Cold Case Files - The Nail File

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

After a grisly murder in a Roy Rogers restaurant ,the initial conclusion was a robbery gone wrong. !4 years later, those conclusions don’t sit right with investigators who develop a suspect and rely on DNA from a cigarette to get their conviction. SimpliSafe: Right now, get 20% off any new SimpliSafe system with Fast Protect Monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/COLDCASE There’s No Safe Like SimpliSafe. 

I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And together we host a weekly true crime podcast called The Prosecutors. In every episode, we bring our unique perspective as full-time prosecutors to the most famous and debated true crime mysteries. Whether it's Maura Murray, Scott Peterson, or the Delphi murders, Brett and I dig deep to bring you details you won't hear anywhere else. Our podcast is about more than just a story. We will walk you through the legal problems lurking behind every case, breaking down the complexities of the criminal justice system with humor and a personal touch. And it's not just true

crime. We bring the same training and approach we've learned as prosecutors to classic mysteries like the Dyatlov Pass incident and the ghost ship Mary Celeste. So if you're looking for a true crime podcast with a different point of view, The Prosecutors is the one for you. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. It's February 3rd, 1984 in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania. It's a former steel town turned trucker's haven. Cheap booze and even cheaper food highlight the main drag, a stretch of road called the Lincoln Highway,

better known to the locals as the Highway of Crime. After midnight, a single light burns inside a Roy Rogers restaurant on the corner of Oxford Valley Road and Route 1. Inside, assistant manager Terry Brooks is closing up for the night. The 25-year-old is engaged and hoping to make extra money for her summer wedding. Sometime after midnight, Brooks begins her final task, a letter to the general manager, Joe Hampton. The note is never finished. The next morning, Hampton arrives to find Brooks' car still parked outside. Inside, he finds Terry lying on the kitchen floor. About 12 feet in front of me on the floor was Terry's body, face up. There was a plastic bag over her head, a large kitchen knife sticking out of her neck.

Her eyes were open. And there was blood, obviously, a puddle of blood behind her head on the floor. Two hours later, forensic technician John Durante assesses the crime scene. The attack of this person was just out of the norm for a person to be beaten and strangled and stabbed and suffocated. It was just a very, very violent scene. Durante collects the plastic bag that had been placed over the victim's head, strands of hair found on the victim's body, and the knife. He tags all three items and sends them out for forensic testing. A few feet from Brooks's body, Durante notes the restaurant safe open and

empty. It appeared it had every signs of the safe being opened and the contents of the cash drawers. That was gone. Even the change was gone. So it had all the appearances of a robbery. Detectives suspect the Freezer Bandit, a gang targeting fast food restaurants in the area. In the past, the gang has always left their victims alive. Detectives believe they have just raised the bar to murder. Within weeks, forensics returns test results on the items of evidence found at the crime scene. The reports offer no new leads as to who might have killed Terry Brooks.

Over time, the case begins to fade away. The robberies stop, and a $5,000 reward for information goes unclaimed. Five months shy of her wedding day, Terry Brooks is buried wearing her engagement ring, and the investigation into her murder goes cold. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1998. Fourteen years after Terry Brooks' body was found, the city of Falls Township, as well as its police department, has grown. In January of that year, Detective Sergeant Wynn Cloud begins to work through a stack of cases, all of them cold. I started taking a look at some of the old cases we had unsolved, and the Brooks homicide was the first case that I looked at. And then I started looking at what we had as far as evidence

and we had quite a bit. In the summer of 1998, Cloud assigns the Brooks case to a young homicide detective. His name is Nelson Whitney. We took the 80-something pieces of evidence that we had from the crime scene in 84 to a crime lab. We utilized a criminalist by the name of Diane Marshall. Marshall focuses her attention

on items collected during autopsy of special interest fingernail clippings taken from the victim. Typically during an autopsy the medical examiner coroner will do fingernail clippings because most homicides are very violent and there's a possibility that during the struggle to preserve your life, one might scratch somebody to offend off the attacker. Marshall plays the long shot and is rewarded. Under one of the victim's fingernails, she discovers something that looks like skin. On the ninth fingernail, there's a little clump of something underneath the fingernail. So I wasn't sure what it was. I said, well, I'm going to take that separately, and I did. Marshall identifies the material as human tissue.

