Dateline NBC - The Devil Was Watching

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

When Tina Sandoval disappears, her parents and loved ones spend years searching for any signs of her. Law enforcement is convinced she is the victim of foul play, but the prosecution has a problem. How can they convince a jury that she was murdered if there is no body, no crime scene and no physical evidence? Meanwhile, Tina was keeping a dark secret, one that might lead to clues about what happened to her. Dennis Murphy reports. Originally aired on NBC on December 13, 2019.

Tonight on Dateline. Me and my sister were really scared. We felt a little broken. Why wouldn't she come back? She loved us. It gripped the community. Where is she? What happened to her? Who's responsible? We went into full

investigation immediately. Quite honestly, is it possible she is alive? He was watching her and following her. Deeply creepy stuff. Criminal acts that he'd recorded. Yes. watching her and following her. Deeply creepy stuff. Criminal acts that he'd recorded. Yes. That's his favorite thing, collecting women.

My heart just sunk. How many other times has he done this? How many other women has he done this to? A young nurse vanishes in a mystery stained with evil. He brought us to the back. And we all looked down. We just gasped. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with The Devil Was Watching.

The front range of Colorado, the vast grasslands east of the Rocky Mountains, offers plenty of places to conceal the body of a 97-pound woman. This woman, Tina Sandoval. The question gets set for the next two decades, where are you, Tina? And then the searches begin, yep. Where are you? Yep. And we searched, oh gosh, probably over 50 different locations. Officially, she was a missing person, had been for more than 20 years. But the authorities, like veteran detective Brad Goldschmidt, couldn't accept that she was a runaway looking for a fresh start. He'd spent more hours than he could count

searching gravel pits and drained ponds for missing Tina. So poor Tina was just a small little woman, and there's a lot of Colorado. I mean, just this one area here. Did you think we're never going to get this? Oh, I thought we'd never get her. They couldn't prove it, but it was the consensus of law enforcement that the young nurse was the victim of foul play. Her sister Susan didn't disagree. It just wasn't fair. You know, she would have been so good for the world. And she had an unshakable theory about who made her sister disappear.

Evil. He's just evil. Did you think, I now have Hannibal Lecter here? Yes. This guy is by far the worst criminal I've ever investigated. The problem with the missing Tina investigation was this. How could a prosecutor convince a jury she was murdered if you couldn't even prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was in fact dead?

Take it off. What were the usual ingredients you were missing here? We did not have a victim's body. We did not have any kind of a confession or admission by a suspect. We didn't have a crime scene. We didn't have any physical evidence. Carol, a nurse and co-worker of Tina's, spent weekends looking for her vanished friend, only to be startled awake later with a Stephen King-like vision. I would be like on a remote area and she was in a shallow grave in my dream and she would sit up kind of zombie style and she was trying to tell me where she was in a shallow grave in my dream. And she would sit up kind of zombie style and she was trying to tell me where she was buried.

And I always wondered, is that really her telling me, you know, or is this just my way I'm coping with this? Eventually there would be a grave, but it wasn't shallow and it wasn't out in the prairie. But there's so much to know before I tell you about that. Go back to a time in America when kids would play outside on summer nights till the streetlights came on. In Windsor, Colorado, you might have met the tournées. There are a lot of them.

Here's Annie. Nine kids, seven girls, two boys. And where were you in all of that? I'm the youngest, number nine. It was kind of like boot camp, you know, as soon as you get to a certain age, here's how you do laundry, here's how you clean. Dad Michael was an ex-Marine and a former city cop. Mom, Mary Ellen, worked at the campus bookstore in nearby Greeley. Annie's sister, older by 13 years, was Tina. Was she something like an older aunt to you or something? As much as a sister?

She was very much a sister to me. She cared for me. She played with me. She would play with us in our clubhouse. Being with family made her very happy. She loved us kids a lot. Tina was a little shy, but a spirited competitor in high school basketball and track. Finding suitable boyfriends was where she stumbled some, as Sister Susan recalls. Mom and Dad did not approve of two of her young studies.

Yeah, she kind of found the ones that needed help, and she thought she could help them. But college gave her footing, and studies in nursing gave her direction. That's where she met a guy taking classes to become a radiology technician. His name was John Sandoval. So what did your parents think of this John? I think my parents kind of liked him. He was a little older than Tina. And just like that, Tina was soon sharing an apartment in Greeley, Colorado with her new boyfriend, John. Kid sister Annie, about nine at the time, thought it was all very exciting.

I really looked up to their relationship a lot. I thought they were a good fit. I thought it was a fairy tale, you know. Annie loved going over to Tina and John's to play Chinese checkers and mess about with their new dog, Cody. Tina had broken out of her strict Mass on Sunday Catholic upbringing. What does your childhood mind make of your sister and her boyfriend? I don't think any of my other siblings had lived with somebody before, so it was a whole new experience. And there was going to be a wedding. And there was going to be a wedding, and we were in the wedding.

John and Tina had found a chapel up in the Rockies to exchange their vows. Very, very beautiful. We took a huge group picture out in front of the chapel afterwards. John toasted his bride at the reception. I've got the best woman in that library hospital. And our family is just getting bigger. And welcome to the family. Tina opened presents.

This is from Annie. All right, it's a book. And a little flower girl remembers tearing around the reception hall, squealing with all her sisters. It's a time to be gleeful and happy and enjoy the time. John's cousin and best man, Jesse, gave a little speech. I know they're going to do well for each other. And thanks again for everybody making it. Jesse, for some reason, set Annie's teeth on edge.

He was extremely quiet. Kind of made me nervous. I just had a feeling about him that I just kind of put my finger on. And so after the toasts and happy tears, the new Mr. and Mrs. were off to Cancun for a Mexican beach honeymoon. The snapshots show a happy couple, and he was thrilled to get a souvenir. Cancun t-shirts, and that was pretty cool

because we'd never been out of the country or even flown on a plane, and here's Tina going on a cool vacation, you know? So a suntan Tina returned to her nursing studies. Happy forever after? Not exactly. I didn't see it coming. Didn't notice anything off-kilter. And then suddenly we were moving Tina out into a new apartment. When we come back.

She had concerns, but she wasn't telling me. And me and my sister were really scared. Had Tina been keeping a secret, the mystery that would take 20 years to solve was just getting started. There was no body, there was no crime scene, there was no witnesses. Quite honestly, is it possible she is alive and she's living somewhere else? She was really in love in the beginning. What do you think the glue was there?

I think that the way he talked to her just so gently, and he just treasured her, and he made her feel really special, and she hadn't felt that way for a while. Like, she'd been treated like dirt. That can go a long, long way, right? Yeah. He called her kitten,

and just was constantly just like, you're so beautiful. You're so beautiful. I can't believe I'm with you. He might have been an eloquent sweet talker, but John seemed to have trouble holding a job. He never did finish his radiology class and found a string of part-time hourly jobs, working in a liquor store, a customer care call center. About two years into the marriage, Tina's sister Susan could sense that something was off. She was feeling like maybe John wasn't who she thought he was.

Did you scratch around on that? A little bit. She wasn't very forthcoming in the beginning. I knew they were having problems and she had concerns, but she wasn't telling me a lot of what she already knew at that point. Tina, it turned out, was keeping a secret about her marriage, a dark one, and she wasn't ready yet to disclose the humiliating truth, not even to her sister. Nursing school, meanwhile, was going very well. She dove into the field and found her passion, caring for other people. Tina soared.

