Transcript

Grave Horrors | “48 Hours" Full Episodes

From 48 Hours · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 2 h 6 min · 17,755 words · 437 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Grave Horrors | “48 Hours" Full Episodes", an episode of 48 Hours published January 3, 2026 (2 h 6 min, about 17,755 words). It mentions 88 people, works and ideas, including Bryan Kohberger, Sheila Keane, Daniel Han, Xana Kernodle, Marlene Warren.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 15:00: Sheila Keane, Marlene Warren, Michael Warren, Bargain Motors
  2. – 30:00: Sheila Keane, Sheila Keane Warren, Marlene Warren, Michael Warren
  3. – 45:00: Marlene Warren, Sheila Keane, chain of custody, Sheila Keane Warren
  4. – 1:00:00: King Road, Brianna Fox, Airmail, CBS News
  5. – 1:15:00: Brianna Fox, Howard Bloom, KBAR knife, Albrightsville, Pennsylvania
  6. – 1:30:00: Daniel Han, Kaylee Jade Gonzalez, Don Goldberg, Instagram
  7. – 1:45:00: Daniel Han, Pierre Hopp, Anthony Flores, Home Depot
  8. – 2:00:00: Pierre Hopp, Daniel Han, Christine Voss, Oceanside, California
  9. – 2:05:38: Pierre Hopp, Daniel Han, Department of Energy, Henry Han

Notable quotes from "Grave Horrors | “48 Hours" Full Episodes"

  • My mother, Marlene Warren, was a beautiful person. She was loving, caring kind.
    about Marlene Warren · at
  • Were observing Michael Warren's interactions with a woman by the name of Sheila Keane.
    about Sheila Keane · at
  • Owned several businesses, including apartment complexes, and the couple ran Bargain Motors, specializing in used cars and rentals. While business was good, the marriage says…
    about Bargain Motors · at
  • Greg Rosenfeld, Sheila Keane Warren's defense attorney, says Sheila was not the shooter.
    about Sheila Keane Warren · at
  • There are four very, very important names in this case. Kaylee Gonzalez, Madison Mogan, Xanodal, and Ethan Chapen. And if you're going to remember any names from this case, I ask that it be all four. My name.
    about Kaylee Jade Gonzalez · at
  • CBS News consultant Brianna Fox is a former FBI agent and professor of criminology at the University of South Florida.
    about Brianna Fox · at
  • Dr. Han, his wife Jenny, and their 5-year-old daughter Emily were found dead in the garage of their Santa Barbara home.
    about Daniel Han · at
  • It's basically a four-page business contract between two partners. Partner one, Pierre Hopp, and partner two, Dr.
    about Pierre Hopp · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Bryan Kohberger — Person · 28 mentions
  • Sheila Keane — Person · 18 mentions · first at
  • Daniel Han — Person · 16 mentions · first at
  • Xana Kernodle — Person · 16 mentions
  • Marlene Warren — Person · 13 mentions · first at
  • Steve Gonzalez — Person · 13 mentions
  • Pierre Hopp — Person · 12 mentions · first at
  • Emily Han — Person · 12 mentions
  • Michael Warren — Person · 9 mentions · first at
    Michael Warren was married to Marlene Warren.
  • Mark Palumbo — Person · 8 mentions
  • Sheila Keane Warren — Person · 7 mentions · first at
  • Jenny Yu — Person · 7 mentions
  • Kaylee Jade Gonzalez — Person · 5 mentions · first at
  • Brianna Fox — Person · 5 mentions · first at
  • Jasmine Kernodle — Person · 5 mentions
  • Dylan Mortensen — Person · 4 mentions
  • Dave Arenberg — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    County State Attorney's Office. Despite identifying two suspects, the case for decades went unsolved. Dave Arenberg is the current state attorney.
  • Altha McRoberts — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    Altha McRoberts, an assistant state attorney in Palm Beach County, has worked on the case from the beginning.
  • Greg Rosenfeld — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    Greg Rosenfeld, Sheila Keane Warren's defense attorney, says Sheila was not the shooter.
  • Maddie Mogan — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    Maddie Mogan, Kayle's best friend from childhood. give us a sense of just how close Kaye and Maddie were in life.
  • Howard Bloom — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    It's staged in a way that is almost In a strange way, ominously predicting, investigative journalist Howard Bloom has written extensively on the student murders for Graden…
  • Don Goldberg — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    Over to their house and check on them. Mark finally gets in touch with Don Goldberg.
  • Jeff Kernodle — Person · 3 mentions
  • Jenny Han — Person · 3 mentions
  • Shirley Twing — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Marlene shared that same fear with her mother, Shirley Twing.
  • Olivia Gonzalez — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Going to remember any names from this case, I ask that it be all four. My name is Olivia Gonzalez and Kaye was my little sister.
  • Henry Han — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Mark and Mara Palumbo were concerned when their friend and business partner, Dr. Henry Han, failed to show up for a meeting.
  • Anthony Flores — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Sergeant Anthony Flores and his partner were part of the local Oceanside police team assisting the Santa Barbara investigation.
  • Christine Voss — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Defense attorney Christine Voss, who was with the public defenders office at the time, represented Hopph.
  • Samantha Spyell — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Samantha Spyell met Pierre Hopp circa 2012 when he moved into a penthouse apartment in a luxury high-rise she managed in Tempe, Arizona. He pulled up and had this bright red Ferrari. It was.
  • Deborah Offord — Person · 2 mentions
  • Kathy Mabbutt — Person · 2 mentions
  • Joe Arenss — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Joe Arenss was 21, living at home with his stepfather, Mike, and his mother, Marlene, when she was murdered.
  • Dela Ward — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Dela Ward worked at Bargain Motors with Mike Warren. He had a lot of compassion, a lot of empathy, and people just were drawn to him, especially women.
  • Ashley Ston — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Small. I never called her Sheila. I always called her Debbie. Former Purple Cow employees Ashley Ston and Cynthia Swaafford say they knew Debbie as a tough boss.
  • Cynthia Swaafford — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Small. I never called her Sheila. I always called her Debbie. Former Purple Cow employees Ashley Ston and Cynthia Swaafford say they knew Debbie as a tough boss.
  • Madison Mogan — Person · 1 mention · first at
    There are four very, very important names in this case. Kaylee Gonzalez, Madison Mogan, Xanodal, and Ethan Chapen. And if you're going to remember any names from this case, I…
  • Christy Gonzalez — Person · 1 mention · first at
    As the months pass, Steve and Christy Gonzalez remain a united front in wanting justice. But their weight has brought different perspectives. Your mind is still open to the potential. Of.
  • Theodora Mattie Kay — Person · 1 mention · first at
    So, her name is Theodora Mattie Kay.
  • Glenn Miller — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Dr. Dr. Glenn Miller, a psychiatrist, says he and Henry developed a mutual respect and even partnered on a book about how Eastern and Western medicine could work together to improve patients.

Companies & orgs

  • Bargain Motors — Company · 7 mentions · first at
  • CBS News — Company · 3 mentions · first at
    Hey, Mike. I'm Peter Vans with CBS News.
  • University of Idaho — Company · 3 mentions · first at
    Brent Coberg is accused of stabbing these four University of Idaho students in the pre-dawn hours on November 13th, 2022. the murder weapon, which was a knife, has never been found. This is type of survival.
  • Purple Cow — Company · 2 mentions · first at
    Now middle-aged, settled into a new life in Tennessee, running this burger joint called Purple Cow. She took Mike's last name, but in an interesting twist, assistant state attorney Altha McRoberts says she changed her first name.
  • Instagram — Company · 2 mentions · first at
    They believe they had found a possible connection through Instagram and immediately took these screenshots.
  • Home Depot — Company · 2 mentions · first at
    Was used to wrap all three of the bodies. He recognized the plastic wrap was a Home Depot brand and reached out to the company's security department.
  • Arco — Company · 2 mentions
  • Chase — Company · 2 mentions
  • Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office — Company · 2 mentions
  • Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office — Company · 1 mention · first at
    The 1990 murder of Marlene Warren, shot by someone dressed as a clown, haunted not just the public, but the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office. Despite identifying two…
  • State of Idaho — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Maximum penalties, life in prison, or the death penalty. Due to the nature of the crimes, the state of Idaho is seeking the death penalty. He was there to kill.
  • Moscow Police Department — Company · 1 mention · first at
    With investigators. As soon as Jeffree said he was Zana's father, he and Jasmine were escorted to the Moscow Police Department.
  • Grub Truck — Company · 1 mention · first at
    1:45 Kaye had texted him requesting a ride from the Grub Truck, which is the local mac and cheese food truck to take her back home to 1122 King. and she had with her another female.
  • Airmail — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Has written extensively on the student murders for Graden Carter's online magazine, Airmail. He is now writing a book on the case.
  • University of South Florida — Company · 1 mention · first at
    CBS News consultant Brianna Fox is a former FBI agent and professor of criminology at the University of South Florida.
  • Washington State Police — Company · 1 mention · first at
    And we're looking for a 2011 to a 2013 Hyundai Elantre. Washington State Police find the car parked outside graduate housing. they get the license plate and they get Brian Cobberger's name.
  • Department of Energy — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Shootouts with shadowy figures. Now, he said he was sure they were sent by the Department of Energy.
  • 3M — Company · 1 mention
  • FBI — Company · 1 mention
  • Oceanside Police Department — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

  • Chrysler LeBaron — Product · 6 mentions
  • Hyundai Elantra — Product · 6 mentions
  • KBAR knife — Product · 2 mentions · first at
    The police believe the murder weapon, which has not been found, was a militarystyle KBAR knife similar to this one. The details are disturbing.

Concepts & topics

  • CBD — Concept · 4 mentions
  • Cell tower location data — Concept · 4 mentions
  • DNA technology — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    That was scientifically microscopically examined and found to be consistent with Sheila's hair. But DNA technology was still in its infancy in 1990 and scientists were unable…
  • chain of custody — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    Witnesses passed away. He was the one who compiled the evidence and without him we lost a chain of custody for some crucial evidence relating to the fibers. If I can zoom in here, this is an open evidence bag.

Places & events

  • Moscow, Idaho — Place · 7 mentions
  • King Road — Place · 4 mentions · first at
    Of November 13th, 2022 as they settled down to sleep in their off-campus house on King Road.
  • Oceanside, California — Place · 4 mentions · first at
    Southern California region within the last several days or weeks. A Home Depot in Oceanside, California, had security footage of a man who matched the DMV photo of Pierre Hopp, who also happened to have an Oceanside address.
  • Santa Barbara, California — Place · 4 mentions
  • Wellington, Florida — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Marlene and Mike were married when Joe was just three. They had built a comfortable life in Wellington, Florida, an affluent suburb. Marlene owned several businesses, including…
  • Albrightsville, Pennsylvania — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Then on December 30th, 2022, Brian Cobberger was arrested in Albrightsville Pennsylvania.
  • Pullman, Washington — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Captured that white car as it traveled what appeared to be a less direct route back to Pullman, Washington, arriving around 5:30 a.m.
  • 1122 King Road — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

the evil clowns you've seen in the movies. Well, it came to life in this case. When your mom was growing up, was she fascinated with clowns?

