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i love you a 13 year old girl went missing from her colorado home with little evidence to explain
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what happened the investigation dragged on for two long years until an alert fingerprint
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examiner found a serious flaw in the system [Music] [Music] [Music] september 7 1991 was like most other
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days for the church family diane church got the kids off to school ran errands went grocery shopping and
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planned to spend a quiet evening with her family the plans for that night originally was
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to be at home and just do whatever we do probably read them stories and and that
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kind of stuff that moms do then diane remembered her older sons had a boy scout meeting that night
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diane's other children five-year-old sage and 13-year-old heather wanted to stay home
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heather didn't want to go and hang out with all those crazy boys and so she asked if she could babysit that night
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and um and so we said sure fine whatever and um and we took off and went to the cub
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scout meeting heather had taken babysitting classes so diane had no qualms about leaving her in
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charge later that night diane called home to check in [Music] i guess it was right before 8 30 and
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i heard the tv on in the background and i said oh what's going on and she goes
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oh mom i just let him stay up a little bit i'll put him to bed diane and the two boys returned home
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around 10 o'clock the house was dark and for some reason the front door was unlocked
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she assumed heather and sage were asleep sage was in bed but heather was not she was so little and she had such a big
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fluffy comforter that i just figured she was under the comforter so i said what go look again
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so uh he goes and looks again and comes back and goes no she's not in there so
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i went and looked and and and she wasn't in there and and then that's when
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it all fell apart diane and her children searched the house and their five-acre property they
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found no sign of heather so diane called police and they said well 98 of these calls
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turn out to be runaways and i just said oh well this is the other two percent when investigators arrived
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they found the property full of friends and relatives for forensic technicians this was a potential problem
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when there's a multitude of people that have been there for a prolonged period
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of time pretty much everything and anything that could be touched has been touched
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footwear impressions tire tracks anything at all that might be unusual is more difficult to identify
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there was no apparent sign of forced entry or foul play or even of a struggle the only thing taken or person taken was
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heather she was the only thing missing from the scene that we could identify the search
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continued throughout the night and still there was no sign of heather the next morning
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diane church noticed that the screen on her bedroom window was a skew evidence technicians found
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three fingerprints on the outside of the screen's frame the prints themselves were very fresh in
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this particular case on that particular screen they were very distinct prints but these fingerprints could have been
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left by anyone dozens of people had been in and around the house but this was a busy household just like
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many of our households there were hundreds of prints throughout the entire house it was a process that would take
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days perhaps weeks and they were no closer to finding heather what happened ahem don church became the
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mystery for this entire region people were talking about it people were worried people were scared
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what's your favorite violin song to play the devil's dream yeah that's a good one
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i like that one the possible abduction of 13 year old heather church was unusual for colorado springs colorado a
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community with very little crime i think it heightened all the concern about taking safety measures with your
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children and making sure they understood about you know stranger danger concerns
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and things like that diane church and her family lived in a sparsely populated area which meant a
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kidnapper could have abducted heather without drawing much attention it was this 13 year old girl who was
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home and yet her brother was left behind she disappeared and her brother was just still sleeping in his
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bed it all was a very suspicious situation right off the bat an fbi profiler agreed
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since there was nothing missing from the home and no signs of violence the profiler suggested heather's
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abductor might be someone familiar with the family and their routines it's a
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very high percentage of crimes of that nature that family members are involved so you always look at the parents you
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always try to check out their alibi or check out their motive and if there's any evidence of bad character
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at all the first suspect on the list was heather's father at the time he was separated from diane
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church and living on his own the fbi wanted to talk to me and for about four hours i had the i could see
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in the movie the good guy bad guy scenario fbi agents asking me all these questions that
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[Music] some of them were really hard to imagine they were very very personal things that
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how i felt about my daughter but mike church said he had an alibi for the time heather went missing
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he attended a support group meeting for divorcees with plenty of witnesses he left the meeting at 9 30.
