s up next, a man is gunned down just after dawn. >> there was a bullet hole that was straight into the tile. >> his wife is killed, too. >> there were three people in the johnson house. >> two of them did not come out alive. >> no one thought the couple had any enemies. apparently, they had quite a few. >> that certainly was a mystery to us. >> i could describe him as a very cocky, arrogant, young man. >> and the crime scene told a story no one wanted to believe. >> the evidence was yelling and screaming. this is what happened. nestled in the picturesque

sawtooth mountains of central idaho is the town of bellevue, a town that had not had a homicide in more than ten years. here, the johnson family felt safe. alan was a landscaper. his wife, diane, worked as a tax collector. >> alan was an avid hunter, just a wonderful guy. diane, her passion was cooking. she was always doing something wonderful in the kitchen. >> on a september morning in 2003, the serenity of this small town ended abruptly when shots were fired in the johnson home. >> 911, what is your emergency? >> there have been two gunshots. >> okay, where's the shots coming from? >> the daughter came over here and said that somebody shot her parents. >> when police got there, they found diane johnson shot to death in her bed, apparently,

while she was still sleeping. alan johnson was also dead on the floor next to the bed. >> the shower was still going, and i could see directly into the shower, and there was a bullet hole that was straight on, chest high, straight into the tile. >> the murder weapon, a .264-caliber rifle, was on the bedroom floor. >> it was probably one of the most violent crime scenes that i had ever seen. >> sarah, the couple's 16-year-old daughter, said she was asleep in her bedroom down the hall when she heard the first shot. >> she immediately got up, went through her parents' bedroom door, called her mother's name, heard a second gunshot and then fled the residence out the front door to a neighbor's house. >> unfortunately, sarah didn't see the assailant. at the foot of the victims' bed, investigators found two knives. >> that certainly was a mystery to us. we have these two homicides, and

why are these knives placed in the manner that they are and what does that mean? >> another knife was found in the bedroom of the family's 22-year-old son, matthew. he was away at college. since the doors to the house were never locked, there was no forced entry. nothing was stolen. adjacent to the johnsons' home was a guest house the family rented out. inside, on the bed, police found the scope that belonged to the murder weapon. the tenant was 45-year-old mel speegle, and he was gone. >> we found out that the murder weapon belonged to mel speegle. >> mel speegle was now the prime suspect. sheriff walt femling ordered his deputies to seal off the perimeter and to stop the nearby garbage truck from leaving the area. >> i yelled at one of my deputies to run over there and stop him from doing what he was doing. >> sir, just leave the garbage at this truck. >> that garbage truck was one

house away and almost took this evidence. >> in the trash can outside the johnsons' home was evidence more valuable than anything they found inside.

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alan and diane johnson were gunned down in the bedroom of their home in the early-morning hours. their 16-year-old daughter was in the house when the shooting occurred, but unharmed. in the garbage, police found a wealth of evidence. >> in the outside trash can, a pink bathrobe. inside that bathrobe, they found a brown leather glove, a latex glove and .25-caliber ammunition. >> this ammunition did not match the ammunition used in the murders. however, it looked like the killer threw the items in the trash before fleeing the scene. the murder weapon, a high-powered hunting rifle, belonged to the johnsons' tenant, mel speegle, who had mysteriously disappeared. >> mel speegle had rented that

guest house for years, was a very close friend of alan and diane. he works as an electrician. >> within hours of the murders, investigators found speegle in boise, idaho, 150 miles away. he said he had been visiting family members all weekend, an alibi that checked out. speegle claimed his hunting rifle was in his closet when he left for boise. >> i directly asked mel speegle who he thought we should be looking at, and he's the one who told me about bruno santos. >> santos was dating the johnsons' 16-year-old daughter, sarah. >> santos was a 19-year-old illegal immigrant, a dropout, associated with a number of small drug-related crimes, just a guy that, as a father, you wouldn't necessarily aspire your daughter to want to marry because he didn't seem to have much direction in life. >> then investigators learned

about a confrontation between alan johnson and bruno santos a few days before the murders. sarah told her parents she was sleeping overnight at a girlfriend's house, but they later learned she was spending the night with santos. alan johnson was furious, and he asked his brother-in-law, jim vavold, to go with him to santos' home. >> i said it's not worth getting into trouble going in there, beating up the kid or anything like that. you're not going to accomplish anything. >> alan told santos to stay away from his daughter and took sarah home. >> diane and i were in the kitchen and i asked her, did they love each other? and she said, well, she says that they do. and i said, well, if they think they love each other, you won't be able to keep them away from each other. >> the johnsons also told santos that if he didn't stay away from their daughter, they would file statutory rape charges against him. >> any kind of an arrest whatsoever would have sent bruno back to mexico. that just gave him that much more motive to take care of diane and alan.

