Cold Case Files - Cowboys on the Case / Office Politics

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Four retired law enforcement officers, known as the Cold Case Cowboys, help track down the killer of a man wanted for rape and robbery; and police must wait for advancements in DNA technology before they can put away a man who harassed and killed a coworker.Figs: Check out Wearfigs.com for 15% off your first order with the code FIGSRXMint: To get the new customer offer and your new 3-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to Mintmobile.com/coldcaseProgressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.Rosetta Stone - Cold Case Files listeners can get for 20% off their Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when you go to RosettaStone.com/coldcaseShopify - Sign up for your free trial today at Shopify.com/coldcase and take your retail business to the next level today!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. Looking Glass, Oregon is a small town just outside the city of Roseburg in the fertile landscape of southwest Oregon. In 1974, a young couple is making their living on a dairy farm.

After a long day's work, the farmer and his wife turn in for bed shortly after midnight. Gary Lease is a detective for the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. He said about 15 minutes later, there was a knock at the door. He put on his pants. He went to the door. He opened it, and as soon as that door opened, he had a shotgun in his face and was back to the living room. Two masked men are standing in the doorway. One keeps an eye on the husband, while the other makes his way through the house.

One of the suspects went down the hall, found his wife, brought her into the living room, and laid her down next to her husband, and told her, he said, Lady, if you resist me, he's going to shoot your husband. After raping the wife, the attackers ransacked the couple's home. They steal $60 in cash and then flee the scene. The victims can offer few clues as to the identity of their attackers or fathom any reason why they were targeted. All we had to go on was two males about 5-8 to 6-2 stockings over their faces, one armed with a rifle, one with a shotgun, one had a high, kind of a high-pitched voice, and basically that was it.

Several unknown fingerprints are lifted from the crime scene, prints that detectives compare against a dozen possible suspects to no avail. Within a month, investigators have exhausted their leads and the case goes cold. Five months later, on December 26, 1974, Detective Gary Lease gets a call. An anonymous woman claims to have information on the rape and robbery and offers up the names of two suspects, Benny King and Kenneth Nail. She told us that, like, three days after the crime had occurred, that she had spoke with Kenneth Nail, and that he told her, he said, do you remember the robbery that took place out and looking at last?

She said, yes, I heard about it. about that and he said, well, I was the one that held the gun to the husband's head while Benny King raped his wife. Kenneth Nail is 22 years old and Benny King is 16. Two kids with an upbringing that includes drug trafficking and armed robbery. Police pick up Benny King at his grandmother's house in Roseburg. And he immediately confessed that he was involved with Kenneth Nail in that robbery and that he was the one that raped a young lady. King lays out his role in the crime and police book him. Next, detectives pay a visit to the county jail,

where their second suspect, Kenneth Nail, is serving time on an unrelated charge. And then he told us basically everything that happened, that he was there with Benny King, and he told us he was doing speed that night, and they decided to go find a house to rob. It was a random drive-by. They said the house looked good.

They decided that was the one they were going to go rob, see if they could get some money. While Nail sits in the jail cell, Benny King is bailed out by his grandmother. Two months later, on the day he is to appear in court, King doesn't show up. So we went to the grandmother and said, where's Benny King?

And she told us she hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks. Kenneth Nail pleads guilty to his part in the rape and robbery and is sentenced to 20 years. The whereabouts of Benny King, however, remains a mystery, one that eventually grows into a Roseburg legend. Several people said, well, we heard he went to Southern California. Other people said, well, we heard that he took off and went to Canada. And so at that time, that's all we had.

Where was Benny King? Where was Benny King? It's a question that hangs in the air for more than a generation. 23 years later, high above the city of Roseburg deep in the Callahan Mountains, the air is cool and wet. On the afternoon of October 20, 1998, a couple scours these woods hoping to find the season's first mushrooms. What they find peeking out from the ground, however, is a human skull. Lieutenant Kurt Strickland is a Douglas County detective. The skull itself was fairly intact.

and, you know, some of the longer, bigger bones were there. The skull shows signs of foul play, a massive hole and shotgun pellet lodged in the jawbone. Scattered among the remains, police find personal effects, items that tell police Benny King never made it to Canada or even California, that his legend ended in a grave just a few miles outside Roseburg. There was a little medallion and some other items that made us think of Benny King. So when we found that these were bones that had been up there for several years,

his was kind of the first name that popped into mind. Mitochondrial DNA testing confirms the hunch. After 23 years, the search for Benny King is over. And although some in Roseburg say King got what was coming to him, the fact is he was murdered, a fact that doesn't sit well with the lawmen of Douglas County. The problem is they had neither the men nor the time to work cold cases. The unit that I have consists of eight investigators that cover a whole wide variety of things.

