Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Beauty Queen Killer

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

In 1978, beauty queen Tana Woolley moves into her first apartment alone. Not long after her move, Tana is found murdered and everyone in her apartment building becomes a suspect. Check out our great sponsors! Vegamour: Go to Vegamour.com/coldcase and use code "coldca se" to save 20% on your first order! Progressive: Quote at Progressive.com to join the over 27 million drivers who trust Progressive!

Hey, Cold Case fans, we have something special for you. We're bringing you double the episodes every week. We know you dedicated fans need your fix in between new episodes. So every Thursday, we are back bringing some of our best episodes from previous seasons. Let us know which classic episodes you'd like to hear again in the comments. And don't worry, we'll see you back here every Tuesday for all new episodes of Cold Case Files 2. Now, on to the episode. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Use your best judgment.

Tana Woolley was described as a smart and beautiful teenage girl by everyone that knew her. She had lots of interests, but she loved cheerleading the most. Tana was confident and friendly. She came at life with a positive attitude. For example, when she didn't win Homecoming Queen her senior year of high school, she didn't give up. Instead, Tana entered the Roseman Community Pageant and became Miss Roseman in 1976. After high school, Tana enrolled in a local college and got a job on an Air Force base. And as part of becoming an adult, she decided it was time to get her own apartment. As exciting as being out on her own was, it made Tana a little nervous.

Men, neighbors, looked at her in ways that made her feel uncomfortable. She was right to be nervous, scared even, because in October of 1978, Tana was murdered. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. Tana was a responsible person and was never late to work, and she definitely never skipped a day without calling. So, on October 25, 1978, when Tana didn't show up for her shift, her boss became concerned and called Tana's mother, Helen. It was between, I think, 9.30 and 10, and her boss, Patty April, called me and said that Tana had not come to work.

Helen knew that missing work was out of character for her daughter, so she drove over to her apartment to check on Tana. When I pulled up, her car was there. I opened the door, and the first thing I saw was her. And I didn't go any further. She walked into a scene no mother should ever have to see. Tana was hanging over the side of her bed, naked from the waist down.

She had one sock on her foot, and the other tied around her neck. Helen called the police. The detectives collected Tana's clothes and bedding to be processed for evidence. Her body was sent to the local morgue for an autopsy. The cause of death was determined to be strangulation, and the presence of semen determined

it was likely she had been sexually assaulted. In 1978, there were no tests that could be performed on the forensic evidence, and with no other leads, the investigation didn't appear very promising, especially to Tana's dad, Bill. Do you have any idea who it is? And when they're saying, no, we don't, then you are wondering, well, where are you going to go with this if there's no witnesses, there's no real suspects? All you're looking for is to find the guy that would do something like this.

Two weeks after they buried their daughter, Helen and Bill Woolley were not satisfied with the way the detectives were handling their daughter's case. The detective that came to the house was just so overloaded that we felt like it was never going to go anywhere. We didn't feel that he was going to be able to put all of his effort into Tana's case. So that's when I told Helen, we need to get some help here. Tana's parents took matters into their own hands and hired a private detective to look into their daughter's murder. Lou McNatt started by investigating the other people living in Tana's apartment building. I started from each of the apartments interviewing

the people who resided at the apartments, attempting to find out if they heard anything in the first place, if they did, what they heard, and then go on further and tell me what they've seen prior to the time of the murder. Several of Tana's neighbors identified a resident named Larry Hazlett as someone McNatch looked into. They described him as the building creep. Hazlett's apartment was only 10 feet from Tana's bedroom window. His front door faced the other way from her apartment, but the window was right there.

It was a big window, so he could sit there and watch by the hour. And he has a lot of time to spend and look. You see, that's the bad part. And since she was such a beautiful girl, this to him was probably a pinnacle for him. And so I think that's why he watched her so much. Tana had told her boyfriend Rick that Hazlett made her feel uncomfortable. Tana was very concerned because they watched her all the time when she took the garbage out,

when she went out of the apartment. Anywhere she went, there was always somebody watching her. So she became quite concerned. It was like a funnel situation. We have all these people here talking and giving me bits of information. And as it funnels down, somebody comes out down here at the bottom of the funnel. Five months after Tana was murdered, Larry Hazlett left town. I developed a lot of people who gave me information during my period of time in the investigation.

