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[Music] the weiner family were active members of their local church where loving your neighbor and helping
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others were more than just words but a way of life but not everyone in the whiners church
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wished them well [Music] and forensic evidence proved that someone in the congregation had the
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motive to kill them [Music] [Music] [Music] on a thursday night in june of 1988 sally weiner got a telephone call at her
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corey pennsylvania home it was her congressman's office calling to say that her husband harry who was a
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vice president of the local bank and a civic leader had just been chosen as corey's man of the year
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the caller instructed her not to let on to her husband as it was supposed to be a surprise
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and that she was to meet someone the following day to go over the plans for this this celebration
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the next day harry weiner got a telephone call at the bank [Music] we know it's a tape recorded call
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because there's no interaction between harry and sally he's trying to talk to
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her and she's not responding she just continues to tie she had to read that if her husband didn't come up with
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the money why they'd cut off her hands she told him in detail you know that she
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was being held and these people were dangerous and they were going to kill her if he didn't provide the money
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sally told him there was a bag under his car with instructions that he was to follow exactly or she would be killed
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the ransom note told harry to fill the gym bag with all of the money from his bank's vault and drive to a deserted
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bridge 10 miles outside of town to await further instructions harry immediately contacted the local
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police and fbi they told him to drive to the back of the police station and pick up a law
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enforcement officer he got into the car and laid down in the back seat with a 12-gauge shotgun
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[Music] when harry arrived at the railroad bridge no one was there so he waited with the sharpshooter in the back seat
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and with fbi agents hiding in the woods nearby you just sit there very quietly you
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don't move and you listen and you listen for any kind of footstep any kind of twig breaking any kind of
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noise hoping that he might contact us but thinking that he's probably within
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100 yards of us watching with a rifle after waiting for several hours the fbi agents told harry to go home and
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await further word there i felt very sorry for him he's a very good person and he was frustrated and
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he was being patient and he was reasonable the next day at sunrise the fbi performed a grid search of the
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drop site and neared the railroad underpass they found a second ransom note attached to a
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metal rod with the crepe paper flag the rods we recognized as being rods that were used in filing cabinets
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older filing cabinets that slid through the drawers of the filing cabinets from the front to the rear
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but the sign wasn't easy to see which is why harry missed it the night before
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[Music] the second ransom note told harry to proceed to another location several
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miles from there where the fbi found a third note telling harry to proceed to an abandoned church three miles away
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that's where the trail stopped he could observe perry traveling through the countryside there and he could also
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watch for surveillance units and police who might be following him 18 hours had passed from the time sally
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was kidnapped with no further word from the kidnappers investigators feared the worst
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[Music] 36 year old sally weiner the wife of a bank vice president had been kidnapped
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and held for ransom investigators learned that neither sally nor her husband harry had any known
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enemies you can count on just a couple fingers the number of cases that you see where a
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bank employee's family member is abducted in exchange for financial gain it just
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is not a common crime [Music] police found sally's car near a church not far from her husband's bank
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her car is left in that parking lot the windows are up and the doors are locked so there's no sign of a struggle
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and any respect all day saturday which was the day after the kidnapping there was no further communication from
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the kidnappers but on sunday sally's body was discovered by a farmer working his land a few miles outside of
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town she had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the head i just i remember being in shock it's
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i felt i felt guilty and helpless she was executed the killer used a glazier-type bullet
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that exploded on impact making it impossible to determine the weapon's caliber
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sally weiner was killed by a gunshot wound to the head which produced extensive brain damage a bullet entered
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in the occipital region which is the rear part of the skull slightly to the right of the midline so that's back here
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at the base the bullet went in it fragmented extensively and it produced a lot of
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damage to various parts of the brain next the fbi analyzed the ransom notes all were typed with the computer word
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processing program and all were printed with the same font on one note the word exactly was misspelled
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investigators got their first real break in the case from a police officer who was walking in the shopping center near
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harry weiner's bank he noticed a sign in a bookstore window listing the sunday newspapers the store
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carried in particular he noticed the unusual border [Music] it was a five-pointed star with a
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greater than and less than sign shown consecutively and corporal amon ruminated about it and said i know i've
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seen this somewhere the policeman immediately recognized it as the same symbol that was on the first
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ransom note the owner of the store david copenheifer said he made the sign with his computer
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and that the border was one he mimicked after seeing it on other signs copenheifer was a friend of the winer
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family and denied having anything to do with sally's murder they knew each other quite well both
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families were members of the presbyterian church [Music] they worshiped together
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sang hymns together they both sat in pews not far from each other at the church because of the similarity between the
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ransom note and the sign in his store window investigators confiscated both his home
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and office computers the preliminary search that was conducted by the state police and one of
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our other agents revealed exactly to me what it revealed to them uh initially nothing
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next investigators wanted to know the approximate time of sally's death so they could question copenheifer about
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his whereabouts a forensic entomologist analyzed the insect activity on sally's body
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and discovered second stage larvae from the species colifera a type of blowfly [Music]
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by analyzing the outside temperature on the weekend of sally's murder dr kim estimated that the insect
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activity commenced on the body late on friday afternoon the same day she was kidnapped
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then a investigators you know on the prosecution look at that to say aha that must be the time where body was
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placed there so that's their judgment then interestingly kopenheifer could not account for all of
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his time that day but they still needed more forensic evidence to know for certain whether he
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was the killer [Music] a background check revealed some startling information about david
