Troy Roberts
speaker
357 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 11 Dec
Troy Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
The case became known as the Sweetheart Murders. Investigators from two counties mobilized to hunt down this sadistic killer, but they had no idea just how difficult that would be.
As the town of Davis said goodbye to the two sweethearts, their chilling murders had police fearing a serial killer could be on the loose.
Investigator Ron Garverick is with the Sacramento District Attorney's Office.
Police received hundreds of tips. They even released this composite sketch of a suspicious man spotted in the area.
This is the kind of rough brush that the bodies were found in? Yeah. It's just by luck that the officers found the bodies, right?
But the investigation went nowhere and the trail went cold. Year after year, the lack of answers only added to the family's pain.
Six years passed, and then a tip led police to revisit another double murder that happened around the same time to see if there was any connection.
Like John and Sabrina, this college couple was abducted from a public place, killed execution style, and then dumped around the Sacramento area. But in this case, police quickly made an arrest and got a conviction. The killer was this man, Gerald Gallego, a violent sexual predator. But on the night John and Sabrina were killed, he had an airtight alibi. He was already in jail.
And that's why police, looking at the sweetheart's case years later, arrived at an unusual theory that John and Sabrina's murder was a copycat crime committed by Gallego's friends to try and clear him.
In 1989, nine years after the Sweetheart murders, police arrested David Hunt, Gallego's half-brother, who also had a criminal past. Believing he had help, they rounded up Hunt's wife, Sue Ellen, and his partners in crime, Richard Thompson and Doug Lehner. They became known as the Hunt Group. All four were charged with the murders of John and Sabrina.
Better let that anger go, brother. David Hunt and Doug Lehner maintain their innocence to this day. Did you kill Sabrina and John? No. Did your brother mastermind these killings? No.
Both men admit they were drug addicts and thieves, but insist they would never commit murder. Both of you were described as sophisticated, savvy desperados.
Those dumb things Lehner did included stealing bed sheets from hotels. But this time, even with no physical evidence, he and the other members of the Hunk Group were facing the death penalty. It's ludicrous.
So this wasn't designed to free Gerald? Absolutely not.
On the eve of the Hunk Group's trial, there was a stunning development. And it involved that birthday gift Sabrina had intended to give her sister Andrea, a blanket. Apparently, the killer had unwrapped it and left semen stains that went unnoticed for years. Those stains could now be tested for DNA, a forensic tool that didn't exist at the time of the murders.
Police asked for blood samples from the accused. What did your attorney advise you to do?
Lehner, too, was certain the DNA would prove his innocence.
And as they predicted, the DNA on the blanket did not match any of the men in the Hunk group. So in January 1993, all the charges were dropped.
By then, David Hunt and his co-defendants had spent three years in jail.
After their son John was murdered... Oh, it's so pretty. Dr. Richard Riggins and his wife Kate still had two younger children to raise, son Robert and daughter Carrie.
Showing 261–280 of 357 · page 14 of 18
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