>> investigators immediately took bruno santos in for questioning. >> i could describe him as a very cocky, arrogant, young man, somewhat confrontational at times, pretty hard to deal with. he told me that he had proposed to sarah or asked her to marry him, which she said yes. >> bruno and his mother claimed bruno was home asleep on the morning of the murders, but no one else could verify his alibi. >> he was cooperative with us at the time. as we started pushing him a little harder in interviews, his demeanor certainly did change. >> my first thought was bruno. we figured he was angry with diane and alan. he decided to get rid of them so that he and sarah could be together. >> investigators also found evidence that santos defied the johnsons and continued to see sarah, going so far as to have sexual relations with her in her own home. >> we confirmed that by finding

semen stains on sarah's sheets that matched bruno, so we knew that he had been in the house. and so, he was a prime suspect based on the fact that this crime truly was committed by someone with knowledge, access and opportunity. >> the sheriffs got a warrant to search santos's home for evidence. >> we took his clothing, we took his shoes, we took his dna, took him to the hospital and scrapings of his hands and his hair and all those issues for dna samples. >> investigators wanted to know just how far bruno santos was willing to go to continue seeing sarah johnson. ♪ ♪

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following the murders of alan and diane johnson, investigators identified bruno santos as the prime suspect in the crime. since santos was 19 and sarah johnson was 16, the johnsons repeatedly warned santos not to see their daughter again, but santos refused. >> to try to rule bruno in or out, we tested almost every piece of clothing that he was wearing that day and the following day when we arrested him. >> we never found his dna, fingerprints or anything in the crime scene and any of alan or

diane's blood or dna on any of his clothing. >> so bruno santos was eliminated as a suspect. with no other possibilities, authorities then began to focus on the johnsons' daughter, sarah. >> no more what? >> kids. >> no more kids? >> no more! >> they learned that sarah was taking anti-depressants and had a stormy relationship with her mother. sarah's relatives thought she was being a normal teenager, pushing against authority, until they noticed her unusual behavior after the murders. >> she did not seem to be going through any sort of grief at all. she was not concerned at all about losing her mom and dad. she wanted to see her friends, she wanted to get her nails done. i mean, it was just really bizarre. >> this led investigators to consider the unthinkable, that

sarah johnson, acting alone, had murdered her own parents. investigators knew sarah had keys to the family guest house occupied by their tenant, mel speegle. >> sarah would often clean the guest house for mel. since she would clean the guest house, we believe that she would have knowledge that the weapons would have been in that closet. >> when the sheriffs interviewed sarah initially, they noticed inconsistencies in her story. she claimed she was asleep in her bedroom when she heard the first shot and that her bedroom door was closed. >> we found traces of diane's blood and skull in sarah's room against her wall, which was some probably 30 feet away. >> sarah johnson's door was open also to allow the bone to go inside her bedroom, because the back edge where the hinges are also had blood deposits on it. so, both those doors were open. >> but this was only an

inconsistency, not evidence of murder. >> this case was going to be very difficult to prove to a jury. there was not one single piece of evidence necessarily that totally committed sarah to this crime. and so we just had to build it piece by piece. >> the piece they thought might prove most significant was the t-shirt and pajama bottoms sarah was wearing on the morning of the murders. >> police, when they first approached her, saw no blood on her clothing. there was none there, because we luminoled every inch, top to bottom. nothing. >> analysts now turned to the pink bathrobe found in the garbage the morning of the murders. family members said the robe belonged to sarah. as rod engler examined it with a proscope, a high-powered microscope capable of 400 times magnification, he was shocked to discover no blood spatter on the

front of the robe. but then he looked on the back. he found hundreds of tiny specs of blood, high-velocity blood spatter, the type that would be created by a high-powered rifle. dna testing showed the blood came from both diane and alan johnson. this proved the killer wore the robe backwards. but investigators needed to prove that sarah wore the robe on the morning of the murders. to do that, they had to analyze the shirt she had on that day. >> sarah johnson had a blue cotton t-shirt with green paint smeared on to it. so, therefore, i'm thinking, well, let's examine the blue shirt now and see if any of that cotton fiber could have transferred with the green paint on to the bathrobe. >> scientists took samples from the t-shirt and fibers from inside the bathrobe. they used a scanning electron

