Listen up, true crime fans this New Year resolve to add more mystery to your lives with Killer Millionaires', an all new season of HLN Vengeance. Follow the clues as real life millionaires literally make a killing and face the consequences. They may have money for yachts, fast cars and mansions, but money doesn't always buy them a happy ending this new year. Forget planning the fatten your bank account or eat healthy. Here's one resolution you can actually keep tune in for an all new season of Vengeance Killer Millionaires'.

The premiere episode starts Sunday, January 3rd, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern on HLN. She just was the last person who should have ever died like that one summer night. A life comes to a sudden end. I get very worried. She had been targeted.

The suspect knew the victim, but the trail grew cold. I remember one detective saying to me, we just have to wait until he kills again.

It was decades before someone took another look. The whole goal in these cases is just trying to see the thing that's hiding in plain sight, the clues, a weapon, a wedding invitation, a midnight sale to nowhere, he stalked her.

My sister was afraid. I was 100 percent confident that he was our guy. A determined prosecutor faces off against O.J. Simpson's attorney, did it give you pause? I'm on the right side. Would a jury agree? It's been. A long journey. He was alone and its makeshift workshop. Had to be for what he intended carefully, he cut the length of a broom handle, two of them just a few inches, each sanded them down, drilled a hole in each one, found a piece of wire to string between them to thin.

He doubled it for strength is perfect weapon for his perfect crime. Outside in the brilliant sunshine, it was the summer of 1979. Aid hadn't happened to us yet, nor the Internet, nor cell phones, nor a way to read DNA, all of those things were still years away. Everybody worried about Three Mile Island that summer.

The Iranian hostage crisis was still months away.

And in southern California in the summer of seventy nine, in the beach towns that cling to the coast near L.A., 20 somethings came from all over to work to play the practice and art as old as humans.

That is new was last night making the area had a ski clad snow skiing, water skiing, volleyball, all sorts of outdoor activities.

Richard Frank was 30 to that summer. He published an independent community newspaper.

But on weekends we do bus trips and guys are trying to meet girls and hit on people. It was a lot of fun.

One woman in particular got Richard Zie. We had a thing called Snow Queen and she was running for Snow Queen and she didn't win. But she was a very outgoing and gregarious, almost tomboy kind of person. Attractive. Her name was Lynne Knight, she was a neonatal nurse who, like so many here, came from somewhere else in her case, a pretty place called Stratford, not far from Toronto, Canada. She was a beautiful, beautiful person.

This is Leanne, Sister Donna. She was Jim Carey before Jim Carey was ever rude. She did the goofy stuff and everywhere people would be in stitches.

Nurses, whether funny and beautiful or not, were in great demand in the 70s. Lynn could have gone anywhere or stayed close to home like her sister Donna, also a nurse, chose to do.

I had such difficulty when she was going to go to California. I did not want her to go. But she did moved into a tiny studio apartment tacked onto the back of somebody's garage here in suburban Torrance. And she signed up at the hospital called Little Company of Mary, where she went to work with the smallest patients of all, the most vulnerable premature babies.

Those were her babies. She took her job very seriously.

She would arrive early. She would do double shifts.

All of Lynn's hard work paid off. The hospital considered her one of its top employees. She was a finalist in a nursing contest called Miss Red Rose. How she did it all is a wonder, worked hard and played hard.

She would work midnight shift so and then sleep for about three or four hours and then she'd be gone and scuba diving, marathoning running, you name it. Lynn was the most incredible tomboy ever.

And one more thing. She loved the company of men. Many of them, perhaps most of them were just friends, some more than that.

A number of them were racquetball players or skiers or whatever. So she had a lot of male friends because she was competitive in racquetball.

So they were more friends and they were romantic partners. Yeah, yeah. She only went out really with professionals and good looking professionals. And then, of course, she met Richard Frank.

We hit it off pretty quickly. We dated pretty heavily for a couple of months.

Could be confusing, of course, for Richard. Not many young women with as many male friends as the crowd of them that hovered around Lynn, her sweethearts, as she called them.

One of the things was trying to find out where I fit in her life. But with Richard, there's been told her sister it was romance. Well, she perhaps a little too intense. Richard's thirty two year old single self. Yes, she was.

It was a little too much in the beginning. Even her sister Donna said that. And so I kind of cut it off. So she was just a little gone too fast. Is that.

Yeah, yeah. But love has a way of circling back toward the end of that summer of 79 after they've been apart for a while, they ran into each other again on a water skiing trip.

I saw her and we started talking and we decided, you know, OK, let's go out. And it was like for me was is this the one that got away? And then it was August 29, a warm summer evening outside Lindze Little studio apartment on Enza Avenue. Quiet, calm, not a breath of wind.

Lynn was cooking Chinese food. She had company, a male friend who'd come for dinner, a male friend who was not Richard Frank. No, this was an ex-boyfriend named Joe Giarrusso.

After dinner, Lynn and Joe drank some wine, talked about what we cannot know.

And then at 11, 30 or so, he left and Lynn went to bed. Early shift at the hospital. Outside the street was silent Wednesday, ticked into Thursday. That's when the neighbors heard it couldn't help but hearing a high pitched scream. And it came from Lynn Knight's little apartment. It was a scream that would echo down through the years and change so many lives. My whole world crashed in 35 years later. The scene in that apartment would still leave a hardened homicide detective in tears.

The scream was almost beyond human, shrill, harrowing, echoing through the quiet neighborhood on another avenue.

The man next door called nine one one, I guess many would scream, you know who lives there midnight.

Majorettes police arrived minutes later, the little apartment was quiet again and Lin Knight was dead, lying on her bed in a pool of blood. Detective Amelio Borel's had never seen anything quite like it. Just terrible bloody.

And I can't find other words to describe it other than horrific.

So horrific, said lead detective Gary Hilton, that even now talking about it is difficult not to excuse me. Yeah, out of all the ones that I worked, it was the toughest. No wonder the victim had been stabbed more than a dozen times, pointing toward what rage, the desire to see this particular individual dead good and dead good and dead.

But there was another set of wounds that detectives couldn't quite figure out at first, deep cuts on her neck, which may have explain the horrifying sound that woke up Lynn's neighbors.

How do they describe that screaming of.

A squeal. A loud squeal. After he heard that in a neighbor, he caught a glimpse of the man who might have been the killer, a slender young man with dark, curly hair. Not much to go on. He looked at the back of the suspect as he ran down the driveway into the street, carrying something as small satchel.

They couldn't have been much inside that little black bag because very little was taken from Lin's apartment, only her wallet, her keys and one particular piece of jewelry. She had a necklace on with a pendant at the scene. We found the broken clasp and the pendant, but no chain, no chain. But the killer left something of his own behind. Something detectives didn't notice until the coroner moved Lynn's body.

