♪♪
Narrator: Up next -- a late-night walk
in an upscale neighborhood results in murder.
The victim suffered a horrible, agonizing, painful death.
Narrator: Surprise evidence sends investigators
in an unexpected direction.
Murder has no boundaries.
We're going wherever we got to go.
Narrator: After weeks of investigation,
the case comes down to a single phone number.
The bottom line to this investigation is forensics.
The cellphone forensics actually brought
the whole focus 180 degrees.
The forensics is the glue that sticks it all together.
♪♪
Narrator: After meeting online
and living for a while in Europe,
Fred and Sherry Engel married
and moved his consulting business
to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 2006.
The couple, both in their early 50s,
lived in a complex called Carolina Forest.
Carolina Forest -- it was really a planned-unit development,
but it stretches into what was just a bare tract,
a wildlife tract, for many, many acres.
Narrator: Tom and Karen Rickerson were
the Engels' next-door neighbors.
We knew her first because she lived in Myrtle Beach
before Fred was able, with his job, to move there.
They were very quiet, you know,
like, you know, to themselves.
Very nice people.
Narrator: Shortly before midnight on April 21, 2008,
Sherry woke up and couldn't find Fred.
He wasn't in the house,
but his car was still in the garage.
She had worked herself up into a panic.
She knocked on her next-door neighbors' door
and very plainly said then, but in a panicked way, you know,
"I can't find Fred. I don't know where Fred is."
Narrator: Tom Rickerson searched the Engels' home
and found no sign of Fred in the house or surrounding area.
But Sherry noticed that the keys to the mailbox
were not in the house.
The mailboxes for this development --
it's a bank of mailboxes
that's right at the edge of the community,
and it's in a very wooded area.
Narrator: This bank of mailboxes was about two blocks
from the Engels' house.
Sherry Engel and Tom Rickerson drove there.
Thomas: I get out the car, and in front of the mailbox,
I see a pair of glasses.
And when I get up close, I see blood on the pavement.
Well, Sherry comes up, and I said,
"Sherry, get back in the car,"
'cause I'm thinking whoever did this
is still there.
Narrator: Police were called to the scene
and immediately searched the area.
Cestare: And approximately 10 to 15 yards inside the wood line,
they see what appears to be a body laying there.
[ Camera shutter clicking ]
Narrator: It was Fred Engel.
He'd been strangled with a highly unusual murder weapon.
We see what appears to be a bootlace or a shoelace
tied around Fred Engel's neck,
and it's tied from the back.
Narrator: There was also a bloody gash
on the back of his head.
Detectives assumed that, while he was at the mailbox,
Fred had been knocked unconscious,
dragged into the woods, and then strangled.
This gave detectives one piece
of vital information straight away.
Fred was well over 6 feet and weighed 250 pounds.
Dragging him into the woods would not have been easy.
Cestare: This is not gonna be a skinny, little kid.
You know, this is going to be an adult-size male.
Narrator: Fred was still wearing his wedding ring
and an expensive watch.
His cellphone was in his pocket.
It's quite apparent at that point,
robbery is probably not gonna be the motive.
Narrator: The only motive appeared to be murder.
But who would want to kill Fred Engel?
No one had a clue.
♪♪
Narrator: Evidence at the scene of Fred Engel's murder
appeared to indicate his killer was lying in wait,
that he knew where Fred would be and at what time.
This was a particularly vicious crime.
It was the type of crime that, in my opinion,
happens because someone knows someone.
Narrator: When Fred's wife, Sherry, found out what happened,
first responders nearly had
another emergency on their hands.
Thomas: She became very hysterical, disbelief.
She passed out.
They were able to revive her, but she wasn't the same.
Hawes: It was heartbreaking to watch someone process
and go through that instant grief of understanding
that their loved one, their husband, has passed.
Narrator: When she could finally communicate,
Sherry said she had no idea who would want to kill Fred
and freely gave permission for police to search her house.
We're looking for anything that can help tell us
what happened to Mr. Engel.
