Original subtitles

- Harlan, over here!

- Ladies and gentlemen, Harlan Coben.

[applause]

- He's the greatest thriller writer.

- Aw, come on.

- Coben's written over 30 "New York Times" bestsellers.

- With over a dozen hit TV shows and movies.

[dramatic music]

- In all our stories, the same question--

what made the killer cross that line?

[suspenseful music]

♪

- I'm Harlan Coben.

Often, the best mystery novels do not start with a murder;

they start with a missing person.

When I hear those words crackle over a police scanner,

a switch flips, the dots connect,

and I'm pulled into the void.

That's why Nancy's disappearance

wouldn't leave me alone.

She was the reliable one.

She didn't miss appointments.

Nancy wasn't the type to just vanish.

And that's where our mystery begins.

- Nancy Woodrum's disappearance

was extremely high-profile because stuff like that

doesn't happen in this county.

- Deputies are still searching for clues

to find 62-year-old Nancy Woodrum,

who went missing on Friday.

- She had plans with a friend this morning

that she didn't show up for.

- We had no idea what happened to her.

She just vanished.

- You start looking around and questioning people.

- In a case like this, anybody within a mile

is a person of interest.

- Nancy owned a large property that

she was in the midst of selling.

- She had several arguments about money.

- You look at friends, family.

- And that night, there was a large

wedding party on the property.

- Could one of them be involved?

- The entire bridal party were suspects.

- Why can't we find her?

Where is she?

- Where's Nancy?

♪

- A crime happened here.

The past isn't what it seemed.

The story told turns out to be deception.

And just when you're sure you have the answer...

- 911, what is the address of your emergency?

Hello? Anyone there?

- There's one final twist.

[soft music]

♪

- Paso Robles is wine country.

A lot of vineyards, a lot of ranches.

People help each other, care about their neighbors.

You can leave your doors open.

Everybody's like family around here.

- At that time in Paso Robles, you knew mostly everybody.

And Nancy Woodrum was known very well by a lot of people.

- As a friend, Nancy was someone you could trust.

You could confide in her with things.

And she was very gentle, very kind, always generous.

Tip your bartender good.

Tip your waitress good.

[birds chirping]

- Nancy, her residence was beautiful.

It was an oasis.

It felt like stepping back in time.

There were horse corrals, a beautiful pool and spa.

- Nancy lived there with her husband.

And then he passed away, leaving her the house.

[camera shutter clicking]

Nancy was getting ready to sell it.

She was in the process of fixing up

some different parts of the property.

And she put the house up for rent for wedding parties.

[pensive music]

- We picked May 5th as our wedding day.

We rented Nancy's property from a rental site.

It seemed just like the perfect place

to get ready with all of my best friends.

- I stayed in the guest house with the bride

and two other bridesmaids.

The bride had informed me that, if we need anything,

the owner's right here, staying in the studio

connected to our guest house.

- Nancy came across as a very kind-hearted and sweet woman,

someone who gives you a hug right when you meet them,

and very welcoming and upbeat.

- On Friday night, we attended the rehearsal dinner

at a local winery.

And then the day of the wedding,

it was the hustle and bustle of trying

to get 11 bridesmaids and the mom of the bride ready.

Then we started taking pictures around the property.

And at that point, the golf cart pulled up.

It was Nancy's daughter.

She approached us and asked us if we had seen her mom.

She was like, her bed has been stripped.

Looks like there was a struggle in her room.

There's blood.

I remember looking at her and telling her,

you need to call the police.

You need to call the police.

You need to call the police.

I think I said it three times.

[sirens wailing]

- Myself and another deputy were dispatched

to a possible missing persons case

at Nancy's house.

- There were several things not right.

Nancy's daughter told the patrol deputies

that Nancy would never leave her sliding glass door open.

And when family arrived, the TV was on.

And Nancy would never go to bed or fall asleep with the TV on.

- There was what appeared to be blood inside, on the floor,

dried blood on the carpet, some on the wall.

There was bedding that was missing.

- And there was a decorative pillow

that had what appeared to be

smeared dried blood on both sides of it.

[suspenseful music]

At that time, I'd been in law enforcement for 20-some years,

and I'd seen plenty of crime scenes.

And this was a crime scene and not an accident.

[indistinct radio chatter]

- It went from missing person

to potential homicide right away.

You always hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

- And then we learned there was a second scene.

A patrol officer had located some bedding and clothing

out towards Highway 58.

Our lab confirmed that it belonged to Nancy Woodrum.

