06x10 - Church Disappearance

[bunniefuu]

NARRATOR: In , six-year-old Cassie Hansen

disappeared from an evening church service without a trace.

There were no eyewitnesses.

The only clue was strand of very rare and very unusual hair.

It was the most telling physical evidence police had.

[theme music]

On a cold November night in ,

the Hansen family headed to a service

at Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church

near Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Ellen Hansen and her two daughters,

Cassie and Vanessa had been looking forward

to family night at the church.

Bill, the children's father had another commitment

and wasn't able to go with them.

-It is etched in my memory that we had supper,

and then the girls got in the car, Ellen was driving.

And they were in the garage, and Cassie

was sitting in the passenger seat of the car.

And she was blowing kisses at me through the window,

you know, waving goodbye.

NARRATOR: Ellen, Cassie, and Vanessa

arrived at the church early.

The girls went downstairs to the children's area

where Sunday school classes usually were held.

Cassie told her mother she had to go to the bathroom

and said she'd be right back.

-A few minutes later, I followed her

and she wasn't around anywhere.

And so I went upstairs, went outside, yelled her name

a couple of times.

-I got the phone call from Ellen saying that Cassie was missing.

And, you know, my heart stopped, and I think I was just

breathing heavy, you know, and just thinking,

oh, boy, this is-- because you know your child,

and you know that she would just not

walk away from something like that.

Right away I knew something was definitely wrong.

NARRATOR: When Cassie couldn't be found anywhere

in the church, the St. Paul Police

were called to the scene.

Within an hour, Cassie's photograph

was distributed to local newspapers

and television stations.

The search lasted throughout the night.

-We stayed up all night long.

People came all night long to help.

There were a couple hundred people helping us search.

NARRATOR: Police went door to door in the neighborhood

and volunteers made hundreds of telephone calls, all

without success.

Early the next morning, police made the gruesome discovery.

Cassie Hansen's body was found in a dumpster behind an auto

repair shop just three miles from the church.

This undercover officer was the first policeman on the scene.

-It truly incensed the community.

It incensed a lot of police officers.

It was as if, it was he seemed to be

treating her as a piece of trash.

NARRATOR: Cassie's leather shoes, minus the buckles,

were found in two separate locations

not far from the dumpster.

Caroline Lowe covered the story for WCCO-TV in Minneapolis.

-The idea of a church is one place you can go,

and you'd let your daughter go to a restroom.

That's something you would do.

You feel a safeness that these basically good

people are all in their together.

The last thing you would ever expect.

And we had no reason to expect a stranger would

come into a church and abduct a child.

NARRATOR: The autopsy revealed signs of sexual as*ault.

Semen found on her dress revealed

the perpetrator had Type O blood.

And some foreign hairs also were found.

The cause of death was strangulation

with a two and a half inch belt.

Abrasions on Cassie's chest indicated

another belt had been used as a restraint.

A member of the church recalled seeing a white man

to years old with dark glasses and white hair

in the vicinity of the church bathrooms

on the night of the abduction.

It wasn't much, but it was the only lead investigators had.

After Cassie Hansen's m*rder, police

attempted to locate all past sex offenders

in the Minneapolis, St. Paul areas.

-We had a total of people who had been identified

by the community, or through police investigation,

of being possible suspects.

Of those individuals, of them

either lived or worked in the area where

the little girl was abducted from.

NARRATOR: Police interrogated many of these individuals,

and soon, they not only had a suspect, but also a confession.

-Vondell Quanly, a woman from Texas,

who had claimed to have k*lled Cassie Hansen.

And when she came to the attention of St. Paul Police

and allegedly made a confession, it turned out that what she did

was read details in the paper, and then recite them.

And she said, I claim I acted alone.

Well, it was quite obvious that she couldn't generate

seminal fluid, and that this was a sham and a fraud.

NARRATOR: Police found two other witnesses who saw a white male

carrying a motionless child near the auto body shop dumpster

on the night of the m*rder.

This was consistent with the description

given by the church member who saw

an elderly man near the church bathrooms.

With no other leads, police contacted the FBI's Behavioral

Science Unit in Washington, DC.

These profilers analyzed the background and behavior

of criminals who have committed similar crimes,

and make recommendations about the type of individual

who should be considered a suspect.

Former agent, John Douglas, created the behavioral profile

of Cassie Hansen's k*ller for the St. Paul Police.

Douglas said that the k*ller would be a white male, a loner

with a poor self-image who probably had

a history of child sex offenses.

