Up next, the
altercation lasts just seconds,
and ends in m*rder.
There's no rhyme or reason
as to why it happened.
Investigators
can find no connection
between the victim
and his K*llers.
It was not well-planned-put.
It was not motivated
by something personal.
It was our worst nightmare.
We had nothing to on.
The K*llers escape,
but leave tiny clues behind...
and that's just enough
for police to track them down.
There are things out there
that can be done now that,
even us in law enforcement,
a few years ago,
would have felt,
"That's science fiction.
That's impossible."
But it's not.
It's a reality.
On a sunny afternoon in
June of 2013, an elderly couple,
Charles and Yvonne Nieman,
on a much-anticipated
vacation to Colorado,
stopped at a convenience store
in rural Oklahoma
to pick up some snacks.
They were both retired.
They have three adult children
and several grandchildren.
During summer months, routinely,
they traveled to Colorado,
for the cooler weather.
Charles exited their vehicle, and
was helping his wife get out
when a young man approached him.
Mr. Nieman
had hearing impairment,
and had a lot of difficulty
in hearing.
He turned back to his wife,
and asked her,
"What did he say?"
And I believe she told him,
"He asked for your wallet."
Before Mr. Nieman
could respond,
the young man
pulled out a handgun,
and sh*t him two times
at point-blank range.
The sh**t then ran across
the parking lot,
and down an adjacent alleyway.
Charles Nieman, 77 years old,
d*ed almost immediately.
His wife was nearly speechless
with grief and shock.
This was my first homicide.
This was the first homicide
in Boise City in years,
dating back to the '80s.
I was in total shock.
If you wanted to
k*ll someone and disappear,
Boise City, Oklahoma,
had some advantages.
It's one of the most
sparsely populated areas
in the continental U.S.,
and it's also near a number
of major highways.
Where we're at, in 20 minutes,
you can be in Colorado,
in 20 minutes
you can be in Texas,
and in 30 minutes,
you can be in New Mexico.
The victim's wife,
who had no idea
who'd want her husband dead,
attempted to provide
a description of the sh**t.
She told me that a Hispanic male
wearing a dark-colored shirt
and khaki-colored shorts
sh*t her husband.
It all happened so fast
that other potential witnesses
weren't much help.
But the convenience store
had a surveillance camera.
The only problem?
It was inside the store,
and not much help
for recording
what happened outside.
We see a pickup truck
pulling in to the pumps.
You see a man getting out
of the passenger's side,
front seat, opening the door,
and letting a passenger
from the back seat out.
That passenger then walks over
to the direction
of where Mr. Nieman
and Mrs. Nieman are located.
Seconds later, people
outside the store could be seen
reacting to the sound
of g*nshots.
The truck drove off,
out of camera range.
The pixels in the camera,
we couldn't see a whole lot.
You could see the tag,
but you could not read it.
There was definitely a driver,
and then, a passenger
who let the back passenger out.
So, you could tell that there
were three people in the truck,
with only seeing two.
News of this m*rder,
a seemingly random att*ck
with no apparent motive,
terrified the local community.
Nobody knew, myself included,
what was gonna be next.
"Is this gonna happen again?
Are they still here?
Are they coming back?"
Local investigators
combed the parking lot
using what's called
a "grid search."
At the time
that evidence was collected,
there were two
like, spent casings
that were collected.
Chief Cobb immediately
noticed something distinctive
about these two shell casings.
I'm bit of a g*n guru.
I made the comment
to the agent that
"That looks like something
used in a glock."
And he asked me
why I thought that.
I said, "Glock is the only
w*apon platform
that uses
a square f*ring pin."
Three men in a dark
vehicle in the middle of nowhere,
possibly in possession
of a .40-caliber glock handgun,
and clearly capable of m*rder.
Locals, residents,
and investigators alike
had no explanations.
I want to say
nothing surprises me
in this business,
after 18 years,
but this just kind of
hits you like,
you know, "What in the world
is going on?"
And so, we had a challenge
of figuring out what happened,
and why.
Investigators believe the gunman
who sh*t Charles nieman was
connected to the pickup truck
that fled the scene.
In an alley nearby,
they found a black t-shirt.
We considered that, potentially,
when the sh**t was fleeing,
that he had removed the shirt
in order to try to change
his appearance,
even if just slightly.
Within hours of the
sh**ting, police received a call
from the owner of a truck stop
in Colorado
about 25 miles North
of Boise City.
The man, Clarence Jenkins,
had heard about the sh**ting
and the dark-gray pickup truck
on his radio,
and believed he might have
encountered the sh**t
a short time after the m*rder.
But this would be before
he'd heard the radio report.
Mr. Jenkins said that,
between 1:30 and 2:00,
three male individuals
had arrived at his truck stop
driving a dark-colored,
roughly 2000 model
Chevrolet pickup.
As Jenkins pumped the gas,
he had a brief conversation
with one of the men.
The driver made
statements that they were traveling
from Louisiana to Denver, Colorado.
And Mr. Jenkins
actually observed
that there were Louisiana plates
on the vehicle.