And some of it had blood on it.

- She was taken.

And we feared that Nancy was probably in a vehicle,

and somehow, that bedding had fallen out of that vehicle.

Tragically, she may be injured or, at the worst, dead.

♪

- The unknown sparks our imagination,

a million what-ifs to explore.

But those first few hours are the most precious.

Focus on the wrong what-ifs,

and the door of opportunity closes.

- At Nancy's, I dusted for prints

and collected several items that had blood on them.

And a little bit of blood on the pillow

had the shape of a handprint.

I collected items from her bathroom,

such as a toothbrush and a hairbrush,

so that we would be able to build a DNA profile.

We were able to determine that the female contributor

on the blood on the pillow was Nancy.

And there was an unknown male contributor.

- Whoever left that DNA, he's our suspect.

♪

- Forensic evidence is the silent detective in the room,

but it doesn't work alone.

You can't clap with one hand.

DNA needs a match.

[suspenseful music]

- When you get DNA evidence,

you can upload that into the CODIS databank

to see if there's anybody in CODIS

that matches that evidence.

There was no match.

- Now we have to determine, who does that actually belong to?

- At that point, we get Nancy's AT&T phone records.

One of the last people to have contact with Nancy Woodrum

was her son, Chad.

There was a text conversation between the two of them

on Friday at about 7:30 in the evening.

So we know she was alive texting her son.

And at midnight, 17,

there's a 911 call for 0 seconds.

So we feel like that's when

whoever went in her house went in her house,

at midnight, 17, or shortly prior to that.

- You're trying to figure out who saw her last

and who people of interest are.

That was a very difficult task here.

The night of her disappearance,

there's a whole bunch of people on the property.

- We, as the bridal party, were cast as the initial suspects.

- Saturday night, it took a couple hours

to interview the wedding party.

There was a couple of people that did see Nancy on Friday.

And then all of the guests had gone to the rehearsal dinner.

- At the rehearsal dinner, people were drinking.

People do silly things when they're drinking.

- And we did learn that one of the wedding guests

told a detective that he stayed behind

and did not go to the rehearsal dinner.

Why would you come all the way to a wedding

and then stay back?

He puts himself on the property alone with Nancy

for five or six hours.

According to the detective that spoke to him,

he was kind of exhibiting some suspicious behavior,

just a little excessive nervousness.

So we went to re-interview him.

- We just had a couple more questions to clarify.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- His wife provided pictures of him and her

at the rehearsal dinner.

There were phone date and time stamps.

It was very clear he was there.

We asked him for consent.

He very quickly volunteered his DNA.

And he's cleared by DNA.

- Never in a million years was there a thought

that anybody in that wedding party

was a part of or responsible for anything

that happened to Nancy.

We had our babies there. We had our families there.

Everyone cooperated, and we were cleared.

- We did get married that day.

But it hit us really hard.

I look back to my wedding, and I think of Nancy.

- Each dead end means hours lost.

Each hour lost means a lifetime

for criminals to cover their tracks.

- An update now on the missing woman in Paso Robles.

Deputies are expanding their search.

62-year-old Nancy Woodrum has been missing

since Friday afternoon.

- At that point, the investigative team,

they were developing leads to find out

who had been interacting with Nancy in the days

leading up to her disappearance.

- In any missing persons case, we talk to the family.

- Where do you think something could have

gone wrong with your mom

and somebody would want to hurt her?

- There was a realtor named Joe

who was a family friend, who, at one point,

had the listing for Nancy's house.

- I had Nancy's house on the market

maybe a year and a half ago.

- There was some hostility.

He was very angry.

- It's a $2 million property.

That's a lot of commission.

He felt like Nancy did him dirty.

♪

[pensive music]

♪

- Everyone has a mask they show the world,

the best version of themselves, the one who plays by the rules.

But it's an act, a performance.

Those who see the real face underneath the mask,

the messy reality, they're the ones who know

how far we're willing to go.

The truth is never black and white.

It lives in the murky grays where we each negotiate

our own version of right and wrong.

- Do you remember what type of threats Joe made?

- While we were looking at Joe, the realtor,

we did discover Nancy was also having issues

with a contractor.

- They had some level of disagreement with Nancy

over the preparation for sale of the property.

[suspenseful music]

- San Luis Obispo is a fairly small county.

In law enforcement, you can become familiar

with what we call frequent flyers.

When we heard the name of the contractor, Shaun Blume,

most of us knew him.

- He had a conviction.

♪

- I'm a general contractor, so I do pretty much

all different phases of construction.

