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I just can't see why someone we knew would want to hurt her. How could this happen? How could this happen to someone that we knew?
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It's been a very long 13 years. Homecoming queen Hannah Hill was just 18 when she disappeared.
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Everybody's sweetheart. This doesn't happen to people like her. What? Why? Where? When?
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And who? Was it her boyfriend? They had fought before. Did you verbally abuse her?
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Yes. Did you physically abuse her? Yes. Or was it another man in her life? They'd been together the night she died.
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Did you have sex with me? More than 13 years would go by as Hannah's family fought for justice.
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Two possible suspects. Did you kill Hannah Hill? Absolutely not. Did your kid kill Hannah Hill?
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No. Two trials. I was a wreck. It was just very intense. Would there ever be justice for Hannah Hill?
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The truth always comes out. I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with our story.
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She was a girl who made big entrances. She could walk in the room and light up a place.
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She'd make a whole room smile. She was always happy, just wanted to have fun. But it was her exit, her sudden disappearance, poof, gone from her house just like that, that enshrouded young Hannah Hill in mystery.
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Miss Hill was last seen last Wednesday. We're asking that anyone with any information contact the Akron Police Department Detective Bureau.
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She was 18 years old, just days from turning 19, and seemed to be in for the night.
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A former homecoming queen in her PJs phoning a few friends from the basement bedroom at her mom and dad's in Akron, Ohio.
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It's too late now, but you wish she could answer just one question. Why'd you leave the house so suddenly that night?
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Her brother Justin doesn't know. She got dressed and said, I'm going to go off for a little bit.
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I'll be back. I love you. And that was it? Never seen her again. The thing was, the next morning, a Thursday in May of 1999,
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was going to be a red-letter day for Hannah. She'd drive her gold Geo Prism, the used car she was proud to be paying for,
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to her first day of full-time secretary work at Diebold, the company that makes ATMs.
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Her boyfriend of more than a year, Brad Oborn, expected her to swing by his place in the morning to pick him up.
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He says she was a no-show. I remember waking up with this eerie gut feeling that something wasn't right.
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I paged her, no answer. And she always called me back, always. And she didn't. The kids relied on pagers back then.
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Cell phones and text messaging were often the future for Hannah's circle of friends.
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Her mom, Kim, was a homemaker, and dad, Elsa, was scratching out work as a boilermaker in the smokestacks of the Rust Belt.
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Dad loved his girl. Hannah, she was a very bubbly kid. She always loved everybody.
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She liked the Spice Girls and signed her letters with tiny pink hearts. A nice kid.
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These friends of Hannah thought so. She was a very easygoing person, definitely someone you could tell you could be friends with very easily.
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She was a great friend. She was a great girl. Tara Ferguson was the best friend forever.
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She's so fun and silly and funny. There's no doubt she was a very pretty young girl.
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Yes. She was a hopeless romantic, and she was bound to trying to find that Prince Jeremy.
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Now, not every teenage girl has the same definition of Prince Charming. Hannah's boyfriend, Brad, for instance, was a high school dropout with more than a few rough edges.
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But by all accounts, Hannah was smitten. Definitely her one true love. She just really loved him and was really happy.
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And Brad, he remembers like yesterday, being captivated by the girl at the party with the lively brown eyes.
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They quickly became a couple. Do you think I'm really lucky to have this girl? I did.
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And we used to get compliments. People would say, you guys look so cute together.
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But by late spring 1999, Hannah's friends and family thought she was growing distant.
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They worried that Brad was tugging her into a world where she didn't belong. She trusted everybody.
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She saw the best in everybody. Yes. And didn't have her radar up? No. That's where we differed.
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And now Hannah Hill had vanished into the night. Out there somewhere. But where?
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Thursday turned to Friday. The close friends were frantic. Brad and I are calling each other back and forth.
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I'm calling the Hills. I'm paging her. She's not calling. That just wasn't like her.
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We're freaking out now. So we make out thousands of flyers. And we're passing them out.
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Have you seen my sister? Has anyone seen my sister? And you're hearing no, no, no, no.
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Nothing. Brad Oborn, the boyfriend, took it a step further. He went down to the police station on that Friday, the first of several visits to the cops.
