Forensic Files (HD) - Season 13, Episode 18 - Church Dis-service - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[Music] up next a young woman has car trouble and disappears a gentleman in a van pulled up and
offered his assistance eyewitnesses give differing accounts of what happened it is frustrating when
witnesses tell us variations that don't add up a microscopic clue underneath the girl's fingernails and a
bite mark provide needed clues but were they enough this could have been prevented my
sister could be here with me right now the faith tabernacle church is an institution in fort lauderdale florida
[Music] there are about a thousand members among them the decosta family church for us was not only a place to go
to worship and serve god but it was actually a place to go and socialize see your friends the
decosta daughters rochelle and donya attended church three or four times a week and they usually
went together but one december night donya decided to go alone since her sister had homework to do
that was the last time the family saw dorna alive my mom knocked on the door asked me if my sister is home she's not
home i started thinking oh my god something is wrong dona's family drove all over the area
looking for her i didn't find her like i went to the church i didn't find her then on my way back i found her car and
she was not in her car they found donya's car two miles from home on the shoulder of a major highway
i had a dream and they knew something was wrong the car was out of gas there was a prior
incident with the car where she actually ran out of gas before so that that could have been the same
problem we discovered that dania always carried a gas can in the back of her trunk that gas can
was missing witnesses at a nearby gas station a half mile away said they saw someone who matched darna's
description she did come to the texaco gas station and used her credit card to purchase gas
she purchased over a dollars worth of gas to fill the gas can to go put gas back in her vehicle
and witnesses said that donya wasn't alone a gentleman in a van pulled up and offered his assistance to
donia according to the witnesses this gentleman told donia that he would be able to take her
back to her car and help her out witnesses were able to describe the driver to police who created
a composite drawing both witnesses said that the male driver was a black man in his
40s late 30s early 40s very well dressed very articulate very well spoken unfortunately the witnesses disagreed
about the color of the vehicle one said it was teal blue the other indicated it was burgundy both witnesses
confident in their answers both steadfast as to the color it could be either one
it could be burgundy it could be teal the gas station surveillance cameras were no help the van was apparently
outside of camera range [Music] one of the witnesses remembered seeing the word hope
painted on the side of the van you just don't come up with a word even though the colors were different
from each description that was recalled by the witnesses the word hope in my mind was going to be
on that van somewhere police decided not to release this detail to the media but the van was the only clue
investigators had [Music] normally having two witnesses to a possible kidnapping would be a good
thing for investigators but not in dona de costa's case both witnesses saw the same thing but
each gave a different description of the van in which donya was last seen alive they described the van in various ways
regarding the colors and regarding the signage that was on the sign on the side of the van
i can't pick my witnesses i have to work with what i have since one of the witnesses said the word
hope was on the side of the van detectives kaminsky and bukata contacted every organization in the area with the
word hope in its name there were more than a hundred of them i called everybody the rest of my family
we started printing flyers with a picture and started handing them out to people all over
then three days after donya disappeared a worker at an industrial park 20 miles away
found dorna's body near a dumpster female was wrapped in sheets as well as a shower curtain and her head was covered
with a bag the news was on tv and i remember them coming on and said there was a body discovered in oakland
park and then my sister face popped up on the screen and i was like oh no i said i hope
that's not her body i hope that's not her body i was in the room and i looked among the people and i saw all these
police coming and chaplin another chaplain and i saw him coming i said oh my god
oh my god that started and he kicked me and told me dornia was nude and had brown carpet
fibers on her body the medical examiner estimated dania was murdered just hours after she disappeared the state of
the composition was around 36 hours this was our best estimate investigators noticed a tire impression
on the sheet covering dornia's body to have her just wrapped up in sheets and tossed out like a piece of garbage
was really troubling there was some debris-laden tire tracks across the pavement
and it also went across the leg portion of the sedan where she had been wrapped in this sheet
and it was actually on the surface of the sheet the sheet was a dark brown rusty color
which made it difficult to obtain a clear image of the tire impression the impression was faint black
rubber on top of that material and in order to get the best contrast out of that we use various light sources
to try and reduce the actual color of the sheet while bringing up the contrast of the actual impression which
