Rear Window

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Speaker 2 I'm Lester Holt. Tonight on Dateline, a mystery in Paradise.
A young woman murdered near the white sands of Jacksonville Beach.

Speaker 5 I would play out possibilities

Speaker 5 of what happened that night.

Speaker 5 I thought about how scared she must have been.

Speaker 6 You could tell that she had fought for her life.

Speaker 7 You could see what almost looked like handprints coming out the window, and those were in blood.

Speaker 11 People were scared. Women who lived alone were scared.
Neighbors were scared.

Speaker 4 Was your gut telling you that this was someone she knew?

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 11 Everybody became a suspect.

Speaker 8 Did you know you were obsessed with her? I was. I was obsessed.

Speaker 13 He pointed down to Corey's window and said, I watched that girl down there.

Speaker 4 Are you starting to think she could be Corey's killer?

Speaker 13 She was a person of interest, definitely.

Speaker 14 How are you feeling?

Speaker 16 I mean, this is a murder investigation.

Speaker 3 Bullied.

Speaker 6 Helpless.

Speaker 16 We had a profile.

Speaker 11 We knew this was our killer.

Speaker 17 Did everyone's jaws drop?

Speaker 11 My eyes filled up with tears.

Speaker 18 I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 2 Here's Andrea Canning with rear window.

Speaker 15 Maybe it was the hypnotic hum of night coming to life.

Speaker 15 Then again, maybe it was just the booze or the talk of some easy money.

Speaker 19 We're all just sitting there having a couple of beers, fishing, relaxing, and enjoying.

Speaker 15 Somehow, three friends kicking back on a lakeside dock found their evening sliding into the past. A brutal, unsolved murder, an investigation stalled, an old name resurrected.

Speaker 15 As they remembered, their eyes grew wide.

Speaker 17 What is your gut telling you as you're sitting on that dock?

Speaker 19 We're probably onto something.

Speaker 15 And someone who'd prefer to stay hidden. Strange how the night can shine a light into the darkest places.

Speaker 15 Like so many others, Corey Parker came to Florida for the waves and weather, but she stayed for the people, like Amy Ladden.

Speaker 18 Do you remember the first time you met Corey Parker?

Speaker 10 I do.

Speaker 15 Corey, a young 20-something, when she and Amy became fast friends.

Speaker 5 We were at Pete's bar on the beach and we were actually in the bathroom waiting in line.

Speaker 21 And what did you say to her?

Speaker 5 I think she started the conversation and just said, hey, I see you around all the time. You know, we should hang out.

Speaker 8 I said, all right.

Speaker 18 Did you two get into a lot of trouble?

Speaker 9 We didn't get caught in doing things that we probably would have.

Speaker 15 Corey was a transplant from upstate New York, towering and sweet like a sugar maple.

Speaker 22 Corey was 5'11 and she would wear heels, so she was so tall and I'm very short.

Speaker 5 So I think every time she walked into a room people looked at her and she was so beautiful.

Speaker 23 Did she kind of look like a model being 5'11?

Speaker 5 She could model. She could definitely model.

Speaker 15 Instead, she chose a humbler route, taking classes at the local college and waiting tables at Ragtime Tavern near Jacksonville Beach.

Speaker 20 Amy says that was pure pure Corey.

Speaker 14 Did she like being a waitress?

Speaker 5 She loved it because she could talk to people and she was super friendly.

Speaker 20 She was a people person. Yes.

Speaker 15 Another reason she loved Corey, both were fiercely independent. Corey, in particular, had just moved into her own apartment.

Speaker 5 This was absolutely an exciting moment for her moving into this place because she was finally being able to do it on her own.

Speaker 21 This was a big kind of independence day for her then, moving into the world.

Speaker 25 It was a really big deal, yeah.

Speaker 26 I was excited that somebody else was going to be moving in that I might be able to talk with.

Speaker 15 Ashley Berg remembers Corey's move-in day that September of 1998. Ashley, then 18, lived next door with her mom and older brother Joe.
Corey, at 25, seemed like a big sister.

Speaker 26 We would sit outside. She would do our laundry.
We'd have a little glass of wine

Speaker 26 and just talk.

Speaker 15 About work, school, and Corey's new boyfriend, a young man she'd only met three weeks earlier at one of her favorite late-night haunts, the Ritz. Ashley sensed her neighbor was falling in love.

Speaker 26 It started getting pretty close for them. I really feel like that.

Speaker 15 But there was something troubling too. Corey was feeling uneasy about her ground floor apartment.
Her bedroom and front door were across from another building.

Speaker 26 It was someone else in our building that saw a peeping tom

Speaker 26 and it saw that someone was looking into her windows.