She was. She even painted pictures of them. My mother, Marlene Warren, was a beautiful person. She was loving, caring kind. On May 26th, 1990, a woman answered her door in front of her 21-year-old son and saw a clown at the door handing her balloons and flowers.

That was the worst day of my life. We were eating breakfast. We saw the colors of the reflections through the glass. It looked like a clown costume. My mother opened the door and I heard how pretty. And I heard bang. I saw her fall and I ran toward her as the clown was walking away and I saw that she'd been shot in the face. At that moment, I felt my heart, my soul just rip out of my body.

What did you see on the clown's face? Well, it was a white face, nose, or orangeish red hair, and it was just a clown suit.

What does the clown do? Calmly walks right back to the car like nothing happened. A person disguised as a clown walked up to Marlene Warren's AOC Club home in Wellington and shot her in the mouth.

I was working as a prosecutor here in this office when it happened and it was big news.

Meanwhile, at her home, investigators gather evidence searching for clues. Killing with a great costume to conceal one's identity. And anybody passing by would probably say, "Oh, it's not nice. Somebody's getting flowers." It wouldn't be suspicious and it would certainly make for the perfect crime.

Marlene Warren was someone without any known enemies, someone who cared deeply about her family and they lived in a home in a pretty secluded part of Palm Beach County.

Michael Warren was married to Marlene Warren. Michael was a local businessman in the car business. The Warren's marriage seemed to be an ideal marriage, but for the people on the inside that knew better, Marlene was expressing issues with Michael Warren. The people closest to Michael Warren that worked with them knew there was something wrong because they were observing Michael Warren's interactions with a woman by the name of Sheila Keane.

And the rumors was what about Sheila and Mike? Well, it was more than a rumor that Sheila Keane and Michael Warren were having an affair. It was not hidden from any of the employees.

In the hours after the murder of Marlene Warren, the suspects became clear it was Sheila Keane and was Michael Warren. But Michael Warren had an alibi. Michael and Sheila thought that they could get away with anything.

It took over 30 years to make sense of it all. This house was the scene of a bizarre murder.

That shooter, a clown carrying flowers and balloons. It's easy to see why this case has so much interest. Who isn't afraid of a killer clown? The 1990 murder of Marlene Warren, shot by someone dressed as a clown, haunted not just the public, but the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office. Despite identifying two suspects, the case for decades went unsolved. Dave Arenberg is the current state attorney.

This was an assassination. This was not a random act of violence. This was not a robbery. The unknowingness of this heinous crime, the fear, it was hell.

Joe Arenss was 21, living at home with his stepfather, Mike, and his mother, Marlene, when she was murdered.

She was a good mother. Everything she did, she took pride in. The morning of May 26, 1990, had started as a cheerful one. Joe, recuperating from a broken leg, was having breakfast at home with his mom and three friends when they saw a clown approaching, carrying balloons and flowers.

And we kind of figured I had cast on. Somebody was sending to heal and for gesture.

This is like, oh, what a delightful gift to cheer you up with your broken leg, right? My mother opened the door and then we heard bang and she fell. At that point, we knew something was wrong. My mother was struggling to breathe and then I jumped to the phone. You know, call 911 right away.

As the clown slowly and silently walked to a car, Joe and some of his friends tried to get a closer look at anything that might help describe the disguised attacker. The only thing that didn't have any color on it was the shoes that were solid black and the white gloves.

And did you notice anything about the clown's eyes? I did. That That's the most thing I I saw was the big brown eyes.

And the clown gets in the car. What kind of car was it? It was a white Learon. And does the car peel off?

No. It goes into gear and drives off like nothing happened. While some of Joe's friends remained at his house waiting for EMS, Joe got into Marlene's car and tried to chase down the clown, but he couldn't catch up. He is seen here back home afterwards where TV news crews were on the scene. Meanwhile, with the clown's balloons and flowers left behind, Marlene was rushed to the hospital, barely alive, where she was put on life support. I kept telling her I love her and I don't want her to go and please don't leave me.

Two days later, with no hope of a recovery, life's support was removed and Marlene died.

I knew my life was going to change and I knew it was going to become hell cuz she wasn't here to help me.

A top clue the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office had was Joe's description of the clown. about 6'1, tall, skinny, with orange hair, a red nose, and a big orange smile, and male. And those balloons left behind, they now seemed cruy mocking. "You're the greatest," one said. The other had a picture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Authorities had also spoken with Joe's stepfather, Mike Warren, who they learned had an alibi. He was in a car with friends heading to a racetrack when the shooting took place. Growing up with Mike Warren, what was that like? Was he a good dad?

I thought so. That's the only father I knew. I mean, I was really young when my real father and mother separated.

Marlene and Mike were married when Joe was just three. They had built a comfortable life in Wellington, Florida, an affluent suburb. Marlene owned several businesses, including apartment complexes, and the couple ran Bargain Motors, specializing in used cars and rentals. While business was good, the marriage says Joe was troubled. He says his mother became convinced Mike was having an affair, making her fearful.

She said, "If anything does happen to me, your father did it." She said that to I told her, "No way. He would never do anything like that." She said, "Don't put it past him."

Marlene shared that same fear with her mother, Shirley Twing. She says, "If anything happens to me, Mike did it."

We interviewed Shirley in 2017 when 48 hours started investigating Marlene's murder.

That's an ominous thing to say. Did you sense fear in her voice? Sure. Yes, I did.

So, when Shirley learned her daughter had been murdered, her mind went to Mike.

Right away, I figured Mike had something to do with it. That's for damn sure. But Mike had that alibi. So, authorities were looking for someone else. And when they visited Bargain Motors, Mike's place of business, one name kept popping up. That woman with whom Mike was supposedly having an affair. Everybody at the Bargain Motors were reporting that you should look first at Sheila Keane.

Altha McRoberts, an assistant state attorney in Palm Beach County, has worked on the case from the beginning.

And within the next day or so, tips were being called in that you really should investigate Sheila Keane and Michael Warren.

They were definitely seeing one another. Dela Ward worked at Bargain Motors with Mike Warren. He had a lot of compassion, a lot of empathy, and people just were drawn to him, especially women.

One of those women Dela believed was Sheila Keane. I found her very nice, very bubbly. You knew the way she looked at Michael, you just you loved them. You could see it.

Sheila, who also had a reputation for toughness, was a repo woman, repossessing cars at Bargain Motors. to do repos, you have to you have to have some kind of guns. She told me, "I keep a gun for my protection because people are crazy what they do."

Sheila told investigators she was out working at the time of Marlene's murder. She claimed that she was looking for repossession vehicles, but she was unable to provide any address that she went to so that they could follow up and confirm it. As for the affair, both Sheila and Mike told investigators they were just friends. But that's not what authorities learned when they talked to Sheila's neighbors.

The neighbors at that apartment complex believed that Michael Warren and Sheila Keane were husband and wife.

Is there any doubt in your mind that there was a romantic relationship? There's no doubt and they didn't hide it.

An affair, though, isn't necessarily a motive for murder. Did anyone profit financially from Marlene's death?

Yes. So, Michael Warren profited. Largely the properties and assets that they owned together were in her name. So, by her predesceasing him, he was able to obtain 100% of the assets.

Investigators were also trying to locate local stores that had recently sold clown outfits. Deborah Offford had been working at a costume shop when two nights before Marlene's murder, a customer knocked at the door at closing time.

She wanted to see the clown costumes. I said, "Can you come back tomorrow?" And she said, "No, I need something right now."

Deborah told investigators the customer paid cash, buying a clown suit, an orange wig, makeup, and a red clown nose. She was, I would say, about 510. Um long thick straight like chocolate color hair, big brown eyes.

Detectives later presented Deborah with a photo lineup that included a picture of Sheila Keane. Deborah identified Keen and one other woman as possibly being the person who bought the clown costume. The sheriff's office also believed they located where the shooter bought those flowers and balloons. This supermarket, the buyer described as a white female with dark brown hair.

The description of the customer given by the worker at the supermarket, brown hair and at the costume store, brown hair, brown eyes was consistent with Sheila Keane. And there was Sheila's reported affair with Mike Warren. It was intriguing circumstantial evidence, but would it be enough to make an arrest?

before they turn the machine off on my mother. God, I wish you could be here with me.

I told her that I loved her very much and that we were going to get justice. As Joe Erenss mourned the loss of his mother Marlene investigators continued looking for additional evidence tying Sheila Keane to Marleene Warren's murder.

You talk about this case to anyone and the first place people go is, yeah, it's the mistress. So, investigators focused on Sheila Keane. And soon a big break when detectives located this abandoned white Chrysler Learon matching the description witnesses gave of the getaway car.

What was found inside that Chrysler Learon? There was synthetic fibers similar type fibers to the clown wig.

They were orange, the same color as the wig Joe Aaron says the asalent was wearing. Also inside the car, they found a human hair. It was brown like Sheila Keane.

Sheriff's detectives executed a search warrant at the home of Sheila Keane. Inside Sheila Keane's closet, detectives say they recovered orange fibers that a forensic examination later concluded were similar to the ones found in the Chrysler Learum. And another breakthrough was made when Sheila's hair from her apartment was compared to the one recovered from the getaway car

that was scientifically microscopically examined and found to be consistent consistent with Sheila's hair. But DNA technology was still in its infancy in 1990 and scientists were unable to make a definitive connection. There were other challenges for investigators. The gun used to kill Marlene and the actual costume the killer clown wore were never found. And remember, Joe thought the attacker was a 6- foot tall man. Sheila didn't fit either of those descriptions.

We're talking about an event that took seconds. Glances of this clown was a second or two. Also, McRoberts says any eyewitness would have a hard time describing someone in a baggy clown costume, makeup, and a wig.

It's basically a clown is a clown. And there was Sheila's alleged affair with Mike Warren. those fiber and hair results and those sales clerks at the costume and grocery stores whose description of the customer purchasing the clown outfit, balloons, and flowers was consistent with Sheila.

This sounds like the evidence is really building up. Like you've got enough there to make an arrest. What happens? Well, there was certainly argument about that and opinions that differed at the time and then there's a an indecision about do I do it now or should we keep trying and get a little bit more.

As investigators looked for more evidence, they discovered that Mike Warren's business, Bargain Motors, was connected to the suspected getaway car. They learned an employee stole the car from a competitor several weeks before the murder

and that's how they got the Chrysler Learon. Sheriff's detectives spent about 5 hours Thursday night searching the offices of Bargain Motors at

and as they investigated Mike Warren's business, they discovered widespread fraud, charging him with racketeering, insurance fraud, and odometer tampering. He ultimately was convicted on 43 counts of fraud and sent to prison.

It was for fraud. And so, you know, you just can't extrapolate one to the next. I mean, there's no evidence that he's a murderer. We do have our suspicions, though.

He was not charged with any crime in connection with Marlene's murder. And Warren felt he was a victim in this case. Sentiments he shared in a radio interview before he went to prison. They wanted to put me out of business.

