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NARRATOR: Two women, both murdered in the same state
park, Indiana police feared it was the work of a serial killer
until the forensic evidence pointed them
into two different directions.
[theme music]
It was just after midnight when a police officer in Franklin,
Indiana noticed an abandoned car parked at a stop sign.
The lights were on, but the engine was turned off.
The car keys and a wallet were on the front seat.
CHIEF BORGES: Generally, if people are going
to leave their vehicles, they secure them,
or they'll take those personal items with them.
He was very concerned that something
did not appear right with that scene.
NARRATOR: The car belonged to 18-year-old Kelly Eckart.
There were no signs of her anywhere near the area.
-I went to bed and to sleep.
And all of a sudden, about 2:00, 2:30 in the morning,
I got a phone call.
And it was Franklin Police telling me
they found Kelly's car.
Kelly wasn't in it.
Naturally, I knew something was wrong,
because she wouldn't leave her car.
NARRATOR: Mrs. Sutton told police
that Kelly worked at the local Walmart,
and had been most likely on her way home.
-I just thought the car broke down,
and she walked somewhere to get help.
I never, in my wildest dreams, could have thought
or would've thought that anything
had happened to her bad.
NARRATOR: Police noticed a fresh scratch on the back bumper,
and wondered if someone bumped the car intentionally as a way
to get Kelly out of the vehicle.
-We're not leaving any stone unturned.
We hope she's alive.
We hope she just walked away and she'll come home.
But as law enforcement officials,
we have to look at worst case scenarios, too.
NARRATOR: For four days, police and volunteers
searched the area.
And the family held a candlelight vigil
praying for Kelly's safe return.
-We're stunned.
We're shocked.
We're anxious, but we're also hopeful.
NARRATOR: Then came the news no parent ever wants to hear.
Two women walking their dogs found
Kelly's body in a ravine 40 miles away.
BUD ALLCRON: The shoes were not there.
Her jewelry was not there.
The positioning of the body itself, the way her arms,
and the way her torso was positioned,
it all indicated she had just been dumped there.
-I just needed something to bring me closer.
And so they brought me the tassel out of her car
from graduation.
And I carried it with me for a really long time after that.
But I had something of hers closer, and I needed that.
NARRATOR: The forensic pathologist
concluded Kelly Eckart had been strangled to death.
-There were three objects tied around her neck.
There was a metal chain, which was gold colored.
There was a white shoestring off an athletic-type shoe.
And there was the strap off the top of a pair of bib overalls.
NARRATOR: The autopsy found evidence Kelly had been
sexually assaulted and also shot.
-There was a wound on the right side of the forehead that
looked exactly like a gunshot wound to the entrance.
NARRATOR: But the bullet was made of wax, not lead.
DR. CLARK: The only thing I'm aware of that
would be close would be a stun gun, which
is used at the slaughterhouse.
It's use to strike animals in the head
and stun them before they're slaughtered.
LANCE HAMNER: We think that he bumped the back of her car
and was able to get her to stop and get out.
At some point he immobilized her in some way.
We think that maybe that's when he shot her.
Or maybe took her at gunpoint and got her into his car.
NARRATOR: On Kelly's clothing investigators
found white fibers, as well as green trilobal or triangular
carpet fibers, suggesting she had been wrapped in something
white and been inside a car with olive carpet.
Would this information lead them to the killer?
Kelly Eckart was a member of the National Honor Society
and won an academic scholarship to college.
She seemed destined for a bright future.
CONNIE SUTTON: Her life was just taken.
She was too good of a person for all this to happen to.
BUD ALLCRON: I've investigated a lot of murders over my career.
This one was very touching and very heart
wrenching in that it was just a young girl who's just starting
her life, starting her college education,
and getting ready to have a full and a happy life.
And for no good reason, it was taken away from her.
That hurts.
NARRATOR: Kelly's body was found in a ravine four days she went
missing and investigators wanted to know when she was killed.
Dr. Neal Haskell, a forensic entomologist,
found fly larvae on the body from the green bottle blowfly,
a species that lands on a body almost immediately after death.
Their rates of growth are fast and consistent,
and provided a vital clue in determining time of death.
-It acts as a time clock.
By knowing the growth and development,
we can use it to calculate backwards.
NARRATOR: Dr. Haskell believed that Kelly
was killed on the night she disappeared.
DR. HASKELL: Since the blowflies are not active at night,
she could have been killed at any time after darkness
throughout the 26th, into the 27th, until sunrise.
But she definitely had to be dead after sunrise.
NARRATOR: Police interviewed everyone
who saw Kelly Eckart on the night she went missing.
According to her employer, Kelly finished her shift
at the Walmart store a 10:00 PM.
From there, she met her boyfriend,
Anthony, and his mother.
The three of them shopped together until 11:15.
And then they each left in separate cars.
CHIEF BORGES: The last individual
to see Kelly Eckart alive is her boyfriend
at the time, Anthony Evans.
