00:00:06
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NARRATOR: This time, on
"Killers Caught on Camera," in the United States, Colorado,
an abandoned car full of trash
00:00:16
is cause for suspicion. There was a distinct odor. Every police officer
knows the smell of death.
00:00:23
NARRATOR: The SWAT team
moves in on a suspect. And in Michigan, a
young couple disappears.
00:00:31
Two black bags in a shed
put police on the path to a double murderer. MAN 1: It just
sounds like something
00:00:46
bad is happening to her. WOMAN: We know what
happened because the video tells us what happened.
00:00:51
MAN 2: I heard some gunshots. POLICEMAN: Drop it. Whatever it is, drop it. That does not prove
that I killed my wife.
00:00:58
MAN 3: The camera doesn't lie. NARRATOR: Arvada, Colorado. Just a few miles northwest
of the state capital, Denver.
00:01:16
Home to 38-year-old
Veronica Sarinana, one of five children who grew up
to love music and cheerleading.
00:01:28
She went on to have
two sons of her own, her firstborn arriving
when Veronica was 20.
00:01:35
Later, she worked at a bank. By June 2019,
Veronica was living back home with her parents.
00:01:45
But in the early hours
of Wednesday, June 19, Veronica went missing. On the same day, 911
dispatchers received a call
00:01:58
from an employee at a church
with a tip about a body in an obscure location. In the background, someone could
be heard prompting the caller.
00:02:42
Sergeant Kate Herrlinger
responded to the call to investigate the claim. She said that there
was a man in the church
00:02:50
and that she wanted
to report a crime. Essentially, the crime
was that his brother
00:02:56
had killed his girlfriend
and placed her into the trunk of a vehicle near his home.
00:03:00
As soon as we heard we possibly
have a body in our car, we're thinking we
have a homicide.
00:03:04
We need to treat
this as a homicide. NARRATOR: It was a serious
allegation with a named suspect
00:03:11
who lived close to the car. When the police arrived at
the address they'd been given,
00:03:16
they found a white Ford Escort. It was abandoned,
unregistered for two years, and stuffed full of trash.
00:03:25
When police
questioned neighbors, they thought the visible
limbs and the abandoned car
00:03:30
were part of a mannequin. There was a distinct
odor of rotting, of death. Every police officer
knows the smell of death.
00:03:53
There was a female
body in the car. Her head was down
near the floorboard. Her feet were almost
up on the seat.
00:04:01
My initial response is we
need to get our CSIs out. We need to get the lab out. We were concerned with
the rising temperatures
00:04:08
that we would start to
lose physical evidence, DNA off of the body. NARRATOR: Detective Chris
Steiner was called in to capture
00:04:17
a 3D scan of the crime scene. CHRIS STEINER: The
car is a critical part in this particular
scene because that's
00:04:24
where the body is located at. We use a 3D terrestrial
laser scanners. It allows us to make a
virtual copy of a crime scene.
00:04:34
And we can go back to that
crime scene any time we need to. NARRATOR: They needed to
examine the body buried
00:04:43
beneath the bags of garbage. MATT ARCHULETA: Upon
death, the body continues to change as it decays.
00:04:49
So we ultimately
sealed the car and then had it towed with the body in
it back to the police station.
00:04:58
NARRATOR: The question was, how
did the body get in the car? They only had one lead--
00:05:05
the man named in the 911 call,
Frank Moffat, who lived just around the corner from the car.
00:05:16
The police moved in. Frank Moffat was arrested
and taken into custody. He basically said that he had
nothing to do with the homicide,
00:05:51
had no idea how she ended
up inside this vehicle that he was using at the time. NARRATOR: The police
quickly got to work,
00:05:58
searching for evidence in
and around Frank's house. They also canvassed the area
for surveillance footage.
00:06:06
KATE HERRLINGER: We need to
knock on every single door and then get as much footage
as we possibly could.
00:06:10
Everybody has
cameras these days. NARRATOR: Meanwhile, the
crime scene investigation team
00:06:21
got to work on the white car. This was not just a
female placed in the back of an empty vehicle.
00:06:28
The car had a rolled-up rug. It had trash bags. It had car batteries. It was packed full of stuff.
00:06:36
Each item had to meticulously
be taken out of the car. We processed some of
the items for DNA.
