Cold Case Files - REOPENED: The Peeper

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

A worried father lays a trap for the mysterious prowler who has been peeping on his young son, but the man doesn't realize he's facing something far more sinister than he could have imagined. Check out our great sponsors! KiwiCo: Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code COLDCASE at kiwico.com  Progressive: Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 27 million drivers who trust Progressive!

This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Use your best judgment. On August 20th, 1986, a post office employee killed 14 people in Edmond, a suburb of Oklahoma City. The man went back and forth with the police until finally turning his gun on himself. As you can imagine, a lot of manpower went into the investigation of that case, and the incident itself was broadcasted on all the news outlets. Four days earlier, on August 16th, a different tragic crime had taken place in Edmond. Gary Larson had been murdered in his own home, and his fiancée was raped

repeatedly, but she survived. Every detective that had been assigned to solve Gary Larson's murder was diverted to the postal shooting just four days later. By the time the detectives were finishing the postal case paperwork, the witnesses and other possible leads to the man who attacked Gary and his fiancée were practically non-existent. It took 18 years to make up for the delayed investigation and to finally arrest Gary Larson's killer. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke, and here's the legendary Bill Curtis with a classic case, The Peeper. It was obviously starting to slow down because we were getting into those morning hours.

Officer Steve Day works the graveyard shift in Edmond, Oklahoma. Just before 6 a.m., a call comes over his radio. The dispatcher told me it was possibly a DOA, which made me think, well, obviously it sounds like pretty serious. Day is the first to arrive at 1228 Harding Avenue,

a one-story ranch house. I could see a female standing in the doorway. Porch light was on, door was open. And as I got to her, I could tell she was saying, he's dead, I know he's dead, is he dead? And she had her hands over her mouth and her face, and as I got closer, I could tell she had blood on her hands and her face. The officer steps inside and finds 27-year-old Gary Larson on the floor.

He was laying up in a corner, and he had large stab wounds on his chest. It was fairly obvious to me that he was dead. As the sun rises over Edmond, a homicide investigation unfolds. Detective Chuck Good takes the lead and starts by questioning his only witness. She tells Good that she and her fiancé, Gary, were in bed when they heard a noise. Gary Larson gets out of bed, walks down the hallway. She hears, you know, the panic moans, the oh, oh. And she gets out of bed at that time,

and she can just make out a figure in the dark walking towards her, and she thought that the guy only had on underwear. Gary Larson's fiancée says she was raped and tortured for three hours. The woman provides police with a description of her attacker, and she is taken to the hospital, where semen is recovered from her body. Meanwhile, crime scene technician Rocky Yardley surveys the house and stops underneath

the victim's bedroom window. We found some footprints, and we found an impression where someone had sat down. Maybe some car went by and they sat down to hide a little bit. So there was obviously activity in that area. He was just one of those peeping Toms that probably knew which windows to go to at a particular time of the week. Obviously, it was not his first time here. After observing his victims for a while, the killer apparently cut his way through a screen

and entered the house. The screen was cut in an L shape from top to bottom. Not a big opening was there, so we knew it wasn't a big gentleman that went through there. But climbed right in, right underneath the street light, which was incredible for somebody to do that, take that kind of chance. Tells you you're looking for someone that's familiar with the neighborhood, may possibly live here or have direct ties

to the neighborhood and the immediate area. Inside the house, investigators catch a break. A single bare footprint in blood in the hallway. The print is photographed and examined. And you can see the big toe here and the next toes, following toes, right in here. And then down this way would be the backside of the foot. And actually, after they enhanced it,

they were able to take a photograph of it, which showed some good identifying marks and ridges. The footprint carries enough detail for forensic comparison. Now detectives just need to find you can to get it solved. The day after Gary Larson's murder, Detective Good hits the streets and continues the hard work of a murder investigation. For days we had gone door to door all in this area this edition just making contact with the people trying to find out who lives there what they can tell us about neighbors. More than 100 suspects are developed. Each is asked to take his shoes off.

None, however, match the bloody print left at the scene. I'm beginning to wonder if the footprint could ever be made or if we were ever going to find this guy. For four years, Good searches for the footprint, determined to crack Edmunds's only unsolved homicide. In the end, however, the detective comes up empty. There was one point in the whole thing I think I probably would have sold my soul to the devil

to be able to get this thing solved. I was just consumed by it for a long time. It is the worst part that something just came in out of the night and killed someone you loved. Diane Larson is Gary Larson's sister. And there was no reason, no person to blame, no face to blame. That was the worst part. Over the years, she keeps in close contact with Edmond police,

hoping they will find the man that killed her brother. I never went longer than three months without calling the detectives to see what they were doing, because I didn't want them to stop doing something. And they never gave up hope. They always gave me hope that someday they would find it. As time slips by, the hope gets harder to come by. It wasn't fair that Gary was murdered, and he was just a light in my life.

And I would think that had it been reversed, had it been me that hadn't been murdered, that he would have done the same for me. In 1990, Gary Larson's murder slips into the cold files, where it will stay for almost 14 years, until a young boy looks out his bathroom window and finds a grown man looking in. I asked him, was it a boy, was it an adult? And he goes, well, it wasn't a kid. Gary Larson was murdered in his home and his fiancée was brutally raped.

