Cold Case Files - Murder Checks In

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

When three women's bodies are found in Iowa hotels, all within miles of each other, police realize they are on the hunt for a serial killer. Check out our great sponsors! Nutrafol: Go to Nutrafol.com and use code COLDCASE to save $15 off your first month’s subscription! Shopify: Go to shopify.com/coldcase for a FREE 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features! SimpliSafe: Claim a free indoor security camera plus 20% off with Interactive Monitoring at simplisafe.com/coldcase  Progressive: Press play on comparing auto rates! Quote at Progressive.com to join the over 27 million drivers who trust Progressive!

Patricia Lang was 36 years old when she took a job in Des Moines, Iowa to be closer to her family. She was relocating there from Denver and needed a place to stay until her new apartment was ready. So in August of 1993, she booked a room for a week at the Holiday Inn in West Des Moines. When Patricia didn't show up for work on Monday, a week at the Holiday Inn in West Des Moines. When Patricia didn't show up for work on Monday, a member of the housekeeping staff was sent to her room to make sure she was okay. Patricia was not okay. The housekeeper found her body in the hotel room.

Patricia had been murdered. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. Paul Bush from the Iowa DCI Crime Lab was at the scene. This was probably one of the more violent crime scenes that I'd been on in the fact that the victim was, hands were bound.

There was also a piece of cloth tied around her neck. Patricia's body was on the floor, and the room had been ransacked. Investigator Bush tried to make sense of what he saw at the crime scene and determine a possible motive. In the room was the victim's purse or clutch wallet, and I think there was over $200 yet still in her purse. There was no indication of a robbery-type situation. So the fact that the woman was naked from the waist down, it appeared again that we had a sexual assault homicide. Bush continued to process the crime scene. He collected samples from Patricia's body and the blanket she'd been wrapped inside. He was accompanied by Agent Jim Saunders from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

Agent Saunders wanted to determine how the killer had entered the room. There was no signs of forced entry into the room which indicated to us one of two things occurred. Either the person had gained access to the room with a pass key of some sort and was laying in wait for the victim when she returned back to the room, or using some ruse to gain the trust of the victim, was allowed in. The police were contacted by a possible witness who was staying at the hotel with her daughter on the night Patricia was killed. The woman's daughter was a 13-year-old named Candace,

who was a tap dancer performing at the state fair. Coming from a small town in Iowa down to the big city of Des Moines, we were excited to stay overnight in the hotel and looking forward to the next day tap dancing. On the night that they had checked into the hotel, Candace had a scary experience. She'd been in the elevator alone with a man who she felt was acting suspicious. He even waited for her to push the button to see which floor she was going to. And so he had let me go around and as I rounded the corner I looked over my shoulder to see if he was still behind me and he was. I thought it was just a little bit odd that he was still behind

me and so I kind of picked up the pace and I thought, man, I think he's really following me. Candace was really scared, and so she ran to her room and yelled her mom's name. And so I said, Mom, Mom, Mom, look what magazine I got. And she came out, and she said, what are you talking about, what are you doing? And I said, that guy, he feels like I have a stalker. The next morning, Candace and her mother heard about the murder in the hotel, so they talked with the police.

The investigators asked Candace if she could help them to develop a sketch of the man she saw. We sat at my dining room table, and he brought out a composite sheet where we took transparencies and laid out each feature of the face, picked out the eyes, picked out the eyes, picked out the mouth, the mustache, and went from there. Candace's sketch was shown to hotel employees and other guests who were at the hotel on the night of Patricia's murder. But no one seemed to recognize him. Here's Detective Saunders again.

It put somebody suspicious in the general vicinity of the crime scene or room 732, and so we did everything we could to try to identify who that individual was, but unfortunately at that time we weren't able to do that. The crime scene investigator, Paul Bush, began to closely examine the evidence he had collected from Patricia's hotel room. Swabs taken from the victim's body tested positive for semen. I wish it was more surprising that the bedspread from the hotel showed a lot of various stains when looked at with a blacklight. Here's Detective Bush to explain why that was a problem.

