Priority number one for Agawam Detective Sergeant Wayne Macey
and investigators is finding the killer of Lisa Ziegert.
There was a lot of mystery and confusion
surrounding this case right from the very beginning.
Police believe there are people out there who know something
about Lisa's murder and who have not yet come forward.
People start to wonder if I walk out the door of my house,
is somebody gonna be out there waiting for me?
That's the unknown, and the unknown creates
all kinds of conflict in your mind.
There are very, very dangerous people who are intentionally
hiding their behavior from everyone they know.
Those people are wolves.
They remain in the shadows. They kill because they like it.
There's nothing more dangerous than that.
I spent my career closing murder cases.
But I'm not the only one who answered 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."
Agawam, Massachusetts.
A small town of about 25,000 souls.
Sophia Maynard pulls up to Brittany's Card Shop
at 9 o'clock in the morning to open business for the day.
She notices Lisa Ziegert's car in the parking lot
and thought that was very odd.
Lisa's responsible to close the business at 9 o'clock
in the evening, lock up, and go home.
So why is she here now?
Sophia goes to the front door, and it's unlocked.
The lights are on, the music is playing.
It's not supposed to be.
So she proceeds to search for her.
And becomes extremely alarmed
when she sees the back door is standing open.
It should be closed and locked.
This is bad. And she instinctively feels it.
And her instincts are correct.
It is bad.
I am Wayne Macey.
I was with the Agawam Police Department for 31 years.
On the morning of the 16th,
I was advised that there was a missing person down
at Brittany's Card Shop.
Agawam is a very small town, a close-knit community.
It was just unlikely that this kind of a thing
could have happened.
When I first drove up, the only thing when I got there
in the parking lot was the vehicles
that our police officers had arrived in.
And the one car that didn't fit in there was Lisa's car,
all by itself in the corner.
Walking into the store, there was no signs
of a struggle as far as things falling on the floor.
Nothing was knocked over.
But as we kept investigating inside the store,
and I started noticing, um...
things that were completely and totally out of place.
They had her pocketbook and her coat
remaining in the building.
Something is happening here.
The register is undisturbed.
This is not a robbery. It's something else.
At that point, I went past the register
and as I was walking through the store,
I noticed that there were some blood spattering
on some of the cards.
Blood spatter is significant evidence.
A first blow produces blood.
Subsequent blows disperse the blood.
Someone is hurt, not mildly hurt.
Hurt.
Macey looks in the storage room and finds evidence
of a struggle.
I noticed that there's a heel mark in the door
from the inside that appears that somebody
might have kicked that door.
There are certain earmarks of a crime scene
that add up very quickly in a policeman's head.
She's assaulted...
with violence.
There is resistance.
No one's looking for money. She is the motive.
This was an obvious abduction.
We don't have Lisa Ziegert because somebody else has her.
Meanwhile, Lisa Ziegert's family arrives.
Lisa's oldest sister, Lynn, and I
went to the gift shop
and the police were there.
And I went from "Lisa's gonna turn up" to...
abject...
fear.
This is one of your beloved children who is missing,
and you know it's not like her.
It made no sense.
We were very lucky.
We were blessed with four children.
Uh, Lisa was the second,
uh, oldest, the shortest.
- Wanna say something? - No,
Lisa always reminded me of an old song.
It was called "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue"
but, oh, what those five foot could do.
That was Lisa.
Her stature didn't seem to matter.
Her personality was big.
Lisa was always a glass-half-full kind of girl.
She was always very positive, always supportive,
and a really good listener.
- We're here to see if you're having enough fun. - Oh, yeah.
Lisa was the coolest person I've ever known.
She did nerdy things, played in the band,
was a drum major,
read science fiction, but she was just so magnetic
of a personality that people didn't care that they might not
have exactly the same interests.
So in 1992, she was working at the gift shop part-time,
but she was also working full-time
as a teaching assistant at the middle school.