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there was a short time gap from the time he left the workshop to the time he was
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called at his residence that gap had to be filled in he also passed a polygraph test
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one of the detectives did come to my work and he asked to see me at that time i said am i still considered a suspect
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and he says mr church yes you are and i said well i think that you need to look somewhere else
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diane church was also considered a suspect they gave me a lie detector test a horrible thing to go through to you know
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go to the police station and be fingerprinted and lie detector test and all this kind of stuff
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the only potential evidence at the scene was the fingerprints on the bedroom screen
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the prints were compared with those in the database of the colorado state bureau of investigation
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there was no match next the sheriff's office sent the prints to the fbi and their automated
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fingerprint identification system or aphis it's one of the largest fingerprint
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databases in the world at the time containing over 45 million prints our impression at that time was
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that if we submitted those fingerprints to the federal aphid system that we were covering the broadest
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spectrum that could be accessed again there was no match as a father i felt like i should have
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been there and i wasn't so uh i went through i was going through a failed marriage and then i wasn't i
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wasn't there as a father for my children so i blamed a lot of that on myself why
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why wasn't i there my biggest wish was that somebody had taken her who had lost a kid
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of their own and that was what i clung to [Music] the investigation into heather church's
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disappearance dragged on for months then years the fingerprints found on the bedroom
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window screen didn't match any in the state or national databases despite this
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the family never lost hope i think that's what got me from one day to the next
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and then i have those days that i would see her up in the mountains somewhere alone
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and calling for me it was agonizing so i had to put my myself in a right frame of mind and i
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tried to get out of those type of situations exactly two years after heather went
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missing the family was told that a hiker had found a human skull near pikes peak just 15 miles from their
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home the skull was recovered in a pretty remote area of el paso county off rampart range road
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about seven over seven miles from town by a hiker in a pretty steep ravine about a 400 foot ravine
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the skull was that of a young caucasian female the news came on and the reporter was
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holding the skull and was saying this body has been found yadda yadda and all the details
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and about and this happened this had happened to me so many times since she went missing
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it's amazing how many bodies are found dental records identified the victim it was
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heather church at the beginning i didn't want to hear it like 24 hours i kept on saying are you
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sure i must have said that a hundred times the autopsy revealed the manner of death
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was homicide the medical examiner was able to conclude that heather died of blunt
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force trauma to the right rear of the head in the area where the skull was found
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investigators discovered a pair of girls pajamas but surprisingly her mother said
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they weren't heathers with no other clues it looked like the case might go cold
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again but before that could happen the newly elected sheriff of el paso county made the heather church case his
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first priority and one of his main topics that he wanted to work was the heather dawn church case
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and he asked me if i would look into it when lou said he was going to open the case up i said i thought to myself
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what good is this going to do you know what are you going to find out that these other
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police officers and detectives didn't know detective lou smith turned to the only possible clue to the
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killer's identity the three fingerprints found on the bedroom window screen at the church's
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house at the same time layton print examiner tom carney took a fresh look at these prints too
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he was new to the el paso county crime laboratory he came from miami where he learned
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something not many others knew the fbi's fingerprint database did not contain the prince of everyone in the
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united states who was convicted of a crime i knew right away that they had not all
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these atheist systems out there had not been searched to the best of my knowledge only two aficio systems had
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been searched i just assumed that it was a centralized network and uh tom carney uh
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was the one that really opened our eyes on that generally the fbi stores only the
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fingerprints of criminals convicted of major crimes not those convicted of minor crimes like burglary or theft
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so kearney needed to identify every database that had fingerprints which were not on file with the fbi
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i just contacted every state and try and track down every system in every state including canada and even mexico carney
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identified 92 fingerprint databases in north america that hadn't been searched for
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the prints from the heather church case i left a note for our photographic lab saying please make 92 sets of the
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heather dawn church crime scene latents and i'm going to mail them out and that's what i did
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four weeks later tom carney got a surprise [Music] finally after two long years colorado law enforcement officials got
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the break they'd been hoping for they compared the fingerprints from the heather church case with 92 databases
