Common Denominators

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Speaker 1 He seemed uncomfortable somehow, a burly cop in the heart of wintry Manhattan. He wasn't used to being the center of positive attention.

Speaker 1 And yet, way up high in a New York City hotel conference room, the sleek crowd, the lawyers, the judges are here to honor him.

Speaker 1 For his work with the Buffalo Police Cold Case Unit for solving a string of rapes and murders committed by a man known as the Bike Path Rapist, and in the process, freeing an innocent man from prison.

Speaker 3 You're free, Aunt. You're free.
They made a mistake.

Speaker 1 All right, that sounds good to me.

Speaker 1 But Dennis Delano was in no mood to spout the usual banalities of a grateful cop clutching his big award.

Speaker 2 I'm speaking to you as, you know, lawyers, and I'm just an average person, average intelligence. I happen to have a lot of experience in police work.

Speaker 1 And that gathering of the cream of New York law could hardly mistake the tone of an angry man.

Speaker 2 And surely people with law degrees and that type of thing have to be able to see there's a flaw in the system here. Something has to be done with the system.

Speaker 1 I don't know what.

Speaker 2 I just know that it has to be changed. And I don't know.

Speaker 1 Even as he's speaking, he knows his own future as a cop is very bleak indeed.

Speaker 1 It's a very dangerous moment in the remarkable story you're about to hear.

Speaker 1 This is where it began, months earlier, a simple service in a modest church, Buffalo, New York. Detective Dennis Delano was at his usual Sunday post, a member of the church band.

Speaker 1 It was just a fluke, really, when Trish Radzikowski learned that the man helping with the service was actually a detective, a specialist in cold cases, who had become rather well known in Buffalo.

Speaker 4 I just thought, I got to talk to this guy because

Speaker 4 he's the one that can look at my sister's case.

Speaker 1 Her sister's case? Well, that would be the dreadful business of what happened to Joan Giambra in 1993.

Speaker 4 Sometimes I still find myself not totally, you know, have absorbed it, you know, after all these years.

Speaker 7 Detectives tonight, we're back at the Hillside Avenue address where they say 42-year-old Joan Giambra was strangled between 4 and 6 this morning.

Speaker 1 Joan Giambra was 42 years old the night her attacker raped her, choked the life out of her, left her naked and dead on the living room floor. A monstrous crime.

Speaker 1 More so because whoever did it also assaulted Joan's 11-year-old daughter. And when the police came, they found that little girl also naked and sprawled unconscious across her mother's dead body.

Speaker 3 Both the mother and her daughter, Kathy Giambra, were found nude on a sofa bed.

Speaker 1 The girl, Kathleen, was breathing but in a catatonic state when her brother, Don Cormier, saw the ambulance take her away.

Speaker 1 Don was Joan's eldest son. He lived just around the corner.
He'd been at his mother's house just the night before.

Speaker 8 I got out of work and I stopped over before I went home, and it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Speaker 1 And the next morning?

Speaker 8 One of my mom's friends came and knocked on my door and told me that there was a problem.

Speaker 1 A problem?

Speaker 8 I ran down to my my mom's house and

Speaker 8 that's when I seen Kathy

Speaker 8 on a gurney and my mom was covered up.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 I just couldn't believe what I was seeing.

Speaker 1 Difficult, even as we spoke in 2008, for Dawn to remember. Just as for Kathleen, the lack of memory was tormenting.

Speaker 11 It ate me up inside inside for 15 years almost that I can't remember, trying to remember every day, and there was a reason why I don't remember.

Speaker 9 Maybe it was too hard.

Speaker 1 But all the initial horror, and it did grip the city for a time, seemed gradually to fade away as interest shifted elsewhere, and the investigation of Joan's fate just died.

Speaker 4 We had to just hope that, you know, one day, you know, God will provide the justice for her.

Speaker 2 My focus is now on other people.

Speaker 1 And so, when she learned that that man in her parish was a detective, her deeply religious heart skipped a beat.

Speaker 4 I was meant to be there. I believe that all that was not an accident.

Speaker 1 Detective Delano, it should be said, did not gush enthusiasm. He had heard far too many entreaties that wound up going nowhere.
Still, she was a church member.

Speaker 2 I pulled the file, located the file, started reinvestigating it. My squad did.

Speaker 1 At first, it it looked frankly obvious. One more case among many of an angry husband, a woman who wanted to leave.

Speaker 2 She was going to serve divorce papers on her husband a week prior to her death. After reading the file, the most likely suspect seemed to be it would be her husband.

Speaker 1 Sam Jambra was not charged, though. There wasn't enough evidence for that back then, but there might be DNA evidence now.

Speaker 2 The clippings from the fingernails indicate that there was a struggle and that she had scratched her attacker.

