00:00:06
in 1989 near the pocono mountains in
00:00:10
pennsylvania nineteen-year-old lori
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awker left for
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work she was never heard from again
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[Music]
00:00:22
it was nasa technology a fly
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and the family cat
00:00:28
that helped solve her disappearance
00:00:30
in a most unusual way
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[Music]
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[Applause]
00:00:48
[Music]
00:00:54
[Applause]
00:01:02
the susquehanna valley in central
00:01:04
pennsylvania is a quiet agricultural
00:01:07
area
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lori orca grew up here not far from the
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mighty susquehanna river
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lori was a very sweet girl she was a
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typical 19 year old she had a lot of
00:01:19
goals and aspirations for her future as
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far as becoming a veterinarian and had a
00:01:23
great deal of interest in animals
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just out of high school lori married
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robert orker he was almost 10 years
00:01:31
older and worked in a warehouse
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not long afterwards the couple had a son
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matthew
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lori took a job at a local pet store to
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earn extra money
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she shared her love of animals with her
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son matthew at every opportunity
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when she wasn't working she'd come in to
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show him he'd particularly like kittens
00:01:53
and she'd bring him in to show him the
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kittens and he liked watching the fish
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playing with the puppies
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but she was a good mother
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although lori and robert loved their
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child problems between the two began to
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surface
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the couple argued and friends say they
00:02:09
were unable to resolve their differences
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just 18 months after they were married
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lori and robert separated
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laurie and the baby moved in with her
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parents
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robert moved in with his and had
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visitation rights
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she wasn't happy with him because he was
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had a very controlling type nature about
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him she had to answer all his questions
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before she could go anywhere
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he used physical
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discipline whenever he got upset with
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matt
00:02:39
and that's what upset lori
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while separated laurie dated
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occasionally but only casually
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on may 24 1989 while matthew was at
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robert's house lori prepared for her
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usual four to nine shift at the pet
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store
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[Music]
00:03:06
after packing a snack
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laurie left for work
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but she never arrived
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lori's supervisor called looking for her
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and i asked them if lori had left for
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work and and her father said that she
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had and and i said well has she called
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or anything because she she's not here
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at the store yet and she was scheduled
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to start
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about a half an hour ago he said no he
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said but this makes me very worried he
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said
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she left on time
00:03:37
laurie's father drove the route that she
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usually took to work he thought she
00:03:41
might have had car trouble along the way
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he eventually found laurie's car in the
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parking lot near the pet shop where she
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usually parked
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nothing seemed to be out of place
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laurie's purse and keys were not in the
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car
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the disappearance frightened people the
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thought that some young woman could go
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to a mall a very busy mall in broad
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daylight and suddenly disappear
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presumably
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being abducted
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really shot a shock wave of fear
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throughout that
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rather conservative small
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area
00:04:19
police canvassed the area and questioned
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employees and shoppers in the mall but
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no one saw anything suspicious
