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In the midst of a promising dance career, Tracy Joe Shine suddenly dropped out of school and shortly afterward, disappeared.

Twelve years later, debris from an old refrigerator would warm up what had become a very cold case.

Tracy Joe Shine grew up in Houston, Texas.

She was a good student, a Girl Scout, and played sports.

But her real interest, her passion, was dance.

At the age of 13, she auditioned and was accepted at the prestigious High School for Performing Arts in Houston.

It was a dream come true.

And while away at school, Tracy Joe began to experiment with drugs.

That's when

she started having the problem.

She started meeting the wrong people.

She started skipping classes.

Her grades began to slip, and she became romantically involved with 31-year-old Michael Neal, who had recently been released from prison.

The first time I'd met him and she brought him over to my apartment, he seemed to be polite enough and seemed to be nice enough.

Eventually, Tracy Joe abandoned her dreams of a career in dance, dropped out of school, and at the age of 18, moved in with her boyfriend Michael and his mother.

Tracy Joe's mother didn't know what to do next.

Tracy was not the Tracy that she was before she did the drugs.

Tracy had become someone else that was controlled by drugs.

And I just kept praying that, you know, she'd just live through this.

and get out of all of it and then we could have our lives together again and and go on.

Michael Neal had recently been implicated in a racially motivated drive-by shooting detective Marcel Dion went to Neal's home to question him Neal wasn't home but Tracy Joe was

how long have you known him Tracy had just taken a shot the

syringe was still there on the couch right there with her At first, you could make heads of tails out of anything she was saying.

So he arrested Tracy Joe for using drugs.

drugs she'd been arrested two other times i believe for the for her drug problem she said she had tried to stop i had attempted to see if there was some way that i could get tracy

committed to a drug program

And I was finding that there was a waiting list at different places, and there really wasn't a whole lot I could do since she wasn't a child anymore.

At police headquarters, Tracy Joe offered to make a deal.

She said her boyfriend Michael was the one who committed the drive-by shooting, and she agreed to testify against him in return for a lighter sentence for her drug charge.

Detective Dion agreed to the deal.

Early the next morning, Michael Neal walked into police headquarters and put up the bail for Tracy Joe.

She was never seen again.

Nobody had seen or heard from her.

So at that point,

you start calling her friends and start calling anybody that she'd been associated with.

Well, nobody had seen her or nobody had heard from her.

Marcel Dion discovered that Michael Neal was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a violent white supremac group.

This explained Neal's alleged involvement in the drive-by shooting, which occurred in a black neighborhood.

When Dion asked Michael Neal about Tracy Joe's whereabouts, he said that Tracy Joe left home shortly after her arrest and that he hadn't seen her since.

Dion wasn't so sure.

The day after Tracy Joe's Shine was released from prison on drug charges, she visited her mother to borrow some money.

Although Tracy Joe had always stayed in touch with her mother and brother, that visit was the last time her family saw her.

Tracy Joe had simply dropped out of sight.

I,

for some reason, just felt something was wrong.

Virginia contacted Tracy Joe's boyfriend, Michael Neal.

And they told me she wasn't there anymore.

When Michael Neal wasn't forthcoming, Virginia had no other choice but to file a missing persons report.

Detective Marcel Dion immediately suspected foul play.

Then, a few weeks later, Dion received an anonymous telephone call.

Yes, I'd like to report a murder that I was.

She was telling me about this girl that was apparently killed by her boyfriend, stuffed in a refrigerator, and taken out to a car lot.

The informant eventually revealed the identity of the dead girl.

It was Tracy Joe Shine.

The informant also said that the refrigerator used to store Tracy Joe's body was still at the used car lot owned by Michael Neal and his brother Robert.

Armed with the search warrant, detectives went to the car lot, found the refrigerator, but discovered it had recently been cleaned with bleach.

We took the refrigerator apart.

We collected a piece of

human tissue from the freezer unit, and it had some hair follicles on it.

Forensic scientists attempted an RFLP DNA enzyme analysis on that tissue, but were unsuccessful.

The hair was compared visually to hair taken from Tracy Joe's hairbrush.

But that comparison was inconclusive.

