The Secrets in the Suitcase

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Speaker 10 Hello, I'm Keith Morrison. It was a baffling case for detectives.
A crime, a suspect, but not enough evidence to prove it, to solve it.

Speaker 3 Nearly three decades passed.

Speaker 12 Heartbroken loved ones wondered if justice would ever be done.

Speaker 10 And then they learned the answer was in plain sight all along.

Speaker 18 They kept it in the dark, down the stairs in the basement, among the bolt cutters and the bags of white powder and the guns, the investigative leftovers of a small police department.

Speaker 23 Why they chose a lime green suitcase for it is beyond knowing now.

Speaker 25 But he'd see it down there every time he filed a piece of evidence, tucked in, all but forgotten behind a door frame, like a silent accusation.

Speaker 28 And there it kind of sat in that room staring at you.

Speaker 30 Yes, yes, for years.

Speaker 19 In fact, since about the time Brad Benson got his start in the Woods Cross Police Department.

Speaker 30 I was always always intrigued by this case because,

Speaker 30 you know, it was a cold case, homicide, that had never been solved.

Speaker 27 The Lime Green Mystery.

Speaker 33 Inside that suitcase was quite possibly all the evidence required to put a murderer away for life.

Speaker 29 If he opened it, God knows what would come slithering out, though he never guessed just how bizarre it would turn out to be.

Speaker 5 Back in the summer of 1980, it seemed frankly like one of those murders that happen all too commonly in other cities, though surely not here.

Speaker 5 Brad Benson was a rookie, a reserve officer, in a town that only rarely seemed to need much of a police department.

Speaker 30 I was kind of shocked, quite frankly, that we had something like that in Woods Cross.

Speaker 30 I mean, I'd only been there a couple of years, but I could never imagine that we would be investigating a homicide.

Speaker 13 Murder in Woods Cross?

Speaker 13 Woods Cross. Yes, unheard of.

Speaker 30 That was our very first homicide, as a matter of fact.

Speaker 11 Woods Cross was busily growing out from the fringe of Salt Lake City in those days.

Speaker 21 Quiet, middle class, studded everywhere with mostly Mormon churches.

Speaker 34 And it prided itself on being a safe place to live.

Speaker 11 That's why people moved here.

Speaker 4 So it was a shock that very first time Woods Cross encountered murder.

Speaker 33 It was the 6th of June, 1980, a Friday morning. Oh my god, there's a 1653 South! 1200!

Speaker 33 1,200 last 1653 centimeters! But surprise! And what's current? My wife's been killed! Let us get home from work!

Speaker 26 The event stands out in the collective memory here.

Speaker 26 Okay, I'll say, what's your name? Steve Strom!

Speaker 26 Please, John! Steve Strom! Please hurry!

Speaker 14 Steve Strom was an overnight shift worker at a local aerospace parts company.

Speaker 23 So it was just before 8 a.m., he told first responders, when he came home to find his wife's body.

Speaker 31 She'd been severely beaten.

Speaker 19 The furniture in their bedroom had been pushed around as if in a violent struggle.

Speaker 42 I was at work and my stepmother had called me and she says, Karen's dead.

Speaker 42 And I just said,

Speaker 13 what?

Speaker 42 She goes, Karen's dead. My kid says, she can't be.
I just talked to her.

Speaker 19 Karen Strom's sister, Coco, rushed to the crime scene.

Speaker 42 I knew it was a crime scene, but, oh god I just wanted to hold her so bad. And then they brought her body out

Speaker 42 and you're in such shock you're like she can't be in there.

Speaker 42 No that's not my sister. She's not in there.

Speaker 42 And then they took her away.

Speaker 14 Did you ever get a chance to hold her?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 16 Then the whole town got to know about Coco's big sister Karen, how pretty she was, how full of life and potential, how young.

Speaker 16 Just 25 when someone got into her bedroom, tore the place apart, and strangled the life out of her.

Speaker 43 What earthly reason would anyone have for killing Karen Strong?

Speaker 42 She was fun. She was happy.

Speaker 42 She had a lot of friends. She was just, she was a good soul.

Speaker 37 But even before that awful day came to an end, Some friends of Stephen Karen Strong felt like they knew what must have happened.

Speaker 42 I received a telephone call

Speaker 42 from my husband. What he said to me was,

Speaker 42 well, it finally happened.

Speaker 42 Steve finally killed her.

Speaker 25 Steve killed her? My wife's been killed. She just got home from work.

Speaker 45 Was his frantic voice on that 911 call the equivalent of crying crocodile tears?

Speaker 48 Brad Benson, remember, was a rookie back then.

