Cold Case Files - Caught by an Eyelash

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

The day before her 28th birthday, Kiva Bible is murdered. Detectives search for over a decade with just one scrap of evidence: a single eyelash. Here's some great deals from our sponsors! Jenny Life: Ladies! Visit www.JennyLife.com/coldcase to get a FREE quote right now! Ring: Get a special offer on the Ring Welcome Kit when you go to www.Ring.com/coldcase -- The Welcome Kit includes the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and Chime Pro! Madison Reed: Get 10% off plus FREE SHIPPING on your first Color Kit with code CCF at www.madison-reed.com 

Thank you for listening to this Podcast One production. Available on Apple Podcasts and Podcast One. hosted by WNYC reporter Jim McGrady, Blindspot The Road to 9-11 draws from interviews with more than 60 FBI agents, high-level bureaucrats, journalists, and experts, weaving together a captivating narrative and revisiting the evidence to understand why we didn't see the attacks coming. Blindspot The Road to 9-11 is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe today and catch up on every episode. The only information I found about Kiva is that she was a sex worker in Garden Grove, California, and she had a drug problem. The only reason I found that information, or any information about Kiva at all, was because on the day before her 28th birthday, she was murdered. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke, and here's the original Bill Curtis with a classic case caught by an eyelash.

As I pulled up, I pulled down Lucille Street, and right in the middle of the street was a female laying down. John Keeley is a street cop with Garden Grove. At a little after 2 a.m., he finds 28-year-old Kiva Bible face down in the middle of the road. Originally, I came in from over here, from the north side. And I drove down here, at which time I immediately saw the female laying in the street, right about where the light is shining. On her chest, she had about four or five, I think it

was five but it may have been four stab wounds. They looked like they were pretty deep and they also had some type of a gauze or or something shoved in them to help stop the bleeding. It made us believe that the incident happened somewhere else and the person didn't want blood all over wherever it happened. That's what we were thinking at the time. Keeley finds no witnesses, no obvious evidence indicating how or why a young woman might have found herself dead. Bible's body is zipped into a coroner's bag and sent to the morgue for autopsy. This is the Orange County Sheriff Coroner Division.

This is the main autopsy room where the homicide autopsies take place. Dan Gamme, a trace evidence examiner, works on the body inside the morgue. He begins with Kiva's clothes. At the crime scene, the body was pretty much fully clothed. And in further examination of it, we saw that the jacket itself was fully zipped up and covering the upper chest portion of her body. Upon removing of the jacket, we then observed here that she had multiple stab wounds in the upper chest. Again, the jacket itself had no defects. It had no tears. It had no punctures within it, which again indicated to us that she had been redressed following these injuries that she had sustained.

What was instrumental about that in my mind was it showed the close contact that our suspect obviously had. And so we're looking for those elements of transfer because of the closeness of that contact. Using clear tape, Gammy goes over Kiva's clothing and body, looking for hairs, threads, or carpet fibers, anything that might have been left by her killer. At this stage of the autopsy, I was just interested in collecting anything and everything.

Even if there were a number of them that looked like her own hair, I was collecting all that was present there. Gammy collects more than 200 hairs, packages each one, and then waits for detectives to begin pulling suspects off the streets. Kiva, she had probably a $200 a day habit for heroin and cocaine, and so did most of the girls working this part of town. In 1986, Sergeant Scott Watson works vice for the Garden Grove Police. He knows Kiva Bible. Watson cruises the streets asking his sources what they know about Bible

and how she wound up dead. The night she was killed, there was two different prostitutes we found that said, hey, there was this guy in this type of car that's looking for her because he said he wanted to kill her. The guy, according to street sources, was a contract killer hired by Donald Lubbers, a sex offender now in jail after Kiva Bible testified against him in an unrelated case. Detectives focus on Lubbers, trying to connect him to the murder. We put mail covers for any outgoing mail, any in-call, see who he's calling, who he's talking to, all kinds of different things. But just in speaking with him, the investigator at the time felt like, you know, this guy's being upfront and honest with me.

I just don't get the feeling that he's really after her for that. Detectives go back to the streets, pressing sources about the supposed hit. What they find is a theory of murder that gets less reliable each time it's retold. When you get down to it and you start hitting them up, it's because they heard from this guy, and this guy heard from this guy, and this guy heard. And by the time you get to how the thing started, it was nothing like what you got. Lubbers and his alleged hitman fade as possible suspects, and Kiva Bible's case finds its way to the Orange County Evidence Room and into the cold files, where it sits for 15 years.

