Thought Crimes: The Case Of The Cannibal Cop
Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop Gilberto Valle and his mother, Elizabeth Valle, in this documentary about his case, Monday on HBO. Credit HBO
“He’s not a cannibal,” the accused man’s mother says. “He never ate anyone. Isn’t that the true definition of a cannibal, is someone that eats human meat?”
That head-spinning statement — and let’s note again that it’s the defendant’s mother saying it — sums up “Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop,” a documentary set for Monday night on HBO that is a trip down the rabbit hole if ever there was one.
It revisits a notorious case that is still evolving, the one in which a New York City police officer named Gilberto Valle was accused of planning to kidnap women, then cook and eat them. What makes the case doubly bizarre is that at the heart of the preposterous-sounding charges are serious and sobering issues: Is it illegal to think vile thoughts and chat about them on the Internet? Where is the line between sadistic fantasizing and imminent crime?
The film’s director, Erin Lee Carr, gains the confidence of Mr. Valle, who gives his side of the case that began when his wife found startlingly gruesome chats on his computer. Mr. Valle’s mother, Elizabeth Valle, also opens up, as does his father, Gilberto Sr., though to a lesser extent. These interviews enhance the arguments familiar from Mr. Valle’s trial — that his chats on a fetishist website were only fantasy, that arresting people on the basis of such things is a foray into a thought-police state.
The film, though, is no knee-jerk defense of Mr. Valle’s right to talk about trussing up women like livestock and making centerpieces out of their heads. Ms. Carr (whose father was David Carr, the media columnist for The New York Times, who died in February) sprinkles the film with excerpts from Mr. Valle’s chats, which are appalling even if they are merely fantasies. She also gives voice to all sides in the debate over the implications of the case, not just the free-speech one.
“The idea that everything that happens on the Internet is fantasy and it’s not really real is dangerous,” says Laurie Penny, a journalist who writes for The Guardian. “It’s just another way of not wanting to confront the fact that these evil thoughts and behaviors exist within human beings. It’s not a product of technology or possession by the devil or any kind of outside force. It comes from us. The darkness comes from us.”
In 2013 a jury convicted Mr. Valle of conspiracy to kidnap, but a judge later overturned that conviction. Mr. Valle hoped that might be the end of the case, but Ms. Carr follows him as he gets word that prosecutors decided to appeal. That appeal is pending.
The case, of course, has been irresistible to certain elements of the New York news media, spawning garish, pun-filled headlines. Ms. Carr isn’t immune to the cheekiness. For instance, James A. Cohen, a Fordham Law School professor, is discussing the tension between allowing freedom of thought and preventing crime.
“How are you going to feel if you let him off and he goes out and eats somebody?” he says. And Ms. Carr cuts immediately to a shot of Mr. Valle stirring a simmering pot of something goulashy-looking.
But the cheap shots are few and far between; for the most part, this absorbing film stays focused on the substantive issues raised by the lurid case. A bit more discussion of the broader implications would have been welcome. How do the arguments supporting Mr. Valle’s right to fantasize apply if the discussion is about, say, abhorrent images of children, or about terrorism?
Plenty more will no doubt be said on these and related subjects as the age of the Internet and electronic eavesdropping progresses. Consider “Thought Crimes” a primer for the century ahead.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
48 Hours Mystery: The Writing on the Wall | CBS News
Produced by Sara Ely Hulse and Clare Friedland
[This show originally aired on May 5, 2012. It was updated on July 19, 2014.]
COLUMBIA, Ill. (CBS) - On the morning of May 5, 2009, Christopher Coleman returned home from the gym to a scene of chaos and unimaginable horror.
"I told him, 'Hey, they -- they didn't make it' -- being the family," Detective Justin Barlow of the Columbia Police Department said. "[Chris] sat down on the driveway and started sobbing. Said he felt like he was gonna throw up. And then kind of curled up in the fetal position."
Detective Barlow had been the Coleman's neighbor for five years and was the first to respond when Chris could not reach his wife.
"This crime scene, it wasn't bloody," he told "48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher. "...but that didn't mean it was less gruesome."
"Were you at all prepared for what you were about to walk into?" Maher asked.
"I don't think anybody could be prepared for that," said Barlow.
Upstairs, where they should have been safe in their beds, were 31-year-old Sheri and the couple's two young boys, 11-year-old Garett, and 9-year-old Gavin.
"What is the lasting image you have in your mind from that day?" Maher asked Barlow.
"I would say the one that sticks out the most would probably be Garett, just because he's the one that -- that, you know, I -- I discovered," he said.
"Is that a haunting image for you?"
"Yeah. Little bit," Barlow nodded.
The killer had not only taken Garett's life, but had desecrated the body by leaving another disturbing message.
"The spray paint in his room was actually on the sheet that was over his body?" asked Maher.
coelmanthreat.jpg
"Punished" One of the Manson-style messages spray-painted on a wall in the Coleman home CBS NEWS
"It was and there was some remnants of the spray paint on him as well," said Barlow.
"We knew that -- that this case was gonna be probably the biggest one -- of our lives -- definitely our careers, probably our lives," said Chief Joe Edwards.
Columbia, Ill., is a small, quiet suburb outside of St. Louis. Chief Edwards calls it "a wonderful place to live and raise a family."
Chief Edwards immediately recognized that his two investigators were going to need some help and called in a special unit - Major Jeff Connor and the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis, which brought in an army of 25 seasoned cops.
"It's typically your smaller departments that need the resource -- need the help," Maj. Connor explained.
Hours after the murders, the Major Case Squad swung into high gear. The CSI team started processing the house, warrants were secured to go through the Coleman's phones and computers, while a very distraught Chris was taken to the police station to give his statement.
Coleman told investigators that it had been a normal morning. He got up and left for the gym around 5:40 a.m. and called Sheri numerous times to wake her up.
As neighbors woke to the news of the murders, they were both devastated and terrified.
"So as I got down the street, I see that it was at the Coleman house. And I text her right away and said, 'Is everything OK?' And I didn't get a response," said an emotional Vanessa Riegerix.
Riegerix, who lived down the street, said the Colemans appeared to have a perfect life raising their two beautiful sons.
"I always thought of them as the American family, the perfect family," Riegerix said. "...everybody would want their children like these two boys, polite -- always helpful ... they had a heart of gold."
21 PHOTOS
The Coleman triple murder
The couple had been married for 12 years and met when they were both in the military, training at the K9 unit. Sheri became a stay-at-home mom.
Chris, 32, the son of a preacher, used his Marine and security experience to land a job for a well-known televangelist, Joyce Meyer.
"Joyce Meyer is now known throughout the country, and known throughout the world -- as a leading voice in the evangelical movement," St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Nick Pistor explained. "She's extremely successful financially. ...I've seen figures from $50 million to $100 million a year."
Pistor has followed the Coleman case for two years and is a CBS News consultant.
"Joyce Meyer does conferences all throughout the world in countries that have -- that don't necessarily respond well -- to women who -- are preaching -- a Christian message. And so she wanted some deeper security," he said.
But being Joyce Meyer's head of security apparently put a target on Chris Coleman's back. In November 2008, Chris had begun receiving death threats to his work email.
"Whenever Chris Coleman reported the first death threat that he got from his e-mail account at w-- at his work at Joyce Meyer Ministries, he came to us at the police department," said Barlow.
The email read:
Tell Joyce to stop preaching the bull---- if I can't get to Joyce, then I will get to someone close to her
"We give the Coleman family... extra patrol which we just patrol the area a lot more than we normally would during a shift and give it special attention to make sure nobody's there," explained Barlow.
It was in January 2009, that a hand-delivered threat showed up in the mailbox at the Coleman family home. It read:
F--- You! Deny your God publically or else. No more oppurtunities [sic]. Time is running out for you and your family!
"Did it concern you as a neighbor living so closely when you heard that there were death treats being made to the guy who lived across the street?" Maher asked Barlow.
"Absolutely," he replied.
Each note seemed to escalate the seriousness of the situation and, on April 27, less than a week before the murders, a final missive arrived with an ultimatum:
Stop today or else. I know your schedule! You can't hide from me forever. I'm always watching. I know when you leave in the morning and I know when you stay home.
"You decided to ramp things up yourself to be proactive," Maher noted to Barlow. "And what did you do at your house?"
"We got one camera mounted up in my 5-year-old's bedroom and pointed it right at the mailbox," he replied.
With the camera aimed directly at the Coleman's mailbox, about 214 feet away approximately, according to Barlow, they hoped to get a clear shot of whoever was leaving the notes.
"...and be prepared for something that was gonna happen. And be as proactive about it as we could," said Barlow.
Instead, days later, the killer somehow snuck into the Coleman home and strangled Sheri, Garett and Gavin.
But if the murders were linked to the threats and Joyce Meyer Ministries, that meant the cops might now be on a global search for suspects.
"There was a lot of fear that there was somebody out there killin' families, and who was gonna be next?" said Maj. Connor.
QUESTIONING CHRIS COLEMAN
The small town of Columbia, Ill., was reeling with the sudden loss of Sheri, Garett and Gavin Coleman.
"This touched an entire community... The neighbors were shocked," reporter Nick Pistor explained. "They saw the young boys playing touch football with their father on the front lawn. These were little boys that they knew."
Close friends like Kathy LaPlante were crushed.
"You could just see the pain on everyone's face. It devastated the community," LaPlante said. "Sheri was a loving mother, loyal friend and sister to me. My life's not the same...it put hole in my heart."
"If I would've known for one millisecond she was in danger, I would've been down there," said Sheri's brother, Mario DiCiccio.
The Coleman Family
The Coleman Family THE COLEMAN FAMILY
For Sheri's brother and their mother, Angela, it was impossible to accept the reality of the brutal crime.
"She grew up to be a beautiful person on the outside as well as on the inside," Angela explained. "...they were her world, those boys. They were her world."
"Garett was more -- quiet and more like a -- more of a thinker. He was -- you could tell by lookin' in his eyes he was always thinking," Mario explained. "And Gavin was very...outgoing...he was like a social butterfly. ...his personality's just like his mom's. Just like his mother's."
"With Sheri, Garett and Gavin, I mean, I think that just... that's what the motivation was for everybody," said Det. Justin Barlow.
Hours into the investigation, the Major Case Squad continued to pursue their best lead -- finding whoever wrote those threats.
"We tracked down people across the country who didn't like Joyce Meyer. We interviewed them to find out where they were at on May the 4th and May the 5th," said Chief Joe Edwards.
And that morning they were hoping Chris Coleman might be able to point them in the right direction:
Det. Barlow: Who do you suspect? I mean. Out of all these emails and things you've been talking at work, there's got to be one person that stands out in your mind?
Chris Coleman: (voice cracks) I don't have a clue. I should have been there this morning.
But as police continued to talk to Coleman, they were surprised by how he was acting:
Sgt. Bivens: How do you think they died?
Chris Coleman: I have no idea. You guys haven't told me.
Sgt. Bivens: OK. Do you have any clues?
Chris Coleman: (Mumbles)
"Did he ever ask how his wife and children died? Maher asked Barlow.
"No," he replied.
"He never asked."
"No."
"What else sticks out in your mind from those first few hours?"
"Just the lack of reaction, I mean just the lack of curiosity of 'what's going on,'" said Barlow.
So police kept probing:
Sgt. Bivens: Was there a problem in your relationship? Was there anything currently that wasn't going so well in your relationship?
Chris Coleman: No, not really. I mean just a communication thing.
Sgt. Bivens: Had you seen anyone else outside of your wife.
Chris Coleman: What do you mean?
Sgt. Bivens: In a romantic way?
Chris Coleman: No.
Chris was adamant that he was not having a relationship outside of his marriage, so it seemed odd when he offered a stunning piece of information about another woman:
Chris Coleman: Tara in Florida that you guys are going to talk to, I talk to her a ton lately, but --
Sgt. Bivens: And what's with that?
Chris Coleman: Just a friend, somebody to talk to.
Tara is Tara Lintz -- a cocktail waitress and an old high school friend of Sheri's.
Sgt. Bivens: OK. You said you had a close friendship, but were you actually doing anything that you felt wouldn't be approved by your wife?
Chris Coleman: Some of the conversations, probably.
Coleman insisted they were just friends -- that he met Lintz through Sheri when their family went to Florida on vacation:
Sgt. Bivens: Did it have potential to go further?
Chris Coleman: No. I didn't want to do that to my kids.
Police in Lintz' hometown of St. Petersburg, Fla., were contacted to check out Chris' story.
Detective Shannon Halstead got the call.
"So, we went from the station to go make contact w ith her thinking it was gonna be a quick, 20-minute interview and it ended up being very different," she said.
That's because the information Halstead gained from Lintz about the relationship was very different than what Chris Coleman was telling police in Illinois.
"She provided the Blackberry and the laptop computer, obviously, had files of videos and emails ... relating to their relationship," Det. Halstead told Maher.
"Did you immediately step out and call St. Louis?"
"I did."
"And what did you say to them?"
"I said, 'I'm not positive, but I think this is his girlfriend,'" said Det. Halstead.
Armed with that information, Det. Barlow confronted Chris:
Det. Barlow: The one thing I did want to tell you right now, the St. Petersburg homicide unit is talking to Tara right now, and she showed us the pictures you sent her of you two, and we know you two have been having an affair.
"So was that a pretty big break for you guys?" Maher asked Det. Barlow.
"It was a -- important piece," he replied.
Investigators learned the couple had begun seeing each other in the fall of 2008, six months before the murders. During the affair, Chris would fly Lintz to meet him at locations where he was working for Joyce Meyer.
Det. Barlow: I know you guys went to Hawaii together. We pulled the Enterprise leasing cars receipt where you guys went to different trips together...
Chris Coleman: Well, I didn't think it was an affair.
Det. Barlow: You didn't think it was an affair?
Chris Coleman: No an affair is when you're like living with them and you plan to get married and everything.
"She had on her calendar -- a scheduled wedding to Chris Coleman, scheduled vacations, different accounts -- credit card accounts that they held together -- and I think she, honest to God, believed that he was going to leave his wife and two children," said Det. Halstead.
Chris' parents, Pastor Ron Coleman and his wife, Connie, were stunned to learn their son had an affair. They insisted it had nothing to do with the murders.
"He's always been a real gentle person-- kinda quiet," Connie Coleman told Maher.
"Is there any way there's a part of Chris that you don't know that could have been capable of this?" Maher asked.
"Not in my view," Ron Coleman replied. "... you couldn't put something around your kid's throat unless you're a monster. It's just not there. It's just not there."
While investigators believed Chris' affair with Tara Lintz was a strong motive for murder, there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. So after six long hours, Chris Coleman walked out a free man.
"It wasn't like we were wanting to believe that Chris is the one who did this. It's just that the evidence kept pointing to him," said Maj. Jeff Connor.
THE OTHER WOMAN
Every day, friends and neighbors are reminded of the beautiful lives that were stolen from them.
"The memorial -- in their subdivision is awesome. There's a bench and there's trees," Meegan Turnbeaugh explained. "...the community of Columbia Lakes got together and created that. ...So they wanted to do something positive. And they created a nice memorial."
Turnbeaugh says it's a fitting tribute - unlike the funeral service at Pastor Coleman's church.
"No friends, no family, no coaches. Nobody spoke about these three awesome people that were dead," she said.
In the days that followed the service, any sympathy for Chris Coleman was stripped away as news spread about his affair with Sheri's high school friend, Tara Lintz.
"Well, when the affair came out, and I had no idea, and I heard about it from someone else. I felt like every day I was just getting stabbed in the heart by these little pieces of information," said Kathy LaPlante.
Asked if she thought Coleman would be arrested, Turnbeaugh told Maher, "Yes. And I couldn't wait. I was nervous, to be honest with you."
The Major Case Squad felt that pressure.
"Obviously, in any case...you want to get the person responsible for it. But you want to get the right person," said Det. Justin Barlow.
But right away, there were red flags. Police were concerned when they found a basement window open and others unlocked.
"Here's a guy who's family is bein' threatened. They're gonna destroy his family while he's gone, and yet, that window was left unlocked, and it was obvious it was left unlocked, 'cause there was no forced entry," said Maj. Jeff Connor.
And remember that camera Det. Barlow installed in his house?
"We saw no strangers walking up and down the street. You saw no strange vehicles," said Chief Joe Edwards.
Chris had even installed his own surveillance cameras in his house.
"What about the surveillance equipment that was allegedly in the house?" Maher asked Maj. Connor.
"The recorder was missing," he replied.
"That's convenient."
"Yes."
An autopsy on Sheri revealed she fought violently with her killer, leaving her with two black eyes.
"Sheri was involved in an altercation before she was murdered. Those two boys weren't," said Chief Edwards.
Which made scratches found on Chris Coleman's arms all the more suspicious.
"When did you first notice the scratches on his arms?" Maher asked Det. Barlow.
"It was brought to my attention by people at the scene," he replied.
Det. Barlow: How are you doing?
Chris Coleman: Freezin.
Det. Barlow: Anything I can get you? You're freezing?
Police say Coleman tried to hide his arms during his interview.
"You can see on the video where he's asking for a blanket because he says he's cold. The only part of his body that he covers up are the -- you know, suspected-- marks on his arm," Barlow explained.
Det. Barlow: That'll work, won't it.
Chris Coleman: Yeah that's fine. As long as I can cover my arms. I'm freezing. [Covers his arms]
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Chris Coleman police interview
"I remember in the interview room it being very warm in there," Barlow told Maher.
"Did you think he was in shock?"
"No."
Chris later claimed he got those scratches the day before when he was removing a satellite dish from his roof.
Asked if there was any DNA found at the scene that would implicate him, Det. Barlow said, "I'll just say there wasn't any DNA found that didn't belong there. No boogeyman, no -- unidentified DNA, anything like that."
There was incriminating evidence found on Chris' phone and computers, starting with X-rated snapshots and videos that Tara Lintz and Chris had sent each other.
"It was a serious affair. He had written down every -- her measurements, her favorite things. Everything about her he had stored so he could, you know -- buy her things or do whatever for her," reporter Nick Pistor said. "By November 5th of 2008, Chris had written on his computer that that was the day Tara changed his life."
For police, that date would set off alarms bells.
"And how many days after that, then, did the threats start to show up?" Maher asked Pistor.
"About nine days after that," he replied.
Nine days. The Colemans insist it's all a coincidence.
"It's my understanding that he had written down, 'November 5th, the day Tara changed my life.' That they had exchanged promise rings... And that he had even written down the name of their first child were it to be a little girl," Maher commented to Chris' parents. "Is that true?"
"That's not Chris," said Ron Coleman.
"Honestly, I cannot imagine him doin' that," Connie Coleman said. "He just didn't really operate in that -- in that arena of -- emotions. He just didn't. He was just very calm and logical sense."
Chris' parents believe their son is innocent and that it was an intruder who killed his family and left hateful messages. In fact, Chris even voluntarily provided samples of his own handwriting to police.
Asked what was the most important piece of evidence at the crime scene, Maj. Jeff Connor told Maher, "At the crime scene, probably the handwriting on the walls."
But those samples would later come back to haunt Chris Coleman.
"The crime scene lab coming back and saying that the handwriting found on the wall matches up to the handwriting -- from the handwriting example that Christopher Coleman gave at the Columbia Police Department," said Det. Barlow.
Finally, two weeks after the murders, police felt they had enough to make their case. Christopher Coleman was charged with the first-degree murder of his wife and two sons.
"If it was another time they would have had pitchforks and lanterns in their hands," Pistor said of the public's reaction. "They were out for vengeance. They wanted this case solved and they wanted it solved immediately and they wanted him to be found guilty immediately."
"Were you there when he was arrested?" Maher asked Ron Coleman.
"Yes. It was at night," he replied. "...the worst scenario. ... we'd lost Garett and Gavin and Sheri and now Chris is gone."
Sheri's friends and neighbors were relieved, but angry at the toll it had taken on them and their children.
"I've talked to some of the moms, and the children in the community wonder if their dad could do the same thing," said LaPlante.
And investigators insist all this pain was caused by Chris Coleman's obsession.
"And all because of a woman," Maher commented to Maj. Connor.
"I believe that had a major part of it," he said.
MOTIVE FOR MURDER?
"This crime was about greed, sex, selfishness, and narcissism. Chris Coleman decided he wanted a new life, and his family was in the way," Prosecutor Ed Parkinson told Maureen Maher. "He was obviously a monster who carried out a very sadistic plan."
By the time Chris Coleman went on trial in April 2011, prosecutor Ed Parkinson and his team had spent two years building their case.