Speaker 15 Ashley says for that reason, Corey preferred hanging out in the back of the apartment in the kitchen. That's where they were the day before Thanksgiving.

Speaker 15 Corey was making dessert to bring to a friend's house for the next day's feast.

Speaker 26 So we drank a beer, started making some pies, and she was telling me about Thanksgiving. She was telling me where she was going.

Speaker 26 And I didn't even know she could bake.

Speaker 15 When she finished, Corey went out for for the evening. Amy, who'd left town for Thanksgiving, remembers being tempted to stick around Jacksonville Beach so she could party with her best friend.

Speaker 5 Looking back, I wish I had, but I opted to go down to my mom's the night before and spend the night.

Speaker 15 Photos from that night show Corey inside her hangout, the Ritz. She's seen looking back at the camera.
One of the women there was a new friend. Her name was Tiffany Zienta.

Speaker 9 We were young and all in college and felt that, you know, we'd just all go hang out.

Speaker 17 You and Corey went out a lot.

Speaker 9 We did.

Speaker 25 Your relationship kept getting closer and closer. Yes.

Speaker 9 Well, on my part, yes. I can't answer for Corey, but yes, from my vantage point.

Speaker 15 That night, Tiffany says, Corey, usually the bubbliest in the room, had fizzled out early, around 1.30 a.m.

Speaker 9 We left at the same time.

Speaker 21 And how do you part ways?

Speaker 9 She got in her car

Speaker 9 and I got a ride from a co-worker.

Speaker 15 She says Corey promised to stop by her place the next day, but Thanksgiving came and Corey was a no-show.

Speaker 9 I didn't think much about it, but I did tell my mom that I was a little bummed out that she didn't call and didn't come by.

Speaker 18 Was that like Corey did not call and say

Speaker 18 is she the type who would have said, hey, you know what, I'm going to bow out for tonight? Correct.

Speaker 15 It wasn't until the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, that someone finally noticed Corey missing. She didn't show up for her morning shift at the restaurant.

Speaker 15 No one had heard from her in more than a day.

Speaker 5 So one of the cooks, who was a friend of ours, said, I'll go check on her because she didn't live far from where she worked.

Speaker 15 The man returned to the restaurant to report that Corey hadn't answered her door. Alarmed, the manager sent him back.

Speaker 5 He walked around the back of her apartment and her blinds were closed in the back, her bedroom, but there was a little opening and he could see her foot, and there was blood on her foot.

Speaker 15 The co-worker immediately raced back to work in a panic. Police were called.

Speaker 15 Corey Parker had just been found.

Speaker 2 What had happened to Corey when we come back? The first chilling clues.

Speaker 6 You could tell that she had fought for her life.

Speaker 2 And why detectives are sure her attacker was no stranger.

Speaker 13 That speaks to some sort of a relationship.

Speaker 15 It was just before noon on Black Friday. Ashley Berg woke up to banging at her front door.
It was the police.

Speaker 26 They're like, are you Corey Parker? And I said, no, I'm not.

Speaker 26 I said, I point at the

Speaker 26 kind of like the window next to me, which is her house.

Speaker 9 And I said, she lives right there.

Speaker 15 Moments later, officers were in Corey's apartment.

Speaker 16 And I heard what, you know, they had said, there she is.

Speaker 26 And I just fell

Speaker 26 to my knees.

Speaker 4 25-year-old Corey Parker was dead. It was clear she'd been murdered.

Speaker 15 Investigators called Angela Corey, then an assistant prosecutor.

Speaker 6 The police were all there when I arrived,

Speaker 6 and so they walked walked me through the scene.

Speaker 25 How hard was it seeing Corey Parker in that way?

Speaker 6 This was brutal because you could tell that she had fought for her life.

Speaker 6 You could tell that she was at her most vulnerable, alone and in bed, and that she had been, you know, brutally and viciously stabbed in the middle of the night.

Speaker 15 Stabbed more than a hundred times.

Speaker 12 This was a sick individual who did this.

Speaker 25 Very.

Speaker 15 It didn't take long for word of Corey's death to spread from the tiny apartment. Amy Ladden, still visiting her mother out of town, got a call from Corey's boyfriend.

Speaker 5 He was crying and he said, Did you hear what's going on? I'm so confused. I said, No, what's wrong? Everything's fine.
And he said, Corey, there's something wrong with Corey.

Speaker 5 Somebody found her in blood. And I said, no.

Speaker 5 No, she's fine. I talked to her yesterday.
Everything's fine.

Speaker 15 Still, she drove back to Jacksonville Beach, straight to the police station, just to make sure.

Speaker 18 Did it finally register at the police station eventually?

Speaker 5 I went into a room with a detective. They did confirm that she was found in her home dead.
I kept thinking something happened to her heart. I don't know why.
I kept going back to that in my mind.