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copenheifer he had been turned down for a 25 000 business loan by harry weiner less than a year earlier
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copenheifer was now the prime suspect in the kidnapping and murder of harry weiner's wife sally
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[Music] so the fbi put david copenheifer under surveillance and watched as he took some trash out to
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the dumpster behind his store when the fbi seized it they found some suspicious items
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they found a used roll of crepe paper the same make and color as the paper found with the ransom notes
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the fbi was able to match up the tear from that roll of crepe paper which was in the the trash at the bookstore
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to one of the actual flags they also found bits and pieces of paper the fbi painstakingly pieced them
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together and that note actually was a duplicate of one of the notes that was left at one
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of the sites that mr weiner was directed to go to after the kidnapping of his wife
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armed with a search warrant the fbi found a stack of metal file cabinet rods in kopenheifer's shed similar to the
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ones found with the ransom notes the fbi's forensic metallurgist william tobin analyzed the rods with a scanning
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electron microscope and discovered some unique marks on the side of the rods created as they were manufactured
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individual characteristics that are imparted from the tool or die on the work piece
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are not the same in hour one of that dye's life as they would be an hour 8 12
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or hour 16. these marks indicated to mr tobin that the rods found in copenheifer's home and
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those found with the ransom notes were all made on the same day at virtually the same time
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something on the order of minutes this was one of the best associations i've
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ever had with regard to the fabrication characteristics police also found glazier brand ammunition in
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copenheifer's home the same type used in sally weiner's murder i think that'd be extremely unusual to
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have glacier ammunition glacier on ammunition in in a person's home and local authorities asked the fbi to
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conduct their own analysis of copenheifer's computers after the initial search of the hard drives turned
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up nothing a document is not all in one place on a disk drive pieces of it are stored in different
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sectors of a drive when a document is deleted it's not erased from the hard drive instead the
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space occupied by that document is labeled available to reuse if necessary by going through that disk
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mathematically finding the proper clusters based upon the known interleaving of the
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drive you can piece together an entire document if the file space that that document
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occupied had not been overwritten when this crime was committed in 1988 there were no computer programs that
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could reassemble documents that had been deleted so al johnson and his team had to do
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something that had never been done before they had to do the analysis manually it was a painstaking process that took
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approximately 33 days to look at two 20 megabyte hard drives a computer is about as secure as a wet paper bag
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it never throws data away and they found bits and pieces of a document copenheifer had deleted called
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the plan it listed all of the steps necessary to carry out sally weiner's kidnapping and
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murder we were able to recover 80 percent of the murder plan back off of the hard drives
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20 of that had been overwritten or altered and to a point where we couldn't recover the data this evidence was the
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most damning this evidence connected the computer to the man to the notes to the crime
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this document revealed that sally weiner wasn't copenheifer's only target
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it looks as if based on that plan he planned on killing harry weiner after retrieving
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the ransom [Music] prosecutors believe it was david copenheifer who had disguised his voice and called sally on
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thursday night with the bogus story that her husband harry was chosen as man of the year
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he set up a time the next day for the two of them to meet to plan the award ceremony
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then copenheifer placed the ransom notes in the various locations outside of town
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and put one of them in the gym bag underneath harry's car sally arrived at what she believed to be
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the planning meeting she would have recognized copenheifer from church he somehow talked her into his van where
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he overpowered and subdued her he then forced her to record the message to her husband telling him she had been
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kidnapped the forensic evidence shows that copenheifer killed sally within a few hours after he abducted her
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then dumped her body on the farm outside of town he returned to his store placed to call
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to harry at the bank and played sally's tape recording copenheifer was sure harry would follow
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the instructions to the letter the computer evidence shows that he planned to kill harry at the abandoned
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church when he dropped off the ransom money harry was the one he was mad at for having turned him down on the loan
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application he wanted revenge on harry as much as he wanted the money despite warning harry not to call police
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copenheifer learned that harry did just that because of a journalist who had heard
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about the kidnapping from the police scanner and i went immediately to the plaza
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and parked my car and there was not a lot of activity so he walked into david kopenheifer's
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store and asked what was going on he looked at me and said no he said there hasn't been a single thing going
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on it's been a very quiet night there isn't anything going on at the time i was talking i didn't know
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that he had killed her so i did not make a connection that here was a cold-blooded murderer sitting in
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front of me after learning that the police were involved copenheifer most likely stayed
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in his store instead of going to the ransom drop site [Music] and harry didn't see the next ransom note
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copenheifer left for him at the railroad bridge based on the forensic evidence david copenheifer was arrested and
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charged with kidnapping and first degree murder one of the things that we did is get a
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writing sampler from copenheifer and had him spell exactly and he misspelled it in the writing samples the same way that
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it was misspelled in his computer and again that's to correlate the fact that that he's the one who inputted that
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stuff into the computer versus some external source david copenheifer was tried and
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eventually convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison david copenheffer is the master
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manipulator it's an intellectual game an intellectual challenge to see how far he
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can push the system and what he can get away with i think if he were out he would kill
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again and uh he put a contract on me and harry weiner while the trial was going on because we
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were key witnesses against him i don't think that he would stop at anything despite the overwhelming amount of
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forensic evidence against him copenheifer continues to maintain his innocence that's the arrogance of the man
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that despite overwhelming evidence as to his guilt and many defendants to do this
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they still still refuse to accept responsibility for the crimes that they've committed
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and that's the sin one of the sins of all of this this case in my own opinion
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is a landmark case it is the beginning of the genesis of what computer forensics is
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now from this computer forensics was born [Music] [Music] [Music] you