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Forensic Files

Nailed

Forensic Files

HLN

True Crime, Society & Culture

4.43.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Just weeks before a witness is to testify against the man accused of sexually assaulting her, she is murdered in the front yard of her own home. Investigators immediately suspect her attacker, but they don't have enough evidence to prove his guilt. It would take fifteen years, and the remarkable advances in forensic science and DNA testing which occurred during that time, to enable police to nail the killer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Just weeks before testifying at a criminal trial, one of the key witnesses of brilliant research

0:11.0

scientists was murdered.

0:15.2

For 15 years, there were many suspicions but little proof.

0:20.5

Ironically, advances in the very research the victim had been working on helped nail her

0:27.2

killer.

0:28.2

When you ask friends and colleagues about Helena Greenwood, you hear words like brilliant,

0:45.0

quiet, honest and a hard worker.

0:47.8

Helena earned a PhD in microbiology and was an executive in the biotech industry.

0:55.0

She not only was an excellent scientist, but she had marketing skills.

1:00.6

And those two things often are not concurrent.

1:04.8

Helena was very forward-thinking, especially looking at technology.

1:10.3

But she also knew the power that technology by itself doesn't market a product.

1:16.8

Basically, it's the human need.

1:19.0

If there's a human need, there's a product that's required.

1:25.0

Helena and her husband Roger, a landscape designer, lived in Atherton, a quiet suburb

1:33.9

outside San Francisco.

1:38.9

Our story begins on a Saturday night in April of 1984 when Roger was out of town on a business trip.

1:50.6

In the middle of the night, a man suddenly appeared in Helena's bedroom and threatened

1:55.7

to kill her.

1:57.7

Helena was sexually assaulted, then robbed before the assailant made his getaway.

2:04.0

Dr. Greenwood described her assailant as being fairly tall, slender, athletic, with a

2:10.9

complexion, perhaps of half black or Hispanic person, all of complexion.

...

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