I actually found, I think I identified like 106 stains on the bedspread. 106 stains was kind of a shock, and then the fact the number of semen stains that we found on the bedspread was kind of shocking too. In total, on the bedspread, there were 38 semen stains, which was not only disgusting, but also a problem for the investigation. It wasn't likely that all the stains were connected to Patricia's murder, but one of them could have been. Detective Bush had the difficult task of determining which one. Again, if there's 100 stains or even if there's 30 semen stains, they're probably not all related to this incident. So I specifically chose certain stains off the bedspread that I thought may have been associated with the case.

Using his best judgment, Detective Bush picked out two of the stains, the ones closest to the body, to send to the lab. He also sent the semen swabs that had been collected from the victim's body. The lab extracted a genetic profile from the samples. They determined that the samples from the body and the sample from one of the stains likely came from the same donor. This is one of the incidents where DNA isn't as useful as it could be, because they didn't have a suspect's DNA to compare to the samples from the crime scene. Here's Detective Saunders again.

There's an old saying out there that if you don't have something tangible within the first 48 hours, every day that passes it becomes more difficult, and there's some truth to that. And so months went by, and we were not coming up with any tangible information that was leading us to any one individual as being responsible for this, and so that did become quite frustrating. Unfortunately, the investigators weren't able to uncover any new leads in Patricia's case. Her case went cold for the next four years. In 1993, less than a mile from the Holiday Inn where Patricia L Lang was killed, at a hotel called Budgetel,

a similar murder had taken place. A housekeeper named Zuriata Sikanovic had begun cleaning around 8 a.m. She was 21 years old and had emigrated from Bosnia, hoping for a better life. Tragically, she didn't get one, because two hours later, her supervisor found her abandoned cleaning cart in front of room 309. Inside, the supervisor found Zerietta covered in blood.

She'd been stabbed repeatedly and strangled to death. Agent John Quinn responded to the crime scene. She was naked from the waist down, except for her socks and shoes were on. And one of the things that just immediately stuck out in my mind was the fact that we had had a homicide less than a quarter of a mile away, which was just adjacent across the interstate at the Holiday Inn in 1993. In both cases, the women were found in a hotel room, positioned on the floor next to the bed. They'd both been gagged and then strangled. When you put everything together, the position of the body, the way she's naked from the waist down,

the binding of the hands, manual throttling, you know, all those things indicate that, hey, it's the same person. In fact, that's the first thing that struck out in my mind. I just kind of said, I feel fearful for Des Moines and the surrounding area due to the fact that we had a predator on our hands. Some of the other investigators didn't agree with him. They pointed out the differences between the cases. Zerietta had been stabbed multiple times, and Patricia hadn't. Patricia had been sexually assaulted, and there was no evidence of that in Zarietta's case. However, any doubt about the connection between the two murders was soon erased.

In 1998, a 15-year-old girl, Mariana Redrovon, came to Iowa from Ecuador. She was given a full-time job at Best Western, less than 10 miles from the hotels where Patricia and Zerieta were murdered. On January 16, 1998, she was found dead in room 209 of the Best Western. Detective Tom Boyd was the one to investigate her case. The maid, the deceased, was found on the bed, and it appeared that she had been a victim of multiple stab wounds. The immediate response was, these are very similar.

We have a problem here. This is not a coincidence. Agent John Quinn led the cold case detectives in the review of all three murder cases. They focused first on Patricia, the only case where the killer had left his DNA behind. Her case had the best chance for a forensic lead. This is Agent Quinn. The decision was made, we've got to sit down, go back to the 93 case. And in doing so, we dissected it and reviewed every interview, reviewed all composites, reviewed all DNA evidence.

The cold case team read through the reports in Patricia's file and made a list of possible suspects that had not given DNA samples. One of the people on that list was a man named Donald Piper, a former employee of the Holiday Inn. Two months before Patricia's murder, Piper was fired from his maintenance job after one of the housekeepers had filed a sexual harassment suit against him. This is Detective Boyd. It was known that he obviously had access keys to

virtually probably every room in that hotel. It was never really clear whether or not those keys got turned in after his termination. The investigators collected a sample of Piper's DNA and sent it to the lab to be compared against the sample found on Patricia's body. The results were hopeful, but not absolute. The lab had used the RFLP method of testing the DNA. It's pretty complicated, but RFLP testing is the least precise method of DNA analysis. Donald Piper could have been linked to the semen, but 10 other people in Iowa also could have been possible donors. This is District Attorney Steve Foritano.