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My girlfriend's missing. It doesn't seem like the police are doing very much. Long days became longer nights with no word from Hannah.
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By Tuesday evening, she'd been missing nearly a week. The police finally turned to the media.
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Well, an 18-year-old girl has vanished, and tonight, police are asking for your help.
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When it came across the TV that she was missing, I got really real. The very next morning, a breakthrough.
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News that police had located Hannah car It was parked on a quiet dead street called Kane Road Akron PD Sergeant Jerry Hughes raced to the scene
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Detectives popped the trunk. It was worse than he'd expected. You've seen a lot of stuff in a lot of years.
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How does this fit in the awful things that cops encounter? It's sickening. It's something you can't unsee.
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You will see that for the rest of your life. The body of Hannah Hill had been found naked from the waist down, closed, her shirt pulled up.
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All right, at approximately 7.30 this morning, that the auto belonging to missing person Hannah Hill had been seen parked on Kane Road.
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Pictures of her car being towed away made the evening news. Devastated? How could this happen?
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I just totally kind of blacked out. Every emotion just hit me all at once. What had happened to Hannah, and why?
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And the even bigger question, who, who had killed Hannah? Police quickly focused on one man, Hannah's boyfriend, Brad.
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We found out that he was a drug dealer and that he liked to chase other girls. You know, it takes you pretty closely into means motive opportunity country.
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Who would think? Hannah Hill was buried in a family plot in Kentucky a day after what would have been her 19th birthday.
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For her friends back in Akron, Kane Road, the quiet residential street where her car had been found,
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became a place to honor her all-too-brief life. We put ribbons around a nearby tree in remembrance.
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For detectives, the heat was on to find her killer. The Akron Police Department was already facing intense scrutiny for taking a full week to find Hannah's car.
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There it had sat, abandoned in the night on Cain Road, where just hours after Hannah first disappeared,
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residents began calling police to come take a look. At least five neighbors called police.
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We have a car in our neighborhood that's totally unexplained, and you need to come out here.
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Ed Meyer reported on the case for the Akron Beacon Journal. He says the neighbors saw car keys on the dashboard and Hannah's name clearly visible in two places.
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In a black eye for the department, police came and ticketed the car but failed to make the connection.
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Major, how could this car have sat there since Wednesday and not be connected with this cell?
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Well, I think that's entirely possible for a car to be parked for many days anywhere in the city.
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Did somebody drop the ball here, Captain? Well, again, like I say, that's under investigation.
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Was the investigation compromised horribly because of that delay? Condition of the body, the forensic results?
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Very possible. It gave time for whoever did this to cover his tracks. Who did do it?
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In the week after Hannah had vanished, all the while her body in the trunk of her car undetected,
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the police were trying to make sense of her boyfriend, Brad Oborn. When detectives checked him out with Hannah's family, they got an earful.
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Mr. Hill was never a fan of Brad O'Born. They knew very well who he was. Yes, yes. Mr. Hill didn't like him.
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And Mr. Hill made no bones about it. I tried to pull her away from Brad O'Born. And you know, when kids get something in their head, the more you try, the further they get away from you.
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Hannah's friends saw things they didn't like about Brad, too. I probably told her she was better than that and she could do better and he wasn't good for her.
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And when they met him, police were struck by Brad's demeanor. Before Hannah's car had been found, police officer Washington Lacey was pulling weekend duty.
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When again, into the station walked the fuming teenager demanding to know what was being done to find his missing girlfriend.
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First impression, I didn't like him. He was, he just was abrasive. Brad's attitude wasn't the only thing to catch the officer's eye.
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Right away, I noticed some scratches on him. We kind of raised our eyebrows at that.
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Sergeant Hughes was on duty that weekend, too. He made note of the angry boyfriend with the scratches.
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He's got physical injuries. He's coming on like a house on fire. Right. Either he was completely innocent and concerned about his girlfriend and really loved her,
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or he had done something and was going to use us as a tool. Could have fallen either way.
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Right, right. The detective said Brad was visibly upset and told him he'd been a bad boyfriend.
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Jealous, controlling. We found out, you know, that he was a drug dealer and that he liked to chase other girls.
