[music playing]
NARRATOR: It's Halloween in the Rust
Belt community of Oil City.
12-year-old Shauna Howe is leaving a Girl Scout party.
Her best friend offers to walk her the extra block home.
Shauna goes it alone.
She would never be seen alive again,
and Halloween would change forever.
LUCY HOWE: I used to love Halloween.
I used to love to dress the kids up.
Shauna loved Halloween, too.
I remember that morning, Shauna come over.
And she says, mom, I've got the Girl Scouts tonight.
We've got the Halloween thing.
We're going up to the nursing home.
She gave me a kiss and a hug and told me she loved me,
and then she was gone.
And that was it.
They got out of Girl Scouts between 7:30 and 8 o'clock.
Shauna and Joey L. had left together.
Nobody was there to pick up Shauna because I forgot.
They come out of the alley where the Girl Scout meeting was.
And at the corner there, Joey L. went straight down,
and Shauna made the left and was coming up the street.
JON BROWN: Lucy calls.
And I said, you know Shauna ain't home yet.
What time's that Girl Scout stuff?
She says, that should have been over.
LUCY HOWE: I started getting worried.
I mean, even the latest party for the Girl Scouts
wouldn't last that late.
I told John to call, like, the hospitals
to see if there had been any type of accidents or anything.
The police showed up, and they come to the house.
Maybe she was lost.
Maybe she stayed at a friend's.
I think that was the hope.
And then other reports started coming in.
BRIAN O'TOOLE: Dan Payton was walking on West
First Street in Oil City.
He saw a little girl walking on the other side of the street.
He then sees a tall, skinny guy wearing a ball cap.
He hears a short scream.
She was grabbed and taken into a car that left immediately.
Dan thought it was a small red car.
BRIAN O'TOOLE: This is before cell phones.
So then he now at 8 o'clock at night has to knock on doors
to have somebody call the police station.
ROBERT WENNER: We got called in to help look for Shauna Howe.
There's a lot of emotion involved.
There's a little girl missing.
How could this happen?
We got a call that they found something,
and they specifically wanted me to identify it.
I walked up to it and took a close look at it.
There in the bush was her body suit.
It had been there, like, overnight.
The moisture was, like, on it.
I'd known that with the gym clothes
being there that way that she had
been raped or molested somehow.
The lab in Erie knew that they had a semen stain,
and there was enough on there to get DNA.
The day after the bodysuit was found, we were at the station,
and a call came in.
This guy had gone to a nearby cottage down by Coulter's Hole.
And he said, I just walked out on the bridge,
and I looked down, and there she was.
She wasn't there the day before because we were out there.
Her shoes were found on the bridge.
The area was combed by law enforcement the day before.
And then she's found there at daylight, clearly indicating
that the kidnapper had went back in during the dark
with the child and then killed Shauna and disposed of her body
there.
The likelihood of those shoes being found on the bridge-- one
facing one direction, one facing the other--
and not falling off the bridge?
Nah, it was placed there.
So who killed Shauna Howe?
Somebody was toying with us.
So I'm sitting there.
and all of a sudden, I hear clump, clump,
clump coming up the steps.
My brother Keith literally falls in my lap and says,
this-- it's Shauna.
I'm like, no, it can't be.
It just can't.
And Clare wraps his arms around me.
And he says, it is, sis.
I seen her.
And I said no.
And I lost it.
[cries]
CHARLES DALEY: They canceled Halloween.
People were keeping a real close eye on their kids.
They weren't letting them out.
If this case was going to be solved,
you had to find a match for that DNA.
CHARLES DALEY: We DNA tested her stepdad, Jon Brown.
We DNA tested the uncles.
ROBERT WENNER: It was an intense search.
There was nobody not looked at.
But we never got a hit.
But then somebody called in and said that the description
fit a guy named Ted Walker.
LUCY HOWE: Ted Walker met Shauna at the pizza shop.
If Walker was working, for some reason,
he'd always want to give the girls a hug,
and the girls would run from Walker
so that he couldn't touch them.
CHARLES DALEY: But we know he's familiar with the family
and that he had a small red car.
But eventually, the DNA cleared him, too.
So many dead ends, looking at family, friends,
other possible motives.
