This was the "I don't remember murder,"
And I'm absolutely bamboozled by this.
Crew: He needed her gone.
Can't have two women living under one roof.
She figured that he'd been cheating.
He thinks the same thing back.
Right after that is when she was killed.
Waters: A young mother was killed
While her 8-year-old son is sleeping in the next room.
Seely: And her own mother
Had been murdered when she was 2.
We not only have to deal with the present,
We have to recreate the past.
My gosh, is there something more
Than just a weird heebie-jeebies coincidence here?
♪
Houston, texas, america's fourth largest city.
I served as a homicide detective
With houston's finest for over 23 years.
I've investigated over 400 murders
And solved 90% with a confession.
Once I have a suspect in the room,
I don't quit until I get justice for the victims.
I am homicide detective fil waters.
When you think you have heard
Or seen everything as a homicide detective,
There's always something that comes along that's more tragic.
Can't even begin to explain the horrific atmosphere that
That scene set in my head.
♪
Crew: Jennifer and I grew up
Right down the street from each other.
Our grandparents both lived in the same neighborhood.
Jennifer was very much a tomboy growing up,
And she stood up for me a lot.
She had a big heart and a big mouth.
[ laughs ]
She didn't hold back from what she was thinking,
Which was a blessing and a curse.
♪
[ dialing ]
[ ringing ]
♪
Waters: May 19, 2012,
My partner brian harris and I are working weekend duty,
And we get a call we've got a homicide scene
In the kingwood area of houston, texas.
The nature of the information on the call is very sparse.
We know that we have a dead white female.
We know that there is a small child that's there.
♪
Harris: We ride up together, and it's an apartment complex.
It's a very nice neighborhood.
Patrol officers are there.
♪
Waters: We work in partners.
Brian and I, we're going to split the investigation
Into a scene side and the witness side.
Harris: In this particular scene,
Fil was going to interview the witnesses,
And I would handle documenting the physical evidence.
♪
The apartment is on the second story.
As you walk in the front door, it's a clean house.
Things are put away.
You go through the living room into a child's bedroom,
And what's in that child's bedroom?
Drawings -- happy drawings.
And there are pictures of a young boy
With his mother and smiles, but where's the kid?
♪
We are able to confirm that the child is safe.
A neighbor had come over during all the commotion
And had taken the child.
♪
And then you go into the master bedroom,
And in between the master bed and the bathroom...
There she is...
Partially covered, laying down on the ground.
28-year-old jennifer mckinley, single mom, had been strangled.
♪
Seely: She was beaten black and blue.
[ camera shutter clicks ]
The main cause of death was strangulation,
But jennifer had multiple abrasions.
She had subdural hematoma to her scalp.
And it was indicative from the scrape on her foot
And scrapes on her arm and the side of her face
That she had fought back.
♪
Waters: There at the scene,
One of the first people I talk to is ben,
The 8-year-old son of the deceased.
Of course, this brings about
An immediate concern for me since I'm a father.
♪
He was so innocent
In his discussion with what he was doing.
♪
Ben tells me that he heard some kind of a noise.
He's not even sure what the noise was...
But it was something that woke him up.
♪
So he goes out into the living room to investigate.
♪
Ben doesn't see anything, doesn't hear anything.
♪
Thankfully, he has not witnessed anything having to do
With his mother laying on the floor dead.
That was a godsend for me.
Whatever took place happened while ben was asleep.
♪
Waters: At the end of our discussion,
He spoke in a low tone,
Almost like he was letting me in on a secret,
And he said,
"you know, I came outside and I saw my mom's car,
But she's not here. I don't see her."
♪
He noticed that the police were there.
He knew the ambulance was there,
But he had no conception of why we were there.
♪
Erick erminger was jennifer's boyfriend.
There was a relationship with erick and with ben.
Erick is not the father,
But he had been in a relationship with jennifer
And had been around ben for three or four years.
Walden: He seemed to be really good with ben.
They did a lot of gaming together
And played a lot of games.
Crew: Erick was very involved in his boy scouts, too.
He was really good for ben.
Waters: The morning of jennifer's death,
Erick is the one who discovered the body.