It appeared to be a homemade device used to strangle a victim was cut off portions of what appeared to be a broom or a mop handle and a piece of wire going between the two. Yes. So there was some planning involved? Oh, there's a great deal of planning involved. That's the homemade garrote I got. Right. Detective Gary Hilton hadn't seen one of those since he served in Vietnam and certainly never at a crime scene. But now he understood why Lynn's neck was cut so deeply.

Did he actually put it around her neck?

Yes, overkill.

And that would be an understatement, that it was time for what was perhaps the most difficult part of all of this, making the phone call to Lynn's family, her little Stratford, Ontario, a family which until that very moment had assumed that their precocious daughter was perfectly safe saving babies in Los Angeles when sister Donna was just getting off her shift at a Toronto hospital, got a call from my brother in law and he was like gulping for air and having, you know, practically out of his skin.

And he said that I hate to have to tell you, but Lynn's been stabbed to death. And it was like. It was such a sad day, it's not something you ever would expect to hear, no matter what. No, no, no. It was like my whole world crashed in and that was it. It was completely life altering.

My life has never, ever been the same since Donna was 26, only recently out of nursing school. How do you even take a thing like that in. Oh, you don't. Because you go like it's like totally out of body. You go into shock. It's complete shock. It's like also a great big hole in your chest.

Who would have done such a thing to lean the kind and compassionate nurse? Not an enemy in the world.

But then before dawn, a concrete lead, police saw someone suspicious running in Lounds neighborhood, the same guy, the neighbor saw the suspect running from the location carrying a black bag.

They picked him up and by the look of it, with blood literally on his hands. A clue found in the strangest place I saw this wedding invitation, it was crumpled up in the trash. A party Lynn would never get a chance to attend. Who threw out the invitation and why? Sometimes cops get lucky.

This was recorded in the predawn hours of August 30th, 1979, just after the brutal murder of Lynn Knight 23 years earlier last year in a patrol unit detained and arrested an individual who was acting strangely nearby.

Looked like he had blood on it. He did. His name was Gerardo Juarez, and he appeared to match a description of the man seen running away from Lin's apartment. So they held Juarez for questioning. But before they got to that, they had to finish processing the crime scene and Lynn's apartment.

I found evidence of blood smears in the house. It looked like it was caused by gloves and there was no DNA. Of course, back then we didn't have DNA. All the blood found was consistent with the victim. Remember, this was 1979, years before the advent of DNA. Fingerprints were still the gold standard back then, but only Lynn's prints were identified in her apartment. The others could not be traced back to the murder and that apparent murder weapon.

The garrote was clean of prints, so there was planning a lot of it and immense brutality. But burglary? No, only small personal items were taken. Detectives Perez and Hilton are pretty sure it could mean only one thing. The suspect knew the victim. She had been targeted, and I say that because the location was quite removed from the street, it was not a place where there were passers by, someone would have to know how to go back there in order to reach the door.

So the detectives went back to the Torrance P.D. to talk to their possible suspect, Gerardo, whereas he insisted he didn't know Lin had never even seen her. They had no reason to kill her. A search of his home turned up nothing. And that blood on his hands and clothes had proved not to be blood. But was it could have been something like paint, dirt, mud. We just simply couldn't tie him to the crime scene. So much for that break.

Gerardo Juarez was released and for the moment at least, they were nowhere. A few days after the murder, a small funeral was held in Stratford, Ontario. They'd been planning to have a wedding, then Donna's wedding. Lynn was supposed to have been here alive as her sister's maid of honor. They dressed her in her maid of honor dress.

I remember feeling such anger to whoever did that.

For my sister. My parents. Watching my parents grieve. What is he doing to my baby? The coroner's report answered some questions. An autopsy determined the garrote did not kill Lin. She died of stab wounds and the report revealed something else, traces of two semen samples. But again, DNA testing was not available back then, so they could not attach identities to those semen samples.

So you began to talk to everybody. That's where we started, the circle of friends, acquaintances, her job, anybody that knew her, including all her current and former boyfriends, racquetball partners, ski buddies, work colleagues. We needed time to develop a little bit of background on all of the various players so that we'd have some idea what questions to ask. And any one of them could have been the one anyone.

I knew Richard Frank had already called the police to offer his help and was pretty quickly eliminated. He had an alibi, but what about that old flame, Joe Jiru? So he was without a doubt in Lynn's apartment just hours before she was killed. The neighbors had seen him there eating dinner. Joe told the detectives Lynn was fine when he left about midnight. Didn't that make you think that he might be a suspect?

Oh yeah.

He was, of course, somebody we had to investigate immediately. So they took Joe in for questioning. He, too, seemed very forthcoming. And if he wasn't deeply upset about what happened to Lynn, he was putting on a good act until the detectives noticed something strange on his fingers. Several cuts. He insisted they happened at work in a lab where he dropped a test tube. He would never hurt Lynn. He told them that no reason for jealous rage.

He was in a relationship with another woman and was still visiting our victim and apparently were friends by the time Lynn was murdered, said Joe, he was in bed with his girlfriend. What to make of the story until his alibi could be checked out.

Joe Giarrusso remained the only possible suspect at this time. When the investigation had been underway for almost two weeks, the Knight family flew to L.A. for the grim task of packing Lynn's personal belongings.

We felt. We really this is not nice to say, but we hated America for what happened to Lynn and we didn't want anybody touching her stuff.

And so we as a team cleaned up her place and it was a really hard job. They collected all her keepsakes and mementos, even her financial records, which said a lot about them. The sum in her bank was all of 18 dollars because she paid for scuba diving lessons and you name it, she just did it. She was packing in every activity she could possibly pack in.

So she really lived a lot in those 28 years.

But there was one thing Donna didn't find something that was quite special to both sisters, the invitation to her upcoming wedding. And then Detective Hilton remembered he spotted it in a wastebasket, though he didn't collect it as evidence.

I saw this wedding invitation that was crumpled up. Didn't seem like a big deal. Now it's just a wedding invitation. Had her name on it and it was crumpled up in the trash.

And that's when we went in. Wouldn't do that. My grandparents picture was right there, their wedding pictures. So we knew something wasn't right and also course crumpled up. Who else? So I have the motive to crumple it up.

Somebody who was ticked off that they weren't coming to this wedding ticked off enough to actually kill Lynn Knight. Who was it who was left off the guest list? An old boyfriend tells a startling story, is it also a valuable clue? It's almost surreal knowing that the incident happened and may be related somehow to the crime. This was home, lovely little Stratford, Ontario, where Lynn Knight grew up, the place she intended to return for her sister, Donna's impending wedding, no wedding.

Now, we had to cancel the wedding and it was just so horrible. You know, wedding supposed to be a happy time and nothing happy about those days.