Speaker 5 I don't know why.

Speaker 15 Tiffany Zienta, who'd been out with Corey two nights earlier, was finishing her bartending shift when a customer broke the news to her.

Speaker 9 I had this feeling kind of wash over me and

Speaker 9 called Amy

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 5 asked her if it was true.

Speaker 9 And she said it was.

Speaker 15 Detectives on the scene, meanwhile, were busy talking to Corey's neighbors and sizing up the layout and location of her apartment.

Speaker 15 That in itself was a red flag.

Speaker 16 My first time here at first glance doesn't necessarily feel like the safest situation for a young woman living in this ground floor apartment.

Speaker 13 Right. There's a lot of transient traffic that comes through here.
The beach is three blocks from here.

Speaker 15 Detectives Billy Carlisle and Katie Kingston, both now retired, worked the case.

Speaker 13 She was a beautiful woman and whenever she would walk to and from her apartment, I'm sure there were a lot of guys that were looking at her.

Speaker 16 There's a lot of apartments around here. You must have had to do a lot of canvassing.
We did.

Speaker 29 Yes.

Speaker 13 A lot of individual canvasses. We had to talk to every one of those people, document it all.

Speaker 27 And there's a lot of partying that goes on at the beach. And so you have people wandering up and down the streets here at two, three o'clock in the morning sometimes.

Speaker 27 So, you know, yeah, that's a concern.

Speaker 15 Neighbors told police there had lately been a peeping tom creeping around the area. So it was possible she was killed by a complete stranger who'd broken into her apartment.

Speaker 13 It looked like that the suspect had put his hand on the kitchen counter right there at the lip of the sink in order to lift himself up on the cabinet to be able to extricate himself from the window.

Speaker 7 You could see what almost looked like handprints coming like they lowered themselves out the window.

Speaker 7 And those were in blood.

Speaker 15 It was Corey's blood. Traces of her murder left by the killer.
But the idea that this was a random killing didn't sit well with detectives.

Speaker 4 Was your gut telling you that this was someone she knew?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 15 Yes. What was it?

Speaker 17 Why were you thinking that?

Speaker 13 Because the extensive stab wounds, she was stabbed stabbed 101 times. And that speaks to some sort of a relationship.

Speaker 15 They hoped to find traces of her killer in the mess left behind. There was plenty of evidence to test.
Fingerprints on wine glasses and cigarette lighters. Hair and blood everywhere.

Speaker 13 You just never know what's valuable, so you try and photograph everything and then you try and examine everything that you can that you think is potentially involved in it.

Speaker 15 And everyone.

Speaker 15 The first person they needed to talk to was the new man in Corey's life.

Speaker 17 You all wanted to talk to the boyfriend, a logical place to start. Any red flags there with him?

Speaker 13 No, we determined through plane flight tickets that he was out of town at the time. He wasn't even here in Jacksonville Beach.

Speaker 20 Was it a solid alibi?

Speaker 13 Solid confirmation.

Speaker 15 But these were early days in the investigation, and there were many people in Corey's world for police to rule in or out, including a man who lived right next door, Ashley Berg's brother.

Speaker 15 Police had a reason to talk to him.

Speaker 2 Coming up.

Speaker 25 Did he have a solid alibi?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 2 Questions about a neighbor's whereabouts, and then suspicions about a co-worker's feelings for Corey.

Speaker 8 Did you know you were obsessed with her?

Speaker 30 I was. I was obsessed.

Speaker 2 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 15 This was low-key Jacksonville Beach, Florida, where the main concern of the day was how high the waves were riding.

Speaker 15 A young single woman attacked in the night in her bed just didn't happen here.

Speaker 6 I think this case illustrates every woman's nightmare.

Speaker 6 That as hard as Corey Parker tried to be safe and she had all her doors locked, she still was the most vulnerable in the sanctity of her own home.

Speaker 11 Women who lived alone were scared.

Speaker 15 Melissa Nelson, then an assistant prosecutor who joined the case, recalls the fear.

Speaker 11 Neighbors were scared.

Speaker 20 People she worked with were alarmed.

Speaker 11 So it was a very scary time for that community.

Speaker 15 Tiffany Zienta, raised in Jacksonville Beach, couldn't believe this had happened to someone she knew.

Speaker 9 I mean, they kept calling it the bloodiest crime scene in Jacksonville Beach in 25 years. It's not really comforting to feel or to hear.

Speaker 15 Ashley Berg was also also frightened for another reason. Detectives thought her brother Joe had been too vague about where he'd been in the hours surrounding Corey's death.

Speaker 25 Did he have a solid alibi?

Speaker 8 Not really.

Speaker 25 No. What was he doing?

