Original subtitles

[dramatic music playing]

[ticking]

[plinking]

[ticking continues]

[phone ringing]

[phone continues ringing]

[ringing continues]

-[plinking continues] -[ticking continues]

[Christy Sanger] I moved to Rockford, Illinois

in the beginning of October of 1994,

and it was a wonderful place

to live for a short period of time.

I had a great job,

I met great people,

and that was when I first met Barbara.

[Corina Curry] Barbara Purcell was an occupational therapist,

that was her profession,

and that kind of carried over

into her personality.

She just had

a very caring personality.

She was a very kind person.

[Sheldon Bird] Barbara is my younger sister.

In our family, uh,

Barbara was always called Lorrie.

My first memory of Lorrie,

I was looking at her in a crib,

the sun was shining down on her,

and she had this red curly hair,

and, even at that age,

I, I just looked at her and I thought,

"My God, she looks like an angel!" [chuckles]

She was just a smart girl.

And she was also very strong.

We were very proud of her

for what she had accomplished in her life.

[Christy] Barbara and I worked together

at Rockford Memorial Hospital.

The thing that I remember most clearly about Barbara,

before I had really became friendly with her,

is her walking down the hospital hallways in her white coat.

She had beautiful long red hair,

and she was always looking down,

she was always lost in her thoughts.

Uh, she was a very, very private person.

She appeared to have an extremely hard

protective shell covering her.

But when I broke through that outer shell,

I discovered that she was the most

loving, caring, sensitive person

probably that I had ever met.

[gentle music playing]

Before she started her career as an occupational therapist,

Barbara was a waitress in a restaurant

in Oklahoma when she met Willard.

My understanding was that Willard travelled around fixing printing presses.

But he frequently visited the restaurant where Lorrie was a waitress

and eventually they became a couple,

got married and moved to Rockford.

Willard and Barbara had been married for several years.

He had a good job. Um, Willard worked for a long time

in another community for a manufacturing company.

He was quiet. Willard was always very polite.

And he would answer your question,

but he was always on the outskirts,

just in his own world, in his own thoughts, separate.

But seeing them together,

there were things that I could understand

that had brought them together.

In many ways they were very similar.

They were both very private. They were both very protective.

They both loved nature and their outdoor space

and being in their home, away from other people.

[suspenseful music playing]

[medical equipment beeping]

My memory of June 6th, 2001,

it was a very sad day.

Barbara had not shown up for work,

which was not her personality at all.

If, for some reason, she could not fulfill an obligation,

she let you know.

At that point, I knew that there was

something wrong.

[phone ringing]

-[car door closing] -[phone continues ringing]

[indistinct radio chatter]

-[doorbell rings] -[phone ringing]

[doorbell rings]

[phone ringing]

[indistinct radio chatter continues]

[phone ringing]

I was a sergeant

with the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office

and Supervisor in the Detective Bureau.

Initially our deputies were dispatched to the house

for what we call a welfare check.

It was in rural Winnebago County

and it's a ranch-style home.

From the front, it looks like a single level,

but as you go around to the back,

it's an exposed basement,

so it looks like a two-story home

and in front of the house, it looked fairly normal.

There was no telltale signs

that there was any problems inside.

There was a storm door on the outside.

You could see that the inner door

to the home wasn't shut completely.

[indistinct radio chatter continues]

[phone ringing]

[Det. Kurt Ditzler] They discovered a white female who was deceased.

Part of her body was in the landing area in the basement,

and her legs were kinda up the stairway

towards the main level of the home.

Rocco Wagner, I was the lead detective

assigned to the case.

When I arrived, I could see that

she had, uh, blood on the back of her head,

so some type of, uh, blunt force trauma.

And there was blood spatter on the walls and the stairs.

My name is Margie O'Connor

and I was the lead prosecutor on the case.

Her injuries to her head were consistent

with an object such as a flashlight,

and then they found a flashlight in the home

that actually had her DNA on it.

[Det. Ditzler] It seemed to be a pretty violent scene.

It was a finished basement,

carpeted, the walls were finished.

They had it set up as an office area.

There was a broken window.

And there was a display case

coffee table with a glass top and some drawers in it,

and the drawers were pulled out and they were empty,

so it looked like maybe something had been taken.

It also appeared that she could have been the victim of a sexual assault

because her undergarments were removed

and her dress was pulled up.

There appeared to have been a struggle.