Warren speculated that Marlene might actually have been the victim of an angry tenant or car buyer.

I really can't think of a reason why uh other than the fact of the type of businesses that we're in as far as them landlords and crossing a few people by repossessing their car. But law enforcement did not think Marlene Warren's murder was the work of a disgruntled tenant or customer. And as the years passed, the case grew cold. And as for Sheila Keane, she seemed to disappear.

Nobody ever brought her name up again. You know, for many years, I was suffering in in despair. After Mike Warren went to prison, Joe says he and his stepfather became estranged. And as he continued to grieve the loss of his mother, he was consumed by her case going unsolved. And give me a sense of what problems you fell into after your mother's murder.

Ah, wow. Where do we start? Alcoholism, drugs, I mean, you name it. It was especially painful, says Joe. on each passing anniversary of the shooting.

I would blow up that day and go get drunk, you know, and just go to her grave site. It was sad.

Would you go out to her grave to talk to her? I did a lot to try to find answers, you know, but I was so confused. I was getting nothing. I was just lost. I miss you. I wish you could help me through these hard times. Joe eventually emerged from the fog of drugs and despair. With that behind him, he became increasingly certain of who murdered his mother.

I concluded that Sheila was the one that did it. She probably never thought in a million years she'd be held accountable for her crimes. She thought she got away with it.

These are paintings that Marlene had painted when she was about 14 years old. I kind of grin cuz I can almost see her doing this.

Shirley Twing and her daughter Marlene shared a fascination with clowns. And over here

in Shirley's home, she even kept a room full of clown art and figurines. This one says to me, "Things will get better."

The sad, sometimes unsettling images brought comfort to Shirley, despite the fact that a clown had so brutally ended her daughter's life.

I don't hate clowns. I just hate one. Although the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office hadn't given up on solving Marlene's murder, 27 long years had passed without an arrest. Then by 2017, a cold case unit made a breakthrough. State Attorney Dave Arenberg finally had new important evidence.

The hairs that were found in the Learon were able to be traced to Sheila Keen through DNA technology. With that new DNA match, detectives believed they could now definitively connect Sheila to the alleged getaway car and to Marleene Warren's murder. And when sheriffs found suspect Sheila Keane, they were blown away to learn whom she had married. After Michael Warren got out of prison, he reconnected with Sheila Keane. Here's someone whose wife had been murdered and he just married the chief suspect. What did that tell you?

When you combine the fact that the two of them were in affair at the time of the murder and then later they got married, it did seem like mission accomplished.

That marriage was in 2002. The Warren, now middle-aged, settled into a new life in Tennessee, running this burger joint called Purple Cow. She took Mike's last name, but in an interesting twist, assistant state attorney Altha McRoberts says she changed her first name.

Sheila Keen Warren introduced herself to their friends in that life that her name was Debbie. She had dyed her hair blonde, changed her name, and was living a full life. We would have dinners. They were wonderful cooks.

The Warren befriended Brooke Blevens. This is Mike Warren's house, a neighbor at a weekend property the couple purchased in the Virginia mountains. When we spoke to Brooke in 2018, she said she knew Mike's wife as Debbie and was told it was a childhood nickname.

Her dad nicknamed her that when she was small. I never called her Sheila. I always called her Debbie. Former Purple Cow employees Ashley Ston and Cynthia Swaafford say they knew Debbie as a tough boss.

I mean, she was awful aggressive mean and even heard an alarming rumor about her past.

The rumor around Purple Cow when we worked there was Debbie killed Mike's ex-wife. I thought they was blowing off steam. And I was like, "Okay, whatever."

But the rumors said it more than once, even to where we knew she dressed up like a clown.

According to an employee, Sheila had appeared in clown makeup at the restaurant one year during Halloween. By the fall of 2017, the Warren had sold the business and retired fulltime to the House in Virginia. Meanwhile, state attorney Aaron Berg felt the case against Sheila had only gotten stronger.

When you combine the fact that they got married and seemingly lived happily ever after with the new DNA breakthrough, we're able to get enough evidence to make an arrest.

On September 26th, 2017, 27 years after Marlene's murder, authorities arrested Sheila Warren driving on a road near their home. She was charged with firstdegree murder.

Sheila did not murder Marlene Warren. Greg Rosenfeld, Sheila Keane Warren's defense attorney, says Sheila was not the shooter.

Everything was so methodical. This person walking up to the house, committing the shooting, and then slowly walking away. We're dealing with someone who had experience in committing a hit or a murder.

That's not Sheila. That is not Sheila. Shortly after Sheila's arrest, Dave Arenberg addressed reporters.

Today, we filed notice of intent to seek the death penalty in this case. Can you say whether Michael Warren is a suspect?

I can't say that. Altha McRoberts says there was something Sheila asked as she was being taken into custody that caught prosecutor's attention.

One of the first things she said is, "Well, are you going to arrest him, too?" Pointing to her husband,

which suggests what to you? That she knew exactly what she was being arrested for, and they had done it together.

Joe had come to the same conclusion that his stepfather and Sheila were both involved in his mother's murder. Would you like to see Mike Warren charged in the murder of your mother?

Yes, I would. With Sheila in custody, we wanted to speak with Mike Warren. We're going to go to his front door, give it a knock, and see if he'll answer a couple of questions. After the arrest of Sheila Warren in 2017, 48 Hours wanted to talk to Mike Warren about what he knew about his wife's murder. Here he comes.

Hey, Mike. I'm Peter Vans with CBS News. He wouldn't open the door, but we spoke through it for several minutes, competing with a barking dog.

Did you have anything to do with planning the murder of your wife, Marlene? You did not.

He was adamant that neither he nor Sheila Keane Warren had anything to do with Marlene's murder. Did you suggest to Sheila that she dress in a clown outfit?

You're saying Sheila. Sheila, who said Sheila did that? I don't think she had anything. If I thought she had been with

Do you believe based on the evidence over the years that Mike Warren knew what was going to happen that day?

I don't believe there's any direct evidence of that. There just wasn't enough evidence to prosecute Michael Warren. But if evidence emerges, we'll pursue it.

As they prepared for trial, despite never recovering the clown disguise or the gun, prosecutors were confident they could prove that Sheila Keane Warren committed the murder so that she could marry Mike Warren.

Sheila Keen Warren had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to do this. We will never know who killed Marlene Warren because the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and the State Attorney's Office did such a poor job investigating this case. I can tell you without question that it was not Sheila Keane. Sheila Keane Warren's defense attorney, Greg Rosenfeld, says she's innocent, a victim of the state attorney's reckless desire to close a notorious cold case.

And they said, "You know what? This is our suspect. We're going to stick with it." Even though the pieces of the puzzle didn't fit the puzzle. Rosenfeld says there were other potential suspects authorities ignored, including an inmate who supposedly bragged in prison about murdering Marlene. But prosecutors say he was investigated and cleared.

It's not surprising that they would try to point the finger at law enforcement for not looking at every potential suspect, but if you look at the evidence, it pointed to one person all along, Sheila Keem Warren. The state was confident Sheila Keane Warren was responsible for Marlene's murder, but Rosenfeld plans to poke holes in its case at trial. How do you overcome DNA evidence? The state attorney's office should be embarrassed about the DNA evidence in this case. Rosenfeld agrees the hair prosecutors say was found in the Leberaron getaway car could be from Sheila Warren, but he says it could also be from about 4% of the US Caucasian population.

They couldn't exclude Marlene Warren from that hair sample. So that was their groundbreaking DNA evidence. And if you concede that the hair is from Sheila Keane Warren, says Rosenfeld, there's an innocent explanation as to how it got there. The labar was on the lot at Bargain Motors where she worked.

Sheila may have been in the car used in this murder. That's it. The defense attorney says, "Well, of course, her hair might be in there. It doesn't suggest that she was driving at the time of the murder." What do you say to that? It's just one more link. Once you put that one thing with the totality of all the circumstances, then it starts to become overwhelming.

Rosenfeld says the orange fibers found in the car, which prosecutors say could be from the clown costume, should also be excluded.

So, the fibers found in the car were synthetic fibers. That same type of fiber can be used in thousands of different products. So the state likes to present it as clown wig fibers, but that's factually incorrect.

Even more troubling than the evidence gathered, says Rosenfeld, is how it was handled over the decades.

What are we looking at here? These are evidence bags at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office evidence unit torn open. Just gaping holes in these evidence bags.

If there's gaping holes, what can that do to the evidence inside? That's precisely how how you have crosscontamination. Now, look at if I can zoom in here. This bag contains a clown wig investigators purchased similar to the one they believe was worn by the asalent. They used it to compare to the fibers found in the labaron and in Sheila's home.

This is an open evidence bag with the wig sticking out. This is horrifying. And so your bottom line is is that this evidence is unreliable. Now,

without question, can it not be argued that some of the evidence in this case was indeed bungled?

You know, it's you're asking a lot of law enforcement to be perfect from 1990 to today. Some of the evidence was kept in an evidence storage area that wasn't ideal. Any mistake, any small opening will be exploited by defense lawyers. Prosecutors were still certain they had [clears throat] the right person for Marlene's murder, but in February 2020, after a re-evaluation of Sheila Warren's case, they announced they would no longer seek the death penalty. Were you told by the prosecutor's office that there was always a chance in a jury trial that she might even be acquitted?

Yes. When you think of your mom today, what do you think about? What images come to mind?

Well, she was robbed and so was I. It is said the wheels of justice turned slowly and when it came to the murder of Marlene Warren, that grind often seemed to come to a halt. After the 27-year wait for an arrest, Sheila Keen Warren's trial kept getting delayed. By 2022, she had spent 5 years in jail. Her trial postponed six times

and then we had CO. So, it just was one thing after another. Decades of accumulation of files and photographs and mountains of evidence and documents. Defense attorney Greg Rosenfeld was also trying to work his way through all that evidence and he says adding to the delays was a lack of cooperation from the state.

Evidence kept I'd say disappearing. Rosenfeld says one crucial piece of evidence for the defense that disappeared for years was what investigators called the clown sighting file. These were all the tips about people who alleged to have seen clowns in the area.

That opens up for you new avenues as to possible suspects, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the sheriff's office and the state attorney's office just decided they didn't want to look for this evidence.

But then suddenly in October of 2022, as another trial date neared, the file was found. It was located not with the Sheila Keane clown murder boxes. It was actually a file out of place.

They find this clown setting file and there's 35 tips. We begin to investigate them. Now we're 32 years after the murder. You know, we couldn't track down these witnesses.

I've seen it and it's silly things. Clearly clown sightings that had nothing to do with Marlene Warren

and it wasn't being intentionally hidden from the defense. Absolutely not. We were meticulous about making sure they had everything.

Though as the trial neared, the decades of delays were causing problems for the prosecution as well.

Every day that went by, it was a tougher case. Witnesses die, memories fade, evidence spoils. One of our key witnesses passed away. He was the one who compiled the evidence and without him we lost a chain of custody for some crucial evidence relating to the fibers. If I can zoom in here, this is an open evidence bag.