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You know, it takes you pretty closely into Means Mode of Opportunity country. Who would think?
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Hughes had tough questions for boyfriend Brad. Take off your shirt. We need to get all your footage.
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We want full fingerprints and palm prints. Is he saying, wait, wait, slow down? I may need to talk to a lawyer.
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No, absolutely not. Here's the thing. It's like never once said anything about an attorney, his rights.
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Just find my girlfriend. Whatever you need, find my girlfriend. And then came the awful day they discovered Hannah's body.
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And now we're hammering him. We're peppering him, you know, if not you, who, basically.
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You think he's good for this crime? Not sure, but I want more information. Give me something to go on.
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To detectives, Brad was a puzzle, angry and abrasive on one hand, and yet cooperative and seemingly distraught about Hannah's death on the other.
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It just didn't click. It was low-borne. Questions still swirled around Brad in the hours after Hannah's body was discovered.
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But now the case was about to spin off in a whole new direction Investigators had obtained Hannah phone logs and learned she made four calls on her last night One to a girlfriend two to Brad and another to a boy named Denny Ross
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Denny Ross, does it mean anything to anybody? It doesn't mean anything to me. The detectives learned that this Denny Ross lived in a three-bedroom apartment next to a porn shop.
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They drove over and knocked on the door. Denny Ross answers the door. He's got a phone in his hand.
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And I say, hey, you know, Detective Hughes, I'd like to talk to you about this. And he goes, well, I've got my attorney on the phone.
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Attorney? Yes. I said, well, that's a little different. Coming up, there was an even more surprising admission from Denny Ross still to come
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about a visit from Hannah the very night she died. Hannah and I were conversating.
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And, you know, we're just going to do that. But did that lead to murder when Dateline continues?
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Investigators looking into the murder of Hannah Hill had followed her phone logs to the doorstep of 20-year-old Denny Ross.
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Denny, it turned out, was a friend of Hannah's boyfriend, Brad O'Born. The kids knew Denny as the host at a nonstop funhouse and crash pad.
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Were you surprised Hannah was hanging around with that crowd? No, I mean, we hung out with people that didn't do some great stuff,
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but I guess we just kind of thought it was, not that it was okay, but we weren't doing it,
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so I guess we were pretty naive, too. Denny was days into probation on a drug charge
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and asked to have his lawyer present when detectives arrived for a conversation.
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Once the lawyer showed up, detectives took out a tape recorder and began an interview.
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Would you say the full answer? Denny told the detective he stayed in the night Hannah disappeared,
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but then volunteered an astonishing bit of information. Was there anybody here at the house with you?
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Hannah stopped over Wednesday evening? That makes him, in police jargon, the last known person to have seen her alive.
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Absolutely. Yes. Her and I were conversating, and, you know, then just one thing I told him, you know, is
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because you have sex with me. Denny offered up a tip for the cops. Take a look at Hannah's boyfriend, Brad Oborn.
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Why would you do it? Do you know? Jealousy. fear that maybe she's seeing somebody else.
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I recall many occasions that he would basically have Hannah basically under control. She could not go anywhere.
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But Denny, not Brad, was suddenly the person cops wanted to know a lot more about.
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At 3 a.m., they returned to Denny's in force with a search warrant. The officers charging up the exterior stairs said they heard a thud.
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It wasn't long before one of them found a garbage bag beneath Denny's window. In it, Hannah's missing clothing.
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Is that case closed? It's not case closed, but it's a big factor. I've always called that bag of evidence the key factor in this whole case, the magic bag.
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Critics of the police work in the case, like local journalist Ed Meyer, were skeptical.
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We didn't buy it. Why would he keep a potential bag of evidence that could hang him inside his apartment for a full week?
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Denny insisted he did not toss the bag out the window. His fingerprints weren't found on it, and it didn't match any of the garbage bags he had at home.
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The officers didn't check the temperature of the bag and couldn't say if it had been outside for minutes or for days.
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Still, the next day, Denny was charged with Hannah's rape and murder. Breaking news at this hour, an arrest has been made in the murder of 18-year-old Hannah Hill.
