48 Hours - 48 Hours: NCIS: Body of Evidence

Episode Date: June 7, 2017

NCIS agents face a tough investigation into one of their own after a young mother, the girlfriend of a Navy petty officer, vanishes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to this podcast ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app today. Even if you love the thrill of true crime stories as much as I do, there are times when you want to mix it up. And that's where Audible comes in, with all the genres you love and new ones to discover. Explore thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. Listening to Audible can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits,

and even your overall well-being. And you can enjoy Audible anytime, while doing household chores, exercising, commuting, you name it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert

to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military. And when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. That looks like a great print. When you work on an investigation, you give it everything you got. That's why we went into law enforcement,

helped those who couldn't help themselves. We're driven to solve these cases. And work in these cases, in particular missing persons cases, it's devastating to the family. They have no answers. In the fall of 1989, Annie Tehan, a single mother of three in her 20s, went missing. People don't just disappear, but that really happened in this case. She just disappeared and vanished without a trace. Michael Pilon was Andy Tejon's boyfriend. He was a decorated sailor in the U.S. Navy and became the center of interest in this case.

Thank you, Chief Pilon. He had a complicated role within the Navy. He was an electronic service warfare specialist. You've got to be very sharp in order to execute that mission. When Annie met Michael, she thought that she had found the man of her dreams. It really seemed like they were about to start a life together. He was good to her. He treated her nice. He swept her off her feet. He was good to her. He treated her nice. He swept her off her feet. They moved to South Carolina and Annie got pregnant and Annie is just ecstatic. She could not have been happier.

But it wasn't long before this story took a unexpected and tragic twist. Michael told the police that on November 6th, 1989, he woke up and Annie was gone. You would think that if someone disappeared that there would be a massive search, but that did not happen. After she went missing, Kathy French, her closest friend, was the only person searching for her for about three and a half years. I needed to find her. I spent approximately $16,000 in phone bills. I had hired a private detective. I wasn't going to give up.

Kathy contacted every agency she could think of trying to get someone to look into Michael Pilon. The mere fact that Michael Pilon was active duty sailor at the time, we had an obligation to seek out the truth. I have to fear for the safety of me and my family. The more and more that I spoke with Kathy, the more I became concerned that something really did happen to Annie. Michael was an evil, evil man. I know with every fiber of my being that he had done something really bad to her.

We're starting to realize that she did not leave on her own volition. These are the things that you see in horror movies. These are not things that happen to the people that you love. This case definitely turned into a cat and mouse game between NCIS and Michael Pilon. There are a lot of disadvantages to opening a case like this, but here's the advantage. We own the clock. We knew that this is going to be a mental warfare game. If we're going to solve this thing, we've got to approach it right, because something terrible has happened to Annie Tahan, and we owe it to her. The NCIS mission is global. We're on aircraft carriers. We're in foreign ports. We watch after each other. We take care of each other.

NCIS deal with every type of crime. Cyber, fraud, murder. Counterintelligence, counterterrorism. Every crime is a tragedy. All sisters, brothers, husbands. I feel it very personally. We live in dangerous times. Are we ever going to give up?

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you're going to dominate your next dinner party. So follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. It's just The best idea yet. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. The scary cult classic was set in the Chicago housing project. It was

about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. Candyman. Candyman? Now we all know chanting a name won't make a killer magically appear, but did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. We're gonna talk to the people who were there and we're also going to uncover the larger story. My architect was shocked when he saw how this was created. Literally shocked.

And we'll look at what the story tells us about injustice in America. If you really believed in tough on crime, then you wouldn't make it easy to crawl into medicine cabinets and kill our women. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a story about evil. It's a story about an evil person. Evil walks with us every day. Evil walks with us every day.