He was much too distraught to talk.
♪
Erick's mother, yvonne, makes the 911 call.
She lives about two minutes away.
Yvonne shows up at the apartment,
And she does find erick very distraught and she finds ben.
She was very clear that the relationship
Between erick and jennifer was a good one.
Yvonne treated jennifer like a daughter-in-law.
♪
Within an hour of making that scene,
Family members had heard about what had happened to jennifer.
Crew: My sister-in-law called me.
She was like, "jessica, jennifer is dead."
I thought she was lying.
It wasn't true because I had just seen her.
We had just, you know, been together.
♪
Walden: It was shock.
It happened the night before.
They had found her that morning, Saturday morning.
♪
Crew: My very first question was, "where's ben?"
And I did find out that, you know,
He was with his dad, john.
♪
Jennifer met john at church through mutual friends.
The next thing I know, she was pregnant,
And then they were getting married.
♪
Ben was born in July of 2003.
Jennifer loved ben more than anything.
He was her world.
She was a stay-at-home mom.
John did provide for his family,
But it was more out of obligation.
And he had a tendency to be controlling of jennifer.
♪
When john found somebody else, he kicked jennifer out,
And not long after that, the new girl moved in.
♪
Ben was staying with his mom whether john liked it or not.
♪
Once they were divorced,
She said that john was verbally abusive
And that he had put his hands on her a few times.
♪
That's one of those things that she didn't tell anybody about.
♪
At the scene, when john showed up to get ben...
♪
...I noted an attitude of ambivalence.
♪
He wasn't too happy
About the relationship that jennifer had with erick,
But the minute he got there, he was ready to go.
I don't even recall him even asking me
What happened to jennifer.
He wasn't concerned about that.
It was more of,
"I'm ready to get the hell out of here."
This is one of these moments your spider sense is going off.
♪
Waters: May 19, 2012.
28-year-old jennifer mckinley was found strangled to death,
Laying on her bedroom floor.
Jennifer is killed while her 8-year-old son, ben,
Is sleeping in the next room.
♪
Her ex-husband, john mullins, showed up at the scene
And took custody of ben.
We're hearing all kinds of information from,
"it was a healthy breakup,"
To, "uh, there might have been some abuse here."
Waters: Not the most sterling guy on the planet.
John forsaked her for somebody else.
♪
And then another man in jennifer's life
Showed up at our scene.
♪
Harris: There's a guy in the apartment complex.
Definitely got to be sweet on jennifer.
He shares with fil about
The victim's current boyfriend, erick erminger,
He believes he's not good for her,
That he's abusive,
That she wanted to get away from him,
So he's laying out the motive
For the victim's boyfriend being a potential killer.
Or is he deflecting attention away from him?
♪
Waters: Well, the nosy neighbor comes to us as mike.
He wants to put himself as being the white knight in this.
He wants to be the guy that's going to come in,
And he's going to defend jennifer's honor
By castigating what he thought about erick.
So he wasn't a big fan of erick, it was clear,
But he was a huge fan of jennifer's.
For him, I think it went beyond friendship.
She was nice to him,
Never romantically interested in him.
Well, how do we know that?
Because of another friend,
A female in the apartment complex.
What does she tell fil at this time?
"that guy who just told you about her boyfriend?
I don't know about him, either.
He might be a little obsessive about my friend."
So now do we have three people
That could potentially be involved?
♪
Waters: Once we have cleared the scene,
I take jennifer's phone.
♪
I find text messages the night of jennifer's death
Between mike and jennifer.
Mike is kind of fawning over jennifer,
Telling her that she's a very pretty girl,
That erick doesn't deserve her,
And ends it with, "you know what I mean?"
What does he mean?
Does he mean that, "I'm the guy for you,
Even though I'm married and have my own children"?
We're not sure what the depth is
About his affection for jennifer,
But he's definitely sending a different message to jennifer
Than jennifer is returning to him.
♪
Seely: It did seem like there was evidence of a new suitor,
A new romantic relationship,
And that could always be a potential suspect.
You don't know how that person is perceiving jennifer.
