Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 12 - Screen Pass - Full Episode | Forensic Files

i love you a 13 year old girl went missing from her colorado home with little evidence to explain
what happened the investigation dragged on for two long years until an alert fingerprint
examiner found a serious flaw in the system [Music] [Music] [Music] september 7 1991 was like most other
days for the church family diane church got the kids off to school ran errands went grocery shopping and
planned to spend a quiet evening with her family the plans for that night originally was
to be at home and just do whatever we do probably read them stories and and that
kind of stuff that moms do then diane remembered her older sons had a boy scout meeting that night
diane's other children five-year-old sage and 13-year-old heather wanted to stay home
heather didn't want to go and hang out with all those crazy boys and so she asked if she could babysit that night
and um and so we said sure fine whatever and um and we took off and went to the cub
scout meeting heather had taken babysitting classes so diane had no qualms about leaving her in
charge later that night diane called home to check in [Music] i guess it was right before 8 30 and
i heard the tv on in the background and i said oh what's going on and she goes oh mom i just let him stay up a little
bit i'll put him to bed diane and the two boys returned home around 10 o'clock the house was dark
and for some reason the front door was unlocked she assumed heather and sage were asleep
sage was in bed but heather was not she was so little and she had such a big fluffy comforter that i just figured she
was under the comforter so i said what go look again so uh he goes and looks again and comes
back and goes no she's not in there so i went and looked and and and she wasn't in there and
and then that's when it all fell apart diane and her children searched the house and their five-acre property they
found no sign of heather so diane called police and they said well 98 of these calls
turn out to be runaways and i just said oh well this is the other two percent when investigators arrived
they found the property full of friends and relatives for forensic technicians this was a potential problem
when there's a multitude of people that have been there for a prolonged period of time
pretty much everything and anything that could be touched has been touched footwear impressions
tire tracks anything at all that might be unusual is more difficult to identify there was no apparent sign of forced
entry or foul play or even of a struggle the only thing taken or person taken was
heather she was the only thing missing from the scene that we could identify the search
continued throughout the night and still there was no sign of heather the next morning
diane church noticed that the screen on her bedroom window was a skew evidence technicians found
three fingerprints on the outside of the screen's frame the prints themselves were very fresh in
this particular case on that particular screen they were very distinct prints but these fingerprints could have been
left by anyone dozens of people had been in and around the house but this was a busy household just like
many of our households there were hundreds of prints throughout the entire house it was a process that would take
days perhaps weeks and they were no closer to finding heather what happened ahem don church became the
mystery for this entire region people were talking about it people were worried people were scared
what's your favorite violin song to play the devil's dream yeah that's a good one
i like that one the possible abduction of 13 year old heather church was unusual for colorado springs colorado a
community with very little crime i think it heightened all the concern about taking safety measures with your
children and making sure they understood about you know stranger danger concerns
and things like that diane church and her family lived in a sparsely populated area which meant a
kidnapper could have abducted heather without drawing much attention it was this 13 year old girl who was
home and yet her brother was left behind she disappeared and her brother was just still sleeping in his
bed it all was a very suspicious situation right off the bat an fbi profiler agreed
since there was nothing missing from the home and no signs of violence the profiler suggested heather's
abductor might be someone familiar with the family and their routines it's a very high percentage of crimes of that
nature that family members are involved so you always look at the parents you always try to check out their alibi
or check out their motive and if there's any evidence of bad character at all the first suspect on the list
was heather's father at the time he was separated from diane church and living on his own
the fbi wanted to talk to me and for about four hours i had the i could see in the movie the good guy bad guy
scenario fbi agents asking me all these questions that [Music] some of them were
really hard to imagine they were very very personal things that how i felt about my daughter
but mike church said he had an alibi for the time heather went missing he attended a support group meeting for
divorcees with plenty of witnesses he left the meeting at 9 30. there was a short time gap from the time
he left the workshop to the time he was called at his residence that gap had to be filled in he also passed a polygraph
test one of the detectives did come to my work and he asked to see me at that time
i said am i still considered a suspect and he says mr church yes you are and i said well
