Hundreds Of Reasons

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Up next, a restaurant robbery goes wrong.

There was no reason for this to happen, Stephen.

This was a vicious, vicious attack.

And the evidence is contradictory.

There was somebody else bleeding at the scene of the crime.

That blood and the partial fingerprint were all investigators' hand.

I wasn't holding my breath for any real results until the money trail provides investigators with a vital clue.

Jennifer Holmes remembers Super Bowl Sunday 2001 for one reason.

It was the day she first met her husband.

They were both at the same Super Bowl party.

And I saw him sitting there with the perfect hair and his leather jacket, perfect smile.

A year later, the two were married.

And 29-year-old Stephen became a father to Jennifer's young son.

They also had plans to have children of their own.

As far as his career, he was...

I noticed this about him.

He was always happiest when he was working in a restaurant.

Stephen was an assistant manager of a steakhouse in St.

Petersburg, Florida.

He often worked long hours, and some nights were longer than others.

He called me at 10.18 and said, I'm just letting you know I'm going to be later tonight because we had a late party and I just closed up.

I just let everyone out and lock the door.

Around midnight, an exterminator entered the restaurant with his own key.

That's when he saw the bloody footprints and he saw and found Mr.

Holmes'

lifeless body.

Stephen Holmes had been stabbed to death.

I've never seen a crime scene this horrific.

It was a pretty, pretty bad scene.

In a clear case of overkill, Stephen was stabbed more than 40 times.

When you think of a murder, you sometimes think, okay, somebody is shot or maybe they're stabbed.

I mean, this was a vicious, vicious attack.

It was almost decapitated.

Robbery appeared to be the motive.

About $8,000 was missing from the safe in the manager's office.

This was much more than usual because the restaurant had been promoting $100 gift certificates as Christmas presents that evening.

It's at a restaurant during the month of December, generally speaking a fairly busy time of the year, so we'd all piece together that that's what the motive was.

The exterminator who found the body was the first and most obvious suspect, but was quickly written off.

Due to his demeanor, how he looked, and not having any signs of violence or blood on his person, they could see that he was nowhere near involved in this case.

Fortunately for police, the restaurant had several surveillance cameras.

When we saw the camera was present in the hallway, our initial reaction was that we may very well have not only the attack on video,

but at least a starting point of how the suspect was built and his race.

But there was an immediate setback.

All the cameras were hooked to a single video recorder,

and it was gone.

The entire VCR was, the cords were actually cut and removed from the office.

There were no signs of forced entry.

Was it possible that a customer hid in the restaurant until closing time in preparation for the robbery?

If the killer was a customer, that meant dozens, if not hundreds, of potential suspects.

Friends, family, and co-workers had difficulty understanding why Stephen Holmes had been murdered.

The restaurant had never been robbed before and was located in a low crime area.

Robberies usually don't result in this type of repeated violence.

Very rarely, and in armed robberies, does the victim sustain this many injuries.

Stephen's best friend and co-worker, Wilson Santeal, was among the first to offer his condolences.

I heard wailing.

I came inside and it was Wilson in the living room crying.

My wife consoled him and

you know,

grabbed his shoulders and just said, you know, think about Stephen's smile and,

you know, he would forgive whoever did this.

And

I think he started wailing more.

The day after Stephen Holmes' murder, a man working across the street from the crime scene contacted police.

This individual indicated that a white pickup truck with a horizontal stripe along the side of it raced out of the Durango's parking lot prior to the police arriving.

The witness said this happened at about 11 o'clock, just after the time police believe Stephen was killed.

The description was so detailed.

I mean, a loud muffler,

stripes on the side,

you know, a small pickup.

For two days, police officers stopped dozens of trucks that fit the description, checking the interiors for blood and the drivers for any fresh wounds.

Then, they got a devastating setback.

The witness now said he made the whole thing up.

He was trying to score points with his girlfriend is what it basically boiled down to.

That's a week's worth of work.

And it's down the tubes.

And it's very disappointing.

As family and friends mourned Stephen Holmes, police wondered who would want him dead.

Nobody who knew him, as far as I was concerned at that time, could have hurt him, especially like that.

We'd interviewed a lot of his friends, a lot of family members, some co-workers.

You could not find a single person that would say anything bad about him.

Defensive wounds showed Stephen fought his attacker to the end.