Speaker 45 Didn't take part in the investigation.

Speaker 49 But before long, his colleagues seemed to feel that Steve was indeed the murderer.

Speaker 39 And they had their reasons.

Speaker 30 Well, there were some reports of domestic violence in his past.

Speaker 50 In fact, it turned out, Karen had left Steve.

Speaker 43 Why was she even in the house that night?

Speaker 23 A couple of months after Karen's death, Steve was arrested and charged with his wife's murder.

Speaker 28 What did Steve Strom do?

Speaker 30 Well, of course, he denied it. He denied being involved.

Speaker 30 He fought the case tooth and nail.

Speaker 28 And those investigators remained convinced that their man was Steve.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 52 But as the trial approached back at the beginning of the 1980s, none of the evidence from that chaotic bedroom murder scene could be tested for DNA.

Speaker 4 The technology just didn't exist then.

Speaker 19 What they had instead was a circumstantial case, the testimony of friends and family, who would say that Steve was sometimes verbally and possibly physically abusive.

Speaker 25 that Karen wanted out.

Speaker 30 There was black eyes and bruises that were witnessed by some of their co-workers and friends.

Speaker 41 But it wasn't enough, not much more than hearsay, according to the assigned trial judge, who dismissed the charges and released Steve Strom to go on about his life.

Speaker 19 Strom lost his friends, his credibility.

Speaker 23 Perhaps only this friend still believed in him.

Speaker 53 I mean,

Speaker 53 everybody was just saying, you did it, you did it, you did it, you did it, you did it, you know.

Speaker 53 And they chased him.

Speaker 53 They followed him everywhere he went.

Speaker 17 The cops?

Speaker 53 Yep, I was with him.

Speaker 47 And that was that.

Speaker 21 Nobody satisfied.

Speaker 46 Certainly not Karen's sister Coco, who believed in her heart, like so many others, that Steve had gotten away with murder.

Speaker 45 And that decided Coco could not stand.

Speaker 25 Her big sister had been there for her growing up, and now Coco would do what she could to fight for justice.

Speaker 42 27 years.

Speaker 28 27 years and it never left your mind?

Speaker 42 How could it?

Speaker 42 It's shocking.

Speaker 42 And it's your sister, somebody you love dearly. It's like

Speaker 42 you go and think about it and then you give up and then it's there again. You know, it never goes away.

Speaker 25 Just like the lime green suitcase.

Speaker 43 Though all that evidence felt no emotion at all as it sat there gathering dust all those years.

Speaker 56 But now as he contemplated imminent retirement, Brad Benson, now a detective sergeant, had come to believe, or to hope at least, that new technologies would finally give mute evidence a voice and make the case that couldn't be made back in 1980.

Speaker 30 We're pretty confident that if there is DNA, that it'll combat

Speaker 30 somebody that we are familiar with.

Speaker 25 But you know what they say about assumptions?

Speaker 27 Because, as Benson was about to discover, just beneath that apparently obvious surface was a very strange story indeed.

Speaker 1 It was June 2006, 26 years almost to the day since Coco Saltzgiver's sister Karen Strom was murdered in Woods Cross, Utah.

Speaker 19 The crime had never been solved, though some evidence at the time seemed to point toward Karen's husband, Steve Strom.

Speaker 7 And who knows why these things come about.

Speaker 52 Coco happened to be in Utah to attend a funeral.

Speaker 33 She happened to be driving through Woods Cross and, on a win, really, decided to stop at the local police department to ask what finally happened to that case.

Speaker 42 And I says, ma'am, where do I find some information on a homicide that's never... She goes, oh, do you mean Karen?

Speaker 42 And I says, okay, you people are freaking me out here.

Speaker 4 Within minutes, Coco was on the phone with Detective Brad Benson.

Speaker 42 And And he goes, You want to know what's funny? And I said, Oh, please, this is getting better and better. And he said, I took her case out six months ago and started looking at it again.

Speaker 48 Just coincidence, of course, wasn't it?

Speaker 42 And I thought,

Speaker 42 wow. I says, maybe something's really going to happen this time.

Speaker 40 By this time, Benson had followed a trail round a corner of the storage room from the old green suitcase to a makeshift plywood shelf, where he discovered boxes and boxes chock full of evidence.

Speaker 30 They had fingernails that

Speaker 30 they didn't know what they contained back then.

Speaker 4 But they saved them anyway.

Speaker 30 They saved them. Consequently, they became one of the best pieces of evidence that we had.

Speaker 33 Benson sent those preserved fingernails off to the lab, along with other testable pieces of evidence.