Speaker 1 The latest DNA technology could identify even a few stray skin cells left out of those fingernails by the assailant. Now they could know for certain if the killer was Joan's husband.

Speaker 1 If the DNA was his, he must have been the murderer. But...

Speaker 2 When we went looking for the husband to talk to him, we found out that he was deceased.

Speaker 1 Sam Giambra, it turned out, killed himself in 2000. Dead end again? Not quite.
The coroner had preserved a crucial piece of information, a sample of Sam's DNA.

Speaker 1 What if that new DNA technology was applied to the old sample?

Speaker 2 We tried to match his DNA with the DNA found at the Giobra crime scene, and it turned out that it wasn't a match.

Speaker 1 So the murderer wasn't the husband, couldn't have been.

Speaker 1 Now the mystery was irresistible. Delano and his team went to work in earnest.

Speaker 2 My partners and I began taking DNA samples from everybody that we could find that was associated with that case. Everything was negative.

Speaker 1 But DNA, of course, is not the only thing a good investigator has at his or her disposal. Often it's simple chatter that will break a case.
Remembered stories.

Speaker 1 With the story, another of Joan Giambra's daughters told about a local bartender who, in the weeks after Joan left her husband, took her stepping out on a date or two.

Speaker 2 He had called her a few times after her mother's death, asking her how she was, and he felt bad because he used to go out with her mother and all of this stuff.

Speaker 1 A bartender?

Speaker 1 Who was he?

Speaker 1 Maybe if he was still feeling bad all these years, he might help solve the crime.

Speaker 1 Of course, as it would turn out, there was much more to it than just a courtesy call.

Speaker 3 Police say 42-year-old Joan Giambra was found strangled in her Hillside Avenue apartment yesterday.

Speaker 1 Buffalo, New York, September 1993. Joan Giambra, a mother of three, was found strangled and naked on her living room floor.
Her 11-year-old daughter unconscious, naked and draped over the dead body.

Speaker 1 And now, all these years later, the Buffalo Coal case team encountered a very curious story.

Speaker 1 Another of Joan's daughters told them about a mysterious phone call she'd received after the murder from a man who'd claimed he dated her mother, pumping her for information.

Speaker 12 Told me he was a friend of my mother's and if you know they found out what happened to her.

Speaker 1 The daughter vaguely remembered a name, Dennis.

Speaker 1 Dennis Donahue.

Speaker 1 Weirdly similar to the detective's name, Dennis Delano, though two more dissimilar lives would be hard to find.

Speaker 1 13 years after the murder, Donahue still hadn't gone far from the gritty watering holes on Buffalo South Side, where he'd once tended bar. He was unemployed now, living with relatives.

Speaker 1 Time for a visit.

Speaker 9 We decided to go and swab him.

Speaker 1 From Lisa Redman, a member of Delano's cold case team.

Speaker 15 He seemed very surprised that all of a sudden, after all these years, we were there at his door.

Speaker 1 Why get a sample of DNA? Well, if he dated Joan Giambra and then checked up on events after the murder, he had to be considered a suspect.

Speaker 2 When Detective Redmond asked him for a DNA sample, he agreed to give a DNA sample.

Speaker 1 Go figure. The swab was sent off to the lab.
A long wait ensued, and then it was a perfect match.

Speaker 1 Dennis donahue's dna matched the skin cells found under joan diabra's preserved fingernails dna evidence was obtained and yesterday we arrested one dennis donahue another mystery apparently solved thanks to the wonders of dna

Speaker 1 i was in disbelief but a funny thing can happen when you start to pull the thread on a long and ragged case The investigation began to turn up something else.

Speaker 1 Strange similarities to two other Buffalo murder cases, one in the 1990s, the other way back in the 1970s. And the common denominators were a method

Speaker 1 and a name.

Speaker 2 There was a lot of similarities in the crime scene photos with two of our prior cases that I had looked at earlier.

Speaker 1 One of those cases was the rape and murder of a middle-aged woman named Carol Reed, September 9th, 1975.

Speaker 1 Her body, naked and strangled, was found on the living room floor of her Buffalo apartment.

Speaker 16 Oh, I was in shock.

Speaker 9 You know, just didn't know what to do.

Speaker 1 When we spoke to her more than three decades later, Carol Reed's daughter, Lori Krug, was still picking up the pieces.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it was very difficult, but I think I kind of used,

Speaker 15 I'll think about it tomorrow.

Speaker 9 I'll just get through today.

Speaker 1 You saw the bloodstains on the carpet. That couldn't have been easy.

Speaker 15 Washing the kitchen floor was hard.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 That's okay.

Speaker 1 The thing of it is

Speaker 1 that nothing ever happened.