I first learned about the Annie Tehan missing person case when I was at the Berkeley County Sheriff's Department in South Carolina. A detective who was a very good friend of mine came to me and said, Hey, Jim, we have a very difficult case. We have a young lady that just simply disappeared. We've investigated, and there's nothing further we can do. She was last associated with a Navy chief and he's no longer here. Can NCIS help us? We got involved in 1993, so there was a four year gap between when she disappeared and

we were actively pursuing the investigation. When NCIS got this case, they really were starting from scratch. One of the first people they spoke to was Kathy French, her friend who had never given up searching for Annie. Kathy was definitely afraid of Michael Pilon and knew that if her cooperation in this investigation was revealed, Michael Pilon at some point could come back and hurt her. She loved to dance.

She just loved life. Her dream from the time she was a little girl, she wanted to be a mother. At the time that Annie Tehan met Michael Pilon, she was a single mom with three kids of her own. Annie didn't have much family. Annie Tehan met Michael Pilon. She was a single mom with three kids of her own. Annie didn't have much family. She met Michael Pilon in 1987 when his ship, the USS Brumby, from Charleston was docked in Portland, Maine. She was very proud that he was a sailor. She absolutely fell head over heels for him.

Annie wasn't looking for someone to take care of her. She found what she thought was love. They were only dating a couple of months before he moved in. Shortly thereafter, there was a fire. Annie had gone out, and Michael was home with the kids. Annie's two sons, Jamie and Sean, made it out of the apartment, but her youngest daughter, Cheyenne, who was six months old, perished in the fire. News crews were on the scene when Annie Tehan arrived home. Annie was trying to run into the apartment to save her daughter

and was having to be held back by neighbors. It's like yesterday. Sorry. The death of that baby, it had changed her. When NCIS investigated the source of the fire, the facts didn't add up. There was always a suspicious fire, but the police department and the arson investigators

were never able to figure out exactly what happened. Annie Tehan and her two children moved in with her mother in Portland, Maine, and Michael Pilon went back to live in the barracks. And just a few months later, another fire struck her mother's house. There's a storage shed on the side of that house that's set on fire. The source of that fire was a little bit more suspicious. Investigators, when they were looking into the cause in the rubble,

found a lighter. It was engraved with USS Brumby, which was the ship that Michael Pilon was on. They never could prove that Michael Pilon started either fire, but there was suspicion surrounding it. So what happens is, is the state of Maine decides we need to protect Annie's children. So they remove them from her custody and they place them with the Department of Social Service in foster care. Annie desperately tried to get her kids back, but couldn't. So when Palan's ship returned to Charleston, South Carolina, Annie followed him there and moved into Palan's apartment in the suburb of Goose Creek. As if things weren't hard enough for Annie already, shortly after arriving, she learned that Palan had been living a double life.

She saw a picture of him, and in that picture, he had on a wedding ring. Pilon admitted that he had been married to this woman, Dawn Breeze, who lived with their three children at his mother's house in Savannah, Georgia. But Pilon assured Annie that they were separated. Annie considered whether or not to leave Pilon, but decided to stay. She was still holding on to that idea of this perfect man and having a family with Michael. But not long after that, there started to be some allegations of domestic abuse. At this point, Annie had had it with Pilon. She wanted out of the relationship.

However, around this time, she learned that it with Palan. She wanted out of the relationship. However, around this time, she learned that she was pregnant and couldn't leave. The baby, their daughter Jade, was born in October of 1989. She loved that baby. She said, this baby cannot take Cheyenne's place, but she has filled a huge hole in my heart. So about a month after Jade was born, Annie still finds herself in this abusive relationship, and she just felt that she couldn't get away that Michael would come after her.

Michael started taking the phone off the jack, and he would put it in his briefcase and take it to work, so she couldn't make any phone calls. He started locking the door from the outside so she couldn't get out. She was scared. I mean, she was really scared. Two days before Annie disappears, she calls Kathy in a panic. She tells Kathy that she wants out, that Michael has threatened to take Jade from her. She kept screaming and crying, and she begged me. She begged me to come get her,

and I couldn't go get her. Kathy wired her money for a bus to get out, and that was how they ended the conversation. That was their plan. When Thanksgiving came and she didn't call me, I mean, this is the longest period of time we have not spoke to each other. Almost 20 days, and I'm really starting to get uneasy about it. I started trying to call people that we both knew. You know, have you heard from her? After Andy disappears, and again, Kathy's frantic.

