BONUS: Fatal Fast Food (An Unexpected Killer)

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Hi, SNAP listeners.

We're bringing you a special bonus episode today from Oxygen's hit series, An Unexpected Killer.

Returning to Oxygen this Friday, September 16th at 8.7 Central.

You can also watch full episodes live or on demand on the free oxygen app by clicking the link in our description.

Enjoy.

An ambitious, popular young restaurant manager.

She was a tremendous young person who had unlimited potential.

We always saw it just light the world on fire.

Is found beaten, stabbed, and suffocated.

The person who did this absolutely wanted to guarantee that she was dead.

Whoever did it ransacked the site.

Something that brutal had to be more than just a robbery.

Detectives uncover a history of workplace conflict.

He didn't like to be told what to do.

He scared me.

I was uncomfortable around him.

For me, that was a red flag.

With the community on edge, another attack leaves them living in fear.

It was such a similar homicide, a lone female employee and the use of a knife.

You don't know if somebody's lurking out there and they're going to do it again.

And new evidence confirms disturbing suspicions.

The lab informed me that there was a match.

I just couldn't believe what was happening.

Like, when am I gonna wake up?

Terry's murder wasn't what it appeared to be.

Falls Township, Pennsylvania.

is a family-friendly suburb with blue-collar roots.

Falls Township is a community in Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

It was built up around the U.S.

steel mill in the 1950s.

Steel workers moved out here from different parts of the country and it was a nice community.

Although we're a suburb of Philadelphia and we're right across the river from Trenton, violent crime is relatively unusual in Falls.

That all changes one Saturday morning with a gruesome discovery at a fast food restaurant.

On the morning of February 4th, 1984, the manager arrived to open the the restaurant and upon entering discovered that someone was laying outside the kitchen area and obviously deceased.

The manager recognizes the woman as the restaurant's night shift manager, 25-year-old Terry Brooks.

He observed Terry Brooks laying on the floor in a pool of blood with a knife stuck in her neck.

And he phoned the dispatcher and stayed on the phone until officers got there.

I was told that they had a homicide at the Rory Rogers restaurant on Route 1, so I was there pretty quickly.

Her body was positioned near the kitchen.

There was a butcher knife sticking out of her neck.

She had black and blue marks and bruises everywhere.

And it looked like hand marks around her neck like she had been strangled.

It was thought that she was still alive until the bag was put over her head.

because of the moisture in it from her breath.

She looked like she had blood under her fingernails and blood on her hand, and that was wrapped in the evidence bag and secured.

There was a rectangular kitchen prep area.

That's where you can see both her shoes that were against the wall.

To my mind, that was probably the first act of violence that took place, that she was literally pushed right out of her shoes and that a struggle had taken place right there.

Moving around the corner is where the body was found.

It looked like her body had been dragged on the floor to where she laid.

Terry had her winter coat on and her bag was also on the floor like she was getting ready to leave.

Further examination of the scene reveals evidence of another crime.

In the office, a safe was opened.

There was a register drawer on the desk.

The coins were scattered all over the floor.

It just appeared that whoever did it ransacked the safe.

There was money taken.

It had all the earmarkings of a robbery homicide.

It was fairly easy for the restaurant to get a count of what was missing, and it was around $2,500.

Looking for more clues, detectives speak to the manager who discovered Terry's body.

When the manager of the restaurant arrived around 6 in the morning, he found the inner vestibule door locked.

The door to the interior of the building was locked, but the drive-through window was partially open.

It appeared that the killer had left through the drive-through window because the metal pipe that was laid in the track as the kind of security measure to lock it up had been removed and laid to the side.

But there was no sign of forced entry in the restaurant.

Police believe Terry was killed sometime after midnight when the restaurant had closed.

As detectives continue to process the crime scene, Terry's family discovers that she never returned home from work.

The morning of the murder, Scott, the victim's fiancé, knocks on the door to the Brooks family home.

At the time, Terry lived with her parents.

We hear a banging at the door and it was Scott standing there and he's like, Terry's car is not in the driveway.

He tells them that he was driving by their house on his way to work and that he noticed Terry's car wasn't there.

They then looked in her room and saw that, in fact, she wasn't home.

And then Scott picked up the phone and dialed Larae Rogers.

And he goes, this is George Brooks, Terry Brooks' father.

You know, she didn't come home last night.

Is she okay?

And they said, no, she's not.

