Up next, her m*rder
stuns even hardened New Yorkers.
It was
a pretty horrific homicide,
and we knew
that the suspect's perpetrator
was still on the loose.
We begin tonight
with the latest developments
in a crime that has shocked
this unshockable city.
The life cut
short, way too short...
that should have never happened.
The k*ller has attempted
to strip all identification
from his victim.
We didn't know the cause
of death at that point.
We didn't know who she was.
I can't find out who k*lled you
unless I know who you are.
Detectives finally
I.D. the dead woman...
and are led to a k*ller
with a seemingly limitless
capacity for v*olence.
It's just beyond belief.
It's like a Jack the Ripper
kind of guy.
You know, just absolute animal.
Away from the glare
of the lights
and gleaming skyscrapers
of New York City
are some little-traveled byways,
notorious to locals
and to police,
for being dirty, desolate,
and dangerous.
On Saturday, February 25, 2006,
a body turned up
in one of those places,
about 20 miles
from downtown Manhattan.
First responders
came upon a horrific scene.
The victim was a young female,
probably in her 20s.
This victim was naked
and wrapped in a blanket
and was bound
with twist ties behind her back,
which basically held...
used as handcuffs.
The victim's head
was wrapped with packing tape.
Some sort of cloth
had been shoved down her throat.
A chunk of her hair
had been cut away...
one of a number of apparent
attempts by her k*ller
to cover up his crime.
He knew enough
on how to clean up the scene.
He cut her fingernails down,
so there was no DNA underneath
underneath her nails.
There were no
surveillance cameras in the area.
There was no identification
on the victim.
But her body
still gave investigators
some basic information.
What stood out to me is she had
specific tan lines on her
and she was Latino.
So, middle of February,
in the cold,
she either just came
from somewhere warm
or was not from the area originally.
A snow brush was found
near the body.
No one was sure if this had
anything to do with the m*rder.
after the body was found,
a woman called police
to say her friend,
Imette St. Guillen,
had gone missing.
And one thing she said was
that Imette had just returned
from Florida,
you know, the day before
she went missing.
And that immediately struck
a chord with the detective,
because there was a tan.
Tonight, the sad irony.
New York's top detectives
are furiously investigating
her m*rder
as they search for a k*ller
on the loose.
Guillen, a Boston native,
was two months away
from a graduate degree
in criminal justice.
She was fabulous.
Fabulous young woman.
It's a tremendous loss.
In this case, when your child
dies, you die.
There's a part of you
that will never,
ever be resurrected again.
Imette's autopsy made it clear
her m*rder
was even more gruesome
than first responders
originally thought.
There was definitely damage
to her private areas,
indicating it would seem
as though
there was a forceable sex crime
of some sort going on.
I believe it was a sock
that was in her mouth
actually pushed her tongue in backwards.
That was the cause of death.
So we're not looking
for a w*apon.
We're not looking for ballistic
evidence in this type of case.
Incredibly, no foreign
DNA was found on the body.
Assaulting his victim
and then removing all his DNA
from her body
would have taken hours,
which meant Imette's k*ller
had to have a safe place
to do all this.
And that location wasn't
where her body was found.
It was so time-consuming
with the zip ties
and the wrapping and the cord
and the blanket and the tape.
It'd be too much time
for the person to do it there.
If this case
was going to be solved,
detectives needed to find out
not only who did the m*rder,
but also where he did it.
Investigators were stunned
to find that
Imette St. Guillen's k*ller
was able to remove
all foreign DNA from her body.
But he couldn't remove everything.
The tape and blanket
used to wrap her body
were rich sources
of trace evidence.
Analyst Nick Petraco found
red carpet fibers on both.
A cheap-colored nylon fiber.
Carpet fibers.
And I happen to know
what those red rug fibers
look like
on that particular carpet,
because I've seen that kind of
carpet many times in casework.
Petraco's microscopic search
also revealed animal hairs.
I'm finding mink hair,
so there's a mink coat
around there somewhere.