Speaker 13 Well, he, you know, he was at the apartment just hanging around and, you know, he comes and goes. So we really couldn't establish that he had a solid alibi at the time of the crime.

Speaker 15 Their interest grew when they found a hair on a sock in Corey's bedroom. The hair looked like it could have come from Joe.

Speaker 13 I know we did a microscopic comparison and that the microscopic comparison developed that likeness.

Speaker 15 The test they used back then wasn't definitive but it was enough to make police suspicious and for Joe to worry.

Speaker 20 So they would ask well why is your hair on her sock?

Speaker 26 He couldn't answer that.

Speaker 20 He was petrified.

Speaker 26 Petrified. He didn't know what they were going to do next.

Speaker 15 What police did was take a sample of Joe's DNA for testing and press on. Meanwhile, there was another young man they were interested in, a dishwasher named Eric Ely.

Speaker 13 Eric was a co-worker that worked with Corey at Ragtime Tavern.

Speaker 15 And everyone knew he really liked Corey.

Speaker 13 Had come on to her on multiple occasions and had also done that to several of the other waitresses up there. They just thought he was a creepy guy.

Speaker 15 Who'd grown stranger by the day? Police found out he'd been pestering Corey to have Thanksgiving dinner with him alone.

Speaker 15 Each time she turned him down, detectives brought the young man in for questioning. Did you ask Corey out for Thanksgiving dinner prior to piling on?

Speaker 31 I may have mentioned it, but

Speaker 31 I know I didn't ask her a direct question.

Speaker 15 But to the detectives, what the dishwasher did next was a move straight out of a Norman Bates playbook.

Speaker 13 He made this really nice Thanksgiving dinner in hopes that he could call her and say,

Speaker 13 I've made Thanksgiving dinner. I'd like for you to come over and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with me.

Speaker 15 So he made the dinner first?

Speaker 17 Yes. And then called?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 31 That's a tiny bit

Speaker 15 on the creepy side.

Speaker 13 It was a little strange.

Speaker 15 It was clear he was infatuated.

Speaker 8 Did you know you were obsessed with her?

Speaker 30 Yeah, I was slightly obsessed, but I wouldn't do it.

Speaker 14 Greatly obsessed, Eric. Jesus.

Speaker 8 My God.

Speaker 30 I was.

Speaker 15 From there, the interview took an even darker turn. The young man admitted to violent fantasies.

Speaker 14 Tell me the things that you think about doing with women that you wouldn't do because you know it's not the right thing to do.

Speaker 12 I mean, like taking him into a bedroom and rape him?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 20 He's talking about rape.

Speaker 16 I mean, that's scary stuff right there.

Speaker 10 Exactly.

Speaker 15 That paled in comparison to what he said next. He described how he thought Corey had been killed.

Speaker 30 How would you contain her?

Speaker 32 How would this person kill her?

Speaker 15 In fact, that's how Corey was killed.

Speaker 17 Did you think about the scenario that he might have felt really rejected by Corey and he snapped?

Speaker 13 Anything's possible. Yes.
I mean, that comes into your mind. You know, he asked her multiple times to go out with him.
Although she was cordial to him, she just never went there.

Speaker 14 You sound like you know a little bit about what happened to Corey.

Speaker 30 How would you

Speaker 30 know? Because maybe I would share the same thoughts as his first petition.

Speaker 15 He sounded like an obvious suspect.

Speaker 30 I would like to have fantasized myself doing it instead of him doing it, but I didn't do it.

Speaker 15 Despite all his incriminating descriptions, the dishwasher was adamant. He hadn't killed Corey, and police didn't have any hard evidence that put him inside her bedroom.

Speaker 13 He's got a denial, and you got nothing to put him there.

Speaker 4 For the time being, police had to let the man go.

Speaker 15 And just when it seemed their case couldn't get more complicated, it did.

Speaker 15 Corey's friend had been talking around town about the murder, and she was saying all the things that catch a detective's attention.

Speaker 2 Coming up. Are you ready for another potential suspect? This close girlfriend of Corey's.
Was she a little too close?

Speaker 17 Tiffany was infatuated with Corey?

Speaker 13 Yes, her statements about how much she loved Corey piqued our interest.

Speaker 15 In the months after Corey Parker's murder, police had several potential suspects, including a next-door neighbor with a vague alibi and an obsessed dishwasher.

Speaker 15 But they didn't have enough to make an arrest.

Speaker 17 Corey's family even offered a reward for information.

Speaker 15 Melissa Nelson, now a state attorney, worked the case.

Speaker 11 And to that end, everybody who presented as a potential suspect, they were running that to ground. Could it be this person? Is it this person?

Speaker 15 Amy Ladden found herself looking around at Corey's other friends and wondering, could it be one of them?

