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The tiniest clues can bring down the biggest criminals! Join us as we explore the remarkable cases where seemingly insignificant details led to major breakthroughs. From a floppy disk that caught the BTK Killer to a parking ticket that ended the Son of Sam's reign of terror, these small pieces of evidence proved to be criminal undoings.
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00:00Police had finally unearthed the secrets that Gacy had thought would stay buried forever.
00:05Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at 20 crimes that were solved by a seemingly insignificant detail.
00:12He said, my weapon is loaded. And I nudged him a little bit with the barrel of my weapon, and
00:17I said, well, so is mine.
00:19Floppy disk metadata.
00:21We could tell that it was somehow affiliated with Christ Lutheran Church and the Park City Community Public Library.
00:27And the next thing we looked at was statistics, and it shows here that it was last saved by Dennis.
00:33Dennis Rader, better known as BTK, terrorized Kansas for decades.
00:37He bound, tormented, and killed 10 victims before vanishing off the face of the earth.
00:42But in 2004, craving the spotlight once again, he resurfaced to taunt the police.
00:47He actually sent a letter asking if a floppy disk could be traced.
00:51When police lied and said no, Rader sent a purple disk to a local TV station.
00:55Big mistake.
00:57Forensics analyzed the metadata of a deleted Word document on the drive.
01:00It listed the last user as Dennis, and the registered organization as the local Christ Lutheran Church.
01:06A simple Google search then identified Dennis Rader as the church council president.
01:10The floppy disk he didn't understand led police right to his doorstep, finally ending a 30-year reign of terror.
01:16I need to ask you how do you lie to you?
01:22Because I was trying to catch you.
01:24I lied to you because I was trying to catch you.
01:26Walgreens order number.
01:28In February 2012, Edward Byam, Akeem Monsalvich, and Derek Dunkley robbed a pay-o-matic in Queens, New York, wearing
01:35realistic masks and police uniforms.
01:38They threatened the cashier with a gun and showed her a photo of her own home to prove they knew
01:43where she lived.
01:43While this threat may have been successful in intimidating the employee, it also helped lead to their downfall.
01:49On the back of the photo was an order number and information that indicated the Walgreens where they had developed
01:55the film.
01:55This allowed police to identify them, as did their polite thank-you email to the company that manufactured the masks.
02:02Murder weapon.
02:03They say to be careful what you post on social media.
02:06Apparently, this guy did not get the memo.
02:09In February of 2016, Rito Llamas Juarez was shot and killed in Indianapolis, Indiana, while meeting a buyer for an
02:15iPhone he posted on OfferUp.
02:17After meeting up, the buyer tried to rob Llamas Juarez and then ultimately shot him.
02:21Police were able to locate the Facebook profile connected to the OfferUp account of the buyer, Larry Thomas.
02:26This profile turned out to be a goldmine for the police when they discovered that Thomas posted a photo of
02:32himself with an AR-15-style rifle,
02:34which uses the same .223 caliber bullets that matched a shell casing found at the scene.
02:39Thomas was later sentenced to 60 years in prison.
02:43A bit of phrasing.
02:44What he read sent chills down his spine.
02:47He recognized the language and content of the manifesto as being similar to that of writings by his brother Ted.
02:54For nearly two decades, the Unabomber was a ghost.
02:57He killed three people and injured another 23, all while evading the FBI's most expensive manhunt in history.
03:04But his downfall didn't come from a fingerprint or DNA, but from a simple turn of phrase.
03:09After the Unabomber forced the Washington Post to publish his manifesto, David Kaczynski read it and froze.
03:15He recognized a specific archaic reversal of a common proverb.
03:19The manifesto read,
03:20You can't eat your cake and have it, too.
03:22While most people say, have your cake and eat it, too,
03:26David knew his estranged brother Ted strictly used the inverted version.
03:30That single linguistic quirk was the key evidence that led David to turn his brother in.
03:35Ultimately, a genius mathematician was outsmarted by his own grammar.
03:39And then we were able to do a side-by-side comparison between that document
03:43that was prepared many years before to the current copy of the manifesto.
03:50And it was very clear to us, many of us in the task force, that the similarities were more than
03:59coincidental.
04:01On March 24, 2015, 18-year-old friends Cheyenne Antoine and Brittany Gargle from Saskatchewan, Canada, posted a selfie on
04:09Facebook.
04:09This photo proved instrumental.
04:12It took police on a trail that eventually led to the guilty plea of this young woman.
04:18They headed out for the night, but later, Gargle was found dead on the side of the road with a
04:22belt nearby.
04:23While Antoine initially stated that Gargle left with a man she met that night,
04:27police determined that her story was untrue after looking at surveillance video.
