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portageville missouri 1998 police respond to the murder of a young mother and her 14 year old
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daughter police soon learn of similar attacks the linking of all these cases was
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gathering more and more information about this perpetrator and who he might possibly be
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but the case goes cold until police use a ground-breaking forensic weapon genetic genealogy
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they had looked at hundreds of individuals over the years and all of the leads went nowhere
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i believe without genetic genealogy we would not have solved this case this is the story of a series of brutal
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murders and sex attacks throughout the 1990s the evil man behind them and high police finally get their man after 20
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long years i'm nancy grace this is bloodline detectives [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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march 28 1998 portageville missouri police get a call from a local farmer tony shearer
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tony shearer that called 9-1-1 i was at my house i received a call from my boss telling me that there had been a double
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murder reported in portersville before police enter the home tony shares outside he tells cops
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how he discovered his wife sherry and his daughter megan dead when they arrived home they arrived to a
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horrible scene there in their house stephen goes in first the mother is in plain view as well as
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the daughter and i think at 14 years old there's just no way that his mind could
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comprehend what he was seeing yelled out to his to his father dad mom and megan are dead
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and that's when tony came around that same corner and then saw his his wife and his daughter
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[Music] police enter the home turned crime scene well i think the scene was staged
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and so as soon as you walk in and saw it it was horrific and i think that's what the killer
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intended on sherry had been shot several times in back of the head and that she laid in the living room
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floor close to megan who had been laid over a footstool or ottoman and that she also had a
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gunshot wound to the head she was gagged and her arms had been tied behind her back
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with an extension cord and that it was obvious that she had been raped there wasn't signs of a struggle or a
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fight in the house we believe that the suspect used megan as a tool to convince sherry to follow his directions
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we know he had a gun at the scene and if he had been holding a gun to megan's head that sherry would have
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followed his directions police comb the crime scene for clues we were early early stages of dna
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so we knew enough to take a lot of stuff we just didn't know what was going to turn out to be
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usable evidence so we took all the normal stuff that anybody would in an investigation like the bindings any type
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of blood swabs and just different things like that but we also took some swabs from
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uh megan's body we swabbed several areas but her breasts is where we were able to
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develop our dna profile the bodies of this young mother and her little girl are taken away by the
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coroner sergeant windham from the highway patrol was one of the officers that attended
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the autopsy and he was responsible for collecting any evidence from the bodies or from the autopsy that would have been
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submitted to the crime lab such as ballistic evidence and sexual assault evidence and
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dna swabs they did not have any significant defensive wounds you know it appeared
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that the suspect took control of them very quickly there were a number of hairs and other trace evidence seized
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from on and around their bodies particularly megan's she also had a bite mark on her back right
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buttocks cheek that was also very faint uh and it was faint to the point that the doc
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that did the uh the autopsies didn't say anything about it and so when when i talked to him i was
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like did you not think those were bite marks and he said i i didn't see anything
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so when i sent him pictures from the crime scene that were taken a couple hours after
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he was like absolutely those are bite marks and it's a good thing that you swabbed
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where you did because it's probably your best chance of getting dna the cause of death was the gunshot
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wounds to the head on megan and sherry shearer now the community has to face up to the
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loss of two popular and beloved people a mother and daughter megan cher was a delightful very bright
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very happy little girl who really looked forward to living life every day and that shari shear
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was a loving and doting mother who liked nothing more than raising her children and loving her family
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portageville police launched a full-scale investigation into the brutal attacks of sherry shearer and her teen
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girl megan they want to know what kind of a monster could commit such a horrible crime
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that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] march 1998 portageville missouri a
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manhunt is underway for a vicious killer who murders and sex assaults a mother and daughter in their own home
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very soon investigators learn of yet another attack this time in dire county just across the mississippi river in
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tennessee about three hours after our homicide lady and her three children were at home
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in a small a rural area of tennessee just outside dyersburg she had just got home from grocery