Speaker 40 And then, as he and Coco waited for the results, Benson continued to dig into the murder file and into the life of Karen Strong.

Speaker 32 What happened to make her a target of somebody's murderous rage?

Speaker 6 She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, an eldest daughter, Coco's big sister.

Speaker 27 And in this state, in some ways, she was distinctly unusual.

Speaker 42 We grew up Catholic in Utah. My dad side of the family was Mormon.
My mom was Catholic.

Speaker 23 So you knew what it was to be a minority.

Speaker 42 Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 52 And she was popular and pretty, a natural dancer.

Speaker 39 who, once in high school, was rarely without a date on the Saturday night.

Speaker 18 And when she got her first car, her adored yellow Camaro, life couldn't get any better.

Speaker 42 She loved that car. I loved that car.
We used to go riding just cruising in that car.

Speaker 42 That car was,

Speaker 42 she was so happy when she got that.

Speaker 32 That she got married so soon, just 18 and right out of high school, seemed reasonable at the time.

Speaker 18 At least to Coco, it did.

Speaker 42 Living in Utah?

Speaker 13 Kind of happened, so.

Speaker 42 That was

Speaker 42 nothing new, but so I just figured, well, Karen did it too. You know?

Speaker 4 She and Steve Strom were in love, after all.

Speaker 42 I didn't know Steve that well.

Speaker 42 He didn't talk, very quiet.

Speaker 19 This is Karen's high school friend, Melody Fairbourne.

Speaker 42 She really did love him and enjoyed his company.

Speaker 45 But then, it was about seven years in when the bad times started to outweigh the good.

Speaker 34 The problem, said Melody, was Steve, who could be, she said, a mean drunk.

Speaker 42 When he would start drinking, he

Speaker 42 would start verbally degrading her.

Speaker 46 And there had been rumors of some physical abuse.

Speaker 49 Perhaps for that reason, maybe something else, Karen decided to file for divorce, even though.

Speaker 42 She loved him.

Speaker 13 Really?

Speaker 14 She wanted to leave him, but she loved him.

Speaker 42 I know, I know it's beyond me. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 42 But she did. She loved him.

Speaker 26 So it was complicated.

Speaker 19 Karen seemed to move on, started seeing someone else.

Speaker 42 I was thinking that she had finally broken away.

Speaker 18 But just over a month after she filed her divorce papers, Karen returned to the house in Woods Cross.

Speaker 45 Her puzzled friends assumed must be temporary, a goodbye visit.

Speaker 32 But an exultant Steve told his pal Dick Cantonwein, it was all going to work out.

Speaker 53 He was happy that she was come back because he loved her.

Speaker 53 I mean,

Speaker 53 when she was gone, he was down in the dumps.

Speaker 13 Just miserable about it. Yeah.

Speaker 31 On June 5th, 1980, the records showed Karen and Steve spent the evening together.

Speaker 19 They ate out, returned home.

Speaker 47 And then just after midnight, about 12.15 a.m., Steve left to go to work the graveyard shift at an aerospace parts company.

Speaker 22 Steve told police how Karen walked him to his car, all lovey-dubby, then said goodnight and walked back into the house.

Speaker 49 She passed her yellow Camaro parked in the driveway and closed the door behind her.

Speaker 25 He claimed he called her later that morning to wake her up for work.

Speaker 51 No answer. Called again, let the phone ring 20 times, still no answer.

Speaker 46 So he said he clocked out about 7:30 the morning of the 6th and drove home.

Speaker 51 Karen's Camaro was still parked in the driveway when he arrived.

Speaker 32 Or that was his story, at least. My wife's been killed.
She just got home from work. What's your name? Steve Strong.
Please, Karen. Steve Strom.
Please hurry.

Speaker 4 And now, all these years later, Detective Benson read about his colleagues' frustrated attempts to mount a case against Steve Strong and waited with Karen's sister Coco for the results of DNA tests conducted on Karen's preserved fingernails.

Speaker 11 Waited to be able to say, finally, got him.

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Speaker 21 Around Woods Cross, Utah, and among the suburbs and the city on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

Speaker 19 The story of Karen Strom was ancient history now, an artifact long lost to public memory.

Speaker 41 There was just the green suitcase, the soon-to-retire detective, and the one person for whom a burning need lived on every day for more than a quarter century, Karen's sister, Coco.

Speaker 14 How important was it for you to find out what happened?

Speaker 42 Very, because I want to know why.

Speaker 42 Why would you take somebody so beautiful? She wasn't raped.

Speaker 42 You know, it wasn't a robbery. They just plain killed her.
It's like, why?