Lisa was born to be a teacher.
She was generally empathetic and was somebody
easily approachable, and she generally cared.
She was 24.
She was sweet and loving, and she had her whole life
ahead of her.
Someone made this happen.
Macey needs to develop a suspect.
At that point in time, some of her friends
started gathering outside the store.
This is a small town.
Everybody knows that Lisa Ziegert is missing
from the card shop.
Lisa's boyfriend, Blair, he was there also.
Boyfriends are always of interest to a detective
because they are emotionally involved.
And emotion leads to violence in many cases.
Well, when we started talking with Blair,
we just wanted to know if there were any problems
in the relationship.
He's concerned about this woman.
They are in love, and it seems to be genuine.
But a good detective takes nothing at face value.
He did have an alibi for that evening.
He was with his mother.
I mean, he just was nowhere near there that night.
Blair is eliminated by alibi.
He was obviously very worried, but he had no real information
as far as what could have happened here.
So here we are.
We know she's been hurt in the process
of being abducted.
And other than that, we don't know anything.
Where is she?
Agawam PD quickly called for assistance
from the state police and the FBI.
Combined with participation from the community,
the search to find Lisa was extensive.
As the days start going by, I'm losing hope
because of the fact that we haven't found her.
I thought something bad may have happened to her.
But I never thought she wouldn't come home.
Everything will be fine.
On April the 19th, a man is walking his dog
in a remote area about three miles from the card shop.
And the dog strains at the lead and drags the owner forward
because he sees and smells something.
And he got to within 50 or 75 feet of what he determined
might be a female body.
I am thinking, this is it.
This is gonna be more than a coincidence.
Good policemen don't believe in coincidences.
2 Four days after Lisa Ziegert's disappearance,
her body has been found.
The 24-year-old Agawam woman
was abducted from the card shop where she worked.
Days later, her body was found in a wooded area
off route 75.
In 1992, this barricade wasn't here.
It was pretty much open.
I'm gonna say that the body is about 250 to 300 yards down
this particular road.
I think it was the worst of my career when I saw it.
The first obvious fact of the discovery of her remains
is that she is naked from the waist down.
Her clothes were torn
or ripped off of her body.
And there was blood all over her blouse.
And the buttons from her blouse
were found scattered around the area.
Because of Lisa's clothing and the way it was
displayed, it was becoming obvious to all of us
that it was a sexual assault.
Lisa's injuries indicated that this was a brutal attack.
She had been stabbed multiple times
to the front of her neck...
the back of her neck...
and one to her leg as well.
She also had multiple defensive injuries on both of her hands.
I was thinking to myself, whoever did this,
it's probably not their first time, it's probably not gonna
be their last time, and they enjoyed it.
And that's a very, very dark. and disturbing thought.
Lisa had been exposed to mother nature for three days.
So evidence has been destroyed by the weather conditions,
but it's also provided something else.
Part of the evidence that was found were tire tracks.
The lab people take castings of the tire tracks for possible
identification at a later time if a car is recovered.
So that's all you've got.
After viewing the crime scene, I jumped in my cruiser
and headed down to where the Ziegerts lived.
As I'm walking up, I'm thinking to myself, how do you say
the word "dead" and make it have less of an impact
than it's gonna have?
Detective Wayne Macey came to the door.
I just looked at him. I knew.
She just looked at me, and she said...
She's dead, isn't she?
Um...
I kinda dropped to my knees.
I said, "What are we gonna do without her?
She's such a good person. W-why is she gone?"
We sat on the porch.
Dee's brought Lisa's teddy bear out.
And we just talked about the family.
Wayne had an attitude, the way of talking,
that you just knew that he cared.
Wayne Macey was more than just a detective.
He became a friend.
It became more of a personal issue at that point.
There was only one case.
Nothing was going to be as important
as solving Lisa's murder.
The mission is what means everything.
