case was important in securing his identity and making this case, and the forensic evidence also helped us prove the enormity of the horrible crimes that he committed. up next -- a human skeleton is found in the marshlands of north carolina. >> the longer a body's been dead, the harder it is to determine how long it's been dead. >> we don't know who she is or why she was killed. >> but it tells a story all its own. >> whatever happened to precede death, it probably was sexual. >> a story of anger and hatred. >> at what point does a person realize that, you know, they're dying? >> and a violent end. >> had this person remained anonymous, we would have had nowhere to go. on a cold, spring afternoon in 2004, ray lee jacobs found what looked like human bones in

the backyard of the home he rented in wilmington, north carolina. >> it was kind of gruesome. we came across these bones. it was horrible. at first, we seen her leg bones and then we came across her skull. you know, and ribs and -- and then we realized, you know, it wasn't fake. it was real. you know, so it was terrible. >> he called authorities who moved quickly to collect the remains and any possible forensic evidence. >> the bones had been scattered by the animals and maybe by the tide coming in because it was a marshland. it was a dump site. and there's a lot of garbage back there. >> anthropologist dr. midori albert and her team of student volunteers recovered about 160 bones, or 80% of the skeleton. the victim was a caucasian female about 30 years old, and from the length of her femur, about 5'4" tall.

the amount of decomposition indicated she'd been dead for approximately 18 months. and it was clear the woman died violently. >> when i see injuries that were as extensive as this particular case, i'm sort of perplexed by what the individual, what the victim was going through while sustaining these injuries and how long death might have occurred. >> the woman had a broken nose, broken ribs and had been stabbed with a sharp object numerous times in the lower abdomen. >> it indicated to me somebody who might have been stabbing or mutilating this individual, stabbed 50 times. at what point do you just not feel any more stab wounds? >> the lack of clothing found near the remains was also telling. >> the nudity would indicate a certain behavior pattern. that would indicate that whatever happened to precede

their death, it probably was sexual. >> fennell believed it was a clear sign of rage and a possible indication the killer knew the victim. he also believed the killer was familiar with the area. >> someone knew they could get back there and hide this body there without being seen while they were hiding the body. >> because ray jacobs had lived in the rental home only a short time, he wasn't considered a suspect in the homicide. >> whoever put the bones there or had done this, you know, i was afraid that they would probably come back or, you know, show up unexpectedly and, you know, so i didn't really know what to think at the time after that. >> the first order of business was to identify the victim. a task that wouldn't be easy. according to the doe network, an organization that tracks the number of unknown victims, there

were 100 other cases involving unidentified victims in north carolina alone. investigators hoped that forensic anthropology could narrow the search. >> obviously, in order to do any kind of investigation, you have to start with figuring out who this person is. this allergy season, will you be a sound sleeper, or a mouth breather. a mouth breather! well, put on a breathe right strip and shut your mouth. allergy medicines open your nose over time,

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the victim found in the north carolina marsh had suffered a violent death. she was beaten, stabbed and her nude body left in the marsh in the cold of winter. but who was this person? >> her remains were laid out in the lab, and she was somebody i saw every day. every day i go in the lab, turn the lights on, work on another case or we hold a class in there. i would look over at her and often wonder how long it was going to take to get any kind of confirmation. >> investigators had a theory that the killer was local. >> it had to be someone who had some familiarity with that particular plot of land. >> and if the killer was local, the victim might be as well. so investigators searched

missing persons reports for caucasian females living in a 50-mile radius who disappeared in the last 18 months. this yielded a number of possibilities, but the closest match was 31-year-old scarlett wood. she was unmarried and living at home so she could care for her mother who was suffering from liver cancer. on the night she disappeared, she told her mother she was going to a party with friends. >> it was in january, and it was cold. and i woke up with the funniest feeling. i had a superstition. i said, scarlett, i have a bad feeling something's going to happen. i said you just stay here tonight. she said, no, i'll be all right. >> but scarlett never returned. >> she was always good about checking in with them, saying where she was going to be, if she wasn't going to be home in a certain amount of time. >> investigators hoped to compare scarlett's dental records with the unknown victim, but their attempt was unsuccessful.