Speaker 47 And of course, who?

Speaker 29 What happened behind that bedroom window in this middle-class neighborhood in the summer of 1980 is not really in doubt and wasn't from the beginning.

Speaker 29 There was a violent struggle, that was obvious, and a woman was dead, strangled. A little checking revealed there was no forced entry to the house.

Speaker 29 A little more checking indicated that this was a woman in the middle of marital discord.

Speaker 23 And so the answers to the questions, who did this thing and why, seem perhaps to have fairly obvious answers.

Speaker 29 What was your assessment then as to what probably happened that night?

Speaker 30 I believe that there was some sort of a domestic dispute

Speaker 30 and that things had got out of hand.

Speaker 30 And that's what led to her death.

Speaker 18 And everything in the case file certainly seemed to back up that point of view.

Speaker 28 Was there anything else that went to motive as far as Steve was concerned?

Speaker 30 Nothing other than the divorce that was currently going on.

Speaker 30 It sounded to me like that

Speaker 30 she may be leaving him for another man.

Speaker 28 Ah, so jealousy comes into play as well.

Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 4 Couldn't do anything about it, though.

Speaker 30 Well, back then we didn't have DNA, so short a confession, there wasn't really anything they could do.

Speaker 25 But now there were those fingernails.

Speaker 45 The chaos in the bedroom where she was murdered made it obvious that Karen had fought back against her attacker and thus probably unknowingly collected that person's DNA profile by scratching him before she died.

Speaker 52 Benson spoke to Steve Strong to let him know he'd reopen Karen's case.

Speaker 23 Would Steve provide a comparison sample of his own DNA?

Speaker 30 I told Steve that if he came up and provided those samples, it could do just as much good eliminating him as a suspect

Speaker 30 as it could actually point the finger at him.

Speaker 45 He agreed, and within 48 hours, he drove to Utah from his home in in Nevada and Freedy gave up a sample of his DNA.

Speaker 43 But was he worried? Oh, yes, he was, said his friend Dick Cantonwein.

Speaker 53 He says they're going to try and hang me again. They just were focused in on him from day one, and they just wouldn't let go.

Speaker 40 And less than two weeks after Benson submitted the samples that could finally identify a murderer, a result.

Speaker 43 And Benson looked at the name and

Speaker 13 well,

Speaker 45 I was a little confused at first confused once Benson absorbed the news he picked up the phone and called Karen's sister Coco he goes are you ready for this he said Coco the DNA came back and I said it did and he goes

Speaker 42 Ed Owens and I said

Speaker 42 who is Ed Owens

Speaker 43 and suddenly What once seemed a case of tying up old loose ends had been blown wide open.

Speaker 19 Funny thing about public attitudes, how a common suspicion can harden over time into something like received truth.

Speaker 4 Those few who still remember the 1980 murder of Karen Strong had two and a half decades to solidify their suspicion of husband Steve.

Speaker 25 And now, DNA revealed that cells under Karen's fingernails belonged to someone else altogether.

Speaker 52 Belonged to a man named Ed Owens.

Speaker 42 I had no idea who he was. My family doesn't know him.
None of Karen's friends know him. The only association to Ed Owens is

Speaker 42 Steve.

Speaker 30 Shocking.

Speaker 28 What is the relationship between Ed Owens and Steve?

Speaker 42 They worked together.

Speaker 48 Or at least, they both worked at the same machine at E-Systems, an aerospace parts manufacturer.

Speaker 4 Ed worked the swing shift and Steve took over the machine on the graveyard shift.

Speaker 45 Ed was new in town and Steve befriended him.

Speaker 53 He didn't have any friends and Steve was that kind of guy that, you know, would kind of take somebody under his wing because they had the same interests.

Speaker 53 They liked guns and hunting and four-wheeling and things like that.

Speaker 60 Did he seem to like the guy?

Speaker 61 Yeah, he thought he was pretty good.

Speaker 53 You know

Speaker 13 just a guy he's a little bit different. A little different, but you know.
A little different? Yeah.

Speaker 53 He tried so hard to be your friend and

Speaker 53 he just went at it the wrong way.

Speaker 37 And so they kind of thought that was a little weird, you know.

Speaker 60 His social skills were a little defective.

Speaker 13 Yes, yes.

Speaker 53 And you just look at him and say, wow,

Speaker 53 is he playing with the full deck?

Speaker 52 Still, something like a friendship had developed. They'd gone four-wheeling together, and once Steve and Karen took Ed and his wife, Patricia, on a double date.

Speaker 48 But really casual acquaintances.

Speaker 45 So, how would Ed Owens' DNA end up beneath Karen's fingernails?

