Killer Left Her Dead in the Bathtub - Message on the Mirror Made No Sense | Jenny Zitricki

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's soaked into the carpet and it's spread out to the hallway. Nobody had come in or 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. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue, just plum, dewy hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mavily New York. Maybe it's Mavily. Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel, and if you have never been here before, I am Kimberlya. 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 Sharer and his 15-year-old son Steven 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. Steven 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 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, Sharer's car is in the garage and the hood is cold. And inside, Steven ends up finding his mother and his 12-year-old sister dead on their living room floor. 38-year-old Sharer Sharer and Megan, who was in sixth grade, she played basketball. She had just won a public speaking contest the day before. Sharer 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 self-adulted. Sharer 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 Sharer. 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 Dyer'sburg, 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 hid her. But she survived. Her name was Stephanie. Ballistics proved the bullet in her arm came from the same gun that killed Sharer 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 Sharer 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 touched DNA, but it ended up being saliva and they got a partial DNA profile. And the problem was, codeus 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 contain traces of a chemical called isopropylmyverstate, 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 knew 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 1908, they had something that they could go and put into codeus. 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 Sherry 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 Sharer 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 who 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. And Michelin North America had quarterers in Greenville. Genevieve is 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 co-workers 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 was 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 It's a mini-lead. 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. Genitive, hage-adieu-sitch 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 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 in 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 is as 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 Zatrici. 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 a 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. And she moved 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 word. 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. Imagine setting your makeup. Then forgetting it's even theirs. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue, just clump, dewy hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. 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 pantyhose 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 and 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 skull. Now, everything else and that apartment was arranged as well. And this was where it kind of gets strange. The bedroom had been completely ransacked. Dresser drawers were being duped and 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 in 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. 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 to reasonate or hurt. But investigators needed to look deep or as 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 laugh 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 under 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 pantyhose around the neck is what did that. The time of death was estimated at around two 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 onto it on the reasoning that science might eventually catch up. Now, think about that alongside what Don Wyndham did in the Sherry's 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 detect his belief had happened to Jenny? They believe her killer had actually gotten in through the sliding glass patio door, which had been pride-open with some kind of tool. They believe that Jenny was asleep in her bed. And he crossed that apartment, struck her in the head, whispered her, and then strangled her with the pantyhose. 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 the 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 lights, which is they had no fingerprints, 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 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 canvas 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 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, while he's a serial killer, and he had murdered 11 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 the 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's atrisky'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 sample 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 prized 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 a fake robbery, writes a message in the mirror, and wipes down the surfaces in this takes time. But in Megad and Sherry's case, eight years later, in Portageville, you've got a farmhouse, a mile and a half outside a town of 3,000 people on a Saturday evening when they're still light out. A mother and her 12-year-old daughter just going about their day. There's no four century 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 Megad 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 men. Meghan 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 Meghan 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, bolder. 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 lists of men who could be placed in or near Greenville in 1990, and in or near Portageville and Dyersburg in 1998, 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 Dyersville. 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 away 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 it was almost certainly the man who attacked and shot Stephanie and Dyer's Berk 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. 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 Dyer's Berk. And a number of them cooperated voluntarily. Men who had no obligations to 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 Sherry's 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. He 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. Meet new grippy setting mist from Maybelline, New York. Deltamist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness. No stickiness. No residue. Just plum. Do we hydrate it skin? That still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Maybelline, New York. Maybe it's Maybelline. 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 of 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 it's 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. There was already a sad start to that day. Mandy had to go to a funeral. So Loretta, Nadia, 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 wanted to be helpful, turned 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 in an infant, were told that no one was going to get hurt, another lie. Somebody 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 need a time." Because the police were after him for something he'd done. Something bad. Now that's kind of scary than it is innocent. 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 play band. 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 them she could help him get away. But 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. well, including Stephanie's. If you watched 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 sat on his shoulder to 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 climbed Maxx 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. I 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 five foot eight 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, the reddisk car turned up abandoned at a nearby Camart 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'd 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 kid 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 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 were 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 kid 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 into codeus. 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 Meagan's case and Jenny's. So the same man had murdered Jenny as a 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 Meagan in 1998. And they were all connected two decades later in 2017. Bud Cooper and Chris Hensley went to Memphis. They 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. He 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 Dyer's Burg. The one built from the description the woman in Tennessee gave and she said that sketch looked 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 never met Stephanie and she'd never heard her story. But a year after he said it in 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 Jennie'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 had 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 he was looking for directions, 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, miners were present. If not the victims themselves, they were at least in 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 built a list and then Crosse 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 D'Angelo was arrested. The Golden State Killer, a man who had committed a string of roaps 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 investigators. 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 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 an inaction for the very first time. You didn't need your killer to be in the database. You just- needed some distant relative who would spit in the 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 in 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 were made 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 and 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 Parabond 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 Parabond 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 CC 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 brand 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 could produce a man of the right age in 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 CC definitely felt like she was on the right track. But all she really had at this point was a name. Imagine setting your makeup then forgetting it's even theirs. Gel to miss technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. But she had a name. Robert Eugene for shares. Now you were going to hear it pronounced brashers. But I've listened to his family pronounce it. And they say, "presures." 