i think that you need to look somewhere else diane church was also considered a suspect
they gave me a lie detector test a horrible thing to go through to you know go to the police station and
be fingerprinted and lie detector test and all this kind of stuff the only potential evidence at the scene
was the fingerprints on the bedroom screen the prints were compared with those in
the database of the colorado state bureau of investigation there was no match next the sheriff's office sent the
prints to the fbi and their automated fingerprint identification system or aphis
it's one of the largest fingerprint databases in the world at the time containing over 45 million prints
our impression at that time was that if we submitted those fingerprints to the federal aphid system
that we were covering the broadest spectrum that could be accessed again there was no match
as a father i felt like i should have been there and i wasn't so uh i went through i was going through a
failed marriage and then i wasn't i wasn't there as a father for my children so i blamed a lot of that on myself why
why wasn't i there my biggest wish was that somebody had taken her who had lost a kid
of their own and that was what i clung to [Music] the investigation into heather church's
disappearance dragged on for months then years the fingerprints found on the bedroom
window screen didn't match any in the state or national databases despite this the family never lost hope
i think that's what got me from one day to the next and then i have those days that
i would see her up in the mountains somewhere alone and calling for me it was agonizing
so i had to put my myself in a right frame of mind and i tried to get out of those type of
situations exactly two years after heather went missing the family was told that a hiker had found
a human skull near pikes peak just 15 miles from their home the skull was recovered in a pretty
remote area of el paso county off rampart range road about seven over seven miles from town
by a hiker in a pretty steep ravine about a 400 foot ravine the skull was that of a young caucasian female
the news came on and the reporter was holding the skull and was saying this body has been found yadda yadda and
all the details and about and this happened this had happened to me so many times since she went missing
it's amazing how many bodies are found dental records identified the victim it was
heather church at the beginning i didn't want to hear it like 24 hours i kept on saying are you
sure i must have said that a hundred times the autopsy revealed the manner of death
was homicide the medical examiner was able to conclude that heather died of blunt
force trauma to the right rear of the head in the area where the skull was found
investigators discovered a pair of girls pajamas but surprisingly her mother said
they weren't heathers with no other clues it looked like the case might go cold again
but before that could happen the newly elected sheriff of el paso county made the heather church case his
first priority and one of his main topics that he wanted to work was the heather dawn church case
and he asked me if i would look into it when lou said he was going to open the case up i said i thought to myself
what good is this going to do you know what are you going to find out that these other
police officers and detectives didn't know detective lou smith turned to the only possible clue to the
killer's identity the three fingerprints found on the bedroom window screen at the church's
house at the same time layton print examiner tom carney took a fresh look at these prints too
he was new to the el paso county crime laboratory he came from miami where he learned
something not many others knew the fbi's fingerprint database did not contain the prince of everyone in the
united states who was convicted of a crime i knew right away that they had not all
these atheist systems out there had not been searched to the best of my knowledge only two aficio systems had
been searched i just assumed that it was a centralized network and uh tom carney uh
was the one that really opened our eyes on that generally the fbi stores only the
fingerprints of criminals convicted of major crimes not those convicted of minor crimes like burglary or theft
so kearney needed to identify every database that had fingerprints which were not on file with the fbi
i just contacted every state and try and track down every system in every state including canada and even mexico carney
identified 92 fingerprint databases in north america that hadn't been searched for
the prints from the heather church case i left a note for our photographic lab saying please make 92 sets of the
heather dawn church crime scene latents and i'm going to mail them out and that's what i did
four weeks later tom carney got a surprise [Music] finally after two long years colorado law enforcement officials got
the break they'd been hoping for they compared the fingerprints from the heather church case with 92 databases
not connected to the fbi's aphis registry and their efforts were richly rewarded
actually was my wife we're standing at home and the phone rang and it was the department saying that they had just
made a match the fingerprints matched 42 year old robert brown who'd been arrested in both louisiana
and california and served time in prison for car theft he had a criminal history in both of
those states had nothing for murder but we knew he was a felon brown's fingerprints didn't make it into the
fbi's database because his offense was comparatively minor when louisiana notified us that they had
