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[Music] up next a nursing student disappears it's really a mystery as to where she's
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vanished and her ex boyfriend is the prime suspect i'm telling the police i'd really like
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for you to take a look at him but without a body is there even a case you don't have a crime yet what's the
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crime the only real clue is a set of keys the trick for investigators is finding
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out which door they might open the keys are a mystery at this point [Music] ever since she was a little girl tamika
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houston wanted to be a professional singer and many thought she had the talent to make
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it [Music] she loved to sing she would practice her songs she tried out for american idol
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and sat outside i think for a day and she was devastated when she didn't make the
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first cut realizing how difficult it was to make it in the entertainment business
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at the age of 24 tamika decided to enter nursing school when classes ended and summertime came tamika finally had
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some free time she didn't have class to report to she didn't have a job to go to every morning she was very
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spontaneous she was the type of person to get in her car and kind of go and that's what everyone thought had
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happened when they couldn't get in touch with her but after two weeks passed her family
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became alarmed i called police and said that there's clearly something wrong i can't locate my knees
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she's not returning anyone's phone calls tamika was 24 years old and it's
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perfectly acceptable for someone who doesn't want to call someone to not call them police in
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spartanburg south carolina went to tamika's house her car was gone and the doors were locked but they
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gained access through an open window in the back room police found tamika's dog and
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a litter of puppies all on the verge of starvation i remember the detective coming and
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telling me that she loved animals and she would not have left her animals there were no signs of violence and no
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indication where she'd gone police issued a be on the lookout bulletin for tamika's car
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a 1991 black honda it could have been a traffic accident off the side of a road and
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which would still be a tragedy but it would be a criminal tragedy family and friends put up missing person
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flyers all over town as a mother is very difficult not knowing where my daughter is or hoping
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that and thinking that she's okay and safe police checked to make a cell phone and
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credit card records and there had been no activity during the time she'd been missing
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tamika's ex-boyfriend terence moss went to police and offered his assistance
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he had been living with tamika until three months earlier when they broke up there was an incident at her house where
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she accused him of hitting her and striking her however many flares can go off in a law
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enforcement officer's mind that's how many would have gone off with terence smalls moss said he knew nothing
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about tamika's disappearance although he admitted the assault claiming it was a one-time incident i punched her
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i actually punched her um and i fell down on my knees and i started praying and i was like there's just so
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many demons in here that you know we we're becoming physical with each other now that we just need to
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separate because of that incident tamika had filed an assault charge against moss and she disappeared just two weeks
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before she was to appear in court she was a victim of domestic violence she's supposed to go to court and
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testify against this guy as we kept pressuring and pushing and repeating questions to him
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he became agitated and finally just shut down from us and refused to talk to us completely
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terence moss is prime suspect number one one month had passed since tomeka houston disappeared
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and police were no closer to finding her she could still be alive we don't know
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there was still kind of like an undercurrent of a sense of hope then a tenant in a nearby apartment
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complex called police with a tip flyers were distributed all over spartanburg tamika houston's face became
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very familiar to people in this area a woman saw the flyer and saw the description picture of the
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car on there and said you know this looks like a car that's parked behind barksdale
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apartments and she was correct it was tamika's car parked just four miles from tamika's
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home cars are easy to track with respect to license tags and vin numbers and in many instances cars
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are more distinctive in some ways than people are no one living in the apartment saw anyone
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driving the car or parking it inside police found no forensic evidence no blood and no sign of a struggle the only clue
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was a partial fingerprint which didn't match tamika's ex-boyfriend terence moss or anyone in the national
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fingerprint database the car wasn't the treasure trove i'm sure police had hoped
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for but investigators did find a set of keys on the passenger side floor you could
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see that one looked like an automobile key and one looked like a house key none of the keys worked in tamika's car
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so we thought maybe those were the keys to tamika's house but they didn't work there either the
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keys don't belong to tamika houston so maybe they belong to the person responsible for her disappearance
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the keys were dusted for fingerprints but none were found then investigators noticed a code
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on one of the keys it had a special stamp on it it was stamped with aa14 nothing that
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indicates who cut the key who put the stamp on it it was just a key with a stamp
