[dramatic music playing]
[Joe] September 30th of 2015, at 6:42 in the evening...
[phone rings]
a dispatcher for the Ault Police Department
in Colorado, gets a call from a very distressed woman.
Her mother's instinct tells her
that something awful has happened.
Mothers have instincts about these things.
And if the mother says that, I would be concerned as well.
[opening theme music playing]
I spent my career closing murder cases.
But I'm not the only one
to answer the call.
It takes a rare breed to solve the unsolvable,
to catch a ruthless killer,
to find justice for the dead.
That's what it takes...
to be an American detective.
[Ben] In 2015,
I was the lead detective on this case
for at the Weld County Sheriff's Office in Colorado.
This case first got started with a woman
getting in touch with the Ault Police Department,
and wanting to report her daughter is... as missing.
[Joe] The woman's name is Vonda Holt.
Her daughter's name is Tera Lewandowski.
Vonda thinks her daughter may be dead.
[officer] You're allowing us to search the premises...
[Joe] Officers do their welfare check at the residence
where Tera lived.
[Ben] They went out to the house
to see if she was there, and talk to the folks that were on scene there.
[Joe] They've encountered
two roommates,
who also say they have no idea where she is.
The roommates report that this girl, Tera,
believe she was developing pneumonia.
She had a terrible cough.
[Ben] So, they took her
into Greeley, and dropped her off at an urgent care.
[Joe] The roommates say that she never returned.
DJ Meyer is the homeowner.
And he has a girlfriend, Crystal, who lives with him.
He invites the officers in,
and they look around in the place.
[officer] Okay, what's in here?
[DJ] That should be [indistinct]
[Joe] They look around.
They find nothing of real interest.
They see nothing out of place,
no evidence of a struggle or a fight.
[indistinct conversations]
[Joe] And they find no Tera.
-[man] Just take a look at this. -[Joe] She is now
a missing person.
[Robert] And that starts the process
going towards looking for what happened to Tera.
[Joe] Detective Endreson and Detective Boyle
need to find this girl.
We dove in, and we did an interview with Vonda.
So, will you tell us a little bit about your daughter, ma'am?
[Vonda] I really felt like she had been murdered.
I was really afraid
they were [chuckling] gonna think I was nuts.
Well, I wanted to learn more about Tera, and her history.
[Vonda] Tera was a really happy child.
She was extremely smart.
[Mechell] She had a lot of love and a lot of compassion to give.
She always wanted to be a vet,
and that was before her dreams got crashed by a car accident.
[sirens wailing]
[Vonda] She had multiple surgeries
out of that one accident.
[Mechell] It changed a whole trajectory of her life.
She got hooked on painkillers.
She was always in pain.
She was at a rehab.
One of the ladies in there,
was Crystal.
They were friends.
Crystal offers Tera a place to stay.
Crystal Griffin is the girlfriend of DJ Meyer, the homeowner.
So, DJ Meyer is, in fact, Daniel Meyer,
a respected member of the community,
and a respected member of the city council.
She was on disability.
And they were gonna rent her the room for $100 a month.
She thought it was a great opportunity.
[Joe] Tera moved into this house
with DJ Meyer and Crystal Griffin.
When's the last time you actually spoke
-to Tera? -[sighs]
[Robert] And then, one night,
Tera texted Vonda, saying, "Stay by your phone, something might happen."
And Vonda gets the text the next morning at, uh,
at around 5:00 in the morning, when she's getting ready
for work.
[Vonda] When I woke up,
I tried to reach her, and I couldn't get ahold of her.
Tera had a pain specialist appointment that day.
And so, I called,
and they said, "Vonda, she didn't show up."
Vonda said she got this weird feeling
come over her, and she thought,
"Something bad happened," and she called 9-1-1.
[Joe] The mother explains that Tera has a dog
that never leaves her side,
a black Chihuahua, whose name is Diablo.
[Ben] According to Vonda, she was very,
very attached to her dog, Diablo.
[Vonda] Tera never went anywhere without her dog.
It didn't matter if she went to the doctor, didn't matter if she went to the store,
that was her sidekick, period.
[Joe] The dog is also missing.
It's a total mystery.
However, they are fortunate
that someone was about to make a discovery.
