Forensic Files - Season 10, Episode 13 - Crash Course - Full Episode | Forensic Files

it looked like a routine traffic accident until a patrolman with no forensic training suspected something
worse but he couldn't prove it until a bent steering wheel a security camera and a physics calculation showed what
really led to a young woman's death [Music] [Music] [Music] highway patrolman tony snyder was
heading home after finishing his night shift when he got a call about a traffic accident on route 95 just outside of
princeton minnesota it was maybe 10 miles from my house so i said i would do it [Music]
when snyder arrived he saw that there had been a two-vehicle accident apparently a jeep collided with an
abandoned car that had broken down and was parked on the side of the highway when i was met by the deputy he informed
me that one person is deceased the female passenger in the red jeep and the other vehicle that was struck
was unoccupied i could see the ambulance personnel working on a male who was covered in blood and he was
screaming the jeep driver steve hollermann was rushed to a nearby hospital steve's passenger his 41 year old wife
deborah was dead everybody knew her i mean she was that well loved it was just disbelief and shock
if you got to know deb you liked them she was the life of the party she was somebody that people gathered around
because she was fun to be with steve hollerman survived the crash with only minor injuries and toxicology tests
revealed no drugs or alcohol in his system he told investigators that he and deborah were on their way home from
shopping when he inadvertently drove off the highway and struck a parked car i said do you
remember what you hit and he said yeah i hit a car i said you know where the car
was he said yes it was on the shoulder i said did you see the car when you hit it he said yeah i saw the tail lights
and i then asked him if he tried to maneuver the vehicle or brake to avoid collision and he said
that he didn't have time to do that the right front end of steve's jeep hit the back left side of the parked car
steve said he was driving approximately 60 miles an hour at the time of the accident and he was wearing his seat
belt but debra was not that was out of her character she was [Music] pretty religious about wearing seat
belts and made it a point to everyone else that they needed to have theirs on also
at deborah's autopsy the medical examiner found skull fractures and evidence that her brain had been
jolted violently inside her skull from side to side the finding of the pathologists that did
the autopsy was that the death was a result of a motor vehicle accident the blunt force trauma
and the injuries that were observed the the skull fracture the bruising of the brain any of those could
have been consistent and would have been consistent with being killed in a motor vehicle crash
although patrolman tony snyder wasn't a doctor or formerly trained in forensic science he couldn't believe the
coroner's report i was sick to my stomach when i heard those words come out of his mouth because i
thought i was at a dead end now i was not comfortable with it at all but to be honest with you i
i was tore up inside i couldn't even sleep at night snyder was bothered because this
accident didn't seem bad enough to have caused the fatality as he had seen in so
many other accidents i've been to accidents like that where people has actually their head went clean through
the windshield and they're speaking to me when i get there and this windshield wasn't broke
out it was barely cracked and snyder thought the amount of blood in the car was inconsistent with
deborah's injuries there was a lot of blood in the vehicle more blood than i've ever seen in any
accident in my life and i've been to hundreds of accidents but so had local traffic investigators and they disagreed
with snyder they came to the same conclusion as the coroner that the car crash was an
accident tony snyder's options were dwindling until an anonymous telephone call shed
new light on an already mysterious case [Music] deborah hollermann's family was angry
with police when they learned some of the details surrounding the car crash that took her life how can there be a
car on the side of the road for a couple of days i mean isn't it somebody's responsibility to take a car
off of a state highway highway patrolman tony snyder was less concerned about the abandoned car and
more concerned with steve hollerman's driving skills he was convinced there was more to the
story than steve was telling i asked him if a deer jumped out if he was playing with his radio knobs
if he was on the cell phone i'm asking him if he passed out blacked out was dizzy fell asleep
and none of those things were the reason he was off the roadway he just said he didn't know
steve told investigators that he and deborah had been shopping and were heading home when the accident occurred
so snyder checked steve's story by reviewing the videos taken by the store's security cameras
they showed the hollomans at the store that night but they left several hours earlier than steve claimed
the last store he left was around 7 30 p.m and i got a call to come to the crash at 10 pm
so there's quite a bit of time missing to drive 18 or 20 miles in addition the items the hollomans bought at the store
weren't in the jeep at the time of the accident so where were the hollomans between
8 and 10 p.m an anonymous telephone call gave tony snyder a clue there was no name no way to get a hold
of anybody but just so you know somebody called and said steve hollerman's been having an affair well that peaked our
interest even more to say geez there's some more pieces to this that we're unfamiliar with that we want
to look into surprisingly deborah's friends all knew about the affair and apparently
so did deborah she was aware there was an affair going on and she was going to confront him that was made clear her