Speaker 1 Never heard.

Speaker 1 Dennis Donahue, it turned out, was a person of interest in the Carol Reed case. He lived just down the hall in her apartment building.

Speaker 1 But there was no way then to test the minute bits of evidence in and around the body for DNA. And no other evidence turned up, so the investigation died.

Speaker 1 But now, Detective Delano began to get that gut feeling cops are famous for.

Speaker 2 Carol Reed was murdered, left nude face up on her apartment floor in 1975, 9,975.

Speaker 2 Joan Jombrow was murdered on 9,993.

Speaker 2 Dennis Donahue's birth date is 9,952.

Speaker 2 So both of them homicides were committed on his birthday. And it was more than a coincidence.

Speaker 1 Two murder cases, same month and day, one M.O., rape, strangulation, nude corpses. Who was this Dennis Donahue? Was there even more in his past?

Speaker 1 About then, in fact, Detective Delano got another tip on another homicide. And once again, like a bad penny, the name Dennis Donahue popped up.

Speaker 2 So I hunted that file down. That was from 1993.

Speaker 2 I read that file and I said, sure enough, it's the same Dennis Donahue.

Speaker 1 Donahue had been questioned in the 1993 Valentine's Day murder of a 13-year-old girl named Crystal Lynn Girard.

Speaker 2 Now we have him at three homicide scenes.

Speaker 1 All three victims female.

Speaker 2 All three victims left to be found nude. lying face up.

Speaker 1 It all looked so similar. Again, that distinct method of of killing.
Again, Donahue was a suspect, but not charged. But in one way, the murder of young Crystal Lynn Girard was very different indeed.

Speaker 1 In that case, someone else had been convicted, and that someone had been in prison for it for more than a decade.

Speaker 1 When I first read the file and I saw somebody was convicted of it, it should, by rights, have been enough to make Detective Delano stop pulling that thread. But it wasn't.

Speaker 1 And thus began a strange and dangerous struggle between a cold case cop and the system he was sworn to uphold.

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Speaker 1 It was September 2007, a few days after the 14th anniversary of the dreadful murder of Joan Jambra, way back in 1993,

Speaker 1 finally charged with second-degree murder, a former bartender by the name of Dennis Donahue.

Speaker 9 DNA evidence was obtained, and yesterday we arrested one, Dennis Donahue.

Speaker 1 But by then the real mystery surrounded other cases to which that name, Donahue, had led.

Speaker 9 It's possible that he is a serial killer.

Speaker 1 For one thing, the 1975 murder of Carol Reed, in which he'd once been a person of interest.

Speaker 1 But also this, the closed case of the 1993 Valentine's Day murder of a 13-year-old girl eight months before Joan Giambra was killed.

Speaker 1 Crystal Lynn Girard was found naked and strangled on her bed, her Valentine socks the gut-wrenching reminder of what had been done to her. The victim's mother found the body.

Speaker 1 and accused an ex-boyfriend. His name was Dennis Donahue, who was taken in for questioning.

Speaker 2 And what do you know? The tape of his polygraph exam still existed. Here it is.

Speaker 7 Did you yourself kill Crystal Lynn? No. You know for sure who killed Crystal Lynn?

Speaker 1 No. The polygrapher's verdict? Dennis Donahue was telling the truth.
Of course, polygraphy tests are not considered to be particularly reliable. They're not permitted in court, for example.

Speaker 1 But Donahue was cleared of any involvement in Crystal Lynn's murder after that polygraph test.

Speaker 1 In fact, the Assistant District Attorney at the time, Frank Clark, allowed Donahue to testify to the grand jury that indicted the main suspect.

Speaker 1 Who was the evil person accused of viciously strangling sweet little Crystal Lynn?

Speaker 1 It was a woman named Lynn Djack, Crystal Lynn's mother.

Speaker 1 What kind of a world, what kind of a mother would do such a thing? Lynn Deejack was 29, a single mother, foot loose, a bartender herself. Lynn, did you kill your daughter?

Speaker 1 By the time of her arrest, a consensus had already formed in the old neighborhood.

Speaker 20 I think she really did it.

Speaker 21 She just didn't give a.

Speaker 21 Excuse my French.

Speaker 9 But she didn't look like she cared.

Speaker 7 No, she did not look like she cared.

Speaker 2 I didn't do it.

Speaker 1 Once the trial began, it picked up that same issue the neighbors gossiped about character. Lynn Dijak was not exactly a poster child for motherhood.

Speaker 1 She worked at her mother's bar, practically grew up there. Too many late nights, lots of boyfriends, one of them, Dennis Donahue.

