00:00:00
I think back and I go, this was such a senseless murder. And why Diane? Why when she was ready to start a brand new life?
00:00:11
I'll never know that answer. Someone had killed her. We had her body. We had the scene.
00:00:19
That was all. There was always men around whenever Diane was there. Always. Most of the time you're going to be killed by someone you know.
00:00:27
Sometimes it's someone you know very well. He wanted to get me in there, and I didn't budge, and all the bells were going off.
00:00:37
I jumped in my car and took off. I felt I dodged a bullet. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that a website like this could even exist.
00:00:47
That was extremely frightening. Oh, boy, it gets into pretty dark territory, doesn't it?
00:00:53
Yes. It was the afternoon of November 15th, Austin, Texas, 4 p.m. There was something ominous in the air.
00:01:06
Suddenly, the smell of it, the familiar feel of it against the skin, storm coming, something big.
00:01:13
They did tell us, you know, on the news, if you don't have to go out tonight, don't,
00:01:18
because we are going to get relentless rains. And then the sky overhead turned dark.
00:01:23
Like midnight in the afternoon. And when it gets like that, it's pitch black out.
00:01:28
And you have the fear for tornadoes. Sure enough, said the announcers on TV, twisters had been spotted headed toward parts of the city, including the northwest.
00:01:38
And Diane lived in the northwest. And I called her and I said, hey girl, I said, you know,
00:01:42
they just said that there was a tornado heading in your direction. And she's like, my direction?
00:01:47
And she's like, I don't know what to do. I've never been in a tornado. So she must have been kind of freaked out.
00:01:53
She was very freaked out. And then the ferocious rain and hellish wind and fickle funnel clouds
00:02:00
dipped and swirled around the city. The next morning of Friday, it was all over.
00:02:07
Friends checked on friends. But no one could reach Diane, the freaked out one. Diane Hollick worked from home, worked for IBM.
00:02:16
That Friday morning, so unlike her, she missed a conference call. Hi, Diane. It's 2 o'clock. Just worried about you. Wanted to check and make sure you're okay.
00:02:27
All day, phone calls from IBM and from friends went to voicemail. Saying, hey, this is Sharon. I was calling this if you were going to show up tonight or not.
00:02:37
She didn't. I got to the club and I was waiting and she didn't come, she didn't come.
00:02:42
And I spent all my time wondering when she was going to show up. Had she been caught in the storm? Was her house hit?
00:02:48
A co-worker called the police, who cruised over to Diane's exclusive neighborhood
00:02:54
and found her fine big house unscathed. They peered through windows, saw no one.
00:03:01
They secured a key. They went upstairs. And there, all but hidden behind a guest room bed, they found Diane.
00:03:12
Someone had killed her. I actually had a scream of some sort, just like, ah, you can't, it's not true.
00:03:20
That's not what happened, it's not Diane. But of course, it was. Diane Hollick, 43 years old,
00:03:28
suddenly the unlikely center of a strange and disturbing mystery, and a most unlikely victim of murder.
00:03:37
Absolutely lived a life with gusto. She was a vivacious, beautiful woman. Lynn Lepore had known Diane since the 90s when they started working together at IBM.
00:03:48
She loved her friends. She loved her family. We would vacation together. We'd have so much fun and just laugh and laugh and laugh.
00:03:57
Well, a lot of things we liked to do all together was we hit the clubs a lot. Lots of dancing.
00:04:03
Lots of dancing. Diane met Anita Lockamy and Sharon Cooper in the ladies' room of an Austin bar.
00:04:11
She was in there. She said, oh, you've got on cowboy boots. You must know where Country Bar is.
00:04:16
And I said, well, yeah, I do. I said, well, my best friend's coming. And I said, we're going to go there when she gets here.
00:04:22
And she said, cool, I'm going to go with y'all. First time I ever met her, never seen her before.
00:04:28
She'd only been town three weeks. Yeah. Diane said, well, I'm not dressed for the club.
00:04:33
So she gets in the truck for a car where her clothes are and starts pulling out something western wear
00:04:39
and starts putting it on right there in the parking lot. She's crazy. And she's throwing on things that she feels as a restaurant trip.
00:04:45
Stripping it right there in the parking lot. Right there in the parking lot. So we all went dancing all night long.
00:04:49
She was just having a blast, and she was so happy that she had met the two of us
00:04:53
because she said, now I have me some dancing buddies. So, magnetic. Which, said her colleague Lynn,
00:05:02
helped make her a fine recruiter for IBM? I would send her off to colleges, and these kids, they would just gravitate to her.
00:05:09
She had a personality that just stood out. And her attitude? Endlessly adventurous.
00:05:16
One time I remember sending her off to do a recruiting trip, and she got out there and they were doing a balloon fest.
00:05:23
And she called me up and said, I need half a day off. And I said, why? She says, I'm jumping in a balloon and going.
00:05:29
She'd always kind of test the edges, would she? Always, yes. She would throw all kinds of parties at her house
00:05:35
and invite everyone she knows. So they may not know each other, but everybody knew her.
00:05:40
Yes, yes. And she was great. She just loved having all of these wonderful people around her.
00:05:48
In any room, any crowd, Diane was the lure, especially to men. It was never a problem going out with her because she was like a magnet for all of us Yeah there was always men around whenever Diane was there Always
00:06:05
So there were, and now she was dead. And the one thing that seemed obvious there in that second floor bedroom,
00:06:15
what happened to Diane bore the mark of a man. A killer as calm and cool as he is cold-hearted.
00:06:25
You commit the act of murder and then you leave. You don't want to get caught. This person didn't do that.
00:06:32
That in itself was odd. And a suspect emerges. Someone close to Diane. An interesting thing happened when she hit 40.
00:06:40
She decided, I need a partner. I want a marriage. I got a page from the supervisor in homicide saying that a woman had been found deceased in her home in northwest Austin.
00:07:02
Detectives Tracy Garrish and Eric DeLosanto said long since learned that if the call out didn't tell them much, the crime scene probably would.
00:07:11
But when Diane Hollick was murdered? We had her body, we had the scene, and that was all in the beginning.
00:07:20
They looked for evidence of forced entry. There was none. The doors were locked, and the windows were all intact.
00:07:27
So either the killer knew her and had a key to the house, or she let the person in.
00:07:33
In any event, it certainly didn't look like a robbery turned deadly. Because she still had her watch on, she still had a tennis bracelet on,
00:07:41
and she had a charm that was stuck in her hair that had obviously been on a necklace that was
00:07:46
not around her neck. She also had some money that was sticking out of her pocket. So maybe Diane's
00:07:52
body would tell them the story of what happened to her. The killer had hidden her under a bedspread.
00:07:58
It appeared that she'd been strangled, a ligature mark around her neck. It could have been a rope,
00:08:03
it could have been one of those flex bands that you use to exercise. But clearly not somebody's
00:08:09
hands, wasn't it? No. Were no finger marks? No. What about her eyes and her face?
00:08:15
Was there any sign there? She definitely had petechia in the eyes, and that usually happens from strangulation.
00:08:21
She appeared to have a bruise on her cheek. It was like a rubbing type of a bruise
00:08:25
on her cheek, and then she had four of them on her stomach. Rubbing type of a bruise? Like as if you were
00:08:31
being dragged across the carpet, and it was a rug burn. They discovered smudges of lipstick and mascara
00:08:37
on the carpet in the bedroom. And we also found a spot of urine where her body would have been had she been strangled.
00:08:45
So we knew something bad happened there at that particular spot. She must have been killed there and dragged behind the bed where they found her body.
00:08:55
Was there any indication that she had been sexually assaulted in any way? No. Her clothes weren't messed up.
00:09:03
There was nothing to indicate that she had been fighting and she had no scratch marks on her neck.
00:09:06
You know, why didn't she try to defend herself? Why didn't she try to remove the ligature?
00:09:11
So as we continue to look at the body, then we see we notice some faint red marks on her wrist.
00:09:17
That was interesting because you don't usually see that. There was no ties. There was no rope.
00:09:22
There was no tape that was around her in the room. Just red marks. Yeah, just red marks.
