patient. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com criminals usually leave some kind of trace evidence at the crime scene. the trick is to find it. scientists used some aurora pink powder, cyanoacrylate fumes and a computer database to identity a suspect in the midst of a senseless crime spree. ♪ it was 4:00 a.m. on an october morning, and kim miller was manning the police switchboard. >> stay on the line, please. i was working the night shift. i think i had only worked there like around six months, so i hadn't been trained at that particular position very long.

>> there isn't much crime in lansing, michigan. it's usually quiet. but this night was different. >> all of a sudden, i took this call, and this lady said that someone's breaking into my house. >> 911. >> someone broke into my house. i live at 4217 brighton drive. [ screaming ] >> ma'am, stay on the line. the line went dead, so i knew something was very wrong. [ sirens ] >> police were dispatched immediately. it took less than four minutes to get there. at first glance, everything looked fine, but behind the house was clear evidence of a break-in. >> the door had been kicked in and kicked in violently. the door was actually off of the frame and there was glass from the door outside on the front porch as well as on the inside entranceway from the door. >> inside, down the hallway, police found the bathroom door

had also been knocked off its hinges. on the floor was the body of 67-year-old audrey nichols. she been shot in the head at close range with a .32-caliber bullet. >> the phone that they believe that she was using was found right in that area, i believe in the hallway just outside the bathroom. >> the police officers knew mrs. nichols. she had worked for the michigan state police for 17 years analyzing traffic accidents. she had retired just four months earlier and lived alone. her three children were grown and living elsewhere. >> we all felt violated by it just because so many of us were alone. it was very shocking to us. it was numbing. and there was a lot of anger, an awful lot of anger. >> since police arrived within five minutes of the call, the killer wasn't inside the house long. none of the drawers or closets

had been ransacked, but audrey's purse was missing. >> looked like the house had been selected for a break-in so that somebody could go in and find something of value, probably to purchase for drugs. >> a preliminary look at the evidence left no doubt about what had happened. audrey heard the intruder kick in the back door. she grabbed the portable phone, ran to the bathroom and locked herself in. but apparently, he heard her on the phone. [ screaming ] [ shot ] then grabbed her purse and left. >> here was a woman that was huddled on the floor of her bathroom on 911, who, at least in the opinion of the forensic pathologist, turned her head to avoid what she saw was coming, the fatal gunshot.

it doesn't get any worse than that. >> unfortunately, police could find no witnesses. >> we didn't have any neighbors or anything that saw or heard anybody in the neighborhood that could give us any type of physical description. >> he has no regard for human life. and our concern was at that point, we needed to find this guy and put him away. they lived. ♪ they lived. ♪ they lived. ♪ (dad) we lived... thanks to our subaru. ♪ (announcer) love. it's what makes a subaru, a subaru. it's how i try to live... how i stay active.

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police and forensic experts searched audrey nichols' home hoping to find evidence left by the person who killed her. >> the victim was in the bathroom, dead. so, we determined a pathway from the entranceway to the bathroom. and so, everything in between has to be processed. and then there was no other way out of the house but out of the door that the suspect came in. >> in the kitchen, police found one foreign fingerprint, although it was badly smudged. there were shards of glass spread over the linoleum floor of the kitchen. was it possible that the killer stepped on a shard of glass,

leaving his shoe impression? >> the theory of any crime scene investigation is that the suspect is always going to leave something of themself at the scene or take something away that's going to link them to the crime. >> the shards were collected and sent to the forensics lab. >> glass is such a smooth, perfect surface that it's really the best surface we can possibly hope for to get a footwear impression on. >> the linoleum floor was dusted with a powder called aurora pink that sticks to any moisture present. then, using what is called an alternate light source, any powder that clings to the moisture will fluoresce. >> if you have a patterned linoleum where the background is interfering with the impression, you can usually use your alternative light source to eliminate the background, and then the fluorescent powder that you use to dust up the impression is very bright and so it makes a very good contrast.

