Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Remains of Murder

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

A mysterious set of bones is discovered in the California wilderness, more than a decade after a 13-year-old boy was reported missing. The new information sets detectives on a path to catch a dangerous predator. ZocDoc: Check out Zocdoc.com/CCF and download the Zocdoc app for free! 

Jamie Trotter was 13 years old in April of 1979, when his parents got divorced. Jamie and his mother were spending a few nights in a local hotel near their home in Costa Mesa, California. On the morning of April 19th, Jamie's mom woke up and got ready for work, while Jamie got ready for school. Then the two went their separate ways. Jamie never made it to school, though. This is his mother, Barb. He had his lunch money and his bus fare and a book bag and a skateboard. And last thing he said was goodbye and I love you mom, so goodnight. And that was the last time I ever saw him.

From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. When Barb got home from work and couldn't find Jamie, she called his friends. But it turned out he hadn't made it to school that day. Barb called the police in a panic for help finding her missing son. Helped didn't arrive in time, though. Back then it was 72 hours before they would take a report. And then if they wouldn't consider him a missing person unless they were seen being

abducted, they were considered runaways. A lot of times, you know, you get a case like this and it's a, if there is a typical runaway where they're gone for a few days and then one of their relatives or friends will spot them and you'll hear about them. That was Detective Dave Walker, who after three days began to investigate Jamie's disappearance. He started at the school that Jamie hadn't made it to and interviewed some of his classmates. I'd received several different scenarios, one of them being that he'd been kidnapped. Another one was that he'd merely ran away from home. Another one was he'd been

injured and was in a hospital somewhere. Long story short, nobody had actually seen any of this. It was all rumors. After six weeks of looking for information that might lead him to Jamie, the detective became convinced of what Jamie's mother had feared all along. At that point, I'm thinking that there's probably foul play involved in the case, that someone has taken him against his will. That's based on the fact that he has not voluntarily contacted any of his friends or relatives. As more time passed without any new leads, Jamie's case became cold, and his mother was left without any new leads, Jamie's case became cold and his mother was left without any answers. That's the worst part,

is year after year of looking and not knowing. In January of 1990, 11 years after Jamie had gone missing, a call came in to the Riverside County Sheriff's Office that brought new attention to the case. The call was taken by Investigator Larry Nielsen from a hiker named James Crummel. This is Investigator Nielsen.

Crummel said that he had found what he thought were human bones because it was a jawbone with braces or dental appliances. The next day, the hiker took Investigator Nielsen and his partner to the place where he had found the bones. Well, he brought us to one location on the side of the hill, and he pointed down onto the ground, and there was a portion of the skull that was visible. Near that portion of the skull,

there was the upper jawbone, and a little bit farther away, we found the lower jawbone with the braces on it. They saw other smaller bones scattered around the hill. The bones were collected and then sent to Dr. Robert Hegler, a forensic anthropologist. Here's Investigator Nielsen. Seeing the braces, my initial reaction was that it was probably a young person, and that bothered me.

Somebody was missing a son or a daughter. He concluded that we had a female, and it was a young female, early teens. The investigators began their search for a missing girl, but none of their open cases matched the teeth that the hiker had found. They labeled the bones as Jane Doe, and the case was pushed aside. In the early 1990s, the state of California began using a new computer database to process unidentified remains. The database is called MUPS, which stands for Missing Unidentified Persons System. In 1995, Judy Suchy, a forensic anthropologist, was entering information unrelated to Jamie's case into MUPS. She came across the Jane Doe records and the report that had determined they were female.

Here's Dr. Suchy. I was rather surprised that he had tried to determine a sex. This particular individual was 10 to 12, 13 in that vicinity, which is virtually impossible to sex accurately. As Dr. Setshi looked further into the report, she realized that the sex of the remains had been determined using a pelvic measurement system known as the Weaver method. The problem is that the Weaver method isn't extremely reliable, especially in adolescents, because while girls tend to grow faster, the boys tend to be larger.