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The arrest of good-time Denny was incomprehensible to Hannah's friends. I just can't see why someone we knew would want to hurt her.
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Denny's father, Alan Ross, says he was stunned too. You tell me who your boy is.
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Who's Denny Ross? Denny Ross, well, a young kid who got himself in a situation by telling the truth.
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The father says Denny was an average, carefree kid, excited about a new job in Internet marketing.
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Not a killer. personality, demeanor. If you walked in the door, who do we meet? You'd meet a person who just
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doesn't stop smiling. It doesn't matter who you are. You'll feel at home when you're around him
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because he's just got that personality. The medical examiner ruled Hannah's death a homicide by
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asphyxiation, saying she was strangled to death. But little else was clear. For instance, the Emmy
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found semen inside Hannah's body during the autopsy, but said the sample wasn't useful because
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it had degraded so much during the week her body lay in the trunk of her car. And then there were what critics saw as investigative lapses.
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Police never checked boyfriend Brad O'Born's alibi the night Hannah disappeared,
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never checked her pager records, and never performed a key chemical test of the carpet in Denny's apartment,
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the luminol test. The police investigators can spray a chemical on this alleged evidence,
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and it will luminesce and show as blood and therefore can be tested. That was never done.
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Visible blood spots were found on Denny's apartment walls, but in the dozens of samples of blood and fiber sent out for testing,
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none came back to Hannah. No DNA, no blood. You theorize that she was killed there in a bloody homicide,
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and yet there's no trace of her. Nor was there a trace of Denny on or in Hannah's car.
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Despite the ambiguous evidence, In October 2000 21 Denny Ross stood trial for the rape and murder of Hannah Hill He pleaded not guilty and faced the death penalty if convicted He beat her into submission so that he could rape her
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Two young prosecutors argued their theory of the case, that inside that apartment, Denny had raped and killed Hannah.
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They faced off against what the papers were calling a million-dollar defense dream team hired by Denny's father.
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The lead defense attorney was David Chesnaugh from Las Vegas. The police rushed to Denny and ignored everything else.
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The girl's mother was called to the stand but not videoed. Those were her favorite pants.
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It all came down to the contents of the trash bag found beneath the window. Of all the DNA tests run on Hannah's clothing spotted with blood,
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only one came back to Denny, a small semen stain on the girl's underwear. Hardly proof of a crime, said Denny's lawyer.
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They're kids. They're fooling around. That doesn't mean he raped her. The case went to the jury.
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And in the midst of deliberations came a stunning turn. The judge, quite unexpectedly, walked into the jury room and declared a mistrial.
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She said she took that drastic measure because she was getting a report that one of the jurors was talking about a lie detector test, not an evidence.
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A lie detector test, Brad O'Born, Hannah's boyfriend, had taken and passed. Well, that said, the judge was jury misconduct.
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Court finds that the jury is unable to fulfill the obligations required by law. The prosecution team was stunned.
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It was not a good day. Nor was it a good day for the defense. Everybody was brokenhearted, including Denny.
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Denny's team was even more heartbroken to learn that when the judge interrupted the jurors,
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they had already reached a decision on the major counts. Dateline spoke with four jurors after the trial,
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and they said they had already signed and sealed the ballots on all of the charges
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except the lesser charge of manslaughter. Rape. Not guilty. Not guilty. Murder. I voted not guilty.
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Not guilty. Denny had come oh so close to being acquitted in Hannah's murder. Because jurors had voted in his favor,
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his lawyers went back to the courts to contest his being tried again on grounds of double jeopardy.
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How does one get tried again for a crime that he was found not guilty of? Denny waited in jail for over a year while the courts tried to sort out what to do with him.
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In September of 2001, he was released on a $1 million bond. It's great to finally be out of here.
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But Denny's freedom would be short-lived. You'll hear more about that later. For Hannah's friends and family, the shock of her violent death
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followed by the inconclusive trial, took an enormous toll. Brad Oborn now lived under a shadow of suspicion,
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with people still wondering if he had killed Hannah. He tumbled deeper into drugs and even did time for robbing a bank.
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Maybe hardest hit of all was Hannah's mother, Kim. She went to a show. I mean, it ripped our family apart.
