True Crime with Kimbyr - Killer Left Her Dead in the Bathtub - Message on the Mirror Made No Sense | Jenny Zitricki
Episode Date: September 24, 2026WATCH PART ONE: HEREDNA 🧬 database: https://www.gedmatch.com/On a Friday morning in April of 1990, a woman in Greenville, South Carolina didn't show up for work. Nobody had heard from her in al...most thirty-six hours. When maintenance finally opened her apartment door, water was still running in the tub and it had overflowed into the apt. Her name was Genevieve, but everyone called her Jenny. She was twenty-eight years old, originally from Youngstown, Ohio, and she had moved to South Carolina less than two years earlier and built an entire life there from scratch. Her case went cold.However in Part ONE we found out that sixteen years later, and six hundred miles away, investigators in Portageville, Missouri, finally developed a full DNA profile in the 1998 murders of 38-year-old Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter Megan, who were killed inside their own farmhouse in a forty-minute window while the rest of the family was stuck behind a truck blocking the only road home.Missouri had spent eight years with evidence they couldn't use. When they finally entered that profile into the national database, it came back to an apartment in South Carolina. Two unsolved cases became one unsolved case. And there was still no name.🚧 Don't forget to check out my other True Crime Show: DARKLIVITY: HERE 🔎 COME FIND ME: Personal IG https://www.instagram.com/kimbyrleigha/🚧 True Crime IG: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimewithkimbyr🔗 Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/KimbyrleighaYouTube/📥 Sponsorship Inquiries: contact@tablerock.com🚨 This video is for educational purposes & documentary purposes ONLY. All info is gathered ONLINE from multiple sources, and though each case is thoroughly researched, not all info is always 100% valid. Please do your own research. 👩🏻🎓 ABOUT ME: I'm Kimbyrleigha; thanks in advance for reading this. I think it's important to know someone's background and education because it helps explain how they view situations and why they may hold a particular point of view. I hold a bachelor's degree in Psychology and Sociology. I graduated from law school in 2010 and have a Juris Doctor (law degree). I'm also currently in school studying Medicolegal Investigation. COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER: I do my best to ensure that everything in these videos complies with the legal Fair Use Standards. I never intend to violate anyone’s copyright. If you own the rights to something that was unintentionally used in this video and would like it removed, addressed, or licensed for a fee, please reach out to me first, and I will get back to you ASAP. Darklivity@jackpotsyndicate.com
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It's a Friday morning in April of 1990 in Greenville, South Carolina, at Hidden Lake Apartment Complex.
People are busy leaving for work, but behind one of those doors, water is running, and it's been running for a very long time.
The tub was filled to the top, and the water kept flowing until it came over the side.
It soaked into the carpet, and it spread out to the hallway. Nobody had come in or out.
out of that apartment in a day and a half.
And it's still running when a man walks up to that door with a master key
because the woman who lived there didn't show up for work that morning.
Behind that door is a 28-year-old woman named Genevieve.
And the monster who left her there is long gone.
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Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel. And if you have never been here before, I am Kimberlea.
It's nice to finally meet you. Okay, if you do not listen to any of the other parts of the beginning
of this video, listen to this because it is very important. This is a part two. It's a continuation
of my very last video on this case.
This last case that I just did,
it looks like this.
I'm putting the thumbnail right here.
So if you want all of the details,
I highly recommend you going back to part one.
I will put it below right in the description box.
Or if you prefer to start right here,
or it's been a minute since you watch part one,
I am going to give you enough of a recap
that you will be caught up.
In our last video,
I told you what happened
on Saturday, March 28th of 1998 in Missouri.
This was a farm town of about 3,000 people.
It's called Portageville.
Tony Scherer and his 15-year-old son, Stephen, come home.
It's a little after 7 p.m.
They'd been out working on the fields all day.
They get stuck behind a truck blocking their only road home.
It fell over.
It's in the middle of the road.
It's got fertilizer across everything.
Cops come.
They block it off.
Stephen picks up his dad's cell phone,
calls his mom while they're waiting,
and she says she's going to go pick up some things.
pizza and then take him to his girlfriend's house after they're done eating. About 20 minutes later,
Tony calls the house and they get the answering machine, which is odd because they had spoken to
her not too long ago. And when they pull in, Sherry's car is in the garage and the hood is cold.
And inside, Stephen ends up finding his mother and his 12-year-old sister dead on their living
room floor. Thirty-eight-year-old Sherry Sherr and Megan, who was in sixth grade, she played back.
basketball. She had just won a public speaking contest the day before. Sherry was warm,
Megan was cold, and both had been shot with a 22 caliber weapon, and both had socks stuffed
in their mouths. Megan had been bound with an orange electrical cord, and she had been sent
assaulted. Sherry had marks on her wrists, showing that she had been restrained at one point as well,
but whatever he had tied her with was gone. He had also brought things with him.
and taken them back out with him or that cord that was now around Megan could have once been on Sherry.
There was no force entry. Nothing in the house was missing. They had a safe and it was opened, but it was untouched.
And the whole thing happened inside a window of about 40 minutes. They actually said it was either 30 to 40 minutes, so fast.
Two and a half hours later, 40 miles away in Dyersburg, Tennessee, a man pulls up outside a woman's home,
This is a mom. She's got kids with her. He's got a maroon van. He tries to talk his way inside.
She fought for her life and somehow she's able to get the door shut. But he shot through it and hit her.
But she survived. Her name was Stephanie. Ballistics proved the bullet in her arm came from the same gun that killed Sherry and Megan.
So this man was on the move. And he was also a stranger. Stephanie had never.
seen him before and he came to her door and tried to talk his way in, which they presume he
also tried to do with Sherry and Megan. Investigators had his DNA from the very first night
because a highway patrol sergeant named Don Wyndham noticed a mark on Megan's body and swabbed a clear
substance around it without being able to say why he did that. He was supposed to be swabbing for
touch DNA, but it ended up being saliva. And they got a partial DNA profile. And the problem was,
Codis was brand new. It had just only gone live after this, and this wasn't a full profile,
so it couldn't be entered. But it wouldn't have mattered anyway because the database, of course,
wasn't large yet. They also noticed a weird substance on the swab they took from inside of Megan,
even though there was no seminal fluid found. There was something else. The swabs contained traces
of a chemical called isopropyl myristate, which is an ingredient that's found in a topical
medicated cream. And this was odd because Megan had not been prescribed anything like that. And this
was significant because of where it was found. It meant that the killer could have potentially
had an active infection down there. So for eight years, the investigators worked this case.
Over a thousand leads, contractors, delivery drivers, offenders in the area, anybody they could think
of. Three separate serial killers were looked at and cleared, including Tommy Lynn
cells, who grew up 25 miles from that house and new things about that scene and the living
room that he shouldn't have. But the DNA said that wasn't their guy. And it was frustrating
because he was a really good match. He even told them that he could have done it. But they had
to move on without a DNA match. Sadly, Sherry's mother, Frances, died in 1998. So she never got
resolution about who killed her daughter and her granddaughter. And then in January of 2006,
Sergeant Jeff Heath sent everything back to the lab.
And an analyst named Ruth Montgomery worked through all of it, the socks, a bunch of random head
and pubic hairs, cuttings from the clothing and the saliva swab.
And this time, there was enough markers for a full DNA profile, not partial but complete,
which meant for the very first time since March of 1998, they had something that they could go
and put into CODIS.
They entered it and they got a hit.
This same man had committed a murder in South Carolina back in 1990, which was eight years
before Cherry and Megan and 600 miles away.
But the problem is this only brought more questions than answers because that case was unsolved
as well.
No name, nobody identified, two dead ends that just became one big dead end.
They knew the cases were connected, but not who the killer was.
All they knew was that the victim in this other case was a 28-year-old woman found in her apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, in April of 1990.
And her name was Genevieve.
So in part two here, we are still trying to understand what happened to Sherry and Megan Scherer and the man who did it.
That's why I have to take you back eight years before their case to that apartment complex in South Carolina called Hidden Lake.
and to a woman whose story deserves every bit as much time as I gave theirs.
So now you're all caught up.
So now to the new case you haven't heard about,
but that I mentioned at the end of part one.
Genevieve's.
It was Friday, April 6th of 1990.
At Michelin North America headquarters in Greenville,
Genevieve's a tricky, who goes by Jenny, doesn't come in.
And this raises red flags immediately because Jenny is reliable.
She's always on time.
she's always where she's supposed to be.
She doesn't just not come into work.
So where coworkers start making calls.
They called her apartment.
They get no answer.
They start calling her friends.
They're working through people who would know where she is.
And that's when they figure out that it isn't just this morning.
Nobody has seen or heard from Jenny in almost 36 hours.
Now that is concerning.
So someone calls the office at Hidden Lake Apartments.
And they ask to please go check on her.
The complex manager,
doesn't wait around. She sends a maintenance worker over with a master key. The apartment is on the
ground floor out on Villa Road in a complex full of people in their 20s and 30s who are all at
work right now because it's in the middle of the day. It's quiet. And I thought, yeah, back then,
everyone really did have a traditional desk job or they worked in retail. So there was really no one
working from home like there is today. That was extremely rare if it existed at all in 1990.
The man who is working maintenance arrives at Jenny's door.
The key goes in and the door opens.
And what's on the other side of it is so far outside anything that anyone expected to walk into on a normal morning
that this man doesn't even go any further.
He knows something isn't right as soon as he gets to the bathroom door.
He gets back out of there as soon as he can and calls 911.
Officers from the Greenville Police Department arrive within minutes.
They go inside and it's a moment.
immediately obvious that something violent has happened. The place is torn apart. There's blood.
