Bound For Jail

22m
This episode originally aired February 4, 2019. A woman is found dead in a ravine near a jogging path. Crucial crime scene evidence had been washed away by severe thunderstorms. Then, almost 20 years later, two pieces of newly-discovered evidence brought the killer to justice.
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Transcript

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A woman jogging along a deserted footpath in central Michigan disappeared.

When investigators find her body, clues at the scene point to a killer

with professional training.

It took almost 20 years before an old hat and a chip of stainless steel, no longer than a fingernail, brought the killer to justice.

On a beautiful summer day in 1986, Muriel Kirby started her day as she always did by meeting her daughter Jeanette for breakfast.

Well to me it was a very special routine, just talking over what had been going on and what was on her mind or my mind.

It was a very special,

almost a friendship breakfast.

But this morning was different from the others.

Jeanette didn't show up, and she never called or left a message.

Jeanette's employer said she hadn't shown up for work, and she wasn't at her home either.

Her mother immediately notified police.

The 35-year-old divorcee with no children wasn't known for leaving town without notifying friends and family.

As night fell, the sky was dark with rain clouds, and during the night, there were severe thunderstorms, the worst in years.

I knew in my heart that Jeanette was somewhere in that storm and she needed help.

Jeanette was an avid walker, and she often explored the secluded trails of nearby Riverbend Park, an undeveloped public space of more than 500 acres.

Riverbend Park is very large.

It's not what you would think of as a city park, manicured and

small in size.

The day after Jeanette disappeared, police found her car at the park.

A parking ticket indicated the car had been there since the day before.

A day-long search of the park turned up nothing.

The search continued into the night.

I remember praying, Dear God, let her be all right.

I knew that it was wrong.

Something was definitely wrong.

Jeanette was too close to this family.

She would never let us worry.

When dawn broke the next day, police found Jeanette's body in an isolated ravine just a half mile from her car.

There were clear signs of a struggle.

Clothing was strewn about the area.

Jeanette's broken headphones from her tape player were found yards away from her body.

From the physical evidence at the scene, the struggle took place on the walking trail itself.

However, the body was dragged to a lower area by the drag marks left in the plant material and the dirt.

But investigators found something unusual at the scene.

Jeanette's hands were bound behind her back with a plastic tie.

Consumers use ties like this for binding electric cables, but police recognize these as the same type of ties they use called flex cuffs.

Police cuffs seen here on the left have a metal tab inserted into the plastic head.

Consumer ties seen on the right have plastic tabs.

That metal tab acts as like a ratcheting device, and that's what makes flex cuffs different from normal household ties.

It's not something that you can readily go and buy at Home Depot or anywhere else.

Investigators now had a potential pool of suspects, fellow police officers.

The rain that fell the night of Jeanette Kirby's murder made things difficult for investigators.

Rain is probably one of the worst enemies when you have a body found exposed to the elements because it will destroy a lot of the evidence.

Police could find no footprints to or from the scene.

There were no tire or bicycle impressions in the area.

At the autopsy, the medical examiner found no signs of sexual assault.

The cause of death was three knife wounds in her chest.

In a search for suspects, investigators routinely question relatives and friends.

Jeanette's ex-husband was in Florida at the time of the murder, so he wasn't a suspect.

Investigators discovered that Jeanette dated casually, but none of the men she dated had a motive to kill her.

It appeared her murder was a random killing, the hardest type to solve.

We don't have an eyewitness.

We don't have a murder weapon.

We have no DNA evidence.

But the way Jeannette's clothing had been cut gave investigators a clue.

There's this drive here, this seeking of sexual stimulation.

And rather than just obtaining that through contact with the victim, in this case, it had to be obtained through a particular set of behaviors involving the victim's clothing.

Her jersey had been cut up the middle, and her sweatpants had been sliced apart in squares.

A methodical, time-consuming process.

You start to get a picture of a person, a very evil person, who

is very

angry,

specifically with women, and is most likely a predator of women.

The only thing the killer left at the crime scene were the flex cuffs.

They were the same brand used by the local police.

But the Tennessee-based company that made the cuffs had some very bad news.

Virtually every police force in the country used these same flex cuffs.

