Original subtitles

Around 3 pm,

Diane gets a knock on the door.

She lets this person in,

and she is attacked.

We have a man running around

talking his way into women's homes.

He seemed to...

...worship the ground she walks on.

They had broken up, made up, broken up.

Maybe this was...

..."If I can't have you, nobody can."

During sex, he would strangle her.

We were able to find pictures of hands around throats,

strings around throats.

We need to get him off the street

so we don't have another victim.

You never know who's knocking on the door.

In 2001, Austin, Texas was a rapidly growing city.

Multiple high-tech companies

have moved into the area.

You had Dell coming up.

IBM was big.

You had... Applied Materials was big.

It was starting to get that reputation as a...

...mini Silicon Valley.

Great Hills is in Northwest Austin

and it would be considered

a higher income neighbourhood, very safe.

Diane Holik is 43 years old and she lives in a house

in the Great Hills area.

Diane is an IBM executive

and had been with the company

for at least 20 years.

She has two dogs,

Rocky and Baylor.

She has a great base of friends

that love her and love hanging out with her.

She is engaged to be married to a man named Dennis Conley

and they were going to be moving to Houston,

so Diane is selling her home.

The Austin market right now isn't in very good shape.

A lot of people are putting their homes up for sale

and they're not moving.

Diane happens to be

suffering from that issue as well.

On the afternoon of November 15th,

Diane is working from home.

And she had a conversation with a coworker named Cynthia Barajas.

She told Cynthia

that she was very excited because a man had come to the home

wanting to purchase her home

for cash.

He told her that he was from Bastrop,

which is a town

outside of Austin, about 25 miles.

The man told Diane that he'd be back later

with his wife so that they could take a tour of the house.

Cynthia was very concerned that Diane

had let a stranger into her home.

And she told her, "You need to be careful about doing that."

"You never know

who's knocking on the door."

That afternoon, a violent thunderstorm

moved into Austin.

Diane told Cynthia she needed to get off the phone

so that she could batten down the hatches of her house.

She ended her call with Cynthia at 1:30.

Around 3:00 pm,

Diane gets a knock on the door.

And she lets this person in.

After Diane lets this person in,

she is attacked.

By the next day, the storm had cleared

and Diane was supposed to have a IBM Zoom call

with Cynthia Barajas.

When Diane did not show up

on the Zoom call, Cynthia became concerned that maybe

something happened to Diane during the storm.

She called the home several times.

When she could not get in touch with Diane

she decided to call the Austin Police Department

to conduct a welfare check.

Police arrived at Diane's house but nobody answered the door.

Lakki Brown, who is a neighbour and happens to be

the realtor selling Diane's home,

walks down to inquire what's going on.

Police tell her that they're checking on her welfare

because employees are concerned.

So, she gives them a key.

When the police make entry into Diane's home,

they find her two beloved dogs,

Rocky and Baylor in extreme distress.

They found a lot of faecal matter and urine

all over the carpets.

The master bedroom was on the bottom floor.

They look around that part of the house,

didn't find anything.

They go up the stairs...

...and in searching one of the spare bedrooms,

on the other side of the bed,

that's where he found the body.

When the officers realised that it was a potential homicide,

they called our detective who was

on duty at the homicide office.

And he's actually the one that called myself

and Detective De Los Santos to respond.

We arrived at the scene

and went inside.

My initial observation was the house was

immaculately clean. Everything was in place.

It didn't seem like there had been any kind of

violent disturbance in the house.

And because her house was so clean

and organised, we thought it was very odd

that there was a towel

just draped over the couch.

It seemed very out of place.

We then went upstairs to the spare bedroom.

I walked into the bedroom

and I saw Diane's body.

It looks exactly like someone tried to push

most of her body underneath the bed,

but Diane was small.

She wasn't that small.

They then slid the bed cover over her to try to hide her.

One of the things that immediately struck me

was a red ligature mark that went around her neck.

This indicated to me that she had been strangled.

The other thing that I didn't notice,

and usually do in these types of cases,

is defensive marks that are on the neck.

When someone is trying to pull the ligature away,

sometimes they cut themselves with their fingernails.

There was no injury present,

which was odd.

As I moved further down her body,

I looked at her wrist and saw

that she had red linear lines on both of them.