00:06:44
It was a very
lengthy, slow process. NARRATOR: They
used the 3D scanner to ensure that
every possible piece
00:06:53
of evidence was documented. Detective Matt Archuleta had to
examine the evidence in the car
00:07:02
and what the body
itself revealed about the cause of death. MATT ARCHULETA: There
was a small trickle
00:07:10
of, like, a bloody
substance coming out of one of the eye sockets. And it had a downward
shape to it in the sense
00:07:17
that it had run down
the nose and then dried. Following gravity,
that would indicate
00:07:22
the head was in an
upright position when that drop came out. It was fairly obvious that the
death had occurred somewhere
00:07:29
else, that the body was put
into the car by someone, and then that the
body was covered
00:07:35
with trash to hide the body. NARRATOR: Once the police
were able to remove the body
00:07:41
from the car, they
used a fingerprint scanner to identify the victim. Her name was Veronica
Sarinana, the same woman
00:07:53
who'd been reported missing. The police notified
Veronica's family of her death and started to try and
piece together how she died.
00:08:07
We contacted family, more
specifically her mother, and started to get details. We wanted a time frame
of her whereabouts.
00:08:17
NARRATOR: Doorbell footage
showed the last time Veronica was seen, at her mom's house
on the afternoon of June 18,
00:08:26
the day before she
was found in the car. Speaking with Veronica's
family, the police
00:08:34
discovered that she'd
been in a relationship with a man named Chris Moffat,
the same man who initiated
00:08:43
the 911 call about the body in
the car and blamed his brother, Frank Moffat. Veronica's mother said it was
a very tumultuous relationship.
00:09:00
There were plenty of times that
Chris put his hands on Veronica. There were times
he strangled her.
00:09:05
He went to jail for this. He had just gotten out of jail. There was an active
restraining order attempting
00:09:11
to keep him away from her. He had possibly killed
one of her cats. His behavior was very erratic.
00:09:20
I think she was
very scared of him. However, for whatever reason,
she kept going back to him,
00:09:26
and they kept this
relationship going. There's a psychological effect
known as trauma bonding, which
00:09:33
is when you are in a
domestic violence situation, and you keep returning
to your abuser.
00:09:39
And the reason for that is
because they're violent, and then they're
really nice to you,
00:09:43
and then they show
a lot of love, and then they're violent again. And in those nice
moments, you develop
00:09:48
this response where you almost
accept the bad with the good. And you keep going back,
hoping for the good.
00:09:57
NARRATOR: Kyle McElroy was a
detective for the Arvada police department. Veronica's family were
worried about her safety.
00:10:05
She had come back to her family. She had told her,
I don't feel safe. I can't be around Chris anymore.
00:10:10
She even made the statement, if
I disappeared, look at Chris. NARRATOR: Two months
before Veronica's death,
00:10:18
Chris Moffat had posted a
series of strange videos online. A lot of people
who are perpetrators
00:10:53
of domestic violence,
we know that they have issues with anger management. We know that they don't have
good conflict resolution skills.
00:11:00
So it's not that someone is
sitting there planning the cycle of, I'm going to do something
terrible to this person,
00:11:05
and then I'm going to make up. It's more that someone is unable
to regulate the emotions when
00:11:11
they feel angry
and then goes back and overwhelms
someone with love. So I think it's from both sides.
00:11:16
It's a very broken
relationship structure. But I think people often blame
the woman for going back when we
00:11:23
should obviously be focusing
on the men who keep engaging in this violent behavior.
00:11:28
NARRATOR: Chris's violent
behavior was an ongoing concern. Veronica's texts
showed that they
00:11:35
were seeing each other right
up to the day she went missing. The messages reinforced
that she was fearful of him.
00:11:49
Chris was now a key
person of interest. The police needed to find him. KYLE MCELROY: About that
time is when we also realized
00:11:58
we are missing her car. We're going to
try and notify all the other law enforcement
agencies around the state
00:12:04
at this point that-- it's called a BOLO. Be On the Lookout
for this vehicle. NARRATOR: Veronica's car was
a blue Mitsubishi Gallant.
00:12:13
It was tracked down the same day
as Veronica was discovered, just 24 hours after she disappeared.
00:12:22
KATE HERRLINGER: On June
19, late in the evening, around 11:30-ish, Glenwood
Springs Police Department
00:12:27
locates Chris sitting in a
Walmart parking lot, and he is in Veronica's vehicle.
