Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 15 - Good as Gold - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[Music] two young women were brutally murdered on halloween but the killer left behind
his dna and a groundbreaking new test identified his eye color his hair and even the
color of his skin but knowing what he looked like was one thing finding him was another
[Music] [Music] my [Music] it was close to midnight on halloween in napa california
trick-or-treat had been over for hours and 26 year old lauren minza went to bed around 11 pm
her dog chloe slept in her room [Music] at two in the morning the dog started to
growl and lauren heard noises at first she thought one of her roommates came home
with a boyfriend but then she heard a fight and screams when she looked out she saw a man run
down the stairs and jump out of an open front window but she didn't see his face
[Music] when she went upstairs lauren found her two roommates both had been stabbed repeatedly
in an emergency what are you recording oh my god we've got attack and please help
you i don't know my roommates are upstairs i think they're dying when police arrived they found 26 year
old adrian insonya and 25 year old leslie mazzara dead it was a very very bloody crime scene
it's the most bloody crime scene i've seen in my career leslie mazzara was a former beauty queen
who worked in the sales department of a local winery at the university of georgia miss williamson
adrian insonya was a civil engineer it was horrible there aren't any words really to describe that
it's almost as if you just go completely cold blood stains in the house provided
investigators with critical information he had gone into the house up the stairs
into leslie's bedroom first where he attacked her apparently the commotion woke adrian up in her bedroom
and she turned on the light and he proceeded to her bedroom and then attacked adrian
she had reading glasses either in her hand or on her face that were cut with the knife she fought hard
she fought for her life the blood trail led to the front window and continued on
to the aluminum siding on the outside of the house investigators found three cigarette butts two at the front
of the house the other in the backyard anytime i see cigarette butts at a crime scene i will collect them because they
are an excellent source for obtaining dna all of the blood evidence was collected
for analysis we received 71 pieces of evidence one or two is average up to four or five
possibly this particular case really surpassed most of what we see in the laboratory
police searched for motive and found one when they discovered some plastic zip ties underneath the front window
in police work we use the same type of ties to hold prisoners especially like in riot situations or crowd control it
appeared to us that this person had come in with a plan when they came in and that part of that plan would have
been to bind these girls the next morning napa valley residents awoke to the news
of this horrible crime and the terrible possibility that a serial killer might be in their midst
this was a violent crime i felt real uneasy we have never had a serial killer in the city of napa and this was my
first taste of a possibility that we were dealing with a serial killer three young women lived together
in this house in napa california until halloween night when an unknown assailant broke in and
murdered two of the three roommates hearing those calls my heart really went out to lauren for
what she had been through i could hear the panic the fear the grief in her voice
as she you know tried to relate that something horrible had happened to her friends
the surviving roommate lauren minza told investigators she had no idea who would
have done this nothing was stolen and lauren didn't think either victim had any enemies or
at least none she knew about it appeared that leslie masara was attacked first it wasn't clear whether this was because
her room was closest to the stairs or whether she was the intended target the evidence in her room indicated that
she had been in bed when the attack happened and so it appears like she was probably asleep at the time the attack
occurred and didn't have a chance to even understand what was happening to her or defend herself
a background check revealed leslie was being pestered by the father of one of her ex-boyfriends
it was leslie's last full-time boyfriend that she had before she moved out here to california
and her ex-boyfriend's father continued to call her even after she moved to california
we looked at phone records for the house and cell phone records and we learned that leslie had received several phone
calls from the father of her ex-boyfriend that that that night on halloween leslie's ex-boyfriend and his father had
alibis for the night of the murder they were both in south carolina thousands of
miles away and witnesses confirmed it another potential suspect was a handyman who had worked in the house on the day
of the murders but he too had an alibi in all police interviewed more than 200 potential suspects and came up with
nothing there was no information coming up after the murders no one was saying anything
we all thought that it was someone who had hightailed it out of here immediately after the
crime two weeks after the murders friends organized a candlelight vigil to keep attention focused on the case
the majority of people we looked at early were ex-boyfriends current boyfriends co-workers that were very close to the
girls who would have had that type of ongoing relationship then police got a break
dna testing found blood at the crime scene that wasn't from the victims there was an x and y peak detected for
those particular samples so we knew that we were dealing with male blood on the outside of the house