Yeah, so Tina is right here. And where are you? I'm right here. One of Tina's fellow nursing students was Carol Shervin. She was as scared to meet her first patient as Tina was confident. She literally pushed me in the door. You can do it? She said, can do it and she physically pushed me into the patient's room. So I think when it came to nursing she was a natural. In command? Confident? Confident. Not bossy at any way but just she knew what she was doing. But Carol knew almost nothing about Tina's life away from nursing school. The shy teenager had become the nose-in-the-book student and didn't socialize with her classmates. Sister Susan had married by then, too, and she and her husband ended up getting an apartment just down the street from John and Tina.

So we could easily walk back and forth and see each other. And I had my daughter at that time, and she was a toddler, and she, my sister loved children. Susan would take her little girl to see Aunt Tina for coffees that became heart-to-hearts. Susan confided that she was unhappy in her marriage, just as Tina was restless in hers. So she was actually really encouraging me to get out of my marriage. And so she really wanted to help me. And then she kind of made the leap before I did and started filing the divorce paperwork and moving out into her own place.

By summer's end 1995, Tina and John were done. When it cracked, what was the thing? I think it had been going on for quite some time before I knew about it. From what she told me later, she was confronting him about things that she was finding out about him. He's not a good person. Kid sister Annie was clueless about why Tina and John, her almost Prince Charming, were splitting up. But there she was helping to lug boxes from the old place to the new apartment. And John was there.

He helped as well. And I asked him, I said, well, why is Tina moving out? What's going on? And he said, oh, don't worry about it. We just need a little bit of space. Don't worry, we'll be back together soon. But John Sandoval soon plummeted from Annie's list of admired men because of something that happened just after they'd finished getting Tina moved. He took me and my sister back to town, and he got us some ice cream cones and took us to the lake, and then he started driving down the boat dock into the lake. The boat launch, the ramp?

Yes. In the vehicle? Yes. And me and my sister were really scared. We didn't know what he was doing. Doing it as a goof? It was a different side of him I'd never seen. He seemed to be getting joy out of our terror.

And the water's coming up off of the hubcaps? Yeah. And we just didn't up over the hubcaps? Yeah. And we just didn't know what was going to happen. And then he stopped and backed up and took us home. And that was it. Did he become a category of a different person after that to you? Yeah. Yeah.

Sean, you idolized wasn't necessarily the same guy? Yeah. He scared us. Scary and John Sandoval were just getting up to speed. Coming up. My jaw drops and I'm like, what? A separation and an obsession. She would look out over her balcony.

She said his car would be there for hours. He was letting her know that he was watching her and following her. When Dateline Continues. In the spring of 1995, the University of Northern Colorado students about to get their Bachelor of Science in Nursing gathered on the lawn for a group photo. I'm looking and looking and looking for Tina, and of course, there she is. Just her head, she's in the back, making sure everybody else gets seen, I think. Does that speak to the shy Tina that we hear about? I think, I don't even know if it's a shyness,

but she's definitely going to put everyone else in the spotlight before she takes it. But the upcoming summer was Tina's time to step out into the lights for maybe the first time in her life. The shy young woman was emerging from her cocoon. Her colleague, Carol Shervin, noticed. I think she finally started to become age-appropriate, to be honest. I mean, she just seemed like she was so much happier, more free. And Carol quickly regarded Tina as the real deal when it came to nursing.

Tina was the best. I mean, if there was a call light going off, she's the first to pop up and go get it. And she, you know, her patients liked her. Everyone liked Tina. She was fantastic. It had been a momentous year for Tina. She'd gotten her degree, left her marriage, and now had successfully kicked off her career in nursing. She was a 23-year-old woman about to be divorced and living alone in a cool apartment that was all hers. I think it was almost just like a huge weight had come off her shoulder. She seemed to smile

more, I think, and just open up kind of like a butterfly. Old Tina rarely socialized with her classmates, but with Carol's encouragement, she now stepped out and let down her hair. She finally wanted to go have fun and join her friends, and it was so nice to see her open up and tell more about her life. And probably the most profound thing that happened the night we went out, she came to my apartment to get ready. While she was at my house, I said, you know, tell me more about John. And she said, well, John has a disease.

Disease? And I said that too. Well, what do you mean? And she said, well, he has voyeurism. And I didn't know what that meant at the time. I said, well, what's that? And she said, well, you know, he'll see a pretty girl at the grocery store, and he'll kind of feel compelled to just follow her home,

and he might watch her for two or three days. And, you know, she said it just super calm like that. As though this is a normal kind of story to tell? Right, and my jaw drops and I'm like, what? That's like a stalker. She said, no, no, no, you don't understand. It's an illness. He can't help it. A disease of stalking?

In nursing school, we learn about all the personality disorders. I don't ever remember learning that it was any kind of an illness. So my husband is a guy who follows women around. Right. Carol let the stunning remarks slide as she and Tina went to a club that night and their friendship was born. The topic of her about-to-be-ex's so-called disease came up again. I said, so do you think that John ever watches you? And she said, yeah, same thing, real calm about it.

And I said, you know, she said she would look out over her balcony. She said his car would be there for hours just watching. His car? His car. They're separated, but he's checking her out. He's stalking her. Right. Did that creep her out?

You know, she said it matter-of-factly. She didn't seem afraid at the time. Once she'd made the decision to leave, Tina told the same stories to her sister Susan. Tina finally confided that she had married a peeping Tom. He'd leave their bed in the middle of the night, she said, to crawl back yards and sometimes bring back trophies, women's underwear. But Tina also confided something else. She was moving on from John, drawing closer to old friends, including John's cousin Jesse, the silent best man at their wedding.

Jesse in particular, the cousin, did he become more of a date? Was he an intimate friend of hers, do you think? You know, I never knew for sure. I knew they were talking that he would come over to her apartment sometimes. Because you wonder if it kindled jealousy. Right, right. But she was also talking to other people, like my older sister's friend Kevin was another person that she was talking to who would also come and check on her, and they would sometimes go out and do things together. So definitely not settling in on anybody in particular. And he was letting her know that he was watching her and following her. He even had jumped onto the deck of her apartment from the staircase that led up to her front door

and was watching her in there and told her everything he saw. So where was John as this summer rolled on? He was working at a local call center. He'd rented a house in downtown Greeley and sublet the basement to his Aunt Gabby. But he was telling friends and family that he was leaving Greeley, getting out of Dodge for a while. But first, there was some final divorce business to settle with Tina. Coming up. She said, well, I'm working the night shift tonight and I'm going to be meeting John in the morning. And I told her I was really concerned. Tina's sister had good reason to be worried. My mom said we need to go to the police station. We went into full investigation immediately. On October 19, 1995, Tina clocked into the overnight nursing shift at

the oncology unit, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. That last night, what do you remember about it? I think that was one of those crazy busy nights, for me at least, that we talked about because I wasn't part of the conversation that I know she had with some of the other nurses. The conversation. Tina was distracted that night because, as she told her fellow nurses, when she got off shift in the morning, she was going to have a big conversation with John at his house about bringing the divorce to a close. Final money issues, final legal paperwork. She was apprehensive that night. She was. She had told a couple of the other nurses that she was nervous about meeting with John. And, you know, I know one of them said,

I think you should go to a public place if you're nervous about meeting with him. Carol ran into Tina that morning at the end of her shift, a moment she'll never forget. I think once somebody dies or disappears, you always remember your last time that you saw them. What is yours? So she was, there's a long corridor that we worked on, and whichever nurse it was that was next to me had said, well, good luck, you know, and she said, thank you, you know, whatever. And then she turned and in my mind, it's kind of almost like a slow motion turn. She always had this beautiful blonde ponytail and her ponytail followed her around and she walked out the door. Last living memory.

Earlier, Tina had called her sister Susan about that meeting with John. How did she frame it? What was going to happen? She said, well, I'm working the night shift tonight, and I'm going to be meeting John in the morning. And I told her I was really concerned because of everything that he'd been doing about following her and acting up with the other women again. I just was really worried. And I did ask her if she could take someone. She asked me to go, and I couldn't. Susan couldn't shake her own growing fears about the meeting.