>> she had dental records but they were ten years old. i couldn't find a dentist that kept their records that long. >> and initially scientists couldn't use dna testing either. >> they couldn't pull the dna from the remains from the bones. apparently the bones were too dried out. >> investigators were facing the very real possibility that their victim would never be identified. then forensic anthropologist dr. midori albert had an idea. >> i'd been familiar with a procedure called skull photo video superposition where you take an actual skull and you can take a photograph of a person and actually blend the two images together. and what we tend to do with that is we look for different anatomical landmarks and points of similarity. >> unfortunately, the university of north carolina didn't have the facilities to perform this procedure. the hardware and software can cost as much as $35,000. so dr. albert did the next best

thing. she asked one of her colleagues to improvise. >> i went to shane batista on campus who is a computer guru and is very familiar with open source software, software that is available to anybody as a free download. >> batista found a free program called g.i.m.p., or ganu image manipulation program. >> g.i.m.p. is an unfortunate acronym. pretty much feature for feature an equivalent of adobe photoshop. >> to see if it worked, he performed a forensic test on himself. >> i sat myself down and set up a web camera on the computer and took some photographs of myself at what i tried to get to be the same orientation. >> he superimposed his photo over a plastic skull. he separated both images into quadrants and looked for

consistencies in the images. as he expected, there were none. >> i was able to get a creepy image that showed that that wasn't my skull, which we pretty much knew. >> batista moved on to the ultimate test. pictures of scarlett wood were superimposed over the skull of the murder victim. the similarities were immediately apparent. >> it kind of lined up pretty quickly. and so it was the ease of the fit that got me pretty confident at the outset that we were on the right track. >> it seemed possible that the victim was scarlett wood, although investigators still weren't 100% certain. but at least they had somewhere to start.

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with the skeleton found on private property, investigators first turned to the property owner and the residents as potential suspects. investigators learned that there were two tenants living on the property at the time of the murder. both men in their mid to late 20s. >> they both had some histories with law enforcement of

questionable character. >> the landlord told police the men moved out a year and a half earlier, which would have been around the time of the murder. >> they left in a hurry, leaving behind furniture, clothing. there was some women's clothing left in the house. some underwear, that kind of thing. >> hoping for answers, police found one of the men in hampstead, north carolina, 28 miles away, and brought him in for questioning. >> did you guys have parties at the house? what kind of weapons do you have? >> neither one of us got anything to hide. >> well, how do you know that? >> the man said he knew nothing about the murder and never met scarlett wood. he said he and his roommate weren't getting along and they moved out of the rental property after living there only a few months. >> just roommates breaking up, money issues. >> police weren't so sure and sent a forensic team to search the house. all of the floors, walls and ceilings were sprayed with

luminol, but they showed no signs of blood. >> after interviewing the tenants and the previous tenants, we were pretty much at a standstill. >> next, investigators interviewed all of scarlett wood's friends. and her best friend, lynn bolinger, said she knew where scarlett was headed on the night she went missing. she said scarlett spent every friday night at a local motel where there was usually a party. >> they were at a motel partying, drinking, having beer and just having a good time. i believe it was scarlett and three or four other people. >> police interviewed several individuals who attended that party. they said everyone left around 2:00 a.m., except scarlett and a friend of hers, 47-year-old john wayne boyer. >> john boyer is a truck driver who actually worked at a couple of different locations here in

wilmington. >> boyer no longer lived in the area. he had been interviewed by police after scarlett disappeared. >> they were partying and drinking, scarlett wanted to leave. and he said he didn't want to leave and she left. >> boyer said she left around 3:00 a.m. on foot. at the time, no one really believed boyer's story, that scarlett would have walked home seven miles away in freezing cold temperatures. >> she was not equipped for the cold. it was about 17 degrees that night. i believe she had on just a pair of jeans and with a light coat. >> but john boyer had no criminal history and he and scarlett were acquaintances. >> she used to baby-sit his ex-girlfriend's children. so he had a personal relationship with her. >> scarlett's friends, however, despised him. >> my father had his own trucking business. so we knew about this man.

he was really big. he drank a lot. and he just -- he acted fine, but i just -- there was something about him i just didn't like, i didn't trust. >> investigators were able to locate the minivan boyer owned at the time of scarlett's disappearance. >> we ended up finding that van and doing a search on it. and we ended up finding nothing in it. >> they also searched the hotel room where the party took place. >> the room was examined for blood. we used the luminol to determine if there was blood. >> unfortunately, they had redecorated that particular hotel room, so some of the furniture was new, but there was no evidence found of any kind of bodily fluids or blood or anything like that. >> unsolicited a psychic called saying that scarlett's body was dumped in an industrial area about a block away from the hotel.