Douglas also predicted that the man would

frequent parks where children played.

He would be nocturnal and drive around at night.

After the m*rder, he wouldn't flee the area.

He would feel what he had done was justified.

He may have kept a souvenir from the crime.

Most important, he would be obsessed with the m*rder

and need to talk about it.

One of the tips called into police

was from Dorothy Noga, a massage parlor employee.

-How's that? -Terrific.

NARRATOR: She told police that one of her customers

was a taxicab driver, Stuart Knowlton,

had been in her massage parlor the day

after Cassie Hansen's m*rder.

-By the way, Dorothy--

-Hmm?

-If anybody asks, would you tell them

I was in here last night, too?

NARRATOR: Which made her suspicious.

During police questioning, Knowlton

denied he was involved in any way.

NARRATOR: Knowlton also claimed to have an alibi.

He said he was on duty driving his taxicab

on the night of the m*rder.

If his alibi checked out, police had hit a dead end.

Three months passed since Cassie Hansen's m*rder.

And police finally had a suspect in -year-old taxicab

driver, Stuart Knowlton.

But Knowlton had an alibi.

He said he was working on the night of the m*rder.

In the back alley underground of massage parlors,

it's not unusual for clients to confess their most perverse

sexual fantasies and sometimes their secrets.

Masseuse Dorothy Noga had many clients who confided in her.

Knowlton was one of them.

He asked Dorothy to say he was at the massage

parlor on the night of Cassie Hansen's m*rder.

Noga went to the police and offered to tape record

her conversations with Knowlton.

But Police declined her offer as too dangerous.

Janice Rettman also was familiar with Stuart Knowlton.

Miss Rettman was head of St. Paul's Public Housing Office.

Eight months before Cassie Hansen's m*rder,

a resident filed a formal complaint

against Stuart Knowlton alleging he made

sexual advances towards some of the children.

-I can't remember anyone being as chilling as he was.

Rettman made the same offer to police that Dorothy Noga had.

To conceal a wire on her body, and talk to Stuart Knowlton

about the m*rder of little Cassie Hansen.

This time police accept it.

When Janice Rettman met with Knowlton,

she asked if he had been following

news reports about Cassie's m*rder.

Knowlton admitted he had.

Then, he made a critical mistake.

He said that Cassie had been beaten about the face.

This fact had not been released to the public.

NARRATOR: Judge Thomas Poch, who prosecuted this case said,

this was their first breakthrough.

-That was crucial.

And that was very critical, because no one had revealed

to the press, to the media, to anyone that she's been beaten.

And only the k*ller could have known that.

Meanwhile, we didn't have any witnesses,

and it was entirely a circumstantial case.

NARRATOR: As police prepared to close in,

Stuart Knowlton was crossing the street in downtown St. Paul.

He was hit by a car and seriously injured.

He was rushed to the hospital where

his leg was amputated below the knee.

-It just seemed to me that divine intervention was there,

and that the children were going to be protected,

in that he would not be able to grab another child.

NARRATOR: When police checked Knowlton's alibi,

they discovered that on the night of the m*rder,

he had not turned in his logbook.

When questioned, Knowlton said his logbook was stolen.

Despite police warnings, the masseuse,

Dorothy Noga called Stuart Knowlton on her own.

She, too, asked Knowlton if he'd been following the news

reports of Cassie Hansen's m*rder.

-She was a hero for us.

She told us that during one of these conversations,

that he admitted to her that had k*lled the little girl.

That he had, in fact, k*lled Cassie.

Dorothy Noga agreed and wanted to help in case,

and stated that she would be willing to talk

to him and to tape these conversations.

And she did this hours on end.

NARRATOR: But he wouldn't repeat the confession on tape.

Later, when Dorothy Noga left her massage parlor,

a man jumped out of the darkness and slashed her throat.

He ran away leaving her for dead.

-I proceeded to the hospital.

Her throat had been slit, that her blood pressure was down

to zero, that they were certain she was going to die.

NARRATOR: Dorothy Noga recovered from her attack.

In an attempt to recall the events surrounding her as*ault,

Dorothy Noga underwent hypnosis.

Through hypnosis, Dorothy Noga remembered the man

who stabbed her that night and left her for dead.

She alleged it was Stuart Knowlton, who att*cked

her just hours after the telephone conversation in which

he confessed to the m*rder of Cassie Hansen.

-He jabbed the knife straight on in, like that on my neck.

