Filtered Out

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Up next, a teenage girl goes missing.

This child had walked away into the darkness and disappeared.

Was she the victim of foul play?

Or did she run off to be with a friend?

It was horrible.

You know, people just didn't know what to make of it.

For weeks, there were many questions, but no answers.

So something's not right.

You know, it's just too weird.

Until police find evidence of an encounter gone wrong.

She would have put up a tremendous fight.

This is good science.

This is absolute good stuff.

Teenage love affairs are notoriously passionate.

So when 16-year-old Tara Muncie fell in love with her high school classmate, Nick Zaroba, she expected it to last forever.

Tara and Nick was the strongest love that you could imagine, but it was like the car show, Fast and Furious.

It was sometimes it was really great and sometimes it was really furious.

When Nick graduated, he joined the Navy and was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois.

Tara stayed in Virginia to finish her last years in high school.

She was in love with him and she talked about him constantly.

They planned on getting married.

On the night of January 25th, 2000, Tara didn't return home after her shift at a local fast food restaurant.

It wasn't like Tara to do that.

Tara would always call in, check in.

Tara's parents called the local sheriff's office, but this was a story they'd heard a hundred times before.

A teen missing for a couple of hours is a very routine call.

Typically,

a teenager or any missing person turns up within 24 hours.

Her last known location was the fast food restaurant where she was seen leaving alone at 7 o'clock carrying a container of food.

Her car was still in the lot.

The car was unlocked, and the food and hat was sitting on the front driver's seat, like she had placed it there.

There was no purse nor keys found at the scene.

The main question is, why wouldn't she have her car?

And now who she is with or where she is at?

Is it someone that she doesn't want her parents to know she's with?

It was as if Tara had dumped her belongings and just left.

But it was freezing outside, so it didn't seem likely she would simply walk away.

But by the next morning, Tara still hadn't returned home.

Both of us, Tara's mom and myself, both knew deep down that something wasn't right.

Some people thought she'd run off to be with Nick.

Is she headed for Illinois?

Is she headed to meet the boyfriend?

There was no evidence of her purchasing a ticket at a bus station.

There was no evidence she had purchased an airline ticket.

Investigators contacted Nick at the naval base.

He said he hadn't had any contact with her.

He hadn't seen her.

She hasn't called him.

His commanding officer was able to confirm that he had been on the base the entire time.

24 24 hours after Tara disappeared, police received some alarming information.

A co-worker said that the night before, Tara was working the drive-through window and got into an argument with two young male customers.

She had had a wordy conversation or a confrontation, maybe, with a couple of young men that came through the drive-thru.

We're thinking that those are two potential suspects.

Normally, there would be video to identify these men,

but not this time.

Big disappointment.

The restaurant didn't have any video surveillance of any kind.

This also meant there was no video surveillance of the parking lot, and none of the customers or Tara's co-workers saw anything suspicious.

They didn't really pay attention who she left with or, you know, what transpired out in the parking lot.

This left Tara's family and police without answers.

We knew absolutely nothing.

We had nothing.

The case was completely clueless from the start.

When Tara Muncie disappeared, her friends thought she had run away to be with her boyfriend Nick in Illinois.

Her parents, however, didn't believe it.

I think maybe one time Tara decided she was going to run away.

I think she was gone for an hour.

She would not run away.

No.

When media outlets reported the story of Tara's disappearance, hundreds of volunteers joined the search.

Neighborhoods searched parks, looked everywhere they could for her in the snow, in the cold.

I miss her so much.

I just want her back.

Somebody's got her.

I don't know why, but she just wouldn't run, so something's not right.

You know, it's just too weird.

Two long weeks passed, and still there was no trace of Tara.

The pressure at that time was extreme, and it was all fueled by the thought that this child had walked away into the darkness and disappeared.

And it could happen to yours or mine.

Then, 17 days after Tara went missing, a hiker found a body near an isolated railroad track seven miles from Tara's house.

My first thought is, you know, how fast can we get there?

Is it Tara or is it or is it something else, you know?

The body was at the bottom of a 70-foot wooded ravine, almost completely hidden from sight.

The victim was naked from the waist up and had been shot to death.

Some injuries were consistent with the body being rolled down the ravine post-mortem.

