Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 11 - A Cinderella Story - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[music playing] NARRATOR: A massive hurricane forced the evacuation of North Carolina's Outer Banks.
Some of the evacuees were suspects in a murder investigation, and police had to find some way to get them back.
[theme music] The Outer Banks of North Carolina is one of America's favorite getaway destinations.
Nearly seven million people visit these beaches every year. ROBERT TRIVETTE: The beaches are very nice,
lots of good restaurants-- real family-oriented place. NARRATOR: In 1993, Janet Siclari came to Nags Head, North
Carolina, for a week's vacation, along with her brother Robert and several friends.
Janet was 35 years old and had recently broken up with her boyfriend. CELESTE BETHMANN: Janet had a previous 10-year relationship
with someone. It just never was totally right for her. It had to be perfect. And she never found the Mr. Perfect
that she was looking for. NARRATOR: On their last evening in town, Janet went to dinner with her two girlfriends.
Later, they went to a nearby nightclub. [rock music playing] CELESTE BETHMANN: The girls decided
that they wanted to get home. They were tired, and they wanted to pack up. Janet was still having fun and was partying,
so they left her with the car, because she was going to be basically by herself and they
knew that she would be easier to drive back while they walked together. NARRATOR: At dawn the next morning,
a sanitation worker found Janet's body on the beach, just 10 yards from the front of her hotel.
ROBERT TRIVETTE: She was only wearing a blue denim top with no clothing below the waist,
and she was clutching a pair of white denim shorts to her neck area. NARRATOR: A rape test kit proved Janet
had been sexually assaulted. Next to Janet's body was a pair of men's size-nine tennis shoes
with gray socks inside. ROBERT TRIVETTE: It was very odd that there was this rape
and murder on the beach, and this pair of shoes within 30 feet of the body. This was just sort of a bizarre fact to me.
And we had always been suspicious that they were connected. It's just too coincidental.
NARRATOR: Police decided not to release the cause of death to the media so if a suspect knew how she was killed,
there would be only one way he'd know that. Janet had been sharing a hotel room with her brother, Robert.
He told police Janet got back around 2:30 in the morning. ROBERT TRIVETTE: Robert was asleep
when he heard her come in the room. She came in, he said, lit a cigarette, put her purse down, and said something
like, I'm just going to go out and smoke this cigarette. And walked right out the door.
NARRATOR: Robert said he was barely awake, but thought Janet might have been with friends.
ROBERT TRIVETTE: He thought that he heard some voices outside the door, some whispering,
and thought that perhaps Janet was with someone else. He wasn't real clear on this ever in his statements.
NARRATOR: Unfortunately, none of the hotel employees saw Janet enter or leave the hotel.
ROBERT TRIVETTE: That room was at the end of a hall that faced the ocean. And right outside their door was a doorway and a set of stairs
that led out and down to the deck and right to the ocean. So she didn't have to go back through the lobby
to get out of the hotel to go to the ocean. NARRATOR: Police now had to search for witnesses, anyone
who might have been in the general area around 3 o'clock in the morning. And in a vacation community, that wouldn't be easy.
No one, neither family nor investigators, could make sense of Janet Siclari's murder.
ROBERT TRIVETTE: This was a horrific crime. This was a stranger sexual assault and murder.
And if there is any other crime that's more horrific than that, I don't know what it is.
-Things like this don't happen to people who live their life honestly and decently.
They just don't. ROBERT TRIVETTE: Carolinian was a relatively large hotel that went north and south for some 100 feet.
It would have been a sound barrier that would have prevented anything, probably, that had occurred on the beach,
except some wild firework-type sound or a gunshot to have been heard. NARRATOR: Police attempted to retrace
Janet's steps on the day of her murder. According to her two girlfriends, Janet spent time in the afternoon
with the hotel's bartender, Read Powell, and they immediately hit it off. CELESTE BETHMANN: They were talking to each other.
Janet was flirting a little bit, I think, with Read. He was quiet and he was shy, which
was probably very attractive to Janet. NARRATOR: Later that evening, Janet and her friends
