[music playing]
NARRATOR: It's the summer of 1974.
John Wilson is 11 years old, his sister Lizabeth 13.
JOHN WILSON: So I went out into the middle of the parking lot,
and I heard my name.
She called out my name, "John."
Turned around and looked, and she was running my way.
NARRATOR: John Wilson runs through the parking lot,
ducks around the corner of a local high school,
and waits for his sister.
I was going to jump out and scare her
and try to make a last-minute deal with
her not to tell Mom and Dad.
And she never came by.
Never came by.
NARRATOR: With no sign of Liz, John runs the four blocks home
and waits.
The minutes turn into hours, and still Liz is a no-show.
Officer Randy Poletis catches the call.
We received a radio call on a missing child
from the Prairie Village Swimming Pool parking lot.
NARRATOR: Poletis and a team of officers hit the streets.
Responded to the area and conducted a neighborhood
canvass of all these homes and went
door to door to see if anyone had seen the little girl.
NARRATOR: After five hours, the search
turns up no trace of Lizabeth and no reports of anyone
or anything suspicious.
Lizabeth Wilson was last seen alive running
past a local high school.
With nowhere else to turn, detectives
returned to the school.
And the only man working there at the time, a janitor
named John Henry Horton.
He's a person of extreme interest at the time,
given the extensive amount of door-to-door
canvass and investigation that was being conducted.
And no one else had seen any other person in the area,
and he had the job to put him right
there where she was last seen.
NARRATOR: Horton's time card shows
he punched out for a dinner break at 8:00 PM
and didn't return until almost 11:00.
He clocked out about 20 minutes
after Liz Wilson is last seen.
Well, that was the first serious red flag of the investigation
was the fact that he had not returned during that window
of her disappearance.
NARRATOR: According to the overnight janitor, when Horton
returned to work, he was shirtless
and had fresh scratches on his back and arms.
When detectives questioned Horton about his absence
from work, he claims he went out to buy dinner
and had some car trouble.
His story is that his car broke
down at a Milgram's Grocery parking lot on 75th Street.
We interviewed the employee there at the Milgram's, and
this particular employee said there
was nobody in that parking lot during that period of time.
NARRATOR: Horton's shaky alibi raises enough suspicion
to merit a search warrant.
When detectives popped the trunk on Horton's car,
they get an eyeful.
They pulled a lot of stuff out of the trunk of his car that
was very questionable-- sulfuric acid, chloroform, ether,
butcher knife, some bags.
And it just wasn't right, obviously.
RANDY POLETIS: We all know in police work
that chloroform in a rag, you put it over someone's face,
you can render them incapacitated very quickly.
And at that time, I was very concerned about the fact
that we had a possible homicide on our hands.
NARRATOR: Horton tells police he stole
the chloroform to get high, and the knife
was a gift for his wife.
Agents don't buy a word of his story.
They have Horton pegged as a liar and a murderer.
It's a theory that gets a boost when police talk to Beth
Reichmeier, a 15-year-old who describes
an encounter she had with Horton on the same night Lizabeth
disappeared.
I had been over playing tennis at Prairie Village Pool,
and I was walking home.
And on my way, a man-- gentleman stopped me.
He was standing right here.
He wanted me to stand on his shoulders
to help him turn off the water.
He said he'd been watering the trees
and needed somebody to stand on his shoulders
to help him turn off the water.
And that just didn't sound right to me.
NARRATOR: Beth says she refused to help and walked on.
It was like it was yesterday.
NARRATOR: But FBI agents revisit the school.
They discover the water spigot is just six inches off
the ground and suspect Horton was using that ruse
to lure Beth into the school.
In the weeks and months that follow,
detectives pound the pavement trying to forge a similar link
between Horton and Liz Wilson.
[music playing]
Nine miles from the spot where Lizabeth Wilson vanished
is a vacant field.
On January 7, a construction worker named Fred [inaudible]
surveys the land and turns up a skull.
Agents recover the skull and some bones,
but nothing further in the way of usable evidence.
Dental records confirm the remains belong
to 13-year-old Lizabeth Wilson.
After six months, a family's worst fears become a reality.
Cold case detectives begin the process of tracking down
and re-interviewing witnesses.
