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[Music] the mother of two young children went missing from her suburban home [Music]
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a few days later her close friend and co-worker was killed in a mysterious accident
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some wondered if there was a connection 20 years later a body was exhumed and forensic science uncovered
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the truth [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's winter in ohio charles mill lake is peaceful now
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but in the summer it's full of activity punctuated by the sounds of boats and
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children playing leroy and melody bruce remember those days fondly we used to go out on a
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pontoon boat and i remember laying on the front of the pontoon boat with my hands out catching leaves and bugs and
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seeing who could catch the most in the water melody's stepfather larry bruce worked
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as a driver for roadway trucking judy was a stay-at-home mom my mom was kind of introverted she
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did not really socialize a lot because of her speech impediment she had a hard time
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with people understanding what she was saying the speech impediment the result of a
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cleft palate made judy self-conscious but when she had corrective surgery her life changed
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well she got her driver's license she had a car she got a job at mansfield general hospital
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and housekeeping she was making friends there judy loved her job at the hospital but
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on the morning of november 2nd 1978 she was too sick to go to work she was sick the day before she was not
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feeling well and as i came out of my bedroom from getting dressed the door was cracked about six inches i
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looked into my parents room and i was able to see that she was laying there the children walked outside to the bus
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stop their father left with them to go to work when the children got home from school
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their mother wasn't there my brother was already home he asked me when i came in the door
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if i knew where mom was at if you look that way i look this way when larry got home from work he too was
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concerned and called police to report her missing it appeared that the only thing missing
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from the house was mrs bruce and the clothes she was wearing her car was still there her purse was still there
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her prescription drugs were still there and there were no signs of forced entry or any kind of struggle
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we called the office to see if maybe she was admitted to the hospital and or if she was showed up at work and
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nobody had seen her family friends nobody after searching all night police made an unfortunate discovery
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the police just kind of swarmed into our house and [Music] i was standing at this kitchen sink
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doing dishes and they had said that they had found they had found my mom but she was dead
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her body was discovered in a deserted campground along a creek just a few feet from a newly paved road
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she was in her pajamas and wrapped in a blanket feet were immaculately clean that was a significant thing that led us
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to believe that she wasn't murdered at that spot during police questioning larry bruce
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said that judy had planned to spend the day home in bed because she was sick he also said he had no idea where she
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might have gone the children provided larry with an alibi confirming that he had left the
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house with them that morning and larry's time sheets confirmed he had gone straight to work
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he pretty much kept his entire schedule that day nothing was out of order there had been no other time that he could
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have committed the homicide police noticed that larry's shoes had dirt on the soles
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and they wondered whether the dirt was from the area around judy's body so larry's shoes and a dirt sample from
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the campsite were sent to the fbi for analysis the results were inconclusive [Music]
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but judy's autopsy revealed several new clues and raised even more questions
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[Music] judy bruce's body was sent to the cuyahoga county coroner for an autopsy
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the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide the final coroner's report indicated
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cause of death was asphyxiation she was actually smothered to death the time of death is an inexact
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science but was estimated to be either shortly before or within a few hours after larry and the children left the
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house the autopsy also revealed that judy's bladder was empty when you consider a person who is dying
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of suffocation when they die that way their bladder evacuates involuntarily investigators found no significant urine
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sample near judy's body in the park this was another indication she was killed elsewhere
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interestingly judy's children told police their father had complained about some
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soiled bed sheets shortly after judy disappeared i can remember him came around and threw
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in a bed sheet into the trash and i was you know why you burning that he's like
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well the dog you know the dog urinated on it on hearing this news police immediately confiscated what
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remained of the bedding from the master bedroom there was some blood staining on
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one of the pillow cases and there were some unexplained stains on other blankets on the bed
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but the forensic tests at the time were unable to identify whose blood and urine
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it was back then the technology did not exist to detect whether it would have been