[dramatic music playing]
[Ben] There was a rancher
that called in to law enforcement,
said, "Hey, I found this dog a few days ago."
[Joe] A farmer sees this small, black Chihuahua
wandering around on the side of the road,
near the Pawnee Grasslands.
And he thinks he's gonna rescue this creature.
-[crowd noise on TV] -[man on TV speaking indistinctly]
At the same time,
Vonda posted a photograph of her daughter
and the dog on Facebook.
The farmer sees the posting,
and decides he's got that dog.
So, he calls the Weld County Sheriff's Department
to report this.
[Ben] I went out to that rancher's house,
and took a couple photos of the dog.
And then, I sent those back
to Vonda, and she confirmed that
that was Tera's dog, Diablo.
[Joe] This is a very promising event.
We've solved one part of this mystery.
Now, we need to solve the other part.
Where is Tera?
They search far and wide
around the Pawnee Grasslands, where the dog was discovered.
We even had a state patrol fly over, looking for mounds of fresh... fresh dirt,
or, like, a grave.
[Ben] Those first few days, it was pretty extensive.
But we just weren't finding anything.
We were needing an additional lead
to follow up on.
[Joe] So, they bring in Tera Lewandowski's roommate,
DJ Meyer,
as to knowledge of her disappearance.
DJ Meyer is cooperative and helpful.
He says, since she didn't drive,
she asked him for a ride to an EmergiCare
in Greeley, Colorado,
a short distance away.
He then says, they tell her, when they drop her off,
"We're gonna go get lunch with my grandmother.
And we'll be back in about an hour, and pick you up."
[Dan] He said, "I don't know where she's at.
I took her to the doctor, haven't seen her since."
[inaudible]
[Joe] They asked him,
"So, what do you think happened to her?"
[inaudible]
[Dan] DJ said she's probably downtown,
looking for her drug dealer.
[Joe] He believes that, instead of going into the EmergiCare,
she went and found Cheech, and fell off the wagon.
Endreson and Boyle have been looking
for another place to go besides DJ.
And he's just provided it.
Who is Cheech?
And where is he right now?
[dramatic music playing]
Detective Endreson and Boyle have received a tip
from Tera Lewandowski's roommate, DJ Meyer.
He says she may have made contact
with a drug dealer he knows, as Cheech.
[Ben] When he provided that information,
we tried to track down that drug dealer, Cheech.
[Joe] It's a street name.
Every agency has these list of names, monikers,
gang members, sex offenders.
You name it, we've got a list.
I had recently been undercover for the drug taskforce,
so I called them. Nobody have ever heard "Cheech."
So, they decided, "This is nonsense."
They're gonna roll it out.
But, the problem they have
at the moment is, they don't have a body.
They don't have a crime scene.
They know that Tera texted her mother,
and said, "Something bad might happen tonight,"
in DJ's house.
That's all they have. So,
you have to keep at it.
[Vonda] She didn't have a phone at that time.
She had a tablet that she was using,
so she mainly texted.
[Ben] There was no tracking her cellphone,
because she didn't have one.
[Joe] So, that's another strike against.
Right. Have a seat.
[Joe] But then,
two weeks in,
their detectives' luck changes.
A man walks into Weld County Sheriff's Department.
He says his name is Richard, and he has his sister,
whose name is Crystal Griffin,
DJ's girlfriend,
and former roommate of our missing person.
Richard says,
"My sister knows something about this."
[Ben] He said that, at some point, couple of weeks
following the homicide,
she had disclosed to him that she had been in the house when
Tera had been murdered.
This is the type of tip that convinces you that there is a God.
We have a focus, now.
[inaudible]
If you're gonna tell anybody about a bad thing,
you're gonna tell blood before you tell a stranger.
They bring in Crystal Griffin,
and take her back
to an interrogation room.
[Dan] She started telling us this story.
It was really hard to believe her,
because it was really so far-fetched.
So, tell us a little about DJ.
DJ is kinda living a double life.
[Joe] Crystal begins her statement
by saying that, "My boyfriend, DJ,
you don't really know who he is.
He's a member of the city council." "Yeah, he is."
"But he's also the enforcer
of a motorcycle gang,
called 'The 21 Biker Club.'"
Endreson and Boyle have never heard of that.
"What is that?"
"Well, it's this group of people,
they're all friends. And they all belong to this gang.