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almost from the start
00:04:30
police suspected laurie's estranged
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husband robert may have had something to
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do with her disappearance
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but robert said he hadn't seen laurie at
00:04:39
all that day and he had an alibi he said
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he was babysitting their son went
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shopping and then went to two scheduled
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appointments
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mr elka told me that
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on the day of lorianne's disappearance
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that he had been over to wise markets to
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get a disability claim form
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and he took that form to an office in
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louisburg an orthopedic surgeon
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and from there he went to the bloomsburg
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sears
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mall
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and priced the dishwasher for his mother
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police are now asking for the public's
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help for the next three weeks
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police family members friends and
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volunteers continued the search
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with no success
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on june 12th
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a woman jogging a few miles from the
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mall spotted something in an area known
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as claudi's dump
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it was little more than a skeleton
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investigators wondered whether this was
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the body of laurie orcar
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and looked to forensic science for some
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way to tell
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the body was markedly decomposed in that
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only in the extremities was there any
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flesh left
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there was no skin
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and no organs internally that to work
00:06:04
with investigators needed to identify
00:06:08
the skeleton found in the dump a few
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miles from the pet store
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and they also wanted to know the cause
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of death
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to find out they brought in forensic
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pathologist dr isidor mahalikas
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from the size of the skull he knew the
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body was female
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the cut marks on the bones and the holes
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in the clothing helped him to determine
00:06:33
the cause of death
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the presence of cuts
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which
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corresponded to perforations in the
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sweater
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is
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consistent
00:06:46
with stab wounds with movement
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and with homicide
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dr mahalikas concluded that this woman
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had been stabbed in the chest and back
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at least seven times possibly as many as
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eleven
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but he wasn't able to make an
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identification from the remains
00:07:09
for that
00:07:10
dr mahalicas asked forensic odontologist
00:07:12
dr dennis ayson to make a dental
00:07:15
comparison
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without the benefit of forensic
00:07:18
dentistry when you have a victim such as
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lariaka's in the loriaki case there are
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no fingerprints that you can use the
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body is unrecognizable because of the
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disintegration of tissues
00:07:30
very often the only thing that does
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remain is the dental evidence that we
00:07:33
can compare to before death records and
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and establish a positive identification
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after comparing the teeth of the victim
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to lori's dental records and x-rays
00:07:44
dr aysan made a positive identification
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the victim had nine teeth restored with
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dental materials those teeth
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as it turned out were the same teeth
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that loriaka had restored the same nine
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teeth the same type of material in each
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tooth the same location of materials or
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restorations in each tooth that matched
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up with lariaka
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no murder weapon was found at the scene
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investigators now wanted to know when
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laurie died
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time of death is usually determined in
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one of three ways first by the body
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temperature useless in this case given