00:09:28
Little red marks that looked somehow familiar. year. It looked like two parallel lines and then perpendicular to those lines are little
00:09:38
little lines are probably a sixteenth of an inch apart. I've seen these marks before you know
00:09:43
sometimes on the flex ties that we use to make rest. Or zip ties. We thought it's like oh wow
00:09:49
he used zip ties to binder. But then he would have cut them off afterwards. He obviously cut
00:09:54
them off afterwards and we knew that immediately. Detective De Los Santos' mind went to the darkest
00:09:59
of places. Diane must have been restrained with those zip ties, helpless and terrified,
00:10:06
as she watched her killer prepare the ligature and put it around her neck. What kind of horror
00:10:11
did she go through? What was going through her head? And after she was dead, the killer must
00:10:16
have stayed for a while, carefully erasing any sign of his or her presence. So that in itself was
00:10:24
odd. That doesn't happen a lot. You commit the act of murder and then you leave. You're scared.
00:10:31
You want to get out of there. You don't want to get caught. This person at the time, we didn't know
00:10:35
male or female, didn't do that. Who was this person? So deliberate, so cold-blooded. This was
00:10:42
no straightforward case. Nothing simple about it. I probably didn't sleep for 72 hours. As they
00:10:48
chased down their endless questions. So what does that leave you with? Was it a targeted killing?
00:10:55
Somebody was angry with her? Those were all possibilities. Most of the time you're going to
00:10:59
be killed by someone you know. Yeah. Sometimes it's someone you know very well. And of course we're all
00:11:05
familiar with domestic violence and such. So we want to see who's in the immediate inner circle
00:11:11
of her life. From Diane's friends they learned she'd been married years before but had spent most
00:11:17
of her adult life as a single woman, and happily so, until she changed her mind.
00:11:24
She loved her single life, and she loved her independence. But an interesting thing happened
00:11:29
when she hit 40. She decided, I need a partner. I need somebody like my friends have. I want a
00:11:35
marriage. I want the things they have. So Diane set out to find a mate. With the help of the
00:11:41
dating service, It's Just Lunch. And pretty soon she met a divorced father of two named Dennis Conley.
00:11:49
I think they truly immediately had a chemistry. I think they were in love. He was a successful businessman He was handsome He took her everywhere And that what she was looking for Just two months later Dennis presented Diane with the bauble of a lifetime
00:12:06
A $20,000 engagement ring. He loved her. He put her on a pedestal and treated her like a queen.
00:12:13
She liked his daughter. She cared very much for his daughters. And that was a good, strong point.
00:12:18
They made plans, as lovers do. Dennis had moved from Austin to Houston. The idea was Diane could sell her big house and move down there, too.
00:12:29
It was a down market then, but as Diane told her friends, she'd met at least one potential buyer.
00:12:35
But now Diane was dead, and there were all those questions. Not a robbery, and yet, as the detective soon discovered, something was missing.
00:12:45
That $20,000 engagement ring. Nowhere to be found. So, police wondered. Where was fiancé Dennis during the violent storm?
00:12:57
And did he know something? The storm outside and in. They argued a lot. We had our ups and downs, no question.
00:13:07
It was true. All her friends knew it. Diane Hollick was in love with the man she met through the dating service,
00:13:29
smitten like a teenage girl. But the road of love, as we all know, isn't always smooth.
00:13:35
They were engaged so quickly. Too quickly? Before long, they encountered some serious issues, said her friends Anita and Sharon.
00:13:46
They argued a lot. About, one example, her dogs, who were like children to Diane.
00:13:54
But she told her friends Dennis didn't want any dogs in their new house in Houston.
00:13:59
They fought, said her friends, about what he seemed to want her to be. She was always talking about he didn't want her to do this or didn't want her to do that,
00:14:10
and that would cause arguments. She would not go along with it? Right, no, she wouldn't.
00:14:15
She was independent? Mm-hmm. What was he? Controlling. Oh. Very controlling. That can be a difficult combination.
00:14:23
Yeah. So, it was confusing. She proudly wore the spectacular ring, but the engagement was off, and then maybe on again.
00:14:35
And yet that very week, said her friends, Diane told them she still didn't know what to do.
00:14:41
So she's going back and forth and back and forth. Oh, yeah. Emotionally, it's a roller coaster for her because she just couldn't see how it was going to work.
00:14:48
And none of us could see how it would work either. Especially when she told Sharon she made a date with another man.
00:14:56
We kept telling her, if you're still wanting to do these things, you're not ready for that.
00:15:02
Waffling on her plans with Dennis? A date with another man? Anita said she had seen Dennis angry.
00:15:10
So, after Diane was murdered, she wondered. Maybe he had just lost control this time and killed her.
00:15:19
That was my first thought. Detective Gerrish asked Dennis to come into the station,
00:15:24
where he agreed to speak to them without the aid of a lawyer. We've developed some information.
00:15:28
The detectives focused on the timeline. They believed Diane had been killed that stormy Thursday afternoon or evening.
00:15:36
Her body was discovered about 5.30 p.m. on Friday. We were definitely interested in, you know, where he had been for the last three days.
00:15:45
He knew he was going to have to verify his alibi to us. At the station, Dennis seemed upset, but composed.
00:15:53
As he told investigators, he was in his office in Houston the night of the big storm,
00:15:57
but exchanged online messages with Diane back in Austin that afternoon. It was just, you know, like, hey, I'm working late, I'm getting ready to go home,
00:16:07
and she just sent me up, you know, I love you. Okay. That was it. And you were at the office when she sent that to you?
00:16:17
Okay. Dennis said he got home from work late Thursday evening and was back at the office early Friday.
00:16:23
We looked at the time frame. Could he have driven down to Austin, murdered Diane?
00:16:27
and theoretically driven back in time for work. And yes, he probably could have.
00:16:34
They checked Diane's answering machine and found messages from him. This one was left on Friday, the day after the big storm.
00:16:42
She was dead by then. Hey, you. I don't hear from you. In about an hour, I'm calling the creepy police.
00:16:49
We have to go by your house, okay? Another message Saturday morning. which could have been some sort of cover-up of course
00:17:05
dennis admitted their relationship was iffy we ran into some rough spots we were going to build a
00:17:12
house in houston and i decided that you know given the fact that we weren't getting along
00:17:18
together very well i mean there was no fight i mean we don't fight it's just you know
00:17:22
everybody carries baggage into your relationships at this age, and our baggage was clashing, and we were working on it,
00:17:31
but we decided not to be engaged anymore. Okay. And stopped building the house. But he said they were going to therapy, which was helping.
00:17:39
I mean, we were really, really making breakthroughs, you know. About Diane's dogs, for example.
00:17:46
She thought I was accepting the fact that, you know, her dogs were going to be in the house.
00:17:51
And not long before Diane was killed. I remember her saying that she loved me and that she would jump at the chance to be in a relationship and marry me and you know no matter how long it took
00:18:05
Yeah, we had our ups and downs, no question, but they weren't, you know, it wasn't like, it was very, nothing, never, never, never even angry or loud words.
00:18:14
It was just, it's stupid, you know. She thought I should be more of a, like, handyman kind of guy like her dad, right?
00:18:24
and I thought she should be more appreciative. Was she faithful to you? I would be shocked if she wasn't.
00:18:33
I would be stunned. Everyone has his or her version of the truth, of course. Dennis' story, not at all what Diane's friend said they'd been hearing from her.
00:18:45
I wanted so many times to just say, dude, you're just so stupid because she didn't want to marry you.
00:18:52
Detective Garris took fingerprints. collected Dennis' DNA, made plans to check his alibi.
00:18:58
And Dennis? Before he left, Dennis brought up another name. Has anybody gotten a hold of Ray?
00:19:06
No, they're trying to figure out who Ray is. Ray was a colleague of Diane's at IBM.
00:19:11
He seemed to worship the ground she walks on. he seems to be attracted to women that are not attracted to him.
00:19:26
Honestly, if I was a woman, he would give me the creeps. And according to Dennis, Ray and Diane were not on good terms.
00:19:36
Now they had had a falling out about a month or so ago. Don't know the exact nature of it.
00:19:44
So, time for a talk with Ray. A co-worker with a crush, but did he want something more?
00:19:54
I always was very spoily to her and very affectionate, and she didn't like it. Suspicion.
00:20:13
There was lots of it to go around after Diane Hollick was choked to death in her own guest bedroom.