Speaker 18 Good question.

Speaker 4 When Detective Benson went through the file, he discovered that, in fact, Ed Owens had drawn a mention in the original investigation.

Speaker 21 So, Benson, all these years later, tracked him down.

Speaker 30 He was listed as a person of interest or possibly a witness. And I wanted to go over his statement and make sure that we had everything correct.

Speaker 23 They'd put him on record back then.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 49 Back in 1980, Steve Strom told police that when he arrived at work at 12.45 a.m.

Speaker 11 June 6th, Ed Owens wasn't there, as he should have been, to turn over the machine they both worked on.

Speaker 25 He finally did show up, said Steve, a little after 4 in the morning, drunk and throwing up, claiming he left work at 8 p.m.

Speaker 39 and went out to party at a local bar.

Speaker 48 Also in the old file, statements from some of Steve's co-workers, who told police they saw scratches on Ed's hands and face in the days after Karen's murder, and the cops back then even took pictures of Ed, collected blood and hair samples.

Speaker 32 And now that some of the DNA under Karen's fingernails turned out to be a match for that sample collected from Ed Owens, Benson's belief about what happened the night of Karen's murder took a sudden U-turn.

Speaker 30 I believe that it was more or less an opportunity with Ed that he'd gone to the bar that night from work at 8 o'clock, just like the log showed. that he probably drank more than usual and decided that

Speaker 30 he wanted to go out and get into trouble.

Speaker 23 Get into trouble.

Speaker 30 I think he went there with the intentions of

Speaker 30 raping Karen and she fought back.

Speaker 28 He waited till Steve had gone to work.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 23 And Ed knew exactly the time Steve went to work because their shifts overlapped.

Speaker 28 How would he get into the house though? There was no sign of forced entry.

Speaker 30 Well, this was little old Woods Cross, you know, back in 1980. A lot of people didn't lock their doors back then.
There was no forced entry.

Speaker 30 We don't know if the door was locked for sure when Steve left for work that night or not.

Speaker 22 So he would have basically barged in on her and started an assault immediately.

Speaker 30 That's what we believe, yes.

Speaker 23 And created havoc as she fought back against him.

Speaker 13 Yes. But why would he kill her?

Speaker 30 Well, that would be the only way that he could be assured that the fingers wasn't going to be pointed back to him.

Speaker 39 But now, years later, the DNA pointed directly at Mr.

Speaker 35 Owens.

Speaker 47 Soon after Detective Benson informed Owens that the case was being reopened, Ed left town, leaving nothing but a note behind for his wife Patricia, containing things like bank account numbers.

Speaker 13 How do you explain behavior like that? It's

Speaker 30 a guilty person. That's the only way I can explain behavior like that.

Speaker 52 And then, a few weeks later, another surprise.

Speaker 24 Ed Owens showed up and turned himself in.

Speaker 31 And in short order, he was charged with Karen's murder.

Speaker 30 I kind of got the gut feeling that to a certain degree you may be relieved to have this

Speaker 13 happen.

Speaker 18 As Owens awaited his day in court, an apparently relieved Steve Strom appeared briefly on local TV.

Speaker 15 It's nice that they're looking at evidence instead of listening to hearsay and gossip and lies.

Speaker 4 And for the first time, Coco began to believe she would finally understand what happened to her sister Karen.

Speaker 38 Will it help you to have a resolution of this case?

Speaker 42 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 42 And it's not how people say closing the book.

Speaker 13 You never close the book.

Speaker 42 You never close that book. But

Speaker 42 it's an understanding.

Speaker 42 And I know you never understand the universe and everything that happens in it, but with my sister, I just want to know why.

Speaker 24 But that last bit about not understanding everything, As we spoke, she could have no idea.

Speaker 34 The trial date was close.

Speaker 11 The state's case was ready.

Speaker 31 And then, Michael Studebaker, Ed Owens' defense attorney, was driving to work when his cell phone rang.

Speaker 7 It was his own forensic expert.

Speaker 62 And said, you're not going to believe what we just found under the fingernails. And I literally had to pull over because it just, my mind was just spinning.

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Speaker 31 It was the DNA.

Speaker 33 Like a legal magic wand, it seemed that test had changed everything in the Karen Strahm murder case.

Speaker 46 And now Ed Owens, a man who would have escaped detection forever without DNA, was about to go on trial for murder.

Speaker 25 And then a remarkable or at least extremely curious discovery.

Speaker 33 The material under Karen's fingernails was Ed Owens' DNA, all right. There was no dispute about that.

Speaker 43 The curious thing was the type of DNA.