00:12:32
So they arrested him and
booked him into the county jail up there. NARRATOR: Inside Chris's
wallet were recent receipts.
00:12:40
They gave the police
critical information. Those paper receipts
being in the car
00:12:47
were huge for us because all
the receipts are time-stamped. And what we found was
it looked that Chris
00:12:56
and Veronica had taken a
trip to Lake Dillon together. NARRATOR: A hotel
room keycard led them
00:13:04
to cameras and their first
sighting of Veronica. This is the surveillance
footage from the Luxury Inn.
00:13:17
And this was really important
because, as you can see here, this is the first time that
we saw Chris and Veronica
00:13:23
together up at Lake Dillon. And it gave us a really
great starting point to try and develop the
timeline from here.
00:13:30
One of the other things
we learned in this video, as you can see, it's Veronica,
and then you see the purse
00:13:34
that Veronica is carrying here. And that is a purse
that continued to come up in this investigation.
00:13:41
NARRATOR: The same
purse was filmed by a camera pointing directly
at Frank Moffat's house.
00:13:47
The purse was hung on the front
door by an unidentified male. It was recovered from the front
door and taken in as evidence.
00:14:05
That was a really
key piece for us because we now know
that this is the purse that Veronica is carrying.
00:14:09
She has with her in some of the
final moments when she's alive, and then it pops
up back in Arvada.
00:14:20
NARRATOR: Veronica was
also captured on camera at a nearby liquor store in
Lake Dillon in the early evening
00:14:26
on June 18. KYLE MCELROY: We see that
Veronica is still alive, buying items that correspond
directly with the receipts
00:14:34
that we found in her car. So all of this is
just narrowing down a timeline of when we're
trying to determine
00:14:40
when this crime happened. It was one of the
highest-quality videos that we were able to recover.
00:14:45
And we get really
lucky here in that we get a clear shot of the purse. NARRATOR: She was also filmed
withdrawing money at an ATM.
00:15:01
Every single time we could
catch Veronica alive on camera, we knew that we needed to
keep going because the crime
00:15:07
would happen soon after that. This is the last video
where we see Veronica alive.
00:15:15
NARRATOR: The cash withdrawal
was in the early evening. And with Chris now in
custody, detectives
00:15:21
questioned him about
his trip to Lake Dillon with Veronica on June 18. Chris described
the whole evening
00:15:49
with Veronica on the Tuesday
night in Lake Dillon. Chris then suggested
that the police
00:16:08
investigate the nature
of Frank's relationship with Veronica. The police wanted
to understand why
00:16:30
Chris persisted to link his
brother with Veronica's death. Chris was under the impression
during his time in jail,
00:16:37
his brother and Veronica
had started a relationship and were seeing each
other all the time.
00:16:46
We knew that wasn't true,
but Chris was convinced of it. JULIA SHAW: The
thing with jealousy
00:16:52
is that it doesn't
matter if it's true. What's particularly
pernicious when it's not true
00:16:58
is that you take
every single protest that that partner is offering
you as further indication
00:17:05
of their deception. And so it's this vicious cycle
where the person keeps saying,
00:17:09
no, I'm not cheating
on you, and you go, that's exactly what
a cheater would say.
00:17:14
And we know that jealousy is a
major contributor, especially when combined with poor
conflict resolution skills,
00:17:19
to domestic violence and also
to intimate partner homicide. NARRATOR: While Chris and
Veronica were at Lake Dillon,
00:17:28
there were a series of texts
sent from Veronica's phone. They were to Chris's brother,
Frank, just after 8:00 PM.
00:17:39
We began to notice that the
night before the discovery of the body that the
tones and the words that
00:17:45
are used within
the text messages are fundamentally different
than all of the text
00:17:49
messages we see before. NARRATOR: The language
used was suspicious, and it was unclear why
Veronica would be texting
00:17:58
Frank when she was with Chris. The police decided
to confront him. KYLE MCELROY:
Ultimately, he said
00:18:15
that his brother had told him
that he had murdered Veronica. And Chris was
saying that he felt
00:18:20
guilty about ratting
his brother out, and that was the
reason that he fled. He basically
claims, hey, I took
00:18:27
her down to my brother's
house on the 19th. I dropped her off. I don't know anything
else about that.