"This was a huge case ... this was, like, a 10,000 piece puzzle," said Chief Joe Edwards.
The murders of Sheri Coleman and her two young boys were a big case for local media, as well. All the pre-trial publicity prompted the judge to bus in a jury from a county an hour-and-a-half away.
"What was the biggest challenge for you as a prosecutor in this case?" Maher asked Parkinson.
"People who turn out to be jurors have to accept the fact that parents kill their kids...it's just hard to accept," he replied. "He just looked like a good guy."
"How do you get that much hatred for a child?" Chief Edwards asked.
As unthinkable as it was, at every corner, investigators had turned up more evidence against Coleman. Some of it came from Sheri's own friends, who were determined to have their day in court.
"What was it like waiting for the two years for the trial?" Maher asked Meegan Turnbeaugh.
"It was life changing," she replied, "and not for the better."
"How did you feel about testifying?"
"I was scared to death. I was like, 'I'm gonna do this for Sheri.'"
Coleman, sporting a new hairdo and a bulletproof vest at his trial, would hear those friends bolster the prosecutor's claim that he had lied about his marriage in his interrogation:
Chris Coleman: We talked about it a while back about possibly maybe splitting up or something... We started meeting with actually one of the pastors...
Det. Justin Barlow: OK. From Joyce's church?
Chris Coleman: Yeah, things have been going awesome."
Coleman insisted that he and his wife had merely hit a few bumps in the road and were helped by counseling. Sheri told her friends a different story.
"She was in my room and she was crying and Chris wanted to leave her," Kathy LaPlante said. "And then he would start to say hurtful things like 'I never loved you.'"
But Sheri wasn't willing to let him go.
"And he would put on a face in front of the marriage counselor. And Sheri said when he got back home he'd yell at her and, you know, it would just be hell to pay," said LaPlante.
Prosecutor Parkinson says there's a reason Coleman wanted Sheri to be the one to divorce him.
21 PHOTOS
The Coleman triple murder
"I believe he became so enraptured by Tara Lintz...but he couldn't get divorced in his own mind, because then he'd lose his $100,000 job a year with Joyce Meyer Ministries," he said. "They frown on divorce, if it's your fault."
Parkinson believes Coleman was hoping to make a clean break before anyone caught on about the affair. In a videotaped deposition, Joyce Meyer confirmed her ministry's zero tolerance of adultery.
"If he would have been having an adulterous affair, while he was still married, then it could have definitely affected his job," said Meyer.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Joyce Meyer deposition excerpts
But eventually Sheri did find out her husband was having an affair with her best friend from high school.
"Sheri opened up her computer one night with a friend and said, 'Do you want to see the woman who's having an affair with my husband?' And showed images of Tara Lintz," said reporter Nick Pistor.
But Sheri still refused to get divorced. And something she said to her friend, Kathy LaPlante, will haunt her forever.
"When he came home, demanding a divorce...she told me that if anything happened to her, Chris did it," said LaPlante.
Several months later, Sheri and her sons were dead.
"What do you think the trigger was that made it May 5th?" Maher asked Parkinson.
"I think Tara was pressing him. I think he just got pushed into his own corner," the prosecutor replied.
"They had wedding dates planned. Chris had told Tara...that he was serving Sheri with divorce papers on May the 5th, the day of the homicides," Det. Justin Barlow told Maher.
"And had he ever filed divorce papers?"
"Not that we found, no," he replied.
"Did he ever speak to an attorney?"
"No."
After hearing all about this "other woman," the jury would finally get to meet her. It was the most anticipated moment of the trial: Tara Lintz making her entrance under police escort.
"She arrived at the courthouse ... almost like a Hollywood star arriving somewhere," Pistor recalled. "It was a packed courtroom gallery."
Lintz testified that she and Coleman talked or texted, "all the time, constantly" and that they often professed their love for each other. When asked whether she and Coleman had plans to marry, her short answer spoke volumes: "The divorce had to happen first."
"Do you think that Tara had anything to do with the murders?" Maher asked Parkinson.
"No, I don't," he replied.
"And you don't think she had any idea that something was about to happen?"
"Nope. Not from any of the evidence, I don't believe that," said Parkinson.
But the prosecutor does believe Coleman's lust for Tara Lintz had everything to do with it. And to drive his point home, he showed the court the sexually explicit videos and photos the two sent each other.
"We said, 'Lord please help us.' We don't have to look at this, but please help us sit here for his sake that he doesn't feel we're ashamed of him," Connie Coleman told Maher.
Now, instead of embarking on an exciting new life and keeping his six-figure income, Chris Coleman was facing the death penalty.
A GUT-WRENCHING CASE
Chris Coleman had a prominent local defense team at his side when he went on trial for his life. But John O'Gara and Bill Margulis had to admit they faced an uphill battle.
"The evidence was, although, all circumstantial, it was very overwhelming," said Margulis.
And at trial, one of the most critical pieces of evidence would be time of death. The prosecution maintains the three victims were killed hours before Coleman left the house to go to the gym.
"The bodies were stiff ... they had rigor mortis ... that everything pointed that they were dead by at least 3:00 in the morning," said reporter Nick Pistor.
"It could've been the whole case, quite frankly," said Prosecutor Ed Parkinson.
The defense insists that Sheri, Garett, and Gavin could have been killed that morning, during the hour and 10 minutes that Coleman was gone.
"You can use various formulas...the time of death is not an exact science," said Margulis.
As investigators kept building their case, something was troubling them about that trail of threatening letters and emails.
"It read: "If I can't get to Joyce then I will get to someone close to her," said Det. Justin Barlow.
"We didn't find anybody else who had received messages that were threatening to their family," said Chief Joe Edwards.
The prosecution's computer experts discovered there was good reason for that.
"Those threats were typed on his laptop," Parkinson told Maher.
"The email threats that came to him originated from..."
"...his own laptop," said Parkinson.
Those threats were sent from an account called destroychris@gmail.com. Defense attorney Bill Margulis insists someone else could have sent them.
"Anybody that had access to his computer, whether it was a co-worker or anybody else could've created that account," Margulis explained.
Investigators still had no so-called "smoking gun;" No DNA, no murder weapon and no eyewitness. But after analyzing the blood-red paint in those frightening messages on the walls, they believed they had something close to it.
"One can of that exact spray paint was purchased at a local hardware store. And the computerized signature said Christopher Coleman," said Edwards.
"You cannot paint that much without paint being somewhere on you," Ron Coleman said. "They literally cut him to the quick ... he pulled his own hair out for them ... there was not a trace of paint."
But if Coleman was the killer, it made a scene on the surveillance video -- recorded the afternoon before the bodies were discovered -- all the more chilling.
"It's a perfect suburban scene ... he played catch with his son at the house," Pistor said. "...and then, the next morning, they're dead. ...It's unexplainable."
Chris Coleman did not take the stand.
In a case that was gut-wrenching for everyone involved, it turns out, the jury was no exception.
"I didn't wanna believe that he could do that," said juror Gina West.
"I cried myself to sleep," juror Olivia Shopinski said. "Absolutely unimaginable. I mean, there's just so much hate. It's just hatred spread everywhere."
The first vote inside that jury room was 7 to 5, not guilty, but not because they believed Coleman was innocent.
"I mean, we all thought he did it. Who else would have done it?" said jury foreperson Jonece Pearman.
But many of the jurors were troubled by the circumstantial nature of the case.
"You wanted factual, tangible evidence that said he did it?" Maher asked.
"Make 'em prove it," said West.
As the deliberations entered a second day, crowds gathered outside the courthouse, the tension mounting. Sheri's mother remained optimistic.
"We will get justice for my daughter and my grandsons," Angela DiCiccio told reporters outside the courthouse. "I have what they call the mother instinct. I am very confident."
Incredibly, it was the jurors own detective work that, they say, pushed them over the top. When they looked at the back of a picture of Chris Coleman and Tara Lintz kissing, they noticed it was taken on Oct. 21, 2008.
"I think actually what I said was, 'Oh my God.' And I said, 'What was the date that he said the affair started?'" Pearman recalled.
"Yeah, the dates didn't match," West affirmed.
"Which wasn't til November -- and the picture was created in October," Pearman continued. "October, way before they said they had been seeing each other."
"And what did that say to you?" Maher asked Pearman.
"That was something black and white in front of my face that said if he could lie about this, he's lying about everything," she said.
After 15 hours of deliberations, the verdict was guilty. The crowd outside the courthouse erupted in applause and cheers.
"I had never seen anything like what happened on the lawn of the courthouse that night," said Pistor.
The verdict was handed down on May 5, 2011, two years to the day that Sheri, Garett, and Gavin were found murdered.
"I walked outta the courtroom and the first words out of my mouth, 'Yes, we did it, we got justice," Angela DiCiccio said.
The judge sentenced Coleman to life in prison, in part, because the State of Illinois' repeal of the death penalty was just months away from taking effect.
"48 Hours" spoke to Chris Coleman by phone, because cameras were not allowed inside the prison:
Maureen Maher: Did you kill your wife and your children?
Chris Coleman: No, absolutely not. I absolutely love my wife and my kids. And this, you know, it's not, it's not me.
Maureen Maher: How do you love your wife and be having an affair with one of her best friends?
Chris Coleman: Well...just because maybe I wasn't, you know, selfishly getting what I thought I...should be getting at home...from the physical side of things. But I still absolutely loved her.
Coleman denies he was planning to divorce Sheri to marry his mistress, Tara Lintz:
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Coleman phone call with Maureen Maher
Maureen Maher: So why does Tara say that?
Chris Coleman: It was discussed on several different things...and you know, it was a conversation...but there was no specific plans or no dates...or nobody asking each other to be married or anything like that.
Maureen Maher: She also says that you told her that you were...serving divorce papers to Sheri.
Chris Coleman: You know, unfortunately, and I feel horrible about it... if I ever talk to Tara again, that would be something that I apologize to her about...that was a lie. ...I lied to Tara about that.
So if he didn't murder his family, who did?
Chris Coleman: I have absolutely no clue. Believe me, I have wracked my brain for two-and-a-half years trying to figure that part out. ...I just had to stop and give it to God, just release that and do my best to forgive that person and move on.
Forgiving and moving on has been difficult for Sheri's friends, who are still struggling to understand this incomprehensible crime.
"As a Christian, I feel like it's imperative that I forgive, because Jesus forgave me. And I want to forgive with all my heart," Kathy LaPlante said, choking up.
"What makes it so hard to do that?" Maher asked.
"Because they were so innocent," she said.
Sheri's family and friends want to ensure that she, Garett and Gavin are never forgotten. They've been raising money to help victims of domestic violence. And they hope to build a new Little League field and name it after those two young boys who loved to play ball.
"The boys had their whole life ahead of them...they didn't deserve it," Vanessa Riegerix said. "This should've never happened. Shoulda never happened."
After a long legal battle with the Colemans, Sheri's family was allowed to rebury Sheri and her sons in a cemetery closer to their home in Chicago.
Chris Coleman is appealing his conviction.
[This show originally aired on May 5, 2012. It was updated on July 19, 2014.]
COLUMBIA, Ill. (CBS) - On the morning of May 5, 2009, Christopher Coleman returned home from the gym to a scene of chaos and unimaginable horror.
"I told him, 'Hey, they -- they didn't make it' -- being the family," Detective Justin Barlow of the Columbia Police Department said. "[Chris] sat down on the driveway and started sobbing. Said he felt like he was gonna throw up. And then kind of curled up in the fetal position."
Detective Barlow had been the Coleman's neighbor for five years and was the first to respond when Chris could not reach his wife.
"This crime scene, it wasn't bloody," he told "48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher. "...but that didn't mean it was less gruesome."
"Were you at all prepared for what you were about to walk into?" Maher asked.
"I don't think anybody could be prepared for that," said Barlow.
Upstairs, where they should have been safe in their beds, were 31-year-old Sheri and the couple's two young boys, 11-year-old Garett, and 9-year-old Gavin.
"What is the lasting image you have in your mind from that day?" Maher asked Barlow.
"I would say the one that sticks out the most would probably be Garett, just because he's the one that -- that, you know, I -- I discovered," he said.
"Is that a haunting image for you?"
"Yeah. Little bit," Barlow nodded.
The killer had not only taken Garett's life, but had desecrated the body by leaving another disturbing message.
"The spray paint in his room was actually on the sheet that was over his body?" asked Maher.
coelmanthreat.jpg
"Punished" One of the Manson-style messages spray-painted on a wall in the Coleman home CBS NEWS
"It was and there was some remnants of the spray paint on him as well," said Barlow.
"We knew that -- that this case was gonna be probably the biggest one -- of our lives -- definitely our careers, probably our lives," said Chief Joe Edwards.
Columbia, Ill., is a small, quiet suburb outside of St. Louis. Chief Edwards calls it "a wonderful place to live and raise a family."
Chief Edwards immediately recognized that his two investigators were going to need some help and called in a special unit - Major Jeff Connor and the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis, which brought in an army of 25 seasoned cops.
"It's typically your smaller departments that need the resource -- need the help," Maj. Connor explained.
Hours after the murders, the Major Case Squad swung into high gear. The CSI team started processing the house, warrants were secured to go through the Coleman's phones and computers, while a very distraught Chris was taken to the police station to give his statement.
Coleman told investigators that it had been a normal morning. He got up and left for the gym around 5:40 a.m. and called Sheri numerous times to wake her up.
As neighbors woke to the news of the murders, they were both devastated and terrified.
"So as I got down the street, I see that it was at the Coleman house. And I text her right away and said, 'Is everything OK?' And I didn't get a response," said an emotional Vanessa Riegerix.
Riegerix, who lived down the street, said the Colemans appeared to have a perfect life raising their two beautiful sons.
"I always thought of them as the American family, the perfect family," Riegerix said. "...everybody would want their children like these two boys, polite -- always helpful ... they had a heart of gold."
21 PHOTOS
The Coleman triple murder
The couple had been married for 12 years and met when they were both in the military, training at the K9 unit. Sheri became a stay-at-home mom.
Chris, 32, the son of a preacher, used his Marine and security experience to land a job for a well-known televangelist, Joyce Meyer.
"Joyce Meyer is now known throughout the country, and known throughout the world -- as a leading voice in the evangelical movement," St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Nick Pistor explained. "She's extremely successful financially. ...I've seen figures from $50 million to $100 million a year."
Pistor has followed the Coleman case for two years and is a CBS News consultant.
"Joyce Meyer does conferences all throughout the world in countries that have -- that don't necessarily respond well -- to women who -- are preaching -- a Christian message. And so she wanted some deeper security," he said.
But being Joyce Meyer's head of security apparently put a target on Chris Coleman's back. In November 2008, Chris had begun receiving death threats to his work email.
"Whenever Chris Coleman reported the first death threat that he got from his e-mail account at w-- at his work at Joyce Meyer Ministries, he came to us at the police department," said Barlow.
The email read:
Tell Joyce to stop preaching the bull---- if I can't get to Joyce, then I will get to someone close to her
"We give the Coleman family... extra patrol which we just patrol the area a lot more than we normally would during a shift and give it special attention to make sure nobody's there," explained Barlow.
It was in January 2009, that a hand-delivered threat showed up in the mailbox at the Coleman family home. It read:
F--- You! Deny your God publically or else. No more oppurtunities [sic]. Time is running out for you and your family!
"Did it concern you as a neighbor living so closely when you heard that there were death treats being made to the guy who lived across the street?" Maher asked Barlow.
"Absolutely," he replied.
Each note seemed to escalate the seriousness of the situation and, on April 27, less than a week before the murders, a final missive arrived with an ultimatum:
Stop today or else. I know your schedule! You can't hide from me forever. I'm always watching. I know when you leave in the morning and I know when you stay home.
"You decided to ramp things up yourself to be proactive," Maher noted to Barlow. "And what did you do at your house?"
"We got one camera mounted up in my 5-year-old's bedroom and pointed it right at the mailbox," he replied.
With the camera aimed directly at the Coleman's mailbox, about 214 feet away approximately, according to Barlow, they hoped to get a clear shot of whoever was leaving the notes.
"...and be prepared for something that was gonna happen. And be as proactive about it as we could," said Barlow.
Instead, days later, the killer somehow snuck into the Coleman home and strangled Sheri, Garett and Gavin.
But if the murders were linked to the threats and Joyce Meyer Ministries, that meant the cops might now be on a global search for suspects.
"There was a lot of fear that there was somebody out there killin' families, and who was gonna be next?" said Maj. Connor.
QUESTIONING CHRIS COLEMAN
The small town of Columbia, Ill., was reeling with the sudden loss of Sheri, Garett and Gavin Coleman.
"This touched an entire community... The neighbors were shocked," reporter Nick Pistor explained. "They saw the young boys playing touch football with their father on the front lawn. These were little boys that they knew."
Close friends like Kathy LaPlante were crushed.
"You could just see the pain on everyone's face. It devastated the community," LaPlante said. "Sheri was a loving mother, loyal friend and sister to me. My life's not the same...it put hole in my heart."
"If I would've known for one millisecond she was in danger, I would've been down there," said Sheri's brother, Mario DiCiccio.
The Coleman Family
The Coleman Family THE COLEMAN FAMILY
For Sheri's brother and their mother, Angela, it was impossible to accept the reality of the brutal crime.
"She grew up to be a beautiful person on the outside as well as on the inside," Angela explained. "...they were her world, those boys. They were her world."
"Garett was more -- quiet and more like a -- more of a thinker. He was -- you could tell by lookin' in his eyes he was always thinking," Mario explained. "And Gavin was very...outgoing...he was like a social butterfly. ...his personality's just like his mom's. Just like his mother's."
"With Sheri, Garett and Gavin, I mean, I think that just... that's what the motivation was for everybody," said Det. Justin Barlow.
Hours into the investigation, the Major Case Squad continued to pursue their best lead -- finding whoever wrote those threats.
"We tracked down people across the country who didn't like Joyce Meyer. We interviewed them to find out where they were at on May the 4th and May the 5th," said Chief Joe Edwards.
And that morning they were hoping Chris Coleman might be able to point them in the right direction:
Det. Barlow: Who do you suspect? I mean. Out of all these emails and things you've been talking at work, there's got to be one person that stands out in your mind?
Chris Coleman: (voice cracks) I don't have a clue. I should have been there this morning.
But as police continued to talk to Coleman, they were surprised by how he was acting:
Sgt. Bivens: How do you think they died?
Chris Coleman: I have no idea. You guys haven't told me.
Sgt. Bivens: OK. Do you have any clues?
Chris Coleman: (Mumbles)
"Did he ever ask how his wife and children died? Maher asked Barlow.
"No," he replied.
"He never asked."
"No."
"What else sticks out in your mind from those first few hours?"
"Just the lack of reaction, I mean just the lack of curiosity of 'what's going on,'" said Barlow.
So police kept probing:
Sgt. Bivens: Was there a problem in your relationship? Was there anything currently that wasn't going so well in your relationship?
Chris Coleman: No, not really. I mean just a communication thing.
Sgt. Bivens: Had you seen anyone else outside of your wife.
Chris Coleman: What do you mean?
Sgt. Bivens: In a romantic way?
Chris Coleman: No.
Chris was adamant that he was not having a relationship outside of his marriage, so it seemed odd when he offered a stunning piece of information about another woman:
Chris Coleman: Tara in Florida that you guys are going to talk to, I talk to her a ton lately, but --
Sgt. Bivens: And what's with that?
Chris Coleman: Just a friend, somebody to talk to.
Tara is Tara Lintz -- a cocktail waitress and an old high school friend of Sheri's.
Sgt. Bivens: OK. You said you had a close friendship, but were you actually doing anything that you felt wouldn't be approved by your wife?
Chris Coleman: Some of the conversations, probably.
Coleman insisted they were just friends -- that he met Lintz through Sheri when their family went to Florida on vacation:
Sgt. Bivens: Did it have potential to go further?
Chris Coleman: No. I didn't want to do that to my kids.
Police in Lintz' hometown of St. Petersburg, Fla., were contacted to check out Chris' story.
Detective Shannon Halstead got the call.
"So, we went from the station to go make contact w ith her thinking it was gonna be a quick, 20-minute interview and it ended up being very different," she said.
That's because the information Halstead gained from Lintz about the relationship was very different than what Chris Coleman was telling police in Illinois.
"She provided the Blackberry and the laptop computer, obviously, had files of videos and emails ... relating to their relationship," Det. Halstead told Maher.
"Did you immediately step out and call St. Louis?"
"I did."
"And what did you say to them?"
"I said, 'I'm not positive, but I think this is his girlfriend,'" said Det. Halstead.