Where's her friend at, where's she at? She receives a call from Palon. Palon told her Andy had left Goose Creek, South Carolina on November 6th, and that's the last time he'd heard from her or seen her. And I know he's lying. I know something's wrong, and I just want to get off the phone. I started calling the police department in Charleston, and every time I called, it was like hitting a brick wall.

They would not allow me to file the missing persons report because I was not a blood relative. Months and months and months later, I located his mother's number, and his mother told me that she was in possession of Annie's daughter. And at that moment, I knew he had done something really bad to her. There's no way that she would have left that child. We're now at the point, something very bad's happened to Annie,

and that she's probably been murdered. So we really needed a break in this case. And interesting enough, something was about to happen. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty. Her specialty? Representing some of the city's most infamous gangland criminals. However, while Nicola held the underworld's darkest secrets, the most dangerous secret was her own. She's going to all the major groups within Melbourne's underworld, and she's informing on them all. I'm Marsha Clark, host of the new podcast, Informants Lawyer X. In my long career in criminal justice as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I've seen

some crazy cases, and this one belongs right at the top of the list. She was addicted to the game she had created. She just didn't know how to stop. Now, through dramatic interviews and access, I'll reveal the truth behind one of the world's most shocking legal scandals. Listen to Informants Lawyer X exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify and listen to more Exhibit C true crime shows early and ad-free right now. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal.

There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still a virgin. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with.

In the Pitcairn Trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. It wasn't until three and a half years after Annie's disappearance that the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office opened their investigation into this case. But six months later, they came up at a dead end. NCIS agents Grievous and Hughes tracked Michael Pilon to the Pearl Harbor Naval Station in Hawaii, where he transferred soon after Annie's disappearance.

One of our special agents from NCIS tried to interview him about her disappearance, but he just said, I want an attorney. We're at the point now that if we don't come up with some kind of physical evidence, this guy's going to get away with murder. You know, law enforcement officers, they do take these cases home at night with them, and this case was no exception. I took it home, I would lay in bed at night,

I would think about it, I'd wake up in the middle of the night and I'd remember, I need to do this. You constantly think about it. One of the things that we realized I hadn't done was I hadn't searched the missing person files. He was looking for a Jane Doe that had recently given birth. So what I did is I went up to the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division. I met with the lieutenant that was in charge of it, and I started telling her about the case. The agents knew that Annie had given birth within a month of her disappearance. And the records department said,

we have someone who gave birth just a month before they died. I remember the investigator put up one finger like that, and she goes, let's flip through here. And she opens up a large book with a bunch of pictures in it, and she comes to this one drawing. It was a composite sketch of a young female. Now, I've got her picture in my hand. And I look at the sketch.

The hair literally stood up on the back of my neck. I knew we found Annie. Jane Doe became Annie Tahan. Annie Tahan became a murder victim. Yeah. The victim's body was found along the side of a highway in Jasper County, South Carolina. Within about 100 miles of the apartment

that Annie and Palon shared together in Goose Creek, South Carolina. When you looked at the crime scene pictures, they were horrific. Personally, I haven't seen anything worse than this. This young lady's face was leveled almost even with her ears. This murder was brutal beyond imagination. Her skull was broken into 124 pieces. It took more than 500 hours to reassemble. She was put in a military sea bag, doused with gas, and guess what? She was set on fire.

Fire surrounds Pilon. But the biggest thing was the day she was found, 6 a.m. in the morning on November 7th, 1989. That was about the same time that Kathy French reported her missing. So everything was lining up. When we compared the dental records we had for Annie to the Jane Doe, it was a match. At that point, this went from a missing persons case to a homicide. So we found Annie and determined she'd been murdered.

