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[Music] in 1996 seattle police faced an unusual challenge a severely wounded dog
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witnessed the murder of his two owners could the dog identify the killers and if so
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how [Music] [Music] december 9 1996 seattle washington it was going to be a special day for 22
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year old raquel rivera she was starting a new job as a receptionist in a downtown office
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i seen her the night before and she was really excited about it she was a little sick but she wasn't worried
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about she was going to make it to work or not she was really excited raquel shared this house in seattle's
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south park section with her longtime boyfriend jay johnson the two had been together since high
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school and were talking about getting married i loved jay he was a great guy he i i loved him
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he was very good to my daughter you know they were good for each other just after dawn
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neighbors heard gunshots coming from the couple's home probably about four or five shots and
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then a break and then maybe about six more shots when police arrived they found the front door off its hinges the
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windows had been shattered by bullets inside were two bodies the only thing we have right now is that
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we found two people in the house a male and a female both shot raquel rivera's mother who lived only a
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block away got the phone call every parent dreads when i got there there was police and everybody they wouldn't let
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me in the apartment and i said it's got to be raquel the bodies were positively identified
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as raquel and jay the couple's dog chief a six-month-old labrador mix was also shot
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i poked my head around the corner saw that the dog was up against the door he was
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obviously in pain he was growling there were blood traces all over the door where he had smeared blood against
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that wall i said let's get everybody out get animal control in here and get the
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dog out this particular casewood raid is probably the most severely injured dog that we've ever seen from a gunshot just
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by virtue the face that it received such a full-on frontal bullet right through the
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the front of the nose unfortunately despite undergoing emergency surgery the dog died
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an autopsy was performed it revealed the dog had been shot twice a non-fatal shot in the shoulder
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and the bullet through his muzzle you could liken it to running face first into the front end of a truck bumper on
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that in terms of this given what we could see in terms of the the bullet trauma that that did to the front of his
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muzzle in his face the evidence told homicide investigators that the killer was searching for
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something cabinets have been gone through doors have been opened the bed was tossed around
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so clearly the perpetrators wanted to find something not just eliminate the lives and witnesses therein but they
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were after something there was no finesse to this it was a blitz style attack they're in
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they shoot they shoot the dog they shoot the owners of the dog mr johnson was shot several times in the
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legs which is indicative of someone trying to extract information before the coroner would later describe the
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murders as execution-style killings the entire community was asking who would have killed this young couple who
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had no known enemies the only clues to the merger of jay johnson and raquel rivera were a smeared
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footprint at the couple's front door and some nine millimeter shell casings blood spatter was on the walls floor and
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on the inside of the door police discovered that a fifteen-year-old boy living across the
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street in an apartment building had seen the shooting this person described them as samoan
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males dressed in black very large men and one wearing a bandanna the boy said the two men kicked open the
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front door shocked the dog and then moved into the house the witness could no longer see them but
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he heard the firing he saw the dog he heard two shots and he heard the barking and then he heard the
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dogs yelping and the dogs screams the boy said the men left minutes later and drove away in a red camaro driven by
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a third samoan man [Music] police suspected the men were members of a local gang
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madpack there's a large samoan community in seattle are law abiding hard-working
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people but with every group you've got a criminal element and the madpack made up a large portion of their
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criminal element they were a gang in the the sort of worst sense of the word just three days earlier in seattle's
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chinatown there had been a similar shooting the victim johnny pake survived the attack
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that being a samoan male sitting in a red car a very large samoan mail shell casings from the chinatown
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shooting were compared to those taken from jay and raquel's apartment they matched
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police now scoured the city looking for any samoans driving a red camaro amazingly
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they didn't have to look far on the afternoon following jay and raquel's murder police noticed a red
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camaro slowly driving past the murder scene driving back to the crime scene and checking things out is not an uncommon
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thing for a suspect to do it's the old return to the scene of the crime cliche