Evidence the defense already claimed had been poorly stored and mishandled, contaminated, inadmissible, unreliable. It just goes to show you how poor of an investigation that was done. They were going to be able to argue that because of the opening of the bags that the evidence was spoiled and because of the break in the chain of custody, because of the death of our witnesses, it shouldn't even be admitted. So, you had some real potential for reasonable doubt.

There was beyond reasonable doubt. On April 25th, 2023, two weeks before Sheila Keen Warren's trial for the murder of Marlene Warren was to begin, there was yet another surprise in a case that had been filled with the unexpected. A plea deal was reached.

Miss Keen Warren, the defendant herein, will agree to withdraw her previously entered plea of not guilty and her plea of guilty. Sheila Keane Warren, whose case at one time included the death penalty, then life in prison, would now plead guilty to secondderee murder and be sentenced to 12 years in prison. Under sentencing guidelines for time served, she is expected to be released in 2025, perhaps sooner. We had to make a judgment based on what we had

because the fear is what if you take this to trial. The worst thing that could happen would be that Sheila Keen Warren would be found not guilty. Not because she was innocent, but because after 33 years, we could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was the one who did it.

But Sheila Keen Warren did have to publicly pay a price for this plea deal, admitting in open court that she in fact Yes,

did murder Marleene Warren. If this case were to proceed to jury trial, the state would present evidence that on or about May the 26th of 1990, the defendant was responsible for the death of Marlene Warren.

Warren, did you hear all that? Yes, sir. And do you agree with that factual basis?

Yes. Despite admitting her crime, Sheila Keen Warren through her attorney still maintains she is innocent.

Sheila did not commit this murder. It was very difficult for her to admit to committing a crime that she did not commit.

But as a matter of law, she has admitted to committing the murder by saying yes.

Correct. For the purpose of So she is a convicted murderer. And so far as the law goes, sure. But when you're told you could be home or you know you can play Russian roulette and risk spending the rest of your life in prison, it's kind of a no-brainer.

The defense cannot have it both ways. So she will be a murderer for every day for the rest of her life. Even when she gets out of prison one day, she'll still be a convicted murderer.

When she does get out of prison, she will reunite with her husband, Michael Warren.

Sheila is going home to Tennessee. She's going back to her life. Michael Warren in a statement provided to 48 hours regarding the plea said, "My wife did not commit this crime. It was difficult to see her plea to a crime she did not commit, but it wasn't worth the gamble when she was offered a deal that'll have her home in 16 to 18 months. With this deal, there is a chance that Sheila might get out of prison within the next year or two. Are you all right with that?

Well, I'm not [clears throat] all right with it, but I have to be. Still, Joe Erenss approved the plea deal, feeling it wasn't worth the gamble of going to trial.

That was very emotional because that was the end of something so huge that grew for 33 years of my life.

Finally, it's over. Finally, you know, it was the demons that once occupied Joe's mind are gone, replaced with loving memories of how his mother Marleene lived rather than how that life was so violently taken.

What would you say to your mother if you could speak to her today? Wow. What could I say to my mother? Thank you for showing me how to love and be peaceful. And thank you for being in my life. Hurts.

48 hours to miss it. would be a crime. Were you at all prepared for what happened in this case?

Moscow will forever be known as the scene of one of the most tragic crimes. times in American history. There's still sort of a a darkness whenever you talk to people. It will be ever part of the university's history and the town's history.

There are four very, very important names in this case. Kaylee Gonzalez, Madison Mogan, Xanodal, and Ethan Chapen. And if you're going to remember any names from this case, I ask that it be all four. My name is Olivia Gonzalez and Kaye was my little sister. Everybody's going to work and you look out the window and there's kids running down the street laughing and you're just like, how can you be out there playing? My daughter is dead. You know, Kayla Gonzalez is gone. Stop everything. Everybody in the whole world stop.

and everything just keeps going. My sister Zanna Kernodal is one of the happiest, funniest people I've ever met. And I had the awesome privilege of growing up with her and I still have a hard time coming to terms with the facts that did happen. Brent Coberg is accused of stabbing these four University of Idaho students in the pre-dawn hours on November 13th, 2022. Uh the murder weapon, which was a knife, has never been found. This is type of survival knife. Brian Coberger did not make his own plea. The judge entered a plea for him of not guilty.

Maximum penalties, life in prison, or the death penalty. Due to the nature of the crimes, the state of Idaho is seeking the death penalty. He was there to kill.

He came in with a kit. I believe he had a kill kit. And you believe that everything right down to the implement of destruction, this large marine knife, that was all planned.

All planned. It was inhumane. You wouldn't do these type of things to any living creature, let alone an innocent human being. The star piece of evidence in the prosecution's case is the DNA that was found on the knife sheath that was left at the crime scene. But there's so much other evidence that's also pointing towards nobody else that we're aware of. How was Brian Cobberger's car spotted leaving the scene? Why was his cell phone seen there 12 times, including the morning after the offense? prosecution would like everyone to believe that it's an open and shut case. But I think the facts they have make the case more open than open and shut.

According to the defense, there is no connection whatsoever between Brian Cobberger and the victims. And if there is no connection, then there is no motive. And if there is no motive, then it becomes very hard to make the case that he is the killer. And this is a graduate student, not a trained assassin.

It's more so about putting these pieces together because I know what the puzzle looks like at the end. I have the box in front of me, but I'm missing so many pieces. How did all of these pieces fall to create what I'm living in right now? Where did where did this come from?

It was not the new Steve and Christy Gonzalev. wanted to hear. In August of 2023, just 6 weeks before the murder trial of Brian Coberger was set to begin, he waved his right to a speedy trial.

Should you want to begin? Absolutely. They would have to wait indefinitely for their day in court. I was really hoping that um we could get this show on the road because uh the not knowing it just it's agony. It's agony. Steve and Christy, the parents of Kaye, haven't left anything to chance. After the judge issued a gag order to attorneys and law enforcement, quote, to preserve the right to a fair trial, they drilled down on their own investigation and are now sharing what they believe that investigation found. Steve says he believes transparency is the best path to justice.

We're not going to just sit back and cross our fingers and pray that we're going to get justice. It has been a long and painful journey for the families of Kaylee Gonzalez, Mattie Mogan, Zana Kernodal, and Ethan Chapen. the four University of Idaho students who were savagely murdered by a knife wielding asalent in the wee hours of November 13th, 2022 as they settled down to sleep in their off-campus house on King Road.

Do you ever dream of your sister? Yeah, I've had some dreams of her. There's times where I prayed and asked God to see her another time and I did and just gives me some peace knowing that I know she's okay. Jasmine Kernodal who is speaking for the first time was a senior at Washington State University and lived only 15 minutes away from her younger sister Zana. often mistaken as twins growing up, she says they were best friends.

She just was always fun and she was uplifting and she took any bad situation and turned it into a good one.

Jeeoff, what did you love most about your daughter? Everything. She cared about people. She was a people person. She cared about her friends just as much as like her family. For the first time in her life, Zana had fallen in love with fellow student Ethan Chapen, a triplet who loved his siblings, boats, and working on a tulip farm.

The sweetest kid ever. They were just two happy people. And there's just seeing the videos and photos of them, you can just like tell how happy they are. They were just amazing together. Sadly, they will now forever be linked in death. On Sunday morning, November 13th, Zanna's friends started calling Jasmine, saying something bad had happened on King Road. Jasmine rushed over to Zana's house.

And while you're driving that 8 n miles over to the house, are you trying to reach your sister then?

Mhm. How many times did you call her? A lot. I called her a lot. Called Ethan a lot. Her next call was to her father. Jeffree had been visiting Jasmine for dad's weekend and was on his way home.

So you answer the phone. What do you hear? I hear her kind of crying and just telling me to get back to Moscow and meet me at Santa's house and [snorts] you know my heart drops. He instantly raced back down there. The house was cordoned off and swarming with investigators. As soon as Jeffree said he was Zana's father, he and Jasmine were escorted to the Moscow Police Department.

And Jasmine, what does the officer say to you and your father? Oh, I don't remember exactly. Just that four people passed away and that one was Santa.

The worst day of your life. is your worst nightmare. It just happened. You know what do you do? You can't do a damn thing.

100 miles away, the Gonzalez family also had been getting frantic calls saying something bad had happened to their daughter Kaye, but no one knew what.

I just kept saying over and what do I do? What do we do? What do we do? Finally, at around 4:00 in the afternoon, a deputy appeared at their door

and we said, "What's going on? I can confirm your daughter's died. It's passed away."

Point. He said, "There were four victims." And we and I said, "Four?" And he said, "Yes, ma'am." I said, "Can you tell us if one of the victims was Mattie Mogan?" And he said, "Yes, ma'am."

Maddie Mogan, Kayle's best friend from childhood. give us a sense of just how close uh Kaye and Maddie were in life.

I think that they had a very amazing relationship. The epitome of true best friends from very early. I mean, they were sisters through and through.

They were um completely inseparable. As soon as the news hit, Olivia, the eldest of the five Gonzalez children, and her parents, went into detective mode. We had zero details. We just knew they were gone.

Olivia got into her sister's call log and frantically started cold calling recent numbers. She says a friend told her that Kaye had been at the corner club bar around 1:07 a.m. and later texted a rid share driver who Olivia managed to track down.

The ride share driver said around 1:45 Kaye had texted him requesting a ride from the Grub Truck, which is the local mac and cheese food truck to take her back home to 1122 King. and she had with her another female.

Olivia then uncovered one of the most important leads in the case. The ride share driver told her about a camera mounted on the grub truck.

So I was able to look it up and um find Kaye on the video and I saw the girl that she was with was Maddie. So at that point I knew Kaylee and Maddie were together. They got into the car to go home together and alone. The driver told her the exact time Kaye and Maddie were dropped off at their house on King Road, 1:56 a.m. A timeline she says she confirmed before the police.

I immediately took it to the police officers. Here's her phone information. Here's the ride share driver's name.

Olivia says Kaye made a call to her boyfriend at 2:56 a.m., but he didn't answer. The Gonzales believe Kaye fell asleep shortly after. According to the police affidavit, Kaye and Maddie were stabbed to death between 4 and 4:25 a.m. Just as they had done since they were little girls, they were sleeping in the same bed.

Those two best friends, since little girls, I don't think there's anything more terrifying than what they went through. I really don't.

The killer took four lives in a matter of minutes, but he left behind two surviving roommates, one of whom would provide a key description of the intruder.

He was dressed in black but muscular build and very bushy eyebrows. If there is one picture that speaks to the Idaho student murders, it is this. Six smiling college students blissfully unaware of the carnage to come.

It's staged in a way that is almost In a strange way, ominously predicting, investigative journalist Howard Bloom has written extensively on the student murders for Graden Carter's online magazine, Airmail. He is now writing a book on the case.

On the ends of the picture are the two survivors. In the middle are are the victims, and they're huddled together.

