Bloodline Detectives - Season 2, Episode 16 - A Family Torn Apart - Full Episode | Forensic Files

portageville missouri 1998 police respond to the murder of a young mother and her 14 year old
daughter police soon learn of similar attacks the linking of all these cases was
gathering more and more information about this perpetrator and who he might possibly be
but the case goes cold until police use a ground-breaking forensic weapon genetic genealogy
they had looked at hundreds of individuals over the years and all of the leads went nowhere
i believe without genetic genealogy we would not have solved this case this is the story of a series of brutal
murders and sex attacks throughout the 1990s the evil man behind them and high police finally get their man after 20
long years i'm nancy grace this is bloodline detectives [Music] [Applause] [Music]
march 28 1998 portageville missouri police get a call from a local farmer tony shearer
tony shearer that called 9-1-1 i was at my house i received a call from my boss telling me that there had been a double
murder reported in portersville before police enter the home tony shares outside he tells cops
how he discovered his wife sherry and his daughter megan dead when they arrived home they arrived to a
horrible scene there in their house stephen goes in first the mother is in plain view as well as
the daughter and i think at 14 years old there's just no way that his mind could
comprehend what he was seeing yelled out to his to his father dad mom and megan are dead
and that's when tony came around that same corner and then saw his his wife and his daughter
[Music] police enter the home turned crime scene well i think the scene was staged
and so as soon as you walk in and saw it it was horrific and i think that's what the killer
intended on sherry had been shot several times in back of the head and that she laid in the living room
floor close to megan who had been laid over a footstool or ottoman and that she also had a
gunshot wound to the head she was gagged and her arms had been tied behind her back
with an extension cord and that it was obvious that she had been raped there wasn't signs of a struggle or a
fight in the house we believe that the suspect used megan as a tool to convince sherry to follow his directions
we know he had a gun at the scene and if he had been holding a gun to megan's head that sherry would have
followed his directions police comb the crime scene for clues we were early early stages of dna
so we knew enough to take a lot of stuff we just didn't know what was going to turn out to be
usable evidence so we took all the normal stuff that anybody would in an investigation like the bindings any type
of blood swabs and just different things like that but we also took some swabs from
uh megan's body we swabbed several areas but her breasts is where we were able to
develop our dna profile the bodies of this young mother and her little girl are taken away by the
coroner sergeant windham from the highway patrol was one of the officers that attended
the autopsy and he was responsible for collecting any evidence from the bodies or from the autopsy that would have been
submitted to the crime lab such as ballistic evidence and sexual assault evidence and
dna swabs they did not have any significant defensive wounds you know it appeared
that the suspect took control of them very quickly there were a number of hairs and other trace evidence seized
from on and around their bodies particularly megan's she also had a bite mark on her back right
buttocks cheek that was also very faint uh and it was faint to the point that the doc
that did the uh the autopsies didn't say anything about it and so when when i talked to him i was
like did you not think those were bite marks and he said i i didn't see anything
so when i sent him pictures from the crime scene that were taken a couple hours after
he was like absolutely those are bite marks and it's a good thing that you swabbed
where you did because it's probably your best chance of getting dna the cause of death was the gunshot
wounds to the head on megan and sherry shearer now the community has to face up to the
loss of two popular and beloved people a mother and daughter megan cher was a delightful very bright
very happy little girl who really looked forward to living life every day and that shari shear
was a loving and doting mother who liked nothing more than raising her children and loving her family
portageville police launched a full-scale investigation into the brutal attacks of sherry shearer and her teen
girl megan they want to know what kind of a monster could commit such a horrible crime
that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] march 1998 portageville missouri a manhunt is underway for a vicious killer
who murders and sex assaults a mother and daughter in their own home very soon investigators learn of yet
another attack this time in dire county just across the mississippi river in tennessee
about three hours after our homicide lady and her three children were at home in a small
a rural area of tennessee just outside dyersburg she had just got home from grocery
shopping and she was carrying groceries into the house as her kids were playing in the yard
and that a white male in a van had pulled up and was asking directions to a jeremy
taylor's residence and she said she didn't know a jeremy taylor but her brother knew everybody she could
go inside and call him she immediately gets a weird sense of feeling like that this
is not there's something wrong with this guy there's something wrong with this situation
and she says that she was standing on the porch and if she had went in and called dyer county
sheriff's department that they could have got there in the time that it took him to get out of the