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not connected to the fbi's aphis registry and their efforts were richly rewarded
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actually was my wife we're standing at home and the phone rang and it was the
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department saying that they had just made a match the fingerprints matched 42 year old
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robert brown who'd been arrested in both louisiana and california and served time in prison
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for car theft he had a criminal history in both of those states had nothing for murder
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but we knew he was a felon brown's fingerprints didn't make it into the fbi's database because his offense was
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comparatively minor when louisiana notified us that they had matched a prince to a subject named
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robert brown we immediately went into our files and our databases to find out where robert brown lived and we found
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that he lived just a quarter mile away from heather church brown worked as a tree farmer and was
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married with one grown son colorado officials put brown under surveillance and arrested him walking out of an art
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supply store based on what i saw he's pretty calm he didn't really have a reaction didn't
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look surprised didn't overreact you could just see in his face like you know
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you got me when questioned brown denied any involvement in heather's murder why are
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your fingerprints out there robert my fingerprints aren't happy i'm guaranteeing you that i ain't lying to
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you your fingerprints are there do you want me to show you the the document that
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as your friend what i want you to do is fingerprint me again and have somebody who knows what to do and compare
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we've had four people that know what they're doing compare people they need to do it again i mean
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you know i've got the same thing friends i've had all my life prosecutors believe
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brown's motive was burglary on the night of the crime heather church was babysitting her
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brother sage her mother called at 8 30 to check on them after her mother called heather put her brother to bed
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turned out the lights and went to sleep herself brown arrived at the church's home
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sometime after 8 30. the house lights were off and there was no car in the garage so we probably
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thought no one was home brown entered the home through a window into one of the empty bedrooms
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he most likely wore gloves but when he had difficulty removing the screen he took them off
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and inadvertently left three prince behind prosecutors believe heather heard the noise and went to
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investigate when brown saw her he realized heather could identify him so he struck her in
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the head with a blunt object killing her instantly he carried heather's body out through
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the front door which he left unlocked loaded her into his vehicle and drove to the mountains
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where he dumped her body in a ravine [Music] to avoid the death penalty brown pleaded guilty to kidnapping and
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murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole it's just
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i think just a scary prospect to all of us that people can do these things and at least for a while get away with it
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had it not been for an alert fingerprint examiner brown's print might never have
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been matched the aphis systems have to be organized into one central location where all fingerprint files are kept
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so that you don't have to go through so many different agencies in order to find out the answers sometime
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once in prison robert brown made a shocking revelation he admitted that heather church
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wasn't his first murder victim he said he killed another colorado springs woman named rocio sperry
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who'd been reported missing in 1987 he said he put her body in a trash dumpster
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the the sperry case was a classic cold case it was a missing person wasn't really investigated as a homicide
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investigators weren't entirely surprised by brown's revelation the unidentified pajamas found near
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heather's body led them to suspect there were other victims it wasn't surprising to me that he had
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done other killings i knew from the beginning once we made the arrest that he was a serial killer i mean i think
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that was pretty common among investigators that this wasn't his first time eventually brown confessed to 48 murders
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including one he committed while serving in the u.s military in south korea there have been serial killers through
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here before you know you hate to think that there are others but apparently he was one robert brown was
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one investigators around the country are still trying to corroborate brown's
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claims if true brown may be one of the most prolific serial killers in american history
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and he might still be free if it weren't for the local fingerprint databases in louisiana and california
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and the investigators who knew where to look what i hope the episode shows is number
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one is you don't give up because it's a cold case keep trying and obviously
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technological communication is important one department didn't talk to another
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one system wasn't connected to another it's very important to have that communication both from a technological
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standpoint and a personal standpoint you just don't know sometime how just a
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little clue just a little fingerprint and will will lead you right directly to the
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killer they wouldn't have been able to find brown without those forensics that fingerprint was
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was the thing that i nailed the the nail in the coffin for him and without that after
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over a year i don't know how that could have had anything could have evolved out of
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that