Kaye with a beaming Maddie on her shoulders, friends for life. Ethan with his arm around Zana. Young love in full bloom. A moment that should have been a memory of their idyllic college years would eternally be a reminder of the gruesome murders that put them in their graves. What makes it so tragic is they're forever preserved in this moment. They'll never be able to leave this moment. Hours after this photo was taken, the four friends would be murdered. Their deaths so violent, even the house seemed to be bleeding.

There was literally blood oozing out from the home. Uh you could see it on the exterior walls.

CBS News consultant Brianna Fox is a former FBI agent and professor of criminology at the University of South Florida.

That's how bloody and gruesome the crime scene is. According to the affidavit, which outlines law enforcement's investigation, the bodies of Zana and Ethan, who was sleeping over, were found in or near her bedroom on the second floor. The bodies of Kaye and Maddie were on the third floor in the same single bed in Mattiey's room.

How did your daughter die in that house? What do you know? We know the autopsy. We know the means. What is officially how she died? She was assaulted and stabbed

several several times. Her death certificate is the ugliest, disgusting piece of paper that you will ever see in your life.

And every line is a horror show. Every line. Cuz there's causes of death and then there's contributions to death. Christy and Steve spoke to coroner Kathy Mbott before the gag order was issued and they say she told them how the two friends were positioned in the bed.

The bed was up against the wall. The headboard was touching the wall and the left side of the bed was touching the wall and we believe that Maddie was on the outside and Kaye was on the inside.

According to coroner Mbott, the killer's first victim was Maddie, says Steve. And then from Maddie, he moved on to your daughter. You believe she had awakened at that point?

Yes. Yeah. There's evidence to show that she awakened and tried to get out of that situation.

The way the bed was set up is what she was trapped. She was trapped. We know from the affidavit that Coberger's cell phone pinged in the vicinity of the house 12 times prior to the murders. Steve says before the gag order, one of the lead investigators told him they believe Coberger had been scouting out the house.

You believe these visits were like he was like on an intelligence mission, a scouting mission, looking at lifestyle patterns, when they came and went, who came to the house methodically?

Yeah. He had to know when people were coming, people were going. It makes the Gonzalez's wonder if he'd ever gone inside the house.

I think that he at least had opened that door, went in, tested the waters, looked around.

Steve says the coroner told him the killer's rampage started on the third floor where both Maddie and Kaye had their bedrooms. Christy thinks he wasn't expecting to find the two friends together in the same bed.

I do think that his plan went ary. I do think that, you know, he intended to kill one and killed four.

Brianna Fox also believes Zana and Ethan were collateral damage. According to the affidavit, Zana received a Door Dash food delivery at 400 a.m., then went back to her room on the second floor. It's possible, says Fox, that Zana, still awake, came face to face with the killer.

And she sees somebody that she doesn't expect. and I don't think he was expecting to see her either.

One of the two surviving roommates, Dylan Mortonson, later told the police that she heard what she thought was crying coming from Zana's room. She heard a male voice say something to the effect, "It's okay. I'm going to help you." Not something a killer would likely say to an intended target, says Fox.

He probably was trying to make a split-second decision. Do I run away? Do I kill her? What do I do? And he decided to kill her.

At approximately 4:17 a.m., police say an outside security camera less than 50 ft from Zanna's room, picked up distorted audio of what sounded like voices or a whimper followed by a loud thud. Shortly after, Dylan, the surviving roommate whose bedroom was near Zanna's, opened the door. According to the police affidavit, when Dylan opens the door, she saw a man dressed in black with a black mask and she says he has bushy eyebrows. Those bushy eyebrows become very important when the police are making their identification.

The man with the bushy eyebrows kept walking to the rear of the house without harming Dylan.

Why was Dylan not killed? Again, there is no definitive answer. He He didn't kill her because he didn't see her. He was sort of transfixed on getting out. He didn't kill her because he was satiated.

Or he was simply too depleted to kill again, says Fox. Even stabbing somebody for a minute and a half. Not only is that overkill, but it actually would become rather exhausting. The police believe the murder weapon, which has not been found, was a militarystyle KBAR knife similar to this one. The details are disturbing.

This is not a civilian knife. It was actually meant to tear apart bone, ligaments, organs. So this is a extremely brutal and something that you would never expect a person to walk in and want to commit unless they took some pleasure out of the brutality of it.

After seeing the intruder, Dylan, the surviving roommate, told investigators she locked herself in her room. It would be almost eight hours before 911 was called, causing an uproar on social media criticizing Dylan's alleged inaction. But Brianna Fox says it's not unusual for people to freeze or be too afraid to intervene.

She had no reason to, you know, know how to handle herself in that moment. According to the affidavit, the male walked towards the backs sliding glass door and presumably left the scene. But committing murder and getting away with it are two different things, says Fox.

For an offender to get away with a crime, a murder, they have to bat a thousand. They have to be absolutely perfect. They make one singular mistake. That's all it takes. And that one possible mistake in this case may have been the sheath to the KBAR knife. One like this was found on the bed next to Mattie Mogan. It would lead investigators to the door of a man studying for a career in criminology. Brian Cobberger, the alleged killer. To see a timeline of the case, go to 48our.com.

Day after day and week after week pass and there is no suspect that is arrested. What was that time like for you?

That was the worst. For 47 days after the murders, the families of Kaye, Maddie, Zana, and Ethan, and the country waited. We do not have a suspect at this time and wept and weighed in.

The people of Idaho and those throughout our nation who provided information has been very impressive. We've received over 19,000 tips. Then on December 30th, 2022, Brian Cobberger was arrested in Albrightsville Pennsylvania. At the time, his attorney said Coberger looked forward to being exonerated.

What goes through your mind when you see the face of the alleged killer? Oh, I wonder why. Who? Who is this? Why? You know, never heard of the person before. It still is confusing. Why? At this point, the families knew as much about Coberger as the public did, a PhD candidate studying criminology just 10 miles away at Washington State University in Pullman.

I remember thinking, I only have a few minutes to look up this individual and to try to get any credible information before things start getting wonky. Some of Olivia Gonzalez's online discoveries of Coberger made her uneasy.

He had made a few posts on Reddit in which he was conducting seems like a questionnaire to uh people in prison or jail who had committed crimes. How did you pick your victim or your target?

For 7 weeks, the families and the country were left wondering. I think for this type of an investigation, 47 days is actually quick. Criminologist and CBS News consultant Brianna Fox says the Moscow police kept things moving, starting with a video canvas which produced footage from those early morning hours, showing a white car making three passes by the girl's house starting around 3:30 a.m. Less than an hour later, investigators say the killer struck. They noticed that this car approached King Road, left, came back, uh, almost did a Uturn, finally went there around 4:06 in the morning, and that car then departed in about 25 minutes and sped off.

Multiple surveillance cameras then captured that white car as it traveled what appeared to be a less direct route back to Pullman, Washington, arriving around 5:30 a.m. That information helped investigators identify the make and model of the vehicle.

And we're looking for a 2011 to a 2013 Hyundai Elantre. Washington State Police find the car parked outside graduate housing. Uh they get the license plate and they get Brian Cobberger's name. They then get the driver's license and they see the bushy eyebrows that in the eyes of one of the Moscow detectives must be the eyebrows of the killer. Now armed with a warrant, investigators retrieved cell tower data from that morning, which captured Coberger's phone around 2:47 a.m. in Pullman when it suddenly stopped connecting to the network. According to the affidavit, this was also around the time cameras caught a white Alantra leaving his apartment complex. There was an indication that he turned off his cell phone, which is something that a lot of people do when they want to avoid law enforcement knowing their whereabouts.

His cell phone signal was picked up again 2 hours later south of Moscow as it traveled back toward his apartment building. The affidavit described a deeper dive into Coberger's phone history that revealed this was a familiar neighborhood to him, going back several months. Cell phone records indicated that he has traveled past and was very near the vicinity of this crime scene on 12 separate occasions.

And Towers actually captured a 13th trip just hours after the murders. Anecdotally, a lot of killers, they like revisiting the memory of the crime. You know, I won. I was able to get away with this and you guys won't catch me.

But they had one secret weapon to make their case. They had the knife sheath and there was a microscopic spot of DNA on this. Could they tie this DNA to Coberg?

According to the affidavit, the DNA was found on the button snap of the sheath, but when investigators ran it through the national database, there were no matches. It's unclear if Brian Coberger knew law enforcement was watching when he left Washington in mid December. Coberger and his father, who had flown in from Pennsylvania, drove back home together in his white Elantra.

Coberger, from what I've heard, tells the father that he's in trouble with his his job. He's concerned enough about his son to want to make the drive back with him.

On the 2500 mile journey from Washington, they are stopped twice for traffic violations.

Hello. What's also interesting is Coberger's reaction to the police. Is this your car?

Okay, cool. He's pretty calm and cool. Father and son made it home to Alitesville, Pennsylvania, where Bloom says investigators initiated a stealth operation.

What they did is they sent a team of Pennsylvania state troopers to Coberger's family's house. Law enforcement recovered Coberger's father's DNA from the trash outside their home, which tested as a high probability it was the biological father of whoever left DNA on the knife sheath.

So that was the Eureka moment which they decided they could get an arrest warrant.

At that point, they made the arrest of Brian Cobberger and they got a separate essentially a search warrant for his DNA. And when investigators compared his DNA to the DNA on the knife sheath, they say it was a statistical match. At least 5.37 octillion times more likely to be Coberers than anyone else.

Where you sit today, are you certain that Brian Coberger is the killer? With what you know?

I don't trust anybody or anything. So, I have to see it myself. I have to see everything.

As the months pass, Steve and Christy Gonzalez remain a united front in wanting justice. But their weight has brought different perspectives. Your mind is still open to the potential. Of course,

that it could have been someone else. Of course. Yep. I go into that 100%. Yep. Of course.

That's not where you are. No. No, that's fine. I don't think there's any slam dunk.

Criminologist Brianna Fox says with the gag order in place, any hint of Coberger's defense has come from court documents. It seems that the defense is alleging there was a rush to judgment. Law enforcement made an arrest too fast and they focused on their client too quickly.

A defense filing did reveal Coberger's alibi for the night of the murders. It simply stated Mr. Coberger was out driving alone.

The defense is not necessarily having to prove that he's innocent. They just have to raise doubt. Both Fox and Howard Bloom think the defense can find ways to poke holes in the prosecution's case, challenging some of the key evidence presented in the affidavit, including the cell phone location data and the white Elantra.

There's other concerns such as whether Brian Coberger's car was accurately identified at the onset or if that was revised after knowing what Brian Coberger drove. The cell phone data makes one suspicious of Coberger, but it's not convincing. It's not putting someone at someone's doorstep. It's putting someone in someone's neighborhood. If you can raise doubts about the validity and the accuracy of the cell phone data, I think you're half way there to getting the case against Coberger,

either a hung jury or a not-uilty verdict. And there's more. According to the defense,

that there was no DNA or forensic evidence found from the crime scene at the apartment, car office, or on Brian Cobberger's person. So, they were basically alleging how could he have committed such a brutal murder and yet have no evidence found on him of that. After consulting their own investigators, Christy and Steve theorize that Coberger likely brought what they call a kill kit with him.

