Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Something Snapped

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

When a young woman is murdered, investigators believe they have the perfect suspect, until DNA advancements prove they might be looking in the wrong direction. Apartments.com: To find whatever you’re searching for and more visit apartments.com the place to find a place. ZocDoc: Check out Zocdoc.com/CCF and download the Zocdoc app for free! 

This guy was as cold and calculated as they come. Maybe we weren't going to get it solved. It was like the epitome of innocence that had been preyed upon. This is a case that has no evidence. We didn't have DNA. We didn't have fingerprints. Step inside the court of law with the new true crime podcast, American Justice. We realize we have four men who answered the same ad for a job on a farm. My brother Ralph went to interview and he was never seen again. A podcast that explores

impactful crimes and reveals how our justice system works. You have to consider that there are more possibilities than one. And sometimes how it doesn't. We have to find whoever this monster is. Go in depth into chilling cases and their conclusions in this new true crime series. You just have a pit in your stomach thinking how many people are we going to find? New episodes of American Justice are available every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. In August of 1987, 19-year-old Diana Deeso went out with friends for a night on the town. Her mother, Marianne, knew her daughter was responsible, and so she wasn't particularly worried.

She wasn't worried, that is, until Diana didn't come home. Diana's mother called the police, hoping they could help her find her daughter. Tragically, Marianne was unaware that Diana had already been found. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke, and here's the dynamic Bill Curtis with a classic case, Something Snapped. I was told to respond to this area in connection to an apparent homicide that occurred. John Murray works homicide for the New York State Police. As I walked down towards the end of the trail here and reaching the river, I noted that there was a concrete shelf-like area, and against that shelf area there was the body

of a woman lying partially submerged in the water. Her back was scraped up from what looked like her sliding down this rough surface of the concrete into the river. Initial signs point to murder. An autopsy will later determine the victim had been strangled and confirms the presence of semen and the possibility of a sexual assault. Meanwhile, John Murray needs to ID his victim. Her pocketbook wasn't found. There was nothing here that indicated who she was.

An APB is put out, and Investigator Murray waits for someone somewhere to recognize his victim. Well, she didn't come home. And, um, I knew she always would come home, and this time she didn't.

Marianne Deeso is worried. She has not seen her daughter, 19-year-old Diana, since last night. It is now going on 11 p.m. We were sitting watching the news at 11 o'clock. And they had said that they had, you know, found an individual on the other side of the Hudson in North Greenbush. And I looked at my husband and he looked at me and I said, oh no, this can't be. The family contacts police, who put them in touch with investigators working the Hudson River case.

One of the investigators had her brush. And, you know, he showed me that, and he said, is this hers? And I said, yes. Right away, the mother believes that the boyfriend, Michael Pullman, was probably involved. He was like, you know, the motorcycle guy, used to hang out and, you know, kind of see the bars in Albany. He was an automobile mechanic. He had a reputation for having a temper. He also was known to be a little bit abusive. He wasn't your stand-up everyday guy.

That's why I didn't approve of her being with him. Mary Ann may not have approved, but Diana was infatuated with the bad boy biker. In fact, Pullman was the only thing on her mind the night she went missing. Diana apparently made several phone calls trying to contact Michael, hoping that they were going to have some sort of a rendezvous that night.

That was her mission. That day, that night, that was her mission. There was no other reason to think of anybody else. It was just him. Well, we went looking for him, obviously, that very next morning as a person that we really needed to interview because she had, in fact, left looking for him, and we wanted to know if she had found him.

I was on my way to work when I got pulled over by half a dozen police officers and state police and everything else. Michael Pullman is surprised to see blue lights flashing in his rearview mirror. His thoughts immediately turned to one of lights flashing in his rearview mirror. His thoughts immediately turn to one of the women in his life, Diana Deeso. And I says, I know what this is all about.

They said, oh, you do? I have a feeling. And they wanted to know, what did I think? I said, this is about Diana Deeso. We found that to be kind of a strange thing for him to ask right off the top like that. I mean, he could have been stopped for any number of things, and the first thing that comes out of his mouth is, is this in relation to Diana? Pullman is brought in for questioning and told Diana has been murdered. I just flipped. I just couldn't believe it.

I didn't know what to do, who to turn to. I just didn't know where to go with it. Well, this whole area was very well and highly used. Detectives know exactly where to go. Focusing on Pullman's whereabouts, the night Diana went missing. He told us he did not see Diana that night. He told us that he had never had any sexual contact with Diana. He told us that he had gone to bed at 1 o'clock in the morning with his girlfriend.