van and come back into the house but the strange man is not looking for directions
she said he later gets out of the van and walks back up there to her and says i didn't find a map but i found
this and he pulls a pistol out the adult female and our suspect struggled over the gun
the man's intended victim moves quickly to try and protect herself she was able to get back into her
trailer they were still wrestling over the guns she was trying to lean against the door and
close the door his hands were inside the trailer she yelled at her 12 year old daughter
to get the gun off the wall the father's deer rifle was was hanging on the wall so they come running into the living
room to the front door to give her the gun and he sees this so through the window in the door
and he pulls the gun out of the door and fires a shot just above the door knob and it strikes her in the in the arm
and then he leaves she had non-life-threatening injuries and survived the attack
i can't imagine being in that situation and having to protect myself and my children
police interview the victim about the attack and she is able to give crucial details to investigators
she said he was a small small man small framed 30 to 50 years old salt and pepper hair
glasses she thought may or may not have been wearing a ball cap 150 pounds police can now link this incident to the
attack on the sharer family we subsequently connected the crime in dyersburg tennessee or dyer county tennessee to
our homicide through the use of ballistics it was a few days but we were able to
confirm that the gun used to shoot her was the same gun that killed megan and sherry shearer in missouri
striations on the bullet as it goes through the barrel of the gun and that is as unique as a fingerprint
and so knowing that dyersburg tennessee which was about 45 minutes away it gives you
hope so now we know what the guy looks like we knew who he'd asked for we knew what he had said to that lady
what ruse he had used so we figured that it just worked with sherry so it's probably the same thing that he said to
her investigators have multiple clues to help track down the wanted suspect now they use another investigative tool
they turn to the media and the public desperate for help we used the fbi's vicap system to to put
to share our case information to look for similar cases and we suspected if we could connect him to other crimes we
would have a better chance of solving ours we used inlet messages which are messages that go to other law
enforcement agencies describing our crime and asking for input about similar cases
this case aired on a television show a national television show a number of times we
went on america's most wanted and went out to their live filming in washington dc and we had crews
of policemen here waiting for the tips to start coming in we received thousands of leads
of people calling in on the tip line i'm not sure i would have made that decision
again because all we had was a composite drawing a likeness of someone so out of about 4 000 leads
it got pretty daunting to go through each and every one and trying to figure out
which ones we could actually follow up which ones were worth following up it was a pretty big task
in an investigation like this one the hard work of detectives can bring both results and frustration
the results in this case are a huge amount of material to review the frustrations
much of that material is irrelevant it becomes a game of triage some of the leads were so obscure such as i think i
saw the man depicted in the composite in a walmart in oklahoma six years ago well
there's really not anywhere to go with those kind of leads so there's no follow-up investigation to be done
if there's an individual that's named those are the leads that you try to follow up on and and see if they even
had the opportunity to commit that crime many of those folks we got leads on were
in institutions at the time our crime was committed in the 1990s dna forensic sciences still
in its infancy the portageville police used the forensic tools they do have and they tried to create a dna profile of
the killer we had sent our swabs off to a private lab to get a dna profile and they were only able to give us
about three loci and it takes 13 to be able to enter it into the national database
and then they'd called back and said that of the dna they had left they would be able to
do mitochondrial dna we were able to obtain mitochondrial dna from the hair that was found on megan's
body and we were going around in and obtaining hair samples from suspects and sending them to the lab
to check against this mitochondrial dna but there is no match for the dna it was very frustrating
it was frustrating because one we were trying to bring justice to megan and cherry sheer
and two we knew that the type of person that committed this crime wasn't going to stop that there would be
more victims police cannot find the killer the case goes cold but then in 2006 investigators
look for a game changer they go to ruth montgomery the forensic scientist at the
missouri highway patrol labs [Music] there had been technological advances in dna we had our evidence reworked and
developed a ruth montgomery developed a full dna profile that was subsequently entered in
codis codis the profile that i developed from megan share went into codis in march of
2006 and it was searched locally within the state of missouri and then nationally
there was a hit to a profile developed from a homicide in greenville south carolina
it took us back eight years before sherry and megan's murders and the rape and murder of a young woman
named genevieve zatriki in her apartment in greenville eight years after the first homicides
investigators are now able to connect not one not two but three cases the first two connected by ballistics and