What do you mean by a kill kit? I think he had a backpack. Change of clothes. We don't know if it was covers, pants, hoodie. We don't know.

A defense filing also claimed the presence of other unidentified male DNA was found on the premises. Three separate and distinct male DNA profiles were found from the crime scene. Two were inside the house. One was outside on a glove.

The defense wants to know who are these people and what role could they have played in this whole story. So what the defense is doing now is trying to look for other narratives that make sense. Howard Bloom has written extensively about this case, including a piece on a possible alternative defense theory involving drugs.

Maybe someone had renegged on a drug payment, and this was a retribution of vengeance for people not paying for drugs they had ordered. I want you guys to respond to one thing that's out there because the speculation that somehow drugs were involved in this attack.

That's just Hollywood nonsense. I I just dismiss that because I I understand our society wants to believe in some of these movies that they watch. They don't have these crazy lives where they're crossing paths with people like that. That storyline of it being drugs gives people a reason to think why it happened because nobody knows why. And the reason I think it happened is because he wanted to. That's what he wanted to do. He wanted to commit a murder.

Brian Coberger's defense attorneys argue there's a lack of evidence linking their client to the students.

The defense is claiming that the defendant, Brian Coberger, and the victims have absolutely no connection. There's no motive. In the minutes after Brian Coberger was publicly named, the Gonzalez family went online.

They just told us the name and we immediately started googling. They believe they had found a possible connection through Instagram and immediately took these screenshots.

From our investigation of the account, it appeared to be the real Brian Cobberger account. Among the people this account was following were Maddie Mogan and Kaye Gonzalez in addition to several people with the name Coberger.

But when we looked through those it appeared to have other family members that were related to him.

At first, Steve, who works in it, was skeptical, thinking someone created a fake account immediately following Coberger's arrest. But according to the family, they uncovered more possible connections.

You would go to Mattie's Instagram account and look at her pictures and he liked them. Brian's name was under a lot of Maddiey's pictures like that picture and that picture and that picture and that picture. So he was actively looking at the Instagram accounts

and the importance of that is what? Just digital evidence that this particular account had some type of connection with the with the victims. 48 hours has not confirmed the authenticity of this account, which has since been deleted, and the gag order prevents investigators from commenting. After dedicating months looking for their own answers, the Gonzalez say they are mentally prepared for trial, no matter when it begins.

I think he's done. He's going to feel all of us just staring at the back of his head. And he's going to know that we are the Golova family. And he knows what he did to our daughter.

How could this happen to a group of kids that are doing everything the way they're supposed to do? To not known is what keeps you awake at night. And it's every day, all day. It never stops. Why? Why? Why? There is no why. It is as unexplainable today as it was the day Kaylee Gonzalez, Maddie Mogan, Zanna Kernodal, and Ethan Chapen were murdered.

I wish I wish we knew. They were all four of them were just such great people and made such an impact on the lives around them. For now, the families are left with thoughts of what might have been.

Kaylee Jade Gonzalez has been recommended to receive aostumous bachelor's degree.

Her family will receive the diploma of the University of Idaho. On May 13th, 2023, exactly 6 months from the day of the murders, an occasion that would have been a cause for celebration, graduation was instead another reminder of what was lost.

Seeing all those graduation photos, it just they should be here. [snorts] Graduation is just one of many milestones that will be missed. She would have been my maid of honor and I probably would have been hers and it's like sad to have to go through those life moments without her.

Jasmine Kernodal planned to work side by side with her sister Zana creating their own marketing business.

It's just not the same without her because she just brought like such a crazy different energy than anybody else I've ever met.

[snorts] Kaylee Gonzalez's future was in sight. She had accepted a job in Austin working for an IT firm. Kaye not only pushed herself, say her parents, but pushed them.

We lost that person that would force us to make new memories and force us to go and take on something that seems a little daunting at first.

One of you guys, guys. For the Gonzalez, amid all the loss, there was an addition to the family when in February, Olivia gave birth to a baby girl.

So, her name is Theodora Mattie Kay. Obviously, Mattie Kay is after Maddie and Kaye.

And if one were to believe in signs, there were, says Olivia, several with Theodora Mattie Kay's arrival in the hospital. Her room number 1113 was the same as the date of the murders, November 13th. And eerily, the time of birth, 4:21 a.m., is in the time frame that Kaye and Maddie are believed to have been killed.

To have birth and life and firsts, first giggles, first walks, that they would be there somehow, you know, even if it's just a namesake. This is the Gonzalez family. Maddie has truly been a blessing in our lives.

I'm Zana's sister. The families of Kaye, Maddie, Zana, and Ethan have all searched for ways, sometimes together, to cope with a horrible new normal.

We all are always going to be there for each other, and it's just difficult. We all We're all going through it in our own ways. For Ethan's parents, Stacy and Jim Chapen, one way of coping involves creating a foundation. Ethan's smile.

Ethan just had a great smile. I mean, smiled all the time. Raising money for scholarships by selling tulips planted in honor of Ethan, who had worked at a tulip farm.

So, Ethan will live on through the foundation. That's what motivates us to to do this. How do you live with this, Jeff?

It's not easy. Just got to keep going. You know, I think just like living our lives like Zana would want us to, I know that she would want us to talk about the life that she lived and to be her voice right now. She had a beautiful smile. her and Maddie.

The memories that we shared, we don't do it lightly because they are very private memories and sometimes it feels like I'm giving away a part of them. But I do it for the importance to realize how great of a loss it is because nothing's going to bring them back.

CBS next Saturday. 48 Hours brings you backtoback episodes all summer long. Next week, Beachside Homicide.

How could a single mom be executed in Cape Cod? I was knocked unconscious. I couldn't protect her.

48 hours crime time. Double feature next Saturday on CBS and streaming on Paramount Plus. We don't want to accept that there's actually evil that walks amongst us, but it does. And this was pure evil.

The Han family. I felt better whenever I spent time with Henry, Jenny, and Emily. Henry was born to be a healer. Henry was the guy. In the alternative medicine world, patients would come in from all different parts of the country to see him. When you go to the clinic, it just kind of oozed of peacefulness. He had the magic. Emily had her own little table and her crayons. Her mom Jenny was there working in the clinic. It's kind of good therapy to be with the three of them.

They did make a good team. We were business partners with Henry and we were becoming friends.

We really had a beautiful road ahead of us. He had a 10:00 a.m. meeting with his normal investment group. It was probably, you know, a good 45 minutes um after the meeting was supposed to start that we all kind of went, "Where is Henry?"

If he was going to be two minutes late, he called. We're trying to call Henry and was going straight to voicemail. So, for him to miss this meeting would be a big deal.

He just wouldn't. Something was not right. We all had a pit in our stomach and we were trying to find a reason why that pit shouldn't be there. Emily's birthday is coming up. Maybe they took her to Disneyland. Somebody's got to go over to their house and check on them. Mark finally gets in touch with Don Goldberg.

Very unusual not to get any communication from either Jenny or Henry. By midday, I decided to go to the home. From the outside, it looked normal. Went to the front door. Door was closed, but it was not locked. The two vehicles were in the garage, which you could see through the windows at the top of the garage door. Then I called uh 911. They came over and did a welfare check.

Around 5:30 that evening, two deputies arrived, made entry, called out, no response, and then started to look to see if there was any sign of foul play. And that's what led them to open the garage door. And then if you walk around the first car, they can see what appears to be three bodies wrapped in plastic and duct tape. within a minute or two sunk in that the the three bodies were Henry, Jenny, and Emily. My friends were gone. There's a certain amount of shock that that sets in.

We didn't hear back from Don. We didn't eat that night. We didn't sleep that night.

A 5-year-old 3 days short of her birthday. It shook us all to our core. It was rough. things started rapidly going into the next phase. Who, how, and why. It's a huge home. There was biological evidence throughout, primarily in the upstairs and the bedrooms where the murders took place. The smell of bleach was there indicating a cleanup attempt. An entire family killed presumably while they slept. We knew there was a monster out there and we were going to find him and get him.

Heat. Heat. Mark and Mara Palumbo were concerned when their friend and business partner, Dr. Henry Han, failed to show up for a meeting. on March 23rd, 2016. They would learn the horrific reason why the following day from a news report.

I was in the kitchen on my computer and I kept checking and I just remember screaming, "They're all dead."

Dr. Han, his wife Jenny, and their 5-year-old daughter Emily were found dead in the garage of their Santa Barbara home. Mark had just seen them on his way back from a business trip.

We went out for dinner, played Connect 4 with Emily. He brought his phone to me and I'm just looking at all these pictures of Emily and they were taken the Friday before. Just horrific. Yeah. And she was just goofing around with a book, making all these funny faces. and you could tell she was loving life.

The Palumbos had recently embarked on a new business venture with Dr. Han. I really love the guy. I mean, he really was smart and curious and open-minded.

He had to come with food and in shorts and flip-flops, you know, just no air about him. But what made you trust him? His passion.

Yeah. The way he cared about people. Don Goldberg had known Dr. Han for more than 25 years and thought of him as a brother. To Dawn, he was just Henry.

I was approximately 10 years older than Henry, but he still called me his younger brother. You just don't come across a friend like Henry. It's once in a lifetime friendship. When they met, Henry was making a name for himself after immigrating from China, where he came from a family of physicians. He would soon take over the Santa Barbara Herb Clinic.

I had several patients who had had medication side effects. They would say, "I went to see Dr. Han and it went away." And it was like, "I got to meet this guy."

Dr. Dr. Glenn Miller, a psychiatrist, says he and Henry developed a mutual respect and even partnered on a book about how Eastern and Western medicine could work together to improve patients quality of life.

Henry's practice was flourishing as far as active patients he would see like in a month was hundreds. But he also tried to balance it. In 2009, that balance he was seeking became a reality when Henry met and married Jenny U.

He seemed incredibly happy. It was good to see Henry that happy. Jenny was absolutely warm and lovely.

When they had Emily, the dream was complete. Henry was just on cloud nine. He was very proud father. They were often together at the clinic where Jenny had quickly become Henry's right hand, says her friend Isaiah Oregon.

He really trusted her and let her kind of take the reigns. In the spring of 2016,

it's my turn. They were getting ready to celebrate Emily's sixth birthday. Where should I go?

Wherever. Go wherever. We were making plans for her birthday party and, you know, had all her presents wrapped.

But just 3 days shy of her birthday, her loved ones were stricken with grief. I don't really have adequate words to describe how I felt. The sadness is too deep.

As night fell on the Han estate on Wednesday, March 23rd, Don tried to process what he had just witnessed. He had called 911 when he couldn't find the Hans anywhere. And he was with sheriff's deputies when they discovered the bodies in the garage wrapped in plastic.

None of it made any sense at all. Prosecutor Ben Leinig says it was shortly before midnight when Santa Barbara Sheriff's investigators obtained a search warrant and began to piece together what had happened inside the house. It appeared the family had been shot while they slept upstairs on the second floor. Henry in the couple's bedroom and Jenny and Emily across the hall in Emily's room.

