[ominous music]
NARRATOR: As New Year's Eve parties
roll into the early morning hours,
one Pensacola family leaves their house on a mission.
It's not to ring in the new year.
It was a rainy, foggy night.
A family on Peacock Drive was taking their dog
to the all-night vet clinic at around 3 o'clock
in the morning.
And they pulled out of their driveway.
And the daughter that was in the car
thought that a mannequin had been left on the curb.
But her mother knew right away that it was a dead body
and went home, called the police.
CHUCK MALLETT: When the first officers arrived on scene,
they found the body on the side of the road.
She was wearing a blue dress and had obviously
been in a struggle and possibly sexually battered,
just from her initial appearance.
NARRATOR: Police determined the victim
is 23-year-old Tonya McKinley.
We grew up in Milton, Florida.
It was a nice little community.
And we had a lot of friends.
And we would go bowling.
Bowling was our big thing we liked to do.
Tonya had a real big personality.
I mean, it wouldn't fit in this room,
her personality was so big.
Oh lord mercy, she was a tomboy.
She weren't scared of nothing.
She was a good girl when she weren't
getting in so much trouble.
Tonya was absolutely a firecracker.
She was the center of attention.
She was the jokester.
She's the one that would start the conversation in a party,
a lot of people around.
She'd never met a stranger.
NARRATOR: Tonya drops out of high school at 17
and moves to Pensacola with Vanita.
Tonya was thinking of working in the medical field.
We were taking the transcribing classes, where you would work
for a doctor and transcribe.
She was really looking forward to doing that type of work.
NARRATOR: Tonya meets Tim Davidson in the late 1970s.
VANITA BIASCO: I introduced her to Tim.
I thought that they were not good together.
They were both strong-willed, hard-headed people.
They fought a lot.
They had a lot of arguments.
She would move out a lot.
NARRATOR: Tim and Tonya's rocky relationship
takes a toll until a ray of hope changes everything.
In July 1983, Tonya gives birth to a boy she names Tim.
Tonya loved being pregnant.
She was very excited about it, couldn't
wait till her baby was born.
Everybody told me the same thing.
They were like, your mom was great, worked hard, and loved
you like nothing else.
You were the light of her life.
You were her heart and soul.
NARRATOR: Tonya is excited for this new chapter in her life.
But work, school, and a baby at home
leaves her with little time for herself.
It's New Year's Eve and Tonya's looking for a rare night out.
She and Vanita dropped their kids off at a daycare
and head out with Vanita's husband, Larry,
to Darrell's, a local bar.
Tonya saw a lot of people there that she knew,
people that we had gone to school with, the bartender,
of course.
And we were sitting at a table and as she did her walking
around, saying her hellos.
Right after midnight when we had the champagne, my husband said,
we need to go.
The daycare closed at 1:00 AM.
And she said, just go ahead.
Pick up my son for me.
So I told her, I said, well, who are you going to go home--
who's going to bring you home?
And she says, I've got friends everywhere here.
And she's like, of course I have a ride.
She kissed Larry on the cheek and she
hugged me and said, "Happy New Year,
and I will see you in the morning."
When we woke up the next morning and getting the kids up
and for breakfast, and Larry asked me, is Tonya home yet?
I said, no, she's not here yet.
But she'll be here soon.
And then that's when my husband's
mother knocked on our door.
We opened the door.
And she said to Larry, "I need to tell you something."
And she said, "They found Tonya's body."
The working theory was she was in a confrontation
with the suspect.
She suffered a blow to the head and subsequently was strangled.
As part of the autopsy, they conducted
a sexual battery kit, which involved taking
swabs of the vaginal area.
It was later determined that semen
was present on those swabs.
The semen in 1985 could only be classified by blood type.
And it was determined to be blood type A.
NARRATOR: Investigators asked Tim for a hair sample
to compare to the sample found at the crime scene.
It's not Tim Davidson's.
The case of the murdered single mother
goes as cold as a winter wind on New Year's Eve.
Very quickly after I started there,
the primary crime scene analyst on the McKinley case
told me about the case.
And it became an important case for me.
NARRATOR: Nicole believes the DNA collected
at the crime scene 16 years earlier
might be key to solving the case.
So here we have actually the original evidence bag.
Areas that were identified on the towel, either that tested
positive for blood or tested positive
for the presence of semen, would have
had cuttings taken, which is why you see holes in the towel.
Those were cuttings taken by the crime lab.
In 1985, there was no DNA analysis.
So initially all the evidence was sent to the FBI.
And all you could tell at that time was ABO blood group.
NARRATOR: Analysts repeatedly test the DNA,
but it leads nowhere.
CHUCK MALLETT: In early 2019, Nicole Heintzelman
came to my office and told me that she
had heard of this technique called genetic genealogy.
Genetic genealogy has been a total game changer in the field
of forensics, because in the past
we've had to rely on offender databases.
And now we have anybody and their relatives
who have put their DNA into these
genetic genealogy websites.
That is just opened the suspect pool from a few thousand
to millions.
CHUCK MALLETT: We were doing something different.
And I really wanted to focus on the genetic genealogy, where
those leads would take us.
NICOLE HEINTZELMAN: We would meet periodically, the gene
team, and would try to talk out what the best targets
would be for genetic testing.
I mean, we learned from each other.
I learned a lot from them.
Just being in those meetings and seeing how they operated
was fascinating as well.
NARRATOR: The so-called Gene Team
searches sites like GEDmatch, looking
for a relative of the killer with similar or familial DNA.
CHUCK MALLETT: The first initial round
of genealogy identified a third or fourth cousin
to the suspect.
But again, we were a long way away from the suspect.
And I think all of us at that point
were a little discouraged.
TONY ADAME: I got a call at my desk from Chuck Mallett.
And he said, we got a name, Daniel Wells.
I said, let me call you back in a few hours.
And I just went at it in public databases
and it had stuff going back to the mid 1980s,
right after Tonya's murder.
Very quickly, that made it seem like this might be the guy.
NARRATOR: Investigators begin round-the-clock surveillance
on Daniel Leonard Wells.
One day on his way into work, he was smoking a cigarette.
And as he drove down the road, he flicked the cigarette butt
out the window.
Officers that were directly behind him
notified another surveillance vehicle a few cars back.
That officer stopped traffic, went out into the street,
and was able to recover that cigarette butt.
NARRATOR: The DNA on Wells' cigarette
is a 100% match to the killer's DNA.
After 45 minutes, Wells begins to crack.
You can see in his face, you could see it in his eyes
that he knew it was starting to crumble.
He had admitted that yes, he had met
Tonya at Darrell's that night.
NARRATOR: 35 years after Tonya McKinley's
New Year's Eve murder, her killer is finally arrested.
The night that I called Tim, I had the privilege
of giving him a call and letting him know what all
these people have been doing.
I think you can hear my voice crack because I
think it all caught up to me.
TIMOTHY DAVIDSON: It was just this insane sense of relief.
This huge weight, this huge burden lifted off my shoulders,
off my family's shoulders.
NARRATOR: Wells might be facing the rest of his life in prison.
But once again, he cheats justice.
CHUCK MALLETT: Approximately two weeks after his arrest,
I came to work and started receiving texts from our PIO.
He said, Wells committed suicide in jail last night.
When I found out that he committed suicide,
I felt very, very cheated.
How different would my life be if she was never taken from me?