Then she breaks it down further and isolates an unknown male DNA profile. The criminalist next tries her luck with a strand of human hair plucked off Terry's clothes. To do DNA typing from a hair, you need to have a little piece of skin present. Because if you were to pull a hair out of your head, there's always that little hair follicle that comes out, the little skin tag. And that's what we do the DNA typing from. Marshall is able to extract a second DNA profile from the strand of hair. The profile is identical to the unknown profile found under the victim's fingernails. Finally, Marshall examines the

knife used to kill Brooks. She ignores the blade covered in the victim's blood and focuses on the handle, theorizing that the killer might have cut his own hand while holding the handle and stabbing his victim. I broke the rivets and sort of just took it apart in case any material ran down between the knife blade and the handle. And then I processed those samples for DNA. Inside the knife's handle, Marshall found the same unknown genetic profile found under the victim's fingernails and from hair found on the victim's body. That was very exciting for us. That was one of those moments where momentum started to build in the case. Now we have three key pieces of evidence that were the same unknown subject DNA profile.

Cold case detectives had no doubt. Find the owner of this genetic signature and they will have found their killer. This episode is sponsored by Greenlight. As your kids get older, some things about parenting get easier. You no longer have to change diapers at 3 a.m. and you can finally sleep in, sometimes.

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Greenlight for free. greenlight.com slash cold case. On February 4th, 1984, in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, Terry Brooks's body was discovered stabbed to death inside the Roy Rogers restaurant. Detectives believed it to be a robbery gone wrong, but could not develop any leads. 14 years later, cold case detectives had extracted an unknown DNA profile from evidence collected at the crime scene. Their task now is to attach a name and face to the genetic signature. Lori Markle is the chief deputy DA for Box County. There had been a significant amount of investigation related to the theory that this was a robbery homicide, but it did strike me when I began looking at the case that no one had investigated the possibility that Terry was killed by someone who might have had a motive to kill her other than simply wanting the money and the restaurant. And I felt that that possibility had to be pursued.

Inside the original homicide file, Markle and Detective Nelson Whitney discover a forgotten report. Developed by a behavioral science firm, the report offers an alternative theory for the Brooks slaying, as well as the name of a potential suspect. On the outskirts of Washington, D.C., resides a company known simply as the Academy Group. Founded by former Secret Service and FBI profilers Ken Baker and Roger DePue, the Academy Group consists mainly of retired behavioral scientists. In 1990, the group profiled Terry Brooks' killer for a private civil suit. Their conclusion, the murder itself was an intensely personal one. This is Ken Baker. The police had viewed this crime as a robbery. We didn't see that at all for several reasons. The money was missing, that's true, but the dominant things were the injuries to the victim and the stages of overkill.

Terry Brooks had been beaten, strangled, suffocated, and stabbed in the throat. The attack was so vicious that Brooks was nearly decapitated, and the knife itself became embedded in the victim's spine. This is Roger Depew. I don't think Ken nor myself had ever seen that many kinds of killing behaviors. You see here a tremendous fight that occurs and you see an interest in the perpetrator of making sure that she's dead. It's essential to the perpetrator of this crime that she's dead when he leaves. Well, what's the obvious reason for that? The obvious reason is that she could identify him.

And it was our opinion that the person that killed her knew her and had a lot of emotion to fend in the process of committing that very disorganized, unsophisticated murder. In 1990, the Academy Group's conclusions led them to interview those closest to Terry Brooks, included on that list, her fiancé, Scott Keefe. And his response to our reasons or our desire to talk to him, as I recall, he said, I don't care to get involved. And so I said, Scott, you are involved. You are, you were her fiancé. What do you mean you don't care to get involved?

How can you be more involved in a person's life than to be engaged to marry that person? Keith's behavior piqued the curiosity of DePue and Baker, who began to key in on body language. He was twisting on the rail of the stairs. He was wanting to go, he was trying to walk up the stairs with each question that we asked, and he was highly resistant to provide answers. And the answers Keith did provide appeared to be lies. Said she was left-handed when she was right-handed.

Said that she didn't smoke when, in fact, at the crime scene, there was a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and everybody else knew that she smoked. And when we left the scene, we got in the car, and as I recall, we looked at each other, and Raj looked at me, and I looked at him, and we said, something's not right. That was inappropriate affect to the purpose of the interview.