"What do they ride?"
"Well, they don't have motorcycles." "What?
It's a biker gang,
but they don't have motorcycles?"
[Ben] She explained to us that this group was trying to be
some sort of gang.
[Dan] She said they were infatuated
with knives and weapons,
you know, stabbing pillows and trees.
-[man 1 grunts] -[man 2] There we go!
She kind of laid out the hierarchy a little bit of the group.
Tom Vassil was Mike Vassil's father,
and he was supposedly the president of this group.
Mike Vassil would have been the second-in-charge.
DJ Meyer was supposedly the enforcer of the group.
Chad Iler was a friend of the group.
Karly Hanchett was Mike's girlfriend.
And then, Karly's brother,
Scott Hanchett.
[Dan] Except for Tom,
DJ was the oldest one at that time, and I think
he was over 30.
And all the way down to Karly, who was 17.
She also said Tom Vassil had been part of some sort of biker gang when he was back
in New York.
[Joe] Supposedly, he was
a former Hells Angel.
[Dan] I think he maybe worked on bikes for them,
but not a full patch member, or anything. Um, and I think
that history probably intrigued
the son, Mike, and the rest.
[Crystal] I've seen seriously scary stuff.
[Ben] Crystal disclosed that there had been
some sort of an issue
in the house, and that everybody else,
um, had decided to kill Tera,
upstairs in Tera's bedroom.
-[objects clattering] -[woman screams]
[woman grunts and yelling indistinctly]
She said that, during that timeframe,
she had gone into a downstairs bedroom,
and never went upstairs to see what was going on.
[woman screaming and yelping]
And then, she said that, afterwards, she had been with them when they
loaded Tera's body up and took it to dump it.
She was not able to give us a specific location on where they had dumped the body.
Both detectives understand this story is bizarre,
but they also know
there is a house where Crystal says this crime occurred.
Based on her information, they obtain a search warrant
for the house,
which is owned by DJ.
[Robert] There is a lot of cleaning products out in the kitchen.
If I remember right, there was, uh, a bottle just labeled "Bleach."
It seemed a little odd.
[Joe] They're looking for evidence of death in this house,
primarily, blood evidence,
in a place that is thought to be a violent crime scene.
They use a technique called "luminol."
Luminol is a chemical
that will cause human blood to fluoresce in darkness.
They go into the room where Tera lived,
and they "luminoled" the walls, the ceiling.
There is no blood in this room
where Crystal says she was killed.
They checked the other rooms,
and they find nothing.
There is no evidence of blood in this house.
Did they clean up?
Or Crystal story isn't true.
[clicks]
Hey, folks.
-[Joe] Endreson goes outside. -How's it going?
And he sees two people next door.
He goes over and introduces himself,
shows him a badge, and says, "Is there anything unusual here
in the last few days?"
"Oh, yeah."
"And what was that?"
"Well, DJ, the guy that lives there,
we saw him digging a hole in the backyard,
and he had something wrapped up in a blanket."
They say, "We thought
he was digging a grave."
"Really?"
They go check the backyard.
They do find, what appears to be, a grave,
and freshly-turned earth.
[Ben] They ended up excavating,
what appeared to be, a fresh gravesite.
[Dan] And then, it happened.
[woman] There's something here.
I can't remember who dug it up,
but they said there's bones.
[Joe] They begin looking at this gravesite.
They find bones.
But there's a problem.
They're not human.
They're a dog,
a buried dog.
They know this is not Tera's dog,
'cause they have Tera's dog.
It's with the mom.
So, where are they now?
No body, no crime scene.
Crystal's story didn't seem to make a lot of sense,
and then she has a relationship with DJ.
What if she's just mad at him,
and wants to give him up
for a disappearance and a homicide?
It's time to talk to her again.
Crystal said, in her initial statement,
she was forced to accompany this group,
as they dispose of the remains.
"Okay, Crystal. Take us to the body."
They put her in a car,
and they drive north toward Wyoming.
[Ben] We spent a lot of hours in the car,
trying to get her to remember things that she had seen,
um, when Tera's body was dumped.
[Joe] She said, "It was dark, it was late at night.
I'm not sure,
but there was water running nearby."
[Ben] She took us right over the Wyoming border.
