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a forensic puzzle for crime scene investigations. >> we'll apply the solution. then you know you have a positive for human blood. >> a brick wall for interrogators. >> tell me why -- look at me. why are those guns in that house? >> can this detective team unravel the truth in time? >> okay. do it. >> you'll live this case just as they do. >> the sights, the sounds, the smells. that is burned into your memory. you can't forget it. >> that's coming up next when "vegas homicide: race against the clock" with stone phillips continues.

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and now "vegas homicide: race against the clock." from the las vegas strip, here is stone phillips. >> good evening. you know the glitzy side of this city. tonight, an up close, inside look at its gritty side. as two las vegas detectives try to solve a brutal double homicide. "dateline's" cameras are there from the crime scene, to the crime lab, even inside the interrogation room and you are going to hear it all straight from the detectives themselves. >> my name's jeff ruskin. i'm a homicide detectives with the las vegas metropolitan police department. >> my name is mark mcnett, i'm a homicide detective in las vegas. >> we got the call about 6:00

a.m. and it was -- it was two, young hispanic males dumped on the side of a dirt road near some junk yards. >> together we have seen a lot over the years. we have seen a lot of different kinds of murders. but we'd never seen anything like this. this was bizarre. and a total mystery from the very beginning. >> i arrived at the scene. i saw two young males taped up with tape on their mouth and hands. robe tied. their legs to their head. these two bodies were discovered this morning by a paper delivery man. >> sunrise with sue and scott. >> the story was on television before we really knew anything. >> first some breaking news. police are on the scene of a bizarre murder this morning.

officers say two people -- >> we have no witnesses. the crime scene basically is our only lead right now. >> my role from the beginning was to manage the crime scene investigation. all the evidence we could find at the scene was collected. bottles, cans, a cigarette pack. >> we do have some footwear impressions and tire tracks. the crime scene analysts take photographs of the footwear and tire impressions. and then they take castings. using plaster of paris. >> this was a particularly brutal murder. it was our job to find out who did it, bring them to justice. the big question in my mind was, what killed these two? most of the times it's obvious how the murder occurred. i'm not seeing any gunshot wounds but not in this case. we didn't have a clue. we have a large amount of white tape used on the victims.

ankles, wrists and mouths. if we could find fingerprints on that tape, it could lead us to the killers. a fingerprint, that would be nice. it was very odd the way the bodies were just dumped there. it is like somebody was trying to send a message and i had a lot of questions about how that could have been done. >> how did they get these guys in a car? must have tied them up after they got them in the car. how do you get a guy tied up like that inside a car? >> i conducted a canvass of the area. my goal to see if anyone in the area might have seen or heard anything in the night. >> just talking to see what time people were coming in to work. if they saw anything on the way in. if they have security out here that maybe goes and gets coffee in the middle of the night. >> no. none of us do that. >> okay. if somebody hears something or -- you know -- >> jeff and i have collectively seen hundreds of death scenes

and taken part in dozens and dozens of investigations. >> every one is unique and different and has a different story to tell. >> with this one, i needed to know who these guys were. what happened to them. who did this? see, that guy is not very bloody. the worst part of this mystery was, we didn't even know who these two young men were. >> doesn't appear to be any identification on them. so identifying them is going to be a real challenge. >> there's a bracelet on the ground. maybe get some dna off of that. after we'd done everything we could do at the scene, we went back to the office. as soon as we got back, we got a break. >> it's about 11:30 and we just got some information from a patrol officer. as luck would have it, some of the patrol officers who were out at the initial scene with us had

received a call later in the morning about an abandoned vehicle. >> and while the officer was conducting his initial investigation, realized that there was two young hispanic males associated with that vehicle and thought it might be related to our case. >> did you see when that car was parked? >> i seen it pull up. i can't didn't pay no attention to it. didn't think anything of it. but if i remember correctly, there was one person driving in the car. >> could you tell me if it was a man or a woman? >> if i was correct, it would be a man. >> while mark was checking out the car, i went over to the house where the owner of the car lived. >> how are you doing? when i arrived there, i talked to the brother of a guy and he said they were missing for two or three days and gave me pictures. when i looked at them, i knew it was the two victims.

okay. just get that pertinent information from you, okay? this is your brother? >> yes. >> okay. >> he is not a -- he is not like related by blood but my parents raised him since he was a kid. >> okay. one of the guy's names is clioafas martinez. clioafas was an 18-year-old kid who had just come to the united states about a year previously. here in las vegas and never missed a day of work. was a hard-working kid. >> he involved in any narcotics? >> my brother, he's a pretty good kid. >> never involved in criminal activity. just a nice, clean cut kid trying to live the american dream. he's never going to have children and he's never going to be able to have grandchildren. cut down at 18. it's a tragedy. and then i asked about his friend and the brother said the other guy's name was julian cano. he was the other guy missing.