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investigators took the key to all the locksmiths in the area miraculously one of them was able to
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identify it he said i can tell you who i made it for so he pulls his records out and after
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looking through his records for a while he finds who that code was and that was for fremont school apartments
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that's a great break it's a great break it is amazing how much luck the hard workers have it's amazing
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fremont school apartments is once a local elementary school and the government converted it into some
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some public housing detectives tried the key in each of the 46 apartments strangely it didn't open
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any of them but it did open a storage area door it fit a door in the basement and the the door that it fit in the
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basement when it opened up that was a an apartment that was closed it had been taken offline because of
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flood issues investigators asked forensic technicians to look for possible evidence
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inside that room we ended up seizing all the evidence out of that offline apartment and it was a tremendous amount
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and we processed it for any kind of dna or anything for tamika and it ended up being a dead end also
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no one in the apartment complex had seen a woman matching tamika's description there was a lot i
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think false hope during that time then the apartment manager offered a possible explanation when a tenant is evicted
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maintenance often removes the entire doorknob from the evicted tenant's apartment door
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and replaces it with the doorknob from another apartment so that the person who moved out can't
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come back later with a copied key and enter that apartment again unfortunately they didn't keep good records of which
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door knobs were swapped meaning the doorknob from the basement unit could have come from any apartment in
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the complex investigators were convinced that the apartment key found in tamika houston's car held the
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secret to her disappearance but it didn't open any of the apartment doors in the
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fremont school apartments only a basement storage area so investigators asked for a list of
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tenants including those who'd been evicted and they showed that list to tamika's
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friends and relatives you get to a point where you've run out of more traditional leads
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so you're going to pursue it even if it's a somewhat unusual lead her best friend mention there's
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this guy named chris that she started seeing around the time of her disappearance
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there was only one person named chris on the tenant list christopher hampton he'd been evicted
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from the fremont apartments one month after tamika disappeared he also had a police record he served
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four years in prison for bank robbery investigators located chris hampton he was in prison
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serving a 30-day sentence for a parole violation but records showed he was free at the
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time of tamika's disappearance when questioned hampton said he knew tamika but he didn't know where she was she
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said i won't go to bike week she said who she was going with no she didn't say she said she's gone
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did you see her at any point after that hampton's prince did not match the partial print found in tamika's car
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but investigators got a huge break when hampton's former girlfriend the mother of his two young children
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called police she said hampton mailed her his wallet for safekeeping since he wasn't
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permitted to keep it in prison she says i've got his wallet if y'all want to come look at it she told police
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she called because she'd been following news stories about tamika houston's
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disappearance and was well aware that hampton had been living in the fremont apartments she
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also said there was a tiny speck of blood on the wallet it was very important if it wasn't for
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that media coverage there um that that young lady may have never came forward i examined the photograph found the spec
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of potential blood took it through the preliminary testing for blood and it passed it was positive but
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whose blood was it to find out investigators needed dna from tamika's family in this case we had
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the mother and the father so you can quickly ascertain whether or not this unknown sample could have
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originated from an offspring from those two parents the dna test left no doubt the blood
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was tamika's when confronted with this evidence hampton again denied any involvement
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whatever happened to tamika happened right there in your apartment i don't believe that well you know it
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could be in my blood no it can't be anybody's blood how long you think we've been doing this
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you don't know that we can tell one person's blood from another blood you ever heard of dna no
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but prosecuting a case without a body is never easy her body is not turned up you've got pets abused no contact with
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your family and an injury that led to a loss of blood and your car has been abandoned that's
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pretty good circumstantial evidence that something bad happened to you but you still got murder manslaughter
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involuntary self-defense accident what do you have to fill in any of those five scenarios right now
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fourteen months after tamika houston's disappearance her ex-boyfriend terence moss was no
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longer considered a suspect that's because police found tamika's blood in a wallet
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belonging to chris hampton a man who tamika had been dating at the time of her disappearance
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hampton once lived in apartment 215 of the fremont school apartments but more than a year had passed and
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another family was now living there then a young woman called police to say she was inside apartment 215
