Mr. Ballin

So he knows things about the crime scene that he shouldn't know.

But Park felt like there were some other people in this case that also deserved a second look, like Barbara's best friend, Jerry Hicker.

It was true he did have an alibi, and Barbara had told that pawn shop owner, you know, before she was killed, that she was with her boyfriend, which she would not have referred to Jerry as.

But if this was as emotional a crime as Park thought it was, Jerry had to be considered.

After all, he was Barbara's closest friend at school, and maybe he heard she was leaving town and got mad at her.

And then Barbara's roommates, they all seemed to have solid alibis, but maybe one of them had gotten somebody else to kill Barbara.

I mean, Park knew the original investigators hadn't found any evidence of that, but they also hadn't seemed to spend much time on the roommates one way or another.

They just kind of quickly ruled them out.

But Park also knew it could be someone that they hadn't even considered yet, like the utility worker who actually found the body, or maybe another student at BYU who didn't like Barbara and considered her an outsider or a weirdo.

Park wasn't sure yet, but he was confident that they'd be able to pick up some DNA somewhere in the evidence, and once they did, they'd find their killer.

Two years later, on an afternoon in October of 2007, Park paced around his office and periodically stopped to look at the phone on his desk.

He was waiting for a call from the lab, and with each passing moment, he got more and more anxious.

So at this point in Park's reinvestigation of Barbara's murder,

The DNA testing had basically gotten them nowhere.

Over the last two years, the medical lab had gone over almost every single item from Barbara's case, like her rape kit swabs and her clothes.

But they hadn't been able to get any DNA from anything.

It either wasn't there or was just too old and not preserved well enough.

And so the only thing left to test was the dirt that the original investigators collected from underneath Barbara's body.

Park actually had not originally sent in the dirt because he didn't think it would have any DNA inside of it.

But it was now the only piece of evidence that he had left.