ran into Read at the Port O'Call Bar. Read was there with his girlfriend, but he had gotten into a fight.
TOM GILLIAM: While Read was at the Port O'Call, he saw his girlfriend dancing with another gentleman
and got a little bit upset about that, and there was a slight altercation as a result.
NARRATOR: When Janet's friends went back to the hotel, Janet stayed behind to talk to Read.
They left the bar at closing time, around 2:00 AM. TOM GILLIAM: So he stated that he was going to take a cab.
And at that point, Janet told him there was no sense in that, that she would give them a ride since she was going right
by his house to go back to the hotel. NARRATOR: When questioned, Read Powell told police that after Janet dropped him off at home,
he got the keys to his car and went looking for his girlfriend to patch things up.
ROBERT TRIVETTE: His girlfriend was an employee of the Carolinian, and they had apartments there for employees.
NARRATOR: The Carolinian was also where Janet Siclari was staying. TOM GILLIAM: Read drove to the Carolinian Hotel,
and while waiting there for his girlfriend in the parking lot, he observed Janet arrive at the hotel and go inside by herself.
NARRATOR: Read said he didn't speak with Janet at the time. He eventually saw his girlfriend when she returned to the hotel.
ROBERT TRIVETTE: They got into a verbal argument, and he ended up slapping her across the face.
That pretty much ended the conversation. His girlfriend went on to her apartment,
and he went back to his apartment. NARRATOR: When police asked Read what he was doing while waiting
for his girlfriend, he made a shocking revelation. ROBERT TRIVETTE: He had gotten hungry and carried with him
a steak knife and stick of pepperoni, and sat in the car as he was waiting for his girlfriend to return.
NARRATOR: This was a valuable piece of information, and possibly incriminating. Janet had been stabbed to death on the beach that night,
but police didn't release this information to the public. Read Powell admitted he was sitting just 100 yards away
from where Janet was murdered with a knife in his hand. ROBERT TRIVETTE: Read Powell was a very
prime suspect in the investigation. They had had interactions that day indicating something more than just a friendship or just
an acquaintance-type relationship, so all of this was very much a concern of ours and led
us to look at him very closely. NARRATOR: The investigation of Janet Siclari's murder
was just one day old when Mother Nature provided an unexpected setback. Hurricane Emily, a Category 3 storm,
was bearing down on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. ROBERT TRIVETTE: The whole island was completely
turned upside down by a mandatory evacuation caused by a hurricane that did significant damage
to the island. So we lost the crime scene and we lost-- we thought-- we were worried
that we were losing witnesses. NARRATOR: Approximately 80,000 people evacuated the area.
But the prime suspect, Read Powell, stayed in town. CELESTE BETHMANN: There was only one person
that we thought could be a suspect, and that was Read. He was the only person that we had talked to extensively
that week and allowed into our little circle. NARRATOR: Police searched Read's home
and confiscated several steak knives. MARK BOODEE: The steak knives were submitted
to the laboratory to look for the presence of blood on them. However, none of them demonstrated any indications
for the presence of blood. NARRATOR: Investigators also took a sample of Read's DNA.
At the time, in 1993, DNA testing wasn't as advanced as it is today. The method at the time was to compare the length and patterns
of autorads, which looked very much like barcode. MARK BOODEE: We compared the DNA profile from it
to the DNA profile from the vaginal swabs, and it was very easy to determine that it was not a match.
-I think we were all somewhat surprised that he was-- this was not a match. NARRATOR: Police discovered there were 10 other men who
were either in the vicinity of the murder or had some contact with Janet the week of her vacation.
All were asked to provide a DNA sample. MARK BOODEE: I examined them and their DNA standards
and compared them to DNA profile obtained from the sperm cells. Every single one of them was eliminated in this case.
NARRATOR: It began to look like the perpetrator had already left the area, either because his vacation was
over or because of the mandatory evacuation. ROBERT TRIVETTE: At that point in my career,
I'd never had a case of this significance that we were not able to solve. So it was extremely frustrating and extremely heartbreaking.
