at the treatment center, rudy gaytan, told police he thought jim did it. >> he said he would rip her heart out if he caught her cheating on him. >> jim meadow would make statements to these other inmates about how he could just

kill her or how he could just strangle her. >> jim insisted he was at the treatment center when the murder occurred, which the autopsy indicated was between 9:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. >> records show that he signed back into the facility at 9:43 p.m. >> jim and tammy's apartment was only a 15-minute walk from the treatment center, which didn't help jim's alibi. >> it was possible for him to commit the crime before leaving the apartment to head back to the halfway house. >> but it was something else in that apartment that all but confirmed detectives' suspicions that jim was the killer.

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get lifelock protection and live life free. tammy tatum's common-law husband, jim meadow, was the prime suspect in her murder. he had hit her in the past and threatened to kill her. letters found after tammy's murder made it clear she was terrified of him. >> a lot of these letters talked about the violence in the relationship and how scared tammy was when he hit her and that the last time he hit her it scared her so much that she wanted to leave.

>> another fact pointing to jim meadow was that the killer appeared to be comfortable in the apartment. he took the time to use a towel found near tammy's body to clean her and the rest of the bedroom. >> there was no evidence that tied anything or anyone to the crime scene. >> it was probably the cleanest crime scene as a detective i'd ever been handed. >> and tammy's killer had also taken the time to pose her body. >> i thought the scene had been staged to look like a sexual assault. >> it was a very strange crime scene. >> but even though tammy's murder was sexually motivated and there were indications of sexual activity, the medical examiner did not believe she'd been raped. >> we find in the trash a used condom that had been tied shut. >> dna from the condom matched jim meadow, but meadow claimed they had consensual sex the

night before and that when he left to return to the drug and alcohol treatment center, tammy was alive. investigators didn't buy it. >> our thought was that after that they got into an argument and that may have been when he choked her to death. >> finding this condom was consistent with jim meadow performing a sex act and killing tammy tatum. >> but even though the killer had spent a lot of time cleaning the scene, he missed something. on tammy's bed, amid numerous hairs from jim, tammy and their baby was a single foreign hair. and the medical examiner also found a tiny amount of skin and blood under tammy's fingernails. unfortunately, in 1993 a larger sample was needed to generate a dna profile, and scientists were worried if they tested these samples and were unsuccessful,

there would be nothing left to test later when dna testing improved. >> there was clearly probable cause to arrest jim meadow, but there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. >> although no other suspect surfaced, prosecutors chose not to charge jim meadow with tammy's murder, and the case went cold. >> i thought he was getting away with murder, but i didn't think he'd get away with it forever. >> then three years later, just one mile away, police received this 911 call. >> someone just left my house that raped me. >> okay. do you know who it was? >> no. i didn't see him. i was blindfolded, and my eyes were taped. he had my hands tied together too. >> how did they get in? >> i have no idea. i woke up and he had a knife to my neck. he said don't open your eyes or i'll cut you. which he said quite a bit until he got the tape around.

and then he started telling me don't make a noise or i will kill you. >> the victim was renee dulany. >> i at one point decided that the best thing i could do was convince him that i was not going to call the police or anything. that was the best chance i had for living. >> renee's rapist spent a lot of time in her apartment making sure he left no evidence behind. >> when he was finished, he dumped water over me and then used a towel and wiped me off. >> when the rapist actually left the residence, he took everything with him. he took the tape. he took the knife. he took the items that he brought with him, so there wasn't a lot of evidence to be collected on the scene. >> to investigators the m.o. of the rapist seemed similar to

that of tammy tatum's killer. was it possible the two crimes were connected? i live in a luxury penthouse overlooking central park. when the guests arrive, they're greeted by my butler, larry. my helipad is being re-surfaced so tonight we travel by more humble means. at my country club, we play parlor games with members of the royal family. yes i am rich. that's why i drink the champagne of beers.

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kind of shut it out. there's not a whole lot you can do. you can't really absorb what's happening to you. >> the attack happened shortly after renee's grandmother left for work around 5:00 a.m. both renee and police were convinced the perpetrator had planned this attack carefully. the assault lasted for two hours. even though renee was blindfolded, she could tell her attacker was going back and forth to the bathroom to wet a towel and wipe down surfaces in the room. >> i knew he was trying to not leave evidence, and i was so afraid it was going to work. >> but incredibly, despite all these precautions, renee's rapist still left biological evidence behind. >> it looked like he had no knowledge of dna evidence but felt certain that law enforcement could get fingerprint evidence off of a body, and that's why he wiped down renee dulany. >> a dna profile was generated from the biological sample in renee's rape kit.

unfortunately, it did not match any of the dna profiles in the colorado state database of known criminal offenders. renee's former boyfriends and her co-workers and fellow students willingly submitted dna for comparison. none matched. >> this case goes cold. no one is arrested. no suspects are named. >> you absolutely live in fear. i mean, you have this person who's told you that they were going to kill you, and they've certainly shown you that they're capable of it. >> it wasn't until ten years later, after colorado officials were able to input all of the dna samples from past criminal offenders into their statewide dna database that investigators finally got a break. the dna from renee's case turned up a hit.