No. But the wedding did offer an odd clue of sorts, Lynne's invitation, which had been found, crumpled up in her wastebasket. The question was, would she have called it up or thrown it in the trash, or did the suspect do it?

The detectives were convinced that Lynn's killer knew her, hated her, maybe wanted revenge for something. Donna couldn't imagine who that might be, who would slaughter an.

Somebody that to that degree, if they didn't have a motive, a hatred, something two weeks into the investigation, the only potential suspect was Lynn's former boyfriend, Joe Giarrusso.

He was with her just hours before she died. He had cuts on his fingers and then the detectives discovered something else and he had a physical altercation with Lin. At some point, there was a situation where she was beaten up.

So they brought Joe back in, grilled him again. He swore it wasn't a beating at all, but a minor thing, a slap during an argument. And afterwards, he and Lin remained close friends. Besides Joe and his girlfriend, they were in bed together when the murder happened. They volunteered to take a polygraph and they both passed.

And soon after that, Joe Giarrusso, who, after all, didn't look anything like the man the neighbor saw after the attack, was eliminated as a suspect. In fact, one by one, just about all of Lynn's male friends came up clean and seemed to want to do whatever they could to help find her killer. They all had good things to say. I thought that was unusual, to talk to 12 men who dated her or newer and nobody had a bad word.

And that, of course, included her athletic new beau, Richard Frank, who had rekindled his romance with Lynn just a week before her murder.

It was it's devastating. It's it's almost surreal knowing that the incident happened and maybe it related somehow to the crime.

The incident, Richard, told police about a bizarre encounter he and Lynn had a couple of months earlier at her apartment.

A guy she once dated stopped by to drop off a lamp he had borrowed when he to the effect.

Excuse me. Thank you. And he left.

But minutes later, he was back and he comes in and he starts yelling at her and he's calling her a whore and took the lamp and threw it over our heads and was pretty violent with all of this.

And then left, you can hear the tires squeal.

What was that all about? And she explained it to somebody that she's been trying to cut it off with.

Lynn told Richard that the guy's name was Doug and they dated for a few months. But just the day before Richard came to call, she broke it off. Apparently, Doug didn't take it so well that particular night. Do you remember her reaction then? Obviously, she was scared. Was it scary to you, too? I was concerned. I was concerned for Lynn in the days that followed.

The incident seemed to be forgotten, at least as far as Lynn was concerned.

And she had this calming way of taking big things and making small things out of her. She was in control. Later on, she explained that, you know, she calmed him down on the phone a couple of times. And after that incident. Yeah, and she thought it was kind of taken care of.

Detectives were intrigued. They found Lynn's address book in her purse. Only one Doug Doug Bradford.

They asked Donna about him and she vaguely remembered something Lynn mentioned in a letter saying that Doug was no longer coming to the wedding, OK, and that he was on the back burner.

And I just sort of put it out of my mind because I had all this wedding. And to organize, I knew obviously he didn't light or fire too much. This was the first bit of heat on a cold trail. They gave dog a call. He lived with his parents.

He sounded shy but agreed to meet at the house where it turned out Doug Bradford had a lot to say.

It's the kind of trick cops always used in the movies. Not going to tell them that she's dead. See if it works in real life. It was a less congested drive in those days back in 79. The crews down the freeway from Torrance to Costa Mesa, California.

This, the working class midsection of sprawling Orange County detectives Gary Hilton and Emilio Perez parked in front of a modest house where a 27 year old engineering student named Doug Bradford lived with his parents.

He seemed somewhat meek, somewhat soft spoken, kind of a neatnik, sort of a guy, nerdy kind of character. You could say that an engineering type of person.

Nothing about Doug Bradford made him look or sound or act like a potential suspect. He was clearly a smart and pretty civilized guy. Now, the only cool thing about Doug was his car, a bright orange, 280 Z, lust worthy back in 79.

Still, according to Richard Frank, this same Doug had engaged in a very uncivilized land throwing tantrum and Lynn's apartment.

So he was a guy they had to look at. Besides, at some point, Glen was something of a big deal in Doug's life.

She had spent Easter at his home with his family. They were fairly close. The fact that he would have introduced land to his family is just somewhat telling.

This is a serious relationship. I think he wanted it to be.

Lynn, too, apparently. Why else would she have invited him to tag along to her sister Donna's wedding up in Canada? So knowing that much way back of the freeway, a bit something else you need to know.

Gary Hilton's detective mind was oddly creative, sometimes in ways other cops didn't quite get. Hilton knowing the case, hadn't got much news coverage, hatched a plan on the way to the interview.

We're not going to tell them that she's dead and that we were there investigating a missing person, just a friendly chat about a missing woman, missing ex-girlfriend, if he was involved in the murder, how might he react to that? Gives something away. Maybe there was no giving of Miranda rights when he was in his own home. He was voluntarily cooperating. He could have stopped the interview at any time, but he opted not to do that.

He wanted to speak and he did so as the detectives. What did they do when they dated he?

And then we go out to dinner, quite a bit of evening wine took her sailing. We went skiing locally here, go out and go dancing.

As for the relationship, it was exclusive. Sit down more or less to go out with other men and well, not to the best of my knowledge. At least when I was dating her, she used to kid me and say, no, you know, you don't have anything to worry about that. Yeah, I guess she might have gone out and met with Lynn.

It was just fun. Said back active. Lots of laughs. But he never did consider Lynn to be the love of his life.

And sure enough, he said she wasn't, as you say, which one of the two of you was more decisive about breaking off the relationship? I think that was more decisive. I was just kind of going along with it when I saw that the relationship was going to come to an end. That became very obvious out in Palm Springs one weekend, a few months into their relationship, said it just didn't seem to be clicking anymore and we decided we should go our own way and that that was the last thing Mr.

.

But wait, unless Richard Frank was lying, Doug showed up at Lynn's place the very next day to return a lamp, saw Richard and flew into a rage throwing the lamp across the room. So what about that? They asked Doug. There was no rage at all, he said. Disappointment, maybe? Well, I don't know if I was really mad, I was just more upset about it, you know, jumping from one relationship. Next time I want a at.

And then Doug said something kind of strange. Remember, the Detective Hilton had decided not to tell Doug that Lynn was dead, rather that she was missing. Listen to this.

I don't even want to tell her, you know, I want to see you again. She's dead and put on and she's dead.

Why would he say that? The cops didn't follow up. Worried Bradford might clam up. Then, as detectives were about to grill Bradford concerning his whereabouts the night Lynn supposedly went missing, an unfortunate surprise.

The tape recorder started making some strange sounds. Oh, boy. And when it failed, we had to stop.

So they waited a few days, did some research, and Doug Bradford discovered he liked to play jazz on the piano, was an expert sailor in addition to his engineering studies and his tinkering. He liked to make things. He was accomplished, however, didn't like him much. Not a good fit for Lynn.