They can still hear water running from somewhere. They follow it to the bathroom. And that's when
they see it. There's a woman in the tub. It's Jenny. The water is still going and they don't know it
yet, but it has been running for a day and a half. Before they go any further, they have to find out
who this woman was. Genevieve, Hage Adduce,
was born on August 11th of 1961, and she was not a Southern girl. She was not a local from
South Carolina. She was from Youngstown, Ohio, steel country, a working city on the edge of the Rust Belt.
And by the time Jenny was growing up in that city, it was actually losing the thing it had been
built on. She was raised there by her parents, Edward and Rosemary, alongside her brother Philip.
And she was very close to her family. There were summers they spent at the
the lake and Jenny had a lot of happy memories of those times. She loved fishing and she was also
a Cleveland Browns fan, a big one, which in Northeast Ohio is less of a preference than it is an
inherited condition. She went to Youngstown State University and graduated from there. And if you
have seen pictures of her like I'm showing you on the screen, you know exactly what she looked like.
She looks like a lot of women in 1989, the big dark hair, the dark eyes, a weakness for those
enormous earrings, I've been guilty of it too, and a smile that takes up her whole face, big and
bright. And every person that talks about her says a version of the same thing, that she was the most
lively person in the entire room. Her brother Philip described her as a force of nature, a firecracker,
a bundle of infectious energy. She was outgoing and social and optimistic, the kind of person
who put people at ease within 90 seconds of meeting them. She was also the life of the party.
And she was not somebody who drifted through her own life.
She wanted to do something with her life.
And somewhere in her early 20s, Jenny got married.
And that is when she became Jenny Zatriki.
And in June of 1988, she and her husband moved from Ohio to Greenville, South Carolina.
And that is how she initially ended up there.
She was 26 years old and left the city she'd grown up in with her parents and her brother behind and everybody she knew.
And she moved 700 miles south to a state where she had no roots at all.
unfortunately and within about a year and a half the marriage was over they separated not long after
they relocated seven years of marriage done she was 27 newly divorced living in a city that she had just
arrived in with her whole family a day's drive away and this is where you find out exactly who
jenny was because she did not go back home she stayed in south carolina and she built an entire life
from scratch. She got a job at Michelin North American headquarters, the tire company in corporate,
and she was working as a computer programmer in the payroll department. She did systems work.
And in 1989, as a woman, this was not a crowded field at all. And she was really good at it.
She was reliable. And actually, that reliability is going to matter in this case a lot, because that is
what tips people off that something was wrong. She played softball. She even taught at a local school.
into an apartment complex called Hidden Lake on Villa Road, a complex full of young professionals,
people that were her exact same age, trying to figure out where they wanted to go in life.
There was this big community pool area where people threw parties, and Jenny was the kind
of neighbor who was at those parties all the time. She also showed up in a way to show people
around her. She was a woman who got knocked down, but she would get up again instead of retreating.
She filled her calendar with a whole social world that she
built in under two years in a place where she started with nothing. And in 1990, she was 28 years old
and had every reason to think the hard part was behind her. And there was one more thing that I wanted
to tell you about her. And that's her dad. Jenny absolutely idolized her dad Edward. Her brother
Philip said that the relationship between Jenny and her father was something extremely special
and that she held him in the highest regard. And in the spring of 1990,
Edward was sadly fighting a battle with cancer.
So when police in South Carolina eventually had to make that phone call that no family
can ever recover from, they were making it to a man who was already very sick,
about the daughter who thought the world of him.
And it was heartbreaking because he only had a month left to live.
That poor family.
He didn't get to find out who killed his daughter.
I want to walk you through that apartment.
the way the Greenville detectives had to walk through it.
I'm going to start with the bedroom
because that is where the attack started.
There was a significant amount of blood
in and around Jenny's bed on the sheets, on her pillows,
and there was blood spatter all over the walls.
That combination told the investigators one thing very fast.
She was in that bed when it happened
and she was most likely asleep.
It appeared that she never got up,
that she never was able to fight,
back. She never saw her killer coming from across the room. The FBI actually has a term for this.
It's called a blitz attack and it means exactly what it sounds like. Maximum violence delivered
instantly before the victim has any opportunity to react or defend themselves or even make a sound.
There was a diluted trail of blood that ran from the bedroom across the bedroom carpet out into
the hallway and roughly 20 feet through the apartment to the bathroom. She had been dragged.
She did not walk from the bed to that bathroom, and Jenny was found inside her tub face-up.
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The only thing she had on was a T-shirt, and the tub was full,
and the faucet was still running with the water coming over the sides from hours earlier and soaking the hallway.
She had a pair of tights, a pair of tights, a pair of,
panty hose around her neck, and her hands were up over her head. She had been positioned this way,
deliberately, placed so that the running water fell directly between her legs on purpose, which were
pushed apart. Her face was bruised, her head was bleeding, and there were blood stains all over
on the part of the tub, on the toilet, and inside of it. The seat was up like it would be if a man
had used it last. It looked like she had been hit in the back of her head.
with a blunt object, something like a tire iron, hard enough to fracture her school. Now, everything
else in that apartment was arranged as well. And this was where it kind of gets strange.
The bedroom had been completely ransacked. Dresser drawers were yanked open. Clothing was thrown
all over the room. And that mess spilled out into the hallway. There was even a teddy bear and a
magazine lying on the floor. The killer had taken Jenny's purse with her checkbook still in it
and thrown it into the kitchen sink.
And then he filled the sink with water.
It was very odd.
But probably the strangest thing was what was left
on the mirror of her dresser in black marker.
There was a message left behind.
It was written on the glass
and it said, don't fuck with my family.
The work of a detective
is mostly about asking
if whether what you're looking at makes sense.
And to Greenville detectives,
almost immediately none of this did.
Nothing was missing.
not one thing of value had been taken out of that apartment.
Even the checkbook was left inside the purse, and the purse was in the sink.
If you break into a home and you tear the bedroom apart looking for something,
you usually take something, but nothing was stolen.
So the ransacking seemed like it was a performance, like the mess was staged,
and that meant maybe the message was too.
But what if they were wrong?
I mean, it reads like a motive.
It reads like passion, like revenge.
like someone with a grievance.
So they had to check if Jenny had any enemies.
Detectives went straight into Jenny's personal life,
looking for a relationship gone wrong, a jealous boyfriend,
a wife of maybe someone she was possibly seeing at the time.
They were looking for a reason.
They looked at her ex-husband right away
because there was that recent divorce,
only a couple years before this.
And of course, because the message on the mirror pointed directly
at exactly that kind of motive.
And on paper, he was a suspect.
He had access, sort of, because he and his new girlfriend were living in the same apartment complex.
Yeah. So you have a recently divorced woman murdered in her own bed with a message on the mirror that reads like a grievance and her ex is right on that property with somebody new.
So they thought it had to be him, but he could not have been more cooperative.
I mean, not that that means anything right, but he gave his fingerprints. He gives his DNA sample.
He voluntarily takes a polygraph test, and he had a solid alibi for the night that Jenny was killed,
which detectives checked and confirmed, and he was cleared.
He was actually devastated about what happened.
I mean, they were not together anymore, but it didn't mean that he didn't love her.
I mean, he spent part of his life with her.
It was heartbreaking.
Jenny was the kind of person that nobody could think about as someone anyone had a reason to hate or her.
But investigators needed to look deeper, so they turned and looked at Jenny herself.
They had to consider whether she was involved with somebody, whether maybe there was a reason some other relationship ended,
and whether that sentence on the mirror was actually about her and something she did.
And again, they found nothing.
That sentence on that mirror sent an entire police department into a dead woman's private life for months on end.
But there was just nothing that made sense.
It was almost as though they killed the wrong person.
Don't F with my family?
She wasn't involved in any domestic or other issues with anyone.
There was no proof of anything.
But from what was done to her, investigators had other theories.
At Greenville Memorial Hospital, the medical examiner conducted the autopsy.
Blunt forced trauma to the back of her head with skull fractures.
But the cause of death was strangulation and the panty hose around the neck
is what did that.
The time of death was estimated
at around 2 o'clock in the morning
on Thursday, so the day before
she was found. There was
evidence that she had been sexually assaulted
just like Megan.
But also just like in that case,
there were no defensive wounds.
And then the medical examiner did
something that was pretty useless
back in 1990.
Collected the male DNA
from her body.
But at the point, there was no
national database. This was before Megan and Sherry's case. Remember, this was in 1990. There's
happened in 1998. The technology was in its infancy. There was no realistic prospect of matching it to
anybody, but he preserved it anyway. He held on to it on the reasoning that science might
eventually catch up. Now think about that alongside what Don Wyndham did in the Sherrers farmhouse
in Missouri eight years later. He noticed that mark on Megan's left breast.
which ended up being a bite mark, and he didn't know why,
but he decided to swab that clear substance on top of it.
And this was back when this was not the norm, this was not protocol,
and it turned out to be saliva,
and that's how they obtained the DNA of the killer.
And neither of those men knew what they were doing at that point
was going to be so important in the future.
And every single thing that happens,
and the rest of the story exists because they did that.
So what did Detective's believe had happened to Jenny?
They believed her killer had actually gotten in through the sliding glass patio door,
which had been pried open with some kind of tool.
They believed that Jenny was asleep in her bed,
and he crossed that apartment, struck her in the head,
assaulted her, and then strangled her with the panty hose.
And then he took an additional pair of tights and wrapped them around her neck,
then dragged her 20 feet down the hallway into the bathroom,
put her inside the tub, arranged her, and turned on the faucet, and left it running exactly
where he wanted it to run between her legs. Investigators believe that was actually an attempt
to wash away evidence of what he had done, which wouldn't have necessarily worked because it
was inside of her body already. But either way, he tried. And then he went back and staged the scene
as a robbery. He pulled the drawers out. He threw her clothes around. He put the person in the sink,
and then he filled it with water. And he wrote that message on the mirror. At this point,
months later, putting it all together, they did not believe that that message had anything to do
with why Jenny was killed. But those detectives had taken a lot of time to figure that out.