All signs pointed to Michael Pilon. One of the first calls, the toughest calls I had to make as an investigator, was to Kathy French. I can honestly say that has been the worst day of my life. Because I kept thinking if I had been able to get to her, he might have not been able to kill her. Knowing that Michael Pilon was likely our key suspect in this, we developed a detailed investigative plan and started to populate what we call our timeline. The agent subpoenaed Pilon's bank records,

which revealed a suspicious purchase made on his credit card on the date that Annie disappeared. So interesting enough, we learned that Pilon's gas credit card had been used about 25 miles south of where the body had been found. And really what we're focused on are those dates around when Kathy last has contact with Annie to 7 November where Annie's body is found on fire in Jasper County. When the agents pulled Pilon's phone records, they discovered two early morning calls to

Savannah, Georgia, the day before Annie's body was discovered. Those phone records were critical in that we showed phone calls going from Michael Pilon to his mother's residence in Savannah the morning of the 6th of November, one at 0435 and the second one at 0517. And of course, that's the same day that Palan says that Annie walked out of the apartment and left him with their child. The agents had a theory that Palan killed Annie inside his apartment and dumped her body on the side of the road. And they wanted to know what his now ex-wife Dawn knew. Dawn was living with his mother in Savannah, Georgia.

So by Pilon calling her that early in the morning, we knew there must have been some type of problem. Pilon wasn't cooperating with NCIS, so the agents turned their attention to Dawn Breeze, who had left Savannah shortly after Annie's disappearance. She was like a nomad, crisscrossing all over the United States like she was running for something. And what was she running from? Quite frankly, it felt like it was Palan and maybe Annie and her being murdered. The focus of the investigation was not only on Palan, but on Dawn as well.

Through a series of database checks and multiple phone calls, we found out that she was living in Miami, Florida. Before we interviewed Dawn, Pete and I decided to meet with a Navy prosecutor in Mayport, Florida, to basically just lay out the facts of this case. There was no doubt in my mind that NCIS was focusing on the correct person. The doubt in my mind was whether we were ever going to be able to make the case without something more. Don Breeze was a key to unlocking this case.

What was her involvement? What was not her involvement? How did she support Pilon in doing this? Or did she do it herself? This was a big issue because we knew that Pilon could doing this, or did she do it herself? This was a big issue, because we knew that Pilon could simply point the finger at Dawn and say she committed this murder. What separates this from any other case we've ever worked was we had to work backwards, which was a unique challenge for us. We had to work backwards, which was a unique challenge for us.

So in the summer of 95, Pete and I head down to Miami, Florida, to interview Dawn Breeze, Pilon's now ex-wife. On the day of the murder, he had called Dawn twice, so Pete and I knew she had knowledge of the murder. At no point in this investigation had Pilon cooperated with us, so she became very key to this investigation. We had gone about as far as we could possibly go in the investigation, so I called them up to say,

unless you get an eyewitness, we're never going to be able to make this case. Jim and I travel over to the site where Dawn works. When Dawn comes in, I identify myself, I show my credentials as a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and I tell her that I need to speak with her about the disappearance of Annie Tehan. She asked how long was this going to take, was this interview going to be long, because if it was, she would like to get something to eat before the interview starts. Now, for us, that was a bad sign, because what I was hoping to see, I wanted to see the color leave her face, I wanted to see her start quivering,

that this skeleton in her closet that's been there since November 1989 is about to be disclosed. That didn't happen. We strongly feel that this lady has intricate knowledge, if not participated, in Annie's murder. We're about to get in a box. This is not going to be an interview. This is going to be an interrogation. It lasted 10 long hours, and Dawn's story matched Pilon's word for word. Ten long hours, and Dawn's story matched Pilon's word for word. Dawn told us she arrived at the apartment, and upon doing so, Pilon told her that Annie had left, and Annie had left him with the baby.