Jenkins was able to
provide enough information
for a forensic artist
to create a sketch.
It bore marked similarities
to a sketch
created from the description
of the sh**t
provided by the victim's wife.
Though Jenkins saw
Louisiana plates,
he didn't get
the license number.
Even worse, the truck
was hardly distinctive.
In this part of
the world, trucks like this,
pickups like this, are,
you know,
every other vehicle,
or 5 vehicles out of 10.
It became like looking for
a needle in a haystack.
Analysts now turn to
the one piece of evidence
they were sure came
from the sh**t...
the shell casings recovered
from the crime scene.
The problem was, analysts didn't
have a m*rder w*apon
to tie back
to the shells casings.
In years past,
that would render the casings
almost useless as evidence,
but a relatively new piece
of forensic technology, IBIS...
or the Integrated Ballistic
Identification System...
was changing that.
IBIS was created
in order to link crimes
that they didn't know
were linked.
It's similar to CODIS and AFIS,
in that you have a database,
and you're able
to potentially link cases
that you didn't know
were associated with each other.
Every time a b*llet is
fired, two pieces of evidence
unique to that firearm
are created.
First are the markings,
called "lands and grooves,"
that are imprinted on the b*llet
as it passes through the barrel.
The second are markings
found on the shell casing,
or "cartridge,"
that holds the b*llet.
When the trigger is pulled,
the f*ring pin
strikes the primer,
setting off a small expl*si*n.
That expl*si*n is going to
expel the projectile down the barrel,
as well as push back
on the cartridge case,
onto the breech face
of the firearm...
what the sh**t would feel
as recoil.
The impact
creates unique tool marks
on the soft metal
of the b*llet casing.
You're gonna have a f*ring pin
leave a mark,
the breech face leave a mark.
Whenever police
confiscate an illegal g*n,
or one connected to a crime,
analysts test-fire it,
and take digital photographs
of the shell-casing tool marks
left by that g*n.
They do the same
with shell casings
that are collected from
the scenes of unsolved crimes.
These high-definition scans
are entered into a vast database
with millions of images.
If we can link
these crimes via the common denominator,
which is the firearm, you may
be able to prevent future crimes
from happening by getting
that g*n off of the streets,
or getting particular people
that are serial g*n users
off of the streets.
As with the AFIS
database for fingerprints
and the CODIS database for DNA,
the IBIS firearm database
gets bigger every day.
And the ability to track g*ns
through the marks
they leave on shell casings
has grown exponentially.
As a result, the IBIS database
is so big that, at present,
it runs only on
a state-by-state basis.
We enter an excessive amount
of casings into the IBIS system
for the purpose that,
in the future,
there could be a hit.
Ballistics analysts
put the shell casings
from the Nieman crime scene
into Oklahoma's database,
in the hope that technology
might reveal their sh**t.
In this particular case,
there weren't any matches.
Nothing came back.
And with their best
piece of evidence yielding no results,
detectives worried
that Charles Nieman's k*ller
would never be found.
We had a cold case.
There were no leads to follow.
They were at a standstill.
When the IBIS database
failed to find a match
to the shell casings
from the Nieman m*rder,
investigators turned
to the t-shirt
discarded in a nearby alley.
DNA analysts were able
to extract
a very weak male profile.
It was a mixture, first
of all, and it was very low.
It was maybe 1 in 19,000 people
that could match
this DNA profile,
this mixture profile.
But incredibly, there was a
hit to a man named Mark Evans,
a former Oklahoma resident
now living 500 miles away
in Arkansas.
He had some criminal history,
and that was why his DNA profile
had been uploaded
into the CODIS system.
Evans denied any involvement,
and said he had never seen
the shirt before.
He also claimed he had
never been in Boise City,
and all efforts to track him
seemed to confirm this.
He provided his whereabouts,
provided family members
and friends
who he had spent time with
around that time.
But how did a shirt
with his DNA get there?
Analysts say the partial profile
could match thousands
of people in the U.S.
It was not definitive
that he was absolutely
the contributor
of the DNA on that shirt.
Evans was cleared.
And with no other suspects
or leads,
the case quickly went cold.
There wasn't anything else
for us to follow at that point.
It's a very heartbreaking thing
to have to tell a family.
They have had a loved one
taken from them,
and then, we have to tell them,
"We're not sure
where to go from here."
Four years passed.
Then, in November of 2018,
the Oklahoma State Bureau
of Investigation
created a new cold-case unit,
and decided to revisit
the Nieman case.
My partner and I
reviewed all the reports,
and we saw that there...
the only thing that could really
help us in this case
was the shell casings.
The IBIS database in Oklahoma
had come up empty in 2014.
Now, analysts tried surrounding
states, and soon got a match.
When we get a hit,
it's exciting,
because you're able to provide
an investigative lead
to the submitting agency.
This specific hit was that
times about 1,000.
I'm getting goosebumps
as I talk about it,
because it was just so exciting
to get a hit of this magnitude.