girlfriends have told us that investigators eventually discovered the identity of steve's girlfriend
she was employed by the local hospital where steve worked as a lab supervisor when questioned
she openly admitted the affair she basically said that they had been seeing each other for a year
they were in love with each other they went on outings together and she admitted that they had sex that
day in his cabin the cabin was the holloman summer home at green lake it was just a mile and a half from the
crash site with a warrant investigators searched the cabin and found evidence confirming the story
they'd heard from steve's girlfriend you could see a bed where it looked like it had been recently slept in or
used in some way and they also discovered that steve and debra had been in the cabin before the
car crash several items they had purchased that night were in the cabin so snyder decided to take a closer look
at the hollerman's jeep as well as the accident scene steve said he was driving 60 miles an
hour when the accident occurred accident reconstruction experts have a way of confirming this
if a parked car is hit the distance it moves after impact can tell you the speed at which it was
hit it's based on sir isaac newton's laws of physics specifically conservation of
momentum when one object strikes another as in this demonstration its momentum is transferred to the other
all things being equal the speed of the first ball is equal to that of the last the weight of the two cars plus the
friction between the tires and the road surface factor into the analysis the coefficient of friction is basically
just a measure of how slippery that surface is so that's that's a very important piece the
other thing is um the the angles that are involved with approach and departure from the impact
area for vehicles that are involved in a collision like this skuglin used surveying equipment to
measure the distance the parked car moved after impact as well as the angles of impact
a computer program performed the physics calculations and the result steve's jeep was traveling between 38
and 42 miles per hour when it hit the parked car not 60 miles per hour as he claimed
these calculations also proved that steve had enough time to avoid hitting the parked car he had
slightly over two seconds um from the time that he left the paved pavement until the impact he admitted he
saw the taillights of the vehicle he admitted that he didn't swerve he admitted that he didn't break say he
didn't have time it was obvious that the crash didn't happen the way steve claimed
but would evidence found inside the jeep prove it was murder investigators now suspected that deborah
hollermann had been murdered her family couldn't believe her husband steve had anything to do with it
it was disbelief going oh my god the poor guy lost his wife he's gone through a month of uh
of mourning and and now they do this to him but patrolman tony snyder feared steve
may have committed the perfect crime i literally didn't sleep at night several nights easter dinner at my mom
and dad's i hardly ate and they thought i was mad at them or upset with the family or sick or something i was just
so obsessed by this i couldn't eat and i was worried that i was i was running out of options
to get this figured out i was running into a lot of dead ends since the original autopsy ruled
deborah's death as accidental snyder asked dr janice amatuzio for a second opinion
as i looked at those photographs of the vehicle which i had not seen before that
and i looked at the injuries i said you know there's something we don't know here and i think this case deserves more
investigation there's way too much blood inside the vehicle dr amatuzio wanted to
examine the holloman's jeep herself because let's face it steve hollerman's future was at stake here
and the truth about deborah hollerman's death was at stake the most important thing for everybody
to remember is that what we were trying to get at was the truth dr amituzio was approximately the same
size and weight as deborah so she did something extraordinary she donned protective clothing and
climbed into the blood-stained car it was a little creepy it was um sobering i realized i was sitting
on the last spot that debra hollerman had been sitting before she died the first thing she noticed was the blood
smear on the windshield had what looked like a fabric pattern in fact it looked like the heavy knit
sweater that debra had been wearing at the time that she died this was a key finding
because it proved that deborah was bleeding before the crash occurred the only way that that much blood could
have been deposited on the inside of the vehicle at the time of the crash was was if deborah hollerman had been
bloody before the crash in other words she had been injured before the crash that is the only way that she could have
gotten that much blood onto her sweater onto her hair onto her face and there was more evidence that deborah
was bleeding before the crash on the passenger side rear window you could see where blood had came from the
seat and was running down the window the l-shaped pattern demonstrated once again the physics of momentum
when blood drips down the window of a jeep traveling at 40 miles per hour and it stops abruptly
everything in the jeep including the blood continues to move forward scientists believe
that's what caused this l-shaped pattern the final three pieces of evidence were
crucial to understanding events before and after the crash depara's blood was found on the lever
used to adjust the driver's seat the driver's seat where stephen hollerman was seated
was pushed as far back as the seat could go the steering wheel was bent and investigators found steve's bloody
shoe print on the passenger side window this indicated that steve moved his seat