And we get really, like probably all departments across the country, we just stay really, really busy. So it's hard to look back into the past very far and work these cases. So an idea is developed. The sheriff mentioned to me that he'd seen some things on TV about working cold cases. And so we just basically ironed out what I would call the details. And then I asked the local media that the local media, if they would help us by running articles saying that we were interested in some volunteers that had law enforcement experience.

The day the notice hits local papers, the sheriff's phone starts ringing. Retired detectives, officers, and police chiefs, everyone in the county, it seems, wants to be a cold case detective. We were just amazed by the response. I mean, we had tons of people call us. And then we just started eliminating them sort of according to the case. experience, and then we interviewed a select group, and we came up with the four that we have. Tom Hall worked as a U.S. postal inspector on the West Coast for 27 years.

Sid Boyle is a retired police detective who now runs a cattle ranch. Thomas Schultz worked in law enforcement for 23 years as an officer and then a polygraph examiner. Al Olson retired as the chief of police in Merro Bay and Pacifica, California. These four men make up Douglas County's volunteer Cold Case Squad. Combined, they bring over 100 years of experience to the investigative table. We are four older guys with a lot of experience. We all come from different backgrounds.

Each of us have an expertise. We all think we know what we're doing and I'm the only one it does. And so it works out. Somewhere early on, the four got a nickname, the Cold Case Cowboys. Their first assignment was to find out who killed Benny King. Who do you think we should contact? In January of 1998, the Cold Case Cowboys work out of a small office in the Douglas County Sheriff's Department. Their investigative tools, three tables pushed together, a couple of phones, and boxes full of old evidence.

The murder book on Benny King is several volumes long. Each of the Cowboys takes a binder and begins to read. half a dozen different conflicting stories about what, how, and why. After more than a month of research, the cowboys have a feel for their victim, who he was, and perhaps why he died. Benny was already heavy into a serious life of crime. He was into drugs, selling drugs, buying drugs. He ran with a crowd that was known to be a little bit rough.

We knew the kind of guy that Benny was at the time, and the kinds of people that he ran with. So he put himself in with a group of people who wouldn't hesitate to do him arm. Among that group is a man named Lewis Clark. Clark's name first appears in a 1984 statement given to police by another Roseberg Undesirable named Gary Holland. There was a guy named Gary Holland

who had told police in years past that he was on a road trip. with some other guys and a guy named Clark had told him that he had killed Benny King. Lacking a body or any other physical evidence, investigators in 1984 could not substantiate Holland's claim. 14 years later, Benny King's bones put a ring of truth to the biker's story. Part of that story included how he was shot,

and that was in the side of the face with a shotgun. The bones were still in evidence, so we examined the bones and realized that Benny King had been shot in the left jaw. The physical evidence verified that story. So from the beginning, we knew that Clark knew. So Lewis Clark either killed Benny King or knows who did. As the Cowboys tried to get a line on the biker's whereabouts, a phone rings at the county sheriff's office. There was an anonymous call into the sheriff's office. who said, the person who killed Benny King is Carlos Tinker, and he did it because Kenneth Nail hired him to kill Benny so he wouldn't testify.

In early 1975, Carlos Tinker was locked up in Douglas County Jail on a probation violation. When the cold case cowboys pull old prison records, they discover Kenneth Nail was serving time in the same jail, making a murder for higher scenario more than plausible. Well, Kenneth Nail was in jail with Carlos Tinker, and Carlos Tinker got out on the 25th, and two days later, Benny King was dead. An associate of Benny King, Johnny Carlos Tinker, was questioned by police when King first disappeared in 1975.