He had over 24 defensive wounds, I believe, and 20 wounds to his neck and his face.

It was obvious it was a very big struggle.

Part of the struggle started inside the kitchen area and it made its way down that small hallway into the doorway of the office.

And then, right there in the office, is where the final struggle took place.

It appeared Stephen tried to make it into his office and shut the door.

There were actually stab marks on the door.

There was a large concentration of blood on that door.

There was a huge amount of blood on the floor.

The victim very well may have slipped on his own blood.

There were dozens of footprints made by the killer.

Unfortunately, there were no clear impressions for comparison.

It was someone that may have had a pair of galoshes or boots, the cleanup type boots, handy, or actually had them on at the time they left the murder scene.

But it appeared the killer left evidence as he removed the surveillance equipment.

The suspect had to actually step over the victim that he had just killed.

The VCR was up off the counter area of the desk.

I believe that the suspect utilized part of that desk to reach up, cut the cord, and take the VCR.

On the floor underneath that shelf, investigators saw a manila folder.

When they turned it over, they found something.

We looked at it closer and we actually noticed the fingerprint in blood.

Myself and Mr.

Carlisle looked at each other and said, We got it.

Was it possible the killer accidentally knocked it onto the floor as he was stealing the security system VCR?

The folder, the fingerprint wasn't face up, so the person who, as they were leaving, probably wouldn't have known that they had left that essential piece of evidence.

But it was a partial print and badly smudged.

The technician and I were going back and forth and I'm like, well I think I can use it but let's see if we can make it just a little bit better and handed it back to him.

But enhancing it would come at a price.

That would actually destroy the DNA profile of the blood that the fingerprint was left in.

Investigators decided the risk was worth it.

The print was sprayed with amido-black, a chemical dye that reacts with the proteins in blood.

You worked on it a little bit more, and we decided that was as good as the print was going to get.

The result was the partial print of a fingertip.

Investigators entered the print into the nationwide fingerprint database of known criminal offenders, and the result was bad news.

I did do an APHIS search, but I was not able to come up with the match.

That's because the print didn't have enough points of comparison for the computer to process.

With no print match and now no DNA, investigators were no closer to solving this murder.

In an attempt to find Stephen Holmes' killer, investigators wanted to make sure they identified every piece of potential evidence in the restaurant.

The murder took place in Stephen's office in the back.

But investigators noticed small circular blood drops on the counter near the sink in the kitchen.

It was obviously close to the crime scene, but far enough away that we were hoping that that was in fact the suspect's blood.

Blood tests revealed it did not belong to the victim Stephen Holmes.

Somebody had to be standing over the table and blood dripped off of onto the table.

But if the blood was the perpetrator's, why was it there and why didn't he clean it up?

These almost perfectly round blood drops called passive drops were made by someone standing still, possibly while washing his hands at the sink.

A lot of times in a knife fight like that, the knife may slip out of his hand and cut his finger or something similar to that effect.

The blood DNA was possible evidence, but investigators had no one to compare it to.

With no sign of forced entry, the killer could have been an employee.

So investigators asked restaurant employees for DNA samples and their fingerprints.

They also wanted to see if anyone had cuts or bruises on their hands.

They say, you know what?

Let's bring all the employees in and let's fingerprint everybody.

At least if we do that, maybe we can rule everybody out with the fingerprint that we've got now.

But as police were fingerprinting the employees, they didn't notice any with visible injuries.

Authorities are thinking the killer's probably not here.

He's probably not an employee.

It was basically something that had to be done to further the investigation, but I wasn't holding my breath for any real results.

Nevertheless, each employee was fingerprinted carefully.

This would be the front of the finger, but the print I had was more off to the side.

So, in order to make sure I got the area I needed, I had to fully roll each and every finger of each and every employee.

And in a shocking development, the print on the Manila folder matched the last person anyone expected, especially Stephen Holmes' family.

It belonged to Wilson Santiel, Stephen's best friend, the restaurant's maintenance man and prep cook.

Stephen's family couldn't believe it since the two often worked late together.

Stephen would bring in CDs specifically that he knew was the type of music that Wilson liked so that they could put them in and it would go through the whole store and they could be listening to that music while they were working.

Wilson Santile went to the ceremonies to honor the deceased.

He hugged family members, cried when it appeared to be appropriate.

There were no flight issues.