On closer inspection, I saw perpendicular spaces

between the two parallel lines.

And these reminded me of zip ties.

So, I figured that she had been...

...tied up before she was strangled,

and that's why there were no defensive marks.

She was already in rigor mortis,

and she was starting to get some of that...

...bruising that you get

as your body decomposes. And so, we knew

that she had been strangled 12...

...possibly 24 hours earlier.

We had no reason to believe that she'd been sexually assaulted

because she was still fully clothed.

We had a discussion with Lakki Brown

because she was concerned and

asked us if we had found Diane's ring?

She said that was a massive ring.

She thought it was about 20,000 dollars, and that

if it was missing that maybe that could have been the motive.

But we never found that ring. The potential for this

to have been a robbery gone bad

was definitely in the forethought of our minds

because we couldn't find the ring.

When we realised that there was no forced entry into the house,

we thought that Diane either knew them or felt comfortable enough

to open the door for this person.

There appeared to be black mascara and makeup

on a portion of the carpet,

which to me, said Diane was face down at one point

in this area.

It indicated to me that yes, she was definitely moved.

And that's what really concerned me,

that this killer is comfortable

putting his hands on her after she's dead,

and then staging her body.

To me, this is a killer who,

this isn't his first time.

He may have done this before

because he cleaned up that crime scene.

We didn't find a lot of fingerprint evidence.

It appeared that the house may have been wiped down,

and that the attacker had gone to great lengths to cover their tracks.

When investigators discover that elaborate efforts

have been undertaken by the suspect to clean the crime scene,

they have to start wondering whether

there's significant premeditation

in this case.

Somebody who is confident enough in remaining at the scene

for a prolonged period after the murder,

which carries with it additional risks of introducing new evidence.

I mean, there's fibres and cells that are constantly falling

off the body, so, to remain there, this will...

...communicate to investigators that this person

has thought this through and thinks they're smarter than police.

After interviewing her friends and family,

we realised that Diane was this gregarious,

successful, fun-loving woman...

who liked to throw parties, liked to hang out with her friends.

But once Diane turned 40, her friends said that

she decided that she wanted to settle down,

maybe raise a family.

She actually signed up for a couple of dating websites.

One of them was called "It's Just Lunch"

and I believe that's where she met Dennis Conley.

Dennis Conley is a divorced father of two

and a successful businessman.

Within a few months, the two are engaged.

When we were in the house,

we noticed that there was an answering machine

and it was blinking.

We listened to all the messages, and almost all of them were from Dennis.

Some of them were concerned, like, "Where are you at?"

Because Diane was supposed to have gone

to Houston to be with him for the weekend.

By the second day, he was

pretty distraught and angry that she hadn't called him back.

He just was like, "What is going on?"

"I don't understand what's happening,

and you need to call me back."

When we talked to Diane's friends about Dennis,

many of them were not eager for them to get married.

They felt like he was very controlling and I don't think

they thought that the marriage was going to last.

And apparently she was

vacillating as to whether she really wanted to marry him or not.

They had broken up, made up, broken up.

In talking with two of Diane's friends, they told me that

Diane had reactivated her dating service app

and had gone out with a couple of other men.

One friend told me that the Thursday before...

...that she had had a date from somebody that she had met

on the internet.

Is it possible that Dennis Conley found out

and was upset about it?

Is it possible that Dennis

was the one she opened the door for?

I called Dennis Conley

from the house. He's not there,

but I speak to his roommate,

and I tell the roommate that Diane

was deceased and that we needed to have Dennis call us.

Dennis called us back pretty quick

and told us he was already on his way to Austin.

So, we agreed that

we would meet him at the police station for an interview.

When I get him in the interview room,

he seems very distraught about Diane, very upset.

But he also came across as more concerned

about his own feelings and how he was going to be dealing with this,

than he really was with what happened to Diane.

Conley admitted to me that their relationship

did have rough patches.

At one point, they ended their engagement

and did some couple's therapy.

Finally, they decided that they were gonna get married,

and Diane made the decision to sell her home.

Dennis claimed that he was in Houston at the time of the murder.

He had a major presentation to give

the following morning, so,

he had been working all night on that presentation.

But it was not out of the realm of possibility that

Dennis could have driven to Austin...

