tv Forensic Files CNN April 11, 2015 10:00pm-10:31pm PDT
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if we don't get dna off that envelope and fingerprints off the letter, we can't authenticate that she had written that. if we don't have the autopsy results that we have and the blood spatter results that we have, you know, we've got a whole different ball game here. a young woman just landed her first big modeling job. a few hours later, she disappeared. the weave pattern on some fabric, the mixture of some concrete and a dog hair were the keys to the mystery. it was a friday night in central illinois, around 10:00 p.m. a motorist saw an abandoned car along the side of the road. the driver's side door was open. the lights were still on. the engine was running, but there was no one inside. >> the purse was inside the car. the inside of the vehicle was a little bit disheveled.
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it appeared to be a little bit suspicious. >> there was no identification in the purse. the car's license plate number was registered to david swann, a 34-year-old employee of the local newspaper. when police called swann, he said his girlfriend, karyn slover, had borrowed his car that night to pick up her 3-year-old son, christopher, who had spent the day with his grandparents. but the car was nowhere near the grandparents' home. it was 40 miles away, facing in a different direction. >> at that point, she's just missing, you know? at that point, we're not sure if it's a kidnap. you assume it's a kidnapping, a hijacking on the highway. >> investigators asked family and friends if karyn might simply have run away. everyone said it was impossible. friends said karyn had just gotten her first professional modeling job and was excited about it.
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>> she was an aspiring model and she had received a phone call from paris international indicating that they were going to possibly offer her some work out of state. >> she was very excited about the modeling job. she was flitting around the office with a big smile on her face and pretty much letting everyone know that she was excited about it. >> two days passed. still, there was no sign of her. then, 40 miles away, some boaters on lake shelbyville noticed something. >> they thought it was some garbage, a garbage bag that had floated up to the shoreline. the first thing i thought of when i saw that was, oh, this is going to be bad. >> inside the bag was a woman's
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head. nearby, police found other garbage bags with the rest of her body. >> i realized that there was a missing person from the friday night before, a female in a neighboring county. and the thought flashed through my mind that this probably is that missing female from the neighboring county. >> dental records confirmed that the body was karyn slover. she was just 23 years old. >> she liked everybody. everybody liked her. who could do such a bizarre thing? you don't think about that happening to you until it does. >> the bags were sealed with duct tape. inside were chunks of cement and cinders, consistent with the material found on the floor of the car karyn was driving. apparently, the killer used the cement to keep the bags under water, but the body gases most likely raised them to the surface. analysts found six dog hairs stuck to a piece of the tape,
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but there were no fingerprints found on the tape or the bags. the lake apparently washed away all other trace evidence. >> i have been in law enforcement 33 years and i have seen a lot of carnage. this affected me probably worse than anything that i have ever seen. we come by almost every day to deliver your mail so if you have any packages you want to return you should just give them to us since we're going to be here anyway it's kind of a no brainer
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at karyn slover's autopsy, the medical examiner found she was shot in the head six times with a .22-caliber handgun at point blank range. >> somebody was very angry, and i think when the actual murder occurred, absolutely lost control and just continued to shoot until probably the gun was empty. >> the last time anyone saw karyn slover alive was when she left work to pick up her son, who was spending the day with his grandparents. >> more than likely, karyn was killed some time between 5:00 p.m., when she left her job, and 10:00, or roughly 10:00, when her car was found out on the interstate. >> there was many theories
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involved. one was, was she abducted by a pervert, serial killer-type investigation? >> the first potential suspect was her ex-husband, michael, the father of her little boy. >> there was obviously some violence in that relationship. we talked to several people who indicated that michael had battered her in the past. i don't think it was a good relationship. >> karyn wasn't very fond of michael's family either. they were the ones baby-sitting karyn's son, christopher, on the day of her murder. >> karyn had a tough time with her ex-in-laws. they're the ones who watched her son, and it was frequently stressful when she either would go to drop him off or to pick him up. >> but karyn's former husband, michael slover, had an alibi for the time of karyn's disappearance. >> he was working as a security guard at cub foods. he had made an arrest that afternoon at cub foods.