But that seemed to be precisely what the perpetrator wanted. He wrote a sentence on a mirror
and sent this entire police department on a wild goose chase,
which means he wanted police to spend months chasing a story that he had invented.
And then before he left that apartment, he cleaned up.
Not a single usable fingerprint was recovered from inside.
He had wiped down every surface or he had worn gloves.
Just like in Megan and Sherry's home, everything was clean.
I mean, the door knobs, the light switches, they had no fingerprint.
so they concluded he must have been wearing a pair of gloves.
All of this told Greenville detectives the kind of man they were looking for
because all of this takes time.
The staging, the message, the water, the wiping down, or he came prepared.
This was not a man who panicked and just ran.
This was a man who was comfortable inside that apartment,
who felt no urgency at all to leave, who knew with confidence
that nobody was going to walk through that door.
and if he was that confident, it meant that he knew she lived alone.
And to know that, he would have had to have been watching her.
Detectives went to work on this new direction, this new theory of the case.
They had processed the department for hours.
They took pictures.
They collected evidence.
They dusted.
They had canvassed that entire complex looking for anyone who had seen or heard anything.
They even searched a nearby body of water in case he had dumped anything.
inside, but they found nothing because there was nothing. But as they worked the case,
there was one more thing about that apartment that made this harder than it should have been.
Jenny's building was right near the community pool that I told you about. And all the people in
that complex used that pool constantly for parties all through the warm months of the year.
And Jenny would frequently allow partygoers to use her bathroom because it was right there.
And because Jenny was the kind of neighbor who said, sure, go right ahead.
which means that in the weeks before she died, a lot of different people had been through that
apartment, specifically through that bathroom. That is exactly the sort of thing that turns a crime
scene into a nightmare, not just because of what happened in there, because of the foreign
material in that bathroom. It wasn't going to be unexpected that a bunch of different people
had been in there and they were going to find a lot of different things, different people's hair,
skin cells, and possibly different people's DNA would be recovered. There was a lot of different people's
nothing that matched the sample DNA they collected and years went by and by 1994 four years later
detectives had a name they wanted to look into now this was henry lewis wallace he's actually known as
the taco bell strangler and i had never heard of him before well he's a serial killer and he had murdered
eleven women between 1990 and 1994 most of which were either co-workers random customers of his or friends
from that Taco Bell that he managed in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Well, they thought he may have been Jenny's killer
since his crime started the same year in 1990.
And he was only about an hour away from Greenville.
But he was eventually ruled out
and sentenced to death for his other crimes.
And then her case went quiet.
Finally, in August of 2005,
Greenville investigators did what Missouri did a few months later.
They took the DNA profile developed from Jenny's,
autopsy, the sample that that medical examiner in 1990 refused to just throw away, and they submitted
it to CODIS. And at the time, nothing came back. No suspect, no name, and they had no way of knowing
that in a few months, a lab technician in Missouri was going to develop a full profile off of a
swab taken from a 12-year-old girl's body and enter it, and that Jenny Zatriski's file was going to
come back as their answer. So this was how the case is connected.
So now two police departments in two different states who had never spoken to one another, who had no idea the other one existed, picked up the phone.
And they compared their files.
And this is where it got strange.
Because there was nothing really in common in the murders except for the sexual assaults on both Megad and Jenny.
But Chris Hensley, who had been on the sheriff's case for years, was genuinely shocked when he learned how Jenny had died.
Because when you look at these crimes side by side, in Jenny's case, you've got a single woman in Greenville living alone in an apartment complex in the city.
The killer pries open a sliding glass door in the middle of the night and she's asleep and she's beaten and attacked and strangled and then dragged to the bathroom and arranged.
And then he stages of fake robbery, writes a message in the mirror and wipes down the surfaces and this takes time.
But in Megan and Sherry's case, eight years later in Portageville, you're going to be a message in the mirror,
You've got a farmhouse, a mile and a half outside a town of 3,000 people on a Saturday evening when there's still light out.
A mother and her 12-year-old daughter just going about their day.
There's no force entry in that case.
He comes to the door, he gets in, he controls both of them with a gun, ties them up, forces himself on Megan and shoots both of them.
And is gone in about 30 to 40 minutes.
So he doesn't stick around.
You've got different states, different times the day, a different way of entering.
a different weapon and a different type of victim. One where he stays for hours and one where he's
gone before one of the bodies is even cold. This is the thing about this killer that made him so hard
to catch. And that's what the FBI would eventually confirm. He didn't have a signature that you
could follow. He just adapted. He looked at a situation and worked out what could get him what he wanted.
And he did that instead. He got messier, not more organized.
With Jenny, he spent a long time planning, watching, even cleaning up after himself.
But with Megan and Sherry, it seemed like he came with the things he needed.
But most likely, he wasn't sure who his target would be until he saw her.
He saw Megan and Sherry outside.
And he knew he was going to go into that house.
And with Stephanie, it seemed like a pure opportunity.
She got out of her car that night.
He saw her and had an urge.
and he wanted to stop.
It seems more reckless, but at the same time, Boulder.
And then investigators went through both case files
looking for a single name that appeared in both.
But there wasn't one.
Not one overlapping suspect in both files.
So they went at it from the only other angle available,
which was geography.
They started building list of men
who could be placed in or near Greenville in 1990
and in or near Portageville and Dyersburg in 19,
And that sounds impossible until you actually look at a map.
Because if you drive from Greenville, South Carolina to Portageville, Missouri, the route takes you through Dyersburg.
That is where Stephanie was attacked.
Remember from part one, every one of those scenes was near an interstate.
This was a man who seemed to live on highways, like maybe a truck driver would.
And there's an interesting fact.
According to the FBI, long-haul truck drivers are linked to more.
than 850 highway murders across the United States over the past few decades. Yeah. So do they choose
that job because it affords them a way to get around quickly and escape the same way they came?
Or another way with speed? They do work odd hours, which does help avoid detection. And they can
scope out victims who may be in vulnerable situations. If you're wondering though, the FBI has found
that some choose the job because it helps facilitate murder.
But others actually escalate to killing after they become a truck driver.
And it's interesting, right?
The reasons do include severe isolation, detachment from normal social constraints,
and psychological issues that begin to worsen on the job when exposed to people in vulnerable
areas or situations like hitchhiker, sex workers, and their fantasy turns into action.
which I felt was kind of interesting to know.
The investigators believed the person connected to those three places was someone they could find,
but the skill of that job was enormous, which is why the resources had to be combined.
And since it was confirmed as a multi-state case, the FBI could bring in its own people.
Working with Missouri, Tennessee, and South Carolina, behavioral analysts built a profile of the man who killed Jenny, Sherry, and Megan.
And he was almost certainly the man who attacked and shot Stephanie in Dyersburg, Tennessee.
But then they concluded something interesting.
Yes, they thought he was transient.
But there was also something else tying him to both South Carolina and Missouri.
They didn't think he was just passing through.
Some actual connection to both these places, especially because in order to watch Jenny,
he had to be there for an extended period of time.
And to know where the sheriff's house was located,
he needed to be familiar with those roads and not simply and randomly just passing by.
by. So a task force was put together. The FBI, Greenville Police Department, the Missouri State Highway
Patrol, and the new Madrid County Sheriff's Office, and the U.S. Marshals. So instead of these
cases going cold over the years, it was the opposite. They were getting more and more attention
and resources. They tracked down and interviewed over 300 men about their links to Greenville,
Portageville, and Diersburg. And a number of them cooperated voluntarily, men who had no
obligations to do anything actually gave them their DNA because they wanted this person found
and they wanted to be cleared. Analyst Ruth Montgomery tested every single one of those samples
and none of them matched the ones from the crime scenes. In September of 2009, both cases actually
go on America's Most Wanted together, Sherry and Megan and Jenny in one segment. And alongside
the original composite sketch, they actually ran an age-progressed version showing what the man
might have looked like back in 1990, and then what he looked like in 1998, and what he might look
like, I don't know, 19 years on. Now, this is a very blurry picture. I don't know if I'm going
to be able to enhance it. It's the only one I could find, but the leads came in. Most of them
were about Jenny, but none of them were the suspect. New Madrid County Sheriff Terry Stevens,
who stood in the Sherrers driveway on the night of March 28th of 1998 and said that it was the most
horrific case he had worked on in his entire career promised one thing, that this case would never
be classified as cold. And by that point, over 1,200 leads had been chased down and cleared in the
Sherry's case alone. And Sherry's husband, Tony, was still living in that home. Even though his
daughter and wife were brutally murdered there, he never left. Because that was also the house where his
kids grew up. It had memories of the kitchen that Sherry was so proud of the floors that she just
had put in. It contained Megan's bedroom just as she left it. And he refused to give any of that up,
even though it meant living inside the worst day of his entire life. He was waiting and eight more
years went by. To get to the end of the story, we have to go back. Where some see heroes and
others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise,
we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Not as far as Greenville, but to just a year
before Sherry and Megan were killed. This time, we're going to a house in Memphis, Tennessee.
It was March 11th of 1997. There were five people inside that house that afternoon, and because
what happened to them. And because some of them were minors, I'm going to be using different names for everyone
involved. There was a 47-year-old woman that I'm going to call Loretta, her 17-year-old daughter, I'm going to call
Nadia, a 14-year-old girl that I'm naming Laura, and a 21-year-old woman that I'm going to call Mandy.