Speaker 33 It was seminal fluid.

Speaker 57 What did you think when you heard that?

Speaker 62 I thought there's a semen under his fingernails that sure doesn't show murder. That shows consensual relations at the best.

Speaker 25 Ed must have had sex with Karen, said the defense attorney.

Speaker 26 Naturally, Detective Benson also heard about the discovery of semen, but his reaction was considerably different.

Speaker 30 I didn't believe that the whole sample was semen based on the scratches that Mr. Owens had on his arms and hands and face.

Speaker 29 This was not a lovey-dovey-sex situation.

Speaker 30 No, no, it was a knock-down drag-out fight.

Speaker 18 And Troy Rawlings was taken by surprise, too.

Speaker 4 Rawlings is the county attorney, the prosecutor. He'd been about ready to present his case in court when the news about semen hit.

Speaker 59 We didn't expect that, Keith. No kidding.
No kidding. That was a curveball,

Speaker 59 but instead of that curveball making us abandon our attempt to hit that pitch, we just decided, you know what, we need to learn to be better curveball hitters.

Speaker 34 Except, what happened next didn't seem so much like a hit for the prosecution, more like a strikeout.

Speaker 11 County Attorney Rawlings dropped the charges without prejudice, dismissed the case.

Speaker 11 Ed Owens was released.

Speaker 28 It's freezer bird.

Speaker 59 I took some heat over it. There's no doubt about it.

Speaker 4 In December of 2007, Ed went home to be with his family just in time for the holidays.

Speaker 13 Relieved.

Speaker 11 Glad it's over.

Speaker 12 And his family appeared before the cameras to say they had never doubted his innocence.

Speaker 68 We've always stood by Eddie saying that we knew he didn't do it. Anybody that knows Eddie knows he wouldn't do it.

Speaker 25 Steve Strom, watching all this, was horrified.

Speaker 4 Or so said his friend Dick Cantonwein.

Speaker 53 He just went to pieces again.

Speaker 53 He says, they haven't got enough on him, so they're going to come looking for me again. He says, it's going to start all over.

Speaker 39 Oh, the prosecutor tried to assure the public he wasn't giving up on making a case against Ed Owens.

Speaker 59 We were still confident Ed was the guy. We just didn't want to go off half-cocked, go to a jury trial, look stupid, quite frankly.

Speaker 24 But frankly, it was, in most people's opinion, over.

Speaker 29 It was dead, as far as a lot of people were concerned.

Speaker 62 As far as I was concerned, it absolutely was.

Speaker 4 Your man was free to go.

Speaker 29 He was.

Speaker 24 Winter settled in then, and the snow snow piled up on ski runs around Salt Lake City.

Speaker 4 The Karen Strom murder case faded out yet again as another season went by and the snow melted and the city bloomed into another summer.

Speaker 25 And her killer, whoever that might be, remained free.

Speaker 34 And the prosecutor did take some heat from people who might not have been aware of what his team was up to.

Speaker 4 An exhaustive re-examination of all the evidence, which, sometime in the summer of 2008, produced what was, shall we say, a tiny discovery.

Speaker 34 Two barely perceptible spots, indications of blood on Karen's underwear.

Speaker 52 Minuscule spots, major implications.

Speaker 5 That blood matched the DNA profile of Ed Owens.

Speaker 59 I think that Karen was fighting him off and scratching his hands. He's got her pinned down with one hand.

Speaker 59 He's trying to sexually assault her with another hand that she's cut and scratched, and that that's how the two drops of blood get on her panties.

Speaker 1 Now Prosecutor Rawlings was more confident he could convince a jury that far from having consensual sex with Karen, Ed tried to rape her and killed her in the process, which would explain the semen found under Karen's fingernails.

Speaker 59 Our view is that the most consistent explanation is she's trying to prevent him from sexually assaulting her.

Speaker 52 And so in the dog days of August, eight months after he'd withdrawn the murder charges against Ed Owens, Rawlings re-filed his murder case.

Speaker 38 We need to turn Ed Owens in.

Speaker 29 I didn't figure that they would ever re-file charges again, but evidently they want to try it again.

Speaker 40 It was March of 2009.

Speaker 39 Finally, the event had arrived. Almost 29 years after the murder of Karen Strom.

Speaker 21 It was the eve of Ed Owens' trial in Farmington, Utah.

Speaker 25 Coco was overcome with emotion.

Speaker 42 Oh, God, don't let me fail, Karen. I loved her so much that I want her to know the monster got you and now I'm facing the monster and I'm going to get him.

Speaker 40 But who was the monster?