Speaker 5 Everybody was an actual suspect. So that became a little bit scary to me.

Speaker 17 Her killer could have been right under your nose.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Tiffany Zienta remembers just wanting to be helpful. Like most of Corey's friends, she met with the detectives.

Speaker 12 They want to talk to you.

Speaker 22 Detectives.

Speaker 22 We all write a statement.

Speaker 12 Well, they wanted to talk to you.

Speaker 16 Absolutely.

Speaker 15 Tiffany told the detectives she had been with Corey at the Ritz bar Wednesday night into the early morning hours of Thanksgiving. She said they left the bar at the same time, around 1.30 a.m.

Speaker 15 Tiffany hitched a ride with another friend to go bar hopping. Corey, she noted, got into her own car car and headed home.
Later, Tiffany said, she called Corey's home phone.

Speaker 9 It was like 2.15. It was right after we left, the original bar.

Speaker 15 Detectives followed up on what Tiffany had told them. Carlisle says they quickly noticed a wrinkle in her story.

Speaker 13 Her phone call was not on the phone records of Corey Parker's home residence phone.

Speaker 12 So she's starting to make some inconsistent.

Speaker 1 statements.

Speaker 13 Inconsistent statements.

Speaker 15 More troubling to police was what they were hearing from Corey's friends. They were saying Tiffany had been describing the murder, the stab wounds to the body, details that hadn't been made public.

Speaker 15 They also believed she harbored deep feelings for Corey that weren't mutual.

Speaker 20 Tiffany was infatuated with Corey?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 4 What were you told?

Speaker 13 Well, we were just basically told that it was bordering on a little...

Speaker 13 a little strange, you know, with what we'd heard about her statements about how much she cared about Corey and how much she loved Corey. You know, it just piqued our curiosity and interest.

Speaker 15 Now, detectives wanted to sit down again with Tiffany, but by then, more than five months had passed since Corey's murder, and Tiffany had left town.

Speaker 15 For New Orleans, the move only made her look worse to police. So they tracked her down, hoping to confront her.
But Tiffany wasn't having it.

Speaker 13 She at some point decided she wasn't going to cooperate further and referred us to her lawyer.

Speaker 15 So detectives decided to get a warrant for Tiffany's DNA.

Speaker 13 We had to get a court order to get her standards, her hair and her

Speaker 4 blood. Are you starting to think she could be Corey's killer?

Speaker 13 Well, you just have to follow that lead. We felt like based on what we knew to that point that she was

Speaker 13 a person of interest, definitely,

Speaker 13 maybe a viable suspect.

Speaker 9 I'm not the person that's going to kill somebody.

Speaker 15 Looking back, Tiffany is convinced detectives set their sights on her from the moment she first talked to them.

Speaker 15 The fact that she was the last friend to see Corey alive, she says, shaped everything that followed.

Speaker 9 I never knew that saying I was the last one with her was going to come back to haunt me. You know, the police are like, well, the killer was the last one.
Well, until you think about it.

Speaker 9 that way, you don't think about it that way.

Speaker 15 First of all, she says, she never lied about that call to Corey, no matter what the phone records said.

Speaker 12 How do you explain that?

Speaker 9 According to my attorney, he had had other clients that had called people that didn't show up on phone records either.

Speaker 10 I don't know. I don't know why it didn't show up.

Speaker 9 I have no idea.

Speaker 15 As for being in love with Corey.

Speaker 17 Is there any truth to that?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 9 Because

Speaker 9 I'm not gay. I thought she was beautiful.
I thought she was a great person. Have I been infatuated with Corey? No.

Speaker 15 Everything else she did in this case, she says, was out of innocence or panic. She learned about the bloody crime scene from a friend, a paramedic who'd been there.

Speaker 15 She went to New Orleans to rest, not escape. She got a lawyer out of fear, not guilt.

Speaker 14 How are you feeling as this is getting more intense?

Speaker 16 I mean, this is a murder investigation.

Speaker 16 Helpless.

Speaker 16 Bullied.

Speaker 8 Helpless.

Speaker 9 Like there were going to be no answers.

Speaker 6 And this was going to be hanging over me for the rest of my life.

Speaker 15 But before they could make an arrest, detectives needed to link her DNA to the crime scene. That's when things got really interesting.

Speaker 2 Coming up,

Speaker 2 yet another person of interest. This one lurking in the shadows.

Speaker 12 It wouldn't take much.

Speaker 23 Do you think he'd been watching her for a while?

Speaker 13 Absolutely. No question question about it.

Speaker 2 And then, detectives get their hands on the one thing that might solve this case.

Speaker 13 We were jumping for joy.

Speaker 2 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 28 A BetterHelp ad.