NARRATOR: Months stretched into years, and the case turned cold. CELESTE BETHMANN: Of course there's a lot of frustration
when you're trying to deal with something like this. You're thinking that the more time goes on,
the more that they'll never find the person. And you just sort of try to live with it and say that, you know,
you pray someday it'll happen, but youi're thinking, after five years, it's not going to happen.
NARRATOR: But during that period of time, the FBI developed a way for every state
to access the DNA profiles collected in other states. At the time, not every state collected
DNA samples from convicted felons. But for the majority that did, this new system was a godsend,
and they called the database CODIS, or Combined DNA Indexing System. So in 1997, almost five years after Janet Siclari's murder,
North Carolina officials entered the killer's DNA profile into the CODIS system-- and they got a match.
Amazingly, it matched someone living just an hour away in the same state of North Carolina.
DONNY VARNELL: This was our first-- what we call first cold hit of an unsolved murder/homicide,
no suspect. And this was the first cold hit the state had ever had. NARRATOR: The DNA matched 32-year-old Thomas Jabin Berry,
a commercial fisherman and convicted sex offender. One of those convictions was for an assault
on a 12-year-old girl. Berry claims he was innocent of that charge. THOMAS BERRY: She wouldn't [inaudible] if she was 14.
I got the paperwork in there. Or she was 13 going on 14, or something like that.
But, um, no, it was all consensual. ROBERT TRIVETTE: She was 12 years old. She was a kid.
NARRATOR: When police caught up with Berry, he was in prison for a parole violation.
Investigators showed him photographs of Janet Siclari and asked if he'd ever seen her.
At first he claimed he hadn't, but in a subsequent interview, he said he vaguely recalled her.
-I had to have had sex with Janet. I mean, that's obvious from the DNA. But it would have been consensual,
and there was no-- I wouldn't have never killed nobody. I'd never killed anybody.
DONNY VARNELL: For him to say he had consensual sex with Janet is untruthful. It's a lie.
I think the evidence shows that what happened was a rape and a homicide. ROBERT TRIVETTE: We were dealing with two crimes here-- one
was a rape and one was a murder. And while the evidence of DNA, we felt like, went very strongly towards prosecuting a person
for the rape of Janet Siclari, that wasn't conclusive evidence of a murder. NARRATOR: For more evidence, investigators
had to look at the shoes found next to Janet's body. And inside, they found a huge surprise.
The prime suspect in Janet Siclari's murder was Thomas Jabin Berry. He admitted he was in Nags Head at the time,
but he claimed any contact he had with Janet was consensual. THOMAS BERRY: I had sex with a lot of people on the beach.
I wouldn't have had any idea, you know, if we met that way, and then just started walking and talking
and one thing led to another. I've had that happen several times in my life. As a matter of fact, my first wife and I met that way.
[chuckles] NARRATOR: But a look at Berry's background revealed his sexual history was far from innocent.
DONNY VARNELL: There were approximately a dozen other victims of sexual assault by Mr. Berry.
We found one instant where he actually raped a young lady on the beach. NARRATOR: As for the night of the murder,
Berry admitted he was on drugs. ROBERT TRIVETTE: I think Berry had been on the beach
that night somewhere, partying, drinking, and doing crack. He admitted in his statements that he-- that period of time,
he was high on crack a lot. NARRATOR: To Janet Siclari's friends and family, the possibility of her having sex with a complete stranger
was totally out of character. CELESTE BETHMANN: She wasn't one to have a casual fling or an affair with someone.
She was looking for something really sturdy in her life, at 35 years old, a nice, good relationship.
NARRATOR: But prosecutors didn't have to convince Janet's friends. They had to convince a jury.
In an attempt to find something besides the DNA that tied Berry to the murder, detectives turned to the only other evidence
at the crime scene-- the tennis shoes. Berry denied the shoes were his. ROBERT TRIVETTE: The only way we could think
to do that was to find someone who could do shoe impressions, to see if there was a way to say-- like a fingerprint,
except with a foot and a shoe. NARRATOR: Investigators contacted Robert Kennedy,
a forensic expert with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He had an international reputation