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shopping and she was carrying groceries into the house as her kids were playing in the yard
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and that a white male in a van had pulled up and was asking directions to a jeremy
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taylor's residence and she said she didn't know a jeremy taylor but her brother knew everybody she could
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go inside and call him she immediately gets a weird sense of feeling like that this
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is not there's something wrong with this guy there's something wrong with this
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situation and she says that she was standing on the porch and if she had went in and called dyer county
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sheriff's department that they could have got there in the time that it took him to get out of the
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van and come back into the house but the strange man is not looking for directions
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she said he later gets out of the van and walks back up there to her and says i didn't find a map but i found
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this and he pulls a pistol out the adult female and our suspect struggled over the gun
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the man's intended victim moves quickly to try and protect herself she was able to get back into her
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trailer they were still wrestling over the guns she was trying to lean against the door and
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close the door his hands were inside the trailer she yelled at her 12 year old daughter
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to get the gun off the wall the father's deer rifle was was hanging on the wall
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so they come running into the living room to the front door to give her the gun and he sees this
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so through the window in the door and he pulls the gun out of the door and fires a shot just above the door knob
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and it strikes her in the in the arm and then he leaves she had non-life-threatening injuries
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and survived the attack i can't imagine being in that situation and having to protect myself and my
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children police interview the victim about the attack and she is able to give crucial
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details to investigators she said he was a small small man small framed 30 to 50 years
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old salt and pepper hair glasses she thought may or may not have been wearing a ball
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cap 150 pounds police can now link this incident to the attack on the sharer family
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we subsequently connected the crime in dyersburg tennessee or dyer county tennessee to
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our homicide through the use of ballistics it was a few days but we were able to
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confirm that the gun used to shoot her was the same gun that killed megan and sherry shearer in missouri
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striations on the bullet as it goes through the barrel of the gun and that is as unique as a fingerprint
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and so knowing that dyersburg tennessee which was about 45 minutes away it gives you
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hope so now we know what the guy looks like we knew who he'd asked for we knew
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what he had said to that lady what ruse he had used so we figured that it just worked with sherry so it's
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probably the same thing that he said to her investigators have multiple clues to
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help track down the wanted suspect now they use another investigative tool they turn to the media and the public
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desperate for help we used the fbi's vicap system to to put to share our case information to look
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for similar cases and we suspected if we could connect him to other crimes we would have a better chance of solving
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ours we used inlet messages which are messages that go to other law enforcement agencies describing our
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crime and asking for input about similar cases this case aired on a television show a national
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television show a number of times we went on america's most wanted and went out to
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their live filming in washington dc and we had crews of policemen here waiting for the tips to start coming in
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we received thousands of leads of people calling in on the tip line i'm not sure
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i would have made that decision again because all we had was a composite drawing
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a likeness of someone so out of about 4 000 leads it got pretty daunting to go through
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each and every one and trying to figure out which ones we could actually follow up
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which ones were worth following up it was a pretty big task in an investigation like this one the
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hard work of detectives can bring both results and frustration the results in this case are a huge
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amount of material to review the frustrations much of that material is irrelevant
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it becomes a game of triage some of the leads were so obscure such as i think i saw the man depicted in the composite in
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a walmart in oklahoma six years ago well there's really not anywhere to go with
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those kind of leads so there's no follow-up investigation to be done if there's an individual that's named
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those are the leads that you try to follow up on and and see if they even had the opportunity to commit that crime
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many of those folks we got leads on were in institutions at the time our crime was committed
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in the 1990s dna forensic sciences still in its infancy the portageville police used the forensic tools they do have and
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they tried to create a dna profile of the killer we had sent our swabs off to a private lab
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to get a dna profile and they were only able to give us about three loci and it takes 13
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to be able to enter it into the national database and then they'd called back and said
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that of the dna they had left they would be able to do mitochondrial dna we were able to obtain mitochondrial dna