Speaker 4 As the trial began, the defense attorney offered his theory to the jury that Ed and Karen had been having an affair.

Speaker 45 The semen got under her nails earlier before the night of the murder, a night when he wasn't even there.

Speaker 69 Where was Ed the night of the murder? I'll tell you where Ed was. Ed's a drunk.

Speaker 69 He went to the bar.

Speaker 54 He closed the bar, but he was not at the Stomp's house murdering Karen Strom the defense wanted the jury to believe it was an angry and jealous Steve who grabbed Karen by the neck and choked her to death an entirely different story than the one told by the prosecutor as Karen Strom was struggling for her life what she was doing was collecting the evidence that now testifies to you

Speaker 71 who her killer was even after she's dead

Speaker 71 and what that evidence tells you is that her killer is Ed.

Speaker 7 After a seven-day trial, it was now in the hands of the jury.

Speaker 55 And the detective who brought this cold case back to life was sweating.

Speaker 30 You just never know what a jury is going to do.

Speaker 39 On the first night, the jury deliberated until 9.30 p.m.

Speaker 20 and then announced they were going home.

Speaker 29 Boy, oh boy, the wheels of justice do grind slow, don't they? They do.

Speaker 30 And my thought was, holy cow, we're going to be doing this all over again.

Speaker 39 Could be, because when the jurors went home that night, they were deadlocked.

Speaker 23 How difficult was it to come forward and say you weren't so sure?

Speaker 61 It wasn't difficult for me because if you're going to hand down a guilty verdict, you better be able to erase all reasonable doubt.

Speaker 32 Here they were, responsible public servants, no idea that all their deliberation about guilt or innocence was about to be turned on its head by an unlikely public confession, a poisonous accusation, accusation, and a tale almost too wild to be believed.

Speaker 13 And you think people will believe that? Well, if they don't, they don't.

Speaker 19 Karen's sister Coco tossed all night.

Speaker 45 Detective Brad Venson barely slept the night the jury went home without a verdict.

Speaker 30 Yeah, I was sick.

Speaker 38 Now it looked like it might be what, a hung jury?

Speaker 30 Yeah, well, that was pretty much the only alternative as far as I was concerned.

Speaker 43 Oh, there was another alternative, as everyone would soon know.

Speaker 54 But the jury of the morning of the second day was preoccupied instead by a determined holdout.

Speaker 13 What were you concerned about?

Speaker 61 I had to be able to put Ed Owens

Speaker 61 in that home, murdering her that night.

Speaker 4 His lingering doubts were eventually dispelled, and the defense's efforts to pin the murder on Steve were rejected.

Speaker 23 I think we all agreed that, yeah, he was abusive, but the motive, I don't think we questioned whether or not he had a motive there.

Speaker 43 And so, before noon, the second day of deliberations, a verdict.

Speaker 70 We, the jury, and county, to try the issues in the above entitled Matter, do hereby find the defendant, Edward Lewis Owens, guilty.

Speaker 11 Guilty.

Speaker 23 The sound you hear is Ed Owens' distraught family.

Speaker 4 Outside the courtroom, they dodged reporters and then insisted later that the jury had simply gotten it wrong.

Speaker 47 Even the family to judge by their statements, unaware of one more wild, improbable, and impending twist.

Speaker 45 Almost two months after the verdict, a May morning, 2009, Ed's sentencing day.

Speaker 45 Waiting in the wings to make a pre-sentence statement, a woman who would offer evidence that Ed once raped and very nearly killed her a few years before Karen's murder.

Speaker 55 And then suddenly her statement was canceled.

Speaker 27 The judge made an announcement.

Speaker 32 Ed Owens had something important to say.

Speaker 72 Mr. Strom had asked me to kill his wife on several different occasions, and then he finally offered me half of her insurance money to do it.

Speaker 72 Actually, what I did was I went over to Warner and tell her that he wanted her killed. As it turned out, there was an argument between her and I, and I ended up strangling her and killing her.

Speaker 25 A confession.

Speaker 45 All of Ed's denials had been a lie.

Speaker 4 But it was a confession accompanied by a poisonous accusation that Steve Strom, Karen's husband, asked Ed, offered to pay him, to kill his wife.

Speaker 32 And as the killing was an accident, said Ed, he was guilty of manslaughter, not murder.

Speaker 46 Unlikely and outrageous as the allegations seemed, Detective Benson went right back to work.

Speaker 38 And you have to investigate that? Yes.

Speaker 30 So the saga continues.

Speaker 13 Hello, Ed.

Speaker 17 How are you?