She would show us different things
that she had thought looked familiar,
but it was never the right place.
[Joe] So now, Crystal has another problem
with her story.
The body isn't in the area where she says it was.
So, has Crystal just invented this whole thing? What is...
What's going on?
[Ben] In the car,
we ended up trying to gather
as much information from her, verbally,
to, at least, paint a picture
of what had happened with Tera.
[loud rock music playing on stereo in the distance]
[loud rock music playing]
-[music volume decreases] - Crystal's story was, that...
Tera had had some sort of a disagreement
or an argument with Karly...
-[music playing continuously] -...the night before.
And it was all over, uh, a stereo.
It was too loud.
Tera had said something that made the group think
that she had disrespected Karly.
[volume increases]
[scoffs]
[Karly] Who does she think she is, anyway?
This is so messed up!
-[Karly sighs in exasperation] -[Ben] Being that Karly was dating Mike,
who was the second-in-charge of this... this gang,
they had to do something about it.
[Joe] She has been disrespected,
and it's meaningful thing in the biker world,
and it's a death penalty offense.
Even though these people have no idea
what the biker world is all about,
only what they have heard or seen in the movies.
According to Crystal,
because of the rules of the gang,
the enforcer is called upon to carry it out.
And that is DJ,
the owner of the house.
[Ben] We were wondering...
We were wondering if she was even being truthful about a lot of it.
She doesn't want to paint herself into a corner
where she's suspected of doing something more than she did.
When Crystal tells him about this, they run
all the names of these individuals who supposedly
are members of this gang, and no one has
a criminal record of any kind.
I mean, supposedly, they went from basically
zero history to murder.
They're a motorcycle gang, missing a few components,
like a motorcycle.
All those other names, and no one has a criminal record.
So it's another aspect of the story that raises
an eyebrow about Crystal.
[Robert] We have a girl that's missing for several weeks.
We start interviewing the people that lived at
the house as well as other associates of theirs.
And when they came in, they all denied any sort of
wrongdoing or knowledge of where Tera was at.
Mike Vassil says he has no idea about
a 21 Club motorcycle gang.
Doesn't even know what that is.
Well, that makes two of us, Mike,
because we don't know what it is either.
They're getting no confirmation from anybody so far.
And then they speak to DJ Meyer, the supposed enforcer.
[Dan] He came in for a second interview.
With DJ, I mean, my whole point was just to win his trust.
So I talked to him some more and I said,
"DJ, I just need you to be my witness.
You need to tell me what went on."
They continue to press him, because they can feel it,
that he's emotional about this.
And he becomes emotional.
And he said, "Yes, I do know something."
He then says that Tera and Crystal had
a love-hate relationship, and they would get into
arguments all the time.
And on the night in question, Crystal and Tera got in
a heated argument.
What are you doing? [screams]
He then says Crystal grabbed a knife
and stabbed her to death.
And DJ's mistake was to help her cover it up.
[sniffles]
So we have Crystal pointing her finger at DJ
and DJ pointing his finger back.
Which finger should we believe?
The detectives believe that Tera's dead by someone's hand.
Crystal alleges this group of nitwits who call themselves
a gang are the ones responsible.
DJ says it's a simple catfight between two women.
Which one's true?
We'll see.
[Ben] We didn't have any murder weapons.
We didn't have Tera's body.
So we were just hoping that we'd get lucky with finding something.
So we continued doing the area searches to find Tera's body.
[Joe] Endreson is the kind of detective
that just won't stop.
The best kind of detective.
He won't ever quit.
I figure there's six and a half, seven billion people
on the planet, and if I'm the one that was trying to help
and it still didn't go right, I at least tried.
[Joe] They searched for days and weeks
in the Wyoming border area, and they find nothing.
We're still trying to corroborate things that Crystal had said.
We went out to the house where Tom Vassil, Mike Vassil,
and Karly Hanchett were living,
outside of Nunn, Colorado.
[Joe] They go see Thomas Vassil,
expecting to find a hardened biker.
[Dan] Tom Vassil's an unhealthy older gentleman,
extremely overweight, on oxygen,
pretty much stays at home.
But he is also supposedly the leader of this gang.
Instead of finding a badass biker,
they find Santa Claus, who's inhaling oxygen.
Not exactly an inspiring look.
