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[Music] two young women were brutally murdered on halloween but the killer left behind
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his dna and a groundbreaking new test identified his eye color his hair and even the
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color of his skin but knowing what he looked like was one thing finding him was another
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[Music] [Music] my [Music] it was close to midnight on halloween in napa california
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trick-or-treat had been over for hours and 26 year old lauren minza went to bed around 11 pm
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her dog chloe slept in her room [Music] at two in the morning the dog started to
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growl and lauren heard noises at first she thought one of her roommates came home
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with a boyfriend but then she heard a fight and screams when she looked out she saw a man run
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down the stairs and jump out of an open front window but she didn't see his face
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[Music] when she went upstairs lauren found her two roommates both had been stabbed repeatedly
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in an emergency what are you recording oh my god we've got attack and please
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help you i don't know my roommates are upstairs i think they're dying when police arrived they found 26 year
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old adrian insonya and 25 year old leslie mazzara dead it was a very very bloody crime scene
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it's the most bloody crime scene i've seen in my career leslie mazzara was a former beauty queen
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who worked in the sales department of a local winery at the university of georgia miss williamson
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adrian insonya was a civil engineer it was horrible there aren't any words really to describe that
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it's almost as if you just go completely cold blood stains in the house provided
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investigators with critical information he had gone into the house up the stairs
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into leslie's bedroom first where he attacked her apparently the commotion woke adrian up in her bedroom
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and she turned on the light and he proceeded to her bedroom and then attacked adrian
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she had reading glasses either in her hand or on her face that were cut with the knife she fought hard
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she fought for her life the blood trail led to the front window and continued on
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to the aluminum siding on the outside of the house investigators found three cigarette butts two at the front
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of the house the other in the backyard anytime i see cigarette butts at a crime scene i will collect them because they
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are an excellent source for obtaining dna all of the blood evidence was collected
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for analysis we received 71 pieces of evidence one or two is average up to four or five
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possibly this particular case really surpassed most of what we see in the laboratory
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police searched for motive and found one when they discovered some plastic zip ties underneath the front window
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in police work we use the same type of ties to hold prisoners especially like in riot situations or crowd control it
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appeared to us that this person had come in with a plan when they came in and that part of that plan would have
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been to bind these girls the next morning napa valley residents awoke to the news
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of this horrible crime and the terrible possibility that a serial killer might be in their midst
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this was a violent crime i felt real uneasy we have never had a serial killer in the city of napa and this was my
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first taste of a possibility that we were dealing with a serial killer three young women lived together
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in this house in napa california until halloween night when an unknown assailant broke in and
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murdered two of the three roommates hearing those calls my heart really went out to lauren for
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what she had been through i could hear the panic the fear the grief in her voice
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as she you know tried to relate that something horrible had happened to her friends
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the surviving roommate lauren minza told investigators she had no idea who would
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have done this nothing was stolen and lauren didn't think either victim had any enemies or
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at least none she knew about it appeared that leslie masara was attacked first it wasn't clear whether this was because
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her room was closest to the stairs or whether she was the intended target the evidence in her room indicated that
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she had been in bed when the attack happened and so it appears like she was probably asleep at the time the attack
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occurred and didn't have a chance to even understand what was happening to her or defend herself
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a background check revealed leslie was being pestered by the father of one of her ex-boyfriends
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it was leslie's last full-time boyfriend that she had before she moved out here
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to california and her ex-boyfriend's father continued to call her even after she moved to california
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we looked at phone records for the house and cell phone records and we learned that leslie had received several phone
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calls from the father of her ex-boyfriend that that that night on halloween leslie's ex-boyfriend and his father had
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alibis for the night of the murder they were both in south carolina thousands of
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miles away and witnesses confirmed it another potential suspect was a handyman who had worked in the house on the day
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of the murders but he too had an alibi in all police interviewed more than 200 potential suspects and came up with
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nothing there was no information coming up after the murders no one was saying anything
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we all thought that it was someone who had hightailed it out of here immediately after the
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crime two weeks after the murders friends organized a candlelight vigil to keep attention focused on the case
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the majority of people we looked at early were ex-boyfriends current boyfriends co-workers that were very close to the
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girls who would have had that type of ongoing relationship then police got a break