Taking their cue from the Academy Group, cold case detectives dig into Scott Keith's past with particular emphasis on his relationship to Terry Brooks. They had an odd relationship. Everybody that described them as a couple said that they were a mismatch. Some people indicated to us that they believe that Keefe may have been physically abusive toward Terry. Certainly that he was verbally abusive toward her at times. And witnesses indicated to us that they believed Terry was planning to end the relationship. Once we discovered that she was thinking of breaking it off, you know, that was an eye toward a motive for this man to want to kill her. Cold case detectives believe Terry Brooks tried to break up with Scott Keefe the night she was killed, a decision that may have cost her her life. He's number one on the list due to victimology. So the next logical step is, well, how do we see

if he matches our unknown subject DNA profile? Detectives don't have enough probable cause to demand a DNA sample from Keith. Criminalist Diane Marshall suggests an alternative strategy for obtaining a sample. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, if one puts their trash out on the curb, it's anyone's domain. It is no longer your property. So it's legal to pick up that trash and take it into the laboratory and analyze it. And we arranged with the trash hauling company in Scott's neighborhood in Warminster for me to be there and for us to collect his trash. At 930 in the morning a garbage truck rolls down Horseshoe Lane and stops in front of the home of Scott Keefe. Ten yards away detective Nelson

Whitney watches. I watch the trash collectors collect the trash from in front of the Keith residence. We then went around the block and transferred the trash from the back of the trash truck into the back of this pickup truck and then drove directly to the lab. Whitney follows the garbage to the crime lab in hopes that along with his trash, Scott Keith also threw out a usable sample of his DNA. We all know how important it is to keep our homes and families safe and secure. And that's why I'm excited to talk to you about SimpliSafe. SimpliSafe is advanced home security that puts you first.

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slash coldcase to claim this discount. That visit simplisafe.com slash coldcase to claim this discount. That's simplisafe.com slash coldcase. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. On October 12th at DrugScan Inc., Diane Marshall begins sifting through bags of Scott Keith's trash. Many of the bags had used cat litter in there, so I had to go sorting through the used cat litter

to find drinking straws and cigarette butts, things that might have been in someone's mouth or handled or whatever. And we had a lot of cigarettes in this case. 42 cigarettes, to be exact. Over 20 bearing the brand name Newport, Scott Keith's smoke of choice. Marshall suspects saliva traces left at the tip of the cigarette butt may hold Keith's DNA.

So I picked out the cigarettes and then I just took where the filter is, like a piece of paper that holds the actual filter unit onto the cigarette. You just cut a little square, about a quarter of an inch by a quarter of an inch. You remove that little piece of paper, put it into a test tube, and then extract the DNA from it. Once processed, it only takes a few moments for genetic markers to appear. Marshall then compares Keith's DNA with the killer's profile. The DNA type that I isolated from the Newport matched the DNA from underneath the one fingernail, from the knife, and from the hair. And that was like Christmas.

We knew at that point, and every investigator knows this at some point in their case, that he's on borrowed time. That we are going to get him, that we are not going to rest until we get him. We knew we had him at that point. It was just a matter of making sure we had him the right way. Fifteen years to the day after Terry Brooks' body was found, Scott Keith is brought in for questioning. At 5.45 p.m., Detective Whitney enters the conference room and pulls up a chair. Keith is playing the role of bereaved fiancé. As he talks, Nelson lays a DNA report on the table between them.

And I opened up the DNA report to the page that had the trash pull listed on it with the match from the Newport cigarettes to the crime scene evidence. And I saw him reading that kind of upside down as it laid open in front of me. And he slowly began to change his demeanor. Nelson seizes the moment and moves in to gather up a confession. I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, I know you can do this. I know you have the courage to do this. And he said, I didn't mean for it to happen, guy. She came at me first.

Six hours after he first sits down with Nelson Whitney, Scott Keith writes out a full confession to a murder and a memory he has lived with for 15 years. Keith writes, I went to the restaurant to pick her up. She told me she didn't want to be around me anymore, and she hated my guts. I turned around, and she was holding a kitchen knife.

I went toward her, and she swung the knife. I grabbed the knife, and she came after me. That's all I remember until I got in the car. I didn't want to hurt her. I loved her, but that's what happens. He blamed her. It was her fault. She broke up with him, and she came at him first.

We don't believe that to be true in any way, shape, or form. As cold case detectives press him for more details, Keith walks them through the crime, revealing that his true impulse was not one of self-defense, but murder. And he said at that point, he got down close to her face to make sure she was dead. You can certainly conclude from that and from his actions that he wanted to kill her. He got angry, and he wanted to kill her. And he did. On February 4th, 1984, Scott Keith took the life of the one person he promised to love and protect. Fifteen years later, cold case detectives fulfill a promise of their own as Keith pleads guilty to murdering his fiancée, Terry Brooks, and is sentenced to life in prison. At that point,

I felt like we had completed our task. Of course, the family was in the back of the courtroom and I was aware of their presence. I had been speaking to them on breaks and so forth. And at that point, I was kind of able to look over my shoulder and kind of give them that nod that it's over. We got him. He's convicted. I'll never get out. It might have been 15 years late, but we got him. Cold Case Files is hosted by Marissa Pinson, produced by Jeff DeRay, and distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series

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