>> it was successful. they saw one clear print, the heel portion of the killer's left shoe. it appeared to be an athletic shoe. >> most of the prints you see are partial prints. you may sometimes get some full footwear impressions, but with people walking over on top of them, it can destroy the prints and many times you only get partial prints. >> back in the forensics lab, scientists saw what looked to be another shoe impression on a shard of broken glass. so, they placed it in a tank filled with heated super glue. the fumes create a permanent image of the print, and it looked like the toe area of the killer's right shoe. >> because we had a toe area on the glass and a heel area on the linoleum, we basically almost had an entire shoe impression. so, we did have a very good idea what the entire tread pattern looked like. >> i remember looking at the glass and saying, we have some really good footwear impressions

here. >> today, forensic analysts have access to sophisticated databases of all kinds of shoe impressions. it includes men's, women's, even children's shoes, both dress and leisure from all over the world. this database is called sole mate. >> elements of the shoe patterns will be entered in by the operator. so, if it has squares in the ball area of the shoe or the toe area of the shoe, you would enter that in, and then the computer comes back with a list of possible shoe treads, and you can pull those up and look at them to determine, you know, if any of those are the shoe you're actually looking for. >> checking and cross-checking finally gave investigators their first solid piece of information. >> the footwear impressions were consistent with having been made by a spalding tennis shoe. >> unfortunately, the print wasn't complete, so some details were unclear. >> the fact that he's wearing

tennis shoes was about the only given that we had. >> a month after audrey's death, a pedestrian found her purse in a field about a mile from her home. her identification was inside, but all the money was gone. this proved robbery was a motive, but why murder? >> it was an unanswered question for all of us. it was like, who would do this, why would they do it, and how? how did they choose her? >> research shows criminals often commit their crimes close to where they live. so, police focused their search in the surrounding areas but got no leads. >> you always fear that this might be one of those cold cases that might end up on the shelf, and this was a very, very serious case. so, we had this concern that we hoped this one doesn't go cold. >> then, six weeks after

audrey's murder, police got a break. police apprehended a man breaking into a home just down the street from audrey's. >> get down on the ground! >> irony of ironies. they end up with a home nearby audrey's that was broken into, and the guy's wearing sneakers. not only is he wearing sneakers, but he's wearing spalding sneakers. >> there were glass fragments embedded right in the shoes of the first suspect's shoes. >> it's like, whoa, is this the guy? and glimmers of hope that maybe there had been a solution to the audrey slaying. >> but it didn't turn out to be that simple. imagine - she won't have to remember passwords.

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who had prior arrests for petty theft and burglary. >> a suspect happened to be wearing spalding tennis shoes like we had told the investigators that they were looking for. >> since these are spaldings and we already know that we need spaldings, we needed to have these analyzed right away because this could be the big break in audrey's shooting. >> police sent the shoes to the forensics lab, where they were inked and printed. using transparent overlays, amy michaud compared them to the two partial prints found in audrey nichols' home. >> that was compared directly to the photograph of the footwear impression on the linoleum and then directly to the glass. >> michaud was looking for two things -- class characteristics, which result from how the shoe is made, and accidental characteristics, which result from how it's worn. >> just the random wear that occurs to the bottoms of those shoes through ordinary activities every day, it

produces cuts and scratches and nicks in the bottoms of your shoes, which make it unique to all other shoes. and so, it's those scratches that we really look for. >> after extensive comparisons, michaud called investigators with some bad news. >> the sizes were slightly off. things just didn't line up correctly. and then we were absolutely positive that those weren't the shoes that made the impressions left at the crime scene. >> what we had hoped would be good evidence turns out to be absolutely useless and unrelated. it wasn't that break that we were looking for. >> now we had to basically start from zero again and move forward. >> investigators went back to canvassing the neighborhood but feared audrey's murder would go unsolved. then, almost four months after audrey's murder, the local district attorney received a letter from a man in prison. >> do you remember the retired state police lady that was killed in lansing?

i can give up the killer for a deal with the prosecutor. he said he found her in a bathroom. she was calling for help, so he knocked the phone from her hand and stomped on it. when she looked up, she was looking at his face, so he shot her in the head with a .32 caliber. see what you can do. >> the letter was from a prisoner named carl hedley. hedley said that he heard about the murder from a cellmate who was awaiting trial for shooting and robbing a truck driver. >> it had to be checked out. sometimes in the jailhouse people pick up information that they think they can sell or trade off, so that always has to be taken with a degree of skepticism. >> but the details of the letter were all accurate. >> he had details that we had not released to the public. there's only one way he could have come into that type of information. he was either there or he got it

from somebody who was. >> the man's name was john skinner, 22 years old. homicide investigators questioned skinner about the murder, but he denied it. >> and like everybody else that we interview is accused of a murder, never had anything to do it, weren't there. you know, i don't remember where i was that night, but i wasn't there. >> skinner's fingerprints did not match the unidentified print found in audrey nichols' kitchen, and there were no spalding tennis shoes in the prison storage unit or at the local county jail where skinner was first processed. >> it was a tough situation because of the fact that the homicide occurred approximately a month earlier and we're no closer to finding this horrific person out running around, possibly killing people. >> again, the investigation faced a crisis. without a fingerprint match and with no spalding tennis shoes,

