♪♪
Narrator: Up next, a sexual encounter goes horribly wrong.
She fought back. She gave us the evidence we needed.
Narrator: The victim pays with her life.
She didn't deserve to die, not that young, not that way.
Narrator: Investigators think they have solid information
on her killer, but a brand-new piece of forensic technology
upends the investigation.
This was completely different from what they had expected.
♪♪
Narrator: Lake Charles, Louisiana --
one of America's gateways to the Gulf of Mexico.
It's a tight-knit, blue-collar community
where people work hard and live easy.
McGee: I was born and raised in Lake Charles.
It's about 100,000 people.
It's a diverse community.
Many of our families work at the petrochemical industry
and at the local casinos.
Narrator: But as Thanksgiving approached in 2009,
the peace of this bayou boomtown was shattered
when shortly after dawn, a young woman was found dead
off a secluded road just out of town.
Whoever did this was mad and angry,
and it was a brutal murder.
McGee: This homicide was overkill in every sense of the word.
Someone was very angry when they killed her.
Narrator: Investigators from
the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff's Office
processed a scene of uncommon violence.
The victim had been beaten beyond recognition.
She had on a blue jean skirt and it was twisted to the side.
Her bra was pulled open and her shirt was down.
She's all cut up.
So she did struggle.
It appears she ran out of her flip-flops
because they're in two different places,
and her panties are near one of the flip flops.
Narrator: Problems presented themselves straight away.
The area was so isolated there were no streetlights,
which meant no witnesses.
There was no murder weapon at the scene.
The victim had no identification.
But the killer did leave some clues behind.
We had numerous pieces of evidence from the scene,
including a candy wrapper.
There were bloodstained rocks that were swabbed at the scene,
and the swabs were submitted.
Narrator: The autopsy revealed the victim
died of blunt force trauma to the head,
and the motive appeared to be sex.
I think that she got picked up by this suspect.
I think however it transpired,
he wanted to have sex, she didn't,
and she fought for her life, and unfortunately,
he ended up killing her.
But I do not think any sexual activity actually happened,
and I believe that's because she fought him off
and did not want to.
Narrator: In attempting to identify the victim,
investigators got a possible break.
She had a distinctive tattoo of someone's name,
and since tattoos are an identifying feature
and lots of people have them,
many jurisdictions keep a file of offenders' skin art.
We photograph them and we put them in our computer system.
Her tattoo was very unique,
which narrowed it down to be just her.
Then with her book-in photograph,
her driver's license, we were able to identify her.
Narrator: The victim was 19-year-old Sierra Bouzigard,
a young woman with a troubled past.
Bouzigard: She had a rough time growing up.
I wasn't the mother that I should've been for her.
I wasn't there for her when she needed me.
When I found that she wasn't alive, it's like,
"Why her? Why not me? Should've been me."
Narrator: Sierra's lifestyle might or might not
explain what looked like a sex crime.
Mancuso: She was using prostitution to help support her drug problem.
I don't want to use the word "gypsy,"
but she really just kind of lays her head
wherever she can find a spot.
McGee: Sierra lived a high-risk lifestyle.
Her background may have affected me a little different
than it does others, because I grew up in a community
where people ended up like Sierra.
And so I saw myself in Sierra,
and it became more personal to me.
Narrator: And now investigators got another possible break.
Sierra had been released from jail on a minor drug charge
just three days before her murder.
McGee: So her background helped in a way and hurt in a way.
It helped because we only needed
to fill in the blanks of 72 hours.
She had only been released from jail for those 72 hours,
so we backtracked that way.
Narrator: But where that backtracking took police
threatened to stop the investigation
dead in its tracks.
♪♪
Narrator: Even though Sierra Bouzigard's murder
appeared to be sexually motivated,
no DNA was recovered from her rape kit.
But thanks to Sierra, the killer left his DNA behind.
She apparently fought off a sexual assault
before being killed.
