09x02 - Hunter or Hunted

[bunniefuu]

[music playing]

NARRATOR: On the last day of hunting season,

a young woman was k*lled while walking her dogs in the woods.

Police assumed it was an accident.

But a handwriting analysis, a ballistic test,

and an unusual physics experiment

led investigators to ask the question--

just what was the hunter's target?

[theme music]

The upper peninsula of Michigan is , square miles

of sparsely populated woodland.

It's quiet, and usually safe.

DAVE DISTEL: I would think if someone had a bicycle stolen,

it would make the front page of the newspaper.

NARRATOR: Here, residents have more trouble

with hunters than with criminals.

[g*nsh*t]

HULDAH MOILANEN: My daughter-in-law was hanging

clothes one day, and b*ll*ts were just

whizzing by her as she was hanging clothes.

And it wasn't even deer season.

NARRATOR: On the last day of deer hunting in ,

Judy Blake Moilanen went for a walk in the woods

with her five dogs.

[dog barking]

Eventually, the dogs returned home, but Judy did not.

Judy's mother and a neighbor went looking for her

and found her on one of the trails in the woods.

MALE VOICE [ON POLICE RADIO]: ----.

We have a [inaudible] at the end of Cherry Lane off of M-.

[sirens]

NARRATOR: Judy was dead from a g*nsh*t wound to the chest.

It appeared to be an accident.

HULDAH MOILANEN: Somebody called me.

They told me about it, and well, my-- my stomach

just sunk to the floor.

Felt like it.

I said, oh my god, no.

NARRATOR: b*ll*ts from high-powered r*fles

can often travel three miles or more.

-And every now and then, one comes down in the wrong place.

NARRATOR: Neighbors said they heard

a r*fle sh*t just after : PM.

The investigation was hindered because the b*llet that k*lled

Judy could not be found in the brush.

DAN CASTLE: There wasn't any b*llet.

I did find an older b*llet, and that was underground

and it was slightly corroded, and that was turned over.

But it was determined that it was probably

not the projectile they were looking for.

NARRATOR: But they did find evidence

of where it hit after k*lling Judy.

DAVE DISTEL: I think they noted, that particular night,

there was a blaze mark or a scar that a b*llet

might have made on a nearby tree.

NARRATOR: Judy had been married to her husband Bruce for

years, and they had a three-year-old daughter.

Bruce worked as an insurance adjuster,

and he said he had an alibi for the day of the accident.

DET.

BOB BALL: Well, he came up with somewhere around

different individuals that he thought

might be able to produce alibi for him on that day,

starting at about o'clock in the morning

and going all the way till :, : at night.

NARRATOR: Bruce was angry that his wife wasn't more careful.

DET.

BOB BALL: And he was more or less critical of his wife

for not wearing orange that day when she went in the woods.

To me, I thought this was-- this was way out of character

for this type of a situation.

NARRATOR: Bruce made several more unusual statements

about his wife, and investigators were starting

to wonder whether Judy's death was really an accident.

Within days of Judy Moilanen's funeral,

several friends noticed that her husband was behaving strangely.

One said he made sexual advances towards her.

LEE ANNE WYSOCKI JESSUP: Asking me

if I wanted to live with him.

And asking me if we could be more than just

friends, and those types of things.

It was like, my god, your wife hasn't even been dead

for a couple weeks, and he's saying these things, you know?

NARRATOR: And there was another bizarre incident.

After the funeral, Bruce gave some of Judy's clothing

to another friend, Gayle Lampinen.

And among the clothes was a letter.

BETH PACZESNY: It's addressed to her,

and its allegedly from the victim, Judy Moilanen,

signed "Judes," which was Judy's very personal nickname.

And Judy did not know Gayle very well.

She only had met her in passing like once or twice.

-When I read the letter, I stood in the kitchen

and I think the my first thoughts were, what the heck

is this?

BETH PACZESNY: And it basically said,

I'm having problems in my marriage.

Bruce and I are growing apart.

He's got his things, I've got mine.

Please help him find somebody else, one of those things.

And for me, the kicker was the PS line, which was,

but he's great in the sack.

