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Chapter 1: What tragic event happened to Nicole Vander Heyden in 2016?
To most Wisconsinites, Green Bay is a magical place. It's where the Packers play. It's a fun town and everybody knows everybody. Drinking is part of the Wisconsin tradition. Green Bay is a great downtown pulse and I feel it's relatively safe. Nobody would ever think that something like this would happen in our community.
Continuing coverage tonight of a death investigation in the village of Bellevue. When I had gotten the news, I just shook. I just shook. There is police activity in a field. I was a good friend of Nicole Vander Heiden's. She was my neighbor. We watched each other's kids. She just was a ball of fire. Nicole Vander Heiden was 31 years old.
She was living with her boyfriend, Doug Dietry, and they had just had a baby together. It was Friday, May 20th of 2016. Doug and Nicole decided to go out that night. This was an opportunity for them to go out and have a great time. The night didn't end in a great time. It ended in a nightmare. Nikki walked off into the darkness that night. She just walked off. She vanished.
That was the last anyone saw of her. About where was she found? Right down this embankment. When we arrived on scene on this one, you kind of knew right away it was probably going to be different. At the scene, that was the most apparent thing, is the trauma to the left side of the face. When you came here, there was no way to identify her. You had no idea who she was? Not right away, no.
He woke up in the morning. Eventually later that afternoon, he had called the sheriff's officer, 911, to report that his girlfriend did not come home from the night before. We sent some officers over to her residence to take the missing person report.
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Chapter 2: How did the police begin their investigation into Nicole's murder?
So this is not normal behavior for her? Not at all. This is where Nicole was living? Correct. And you believe that she was killed here? Correct. Across the street, in the roadway. A large quantity of blood that was determined to be Nicole's. Everything's pointing to Doug Dittry's. Yeah, so then Monday night... Right now I'm going to be taking you into custody.
We felt we had probable cause to arrest Doug Dittry. I'm a decent guy. Okay, I'm a decent guy too. I get that, I'm sure you are. I think people were shocked. People are wondering, could he have done it? Did Doug do it? His alibi was his Fitbit that he had been wearing all night. And that supposedly proved that he was asleep at the time of her murder.
The technology is really what drew me to this case. We had this evidence we wanted to check out, have tested at the lab. The DNA evidence starts to come back. and it belonged to an unidentified male. Subject outside on the porch. That was our goal, is to figure out who is this mystery person. It's definitely a whodunit.
There's lots of twists and turns to it, and it's hard to know who's telling the truth. Green Bay is supposed to be a really safe place. You know, mothers don't go missing, and police don't find their bodies in farm fields. February 2018. Friends and family of Nicole Vander Heiden gather in a packed Brown County courtroom seeking justice for her brutal, senseless murder two years earlier.
What happens in this case could definitely come down to the technology. Kate Bricolet covers crime for The Daily Beast. Who would do this? Who would do this to Nikki? I was just, it's not real. You know, that can't be. Tiffany Hoffman was a close friend of Nicole's who everyone called Nikki. They had been friends for years and shared a love of the outdoors.
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of her? Light, spirit, a verve and a zest and zeal. She was close with her family and loved her children. Nikki was a mom to three, Mikayla and Tyler from a previous marriage, and six-month-old Dylan, whose father was her boyfriend, Doug Dietry. The two had met in January 2015 and soon moved in together. She was really, really happy.
When she talked to me, she said they both were excited. Yeah, that they both were excited to have a baby. On the night of Friday, May 20th, 2016, Nikki and Doug make last-minute plans to get a babysitter and join friends at a bar called The Watering Hole to see a Steel Panther concert. I think Nikki was really looking to let loose and have a good time.
As the concert is ending, Nikki decides to go with Doug's friends to another bar called the Sardine Can and leave him. Doug agreed that he would finish his conversation he was having and find her at the next bar. As seen on this Sardine Can security camera, Nikki appears to be having a great time talking and dancing with friends.
But as the night wears on, and Doug still hadn't shown up here at the sardine can, she gets upset and begins sending him angry texts. They were scorching, and they were all but accusing him of infidelity. Sometime after 11.30 p.m., Nikki tries calling Doug, but he doesn't answer. So another friend calls Doug and he answers, and this enrages Nikki. And so she gets up and leaves the bar.
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Chapter 3: What role did Doug Dietry play in the investigation of Nicole's disappearance?
It's here they tell him that Nikki has been murdered. Please don't. Please don't. As Deitri is being questioned, detectives get a warrant to search his and Nicky's home. They find blood on the floor of the garage and in Nicky's car. On the headboard, on the side, and then in the backseat area.
They also discover a pair of Air Jordans in the garage that appear to match the shoe print found on Nicky's back and seem to have blood smudges on the bottom. For us, it's adding up, okay, this is our guy. Just before dawn, an off-duty patrolman reports items scattered along a highway ramp less than two miles from where Nikki's body has been found.
