Forensic Files Season 11, Episode 28 - If I Were You - Full Episode | Forensic Files

amid the rustic beauty of rural idaho a retired school teacher vanished but even though he was missing his bills
were paid on time and he continued to correspond with his family but they couldn't contact him
making this one of the most bizarre missing persons cases in u.s history [Music]
[Music] [Applause] [Music] for 22 years the most popular teacher at incline high
school near lake tahoe nevada was paul grouper it was his passion for travel that
fueled his love of foreign languages he loved that he could go to these places and speak their language
and he emphasized that very much that that was really one of the main benefit of learning a foreign language is that
traveling the world you could take care of yourself i went to mexico with him um my junior
year of high school [Music] that was fun we went dancing that was kind of embarrassing
but anyway we had a good time when he was in his early 50s paul gruber inherited some money and retired from
teaching he moved to sandpoint idaho and bought a home on the shores of muskrat lake
he just liked that slow pace when i actually saw sandpoint i could see why he liked it it was you know has
the same lake tahoe feel shortly after christmas in 1993 paul sent his three-year-old grandson a
birthday card as was his custom [Music] but his daughter noticed immediately that this card was different from all
the others it was a really brief note and wasn't very affectionate but it wasn't sitting
right with me there was just red flag inside you know something wasn't right i pulled out old birthday
cards and started comparing writing and it didn't look like his signature to me you know
shelley left phone messages for her father at his home in idaho uncharacteristically
he didn't return them so shelley called the local police department asking them to check on her
father's welfare the detectives found no one home and no evidence of a break-in but
virtually everything inside was gone there was a total absence of personal items clothing toothbrush airbrush
nothing just totally vacant like no one had lived there or someone had rented the house
stereos you know valuable stuff like that tvs were all gone shelley decided to set a trap
she left a bogus message on her father's answering machine reminding him not to forget her husband's birthday
can you please send the money that we had discussed i think it was just uh something that she made up to see what
would happen five days later her father sent shelley's husband a birthday card and a
25 check she knew that her dad had never promised to send a check for her husband
and i don't think it was even his birthday and so that certainly let her believe that something had happened to
her dad [Music] an idaho state police forensic document examiner compared the handwriting on the
check and envelope to paul gruber's known handwriting samples when the handwriting analysis came back the
examiner felt that it was gruber's handwriting paul's family however didn't believe it it didn't look like
his signature to me my husband agreed that it didn't look like his writing so i think that's when i started making
some more calls police checked paul's financial transactions and discovered that he had
been paying his monthly bills on time and was using his atm card around town for cash
strangely none of the atms got a picture of the person using the card none of the atms used had a camera not
one so we found that to be a little bit odd was this merely a coincidence and if paul was all right where was he
living and why didn't he return his family's telephone calls [Music] shelley kepley was convinced that
something sinister had happened to her father paul gruber on a hunch shelly called the post office
in sandpoint idaho and asked them who is picking up her father's mail from his post office box
a security camera provided a partial answer unfortunately somebody probably knocked
it a skew so that all we got was a silhouette of the person who entered in and went into his post office box
the silhouette wasn't paul gruber to some people in town it looked like 43 year old daryl kewl
a local handyman who had been doing work for paul a comparison between the silhouette and
kul's picture confirmed it keel from where we could tell had lived in california and possibly washington
had a large family wife and six seven kids jewel admitted he had been picking up
paul's mail he said paul asked him to before leaving for a trip to canada investigators showed cuell
a photograph of paul gruber and incredibly kewl didn't recognize him he said this
wasn't the paul grouper he knew somebody pretended to be paul gruber to daryl kill hired
daryl kill to be a caretaker so we asked him if he would provide us with a you know an artist's
sketch police sketch of the person what side of the person's face did you see the best
investigators took keel's description and keyed that information into a computer program called compusketch
i'm entering the answers that they provide to the question and so the computer with those answers generates
that sketch then kule provided feedback on the first image to improve the likeness
i want to change one item at a time that way if it's the nose that's the problem
we can pinpoint the nose or if the eyes don't match the nose we can pinpoint that
it could be average hour to two hours to go through it when finished police released this
