Forensic Files - Season 10, ep 31 - Garden of evil

NARRATOR: The *** of a well known radio personality left police wondering who wanted her dead. A tiny piece of plastic, a sniffer dog, and a sponge were all investigators needed to find the answer. [theme music] NARRATOR: Radio personalities have many fans, but aren't usually the target of stalkers since there's a certain anonymity that comes with the medium. (RADIO ANNOUNCEMENT) Debbie Dicus, 2WD. NARRATOR: But 31-year-old Debbie Dicus was different. Her late night radio show on an FM station in Virginia captured listeners' attention with the unique blend of intimate conversation, self-disclosure, and a little music thrown in too. -Why don't you and I make sure Maryland and lots of kids like her are not disappointed again this year? -She would tell the audience, I'm kind of feeling this way today, be it happy or sad or upset or maybe she was elated that, you know, something good had happened in her life. So she'd say, you know, why don't you call in and tell me what's going on with your life, or how do you feel about this or whatever. -She sounded like the girl next door. I think that was one of the things that made her so popular was that she seemed to be very accessible. NARRATOR: But the story of Debbie Dicus took a tragic turn when police received this telephone call from a hunter. -I found a dead body. -Where? -You know where that city field is that they have for a garden? -Was it male or female? -It was a female. -Black or white? -She was white. NARRATOR: When police arrived they found Debbie's body in a ditch near the community garden where she grew vegetables. -My initial viewing of the body seemed to indicate to me a possible sexually motivated crime. Her clothing was in disarray and the position of her body just seemed to lend itself to that possible motive. NARRATOR: Robbery didn't appear to be the motive since her purse was in her car about 30 feet away. -Clearly there was an attack at the back of the car. Her hair barrettes had fallen out, her cigarettes had fallen out on the ground. There was obviously signs of a struggle. There was blood on the car. NARRATOR: Near Debbie's car police found their first piece of evidence. -We noticed a very black piece of plastic. At the time, we wasn't sure what it was sitting on top the track, which meant it had to be there after the car drove in. NARRATOR: As police investigated the scene, Debbie's live in boyfriend Bill Campbell showed up before police even called him. -As I pulled in, the police officer sitting in his car immediately got out to stop me. And he says, you can't go back there. I said, my girlfriend's got a city garden plot back there. She's gardening. He goes, yeah, but you can't go back there, there's been a crime. Of course, then I knew something was wrong. NARRATOR: Campbell was a disc jockey at the same radio station. He said he was worried when Debbie didn't arrive home at her usual time. -At some point, he told me that she was dead and didn't give me any other further details. NARRATOR: One of Debbie's co-workers thought professional jealousy might have been a motive. -I will admit I did have the list of usual suspects, you know, of people that used to work at the station and no longer worked there that, you know, maybe didn't get along with her, because they thought she was too mild, and they didn't like or style of broadcasting. NARRATOR: Apparently, Debbie told friends that she feared this exact scenario, that someone, possibly a member of her radio audience, might get too close. -Debbie had a paralyzing fear that she actually sat down and discussed with me that someone was going to break into the studio attack her, *** her, and kill her. Maybe she had a premonition that something like this would happen, or maybe she was just overly cautious. -Because she was a celebrity could it be somebody who followed her there and waited a fan, a deranged fan, a Play Misty for Me kind of situation? NARRATOR: This meant a huge pool of potential suspects in the Norfolk, Williamsburg, and Virginia Beach communities. Police knew it would be a difficult investigation. -The community just was very afraid and it was palpable. It was all people were talking about. You'd go to the grocery store, you'd go to get gas, you'd go to the dry cleaners and that's what people were talking about. NARRATOR: Debbie Dicus a popular late night radio personality, was found murdered in a public park where she had planted a vegetable garden. (RADIO ANNOUNCEMENT) Debbie Dicus, 2WD. -Here's a woman who's doing her gardening in the afternoon, where there are people in and out of all the time, and she's found brutally murdered. So it's not the middle of the night in a place where she perhaps shouldn't have been. NARRATOR: At Debbie's autopsy, the medical examiner found multiple lacerations on the front and back of her head. And there was an unusual patterned bruise on her back. Her body temperature and rigor mortis indicated she had been dead for only a short time before police arrived. -And the police told us that she had been dead no less than two hours. NARRATOR: The cause of death was asphyxiation. She had been strangled and then drowned in a small puddle of water. The medical examiner found no signs of *** assault. -Evidence shows there was a struggle. I just wish she'd had kicked his ***. NARRATOR: At the crime scene, police continued to search for possible clues. They interviewed everyone who had visited the vegetable garden bad day. -They mentioned a young blond haired boy who was often seen walking around in the area. They couldn't recall when they last saw him, but it hadn't been long before the offense