Original subtitles

A citizen was driving on Elm and Highway 2,

where he saw smoke coming from the house.

Local fire department responded in their engine.

They arrived on scene.

The house is fully ablaze.

They kicked the door in.

A firefighter entered the living room,

and, through the heavy smoke, crawled on the living room

floor, looking for people in the house.

As he got to the hallway between the bedrooms,

he bumped into something.

He went to throw the blanket off so he could see.

It was clear from what he saw there

that something heinous had happened.

And he came out to me and took me aside and said,

"It looks really weird in there."

Yeah, it was a gruesome scene.

February 28th of 2008,

I was the lead detective working for the Spokane County

Sheriff's Department at that time, I got a call at home

about 5:30 in the morning, calling me out to an incident

that happened on Elm Street.

It was completely unusual, so I wasn't really entirely sure

what to expect.

This was my, probably, fifth month as a homicide detective.

I was really new,

so it was daunting.

When I first got there, the house was smoking still.

There was firemen coming in and out.

I went in through the front door.

There was just a haze through the house,

which kind of gave it a little bit of a haunted house effect.

Once I got in there, the whole scene, the way it was

laid out, I said, "Yeah, I don't care who you are."

It's something that you don't forget.

All of the pictures had been removed from the wall

and purposely placed face down on top of the couch, which led

us to believe that it might be some ritualistic thing.

There was blood everywhere in the hallway,

bloodstains all over the wall.

It was impossible to get into the hallway without stepping in

some form of blood pool.

Once I came around the corner,

I saw the body of a male there,

partially covered still with a blanket,

with a big huge sword sticking out of him.

I have seen cases of knives and swords even,

but I don't know that I've ever seen

a broadsword like that-- it was--

it was a pretty big piece of work.

He was laying on top of a guitar in the hallway.

He was covered in blood, the blood was all dried out

from the fire.

Clearly visible to me at the time, was a huge incised

wound to the side of the head right here, and a huge incised

wound right to the side of the neck.

I wasn't sure the sword was the murder weapon, but it was

clearly some kind of sharp implement like a knife.

Just past the body of the male is an open doorway with

the door standing open into a small bedroom.

And literally shoved between the bed and the nightstand

table is the body of a young female.

She had been stabbed repeatedly many, many, many times...

...a minimum number of 26.

She was on the floor, kind of like she was on her knees,

leaning forward with her head towards the wall.

And it looked like there was a samurai sword stuck

completely through her neck.

But it turns out, it's actually just propped in there.

Whoever put it there tried several times

to make it stick out of her neck.

It was disturbing that somebody would brutalize them so badly.

But part of me thought it was just, uh, "Look at me.

"Look what I did.

Look what I can do."

It just seemed violent and unnecessary and excessive

and just plain mean,

and I felt really bad for her.

Who might have been capable of committing such a crime?

It seemed, at once, both personal

and that they knew them, and totally antisocial.

They knew them, but they just didn't give a [bleep], so...

I had become fairly proficient at compartmentalizing.

I don't connect myself to what happened there

because I wouldn't be able to do my job.

People don't call the police because they want them to come

and cry with them-- that's not why I'm there.

I've got a job to do.

Number one, try to do an identification of the bodies,

because we didn't know who they were.

The nature of the posing, the nature of the injuries just

seemed to have a bizarre feel to them.

I've had training on ritualistic killings before,

and some of the things that you saw in this scene were

similar to what they teach us.

Just actions for action's sake, no--

no purpose behind them other than to just gratify the doer.

The supervisor of the forensic unit came out and said,

"Boy, we have gold." I said, "Oh, do tell."

She said, "There is a bloody fingerprint on the inside of

the back door."

I said, "I want to find whose print that is."

That leads me to a suspect. That is what we call a clue.

We're just gonna take the whole door down to

the forensic unit for fingerprint processing to swab

the blood samples and all of that stuff that we needed to do

to process that door.

We're gonna do it right away.

So as we finished examining the scene in the house,

the homeowner showed up, Laurie.

She's standing out in front of the house that's clearly burnt.

She was clearly upset.

So I ran up, and I think my daughter was there.

And we ran up to the line.

It was creepy. It was eerie.

There was cops everywhere.