During the autopsy, the most important piece
of evidence that we got was the suspect's DNA.
DNA databases did not exist in the same way in 1992.
There was no way to compare that person's profile
to a large pool of subjects to rule somebody in or out.
But we were always hoping that that was going to be
our ace in the hole.
This crime scared the local community
in a way that few crimes do.
While police have not yet solved this case,
they remain hopeful that someone will come forward
to break the case.
It changed the way people lived their lives.
We didn't know who it could have been, but we did strongly
feel like it was somebody local.
Once it was dark, most women stayed in.
A lot of women started to carry mace,
and some even got gun licenses.
People were widely concerned that whoever did this assault
was gonna do it again.
When there's no enemies that are known,
Macey turns to friends and family,
and Lisa's friend, Kim, has an interesting story to tell.
The week before she went missing,
I had stopped by the shop, and while we were talking,
there was a man in the store.
He was at the back of the shop, kind of just lingering.
I mean, it just didn't seem normal.
He finally did leave...
and he didn't buy anything.
He was a tall and thin man with dark hair,
and he was wearing a black jacket.
I can talk about a thousand, you know, tall, lean,
white guys who look suspicious, but, uh, with Kim,
that's what she noticed.
Later, we were standing in front of the big glass window
and she started to look around, and she said,
"I just feel like I'm being watched."
And I remember looking out across the parking lot
and saying to her, "Nobody's out there."
In retrospect, I think that...
she was right, and I was wrong.
I feel a lot of guilt over it.
I do, I carry that with me.
So it's possible that Lisa may have a stalker.
Without any solid leads to go on, police turned to the public
for their assistance.
Volumes of calls that the Agawam Police Department
received with people trying to help, it was so massive that
we actually had to put extra phone lines
into the detective bureau.
As strange as it may sound, a lot of these were coming in
from either girlfriends or wives who, for one reason
or another, were trying to unload their boyfriends
or whoever in our laps.
It's their ex-husband who's a no-good rat.
It is insane what people will say, but you are now required,
because you asked the question, to pay attention to the answer.
Every lead has to be looked into, or else you're just not
doing your job.
But there's one rumor that Macey keeps hearing over and over...
About a secret love triangle involving Lisa.
This kind of information was coming in
from a lot of people.
When you mention a love triangle, every detective would
turn a head. Three is not an even number.
Somebody decides to make it two.
2 Priority number one for Agawam Detective Sergeant Wayne Macey
and investigators is finding the killer of Lisa Ziegert.
The case is worked on daily.
There are phone calls coming in with new information.
I'm very optimistic with both the evidence that we have
and information that we've received by telephone.
Rumors are now circulating in this small town about
a love triangle gone bad.
The phone calls would be coming in, and some names were given
to you once, some names were given to you twice.
Ed Borgatti's name was coming to us a lot.
Mom? Dad?
Eddie Borgatti's father owned a restaurant
two or three doors down from Brittany's Card Shop.
Eddie Borgatti was also the roommate
of Lisa's boyfriend, and it was a circle of friends
that were always together.
The prevailing theory was that Lisa's boyfriend
and his best friend Eddie were more than just friends.
They were in a secret romantic relationship.
And when Lisa found out, Eddie decided to get rid of her.
When you are getting information from multiple
sources on one particular person,
it had to be looked into.
Macey brings Eddie Borgatti in for questioning.
When I talked to the police, I wasn't afraid of any
of the questions, because I knew that I had nothing to hide.
He was very calm, and he was direct.
Borgatti denies it all and says, "That's insane"
And there was no love triangle.
The night Lisa was taken, I was working
at my family restaurant.
And I had witnesses.
I mean, it was family, friends, staff.
He volunteered to give his DNA,
and he was cleared through his DNA.
It is not Eddie Borgatti. He is innocent of this crime.
And that should have been the end of the story.
But people were reading this like a novel, and they had
the answer before they got to the end of the book.
