i simply saw with my own eyes looking at the dead body on the morning that i did the autopsy. as far as i am concerned, her death is intentional homicide. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com for almost 20 years a young woman was believed to be missing in the dense colorado mountains. but 12 small pine needles and a clump of hair suggested that investigators narrow their search to an area 9,000 feet above sea level. this is how forensic plant ecology helped solve a very cold case. ♪ >> after graduating from college, 25-year-old michele wallace decided to pursue her love of photography. she was known primarily for her

photos of people. but she decided to try her hand at landscape photography, and she headed to the mountainous wilderness of western colorado. >> she rode polo ponies and branded cows and went rock climbing and was a student at the rochester institute and was quite a student of photography. >> she was a realist and she knew how to face things and worked through them. >> michele faithfully called her parents almost every day to let them know where she was and what she was doing. but when several days passed without a call, her parents became alarmed. >> i knew that she didn't run off. you know, they said, well, this is one of these girls that, you know, just decides she's a free spirit and off she goes. she was not that way.

>> when local officials were told she was missing, they instituted what was to become the largest manhunt in colorado history. >> there were hundreds of people in the woods literally walking hand in hand across fields and mountains. >> search teams covered more than 3,000 square miles of isolated mountain landscape but found no sign of michele or her red station wagon. it was as if michele had simply disappeared. then, a week after she was reported missing, there was a potential break. a local rancher told police about a german shepherd that had come down from the mountains and chased his cattle. the rancher said he shot and killed the dog. the name on the dog's collar was

okie, michele's german shepherd. >> the fact that the dog obviously had been separated from her and found dead later was of great concern because people felt clearly michele wallace never would have willingly been separated from her dog. >> another ranch hand came forward with even more information. he said michele gave him a ride in the mountains after his car broke down. he said his friend, roy, sat in the front seat with michele, and that he was in the back seat with the german shepherd. >> the ranch hand remembers the dog in particularly because he had to sit in the back seat of the station wagon with the dog. and amusingly recalled the dog drooling on him as his new buddy, roy, in the front struck up the conversation with the girl. >> he said michele dropped him off at a local bar and she was taking roy further down the road

to his truck. he said he didn't know roy's last name and never saw either of them again. >> the police are looking for a mysterious roy. they don't have a last name for this man. all they know is that he's the last one seen with michele. >> investigators suspected roy was the key to michele wallace's disappearance. rubut then i got ap domain and built my website all at godaddy. now i look so professional, i just got my first customer who isn't related to me. get a domain, website and email starting at $1/month all at godaddy. like it used to?ould bounce back

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michele wallace was last seen in her car with a hitchhiker in the colorado mountains. about a week later police stopped a man matching the hitchhiker's description in pueblo, colorado, 160 miles away. he was identified as roy melanson. >> mr. melanson's background is pretty checkered. he'd been accused of and convicted of sexual assault in, i believe, louisiana and texas, had served prison time.

>> in melanson's possession was michele's backpack, driver's license and pawnshop ticket for a 35 millimeter camera. >> on the camera was was a roll of film. the last photographs on the roll of film were photographs of michele's dog, okie, wearing his hiking packs. in the very last photograph on the roll was a picture of roy melanson with a young woman he met in pueblo, colorado. >> melanson denied having anything to do with michele's disappearance. he said they stopped for coffee and he admitted sneaking out the back way and stealing her car. and he said michele's dog was tied up outside. melanson told police he dumped michele's car in amarillo, texas. when police recovered the car, they found no evidence of violence either on the inside or outside. although the car had been wiped

clean of fingerprints. >> all they have is somebody who's admitted stealing a car from a young woman that he left in town. there is no body. there's no evidence of foul play. >> it was also suspicious that this wasn't the only missing persons case melanson was involved in. >> there is another case where a woman in port arthur, texas, who was his landlady, disappeared and ironically the only thing that was found was her car and he was the last person seen with her. >> michele's disappearance sent her mother into a serious depression. >> she became more and more despondent. she couldn't live without her daughter. she lived through her daughter. >> one morning, george would be to discover his wife was dead. >> i never felt anybody cold before. you just can't believe someone that you lived with for 34 years

