08x17 - Brotherhoods

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NARRATOR: Two men were m*rder*d while sleeping in their bed.

One night later, an arson fire destroyed

a family planning clinic.

Investigators wondered whether some shards of glass, paint

chips, and a chicken feather could link what

appeared to be two separate crimes.

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On the morning of July , , Oscar Matson

called his son Gary.

No one answered the phone.

But there was an unusual message on the answering machine.

Hi everybody, this is Gary.

We came down with something pretty bad, pretty suddenly,

and we're going to have to go back to a-- to a specialist

friend of ours in the Bay Area.

We'll see you guys in about a week.

OK. Bye.

-It clearly wasn't Gary's voice.

And at that point, I became very concerned.

NARRATOR: Family members drove out to Gary's home.

BRIAN MATSON: We came up to the house, and called loudly.

Nobody answered.

We walked in and saw a foot sticking up on the bed.

And at that point, we realized what had happened.

NARRATOR: Gary and his partner Windfield Mauder

had been sh*t to death in their loft bed

with a caliber p*stol.

-It was just a tremendous shock when I--

I don't know if I was ever in denial.

It was instant depression.

NARRATOR: The trail of empty cartridge cases

and the location of the blood spatter

told investigators where the sh**t had stood.

TOM VASQUEZ: The sh**t walked towards the loft.

I think the people in the loft got

up to see what was going on.

And then they started being sh*t.

And the sh**t got closer to the loft

and then basically finished them off.

-It was overkill, basically.

Each of them being sh*t multiple times

like that, It was like somebody was trying to send a signal

to us or had something that they wanted

to say about how they k*lled these people.

NARRATOR: The k*ller then recorded a new message

on the telephone answering machine

saying the two men were away on a trip.

The autopsy revealed Gary and Winfield

were k*lled between midnight and : AM.

Winfield's car was missing from their home

along with Gary's credit card and driver's license.

Gary's family didn't believe the m*rder was a random act.

BRIAN MATSON: We felt very strongly

early on that it was a hate crime.

That they were m*rder*d because they were gay.

Because they both were active in gay rights issues.

So we just had a strong feeling.

We just knew it was a hate crime.

I did, anyway.

-You know, everybody was looking over their shoulder,

you know, wondering what was going on,

if they would be next.

I think the fact that someone goes into your home

and sh**t you to death in your bed

disturbed everybody in this community.

NARRATOR: Gary Matson and Winfield Mauder

had lived together for years and owned

a landscaping and nursery business.

They had no known enemies.

Six days after the murders, police found Winfield's car

on a deserted road about miles away.

Gary Matson's driver's license and credit card

were not inside.

Investigators asked the bank when the credit card was

last used, and they got a surprise.

The card had been used after Gary's m*rder

to purchase some g*n-related equipment.

TOM VASQUEZ: They had purchased almost $,

in reloading equipment, amateur reloading equipment.

And the person that had made the purchase

had requested that it be sent to a PO box in city.

-That is really dumb.

Criminals do dumb things.

And you have to wonder whether they have a-- some kind

of subconscious urge to be caught.

NARRATOR: Investigators set up surveillance

hoping the k*ller would walk into their trap.

When Winfield Mauder and Gary Matson were m*rder*d,

the only items missing from their home

were Matson's driver's license and credit card.

Immediately after the murders, Matson's credit card

was in use.

MICHAEL BARTRAM: They used the victim's credit

cards within hours of the murders.

The murders were probably committed

around : in the morning on July .

And that same day, in the afternoon,

they spent about $, in a shoe store.

And they stopped at several other stores

and used the credit card.

NARRATOR: And the credit card was also

used to purchase some g*n-related equipment.

The person using the card had the items shipped to a post

office box in a town about a two-hour drive away.

Police head straight to the address

where the items had been shipped.

Sure enough, they saw two men carrying

boxes out of their car.

They were identified as -year-old Matthew Williams

and his -year-old brother, Tyler.

Inside the car, detectives found Gary Matson's

credit card and driver's license.

In the brothers' home, police found several newspaper

articles about an arson spree that occurred two weeks

before Gary and Winfield's m*rder.

Three synagogues b*rned on the same night.

All were arson.

And at each one, hate literature littered the crime scenes.

CHRISTOPHER HOPKINS: The fliers were

found kind of randomly dispersed.

Thrown throughout the synagogue and also on the outside

as well.

And it almost in a random fashion.

NARRATOR: Police found similar literature

in the boys' apartment.

-Thousands of pages of hate literature,

anti-Semitic literature, r*cist literature.

White supremacist-- all kinds of white supremacist stuff.

NARRATOR: Gas chromatography identified the chemical makeup

of the accelerant used in the arsons.