The type of force that was evident showed how violent it was

and how she fought for her life.

[radio chatter continues]

Dad called me up and he said that Lorrie was murdered.

And I just remember saying,

"Why not me?"

And he said that he had said the same thing

when he was told.

I think either one of us would have just traded places,

no problem.

[Christy] I received the call on that day

from another mutual friend, with details

that Barbara had been found

dead at the bottom of the stairs

in their basement.

And words cannot describe...

how I felt.

I felt sadness,

I felt anger.

I felt a lot of anger.

How could this happen to such a great person?

So, at any homicide scene, you do a search of the house

and then you do a grid search,

meaning sections, so you cover everything

on the property where the crime was committed,

adjacent properties, possible escape routes.

And during that grid search we found tire tracks...

about 75 yards in a wooded area west of the house.

[Det. Ditzler] When we found the tire tracks, they were able to do

what's called the plaster cast,

where plaster is put into the impression

and then it's allowed to harden

and then it's pulled up and sent to the crime lab.

After that, we started doing a neighborhood check, neighborhood canvas,

just to see if we could find out from neighbors

if they knew anything, saw anything suspicious,

or anything that might aid us in our investigation.

So, of course, you look at the spouse first in something like this,

and you wanna eliminate that person or put him into it.

So we attempted to locate him at his brother's house, couldn't find him,

at work, couldn't find him.

We put an attempt-to-locate out on him to the squads.

But we kept an open mind and checked other things.

We checked any sex offenders released recently in the area.

We checked area burglaries,

suspicious vehicle stops, car stops, things like that.

But something was off with it.

As far as, uh, physical evidence at the scene,

and the pieces there just didn't fit together.

Something just didn't make sense.

[eerie music playing]

[clock ticking]

[keys jingling]

[exhales]

[phone ringing]

We presume that Barbara was murdered

after she got home from work

the night before she was found dead.

We think someone was in the house, in the kitchen,

and when she walked in, he came up behind her

and hit her the first time near the top of the stairs.

[screaming]

Then two more times as she was falling down the stairs.

[Det. Ditzler] We had a blood-spatter expert

on the Rockford Police Department.

He could tell from looking at the different spatter patterns

that, uh, it appeared to be a minimum of

three different

actions of striking.

So we were pretty confident then that we had a pretty violent confrontation

that took place in the stairway.

We interviewed the housekeeper and she said that

some of Barbara's jewelry was missing

and the wedding ring was gone.

There was also some coins missing from the basement den.

They were in a glass coffee table, which was in disarray.

So the way the, the homicide scene laid out,

it appeared that a burglary had occurred

as well as a sexual assault

but it-- Generally, you don't do both.

It's, it's, a burglar is in the house to steal things,

somebody comes in, they run.

They don't confront the person and then turn into a rapist.

It just didn't make sense.

She was on the bottom of the stairs,

face down, head down,

with her garments pulled down,

that's not a position for a sexual assault to occur.

And I could see the glass on the outer door

wasn't broken in as a burglary would happen.

[Det. Ditzler] Broken glass was between the threshold

of the storm door and the exterior door to the house.

If it would have been somebody breaking in

using something to break the window to get in the house,

the glass would've gone to the inside of the house,

on the inside of the door.

Where that vehicle was that left the tire tracks,

it would be hidden from any neighbors and hidden from any traffic.

A person hides their vehicle if it's premeditated and planned.

So we had a homicide there and...

it was staged to look like something else, I thought.

We still had custody of the house,

and we wanted to take the computer,

and that was in the basement where she was found dead,

and, in going to unhook the computer,

there was a wire going up to the drop ceiling,

so I got up, moved the drop ceiling...

And up in the drop ceiling,

I found some pornographic magazines,

pornographic, uh, tapes and her life insurance policy,

hidden away with porn.

I, I can't imagine anything odder than that.

And in the insurance policy, her husband, Willard Purcell,

was listed as the beneficiary of it.

[indistinct radio chatter]

[Det. Ditzler] We had a reason to at least speak

with her husband, Willard,

and a deputy had been driving on the east side of Rockford

and just so happened to see Willard Purcell right in front of him

and made a traffic stop, and when he did that,

we asked him to detain him

and bring him to the police station.

He was kind of standoffish right from the beginning.

I think he made some comment about,

"What is she saying about me now?" or something like that.