back after he was in contact with deborah's blood then grabbed the steering wheel to brace himself for the
crash the evidence also proved that steve holloman tried to break the passenger window after the crash
my opinion is he was trying to break the window out at the accident scene he needed glass because there was a lot
of blood and there was no glass anywhere lastly dr amatuzio discovered what really caused deborah's death
forensic experts found what they believed was the murder weapon used to kill deborah holloman
it was the knob used to adjust the passenger side mirror that adjustment knob was caked with
blood and long brown hairs it was clear to me that that adjustment knob was the instrument that created the
injury pattern of the four lacerations or tears on her scalp and in all likelihood caused the depressed
skull fractures this proved that steve killed deborah by hitting her head repeatedly against the
knob it was a severe beating it was it was severe so when death is the result of an
assault we classify it as a homicide steve hollerman was arrested and charged with deborah's murder
he acted surprised dumbfounded that he was under arrest when i when i cuffed him and put in my
car he's like tony he wanted to talk to me he's called me tony you know why is this why is that
like we were friends drove down to a park and sat in my car and read the criminal
complaint word for word and the visions of the pictures really showed themselves when when you
read what they had discovered steve hollerman's lover admitted spending the afternoon with steve at the
couple's summer cabin later that night around 7pm steve and his wife deborah went shopping
together and took their purchases to the cabin deborah may have found evidence that
steve had been there earlier with his lover regardless the forensic evidence suggests an argument ensued and turned
violent while in the jeep steve repeatedly smashed deborah's head into the mirror knob inside window
causing the brain injuries that killed her then steve tried to devise a plan to cover up the crime
while driving home he saw the parked car along the side of the highway and decided to stage an
accident he got the jeep into position moved his seat back with his bloody hands made
sure a seat belt was fastened while deborah's wasn't then braced himself for impact
the jeep traveled 130 feet at 40 miles per hour directly into the back left side of the parked car
debra's arm and bloody sweater struck the windshield proof that she was bleeding before the
crash after the crash steve tried to break the side window to make the crash look worse but a passing
motorist stopped to help before steve could do it i'm convinced that he contrived a plan
to try to cover it up whether he had that already figured out before he assaulted her and killed her
i believe that he did come up with a plan to cover it up to make it look like she died in that car crash we found a
lot of things pretty quickly you know as far as like the speed limit he was traveling at and the positioning of a
seat and a lot of the things you know you know i i guess after you know we found out
about the beating and that kind of stuff that happened that night i guess nothing
was really surprised after that you know at the trial steve pleaded not guilty he admitted striking deborah during an
argument but said he was driving her to the hospital for treatment when the accident occurred
the judge didn't buy it steve hollerman was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 30
years in prison the most fascinating case that i've dealt with in my 15 years as an attorney
if you look long enough pretty soon the scene begins to speak to you it really just depends on the amount of attention
that you give it it's really meticulous attention to detail i've learned over the years
that if we look hard we will eventually get to the answers without a careful look at the evidence
and the use of science to reconstruct the crash debra hollerman's death might have
remained an accident and her husband would have walked free tony snyder is adopted as our family hero
highway patrolmen don't investigate murders they give out traffic tickets and for him to to do what he did
i mean he didn't have experience in investigating murders he went to his uh superiors and they
gave him the opportunity to follow his heart and we just need to thank everybody that was
involved in it to give our family peace tony snyder is back to his old job as a highway patrolman
this case was his first brush with forensic evidence but might not be his last i am sure
i will probably never see anything like it again in my career but i'm ready for it if i do
[Music] [Music] [Music] you

highway patrolman was dispatched to what he thought would be a routine traffic accident until he looked in the car. While he had no formal training in forensic science, he had seen hundreds of accidents - but never as much blood as this.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

A traffic accident reveals a murder case as forensic evidence uncovers Steve Hollerman's assault on his wife Deborah before staging the crash.

Key points

A Routine Traffic Accident?. What seemed like a simple crash turned into a complex investigation.
The Affair Uncovered. An anonymous tip reveals Steve Hollerman's affair, complicating the case further.
The Shocking Discovery. Evidence suggested Deborah Hollerman was injured before the crash, leading to a murder investigation.
The Murder Weapon Revealed. Forensic experts identify the knob used to kill Deborah Hollerman, leading to Steve's arrest.
Justice Served. Steve Hollerman is convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I was sick to my stomach when I heard those words.

Patrolman Tony Snyder reacts to the coroner's report.

4:04WatchJan 14, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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