would do it. >> she killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates. >> when my daughter was killed, she was killed. simple. >> michele's mother left a suicide note which included one last wish. >> george actually showed me that note that said, when you find our daughter, bury her remains next to me. bury her beside me. >> with no evidence of foul play, and without a body, the case of michele wallace's disappearance went completely cold. >> because of the difficulties in proving the crime of murder without being awfully darn sure that your victim is dead. >> five long years passed, until investigators got another potential break. a hiker on an isolated trail found what looked like a clump

of braided hair. >> interestingly enough, those braids are identical in appearance to a photograph that was actually obtained from the camera of michele wallace when it was recovered in 1974 from the pueblo police department who had recovered it from a pawnshop. >> again, the case stalled. the hair, while promising, looked to be a dead end. another decade passed and the case grew cold yet again. until a homicide investigator, cathy ireland, discovered something in the evidence file that had been overlooked. >> so i came across a hair brush that had been bagged and sealed and it had michele wallace's name on it. >> and the forensic evidence it contained changed the course of the investigation. of your daily routine.f so why treat your mouth any differently? complete the job with listerine®.

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cold case investigators discovered an unfortunate oversight. when michele wallace disappeared, no one thought to compare samples from her hair brush to the braided hair found in the mountains. so everything was sent to joseph snyder for forensic analysis. under a microscope, snyder

visually compared samples from michele's hair brush to the braided hair, looking for similarities in color, consistency, and structure. >> microscopic characteristics were very consistent with each other. the widths were the same. the medullary component was the same. the center portions and the mid-region portions of the hair were the same. >> but this was not conclusive. microscopic similarity is still not a match. but with this new evidence, detective ireland was not willing to let the case go cold again. so she contacted a group of scientists with an odd mission and an unusual name. they called themselves necrosearch, and they find bodies no one else seems to find. >> we are a multidisciplinary, entirely volunteer organization

that helps law enforcement look for clandestine graves and to recover evidence and to recover bodies from those graves. >> for necrosearch, the starting point was the braided hair that was believed to be from michele wallace. forensic plant ecologist vicki trammell looked for any plant material that was in the hair. >> the hair had spent five years outside most likely being drug around by scavengers like coyotes. so my question was not so much where is the body, because i had no way of determining that, but where had the hair spent five years? >> the lack of soil in the hair suggested the body had not been buried. >> the hair wasn't muddy and there was bleach marks.

in other words, bleached by the sun in the places that were exposed. and that would not have happened had the hair been buried for five years. >> trammell also found pine needles and shards of bark in the braids. the bark was from an aspen tree which tends to grow in cleared areas. she also found needles from two coniferous tree species, the subalpine fur and the engleman spruce. subalpine furs grow in elevations above 9,000 feet. and engleman spruces grow in wet areas suggesting the body was somewhere on the mountain's north slope, which doesn't get much sun. trammell identified an area matching all these parameters just one mile from where the braided hair was discovered 15 years earlier. the necrosearch team made up entirely of volunteers moved into action.

>> they have a commonality to them, is that they, i think they all wanted to be sherlock holmes at one time. >> the team marked off the area and began what's known as a grid search. each grid measuring one square meter. >> on their hands and knees, just a few feet apart and literally crawling across the forest floor, looking for any traces of something out of the ordinary. these are scientists. they're used to looking for the minute that is not in the ordinary. >> search teams thoroughly analyze one grid area before moving on to the next. on the first day they found nothing. on the second, it was a different story. >> a lady by the name of cecilia armbrust, who i believe was a geologist with that group, had actually gone down the hill from

where the others were working to answer the call of nature. and on her way back up had discovered what appeared to her to be a skull. >> she yelled out, "i found it!" we didn't believe her at first. even though we know she isn't much of a practical joker, we didn't believe her at first. >> the skull contained an unmistakable feature michele's father told police about almost 20 years earlier. >> michele had a gold tooth and the sunlight was just right and it reflected, and that's how they discovered her. >> she had never been buried. and, as a matter of fact, we could determine that her body probably had just been tossed off the side of the road and had rolled up against a tree, and from there gravity and scavengers had taken their toll. >> i was glad i could be able to help a little bit, and i

