Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 22 - Brotherly Love - Full Episode | Forensic Files

up next he promises to avenge his sister's murder i pray to god that i would be led to be in the right place
the right time for years he tracks her killer without success every day with another blow to the stomach somewhere
deep in the houston crime files are the secrets to solve the case he just had to find them houston had 500
000 prints everybody has 10 fingers that's 5 million prints 34 years later investigators find the answer i want to
know who killed diane [Applause] in december of 1969 diane maxwell pulled into the company parking lot in houston
texas it was sunday and downtown was virtually empty diane worked for the southwestern bell
company and her shift started at 1pm but she never made it inside the building a half hour later a homeless man saw
someone walking away from an old shack next to the parking lot he walked back to the shack and walked
very close to him got a good look at him and went on to the shack and he found this young girl lying on her back with
her hands tied behind her back and he asked her if she'd been assaulted she'd said yes
she asked him to untie her and he said no but he agreed he would go call the police
tragically by the time police arrived 25 year old diane maxwell was dead she was lying on her back bra pushed up
a small wound just above her navel probably an inch and width diane was just 25 years old a single
mother of a four-year-old son well i would tell you that it was the most devastating thing i'd ever
experienced my first reaction was denial that there's no way that you know diane
could be dead when my father called he could barely speak and my stepmother took over who was much
more composed under those circumstances and was really able to give me more of the details
in a search for evidence police scoured the wooden shack among the debris they found a rumpled
pink blanket and a man's gray suit coat it had been used as a storeroom for a service station
and everything imaginable was in there from service manuals to old oil cans the only witness
was the homeless man willie bell and that the only physical description was that it was a black male with an
afro haircut there was no money in diane's purse her car keys were missing and her car a new
red mustang was gone police found it nine hours later a mile away the car was locked the keys were in the
ignition so it was obvious that whoever killed diane you know took her keys and then took her car
at the autopsy the medical examiner found evidence that diane had been sexually assaulted
and she had been stabbed just once with surgical precision severing an artery one possibility was that the killer was
a medical professional and since one of the state's largest prisons was just 70 miles away in
huntsville an ex-convict could have been responsible houston was the first stop and usually they had
just the clothes on their back and probably 25 and wouldn't have been enough to live on
a day or two until they would start into other endeavors diane's brother vowed to help catch her
killer [Music] the senselessness of diane maxwell's murder shocked everyone friends
co-workers and family i knew that she had been attacked and murdered and i really never asked for
any other details just because i didn't think i could really deal with it the last thanksgiving we
spent together diane had gotten me off to the side and said you know david if something
happens to me i want you to raise my son and i said okay well i will and uh and that was less than a month
before she was killed more than 20 of diane's co-workers at the phone company quit their jobs
many of those who remained armed themselves with ice picks and knives it's very very hard and it was very
public because the news carried quite a bit of information about it and you're seeing it on tv and you're
reading about in the paper and i'm getting phone calls and even phone calls from people i don't
know but the killer had stolen diane's red mustang and abandoned it leaving it a
mile from the crime scene i printed to the steering wheel inside the driver's door
and the t-shift the next day went back over it and was successful in getting i would say 12 or 15 identifiable latent
prints very good prints and many of them look fresh the prince three partial fingerprints and the
partial palm print did not match those of the witness willie bell and he was eliminated as a
suspect in 1969 before computers someone had to literally compare a print visually to all the ones in the houston
crime files and there were millions of prints let's just say houston had 500 000 prints well if you
think everybody has 10 fingers that's 5 million prints now if i were to try to take that late and go look at 5 million
prints well i don't know how many lifetimes it would have taken it would have never happened
instead police compared the prince from diane's car to everyone arrested for a crime
committed after her murder police also questioned the people who loitered in the downtown area
they were looking for a black male they knew that from from willie bell told him it was a black male that he'd
seen raping diane they did get a few leads but they didn't pan out nothing pointed
to the person that actually committed the offense since the fatal wound was made with
surgical precision police also focused on health care workers as possible suspects
they just started dragging everyone all the black males downtown and had them fingerprinted they were doing some
things that would not be accepted today i thought that honestly that the person just slipped
through the crack diane maxwell's murder started to look like a random homicide the hardest kind
to solve everyone assigned to the homicide division at the time there were like 30
detectives they all worked the case but as time goes on as you know and the leads diminish there just comes a point
in time where there's just there's no more trails left each week as more and more fingerprints