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the length of time the body was outside
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another way is to examine stomach
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contents but the body was too badly
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decomposed
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the third way is to analyze any insect
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activity
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forensic entomologist dr k chung kim
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studied the larvae found on the body
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an entomologist is an expert in the
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study of insects
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what this body had was a large number of
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different kind of beetles and then a
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very late stage of maggots
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within minutes of death
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blow flies can detect the smell of
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decomposition even from miles away
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dr kim calculated that the larvae
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deposited by the flies had been on the
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body for 19 days which meant
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they were on the body the day laurie
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disappeared
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in an incredible stroke of luck
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police learned that an automated teller
00:09:30
machine near the entrance to the mall
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was equipped with a surveillance camera
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which took pictures every 10 seconds
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the camera was aimed in the direction of
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laurie's car
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at first glance the images looked
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unimportant
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they showed a man making a bank
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transaction
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but in the background out of focus there
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appeared to be an automobile near
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laurie's car with an unidentified person
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standing nearby
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deeper into the parking lot was a scene
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that was captured on this video the
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scene was a little blurry i would liken
00:10:10
it to like a an alfred hitchcock kind of
00:10:13
movie
00:10:15
the images looked promising but were not
00:10:17
clear enough for any kind of analysis
00:10:20
so prosecutors asked both the
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pennsylvania state police laboratory and
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the fbi for help
00:10:26
but neither one could improve the
00:10:28
photographs
00:10:30
with nowhere else to turn
00:10:32
the fbi suggested they asked nasa for
00:10:35
help
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nasa had been using sophisticated
00:10:39
digital photo enhancement technology to
00:10:42
improve images from space
00:10:46
nasa referred the case to research
00:10:48
scientist alan teigen of the ballistic
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missile defense organization
00:10:57
teigen used a technique similar to the
00:10:59
one used to determine the cause of the
00:11:01
challenger explosion in 1986
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digitization is the process of taking
00:11:08
the normal video signal
00:11:10
that you would get out of your vcr at
00:11:12
home and turning it into a computer
00:11:15
image file
00:11:18
when the images are put into the
00:11:20
computer
00:11:21
they are broken down into thousands of
00:11:23
pixels
00:11:25
each of these pixels
00:11:27
are converted into a number representing
00:11:30
how bright that dot is in this
00:11:32
particular case
00:11:33
the data is black and white video
00:11:36
so that the pixel represents simply
00:11:38
different shades between total black and
00:11:42
full white
00:11:44
digital enhancement can also remove
00:11:47
blurring in an image and special filters
00:11:50
can eliminate some of the grain
00:11:53
once complete you can see how this
00:11:55
process significantly improved the
00:11:58
images
00:12:00
prosecutors hoped that these enhanced
00:12:03
photographs would tell the story of lori
00:12:06
orker's disappearance
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the digitally enhanced surveillance
00:12:14
photos of the parking lot where laurie
00:12:16
awkward disappeared showed laurie's car
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in its parking spot
00:12:21
standing behind it was a person in the
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same clothing laurie wore that day
00:12:26
the film was in black and white
00:12:29
on that particular scene we knew that
00:12:31
lori had been wearing a windbreaker that
00:12:33
day had been wearing jeans and had
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carried a white purse
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she was a medium build she had short
00:12:40
brown hair that person that we see in
00:12:42
the picture there fits that description
00:12:45
precisely
00:12:47
the next picture taken 10 seconds later
00:12:50
shows another automobile diagonally in
00:12:53
front of lorry with the passenger side
00:12:56
door open
00:12:58
you can see that laurie is bent over
00:13:01
looking into the car
00:13:04
the final picture shows lori's car still
00:13:07
in its parking spot
00:13:09
but lori is gone
00:13:11
the car lori was standing next to is
00:13:14
leaving the parking lot
00:13:18
the person we've described as lori ocker
00:13:20
cannot be seen and we know
00:13:22
circumstantially that she never made it
00:13:24
into the door
00:13:25
so that we believe was the depiction of
00:13:28
her abduction
00:13:31
an automobile expert identified the
00:13:33
getaway car
00:13:34
as a chevrolet celebrity
00:13:37
although laurie's estranged husband
00:13:39
robert didn't own a chevrolet celebrity
00:13:42
his parents did
00:13:45
robert's parents told police that robert
00:13:47
had borrowed their car on the day laurie
00:13:49
disappeared they said they sold the car
00:13:52
a week after robert returned it
00:13:54
[Music]
00:13:56
police tracked it through three