She, you know, has been murdered.

I was kind of shocked they told him over the phone, but

I just couldn't believe what was happening.

Like, when am I going to wake up?

It's a horrible thing.

I was getting ready to go to work when my phone rang.

I was getting a call from her stepmother to tell me so that I wouldn't see it on the news and

my heart just sunk.

Terry Brooks grew up in Warminster, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children.

My mom and dad divorced.

Terry was in eighth grade and she kind of took over the mother role.

After that happened,

out of all of us, she was probably the most ambitious.

We always thought, you know, Terry would have her own business one day and she just just light the world on fire.

Terry took jobs in the restaurant industry and earned a reputation as a hard worker.

I worked with Terry at an Italian restaurant.

In the beginning, she was a server.

I tended bar.

She became management after working there for a while.

She really, really took pride in her work and how she dealt with people.

Soon after her promotion, she began a year-long romance with her coworker, Scott Keith.

She met Scott at the restaurant.

He was the head chef.

They had a good time together.

Terry just came home one day with a ring on her finger and we were all like, oh my God.

While Terry planned her dream wedding for the upcoming summer, her career also started to take off.

It was her dream to move forward to bigger things in the hotel business.

And she had looked into getting a job with the Marriott Corporation.

The position she accepted with the Marriott was to be a manager of a Roy Rogers restaurant.

I first met Terry when I started working at the Roy Rogers.

She was my boss.

She was always happy.

She was very excited about her wedding and she was excited to go dress shopping.

I know she put the down payment on the honeymoon to Hawaii and she was talking about the bridesmaid dresses.

Terry and Scott were apartment hunting.

There was a lot to do.

It was at a time when all new things were happening in her life.

Now, detectives must determine who could have killed this ambitious young woman just a few months before her wedding.

They asked the family about Terry's movements in the hours leading up to her murder.

Mr.

and Mrs.

Brooks last saw Terry the day before, Friday, February 3rd, 1984, when she left left for work.

Usually, her fiancé Scott would make sure that he went and closed with her every night, and her father was glad that Scott would go and close with her and be there to keep her safe.

Scott was worried about Terry's security at the restaurant.

He would go and sit with her while

she finished everything up.

Scott tells police he wasn't with Terry the night before.

He had stayed home because he was working the early shift the following morning.

Neither Scott nor Terry's parents are able to provide police with any leads.

The family was really cooperative with the investigation.

There was just nothing that they could volunteer or give us that would indicate that they knew anything about the case.

It was completely out of the blue.

There was no reason for them to feel that she was in any danger or in any jeopardy.

I couldn't think of anybody who

really disliked Terry, and and I can't imagine anybody would dislike her that much to kill her.

Investigators turned their attention to Terry's co-workers.

It looked like it could possibly be a robbery, but the deeper we looked into to see how brutally she was murdered, it had to be more than just a robbery.

Detectives want to know how Terry was thought of by her colleagues.

Terry was a young woman who was very staunch about the procedures and she enforced them strictly.

She was a buy-the-book person and as long as you did your work the way you were supposed to, there were no problems.

When police ask if Terry's management style made her any enemies, one name keeps coming up.

Steve Daly was an employee that didn't adhere to the procedures.

He was a little hot-headed.

Steve scared me, to be honest.

He was very rough, quick to anger.

I was uncomfortable around him.

Detectives learned that just weeks before the murder, the tension between Terry and Steve hit a breaking point.

He ended up getting fired and wasn't too happy about it.

You've got this former employee who had a clear animus towards the victim and is fired by the victim.

And add to that that here's an employee who knows how the restaurant operates, who knows the security procedures.

He's got the kind of knowledge to be able to commit this crime.

So this is somebody who now rises to the top of the list.

Coming up, police zero in on a suspect.

Fingerprints were found on one of the murder weapons.

At that point, he admitted he took the money from the office.

But conflicting statements frustrate detectives.

It was completely a misdirection, a diversion.

How could somebody do this and get away with it?

Until the investigation takes a jaw-dropping turn.

A polygraph operator said he was lying.

It caught me by surprise.

I remember him all of a sudden blowing up.

It was the turning point in the investigation.

Police investigating the fatal stabbing of 25-year-old restaurant manager Terry Brooks have learned that a disgruntled coworker lashed out at Terry before he was fired.

If you threaten somebody and they end up dead, you'd have to look at them and look at them seriously.