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the police had been there. >> since michael had an alibi, investigators turned their attention to karyn's current boyfriend, david swann. >> he'd had some run-ins with law enforcement. he had been put on probation in the past. he had pretended to be or impersonate a law enforcement officer in the past. he had spent time in a mental ward at a hospital. >> 34-year-old david swann had been dating karyn for only a short time. a background check revealed a disturbing incident. >> he had been involved in killing a deer and then had put the deer over a swimming pool and had used a chainsaw or like instrument to clean the deer. and due to the fact karyn had been dismembered and we weren't exactly sure what the means of dismemberment were, we were interested in information like that. >> and david's alibi was shaky. on the night of the murder, he
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was attending a friend's wedding rehearsal, and witnesses said he was 45 minutes late for the rehearsal dinner that followed. this created a 45-minute window that could not be accounted for. >> we were concerned that david swann was free for a period of time and could have possibly committed the crime during that time period. >> i felt like he very, very possibly could have been the one. i remember telling the sheriffs, i think i've got the guy. >> karyn told friends she dreamt of moving to georgia to pursue her modeling career. was it possible that david grew angry over her plans to leave? investigators brought in a profiler to study david's past. >> the fbi profiler indicated that david did match the profile of the type of person that could be responsible for this type of crime. >> but investigators had no hard evidence against him, and without it, they couldn't obtain a search warrant.
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despite repeated interrogations, he denied having anything to do with karyn's murder. if david swann was the killer, he might have committed the perfect crime. l i was doing. so when i finally told my doctor, he said humira is for adults like me who have tried other medications but still experience the symptoms of moderate to severe crohn's disease. and that in clinical studies, the majority of patients on humira saw significant symptom relief. and many achieved remission. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you've been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you've had tb,
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police were convinced david swann was involved in karyn slover's murder. he had an alibi for the night of her murder, except for a 45-minute period he said he was running some errands, but no one could corroborate that. after six months, police decided to interrogate david one last time, hoping he'd incriminate himself. >> we all held hands and prayed that, lord, if this is your will, that if david swann is, in fact, the one involved, you know, let us get a confession. if he is not, if he's not involved, give us a sign we can go elsewhere. >> in this last interrogation, police continued to ask where he was on the night of the murder during the time he couldn't account for. the pressure paid off, but not the way police expected. david said that the reason he was late to the rehearsal dinner was that he went to the bank.
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investigators went to that bank and checked the atm surveillance video. it showed david swann, just as he said it would. >> we were able to verify through the atm tapes, david swann did not have a window of opportunity to commit this crime. >> with david swann cleared, there were no other suspects. investigators feared that karyn slover's murder might never be solved. >> i took it personally. i spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about this case, wondering what i was missing, what we weren't doing, what we needed to do to actually come up with a killer in this case. >> as a last resort, police looked one more time at the crime scene. it was clear, there had to be another car at the scene. >> there had to be more than one person involved in this. you couldn't leave a vehicle along the interstate and walk
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back to wherever you left from. someone had to drive there and pick you up and take you back. >> so, who would have had the motive and the opportunity to commit this crime? karyn's ex-husband, michael, had an alibi for the night of the murder, but his parents did not. they were the ones watching karyn's son, christopher, on the day of the murder. >> michael slover sr., he works at a power plant in the decatur area. and once he clocked out, he has no alibi after that time. jeannette slover, who wasn't employed or anything, she had no alibi or anybody to corroborate their alibi. >> 51-year-old jeannette slover detested her ex-daughter-in-law karyn, and everyone knew how much she loved her 3-year-old grandson, christopher. >> i think the relationship between jeannette and the boy
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was not normal, that jeannette treated the boy as her own and actually believed it was her own son. >> in fact, she told friends that after christopher was born, she began breast-feeding him. investigators checked telephone records and discovered that michael jr. called his parents 12 times on the weekend of the murder. also suspicious, the slovers owned a used car lot just one mile from their house. the lot, patrolled by two junkyard dogs, was always dirty and in disrepair. just after karyn disappeared, neighbors said the lot got a makeover. >> michael jr. and michael sr. were seen by the neighbors out at miracle motors cleaning up the lot, cutting brush, cutting
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weeds, burning items. >> was it possible they were trying to remove something connected to karyn's murder? to find out, investigators contacted richard monroe, a well-known forensic geologist. concrete and cinders were found with karyn's body. could he tell if they came from the slovers' car lot? both samples were placed in a scanning electron microscope and hit with high-energy radiation. >> in a vacuum in the s.e.m., the darkness in the chamber, there's no light source. the only light it puts in is the x-rays. >> this enables the images of the samples to be magnified up to 5,000 times their actual size. visually, the samples looked similar. monroe then ground the samples into a powder and bombarded it with x-rays to identify the chemical makeup of the samples. monroe concluded that the material found in the bag with karyn's body and the material
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from the car lot were similar enough to raise suspicions. but investigators needed more than that. and to get it, they turned to an unlikely source, the united states army. 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. it used to take two weeks to sequence and analyze a genome; with the microsoft cloud we can analyze 100 per day. whatever i can do to help compute a cure for cancer, that's what i'd like to do.