Does he have a beef with any of the neighbors in the area?
Has any business partners or business contracts gone bad?
Any threats against him?
Narrator: And it turned out that Fred did have a confrontation
shortly before his murder
with a teenager who lived in the neighborhood.
This young man was so troublesome
and scared so many residents that he and his mother
had been kicked out of the development.
Hawes: This young man had committed some small fires,
had been accused of, like,
shooting an air rifle at passing cars,
different things of that nature that had basically made him
unwelcome on other people's property in the neighborhood.
Narrator: And he fit the bill as a potential suspect.
He had a significant temper, was the size of a regular man,
so we're not talking about dealing with a child.
We're talking about a child in a man's body.
Narrator: Even more telling, the killer used a shoelace --
a crime-of-opportunity weapon,
the kind of weapon a person might resort to on impulse.
Seeing the shoelace around his neck, to me,
immediately started gears spinning in my head.
The first thing it told me was this most likely
was something that happened in a hurry.
Narrator: Perhaps Fred had another altercation
with this teenager, and it escalated into murder.
The young man's police interrogation
did little to knock down this theory.
Hawes: His personality was very confrontational.
He did not want to be there.
He would not provide any direct answers.
Everything was evasive.
Narrator: He finally admitted to being in the neighborhood
but said he'd gone to a nearby shopping center
later that night.
Surveillance video from that shopping center
showed he was there.
And, most important,
he was there during Fred's estimated time of death,
between 11:00 and midnight.
So, that takes him out of the equation.
Narrator: Investigators now had to consider another possibility.
Fred's job tended to make enemies.
Hawes: He would come and evaluate businesses,
see what was working, what was not,
and very frequently, whenever Fred came in,
people lost their jobs.
A lot of people didn't like Fred.
He was kind of the hatchet man.
Narrator: This meant a huge pool of potential suspects,
not only in America, but also overseas.
If you jump into a pond, you're gonna make a splash,
and Fred had jumped into quite a few ponds
through his business.
Narrator: As detectives began the painstaking search
for possible suspects,
they hoped DNA might provide a break.
Could analysts get DNA
from the very unusual murder weapon --
the shoelace used to strangle Fred?
Hawes: The shoelace looked dingy and old,
so I immediately got optimistic, hoping, "Okay, great.
Hopefully, there's gonna be DNA on this shoelace."
Narrator: But in a setback no one anticipated,
no foreign DNA was recovered.
Jurors believe that DNA is everywhere, and it is.
But it's very fickle,
and it's very hard to get a lot of times.
Hawes: We're really looking for it,
and not having it in this case --
it really hurt me.
Narrator: As police dug for leads,
they had to deal with a community on edge.
Karen: A murderer was at loose.
No child was playing outside after 5:00
when the sun went down.
Nobody was jogging any longer.
Hawes: We've already crossed that 48-hour threshold.
The investigation reached a point
where I had essentially ran out of leads.
Narrator: But a few weeks into the investigation,
detectives got a potential break in the case.
Sherry's friends and family said they saw something strange
shortly after Fred's murder,
on the very day he was laid to rest.
During the memorial services for Fred,
several family members and friends of Sherry noticed
her having conversations and interactions
with someone they didn't know.
It was a tall, redheaded stranger.
Narrator: And this behavior continued
well after the funeral.
She seemed to have a very friendly, very cordial,
on the borderline of being flirtatious relationship
with this man that none of them knew.
Narrator: Who was this man, and was it possible
he held the key to Fred Engel's murder?
♪♪
Narrator: Even though Fred Engel
had moved his business to the U.S.,
he still spent a lot of time on the road.
He would fly to New York for business meetings.
He would go to China.
He would fly all over.
Narrator: And when he was gone,
Sherry would often stay with her family in Kentucky.
Fred accompanied her whenever he could.
Sherry's family in Kentucky absolutely loved Fred.
They enjoyed every time he visited.
They really appreciated him.
