JENNIFER: People gravitated towards Cindy,
and Cindy was a lot of fun.
[man speaking]
She loved being on camera.
Just hamming it up.
Cindy always saw the best in people, and she was very,
very trusting.
But she met some people that she shouldn't have met.
[Cindy speaking]
LINDA: She was so wrapped up in
the whole thing that she was like a captive.
The effort they went to, it was pure evilness.
[Kathy speaking]
You're not thinking that there was such danger coming.
NARRATOR: It's April 12th, 1984, in Los Angeles.
25-year-old Cindy Monkman sits
in the audience of hit game show,
"The Price Is Right" -- alongside her are her
24-year-old sister Kathy and their grandma, Estelle.
[audience applause]
Welcome to "The Price Is Right."
KATHY: Cindy was always obsessed with "The Price is Right."
She watched that show religiously.
We went every year to Santa Monica to visit
our grandma, doing these wild adventures all throughout L.A.
Cindy was always initiating stuff like,
"Hey, we're gonna do this now,
let's go do this," very adventurous wanting to travel,
try new things.
Cindy said, "We are gonna go on 'The Price Is Right.'"
She's like, "I'm gonna get on that show.
"I know how to do it.
I know the formula."
We down-dressed me to the max, and then
we put her in this bright, hot fuchsia shirt,
made her hair super big, we really dolled her up
so that she would get chosen.
John, I have a vacant spot right here.
What are you going to do about that?
JOHN: Bob, we're gonna try to fill it with Cynthia Monkman!
You know, there's Cindy
and my grandma and me -- you can see I'm grabbing her,
and, like, had this big look of shock.
I mean, that was a peak moment for her.
[audience applause]
Cynthia, I...
KATHY: That was more of a big deal than, like, any even
birthday or anything like that, you know, for her to be on TV.
-BOB: What do you want to do? -I'm gonna...
KATHY: She really wanted that kind of spotlight, I guess.
I was so happy for her that she got on there.
And there she is meeting her idol, Bob Barker.
It was a really great, great day, and a great memory.
NARRATOR: The naturally extroverted Cindy, who loves
being the center of attention, started life in the sunshine.
KATHY: Cindy was born September 16th, 1958,
in Pensacola, Florida.
I came along 14 months after Cindy was born.
In many ways, we were like twins, you know,
I think, because we were pretty inseparable, and we did
everything together, and, you know, we were best friends.
NARRATOR: Cindy, Kathy, and their younger brother, John,
spend their early childhood in Florida, together
with parents Jack and Dorothy.
My dad was working as a psychologist.
Our mother was a stay-at-home mom.
NARRATOR: In 1963, doctors diagnosed
Dorothy with breast cancer.
When it became clear that she was not going to survive,
my dad packed us all up and moved back to rural Illinois,
which is where she was from.
She passed the end of October '65.
She was 36.
We were affected growing up without our mom, for sure.
You just don't have an internal compass
that you have when you have a mother.
NARRATOR: Dad, Jack, marries Marjory McQueen in 1971.
Cindy and the rest of her family carry
on with small town life in Champaign, Illinois.
My family moved into a house that was about a block
and a half from Cindy's house,
and we were instant friends.
KATHY: Cindy did make friends easily.
She was a very innocent kind of person,
extremely sensitive.
NARRATOR: In 1980, Kathy moves to Arizona
to enroll in nursing school.
Cindy follows her sister, and two years later,
she completes a Master's degree in
Community Health Education.
KATHY: We had a lot of fun.
We did a lot of partying back then, actually.
There was something about our dynamic that was
very magnetic to other people,
to the point where they would tease us and say it's
the Monkman sisters syndrome.
We were each other's life force in a lot of ways,
but we both had our demons we had to meet.
NARRATOR: In 1983, Cindy receives an offer
that she cannot refuse.
She got this great job opportunity, heading up
a wellness program at a major corporation in Minneapolis.