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with chris hampton around the time of tamika's disappearance and she'd seen something suspicious
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there was a large brownish red stain on the floor in the bedroom and that the dresser was
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pulled over in front of the closet door which was odd entering apartment 215 fremont
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apartments there's the entrance door the living room investigators obtained a search warrant
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and found evidence of a cleanup in the master bedroom just as she described whenever law
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enforcement sees bleach they think clean up crime scene clean up blood so you start peeling away the carpet and
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when we pulled the carpet up there was a large reddish-brown stain that was on the back
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of the carpet and into the padding on the floor this stain tested positive for human
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blood and they found more blood elsewhere in the apartment not only was there blood in the bedroom
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there was blood in the closet which was in some instances even more interesting how would a blood stain get
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inside a closet analysts sprayed luminol in every room of the apartment and found
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even more blood [Music] you just know that this is where something really bad and really violent
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happened you immediately know that she was moved from here and taken into the closet and
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laid in the closet because the one in the closet's the perfect size of a head
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with the tests that are in use today throughout the world we have a sex determining link so we knew it was a
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female we had a full profile we had all 13 locations that we look at dna testing confirmed the blood
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was tamikas it just took all the life out of me because i knew that uh hey my daughter was in an
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apartment and there was enough blood that my daughter could have died the blood evidence
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and information provided by the young woman gave investigators a picture of what happened he sticks her
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in a closet and goes and gets a girl and has sex with her and enjoys a meal and then has to figure out
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how am i going to get this body out of my apartment when investigators confronted chris
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hampton he initially had nothing to say but he must have realized the weight of the evidence against him because
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he made police an offer he stands up and he says let's go we said where we going are we
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going to the jail are we going are you going to show us where she's at he says i'll show you where she's at
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hampton led investigators to a wooded area about 12 miles away and pointed to the exact spot where he buried
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tamika's body he said he was sure because he left a marker he just said that he made a cross out of
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sticks that he found laying around on the ground and just laid him out on the ground in a cross
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pattern in a shallow grave investigators found a woman's remains dental records confirmed it was tamika
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houston it was really a difficult time for our entire family and to see my sister like suffer so much
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you never really recover fully from from um losing someone in that way it's like somebody
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taking a pitchfork that's burning and sticking it to your chest the side your heart is on
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it's another way to describe this pain hampton told police that tamika stopped
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by his apartment while he was ironing his clothes they got into an argument hampton said
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it was because he was seeing other women hampton admitted he lost his temper and struck her in the head with his iron
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a tiny drop of blood landed on the inside of his wallet blood also dripped onto the carpet
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the evidence shows hampton wrapped tamika's body in the bed sheets and put it in the closet
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then he pulled his chest of drawers in front of the closet door [Applause] hampton brought another woman back to
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his apartment who saw the blood stain on the floor the next day hampton used a friend's car
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to transport tamika's body to the wooded area where he buried her in a shallow grave
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hampton rented a carpet cleaner and removed as much blood as he could although he couldn't remove everything
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large amounts of dna remained later when he abandoned tamika's car in a nearby apartment complex he
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inadvertently dropped his own keys on the passenger side floor [Music] a set of keys with a locksmith stamp
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that led straight to his front door if we had not found out where that key went um we would probably still be
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looking for tomeka i imagine that the police officer wanted to probably kiss this locksmith uh if not do more than
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that when he said that yeah i recognized this key at first hampton claimed it was an
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accident i'm not telling you that he premeditated it i'm telling you that he struck a blow with malice that
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resulted in her death and if you doubt for one second whether or not that's true
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look at what he did after it happened chris hampton changed his mind on the first day of his trial
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are you guilty of the crime of murder yes sir christopher hampton pled guilty the
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morning we were set to draw the jury and i was surprised he pled guilty we were ready had opening statement i
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was going to try the case with another prosecutor in my office we were ready as a result hampton was convicted
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and sentenced to life in prison without parole he came as close to getting away with it
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as double a14 stamped on a key he came close to it the morals of the story are you don't know what the most
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important piece of evidence is going to be until after the trial is over in this
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case it happened to be a key which led you to a crime [Music] scene