Narrator: But there was something about Sherry's behavior
that concerned her family in Kentucky.
She was increasingly seen in the company of a man
her family had never met.
And they seemed to be more than friends.
In Kentucky, she had been seen
with this unknown redheaded man, redheaded stranger,
several times over the course of her visits,
and she had been visiting frequently back home.
Narrator: Family members didn't know him.
And after Fred's murder,
Sherry seemed to be spending even more time with him.
The scuttlebutt on the street in Breckinridge, Kentucky,
is Sherry is having an affair
with some redheaded guy that's really big.
Narrator: Family members in Kentucky
contacted the local sheriff to express their concerns.
That sheriff promptly called his counterparts
in South Carolina.
Both offices agreed to work together to find out what,
if anything, was going on.
I asked the sheriff in Breckinridge County,
"Is there any way -- would you mind, please, going out
and kind of doing the legwork there in Kentucky
and finding out who this person may be?"
And he agreed to do that for me.
Narrator: Detectives in Kentucky were eventually able to identify
the man seen with Sherry Engel as Tim Rogers,
a divorced 40-year-old contractor
with no criminal history.
He was 6'4", 240 pounds --
almost the exact size as Fred Engel.
I immediately realized I had a person
that was physically capable
of doing the things that the crime scene
and the body showed me happened that night.
Narrator: Tim Rogers drove a red pickup truck,
which turned out to be potentially significant.
The night of the murder, a woman in Fred's neighborhood
saw a red pickup driving around the mailboxes
where Fred was attacked.
The truck, which she had never seen in the neighborhood,
drove very slowly to the bank of mailboxes and parked nearby.
She said she never saw the driver exit the vehicle.
She doesn't recognize the vehicle
because, obviously, she lives there.
She's never seen it before.
She believes it's a Chevy S-10 pickup.
Narrator: This truck was the same model as Tim Rogers' truck.
But when South Carolina detectives
went to interview Tim, his truck was no longer red.
Hawes: So, he changed the color from maroon or red
to basically primer gray,
which was very suspicious in and of itself.
Narrator: Meanwhile, detectives were questioning Sherry Engel.
On the night of the murder,
she allowed police to search her house.
One item they searched was her cellphone.
There appeared to be nothing unusual on this phone.
But a few days later,
while going over Sherry's physical phone records,
analysts found something unexpected.
She'd deleted a series of calls
that happened in the days leading up to Fred's murder.
All of these calls were to a number in the 502 area code.
The area code was a Kentucky phone number.
Narrator: And analysts traced the number
Sherry had called to a disposable burner phone
purchased by none other than Tim Rogers.
A concentrated burst of these calls
happened the night of Fred's murder
at a time when Sherry told police she'd been asleep.
Her whole story now was suspect.
Not only was Sherry lying to me,
she was lying to me during the exact time period
that we're investigating where a homicide occurred.
Definitely something is up.
Narrator: Analysts now did a deep dive
on Sherry and Tim's phone activity,
and it revealed a murder conspiracy
in the works for months.
Sherry was brought in for questioning
and denied any involvement in her husband's murder.
But when confronted with the evidence from her phone,
would Sherry's story change?
♪♪
Narrator: Sherry Engel's reaction to her husband's murder --
she was so shocked, she had to be treated by paramedics --
made her an unlikely murder suspect.
But if she was having an affair with Tim Rogers,
investigators and even her relatives weren't so sure.
Sherry's own family is saying, "This is closer than friends.
These two have something going on."
Narrator: Rumors of an affair
and a lot of suspiciously timed phone calls
were hardly proof of murder,
but detectives believed those calls
might be able to tell the story
of what happened the night Fred was killed.
Investigators got the locations
of all the cellphone towers in the area
and then did what's called a tower dump.
Cestare: A tower dump shows you every phone number
in and out of a particular tower and the times that it occurs,
how long the call lasted,
the phone number it connected with
or called to or called from.