Armed with that information, Det. Barlow confronted Chris:
Det. Barlow: The one thing I did want to tell you right now, the St. Petersburg homicide unit is talking to Tara right now, and she showed us the pictures you sent her of you two, and we know you two have been having an affair.
"So was that a pretty big break for you guys?" Maher asked Det. Barlow.
"It was a -- important piece," he replied.
Investigators learned the couple had begun seeing each other in the fall of 2008, six months before the murders. During the affair, Chris would fly Lintz to meet him at locations where he was working for Joyce Meyer.
Det. Barlow: I know you guys went to Hawaii together. We pulled the Enterprise leasing cars receipt where you guys went to different trips together...
Chris Coleman: Well, I didn't think it was an affair.
Det. Barlow: You didn't think it was an affair?
Chris Coleman: No an affair is when you're like living with them and you plan to get married and everything.
"She had on her calendar -- a scheduled wedding to Chris Coleman, scheduled vacations, different accounts -- credit card accounts that they held together -- and I think she, honest to God, believed that he was going to leave his wife and two children," said Det. Halstead.
Chris' parents, Pastor Ron Coleman and his wife, Connie, were stunned to learn their son had an affair. They insisted it had nothing to do with the murders.
"He's always been a real gentle person-- kinda quiet," Connie Coleman told Maher.
"Is there any way there's a part of Chris that you don't know that could have been capable of this?" Maher asked.
"Not in my view," Ron Coleman replied. "... you couldn't put something around your kid's throat unless you're a monster. It's just not there. It's just not there."
While investigators believed Chris' affair with Tara Lintz was a strong motive for murder, there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. So after six long hours, Chris Coleman walked out a free man.
"It wasn't like we were wanting to believe that Chris is the one who did this. It's just that the evidence kept pointing to him," said Maj. Jeff Connor.
THE OTHER WOMAN
Every day, friends and neighbors are reminded of the beautiful lives that were stolen from them.
"The memorial -- in their subdivision is awesome. There's a bench and there's trees," Meegan Turnbeaugh explained. "...the community of Columbia Lakes got together and created that. ...So they wanted to do something positive. And they created a nice memorial."
Turnbeaugh says it's a fitting tribute - unlike the funeral service at Pastor Coleman's church.
"No friends, no family, no coaches. Nobody spoke about these three awesome people that were dead," she said.
In the days that followed the service, any sympathy for Chris Coleman was stripped away as news spread about his affair with Sheri's high school friend, Tara Lintz.
"Well, when the affair came out, and I had no idea, and I heard about it from someone else. I felt like every day I was just getting stabbed in the heart by these little pieces of information," said Kathy LaPlante.
Asked if she thought Coleman would be arrested, Turnbeaugh told Maher, "Yes. And I couldn't wait. I was nervous, to be honest with you."
The Major Case Squad felt that pressure.
"Obviously, in any case...you want to get the person responsible for it. But you want to get the right person," said Det. Justin Barlow.
But right away, there were red flags. Police were concerned when they found a basement window open and others unlocked.
"Here's a guy who's family is bein' threatened. They're gonna destroy his family while he's gone, and yet, that window was left unlocked, and it was obvious it was left unlocked, 'cause there was no forced entry," said Maj. Jeff Connor.
And remember that camera Det. Barlow installed in his house?
"We saw no strangers walking up and down the street. You saw no strange vehicles," said Chief Joe Edwards.
Chris had even installed his own surveillance cameras in his house.
"What about the surveillance equipment that was allegedly in the house?" Maher asked Maj. Connor.
"The recorder was missing," he replied.
"That's convenient."
"Yes."
An autopsy on Sheri revealed she fought violently with her killer, leaving her with two black eyes.
"Sheri was involved in an altercation before she was murdered. Those two boys weren't," said Chief Edwards.
Which made scratches found on Chris Coleman's arms all the more suspicious.
"When did you first notice the scratches on his arms?" Maher asked Det. Barlow.
"It was brought to my attention by people at the scene," he replied.
Det. Barlow: How are you doing?
Chris Coleman: Freezin.
Det. Barlow: Anything I can get you? You're freezing?
Police say Coleman tried to hide his arms during his interview.
"You can see on the video where he's asking for a blanket because he says he's cold. The only part of his body that he covers up are the -- you know, suspected-- marks on his arm," Barlow explained.
Det. Barlow: That'll work, won't it.
Chris Coleman: Yeah that's fine. As long as I can cover my arms. I'm freezing. [Covers his arms]
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Chris Coleman police interview
"I remember in the interview room it being very warm in there," Barlow told Maher.
"Did you think he was in shock?"
"No."
Chris later claimed he got those scratches the day before when he was removing a satellite dish from his roof.
Asked if there was any DNA found at the scene that would implicate him, Det. Barlow said, "I'll just say there wasn't any DNA found that didn't belong there. No boogeyman, no -- unidentified DNA, anything like that."
There was incriminating evidence found on Chris' phone and computers, starting with X-rated snapshots and videos that Tara Lintz and Chris had sent each other.
"It was a serious affair. He had written down every -- her measurements, her favorite things. Everything about her he had stored so he could, you know -- buy her things or do whatever for her," reporter Nick Pistor said. "By November 5th of 2008, Chris had written on his computer that that was the day Tara changed his life."
For police, that date would set off alarms bells.
"And how many days after that, then, did the threats start to show up?" Maher asked Pistor.
"About nine days after that," he replied.
Nine days. The Colemans insist it's all a coincidence.
"It's my understanding that he had written down, 'November 5th, the day Tara changed my life.' That they had exchanged promise rings... And that he had even written down the name of their first child were it to be a little girl," Maher commented to Chris' parents. "Is that true?"
"That's not Chris," said Ron Coleman.
"Honestly, I cannot imagine him doin' that," Connie Coleman said. "He just didn't really operate in that -- in that arena of -- emotions. He just didn't. He was just very calm and logical sense."
Chris' parents believe their son is innocent and that it was an intruder who killed his family and left hateful messages. In fact, Chris even voluntarily provided samples of his own handwriting to police.
Asked what was the most important piece of evidence at the crime scene, Maj. Jeff Connor told Maher, "At the crime scene, probably the handwriting on the walls."
But those samples would later come back to haunt Chris Coleman.
"The crime scene lab coming back and saying that the handwriting found on the wall matches up to the handwriting -- from the handwriting example that Christopher Coleman gave at the Columbia Police Department," said Det. Barlow.
Finally, two weeks after the murders, police felt they had enough to make their case. Christopher Coleman was charged with the first-degree murder of his wife and two sons.
"If it was another time they would have had pitchforks and lanterns in their hands," Pistor said of the public's reaction. "They were out for vengeance. They wanted this case solved and they wanted it solved immediately and they wanted him to be found guilty immediately."
"Were you there when he was arrested?" Maher asked Ron Coleman.
"Yes. It was at night," he replied. "...the worst scenario. ... we'd lost Garett and Gavin and Sheri and now Chris is gone."
Sheri's friends and neighbors were relieved, but angry at the toll it had taken on them and their children.
"I've talked to some of the moms, and the children in the community wonder if their dad could do the same thing," said LaPlante.
And investigators insist all this pain was caused by Chris Coleman's obsession.
"And all because of a woman," Maher commented to Maj. Connor.
"I believe that had a major part of it," he said.
MOTIVE FOR MURDER?
"This crime was about greed, sex, selfishness, and narcissism. Chris Coleman decided he wanted a new life, and his family was in the way," Prosecutor Ed Parkinson told Maureen Maher. "He was obviously a monster who carried out a very sadistic plan."
By the time Chris Coleman went on trial in April 2011, prosecutor Ed Parkinson and his team had spent two years building their case.
"This was a huge case ... this was, like, a 10,000 piece puzzle," said Chief Joe Edwards.
The murders of Sheri Coleman and her two young boys were a big case for local media, as well. All the pre-trial publicity prompted the judge to bus in a jury from a county an hour-and-a-half away.
"What was the biggest challenge for you as a prosecutor in this case?" Maher asked Parkinson.
"People who turn out to be jurors have to accept the fact that parents kill their kids...it's just hard to accept," he replied. "He just looked like a good guy."
"How do you get that much hatred for a child?" Chief Edwards asked.
As unthinkable as it was, at every corner, investigators had turned up more evidence against Coleman. Some of it came from Sheri's own friends, who were determined to have their day in court.
"What was it like waiting for the two years for the trial?" Maher asked Meegan Turnbeaugh.
"It was life changing," she replied, "and not for the better."
"How did you feel about testifying?"
"I was scared to death. I was like, 'I'm gonna do this for Sheri.'"
Coleman, sporting a new hairdo and a bulletproof vest at his trial, would hear those friends bolster the prosecutor's claim that he had lied about his marriage in his interrogation:
Chris Coleman: We talked about it a while back about possibly maybe splitting up or something... We started meeting with actually one of the pastors...
Det. Justin Barlow: OK. From Joyce's church?
Chris Coleman: Yeah, things have been going awesome."
Coleman insisted that he and his wife had merely hit a few bumps in the road and were helped by counseling. Sheri told her friends a different story.
"She was in my room and she was crying and Chris wanted to leave her," Kathy LaPlante said. "And then he would start to say hurtful things like 'I never loved you.'"
But Sheri wasn't willing to let him go.
"And he would put on a face in front of the marriage counselor. And Sheri said when he got back home he'd yell at her and, you know, it would just be hell to pay," said LaPlante.
Prosecutor Parkinson says there's a reason Coleman wanted Sheri to be the one to divorce him.
21 PHOTOS
The Coleman triple murder
"I believe he became so enraptured by Tara Lintz...but he couldn't get divorced in his own mind, because then he'd lose his $100,000 job a year with Joyce Meyer Ministries," he said. "They frown on divorce, if it's your fault."
Parkinson believes Coleman was hoping to make a clean break before anyone caught on about the affair. In a videotaped deposition, Joyce Meyer confirmed her ministry's zero tolerance of adultery.
"If he would have been having an adulterous affair, while he was still married, then it could have definitely affected his job," said Meyer.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Joyce Meyer deposition excerpts
But eventually Sheri did find out her husband was having an affair with her best friend from high school.
"Sheri opened up her computer one night with a friend and said, 'Do you want to see the woman who's having an affair with my husband?' And showed images of Tara Lintz," said reporter Nick Pistor.
But Sheri still refused to get divorced. And something she said to her friend, Kathy LaPlante, will haunt her forever.
"When he came home, demanding a divorce...she told me that if anything happened to her, Chris did it," said LaPlante.
Several months later, Sheri and her sons were dead.
"What do you think the trigger was that made it May 5th?" Maher asked Parkinson.
"I think Tara was pressing him. I think he just got pushed into his own corner," the prosecutor replied.
"They had wedding dates planned. Chris had told Tara...that he was serving Sheri with divorce papers on May the 5th, the day of the homicides," Det. Justin Barlow told Maher.
"And had he ever filed divorce papers?"
"Not that we found, no," he replied.
"Did he ever speak to an attorney?"
"No."
After hearing all about this "other woman," the jury would finally get to meet her. It was the most anticipated moment of the trial: Tara Lintz making her entrance under police escort.
"She arrived at the courthouse ... almost like a Hollywood star arriving somewhere," Pistor recalled. "It was a packed courtroom gallery."
Lintz testified that she and Coleman talked or texted, "all the time, constantly" and that they often professed their love for each other. When asked whether she and Coleman had plans to marry, her short answer spoke volumes: "The divorce had to happen first."
"Do you think that Tara had anything to do with the murders?" Maher asked Parkinson.
"No, I don't," he replied.
"And you don't think she had any idea that something was about to happen?"
"Nope. Not from any of the evidence, I don't believe that," said Parkinson.
But the prosecutor does believe Coleman's lust for Tara Lintz had everything to do with it. And to drive his point home, he showed the court the sexually explicit videos and photos the two sent each other.
"We said, 'Lord please help us.' We don't have to look at this, but please help us sit here for his sake that he doesn't feel we're ashamed of him," Connie Coleman told Maher.
Now, instead of embarking on an exciting new life and keeping his six-figure income, Chris Coleman was facing the death penalty.
A GUT-WRENCHING CASE
Chris Coleman had a prominent local defense team at his side when he went on trial for his life. But John O'Gara and Bill Margulis had to admit they faced an uphill battle.
"The evidence was, although, all circumstantial, it was very overwhelming," said Margulis.
And at trial, one of the most critical pieces of evidence would be time of death. The prosecution maintains the three victims were killed hours before Coleman left the house to go to the gym.
"The bodies were stiff ... they had rigor mortis ... that everything pointed that they were dead by at least 3:00 in the morning," said reporter Nick Pistor.
"It could've been the whole case, quite frankly," said Prosecutor Ed Parkinson.
The defense insists that Sheri, Garett, and Gavin could have been killed that morning, during the hour and 10 minutes that Coleman was gone.
"You can use various formulas...the time of death is not an exact science," said Margulis.
As investigators kept building their case, something was troubling them about that trail of threatening letters and emails.
"It read: "If I can't get to Joyce then I will get to someone close to her," said Det. Justin Barlow.
"We didn't find anybody else who had received messages that were threatening to their family," said Chief Joe Edwards.
The prosecution's computer experts discovered there was good reason for that.
"Those threats were typed on his laptop," Parkinson told Maher.
"The email threats that came to him originated from..."
"...his own laptop," said Parkinson.
Those threats were sent from an account called destroychris@gmail.com. Defense attorney Bill Margulis insists someone else could have sent them.
"Anybody that had access to his computer, whether it was a co-worker or anybody else could've created that account," Margulis explained.
Investigators still had no so-called "smoking gun;" No DNA, no murder weapon and no eyewitness. But after analyzing the blood-red paint in those frightening messages on the walls, they believed they had something close to it.
"One can of that exact spray paint was purchased at a local hardware store. And the computerized signature said Christopher Coleman," said Edwards.
"You cannot paint that much without paint being somewhere on you," Ron Coleman said. "They literally cut him to the quick ... he pulled his own hair out for them ... there was not a trace of paint."
But if Coleman was the killer, it made a scene on the surveillance video -- recorded the afternoon before the bodies were discovered -- all the more chilling.
"It's a perfect suburban scene ... he played catch with his son at the house," Pistor said. "...and then, the next morning, they're dead. ...It's unexplainable."
Chris Coleman did not take the stand.
In a case that was gut-wrenching for everyone involved, it turns out, the jury was no exception.
"I didn't wanna believe that he could do that," said juror Gina West.
"I cried myself to sleep," juror Olivia Shopinski said. "Absolutely unimaginable. I mean, there's just so much hate. It's just hatred spread everywhere."
The first vote inside that jury room was 7 to 5, not guilty, but not because they believed Coleman was innocent.
"I mean, we all thought he did it. Who else would have done it?" said jury foreperson Jonece Pearman.
But many of the jurors were troubled by the circumstantial nature of the case.
"You wanted factual, tangible evidence that said he did it?" Maher asked.
"Make 'em prove it," said West.
As the deliberations entered a second day, crowds gathered outside the courthouse, the tension mounting. Sheri's mother remained optimistic.
"We will get justice for my daughter and my grandsons," Angela DiCiccio told reporters outside the courthouse. "I have what they call the mother instinct. I am very confident."
Incredibly, it was the jurors own detective work that, they say, pushed them over the top. When they looked at the back of a picture of Chris Coleman and Tara Lintz kissing, they noticed it was taken on Oct. 21, 2008.
"I think actually what I said was, 'Oh my God.' And I said, 'What was the date that he said the affair started?'" Pearman recalled.
"Yeah, the dates didn't match," West affirmed.
"Which wasn't til November -- and the picture was created in October," Pearman continued. "October, way before they said they had been seeing each other."
"And what did that say to you?" Maher asked Pearman.
"That was something black and white in front of my face that said if he could lie about this, he's lying about everything," she said.
After 15 hours of deliberations, the verdict was guilty. The crowd outside the courthouse erupted in applause and cheers.
"I had never seen anything like what happened on the lawn of the courthouse that night," said Pistor.
The verdict was handed down on May 5, 2011, two years to the day that Sheri, Garett, and Gavin were found murdered.
"I walked outta the courtroom and the first words out of my mouth, 'Yes, we did it, we got justice," Angela DiCiccio said.
The judge sentenced Coleman to life in prison, in part, because the State of Illinois' repeal of the death penalty was just months away from taking effect.
"48 Hours" spoke to Chris Coleman by phone, because cameras were not allowed inside the prison:
Maureen Maher: Did you kill your wife and your children?
Chris Coleman: No, absolutely not. I absolutely love my wife and my kids. And this, you know, it's not, it's not me.
Maureen Maher: How do you love your wife and be having an affair with one of her best friends?
Chris Coleman: Well...just because maybe I wasn't, you know, selfishly getting what I thought I...should be getting at home...from the physical side of things. But I still absolutely loved her.
Coleman denies he was planning to divorce Sheri to marry his mistress, Tara Lintz:
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Coleman phone call with Maureen Maher
Maureen Maher: So why does Tara say that?
Chris Coleman: It was discussed on several different things...and you know, it was a conversation...but there was no specific plans or no dates...or nobody asking each other to be married or anything like that.
Maureen Maher: She also says that you told her that you were...serving divorce papers to Sheri.
Chris Coleman: You know, unfortunately, and I feel horrible about it... if I ever talk to Tara again, that would be something that I apologize to her about...that was a lie. ...I lied to Tara about that.
So if he didn't murder his family, who did?
Chris Coleman: I have absolutely no clue. Believe me, I have wracked my brain for two-and-a-half years trying to figure that part out. ...I just had to stop and give it to God, just release that and do my best to forgive that person and move on.
Forgiving and moving on has been difficult for Sheri's friends, who are still struggling to understand this incomprehensible crime.
"As a Christian, I feel like it's imperative that I forgive, because Jesus forgave me. And I want to forgive with all my heart," Kathy LaPlante said, choking up.
"What makes it so hard to do that?" Maher asked.
"Because they were so innocent," she said.
Sheri's family and friends want to ensure that she, Garett and Gavin are never forgotten. They've been raising money to help victims of domestic violence. And they hope to build a new Little League field and name it after those two young boys who loved to play ball.
"The boys had their whole life ahead of them...they didn't deserve it," Vanessa Riegerix said. "This should've never happened. Shoulda never happened."
After a long legal battle with the Colemans, Sheri's family was allowed to rebury Sheri and her sons in a cemetery closer to their home in Chicago.
Chris Coleman is appealing his conviction.
48 Hours Mystery: The War in Chicago - CBS News
A "48 Hours" investigation into drugs, guns, gangs and the battle for America's third-largest city
Produced by Josh Yager, Doug Longhini, Josh Gaynor and Kathleen O'Connell
[This story first aired on May 18, 2013. It was updated on June 28, 2014]
After Hadiya Pendleton was shot in a Chicago park, she quickly became a symbol of the deadly street violence in the city. But nearly every day, someone is gunned down in Chicago, often the result of gangs fighting over territory to sell drugs.
In the fall of 2012, "48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher and CBS News correspondent Armen Keteyian began reaching out to some of the victims who are hurting and some of the people who are fighting back in this city at war over guns, gangs, and drugs.
"I wish you guys could've been here asking me about, you know, the dancing at the inauguration, but unfortunately this is what we're dealing with," Hadiya's father, Anthony Pendleton, told Maher.
"We know from years of working the streets ... that much of the gang-related shootings -- are drug related," Jack Riley, who heads up the Chicago division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Keteyian.
To get the gangs, Riley and the DEA go after their drugs -- heroin in particular.
"That's why I look the way I look, that's why I don't sleep a lot," he said. "One homicide in this city is too many. One person abusing heroin in the suburbs is too many."
Paula Nixon started using heroin when she 16. "... and the first time I did it ... I was in my family room ... and I was thinking, 'this is the best feeling in the world,'" she said.
Heroin has taken many of Paula's friends, but she can't kick it on her own.
"I'm not strong enough... if I saw heroin in front of me right now I can't tell you that I wouldn't do it," she said. "There is no amount of willpower I have on my own that I can stop."
With drug dealers at his doorstep, David Muhammad risked his life to stop them.
"Every day for about a year I videotaped them," he said. "It's worth it to lose my life if I have to try to slow this down."
For six months, we watched David Muhammad stand up to drug dealers, Paula Nixon battle her heroin addiction and the Pendletons search for justice.
The Chicago Police force and the DEA have been hunting down drug-dealing gangs and "48 Hours" is there as it all unfolds.
HADIYA PENDLETON
In 2012, the murder rate in Chicago soared to more than 500 - that's more than New York, though Chicago is only a third the size. "48 Hours" had been in Chicago for six months investigating gun violence when Hadiya Pendleton was shot to death.