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from the hair that was found on megan's body and we were going around in and
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obtaining hair samples from suspects and sending them to the lab to check against this mitochondrial dna
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but there is no match for the dna it was very frustrating it was frustrating because one we were trying to bring
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justice to megan and cherry sheer and two we knew that the type of person that committed this crime
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wasn't going to stop that there would be more victims police cannot find the killer the case
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goes cold but then in 2006 investigators look for a game changer they go to ruth
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montgomery the forensic scientist at the missouri highway patrol labs [Music] there had been technological advances in
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dna we had our evidence reworked and developed a ruth montgomery developed a full dna
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profile that was subsequently entered in codis codis the profile that i developed from
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megan share went into codis in march of 2006 and it was searched locally within the
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state of missouri and then nationally there was a hit to a profile developed from a homicide in greenville south
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carolina it took us back eight years before sherry and megan's murders and the rape and murder of a young woman
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named genevieve zatriki in her apartment in greenville eight years after the first homicides
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investigators are now able to connect not one not two but three cases the first two connected by ballistics and
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the last case connected by dna profiling as we see next on bloodline detectives they are closing in
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on a killer [Music] 2006 portageville missouri police are on the hunt for a vicious killer who
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murders a mother and her daughter during a horrible home invasion 1998 thanks to dna profiling investigators
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can link the perpetrator to another violent murder two years later in greenville south carolina
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they wanted to go to south carolina and meet with the investigators there and have a
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group meeting between the two missouri and south carolina to discuss the cases to determine what
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the commonalities were and to ensure that the dna evidence was actually from the perpetrator of the crime
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we were on a plane the next day they had a a crew of hard-working officers out there and
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we took a crew of about nine of us out there so yeah it was uh certainly a breath of life that was breathed into
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the case because we had new information it was strange information their case was polar opposite of our
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case and without the dna you would have argued that they had nothing to do with one another
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portersville police learn more about the death of genevieve's a tricky we were surprised that that it was
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connected to a murder that was so far away we had learned that genevieve zatricki
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had failed to show up for work for a couple of days and they sent the handyman over to her apartment to try to make
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contact with her when he entered into the apartment he had located genevieve in the bathtub
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with the bathtub still running and she was obviously deceased it appeared to investigators in
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greenville who we worked extensively with that jenny was asleep in her bed when the perpetrator broke in to her
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apartment through the sliding glass door attacked her in a blitzkrieg style that while she was
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still asleep he just started hitting her in the head with a very hard long object that created a lot
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of blood spatter and then once he had hit her numerous times causing her death he pulled her off the bed
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and had sex with her and they were able to tell that by the blood pooling on the floor
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and then drug her into the bathroom and put her in the tub on her back with her bottom
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all the way up under the faucet and the fossil was turned on hot so the police department at the time
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had located in her bedroom where it had been ransacked there was clothes strong all throughout the bedroom
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all the drawers on the dresser were pulled out there was a message written in black marker on the mirror in jenny's
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bedroom that said don't f with my family to this day we're not certain if there is some significance to that or
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if that was merely put there to throw off investigators the the perpetrator took some steps to conceal evidence by
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placing the contents of jenny's purse in the sink under running water and actually placing jenny under running
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water to try to destroy evidence he had tied a double a knot and then another knot
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where the first knot was sufficient it was overkill that you could tell he was really making sure that she was dead
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both the missouri murders and genevieve's the trickiest killing are incredibly violent but it
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doesn't appear they were committed by the same person if it wasn't for dna we wouldn't be
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having that talk because the crime scenes are so polar opposite my thoughts being that he staged our
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crime scene so i thought the stuff he wrote on the mirror was a ruse that it was just a red
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herring based on our crime scene and what the lady told us from dyersburg that this guy had really graduated
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he'd gone from no social skills where he could talk to these women he had to
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start beating her while she was asleep to talking his way into the house at the shear house
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and nearly getting into the house and in dyersburg so who is genevieve zatriki and does her