date. So we set about to try to locate him. NARRATOR: The boy spent a lot of time in the cemetery adjacent to the garden, and police were able to locate him. -This young man was identified as a Michael LaPrade. He was an area resident, lived further up on Armistead, about two miles from the scene. NARRATOR: But LaPrade was not in the city on the day of the *** and was ruled out. Debbie's boyfriend was eliminated as a suspect. He was at home on the afternoon of the ***. Next, police checked phone logs at the radio station to see how many people called Debbie's radio show multiple times. -I'm sure over the years that we spent together and being in radio that long, you know, I'm sure we'd get the occasional wacky caller, but none sticks in my mind that she felt threatened by or anything like that. NARRATOR: Investigators got their first real break in the area surrounding the vegetable garden. Just a few yards from Debbie's body they found what appeared to be the wooden shaft of a garden hoe. It had been broken in half. -It was obvious that the hoe was used to hit her in the head on several occasions. It was long cuts in the top of her head, her scalp was wide open. It was consistent with hard blows of the hoe. NARRATOR: A police dog came in to track the killer's scent. Glennell Fullman advised the officers not to touch the hoe until the dog could get a sniff. -I didn't want anybody else to touch the hoe. So I had them bring the hoe out of the water with using a stick, just the handle, the rest of the hoe stayed in the water. I didn't want to disturb it anymore than I had to. NARRATOR: The dog picked up the scent. Some believe it's the adrenaline they detect. -Dogs do smell fear. Yes, they do. When a person is getting ready to commit a crime, they know it's wrong, their adrenalin goes crazy, the fear factor comes out. They don't want to be caught. And that puts out more scent from the body which makes a better tracking. NARRATOR: As the dog sniffed around, a small crowd of bystanders had gathered nearby. Strangely, the dog headed straight towards them. -He went past her car and then headed for the crowd. I advised the crowd to stand perfectly still, that he would not bite anybody. Just don't move. He went up to a gentleman's back legs, sniffed up and down his legs, stopped right there, and turned and looked at me. NARRATOR: Why had the dog identified a man standing in the crowd? Investigators would soon learn why. -When I think about her it's always in a good way, a positive way. I don't, I don't dwell on how she left us, but what she was before. NARRATOR: When radio personality Debbie Dicus was found murdered in a field, analysts searched for evidence on the broken hoe found near her body. -Hairs were recovered from the blade end that was caked in mud. Those hairs were consistent with the victim. NARRATOR: A police dog tracked the scent on the hoe to a man standing in the parking lot watching police process the scene. His name was Ronald Blanchard, the same man who found Debbie's body and called police. -While there could be an innocent explanation for that, but that was certainly one thing that we were all very interested in. NARRATOR: 21-year-old Ronald Blanchard was a newlywed who worked on a fishing boat. He had no apparent motive and claimed he didn't know the victim was a radio personality until someone in the crowd told him. -I did a background investigation. I went to the trailer court where he used to live and found out that he had a record. He was a high school drop out. I found that he, you know, a very, very unstable human being. NARRATOR: When questioned, Blanchard denied he had touched the hoe when he found Debbie's body. He said all he did was check Debbie's pulse. On Blanchard's shirt, analysts found blood spatter. When tested, the blood was clearly not his. -The proteins and enzymes that were identified was consistent with the victim, which means those genetic material that was detected could originate from her but did not originate from the suspect. NARRATOR: Blanchard's claim that Debbie's blood got on to his shirt when he leaned over her body was substantiated to some extent by the evidence. -A contact transfer would be where some bloody object such as a bloody hand makes contact with a surface that is clean, and the blood is transferred from one surface to the other. NARRATOR: But other blood stains could not be so easily explained. -I recognized at least two areas of stain, one on the shirt, one on the pants, that would fall into the category of impact spatter. NARRATOR: Then police remembered Blanchard said he was hunting when he discovered Debbie's body. So police asked for the rifle he was using. -Not only that it had a lot of mud on it, but the barrel of the gun had been bent and the bolt action had been disabled. In other words, it had been crushed and broken off, a piece had been missing from it. NARRATOR: This was indicative of swinging the rifle like a bat. Interestingly, the plastic fragment found near Debbie's car was the missing piece from Blanchard's rifle. -He was asked specifically if he had been near the victim's vehicle, and he indicated no he had not. NARRATOR: The stock of his rifle was the same shape and left the same pattern as the injury on Debbie's back. And investigators found even more. -We noticed that there were hairs up at that bolt area which was damaged. And two hairs were recovered from that bolt area. And they were microscopically examined and saw that they were forcibly removed. NARRATOR: Hairs from Blanchard's rifle were compared to head hairs taken from Debbie Dicus during her autopsy. Under high magnification, scientists discovered they were