A driver's license in her back pocket confirmed everyone's worst fears.

It was Tara Muncie.

Tara was quite a girl, one of a kind.

And it's just too bad she never got to live too.

For all us to find out her full potential.

Fortunately, near-freezing temperatures helped forensic investigators.

Her body appeared to be fairly well preserved.

I remember thinking at the time that I hope that means that we're going to have some good evidence.

But the crime scene itself was another matter.

It was a dumping ground.

It was a ravine where people dumped their tires, their stoves.

It was very difficult for investigators to separate out what was perhaps related to the crime and what was not.

At the top of the ravine was a single.22 caliber shell casing, as well as Tara's car keys and parts of a cigarette.

The cigarette filter was right in the middle of the crime scene.

The filter was found separately from the cigarette.

Very few people ever pull a filter off of the cigarette to smoke it.

In a bundle thrown to the side, investigators found Tara's t-shirt and on it, it a potential clue.

You could see a faint outline of an outsole of an athletic shoe on the front of the shirt.

You can make a positive identification of a footwear impression just like you can make a positive identification of a fingerprint.

But finding the shoe wouldn't be easy.

Tara Muncie's autopsy showed she was most likely killed the day she went missing.

She'd been shot four times at close range.

This child was executed.

I firmly believe that she was shot in the chest.

And while she was on the ground, I think that a rifle was held next to her head and three shots were fired.

Blood found under Tara's fingernail showed she had fought her attacker.

Even though Tara's rape kit came up negative, investigators found seminal fluid on her body.

All of the biological evidence was sent for DNA testing.

The ballistic evidence provided a surprising clue.

The murder weapon left an unusual combination of LANs and grooves on the fatal bullets.

Only three types of.22-caliber rifles could have fired those shots.

You're looking for a Sears, a Marlin, or Revelation.

And by the way, Marlin manufactures Four Sears and Revelation.

So it's only one manufacturer going up three.

When you're talking hundreds of different firearms to narrow it down to three, that's pretty unique and good information.

Tara's ripped shirt also provided a possible clue.

Using alternate light sources, Forensic analysts found a partial muddy shoe print on the front of her shirt.

Investigators searched their database of thousands of known outsole designs and found the one they were looking for.

We were able to tell the police that they need to look for an individual that has a pair of Nike brand running shoes with a herringbone outsole design.

The print wasn't large enough to identify the shoe size, but it was valuable information nonetheless.

Then, Tara's friends told police something they had been reluctant to reveal earlier.

On the day Tara went missing, Tara and her friends were smoking marijuana after school, and an older man was with them, the man who had provided the marijuana, 30-year-old Jeff Thomas.

It struck me out at that time that there was a 30-year-old male there smoking marijuana with these teenagers after school.

He didn't have a regular employment, and we're not even sure that he really had a regular place to live.

He stayed at times in his girlfriend's basement.

Tara and Jeff Thomas knew one another.

Tara often babysat for Jeff's six-year-old daughter.

A background check revealed Thomas had a criminal record.

Eight years earlier, Thomas attacked a neighbor with a baseball bat and served two years in prison.

When questioned by police, Jeff Thomas denied any involvement in Tara's murder and said he had an alibi.

Thank you for coming in today, Mr.

Thomas.

We found that there had been some holes in his alibi, particularly where he'd spent the night.

Jeff Thomas denied owning a.22-caliber rifle, but said his friend Kevin Williams, a.32-year-old bricklayer, owned one.

Police converged on Kevin Williams' house, hoping to question Williams and examine his gun.

But Williams' story was significantly different from that of Jeff Thomas.

Kevin Williams told us that he owned a.22 caliber rifle and that he left it in the possession of Jeff Thomas, and he has not seen that rifle or firearm since.

Williams admitted he sometimes used the rifle for target practice in his backyard.

Investigators knew this was their chance to find out whether Kevin Williams' rifle was the murder weapon.

Incredibly, investigators found two shell casings under the porch.

Ballistics matched the shell casing found near Tara's body.

This is absolute good stuff.

This is good science, which tells you you've just recovered cartridge cases from the murder weapon.

But where was the rifle?

And

which man was telling the truth?

