00:00:04
[Music]
00:00:15
the weiner family were active members of
00:00:18
their local church
00:00:19
where loving your neighbor and helping
00:00:22
others were more than just words but a
00:00:24
way of life
00:00:31
but not everyone in the whiners church
00:00:34
wished them well
00:00:35
[Music]
00:00:39
and forensic evidence proved that
00:00:41
someone in the congregation had the
00:00:43
motive to kill them
00:00:47
[Music]
00:00:58
[Music]
00:01:16
[Music]
00:01:17
on a thursday night in june of 1988
00:01:22
sally weiner got a telephone call at her
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corey pennsylvania home
00:01:27
it was her congressman's office calling
00:01:29
to say that her husband harry who was a
00:01:32
vice president of the local bank and a
00:01:34
civic leader had just been chosen as
00:01:37
corey's man of the year
00:01:40
the caller instructed her not to let on
00:01:43
to her husband as it was supposed to be
00:01:45
a surprise
00:01:48
and that she was to meet
00:01:50
someone the following day to go over the
00:01:53
plans for this this celebration
00:01:56
the next day harry weiner got a
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telephone call at the bank
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[Music]
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we know it's a tape recorded call
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because there's no interaction between
00:02:15
harry and sally he's trying to talk to
00:02:17
her and she's not responding she just
00:02:20
continues to tie
00:02:23
she had to read
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that if her husband didn't come up with
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the money why they'd cut off her hands
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she told him in detail you know that she
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was being held and these people were
00:02:35
dangerous and they were going to kill
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her if he didn't provide the money
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sally told him there was a bag under his
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car with instructions that he was to
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follow exactly or she would be killed
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the ransom note told harry to fill the
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gym bag with all of the money from his
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bank's vault and drive to a deserted
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bridge 10 miles outside of town to await
00:02:59
further instructions
00:03:01
harry immediately contacted the local
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police and fbi
00:03:07
they told him to drive to the back of
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the police station and pick up a law
00:03:12
enforcement officer
00:03:14
he got into the car
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and laid down in the back seat with a
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12-gauge shotgun
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[Music]
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when harry arrived at the railroad
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bridge no one was there so he waited
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with the sharpshooter in the back seat
00:03:29
and with fbi agents hiding in the woods
00:03:32
nearby
00:03:33
you just sit there very quietly you
00:03:35
don't move and you listen
00:03:38
and you listen for any kind of footstep
00:03:41
any kind of twig breaking any kind of
00:03:44
noise hoping that he might contact us
00:03:47
but thinking that he's probably within
00:03:49
100 yards of us watching with a rifle
00:03:54
after waiting for several hours
00:03:57
the fbi agents told harry to go home and
00:04:00
await further word there
00:04:02
i felt very sorry for him
00:04:05
he's a very good person
00:04:07
and he was frustrated and
00:04:09
he was being patient and he was
00:04:10
reasonable
00:04:12
the next day at sunrise
00:04:14
the fbi performed a grid search of the
00:04:16
drop site
00:04:18
and neared the railroad underpass they
00:04:20
found a second ransom note attached to a
00:04:23
metal rod with the crepe paper
00:04:26
flag the rods we recognized as being
00:04:30
rods that were used in filing cabinets
00:04:34
older filing cabinets that slid
00:04:36
through the drawers of the filing
00:04:38
cabinets from the front to the rear
00:04:41
but the sign wasn't easy to see which is
00:04:44
why harry missed it the night before
00:04:47
[Music]
00:04:48
the second ransom note told harry to
00:04:51
proceed to another location several
00:04:53
miles from there where the fbi found a
