Almost 38 years later, the truth about what happened to Kara Lazzinski and who is responsible

for her death still has yet to be revealed. Two suspects were arrested and charged in the case,

but after three trials with three separate juries and weeks upon weeks of testimony, no one

has ever been convicted.

I'm going to share with you what investigators thought and tried to convince the jury really

happened based on highly disputed evidence that stirred controversy even before it hit a courtroom.

And then we're going to talk about what could be done today with contemporary forensics

to figure out once and for all what happened on that October night in 1987.

I'm Kylie Lowe and this is the case of Kara Lazzinski on Darkdown East.

It was a Monday morning, October 5, 1987, and a new-ish reporter at the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut hadn't shown up for work yet.

According to Liz Willens reporting for the Hartford Current,

24-year-old Kara Lazzinski had been at the paper only a few months at that point,

but she was reliable and conscientious and wouldn't have missed work without letting someone know.

So when her absence was noted by an associate editor at the paper,

another reporter who lived next door to Kara was sent to see if she could find her.

The fellow reporter tried calling Kara's apartment, but there was no answer, and so she walked

over to the building at 31 Evergreen Avenue in Hartford. That's when she noticed that the screen on Kara's bathroom window was neatly slit.

Unsettled at the site, the reporter went to go find a maintenance worker for the building,

and together they went inside Kara's apartment.

That's when they found her nude body on the floor.

The telephone had been ripped from the wall,

so the maintenance worker plugged it in and called police. A swarm of Hartford police detectives

...