matched a prince to a subject named robert brown we immediately went into our files and our databases to find out
where robert brown lived and we found that he lived just a quarter mile away from heather church
brown worked as a tree farmer and was married with one grown son colorado officials put brown under
surveillance and arrested him walking out of an art supply store based on what i saw he's pretty calm he
didn't really have a reaction didn't look surprised didn't overreact you could just see in his face like you know
you got me when questioned brown denied any involvement in heather's murder why are
your fingerprints out there robert my fingerprints aren't happy i'm guaranteeing you that i ain't lying to
you your fingerprints are there do you want me to show you the the document that
as your friend what i want you to do is fingerprint me again and have somebody who knows what to do and compare
we've had four people that know what they're doing compare people they need to do it again i mean
you know i've got the same thing friends i've had all my life prosecutors believe
brown's motive was burglary on the night of the crime heather church was babysitting her
brother sage her mother called at 8 30 to check on them after her mother called heather put her brother to bed
turned out the lights and went to sleep herself brown arrived at the church's home
sometime after 8 30. the house lights were off and there was no car in the garage so we probably
thought no one was home brown entered the home through a window into one of the empty bedrooms
he most likely wore gloves but when he had difficulty removing the screen he took them off
and inadvertently left three prince behind prosecutors believe heather heard the noise and went to
investigate when brown saw her he realized heather could identify him so he struck her in
the head with a blunt object killing her instantly he carried heather's body out through
the front door which he left unlocked loaded her into his vehicle and drove to the mountains
where he dumped her body in a ravine [Music] to avoid the death penalty brown pleaded guilty to kidnapping and
murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole it's just i think
just a scary prospect to all of us that people can do these things and at least for a while get away with it
had it not been for an alert fingerprint examiner brown's print might never have
been matched the aphis systems have to be organized into one central location where all fingerprint files are kept
so that you don't have to go through so many different agencies in order to find out the answers sometime
once in prison robert brown made a shocking revelation he admitted that heather church
wasn't his first murder victim he said he killed another colorado springs woman named rocio sperry
who'd been reported missing in 1987 he said he put her body in a trash dumpster the the sperry case was a classic cold
case it was a missing person wasn't really investigated as a homicide investigators weren't entirely surprised
by brown's revelation the unidentified pajamas found near heather's body led them to suspect
there were other victims it wasn't surprising to me that he had done other killings i knew from the
beginning once we made the arrest that he was a serial killer i mean i think that was pretty common among
investigators that this wasn't his first time eventually brown confessed to 48 murders
including one he committed while serving in the u.s military in south korea there have been serial killers through
here before you know you hate to think that there are others but apparently he was one robert brown was
one investigators around the country are still trying to corroborate brown's claims
if true brown may be one of the most prolific serial killers in american history
and he might still be free if it weren't for the local fingerprint databases in louisiana and california
and the investigators who knew where to look what i hope the episode shows is number
one is you don't give up because it's a cold case keep trying and obviously technological communication is important
one department didn't talk to another one system wasn't connected to another it's very important to have that
communication both from a technological standpoint and a personal standpoint you
just don't know sometime how just a little clue just a little fingerprint and will will lead you right directly to the
killer they wouldn't have been able to find brown without those forensics that fingerprint was
was the thing that i nailed the the nail in the coffin for him and without that after
over a year i don't know how that could have had anything could have evolved out of
that

A 13-year-old girl went missing from her Colorado home, and the only evidence the kidnapper left behind was three fingerprints on a window screen.

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 episode details Heather Church's kidnapping, murder, and the investigation that led to Robert Brown's arrest as a serial killer.

Key points

The Disappearance of Heather Church. A 13-year-old girl goes missing, sparking a long investigation.
Breakthrough in the Case. After two years, a fingerprint match leads to a suspect.
Robert Brown's Shocking Confession. The suspect admits to multiple murders, raising fears of a serial killer.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I guess it was right before 8:30...

Diane's call to check on Heather.

1:59WatchJan 27, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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