>> he came here at the same time? >> he got here about two months ago. >> two months ago. they lived together at the same house. >> a friend owed him money and they were trying to -- they were talking about going over to collect their money. >> do you know what that's for? >> i don't know. >> after i got done, mark and i met up and i told him what i had learned. >> yeah, yeah. there you go. >> this is the two guys. >> who owed this guy money? >> that we don't know yet. >> clioafas. >> it's a real mystery right now. cause of death is -- at this point, unknown. >> we got back to the office. mark and i recalled a murder approximately a week earlier where the victim was tied or taped in a similar manner. we are just checking to see if there's anything linking the two. >> at that point we decided to talk to the detectives investigating that case. >> thanks, phil. >> they were tied in the same manner.

and i mean, it is really unusual to see somebody tied up the way to see somebody died up the way ours was and the way theirs were. i've seen that three times in ten years. i was wondering, do we have a killing spree? it was a race against the clock at that point. >> we needed to stop these guys before they killed anymore. >> in the dead of night, detectives get a crucial tip. is it the break they need? >> that lead sounded very promising and dangerous. vegas homicide, race against the clock continues.

vegas homicide, race against the clock continues. here again is stone phillips. far from the bright lights of the strip, the bodies of two young men are found hog tied and dumped in a junkyard. investigators think it could be the start of a killing spree. with few clues, each piece of evidence is precious. and the intricate work inside the crime lab is critical.

you're about to see how a single piece of tape helped unravel the truth. >> this was a particularly brutal crime. we had two dead guys who were bound, gagged and thrown on the side of the road near a junkyard in the north end of town. >> jeff and i started working day and night to try to find who did this. we'd finally positively identified both our victims. clioafas and julian cano. we needed to find out as much as we could about these two. >> can you show me where their rooms were? >> he was a lovely person. like i have two young sons. he loved our son. he loved kids. it was just one of those kind of persons that, you know, nobody

would have hurt him. >> this is clioafas' girlfriend? he saved his money. he hoped one day to bring his fiancee to the united states. so they could start a life together here. these two young men had their whole lives ahead of them. who knows what they have could have done, who they could have become? and that's all gone. >> i wish we could give him, you know, enough information to find these guys. it is to us like very painful and important, too, that they get caught. >> as i left the house, some of the family members asked me if i could please find who did this? i don't understand. >> he said help us please to -- >> i'll do my best. >> to a murder victim's family, what i do is everything. they need to know what happened, why, who did this? and if i can deliver that, that's very rewarding.

>> to me, there's nothing more solemn than reaching out and being the one that is able to speak for that person, you know, most crimes you have the ability to talk to a -- to the victim and ask them what happened and they can explain it to them and show them photographs. we don't have that luxury in homicide. >> down at the lab, some of the crime scene analysts were working on the tape used to bind the victims. >> there was a lot of tape involved in this case. we are looking at many, many hours if not a couple of days for dave to complete his processing on this evidence. >> specifically, on the tape, we were hoping to find the killer's fingerprints. >> there are two different patterns. we have a loop pattern and a small whirl pattern. anything involved in a wrapping of the tape around the ankles or ankles or face, that would be the person to wrap the tape on the victim.