The coroner was able to obtain a DNA sample
from under the fingernails of Sierra.
Narrator: This meant the killer would likely be scratched up.
Even better for investigators,
this DNA profile matched other evidence at the scene.
Quaal: There was a profile obtained from a candy wrapper.
That was a full profile, what we call a major-minor.
The profile on the candy wrapper was a great quality profile.
Narrator: Investigators knew that killers
who resort to the kind of overkill
seen in Sierra's murder have usually killed before
or have at least committed violent crimes,
so they were confident they'd find a DNA match
to their killer in CODIS, the national DNA database.
Well, I think we're going to solve it immediately.
I think, "Okay, if we put this in CODIS
and we get a hit, then case solved."
Narrator: But it was not to be.
Despite the high quality of the killer's DNA profile,
there were no matches.
I was very aware there was not a hit in CODIS.
That was very frustrating for us,
and I know it's frustrating for the detectives, as well.
♪♪
Narrator: Now investigators backtracked
Sierra's final hours,
and true to her freewheeling lifestyle,
this led in some unexpected directions.
McGee: We knew that she attended a party
with some Hispanic males, and found some friends there,
and liked some of those guys.
Narrator: Those Hispanic men, more than a dozen in total,
turned out to be workers
who had taken temporary construction jobs
and shared a house near the murder site.
Mancuso: These people are undocumented, illegal aliens,
and so we have nothing to go on
other than if they're telling us who they are,
if that's who they are.
We got nothing.
Narrator: The men freely submitted their DNA.
None of their profiles matched.
And they had more bad news for investigators.
One of their group fled town right after Sierra's murder.
♪♪
McGee: We believe that the worker was headed back to Mexico,
and he had an eight-hour jumpstart on us.
You have to realize we had to identify Sierra
and put the pieces of the puzzle together
before we even ended up at that home.
So he had a good little jumpstart on us.
Narrator: And he apparently made it back over the border.
For those seeking justice for Sierra, this was a disaster.
Mancuso: We were continually working with the FBI
and the U.S. Marshals to try to find this guy
and bring him back to get him here,
at least to get a DNA sample and question him
about what he did that night and what was going on that night.
Narrator: But they didn't know who he was or where he was
and had only a vague idea of what he looked like.
The case stalled for nearly six long years.
Yeah, that frustrated me a lot.
Narrator: Investigators shared the family's frustrations.
They had the killer's DNA, but with no other clues,
it was all but useless.
Mancuso: I think any time any murder occurs
and you're trying to solve it
and you can't, it's very frustrating.
I always felt like we were going to solve it because we had DNA.
McGee: We can't put an identity with this DNA.
We had all kind of great ideas,
but none of them panned out because nobody is matching.
Quaal: This case was worked on every aspect
harder than any other case I'm aware of,
at least in this area.
Narrator: There was, however, one thing they had not tried
because the technology was just being developed.
Quaal: It was really hard to believe that this would be able to work.
I did not think that you could create a picture from DNA.
Narrator: But was it science or science fiction?
♪♪
Narrator: Sierra Bouzigard's murder
had all the earmarks of a random attack,
a stranger-upon-stranger killing
that are always the hardest to solve.
Mancuso: Normally we get four to six homicides a year.
Very seldom do we have a whodunit.
Normally it's domestic in nature or a drug deal gone bad.
Very seldom is it just a random act of violence.
In this particular case, that is exactly what this was.
Narrator: As the years pass since Sierra's murder,
detectives in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana,
refused to let the case go.
McGee: It was so frustrating. I lived and breathed this case.
I just felt so drawn to it.
So we were open to everything that everybody had to say --
every tip, every idea.
Narrator: And that search for something new
turned up a possibility
when DNA analyst Monica Quaal saw a Web seminar
from a cutting-edge forensics company called Parabon NanoLabs.
Quaal: We were contacted by a neighboring agency
saying that they had some interesting science
that a new agency was doing,
and they were interested in sharing with us.