00:20:19
At least one of Diane's friends directed her suspicion at Dennis, the man who said he was her fiancé.
00:20:26
But was he anymore? Dennis swore it wasn't him, but maybe he was suspicious too.
00:20:32
What about this guy, he asked. What about Ray? There was a man that she worked with by the name of Raphael Chauncey,
00:20:41
and she had actually hired him at IBM. So she was kind of his boss. Maybe more than his boss?
00:20:49
Here's what Diane's friends told the police and us about Ray. He was Johnny on the spot every time she needed something.
00:20:57
You always call Ray, and Ray was there. And he did, you know, honestly, in my heart, I believe that he really, truly loved her and would have married her.
00:21:04
If she'd have him. Yeah, if she'd have him. It seemed off to Dennis. Ray's relationship with Diane, he told the police, it was a little too cozy.
00:21:15
Obsessive, maybe? He always felt like Ray kind of took a liking to her and was very infatuated with her.
00:21:21
And he would always offer to take care of her dogs when she was out of town. Always wanted to be kind of close to her.
00:21:28
And so he thought maybe that he had too much of an interest in Diane. What's more, Ray had his own personal key to Diane's house.
00:21:37
And remember, there was no forced entry. The killer was either invited in or had a key.
00:21:42
So, Detective Garish asked Ray to come into the station to answer a few questions,
00:21:47
except it was Ray who seemed to be full of questions. Any idea what she's doing? What happened?
00:21:53
Well, we're working on it. Unfortunately, I didn't know anything about Diane Hollick until I went to her house last night.
00:22:04
I know a lot about her. And he seemed excited to share what he knew. I haven't spoken to her in a couple years.
00:22:09
How long have you known Diane? Two years. He was an odd character. Super eager to help us. Almost too eager to the point where we were, it just threw us off a little bit.
00:22:20
Diane did a favor for me when I first came to IBM. So my payment to her was I always took care of her dogs when she was going out of town.
00:22:28
And for two years she never had to have a dog sitter or a house sitter. I watched them all the time.
00:22:32
I even changed my schedule so that I could watch her house when she was going. People say you might have had a little crush on her.
00:22:37
Diane? Oh hell yeah. For sure. They told you a lot, didn't they? Man, I can't believe that.
00:22:41
I always had a crush on Diane since I remember. And Diane didn't reciprocate your feelings?
00:22:46
No, no. She just springs. Did that ever cause problems between you? No, never. No?
00:22:51
In the beginning it did. Arguments and stuff? No, in the beginning we had some, I always was very spoily to her and very affectionate
00:22:58
and she didn't like it. They played good cop, bad cop. Another detective came in and pressed Ray.
00:23:04
You ever had a relationship with her? No, she asked me that too. No, I never did.
00:23:07
No sexual relationship at all? Never even kissed her. Never even. Did you want to?
00:23:11
Always wanted to. We never did. Ray agreed, yes, he did have a key to her house, but he also had an alibi.
00:23:19
He was at work the day Diane was murdered. Did you punch in at work? Yeah, I had the badge in.
00:23:26
I had the badge in. So you can get that, too. That's a record you can use. And this came in an older place, too, in the parking lot.
00:23:30
There's a scanned card. You can ask. I'll be in for the records. When I left them, I didn't leave.
00:23:33
That day, Ray said he stayed late at work and then drove home through that terrible traffic
00:23:38
created by the storm. Didn't get home till 10.30 p.m. And after that stayed home.
00:23:44
That's not a stay at home and didn't go anywhere and sleep. I don't know what time I sleep.
00:23:48
I'm always loaded clothes. Back to work next morning. Got to work I guess eight o'clock, eight o'clock or so.
00:23:53
Of course, they need to verify all that. But when they asked Ray about Dennis, the fiancee,
00:24:00
How did her and Dennis get along? It's a loaded question. Is it? Yep. I mean, I want the truth.
00:24:06
If there were some problems or whatever. They were uncomfortable. They were engaged to get married this November,
00:24:12
but they didn't do the engagement because they were having some problems. Clearly, Diane had complicated relationships with Dennis and Ray.
00:24:19
So, just as they had done with Dennis, police fingerprinted Ray and took a DNA swab
00:24:25
and went on looking. Sharon told the detectives, Diane had a date with a man the very night she was killed.
00:24:33
They couldn't figure out who that man was, but they tracked down every man she'd met from the dating service.
00:24:39
It's just lunch. I interviewed every single date she had through that service. Too many options.
00:24:47
Police wondered, had Diane been strangled by a man she'd met through the dating service?
00:24:51
Or a man she knew well, even loved? And yet, something seemed to be missing. But what? This wasn't going to be easy.
00:25:05
A funeral and a wedding and what some say was a former fiancé's extremely strange behavior.
00:25:12
Oh, God, he did a morbid thing. I mean, beyond belief. And finally, a clue. Was this one of his mistakes?
00:25:29
That is an affluent neighborhood. It's not normally where you find murder victims.
00:25:39
Darla Davis was worried. Diane Hollick's body was barely cold when Prosecutor Davis jumped on the case and encountered the problem.
00:25:49
The fact that she lived by herself. There were men who wanted to change that single status,
00:25:54
and there was certainly reason to look at them carefully. But the prosecutor worried, too, about another possibility.
00:26:02
We might have a stranger-on-stranger offense, which is way harder to solve. So essentially a dead body, not much evidence around.
00:26:10
Right. And no idea who did it. Exactly. And I decided that we were going to Monday morning quarterback the crime scene right away.
00:26:18
That meant she and the investigators went back to Diane's house and took a more in-depth look.
00:26:23
and went over it with the alternate light source. You have to do it in the dark.
00:26:29
You just take it and put it like on carpeting or any kind of fabric or the wall or anything,
00:26:35
and certain things will fluoresce. For example, if there was blood or something.
00:26:40
Mostly the alternate light source were looking for seminal fluid. It didn't look like Diane had been sexually assaulted,
00:26:47
but they had to know for sure. And when they tested... There was no indications that there was any semen anywhere in that room or different parts of the house that we checked.
00:27:00
Nothing. No semen, no blood, no evidence of sexual assault. And apart from her missing engagement ring, nothing in Diane's house seemed out of place,
00:27:11
except in the middle of the otherwise pristine living room. And there on the love seat is this towel that's just thrown over. Weird. Yeah.
00:27:20
It was definitely out of place. As if maybe it was left behind by the killer? Was this one of his mistakes?
00:27:26
Was anything found on that towel? There were some hairs. Later on. Her hairs? No.
00:27:31
No. There were seven hairs found on that towel. They sent the hairs to the DNA lab and waited.
00:27:39
While her friends planned the excruciating details for Diane's memorial service here in Austin.
00:27:44
Sharon found the funeral home and the lady to do the makeup and everything. We went in with them and helped them pick out her casket and all.
00:27:54
And her dress for an open casket. I need to make sure that whatever we got looked right and covered the appropriate parts of her.
00:28:03
Seeing where the wounds were, seeing where the ligature marks were, was probably just as difficult as the day I found out that she passed.
00:28:12
Dennis came to the service as expected, but... He tended to not speak with anybody, which I found somewhat strange for a man who was so in love with Diane.
00:28:22
He didn't come sit front and center like a fiancé? No, he did not come sit front and center, which somewhat surprised me.
00:28:28
They watched him through a haze of grief and suspicion. When Diane's parents flew her body from Austin to their family home in New York for the funeral,
00:28:37
Diane's friends went along, as did Dennis. And there, as Diane lay in her open casket, something very strange happened.
00:28:46
Oh, God. He did a morbid thing that just infuriated her parents. I mean, beyond belief.
00:28:55
Dennis had brought a minister with him to the funeral. To actually say the marriage vows to him as she was laying in the coffin.
00:29:05
and then took her hand and put that gold band on. I thought Mom was going to come unglued.
00:29:13
Diane's parents removed the ring, said her friends. But though Diane's family was appalled and her friends were deeply suspicious,
00:29:22
back in Austin, investigators were looking at all kinds of possibilities. Dennis, Ray, and other men Diane had known remained on the list.
00:29:30
Their statements viewed, their alibis checked and rechecked. wouldn't be the first time love turned to murder.