And this particular method, we're running around 80%, which isn't too good. An 80% method I would not use in forensic cases. And I actually talked to Dr. Weaver and said, well, would you use this method in a forensic case? And he said, no, I would only use it for archaeological material, or maybe not at all. So he was the first to say, it's an interesting method, but not too reliable. Dr. Suchy reclassifies the remains as having an undetermined sex and sends the information back to Riverside County. The investigation is reopened, five years after the remains were found

and 16 years after Jamie went missing. There was a hit almost immediately. When we were able to enter the correct identification into the MUP system, we immediately got a hit out of Orange County on Jamie Trotter. The investigators sent a copy of Jamie's dental records to Dr. Doug Weiler, a forensic ID specialist, so that he could compare them to the remains. In most cases, dental records can be used for a conclusive ID. Here's Dr. Doug Weiler. Right here he has a small filling.

These are the post-mortem. In this case, though, the entire jaw hadn't been recovered, so it made the comparison more difficult. Here's Dr. Weiler again. You couldn't tell anything definitive. You couldn't tell if it was him for certain, but you could not eliminate him. Dr. Weiler, who was also a dentist, looked to the braces for clues. He realized that there were certain signature characteristics

that could distinguish one doctor's work from another. As I looked at the teeth and the braces, I immediately knew that I did not do the work. And so it hit me that his orthodontist would know whether that was his work or not. Jamie's orthodontist confirmed that the braces were his work. So Jamie's family provided a DNA sample and forensic testing confirmed that the remains were Jamie. Detective Paul Cappuccilli from the Costa Mesa Police Department was the new lead investigator on Jamie's case.

As a parent, I really wanted to find Jamie. You know, we closed one chapter on this incident because now we had him. But we also got a new chapter in that we didn't know how we got there. Though the bones had been useful in making an identification, there just wasn't enough information to determine how Jamie died. Have you ever been stuck with a dentist who wants to chat with you the whole time they're cleaning your teeth? Or a primary care doctor with a literal six-month wait to get in for a visit? Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't have to settle anymore when it comes to finding the right doctor. With ZocDoc, you've got options. ZocDoc is the free healthcare app and website that takes the guesswork out of finding a doctor

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ZocDoc.com. Around a year later, while Detective Cappuccino is working patrol, he stops the car in front of him for an expired license plate. He got out of the car and gave me his driver's license. And as I'm writing him this ticket, I looked at it and I said to him, Mr. Kreml, how do I know you? And he says, we never met before. It turned out that James Kreml, the hiker that had discovered Jamie Trotter's bones, was the driver of the car. And I thought, what a coincidence. This is incredible. And I was thinking about that car stop all day long. And I'm thinking, I know him from someplace.

How in the world do I know him? To satisfy his curiosity, Detective Cappuccini did some checks on James Crummel to see if anything would jog his memory. He discovered that in 1982, Crummel had been investigated on a charge of child molestation. Maybe it had been more than a coincidence that Krummel had found the bones. When I saw his name in there and that arrest, it all came back to me.

I remembered in 1982 that I ran a records check on Mr. Krummel and learned that he had been arrested in Wisconsin for attempted murder on a child, and he had been arrested for murder of a child in Arizona. The detective contacted the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, where the bones had first been reported. He wanted to share the information that he had discovered on James Kreml. He talked to investigator Tim Johnson. Automatically, we make him a person of interest in the case. Investigator Johnson and Deputy District Attorney Bill Mitchell did a deep dive into James Crummel's past.

They put together a timeline that pointed to Crummel for more than just Jamie Trotter's murder. Here's Deputy DA Mitchell. What we looked at is his prior crimes. We looked to see were there any similarities there. And we were actually shocked to find that there were many, many similarities. In February of 1967, a boy was found murdered in Pima County, Arizona. James Kreml had been a suspect, but left town before he could be fully investigated. Six months after that, in Maquon, Wisconsin,

a boy on the way home from football practice had been picked up by Kreml driving a laundry truck. Here's D.A. Mitchell again. He was driven to a wooded area on the shores of Lake Michigan, tied up, sexually assaulted. This boy, he beat over the head and then strangled and left for dead. The boy lived and was able to identify James Kreml, who did five years for assault and was then released on parole. Unfortunately, Kreml learned the wrong lesson from his prison sentence. This is Investigator Johnson.