Speaker 1 In fact, the night Crystal Lynn was murdered, Lynn broke up with Donahue, a screaming, threatening, booze-soaked night of jealousy, revenge, sex, and it turned out, death for the one person innocent of everything.

Speaker 2 To kill one's own child with one's own bare hands

Speaker 2 by applying a fatal chokehold for four or five continuous minutes

Speaker 2 It's without question wickedly evil.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor wove a story about a drunken, unfit mother who left her child alone all night long and then boiled over in a fit of unrestrained fury on her returned home and choked her own daughter to death.

Speaker 1 And that was more, it seemed, than just a theory. An old family friend named Wayne Hudson told the jury that Lynn D.

Speaker 1 Jack met him in a bar months after Crystal Lynn's death and in a drunken stupor confided to him her dreadful secret. How could Defense Attorney Andrew Lutempio counter this?

Speaker 5 Wayne Hudson said there were people in the bar and that she came up to him and started crying and just out of nowhere said, I can't take it anymore. I need to tell you what happened.

Speaker 1 The jury was convinced Lynn had strangled and killed her own daughter.

Speaker 2 I didn't do this.

Speaker 1 Lynn wept what most everyone assumed were crocodile tears, and the judge gave her 25 to life. You are indeed guilty of this crime.

Speaker 1 Detective Delano pored over the 1994 trial transcripts, all 800 pages. Turned out he knew and liked the prosecutor, Joseph Maruzak.

Speaker 1 And he certainly believed in her guilt, didn't he?

Speaker 2 He told me she was absolutely guilty. She was evil, and all of this stuff.

Speaker 1 She must have been an evil woman to kill her. Very strong.
Oh, absolutely. Then he called another acquaintance, Lynn D.
Jack's defense attorney, Andrew Lotempio.

Speaker 2 He said, she didn't do it. He didn't say hello.

Speaker 1 Lotempio gave Detective Delano an earful about the police and the DA's office.

Speaker 5 I think that what happened, quite frankly, is they ran into a case here where there were not a lot of leads. And the next day after Crystal's body was found, they went out there.

Speaker 5 The women in the neighborhood immediately were saying it had to be Lynn. No one else could have done this.
It had to be Lynn.

Speaker 1 Still, Lotempio was pretty sure he knew why the jury convicted. It was the testimony of Wayne Hudson, that old family friend.
He told jurors Lynn Djack confessed to him her crime.

Speaker 1 But there was an important fact about Hudson. He was a two-time convicted felon.
He'd been charged again.

Speaker 1 Lotapio told Detective Delano he always suspected the DA's office had made a cozy deal with Mr. Hudson.
And yet, you know, the DA says no offer was made to him, no, and he got nothing from it.

Speaker 5 Well, at the time, Mr. Hudson had two prior prior felony convictions.
He was under indictment on a third felony conviction.

Speaker 1 In New York State at the time, a third felony conviction was worth 25 to life.

Speaker 2 After that, Wayne Hudson's original case comes up in court, where he is allowed by the district attorney to plea to a misdemeanor, thereby doing absolutely no jail time.

Speaker 2 when he was originally facing 25 to life. Now,

Speaker 2 I'm not saying that

Speaker 2 the district attorney made a deal with Wayne Hudson, but it sure looks like it to me.

Speaker 1 Detective Delano considered all this and concluded.

Speaker 2 Absolutely nothing about that trial, the testimony, anything else added up. Not in my mind anyway.

Speaker 1 By now, he was all but convinced Lynn Djack had been framed. She did not murder her daughter.

Speaker 1 But Delano needed to hear her say it himself, so he called DJ at the Maximum Security Security Prison, where she'd been held for 13 years.

Speaker 2 I was more convinced after talking to her that she didn't do it.

Speaker 1 And so Detective Delano put that certainty into his hip pocket right beside his dogged sense of right and wrong and went public. An innocent woman was in prison, he told the press.

Speaker 2 I felt somebody had to do something about it.

Speaker 1 Perhaps. But the DA Frank Clark was not amused.
The DA was a man whose undeniable popularity and judgment had kept him in the job for a long time.

Speaker 1 And in this case, the judgment of a jury 13 years earlier is what counted, not some detective's opinion.

Speaker 20 We all have opinions. And you know what our opinions are?

Speaker 19 In fact, mine too?

Speaker 20 You know what they count for? A great big nothing. The only opinion that counts is the jury's opinion.

Speaker 1 Besides, D.A. Clark had butted heads with Detective Delano in public already.

Speaker 1 That time, another convict was released from prison, and Delano wound wound up getting that award in New York City. Was the cop going to defy the DA again?

Speaker 1 At this point, it was pretty clear somebody was going to get hurt.

Speaker 2 This area here is basically called South Buffalo area.