You don't know if they're making the relationship
To be bigger than it is, and they could have become angry
If she's not willing to leave erick.
Waters: We check out mike,
And his story was confirmed by his wife.
He was with her.
He's quickly eliminated from this,
But we're building this mosaic as a result of mike's claim
That erick had been abusive to jennifer.
I had to ferret out and make sure that either there was abuse
Or there was not abuse.
My next step is to start contacting friends
And family members of jennifer to see if we have any evidence.
♪
Jennifer's family is very supportive of the relationship
Between erick and jennifer.
Erick's filled a void in jennifer's life.
He's filled a void in ben's life.
The family contrasts their relationship
To the relationship she had with john,
Who dumped her and destroyed her life.
Crew: Erick was just so different from john
In every way.
Erick was very tall and masculine and with a beard,
And he was a man.
And john was...Not.
Walden: When she got in a relationship with erick,
She was happy.
We were happy for her.
They seemed to have a really good relationship.
♪
[ telephone rings ]
Waters: Within hours of the investigation starting
And progressing,
I get a phone call from charles wright,
And he identifies himself to me as jennifer's grandfather.
I start to talk to him about what he knows
About the relationship with jennifer, erick, and john,
And I'm starting to see a pattern now
That the relationship that john and jennifer had -- not good.
♪
Then I was stunned
When mr. Wright made the comment
That he'd been through this before.
♪
Seely: When jennifer was 2,
Jennifer's own mother had been murdered.
♪
Jennifer was inside the home.
And they find jennifer walking around the scene.
♪
Mr. Wright and his wife raised jennifer as their own daughter.
♪
With jennifer's death a quarter of a century later,
Mr. Wright is reliving the same set of circumstances.
Now he's lost two daughters to an act of violence.
That's something that I can't imagine ever having to endure.
I don't know how many years that would take off of a person.
♪
I'm thinking to myself, "my gosh, is there a connection
Between what happened to jennifer's mother
And jennifer 25-something years later,
And is jennifer's son in danger now of an unknown threat?"
♪
Waters: We have 28-year-old jennifer mckinley
Strangled to death in her bedroom
While her son, ben, slept in the next room.
Within 24 hours of our investigation,
We find that jennifer's mother, 22-year-old tammy wright,
Was murdered in 1985.
Is there something more than
Just a weird heebie-jeebies coincidence here,
Which I do not believe in coincidences,
Or is this something we need to further explore?
♪
We're talking about a triple homicide.
It was a big deal then. It's a big deal now.
And what is my first question -- "is the case closed?
Did they find a suspect?"
♪
In 1985, delbert bryan is one of our victims
In that particular homicide, and his boss makes a call to hpd
Because he's concerned
That delbert hasn't shown up for work.
♪
What police officers find is a horrific scene.
Delbert is dead.
Two women are dead, shot to death.
One of those women is tammy right,
And they find tammy's daughter, jennifer,
In the midst of these dead bodies.
♪
Jennifer, as a 2-year-old,
Was in imminent danger when this occurred.
♪
Walden: After tammy was killed,
Jennifer came to live with my grandparents.
♪
Waters: When I talked to mr. Right,
He explained to me that the relationship
Between his daughter
And her husband, jennifer's father, was not good.
It was an abusive relationship. They had split up.
♪
Jennifer's father had gone to the apartment
To talk to tammy.
Got in an argument.
♪
Walden: And he had yelled through the apartment door
That he was gonna kill her.
And he ends up being arrested for domestic violence.
♪
Crew: Jennifer did not like her father,
And she let everybody know.
She would not use his last name.
Waters: But tammy's husband was in jail at the time,
So obviously, he didn't do it.
But the question remains,
"did he put somebody else up to do it?"
♪
As we peel back the onion on people's lives,
Eventually, you peel it back far enough,
You're gonna start to cry.
♪
Walden: After jennifer's death,
My grandfather talked to cold case,
And they had said they were looking at it,
Possibly add something, some dna they were going to send off.
Waters: There was forensic evidence
That could be submitted for analysis
That was not available in 1985.
When I went in and discussed that case
With the cold-case sergeant,
We determined that evidence was a hairbrush.