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dna testing found blood at the crime scene that wasn't from the victims there was an x and y peak detected for
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those particular samples so we knew that we were dealing with male blood on the outside of the house
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it appeared the killer cut himself while stabbing the girls when the knife slipped in his hand
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he probably had the knife in his right hand and when he hit the wall the blood that was on his right hand and on the
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knife was cast off onto the wall investigators now turn to the three cigarette butts found at the scene
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two were in front of the house the other in the backyard dna from the saliva on two of the
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cigarette butts matched dna from the blood on the stairs it also matched dna from skin cells
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found on the rubber band holding the plastic zip ties the rubber band was a good dna source
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because it's made of porous material the perspiration or whatever it was that
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left the dna behind was absorbed into the rubber band and preserved the dna profile was entered into a
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national database of 4 million known offenders there was no match again police had to consider the
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unthinkable that they were dealing with a serial killer who had successfully eluded them
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that's the worst kind of crime to try to investigate because there's no known
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link to the girls and so then you have a larger pool of potential suspects obviously
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however a second look at the cigarette butts provided a possible lead on the white part of the cigarette there
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was a gold pattern that kind of looked like little gold birds kind of drawings all the way around no name no words
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so we had no idea what the brand was investigators did some research and learned the cigarettes were a brand
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known as camel turkish gold they were relatively new and had only been on the market for a very short time
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not every store even carried them and the stores that we talked to they would let us know maybe they sold one or two
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packs a week investigators asked the surviving roommate lauren minza for a list of
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everyone she knew who smoked cigarettes perhaps one of them was the killer [Music]
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solving the double homicide of adrian and sonya and leslie mazzara proved to be far more difficult than police ever
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imagined it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack and we wanted to find out who did this
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and we wanted to put them and where they belonged and that's why the community
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came together with a hundred thousand dollar reward but investigators knew something about
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their killer blood stains on the stairway wall were on the right side indicating he was
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probably right-handed and he smoked camel turkish gold cigarettes to find out more
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investigators asked dr tony fridaykas if the killer's dna could provide any information useful to their
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investigation and dr fudegas told them about a new forensic technique he developed that
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could determine the killer's physical characteristics it's really important that you be able
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to narrow down your focus because otherwise you have no information with which to work and you're
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sort of flailing around since 99.9 percent of all human dna is alike dr frudakis focuses his attention on the
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remaining one-tenth of one percent and compares these polymorphisms to the dna of citizens from other countries
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this can identify the killer's ethnic identity the donor was primarily of northwestern
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european ancestry very small amount of southeastern european ancestry and no middle eastern or south asian admixtures
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so you knew for example he wasn't hispanic he wasn't african american so
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that certainly narrowed down the focus of the investigation in terms of who they should be looking at and dr
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frudaykas found a marker in one of the killer's jeans that indicated he'd have
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blue or green eyes and most likely light-colored hair i was glad they had done it it made me
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more hopeful that eventually they would be able to determine who the perpetrator
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was police released this new information to the public hoping someone in the community would recognize him
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tonight there's a new development in the murders of two napol women and there was a man
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living just two miles away from the murder scene who was listening to every word
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they say he's white has blondish hair and most likely has green eyes he now knew two things
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that he made too many mistakes and the dna technology had advanced far beyond anything he could ever have imagined
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at the same time police asked their surviving roommate lauren minza if she knew anyone who
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smoked this brand of cigarettes she had let us know well the only smoker i can think of at
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this point is eric koppel twenty-five-year-old eric koppel was a land surveyor and a friend of one
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of the victims but before police could question him koppel walked into police headquarters
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and confessed i'm just getting done with dinner and i get a phone call at home
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someone's here at the police department and they want to confess couples said he knew adrian and sonya
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it was that cold feeling that came over me i didn't know what to feel or at that
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moment i really didn't know we want to make sure that he knows details about the crime and the things
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he's telling us match up with what we already know about the crime scene i want to make sure that it's information
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that hasn't been released to the media although eric koppel confessed he wouldn't tell police why he did it
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he always claimed he didn't know what he did with the murder weapon which again