And since she couldn't be there, she set up a precautionary plan. What did you tell her? I told her she needed to call me when she was done. When I got off work, around the lunch hour, I wanted to hear from her and know that she was okay. And did she understand why you were saying that? Yes. Yeah. And she promised me she would. So it's call me at noon when this is over. Right. And the phone doesn't ring. Right. Susan became more apprehensive as the afternoon dragged on and still nothing heard from Tina. When do you get worried? I was pretty worried by the time

I was done with my first appointment, and I still hadn't heard from her. After the second appointment, I was just screaming and said, like, I need to just do something. And so, listening to that urgent voice, she called her mother and asked that she drive by both Tina's and John's homes to see if their cars were there. They weren't. Tina's mother did stop at John's place, which he was sharing with his Aunt Gabby. The aunt said she didn't know where John or Tina had gone. But before leaving, Tina's mom spotted something that set off alarm bells. She saw Tina's jacket on the kitchen chair.

And she said, here, take the jacket. And my mom had just bought that jacket for Tina maybe two weeks before. So why would she be separated from her jacket? That made no sense. Exactly. Susan and her mother knew the pieces just weren't adding up. Disappearing was not like their Tina. And so we, my mom said, we need to go to the police station. A shaken mother and daughter trooped down to the Greeley Police Department and were introduced to two figures, Detectives Keith Olson and later Brad Goldschmidt, two cops who would become part of their family history over the next 20 years. How do you guys find out something has happened to a woman named Tina? Tina's mother and her sister came into the police department and they contacted the desk

officer and reported that their daughter's missing and they believe something may have happened to her. And they named their daughter's estranged husband as John Sandoval. And when you heard that name? Well, we had a lengthy history of John Sandoval. We knew that he was a pervert. Greeley cops knew Sandoval had run-ins with the law dating back to the 1980s, including convictions for harassment and burglary. So they weren't about to wait to see if Tina turned up. John Sandoval's connection to this case set off the alarms. I mean, we went into full investigation immediately.

Where was Sandoval at this very moment? Where was his vehicle? And where, oh where, was Tina? Yep. Where was Sandoval at this very moment? Where was his vehicle? And where, oh, where was Tina? Coming up. He says, Brad, you've got to come over here and see this. John Sandoval's car with disturbing evidence inside. The hunt is on.

I said, step aside. We're coming in. When Dateline continues. Tina's family had reported her missing. Greeley, Colorado detectives were looking for her estranged husband, John Sandoval. And he is a guy known to authorities, as they say. Yes, for many years. I think at that time, I'd probably been at Greeley Police Department for 15 years, and I'd been dealing with him from the first year I started there. Detective Keith Olson says Sandoval

was regarded as Greeley's usual suspect when it came to peeping Tom complaints. But was he capable of abduction or even murder? That was the question on the detectives' minds as they went out looking for him at 10 that night. Knocked on the door and it was answered by John's aunt, Aunt Gabriella. And she led us into the house and then asked us to leave. So we left. She said that she hadn't seen John since like 6.30 that evening. So it was off to Tina's for a check of the apartment she'd moved into after leaving John. What do you find? Anything in disarray? Well, it's all the evidence is matching what we know.

She got off of work to go meet with John on a pre-scheduled appointment. So she's changed out of her work clothes, I guess. Her nursing uniform, her nurse's blouse with the name tag, ID tag still attached, is lying on the ground with the white uniform pants. But no drawers are open, no jewelry boxes messed with, nothing like that, huh? Correct, correct. So this tells you whatever happened didn't really happen here. Right. Other than she came home. Yep, she came home, quickly changed, and went to meet with John. A critical question early on was, where's Tina's car? We started looking, checking the neighborhood for likely spots, parking lots of apartment complexes, and we found her car right

away. It had been abandoned by an apartment parking lot. Through the glass inspection, you seen anything? Yeah, her wallet was inside the car, which was important to us. Not good at all. Not good. It was well after midnight and still no sign of Tina. Back at police headquarters, Detective Brad Goldschmidt was at his desk doing a little research on John Sandoval. And I happened to come across a report that had been made about four weeks earlier than this date we're on.

And a woman had come home and knew John Sandoval, just knew him through a roommate that used to live with her. The detective discovered John had recently been busted for trespassing in a former co-worker's townhouse. The citation mentioned a pair of men's shoes left outside the slider door. And she walks up into her bedroom, and who does she see in hiding in her closet is a shoeless John Sandoval. And she confronts him, you know, what the hell are you doing here? And he said, oh, well, I came to see so-and-so who used to live here. Well, you know he's dead. She doesn't live here anymore. You know, get the hell out of my house. Sometimes you get lucky even with mistakes.

The officer who'd taken the offense report had written it up as a misdemeanor. He was incorrect. Sandoval had allegedly committed a felony crime, and it carried serious prison time upon conviction. Now Goldschmidt could arrest Sandoval for that outstanding crime, if only he could find him. The cops decided to stake out a surveillance officer in an unmarked car outside Sandoval's home. Bingo. At 4.45 a.m., Officer Joy Hemby radioed in.

And she goes, the car just pulled up, a male subject just got out, and he's walking into the house carrying a white bag. So Clay Buckingham and I jump in our cars and we fly out to John's house. It took us four minutes to get there. I knock on the door and Aunt Gabby comes to the door. And I said, hey, I know John just got here. I need to talk to him right now. She goes, well, he's in the shower. And I was like, oh my God, he's in the shower already. There goes all your trace evidence. Any trace evidence that he had on him is being washed down the drain right now. And I go, okay.

And then Clay had walked over to John's car, and he shined this flashlight in the car. And he says, Brad, you've got to come over here and see this. Inside the hatchback, they could see a wet shovel, a pail, some rope, and a flashlight attached to a lanyard. So I run back to the house. I pound on the door again. Aunt Gabby comes to the door, and I said, hey, I need to talk to John right now. Get him out of the shower.

She walks back. The house is dark. There's only a dim light on in the kitchen, and I'm standing by the back door, and I see a figure that I assumed to be a man walk past Gabby into the different part of the house. She comes back to the door and she says, oh, I'm sorry. I made a mistake. John's not here after all. He's not there. Yeah. She lied to me. Law enforcement careers are sometimes made and lost in fleeting moments of decision. This was one for Detective Brad Goldschmidt.

Your dashboard is warning you, I got to get a search warrant. I got to get a search warrant. I want to get in, but I need a warrant. I'm weighing all this stuff in my head, and I'm thinking, here's what I know. Tina was last seen there. John was gone. He came back in the middle of the night. There was a wet shovel in his car. Tina's either dead or in really bad trouble.

And if I don't go in and collect some evidence now, that may lead us to her. If she's still alive, she's going to be dead soon. So I made the decision that we're going into the house and I grabbed Clay Buckingham and another officer who had arrived on scene. That pre-dawn decision would change the course of the investigation. And I said, step aside, Gabby, we're coming in. And she's trying to stop me and I push my way in. I get inside, I announce, John Sandoval, Greedy Police, I need to talk to you right now. We're coming in. And as I get back to the hallway, I hear this scraping on. It sounded like kicking or scraping on a wall. So we jump in. We burst into the bedroom, and the windows open, and the

drapes are flapping. So John bailed out the window. He's out the window. He's out the window. So the three of us go running outside. Fortunately, the officer who had been surveilling the house positioned herself in the part of the house that we weren't going to be in when we made our entry. And we run outside, and she's got John Sandoval on his knees at gunpoint. Partially clothed. He's wearing... Late October. Late October. It's like 20 degrees outside. He's wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans. And yet, what are you going to charge him with, right? He's going to stand up and say, fellas, what's this all about, right?