00:29:37
But that worry Prosecutor Davis talked about, was that really what happened? Was the killer some random predator?
00:29:45
It's not a great feeling to know that you're going to have to expand out into the possibility that this was somebody who was a stranger to her,
00:29:55
because that makes it so much harder That second more intense search of the crime scene confirmed everything the detectives found the first time including that this killer whether lover or stranger
00:30:07
had been chillingly careful and clearly had prepared for what he or she was going to do.
00:30:13
This person is trying to avoid being captured, and so he's not leaving any evidence.
00:30:17
Yes, so he cut the zip tie off of her and took the zip tie with him. And thus removed the evidence.
00:30:24
But there was this one other thing, just a passing comet. They heard it from Anita, who, remember, was on the phone with Diane
00:30:32
as that huge storm was about to roll through Austin. She said that she had somebody that had come by earlier
00:30:39
and had looked at the house, was very impressed with it. I said, that's good. She goes, yeah, I might finally sell this thing, you know.
00:30:45
Could that visitor be connected to Diane's murder somehow? Or that discarded wet towel with those seven tiny strands of hair?
00:30:57
A stranger knocking on doors. What happened next still haunts the women who answered.
00:31:04
Jumped in my car, locked the car, and took off. And I felt I'd dodged a bullet. He wanted to get me in there.
00:31:12
And I didn't budge. I stood there and all the bells were going off. The detectives investigating the death of Diane Hollick
00:31:32
were all too aware that stranger killings are among the hardest to solve. At the point when you were driving around
00:31:39
talking to people here, did you have any idea what you were looking for even? No, none.
00:31:45
especially if that stranger is as careful as Diane's killer appeared to have been.
00:31:51
I mean, it was a true who done it. The medical examiner looked carefully for evidence of sexual assault,
00:31:58
semen, the killer's saliva, DNA under her fingernails, that sort of thing. And there was none, none at all.
00:32:08
So, Police 101, maybe one of the neighbors saw something, or someone, suspicious.
00:32:15
And sure enough, not one but several neighbors had seen a stranger, a potential homebuyer,
00:32:22
who was a welcome visitor, frankly, in the difficult housing market that year. They all agreed he was tall, had dark, slicked-back hair, and a big nose,
00:32:33
and that he said he wanted to pay cash for a nice house. So, was he the man who toured Diane's house day of the storm?
00:32:41
You always try to find the last person that saw the victim alive. And we thought, well, this man could be the last person to see her alive.
00:32:47
Who was this phantom home buyer? Did anybody get a name? We did get one name, Walter Miller and a number.
00:32:55
Walter Miller? Of course, they looked up the Walter Millers around Austin and found two of them.
00:33:02
Neither one fit that description, though. And the phone number the man left? It ended up being a fax machine.
00:33:08
It belonged to the wife of a guy by the name of Matthew Sapolsky. Matthew Sapolsky?
00:33:16
Yes. What was he all about? He did have a background that involved some drug addiction, some assaults.
00:33:23
He'd had a restraining order put against him. And then we eventually tracked down Matthew.
00:33:28
And they realized right away he could not be the killer. He was in a neck brace.
00:33:34
He'd been in a bad accident and he had some paralysis in his arms. so we knew it couldn't be him.
00:33:40
Meaning this visitor, whoever he was, had left a fake name and a fake phone number.
00:33:45
Who would do that? And then they found another neighbor who'd talked to the guy, heard his story.
00:33:52
Got a good enough look at him to help with a composite sketch. And we aired it on the 10 o'clock news.
00:33:57
Austin police have asked for help in solving a murder. Police want to question a man that was seen in the area a few days before that murder.
00:34:04
The man is described as white, between the ages of 35 and 45. He's about six feet tall and neatly dressed.
00:34:11
And we were hoping to get tips. What do you know? Before long, women started calling with tales about a man who wanted to buy a house.
00:34:21
So what were you hearing from people who may have had a visitor? Was it the same story they were hearing or what?
00:34:28
Pretty much. Yeah, yeah. Hey, we're getting the story about this guy that sold his ranch in South Boston.
00:34:34
He puts the big cash. Him and his wife are looking to do this quick. And then the physical description, they were all the same.
00:34:40
Some callers, like Tammy Taman, added curious details. He had on brand new jeans that were probably three sizes too long.
00:34:49
It was the kind of strange thing you remember, said real estate agent Tammy. He had on a shirt, a striped shirt that had wrinkles in it.
00:34:58
I mean, folds. It just came out of the box. Oh, he just bought clothes, I'm sure of it.
00:35:02
He had suspenders on, which nobody wears suspenders, and it wasn't like his pants were falling off.
00:35:09
But it's when she showed him into the house that her nerves went on alert. He said, oh, after you, after you, and it was a standoff at the bottom of the stairs. I wouldn't go.
00:35:19
You know, my stomach is tight inside. Tammy was wary. Years earlier, she had been raped by an armed customer at a store she managed.
00:35:26
I knew that my instincts and all that I had learned and all that I had been through were the reason that I was nervous about him.
00:35:35
He said his name was Jim Sage. He kept trying to get her into upstairs rooms. He wanted to get me in there. And I didn't budge. I stood there and all the bells were going off.
00:35:47
The next day, Tammy called the police to report this Jim Sage. Did he hurt you Did he threaten you Did he put his hands on you And I had to say no to all of that He said I sorry there nothing we can do But now Diane Hollick had been murdered strangled And with a shudder Tammy remembered the man odd suspenders
00:36:10
Did he use them on Diane Hollick's neck? When did that hit you? After. After you found out.
00:36:16
After I found out she was strangled. The calls kept coming in. Women with stories of a strange man posing as a homebuyer,
00:36:24
Some truly hair-raising stories. Like what happened to ex-real estate agent Melody Blunt six months before Diane was murdered.
00:36:32
A man had called her about one of her houses. It was a vacant listing, and I asked him if he had been pre-qualified by a lender,
00:36:42
and I'm paying cash, and so I drove over to meet him at the house. I go to the door to greet him, and immediately he was behind me.
00:36:58
He would never walk in front of me. Which made Melody uncomfortable, especially because he only wanted to see vacant houses.
00:37:09
And? The whole time that I was showing him the home, he was never looking at any room.
00:37:15
He seemed to be more interested in looking out windows than he did the actual room.
00:37:21
She said something else seemed off about him. He has a tick in his neck. He's constantly cracking and popping his neck and breathing very heavy.
00:37:34
Melody wanted to leave. But then the man noticed the detached garage. He was adamant about getting in the garage.
00:37:43
She said, I really want to see inside the garage and started that neck popping. Her hands shook as she tried to work the key in the door.
00:37:53
It didn't open. I just turned to him, said, I'm leaving, jumped in my car, locked the car and took off and I left him.
00:38:03
She drove home still shaking. I have never cried nor prayed so hard in my whole life because I felt I dodged a bullet.
00:38:15
Melody called the police too. Got the same message as Tammy. They did not believe me.
00:38:22
Did he touch you? Did he hurt you? No, he did not. But when she saw the story about Diane and the sketch...
00:38:30
I looked at it and immediately knew that it was the same man. Scary stories. Who was this man?
00:38:40
And how were they going to find him? More calls about the mystery man. She immediately got a creepy feeling from him.
00:38:51
And the break detectives had been waiting for. She actually wrote down his license plate and called the police.
00:39:00
The idea that the murder of Diane Hollick had something to do with her attempt to sell her house
00:39:17
was gaining some traction. Even the friend who remained so suspicious of Diane's fiancée wondered about that.
00:39:25
I just had a fleeting moment that maybe it was somebody dealing with the royalty
00:39:29
and the selling of the house because there were quite a few people that came in,
00:39:32
husbands and wives and stuff, and I thought, well, you know, maybe a husband found her attractive, you know, made a move, and she didn't go for it.
00:39:41
Meanwhile, the police and prosecutor were working every angle they could think of, but...
00:39:45
We were just coming up zero. Yeah, so whoever this killer was knew what he or she was doing
00:39:50
and was very careful about doing it just so. That's the impression that we were getting, and that's what was increasing our anxiety.
00:39:57
So, they waited for DNA results from those tiny hairs found on the towel in Diane's living room.
00:40:05
And they listened to the women who called in to tell about being frightened by a mysterious would-be home buyer.