00:13:58
different car dealerships
00:14:00
it transferred hands within the used car
00:14:04
industry a few times and was ultimately
00:14:06
purchased the first consumer the
00:14:08
purchase that was a retired state police
00:14:11
officer
00:14:13
the police officer bought the vehicle
00:14:15
for his stepdaughter who hadn't yet
00:14:17
reached driving age
00:14:19
so it had been sitting in a garage a
00:14:22
lucky break for investigators
00:14:24
it still maintained its integrity
00:14:27
by the time we got to it we were able to
00:14:30
access the vehicle
00:14:31
test it scientifically for prints for
00:14:34
trace evidence
00:14:35
investigators searched the car but could
00:14:38
find no traces of blood anywhere inside
00:14:42
we did have some neighbors
00:14:45
observe robert ocker
00:14:47
scrupulously cleaning that car
00:14:49
the day after lori
00:14:52
disappeared
00:14:54
but in the trunk of the car
00:14:57
they found a clue
00:14:59
a tiny strand of hair
00:15:02
under a microscope
00:15:04
the hair did not appear to be
00:15:06
human
00:15:08
on the left
00:15:10
is a human hair on the right
00:15:13
the hair from robert's trunk
00:15:15
under an electron microscope magnified
00:15:18
thousands of times
00:15:20
the outer pattern of the hair was more
00:15:22
box-like than human hair
00:15:25
similar to the steps on a ladder
00:15:27
the blue specks are dust particles
00:15:30
after looking through numerous species
00:15:33
of hair
00:15:34
scientists discovered
00:15:36
it was a cat hair
00:15:38
investigators compared that hair to a
00:15:41
cat hair from laurie's parents cat and
00:15:44
found
00:15:45
they were microscopically similar
00:15:50
this was significant since the cat
00:15:52
belonged to laurie's parents
00:15:54
robert didn't have access to this cat
00:15:57
and the cat never resided with robert
00:15:59
and laurie when they lived together
00:16:03
what was also significant
00:16:06
robert's parents didn't own a cat and
00:16:09
laurie had never been in robert's
00:16:10
parents car before her disappearance
00:16:14
investigators believed that this cat
00:16:16
hair was proof that laurie had been
00:16:20
in the trunk of robert's car
00:16:24
robert docker knew his parents were
00:16:25
going to be trading that vehicle in
00:16:27
within a matter of days
00:16:29
and in my opinion that's why he used
00:16:31
that vehicle and not his own
00:16:33
to abduct laurie
00:16:35
with this evidence in hand police
00:16:37
arrested robert awker for the murder of
00:16:40
his estranged wife
00:16:41
when i arrested robert locker he said to
00:16:43
me you've got to be kidding
00:16:48
what the worst part of it
00:16:51
to me other than the fact that she died
00:16:54
was when we were told that he had thrown
00:16:57
her body in a dump
00:17:05
there's no reason
00:17:06
for someone like lori to wind up at a
00:17:09
dope
00:17:13
prosecutors believe the surveillance
00:17:15
photograph supported their theory that
00:17:17
robert abducted laurie in the mall
00:17:19
parking lot
00:17:22
to convince a jury
00:17:24
prosecutors needed to prove that the
00:17:26
automobile in the pictures was the
00:17:28
chevrolet owned by robert walker's
00:17:31
parents
00:17:33
so they reconstructed the crime they
00:17:36
placed the chevrolet robert was driving
00:17:38
in the mall parking lot
00:17:40
and took photographs from the same
00:17:42
position height and at the same
00:17:44
millimeter as the surveillance camera
00:17:48
but this time
00:17:49
the background was in focus
00:17:53
at the top is the original surveillance
00:17:56
picture of lori's alleged abduction
00:17:59
at the bottom
00:18:00
is the recreation photograph
00:18:03
the vehicles in both pictures look
00:18:05
identical
00:18:07
[Music]
00:18:09
and prosecutors discovered a possible
00:18:12
motive for the murder money
00:18:15
ocker had taken out an insurance policy
00:18:18
on laurie and on his son listing himself
00:18:22
as the beneficiary he had taken that
00:18:24
policy out after they separated
00:18:28
and robert and laurie had been engaged
00:18:30
in a custody dispute over their son
00:18:33
another possible motive
00:18:36
a background check of robert awker
00:18:38
revealed that he had a troubled past
00:18:42
robert ocker had been in trouble most of
00:18:44
his life as a juvenile up to his
00:18:48
adulthood
00:18:51
shortly after he married laurie robert
00:18:54
was convicted for driving under the
00:18:55
influence of alcohol and served a brief
00:18:58
stint in prison
00:19:00
while there robert ordered a book that
00:19:02
described in detail how to commit a
00:19:04
murder and get away with it
00:19:08
the title of the book will not be
00:19:09
revealed in this program for obvious
00:19:11
reasons
00:19:12
police officials blocked the delivery of
00:19:15
this order
00:19:16
[Music]
00:19:19
prosecutors believe that on may 24 1989
00:19:23
as laurie drove into the mall parking
00:19:25
lot
00:19:26
robert was there
00:19:27
waiting
00:19:33
what are you doing here i need you to
00:19:34
come with me right away
00:19:36
when robert drove up and opened the door
00:19:39
he may have used some type of excuse to
00:19:41
get laurie inside possibly that their
00:19:44
son was sick and he needed her help
00:19:52
prosecutors admit they don't know where
00:19:55
the murder took place
00:19:57
the forensic evidence doesn't say
00:20:00
all they know is that laurie was in
00:20:02
robert's trunk sometime that day and was
00:20:05
stabbed numerous times in the chest and
00:20:08
back
00:20:09
before her body was left at the dump
00:20:23
when robert later cleaned the trunk
00:20:25
he couldn't see
00:20:27
the almost microscopic evidence that
00:20:30
laurie left behind
00:20:34
the cat hair which had stuck to laurie's
00:20:37
clothing was transferred again onto the
00:20:40
carpet of robert's trunk
00:20:45
it was an ironic twist given laurie's
00:20:49
lifelong love of animals
00:20:52
i remember lori as being a very
00:20:55
nice person
00:20:57
just all around nice she was nice to
00:21:00
animals she was nice to people
00:21:02
and
00:21:04
she loved her son absolutely loved her
00:21:06
son
00:21:08
robert awker was found guilty of first
00:21:10
degree murder and kidnapping and was
00:21:12
sentenced to death
00:21:15
on appeal the sentence was reduced to
00:21:18
life in prison without parole
00:21:20
[Music]
00:21:21
nasa's help was an important forensic
00:21:23
breakthrough since it was one of the
00:21:25
first times a crime scene photo had
00:21:28
undergone digital video enhancement
00:21:32
the enhancement of the video from the
00:21:35
atm machine was something brand new
00:21:37
something that had never been done
00:21:38
before this is a case that set a trend
00:21:42
for prosecutors certainly throughout
00:21:44
pennsylvania i think there was an
00:21:46
awakening
00:21:47
a scientific awakening on the part of
00:21:49
police on the part of
00:21:51
prosecutors
00:21:52
they realized suddenly that there were
00:21:54
other tools at their disposal that
00:21:56
perhaps they hadn't considered before
00:21:59
and ironically those tools have now
00:22:00
become somewhat routine
00:22:02
[Music]
00:22:12
[Music]
00:22:22
so
00:22:23
[Music]
00:22:33
you