Kate came to our office,
and she said,
"You're never gonna believe
this, but we have a hit."
I grabbed her hands,
and we were jumping up and down
like little girls
in the middle of the OSBI
forensic science center.
The match was to
a .40-caliber handgun
confiscated by police
in Denver, Colorado,
four days after the m*rder
in Oklahoma.
We learned that it
was recovered from a Chevrolet Tahoe
occupied by two Hispanic males
who were associated with
a burglary, there in Denver,
at the time.
Now, we have the g*n
in Denver four days after our homicide.
And it's recovered
with two Hispanic males...
not three, but still two.
So, we think this is
gonna be it.
These men were
located, and questioned.
Both had rock-solid alibis
for the time of the m*rder.
Despite the ballistic link,
they were not the K*llers.
So, how did the g*n
that k*lled Charles Nieman
end up in their hands?
We've seen that
happen many times.
When you're related in gangs,
as they were,
sometimes, those g*ns pass hands
to several other people,
and they just don't know
who they got them from.
A p*stol in Boise City
today could be in Chicago or Miami
in a couple of days from now.
And you know, I mean,
there's just so much movement.
Stolen g*ns very often
have strange histories.
The task now was to track the
history of this particular g*n.
All g*ns have serial numbers.
The number on this g*n
traced it back
to a police department
in Port Allen, Louisiana.
Even stranger, the g*n
was registered in the name
of the local police chief.
How did this happen?
How does this g*n, you know,
end up being used
in a m*rder in Oklahoma,
and then, end up in Denver?
I was like, "Oh, my,
a police officer's g*n."
So, it bothered us.
You know, it bothered me.
When the police chief
of Port Allen, Louisiana,
was told a g*n
registered in his name
was used to m*rder someone
in Oklahoma,
he had a surprise
for investigators.
He told them the g*n in question
had been stolen from his vehicle
just days before the m*rder
in Oklahoma.
And that wasn't all.
We also learned that,
that same day,
a pickup truck...
a gray pickup truck
with Louisiana tags...
had been stolen down the street.
There was little doubt
the theft of the truck
and the g*n were connected.
And the truck fit the exact
description of the truck
believed to be driven
by Charles Nieman's K*llers.
Then, we were able to kind of
connect the dots from there.
In the driveway
where the truck had been parked
before it was stolen,
investigators found
potential evidence.
There was a cigarette
butt located at the scene,
and the owner said
he didn't smoke.
A DNA profile was generated,
and entered into the CODIS database,
and there was a hit...
to a 28-year-old man
named Zach Wilson.
Investigators tracked him down.
They told him they
were investigating
Charles Nieman's m*rder,
and showed him a picture
of the victim.
He began crying,
breathing real hard,
just crying uncontrollably.
He was, at a point,
on the floor,
in the fetal position,
crying, and just overwhelmed
by emotion,
to the point where I had to
get down on the floor with him,
and try to get him to calm down.
It was almost like
this big weight
was lifted off of his chest
to tell us, you know,
what happened.
Wilson told
investigators that he,
his half-brother Timothy Dees,
and a friend named Jeremy Scott
stole the pickup truck
and handgun in Louisiana,
and went on
a multi-state crime spree.
Low on money, Wilson and Scott
used the g*n
to rob a dollar store in Texas.
Two days later, they arrived
in Boise City, Oklahoma.
It was Timothy Dees'
turn to do the crime.
The intention was for him to
go in the store, and rob the store.
I think he just thought
that this old man
would be an easier target
than going in that store.
Dees, just 19 years old,
panicked during
the attempted robbery,
and fatally sh*t Charles Nieman.
His partners heard the sh*ts,
circled the block,
picked up Dees,
and fled to Colorado.
In Denver, Wilson tried to sell
the m*rder w*apon,
only to have it stolen from him.
That put the g*n
back into circulation.
But what the trio didn't know
was that those two shell casings
left at the scene of the m*rder
would allow IBIS analysts
to track the g*n
over at least 4 states
and more than 1,200 miles.
The IBIS system gives us
the ability to connect the dots,
and that's just critical
in solving these cases.
Investigators found
Timothy Dees in Alabama,
and he confessed.
Jeremy Scott was arrested
in Colorado.
In August 2019,
Zach Wilson and Jeremy Scott
pled "no contest"
to felony m*rder,
and received sentences
of 25 and 35 years respectively.
Timothy Dees pled "guilty"
to felony m*rder,
and was sentenced
to life in prison
with the possibility of parole.
A random and completely
senseless m*rder...
the kind of case
that often goes unsolved.
But a discarded cigarette butt
and a few microscopic marks
on some shell casings
ultimately told the sordid tale
of who k*lled Charles nieman.
We absolutely needed a miracle,
and the IBIS hit,
that was the turning point.
Without that, we wouldn't have
these three convictions.
You know, they would still be,
you know,
out and about in the world.
The forensic science,
the IBIS hit,
opened up a pathway that,
it could've led nowhere,
but in this particular case,
it opened a pathway
that led to the conviction
of the perpetrators.