(low rumbling)
(tense music)
(train rumbling)
(gentle music)
- Bruce was
a very caring, loving person.
He had a great sense of humor.
He always wanted to help people,
and he always wanted to make friends.
He had a lot of friends.
- My brother was missing, we had not heard from him.
After a couple of days and nothing turned up,
then you start to think the worst thing.
(tense music)
- Everything led back to Perez.
But when you can't even find a body
and you don't have that one witness,
you have nothing.
(tense music)
We had a meeting about this case
with the chief of detectives,
and he says,
"Well, drop everything else you're doing,
this is what you're going to work on
from now until you make an arrest."
I'm looking at everything,
everything led back to one person.
The DA's office is adamant
about proof and evidence.
And the DA's office say,
"Well, Detective, how you gonna prove it?
You have nothing."
(tense music)
In July, it's, I don't know,
two, three o'clock in the morning,
the phone is ringing,
(phone rings)
and I go, "Yes, Detective Stradford."
He goes, "This is Detective Such-And-Such
from the 73 Precinct."
I go, "Yeah, what can I do for you?"
He goes,
"Someone tipped, she knows about one of your murders."
And I go, "Did she happen to tell you which murder it was?"
He says, "She doesn't wanna talk to anybody,
she wants to talk to you and only you."
Now I hightail it to the 73 Precinct.
(tense music)
I sit down, I introduce myself to her,
she tells me who she is,
and she has her daughter with her.
And I go, "Hey, why don't you let them
keep your daughter outside for a minute?
You can talk to me."
She proceeded to tell me what she knew
about this case.
And I go,
"Well, why are you coming now?"
And, you know, she says,
"He hurt me once before, me and my mother,
and I don't want him to do anything
to my daughter and myself.
And I'm telling you this now,
and you need to do something about it."
And I asked her, would she be willing to record
him talking about it?
She goes, "He talks about it all the time.
It's like a trophy to him,
about how he got away with killing this man,
and I feel bad, you know, for that man's family."
We just didn't want to put her in a position
that she would be found out and some harm would come to her.
We got a recorder for her,
a mini recorder that she could use,
and we showed her how to work it.
How to turn it on, how to turn it off,
where you should put it,
and the best time to, you know, where you should be.
And ultimately, you know, with the recordings,
he told her what he did.
And, you know, she became a witness.
He goes, "Listen, I put him in a chokehold,
I choked him out, you know, and then like,
I tied him to a chair."
- He used bleach to clean out the drains,
knew to line the apartment with plastic,
you know, on the floor and on the walls,
he got a saw to dismember him.
- And then he just enlisted the aid
of several homeless people.
He paid them, they didn't know what they were doing,
and they just deposited the bags
that had Mr. Blackwood's remains in it
in different locations around the area
so that they would be picked up by sanitation.
(tense music)
Most criminals don't sit around
with their daughter,
and their granddaughter in another room,
and explain how you murdered somebody
and got rid of their body,
which made it that much more disgusting.
I've heard some pretty bad stuff in my career.
This was right up there with them.
(tense music)