And then he pulled it out.

Well, then I knew, you know, that he had cut me,

and I turned my head like that.

And he said, I'll teach you not to talk.

And then he cut it and just slit it all the way down.

NARRATOR: Minnesota State Law prohibits testimony

from individuals with hypnotically enhanced

recollection, so no charges were filed for this incident.

Scientists investigating Cassie Hansen's m*rder

had a semen sample which showed the perpetrator's blood was

Type O. In , DNA testing was still years

away from widespread use in criminal cases.

Stuart Knowlton had Type O blood,

but so did % of the population.

So police obtained a hair sample from Stuart Knowlton,

and sent it along with Cassie Hansen's clothing

to the FBI forensic laboratory in Washington, DC.

There the technicians used a spatula to scrape loose hairs

and fibers from Cassie's clothing.

Under a stereo microscope, those hairs and fibers

were analyzed and compared to hairs

taken from Stuart Knowlton.

The comparison is subjective.

Even if the specimens look similar,

comparing hair samples is not like matching fingerprints.

Al Robillard was in charge of the FBI's Hair and Fiber Unit

at the time.

-Hair comparisons, it's not a means

of absolute personal identification.

Because I say that the hair matches an individual,

or has the same microscopic characteristics

as that individual's hairs, does not absolutely mean it

came from him.

The reason for that is, hairs are not so unique that they

allow you to reach an absolute conclusion.

It's possible that two hairs that are so nearly alike they

can't be distinguished microscopically,

could come from two separate individuals.

NARRATOR: But in this case, Robillard

had made an interesting discovery.

He found a hair on Cassie Hansen's clothing

that was so unique, he had never seen it before,

nor has he seen it since.

-It was so unusual.

In my career looking at hairs at the FBI laboratory,

I've never seen, or I've never matched a hair that

had this unusual characteristic.

A hair disease called pili annulati.

Commonly, that s referred to as either ringed hair

or banded hair.

So I thought this was rather significant.

NARRATOR: Pili annulati is a hair shaft abnormality, which

is very rare and medical experts don't know what causes it.

-If you think, looking at a racoon's tail,

you actually see bands.

And these bands are created, because there's

a breakdown in that area of the cuticle

that begins to separate.

NARRATOR: When Robillard analyzed Stuart Knowlton's

hair, he discovered that it showed signs

of the same condition, pili annulati.

-No doubt about it.

Thousands of hairs over the course of my career,

and I only saw this, or was I able to put two hairs,

associate a victim to a suspect, not only

through the microscopic characteristics,

but also through a disease of the hair.

NARRATOR: With this discovery, Stuart Knowlton

was arrested and charged with Cassie Hansen's m*rder.

Dorothy Noga's testimony held the courtroom

spectators spellbound.

She told the jury what Knowlton said during a telephone call

just hours before she was att*cked.

Knowlton said he was driving his taxicab in the vicinity

of the Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church

when he needed to use the bathroom.

Knowlton ran into Cassie Hansen.

-Hi, how are you? -Good.

-What's your name? -Cassie.

-Are you here for the church services today?

-Yes.

-Are you here with your mom and dad?

-Just my mom.

NARRATOR: He asked her if she wanted to play a game.

-Uh, what kind of game?

NARRATOR: When he took her outside to his taxi,

she became frightened and started to scream.

In the taxi, when Cassie was struggling to get away,

Knowlton strangled her with his belt.

Later, he put her body in a dumpster a few miles away.

He took the buckle off her shoes, possibly as a trophy,

and dropped the shoes in two different locations.

-Stuart had a shoe fetish.

When he talked about shoes at first, it meant nothing to me.

In retrospect, it was probably more significant

than I thought.

NARRATOR: The description of Stuart Knowlton's rare hair

condition convinced the jury that the banded hair found

on Cassie Hansen's clothing came from Stuart

Knowlton's clothing.

-The evidence from the FBI laboratory

was the absolutely critical one piece of evidence

that was absolutely essential to tying him in, and to being

able to get a conviction of Stuart Knowlton.

NARRATOR: Stuart Knowlton was found guilty of first degree

m*rder, and second degree misconduct,

and sentenced to life in prison.

To this day, the Hansen family visits Cassie's grave,

and hope that Cassie's death might serve as a warning

to others.

The Hansens founded an organization called,

Save Cassie's Friends, which uses print and video materials

to heighten awareness that child abduction

can happen anytime, anywhere.

[theme music]