It really was Cindy's dream job, because she had spent
years being a nutritionist and working in diet programs
and schools.
It paid well, and it was a great job.
It was really, really hard
to say goodbye to her.
Of course, this was before the Internet or cellphones.
Long distance calling was very expensive.
She was really into doing things on cassette tapes.
[Cindy speaking]
You would just be talking like you're talking to the person
on the phone, but you're speaking
into this cassette player, and then we
would mail off the cassettes to each other back and forth.
We did that for months.
[Cindy speaking]
KATHY: A lot of it was about boys.
She was always looking for the tallest guy in the room.
She loved blondes.
She called it the caramels, which was attraction,
that infatuation that feels really good.
She was definitely looking for that with somebody.
Minneapolis was a very corporate,
very settled life, and she just didn't feel like she really fit
there, and she wanted to still be...
kind of party girl.
So she left it and moved back to Arizona.
I was thrilled.
NARRATOR: Always restless, Cindy returns to Mesa in late 1986.
KATHY: She didn't even really have
a big plan when she moved back.
So she was pretty footloose and fancy free.
We were both living in Mesa.
I was living in my little house, and Cindy was living in
a nearby apartment, and it was
probably pretty soon after moving back,
she met Mark, and that was a big deal.
Mark Maurer was Mark in the Dark on KDKB,
the nighttime DJ.
DJs back then were rock stars.
Their -- their face might be on the side of a bus.
She jumped into that relationship pretty quickly.
It was wild.
A lot of passion, a lot of drinking, a lot of partying.
She was having a lot of fun with it.
She was having a lot of angst with it, too.
It pushed a lot of insecure buttons in her,
being with somebody that kind of well known
and popular and stuff.
They had a lot of extreme highs and lows.
I think they dated for close to a year.
There was a lot of drama between her and Mark.
Mark had a previous relationship with a woman
who was murdered, and it was never solved.
You know, it kind of freaked her out.
So she knew it needed to end.
NARRATOR: Cindy telephones Mark to end the relationship
in July 1988.
She records their conversation as a keepsake.
[Mark speaking]
[Cindy speaking]
[Mark speaking]
[Cindy speaking]
You know, she was getting close to 30
and watching her friends get married and have kids.
It was just, I know it's time for me to change my life.
NARRATOR: A month after the breakup with Mark,
Cindy joins the rest of the Monkmans at Monkey Spoon,
the family's vacation cottage on the Maine coast.
KATHY: We had been going there since the early seventies.
That was where we spent most of our summer holidays.
[man 1 speaking]
[man 2 speaking]
There's my bro, putting on his Monkey Spoon T-shirt.
We all had T-shirts with the logo of the cottage on 'em.
And there's Cindy.
[man speaking]
[Cindy speaking]
KATHY: She's saying, "I love you so very, very, very much."
It was good for her to be there and with family.
She and Mark had just broken up, like, a month before.
She was still needing a lot of
reassurance that she did the right thing.
You know, it's gonna get better,
and you made the right decision,
but on that trip, she was really struggling.
I'm sure she was suffering from depression, she felt lost.
She did a very good job of covering it up,
but I definitely knew her very well, and I could feel it every
single minute of every single day.
[laughing]
KATHY: She brought the fun in our family,
and we lost that, because she was, like, the spark.
NARRATOR: It's December 17, 1988.
Cindy Monkman attends the wedding of her close friend,
Linda Smith at Pointe Tapatio Resort in Phoenix.
I met Cindy, we were both enrolled in a course
at Arizona State University in Tempe,
but Cindy and I just sort of hit it off.
So here I am talking to Cindy on
the left, and she was asking me who certain people were.
I was very happy to see that she'd brought
a date, Michael from Germany, and she seemed very comfortable
with him.
I do remember Cindy coming over at some point,
and she held out her finger with a ring on it
and I said, "Oh my gosh, you're engaged!"
And she said, "No, I'm married."
And I remember my first reaction
was...what?!
I remember going over to my husband
and saying, "Cindy found the love of her life."