for using barefoot impressions, particularly on the inside of shoes, as evidence.
ROBERT KENNEDY: I became involved with the barefoot research back in 1989. And as a result of a serial killer back in New Brunswick,
we needed to see if the suspect's barefoot impression would match the impressions found inside of the shoe.
Kennedy soon established a database of these impressions and did a detailed study of how they're made.
ROBERT KENNEDY: When somebody wears a pair of shoes, the foot generates a large amount of heat
inside the shoes, so the foot will sweat. The weight-bearing area of the foot will cause indentation on the insole of the shoe.
So you have a combination of slight indentations, sweat-- dirty, darkened marks inside of the shoe.
NARRATOR: These marks are unique to an individual's feet and therefore provide a potential basis for comparison.
Kennedy got inked impressions on the bottoms of Thomas Berry's bare feet. Then he cut out the insoles of the shoes from the crime scene
and photographed the surfaces. The images were overlaid for comparison. ROBERT KENNEDY: There was no dissimilarities
between the impression that Thomas Berry would make and the Spalding running shoe, so I
was able to form a conclusion that Thomas Berry was the likely wearer of the Spalding running shoes.
NARRATOR: To law enforcement, this placed Berry at the crime scene with the body.
ROBERT TRIVETTE: We always were convinced they were connected and that the shoes went with this crime,
and that they all pointed to Thomas Berry as our suspect. NARRATOR: Prosecutors believed Janet gave Read Powell a ride
home from the bar, then went to her hotel. They believe her brother was mistaken when he said he heard
voices coming from outside the room. Janet went back outside to smoke a cigarette.
By tragic coincidence, Janet ran into Thomas Jabin Berry, a man with a history of sexual violence.
He was also high on drugs. Prosecutors believe he used a knife to force Janet to have sex.
Then he stabbed her to death so she couldn't identify him. Some in law enforcement think Berry left his shoes
on the beach so his shoe impressions wouldn't lead investigators back to his aunt's house near the hotel, where
they think Berry spent the night. MARK BOODEE: In the end, Thomas Jabin Berry was the one who did himself in.
If he had not violated the conditions of his parole, his sample would never have been available for us to analyze.
NARRATOR: During Berry's murder trial, prosecutors learned an unfortunate piece of information.
TOM GILLIAM: He was back in the holding cell during the trial and he made a comment to a jailer,
they'll never sentence me to death. And the jailer said, what are you talking about?
He said, well, there's somebody on the jury. She's good friends with my mama. She watched me grow up.
NARRATOR: The jury convicted Thomas Jabin Berry of rape and first-degree murder.
But this particular juror was the only one to vote against the death penalty, so Berry was sentenced to life in prison
with no possibility of parole. Despite the forensic evidence, Berry still says he's innocent.
-I've been trying unsuccessfully, filing appeals and trying to get back in court, and I figured it couldn't hurt,
you know? It may generate some publicity and help me in some way. -I say, you're a liar.
There's no question about it. Because of all the types of scientific evidence out there,
this evidence is irrefutable, that Thomas Berry encountered Janet Siclari on the night of August 28.
There's no question about it. That, we proved beyond all doubt, instead of beyond a reasonable doubt.
And if Mr. Berry says that, he's a liar. [theme music]

The victim had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death on the beach. A pair of men's tennis shoes was discovered near her body. Police were sure that if they found the man who fit the shoes, they would also find the man who committed the crime.

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

The murder of Janet Siclari leads to the conviction of Thomas Berry through DNA evidence and shoe impressions.

Key points

Janet's Mysterious Murder. Janet Siclari's body was found on the beach, leading to a complex investigation.
DNA Breakthrough. Five years after the murder, DNA evidence finally leads to a suspect.
Trial and Conviction. Thomas Jabin Berry is convicted of rape and murder, sentenced to life in prison.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This was a horrific crime.

Robert Trivette reflects on the nature of the crime.

4:38WatchJan 27, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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