We cuff him outside, walk him into the house, and Clay Buckingham and I look at each other, and Clay is like, what are we going to charge him with, Brad? Remember, Detective Goldschmidt had done some research a few hours before and come upon that police officer's charging error. And now he would play that card. Well, Clay didn't know about what I had been doing.

He was out searching for vehicles and so forth. And I said, trespass. You had that unserved warrant in your back pocket, huh? I had that unserved charge in my back pocket. So I just, and Clay had no idea. Well, trespass, okay, whatever. So I just said, trespass, you're under arrest for trespass.

So John Sandoval was on his way to a police interview room. It wasn't about trespassing. It was all about Tina and he was giving up nothing. Coming up. And why would I know where she's at? John Sandoval plays it cool and concern plagues the detectives.

We're running out of tips and leads. I really did feel like we were never going to find Tina Sandoval. John. How you doing? Huh? Do you want to know why I'm here? Why don't you just call my lawyer? I promised you that I'll let you know as soon as I can. I don't know enough about that kind of stuff to tell you anything, okay?

John Sandoval was down at the Greeley Police Station after being arrested on a trespassing charge. But cops really wanted to talk to him about his missing wife, Tina. You're being held right now for investigation of a missing person. Your estranged wife. And why would I know where she's at? He was having none of it, claiming he'd injured himself when he jumped out the window to avoid arrest.

I'd like to see the doctor. When is that going to happen? They don't tell me anything, okay? And he wasn't a cooperative witness during this interview, right? Well, John is never a cooperative witness. John always says, I'm not talking to you. I got nothing to say. He knows the drill, huh?

What am I here for? You know, what am I here for? What am I here for? Well, and I'm not going to cooperate either. What the hell's wrong with you? You know, you know, you're arresting, you... Yeah, you're under arrest, all right? Okay, you got me tied up.

Why? Why? Why? John, you know why, okay? I don't know why. Why would I be asking you why? If I knew why... okay? I don't know why. Why would I f***ing be asking you why if I knew why? This facility has a phone I take. I'd like to call my lawyer.

Detectives kept Sandoval in jail on that trespassing charge, but he lawyered up. Now Olsen and Goldschmidt were left on their own to pose the question, where was Tina? You still can't discount that she has a perverted husband, and maybe she just left, you know?, initially those are thoughts you have to consider. Baja here I come. Yeah, yeah, I'm out of town. It's hard to disprove that she didn't do that. It's hard to disprove. But you know we sent people down to the bus stop. Did

you see this woman the other day? Nope, didn't see her. Check airline records. Could she have bought a plane ticket and gone one way somewhere. Then as the days went on, the theory that she may have just disappeared became less likely. Of course, they considered other possible suspects, like Sandoval's cousin, Jesse, best man at the wedding, the guy who gave Tina's sister the creeps. Tina was seeing Jesse after her split with John, and there was another guy at the medical center who showed an interest in her. We vetted the boyfriends. We only found the two, Jesse and the person she worked with.

Alibied them. They didn't know anything about what she had planned. Could it have been the drifter who walked up from the bus station? Possible. You don't want to exclude any alternative suspects, but when you're looking for any alternative suspects and all the evidence goes right back to John, how do you discount that? If you hear hoofbeats, don't think zebras. Right, right. Go for the obvious. Yep, yep. And the evidence was piling up on Sandoval. When investigators searched his house along

with his wet, sweated-out clothes... We find three credit cards belonging to Tina Sandoval in John's house. In Sandoval's car, something they couldn't explain. Along with that bucket, the wet shovel, and the flashlight on a lanyard, they found something odd. A carpenter's level, 48-inch carpenter's level, that we never understood at that time. Why does he have this carpenter's level? Despite all their evidence,

the Weld County DA told detectives that it wasn't enough. We felt we had a lot of evidence, circumstantial, but a lot of damning evidence against John. But our district attorney at the time said, you don't have a body, you don't have a crime scene, you don't have statements, you don't have a confession. So if you guys don't come up with a body, you know, we're not going to do anything with this case. Now it seemed everyone in Greeley was united in one purpose, finding Tina. Her sister Susan remembers. Everyone from this area was really impacted by what happened to her. It was really scary. Like it's that type of thing that you hear on national news, but it's like, no, not here.

And so, together with the tight-knit community, throngs of people began looking for missing Tina. We started searching for her. Just, we didn't know where to go, but we just started searching. Like, you just start driving around in the country and looking and calling her name out. Up one road and down another? Yeah, just, like, calling her name, calling her name, and just going all over. Tina's co-workers, like Carol Shervin, were out on those searches too. I think I went on at least three or four. I don't know how many weeks or however long it went on.

I used to have nightmares that whole time. I can't even imagine how the family dealt with this. Detective Brad Goldschmidt remembers driving the county roads day after day with Tina's dad, Mike Tourne, beside him, an ex-cop himself. I mean, I spent hours with Mike Tourne in my car. He and I drive around in the county. How did her dad take it? Oh, not good. No, he's a big, strong, proud man. And he was in my car crying on many occasions. And you two were looking for the remains of his daughter. Hard to see.

Yeah, hard to see. Hard for him to deal with. And there's nothing I could have done to make it better. Detectives followed every tip, every lead, went down every rabbit hole. Like this reservoir where Sandoval used to take target practice. So we searched this area, among many other places places and we're running out of, you know, tips and leads. And, you know, I really did feel like we were never going to find Tina Sandoval. Back at the hospital where Tina worked, they kept Hope alive as long as they could. You know, we had a book and if you had an ex, you know, that day

you worked. And I think it was two or three months before finally someone said, I guess we should take her name off the book. Five months passed. John Sandoval was saying nothing about Tina, but he was still facing that criminal trespass charge. And John just pled guilty to it. I think he just wanted to get on Dodge. He ought to really, even if it's a few years in prison.

The judge sentenced Sandoval to six years. Tina's case went ice cold, but Detectives Goldschmidt and Olson never gave up and couldn't let go. A murder case is a roller coaster ride. There are so many highs and so many lows, and the highs can be really high and the lows can be really low.

You don't leave it at the office? No, no. The entire city of Greeley seemed to feel Tina's loss. What did you learn about your hometown? There's a lot of good people. We had a lot of people come help us search. They took care of my family. They took care of my parents when we were kind of all falling apart. As for John Sandoval, well, he was a model prisoner out on parole in just over four years and now living in Las Vegas.

A man with a lengthy history of peeping and trespassing had relocated himself to perhaps the most carnal city in America. Coming up, the case gets a new team with a bold new plan. You guys rolled the dice here. We really did. You're jumping off the high diving board together. That's right. And later, another woman with a harrowing story. I would try to drive quickly to my house,

get in the garage, shut the door, not knowing if he had found my house. I didn't know if he just wanted to shoot me or take me, kidnap me, what? When Dateline continues. I didn't know if he just wanted to shoot me or take me, kidnap me. What? When Dateline continues. The missing sister, missing daughter, was a hole in their universe that the Tournay family simply couldn't repair. We felt a little broken.

There's a little sadness. You feel a little guilt and joy because that person isn't there to experience it with you. It really changed us. My parents were just constantly trying to resolve this, trying to find her. For years, Susan says her parents spent weekends driving the prairie, searching for any sign of their lost daughter, often with their youngest girls in tow. That's their childhood memories, looking for their missing sister. Looking for their missing sister and taking care of themselves because my parents were just overwhelmed with the situation.