I can see why she would have not wanted to go with Bradford because it wasn't her usual type, but it was a rebound relationship.

But what mattered now was Doug's alibi, if he had one, so detectives drove down to Costa Mesa again, worried he'd refuse to see them or demand a lawyer, but he didn't.

Instead, Doug Bradford told them a story of his own, which put him miles and miles from the murder of Lynnae. Doug Bradford's alibi, so much so that know he saw on that show the. Torrance police detectives were a little surprised Doug Bradford agreed to talk to them a second time. Here they were back in Costa Mesa with their new recorder. Again, Doug described how he and Lynn had once been close, how he liked to buy her presents, a necklace.

Well, actually, I didn't give it to her. I helped by it because she paid for how that caught the cop's attention.

A necklace which just happened to be the one piece of jewelry that appeared to be missing from Lynn's apartment pendant and clasper collected but no chain. Interesting. But now the real reason they were here to find out where Doug was the night Lynn was murdered, I spoke on Wednesday night, could become a little closer.

Well, I was hearing most of the evening. I mean, I went up to Long Beach and. That he'll be sailing in the wee hours of the morning in the dark alone out there on the Pacific Ocean.

Odd, maybe, but after all, Doug belonged to a local sailing club, so he had access to a sailboat any time he wanted one that night, said Doug. He took out a 30 foot sloop, a special type of racing boat known as a shields.

You're to change that night. Well, it started off on sailing that coming back from that part of the world. And they don't think anybody in their life back then, no one could have been moved over to Guam, which was right around the time Lyn was murdered.

Let's hope that, you know, he was on the show this morning, think this going out by himself on a 30 foot sloop with no motor, right?

No motor. No no auxiliary power, as he put it.

I knew Doug was an expert, skipper, said he knew how to paddle the shield, but the detectives didn't like it. This too perfect, too weird alibi.

It didn't make sense to me then and it doesn't make sense to me now. So they paid a visit to the boat club where Doug claimed to have set sail that night. We obtained one of the records showing that he had signed out for the boat.

They asked another skipper was a 30 foot shields, a boat a skilled sailor could handle alone. And his comment was, oh, yeah, you could.

Hmm, yeah, you could sell this by yourself.

So that was the alibi. I penciled Mark in a sailboat schedule book and Doug's claim that he sailed alone that night, he could never come up with anybody who actually saw him take the boat out.

No, he said he was the only one there.

Maybe nobody saw Doug sailing, but there were reports he was seen driving in front of Lynn's apartment just days before the murder.

Now, that was interesting because remember, Doug told detectives he cut off all contact with LAN after their breakup. So they checked with Lynn's neighbors and showed them a photo of Doug and his two A.D.s.

And I got a witness to identify Mr. Bradford as the person who had been seen driving back and forth in front of the residence, looking up the driveway.

He wouldn't leave her alone. He wouldn't leave her alone. As a matter of fact, he stalked her, stalked her before the murder.

Which might explain, said her sister, Donna Wilin stayed with a number of male friends for several nights before the murder.

I know that the last week of her life, it looks like she, you know, slept with a lot of men. And that's not true. When I look at the pattern, my sister was afraid. She was scared.

So maybe drugs to A.D.s would yield a clue for detectives.

They got a warrant, but that was just as clean as a whistle. There was no evidence in it at all. None that we were able to recover. And there was no blood found. There was no sign of of anything there. And whoever attacked her would have been covered with blood. You would conclude that.

Yes, but the cops couldn't help but notice the smell in that two eighty Z when they opened it up.

Just an overwhelming smell of Armorel. It had just been cleaned. Hetu It was a clean car.

And after that there was no talking to Doug Bradford anymore.

And I received a phone call from an attorney, said he was representing Doug Bradford and told me, don't do anything with regard to my client unless you call me first. It seemed pretty clear that you're after him. He was number one, as I put it.

So the detectives took their case to the D.A. with a request to charge Doug Bradford with murder. But all the district attorney has pretty much said there is just wasn't enough.

Yeah, they needed that. They call it the smoking gun.

We were sent back and told to do additional investigation and bring it back, which they did.

But always the answer was the same. That hurt. That hurt.

Well, you couldn't put that guy in that room on that night, Drew.

It was heavily circumstantial. It wasn't just the detectives who were disappointed, Donna was convinced Doug Bradford killed her sister, but she wasn't holding your breath for justice to be done.

I said to my mum, there's not going to be arrest for 20, 25 years or more. I just know Mum just get used to it. It's not going to happen. She was certainly right about that after three years in 1982, the investigation into the murder of Lin Knight was classified as inactive, a nice way of saying it was over and no one saw the tantalizing clue hiding in plain sight.

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Hi, I'm Mike Hicks Ball, NBC News national investigative reporter and host of Do No Harm and original podcast from NBC News. And wondering over the last six episodes, we pulled back the curtain on a medical and legal system that's committed to protecting children and what happens when that system goes too far. I'm excited to tell you about a special bonus episode of Do No Harm that's now available.

I talk with Laura Beale, host of Wonderings hit podcast Dr. Death, about what I've learned about the child welfare system.

You'll also hear the emotional moment when the two mothers at the center of the story talk for the first time, nobody walking down the street but know what we've been through, you know, because we still smile, we're upset and we're hurt. I know I'm hurt. I feel like a lot of my trust has been broken.

I felt like I was spanking them while they were taking my kids and looking back and like, what was I doing?

Because you don't know, search for it, do no harm wherever you're listening right now to listen to this special bonus episode and subscribe to the series. It's a terrible thing when a murder goes unsolved, justice undone, especially a murder as vicious and intentional as what happened to Lynn Knight in her Tony Torrence apartment in the summer of 79.

Lynn's family up in Canada could scarcely stand it.

Every time you think about it, you shot her. And then it's like Niagara Falls and you're at the bottom and it's all coming at you at a terrible, horrible, horrible experience.

She just was the last person who should have ever died like that.

As the 80s rolled out their own catalog of horrors, AIDS, drugs, urban decay, rampant and growing crime, Donna fought to keep her sister's memory from sinking under the weight of so many other troubles. She wrote letters, lots of them, and enlisted Lynn to help.

I got that nice picture of Lynn and I pasted there and I thought, Sell yourself, Lynn. Here goes. I'm just going to send it. And you set them where I was a governor. The FBI.

I have nothing to lose. You even wrote to Ronald Reagan. Yes. That I got to go to key decision makers.

But she was shouting in the wind, Detectives Hilton and Pareles retired, not happy about what they left behind. This one weighed on on me for quite a long time.

It nags you in the back of your head. You don't want to leave a homicide case undone.

That's just. This wrong lead detective Gary Hilton second guessed himself endlessly, still does, I could have been a little bit more done, a little bit more. I just got to know Lin Knight just a little personally. Too bad I didn't know where in life.

