Forensic Files - Season 9, Episode 29 - The Stake-Out - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[Music] the weiner family were active members of their local church where loving your neighbor and helping
others were more than just words but a way of life but not everyone in the whiners church
wished them well [Music] and forensic evidence proved that someone in the congregation had the
motive to kill them [Music] [Music] [Music] on a thursday night in june of 1988 sally weiner got a telephone call at her
corey pennsylvania home it was her congressman's office calling to say that her husband harry who was a
vice president of the local bank and a civic leader had just been chosen as corey's man of the year
the caller instructed her not to let on to her husband as it was supposed to be a surprise
and that she was to meet someone the following day to go over the plans for this this celebration
the next day harry weiner got a telephone call at the bank [Music] we know it's a tape recorded call
because there's no interaction between harry and sally he's trying to talk to her and she's not responding she just
continues to tie she had to read that if her husband didn't come up with the money why they'd cut off her hands
she told him in detail you know that she was being held and these people were dangerous and they were going to kill
her if he didn't provide the money sally told him there was a bag under his car with instructions that he was to
follow exactly or she would be killed the ransom note told harry to fill the gym bag with all of the money from his
bank's vault and drive to a deserted bridge 10 miles outside of town to await further instructions
harry immediately contacted the local police and fbi they told him to drive to the back of
the police station and pick up a law enforcement officer he got into the car and laid down in the back seat with a
12-gauge shotgun [Music] when harry arrived at the railroad bridge no one was there so he waited
with the sharpshooter in the back seat and with fbi agents hiding in the woods nearby
you just sit there very quietly you don't move and you listen and you listen for any kind of footstep
any kind of twig breaking any kind of noise hoping that he might contact us but thinking that he's probably within
100 yards of us watching with a rifle after waiting for several hours the fbi agents told harry to go home and
await further word there i felt very sorry for him he's a very good person and he was frustrated and
he was being patient and he was reasonable the next day at sunrise the fbi performed a grid search of the
drop site and neared the railroad underpass they found a second ransom note attached to a
metal rod with the crepe paper flag the rods we recognized as being rods that were used in filing cabinets
older filing cabinets that slid through the drawers of the filing cabinets from the front to the rear
but the sign wasn't easy to see which is why harry missed it the night before [Music]
the second ransom note told harry to proceed to another location several miles from there where the fbi found a
third note telling harry to proceed to an abandoned church three miles away that's where the trail stopped
he could observe perry traveling through the countryside there and he could also
watch for surveillance units and police who might be following him 18 hours had passed from the time sally
was kidnapped with no further word from the kidnappers investigators feared the worst
[Music] 36 year old sally weiner the wife of a bank vice president had been kidnapped
and held for ransom investigators learned that neither sally nor her husband harry had any known
enemies you can count on just a couple fingers the number of cases that you see where a
bank employee's family member is abducted in exchange for financial gain it just
is not a common crime [Music] police found sally's car near a church not far from her husband's bank
her car is left in that parking lot the windows are up and the doors are locked so there's no sign of a struggle
and any respect all day saturday which was the day after the kidnapping there was no further communication from
the kidnappers but on sunday sally's body was discovered by a farmer working his land a few miles outside of
town she had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the head i just i remember being in shock it's
i felt i felt guilty and helpless she was executed the killer used a glazier-type bullet
that exploded on impact making it impossible to determine the weapon's caliber sally weiner was killed by a gunshot
wound to the head which produced extensive brain damage a bullet entered in the occipital region which is the
rear part of the skull slightly to the right of the midline so that's back here at the base
the bullet went in it fragmented extensively and it produced a lot of damage to various parts of the brain
next the fbi analyzed the ransom notes all were typed with the computer word processing program and all were printed
with the same font on one note the word exactly was misspelled investigators got their first real break
in the case from a police officer who was walking in the shopping center near harry weiner's bank
he noticed a sign in a bookstore window listing the sunday newspapers the store carried
in particular he noticed the unusual border [Music] it was a five-pointed star with a
greater than and less than sign shown consecutively and corporal amon ruminated about it and said i know i've
seen this somewhere the policeman immediately recognized it as the same symbol that was on the first
ransom note the owner of the store david copenheifer said he made the sign with his computer
and that the border was one he mimicked after seeing it on other signs copenheifer was a friend of the winer
family and denied having anything to do with sally's murder they knew each other quite well both
families were members of the presbyterian church [Music] they worshiped together
sang hymns together they both sat in pews not far from each other at the church because of the similarity between the
ransom note and the sign in his store window investigators confiscated both his home
and office computers the preliminary search that was conducted by the state police and one of
our other agents revealed exactly to me what it revealed to them uh initially nothing
next investigators wanted to know the approximate time of sally's death so they could question copenheifer about
his whereabouts a forensic entomologist analyzed the insect activity on sally's body
and discovered second stage larvae from the species colifera a type of blowfly [Music]
by analyzing the outside temperature on the weekend of sally's murder dr kim estimated that the insect
activity commenced on the body late on friday afternoon the same day she was kidnapped
then a investigators you know on the prosecution look at that to say aha that must be the time where body was
placed there so that's their judgment then interestingly kopenheifer could not account for all of
his time that day but they still needed more forensic evidence to know for certain whether he
was the killer [Music] a background check revealed some startling information about david
copenheifer he had been turned down for a 25 000 business loan by harry weiner less than a year earlier
copenheifer was now the prime suspect in the kidnapping and murder of harry weiner's wife sally
[Music] so the fbi put david copenheifer under surveillance and watched as he took some trash out to
the dumpster behind his store when the fbi seized it they found some suspicious items
they found a used roll of crepe paper the same make and color as the paper found with the ransom notes