And so I asked them, you know, I'd go around and I'd say, well, have you seen Hassel Dell? When was the last time you saw him? Oh, maybe two weeks ago, maybe a month ago. And the synopsis was that he just wasn't there. He was gone. And once he's gone, there's nothing else to do. McNatt felt like he had found Tana's killer, but was powerless to do anything about it. It's always frustrating when you can't pin down, especially a murderer,

and especially of somebody that you thought a great deal of. It's difficult. The frustrated private investigator explained the situation to Tana's parents. He told us, you know, from about the fifth or sixth day who it was, or he was pretty sure who it was, but there was no evidence. They could not get any evidence on him. The case found its way into the cold case files. But through the years, Helen and Bill Woolley never lost hope that their daughter's killer would be charged.

There was times when I'd think, oh my gosh, it's not going anywhere. But I always felt like someday, I just knew, someday it would. As long as everybody believes that there is hope, you know, then you can press on. If we had anybody that was negative, then it would probably have discouraged all of us, but we never got to that point. As the years passed, Tana's parents remained hopeful that one day there would be a lead in their daughter's case. Helen would call, I know, on the average of once a month and talk to either one of the detectives or they'd stop by. The problem that we had is there was a turnover of detectives on this case. So each new detective that was given the case

would have to start off from square one. In 1999, more than 20 years after Tana was murdered, Taryn Woolley, Tana's sister, took over. I didn't feel like that they should have to go through this all over again, being the parents, so I took it, I just said, I have to do this. Every month I'll call until they tell me, there's not, you know, we can do no more. After three months of phone calls, Taryn talked to Sergeant Chris Spear, who agreed to look into the case.

I looked through it, and unfortunately, in the 1970s, the documentation about how an investigator got from point A to point B wasn't as thorough as we currently do. So there were some scraps of information in the case file that, you know, I considered clues or potential clues left me by the prior investigator. While looking over the file, Sergeant Spear found a request for fingerprints from a suspect named Larry Hazlett, but he wasn't able to determine why he might have been a suspect. Hazlett was also a suspect of McNatt, the private investigator hired by Tana's

parents. Spear decided to run a background check on Hazlett. What he found was an extensive rap sheet with four arrests for rape. I think that was when the light bulb came on, the eureka moment, this is my guy. Or at least he's as good as any that I got right now. Hazlett was living in Sacramento, and his address was available on the sex offender registry.

Sergeant Speer got a search warrant for a DNA sample and paid him a visit. He voluntarily surrendered the samples and just said, here you go, didn't know her, be glad to help you in the future, goodbye. This worked 20 years ago, be somewhat cooperative and just deny it, and, you know, they'll leave me alone for another 20 years. Spear took the samples to the Kern County Forensic Lab, where analyst Brenda Smith

attempted to pull DNA from evidence that was more than 20 years old. The semen sample that was collected from Tana's body was too degraded for DNA testing. So Smith used a blacklight to look for other sources of DNA on the items and evidence. This is DNA analyst Brenda Smith. I found some small circular stains, kind of yellowish looking stains, towards the top of the bedspread. I did screen portions of a couple of those areas and they did screen positive for semen. I just kind of got excited and had a gut feeling about those stains from the very beginning. Smith isolated and analyzed the stains and was able to extract a DNA profile, which she compared to the sample collected from Larry Hazlett. It ended up matching Hazlett.

I've never been more excited on it. Probably on any of the other cases that I've looked at in the time that I've been doing DNA, I think I almost hyperventilated on that one. The match was extremely compelling. The odds that the sample didn't belong to Hazlett were only 1 in 126 billion. An arrest warrant was issued, and Detectives Joe Hicks and Scott Jelichich were in charge of bringing Hazlett into the station. We were concerned that a defense of his could be his claim that it was consensual. And that was why his semen would be on her bedspread. could be his claim that it was consensual,

and that was why his semen would be on her bedspread. Our intent to obtain a statement from him is to, for court purposes, lock him in to what does he have to say happened there. Whatever he could possibly use as a defense later in a court trial, we wanted to establish at that interview. The detectives went into Hazlett's home and interviewed him at his kitchen table. Here's some of the recorded audio from that interview. Are you a person that would be capable of doing that to someone?

Heavens no. Absolutely not. Heavens no. And you absolutely, in looking at this female, can tell me, have you ever had sexual relations with this female? Of any type? No, sir. Oral copulation? Intercourse? No, no, no, no.