Suddenly, what had been a local story began to fuel a national debate.
"One of those we lost was a girl named Hadiya Pendleton," President Barack Obama said in his State of Union Address. "Hadiya's parents Nate and Cleo are in this chamber tonight."
hadiyapendletonap763026092998fullwidth.jpg
Hadiya Pendleton AP PHOTO/COURTESY OF DAMON STEWART
Hadiya, 15, was gunned down on January 29, 2013, in a park only a mile from President Obama's Chicago home when members of a street gang apparently mistook her group of friends for a rival gang.
Until that moment, Hadiya's life had been largely untouched by Chicago violence, according to her parents, Anthony and Cleopatra. And "48 Hours" found Hadiya had no connection to gangs.
As early as the sixth grade, when she made a school video, she seemed to understand the risks for kids in her city:
Hi. My name is Hadiya ... this commercial is informational for you and your future children. ... so many children are joining gangs and it is your job to say no to gangs and yes to a great future.
"Amongst everything else she was doing, she was on the debate team ... she was a majorette, she did volleyball," Pendleton said. "Basketball... cheerleading," Cleo Cowley added.
Her parents say Hadiya was a normal, happy teenager who dreamed of being a veterinarian or a journalist.
"What did you see her growing into?" Maher asked.
"Whatever she wanted to, to be perfectly honest," Cowley said. "Best answer," Pendleton agreed.
"It's the truth, whatever she wanted and whatever it was she was going to be hugely successful at it," said Cowley.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Hadiya Pendleton's parents speak out
Less than a week after Hadiya's high school marching band had returned from the president's inauguration, school had just let out on an unusually warm winter day.
"When I got a phone call from her friend and she was like screaming, 'Hadiya's been shot. Hadiya's been shot...' Cowley recalled in a whisper.
She says she literally could not make sense of it -- even after meeting her husband at the hospital.
"This can't be us," she said. "This is not our life! This is not the rest of my life!"
"I mean, only thing I could really remember is 'why they bringin' these tissues in here? Why they bringin' these tissues in here?"" said Pendleton.
"After the doctor came in and told you that she hadn't made it, what do you remember happening after that?" Maher asked.
"I died," Cowley replied. "This is my best description...you ride roller coasters? ... I think the intensity of riding the ride is hearing the click, click, click ... and then the roller coaster starts to roll ... your stomach goes, like crazy, and you reach instinctively for that bar ... it's like reaching for that bar, but never having it and never falling any further to level off."
Just days after Hadiya's murder, the Pendleton family was riding an emotional roller coaster. But they agreed to let "48 Hours" into their lives as they remembered Hadiya's life as a typical teenager.
They wanted to share their memories, in the hope that her death would mean something.
"I just think that there needs to be an awareness that, you know, there are good people out here that have promising futures that are not living to see them through because -- because something's wrong," said Cowley.
"We've got people dying ... and I'm not rolling over, I have not thrown the towel in," said Jack Riley, who thinks he knows why so many of Chicago's children are dying.
Riley is a long-time veteran of the DEA and heads the agency's Chicago office, which controls five surrounding states.
"I wanted to retire a few years ago ... my wife's naggin' me every day... get outta the job," he said. "I can't do it!"
While Hadiya became a celebrity in death, shootings happen just about every day in Chicago.
Riley says many Chicago shootings are carried out by the area's roughly 70,000 gang members who are going to war over one thing in particular: drugs
"In your mind, there is an absolute direct connection between the murder rate in Chicago and the drug wars in the streets," Armen Keteyian noted to Riley.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Street gangs are "selling death and misery in the form of heroin"
"As sure as I'm sitting here telling you," he replied.
He said these days, the gangs are fighting mostly over distribution of one drug alone: heroin.
"It is right now the drug of choice for street gangs," said Riley.
A man who is risking his life to talk to "48 Hours" says the heroin is brought to Chicago by one main source: Mexico's infamous Sinaloa Cartel.
"And the worst part is they are armed," the man said. "It's practically a time bomb, and this is the reality we're living."
"How powerful is the Cartel influence in Chicago right now?" Keteyian asked.
"Very strong the influence of the Sinaloa Cartel here in Chicago and it's getting stronger," the man said.
He should know. He was once trusted by the cartel to smuggle drugs to Chicago. "I tell them if they have 50 kilos, I'll buy that...if they have 100 kilos in a week, I can sell that too," he said.
Jack Riley says the Sinaloa Cartel was run by one of the world's most dangerous men: Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, who escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001. The Feds say Guzman targeted Chicago specifically.
Why Chicago? "It's the same reason there's many fortune 500 companies here," Riley told Keteyian. "It is a business logistic home run."
"We're over some of the biggest interstates in the country here in addition to the trucking and obviously the rail and that's what makes this area so important to traffickers," Riley explained while flying over the city with Keteyian.
"Jack, you've got a personal history with Chapo Guzman?" Keteyian asked.
"Yeah, I hate the guy," Riley replied. "He made it clear to some of his subordinates that he would like to see my head lopped off. ... I still got my head ... get in line Chapo! C'mon let's go!"
Guzman was considered such a menace to these streets that the city's crime commission named him "Public Enemy Number One" -- a title they last bestowed on notorious gangster Al Capone.
"Chapo to Chicago right now is what Al Capone was in my opinion," Riley explained.
"Does that make you the modern day Eliot Ness?" Keteyian quipped.
"I've been called worse!" said Riley.
Until Guzman and the Sinoloa cartel are is brought to justice, Riley and a multi-agency "strike force" are vowing to take down the violent Chicago street gangs that do the cartel's bidding.
"They're demanding a safer place to live, a safer place to raise their kids...and that's what it's all about today," he said.
"This is good versus evil and you're riding with good today," Riley commented to Keteyian as they headed to a pre-dawn raid.
THE HEROIN HIGHWAY
It may look like a scene from Iraq or Afghanistan, but, just 20 miles from Chicago, Jack Riley of the DEA is training an army to fight a drug war.
It's a new strike force to target middlemen between the violent street gangs and the Mexican cartels. They're making raids all over the area - from one on a quiet suburban street in Plainfield, Ill., to one in Gary, Indiana -- only about 15 miles from Chicago.
More and more these days, heroin is making its way out of the inner city, where it is cut and packaged for sale at secret locations. The workers in a so-called chop house on Chicago's west side are naked to keep them from stealing the drug before it reaches its suburban clientele.
To get their drugs, many suburban users drive down a stretch of Interstate 290 onto the city's west side. The street gangs in control of the neighborhoods there grant them safe passage. So many addicts are using the road that it's earned a nickname: the heroin highway.
"Well from what we're seeing is that heroin users take that road and head right into the west side of the city to purchase heroin. This is a crucial artery to the whole regional problem," he told Keteyian as they flew above the heroin highway.
"After I would get my heroin ... I would drive home high," said 18-year-old Paula Nixon.
Paula was a good student, an athlete and an avid photographer living in the leafy suburb of Glenview. While Hadiya Pendleton lost her life to Chicago's violence, Paula has been living through a different kind of war.
"You live to get high!" she told Maureen Maher.
Photos: Lives lost - The faces of suburban fatal heroin overdoses
Understanding heroin and its hold
Her ordeal began in 2011, when she was sitting in the family room with her boyfriend and he encouraged her to try a little bag of white powder. Paula was only 16.
"I remember saying, 'I love this feeling!'" she said.
Like much of the heroin coming from Mexico these days, it was cheaper than a six pack and easier to use -- so pure it could be snorted.
"I snorted the first time," Paula told Maher. Asked if she was hooked right away, Paula said, "Yeah ... The first high is the greatest. It really is. ... All your problems are gone..."
It was so good, Paula says, that she couldn't stop. She began driving the heroin highway nearly every day -- even after the boy who got her started died of an overdose.
"People ask me, 'How do you continue to use after you lose someone like that?'" she said. "... and it's indescribable how strong it is."
In suburban Will County, a middle class area southwest of Chicago, Coroner Pat O'Neil says heroin use has become an epidemic.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Will County Coroner: "Heroin is everywhere"
"I've signed four death certificates this week and all four have been heroin overdoses," he said.
In 2012, fatal overdoses were up 76 percent over the year before.
"We have more heroin overdoses than car crash fatalities and homicides combined," said O'Neal.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Heroin diaries: Jaymes Lindbloom's journey from addiction to recovery
In nearby Naperville, Jaymes Lindbloom knows the heroin scene well. He admits he was a dealer while at Neuqua Valley High School and drove the heroin highway to pick up his product.
"Kids from suburbs ... ride down to the west side [of] Chicago all the time," he explained. "People think it's such a far-fetched idea, you know. But it's just - it's in everyone's back yard now."
"It's taking over slowly but surely. I mean...It's everywhere," said Paula.
"It's like living with someone that's crazy," said Paula's mother, PJ Newberg.
Newberg forced her daughter into rehab.
"She made a horrible scene... I mean, she started swearing and yelling and kicking," she said. "I didn't recognize her; she was a completely different person."
When she got out, Paula did well for a while, but then fell of the wagon. After four more failed rehabs, Newberg decided tough love was her only hope -- and kicked Paula out of the house. In some ways though, that decision only made matters worse.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Heroin diaries: A mother's mission in the face of addiction
"I couldn't even sleep," said Newberg.
"What would you lay in bed thinking about?" Maher asked.
"Where is she? What's gonna happen to her? Is she alive?" Newberg replied.
Paula was alive, but within a few months, she was homeless -- injecting heroin five times a day.
"You'll do anything for it. You'll betray your family, your friends," she explained. "I stole my father's wedding ring and pawned it. ... like who does that?"
In September 2012, Paula was jailed for shoplifting. Four months behind bars forced her to get clean. But once she was released into rehab, the question was, could she stay clean? Even Paula had her doubts.
"I am scared! I am scared that I'm gonna relapse," she said. "I am scared that, you know, I won't get it this time, just like I don't every other time."
What's so hard for kids like Paula is that they know the heroin they crave is just down the road.
"My corner ... was dominated by gang members and drug dealers," David Muhammad said.
It's a neighborhood where "48 Hours" found one man risking his life to stop the gangs, guns and drugs.
Said Muhammad, "... one of the drug dealers told me that he would shoot me, I knew it was time to do something."
TAKING A STAND
On an early Sunday morning, the believers at the Sun Rise Baptist Church on Chicago's west side are already wide awake.
Inside, the spirit is high. But on any given day, just outside on the corner of Kilbourn and Van Buren, a much more sinister gathering takes place.
"All nationalities, all ages ... come and buy the drugs out of this community," said 58-year-old David Muhammad. The retired diesel mechanic for the city lives across the street from the church. For him, this corner is at the center of the city's drug war.
"... the whole block, the intersection, sitting on the church steps. All of that was used for drug activity," he told Armen Keteyian.
It is the heart of Chicago's 11th District, one of the most violent in the city -- the de facto property of Chicago's largest gang, the trigger-happy Gangster Disciples.
"I heard about 10 shots just go off. ...It was like pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa," Muhammad said, imitating the sound of the gunshots. "It's a common thing. When people around there hear gunshots ... you don't duck or anything. You're just used to it."
Seventeen convicted gun offenders lived within a 10-block radius from Muhammad's doorstep, where he says gang members deal heroin and crack from morning until night.
"Sometimes I would call the police and they wouldn't even come," he said. "It was like the wild, wild west."
When he saw dealers doing business right in front of the Baptist church, Muhammad, a Muslim, took a stand.
"It's a Baptist church. But in Islam we're taught to protect all institutions of God. So it was like a slap in my face for them to deal drugs right out of the door of the Church," he told Keteyian.
Politely, he asked the local dealers to take their business elsewhere. They pulled a knife and threatened to kill him. So Muhammad retreated to his house and armed himself, vowing to fight back. His weapon? A small digital camera.
"You were videotaping the drug sales?" Keteyian asked.
"Yes," Muhammad said. "Every day for about a year I videotaped them."
Every day, he sat at his third-floor window filming through a crack in his tightly-drawn blinds, capturing one stop on the heroin highway; each car, each face, each deal, each dealer.
"How many people during the course of the day on a busy day would you see come to that corner?" Keteyian asked.
"I'd say at least 75," Muhammad replied.
Like customers at a fast food restaurant, they came in sunshine and in snow.
"Every walk of life. Every walk of life," Muhammad noted -- black, white, Latino, housewives and businessmen. "All of that," he said.
The deals went off like clockwork: drugs in, money out. Everyday people getting their fix.
"It's not exactly subtle, Dave. The guy's driving a dump truck," Keteyian commented as he and Muhammad watched one of the deals captured on video.
"OK, now watch the hand come out of the window," Muhammad said. "...money ... drugs. It don't get too much better than that."
"Your sense is these are heroin dealers on your street," Keteyian noted.
"Oh, absolutely. The people come back every day, sometimes two and three times a day," Muhammad said.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
David Muhammad takes a stand against gangs
The threats to his life kept coming, but David Muhammad decided to take it a dangerous step further by posting 75 of his videos on YouTube, to let the world know what was happening on his block.
"David, I hate to be blunt about this, but one of these guys could just walk up to you and say, 'You know what, it's over,' and put a bullet in your head," Keteyian said. "You think about that?"
"No," Muhammad replied. "No, I don't think about it. I just be careful as I can be ... If it's meant for me to leave here like that, I'll leave."
For Muhammad, each video in his vast collection tells a personal story of addiction, none more vivid or powerful than the man in the pickup truck.
"...he's gettin' ready to snort," Muhammad points out.
"There he goes. Wow! Head down," Keteyian said as he watched the man taking a hit while sitting in the driver's seat.
"...he's serious," said Muhammad.
"... and he just gives that little bit of a ... wow -- that's like five hits. Snortin' heroin," said Keteyian.
David Muhammad's goal is boundless yet simple: clean up just one street -- his street.
And he did clean it up. The dealing has stopped on Kilbourn and Van Buren and his neighbors have noticed. The church steps are clear; his block is, too.
But this is real life. He says the dealers have just moved to another corner close by, away from the eye of David Muhammad's lens.
The problem remains, but for one man, a little progress outweighs the enormous risk.
"...it's worth it to lose my life if I have to," Muhammad said. "I don't think I can stop it, but I think that someone has to try and slow it down because it's moving too fast."
Hadiya Pendleton's family didn't have to call for attention. Their tragedy seemed to attract it.
"I was just a woman that lost her kid...and then I got up off the floor and the world knew her," Cleo Cowley told listeners of radio show.
It was a constant buzz of calls and cameras, vigils and rallies, including attention from the governor and the mayor.
"I have called Cleo and Nate ... either every night or almost every other night," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told reporters.
It was all overwhelming, but it was also a helpful distraction.
"...all of it was just taken in stride. Like, 'Look at you, Hadiya. You know, I'm proud of you,' because they were callin' because of her," said Cowley.
And it got results, Just two days after Hadiya was gunned down, Chicago Police Superintendant Garry McCarthy made an announcement:
"We are going to take approximately 200 sworn officers and reassign them from administrative assignments to field duties," he told reporters.
The law enforcement surge immediately flooded Chicago's streets and neighborhoods with the power and presence of hundreds of uniformed cops.
"Before a flame becomes a fire, to put it out," Emanuel told reporters, "and, uh, have the resources to do that."
And then, just two weeks after Hadiya Pendleton's death, 18-year-old Michael Ward and 20-year-old Kenneth Williams, ID'd by police as Gangster Disciples, were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Police say Ward confessed and indicated that Hadiya was not the intended target.
"Do you think the attention that was placed on Hadiya's case helped to have it solved more quickly than others?" Maher asked Cowley.
"Probably, probably," she replied.
"Would the pain you're in right now be more difficult if it was six months from now and there had been no arrests?" Maher asked.
"Yes," Cowley replied.
"And no answers?"
"Yes."
And that is a pain another mother knows all too well. Her 15-year-old daughter was gunned down in Chicago in November 2012. But the response to that senseless murder has been very different.
"My daughter's murderer is still standing on the streets," said Bonita Foster.
ANOTHER SENSELESS MURDER
To hear Cleo Cowley and Bonita Foster talk, it almost sounds like the two grieving mothers shared the same 15 year-old daughter.
"She was sweet, she was loved, she was a peacemaker," said Bonita Foster.
"She very much liked helping people," said Cowley. "That was my baby girl."
"A happy person, she was always happy," said Foster.
Porshe Foster and Hadiya Pendleton never met, but both fell victim to Chicago's merciless street violence.
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Porshe Foster
Porshe was shot in November 2012, when -- as with Hadiya two months later -- a gunman opened fire on her and other teenagers who were standing around talking.
Bonita Foster was at work, driving a public transit van when she found out her daughter had been shot. By the time she got to the hospital, Porshe was already gone.
"I knew by the look on the doctor's face," she said. "[Sighs] That was an unbelievable moment."
The lives of both 15-year-olds have been frozen in time. Neither girl will go to a prom, go to college or get married and have her own children.
"You know, I just whispered to her, 'I'm sorry this had happened to you. I'm sorry," said Foster.
But that is where the similarities end. It is as if Porshe and Hadiya died in a city with two very different police departments: one for high-profile cases, the other for almost everyone else.
One department, as Chicago's Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy described, moved heaven and earth to solve the murder of the teenager who had been at the president's inauguration.
Arrests were quickly made. But most killers in Chicago never get caught. In fact, that other police department solved only 26 per cent of the homicides committed in 2012.
"What irritates me, my daughter's murderer is still standing on the streets," said Foster.
More than a year after Porshe Foster's murder, there still have been no arrests.
"I don't see why one gets more attention than the other. I am thinking that had they took the action that they're taking now, with her, with Porshe... maybe little Ms. Pendleton would still be here," said Foster.
Porshe's family says there's has been almost no information from the police, though shortly after she was killed, a detective did stop by.
"He came - shortly after. He was on his way to another shooting," Foster told Maher. "He gave me his card. And - that's the last I've heard from or seen him. ... We have tried to call. ... And we find out he's on vacation. I haven't talked to him [in two months]."
"We've made calls to the officer doing the investigation," said
Demetria Rogers, Porshe's aunt. "I did just call him last week and I haven't gotten a response - phone call yet."
Chicago police dispute those accounts. Two months after "48 Hours"' interview, a detective did pay another visit, but the family believes more should be done. So they're trying to find Porshe's killer themselves, putting up reward posters near the crime scene.
"That's gonna happen again next week if it's-- if it's not happening right now as we're speaking. It's gonna happen again next week. It's gonna happen again. It's gonna keep happening," said Foster.
"And why does it keep happening?" Maher asked.
"I actually believe this thing is bigger than the police. Can the police handle this?" Foster asked.
"Can they?" Maher asked.
"Can they?' Cause if they can, then what's the problem?" said Foster.
"She was told repeatedly by -- when she called the department, 'He's on vacation. No one else can talk to you. You'll have to wait till he gets back,'" Maher told Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.
"OK -- that shouldn't have happened," he said. "There's a system where if the detective's not there there's supposed to be somebody else picking that up and taking care of it.
"You've gotta treat every individual, every victim like you're treating one of your own family members or you would want your family members to be treated," said McCarthy.
"Can you understand how the parents of some of these other victims felt like the Hadiya Pendleton case got more attention than their case did? Maher asked.
"I speak to -- I speak to the families all the time. So absolutely I understand it. But you know that's not something that we did. That's something that happened in the press and in the media. That's where that got blown up," said McCarthy.
McCarthy says it was good old-fashioned detective work that quickly solved the Pendleton case, not the extra 200 cops on the streets.
"Was that just a coincidence then, the timing that it came right after Hadiya was killed and there was such national attention?" Maher asked McCarthy.
"Yeah, probably was a coincidence," he said.
Whether by coincidence or as a result of the surge, McCarthy says, "We're starting to hit a point that I am hoping will be a turning point."
In the year since Hadiya Pendleton was killed, Chicago's homicide rate dropped 22 percent.
"We're getting progress, not victory," said McCarthy. He says most homicides are gang-related, one gang member shooting another.
"So how are you getting in front of it today?" Maher asked McCarthy.
"We actually ... charted out the territories that the gangs call their own, and every gang member within those gangs and every gang they're in conflict with," he replied.
Chicago police now track gang conflicts to try to predict -- and stop -- the next shooting.
"We put our resources into that neighborhood, picking up those guns that we're seizing more than anybody else in the country and preventin' those retaliatory shootings," McCarthy explained. "The mayor recognizes as do I that we're not going to fix this thing by throwing on a light switch."