Occasionally, a new set of detectives would dust off the file and tell Donna they were optimistic about cracking.

So it was just like, oh, here we go again. But I remember one detective saying to me, oh, we just have to wait until he kills again.

And I went, no, no, this is not going to happen, this is not going to happen. There has got to be an answer.

And Doug Bradford, the man cops long suspected of murdering Lynne, he did quite well for himself, owned a successful high tech company, a nice house in California, had a young wife.

And Richard Frank, remember him, the mandoline started seeing again just days before her death. He, too, had moved on, got married, raised a family, owned a successful newspaper business, but occasionally thought about it. And what happened? I drove by the neighborhood a lot because I worked in that area. So that would be a constant reminder. You just wondered. Yeah, I'd call the detectives every once in a while. Anything new?

Nearly two decades went by. It was 1997. Someone found a little extra money for the Torrance Police Department to open a cold case unit.

When we first up in this detail, we started looking at about 30 cases. And this is one of the very first ones we did.

And that's when Detective Jim Wallis heard about Leon from her sister. Donna Wallace likes to work crimes with his brain. He's cerebral.

But what he saw that file here to the baser level, the cases I've worked, I'm not going to tell you this is the most horrific, powerful, terrifying. Crime scene I've ever seen, there's something about the horror that Lynn went through that was still evident in the crime scene, that ghost of this scene was still there.

The ghosts maybe, but virtually no hard evidence.

So Wallace went back to the beginning and took a good look at Lin and the company she kept.

Wallace reinterviewed all of Lynn's surviving boyfriends. They were very happy with the kind of relationship they had with Lynn, and everyone would tell you that except for two about whom they couldn't know. Joe Giarrusso, the man she invited in for dinner the last night of her life, had since died a way to talk to him. And then there was Doug Bradford, the ex-boyfriend who threw the lamp and was seen driving your apartment the days before her murder and had offered that odd alibi about sailing and paddling a 30 foot sleep in the middle of the night.

I think there's always a rational element in these kinds of circumstantial cases because anything is possible, but not anything is reasonable. And this case was one of those where you really had to ask, is it possible that somebody would go out on a boat at 10, 30 at night? Oh, absolutely. Is that reasonable? No one else could see why the initial investigation focused on Bradford, but it wouldn't be easy, which he knew was catnip for Deputy District Attorney John Lewis.

The cases that I enjoy are lots of little pieces, and if I get too big of a piece, it's not as as challenging, you know, to work.

So Louann read the file, too. And right away it looked to him like Joe Giarrusso could have been the killer.

But then he listened to those original nineteen seventy nine interviews with Doug Bradford, who did OK, but I was one hundred percent confident that he was our guy.

It wasn't just the fact that his statement was so creepy and so incriminating. It was when you mix that with his alibi, it was absurd, the fact that he was the only person in her life that had motive, but proving it creepy and absurd or not exactly legal terms.

His boss, the district attorney, would laugh looking out of his office if he didn't come up with something new to connect Bradford to the crime. So bit by bit over years, Lewontin and Wallace and his partner worked the case like a big jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. But one didn't quite fit such a brutal crime committed by a dirty engineer.

One of the big problems that I had was when you looked at Doug Bradford, he looked like a normal regular guy who could live next door. Sure, this is a guy who builds a weapon to go over to murder and then mutilate someone after they're dead.

In my 20 years of doing this, one of the worst scenes I've ever encountered, that weapon, the homemade wire and wood garage, had been a mute resident of the evidence locker for a long, long time. Wallace couldn't stop looking at it as if it could talk. The whole goal in these cases, right, is trying to see the thing that's hiding in plain sight. So the is Garet was made with wooden dowels that were connected by a very thin piece of wire, a double strand weight double.

Why would you double it?

Because apparently you recognize this is so thin, it's probably going to break it is by itself. So why not just use thicker water? Well, that makes sense to me that you're using something that's available to you that's not ideal, but you happen to have it on hand, so I'll just settle for it.

Same thing with the handles like the killer cut pieces from a household room.

We could see forensically blue specks of paint that have almost been sent it off completely, but not completely. So I'm just thinking this looks like something that you're making from available materials. And that's what gave us the idea, wow, maybe these available materials are just junk that's still lying around. Let's just take a look and see.

Doug Bradford moved out of that house years earlier, but his elderly mother still lived there.

Is it possible that some of the simple building materials you would use to build a garage might still be tucked away in some old drawer stuck on the side of the garage? It's worth a look.

Anyway, Wallace and his partner ran the idea by Deputy D.A. Louann John, who liked it.

The best case scenario, can we actually find, you know, the same wire, the same darling? Right. And two thousand seven, they serve the warrant.

But really, by then, nearly three decades have passed. So what in the world would they find in that little house in Costa Mesa? Something old, what are the odds of anyone keeping that that long? Something new she would know about his relationship with land? Some people are just really bad at taking a know the time won't take no for an answer. By the time the Christmas lights went up in Torrance, California, end of 2007, Lenn Knight had been lying in the cold Canadian ground for 28 years.

A renewed murder investigation had gone and empty circles for a decade. And though neither did John Louann nor Detective Jim Wallace seemed capable of giving up on it. Look at this. They couldn't charge Doug Bradford with murder based on mere suspicion. So one last effort, they got a warrant to warrants, actually, first, Wallace and his partner went to pay a surprise visit to Doug Bradford's current house with a hidden microphone.

They asked him about Linn's case.

I would have guessed that was solved. I hadn't heard anything. So I wondered if we could have a few moments to see what you remember from back in 79. Well, I've been advised by counsel not to have any further discussions about that. Oh, really?

Which was just the reaction the detectives expected.

So they showed him their search warrant and set about poking around, snapped a few pictures of the place, including one of Doug sitting and steaming in his living room. They found several firearms, all legal and in a file cabinet, two articles on polygraph tests, odd.

Back in seventy nine, Doug initially agreed to take one and then changed his mind.

And then right next to that file was another file that had a brochure on a crossbow. And then even more disturbing, literally a manual on how to Homebake, how to build a crossbow.

So again, that was interesting, except he didn't make a crossbow. Well, what it showed was whether he made the crossbow or not. I'm pretty confident if I came into your house right now. Yeah, I would not find manuals on how to make exotic weapons.

But there was nothing in Doug's house related to that other exotic weapon.

The. So what little optimism the detectives brought with them began to evaporate.

But they had a second warrant.

Remember, for the very place Doug lived when Lynn Knight was murdered, his father had died, but his mother, Norma, still lived in the same house all these years later with the problem in old 1979, a murder case that we are revisiting, Norma Bradford was no slouch.

Could see this might be trouble for Doug. A woman doesn't stop being a mother just because her son is 56.

He is the strongest straight arrow to know.

We knew there might be a number of things she could tell us. She would know about his relationship with Lynn.

