Forensic Files — Season 3, Episode 6 — 'Sim'ilar Circumstances (In HD) | Forensic Files

- After working the night shift, Robert Sims returned home and found his wife unconscious on the kitchen floor. To his relief, their two year old son Randy was
asleep undisturbed in an upstairs bedroom, but their six-week-old daughter Heather
was missing. When she regained consciousness, Paula Sims was the only witness to a crime that baffles investigators to this day.
♪ [theme music] ♪ [theme music] - Robert and Paula Sims had recently moved into this frame home in St. Louis suburb
of Alton, Illinois. Neighbors describe the Sims as a quiet and private couple who
spent most of their free time with their children. - They really seemed to be living the American dream. That was one of the things
that was so intriguing about the story, to have this kind of violence, this kind of
tragedy visited on such an all American couple. That was what really turned the story for us at the beginning.
- When police were called to the Sims home on April 19, 1989, they heard details of an unusual crime.
Paula said she was taking out the trash just after 10 pm when a masked man armed with a gun forced her back inside the house.
- What are you doing to me? Will you let go of me? - And knocked her unconscious with a blow to the back of her head.
That was the last thing she remembered before her husband found her on the floor 45 minutes later.
Their infant daughter Heather was missing, but the area around the bassinet was undisturbed.
Police could find no foreign finger prints or foot prints and no valuables were missing.
- We stayed there seem it seemed like forever. I know we were there for a good half day. We looked everywhere. Every conceivable place where that child might
have been, we looked. - Assuming the worse, police also searched the bottom of the Mississippi River
near the Sims home. - We had asked Mr. and Mrs. Sims if they had any enemies that, for whatever reason,
might want to steal their baby in order to punish them in some way and they were pretty adamant that didn't have anybody that they would suspect
of doing that. - A neighbor reported seeing a suspicious character walking near the Sims' home.
Another informant saw an individual burying something that night behind a nearby factory. All of the leads were dead ends.
Police had little to go on and no motive. - Seldom does anybody take a baby just to be taking it. There's usually a ransom
demand which we had none. - We found no evidence that there was any extramarital problem,
any involvement of a boyfriend who might suspect he's the real father of the child and he wanted his child. We couldn't find anything that would explain
why someone would target the Sims' for a kidnapping. - Four days later, Charles Saunders was fishing on the Missouri side
of the Mississippi River. Around noon, as Saunders was about to leave, he stopped to empty some trash into
a barrel. Inside, he noticed a large black garbage bag. Because of its size, it looked
suspicious. Inside, he discovered the well preserved remains of a dead baby girl.
Homicide investigators converged on the parking lot where the body of a baby girl
was found in a garbage can. - Lying on her back, face up, her head tilted to on side.
She was still rather pink, appeared that if you look at her, you'd think at first, she was asleep but she was in fact dead.
- Hand and foot prints from the dead baby were compared to the prints of Heather
Sims taken at the hospital just after she was born. The body was positively identified as Heather Lee Sims. Medical examiner Dr. Mary Case performed the
autopsy. One of the first things she noticed, three small vertical cuts on the inside of the baby's lip.
- Obviously, this is not, for example, a sudden infant death which is a natural death. It's not a death by accident. It's not a death by suicide so it's a homicidal
death and when I begin the examination, there is no gun shot wound, there's no stab wound, there's no battering,
and the inner lip showed changes that I associated with someone placing their hand over the nose and mouth and causing suffocation.
- When death occurs, blood settles in parts of the body closest to the ground. This is called post mortem lividity and is usually dark red or purple in color.
Heather's face showed signs of lividity but it was cherry red in color. This told Dr. Case that the body had been placed in a freezer during the time
lividity occurs, eight to twelve hours after death, and there was another clue the body had been frozen.
- The external appearance was that there was no decomposition when I looked internally. Then I even had to look microscopically at those internal organs
to see this, but there was early decomposition beginning but it was a little bit more advance than externally.
- Dr. Case concluded that Heather Sims had been suffocated, placed in a freezer face
down, then placed in the trash bin face up either the night before or the morning
that the body was discovered. Assistant State's Attorney Don Weber was keeping a
close eye on this case. There was no evidence linking Paula or Robert Sims to the crime but Weber decided to take a closer look at their story. Something
Robert Sims told the FBI disturbed him. - He made the statement to the FBI that during the time that Heather was reported
missing and the time she was found that they have had longest and longest lasting
and best sex that they'd ever had. And that is such a startling statement to me.
- I couldn't and I don't believe the other people involved in the case could really