04:32The selfie posted the night of Gargle's murder came into play when authorities noticed that Antoine
04:36was wearing a belt similar to the one found at the scene.
04:39Eventually, Antoine admitted to killing Gargle by strangling her with her belt during a drunken argument.
04:45The sentence that she received was a joint submission sentence agreed upon by the Crown and Defense.
04:49The judge accepting it, meaning that Antoine will serve a seven-year sentence.
04:55A parking ticket.
04:55A few days later, an eyewitness came forward.
04:59They had spotted a suspicious-looking man near the scene of the crime.
05:03They described how he looked agitated after receiving a parking ticket.
05:08In the late 70s, David Berkowitz held New York City hostage.
05:11The so-called Son of Sam seemed like a phantom, shooting victims in parked cars with a .44 Bulldog revolver.
05:17But he was undone by the thing that gets us all, a simple traffic violation.
05:22On the night of his final murder, a witness noticed a strange man near the scene of the crime and
05:26called the police.
05:27They checked records and found that a yellow Ford Galaxy had been ticketed for parking too close to a hydrant
05:32nearby.
05:33The car belonged to one David Berkowitz.
05:35Police traced Berkowitz to his apartment and arrested him after finding a weapon inside his car.
05:40The biggest manhunt in New York history ended simply because the killer didn't want to pay for street parking.
05:45Berkowitz turned to Detective Fulatico and said,
05:49You got me.
05:50Fulatico says to him,
05:52Who do I have?
05:53He says,
05:53You have the Son of Sam.
05:55Mugshots
05:55With the help of old photographs, the 38-year-old mystery of Janie Landers' murder was finally solved.
06:01On March 9, 1979, 18-year-old Landers, who functioned at an 8-year-old level,
06:07disappeared from Fairview Training Center in Salem, Oregon, and her body was found five days later.
06:12The staff was all talking about it, up until end of shift, and we hadn't heard any word other than,
06:20Nope, they haven't found her yet.
06:22Despite numerous witnesses, the case went cold.
06:25Decades later, in 2015, police found DNA on Landers' clothing that matched that of Gerald Kenneth Dunlap,
06:32a man who had previously been convicted of sexual assault and worked in the laundry department at the training center.
06:38Because Dunlap could have inadvertently transferred his DNA to Landers' clothing,
06:42authorities turned to mugshots of Dunlap and compared them to composite sketches from the original witness descriptions.
06:48This is the man that I saw there.
06:52And he says,
06:54Yeah, we got him.
06:56They were a match, and authorities named the since-deceased Dunlap as the murderer.
07:00An Expedia map
07:02The map was proprietary, meaning that Expedia was the only site which offered that map and no one else.
07:09Maury Travis targeted the women of St. Louis, filming his depraved actions and holding the city in fear.
07:15Desperate for notoriety, he sent a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with a map to a victim's body.
07:20He thought he was being clever, but he made a sloppy error.
07:23Turns out he simply used a map obtained from Expedia.com, and investigators were quick to source it.
07:29They contacted Expedia, who traced the IP address of the user who viewed that specific map.
07:34The digital trail led straight to Travis's home computer.
07:38His arrogance was his downfall, proving that even anonymous letters can leave behind digital fingerprints.
07:43Microsoft analyzed their computer download records and discovered that only one computer had downloaded that map during that four-day
07:52period.
07:53And the size of the downloaded map was identical to the map sent to the newspaper.
07:59Pill Bottle
08:00A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the police only needed a few letters to solve this case.
08:05In November 2012, Stephen Keating was arrested for producing illicit material of minors.
08:11He'd been caught thanks to clever analysis of a photo he had shared of one of his victims.
08:15Special agents removed motion blur to decipher Keating's first name and the first three letters of his last name on
08:21a prescription pill bottle in the background,
08:24along with part of the prescription number.
08:26After contacting the pharmacy, they identified Keating and arrested him.
08:30Luckily, Keating will have ample time to think about how he was responsible for his own downfall during the 110
08:36years he's spending in prison.
08:38A Single Fingerprint
08:40As we go back to the office, the captain comes up and says,
08:44We got a name.
08:47What do you mean we got a name?
08:49In the sweltering summer of 1985, the Night Stalker had Los Angeles debilitated with fear.
08:54And the massive break came from two things.
08:57A single fingerprint and a brand new piece of technology.
09:01After finding the killer's abandoned Toyota, investigators dusted the car and found a single partial fingerprint on the rearview mirror.
09:07Luckily, the LAPD had just installed a new toy called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
09:13What used to take months of manual searching took the computer three minutes.
09:18It matched the print to Richard Ramirez, a petty criminal with a record.