>> this was huge. having an investigative lead develop nearly ten years after the sex assault, that hadn't happened before. >> the dna profile from renee dulany's rape kit matched rudy gaytan, a 48-year-old auto mechanic who was married with two children. coincidentally, he also lived in renee's apartment complex. >> it was shocking, upsetting to find out that it was someone that had lived right next door. >> in fact, renee had identified gaytan as a possible suspect the night of her rape. >> i don't want to say this because i'm afraid i'll be wrong, but it sounded kind of like one of the people in the next building. >> it might -- oh, it did? >> yeah. but i'll feel awful if it's not. because he's always been nice to me. >> but renee always felt uncomfortable around gaytan. >> he was the creepy neighbor that always tries to talk to you. >> at the time police had no probable cause to search gaytan's apartment or get a

court-ordered sample of his dna. but just two weeks after renee's rape gaytan was involved in a serious car accident and there were consequences that went well beyond broken bones. >> it's almost like instant karma. rudy gaytan gets hooked on pain medications, and that's what ultimately lands him in prison in the department of corrections in colorado, is his falsification of these prescriptions. >> since writing false prescriptions is a felony, gaytan had to provide a dna sample upon his release from a three-year prison sentence. >> had rudy gaytan not been involved in this motor vehicle accident, chances are we would never have gotten his dna. >> now police look further into his past and were shocked by what they found. >> i knew who rudy was. i was floored. i was just floored. >> police recalled that rudy gaytan was the man who provided

incriminating evidence against jim meadow during tammy tatum's murder investigation. >> he was one of the witnesses that provided information about seeing tammy with bruises and the black eye and some of the violence that was involved between jim and tammy. >> gaytan knew jim meadow since the two attended the same drug and alcohol rehab center. was it possible that gaytan was involved in tammy's murder? ten years after renee dulany's sexual assault the dna testing identified rudy gaytan as her rapist. when folks think about what they get from alaska,

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ten years after renee dulany's sexual assault the dna testing identified rudy gaytan as her rapist. surprisingly, gaytan was also connected to the tammy tatum murder case. he was friends with both tammy tatum and her common-law husband, jim meadow. >> jim meadow had actually introduced rudy gaytan to tammy tatum. >> but tammy told people she didn't like rudy gaytan. >> she complained to her friends that she found rudy creepy and that he made her uncomfortable.

>> there were many similarities between tammy tatum's murder and renee dulany's rape. >> the sex assault occurred in the early morning hours. in addition to that there was no forced entry found. there was use of water and a towel to wipe down renee's and tammy's body. >> although there was no semen in tammy's murder case, investigators did find one foreign hair with the root intact. >> when an analyst finds a bulb on a hair, typically that means that the hair had been forcefully removed. >> in 1993 it was difficult to get dna from that hair bulb, but in 2006, it was there for the taking. >> when the dna from the hair had been analyzed, it produced a dna profile that was identified as rudy gaytan. >> gaytan's dna was also found on other items in tammy's apartment. most significantly, the towel that was used to wipe her body.

>> clearly, dna made this case. it not only identified the suspect in the case, but it exonerated someone else. >> after all of those years we were able to finally clear jim meadow. >> when confronted with the dna evidence against him in the tammy tatum murder, gaytan confessed, but police found parts of the confession unbelievable. he claimed it was a consensual affair gone wrong, but he was very clear on the murder. >> i wasn't stumbling drunk, but i was drunk. >> i know you said a lot of it was rape. so i'm not expecting for to you have a lot of detail. but when you started to strangle her, did you have her pinned on the bed so you were on top of her?

>> yes. with just my hand. >> how long did she fight back before she wasn't fighting back anymore? do you have any idea on that? >> not really. 30 seconds, a minute. i don't -- it happened so fast. >> prosecutors believe that on the night of tammy's murder rudy waited until jim meadow left the apartment and then knocked on the door. tammy opened the door, possibly in the belief it was her husband. and gaytan forced his way in. the two fought. and during the struggle tammy pulled a single hair from his head. rudy overpowered her, then strangled her to death. he knew jim was at the treatment facility and wasn't coming home. so he had all the time he needed to clean the crime scene and his victim. three years later he attacked renee dulany. but despite his meticulous cleaning of that crime scene, he still left biological evidence

behind. the dna from renee's rape kit and the single hair from tammy's bed ultimately tied him to both crimes. rudy gaytan was convicted of second degree murder in the death of tammy tatum and first degree sexual assault of renee dulany. >> he chose to kill her, and i got to live. i felt responsible to make sure i, you know, live a good life because hers was taken from her. >> gaytan was sentenced to a total of 72 years for both crimes and will not be eligible for parole until he's 103 years old. >> forensic evidence and the emerging technology of dna was critical in the solving of this case. without the dna evidence that was recovered from tammy tatum,

this case would have never been solved. >> i always knew that the technology would catch up with the samples that they had. i never gave up hope. i never gave up hope. this had to be done. it had to be resolved. and i knew it would be this young couple had everything. successful careers, money, time to enjoy it, and a home fit for a movie star. then everything changed. their 3-year-old son developed serious respiratory problems. and his father started showing signs of alzheimer's disease. forensic scientists needed to know whether these illnesses were bad luck, bad genes or something else.