Forensic Files - Season 10, Episode 22 - A Clean Getaway - Full Episode | Forensic Files

for years criminals used women's hosiery as a mask to hide their identities but today to a forensic scientist
hosiery can be as valuable as a fingerprint because of its signature characteristics
and textile science identified a killer when an eyewitness couldn't [Music] in the small midwestern town of heron
illinois murder was like a virtual stranger it's so rare that police thought this
9-1-1 call was a prank 9-1-1 emergency [Applause] police traced the call to a pay phone
near the center of town just up the street was a dry cleaning store the front door was open
and no one was there behind the counter was a purse with its content scattered all over the floor
right at that moments when we thought there's something serious here in the back room
behind a water heater police found a woman's body she had been beaten apparently
with the bloody mop ringer nearby i checked her for a pulse she did not have one that i could locate
the victim was identified as a store employee 40-year-old kathy woodhouse she was a married mother of three
children she was my mom and you know she disciplined me and all those things but
she was also my friend sorry i'm sorry guys outside the store police found a piece
of pantyhose which the killer may have used as a disguise investigators wondered whether the man
who made the 9-1-1 call was somehow involved we listened to this 9-1-1 call could he be a witness
or was he the actual assailant of kathy woodhouse at a certain point in the investigation
we were relatively certain that it was probably the killer a gas station attendant saw the man who
made the call and described him as a caucasian about six feet tall police took the phone receiver to the
forensics lab for testing at the dry cleaning store on the counter investigators found a check made out to
the store in the amount of 14.30 signed by one of the store's customers when police contacted the woman she said
she was in the store that morning but no one was there she found her clothes wrote a check for
the amount she owed and was about to leave when a man came out of the back room and asked if she needed help
she told him at that point that she was there to get her cleaning she assumed that he was an employee there she had no
reason to believe otherwise the witness described the man as 30 to 35 years old six foot two inches tall
and weighing over 200 pounds the police realized that she had come face to face with the killer
[Music] a customer of the dry cleaning store said she got a good look at the man who was
most likely kathy woodhouse's killer we were very excited in that we thought we did have a
potential witness as to who the perpetrator may have been i also thought she very well may have been extremely
lucky that things happened the way they did and she was not killed at that point
in time police used her description to create a sketch which was distributed to the local media
an autopsy revealed that kathy woodhouse died from blunt force trauma to the head
she received three blows to the left side of her head because there was three separate lacerations to the left side of
the head so that the mop ringer fit the bill as far as its weight its mass of the variety of surfaces and when you
look at the mop ringer itself there was at least one part of the mop ringer metals which was bent
she had also been sexually assaulted on unfortunately biological material collected from the
rape test kit could not identify the killer's blood type because he was what's known as a non-secretor
a non-secretor does not secrete their blood type into their secretions and approximately 20 percent of the
population would fall into that class of being a non-secretor [Music] with little else to go on police turned
their attention to the phone receiver used to make the 911 call the brushes that apply fingerprint
powder can sometimes remove some of the fingerprint so technicians wanted to stabilize any
possible prince by using super glue fuming it's a little like putting chocolate over ice cream it creates a protective
shell over any print the heated super glue adheres to any amino acids present then fingerprint powder is applied
to better visualize the print technicians used a dye called aardrox the prints that have soaked up the
ardrock's will appear a yellowish color and then we can photograph those using specialized
film and the end result is we have a print potentially that we would not have without using that dye stain
and under an ultraviolet light investigators found what they were looking for a clear print once i told them the news
i could hear other officers in the background and there was definitely a level of
excitement that he hadn't heard for a while with this case but was this the print of the killer
after all in any given week hundreds of people use a pay phone unfortunately the print did not match
any known criminal offenders who had prints on file there were times that we became frustrated yes
but we still weren't going to give up in the event that this individual was still
here because we had to get him off the street so he wouldn't strike again then police got a valuable tip
a friend of the murder victim came forward with a startling piece of information the day before kathy was
killed she received a telephone call from someone wanting to know what color of toenail polish that she wore
and when the police got the lead they went and got all the telephone records uh from the calls coming into the cleaners
on that day according to the phone records there were only a few calls made to the store