were added to the houston files examiners would compare those to the prince from diane maxwell's mustang
with no success we were confused we thought we expected that it would be resolved you know you
had the funeral and everything then you did begin to think about the resolution and so it was very
you know upsetting and hurtful that there was no resolution eventually the trail of diane maxwell's killer
turned cold and for 17 years there was virtually no progress nevertheless diane's father never lost hope
every time i would see him he'd say son i want you to solve this case before i die i want to know who killed diane
our parents are were quite elderly at the time and um so i know that was an impetus but i
think it was just an ongoing impetus so at the age of 37 david maxwell was accepted into the oldest and most
exclusive law enforcement agency in north america the texas rangers an elite group with only 134 members
i thought about a great deal that if i became in law enforcement if i was able to
eventually get in the texas rangers that in the and it remained unsolved that i would be able to reopen the case
and eventually solve it what happened to diane influenced him and was certainly part of the reason
that he decided to go into law enforcement and by this time the houston police department had
recently purchased an aphis system the automated fingerprint identification system which can instantaneously compare
unknown prints to those in the houston database david asked the department to run the
unidentified prince found in his sister's car at the time they actually had to be traced
we don't do that anymore but years ago the traced image we just had better luck with the tracing than the direct the
image just wasn't as clear as it is now unfortunately there was no match i began to think that maybe he was dead
because i couldn't imagine that you would commit that type of crime which was probably random and never committed
again and the case turned cold again for another 17 years it was becoming clear that david maxwell
would need help [Music] for more than 30 years david maxwell was haunted by his sister's murder and still hoped to find
some way to solve it he had been successful in solving a lot of very complicated crimes and
i i know that it was really important to him to try to solve this crime because of
course this was very personal and you know he felt very deeply about it and he had promised his father he would
solve the murder before he died by this time his father was close to 90 years old and time was running short
and he would tell me that he would dream of seeing diane and that's all he thought about he said that's all i can
think about is diane and this case being solved i want to know who killed her before i die
with nowhere else to go david turned to his friend jim ramsey a veteran homicide
investigator with the houston police department the two had known each other for years
but david never told jim about his sister's murder i was shocked i was amazed that anyone could could
hold that in and not talk about it but if anyone could do it it would be david i saw no need to tell people about
what had happened in my life i wasn't looking for sympathy david could have had just about anybody in the state of
texas work that case i really considered it a i guess a privilege when he asked me to look into it
ramsey's first priority was to examine diane maxwell's clothing if we could do the dna for the sexual
assault and and get that and put it in the database because now all the offenders as they go to prison they're
taking dna samples and we're getting a lot of cold hits on the on the dna database
but diane's clothing was gone to their shock and dismay it had been thrown away over a period of years i guess folks in
the property room just had to make room for new property coming in next ramsay tried to interview the only
witness to the crime willie bell we tracked him out to an address in california and we eventually learned he had died
back in i think in the mid 80s then things went from bad to worse the crime scene photos and the negatives
were also gone apparently in violation of police policy someone had sold them to the british crime
magazine master detective in 1971. when contacted the publisher no longer had the pictures or negatives all they
had left was a single copy of the magazine i asked him to send it to me because i
didn't have any pictures of the crime scene and they were hesitant to do that because that was their only copy so ask
them to please you know make copies of the photograph the photocopies of the magazine pages
were virtually useless and then jim ramsey and david maxwell got even more bad news
the killer's fingerprints found in diane maxwell's car that was supposed to be in
her police case file were also missing it was just like every day was another blow to the stomach i knew they existed
and now they're gone so yeah i was pretty upset about it with all the evidence gone
david now had to tell his father that the case might never be solved and i prayed about it you know
because i knew that physically and as a as a ranger or whatever i'm doing what i can do
but i prayed to god that i would be led to be in the right place the right time if the prince couldn't be found
there was nothing more anyone could do investigators literally had no evidence from diane maxwell's murder
the crime scene photos were gone the victim's clothing had been discarded the only eyewitness had died
and the killer's fingerprints were missing presumably misfiled in one of the thousands of open case files in the
houston police department everybody at some point in time was looking for that case so it wasn't like
okay we'll just do it in our spare time somebody every day was looking for that case i
guarantee they went through many many files a tremendous undertaking debbie and i have worked together for 11 years
rumor has it that she went to the director of the leighton lab and told the director