composite sketch to the media hoping to find the man who had assumed paul gruber's identity
but no one called [Music] months went by and there was still no sign of the real paul gruber either
we still didn't know where gruber was at we hadn't located him we weren't even sure
that anything had happened to this man police continued to keep a close eye on paul's house
and searched the property repeatedly even using cadaver dogs but something inside the house bothered detective
sergeant valdez a small rug in the foyer had been glued to the floor that just drove me crazy i couldn't
figure out why anybody would glue a rug to the hardwood floor that's great my wife would kill me if i did something
like that so we tore it up under the rug investigators found a small gouge in the
wooden floor it looked like a bullet had ricocheted and hit the floor tests of the wood were positive for the
presence of lead police used luminol and discovered there had been blood on the floor near
the bullet mark and elsewhere we started spraying up the door and you could see white marks about
halfway up the door i mean they stand out if you use bleach or anything else they stick out
real well dna testing proved that the blood was paul gruber's but where was the body
we don't have a groover we don't have a body we don't we can't prove the man's dead
[Music] daryl kewell a 43 year old handyman said this man identified himself as paul
grouper and hired him to take care of the group her property while he went away on vacation
this man was obviously an imposter and no one had heard from the real paul gruber for months they continue on with
the investigation the number one thing that they're looking for is a body trying to figure
out where the body of paul gruber is as for daryl kill he was well respected in the community and had no criminal
record however a search of his finances showed he recently deposited over twenty thousand
dollars into his checking account at the same time there were similar withdrawals from paul
gruber's account hewlett admitted transferring paul's money into his checking account so that
he could pay paul's bills none of that to me rang true i have a lot of friends i don't have any friends
that are you know i'm going to go out and pay their bills for them at five six hundred dollars of whack
that i just met the only evidence detectives had were the birthday cards and checks paul
gruber sent to his family while missing a forensic document examiner concluded that the handwriting on those birthday
cards was consistent with the real paul grouper's known handwriting samples paul's family disagreed i was absolutely
persuaded that it wasn't so it's hard when you got experts saying yes it is and you're like no it's not
so the materials were sent to another forensic examiner for a second opinion once i knew what his signature looked
like what his subconscious characteristics were then i took some of the question material looked at it and
it didn't take long to see if it was counterfeit or if it was valid the most striking part of the
examination was the writing of the letter p paul gruber consistently had a large
loop in this letter yet in the question documents the p's were different the loops weren't as well formed they
were completely missing or they were elongated flowberg also noticed that paul gruber wrote his ms and ends
much differently than those in the question document he concluded that paul gruber did not
write these documents the signatures did look pretty close to the victims i believe a lot of practice
had gone into duplicating the victim's signatures his downfall however was that there's a
lot more writing that goes into a birthday card and an address next floburg analyzed daryl kuhl's
handwriting to see if he had written the checks and birthday cards he noticed that kewl used the same
closed loop on the capital p and other capital letters and kule wrote his f's in virtually the
same way as the question document no matter how much time you have to practice writing it's so hard to
duplicate the writing of another that mr kuehl was conclusively the writer of the
forged checks and birthday cards and addressed the envelopes investigators searched daryl kuhl's
property and found some incriminating evidence we found a hidden door upstairs and found
military type dark camouflage type clothing throwing stars a katana which is a big sword it just
didn't fit with daryl kewley family man father mormon good mormon type person they also found
power tools furniture even a boat which were all identified as belonging to paul gruber
we found a small suitcase or briefcase that had his sunday go to meeting clothes in it and a
large butcher knife and that really seemed strange and in the middle of it all was called
one of paul gruber's power bills but most alarming was a 22 caliber handgun with a homemade
silencer silencers are illegal because they can alter the ballistic evidence the
microscopic characteristics which are imparted to the bullet by the barrel itself
are usually obliterated by a misaligned silencer very very difficult and rare to identify
a bullet with the barrel of a weapon who has had a which has had a silencer device attached
and detectives still didn't have paul gruber's body [Music] 18 months after paul gruber disappeared
investigators searched his house yet again this time in a basement crawl space they