it appeared the killer cut himself while stabbing the girls when the knife slipped in his hand
he probably had the knife in his right hand and when he hit the wall the blood that was on his right hand and on the
knife was cast off onto the wall investigators now turn to the three cigarette butts found at the scene
two were in front of the house the other in the backyard dna from the saliva on two of the
cigarette butts matched dna from the blood on the stairs it also matched dna from skin cells
found on the rubber band holding the plastic zip ties the rubber band was a good dna source
because it's made of porous material the perspiration or whatever it was that left the dna behind was absorbed into
the rubber band and preserved the dna profile was entered into a national database of 4 million known
offenders there was no match again police had to consider the unthinkable that they were dealing with
a serial killer who had successfully eluded them that's the worst kind of crime to try to
investigate because there's no known link to the girls and so then you have a larger pool of
potential suspects obviously however a second look at the cigarette butts provided a possible lead
on the white part of the cigarette there was a gold pattern that kind of looked like little gold birds kind of drawings
all the way around no name no words so we had no idea what the brand was investigators did some research and
learned the cigarettes were a brand known as camel turkish gold they were relatively new and had only been on the
market for a very short time not every store even carried them and the stores that we talked to they would
let us know maybe they sold one or two packs a week investigators asked the surviving
roommate lauren minza for a list of everyone she knew who smoked cigarettes perhaps one of them
was the killer [Music] solving the double homicide of adrian and sonya and leslie mazzara proved to
be far more difficult than police ever imagined it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack
and we wanted to find out who did this and we wanted to put them and where they belonged and that's why the community
came together with a hundred thousand dollar reward but investigators knew something about
their killer blood stains on the stairway wall were on the right side indicating he was
probably right-handed and he smoked camel turkish gold cigarettes to find out more
investigators asked dr tony fridaykas if the killer's dna could provide any information useful to their
investigation and dr fudegas told them about a new forensic technique he developed that
could determine the killer's physical characteristics it's really important that you be able
to narrow down your focus because otherwise you have no information with which to work and you're
sort of flailing around since 99.9 percent of all human dna is alike dr frudakis focuses his attention on the
remaining one-tenth of one percent and compares these polymorphisms to the dna of citizens from other countries
this can identify the killer's ethnic identity the donor was primarily of northwestern
european ancestry very small amount of southeastern european ancestry and no middle eastern or south asian admixtures
so you knew for example he wasn't hispanic he wasn't african american so that certainly narrowed down the focus
of the investigation in terms of who they should be looking at and dr frudaykas found a marker in one of the
killer's jeans that indicated he'd have blue or green eyes and most likely light-colored hair
i was glad they had done it it made me more hopeful that eventually they would be
able to determine who the perpetrator was police released this new information to
the public hoping someone in the community would recognize him tonight there's a new development in the
murders of two napol women and there was a man living just two miles away from the
murder scene who was listening to every word they say he's white has blondish hair
and most likely has green eyes he now knew two things that he made too many mistakes and the
dna technology had advanced far beyond anything he could ever have imagined at the same time
police asked their surviving roommate lauren minza if she knew anyone who smoked this brand of cigarettes
she had let us know well the only smoker i can think of at this point is eric koppel
twenty-five-year-old eric koppel was a land surveyor and a friend of one of the victims
but before police could question him koppel walked into police headquarters and confessed
i'm just getting done with dinner and i get a phone call at home someone's here at the police department
and they want to confess couples said he knew adrian and sonya it was that cold feeling that came over
me i didn't know what to feel or at that moment i really didn't know we want to make sure that he knows
details about the crime and the things he's telling us match up with what we already know about the crime scene i
want to make sure that it's information that hasn't been released to the media although eric koppel confessed
he wouldn't tell police why he did it he always claimed he didn't know what he did with the murder weapon which again
to me always suggested to me that he wasn't telling the truth because it would seem to me that that would be
something he'd be able to tell us eric was very elusive as far as a question of why the crime happened
we could never get him to say i did this because of x y and z 25 year eric koppel walked into police
headquarters and confessed to the murders of adrian and sonya and leslie mazzara
he knew from the genetic testing that it was only a matter of time he knew he was just getting circled in
he had to do it and he was going to commit suicide he was going to do whatever and he saw that stuff and he
says i can't take it and he came in and he confessed dna tests confirmed that eric coppel's