microscope to compare the similarities. they found paint on both the t-shirt and the bathrobe with the same chemical makeup. >> what i believe happened now, there is an evidence transfer from the blue t-shirt deposited on to the pink bathrobe. >> this proved that sarah had worn the robe over the top of her t-shirt. finally, investigators analyzed the gloves found in the garbage. >> when you handle an item and you leave behind the oils and residues from your skin, that contains skin cells. and we are oftentimes able to get dna from those samples. >> scientists swabbed the inside of the gloves and found dna from only one person. >> sarah was the source of the dna found on the latex glove. >> all the clothing found in the garbage can was then checked for gunshot residue, a gas created

by gunfire that can adhere to the shooter. >> we sent the robe, we sent the leather glove and we sent the latex glove to a lab in chicago, akrone and associates. they ultimately found gunshot residue on all three items. >> but investigators had one final question. why wasn't sarah's hair covered in blood when she went to her neighbor's house to report the murders? did she wear some kind of hat? if so, where was it?

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investigators learned that sarah johnson disagreed vehemently with her parents over her relationship with her 19-year-old boyfriend, bruno santos. sarah's parents threatened to file statutory rape charges against santos and have him deported unless the two stopped seeing one another. instead, prosecutors say sarah turned to violence. in october of 2003, sarah johnson was charged as an adult. >> sarah, i have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of your parents, diane and alan johnson.

you're charged with two counts of murder and you're under arrest. >> it was a sad moment, because it's a 16-year-old that did this. it's sad for everybody involved. >> the trial of a teenaged girl killing her parents was a national sensation. >> there were three people in the johnson house that morning when alan and diane were murdered. two of them did not come out. >> at trial, prosecutors presented voluminous forensic and circumstantial evidence to prove that sarah murdered her parents. >> she wanted the big, rich things in her life. she wanted to provide for her boyfriend. they were going to get married. and she asked him, do you want to live in a big, beautiful home? >> with her parents' life insurance and her inheritance, she thought she'd be all set. >> and she could live that happily ever after life that

only a 16-year-old probably envisions. >> in a surprise turn of events, sarah's boyfriend, bruno santos, testified for the prosecution, primarily to show he had nothing to do with the murders. >> he did testify that sarah had talked about hating her dad and about shooting him, given the fact that he did not like their relationship. >> prosecutors believe that sarah chose murder instead of ending her relationship with santos. she knew that the man renting her parents' guest house had a hunting rifle, so she waited for him to leave for the weekend and stole it. on the morning of the murders, sarah put on her bathrobe backwards, the gloves and a shower cap.

after hearing her father go into the shower, she entered the bedroom and fired from close range at her mother. the blood spatter landed in sarah's room, contradicting her story that she was asleep with her bedroom door closed. her father heard the shot. he came running into the bedroom, and sarah shot her father in the chest. sarah attempted to mislead investigators by placing knives at the foot of her parents' bed to make it appear that the murders were gang related. she flushed the shower cap down the toilet, where plumbers found it several weeks later when it clogged the drain. she threw the gloves and bathrobe into the trash. then she ran next door to report her parents' murders, looking remarkably free of blood spatter, but she left more than

enough evidence behind. >> had that garbage container been picked up, you would have lost the robe and you would have lost gloves that had sarah johnson's dna. >> sarah johnson was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to two life terms without parole. what happened was hard for jurors and even investigators to believe. forensic evidence left no doubt that sarah johnson murdered her parents. >> without having the robe, which contained the leather glove, the latex glove and all the blood, i do not believe we would have ever been able to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury. >> circumstantial evidence is too hard to convict people on circumstantial evidence alone. you need that forensic evidence, because this is for a first-degree murder charge.

>> it makes me wonder what was going through sarah's head when she committed this terrible crime, of how she could do this to her parents. up next -- a hairdresser is attacked in her own salon. >> it's a male fist against a female face. is it personal? yeah, it was personal. >> only one of them got out alive. >> it was the most frustrating case i have ever dealt with. >> there is forensic evidence, but it doesn't match any of the suspects. >> the fingerprint was never identified. >> i don't think they are going to catch anybody. >> the case goes cold until an auto mechanic comes forward with a secret. >> there was something inside said it still ain't right. >> he's going to commit one of the most brutal murders in the history of spartanburg county for what reason? why?