The Cold Case Cowboys pulled that statement and discovered Tinker was the last known person to see Benny King alive, claiming he saw the 16-year-old climbing into a Volkswagen. Tinker said that he drove to River Fork Park and saw King get into a vehicle with some unknown people. He then said that he hitchhiked back to Roseburg. When in fact he started saying he drove out to River Fork Park,

why would he want to hitchhike back when he drove there in the first place? Was Carlos Tinker hired by Kenneth Nail to silence Benny King permanently? or was King's death drug-related, perhaps orchestrated by Lewis Clark, who seems to know an awful lot of detail about King's demise. All his behavior is consistent with perception. The Cowboys juggled different scenarios back and forth in their makeshift office and decide it's time to talk to some of the players. Clark, Tinker, and Benny in the car together.

First on the list is Johnny Carlos Tinker. Tinker lives at the Oregon State Penitentiary, reflecting on 46 years of life that plays more like a train wreck. My entire life has been a blur. There's seconds of it that I remember, and those are the times when the alcohol level, when my blood was, was, whether there's more blood than alcohol in my system. Most of the time, there's more alcohol than blood. In May of 2003, while serving a seven-year prison term on unrelated charges, Tinker catches wind of a nasty rumor floating through the prison grapevine that the cold case cowboys are closing in on Benny King's killer. And it's like get hit in the back of the head with a stick because I, those words I've been

not wanting to hear for a long, long time. When I found out they were looking for Lewis Clark, I told all myself, you know, by saying, no, he didn't do it, you know, or I'm not going to justify against him. There's only one other person up there. So in all reality, it was me. in my big mouth that changed them from looking from Lewis Clark to me. Tinker talks about a Ford Galaxy he claims to have used to transport Benny King to the murder scene. On May 21st, Tom Hall and Thomas Schultz make their way to Salem, Oregon, to talk to Tinker and see if his jailhouse boats ring true. And we wanted him to tell the truth, and he said he'd tell the truth.

He started with the same old line. He started out with his usual. Well, last time I saw Benny, he was getting into a Volkswagen, and we said, stop. And I believe I told him, you're full of s'clock. Start over and use a Ford. You all left in a Ford. In fact, Schultz and Hall are bluffing. They have no evidence that Tinker's Ford Galaxy was used in a crime,

except in the statements Tinker himself made in jail. The ploy, however, is enough to shake up their suspect. I said, I think I need a turn. Schultz reached over and shuts the tape recorder off. And while before the tape puts spinning, he slammed his fist on the table. He says, you're it. We know it's you. We got you.

You're going to burn. Well, let's stop to think about this for just a minute. Then, after more than 25 years, Tinker decides it's time to tell the story of Benny King. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that, you know, time to get it over with. I've been packing it around for a long time. So I told him to start the tape again and told him what happened. I was involved in it.

I was there. It's been a long time I've been carrying this weight. I just want to get rid of it. With the tape rolling, Johnny Carlos Tinker takes the cold case cowboys back in time for a walk in the woods and a story of murder. Learning another language has always appealed to me because travel feels completely different when you can connect with people in their own words.

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Johnny Carlos Tinker takes investigators back to 1975 and the murder of Benny King. The story begins a couple of days before the crime, inside the Douglas County Jail, where Tinker was being held on a probation. violation. I was juvenile, so they had me in a segregated area, but the vents reached other cells. According to Tinker, the vents were a sort of jailhouse telephone system used by inmates to share information and swap stories. One story was of a rape and robbery allegedly committed by one of Tinker's

drinking buddies, Benny King. What I had heard was that he tied a husband up and made him watch while he raped his wife. And the rumor was that he was going to get off by testifying against another person and because he was juvenile. Tinker tells detectives that he was so infuriated by Benny King's alleged crime and lack of punishment that he decided to take the law into his own hands. I think the main thing was that he'd raped a girl. And then was going to get away with it.

That was it. Tinker tells detectives he got out of county jail two days later. and immediately began making plans for the murder, enlisting the help of his girlfriend to dig a grave in the Callahan Mountains. We're up there smoking dope and digging a grave, and she's just a happy little camper. She has absolutely no idea that I'm actually going to do this. Then two days later, I enlisted the help of Lewis Clark because he had a vehicle.