NARRATOR: Rewind two months to October 8th.
A mutual friend invites Kathy
and Cindy for a night out in town.
She takes the sisters to Bobby McGee's,
a trendy nightspot in Mesa.
KATHY: She had met these two brothers.
Michael and Rudi Apelt
were from Dusseldorf, Germany, and she had kind of hit
it off with one of them, and the other brother
was 6'7" and blonde.
I went and joined them, and, um, Cindy
was already wrapped around this tall, blond guy.
They looked wealthy.
Michael was wearing a tuxedo with all kinds of,
you know, diamond earrings, gold rings, gold chains.
Um, Rudi was wearing a suit, so they stood out.
After the night was over,
these guys left kind of early, and so the three of us
went out to breakfast, and Cindy had the stars in her eyes.
"He was so into me, he just was so into me.
He even asked me to marry him."
I was like, "Oh, please, don't -- don't even."
Or something like that.
And she just, like, swung her head around and snapped at
me and said, "Do not burst my bubble, Kathy," like that.
It's taking her out of this depression.
She's feeling like a million bucks.
And you gotta let her have it.
She and Mark had just broken up.
There's nothing better going through a breakup than having
somebody come along who thinks you're just
absolutely everything.
It scared me, because here comes Mr. Glitz and Glamour
and way into the party seen, this big, unknown person.
Michael was supposedly a big deal.
She had just come out of
a relationship with somebody who was a big somebody.
It was a lot of a repeat of Mark,
and I think she just found that appealing.
NARRATOR: Rudi tells the sisters that
he is in international banking.
Michael says that he is an IT expert
for big corporations.
KATHY: They were visiting for business,
so they were staying at the Holiday Inn in Mesa.
Cindy and our friend started hanging out with them a lot.
Immediately, she used the word "whirlwind."
Within a couple weeks, they noticed that every time
they dropped them off at the Holiday Inn,
they never invited them to their room.
They always seemed to be hanging out in the lobby.
NARRATOR: Suspicious, Cindy and her friend followed
the brothers to check on their movements.
So they decided to basically spy on them.
They saw that they walked right through
the lobby and out through another door.
And so then they just followed them
into a cheap Motel 6 across the street,
and somehow, they convinced the desk clerk
to give them their room number.
NARRATOR: A young woman with a German accent
answers the door to Michael and Rudi's room.
She said that she was a family friend.
Our friend just pushed her way into the room and said,
"They're in here, I know they're in here."
And there, she saw their shoes they'd been wearing that night,
their watches they'd been wearing that night,
and they're confronting this person who's German
and who's saying, "They're not here,
they're not here," you know? And they end up leaving.
NARRATOR: The next day, Cindy and her friend return
to the motel to confront the Apelt brothers.
Michael and Rudi explained that the woman in their room
the night before is their friend, Anke Dorn,
also from Germany.
They're just helping out, because her husband
was here on vacation and died.
It was pure drama.
These guys convinced these women
that because they snooped on them like that,
that they lost their jobs and they lost
their security clearance because of this snooping.
NARRATOR: The brothers say that they are unable to access
their money and that they have nowhere to go.
Cindy and our friend went into, "Oh, my God,
"we owe you, how could make this right for you?
We're so sorry." You know, they felt terrible.
They were both crying, everything was blamed on them.
Cindy and our friend bought into that nonsense.
NARRATOR: Now feeling sorry, Cindy invites
Michael to stay at her apartment.
KATHY: It was an impulsive decision.
She could be impulsive.
She really believed that he was, like, a multimillionaire.
She didn't want him to slip through her fingers,
and she wanted to give this relationship a chance.
Within a couple of weeks, we were talking on the phone
and she said he told her he was gonna have to go back
to Germany, and the only way that that relationship could
continue was to marry him, and then he can
legitimately stay in the country.
And I was like, really? I said, "Well...
you're not gonna marry this guy or anything,
are you?" Fell silent.