was black the images were photographed in both black and white and in color analyst mark zuckermel
was able to get an image of the tread unfortunately it wasn't large enough to figure out the make and
model of the tire investigators also used super glue fuming to look for prints on the plastic bags
and shower curtain that encased donya's body they found six partial prints and two
full prints these were submitted to our latent fingerprint people there was a search done in our automated
fingerprint system and came up with no matches the medical examiner discovered that
dornia had been sexually assaulted and tortured there were more than three dozen
star-shaped wounds on her chest those injuries in the area of the chest were superficial
in other words they didn't penetrate the chest wall didn't enter the body cavities
and did not contribute to them it's as if the killer was on top of the young lady and just
stabbing her to cause her pain the cause of death was a blow to her skull with the same star-shaped instrument the
stab wound to the skull actually went through her skull as if it was the final coup de gras
which took her life near the fatal wound was an odd horseshoe-shaped bruise no one could tell what caused it what
did she do to deserve such a harm with it the killer left a bite mark on donya's right arm
dr steven rifkin photographed it and discovered some unusual characteristics he had
spaces between his upper front teeth and several spaces between several of his lower front teeth
investigators also found foreign skin cells underneath donya's fingernails day by day investigators were getting
[Music] closer eight days after donna decosta's murder detectives got a tip someone just two blocks from donya's
home drove a burgundy van that belonged to the church of god i received a phone call that there was a
few men up in deerfield beach that utilized a burgundy church van they lived just to the north of the gas
station i went up to their house we ended up surveilling them detectives kaminsky and bukatak watched
as four men got into the van and took off the detectives pulled them over for a look around
inside the van they found the floral print dress which matched the description of the
dress dania was wearing when she was last seen alive naturally investigators confiscated the
van and mark zuckermel compared the van's tires to the tire impressions found near
darna's body they did not match daphne both said that the dress i had wasn't her daughter's so
the van in question that we had stopped was not the van none of the men had criminal records and
all willingly provided a dna sample and we were able to exclude all four of the individuals that were originally
submitted as being a possible contributor to the that foreign dna that we had detected
the men were released and the case went cold at that point i think we all thought that
picada and kaminsky were going to be looking for a needle in the haystack then four months after dorna's murder
detectives on duty saw yet another van that caught their eye and as i'm looking at the van i'm
starting to realize that the color was a teal color and then i even looked a little further
and i saw the word hope on the side of the van we both looked at each other and said no i couldn't be
because we're looking for what we believe to be a burgundy van the van was parked in front of the
generation hope daycare in fort lauderdale the daycare was affiliated with a local church but not
donya's church the van was obviously teal it wasn't burgundy however the word hope h-o-p-e
the letters themselves were burgundy in color detectives were greeted by the pastor he
said he wasn't driving the van on the night of darndest murder but he was pretty sure he knew
who was the pastor was a meticulous man and he kept detailed logs with dates and
times he began to look through his logs in a date in question when dania was missing and subsequently
murdered during that time period we learned that lucious boyd was the one who had the van lucius boyd
was the maintenance man at the daycare center and had been using the van to run errands the day before
dorna disappeared but according to the pastor's records boyd didn't return the van until several
days later since the van wasn't needed it didn't raise any alarms [Music] when officers looked inside the van they
saw a purple laundry bag like the one found with dania's body church officials also
noted that a box of tools usually kept in the van was missing a reciprocating saw was
missing a torx screwdriver was missing there was also a garment bag that was used to
turn in dirty laundry to the cleaners those items were missing 39 year old lucius boyd lived just two
blocks away from the gas station where dania was last seen boyd denied any involvement
but had no alibi for the time dornia went missing and he was no stranger to police over
the last decade he'd been charged seven times for violent offenses ranging from rape to
murder but was acquitted in every case i did not do this what they talked about i did not do this here
boyd had also been a suspect in no less than 10 unsolved murders he just wasn't ever convicted of any crime he
did and police worried that unless they found solid evidence he might go free again
[Music] lucius boyd was the prime suspect in dorna decosta's murder apparently his employer at the daycare
center knew of his arrest for violent crimes but assumed his innocence since he had always been acquitted in
court when police questioned boyd's living girlfriend geneva lewis she was more than