[Det. Rocco Wagner] So myself and Detective Reno interviewed Mr. Purcell,

and in the interview room, we first went over his activities, where he was,

backtracking the days and particularly that day.

Willard told our detectives that he had been working,

uh, in Naperville, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago

about 90 miles east of Rockford,

and that he worked until later in the day that day,

and when he came home, he went to his brother's house where he was staying.

[Det. Wagner] He was very flippant, really didn't care

what happened, what we were there for.

And he said something like,

"What did she say that I did this time?"

And we finally told him his wife was dead

and, uh, that we thought that he was involved.

He became a little more,

I think, concerned about maybe what kind of trouble he could be in

and that he was gonna look like a suspect.

And he kinda ended the interview

with the detectives by asking for an attorney.

So we talked to some of Barbara's coworkers

and she had some close friends she confided in them that,

that there were some marital problems.

[Christy] I had never seen any signs from Willard

to suggest that he was capable

of something this awful.

But I feel as if they had reached a point in their relationship

that there is almost a block between the two of them.

Some sort of barricade.

You knew that they were together,

but there wasn't any emotion,

there wasn't any hand holding,

there wasn't any hugging,

and there wasn't much eye contact.

But I remember them being comfortable together

with a barrier between the two.

And then Barbara started her additional hand therapy training,

1999 into 2000.

So she started travelling out of town to take her classes

and having to stay overnight

and she was spending more time than usual away from home.

I think that was the beginning of the real downhill

and Willard didn't trust her being away for so long.

[Corina] Police had learned the relationship was very volatile

in the months leading up to her death.

They were fighting

and they were splitting up,

and we learned,

in one of their fights, that they were fighting over

Barbara getting her own cell phone

and Willard just being very upset,

you know, demanding to know,

"Why do you have a cell phone?"

[Det. Ditzler] We found out that they were sleeping in separate bedrooms.

Willard would get a phone call on his cell phone,

he would go outside in the yard,

talk on the phone and then come back in.

But then she would get phone calls

and she would leave the house and she'd be out in the yard

talking on her phone.

They were, I think, suspicious

of one another of having affairs.

[Det. Wagner] We did a phone study on her home phone

and one thing was a number called to her house...

[phone ringing]

...I think two times the night of the murder

and then several times going back a couple of days,

and that phone number was not registered to her husband, Willard.

[phone ringing]

We felt it could be

a person trying to set her up, see if she was home or not.

[phone ringing]

[Det. Ditzler] It would be a strange coincidence

that these phone calls were made

at about the same time Barbara was being attacked.

So that drew our suspicion.

I don't believe in coincidences.

[phone ringing]

[continues ringing]

[phone ringing]

[phone ringing]

[Det. Ditzler] The night the murder occurred

there was a series of two or three phone calls

made to Barbara Purcell,

kind of a short period of time,

but close to one another

from the same origin phone,

so we tracked that back to a guy named Willie Brown.

[Det. Wagner] We did a background check on him.

He had no arrests. He was not wanted on any warrants.

And there was no connection to Barbara Purcell.

We didn't know why he was calling her.

But his phone is calling her phone

several times, six, seven times,

leading up to the time of the murder.

We picked him up, brought him to the station for an interview.

[dramatic music playing]

And his phone is calling her phone

several times, six, seven times,

leading up to the time of the murder.

But Willie Brown just, uh, said

he didn't know Barbara,

he never called her,

had no reason to call her.

And we showed him the records,

he verified that was his phone,

and he said if it's coming from his phone,

it must be a wrong number. But it's hard to buy

since he did it six, seven, eight times,

kept calling the same number.

[phone ringing]

And this was going on and on, this interview,

him saying he had no idea what it was,

us saying, "It's here on paper.

You have to explain this somehow."

He was racking his brain.

And it took a while, but then he finally remembered

he was calling some type of ad in the paper.

And we got the newspaper and we saw the number.

He had inverted the last two numbers,

which explained the whole thing.

So that was a very unfortunate coincidence for Mr. Brown.

We felt bad about it, but we had to get the answers.

[Margie O'Connor] They were able to eliminate him as a suspect.

Well, I guess, when I think about that,

I think about,

did one of his calls

cause the person who murdered her to panic a little bit?

Did it cause them to make mistakes?

Because it was clear that someone had planned this.

Willie Brown was the only person on our radar besides, uh, Willard.

And then we found out that her husband, Willard,

was arrested the week before of the murder.

[Christy] Barbara was in the garage in their home.

