Southside Strangler | S1 E6 | Forensic Files | FULL EPISODE | Forensic Files

[Applause] shortly after Thanksgiving in 1987 an intruder broke into the Tucker residence in Arlington
Virginia it might have been just another statistic but the crime committed that night launched a new era in police
investigations [Music] this is how DNA evidence and psychological profiling helped catch a
serial killer and set an innocent man free [Music] [Music] [Applause] everything about her was very gentle she
was very softspoken um just had this amazing softness about her um this human quality
44-year-old Susan Tucker was a Publications editor who worked for the United States forestry service she was
spending the Thanksgiving holiday alone since her husband Reggie was out of the country in Wales on a business trip
neither of us could put the phone down we kept saying I love you and we said this over and over again I don't
know how many times but without explanation telephone calls went unanswered and neighbors noticed her
bedroom window wide open in the cold November weather so they called police as they approached the front door they
noticed it was a jar inside a woman's purse was lying on the foyer floor I arranged call on the Monday couldn't get
an answer just just ran sucker I rang again I rang again I don't know how many times I
around Susan Tucker's badly decomposed body was lying face down on the bed dead she had been dead for four or 5 days her
hands were tied behind her back her feet were tied the head hanging over the side
of the bed almost she had been strangled and possibly raped it appeared that the
killer more than likely was was inside the home for for quite some time I mean it wasn't a just very you know quick in
andout type of a situation uh you know many of the the drawers had been you know ransacked had been gone through
when Reggie Tucker first first heard the news he was devastated she said sir I've
got bad news and I knew it I just knew it at that point I just you know my my whole
world just fell away Detective Joe horgus of the Arlington Police homicide unit was
quickly assigned to the case his task wouldn't be easy for for one thing the killer had been careful he had worn
gloves and left no fingerprints this has been White Plain it had been raining on
the night of the murder and he meticulously cleaned the area around his point of entry he's smart enough uh to
know that Footprints which is what we were we would have gotten from that would maybe come back to Hanam which
kind of tells you maybe some past experience on burglaries police collected the sheets night gown and the
large sleeping bag which covered Susan Tucker's body to look for possible blood and seon stains they found hairs on the
bedding around Susan Tucker's body in the bathroom sink and on a washcloth discovered outside on the clothes line
and they gathered shards of broken glass from the basement window everything was
taken to the forensics lab for analysis but perhaps the most important clue was all also the most obvious the rope and
Knots used to strangle Susan Tucker the police were convinced they had seen this
Killer's work before 3 years earlier a 34-year-old lawyer named Carolyn ham had been raped
and strangled in her home only four blocks away from Susan Tucker the killer entered the ham residence the same way
through a basement window and tied his victim using the same knots and it's not a common occurrence not not common at
all to see victims killed by using ligatures to strangle them uh ropes tying up victims um that's it's really
quite rare but the H case was closed when this man David Vasquez confessed to her murder and was sentenced to 35 years
in prison could he have had an accomplice Horus spoke to him for several hours and from the way he was
talking and everything and answering my questions I didn't think he knew a damn thing about Carolin H's murder while
detective horgus began his search for Susan Tucker's killer 100 miles away in the capital city of Richmond police
there were investigating a series of murders shockingly similar the body of 35-year-old Debbie Davis was found
inside her South Richmond apartment she'd been raped and stranged in less than a month two young women had been
raped and strangled in their homes just a few blocks from each other in each case there was a forced entry with the
murderer entering by cutting the screens and entering through an open window each
victim was strangled both victims were quite between the ages of 30 and 35 years 2 weeks later he struck again this
time a 15-year-old girl raped and strangled in her bedroom while her family was sleeping
all three had been bound raped and strangled with rope the knots were identical to the ones used in the
Arlington cases detective Horus suspected that the killer of Susan Tucker was the same man who murdered
Carol and ham and the three women in Richmond if horgus was correct a Serial murderer was loose on a 100m killing
spree detective horgus believed the man who raped and strangled Susan Tucker had
also murdered Carolyn ham 3 years earlier horgus also believed the same man was responsible for the three rapes
and murders in Richmond 100 miles away the Richmond police weren't so sure I mean they have three murders that were
within a couple Miles Square radius I I'm guessing or maybe even less uh that you know and and now we're
trying to say that a 100 miles away we're trying to link something to theirs it's like he get out of here I mean this
thought a local guy horgus was a man of he was the perfect man for this case because he was obsessed
he he was he knew something was wrong author Paul monz wrote a bestselling book entitled stalking Justice it
profiles the rapes and murders of these five women and the history-making investigation which followed Joe horgus
is motivated by by uh the uh the hunt he's not a guy who's obsessed by issues of right and wrong except for his own
internal moral compass which tells him if there's an innocent man in prison I don't care if we got the guilty guy we