The perpetrator had entered through a window. The only evidence that the investigators were able to collect was a bloody footprint that the killer had left at the scene. When the detectives couldn't find a suspect with a matching footprint, the case went cold. Eighteen years after Gary was killed, a scared child provided a new lead into the case. So my son was back here to take a shower and, you know, looked up through this window

and said he saw a man. In a small house in a shower, and, you know, looked up through this window and said he saw a man. In a small house in Edmond, Oklahoma, Scott Eggleston has a rather large problem. A peeping Tom targeting his kids. You know, it's my house. It's my kids. I shouldn't have to worry about somebody looking in my windows. So at that point, I thought, well, we'll see what we can do. Eggleston believes the peeping Tom might return and sets up an infrared beam outside just underneath his children's bedroom windows. In four weeks' time, the peeper returns and

an alarm sounds in the Eggleston's house. There's this 6'2", 250-pound, 38-year-old man standing back here in the bushes, looking in the bathroom window. I notice he's all in black, he's barefooted. The minute I turn the light, he grabs the turtleneck and pulls it up, you know, over the bridge of his nose. The man takes off running down the street. Eggleston is right on his heels. I jump on his back and put my arms around his neck. I feel the only wrestling move I know on him. And we roll to the ground, and I'm still screaming bloody murder. Call the cops. Call the cops, I caught him. Minutes later, Edmond police arrive and arrest the peeper, a local ID'd as 39-year-old Jonathan Graham. Investigators believe they have captured nothing more than a nuisance,

a man who likes to look through people's windows. What they don't realize is they have much more, a man who not only looks through windows, but also climbs in them. So, we wanted to get an idea of everything that had actually taken place. On April 13th, 2004, Detective Steve Day visits the Eggleston home and walks the perimeter. The visit is a routine follow-up to the peeping Tom arrest eight days earlier. I walked around the corner. I got to about here, and what I saw was pretty thick bushes over that back window. And it was at that time that I first got a feeling, kind of an adrenaline feeling. I don't know how else to explain that. And I said, where are we? Realizing that this is the neighborhood where Gary L. Larson

was killed. Day's mind flashes back to a crime scene 18 years cold. A suspected peeping Tom, a torn screen, bare footprints etched in blood, and Gary Larson dead on the floor. The feeling that came across me made me think, that looked the same. It's Gary Dale Larson's house. Back at the station, Day pulls out a map and plots the two crimes. This is about the location where Scott Eggleston lived,

and then on this corner was where Gary Dellarson was killed. The detective runs a criminal history on Graham and learns of an arrest out of Texas. What piques Day's interest is what police found in the trunk of Graham's car. Handcuffs, double-edged knives, army knife. There were gloves, there were condoms, there were sexually related toys and items. In the business, we know that's a rape kit, And in this case, possibly a rape-murder kit. Dace wears out a warrant for Graham's home.

Among the items seized, the suspect's personal computer. I found some child pornography images, both still imagery as well as video files, and they totaled 850. Jeff Hancock digs further into Graham's hard drive and uncovers the piece of evidence police have been searching for. In the same area of the hard drive were the pictures from the Eggleston's residence. On April 23, 2004, Graham is booked on multiple counts, including child pornography.

His feet are inked, and the prints are sent to the crime lab where police hope to make their case for murder. This is the submitted evidence. This is an inked right foot. On April 23rd, criminalist Jim Stokes takes receipt of Graham's footprint and compares it to the bloody print pulled from the Larson murder. You have unique identifying characteristics such as ridge endings, bifurcations of ridges, dots,

and you look for these characteristics as well as their relationship to each other. Stokes isolates the right side of the foot, and in a side-by-side comparison, finds the similarities undeniable. In this general area right here, I was able to locate enough unique identifiers that I could say that this Leighton impression was made by the same source as this inked impression. This is the foot that so many people looked for for 18 years.

Two months after the print match, DNA testing confirms Graham is the donor of the semen recovered from Gary Larson's fiancée. On January 5th, he pleads guilty to murder, rape, and burglary in exchange for life in prison and a sit-down with police. There's quite a few people that have some questions that they'd like answered. I hope we can answer some of those questions here today. On February 18th, Detective Steve Day talks to Jonathan Graham about the night he murdered Gary Larson and raped his fiancée. He's quiet, very monotone, straightforward. There's not a lot of motion scene either way.

I just went out to a peep and went to that street, and it was just opportunistic. The lights were off, and that's when I decided that I was going to rape the girl because I thought she was by herself. Gary Larson heard a noise in the house. He was walking through the house at

3, 4 o'clock in the morning in his underwear half asleep. So what happened next? I went through one of the front windows and wandered around the house his underwear half asleep. There was no timeout, no wait just a minute, I'm not ready. And out of excitement, fear, shock, I pushed him against one of the walls. And bam, out of the darkness, he gets hit with a fairly good sized kid

and a knife right in the chest that was buried completely through his body. I didn't even know how many times I had stabbed him. I can't imagine anyone, how physically strong, how good a shape you're in, what a tough guy you are. You're not going to survive that. Gary Larson's life was gone in a heartbeat, taken without a moment for reflection, for pause, or for those who loved him to say goodbye.

I think for my whole life I'm going to be just devastated about it because of what might have been. You can't take it back. And you can't brush it under the carpet. You can't do away with it. It's always going to be with you. And it was with my parents to their dying day, to their dying breath. It was the last thing they asked. So now I can live my life,

but I will never forget what happened. Jonathan Graham is currently serving 15 life sentences related to juvenile pornography, two life sentences for the rape of Gary Larson's fiance, one life without parole sentence for Gary's murder, and 20 additional years for using video equipment for illegal and lewd purposes. He's 54 years old, and he will spend the rest of his life in prison. 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 Belder.

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 Podcasts 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 real crime.