Forensic Files (HD) - Season 13, Episode 15 - Sworded Scheme - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[Music] up next a college girl goes missing and police suspect murder a cryptic text message provides a
salacious clue and that was code for sex shenanigans and sex in the back of my mind i think i knew that something
wrong had happened the victim's boyfriend had a shady past whether they had a relationship and he
also had a history of a sex offense despite some blood evidence police can't find the girl's body
which raises even more questions without anything pointing us to her i don't think we will ever find her
many students at the university of nebraska work during the school year to pay for living expenses
or even tuition nineteen-year-old jessica o'grady worked as a waitress in a local steak restaurant her goal was to
pursue a career in child care she started out as a social studies major and then she worked at a daycare also
and so the more she worked there the more she realized that she loved kids and had a passion for it and decided
that she wanted to be a teacher as her sophomore year was coming to an end jessica celebrated with friends while
making plans for the summer vacation jessica was with her friends that evening they'd ordered some pizza they'd
been watching movies she got a message probably a text message of some sort and she indicated that
she was going to go over and talk to chris i know people always do it um so i'm actually gonna go over to
chris's really you're gonna go over to chris's place yeah and i was like you're going over to chris's and so then
she went to her bathroom and took a shower and got ready and left to go over there everyone assumed
that chris was chris edwards jessica's co-worker in the restaurant and a fellow student at the university
we were actually in the restaurant she kind of you know like pointed you know so so nobody to be able
to see her and so i caught a glimpse of him and she was excited about that jessica left
her apartment around 11 30 p.m and that was the last time anyone saw her two days later when she
hadn't returned home and wasn't returning phone calls her friends and relatives notified police
you know 98 percent of the time when we receive a missing person report we're able to determine within the first
24 to 48 hours that they're they're not really missing we've located them but this case was different police found
jessica's car abandoned near the restaurant where she worked her family knew immediately something
was wrong she wasn't blessed with cleanliness when it came to her car and there was hardly
any trash in it and that was concerning to me that wasn't like jessica at all and jessica's friend chris edward said
he didn't see jessica that night he claimed he was at a movie with his friends an alibi that checked out we did go to
the movie theater located video of the movie ending and saw him when he was leaving the movie theater he
told me he hadn't didn't know she was coming over that night here's a young girl
you know attractive a college student what happened to her where did she go why would she just
disappear and it was clear from talking to the family how passionate they were that she
didn't just walk away from her life here then police learned two potentially disturbing pieces of
information first a jessica might have been pregnant jessica at that time had believed that she was pregnant she
had taken a pregnancy test at her friend's house and told her friend and her mother that she was
pregnant and they also learned that there was another chris in jessica's life someone she'd been dating several months
earlier could this be the chris she was going to see i'm going to go over to chris
which chris was she talking about which boyfriend could it have been when police first learned that jessica
o'grady was pregnant they thought the stress of this unexpected event may have prompted her
to simply run off but as the hours passed and there was still no sign of her they
began to lose hope i mean she didn't take any clothes with her not her personal items her personal
hygiene items those kinds of things there's no activity on any credit cards there's no activity on a cell phone
she's not talking with any of her friends she does that daily she's not talking with her aunt
that she'd talk to on a daily basis the last time anyone saw jessica was at 11 30 p.m
when she said she was going to her friend chris's apartment an hour later at 12 29 a.m jessica sent
this text message to a friend it read no more shenanigans for jessica we knew that it was from jessica because
shenanigans was a code word that jessica had for sex what did it mean exactly i don't know but that was
the last text message that one of the friends received investigators first wanted to know where
the text message originated which can be identified by the location of the cell towers
that were used some of the phone companies only keep their text messages for 24 hours or a very short period of time
and we were never able to retrieve the text message records next investigators wanted to know the
identity of chris jessica's friends assumed it was the boy she'd been dating chris edwards
he claimed he didn't see jessica that night and was at a movie with friends and he had a ticket stub and witnesses
to prove it the other chris she knew was chris ryan a man she dated several months earlier
chris had a past that required him to register as a sex offender and obviously that was a red flag he'd
served two and a half years on a statutory rape charge and had been out of prison for 20 months
but he also had an alibi there was no evidence from phone records from computers from friends
that she'd had any additional contact with the other chris for several weeks investigators were
running out of answers until they learned that jessica's co-worker chris edwards had been dating other girls
while he was with jessica and one of those girls michelle was also pregnant jessica knew who
michelle was and michelle actually knew who jessica was they had worked at the same restaurant but edwards told
them both different stories chris was kind of playing both of these girls one of them
he told her he wanted to be with her and they were gonna have a baby together and then