There was also Mandy's baby daughter inside, who was only nine months old. And there was already a sad start
to that day. Mandy had to go to a funeral. So Loretta, Noddy,
and Laura were watching the baby while she was gone. Mandy got back sometime in the early afternoon
and at around one o'clock somebody knocked on the door and she answered it. Standing there was a white
man with brown hair and a mustache and he was asking for their help. He explained that his wife had
been to a local Kmart store and she left her purse on the roof of their car and now it was gone.
It's a pretty good story. It's a story that makes you feel sorry for
this complete stranger. And it's a small story and it's specific and it's kind of embarrassing
in a relatable way. And it's asking for just a small favor just to use the phone. I think you
probably know it's a lie. This story is made up. And it makes you think this probably happened
in this person's life at some point or something similar because a lot of times lies are based on a
little bit of truth. Mandy wanting to be helpful, turn to go get something to write his details
on and when she turned around, he took that opportunity to push his way inside that house with a gun in his hand.
And the five people in that house, four women and girls and an infant, were told that no one was going to get hurt.
Another lie.
But he tried to get them to let their guard down by saying all he needed was somewhere to lay low for about 30 minutes.
That's an interesting amount of time, isn't it?
Knowing what we know about Sherry and Megan's murder, but it only took about that same amount of time to carry it out.
But he said, you just needed time because the police were after him for something he'd done,
something bad.
Now, that's kind of scary than it is innocent.
You know, it's a bind that maybe you need some help with, but it's not just like,
hey, let me use your phone.
It's, no, I'm a potential criminal here.
It indicates he isn't a good guy.
So it puts fear in them.
However, it seemed like he had a conscience because he told them to go put the baby in her plate pen.
And after that, he told everyone else to get on the couch.
Loretta, she's the 47-year-old, she tried to negotiate.
She told him she could help him get away,
that she could hide him in the trunk of her car and drive him out of there
if he promised not to hurt anyone in that house.
His response was to make them get on the floor and lie face down in the living room
next to one another and not to look at him.
And then he went to work.
And I want you to pay attention to the sequence here because a year from this afternoon,
he's going to do a version of it again in Missouri with Sherry and Megan.
So just keep it in mind.
This was prior to that crime.
It's just that no one had put it together yet.
Here in Memphis, he had brought duct tape with him and he taped the women and girls' wrists
behind their backs and he bound their feet.
And he was wearing a pair of yellow rubber kitchen gloves, the kind that you use when you're washing dishes.
He brought those two.
He cut the phone lines so nobody in that house could call anyone.
In FYI, he did that in other cases as well, including Stephanie's.
If you watch part one, she tried to make a call to her brother-in-law and she couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work.
He went through the bedrooms and gathered up socks that came from that house.
He did the same thing in Sherry and Megan's case, but in this case, he decided not to put them in the girl's mouth.
He didn't use them.
But can you imagine?
this monster rummaging through your house and then using your own items on you as a weapon.
He told them, if anyone came home while he was there, he was going to kill them.
It's absolutely terrifying.
And then he made all of them expose themselves to him.
It was like he was choosing which one he wanted.
He definitely had a target in his mind, the 14-year-old.
Now recall Megan was 12, he's a sicko.
He didn't hesitate. He cut Laura's clothing off with a pocket knife, and he sexually assaulted her.
And he forced her to perform a sex act on him. And then he used a pink towel to clean himself up afterwards after he climax and to wipe off any of the DNA.
And then he demanded the keys to Loretta's Red Crown Victoria. And then he left with the pink towel with him and the duct tape.
Once he was gone, they managed to get themselves free and they called the police.
can't even imagine. These women were alive. These women and girls did something that took so much
courage because it is the hardest thing anyone is asking of a survivor. They came forward.
Not everyone does. It is very, very traumatic to go through something like this.
The 14-year-old that I'm calling Laura agreed to have an essay kit performed on her at the hospital
and for an exam to be conducted. And I'm so sorry that she had to go through.
all that she did, and then just hours after that, would have been done to her, she had to go through
the exam and everything else. But she was aware that there was a chance it might help catch this
monster, so that's why she did it. And all of them worked with police on a composite sketch.
The man they described was around 5'8 in his mid-30s to mid-40s, about 140 pounds,
and he had been wearing a baseball cap, aviator sunglasses, a gray t-shirt,
dark jeans, a maroon windbreaker, and black tennis shoes. Two days later, Loretta's car turned up
abandoned at a nearby Kmart parking lot. And the pink towel was still inside. Interesting,
and also kind of a dumb move, why would you go through all that trouble and then leave it there?
Now, the store employees told police that they had seen a man running away from that vehicle
and that he looked like the same man in the composite sketch. They had his description
confirmed by independent witnesses, they had his DNA, sitting in a kit at a hospital,
they had the car he abandoned, and the towel that he used. But at that time, he was never found.
The DNA went into storage, and it stayed there for the next 20 years. That's a long time.
And I want to talk about that, because it is the most infuriating thing in this entire story,
and it's not unique to this case in Memphis. In 2013, the Memphis Police Department
disclosed that it had a backlog of more than 12,000 untested swabs from cases just like this one.
Some of them went back decades.
12,000.
It's almost like they didn't take this kind of violation, so what I'm going to call it, seriously.
Every single one is a person, somebody that was attacked, violated, and who went to a
hospital and consented to an invasive examination in the worst hours of their life.
specifically because they were told it might help.
And then the evidence they gave them just sits on a shelf.
Some of those kids were older than the people whose cases they belonged to her when they were attacked.
And you might ask, how does that even happen?
Well, it's not through just one decision from what I could publicly gather.
It's through years of systemic neglect and a genuine shortage of money and staff,
one kit at a time until 12,000 of them are done.
And eventually the technology began to improve.
And Memphis started working through that backlog,
kit by kit, testing them, entering the profiles in Tacotus.
And in May of 2017, they got to Laura's kit.
It was swabbed back in 1997.
That's how long it took.
It almost seems like these victims were not a priority.
They tested it.
They ran the profile.
and it came back to the same DNA profile
of the one in Sherry Megan's case and Jenny's.
So the same man had murdered Jenny is the tricky
that was 1990, done this to the 14-year-old girl in Memphis in 1997,
and then went on to murder a mother and daughter,
Sherry and Megan, in 1998.
And they were all connected two decades later in 2017.
Bud Cooper and Chris Hensley went to Memphis.
sat down with that survivor, Laura.
She was now in her 30s.
And here were two investigators from Missouri telling her
that the man who did it
had killed a mother and her 12-year-old daughter
a year after he walked out of that house.
It was really hard to take in.
But Laura told them two things.
The first was about the sketch.
She'd seen the composite that came out of Portageville and Dyersburg,
the one built from the description the woman in Tennessee gave,
and she said, that sketch looked more.
more like her attacker than the one from Memphis that was drawn after her own attack and her
own description in 1997 and that's interesting so she's talking about this one the second thing is what
she said that he said at that door she remembered his words when he pushed his way in he said take
it into the house that's exactly what he told stephanie laura had no way of knowing that she'd never
met stephanie and she'd never heard her story but a year after he said it in me
Memphis, he said it to Stephanie with a gun pointed at her. Take it in the house. It was almost as though
he was talking to himself. Like he knew he needed to act to move this attack to a place where no one
could see it, not to draw any attention. But even without the words being the same, everything
matched up. The bullets were the same in Stephanie's case as the ones that killed the sharers. And the DNA and
the sharers matched Jenny's and Laura's case. They were all the same man. With all the sketches
side by side, you can tell it's the same man. He wears glasses. He's kind of got longer hair and a mustache,
but it was worse than anyone who thought. Four cases, three different states, eight years apart
at the ends of it, every scene was near an interstate. And in three out of four, he talked his
way in. He always had a reason for being at the door, a missing purse, a friend who was looking for,
something small and ordinary.
We don't know what he said to Megan and Sherry.
But we know his MO was to use a gun to control people,
even though he didn't always use it as his method to end their lives.
He brought what he needed, and he took most of it away with him.
And in three of the four cases, minors were present.
If not the victims themselves, they were at least there.
It's shocking.
Bud Cooper looked at all of it and reached a conclusion
that he didn't want to reach.
The man they were hunting was targeting young women, younger women, girls.
The task force expanded again.
And Memphis PD came in and they did what they had done decades earlier,
which was build a list and then cross-referenced them,
men who lived in and around the Memphis area in 1997,
against men who lived in and around Greenville in 1990,
against people who lived in Portageville in 1998.
And they ran it.
and nothing came back.
They're trying to make the connection.
Like, how did he get to all these places and why?
27 years of investigation.
DNA connected it all conclusively,
and still, no one knew this man's name.
It's maddening, which is why I really wanted to cover this case.
Okay, but are you ready for my favorite part?
Probably the one that you've been waiting for as well,
but it's not the end.
So still, you need to buckle.
up and stay buckled for quite a while. In April of 2018, something happened right here in California
that changed cold case investigation in this country forever. Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested,
the Golden State Killer, a man who had committed a string of rips and murders across California
over 12 years and had gone unidentified for more than four decades. And the way they found him was
brand new, at least to investigate.
They took the DNA from one of his crime scenes,
they uploaded the profile to a public genealogy database,
and they looked for relatives.
So they weren't looking for him.
They were looking for distant relatives like his cousins.
And then a genealogist built out a family tree
from those matches, working backward to common ancestors
and then forward down the branches until the tree narrowed to one man.
And that's what we now know as forensic genetic genealogy,
genealogy or investigative genetic genealogy. Because now it's a real and viable tool in crime
solving. But in April of 2018, every investigator in America was seeing it in action for the very
first time. You didn't need your killer to be in the database. You just needed some distant
relative who had spit in a tube because they were curious about their heritage. And if their DNA was
in a database that allowed law enforcement access to it, not all of them do, by the way,
they could find a match.