that night one came from a man who lived in the town of ziegler several miles away
officers thought at that time with it being a sex crime the type of call that they made that
this is this is probably our guy the man a 25 year old construction worker at first denied making the call
we confronted him with a statement concerning the color of the toenails and he immediately you could tell on his
expression that he was the one who made the calls the man eventually admitted that he
called kathy woodhouse but said he meant no harm he stated that he did those type of
calls a couple times a month he was very nervous about that which is understandable
he said he knew kathy because he was a customer of the dry cleaning store but insisted he had nothing to do with her
murder but investigators weren't so sure police investigating the murder of kathy
woodhouse were worried it looked like the attack was random something that just it literally scares
people to death they're not accustomed to this type of crime we truly feared that he would
possibly strike again and kill another woman and it was basically a race against time
police thought they had their killer when they found a construction worker who made an obscene telephone call to
kathy woodhouse on the night before the murder but he said he had an alibi that he was
teaching a class at a local community college on the morning of the murder we were able to confirm his alibi for
where he was at that followed the morning of the homicide and was able to rule him out
then police got another tip the police received an anonymous telephone call that they should check out a paul taylor
who lived on 16th street in herron as a possible suspect in the kathy woodhouse murder and rape he had recently in
december just been released from louisiana prison for aggravated sexual assault that's all the callers said and they
hung up taylor only 20 years old lived with his mother just two blocks from where the murder took place
and police learned that taylor worked at a fast food restaurant that used the dry
cleaner to launder the employees uniforms investigators called the manager and asked if taylor was the one who took the
clothes to the dry cleaners they said no paul taylor would not have brought the clothing over there however
he just he just quit his job 15 minutes going planning on going to louisiana police rushed to paul taylor's house
and when they arrived paul taylor told them that he had just gotten home from work
one of the officers confronted him with the fact that you didn't just get home from work
manager just told us you went over there and quit your job that you were going back to louisiana
when questioned taylor denied any involvement in the murder taylor's grandmother provided an alibi
she said paul was at home that morning and taylor bore no resemblance to the description given by the eyewitness he
came across very believable when asked questions like what should happen to someone that
killed kathy woodhouse his response was brian do you think that individual should get
a second chance his response to that was no there should be no second chance on a hunch police asked taylor if they
could search his home he agreed while doing the search i lifted up the mattress on his bed
and immediately saw a pair of women's pantyhose with one leg missing laying on top of two pornographic magazines
then police remembered the piece of pantyhose they found on the ground outside the dry-cleaning store
was it possible it was cut from the pier found in taylor's home it really raised my curiosity because
now i've seen some physical evidence that may connect him with the crime scene police sent both pieces to forensic
microscopist glenn shubert the first exam i did physically then was to try and match up the edges in what we call a
physical match but the ends were too frayed for any sort of comparison but under a microscope
schubert was able to find similarities i was able to determine that they were both a similar knit
jersey stitch knit pattern next using high magnification schubert found another striking similarity
both pieces contained some unique chemical properties the titanium dioxide is the small little
dots that appeared in the microscope those are just particles they put in synthetic fibers to keep them from being
too shiny and in this particular case there was a moderate amount of the titanium dioxide delusion particles in
both samples to see if the colors were the same schubert turned to micro spectral
the spectra that i observed from these fibers was very unique it had several peaks which is a little unusual in
colored fibers so the fact that it had several peaks that was very consistent between two samples made this color
comparison very unique since they were both dyed the same color had the same amount of titanium dioxide
and were the same knit pattern schubert made a definitive assessment we knew that night that we had enough
evidence that would lead to his arrest warrant with our cutting edge technology here we
were able to come up with the results that prove that he was likely the perpetrator of this crime
finally investigators compared taylor's fingerprints to the print found on the payphone
it was a match and the fingerprint evidence revealed something else investigators found paul taylor's left
palm print on a plastic garbage bag found near kathy woodhouse's body proof he was in the back room of the dry
cleaning store on the day of the murder forensic science proved what the eyewitnesses couldn't
that paul taylor had killed kathy woodhouse as it turns out the witness was wrong in