There were hundreds of thousands of them in existence, all of them identical.

At the crime scene, no one saw a policeman in or near River Bend Park around the time of the murder.

Even policemen who were in the general vicinity of the park were questioned.

I know several police officers were investigated as a result of this homicide.

They run down all the leads that they get, but essentially they run up against a brick wall because nothing gets them any farther in the investigation.

They still have a pair of flex cuffs.

A full year passed, then two.

It was four years after the murder that an incident in Leland, a tourist town 200 miles away, offered new hope.

A woman there told police that a truck with police-style lights signaled her to pull over on the deserted country road.

The man from the truck approached her, wearing a police hat, but no uniform.

He ordered her out of her car and into his truck.

She resisted.

There was a struggle.

He pulled his gun and fired a shot in the air.

Just then, another car drove by.

The man panicked and fled.

When the investigators assigned to Jeanette Kirby's murder heard this news, they took particular notice.

A man impersonating a police officer in an attempt to abduct a woman in a deserted area sounded all too familiar.

Police questioned everyone they could find, looking for the owner of an unmarked pickup truck with a police-style light bar on the roof.

The gas station attendant remembered that vehicle and called the police to say he had come and gotten gas there.

Not only that, but the gas station attendant remembered that the man had used a credit card to pay for the gas.

His name was David Dreheim.

He was a 33-year-old factory worker, a volunteer fireman, and an ex-Marine with no previous record.

He had been vacationing at his parents' cabin in Glen Haven, but he lived in Ingham County in the same town as Jeanette Kirby.

When questioned by police, Dreheim denied he was involved in the attempted kidnapping, although the victim identified him in a police lineup.

On the front seat of his truck, police found a hat from the Ingham County Sheriff's Department, the same county where Jeanette Kirby was murdered.

So they call the Ingham County Sheriff's Office and they say, do you know this person?

Is he one of your deputies?

Is he someone that you're aware of?

Is he connected to you in any way?

He was someone that we knew on a regular basis, trusted him, knew him, believed him to be a local good guy.

Dreheim worked at a wastewater treatment plant just a mile from where Jeanette Kirby was killed.

Inside Dreheim's truck were two other suspicious items, a knife and a package of plastic ties, similar to police-style flex cuffs.

The suspect has in his possession a type of ties that could be characterized as flex cuffs, although they're slightly different than the police flex cuffs.

But he has these plastic fasteners in his possession.

Dreheim denied any involvement in Jeannette's murder.

They didn't have the magic bullet, they didn't have the tie between him and the flex cuffs.

They knew that he was found in possession of something that looked like or were called flex cuffs up north, but they didn't know where he got him.

There was no evidence tying him to Jeannette's murder.

But David Draheim was convicted for the attempted kidnapping charge and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Once again, Jeannette's case went cold.

Jeannette's family had remained patient, but in 1998, 12 years after Jeanette's murder, her mother could take no more.

She was disillusioned and angry that her husband died before they could get justice.

Jeanette was his baby.

You know, that was his girl.

And how could anyone touch her or hurt her?

He was very angry.

And he kept that anger until he died.

And his wishes so many times were, if I could only get hold of him,

I know what I would do.

In desperation, Mrs.

Kirby contacted the state's highest-ranking law enforcement official.

And I finally went to Jennifer Granholm, the Attorney General, and asked her for help, told my story.

She

said, I'm going to send two criminal investigators on the case.

And those investigators found something that had been overlooked.

When David Draheim was arrested on the kidnapping charge, The local police in Draheim's hometown failed to interview all of his friends.

For some reason, a major character was overlooked, and that was David Draheim's best friend at the time of the murder.

He had never been interviewed.

That man was Mark Griko, and he told police an interesting story.

A few years before Jeanette Kirby's murder, Draheim and Griko shared a house and both worked together as security guards.

At the time, Griko owned a used police car, which Griko, pictured here with the car in 1984, was was refurbishing.

I was actually physically inside the trunk trying to run the wires up through the dash and

that's when I found the the plastic bag stuck in between the the inner and outer fender well of the car and it turned out to be the bag of flex cuffs.

These were police issue flex cuffs that had been overlooked when the car was sold.