Steve Daly was a former Marine and had a difficult personality.

He didn't like to be told what to do.

Just weeks before the murder, Terry and Steve had a major blowout.

There was an occasion at work where Steve Daly was told to make a hamburger for a customer and he had just closed out that workspace.

So he didn't want to reopen the workspace.

And I remember him all of a sudden blowing up.

Steve lost his temper with screaming and yelling.

He became explosive at one point even calling Terry a bitch.

Terry was alarmed by Daly's behavior.

Terry, in a situation like what happened with Steve, she wouldn't tolerate it.

She didn't waiver.

So I think that was the frustrating thing for Steve is he couldn't break her.

And she was like, you need to go home.

You are done for the night.

And you will talk to the boss the next morning.

Daly storms out of the restaurant.

And the next day, Terry talks to her manager, tells him what had happened, which of course led to Daly being fired.

That did little to stop Steve's aggressive behavior.

Even after he was fired, Daly would return to the restaurant and buy food and have meals there.

He went back just to the lawyer.

Just, here I am.

You can't throw me out now.

It was very upsetting to her.

So given his personality and his conduct, that certainly seems to provide a motive.

Did Steve Daly's harassment escalate into a fatal act of revenge?

Police bring him in for an interview.

When we tracked Daly down, one of the first things, he tells us, that he knew at some point the police would be coming to talk to him.

Daly said that he didn't get along with Terry, that they clashed often.

In fact, he said that if she'd been a man, he would have punched her.

Daly's excuse for why he was going back to the the restaurant was that he was dating somebody who worked there.

I don't know that I buy that, but that's the reason he gave.

Investigators ask where Steve was the night of the murder.

He says that he was trying to get into a club, that he was not permitted access to the club.

So then he just drove around for several hours.

Investigators go to the club, they look at the security footage.

They can't find any footage of Daly being denied entry.

So this is not a hard alibi that can allow you to say, okay, this person's eliminated.

Just the opposite.

With no way to prove his whereabouts when Terry was killed, police ask Steve to take a polygraph.

So a polygraph is a useful investigative tool.

It can help us rule people in or out.

So Daly agrees to take the polygraph, and without question, he passed.

This guy looks like a good suspect.

So when you have momentum build like that and then it crashes to a halt, it's hard to swallow.

Police can't verify Steve's alibi, alibi, but with no evidence against him, he's free to go.

Stephen Daly was pushed down lower on the list of suspects, but you never eliminate somebody until you make sure that they are completely not involved.

Investigators turn their focus on the Roy Rogers staff who worked with Terry the night of the murder.

During the investigation, we knew that we had to interview the employees to see what the atmosphere was when they left, if there was any arguments.

Everybody consented to have their fingerprints taken.

The evening that Terry was murdered, there were four employees that she was working with, Patricia, Ron, Barb, and Dan.

And each of those employees was identified and interviewed separately.

Patricia tells investigators that just before closing, Terry discovered that money had gone missing from Barb's cash register.

The employees got in an argument and there was $40 that was supposedly missing.

Terry was going to get to the bottom of this.

It wasn't a MITRE event.

She took it very seriously.

She began questioning different employees.

You know, where did it go?

Why is it missing?

Terry played everything by the book.

If there's any money missing and you are caught being the person that's been hitting the till, there's no tolerance for stealing.

Terry cared about her employees, but some people didn't like her because she could be tough when she needed to be tough.

Patricia indicated that this wasn't the first time something like this had happened.

If you're stealing money from Roy Rogers and you're an employee there, that's a fireable offense.

So did this provide a motive for murder?

As Terry attempted to unmask the thief, the employees began to point fingers.

Barb told Terry that she thought Ron did it.

So he's now being confronted with the idea that he took this money and he actually turned his pockets inside out to prove, hey, he didn't have any cash on him.

Could Ron have killed Terry in a a rage after being accused of stealing?

As detectives look closer at Ron, fingerprint analysis provides crucial new evidence.

The employees who worked that night clean up before they close.

Working the later shift, we had to clean up everything, wash all the equipment, sweep them out the floors, wipe down all the tables, stuff like that.

So I thought that whoever was in there after closing could have possibly left fingerprints.

We began matching up fingerprints that they'd lifted from different services to elimination prints taken from different employees.

And it was discovered that Ron's fingerprints were found on the drive-through window and on the trash bag that was wrapped around Terry's face.