And he also had a friend with a saw-up 12-gauge. On the afternoon of February 28, 1975, Tinker's plan is set. Tinker tells Benny King that he has buried marijuana in the Callahan Mountains and wants help digging it up. King takes the bait and joins Tinker and Clark in the Ford Galaxy as it rumbles up the steep mountain switchbacks. It was a weird ride because, you know, again, Benny King was a friend of mine, and he's sitting in the back. We got stereo blasting and we're thumping up in the woods. He's just all into let's party hardy, you know, he has no... clue what he was walking into.

Near the end of the road, Tinker pulls the car over and the three get out. Open the trunk up, and I had a box of shells and the shotgun. The shotgun was already loaded, so I just grabbed it. And, you know, we were doing a dope run, so having a gun along didn't, nobody questioned it. And Benny walked back and forth. When he'd walk one way, I'd walk the other way, and he kept jumping over his own grave. There's a big old hole in the ground, and he's jumping over it. It's just not clicking to him what the hell's, what time it is.

Tinker finally gets up the courage to do what he came to do, and that's when things begin to go sideways. And everything was slow motion. I squeezed the trigger, blew his ear off, and he cartwheeled through the air, hit the ground, and then stood up. And I'm gone, oh my God, you know, that wasn't in the script. And he took off. And I freaked out.

I turned around, and Lewis is gone. Benny's gone. I'm the only one standing out there smoking gun and I'm freaked out. According to Tinker, he runs back to the car, takes out a box of shells, and reloads the gun. He then tries to lure Benny King out of the trees. I went walking through the woods and was yelling at him, just telling him that it was an accident, man. I said, hey, the gun went off, Benny, da-da-da-da-da. And I go way the hell out in the woods and I look up and be dead if he isn't walking back towards me. And he got about 15 feet away from me again, and I drew down on.

on him and he saw I was going to shoot so he turned around and started running. I popped another round and hit him in the back of the head. Knocked him down. Then he was still trying to move. He was crawling. But I put another shell in the gun and walked up and right straight down to the back of his head. Sounds like a watermelon smash, or a baseball bat smashing a watermelon. It just explodes.

Leaving King where he lay, Tinker and Clark drive back down the mountain. On the way into town, Tinker tosses the spent shotgun shells into the, the Ung-Plough River. Tinker tells detectives he spent the next 28 years haunted by nightmares and feelings of guilt for the killing. Once the act was done, you can't tell anybody. You know, it just didn't prove anything. It didn't prove anything to me because I sure as hell wasn't any tougher. I was scared to death and I couldn't tell anybody about it. He was relieved to get this information off of his mind. He had nightmares. He told us he had nightmares at times over this horrendous killing.

This is a guy who's been in jail most of his life, but you could actually see the relief when he finally got it off his chest. It's been a long time I've been carrying his weight. The Cowboys have their confession from Tinker, but there is still a loose end, Lewis Clark. What exactly was his involvement and will he corroborate to Tinker's statement?

Al Olson and Sid Boyle tracked down Clark in Parker, Arizona, and decide to pay him. pay him a surprise visit. Well, he answered the door and started in with the Volkswagen story and the, and when I informed him that I wasn't going to listen to it, that he either tell the truth now or next time he saw me I'd have a warrant in my hand, he at that point decided he'd give us the story. Now we have not only the confession from the shooter, but we have the person that was with

him at the time of the shooting telling the same exact story that the, uh, the, uh, the, you that shooter Tinker was telling. Lewis Clark's statement is the final bit of evidence the cold case cowboys need. On September 9, 2003, Johnny Carlos Tinker pleads guilty to murder and is sentenced to life in prison. Tinker's conviction marks the final chapter

in the legend of Benny King, a case that is perhaps not so much about justice for an alleged rapist and robber as it is about the rule of law. In this society, who don't go out and do vigilante killings. That's not the decision for the individual. So the fact that Benny was not maybe the nicest person in the world was not an issue.