00:18:32
And then he asked
for an attorney. NARRATOR: As a
result, the police became increasingly reliant
on surveillance footage.
00:18:40
It showed inconsistencies
in Chris's testimony. Veronica's car was
captured on camera
00:18:47
leaving Lake Dillon just before
8:00 PM on Tuesday, June 18. The change in tone in the texts
coincided with Veronica's car
00:18:58
leaving Lake Dillon. KYLE MCELROY: When we see that
car coming out of Dillon Dam
00:19:02
Road over by Lake Dillon, we
start to get the idea she's not using the phone anymore.
00:19:11
NARRATOR: Her car was
picked up again at 10:40 PM at a Walmart near Frisco. It parks in the
parking lot of Walmart.
00:19:24
You see Chris get out. You never see Veronica get out. And we can watch as he
comes into the store.
00:19:35
We can clearly see
him on surveillance. We identify him by the
clothes he's wearing.
00:19:39
His physical features
are the same. We don't see Veronica again. From the minute that
they leave Lake Dillon,
00:19:45
Chris is the only one
seen exiting that vehicle. NARRATOR: The next
morning, Chris
00:19:52
was seen at another
Walmart, just nine miles from where Veronica's
body was found
00:19:58
in the unregistered white car. This was the camera angle
that we used to definitively say
00:20:08
that all the features that
we can see in the video are consistent. The text on the front of the
shirt, the white collar, the hat
00:20:14
that he's wearing, and the
physical features that we see on him continue to be consistent
with who we know to be Chris
00:20:22
Moffat walking out
of the Walmart just about an hour before
the 911 call is made.
00:20:29
NARRATOR: Detectives compared
all the different surveillance footage over the three days.
00:20:33
The clothing was a direct match
with what Chris was wearing in the Luxury Inn, the clothes
found in Veronica's car,
00:20:41
and crucially,
the figure hanging the bag on Frank's front door. KYLE MCELROY: This was
the clip that really
00:20:49
kind of tied it all together. We see a man. We know his physical features
are the same as Chris.
00:20:55
And you can clearly see
him hanging a purse. We had seen this purse
appear over and over again.
00:21:02
It has been with Veronica
every time we've seen it. NARRATOR: Chris
Moffat was clearly
00:21:07
identified planting evidence. We're sure that Chris was
trying to frame his brother.
00:21:17
NARRATOR: The
surveillance footage also confirmed Frank's alibi. We noticed that the brother
had come in 12 to 18 hours
00:21:26
or a long time
before, and he never leaves again, which was
consistent with what
00:21:30
his statement was. NARRATOR: Back at the crime
scene investigation lab, Matt Archuleta had
another breakthrough.
00:21:39
Chris Moffat's fingerprint
was found on a trash bag inside the white
car, contradicting
00:21:46
Chris's version of events. One of those stories was
that he wasn't in the car, he didn't put the
trash into the car,
00:21:53
and he had nothing
to do with it. The fingerprint on the
trash bag told us otherwise.
00:21:59
Now we know Chris
was in that vehicle. When he claimed to have nothing
to do with Veronica's death
00:22:05
and nothing to do with being
in or around that vehicle, we now have him placed
inside that car.
00:22:10
NARRATOR: The fingerprint
and the footage were vital for proving
that it was Chris
00:22:15
Moffat who killed Veronica. KYLE MCELROY: Seeing Chris
on camera planting evidence
00:22:21
in his brother's house
allowed us to focus on him as a suspect within
24 hours of this crime
00:22:26
occurring, which is so vital
in any homicide investigation. We knew how Veronica
had been killed,
00:22:34
when she had been killed. We felt confident
that an argument had broken out
like it had before,
00:22:39
and it had turned physical. We knew from looking
at Veronica's body, the most likely cause of
death was asphyxiation
00:22:45
or being strangled to death. And so that would be consistent
with an argument breaking out.
00:22:51
NARRATOR: There are 65 miles
between Lake Dillon and Arvada with plenty of
places to pull over.
00:22:59
KATE HERRLINGER:
Up at Lake Dillon, there are some pull-off
spots that people sit,
00:23:03
and they can enjoy
the views of the lake. And we believe that's where
he actually murdered her
00:23:08
and then drove
her back to Arvada to dump her body in the
car at his brother's house.
00:23:14
JULIA SHAW: Framing someone
for a crime that you committed is incredibly difficult to do.