>> we got our second big break about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning one night. >> it had been five days since the bodies had been discovered. two citizens called in and reported that they had some information about our murder. >> to the people that lived upstairs to them might have been involved in the crime. >> they're in the apartment and heavily armed with automatic rifles. >> that lead sounded very promising and dangerous. >> homicide investigations don't run on a nice monday through friday 8:00 to 5:00 schedule. >> it doesn't matter to us that the call came in at 3:00. day or night. that's when we're going to go to find out. >> you get up and go when the people call in. you run the information until the leads are done. >> dispatch got a call from some citizens claiming that last weekend some people that live

upstairs from them asked to borrow some tape and some rope. >> one of the witnesses told our sergeant what he had seen when he had been upstairs at his neighbor's apartment. >> goes up there, goes into the apartment and in one of the bedrooms he sees two pairs of male legs bound together with rope. and then a couple of other guys in the apartment kind of shut that door and throw him out. >> the witnesses hadn't called the police before then because they were very afraid. and when we learned how heavily armed they were, they had reason to be afraid. >> we tell you he had killed them, i interviewed one of the witnesses. one of the main suspects in the crime confessed to her about it. she told me his name was nicolas felix. nico to his friends. they put him in a vehicle? >> yeah. >> did he tell you how he killed them? >> this is what he said exactly. he was like, i was driving around for like a few hours and

then i went and checked on them to see if i would have to shoot them, but they were already dead. >> we have got at least four suspects involved in this, possibility of more. >> we needed to chase them all done. but this one guy nico, he started emerging as our primary suspect. so when we have got heavily armed murder suspects holed up in a house, we don't go in and get them. we call s.w.a.t. >> they handle search and arrest situations when we're dealing with this kind of particularly violent suspects. >> we got s.w.a.t., s.w.a.t. sergeant and negotiator out here. per their direction, patrol officers are evacuating neighboring apartments to the target. because the suspects are known to be armed. witnesses have said that they have an automatic rifle. like an ar-15. shotgun and revolver at a minimum in there. obviously, we're taking

precautions to make sure that no one else gets hurt. >> during a s.w.a.t. operation everyone, including us, is asked to withdraw to a safe distance. s.w.a.t. officers search the premise. unfortunately, they only found two of the suspects inside. >> what we need is any way to place the victims inside here, fingerprints, dna whatever. i searched the apartment. what i found were drugs, guns and a section of carpet where the stain that looks like it might be blood. most importantly, i found a roll of tape that seemed to match the kind of tape used to bind the victims. >> what about the blood? blood stains.

are you going to do that, too? >> the blood stains are going to do a hema trace on it for human blood or a primate. >> small. so we're going to apply that solution. if it's blood, it is going to mix and the first thing you are going to see is a small line of pure to tell you if the test is a valid test. then you know you have a positive for human blood. and we do have a line so that is human blood. at this point it's time for the showdown. if we take the two suspects, come back to the office, by the time we get here, i'd be up for probably a day and a half. dude, i am smoked right now. i am tired. whew. >> what i needed to find out from these guys is what their particular involvement in our murder was and if they had other information about other murders and in addition to that, what

information they could give me about nico, particularly his whereabouts. >> i'm about to go in the first interview with the first suspect. that's him sitting there. right now, i don't know what's going to happen when i walk in there. i don't know if he's going to immediately want to speak with a lawyer and that's that or if he's going to give us a statement so right now, i'm going to go in cold. get him up with miranda and see if he's willing to talk to us. here we go. >> inside the interrogation room, can the detectives break the suspect? >> look at me. do you think i'm stupid? hmm? >> no. >> then why are you treating me like i'm stupid? when vegas homicide race against the clock continues.

she is stepping down this

week. just after a year after being shot in the head, the arizona congresswoman said she needs to focus on her recovery but she may one day return to public life. long-time football coach joe paterno has died from lung cancer at the age of 85. jerry sandusky, that cost paterno his job, calls today a sad day. now back to "vegas homicide." we now return to "vegas homicide: race against the clock" with stone phillips. >> detectives are working around the clock to crack a double murder. they have collared two suspects but can they get them to talk?

we're about to take you inside the interrogation room. >> there were five suspects involved this. two of which we had in custody. >> all of these suspects' primary language is spanish, so i brought in a close friend of mine and very good detective named roberto vargas. >> i didn't tell him why he was there at first. why do you think you're sitting here right now? >> me? >> because of the guns. >> you know there's not just pistols. you have the machine gun. you don't just keep a machine gun around unless you have a reason. and you know what i'm saying so i ask again, why are those guns in that house? >> i don't know. >> no. why. >> no, no, no, no, no, no. >> he wasn't coming clean. then i used a little technique that i have kind of picked up over the years. my experience most people that speak spanish as their principle language speak quite a bit of english so i'll say something in english and see if they respond to me. he did.

