Up next, a woman has
a frightening premonition.
I knew something was coming,
but I didn't know it was that.
Within hours,
a young mother is missing.
She said goodbye,
smile on her face,
and that was the last I saw her.
Detectives can find
no sign of the missing woman.
We don't have an apparent
crime scene.
It appeared as if she had
just vanished.
Months pass.
Then a makeshift coffin rises
from the depths
and exposes
a cold-blooded k*ller.
When you delve inside his mind,
you can find a very evil,
evil person.
There's Lori.
Say hi, Lori.
Say hi.
In the spring of 2005,
Lori Leonard, the 33-year-old
single mother of two young boys,
was embarking on a new life.
She moved from Syracuse,
New York,
to the small town of Chittenango
about a half-hour away.
She was determined
to give her boys a good life.
She wanted them to have
a family upbringing,
a traditional upbringing,
where they'd go outside
and play in the backyard
and they have animals
and each other.
For a while, Lori and
the boys stayed with her sister.
She got a job as a bartender
and began moving
into a new apartment.
She was just ecstatic to be
getting her own place finally,
getting back on her feet.
On the morning of May 4th,
she dropped the boys
off at school.
Lori was supposed to pick them
up the next morning
at her sister's house.
She never showed up.
I start feeling anxious.
I thought, like,
"What is happening?"
It was an anxiety att*ck.
I'd e-mailed my cousin.
I said, "I don't know
what is wrong with me.
Something is happening.
I just... I feel it."
Her family called the police.
They checked her new apartment.
Her car was parked outside.
We obtained a search warrant
to look through the apartment.
The apartment has a person
was in process of moving.
There were a lot of boxes
still unpacked.
Everything looked rather normal.
It did not look like
a crime scene.
It did look like somebody
had just moved into the home.
But there were
no sheets on the bed,
and there was something
else that seemed strange.
It was a female shoe
that was located on the bed.
It was believed
to have been hers.
There was no other females
that was in the home
that were residing there.
And the match to that shoe
was nowhere in the apartment.
But this was hardly
an indication of foul play.
There wasn't blood anywhere.
There wasn't any visible signs
of struggle.
There was no forced entry
to the home.
There didn't appear to be
any valuables that were missing.
Police across New York state
used all the tools
at their disposal,
both high and low tech,
to track her down.
We looked into cellphone usage
to try and see if we could
locate her by GPS.
Also, we started looking
at credit cards
to see if she was
using them somewhere
or if they were
being used somewhere
so we could go to
that specific store,
maybe get some video footage,
see who's using the cards.
There was no activity.
At all.
Even worse,
police were in a bind.
There was no actual evidence
that a crime had been committed.
We didn't have a body.
We had checked local hospitals,
hospitals all over,
and they didn't have
any Jane Does.
They didn't have anybody
matching her description.
We didn't have any information.
But Lori's family
did have some information
that concerned detectives.
Lori was a single mom
looking for love
and a father for her sons.
I know that to complete
her family,
wanted a good man for the boys
in their lives constantly,
and that would have
completed everything.
She was doing this online.
In 2005,
a relatively new way to date.
Lori's family and police
were worried.
Perhaps a predator under
the cover of the Internet
was hunting for a victim.
That's very risky behavior.
Online dating, meeting people
on the Internet...
it's dangerous.
The potential of things
happening are bad there.
On the day she went missing,
Lori Leonard told her family
that she was driving
two hours to Albany
to pick up tickets
to a New York Yankees
baseball game
from a man she never named.
She met this man during her
previous job
at an upstate casino.
It was a customer.
He must have had something
Yankee on.
They struck up a conversation,
and he had said that
he had extra tickets that he
wasn't gonna be able to use,
and did she want them,
and she said, "Absolutely."
Lori and this man were
to meet at a hotel in Albany.
At the time, her family
didn't think this was unusual.
Now they had questions,
and so did detectives.
There was always a belief
that with the tickets,
with them meeting
at a hotel in Albany,
that there was
other arrangements
and other things going on.
The whole scenario
seemed strange, you know?
This guy is just giving her
free Yankees tickets.
She's got to drive
a way's away for them.
I mean, we didn't know anything
about the guy.
This man, a corporate
executive, was located after detectives
backtracked his e-mails
with Lori.
He was married,
denied any affair with Lori,
and told detectives the meeting
he planned with her
was entirely innocent.
There was just one problem.
According to him,
that meeting never happened.
It said she never showed up,
which was horrifying to hear.
He believed that something
either happened to her
or that she just blew him off
and wasn't coming
to get the tickets.
Investigators went to the
hotel to check out his story.
Hotel video and staff
were able to establish
that he was there by himself,
that nobody else had arrived.
There wasn't anybody else.
Now detectives re-doubled
their efforts
with people Lori had contacted
via online dating sites.
She had numerous male contacts,
and it became quite apparent
very fast
that there were
numerous interviews
that had to be conducted to help
to locate where she might be.