00:40:11
But who was he? And then, one more call, and they knew this could be their breakthrough.
00:40:19
She said that she had seen the news, and she thinks that that man had come to her house,
00:40:25
and she possibly had a flyer that he had handled that he had left behind. We were really excited about that.
00:40:35
Which meant that maybe there might be fingerprints. She saved this thing? She did it by accident.
00:40:41
She didn't just throw it away? Nope, she actually picked it up and put it in the back of the stack.
00:40:45
What happened before that to her was a story that by this time sounded altogether too familiar.
00:40:51
She was excited to sell her house. He was going to pay cash. He wanted to bring his wife back to look at the house, and he asked her if he could look around, and she said sure.
00:41:00
So she kind of followed him into one of the bedrooms, and when he got to the closet, he turned around on her,
00:41:08
and she said there was this awkward silence, and he just stared at her. She became so uncomfortable, she thought something bad was going to happen.
00:41:17
And just then, in a nearby room, the woman's baby cried. And it gave her the opportunity to break the encounter with him, to grab the baby.
00:41:27
And he followed her into the room and was standing behind her when she turned around with the baby in her arms.
00:41:33
And it must have spooked him. And he just left? Yeah. Leaving behind the flyer. Leaving behind the flyer.
00:41:40
So they picked up the real estate flyer and brought in a latent fingerprint expert.
00:41:45
Those prints just might belong to their killer. except remember they found no prints in diane's house to compare them to in fact and this was
00:41:54
strange even diane own prints were hard to find as if the killer may have wiped them clean There was really not even the fingerprints that you would think you would find in a house that was occupied
00:42:08
That's very rare. Yes, it was very rare. And scary. Scary because they couldn't know who he was.
00:42:15
Scary because if he was a stranger just looking for a convenient target, he had probably seen the stories on TV, the composite sketch, and knew they were looking for him.
00:42:24
so he could have changed his appearance or left the area, or even worse, might strike again somewhere else.
00:42:31
But then there was this one more phone call from a woman who said she too had had an experience with a male homebuyer,
00:42:39
and this caller just might lead them to an actual person. And she basically had told us that months earlier
00:42:47
that this man with the same story had come to her home, but in a different neighborhood. But very affluent. Yes. So it kind of matched. Okay.
00:42:57
And he was very insistent about wanting to go in and see that house. And she immediately got a
00:43:03
creepy feeling from him and told him no. And her husband said, well, if he ever comes back,
00:43:09
you need to call the police or get his license plate because it really scared her. And about
00:43:14
six months later, he came back and was very insistent on going in to see her house. And she
00:43:21
told him no, she was not going to allow him to come in. And so she called the police.
00:43:27
Nothing happened then. The reaction she got was like those other women. The police could
00:43:32
hardly arrest some guy for just seeming creepy. But this woman did something different. She
00:43:39
wrote down the name and phone number the man gave her, but more important, his license plate
00:43:45
number, stuck it on her fridge. Instinct? Luck? Maybe both. She didn't know if he would come back
00:43:52
again. She thought it was concerning enough that she would just leave it on her refrigerator just
00:43:58
in case. And she gave us the original piece of paper that she wrote his license plate down with.
00:44:05
And? Well, we immediately ran his license plate and it was a minivan and it was registered to
00:44:13
Patrick Russo and his wife Janet Russo. Patrick Russo? Could he be the guy who creeped out all those women?
00:44:22
Could he also be the killer? His last own address was in a rural area about a half hour outside Austin.
00:44:29
So, before dawn, unannounced, they paid a visit. Patrick Russo seemed an unlikely killer.
00:44:40
I studied for theology to become a minister. But an odd coincidence. He was in Diane's area the day she was killed.
00:44:49
Do you remember ever talking to her? It's a pretty drive from Austin, Texas to Bastrop County
00:45:10
through the gently rolling greenery, the live oaks, cypress trees. But at 4 a.m., Detectives Garrish and De Los Santos weren't exactly taking in the view
00:45:19
as they drove to the home of a guy named Russo, hoping this was a lead that could shed some light on the murder of Diane Hollick,
00:45:27
though all they had, remember, were stories about a creepy guy looking at houses for sale.
00:45:32
Was Patrick Anthony Russo that guy? Maybe. Maybe not. Don was hours away when they knocked at his door.
00:45:41
The man, who woke up to answer it, looked like the composite sketch. We told him that his name had come up in an investigation in Austin,
00:45:50
and he basically just told his wife that these things will happen from time to time
00:45:54
because he's a convict and out on parole, and not to worry that he'd be back in a couple hours.
00:46:00
And we left. On the ride to the police station, he said he went by his nickname, Tony,
00:46:06
and he wasn't surprised they wanted to talk to him. If things go wrong in your town or something, it's possible people would look at you.
00:46:13
and that's okay. He seemed eager to help and wanted detectives to know he'd turned his life around
00:46:26
when he was in prison. I spent my entire eight years in prison doing nothing but engulfing myself
00:46:35
in a better life. I got my GED, I went to college, I studied for theology, to become a minister. It was behind bars where Tony met his wife, Janet. She's a church volunteer.
00:46:50
Since his release, he said, he published an autobiography about his tough childhood,
00:46:55
his battle with drugs, and his redemption. I have a ministry that I go into prisons with.
00:47:01
I go to churches and share testimony with them on how they can deal with, you know,
00:47:10
youth or whatever that are headed in the wrong direction. At his local church, he said he'd
00:47:16
become the minister of music. I mean, what is your job at the church where they pay you for?
00:47:21
My job is to make sure that the music for the praise team or any kind of music that's being
00:47:28
done for church services is handled, whether I play it or have someone play it. And in his spare
00:47:35
time, he fronted a Christian rock band. What's the name of your band? It's Broken Silence. Broken
00:47:41
Silence? Good name. Again, said Tony Russo, he was more than willing to cooperate with the
00:47:48
investigation any way he could. I will be happy to do whatever it takes to do whatever you guys need.
00:47:55
So I'm not, I don't have any problem with it at all. So they asked. him. Where was he when Diane was murdered? Did he have an alibi? Thursday, that was that big storm
00:48:10
day, wasn't it? Thursday, I spent some time at the church again. I went to go to KNLE here in Austin.
00:48:20
KNLE is a Christian radio station. Tony said they were helping him create a website for his
00:48:26
Christian rock band. Okay. About what time was that? I think it was about, let's say, I talked to my wife.
00:48:41
I was pulling in the parking lot, so that would have been about four o'clock, I believe.
00:48:47
When no one came to the door, I went ahead and left. So you made the trip up there for nothing, basically?
00:48:54
Pretty much. Then, of course, he got caught in that awful storm. I got lost for probably a good hour or so.
00:49:02
I got on the phone with my wife. She stayed on the phone with me. It started getting later.
00:49:08
That's when the heavy winds started coming and the tornadoes, I guess. So what time did you get home, finally?
00:49:16
My wife's better at the timing on this than I am. 5.30, I guess, or 6, somewhere.
00:49:23
I'm not really sure exactly the time frame. The thing was, Diane's house, where she was killed,
00:49:30
was not far from the radio station. Do you remember ever talking to her? Yes, sir.
00:49:44
Tony was adamant he'd never seen Diane. He never talked to her? No. Interesting.
00:49:51
Then detectives asked, had he been doing some house hunting? Is there any reason why you'd be in a neighborhood looking for a house?
00:50:02
No. None whatsoever? Of course, they knew a thing or two about that. So the detectives leaned on him a little.
00:50:11
Let me tell you how serious this is. I would appreciate it because I feel like I'm getting pretty banged here and I don't even know what it's for.
00:50:20
She's dead. I don't know if you noticed when you walked in here, this is the homicide unit.
00:50:27
I've done a lot of things wrong in my life, and I don't care what anybody's saying about me.
00:50:32
I'm telling you that as badly as I feel for this woman here, I'm sorry, but you guys are barking up the wrong tree.
00:50:42
Go ahead, he said. Search my house, my car. He even offered to take a polygraph.
00:50:48
I don't care how hard you dig, you're not going to find me committing any crime like that.
00:50:56
Any crime, period. Tony's wife, Janet, was very helpful, too. And her story about that day was just about the same as his.