the last case connected by dna profiling as we see next on bloodline detectives they are closing in
on a killer [Music] 2006 portageville missouri police are on the hunt for a vicious killer who
murders a mother and her daughter during a horrible home invasion 1998 thanks to dna profiling investigators
can link the perpetrator to another violent murder two years later in greenville south carolina
they wanted to go to south carolina and meet with the investigators there and have a
group meeting between the two missouri and south carolina to discuss the cases to determine what
the commonalities were and to ensure that the dna evidence was actually from the perpetrator of the crime
we were on a plane the next day they had a a crew of hard-working officers out there and
we took a crew of about nine of us out there so yeah it was uh certainly a breath of life that was breathed into
the case because we had new information it was strange information their case was polar opposite of our
case and without the dna you would have argued that they had nothing to do with one another
portersville police learn more about the death of genevieve's a tricky we were surprised that that it was
connected to a murder that was so far away we had learned that genevieve zatricki
had failed to show up for work for a couple of days and they sent the handyman over to her apartment to try to make
contact with her when he entered into the apartment he had located genevieve in the bathtub
with the bathtub still running and she was obviously deceased it appeared to investigators in
greenville who we worked extensively with that jenny was asleep in her bed when the perpetrator broke in to her
apartment through the sliding glass door attacked her in a blitzkrieg style that while she was
still asleep he just started hitting her in the head with a very hard long object that created a lot
of blood spatter and then once he had hit her numerous times causing her death he pulled her off the bed
and had sex with her and they were able to tell that by the blood pooling on the floor
and then drug her into the bathroom and put her in the tub on her back with her bottom
all the way up under the faucet and the fossil was turned on hot so the police department at the time
had located in her bedroom where it had been ransacked there was clothes strong all throughout the bedroom
all the drawers on the dresser were pulled out there was a message written in black marker on the mirror in jenny's
bedroom that said don't f with my family to this day we're not certain if there is some significance to that or
if that was merely put there to throw off investigators the the perpetrator took some steps to conceal evidence by
placing the contents of jenny's purse in the sink under running water and actually placing jenny under running
water to try to destroy evidence he had tied a double a knot and then another knot
where the first knot was sufficient it was overkill that you could tell he was really making sure that she was dead
both the missouri murders and genevieve's the trickiest killing are incredibly violent but it
doesn't appear they were committed by the same person if it wasn't for dna we wouldn't be
having that talk because the crime scenes are so polar opposite my thoughts being that he staged our
crime scene so i thought the stuff he wrote on the mirror was a ruse that it was just a red
herring based on our crime scene and what the lady told us from dyersburg that this guy had really graduated
he'd gone from no social skills where he could talk to these women he had to start beating her while she was asleep
to talking his way into the house at the shear house and nearly getting into the house and in
dyersburg so who is genevieve zatriki and does her murder give police any new leads
she lived alone and had formerly been married her former husband was looked at as a suspect but he was eliminated as a
suspect as well the dna profile from the zitricki case was developed from a vaginal swab
they had looked at hundreds of individuals over the years and all of the leads went nowhere
investigators now so frustrated there seems to be no link between the genevieves the tricky case and the other
murders but then 2017 the suspect's dna is entered into codis again we received a call from our crime lab
where there was a case from memphis tennessee that had entered dna in dakotas and and
it had matched our suspect dna we contacted memphis and learned that it was a rape of a 14 year old girl in
1997 two adult females and their children had just returned home from a funeral our suspect talked his way into their
house through a ruse indicating he was running from the police they too talked about they didn't feel
real comfortable around this this man they tried to brush him off and shut the door
he had pushed his way into the house and he had told the women that the police are after him he's just
trying to get away he's just trying to get a car and he needed to get away the ladies had told him that the car out
in the drive has the keys in it just take the car and he had brought with him some duct tape and
a pistol he had used telephone wire that he had found in the house to tie the the women up
and he focused on the 14 year old that he raped there in the living room this perpetrator looks like the one in
the dyersburg case they actually found a composite that was or a sketch that was drawn up
back in 1997 and when you set it next to our composites that we had they were very similar the only difference was the
the glasses on the their suspect was tinted where ours didn't have any tent but they had run out of leads
early on in that investigation and they they weren't able to locate anybody detectives frustrated yet again