Narrator: Parabon claimed that they could take DNA evidence
to a completely new level.
They said it was possible to put a face on unidentified DNA,
that the human genome combined with massive computer power
could actually tell investigators
what someone looked like just from their DNA.
Detectives believed Sierra Bouzigard's killer
was an undocumented Mexican worker.
But there was no clear description of the suspect.
Monica Quaal raced to tell her fellow investigators
that this new technology could provide that description.
I really think that she's crazy.
She was like, "You just have to have faith in me."
I was like, "I have faith in you, but this just
kind of seems like magic."
And she's like, "No, it's gonna work."
And so she convinced me and then we convinced the sheriff.
Narrator: Parabon got the unidentified DNA sample
from Sierra's case and put it through a process
they call Snapshot.
Snapshot is a way to take that DNA and ask it questions.
Okay, if we don't know exactly who this person is,
do we know his ancestry?
Can we say something about eye color, hair color,
skin color, freckling, face shape?
Can that information at least help the police
narrow their investigation and be more efficient?
And the answer is yes.
Narrator: Genetically speaking,
human beings are remarkably similar.
It's only a small portion of the human genome
that makes us different from one another --
eye color, hair color, facial shapes.
Quaal: The genome is so big.
Greytak: We're talking about 3 billion pieces of information.
If we looked at your DNA and my DNA,
we might differ at a few million spots.
But those tiny differences are the reason
that those two people look different.
Narrator: Parabon has assembled a vast library
of known genetic information.
They have the DNA of thousands of volunteers,
and courtesy of a 3-D photographic process,
they also know exactly what each of these people look like.
Armentrout: Traditionally, a 3-D camera rig is used.
Multiple cameras have to be synchronized.
They have take the picture at the same time
and just know their locations.
If you have that, then you can use mathematics
to actually recreate the three-dimensional shape
of someone's face.
Narrator: Snapshot uses those photographs
and that DNA to create a library of known genetic information.
Then the unknown, so far unidentified DNA,
is cross-checked across that library by computers
billions of times a second.
The result is a high-tech prediction
of how the unidentified person might look.
It's important to remember that the composite
is not a photograph.
Narrator: These composite images were created by Snapshot
using DNA and genetic data from their library.
They reveal not just ethnicity, but specific facial features.
It's intended to be a description of a person,
so it's essentially a summary of the prediction information,
but that information is just coming from the DNA.
Narrator: Of course, you can't tell how a person
parts their hair or if they have tattoos or scars
or their exact age.
But in dozens of cases, Snapshot has used DNA
to put a face where none existed before.
If you reflect on what we're doing,
it shouldn't sound like science fiction.
Narrator: The chief suspect in Sierra's murder
was a Mexican construction worker.
But investigators were in for a shock.
This was the image Snapshot created
of the man who killed Sierra Bouzigard.
He wasn't Hispanic.
He was Caucasian with blue eyes.
This meant they had been looking for the wrong man
for six long years.
Mancuso: It was a step-back moment.
It was literally, "Holy crap, what just took place here?"
We're not even looking in the right direction.
McGee: When you first see that sketch, it just --
it's unbelievable, and you're like,
"Have we wasted all these years going in this wrong direction?"
It was very different from what we were expecting.
We predicted that this was a Caucasian male,
fair skinned, blue eyes.
Very, very different from the Hispanic male description
that they had previously been looking for.
Narrator: Detectives could have viewed this
as a setback for their investigation.
Instead, they viewed it as an opportunity.
We literally started over from scratch
right there at that point, and it was a new investigation.
Armentrout: It's always nice when the DNA
can help redirect an investigation.
This is an example of when that happened.
Narrator: But could the new investigation find this man?
♪♪
Narrator: In September of 2015,
authorities investigating the unsolved murder
of 19-year-old Sierra Bouzigard
released this computer-generated likeness to the media.
Created solely from unidentified DNA,
they were hoping this could predict
what Sierra's killer actually looked like.