microscopically similar. Coincidentally, before her death Debbie told her boyfriend that she had gotten into an argument with a man who had been hunting close to the community vegetable garden. -Well, she did mention that she'd seen a guy with a BB gun. And she didn't describe him or she didn't necessarily get a bad vibe from him. She was just a little angry that a guy would be out there, you know, shooting birds. NARRATOR: And there was another question that haunted police. Why would Blanchard report the crime if he was the killer? Ronald Blanchard claimed he found Debbie Dicus' body in the ravine while he was walking to his car after an afternoon of hunting. He insisted that the blood on his shirt and pants was the result of trying to help Debbie Dicus not hurt her. To find out, forensic analyst Norm Tiller put on white coveralls and conducted an experiment. He used a sponge soaked in blood and placed it on a motorcycle helmet. Then used a hoe like the one found at the crime scene. -I delivered some pretty substantial blows with that hoe and immediately we began to produce the same types of stains that were on the suspect's t-shirt. -And the harder he hits it the further it goes and the tinier it is. So it's, sort of, something that people, I think, inherently will understand the physics of, but you haven't ever really thought about it in that context before. NARRATOR: Experts say the only way Blanchard would have this kind of blood spatter on his shirt was if he was present during her attack. -They were on the upper portion of the shirt, across the chest, on both sleeves, and actually some stains were actually on the back of the shirt on the upper portion of the back of the shirt. NARRATOR: The blood on the back of someone's shirt means the person was swinging an object covered in blood. -There's no other way to explain this. He can talk about transfer all day long. He can talk about trying to feel her pulse and falling down into the ditch. But that will never explain how the spatter got onto his clothes. -There's no way he could have gotten blood on his shirt in that way. And they, to me as an observer, they proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt to me. NARRATOR: The evidence on Blanchard's jeans was also consistent with a struggle. -The knee areas of the jeans had grassy stains like somebody would have knelt down into an area with their knees and had grass stains on those as well. NARRATOR: Ronald Blanchard was arrested and charged with attempted ***, abduction, and ***. Prosecutors believed Blanchard saw Debbie at the community garden, they may have spoken or met before. The evidence shows that Blanchard hit Debbie with the butt of his rifle. When she tried to get away, he hit her again breaking a piece of the plastic on the rifle, which was found near her car. The motive may have been *** assault, and the evidence shows she fought back aggressively. So Blanchard struck her repeatedly with the garden hoe, which created the fine mist of blood splatter on his clothing. He then strangled her to death. When he got home, his wife probably saw the blood on his hands. This forced him to create the cover story that he found a dead body in the field. This, in turn, required him to call police. -I've found a dead body. -Once he made that call, he had to continue the charade and go along with his story through the end. NARRATOR: He went back to the scene to speak with police, and the dog made the identification. -This was the first case that I had a really used a dog track to come up with a critical incriminating piece of evidence. So learning about the science of dog handling and tracking was really fascinating. NARRATOR: Police say their sniffer dog Roadie was used in hundreds of other cases and had an incredible record of success. -And I figured it up. It was over 700 cases. And of those over 700 cases, he was 99% accurate. He found what he was looking for, whatever I scented him on the track trail, he finished the track and found an object, a person, a car, whatever was at the other end, he found it. NARRATOR: At his trial, Ronald Blanchard maintained his innocence and even testified in his own defense. But the evidence was too great. Blanchard was convicted of Debbie Dicus' *** and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. -He showed no remorse at all. And he insisted that he was not guilty that they had, that the police had the wrong, the wrong person. -Well, he never could or never would acknowledge his true involvement in this crime. NARRATOR: Only now years after the crime in a letter to the producers of this program has Blanchard finally admitted his guilt. ROBERT BLANCHARD (VOICEOVER) I deeply regret the pain and suffering that I've caused so many people. Never doubt that I don't realize what I have done and accept the consequences of my actions. -I'm sorry It took so long for him to do that, but I guess that's a step in the right direction for him to continue living with what happened. NARRATOR: Debbie's friends and family didn't need Blanchard's confession to know the truth. The truth, they say, was clearly evident from the forensics. -You go, what went through this guy's head? I didn't feel hatred toward him. I felt no empathy toward him. He's just a stupid, mean guy apparently. -I appreciate what science has been able to do, because if they weren't able to track down Blanchard I have to wonder where it would have stopped. -Without the forensics, I don't think it could have all come together in the way it did. There would've been a lot of pieces pointing toward him, but I think there would have been a lot of holes in the jigsaw puzzle without the forensics.