GAYLE LAMPINEN: And just thought it was bizarre

that she would be writing something like this.

NARRATOR: Gayle told police Bruce behaved inappropriately

towards her in the months leading up to Judy's death.

DET.

BOB BALL: Bruce really turned up the heat,

and he was becoming a stalker, is what it boils down to.

GAYLE LAMPINEN: Well, he started coming over here and calling

the telephone a lot, and invite us to go skiing

and do different things.

And we wouldn't go with him.

-We were finding out that there may be a little bit more

to Bruce Moilanen than what his family knew about.

NARRATOR: To see if the letter was authentic,

police took it to a forensic document examiner.

JAMES STEGGALL: And I was asked to compare

that to known handwriting samples of Judy Moilanen.

NARRATOR: Steggall noted that the handwriting

was slow and deliberate.

JAMES STEGGALL: Well, that's an indication

that the document could be a forgery.

Someone's attempting to either disguise their writing,

or simulate the writing of another individual.

NARRATOR: There were several characteristics

inconsistent with Judy's known handwriting samples.

JAMES STEGGALL: In the known handwriting sample of Judy,

the end part of the T is a round bowl.

Of course, it almost looks like a B.

And over in the questioned sample,

there is a complete separation between the T

and the H. There isn't that bowl formation,

and it has a very short T crossing.

-It lacked all of her individual habits--

the way she formed her letters, the way she connected

her letters, the ending strokes, the crossing

of the T's, the directions of strokes.

NARRATOR: The letter was a forgery.

When someone writes on a piece of paper,

it leaves indentations on the page underneath, which

will hold more of an electrical charge

than the other paper fibers.

So Steggall placed a thin piece of plastic Mylar

over the letter, then used an electric wand

to create an electrostatic charge.

JAMES STEGGALL: So then we take a toner

and sprinkle over the top of the Mylar surface.

And those areas that have the greatest charge

will draw that black powder, or toner, to that area,

and develops an image.

NARRATOR: This revealed and someone

practiced writing an earlier version of this letter

on the page above this one, which is common in forgeries.

Steggall compared the letter to Bruce's known handwriting

samples and concluded he had written the letter.

DAVE DISTEL: To think that some guy would

be so bold as to write this and attribute it to his wife

after she'd been k*lled in a hunting accident.

GAYLE LAMPINEN: I didn't think about it, because the person

that I knew, I didn't think he was

capable of doing something like that.

NARRATOR: And investigators discovered something else.

Just one year earlier, Judy was hit on the head

by a large chimney block that accidentally slid off the roof

while Bruce was on the roof repairing it.

DET.

BOB BALL: And that accident darn near took Judy's life.

She was lucky that she survived it.

NARRATOR: Another time, a fire broke out at the Moilanens'

home while Judy was home alone sleeping.

Fortunately, she woke up in time to call the fire department.

[sirens blaring]

JAMES STEGGALL: But she kept that quiet.

She only told, I think, one-- one or two people about that.

-It was just weird.

And again, weird doesn't equal guilty,

but it certainly lays the foundation

for m*rder and motive.

NARRATOR: And Judy had over $,

worth of life insurance when she d*ed.

-In , here in the UP, that's a lot of money.

NARRATOR: Bruce also told Gayle about the insurance money

in what she described as his clumsy attempts to seduce her.

GAYLE LAMPINEN: A lot of times, he would try to tell me that he

was going to be financially wealthy,

to the point that he could quit his job

and just work with his animals.

-It didn't take us long to know something just wasn't right.

This wasn't just an accident.

NARRATOR: That may have been the understatement of the year.

LEE ANNE WYSOCKI JESSUP: She

about other people and would do anything for you, if she could.

NARRATOR: When -year-old Judy Moilanen was k*lled in a freak

hunting accident, her husband Bruce

had an alibi for the entire day.

But police found a witness who reported seeing Bruce

out hunting that day alone, which contradicted his alibi.

DET.

BOB BALL: He had people that he claimed

saw him around :, : in the afternoon.

But when you get right down to interviewing these people,

some of them couldn't even substantiate that they saw him.

