[music playing]
Gallaudet University is the world's only university
specifically designed to serve the needs of deaf,
hard of hearing, and deaf-blind students.
You walk on campus, and immediately everything
changes from a sound-based world on the outside
to a visual base.
Every freshman that I see coming onto campus,
they are thrilled to be in an environment
where everything is accessible and the playing field is level.
For the first time in their lives,
they're able to come in and socialize, learn, study,
interact with their peers in a community
that they will never see again outside of there.
NARRATOR: But in the fall of 2000,
as Gallaudet students excitedly begin their new school year,
they learned their tailor-made campus isn't the safe haven
they thought it was.
[music playing]
[bell ringing]
Just before 9:00 PM on September 28,
Gallaudet freshman Joseph Mesa Jr. Knocks on his RA's door.
Mesa says he can't get a hold of his friend
and fellow Cogswell Hall dorm mate 19-year-old Eric Plunkett.
Using a master key, the RA opens Eric's locked door.
Inside, they find Eric dead in a pool of blood.
[sirens blaring]
When I got the message that there was an emergency
and involved a student had died, I
thought maybe it was a suicide or some other kind
of tragic accident.
But when I got to campus, I was informed
that he had been murdered.
I was completely aghast.
[radio chatter]
NARRATOR: Eric's mother, Kathleen
Cornills, and his stepfather, Chris, are inconsolable.
And I remember Kathleen.
She was wailing at that point.
I took my baby to college, and he's never coming home.
What can I say to my wife who just learned that her one
and only son is dead?
[music playing]
So when Eric was about three months old, he wasn't hearing,
and he had congenital rubella.
So a lot of his growing up was focused on understanding what
he needed and getting him into a program called infant hearing
where they started working with him with sign language
and fit him for hearing aids before he was even a year old.
From a very young age, he could sign.
He could read lips and write notes.
He would mime.
He was very good at getting people to understand what
he was trying to communicate.
Eric wanted to be a psychiatrist.
He was always helping people or assisting people.
So he had a generous heart.
And he had a lot of friends and that he
had a family that loved him.
[music playing]
He was very excited to go to Gallaudet.
And when his acceptance letter arrived at home,
he opened the letter, and he was jumping up and down
and screaming.
He was so excited that he was accepted.
He wanted to experience life.
The last thing he said to me was, "Don't worry, Mom.
I'll be fine."
[music playing]
NARRATOR: Weeks pass then months.
With no new developments in the case,
Gallaudet remains on edge.
I don't really have a lot of information
to share except to say that we are coping with the situation
as best we can, maintaining and ensuring strong safety
for our students here.
I became increasingly frustrated.
We lost confidence that the case would ever be solved.
We didn't know who to trust anymore.
At the end of the semester, there
is a huge sigh of relief from the faculty
and the students both.
We made it through a difficult semester.
Everybody would go back home where they felt safe,
and we were going to have a great big time out.
We all went home for the holidays.
We spent time with our families.
Things seemed to get back to a normal rhythm.
And then we came back to school.
NARRATOR: With the start of a new year,
students returned to Gallaudet with a restored sense of calm.
But if these poor souls think their troubles are behind them,
they're wrong.
[music playing]
I got a call in the middle of the night.
My husband answered it at 2:00 AM.
He came to tell me that another student had been
found in the dorm murdered.
I thought, what is wrong with Gallaudet University?
What is happening here?
I drove back to the dorm, and the whole scene
is playing out again, another murdered student.
NARRATOR: The victim is 19-year-old Ben Varner.
He was discovered lying face up in a pool of blood
on his dorm room floor.
I learned that the body had been found because a student
pulled a fire alarm, which required all
the students to exit the dorm.
And then the residence assistant went through the dorm
and checked all the rooms.
It felt like almost like the end of the world
because another murder occurred, and we
haven't solved the first one.
And that threw the whole community,
myself included, into a tailspin because there's
still someone lurking around, and
they're killing deaf people.
And what are we going to do?