- There was a painter on the job site, Carlo Fuentes.

We called Carlo.

He told us that he had met Nancy.

He described her as being very polite and very nice.

There was one time he was working late,

and she had brought him out some tamales

to eat while he was painting

and they had a brief conversation.

- He confirmed, yeah, he had seen those two arguing.

- Did Shaun push her?

Did she fall and hit her head? Did he freak out?

- We got DNA.

It doesn't match.

♪

- And then when we spoke with the realtor, Joe,

he had a confirmed alibi.

- He had 15 or 20 people that put him

out of the area on a trail ride.

He could be taken off the list.

- So the wedding guest, the contractor,

and the realtor were ruled out.

- We cleared those people in a few weeks.

After that, it was a real big whodunit.

♪

[phone rings]

- You wanna believe all the work hasn't been in vain.

But in those pursuits are clues,

and they're adding up to something.

Or are you overthinking it?

- We looked at financial motive.

Who might stand to gain something

if she were to disappear?

- You have a potential sale of a property.

Certainly, you have to put family in

as a person of interest.

- Nancy's son, Chad, was the last person

to have contact with her.

- Nancy and her son didn't get along

because of Nancy's faith.

- Chad was very angry, didn't wanna talk to us,

didn't really wanna cooperate.

- Nancy's selling her property,

and if something happened to Nancy,

you were in line to inherit what the property sold for.

- He said he didn't want his DNA uploaded into the system.

We told him how suspicious it makes him look,

and he wouldn't budge.

He was set in stone.

He would never give us his DNA.

[sirens wailing]

[grim music]

- We see an empty chair at the dinner table,

and we think we have it all figured out--

a mother's heartbreak, a son who no longer cares,

a shattered relationship.

Case closed.

Or is that all just a little too obvious?

- When was the last time you'd been out to her place?

- Nancy's son, Chad, wanted nothing

to do with the investigation.

It seemed that he felt no love for his mother.

- And he's just not a cooperative person.

So we were watching Chad at work.

And at the end of his shift, he was drinking beers.

We seized the beer bottles and got his DNA.

It surprised me that DNA

ruled him out as a contributor to our evidence.

- I know there was some concern that Chad

wasn't as cooperative as he should have been,

but his mother's gone,

and the whole community is asking questions.

I just think it was his way of responding,

of just self-protecting.

[soft music]

- By around September,

we had kind of cleared most everybody.

And there was a lull there where it was scary.

- People, quite frankly, were very afraid.

There was a perpetrator out there that

no one knew who they were.

- I'd go on my walks, and all of a sudden,

it was like, I don't know if I should be walking alone,

when I never felt that fear before.

- Her poster started being put up around the county.

And people, they'd ask,

hey, any idea what's happened to Nancy?

Any word?

- We reached out to the San Luis Obispo

County Sheriff's Office.

Unfortunately, no new details are available at this time.

- I can't believe there hasn't been any more leads.

- The sheriff's office has a volunteer search and rescue.

For weeks, they literally walked

a good ten miles looking in culverts, looking in ditches.

I've never seen anything like it.

[suspenseful music]

- Unfortunately, none of those search parties

ever turned up any evidence.

[sirens wailing]

- As time passes, fear quiets in the criminal.

But for the detective, it grows.

And nothing is louder than the tick of the clock.

- Detectives were trying everything possible.

Sometimes, you just have to have a lucky break.

[suspenseful music]

- At that time, one of our investigators

had just returned from a new training

about what is called a Google geofence.

- We were the first homicide case in California

that it was used.

Geofencing is a invisible line

drawn around a particular area.

It will pick up on any electronic device

with a signal that comes in there.

We can detect that phone number and when that device

entered that space.

- That night, on Nancy's property,

there were guests with cell phones

in the large house and in the small house next to Nancy's.

- We have to be extremely precise.

- So we put a little fence around Nancy's living area.

- A 12-foot radius was its accuracy.

- And we asked for all the cell phones

that were in that area during the time frame of our crime.

And we finally get the data back.

- We have a device that was there

at 1:00 in the morning time frame.

It's not Nancy's device.

So who owns that cell phone?

- It's kind of like a fingerprint.

- So now we get a search warrant

to figure out what that device is and who owns it.

- I am in the courthouse.

And my co-lead investigator,

he says it's Carlo.

I said, what?

Who's Carlo?

They said, that guy you talked to in July, the painter.

And I said, are you kidding me?