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animal human the only technology we had was to get a type of blood in fact you couldn't even get the blood
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typing because the sample was so small in the trunk of larry's car investigators found some oak leaves but
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little else they didn't have a lot of evidence and what little evidence they
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did have forensic science hadn't come a long way toward making it useful just a few days later
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there was another death in man's field one of judy's co-workers james isaac was
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killed in a traffic accident and larry bruce made a startling revelation he told police that isaac was having an
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affair with his wife and accused isaac of killing judy and then he may have killed himself bruce implied
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that isaac was somehow responsible for judy's death and killed himself due to
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his guilt over it but no one could corroborate larry's claims and the primary focus continued to be
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on larry bruce we ultimately made the decision not to press for the indictment at that time
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because everything we had at that time was circumstantial time passed and judy bruce's murder slowly drifted
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to the bottom of the unsolved case file i never forgot the case i would drive by
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their residence and we would even drive by roadway trucking i remember on an alarm off once talking to a dispatcher
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at the roadway trucking i said hey you know what what did larry ever you know say about this case because he
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worked there for several years after the homicide and it was the feedback i would get was that he was the
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kind of guy that was bragging about it he committed the perfect crime he got away with it
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about a year after judy's murder larry bruce got married again and the couple continued to live in the house in
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mansfield for the next 20 years the case went unsolved until a cold case unit delved deeper
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into the death of judy bruce by the year 2000 police in mansfield ohio had a total of 17 unsolved murder
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cases in their files and local officials started to grow impatient so prosecutors did what other
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communities were starting to do we approached the county commissioners for twenty five thousand dollars to set
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up a cold homicide unit to look at cases that were unsolved the first case they reviewed was the
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murder of judy bruce which by this time had gone unsolved for more than 20 years
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some in law enforcement suspected her husband larry had committed the crime but they couldn't prove it
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so the new cold case unit began their investigation with the oak leaves found 20 years earlier in the trunk of larry
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bruce's car so it was our theory that when he opened the trunk to take the body out some of
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those oak leaves fell into the trunk of his cadillac and information presented in this very
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television series suggested a new way to test them i was watching a forensic files episode
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one night and they had a story about out western arizona had done a plant dna case
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the crux of that investigation was a seed pod found in a suspect's truck which was later matched with plant dna
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to the palo verde tree next to the victim's body reinboat contacted the scientists who
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pioneered plant dna analysis and asked them to test the oakley found in larry's
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trunk to determine if it came from the oak tree near judy's body i did go out to the camp
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to see if black oaks and red oaks grew nearby and there were quite a few of them
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right up the short ways up the street there unfortunately too many years had passed and scientists
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were unable to extract any dna from the leaf but to their credit police didn't give up
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investigators decided to retest the stains on the bedding from judy bruce's bedroom
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dna analysis which didn't exist in 1978 determined that they were semen one stain
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matched larry bruce's dna judy's husband the other did not when judy was murdered
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larry claimed that judy was having an affair with the co-worker james isaac who died in a suspicious traffic
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accident days after judy's death to see if it was isaac's dna on the bedding
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investigators obtained a court order allowing them to exhume james isaac's body
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when the dna profile from isaac was compared with the unidentified semen on the electric blanket it was found to be
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not a match so the semen on the electric blanket remains unidentified investigators found no evidence that
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judy bruce and james isaac were anything more than acquaintances next investigators asked dick bisping
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senior research microscopist at macron associates to analyze the dirt on the bottom of larry bruce's shoes which were
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still in evidence to do this bisping used a polarized light microscope it's like looking through polarized
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sunglasses and by manipulating the light we can see different optical properties
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different optical features of each of these mineral grains their appearance their color their optical properties all
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help us identify the type of mineral the dirt on larry's shoes did not match
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the samples of dirt around judy's body but the polarized light revealed an important previously undetected clue
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these brightly colored minerals the soil from the shoes contain calcite which is calcium carbonate
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could be from limestone and that type of material is often used in roadways road beds
