Forensic Files II

Up next, a community reels

after the senseless murder of a young woman.

It's very difficult to let a mom and a dad know

that their daughter has been killed.

It was a horrendous tear in the fabric of our life.

The victim has no known enemies.

Her murder defies explanation.

There was really no context for it.

It was really a complete mystery.

Hundreds of suspects emerge,

but for years, there are no arrests.

Nothing about this case was another day at the office.

It was complex. It was challenging.

Ultimately, old-fashioned detective work

and a little bit of art expose a killer hiding in plain sight.

Science was there.

Science was there from the beginning.

Most residents of Agawam, Massachusetts will tell you

it's an ideal place to raise a family.

The community has always been great.

Great schools, great activities for the kids.

A warm place.

A warm place with wonderful people.

The Zeigert family raised

three girls and a boy in the town.

Their second child, Lisa,

was determined to follow in her parents' footsteps,

and once married, planned to raise a family close to home.

She could have changed her mind,

but she loved being close enough to be able to pop in

and say, "Hey, mom, can I borrow your shoes?"

You know, or something like that,

or "Can I do some wash?"

You know?

I think she loved the closeness, yet the independence.

Lisa had a degree in education

and was working as a teacher's aide.

To make some extra money, she took a job at a card shop

called Brittany's in a local strip mall.

She loved it because she loved people.

Lisa worked nights and weekends,

and her hours meant she almost always worked alone.

Four days before Easter in 1992,

she was working her usual 5:00 to 9:00 shift,

when a customer entered the store to find it empty,

but with the door open and all the lights on.

Police say the customer called out and got no answer.

The next morning, a worker found the store unlocked.

It hadn't been closed up from the night before.

At 9:00 am, the door was open. Lights were on.

Lisa's car was in the front, in the parking lot,

and all of her personal belongings

were still inside of Brittany's card shop.

Lisa was too responsible.

She would have never left that store unsecured.

She would have never left until 9:00.

Officers searched the premises

and were alarmed by what they found.

We went into the back room, and there was boxes on the floor

that had been obviously pressed down,

like somebody had been on top of them.

Slight blood spattering on some of those boxes.

There was also blood spattering on a few of the greeting cards

that were on a stand just outside the door

to that particular closet or back room.

The signs were ominous.

All that was missing from the store was Lisa.

Investigators searched the surrounding area

and found nothing.

Everyone had fingers crossed.

The community would organize searches,

you know, for her.

If you didn't live under a rock,

everyone heard about the Lisa Zeigert disappearance.

There was never a time that they weren't out

looking for her, searching for her,

and we had faith that we would find her

and she would be okay.

Days passed.

Lisa's deeply Catholic family hoped for the best

and prepared for the worst.

Easter Sunday arrived,

and still there was no sign of her.

We went to Mass at our church, where we attended every Sunday.

The whole family and a large group of friends

came with us to Mass.

It was good to be there. It was good to be there.

It was a peace.

But any hopes for Lisa's safe delivery

were dashed a few hours later.

Her body was found in a wooded area

about three miles from the store where she was last seen.

I'm trying to think of the best way to say the word "dead,"

and I got there and walked up and Dee was waiting at the door,

and I explained it to her and just went from there.

Wayne Macey, our wonderful, dear,

wonderful friend Wayne Macey, came to the door by himself.

I went to the door and I looked at him,

and I said, just by his face, "You found her, didn't you?"

And he went, "Yeah. We did."

And I said, "She's dead, isn't she?"

The tragedy stunned this normally quiet, peaceful town,

and as details of Lisa's murder emerge,

outrage gave way to outright terror.

In my 20 years of being a crime reporter,

it was one of the most savage, depraved,

almost bestial assaults that I've covered.

Because she had clearly struggled for her life,

the scene of Lisa Zeigert's murder

was littered with evidence.

She was found partially clad.

Her upper body clothes had been pulled down,

and she had numerous stab wounds,

the major one being across her neck.

Police had, really, a trove of information.

Forensic material was found, you know, spread out,

maybe by 20 or 30 or 40 yards in this area,

so police really had a large scene with which to work.

But no murder weapon, apparently a knife, was found.

Even in 1992, investigators understood

that genetic evidence from this scene

and from Lisa's rape kit would be key.

In Massachusetts, DNA evidence

wasn't even admissible in court for years,

but investigators knew that day was coming.

Even though we couldn't put a name to that DNA,

we felt that eventually,

the individual that had committed this crime,

that his DNA would eventually match

with the sample that we had.

In 1992, DNA criminal databases didn't even exist,

so detectives turned to old-fashioned police work

to expose who their DNA profile might belong to.

First off, they had a rock-solid timeframe

for when Lisa was kidnapped from the card shop.

The last person in the store was there at 8:20.

A purchase was made, and she left.

Another witness entered the store around 9:00

to find the lights on and no one there,

so the abduction almost certainly happened

within that 40-minute window.

Another possible lead...

a fresh set of tire tracks found near Lisa's body.

The officers made a mold of the tire tracks.

We took those back to the lab to be analyzed.

They were Cooper tires.

The combination of tires on this vehicle was so distinctive,

detectives were able to comb through sales records

at local dealerships and track down the driver of the vehicle.

We brought him in for questioning,

and he went home and brought back with him

pictures of that vehicle

at the crime scene three days prior to Lisa being killed,

where he was four-wheeling with his friends,

and that particular lead turned out to be of no significance.

Another witness said they remembered

seeing a Bronco S.U.V. in the area where the body was found

around the time of Lisa's murder.

This prompted a local woman to contact police.

A woman called and said,

"My then-boyfriend, who is ex-military,

has a fixation with knives and has a Bronco,"

or a type of vehicle like that, that they were looking for.

Moreover, he came home around the time of the murder

and there was blood on the inside of his truck,

and the dashboard had been kicked in.

Detectives tracked him down.

He said he'd sold the vehicle.

To see if this was true, it was traced halfway around the world.

And it ended up going to New York City,

and then from New York City, a car dealer there sold it

to somebody in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

European countries do a big business

in four-wheel drive vehicles

that are exported from our country.

Investigators in Massachusetts reached out to analysts overseas

to have the S.U.V. examined.

We got in touch with INTERPOL,

and they went over the car as best they could

and did not come up with anything.

Detectives found themselves

taking some unconventional approaches,

even employing psychics

and hypnotizing people, like this woman,

who may have seen something connected to the murder.

Investigators really turned over every stone,

and over the years, tried every possible tactic.

But traditional and non-traditional methods

turned up nothing.

The case went cold... not for lack of evidence,

but because no match could be made

to the high-quality DNA profile from the crime scene.

But a troubled marriage ended up solving that problem.

To this day, nearly every long-term resident

of Agawam, Massachusetts,

remembers the shock of Lisa Zeigert's murder.

Lisa Zeigert's murder, abduction, and rape

threw the entire town for a loop.

Some of the young waitresses,

their parents wouldn't let them go to work.