...come to Diane's home...

...murdered her,

and driven back,

as it's only a two-and-a-half-hour drive.

We asked him if he would voluntarily give us a sample of his hair

and a sample of his DNAs.

And he volunteered to do it.

We did test his DNA

against DNA that we collected at the crime scene,

and he was not a match for any of it.

I attend the autopsy,

and we were able to look at those ligatures around her wrists...

...pretty closely.

We're able to actually measure the distance between

the linear marks that are on there,

and that's when we determined that those were zip ties

of some sort that were around her wrist.

But because we didn't find anything in the house that even

resembled those zip ties,

we knew that the perpetrator must have

taken those with him.

The autopsy is really the linchpin of most

effective homicide investigations.

There's significant data

that can be gleaned from that,

that will send investigators

in a particular direction.

Approximate time of death, cause of death, stomach contents,

toxicology. You know,

was this person consuming drugs or alcohol?

And that perhaps changes the circumstances.

All kinds of things that will really guide them into where to go next.

At the autopsy we learned she was

definitely murdered by strangulation.

It looked like... the angle of the ligature mark

would've been somebody that was taller than her

as it went kind of up...

...and behind her.

And that ligature mark was very, very deep,

so, it would've been a lot of force used to actually strangle her.

The time of death is estimated to be between

3:00 pm on November 15th

and 3:00 am on November 16th.

On November 15th, Dennis Conley went to dinner,

apparently, with his roommate and a neighbour,

a friend of his,

and was able to provide us with the receipts for that.

And then we went back and we also corroborated that

those two individuals did actually have dinner with him that night.

At this point we were able to pretty much clear Dennis

as a suspect in this murder.

But when we were trying to figure out

who might want to hurt Diane,

he really didn't know,

but he did offer up a name

of somebody that was very attracted to Diane,

that he thought we should start looking at.

Ray was hired by Diane a few years earlier

and worked with her at IBM.

When we talked to the people

that know him, we know that Ray was...

He was really just in love with Diane.

He was willing to do anything for her that she asked.

Ray was the person who always took care of Diane's dogs

when she was out of town and went to Houston,

because Dennis didn't like the dogs at the house.

Ray actually showed up at the house

while we were working the crime scene.

He was distraught about the dogs.

I mean, he legitimately was distraught about the dogs

having been stuck in the house.

We pulled Ray in to see if maybe this was...

...a jealousy issue or

if "I can't have you, nobody can" type of thing.

When we get Ray into the interview room...

...he's almost jovial and

super eager to please. He's like, "I want to help you solve this."

"I want to help you solve this."

And I'm like, "Well, I want you to help me to solve this, too."

It was very odd the way he acted.

I think he was overzealous to help us,

which a lot of times that means

you're inserting yourself in an investigation because

you want to know what we know if we catch you.

And that's when we kind of focused in on Ray.

He told us that he had known Diane for two years,

but he hadn't spoken with her in the last two weeks.

He made it clear that he definitely had feelings for Diane

and would have dated her in a heartbeat,

but because she didn't feel the same way,

they kinda had a falling out the month before.

But he was still willing to care for her dogs because

he loved the dogs.

So, she continued to give him a key to her home

and allowed him to care for the dogs while she was out of town.

We asked Ray about his whereabouts when we thought

the murder might have happened,

and he told us that

he was at work, and that

we should be able to get his key card information

through IBM, which we did,

and it shows that he was actually at work

during when we suspected the murder happened.

Ray was willing to give us a sample of his hair and his DNA.

When we did the comparison, we were unable to find

a match for Ray's DNA

with anything at the crime scene.

Ray is no longer a suspect.

When we realised that

Diane had actually met Dennis through "It's Just Lunch,"

we called "It's Just Lunch"

and tried to get the information on anybody that Diane

had met through that organisation.

We really are

living in an age of ubiquitous surveillance,

to the extent that

all homicide investigations now have

a tech component that involves cell phone activity,

internet browser history,

and other technical clues

that will really provide police

the laser focus that they need.

But "It's Just Lunch" was not eager to help us

because it's supposed to be an anonymous site.

We were forced to get a subpoena.

And then I was given all the names of the people that

Diane had actually had lunch with.

I contacted each and every one of them...