00:51:05
Yeah, I was telling him where the tornadoes were. I think he had gotten pretty scared.
00:51:09
And he doesn't know his way around Austin all that well, especially that direction.
00:51:14
Next thing he knew, he actually circled back around to going west because he was back on.
00:51:19
He said, well, there's Candle again. Candle is a nickname for KNLE, the Christian radio station.
00:51:26
When the interviews ended, Tony asked to see Janet. I promise you, I never did anything to anybody.
00:51:36
I promise. I think about how this affects you and our church and everything. We're so hard for them.
00:51:49
I know. Tony and Janet Russo had answered all their questions, had been cooperative,
00:51:56
and Tony even gave them a swab of his DNA and his fingerprints. So the police thanked them and took them home.
00:52:07
The Interview, Part 2. This one, a little tougher. Is there any reason why somebody might have seen your van over there?
00:52:15
Surely I don't have the only computer Ford minivan in this entire town. You have the only computer Ford minivan that has that life to play on it.
00:52:25
That's true. That is true. The day after police interviewed Tony Russo and his wife, they brought him back in.
00:52:46
And again, he was cooperative. Said he was surprised to be a suspect in, of all things, a murder.
00:52:54
For two years, I've done everything I can to make the best life for my family and myself.
00:53:00
being caught up in this whole thing is such a mind boggler that I feel like I'm in a nightmare
00:53:10
state right now. But bits of information and the women's stories about a creepy man who looked a
00:53:16
lot like him were stacking up. Detectives asked him about the upscale neighborhoods where several
00:53:22
women had reported seeing him, often driving his minivan. Is there any reason why somebody
00:53:27
You might have seen your van over there. Surely I don't have the only Pewter Ford minivan in this entire town.
00:53:35
You have the only Pewter Ford minivan in this entire town, or in the entire state of Texas, that has that license plate on it.
00:53:42
That's true. That is true. By the time the detectives interviewed Tony, they'd already checked for priors.
00:53:48
And guess what? That conviction, the one he was on parole for, was for kidnapping with a very particular twist He had gone into a office where a woman was alone and tied her up with zip ties and choked her
00:54:06
Did not kill her, but did choke her. Disturbingly familiar, given what happened to Diane Hollick.
00:54:14
Back then, a decade before Diane's murder, Tony confessed to kidnapping and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
00:54:21
It was there he met and married Janet and soon after was paroled after serving only one-third of a sentence.
00:54:28
But the kidnapping charge wasn't all they found at Tony's record. Even earlier, years earlier, there was her.
00:54:38
It had actually been a quiet day. Donna Shank encountered Tony when she was a 21-year-old apartment manager
00:54:45
in Lake Jackson, Texas, all alone late one afternoon in her building's rental office
00:54:50
when a man walked in. And he wanted to look at a two-bedroom apartment for himself and his girlfriend, he says.
00:55:00
Donna showed him an available apartment. We're walking down the hallway. We get back to what would be the master bedroom.
00:55:08
So I opened the closet door and went into the closet to turn the light on. And in a split second, he had me by the throat.
00:55:18
She struck out at him, tried scratching and slapping him in an effort to get away, but he took her down.
00:55:24
Before I knew it, I was on the floor. I was on the floor, face up, and he was straddling me with both of his hands around my throat.
00:55:32
Just squeezing. Tight. Very tight. I wasn't able to speak. I wasn't able to breathe.
00:55:39
I was thrashing and kicking, bucking, you know, everything I could do. until he grabbed my hands and pinned them, I guess, under his knees.
00:55:49
But I couldn't move my hands. It just, you know, dawned on me, okay, well, this is it.
00:55:55
You know, this is the end. Is this absolute terror? It is absolute terror to where, you know, your life flashes before your eyes.
00:56:04
And you think, I'm going to die. And you're, this is it. Then she thought, no, this would not be it.
00:56:11
And she thrashed about until she was able to free her hands. and I put my hands on his forearms trying to pull him away.
00:56:18
I had sort of a high neck sweater on and he kept pulling my sweater down to look at my neck
00:56:23
and his eyes are very, very different, very scary and it was completely different.
00:56:30
It was like flipping a switch. It was a very scary, crazed look. Then Donna, in a panic, said all she could think of saying.
00:56:37
I've been gone too long. They know what apartment I'm in. They will come looking for me.
00:56:42
And he would say, you're lying. Don't lie to me. You better not be lying to me. And would call me profanities and would strike me.
00:56:51
He's still holding on to you, your throat? Yes. But he seemed to realize, yes, there was a possibility somebody would be coming to look for her.
00:56:59
And as quickly as he had become a monster. His expression changed again and his eyes went softer.
00:57:07
Then he completely took his hands off of me and just went like this and just covered his face and then sat back up and he said, I can't believe I did this.
00:57:17
Are you OK? I think he's a different person now. Yes. To the point that he was apologizing profusely for doing it.
00:57:26
Asked me if I was hurt. Asked me if I was OK. Helped me up off of the floor. Helped me collect my necklace that was, you know, torn off and thrown about.
00:57:37
He begged Donna not to call the police, but she did. And he confessed. He was convicted of misdemeanor assault and was put on probation.
00:57:49
But as the years went by, he attacked five other women in similar ways, including his kidnapping victim.
00:57:56
And now he's being questioned by Austin police about a murder involving zip ties and choking
00:58:01
and was denying he knew anything about it, saying the similarities with earlier incidents were merely coincidence.
00:58:09
It's disgusting to sit here and listen to you talk about being such a devout Christian
00:58:13
and forgiveness and how much you've turned your life around when this one coincidence after another,
00:58:20
this whole thing goes back to similarities that I'm sure are coincidental back in 1989, 1990, 91, 92, you know?
00:58:29
But you're this reborn Christian, and you're going to sit here and lie about it?
00:58:34
But the truth was, at that point, police could only prove patterns of behavior. Patterns Tony insisted he broke when he became a born-again Christian.
00:58:44
But really? So the detective set up a little trap and asked him if his fingerprints could possibly be found on a real estate flyer.
00:58:54
Have you ever handled a real estate flyer for a house for sale in West Austin? Oh, okay. Then your fingerprints shouldn't be on there. Correct.
00:59:06
But even as Tony insisted otherwise, they already had received the test results from the real estate flyer saved by that woman.
00:59:15
Thank you, Lord. Tony Russo's fingerprints were positively on that flyer. What happens in the old gut from that?
00:59:22
Well, I mean, we knew it was him. We just weren't able to put him anywhere. And now we had him. We had him dead to rights.
00:59:29
True, they had him recently in the home of a woman who'd been terrified by his behavior.
00:59:34
But they didn't have him in Diane Hollick's house. To get that evidence, they needed time.
00:59:40
And they worried, would he run? And then the prosecutor had a canny idea. When Tony Russo said he didn't touch the real estate flyer, that was a lie.
00:59:51
And lying to the police was a parole violation So the DA office cleverly came up with this charge that allowed us the time we needed to send off all the DNA and physical evidence to see if we could actually put him at her house
01:00:08
Bring your right hand back. So into jail went Tony Russo. Showtime with a script as his victims come face to face with Tony Russo.
01:00:22
Repeat the following phrase. Do you have any information about the floor plan of the house?
01:00:28
Do you have any information about the floor plan of the house? I did not expect him to be right in front of me.
01:00:36
So that was extremely frightening. It was a bit of a reach, frankly, jailing Tony Russo for lying about leaving his fingerprints on that real estate flyer.
01:00:59
Still, Tony was on parole, after all, and his lie was technically a parole violation.
01:01:06
But mainly, detectives wanted him safely behind bars, while they looked for evidence to tie him to the murder of Diane Hollick.
01:01:14
Mind you, they'd already noticed something, like the fact that Tony changed the look of his van after he became a suspect.
01:01:22
He took all the pinstriping off of his van, which several of the women noticed. So he went to some trouble to make his car look different.
01:01:31
And you didn't change the symbol of the Christian fish that was a sticker on the back windshield.
01:01:36
You took that off. Of course, they searched Tony's van, top to bottom. But they didn't find Diane's engagement ring or anything else that belonged to her in the van.
01:01:46
And a search of Tony's house came up empty, too. Though, with the rolled-up wire fencing outside the house, they found zip ties,
01:01:54
which appeared to match the markings on Diane's wrists. They tracked down his alibi, too.
