narrator: todd bonner placed a call to deliver the grim news to the victim's stepfather in washingtontate. and when he did, this already strange case got even stranger. tracy's stepfather said she couldn't be dead because he had just seen her. he told me that tracy beslanowitch lived a couple of doors down from him, and he went to check to make sure that she was there. i waited on the phone while he was checking, and came back and said, "you have the wrong person." what the hell was going on? ♪ ♪ narrator: when a 17-year-old woman was found naked and beaten beyond recognition, local detectives were determined to fight for a victim who evidence showed had clearly tried to fight for herself. she put up one heck of a struggle, blocked a lot of blows with her fingers, a way that the hide had been ripped off of each one of her fingers. she struggled all the way through it. narrator: her boyfriend and a local cab driver identified the victim as a young woman named tracy beslanowitch. but tracy's stepfather, who lived 700 miles away in washington state, told utah police their victim could no

. ♪ ♪ narrator: about two weeks before christmas in 1995, todd bonner, a patrolman in utah's wasatchs office, got the kind of call all policemen dread. a farmer found a corpse next to a river on his property. bonner: this was a body found nude. you knew deep down in the back of your mind that this was going to be a different type of a case. narrator: the victim, a female in her late teens, perhaps her early 20s, had been beaten to death and left along an isolated stretch of the provo river. bonner: the scene was very graphic. you knew that she had taken one heck of a beating. she had -- she had suffered quite a bit. ♪ narrator: no conventional murder weapon was found at the scene, but it didn't take long to figure out what had been used to kill this young woman. six bloody rocks were found near the body. bonner: the rocks ranged in different sizes. we did come across one. don't want to say it was a small rock, but it was small enough that you could grab hold of it with your hand, and it appeared to have a handprint or fingerprint. narrator: the rocks told detectives straight away tha