Speaker 1 We called it the Queen City once. Buffalo, New York, a place bursting with steel and trade and high-paying jobs.

Speaker 1 But times changed.

Speaker 2 It's just a working man's town.

Speaker 1 Back then there was a bar in every corner just about.

Speaker 1 It's a neighborhood where Detective Delano and the Cole Case squad found themselves investigating a series of murders thought at the time to be unrelated.

Speaker 1 It's where 13-year-old Crystal Lynn Girard grew and lived and died her dreadful death on Valentine's Day 1993. Killed, a jury decided by her own mother, Lynn Djack.

Speaker 2 We came to the conclusion after poring over and over it again that most likely she didn't commit the crime.

Speaker 1 Instead, believed Detective Delano, the murderer was Dennis Donahue, Djack's jilted boyfriend.

Speaker 1 the same man now charged with killing Joan Giambra, the cold case that led investigators to other crimes in the south side of Buffalo. But to convince the DA, Delano and his team needed hard evidence.

Speaker 5 I'm going to sit down with Detective Delano and I'll help in any way I can because I

Speaker 1 had always believed Donahue committed the crime. And thus an unlikely alliance was formed.

Speaker 1 The detective and the defense attorney set out to free Lynn Djack and find convincing evidence against Dennis Donahue.

Speaker 5 I had directed them as to what evidence might have been in the evidence boxes that could be retested for DNA using the current DNA technologies.

Speaker 1 Detective Delano and the Buffalo Police Cold Case Squad dug up the evidence box. Was there enough material to produce a sample of DNA?

Speaker 1 Why, yes, there was.

Speaker 2 There was blood on some type of fluid. There was male DNA found in that mixture.

Speaker 1 That male DNA was found in three places in and around the body of Crystal Lynn. The police, remember, also had a sample of Dennis Donahue's DNA.
The samples were compared

Speaker 1 and matched. It was a slam dunk at that point.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Now that, it seemed to Delano, was evidence that DA would have to listen to. But then again, maybe not.

Speaker 20 The issue is whether that fact indicates that someone other than Lynn D-Jack was the person who killed her daughter.

Speaker 1 D.A. Clark was of the view that the matching DNA did not necessarily indicate another killer.
Now, by rights, the D.A. was the boss, after all, and he made the call.

Speaker 2 Then we were told to lay off of it.

Speaker 1 So that pretty much was that. Time to quit.
Except, well, you've probably already gathered that Detective Delano wasn't about to do that. He did not quit.

Speaker 1 He went over the boss's head again and made his case to the public on TV.

Speaker 21 Later, Buffalo Cold Case detectives spoke publicly about the case.

Speaker 1 To which Frank Clark shot back, also in public, a suggestion that the DNA evidence did not prove Donahue killed Crystal Lynn.

Speaker 1 It might have meant, said the DA, that he was having consensual sex with that 13-year-old and that her mother may still have been the killer.

Speaker 20 Let's take a hypothetical.

Speaker 20 If somebody has sexual relations with somebody else and that somebody else turns up dead two days later, is the fact that they had sexual relations evidence of the homicide?

Speaker 1 Well, those, as far as Detective Delano was concerned, were fighting words. The DA, he said, had impugned the character of an innocent murdered girl.
The very idea she'd been having sex with that

Speaker 2 That's absurd and it's disgusting. And for him to publicly state something like that, I think it's totally unconscionable and irresponsible.

Speaker 1 It was an unequal battle, of course. Detectives aren't supposed to take on the DA, especially on television.
But all of a sudden, the odds changed quite dramatically.

Speaker 1 A judge had been looking at the new evidence Detective Delano had found and issued an order to release Lynn Djack from prison.

Speaker 22 Yes, DJ is released upon her own recognizance. That's the order of this court.
We stand adjourned.

Speaker 1 And just like that, Lynn walked out of the courthouse into the cold Buffalo air. But to what? Freedom?

Speaker 1 Well, not quite. The DA had an option now.
He could drop all charges against Lynn Djack, or he could try her all over again.

Speaker 20 The question of guilt or innocence hasn't been determined.

Speaker 1 The decision was quick. Retrial for murder.
Really? In spite of that new DNA evidence?

Speaker 6 It's been a long couple of weeks, hasn't it, Dennis?

Speaker 1 It sure has, yeah. Now again, Detective Delana was having trouble keeping his mouth shut.

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Try Dorito's Golden Sriracha. Spicy, but not too spicy.

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Speaker 24 Do I feel vindicated?

Speaker 1 No, I don't. Not at all.
Not yet.

Speaker 1 Not yet. It was just before Christmas 2007 when, after 13 years in prison, convicted of murdering her own daughter, Lynn Djack was released, but not quite free.