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Several years after Hannah's murder, the figure of an angel appeared in a tree near where her car had been found.
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A small shrine to Hannah's memory. And for Hannah's best friend, Tara, it wasn't that she ever stopped thinking about her sweet friend, but found she couldn't talk about it.
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Emotions all bottled up. Hannah, frozen forever at 18. So you went on with your life?
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Uh-huh. And you have babies? Yes. She never got to do that, did she? No. The case, meanwhile, was mostly in the deep freeze, making a glacial procession through the courts.
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Seasons passed with no resolution, but that was about to change in startling fashion.
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Coming up, a second trial. But at times, it was hard to know exactly who was the defendant.
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Was it Denny Ross? He was choking me from behind and just squeezing. Or Hannah's boyfriend?
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Did you blame yourself for Hannah's murder? Yes. The trial of Denny Ross for rape and murder had collapsed.
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Years passed with the Akron Police Department getting kicked in the teeth for losing the conviction with what so many people called sloppy police work.
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People that remember the case, it goes down as an Akron PD fumble. Unfortunately, that's probably the way it's remembered by most,
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but defending ourselves is not what we're concerned with. Solving the case is what we're concerned with.
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With a team of detectives and prosecutors, Jerry Hughes, now Lieutenant Hughes, toiled away in hopes of a second chance at convicting Denny Ross.
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The case went careening into years of appeals in the state, federal, and the Ohio Supreme Court.
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Finally, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned lower court decisions and ruled that Denny Ross could be retried for Hannah's murder.
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And so, 13 years after Hannah's death, the second trial began. Hannah's mother was dreading it, said best friend Tara.
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Kim said, I have to be here every day. And I know that was probably hard for her.
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But that's just what she felt she had to do. The evidence will show that on that fateful evening of May 19, 1999...
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Prosecutors Anna Feralia, Matt Meyer, and Brian Radigan laid out their theory of the crime.
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that Hannah Hill was lured over to Denny Ross' bachelor pad for what would be a fatal encounter.
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Do solemnly swear. Nearly 70 witnesses were called. Some of them testifying off camera to things Denny had told them over the years about Hannah's death.
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Denny had made a comment to me that he was going to s*** Hannah. He said we were all having sex and I was having sex with this girl and ended up choking her.
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Excuse my language. She died. This woman was a stripper back then and a regular at Denny's place.
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For 12 years, she denied being there the night Hannah died. But just months before the second trial, she changed her story,
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saying now she was there that night and hadn't spoken up earlier because she'd been afraid.
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While you were there, what did you observe? What did you hear? What did you see?
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Denny and Hannah were in the bedroom. Did you know what was going on in that bedroom?
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I had kind of a good idea. I knew they were f***ing around, and then when I heard her make weird sounds,
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I just said, f*** this, I don't want to be a part of any crime scene in the left.
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But would you believe these kids? I mean, if they told you the sun was going to come up in the east, you'd get a second opinion.
00:25:04
You know what? Ten, thirteen years later, I think you look at somebody for who they are when they come before you.
00:25:10
The jury can believe some, all, or none of what these people testified to. Those are swabs.
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And then there were expert witnesses, like this pathologist, who said that DNA testing had advanced so much in the years since Hannah's death
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that now they could detect Denny's DNA in blood droplets on Hannah's pants discarded in that trash bag and even on the t-shirt found on her body in the car.
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The DNA profile from item 9.5, which is one of the cuttings from inside the pockets,
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is consistent with Denny Ross. The new evidence, his blood on the victim's clothing,
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seemed to belie his account of two teenagers making out, kissing and stuff. Any intimate relationship, there really isn't an exchange of blood, unless it's a violent exchange.
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One of the most electrifying prosecution witnesses was this woman, who said she first met Denny at a bar in 2004, five years after Hannah's death.
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Denny was out on bond at the time. She said she invited him back to her place, where she says he violently attacked her.
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How were his hands fixated on your neck? From behind. He was choking me from behind and just squeezing till I couldn't breathe.
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I couldn't breathe at all. I know I passed out a few times. And what are you doing at this point?
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Pretending I'm dead, hoping he can't see me breathe. Choked during sex, battered and left for dead.
