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it looked like a routine traffic accident until a patrolman with no forensic training suspected something
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worse but he couldn't prove it until a bent steering wheel a security camera
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and a physics calculation showed what really led to a young woman's death [Music]
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[Music] [Music] highway patrolman tony snyder was heading home after finishing his night
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shift when he got a call about a traffic accident on route 95 just outside of princeton minnesota it was maybe 10
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miles from my house so i said i would do it [Music] when snyder arrived he saw that there
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had been a two-vehicle accident apparently a jeep collided with an abandoned car that had broken down and
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was parked on the side of the highway when i was met by the deputy he informed me that
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one person is deceased the female passenger in the red jeep and the other vehicle that was struck
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was unoccupied i could see the ambulance personnel working on a male who was covered in blood and he was
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screaming the jeep driver steve hollermann was rushed to a nearby hospital steve's passenger his 41 year old wife
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deborah was dead everybody knew her i mean she was that well loved it was just disbelief and shock
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if you got to know deb you liked them she was the life of the party she was somebody that people gathered around
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because she was fun to be with steve hollerman survived the crash with only minor injuries and toxicology tests
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revealed no drugs or alcohol in his system he told investigators that he and deborah were on their way home from
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shopping when he inadvertently drove off the highway and struck a parked car i said do you
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remember what you hit and he said yeah i hit a car i said you know where the car
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was he said yes it was on the shoulder i said did you see the car when you hit it he said yeah i saw the tail lights
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and i then asked him if he tried to maneuver the vehicle or brake to avoid collision and he said
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that he didn't have time to do that the right front end of steve's jeep hit the back left side of the parked car
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steve said he was driving approximately 60 miles an hour at the time of the accident and he was wearing his seat
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belt but debra was not that was out of her character she was [Music] pretty religious about wearing seat
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belts and made it a point to everyone else that they needed to have theirs on also
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at deborah's autopsy the medical examiner found skull fractures and evidence that her brain had been
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jolted violently inside her skull from side to side the finding of the pathologists that did
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the autopsy was that the death was a result of a motor vehicle accident the blunt force trauma
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and the injuries that were observed the the skull fracture the bruising of the brain any of those could
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have been consistent and would have been consistent with being killed in a motor vehicle crash
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although patrolman tony snyder wasn't a doctor or formerly trained in forensic
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science he couldn't believe the coroner's report i was sick to my stomach when i heard those
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words come out of his mouth because i thought i was at a dead end now i was not comfortable with it at all but
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to be honest with you i i was tore up inside i couldn't even sleep at night snyder was bothered because this
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accident didn't seem bad enough to have caused the fatality as he had seen in so
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many other accidents i've been to accidents like that where people has actually their head went clean through
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the windshield and they're speaking to me when i get there and this windshield wasn't broke
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out it was barely cracked and snyder thought the amount of blood in the car was inconsistent with
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deborah's injuries there was a lot of blood in the vehicle more blood than i've ever seen in any
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accident in my life and i've been to hundreds of accidents but so had local traffic investigators and they disagreed
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with snyder they came to the same conclusion as the coroner that the car crash was an
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accident tony snyder's options were dwindling until an anonymous telephone call shed
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new light on an already mysterious case [Music] deborah hollermann's family was angry
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with police when they learned some of the details surrounding the car crash that took her life how can there be a
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car on the side of the road for a couple of days i mean isn't it somebody's responsibility to take a car
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off of a state highway highway patrolman tony snyder was less concerned about the abandoned car and
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more concerned with steve hollerman's driving skills he was convinced there was more to the
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story than steve was telling i asked him if a deer jumped out if he was playing with his radio knobs
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if he was on the cell phone i'm asking him if he passed out blacked out was dizzy fell asleep
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and none of those things were the reason he was off the roadway he just said he didn't know
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steve told investigators that he and deborah had been shopping and were heading home when the accident occurred
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so snyder checked steve's story by reviewing the videos taken by the store's security cameras
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they showed the hollomans at the store that night but they left several hours earlier than steve claimed
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the last store he left was around 7 30 p.m and i got a call to come to the crash at 10 pm
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so there's quite a bit of time missing to drive 18 or 20 miles in addition the
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items the hollomans bought at the store weren't in the jeep at the time of the
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accident so where were the hollomans between 8 and 10 p.m an anonymous telephone call gave tony
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snyder a clue there was no name no way to get a hold of anybody but just so you know somebody