think that would be a normal response after your baby was kidnapped. - And when authorities looked into the couples' past, they found an alarming
coincidence. At Heather Sims' funeral, Robert and Paula Sims looked every bit the grieving parents to the outside world.
But a background check revealed that the Sims had experienced another kidnapping.
Three years earlier, while living in another town, the Sims' first daughter, Loralei, had also been kidnapped. It was a same scenario. Robert
was at work and Paula said a masked intruder confronted her in the house and kidnapped her baby. A few weeks later, the infant's skeletal remains were found
scattered in a field behind the Sims' home. Although authorities had their suspicions at the time, they could find no evidence linking Robert or Paula Sims to
Lorelei's murder. - The remains appeared to have been moved by some type of animal. The quality of
the remains were of such that the investigation could not be put together murder.
The Sims' themselves became even stronger suspects after that and in my opinion is that they got away with murder.
- But in the case of Heather's abduction, there was something about Paula's head
injury that didn't sound right to prosecutor Dan Weber. So Weber paid a visit to the Medical Examiner, Dr. Mary Case who had a unique background. She was
not only the pathologist who performed Heather Sims' autopsy, she was also a board certified neuro pathologist, an expert in the study of the brain
and nervous system. - Paula says that she saw the guy outside, that the guy made her come inside. That he
gave her instructions inside. That once she was inside, he hit her and she gestured, Paula gestured with a karate chop on the back of the neck and that
knocked her out and she was out for about 45 minutes. And that she remembered getting hit.
And I said, is that possible and I remember Mary Case thought about it very carefully and she sort of leaned back in her chair and she said,
now that's impossible. - When an individual is hit hard enough to cause unconsciousness, the soft brain
tissue collides with the hard inner surface of the cranium, creating a brain injury.
This disrupts the electrical activity in the outer areas of the brain where memories are stored. And it's this disruption which prevents memory from
forming, not only of the traumatic event but for several minutes preceding the traumatic event. This explains why individuals knocked unconscious
in an automobile accident, for example, remember very little about the accident or the events leading up to the accident.
When police learned about this neurologic inconsistency, they looked for some connection between Paula Sims and the location where the body was
discovered. Police found some three dimensional shoe impression in the dirt a few feet away from the trash bin. They appeared to be from an athletic shoe, but
it did not match any of the shoes found in the Sims home. Next, police sent the black
garbage bag which contained Heather's body to the FBI laboratory in Washington, DC.
Forensic examiner David Actinburger had little to work with since there were no finger prints, hairs or fibers found on the bag.
- The baby was found in a black garbage bag. The bag itself was made by Polytech
Corporation out of Minneapolis. K-Mart was the retailer of the bags and they were
sold under the brand name of Kurbside. - However, more than one million of these Kurbside garbage bags were made for
K-Mart each and everyday. - Actinburger compared the edges of the bag containing Heather Sims body to the
first unused garbage bag from the Sims' kitchen. But the stretching that occurs when bags are pulled from the roll made matching the ends impossible. But the bag
Heather Sims was in did have a signature characteristic. Trash bags are made from
large sheets of melted plastic. A blade makes the perforations so that the bags can be ripped from the end of the roll. At the same time, a heat seal melts
the bottom of the bags shut. - The heat seal, as we found out from the manufacturer, as the plastic traveled
beneath and through the heat seal, more debris collected on that heat seal. The more debris that collected on there, the more unique identifying
characteristics that we found. We found incomplete melting of the heat seal. - This incomplete melting caused a small opening in the bottom of the Heather Sims
bag. Debris on the heat seal also produced a small puncture hole in the bag. When
Actinburger analyzed the bags found in the Sims' kitchen, he found the same puncture
hole in the same location. And he also found the same small opening in the bottom
of the bags caused by debris on the heat seal. The last step was to analyze the dye lines in the garbage bags.
As the plastic is pulled over the rollers in the manufacturing process, it gets stretched, leaving lines or stretch marks in the
plastic called dye lines. When the dye lines on the inside of the Heather Sims bag were compared to the dye lines inside the first unused bag found in the Sims'
kitchen, the lines matched. The tiny puncture hole, the defect in the bottom heat seal and the dye line
comparison lead the FBI to conclude that the first unused garbage bag in the Sims'
kitchen was made within ten seconds of the bag Heather Sims body was found. Police
now had first piece of physical evidence linking an item in the Sims' home to where
Heather's body was found. They were no longer searching for a mysterious kidnapper but a cold blooded murderer.