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The prosecution's implication was clear. Is this what happened to Hannah Hill years before?
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People develop patterns of behavior. I mean, it's what we do. We form habits. And killers are no different.
00:26:50
The prosecutors knew that Denny's lawyers would offer the jury an alternative killer in this trial.
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And who would that be? Why, Brad O'Born, the scratched-up boyfriend. To preempt the defense team, the prosecutors put Brad in the stand.
00:27:03
It was a risky strategy. You know, I was a heroin addict for quite some time. The story Brad told of his relationship with this nice girl Hannah was for sure a warts and all presentation.
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I was not a good boyfriend. Can you explain to us what not a good boyfriend means?
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I was abusive. I abused her. did you verbally abuse her yes did you physically abuse her
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you need to answer our father yes brad testified that just days before hannah disappeared
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they'd had a big fight about him cheating on her and said that's when she'd scratched him
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Does that picture fairly and accurately represent the scratches that are on your arms?
00:28:08
Yes. Most painful, he said, was the fact that he had introduced Hannah to Denny in the first place.
00:28:14
So, but for you, Hannah Hill would never have met Denny Ross. Is that what you're saying, Mr. Oldborn?
00:28:28
Yeah Did you blame yourself for Hannah murder Yes Do you still blame yourself for Hannah's murder?
00:28:37
Yes. Did you kill Hannah Hill? Absolutely not. The prosecutors had had their chance to show Brad as someone clearly not the killer.
00:28:46
But now defense attorneys would have their crack at him. And all or nothing cross-examination.
00:28:51
Coming up, did Brad have a motive for killing Hannah? Maybe something he had read in her secret diary?
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She wrote that she had gone to Denny's. Did you read that when you read the book?
00:29:04
When Dateline continues. Through 13 years of hearings, appeals, and trials, Denny Ross always had one loyal person in his corner, his father, Alan.
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Did your kid kill Hannah Hill? No. In a moment of rough sex that went bad? Oh my God, she's dead.
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Put the body in the car. Ditch the car. Walk home. and then make yourself a suspect by telling the police she was there.
00:29:41
No. No. My son didn't do this. Alan sees Hannah showing up at Denny's apartment that night looking for a shoulder to cry on.
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The teenager upset that her boyfriend Brad, the guy she'd recently scratched up, had cheated on her.
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The father says the night unfolded just as Denny had told the cops. They fooled around a little, kissed and stuff, and Hannah left a few hours later.
00:30:04
had someone been waiting below for her to leave the notorious party house. So Denny Ross was framed by the true killer, is what you're saying.
00:30:13
Well, that's pretty obvious. That was the theory defense attorneys Roger Sinnenberg, Larry Whitney, and Dominic Coletta took to court.
00:30:22
Preparing for Denny's trial number two was a daunting task. It turned out to be a 13-year investigation, so there was an awful lot of data.
00:30:31
They insist Denny is innocent. the fallout victim of all that heat that came down on the Akron PD when it failed to find Hannah's car.
00:30:39
Once they found the bag of her clothing outside the window, the case turned from an investigation into the death of Hannah Hill into an investigation of Denny Ross.
00:30:50
Denny's lawyers told the jurors about all the things police had failed to do, like check Hannah's pager records or do a luminol test of Denny's place.
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They questioned how Denny could have possibly killed Hannah in his apartment and left no trace of the murder.
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No blood, no excrement, nothing that belonged to Hannah Hill. And yet that's where they say she was murdered.
00:31:15
As for the so-called new blood evidence, Denny's attorneys told jurors those spots were so tiny they didn't prove anything.
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And also challenged the notion that bleeding necessarily proved a violent encounter.
00:31:28
We all get paper cuts, don't we? Correct. We get mosquito bites, don't we? Yes. The defense team challenged the credibility of prosecution witnesses in Denny's circle back when.
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For instance, the former stripper, who 12 years along had changed her story, now testifying she heard Denny hurting Hannah the night she died.
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The defense team got her to admit she had smoked a lot of pot that night and had a pattern of lying, even lying in a formal pre-trial interview with Denny's lawyer.