But like many big cities, Chicago has serious budget problems. The extra police on the streets is costing the city millions. Can they afford to keep up the fight?
SUCCESSES & SETBACKS
There are lines of demarcation in every city. For the uniquely American city of Chicago, the death of Hadiya Pendleton may well be one of them. After her murder on Jan. 29, 2013, the number of extra police on the streets -- in high-crime neighborhoods -- doubled to 400 with officers working seven days a week
In the six months we shadowed the DEA and its newly-formed strike force, it had its fair share of success.
Jack Riley's agents seized millions of dollars of Chapo Guzman's heroin. But by the end of 2013, they had failed, as yet, to execute the type of big-time bust needed to cripple the cartel's hold on Chicago.
"Someone might say, Jack ... the war on drugs has been a failure and this is just the next chapter of that failure," Keteyian commented.
"Now you've got my Irish going," he said. "The changes we're making, the way we're attacking organizations, the way we're educating suburban police departments for the first time, by the way, is going to have an effect. It's gonna take time. And if you hold tight with us in the next couple of months, I think you're gonna see the fruits of our labor come to fruition."
On Feb. 22, 2014, the world's most notorious drug kingpin finally was captured after 13 years on the run. American agents pinpointed Joaquin Chapo Guzman's location at a seaside hotel in Mazatlan, Mexico, using cell phone signal tracers while Mexican Marines moved in for the arrest.
Guzman is being tried in Mexico on several organized crime charges. He has also been indicted in seven states, but it is unclear if he will ever be extradited to the U.S. to face trial.
But even with Guzman behind bars, the drug war is far from over. Either the Sinaloa cartel under new management or one of their rivals is expected to go right on sending billions of dollars of illegal drugs up the "heroin highway" to Chicago and around the world.
"48 Hours" was there in April 2013, when Paula Nixon completed rehab and moved into a halfway house.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Paula Nixon's heroin journey
"I'm doing good, I'm really happy to be here," she said. "I'm waiting for this place for almost six weeks..."
But less than three weeks later, she disappeared. Her mother was frantic.
"I called her eight times in the last two days and she wouldn't pick it up. She doesn't want to talk to me," PJ Newberg said in tears.
Then she discovered her daughter had been picked up for shoplifting again. Paula was back in jail, but alive.
"It's tragic ... it's tragic ... it's life or death. I know how easy it is to overdose...I don't want her to die! I really don't," Newberg cried.
For Hadiya Pendleton's family and friends, her funeral was a day filled with love and loss.
"I'm so broken ... like I'm so like distraught. Like I don't know how to explain it," Cleo Cowley said. "There's not enough for me to try to understand that, like, someone actually did this to my family ... like someone actually did this, stole my baby."
With Hadiya's 10-year-old brother, Anthony Jr., in tow, the Pendletons arrived at a church already overflowing, with people and emotion.
It wasn't just family and community. It was media, local and state dignitaries -- even the first lady came. As one Chicago mother comforted another, an emotional Cleo Pendleton continued riding a roller coaster of grief and gratitude.
"No mother, no father should ever have to experience this," she told the crowd packed inside the church. "I just want to say thank you to everyone who had something to do with grounding her and making her who she was."
The same community that helped raise Hadiya, seemed to raise her family's spirits.
"... precious Hadiya, you were excited to have been at the inauguration in the presence of the President. Today you sit at in the welcome table, in the presence of the King of Kings. ...Welcome home sweet Hadiya, see you on the other side," Father Michael Pfleger spoke from the pulpit.
Damon Stewart was Hadiya's godfather. "I loved that child... nobody knows how much I love that child," he said at the funeral.
As a Chicago police officer, he reminded everyone a city is only as strong as its citizens.
"If you say this is painful to you - then prove it," he urged the crowd." Police your own family... find someone with your blood and make a decision you're not going to turn your back on them."
Hadiya's parents say they were always there for her.
"How many times do you ask yourself, 'Why?'?" Maher asked.
"Too many to count," Cowley replied.
"Then you still ask yourself ... 'why mine?'" said Anthony Pendleton.
The answers live in the hearts and eyes of those left behind, like Hadiya's little brother.
Photos: Lives lost - Caught in the crossfire
For Porshe Foster, the hundreds of others who were lost and for 15- year-old Hadiya Pendleton who came to symbolize all of them.
"She's important because of those other people who died are important. She's important because all those lives and the voices of their families that was ignored or that was silenced she now speaks for," Stewart said of Hadiya.
This was a family's plea for peace.
Said Stewart, "She's a representative not just of the people of Chicago. She's a representative of the people across this nation who has lost their lives ..."
The two men charged with the killing of Hadiya Pendleton have pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set.
There has still been no arrest in the killing of Porshe Foster.
The murder rate in Chicago in 2014 is down 33 percent compared to the first half of 2012.
Produced by Josh Yager, Doug Longhini, Josh Gaynor and Kathleen O'Connell
[This story first aired on May 18, 2013. It was updated on June 28, 2014]
After Hadiya Pendleton was shot in a Chicago park, she quickly became a symbol of the deadly street violence in the city. But nearly every day, someone is gunned down in Chicago, often the result of gangs fighting over territory to sell drugs.
In the fall of 2012, "48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher and CBS News correspondent Armen Keteyian began reaching out to some of the victims who are hurting and some of the people who are fighting back in this city at war over guns, gangs, and drugs.
"I wish you guys could've been here asking me about, you know, the dancing at the inauguration, but unfortunately this is what we're dealing with," Hadiya's father, Anthony Pendleton, told Maher.
"We know from years of working the streets ... that much of the gang-related shootings -- are drug related," Jack Riley, who heads up the Chicago division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Keteyian.
To get the gangs, Riley and the DEA go after their drugs -- heroin in particular.
"That's why I look the way I look, that's why I don't sleep a lot," he said. "One homicide in this city is too many. One person abusing heroin in the suburbs is too many."
Paula Nixon started using heroin when she 16. "... and the first time I did it ... I was in my family room ... and I was thinking, 'this is the best feeling in the world,'" she said.
Heroin has taken many of Paula's friends, but she can't kick it on her own.
"I'm not strong enough... if I saw heroin in front of me right now I can't tell you that I wouldn't do it," she said. "There is no amount of willpower I have on my own that I can stop."
With drug dealers at his doorstep, David Muhammad risked his life to stop them.
"Every day for about a year I videotaped them," he said. "It's worth it to lose my life if I have to try to slow this down."
For six months, we watched David Muhammad stand up to drug dealers, Paula Nixon battle her heroin addiction and the Pendletons search for justice.
The Chicago Police force and the DEA have been hunting down drug-dealing gangs and "48 Hours" is there as it all unfolds.
HADIYA PENDLETON
In 2012, the murder rate in Chicago soared to more than 500 - that's more than New York, though Chicago is only a third the size. "48 Hours" had been in Chicago for six months investigating gun violence when Hadiya Pendleton was shot to death.
Suddenly, what had been a local story began to fuel a national debate.
"One of those we lost was a girl named Hadiya Pendleton," President Barack Obama said in his State of Union Address. "Hadiya's parents Nate and Cleo are in this chamber tonight."
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Hadiya Pendleton AP PHOTO/COURTESY OF DAMON STEWART
Hadiya, 15, was gunned down on January 29, 2013, in a park only a mile from President Obama's Chicago home when members of a street gang apparently mistook her group of friends for a rival gang.
Until that moment, Hadiya's life had been largely untouched by Chicago violence, according to her parents, Anthony and Cleopatra. And "48 Hours" found Hadiya had no connection to gangs.
As early as the sixth grade, when she made a school video, she seemed to understand the risks for kids in her city:
Hi. My name is Hadiya ... this commercial is informational for you and your future children. ... so many children are joining gangs and it is your job to say no to gangs and yes to a great future.
"Amongst everything else she was doing, she was on the debate team ... she was a majorette, she did volleyball," Pendleton said. "Basketball... cheerleading," Cleo Cowley added.
Her parents say Hadiya was a normal, happy teenager who dreamed of being a veterinarian or a journalist.
"What did you see her growing into?" Maher asked.
"Whatever she wanted to, to be perfectly honest," Cowley said. "Best answer," Pendleton agreed.
"It's the truth, whatever she wanted and whatever it was she was going to be hugely successful at it," said Cowley.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Hadiya Pendleton's parents speak out
Less than a week after Hadiya's high school marching band had returned from the president's inauguration, school had just let out on an unusually warm winter day.
"When I got a phone call from her friend and she was like screaming, 'Hadiya's been shot. Hadiya's been shot...' Cowley recalled in a whisper.
She says she literally could not make sense of it -- even after meeting her husband at the hospital.
"This can't be us," she said. "This is not our life! This is not the rest of my life!"
"I mean, only thing I could really remember is 'why they bringin' these tissues in here? Why they bringin' these tissues in here?"" said Pendleton.
"After the doctor came in and told you that she hadn't made it, what do you remember happening after that?" Maher asked.
"I died," Cowley replied. "This is my best description...you ride roller coasters? ... I think the intensity of riding the ride is hearing the click, click, click ... and then the roller coaster starts to roll ... your stomach goes, like crazy, and you reach instinctively for that bar ... it's like reaching for that bar, but never having it and never falling any further to level off."
Just days after Hadiya's murder, the Pendleton family was riding an emotional roller coaster. But they agreed to let "48 Hours" into their lives as they remembered Hadiya's life as a typical teenager.
They wanted to share their memories, in the hope that her death would mean something.
"I just think that there needs to be an awareness that, you know, there are good people out here that have promising futures that are not living to see them through because -- because something's wrong," said Cowley.
"We've got people dying ... and I'm not rolling over, I have not thrown the towel in," said Jack Riley, who thinks he knows why so many of Chicago's children are dying.
Riley is a long-time veteran of the DEA and heads the agency's Chicago office, which controls five surrounding states.
"I wanted to retire a few years ago ... my wife's naggin' me every day... get outta the job," he said. "I can't do it!"
While Hadiya became a celebrity in death, shootings happen just about every day in Chicago.
Riley says many Chicago shootings are carried out by the area's roughly 70,000 gang members who are going to war over one thing in particular: drugs
"In your mind, there is an absolute direct connection between the murder rate in Chicago and the drug wars in the streets," Armen Keteyian noted to Riley.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Street gangs are "selling death and misery in the form of heroin"
"As sure as I'm sitting here telling you," he replied.
He said these days, the gangs are fighting mostly over distribution of one drug alone: heroin.
"It is right now the drug of choice for street gangs," said Riley.
A man who is risking his life to talk to "48 Hours" says the heroin is brought to Chicago by one main source: Mexico's infamous Sinaloa Cartel.
"And the worst part is they are armed," the man said. "It's practically a time bomb, and this is the reality we're living."
"How powerful is the Cartel influence in Chicago right now?" Keteyian asked.
"Very strong the influence of the Sinaloa Cartel here in Chicago and it's getting stronger," the man said.
He should know. He was once trusted by the cartel to smuggle drugs to Chicago. "I tell them if they have 50 kilos, I'll buy that...if they have 100 kilos in a week, I can sell that too," he said.
Jack Riley says the Sinaloa Cartel was run by one of the world's most dangerous men: Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, who escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001. The Feds say Guzman targeted Chicago specifically.
Why Chicago? "It's the same reason there's many fortune 500 companies here," Riley told Keteyian. "It is a business logistic home run."
"We're over some of the biggest interstates in the country here in addition to the trucking and obviously the rail and that's what makes this area so important to traffickers," Riley explained while flying over the city with Keteyian.
"Jack, you've got a personal history with Chapo Guzman?" Keteyian asked.
"Yeah, I hate the guy," Riley replied. "He made it clear to some of his subordinates that he would like to see my head lopped off. ... I still got my head ... get in line Chapo! C'mon let's go!"
Guzman was considered such a menace to these streets that the city's crime commission named him "Public Enemy Number One" -- a title they last bestowed on notorious gangster Al Capone.
"Chapo to Chicago right now is what Al Capone was in my opinion," Riley explained.
"Does that make you the modern day Eliot Ness?" Keteyian quipped.
"I've been called worse!" said Riley.
Until Guzman and the Sinoloa cartel are is brought to justice, Riley and a multi-agency "strike force" are vowing to take down the violent Chicago street gangs that do the cartel's bidding.
"They're demanding a safer place to live, a safer place to raise their kids...and that's what it's all about today," he said.
"This is good versus evil and you're riding with good today," Riley commented to Keteyian as they headed to a pre-dawn raid.
THE HEROIN HIGHWAY
It may look like a scene from Iraq or Afghanistan, but, just 20 miles from Chicago, Jack Riley of the DEA is training an army to fight a drug war.
It's a new strike force to target middlemen between the violent street gangs and the Mexican cartels. They're making raids all over the area - from one on a quiet suburban street in Plainfield, Ill., to one in Gary, Indiana -- only about 15 miles from Chicago.
More and more these days, heroin is making its way out of the inner city, where it is cut and packaged for sale at secret locations. The workers in a so-called chop house on Chicago's west side are naked to keep them from stealing the drug before it reaches its suburban clientele.
To get their drugs, many suburban users drive down a stretch of Interstate 290 onto the city's west side. The street gangs in control of the neighborhoods there grant them safe passage. So many addicts are using the road that it's earned a nickname: the heroin highway.
"Well from what we're seeing is that heroin users take that road and head right into the west side of the city to purchase heroin. This is a crucial artery to the whole regional problem," he told Keteyian as they flew above the heroin highway.
"After I would get my heroin ... I would drive home high," said 18-year-old Paula Nixon.
Paula was a good student, an athlete and an avid photographer living in the leafy suburb of Glenview. While Hadiya Pendleton lost her life to Chicago's violence, Paula has been living through a different kind of war.
"You live to get high!" she told Maureen Maher.
Photos: Lives lost - The faces of suburban fatal heroin overdoses
Understanding heroin and its hold
Her ordeal began in 2011, when she was sitting in the family room with her boyfriend and he encouraged her to try a little bag of white powder. Paula was only 16.
"I remember saying, 'I love this feeling!'" she said.
Like much of the heroin coming from Mexico these days, it was cheaper than a six pack and easier to use -- so pure it could be snorted.
"I snorted the first time," Paula told Maher. Asked if she was hooked right away, Paula said, "Yeah ... The first high is the greatest. It really is. ... All your problems are gone..."
It was so good, Paula says, that she couldn't stop. She began driving the heroin highway nearly every day -- even after the boy who got her started died of an overdose.
"People ask me, 'How do you continue to use after you lose someone like that?'" she said. "... and it's indescribable how strong it is."
In suburban Will County, a middle class area southwest of Chicago, Coroner Pat O'Neil says heroin use has become an epidemic.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Will County Coroner: "Heroin is everywhere"
"I've signed four death certificates this week and all four have been heroin overdoses," he said.
In 2012, fatal overdoses were up 76 percent over the year before.
"We have more heroin overdoses than car crash fatalities and homicides combined," said O'Neal.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Heroin diaries: Jaymes Lindbloom's journey from addiction to recovery
In nearby Naperville, Jaymes Lindbloom knows the heroin scene well. He admits he was a dealer while at Neuqua Valley High School and drove the heroin highway to pick up his product.
"Kids from suburbs ... ride down to the west side [of] Chicago all the time," he explained. "People think it's such a far-fetched idea, you know. But it's just - it's in everyone's back yard now."
"It's taking over slowly but surely. I mean...It's everywhere," said Paula.
"It's like living with someone that's crazy," said Paula's mother, PJ Newberg.
Newberg forced her daughter into rehab.
"She made a horrible scene... I mean, she started swearing and yelling and kicking," she said. "I didn't recognize her; she was a completely different person."
When she got out, Paula did well for a while, but then fell of the wagon. After four more failed rehabs, Newberg decided tough love was her only hope -- and kicked Paula out of the house. In some ways though, that decision only made matters worse.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Heroin diaries: A mother's mission in the face of addiction
"I couldn't even sleep," said Newberg.
"What would you lay in bed thinking about?" Maher asked.
"Where is she? What's gonna happen to her? Is she alive?" Newberg replied.
Paula was alive, but within a few months, she was homeless -- injecting heroin five times a day.
"You'll do anything for it. You'll betray your family, your friends," she explained. "I stole my father's wedding ring and pawned it. ... like who does that?"
In September 2012, Paula was jailed for shoplifting. Four months behind bars forced her to get clean. But once she was released into rehab, the question was, could she stay clean? Even Paula had her doubts.
"I am scared! I am scared that I'm gonna relapse," she said. "I am scared that, you know, I won't get it this time, just like I don't every other time."
What's so hard for kids like Paula is that they know the heroin they crave is just down the road.
"My corner ... was dominated by gang members and drug dealers," David Muhammad said.
It's a neighborhood where "48 Hours" found one man risking his life to stop the gangs, guns and drugs.
Said Muhammad, "... one of the drug dealers told me that he would shoot me, I knew it was time to do something."
TAKING A STAND
On an early Sunday morning, the believers at the Sun Rise Baptist Church on Chicago's west side are already wide awake.
Inside, the spirit is high. But on any given day, just outside on the corner of Kilbourn and Van Buren, a much more sinister gathering takes place.
"All nationalities, all ages ... come and buy the drugs out of this community," said 58-year-old David Muhammad. The retired diesel mechanic for the city lives across the street from the church. For him, this corner is at the center of the city's drug war.
"... the whole block, the intersection, sitting on the church steps. All of that was used for drug activity," he told Armen Keteyian.
It is the heart of Chicago's 11th District, one of the most violent in the city -- the de facto property of Chicago's largest gang, the trigger-happy Gangster Disciples.
"I heard about 10 shots just go off. ...It was like pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa," Muhammad said, imitating the sound of the gunshots. "It's a common thing. When people around there hear gunshots ... you don't duck or anything. You're just used to it."
Seventeen convicted gun offenders lived within a 10-block radius from Muhammad's doorstep, where he says gang members deal heroin and crack from morning until night.
"Sometimes I would call the police and they wouldn't even come," he said. "It was like the wild, wild west."
When he saw dealers doing business right in front of the Baptist church, Muhammad, a Muslim, took a stand.
"It's a Baptist church. But in Islam we're taught to protect all institutions of God. So it was like a slap in my face for them to deal drugs right out of the door of the Church," he told Keteyian.
Politely, he asked the local dealers to take their business elsewhere. They pulled a knife and threatened to kill him. So Muhammad retreated to his house and armed himself, vowing to fight back. His weapon? A small digital camera.
"You were videotaping the drug sales?" Keteyian asked.
"Yes," Muhammad said. "Every day for about a year I videotaped them."
Every day, he sat at his third-floor window filming through a crack in his tightly-drawn blinds, capturing one stop on the heroin highway; each car, each face, each deal, each dealer.
"How many people during the course of the day on a busy day would you see come to that corner?" Keteyian asked.
"I'd say at least 75," Muhammad replied.
Like customers at a fast food restaurant, they came in sunshine and in snow.
"Every walk of life. Every walk of life," Muhammad noted -- black, white, Latino, housewives and businessmen. "All of that," he said.
The deals went off like clockwork: drugs in, money out. Everyday people getting their fix.
"It's not exactly subtle, Dave. The guy's driving a dump truck," Keteyian commented as he and Muhammad watched one of the deals captured on video.
"OK, now watch the hand come out of the window," Muhammad said. "...money ... drugs. It don't get too much better than that."
"Your sense is these are heroin dealers on your street," Keteyian noted.
"Oh, absolutely. The people come back every day, sometimes two and three times a day," Muhammad said.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
David Muhammad takes a stand against gangs
The threats to his life kept coming, but David Muhammad decided to take it a dangerous step further by posting 75 of his videos on YouTube, to let the world know what was happening on his block.
"David, I hate to be blunt about this, but one of these guys could just walk up to you and say, 'You know what, it's over,' and put a bullet in your head," Keteyian said. "You think about that?"
"No," Muhammad replied. "No, I don't think about it. I just be careful as I can be ... If it's meant for me to leave here like that, I'll leave."
For Muhammad, each video in his vast collection tells a personal story of addiction, none more vivid or powerful than the man in the pickup truck.
"...he's gettin' ready to snort," Muhammad points out.
"There he goes. Wow! Head down," Keteyian said as he watched the man taking a hit while sitting in the driver's seat.
"...he's serious," said Muhammad.
"... and he just gives that little bit of a ... wow -- that's like five hits. Snortin' heroin," said Keteyian.
David Muhammad's goal is boundless yet simple: clean up just one street -- his street.
And he did clean it up. The dealing has stopped on Kilbourn and Van Buren and his neighbors have noticed. The church steps are clear; his block is, too.