Speaker 24 Because they're still trying to say that they're going to retry me. When they retry me, and I hope and pray to God they do, that's when I'll be vindicated.

Speaker 1 As she sat with us, she was still waiting to learn her fate. With her, for support, her husband and the father of her twin boys.

Speaker 1 She's been getting reacquainted after all that time.

Speaker 1 As for her story, nobody ever really knew her side, she said.

Speaker 1 She never testified in court during her trial and decided to tell us what she knows about what happened and about her daughter, Crystal Lynn.

Speaker 1 She was your little buddy. Yep.

Speaker 24 She was my heart. She was considerate.

Speaker 1 She was compassionate.

Speaker 24 She looked out for me more than I looked out for her.

Speaker 1 And often it fell to Crystal Lynn at 13 to mother her eight-year-old brother Eddie while Lynn was out working at the bar. She was sort of the grown-up in this relationship in some ways.

Speaker 24 In some ways, yes, she was.

Speaker 1 Yes, she was.

Speaker 1 And then, Valentine's Day, 1993, Crystal Lynn spent the evening at home, alone, while her mother attended a friend's wedding with Dennis Donahue, a man she admits she was dating not for love,

Speaker 1 but for help in starting a business.

Speaker 24 Truth of the matter, I was playing him.

Speaker 24 And I don't know what I was going to do at the end, but I know know I was playing him to try to get this business out of him so I could be on my own.

Speaker 1 But she soon noticed odd things about Donahue. For one thing, she said, he was very possessive.

Speaker 24 He hired somebody to follow me on a girl's night out.

Speaker 1 He's a stalker. Yes.

Speaker 24 I had told myself after the wedding that I was going to break up with him. And that's exactly what I did.

Speaker 1 And thus, on an unlucky street corner of South Buffalo, a night of drama, Dennis Donahue, Donahue, she said, followed her to her mother's bar.

Speaker 1 And when she fled from there, he followed her to her house about six doors down the street. Around midnight, she said, a screaming, drunken fight ensued, and still Donahue refused to leave.

Speaker 1 Crystal Lynn helped her mother call 911.

Speaker 24 He slapped the phone out of my hand, and I proceeded to again pick up the phone and call the police. Because the police are coming, he now leaves.

Speaker 1 And then Lynn D. Jack made what may have been the biggest mistake of her life.
She turned to her daughter and said, Don't answer the door when the police come.

Speaker 24 I don't want to get in any trouble for leaving you home alone.

Speaker 1 That's right. She left her daughter alone in the house and headed back down the street to her mother's bar.
She rationalized. Crystal Lynn was an accomplished babysitter.
She could look after herself.

Speaker 1 At the bar, Lynn once again encountered Donahue.

Speaker 24 He comes into the bar. He starts chasing me all around the bar.

Speaker 1 The night spiraled from bad to worse when Lynn met up with an old boyfriend at the bar and left with him, ditching Donahue, who then stalked the pair of them throughout the night, jealousy fueled by alcohol, drugs, and rage.

Speaker 24 We got out of the car and

Speaker 24 Dennis Donahue came out of nowhere, grabbed Michael from behind. and put a knife up to his throat.
And he was asking me, is this what you want?

Speaker 1 is this what you want and i said yes it is lynn said she slipped back to the house to check on her daughter one more time at about 4 30 a.m her story supported by the former boyfriend who said he went with her and she was fine i breathed a sigh of relief but then she left again she and her male companion went back to his place where she spent the rest of the night.

Speaker 1 And it was after noon by the time she arrived home again.

Speaker 24 When I came in,

Speaker 24 I just knew something was wrong. You know, Crystal Lynn, where are you?

Speaker 1 Are you up?

Speaker 1 No answer. She stepped into the bedroom, and there was Crystal Lynn.
She was lying on the bed, naked, but for some red socks she had worn for Valentine's Day.

Speaker 24 You just do.

Speaker 24 I don't know how to explain it. You just don't want to believe what you're seeing.

Speaker 1 The police came then.

Speaker 24 I went down for questioning. Toward the end, I started feeling like, wait a minute, this is not going like I feel that it should be going.

Speaker 24 I'm questioning questions that should be brought to a grieving mother.

Speaker 2 They suspected you.

Speaker 24 They never came out and said it, but I felt it.

Speaker 1 Did you ask them, you know, have you talked to this Donahue?

Speaker 24 Oh, yeah. I kept telling them you need to go get Dennis Donahue.

Speaker 1 And the police did contact Donahue. That was when he passed the polygraph test and was eliminated as a suspect.

Speaker 1 Eight months after her daughter's death, Lynn Dijack was charged with second-degree murder. Lynn was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 25 years to life.