00:31:59
So you decided that it was better to lie to me, correct? Yeah. It was in your best interest to lie to me.
00:32:06
Yes. Right? And when it came to this woman, who had electrified the court by saying Denny had attacked and choked her,
00:32:13
defense attorneys had lost the pre-trial battle to keep her off the stand. They insisted that no matter what she had to say,
00:32:20
she couldn't tell the jurors anything about what had happened to Hannah. Do you know where Hanny Hill was between May 19, 1999 at 9 p.m. to May 20, 1999 at 2 a.m.?
00:32:34
Absolutely not. Thank you. I have no further questions. Defense attorneys said the focus on those other witnesses
00:32:41
was the prosecutor's attempt to shift attention away from the true killer. The person who we still to this day believe killed Hannah is her boyfriend.
00:32:50
Brad O alibi as to where he was that night was that he was home watching television with his roommates and they never interviewed the roommates And now Denny attorneys would have a shot at the one man who could create reasonable
00:33:04
doubt in their case, Brad O'Born. They began by attacking his depiction of himself as a bad boyfriend.
00:33:12
You were a bad boyfriend, but you were also abusive. Correct. You hit this young girl.
00:33:17
No, I didn't. You slapped her. No, I didn't. You kicked her. No, yes, I did. Denny's lawyer tried to trip Brad up on dates and times.
00:33:24
You told us earlier today, just want to get this straight, that you are not trying to get it straight.
00:33:30
You're trying to confuse me. But did Brad have a motive for killing Hannah? For an answer to that question, Denny's attorneys would turn to Hannah's diaries.
00:33:41
Reporter Ed Meyer. Page after page of entries in her own handwriting, you could argue that she was fed up with Brad O'Born
00:33:48
and was reaching out on the very night she disappeared. That's going to be something for a jury to think about.
00:33:53
It would be if I was sitting on the panel. The diary entry, speaking from her grave,
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Hannah's own words telling jurors who she was thinking of, Denny. What's more, the defense attorney got Brad to admit he had read the diary,
00:34:07
cataloging Hannah's visits to Denny. Do you recognize under the 19th where it said Brad read this book?
00:34:14
It hurt really bad. I've never loved someone so much. I recognize the fact that she recognized that I read the book.
00:34:22
She wrote that she had gone to Denny's. Did you read that when you read the book?
00:34:29
I don't remember. Was it jealousy then? Was that the motive? And you were concerned that Denny might have went up on you?
00:34:37
Yes. And you were concerned that any male was a potential risk to your relationship with Anna, correct?
00:34:43
Correct. Denny's lawyer closed by saying the state's case couldn't possibly add up to a conviction.
00:34:49
Inconclusive DNA, a long string of sketchy witnesses, and most of all, an angry, abusive, jealous boyfriend.
00:34:58
In your deliberations, ask yourself, against who is the evidence stronger? And if there's any kind of evidence against Brattleborn, we've got reasonable doubt then.
00:35:08
Had the defense made a persuasive case for Hannah's family and friends, there was now more waiting than just one hope, justice for Hannah.
00:35:18
The truth always comes out, you know, no matter what it is. Coming up, the verdict in the second trial of Denny Ross.
00:35:29
We have two families out there. We had to take our time and make that right decision.
00:35:38
Jurors deliberating, asked by the state to pass judgment on another human being.
00:35:52
We have two families out there. We had to take our time and make that right decision.
00:35:57
What would they make of the weeks of testimony? Why a murder defendant who didn't even look like one?
00:36:03
The first day I thought he was a lawyer. He had this boyish look as if to say, why am I here? I didn't do this.
00:36:12
Seven jurors in the case spoke to Dateline and told us initially they were an evenly divided panel of 12.
00:36:19
As they talked, it became apparent they regarded some of the prosecution witnesses as literally unbelievable.
00:36:26
And then you as a juror have to make a decision, do I believe the story this person's telling me?
00:36:30
That's really hard, especially when they tell you how many drugs they put in their system.
00:36:35
When it came to this woman, the one who testified about Denny attacking and choking her,
00:36:40
jurors said they believed her story about being assaulted. But nonetheless, her testimony was not a deciding factor in their final decision.