[radio chatter]
NARRATOR: The MPD assigns veteran homicide detective
Pamela Reed to the case.
We had a very violent crime scene.
His dorm was not ransacked, but obviously there was a struggle.
There was blood patterns all along the walls,
multiple stab wounds and cutting wounds just
cut across his throat as well.
We could see blood drops going down
the hallway and a very, very faint
outline of a bloody shoe print.
This really remarkable gal came out from the lab.
That was her expertise, with shoes.
She was looking at the footprint with me, and she goes,
I might be able to spray that and pop up the coloring
so that we can have a discernible tread print.
I'm like, go for it.
And she sprayed a little compound on it,
and it came to life.
NARRATOR: The specialist matches the tread to a size
11 Nike Air Max sneaker.
If Reed can find the Nike's owner, she's got her killer.
After five days of sniffing around,
MPD's financial fraud team catches
a whiff of potential suspicious activity in Ben's bank account.
A $650 check had been cashed on Friday, February 2,
the day after Ben was murdered.
When we pulled up the check, it was made out to Joseph Mesa.
I say, where does Joseph Mesa live?
Oh, pull up his account.
He's a Gallaudet student.
NARRATOR: And when Detective Reed thinks about it,
she remembers the name.
Joseph Mesa is the friend who originally
reported Eric Plunkett missing to the RA right
before he showed up dead.
Reed brings Mesa in to ask why he had a check from Ben Varner.
He denied it, which was great for me
because I'm already drafting the search warrant in my head.
Because remember, I got a shoe print.
NARRATOR: Two hours later, Reed has the search warrant.
And it doesn't take long to find a pair of size
11 Nike Air Max sneakers in Mesa's closet,
just like the ones that left the bloody prints
outside Ben Varner's dorm room.
Then the DNA results come back.
The blood samples from Ben Varner's crime scene
are a perfect match to Joseph Mesa.
There's no question he killed his fellow classmate.
Reed sits back down with the 20-year-old.
He kind of knew it was all closing in.
When he saw that the noose was tightening, he gave it all up.
And at the end of his lengthy confession,
he told the police, one other thing I should tell you.
And they said, what's that?
And he said, I killed Eric Plunkett, too.
NARRATOR: On May 3, 2002, Joseph Mesa is on trial.
He claims temporary insanity.
He says he saw a vision of two black gloved hands
telling him in sign language to kill his classmates.
I was cross-examining him, and I asked him whether the black
gloves had compelled him to cash the check and use
the ATM of Ben Varner, which was a little
bit hard for him to answer.
So he said no.
No jury wants to be hoodwinked by someone who is going
to fake an insanity defense.
NARRATOR: On May 21, 2002, Joseph Mesa is found guilty
and sentenced to two life terms without the possibility
of parole.
The judge considers the 20-year-old a highly dangerous
threat to anyone around him, including other inmates,
so Mesa is shipped off to a maximum security prison.
I wanted to understand why Joseph
Mesa killed Eric and Ben.
They're all in the same world and in the community
with the same goals.
Why would he want to kill them?
I wrote him and asked him if I could meet him, and he agreed.
I asked him, why did you kill these two men?
He said, I don't know.
They were my friends.
I said, what do you mean they were your friends?
He said, I know this doesn't make any sense,
but it was like I had the angel on one shoulder and a devil
on another shoulder.
I don't know why I did it, but I did it.
But when I asked him, if he hadn't gotten caught,
would he have killed somebody else,
he kind of shrugged, and he said probably.
NARRATOR: More than two decades later,
a brutal lesson still echoes silently
through the hallowed halls of Gallaudet.
Even here, no one is safe from the dark side of humanity.
The deaf community will never forget the murders.
For a long time, we lived with the privilege
of assuming that there could never be a murderer
within our community.
And now, we know that it can, and it did.
We lost our innocence.
The murders changed Gallaudet forever.
We're not an oasis.
We're not an island in the middle of the city.
We are part of Washington, DC, and all of the good and bad
things that happen here.
[music playing]