but they don't give up they know they are this close to solving the case so now they begin to search for different
forensic tools there's a company that produces composites based on a dna profile you know an image
of this perpetrator based on their dna it was initially discussed that maybe that would be a good idea in this case
however the final outcome of that conference call was it would be much better to do
genealogy genetic genealogy and attempt to identify at least a perpetrator's family that that would be a good solid
lead to closure of these cases the samples are brought to parabon nano labs parabon works in conjunction with other
laboratories to develop a short nucleotide polymorphism profile or a snip profile
that goes into a different database than codis and is searched differently so the scientific bench work would have
been done in collaboration with parabon and another lab we're looking at over 800 000 genetic
markers across the genome and that's what allows us to have this power to detect distant relatives
so that dna sample needs to go to the lab and go through a process called snip genotyping you can also use whole genome
sequencing but in this case we did snip genotyping at the lab and that extracted
those 850 000 snips then the bioinformatics team our scientists at parabon create a file from that and that file
needs to be similar to what you would get if you tested at one of the commercial dna testing companies like
say ancestrydna or 23andme so that's what we needed to do with this dna was ultimately create a file that would be
accepted for upload to gedmatch and compare it against the other people participating in that database
investigators wait patiently for the outcome from cece moore the genetic genealogist at parabon
it was a couple months later when all the investigators were on a conference call the missouri
investigators the memphis investigators and the greenville south carolina investigators
when they called they put cece moore on the phone who explained the family tree that she
developed and she walked us through the family tree and showed us how she come up with the
suspect this guy was at or near the proximity of each of our crime scenes he was five five
150 pounds wore glasses cece moore's determined forensic work id's a man his name
robert eugene brashears the amazing work that she had done the was just near magical
all the things that she did and covered every possible angle uh it was now that was near
near terry moment then because you knew that your journey is near over the bloodline detectives now have a
suspect and a solid link to crimes they believe he is committed now they've just
got to catch him that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] 2017 detectives from three states are using a
revolutionary new dna forensic technology called genetic genealogy to identify a suspect named robert eugene
brashears they believe he's responsible for a whole series of brutal murders and sex
attacks beginning all the way back in the 1990s and stretching from missouri to tennessee to south carolina but now
they need to track him down robert beshears was born in newport news virginia he grew up in huntsville alabama
and he entered the u.s navy and was discharged within eight months and when he was discharged he was
discharged in memphis tennessee but he had also done part of his navy time in florida
robert brashears seemingly has a very dark past in 1985 robert brashears had picked up a young lady and attempted to
rape her and when she fought him he shot her and attempted to kill her but she got away from him and got to authorities
in 1986 robert brashears was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the attempted homicide in florida he did not serve 15
years he was released from prison in march of 1989. when he got out of prison he moved to
greenville south carolina and his address was within a mile of genevieve zatriki's
apartment we know throughout 90 to 97 he was in prison in several different states
for several different crimes and that in 97 i believe he picks his family up from alabama
and takes them to jonesboro arkansas which is in very close proximity to portageville
police now believe they've got their man but the investigation hits a new wall when they make their next discovery
robert beshears was found in a hotel room in in southeastern missouri because they had found a car parked in
the parking lot that had unregistered license plates and they went into the hotel or motel to determine who the
owner of the car was and the clerk sent them to a specific room and when the investigators went to
that room a lady answered the door and said that there was no man there that he had left
but an investigator observed someone moving underneath the bed and when they um asked him to get out then there became a
standoff with the police he thought that when the police came there that they knew
all of his terrible past history when in fact they were there to talk to him about his own license plate
he had his wife and a couple daughters with him the police had to stand off they're able
to talk him into letting the family go i think at one point they even talked him out of
a gun and he gave up his gun which turns out he had a second gun and ended up taking his own life
the day he killed himself he thought his world had came crashing down and that was the end of the line
for him it just exemplifies what a coward he was and what type of person he was he wasn't going to be man enough to
to stand up and answer for what he had done robert brashears is dead but as we see next the bloodline
detectives still want answers for the victims their relatives and closure for the hard work of the investigators on