But this is real life. He says the dealers have just moved to another corner close by, away from the eye of David Muhammad's lens.
The problem remains, but for one man, a little progress outweighs the enormous risk.
"...it's worth it to lose my life if I have to," Muhammad said. "I don't think I can stop it, but I think that someone has to try and slow it down because it's moving too fast."
Hadiya Pendleton's family didn't have to call for attention. Their tragedy seemed to attract it.
"I was just a woman that lost her kid...and then I got up off the floor and the world knew her," Cleo Cowley told listeners of radio show.
It was a constant buzz of calls and cameras, vigils and rallies, including attention from the governor and the mayor.
"I have called Cleo and Nate ... either every night or almost every other night," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told reporters.
It was all overwhelming, but it was also a helpful distraction.
"...all of it was just taken in stride. Like, 'Look at you, Hadiya. You know, I'm proud of you,' because they were callin' because of her," said Cowley.
And it got results, Just two days after Hadiya was gunned down, Chicago Police Superintendant Garry McCarthy made an announcement:
"We are going to take approximately 200 sworn officers and reassign them from administrative assignments to field duties," he told reporters.
The law enforcement surge immediately flooded Chicago's streets and neighborhoods with the power and presence of hundreds of uniformed cops.
"Before a flame becomes a fire, to put it out," Emanuel told reporters, "and, uh, have the resources to do that."
And then, just two weeks after Hadiya Pendleton's death, 18-year-old Michael Ward and 20-year-old Kenneth Williams, ID'd by police as Gangster Disciples, were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Police say Ward confessed and indicated that Hadiya was not the intended target.
"Do you think the attention that was placed on Hadiya's case helped to have it solved more quickly than others?" Maher asked Cowley.
"Probably, probably," she replied.
"Would the pain you're in right now be more difficult if it was six months from now and there had been no arrests?" Maher asked.
"Yes," Cowley replied.
"And no answers?"
"Yes."
And that is a pain another mother knows all too well. Her 15-year-old daughter was gunned down in Chicago in November 2012. But the response to that senseless murder has been very different.
"My daughter's murderer is still standing on the streets," said Bonita Foster.
ANOTHER SENSELESS MURDER
To hear Cleo Cowley and Bonita Foster talk, it almost sounds like the two grieving mothers shared the same 15 year-old daughter.
"She was sweet, she was loved, she was a peacemaker," said Bonita Foster.
"She very much liked helping people," said Cowley. "That was my baby girl."
"A happy person, she was always happy," said Foster.
Porshe Foster and Hadiya Pendleton never met, but both fell victim to Chicago's merciless street violence.
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Porshe Foster
Porshe was shot in November 2012, when -- as with Hadiya two months later -- a gunman opened fire on her and other teenagers who were standing around talking.
Bonita Foster was at work, driving a public transit van when she found out her daughter had been shot. By the time she got to the hospital, Porshe was already gone.
"I knew by the look on the doctor's face," she said. "[Sighs] That was an unbelievable moment."
The lives of both 15-year-olds have been frozen in time. Neither girl will go to a prom, go to college or get married and have her own children.
"You know, I just whispered to her, 'I'm sorry this had happened to you. I'm sorry," said Foster.
But that is where the similarities end. It is as if Porshe and Hadiya died in a city with two very different police departments: one for high-profile cases, the other for almost everyone else.
One department, as Chicago's Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy described, moved heaven and earth to solve the murder of the teenager who had been at the president's inauguration.
Arrests were quickly made. But most killers in Chicago never get caught. In fact, that other police department solved only 26 per cent of the homicides committed in 2012.
"What irritates me, my daughter's murderer is still standing on the streets," said Foster.
More than a year after Porshe Foster's murder, there still have been no arrests.
"I don't see why one gets more attention than the other. I am thinking that had they took the action that they're taking now, with her, with Porshe... maybe little Ms. Pendleton would still be here," said Foster.
Porshe's family says there's has been almost no information from the police, though shortly after she was killed, a detective did stop by.
"He came - shortly after. He was on his way to another shooting," Foster told Maher. "He gave me his card. And - that's the last I've heard from or seen him. ... We have tried to call. ... And we find out he's on vacation. I haven't talked to him [in two months]."
"We've made calls to the officer doing the investigation," said
Demetria Rogers, Porshe's aunt. "I did just call him last week and I haven't gotten a response - phone call yet."
Chicago police dispute those accounts. Two months after "48 Hours"' interview, a detective did pay another visit, but the family believes more should be done. So they're trying to find Porshe's killer themselves, putting up reward posters near the crime scene.
"That's gonna happen again next week if it's-- if it's not happening right now as we're speaking. It's gonna happen again next week. It's gonna happen again. It's gonna keep happening," said Foster.
"And why does it keep happening?" Maher asked.
"I actually believe this thing is bigger than the police. Can the police handle this?" Foster asked.
"Can they?" Maher asked.
"Can they?' Cause if they can, then what's the problem?" said Foster.
"She was told repeatedly by -- when she called the department, 'He's on vacation. No one else can talk to you. You'll have to wait till he gets back,'" Maher told Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.
"OK -- that shouldn't have happened," he said. "There's a system where if the detective's not there there's supposed to be somebody else picking that up and taking care of it.
"You've gotta treat every individual, every victim like you're treating one of your own family members or you would want your family members to be treated," said McCarthy.
"Can you understand how the parents of some of these other victims felt like the Hadiya Pendleton case got more attention than their case did? Maher asked.
"I speak to -- I speak to the families all the time. So absolutely I understand it. But you know that's not something that we did. That's something that happened in the press and in the media. That's where that got blown up," said McCarthy.
McCarthy says it was good old-fashioned detective work that quickly solved the Pendleton case, not the extra 200 cops on the streets.
"Was that just a coincidence then, the timing that it came right after Hadiya was killed and there was such national attention?" Maher asked McCarthy.
"Yeah, probably was a coincidence," he said.
Whether by coincidence or as a result of the surge, McCarthy says, "We're starting to hit a point that I am hoping will be a turning point."
In the year since Hadiya Pendleton was killed, Chicago's homicide rate dropped 22 percent.
"We're getting progress, not victory," said McCarthy. He says most homicides are gang-related, one gang member shooting another.
"So how are you getting in front of it today?" Maher asked McCarthy.
"We actually ... charted out the territories that the gangs call their own, and every gang member within those gangs and every gang they're in conflict with," he replied.
Chicago police now track gang conflicts to try to predict -- and stop -- the next shooting.
"We put our resources into that neighborhood, picking up those guns that we're seizing more than anybody else in the country and preventin' those retaliatory shootings," McCarthy explained. "The mayor recognizes as do I that we're not going to fix this thing by throwing on a light switch."
But like many big cities, Chicago has serious budget problems. The extra police on the streets is costing the city millions. Can they afford to keep up the fight?
SUCCESSES & SETBACKS
There are lines of demarcation in every city. For the uniquely American city of Chicago, the death of Hadiya Pendleton may well be one of them. After her murder on Jan. 29, 2013, the number of extra police on the streets -- in high-crime neighborhoods -- doubled to 400 with officers working seven days a week
In the six months we shadowed the DEA and its newly-formed strike force, it had its fair share of success.
Jack Riley's agents seized millions of dollars of Chapo Guzman's heroin. But by the end of 2013, they had failed, as yet, to execute the type of big-time bust needed to cripple the cartel's hold on Chicago.
"Someone might say, Jack ... the war on drugs has been a failure and this is just the next chapter of that failure," Keteyian commented.
"Now you've got my Irish going," he said. "The changes we're making, the way we're attacking organizations, the way we're educating suburban police departments for the first time, by the way, is going to have an effect. It's gonna take time. And if you hold tight with us in the next couple of months, I think you're gonna see the fruits of our labor come to fruition."
On Feb. 22, 2014, the world's most notorious drug kingpin finally was captured after 13 years on the run. American agents pinpointed Joaquin Chapo Guzman's location at a seaside hotel in Mazatlan, Mexico, using cell phone signal tracers while Mexican Marines moved in for the arrest.
Guzman is being tried in Mexico on several organized crime charges. He has also been indicted in seven states, but it is unclear if he will ever be extradited to the U.S. to face trial.
But even with Guzman behind bars, the drug war is far from over. Either the Sinaloa cartel under new management or one of their rivals is expected to go right on sending billions of dollars of illegal drugs up the "heroin highway" to Chicago and around the world.
"48 Hours" was there in April 2013, when Paula Nixon completed rehab and moved into a halfway house.
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Paula Nixon's heroin journey
"I'm doing good, I'm really happy to be here," she said. "I'm waiting for this place for almost six weeks..."
But less than three weeks later, she disappeared. Her mother was frantic.
"I called her eight times in the last two days and she wouldn't pick it up. She doesn't want to talk to me," PJ Newberg said in tears.
Then she discovered her daughter had been picked up for shoplifting again. Paula was back in jail, but alive.
"It's tragic ... it's tragic ... it's life or death. I know how easy it is to overdose...I don't want her to die! I really don't," Newberg cried.
For Hadiya Pendleton's family and friends, her funeral was a day filled with love and loss.
"I'm so broken ... like I'm so like distraught. Like I don't know how to explain it," Cleo Cowley said. "There's not enough for me to try to understand that, like, someone actually did this to my family ... like someone actually did this, stole my baby."
With Hadiya's 10-year-old brother, Anthony Jr., in tow, the Pendletons arrived at a church already overflowing, with people and emotion.
It wasn't just family and community. It was media, local and state dignitaries -- even the first lady came. As one Chicago mother comforted another, an emotional Cleo Pendleton continued riding a roller coaster of grief and gratitude.
"No mother, no father should ever have to experience this," she told the crowd packed inside the church. "I just want to say thank you to everyone who had something to do with grounding her and making her who she was."
The same community that helped raise Hadiya, seemed to raise her family's spirits.
"... precious Hadiya, you were excited to have been at the inauguration in the presence of the President. Today you sit at in the welcome table, in the presence of the King of Kings. ...Welcome home sweet Hadiya, see you on the other side," Father Michael Pfleger spoke from the pulpit.
Damon Stewart was Hadiya's godfather. "I loved that child... nobody knows how much I love that child," he said at the funeral.
As a Chicago police officer, he reminded everyone a city is only as strong as its citizens.
"If you say this is painful to you - then prove it," he urged the crowd." Police your own family... find someone with your blood and make a decision you're not going to turn your back on them."
Hadiya's parents say they were always there for her.
"How many times do you ask yourself, 'Why?'?" Maher asked.
"Too many to count," Cowley replied.
"Then you still ask yourself ... 'why mine?'" said Anthony Pendleton.
The answers live in the hearts and eyes of those left behind, like Hadiya's little brother.
Photos: Lives lost - Caught in the crossfire
For Porshe Foster, the hundreds of others who were lost and for 15- year-old Hadiya Pendleton who came to symbolize all of them.
"She's important because of those other people who died are important. She's important because all those lives and the voices of their families that was ignored or that was silenced she now speaks for," Stewart said of Hadiya.
This was a family's plea for peace.
Said Stewart, "She's a representative not just of the people of Chicago. She's a representative of the people across this nation who has lost their lives ..."
The two men charged with the killing of Hadiya Pendleton have pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set.
There has still been no arrest in the killing of Porshe Foster.
The murder rate in Chicago in 2014 is down 33 percent compared to the first half of 2012.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
48 Hours Mystery: Amanda Knox - The Untold Story
"48 Hours" reveals Knox's personal accounts of cruel manipulation and sexual intimidation while in prison; Plus, never-before-seen video diaries from Amanda's best friend
Produced by Doug Longhini, Clare Friedland, Paul LaRosa, Sara Ely Hulse
[Editors note: On March 27, 2015, Italy's highest court overturned the murder conviction of Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend, which appears to finally bring an end to the high-profile case. It's the second time Knox and Raffaele Sollecito have had their convictions overturned in the murder of Knox's British roommate Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy, in 2007.]
(CBS) SEATTLE -- The welcome home signs in Seattle say it all.
"My family is the most important thing for me right now and I just want to go be with them," Amanda Knox told supporters at a welcome home press conference in her hometown.
Amanda Knox is doing just that -- reconnecting with family, friends and adjusting to freedom.
"We've now kind of woken up and realized that the nightmare is over," Amanda's father, Curt Knox, told "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Peter Van Sant. "Living for four years inside a concrete and steel prison and now being able to kind of look around, smell the air...it makes a huge difference."
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Extra: Curt Knox on daughter's release
It's almost hard to believe that days earlier, her face was filled with fear as Amanda Knox stood up in court -- with the whole world watching -- to deliver the most important speech of her young life.
In fluent Italian, she spoke forcefully and emotionally, proclaiming her innocence in the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.
"I am not what they say..." she told the court." "...the perversion, the violence, the disrespect for life, for people, that's not who I am. ...I did not do what they claim I did. I did not kill, rape, I did not steal. I wasn't there. I wasn't present at this crime."
U.S.
Amanda Knox's tearful final appeal
More than 10 hours later, the tension was almost unbearable. A judge read the verdict: Not guilty. Amanda was quickly rushed from the courtroom.
It was the end of a long and difficult road for her family.
"I watched Amanda and I saw her slump, and I went 'No' and then our attorney that speaks English turned around and said, 'She's free,' and [I] couldn't tell you, couldn't' be better," said Curt Knox.
Amanda's family had sacrificed everything to be near her, and so did one very determined best friend, 24-year-old Madison Paxton.
Paxton moved to Perugia in 2010, and played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role as morale booster and confidant as Amanda prepared for her new trial.
Amanda Knox murder case
"Your spunkiness and the nature of your relationship with Amanda, you've really encouraged her to stand up and fight," 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant remarked to Paxton.
"Very much so," she replied. "I can remind her ... that you can be mad, that you should be mad, and that it's fine for you to defend yourself."
Just about every Tuesday and Saturday, for the past 10 months, Madison took a 15-minute bus ride and then set out on a 20-minute walk, to see her best friend in prison. Her visits provided much-needed human contact during times of desolation and despair.
"I remember one time when I visited her, and she just had an eyelash. And so of course I brushed it off.... And the letter I got from her a few days later, she wrote ... how much it meant to her that I brushed off her eyelash, just because it's like a kind, friendly, physical gesture and that just doesn't exist for her anymore."
Paxton kept a video diary at "48 Hours"' request. The powerful entries provide an inside look at what Amanda was thinking and feeling while trapped behind bars.
Paxton video diary excerpt:
"She's beyond heartbroken. She is depressed. She's absolutely terrified...
"And Amanda, she's just like, 'Why do people feel that they have a right to like, make these presentations about my life when I've never met them and they don't know me?' And I just turned to her and I was like, 'Babe, cause you're a character to them; you're not a person, you're a character.'"
How could all this have happened? "48 Hours"' investigation reveals an incredible story of how police and a powerful prosecutor twisted the evidence to fit their theory of the crime.
It started on Nov. 2, 2007, with the murder of her 21-year-old British roommate.
TV Reporter: Police say Meredith Kercher was found partially clothed and had been left in a pool of blood with a deep cut to her throat.
Amanda had no idea how quickly she would turn from witness to suspect. Her troubles began with a kiss with Sollecito that would be played over and over again on Italian TV.
"And from right at the beginning with those series of kisses, Amanda Knox was demonized in the Italian mind?" Van Sant asked Bob Graham, an investigative journalist and CBS News consultant.
"Yes. It showed a callousness; it showed a disregard for this moment when her flat mate had been murdered," he replied.
And if Amanda could be so cold, Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini thought, that meant she could also be involved. Amanda's mother, Edda Mellas, had a very different view.
"It's not passionate kissing. It's comforting and consoling behavior ... because she was devastated," she said. "...you can tell she's in shock."
Ironically, Amanda's eagerness to stay in Perugia and help the police was backfiring on her.
"She had the opportunity, on several occasions, to leave the country," according to Graham. "Her aunt in Germany phoned and said, 'Amanda, your mum says you should get out of the country.' ...and she said, 'No I want to stay here. I wanna help solve my flat mate's murder.'"
Amanda was interrogated for a total of 50 hours, over four days, without an attorney. None of the questioning was recorded.
"And these are people who are trained to break Mafia suspects," Van Sant noted to Paxton. "Yeah, they break Mafia," she replied. "And here, they had a little 20-year-old yoga hippy from Seattle who thought that everybody was wonderful and just wanted to go have coffee together."
The brutal interrogation ended with Amanda confessing -- putting herself at the scene and implicating another person, her boss at a local bar where she worked, named Patrick Lumumba.
Author Nina Burleigh has been studying the case.
"She's signed a statement that says, 'I see myself in the house... Patrick with with me -- Patrick Lumumba. He's gone into Meredith's bedroom. And I can hear her screams,'" said Burleigh.
The statement Amanda signed implicated Lamumba with a bizarre and awkward line: "I confusedly remember that he killed her."
"I take offense with the word confession cause Amanda never says that she participated in the murder of her friend ... she never confesses to being part of that crime, ever," said Mellas.
There were many troubling details about that so-called confession. But it was all the police chief of Perugia needed to arrest Amanda, Raffaele Sollecito and Patrick Lumumba for the murder of Meredith Kercher.
"He had the nerve to say case closed, we've solved this murder," Graham said. "That's OK if you've got the evidence."
In fact, none of the forensic evidence -- including the DNA testing -- had even come back. But the prosecutor insisted his gut -- and Meredith's near-naked body -- told him how the murder had occurred: During a drug-fueled orgy. And Amanda was the ringleader.
"Amanda was presented ... as extremely attractive, having lots of sex, decided one night to act on these completely diabolical urges and bewitched two men into attacking her roommate," said Burleigh.
And the world's media ate it up.
Asked if Amanda's beauty played a role in all of this, Paxton told Van Sant, "...it definitely sells more papers if you have two beautiful, beautiful women and then headlines that there was some attempt at an orgy between them."
To prosecutor Mignini -- an orgy that led to a satanic killing.
The fate of Amanda Knox has always been inextricably linked to Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini.
"His world view is evil walks on this earth ... there are people in his community who are practicing occult rituals ... who maybe worship the devil," said Nina Burleigh, author of "The Fatal Gift of Beauty."
Learn more: The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox
Amanda Knox murder case
Burleigh said that the closer Mignini looked at Meredith Kercher's murder, the more he began to see not only evidence -- but the spector of the supernatural.
"A body has been found. It's very spooky. It's the night after Halloween," Burleigh explained. "... it happened on a Thursday night ... that's when the witches held their Sabbath."
Witches? The Sabbath? It sounds laughable, but, Burleigh said, Mignini sees the face of evil everywhere.
"I think when he looked in the eyes of Amanda Knox, he thought that she was evil," she said.
To Mignini, a staunch Catholic with a medieval mindset, Amanda Knox was a sinner who took part in a satanic orgy that resulted in the murder of an innocent.
"This is ridiculous. This is absolutely insane and it's unfounded," said Amanda's friend, Meredith Paxton. "The claims that they put against Amanda that she was so sexually powerful that she could manipulate these two men who she didn't even really know ... tells you a lot more about the person making the claims than about the person those claims are made against."
But Mignini did not back down -- not even when he was forced to release Patrick Lumumba, who had a solid alibi... and not even when the DNA evidence came back and seemed to exonerate Amanda and Raffaele Sollecito.
"There's nothing in that room, out of all those 400 samples, that places Amanda or Raffaele in that room," her mother, Edda Mellas said. "You can't go into a room and selectively just clean up your DNA and leave everybody else's DNA there. It's impossible, it can't be done."
A bloody fingerprint found at the scene gave Mignini a new suspect: Rudy Guede, an African immigrant, who was known to have confronted people with a knife.
"He was hanging around with these students and partying with them and pretending to be like them. But he wasn't like them at all," Burleigh explained. "And in order to keep up with them he started, apparently, getting involved in breaking and entering."
Guede was tracked down, arrested and charged with Meredith's murder.
"His bloody fingerprint is there?" Van Sant asked investigative journalist Bob Graham.
"Absolutely," he replied.
"His footprint is there? DNA."
"Yep. Absolutely."
"And he fled to Germany?"
"And he admits he was there," Graham explained. "He admits cradling her body as she -- as she was bleeding to death, feeling bad about it, feeling so bad that he ran out of there, carrying her money. He felt so bad that he went to a disco and partied. He felt so bad that he disappeared to Germany, to let other people take the rap for it. That's how bad he feels."
Even with Guede in custody, Mignini refused to believe that only one person was responsible.
"He believes deeply in conspiracies," Burleigh told Van Sant. "Conspiracy is part of his investigative DNA."