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on the victim's sock. The hair shape tells Lafferty where it came from on the human body. It has a wide portion in the center and it comes to a very tapered tip. That indicates to me that it isn't a body, what I call a body limb hair, and it is very, very tiny. So that, to me, is descriptive of either an eyebrow or potentially an eyelash hair. A single human eyelash somehow found its way onto the clothes of a murder victim. Lafferty focuses on the root of the eyelash, looking for possible sources of DNA. So that tissue on this hair is right here. That's the root, and then along the shaft,

there is some cellular tissue, and that's where the DNA is contained. This is the DNA section. Lafferty forwards her eyelash, along with several other human hairs, to DNA analyst Mary Hong. These are eyelash hairs. So I first examine them to see if they have a root, and I need to look at them under the stereo microscope in order to do that.

Hong is able to extract a DNA profile from five of the hairs. All match the victim, Kiva Bible. All that is save one. One hair produced a DNA profile that was from a male, and that profile I was able to enter into the database. The profile is run against more than 250,000 felony offenders in the state's DNA database. Within a few days, the database spits back a match.

The eyelash belongs to an ex-con named James Suknich. The news quickly reaches the Garden Grove PD. Obviously, when we got the call, we were quite ecstatic because we had nothing on the case. I mean, all leads had been exhausted, we had nowhere to go. The problem is our victim. She's a prostitute and we realized how easy it would be for this guy to simply explain that away. Kiva Bible was murdered in Garden Grove, California, where she worked on the streets. No witnesses came forward, and the only physical evidence was five eyelash hairs, four of which belonged to Kiva. The fifth eyelash belonged to someone else.

And 15 years after her death, a DNA profile was extracted. The investigators were hopeful that the profile would lead them to the killer, but also feared that the perpetrator would claim he had been one of Kiva's customers. We get this hit on DNA. We check into it, find out the guy had been convicted of a rape in a city very nearby us. Scott Watson is a homicide detective with a hot lead. DNA has linked a single human hair pulled 15 years earlier from the body of Kiva Bible to a convicted

felon named James Suknich. The case however is not without its holes. The problem is our victim. She's a prostitute and we realize how easy it would be for this guy to simply explain that away. Yeah I would agree with that. You know I remember thinking that the eyelash itself and the recovery of it and the DNA hit is almost like a scientific miracle, and it takes us nowhere. The problem for Assistant District Attorney Larry Yellen is proving Sukhnech wasn't a customer of Kiva Bible, but rather her killer. The team decides to travel to Cleveland, Ohio, to talk to Sukhnech and

see if the suspect makes a mistake. Why do we have something that links you to this woman? Okay, there's a reason for it. Tell me why you were linked to this woman. On December 6th, cold case detectives sit down with Sukhnech and ask him about Kiva Bible. Could be sex. Could be a lot of different things. I don't know. Well, tell me about it.

Why do you think it could be sex? Because I had sex with a lot of women back then. That was one of the first things he said was, oh, yeah, I had sex with a lot of prostitutes. Like hookers, did you happen to know some?

Oh, yeah, I knew a lot of them. And right away we're going, Oh, my God, here we go. Because if he would have stuck with that, we'd have been done. We have found some physical evidence on this case. It's very interesting. Detectives confront Sukhnech with the DNA evidence that connects him to Kiva Bible. Suddenly Sukhnech remembers Bible and the night they spent together in a drug house in Garden Grove.

He was using drugs, cocaine, quite heavily, and was in another part of the house when he heard some commotion. There was all kinds of scuffling going on, and I was just too afraid to go out. But after it all quieted down, that's when I went out. He came out, he saw Kiva naked, and these two guys that he called Steve and Alan Kiva was stabbed on the floor and that at that time they forced him to help clean her up that's when I walked out and they were doing this cleanup thing you know and I'm going oh you know what do I do now what do I do now? What do I do now? You know, and Steve just looked at me and said, you better help or else.