Here we go.

This is somebody that we need to look at.

Investigators working to solve the Terry Brooks homicide have just got a match for fingerprints left at the crime scene.

The evening that Terry was murdered, there were four employees that she was working with, including an employee named Ron.

And Ron's fingerprints were found on the drive-thru window and on the trash bag that was wrapped around Terry's face.

Detectives asked Ron how his fingerprints ended up on the bag used to suffocate Terry and on the drive-thru window, the killer's likely escape route.

Ron said that one of his responsibilities at the restaurant was to take care of the trash.

So his fingerprints would have been on that bag because that was part of his job there.

Ron also said that he had covered for some other employees for their break time at the drive-thru.

So that's why his print was there in the window.

Police aren't able to determine if the window had been properly cleaned at closing.

So Ron's excuse is plausible.

Still, detectives want to know his whereabouts after he left work.

Ron said that he left the restaurant shortly after one in the morning with co-workers and that he got home about 1.15 and talked to his mom before he went to bed.

We checked out Ron's alibi, discovered that he had indeed gotten home and stayed home all night.

With Ron all but cleared, police get new details from another employee about the money that had gone missing from Barb's cash register.

We learned the $40 that was supposedly missing, it was found at a later time.

The missing money had mysteriously reappeared in the drop safe.

I think it's fair to say that Terry might have thought that it was Barb who had taken this this money.

My impression was that Terry was suspicious of Barb.

Police also learned that it was Barb's duty to close down the drive-thru.

Those two things combined the missing $40 and the fact that it was Barb's responsibility to lock that drive-through window and that ultimately it's found unlocked and it's believed to be where the killer left puts her at the top of the suspect list.

According to the work schedule, Barb and Terry were the last two employees at the restaurant.

The policy of Roy Rogers for employees that were going to work past the end of their shift was that they would lock the doors and that there would be a minimum of two employees there.

Could an argument between Terry and Barb over the missing money have turned deadly?

Barb said that she was sent home early by Terry and she was insistent that she close the window and place the pipe in the track to lock.

And in looking into Barb's whereabouts, we discovered that she was picked up by her boyfriend, so she had an alibi.

So it's conceivable that Terry was alone in the restaurant working into the early hours of february 4th doing inventory police later confirmed the alibis of every employee who worked the night of the murder when the autopsy report arrives investigators hope it will give them a new lead the pathologist found that terry had uh been strangled and the bone in the back of her neck was severed from the stab wound.

There was a serious brain hemorrhage that was the result of her head being repeatedly banged against that hard concrete floor.

And looking at that stab wound to her spine, it was likely she was conscious but paralyzed when the plastic trash bag was wrapped around her head.

The autopsy report lists each of Terry's severe injuries as potentially fatal, but indicates asphyxiation as the likely cause of death.

There was no indication that Terry had been sexually assaulted.

You can't help but look at the way that Terry was killed and not think that the person who did this had such a high level of rage that they absolutely wanted to guarantee that she was dead.

Material was collected from the knife that was left lodged in Terry's throat and under Terry's right ring finger, where the pathologist had identified a defensive wound.

At the time of this murder in 1984, there was no DNA technology.

Analysis of blood was really relegated to blood typing.

By today's standards, the evidence was limited.

As the investigation continues, Terry's loved ones struggle to make sense of her violent death.

The funeral home called the morning of the viewing, and they said, you know, could somebody come down and take a look at Terry?

And they had her laid out in the casket and she just,

she didn't look good.

You could see the cut marks in her neck and you could see the bruises on the...

you know, the back of her hand, and they had makeup on her, too, and you could still see the, she didn't it didn't look like terry you know i said when i got home to my dad i think we should keep the casket closed we didn't want people to remember her

looking like that

as the brooks family prepares to bury their eldest daughter falls township lives in fear of a brutal killer still at large it was a young person that was killed you know, at her job.

So I think the community as a whole regarded this as a frightening homicide.

It caused quite a bit of fear due to the fact that it was so violent and most people in this area would think this shouldn't happen in our town.

I just really just thought it yeah it probably was you know a robbery.

And fortunately they killed her instead of just robbing the place.

But you don't know if somebody's lurking out there, you know, and they're going to do it again.

Less than two weeks after Terry's murder, the town's worst fear appears to become a horrifying reality.

At another Roy Rogers, an assistant manager was attacked coming out of the bathroom.