Speaker 24 I feel it was more my lifestyle that got me convicted, not the actual crime itself.

Speaker 1 By that time, she'd given birth to twins. They were taken away to foster care.
So was her eight-year-old son, Eddie.

Speaker 24 There's no words in the English language to describe it.

Speaker 1 In the 13 years of prison that followed, she had lots of time to think.

Speaker 1 It's true what they say. The pain never really goes away, does it? It never goes away.
Never.

Speaker 24 And you never stop playing the what-if game.

Speaker 1 How do you play the what-if game?

Speaker 24 What if I wouldn't have played this man? What if I wouldn't have left her to babysit her brother, babysit herself?

Speaker 2 And he can't bring her back?

Speaker 2 Nope.

Speaker 1 And then, not long after her release, Lynn heard the DA's announcement. A new medical examiner had been brought in to review the case, the famous Michael Bodden.
And what did he pronounce?

Speaker 1 Crystal Lynn died of a cocaine overdose.

Speaker 1 Abundant amount of froth

Speaker 6 that

Speaker 6 was present out of the nose and mouth, which is typical of a drug overdose.

Speaker 1 Meaning, said the DA, he would now drop all charges against Lynn Djack.

Speaker 20 Manual strangulation was not the cause of death. We no longer have a criminal case.
The legal issues, as far as I'm concerned, are over, both with regard to D-Jack, Donahue, and everybody else.

Speaker 1 Victory?

Speaker 1 Or was it? Because now the DA was saying Crystal Lynn wasn't even murdered. It was a cocaine overdose.

Speaker 1 What an insult to the victim, said Detective Delano, who now had yet another bone to pick with the DA.

Speaker 2 It's not a cocaine overdose. You can bring in 10 Dr.
Badens and say the same thing, and I'll still disagree with them.

Speaker 1 While cocaine was found in Crystal Lynn's body at the time of her death, the original pathologist said the amount was too small to be lethal.

Speaker 1 Crystal Lynn died a violent death by manual strangulation for which there was evidence. And then, of course, there was the new DNA evidence linking Donahue to the scene of the death.

Speaker 2 All my experience, my heart, everything tells me that this is a homicide.

Speaker 1 And Delano was determined to prove it. So against his boss's direct order to stop talking to the media, he took his evidence and a reporter to a convention of forensic scientists in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 They finally agreed that

Speaker 2 the death was most likely not a cocaine overdose and that you could not ignore all the other evidence in the case.

Speaker 1 And that is when the Buffalo police said enough is enough.

Speaker 1 Detective Dennis Delano was suspended without pay.

Speaker 1 It was still winter 2007 when Lynn Djack channeled Rip Van Winkle. Her first internet experience.
What was it?

Speaker 2 Z. Z?

Speaker 1 And then what am I supposed to do? First time on a cell phone. A call to her eldest son.

Speaker 24 I miss you.

Speaker 24 I mean, it's a homecoming, but it doesn't feel like a homecoming without you.

Speaker 24 I miss you.

Speaker 1 She was even a guest on the Today Show.

Speaker 1 Her youngest, the twins born as she went to prison,

Speaker 1 were now teens.

Speaker 24 My boys were still babies to me. And I'm coming coming home to grown men.
I want to be

Speaker 24 hugging them and kissing them and taking them into my arms and, you know.

Speaker 1 Treating them like little babies.

Speaker 24 Just be affectionate and loving to them. And because they haven't had female interaction like that, female time, they would jerk away from me.

Speaker 1 And it

Speaker 24 would stab me right in the heart.

Speaker 1 Her eldest, Eddie, served two tours in Iraq, had a wife and kids of his own. The twin's father is Chuck Peters.
He married Lynn in prison, stuck with her all those years.

Speaker 1 I think we're on the wrong side, honey.

Speaker 1 Adjustments.

Speaker 1 And we will interfere, honey.

Speaker 1 She listened as the state claimed her daughter had died of a cocaine overdose.

Speaker 24 My daughter didn't use drugs. My daughter was on the honorable.

Speaker 1 Then her hero, the man whose investigation freed her, was suspended without pay.

Speaker 1 And finally, Dennis Donahue, once briefly her boyfriend, went on trial for second-degree murder for killing Joan Giambra. That's the cold case that started it all.

Speaker 1 Fact.

Speaker 2 Joan was strangled to death and the defendant's DNA is under both her hands.

Speaker 1 Someone else.

Speaker 1 As Lynn Dijak waited for Donahue's trial to end, She celebrated Mother's Day for the first time in years.

Speaker 1 She replaced her prison Polaroids with a real family portrait.

Speaker 1 And a day later, after seven hours of deliberation, the jury reached its verdict. Dennis Donahue was guilty of murdering Joan Giambra.