And, as is common
with dating sites,
some people use aliases
to disguise their true identity.
She's communicating with other
people that could have motive,
could have information
as to where she is.
Weeks turned into months.
Then, on the morning
of July 24, 2005,
a local fisherman was out
on the Champlain Canal,
a 60-mile waterway
that connects Lake Champlain
to New York's Hudson River.
He's going along,
and he sees what appears to be
a shiny object below the water.
Couldn't figure out what it was.
He goes over.
He retrieves the item,
hooks onto it,
drags it to shore.
This was clearly no fish.
It was a toolbox,
about four feet long,
designed to fit
into the bed of a truck.
He believes that
it's a good find,
that he's found this tool box,
this treasure,
and he's gonna keep it,
so he hauls it to shore
and he cracks it open,
and it's not what
he thinks it is.
Inside was the badly
decomposed body of a young woman.
As they opened the
tool box and they looked in it,
eerily enough,
there was a casino ID facing up
with the name
Lori Leonard on it.
A tattoo left no doubt
the victim was Lori Leonard.
I remember hearing
my grandmother screaming,
crying herself to sleep,
and she was, like, the toughest
person in the family.
Everybody's personality...
just a switch was hit that day.
Yeah, it was rough for everyone.
What was a missing person's case
now became a full-fledged
homicide investigation.
In all my years
as an investigator,
I've been involved in numerous
homicide investigations.
Every one of them is different.
I've never seen any cases
quite like this one.
When Lori Leonard's body
was recovered from the tool box,
it was clear
she'd suffered a brutal end.
Her hands and feet were bound.
Her face was wrapped
like a mummy with duct tape.
It was discovered that there was
a bandana stuffed in her mouth
to more or less suffocate her.
Also in the toolbox
was the match to the single shoe
that police found on Lori's bed
when she disappeared.
All this evidence led to
the conclusion Lori was subdued,
but not necessarily k*lled,
in her apartment.
The cause of death
was asphyxiation,
and the manner of death
was strangulation,
and there were some
sexual as*ault also involved.
Lori's k*ller clearly
thought this metal coffin
would ensure her body sank
to the bottom
of the Champlain canal.
Inside the tool box were
what are called sand tubes.
Those sand tubes
are the type of tubes that,
if you live in snow weather,
you'd use as weight.
You'd place in the back
of a vehicle,
in the trunk of a vehicle,
or in the bed of a truck to help
with weight for traction.
Despite the tragedy
of actually finding the body,
detectives were stunned
by how it was found.
There was approximately
in the toolbox,
which itself weighed 50 pounds.
Lori was about 100 pounds.
That's more than 300 pounds
that ultimately floated close
to the surface of the water.
I believe it was two variables
that happened.
The water level itself
dropped to a degree,
but most of all,
as her body was decomposing,
it caused gases inside
of this air-tight tool box
that caused it to rise
to the surface,
irregardless of the weight
that was used to hold it down.
To Lori's grief-stricken family,
the piece of evidence that
stood out most was the bandana.
A man she briefly dated...
he had helped her move
into her apartment
the day she disappeared...
wore bandanas all the time.
Every time we saw him,
he had a bandana on.
Different color.
He had the goatee,
the shaved head, and bandana,
and in my mind, it seemed
like a wannabe type deal,
you know, like,
wannabe a tough guy.
His name was Shawn Doyle.
Since he was the last person
to see Lori,
he'd already been
questioned by police.
At the end of May,
when we conducted
our in-person interview,
when he arrived in his bandana
and leather coat, that bandana
that we photographed him
with was the same
design and color
as the bandana in her mouth.
At the time, this
bandana meant nothing to investigators,
but it did now,
especially after they found
Doyle had a history
of trouble with women.
He had had some arrests
for domestic relationships,
as*ault, unlawful imprisonment,
possession of weapons.
There were some domestic
incidents on file.
When it became known
he was a possible suspect,
one of his neighbors
reached out to police.
Shawn Doyle had
an acquaintance, a female.
She saw a tool box on his truck,
a diamond-plate large tool box.
He was very proud of it,
had just purchased it,
didn't have it for very long,
and then, coincidentally,
a short time later,
it was no longer on the truck.
This fit
the description of the tool box
that served as Lori's coffin.
Doyle denied every owning one,
but detectives found
he'd bought a tool box
less than a week
before Lori went missing.
We were able to connect
the dots on where he purchased it,
the means that he purchased it,
the cashiers remembering him,
description,
and what he purchased.
The investigation showed Doyle
once had a plastic liner
in the bed of his truck.
Detectives learned that shortly
after Lori disappeared,
Doyle removed that liner
and replaced it
with a spray-on liner.
Not an uncommon thing to do,
but under the circumstances,
it was highly suspicious.