cooperative she said she was out of town visiting her family when the crime occurred so police asked
her if any of their bed sheets were missing she looked through her closet and told
me when she came back out that she was missing a yellow sheet and a brown sheet these were the same colors as the sheets
that wrapped dona de costa's body and there was other potential evidence in the apartment
while i was talking with her i looked into the bedroom and i noticed that the carpet was brown in color dania's
body had been covered in brown fibers crime scene technicians now scoured the apartment in the bedroom
underneath the bed they found blood stains the carpet was saturated with blood a fiber analysis showed the brown fibers
on dornia's body had come from the carpet in boyd's apartment the fingerprints on the plastic bags
that in case dornea's body didn't match lucious boyd but they did match boyd's girlfriend and their son it links
him in some way to association with the body that he claimed he had never had any
contact with the tire impressions on the sheet found with dornia's body matched one of the tires on the daycare
van but without a murder weapon prosecutors needed to determine how donya had been killed
the church pastor told investigators the make and model of the reciprocating saw
missing from the van criminalist alan greenspan placed an identical saw over a scale
photograph of the strange horseshoe-shaped wound on donya's forehead he was attempting to
determine if the base of the saw known as the foot could have made the mark class
characteristics or the general appearance of the foot was consistent with the mark the wounds
on donya's chest were star-shaped one of the tools missing from the van was a torx driver essentially a
screwdriver with a star-shaped head an identical torx driver was overlaid on scale photos of the chest wounds
and the patterns lined up perfectly and you think of that crime as a big puzzle here's two pieces of the puzzle
that kind of fit in casts were made of boyd's teeth and his bite pattern was consistent with the
mark on donya's arm within reasonable dental certainty we were able to conclude that we would expect teeth like
lucious boy to have made the marks on the victim and dna testing proved it was donya's
blood in boyd's apartment and boyd's dna was found under donya's fingernails his profile that i was able to develop
matched to the foreign dna that i had already detected on the thigh swabs and on the mixtures under the
fingernails prosecutors believe donya trusted the man offering to give her a ride because he was well dressed
and apparently affiliated with the church once she accepted his offer for a ride
the evidence shows he grabbed the reciprocating saw and struck her in the head creating the odd horseshoe-shaped bruise
he then took darnya back to his apartment because his live-in girlfriend was away that
night once there he sexually assaulted donya tortured her and killed her with a blow
to the head he wrapped her body in sheets from his apartment and placed it in a plastic bag that had
his girlfriend's fingerprints on it he dumped the body in an industrial park and then
drove over it leaving behind the tire impression later matched to the van the evidence conclusively proved that
lucious boyd was the only person in the world that was responsible for the death
of donnie decosta the only consolation i can get from this is that my sister was a gift to us god gave her
as a gift after a while after so many years he took her back [Music] in january of 2002 lucious boyd was
convicted of dornia decosta's murder he was sentenced to death investigators believe
boyd killed at least two other women who mysteriously disappeared after he'd been in contact with them
[Music] i just hope that before lucious boyd gets executed he's man enough to tell
law enforcement to tell me to tell anybody where the bodies of these missing girls are
family members want to know and now police and the community are grateful that boyd
is finally behind bars physical evidence doesn't lie people do people like lucious boyd can come up
with any story they want any lie but lucious boyd will never be a match for physical evidence forensics in this
case is critical this is what set everything else from his criminal history to pass
where he was not getting convicted to a conviction we were able to pick up all these individual
little pieces of evidence that on their own may not be that important but when you combine
them all together it leads us back to this individual and it locks them in you

A young woman attends evening church services... then disappears. When her abandoned car is found, the tank is empty and a gas can she kept in her trunk for emergencies is missing.

Brief Summary

Donya DeCosta's murder led to Lucious Boyd's conviction through forensic evidence and eyewitness accounts.

Key points

The Disappearance of Donya DeCosta. A young woman disappears after car trouble, leading to a frantic search by her family.
The Discovery of Donya's Body. Days after her disappearance, Donya's body is found wrapped in sheets near a dumpster.
Lucious Boyd: The Prime Suspect. Lucious Boyd, a maintenance man, becomes the prime suspect in Donya's murder.
Conviction and Aftermath. In 2002, Lucious Boyd is convicted of Donya's murder and sentenced to death.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

My sister could be here with me right now.

0:30WatchMar 5, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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