As for the Cold Case Cowboys, they've gone on to solve a second case and are currently working on a third. What's good to come out of it is we've subsequently solved another one and we've gotten a lot of press from that. and other jurisdictions have contacted us and several victims or families of victims that have contacted us. And there's been several cool case squads similar to ours started now. And if they're just a handful of more homicide solved, it would be great. On the morning of November 2nd, 1989, in suburban Woodbury, Minnesota,

38-year-old Sharon Bloom kisses her live-in boyfriend David Kofod goodbye and joins the morning commute to 3M worldwide, the state's largest employer. Bloom is an up-and-comer in the company. She arrives at work around 7.30 a.m., but fails to make it home in time for dinner. Calls to her cubicle go unanswered, and Kofod begins to worry. So at about seven, I started to call her friends. There's only two places I thought that she might have gone to, and she wasn't either. Bloom hasn't been missing long enough for police to get involved. Kofode, however, feels certain something is wrong.

He calls back to 3M and asks workers on the night shift to take a look through the employee parking lot. And at 11 approximately, I got a call back. They told me your car was still in the parking lot. I found that you can get really no information from anybody. You can't call the highway patrol. You can't call hospital. you can't call anyone. Kofod stays up all night

waiting by a phone that never rings. On Friday morning, he files a missing persons report with the Woodbury Police Department. Investigator David Hines is assigned to the case. He begins with Bloom's car. For her to leave that behind

didn't make any sense. That was the first strong indication, from my perspective anyway, that there was something else involved here. Ticket agents, at bus and train stations, airports and rental car companies have no record of Bloom. Her trail seems to begin and end at 3M.

We were quickly getting to the idea that she had definitely disappeared from the workplace. It didn't take us very long to kind of zero in the fact that we don't think she was ever back at work after the lunch hour. Heinz pokes his head into every cubicle on Bloom's floor. Beneath the corporate veneer, he finds a hostile work environment, and the primary victim was Sharon in Bloom. Over the past year, Bloom's keys had been stolen from her desk four times. Documents or presentations stolen. And most recently, someone dumped a pot of coffee on her chair. There was quite a series of incense and it was quite clear that this was not just the usual

workplace prank kind of thing. This was somebody who was definitely zeroing in on her and harassing her with a purpose. One day she came home and was in tears. And her reaction was, what could I have done to somebody that could cause them to hate me so much? Bloom had working relationships with dozens of people. On the day Sharon disappeared, all of them returned to their office after lunch, except one, a systems analyst named Stephen Zanter. He offered us an alibi right away, but it was an alibi that wasn't alibiing him. It was an alibi that made no sense, in fact.

Zanter tells detectives he left work shortly after 11 a.m. After lunch at a fast food restaurant, Zanter says he did not return to work because his car broke down. After that, according to Zanter, he went home. He didn't see anybody that he knew. There was nobody that he knew of that could verify any of it. It was really accounted for his time, but it was in a way that he almost went out of his way.

to let us know that no one could verify this. The shaky alibi prompts Hines to examine Zanter's office politics. He finds bad blood between the suspect and the missing woman. The two had competed for a promotion. Sharon Bloom got it. Stephen Zanter didn't. We have a guy who's a problem. We have a guy who others think could be capable to harassment.

He's given us an alibi that is just really, you know, lame. Eight days into the investigation, Hines calls in reinforcements, the state's premier investigative agency, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Agent Ray DePrema reviews the case file and concurs with investigator Hines's suspicions. All eyes now fall to Stephen Zanter. There were just gaps in his story, and so we wanted to really zero in on that. And you nail him down because he had left through him about the same time as Sharon Bloom, and no one had seen him.

DePrema and Heinz traveled to Zanter's home to give the suspect an opportunity to flush out his story. Zanter talks a lot, but says very little. And he states that his car breaks down and that some Good Samaritan came along and opened the hood, jumped his car, and that he went home. And then he said, well, what guy? And he said, I don't even know what he looks like. He was a guy, though. He's a man.

He said, I think so. Okay, what kind of car did he have? I don't know. And we told him, you know, your alibi, this is a bad alibi. An alibi like that kind of says to us that you're trying to hide something. Three hours into the interview, Zanter is rock solid. His demeanor is calm and his story is unchanged. Detectives are about to pack it in, but Ray DePrema takes a phone call that changes everything.

And as we're conducting the interview, my page is changed. Pager went off and I was informed by my supervisor that Sharon Bloom's body had been found in a cornfield. In Rice County, Minnesota, 50 miles south of the Twin Cities, the harvest is all but finished as the cornfields are left for winter. Lying among the twisted and broken stalks is the body of Sharon Bloom. Sergeant Barry Cummins is a retired Rice County detective. She obviously had head trauma.