One of the detectives came over

and asked to talk to my mom.

It was just so weird.

Like, it was such a weird thing to hear.

He said, "Did you have any weapons in the house?"

"Do you own any...

knives and swords?"

I go, "Why?"

He said, "Well, we just need to know."

I go, "Well, yeah.

"My other son kind of collects them.

He's got a display on his wall." And he goes, "OK."

And they left.

And then we're sitting there just freaking out.

Why would they ask me that?

My phone rang early in the morning, and I believe it

was my son-in-law, Ian, and said, "The house is on

fire on Elm Street-- you need to come now."

My daughter, Katie, she goes, "Mom,

"there's someone in there.

There's a deceased person inside."

And of course, we were counting people down that we knew could

have been there, but they were OK.

We knew from talking to Laurie

that Laurie lived in the house, it was her house.

Her son, Tanner, lived there, as well.

There was a lady who lived downstairs who was

the approximate age of the woman who was

in the bedroom.

I got a call from an unknown number, I believe, and it was

the police to make sure that I was alive,

which was weird.

I asked if someone had died, and they said there

was somebody.

Well, I only knew it could be one person,

my youngest son, Tanner.

I'm standing, like, five feet behind my mom,

and she just collapsed into a pile on the ground.

It was really hard to watch, you know?

I remember just, like,

like embracing, and I felt like I kind of held her up at

the beginning and just, like...

Not... not Tanner, not Tanner,

not Tanner.

I could not make sense of it.

That shift from harmony and happiness to horror was

such a dramatic...

I couldn't register it.

When they were asking us, "Did he have any enemies?"

We were like, "He doesn't have an enemy."

Trying to even fathom that somehow

he was in that house dead,

and we didn't even know who could be mad at him.

Then they finally told us there was a female too,

And they eventually came out and said, "She has

dark black hair, short hair."

We had no idea who that other person was.

So I'm racking my brain.

It was just a lot of questions and a lot of fear.

Well, I couldn't imagine who else would be in the house.

Who else could there be?

Spokane is located in the eastern part

of the state of Washington.

Spokane City is the largest metropolitan area

really on this side of the state,

this side of the Cascade Mountains.

It's pretty,

but we have our fair share of,

uh, serial killers, so we've had lots of those over time.

Green River Killer in Seattle,

Yates here,

and several others.

So, it's beautiful,

and we have serial killers.

One thing we do often that I don't necessarily

agree with is we tell people, "Hey, we had this murder,

and there's nothing for anybody to be concerned about."

Somebody was murdered. We don't know who did it.

They're walking around the community just like

everybody else.

Maybe they had a reason to kill this person.

Maybe they didn't.

Maybe they have a reason to kill you.

The part of the whole experience that was the worst

for me, was the police officer saying, nonchalantly, mind you,

"You're gonna have people coming in here, like, knowing

"it's a murder scene, like, kids, and they're gonna rummage

"through stuff and be like, uh, cool.

"You better board the house up and take anything

"out of there that you want,

"and here's a card

for the cleanup crew," because they don't clean

anything in the house.

The violence that was there is untouched.

It's a Halloween murder show scene in there.

So we came back to the crime scene as it was getting dark.

There was no power in the house.

I saw it go from

my mom's house

to the scariest place in the whole world.

I remember just, like, having light kind of flash over

certain areas and just being like, oh my gosh.

I mean, there was blood everywhere.

I remember standing where Tanner died, looking at

the huge pile of blood that was there.

And the streaks on the wall, I kept thinking to myself,

this is like something from "Halloween."

It was dark. It was horrible.

It was one of the worst experiences of my whole life.

We went down into that basement, but now it was

pitch black, and I heard a sound.

It was like a donk, doink, doink.

And I couldn't tell what it was.

And I'm looking around with my flashlight.

And I go back to this little nook,

and my mother's exercise ball was on the ground, and it was

right below where Tanner had been murdered.

His blood had saturated all the levels of the floor

and were coming down, and they were dripping from the ceiling,

and they were hitting that ball

like candle wax.

It's just...

...surreal.

And the whole house smelled burnt like a campfire.

And four years after that,

I couldn't camp,

because I couldn't smell that smell

of a campfire for four years,

you know.