Rabbit hairs of the type
used in coats were also found.
A tiny drop of blood was found
on one of the plastic ties
used as handcuffs.
And some DNA was recovered
from the snow brush
found near the victim's body.
The sample that came off
of the snow brush was touch DNA.
And so that is basically DNA
that is deposited
when someone handles an item.
Analysts paid
particular attention
to the blanket
that wrapped the body,
hitting it
with ultraviolet light
in an attempt to expose
possible bodily fluids.
And in a major potential break,
what turned out
to be a semen stain
luminesced when hit
with the light.
The semen profile
was very degraded,
so we knew right away
that the semen profile
was likely to be pretty old.
Detectives now turned
to Imette's final night.
It was a Friday, just days away
from her 25th birthday,
and she was celebrating
with friends,
including her best friend, Claire.
And it was getting late
in the night.
It was almost like 4:00
in the morning.
They had been on vacation.
Claire was ready to go home.
"Come on, Imette. Let's go."
Imette wasn't ready to go.
Claire's trying
to almost pull her in the cab
and convince her to go home.
Imette doesn't want
any part of it,
and she starts
to walk down the block.
Police hoped
surveillance cameras
would give them some idea
of where Imette went.
These days, they're on
practically every street corner
and every shop.
Not so in 2006.
And so they got no video
of any help
in determining where she went.
But by tracing
Imette's credit-card activity,
detectives found she paid
for two drinks at a bar
called The Falls.
The receipt was recorded
within 15 minutes of 4:00 a.m.,
just before bars
in New York City
are required to close.
This would be 17 hours
from when her body was found.
Detectives needed to find out
what happened during this window
and faced
some daunting problems.
There were multiple
crime scenes.
At some point, Imette's k*ller
needed to subdue her,
and no one knew
where that happened.
He took his time
to as*ault her, k*ll her,
and remove his DNA
from her body.
Where that happened,
no one knew.
And he most likely
needed a vehicle
to get to and from
all these spots,
and no one knew
where that vehicle was.
There was really
very little evidence
to point in any direction.
The investigation is really
just the body at that point.
You don't have any items
or a location
that you can focus on or use
in investigating that crime.
Detectives hoped people
at Imette's last known location,
The Falls bar,
could provide some answers,
but got yet another setback.
First of all,
do they have any video?
They don't have any video inside.
But the bartender
at The Falls remembered Imette.
She told detectives
closing time was 4:00
and Imette wasn't ready to go.
And she didn't want to leave
because she still paid
for her drinks.
This bartender said her boss,
bar manager Danny Dorrian,
saw what was happening
and told the bartender
to get a bouncer
to escort Imette from the bar.
But Danny Dorrian denied
that ever happened.
Danny Dorrian was not
very forthcoming initially.
He claimed not to have
any recollection of her.
And I remember
the detectives coming back,
and they're like,
"Yeah, we went there.
We spoke to this guy,
Danny Dorrian,
and we think he's holding
back on something."
And I just remember thinking,
"Wait a minute. Dorrian?
I know that name.
Why do I know that name?"
It turned out
that in New York City,
a lot of people
knew the Dorrian name.
Dorrian is a famous name
in New York City.
There is the eerie
connection between The Falls
and another infamous
New York watering hole,
the one where preppy k*ller
Robert Chambers met his victim.
In 1986,
was arrested for the m*rder
of his girlfriend,
It became infamous
as the "preppy m*rder case."
It was the highest-profile case
in New York,
probably in that entire decade,
and everyone knew
the name Dorrian.
Why?
Because the last place
Jennifer Levin was seen alive
was at a bar owned
by Danny Dorrian's family.
Was there a possible connection
with this latest
high-profile m*rder?
No one knew.
But one thing not in question
was that Danny Dorrian,
bar manager of the last place
Imette St. Guillen
was seen alive,
was telling police a story
they did not believe.
In the 1980s,
a New York family, the Dorrians,
got caught up in the infamous
"preppy m*rder case."
They owned the bar where the
victim spent her final night.