Emily's room was tough to see. Mom probably read her stories to have Emily go to sleep that night and was sleeping with her.

What did that tell you about the depravity of the kind of person who could do something like that? What were they after?

We didn't know what he was after, but the depravity, I've never seen anything like it.

Detectives picked up on the distinct smell of the murderer's attempts to cover his tracks.

The smell of bleach was there. We had bleach bottles found. There were bleach stains on the carpet and throughout other items upstairs. And then you see bloody things in a washing machine. All the bedding which had been stripped from the beds was found piled in the laundry room and in the machine.

The washing machine, the alarm had gone off because it the load was unbalanced. And within there are a huge group of bloody sheets

wedged in pillows in the laundry. Crime scene investigators found a 22 caliber bullet and bullet fragments. Three matching shell casings were found within the wrapping of Jenny's body. and one was later found lodged between the baseboard and box spring of Emily's bed.

We had one bullet that was a through and through. It was perfect for comparison for the murder weapon. As things are going, we start to find clues as to who potentially could be involved. Inside a paper bag next to Henry's bed, detectives found a document signed the last day Henry was seen alive. It provided a name.

It's basically a four-page business contract between two partners. Partner one, Pierre Hopp, and partner two, Dr. Han.

Don Goldberg knew a Pierre that Dr. Han was associated with. But Don thought he was harmless. I did not think that Pierre was capable of murder. I never really saw Pierre become angry or agitated.

But the Palumbos had a bad feeling. He didn't trust him. I did not. This community was left with a scar. The indelible scar left by the murders was the kind that not even Dr. Han could have healed.

Wow. It was like a bomb exploded. Nobody could move for weeks. There was something very, very, very dark going on. Kimberly Ruff says Dr. Han treated her family for two decades. He could do anything.

Ever since she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer shortly after giving birth to her son, Kimberly says Dr. Han's holistic approach allowed her to nurse her newborn while still treating her tumors. No matter how scared you might be or or frightened, you just left feeling like it's going to be okay. Yeah, he was something. Instilling hope may have been one of the secrets to why his patients say Dr. Han could heal just about anything.

Dr. Han like saved my life. Sher Buron was also a young mother with cancer when she went to Dr. Han.

My daughter Abby was 15 months old. I felt a lump under my armpit. Even though she had the prescribed surgery and chemotherapy, she credits Dr. Han with her survival. There was so many people that passed away around me. He got me through it.

What was the impact for you of his loss? It's the fear of if something comes back and I'm trying every day to be positive and try to stay with his level of calm and how much confidence he had that like everything's taken care of.

That conviction is what had drawn the Palumbos who worked in the skinare industry into their partnership with Dr. Han hoping to treat various skin maladies. Henry was very interested in CBD.

Having used CBD in his practice to treat pain and inflammation, Henry wanted to harness its full potential. It was groundbreaking science at the time, and he wanted 25-year-old Pierre Hopp to help develop it.

Pierre, from what we gathered, had a lot of experience uh in laboratories, in this case relating to CBD. Henry had taken a liking to Pierre after meeting him through another associate. But the Palumbos were uncomfortable with Pierre from the start.

You know how when you meet somebody, you can't put your finger on it, but something's not right? That was Pierre.

There was always this kind of little boiling simmer. When it came time to do the lab work, the Palumbos say the results were disturbing. What we came to find out was he was using toxic materials. When we called him on it, he said, "You know, I'm just learning more about the molecules." It was just weird.

As it turned out, Pierre wasn't a formerly trained scientist. He didn't even have a college degree.

The more you got under that surface, the more you realize that he could talk a game and stay over the folks heads a bit scientifically. Sounds like he was sort of a snake oil salesman type, right?

He was sophisticated one, but yes. Yeah, very sophisticated one. There was more eyebrow raising behavior. Pier had also made odd charges on Henry's account.

I was doing all the finances. And I'm like, this doesn't look right. Not a business expense.

Not at all. After Mara flagged the charges to Henry, he discovered they were for escort services. Henry was, you won't believe this, Pierre's out.

That was the final straw. That was Henry's final straw. But then a few weeks before the murders, Mark and Mara say Henry brought up Pierre out of the blue.

Henry mentioned that he had learned a lot more about Pierre's upbringing, how much Pierre had to overcome from his childhood. Mark Norai really responded. We didn't want to have Pierre back in our fold at all.

The Palumbos were not alone in being wary of Pierre. Jenny's friend Isaiah says Jenny also had concerns and confided in him about them 4 days before the murders.

It was weighing on her heavily. Do we trust him? Do we give him another chance? I was like, absolutely not. If he stole from you before, he's going to steal from you again. But Pierre had already ingratiated himself back into Henry's goodwill.

Henry had a very trusting nature. Henry had shared with me that Pierre told him that he was ill, that it was late cancer and that he was going to do what he could to help Pierre

using Henry's good nature by lying to him, by manipulating him. Authorities learned that Pierre had been an overnight guest at the Hans home before the murders and had formed a new partnership with the healer. There was that contract found in the master bedroom they had signed the last day of Henry's life, but prosecutor Ben Leenig says it didn't seem legitimate.

It was like a college sophomore drafted it. It was not notorized, not witnessed. Detectives had found something else of interest.

A brilliant detective found packaging to the plastic wrapping that all three of the Han family were wrapped in in a trash can in the kitchen area next to packaging of 3M duct tape, similar to the duct tape that was used to wrap all three of the bodies. He recognized the plastic wrap was a Home Depot brand and reached out to the company's security department.

And Home Depot was within hours of us getting entry into the house able to run those two items together to see if they had been purchased in the Southern California region within the last several days or weeks. A Home Depot in Oceanside, California, had security footage of a man who matched the DMV photo of Pierre Hopp, who also happened to have an Oceanside address.

And that was bam. We knew he's walking out with three huge plastic rolls and sure enough, duct tape.

So within hours of the crime scene being discovered, Pierre Hopp became person of interest.

Yes. But where was Pierre now? Detectives had a hunch. Data from the Han cell phones, which were missing, showed they were traveling south, further and further from Santa Barbara.

Then inexplicably, Henry's phone goes dark, but Jenny's is still on and it keeps going south. We're getting basically digital footprints leading down to the Oceanside area from a dead woman's phone.

Anytime you're trying to stop somebody that is wanted for homicide, the stakes are going to be high. The day after the Han family was found murdered, a manhunt was underway in Oceanside, California, nearly 200 miles from the crime scene. Sergeant Anthony Flores and his partner were part of the local Oceanside police team assisting the Santa Barbara investigation.

We had come in to work with our special enforcement section and we were going to be the stop car for that day if given a window of opportunity to take him into custody or potentially stop him. Meanwhile, undercover detectives were conducting surveillance at the residence Pierre Hop shared with his father and updating all units, including the homicide team that had driven down from Santa Barbara with prosecutor Ben Leidden.

All of a sudden, we get chatter on our intercoms. Dad's on the move. The surveillance team followed Pierre's father as he drove to a Walmart parking lot where security cameras captured him meeting up with none other than Pierre.

That's dad driving in sedan. And then you see the Lexus following shortly behind. They appear to be communicating briefly together. You can just see that trunk pop.

Yeah. On dad's car. After transferring two large duffel bags to Pierre's car, they both drove off.

We got to move quickly. It was a little after midnight and we just got the update that the suspect was on the move. As we're traveling, we're hearing that he's pulling into the Arco station.

He had a few miles of a head start. The other units and laden had pulled over by the Arco station waiting for the arrest team to arrive.

Then all of a sudden you see an unmarked car drive right through the middle of that intersection. Sparks fly and it just basically comes in and pulls in and lays on the brakes. Two huge dudes get out of the car and pull gun on him and prone them out. And our eyes are like saw. We're like whoa.

Wow. It's 200 miles away that this investigation started and it culminated here. Sergeant Flores had handcuffed Pierre. What do you remember about that arrest?

I remember it going down really fast. All of our senses were heightened. Within 48 hours of the murders, investigators had the Han family's alleged killer in custody. Pierre Hopp waved his Miranda rights and started talking to detectives. what he told them was something out of a spy thriller. He claimed that his life was in danger.

Over the past couple of days, I I kid you not, I've been shot at probably about five individuals so far that I shot in self-defense.

He claimed he was being targeted because of a scientific marvel he had invented.

What does it do? It's um it's a very very advanced energy source. It's it's a quantum kind of energy source. I think probably at least 15 individuals who have been connected to this project are are dead.

Pierre said he had gone to Dr. Han's house earlier in the week to install one of his perpetual energy devices and that the plastic wrap and duct tape he was seen purchasing were for that purpose.

Dr. Henry, we um we signed a contract together. He was going to facilitate taking the technology out to China. Loved the guy to death. He really um really liked this project.

Pierre said he had left Santa Barbara around 2:00 p.m. on March 22nd, the day before the murders after signing the contract, but detectives pushed back.

Is there more to this story that you're not telling me? Dr. Han is dead. What? I had no clue that Oh my gosh. Everything was perfectly fine when I left. Pierre was adamant he would never hurt the family and insisted the shadowy figures who had been after him had killed the Hans and were trying to frame him for murder.

I invented a technology that changes the world at oil companies and people don't want this technology out there.

It was this massive conspiracy to keep this next level energy system from getting out to market. James Bond, Mission Impossible, this fantastical life. I jumped out the window.

Pier's outlandish story continued, but then detectives received an unexpected call from someone who claimed to have information about the murders.

I'm a pretty rough around the edges guy. I have rough around the edges friends.

TJ Dorito was a marijuana grower who said Dr. Han had approached him about supplying CBDrich strains. TJ had also met Pierre.

Dr. Henry had told me that he was like a prodigy street chemist. He had done some stuff that was ahead of his time.

So, a little bit of a mad scientist. Yeah. According to TJ, Pierre had a penchant for making up grandiose stories to seek attention, but he befriended him nonetheless.

He was that awkward kid that wanted to fit in, and I was the guy in high school that stuck up for kids like that. So, I took an interest in him in that regard. Do you think he trusted you then?

Oh, he absolutely trusted me. As TJ revealed to detectives, Pierre had reached out to him via text the morning of the murders. The message sent at 9:39 a.m. said, "I need your help with something urgently, like it's urgent."

What was he asking for? Uh, he needed my help moving something. He says Pierre told him he was in Santa Barbara and needed to talk face to face. So TJ had him come to his house in Thousand Oaks about an hour away.

The first thing out of his mouth, just so you know, I'm a monster. He had told me right then and there that he had killed Dr. Henry, his wife, and his child, and needed help.

Did he give you details of what he did? He did. TJ told detectives Pierre said he had tried to put the bodies in his car, but they wouldn't all fit and Henry was too heavy. Details Leenig says only the killer would know.

How the killings were done, how the bodies were wrapped up, how he had the doctor's phone.

TJ told detectives Pierre had also revealed his motive, $20 million that he planned to drain from Henry's accounts after killing the family. TJ says he didn't know if what he was hearing was another one of Pierre's far-fetched stories. And until he knew for sure, he decided to play along.