Speaker 19 And meanwhile, in the visitor's room deep in a prison in Draper, Utah, we sat down for a chat with the admitted killer and now accuser, Ed Owens.

Speaker 29 You killed her.

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah. But he's the one that wanted her, dead.
Okay, I know. I don't have any proof of that, you know.
But if I'm gonna go down, why not take the other person involved, you know?

Speaker 29 Whether he was actually involved or not. If he wasn't involved, I wouldn't say this.

Speaker 13 Like I said, that's what he wanted me to do, is he wanted me to kill her for half the insurance money.

Speaker 32 And then the story gets a little convoluted.

Speaker 38 Did he ever pay you any money? No.

Speaker 13 I wouldn't have taken it. Wasn't the idea.

Speaker 13 I had no plans of killing her. None.

Speaker 13 None at all.

Speaker 28 No, it was an accident, he says.

Speaker 45 And as he tells this story, keep in mind that killing by strangulation requires prolonged force, several minutes of force, sustained, determined choking.

Speaker 13 I didn't purposely strangle her, okay? She kept slapping at me, you know.

Speaker 13 And I was trying to grab for like her shoulders, you know, and I was just shaking her, you know, trying to, you know,

Speaker 13 telling her, will you listen to me? Listen, damn it, you know. Just kept kept going on and on.
And

Speaker 13 next thing I know, she's on the floor.

Speaker 32 About sexual assault and murder?

Speaker 26 Never, vowed Ed.

Speaker 40 But what about that woman who claimed he'd raped her and left her for dead back in 1973, who was all set to tell her story in court?

Speaker 46 It was Ed's confession that prevented her testimony.

Speaker 28 Did you have any problems sexually in 1973?

Speaker 13 What are you talking about?

Speaker 28 All of a sudden, when she was going to come and testify, you had a statement you wanted to make.

Speaker 13 The girl in 1973. All right.

Speaker 13 All right.

Speaker 60 She described the guy as six foot, six foot two.

Speaker 13 I'm 5'10.

Speaker 34 In 1973, Ed was charged with kidnapping, robbery, rape, and assault with intent to commit murder.

Speaker 5 According to the case file, the young woman was hitchhiking.

Speaker 34 Ed picked her up, drove her to an isolated place, raped her, stabbed her with a screwdriver, then tried to choke her to death.

Speaker 18 And though the woman positively identified Ed and the car he was driving, he was acquitted.

Speaker 45 Ed was out on parole at the time of that incident after another young woman accused him of raping her back in 1969.

Speaker 38 What about the one when you were 18?

Speaker 13 That one, you know, you could have,

Speaker 13 had they been with like a date rape type thing.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I was probably guilty then.

Speaker 25 He was charged then with rape, kidnapping, and robbery.

Speaker 21 Pleaded guilty to robbery.

Speaker 31 The other two charges were dismissed.

Speaker 47 But that was then.

Speaker 25 Now he was claiming that Karen's death was an accident and a murder-for-hire plot.

Speaker 35 But the more we asked for evidence to back up his claim, the more reticent he became.

Speaker 28 What kind of evidence can you provide that there's any truth to that story?

Speaker 13 You know, it's an ongoing investigation, and we're just not talking about it right now.

Speaker 23 You mean there's more you haven't told me, that's what you're trying to tell me.

Speaker 13 seriously you got more evidence you haven't told me I don't know

Speaker 60 could be

Speaker 44 turns out he didn't

Speaker 7 although there was an insurance policy on Karen's life an investigation revealed that Ed's story was not credible and Steve Strom was not involved with Karen's murder and Strom burned by suspicion over the years would not agree to do a videotaped interview.

Speaker 23 And so it was Dick Cantonwein who spoke for him who told us about the damage from which his friend is trying to heal.

Speaker 57 But when the suspicion was lifted from his shoulders, I mean, he must have been thrilled, wasn't he?

Speaker 53 Pretty much, but still, he just relives that over and over and over.

Speaker 31 And Detective Benson, who finally confronted the mystery of the murder at the start of his career, he retired in 2014, just a few years after the old green suitcase finally yielded up its secrets.

Speaker 30 I think 30 years in law enforcement's probably enough.

Speaker 12 Who killed Karen Strom is no longer a mystery.

Speaker 10 All that mattered deeply to the sister who had kept vigil all those years.

Speaker 42 I miss you. I'll always miss you.

Speaker 42 But when I put this ugliness behind,

Speaker 13 I love you.

Speaker 42 We did it, sis. We did it.

Speaker 52 Once, there was a day to ride in her yellow Camaro, and then a day to defend justice in her memory.

Speaker 55 And both are what sisters do.

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