Truth doesn't matter in small towns.
Only finger pointing does.
It just was, like, a perfect storm of having
the house together and then having the shopping center
right around the corner. So they came at me.
It was tough, but you got to rise above it.
I just stayed above it.
The priority was always trying to find justice for Lisa,
and that's what the family and all the friends
always worked towards.
Detective Macey's suspect disappears into thin air.
So he returns to the physical evidence from the crime scene.
The tire tracks were submitted to the state police laboratory.
It turned out to be a Cooper tire.
At the time, back in 1992, they weren't as popular
or well known.
We started canvassing area stores that sold Cooper tires.
And you're able to come up with a list of people
who might have bought them, and you go from there.
They come up with this guy who is from that town.
His name is Jason Ramsey.
When we went out to the house and questioned him.
And they say, "You know, we're looking into
this murder case, we found tire tracks."
And the guy says, "Oh, yeah.
We were out there recently".
They had been four wheeling.
There was mud all over the place.
And they got stuck, and they had to get pulled out.
And he took pictures of it. And here are the pictures.
At that point in time, DNA taken, end of the story.
So it's another dead end.
We had tried so many things in investigating this case.
Macey even went to the Behavioral Science Unit
in Quantico, Virginia, and discussed
this case with them.
And we spent two days profiling this case.
And we had information on some of the characteristics that
this particular suspect could possess.
But they don't completely narrow it down enough.
I feel like there was a shadow cast over the town,
and that over the years, people still didn't feel safe.
People want closure, and they're not getting it.
I never knew Lisa, but as close as I could come was to go every
once in a while to her grave to let her know that we were
still working and we weren't gonna give up on it,
and that's what I did.
None of us gave up ever on the idea that Lisa's case
would be solved.
If somebody said, "Oh, this is going on,
will you do an interview?" Yes.
Not because I wanted my face there.
I wanted Lisa's face there.
As long as people are still talking about Lisa,
she will never be forgotten.
We get out of the '90s, and now we're into the 2000s,
and I was just kind of running on empty,
and there was nothing left.
The most important case of my entire career
was Lisa Ziegert.
And I didn't finish it.
So...
Sometimes, it's just not there. It's just not there.
In a way, I hated to leave, but at the same time,
I also felt that we needed new blood.
It's time to pass the torch.
So when Wayne leaves in 2001, I get promoted to Sergeant.
The lieutenant in charge of the detective bureau said,
"This is your case, You will be working this case."
So I took it as a challenge. I want to solve this.
Like, this has to be solved.
Pfau has made a decision.
We are gonna solve this case because we must.
2 When I took over in 2001, I was excited...
to take a case that I felt, as did others,
that was very solvable.
This was a massive case file.
So when I took it over,
you know, I was determined to get a grasp on it.
So right now we're in the evidence room,
where we have all our files.
Through the years, there was a constant investigation.
It never stopped.
All these files right here, going like this across,
these are all people that we label people of interest.
We had approximately 400 names, and we felt the answer was
in that filing cabinet.
And it's a process of elimination.
And the only way we can eliminate somebody is
to get their DNA.
By 2001, there's been a huge advancement, you know, how DNA
is obtained and everything like that.
You swab their cheek, and off you go, and you move on
to the next one.
We have to go out and start obtaining DNA samples.
Pfau goes through the file of tips involving ex-wives
reporting their ex-husbands as being responsible
for the crime.
He comes across one involving a man named
Gary Schara from 1993.
Gary Schara was, just like many other
people of interest, an ex-wife called.
On the night that Lisa was abducted, apparently,
Gary's ex-wife had said that
Gary came home very late that night,
And he had really no excuse or no reason
for why he was late.
And that he was always looking at news reports of Lisa Ziegert.
The ex-wife also says he likes
to wear a Batman costume while having sex.
OK, Gary, what is this, and who the hell are you?