got to get the innocent man out and he was determined to get this guy but if horgus was right that all of these
murders were connected he needed proof for that he turned to to the forensics lab where scientists were examining the
stains found on Susan Tucker's night gown and bedding I found four semen stains and when I analyzed the sleeping
bag I found one very large semen stain I typed all of those stains the Sean came
from an individual with type O blood and a pgm1 enzyme profile although this matched 133% of the population it also
matched the seen found at the carollyn ham murder scene next they turned their attention
to the hair found at the Tucker crime scene and there are characteristics microscopically that can classify hair
into one of three racial categories which are Caucasian negroid or the hairs found at the Tucker
crime scene appeared to be pubic and did not appear to be from the victim or her
husband they were positively identified as negroid in origin this was another possible link to the Carolyn ham murder
case 3 years earlier at the time of Ham's murder a black male wearing a mask had raped a number of women in the same
neighborhood the masked rapist was never apprehended and horgus always suspected
that there was a connection to the H murder actually the same day that Carolyn H's body was found another girl
lady uh was in her house uh and this black male with a mask and a knife uh Bur regiz her PL house got her and
actually uh he did some sexual activity with her the Richmond police and later the Arlington Police both sought help
from the FBI's Behavioral Science unit in Quantico Virginia this unit has interviewed hundreds of serial killers
to learn what similarities exist in their psychological makeup they were able to predict a number of important
things about the killer we get in look at the uh the behavior that's that's uh uh left by the offender in the
commission of his crime uh it's we believe that by looking at uh that behavior we can interpret the
type of offender uh that may have committed the crime the fact that the Strangler attacked his victims in their
homes suggested that he had stalked them first and knew precisely when to strike
the FBI concluded that the perpetrator was between the age of 18 and 30 the quiet type a loner who held a menial job
he probably had a troubled relationship with his mother and began his crimes free with arson historically many serial
rapists and murderers begin with arson serial killers are usually white but could be any race he lived or worked
close to where he committed his first crimes that's because criminals begin their crimes freeze in
an area where they feel most comfortable he took sadistic pleasure in strangling his victims he would
periodically release the bindings so he could hear his victim plead for her life
it appeared that the perpetrator had intended the victim to suffer considerably in one case a shoe
impression was found on the victim's back these w women were obviously first just terrified to the very bone and then
were systematically sexually assaulted and um uh you know at the end and it's not clear whether they were dead when he
did this or alive but he also masturbated on his victims and it was these Seaman samples which would prove
to be extremely important pieces of evidence I can remember a prosecutor Helen fahe a couple days after the
murder asking me if this was going to be a a DNA case and I'm kind of I don't know I we don't even know what we had
got yet in 1987 when Susan Tucker was murdered DNA evidence was still in its infancy the first time DNA evidence was
used in a criminal case was only a year earlier in England when DNA from a seaman sample was used to convict a
bakery worker with the rape and murder of two 15-year-old girls horgus decided to to try this new DNA testing sending
the seamen stains from Susan Tucker's night gown to the life codes laboratory in New York forensic scientists were
concerned that the samples may have degraded or been contaminated you basically isolate the
DNA you cut it up you generate profiles or patterns and you then generate these patterns on a piece of X-ray film so
it's like a picture of the DNA and when you then compare these pictures and the components are the same and the the two
dnas that would indicate that they're from the same Source the final results from the DNA tests would take up to 10
weeks but Detective horgus still didn't have a suspect detective horgus suspected that
the same individual who raped and murdered Susan Tucker and Carolyn Han 3 years earlier was the Mas rapist who was
committing crimes in the same area but was never caught so Horan drove out to an area of Arlington known as Green
Valley the area where the masked rapist committed his first assaults the FBI told horgus that rapists usually commit
their first crime close to home if the first rape was the first rape for this guy then he would have lived around
there and that was very crucial to me because I didn't I didn't know that and as he drove through Green Valley Horus
tried to recall the names or es of likely suspects young men he'd run across over the years who came from that
area and it just so happens that detective horgus uh started to focus on this one juvenile he he had dealt with I
remembered him he just couldn't place the name and all I could remember was Timmy I could see his face I remembered
the approximate time period and everything that he that I remembered him from but I
couldn't remember his last name so we running all these names to the computer scene when they had been locked up and
released and suddenly he just came in and he said Spencer Timothy Spencer that's the name and I saw where he was
arrested in on January the 29th 1984 which was four days after Carolyn H her body was found Spencer's history
unfolded in trouble as a teenager he had a string of burglary convictions and even more surprising just as the FBI
predicted Spencer had first drawn police attention for arson for setting fire to