00:23:18
We almost always see it in
organized crime circumstances and basically nowhere else.
00:23:22
And the reason for that is
that it takes a lot of planning to successfully frame someone.
00:23:26
And most murder is committed
as an impulsive or bad decision in the moment. In this case as well, he wasn't
planning to kill her probably.
00:23:35
It happened because it
was a domestic violence situation where he lost
control, and he went too far.
00:23:41
But if you don't plan
it, you can't plan also who you're going to frame,
how you're going to make sure
00:23:46
that they don't have an alibi,
how you plant the evidence like a purse on a handle.
00:23:52
It's going to be really hard to
successfully frame that person. NARRATOR: The question remains,
why did Chris kill Veronica?
00:24:02
KATE HERRLINGER: He
believed she was having an affair with his brother. I think he was jealous.
00:24:06
I think he was angry. And I don't think he
wanted her to ever be with anyone else but him.
00:24:12
NARRATOR: Chris Moffat pled
guilty to second-degree murder and abuse of a corpse.
00:24:19
He was sentenced to
55 years in prison. JULIA SHAW: It must have been
a terrorizing force in her life
00:24:27
to have this relationship and
to be drawn back in repeatedly, knowing that she was
likely to be strangled
00:24:34
again, to be hit again. In some ways, this
is a case study in intimate partner homicide.
00:24:41
And what we should take
from this isn't, wow, why did she keep going back? What we should take
from this is, wow,
00:24:47
why did nobody intervene and
take him aside and train him on conflict management and
make sure that his anger
00:24:53
management was under control? NARRATOR: Veronica
Sarinana was trapped. Extreme violence in her
relationship became the norm.
00:25:11
This is a global issue. JULIA SHAW: Femicide, which is
the killing of women and girls,
00:25:17
it's a form of
gender-based violence. Every single day,
133 women are killed in the world at the hands of
family members and loved ones.
00:25:26
So there's even more
women who are killed, but just by people who
allegedly love them,
00:25:32
133 women and girls are
killed every single day. NARRATOR: In our
next case, someone
00:25:39
you'd expect to be loving turned
out to be quite the opposite. Detroit, Michigan.
00:25:55
20 miles northeast
of downtown Detroit lies Clinton Township, home
to the Marzejka family.
00:26:04
The father Robert
Sr., his two sons Robert Jr. and Kevin, and
also the youngest child,
00:26:12
daughter Danielle, and her
boyfriend, Seren Bryan. Ava Glass is a crime
journalist with a fascination
00:26:21
for family dynamics. AVA GLASS: Danielle and
Seren were a young couple. She was 18.
00:26:27
He was 19. Danielle was a
little more outgoing, a little more vivacious. She was a free spirit
who didn't always
00:26:38
like to do the things everybody
else did, whereas Seren was described by his
friends and his family
00:26:45
as quiet, introspective,
and artistic. He liked to express
himself through drawing
00:26:50
more than he liked talking. But Danielle, he could
talk to all the time. And everybody who knew them saw
them as a close and very happy
00:26:58
couple. NARRATOR: Danielle and Seren
worked and lived together. AVA GLASS: Danielle and Seren
both lived with Danielle's
00:27:06
father and her two brothers. They shared a mobile home. It was quite crowded, but
everything seemed perfectly
00:27:15
normal, until one night,
Danielle and Seren returned from their all-night job
at a local restaurant,
00:27:22
were dropped off by
a colleague, and then they completely disappeared. NARRATOR: On August 26,
2018, 911 dispatchers
00:27:35
received a disturbing
call from Danielle's brother, Kevin Marzejka. Police responded to the scene,
recording on body-worn cameras.
00:28:12
Kevin Marzejka and
his father Robert Sr. met them on the
steps of their home. The patrol officers prepared
to deal with potentially
00:28:46
sensitive evidence. They see inside these
large plastic bags, two really large plastic
bags shoved at the back,
00:29:19
and they see a leg. NARRATOR: The home was
considered a crime scene. An investigation was
launched to find out
00:29:33
who the body parts
belonged to and how they ended up in the shed. They searched inside
the home for evidence.
00:29:46
In Danielle and Seren's
bedroom were key items Danielle would normally
carry with her.