...and basically was able to eliminate them also as suspects.

As effective as technology can be,

it's imperative that police still speak to flesh and blood neighbours.

Traditional police canvassing, going door-to-door,

asking the usual questions, "Did you see or hear anything suspicious?"

"Has there been a car parked on the street lately

that you found untoward?"

"Have you seen your neighbour in recent days?"

I love doing canvassing.

It can produce so many great leads,

so much good information.

Sometimes an underutilised asset.

I wanted to go and talk with every neighbour I could find and see

if they had seen anything, if they had had any strange people

come knocking on their doors,

anything that was unusual that would stick out.

I came across

two or three different ladies that

relayed to me a story of a man

looking to buy a home in the area

for him and his wife.

Didn't have a realtor

but he had cash to buy.

This man

also may have visited Diane.

Same story, was in the house,

told her he wanted to buy.

So, now our interest has really piqued.

Who is this man?

We became concerned that

now we have a stranger that's in this neighbourhood

and is possibly attacking women.

Well...

We thought, "Well, we need to figure out who this is quickly."

That's how we moved forward

with a sketch artist.

The description of the suspect that all the women gave

was more-or-less the same,

that he was a larger kind of guy,

stocky,

muscular.

Police sketches are still used

and there are some well-documented cases

of them being very effective.

The idea is to get as many eyeballs as possible on that.

Have you seen this person?

Do you know who this person is?

It's one of the oldest tricks in the book,

but it's still in the book

because it works.

We immediately put that out

and we got a call from a real-estate agent

named Melody Blount.

She met with a man that she said matched his description.

She did take him to see a couple homes,

but she thought it was odd that

he only wanted to see vacant homes.

She said, when they went inside, I felt like he was never really

interested in the home.

He just kinda wandered around, looked out the windows,

and always wanted to be walking behind her.

And that made her very uncomfortable.

She became concerned and actually made a police report

to the Travis County Sheriff's Office and said,

"There's something wrong with this guy."

And basically the sheriff's department said,

"Well, if he hasn't committed a crime,

we really can't do much about it."

I do believe he initially started with real estate agents,

and then when he wasn't having any luck with the real estate agents

decided to just go to affluent houses that

had signs in the front yard and see

if he could work his way in the house.

A neighbour told us that she had seen a gold van

with pin striping parked in Diane's driveway

around 5:00 pm that day.

A gold van with pin striping, which usually isn't noted

in vehicle registration,

that's gonna be a momentous task to find

without a licence plate.

But then we got a phone call on our tipline.

It was from a woman who believes that

that man had come to her home...

...and told her basically the same story.

And he was very insistent about wanting to get into her home.

She asked him, "Where's your real estate agent?"

And he tells her, "Well, you know, I'm just trying to cut out

the middleman. That way we can make more money on both of our ends."

She said, "Well, I'm not comfortable with that,

and you need to go get a real estate agent."

So, he leaves.

I think it was two or three weeks and then he actually

comes back to her house.

However, this time she does write down his licence plate

and she puts it on the refrigerator with a magnet.

When this story came out, she knew that was him.

She felt like she had the licence plate

to the man who was possibly Diane Holik's murderer.

That licence plate is what broke the case for us.

A check of the licence plate revealed that it was owned

by a person named Patrick Anthony Russo,

a music director at a church nearby.

Russo had a criminal past.

In the late 80s and 90s, he had

several reports of attacking women.

One of the ladies reported

that when he got her alone, he strangled her.

One attack in Lake Jackson,

that included a kidnapping charge,

got him a prison sentence.

Russo was actually given a 20-year sentence...

...but while in prison,

Russo found God and he is now

a professed born-again Christian.

He was paroled early for good behaviour,

for helping other inmates find God.

They felt like he had been rehabilitated from his crime.

We linked him to a church in Cedar Creek,

which is where he was living,

with a woman who was a volunteer at the prison

when he was actually in prison.

We obtained a search warrant to search the home and the van.

When investigators discover that Russo

has a significant criminal history,

I mean, this guy's a known felon,

this changes the game in terms of their approach.

You just don't show up at this... at this guy's house

with no backup and just knock on the door and hope for the best.

They're going to have to approach this tactically,

in terms of officer safety and in terms of

ensuring that nobody else gets hurt.