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and it happens the driver of the red camaro was charles nico a known member of the madpack gang
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although nico denied any involvement in the shooting the 15 year old eyewitness identified
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him as the driver of the getaway vehicle when threatened with the death penalty nico finally told police what happened
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he said the motive was drugs the madpack gang members heard that jay and raquel had cocaine in their house
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and they decided to steal it but after breaking in the couple said they had no cocaine and
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then the men started shooting [Music] nico identified the shooters as twenty-two-year-old kenneth leia luala
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whose street name was sabo claus and 24 year old george tu ilofano whose street name was scooby
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both were high-ranking members of the mad pack i already knew who they were because you
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know they ran around south park they were always they were bullies they were always beating everybody up
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both men denied any involvement in the shooting and said they had alibis a search of their apartment did not
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produce the nine-millimeter murder weapon the smeared footprint on the front door
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could not be matched to either suspect and eight red stains found on the right sleeve of sabo claw's jacket was sent
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for dna testing but it wasn't the victim's blood they get a result that is not human
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based because the genotype does not come back to genes associated with a human being at all
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they then are scratching their heads heads with hey what's going on here in fact investigators weren't sure what
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it was with no forensic evidence to tie the suspects to the crime seattle police feared a conviction
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might be impossible [Music] as jay johnson and raquel rivera were laid to rest side by side in a seattle
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cemetery their families demanded justice to decipher exactly what happened at the
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crime scene investigator o'keefe needed to distinguish between the dog's blood
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spatter and that of jay and raquel i requested through my sergeant cindy tallman
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that an officer followed the dog to the vet and draw blood from the dog immediately
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my thinking at the time was to differentiate between the human blood at the scene and the dog blood
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the blood spatter and bullet casings in the apartment and the eyewitness account
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of the 15 year old boy who lived across the street gave police a rough idea of what had happened
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after the intruders kicked open the door dog was shot in the shoulder then the men went into the bedroom
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where they shot raquel [Applause] they took jay into an adjoining room and shot him in the leg while demanding
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the couple's cocaine one of the men left to shoot raquel once more and when jay said the couple never had
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any drugs they killed him [Music] despite his shoulder wound chief again tried to protect his owners and ran into
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the bedroom to attack the killers [Music] but why wasn't the victim's blood on the
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suspect's clothes investigators say both jay and raquel were shot from a distance and were also
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wearing clothes pajamas and t-shirts which absorbed the blood spatter but with chief
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there was nothing to absorb the blood it was short-haired and had not long hairs around the muzzle or face
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or neck area so any kind of a serious wound causing a lot of blood is obviously going to spill or spray or go
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off it's not going to cling to the coat because there's such a short smooth coat
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it's going to roll right off chief was very close to kenneth when he was shot and we know
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also that chief was shot in the muzzle area now police discovered the possible key
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to the mysterious red stains on the right sleeve of sabo claws jacket detective o'keefe and myself decided to
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see if we're dealing with a non-human source namely a dog so with that we needed to
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seek out laboratories that do dna testing with non-humans and through some research
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we came upon a lab in davis california headed by dr joy halvorson dr joy halverson is an expert in
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investigating the parentage of world class show dogs championship caliber show dogs can be
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worth thousands of dollars and where there's money there's often corruption
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dishonest breeders engage in a practice known as litter loading where pups from inferior dogs are mixed in with pups
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from champion dogs and sold at inflated prices knowledgeable buyers now analyze the dna
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profiles of their new pups in order to confirm their dog's championship parentage
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dog dna is exactly like human dna the only difference would be we use a different set of dna markers
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but in terms of its chemical properties and the way it behaves with these testing procedures it's exactly the same
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police suspected the red spots on sabo claw's right sleeve came from the victim's dog chief
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dr halverson cut out a piece of the sleeve with the red stains on it and analyzed it with a pcr based dna test
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a little piece of that fabric is taken and put into a tube and various buffers and so on are added to it blood
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cells will come off the fabric into the liquid and then the various treatments are done to extract
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the dna from that the results were consistent with the blood from a dog but was the blood from the victim's dog