I just wanted to get him out of the house and confirm whether what he had just said was true or not. I said, "Let me work on it and I'll call you later."

Once Pierre was gone, TJ tried to reach Dr. Han and anyone who might have information to no avail.

I didn't want to call the police because I didn't I wasn't sure yet. It was chaotic. It was it was scary and also confusing.

Pierre kept messaging him around 5:00 p.m. when TJ still hadn't provided any assistance. Pierre texted him with a proposition. Want to come to Vegas tonight? All pay. What did you think the reason for that all of a sudden trip to Vegas?

At that point, I wasn't sure. Didn't sound right. It was probably going to kill me and somehow make it look like I had something to do with it. you were going to be the fall guy,

right? TJ made up an excuse why he couldn't go. And Pierre would send him one final text at 7:35 that night. Yep, I'm screwed. They just found everything. My life's over. Only if I'd got to it all sooner. Leig says Pierre had just returned to the crime scene with a big truck to transport the bodies, but law enforcement had beaten him to the scene. He knew his goose was cooked.

Pierre Hopscha's arrest near Oceanside, California had come at a critical juncture. He was armed with a 9mm handgun that was in plain view on the driver's side floorboard. He also had his passport and those duffel bags which he had received from his father minutes earlier.

Two go bags, basically whatever you need, clothes, everything for the person to live for months.

Hopsh's father was also detained and questioned, but he was released later that morning.

We could have charged him as an accessory, but we didn't have any indication that dad was involved in any way, shape, or form in the killing. The next day, during a closer examination of Hopsia's car at the crime lab,

you name it, we found it in that car. There was Henry's wallet, credit card, and social security number along with an expended shell casing. There were also the victim's phones and tablet, all wrapped in aluminum foil in an attempt to evade tracking. In the trunk, you lift up where the spare tire would be, the murder weapon, suppressor, silencer ammunition.

A week after the murders, the autopsies revealed the victims had been shot 14 times, three each into Henry and Jenny and most disturbing, eight in Emily.

That ammunition is the same stuff that we found at the crime scene in the deedants bodies. Match, match, match, match, match everything. Pierre Hopp was charged with three counts of firstdegree murder, making him eligible for the death penalty.

It was one of the most challenging cases, if not the most challenging case I ever came upon.

Defense attorney Christine Voss, who was with the public defenders office at the time, represented Hopph.

He really wanted to be vindicated. To me, the goal was for him to not get death. At the 11th hour, the DA's office agreed to wave the death penalty in exchange for a more expedient bench trial, which meant a judge, not jury, would render a verdict. On October 25th, 2021, more than 5 and a half years after the murders, the prosecution delivered its opening statement and laid out its theory of the case that Pierre Hops had plotted the murder of the Han family for financial gain. They painted him as a career con man who up until the murders flaunted his intelligence and supposed wealth. His entire life's drive was being rich.

He sent screenshots of his Chase account from anywhere from about $3 million up to $940 million to various people attempting to dupe them that he's this jet setting billionaire. Hopped claimed he had received big offers for his energy technology.

I am not a scientist, but I don't know that there's a such thing as a perpetual energy machine.

But several years before the murders, Hopp was actually being paid to build one.

It was going to be a new source of energy as if he was, you know, an Elon Musk.

Samantha Spyell met Pierre Hopp circa 2012 when he moved into a penthouse apartment in a luxury high-rise she managed in Tempe, Arizona. He pulled up and had this bright red Ferrari. It was very flashy.

Leinik says Hopp had duped a group of high rolling investors into financing his invention until they realized it didn't actually work.

He had basically defrauded all these people and the money dried up. When the murders were committed, I think he had less than $500 to his name. Prosecutors presented a detailed timeline retracing Hopscha's movements, including his digital footprint in the days before and after the murders. They say as early as March 17th, 6 days before the murders, he had looked into impersonating the doctor at his bank.

He's searching for Asian disguises and real flesh masks, like a Mission Impossible face mask,

100%. This is his fantastical world that he lived in. There's no evidence he ever purchased a mask, but a timestamped receipt and security video placed him at an Arizona gun store 4 days before the murders. Purchasing ammunition and two firearms, including the alleged murder weapon,

22 pistol with a threaded barrel for what is a silencer or suppressor. On March 20th, he was back in Oceanside, California, buying supplies before driving up to the Hans house under the guise of installing the energy machine. Instead, Leine says Hopsch bugged Henry's computer with a spyware app called a key logger.

What key loggers do is every stroke, every click of the mouse, every navigation page you go, it documents all of it. To their surprise, investigators also found the key logger on Hopscha's laptop. On March 21st, while Hops was still at the Hans home, the key logger had recorded chilling search terms on his laptop.

What part of the skull is more penetrable? What ammunition would be better? As a guest in Dr. Han's house, you've been staying there for the two nights before planning this execution style murder.

Yes. Pierre Hopp left the Han residence on March 22nd, but prosecutors allege he went back around 4:00 a.m. the next morning to carry out the murders. They say later that day, he began frantically trying to siphon money from Henry's accounts.

He's using phones. He's using fake email accounts. He's doing all these things from personal identifying information of Dr. Hans that he stole earlier that week. A Chase fraud alert had flagged an attempted payment for $72,000. Meanwhile, Hopsch also rented that big truck. He allegedly drove to the crime scene, hoping to move the bodies.

There are black and whites all over that house. The crime scenes being processed.

The Plumbos say the meeting they were supposed to have with Henry just hours after he was murdered had foiled Pierre Hopp's plans. He thought that he had that whole day to clean up his mess before Henry would be missed

if we screwed it up for him happily. That's when prosecutors say he fled, driving south toward Oceanside. Leenig argues Hopp's subsequent searches betray his guilty conscience. Is cars searched entering Tijuana? How crime scene investigation works? and how long do fingerprints take to process? Incredibly, he even consulted an online psychic named Count Marco and asked him, "Will I get caught for what I did?"

And Count Marco replies, "Well, what did you do, Pierre?" Pierre Hopp never gave Count Marco an explanation but on the stand, he couldn't stop talking. This was a tough case, but that didn't change the fact that Pierre was entitled to a vigorous defense.

Defense attorney Christine Voss was in an unusual position. This was a really well investigated case because my client wanted to have a trial and wanted me to turn every stone. I did

turn every stone and raise any possible reasonable doubt. You argued that there were elements presented that were implausible, unprovable, and simply impossible. Those were your words.

Yeah. Voss expressed concerns that the alleged murder weapon and silencer found in Hoppa's car didn't match up.

It absolutely did not connect to the firearm that they believed was the murder weapon.

She seized on discrepancies in the location data from Hops's car and phone that the prosecution had used in its timeline. He could not possibly have been in San Diego and Santa Barbara simultaneously or Thousand Oaks and Santa Barbara simultaneously, but that's what the GPS data showed.

And she attacked the credibility of the prosecution's star witness, TJ Darita. Voss questioned why Darita waited nearly 2 days to contact authorities and argued in that time he could have gotten details about the crime scene that the prosecution claimed only the killer knew.

It was not the best kept crime scene. He was making various phone calls after he heard about the death of Dr. Han. But Voss concedes much of Darita's testimony was corroborated by the evidence.

This case was over within the first 72 hours. In fact, the only witness who provided testimony that someone other than Pierre Hopp was the killer was Pierre Hopp. During three days on the stand, he repeated the action-packed account he had given detectives about having shootouts with shadowy figures. Now, he said he was sure they were sent by the Department of Energy.

It sounds like there'd be a trail of bodies, but yet is there proof of this trail of bodies anywhere to your knowledge?

No. Which further made him believe it was the Department of Energy? And what about all that evidence investigators found?

The DOE planted them there. It's all a frame. All that stuff is framed. That banking stuff frame job. What's in my car? for frame job.

It was difficult for me to embrace Pierre's testimony. Do you think he himself believed some of the things he was saying were true?

Oh yeah, definitely. He was obsessed with the government. Samantha Spyell attests there were some kernels of truth in his stories. Pierre mentioned that his dad had ties to the CIA and I could tell that he wanted his dad's approval. When his father died in 2023, his obituary stated he was a key player in clandestine central intelligence agency operations during the 1980s. Hopsch also told Spyell that his sister was going to star in a reality TV show. She got cast on a newlyweds reality show and Pier was gonna be in it. Come to find out that was true.

In fact, both Hops and his father made appearances on the second season of the Bravo TV series newlyweds the first year.

Start by filling that up. Pierre was even shown giving his brother-in-law a cooking lesson.

More black pepper. But prosecutor Ben Leadenig argued any grains of authenticity in Hopsia's life were far outweighed by deceit. You called him a lying liar who lies about lying,

right? Lie, lie, lie, lie. Hundreds of lies we found on him. His life was a con.

On November 24th, 2021, Judge Brian Hill would get the case. None of Pierre Hopp's family members attended his trial. The judge made his ruling. Guilty on all counts. The judge when he issued his ruling said his decision was beyond a shadow of a doubt. Absolutely no doubt of Pierre Hops's guilt.

Yeah. Very satisfactory to hear that. I wasn't surprised. And what was Pierre's reaction upon hearing that ruling? Well, he was visibly disappointed.

On April 15th, 2022, Pierre Hopp was sentenced to three life terms without the possibility of parole. It was little comfort to those still mourning Henry, Jenny, and Emily.

I don't understand how there really could be justice. He's still alive and and they're not. He took precious moments that we'll never get.

I want him to feel every pain possible for what he did. Not enough bad things can happen for him.

Nearly a decade after the murders, the wounds are still raw. It's hard to think of him.

He was a really good man. You don't replace a Henry Han. No. Pretty much every day I think of Henry and Jenny and Emily.

There's an old phrase that a good man and a good family lives for a limited time, but a good name shall live forever. They lived too short, but their name lives on forever.

Hey, hey hey.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Grave Horrors | “48 Hours" Full Episodes"?

In order: 0:00 Sheila Keane, Marlene Warren, Michael Warren, Bargain Motors; 15:00 Sheila Keane, Sheila Keane Warren, Marlene Warren, Michael Warren; 30:00 Marlene Warren, Sheila Keane, chain of custody, Sheila Keane Warren; 45:00 King Road, Brianna Fox, Airmail, CBS News; 1:00:00 Brianna Fox, Howard Bloom, KBAR knife, Albrightsville, Pennsylvania; 1:15:00 Daniel Han, Kaylee Jade Gonzalez, Don Goldberg, Instagram; 1:30:00 Daniel Han, Pierre Hopp, Anthony Flores, Home Depot; 1:45:00 Pierre Hopp, Daniel Han, Christine Voss, Oceanside, California; 2:00:00 Pierre Hopp, Daniel Han, Department of Energy, Henry Han.

What is mentioned in this 48 Hours episode?

88 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Bryan Kohberger, Sheila Keane, Daniel Han, Xana Kernodle, Marlene Warren, Steve Gonzalez. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Grave Horrors | “48 Hours" Full Episodes"?

The episode runs 2 h 6 min; the transcript is about 17,755 words in 437 timestamped sections.

More from 48 Hours

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 4, 2026.