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 sees he 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 Dyer'sburg 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 Debra. Debra brashers. And she was younger looking. So C.C. figured this had to be his daughter. Now this is going to get deep. So please do not get distracted right now. C.C. Moore did not reach out to Debra. 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 Brashier'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 Brashier'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 Dyer'sburg, Tennessee. This man's name had never once come up in 28 years. With a 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 Brashier'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 mug shot on file. Robert Brashier's 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 mug shot 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 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 Brashier's? Where had 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 SR Brother 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 You're telling you this? 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 tucker had a northern accent. It adds up. In 1976, at 18 years old, Robert actually enlisted in the US Navy and he was sent to Pensacola, 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 psychologists who evaluated him concluded that he was actually malingering. He was faking it, but by late fall that same year, he was just openly saying he just wanted out. A psychiatrist ended up signing off on a finding that his personality alone made him inadequate for service. And he was ineligible to ever read and list. 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 that no one has ever been able to answer. He went back to Hunsville, 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 Hunsville, 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 Prashiers 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 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 paths 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. An APB went out, and a couple hours later, police found that truck stuck in the mud. It was at Frederick Douglass Beach, and they arrested him. They found him. Remember, I told you that he had an attempted murder on his record? Well, Michelle is the first person in the story to survive Robert Rashier's. 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, underfloored a 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 Hunsville, Alabama, and he worked in construction. And during that time, he met a woman named Rose Foltz, 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 Pashiers 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 6, 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 they 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 as first. We know what he did in Michelle. There is every possibility. Someone came before her than no one has 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 Bushiers was 32 years old. He had already tried to murder a woman of Florida, served three years for it. Already faked his own death in two newspapers. He had already been discharged from Manavia's 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, Debra. 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 in a jar. job, and a criminal record that no one was even looking at. But after leaving Greenville, Robert Prasier has 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 Al Paso, Texas and Mexico when he was heading west. And agents just didn't like something about this man, so they ran his plates. And the truck that he was driving wasn't his. It was stolen from Marietta, 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, their 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 deputies jacket, handcuffs, binoculars, a security guard badge, a police scanner, a police code book, and a radar detector. You would think he was an actual cop, but no, he was merely posing as one. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue, just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Maybe it's Maybelline, Scott 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 used to pop open a locked car. Along with a range of other tools, surgical gloves, documents, and a variety of different names, well, 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 know 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. 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. His 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 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 Debra met her father, yeah. And this little girl was growing up with two older half-sisters. 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, I didn't know where a 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. They are supposed to have this connection with, but for Debra, 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. 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 Debra and her sisters camping and canoeing. He gardened with them. He spent quality time with them. He seemed like the ordinary, present, involved parent. He looked normal, and I'm saying this because it is important. Debra 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, an ordinary, but he was far from it. Debra 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. He also didn't know why he would sometimes wear eye glasses, 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 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. 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 mom's girl, but she went on to be a daddies 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 Prashier has turned 40, and his family and everyone who loved him, they threw him this big party 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. 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 he 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 never happen 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 wonderful 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-sisters 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 their room they were just laughing and being silly completely normal but for some reason he felt like they were being too loud and is that of just calmly telling them to be quiet. He storms into their 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 grabbed her at the room and he just spanked her but this wasn't like he just spanked her was 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 non-stop 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 Sherian 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 rows 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 Sheri and Megan were killed on April 12 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 we knew the layout he knew where her phone lines where 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 use of the sharers 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 general awards 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 arrested. 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 general awards so there you have it but of course nobody in paracol 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. 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 shimming 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 US Highway 413 in Green County, Arkansas. He hit 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 we 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 Bushiers did what he'd been doing since he was 20 years old and published his own obituary and 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 Kenneth 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 Aries 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 to armed robberies and 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, Ken and police officer John Beddon 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 we called for backup. How scary is that knowing? 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 Trowbridge 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 the bed. She tried to tell him, oh 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 for shares. 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 Beton 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 Crowe 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 fairy long time. But I think you know why he was really scared. He also knew about all the women that he'd 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 true, he would just simply stop breaking the law. The truth was, as far as Kenneth P.D. was concerned, this was just a man who would 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 cut 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, lose bullets, the nine millimeter handgun. But he still had the 380 pistol. And then just after 430 in the morning, on January 13th, there was a gunshot. Officers race in and they find Robert on his back on the floor with the gun still in his right hand and 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 and an address and 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 Braxier's died at 40 years old. Can it 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. He is 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, there's 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 murder her. 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, they're looking back on everything that it was probably true. She said later that she just wanted 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. I was actually really shocked by this, but they went to the court and on September 27th, 2018, Robert Prashier'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, octillion has 27 zeros after it, okay? This was him. On October 5th, 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's share came 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 like to thank each and every one of you for attending this today. On March the 28th, 1998, New Madrid County witnessed one of the most heinous crimes ever in the history of this county. That was the murder of Megan and Sherry Shear 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 tests, and we finally identified the killer. We have positively identified one Robert Brasher out of Paraguld, Arkansas, who took his own life in Kenneth Missouri in January of 1999. Make no mistake about this gentleman. He is a serial racist 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 tools 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, Miss Ruth McGumry. 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 Citrici. And in Tennessee, authorities named him as the man who attacked Laura. Jenny's brother Philips 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 the roof Montgomery spent testing them. The behavioral profile of a man who might strike again. The age progressed sketches. They 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 'cause they didn't get a trial. They didn't get to 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-ark liberty. Yes, we have, but not me alone. And some of you are mad. I'm seeing your comments. I don't know if your mad are 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 you soon.