Northern Exposure

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There were very few clues discovered with the woman's body in the Alaskan wilderness.

But the sheet covering her body looked very different from the bedding sold in department stores.

Was it possible that the fabric could tell a story, one that could lead police to the woman's killer?

When 36-year-old Judy Bergen walked into her favorite bar at the Samovar Inn in Anchorage, Alaska, it was apparent that something was terribly wrong.

The bartender who had known Judy for years said that when Judy came in that night, Judy looked as bad as she'd ever seen her.

Judy came from an affluent and politically connected family and was something of a free spirit, working as a cook on a fishing boat.

But Judy told the bartender that she was tired of life in Alaska and wanted to move away.

Judy was upset, distraught.

At that time, she had a large amount of money and a ticket to Hawaii and was planning to go to Hawaii.

Judy showed her an airline ticket and a substantial sum of money and said she was going to straighten up her life.

Later, a man approached Judy at the bar.

The two shared some drinks.

And witnesses said Judy left with the man and went to his hotel room.

Witness indicated that Judy had gone upstairs with that person,

allegedly possibly to use drugs that day.

Later, she returned to the bar, said her goodbyes, and left in a cab.

Two weeks passed, and no one had heard from her, so Judy's family contacted police.

She would call and just check in and, hi, mom, how are you doing?

And I knew she was around and I knew that she didn't have anything to complain about at the time.

And so when the call stopped coming, then I thought something had happened.

Police interviewed employees and customers of the Samovar Inn where Judy was last seen.

In particular, they wanted to interview the man Judy left with.

But no one at the bar knew who the man was.

He paid cash for his room, did not register under his real name, and hadn't been in the bar before or since.

All avenues were basically slammed shut for one reason or another.

We were never able to determine who this person was.

Judy had been living in Anchorage with her boyfriend Carl Brown, a commercial fisherman.

He told Judy's family that she was fed up with Alaska and just moved out.

He said she told me she was going to Hawaii, so I haven't seen her know anything about it.

He just said their relationship had come to its end, and she just walked off with no explanation for why she would walk off.

Police checked with the airlines and discovered that Judy didn't take a flight to Hawaii or anywhere else.

Four months would pass before police and Judy's family would finally learn where she had gone.

Four months after Judy Bergen's disappearance,

several hikers along Grays Creek, about 200 miles north of Anchorage, Alaska, saw what appeared to be a bundle of clothing.

It was wrapped in a sheet, but they ran over and got their mother.

Their mothers came over and discovered that there was indeed what appeared to be human remains, mostly skeletized remains of a human body out in the woods.

Police immediately sealed off the area.

The badly decomposed body was that of a female approximately five feet tall with short brown hair.

By rehydrating her mummified fingers and we were able to obtain a fingerprint, match that fingerprint, and the body that was found was identified as Judy Bergen.

I really was not surprised.

I just had a feeling that it could be her.

I guess it was just an instinct, mother's instinct or something.

Anytime a body is found in the manner that Judy was, it presents a very difficult case.

At this point, we have no witnesses.

We have no confessions.

We have no murder weapon.

We have no knowledge of how she's there.

The medical examiner determined that Judy's death was clearly a homicide.

The skull had been bashed in.

by what he believed to be more than one blow and substantial force was used because the entire side in front of the skull was caved in.

The body was found in an extremely isolated location.

There were several fishing camps in the area, but most were accessible only by plane.

It was pretty clear that the body had been killed somewhere else, brought to the scene, and purposely laid where it was found.

Investigators were intrigued by the sheets that covered Judy's body.

The sheets seemed to be kind of ordinary plain sheets, but they had some orange stitching that made it appear that they were commercial and not something that you or I might go to our local department store and buy.

At first, the investigators assumed the sheets came from the Samovar Inn where Judy was last seen.

But they weren't the type used by that hotel.

Large hotels usually have their sheets washed by outside commercial laundries.

To keep the sheets separate, each hotel uses a different color stitching.

For example, one hotel chain might use blue stitching, another gold, and so on.

Only one hotel chain used sheets with orange stitching.

We discover that these same sheets that Judy's body was found in were used at the Sheraton Hotel here in Anchorage.

This tied Judy to the Sheraton Hotel, but no one at the Anchorage Sheraton recalled seeing her.

So investigators turned their attention to another piece of evidence.