And she said,
"What would you say if I told you I already had?"
NARRATOR: Michael convinced Cindy to marry him in
a secret ceremony in Las Vegas on October 28th, 1988,
just three weeks after they first met.
It's the first time in our entire lives that
a secret like that was kept on either end.
And so I just said, "I will do my best
to accept him, because he can't drive a wedge between us.
That's not gonna happen."
NARRATOR: Fast forward two months
to Linda's wedding on December 17th, 1988.
Cindy introduces Michael to her friends.
LINDA: I know I was happy for her at the time.
My impression of Michael was that he and Cindy made a very
nice-looking couple, but I was
also thinking, this seems so fast.
I wasn't gonna lecture her -- she seemed happy.
I remember thinking we gotta find out what happened
there and then just sort of laughing it off.
I mean, it's a happy time -- Cindy's married.
What's not to be happy about?
So everybody was in good spirits, and we had all
the time in the world to talk about it afterwards.
It was just a week later that it all changed, so...
When Cindy and I talked about us going
home for Christmas and her getting married to Michael,
I strongly suggested that she let
our parents know before she got there.
So yeah, she called them.
NARRATOR: Kathy books tickets for her and Cindy to
fly home to Champaign, Illinois, on Christmas Eve.
Cindy mails a letter to her parents with
a Christmas present wish list and news about Michael.
He couldn't come with Cindy for Christmas, because he was
gonna have to go back to Germany and visit his mom.
I was relieved that it was just gonna be her and me going back.
I was looking forward to the plane flight,
getting more of the scoop on that relationship.
NARRATOR: Three days before the sisters' flight home
for Christmas, Cindy calls Kathy.
She tells Kathy about a phone call to her ex-boyfriend,
Mark Maurer.
KATHY: She was very distraught.
"Oh, Katie, I did something really stupid.
"I called Mark, and I told him that I had married Michael,
and he got really mad at me,"
and she ended up confessing that she still
had feelings for Mark.
He said, "I'm likely coming over to Phoenix over the holidays,
and maybe we can see each other," and I said,
"We're gonna obsess over all of this when we get on
the plane, so don't even worry about it."
NARRATOR: Cindy checks in with Kathy the day before the trip.
KATHY: We were flying out the next morning,
and she contacted me, and she said,
"When you get off work, call me,
and we will finalize the details."
Cindy had arranged a little Christmas party gathering with
some friends before she left.
I worked the evening shift at my job.
So when I got home, I just thought, oh, I'll have a message
from her, and there was nothing, you know,
there was nothing on the answer machine, and I called
one of those friends who said Cindy never showed up,
and, I mean, Cindy had organized this thing.
That was a big sign of something being wrong.
I called several times, leaving her messages.
[Kathy speaking]
[answering machine beeps]
[Kathy speaking]
But then Michael called.
[Michael speaking]
It went back and forth -- I called
several times, and he wouldn't hang up on me,
And 1:30 in the morning, he calls me, and he's wasted.
I mean, slurring his words,
and he's yelling, "Where's Cindy?
Where's Cindy?" I'm like, "Where's Cindy?
You tell me where she is."
NARRATOR: Minutes later, Cathy telephones a friend to
ask her to go to Cindy and Michael's
apartment to investigate.
She knew him better than me
and felt like she could communicate with him.
She gets over there, she's like,
"He's passed out and snoring in the bed.
"Cindy's purse is here.
And her keys are here."
Michael got up and was totally intoxicated,
and he's saying that she ran out of the house,
because she got a phone call from an angry man,
Which, of course, I'm thinking 100 percent is Mark Maurer,
who said he was coming back in over the holidays.
It's like, "Oh, my God, she's run off with Mark."
I just know that's what it is.
She's just drinking herself into oblivion
and being impulsive and crazy
and, you know, on a bender with Mark.
It just didn't make sense why she wouldn't call me,
you know, if that was the case and this friend and I
decided to call the police.
NARRATOR: Mesa police agree to designate
Cindy a missing person.