tell me, why -- look at me. why are those guns in that house? no. tell me why. you understood what i said. when i said look in my eyes, you looked in my eyes. i'm tting her i'm sitting here asking you questions and you're lying to me and wasting my time. why? why? we took a break at that point. mainly because i felt he needed to kind of stew for a little while. >> he's full of [ bleep ]. >> he's still talking. >> yeah, yeah. he's talking. he doesn't know really what we're going after. >> that's his story. i know it's just how long do we let him sit? too long he is going to resolve or shut down. >> right. >> let's roll on him. >> i'm going to give you a minute to think. you're very young to spend your

entire life in prison. you understand me? after a while he started breaking a little bit. you know, he had a minimized role in this thing. he admitted that they had guns in the place. you know? little by little he would give a little. >> because you know what? >> because you know what? i was there and threw them in suitcases and did carry them out but they were gone for two days. he goes i didn't see anything happen to them. i don't know what happened to them. >> then we got a crucial piece of evidence against these guys. >> mark! sarge got a call from the lab. >> yeah. >> they just made vikio's prints

on the tape. >> him? >> so much for his minimized story. >> yeah. okay. things are going to change a little bit now, huh? >> yeah. we learned that vikio or his name is really eduvijes pena. we learned that his prints were on that tape. that was on our victims. so that point, we knew that he was actively involved in tearing the tape off. and more than likely putting it on the victims, as well. >> he said that nico was directing him and the other guys' activities. and said nico was wearing gloves and well a reason why only his fingerprints were on the tape.

>> he just found out the fingerprints were on the tape. >> what did he say? >> cut the pieces but didn't put them on. >> going for murder, baby. kidnap and murder, baby, times two. nicio even showed us how the guys were tied up. he put his hands together, hands and feet together and bent over and showed us how they were positioned. he also told us these guys are bound, gagged, stuffed in a suitcase and then shoved into the trunk of a car and they're still alive. i mean, that's just -- that's horrible. >> that was disgusting. how could people do this to other human beings?

this was evil. why are you sitting here right now? >> we started the interrogation the second suspect, we knew a lot more. first started interrogating horta. he lied. why? you know why. you know, he said he wasn't involved, didn't know what we were talking about. slowly, he started giving little bits of information. manuel, do you think i'm stupid? look at me. hey. do you think i'm stupid? >> no. no. >> then why are you treating me like i'm stupid? during the interrogation, you're watching everything. you're listening to the inflection of the voice. you're also looking at their body language. slumped, looking down, touching their face. you know, they're just resigned. at that point you know you're starting to get through to them. >> yes?

>> at one point in the interrogation i showed photographs of the two victims to horta. let me -- manuel. let me refresh your memory. laid the photos in front of him. let's put white tape over their mouth. that caused a major reaction. what do you think? does that jog your memory? at that point body language went resignation, started welling up with tears and started crying. i knew he was going to tell us what he knew. >> horta told us his involvement was jaime, another guy involved, called him up and asked him to pick him up. got in the vehicle and had two suitcases, two large suitcases with him.

went over to the apartment and by the time they arrived, the two guys had already been tied up. he said he then witnessed nico beating the guys up and then assisted in placing one of the guys into a suitcase still alive. >> the fact that he assisted and did nothing to stop it and he didn't call the police, he's as guilty as any of them. what he told us is that julian had basically stolen some drugs from the drug organization he was affiliated with and the murders were in retaliation for that. we also learned that clioafas was an innocent victim. >> murder is a destruction. you destroy the victim, you destroy the victim's family and

their friends and it is just utter destruction. >> i want to get nico very bad at this point. to me, it was of vital importance to get him because he posed a serious threat to the public safety. we had five suspects, two in custody. at this point it's two down, three to go. and nico was at the top of the list. >> tomorrow, the man hunt begins. >> the detectives hatch a plot to catch the prime suspect on the tape. what they find is chilling. >> that tape was worth its weight in gold. when "vegas homicide race against the clock" continues.