01:02:01
of course, asked employees of the Christian radio station if Tony could have knocked on
01:02:05
the door without being seen that afternoon of the big storm. And the radio people said, no, not possible, because...
01:02:13
As part of their tornado protocol, everybody in the building had to go to the front lobby
01:02:18
of the radio station. There's no way that he could have shown up there with them not knowing, because there's
01:02:24
probably 20 people sitting in the lobby and they would have seen him. Yet his cell phone pinged in the area, which happened to be near Diane's neighborhood.
01:02:32
And those women who'd been calling in who described a tall, dark-haired man with a big nose and beer belly,
01:02:38
could they help make a case against Tony? We had so many women that had let him into their homes in different neighborhoods all over Austin,
01:02:49
South Austin, North Austin, even real estate agents that he had called when he wanted to look at vacant houses.
01:02:56
But could any of those women actually identify Tony Russo as their guy? We felt like we needed to do a live lineup because the phrasing and his ruse that he used was so specific.
01:03:12
And the women remembered his voice and they remembered his story. So they rounded up some Austin police officers who looked like Tony and put him and them in a lineup and brought the women in.
01:03:25
There were five guys standing like on a theater setting. Number one, take one step forward.
01:03:38
A couple of feet above me and we're down below. Number two, repeat the following phrase.
01:03:44
You have a beautiful house. You have a beautiful house. We had a script that each person had to step forward and exactly repeat what the detective was telling them to say.
01:03:57
I'm going to pay cash for a house. I'm going to pay cash for a house. It was everything that was said to each one of these women when he went into their homes.
01:04:07
I came to this house before, didn't I? I came to this house before, didn't I? Repeat the following phrase.
01:04:16
do you have any information about the floor plan of the house? Do you have any information about the floor plan of the house?
01:04:25
He was number one right in front of me. I did not expect him to be right in front of me.
01:04:32
So that was extremely frightening. I picked him out of a lineup immediately. I was feeling a lot of guilt.
01:04:40
I don't know why. You know, you just feel, what could I have done? Somebody's dead.
01:04:46
And this man was with me. How many of those witnesses picked out the right guy? I believe it was 15 women.
01:04:54
Out of a total of how many? I think it was 30. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously not great
01:05:00
and often doesn't carry much weight in the trial, so you needed something more, right?
01:05:05
Yes. What they needed was something definitive to put Tony Russo in Diane Hollick's house.
01:05:11
They'd sent off DNA samples from Diane's finger where her ring had been yanked off
01:05:16
from that towel on her couch. And finally, the results. What did the DNA tell you?
01:05:23
The swab on her hand was a mixture that was consistent with a combination of Diane Hulick and Russo.
01:05:32
Was it enough to say for sure, though, because DNA... No, no, no, no. We can't exclude him.
01:05:39
It's consistent with him, but it's not the kind of DNA that you can eliminate the rest of the world.
01:05:47
Right. Just really increased suspicion is all. It was helpful. It was not dispositive.
01:05:52
And the hair is found on that wet towel left on Diane couch We sent the hair off to a lab and they did a mitochondrial DNA test on the hair And again we could not exclude Mr Russo
01:06:07
But you couldn't say for sure. We couldn't say for sure, no. So close. Just not quite the absolute proof they'd been hoping for.
01:06:16
But the DNA did provide one very helpful service. While police had confirmed the alibis of Diane's fiancée, Dennis, and her IBM friend, Ray,
01:06:27
these tests definitively eliminated them as suspects. But we could not eliminate Mr. Russo.
01:06:34
Finally, six months after Diane's death, Tony Russo was charged with murder. A risk? Maybe.
01:06:42
They'd only get one shot. And the evidence they were going to take to court did not absolutely link him to the murder of Diane Hollick.
01:06:51
Then, as the trial was almost upon them, they found something. Something almost beyond belief.
01:06:59
In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that a website like this could even exist.
01:07:07
The dark side of the web and Tony Russo. You certainly had your motive. Yes, we did.
01:07:20
Her personality was like this giant bubble that just kept getting bigger, and she put as many people around to be in this bubble of fun, of life.
01:07:36
She lived life to be having a good time. Two years after Diane Hollick's happy, vibrant life was so suddenly asphyxiated,
01:07:46
her friends gathered again for a murder trial. Friends and a whole group of women who had never met each other or Diane Hollick.
01:07:55
But... You could see they were all attractive women. It looked like he had a type.
01:08:01
It was obvious what this man was looking for. Everyone had the same look. And the same determination to testify against Tony Russo, music minister, born-again Christian, happily married man.
01:08:15
But the case against him? Not so easy. It was the most complex murder case, definitely the most complex murder case I've ever tried.
01:08:24
That's because without hard evidence leaking Tony to the murder or even putting him in Diane's house,
01:08:31
she'd have to assemble all the jagged puzzle pieces of coincidence into a coherent pattern for the jury.
01:08:36
When you're getting ready for trial, you put it together almost like a play. You know, what are you going to tell them first?
01:08:45
And so you script it out. There were the zip ties on his property that seemed to match marks on Diane's wrists.
01:08:54
His cell phone pinged near her house. The radio station alibi was a lie. The DNA, though it wasn't absolutely definitive, could not eliminate him.
01:09:04
And all those women could identify him as that creepy guy claiming he wanted to buy a house with cash.
01:09:11
Cash which he certainly did not have. But then... He really wasn't looking for houses. He was looking for victims.
01:09:18
Like realtor Melody Blunt, who cried and prayed after her encounter with Tony Russo,
01:09:24
she found it so terrifying to testify, but did. I did not expect for Patrick Anthony Russo to be sitting across from me within 10 to 12 feet.
01:09:38
And having to testify with that man looking at me, it was petrifying. And most unsettling when she noticed something all too familiar.
01:09:50
Now I'm glaring at Russo, and what does he do? He starts that tick in his neck, starts that popping.
01:09:59
And I raised my hand up, and I said, there he goes. He's doing it right now. The state also called Tony Russo's victims from earlier years,
01:10:09
including Donna, the young apartment manager he attacked in Lake Jackson, Texas.
01:10:14
This phone call just out of the blue, after all of that time. She was not only surprised, she was angry, very angry.
01:10:23
Why did that have to happen? Why did someone have to be killed before this man was stopped?
01:10:29
And the emotions of that whole ugly ordeal flooded right back. My heart started racing. It was just being terrified all over again. It just like being blindsided.
01:10:39
But some of the compelling evidence came courtesy of Tony's first wife, as he'd been married once before.
01:10:47
The first wife said that he could not get aroused sexually unless he was choking her, and that he choked her when they had sex.
01:10:56
And the second wife? The second wife confirmed that he also choked her while they had sex.
01:11:01
I mean, I will say that he does tend to put his hand on my neck. Anytime I feel like my airway is getting restricted, you know, then he always lets go.
01:11:13
So, a strange and potentially dangerous fetish. But was that all it was? Isn't it possible, though, that he really didn't want to kill Diane Hawke?
01:11:25
It's just my belief that he did. that just choking and not killing, it was no longer enough.
01:11:35
It wasn't enough anymore. And why was she so sure? Because of what turned up during a forensic analysis
01:11:42
of Tony Russo's computer. The IT people landed on it just as the trial was about to begin.
01:11:49
Disturbing is perhaps too bland a word to describe what was in there. He was a member of a website, one that you had to pay money on.
01:12:00
To see. It's described as tastefully erotic death scenes, and Mr. Russo had chosen the subcategory of asphyxiation.
01:12:09
OMG. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that a website like this could even exist, or that anybody would want to look at it.
01:12:18
You certainly had your motive. Yes, we did. It's called sexual sadism. So he felt a compulsion to go and choke people.
01:12:27
Yes, he was sexually aroused by women being choked. Oh, boy, that gets into pretty dark territory, doesn't it?
01:12:34
Yes. They nailed him big time. Diane's friend, Anita, was in the courtroom when the state rested,
01:12:42
and she waited to hear Tony's defense. His attorney just stood up and said, defense rest.