BETH PACZESNY: He could not cover a time when

he was in the woods, and there was no witnesses that

could say where he was at that time.

NARRATOR: To determine whether this was an accident or m*rder,

police needed to find the fatal b*llet.

It was still somewhere in the woods,

but police couldn't find it.

Investigators found what looked like a scrape mark on a tree,

about feet away from where they found Judy's body.

Scientists applied sodium rhodizonate, a chemical which

turns purple in the presence of lead.

The mark tested positive, indicating it

was struck by a b*llet.

For weeks, Dan Castle tried to find the b*llet with his metal

detector, but each time came up empty.

DAN CASTLE: Well, I knew the b*llet was out there.

It just-- I was searching in the wrong area.

And it was kind of getting to me.

I knew that the weather was going to change,

that we were supposed to get a lot of cold weather and snow.

NARRATOR: Finally, he decided to try a novel experiment,

using a slingshot to recreate the trajectory of the b*llet.

He knew where Judy was standing when hit

and where the b*llet had hit the tree,

so he fired marbles at the tree from the same trajectory

angle of the fatal b*llet.

DAN CASTLE: So I tried to hit it near the same location

as the b*llet did, and I heard them ricocheting off

the branches and leaves and so forth in the woods.

RAY KENNY: One of the marbles that struck the tree ricocheted

almost at a right angle, somewhere, as I recall,

, feet away from the tree.

NARRATOR: And when Castle looked around that area,

he found the b*llet.

DAN CASTLE: It was just a fluke.

I didn't know if I was kind of at wits' end.

RAY KENNY: To me, this was remarkable,

to have him think of this, to what test could you do out

in the woods to try to determine where

a b*llet might go after it struck a tree?

NARRATOR: Ray Kenny, a firearms examiner with the Michigan

State Police, analyzed it to see if this was

the b*llet that k*lled Judy Moilanen.

The copper jacket was damaged, which wasn't unusual.

But he found some important evidence trapped inside.

RAY KENNY: I pried back the mushroom area of the b*llet

and collected all this material.

There was woody fibrous material.

NARRATOR: Forensic scientists finally had something.

It was the same wood and moss found

on the tree with the scrape mark.

And there was more evidence in the b*llet.

-There was some other little, like, fibers,

and there was a very tiny pink fiber that I could see.

NARRATOR: The pink cotton fiber was microscopically

similar to the shirt Judy was wearing.

They also found a black fiber and a feather fragment

in the b*llet.

CONNIE SWANDER: The black fiber was similar to the black fibers

of the jacket, and the feather fragment

was similar to the down feathers that

were found in the lining of the victim's jacket.

NARRATOR: There was no doubt that this

was the b*llet that k*lled Judy Moilanen.

It was a . caliber round.

-That was an incredible break in the case.

And that's one thing they didn't tell

Moilanen they had for a long, long time.

He had no clue that they-- they had the b*llet.

NARRATOR: Investigators researched all of the r*fles

that could have fired this round and identified

four possible manufacturers.

Bruce Moilanen denied owning any of these r*fles.

But in the couple's financial records

were loan papers of a recent bank loan.

And Bruce's g*n collection was listed as collateral.

BETH PACZESNY: We found an asset list

in which listed a g*n he failed to disclose to us, a -

Savage , a r*fle with a scope.

And that was consistent with one of the weapons

that could have sh*t that b*llet.

So that right there was key to us.

DET.

BOB BALL: Bruce was hunting, but he wasn't hunting deer.

BETH PACZESNY: He was hunting for his wife.

NARRATOR: Prosecutors believe Bruce Moilanen

tried once before to k*ll his wife.

A year earlier, while Bruce was on his roof making chimney

repairs, a cement block mysteriously

fell, hitting Judy on the head.

Judy survived the incident.

And they also believe Bruce started the suspicious house

fire as another attempt on Judy's life.

DET.

BOB BALL: It's really mind-boggling

that this guy could do something like that, with his wife

and his infant daughter sleeping in the house.

[g*nsh*t]

NARRATOR: Prosecutors say Bruce waited until hunting season

for his next attempt, and he hid in the woods,

waiting for Judy to walk the dogs.