But this was someone we had to be careful with because
Tom had a Glock stuck in the couch next to him.
[Joe] He is a sick old man at the moment,
but six pounds of pressure makes him Godzilla.
That's how much pressure it takes to pull a trigger.
He claimed not to know anything
about what we were talking about.
Thomas does what you would expect him to do.
Yeah, my kid Mike, he's a good kid.
He has some friends, they're all good kids.
You wanna look around, go right ahead?
When Endreson and Boyle are talking to Thomas,
they smell an odor from what is likely a burn pit.
A lot of people that live remotely in Colorado,
there's no garbage service in those remote areas.
You have to burn your trash.
We did a search warrant out there, and then
our field evidence technicians sifted through all the ashes.
There is no body or body parts, nothing like that.
It's very difficult to destroy a human body with fire.
This looks pretty interesting.
It takes the heat generated in a crematorium to do that.
During the search, they found the back of an iPad.
Consistent with what Vonda had told us,
that Tera always had this iPad.
It was pretty suspicious. You know, who burns an iPad?
[Joe] An iPad is an expensive toy.
They don't burn an iPad unless it belongs to a murder victim,
and that's most likely what this is.
People will destroy evidence of their involvement
in a crime, believing that they burn it, it's destroyed,
it can't be used against them.
But people look for things that people throw away,
particularly guys that carry a badge.
[Ben] So all of this definitely gave some value to the story that
they were trying to cover up something that had been done.
We have Crystal's story about the whole gang
being involved and her charming boyfriend
DJ's tale of only Crystal being involved.
This burned and destroyed iPad in Thomas Vassil's burn pit
is evidence of what Crystal said as being the truth
and what DJ is saying is a lie.
[Robert] We got a search warrant from the phone company
for all the phone records of the gang.
When those phones are recovered by the police,
they discover something very intriguing.
[Ben] All the different phones from all these different gang members,
it appeared that, for the most part,
they all stopped at the same time
and didn't come back on until the next day.
[Joe] There was, however, one exception.
Mike Vassil, the number two wizard
of the gang, left his on.
[Ben] I don't know why he left it on.
Probably some level of narcissism that
he's the only one that's capable of communicating if need be.
So we were able to use his phone and, using towers,
figure out where they went to dump Tera's dog, Diablo,
which then makes sense where he was found.
[Robert] And then the police basically put a map on their travels,
the early morning hours of Tera's murder,
and also the days following where they were,
what they were doing.
[Joe] They discover the route of travel from Pierce, Colorado to
the Wyoming border.
They see a stop in a convenience store
that sells gas and is open 24 hours
near the Wyoming border.
Investigators were able to locate video footage
of them going to that gas station
and the pickup that they were in.
And there is the 21 Motorcycle Gang
in all their glory.
All together with a dead victim
in the back of the truck.
It's obvious that Thomas Vassil had
some level of involvement in this.
At this point, there's no evidence to support
that he was directly involved.
He's not in the video surveillance,
but everyone else is in.
So that was a big thing for us. It was huge.
[Joe] There's always a moment in a case
that's been a mystery up to this point.
That things begin to fall together.
They're not all the way together yet,
but there's a definite sensation that it's about to be.
At this point, they've got evidence
against all the players in this.
This is the case.
We still didn't have Tera's body, but the detectives
and I knew these guys were good for the murder.
We felt we had enough to get arrest warrants for them.
[Joe] What does Endreson know for sure about this group?
He knows they're idiots. That's obvious.
Endreson puts it out.
Come get your cell phones.
There was nothing of value on them.
We'll get them back.
Karly and Mike show up at headquarters to get
their phones back and wind up wearing handcuffs instead.
[Ben] Crystal was arrested at her brother's house in LaSalle.
Chad Iler was arrested without incident at his house as well.
And then the U.S. Marshals took Scott into custody
at a gas station.
But DJ, there was 24-hour surveillance set up on him
to make sure that he wasn't going anywhere.
That next day, he was arrested.
[Dan] All right, okay.
[Joe] He tells what happened.
He confirms Crystal's story.
What Crystal's been telling them.
The dispute between the victim and Karly
was actually true.
Karly became furious when Tera demanded
she turn down her music.
[Ben] The group decided that they needed to punish her
for the disrespect that she had shown towards Karly.