that sergeant ramsey was threatening an ied investigation if they didn't find that print well i never once said that i
respect authority but i don't mind challenging authority but whatever happened that got him off of dead center
and there were several people that were assigned to go through every hpd case looking for prints
after months of looking through all of the case files someone finally found them they just put it in the wrong file
you know it was just a clerical error of all the evidence lost at least the fingerprints had been recovered
my goodness what a task to have to go through all those folders of all those i mean you're talking about you know every
car burglary every home burglary murder robbery assault just thousands and thousands of just print cards
but they did it by this time the year was 2003 and sophisticated computerized fingerprint systems were everywhere
jim ramsey had the prints from diane maxwell's car compared to those in the texas statewide database
unfortunately there were no hits undeterred ramsay ran the prince through the fbi's
national database this time there were 20 potential hits all 20 were then examined visually
and one stood out this print came up it was like oh my gosh this looks awfully good this looks like
we're going to have a hit the print belonged to 58 year old james davis a career criminal
i identified him four different times i identified him i think fingers right index right middle and right ring and
then the right palm it's hard to really describe how i felt but i was i was absolutely elated about
it james ray davis spent the majority of his adult life incarcerated auto theft forgery assaults
davis was living in a housing project on the texas arkansas border he had been out of prison for about 10 years
following a conviction for abducting a young girl detective ramsey knocked on his door
i said mr davis i'm from the houston police department and you could tell his demeanor changed
drastically he just stared at me ramsay pulled out a photo of diane's car davis didn't want to look at it
he said i've never ever seen that car well that's strange it's a red mustang you've never seen a red mustang
then i pulled out a picture of diane that david had given me and i handed it to him but he wouldn't take the picture
i tried to hand it to me wouldn't tell you davis initially denied any involvement
but when told of the fingerprint evidence he confessed it was that it happened and i cried and
i prayed but i did wrong he'd been out of prison five days when he killed diane and
his life was was a lifetime of crime i'm sick now and uh i'm not able to do no kind of time
nothing kind of changes if i have to go i just have to go but i would hope the judge or whatever happens on me
after more than 30 years the mystery was finally solved well my father was ecstatic it just
was a huge boost for him you know that they knew who this who it was i've worked
scores or hundreds of murders and they're all important to me but it's not very often that
that you're personally touched by them davis said his primary motive was robbery
[Music] when he saw diane get out of her car he abducted her at night point and took
her to the wooden shack he admitted robbing her but denied sexually assaulting her although the
evidence clearly showed that he did then he stabbed her to death and stole her car
he abandoned the mustang across town and left his fingerprints and a palm print although it took almost 35 years to find
him his fingerprints on file had not degraded if it had not been for the aphis system
he would have never been identified on january 15 2004 james davis pled guilty to murder with
malice and was sentenced to life in prison i never saw remorse not one time the only time i saw remorse is when he came
to court and he pled guilty and the judge sentenced him to life he didn't care about diane
diane maxwell's father lived long enough to see her killer brought to justice david was really responsible for keeping
people looking into this case but it was always at the top of his agenda it was always
first in line in terms of what he wanted to accomplish this database has been such a boost to law enforcement
to be able to help solve these crimes that otherwise would go unsolved and now with the dna database and that's doing
the same thing i mean it's just been a tremendous boost to to those of us in law enforcement who
work these kind of cases investigators believe the conviction was the result of hard
work cooperation and perhaps something else i really think it's defined intervention
because i mean look at it yourself look at the odds that we had going into this thing we didn't have a million to one
chance we'd clear this thing and i don't know maybe because of the unselfish life that david it's their
career that david's committed to the people of texas maybe the lord said well i'm going to
give him a break you

In 1969, 25-year-old phone operator Diane Maxwell is raped and murdered. Her brother promised he'd find out who was responsible and bring the killer to justice.

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

Diane Maxwell's murder case was solved 34 years later through modern fingerprint technology, leading to the arrest of James Davis.

Key points

The Murder of Diane Maxwell. Diane Maxwell's tragic murder in 1969 shocked her family and community, leaving unanswered questions for decades.
A Brother's Vow. Diane's brother, David, vowed to find her killer, leading him into law enforcement.
The Breakthrough. After years of searching, a fingerprint match leads to the identification of the killer.
Justice Served. James Davis is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Diane Maxwell, bringing closure to the family.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I want you to raise my son.

Diane's last request to her brother before her murder.

4:35WatchJan 28, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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