able to know that. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com in 1989, near the pocono mountains in pennsylvania, 19-year-old lori auker left for work. she was never heard from again. >> liftoff, liftoff. >> it was nasa technology, a fly, and the family cat that helped solve her disappearance in a most unusual way. ♪ the susquehanna valley in

central pennsylvania is a quiet agricultural area. lori auker grew up here not far from the mighty susquehanna river. >> lori was a very sweet girl. she was a typical 19-year-old. she had a lot of goals and aspirations for her future as far as becoming a veterinarian and had a great deal of interest in animals. >> just out of high school, lori married robert auker. he was almost ten years older and worked in a warehouse. not long afterwards, the couple had a son, matthew. lori took a job at a local pet store to earn extra money. although lori and robert loved their child, problems between the two began to surface. the couple argued, and friends say they were unable to resolve their differences. just 18 months after they were married, lori and robert separated. lori and the baby moved in with her parents.

robert moved in with his and had visitation rights. >> she wasn't happy with him because he had a very controlling-type nature about him. she had to answer all his questions before she could go anywhere. he used physical discipline whenever he got upset with matt and that's what upset lori. >> while separated, lori dated occasionally but only casually. on may 24th, 1989, while matthew was at robert's house, lori prepared for her usual 4:00 to 9:00 shift at the pet store. after packing a snack, lori left for work, but she never arrived. lori's supervisor called, looking for her. >> and i asked them if lori had left for work, and her father said that she had.

and i said well, has she called or anything because she's not here at the store yet? he said, no, but this makes me very worried. she left on time. >> lori's father drove the route that she usually took to work. he thought she might have had car trouble along the way. he eventually found lori's car in the parking lot near the pet shop where she usually parked. nothing seemed to be out of place. lori's purse and keys were not in the car. police canvassed the area and questioned employees and shoppers in the mall, but nobody saw anything suspicious. almost from the start, police suspected lori's estranged husband, robert, may have had something to do with her disappearance, but robert said he hadn't seen lori at all that day and he had an alibi. he said he was babysitting their son, went shopping, and then went to two scheduled appointments. >> mr. auker told me on the day of lori ann's disappearance, he

had been over to wise markets to get a disability claim form, and he took that form to an an office in lewisburg to an orthopedic surgeon. and from there, he went to the bloomsburg sears mall and priced a dishwasher for his mother. police, family members, friends, and volunteers continued the search with no success. on june 12th, a woman jogging a few miles from the mall spotted something in an area known as clowdy's dump. investigators wondered if this was the body of lori auker and looked to forensic science for some way to tell. auker. oh yea, that's coming down

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♪ the body was markedly decomposed in that only in the extremities was there any flesh left. there was no skin and no organs internally to work with.

>> investigators needed to identify the skeleton found in the dump a few miles from the pet store, and they also wanted to know the cause of death. to find out, they brought in forensic pathologist dr. isidore mihalakis. from the size of the skull, he knew the body was female. the cut marks on the bones and the holes in the clothing helped him to determine the cause of death. >> the presence of cuts, which corresponded to perforations in the sweater, is consistent with stab wounds, with movement, and with homicide. >> dr. mihalakis concluded that this woman had been stabbed in the chest and back at least seven times, possibly as many as 11. but he wasn't able to make an identification from the remains.

for that, dr. mihalakis asked forensic odontologist dr. dennis asen to make a dental comparison. >> without the benefit of have a victim such as laurie, there are no fingerprints you can use. the body is unrecognizable because of the disintegration of tissues. often what remains is the dental records. >> after comparing the teeth of the victim to lori's dental records and x-rays, the doctor made a positive identification. >> the victim had nine teeth restored with dental materials. those teeth, as it turned out, were the same teeth that lori

were the same teeth that lori auker had restored. >> no murder weapon was found at the scene. investigators now wanted to know when lori died. time of death is usually determined in one of three ways. first, by the body temperature. useless in this case given the length of time the body was outside. another way is to examine stomach contents, but the body was too badly decomposed. the third way is to analyze any insect activity. forensic entomologist dr. kc kim studied the larvae found on the body. an entomologist is an expert in the study of insects. >> what this body had was a large number of different kind of beetles and then a very late stage of maggots. >> within minutes of death, blow flies can detect the smell of decomposition, even from miles away.

dr. kim calculated that the larvae deposited by the flies had been on the body for 19 days, which meant they were on the body the day lori disappeared. in an incredible stroke of luck, police learned that an automated teller machine near the entrance to the mall was equipped with a surveillance camera which took pictures every ten seconds. the camera was aimed in the direction of lori's car. at first glance, the images looked unimportant. they showed a man making a bank transaction. but in the background, out of focus, there appeared to be an automobile near lori's car with an unidentified person standing nearby. the images looked promising, but were not clear enough for any kind of analysis, so prosecutors asked both the pennsylvania

state police laboratory and the fbi for help. but neither one could improve the photographs. with nowhere else to turn, the fbi suggested they ask nasa for help. nasa had been using sophisticated digital photo enhancement technology to improve images from space. nasa referred the case to a research scientist of the ballistic missile defense organization. >> digitization is a process of taking the normal video signal that you would get out of your vcr at home and turning it into a computer image file. >> digital enhancement can remove blurring in an image, and special filters can eliminate some of the grain. once complete, you can see how this process significantly improved the images.