With no other leads, Detective Dion spent the next few months looking all over Houston anywhere he suspected a body might have been buried.

I took a lot of heat.

Everybody thought I was crazy because I was digging up half of Harris County.

I was draining ponds.

We used horses.

We used four-wheelers.

I was given the nickname of digger because every time I received a phone call, I was digging somewhere.

But none of the leads were fruitful.

I knew that she had to be out there somewhere.

I just wouldn't give up.

Dion also questioned Michael Neal's mother, Barbara, at her consignment shop.

There,

Dionne noticed something suspicious.

In the display case was some women's jewelry, which was identical to jewelry owned by Tracy Joe Shine.

I just couldn't believe the way

they had taken Tracy Joe's jewelry and placed it

in a glass case at the business they were running and selling it over the counter.

Barbara McAllister told police that after Tracy Joe moved out of her home, she simply took the jewelry Tracy Joe left behind and was trying to sell it.

Although it may have been in poor taste, It still didn't prove foul play.

But with nowhere else to turn, the investigation faltered.

Dion had no choice but to attend to other cases.

I ordered all the evidence plus the refrigerator stored in our property room.

And basically, just about every year, almost to the day, they would call me and want to get rid of the refrigerator.

And I kept telling them, no, this is an open case.

I'm still working it.

Michael Neal was later arrested for another shooting incident and was convicted.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

His brother, Robert Neal, was arrested on a methamphetamine charge.

He, too, was convicted and sent to prison.

Despite their convictions, the Neal brothers continued to insist they knew nothing about Tracy Joe's disappearance.

It would take another 10 years before a cold case unit took a fresh look at the disappearance of Tracy Joe Shine.

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Nothing was heard from Tracy Joe Shine for over a decade.

And police could find no solid evidence of what might have happened to her.

During those years, there had been no credit card activity, no applications for driver's licenses, no history of employment, nothing.

Tracy Joe's ex-boyfriend, Michael Neal, and his brother Robert were serving time in prison for crimes unrelated to her disappearance.

Then, in 1999, The Harris County Sheriff's Department formed a new cold case unit headed by Detective Roger Wedgworth and Harry Fakaris.

The Tracy Jo Shine case was one of the first to cross their desk.

Tracy's like a lot of young girls.

If you look at

her upbringing, she was a Girl Scout, very much loved by her mother, just a normal kid who goes up, goes to high school, goes to proms and everything, and she got mixed up in drugs.

And of course, one of the worst mistakes of her life was meeting our suspect in this case, Michael Neal.

As a first step, they decided to retest the tissue sample found in Michael Neal's refrigerator with the new, more sophisticated PCR DNA test.

But after more than 12 years, the sample was too badly degraded.

Then there was another setback.

The hair found with the tissue sample could not be located.

But Fakaris and Wedgworth were astonished to learn that the refrigerator was still in the sheriff's department property room.

In a long shot, investigators decided to take a look at the refrigerator one more time.

We opened it up and it looked fairly clean, but we knew that it had been laid down on its back.

And we thought if there was any kind of body fluids or any kind of evidence it may have drained into the wiring harness on the back side of it.

Forensic scientists swabbed every square inch of the refrigerator and this time included the wiring and harness areas for any biological material that might be present.

The swabs were sent to the forensic lab.

I was skeptical that we would find anything of any value in the refrigerator simply because of the amount of time that it had been stored and the fact that like so many other evidence storage areas, the environment was not ideal for preserving the evidence.

When Watson looked closer at the swabs, he discovered what appeared to be a piece of human skin.

Watson tested that skin sample using a PCR DNA test.

PCR testing essentially takes minute traces of DNA, then amplifies or makes enough copies of it so that it can be analyzed.

The analysis was long and arduous and unfortunately was unsuccessful.

After months of frustration, Watson heard about a new test the FBI laboratory had been experimenting with, a test using mitochondrial DNA.

Traditional DNA testing uses DNA from the cell's nucleus.

Mitochondrial DNA is taken from the mitochondria, which exists outside of the cell's nucleus.

It's not as precise as traditional DNA testing, but in some cases it's all scientists can get.

And this time, Watson was successful.