She didn't see anything unusual. She had no reason to believe that there was any foul play or anything mysterious other than the fact that Annie had left. We knew that Annie had been murdered. We knew Annie had been murdered before Dawn showed up to the apartment. So we knew that everything she had told us was screaming of lies. This is not checkers. This is chess. We would slide in a few probing questions about time. She kept changing her times about when she was back in Charleston at the apartment. What she did is she locked herself in to being at the apartment about the same time that we felt that Annie was still in there, dead.

And when we pointed that out, she just stopped. You could see it in her eyes. And she goes, you got me. Dawn had carried this secret for six years and knew it was time to tell the truth about what really happened to Annie. He said to me that he wanted me to come to Charleston and that he needed someone to help him with the baby. So Dawn then gets in the car, drives back to South Carolina.

I came in the door and the body of Anna Tahan was laying on the living room floor. Where was this at? At Spring Hill Apartments, apartment number M13. What did he say to you about the baby? He said to me, come and meet your daughter. Remember, at the time,

Dawn and Michael Pilon were already married with three children of their own. Dawn told us how Pilon had admitted to having an affair with Annie. He tells Dawn, I'm sorry for having an affair, but that's my child, and that child needs to be with us, and you need to help me raise that child as our own. And Palon had a plan. It was for Annie to have the baby, they were going to kill her, and the baby was now theirs, and that was what they wanted.

They wanted that baby. You know, she's talking with Michael. They're planning this murder. That was the reason. Because she had a child of his, and instead of fighting her for the child, it was easier, and he would never have to deal with her again. He had sex with her, waited for her to fall asleep, and then he grabbed the tire iron and then delivered the blows that killed her. He continued to hit her and hit her, and she wouldn't die. Where did he get her at?

In the head. I believe all the blows he told me were to the head. Their baby daughter was lying on the mattress next to her mother. As you were striking her? Yes. Dawn was as cold as ice, confessing to the agents that she took Annie's baby, Jade, and helped Pilon dispose of Annie's body in the dead of night. When we hit the road, he had Anna in the trunk of the car, and he had a gallon of gasoline,

and I had Jade, and he found a spot that seemed to suit him. And we pulled over to the side of the road, and I helped him to remove the body from the back of the car. And then watched as he poured gasoline over the body. I saw the flames go up, and I started to drive off. The problem with relying on Don's testimony as being the make-or-break evidence in the case was that Don obviously had a potential axe to grind in all of this. Michael Pilon could easily have said that Dawn, his wife,

was responsible for killing Annie. To make Dawn's story stick, we needed to get her to have Pilon admit he did kill her. And we had the perfect plan to do it. Dawn's confession was a major break in this investigation and one of the first ones we've had since finding Annie's body. That may seem like a great break, and it was, but the problem at that point was that we weren't really sure whether Don had actually done it.

Maybe Palan was just the accomplice. We had no idea. In order to corroborate what Don was saying, we needed to pull her in on our side. So what we did with Don's cooperation is we decided to do intercepts, phone intercepts or a sting. operation is we decided to do intercepts, phone intercepts or a sting. We said, if you want to help yourself, you need to assist us. We want you to make some phone calls to Michael Pilon, and we want you to make him make some admissions. So after hours and hours of working with her, coming up with a scenario, the phone call is placed. We need to talk. The body has been identified.

And his response was, no they didn't. Well, if he didn't have anything to do with this, he would have said, what body? What are you talking about? That was a single. We just hit a single. We needed more. Listen, they found blood in the pocket. What? Yeah. We'll be sure everything's gone. How far? Don told Pilon that they were suspects in Annie's murder and that NCIS had laid out their case against them. You've got to come up with an explanation for that blood in the apartment.

Okay, we need to work. We need to get together and work something out. He's giving me as a prosecutor an indicator that he knows exactly what it is that Don is talking about, and he was killed in that apartment. There was blood in that apartment. They disposed of the body. Anything we can't handle? Uh, yeah.