09:21That one smudge on a mirror turned a faceless monster into a known fugitive, leading to his eventual capture by
09:28an angry mob.
09:28They also found that they had a booking photo of him.
09:32On Friday, August 30th, we took that booking photo, took it over to the informant.
09:37The informant looked and said, that's him.
09:39That's when they identified the Richard Ramirez, who was in fact the Night Stalker.
09:46Cleavage coordinates.
09:47Technology is a hacker's best friend.
09:49Until it's not.
09:50You can't stop us.
09:52You need to embrace that hackers are a vital part of the ecosystem of the internet.
09:58They're going to be there forever.
09:59And you either do that, or you will spend the rest of your resources and the rest of your life
10:05fighting them.
10:06In April of 2012, Texan hacker Eugenio O. Ochoa was arrested and charged with unauthorized access to a protected computer
10:13after posting the personal information of police officers on the internet.
10:17After sharing the information, he went on to taunt authorities by posting a picture that showed a woman's cleavage and
10:23a sign claiming responsibility for the crime, using his hacker moniker.
10:27Because the photo was taken with an iPhone, investigators were able to extract data from the post and find the
10:32coordinates of where the photo was taken in Melbourne, Australia.
10:35This information, along with other photos of the same woman and additional information Ochoa posted online, led police to the
10:43hacker.
10:44A missing license plate.
10:45State trooper Charlie Hanger stops a 1977 Mercury Marquis for not having a license plate.
10:52The driver of the car is one Timothy James McVeigh.
10:57The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was a devastating act of domestic terrorism, killing 168 people.
11:03While the FBI searched the country for the perp, he was already in custody.
11:07You see, state trooper Charlie Hanger had pulled over a beat-up Mercury Marquis simply because it was missing a
11:13rear license plate.
11:14The driver was one Timothy McVeigh.
11:16Hanger arrested McVeigh both for the traffic violation and for carrying a concealed weapon.
11:21While McVeigh sat in the local jail cell, the FBI eventually traced the bombing to him.
11:26They ran his name and saw that he had been arrested north of Oklahoma City, and they raced to the
11:31jail to bring him into custody.
11:32If not for that missing plate, the world's most wanted terrorist just might have slipped away.
11:37Hanger arrests McVeigh for carrying a concealed weapon, never imagining that his prisoner is the Oklahoma City bomber.
11:45Car grill.
11:46On April 7, 2012, Betty Marcel Wheeler was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Waynesboro, Virginia.
11:52While the driver fled the scene, a piece of their vehicle was left behind.
11:56Authorities posted a picture of the part asking for help from the public to identify the vehicle it belonged to.
12:01Discerning commenters were able to identify it as part of the grill of a Ford F-150.
12:06Police used this information to help them apprehend two suspects after finding the vehicle in question, which was still missing
12:12the piece.
12:14Photo receipt.
12:14The warrant consisted of three facts.
12:17The first fact is that John Wayne Gacy, in fact, was at the pharmacy the night Rob Peast went missing.
12:25And fact two, that Rob Peast had told people that he was going to see a contractor regarding a job.
12:33And fact three, his criminal background.
12:35John Wayne Gacy was a respected local contractor who secretly murdered 33 young men throughout the 1970s.
12:41He seemed untouchable.
12:43Until 1978, when 15-year-old Robert Peast disappeared.
12:47Peast told his mother he was going to meet a contractor about a job.
12:50When the boy never returned, Gacy denied knowing anything.
12:54But police were suspicious enough to get a search warrant for his home.
12:58Inside, they found a crumpled photo receipt.
13:00This didn't belong to Gacy, but to the victim's co-worker, who had left it in Peast's jacket earlier that
13:06day.
13:06Finding that receipt in the trash proved that Peast, or at least his jacket, had definitely been inside Gacy's house.
13:13That single scrap of paper unraveled Gacy's lies, leading police to the crawlspace where they eventually discovered the bodies of
13:19his victims.
13:20It was an evolution as we went along.
13:22I think it was after that search warrant.
13:25We're pretty confident there's at least five or six victims that were associated with Gacy that hadn't been seen.
13:32Purse in a Tree.
13:33Teenager Tina Fales was murdered on April 5th, 1984, while on her way home from school in Pleasanton, California.
13:40The crime scene, a culvert along Fales' route home, didn't offer many clues.
13:44We didn't know who it was, and I didn't know if I was next.
13:47She had been stabbed 44 times, but no murder weapon or fingerprints were left at the scene, and the case
13:53remained unsolved for decades.
13:55In 2007, Detective Dana Savage looked back at crime scene photographs and noted Tina's purse in a tree.
14:01When I'm looking at the evidence photos, there is a purse hanging from the branches of a tree.