She was hit in the head.

She fell to the floor, and the actor ran away before she can identify them.

The restaurant manager survives.

But just a week later in nearby Scranton, there's another brutal attack.

A male attacker waited in the parking lot until there was a lone female employee, then made entry into the restaurant.

But the money from the restaurant had already already been dropped into the safe.

So he took the female employee's money and then stabbed her to death.

Detectives fear they have a serial killer on the loose.

When you take a community that was already stressed, it made it even worse.

And if you've got an individual who's going from restaurant to restaurant and just robbing people and they have no personal connection to the victim, it's terrifying.

It took it up a notch.

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Three weeks after the murder of Terry Brooks, police have learned another restaurant employee has been stabbed to death in nearby Scranton.

Scranton's just up the turnpike, and it's not really that far from us.

So anything that would indicate a violent armed robbery, we would have to look into.

It was such a similar homicide, a lone female employee inside a restaurant, a male attacker, and the use of a knife.

Investigators learn that a suspect has already been arrested.

Could he also be Terry Brooks' killer?

The person that committed this homicide in Scranton was a man named Steve Duffy.

We sent investigators to go to Scranton to attempt to interview Duffy, and by the time we arrive, he has lawyered up.

But we got a warrant to obtain his fingerprints and compare them to the fingerprints from the scene.

But in the end, the fingerprint comparison indicated no connection to the homicide at Arb Roy Rogers.

Police are also unable to identify a suspect in the assault of the manager at the other Roy Rogers location.

You go through this cycle of building momentum and then you hit a wall.

It's disheartening.

It's been a month since Terry Brooks was found dead and the killer is still at large.

Something that brutal and that terrifying, you have to try to solve it no matter how long it takes.

But when the leads start running out, you get awful upset.

As weeks turn to months, And you identify suspects and then eliminate them over and over again.

A case went cold.

An investigator, by necessity, has to move on to other cases.

But for a family that loses a loved one to a homicide, they don't move on.

When it first happened, you just assumed it was going to be solved.

You think, well, how could somebody do this and get away with it?

My dad's hair turned white within a year.

He lost weight.

He just.

It just destroyed him.

It was hard for Terry's family having to process the heartache of losing their daughter and not having closure over it.

I couldn't imagine not having answers.

There are no significant developments in the investigation for nearly 14 years.

Then, in 1998, Falls Township's new police chief orders a fresh look at the Terry Brooks murder, and a local prosecutor is assigned to the case.

One of the primary reasons that the police chief put this renewed focus on this case was that there had been developments in DNA technology during the 1990s.

And part of the point of my assignment to have someone come in with a fresh point of view, it was just a matter of reviewing all of those reports and reviewing all the physical evidence.

It caught me by surprise a bit when I opened up the bag that contained Terry's wallet.

I found that you could still clearly smell Terry's perfume.

And because I wasn't expecting it, it's one of those things that sort of triggers your emotions and brings you closer to the victim.

A team is assembled for the renewed investigation.

Lori said, take a look at this homicide.

And she asked me what I thought.

And apparently my answers were well enough to get me assigned to work on it.

At the time that the homicide occurred, other robberies at fast food restaurants in the area caused law enforcement to form the initial theory that it was likely to have been a robbery.

We had the advantage of knowing that the robbery homicide track didn't work out, so you know we could start with a different theory.

There were two things that really jumped out.

One, that we could conduct victimology interviews and talk to some people who weren't interviewed back at the time.

And two, develop some kind of forensic signature for the killer.

As the lab works to extract the killer's DNA from crime scene evidence, investigators learn more about the victim, Terry Brooks.

Victimology essentially means learning everything you possibly can about the victim.

Everybody who we spoke to described Terry Brooks as intelligent, ambitious, friendly, well-loved by her family and friends.

Detective Whitney spent a lot of time with the family to gain their trust and to reassure them that we were working on the case diligently.

Nelson and Lori, it seemed like the power couple, both of them are extremely intelligent and they were driven to get this solved.

Detectives hope new interviews will bring to light crucial details that could help the case.

You just never know when you're going to get some new piece of information that's going to put us on a track to identify who did this.

Some of the people who we spoke to, they were quite young when this homicide occurred, in their late teens or early 20s, and having more life experience, were a bit more open than they might have felt they could be in the 1980s.

Detectives reach out to people who weren't interviewed in the 1984 investigation, including those who worked with Terry before her employment at Roy Rogers.