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chief dr halverson compared the dna markers from the blood on the suspect's sleeve
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to the blood taken from chief during his autopsy the result was a perfect match the blood on sabo claw's right sleeve
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was the blood of chief prosecutor tim bradshaw knew he'd face a challenge from defense lawyers
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we were unable to find any other case a homicide case in the country where canine based dna had been admitted into
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evidence the defense lawyers not only would challenge the admissibility of the canine dna evidence they described it as
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hocus pocus and boldly predicted their clients would walk free [Music] the two gang members charged with
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killing jay johnson and raquel rivera were facing first-degree murder charges prosecutors not only had the teenaged
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eyewitness from across the street who identified the two in a police lineup they also had dna evidence from the
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victim's dog on kenneth laila ali'i's sleeve also on his sleeve were hairs
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they were not human but they were compared to chief's hair and found to be consistent
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[Music] this wasn't as good as the dna evidence but certainly wouldn't hurt the
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prosecution's case the main suspect kenneth became so disruptive he had to be
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restrained in a wheelchair for the eight-week trial he taunted the judge the family members
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saying he'd never get convicted every time we walk in he would just look at us and and laugh at us and
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you know throw kisses at us when the girls would walk in i just i prosecutors presented their theory of
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how the murders were committed based on the blood spatter evidence prosecutors believe that the suspects
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kicked open jay and raquel's door and immediately were confronted by the dog
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chief they shot the dog in the shoulder [Music] oh [Music] after killing both rachel and jay
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chief once again tried to protect his owners chief was shot at point-blank range
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the blowback blood spatter landed on ken's right sleeve when presented with the dna evidence
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linking ken's jacket to the dog the judge ruled that legally the animal dna was the same as human dna
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if the testing was the same then so was its value as evidence we took advantage of the fact that the
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science is is no different than the human testing that's done now in in the forensic community and
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there's really no there's nothing groundbreaking about it it's just a
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different set of dna markers developed for dogs it was the first time animal dna was used in the united states
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as evidence in a criminal case kenneth laialuala took the stand and said he had an explanation for the
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dog blood on his sleeve he told the jurors that a few nights prior to the murders he was at a dance
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club in tacoma got into a fist fight with another man there and that thereby explains the blood
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that did give me an opportunity to ask him whether the man he was fighting with had hit him with a dog
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and he um really couldn't explain that after 12 hours of deliberation the jury sentenced both men to life in
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prison without parole kenneth laialuala alii laughed as the verdict was read but the last laugh was reserved for
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chief the victim's courageous dog i had a few puns about her case in chief but the third victim here chief was
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exceedingly important to our case and you know we're grateful to that but we're also
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this will sound a little hokey but grateful to the scientific community for making a contribution to justice and
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that's exactly what happened here jay and raquel had bought chief for protection little did they know that he
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would someday bring their killers to justice one a piece of evidence the one victim who
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could never speak ended up providing perhaps the most eloquent of testimony and that was from
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the the dna profile that clearly placed defendant lealah lee at the crime scene the verdict brought small satisfaction
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to raquel's mother who now makes a point of keeping a dog around the house her only child who she raised by herself
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is dead for no reason leaving a great void in her life that no amount of justice
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can ever fill we were so close her and i she was growing up just her and i what i learned from this case
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is that if it's alive it has dna detectives can use dna in their cases in ways that we never thought of 10
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years ago there is plant dna there is animal dna every domestic animal has a dna data
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bank now the department of interior has a laboratory where they do dna on wild species
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just from my own experience of owning animals i mean i'm sure if i looked on
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my clothing right now i'd find some animal hairs and if somebody kidnapped me and put me in the trunk of their car
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they'd probably a few of those hairs would end up on the trunk of their car so if if someone's being alert and
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thinking about these things i think there are valuable sources of evidence and so it's a constant reminder for
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investigators to be vigilant in your approach to any sort of crime scene and to be quite open-minded and imaginative
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about what application you can do as far as what science is available because to a large degree science is leading the
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way and we got to keep up [Music] [Music] so [Music] you