In 1993, we started investigating
Gary's background, and we found out that he had gone to court
for a custody battle.
Gary's ex-wife apparently had problems with alcohol
and a number of other issues.
So the investigators felt that this was just another
disgruntled soon-to-be ex-wife who was trying to get custody
of her child and was trying to make
her soon-to-be ex-husband look bad.
And then I received a note from his attorney.
She said to me, "Gary won't be coming in to see you
for an interview because of the custody battle."
So as a result of all of that,
we ended up putting Gary Schara on the back burner.
So now, Pfau wants to permanently knock
Mr. Schara off the suspect list.
I ended up calling him up. He did come in.
Very polite, was cordial.
But almost the same time that he was walking through
the front door, I had a family emergency, and I had to leave.
So two other investigators sat with him.
He just completely removes himself from the Ziegert story.
They even ask him about frequently wearing
a Batman costume.
Gary has no idea why he's ever been linked to this case.
So they say, "Fine, there is a way to eliminate you,
but we'd like for you to offer us a DNA sample."
And he says the most bizarre thing that Pfau’s ever heard.
And he's like, "I'm afraid of cloning."
And I'm like, "Cloning?"
Excuse me?
And if you review that tape, he never, ever put his hands
on the table.
He kept his hands on his lap.
He didn't take a sip of a water bottle
that was provided to him.
That means to me that he was conscious to not leave
DNA on anything.
So he declines.
He won't submit to a DNA sample.
He said, "No." But there's a few other people
back then that had said no too. It's their constitutional right.
So we didn't put them in a closeout file.
We just put them back in the file and said,
"We got to get back to this massive list."
And then we pick up the next file, read that, track that
individual down, obtained their DNA,
and you move on to the next one.
So that's how the investigation was led, you know,
for several years, actually.
After chasing down DNA for years without a result,
a new district attorney comes to town, and he has an idea.
When I came in office in 2015,
I was determined to solve Lisa's case.
I mean, we really looked at the lay of the land
forensically and said, "You know, what can we do
"to apply new forensic technologies to a case
that was at that point 25 or more years old?"
And one thing that stood out was DNA phenotyping.
What that does is tell us, with a high degree
of statistical accuracy, the physical characteristics
of the person who left behind that DNA.
And that resulted in
literally a composite sketch of the suspect.
Today, I am releasing the snapshot composite
sketches, as developed by Parabon, to the public.
This forensic testing has predicted that Lisa's assailant
has fair to very fair complexion, with some
freckling, hazel or brown eyes, and brown or black hair.
We're able to rule out people who have dark skin.
We can rule out people with blue eyes.
We ruled out people with blonde hair.
We really focused on cross-referencing the results
of the phenotyping and who had refused to voluntarily give
their DNA profiles.
Eventually, we're able to narrow that list of refusals
down to about 11 people.
And they're hopeful that Lisa's killer
is within that group.
We have to come up with a strategy now to try
to rule these remaining 11 refusals
in or out.
We devised this plan to exercise a rarely-used aspect of the law
in the grand jury proceedings to compel an individual
or individuals to provide a DNA sample.
We didn't want to hit the grand jury
with all 11 names,
so we came up just randomly, for lack of a better term,
let's pick six names.
So, I wanted Gary Schara in there.
He always stood in my mind as,
like, I want to go back and get this guy.
So they go door-to-door and hand-deliver
these hearing notices to the people on that list.
The next day, a woman who was not known to investigators
shows up out of the blue at the police barracks.
This woman tells the troopers at the barracks
that her boyfriend is missing.
And she found three very strange letters that he left.
Among those letters is what appears to be a confession
to the kidnapping, rape, and murder
of Lisa Ziegert in 1992.
The letter is written by none other than Gary Schara.
Well, Gary...
isn't cloning you were worried about after all, now, is it?
2 Gary Schara’s girlfriend has shown up
at the Massachusetts State Police barracks
with three handwritten letters.