That hairbrush was submitted for dna analysis.
A profile resulted from it, and it was entered into codis.
But nothing resulted from that further investigation.
To this day, that case does remain open.
No suspect has ever been identified.
No killer has ever been caught.
♪
As horrible as the set of circumstances were
That looked like they were mirrored,
There was no connection to tammy wright's murder
And jennifer's death.
♪
Seely: It's really hard to say
What the lasting effects could be
From having such trauma at such a young age,
And then growing up without a maternal figure
To kind of guide you.
♪
Friends reported that jennifer had low self-esteem
And she was afraid to be alone.
Waters: Based on how john treated jennifer --
She's completely rejected for another woman --
John mullins, the ex-husband, was a suspect in the case.
♪
With john,
We were able to verify where he was and who he was with
And eliminated him fairly quickly
From the ranks of the suspects.
Just as important to eliminate suspects
As it is to find the right person.
♪
In the course of our investigation,
We want to send people back out
To do a canvass of the apartment complex
Because when we do the initial canvass,
People are at work, they're not there.
We want to go back and knock on doors
And see if there's anybody
That may have heard something in the night.
We may be developing some new information.
We got to not only put together our victim's life,
We got to put together
What are the last moments before this murder.
♪
And the coworker mentions, "yeah, we're drinking,
And erminger was pretty hammered,
But hammered to the point that at least he has enough sense
To call his old lady, jennifer for a ride."
It's late.
She's got to to get a babysitter to watch little ben.
Waters: The information that we received from that neighbor
Is that jennifer not only had gone to go pick up erick
And left ben with him,
But she had returned, picked ben up,
And presumably had brought erick back to the apartment
Around 10:30, 11:00.
She's fuming.
She figured that he'd been cheating.
He thinks the same thing back.
Erminger might have been the last one to see jennifer
Before she was killed.
Waters: There's only two people in that bedroom,
And one of them's dead.
So while I don't have any eyewitnesses to the murder,
One and one still equals two.
♪
The day after 28-year-old jennifer mckinley
Had been murdered,
We found that she went to pick up a boyfriend,
Erick erminger, at a bar.
♪
Erick was much too distraught to talk at the scene.
Erick claimed that he just found her dead body the next morning.
But nobody was there to actually see the event.
That's all circumstantial.
Circumstantial cases can present problems for a jury
To convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt.
Harris: A district attorney would prefer
A straight-out confession.
"I strangled her."
Waters: So now it was important that I talk to erick.
What did he know
About the night that jennifer was murdered?
♪
[ door opens ]
We start to talk about his activities the night before.
♪
How many beers did you drink?
And, of course, he starts off with the always present answer
For any drunk, "I had two beers."
So I asked him, are you sure that's how many?"
♪
Then finally, he gets to the number nine.
He's clear that he had at least nine beers,
So now my thought is,
"he's making some admissions to me, which is good,
And what is the purpose of the admission?
Is he setting up an excuse for later?"
♪
It's important to establish a timeline.
So he's going to leave his vehicle at the bar,
And he calls jennifer to come pick him up.
Now, he knows that jennifer's got ben at home.
She's going to have to do something with him.
♪
He's now starting this "I don't remember" stuff.
So at that point,
I'm going to try cognitive interviewing techniques,
And this is simply where I want to put him in a frame of mind
Where he is relaxed
So he can remember what he can recall
And try to go back to the beginning of the night.
We're talking about
The discussion between jennifer and erick in the car,
And what I am noticing
Is that as he's getting closer to the apartment,
Now all of a sudden, his memory is starting to fade.
And when we get to the apartment...
...It is almost as though he has now walked into a fog,
And suddenly, he can't remember anything
Beyond walking through the threshold of the front door.
♪
Harris: While I'm watching fil do the interview,
This guy is licking his lips.
He's shifting in his chair, making facial grooming.
Now, none of that in itself means he's lying,
But what I can tell you is based on our experience,
He's doing some things with his body
That tend to be associated with a lie.
Given what I believe to be erick's intellect,
I think this became some sort of weird
Erick erminger game thing
Where we were in this competition,
And as long as he holds out or he's deceptive or whatever,
Then I guess in his mind, maybe he wins.