A tuft of red carpet fibers found inside the sheet which covered Judy's body.

So initial investigators who were looking at this knew immediately when they saw that top that they'd made a significant find.

They didn't know what they would be able to do with it.

But this is not a fiber of the sort that we all carry around on a regular basis.

Most carpets are made with a single type of fiber that is the same in terms of size, shape, and color.

But the red carpet fibers with Judy's body were completely different.

There was no uniformity in the shapes of the fibers or how the dye had soaked into them.

Once you put it under a microscope, there are several different types of strands, several different types of colors, several different types of dyes.

And frankly, the crime lab did not have the expertise to make the proper analysis.

Officials in Alaska sent the sample to forensic microscopist Skip Palanek, who recognized it as junk fiber, which is used in less than 5% of all carpet.

Chunk fiber represents a collection of fibers from a number of different sources.

Some of good quality, some of poor quality, some experimental fibers that are all brought together by chance by a fiber broker who's buying this material from a number of different sources.

Investigators now knew that Judy Bergen had been with someone who had a connection to the local Sheraton Hotel and someone who had inexpensive red carpet.

Now all they had to do was find him.

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Shortly after Judy Bergen's body was recovered, family and friends attended a memorial service in her honor.

She was a free spirit.

Judy was barely five feet tall and we probably put less than a hundred pounds, but didn't feel that her size prevented her from doing anything she wanted to do.

Judy Bergen was a person who was dearly loved by a lot of friends and family members.

She was a talented poet.

She was a fisher person,

worked all over the state on various fishing vessels.

She loved to cook, and her friends had a lot of great things to say about her.

On the night Judy disappeared, police found a witness who saw Judy leave the Samovar Inn in a taxi.

But police found no evidence of where she went.

So we get cab records for all the cab companies in town.

No cab driver remembers Judy Bergen or taking somebody to this place.

But the bartender recalled Judy saying she was going home to pick up something before taking a flight to Hawaii.

Home was Carl Brown's place.

Carl and Judy had been living together for about nine months before her disappearance.

Judy told her family that at times Carl Brown was physically abusive.

I felt that it was an unhealthy relationship.

As the time went on and things became evident that she wasn't happy, then I began to feel there was something going wrong.

Carl Brown was known to be a drug dealer in the Anchorage area for a substantial amount of time, for at least 10, 15 years.

He dealt in cocaine and heroin.

Brown said that Judy moved out of his house and that he had no idea where she went.

None of Judy's personal items were in his home.

And investigators noticed that the carpeting in his home was not the same color as the fibers found with Judy's body.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Mr.

Brown's house was that his house was carpeted in shag carpet.

However, it was a different color.

The living room and in the dining room area was an oil shag.

But police discovered a potentially explosive piece of information.

Several years earlier, Carl Brown worked at the Sheraton Hotel in Anchorage.

That piece of information is significant because Carl Brown now has access to the sheets

that match the sheets with the victim's body.

But so did numerous other past and current employees.

At police headquarters, investigators decided to ask Brown whether he made any improvements to his home after Judy left.

Okay.

All right.

You also said you didn't make any changes to your house?

No.

Okay.

Any type of changes at all?

I mean, did you change windows, floors, stuff like that?

Uh I put carpet in in my bedroom.

Was it the whole house or you still just the...

Just my bedroom because it was ripped.

I had a chair at the desk and I'd slid it back and forth and it had a big tear in it so it was threadbare so I just had to be a cheap carpet to begin with.

Okay.

Or your place pad in?

Yeah,'cause it was raggedy.

I mean, I don't know how long it had been there but it was pretty gross you remember when that happened carl when you had that carpet change yeah it was before judy left because she picked out the color no it's just the bag no it wasn't

she picked out the color but i had it did after she left okay after she left right right

but having new bedroom carpet wasn't enough evidence for the local judge to issue a search warrant

We're looking for something, a lead that we can follow and get enough information to get get into his house and

possibly search his house for any possible evidence that might be in there.

We just can't seem to come up with it with a break.

A year passed, and it looked like the murder of Judy Bergen might go unsolved.

But Sergeant Massey refused to let that happen.

It was asking investigators from Anchorage to drive by Carl's house to see what kind of activity is going on there.

Once a week, local police drove by the house.

And then, a year and a half after Judy's death, they finally got the break they'd been hoping for.