Mignini believed he was in possession of the murder weapon: a kitchen knife, found in the apartment of Raffaele Sollecito, Amanda's boyfriend.
"The Roman scientific police claimed they found an infinitesimal amount of DNA on the handle related to Amanda and an infinitesimal amount of DNA on the blade relating to Meredith," Burleigh explained.
All that was left for Mignini was to establish a link between Rudy Guede, Amanda and Raffaele. The police began pressuring Guede.
"First statement from Rudy Guede, 'Amanda had nothing to do with it.' Those are his own words. Following statements he's moving her more into the story -- moving her more into the case ... he gets up and says, you know, 'She did have something to do with it. She was there,'" Burleigh told Van Sant. "And was the instigator."
In 2008, Guede went on trial first. He was convicted of killing Meredith Kercher and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Mignini told the court that Guede had expressed remorse and later his sentence was reduced to 16 years.
The stage was set. Amanda and Raffaele's trial began in January 2009, and by then, Mignini had another piece of evidence that reportedly had Raffale's DNA on it.
"A piece of Meredith Kercher's bra that had been cut off by the killer," said Burleigh.
Mignini barreled ahead with his prosecution, convinced that Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy Guede all conspired and took part in the murder of Meredith Kercher.
And the press, Graham says, played a key role.
"I don't just blame the prosecutor and the police in this. I also attribute a lot of the blame to the media," he told Van Sant. "...they bought the lies ... they helped create the perception that existed that Amanda Knox was the she-devil and Raffaele Sollecito was her slave."
At nearly every turn, Amanda was losing the publicity war. After "the kiss" came a videotape showing Amanda shopping for "sexy underwear" a day or two after Meredith's murder. Never mind that all her clothes were locked up at the crime scene.
"The public was fed a diet of untruths, myths, rumors, falsehoods, lies about Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito," said Graham.
Mignini spun a fantastic tale for jurors, filled with graphic details about the violent sex orgy on the night Meredith was murdered. An Italian magazine created drawings based on Mignini's theory, showing Amanda plunging a knife into Meredith.
"It was made up," Graham said. "It was fantasy."
On Dec. 4, 2009, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, a smiling Amanda Knox walked into the court at nearly midnight convinced the jury had seen the truth and that she'd soon be going home.
Paxton video diary excerpt:
"She did not think for a single moment think that she was going to be convicted ... it never really fully entered into any of our minds that it could actually happen. She very ideally thought that the truth was enough.
But the jury found a different truth. Amanda was found guilty of killing Meredith Kercher and sentenced to 26 years. Raffaele got 25 years.
"This is a complete miscarriage of justice and is a travesty to the Italian judicial system," said Curt Knox.
Amanda, trapped in an Italian prison, soon had a new, more immediate problem -- a prison official she feared was on the prowl for sex.
"48 Hours" has learned just how frightening those first dark days in prison were for Amanda Knox. Right from the beginning, she was terrified that she might be sexually assaulted.
"This is a letter that came to me from Amanda," said investigative journalist Bob Graham, of Amanda's letter detailing cruel manipulation and incidents of sexual intimidation. She described how a high ranking prison administrator ordered her into his office -- alone at night -- to talk about sex.
The letter read in part:
"He was fixated on the topic of sex, with whom I'd done it, how I liked it, if I would like to do it with him."
"When I realized that he really wanted to talk to me about sex I would try to change the subject."
Amanda wrote that she was particularly frightened because the administrator "acted as if he was the king of the castle."
"Therefore, I thought he didn't have to answer to anyone for his behavior."
Amanda eventually came to believe that the administrator had a different motive; that he was perhaps trying to support the prosecution's theory that she really was a sex-crazed she-devil who killed Meredith Kercher during a violent orgy.
"'I realize that he was testing me to see if I reacted badly, to understand me personally," she wrote. "He wanted to get a reaction or some information from me... I did not get the seriousness of the situation."
The intimidation reportedly ended after Amanda's lawyers complained.
"What does this letter say to you about what she's been going through?" Peter Van Sant asked Graham.
"It says in a time when she was clearly traumatized by...the murder of her flat mate...and here she was being pressured, in a prison system -- a system that at least she should have had some degree of safety, and here was this guy, a senior officer in this prison, now pressing her about sex, pressing her, 'do you want to have sex with me?" said Graham.
Bob Graham spoke with the administrator, who admitted he and Amanda discussed the topic of sex, but claims she brought it up.
Madison Paxton says Amanda stood her ground, showing remarkable strength.
"It's still her life," she said. "And the only way that the prosecution wins...is if she becomes some broken, bitter person who relies on the free and abundant tranquilizers at the prison. She's never done that and she's beyond determined to not do that."
Amanda's focus was the appeal - and she soon had a world-renown ally.
"This case horrifies me. I'd like to say it shocks me. But I've seen others like it," said psychologist and professor Saul Kassin, an expert on police interrogations.
On his own initiative, Kassin filed a report with the Italian court on Amanda's behalf. It outlines some of the psychological reasons why Amanda could have confessed to a murder she did not commit.
"Amanda Knox, like everybody, has a breaking point. She reached her breaking point," he explained. "Eight or 10 or 12 police officials in a tag team-manner come in and interrogate her... Their goal is a confession and they're not leaving that room without it."
At her first trial, Amanda told the court just how badly the Italian police had intimidated her:
"I was very, very scared because they were treating me so badly and I didn't understand why" she said with a sigh. "They told me that I was trying to protect someone. But I wasn't trying to protect anyone. ...but they continued to call me a stupid liar."
"She's obviously in a state of grief or shock," Kassin said of her statement. "She is accused, she's called a liar when she denies having any involvement... She's in a foreign place. ...And she's being interrogated in a language in which she's not fluent."
"Now, what does that do to someone?" Van Sant asked.
"She's confused. She's disoriented," Kassin replied.
Hour after sleepless hour passed, with no food, no water, no bathroom breaks and no attorney. During that brutal interrogation, Amanda's mother says, it was the police who first brought up the name Patrick Lumumba, Amanda's boss. They had discovered that Amanda had exchanged texts with him the night of the murder. Amanda's last message said, "See you later."
"See you later is an American way of saying goodbye. But in Italian, it's not, is it? Van Sant asked Amanda's mother, Edda Mellas.
"No, and they took that to mean we're making an appointment to get together later tonight; that's the way they interpreted it," she replied.
"They kept saying you sent this thing to Patrick. We know that you left the house. We know! I just said his name," Amanda told the court.
She didn't know it at the time, but the moment Amanda named Patrick Lumumba would seal her fate. She described it in the letter to Bob Graham:
"So I said Patrick. Nearly all the police officers leapt up, they hugged each other and went off in search of Patrick," she wrote. "In the meantime, I just cried. I curled up into a ball and bawled my eyes out. I don't know how long I cried. I was so tired. I couldn't think."
Hours later, Amanda signed that confession that placed her in the house where Meredith Kercher was killed.
"I believe Amanda's confession is false. I believe Amanda is innocent," Kassin said. "If she was there...wouldn't she have known that Patrick wasn't there? Wouldn't she have known that Rudy was there? The reason she didn't know those things is that she wasn't there."
Amanda later recanted, but it was too late. The damage done, she was officially under arrest.
Three years after the murder, Amanda is ready to attack all the prosecution's evidence head on at her appeal: the confession, the eyewitnesses and the DNA.
"You can't even put into words, as we sit here and talk to you, what it must be like for her," Curt Knox told Van Sant. "I mean, our lives are not on the line. Her life is. It's gonna be put in somebody else's hands again."
And the prosecution would not go down without a fight.
With all the brouhaha over Amanda Knox, it's sometimes easy to forget Meredith Kercher, the murdered woman at the center of this case.
But Amanda's father, Curt Knox, says his thoughts are never far from the Kercher family.
"They've experienced the worst thing that a parent could ever experience in the loss of a child," he said. "You can't even...describe what they must be going through as well."
And in November of 2010, the ordeal was still far from over for any of the families -- Meredith's, Amanda's or Raffaele Sollecito's. It was back to court as Amanda and Raffaele appealed their murder convictions.
"We know she's innocent. She knows that she's innocent. She's not afraid of the truth," said Curt Knox.
A lot had changed in Perugia since the first trial ended.
"If we were to walk up to an average person here in Perugia and ask them, 'Describe Amanda Knox' what would they say after all of this media blitz?" Peter Van Sant asked Bob Graham.
"Three years ago, everyone would have said, 'She is evil, you know, she is the killer.' Now I think you would get a pretty strong number of people who would say, 'Well, perhaps she's not the person that we thought she was."
That attitude carried over into this second trial, which was presided over by a new judge.
"He started the appeals trial with a very clear statement and that was, 'The only thing we know for certain is that Meredith Kercher is dead," said Curt Knox.
True to his word, this judge asked independent experts to review the key DNA evidence in the case. What they discovered shocked most observers.
"Fifty-four mistakes in the gathering of the DNA in that room," Graham said. "That's shoddy work. That's appalling work."
During the first trial, Prosecutor Mignini had said a kitchen knife found in Raffaele's house had Amanda's DNA on the handle and Meredith's on the blade... damning if true.
"Meredith Kercher's DNA was not on the blade," Graham told Van Sant. "Indeed Amanda Knox's was on the handle, but she never doubted it."
"And why was Amanda's DNA on the handle?" Van Sant asked Edda Mellas.
"Cause she cooked in Raffaele's house," Mellas replied, "Her DNA was on the handle and rye bread residue was on the blade, so obviously she had been using the knife to cut bread in Raffaele's house."
And then there was that small clasp from Meredith's bra - supposedly containing Raffaele's DNA.
"The bra clasp, the one piece of evidence that Prosecutor Mignini said definitely put Raffaele Sollecito in the murder room. What happened to that piece of evidence?" Van Sant asked Graham.
"Again, thrown out. Contaminated," he said.
In police video, crime scene technicians are seen collecting this key piece of evidence six weeks after the murder. Using dirty gloves, they pick it up and then place the bra clasp back on the floor.
"Go back to the phrase, 'the forensics will tell us everything about the case.' And it did and it does'," Graham continued. "There is zero evidence against Knox and zero evidence against Sollecito."
In fact, not a single text, email or phone call has ever been found that links Amanda and Raffaele to Rudy Guede, who has admitted holding a blood-soaked Meredith in his arms the night of the murder.
And important witnesses from the first trial appeared to be discredited this time around.
"One of the biggest witnesses was a homeless guy who was a drug addict, who said that he saw Amanda and Raffaele arguing...nervously standing around above the house around the time that the...murder would've occurred," Nina Burleigh explained. "Well, come to find out in the appeal, this guy's a heroin addict...he could barely walk to the witness stand."
"The judge even stopped the questioning and basically said, 'You're outta here,' Curt Knox explained.
"I've heard enough. Take him away," added Mellas.
Things were looking up for Amanda but she couldn't help but worry, said her friend Madison Paxton via her video diary:
As things slowly start to look better with the trial, it almost hurts to hope because we know what it felt like the first time that they were convicted and you have this acknowledgment in your head like wow, this would actually genuinely destroy her if she was convicted again. ...in some ways, it's easier psychologically to be filled with despair - [looks into camera] does that make sense?
"One irony of this case is that the Italian authorities actually did a great job. In less than three weeks, they had the person who murdered Meredith Kercher," Van Sant noted to Graham.
"Indeed," he replied.
"They arrested Rudy Guede and they had the evidence against him."
"Absolutely, but they'd also dug a hole so deep that they couldn't get out of it," Graham said. "That was the problem. And pride, vanity -- whatever it was, ensured they just kept digging."
But Mignini would not let go of his theory that Guede did not kill Meredith by himself, but had help from Amanda and Raffaele.
"So as prosecutor Mignini watches his case collapse around him, what does he do during the course of this appeal? He says that her sentence should be lengthened to life," Van Sant remarked to Burleigh.
"Exactly. It's mind-boggling ... they're not going to give up easily," she said. "I mean, there's a reason vendetta is an Italian word."
After nearly four years in prison, Amanda was itching to get outside again.
"She said today, she's like, 'Madison, it's been three years since I've been able to walk outside past 3:00 p.m. ...I miss walking at night. I miss stars...I miss that so much,'" Paxton said.
But Amanda would never see those stars again if prosecutors had their way. In closing arguments, prosecutors dismissed all questions about their forensic evidence and stood by their witnesses. Nothing they said had changed - Amanda and Raffaele were still guilty of murder.
As the final act of this four-year saga came to a head, it was clear that Amanda Knox was no longer the trusting 20-year-old hippie from Seattle, but instead, a 24-year old prisoner.
"A lot of people have noticed that she's lost weight, there's so much concern on her face. Are you worried?" Van Sant asked Amanda's mother.
"Of course, as a mom, you know she's suffering, you know she's lost weight. She tells you she can't eat, she can't sleep," an emotional Edda Mellas said, "because of the stress. Of course, it breaks your heart as a parent to watch that and know that she's dealing with all of that. Yeah."
Just as he did with the infamous 'kiss,' Mignini attacked Amanda and Raffaele Sollecito's behavior, saying they did not react appropriately when gruesome crime scene photographs of Meredith Kercher were shown in court.
"Amanda was looking down. Raffaele was looking away," Mignini told the court.
"You sit there and you want to yell out, 'LIES,' but you have to sit quietly and remain composed as people just...you watch your daughter being tortured - emotionally tortured - sitting there, having to listen to that stuff," said Mellas.
Complete coverage: Amanda Knox
But then Raffaele and Amanda got their turn.
Raffaele told the court, "I never hurt anybody ever in my life."
The jurors were riveted as Raffaele removed a plastic bracelet.
"My bracelet says 'Free Amanda and Raffaele'. I think the time has come to take it off," he said.
A hush fell over the courtroom as a visibly shaken Amanda Knox began to speak.
"If I had been there that night I would have been dead. Like her. The only difference is that I wasn't there. I was at Raffaele's," she said in Italian.
After thanking Raffaele for his support, Amanda addressed her so-called confession.
"My absolute faith in the authority of the police has been betrayed... and I am paying with my life for things I did not do."
As she ended her dramatic speech, three jurors were in tears.
"I want to go home. I want to return home, I want to go back to my life. I don't want to be punished, deprived of my future for something that I didn't do. Because I am innocent. Raffaele is innocent. [long pause] We deserve freedom because we didn't do anything to deserve this," she said.
That night, the first verdict gave everyone pause: Guilty. Amanda had slandered her former boss, Patrick Lamumba. She was sentenced to three years, time served.
But then came the verdict Amanda longed for: Knox and Raffaele's murder convictions were overturned. The emotional upheaval of her lost years was etched on her face.
Her former boyfriend Raffaele stayed calm, as did the family of Meredith Kercher, who were in the courtroom. Meanwhile, outside, the streets of Perugia exploded.
"It's an extraordinary scene outside the courthouse. There's been whistling, great disappointment among people out here that Amanda Knox has been found not guilty in the murder of Meredith Kercher," Van Sant reported on the "CBS Evening News" following the verdict.
It was time for Amanda to make her last trip back to prison and this time, she had company. Sitting next to her was the boy, turned man, who had been with her on every step of this journey - Raffaele Sollecito.
"They were actually able to both sit in one of the cars that took them back to the prison.. I think it kind of became, 'you're a human being again' versus 'you're a prisoner,'" Curt Knox told Van Sant. "Amanda was crying so much that Raffaele was telling her, 'We're free, hey why are you crying?' ...it was just a very emotional moment."
At the prison, Amanda said goodbye to some of her guards, including one who showed Amanda a touch of humanity.
"There was actually a female guard there that actually put money on Amanda's account one time, because it was kind of that motherly thing," Knox continued.
Today, the lovers from that fateful day are separated; Raffaele remains in Italy, and Amanda is with her family in Seattle.
She missed a lot during her four years in prison...and now that she's free, Amanda is focused once again on her future.
"Maybe in five years, she may be an advocate for people that have been wrongly accused, having felt what she felt," Curt Knox told Van Sant, "and let it be known that there is still a light at the end of the tunnel."
Produced by Doug Longhini, Clare Friedland, Paul LaRosa, Sara Ely Hulse
48 Hours Mystery: Amanda Knox - The Untold Story Video
[Editors note: On March 27, 2015, Italy's highest court overturned the murder conviction of Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend, which appears to finally bring an end to the high-profile case. It's the second time Knox and Raffaele Sollecito have had their convictions overturned in the murder of Knox's British roommate Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy, in 2007.]
(CBS) SEATTLE -- The welcome home signs in Seattle say it all.
"My family is the most important thing for me right now and I just want to go be with them," Amanda Knox told supporters at a welcome home press conference in her hometown.
Amanda Knox is doing just that -- reconnecting with family, friends and adjusting to freedom.
"We've now kind of woken up and realized that the nightmare is over," Amanda's father, Curt Knox, told "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Peter Van Sant. "Living for four years inside a concrete and steel prison and now being able to kind of look around, smell the air...it makes a huge difference."
48 HOURS SEGMENT EXTRAS
Extra: Curt Knox on daughter's release
It's almost hard to believe that days earlier, her face was filled with fear as Amanda Knox stood up in court -- with the whole world watching -- to deliver the most important speech of her young life.
In fluent Italian, she spoke forcefully and emotionally, proclaiming her innocence in the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.
"I am not what they say..." she told the court." "...the perversion, the violence, the disrespect for life, for people, that's not who I am. ...I did not do what they claim I did. I did not kill, rape, I did not steal. I wasn't there. I wasn't present at this crime."
U.S.
Amanda Knox's tearful final appeal
More than 10 hours later, the tension was almost unbearable. A judge read the verdict: Not guilty. Amanda was quickly rushed from the courtroom.
It was the end of a long and difficult road for her family.
"I watched Amanda and I saw her slump, and I went 'No' and then our attorney that speaks English turned around and said, 'She's free,' and [I] couldn't tell you, couldn't' be better," said Curt Knox.
Amanda's family had sacrificed everything to be near her, and so did one very determined best friend, 24-year-old Madison Paxton.
Paxton moved to Perugia in 2010, and played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role as morale booster and confidant as Amanda prepared for her new trial.
Amanda Knox murder case
"Your spunkiness and the nature of your relationship with Amanda, you've really encouraged her to stand up and fight," 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant remarked to Paxton.
"Very much so," she replied. "I can remind her ... that you can be mad, that you should be mad, and that it's fine for you to defend yourself."
Just about every Tuesday and Saturday, for the past 10 months, Madison took a 15-minute bus ride and then set out on a 20-minute walk, to see her best friend in prison. Her visits provided much-needed human contact during times of desolation and despair.
"I remember one time when I visited her, and she just had an eyelash. And so of course I brushed it off.... And the letter I got from her a few days later, she wrote ... how much it meant to her that I brushed off her eyelash, just because it's like a kind, friendly, physical gesture and that just doesn't exist for her anymore."
Paxton kept a video diary at "48 Hours"' request. The powerful entries provide an inside look at what Amanda was thinking and feeling while trapped behind bars.
Paxton video diary excerpt:
"She's beyond heartbroken. She is depressed. She's absolutely terrified...
"And Amanda, she's just like, 'Why do people feel that they have a right to like, make these presentations about my life when I've never met them and they don't know me?' And I just turned to her and I was like, 'Babe, cause you're a character to them; you're not a person, you're a character.'"
How could all this have happened? "48 Hours"' investigation reveals an incredible story of how police and a powerful prosecutor twisted the evidence to fit their theory of the crime.
It started on Nov. 2, 2007, with the murder of her 21-year-old British roommate.
TV Reporter: Police say Meredith Kercher was found partially clothed and had been left in a pool of blood with a deep cut to her throat.
Amanda had no idea how quickly she would turn from witness to suspect. Her troubles began with a kiss with Sollecito that would be played over and over again on Italian TV.
"And from right at the beginning with those series of kisses, Amanda Knox was demonized in the Italian mind?" Van Sant asked Bob Graham, an investigative journalist and CBS News consultant.
"Yes. It showed a callousness; it showed a disregard for this moment when her flat mate had been murdered," he replied.
And if Amanda could be so cold, Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini thought, that meant she could also be involved. Amanda's mother, Edda Mellas, had a very different view.
"It's not passionate kissing. It's comforting and consoling behavior ... because she was devastated," she said. "...you can tell she's in shock."
Ironically, Amanda's eagerness to stay in Perugia and help the police was backfiring on her.
"She had the opportunity, on several occasions, to leave the country," according to Graham. "Her aunt in Germany phoned and said, 'Amanda, your mum says you should get out of the country.' ...and she said, 'No I want to stay here. I wanna help solve my flat mate's murder.'"