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almost 20 years after michele wallace's disappearance, a team of forensic specialists searching through the high-altitude forests of western colorado found a human skull. nearby were other human bones identified by a forensic anthropologist as those from a female in her late teens to mid-20s. >> this woman had been thrown from the road and come to rest against the tree. her body, her bones, were found in such a manner as to indicate exactly how she had come to rest. >> one of the scientists tested this hypothesis by dropping a bucket from the road at the top of the hill. >> the amazing thing is that the bucket landed at exactly where the cranium had been. >> the necrosearch team also

found pieces of michele's clothing. the zipper from her jeans looked like it had been pulled apart violently. >> it's obvious that the zipper has been torn apart, as opposed to simply open in the normal way. so there's evidence of some violence here. >> a forensic odontologist compared michele's dental records to the teeth in the skull and made a positive identification. police and prosecutors now focus their attention on roy melanson, the last known person to see her alive. >> what do you want to do? you want to kill, that's what you want to do. even if it cost your life. >> prosecutors knew michele stopped to give melanson and the other ranch hand a ride into town after their car broke down.

michele dropped one of the ranch hands off at the local bar, but the other, roy melanson, asked her if she would drop him off farther down the road so he could get his truck. she agreed. >> all right. >> prosecutors believe somewhere along the way, melanson ordered michele to stop the car. he let the dog out. there was a struggle, resulting in the ripped zipper. and he killed her. the evidence suggests he dumped her body down the side of the mountain. okie made his way to a ranch about 15 miles away, an indication that michele was dead since he wouldn't have left her side if she had been alive. melanson drove michele's car to texas where he used her 35 millimeter camera, then pawned it with the unexposed film inside.

>> there were certainly the inferences that were drawn from the fact that he was buying clothing in downtown gunnison, driving michele wallace's vehicle at that time, which told us he knew she was dead and he knew she was not around to make a report of a stolen vehicle. he was brazen about that particular fact. >> by this time, roy melanson was serving time in a kentucky prison for burglary, but was extradited to colorado to face trial for murder. melanson pleaded not guilty and even refused to attend the trial. instead, he listened to the proceedings from his prison cell. >> we are not required to prove motive. the issue got raised, however, during the course of the trial in closing argument. because the defense said, where's the motive? after the defense raised that issue, i asked the jury to look at the zipper that was recovered from the levis, because it was torn.

>> in september of 1993, a jury found roy melanson guilty of first-degree murder. he was sentenced to life in prison. >> see these bastards, the devastation they leave behind, nobody knows. they think they killed an individual, but they killed dozens of people. >> michele's father is thankful to forensic science and the volunteers who worked so diligently to find his daughter. >> you can't express the gratitude. i just couldn't believe that it finally came to an end. >> the system of justice worked in this particular case. whether the system itself ever awards justice to a victim or their family is, in my opinion, a hard question to answer.

when you look at the loss of life in this particular case and the tragedy associated with it, that verdict is never going to make them whole. never will. but i have some confidence based upon what happened that our system does work. and it works fairly. for seven years, a group of bank robbers flaunted their expertise in front of security cameras and law enforcement could do little more than watch and marvel. they left no forensic evidence behind and always got away before police arrived. but how they stood, what they said, and the clothes they wore all told a story, one that could be deciphered by forensic science. ♪ calabash, north carolina, is a