Narrator: Forensic analysts were able to pinpoint
almost exactly Sherry and Tim's locations
as they called each other the night of Fred's murder.
So, they could put the signal
down into the size of about a car,
I would say about 6 feet by 10 feet.
I could say that this person was accurately within that area.
Narrator: Sherry and Tim had five phone conversations
around the time of Fred's murder.
The tower dump showed that four of those calls
were either made or received right next to the mailbox
where Fred was attacked.
The last call was from a hotel
about seven miles from the site of the murder.
I immediately walk in with the staff, show them a picture,
and they immediately recognize him,
say, "Yeah, that's Timmy.
Timmy's been staying here off and on for several months."
Narrator: Hotel staff said he drove a red Chevy S-10 pickup,
the same make and model a witness reported seeing
on the night of Fred's murder,
and he checked out the day after Fred Engel's memorial service.
Sherry Engel had been paying for Timmy Rogers' hotel room
with her credit card.
Narrator: Sherry and Tim were both questioned
in connection with Fred Engel's murder.
Richardson: Timmy is denying any involvement in the crime,
and he's denying any relationship with Sherry.
He essentially played dumb about every topic
that I asked him about.
How did...
Narrator: Sherry's story wasn't much different than Tim's.
She said that Timmy was a very dear friend of hers,
that they spent time together,
but they strictly had a friendship, and that was it.
Narrator: Now detectives confronted Sherry
with the evidence from her cellphone.
This interview ended,
but it apparently had quite an effect on Sherry Engel.
Later that day, she came back to the police station
and told detectives it was time to come clean.
Detective: Okay.
Okay.
A rattled Sherry now confessed to the affair with Tim Rogers.
Listen...
She told police Tim wanted to kill Fred and marry her,
but she never thought he'd go through with it
and was shocked when he did.
Tell me, what did --
Prosecutors say the phone evidence created
a remarkably clear picture of what happened
and proved Sherry was in on the murder plot from the start.
At 9:43, Tim called Sherry from the mailboxes.
This was him calling Sherry, saying,
"Hey, I'm in position. I'm ready to go.
Send him down here as soon as you can."
Narrator: At 10:35, Sherry called Tim,
saying the plan had been delayed.
At 11:05, she called Tim again.
Hawes: This is Sherry telling Timmy,
"Get ready. I have sent Fred to the mailbox."
Narrator: Sherry asked Fred to get something from the mailbox,
knowing full well he was walking to his death.
The evidence shows Tim Rogers hit Fred in the head
with some sort of object, knocking him unconscious.
Tim dragged Fred into the woods,
took one of his own shoelaces, strangled Fred to death,
and then made his way back to his truck.
At 11:42, Tim called Sherry.
That is him telling Sherry, "The crime has been committed.
I've done it. I'm heading back to the hotel."
Narrator: At 12:03, Tim called Sherry from the hotel.
He tells her, "I'm back at the hotel.
I'm cleaning up."
Narrator: And now, in a clear indication
she was in on the plot,
Sherry deleted all her calls to Tim
before she informed neighbors that Fred was missing.
When they got those records, it was a definite "a-ha" moment.
Narrator: In October of 2010,
Tim Rogers was convicted of first-degree murder
and sentenced to 35 years.
In December, Sherry went before a judge.
She hoped her story of being an unwitting accomplice
in her husband's murder would buy her some mercy,
but the evidence exposed that story as a lie.
Richardson: The judge couldn't stand her.
He gave her 30 years.
Narrator: As unlikely as it seemed,
Tim and Sherry apparently thought
they could pull off this crime.
Their main mistake?
They had no idea
their cellphones had been tracking every move they made
and proved without a doubt
they had conspired to kill Fred Engel.
The cellular data definitely shifted the direction
of the investigation straight at her.
Richardson: I've described it over and over again
as a busted lamp or a busted vase.
The forensics is the glue that sticks it all together.
Cestare: That's what turned the whole investigation around
to focus at her, to focus at Timmy.
That's what also told us there was no other players
involved in this other than those two.