I was up all night.
Police calling me and giving a statement and what
I knew, and I didn't know what to tell my parents.
I finally called them 5 in the morning, and I said,
"Cindy's missing. Her face is on the news."
NARRATOR: Kathy's parents asked her to catch her flight home so
that she can join the rest of the family for Christmas.
Kathy leaves behind Cindy's ticket for her sister to
collect later.
KATHY: I left it with a note, I wrote,
"I love you. Don't worry about anything.
It's all gonna be okay."
NARRATOR: Kathy departs Phoenix Airport
bound for Illinois at 7:30 a.m.
On December 24th.
RON: I was a detective at
the Mesa police department -- in December 24th,
I received a phone call from Sergeant George Felger to
help with a missing persons case with German speakers
being involved.
I was the only fluent-speaking detective I believe in
the entire valley,
let alone the Mesa police department.
At 8:45, I arrived at Michael Apelt's apartment.
We knocked several times, and then finally,
Michael Apelt opened the door,
and then when I introduced myself to him in German,
he was very, very surprised.
We interviewed him about his wife coming up missing.
Michael's story was that Cindy received a phone call,
and she got upset, and then she told Michael
she had to go somewhere with someone that's waiting outside,
and she would meet them at Bobby McGee's.
Michael, Rudi, and Anke ordered a table for four,
stating that Cindy was going to meet them there for dinner.
They ordered food, ate their dinner,
and Cindy still hadn't showed up.
Michael gave permission to search the apartment
and to search the car that they had.
He didn't seem worried at all.
He seemed, like, matter-of-factly
and very cooperative.
He provided a receipt that he had dinner at Bobby McGee's.
We noticed the $400,000 insurance policy in
the living room and the double indemnity.
The policy became effective
either that day or the day before.
So if Cindy were to die
accidentally, it would be an $800,000 payout.
And then there was another $100,000 policy
that they opened, a double indemnity, which
would bring the entire sum to $1 million dollars,
and it kind of concerned us.
♪♪
NARRATOR: The phone in Cindy's apartment rings mid-morning.
Her ex, Mark Maurer, leaves a message
I pointed them to Mark.
Definitely -- Mark Maurer was the only person
on the planet Earth that she would have
run out of the house for like that, would have been him.
I was clinging to that story, because
it was the best option.
RON: We found out that he had a former
girlfriend in Illinois where he lived that was killed.
So Mark Maurer became a person of interest immediately.
Two p.m. on December 24th, Pinal County
Sheriff's Office received a 911 call.
A father and son had just been driving through the desert,
and they came across a body.
We had already put out an attempt to locate on Cindy,
so Pinal County picked up on that, and they contacted us.
Our detectives and another detective from
Pinal County went to the scene.
They found a white female laying off the side
of the road, and she had blood all over her.
The scene was extremely violent.
She was stabbed in the back at least three times,
in the front once.
One of the wounds in the back penetrated the heart,
which was the wound that killed her, and her throat was
cut to the point where only her backbone was still intact.
We found footprints around the body
and one on the forehead,
and there were tire tracks found on the ground
near the body.
We did all the comparisons, and from the missing person report,
we suspected we had Cindy Monkman as the victim.
It obviously went from a missing persons case to a homicide.
It was escalated right away.
KATHY: The whole house is decorated for Christmas.
We're sitting in this Christmas tree room,
and presents everywhere and decorations,
and we're waiting and waiting and waiting
to hear from the police,
trying to convince ourselves she's holed
up in a hotel with Mark somewhere.
[voices overlapping]
I remember my dad saying,
"It feels way worse than that to me."
NARRATOR: The Monkman family receives
a phone call the night of Christmas Eve.
I watched my dad hang up the phone,
and I knew it was bad.
And he, like, had us put our arms around each other.
He said, "They've recovered Cindy -- she's not alive."
♪♪
NARRATOR: Detective Davis asks Michael to
come to the Mesa Police Department.