00:36:48
You still would have gotten to where you got. And once again, 13 years later, the investigation in the early days after Hannah's disappearance still bedeviled the case.
00:36:59
The jurors said the police work left them with so many unanswered questions. Pager, they didn't look at her pager, and she was a major pager user, you know.
00:37:07
I wasn't convinced that he dropped a bag. Well, I think we all couldn't figure out why they didn't illuminate the first time they went out there.
00:37:13
Monday Tuesday Wednesday passed and for those outside the jury room the wait was excruciating They taking a long time Yeah October 6 2010 The jurors say they weighed Brad O testimony carefully But did you believe his story Looking at his body language making contact with the jury I believed him
00:37:34
None of us felt that it was him and none of his DNA was there. And so on Friday, just after lunch, came word of a decision.
00:37:42
Lawyers, friends, family all assembled at the court. Hannah's brother stayed away, shaky.
00:37:48
I was at a friend's house waiting by the phone. I was terrified. All rise, please.
00:37:56
In just moments, there was no more need for guesswork. Count one, is it your determination that the defendant committed murder in this count
00:38:08
in that he did purposely cause the death of Hannah Hill? Is that your decision? Yes.
00:38:16
Denny Ross, guilty on all five counts. In the back of the courtroom, Hannah's friend Tara was visibly shaken.
00:38:24
I was a wreck. It was just very intense. I remember thinking, thank you God, and a sense of relief all in one fell swoop.
00:38:34
Those long years of work for prosecutors and detectives had paid off. The only thing the state of Ohio is going to say is that we are grateful to these jurors
00:38:43
that they have finally provided an accounting for Hannah Hill's death. Jurors told us that in the end, it all came down to the blood evidence on Hannah's clothes.
00:38:53
The DNA outweighed a lot of unknowns for us. It said Denny Ross was there. As a result of the Hannah Hill case,
00:39:04
Lieutenant Hughes said the Akron Police Department has made many changes throughout the years,
00:39:09
especially in the communications department, to make sure mistakes like the failure to locate Hannah's car never happen again.
00:39:17
Thirteen years on, can Akron residents be assured that the screw-up has been rectified?
00:39:22
I believe so, and there's been a lot of changes. Denny Ross was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison for Hannah's death.
00:39:30
He won't serve that time for years to come. What the jurors didn't know is that he is already serving a 25-year sentence
00:39:37
for the rape and attempted murder of another woman between the two trials. He will be 67 years old before he is eligible for parole.
00:39:46
We're disappointed. We had hoped for a different result. Denny's lawyers filed a request for a new trial, which was denied.
00:39:53
Do I think there'll be a round three? You can bank on it. Okay? Bank on it. Reporter Ed Myers says he is suspicious to this day about how the bag of evidence appeared beneath Denny Ross' window.
00:40:06
Skeptics can still wonder. Absolutely they can still wonder. As for Brad Oborn, despite the fact that Denny's defense has always been that Brad killed Hannah,
00:40:15
Oborn was never regarded as a serious suspect by the authorities or Hannah's friends and family.
00:40:21
Brad says he loved Hannah and that living under a cloud of suspicion has taken its toll.
00:40:27
Do you feel like this verdict clears your name? I believe it has. I know I didn't do it.
00:40:32
I know in the back of my mind I didn't do anything. The only thing I'm guilty of is being a bad boyfriend.
00:40:37
And I can't change that. I wish I could. If I had three wishes, all three of them would be to change that. I can't.
00:40:46
On a rainy Sunday after the verdict, Hannah's friends and family gathered for a balloon release in her memory.
00:40:54
They passed around Sharpies and wrote little messages for the lost girl, her brother.
00:41:00
I'm just glad that it's over with, finally. Now I can start mourning. Father. My dad will always love you.
00:41:08
Love him. The best friend. I said, Hannah, baby. I love you and miss you so much.
00:41:25
Fly high, my bright star. Love, Tara. And then, after a brief prayer, they stood by the pond
00:41:34
and the brisk wind carried away their goodbyes. Farewell to Hannah Hill never forgotten by her
00:41:44
family and friends or as it turned out by the criminal justice system.