You were never even in the apartment? No. Because Hazlitt claimed he was never in Tana's apartment, he wouldn't be able to claim that his DNA was found from a consensual experience. The detectives confronted him with the results of the DNA test. Would it change your story if I told you that in the original crime scene from the Kern County District Attorney's Crime Lab that they found biological evidence

of you being present in what you see. That's a damn lie. Is it a lie? That's a damn lie. You're certain? That's a damn lie. It wouldn't change anything you've told us? That's a damn lie, and at this juncture,

if you're going to start saying something like that, I want a lawyer right now. My first reaction, Mr. Hazlett's quite a large man, was that I wanted to calm him down and get him sat back down at the table because I didn't want to have some altercation inside of his house. Hazlett was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Meanwhile, Helen Woolley got the call she'd been waiting for since her daughter was murdered. It was really ironic. I was at the cemetery.

And when I got the call, I was just putting the flowers. And I just told her all the little angels could dance. Dance in heaven. Yeah. I'm Lola Blanc. And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And we're the hosts of Trust Me,

cults, extreme belief, and manipulation. Right here on Podcast One. Don't miss our interview with former Branch Davidian and Waco survivor Joanne Valleiga.

I looked out the window and from there was just like a hail of gunfire. My mom ran in, grabbed me off the bunk bed. She laid on top of me and she just said, you know, you have to be quiet. I just remember thinking, well, this is where we

die. Get new episodes of Trust Me every Wednesday on Podcast One or wherever you get your podcasts. Larry Hazlett pled not guilty, and Prosecutor Ed Jagles felt as if he needed more evidence to convict him. The defendant could claim that he had an affair with the victim, which they were keeping quiet for various reasons, and that he had certainly seen her, but the last time he'd seen her, she was fine, and he had no idea what happened subsequently. Prosecutor Jagals hired private investigator Trent Sproles to help him gather more evidence. Together, Jagals and Sproles looked into Hazlett's past. He was an unbelievably lucky serial rapist. We found four instances in which he had committed rape, three of them prior to this incident and one subsequent.

He got out of every one of them. He had to actually go back 31 years and retrace where they moved, where they lived, what their names were. One was married four different times, so she had four prior names. Sproles tracked down all four women, and though they had never met each other, they all had similar stories. This is P.I. Sproles. He would come across very polite, very friendly, and then when he had them alone,

it was like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde effect. One of the women he bit so severely, she still has the scars on her to show. Understandably, the women didn't want to come forward or testify about their assaults. Well, most of them at first didn't want to discuss it, which I understood. But once they understood the severity of the case

and that this man had actually murdered someone, a young female, then there was some guilt involved where they thought if they would have continued with their case back 30-some years ago and prosecuted this man, then maybe this young woman may not have died. All four women agreed to testify, which would paint the picture of Hazlett as a serial rapist. Sprouls then paid a visit to the Kern County Crime Lab,

where Brenda Smith had discovered Hazlett's DNA on Tana's bedspread. Sprouls asked Smith to examine the sock that had been found around Tana's neck. Because it was a ligature, it would have had to have been held pretty tightly, and for a little bit of a lengthy time, there was at least a potential that some skin cells from the individual's hands could have sloughed off onto the sock. Using a razor, Brenda Smith scraped the top layer of material off of Tana's sock. The bits of fuzz were then tested, and small amounts of DNA were determined to be present.

Smith was able to develop a partial DNA profile. I was pretty excited that I got anything off the sock, you know, at all. I just, you know, it was a 50-50 proposition in my mind. Even though the partial profile wasn't a full genetic match, the prosecutor believed it would be enough. He just needed to convince the jury that the DNA found in the bedding wasn't from a consensual encounter. This is Prosecutor Jagels again. With the addition of this piece of evidence, which was the DNA extracted from the ligature, from the actual sock that was used to strangle her, that story wouldn't hold any water anymore. On June 10, 2004, Larry Haslett was tried for Tana's murder.

After a week-long trial and an hour-and-a-half deliberation, the jury reached a guilty verdict. A month later, Ed Jagles attended his sentencing hearing. You hereby determine that the penalty shall be death. Yes. Helen Woolley was also at the hearing I just wanted to tell him what he robbed me of I probably would have said he was a monster and just his cockiness when he left court just irritated me.

He just gave us that look and threw his shoulders at us like, are you happy now? And yeah, we were very happy. While no sentence will bring their daughter back, Tana Woolley's parents are glad their phone calls were able to keep the case active. It's one of those things that we hope that other people that are watching your program will realize that whatever they do, they can't give up. They've got to keep pressing the law enforcement, which my family did, and it paid off.

And I knew down deep in my heart that justice would prevail. Larry Hazlett is 72 years old and awaiting his sentence to be carried out in San Quentin State Prison in California. Because he's serving a death sentence, no parole date is listed. Instead, there's one word where the date would be. Condemned. 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 Podcast for Justice.

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