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we now return to "vegas homicide: race against the clock" with stone phillips. >> at this point, we have two guys in custody for kidnap and murder. we have a major manhunt that we have to put together to find nico and we have two additional associates that we need to locate we only know by a first name. >> a few days after the arrest of the initial two suspects, we received another big break. an informant had contacted our sergeant. >> and the informant was a close friend of nico's. he was in a little trouble himself. he needed some help with some burglary charges. >> we came up with a plan. it involved putting a hidden camera in the informant's living

room with his consent. >> knock it off. >> he would get the suspects over to his house and get them to talking about the crime. >> he's with the other people -- >> after a few days, we hit pay dirt. we got videotape of the suspect, nicolas felix, talking to the informant about the crime. it wasn't great quality but it was as good as we're going to get. >> smoking their meth. >> he talks about he took them at gun point. he tied them up like this and like this and shows basically binding their hands and feet. >> put them in the bag, put them in the trunk of the car and like ten hours without the air. >> oh [ bleep ]. >> i like when he says, yeah, they were in there like ten hours.

they couldn't get no air so they died. pretty smart, huh? >> that tape was worth its weight in gold as far as evidence in the murder. it wasn't a matter of whether or not we were going to get him. it was just when. nicholas felix was still -- the informant told us two of the suspects had gone to phoenix and would return later the next night with a large amount of drugs. >> they deliberately delayed coming back to arrive around dark. >> we got together with the narcotics detectives to try to devise a plan. we want all three of them and fixed as to where they are and what we get and maneuver for whatever we do for taking them down. nico is in the apartment and they're coming. >> the informant learned that nicolas felix was staying in an apartment in a budget suites. >> if he is in that apartment, it is only a matter of time. this is his last day of freedom.

♪ it's been a while since i first saw you ♪ >> i went over there. to start a surveillance on the apartment. waiting for the rest of our detectives to arrive. it's a series of ups and downs. it is boring. yeah. it's tedious. there's no way you can do this job and be this close to completing an arrest and not want this guy worse than anything on the face of the earth. >> runs out. we have to be concerned with the stairwell down here. >> several of the s.w.a.t. officers have arrived. they have made their initial surveillance of the targeted apartment and we are making arrangements for their team to be present and serve the warrant for us. >> let them get out of the car.

hey, how are you? how the hell was your trip. bam. >> baboom, almost five hours. >> it's coming back. >> 40 minutes ago, suspect number one, nicolas felix, showed up with his girlfriend and his cousin and went up to the apartment. shortly after that, the cousin left in a vehicle so in the apartment now are nicolas and a girl. at some point we needed to make a decision whether we were going to continue to wait for the other suspects to arrive or take nicolas into custody. we decided to move forward without them because the information that we'd gotten about their whereabouts was very sketchy. we didn't know if they were in las vegas or arizona or even in the united states at that point. >> so we decided to take what we could get. >> why don't the three of you get in your cars? >> since we are about to confront an armed and violent suspect, i got my body armor on just in case. >> yep. >> i went down in my car, got in and got myself prepared. at one point, i got my shotgun out.

at this point, we are going on the offensive. the shotgun is an offensive weapon. yeah. right now, got to be ready for anything. you get in the zone. you focus and you become intent on your goal. getting that person into custody and staying safe. because when you make mistakes that's when you might end up on the bad end of it instead of him. i'm never going to let that happen. >> now it was time for s.w.a.t. to go. my sergeant called me in. >> calling in the green force and getting the apartment. taking off on the go and take the rest from there. >> it's a go. >> like before, we were out of the line of fire. >> have them hit it now. >> we couldn't see what was going on. >> but we could hear. >> okay. do it. >> next, armed and dangerous, the s.w.a.t. team moves in.

will they get their target and will he talk? >> we have to hit him with something to cause him to want to talk to us. vegas homicide: race against the clock continues. try bayer advanced aspirin. it's not the bayer aspirin you know. it's different. first, it's been re-engineered with micro-particles. second, it enters the bloodstream fast, and rushes relief to the site of your tough pain. the best part? it's proven to relieve pain twice as fast as before. bayer advanced aspirin. test how fast it works for you. love it, or get your money back.

armed and dangerous, anyco felix is holed up here in a hotel in vegas. "dateline" is there as the s.w.a.t. team moves in.