I got a call from Falls Township Police.

They wanted to speak to me about the Terry Brooks murder, and they just said to me, we'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

Cindy knew Terry well.

They worked together and Cindy kind of laid out what was going on in the victim's life.

During her interview with investigators, Cindy drops a bombshell.

What Cindy told us presented a completely different image of this homicide.

It turned out Terry's murder wasn't what it appeared to be.

And now you couldn't help but conclude everything's pointing to one person.

14 years after the murder of Terry Brooks, cold case investigators have just received shocking new information from a friend and former co-worker of Terry's.

We asked what things did Terry share with, you know, Cindy as a friend.

And I said to them, Terry and her fiancé Scott, their upcoming wedding.

At first was exciting for Tari.

But I proceeded to tell them that the week before Terry had been murdered, she wanted to call off the wedding.

She just realized that's not what she wanted.

We knew Terry and Scott had just put down a deposit on their honeymoon and their wedding was upcoming.

And in the initial investigation, the officers that conducted it came away with the impression that they were a happy couple.

There hadn't really been anything in the report that indicated there were any problems in Terry Brooks' relationship with Scott Keefe.

But we did learn that Terry confided to some of her friends that she wasn't entirely sure she was going to go through with getting married.

Mr.

and Mrs.

Brooks felt close to Scott.

He was the young man that was going to marry their daughter.

To her parents, Scott was this loving, caring fiancée who would check on Terry and drive by to make sure she was safe and give her rides.

Some of Terry's friends had a very different impression of Scott.

Cindy Bradnave told us that there had been some problems in the relationship.

For me, that was a red flag.

I think through time and her changing jobs and the fact that she was moving on and going for her dream and he was stuck where he was, his jealousy became an issue and he was very possessive.

Scott would not let Terry stay alone.

She was afraid to tell him she didn't want to be married.

She was afraid to call it off.

She didn't know what she was going to do to the point where she was in tears.

Police get further insight into Terry and Scott's relationship from Terry's siblings.

When she started dating Scott, we just were all scratching our heads like what is she doing with him?

He was just not the kind of guy she's always dated.

He wasn't fun loving.

All he wanted to do was sit there and drink.

And that was just unlike her.

Just seemed like he wanted to keep us away from her and him.

It just makes you think back, like maybe he did have signs of an abusive person.

But at the time, I just really thought it was a robbery, and she was killed during the robbery.

Detectives have a new perspective on Scott and how the supposedly grieving fiancé might have avoided suspicion at the time of Terry's death.

My dad thought Scott really loved Terry.

He thought if she loved him, you know, I'll love him too.

Mr.

Brooks was a very kind man, and in fact, George bought Scott the suit that he wore to Terry's funeral.

Her father just had such a big heart that I don't think he believed that someone that his daughter fell in love with could harm her.

And I believe Scott played on that.

Scott becomes someone that we think may have done this.

Examining the crime scene through the lens of what if Scott did this?

Okay, that's how he got in.

She let him in.

We were told that he had a practice of going to the restaurant and sitting with her while she worked after hours.

And it's personal, it's rage,

And then the action of placing that bag over her face to kind of depersonalize her is a telltale mark of what someone does when they've killed somebody that they're close to.

And now it becomes a priority for us to see if the forensic track, if the evidence points that way.

Investigators hope the killer's DNA can be extracted from the crime scene evidence collected back in 1984.

It was a potential concern that they might not be able to find any usable DNA due to the amount of time that had gone by.

Luckily, the knife that was left lodged in Terry's throat and the material collected from under Terry's right ring finger where the pathologist had identified a defensive wound to that area yielded an unknown male DNA profile.

It was highly unlikely under the circumstances that that DNA material would have come from anyone other than the perpetrator.

The next thing we had to do was obtain a DNA sample from our suspect.

Scott Keefe did not have a criminal record at that time.

He didn't have any DNA samples on file with an agency such as the FBI.

One of the things that we learned from the laboratory expert was that cigarette butts are an excellent potential source of DNA because they have saliva on them.

And at that point, we actually knew what kind of cigarettes Keefe smoked and we knew where he lived.

Police hatch a plan to secretly obtain a sample of Scott Keefe's DNA.

We didn't at that point want to obtain a subpoena, to obtain DNA from him directly because we wanted to interview him first.