In the boys' possession was a book on arson

which recommended the same chemical mixture.

A second book described the best techniques

for breaking and entering.

CHRISTOPHER HOPKINS: It describes the best times

to break in, between the hours of : AM and : AM.

And all arsons were within that time frame.

NARRATOR: And the third book recommended

wearing coveralls to commit crime.

Investigators found coveralls in the brothers' closet

similar to the ones the book recommended.

Investigators found nothing in the Williams' home

that tied them to the murders of Gary

Matson and Winfield Mauder.

But they found other forensic evidence.

FAYE SPRINGER: I looked at the suspect's car first.

And probably the only thing that I recovered

that was of significance was glass.

NARRATOR: The glass appeared to be safety glass,

the type used in windows and doors.

FAYE SPRINGER: When it breaks, you actually

have hundreds if not thousands of small particles of glass

that will come back towards the-- the

pushing, breaking of glass.

And it will become embedded in your clothing

even though you can't see it.

NARRATOR: In the trunk of the car were two black crow bars.

One had green paint scrape marks.

Could forensic scientists make any scientific connection

between the murders, arsons, and the Williams brothers?

THOMAS ANZELMO: It's hard to describe.

To see especially the film footage of the [inaudible]

Israel and the flames pouring out of the structure.

Initially we looked at the extremist groups

in the Sacramento area.

There were several groups such as Neo-Nazis, skinhead, hate

groups that had in the past vandalized synagogues

and other houses of worship.

NARRATOR: As police search for Gary Matson and Winfield

Mauder's k*ller, they inadvertently found

evidence linking their m*rder suspects to the arson fires set

to three California synagogues in the same night.

All of the evidence from Matthew and Tyler Williams' car

and apartment was sent to criminalist

Faye Springer, an expert in trace evidence.

She started with the glass shards

found in the suspect's car.

FAYE SPRINGER: Glass is not an organic material.

So it's just made from silicon dioxide and sand, basically.

And melted.

So glass varies a lot by refractive index.

And depending on how it's made and what

materials go in to making it--

NARRATOR: Three wavelengths of visible light

are passed through the glass.

The reflection of that light is measured

under the refractive light index.

Springer compared the glass in the suspects' car

to the broken glass at the synagogues.

FAYE SPRINGER: Glass at the arson at the synagogue

was similar to the glass in the suspect vehicle.

It was the same type of glass and it

had the same physical properties and chemical properties.

NARRATOR: Blue coveralls found in the Williams brothers'

home also contained glass fragments.

So did two other objects found in the brothers' car.

-The crowbars were sent down to my laboratory

because we suspected that the synagogue arsonists

either used crowbars or bats.

Eventually we found some glass fragments

that were similar to glass that was collected.

NARRATOR: Microscopic examination

of the crowbars also revealed green paint.

FAYE SPRINGER: When I called and asked them,

you know, where the green paint came from-- because I knew

none of the synagogues had green paint on them.

Because I had been all of them.

And they said, well, the only thing that we have is this fire

at this medical clinic office building.

NARRATOR: The medical office building was actually

an abortion clinic which had b*rned the day

after Gary and Winfield's m*rder.

The abortion clinic had green trim around the doors

where the arsonist entered the building.

Springer compared these samples to the paint

on the crowbar using pyrolysis gas chromatography.

FAYE SPRINGER: What it does is it allows you to look

at the organic profile of the paint.

And with paints, it's not just one chemical

that goes into making a paint.

There's lots of chemicals that go into a paint.

And they give you kind of a profile

of what that paint looks like.

And when we analyze it, we look at the combination

of all of those materials together.

NARRATOR: The paint on the crowbar

had the same chemical composition as the paint

from the abortion clinic.

CHRISTOPHER HOPKINS: So there we had a double transfer

from the medical clinic going to that crowbar,

and that crowbar going to that synagogue.

NARRATOR: Forensic proof that the three synagogue arsons

and the abortion clinic arson were connected.

And forensic scientists got lucky with some other evidence.

Not all of the fire bombs placed inside the synagogues ignited.

-Extremely fortuitous that you would

have unburnt material left at a crime scene.

NARRATOR: The surviving fire bombs were plastic containers,

a flammable liquid with homemade wicks made of cloth.

But in the cloth were some unusual items,

including dog hairs, cat hairs, and even chicken feathers.

When Springer went to the Williams' home,

she knew she had something.

FAYE SPRINGER: I saw the bird cages, and I thought, oh man,

they're gonna have one bird of every kind

that ever walked the Earth.

-I got excited very quickly.

They had three dogs.

They had a chicken coop in the back.