The truth was stark. Tina wasn't just missing. No one was looking for a better alternative by that point. I think there was a few that, of course, you're hoping that you can just be mad at her and that she just ran away, but they knew. In 2002, seven years after her disappearance, Tina's family had her declared legally dead. It didn't get us the closure that we needed to have, I feel like, without actually knowing what happened to her. What happened to her and where is she? Yeah, exactly.

Two questions you couldn't get answers to. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Tina's friends and family searched these candy roads for years, all in vain. The investigation continued and the police still had their prime suspect. But without a body, the district attorney ruled that the circumstantial case simply wasn't jury ready. Still, Greeley's detectives wouldn't let go. For them, Tina's disappearance had always felt like a homicide,

even though their prime suspect had left Colorado for Las Vegas. With a new chapter of his life, huh? But we always knew where he was. Oh, you had eyes on him. We never forgot about him. Never. Always wanted to nail him for Tina's murder. Then in 2009, opportunity arrived.

A new man was running for district attorney. Keith and I went and met with him during his campaign for DA. He said, would you consider prosecuting this case? And he said? He said. He said he will. I will certainly give you your due time to present it. He was elected.

Now Olson and Goldschmidt, with their growing responsibilities in the PD, needed to hand their old case files off to a fresh detective. They needed someone who could build a murder case without a body that was strong enough for the new DA to prosecute. So I take Mike Pearl, who's a gang unit detective, I take him out of the gang unit. Why him, Brad? My attention to detail pales in comparison to Mike Prill.

He is just way up here when it comes to that. Enter Desert Storm deployed U.S. Army vet Detective Mike Prill. Both of them came to me and said, look, we want to entrust this case over to you. This was something they had lived since 95 up to 2009. So it was quite the honor for me. What's the order of battle? How do you start to dive into it? The best way to begin is just to organize it. Make sure that each piece of evidence collected is still in evidence. Was it? It was. It's been a long time. It was. And as he sorted through each file, in boxes upon boxes, his heart sank a little. The case had all the problems that made the previous DA cautious.

There was no body. There was no crime scene. There was no witnesses. There was no confession. And the cynical maxim in your business is no body, no crime. Sometimes, right. I mean, that's... That's a tough hill to climb. That's what kind of stalls these investigations at times when there's no body. Quite honestly, is it possible she is alive and she's living somewhere else? He teamed with then-assistant prosecutor Michael Rourke. Task number one, prove that Tina was dead.

We've got to be able to show a jury that it's not her just simply running away from a domestic violence relationship and running off to the middle of Montana and hiding out in the woods. As the investigation progressed over that year in 2009, it became irrefutable. You know, there was no renewal on her driver's license, no additional taxes filed. No activity on her credit cards or bank account since October 1995. Every year that goes by, every month that goes by, is a benefit to us because we can show to the jury any person, any reasonable person, can't stay off the radar screen that long. So you really couldn't prosecute the case,

given what you had in, say, 1996, the year after she's gone? Oh, no. I think that we had, in 2009 and 2010, the benefit of time. Still, they had to convince the DA to pursue a murder charge without a victim's body. The DA's office was aggressive, and they made the ultimate decision to go forward knowing... So you got your green light, that was it? From the DA. Next, they had to make their case to a judge to get an arrest warrant for John Sandoval. The detectives' team drafted a nine-page

document detailing the anxious last hours of Tina's life, finding her jacket at his place, the wet shovel in his car, him diving out the window, eluding the cops. I'm thinking of that brilliant affidavit that you guys pulled together, which reads like a crime thriller. Sure. We wanted this to be a very factual reading of exactly what we believed happened. When you get done, you think, we know John Sandoval committed this homicide. Then again, the judge might read the words missing person in the affidavit

and decide there was, in fact, no murder, no crime at all. You guys rolled the dice here. We really did. Mike Prill remembers waiting as the judge read through the document. So now I have that grueling experience of sitting in the hallway, just drumming my fingers, wondering what he's thinking. He stepped out at one point and asked me one question, and that was why did the DA's office reject this years before? I think his fear in by asking that

question was, has some other judge looked at this, rejected it, and now you brought it to me? Are you judge shopping here? Are we judge shopping? Good question. What'd you say? Well, I reassured him that we had never presented this case ever to the DA's office. When Detective Pearl answered that question, the judge immediately got out his pen, signed the arrest warrant. So all three, Detective Judge and you, you're jumping off the high diving board together. That's right.

More than a decade after Tina's disappearance, there was finally a breakthrough in the case. Greeley was coming for John Sandoval. Coming up, a stunning discovery inside Sandoval's home. I found well over 100 VHS tapes and another 70 or so mini VHS tapes. Secret videos, striking evidence. Take a guess. How many other victims do you think there were? Hundreds. Hundreds. Someone like John doesn't do this just once and never again. He's demonstrating his depravity while he's free and not in custody for murder.

It had been a long time in coming. John Sandoval's name on a murder arrest warrant. Did Sandoval out in Las Vegas know the heat was on him? No. No. Except that Mike Prill would not be the one to make the arrest. That honor would fall to Keith Olson and Brad Goldschmidt, the original detectives on the case. I was in charge of the detective bureau,

and I just said, hey, Keith and I are going to Vegas to get him. No questions about it, right? Yeah, yeah. I used to say, okay, fine. The sergeant on the Las Vegas Metro Police Department is a guy that used to work with us. We told Steve we're coming out to arrest John Sandoval, and he says, great, I'll get a team together for you guys. The local NBC affiliate, KSNV-TV,

recorded the moment police snapped the cuffs on John Sandoval. Want to talk about what happened to your wife 14 years ago? Do you get her away from you? John's standing there like this up against the car. And I walk up to him on his right and he looks over at me and he does a double take. And then he immediately goes like this. Like, if I can't see you, you can't see me, right? So I walk up to John.

I said, hey, John, remember us? He goes, oh, no. I said, well, Brad Goldschmidt, Keith Olsen, Greeley PD, you're under arrest for first-degree murder of Christina Sandoval. Did you think you'd ever say those words? I didn't think I was ever going to be able to say those words. Tina's little sister, Annie, got the news from her parents. I was happy because I thought people had forgotten, and I didn't know if we'd ever get justice for Tina. Now it was back

to work for Detective Prill. I realized, as I often do, once an arrest is made, the investigation really begins anew. As luck would have it, Prill quickly learned that John Sandoval was making calls on the jailhouse phone as he awaited extradition to Colorado. Who's he talking to? Anyone interesting? Yes, a guy named Max Motta. Who's he? At the time, I had no idea. It turned out Max, a softball and barbecue buddy, had befriended John years earlier. So Prill flew out to meet the man who said John liked to talk about his missing wife, Tina. Max said that in his conversations with John, John related that his wife had run out on him, kind of left him for a wildlife, joined a biker gang,

fell into drugs, was, you know, running amok across the nation. She left me, but she's still alive. She's out there. It's always been that theory that perhaps Tina did run off, but it's not jiving with what I believe. So a search warrant was extremely important to this investigation to get into his house and get whatever evidence that may be in the home proving Tina was alive, if that's true. And he did just that.

Once inside John's house, he saw it. An eerie shrine of sorts to Tina. Two different pictures of Tina in a little black dress. He had both of those hanging on his wall. And so I wanted that type of stuff collected, and we did. We photographed it, collected the photos. What he didn't find was any proof that Tina was still alive. No recent photos or letters from that

long road trip John claimed she was on. But Mike did uncover something else. I also found well over 100 VHS tapes and another 70 or so mini VHS tapes. John Sandoval, it seemed, had been a busy amateur videographer during his years in Vegas, putting pictures to a stalking and peeping M.O. he practiced so well. Everything old was new again, huh? He was a drunk in a liquor store for those many years he lived out there. Prill found the homemade spy cam videos disgusting. Hundreds, if not thousands of hours that I would end up spending reviewing, shooting up the skirts of thousands of women all up and down the Las Vegas Strip from 2000 to 2009.