At one point in time, it was found the residence was vacant.

Brown's house was on the market, which meant police no longer needed a search warrant to look inside.

Was it possible there was some evidence in the vacant house which would shed new light on Judy Bergen's murder?

When Carl Brown put his house up for sale, Alaska police were free to conduct a thorough search.

We're searching for two things.

We're searching for any blood evidence that might be in there.

We're also searching for, obviously, red shag carpet fiber that might be might use to match up with the carpet fiber found with the victim.

Luminol tests on the bedroom walls and ceiling revealed no traces of blood.

Of course, we're highly disappointed when we don't find any blood that we could somehow match to either Judy, Carl, or anybody that might have been related to the case.

We knew upfront that the carpet had been changed, so obviously we're going to look underneath the existing carpet.

And when they did, They made a startling discovery.

Red carpet fibers like the ones found with Judy's body.

Along the tack strip, around the perimeter of the room, we find remnants in carpet tufts of red shag carpet.

Apparently, the carpet installer had not vacuumed the floor before putting down the new carpet.

They just didn't clean up their mess and didn't sweep up the old existing carpet fibers.

The fibers were sent to the forensics lab for analysis.

Skep Palanik found seven different types of synthetic fibers in the sample.

We see round fibers.

Some round fibers are thicker than other round fibers.

We see seven distinct types of fibers in this case, which corresponded in every single instance to fibers that were found in the other tuft.

Next, Palanik conducted what is called a hot stage analysis.

Synthetic fibers will melt at different temperatures, usually in the range of 210 to 225 degrees Fahrenheit.

Any polyester fiber will melt at a specific temperature, which is one of the physical features that characterizes that particular fiber.

And even two fibers which appear in always identical, they have different melting points are from different sources.

When placed on the hot stage, the fibers from Judy's body and those from Carl Brown's bedroom both melted at the exact same temperature.

In every case, they were identical to one another.

Of course, for every corresponding fiber there was a corresponding melting point that was the same.

Even the dyes were identical.

In both samples one of the junk fibers was thicker than the rest.

As a result the dye did not go all the way through it and is evident in both samples.

This is called ring dyeing, a ring of dye around the outside of the fiber.

For investigators, there was no doubt that the tuft of carpet found with Judy Bergen had come from Carl Brown's house.

It was almost overkill in a way.

We had so many pieces of evidence that we could use in this case that showed that these fibers were identical in every way that could be measured.

We refer to it as a carpet fingerprint because essentially it's the same kind of evidence.

It's very hard to explain away.

Carl Brown was arrested and charged with Judy Bergen's murder.

Prosecutors believe that Judy grew tired of the physical abuse in her relationship with Carl Brown and decided to leave Alaska, fly to Hawaii, and start a new life.

After she left the Samovar Inn, she went home to pick up her things.

When Brown learned Judy was leaving, he responded with violence.

The autopsy revealed he beat her to death with a blunt object.

Then, he wrapped her body in the bedsheet he had taken from the Sheraton Hotel, a sheet which contained the signature stitching.

He didn't see the tuft of carpet which clung to the sheet with fibers so unique they could only have come from his bedroom.

Brown dumped Judy's body 250 miles away in the Alaskan wilderness.

Interestingly, it was just a short distance from where he went fishing each year.

Prosecutors believe Brown removed his bedroom carpet to get rid of the blood evidence left by the murder.

I've seen a lot of evidence in my career, and forensic evidence is something that

you don't have as often as the public thinks.

But when you have a piece of forensic evidence like this, it is extremely powerful evidence.

Carl Brown denied killing Judy and blamed her death on drugs.

One of the defense tactics was that the victim died of a drug overdose and the skull crushing was a result of a moose stomping on her head.

As a lifelong Alaskan, I have never heard of such a thing happening, period.

After a five-week trial, Carl Brown was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 85 years in prison.

All because of orange ditching on a bed sheet and some cheap red carpet that hadn't been dyed all the way through.

There was no doubt in anyone's mind after having that evidence produced that it was

an actual

fact.

And they found him guilty.

And they had a reason to find him guilty.

Essentially, Carl Brown had left his fingerprint on Judy Bergen's remains, unbeknownst to him, but fortunately for us, the investigation uncovered it.

The fiber evidence was the only physical direct link from the body and Carl Brown.

It was the single most important piece of evidence that the jury heard during his trial.