>> my partner and myself looked around, kicked the bushes, that type of thing, didn't locate anything. >> again, investigators were at a standstill. they had no dna proof that the skeleton was scarlett wood. they had no blood evidence to prove that there had been violence in the hotel room or in john boyer's van. in fact, they had no evidence at all.

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using a technique called facial photo superimposition, a forensic anthropologist made a preliminary finding that the unidentified skeleton was 31-year-old scarlett wood. but this wasn't an identification that would hold up in court. investigators had sent the remains to an outside forensic laboratory, hoping to get a dna profile. but for reasons no one can quite understand, the lab was unsuccessful. >> we would never know for sure who our victim was without the dna. i'm not sure what that is, but they just couldn't pull the dna from the bones. so they just advised us almost like a year and a half later, just couldn't do it. just couldn't find dna.

>> nothing seemed to be coming of the analysis, and after the first year passed, we were quite disturbed and very upset about it. >> undeterred, investigators sent the skeleton for a forensic second opinion to a private laboratory. this one in pennsylvania. there, scientists tried drilling into a tooth and found just enough tooth pulp to generate a dna profile. >> within three weeks, they came back with a positive identification. >> and with more digging, sergeant john leonard discovered that scarlett wood had surgery performed on her finger just before she disappeared and that a biopsy was performed. >> by law, i guess medically, they have to keep these things for seven years, i was told. i spoke to the doctor that did the operation on her, and he advised me i could go to the

place that stored this biopsy, and i was able to get it. >> incredibly, dna testing of that biopsy sample matched the dna profile from the victim's tooth. >> when the dna came back and confirmed that my victim was scarlett wood, and that john boyer was the last person to be seen with her, we ended up going to augusta, georgia, and interviewing john boyer. >> at first, boyer repeated what he told investigators several years earlier. that scarlett grew impatient waiting for him to give her a ride. she decided to walk home instead and left the motel room around 3:00 a.m. sergeant leonard didn't believe it. >> i've been talking to you since 10:00 this morning and all we've heard is lies. >> okay, guys, i have the body now, okay? so i'm going to be able to tell if you're lying to me. >> and with that, his story changed.

>> that's when he told me he wanted to have sex. she said okay, but he couldn't perform. >> we had a little sex a little bit. we tried it. she got pissed off cause i couldn't keep it up with her, she told me, "you're just an old man." >> she was belittling him about him not being able to perform. and he ended up pushing her. >> she wasn't bleeding. i know that. >> she wasn't bleeding? >> no, she was not bleeding. >> after you pushed her and she hit the nightstand? >> yeah. >> boyer said scarlett hit her head accidentally against the nightstand, but dr. midori albert believes it's more likely her head was pushed into the table forcibly. prosecutors also believe boyer broke her ribs. since it was late, boyer was able to carry scarlett's body outside to his truck without attracting notice.

he then took her to the marshy field near the trucking company where he worked. the evidence shows he used some sort of sharp object and repeatedly stabbed her, going so far as to mutilate her. and then, he left her there. >> i learned a lot from her skeleton. and i believe in death, she made significant contributions. >> in april of 2007, john boyer pled guilty to a charge of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. scarlett's family still have problems accepting the enormity of the crime. >> he never gave a true story as to what really happened, so i don't guess we'll ever really know. >> i still don't think ms. woods has got it in her mind her daughter's not coming home. >> investigators also suspect

that boyer was involved in the murder of 26-year-old rose marie mallet that took place a year before scarlett wood was murdered. >> when he saw the photo, he stopped everything and said, "i know her. she's a prostitute. i've had sex with her. i want an attorney." so based on that utterance, he is a suspect in this homicide, also. >> but john boyer is now behind bars because simple technology available to anyone identified the victim of his crime. >> we'd have never known that it was her. if it wasn't for the forensic evidence. we'd have never known. >> i'm glad we got this guy. i was really -- still am honored to have been a part of the process and pleased with how the system can stay with it to -- to help this unidentified person

gain some justice to give the family some peace, and to take this bad guy off the streets so that, you know, he's not able to do it again. up next, a young boy is the only witness to murder, but he didn't see the man's face. >> whoever came there came there with a specific purpose to kill. >> the killer did almost everything right. >> the serial number on this weapon was obliterated. >> until he made one small mistake. >> that masking tape was of the same color as the masking tape that was wrapped around the homemade silencer. >> it was a crime that defied a simple explanation. >> the goriest crime scene i've ever witnessed in my 17 years in law enforcement. >> if they had not found the big bag of evidence, this crime may never have been solved.