♪

[pensive music]

- When we think of mysteries,

we imagine the clues are tangible--

a footprint, a torn letter, a motive whispered in the dark.

But often the best leads can't be touched or seen--

a ping, a digital echo.

The days of solving crimes in the pages of an old case file

are behind us.

And now everything depends on the data left behind.

Sometimes it's the only voice a victim has left.

- When I started out my business, I was young.

I was painting a home, and I needed help.

Carlo told me that a couple of years before,

he had come to Paso Robles from Mexico.

He got married and became a citizen.

And now Carlo was working in the vineyards,

and he was unhappy.

So from there on out, he worked for me,

and I trained him to be a painter.

He was a really good worker, eager to learn.

- He just had a nice, mellow demeanor.

There was times there

where Carlo and I worked solely together

for a long period where we were doing a lot of remodels

for a builder here locally.

He was just always a good guy.

- He'd be there from sunup to sundown.

And we developed a relationship.

We would golf.

He spent time with my in-laws.

He spent time with my family.

- We did criminal histories.

He had none.

- We found out that

his marriage was maybe a little troubled

but nothing that really provided any red flags.

But we have the geofence putting him

on the property for two hours.

What is Carlo Fuentes doing out there

at 1:30 in the morning when Nancy goes missing?

- We followed him, trying to get a DNA sample.

Him and his wife had lunch, and he left a bottle of Coke.

We got his DNA from the Coke bottle.

The bloody handprint on the pillow on Nancy's bed

had male DNA.

They were able to determine that it was most likely

Carlo Fuentes' DNA.

[suspenseful music]

♪

- Finding the smoking gun is one thing.

Finding the hand that fired it, that's the hard part.

The clue leads you to a name, a face,

a life that doesn't fit.

And that's when you know the weapon is still out there,

waiting for its true master to be unmasked.

- We have the DNA.

We have the geofence.

But if that's all you have,

is that proof beyond a reasonable doubt

that a homicide occurred?

We don't have a body.

We have no idea what occurred.

Maybe she's in a basement somewhere.

What we know is that he's a suspect.

Let's talk to him as a suspect.

- Yeah.

- In an interview like this,

you have to build a lot of rapport.

- Nobody's gonna tell you anything

if they don't like you.

- We just started collecting information from him.

We spent an hour just talking.

- We brought up Nancy a little bit.

- And then when we felt like it was the right time,

we asked him...

♪

[suspenseful music]

- Carlo presumably knows what happened and where Nancy is.

So they have to figure out an approach to get him to talk.

♪

- He smothered her with the pillow,

rolls her up in blankets, carries her out to his truck.

- The Carrizo Plains has a lot of animal activity.

There's wild pigs,

there's coyotes, birds, turkey buzzards.

- It took a while, but finally I see these rocks

on the side of this hill.

And I see some bones.

And I look up and see her skull.

She's there.

[pensive music]

♪

- Because the dental was still there,

we were able to confirm that it was Nancy.

- Although it didn't bring Nancy back,

at least the family, they know what happened.

♪

- It was closure, and it was sadness.

Because I think there's a little piece of you

that always hopes that they're somewhere,

that they're gonna come walking in the door.

Sorry.

I'm just thinking about what she had to endure

and why someone would do that to her.

- The confession, it's overwhelming evidence

of his guilt.

- Mr. Fuentes Flores was charged

with first-degree murder committed during a rape.

- Carlo wanted to plead guilty from the get-go.

He did not want to put his family through a trial.

And one thing that has always surprised me

is that he did this with no criminal history.

[soft music]

- That evening, her daughter told me this,

that Nancy had called her and said the bridal party,

they arrived, they got their goodie bags.

Everything is in control.

I'm gonna make it an early night,

and I'll see you tomorrow.

And how quick her whole life changed,

and how quick the family's life changed

because they'll be forever scarred by this.

I would hope that this case will spare this

from happening again.

- She was part of the community.

She had touched a lot of people.

She's got her son, her daughter, her grandkids

that'll keep her memory alive.

- I think about her a lot.

I will always remember Nancy's giving spirit.

She was just-- she was light and love.

♪

- Many of us imagine crossing that line

and how we'd get away with it.

Most quickly dismiss the idea, but there are those who don't.

They slip into double lives.

And the thing about a double life,

as the characters in my books know all too well,

is that secrets and lies don't stay buried for long.

And by the time they surface, it's too late.

Guilt is torture forever.

But so is grief.

Just ask the families.

I'm Harlan Coben.

Good night.

[dramatic music]

♪

[suspenseful music]

♪