Grieco said he kept one for himself and gave the rest to Dreheim.

And Grieco had yet another story.

He said he put his flex cuff in the brim of his security guard hat.

It's a common practice in law enforcement.

Police naturally asked Griko whether he still had his security guard hat.

I'm kind of a pack ratcheter.

I kept everything.

Deep in his basement, among dozens of boxes of clothing and souvenirs, Griko found that very same hat he wore as a security guard 15 years earlier.

The odds of that happening are astronomical, and the importance to the case cannot be overstated.

Inside the brim, just as he said, was a set of police flex cuffs.

It was the same make and model used in Jeanette Kirby's murder.

But investigators wanted to find some way to tell whether these two sets of cuffs were scientifically related.

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Today,

After years of searching for Jeanette Kirby's killer, investigators finally had a break.

They discovered a police flex cuff similar to the one used in the murder.

To learn more about how these flex cuffs are made, Michigan investigators went to Monterey, Mexico, the only factory in the world that makes this brand of flex cuffs.

This is the video shot by those investigators.

Since the cuffs were all made with the same plastic, its chemical makeup provided no basis for comparison.

But the stainless steel tabs in the flex cuffs were another matter.

A carbide saw cuts the tabs from large spools of steel.

The cut marks at the end of each tab are distinctive.

This is a very fast process and just is continually cutting for hours at a time.

Well during that process the blade starts to wear a little bit.

And while it's wearing,

the marks that it's leaving on the metal tabs are changing.

The flex cuffs used in Jeanette Kirby's murder and the flex cuffs provided by Mark Grico were analyzed by Scott Marrier of the Michigan State Police.

Using a soldering iron, he carefully removed the tab from each cuff for comparison.

After all these years, the case came down to to some tiny slivers of stainless steel.

There was a time when I was looking at this metal tab thinking, oh, the entire case rests on the identification of these metal tabs.

Using a comparison microscope, Marrier placed each tab on a putty platform, then compared the two side by side.

He was looking for signature marks made by the saw that cut the tabs.

Marrier soon discovered that the marks were strikingly similar.

They ran down the length of each tab, almost like both sides of a zipper.

The quality of the identification was so good that it would not surprise me at all if these two metal tabs had been produced consecutively.

It was an absolutely perfect match.

So perfect that it took everyone's breath away from me.

Now, prosecutors and investigators had a piece of evidence that was a piece of scientific evidence that put David Dreheim at the scene of the crime.

On June 12, 2002, David Dreheim went on trial for Jeanette Kirby's murder.

Prosecutors believe Dreheim left his job at the water treatment facility around 4:30 on the day of the murder and drove to River Bend Park less than a mile away.

Prosecutors say Dreheim was a predator and when he saw Jeanette Kirby, he was prepared.

He probably allowed her to jog or fast walk past the point where he was hiding and attacked her from behind.

immediately grabbed her hands behind her back and flexcuffed her.

Now she was immobilized and isolated.

Jeanette Kirby was murdered and her clothes cut in meticulous detail.

Jeanette Kirby was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There's no other link between the two of them.

At the trial, a surprise witness came forward saying that Dreheim had flex cuffed her years earlier.

You brought my other arm behind me and I was tied.

You know, I was strapped.

You know, know, it was just strapped.

You couldn't go anywhere.

And it was Dreheim's wife who provided the most unusual bit of testimony.

She told jurors he routinely jogged with a small packet of flex cuffs in a bag he wore around his waist.

Why on earth would he need that equipment with him when he went out on a daily jog?

The only reason was either it was there because it was part of the daily fantasy that he carried with him in his head, or it was there because he was hoping if some opportunity came up, it would be there when he needed it.

David Dreheim was found guilty of Jeanette Kirby's murder and was sentenced to 60 years in prison in addition to the 40 years he was already serving.

Forensic science solved the case which might have gone unsolved had it not been for the persistence of Jeanette Kirby's mother and the

who never threw anything away.

The science doesn't age.

The tool marks that are left on those metal tabs will be there forever.

They'll never change.

Thankfully, forensic science did solve it for us.

And

we can rest in peace knowing that her case has been solved because of forensic science.