Tanner was our youngest child.

He was just a great son.

There's a lot of memories of Tanner.

The road...

- Road, yes, on the road. He's steering right now.

We were coming out of my parents' driveway

where I was raised out in the country, and he always

wanted to get on my lap when we would drive that

big Suburban.

Put your hand down. See the road?

You gotta just hold it still, go straight ahead.

And I said, "OK, Tanner," he was only, like,

two and a half or something.

Hands! Watch the road! Yeah, watch that road.

The funniest part was how the brothers and sisters were

reacting in the back seat,

- Drive us on the bridge.

Katie especially, she was just kind of freaking out, you know.

Little bit of concern there from our girl.

Priceless, watching that every time.

The first part of figuring out who killed somebody

is figuring out who they killed.

We still had no idea who the young girl was.

When we searched the bedroom near the body of the female,

we found a credit card with a name on it.

for a lady who was roughly the same physical makeup

as the girl who was deceased.

I wanted to know if she was the unidentified victim.

I also could tell that whoever committed both crimes had more

violent tendencies to the female.

The female had been stabbed way more, so I thought they would

probably be more closely associated

with the female than the male.

So we had a name of somebody,

and we started following that up.

That's a lead.

Laurie wasn't able to give us any information

on who the female might be,

and she didn't know the person whose card was on the table.

She'd never heard of that lady either.

In the process of trying to find the lady whose name was on

the card, we ended up calling some numbers and spoke to a guy

who identified himself as her husband.

The detective just wanted to know where she might be

and how they might get ahold of her.

And he was less than cooperative with any of

that information.

He said that he was a long-haul trucker,

and he was driving across the state,

and they'd been having some marital issues.

He wouldn't confirm any information about her.

And then he hung up on the investigators.

That was weird.

But later, the lady,

she actually called us.

She was fine.

I guess she heard from her husband

we were looking for her.

She didn't know anybody at the house.

She has no idea how her card ended up there.

So we could rule her out as the decedent and consequently

her husband out as the suspect.

As to who this girl was, just from physical

appearance alone,

she was quite disfigured so it's hard to say for sure.

She didn't have fingerprints on file, so we couldn't identify

her with fingerprints, which is generally how we do it.

We needed to find out who this person was pretty quickly.

It was clear from what we saw that that person was likely

gonna re-offend.

I did have to question, is this a serial killer?

Is this somebody that I need to be afraid of?

Is he still out?

Is he going to come after me because I didn't come home,

or come after Laurie,

because we were the survivors?

If you have any information on this case, the Sheriff's Office

is asking that you call the tip line.

That number, of course, 242...

At the time, we were so overwhelmed with losing our son

to such a horrific thing

that I don't know if we even thought about

what the community was thinking.

I'm sure the community in that Spokane area was really wanting

to know, because it must have been one of the worst murders

in a long time.

We received information that

Tanner had an ex-girlfriend that had been

making statements that she wanted to hurt him.

Tanner had this girl in his life that he was really

close with at that time in his life.

It was very clear that she had a lot of feelings for him.

I know it wasn't reciprocated, because he told me himself.

It would have been consistent with what we saw that if it

were a crime of passion, that she could have done it.

We knew that they had known each other.

We knew she had access to the place,

and she'd made threats.

So it fit a lot of the different aspects

of the case.

If I had to pick one person, just something toxic,

like if I can't have you, no one can, you know, one of those

scenarios, she'd fit the bill.

Yes, I completely was able to see that scenario.

We wanted to find Tanner Pehl's ex-girlfriend

and talk to her and figure out where she was,

and try to alibi her out, or include her as a suspect.

On February 26th, I came home.

Tanner that evening had brought a couple of his friends over,

and I didn't know any of them, and it was just like Tanner to

bring new people in.

I think this gentleman had only been in town for a week or so.

He was working at the same restaurant that Tanner was

working at-- Tanner introduced him as Justin.

It was two nights before the murders,

and he walked in and said, "Mom,

I met a guy at work who moved out from Las Vegas,"

and he said,

"I'd kind of like to help him make some friends,"

and I felt OK about it, because I couldn't imagine--

I've never met one of his friends that

I just didn't fall in love with, that didn't end up

calling me "Mama Laurie."