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to me always suggested to me that he wasn't telling the truth because it would seem to me that that would be
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something he'd be able to tell us eric was very elusive as far as a question of why the crime happened
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we could never get him to say i did this because of x y and z 25 year eric koppel walked into police
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headquarters and confessed to the murders of adrian and sonya and leslie mazzara
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he knew from the genetic testing that it was only a matter of time he knew he was just getting circled in
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he had to do it and he was going to commit suicide he was going to do whatever and he saw that stuff and he
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says i can't take it and he came in and he confessed dna tests confirmed that eric coppel's
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blood was at the crime scene and that his saliva was on the cigarette butts found outside
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i don't know if i exactly remembered the moment when i got the news i just knew i
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was elated i was very happy to find out that on a rare piece of evidence that we had
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we had the suspect's dna koppel was arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder
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investigators learned that koppel blamed adrian and sonya for the breakup of his
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engagement to lily prudhomme it appeared that some people and possibly adrian were telling lily that
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she could do better and that uh she shouldn't be any longer involved in this relationship with eric coppoll that
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he wasn't good enough for her or right for her she must have seen something and she was
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just trying to warn lily and unfortunately she was just absolutely a victim of something that never
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should have ever happened such a wonderful person on the night of the murders couple went to a halloween party and ran
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into his ex-fiance lily prudhomme according to witnesses the two argued couple wanted to set a
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new date for their wedding but lily wasn't interested can you just leave me alone for the rest of the night please
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after the party couple returned home he admitted to police that he was drunk the fight with his ex-fiance only added
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to the anger and bitterness he felt towards adrian insonya so he took revenge prosecutors believe couples stood
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outside the house where adrian lived with her two roommates casing the place and smoking cigarettes
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[Music] he used a knife to pry open the window and accidentally dropped the packet of
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zip ties on the floor with his dna leslie's bedroom was the first room at the top of the stairs
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and he killed her first he then went across the hall to adrian's room she fought back aggressively
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at some point he cut his hand and bled profusely as he rushed out of the house at that point based on what he's told us
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at least that he took his clothing and burned them in a fire pit that he had in his backyard
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went back to sleep and then the next day went to lily's house to console her
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after lily called him to tell him that adrian had been attacked no one knows why couples spared lauren
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minza some think he didn't know about the downstairs bedroom i don't know whether or not koppel knew
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that there was a room there and i don't know whether or not he knew that there
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was a person in there i just had a reckoning with myself and really understood that adrian was
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the target and somebody really wanted my child dead [Music] and then i thought how stupid was i of
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course adrian was the target of course we all know it's someone in the inner
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circle so if we had known those kind of circumstances earlier investigation i'm
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sure he would have come into our radar sooner but again we can always look back and wish
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we would have done things differently a few months before he confessed eric koppel patched things up with lily
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prudhomme and the two married in a bitter irony the couple asked arlene allen adrian insonya's mother to be part of
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the wedding ceremony and so it was really a remarkable moment and then and my guest
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at the wedding was my daughter lexi so we were both there at eric and lily's
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wedding lily claims she never suspected eric was the killer in december of 2006 eric koppel pleaded guilty to two counts
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of first degree murder he was sentenced to life in prison without parole had he not pled guilty
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couple would have been eligible for the death penalty and i think that was a very real
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possibility accepting a life without possibility of parole plea was probably the best deal he was going to get
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i never in my life thought that the police would not solve this crime i always believed they would
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were it not for a few drops of blood two cigarette butts and some skin cells on a rubber band eric couple might have
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gotten away with murder but ever advancing dna technology provided a profile so accurate
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it was only a matter of time before he was exposed as the killer this case turned on those cigarette
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butts primarily because it was the dna on cigarette butts that told us a little bit about the killer
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things that would have been not even considered 20 years ago as evidence are very crucial to cases
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nowadays and again the sensitivity of these testing and testing analysis and dna
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it's just incredible we can find in in crime scenes now every homicide that you see
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there's always a twist to the case that's a little bit different from the
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next case and so that's sort of what makes this work so interesting and so challenging it was the dna it was the
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cigarette butts so once again at any crime scene it's very crucial very crucial to do a good
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job and collect all the evidence and most crimes most crimes are solved by the physical
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evidence you