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Speaker 15 Jacksonville Beach had been home to Tiffany Zienta. Now, it seemed home had turned on her.

Speaker 14 Did you think there's a chance I could get arrested?

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 9 For something I didn't do.

Speaker 15 But she wasn't arrested, and neither was anyone else in the months following Corey Parker's murder. A year went by.

Speaker 28 Angela Corey.

Speaker 21 So this wasn't solved after the commercial break.

Speaker 6 Oh, no. No, no.
We went into this knowing we were in for the long haul. As they, what's that phrase? We knew it was going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

Speaker 15 They had their list of possible suspects, but they didn't have the evidence or the science yet to definitively link anyone to the crime.

Speaker 11 DNA testing was actually in the middle of evolving at that time.

Speaker 15 Eventually, the science and the evidence came together. Investigators recovered a strand of foreign hair from Corey's underwear.
They believed that single strand was rich in DNA.

Speaker 11 That had been clearly ripped out of a head.

Speaker 15 Likely, they believed, the killer's head. Now they had to test it against their possible suspects.

Speaker 23 You essentially had your killer in your tests.

Speaker 20 You just stayed locked in a tube.

Speaker 11 Didn't know his name. Hairs on slides.
That's right.

Speaker 15 That's when the case took its most dramatic turn yet. Thanks to this man.

Speaker 23 Would you call yourself a bounty hunter?

Speaker 19 I've been called bounty hunter before, but I prefer fugitive specialist.

Speaker 23 Fugitive specialist, okay.

Speaker 15 William Rensler knew about Corey's murder, and he knew there had been a reward posted for information leading to her killer.

Speaker 19 When I came across the one individual,

Speaker 19 some things struck me as odd.

Speaker 15 The individual was a young man named Robert Denny. He was 17 years old, living in a nearby building when Corey was killed.

Speaker 15 He'd been questioned and dismissed by detectives early on, in part because he was so young. What seemed odd to William was that the teen disappeared not long after the murder.

Speaker 15 As Memorial Day weekend rolled around, William found himself on a dock with two friends.

Speaker 19 We were fishing and having a couple of beers, and I was going over my notes.

Speaker 15 Suddenly, he remembered that Robert Denny had worked at the same restaurant as his friends. They recognized the name instantly.

Speaker 19 They felt that he was an off-beat individual.

Speaker 15 William talked with Detective Katie Kingston. She then went over to check out Denny's old apartment for herself.

Speaker 27 You can see how close it is.

Speaker 15 It was apartment number four, and its back balcony was less than three feet from Corey's old kitchen.

Speaker 15 When police met with Denny's co-workers, they said he had talked about watching a young woman from his balcony.

Speaker 4 Do you think he'd been watching her for a while?

Speaker 13 Absolutely, no question about it.

Speaker 4 It was something straight out of Hitchcock.

Speaker 15 A rear window, a vulnerable young woman, a man watching, seeing, but unseen.

Speaker 15 Kingston didn't know where the man lived now, but she found out he had a sister in the area. What the woman told the detective about her brother was unsettling, to say the least.

Speaker 7 She called him a night creeper, and she said that he would creep around the house at night.

Speaker 7 She had woken up before and he was staring at her.

Speaker 15 The sister said Kingston could find her brother in Easton, Maryland. He had moved there to be with a woman he met online.
Kingston and Carlisle immediately headed north.

Speaker 15 They needed to compare their suspect to that hair sample from the crime scene.

Speaker 14 And you need his DNA.

Speaker 13 Absolutely. Yes.

Speaker 15 With the help of Easton police, they called up their suspect and flat out lied. They made up a story about a recent assault.
Could he come in for questioning?

Speaker 13 So he agreed to come in and he sat down with us.

Speaker 15 What followed was vintage cat and mouse. Police tried to get Denny's DNA off a cigarette.
Denny went for the smoke, but when he was finished.

Speaker 13 He took the cigarette butt and put it behind his ear.

Speaker 13 Wouldn't put it in the cigarette ashtray.

Speaker 15 So they moved on to plan B. They offered him a bottle of water.

Speaker 13 Well, he takes the water, but he doesn't take the top off of it. And he sat there the whole time, never drank from the water bottle.
So now you're on to plan C.

Speaker 15 Which was this. They asked Denny to fill out some forms, police procedural stuff, they said.

Speaker 13 And what we were going to do was have him sign those forms and then put them in an envelope and then seal the envelope. There were three different envelopes.

Speaker 15 Denny filled out the forms but didn't lick the envelopes.

Speaker 13 And he looks at us and says, you guys have tried three separate times to get my DNA sample. He says, you can seal them yourself.
Is there anything else?

Speaker 17 The best-laid plans.

Speaker 13 Best laid plans of mice and men. He didn't fall for it.