>> we were in an outer perimeter, several hundred feet from the apartment when the s.w.a.t. team made an entrance. >> s.w.a.t. uses distraction devices, distracts suspects when they make entry. >> they were able to take nicholas felix into custody. i felt good about that. it was not ap easy case. it was our job to take it from there. i searched the apartment for evidence. yeah, there's a loaded .38 laying over there. >> i found the loaded weapon and a large quantity of methamphetamine. >> i got anyco and brought him back to the homicide office.

once again, since his primary language is spanish, i called my buddy to assist with the interrogation. >> we have got to somehow hit him with something to cause him to want to talk to us. you know? and if we go into it, man, we got you cold, these murders, fingerprints, we got, you know, people who saw you and we even got two guys that are saying you're the guy. okay? is that the way it is or are these guys involved? did they have you do this? you know, that's what we want to find out. i was definitely hoping he would cave in and give the information about the other two guys, where we could find them. what important thing that the police might be interested in has happened that you know about? >> selling of drugs.

>> for me, that's small. >> okay. he is not sure why. >> okay. hey nico, i think you do know why. >> no. >> yeah. nico, you know what i'm talking about, okay? here's the thing. it's very important that you listen to me for just a minute, okay? because you're in some very deep trouble. okay? and you know it. you know you're in deep trouble. he says he doesn't know anything about anything. and then, slowly, he starts breaking in.

>> at one point in the interrogation, we ran into a wall. it wasn't going anywhere and needed to find something to get him to break free with some more information. so we took a break. and we came out in the office and we discussed what are we going to do now. >> he's trying to downplay his involvement. he said, yeah, okay, i was there. but i wasn't hitting him. you won't find my fingerprints. >> yeah. he was wearing gloves. i brought up the fact to show him the ci tape. >> there he's saying, pretty smart, eh? i put them there. i put them in the car. left them for ten hours. i killed them. okay? that's different than being one of the guys that -- you won't find -- i didn't beat them up. you won't find my fingerprints on the tape. i'm one of a couple of guys there. to confront him with we know everything, that might be the only way to get to convince nico to give up the others.

at this point we've got three in custody, and two on the loose, and we only know their first names. that's not much to go on. i want to catch the other two guys. >> i heard it's real nice -- >> the problem we have got is the potential danger to our ci. >> could be bluffing. he's not bluffing. this is like -- >> he has the video. there he is sitting on the couch saying, yeah, i killed him. >> we convince nico that the tape had come from a legitimate drug enforcement surveillance of the informant himself and that he was a suspect in a large drug ring and that nico's conversation with the informant was purely incidental to that. carried the television in. set it in front of nico. queued up the confession on the video. turned it on. >> as soon as he watched the video, he reached over, grabbed the pad of paper and started writing down their name and

phone number. so, beautiful. he admitted that there were two bags, helped move the guys in the bags and he drove the two guys out by the junkyard and dumped them on the side of the road. got everything we wanted from him. and that was it. there's not a single murder case that's not an uphill battle. people like to catch the bad guy. they like to think the police have done their job. the thing to remember here is that there were five people that were accused of participating in this crime. of those five people, two have fled the jurisdiction. those two persons will likely never be found, never be prosecuted.

only nicolas felix, my client, incredibly, faces the death penalty. nicolas should not be death eligible primarily because it is absolutely disproportionate to the sanctions as co-defendants have received. >> our job's not done. we're going to keep working until we get the other two guys. the names of the guys that are still outstanding is jimi pena and alfredo pena. murder cases are never closed. we'll continue to work this case as long as i'm a detective up here in homicide. i mean, these guys can run. they can hide. we're going to keep on tracking them. we'll keep looking for them. we'll keep gathering information. ultimately we are going to catch them. >> when i think about what it must have been like for these

two victims in the trunk of that car, i don't need any other proof to know how vicious, cold and evil these people are. >> the reality of a homicide investigation are, not two-dimensional. it's very three-dimensional. the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feel. everything about it is extremely real. and usually very graphic. that is burned into my mind. >> to be able to take a case like this one where we have nothing -- we have two guys laying there, we know nothing about them. we don't know how they died, and yet to fast forward to having three guys in custody, that's very satisfying. there's nothing more solemn than reaching out and being the one that is able to speak for the person who is dead and can't point out their killer, can't