Skeleton Key | Forensic Files | S14 E19 | FULL EPISODE | Forensic Files

[Music] up next a nursing student disappears it's really a mystery as to where she's
vanished and her ex boyfriend is the prime suspect i'm telling the police i'd really like
for you to take a look at him but without a body is there even a case you don't have a crime yet what's the
crime the only real clue is a set of keys the trick for investigators is finding
out which door they might open the keys are a mystery at this point [Music] ever since she was a little girl tamika
houston wanted to be a professional singer and many thought she had the talent to make
it [Music] she loved to sing she would practice her songs she tried out for american idol
and sat outside i think for a day and she was devastated when she didn't make the
first cut realizing how difficult it was to make it in the entertainment business
at the age of 24 tamika decided to enter nursing school when classes ended and summertime came tamika finally had
some free time she didn't have class to report to she didn't have a job to go to every morning she was very
spontaneous she was the type of person to get in her car and kind of go and that's what everyone thought had
happened when they couldn't get in touch with her but after two weeks passed her family
became alarmed i called police and said that there's clearly something wrong i can't locate my knees
she's not returning anyone's phone calls tamika was 24 years old and it's perfectly acceptable for someone who
doesn't want to call someone to not call them police in spartanburg south carolina went to tamika's house
her car was gone and the doors were locked but they gained access through an open window in the back room
police found tamika's dog and a litter of puppies all on the verge of starvation
i remember the detective coming and telling me that she loved animals and she would not have left her animals
there were no signs of violence and no indication where she'd gone police issued a be on
the lookout bulletin for tamika's car a 1991 black honda it could have been a traffic accident
off the side of a road and which would still be a tragedy but it would be a criminal tragedy
family and friends put up missing person flyers all over town as a mother is very difficult not
knowing where my daughter is or hoping that and thinking that she's okay and safe
police checked to make a cell phone and credit card records and there had been no activity during
the time she'd been missing tamika's ex-boyfriend terence moss went to police and offered his
assistance he had been living with tamika until three months earlier when they broke up
there was an incident at her house where she accused him of hitting her and striking her
however many flares can go off in a law enforcement officer's mind that's how many would have gone off with
terence smalls moss said he knew nothing about tamika's disappearance although he admitted the assault
claiming it was a one-time incident i punched her i actually punched her um and i
fell down on my knees and i started praying and i was like there's just so many demons in here that
you know we we're becoming physical with each other now that we just need to separate
because of that incident tamika had filed an assault charge against moss and she disappeared just two weeks
before she was to appear in court she was a victim of domestic violence she's supposed to go to court and
testify against this guy as we kept pressuring and pushing and repeating questions to him
he became agitated and finally just shut down from us and refused to talk to us completely
terence moss is prime suspect number one one month had passed since tomeka houston disappeared
and police were no closer to finding her she could still be alive we don't know there was still kind of like an
undercurrent of a sense of hope then a tenant in a nearby apartment complex called police with a tip
flyers were distributed all over spartanburg tamika houston's face became very familiar to people in this area a
woman saw the flyer and saw the description picture of the car on there and said you know this looks like a car
that's parked behind barksdale apartments and she was correct it was tamika's car
parked just four miles from tamika's home cars are easy to track with respect to
license tags and vin numbers and in many instances cars are more distinctive in some ways than people are no one
living in the apartment saw anyone driving the car or parking it inside police found no forensic evidence
no blood and no sign of a struggle the only clue was a partial fingerprint which didn't
match tamika's ex-boyfriend terence moss or anyone in the national fingerprint database the car wasn't the
treasure trove i'm sure police had hoped for but investigators did find a set of keys
on the passenger side floor you could see that one looked like an automobile key and one looked like a house key
none of the keys worked in tamika's car so we thought maybe those were the keys to tamika's house
but they didn't work there either the keys don't belong to tamika houston so maybe they belong to the person
responsible for her disappearance the keys were dusted for fingerprints but none were found
then investigators noticed a code on one of the keys it had a special stamp on it
it was stamped with aa14 nothing that indicates who cut the key who put the stamp on it it was just a
key with a stamp investigators took the key to all the locksmiths in the area miraculously one of them was able to
identify it he said i can tell you who i made it for so he pulls his records out and after
looking through his records for a while he finds who that code was and that was for fremont school apartments