the the other one jessica he indicated that the other girl was more like a fling kind of thing
investigators learned that jessica had already informed edwards that he was the father
of her baby and that she had no intention of terminating the pregnancy she seemed to be okay about it she
seemed optimistic and thought things were going to work out when she learned that she was pregnant
she went out bought prenatal vitamins you know things that you know that an expectant mother
would start doing so she you know that showed us that she had every intent of you know keeping this baby
investigators decided to re-interview chris edwards and as they spoke to him about jessica
he said something unusual interestingly he talked about jessica in both the present and the past tense
and we thought that we found that to be very interesting too chris edwards lived in the basement of
his aunt's house in the suburbs of omaha his room had a separate entrance so he could come and go as he pleased
when police came to question him he invited them inside this was just a knock and talk they
weren't you know wasn't a search warrant at that point they just wanted to to just talk to him
informally investigators asked if they could have a look around they asked them you know if there was
any part of the house that he didn't want the investigators to look at he said well um i don't really want you
to you know look at my bed or look at my camping equipment and they really you know obviously that's a red flag
they kind of wanted to know what that was all about investigators asked edwards where he was
on the night jessica disappeared and he repeated his alibi that he was at the movies with friends
investigators found evidence that edward stopped at a walgreens store the day after jessica disappeared
and bought some unusual items someone presumably chris had gone to walgreens and purchased three items there was
poster paint white shoe polish and white out the type of white out they used for corrector
fluid surveillance images from the drugstore showed without question that chris edwards
made this purchase and not someone else using his credit card in edward's bedroom investigators
noticed sections of drywall that were a different shade of white looking closer they noticed small stains underneath the
paint in fact there was blood all over the ceiling and you saw so many blood droplets and you you you
knew that there had been an attempt to try to cover that up they said chris you know there's some blood this
is before he went upstairs there's some blood here he indicated he cut his finger
there was a minimum of seven cast off stain patterns there was actually six cast off stains
and you add one on for the first swing or for the first strike there was some paint that had been used and some
shoe polish that had been used to try to cover up those stains but there was so much blood up there you
had to repaint the whole wall or the whole ceiling several times to cover it up local television news crews found out
about it and broadcast the search on live television we actually got a tip that the csi and investigators were
going to be out there searching we could see the investigators working in the garage
with the lights off special alternative light sources that they use spraying the luminal that sort of thing
i probably had 15 phone calls from people are you seeing this are you watching this did you know this was
happening investigators also turned over edward's mattress it was covered with a huge blood stain
it went down within the bedding of the mattress and i believe it took up about approximately like eight square feet
onto the mattress i believe he had stated that it was from menstrual blood on the mattress and i was looking at
that going no oh my god definitely something happened here and it was not something that somebody could
have survived from more evidence was found elsewhere in the house the garage was actually kind of a gold
mine in the back of the car in the trunk we found some transfer blood in the back seat on the floorboard
there were a pair of hedge clippers investigators found a dirty shovel in the back of edward's
car but a geological analysis of the dirt was unable to determine where this soil sample came from we
found some grass on the shovel they took it to the agricultural college and they determined
that they believed it was potentially the kind of grass that would grow on a golf course
edward's mattress and a four by four foot section of his bedroom ceiling were removed and taken to the forensics
lab identifying the blood with dna testing wouldn't be easy since they didn't have jessica's
dna profile law enforcement k-9 units and more than 150 volunteers searched the countryside looking for
jessica's body but with so much open space in nebraska a body could easily be hidden and never
found that is the big mystery what did he do with her where's her body [Music] to identify the blood found in chris
edward's bedroom scientists needed jessica o'grady's dna profile but without her body they didn't have
her dna the way we were able to establish jessica grady's identity based on dna was from
items of hers that were collected at her house including her toothbrush a comb a razor that was
that she used and a pair of her underwear from these items dna was collected and compared against
each other the dna sample matched the dna sample of the blood in chris edward's bedroom i had to tell
my daughter she started to cry but you know the resilience of kids she said mom i don't want you to worry
i said okay i said why she said because jessica's an angel now and she's right here with us
right now the next step was to attempt to identify the murder weapon the nature of the blood spatter made it
apparent that the murder weapon was a large knife investigators couldn't find any such
weapon when they first searched edward's home but when they returned a second time
several days later they found something that wasn't there before a box containing two swords
with 18-inch blades did he think he was out of the woods or and had put him somewhere else for a
while knowing the police might search and then put him back in in this closet that's a possibility how stupid is this
kid i just couldn't believe that he had if these were the weapons he had brought