It just came up blank.
I'm on my night off.
I get a call from Officer Tom McClellan.
He said, Wenner, we need you down here.
Somebody just tried to abduct a girl.
I said, what?
They tried to kidnap her.
They beat her up pretty bad.
She's down here.
I need you down here.
She was walking down the street.
He stalked her.
He followed her out and tried to bushwhack her.
It's a violent attack, and they're trying to put
somebody in the trunk of a car.
Who's capable of doing something like this?
Jimmy O'Brien is.
Tim and Jim O'Brien were brothers, Timmy older than Jim.
There wasn't a cop here that didn't know the O'Briens
because they're sexually violent offenders, Jimmy in particular.
The guy's evil.
The victim said, I just know if I'd got in the trunk,
I'd be dead, so I fought with everything I had.
I arrested Jimmy for attempted kidnapping.
This crime, it was on the same route
that Shauna had walked home.
We were still having our meetings about Shauna Howe.
And I said, have you looked at the O'Briens?
We knew who the O'Briens were.
I arrested both of them many times,
but they couldn't have done Shauna's
kidnapping because they had been in jail when that occurred.
ROBERT WENNER: Around Halloween, we always had extra patrols
because when you don't know who did it,
you don't know when they'll do it again.
LUCY HOWE: I mean, I've been waiting five years,
and there's still nothing.
You don't have any more information to give
me in '97 than you did in '92.
From the outside looking in, what have you done?
RICH GRAHAM: One of the things was a mark we saw on her cheek.
It appeared to be a partial shoe print,
and there was not even any mention of that in the autopsy.
Betsy and I went to see Halbert Fillinger,
a renowned medical examiner.
Halbert agreed that that appeared to be a shoe
print we saw on her cheek.
He said, this was a violent rape.
He said, somehow they held her in captivity
for a couple of days, but there's
no evidence of any restraints.
That suggested to him that it was quite possible that more
than one person was involved.
This is not one person.
This is most likely two and probably more.
BRIAN O'TOOLE: We decide to do a big sweep again,
and we go back to all the local departments.
One of the places we went was the fire department.
1992, fire department got called to a fire in a red car.
That car belonged to Ted Walker.
Ted Walker's name had been brought up numerous times.
He had met Shauna at a pizza place.
Walker opened his house to young kids in the area,
and Ted fit the description perfect.
If Walker's car was the Chevy Chevette
the witness saw, and he fit the description, throw that
together with a car being set on fire,
did Ted have her in the back seat?
Did something take place back there?
I think that that was done to destroy evidence.
BRIAN O'TOOLE: He hears about the case
from Jim and Tim O'Brien, who come into his house.
He could have made up any name.
Nobody would have been able to question him on that.
RICH GRAHAM: Ted Walker says the O'Briens told
him about Shauna's abduction.
So I asked Chuck Daly, hey, Chuck,
did you ever look at the O'Briens?
And then Chuck said, yeah, they were in jail.
They couldn't have done it.
That's when I realized I had never
seen a report documenting that they had been in jail
on the night of the abduction.
So that's when I get a hold of Trooper John McClain,
who was a friend of mine.
I told him, I'd like for you to go down
and check if the O'Briens were in jail
when Shauna was abducted.
And then he came back to me and said, Rick, they weren't there.
They had bonded out.
Now, I believe it that these guys are good for this.
And we've spent all these years and all these resources
all the while believing that they were incarcerated.
Tim O'Brien was in jail for sexually assaulting a girl.
And his brother, Jim O'Brien, had been arrested by the city
police for trying to abduct a woman,
trying to stuff her into a trunk.
Early February is when I got the call from the crime lab.
Jim O'Brien's a match.
Jim and Tim O'Brien and Ted Walker.
Ted Walker was arrested as an accessory
to the homicide of Shauna Howe.
The O'Briens, those guys had a little girl that to them,
that's a playground.
CHARLES DALEY: What happened, I think,
is they assaulted her upstairs.
Then they left.
And that's when they went out to Coulter's Hole.
But this bodysuit, I think they took her,
and they assaulted her again out there.
Now this child doesn't have clothes.
So they kept her in that car overnight in the trunk.