[g*nsh*t]

The b*llet went through Judy's down vest, her red cotton

shirt, then hit a tree and ricocheted into the woods.

Even as an experienced hunter, Bruce probably

never imagined that someone with a slingshot

would find the b*llet in the dirt, snow, and leaves.

Since investigators couldn't find the m*rder w*apon

in Bruce's home, they believe he disposed

of it somewhere before heading home.

With Judy dead, and $, coming from her life insurance

policies, Bruce continued to pursue Gayle Lampinen, even

though she was married and had shown no interest.

Bruce decided to write her a letter,

and to make it look like Judy had written it before she d*ed.

He added the unusual postscript telling

Gayle about his sexual prowess.

The electrostatic analysis shows that Bruce wrote an earlier

version of the letter, possibly as practice

to mimic Judy's handwriting.

But it didn't fool the forensic document examiner.

JAMES STEGGALL: It's not possible to simulate

someone else's handwriting %.

You can interject some other handwriting habits,

but some of your own are going to appear.

DET.

BOB BALL: I feel his real motive was-- was Gayle Lampinen.

Bruce felt that if he could get rid of Judy, that he was going

to be able to sweep Gayle off her feet and go off,

and they were going to be happily together forever.

NARRATOR: During a police interview,

they confronted Bruce with the forensic evidence.

DET.

BOB BALL: A letter purportedly written--

NARRATOR: They made it clear that Gayle

Lampinen wanted nothing to do with him.

And that she knew from the start that the letter was a forgery.

-I k*lled her.

NARRATOR: At that point, Bruce confessed.

-Cops introduced the fact that Gayle Lampinen had been working

with them, and I think that-- it was

an emotional crusher for him.

And I think that-- that broke him down.

GAYLE LAMPINEN: We had no interest.

We had no interest in doing things with him.

We had our own life, and we just thought

the more we would ignore him, he'd go away.

But he didn't go away.

NARRATOR: Bruce said he threw the r*fle in a nearby river,

although police couldn't find it.

Bruce was able to correct a mistake

in the medical examiner's report.

DET.

BOB BALL: Bruce informed me that we were wrong

in part of our evidence, that we thought Judy had been sh*t

in the left side, when in fact she had been sh*t

in the right side of her chest, exiting out of the left side.

-I felt that that was a key to his confession, because he was

telling us something that only the person who was there,

doing the sh**ting, could know.

NARRATOR: He also revealed his motive.

BETH PACZESNY: What's everybody's motive for m*rder?

I think it comes down to money, you know, greed.

He had $, worth of life insurance on his wife.

DET.

BOB BALL: He said that Judy was a tyrant at work

and she was a tyrant at home.

He said she was a bad cook and he

ended up doing most of the cooking.

He told us that he didn't want to go through a divorce,

because Judy would get half of everything,

he didn't want to give up his assets.

And that was-- that was Bruce's downfall.

He was cheap.

NARRATOR: Bruce Moilanen was arrested

and charged with premeditated m*rder.

Despite his confession, he pleaded not

guilty at the trial.

BETH PACZESNY: He made an excuse for the confession.

And basically it was-- it was, you know,

psychologically coerced, he was tired.

PROSECUTOR: And you will hear how he took that g*n

and he scoped her in and he pulled the trigger that caused

a b*llet to k*ll Judy Moilanen instantly.

NARRATOR: Prosecutors showed the jury

this police recreation of the cinder block incident.

Bruce claimed he accidentally knocked the cinder

block off the roof with his foot.

The recreation showed this was impossible,

that it required a deliberate push.

But the forensic evidence was more than enough.

Bruce Moilanen was found guilty and was

sentenced to life in prison.

BETH PACZESNY: Everything just fit together, and again,

in a very sad situation for a family.

But at least we were able to give them closure and a sense

of justice, and I hope that they have that today.

-I feel the forensic evidence was extremely important.

I don't think we would have had enough information to break

Bruce down without that type of evidence.

-I think that he just thought he was so much

smarter than these-- these, quote, "back woods," unquote,

cops could possibly be.

These guys couldn't be that smart.

Turned out they were just a whole lot smarter than he was.

[theme music]