his mother's car he was presently in a halfway house in Richmond well that wow that's exciting now Spencer was on
probation living in this halfway house just a short distance from where the Richmond murders took place and
according to House Records Spencer had been signed out during the Thanksgiving holiday visiting his mother in Arlington
the week Susan Tucker was murdered the fact that he got out of prison two weeks before the first murders down in
Richmond the fact that he was available for every murder the fact that he came to Arlington when he did for our murder
and the FBI was correct about another important detail Spencer lived in the area where the first rape was committed
and that happened over there and at the time Timothy Spencer was living down here over this hill Hill in his mother's
house barely a mile from the homes of Carolyn ham and Susan Tucker on January 20th 1988 police
arrested Timothy Spencer within hours they had collected a blood sample some of his hair and
confiscated his clothing for forensic analysis the clothing was scraped down for removing any debris in once that
debris was uh collected it was taken to a microscope several dozen particles of glass were removed from the debris that
was uh removed from his clothing the glass fragments were of particular interest to the
police after police recovered glass particles from Spencer's clothing they were examined forensically to see if
they matched glass from any of the victim's homes one technique is called glass GL refraction analysis by Shining
Light from different points on the Spectrum through the particles the characteristics of the glass can be
plotted on a graph in effect measuring how the particles bend light if you stick the pin into the water which is
more dense than the air it bends the light what we're doing with the glass particle basically is measuring how much
the light is bent in a refract and we call it refractive index they compared the glass fragments found on Spencer's
clothing to the glass particles taken from the broken window at Susan Tucker's home we were able to say that that glass
that was removed from Spencer's clothing either came from that particular pain or
that particular source of glass or another source of glass that had the same Optical characteristics when
scientists completed the DNA analysis of the Seaman stain found at the Susan Tucker crime scene they made a chilling
Discovery and I remember pointing out an x-ray film from the from the developer and holding it up from these two
separate cases and being you know bombarded immediately that the patterns I'm seeing are the same I'm seeing the
same profile on this case from one County versus this case from a second County which says to me that same the
same person's involved in both of those incidents really gave you chills up and down your spine to see something like
that horgus was right all along the Seaman sample from the individual who raped and presumably murdered Susan
Tucker matched the Seaman stains from the murders in Richmond there were seven hairs there were consistent with his
there was a glass fragment that was consistent with his his family couldn't provide him with a complete Alibi for
the entire weekend and finally Timothy Spencer's blood DNA was compared to the Seaman samples from The Crime Victims
once we got a sample from uh Mr Spencer to test uh we generated a profile that was the same as the profile we got from
the evident samples we had a frequency of occurrence of greater than one in a million so that means that only one
person in a million in the population would have that particular genetic profile and starting with the first
result the blood type it was a match it was a match it was a match it was a match on July 11th
1988 Timothy Spencer went on trial for his life it was the first time in the United States where DNA evidence would
be used in a Serial murder case it took the jury less than 7 hours to find Timothy Spencer guilty of rape and
capital murder he was sentenced to death I feel some kind of relief uh but I'll never have my wife
back know that's that's really the bottom line is I'll never really feel happy I can't feel happy about
somebody being guilty of raping and murdering my wife I can't feel happy about that so whatever anger I feel I
will feel till I [Music] die death was pronounced by the attending position at 1113 p.m. there
were no complications Mr Spencer did not make a last statement thank you up until
his death I don't think the Timothy Spencer made the connection between Sean and
blood I don't think he knew that the same DNA that's in your semon is in your blood without DNA it would have been
impossible to convict Timothy Spencer he if he had committed those murders a year
or two years earlier he could not have been convicted in fact if this had been 1984 or
1985 we probably would not even have arrested him some people ask the question will DNA fingerprinting replace
detective work I don't think so Susan Tucker left detective horgus the crime scene and Timothy Spencer um left part
of himself at the crime scene but his name would never have come up if it wasn't for Detective horgus
[Music]

With the use of DNA profiling, an innocent man is freed and the real killer is convicted.

Brief Summary

Detective Joe Horgus uses DNA evidence to solve Susan Tucker's murder and catch serial killer Timothy Spencer.

Key points

The Murder of Susan Tucker. In 1987, Susan Tucker was found dead in her home, leading to a groundbreaking investigation.
DNA Evidence in Court. Timothy Spencer's trial marked a historic moment in the use of DNA evidence in the U.S.
Reggie Tucker's Heartbreak. Reggie Tucker reflects on the loss of his wife and the impact of her murder.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I just knew it at that point, my whole world just fell away.

Reggie Tucker's reaction to the news of his wife's death.

3:08WatchMar 4, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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