But at the time, the task force that was working Greenville in Memphis and Portageville and Dyersburg,
they looked at that and they thought the same thing that everyone else did.
They wondered, could it help solve their cases?
To do this, you need DNA.
Not a profile.
You need actual biological material and a good amount of it and sufficient quality.
The sample from Megan's body,
the swab that Don Wyndham had took because there was a mark on her chest, it was used up.
20 years of testing, every time technology improved, they tested it again, and every test
consumes what you have. By 2018, there was nothing left of it. And that makes me so
mad. And what remained from Jenny's case wasn't enough either. Not for something like this,
but of the three where they collected the DNA, one of them had a large enough and clean enough sample to try it.
It was the one from the survivor that I call Laura's attack in Memphis in 1997.
And it was sitting there untouched in storage for 20 years.
Think about that.
The evidence no one tested for two decades was now all there was left.
But this is not a cheap investigative tool, not at all.
So they were going to need money.
Memphis police detective Stephen Shepard went out about finding funding, and he pushed and pushed.
And the funding finally came through.
The sample went to a company out in Virginia called Parabon Nanolabs.
You have probably heard about them before.
I feel like they're kind of becoming a household name.
there were so many hoops that they had to jump through before anything could even start.
But Parabon had the sample.
And they had to confirm it was good enough to proceed to the next stage.
And that's not always possible in a 21-year-old sample.
But it cleared.
The profile was uploaded to Jedmatch.
And that is a public genealogy database where people, just like you and I, can put their DNA in there and upload their results.
and actually find relatives, but also possibly match them to unsolved cases.
If you're interested, I will link it below.
But this case landed on the desk of a woman named Cece Moore.
She is probably the biggest name in the game.
Here's what she was looking at.
The database returned a list of people who shared DNA with the unknown suspect,
distant relatives.
Two of them shared a significant amount of DNA with each other,
which told her they were closely related to one another and to the suspect.
That's two people in the same branch of a family tree.
So she starts building backwards first, up through generations.
She was looking for common ancestors who linked that genetic network together and she found them.
It was a couple out in Arkansas, married in the 1800s, who were the suspect's great, great grandparents.
Stay with me.
She had just identified two people who died long before anyone involved in this was even born.
and the man who murdered Jenny was somewhere in their descendants.
And I think this is just so interesting.
Then she had to come back down generation by generation, branch by branch,
through children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
cross-referencing social security records and marriage records and death records,
eliminating every line that couldn't produce a man of the right age
and the right place at the right time.
This is tedious.
And eventually the tree narrowed.
down to a man from Alabama. Now, he also had an extensive criminal record, and on that record was a
conviction for attempted murder. So C.C. definitely felt like she was on the right track, but all she really
had at this point was a name. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era
of billionaire athletes.
While others follow the noise,
we follow the money.
Learn more at Bloomberg.com.
But she had a name,
Robert Eugene Breshears.
Now, you were going to hear it pronounce Brasher's,
but I've listened to his family pronounce it,
and they say Brashears.
And so does Bud Cooper,
the man who worked on this case the longest,
and I think they would know best.
But a name that,
fits is not the same as certainty and Cece knew that. She needed more before she brought it to law
enforcement. So she did what a lot of us do. She went to Facebook. She started going through profiles
looking for anything that connected this family. And what she saw had the hairs on the back
of her neck standing straight up. There was a picture of a man wearing a hat and aviator sunglasses.
Yeah. He looked exactly like those police sketches.
The one from Dyersburg built from Stephanie's description.
The one from Memphis, built by four people who had been faced down in that living room floor.
Except the Facebook profile that this picture was on wasn't his.
It belonged to a woman.
Her name was Deborah.
Deborah Breshears.
And she was younger looking.
So Cece figured this had to be his daughter.
Now this is going to get deep.
so please do not get distracted right now.
CeC. Moore did not reach out to Deborah.
She did not ask any questions.
She didn't want to tip anybody off.
She put the picture in her report, along with the timeline that she built,
of Robert Brashear's known movements during the exact windows the investigators cared about.
And she sent all of that to law enforcement.
She had concluded that this was their man.
Why?
Well, for starters, he was from Arkansas, which was close to Missouri, and he had also lived in Greenville, where Jenny's murder happened.
This is just from personal information that she could gather online, but Robert Brashear's name did not appear in any file on those cases that I've told you about.
Not in Greenville, not in Memphis, not in Portageville, and not in Dyersburg, Tennessee.
This man's name had never once come up in 28 years.
With the task force five agencies deep, over 1,200 leads in Missouri alone,
over 300 men interviewed and swapped.
New Madrid County Sheriff Terry Stevens was floored,
and they pull Robert Brashear's Arkansas driver's license photo,
and they put it next to the Facebook picture,
and next to the composites, and the resemblance was there.
but I think you know they needed more than just he looks like the killer, the potential killer.
But this is where his own history worked against him.
Because this man, like I said, had a criminal record.
And that means there was a mugshot on file.
Robert Breshears had a record going back years across multiple states.
So they didn't have to look far to find a picture of him.
They had one sitting in a file, taken by a police department that had arrested him
and later let him go.
We're going to get to that.
Now investigators take his mugshot
and the picture from Facebook
and they actually go to Memphis
and they show them to Laura
and the other survivors
from that house in Memphis, Tennessee.
And they were speechless.
It was him.
That was the man who knocked on their door
in March of 1997 with a story
about his wife's purse.
That was the man who put them face down on the floor,
taped their hands,
hands behind their backs. They had no doubt. They knew it was him instantly. So now there was a name
and a face. And for a survivor saying, yes, you have the right guy. Which leaves us with the obvious
question. Who was Robert Eugene Brashears? Where did he come from? What was in his past? And why did he do
these horrific things to these women. And where in the world was he now? But my biggest question
was how many more people did he hurt? Because this man was not easy to connect to these crimes
at all. Well, all I'm going to say is keep watching. Because it may seem like you've heard it all,
but you haven't. Until we literally get to just last year in 2025. So let's keep moving.
I want to tell you who he was before we get into how they track him down.
He was born on March 13th of 1958 in Newport News, Virginia.
He was the youngest of four children.
And while he was still a boy, his family moved to Huntsville, Alabama.
And that's where he grew up.
He went to S.R. Butler High School there, and then his parents divorced.
And for his senior year, he lived with his father in South Bend, Indiana, where he eventually graduated early from John
Adams High School. And it's actually worth me telling you this because a boy who was raised in Alabama,
who finished school in northern Indiana, might end up sounding like he came from neither place.
And remember, Stephanie told the police that her attacker had a northern accent. It adds up.
In 1976 at 18 years old, Robert actually enlisted in the U.S. Navy. And he was sent to Pensacola,
of Florida. And almost immediately, something was just off. He started telling the Navy medical personnel
that he had a list of all kinds of conditions, starting with depression and then a knee surgery
of an aerial disease. Clock that because it's going to come up again. The Navy looked into all
of it and the psychologist who evaluated him concluded that he was actually malingering. He was
faking it. But by late fall of that same year, he was just openly saying he just wanted. He just
wanted out. A psychiatrist ended up signing off on finding that his personality alone made him inadequate
for service. And he was ineligible to ever re-enlist. Think about that. He was honorably discharged
in December of 1976. He had been in the Navy for a matter of months and he had just finished training
and no one knows why he wanted out so badly. That's just one thing on a long list of things about
this man than no one has ever been able to answer. He went back to Huntsville, Alabama, where he was a
bartender for some time, and he spent time in Louisiana working out on an oil rig and in Arkansas and in
Texas. He was already moving around. And at that bartending job in Huntsville, he actually met a woman.
And they had a daughter together. This was his first daughter. They did not stay together.
And he never had contact with that child afterward.
Then in November of 1980, 22-year-old Robert Brashears did something really strange.
He actually published his own obituary.
Not in one newspaper, in two.
One of them in Newport News, Virginia, the town where he was born, and the other was in New Orleans,
in a city that he was living at at the time.
He basically is going out announcing his own death in print in two different states,
and no one knows why.
Go ahead and make some of your own goals.
guesses after you listen to everything because I have my own assumptions as well. You might ask,
was he trying to disappear? Was he building a version of himself that he could walk away from
so that he could start again somewhere else as somebody else? Was he covering something up? And if so,
what had he already done by the age of 22? By 1984, he had resurfaced in Florida. And in November of
1985 on the Treasure Coast, a 24-year-old woman named Michelle Wilkerson got into a truck with him.
And this is the earliest account we have of his crimes. The word account is important here because
listen to what he did. She crossed past with him at a bar in Fort Pierce. He was driving a brown pickup
truck at the time and at some point he told her his name was Gary and he earned her trust enough
for her to get in that truck that night. He drove them out to a
Citrus Grove, and then he pulled out a gun and demanded that she perform acts on him. But Michelle
refused. She actually tried to get out of his truck, and he shot her twice at close range in the head
and in the neck, and then beat her to what he possibly imagined was to death, but she did not die.
But I want to stay on Michelle Wilkerson for just a second because this woman did something astonishing.
She was shot, she was in the dark, miles away from anywhere, and she got out of that truck,
and she somehow found the strength to run.
I bet he wasn't expecting that.
Oh, but he came after her, and she got down to a culvert.
This was an 18-inch pipe running under the road full of mud and water, 18 inches, and she put
herself inside of it.
She crawled through it to get away from him.
Wow, and that's terrifying on its own, because in cases that I've done,
that is a prime location for killers to actually dispose of their victims.
But he lost track of her.
Even though he tried, he couldn't find her.
And eventually he just drove off and went to the beach to get rid of the gun.
He probably thought she died.
Well, while he was out there, his truck got stuck in the sand.
What is it saying?
It's Murphy's law.
Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
Well, so far, that was true for this guy.
Michelle got herself out of that culvert.