Speaker 15 Denny was done, but Carlisle wasn't.

Speaker 13 I wasn't going anywhere without a DNA sample.

Speaker 15 So they staked him out at the computer store where he worked.

Speaker 15 and snapped these photos as their prey came outside for his cigarette breaks. Once again, their mouse was a step ahead.

Speaker 13 He was smoking the cigarette and then when he was finished with it, he would take it and put it behind his ear.

Speaker 17 Do you think he knew that maybe you were watching him?

Speaker 13 I'm sure.

Speaker 15 But on the second day, Denny did something he had probably done a thousand times before.

Speaker 13 He starts spitting on the ground out of the clear blue.

Speaker 15 Spit has DNA in it.

Speaker 10 And we were alike,

Speaker 13 we were jumping for joy at that point.

Speaker 23 So you've never been so happy in your life to see someone.

Speaker 10 I've been so happy to see that.

Speaker 15 When Denny left, Carlisle raced over, collected the sample, and drove straight to the FBI's DNA lab. All there was left to do now was wait just a little bit longer.

Speaker 2 Coming up. No matter how the tests come back, detectives will have to explain a lot of other evidence at the scene.

Speaker 33 There's unidentified fingerprints and there's unidentified hairs in the victim's hands.

Speaker 2 Had someone else been at Corey's?

Speaker 2 And then we sit down with Robert Denny.

Speaker 12 Did you murder Corey Parker?

Speaker 2 The reason Denny says police have it all wrong.

Speaker 15 It had been a year and a half since Corey Parker's murder when police discovered, or rediscovered, Robert Denny, her old neighbor.

Speaker 13 We were full bore on Robert Denny at that point.

Speaker 15 Here's why. Denny lived right behind the victim.
He disappeared soon after her murder and detectives learned this. Denny had an older brother in prison for murder.

Speaker 17 You're starting to think this might run in the family.

Speaker 6 You can't help but think that.

Speaker 15 Denny's brother had been convicted years earlier in Texas. And his crime was eerily similar to this case.

Speaker 13 The interesting thing about the brother was that in his case in El Paso, he stabbed that woman 96 times. And we're dealing with a homicide where our victim's been stabbed 101 times.

Speaker 13 So the similarity was just too much to overlook.

Speaker 15 The detectives had to wonder if Denny had killed Corey in a twisted attempt to outdo his sibling. One thing detectives were sure of, he had become fixated on her.

Speaker 15 A co-worker recalled being in Robert Denny's apartment.

Speaker 13 Robert pointed down to Corey's window and said, I watched that girl down there.

Speaker 15 They were convinced Denny was her killer, but they needed proof. So they waited for tests to compare Denny's saliva sample to that strand of hair found at the scene.

Speaker 15 And wouldn't you know, Denny's DNA was a match. Not just to that hair, but also to a tiny speck of blood recovered near her kitchen sink.

Speaker 15 All the other possible suspects, the next-door neighbor, the dishwasher, and Tiffany, were cleared in the case.

Speaker 13 We were jumping up.

Speaker 12 We wanted to go get him then.

Speaker 15 And prosecutor Angela Corey said, no.

Speaker 6 He can come up with a story to explain that DNA away. Oh, I carried her groceries in for and I cut my finger.
You can't give anybody a chance to explain it away.

Speaker 15 The prosecutor wanted him on the record, denying he'd ever set foot in the victim's apartment. Then they'd hit him with the DNA proof, trapping him.

Speaker 15 So they sent Katie Kingston back to Maryland to Robert Denny's house.

Speaker 12 Well, I was going to play like I didn't know anything.

Speaker 27 You were acting.

Speaker 7 Just acting kind of dumb.

Speaker 15 She told Denny they had found the man who'd killed his old neighbor, Corey Parker. The detective was just here to tie up loose ends.
He seemed willing to help.

Speaker 15 What he didn't know, the detective was wearing a wire.

Speaker 31 Do you know Corey Parker or ever talked to her? No.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 15 Then the detective asked the crucial question. Had he ever been in Corey's apartment?

Speaker 31 So y'all didn't go back and forth either. Corey's apartment I remember was the guy right next to us that was.

Speaker 31 All right, so y'all didn't go back and forth and all that stuff. Okay.

Speaker 15 That was all the detective needed. The cat, it seemed, had finally gotten its mouse.

Speaker 6 When we heard the recording, I had the arrest warrant ready to go and I finished plugging in what they told me over the phone and we were ecstatic. We knew we had him.

Speaker 15 Corey Parker had been dead almost two years to the day when police slipped the handcuffs on Robert Denny. At the police station right after his arrest, he protested his innocence.

Speaker 14 You can't have any evidence.