She was leaving her house

early in the morning.

Willard jumped out from a hidden location

and tased her with a stun gun.

There was no argument,

it was a complete attack, a complete ambush.

[suspenseful music playing]

[door creaking]

-[crackling] -[screams]

[crackling]

After the incident, she got in her car

and drove to the hospital and saw a doctor to document

that, in fact, she had stun gun wounds on her neck.

Willard, as a result of that, was charged

with a domestic battery and he was taken to jail.

It probably took him a day or two to bond out,

and she got an order of protection barring him from the house.

I think, prior to stun gun incident,

it was normal tension, arguments, suspicion,

but afterwards, she was terrified of him.

[Det. Ditzler] She had told coworkers that she was afraid of him.

And then she confided in them

that she thought he might have had something

to do with his first wife's death.

Willard was married before he married Barbara

and I asked her about the first wife and what happened.

Barbara had told me

that Willard's first wife, Crystal,

had had a tragic accident

and, at the time, coming from Barbara,

I accepted it as true.

But I remember thinking, "Well, that's kinda strange.

That's not a typical way to die."

[eerie music playing]

[Corina] Willard Purcell and his first wife Crystal,

they used to live on,

in a different neighborhood,

in Rockford, on Rockford Avenue.

And she was found dead in a very similar situation as Barbara was.

The story was she was doing chores.

She was doing laundry.

[woman on TV speaking indistinctly]

-[dryer buzzes] -[thumping]

[Christy] Crystal was found dead

at the bottom of stairs in the basement.

It was ruled an accident.

And by the way that Barbara

explained the situation at the time,

I feel she accepted what she had heard as being true.

But after the incident

where Willard used the stun gun on Barbara's neck,

Barbara started to believe that he had killed Crystal.

So, in reviewing

the Rockford City report,

talking to the city detectives,

the similarities were just over the top.

Coworker had called because Crystal hadn't come in to work

and then they contacted the house.

Nicole, their daughter, was at the house,

had said she had left for work and work says she wasn't.

She started looking around the house

and she went downstairs and found

Crystal at the bottom of the stairs

laying face down just like Barbara was.

It appeared that she probably tripped down the stairs,

rolled, struck her head on a pipe that was on the floor.

[Sheldon] This type of a circumstance

simply doesn't happen twice.

Almost statistically impossible

for it to happen like that.

Like, "Oops, another one," you know?

[chuckles] Yeah, right, come on.

[Det. Ditzler] During the autopsy, uh, we observed

that she had three blunt force trauma wounds

to the back of her head, to the back right side of her head.

She also had some wounds

on her hands, the back of her hands,

that could be described, I guess, as defensive type wounds.

We were fortunate

during the autopsy that

the pathologist realized

this could be potential bite mark evidence

and properly photographed Barbara's hands.

The bleeding indicated that it happened contemporaneously

the injuries to her head.

And the bite mark also was indicative that

she was trying to defend herself

because it was on the back of her hand

and somehow someone was able to bite her hand while trying to attack her.

We consulted with an odontologist,

who is a dentist who studies bite mark impressions.

Ultimately, they wanted us to get impressions

of Willard Purcell's teeth,

and so we had to seek a court order to do that.

[Det. Ditzler] Willard said he was at work,

but we did a phone study on his cell phone

and we found that, that was hitting a tower

near Naperville where his work was earlier in the day,

but later in the day, when he said he was still at work,

his cell phone was hitting towers in the Rockford area.

Once we knew he was in the Rockford area,

we did a search warrant on his pickup truck,

and we sent the plaster casts of the tire tracks to the crime lab,

along with the tires from Willard's truck.

And the technician at the crime lab was able to determine

that a tire of the same make and model

as those on Willard's truck made the tire impressions.

[Margie] Her wedding ring was missing

and there was a coin collection missing.

So the police searched Willard Purcell's truck

after they got a search warrant

and they found in his truck a garbage bag

that contained jewelry and the coin collection,

and they literally found Barbara Purcell's wedding ring.

We asked him about that during an interview

and he said she'd packed a bunch of stuff for him

when she got the order of protection,

and that bag of stuff was amongst the items

that she'd packed for him and gave to him.

[Det. Wagner] We also obtained a search warrant

for impressions of Willard's teeth,

transported him to the dentist,

and we got those impressions.

When the impressions came back, the forensic odontologist

confirmed that the bite marks on Barbara Purcell's hands

were consistent with Willard Purcell's teeth.