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called and said steve hollerman's been having an affair well that peaked our
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interest even more to say geez there's some more pieces to this that we're unfamiliar with that we want
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to look into surprisingly deborah's friends all knew about the affair and apparently
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so did deborah she was aware there was an affair going on and she was going to confront him that was made clear her
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girlfriends have told us that investigators eventually discovered the identity of steve's girlfriend
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she was employed by the local hospital where steve worked as a lab supervisor when questioned
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she openly admitted the affair she basically said that they had been seeing each other for a year
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they were in love with each other they went on outings together and she admitted that they had sex that
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day in his cabin the cabin was the holloman summer home at green lake it was just a mile and a half from the
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crash site with a warrant investigators searched the cabin and found evidence confirming the story
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they'd heard from steve's girlfriend you could see a bed where it looked like
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it had been recently slept in or used in some way and they also discovered that steve and
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debra had been in the cabin before the car crash several items they had purchased that
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night were in the cabin so snyder decided to take a closer look at the hollerman's jeep
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as well as the accident scene steve said he was driving 60 miles an hour when the accident occurred
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accident reconstruction experts have a way of confirming this if a parked car is hit
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the distance it moves after impact can tell you the speed at which it was hit it's based on sir isaac newton's laws of
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physics specifically conservation of momentum when one object strikes another as in
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this demonstration its momentum is transferred to the other all things being equal the speed of the
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first ball is equal to that of the last the weight of the two cars plus the friction between the tires and the road
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surface factor into the analysis the coefficient of friction is basically just a measure of how
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slippery that surface is so that's that's a very important piece the other thing is um
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the the angles that are involved with approach and departure from the impact area for vehicles that are involved in a
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collision like this skuglin used surveying equipment to measure the distance the parked car
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moved after impact as well as the angles of impact a computer program performed the physics
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calculations and the result steve's jeep was traveling between 38 and 42 miles per hour when it hit the
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parked car not 60 miles per hour as he claimed these calculations also proved that
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steve had enough time to avoid hitting the parked car he had slightly over two seconds
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um from the time that he left the paved pavement until the impact he admitted he
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saw the taillights of the vehicle he admitted that he didn't swerve he admitted that he didn't break say he
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didn't have time it was obvious that the crash didn't happen the way steve
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claimed but would evidence found inside the jeep prove it was murder investigators now suspected that deborah
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hollermann had been murdered her family couldn't believe her husband steve had anything to do with it
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it was disbelief going oh my god the poor guy lost his wife he's gone through a month of uh
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of mourning and and now they do this to him but patrolman tony snyder feared steve
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may have committed the perfect crime i literally didn't sleep at night several nights easter dinner at my mom
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and dad's i hardly ate and they thought i was mad at them or upset with the family or sick or something i was just
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so obsessed by this i couldn't eat and i was worried that i was i was running out of options
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to get this figured out i was running into a lot of dead ends since the original autopsy ruled
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deborah's death as accidental snyder asked dr janice amatuzio for a second opinion
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as i looked at those photographs of the vehicle which i had not seen before that
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and i looked at the injuries i said you know there's something we don't know
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here and i think this case deserves more investigation there's way too much blood
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inside the vehicle dr amatuzio wanted to examine the holloman's jeep herself
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because let's face it steve hollerman's future was at stake here and the truth about deborah hollerman's
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death was at stake the most important thing for everybody to remember is that what we were trying
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to get at was the truth dr amituzio was approximately the same size and weight as deborah
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so she did something extraordinary she donned protective clothing and climbed into the blood-stained car
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it was a little creepy it was um sobering i realized i was sitting on the last spot that debra hollerman
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had been sitting before she died the first thing she noticed was the blood smear on the windshield had what looked
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like a fabric pattern in fact it looked like the heavy knit sweater that debra had been wearing at
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the time that she died this was a key finding because it proved that deborah was
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bleeding before the crash occurred the only way that that much blood could have been deposited on the inside of the
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vehicle at the time of the crash was was if deborah hollerman had been bloody before the crash in other words
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she had been injured before the crash that is the only way that she could have gotten that much blood onto her sweater
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onto her hair onto her face and there was more evidence that deborah was bleeding before the crash
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on the passenger side rear window you could see where blood had came from the seat and was running down the window