Thomas orders her to be killed for this act
and he orders DJ as the enforcer.
Be responsible to carry it out.
[Dan] So they formed up a plan.
They all got their weapon of choice.
Their plan was to go up the stairs, Karly's going to hit her
with a pipe, and then they're basically going to stab her.
-[cell phone vibrating] - [Ben] Tera texted her mother in the middle of the night.
and told her to stay by her phone
because something may happen.
Crystal went into a downstairs bedroom and then Mike
had everybody else go kill Tera upstairs in Tera's bedroom.
-What are you-- [screams] -[thuds]
They then confront her.
Karly hits the victim over the head with a lead pipe.
Then DJ stabs her with a hunting knife.
[Tera screams]
Scott sees that she is suffering from these wounds,
and he decides to give her a quick death,
and stabs her in the spine,
once,
resulting in her immediate demise.
When they searched in the room,
they found no evidence of blood,
so the normal homicide occurs by stabbing
as one killer and one victim.
One blade was driven into the victim over
and over, and there's cast off from that blade.
Here we have several killers.
Each person has a knife stabbed once,
removes the blade,
it wipes through the clothing coming out,
it's clean, no cast off.
That would explain why the house was clean from blood.
Because there was no cast-off to find.
It's not there.
From there, all the others got in the truck
and loaded her and Diablo up.
Scott was supposed to kill the dog and dump the dog out
in the middle of the grasslands.
But he couldn't bring himself to do it,
so he just kicked the dog loose.
He doesn't mind killing a human. That's not a problem.
But to kill a dog? No, he can't do that.
Quite.
The problem remains, where is the victim?
No one can remember.
They're all willing to say what they know,
but they don't know enough.
They've got evidence against all the players in this,
with the exception of Thomas Vassil.
And Thomas winds up providing that evidence by talking
to his kid on a recorded line inside a jail.
This results in the arrest of Thomas.
[Robert] Just because the leader doesn't get involved
and actually do it, they can still be charged with conspiracy under the law.
So that's what we did in this case.
[Joe] They're found guilty of all these various crimes
or sentenced to various terms.
DJ is sentenced to life in prison.
Everybody gets locked up.
So it was a really strong case.
But finding the body, that was our main goal.
To get justice the best way we can in our system for Vonda.
All I did for like six months was drive around,
try to find Tera's body.
Crystal had described a one-lane dirt road,
a sign that said Laramie, and she could hear water nearby.
And I went into Google Maps, found an area near that sign
that appeared to match the description.
And then several of us went up on a road trip
up to Wyoming again.
We got back in that area and gave it maybe
a half-mile stretch of road.
Detective Guyer and Detective Walker started on
one side of that half-mile stretch,
and then the rest of us went up to the other side,
and we just started working towards each other.
We were out there for 15 or 20 minutes,
and then we came across the carpet.
[soft music playing]
There is Tera, laying there undisturbed for 187 days.
[Ben] Sergeant Halloran at the time had cleared everybody out
and just kind of let me stay there by myself for a minute.
Then immediately after that, I went to find Vonda.
When he came over, he said that
they're pretty sure they found her.
[exhales]
It became very real that day.
Even though it was already real,
it was set in cement that day.
[sniffles]
That she wasn't coming back.
I'd never talk to her again. I'd never hold her again.
That my baby was gone.
[sighs softly]
[Robert] The autopsy revealed cause of death was stab wounds.
Manner of a death was homicide.
[Dan] You get very jaded in this profession,
just when you think you've seen the worst in somebody,
the next person's like, "Hold my beer. Watch this."
But it's also cases like this,
this is why you're in it. Cases like this.
Although Tera's surrounded herself with the wrong type of people.
She was trying to make the right decisions
and now the world is without a good person
and that's unfortunate.
[Joe] The 21 Biker Club was a dream
and nothing more than a dream.
-[all laughing] -And they wind up doing this.
First degree murder.
But Endreson spent 187 days of his life
to find a homicide victim,
to bring peace to the family.
To try to find some level of justice in the world.
When you do, for those few moments,
all is right with the world.
[soft music playing]
Next time, on American Detective...
We still have no DNA.
There is no body that's been found.
We were hoping these texts would prompt him
to take us to the body.
Whoever did this was some violent monster.