Now, in 2006, there was
a possible connection
to yet another gruesome m*rder.
The Dorrian family's bar,
The Falls, was the last place
m*rder victim Imette St. Guillen
was seen alive,
and bar manager Danny Dorrian
told police
he'd never laid eyes on her.
That wasn't what police heard
from people working the bar,
and that was a big problem
for Danny Dorrian.
We get a phone call to report
to police headquarters
right away to
the chief of detective's office.
Now, it's very strange
to get a phone call like that,
especially in the middle
of a case.
So we get there,
and it turns out
it was Danny Dorrian
and his attorney.
Turns out
he did know that she was there.
He doesn't know how she d*ed,
but he's now able
to put her there in the bar.
Danny Dorrian's problem wasn't
any connection to the m*rder.
He was alibied.
His problem was his bouncer,
Darryl Littlejohn.
Danny Dorrian
was not a good bar manager,
and the evidence that he was not
a good bar manager
is who he hired
to be his bouncer,
or one of his bouncers,
which was Darryl Littlejohn.
And he did so
without any attempt
to check his references and see
how legitimate or not he was.
was a convicted felon.
He'd served
more than eight years
for robbery and drug offenses.
So he violated his parole.
He should not have been working
in any place that sells liquor,
and he should not have been
working at 4:00 in the morning
while he's on parole.
Littlejohn told police
that on Imette's last night,
he did what his boss
Danny Dorrian told him to do...
He got her out of the bar.
This made him the last
known person to see her alive.
Now, that caused the police
to obviously take
an interest in him.
Because Littlejohn
violated his parole,
detectives had no problem
getting a search warrant.
The trail left by his cellphone
on the morning of the m*rder
put him at his house,
and, ominously,
near where Imette's body
was dumped.
Does that mean
that he k*lled her? No.
But it means now
he's at the crime scene
where we found Imette.
So now everything is now
focusing on Littlejohn.
Police here in New York
now say
they've got compelling evidence
connecting a barroom bouncer
to the m*rder of this
promising young woman
who spent her final hours
at his bar.
Trace evidence teams
descended on the home
Littlejohn shared
with his mother,
and also his van,
searching for anything
that could be tied back
to Imette's body.
One of the first things
that the crime-scene
investigators noticed
was about a dozen
empty bleach bottles
in the garbage
outside the house.
What do you use a dozen
empty bottles of bleach for?
Well, if you know how
to destroy DNA evidence,
you know bleach does it.
Every inch of the
house and van was searched.
Incredibly,
just as with Imette's body,
no foreign DNA was found.
Absolutely no DNA.
So we don't find any evidence
that shows
that she was there at all.
If Darryl Littlejohn
was Imette's k*ller,
he'd done an unusually
thorough job
of cleaning multiple
crime scenes.
But a forensic dogma called
the Locard Exchange Principle...
it dates back
more than 100 years,
to the very beginning
of crime-scene investigation...
holds that's it's impossible
to completely clean
a crime scene.
If you could go back
to the guy named Edmond Locard,
a doctor from France...
his principle states
that there's always materials
to be found.
Someone always leaves something.
Ultimately, what it's saying,
"If you don't find it,
it means it's your fault.
It's there."
And sure enough,
tiny clues remained
that finally told the story
of what happened
to Imette St. Guillen.
Among the key pieces
of trace evidence recovered
from Imette St. Guillen's
crime scene
were red carpet fibers
and animal hairs
from a mink and a rabbit.
You're trying to use
these bits of evidence
to help you figure out
where it happened.
Once Darryl Littlejohn
emerged a suspect,
crime-scene techs
were on the lookout
for these hairs and fibers.
That's the beauty of this stuff,
and it helps you reconstruct
the whole event.
It's really powerful.
One red carpet fiber by itself
wouldn't mean a lot.
But you get two,
three different materials
that are all associating
in one place,
it means a lot more mathematically
as far as the probability
it happened there.
