Our card this week is Tangie Sims, the Nine of Diamonds from Colorado.

Tangi Sims was found murdered a week before Halloween in 1996 in Aurora.

The lead detectives on her case described her death as brutally violent and fueled by anger.

And from the beginning, they were committed to trying to find her killer.

But even with biological evidence and one very strong suspect, Tangi's case ended up going cold.

Now, in many episodes of the deck, you have heard me talk about how detectives hope that new

technology will help them revisit old

evidence one day, how they're still waiting for new science to solve their case. But today,

you're going to hear a different story about what happens when all that waiting finally pays off,

and investigators get the answers that they have been hoping for all along.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

The Deck. The

The Detective Joe Petruchelli pulled into the parking lot of the Aurora Police Department just before 8 a.m. on October 24, 1996, ready for a regular day on the job, which, as cliche as it sounds, normally started with

coffee and donuts. But as soon as he walked inside, he knew the day would be anything but

regular. When I came into work, the boss says, we got a body in an alley in North Aurora,

go take care of it.

Detective Petritelli took the order and drove over to an alley in a residential part of Aurora.

And as he got out of his car and walked toward where the police and paramedics had started to preserve the crime scene,

he saw what they were gathered around.

The young woman that they were all there for was lying in the dirt between trash cans and lilac bushes.

Her clothes were half off.

There was a black Raiders jacket and a blue t-shirt that were bunched up around her neck and her head, covering her face,

...