A bed liner seals
the pickup truck bed
and basically, if there was
any forensic evidence
in that pickup truck bed
prior to it being coated,
it would have been lost.
But now, police got
another potential break.
We were able to track down
the location where he had it done.
They had kept the bed liner,
and we were able to take that
and examine it
and collect the evidence.
For us, that was remarkable
that they still had it.
Hairs consistent with
Lori Leonard's hair
were found,
but detectives had a problem.
Doyle used his truck
to help Lori move,
so of course her hairs
would be on his truck liner.
If they were going to connect
Doyle to Lori's m*rder,
they had to have something more.
Shawn Doyle was known to
Lori Leonard's
family and friends.
The two dated briefly.
I thought he was
a biker wannabe.
He was one of those
that would just, like,
come around the family
but ignore everybody but her,
just be on top of her
the whole time
and not have much to say
to anybody else.
But Doyle didn't like that
Lori was open to seeing other men.
Lori stopped seeing him
because he started getting possessive.
She didn't want to hate him,
but she didn't want to date him.
And so they remained friendly,
and when Lori needed to move,
she asked Doyle,
who had a truck, to help her.
Now with her dead, and with
Doyle as her last known contact,
he was the chief suspect
in her m*rder.
The finding of hairs
consistent with Lori's
provided a possible connection
to Doyle and the m*rder.
Detectives say even duct tape
in his house
was consistent with duct tape
used to wrap Lori's head.
The problem was that while
this potentially linked Doyle
to the m*rder,
none of it conclusively
showed he did it.
So investigators turned to the
sand tubes found with the body.
Many people think of sand
as ubiquitous,
that all sand is alike,
and in actuality, sand comes
in many different varieties.
The grain size, the shape, the
base material, the actual mix.
Like many products, bags
of sand are tagged with information
indicating where it was packaged
and when.
Lot numbers or lot codes
is what is used
for identifying
a group of common items
and has the information
about where, when,
and sometimes how it is
produced and packaged.
A search of
Shawn Doyle's property
turned up the same brand of
sand tubes found with the body.
Investigators wanted to see
if they could tie the bags
from Doyle's garage
back to their crime scene
and turned to the lot numbers.
When you find matching
lot codes,
it demonstrates that
the products were produced
at the same facility
and at the same time.
A last clue came from
the glove compartment of Doyle's truck...
a tool box key
with a serial number.
That number was finally
tracked down.
After the tool box was found
and all the forensic work
was completed,
that's when the key
came back into play,
'cause the tool box itself
had a matching serial number
to that key
that was located
in Mr. Doyle's truck.
The hairs, the duct tape,
the lot numbers
on the sand tubes,
and finally the key
left little doubt
that Doyle was Lori
Leonard's k*ller.
In January of 2006,
he went to trial on a charge
of second-degree m*rder.
One of his ex-girlfriends
was called to the stand.
Shawn Doyle had
apparently became upset at her.
He had tied her up,
similar fashion to that of Lori.
He used bandanas.
Shawn's ex-girlfriend's
mother...
she had heard muffled noises
in her basement,
where her daughter's room was,
and the mother had gone
downstairs just in time to see
that Shawn had wrapped duct tape
around her mouth and her wrists,
and she screamed and he ran out.
A jury found Shawn
Doyle guilty of Lori's m*rder,
and he got a sentence
of 25 years to life.
Lori's sons, now grown men,
say Doyle should have
been arrested
long before he met their mother.
It hurts.
It's angering learning that
he had done this before
and that he should have
already been in jail.
Now knowing that there was
a record
and there were red flags
to begin with,
that definitely could
have been prevented
if the right actions were taken,
but they weren't,
and now my family and us,
we have to be the ones
to suffer for it.
Prosecutors believe that Lori
going to meet another man
at a hotel in Albany
could be what set Doyle off.
The evidence indicates he got
her alone in the apartment.
He shoved a bandana in her
mouth, suffocating her to death.
He bound her wrists and ankles
and wrapped her face with duct
tape, later linked to his house.
He rolled the body up
with sheets
from inside the apartment.
Then he put Lori's body
in the tool box,
leaving her hairs
in his truck bed as he did so.
He weighed the body down
with sand tubes,
unaware those tubes would later
be tied directly to him.
And then he dumped Lori
in the Champlain Canal,
confident all the evidence
would sink,
but he didn't count
on the tool box
being so well-sealed that gases
from Lori's decomposing body
would cause that box to float
to the surface and expose him.
My 25-year career, I've seen
a lot of tragedy as a policeman.
I've seen a lot of incidents
where innocent people are hurt,
but this is more heinous.
This is a story that is very
heartbreaking to me personally.
Had he not been arrested
for this, who knows who else
or how many other victims
that there could be?
He perfected what he was doing.
Each time, he did something
different and better to improve,
which we believe was
his ultimate end goal.
He made mistakes the first
few times,
and unfortunately,
the others could speak,
but Lori could not.