The alibi that he had was basically substantiated with the girl he was living with, but it was pretty shaky. Shaky because some witnesses say Pullman was out on his truck the night Diana went missing. Some even recall seeing his truck in the area where Diana's body was found. It was a red truck, and it had a blue and green hood. It would be a truck that if you saw it, you'd remember it. I didn't even know what they were talking about. Pullman denies driving into the area that night. His story, however, does change. Pullman now remembers leaving his house after midnight to look for tow jobs. I don't know

what he was looking for tow jobs with that particular kind of truck he had because it sure wasn't constructed to be a tow truck. According to the people, they did in fact see this truck going up and down this area here. Pullman's changing story piques the interest of investigators who asked to search his truck. My car, my house, my clothes, my truck, and what triggered them off a lot even better is when they searched my truck, I had a blanket on my seat of my truck. There was some fibers found on Diana at the time of autopsy, as well as some dog hair. There was fibers found on a blanket in Michael's truck, as well as dog hair,

that were all similar in nature to the ones found on Diana. That puts Diana in contact with the blanket which was found in Michael's truck. Duh, no kidding. Diana had sat in the front seat of Pullman's truck many times, making the fiber evidence a tenuous link at best. Pullman is asked to take a polygraph and passes. Matter of fact, when we told him he passed the polygraph, he wanted to hug my partner at the time. Pass or fail, Pullman remains suspect number one. His attitude doesn't help. I had a cocky attitude towards him because they didn't have nothing on me. I knew that. And they couldn't pin anything on me. I knew that. He didn't want to cooperate in the investigation.

It would seem, if he didn't have anything to hide, that he'd really be interested in trying to find out who had killed Diana. I always had to look over my shoulder because I didn't know when they were going to show up or who would follow me. I've had a couple of them follow me. Michael Pullman is not arrested for Diana DeSou's murder. The investigation itself eventually runs cold. The suspicions surrounding Pullman, however, never seem to fade. And my own sister turned around and said, did you do it? I said,

what? I said, you too? I said, where are you people getting this from? Well, this box here was a rape kit that was done on Diana. The year is 1997, and investigator John Murray is reopening the cold homicide case of Diana Deeso, a 19-year-old found strangled to death 10 years earlier. Samples of human sperm were found in a couple areas as well as on her clothing. In 1987, DNA testing was not available to police. Now it is, and Investigator Murray knows who he once tested first. We had circumstantial evidence putting Michael Pullman at the scene.

Michael Pullman was a friend of Diana Deeso and Murray's chief suspect ten years earlier. He said that he had never had sex with Diana and we had the sperm from Diana indicating that she had had sex the night that she was murdered.

So we thought along with the circumstantial evidence that we had with Michael, if we could prove that he was the one that had had intercourse with her, that it would be enough for us to arrest him. Murray obtains a warrant and asks Pullman for a sample of his blood. They wanted me to do a DNA. Do I have a problem with the DNA? And I says, not at all. This is the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center.

This is where we process hundreds of criminal cases. Dr. Allison Eastman works on evidence in the DeSo homicide, including a rape kit taken from the victim's body. And I developed a DNA profile from a very probative item. The profile is then compared to Michael Pullman's blood sample.

And it wasn't a match. It basically shot us in the foot. We had no case, and we had no real viable suspects from there. This would have made our case for us. When it came back as not his, it was devastating to the case and devastating to the investigators' work in it. The results appear to clear Pullman as a viable suspect. Investigator Murray says not so fast. It doesn't mean that he's not the killer. It means that he's not the one that had sex with her prior to her death.

I see a lot of these TV programs where they always find a crooked way or another. If he ain't got no witnesses, they're going to try to pin it on somebody. And that's what I thought. I figured, well, they probably ain't got nobody else. So if the DNA doesn't match, they're going to make it match just to get somebody on this case because it looks bad for them because they ain't got nobody. For years, Michael Pullman remains on edge about a possible setup. Pullman, however, is wrong. The New York State Police are simply waiting for evidence that will lead them to the truth.

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Michael wasn't a match, and the case was once again at a standstill. Even though there were no leads, DNA analyst Allison Eastman never forgot about Diana's case. Family tragedy touches us, and we're not cold lab robots. We're human beings, and we personally get involved in these cases. Seven years after she first worked on Diana DeSou's rape kit, Dr. Allison Eastman hasn't forgotten about the teenager. They just kind of stick to you. A young woman, 19 years old, just goes out one night, and then her family never sees her again.