For us, that was a huge break in the case. At that point, we didn't feel that it was enough probably to arrest him and convict him, and we wanted to be very careful with that, but we did immediately, obviously, make him our prime suspect. Because Donald Piper was considered the prime suspect, the detectives were eager to talk to him. Piper agreed to a meeting at his attorney's office. Here's Detective Boyd again. We went through different hotel settings and asked him specifically if he could think of any reason that anyone could say that he did these homicides would there be any reason that his dna would be left behind in any of these scenes or with any victims over and over the response was no no no

as the questions were being asked i I produced a photograph of Patricia Lang. I slid it across the table in front of him. And the reaction that we got, he just locked in on that photograph and you could just see the muscles in his face tightening and clenching. He wanted that interview over very badly. When the interview was over, Piper hadn't given the investigators any of the information they were hoping for. But the interview seemed to have rattled him. Later on the same day, Piper called Agent Quinn.

And he said, yeah, I want to tell you something. I said, what's that? He said, I masturbate. And I said, really? I said, are you trying to tell me something? And he went on to elaborate that he masturbates quite frequently, that he would randomly select rooms to go ahead and masturbate in, rooms that were empty, of course, at the time,

and that he just insinuated that maybe that's the reason why my seminal fluid's in that room. Agent Quinn ended the call and planned his next step in the investigation. He wanted to talk to Donald Piper again about exactly where he had masturbated. This is audio from that call. Yeah, this is Don. Can I help you? Yeah, hey, Don, listen, you remember you mentioned about the masturbation thing?

Can you tell me how it is that you go into a room or select a room there at the hotel when you when you were doing it? When you masturbate, I've masturbated in the bedroom, I've masturbated in the bathroom, I've masturbated everywhere. You're the one that called me up and said hey look John I want to set the record straight. I do masturbate and I don't know what runs. It isn't something that you really want to talk to somebody about for once. No, I know that. I mean, as far as telling me exactly that I've done it one spot all the time, no, I can't do that. The investigators didn't believe Piper's story and suspected that they had found their killer.

But in 1999, the DNA technology wasn't advanced enough to provide a definite link. The investigation came to a standstill, but the detectives kept their eyes on Piper. Here's DA Forretano again. There was a series of surveillances that were conducted upon him to make sure that we kept track of him and also that he knew that we were watching. Agent Quinn not only wanted Piper to make a mistake that would prove he was the killer, but he also wanted to prevent another attack. So it put a burden on law enforcement,

knowing who our suspect is, knowing his potential that, you know, of death that he can present to the community, the threat. So we had to take some proactive measures. In fact, there was nights I didn't sleep, just worried about what Mr. Piper was doing. I felt it was my responsibility, you know, to take every step possible, proactive measures to make sure that he did not go ahead and hurt anybody else. Constantly being watched started to take its toll on Donald Piper. After four weeks of surveillance, he started lashing out at the investigators. Constantly being watched started to take its toll on Donald Piper.

After four weeks of surveillance, he started lashing out at the investigators. This is Detective Boyd again. He would verbally taunt us, try to get us to chase him. He would try to initiate physical confrontations with us. He'd pull up, extend his pleasures by flipping us off, and he'd want to get out and challenge us to fight and do things like that. On October 8th, 1999, obviously frustrated, Donald Piper asked his brother to drive his truck while he turned the tables on the investigators. He grabbed his video camera and began to film the police.

Here's Detective Boyd again. Just completely went off. They got in his brother's truck and actually started chasing us through the city. And at the time, he had a video camera with him, and he's filming this. Piper taunted the police, trying to provoke an altercation. You got a problem? He took it to a security. The investigators didn't take any action against Piper,

which was likely also frustrating to him. Here's Detective Boyd. He would get out with the video camera, challenge us to get out and physically fight. At one point, he jumped up on the hood of our car and was standing there videotaping himself, just screaming and yelling at us. Come on, you! Come on! Out of here, you!

And as tempting as it was from time to time to get out and take him up on his offers, it just wasn't worth it. That's not why we were there. The detectives had started surveilling Donald Piper with the goal of keeping him from committing another murder. However, they were afraid that Piper's agitated state might push him to kill again. So they backed off.