BETH REICHMEIER: Well, first, I found a note on my door,
and so I called them.
And they said they were going to reopen the case.
NARRATOR: In 1974, Beth Reichmeier
was just 15 years old when she told police that Horton
approached her near the high school
on the same night Liz disappeared.
Now detectives return to Reichmeier and ask her
if she might have also seen Liz's
brother John Wilson that night.
BETH REICHMEIER: It was Horton first.
And then as I got up around the front of the school,
that's when John Wilson went running by.
We were up towards the front of the doors,
and he was out near the pillars.
NARRATOR: Reichmeier's statements
put Horton that much closer to Liz Wilson and the time
she disappeared.
Captain Dan Meyer is a specialist in forensic mapping
and lays out a timeline for cold case detectives.
Based on the evidence provided to me,
I know that Beth is talking to John Horton
and identifies the time of that encounter at 7:20 PM.
I then calculated the time that it would have taken them
to reach the front door, and I know
that Beth arrives at the front door of the school at 7:22.
It's during that time that she sees young John
Wilson run by her location.
Based on my calculations, I know that just seconds prior
to the 7:22 time, John had turned
and saw his sister while she was continuing
to run from this location.
The final location that he saw his sister
was only 175 feet, 13 to 17 seconds away from the location
that John Horton was last seen.
Meaning, he was the only one that
had the opportunity for the abduction
and was in the area at the time.
DETECTIVE: [inaudible] how it happened.
NARRATOR: Horton agrees to sit down for questioning.
For two hours, [inaudible] digs.
But Horton sticks to his denials and admits to nothing.
Cold case detectives believe their case is as good
as it's going to get and prepare to take
their evidence to the DA.
Then another woman surfaces.
Joy tells Agent Wilson that two months before Lizabeth
disappeared, her neighbor John Horton offered to get her high.
[inaudible] at the time was 14 years old.
So we were just going to go to the golf course
for what I thought was just we'll probably get high.
Walked over to a green, kind of sat down like a little circle
area, and pulled out this bottle and a rag
and kind of says, here, this will get you high.
And I went like this because that's what he told me to do.
And I was like, no!
And he said, no, go ahead.
And I remember him putting his hand back to mine.
NARRATOR: Joy inhaled the fumes and quickly blacked out.
Sometime later, she woke up in a haze.
JOY: I couldn't move at all, none whatsoever.
But when I came to, it was like a foggy vision.
But my pants were down.
He had his fingers inside of me.
He was kind of leaning up over me a little bit.
But it was like, I couldn't move.
I couldn't say anything.
NARRATOR: Before she could do anything to stop Horton,
Joy blacked out for a second time.
JOY: I have no idea how I came to.
But when I did, my pants were being pulled up and zipped.
I kind of went out again.
When I came to again, I remember sitting up
and just violently throwing up.
NARRATOR: Joy found her way home and made
a promise to herself that she would never tell a soul.
She was very upset by it and explained
to us that we were the first people
she'd ever told about this.
NARRATOR: Detectives believe the attack on [inaudible]
to be a blueprint for Horton's abduction of Lizabeth Wilson
and the final piece in their case against him.
On October 15, 2003, Horton is arrested and charged with
the murder of Lizabeth Wilson.
Our theory was that she was solicited by the defendant
to come inside the school to turn off a water hose.
He took her into a TV room inside the high school,
had the chloroform with him at that time,
had a knife with him at that time
to threaten her in case she struggled or fought with him.
And then he subdued her through the chloroform,
rendered her unconscious, and then
removed certain clothings for the purpose of fondling her.
In the process of doing that, the chloroform,
instead of rendering her unconscious,
ended up killing her.
NARRATOR: After six days of testimony,
the case goes to the jury.
Just two hours later, they are back with a verdict--
guilty in the first degree.
The look on his face when they announced guilty,
it was priceless because he was stunned.
NARRATOR: For the family of Lizabeth Wilson,
the verdict means justice 30 years in the making,
and a small bit of comfort for a brother
who wonders how different things might have been.
I often wonder how it would have
been growing up with her in the teenage years and getting old.
And-- but I'll see her again in heaven.