Had you met this nurse? Yeah. In here, don't worry. Oh, he did. He was really healthy.

Now, that was interesting. We had two stories, in essence, a story from Doug in nineteen seventy nine that really this was not a relationship. He cared about it, but she offered that Doug really thought this was a keeper, somebody she really thought she has special here with Lynn and he was attracted to her in that way.

Then as they filed that nugget away they looked around and couldn't help but see the veritable gallery of oil paintings hung around the house. Norma revealed that the artist was her she loved to paint, and both her late husband and Doug took pride in framing hanging them. She had one room that was basically like a small museum of her paintings because the paintings hold the glue.

Wallace suddenly turned art collector and decided to take a few of them to the police station.

And then they went out to Norma's garage. All kinds of old stuff lying around looked like nobody had thrown anything away for quite a while and tucked away in the corner.

There they were as we found a number of wooden dowels and not all of our paint. And only one was and it was blue and it was a broom handle.

So we collected it. Who would have believed it? Almost 30 years later, it seemed pretty obvious that the broom handle used to make the garrote was still there. The broom handle was blue. The garage door handles had been sanded down, but specks of paint still clung to them. Blue paint. Oh my gosh, we were so excited.

We had expectations. That's why we got a warrant. But we didn't expect those expectations to be met with the actual wood Dow that was used to build. I mean, what what are the odds of anyone keeping that that low? Sure. But it looked old. But there's your case. We thought this is going to be a pretty good piece of evidence, the kind of what it is that the graining, we were that excited.

All Wallace needed was a testing lab to confirm it, and prosecutor John Lewine would finally have the evidence he needed to file the case.

So we were thinking, OK. And you looked at it. It's blue paint. It's a Dalle. You know, you have it. It's there's cut one in the garage. It looked like they were going to be the same.

One was excited, but also disturbed by what he saw when he compared the two doll samples. He noticed that the one from the garage had been sanded. Person gets a chill when the mind registers a thing like that.

Why would he take the time to set it down? And the answer is just horrible.

Horrifying how? What do you mean? The killer made this weapon because he's enjoying the process of making this weapon that I'm going to use to wrap around her neck and kill her. This is a weapon that someone took time to make and that someone really cared about. I'm going to perfect it.

But now here it was, the evidence that could put Doug Bradford at the crime scene. They sent the samples to a specialized lab outside Chicago for comparison testing.

We are expecting that we're going to get a match, but we didn't. The lab report was unequivocal. These were two distinctly different dowels. They did not match and now suddenly there was no case.

It was you know, it was getting kicked in the in the stomach. I can tell you we were deflated beyond words. And so the expectations we had then we had no match. Was that this case? Was that. Maybe the wood wasn't a match, but maybe something else was. I went down to the local hardware store and I said, gee, if we can find picture hanging wire. Over 10 years of effort, and they were right back at square one, at which point it would have made perfect sense, frankly, to give it up stuffed full in night, file back into the purgatory of unsolved cases or not.

I started to kind of look at the case to say, well, what do we have?

Jim Wallace picked himself up from his disappointment and poked around at the bits and pieces he might be able to build into a case like the bit that never made sense to him. Doug Bradford's alibi, who sails a 30 foot racing sloop alone at night and then is able to paddle it back in.

The alibi checked out way back in 79, but still some alibis can be faked. Kathy was this one. Wallace took a crash course in boating to find out and saw any skipper he could find who knew something about sailing back in 1979.

And I called every one of them and interviewed them and asked them, I don't know anything about sailing.

Teach me for one of his teachers with Charlie Abbott wants an officer in the very same sailing club that Doug used to belong to, where the Shields racing boat was docked sailing at night after 10 p.m. in Southern California.

It's kind of a fool's errand to shields is hard to sail alone to begin with.

And at night you need lights. So if you're going out in Southern California in the summertime, there's not going to be any wind at all or a very little bit.

Sailors have an expression for that. No go. No go means if there's not enough wind, we're not going sailing.

But Doug was an expert after all.

If anybody could sail after sunset, he could listen again to his version of what happened that night out in the dark Pacific.

Well, it started on a sailboat coming back from that part of the world. They don't think anybody know what kind of war they live in a little after be.

If it's not windy already, it's ten thirty. And you're standing at that dock and you're asking yourself, wow, is there enough wind for me to sail? I can maybe barely get out. Do you expect it to get better once you get out there? And everyone I talked to said, no, no, that's crazy.

As a matter of fact, that's the one thing that was a consistent statement from every sailor. Would you do this?

No, not to mention paddling a two ton boat with one little or who could do that on the ocean in the dark?

Yeah, there was Doug's name on the reservation form, a clear record that he booked out the boat the night Lynn was killed. So next question, could he have faked his sailing reservation that night as a club member, Doug did have access to the reservation book so he could have inserted his name even a couple of days after the murder.

Didn't mean he did, but he could have.

But then they discovered something with Doug's name all over it, very intriguing, all the reservations from 1979. So it was just serendipitous.

We had them and we found him because when Wallace reviewed all of Doug's sailboat bookings, what you know, there was a very distinctive pattern. Doug consistently reserved the boat on weekends. The first week that he begins to change his reservation pattern is the week of the murder. The fact that there's nobody who ever reserves the boat for a post sunset sail except for one person, Doug Bradford, on the night of the murder.

Now, that could be useful. Evidence certainly weakened Doug's alibi, but conviction material? No, that's for possible DNA. There was all that blood spattered around the apartment and those two semen samples recovered from Lynn.

With DNA testing now available, could they connect something at the crime scene to Doug Bradford, Texas, went out and they got samples from all the boyfriends, including, of course, Doug, who was served with another search warrant at his house, this time seeking a swab of his saliva, an opportunity for us to kind of say, hey.

You're not the guy. Let's just move on. I thought that had already been determined one by one, the DNA results came in from all of Lynn's old lovers and male friends, and none of them matched the DNA from the crime scene, including Doug Bradford.

It definitely was problematic because unfortunately, the more testing we were doing, we were getting DNA. So there was DNA in the semen. Sure. Belonging to two males, but not him. It just wasn't him. So, yeah, it was definitely disappointing. And I knew that what I really needed was some piece of new evidence that would help something physical, something forensic they could take to the L.A. County district attorney.

You have to sell this thing to your bosses, right?

Yeah, I do. I do. But still, all of us could not get his mind off that. Right. He must have missed something. Wallace now went to his own workshop and started tinkering, made a garage and then another and another to understand the mindset of the killer and the materials he used. He examined the wire very closely. Then he looked again at the pictures Doug's mother painted and the wire Doug used to hang them and both wires were the same type, something called grade number one, eight strand braided wire.

That's the kind of wire used in the garrote. And that's also the kind of wire that Doug's mom was using to hang many of her paintings and exciting discovery.