that's a great break it's a great break it is amazing how much luck the hard workers have it's amazing
fremont school apartments is once a local elementary school and the government converted it into some
some public housing detectives tried the key in each of the 46 apartments strangely it didn't open
any of them but it did open a storage area door it fit a door in the basement and the the door that it fit in the
basement when it opened up that was a an apartment that was closed it had been taken offline because of
flood issues investigators asked forensic technicians to look for possible evidence
inside that room we ended up seizing all the evidence out of that offline apartment and it was a tremendous amount
and we processed it for any kind of dna or anything for tamika and it ended up being a dead end also
no one in the apartment complex had seen a woman matching tamika's description there was a lot i
think false hope during that time then the apartment manager offered a possible explanation when a tenant is evicted
maintenance often removes the entire doorknob from the evicted tenant's apartment door
and replaces it with the doorknob from another apartment so that the person who moved out can't
come back later with a copied key and enter that apartment again unfortunately they didn't keep good records of which
door knobs were swapped meaning the doorknob from the basement unit could have come from any apartment in
the complex investigators were convinced that the apartment key found in tamika houston's car held the
secret to her disappearance but it didn't open any of the apartment doors in the
fremont school apartments only a basement storage area so investigators asked for a list of
tenants including those who'd been evicted and they showed that list to tamika's
friends and relatives you get to a point where you've run out of more traditional leads
so you're going to pursue it even if it's a somewhat unusual lead her best friend mention there's
this guy named chris that she started seeing around the time of her disappearance
there was only one person named chris on the tenant list christopher hampton he'd been evicted
from the fremont apartments one month after tamika disappeared he also had a police record he served
four years in prison for bank robbery investigators located chris hampton he was in prison
serving a 30-day sentence for a parole violation but records showed he was free at the
time of tamika's disappearance when questioned hampton said he knew tamika but he didn't know where she was she
said i won't go to bike week she said who she was going with no she didn't say she said she's gone
did you see her at any point after that hampton's prince did not match the partial print found in tamika's car
but investigators got a huge break when hampton's former girlfriend the mother of his two young children
called police she said hampton mailed her his wallet for safekeeping since he wasn't
permitted to keep it in prison she says i've got his wallet if y'all want to come look at it she told police
she called because she'd been following news stories about tamika houston's disappearance
and was well aware that hampton had been living in the fremont apartments she also said
there was a tiny speck of blood on the wallet it was very important if it wasn't for
that media coverage there um that that young lady may have never came forward i examined the photograph found the spec
of potential blood took it through the preliminary testing for blood and it passed it was positive but
whose blood was it to find out investigators needed dna from tamika's family in this case we had
the mother and the father so you can quickly ascertain whether or not this unknown sample could have
originated from an offspring from those two parents the dna test left no doubt the blood
was tamika's when confronted with this evidence hampton again denied any involvement
whatever happened to tamika happened right there in your apartment i don't believe that well you know it
could be in my blood no it can't be anybody's blood how long you think we've been doing this
you don't know that we can tell one person's blood from another blood you ever heard of dna no
but prosecuting a case without a body is never easy her body is not turned up you've got pets abused no contact with
your family and an injury that led to a loss of blood and your car has been abandoned that's
pretty good circumstantial evidence that something bad happened to you but you still got murder manslaughter
involuntary self-defense accident what do you have to fill in any of those five scenarios right now
fourteen months after tamika houston's disappearance her ex-boyfriend terence moss was no
longer considered a suspect that's because police found tamika's blood in a wallet
belonging to chris hampton a man who tamika had been dating at the time of her disappearance
hampton once lived in apartment 215 of the fremont school apartments but more than a year had passed and
another family was now living there then a young woman called police to say she was inside apartment 215
with chris hampton around the time of tamika's disappearance and she'd seen something suspicious
there was a large brownish red stain on the floor in the bedroom and that the dresser was
pulled over in front of the closet door which was odd entering apartment 215 fremont
apartments there's the entrance door the living room investigators obtained a search warrant
and found evidence of a cleanup in the master bedroom just as she described whenever law
enforcement sees bleach they think clean up crime scene clean up blood so you start peeling away the carpet and