00:04:57
third note telling harry to proceed to
00:05:00
an abandoned church three miles away
00:05:04
that's where the trail stopped
00:05:07
he could observe perry traveling through
00:05:09
the countryside there and he could also
00:05:11
watch for surveillance units and police
00:05:14
who might be following him
00:05:16
18 hours had passed from the time sally
00:05:19
was kidnapped with no further word from
00:05:22
the kidnappers
00:05:26
investigators feared
00:05:28
the worst
00:05:29
[Music]
00:05:34
36 year old sally weiner the wife of a
00:05:36
bank vice president had been kidnapped
00:05:39
and held for ransom
00:05:42
investigators learned that neither sally
00:05:44
nor her husband harry had any known
00:05:47
enemies
00:05:48
you can count on just a couple fingers
00:05:51
the number of cases that you see where a
00:05:54
bank employee's family member is
00:05:56
abducted
00:05:58
in exchange for financial gain it just
00:06:00
is not a common crime
00:06:02
[Music]
00:06:03
police found sally's car near a church
00:06:05
not far from her husband's bank
00:06:08
her car is left in that parking lot
00:06:10
the windows are up and the doors are
00:06:12
locked so there's no sign of a struggle
00:06:14
and any respect all day saturday which
00:06:18
was the day after the kidnapping
00:06:20
there was no further communication from
00:06:22
the kidnappers
00:06:25
but on sunday
00:06:27
sally's body was discovered by a farmer
00:06:30
working his land a few miles outside of
00:06:33
town
00:06:34
she had been killed by a single gunshot
00:06:37
wound to the head
00:06:41
i just
00:06:43
i remember being in shock it's
00:06:45
i
00:06:46
felt i felt guilty and helpless she was
00:06:50
executed
00:06:52
the killer used a glazier-type bullet
00:06:55
that exploded on impact making it
00:06:57
impossible to determine the weapon's
00:07:00
caliber
00:07:01
sally weiner was killed by a gunshot
00:07:03
wound to the head which produced
00:07:04
extensive brain damage a bullet entered
00:07:07
in the occipital region which is the
00:07:09
rear part of the skull slightly to the
00:07:12
right of the midline so that's back here
00:07:15
at the base
00:07:17
the bullet went in it fragmented
00:07:19
extensively and it produced a lot of
00:07:21
damage to various parts of the brain
00:07:26
next the fbi analyzed the ransom notes
00:07:30
all were typed with the computer word
00:07:32
processing program and all were printed
00:07:34
with the same font
00:07:36
on one note the word
00:07:38
exactly was misspelled
00:07:43
investigators got their first real break
00:07:45
in the case from a police officer who
00:07:48
was walking in the shopping center near
00:07:50
harry weiner's bank
00:07:53
he noticed a sign in a bookstore window
00:07:56
listing the sunday newspapers the store
00:07:59
carried
00:08:01
in particular he noticed the unusual
00:08:04
border
00:08:04
[Music]
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it was a five-pointed star with a
00:08:08
greater than and less than sign shown
00:08:10
consecutively and corporal amon
00:08:13
ruminated about it and said i know i've
00:08:16
seen this somewhere
00:08:17
the policeman immediately recognized it
00:08:19
as the same symbol that was on the first
00:08:22
ransom note
00:08:25
the owner of the store david copenheifer
00:08:28
said he made the sign with his computer
00:08:31
and that the border was one he mimicked
00:08:32
after seeing it on other signs
00:08:36
copenheifer was a friend of the winer
00:08:38
family
00:08:39
and denied having anything to do with
00:08:41
sally's murder
00:08:43
they knew each other quite well both
00:08:45
families were members of the
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presbyterian church
00:08:49
[Music]
00:08:52
they worshiped together
00:08:54
sang hymns together
00:08:58
they both sat
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in pews
00:09:01
not far from each other at the church
00:09:04
because of the similarity between the
00:09:06
ransom note and the sign in his store
00:09:08
window
00:09:10
investigators confiscated both his home
00:09:12
and office computers
00:09:14
the preliminary search that was
00:09:16
conducted by the state police and one of
00:09:19
our other agents
00:09:20
revealed exactly to me what it revealed
00:09:23
to them
00:09:24
uh initially nothing
00:09:27
next
00:09:28
investigators wanted to know the
00:09:30
approximate time of sally's death so
00:09:32
they could question copenheifer about
00:09:35
his whereabouts
00:09:38
a forensic entomologist analyzed the
00:09:41
insect activity on sally's body
00:09:44
and discovered second stage larvae from
00:09:47
the species colifera a type of blowfly
00:09:52
[Music]
00:09:53
by analyzing the outside temperature on
00:09:56
the weekend of sally's murder
00:09:58
dr kim estimated that the insect
00:10:01
activity commenced on the body late on
00:10:04
friday afternoon
00:10:06