found a shallow depression that wasn't there before the ground had apparently settled
we worked for two days we sifted every five gallon bucket full of dirt we went square by square
a couple of feet at each square in a pattern we finally exposed what appeared to be
an air mattress and eventually confirmed that there was a body inside the body was identified
as paul gruber he had been shot four times the medical examiner removed several 22-caliber bullets from gruber's body
but they didn't match test fires from daryl kewl's 22 caliber handgun or his silencer which can impart its own
characteristics on the bullet any slight change in the positioning of that silencer relative to the weapon
will cause the bullet to strike different parts of the silencer from shot to shot
and once that occurs you're not going to make an identification nevertheless investigators had more than
enough evidence to charge daryl kewell with murder kewl's first order of business was to
plan his escape an inmate testified that darrell kill had offered him money and a car
to kill the prison transport officers who were taking daryl back this person was
getting out of jail before daryl was going to be transported five thousand dollars for me and five
thousand for harvey and five thousand per howard we thought we were going pretty cheap
there cule thought he'd soon be a free man but the investigators knew better the two officers were actually doing the
transport they said daryl we know about your plot that you're going to have us killed
those guys turn states evident and they said that he was just crushed at that point
prosecutors believe daryl kewell orchestrated an elaborate plan to kill paul gruber and steal his money
this was a crime motivated by greed paul gruber had things that darrell killed wanted
needed more money and six kids seven kids however many he had that's a lot of groceries
apparently paul gruber hired daryl kewell for handyman work around the house and soon gained his confidence
sometime after christmas prosecutors believe kewl went to paul's home armed with his 22-caliber handgun
[Music] and shot him four times one bullet missed ricocheted off the floor leaving a gouge in the wood
[Music] luminol tests show that he dragged paul's body into the crawl space wrapped
him in plastic and buried him underneath his own house [Music] kewl cleaned the blood from the floor
and glued the rug over the gouge created when the bullet ricocheted with paul dead
kewl now had unfettered access to paul's records his atm card his pin number his checks his social
security number he had everything he needed to assume paul's identity he started writing checks in paul's name
and withdrawing money from his accounts his handwriting may have fooled one document examiner
but it didn't fool paul's daughter who knew right away it wasn't her father's handwriting
she set a trap by leaving some inaccurate information about her husband's birthday on her
father's answering machine kewl fell right into the trap sending the birthday card on the wrong
date it was a takeover homicide where it wasn't just a homicide but afterwards the suspect
took over the life of the victim financial matters paid bills paid the mortgage rode out checks and birthday cards to
the grandkids tried to keep the persona of the victim alive so that he could extract more funds from the
victim at his trial daryl kuhl insisted he was innocent he denied signing paul's name on his checks
and sending the birthday cards to paul's family he pointed to the opinion of the first
forensic document examiner as proof so what did prosecutors do they asked scientists to swab the back
of the stamp on the birthday cards and they found saliva its dna matched daryl kewl
there was roughly a million people in idaho so when you have a one in a million on a dna
that tells you that if everybody in idaho is in the same room this is still the only person it could
be i felt a lot happier to know that i wasn't going to be the only one testifying to
the identity of the writer but also the dna was going to corroborate my findings
after a three-week trial kewl was convicted of first-degree murder grand theft and forgery
he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison at first we're skeptical the handwriting
tells us don't be skeptical keep digging later on we find evidence of blood have
confirmed for us that yes you have blood here yes you probably have a crime scene
putting us on the right track and lastly the dna i think that's the nail in the coffin
right there [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

In 1994, Paul Gruber's daughter suspected something was wrong when she received birthday cards addressed from Gruber, on which the handwriting wasn't Gruber's.

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

Paul Gruber vanished in 1993; handyman Daryl Kewl murdered him and assumed his identity, leading to a complex investigation.

Key points

The Mysterious Disappearance of Paul Gruber. Paul Gruber vanished without a trace, yet continued to pay his bills on time.
The Sinister Discovery. A hidden rug in Paul Gruber's home led to shocking evidence of foul play.
The Shocking Truth Revealed. DNA evidence linked Daryl Kewl to the birthday cards sent by Paul Gruber.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This was one of the most bizarre missing persons cases in U.S. history.

0:22WatchJan 20, 2022

Tension

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