01:12:50
And there was a huge gasp in the room. and then totally silent. Diane's friend Lynn arrived just in time to hear the closing argument
01:13:01
from Darla's co-prosecutor. He kind of stood quiet for a minute, and then he walked over to the jury,
01:13:07
and he looked them all in the face, and he said, I need you to understand what happened to her that night.
01:13:12
He put his hands up in the air like this, and he put his thumbs down, and he shook his hands like this, as though he was choking someone.
01:13:19
And then he said, imagine, it took her two and a half, maybe even three minutes for her to die.
01:13:30
As he's holding on to her. Yeah. Stood there and he looked at his watch and just waited.
01:13:37
And for at least two and a half minutes, nothing moved in that courtroom. And it was silent and he held that position with shaking hands
01:13:45
until enough time had passed that a person would have died from being choked. And all of a sudden, slams his hand down on the table.
01:13:54
I mean, he said, that's how long it took for her to die. And the whole courtroom just, I mean, we all broke down at that point.
01:14:08
To think that that's how long it took for her to die, how long she suffered. The defense, which did not call a single witness,
01:14:15
instead made the case in its closing argument. For all the drama, the state, they said,
01:14:20
failed to prove because it couldn't prove that Tony Russo was ever in Diane Hollick's home.
01:14:26
Couldn't prove he killed her. Tony did not testify. But he did talk to us. The verdict.
01:14:37
When the jury walks back into the jury box, I can't even look at him. The End Darla Davis had put everything she had into the case against Tony Russo
01:14:59
When, not if, will this sexually sadistic, psychopathic predator start again? She believed he was a dangerous man who should never be set loose to victimize another woman.
01:15:13
Her circumstantial case was powerful, overwhelming. But nothing, not even the tiny bits of recovered DNA,
01:15:21
could absolutely prove beyond all doubt that Tony Russo killed Diane Hollick. And so prosecutors, investigators, friends, and family were anything but calmed
01:15:32
as the hours passed, and they waited for the jury. Then, after 11 hours... When the jury walks back into the jury box, I can't even look at them, even now.
01:15:42
Yeah, I just look down at the table and I wait for the judge to read. And then...
01:15:48
We, the jury, find the defendant, Patrick Anthony Russo, guilty of the offense of capital murder.
01:15:55
It was great. We really worked for this one. So they did. And won a case which remains as relevant a cautionary tale as it did back in 2004,
01:16:05
when the jury pronounced its verdict. Seller, beware. That was quite eye-opening, the effect on not only her friends,
01:16:14
but the community as a whole and the real estate business. People need to see this and be aware, so maybe this will stop that from happening.
01:16:23
And Tony Russo, his hair has gone silver now. He's in prison for life. And here one Friday morning, he brought his Bible to the barrier that separates his world from ours.
01:16:35
his holy stamp of assurance that what he was about to tell us about his role in the murder of Diane
01:16:41
Hollick would be God's truth. That jury comes back and says guilty. What's that like? Devastating.
01:16:51
When you're innocent, it's devastating. Innocent? Yes. And? So I hear from the warden that you have
01:16:57
you got your bachelor's in divinity. Yes, sir. If I had to spend the rest of my life in here,
01:17:04
I want to use it for Christ. Throughout our talk, he wore his Christianity like a badge and like an accusation.
01:17:13
I noticed that in the media, they love to sensationalize any Christians or people that claim to be Christians,
01:17:23
that somehow they just, they've got it. There's some hidden secrets in their life.
01:17:29
But your victims were Christians too? Well, saying you're a Christian and being a Christian are two different things.
01:17:35
In other words, you're saying you have to be totally honest if you're a Christian.
01:17:37
I don think you have to be totally honest but I think there things in your life that you going to exhibit whether Christ is in your life or not And the evidence against him He had answers for everything Like why he lied to the police when he said he wasn looking at houses
01:17:55
when in fact, he was. I did deny in the interview because I felt like I was going to incriminate myself
01:18:03
in the original interrogation. I did, however, share with my attorneys what had been going on.
01:18:12
Which was, she said, perfectly innocent research. Looking at the different designs and things.
01:18:19
For a long time we had talked about building a house. One of my friends from church had lived in a mobile home
01:18:27
while he built a house on the back of his property. So, we wondered, why did he behave in a way that terrified all those women
01:18:36
who testified in court against him? You've got to admit that it was a pretty creepy thing to do.
01:18:42
Well, I don't know how creepy it is to look at houses or designs of houses. Well, it's to tell people a whole shaggy dog tale, a bunch of lies about why you're there,
01:18:50
to follow them around the house, to make them nervous. Well, actually, I prefer not to follow anybody through a house.
01:18:57
They're the ones that want to show you the house, so they tend to lead you. The rental agent he attacked and half strangled back in 1989.
01:19:06
What do you have to say to a woman like her? Okay, I don't remember her at all. I don't.
01:19:13
And yet, he actually confessed to attacking that woman back in 1989. I also asked him about his decision to take the pinstriping off his van just then.
01:19:23
He said that wasn't because police were looking for it, but because it had been vandalized.
01:19:29
I was going to redo the pinstriping since I had originally put it on there. The zip ties police found wrapped around fencing on his property?
01:19:38
They belong to a friend, he said. And the statement by his wife, Janet, who, by the way, still married to him, still standing by him,
01:19:46
that he would sometimes choke her during sex. I mean, I will say that he does tend to put his hand on my neck.
01:19:54
I never choked anybody. You choked your wife. No, I did not. She said you did. No, she didn't.
01:20:00
She said you choked her as part of the sex act. That's how you had sex. No, that's not true.
01:20:06
That's a manipulation. That's a manipulation of what she said. No, that's not true.
01:20:09
By whom? I'm just telling you that that's not what she said. But we reminded Tony he'd been married twice.
01:20:17
And in marriage number one, same issue. But your ex-wife says you choked her. Okay.
01:20:24
And that's how you got sexual arousal. Okay. The only way you get sexual arousal.
01:20:29
Well, I'm not going to go into detail to embarrass her. So I rather not say anything about her You know that a tactic don you I seen this done a thousand times You can call it a tactic If you got something to say about the woman say it but don do that
01:20:46
where I'm not going to say a bad thing about her because it would be mean to her. That's BS and
01:20:50
you know it. Well, under the world standards, yeah, that would be BS. But as a Christian, it's not.
01:20:56
We asked about that pornographic website purporting to show the killing by asphyxiation
01:21:01
of women, the one he had to register and pay for before he could access it on his computer.
01:21:07
I cannot help that porn sites pop up on the computer. Well, they don't pop up on your computer unless you look at some porn site or other.
01:21:14
So there's an explanation for everything. Well, there's a truth to everything. Oh, yes.
01:21:20
Tony Russo had an answer for everything. I am absolutely innocent. and it disgusts me that every time you try to say you're innocent,
01:21:31
everybody says, isn't that what everybody says? Have you confessed the ultimate sin to God?
01:21:37
What's the ultimate sin that you're talking about? Murder. Okay, if I had murdered someone, I definitely would have.
01:21:42
But you say, with your hand on your Bible, I will die claiming my innocence, and people can believe it or not believe it.
01:21:50
I absolutely am innocent, and I don't care how guilty I look. I mean this he couldn't convince any courts of that though
01:21:59
all his appeals failed so here he will stay well outside this institution several women still struggle
01:22:08
with the anxieties and fears in prisons of their own created by him it'll come back anytime I get a call
01:22:16
from a man that wants to see a house who's single every time I could have been a victim
01:22:21
I was an intended victim That's why he called me. So that's a hard thing to think about.
01:22:28
And they told us the trauma lives on. Though... It's comforting to know that he's in there, that he can't hurt anyone else.
01:22:39
They are sorority sisters of a sort who, unwilling to live their lives as silent victims,
01:22:46
came together to help get Tony Russo off the street for good. We did our job and we got him convicted.
01:22:53
So they did, this sisterhood. For the sake of a woman whose fate might have been theirs, Diane Hollick.
01:23:00
Whose friends came together to remember how they miss her. Even after all these years.
01:23:07
She was a constant friend. She was in my life every day. And all of a sudden she was gone out of my life.
01:23:13
In an instant, like blowing a candle out. You see the smile in all these photographs.
01:23:18
Was she always smiling? Always. Always. She had a magic smile. It was infectious. If she was smiling, everybody else had to.