The one thing I saw in specific was an Amoco printout. Guess what? What? The time is on the printout. It was the day that the body was dumped. Okay? Really? Yeah. Okay, okay, okay. That information is going to lead to a downfall if we don't get our story straight now. Okay. He didn't say he killed Annie, but he didn't deny. He did not deny that she was murdered. They were colluding, they were making up their stories together, and Don just needed to stop talking.

Be careful on what you're saying on the lines. I'm telling you, now just hold on, all right? All right. Can you do that? I can hold on. We're together, right? We're together. Bye.

Okay, bye. These intercepts told us two things. One is that Dawn was being truthful about her role in all this, and the other is that Palan was the killer. This camera is being operated by Special Agent Peter Hughes of the Naval... The agents took Dawn back to the scene of the crime. I am currently videotaping apartment M13. Looking for any shred of evidence that might still be there. We took her back to the apartment, and we put her in an incest jacket and hat.

We didn't want anybody to identify her, and it somehow would get back to Palan that she's now working with us. And we came out of here and walked back to the living room, at which time I saw the body of Anna Tahan lying on the floor right here. Her head was in this location right here, with the body extending out this direction. She was in this location right here with the body extending out this direction. She was face down. She was very concise, detailed, and very specific in what she provided us and where the body was located. In about this position right here, there was a concentration of blood on the baseboard and the wall. So while we're in there, there's a forensic team from the State Law Enforcement Division.

They can listen to her, point to where the body was, point to where the blood pooling was. The crime scene team now can start pulling back rug and start conducting a forensic analysis to see if they can locate physical evidence. Remember, we want physical evidence. Since they had moved out in 1989, that carpet and that padding had been changed out several times by the apartment management team. So we knew we weren't going to find anything in mat padding or carpet. We were focused on the concrete slab. There was a concentration of blood on the base of an animal. Where Dawn said a large pool of blood had been, it soaked into the carpet, to the concrete.

They did an imidium black test. So imidium black reacts to protein, proteins found in blood. So as they sprayed the stuff on the floor, you see this large purple pool just develop. And that pool is exactly where Annie laid and she bled out. But NCIS couldn't conclusively prove that what they found was in fact blood, so they continued their search for more physical evidence. We weren't going to stop this effort until we found just that. We remembered Dawn had told us there was a TV in the apartment. There was at that time a TV stand in this location right here with a TV on it.

She tells us, Michael told me there's a lot of blood on that TV. You need to make sure you wipe that blood down good. If we can find that TV and we were fortunate enough to get blood out of that TV, we could show that the murder occurred there unequivocally. Finding blood on a television that was in the room where the murder occurs was about as close to a smoking gun as we were going to get. Dawn had told us that Pilon eventually got rid of that TV. She also told us that Pilon was very cheap, and he would have never thrown that TV out,

and that, in fact, he would have sold the TV prior to his transfer into Hawaii. We were after that TV, and we were going to find it. When the agents indicated that they were going to go looking for the television six years after the murder, I'm not sure that I would even say this is like searching for a needle in a haystack, because you sort of would have to search for the haystack first. The agents knew the odds were stacked against them and they were out of time. Pilon had found out that we had put a surveillance on him. Don had told him as much, so he was looking for us.

Once he made the tale, they were afraid he was going to flee. He knew we were after him now. We had spun him off and he could have easily just disappeared, and it would have taken us a long time, maybe never, to find him. Six years after Annie's murder, we were close to putting the killer behind bars. While he was stationed at Long Beach Naval Station, California, we had eyes on Pilon. The reason we put surveillance on him is because we now know he committed that murder. So he could flee. Could he hurt somebody else? Could he intimidate our