NARRATOR: Taking the chicken samples wasn't easy.

FAYE SPRINGER: We can just scare them so they're flapping all

over the place, and then we get the loose feathers.

NARRATOR: The hair from the Williams' dog and cat

as well as the chicken feathers were microscopically

consistent with the hair and feather evidence contained

in the wick of the fire b*mb.

And the chemical makeup of the light blue paint

on the Williams family tool shed matched the blue paint found

on one of the synagogue fire bombs.

-There was just too many coincidences.

The-- the feathers, the dogs, the same kind of paint.

I had a lot of confidence that these materials were going

to show that the bottles came from that location.

NARRATOR: With the synagogue and abortion clinic arson solved,

there were still two remaining questions.

Did the Williams brothers k*ll Gary and Winfield,

and was there forensic evidence to prove it?

After the two Williams brothers were linked to the four

California arson fires, investigators still

needed to solve the murders of Gary

Matson and Winfield Mauder.

THOMAS ANZELMO: What we wanted to do

was to see if forensically we could get evidence that would,

at a later time, lead us and help us prove which

individuals committed the crimes.

NARRATOR: Detectives searched a small cottage

behind the Williams brothers' parents' home

and found g*ns and a book on how to make a homemade sil*ncer.

A -caliber p*stol in the brothers' possession

had the same homemade sil*ncer.

-This had some gray tape or duct tape on the end of it

that had had a small hole on the end of that.

And you could actually visually see light through the hole.

On the end of the tape was a tiny speck of blood,

which was sent to the lab for DNA analysis.

One of the victims was within a couple feet of the victim

when it was fired to put that small droplet

on the end of that piece of tape.

NARRATOR: Mark Fisher processed the Williams' g*n.

MARK FISHER: The process was a Mark II caliber p*stol which

I developed three latent impression-- impressions,

and ultimately identified all three

as being made by James Tyler Williams, the younger brother.

NARRATOR: But was this the g*n used to k*ll Winfield and Gary?

-When a cartridge is discharged, the cartridge case

itself expands.

And it picks up an impression in the chamber of the g*n.

NARRATOR: Firearms experts test fired the caliber p*stol

and compared those spent cartridges

with those found in Gary and Winfield's home.

-Based on this comparison, I was able to conclude that the Mark

II p*stol had-- was, in fact, the one that had been used

to fire the components at the scene.

NARRATOR: Finally, the DNA testing of the blood found

on the end of that p*stol confirmed

the blood was Winfield Mauder's.

The Williams brothers lived only a few miles from the home

Gary and Winfield shared.

Prosecutors believe the Williams brothers targeted

the couple because they were gay.

Matthew Williams knew Winfield Mauder

because they had worked together briefly

at the local farmer's market.

Investigators also discovered the brothers were heavily

influenced by groups that express contempt for gays,

Jews, minorities, and abortion rights.

BRIAN MATSON: They are absolutely

a part of that extremist Christian movement that

strongly believes that h*m* are evil

and a scourge of the earth.

NARRATOR: On September , , the Williams

brothers pled guilty to arson.

While awaiting trial, Matthew Williams committed su1c1de.

BRIAN MATSON: It's just fine with me that he k*lled himself.

It's fine with me.

Except for the fact that it would have been

nice to have him stand up in court

and let the world see what kind of a person he was.

-Although they did k*ll two individuals

and cause millions of dollars worth of destruction,

they failed to ignite this so-called revolution,

this uprising against-- against certain institutions.

NARRATOR: His younger brother Tyler pled guilty

to arson and first degree m*rder and was

sentenced to life in prison.

Every year, on the anniversary of Winfield and Gary's death,

there's a celebration of life and diversity

in Redding, California.

-Today, in memory of Gary and Winfield, I ask all of you

to be teaching respect for people's differences.

NARRATOR: This was a case where the forensic evidence

identified a trail.

Glass from the arsons gets trapped in the perpetrator's

clothing, then transferred to his car seat.

Paint from the abortion clinic and glass from the synagogue

is transferred onto the two crowbars

found in the suspects' trunk.

A chicken feather, dog, and cat hairs

cling to a shirt worn by the perpetrator.

A shirt that's later cut into pieces

to make the wick in the fire b*mb--

all identified by forensic scientists who often see

evidence that to others looks like dirt.

-Whether it be the paint chips or the glass fragments

or the dog hairs or the chicken feathers,

each one is an independent action.

And so then it becomes very significant

when you have multiple independent actions all

associated to the same place.

-It's great for us, because it-- it gives us the assurance

that we've got the right people and helps

us prove the case at the same time.

-While it's made my job easier, it's made it harder

for criminals to get away with their acts.

Even smart ones.

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