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Ademas delicios os trosos degranola nues y fruta que todos vanad disprutad.

Honey punches de votes for todos, toder para sabermás.

The prime suspect in Tara Muncie's murder was Jeff Thomas, the man man who was seen smoking marijuana with Tara on the afternoon of her murder.

But the murder weapon belonged to Kevin Williams, a friend of Thomas's.

Both claimed the other was in possession of the gun at the time of Tara's murder.

Then something strange happened.

An unlikely witness came forward with a story of her own.

There was a lady who was in a vehicle that had been stopped for a traffic violation and she knew something about the case.

I think I know Nebuchadnezzar.

Her name was Barbara Helton and when she was with police she told them something she had kept to herself for the past several weeks.

She said she knew Jeff Thomas, and he'd been staying at her house at the time of Tara Muncie's murder.

On the night of the murder, Thomas returned home visibly agitated.

He was dirty, he was muddy, he was upset, and he told her that he had messed up.

He said, I wouldn't have hurt her if she would have gave me what I wanted.

I asked him what he was talking about.

And he said that she wouldn't have sex with me.

He said she wouldn't have sex with me.

And it made him mad.

And she says that he told me, you know, I shot, you know, I shot her three times in the head.

He called it execution stop.

Whatever that's supposed to be.

He called it execution stop.

Yeah.

The number of shots fired was inside information.

Police hadn't released those details to the media for these very situations.

No one knew but us, the killer, and the medical examiner.

But if Helton's story were true, why hadn't she gone to the police sooner?

She was scared of Jeff Thomas.

She was scared for her own safety.

It was only when she actually was face to face with a police officer at the traffic stop that she was willing to talk.

With the information Barbara Helton provided to police, they now had enough evidence to get a warrant to search Thomas's car.

In the trunk, they found a pair of sneakers with a herringbone tread pattern.

Transparencies of the treads were compared to photographs from the partial prints on the front of Tara's shirt.

We were able to say that the right shoe submitted by the police department could have made the two fragmentary footwear impressions present on the shirt collected from the crime scene.

Also in Thomas's car were three strands of blonde hair with the roots intact.

Forcibly removed hairs.

This means they had a good chance of having DNA material in the root of the hair.

It was determined that all three hairs from the car were consistent with Tara Muncie

by DNA.

And investigators also compared Thomas's DNA to the biological evidence on Tara's body.

His DNA was all over her.

It was on her clothes.

It was on her body.

It was on her inner thigh.

It was on the bottom of her shoe.

It was underneath her fingernails.

And it was on the cigarette that was found at the crime scene.

And so that was really the nail in the coffin.

Prosecutors believe Jeff Thomas stopped at the taco restaurant as Tara got off from work.

He may have suggested they go somewhere to smoke marijuana as they did earlier that afternoon.

Once there, Thomas made a sexual advance.

Tara refused.

There was a fight.

Tara's shirt was torn.

She scratched his face.

At some point, Thomas dragged Tara out of the car, shot her once in the chest,

and three times in the head, leaving his shoe impression on her t-shirt.

He pushed her body down the ravine,

then smoked a cigarette after ripping the filter off.

You always break the photos off the cigarettes.

It's just a habit.

I've always always done it.

Three of Tara's hairs, forcibly removed during the fight, fell into his trunk as he was getting rid of the evidence.

The rifle was never recovered.

In March of 2001,

Jeff Thomas was tried and convicted of capital murder and was sentenced to death.

To hear the clerk of court say, not only are you guilty, but you are sentenced to death, death, death.

It sent chills of a spy, literally.

But Tara's mother opposed the death penalty and asked that Thomas's sentence be commuted to life in prison.

In 2002, the Virginia Supreme Court gave him life

without parole.

Tara's family realizes that without science, her case might never have been solved.

In the beginning, you know, we thought, how in the world are you going to solve a case like this?

And I don't think it'd ever been solved.

If it hadn't been the PLISE Police Force, I don't think it ever solved it.

At the end of the day, we had a lot of circumstantial evidence, but it was the forensic evidence that was the most powerful.

Young high school student,

just

taking

such a short time in life here.

It's tragic.

It's tragic.

And if we can help find the truth and justice in that, that's what we're here for.