One is essentially a confession letter
to the killing of Lisa Ziegert, written by Gary Schara.
So they open a full-court press.
Where is Gary Schara, because we want our hands on him.
We started pinging his phone, trying to locate him.
We're able to find Gary's car at a hospital
in Central Connecticut.
There's a note on the dashboard that says something
to the effect of--
"My apologies to whoever finds my body.
Call Mass State Police."
OK, Gary, where's your body?
'Cause it's not in his car. So now what?
They walk into the hospital, and the desk reports he's been
signed in as a patient. For what?
He took, like, a bottle of ibuprofen, which what we felt
was his way of, you know, trying to commit suicide.
But basically, all he got was an upset stomach.
It's an attempt and a pathetic one at that.
Noah Pack and I did go down there
with the intentions of hopefully trying
to interview him at his bedside.
You're thinking, OK, this is gonna be easy.
He'll confess to it.
And he goes, "I'd like to talk to you guys, but I can't.
I'm gonna talk to my attorney first."
It was almost surreal.
Like, this is how this is gonna play out at the end here?
So they provide Mr. Schara with a new set of jewelry made
by Smith and Wesson.
What we need now is a sample of Gary's DNA.
We move for search warrants for his residence on an urgent
and emergency basis.
They find personal items that likely contain DNA...
including a razor and a toothbrush.
Rush the testing on this toothbrush, and the next day,
we have a DNA profile to compare.
It's a match.
Gary Schara is Lisa Ziegert's killer.
And I basically collapsed. It was unbelievable.
There was tears, you know, we both were like, oh my God.
It was another surreal moment.
Mr. Schara is the killer.
Not Eddie Borgatti. Gary Schara.
Other breaking news at this noon hour, the man accused
in the death of Lisa Ziegert over 25 years ago
is now pleading guilty to those murder charges.
He has since been sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
I was almost in shock, like...
can I really believe this?
Because, you know, but no, no, it's really true.
Yes, we got him. We got him, Lisa.
We got him.
I was so grateful.
Now the world can know that this person did it,
that perhaps Lisa will be given some level of...
of respite.
In one of the handwritten confessions, so to speak,
Gary Schara talked about never feeling normal.
And he talked about how he fantasized about abduction
and bondage when it came to his sexual acts with females.
That matches up.
That's clearly consistent with the behavior pattern that
we saw in this crime.
Our belief at the end of this investigation is that
Gary had seen Lisa before and had been in that store.
I feel that he stalked her.
And had an infatuation with her, and she became his victim.
On April 15, 1992, he makes his way into the store
when he knows that she's alone.
He confronts her. She resists him.
He applies force, and then more force.
He then forcibly removes her from the store,
gets her into his car, and...
took her down the road.
And sexually assaulted her,
and eventually murdered her.
He then goes home, and he keeps this secret for 25 years.
The only person that suspected him was his ex-wife.
And she was right.
This case will never, ever go away for me.
It's impossible to not feel like you failed.
We put him on the back burner...
so long ago...
and now it turns out to be him.
Kind of a hard pill to swallow when you think about that.
But having the case solved now makes up for a lot.
It really does.
And never thought as a detective, I would need
closure, but I did, so.
- Hi! - Hi.
- You havin’ fun? - Oh, yeah.
The number of things that Lisa was robbed of is almost too
many things to contemplate.
You know, sometimes I think it's not so much
what she missed out on, but this world has really
missed out on her because I think she had a lot to offer.
I think about Lisa every day.
I mean, I truly do.
They say if a person is remembered,
they're never truly gone.
I still go to the mall or I go shopping or I'll be
in the grocery store and someone will come up and go...
"You look familiar...
You're Lisa's mother."
That's pretty special.
Human nature is particularly frightening.
You can live your life in the best possible way,
but bad things happen to nice people.
Because there are bad people in the world.