She went and got help, and she was taken to a hospital.
And injured as she was, she gave law enforcement a detailed description of that man and of his truck.
And APB went out, and a couple hours later, police found that truck stuck in the mud.
It was at Frederick Douglas Beach, and they arrested him.
They found him.
Remember I told you that he had an attempted murder on his record?
while Michelle is the first person in this story to survive Robert Reschers.
Michelle was the reason police knew about him.
She was the reason he was in custody, and that is brave.
In November of 1986, he was convicted, and he was sentenced to 12 years in prison,
but this is going to make you mad.
He served some time, some time.
He served just a little over three years.
Yes, just three.
he was released in May of 1999 for good behavior.
Don't even get me started.
Because I'm sure you're thinking what I'm thinking.
Just because he sucked at killing someone
doesn't mean he didn't intend to kill Michelle.
Letting him out was a big mistake.
Someone once said, and I don't know if I believe it's true,
but just tell me your thoughts on it.
Someone said that in order to be released,
if a judge wants a criminal out on the street again,
it should be a requirement that that criminal,
stay at the judge's own house for his initial release. At least a month. And then maybe they would be
harsh. I know they were kind of being half serious, but I do believe when things don't concern
others directly, it's easy for them to let it go, and they let him go. He only got 12 years to
begin with for shooting a woman twice in the head and beating her, leaving her for dead in a
Citrus Grove. And he was out in just a matter of years. Now, to be fair, under Florida law today,
that would not happen. But back then, it wasn't unusual at all. Michelle gave police everything she could.
And the system gave him back to the world. When he was released, he went back to Huntsville, Alabama,
and he worked in construction. And during that time, he met a woman named Rose Fultz. And they started dating.
He worked for an HVAC business in Atlanta, and by the following year, he had a new job.
He was working as a maintenance man in an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina.
The complex was called Hidden Lake, and that should be very eerie, because that is where Jenny lived
and where she was murdered.
And in 1990, Robert Bershears was living on Pelham Road just under a mile from Jenny's
apartment, easy for him to slip away and hide. So investigators eventually concluded that whoever
killed Jenny had been watching her and had known with confidence that she lived alone, and it felt
comfortable enough to be in that apartment and stage an entire scene and wipe it down and take his
time. They were right. He worked there. He had a reason to be on that property. He had a reason to know
which units had one person in them and which didn't. And nobody.
would have looked twice at him walking through that complex at about any hour of the day or night.
And when Jenny didn't come to work on April 6th and the complex manager sent a maintenance worker
over with a master key, somebody opened that door.
And it could have been Robert himself.
I couldn't even wrap my brain around how insane that was, because it probably was him.
I've tried to find out who it was, and I can't.
It's just never been reported that I know of.
And that question has never been answered,
but Jenny was almost certainly not his first.
We know what he did in Michelle.
There is every possibility.
Someone came before her than no one is connected.
And probably more before Michelle.
Because escalating to murder is one thing,
but just doing it right out the gate is another.
By April of 1990, Robert Breshears was 32.
years old. He had already tried to murder a woman in Florida, served three years for it, already
faked his own death in two newspapers, he had already been discharged from the Navy as unfit,
and he had 10 months of freedom behind him. It makes you think, but I'm not done. So while he's stalking
and then murdering Jenny, he was dating Rose on and off. I mean, they did have their ups and downs,
as you can imagine, because he would go away for days, weeks, even months on end, and then drop
back over. I wonder why. There's one more thing about this period, because his life did not stop
while he was doing this. In 1991, Rose gave birth to their daughter, Deborah. So the man who was
prying open a sliding glass door in Greenville in April of 1990 and murdered a woman in her bed
had become a father the following year. And he had a partner and he had a new baby and a job
and a criminal record that no one was even looking at.
But after leaving Greenville, Robert Brescher's kept moving
and he kept getting caught for the wrong things.
Call it bad luck or call it being a dumb criminal.
I don't know, maybe both.
In December of 1991, he was stopped by U.S. Border Patrol.
It was at a checkpoint on the interstate, on the 10,
between El Paso, Texas, and Mexico when he was heading west.
And agents just didn't like something about this man,
And so they ran his plates, and the truck that he was driving wasn't his.
It was stolen from Marrietta, Georgia.
I was thinking, oh, poor Robbie, he looked like a creep, and he was one.
Big surprise.
But inside that vehicle was a 380 AMT backup pistol.
And he was a felon with a firearm that didn't want to go back to prison, so he took off.
But he didn't get far before he worked out in his brain that running was worse than just surrendering.
so he gave himself up. He was behind bars again, but he was able to get bonded out. Only a couple
months later in February of 1992, he stole another truck and Georgia police founded in a parking lot in a
motel in Marietta, where he was staying under a fake name on a Tennessee driver's license.
But it was what they found when they looked in the truck in this motel room that was very telling.
A stolen 32 caliber handgun, a sheriff-deprived.
PD's jacket, handcuffs, binoculars, a security guard badge, a police scanner, a police codebook,
and a radar detector, hmm, you would think he was an actual cop, but no, he was merely posing as one.
You just got a glimpse into this man's cons. You know what else he had? A slim gym, and I'm not talking
about the meat stick, I'm talking about the tool you use to pop open a locked car, along with a range
of other tools, surgical gloves, documents, and a variety of different names.
Wow. Think about that. Oh, and he's a smooth talker. He tried to tell police that all of this
stuff he had was because he was a private investigator. Yeah, he was so private that his credentials
didn't even exist. More like a professional stalker. He tried to deny that he was
impersonating an officer. But come on. That's a kit. A man.
who can pass for law enforcement, who can hear where police are because he's on the scanner.
Do you get what I'm saying? He has a tool that he can use to get into a locked vehicle.
He can handle things without leaving prints behind. And he has a bunch of documents to become
whoever he needs to be. At this time, authorities worked out who he really was.
And they found his criminal record across the three states. And he was convicted in sentence to
five years in prison. But again, he was released. It was February of 1997. And if you thought,
okay, maybe he learned his lesson. These tendencies, I'm just going to call them, do not get
taught out of someone. It's quite the opposite. It was only one month later that he knocked on that
door in Memphis with a story about his wife's purse. Remember that? Yeah. And after everything
he did at that house to those innocent women and girls, he was a little bit of women and girls. He was
went home to Rose. They had been together on and off for years through all of it. When he got out in
1997, the two of them finally moved in together in Paragold, Arkansas. And guess how far that is from
Megan and Sherry's house in Portageville? Only about an hour. And that is when five-year-old Deborah
met her father, yeah. And this little girl was growing up with two older half-sissors. They were twins,
and she always believed she shared a father with them, but it wasn't true.
She had a different dad.
And he had just showed up one day out of nowhere, drove up to the driveway,
introduced himself, imagine that?
I mean, I didn't meet my dad until I was eight or nine years old because he was also
in prison.
He left when I was about two.
So I didn't remember him at all.
But it's weird.
It's a weird feeling to meet a person that comes into your life that you're supposed to have this
connection with.
But for Deborah, she noticed right away that he took being her dad.
very seriously. It's going to sound weird to say that. She called him a good dad. That's how she described
him. But we know that he is a killer. So that dichotomy is something that really makes people want to
understand the minds of these monsters. How can they compartmentalize different aspects of their life
and who they are? He took Deborah and her sisters camping and canoeing. He gardened with them.
He spent quality time with them. He seemed like the or...
present involved parent.
He looked normal.
And I'm saying this because it is important.
Deborah actually described him later as tall, dark, and handsome.
And I see it.
And I think charm has a lot to do with it,
which makes sense because it's an act.
He knew how to look normal and ordinary,
but he was far from it.
Deborah knew or was told that he worked as a carpenter.
He was in construction.
and then he traveled a lot for work,
which was his explanation for why he was gone so much.
But we know there were other reasons.
There were some things she noticed,
and she just kind of filed them away
without understanding what they were at the time.
For example, he had a wig.
She didn't know why.
It was a straighter-looking wig than his hair.
It was a little lighter than his brown hair.
She didn't know why he would need that.
She also didn't know why he would sometimes
wear eyeglasses. And other times he would put on some aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap just
randomly, especially when he saw police officers. I mean, to most of us, it would be pretty obvious
that this is some kind of disguise. But for a young girl, it just kind of like made no sense,
but it wasn't anything she took into consideration. But there was also the women's clothing in his
closet. It wasn't her mother's clothes. Well, the reason was that he was robbing gas stations
dressed as a woman. So no one could identify him. Over time, Deborah figured out on some level
that he was not the best, that he was a criminal, that he had at least stolen cars and robbed people.
I mean, kids will pick up on things that are being said. But that was the extent of what she knew.
Stolen cars, a dad who was kind of gone a lot, there was no reason she would have ever imagined
that he had killed anybody.
She and her mother knew that he was in prison on gun charges,
and that was true.
The Georgia conviction in 1992 was for vehicle theft and gun possession.
It was just an incomplete record of what he had really done
because he hadn't gotten caught yet.
Deborah said that she was a mama's girl,
but she went on to be a daddy's girl
within just a couple months of Robert coming into her life.
It was just the way he treated her.
He was so loving and kind and caring.
And he and her mom Rose promised he was never going to stay gone from her life again.
Deborah remembered her life being perfect at this point.
And it was until something changed.
She said it went from the American dream to the American horror story.
But we're not there yet.
But it was beginning to go dark.
On March 13 of 1998, Robert Bresher,
turned 40. And his family and everyone who loved him, they threw him this big party. It was a milestone.
Deborah described it as celebrating her dad from a bar and paragold all the way back to the house.
And then just 15 days later is when he drove into Missouri, turned onto County Road 419, passed
right in front of the sheriff's home and eventually worked his way inside and took the lives of Megan and Sherry.