One of those tapes showed a pervert's view of New Year's 2007 on the Strip. Disembodied legs, high heels, and short skirts. Inside a casino, a tipsy woman is recorded stumbling and falling on the way to her room. We've altered her voice to protect her identity. You guys, I need to go home. She doesn't know she's being followed by a guy with a bag cam. Are you okay? Have a good night? Yeah. Here we go, party people.

She didn't latch the door. Lights are off in the room. Now he's taking the camera out. It's in his hand. He creeps into this dark room with the infrared light activated on his camcorder. Proves that there's four women in this room, two girls in each bed. Concealed in the darkness of the hotel room, he rolls tape for 17 minutes. Films all of them and then selects his blonde that's nearest the door. Concealed in the darkness of the hotel room, he rolls tape for 17 minutes.

Films all of them and then selects his blonde that's nearest the door, slowly removes the sheets and blankets from her as she sleeps. Then he sexually assaults the sleeping woman. Neither the victim nor any of the other women in that hotel room stir. And there's something else the camera caught that night, a glimpse of the alleged assailant's face. According to the detective, there is no doubt it was none other than John Sandoval. Because none of the women ever reported the incident, Sandoval has never been charged with anything relating to the video. Take a guess. How many other victims do you think there were?

Hundreds. Hundreds. Someone like John doesn't do this just once and never again. I mean, he's demonstrating his depravity while he's free and not in custody for murder. That didn't mean all his alleged victims had stayed quiet over the years. Some had come forward only to have their stories forgotten. But Mike Rill knows how to dig into the past. Coming up. I got into my car and he followed me. Another terrifying encounter with John Sandoval. My heart just sunk.

I just knew he had finally done something really bad. I just felt like I had been telling people for so long that he was the devil. When Dateline continues. The tapes Detective Prill found in Sandoval's Vegas home were deeply disturbing. But they weren't going to help him build a murder case. So he started looking deeper into Sandoval's past, pre-1995. He didn't have to go very far before discovering the case of Lori Buckland. I noticed that there was a man in a car, parked in the lines of cars. In 1992, three years before Tina vanished,

Lori was working at a state farm office in nearby Evans, Colorado. She says a strange man started showing up on a regular basis in the employee lot. I got into my car and went out the exit, and he followed me. There would be times that I would try to drive quickly to my house, get in the garage, shut the door, not knowing if he had found my house. State Farm quickly learned his name, John Sandoval. At that point, he was newly married to Tina. Yet, here he was cruising a parking lot looking at another woman.

State Farm ordered him to stay away. He didn't. I saw John up on this overpass. He was parked there. He was holding something, I assumed binoculars, looking this way. Another time, she said, he followed as she drove to a party. I didn't know if he just wanted to shoot me or take me, kidnap me. What?

For three years it went on, Sandoval terrorizing Lori Buckland. At one point he was arrested and pleaded no contest to misdemeanor harassment. To this day, she says, she doesn't know why he singled her out. Nobody really listened. They did listen, but I didn't think they responded like they should, I guess. I guess you can't put somebody in jail just because they're a creep.

The last time she spotted Sandoval was July 1995. He was back cruising State Farm's parking lot. He came down this row and drove by me, but I was pretty scared. She reported it again. When police questioned him, Sandoval said he'd had a moment of weakness caused by an impending divorce. Three months later, his wife Tina disappeared. And my heart just sunk. I just knew he had finally done something really bad. I just felt like I had been telling

people for so long that he was, he was the devil. And as the cops saw, he had been for many years. Mike Prill eventually compiled a 33-page document of Sandoval's run-ins with the police, including all the complaints and accusations made against him over a period of nearly 30 years. The many women that I talked to that were his victims of peeping and stalking, the majority of the women had an instinctual bell ringing in their head that there was something wrong with John, but so many of the women were afraid to act on it. One story in particular seemed to foreshadow Tina's fate. Back in the 1980s, a woman filed a complaint against John Sandoval. It was an ex-girlfriend of hers, his, or at least one that had finally said enough with you. A decade before Tina disappeared, the woman described what happened

when she tried to break up with Sandoval. He kidnapped her at knife point, drug her down to her car, threatening to take her into the county and kill her. She broke free, scattered her purse contents across the ground and ran. That was ominous enough. Also troubling, why police at the time seemed unfazed.

She wasn't taken seriously by the investigators. Was that a missed opportunity to take this guy off the streets? Yes. And so he, you know, he's successful. He's yet again beat another count or beat a charge that he's committed. Again and again and again? Yes. Now Prill was hoping he could use that creepy, violent past against Sandoval in court.

He and Michael Roark knew the looming trial would be excruciating for Tina's family. It would also likely be their one and only chance to hold John Sandoval accountable. It was scary because we were looking at a four-week trial, and we knew we still were in the same boat, that we didn't have a body, and we had a lot to prove. Can we prove to a jury that in fact your sister is dead? Yeah. I wanted to make sure that they understood that if we took this chance, if we filed these charges, and if the trial didn't go well and he was acquitted and then a year from now we found Tina's remains, we're done. We wanted to pursue it, especially as the years went on and it was more and more obvious.

Tina was not coming back. They don't want to come to trial and have it fail, and then you can't charge again. Only get one chance. Only one chance. Can't do double jeopardy. Coming up. My partners and I were sitting around in our war room, and all of a sudden the question is, how are we going to prove that she's dead? Just before trial, a sudden bolt from the blue. A hit came back on Tina's social security number,

and it listed to a woman working as a nurse. Something was active in Tina's social security account. That's got to be a pit of your stomach moment. Sure. The Weld County Courthouse in Greeley, Colorado, was preparing for the first degree murder trial of John Sandoval. We were looking at him as he committed a domestic violence homicide, and now we're seeing a pattern of conduct that has now spanned 26 years, 27 years, and almost every woman that he encounters that we have found, he's turned into a victim in some way, shape, or form.

You've done this a long time. How bad a character is Sandoval? He's about as bad a defendant as we've ever had. Proving it, however, would be dicey. Prosecutors still weren't sure what a judge would allow the jury to hear. The sexual assault and upskirt videos from Las Vegas were out of bounds because those were acts that took place after Tina disappeared. And remember that impromptu search of Sandoval's house on the night he was arrested, the one in which Detective Goldschmidt found Tina's credit cards. Since Goldschmidt had gone in without a search warrant, the prosecutor feared that evidence might be barred as well. But by far, the biggest problem was proving that Tina Sandoval had been murdered. There was a moment after we had filed the charges

where detectives, my partners, and I were sitting around in our war room, and all of a sudden the question is, how are we going to prove that she's dead? And everybody just got really wide-eyed. Talk about a basic question. Probably one we should have talked a little bit more about before we filed it, but we spent about the next two days just listing off everything that we do to try to find people. We knew that we had to do all of those things and then 50% more because we had to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that she was deceased. Sister Susan was ready for trial, but none in her family looked forward to it.