By the time we got that search warrant

it was 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

We got into our cars and headed

to Russo's residence.

It was out in the country, in Bastrop.

This particular night there was no moon, so it was pitch black dark.

So, when we get to the house, we're all on guard.

We don't know what he's going to do, how he's going to act.

If he has a gun, is he gonna try to shoot us through the door?

It was decided that Tracy and another detective

would go to the door.

The rest of us sat back

so as not to overwhelm him.

It was nerve-wracking knocking on that door...

...because we had no idea

what was on the other side.

Patrick Russo answers the door.

His wife is kind of in the background,

asking what's going on.

But before...

...we could tell him anything,

he tells his wife, "I'm sure this has something to do

with me being on parole or whatever."

We basically told him,

"Your name has come up in an investigation

and we would like for you to come back to Austin

and discuss it with us."

He never said, "No, what's this about?"

He never asked for an attorney.

And then he willingly and voluntarily came with us.

We transported Russo back to Austin

while the rest of the team stayed behind and processed the scene.

Among the items to be seized was

if he had any computers, any discs,

those sorts of things.

I noticed a bundle of fencing,

and I noticed that the fencing was tied up with white zip ties.

Very much like the zip ties

that would cause the same impressions

as we saw in Diane's wrist.

So, we definitely took those.

We drive Russo back to our offices in Austin.

We tell him that he's not under arrest and that he's free to leave.

Russo insisted that he has never

been out looking at houses.

And when we put a photograph down

of Diane in front of him,

he adamantly denied that he had ever

seen her or met her.

When we confronted Russo about neighbours

in Diane's neighbourhood

saying that they saw his van...

...he changed his story a little bit.

He did say on the day of the storm

that he did drive in the vicinity of Diane's house.

And then he said it started to pour and that

he got lost in the neighbourhood.

That he was lost for about two or three hours,

and his wife calls him, and then he manages to find

his way back home to Bastrop.

And that was basically his story.

Russo put himself in the neighbourhood.

We take his DNA

and we fingerprint him.

We also brought Russo's wife in...

...and we had a conversation with her.

We learned in our conversation with her

that he would strangle her during sex.

This went back for years.

We also interviewed his first wife who told us the same thing...

...that during sex, he would strangle her.

Investigators are aware that they're dealing with a...

...sexually disordered, fetishistic, sadistic offender.

This is why, frequently,

police will pull historical files for behaviour that they know

is leading towards

the type of really gruesome crime that eventually gets committed.

While Patrick Russo

looks like Diane's killer, and we think he's the killer,

but we don't have the material evidence

that we need right now to link him to it 100%.

So, we don't have an arrest warrant for him.

It's horribly frustrating, especially when...

...a stranger is running around talking his way

into innocent women's homes.

We need to get him off the street as soon as possible

so we don't have another victim.

Police can't act on suspicion.

They require probable cause.

Probable cause allows for an arrest of a suspect

because there's

sufficient cause there

that a reasonable person would say

that an arrest is warranted.

It's the legal framework that gets police

a foot in the door.

As we were investigating this, we came to understand that

Patrick Russo would see the for sale signs,

and if there was a box

that actually had a piece of paper with all the details of the house,

he would grab that piece of paper

and knock on the door so that people would see him

with their house-for-sale detail paper.

This house that he went to,

there was a black and white paper in the box.

And when he went inside the house, he actually laid it down

and took a colour one...

...but he forgot to take the black and white one with him.

And when that person called us back,

she told us, "Hey, I think I might have his fingerprints."

We actually called a fingerprint technician in on...

...Thanksgiving Day

to do a comparison with the fingerprint

that we had taken from Russo

and from the one we got off the flyer.

And it was a match.

We were able to prove with a fingerprint hit

that he did lie to us about not being

in any of these neighbourhoods.

And that's actually a crime,

giving false information during a criminal investigation.

This allowed us to revoke his parole

and that's how we re-arrested him.

But we still need more evidence on Russo.

If not, he's gonna get cut free.

However, everything changed

when we looked through Patrick Russo's computer,

and nobody could believe what was on there.

I'm Roy Rector

and I was the...

...computer forensic examiner on this case.