He arrives with his brother, Rudi.
RON: We told Michael that the body we found
was that of his wife.
He became very upset.
He started crying, he started yelling,
"Why her? Why me?"
And he couldn't believe that was -- that happened.
We really weren't focused on the brothers at that point,
but they were coming into focus.
We told them that we had to get
evidence to be able to exclude them from suspicion.
We collected saliva, head hair,
pubic hair for our lab to compare to evidence found on
the body and at the scene.
They had no problem helping us with the exclusionary evidence.
NARRATOR: Investigators examined the car that Michael and Rudi
used in the days leading up to Cindy's disappearance.
Michael did tell the police that Cindy's car was in
the shop and so they had to rent another car.
They rented a Subaru.
The police went and looked at the cars.
They inked the tires so they would have an imprint of
what the tread was like.
They examined the trunk.
You know, they put Luminol to see if there was any traces
of blood, but there was no physical evidence
at all linking Michael
and Rudi to the crime scene.
Mesa and Pinal County were
following up on all kinds of leads.
They were chasing down Mark Maurer as a suspect.
Just the most remarkable coincidence,
Mark had a previous girlfriend
who had been murdered.
RON: Mark Jones, who was leading homicide investigator,
he flew to Los Angeles to meet with Mark Maurer to
interview him on his whereabouts and his possible
involvement in this case.
NARRATOR: Mark describes his movements around
the time of Cindy's murder to the detective.
CATHY: He rented a car to drive to Palm Springs,
where his mother lived,
and he and his mother and his sister were going to spend
Christmas Eve together.
He had rental car receipts, and he had
his mother and his sister as alibi witnesses.
It turned out to be impossible for him to
have been in the Phoenix area to murder her.
NARRATOR: The detectives rule Mark Maurer out of
the investigation.
They charge him with no crime in relation to Cindy's death.
We were having meetings every morning to see what we found,
where else we had to go.
On January 3rd, 1989, I received
a telephone message from Michael Apelt
telling me about a threatening message
he received on his phone's answering machine,
and I needed to come down to the station
to hear the phone call
and to do whatever we had to do to take action
on -- on that threat.
I told him, "Don't erase the message.
Take the tape out and secure it."
On the following day, Michael brought
the message to the Mesa Police Department.
[answering machine beeps]
[man speaking]
The message was pretty clear,
but what's alarming about it is
at the very beginning of the message,
he had cut Cindy's throat and stabbed her in
the back and the front and that he wanted his drugs,
and that if you can't get them,
then your -- your brother and your girlfriend will be
next to die.
And then finally, it will be you, being Michael.
[rewinding noises]
[man speaking]
The thing that was peculiar about it was the grammar
was wrong, the syntax was wrong,
and I told
the detectives that this was a translation.
This is not...
someone speaking English from America.
If you translate it straight back in the German from
the English, the literal translation
made perfect sense in German, and the only
Germans we were dealing with was Michael, Anke, and Rudi.
RON: I asked my sergeant to put
a surveillance team on the house.
That same evening, I received another phone call
from Michael Apelt, claiming that
there was two black men at the door wanting
their drugs or their money.
[Michael speaking]
[woman speaking]
[man speaking]
[woman speaking]
RON: None of the detectives that were there on surveillance all
night ever saw any black people come to the door.
I said, "We need you to come to the station to talk
"with you individually so we can do composite drawings of
these suspects."
The next morning, Michael sat down with forensic artists.
The end result of the composite was a young
black man with a suit and expensive sunglasses on.
It looked like one of the actors from "Miami Vice."
They were big "Miami Vice" fans.
After interviewing Michael and Rudi,
we believed Michael and Rudi were definitely involved.
NARRATOR: The police decide to officially question Michael,
Rudi, and Anke in connection with Cindy's murder.
RON: Michael and Rudi were being interviewed several hours.
Michael was confronted with...