And so I did give the police

Justin's name very early on.

And that's only because I didn't know him well enough,

because everyone else Tanner had brought around,

we had seen several times.

So he ended up calling us and saying, "Hey, I'm here.

You guys want to talk to me?"

So they drove right up there to talk to him.

Sarah was just lovely and kind.

She was kind of in the background.

She wasn't really a part of a lot of the discussions,

because she didn't know everybody.

I also understood her relationship with Justin to

be just very casually dating.

I didn't have any impression that there was anything serious

or anything like that happening.

I was interested in finding her because I wanted to know if

that was her, to see if she was the unidentified victim.

Well, it could be. It might not be.

But at a bare minimum, that person

has some questions to answer.

I thought perhaps, if that's who that was,

that the person who did the murder

might be more associated with her than with Tanner.

We found the car in Camelot, which is a little housing

development north on the Newport Highway,

a couple of miles away,

and they found blood on the inside.

So we were comfortable, once we saw that,

this is definitely who it is,

and the medical examiner determined

that it was Sarah Clark.

If people could know

just the travail that's going on in my house right now,

it's just uncomprehendable.

She was beautiful.

She had a beautiful smile

with these huge dimples.

We loved her so much.

It was horrible.

Felt so sad for Sarah's family.

Sarah's car was found in Camelot,

where the Camelot Park is.

Justin Crenshaw lived with his sister in that same

housing development,

five, six blocks away or so, I would guess.

The point is to find out who has the opportunity,

what does the evidence tell you, where does it lead you,

and go that way.

At that point, we were able to rule out Tanner Pehl's

ex-girlfriend, because she had nothing to do with it.

There was no evidence that pointed to her there,

which left us with Justin Crenshaw.

So I sent a couple of detectives up to talk to him.

They made contact with Justin.

Then the detectives talked to the sister.

She was concerned because he didn't seem very concerned

at all about what might have happened at the house.

It just seemed odd to her.

And she knew he had violent tendencies, and she knew

he'd been in trouble with the police before.

She was concerned that he might

have had something to do with it.

Tanner had said, "I know he's been in some kind of trouble

before," but you know, he was just a kid that

looked like Tanner.

You know, you just think, he might not be a great kid.

But when I went to sleep, I'll never forget it.

I had a bad feeling, no doubt about it.

I'm racking my brain trying to figure out,

should there have been a red flag?

Is there something that I missed?

I definitely went back to that evening and thought about all

the different conversations and all the different dynamics

and things that I maybe blew off that I didn't--

I should have given more thought to.

Like when Justin was telling me about his gunshot wound, or that

he was not gonna take any of his organs with him when

he died, just some of those weird, weird things.

Running his history, you could see that he'd been

arrested in Las Vegas.

He had stabbed a guy or cut a guy or something when

he was younger.

So we contacted Las Vegas.

As it turns out, he had prints on file, and they, in fact,

did fax a set of prints up to us.

But they did not compare to the one we had on the back door.

We knew he had a pair of black shoes.

Justin's family all described that he was wearing black shoes

when he left-- he had a pair of black Nikes.

But he said, "I don't have any black Nikes."

And also, while they were talking to Justin,

they saw a small injury here, a cut on the back

of the finger,

and a cut on the back of the palm here.

Almost every brutal, violent stabbing that

I've investigated,

that knife becomes covered in blood, and blood is very

viscous and very slippery.

So it isn't unusual for them, as they stab, to start to slip

off the knife and cut themselves.

The problem was,

his fingerprints weren't quite clear enough on the fax to

make a direct comparison with.

So then we thought, OK, we need to get

the prints from him.

So we decided that we would detain him and take him

downtown, get a set of prints, do a search warrant

for his DNA, his clothes,

fingernail clippings,

photographs, all of that stuff.

And then we would have a good fingerprint to compare to

the print on the inside of the door.

So that's what we did.

While we were waiting, he needed to go to the bathroom,

and then he washed his hands like his life depended on it...

...twice, which I don't mind a guy--

I think it's appropriate to wash your hands after you go to

the bathroom, but that was really serious.

He was washing his hands like he was going into surgery.

Once we got the processing done, it was a matter of just

waiting for the results.