They brought the computer to me

for analysis

and we did search the computer for Diane Holik's name

and the name of the street.

We did not find

any positive results for those searches.

They said, "OK, go ahead and now search for real estate."

So, I do a search for real estate,

and we're looking at line after line of text-based content

and we're seeing realtors, and we're seeing Necro Babes,

and then the DA says, "What is Necro Babes?"

And I say, "I don't know."

I would call it a asphyxiation...

...pornographic website.

What it was is picture stories. It wasn't video.

You would select a story

and it would show you a series of pictures

of women being bound,

and tied, and physically abused.

Different pictures of, you know, hands around throats,

or strings around throats.

And in the end, the female actor would pretend to be dead.

So, it's obvious that Russo had a fetish for asphyxiation pornography.

We realised that the very last story

that he looked at on this website

was very similar to what happened to Diane.

The story was basically about a man who was aroused by...

...strangling women.

I think he wanted to kill somebody.

And he said the best way to do it is to...

...make the strangulation look like a robbery went bad

and you ended up having to kill the homeowner.

But aside from the ring that we couldn't find,

we couldn't say he stole anything in the house.

So, I think the true motive was

for him to go to that home and kill her,

and that's what he wanted to do, and then he tried to make it look

like a robbery, just like what was on that story.

We could actually get the company who sponsors that website

in Las Vegas to give us the exact

date and time that he clicked on every one of those photographs

or every one of those stories.

The dates are significant in that I think

he was accessing that website two days before the murder.

So, we were able to find the motive.

It was to actually strangle and murder a woman.

It wasn't to steal a ring or to rob anybody, it was to kill her.

That was where he was aroused.

When you have a stranger murder involving restraints,

a sexual motivation,

significant pre-planning

and fantasy development,

this is a budding serial killer.

He's gotten away with this once.

The fantasies will continue to be developed and cultivated.

And investigators know he has to be caught before he can do this

to another woman.

They know they're on a clock.

That day, November 15th,

it's raining hard.

And Russo was probably dripping wet.

Diane probably offered him a towel so that he could dry off.

He dried off with the towel,

but he didn't take the towel with him.

That's his mistake.

Leaving something behind.

Well, forensics finds hair on that towel.

That hair is submitted for DNA analysis.

And the DNA comes back to Patrick Russo.

This is enough to arrest

Patrick Russo for the murder of Diane Holik.

Driven by violent fantasies of strangling women,

Russo goes to affluent neighbourhoods,

all around different parts of the city of Austin,

looking for homes that are for sale.

Going to the doors.

He pretends like he's a interested buyer

looking to buy a home with cash.

Some of these women

open the door and let him into their house.

Sometime in the morning on November 15th,

Russo made his first contact with Diane Holik

stating he was looking to buy a house.

I believe Russo looked at her stature,

he looked at whether the dogs were friendly,

he looked at if there was a security system.

I think he probably knew that

she was not married and was living alone, and that

this would probably be an easy target.

At about 3:00 pm,

Diane receives a knock on the door.

When she opens it, she realises it was the man

that was there earlier inquiring about buying her house,

so, she lets him in.

Seeing that Russo was wet from the rain,

Diane gave him a towel to dry himself off.

Diane gave Patrick a tour of the house.

At some point they go upstairs

to where that spare bedroom is,

and that's where he attacks her.

Between 3:00

and 3:59 pm

Diane Holik is murdered by strangulation.

Patrick Russo cleans up the crime scene,

wiping down his prints,

taking the zip ties.

Russo is eventually convicted of capital murder

in February of 2004.

I think the murder of Diane Holik

hit the community of Austin really hard.

That neighbourhood obviously was devastated.

The murder of Diane Holik shook everyone.

People very suddenly became very fearful.

Diane truly was a well loved person in the community

that just had her life taken from her needlessly.

It was shocking.

That doesn't happen every day in Austin.

But the thing about this case that haunts me is that this guy,

I think, would've been a prolific serial killer had we not caught him.

He was good at lying. He had

mastered getting into women's homes.

It was very important for us as detectives

to do the best we can to bring justice.

ERIC It makes me incredibly proud to be a part of the team

that got justice for Diane and her family.

I think everybody, we really need to be careful

and be mindful of what's around us

and who we're letting into our homes.

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