all instances but one and that was the height she had said the person was 30 to 35 years old ends up that he was 20.
she indicated he weighed 220 pounds and he only weighed 170. but the truth of the matter is that positive
identification is oftentimes wrong paul taylor was arrested as he was leaving a rock concert with some friends
i have a funny feeling he knows it's coming down he's waving to us so he's still in a good frame of mind
one finger though police found his nonchalance alarming he knew we were following him and he just
sort of made light of it uh he he was not concerned did not seem very concerned about it uh it was sort of a
big joke to him uh was the way it came across to us prosecutors are unsure whether paul
taylor walked into the dry-cleaning store to commit robbery sexual assault murder
or all of the above it would be speculation on our part as to whether he'd actually planned on
killing her or not he didn't bring a weapon with him however he did have he did apparently have the stocking with
him the evidence suggests taylor wore the pantyhose over his head as a disguise he forced kathy woodhouse to the back
room of the store and sexually assaulted her [Music] then he heard someone enter the store
it was a customer who found her dry cleaning and wrote a check for the amount she owed
taylor needed to make sure she didn't look in the back room so he removed the disguise walked out
and asked her if she needed help afterwards he may have realized kathy woodhouse
could identify him so he killed her with the mop ringer [Music] he left his left palm print on a plastic
garbage bag in the back room then he took three dollars from kathy's purse and left the store but
dropped the pantyhose outside a few blocks away he called 9-1-1 and left his fingerprint on the receiver
i can't tell you why paul taylor made the 9-1-1 call sometimes they'll do it to taunt the
police to try to show them they can get by with something for the reaction that they may get
when faced with the forensic evidence against him paul taylor confessed he did not hesitate much about telling
us that he did kill her he told her that he was going to rob her he stated that he did take three dollars
from her purse but he first he denied having sexually assaulted her investigators discovered taylor was a
non-secretor consistent with the biological samples from the rape test kit and they told taylor
they didn't believe him at which point he looked down at the floor for several seconds and then he
looked directly at me again and he said i raped her maybe he thought that murder was okay
but sexually sexual assault was not i think he just tried to lessen the severity of it when he first told us
that he'd murdered her paul taylor was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to
life in prison with no possibility of parole i'm glad to know he's going to be in
prison never going to get out and walk the streets and do something like this someone else
however i felt like he should have been put to death for what he did after the trial taylor has spoke to the
media about the crime as far as murdering her herself i don't have any remorse but
going along with her children now i i feel sorry about that you know but that's all i can say you know i can't do
anything more at the time like i said i wasn't thinking about murder so i i didn't think if she had children
i didn't know if she was married i didn't know anything about that to be honest i don't think about paul
taylor very much [Music] because i don't focus on my mom's death i focus on her life more
and so i guess the hardest part is just being without her not being able to go to the phone
you know tell her what's going on not being able to come home to illinois and see her and you know just
all the fun things that we did and enjoyed before this was a case where an eyewitness's description wasn't
nearly as accurate as the forensic evidence the forensic evidence in this case was
extremely important without that i don't believe we would have made it been able to make an arrest
on taylor i doubt we would have got a confession from him this case is a classic example of
all the law enforcement community working together from from from the local police departments to the
sheriff's department to the state's attorney's office to the crime lab i think in my 20 years this is the most
obvious case of a situation where without the forensic evidence we would not have had the probable cause to
arrest paul taylor he very probably would still be walking the streets and there's absolutely no doubt in my mind
that he would have killed again [Music] [Music] [Music] you

An employee of a dry cleaner was raped and murdered in the store. Police turned to forensic science for the answers they needed.

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

Forensic evidence led to the arrest of Paul Taylor for the murder of Kathy Woodhouse in Heron, Illinois.

Key points

The Value of Hosiery. Forensic scientists reveal how women's hosiery can be as valuable as fingerprints.
A Shocking Murder. In a small town, a rare murder leads to a frantic investigation.
Paul Taylor's Confession. Paul Taylor eventually confesses to the murder, revealing his mindset during the crime.
Eyewitness Misidentification. An eyewitness's description proves less accurate than forensic evidence in solving the case.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

She was my mom... she was also my friend.

A son reflects on his mother's murder.

2:15WatchJan 14, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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