Well, maybe. But like the dolls, it could also be pure coincidence how to tell.

And as I thought about, I said, well, I wonder how rare that wire really is. So I went down to the local hardware store and I said, gee whiz, if I can find picture hanging wire, I found some, but not no one. I couldn't find it anywhere. And I started calling those manufacturers to ask him, do you guys sell a thinner wire? Very uncommon. Very uncommon.

So uncommon that of all the picture hanging wires sold, this particular wire only accounts for one to six percent of sales.

It's that rare. Yet that's what's being used to build the Garet. And that happens to also be what Doug had access to because of his mom's painting. Not like DNA, of course, but what they call a class match. Was it enough, along with everything else, to get Lou Ann to take the case to court? When I got done with the work on the wire, with the work on the alibi, with the work on the garrote, I felt like we had a viable case and I brought it to John Doe.

At this point, a more conservative prosecutor might have told him, forget it. But Lou Ann likes tough circumstantial cases. He said yes and took the case to his boss at the district attorney's office. The decision to file the case was based on, well, it was based on him, on everything.

And so in May 2009, almost 30 years after Lynn's murder, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Douglas Gordon Bradford. Word traveled fast to Canada and there was Messerschmidt.

Call Detective Wallace and I'll tell you, it was electric. There's so much electricity in the air and the church wind chimes on my back veranda were just roaring in a way like crazy.

And it was just wow. At the arrest, it was like, yes, you know, thank God they finally got him. Well, maybe quite possible one had bitten off more than he could chew this time because Doug Bradford had hired one of the most prominent and experienced defense attorneys in the land, a man who had won more than his share of high profile cases, clearing celebrity clients who faced much steeper odds than a middle aged engineer named Doug Bradford.

I asked him, do you have an attorney? Yeah. You have a name? Yeah. What's his name? Bob, Bob who you'll know. Hey, it's Chris Hayes this week on my podcast.

Why is this happening? I'll be talking with Josh Geza about the absolutely mind blowing story of Trump's Wisconsin Foxconn deal.

The company did not really have a plan for what to do in Wisconsin employees. I spoke to talk about being told to figure out something for Foxconn to make in Wisconsin. The big push toward the end of twenty eighteen is just hiring the two hundred and sixty people they need to get subsidies. No one knows what these people are supposed to do. And by the end of the year, they're just sitting around. In this 1960s office building, Foxconn has bought as its headquarters in Milwaukee watching Netflix this week on why is this happening?

Search for why is this happening wherever you're listening right now and subscribe. For 30 years, he built a life, started an engineering business, made it successful, got married, obeyed the law and maintained with absolute consistency that he had nothing whatever to do with the brutal murder of his onetime girlfriend, the Canadian nurse, midnight. Now, Doug Bradford was in the back of a squad car facing a charge of first degree murder. You know, he was calm the whole the whole way, he was defiant the whole way, he never wanted to talk to us, although he did say one thing, which certainly got Detective Wallace's attention.

I asked him, do you have an attorney?

Yeah. Does he have a name? Yeah, what's his name? OK. Do you have a last name? I have his card, and I sure enough, of course, I get the card out as Robert Shapiro responds.

Yes, that Robert Shapiro, the lawyer who represented O.J. Simpson, the man who founded legal Zunes at legalzoom.com, we put the law on your side.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Here was a true courtroom.

Celebrity Robert Shapiro has been practicing law for nearly 50 years, had represented scores of Hollywood's rich and famous, including, of course, O.J. Simpson.

O.J. will do everything he can to cooperate with them to help solve this horrible murder.

Almost 20 years now since he helped engineer Simpson's acquittal in the infamous trial of the century, little sister Donna was well aware of Shapiro's reputation.

I certainly wasn't going to be intimidated by Robert Shapiro. Maybe she should have been on. Shapiro stepped in. Doug Bradford was out on bail within hours. And the outlook for the trial, if there was a mountain of evidence against O.J., the circumstantial bits and pieces piled up against Doug Bradford amounted to a foothill.

Maybe be nice if we had a piece of physical evidence that will lock it in our eye witness and say, oh, I saw him leaving. You know that so-and-so. And we never have those being completely circumstantial.

Luann was eager to get to trial, but the defense, not so much.

Robert Shapiro thought the evidence insufficient to charge Doug Bradford or put on a trial at all. So he papered the court with motions seeking to have the case dismissed, given its age and the lack of new physical evidence. And though his requests were denied, they took time. Lots of time. A year went by, then two, then five, Doug Bradford remain free on bail as the case slowly toward trial. More than 2000 miles north across the border, Donna waited patiently in Canada, bracing for a trial over three decades in the making, this coldest of cold cases.

It wasn't cold. It's never called to me. No, no. Then finally, July 2014, it had taken 35 years to get here, L.A. County Courtroom Department one old three story defense attorney Robert Shapiro versus the D.A. who like circumstantial cases.

John Louis Shapiro had already announced this would be his very last criminal case.

It was also the very last one of Detective Jim Wallace, his long career. He'd be testifying from retirement as a private citizen, a cop no longer.

Good morning.

And so they all assembled in the very courtroom where Robert Shapiro helped to quit O.J. Simpson. And sitting in the gallery, what was left of Lynn Knight's family, though Donna's mother dead almost nine years, was certainly on Donna's mind.

Towards the end.

We had a lot of mother daughter talks and she grabbed my hand and she goes, You got him, kid. I know you got him. And so my mom died knowing it.

She knew. She knew. Here, for the very first time, Lin's family got a look at the man accused of killing the man once invited to Donna's wedding.

I really felt I was able to look him in the eye and say a lot of things in my head that he wasn't hearing.

And that word polite prosecutor John Lewis, but have to sell what was perhaps the most completely circumstantial case of his career when he enlisted cocounsel Ethan Milius to help him with cases like this.

Cold cases, you never have one witness. You have a whole bunch of pieces. And on the surface, they don't appear to be connected. It's our job to connect them all together, to put it together, to give you the final piece.

So no smoking gun. But then there really aren't that the whole thing.

As a smoking gun, Lewine fired the opening shot. The evidence will show, ladies and gentlemen. Beyond any reasonable doubt that this man. Douglas Bradford on August 30th, nineteen seventy nine in the middle of the night, crept in there with that handmade garhi. Got her while she was sleeping and brutally murdered her, then more than 20 witnesses paraded by each to recount a memory or offer an opinion, one tiny piece of the whole people called Detective Gary Hilton.

Gary Hilton was 72, now, still tormented by his inability to close the case. So in a way, he was trying to clear his conscience here.

And I saw Lynn Knight's body. I've never seen anybody so bad off, she was sliced, diced and.

Butchered. I wanted to be there for when it was all these people talking about her, how great she was.

I knew her. I knew or I knew her.

