Innocence Lost

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Sometime during a neighborhood Christmas party in 1989, five-year-old Melissa Brannon disappeared.

Melissa, will you go get the coats?

None of the adults or other children at the party saw where she went or noticed anything unusual.

It took science to see what witnesses did not.

Tammy Brannon and her five-year-old daughter, Melissa, had moved from Texas into this suburban apartment complex in Lorton, Virginia.

Tammy was a single mother recently divorced, working as an accountant and beginning a new phase in her life.

Tammy is A very good mother.

She's a very sweet, very caring person.

Kept to herself more or less.

You know, she wasn't

what I would call extremely outgoing, although she did participate in just about everything.

One of the attractive features of the apartment complex was the active social program for the residents.

Every Friday night was some sort of social gathering in the clubhouse.

And during the holidays, there were special events.

The night of December 3rd, they had a nice layout within the clubhouse, and people spent time getting to know their neighbors.

Tammy Brannan and her daughter Melissa both attended that Christmas party in 1989.

Altogether, about 200 residents of the complex were there.

Everybody was very upbeat, having a very good time.

The children played with each other all through the night, going around and snatching all the food and having a good time.

When it was time to leave, Tammy asked Melissa to get their coats.

Oh man,

yeah, this is Oh, sure.

And now we have holidays and stuff.

Shortly after handing the coat to her mother, Melissa disappeared.

Merry Christmas.

Darren Kitty is.

Tammy looked for her daughter throughout the clubhouse.

Melissa, she's sitting there.

In a utility room off the lobby, marked private, a full-length window leading to the outside was wide open.

The window faced a wooded area behind the apartment complex.

It's a possibility that somebody could have gone out that window and not been seen by anybody outside.

And it's in an area where it's secluded.

So the inside partygoers wouldn't have seen anybody exiting through that window also.

Fairfax County Police searched the entire area and questioned everyone who attended the party.

It was very cold out that night.

It was pretty imperative that we try to locate as quickly as possible.

It's hard to imagine a young child with a dress on and a small coat surviving the temperature that night.

Although no one at the party noticed anything unusual, police feared that Melissa had been abducted.

Tammy Brannon pleaded for her daughter's safe return during a televised news conference.

The person who took Melissa.

I beg you to please call somebody, anybody, and tell us where she is.

No matter what's happened, she's all that I have.

Please bring her back to me.

Melissa,

if you can hear mommy, and get to a telephone.

Call our number like I taught you to.

And call me.

We love you and miss you very much.

Please come back to us.

Mommy's waiting.

All the way down to Davis Port Road.

Police could find no trace of five-year-old Melissa Brannon, despite the help of hundreds of volunteers.

We had hundreds of police officers down there.

We had hundreds of people from the military bases.

We had people volunteering their airplanes, their helicopters.

The search was phenomenal.

It just showed how this case touched so many people.

Yellow ribbons were placed throughout the neighborhood, a symbol of concern and hope for Melissa's safe return.

Police questioned Melissa's father, who was in Texas on the night of Melissa's disappearance.

He was immediately ruled out as a suspect.

I also ask that if the person who took my daughter can hear me, please let her go.

We love her very much.

If anyone anyone has any information that may help, please contact someone

who will pass the information on to us.

Thank you.

Police questioned everyone who lived at the apartment complex, as well as all of the employees.

Caleb Hughes worked at the apartment as a maintenance man and attended the Christmas party.

Police interviewed Hughes at his home a few hours after the party, around 2 a.m.

Mr.

Hughes?

They asked him where he had been since leaving the apartment complex.

I drove straight home.

I stopped off for a six-pack.

I got home about 12.30 quarter to one.

He said he stopped just before you got home near his house.

Well, if you got home at 12.30 quarter to one, they stopped selling beer in Virginia at 12 o'clock.

So he didn't stop for beer.

He couldn't.

What did you do after you got home?

I did chores, laundry, you know, stuff like that.

Do you mind if we look around?

No, go ahead.

During the search, police noticed something unusual.

Hughes told police he had been doing his laundry, but the clothes he was washing were the ones he wore to the party.

Do you always wash your sneakers with your clothes, Mr.

Hughes?

He was also washing his belt and the knife holder.

Said, why would you wash all your clothes?

You don't have another pair of blue jeans?

And why would you wash your sneakers?

Caleb had no response.

The side of Hughes' sneakers had been shaved away.

Although the sneakers had been washed, tests showed traces of human protein, possibly blood, deep in the fibers.

Caleb Hughes wasn't cooperating either.