And beyond that, there was no sign of any struggle that had looked as if she had just been placed there. The body is naked from the waist down, strongly suggesting sexual assault. Seeing someone that way, partially clad, braw pushed up, it had appeared she had been raped. Biological samples collected from the body as well as human hair found at the dump site are determined not to belong to the victim. Bloom's body is transported to the morgue for autopsy. At the same time, Agent DePrima breaks the news to the man he suspects might have killed her, Steven Zanter.

He felt pieces. He just sort of dropped. We were in his family room and he became catatonic. He started crying, became almost convulsive. And he was on the floor. He went all the way around his family room on his knees. his knees. Then he got up and walked into the living room.

His wife kind of was at his side helping him along and he sat in. They had one of these big wicker rocking chair things that you can kind of put your old body in. He sat in there, pulled his, closed his eyes, pulled his legs up to him in the fetal position and rocked back and forth on this thing and just moaned. Detectives are unsure of what to make of Xanter's behavior but lack the physical evidence to charge him with Boone's murder. The following day, the investigation has dealt a critical blow when the coroner informs detectives that biological samples they thought might be semen are not.

And he told us, what I thought was seminal fluid, was not. It was premenstrual discharge. Without a semen sample, the case against Steve Zanter consists of only two strands of human hair, determined to be similar to the suspects, but far from enough to make a case for. murder. In time, the investigation stalls and then goes cold, until Stephen Zanter's wife starts talking to her friends, asking for tips on how to handle hard-to-get-out stains like grass and mud and blood. She didn't give a lot of detail about the way it looked, except she did use the word splattered. My husband runs a small business, and for way too long, he paid someone to maintain the website and online storefront. It never worked the way he wanted it to. I told him about Shopify,

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Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states. In the fall of 1989, Sharon Bloom leaves her office for lunch and never. returns. Ten days later, her body is found in a cornfield. The investigation centers on a hostile workplace and a co-worker named Stephen Zanter. Steve was always the type of guy that felt that he was smarter. He always felt that he could do a job better. But yet, we found out that he was totally isolated at 3M and that everyone thought of him as an incompetent. A year before her murder, Sharon had beat Zanter for a coveted promotion in the company.

Detective suspected it may have been enough to set the wheels of murder in motion. My personal theory on this case is that he was so enraged that he didn't get that promotion and that this what a woman that he perceived as below him that she got it, that that caused him to act. More than two years after the murder, Agent Ray DePrema reopens the five and tries a new approach, this time focusing on Steve Zanter's wife, Barbara. In 1989, Joe Sorensen worked with Barbara Zanter at Woodland Elementary School. Sorensen tells DePrema she recalls a school meeting she and Barbara attended, where the topic of conversation shifted from books to blood.

At that meeting, she brought up the fact that she wanted to know if anyone knew how to get blood out of their new carpeting because they just moved into this new house. and Steve had an accident or something, and he got blood all over it. She wanted to know if we knew how to remove it. According to Barbara Zanter, the blood trail went across her new carpet, up the stairs, and into a bathroom on the second floor. She didn't give a lot of detail about the way it looked, except she did use the word splattered.

Sorensen made a note in her date planner to check for tips on removing blood. The date of that entry, November, 3rd, 1989, the day after Sharon Bloom disappeared. I'm thinking that we're very, very close because if what they're saying is true, Sharon Blum has been killed in that house. DePriam needs to verify Sorensen's story. He asks if she and Barbara's other friends would be willing to help him out.

He asked if we would be willing to tape conversations with Barb. The teachers are uncomfortable with the idea of betraying a friend, but even more uncomfortable with the idea of letting a killer go free. They felt very guilty that they hadn't come forward because, you know, they had, they had, this had passed their mind back in 1989 that they should call the police, but they didn't and they sat on this and so, you know, they were feeling sick that they hadn't called the police. What we really felt is we were worried for Barb because if, if Steve was capable of doing something like this once, and what if he could do it again?