Donna testified about her sister there and 35 years of deep suspicion, beginning with what Doug Bradford didn't do at the time.

Did you notice that one acknowledgement of condolence was conspicuously absent?

Yes, absolutely nothing. Not a phone call, nothing. Not a card from Doug Bradford.

Richard Frank Lynn's last love interest testified about the day he said he saw Doug Bradford fly into a rage just after Lynn dropped him.

Nobody had ever really seen him violent.

And I had came to the sliding glass door and tore off the screen, opened up the door, shouted, ranted, I think, broke a lamp. He was incredibly upset. It was scary. It was jealous.

Rage said the prosecution rage that inspired Doug to make a garrote using materials he found in his mother's garage and his alibi.

That story that he went sailing at night titled a two ton racing boat couldn't have killed Lou and called several sailing experts from local marinas who testified that the alibi was wildly improbable.

It was so absurd that they would almost recoil, in essence, going, This is stupid. Why are you asking me this?

All the while, Doug Bradford watched quietly, listened intently, seemed almost aloof. Except perhaps when it came to Donna, we had some stare down competitions.

I wanted to look in his eyes, but I really wanted to see in his eyes, in his body language, whether he killed my sister.

Did you see that?

Yes, I'm going to get off because I got Shapiro, if that's what he was trying to say.

It was not without good cause because Robert Shapiro had a defense strategy ready featuring a special videotape supporting Doug Bradford's alibi, a tape that just might help in a sail.

Free pictures worth a thousand words.

The famed attorney in the spotlight and the jury gets the last word. When they walked out, I studied their faces and I went on. Now, it was Robert Shapiro's turn, his last criminal case in the same courtroom where he won arguably his greatest legal battle against what was labeled then a mountain of physical evidence, 71 now still sharp, a formidable presence in the courtroom.

In this case, there were implications, accusations, opinions and almost no physical evidence at all. That glaring truth is where Robert Shapiro began to fashion what he hoped would be his final victory in criminal court. At least six fingerprints were found. No match to dog blood, no match to the DNA, the Holy Grail, no match to the wire used in the garage, despite what the prosecution said they couldn't prove was an exact match with the wire found on the back of his mother's paintings.

I can't imagine why, because wire can't be matched. But above all, said Chibbaro, Doug Bradford wasn't there at Lynn's apartment the night she was murdered. His alibi was solid.

He was sailing that night and then paddling his 30 foot.

Sheels, we're going to prove to you to an absolute certainty that not only can you tell us both, Doug Bradford. This proof video produced by the Shapiro office showing a two ton shields boat being paddled by one person, just as Doug Bradford claimed he did on the night of Lynn's murder.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but what Shapiro didn't reveal to the jury was that the footage was all shot in the harbor not far out in the ocean.

And even the skipper he hired to perform the paddling admitted on the stand that nobody sails at night with no wind. And then came another stumble. Shapiro, the famous for tripping up prosecution witnesses on the stand, called his own weather expert, who testified there was enough wind to sail that night, a breeze of five to 10 miles an hour. But the Louann had done his homework and discovered that some of the wind locations the experts cited were nowhere near the area where Doug said he was sailing.

Thirty two point seven north, one seventeen point five west, 20 miles.

That was I don't have the chart in front of me, but eighty six point six miles, guess what landmass it's it's closest to by Mexico. Mexico. Let's not give you credit. It's the right continent.

It was a careless, I estimate, that I made because I didn't look at it carefully enough.

A careless mistake, maybe. But Shapiro told the jury it did not change the fact the prosecution could not and did not prove that Doug Bradford killed the night. Justice delayed is justice denied. And now it's time for justice. There's an old Indian saying, do not judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes.

The prosecution gets the last word, of course. Here's cocounsel Ethan Milius.

He fashioned a garrote, made it from handheld. It crafted it. Fantasized about putting her out of his mind by ending her life.

And finally, John Lewis, 35 years of getting away with murder, he said, had to end. He's had his trial.

It is time. It is time that he is held accountable for what he did.

He is a murderous monster.

He needs to be held accountable.

It's time. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. We look forward. The jury verdict on his way out of the courtroom, a confident Doug Bradford stopped to answer one question. Are you an innocent man? Donna, look forward to with considerable anxiety, and I just hope that we get some peace of mind, Lynn gets her soul, has a chance to rest, and my mother's as well. And we can go on in our lives without a big storm sitting on our chests.

One day passed nothing from the jury then to still nothing, and then finally, day number three, a decision.

And when they walked out, I studied their faces and I went, oh, no.

Oh, no.

We've lost we've lost one of three people at the state of California vs.. And then the verdict was read. We, the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant, Douglas Gordon Bradford, guilty of the crime of first degree murder of Lynne Knight in violation of penal code Section 187, a a felony as charged in one of the information. Doug Bradford submitted the handcuffs, took a last look at freedom and was led away. No family here to weep or cry out or say goodbye.

Even his attorney, Robert Shapiro, was conspicuously absent on vacation. It was almost 35 years to the day after the murder of Lynn Knight. As he goes to jail, we're let out of jail and this team did the most amazing job that could ever be done. It's a wonderful day. It's a wonderful. Yeah, wonderful day. Thank you. People of Los Angeles for being such good angels. Jim Wallis packed away his last and perhaps most difficult case, I felt grateful, you know, he don't work for your agency.

You don't even work for personal pride in these things because you're going to work some case regardless. You work for victims families. And the and those are the people who come up and give you a hug. Those are the people, you know, you never get closure.

And Gary Hilton, long into his own retirement, built, finally liberated, free of the case that had tortured him for so long.

I was thankful.

It sort of allowed me to start putting the case away, why not but carrying around that baggage all those years, I want to put it back on on that shelf.

Now it is time for someone else to carry that burden. The man who caused so much misery in the first place in December 2014, Douglas Bradford, was back in court one more time to be sentenced for the murder of Lynn Knight, now wearing a yellow jail suit, not his business suit, but still defiant as ever as he indignantly addressed the court.

I want you to hear me speak now very clearly and unambiguously. Love my family and friends already know I did not murder them. I'm an innocent man, wrongly convicted. I'm mad as hell. I pay for someone else's crime. This is a horrendous, horrendous miscarriage of justice.

Thank you for Bradford's words rang hollow with the judge who moments later imposed a stiff sentence.

And the court does impose a statutory sentence of 25 years to life over the murder of an inmate, which, all things considered, Sir John Louann isn't such a bad deal for Doug Bradford.

So in the end, what happened in this case was the defendant got his parole thirty five years early.

He lived a life that he never should have had. The right thing happened. He is in prison today. I don't think he'll ever get out and sometimes that's the best we can do.

It's been. A long journey. It's been a long journey. For 35 years, have it always been there to finally being able to to let her go and dance with mom and dad?

That's real satisfaction. Real satisfaction.