Hughes told police he did not speak to Melissa Brannon at the Christmas party, but several witnesses contradicted him.

So Caleb, I think you know more.

I think you took Melissa out of that party.

And all Caleb would do is just sit there and finally Caleb said, prove it.

Looking straight in his face and no emotion at all.

And that's what investigators set out to do.

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Weeks passed, and still still there were no signs of five-year-old Melissa Brannon.

The community of Lorton, Virginia, held a candlelight vigil at the Brannon's apartment complex, just a few feet from the clubhouse where Melissa was abducted.

Bumper stickers, yellow ribbons, and flyers with Melissa's picture were everywhere.

It was all anybody talked about.

Because this wasn't one girl in one family.

This was any child, all of our families.

If this could happen to Tammy Brannon's daughter, this could happen to anyone's daughter.

And there was a desperate outcry to find who would have taken this child.

The suspect was Caleb Hughes.

Hughes attended the Christmas party, but he denied having anything to do with Melissa's disappearance.

Forensic scientists began their investigation with a look inside Hughes' car.

The interior of the car was cluttered with a a lot of debris, dirt, bags of books,

dog hair.

I just looked at it and thought, holy mackerel, how am I going to be able to find any type of evidence that would link Melissa to this car?

The car was sprayed with the chemical luminol, which fluoresces when it comes into contact with the hemoglobin component of blood.

Luminol revealed blood on the steering wheel, foot pedals, and floor mat.

The blood was collected for DNA analysis, but the results were were inconclusive.

The car was also searched for trace evidence, specifically hair and fibers, and was sent to Special Agent Doug Dietrich of the FBI for analysis.

First thing that I do is look at the tapings that came from the front seat of the car.

Trying to identify what types of materials are there and, if possible, anything that may have come from the victim if she had been in that car.

Dietrich discovered quite a bit of animal hair in the car, most of it dog hair.

But three of the hairs from Hugh's front seat were different.

They were rabbit hairs that had been dyed black.

The rabbit hairs were microscopically similar to a German rabbit hair coat Tammy Brannon wore to that Christmas party.

When Tammy Brannon was leaving the apartment, She told Melissa to get her fur coat.

Melissa got the fur coat, and as a child will do, she draped that coat across her shoulders.

And of course,

those

hairs from that coat certain them transfer to her.

Dietrich also discovered blue and red fibers on Hugh's front passenger seat.

The red fibers were cotton, an extremely common fiber.

But the blue fibers were extremely rare.

The 50 blue fibers were man-made and acrylic.

They were all the same shape, shape, length, and diameter, an indication they were from the same manufacturer.

Gas chromatography revealed that the blue fibers were dyed with the same blue dye.

But the chemical composition of the blue dye was unusual.

Melissa Brannon was wearing a blue sweater and red plaid skirt on the night she disappeared.

The outfit had been a gift from Melissa's grandmother, who could not recall where she bought it.

All she could remember was that the sweater had a picture of Big Bird on it, a character from the Sesame Street television series.

Prosecutors needed more evidence than the three rabbit hairs from Mrs.

Brannon's coat found in Caleb Hughes' car.

They knew that any good defense attorney would argue that Caleb Hughes could have brushed up against Tammy Brannon's coat at the party and transferred those rabbit hairs onto the seat of his car.

Doug Dietrich was convinced that the blue fibers held the key to Melissa Brannon's disappearance, but there was no way to tell if the fibers were from Melissa's clothing.

After work one night, Doug Dietrich shared his frustration with his wife.

He told her he needed to find the manufacturer of the outfit Melissa was wearing at the Christmas party.

Some sort of blue Winnie the Pooh thing or a

Sesame Street outfit with a red plaid skirt?

I don't know anything about Winnie the Pooh, but if it's Sesame Street, that's sold by JC Penny.

Hold on a second.

Mrs.

Dietrich had kept a number of store catalogs, some going back a few years.

Red plaid skirt.

I see that.

She proceeded to bring a catalog down from the year before Christmas, and sure enough, on page 11 of that catalog, there was an outfit that looked darn close to what they were describing to me as the one Melissa Brandon wore the night of her disappearance.

When Tammy Brannon was shown the picture from the catalog, she identified it as the one Melissa was wearing at the party.

The FBI asked JCPenney for one of the outfits in order to analyze the fibers, but they were sold out.

The item was a catalog-only item.

JCPenney sold all 7,000 garments in a matter of months.

But J.C.

Penney located a customer in Kentucky who had purchased one of these outfits a year earlier.