There's a purse as well as her cell phone and items that she was wearing that night. And there are more damning clues found in a neighbor's yard who lives across the street from Doug and Nikki. And what was found here? A large quantity of blood that was determined to be Nicole's, as well as some clumps of blonde hair.
And then there was also a cord, which I would describe as like a phone charging cord. This was a huge discovery. Now they had a murder scene, and it was 118 feet from Dietrich's front door. More than 70 pieces of evidence are sent to the state crime lab. Statements. Now detectives had a theory about how Nikki had died. There was some sort of argument between her and Doug maybe when she got home.
Somehow it ended up out in the street. Right now I'm going to be taking you into custody. Sheriff deputies are recording when they arrest Doug Dietry, who quickly becomes emotional. I just want to answer everything in this. Dietry isn't charged with murder, but deputies hold him on a $1 million bond while they wait for DNA results. Is there DNA on the bottom of the shoe?
Is that blood on the bottom of the shoe? Eighteen days later, investigators are stunned. Crime lab tests show the blood in the car isn't Nikki's. The blood in the garage isn't human. And tests on the shoe stains are inconclusive, but appear not to be blood at all. We had nothing on Doug, so he was released.
What's more, on the night Nicole disappeared, Doug just happened to be wearing a Fitbit, a personal tracking device. It goes on your wrist just like this, like a watch, and it tracks your activities, the steps you take, your heart rate, even your sleeping patterns. When the Fitbit data stored in Doug's phone is examined, it corroborates his story.
He had a few footsteps throughout the night, getting up to go to the bathroom, check on the baby, whatever. His story that he told us was absolutely 100% true. So who killed Nicole Vander Heiden? Will more high-tech forensics blow this case wide open? Nicole's mother and her brother Brandon struggled to understand how anyone could murder their beloved Nikki.
It was a horrendous thing, and it's just so hard to let that out of your heart. What do you miss the most? I'm waiting for her to come walking through my door again, you know? I miss her the most. I miss her. Because I have a picture of me and her when we were younger. Just looked at her every night, and that's all the time. Remember, the evidence appears to clear Doug Dietry.
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Chapter 4: How did technology, like Fitbit data, impact the murder investigation?
It was getting to the point where, you know, we had looked at each other and said, oh, I really hope this isn't a cold case. Their first big break comes over the course of the summer. DNA results trickle in, and they are tantalizing.
The investigators learn that many of the samples taken from Nicole's clothing and from the neighbor's yard have DNA from an unidentified man on dozens of samples, the same partial profile, but never enough for a positive ID. We had this one consistent mystery guy, I guess you'd call it, and our job was to try and find out who that was. It was just a very confusing time.
Nobody knew who would have done this to Nikki. And then finally, that August, almost three months after Nicole disappeared, the investigators get a call from the crime lab. One of the socks Nicole had been wearing has enough DNA to run through the national database, and they get a name. The excitement was amazing. The DNA belongs to a man named George Steven Burch.
I was a hit over the state of Virginia. Virginia? Yeah, Virginia. So it was like, okay, who is George Burch and why is he in Green Bay, Wisconsin, of all places? Yes, we have a name now, but now we need to start digging on who this person is. Burch moved from Virginia to Green Bay on March 1, 2016, looking for a fresh start. A longtime friend gave him a place to stay and helped him find a job.
He also loaned him a car, a red Chevy Blazer. That red blazer would provide crucial evidence. It had been involved in a hit and run accident and destroyed in a fire a few weeks after Nicole's murder. So when detectives run Birch's name through the local police database, up pops the accident report, which leads them to an address for George Birch.
Swear to God, drive by the first time, who's standing out in front of the house smoking a cigarette? George Birch. My hair stood up on the back of my neck. I had goosebumps. It was like, oh my God, there's our guy. They videotape his movements and keep their suspicions to themselves. And they learn that when Birch was questioned about the hit and run, he handed over his cell phone.
And on it, a high-tech treasure trove. He gave them consent to search his phone. They extracted the entire thing. So I requested a copy of that. It's an Android phone that had a Gmail account associated with it. We were recently made aware of this Google dashboard data that could potentially give us GPS data.
You may not know this, but chances are, if you have an Android device with a Google account, your exact location gathered via cell phone towers, local Wi-Fi hotspots, and GPS locators is constantly tracked and stored within Google's servers. the information can be viewed with a tool called Google Dashboard. The investigators obtain a warrant to view Birch's Google Dashboard.
What they get back is astonishing. Birch started the night that Nicole disappeared at Richard Cranium's, a bar a half mile from the sardine can. The data tracks Birch at 2.30 a.m., leaving Richard Cranium's and driving to Nicole's house, the crime scene, where he stayed for nearly an hour. It was very obvious that here's our guy. He is next tracked at the field where Nicole's body was found.
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Chapter 5: What evidence led to the arrest of George Burch?
The memory lives on through the stories we share, things we never forget, and she's okay. She's okay. I love you. She had a passion for life, for living. She had good morals. What more can a mom ask for? In 2021, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld George Burch's conviction.