when we pulled the carpet up there was a large reddish-brown stain that was on the back
of the carpet and into the padding on the floor this stain tested positive for human
blood and they found more blood elsewhere in the apartment not only was there blood in the bedroom
there was blood in the closet which was in some instances even more interesting how would a blood stain get
inside a closet analysts sprayed luminol in every room of the apartment and found
even more blood [Music] you just know that this is where something really bad and really violent
happened you immediately know that she was moved from here and taken into the closet and
laid in the closet because the one in the closet's the perfect size of a head with the tests that are in use today
throughout the world we have a sex determining link so we knew it was a female we had a full profile we had all 13
locations that we look at dna testing confirmed the blood was tamikas it just took all the life
out of me because i knew that uh hey my daughter was in an apartment and there was enough blood
that my daughter could have died the blood evidence and information provided by the young
woman gave investigators a picture of what happened he sticks her in a closet and goes and gets a girl and
has sex with her and enjoys a meal and then has to figure out how am i going to get this body out of
my apartment when investigators confronted chris hampton he initially had nothing to say
but he must have realized the weight of the evidence against him because he made police an offer he stands up and
he says let's go we said where we going are we going to the jail are we going are you going to show us
where she's at he says i'll show you where she's at hampton led investigators to a wooded
area about 12 miles away and pointed to the exact spot where he buried tamika's body
he said he was sure because he left a marker he just said that he made a cross out of
sticks that he found laying around on the ground and just laid him out on the ground in a cross
pattern in a shallow grave investigators found a woman's remains dental records confirmed it was tamika
houston it was really a difficult time for our entire family and to see my sister like suffer so much
you never really recover fully from from um losing someone in that way it's like somebody
taking a pitchfork that's burning and sticking it to your chest the side your heart is on
it's another way to describe this pain hampton told police that tamika stopped by his apartment while he was ironing
his clothes they got into an argument hampton said it was because he was seeing other women
hampton admitted he lost his temper and struck her in the head with his iron a tiny drop of blood landed on the
inside of his wallet blood also dripped onto the carpet the evidence shows hampton wrapped
tamika's body in the bed sheets and put it in the closet then he pulled his chest of drawers in
front of the closet door [Applause] hampton brought another woman back to his apartment
who saw the blood stain on the floor the next day hampton used a friend's car to transport tamika's body to the wooded
area where he buried her in a shallow grave hampton rented a carpet cleaner and removed as much blood as he could
although he couldn't remove everything large amounts of dna remained later when he abandoned tamika's car in
a nearby apartment complex he inadvertently dropped his own keys on the passenger side floor
[Music] a set of keys with a locksmith stamp that led straight to his front door
if we had not found out where that key went um we would probably still be looking for tomeka
i imagine that the police officer wanted to probably kiss this locksmith uh if not do more than
that when he said that yeah i recognized this key at first hampton claimed it was an
accident i'm not telling you that he premeditated it i'm telling you that he struck a blow with malice that
resulted in her death and if you doubt for one second whether or not that's true
look at what he did after it happened chris hampton changed his mind on the first day of his trial
are you guilty of the crime of murder yes sir christopher hampton pled guilty the
morning we were set to draw the jury and i was surprised he pled guilty we were ready had opening statement i
was going to try the case with another prosecutor in my office we were ready as a result hampton was convicted
and sentenced to life in prison without parole he came as close to getting away with it
as double a14 stamped on a key he came close to it the morals of the story are you don't know what the most
important piece of evidence is going to be until after the trial is over in this
case it happened to be a key which led you to a crime [Music] scene

In 2004, nursing student Tamika Huston went missing from her Spartanburg, South Carolina home. A tip led detectives to her car and they find an unknown house key that could help solve the case.

Brief Summary

Tamika Houston disappeared; Chris Hampton confessed to her murder after key evidence linked him to the crime.

Key points

Tamika Houston Disappears. Nursing student Tamika Houston vanishes, and her ex-boyfriend becomes the prime suspect.
Guilty Plea. Chris Hampton pleads guilty to murder just before the trial begins.
Discovery of Blood Evidence. Blood found in Chris Hampton's wallet leads to a breakthrough in the case.
Chris Hampton's Confession. Hampton leads police to Tamika's body after initially denying involvement.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

You don’t have a crime yet, what’s the crime?

0:18WatchMar 13, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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