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the l-shaped pattern demonstrated once again the physics of momentum when blood drips down the window of a
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jeep traveling at 40 miles per hour and it stops abruptly everything in the jeep including the
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blood continues to move forward scientists believe that's what caused this l-shaped pattern
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the final three pieces of evidence were crucial to understanding events before and after the crash
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depara's blood was found on the lever used to adjust the driver's seat the
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driver's seat where stephen hollerman was seated was pushed as far back as the seat could
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go the steering wheel was bent and investigators found steve's bloody shoe print on the passenger side window
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this indicated that steve moved his seat back after he was in contact with deborah's blood then grabbed the
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steering wheel to brace himself for the crash the evidence also proved that steve
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holloman tried to break the passenger window after the crash my opinion is he was trying to break the
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window out at the accident scene he needed glass because there was a lot of blood
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and there was no glass anywhere lastly dr amatuzio discovered what really caused deborah's death
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forensic experts found what they believed was the murder weapon used to kill deborah holloman
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it was the knob used to adjust the passenger side mirror that adjustment knob was caked with
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blood and long brown hairs it was clear to me that that adjustment knob was the instrument that created the
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injury pattern of the four lacerations or tears on her scalp and in all likelihood caused the depressed
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skull fractures this proved that steve killed deborah by hitting her head repeatedly against the
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knob it was a severe beating it was it was severe so when death is the result of an
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assault we classify it as a homicide steve hollerman was arrested and charged with deborah's murder
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he acted surprised dumbfounded that he was under arrest when i when i cuffed him and put in my
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car he's like tony he wanted to talk to me he's called me tony you know why is
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this why is that like we were friends drove down to a park and sat in my car and read the criminal
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complaint word for word and the visions of the pictures really showed themselves when when you
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read what they had discovered steve hollerman's lover admitted spending the afternoon with steve at the
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couple's summer cabin later that night around 7pm steve and his wife deborah went shopping
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together and took their purchases to the cabin deborah may have found evidence that
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steve had been there earlier with his lover regardless the forensic evidence suggests an argument ensued and turned
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violent while in the jeep steve repeatedly smashed deborah's head into the mirror knob inside window
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causing the brain injuries that killed her then steve tried to devise a plan to cover up the crime
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while driving home he saw the parked car along the side of the highway and decided to stage an
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accident he got the jeep into position moved his seat back with his bloody hands made
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sure a seat belt was fastened while deborah's wasn't then braced himself for impact
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the jeep traveled 130 feet at 40 miles per hour directly into the back left side of the parked car
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debra's arm and bloody sweater struck the windshield proof that she was bleeding before the
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crash after the crash steve tried to break the side window to make the crash look worse but a passing
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motorist stopped to help before steve could do it i'm convinced that he contrived a plan
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to try to cover it up whether he had that already figured out before he assaulted her and killed her
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i believe that he did come up with a plan to cover it up to make it look like she died in that car crash we found a
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lot of things pretty quickly you know as far as like the speed limit he was traveling at and the positioning of a
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seat and a lot of the things you know you know i i guess after you know we found out
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about the beating and that kind of stuff that happened that night i guess nothing
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was really surprised after that you know at the trial steve pleaded not guilty he admitted striking deborah during an
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argument but said he was driving her to the hospital for treatment when the accident occurred
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the judge didn't buy it steve hollerman was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 30
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years in prison the most fascinating case that i've dealt with in my 15 years as an attorney
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if you look long enough pretty soon the scene begins to speak to you it really just depends on the amount of attention
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that you give it it's really meticulous attention to detail i've learned over the years
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that if we look hard we will eventually get to the answers without a careful look at the evidence
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and the use of science to reconstruct the crash debra hollerman's death might have
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remained an accident and her husband would have walked free tony snyder is adopted as our family hero
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highway patrolmen don't investigate murders they give out traffic tickets and
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for him to to do what he did i mean he didn't have experience in investigating murders
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he went to his uh superiors and they gave him the opportunity to follow his heart
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and we just need to thank everybody that was involved in it to give our family peace
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tony snyder is back to his old job as a highway patrolman this case was his first brush with
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forensic evidence but might not be his last i am sure i will probably never see anything like
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it again in my career but i'm ready for it if i do [Music] [Music] [Music] you