And the blind guy said, if you tell anybody, you're dead. And since he placed himself at the scene, it told me that he probably had more involvement in this than he was actually saying. Cold case detectives believe Sutnich to be their killer. A month after the initial interview, detectives ask him to travel to California and help them find the mysterious Steve and Alan. Once there, they turn up the heat. We're staying in more than usual these days, so feeling safe in your own home is more important

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We, of course, felt different. I just want to hear out of your mouth how it happened. You weren't in another room, Jim. Come on. You remember so much about this night except when the murder actually happened. In California, Suknich once again changes his story. Now there are three men in the drug house, Steve, Alan, and a dope dealer Suknich calls the stranger. And when I walked out and saw that,

he pulled a gun and said, This guy. The stranger? Okay. And when I walked out and saw that, he pulled a gun. Who? This guy. The stranger? Okay. And he said, help clean up or else. Okay. And, you know, he's an angry guy, the stranger, and he wants his money back,

and he's ordering, kind of orchestrating Steve and Alan as these kind of fools, these lackeys, to do his bidding with Kiva. And here we have this Alan who we can't find anywhere. We have Steve who lives there, who doesn't exist, and we have a stranger. And this stranger, when this is all done, pulls a gun and forces you, okay, now you help clean up, or else. Wait a minute, they just stabbed a girl.

Why would he pull a gun on you and threaten you with a gun when a gun's going to make noise? Does that make sense to you? Can't hear it very loud on the tape, but you can barely make it out where he says, I didn't think of it that way. That doesn't make sense. Does that make sense to you? How they're able to intimidate this girl? As soon as he said that, I knew I got him. Because he, at that point, finally figured out that we had more evidence and we were a little bit smarter than he thought we were.

Jim, you're both sinking. Is it close? One key to what I was talking to you said, when I explained about the gun, you said, I never thought of it like that. That's how I know the stranger in the gun is Bull. Just tell us the truth about what happened. There is no stranger. If anybody's a stranger, it was me. Right.

And at that point, he admitted he was a stranger, there was no stranger, and then he started going into the story at that point. Sukhnech finally gets down to something close to the truth. What I wanted to know was, when am I going to get my money back? According to the suspect, Kiva Bible stole drugs from him and his friends, something that angered Sukhnech, who decided to teach her a lesson. How many times did you hit her?

Twice. Where? The back. You bound her wrist behind her back? You holding her at this point? Who hit her in the head? I think Steve did. Okay.

At the point where he starts talking about, oh, we were just going to kick her ass, he's minimizing at that point. He's trying to minimize his participation in the case. Alan went down holding her one shoulder. I was fixing to go down and hold the other shoulder. And that's when Steve jumped on her. He jumped on her across the waist. And that's when Steve jumped on her. Jumped on her across the waist.

And that's when he stabbed her. Unbeknownst to him that when somebody dies, you're just as guilty as the person that committed the crime in California if you're assisting in that assault that ends up in a murder. Despite all the stories and all the characters that Nitsch brings into his conversations with police,

he and he alone is charged with murder. That says it all right there. He just felt his whole world crash around him. Because at that point, I truly believe he realized that he wasn't leaving California. On May 3, 2005, James Suknich is convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. Kiva Bible's evidence is pulled from the cold files. Her case solved. Her murder book closed forever.

For me, working homicide, I want to make sure that the right thing gets done. And whether somebody was a millionaire or whether they were a streetwalker like Kiva was, it doesn't make any difference. You don't deserve to get your life snuffed out like that. James Sukunich filed an appeal in 2006. He challenged the sufficiency of the evidence to support the jury's verdict. His conviction was affirmed. In 2012, Sukunich filed a civil

rights suit against the warden and several employees at the prison. He stated that his Eighth Amendment rights had been violated. The Eighth Amendment is the protection from cruel and unusual punishment. The suit was filed because another inmate had attacked Sukunich and attempted to slash his throat. In order to prove his case, Sukunich had to provide evidence that the people charged had known about the violation and failed to act to prevent them. The case was dismissed.

Sukunich is still serving his sentence in a California prison. He's 60 years old. He was denied parole in 2012, 2015, 2018, and will be eligible to petition for parole again in 2021. Cold Case Files the podcast is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve

Delamater. Our associate producer is Julie Magruder. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. Our music was created by Blake Maples. This podcast is distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and is hosted by Bill Curtis. You can find me, at Brooke Giddings on Twitter, and at Brooke the Podcaster on Instagram. I'm also active in the Facebook group, Podcasts for Justice. Check out more Cold Case Files at AETV.com or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog at AETV.com slash realcrime.