Mr. Ballin

And after a minute, once his eyes adjusted to the dark down there, he saw it was his daughter.

And at that point, he sort of staggered back and he yelled out for his wife to call 911.

Half an hour later, around one in the afternoon, Detective Robert Henderson of the Union County Homicide Task Force drove his police cruiser into a very nice, quiet neighborhood.

His partner, Detective Mike Monacchio, was sitting in the passenger seat.

And at some point, Henderson, he pulled up to the snow-covered curb in front of a large house that was in the process of being roped off with crime scene tape.

Henderson immediately noticed there was an elderly man and woman being interviewed by officers in the front yard of this house.

And as soon as Detective Henderson and his partner got out of their cruiser, one of the officers who was out and about ran over to brief them on what the police knew so far.

He explained that the elderly man and woman were the parents of the victim, Diane Zaleski.

Diane lived alone.

This was her home.

and her parents had come over earlier and found her foyer covered in blood and Diane was found lying dead at the bottom of the stairs in the basement.

Henderson asked if there were any signs of a break-in or a robbery, and the officer said no, but he warned them that the scene inside the house was really unusual.

It seemed like the killer, after killing Diane, had sort of been all over the house, clearly taking a lot of time to both clean up

and also contaminate the scene to make it harder for investigators.

And when Henderson heard this, he sort of raised an eyebrow because in his experience, most killers tried to get away from the crime scene as quickly as possible.

They wouldn't just linger like that.

And so at this point, Henderson turned to Minocchio and was like, you know, how do you want to split this up here?

And Minocchio said he would stay and interview Diane's parents.

That way Henderson could go inside and inspect the rest of the crime scene.

Moments later, Henderson stepped through the front door of Diane's house and he saw the huge amount of blood in the foyer.