The customer bought the outfit as a present for his granddaughter, but it was the wrong size, so it had never been worn.

The customer sent the outfit to the FBI for analysis.

The idea of just being able to find an outfit that's exactly the same outfit that a victim wore in a case, that's an extremely good stroke of luck.

When Doug Dietrich examined the garment, he made a startling discovery.

When J.C.

Penny had this outfit manufactured, they wanted to make it unique.

Instead of using a standard dye, and there are 10,000 of them, Penny's decided to create a brand new color.

JCPenney specifies a particular color, then they'll work with the dye manufacturer to find some combination of chemicals that will produce exactly that tone.

In this particular case, they went an additional step and made sure that it was a dye that nobody else had access to so that they could trademark the sweater from its color point of view.

They called their new color Plum Navy No.

887.

JCPenney patented that signature dye and used it only once when they produced the 7,000 Big Bird sweaters.

When Diedrich compared the fibers from the duplicate sweater to those found in Hughes' automobile, they were the same.

With several hundred million people in the country and only 7,000 sweaters, the probability of that particular sweater being located in an individual car is very small.

You can just work out the ratios of the two.

There's no question in my mind that Melissa Brandon had been in the front seat of Cal Hughes's car.

Where she went from there, well, I guess that's a mystery right now.

A mystery police were desperately trying to solve.

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The search for Melissa Brannon's body continued for almost a year.

Statistics show that children abducted by strangers are usually murdered within three hours of the abduction.

The prime suspect, Caleb Hughes, was asked to take a polygraph test.

Are you the one who abducted Melissa?

No.

Right now, can you take me to Melissa's body?

No.

The results of his polygraph examination indicated deception.

As soon as he realized that I knew that he had failed that test, he didn't want anything to do with that room, didn't want anything to do with me, and pretty much bolted out of there.

But there was a problem.

In the state of Virginia, prosecutors must be able to prove where a homicide occurred.

Since the blood in Caleb Hughes' automobile could not be identified as Melissa's, Prosecutors could not reach the threshold of homicide.

They could only prove kidnapping, which carried a maximum sentence of only 10 years.

But prosecutors were convinced that the blue and red fibers in Caleb Hughes' car indicated more than kidnapping.

The last Tammy Brannon saw her daughter, she was wearing the pink nylon coat, winter coat, over top of this big bird outfit.

If the child remained in that winter coat in the automobile,

you wouldn't have the collection and the population of blue acrylic fibers that are found on the seat because they'd be inside the nylon coat.

They weren't.

Prosecutors believe that Hughes removed Melissa's ski jacket in the car, an indication that Hughes committed a sex act.

Hughes had the child's coat off in the automobile.

And it seems to me the inferences that flow from that are legitimate inferences of an intent to be filed.

While Melissa was waiting for her mother to say her goodbyes at the Christmas party, prosecutors believe that she left for a moment to get a drink from the water fountain in the hallway near the utility room.

This is where Hughes abducted her.

Hughes took Melissa through the window in the utility room and fled in his car.

Hughes removed Melissa's ski jacket in the car, causing the transfer of the blue and red fibers onto the front seat.

Also in the car, there were three rabbit hairs from Tammy Brannon's coat, the one Melissa handed her mother seconds before she was abducted.

Where Hughes took Melissa Brannon and left her body remains a mystery.

Hughes tracked blood onto his foot pedals and floor mat from his sneakers.

Luminol revealed blood on the car's steering wheel as well.

When Hughes arrived home, he immediately washed his clothes in order to remove trace evidence.

He also scraped away the bloodstains from the sides of his sneakers before washing them along with his clothes.

But he didn't remove evidence that he couldn't see.

The tiny fibers from Melissa's clothing left on the passenger seat of his car.

Caleb Hughes was arrested and charged not with kidnapping, but with the abduction of Melissa Brannon with intent to defile her.

He was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in prison without parole, the maximum sentence.

Caleb Hughes has never confessed to the crime, and the search for Melissa's body continues to this day.

Each piece of evidence, no matter how small, whether it's a car or whether it's a strand of DNA, all have a story to tell.

Where they've been, who they've been with, how long they've been around.

And this is the type of information that I look at.

and that I decipher and try to determine what value it has.

So one piece of evidence can be significant when you add multiple pieces of this puzzle, and you never get the whole puzzle.

You only get pieces, but you don't need the whole puzzle to see what that picture is going to say.

And in this case, 50 fibers, blue acrylic, 10 cotton, black rabbit hairs, to me, it's overwhelming evidence.