"We think you killed your wife,"
and he totally denies everything, he says
it's a joke -- all the while,
he refers to his wife as "my wife"
and not as Cindy,
which in interrogations is a big clue as to the suspect
distancing themselves from the victim
because they've done something bad to them.
And during this long time period,
we were watching Anke Dorn in the hallway.
She, at one point, put her head between her legs
and put her hands behind her head like something was wrong,
like she was going to get sick.
Detective Jones was made aware of that.
He was waiting for a sign like that of breaking.
He started showing her pictures of Cindy,
her half-decapitated head,
her body with the stab wounds and the blood and everything
out there at the scene.
He kept after her, and he just told her, "Look,
you need to tell the truth."
She tried to cover her eyes, and that was
when she started turning and telling what really happened.
CATHY: The night of the 23rd, Michael showed up
at the motel where Anke and Rudi had been staying.
She and Rudy were following Michael, and she says
she didn't know that Cindy was in the car.
But she claims that when they got out to the desert,
that Rudi got out of the car.
She stayed in her car, and she didn't see anything.
She realized afterwards that they had
murdered Cindy, because they had bloody clothes.
They had to go back to the motel to clean up
and then dump their bloody clothes,
and then they went out to create their alibi
by going to Bobby McGee's.
Anke Dorn told us that Michael planned all the cover-up
afterwards -- he began to be concerned that the tire
tread on their rental car
might be traced back to the crime scene.
She told us that they had driven the car down to
a riverbed and deliberately tried to destroy
the tread on the tire.
Anke's story was corroborated by the fact that
the rental company had to change the tires.
The police processed the car -- it had brand-new tires on it.
♪♪
Michael, Rudi, and Anke decided that they would travel to L.A.
and randomly picked a homeless person off the street
and offered him $20 to read a message back
into Cindy's answering machine.
[man speaking]
It was a message that was dictated by Michael in German.
But Anke, who had the better command
of the English language, wrote it out.
NARRATOR: Police officers arrest Michael
and Rudi Apelt for first-degree murder
on January 6th, 1989.
We got a call from the detectives, and they
told me that they had arrested Michael and Rudi.
It was -- it was a feeling
of satisfaction, because justice is coming.
NARRATOR: Prosecutors strike a deal with Anke -- immunity in
return for her testimony at Michael and Rudi's trials.
They then find a piece of evidence
that clinches the case.
The evidence that was found at the crime scene
included only one usable tennis shoe print
where you could actually identify
the tread on the ground.
The sole was patterned.
When they searched the apartment,
there were no tennis shoes.
They found a roll of film, and one
of the pictures was a picture of Michael.
He was wearing a pair of shoes,
and it was obvious that they were Reebok tennis shoes.
It matched the shoe print at the scene,
but also, we were able to match it to the footprint on
her forehead.
So the logical inference is that he destroyed
the shoes, because they had Cindy's blood on them.
RON: Michael Apelt's trial began
on April 18th, 1990, at the Pinal County
courthouse in Florence, Arizona.
It was probably the most complex case
that I've ever handled -- Anke Dorn provided us
with so much corroborating evidence.
She was a key to the case, really.
Michael and Rudi had hatched this plan to find a woman
to marry, take insurance out on her life, and murder her.
Michael told Anke Dorn that when Cindy signed
the insurance papers, she signed her death warrant.
CATHY: On August 13th, 1990, Michael Apelt was sentenced
to death on the charge of first-degree murder.
NARRATOR: Five months later,
a jury also finds Michael's brother,
Rudi guilty of first-degree murder.
The judge sentences him to death.
When they kill your best friend,
it shakes your world.
They killed somebody so full of life and love
and forever damaged a family.
KATHY: A part of me wishes I had just scooped her up
and just gotten her away from him, you know?
I miss her voice, I miss her -- I miss those times,
you know, I miss our bubble.
It's bittersweet, because I think, well,
I did have it for 29 years.
I don't know how I would
have gotten through our childhood without her.
But she's a big person to miss, and...
I'm living this life for both of us.