We also know that if something has happened to her, that it's
more likely that it will be someone
connected to her than not.
CONNIE SUTTON: He was a suspect.
And they looked at him for quite a while
and checking everything.
NARRATOR: But Anthony said he didn't see her after that,
and claimed he had an alibi.
That he went to a local convenience store
on his way home.
-He produced a receipt.
We were able to go back and track
that information through witness interviews.
We were not able to have someone say, yes, specifically I
saw him, but he was able to produce the receipts.
NARRATOR: With no solid clues, police turned to the public
for help, and they released the information
that her sneakers were missing.
CONNIE SUTTON: Her tennis shoes were leather.
I believe they were 7 and 1/2, and they were white.
CHIEF BORGES: We had actually obtained an exact copy of them
from a store in Ohio.
We put that out to the media in order
to see if anyone might know the whereabouts
or location of those shoes.
NARRATOR: Three weeks later, a tipster called saying,
there was a pair of sneakers in the bathroom of the Atterbury
Wildlife Preserve, about 20 miles
from where Kelly's body was found.
CHIEF BORGES: They were consistent with what
Kelly's mother had told us.
They were the same size.
Also, missing from one of the tennis shoes was a shoelace.
NARRATOR: Since the killer used a shoelace as a ligature,
investigators were convinced.
These were Kelly's sneakers.
So they scoured the wildlife preserve
looking for additional clues.
BUD ALLCRON: We figured that somewhere out in there,
there would be a crime scene.
And was that the *** scene?
We didn't know.
NARRATOR: The park was more than 33,000 acres,
and they didn't find anything.
One week later, investigators were
told that there had been another ***.
-I did receive a phone call from a state police detective who
informed me that there was a body of a young woman that had
been found down in the Atterbury Fish and Wildlife area, which
is the same are we found Kelly's shoes.
NARRATOR: The victim, 26-year-old, Sharon Myers,
had also been strangled to death.
The cases where frighteningly similar.
BUD ALLCRON: They were both young females.
They both died of ligature strangulation.
NARRATOR: Investigators could find no connection
between the victims except for the way they died.
They now had to consider a chilling prospect, that they
were searching for a serial killer.
Police in Indiana now had two unsolved murders,
Kelly Eckart and Sharon Myers.
Originally, it looked as if the two were related.
-They're both within a 20,25 mile radius.
And you just normally don't have two young women being killed
in that small of a radius in Indiana
without maybe being connected.
NARRATOR: But apparently they weren't.
Sharon Myers co-worker, Jason Hubbell
was implicated in her *** due to an argument
the two had at work.
Hubbell was later convicted.
There was no evidence Hubbell had anything
to do with Kelly Eckart's ***.
-Jason Hubbell's DNA did not match that of the suspect DNA.
NARRATOR: So police, once again, turn to the public for help
in the Kelly Eckart investigation.
Amazingly, they got over 800 leads.
Most were dead ends, but not all.
CHIEF BORGES: We had received a lead concerning a man that
was in a pickup truck with a camper on it that had been
sitting in the Walmart parking lot for extended periods
of time during the same time frame that Kelly went missing.
NARRATOR: Kelly Eckart was last seen alive
in the parking lot of this same Walmart store.
And witnesses said, the man was there almost every night.
In fact, they said there might be a connection to Kelly.
BUD ALLCRON: They had seen him walking up to you
a maroon colored car and walking back.
In fact, they thought he was going to break into the car.
And it turned out that Kelly's car was about that color.
And so we were wondering if it was Kelly's car
that he was actually looking into.
NARRATOR: Investigators set up surveillance in the parking lot
and tracked the man down.
His name was Jeff Wagner, a 37-year-old construction
worker in the middle of a divorce.
Police asked him why he spent so much time at the Walmart.
-Mr. Wagner said, to watch women and to meet women.
He would go there quite often, a couple, three times a week.
NARRATOR: Wagner insisted he knew nothing
about Kelly Eckart's disappearance
and willingly provided a DNA sample.
-Jeffrey Wagner did not match the samples
we recovered from Kelly's body.
NARRATOR: Then police got another tip
saying that a man named Scott Overstreet had
information about Kelly Eckart's ***.
-We, in fact, then went to find Scott Overstreet
and brought him to the Franklin Police Department.
NARRATOR: Scott Overstreet had no criminal record,
and, at first, claimed he knew nothing
about Kelly Eckart's ***.
But during police questioning, he changed his story.
Scott said that his brother, Michael, asked him to drive
his van to the Atterbury Wildlife Preserve.
While driving there, he saw an unconscious woman
under a blanket in the back of Michael's van.
CHIEF BORGES: He had told his brother,
don't hurt this young woman.
And his brother replied to him, don't worry about it.
I'll just get her lost down here.
NARRATOR: Scott said, he left his brother there
and never saw the woman again.
So led police to the Wildlife Preserve.