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more than two years after karyn slover's murder, investigators now suspected that her ex-in-laws were involved. the motive? karyn's former mother-in-law, jeannette, wanted sole custody of her 3-year-old grandson. >> i think jeannette slover is filled with rage. i think that the relationship between jeannette and karyn was not good. i think that jeannette felt like the boy was her own, that karyn was a threat to take the boy from her, and she had to eliminate the threat. >> investigators found no forensic evidence inside the slovers' house, but concrete from their used car lot was consistent with concrete found in the garbage bags with karyn's body. investigators wanted more proof and went to unusual lengths to get it. they called in the army to help
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them remove all the topsoil from the slovers' 5,000-square-foot car lot. during a late winter snowstorm, 60 five-gallon buckets were filled with material. for six painstaking months, teams of investigators sifted through the debris. finally, they found a potential clue, a button that read "authentic paris sports club." the jeans karyn was found in had the exact same buttons. >> i get goosebumps thinking about it right now. because we had worked so long and so hard on this and really had not come up with anything. that was the first piece of evidence we felt like we had that was going to lead us to the direction of the killers. >> further sifting revealed some rivets, which were also consistent with karyn's jeans.
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then, investigators found a different type of button. it was cloth-covered plastic, the type used on shirts and blouses. >> i called the investigator and i asked, where's the white sleeve that was on karyn's body? because i can see here in the crime scene photos that there's a cloth-covered button on that sleeve. i want that sleeve. >> scientists took a fiber from the button on karyn's blouse and placed it under a comparison microscope. >> both buttons were composed of a cotton-polyester mix. >> the next thing was to identify the weave patterns on both buttons. >> in this case, we had a simple one-by-one weave pattern, and that was consistent both with the button that was found at miracle motors and the button that came from the sleeve of karyn slover. >> both buttons were the same size, made of the same material, covered with the same fabric, with an identical weave pattern. finally, the slovers had two dogs, and scientists wondered if the hair on the duct tape came
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from one of them. >> the analysis of animal dna for forensic applications is unusual in that there are probably on three or four labs in the country that do it. >> only one of the six dog hairs from the duct tape provided enough dna for an analysis. >> we concluded that there was a dna match between the hair on the duct tape and the referenced dog, and, therefore, the chances were very high that the hairs came from the same dog. >> jeannette and michael slover sr. and their son, michael jr., were all charged with first-degree murder. michael jr. was charged because he aided his parents in the planning and commission of the
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crime. the motive? the slovers were afraid karyn would move out of state, depriving them of time with christopher. based on the forensic evidence, prosecutors believe karyn went to the slovers' car lot to pick up her son. [ gunshots ] during the dismemberment, buttons from her blouse and jeans fell on the ground. and they used cement and cinders from their lot to give weight to the plastic bags containing karyn's body. some of the dog hair stuck to the tape they used to close the garbage bags and its dna matched the slovers' dog. they dumped karyn's body into lake shelbyville and abandoned her car along the deserted
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highway. but the forensic evidence linked the slovers to the murder in every imaginable way. >> obviously, this was a highly circumstantial case, but the forensic evidence we had was pretty clear-cut. >> although michael jr. was working at the time of the murder, he called his parents 12 times that weekend and helped clean up the crime scene afterwards. prosecutors were convinced he was actively involved in planning the murder and coverup. the three slovers were all convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 60 years in prison. >> we were delighted that it was finally over. and the fact that all three of them were found guilty was even a major blessing, because we felt all three of them were involved.
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>> i think the lord had some intervention in this and put us down the right path. so, that's just my little evangelizing to you, for what it's worth. late at night, a man stopped his car on a residential street. within seconds, he was dead. what did he see? and why did he stop? an asthma inhaler found nearby and tiny acrylic fibers answered those questions when there were no eyewitnesses who could. six gunshots fired in rapid succession shattered the early morning calm of rockford,
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