the same day she was kidnapped
00:10:09
then a investigators you know on the
00:10:11
prosecution look at that to say aha
00:10:15
that must be the time where body was
00:10:18
placed there
00:10:19
so that's their judgment then
00:10:21
interestingly
00:10:23
kopenheifer could not account for all of
00:10:25
his time that day
00:10:30
but they still needed more forensic
00:10:33
evidence to know for certain whether he
00:10:36
was the killer
00:10:37
[Music]
00:10:41
a background check revealed some
00:10:44
startling information about david
00:10:46
copenheifer
00:10:47
he had been turned down for a 25 000
00:10:51
business loan by harry weiner
00:10:53
less than a year earlier
00:10:57
copenheifer was now
00:10:59
the prime suspect in the kidnapping and
00:11:01
murder of harry weiner's wife sally
00:11:04
[Music]
00:11:07
so the fbi put david copenheifer under
00:11:10
surveillance
00:11:11
and watched as he took some trash out to
00:11:14
the dumpster behind his store
00:11:17
when the fbi seized it
00:11:19
they found some suspicious items
00:11:22
they found a used roll of crepe paper
00:11:25
the same make and color as the paper
00:11:28
found with the ransom notes
00:11:31
the fbi was able to match up the tear
00:11:35
from that roll of crepe paper which was
00:11:37
in the the trash at the bookstore
00:11:40
to one of the actual flags
00:11:45
they also found bits and pieces of paper
00:11:49
the fbi painstakingly pieced them
00:11:52
together
00:11:54
and that note actually was a duplicate
00:11:56
of one of the notes that was left at one
00:11:58
of the sites that
00:11:59
mr weiner was directed to go to
00:12:03
after the kidnapping of his wife
00:12:06
armed with a search warrant the fbi
00:12:09
found a stack of metal file cabinet rods
00:12:12
in kopenheifer's shed similar to the
00:12:14
ones found with the ransom notes
00:12:19
the fbi's forensic metallurgist william
00:12:22
tobin analyzed the rods with a scanning
00:12:25
electron microscope and discovered some
00:12:28
unique marks on the side of the rods
00:12:31
created as they were manufactured
00:12:34
individual characteristics that are
00:12:36
imparted from the
00:12:38
tool or die
00:12:41
on the work piece
00:12:42
are not the same in hour one of that
00:12:45
dye's life as they would be an hour 8 12
00:12:47
or hour 16.
00:12:49
these marks indicated to mr tobin that
00:12:52
the rods found in copenheifer's home and
00:12:55
those found with the ransom notes
00:12:58
were all made on the same day
00:13:01
at virtually the same time
00:13:04
something on the order of minutes this
00:13:06
was one of the best associations i've
00:13:08
ever had with regard to
00:13:10
the fabrication characteristics
00:13:13
police also found
00:13:14
glazier brand ammunition in
00:13:16
copenheifer's home
00:13:18
the same type used in sally weiner's
00:13:21
murder
00:13:22
i think that'd be extremely unusual to
00:13:24
have glacier ammunition glacier on
00:13:26
ammunition
00:13:27
in
00:13:28
in a person's home
00:13:30
and local authorities asked the fbi to
00:13:32
conduct their own analysis of
00:13:34
copenheifer's computers after the
00:13:37
initial search of the hard drives turned
00:13:39
up nothing
00:13:42
a document is not all in one place on a
00:13:44
disk drive
00:13:46
pieces of it are stored in different
00:13:48
sectors of a drive
00:13:53
when a document is deleted it's not
00:13:55
erased from the hard drive instead the
00:13:58
space occupied by that document is
00:14:00
labeled available to reuse if necessary
00:14:06
by going through that disk
00:14:09
mathematically
00:14:10
finding the proper clusters
00:14:13
based upon the known interleaving of the
00:14:15
drive
00:14:16
you can piece together an entire
00:14:19
document
00:14:21
if
00:14:21
the file space that that document
00:14:23
occupied
00:14:25
had not been overwritten
00:14:27
when this crime was committed in 1988
00:14:31
there were no computer programs that
00:14:33
could reassemble documents that had been
00:14:35
deleted
00:14:37
so al johnson and his team had to do
00:14:39
something that had never been done
00:14:41
before they had to do the analysis
00:14:44
manually
00:14:45
it was a painstaking process that took
00:14:48
approximately 33 days
00:14:52
to look at two
00:14:54
20 megabyte hard drives a computer is
00:14:57
about as secure as a wet paper bag
00:14:59
it never throws data away and they found
00:15:03
bits and pieces of a document
00:15:05
copenheifer had deleted called
00:15:07
the plan
00:15:09
it listed all of the steps necessary to
00:15:12
carry out sally weiner's kidnapping and
00:15:14
murder
00:15:16
we were able to recover 80 percent of
00:15:19
the
00:15:20
murder plan back off of the hard drives
00:15:23
20 of that had been overwritten or
00:15:26
altered and to a point where we couldn't
00:15:27
recover the data this evidence was the
00:15:30
most damning this evidence connected
00:15:34
the computer