We thought that Crenshaw was the killer, but he might not

have been, and if he wasn't,

that person was likely gonna re-offend.

We got the results back from the forensic unit supervisor.

And she said, that bloody fingerprint is...

...is Justin's left little finger.

Yeah, there it is. That's what I'm looking for.

I told him, "You're under arrest for the first-degree murder of

Tanner Pehl and Sarah Clark."

I found it powerful to use their names.

He was the scariest guy I've ever been in a room with,

and I've known lots of psychopaths.

He was matter-of-fact, and I had seen what

he had done, so it was a relief to be able

to tell him he was under arrest.

The truth is, though, that when we got the fingerprint match,

what we got was enough to arrest him for it.

That's when the work starts.

The deputy found a knife out on the road,

maybe a mile away.

It was right between where the murders occurred and where

he ended up in Camelot.

And it had blood on it, and it was

believed to actually be the murder weapon,

which was pretty remarkable.

Which turned out to be Tanner's favorite chef knife.

We also sent a couple of guys up to go through

his aunt's house,

looking for where the black Nike shoes were,

which we found.

He said, "I don't have any black Nikes,"

because it turns out...

they were covered in blood.

That is...

pretty much the gotcha moment.

Good evening, he's been in Spokane for just two weeks.

But tonight, Justin Crenshaw is in jail, accused of killing

two people in North Spokane.

Both victims had apparently been killed with

a cutting instrument.

Justin Crenshaw had little to no response as the judge read

the graphic details of the accusations against him.

The judge gave Crenshaw four chances to speak.

- He declined. - No thank you.

I don't want to take anything away from any of the families.

While we don't know exactly what happened,

it appears that Justin Crenshaw

was alone in the bedroom with Sarah Clark,

and some argument broke out in there.

Justin accessed Tanner's favorite chef knife,

and began stabbing Sarah there.

Tanner, who was most likely playing guitar,

heard the commotion and came to the bedroom to assist,

at which point...

he was attacked by Justin Crenshaw,

who stabbed him several times, killing him right there.

And then he went back

to finish killing Sarah Clark,

then spent lots of time in the house, putting

the pictures down,

taking items that he found in the house

and stabbing their bodies with it,

doing things that made no sense except just to be...

...brutal.

And just to enjoy himself simply for gratification,

and trying to burn the house down, because he knew there was

lots of evidence that pointed to him there.

When I talked to him about what I had seen him do, he was as

casual as talking about football.

He basically cut the head off his girlfriend and killed

his best friend and then stuck stuff in him for no reason

other than to be cruel and didn't give a [bleep].

He will kill you and not even care.

Part of me was absolutely shocked

when I learned it was him,

because he didn't give off killer vibes, I guess.

But one of the things that the police told me very quickly

is that because Justin was

so violent and so evil, and there just wasn't

a reason for what he did that they could establish,

that it was very good that I didn't go home that night,

because I very likely would have been killed, as well.

We didn't see him officially until the trial.

Being in that courtroom with him, and you're so close,

I hated seeing him.

He was smirking a lot, like,

often those kind of people do,

and I just kept looking at his hands on the stand.

And I just kept thinking, those hands were here.

I just couldn't stop looking at 'em.

And I just think, man, those hands took that

life away.

As we were leaving one day,

and we had to walk down the same court hallway

as Crenshaw,

he darted towards me, and got this close to my face

and did, like, the wink-wink and [kissing noise] to my face.

He goes [clicks tongue], .

Like-- he, like-- they, like, took him to the ground.

Mind you I was...

like 5 months pregnant with my son,

so I couldn't do anything to...

the trial was awful,

and I ended up running into the men's bathroom

and just puking.

Justin Crenshaw was convicted of first-degree premeditated,

aggravated murder of Sarah Clark and Tanner Pehl,

and his only available sentence, since we don't really

use the death penalty here in Washington anymore, is

life without the possibility of parole.

So he's incarcerated until he dies.

A year after it happened,

I moved back to my house, and nobody wanted me to,

but I wanted to be close to him.

I want him to be here.

I want to talk to him every day.

Everybody has their way of remembering, and I think how

they want him to be remembered is, and me too, is the only way

he can be, as beautiful.

Mom, I love you so much.

Have a wonderful day.