There were concerns, but we still wanted
to blast it out to the community,
hoping that somebody would call in.
And we were fortunate enough to have several tips.
Narrator: One of those tips was highly unusual.
A woman said she got a strange call from her now ex-husband
right after the Parabon image was broadcast on TV.
McGee: He called her that day and said,
"Remember that I was with you that night."
And she was like, "What night?"
And he said, "The night that Sierra was killed."
And she said she went back to that night in her head
and remembered that he left to get cigarettes
and should have only been gone for about 10 minutes.
The convenience store was right around the corner,
and was gone for many hours.
His name was Blake Russell,
a 31-year-old with a history of petty crimes.
His ex-wife told detectives
it was possible Blake could be their man.
McGee: She said each time they would have sex, it was like rape,
like that's the only way he knew how to do it.
Sierra would have done it for money,
but I don't think he wanted to pay her.
Narrator: Investigators were stunned.
Blake Russell bore a remarkable resemblance
to the DNA image created by Parabon.
I just couldn't believe how much
he actually looked like this sketch.
To this day, it still surprises me
that it all worked as seamlessly as it did.
I couldn't believe from a DNA sample
they could come up with this picture.
It was a happy day here at the sheriff's office,
I can assure you.
Narrator: But just because Blake Russell looked like
the Parabon image didn't prove he was Sierra's killer.
In fact, this technology was so new, so untested,
it wasn't even legally sufficient
to get a search warrant.
We felt like he was our best suspect,
and it was just gonna be a problem trying to get his DNA.
Narrator: But detectives had something going for them.
Blake had no idea they were looking at him.
McGee: So one of our guys went into a local bar,
had a beer with Blake Russell.
He actually had this crazy story
about how he was going to make a beer bottle Christmas tree
for his grandmother and asked Blake
if he could have the beer.
Blake gave him the beer bottle.
He walked out and brought it to Monica.
The DNA test results left no doubt.
The DNA from the beer bottle
matched the DNA from under Sierra's fingernails
and from the candy wrapper at the crime scene,
incontrovertible proof that Blake Russell
was Sierra's killer.
Quaal: I remember being in total shock
just because we had been looking for that profile for so long.
Narrator: Russell lived down the street from the group
of undocumented workers.
Investigators believe he went out for cigarettes that night,
saw Sierra walking from the party to a friend's house,
and offered her a ride.
He then attempted a sexual advance,
which Sierra either rejected or she may have asked for money.
Russell exploded,
and Sierra found herself fighting for her life.
Police believe Russell used a tire iron from his car
as the murder weapon.
Sierra scratched him during this altercation,
creating the microscopic DNA evidence
that would ultimately produce the virtual image
and land Russell in jail.
Bouzigard: I'm proud of her. I knew she was a fighter.
I knew she was, and she got that from me.
She got something good from me.
Armentrout: The DNA was there at the crime.
It's a matter of interrogating the DNA intelligently
and rendering the output
in a fashion that's useful to the police.
Narrator: In July of 2017,
Blake Russell was charged with second-degree murder.
While awaiting trial, he hanged himself in his jail cell,
a development that brought no satisfaction
to Sierra's family or to investigators.
They wanted the case to go to trial.
They have no doubt this revolutionary piece
of DNA technology would have put Blake Russell behind bars
for a long, long time.
Quaal: The nice thing about this
is that it will create a picture of this person,
and not based on someone's memory,
but actually based on the DNA in the case, which doesn't change.
Mancuso: It was everything.
It was her fighting and giving us the evidence.
It was the coroner swabbing the DNA.
It was our analyst Monica
running the DNA and staying on it.
I'm just very proud that we have people that are dedicated
like Monica who are willing
to challenge new technology.
McGee: It's still sometimes unbelievable
how awesome technology and science is
and how we were able to solve this case
with DNA from under a fingernail
that someone can make into a perfect picture.
♪♪