You know, you've shared a lot of stuff with us at the time all of this chaos. In the afternoon of March 3rd, 1992, five women settled in for a chat at Joe Sorensen's dining room table. Four of the women had the conversation already scripted. The fifth, Barbara Zanter, has no idea her every word is being recorded. And I don't know, do they know all of them? I mean, what you're thinking of. Well, I think the one thing, and I brought it up a little bit when we went to her a walk, and the blood that you found in the house on.

It was close to the time when Sharon's little difficulty. Yeah, and that bogged me too, and I questioned Steve about it a couple times. And he told me that what happened was he hit me at frustration trying to work on the car. He just locked it, whacked his hand down and he cut his wrist. and he didn't, you know, he wasn't thinking clearly, he ran up in the house, and he went upstairs because that's where to keep our medical supplies so he could be bandaged them.

And he said, when I reached for the railing, I think I must have felt faint, and I reached for the railing, and that's why the blood is at the top of the stairs. We didn't tell the police about all that. They don't know about the blood on the carpet, I don't think. I guess I really think that she wanted so much to be. so much to believe him and to believe in their life

that she was trying to convince herself. It was that very definitive, he didn't do this. And they're out to get us. Why didn't she have the police about the guy? Because I just didn't, I didn't want to give him anymore to dig at us with. Barbara Zanter stands by her husband, not realizing her own words have already condemned him. Revelations recorded around Joe Sorensen's kitchen table add up to probable cause for a search warrant.

On March 4, 1992, investigators descend on the Zanter home. We go in this time with our forensic lab and we take the banister apart. We take up the carpet and we bring the luminal. We get this great fluorescence and we knew that we had blood. Fluorescence from luminal testing indicates the presence of blood throughout the second floor. In the basement, detectives find something even better, an immediate and direct link to Sharon Bloom. The other search teams in the basement did locate a set of keys that were later identified as keys belonging to Sharon Bloom. As we left that day, I felt the case was solved.

Got the blood. We'd got the keys. As it turned out, it was only the beginning. On October 23, 1992, a grand jury indicts Stephen Zanter on a charge of murder. Three years later, however, the case has still not gone to trial. His defense attorney submitted a motion to suppress the evidence, especially the keys. Went to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and they threw the keys out, claiming that we had overstepped our bounds, that we only had probable cause to seize the blood. Without the keys, the prosecution is left without a judge.

direct physical link between the blood and Steve Zander's carpet and Bloom. Basically, at that point in time, DNA was not as sophisticated as it is now. The blood evidence in the carpet had been diluted with a number of chemicals to clean the carpet, and they could say it was consistent with, but they couldn't say that it was specifically Sharon Bloom's blood. Unwilling to risk a possible acquittal, Rice County's prosecution's prosecution, Reluctantly dropped the charges, leaving David Kofod with the name of his girlfriend's suspected killer, and nothing at all he can do about it.

In my mind, it was never going to be carried to conclusion. That might have been the conclusion. We know who did it, and we know where he lives, and we know how he did it, and we know why he did it, and that's as far as it could ever go. By 1999, the forensic revolution is underway. short tandem repeat, or STR DNA testing, breathes new life into old cases by detecting strains of DNA where there once appeared to be none. Well, we're able to do more types of samples.

For example, we do cigarette butts and envelope flaps and sweat. So it kind of has opened the door to really the types of evidence that we receive. Anne-Marie Gross is a forensic scientist for the Minnesota Bureau of Queensland. criminal apprehension. In March of 1999, she turns her attention to a section of bloody carpet pulled from the home of murder suspect Stephen Zanter. Chemicals used to clean the carpet have degraded any blood stains, making it difficult to isolate them and even harder to extract a genetic profile. Using STR DNA testing, however, Gross is able to do exactly that. She then compares the unknown profile to the genetic signature of the victim.

The blood then on the carpeting matched the DNA profile from the blood of the victim. In addition to the blood evidence, a hair found at the body dump site is linked through mitochondrial DNA to samples provided by Stephen Zanter. Faced with the daunting physical evidence, Zanter confesses to the crime in April 2003 and is sentenced to 25 years in Minnesota's Stillwater Penitentiary. For Sharon Bloom's family and friends, the sentence carries with it mixed emotions. I've never met someone without a conscience until I met Mr. Zantor.

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