witnesses? He was on the road, just driving the vehicle he was in. When Pilon realized NCIS was closing in on him, he decided to make a run for it. NCIS agents were in pursuit as Palan drove off the shipyard and onto the seaside freeway. After six years, Palan knew it was over and surrendered. On October 11, 1995, Michael Palan was arrested, transferred to Naval Station Mayport, Florida, to face court martial charges. However, Jim and I knew we needed additional evidence. There was at that time a TV stand. We wanted to find that TV. We needed that physical evidence to seal this case. And what we were really hoping for was there was still blood on it after six years. He was still lying in this

position. It was key because it's just going to further corroborate the statement that Don shared with us. And it shows that the murder occurred within the apartment that Pilon occupied by himself. So many people would say you're wasting your time looking for a TV from many, many years ago. You're never going to find it. You know, move on. But Pete and I, we just don't do things that way. While Michael Pilon was being held in a military jail on suspicion of murder, NCIS agents found and interviewed everyone who lived in Pilon's apartment complex in November 1989. Three months later, the agents hit pay dirt.

We were able to locate the person who says, yes, I remember Michael Pilon, I remember Annie, and by the way, I bought a television from him. And he still had the TV. When they called me and said, okay, we found the TV, I think my response was actually to laugh. I just couldn't believe it. We sent it to the FBI lab to be processed. They found blood spatter inside the TV. In fact, they found 11 blood stains on the speaker. They found it on the grill and the face of the TV. When they came back with the blood on the TV, I was convinced that it was the last nail in the coffin.

When the defense attorney in Pilon found that out, they decided to do a plea. Defense approached me and said, we'll waive everything, take the death penalty off the table, he'll plead guilty, give him a 30-year deal. The prosecutor didn't like it. He wanted a death penalty conviction. But military law required him to present any potential deal to the court.

And the judge accepted the plea. I was angry. I was angry when he took that plea because I felt like he was taking the easy road out. Michael Pilon was charged with capital murder for Annie Tehan's death. As part of his plea deal and pleading guilty to Annie's murder, he confessed. His demeanor when he was talking about the crime was like he was reading it from a grocery list. I waited for her to go to sleep, check.

Went to the closet and got the tire iron, check. Proceeded to bash her skull in with the tire iron, check. It was like he had no sense of remorse at all i kept staring at his hands the whole time and thinking to myself how normal his hands looked and how could hands that looked that normal do the heinous hideous things that he did to her. Michael Pilon was dishonorably discharged from the Navy and sentenced to 30 years in military prison. Despite her role in the cover-up, Dawn Breeze was granted immunity for helping NCIS

and received no jail time. I would have liked to have seen her prosecuted, but sometimes you've got to make some sacrifices to get the bad people, the guilty people, and this case was a sacrifice. What I think is important, especially in a court martial system, is accountability. Is this justice? A lot of people would say no. I would say, look, he was held accountable, and now Annie can rest. The level of effort and commitment that was put towards this investigation and the support that we had from our agency, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, just reflects how badly we all want to seek out the truth in these matters.

This case defines NCIS because it shows the lengths to which this agency will go to serve justice, even if it means looking into one of their own. I can sit here today and tell you that without NCIS, this case would have never been solved. Her children know what happened to her. They know they weren't abandoned. Jade's grown up to be a beautiful young woman. Annie's daughter, Jade, was raised by Michael Pilon's family and never had a relationship with her father. She's in my heart. I think about her all the time. You'd think after all those years that it would fade, but it doesn't.

For Kathy French, the memories of her best friend remain fresh. And the nightmare hasn't ended. In 2013, after serving only 17 years in prison, Michael Pilon was released on good behavior. It's devastating. Her life was worth more than that. Today, no one knows the exact whereabouts of Michael Pilon. There's a murderer walking among us today.

I think anybody that's around him needs to beware. We have a motto that we live by. It's to the living we owe respect and to the dead we owe the truth. You know, murders happen every day and they're often unsolved, but for those who commit murder, look behind you, look in your rear view mirror

and in the distance you'll see us out there. We're picking up those pieces. And we're going to come after you one day. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey.