Home Invasion Homicide | Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace | Forensic Files

[TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Garland, Texas, 1986. Police learn of a disturbance at the home
of a married couple, Barbara Carr and Domingo Villarreal. Neighbors of Barbara said that Domingo had showed up
at their house with his arms tied behind his back and was covered in blood. He tells them, hey, you know, these two guys
just broke into our house, took my wife into a room. They took me into another room.
They tied me up. He was able to somehow free himself. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police rush to the scene
and enter the home. There, they find a horrible crime scene. Barbara was lying face down near the front door.
She had sustained multiple stab wounds, and there was a lot of blood. They did their best with the scientific evidence
they had at the time. The labs weren't as capable then of giving them answers that would be useful for creating leads
like they are today. The case went cold that first year. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Years later,
advancements in DNA science and testing will crack this case wide open. The biggest part of this investigation
that moved it forward was our use of investigative genetic genealogy. I want to find the person who did this.
We were actually shocked when the results came back. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): This is the story
of how anger and deceit hides the identity of a killer for 38 years. I'm Nancy Grace.
This is "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC] Garland, Texas, 1986. A diverse and vibrant city in the Dallas-Fort
Worth metropolitan area. Garland is one of the larger suburbs in Dallas County. Good, hard-working people live there.
Garland is a bedroom community, as they would refer to it. It's a suburb of Dallas.
A lot of families live there and then work either in Dallas or outside the city.
Not a lot of violent crime whatsoever in Garland. We had four kids. I was the oldest, and Barbara was the youngest.
We lived in the country. Our grandparents lived across the road. She was just very quiet, very sweet.
I just remember her always being kind to everybody. She had been going out with Domingo Villarreal.
We all called him "Jesse." We were told that was his nickname. He was from Mexico.
I don't remember the name of the town, but we were told that he had 15 siblings,
and they lived in this little shack with a dirt floor. But she seemed very happy, and she
had taken a lot of Spanish courses and spoke very fluent Spanish. And something must have clicked.
She was like my hero, and I think most of it was because everyone said I looked like her when I was young.
I just remember her laughing and smiling. And when she asked me to be her flower girl, it was just--
I was ecstatic. My cousin always got to be the flower girl because she was older than me.
So I was always the last one. But I got to finally be the flower girl, and I felt pretty special.
I remember every time that I was with them, it was good. It was fun. Jesse taught me how to color, and he was--
at the time, I would have probably said that he was my favorite uncle. I thought he was fun and made me happy.
And my Aunt Barb was happy. So I think everyone in the family was happy just to see her happy.
That's-- that's what we wanted. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Behind closed doors, the couple is having marital problems.
A lot of disagreements. Barbara was the primary breadwinner in the house. Seems that Domingo just sat around the house
and lived off of her and that had moved a brother in with him, and they were both staying at home,
and Barbara was making the money, paying the bills, and funding their lifelong vacation, I guess.
[TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): November 7, 1986. Garland Police are notified of a disturbance at the home
of the married couple. Her husband runs out of the house and bangs on the door of a neighbor.
He tells them, hey, these two guys just broke into our house, took my wife into a room.
They took me into another room. They tied me up. He made claims of sexual assault that were made on him by the two
males and that he was able to somehow free himself, ran next door, couldn't say anything about what
had happened to his wife. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The terrified neighbor calls 911.
When the police do arrive at the Villarreal home, they find Barbara's body on the floor and obvious trauma.
She had been stabbed multiple times and was pronounced dead on the scene. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): This is now a homicide investigation.
Detectives commence to work the crime scene. There was certainly a large amount of blood
where Barbara was, on her body, seeping into the carpet. There were some blood stains in that game room.
That's typically gonna be mostly the victim's blood. But what was interesting is that there
was blood found in other parts of the house, including out on the patio. Whoever had done this would have had to likely travel.
That was probably their point of exit. And that blood certainly becomes a much more important
and valuable piece of evidence. It's very common that whoever did a stabbing, especially one
that was this brutal, almost impossible not to have cut yourself. They also recovered a glove, which had a cut mark in it.
And I think pretty quickly, law enforcement realized that that glove had been worn by the murderer,
and it was an important piece of evidence. [TENSE MUSIC] Near her were several items of clothing.
There were a shoebox containing a pair of shoes. The shoes had blood on them. And the shoebox also had blood on it.
There were a pair of jeans there. Obviously, these jeans were either used to clean up
or someone was wearing them and got blood all over them, and they took them off and left them there.
In 25 years of working homicide cases, I have never seen a single scene where the killer brought
a change of clothes and left his bloody clothes laying in the house. There was no signs of forced entry in the house.
There-- a pair of shoes in a shoebox. A killer would bring a shoebox in with shoes, extra shoes?
It just-- things didn't sit well with me. The knife was found. It was left at the scene.
It was covered in blood and damaged. The blade was damaged. It was a fairly long knife.
I remember it was bent. And that's typically from hitting something hard, hitting
bone, going through the body. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Medical examiners arrive at the crime scene to examine Barbara Carr's body.
Barbara had defensive wounds on her hands that she tried to fight off the person, trace evidence.
Even in 1986, there was fibers, different things, clothing, hair. They're looking for a lot of different things.
So they're there to preserve the body as evidence. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The body of 27-year-old
Barbara Carr taken for autopsy. There was no sexual assault. The evidence does not suggest that at all.
The stab wounds, you know, were all over. Often, in a case like this, they can say it could have been this stabbing
which was the fatal blow. Sometimes they're not able to tell. There's multiple stab wounds that could kill--
the neck, the heart, the head. And she had stab wounds all over. She was stabbed to death, and it was classified as a homicide.
From an investigator's standpoint, this type of homicide would be something very personal.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The people of Garland, Texas, are terrified. Could the killer strike again?
It always causes fear and concern, especially when you don't have an immediate suspect and people
feel like there's a potential crazed killer out on the loose. Yeah, it always causes concern.
This was not only big news in Garland, but in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, this was a case that certainly caused and received a great
deal of media attention. Anytime there's a home invasion and a young woman is murdered in this fashion, it puts everybody on high alert.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): A murder investigation now underway. Will detectives find the person responsible for the brutal
stabbing of Barbara Carr? That's next on "Bloodline Detectives." [TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): 1986, Garland, Texas.
Police called to the home of a couple, Barbara Carr and Domingo Villarreal. Wife, Barbara, found murdered.
The evening that she was killed, I had tried to call her and didn't get an answer.
Garland Police had notified the South Bend Police, which is where my parents lived at the time.
And the South Bend Police knocked on my parents' door about 2 o'clock in the morning and told them that they
had been informed of her death. So then they called me. And at the time, my daughter had a house full of 13-year-olds
for her birthday party. I remember my mom screaming. I kept hearing different names being thrown around,
and I didn't know who-- who or what or why. And I don't remember them actually sitting me down and telling me.
I just remember going to all my friends and them having to call their parents to have them come get them because we had a family
emergency and we had to leave. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): After the initial shock fades,
Barbara's loved ones arrange her funeral. I remember wanting to pick out clothes for her to wear
because I knew what her favorite dress was, and I so badly wanted her to be buried in her-- what she had
told me her favorite dress was. And they told me that that wasn't possible because
of her injuries. I just remember just crying and not understanding what had happened and how it could have happened.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): It's SOP, standard operating procedure. The first place where police look is the spouse, the lover,
the boyfriend of the murdered victim. And that's what happens in this case, as detectives immediately hone in
on husband, Domingo Villarreal. He was initially the focus of the investigation.
They had determined that Barbara and Domingo had lived in another house in Garland before living in the one where
she was murdered. They located a neighbor, who was still in touch with Barbara. And she had indicated that Barbara told her
she was afraid of Domingo, and she was scared that he would kill her and that he had a gun, and she had actually
taken his gun and hidden it from him for a while and then recently returned it to him.
She also said that Domingo had shown up to her house to see her husband and that he had come into their kitchen,
and she had left him alone in there. And she believes that the knife used to kill Barbara was
a knife taken from her kitchen. He had been violent, and there had been a recent volatile argument that had been witnessed
by some friends and neighbors. He was arrested. Domingo gives a pretty strange story.
He says that he and Barbara had been fighting. There was talk of separation. He had actually been gone for a day.
So they met at a restaurant to discuss what was going on. And according to him, they had kind of reconciled everything,
and he was gonna come back home, and they were in separate cars. So Barbara came along first.
He said he had to stop for gas or something. He was a little bit behind her. And he said when he arrived in the driveway,
he could hear the dogs barking. And he said that was kind of unusual for them to be barking.
So he went around to the back and was gonna come in the back door just to see what the dogs were
barking at and said when he came to the back door, he was met by a white male and a Black male, who
ordered him into the house and ordered him into a bedroom. And-- and while he's in there, he said he
could hear Barbara screaming. He claimed that he had been assaulted, sexually assaulted, by one of the males.
And he said he laid there tied up until things got quiet. And then after he felt that it was quiet and safe to get up
that he managed to get to his feet and get up and run to the neighbor's house. I've heard a lot of crazy stories,
and anything can be true, but just something about this story didn't sound right.
That bothered me tremendously that he never mentioned stopping and checking on his wife.
And if he feels like it's safe enough to get out and run out and not stop and check on his wife,
I had a little bit of problem with that. But he did not stay in custody very long.
They released him. They determined that the clothing left behind by the killer that was covered in Barbara's blood did not fit.
The shoes were too small. The pants were too short. And the gloves that were worn by the killer
had a significant cut across the palm, and Domingo did not have a cut on his hand.
The case went cold probably within like that first year. I know that they continued to work it,
and there would certainly be periods of time that they would look into it. And I know the family would check in
with the Garland Police Department to see if there was any new developments. But again, once Domingo was released, you know,
there was no real other suspects. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Barbara Carr's family
still believes husband, Domingo Villarreal, is some way involved in her death. My whole family knew he had to have
had something to do with it. I didn't want him near me. I didn't want to talk to him.
He would actually come and joke with me that I'm your favorite uncle. And I said, not anymore is all I could
answer to him is I just didn't want to talk to him anymore. There was just a difference.
[TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Fast forward, 2018. Barbara Carr's murder has been cold for 32 years,
but now it's being re-examined by a whole new team of investigators. Their suspicions still centers on the original suspect,
Barbara's husband, Domingo Villarreal. CODIS is the national offender database for convicted
felons in the United States. If you have been convicted of a felony in the United States,
and in some states, if you've been arrested for a felony, you are required to submit your DNA sample into this database.
If there is crime scene DNA recovered and it's a strong enough profile, it's then uploaded into CODIS to see if there's
a match to any known offenders. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The new team examines blood samples taken from the crime scene
back in 1986. There was blood, certainly, on clothing. That blood is gonna be tested.
But the real focus was going to be the glove. There was a cut and a slit in one of the fingers
that that would have happened during the murder, cutting the murderer, and that the murderer's
blood would be on that glove. And then there was the blood that was taken around from that patio.
That would have been the point of exit, and therefore, you might find the perpetrator's blood there.
The result was that there was blood on that glove and on that patio swab that was male DNA unknown.
They entered it into CODIS, and there was no match. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Next on "Bloodline Detectives,"
will all the blood found at the crime scene finally lead to Barbara Carr's killer?
[TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Garland, Texas, 2019. Detectives reopen the 1986 home invasion murder of Barbara Carr.
Suspicion remains on husband, Domingo Villarreal, just as it did 33 years before.
The killer's injured in the attack. His DNA is uploaded into the CODIS database.
Unfortunately, there is not a match. Now, investigators ask the FBI for help with forensic science.
Investigative genetic genealogy is the technique where we take DNA that we believe belongs to a suspect or any unknown person
that we need to identify. We put it into publicly available genealogical websites
that cooperate with law enforcement in which people voluntarily opt in to having their DNA compared
to law enforcement kits. And we develop familial relationships that help us to develop family trees,
which ultimately leads to us identifying victims or suspects. The biggest part of this investigation
that moved it forward was our use of investigative genetic genealogy. We had blood that had pooled at the front door of the residence
on the inside and outside of the door, droplets of blood, looked like it would have come from the killer
instead of from Barbara. And it was male DNA. We knew that. So we took that DNA and sent it to a lab
where we had a SNP profile created. And as part of the process of getting that SNP profile back,
we got some information about the ethnic background of the person who had left that blood.
And that significantly changed the focus of our investigation. We determined that the DNA left behind by the killer
was Hispanic and was not consistent with the story Domingo had told of a white male and a Black male
being in his home. We shifted gears and decided we needed to properly identify who Domingo was.
We didn't believe Domingo Villarreal was his true name, that he had been using someone else's identity.
This is between '86 and '88. They find out that Domingo Villarreal, when they start
to look further into his name, there's two in the state of Texas. There's two Domingo Villarreals with the exact same name,
the exact same date of birth. So it initially starts to raise some concerns for them
about, OK, who is this person really? They enlisted the help of Department of Public Safety,
which in the state of Texas, is our driver licensing agency as well. And so they're actually troopers at the time.
One's assigned in Garland. There's another one assigned down in Brownsville. And they both start to conduct investigations
into who is actually the real Domingo Villarreal. It came down to the fact of the guy
in Brownsville was able to produce family members-- you know, a mother and father and a birth certificate
showing that this is me. The Domingo Villarreal, who lived in Garland, was unable to produce that, said he did not
know where his parents were and that he lost his birth certificate. So it was ultimately concluded that the guy in Brownsville
was the actual Domingo Villarreal and the one in Garland was not. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Then what's the real name of the man
Barbara Carr married? At the time of his arrest in 1986, his fingerprints were taken.
So his fingerprints were placed into the AFIS database, which is the Automated Fingerprint Index System.
And that database from that arrest from 1986 had a match to an arrest in the 1970s in a town called Sterling, Illinois.
And the person arrested at that time was named Jesus Canales. We requested the booking photo from that arrest.
And when that photo arrived and we were able to compare it to the arrest of Domingo Villarreal in 1986,
we realized that Domingo Villarreal was actually Jesus Canales. It was a pretty big moment to be able to positively
identify Domingo as Jesus. And the reason was because since his release shortly after Barbara's murder, he had disappeared
and not been heard from again. We weren't able to locate him. Very shortly after identifying him properly,
we were able to locate a death certificate for him in Guadalajara, Mexico from 1988, where
he had been shot to death. [TENSE MUSIC] There were stories of people that, you know, connected that to being a cartel-related shooting.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators must locate a blood relative of Jesus Canales
to rule him out as a suspect. So once we identified the name Jesus Canales, we decided we needed to go back and look through the file again.
We found a motor vehicle accident that Barbara had been involved in in 1985. And in the vehicle with her at the same time was a 12-year-old
girl with the last name Canales, and it listed her address as Sterling, Illinois.
At that time, we said, this could be a child of Jesus Canales that maybe was visiting.
So we contacted the Sterling, Illinois city clerk. And that city clerk was able to provide us with a birth
certificate for two different females that were the biological children of Jesus Canales.
Once we identified the fact that we had a Hispanic male and that Jesus Canales had lied to us
or to the initial investigators, we decided he's more of a suspect to us now than he was before.
And when we identified his two daughters, we said the only way for us to properly exclude him
as a suspect is to test his DNA. Unfortunately, we know he's deceased at this point,
and we're not gonna get his DNA. The next best thing, and because of investigative genetic
genealogy, by testing his daughters, we can determine how closely related they are to our killer.
So a decision was made to go locate them and ask them for samples. We interviewed both of them.
They were very upset about the entire circumstance of their stepmother's death. They knew Barb very well and thought highly of her
and-- and liked her. And so they both knew that their father was deceased but didn't really know the details of why.
And they both provided DNA samples that we were able to test. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): DNA samples
from Jesus Canales' two daughters are sent to a lab for testing. And the results surprise investigators.
The results came back at such a high centimorgan rate that we now knew that the person we were looking for
was going to be a biological brother to Jesus Canales. One of them lived in the United States, in New Mexico,
and the other two lived in Mexico. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives now turn their focus to Jesus Canales's brother,
Juan, who lives in New Mexico. We were concerned that if we went to him directly and spoke
to him that he could, if it is him, flee the United States, be uncooperative, or warn his brothers
and make it almost impossible for us to collect DNA on anyone else. So we surveilled him for several days.
He did not leave DNA anywhere. And ultimately, a decision was made in coordination
with the Dallas County District Attorney's Office to attempt to buy some DNA evidence from him.
I got to give a lot of credit, the FBI agents who worked on this case and who were the boots on the ground doing
the surveillance on Juan at the time because a situation arose where they were able to-- you know, they
were thinking on their feet. And I remember they were calling me while this was all happening,
that Juan had gone into a Walmart. I liked Walmart because Walmart has video everywhere.
And you-- anytime you get somebody's DNA, you want to be able-- juries want to see it on video, whether it's
a trash pull or however. So I was like, great. You know, if you can find a way to get his DNA in Walmart,
we'll have it on video. There won't be any question about how it was done. We contacted the lab in this case and said,
this guy's wearing a hat. It looks very old. He's probably worn it for a long time.
And the lab said if he's worn it for a significant amount of time, there's gonna be a significant amount
of DNA in the brim of that cap. And so we decided that the hat would be the best option.
So the task force officer approached the brother in Walmart. I just struck up a conversation with him.
I offered him a sum of money for his cap. He decided that he'd rather have the money than the hat,
and he handed me the hat. Everything worked out. We don't believe he suspected a thing.
Probably wondering why this guy just overpaid for what wasn't probably the greatest hat in the world.
But we had the hat. The hat's in the Dallas County Crime Lab at SWIFS within 24 hours.
I think it was a pretty quick period of time, it's back here. Plea to the crime lab, this is an emergency.
We need you to run this as fast as you can. And as they always do, SWIFS did an amazing job getting it done.
But we get the profile back, and it's not our suspect profile. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators
now look at the remaining brother, Liborio Canales, who lives in Mexico. Arresting a Mexican citizen in Mexico
can be tremendously complex. But we can't even do that until we get the DNA match.
So this is where kinship analysis comes into play because we knew that he had two daughters who
lived in New Mexico. And so we were thinking, you know, how would we be able to tie their paternal relationship
to our suspect? And could we even do that? Fortunately for us, there was a big break in another case
in another part of the country. They had used a paternity test to prove their subject
was responsible for the murder. So we contacted the prosecutor, Leighton D'Antoni, who we worked
very closely with, and said, hey, did you see this on the news, this other case?
This is significant for us. Can we do this here in Dallas? Agent White and I went and met with the directors
over at SWIFS of the DNA and biology department and asked them if they were familiar with kinship analysis.
We showed them how it had been done in this other case. And they said, we could do that.
It was the first time that we had done kinship analysis in Dallas. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): February 2023.
Investigators organize a secret DNA collection from Liborio Canales's daughters in New Mexico.
When people bring their trash to the curb, it's abandoned. And law enforcement is allowed to collect abandoned DNA when
people leave it in restaurants or anywhere they go that they leave a cigarette butt or anything,
anyone can collect that. And so in this case, we collected some trash. And in that trash was a water bottle.
That water bottle was tested. And the DNA came back from the lab that it was very statistically likely
to be the child of the same suspect who left behind DNA at the crime scene where Barbara was found.
Additionally, we had found that this particular brother had briefly lived in the United States.
So we felt like it was possible that he could be the one who was responsible for Barbara's death.
That brother's name was Liborio Canales. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Bloodline Detectives
are now almost certain Domingo Canales' brother, Liborio, is Barbara Carr's killer.
But to be 100% sure, they need to bring him in for questioning and to secure his DNA.
[TENSE MUSIC] Initially, we start thinking right away, OK, how are we gonna get him?
So we know from looking at border crossings, even before this, we talked about he
had a resident alien status in the United States. To keep that resident alien status,
he had to cross into the country periodically or that status gets revoked. So he had to come to the US.
We're watching his border crossings. June comes, he doesn't cross. So now we're like, I don't know if he's coming back.
On July 17, 2023, Detective Shupe was notified-- I think it was right after lunch--
that he had crossed the border from Mexico into the United States. I go by Detective Lambert's desk.
I said, hey, Liborio's crossed. He's in the United States. We're going to New Mexico.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Their prime suspect is back on American soil. Investigators head to New Mexico to confront him.
We're in communication with Agent White, and we're talking with him. And we learned that within four to six hours
of crossing the border, he can probably be back in the New Mexico area. We contacted that residence and talked to family members,
and they gave us a location that he was gonna be at a restaurant. And working with them and local law enforcement
and the FBI and the task force, he was arrested and taken back to the police station,
where he was interviewed. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): This is the moment investigators
have been waiting on. Will Liborio Canales admit to murdering his own sister-in-law,
Barbara Carr, back in 1986? We find out next on "Bloodline Detectives." [TENSE MUSIC]
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Garland, Texas, 2023. Detectives are desperately trying to close the 1986
murder of Barbara Carr. For decades, suspicion centered on her husband, Jesus Canales.
But now detectives questioning a new suspect, thanks to investigative genetic genealogy.
That suspect, Jesus Canales's brother, Liborio Canales. [TENSE MUSIC] We had an officer from Lovington PD sit in with us
as well who could help translate for us. He had not participated in our investigation up to that point,
but he knew the details surrounding the murder and why we believed it was Liborio.
And so he was very well prepared to conduct the interview. He started asking him specific things related
to what we were investigating. She didn't want to have anything to do with him. She didn't want him in her house.
And, you know, he said that-- that made him angry. He had asked his brother if he could come stay with Jesse,
or Jesus, and Barbara. And they had told him no, that they wouldn't let him do that.
And he believed that they had turned their backs on him, and it was really upsetting to him.
So he asked his mother where they were staying, where they lived. He traveled to the Dallas area.
And then he went into the home, and he violently murdered Barbara. We asked him if his brother, Jesus, was involved in any way.
He said no. He goes, I don't know what my brother told y'all. My brother wasn't there, and if he was there,
I would have killed him, too. I absolutely feel like Domingo had something to do with it.
Too many lies. He couldn't divorce her because he would lose everything. I think they discussed it and talked about it
and had a plan on how they were gonna do it. I believe he had-- in his eyes, I'm sure,
it was no other option but to kill her so he could keep everything. His brother, Liborio Canales, did the stabbing and killed her.
He's admitted his involvement. He's told us his account of what happened. It matches up to the evidence we had at the scene.
Matter of fact, he actually makes a stabbing motion with his right hand. [TENSE MUSIC]
And then he talks about being cut. And he even pulls his hand up, and he's talking about his finger.
So then we-- of course, we talked to him about the gloves we found and whatnot, and he admits to that.
I think his motive was white-hot rage. I think he was just incensed that someone would disrespect
him, so incensed that he drove many, many hours to Dallas, Texas, to commit a murder.
It's kind of unfathomable to think that you could maintain that anger for that long for something so petty,
not being allowed to stay at someone's home. But to Liborio, it was just a very upsetting thing.
He was 49 years old at the time he committed the murder. I think that's pretty significant.
When we were looking at the three brother options we had, Liborio was the oldest one, and honestly, we
considered him the least likely suspect just based on his age. You know, typically, you would think someone almost 50 years
old would be more level-headed. A brother who might have been in his 20s might be
more prone to violence, but in this case, it just didn't matter. Like, Liborio was violent, and he wanted revenge for the insult
that he thought he had taken from his brother. [TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): After 37 long years,
Bloodline Detectives have a confession. But now they want a DNA sample to lock the case up
and finally close it. That's next. [TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): 2023, Garland,
Texas detectives finally have a confession in the 1986 murder of Barbara Carr. That confession from her own brother-in-law, Liborio Canales.
Now they try to match Liborio Canales' DNA to blood samples found at the crime scene.
We ask him if he'd be willing to provide a sample of his DNA. So he signed a consent form.
We obtained his DNA. It was delivered to SWIFS, Southwest Institute of Forensic Science, for a direct comparison.
It was a match. So the DNA from Liborio Canales was a match for the blood from the front porch
of the unknown male subject, the blood from the gloves that were inside the house.
Then we realized, we got to call the family. He called my sister, Kathy, which luckily,
she'd been in the same job with the same phone number for 30 years. So he was able to get a hold of her.
And then she set up a family call to let the rest of us know. We knew it had to be somehow related to her husband.
If he didn't do it, somebody he knew did. Liborio Canales pleads guilty to the murder of his own
sister-in-law, Barbara Carr. I was very pleased to see that Liborio, for once in his life,
did the right thing and pled guilty. He had accepted his fate, so to speak. And, you know, it was just one of those things
that here we are. They know. And here's what I'm taking. March 12, 2024, we had the plea and sentencing.
And we had the family. They came in, and some of her friends that still lived here in the Dallas area,
they were able to attend. And I think that was important for them to get closure.
At the sentencing, I attended it along with Detective Bill Elstrom, and also in attendance was Barbara's youngest
brother, Mark Gunderman. Mark was very emotional. He was much younger than his sister,
and so it had affected his life tremendously. I mean, in a lot of ways, he's a victim as well of the murder.
Liborio was convicted of Barbara's murder, and he was sentenced to 20 years in a Texas state penitentiary.
Liborio has never expressed any remorse. He didn't express remorse during his confession.
He didn't seem to express remorse during the sentencing. When a victim impact statement was made,
I think his only dissatisfaction with this is that he's gonna die in prison. [TENSE MUSIC]
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): 37 years after Barbara Carr is murdered, investigators finally
put her killer behind bars. If not for the work of the people who came before me
and their dedication to documenting what happened, preserving the evidence, I wouldn't have been able to get
it closed out the way I did. This wasn't a case that was forgotten. People cared about this case.
Garland Police Department cared about this case. It just took the time of genetic genealogy
to be a viable tool to solve this case. I believe it would be closure for the family,
but that's also in how they take it, you know? It's easy to say closure from my perspective.
But I'm not the person that's lost a loved one to a violent crime. I'm not the person that doesn't have my daughter
or my sister to talk to. I am glad that the DNA found the guilty person. I'm glad he's in jail.
We were in disbelief that after that many years, that it could be solved, but a lot of joy.
I remember even some of the girls that were at my sleepover that night for my 13th birthday party,
some of them reached out to me when we had announced that it had happened, that they remembered very vividly that
night as well and how much they had thought about it over the years and praying that it got solved.
I'm just glad it's closed. I thought about her every day. I mean, there's been very few days
that she hasn't came to my mind and just think of the happy things about her. She was a fighter, and she loved to live.
Barbara was fun, happy, quiet. She loved traveling. She really wanted mostly to be a mother,
and she had not been able to do that. She will always be in our heart. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Foolish anger and years
of deceit combine to hide the identity of Barbara Carr's killer for 37 years. But phenomenal forensic science with determined police
work team up and finally get justice in this senseless murder. It's the first time genetic genealogy is ever used in Dallas
County to close a case. I'm Nancy Grace. Thank you for joining us here on "Bloodline Detectives."
[TENSE MUSIC]

1986, Texas, when Barbara Carr is murdered in a home invasion, her husband oddly escapes unharmed. Could a new forensic technique connect Barbara’s murder to an unexpected suspect?

Now in its fifth season, Bloodline Detectives is the leading true crime series that explores how police departments harness genetic genealogy to solve crimes that were once considered "unsolvable," bringing long-awaited answers to victims' families.

Brief Summary

Investigators solve Barbara Carr's 1986 murder using DNA and genetic genealogy, leading to her brother-in-law's confession.

Key points

The Horrific Crime Scene. Police discover a brutal crime scene with Barbara Carr's body covered in stab wounds.
The Case Goes Cold. After initial investigations, the case goes cold with no suspects for years.
A Shocking Identity Reveal. Investigators uncover that Domingo Villarreal's real identity is Jesus Canales.
DNA Match Confirms Guilt. Investigators secure a DNA match linking Liborio to the crime scene.
Confession After 37 Years. Liborio Canales pleads guilty to the murder of his sister-in-law, Barbara Carr.
Closure for the Family. The family finally receives closure after decades of waiting for justice.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It just-- things didn't sit well with me.

An investigator expresses doubt about Domingo's story.

7:33WatchJun 6, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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