him back he probably didn't think that we would be coming back the swords called bangkok battle swords
are often used in martial arts performances they could have caused the small elliptical cast off blood spatters
in edward's bedroom that evening on the news they showed the detail of what a bangkok
battle sword was it made me sick to my stomach you couldn't have prepared me for that
a knife a gun you know any of those kind of things but it was a sword though the swords had apparently been
cleaned analysts found traces of human blood along one of the blades the sample was sent for dna testing
the blood was jessica's skin cells on the blades handle also produced a dna profile
it belonged to chris edwards it didn't actually sink in until we got the dna results back that we realized
this is her dna on the tip and it's his dna on the handle that was huge with that
evidence chris edwards was charged with murder but he continued to deny any involvement
many people even when they're confronted with as much evidence as you can muster in a
case are still going to continue denying that they did anything until the end of time that's just the way it
is we still have to prove that jessica was dead and not just missing and so we looked at common sense you look at
the mattress and you look at the bloods better and the detectives and everyone in common sense tells us
whoever shed this blood is not coming back this is a lot prosecutors believe chris edwards didn't
have any serious interest in jessica o'grady so when she got pregnant that caused problems when jess
originally told him he was somewhat upset about it they they argued about it and then
later on as time progressed he seemed to calm down and they were going to have a meeting to talk
to talk about it friends said jessica had no plans to terminate the pregnancy and edward's other girlfriend michelle
who was also pregnant at the time was the more serious relationship of the two he was in love with michelle and wanted
to marry michelle there were a lot of questions that came up uh from that relationship with michelle
and obviously he's seeing jessica o'grady at the same time so certainly that would be a that would
be a problem for him on the night of the murder prosecutors believe jessica and edwards talked by text
message and set up a meeting that night around midnight according to friends jessica
said she was going to chris's apartment although edwards did go to the movies with friends that night
the movie was over early enough to meet jessica at his home around midnight prosecutors have no idea what transpired
between the two but they obviously discussed the status of their relationship friends said that jessica knew about his
other pregnant girlfriend michelle did you ask michelle more than likely they also discussed the
status of jessica's pregnancy in any case edwards had to realize that no matter which girlfriend he chose
he'd be supporting two children on his cook salary at 12 29 in the morning jessica sent a
text message to her girlfriend no more shenanigans for jessica her code word for
there will be no sex tonight the forensic evidence shows edwards hit jessica at least seven times with the sword
while she lay on the bed creating the blood spatter on the walls and ceiling blood evidence shows edwards put
jessica's body into the trunk of his car but no one knows where he took her at some point he took jessica's car and
left it near the restaurant where they both worked [Music] he later tried to clean up the blood in
his bedroom but there was simply too much of it he's tried to cover it up and he
just gave up like come on man if you're gonna if you killed somebody do whatever you got to do to make sure
that nobody can see this and he just didn't do that and that made our job really easy
despite being offered a lesser sentence in return for disclosing the location of
jessica's body edwards refused to talk from the human aspect we want to get her back for
you know for her family um because they're good people uh you know they're concerned for
and uh you know they need her back a jury found edwards guilty of second-degree murder
and sentenced him to 100 years to life in prison is there anything you'd like to say to christopher edwards
yes my my statement to christopher edwards would be it's over now please tell us where she's
at we deserve that we've suffered through 10 months of this and it's time for us
to know so that we can give her a peaceful burial that she deserves this smart the first ever no
body conviction in nebraska state history i don't think there would have been any
conviction if that if the csi and the forensics hadn't been there i think she was a girl in love
that wanted to make it work and look what happened i mean for me it's at least once a month
where i'll say you know where do you think where do you think she is where do you think her body's at
the forensics told jessica's story plain and simple they spoke where she could not where her
body could not tell the story her blood spatters that told the story you

When a college student is reported missing, police believe their investigation will be like countless others. But when they discover blood spatter in her boyfriend's bedroom, they know this case is going to be different.

Brief Summary

Jessica O'Grady went missing, and forensic evidence linked her murder to co-worker Chris Edwards, leading to his conviction without a body.

Key points

The Mysterious Disappearance. A college girl goes missing, raising alarming questions about her fate.
The Shocking Evidence. Investigators find blood evidence in Chris Edwards' home, leading to his arrest.
The Cryptic Text Message. Jessica's last message hints at a troubling situation before her disappearance.
The Family's Heartbreaking Plea. Jessica's family seeks closure and a proper burial for their daughter.
The No Body Conviction. Chris Edwards is convicted of murder despite the absence of Jessica's body.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

What did he do with her? Where's her body?

The haunting question surrounding Jessica's disappearance.

12:56WatchMar 5, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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