00:29:52
ROBERTA BABB: Danielle's
phone charger was still there. Danielle was someone who was
always on her phone to the point
00:29:58
that she needed to have a phone
charger to top up her battery, and it was something that she
would never leave home without.
00:30:05
NARRATOR: Danielle had diabetes
and was dependent on insulin to maintain her
blood sugar levels.
00:30:11
Not only was her phone
charger still there, but also, her insulin
was still there.
00:30:19
NARRATOR: Outside,
police guarded the shed. The bags of what appeared
to be human remains
00:30:26
couldn't be removed until the
scene had been fully documented. Danielle's father Robert
Sr. and brother Kevin
00:30:41
could only watch and
wait for the police to confirm who was
inside the bags. The police needed to
work out what happened.
00:31:29
Kevin Marzejka was convinced
that the human remains in the shed were his
18-year-old sister Danielle
00:31:36
and her boyfriend Seren. But the police still had
to confirm it was Danielle and Seren's remains in the shed.
00:32:13
Forensic investigators
use luminol, a chemical that reacts with
hemoglobin, to detect
00:32:19
blood under black UV light. A luminol test
inside the bedroom that Danielle and
Seren had shared
00:32:27
found evidence of blood spatter. Extensive blood
spatter, in fact. And then also, cleaning
fluids that had been
00:32:38
used to try and eliminate it. NARRATOR: As they removed
furniture and carpet, it became clear
that there had been
00:32:48
a violent struggle in
Danielle and Seren's bedroom. Danielle's father Robert
Sr. and her brother Kevin
00:33:02
were taken to the police
station for questioning. Kevin was asked about
the strength of Danielle
00:33:08
and Seren's relationship. During the police interview,
it became clear that Danielle's
00:34:00
brother Robert Jr. was missing. Dr. Roberta Babb is a
clinical psychologist. Robert Jr. in 2011 developed
symptoms of mental illness
00:34:14
to the point that his family
became incredibly concerned and sought medical intervention.
00:34:18
After evaluations
and discussions with medical
professionals, Robert Jr. was diagnosed with
schizophrenia,
00:34:24
bipolar disorder, and paranoia. What we also know is
that from 2011 onwards, due to his erratic behavior, he
was hospitalized two or three
00:34:34
times over a nine-year period. NARRATOR: Kevin had no idea
where his elder brother was.
00:35:16
The police spoke with
Robert Sr. to try and work out where Robert Jr. had gone. Robert Jr.'s phone
records revealed
00:36:22
that he'd called
a cab to pick him up from the home on
Thursday, August 23, the same day Danielle
and Seren went missing.
00:36:34
The cab driver told detectives
that he'd taken Robert Jr. to Walgreens and then Wendy's.
00:36:41
By analyzing the
route the cab took, the police found
surveillance footage that tracked Robert Jr.'s movements.
00:36:53
After going to
Wendy's on August 23, he was caught on
camera taking a bus. He traveled for an hour and
20 minutes before getting off.
00:37:05
Five minutes later, he was
picked up on surveillance cameras entering a Tim Hortons.
00:37:15
Shortly afterwards,
Robert Jr. returned home. The video footage
of Robert Marzejka Jr.
00:37:23
was incredibly helpful. Every place he was
picked up on camera, he was obviously not injured.
00:37:31
He was obviously not kidnapped. He was shopping,
and he was eating. He wasn't a victim.
00:37:40
NARRATOR: Robert Jr.
was last seen by one of Danielle's friends at
home on the 24th of August,
00:37:47
two days before the human
remains were found in the shed. The police urgently
needed to find him.
00:37:56
NEWS PRESENTER: 26-year-old
Robert Marzejka is a person of interest in this case.
00:38:00
He was driving a
white 1999 Ford E250 van with blue duct tape around
the driver's side rear window.
00:38:09
NARRATOR: Police
circulated Robert Jr.'s photograph across the country. Meanwhile, the medical
examiner's report
00:38:17
confirmed the bodies in
the black bags in the shed were Danielle and Seren. It also revealed
exactly how they died.
00:38:29
Both Danielle and Seren
had been violently beaten. A rubber hammer covered
in blood was found along
00:38:37
with the plastic bags, and they
believe that was the weapon that they'd been attacked with.