14:07Seeing the purse up in the tree just didn't make sense to me at all.
14:12She found this odd and believed that the murderer must have touched it.
14:15FBI analysts found four drops of blood on the purse and matched it to Steve Carlson, a high school classmate
14:21of Tina Fales.
14:22Carlson was sentenced to 26 years in prison, and he later confessed to the murder.
14:27Topography and Buildings
14:29A video appearing to depict Cameroonian soldiers executing two women and two children gained attention on social media in July
14:362018.
14:38BBC Africa Eye decided to look into the origin of the video by using forensic analysis of the topography, buildings,
14:44and other details of the video to determine the location of the murders.
14:48Through their analysis, BBC Africa Eye found that the video took place near the town of Zelibut between March 20th
14:54and April 5th of 2015.
14:56The video also reveals other details that can be matched precisely to what we see on the satellite imagery.
15:04This track,
15:07these buildings,
15:12and these trees.
15:15Despite attempts to persuade the world that Cameroonian soldiers were not to blame for the killings,
15:20the Cameroonian government eventually relented and arrested seven soldiers in connection with the murders.
15:25Four of the soldiers were subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison.
15:29A watch's serial number.
15:31One of the technicians at the mortuary had actually read somewhere that Rolex watches kept really good records of the
15:38people that they sold watches to.
15:40When a fisherman pulled a body from the English Channel in 1996,
15:44police had a John Doe with no ID and significant decomposition.
15:48The only clue was a Rolex Oyster Perpetual still on the victim's wrist.
15:52Because Rolex maintains meticulous service records,
15:55investigators traced the watch's serial number to a man named Ronald Platt.
15:59But there was a twist.
16:00When police went to Platt's address,
16:02they found a man already claiming to be him.
16:04Of course, this was not Platt,
16:06but a fugitive named Albert Johnson Walker.
16:08He had killed the real Platt to steal his identity,
16:11assuming the body would never be found or identified.
16:14He forgot that a luxury watch is practically a fingerprint.
16:17And of course, he made one mistake, really.
16:20And that was not removing the Rolex watch.
16:23A yellow sock.
16:24Sometimes a detail that seems mundane or insignificant can turn out to be critical.
16:29That was the case when Byron Wolfe,
16:31head of photography at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University,
16:35was asked to help authorities looking into the 1991 murder of 27-year-old Denise Sharon Kolb.
16:40Kolb's body was found in Delaware County, Pennsylvania,
16:43wearing just a sweater and with the rest of her clothes piled on top of her.
16:47Wolfe was able to look at some of the 35-millimeter negatives authorities had from the crime scene
16:52and restore them enough to note a yellow sock on Kolb's body that matched one found in the apartment of
16:57the suspect,
16:58Kolb's then-boyfriend, Theodore Dill Donoghue.
17:00This is an investigation that took years in the making.
17:05And I think it demonstrates our commitment to the idea that there is no case,
17:14no amount of time that we consider a lost cause.
17:19The boxer tattoo.
17:20The torso has been severed in mid-thorax.
17:23There are no major organs remaining.
17:24May I have a glass of water, please?
17:26This case from 1935 is truly stranger than fiction.
17:29It all began when a tiger shark in a Sydney aquarium vomited up a human arm in front of a
17:34crowd.
17:35It was immediately clear that the arm had not been bitten off.
17:38It had been severed with a knife.
17:40With no body, police were stumped until they released a photo of a distinct tattoo on the forearm,
17:46which showed two boxers sparring.
17:48A witness recognized the tattoo as belonging to Jim Smith, a missing bookmaker and amateur boxer.
17:53Fingerprints confirmed the match,
17:55unraveling a complex web of forgery and murder in the Sydney underworld.
17:59It remains one of the only times that a shark has effectively turned informant for the police.
18:04Right arm has been severed above the elbow with massive tissue loss in the upper musculature.
18:12Thank you very much.
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18:29A telling search history.
18:31In 2003, Robert Petrick played the grieving husband when his wife Janine went missing.
18:36He claimed she had run away, but police were suspicious of his story.
18:40The smoking gun wasn't a weapon or a witness.
18:42It was his browser history.
18:44Investigators discovered that weeks before Janine disappeared,
18:47Petrick had searched for terms like neck snap, cadaver decomposition, and how deep is the lake.
18:53And the timestamps proved he was researching murder methods long before she supposedly ran away.
18:58This digital evidence destroyed his defense and even helped police locate her body in the specific lake that he had
19:03researched.
19:04A pro tip for criminals, the internet never forgets.
19:08Do you think you would have caught these details?
19:10Let us know in the comments.
19:17Let us know in the comments.
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