When this horrific crime first occurred,

I was frightened. I was afraid.

I felt that Willard was dangerous,

and being around a dangerous person is scary.

And then I remember when he had been arrested and charged

that I was relieved in the moment.

I think it probably gave people a lot of comfort that he was gonna be charged.

And I think there was an element of

people thinking that

maybe he had gotten away with it

the first time,

and they wanted to make sure

that he didn't get away with it the second time.

[Det. Wagner] Crystal's death was very suspicious at that time,

so we brought Willard down to Rockford City

and they did another interview with him on that.

But he wouldn't talk to them.

[Margie] The situation with Crystal Purcell was too coincidental

and under the circumstances, it had deserved another look

to see if, after all the years that had passed,

if there was anything that had been missed.

So Attorney O'Connor got an order to exhume Crystal's body.

[eerie music playing]

You learn a lot about a case

before it goes to trial

and it seems like every day

there was some big argument

about whether or not key pieces of evidence could be entered or not.

And I think one of the major undertones

was that first wife's death.

[reporter] County Coroner Sue Fiduccia says

they pulled the file of Purcell's first wife

to re-examine the evidence concerning her death.

That was, what, 12, 13 years ago.

Technology has changed.

[Det. Wagner] Margie O'Connor got a order

to exhume Crystal's body,

and I was present for that autopsy.

We were hoping to find two blows,

which would rule out an accidental fall.

It was disappointing. She, of course, died of blunt force trauma,

just like Barbara, but it was one blow,

and, at that point, it's hard to say, is that from the pipe on the floor?

Is that from a pipe in your hand?

We were not able to conclusively prove

that Crystal Purcell died

in any other manner than an accident.

The judge ruled that we couldn't bring out evidence

of the death of Crystal Purcell

in the trial of Barbara Purcell.

I do believe that Willard killed Crystal.

And I only say that now

because of what happened to Barbara.

[Sheldon] In my mind, he just nearly got away with it once before.

He never paid for it the first time, so

there was nothing to deter him

from doing it again.

[Det. Ditzler] I think we had very good evidence,

and I think the evidence clearly pointed to Willard Purcell,

uh, being the person who committed the crime.

During the entire trial he showed no remorse,

showed no concern, he was sitting there

very flippant and arrogant, actually.

He thought he had the case beat the whole time.

[Corina] When Willard Purcell testified at his own trial,

it was kind of a surprise

because defendants don't always take the stand

during a trial like this.

But then his story changed.

[Det. Ditzler] On the stand, he said that

he was at the house when Barbara came home from work

and she was upset

that he was at the house.

They had a, a bit of an argument,

but she became enraged, according to him,

and she came at him with a flashlight,

uh, and started swinging it at him.

He took it from her

and he struck her with the flashlight.

He said he didn't believe that he hurt her,

but he did say he thought she was in the stairway

and she would wake up and call the police, so he left the house.

Once you say one thing and then you totally recant and you say another thing,

and then you ask people, "No, you should believe

the second thing that I told you,"

it just leaves them wondering what really is the truth.

When he changed it to self-defense,

that puts him in the house.

But with three blows to the back of the head,

it's obviously not self-defense.

He needed to make it look like a stranger

had committed this crime,

and so that's why I believe he did

as much staging as he did at the crime scene.

But we now could prove that

he was involved in a struggle with her

at the time of her death.

[Corina] It didn't really leave a good impression

on the jurors,

his demeanor from the stand

and also just the way that he told his story,

they could kind of see that he was kind of carrying this attitude with him.

It was pretty obvious that the jurors didn't,

didn't believe what he was saying.

In the end, the jury found him guilty of first degree murder

and that he had killed Barbara Purcell.

Willard was sentenced to prison for life.

And he ended up having cancer

when he was in prison

and became terminally ill.

When you grow up with, uh, brothers and sisters,

especially if you're older than they,

you, you expect them to be around your whole life.

And then, if they're not...

it's like there's a hole there

that, that can never be filled.

This was a good woman, living a good life,

and it was all suddenly taken away from her.

I believe that if Lorrie were sitting next to me right now,

whispering in my ear,

she would want people to know,

who could potentially be in her situation, to ask for help.

And to ask for help sooner

and to know that you're not being weak.

She truly...

wanted to help people

not suffer.

Heal, so that they could live

the life of their dreams.

She was such a great friend.