this case before them [Music] 2017 detectives from three states are convinced they know robert brashears is
the suspect who committed a series of murders and sex assaults the problem robert breast years is dead and buried
he killed himself to avoid being captured alive we went to alabama where we interviewed
his daughter and we obtained a dna sample from her and that was sent to the lab and
we knew then that robert bratcher was our suspect robert brazier's daughter cooperates
with missouri police she had a lot of questions for us because she was i believe seven years
old when he committed suicide in the hotel she was actually there at the hotel when law enforcement arrived
in 99 she did believe from the stories that she had heard from her family about robert bradshaw's behavior
and his criminal conduct that he was capable of doing something similar detectives used the dna obtained from
robert brashear's daughter to get a warrant then they exhume or dig up his body we collaborated with the arkansas state
police who were very helpful in obtaining the proper court orders where he was interred in arkansas to
have him exhumed so representatives from the south carolina south carolina law enforcement were on
scene as were we dna samples from the exhumed body were immediately submitted to both crime
labs and within about a day we had it confirmed by both crime labs that robert eugene brasher was our murderer
robert brashears is dead but investigators are able to link him to a series of horrible crimes
but now the bloodline detectives want even more a portrait of the killer how do you
describe a psychopath um [Music] i'm not sure what to think about him i think often
how is a human being capable of this kind of violence against another human being
and what kind of mind did that individual have the motive for robert beshears was
pedophilia i think he was a pedophile that wanted to have sex with these young girls
and he didn't mind the kill to do it he is a serial killer by definition and he he preyed on
young girls and and women and we believe there's several other victims between 90 and 99.
robert brashear's crimes may go back over 20 years after all that time the bloodline
detectives wonder can there be final answers for the victims and their families ready to move on to the next stage in
their lives [Laughter] my heart goes out to a young lady in florida who had to live
with the consequences of robert beshear's actions and she must have great strength and stamina
in order to live with the history of that crime i don't know that you ever get over
something like being raped at the age of 14. and i am sure that that young lady carries scars and the consequences of
robert beshear's actions with her today and it probably still affects how she lives her life every single day and who
she is as a woman as you can imagine a bitter sweet we solved it you got closure for it
you feel kind of cheated because god killed himself he wasn't going to get justice
but maybe that special place in hell was the justice that we got [Music] the idea of closure in a 20-year old
murder and rape case may be in question but not the value of genetic genealogy and solving the crimes
sergeant don windham of the highway patrol if he hadn't had obtained that dna swab from megan's breast
we wouldn't have been able to get a full strand of dna to enter into codis and at the time the technology was not
there to run that sample that sample just set in evidence for several years until technology caught up with us
[Music] forensic genetic genealogy was extremely important in this case because mr
broshears was dead it would not have been solved without it it solved the case we'd still be chasing him around
and i'm very excited for the technology and what genetic genealogy brings to this forensic science field and the
potential that it holds in solving crimes where the perpetrators do not have their dna
in the codis system who would ever have thought that when robert brashears began committing his
series of horrible violent crimes in the 1990s when cases looked so cold would ever be solved
certainly not robert bresciars or serial killers like him who before the use of forensic science like genetic
genealogy would never have been caught i'm nancy grace thanks for joining us to witness these incredible stories on
bloodline detectives [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Portageville, Missouri in 1998. The bodies of Megan and Sherri Scherer are found lifeless in their sitting room. Both had been shot in the head several times.

A compelling new True Crime series, hosted by preeminent legal analyst and renowned former prosecutor Nancy Grace, that explores the advanced form of familial DNA testing.

Brief Summary

The episode details the 1998 murders of Sherry and Megan Shearer and the eventual identification of their killer through genetic genealogy.

Key points

The Game Changer: Genetic Genealogy. In 2006, advancements in DNA technology finally provide a breakthrough in the cold case.
The Brutal Murders of Sherry and Megan Shearer. In 1998, a mother and her daughter were found murdered in their home, leading to a chilling investigation.
Connecting the Dots: Multiple Cases. Investigators link the Shearer murders to other violent crimes, revealing a pattern of terror.
The Breakthrough. Investigators identify Robert Eugene Brashears as a suspect through genetic genealogy.
The Standoff. A tense standoff occurs as police confront Brashears in a hotel room.
The Exhumation. Detectives exhume Brashears' body to confirm his identity as the murderer.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

There’s just no way that his mind could comprehend what he was seeing.

2:38WatchJun 1, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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