00:15:36
to the man
00:15:38
to the notes to the crime
00:15:41
this document revealed that sally weiner
00:15:44
wasn't copenheifer's only target
00:15:48
it looks as if based on that plan
00:15:51
he planned on killing harry weiner
00:15:54
after
00:15:55
retrieving
00:15:56
the ransom
00:15:57
[Music]
00:16:01
prosecutors believe
00:16:03
it was david copenheifer who had
00:16:05
disguised his voice and called sally on
00:16:09
thursday night with the bogus story that
00:16:12
her husband harry was chosen as man of
00:16:15
the year
00:16:17
he set up a time the next day for the
00:16:19
two of them to meet to plan the award
00:16:22
ceremony
00:16:23
then
00:16:24
copenheifer placed the ransom notes in
00:16:26
the various locations outside of town
00:16:29
and put one of them in the gym bag
00:16:32
underneath harry's car
00:16:36
sally arrived at what she believed to be
00:16:38
the planning meeting
00:16:40
she would have recognized copenheifer
00:16:42
from church
00:16:45
he somehow talked her into his van where
00:16:48
he overpowered and subdued her
00:16:58
he then forced her to record the message
00:17:00
to her husband telling him she had been
00:17:03
kidnapped
00:17:05
the forensic evidence shows
00:17:07
that copenheifer killed sally within a
00:17:10
few hours after he abducted her
00:17:16
then dumped her body on the farm outside
00:17:20
of town
00:17:24
he returned to his store placed to call
00:17:26
to harry at the bank and played sally's
00:17:29
tape recording
00:17:33
copenheifer was sure harry would follow
00:17:35
the instructions to the letter
00:17:38
the computer evidence shows that he
00:17:40
planned to kill harry at the abandoned
00:17:42
church when he dropped off the ransom
00:17:44
money harry was the one he was mad at
00:17:49
for having turned him down on the loan
00:17:52
application
00:17:54
he wanted revenge on harry
00:17:57
as much as he wanted the money
00:18:01
despite warning harry not to call police
00:18:04
copenheifer learned that harry did just
00:18:07
that
00:18:08
because of a journalist who had heard
00:18:10
about the kidnapping from the police
00:18:12
scanner
00:18:16
and i went immediately to the plaza
00:18:19
and parked my car and there was not a
00:18:22
lot of activity
00:18:24
so he walked into david kopenheifer's
00:18:26
store and asked what was going on
00:18:29
he looked at me and said no he said
00:18:31
there hasn't been a single thing going
00:18:33
on it's been a very quiet night
00:18:35
there isn't anything going on
00:18:38
at the time i was talking i didn't know
00:18:41
that he had killed her
00:18:42
so i did not make a connection that here
00:18:45
was a cold-blooded murderer sitting in
00:18:48
front of me
00:18:50
after learning that the police were
00:18:52
involved copenheifer most likely stayed
00:18:55
in his store instead of going to the
00:18:57
ransom drop site
00:18:58
[Music]
00:19:03
and harry
00:19:04
didn't see the next ransom note
00:19:06
copenheifer left for him at the railroad
00:19:09
bridge
00:19:14
based on the forensic evidence
00:19:16
david copenheifer was arrested and
00:19:19
charged with kidnapping and first degree
00:19:22
murder
00:19:24
one of the things that we did is get a
00:19:26
writing sampler from copenheifer and had
00:19:28
him spell exactly and he misspelled it
00:19:32
in the writing samples the same way that
00:19:33
it was misspelled in his computer
00:19:36
and again that's to correlate the fact
00:19:37
that that he's the one who inputted that
00:19:40
stuff into the computer versus some
00:19:41
external source
00:19:44
david copenheifer was tried and
00:19:46
eventually convicted of first-degree
00:19:49
murder and was sentenced to life in
00:19:51
prison
00:19:53
david copenheffer is the master
00:19:56
manipulator
00:19:58
it's an intellectual game an
00:19:59
intellectual challenge to see how far he
00:20:01
can push the system and what he can get
00:20:03
away with
00:20:04
i think if he were out he would kill
00:20:06
again
00:20:07
and uh he put a contract on me and
00:20:10
harry weiner
00:20:12
while the trial was going on because we
00:20:14
were key witnesses against him i don't
00:20:16
think that he would stop at anything
00:20:20
despite the overwhelming amount of
00:20:22
forensic evidence against him
00:20:24
copenheifer continues to maintain
00:20:27
his innocence
00:20:29
that's the arrogance of the man
00:20:31
that despite overwhelming evidence as to
00:20:34
his guilt and many defendants to do this
00:20:37
they still
00:20:38
still refuse to accept responsibility
00:20:41
for the crimes that they've committed
00:20:44
and that's the sin one of the sins of
00:20:46
all of this
00:20:47
this case in my own opinion
00:20:50
is a landmark case
00:20:52
it is the beginning of the genesis
00:20:56
of what computer forensics is
00:20:58
now
00:20:59
from this computer forensics was born
00:21:04
[Music]
00:21:18
[Music]
00:21:31
[Music]
00:21:40
you