Speaker 6 It's impossible because I couldn't do this.

Speaker 14 I can't admit something. I think it's true.

Speaker 15 And when Carlisle mentioned Denny's brother, he again told the detective he had it all wrong.

Speaker 15 Detectives weren't buying his tears. They were convinced they had enough evidence to put Robert Denny away for life.

Speaker 15 And yet, it took almost five years to bring him to trial. It was, after all, a complicated investigation.

Speaker 15 Denny's DNA was found at the crime scene, but there was also evidence they couldn't link to him.

Speaker 34 There are still unidentified pieces of evidence at this crime scene.

Speaker 15 Rick Sikhta, an attorney for Robert Denny.

Speaker 33 There's unidentified semen stains, there's unidentified fingerprints, and there is unidentified hairs in the victim's hands.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 34 it's a question of who done it.

Speaker 15 Not a case of Denny did it, he said. To underscore that, Denny even took the stand to show jurors he was just a boy next door, not a monster at the door.
Only it didn't work.

Speaker 15 After a three-week trial, the jury needed less than an hour to render a verdict, guilty of first-degree murder.

Speaker 14 It is a judgment sentenced to the question.

Speaker 17 Denny was sentenced to life without parole.

Speaker 15 We met him in prison for this interview.

Speaker 12 Did you murder Corey Parker?

Speaker 29 No, I did not.

Speaker 15 He believes the sins of his brother made police quick to zero in on him.

Speaker 20 There has been a connection made as far as the theories of the police, the prosecutors, that this was some twisted brotherly bond or rivalry.

Speaker 12 Is there any truth to that?

Speaker 29 None at all. Simply because my brother is convicted of murder does not make me a murderer.

Speaker 15 He says the way police later got his DNA shows they were determined to link him to Corey's murder.

Speaker 29 When I first heard that my spit was what they collected to match to any DNA at the crime scene, it was just unreal. I'm thinking to myself, how could this be?

Speaker 15 He's also convinced that the labs, including the one at the FBI, didn't follow protocol when they tested his DNA against the evidence from the crime scene.

Speaker 29 There's definitely evidence that suggests they may have mixed up samples.

Speaker 12 I think the hardest part to wrap your head around is that there could be contamination on both the blood and the hair.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 29 I can understand why you would feel that way, and maybe that goes to explaining what the police might have done with the evidence. We don't know.
If I knew I wouldn't be here.

Speaker 17 It just seems a little far-fetched that the police would randomly pluck you out of obscurity years later and decide to frame you.

Speaker 29 I understand and

Speaker 29 I've thought about this for years and

Speaker 29 it happened.

Speaker 29 Police do frame people.

Speaker 29 We see it all the time now in America.

Speaker 12 The police have framed you and two separate crime labs have contaminated the evidence.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 29 You can see how that

Speaker 23 is. Very far-fetched.

Speaker 29 It's very far-fetched, yes. I can understand that.

Speaker 16 The detective in this case says that he is 1,000% certain he has the right person.

Speaker 10 He's wrong.

Speaker 29 He does not have the right person.

Speaker 4 So who did it then?

Speaker 29 If I knew, I wouldn't be here now. I wish I knew.

Speaker 15 Yet the people who arrested and prosecuted Danny insist two independent labs did follow protocol, linking his DNA to evidence from the crime scene.

Speaker 15 An appeals court denied Denny's motion for a new trial, but it did agree that his sentence, life without parole, violated guidelines for juvenile offenders, which he was at the time of the murder.

Speaker 15 No date has been set for re-sentencing. Corey's friends remain disgusted.

Speaker 26 I hope he rots in hell.

Speaker 9 I hate Robert Denny.

Speaker 15 As for Tiffany Zienta, she says it took a long time to get over what he and the police did to her.

Speaker 25 How did you deal with it?

Speaker 10 Drank.

Speaker 31 More.

Speaker 9 Tried to lose who I was.

Speaker 9 Tried to change who I was.

Speaker 6 Didn't like myself very much.

Speaker 9 It's taken me a while to get back to who I need to be.

Speaker 15 Amy Ladden has also struggled with the past.

Speaker 5 If I go to that day, why didn't I invite her to Thanksgiving with me? Maybe she would have gone. So even to this day, you know, there's a lot of guilt with with that.

Speaker 15 But there's also gratitude to investigators who never gave up, to three strangers on a dock playing armchair detective, and most of all, to a best friend.

Speaker 5 I definitely feel blessed to have known her for the amount of time I did. You know, I can't imagine what she would have accomplished by now.

Speaker 15 Whatever it was, Amy feels certain it would have been like the woman herself, as vibrant as a northern sky, as unforgettable as a southern night.

Speaker 2 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again next Friday at 10-9 Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 3 Good night.