When the FBI discovered that the Heather Sims garbage bag came from the same roll of bags in the Sims' kitchen, they were now
convinced that Paula Sims was involved in her daughter's disappearance. Investigators learned that Paula and Robert Sims
had an unusual marital relationship, a relationship Charles Bosworth described in his book "Precious Victims."
- When Paula brought the little girls home from the hospital, she was essentially
ousted from the marital bedroom. In the first case, she and Lorelie slept in the
basement which was where the family room was. It was a walkout basement. - Only after Lorelie's death did Paula sleep upstairs again with her husband. A
year after Lorelie's death, Paula gave birth to a son, Randy. And in 1989, after
moving to Alton, Illinois, the Sims had another baby. This time a daughter, Heather. In the hospital, Paula reportedly told her roommate that she didn't want
another daughter, that she and Robert preferred boys. - The evidence clearly suggested that boys were fine, little girls were not
welcome. We were told repeatedly by witnesses that Robert adored the little boy and was just completely uninterested in the little girls even in the hospital
after their births. - When Paula brought Heather home, separate sleeping arrangements
started again, Paula and Heather in the living room, Robert and 2-year-old Randy, upstairs.
- And one of the comments that Paula made to one of her friends was that these sleeping arrangements are gonna have to stop or I'm gonna have
to do something about it. - Based on the garbage bag analysis and the inconsistencies with her head
injury story, Paula Sims was arrested and charged with murder. On Saturday night, April 29th, 1989, while Robert was working the night shift at the paper
plant, prosecutors believe that Paula suffocated her daughter Heather. She placed the body in a garbage bag from the kitchen. She probably wore gloves since no
finger prints were found on the bag. After the murder, Paula drove across town to her
parent's home where she placed Heather's body in her parent's freezer. Paula's parents were away that week on vacation.
Paula returned home in enough time to feign unconsciousness before her husband returned from work.
The next day, when Paula's parents heard about the kidnapping, they decided to end their vacation and return home immediately.
- I don't mean to ruin your vacation. - This required a change to her plan. Paula now had to go back to her parent's
home and remove Heather's body before they returned. With nowhere else to go, prosecutors believe she brought Heather's body back home, placing it in her own
basement freezer. By this time, police had concluded their search of the Sims' home
and had left. Three days later, Paula needed to get rid of the body once and for
all. She made the two mile drive over the Mississippi River across the Louis and
Clark bridge into a parking area and left the frozen body in a trash bin where it
was discovered by a fisherman a short time later. - It was very premeditated, very well thought out, very cold blooded,
very systematic. - The prosecution had no trouble showing motive. - As you walk through the Sims' home, it was very apparent that they had a boy
that they were very proud of, which would be very normal for a couple. But if you look around the house, there was absolutely no indication
whatsoever that they even had a daughter. There weren't any baby pictures, there weren't any pictures at all, on the tables or around the walls or
whatever to indicate that they had a baby at all. - Paula Sims was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
- I think it is tragic event any time in society when a parent comes to the point
that they are so frustrated and for whatever reason, that they decide to take the life of one of their children.
- Well, any time you got the death of two and I might add, very beautiful, perfect
little girls, it's a very sad case. When you add the element that their mother killed them, it gets even worse.
On the other hand, justice prevailed. - No charges were filed against Robert Sims,
who denies he had anything to do with these two crimes. - There's no doubt in my mind the right person is in prison right now
for this particular crime. She did it. She murdered her child. She was tried by a jury of her peers
and she is now doing life. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that she did it.
- And Robert Sims? - Not enough evidence right now, but I haven't forgotten Robert
and I still have the case file. ♪ [theme music]

Robert Sims returned home after working the night shift and found his wife, Paula, unconscious on the kitchen floor. Their two-year-old son, Randy, was asleep in an upstairs bedroom, but their six-week-old daughter, Heather, was missing. Now in HD.

Brief Summary

The episode details the kidnapping and murder of Heather Sims, leading to her mother Paula's arrest and conviction.

Key points

The Mysterious Disappearance. Paula Sims wakes up to find her daughter missing after a violent encounter.
A Grieving Couple's Past. The Sims had experienced another kidnapping before, raising suspicions about their involvement.
The Shocking Evidence. Forensic analysis links a garbage bag containing Heather's body to the Sims' kitchen.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

What are you doing to me? Will you let go of me?

Paula's desperate plea during the attack.

1:57WatchOct 1, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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