The next step was to find a known sample of Tracy Jo Shine's DNA for comparison.

Bill Watson took letters written by Tracy Joe over a decade earlier to see if her DNA could be identified in the saliva from the envelope flaps.

But the DNA from the saliva was too badly degraded.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed from generation to generation maternally, meaning that Tracy Joe's mitochondrial DNA profile would be identical to her mother's.

When the mitochondrial DNA from the refrigerator was compared to Virginia Shine, it matched.

The biological material most likely was that of Tracy Joe Shine.

Had Tracy Joe's DNA been discovered on the handle of the refrigerator, that might not have been unusual.

But skin found on wiring on the back harness was a completely different matter.

With this discovery, Michael Neal was charged with murder.

His brother Robert, hoping to gain an early release from prison for his drug conviction, offered to make a deal.

After all these years that he'd spent in prison, I guess he finally realized he would never be getting out of prison unless he did something.

We know you have something to tell us.

And we sat down, worked out a deal, and he gave us his honest testimony, which we felt mostly was honest testimony, and told us what he knew about the case.

Robert not only revealed his brother's involvement in the murder, he also implicated his mother, his sister, and himself.

Robert Neal told police that his brother Michael feared Tracy Joshine would testify against him for the drive-by shooting in exchange for a lighter sentence for her drug arrest.

So when Michael went to bail Tracy Joe out of jail, he did so to eliminate a potential witness.

The most important thing that Robert told us was he actually showed us how Michael Neal killed her.

And Robert made this motion like this, like a choking motion.

So we knew that she'd been strangled.

Robert said Michael killed Tracy Joe in his bedroom and left her body there for three days.

The smell of decomposition prompted Michael's mother to look into the couple's bedroom where she saw the body.

She goes into the bedroom.

She sees that she's turning purple.

I mean, that's a clue right there that something is not right.

Neil's mother.

never reported Tracy Joe's death to police.

After the body was removed, Robert said his mother and sister cleaned the bedroom and burned incense to remove the odor.

Robert admitted helping Michael transport the refrigerator with the body inside to the used car lot the brothers owned.

Robert told us that he never saw the body.

He said his brother just told him help him move the refrigerator.

Basically, don't ask me any questions

and i won't tell you anything we'll just move this refrigerator out to the car lot

he said i can assume that tracy joe shine was in there but i never saw her in there i never saw her in there

robert said he sat outside while michael placed the body in the 55 gallon drum

Where Michael later took the barrel is unknown.

But Michael Neal didn't realize that tissue invisible to the naked eye would lead to his downfall over a dozen years later.

Michael made a lot of mistakes at the very beginning by leaving the body in there for several days.

It allowed us to get evidence out of the refrigerator.

The fact is science always progresses, always moves forward, and as it has,

We've been able to develop the type of testing that could let us test those smaller and smaller samples and match it up.

So his biggest mistake was in thinking he'd get away with it.

Although prosecutors had no body, Michael Neal was convicted of Tracy Joe Shine's murder and was sentenced to an additional 45 years in prison.

His brother Robert is still serving time for his earlier conviction for manufacturing methamphetamine.

Michael's mother, Barbara, denied any knowledge of the murder, saying she thought Tracy Joe had died of of a drug overdose.

Neither Barbara nor her daughter Jeannie were ever prosecuted for their alleged involvement in concealing evidence or abuse of a corpse since the statute of limitations for those crimes had expired.

Virginia Schein says she will never stop looking for her daughter's grave, even though Michael Neal stubbornly refuses to say where it is.

The sad part of it is if he's just trying to just keep on being the one in control is that he won't let us know where she really is

so that i can have some kind of peace there because it's i mean it's not going to be any worse for him to tell me

to tell us the real truth

and uh

And so I can't ever forgive him for that.

Marcel Dion's insistence on preserving the refrigerator for all those years provided the crucial forensic evidence necessary for a conviction.

I just couldn't believe it.

To me, it was just a huge weight off my back.

I've never been so happy over anything in my life.

The amount of effort that went into the sample processing on the front end was as much as you would put in any

case, any very difficult case.

I mean, it was just

on a scale of one to ten, I would say it was an eight or a nine.