And then on his way back home, he tries to get into Stephanie's house, shoots her, and runs off.
When he finally came back home, no one suspected he had done anything like that.
But as they say, there were signs.
Robert would have these little secrets between him and Deborah that she initially thought were innocent and harmless, just a daddy and his little girl bonding.
But it seemed like her mother Rose knew more because there was this one,
vivid memory the Deborah has of Robert wanting to just take her on what she thought was a quick
errand to the liquor store. He put her inside his van. He started down the driveway, but Rose ran out
screaming for him to stop. And he did. And Deborah thought, wow, she's really upset. It was like
over the top for merely going on a short drive. It was like she didn't want him alone with her
daughter. She screamed, you're not taking my fucking kid to the damn liquor store.
Get my kid out of that car now and get into the house.
He did get out.
But instead of going inside, he started throwing punches at Rose.
However, this woman fought back.
She didn't back down.
And the more she did, the more it seemed like he was just beating her relentlessly.
Deborah was watching all of this unfold and she was shocked because she had never seen her dad even get angry before this.
It was out of character.
But was it?
or was his facade falling away?
Rose kicked him in the crotch.
He was begging for her to stop at that point,
and she was yelling at him.
She told him, we moved here for a better life,
and this isn't it.
She didn't want her children exposed to this,
so we apologized.
He begged her to let him stay,
and they all went back inside,
and things returned to normal.
And I'm definitely using air quotes there.
Robert promised that would not
ever happened again. And it didn't. He never laid a finger on Rose after that, at least not anything
that Deborah had ever witnessed. But she did witness him being violent, except it was towards one of her
older half-sisters. The punishment didn't match what she had done either. It was like he was taking
this anger he had inside of him, this rage out on her. And coincidentally, this was around the same time he
killed Megan and Sherry. Now before I tell you what happened, there was a photo taken during what
seemed like this very playful exchange between Robert and the girls. But in this photo, he actually
has his hand around Deborah's older half-sister's neck. And they were all joking around and that's
what they thought it was just a joke. But knowing he's a killer, we can look at this photo
and think it's pretty chilling.
Looking back, after what I tell you that he did next,
Deborah thought that it could have been more.
He seemed to have a really short temper out of nowhere.
He would get really angry and blow up about almost nothing.
The girls were just playing together in the room.
They were just laughing and being silly, completely normal.
But for some reason, he felt like they were being too loud.
And instead of just calmly telling them to be quiet,
He storms into the room. He starts screaming for them to stop saying things like, I told you to shut the fuck up.
And then Deborah's sister did something. She talked back. Yeah. She basically just let something slip.
Like, why don't you relax or why are you making such a big deal on this? Whatever she said made something in Robert snap.
To these girls, it was completely unexpected. His face changed. His eyes.
everything. He grabbed her. He dragged her into the room and he just spanked her. But this wasn't
like he just spanked her words. He wasn't stopping. She was screaming. She was trying to get away.
It was extreme. More than a simple punishment. He looked like a monster. And from that point,
Deborah called it his alter ego. He was also paranoid. He would watch the news nonstop. He had
two TVs on with different stations. One was CNN and the other one was like a local news station.
And when the news broke about Sherry and Megan, it was on TV everywhere in that region.
I mean, of course it was.
A mother and a 12-year-old daughter murdered in their home an hour away, and nobody had any idea who did it.
Deborah remembers her father hearing the news that night.
It was on like it always was.
Every bulletin, all of it, all the details.
She remembers her mother being so scared.
and Robert just kept reassuring them that as long as they kept the house locked, they would be safe.
Isn't that interesting?
But there he sat in that house with Rose and three little girls watching coverage of the murders that he committed.
And he told them, lock your doors.
The police composite sketch was actually shown on TV.
It was in the papers.
The entire area was looking at that face.
It never once occurred to anyone in that house that the man in that sketch was living under their roof.
Wow.
Two weeks after Sherry and Megan were killed on April 12th of 1998, Robert was arrested.
It happened in Arkansas, and this time it was for an attempted burglary.
He targeted the house of a woman who lived all alone, a house where he previously did some construction work.
So he knew the layout.
he knew where her phone lines were. He cut her phone lines. He had a video camera with him at the time
and he was armed with a 22 caliber revolver, the same style of gun used at the sheriff's crime scene.
And here's what I want you to remember from part one. That ingredient in the medicated lotion I told
you about that was found in swabs from Megan's body, as you will recall, or if you're new to this,
It was used for things like genital warts and other venereal infections, which Megan did not have.
So the only other reason it would have been present down there would be if the killer had it on him when she was assaulted.
Well, when he was arrested, guess what was taken from Robert's pocket?
A tube of that medical cream.
And he told them it was to treat his genital wards.
So there you have it.
But of course, nobody in Paragold, Arkansas had the faintest idea what they were holding.
Major evidence connecting him to another crime.
They had a local man with a record caught trying to get into a house.
So they booked him.
They took his gun and his bond was set at $5,000.
He paid it and he walked out the door.
That was it.
Deborah did remember that right after this,
Robert and her mom abruptly got married.
Hmm, that's interesting, isn't it?
I think you probably know why.
There's no ceremony, nothing like that, but it makes sense.
If Rose was now his wife, she could not testify against him.
After that, he would go on the run.
And then the family would periodically sneak him back inside when he came home.
There was this whole story that Deborah told about how her and her sisters and her mom,
They bought this enormous rug.
He was in the car with them.
And when they got out to get back in the house,
they held it up and they were all shimmying.
And Robert was behind it.
They were hiding him.
They were making it look like a game, though.
She was harboring a criminal.
Rose knew.
But did she have an idea of the extent of his crimes?
Probably not.
That August, he drove through a fence on U.S. Highway 413
in Green County, Arkansas.
saw. He hid a parked car and he left the scene. When police finally caught up with him, he gave a
false name. But that didn't hold up for long. They figured out who he was. They also figured out
that he had stolen valuables from a neighbor's house. His bond on the burglary charge was revoked
and it was all coming apart. Deborah remembers this time specifically. She was outside. She was
playing with her sisters and he showed up out of nowhere. Him and Rose started arguing and he was
saying, I am not going back to prison. I would rather die. And Rose was actually worried because she knew
he had a gun and that he would use it. He wasn't bluffing. He was serious. Something was up.
Rose was frightened. She didn't want to let him leave. Deborah described him as chaotic,
paranoid, violent, drinking. He was adamant over and over that he wouldn't go back to prison.
So that was what was happening. And Deborah is watching this unfold. The neighbor is there.
While her mom and Robert are arguing, the neighbor is getting into the van, getting the gun, unloading it, and running off with it, probably because Rose instructed him to do so.
Well, this set Robert off. He was enraged, and there was a good reason. That gun had been used to murder his victims.
He couldn't let someone just take it, and apparently he was able to gain possession of it again.
That fall, warrants were issued in Arkansas for his arrest, and Robert Bershires did what he'd been doing since he was 22 years old and published his own obituary in two newspapers. He disappeared.
I know this is a lot to follow, but this was the timeline. On January 12th of 1999, Robert called his now wife Rose.
But just so you all know, this wasn't out of nowhere.
you've heard about some of his murders not all of them he kept going the last one he committed was just months before this in november
but since no one would solve that case until later i'm going through this chronologically of what he was doing from his end right now
he'd been gone for months by then living wherever person like him goes so that he will not be found and now he wanted to see his family call it loneliness
I don't know what it was.
But he told Rose to bring the girls to a super eight motel in Kennet, Missouri, about 30 miles away.
The room had been booked under a fake name, Thomas Mitchell.
And when Rose got there, it was obvious why.
Parked outside was a gray Dodge Ares that he had stolen.
It had plates on it that was taken off of another vehicle in Indiana.
Now, he told Rose that he had committed two armed robberies in Tennessee.
I know what you're probably thinking.
Why is she with him?
Why is she here?
Why is she bringing her children?
Because this was a man with warrants out for his arrest in a motel room under a fake name with a stolen dodge outside.
And now his wife and three little girls are inside with him.
I can't answer that question.
There are a lot of reasons why people will stay with someone that they know is not good for them.
But around 11.30 that night, Kennet Police Officer John Bedden drove past that super eight and he saw
the dodge. He ran the plates. They came back as the wrong ones and he knew it was stolen, so he called
for backup. How scary is that knowing that those girls are in there with him? Why even put them in
harm's way? I mean, I just can't not think about that. I'm not even talking about Rose. I'm talking
about him. But I've said this so many times, we cannot make sense of the senseless. We're never
going to be able to get into a monster's mind and make sense of any of this. Officer Tim Trobridge
went to the front desk and asked about that car in the parking lot, and the clerk told him it belonged
to the man that was staying in room 323. He checked in as Thomas Mitchell. He had kids in that room with him,
and thankfully that was relayed to this officer. They went up and they knocked on the door and Rose opened,
and she was intoxicated. You could tell. The girls were already fast asleep in their bed.
She tried to tell him, oh no, no, the Dodge is mine. I don't really know why there's Indiana plates on it,
and Thomas, who's really Robert, isn't here.
And then she said, come in, search the room.
That officer and four others went through it
and they found bullets from a 380,
a police scanner, fake IDs,
and a loaded 9-millimeter pistol.
That was a lot on its own,
but then they noticed something else.
There was someone hiding under one of the beds,
That just gives me the chills.
So they ordered whoever was to come out with their hands up.
There was nothing.
There was no movement, no answer.
So Corporal Crawford took hold of the mattress.
He pulls it off the bed and underneath is Robert Reshears.
And he had a 380 pistol pressed to his own head.
The officers tell him, drop it.
But he wasn't going to.
Rose actually becomes physically aggressive.
She does not want the cops there.