By the year 2000, DNA technology had advanced considerably, and the DNA collected from Patricia's case could be checked against the DNA of Donald Piper with more precision. Here's Paul Bush from the Iowa Crime Lab again. Again, you have to realize that this DNA technology has really blossomed or developed since from the mid to late 80s.

And again, this case spanned major changes in the types of DNA testing that took place. When Detective Bush reviewed the evidence, the possibility of matching the DNA seemed to be fleeting. The previous DNA testing had used all of the semen sample. Desperate to test the samples, Bush looked through the rest of the evidence, hoping he would find another sample. Detective Bush found a pair of socks belonging to the victim. He knew it was a long shot, but he examined them for traces of semen. Here's Detective Bush again.

I screened, I think, three or four more areas in this vicinity, and they all came up with a very strong AP positive screen test. So I said, oh, I'm pretty sure here we've got seminal fluid on this sock. Detective Bush removed the stains and extracted the DNA and compared it to the saliva sample from Donald Piper. The profiles were a match. The stain on the sock was also significant because Piper's masturbation story didn't explain how a semen got on the sock. These socks, again, with all these other items of clothing had just been laundered.

So we had, in my opinion, clean clothing here where we had a semen stain on it. So I felt it was very significant in that it would have to tie to the assault. The police got a warrant for Donald Piper's arrest, and he turned himself in to the West Des Moines Police Department. This is Agent Quinn. He has no explanation as to why his seminal fluid would be on that sock. That's how profound that one piece of evidence was. The investigative team was relieved that Donald Piper was behind bars.

But they realized there was only a solid forensic lead in the case of Patricia. The only ties to Zerietta and Mariana's murders were the similar M.O.s. The detectives reviewed the files and focused in on the bloody bedspread from Zurieta's case. One of the things we noted was that not all the bloodstains on the bedspread were identified, all the independent ones, and then the instruction was given, every independent blood stain on that bedspread will be profiled. DNA analyst Marie Sides was given the task of testing the stains from Zuriata's bedspread. The agents felt that we needed to pursue all avenues and so I went ahead and did the testing in hopes of finding that there might be somebody else on the bedspread. Analyst Sides isolated each spot of blood on the bedspread and developed a genetic profile for all 10.

This is Marie Sides again. And so I was quite surprised when there was indeed a male profile from one of the bloodstains that was developed off of the bedspread. The next step is to compare that profile to the other profiles of potential suspects within the cases that the agents were looking at as possibly related, and it matched the profile of Donald Piper. Donald Piper had maintained that he had never been in the Best Western where Zerietta was killed, but his DNA said otherwise.

The district attorney was able to add a second murder charge to the first. When Donald Piper took the stand in his own defense at trial, he stuck with the masturbation story. I worked a lot of hours. I worked from usually from six in the morning till six at night, five at night, and I basically take it over like it's my home. Then Piper went on to say that the seaman could have been in the room for another reason. He claimed that he and his wife had sex in at least 12 of the rooms at the hotel. His wife backed up his story.

What was the room number that you stayed in? I don't remember. DA Steve Foratano wasn't worried that the story about Donald Piper and his wife would fool the jury. We didn't think a jury would buy it. It was a pretty feeble effort to try and explain how his semen got on the bedspread. And that still didn't explain how the semen got on Patricia Lange's sock. The jury deliberated for eight days and came back with a guilty verdict for the murder of Patricia Lang. Donald Piper was sentenced to life in prison.

Then, a year later, in another trial, Piper was found guilty for the murder of Zerieta Sankanovic and was given a second life sentence. The family of Mariana Redrovon was told by the police that the case had been solved. But because of the lack of physical evidence, Donald Piper will likely never be prosecuted for it. Agent Quinn was satisfied with the verdict and the fact that Donald Piper will never walk the streets again.

In Iowa, life is life. It takes commutation of a life sentence by the governor. And I know that there's no governor that would ever commute Don Piper's life sentence. Donald Piper is 58 years old and continuing to serve his sentence in the Iowa State Penitentiary. 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 on Twitter and at Brooke the Podcaster on Instagram. I'm also active in the Facebook group Podcast 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.