Amanda was interrogated for a total of 50 hours, over four days, without an attorney. None of the questioning was recorded.
"And these are people who are trained to break Mafia suspects," Van Sant noted to Paxton. "Yeah, they break Mafia," she replied. "And here, they had a little 20-year-old yoga hippy from Seattle who thought that everybody was wonderful and just wanted to go have coffee together."
The brutal interrogation ended with Amanda confessing -- putting herself at the scene and implicating another person, her boss at a local bar where she worked, named Patrick Lumumba.
Author Nina Burleigh has been studying the case.
"She's signed a statement that says, 'I see myself in the house... Patrick with with me -- Patrick Lumumba. He's gone into Meredith's bedroom. And I can hear her screams,'" said Burleigh.
The statement Amanda signed implicated Lamumba with a bizarre and awkward line: "I confusedly remember that he killed her."
"I take offense with the word confession cause Amanda never says that she participated in the murder of her friend ... she never confesses to being part of that crime, ever," said Mellas.
There were many troubling details about that so-called confession. But it was all the police chief of Perugia needed to arrest Amanda, Raffaele Sollecito and Patrick Lumumba for the murder of Meredith Kercher.
"He had the nerve to say case closed, we've solved this murder," Graham said. "That's OK if you've got the evidence."
In fact, none of the forensic evidence -- including the DNA testing -- had even come back. But the prosecutor insisted his gut -- and Meredith's near-naked body -- told him how the murder had occurred: During a drug-fueled orgy. And Amanda was the ringleader.
"Amanda was presented ... as extremely attractive, having lots of sex, decided one night to act on these completely diabolical urges and bewitched two men into attacking her roommate," said Burleigh.
And the world's media ate it up.
Asked if Amanda's beauty played a role in all of this, Paxton told Van Sant, "...it definitely sells more papers if you have two beautiful, beautiful women and then headlines that there was some attempt at an orgy between them."
To prosecutor Mignini -- an orgy that led to a satanic killing.
The fate of Amanda Knox has always been inextricably linked to Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini.
"His world view is evil walks on this earth ... there are people in his community who are practicing occult rituals ... who maybe worship the devil," said Nina Burleigh, author of "The Fatal Gift of Beauty."
Learn more: The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox
Amanda Knox murder case
Burleigh said that the closer Mignini looked at Meredith Kercher's murder, the more he began to see not only evidence -- but the spector of the supernatural.
"A body has been found. It's very spooky. It's the night after Halloween," Burleigh explained. "... it happened on a Thursday night ... that's when the witches held their Sabbath."
Witches? The Sabbath? It sounds laughable, but, Burleigh said, Mignini sees the face of evil everywhere.
"I think when he looked in the eyes of Amanda Knox, he thought that she was evil," she said.
To Mignini, a staunch Catholic with a medieval mindset, Amanda Knox was a sinner who took part in a satanic orgy that resulted in the murder of an innocent.
"This is ridiculous. This is absolutely insane and it's unfounded," said Amanda's friend, Meredith Paxton. "The claims that they put against Amanda that she was so sexually powerful that she could manipulate these two men who she didn't even really know ... tells you a lot more about the person making the claims than about the person those claims are made against."
But Mignini did not back down -- not even when he was forced to release Patrick Lumumba, who had a solid alibi... and not even when the DNA evidence came back and seemed to exonerate Amanda and Raffaele Sollecito.
"There's nothing in that room, out of all those 400 samples, that places Amanda or Raffaele in that room," her mother, Edda Mellas said. "You can't go into a room and selectively just clean up your DNA and leave everybody else's DNA there. It's impossible, it can't be done."
A bloody fingerprint found at the scene gave Mignini a new suspect: Rudy Guede, an African immigrant, who was known to have confronted people with a knife.
"He was hanging around with these students and partying with them and pretending to be like them. But he wasn't like them at all," Burleigh explained. "And in order to keep up with them he started, apparently, getting involved in breaking and entering."
Guede was tracked down, arrested and charged with Meredith's murder.
"His bloody fingerprint is there?" Van Sant asked investigative journalist Bob Graham.
"Absolutely," he replied.
"His footprint is there? DNA."
"Yep. Absolutely."
"And he fled to Germany?"
"And he admits he was there," Graham explained. "He admits cradling her body as she -- as she was bleeding to death, feeling bad about it, feeling so bad that he ran out of there, carrying her money. He felt so bad that he went to a disco and partied. He felt so bad that he disappeared to Germany, to let other people take the rap for it. That's how bad he feels."
Even with Guede in custody, Mignini refused to believe that only one person was responsible.
"He believes deeply in conspiracies," Burleigh told Van Sant. "Conspiracy is part of his investigative DNA."
Mignini believed he was in possession of the murder weapon: a kitchen knife, found in the apartment of Raffaele Sollecito, Amanda's boyfriend.
"The Roman scientific police claimed they found an infinitesimal amount of DNA on the handle related to Amanda and an infinitesimal amount of DNA on the blade relating to Meredith," Burleigh explained.
All that was left for Mignini was to establish a link between Rudy Guede, Amanda and Raffaele. The police began pressuring Guede.
"First statement from Rudy Guede, 'Amanda had nothing to do with it.' Those are his own words. Following statements he's moving her more into the story -- moving her more into the case ... he gets up and says, you know, 'She did have something to do with it. She was there,'" Burleigh told Van Sant. "And was the instigator."
In 2008, Guede went on trial first. He was convicted of killing Meredith Kercher and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Mignini told the court that Guede had expressed remorse and later his sentence was reduced to 16 years.
The stage was set. Amanda and Raffaele's trial began in January 2009, and by then, Mignini had another piece of evidence that reportedly had Raffale's DNA on it.
"A piece of Meredith Kercher's bra that had been cut off by the killer," said Burleigh.
Mignini barreled ahead with his prosecution, convinced that Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy Guede all conspired and took part in the murder of Meredith Kercher.
And the press, Graham says, played a key role.
"I don't just blame the prosecutor and the police in this. I also attribute a lot of the blame to the media," he told Van Sant. "...they bought the lies ... they helped create the perception that existed that Amanda Knox was the she-devil and Raffaele Sollecito was her slave."
At nearly every turn, Amanda was losing the publicity war. After "the kiss" came a videotape showing Amanda shopping for "sexy underwear" a day or two after Meredith's murder. Never mind that all her clothes were locked up at the crime scene.
"The public was fed a diet of untruths, myths, rumors, falsehoods, lies about Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito," said Graham.
Mignini spun a fantastic tale for jurors, filled with graphic details about the violent sex orgy on the night Meredith was murdered. An Italian magazine created drawings based on Mignini's theory, showing Amanda plunging a knife into Meredith.
"It was made up," Graham said. "It was fantasy."
On Dec. 4, 2009, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, a smiling Amanda Knox walked into the court at nearly midnight convinced the jury had seen the truth and that she'd soon be going home.
Paxton video diary excerpt:
"She did not think for a single moment think that she was going to be convicted ... it never really fully entered into any of our minds that it could actually happen. She very ideally thought that the truth was enough.
But the jury found a different truth. Amanda was found guilty of killing Meredith Kercher and sentenced to 26 years. Raffaele got 25 years.
"This is a complete miscarriage of justice and is a travesty to the Italian judicial system," said Curt Knox.
Amanda, trapped in an Italian prison, soon had a new, more immediate problem -- a prison official she feared was on the prowl for sex.
"48 Hours" has learned just how frightening those first dark days in prison were for Amanda Knox. Right from the beginning, she was terrified that she might be sexually assaulted.
"This is a letter that came to me from Amanda," said investigative journalist Bob Graham, of Amanda's letter detailing cruel manipulation and incidents of sexual intimidation. She described how a high ranking prison administrator ordered her into his office -- alone at night -- to talk about sex.
The letter read in part:
"He was fixated on the topic of sex, with whom I'd done it, how I liked it, if I would like to do it with him."
"When I realized that he really wanted to talk to me about sex I would try to change the subject."
Amanda wrote that she was particularly frightened because the administrator "acted as if he was the king of the castle."
"Therefore, I thought he didn't have to answer to anyone for his behavior."
Amanda eventually came to believe that the administrator had a different motive; that he was perhaps trying to support the prosecution's theory that she really was a sex-crazed she-devil who killed Meredith Kercher during a violent orgy.
"'I realize that he was testing me to see if I reacted badly, to understand me personally," she wrote. "He wanted to get a reaction or some information from me... I did not get the seriousness of the situation."
The intimidation reportedly ended after Amanda's lawyers complained.
"What does this letter say to you about what she's been going through?" Peter Van Sant asked Graham.
"It says in a time when she was clearly traumatized by...the murder of her flat mate...and here she was being pressured, in a prison system -- a system that at least she should have had some degree of safety, and here was this guy, a senior officer in this prison, now pressing her about sex, pressing her, 'do you want to have sex with me?" said Graham.
Bob Graham spoke with the administrator, who admitted he and Amanda discussed the topic of sex, but claims she brought it up.
Madison Paxton says Amanda stood her ground, showing remarkable strength.
"It's still her life," she said. "And the only way that the prosecution wins...is if she becomes some broken, bitter person who relies on the free and abundant tranquilizers at the prison. She's never done that and she's beyond determined to not do that."
Amanda's focus was the appeal - and she soon had a world-renown ally.
"This case horrifies me. I'd like to say it shocks me. But I've seen others like it," said psychologist and professor Saul Kassin, an expert on police interrogations.
On his own initiative, Kassin filed a report with the Italian court on Amanda's behalf. It outlines some of the psychological reasons why Amanda could have confessed to a murder she did not commit.
"Amanda Knox, like everybody, has a breaking point. She reached her breaking point," he explained. "Eight or 10 or 12 police officials in a tag team-manner come in and interrogate her... Their goal is a confession and they're not leaving that room without it."
At her first trial, Amanda told the court just how badly the Italian police had intimidated her:
"I was very, very scared because they were treating me so badly and I didn't understand why" she said with a sigh. "They told me that I was trying to protect someone. But I wasn't trying to protect anyone. ...but they continued to call me a stupid liar."
"She's obviously in a state of grief or shock," Kassin said of her statement. "She is accused, she's called a liar when she denies having any involvement... She's in a foreign place. ...And she's being interrogated in a language in which she's not fluent."
"Now, what does that do to someone?" Van Sant asked.
"She's confused. She's disoriented," Kassin replied.
Hour after sleepless hour passed, with no food, no water, no bathroom breaks and no attorney. During that brutal interrogation, Amanda's mother says, it was the police who first brought up the name Patrick Lumumba, Amanda's boss. They had discovered that Amanda had exchanged texts with him the night of the murder. Amanda's last message said, "See you later."
"See you later is an American way of saying goodbye. But in Italian, it's not, is it? Van Sant asked Amanda's mother, Edda Mellas.
"No, and they took that to mean we're making an appointment to get together later tonight; that's the way they interpreted it," she replied.
"They kept saying you sent this thing to Patrick. We know that you left the house. We know! I just said his name," Amanda told the court.
She didn't know it at the time, but the moment Amanda named Patrick Lumumba would seal her fate. She described it in the letter to Bob Graham:
"So I said Patrick. Nearly all the police officers leapt up, they hugged each other and went off in search of Patrick," she wrote. "In the meantime, I just cried. I curled up into a ball and bawled my eyes out. I don't know how long I cried. I was so tired. I couldn't think."
Hours later, Amanda signed that confession that placed her in the house where Meredith Kercher was killed.
"I believe Amanda's confession is false. I believe Amanda is innocent," Kassin said. "If she was there...wouldn't she have known that Patrick wasn't there? Wouldn't she have known that Rudy was there? The reason she didn't know those things is that she wasn't there."
Amanda later recanted, but it was too late. The damage done, she was officially under arrest.
Three years after the murder, Amanda is ready to attack all the prosecution's evidence head on at her appeal: the confession, the eyewitnesses and the DNA.
"You can't even put into words, as we sit here and talk to you, what it must be like for her," Curt Knox told Van Sant. "I mean, our lives are not on the line. Her life is. It's gonna be put in somebody else's hands again."
And the prosecution would not go down without a fight.
With all the brouhaha over Amanda Knox, it's sometimes easy to forget Meredith Kercher, the murdered woman at the center of this case.
But Amanda's father, Curt Knox, says his thoughts are never far from the Kercher family.
"They've experienced the worst thing that a parent could ever experience in the loss of a child," he said. "You can't even...describe what they must be going through as well."
And in November of 2010, the ordeal was still far from over for any of the families -- Meredith's, Amanda's or Raffaele Sollecito's. It was back to court as Amanda and Raffaele appealed their murder convictions.
"We know she's innocent. She knows that she's innocent. She's not afraid of the truth," said Curt Knox.
A lot had changed in Perugia since the first trial ended.
"If we were to walk up to an average person here in Perugia and ask them, 'Describe Amanda Knox' what would they say after all of this media blitz?" Peter Van Sant asked Bob Graham.
"Three years ago, everyone would have said, 'She is evil, you know, she is the killer.' Now I think you would get a pretty strong number of people who would say, 'Well, perhaps she's not the person that we thought she was."
That attitude carried over into this second trial, which was presided over by a new judge.
"He started the appeals trial with a very clear statement and that was, 'The only thing we know for certain is that Meredith Kercher is dead," said Curt Knox.
True to his word, this judge asked independent experts to review the key DNA evidence in the case. What they discovered shocked most observers.
"Fifty-four mistakes in the gathering of the DNA in that room," Graham said. "That's shoddy work. That's appalling work."
During the first trial, Prosecutor Mignini had said a kitchen knife found in Raffaele's house had Amanda's DNA on the handle and Meredith's on the blade... damning if true.
"Meredith Kercher's DNA was not on the blade," Graham told Van Sant. "Indeed Amanda Knox's was on the handle, but she never doubted it."
"And why was Amanda's DNA on the handle?" Van Sant asked Edda Mellas.
"Cause she cooked in Raffaele's house," Mellas replied, "Her DNA was on the handle and rye bread residue was on the blade, so obviously she had been using the knife to cut bread in Raffaele's house."
And then there was that small clasp from Meredith's bra - supposedly containing Raffaele's DNA.
"The bra clasp, the one piece of evidence that Prosecutor Mignini said definitely put Raffaele Sollecito in the murder room. What happened to that piece of evidence?" Van Sant asked Graham.
"Again, thrown out. Contaminated," he said.
In police video, crime scene technicians are seen collecting this key piece of evidence six weeks after the murder. Using dirty gloves, they pick it up and then place the bra clasp back on the floor.
"Go back to the phrase, 'the forensics will tell us everything about the case.' And it did and it does'," Graham continued. "There is zero evidence against Knox and zero evidence against Sollecito."
In fact, not a single text, email or phone call has ever been found that links Amanda and Raffaele to Rudy Guede, who has admitted holding a blood-soaked Meredith in his arms the night of the murder.
And important witnesses from the first trial appeared to be discredited this time around.
"One of the biggest witnesses was a homeless guy who was a drug addict, who said that he saw Amanda and Raffaele arguing...nervously standing around above the house around the time that the...murder would've occurred," Nina Burleigh explained. "Well, come to find out in the appeal, this guy's a heroin addict...he could barely walk to the witness stand."
"The judge even stopped the questioning and basically said, 'You're outta here,' Curt Knox explained.
"I've heard enough. Take him away," added Mellas.
Things were looking up for Amanda but she couldn't help but worry, said her friend Madison Paxton via her video diary:
As things slowly start to look better with the trial, it almost hurts to hope because we know what it felt like the first time that they were convicted and you have this acknowledgment in your head like wow, this would actually genuinely destroy her if she was convicted again. ...in some ways, it's easier psychologically to be filled with despair - [looks into camera] does that make sense?
"One irony of this case is that the Italian authorities actually did a great job. In less than three weeks, they had the person who murdered Meredith Kercher," Van Sant noted to Graham.
"Indeed," he replied.
"They arrested Rudy Guede and they had the evidence against him."
"Absolutely, but they'd also dug a hole so deep that they couldn't get out of it," Graham said. "That was the problem. And pride, vanity -- whatever it was, ensured they just kept digging."
But Mignini would not let go of his theory that Guede did not kill Meredith by himself, but had help from Amanda and Raffaele.
"So as prosecutor Mignini watches his case collapse around him, what does he do during the course of this appeal? He says that her sentence should be lengthened to life," Van Sant remarked to Burleigh.
"Exactly. It's mind-boggling ... they're not going to give up easily," she said. "I mean, there's a reason vendetta is an Italian word."
After nearly four years in prison, Amanda was itching to get outside again.
"She said today, she's like, 'Madison, it's been three years since I've been able to walk outside past 3:00 p.m. ...I miss walking at night. I miss stars...I miss that so much,'" Paxton said.
But Amanda would never see those stars again if prosecutors had their way. In closing arguments, prosecutors dismissed all questions about their forensic evidence and stood by their witnesses. Nothing they said had changed - Amanda and Raffaele were still guilty of murder.
As the final act of this four-year saga came to a head, it was clear that Amanda Knox was no longer the trusting 20-year-old hippie from Seattle, but instead, a 24-year old prisoner.
"A lot of people have noticed that she's lost weight, there's so much concern on her face. Are you worried?" Van Sant asked Amanda's mother.
"Of course, as a mom, you know she's suffering, you know she's lost weight. She tells you she can't eat, she can't sleep," an emotional Edda Mellas said, "because of the stress. Of course, it breaks your heart as a parent to watch that and know that she's dealing with all of that. Yeah."
Just as he did with the infamous 'kiss,' Mignini attacked Amanda and Raffaele Sollecito's behavior, saying they did not react appropriately when gruesome crime scene photographs of Meredith Kercher were shown in court.
"Amanda was looking down. Raffaele was looking away," Mignini told the court.
"You sit there and you want to yell out, 'LIES,' but you have to sit quietly and remain composed as people just...you watch your daughter being tortured - emotionally tortured - sitting there, having to listen to that stuff," said Mellas.
Complete coverage: Amanda Knox
But then Raffaele and Amanda got their turn.
Raffaele told the court, "I never hurt anybody ever in my life."
The jurors were riveted as Raffaele removed a plastic bracelet.
"My bracelet says 'Free Amanda and Raffaele'. I think the time has come to take it off," he said.
A hush fell over the courtroom as a visibly shaken Amanda Knox began to speak.
"If I had been there that night I would have been dead. Like her. The only difference is that I wasn't there. I was at Raffaele's," she said in Italian.
After thanking Raffaele for his support, Amanda addressed her so-called confession.
"My absolute faith in the authority of the police has been betrayed... and I am paying with my life for things I did not do."
As she ended her dramatic speech, three jurors were in tears.
"I want to go home. I want to return home, I want to go back to my life. I don't want to be punished, deprived of my future for something that I didn't do. Because I am innocent. Raffaele is innocent. [long pause] We deserve freedom because we didn't do anything to deserve this," she said.
That night, the first verdict gave everyone pause: Guilty. Amanda had slandered her former boss, Patrick Lamumba. She was sentenced to three years, time served.
But then came the verdict Amanda longed for: Knox and Raffaele's murder convictions were overturned. The emotional upheaval of her lost years was etched on her face.
Her former boyfriend Raffaele stayed calm, as did the family of Meredith Kercher, who were in the courtroom. Meanwhile, outside, the streets of Perugia exploded.
"It's an extraordinary scene outside the courthouse. There's been whistling, great disappointment among people out here that Amanda Knox has been found not guilty in the murder of Meredith Kercher," Van Sant reported on the "CBS Evening News" following the verdict.
It was time for Amanda to make her last trip back to prison and this time, she had company. Sitting next to her was the boy, turned man, who had been with her on every step of this journey - Raffaele Sollecito.
"They were actually able to both sit in one of the cars that took them back to the prison.. I think it kind of became, 'you're a human being again' versus 'you're a prisoner,'" Curt Knox told Van Sant. "Amanda was crying so much that Raffaele was telling her, 'We're free, hey why are you crying?' ...it was just a very emotional moment."
At the prison, Amanda said goodbye to some of her guards, including one who showed Amanda a touch of humanity.
"There was actually a female guard there that actually put money on Amanda's account one time, because it was kind of that motherly thing," Knox continued.
Today, the lovers from that fateful day are separated; Raffaele remains in Italy, and Amanda is with her family in Seattle.
She missed a lot during her four years in prison...and now that she's free, Amanda is focused once again on her future.
"Maybe in five years, she may be an advocate for people that have been wrongly accused, having felt what she felt," Curt Knox told Van Sant, "and let it be known that there is still a light at the end of the tunnel."
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