And you're thinking about, what if it happened to your family? In 2004, Eastman is working with a new breed of DNA testing called short tandem repeat, or STR. It is a prerequisite for access to CODIS, a database containing 1. half million felony samples, and requires a new profile extraction from the DSO evidence. I knew there was a little bit of evidence left, and I thought, we can't just leave this case sitting.

So I figured that we would just give it one more try and go for the gold, I guess. Eastman is able to develop a full SDR DNA profile, enters it into CODIS, and gets lucky. It hit on a convicted offender by the name of Ray Keller. Once we got the DNA hit on Ray Keller, this is where we came and did all our research. Dave Madden jumps on the Ray Keller lead,

teaming up with investigators Steve Ortiz and Debbie Comar. What was the connection between Ray Keller and Diana Dasso? Yeah, we really worked that hard. I mean, we had a lot of investigators in both your unit and in our unit. We really beat the bushes on that. Keller has no apparent ties to Diana, but the team finds his criminal past to be telling. Just looking at his criminal history, which has sexual assaults in it, rapes, again, that was another thing that to us indicated he was a real good suspect in this cold case. Keller is serving up to 25 years for raping a girl in 1989 in New York. Detectives decide to talk to Keller's victim

before speaking with the suspect himself. She was scared to death of Ray Keller, and one of her first or second comments were, he tried to kill me. Komar notes that the attack bears a striking similarity to Diana Deeso's case. Like Diana, this victim was choked. Unlike Diana, she lived to tell the tale.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of her describing his neck hold on her and knowing that cutting off someone's air supply like that could cause death in a very short amount of time. Investigators have Keller's DNA at the scene and a similar act. To put their case over the top and eliminate Michael Pullman as a suspect, they need a confession to murder. We had talked about the possibility that somewhere along the line that night

Diana had had a consensual encounter and that Michael Pullman had found out about it and either in a temper, a fit of rage, over jealousy, very well could have committed the homicide in that the DNA sample could have been from nothing more than an innocent encounter. One of my big fears was that he was going to shut us right out. Yeah, I had sex with her, so what? Investigators need to get inside their suspect's head, get him thinking, and then

get him talking. At some point, something snapped inside of me. Something went wrong. I was just, you know, squeezing, squeezing, I was just squeezing. During my day, I typically meet with adults who have committed sex offenses of different types. Dr. Richard Hamill is a psychologist who's spent the past 22 years talking to sexual predators. These are folks who oftentimes have unusual ways of looking at the world, and if they sense that you don't understand or are being judgmental about their way of thinking, they clam up, they keep quiet right away.

In 2004, he's tapped by cold case detectives who want to get inside the head of Ray Keller. Prison changes people, and it seems that he has made some changes. Keller is a convicted rapist and suspect in the murder of 19-year-old Diana Deeso 17 years ago. Dr. Hamill offers to study Keller and classifies him as a sexual-type rapist, one who harbors romantic fantasies about his victim. There are some types of rapists who really don't care about the perceptions of others, but the sexual type rapist often does.

They feel unfairly rejected or stigmatized by other people. They often work to have folks have as positive an image of them as possible. Dr. Hamill suggests playing on these insecurities in the hopes that Keller might open up. If he thought he was being misunderstood or might be misunderstood, it was possible that he would step forward and provide incriminating information toward the goal of showing people that he was not such a bad guy.

The plan? Hit Keller with the DNA evidence and give him the opportunity to own up and put himself in the best possible light. It's your suggestion, the direct approach. Don't play games, just go right at him, tell him what you got. This was the one time that he had to go on the record. This was his one shot to introduce some information to you, potentially back to the court. For detectives, it is also their one shot at a confession.

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On December 17th, 2004, detectives Ortiz and Madden have a face-to-face with inmate Ray Keller. I see a man who looks almost like a deer caught in headlights. They bring me out shackled up and all coughed up. I think a little bit of him in the back of his mind knew why we were there. They put me in a corner, and Officer Ortiz was basically a foot away from me. So I just told him, 1987, he had an encounter with a girl named Diane Besso, and he indicated, you know, he does not know who that name is. And I'm like, well, I don't know.