Speaker 1 There was a brief meeting in front of the courthouse, Lynn Dijak and Joan Giambra's family.

Speaker 5 He's done. He's done, Lynn.

Speaker 1 He can't hurt nobody ever.

Speaker 1 Finally, something that felt like justice to her children, Don Cormier and Kathleen Giambra.

Speaker 8 That will never bring my mother back, but it was she finally gets some peace and her case finally being solved.

Speaker 11 That day, it was very gloomy and rainy that day, and then the day after, it was so sunny and beautiful outside.

Speaker 11 It was like you knew your mother, my mother, was shining down on us, like she was in her glory and finally could rest in peace.

Speaker 1 Perhaps the biggest outrage for Delano was that Dennis Donahue, whose DNA was linked to 13-year-old Crystal Lynn Girard's case, could never be brought to trial in her death. Why?

Speaker 1 Because back in 1993, Dennis Donahue testified before the grand jury that indicted Lynn Dijak.

Speaker 1 And it turns out that under New York State law, that testimony gave him automatic immunity from prosecution. It was the DA, said Delena, who made that possible.

Speaker 1 The same DA who suggested Crystal Lynn wasn't murdered at all, but overdosed on cocaine. Donahue died in prison in 2020.

Speaker 2 I don't know how many pills I take for blood pressure and stuff.

Speaker 1 Detective Delano, knowing it might cost him his job, had defied his own boss's gag order

Speaker 1 by going public to force the Crystal Lynn Girard case forward.

Speaker 1 Here you are, battering your head against the district attorney, for God's sake, until getting to the point where you're suspended

Speaker 2 without pay.

Speaker 2 Without pay.

Speaker 1 Why does it matter so much?

Speaker 2 Because it's not the truth. I don't care if it was the president of the United States that told me that this is a cocaine overdose.
It's not a cocaine overdose. It was a homicide.
Shame on them.

Speaker 2 Shame on them. It's a 13-year-old little girl, and she didn't deserve to die like that.

Speaker 1 The end of the road for the cop who took on the DA?

Speaker 1 Well, not quite.

Speaker 2 A rural outrage.

Speaker 1 Detective Dennis Delano had become something of a folk hero around Buffalo. The thought that there is a cop out there who who would say, that's not a good enough answer.

Speaker 25 I don't believe that to be true, and actually get you out of jail.

Speaker 11 He's my hero.

Speaker 13 He solved our case when other cops couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 A fundraiser was organized. When I tell you, your fans are your fans.

Speaker 1 The two innocent people he freed from prison were there.

Speaker 1 We recorded you getting that award in New York City, and you said to those people, something has to change, something has to be done. It has to be.
What are you going going to do about it?

Speaker 1 I think I may be

Speaker 2 getting more involved in the system than

Speaker 2 I was willing to get involved in before.

Speaker 1 Delano retired from the Buffalo Police Department rather than take the suspension. In 2010, he sued the city of Buffalo and the Buffalo Police Department.
That suit was later dismissed by the court.

Speaker 1 Also in 2010, Delano was elected the town justice for Cheetahwaga, New York.

Speaker 2 I just cannot sit for things that are wrong to keep on being wrong.

Speaker 1 Delano retired from the position in 2014, citing health issues. As for the DA, Frank Clark, despite our repeated requests, he declined the opportunity to offer his point of view.

Speaker 1 And the very day in 2008 that the jury found Dennis Donahue guilty, he held a press conference, and Frank Clark announced he was retiring. Health reasons.

Speaker 20 This is the time that I have to say goodbye.

Speaker 1 In those early days, there were some new parishioners at Dennis Delano's church on Sundays. Parishioners like Lynn Dejak.

Speaker 2 Yes, she comes, her whole family. They come every Sunday.

Speaker 1 Of course, those Sundays are long gone now. Lynn Dejack sued the state of New York and settled for $2.7 million.

Speaker 1 And a federal lawsuit naming, among others, the city of Buffalo and Erie County would be settled in 2015, the proceeds going to her estate.

Speaker 1 Lynn Dejack died in 2014, less than seven years after her release from prison. She died praying that somehow, someday, justice would also be done in the name of her daughter, Crystal Lynn Girard.

Speaker 23 Are you ready to get spicy?

Speaker 14 These Doritos Golden Sriracha aren't that spicy.

Speaker 23 Sriracha sounds pretty spicy to me.

Speaker 18 Um, a little spicy, but also tangy and sweet.

Speaker 23 Maybe it's time to turn up the heat.

Speaker 14 Or turn it down.

Speaker 14 It's time for something that's not too spicy. Try Dorito's Golden Sriracha.

Speaker 23 Spicy. Spicy,

Speaker 18 but not too spicy.