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murder give police any new leads she lived alone and had formerly been married her former husband was looked at
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as a suspect but he was eliminated as a suspect as well the dna profile from the
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zitricki case was developed from a vaginal swab they had looked at hundreds of individuals over the years and all of
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the leads went nowhere investigators now so frustrated there seems to be no link between the
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genevieves the tricky case and the other murders but then 2017 the suspect's dna is entered into codis
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again we received a call from our crime lab where there was a case from memphis tennessee
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that had entered dna in dakotas and and it had matched our suspect dna we contacted memphis and learned that
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it was a rape of a 14 year old girl in 1997 two adult females and their children had
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just returned home from a funeral our suspect talked his way into their house through a ruse indicating he was
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running from the police they too talked about they didn't feel real comfortable around this this man
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they tried to brush him off and shut the door he had pushed his way into the house
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and he had told the women that the police are after him he's just trying to get away he's just trying to
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get a car and he needed to get away the ladies had told him that the car out in the drive has the keys in it just
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take the car and he had brought with him some duct tape and a pistol he had used
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telephone wire that he had found in the house to tie the the women up and he focused on the 14 year old that
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he raped there in the living room this perpetrator looks like the one in the dyersburg case
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they actually found a composite that was or a sketch that was drawn up back in 1997
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and when you set it next to our composites that we had they were very similar the only difference was the
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the glasses on the their suspect was tinted where ours didn't have any tent but they had run out of leads
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early on in that investigation and they they weren't able to locate anybody detectives frustrated yet again
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but they don't give up they know they are this close to solving the case so now
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they begin to search for different forensic tools there's a company that produces
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composites based on a dna profile you know an image of this perpetrator based on their dna
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it was initially discussed that maybe that would be a good idea in this case however
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the final outcome of that conference call was it would be much better to do genealogy genetic genealogy and attempt
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to identify at least a perpetrator's family that that would be a good solid lead to closure of these cases
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the samples are brought to parabon nano labs parabon works in conjunction with other
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laboratories to develop a short nucleotide polymorphism profile or a snip profile
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that goes into a different database than codis and is searched differently so the scientific bench work would have
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been done in collaboration with parabon and another lab we're looking at over 800 000 genetic
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markers across the genome and that's what allows us to have this power to detect distant relatives
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so that dna sample needs to go to the lab and go through a process called snip genotyping you can also use whole genome
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sequencing but in this case we did snip genotyping at the lab and that extracted
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those 850 000 snips then the bioinformatics team our scientists at parabon create a file from that and that file
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needs to be similar to what you would get if you tested at one of the commercial dna testing companies like
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say ancestrydna or 23andme so that's what we needed to do with this dna was ultimately create a file that would be
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accepted for upload to gedmatch and compare it against the other people participating in that database
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investigators wait patiently for the outcome from cece moore the genetic genealogist at parabon
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it was a couple months later when all the investigators were on a conference call the missouri
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investigators the memphis investigators and the greenville south carolina investigators
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when they called they put cece moore on the phone who explained the family tree that she
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developed and she walked us through the family tree and showed us how she come up with the
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suspect this guy was at or near the proximity of each of our crime scenes he was five five
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150 pounds wore glasses cece moore's determined forensic work id's a man his name
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robert eugene brashears the amazing work that she had done the was just near magical
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all the things that she did and covered every possible angle uh it was now that was near
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near terry moment then because you knew that your journey is near over the bloodline detectives now have a
00:29:35
suspect and a solid link to crimes they believe he is committed now they've just
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got to catch him that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] 2017 detectives from three states are using a
00:29:58
revolutionary new dna forensic technology called genetic genealogy to identify a suspect named robert eugene
00:30:08
brashears they believe he's responsible for a whole series of brutal murders and sex
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attacks beginning all the way back in the 1990s and stretching from missouri to tennessee to south carolina but now
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they need to track him down robert beshears was born in newport news virginia he grew up in huntsville alabama
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and he entered the u.s navy and was discharged within eight months and when he was discharged he was