You know, it's 17 years ago, you know, a long time ago, whatever. And when he said he didn't know anything about her or had any connection to her or any recollection to her, it's then when Steve showed him the picture. And that's when they asked me, you know, do you know who this is? And I was like, no. And we were in a good place because even if he continued to deny, we knew from our DNA evidence that he knew her. He was there with her. And by denying it, it helped. But yet we weren't quite there yet. What we wanted, we were there for, is we wanted to know exactly what happened and how it happened and we wanted him to tell us that that's when detectives hit keller with their trump card

the dna match between keller and seaman found at the scene and after i'd say 20 to 30 minutes he just looked up into the ceiling and said hypothetically if i were to tell you what happened how do i know that you wouldn't tell the truth when you left this room? When he said that to us, I knew we had him. With audio tape rolling, Keller takes detectives back to 1987 and the night Diana Deeso was murdered. Hi, Ray T. Keller. on December 17th, 2004, stated the following to be as true to my memories at this time.

I was high on coke, drunk, and wild. I guess you could say I was looking for maybe some sex. I'm not going to sit here and say maybe, you know, that that wasn't in my mind. Keller says he was driving around when he spotted a young woman hitchhiking and pulled over. I asked her where she was going. Said she was going home. She got in the vehicle. I asked her what was going on.

She said that she had a fight with her boyfriend, and she seemed upset. I guess you could say she was in an angry mood, hurt, whatever, from what I recollect. The two ended up at a secluded area near the Hudson River. We then went out to the back of the truck, and that's when we had sex, but not by her choice. Keller sexually assaulted Diana, then allowed his victim to get dressed. That's when Diana Deeso made a comment. I remember her saying she was going to tell. At some point, something snapped inside of me.

Next thing I knew, I had my arm around her neck and throat and a chokehold from behind. I had Diane by the back, by the throat, my arms around her throat, and I was just squeezing. She was struggling, but couldn't say anything because of the chokehold. Just anger. Just anger was going through my mind as I was just, you know, squeezing, squeezing. I was just squeezing. Diana collapsed. Keller was left holding her body.

I must have believed at that time that she was dead. I must have thought that, or if I didn't time that she was dead I must have thought that or if I didn't think that she was dead I guess I must have thought that I put her in the water, she will be dead I then dragged her over from the back of the truck by her shoulders to the embankment and pushed her down towards the river

I left and went home Detectives Ortiz and Madden have pushed the right buttons I left and went home. Detectives Ortiz and Madden have pushed the right buttons, and their suspect confesses, exactly as Dr. Hamill predicted. We knew what he did, and everybody was going to know what he did, and now he needed an opportunity to try to make himself look as best as possible. Nineteen-year-old Diana Deesa was raped and strangled 17 years ago, and today her killer, Ray Keller,

was finally sentenced to 22 years for the crime. You are a despicable coward who serves no purpose. In a Rensselaer County courtroom, Ray Keller stares straight ahead, into his past and the face of a woman whose daughter he murdered. I pray every day that your miserable existence consists of cold steer bars, torment and turmoil and the faces of your victims. He's a little Napoleonic figure and was asking for our forgiveness and, you know, just like most of them do. And, well, I wasn't going to stand for that at all. Revenge is sweet for us,

and there will never be any forgiveness for you coming from the DeSalle family. Keller is sentenced to 22 years to life for raping and murdering Diana DeSalle. Nobody's gotten the real side of the whole story. In his interview with Cold Case Files, Keller readily admits to murder, but now claims there was never any rape. There was nothing, no fighting, no nothing, no force for sexual, you know, for the sex

that we had. We then went out to the back of the truck and that's when we had sex, but not by her choice. Keller's latest story contradicts his official statement and doesn't play with detectives who worked the case. I think now that he's had time to think about what's going on and he's gotten some feedback on all of what's happened and realizes what he's told us, I think he's trying to back off on that. I am completely, you know, I'm truly sorry for what I've done,

you know, and all the people I've hurt. And I've got nobody else, you know, nobody to blame but myself. You know, I mean, I did what I did. For longtime suspect Michael Pullman, Keller's words lift the shadows of suspicion. His life, once again, is his own. I can just go back to my normal self again. Just be wild, crazy, outgoing. Just, you know, live life to the fullest and then enjoy it.

As for Marianne Deeso, she is left with nothing but her grief and a flat piece of stone where her child should be. Ray Keller is still currently serving a life sentence in New York. He'll be up for parole in the year 2027, and at that time, he'll be 66 years old. When a person is given a life sentence, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll spend the rest of their life behind bars. However, Marianne Deeso, Diana's mother, is confident that Keller will stay locked up.

You kind of wonder today what she would be like. She says she would be like. She would be 37. And I don't know, she might have had children. I believe that she would have been special for somebody. I'm budding. 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. 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.

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