the fbi was able to match up the tear from that roll of crepe paper which was in the the trash at the bookstore
to one of the actual flags they also found bits and pieces of paper the fbi painstakingly pieced them
together and that note actually was a duplicate of one of the notes that was left at one
of the sites that mr weiner was directed to go to after the kidnapping of his wife
armed with a search warrant the fbi found a stack of metal file cabinet rods in kopenheifer's shed similar to the
ones found with the ransom notes the fbi's forensic metallurgist william tobin analyzed the rods with a scanning
electron microscope and discovered some unique marks on the side of the rods created as they were manufactured
individual characteristics that are imparted from the tool or die on the work piece
are not the same in hour one of that dye's life as they would be an hour 8 12 or hour 16.
these marks indicated to mr tobin that the rods found in copenheifer's home and those found with the ransom notes
were all made on the same day at virtually the same time something on the order of minutes this
was one of the best associations i've ever had with regard to the fabrication characteristics
police also found glazier brand ammunition in copenheifer's home the same type used in sally weiner's
murder i think that'd be extremely unusual to have glacier ammunition glacier on
ammunition in in a person's home and local authorities asked the fbi to conduct their own analysis of
copenheifer's computers after the initial search of the hard drives turned up nothing
a document is not all in one place on a disk drive pieces of it are stored in different
sectors of a drive when a document is deleted it's not erased from the hard drive instead the
space occupied by that document is labeled available to reuse if necessary by going through that disk
mathematically finding the proper clusters based upon the known interleaving of the
drive you can piece together an entire document if the file space that that document
occupied had not been overwritten when this crime was committed in 1988 there were no computer programs that
could reassemble documents that had been deleted so al johnson and his team had to do
something that had never been done before they had to do the analysis manually it was a painstaking process that took
approximately 33 days to look at two 20 megabyte hard drives a computer is about as secure as a wet paper bag
it never throws data away and they found bits and pieces of a document copenheifer had deleted called
the plan it listed all of the steps necessary to carry out sally weiner's kidnapping and
murder we were able to recover 80 percent of the murder plan back off of the hard drives
20 of that had been overwritten or altered and to a point where we couldn't recover the data this evidence was the
most damning this evidence connected the computer to the man to the notes to the crime
this document revealed that sally weiner wasn't copenheifer's only target it looks as if based on that plan
he planned on killing harry weiner after retrieving the ransom [Music] prosecutors believe
it was david copenheifer who had disguised his voice and called sally on thursday night with the bogus story that
her husband harry was chosen as man of the year he set up a time the next day for the
two of them to meet to plan the award ceremony then copenheifer placed the ransom notes in
the various locations outside of town and put one of them in the gym bag underneath harry's car
sally arrived at what she believed to be the planning meeting she would have recognized copenheifer
from church he somehow talked her into his van where he overpowered and subdued her
he then forced her to record the message to her husband telling him she had been
kidnapped the forensic evidence shows that copenheifer killed sally within a few hours after he abducted her
then dumped her body on the farm outside of town he returned to his store placed to call
to harry at the bank and played sally's tape recording copenheifer was sure harry would follow
the instructions to the letter the computer evidence shows that he planned to kill harry at the abandoned
church when he dropped off the ransom money harry was the one he was mad at for having turned him down on the loan
application he wanted revenge on harry as much as he wanted the money despite warning harry not to call police
copenheifer learned that harry did just that because of a journalist who had heard
about the kidnapping from the police scanner and i went immediately to the plaza
and parked my car and there was not a lot of activity so he walked into david kopenheifer's
store and asked what was going on he looked at me and said no he said there hasn't been a single thing going
on it's been a very quiet night there isn't anything going on at the time i was talking i didn't know
that he had killed her so i did not make a connection that here was a cold-blooded murderer sitting in
front of me after learning that the police were involved copenheifer most likely stayed
in his store instead of going to the ransom drop site [Music] and harry didn't see the next ransom note
copenheifer left for him at the railroad bridge based on the forensic evidence david copenheifer was arrested and
charged with kidnapping and first degree murder one of the things that we did is get a
writing sampler from copenheifer and had him spell exactly and he misspelled it in the writing samples the same way that
it was misspelled in his computer and again that's to correlate the fact that that he's the one who inputted that
stuff into the computer versus some external source david copenheifer was tried and
eventually convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison david copenheffer is the master
manipulator it's an intellectual game an intellectual challenge to see how far he
can push the system and what he can get away with i think if he were out he would kill
again and uh he put a contract on me and harry weiner while the trial was going on because we
were key witnesses against him i don't think that he would stop at anything despite the overwhelming amount of
forensic evidence against him copenheifer continues to maintain his innocence that's the arrogance of the man
that despite overwhelming evidence as to his guilt and many defendants to do this
they still still refuse to accept responsibility for the crimes that they've committed
and that's the sin one of the sins of all of this this case in my own opinion is a landmark case
it is the beginning of the genesis of what computer forensics is now from this computer forensics was born
[Music] [Music] [Music] you

Police are led on a wild goose chase when the wife of a prominent banker is kidnapped. An entomologist's unexpected discovery leads to a new suspect — and the realization that ordinary office equipment can leave extraordinary clues.

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

Sally Weiner was kidnapped and murdered; David Copenheifer was convicted based on forensic evidence and a deleted computer document.

Key points

The Shocking Kidnapping of Sally Weiner. Sally Weiner, wife of a bank vice president, is kidnapped, leading to a tragic outcome.
Forensic Breakthroughs in the Case. Investigators uncover crucial evidence linking David Copenheifer to the crime.
Copenheifer's Manipulation and Conviction. David Copenheifer is arrested and convicted for the murder of Sally Weiner.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I felt guilty and helpless; she was executed.

A witness reflecting on Sally's tragic fate.

6:50WatchJan 1, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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