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discharged in memphis tennessee but he had also done part of his navy time in florida
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robert brashears seemingly has a very dark past in 1985 robert brashears had picked up a young lady and attempted to
00:31:08
rape her and when she fought him he shot her and attempted to kill her but she got away from him and got to authorities
00:31:18
in 1986 robert brashears was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the attempted homicide in florida he did not serve 15
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years he was released from prison in march of 1989. when he got out of prison he moved to
00:31:35
greenville south carolina and his address was within a mile of genevieve zatriki's
00:31:43
apartment we know throughout 90 to 97 he was in prison in several different states
00:31:52
for several different crimes and that in 97 i believe he picks his family up from alabama
00:32:01
and takes them to jonesboro arkansas which is in very close proximity to portageville
00:32:08
police now believe they've got their man but the investigation hits a new wall
00:32:15
when they make their next discovery robert beshears was found in a hotel room in in southeastern missouri
00:32:25
because they had found a car parked in the parking lot that had unregistered license plates
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and they went into the hotel or motel to determine who the owner of the car was and the clerk sent them to a specific
00:32:45
room and when the investigators went to that room a lady answered the door and said that there was no man there that he
00:32:52
had left but an investigator observed someone moving underneath the bed and when they
00:33:00
um asked him to get out then there became a standoff with the police he thought that when the police came
00:33:09
there that they knew all of his terrible past history when in fact they were there to talk to
00:33:17
him about his own license plate he had his wife and a couple daughters with him the police had to stand off they're able
00:33:28
to talk him into letting the family go i think at one point they even talked him out of
00:33:36
a gun and he gave up his gun which turns out he had a second gun and ended up taking his own life
00:33:50
the day he killed himself he thought his world had came crashing down and that was the end of the line
00:33:56
for him it just exemplifies what a coward he was and what type of person he was he wasn't going to be man enough to
00:34:08
to stand up and answer for what he had done robert brashears is dead but as we see next the bloodline
00:34:18
detectives still want answers for the victims their relatives and closure for the hard work of the investigators on
00:34:27
this case before them [Music] 2017 detectives from three states are convinced they know robert brashears is
00:34:45
the suspect who committed a series of murders and sex assaults the problem robert breast years is dead and buried
00:34:54
he killed himself to avoid being captured alive we went to alabama where we interviewed
00:35:00
his daughter and we obtained a dna sample from her and that was sent to the lab and
00:35:10
we knew then that robert bratcher was our suspect robert brazier's daughter cooperates
00:35:20
with missouri police she had a lot of questions for us because she was i believe seven years
00:35:26
old when he committed suicide in the hotel she was actually there at the hotel when law enforcement arrived
00:35:36
in 99 she did believe from the stories that she had heard from her family about robert bradshaw's behavior
00:35:47
and his criminal conduct that he was capable of doing something similar detectives used the dna obtained from
00:35:58
robert brashear's daughter to get a warrant then they exhume or dig up his body
00:36:06
we collaborated with the arkansas state police who were very helpful in obtaining the proper court orders
00:36:12
where he was interred in arkansas to have him exhumed so representatives from the south
00:36:17
carolina south carolina law enforcement were on scene as were we dna samples from the exhumed body
00:36:26
were immediately submitted to both crime labs and within about a day we had it confirmed by both crime labs that robert
00:36:34
eugene brasher was our murderer robert brashears is dead but investigators are able to link him
00:36:43
to a series of horrible crimes but now the bloodline detectives want even more a portrait of the killer
00:36:54
how do you describe a psychopath um [Music] i'm not sure what to think about him i
00:37:01
think often how is a human being capable of this kind of violence against another human being
00:37:10
and what kind of mind did that individual have the motive for robert beshears was
00:37:18
pedophilia i think he was a pedophile that wanted to have sex with these young girls
00:37:25
and he didn't mind the kill to do it he is a serial killer by definition and
00:37:34
he he preyed on young girls and and women and we believe there's several other
00:37:41
victims between 90 and 99. robert brashear's crimes may go back over 20 years
00:37:51
after all that time the bloodline detectives wonder can there be final answers for the victims and their
00:38:00
families ready to move on to the next stage in their lives [Laughter] my heart goes out to a young lady in
00:38:08
florida who had to live with the consequences of robert beshear's actions and
00:38:17
she must have great strength and stamina in order to live with the history of that crime
00:38:25
i don't know that you ever get over something like being raped at the age of 14. and i am
00:38:33
sure that that young lady carries scars and the consequences of robert beshear's actions with her today
00:38:41
and it probably still affects how she lives her life every single day and who she is
00:38:48
as a woman as you can imagine a bitter sweet we solved it you got closure for it
00:38:57
you feel kind of cheated because god killed himself he wasn't going to get justice
00:39:04
but maybe that special place in hell was the justice that we got [Music] the idea of closure in a 20-year old
00:39:16
murder and rape case may be in question but not the value of genetic genealogy and solving the crimes
00:39:25
sergeant don windham of the highway patrol if he hadn't had obtained that dna swab from megan's breast
00:39:37
we wouldn't have been able to get a full strand of dna to enter into codis and at the time the technology was not
00:39:45
there to run that sample that sample just set in evidence for several years until technology caught up with us
00:39:58
[Music] forensic genetic genealogy was extremely important in this case because mr
00:40:04
broshears was dead it would not have been solved without it it solved the case we'd still be chasing him around
00:40:14
and i'm very excited for the technology and what genetic genealogy brings to
00:40:19
this forensic science field and the potential that it holds in solving crimes where
00:40:26
the perpetrators do not have their dna in the codis system who would ever have thought that when
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robert brashears began committing his series of horrible violent crimes in the 1990s when cases looked so cold would
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ever be solved certainly not robert bresciars or serial killers like him who before the
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use of forensic science like genetic genealogy would never have been caught i'm nancy grace thanks for joining us to
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witness these incredible stories on bloodline detectives [Music] [Music] [Applause]
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[Music] [Music] you