We wanted to set that up in the most advantageous possible way and we were concerned that he was a flight risk.

It was very important to us to be very careful about who knew he was a suspect and who we shared that information with.

And it was also very important to us to not be caught doing surveillance.

In 1998, Scott's life had kind of come full circle from where it was in 1984.

In 1984, he was living at home with his parents.

He had gone on to live with a girlfriend and then marry.

They'd had a child together, but then they split up and got divorced.

And in 1998, he was back home living with his mom.

Under Pennsylvania law, trash was considered to be abandoned property once it was put out in front of the house for collection.

So Detective Whitney immediately took custody of it, took it directly to the laboratory that was doing the DNA analysis.

I knew I was going to get a definitive answer one way or the other.

Could be him, him, could be somebody else.

It was that anticipation of I'm going to get a final result here that's going to matter a great deal in this investigation.

Police investigating the 1984 murder of Terry Brooks have secretly collected a DNA sample from her fiancé, Scott Keith.

We had to obtain a DNA sample from our suspect, so we collected cigarette butts that were in the trash.

The sample is compared to DNA found on Terry's body.

I'll never forget the phone call I got where the doctor at the lab informed me that there was a match from Scott's cigarettes to the crime scene evidence.

It was the turning point in the investigation.

That was the point at which we knew we would be able to prove that Scott Keefe was the killer.

Although we had very solid physical evidence against Keefe, it's always better if you have an incriminating statement from the defendant.

We asked Mr.

Keefe to come to the police station as one of the friends and family members that we were interviewing as part of our investigation.

We believed that he would cooperate with us.

We believed that he would come across as wanting to help, that he would try to sell us the same story that he was the grieving fiancé, you know, that he'd been telling people for 15 years.

As predicted, Scott agrees to cooperate with police.

We had a strategy to conduct that interview on the anniversary date of the murder.

People pay attention to dates.

It could raise a person's anxiety level and make them more apt to make mistakes.

The interview begins and Scott tells a familiar tale.

He told us the same story that he had told others over the years that they were happy, this was the love of his life, and that somebody else had taken her away from him.

If we came on too hard, we were too aggressive in our questioning, we felt he would lawyer up and stop the interview.

So slowly we built towards the question of whether Scott had anything to do with this or any knowledge of it.

And once we got to that point, we asked Scott if he would take a polygraph.

You can never force anyone to undergo a polygraph examination, but he agreed agreed to that.

The polygraph operator said he was lying.

So now Scott started to say things like,

I didn't mean for this to happen.

But then he caught himself and said, but I didn't do it.

But over time, that culminated at one point in him saying, she came at me first.

And that was the first time he put himself at the scene.

Investigators keep the pressure on.

And finally, Scott breaks.

He admitted that she essentially told him that she wanted to break up with him and he was enraged because of that.

At one point, he punched her in the face.

They struggled for a while in that kitchen prep area.

A knife had fallen onto the floor, and he knocked her down and straddled her, choking her and banging her head repeatedly against the floor.

But then he grabbed the knife.

and stabbed her with it and it stuck into her throat.

Then in his words, he bent over to make sure she was dead, saw that she was still breathing.

So he grabbed the trash can liner to wrap around her face to make sure that she would in fact die.

And he said he didn't want to look at her face.

At that point, he admitted he took the money from the office.

He said he exited to the drive-through window to make it look like a robbery.

Scott told us that the reason he went to the Brooks family home the morning of the murder was to make him look innocent.

So he's surrounded by her family when the crime is supposedly discovered.

It was completely a misdirection, a diversion that worked for 15 years for him.

Scott is charged with first-degree murder.

I was elated.

I was like, thank God they finally nailed him.

We waited a long time.

Getting the answers of who killed my sister really gave my dad some comfort, but I think he was still in disbelief that Scott did it.

We were just so happy we could tell her family that the person who had killed their daughter was in prison and we were confident he was going to be convicted.

At trial, Scott Keefe is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Terry was a tremendous young person who had unlimited potential.

She had good relationships with her family.

It's really a terrible tragedy that her life ended this way.

It's just so sad that somebody so young, because of standing up for themselves and wanting to move forward in their lives, gets their life cut short.

Terry would have had a very bright future and I'm sure she would have had a ton of kids and We'd be hanging out right now.

Terry would love to be remembered with those big eyes, that smile, her kindness in her heart, and a person with a goal.

She was truly a lovely, lovely person.

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