There was no obvious signs that we needed to suspect him of anything.

But investigators naturally went further, comparing Santile's DNA to the blood droplets on the kitchen counter and faucet.

Those six foreign male DNA profiles found at the scene did match the suspect in the case.

The 51-year-old Haitian national was arrested on suspicion of murder.

Do you have anything to say at all?

They get the wrong guy, that's why.

They got the wrong guy?

Yes.

You didn't kill Stephen Holmes?

I don't.

You don't know anything about it?

Steve was my bootfield.

Although Santile's blood and fingerprint were both at the scene, police had a problem.

There was a plausible explanation for his blood to be at the sink in the kitchen.

The defense is pretty clear.

He's a maintenance worker.

He's a prep cook.

People cut themselves all the time.

And there was no proof Santile's fingerprint was in Stephen's blood.

It could have been there previously.

Needing more, investigators looked into a possible motive.

Why would Wilson Santile want to kill a man he called his friend?

People thought that Wilson was a hardworking guy, good family man, good father.

Until a background check revealed a secret past.

Wilson Santeele insisted he had nothing to do with Stephen Holmes' murder.

The father of three was active in his church and well-liked by his co-workers.

He even considered the victim his best friend.

But a background check revealed Santile had a violent past.

20 years earlier, Santil served four years in prison for aggravated assault and concealing a weapon.

And despite working three jobs, he had money problems.

He was paying child support, from what I understand, for two different children.

And the amount,

when I add it up now, it's probably the amount it's like $700 or hundred dollars a month it was quite a large sum of money the forensic evidence clearly pointed to Wilson Santiel as the man who killed Stephen Holmes inside the steak restaurant but investigators wanted to know what happened to the $8,000 missing from the restaurant safe that's when they learned that Santiel visited a local furniture store the day after the murder.

The furniture store had a security camera in the office which showed Santiel paying off a $1,200 debt in cash with $100 bills.

Much of the money stolen from the restaurant was in $100 bills from the gift certificates they'd been selling on the night of the murder.

We know that there are $100 bills that are stolen.

The fact that he pays off this debt at this furniture rental company so quickly after the murder

is

it's just bizarre.

And forensic testing found a connection between Santile's fingerprint in Stevens' office and his blood drops near the sink.

You had feet print leading to the manager's office and you had shoe prints leading from the office to the kitchen.

Prosecutors believe Wilson Santile was desperate for money and believed his only recourse was to rob the restaurant where he worked.

As the maintenance man, he stopped by after hours, knowing the cash receipts would be in the safe.

Santile probably made some noise in the kitchen.

Stephen walked out of his office to see who was there.

That's when Stephen saw the knife.

Stephen ran to his office and tried to close the door, but Santile was still able to get inside.

Stephen was stabbed more than 40 times and died in his office.

As Santile washed his hands and the knife, his blood, possibly from a bloody nose from the fight, dropped onto the kitchen counter and faucet.

Santile took the $8,000 from the safe.

Since he knew the surveillance cameras had captured the fight, he cut the cables and removed the video recorder.

But as he did, he left his partial fingerprint on the Manila folder, which fell to the floor upside down.

Santile left the restaurant with the murder weapon, video recorder, and his bloody clothes.

Prosecutors believe he returned later to clean up the blood.

But his plan fell apart when he saw the exterminator was there on an unscheduled visit.

Stephen's the only person that knows that this guy is showing up.

And again, thank God that he shows up on that night because that narrows the timeline, that preserves the crime scene at that point, and that prevents Wilson Santile from coming back and cleaning up the crime scene.

When Stephen's family learned that Wilson Santile murdered their son, they were shocked and angry because it was Santile who came to their home hours after Stephen's murder to offer his condolences.

When we found out later, it was him.

It's a weird feeling that he had the nerve to come here to our home to see.

It's still hard to comprehend that.

Wilson Santile was tried and convicted of first-degree murder.

He was sentenced to life in prison without without the possibility of parole.

Santile left evidence behind.

Some he might have explained, having worked there as an employee, but not all of it.

I think forensic science is amazing.

That's what solved the case.

It just puts that much more of my faith in the system.

And I'm just, I'm glad that it's progressed to where it has, and I hope it continues to

do so.

Forensic science in this particular case is 110%.

It's the reason Wilson Santiel is in prison, and without it, he would be a free man today.