When Darryl Littlejohn's
house and minivan were searched,
a red carpet was found
inside the house,
and fibers from it
were micrscopically consistent
with fibers from the dump site.
Littlejohn's mother,
who lived with him,
owned a mink coat,
and those hairs
were also consistent,
as were hairs
from a coat of hers
with a rabbit-fur collar.
And there were also
shoes he had.
On the bottom of the shoes,
there were red carpet fibers
attached to it.
So that's probably how
they got into the van.
The mother probably wore
the mink coat
to go to church on Sunday,
and she leaves a couple hairs
from the mink coat on the seat.
This evidence
definitively tied Darryl Littlejohn
to Imette's body.
But there was a problem.
So far,
prosecutors could only prove
that he'd gotten rid
of Imette's corpse,
not that he'd committed
her m*rder.
It created, or it left
some degree of doubt
as to whether
he was actually the k*ller.
And Darryl Littlejohn,
who had a very good lawyer,
said he was no k*ller.
I'm truly sorry what happened
to this young lady,
but they have the wrong person.
Forensic analysts now turned
to the degraded semen stain
on the blanket
used to cover Imette's body.
The DNA results
delivered a bombshell.
And I took another look
at the semen sample
and thought it looks similar
to Darryl Littlejohn's DNA...
similar enough
that it could be a relative.
Now, as it turns out,
Darryl had a brother who did die
while in custody in
the Queens house of detention,
awaiting trial
on a double m*rder.
He d*ed of some sort
of asthma att*ck.
This happened 11 years earlier,
which would account for why
the sample was so degraded.
They've also tested,
I understand,
the blanket in which
Imette's body was wrapped.
What have you learned
about those tests?
There was semen on the blanket,
but unfortunately, the semen on
the blanket was somebody else's.
But in the end,
just as a famous
French criminalst stated
nearly a century earlier,
you can't completely clean
a crime scene.
The touch DNA
from the snow brush
near Imette's body
matched Littlejohn.
But it was the trace evidence...
what analysts call
"innocent transfer"...
that linked Littlejohn
to Imette's body.
All of this was confirmed
when his DNA was lifted
from a small blood stain
on one of the zip ties.
It remained despite
what even analysts admit
was an incredible job of
attempting to clean the scene.
He might be thinking
about blood and semen and spittle
and that kind of thing,
or even his hairs.
But he's not thinking about
the stuff that's around him
all the time...
the red carpet,
the mink coat, the...
He's not thinking about
that stuff.
And that's the stuff that
ultimately helps to nail him.
Investigators believe
that when Littlejohn was told
to get Imette out of the bar,
he'd found an easy mark.
She'd had a lot to drink.
The streets were nearly empty.
Once outside, he subdued her
and got her into his van.
Where he took her next
is the subject of speculation.
What's clear is that
he spent hours assaulting her,
then bleaching her body
and the scene.
But he was unaware of the fibers
and animal hairs
that had simply become part
of his environment,
all of which
stuck to his victim.
It appears that at some point
in this as*ault,
Imette might have fought back.
It's possible
she injured Littlejohn
and his DNA got on her hair.
That could be the reason
he cut part of her hair away.
He also cut her nails in another
attempt to eliminate DNA.
Now, with the m*rder done and
the cleanup apparently complete,
he had to get rid of the body.
Soon, he was outside,
exposed
and in a hurry to get away.
The snow brush from inside
his van, with his DNA,
got tangled up
with the body as he dumped it.
But a small blood stain
on the zip tie
left absolutely no doubt
he was the k*ller.
In June of 2009,
Darryl Littlejohn was found
guilty of first degree m*rder
and was sentenced
to life without parole,
all on the strength of evidence
he tried to clear away,
but never saw.
No one walking into that
bar would have had any reason
to think they were gonna meet
their k*ller that night,
whether intoxicated or sober.
It really is a case
that's totally made
by forensic evidence.
So between the phone records,
the DNA,
and the hair and fiber evidence,
together,
that's a trifecta of evidence
that is the thing
that proved him guilty.