That was hard. I mean, we're all having to go back years and years and recall exactly what we all individually experienced. Tina's friend and colleague Carol Shervin would also testify. Were you a little intimidated by that when you were put on a witness list? I was, yeah. Had you ever been in a courtroom environment before? No, I don't even watch court TV and was pretty naive. Everything was ready. Then a few months before trial, a routine computer search turned up something that caused the hair to stand up on Detective Prill's neck. A hit came back on Tina's social security number, and it listed to a woman working as a nurse down in southern Colorado. Something was active in

Tina's social security account? It appeared, yeah. What'd you do? My partner went down and met with the woman that was using this social security number, and it simply turned out in the end that it was a transposition of numbers. 3-5 became 5-3, something like that? Finally, in July 2010, almost 15 years after Tina disappeared, a jury was seated. It was time for opening arguments. Sandoval had pleaded not guilty. The Tourne family began by telling the jury the backstory of a troubled marriage. The prosecutor would add the sordid details of Sandoval's fetish as a peeping tom,

some of his history with women. Tell me about coming into court, Susan. He's right there, your feet apart. He was just smiling. It was kind of like he was trying to intimidate me. Just like, I gotcha, I gotcha, kind of a smile, and I didn't want to look at him. I just really focused on the attorneys and answering the questions. I wasn't going to give him anything.

His anger. The court heard how Sandoval once pulled a gun and threatened suicide if Tina were to leave him. Manipulative. A building, growing fear of what John would do as a result of this pending divorce. Tina's expression of the result of this pending divorce. Tina's expression of the nature of the domestic violence, not really physical necessarily, but certainly psychological and emotional domestic violence going on inside the home. Her desires to distance herself from him and live her own life. Thanks to some favorable freerial rulings, the judge found that the jury could hear

about some of the criminal acts John Sandoval had committed against women in Colorado prior to Tina's disappearance in 1995. The judge had also ruled that evidence taken during that warrantless search of Sandoval's home and car was admissible. The shovel and the bucket, a handgun, Tina's credit cards, and some of Sandoval's sweated-through clothing that was covered with soil as though it had been flung over his head and rained down upon him. I'd like to talk to my lawyer there. Hello? And the jury saw this. Sandoval in the interview room from that first night. Here he's learned that investigators want to check his fingernails for signs of foreign DNA. He didn't want to have anything to do with that.

So instead of allowing law enforcement to cut his fingernails, he sat there and maniacally chewed on his fingernails. Trying to destroy evidence, presumably, huh? He would chew them off. We could see them on the video biting him off. And then he would spit whatever he had chewed off onto the floor. Then police attempted to photograph some deep scratches seen on his face and chest. And so they have to physically put him in a position where they can take photographs of these injuries before they disappear.

You got to turn his head and restrain him? Turn his head, hold his head to the side. They ended up cutting his shirt off of him so that they could get at the rest of the what we believe to be scratch marks he was wholly uncooperative with that entire process you guys are insane man so what why can't you just call my lawyer? And then there was the fascinating story told by Daisy, the police canine, and her handler. A search that began at Tina's abandoned car.

So what does a dog do? It goes through the neighborhood and tracks right up to John's house. From Tina's abandoned vehicle to his back door. Correct. So John is at the hospital. I think we have him up there for gathering of additional 41-1 evidence, hairs, pluckings and stuff. So she then takes her dog up to the hospital and John's in one of the rooms. She sends a dog on the track. Going past nursing stations and just. Yeah. And the dog goes right up to the room John's in

and goes up and nudges his foot, I believe it was, and sits down. The defense argued that John Sandoval was once again the usual suspect, a man with a past whose estranged wife just happened to disappear shortly after telling friends and family that she was going to meet with him. In the end, the jury didn't buy it. Deliberations lasted seven hours. And as soon as they read guilty of the first degree, we just gasped. It was just like a huge sigh of relief.

Just all the emotion came out. I kind of had been keeping a stoic face for a long time. Did you see any remorse in him? No. No. No, he had no remorse and he, very next day he was calling the attorney that I worked for that was a defense attorney

and asking him to file an appeal. At the very firm where you were working? He didn't know I was there. He was calling all the attorneys around town asking them to file an appeal, and most of them were turning him down. Sandoval was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. And it was one of the more rewarding points of my career. Conviction meant that Tournaz would no longer have to look over their shoulders in fear of this angry man's retribution. As time went on, it was a little easier to settle in

and feel like everything was okay. They didn't have Tina. There's the graduate. Didn't know what he'd done with her, but it seemed enough to know that he was gone away forever. You'd think. Wouldn't you? Coming up... I called Susan, and all I could say is I have bad news.

It was a pretty big blow. A stunning ruling from the court leads to a stunning offer from John Sandoval. Is he finally going to tell us where Tina is? My mom wanted to know where she was. Okay, from here, John, you're just going to have to give me directions on where to go. When Dateline Continues. You don't have to say anything over this, you know what I mean?

In the spring of 2016, John Sandoval was nearly seven years into a life sentence at a Colorado State prison for the murder of his wife, Tina. Nearly 200 miles away in Greeley, his one-time in-laws, the Tournais, were still piecing their lives back together. Life has to go on. Everybody's getting married. Everybody's having kids. And, you know, the relief of kind of having him put away, let everybody settle in, kind of in their own place. Then on March 17th, on what would have been Tina's 44th birthday, the villain they thought they'd seen the last of crashed back into their lives. Colorado Court of Appeals reversed his conviction. And what was the narrow issue that they ruled on? The Court of Appeals found that some of that prior bad act evidence, not all of it,

but some of it should not have been admitted. They also found that some of the testimony that we had elicited from our domestic violence expert went too far, and they sent it back for a new trial. Sandoval would have to remain in prison till then, but the fight to keep him there was just beginning. I called Susan, and all I could say is, Susan, I have bad news. The Court of Appeals has reversed his conviction,

and the Supreme Court has refused to hear it. It was a pretty big blow, because just a month before, my mom had found out that her breast cancer had come back. And then this was happening. So things really fell apart again at that point because we didn't know what was going to happen. Did you guys even have to think for a moment about going for a second trial? Not for a second.

The appeals court may have ordered a new trial for John Sandoval, but the DA was in no hurry to set a trial date. Prosecutor Rourke figured that since Sandoval had been in prison for nearly seven years, where all phone calls and visits are recorded, he may well have said something incriminating to somebody. So we had a feeling that when he went to the Department of Corrections, he would think nobody's listening anymore, my case is over, now we can talk without having to use code words.

And so I said to the judge, when he asked how long of a time we need, nobody's listening anymore. My case is over. Now we can talk without having to use code words. And so I said to the judge, when he asked how long of a time we need, I said, Judge, we're asking for a significant delay because we're getting every phone call and every visitation that he has had, and we're going to listen to them all. So Sandoval, don't make any plans for getting out next Christmas. That's right. And you're going to be in for a while. You're going to be in for a while. And oh, by the way, anything you've said to your mom about killing Tina, we're going to find. So how did that percolate down in his thinking and with his defense team? It didn't take long after that for my office phone to ring. And his attorney said, do you mind if we come over and talk about Mr. Sandoval's case? I said, sure. After discussing court calendars and retrial logistics, Rourke says Sandoval's attorney cut to the chase.

And she said to me, Mr. Sandoval has some information that he thinks would be of interest to you, of interest to the Guerrilla Police Department, and notably of interest to the Tornier family. And I looked across the table at her and I said, is he finally going to tell us where Tina is? And she said, possibly. Leverage. Leverage. Leverage. I can take you to the body. That's right. But what are you going to do for me in exchange, right?

Oh, that went without saying. We knew that he was only going to do this if we made him some kind of a plea offer. And we went into the DA's office, and they dropped the bomb that he said, I want to plea, and I'll tell you where Tina is if you give me this. And I don't recall how much time he wanted, but it wasn't enough.

The rough proposal knocked the conviction down to a lesser charge of second-degree murder with a shorter sentence to be negotiated. In exchange, the family would get Tina back. Did you have a vote or was this just a matter for the DA to decide himself? No, he let us discuss it as a family and we did. So I was kind of feeling like, no, I don't want to do this. Like I'm willing to go back to trial, but my mom wanted it really badly. And a few of my other siblings, they really wanted to know where she was and they wanted that closure. There were a number of variables to consider.