I'm like, "guy, really?"
I need to put on a whole new set of frickin' hip boots
Because the crap in here is getting really deep.
♪
Waters: Jennifer mckinley, single mom, had been strangled.
Her boyfriend, erick erminger, who had found her dead,
Now is claiming that he has no memory
Of what happened after they got home.
Be smart enough to all of a sudden
Explain everything that went on, and then black out
And allude to what's called alcoholic amnesia,
That when he drinks, he can't remember.
Is this guy pleading insanity?
Clearly, erick was manipulative, holding back.
It's important that I establish that relationship with him,
And in order to do that, and I do this with all my interviews,
Is that I want to share a little bit of myself.
And what we have in common is that we're both fathers.
So I talk about my son.
He talks about his son.
We're looking wide-eyed at each other,
And we're fathers talking.
Then I want to start
Getting into the relationship between he and jennifer.
♪
So we started talking about,
"how did you guys argue when it got bad?
What was the nature of those arguments?"
And he starts complaining,
Which was exactly what I wanted him to do.
I wanted him to start telling me about what sets him off.
She picks him. She pushes him.
And he's now setting up his excuse for strangling jennifer.
Without hesitation, talks about physical contact, yes.
"oh, yeah. I'd push her away from me."
I ask him to relax in his chair, close his eyes.
♪
As long as erick keeps talking to me,
I'm going to keep talking to him.
Patience is a virtue,
Especially in the interview room.
Erick's at home, and he's passed out,
Gone to sleep, whatever.
Detective waters had searched jennifer's cellphone
And found text messages.
The text messages painted the picture of a woman
Starting to suspect that erick may have been cheating.
And jennifer is getting so upset with him.
♪
One of the most ominous messages is the very last message,
Where she says she's going to wake him up and confront him.
Waters: She intimates that
If she does that, she's going to regret it.
Seely: Erick erminger is very deceptive.
He doesn't answer questions directly.
He doesn't even refer to jennifer by name.
Erick's deflection in this is
He's going to claim alcoholic amnesia.
This is something that he's calculated,
So I've got to press erick to get him again
As close to the truth as I can possibly get him.
There comes a point where I just tell him straight out,
"look, you're in the room.
You've strangled her. You've done it with your hands.
Come on."
And he has now said that, "I did it."
No expression of remorse -- ever.
Harris: When you strangle someone,
That is the most personal way
To literally squeeze the life out of somebody.
And a strangulation takes about two minutes.
Count to 120.
It's about the average time it takes
To squeeze the life of a grown person.
She's fighting.
She's hitting so hard on that bed
That her ankle gets cut.
That's really personal.
♪
Waters: We get who it is,
Where it happened, how it happened,
And now we need the why did it happen.
At that moment in time in that interview room,
I've got him as close to the truth as I can possibly get.
He's just not going to go any further than where he went.
♪
Seely: Without the confession,
This would have been a circumstantial case,
So the confession that detective waters was able to get
From erick erminger in that interrogation room
Was crucial to prosecuting this case.
The circumstances of him being one of two adults
That are in the apartment when they go to bed admittedly
And how she's beaten, his description of the events,
And her injuries, it really left no other suspect.
He walked in, we were set to pick a jury,
And he asked the court to plead guilty to the judge.
♪
The judge ultimately gave him
40 years in the texas department of corrections.
♪
Waters: I call it the "I don't remember" murder
Since this is the only case of 23 years
Where a claim of alcoholic amnesia
Was used as the primary foundation for the denial.
And he stuck to it.
♪
I would tell her I loved her.
♪
This picture is the reminder of the family
How we got together no matter what,
And christmas was a time that we all spent together.
And no matter what the year brought
And how busy we were during the year
And didn't see each other,
We got together, and, you know, smiled.
Crew: Jennifer was definitely one-of-a-kind.
She was such a great friend and a great mother.
She brought so much laughter.
Waters: What I always strive for in every case,
Find the right person who did the wrong thing,
Bring about a measure of justice
So that they might find some peace.
♪