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near judy's body was a roadway that had been paved with new limestone gravel
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just days before her body was dumped there this was the first potential link between larry bruce and where judy's
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body was found next investigators sent the trunk liner from larry's cadillac and the blanket judy
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had been wrapped in to the cuyahoga county coroner's office for forensic analysis
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we were trying to find any piece of evidence that we could that would put mrs bruce's
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body or the moving pad that she was wrapped in into the trunk of bruce's car or inside
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his car in any fashion forensic scientist curtis jones used tape to collect any loose fibers from
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the blanket that covered judy's body using a comparison microscope jones compared the fibers to see if they
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were similar the three fibers three different fiber types that made up the trunk liner
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were also found on the moving blanket but were the fibers in larry's trunk an exact match to the fibers from the
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blanket covering judy's body to find out jones used fourier transform infrared
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spectroscopy a technology not available in 1978. the fdir uses infrared energy and it passes that infrared energy
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through the fiber or material that you're examining and the infrared energy is absorbed or
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not absorbed by the chemical bonds of the material and that produces a spectrum of peaks and valleys that can
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be used to determine what chemical bonds are present and the result the three fibers from the blanket were
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synthetic rayon and the three fibers found in the trunk were also synthetic rayon
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the evidence doesn't lie you know in cases there's both sides of the story but the only real side that
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doesn't ever lie is the evidence more than two decades after judy's death
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larry bruce was arrested and charged with her murder and prosecutors also learned
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that judy was keeping a dark secret something that larry bruce did not want to come to light
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[Music] 23 years after judy bruce's death her husband larry went on trial for murder
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prosecutors first witness was the couple's son leroy [Music] on the morning of his mother's death he
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recalled going into his parents bedroom to get a permission slip signed for school
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i stood there as he signed that permission slip that there was basically no movement
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you know i'm sure mom would at least came to see what was going on prosecutors believe judy was already
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dead after larry got the children off to school prosecutors say larry wrapped judy's
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body in a blanket and put it in the trunk of his car as he left for work he waved to the
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children at the bus stop hoping they would be his alibi then he went directly to work to keep his
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usual schedule but after work he stopped by the deserted camp and dumped his wife's body
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[Music] the synthetic rayon fibers from larry's trunk liner were transferred to the
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blanket covering judy's body and larry's shoes picked up the calcite particles from the newly paved limestone
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where they were discovered 20 years later by alert forensic scientists the prosecutors were able to put up a
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good faith effort and tell them this is everything we know using modern forensics about the evidence that we do
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have remaining to us and we pulled out all the stops and here's what we know
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prosecutor mayor saved his most compelling witness for last from the age of five until i was 14
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larry was sexually molesting me if i wanted to go do something he would tell me i would have to do
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something for him first melody was larry's stepdaughter she also presented evidence that her
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mother knew what was going on and that larry had the motive to silence her when she was a little girl before her
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mother was murdered she was being molested by her father in a bedroom by chance her mother judy bruce came into the
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bedroom she witnessed the molestation she was furious with her husband larry bruce a vicious argument ensued
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immediately after that very loud profanities and then the defendant got so worked up larry bruce that he took a
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swing at his wife and missed her and punched the wall and broke a bone in his arm
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the defense presented no witnesses arguing that the prosecution had improved its case beyond the reasonable
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doubts look at every angle of this and you'll see that it's entirely circumstantial case the jury deliberated
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for less than two hours we the jury find the defendant larry bruce guilty of the
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crime of [Music] just can't believe murder all happening larry bruce was sentenced to 15 years to
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life in prison i was glad that he was being convicted but in the same time i didn't want to be
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there i didn't want to have to deal with it i didn't want to face the reality that this really did
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happen after more than 20 years old-fashioned police work and modern forensic science finally brought justice
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for judy bruce's family the forensic evidence was very important to this case because without it
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it's very likely that the jury would have acquitted the defendant if i could get into a time machine and go
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back to 1978 and tell those investigating officers the things that would be available today
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i think it would be beyond their imagination [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Music]
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you