Time served. Time reduced for good behavior. Formulations that determined the earliest eligibility for parole to a halfway house. After being reassured John Sandoval would remain in prison for at least another 10 years, the Tourne family held its collective nose and agreed to a deal with the devil. Our hope was to make it so he'd be a very old man when he saw daylight. The Tourne family held its collective nose and agreed to a deal with the devil. Our hope was to make it so he'd be a very old man when he saw daylight. But it's something that's out of your control in a way. Yeah.

March 22, 2017. Nearly a year to the day after his murder conviction was overturned, John Sandoval accepted his new plea deal. I want to make a sole condition of this plea offer is our ability to locate, recover, and forensically determine that the body that presumptively you're going to show us the location of today is in fact Tina. Any of those three things do not happen happen and we don't have an agreement. Do you understand that? Yes, sir. The time had arrived

for John Sandoval to finally reveal the secret he'd been keeping for more than 20 years. Where he'd put Tina. Okay, from here, John, you're just going to have to give me directions

on where to go. Coming up. Just keep following the road. Was Tina's family about to learn the truth at last? I'm not super confident at this point that John's led us to the right location. He's such a snake. You have no idea what he might be trying to do. There were any number of places John Sandoval might have led the detectives to. All that prairie, rugged wilderness areas, remote ravines where he might have disposed of the body. We need to go to 10th Street. But in this police video,

recorded on a chilly day in late March of 2017, John Sandoval gave directions and calmly gazed out the car window, watching the familiar streets of the Greeley cityscape go by. Crossing over 34, and then look left into this Sunset Memorial. They turned into Sunset Memorial Gardens. Just keep following the road. A sprawling cemetery in the heart of Greeley was their destination.

Turned out Sandoval had once worked there. The implication was clear. Somewhere in this vast cemetery, Tina Sandoval was likely sharing a grave. Once out of the car, Sandoval seemed disoriented. Is this going to help you? Well, what we need is up to 95 what was undeveloped. 95 undeveloped? Yeah. Okay. That may take a little bit longer. Trees have grown, more graves have been dug, and more headstones and markers are laid out.

The cops weren't saying, but they knew cemetery records indicated there were three freshly dug graves here on the morning Tina disappeared. One was the resting place of a U.S. veteran. I knew I was close, right at the apex of this drive here, so this seems about right. Seems about right to come this way. Sandoval indicated here, I think. And that was what, the name of the person who was actually buried there? Arthur Hurt was the family name. The veteran buried there. He was a World War II vet. So we went back to the police department and called his son Richard and his wife Deborah

and just had this really uncomfortable breaking the ice kind of thing. You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you? And that's exactly what I told him. I said, man, you're not going to believe this, but we have reason to believe that a murder victim is buried under your dad at the cemetery. And those two remarkable people were 100% supportive and cooperative, agreed to sign whatever documents were necessary to exhume his dad. Raise, no raise. Raise that. Okay. Sandoval was returned to the county jail while Prill made plans for the exhumation in the morning. He knew he'd need the expertise and high-tech gear of a group of body recovery experts known as NecroSearch.

They would dig in the grave. Prill, a proud Army vet himself, also knew he had to honor the veteran who, in a way, had stood watch over Tina all those years. I thought it'd be proper to at least have a military ceremony, both for the exhumation and then later for the remains to be returned into the grave. You know what? That says a lot about who you are, detective. Well, I suppose so. I mean, I'm former military and this family is now a new victim of John Sandoval. So how can we make it as honorable and as respectful and dignified as possible to potentially and hopefully find Tina underneath? Because I'm not super confident at this point that John's led us to the right location. He's such a snake, such a weasel, you have no idea what he might be trying to do. The veterans' coffin and remains were exhumed and taken to a mortuary to await reburial.

The forensic experts went into the grave and began their oh-so-careful digging. When they came upon a plastic tarp, Mike Brill immediately called Detective Brad Goldschmidt. We found plastic. It's a plastic bag. He's like, do you think we found her? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. And then the tarp was brought up and opened up by our pathologist. And almost immediately, when I saw her teeth and her braces, I knew. You and the team had found her? We found her.

The DA called me. And said it's her. And he said it's her. What happens at that moment after all these years for you? It's again that release of relief of some closure of something being finished of something being over a part of that um that we finally knew where she was so i was glad that we knew tina's friend and co-worker carol shvin, the one who'd had nightmares after she vanished, was understandably relieved to hear Tina's body had been recovered.

Today, she says she understands the tournée's determination to get her back, even if it meant agreeing to a plea deal for her killer. My nightmares finally went away, and now I have two daughters. And I'll tell you, the nightmares never would go away if it was my child. I can only imagine how painful it was for them to think, where could she be? So I totally understand why they wanted to do that. At least that's how I would feel as a mother. The medical examiner studied Tina's remains, but could not determine how she was killed.

Sandoval knew, but he wasn't talking. That was part of his plea deal. He would not give up the how and why of his wife's murder. We get down into a fresh grave in the middle of the night. And then dragging her. Drag her over. Get her down in there, fill it back up, level it off. On a trip back to the cemetery, Detective Prill told me he has a pretty good idea of what happened on the night Tina was buried here.

This is X Marks' spot. Where we're standing is the edge of the cemetery, just across these hedges. Right. So I guess he just went in bold as brass through whatever that public driveway, the access is. Yeah, yeah. And there's no keys, there's no big gates, welcome to heavenly rest and all that kind of stuff? No, there's no gates, there's no big gates, welcome to heavenly rest and all that kind of stuff? No. There's no gates, there's no controlled access. And he probably just hit off his lights and maybe even just coasted to a stop. He came upon an empty, freshly dug grave.

He's never explained how he went about it, but it's fairly evident that he had a flashlight tied around his neck. We recovered that from the car. Jumped down in a hole, dug the hole, used the bucket to climb out, drug Tina's body into the dug grave, put her deeper under the ground. Because the vet's funeral was scheduled for the next day, Prill imagined Sandoval using that carpenter's level they'd found in his car to smooth out the disturbed soil on the bottom of the grave so that the soon-to-arrive cemetery employees wouldn't be suspicious.

There's the graduate. Tina and, um, Tina and... But now the Tournée family had Tina back and could finally give her a grave of her own. Is she going to be taller? I'm still a lot taller. Yeah, you're still a little taller. I don't have shoes on. And you had her back, and now you could do a proper burial. Yes. And memorial service.

Yes. It was very healing, I think, for everybody. Brought us together again and kind of zipped it up for all of us as far as she's okay now and she's back with her family. As for John Sandoval, when he next appeared in court, he got the lighter sentence he'd been looking for. In return for delivering up his murder victim's body, he would now have the possibility of parole. Do you understand that right? I do.

But that's not the end of the story. John Sandoval can apply for parole again in 2026, and he has a release date of 2032, when he will be 70 years old. We're working as a family to try and keep him put away. Do you believe he is rehabilitated? No. If he walks out? No.

No. You think he's a clear and present danger? Yes. He gets good behavior when he's in prison because... He's a model prisoner, they say. There's no women in prison. That's his favorite thing, collecting women. We're still hoping that something will happen with Vegas. That a fresh

charge might come up? Fresh charge might come up, that one of the women might speak up. No one has come forward, so Tina's family has been proactive, appealing to the state parole board every time Sandoval has come up for a hearing, saying don't release him, not this time, not ever. If Tina was sitting here, don't release him. Not this time, not ever. If Tina was sitting here, don't we wish she were? What would you tell her about all those years? I'd just tell her I love her. And, you know, we tried our hardest. And we're going to keep trying. Justice is not fully served yet. and we're going to keep pushing. That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Friday at 9, 8 central. And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News. Good night.