blood was at the crime scene and that his saliva was on the cigarette butts found outside
i don't know if i exactly remembered the moment when i got the news i just knew i
was elated i was very happy to find out that on a rare piece of evidence that we had
we had the suspect's dna koppel was arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder
investigators learned that koppel blamed adrian and sonya for the breakup of his
engagement to lily prudhomme it appeared that some people and possibly adrian were telling lily that
she could do better and that uh she shouldn't be any longer involved in this relationship with eric coppoll that
he wasn't good enough for her or right for her she must have seen something and she was
just trying to warn lily and unfortunately she was just absolutely a victim of something that never
should have ever happened such a wonderful person on the night of the murders couple went to a halloween party and ran
into his ex-fiance lily prudhomme according to witnesses the two argued couple wanted to set a
new date for their wedding but lily wasn't interested can you just leave me alone for the rest of the night please
after the party couple returned home he admitted to police that he was drunk the fight with his ex-fiance only added
to the anger and bitterness he felt towards adrian insonya so he took revenge prosecutors believe couples stood
outside the house where adrian lived with her two roommates casing the place and smoking cigarettes
[Music] he used a knife to pry open the window and accidentally dropped the packet of
zip ties on the floor with his dna leslie's bedroom was the first room at the top of the stairs
and he killed her first he then went across the hall to adrian's room she fought back aggressively
at some point he cut his hand and bled profusely as he rushed out of the house at that point based on what he's told us
at least that he took his clothing and burned them in a fire pit that he had in his backyard
went back to sleep and then the next day went to lily's house to console her after lily called him to tell him that
adrian had been attacked no one knows why couples spared lauren minza some think he didn't know about the
downstairs bedroom i don't know whether or not koppel knew that there was a room there and i don't
know whether or not he knew that there was a person in there i just had a reckoning with myself
and really understood that adrian was the target and somebody really wanted my child dead
[Music] and then i thought how stupid was i of course adrian was the target of course
we all know it's someone in the inner circle so if we had known those kind of circumstances earlier investigation i'm
sure he would have come into our radar sooner but again we can always look back and wish
we would have done things differently a few months before he confessed eric koppel patched things up with lily
prudhomme and the two married in a bitter irony the couple asked arlene allen adrian insonya's mother to be part of
the wedding ceremony and so it was really a remarkable moment and then and my guest
at the wedding was my daughter lexi so we were both there at eric and lily's wedding
lily claims she never suspected eric was the killer in december of 2006 eric koppel pleaded guilty to two counts
of first degree murder he was sentenced to life in prison without parole had he not pled guilty
couple would have been eligible for the death penalty and i think that was a very real
possibility accepting a life without possibility of parole plea was probably the best deal he was going to get
i never in my life thought that the police would not solve this crime i always believed they would
were it not for a few drops of blood two cigarette butts and some skin cells on a rubber band eric couple might have
gotten away with murder but ever advancing dna technology provided a profile so accurate
it was only a matter of time before he was exposed as the killer this case turned on those cigarette
butts primarily because it was the dna on cigarette butts that told us a little bit about the killer
things that would have been not even considered 20 years ago as evidence are very crucial to cases
nowadays and again the sensitivity of these testing and testing analysis and dna
it's just incredible we can find in in crime scenes now every homicide that you see
there's always a twist to the case that's a little bit different from the next case and so that's sort of what
makes this work so interesting and so challenging it was the dna it was the cigarette butts
so once again at any crime scene it's very crucial very crucial to do a good job and collect all the evidence
and most crimes most crimes are solved by the physical evidence you

On Halloween night 2004, Adriane Insogna and Leslie Mazzara were brutally murdered in their Napa, California home.

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 the Halloween murders of two women and the DNA evidence that led to Eric Koppel's confession and arrest.

Key points

Brutal Murders on Halloween. Two young women were brutally murdered, leaving a community in shock.
The Panic of a Survivor. Lauren Minza hears a fight and screams, discovering her roommates have been attacked.
DNA Technology Breakthrough. Groundbreaking DNA testing reveals critical details about the killer's appearance.
Confession of a Killer. Eric Koppel walks into police headquarters and confesses to the murders.
Life Sentence for Koppel. Eric Koppel pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, avoiding the death penalty.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It’s almost as if you just go completely cold.

Describing the crime scene's impact.

2:40WatchJan 27, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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