00:38:42
They were both wearing
T-shirts and underwear. So authorities
believed they'd been
00:38:48
asleep when they were attacked. They didn't die from the
violent blunt force trauma
00:38:56
that they suffered. According to forensic analysis,
they actually suffocated. They were wrapped in
plastic and their mouths
00:39:04
and nose duct-taped. And then the plastic bag was
duct-taped around their necks.
00:39:12
NARRATOR: On August
27, Robert's white van was spotted in Toledo, Ohio, 80
miles south of Clinton Township.
00:39:22
The police found the van,
but it was abandoned. Robert Jr. was
nowhere to be seen.
00:39:30
When the police got the DNA
and fingerprint results back from the crime scene,
they were a match
00:39:36
for Robert Jr. The police
were now on the hunt for Danielle's brother. Police notified
employees and security
00:39:46
at bus stations and
airports, warning them to be on the lookout for
a potential murder suspect.
00:39:55
NARRATOR: August 28, two days
after the bodies were found, Danielle's brother was caught
on camera but looked different.
00:40:08
Robert Jr. develops,
creates, finds a disguise. It's a sort of rudimentary
disguise-- a wig,
00:40:18
a baseball cap or a hat of
some sort, and sunglasses. NARRATOR: The next day, he
walked into a bus station
00:40:30
in Toledo and bought a
ticket to Cincinnati. People working there
believed it was Robert Jr.
00:40:38
and reported him to the police. AVA GLASS: These attempts
to disguise his identity
00:40:45
had the unintended
opposite effect of making everybody notice him
because he looked so strange.
00:40:53
NARRATOR: When
Robert Jr. arrived at Cincinnati Bus Station,
he asked employees for access to a computer.
00:41:04
They directed him
to the library. He was relaxed and friendly. He scanned the news, unaware how
closely he was being watched.
00:41:19
In reception, the
police were waiting. Unmasked and identified, Robert
Jr. was taken back to Detroit.
00:41:59
In search of answers,
Robert Jr.'s brother Kevin called to speak with him
in the interview room.
00:43:22
Psychiatric reports
declared Robert Jr. was sane and fit to stand trial. AVA GLASS: He pleaded not
guilty by reason of insanity.
00:43:32
Despite his long
mental health struggle, the argument of the
state in this case was he covered up his crime.
00:43:41
He attempted to hide
all evidence of it. And then he fled. And they said those were not
the actions of an insane person.
00:43:50
NARRATOR: Robert Jr. did
not offer up an explanation. All the surveillance
footage could provide
00:43:55
was an insight into
his state of mind. AVA GLASS: He doesn't
seem panicked. He doesn't seem deranged.
00:44:01
He doesn't seem to
be lost or confused. In fact, he seems
calm and rational. He seems to know
where he's going.
00:44:09
There's nothing in
the footage that seems to indicate his mental
illness is so severe he should
00:44:14
be forgiven for beating his
sister and her boyfriend to death with a
hammer and suffocating
00:44:20
them in plastic bags. NARRATOR: Defense counsel
claimed Robert killed his sister
00:44:26
and her boyfriend because he
thought they were conduits for voices in his head. The jury deliberated
for just 40 minutes
00:44:34
before finding
Robert Jr. guilty-- murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to life
in prison without parole.
00:44:44
The family never got
a full explanation. But Dr. Roberta Babb
feels the family dynamic offers some insight.
00:44:52
From what we know, the
children responded differently to the loss of their mother.
00:44:56
Kevin and Danielle
appeared to grieve but managed to continue
with their life. It didn't disrupt it unduly.
00:45:03
Robert Sr. had lost his wife. He was sleeping on the
sofa, drinking excessively.
00:45:08
Robert Jr. had lost
his mother and was sleeping in his own room on his
own, left with his own thoughts.
00:45:14
And that must have
been incredibly lonely and isolating for him. It may not have been that
Robert Jr. felt a physical sense
00:45:22
of threat from his
younger sister, but her presence, her
relationship, her getting on
00:45:27
with life did pose a
threat to his own sense of his identity, his agency,
potentially his own masculinity.
00:45:35
And that may have
been something that activated very murderous
thoughts in Robert Jr.
00:45:41
AVA GLASS: They
were heartbroken. They were devastated. Danielle's brother Kevin, he
said, I don't hate Robert,
00:45:50
but he's not my brother anymore. And I think that gives us a very
good picture of how strongly
00:45:55
he felt about what happened. [THEME MUSIC]