And there they found evidence that the woman in Michael
Overstreet's van was, indeed, Kelly Eckart.
BUD ALLCRON: Kelly's pager was one of the first items found
there, and then we started finding
her other jewelry items.
And once we found those, we knew that that was the scene.
NARRATOR: Michael Overstreet was a factory worker married
with five children with no prior criminal history.
LANCE HAMNER: He had a short enlistment
in the United States Navy.
Was in for about a month and was discharged
for psychological problems.
NARRATOR: During police questioning,
Michael denied everything.
LANCE HAMNER: He did not present an alibi.
He just simply said he didn't do it.
He said, I don't know who did it,
but I had nothing to do with it.
NARRATOR: In Michael Overstreet's home,
police found a .22 caliber rifle and several shells.
These were unusual.
The bullet portion was made of wax.
BUD ALLCRON: The lead portion of the bullet
had been pulled from the casing and wax put into those,
plugging it up, and thus in making a blank shell.
NARRATOR: This was consistent with the wound
on Kelly's Eckart's forehead.
Investigators also found the white blanket
in Overstreet's home and took tape samples
of the green carpet in his van.
The green fibers from Michael's van were made of nylon
and were trilobal in shape.
They were visually consistent with the fibers
from Kelly Eckart's clothing.
The white fibers from the blanket
were also similar to the ones on Kelly's clothing.
By examining the refractive index,
trace evidence expert Damon Lettich
measured the amount of light that passes through the fibers.
And in doing so, he found even more proof
that Michael Overstreet was the killer.
DAMON LETTICH: I concluded then, after I had completed
my examination, that the fibers that I had collected from Kelly
Eckart's overalls could have originated, then,
from the comforter and the fibers that were taken
from carpet in Overstreet's van.
-When we found out there was a fiber match,
we were very excited about it.
It linked this killer to this victim
in another way that strengthened all of the circumstantial case.
NARRATOR: Finally, investigators measured the height
of the bumper on Michael Overstreet's van
and compared it to the scratch on Kelly's bumper.
-The damage to the Kelly Eckart's vehicle
was consistent with what the bumper
height could be on the van.
NARRATOR: Based on the forensic evidence,
prosecutors believe they know what happened
to 18-year-old Kelly Eckart on the night of her ***.
According to friends, Michael Overstreet
shopped in the Walmart store where
Kelly Eckart worked as a cashier.
On the night of the ***, prosecutors
believe he followed Kelly home after work.
And the evidence suggests he bumped the back of Kelly's car,
which prompted her to stop to inspect the damage.
And that's when Overstreet fired a wax
bullet from his .22 caliber rifle.
[gunshot]
It didn't kill her, but knocked her unconscious.
Michael put Kelly into his van, then called his brother
asking him to drive his van to the game preserve.
Once there, Michael walked Kelly into the woods,
then assaulted her, and strangled her to death.
For reasons that are unclear, Overstreet tossed her shoes
in a bathroom at the game preserve,
which we later found by police.
Days later, police believe Michael returned to the scene
to move Kelly's body to a more isolated location.
-We think that he went back, picked up her body,
and took her out to Brown County and dumped her over the ravine.
NARRATOR: Michael Overstreet left behind forensic evidence,
however, much of it too small for the naked eye.
-Forensics were absolutely critical to this investigation.
It helped us paint a picture for the jury of exactly
what happened to Kelly Eckart the night
she was abducted, ***, and murdered.
NARRATOR: For prosecutors, most of their questions
had been answered, only one remained.
Was is it possible that Scott Overstreet
was more involved than he was willing to admit?
Investigators took DNA samples from both brothers,
and compared them to genetic material on the victim.
The results pointed to Michael Overstreet, and not
his brother.
-The chance that somebody other than Michael Overstreet
contributing a DNA, after combining all the statistics
from all the tests that we'd done, was one in four trillion.
NARRATOR: Scott Overstreet was offered immunity in return
for his testimony.
After a five week trial, Michael Overstreet
was convicted of Kelly's *** and sentenced to death.
LANCE HAMNER: We were happy because we'd done our jobs.
We were happy because a dangerous criminal
was going to be off the streets.
And we were happy that we'd gotten justice for Kelly.
CONNIE SUTTON: I think about the fact
that I'll never see her walk down the aisle.
I'll never watch her have children.
Every time I see one of her friends get married, it hurts.
It's just not fair that I don't get that.
He took that away from me.
NARRATOR: Solid police work generated the leads.
Family members provided useful information.
And forensic evidence cemented the case
in yet another senseless crime.
-As far as forensics, I didn't know a whole lot about it
before.
They taught us along the way.
We had a lot of good people work this case that
explained everything to us along the way.
And they explained it in a language we could understand,
because we weren't scientists or whatever.
-It amazes me what we're able to do now that we couldn't do
10 years ago, that we couldn't do 20 years ago.
I think that as far as making our society safer,
we live in a good time as far as the ability to prove cases.
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