He learned that dead kids don't talk. He learned that the next time this happens that he's going to make sure he kills the kid. In 1979, James Cremwell moved to Costa Mesa and lived only a few blocks from Jamie Trotter. And that address, which I didn't know personally, but when I started looking at a map and then I later drove out there, was right down the street from where Jamie Trotter lived and was actually on the same side of the street where he would have had to walk to go to his school that morning. That means that these two people had crossed paths within a few feet of each other, their residences.

The detective found it a little too coincidental that James Kreml then found himself in the mountains and happened to stumble upon Jamie's remains. The problem was that they didn't have any physical evidence tying him to the crime. The investigators made a phone call to James Kreml and gave him the impression that it was just a routine follow-up to the discovery of the remains. Here's Investigator Johnson again. He's an experienced criminal, and he wasn't the type of person that you could bring into the office and interview. He's going to deny, deny. He's not going to come.

He knows he doesn't have to. He's going to get a lawyer. He's not going to talk to you. So we wanted to kind of make an ally of him and try to set up a meeting with him to have him take me back up to the crime scene. Here's some of the audio from the call to Crummel. Hello? So we thought of calling you and asking if you could maybe meet us up there or meet us somewhere and point the area out to us again. I wouldn't even have any idea where it was.

No? It's been so long ago, I don't even remember where it was. It was somewhere right along in there, but I really couldn't tell you exactly. Ah, that's too bad. The detectives asked Crummel if he would accompany them to the area to see if it would jog his memory, but James Crummel declined.

The detectives didn't believe that James, sometimes referred to as Jim, wouldn't remember where the remains had been located. They also believed that the mountains might have been a place that he went often. So the investigator located someone that Crumwell had known intimately and interviewed him. Here's investigator Johnson. It was strange that every time they went to a location, Jim would want to have sex with them at that location. It was a place where Jim enjoyed having sex up there in the mountains. So I took him in towards the area where we knew that Jamie's body was found. And as we hiked into the area, he pointed out and said, I've been here before with Jim.

Deputy G.A. Mitchell believed that he finally had enough evidence, though circumstantial, to charge James Crummel. It's too incredible to be a coincidence. There's no way that lightning can strike that many times on one person. On May 30th, James Crummel was arrested for child molestation and the murder of Jamie Lee Trotter. The defense attorney in this case was Mary Ann Galanti from the Riverside County Public Defender's Office. This is not a case where there was any physical evidence at all

linking Crummel to the crime. There's no blood, there's no witness, there's no smoking gun. There is no physical evidence at all linking Crummel to the crime. There's no blood, there's no witness, there's no smoking gun. There is no physical evidence. Crummel's attorney was correct, but Deputy D.A. Mitchell was ready to face that argument in court. The law, the evidence code, allows you to consider the defendant's prior crimes to even actually prove what they call the corpus delecti or the body of the crime. And we can infer from his prior crimes and the types of sex acts that he committed against those other boys what he did to Jamie. After a four-week trial and four days of

deliberation, the jury found James Crummell guilty for the murder of Jamie Trotter. The state requested the death penalty in this case. And I told the jury from the opening statement on, you know what he did, you know why he did it, and you know what he deserves. There is no more heinous crime, no one more deserving of the death penalty than someone like James Crummel. On June 7, 2004, James Crummel was sentenced to die by lethal injection. I have to wonder if that sentence was any comfort to Barb, Jamie's mother. Well, I don't think you ever feel justice is done when it takes the life of a loved one.

After the judge had read over all these things that he had done over the years, and then Jamie, it was just like, he deserves whatever he gets. That's my opinion. The case was closed, but there is still an unsolved mystery. Why did James Crummel lead the police to Jamie's remains? Investigators Johnson and Nielsen share their opinions. When you talk to people who study these people's minds, they'll tell you that a lot of times these guys will interject themselves into the investigation. They want to know what's going on. They can't leave it alone.

Some of them like the attention. He led us to the bones on his 45th birthday. And I believe that he was giving us or giving himself a birthday present by watching our reaction to discovering his work and us not being able to do anything about it. I think he got a good laugh at us. If he did get a laugh from the detectives, Crummel isn't laughing anymore. In May of 2012, 68-year-old James Crummel hanged himself in his cell. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve Delamater. Thank you. AETV series was produced by Curtis Productions and is hosted by Bill Curtis. 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 real crime.