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esurance. backed by allstate. click or call. 22-year-old john skinner was the prime suspect in audrey nichols' murder. he was in prison awaiting trial for an unrelated crime when he allegedly bragged to a cellmate

that he had killed audrey nichols and gotten away with it. but police couldn't find any evidence that skinner even owned a pair of spalding brand tennis shoes similar to the prints found at the crime scene. >> we had the information from the jailhouse informant. we knew that we had to have something else. >> it was imperative to get the shoes to do the comparison work. and the longer you wait, the chances of getting the shoes lessens, and the chances of more damage occurring to the shoes if somebody's wearing them, that lessens the chance of an identification. >> as a last resort, police spoke with everyone working in the prisoner processing area of the county jail, and they got a break. skinner's prison file indicated that his mother picked up her son's personal belongings after he was incarcerated. investigators rushed to her home, which was less than a mile

from the murder scene. >> so, those sneakers were absolutely essential. the mother could have taken them and thrown them in a trash can, or he could have called her and said get rid of them, and that could have been very damaging. >> but police found a worn pair of spaulding tennis shoes in john skinner's bedroom. amy mechaud compared skinner's pair to the transparent overlays of the partial prints found at the murder scene. >> on both of the impressions, the one from the linoleum and the one from the glass, there were enough accidental markings and characteristics that were visible in the impression that lined up with the known shoes that we were able to say without a doubt that these were the shoes that made those impressions. >> based on the forensic evidence, prosecutors say that skinner kicked in the back door and broke the glass. as he stepped into the room, his

sneaker left a partial print on the broken shard. his other shoe left a partial print on the linoleum floor. audrey heard the commotion, grabbed her telephone, ran into the bathroom, locked the door and called police. >> 911. >> someone broke into my house. >> when skinner heard this, he kicked open the bathroom door and killed her. [ screaming ] [ shot ] police arrive within five minutes, but skinner had already fled with audrey's purse. inside was all of $100 in cash. >> his drive to get money was more important than a human life. >> his downfall was the fact that he was wearing those spaldings. >> there's no reason for his footwear impressions to be there, because he did not know the victim, the victim did not know him. >> police questioned skinner one last time. he asked about the evidence against him.

>> after denying the fact that he was there, his main question to me was, is do you have my prints in the house? and my response to that is, yes, i do, john. i have your prints, so i need to know whether or not you planned this killing or whether or not it was a random act. >> skinner then realized the investigation was over. he confessed to the crime and said he chose the house at random, but all he planned to do was to steal some money for drugs. >> he said he didn't go there with the intent to kill her or anything like that. he heard her talking on the phone and only wanted to make her stop talking on the phone and somehow the gun went off accidentally, which we thought was a bunch of bull crap. >> we never did identify him with latent prints. i don't know whether he was wearing gloves or not wearing gloves at the time. >> after the arrest, we talked to him about where the gun was, because our main goal was to get

the gun back so it couldn't be used in any other crimes. he indicated that we would never find the gun, it was thrown down a sewer, and later on he recanted that story saying someone else had the gun and we would never find it. >> john skinner pled guilty to second-degree murder. he was sentenced to life in prison. >> i'm glad for the forensic scientists that were able to close this case. i think that audrey rests better, knowing that her kids don't have to wonder what happened and her friends don't have to wonder what happened. >> while investigating homicides, the first line of defense is forensic sciences. the person coming in and fuming the floors, obtaining fingerprints. without them, would half of the crimes be solved? probably not. as technology progresses, i hope forensic science does. >> in this case, forensic science was at the very heart of

this case being solved and being successfully prosecuted. without it, who knows? we might have a cold case on the shelf, plain and simple. but with the forensics, everything came together. a beautiful mail-order bride, her millionaire husband, and the gardener. as unusual a love triangle as you will ever find, until one of them died in a suspicious car crash. was this truly an accident or something more sinister? ♪ jonathan nyce, a 53-year-old pharmaceutical executive, entrepreneur and millionaire, met his beautiful, young filipino wife, michelle, through a classified ad. she was a mail-order bride.