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♪ the digitally enhanced surveillance photos of the parking lot where lori auker

disappeared showed lori's car in its parking spot. standing behind it was a person in the same clothing lori wore that day. >> the film was black and white. on that particular scene we knew laurie had been wearing a wind bre breaker. she was a medium build. she had short brown hair. that person that we see in the picture there fits that description precisely. >> the next picture taken ten seconds later showed another automobile, diagonally in front of lori, with the passenger's side door open. you can see that lori is bent over, looking into the car. the final picture shows lori's car still in its parking spot, but lori is gone. the car lori was standing next to is leaving the parking lot.

>> the person we've described as lori auker cannot be seen, and we know circumstantially that she never made it into the door. we believe that was the depiction of her abduction. >> an automobile expert identified the getaway car as a chevrolet celebrity. although lori's estranged husband didn't own a chevrolet celebrity -- they said they sold the car a week after robert returned it. police tracked it through three different car dealerships. >> it transferred hands within the used car industry a few times and was ultimately purchased. the first consumer who purchased it was a retired state police officer. >> the police officer bought the vehicle for his stepdaughter, who hadn't yet reached driving

age, so it had been sitting in a garage, a lucky break for investigators. >> it still maintained its integrity. by the time we got to it, we were able to access the vehicle, test it scientifically for prints, for trace evidence. >> investigators searched the car, but could find no traces of blood anywhere inside. >> we did have some neighbors observe robert auker scrupulously cleaning the car the day after lori disappeared. >> but in the trunk of the car, they found a clue. a tiny strand of hair. under a microscope, the hair did not appear to be human. on the left is a human hair. on the right, the hair from robert's trunk. under an electron microscope

magnified thousands of times, the outer pattern of the hair was more boxlike than human hair, similar to the steps on a ladder. the blue specks are dust particles. after looking through numerous species of hair, scientists discovered it was a cat hair. investigators compared that hair to a cat hair from lori's parents' cat and found they were microscopically similar. this was significant since the cat belonged to lori's parents. robert didn't have access to this cat, and the cat never resided with robert and lori when they lived together. what was also significant, robert's parents didn't own a cat, and lori had never been in robert's parents' car before her disappearance. investigators believed that this cat hair was proof that lori had

been in the trunk of robert's car. >> robert auker knew his parents were going to be trading that vehicle in within a matter of days. and in my opinion, that's why he used that vehicle and not his own to abduct lori. >> with this evidence in hand, police arrested robert auker for the murder of his estranged wife. >> when i arrested robert auker, he said to me, you've got to be kidding. the real question that needs to be asked is "what is it that we can do that is impactful?" what the cloud enables is computing to empower cancer researchers.

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♪ what the worst part of it, to me, other than the fact that she died, was when we were told that he had thrown her body in a dump. there's no reason for someone like lori to end up in a dump. >> prosecutors believe the surveillance photographs supported their theory that robert abducted lori in the mall parking lot. to convince a jury, prosecutors needed to prove that the automobile in the pictures was the chevrolet owned by robert auker's parents, so they reconstructed the crime. they placed the chevrolet robert was driving in the mall parking

lot and took photographs from the same position, height, and at the same millimeter as the surveillance camera, but this time the background was in focus. at the top is the original surveillance picture of lori's alleged abduction. at the bottom is the recreation photograph. the vehicles in both pictures look identical. and prosecutors discovered a possible motive for the murder, money. >> auker had taken out an insurance policy on lori and on his son, listing himself as the beneficiary. he had taken that policy out after they separated. >> and robert and lori had been engaged in a custody dispute over their son, another possible motive. a background check of robert auker revealed that he had a

troubled past. >> robert auker had been in trouble most of his life as a juvenile up to his adulthood. >> shortly after he married lori, robert was convicted for driving under the influence of alcohol and served a brief stint in prison. while there, robert ordered a book that described in detail how to commit a murder and get away with it. the title of the book will not be revealed in this program for obvious reasons. police officials blocked the delivery of this order. prosecutors believe that on may 24th, 1989, as lori drove into the mall parking lot, robert was there, waiting. >> what are you doing here? >> lori, i need you to come with me right away. >> when robert drove up and opened the door, he may have used some type of excuse to get lori inside, possibly that their

son was sick and he needed her help. prosecutors admit they don't know where the murder took place. the forensic evidence doesn't say. all they know is that lori was in robert's trunk sometime that day and was stabbed numerous times in the chest and back before her body was left at the dump. when robert later cleaned the trunk, he couldn't see the almost microscopic evidence that lori left behind. the cat hair, which had stuck to lori's clothing, was transferred again onto the carpet of robert's trunk. it was an ironic twist, given

lori's lifelong love of animals. >> i remember lori as being a very nice person, just all around nice. she was nice to animals. she was nice to people. and she loved her son. absolutely loved her son. >> robert auker was found guilty of first-degree murder and kidnapping and was sentenced to death. on appeal, the sentence was reduced to life in prison without parole. nasa's help was an important forensic breakthrough since it was one of the first times a crime scene photo had undergone digital video enhancement. >> the enhancement of the video from the atm machine was something brand new. something that had never been done before. this is a case that set a trend for prosecutors, certainly throughout pennsylvania. i think there was an awakening, a scientific awakening, on the

part of police, on the part of prosecutors. they realized suddenly that there were tools at their disposal. this is the story of a classic love triangle, husband, wife, and lover. one of these three died in what was described as an accident. a forensic computer analysis uncovered photographs and e-mails so revealing they even embarrassed a local judge. ♪ detroit, michigan,