She's trying to fight them so that they would just back off of Robert.
Officer Betten handcuffed her.
At this point, the girls had woken up, of course, with everything that was going on around them.
And they were taken to the police station with their mother.
When they walked out of that room, Robert demanded that those officers, just please get out of the room so he could call his attorney.
That's all he said he wanted.
And they agreed.
They backed out.
and then he locked the door behind them.
The Dunkling County Sheriff and the Missouri State Highway Patrol arrived to assist.
And then for the next four hours, Officer Craig Crow talked to Robert trying to negotiate with this man
on a phone in that motel room.
Robert knew that if he got arrested now with warrants, with a stolen car, a fake ID loaded gun,
and again a police scanner, he was going away for a very long time.
But I think you know why he was really scared.
He also knew about all the women that he had killed.
But he had no idea that they don't know any of it.
He thinks they must know, that they've ran his DNA,
that they have connected him to all these crimes,
that he may even get the death penalty.
He already said he would rather die than go back to prison.
So you would think if that were really,
really true, he would just simply stop breaking the law. The truth was, as far as Kenneth PD
was concerned, this was just a man who had stolen a vehicle who had outstanding warrants. That was it.
Nobody out in that parking lot had the slightest idea that Robert was a serial killer and that
he had murdered at least seven people. That's right. Seven. I know you know about three,
which is why I needed this in parts.
In all likelihood, Robert believed the law had finally caught up with him.
And meanwhile, at the police station, Rose is talking.
She told officers the real identity of the man in room 323.
And they learned about his warrants.
And through those four hours, he started throwing things out the door, clothes belonging to Rose and the girls, loose bullets, the nine-millimeter handgun.
But he still had the 380 pistol.
And then, just after 4.30 in the morning, on January 13th, there was a gunshot. Officers race in,
and they find Robert on his back, on the floor, with a gun still in his right hand and a wound to his head.
And in his front pocket was a note. It said that in the event of anyone reading it, he was dead.
and it asked that Rose be contacted at an address in Paragold, Arkansas.
And then it said something else.
It asked that his father not be told.
His dad had just come out of the hospital after cancer surgery,
and he wrote that it would kill his father if the police were the ones to tell him his son was dead.
So this serial killer spent part of what he believed were his last minutes on earth worrying about his father's condition.
It's such a juxtaposition. It's one that I don't have an explanation for. How can he care?
But also be so careless with the lives of others. But Robert didn't die that night.
He was taken to the hospital and he lived for six more days. But on January 19th of 1999,
Robert Eugene Brashears died at 40 years old. Kenneth police ran that 380 pistol through their database.
to see whether it connected to anything else and nothing came back.
They had no reason to think
that this looked like anything other than what it actually looked like to them,
a car thief with warrants who took his own life in desperation in a motel room
rather than go to prison.
And yes, he's dead.
So if you're kind of doing the math, you're probably saying,
wait a minute, this was back in 1999.
Yes.
For almost the next 20 years,
Robert's name did not appear once
in any of the cases that the Joint Task Force was investigating.
And Rose lied to her daughter, Deborah.
She told her that the police had killed her father.
Think about what that could do to a young person.
That's what she grew up believing,
that her father was shot by police in Missouri when she was seven years old.
But it was finally her older sisters who told her the truth.
It was so hard for her to comprehend.
Why? That was the question she had, but they were so in the dark. And that's why I now need to come back
to September of 2018. C.C. Moore's report is in the hands of the task force. They have a name,
they have a face, and four survivors in Memphis who looked at his picture and said that's him
instantly. But you cannot close homicides on resemblance on a family tree. They needed his DNA. His
DNA. So they go to his family, and when I say family, they found Deborah. And they ask her
if she would be willing to help them. Now, this part of the story was so shocking because you're
seeing the story unfold through the eyes of Robert's daughter who grew up not knowing all the
things she's about to discover about her own dad. Deborah was in her 20s by then. Investigators were
sitting in front of her saying that they believed he was a serial racist and murderer. And it
victimized women and girls across three different states. They gave her all the information about
Jenny, about Megan and Sherry. She's like, I don't know anything about South Carolina. She did not even
know her father had lived there. That was before he came back into her life. She knew that he had been
in Alabama, Missouri, and Arkansas. She agreed she was going to help the police. So she gave them a
sample of her DNA and so did Rose. Deborah handed over photographs of her father.
And she knew in her gut that looking back on everything that it was probably true.
She said later that she just wanted a police to leave at that point because she needed a moment
to just break down by herself alone, to take everything in.
I'm sure this is something that all of us would do, but she gets on the internet, she goes on Facebook,
she goes through her own personal papers and photos, and she starts to connect the dots.
And it really started adding up for her.
She was learning about what was done to Jenny and Megan and Sherry and his other victims and how bad it was and she felt awful.
She had so much compassion for these innocent people.
She couldn't understand how he could kill another person's child or wife.
Deborah's DNA sample was sent to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division's forensic lab
and to the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Lab.
And the results came back saying that the DNA from the Greenville, the Portageville, and the Memphis crime scene was 19 trillion times more likely to have come from someone who was Deborah's father than from anybody else.
19 trillion.
That's an enormous number.
But unfortunately, it has holes in it because Deborah's father had brothers.
And a sibling's DNA is close enough that this kind of familial comparison,
cannot completely rule them out.
So prosecutors knew what they needed to do.
And I was actually really shocked by this, but they went to the court.
And on September 27, 2018, Robert Brashear's body was exhumed from his grave in Shiloh
Cemetery in Paragold, Arkansas.
They were able to get a sample directly from his remains, and they compared that sample
to what had been sitting in evidence for 28 years.
The likelihood that it belonged to anyone else in the world was one in 65 octillion.
I looked.
Octilian has 27 zeros after it, okay?
This was him.
On October 5th of 2018, the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the new Madrid County Sheriff's Office held a joint press conference,
20 years, six months and seven days after Tony and Stephen Scherer came home.
home to find. Their loved ones dead. Terry Stevens announced that they had identified the man
who murdered them. It was conclusive. Listen for yourself. Good morning. I'd like to thank each and every
one of you for attending this today. On March the 28th, 1998, Newmatter County witnessed one of the
most heinous crimes ever in the history of this county. That was the murder of Megan and Sherry
Shearer in rural Portageville. We activated our major case squad immediately and through diligence,
through hard work and tenacity, we have finally solved this case. We've traveled all the way
across the United States, done countless interviews, search warrants, DNA,
test and we finally identified the killer. We have positively identified one Robert Brasher out of
Paraguld, Arkansas, who took his own life in Kennett, Missouri in January of 1999. Make no mistake
about this gentleman, he is a serial rapist and a serial killer, but no more.
I want to give a special thanks to several of the men and women who have been involved in this investigation from the get-go.
No telling how many hours have been put into this investigation.
I have no doubt in my mind that this is the most heavily investigated case this county has ever seen.
Starting off with several members of the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Without their efforts, their assistance, the two.
that they bring to the game, we wouldn't have accomplished this today.
Most especially Master Sergeant Bud Cooper, who was there from the get-go and took a special personal interest in this case.
Lieutenant Phil Gregory, who just spoke to you, he's been involved since the beginning.
Members of the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Lab, especially
DNA technical leader, Ms. Ruth Montgomery. Her work has been invaluable in solving this.
The Greenville, South Carolina Police Department, most notably Sergeant Tim Conroy and Captain
Stacey Owens. They couldn't be here today because they're holding their own press conference
in Greenville, South Carolina as we speak. They had an unsolved homicide from 1990 that proved
to be the same suspect as ours.
And then at the same time in South Carolina, Greenville Police Chief Ken Miller announced the same man had murdered Genevieve Zatriki.
And in Tennessee, authorities named him as the man who attacked Laura.
Jenny's brother, Phillips, stood up, and he spoke.
He said, 28 years, that's how long it had been cold.
That's how long memories had to fade.
for connections to fray and to sever,
that it had almost been so long he was giving up hope.
But he thanked the investigators for their perseverance
and for their teamwork,
and for their refusal to stop.
He said that his words alone could not express his family's appreciation.
And then he said something about his sister.
He said that he hoped she would be remembered
not as she left this world,
but how she lived.
And for Tony and Stephen, this was what they waited for for two decades.
It's not what anyone wanted because Robert was dead.
He'd been dead since January of 1999, 10 months after he came up that driveway.
Every lead the task force chased, every one of the 300 men who volunteered a DNA sample,
every hour that Ruth Montgomery spent testing them.
The behavioral profile of a man who might start,
again, the age-progressed sketches that ran on America's Most Wanted in 2009, showing what he could
have looked like 19 years later, was drawn for a man that had been in the ground a decade.
They'd been chasing a ghost the entire time, and there was no way any of them could have known it.
So it doesn't feel like justice.
And Deborah felt that.
She was sad for these victims because they didn't get a trial.
confront him but at least it was over he would never hurt anyone again but there were other ghosts out there
the ones he'd taken with him to his grave who had yet to be brought to light his five other victims so i have
never done a three-part series on this channel so this would be a first dark lividi yes we have but not me alone
and some of you are mad.
I'm seeing your comments.
I don't know if you're mad or just really excited
to get to the next parts,
but I would not be mad about having three videos
going really deep.
This is a ultra deep dive.
I promise.
There will not be one left after this.
This is the final installment.
I already wrote it,
and I'm filming it tomorrow.
So I will see...
This family is on the brink of Civil War.
Mobland.
The hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus.
We are the Hortigans.
Don't know the net?
Then Google us.
From the underworld of Guy Ritchie.
Do you want to step up the ladder?
I won't comment.
Dead.
Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren.
Do I have to do everything myself?
You want to want?
I'll give you a...
Moblad.
New season is now streaming on Paramount Plus.
