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Manhunt in Idaho for Murder Suspect; Floods Hit 12 States; Tiger Woods Trailing at the PGA

Aired August 10, 2013 - 16:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(LIVE PRESSER COVERAGE)

ANDREA DEARDEN, PIO, VALLEY COUNTY, IDADO SHERIFF: Right. So, that's, you know, we call on the forest service. We call on fish and game, BLMs, these are the people who are experts. We certainly use the local resources here to give the FBI and all of the search teams involved here the best possible information. And we're using all of those resources, maps and, you know, topography and things like that to make sure we know what we're dealing with as we move in.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And then what about nighttime?

DEARDEN: At this point I don't have a nighttime plan. It does sound like there will not be a lot of activity during the night simply for safety reasons. It isn't practical to have people out there at night and so it sounds like operations will likely end or be suspended, I don't want to - you know, certainly continue to move - tips coming in and all of that, but it doesn't sound like we'll have people in the wilderness area overnight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are not talking about in the aircrafts or the night planes or -

DEARDEN: No, not at this point.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Can you talk about just the public up there. It's Saturday and people are out recreating, what is the interaction that police are having with the public. Is there a challenge there?

DEARDEN: Haven't had any issues or any concerns reported about public interaction there. They are stopping people from coming into certain areas. There are already people in the wilderness area that have been camping or have been going down the river. We're talking to everyone. We want any information that we possibly can find from anybody who might have seen something or heard something and so we're certainly going to talk to anyone that we come in contact with, but at this point haven't had any reports of any problems.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So, are you stopping rafting groups from going through?

DEARDEN: I don't believe that we are. I believe that as long as they are inside the wilderness area, as long as they have already gotten access inside, then they're able to go about their normal course. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A lot of the multiday rafting trips, they pull out, they put their raft gear on the shore and they go to - any reports of -

DEARDEN: Nothing. No reports of missing vehicles, missing rafts, any kind of missing gear.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Can you talk about how authorities up there are not leaving any stone unturned, they're searching vehicles, they're searching everything.

DEARDEN: At this point we know that any piece of information, any piece of evidence, any clue that we can find could be what we need to bring Hannah home safely and so we are not going to take, you know, any chances in missing something, so absolutely, we're going to investigate every possible lead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Have any clues been leaked from that process so far?

DEARDEN: I can't speak directly to any leads or pieces of evidence that we've been able to uncover at this point.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Any additional information about Dimaggio's outdoor experience or the level of expertise he has?

DEARDEN: I don't. I have heard the same information that you have, in terms of him described as a survivalist. I don't know how they define that or where that comes from or what kind of experience he may have with camping or that kind of backcountry area.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You still don't have any information (INAUDIBLE) -

DEARDEN: I don't. I don't have any information about whether he's been here before or what his - what his history is.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I hear you've been able to glean his travel pattern between California and (INAUDIBLE)?

DEARDEN: I think they have pretty good information from, you know, at least a pretty good idea of where he might have traveled as he made his way up from California. But those specifics haven't been released at this point.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's the chain of command? Where is everything being run? Where are headquarters?

DEARDEN: We have an emergency operation set up where there's joint command. It's not here at the fire station but it's over in the emergency operations center here in Cascade and just as any operational teams, you know, they work as a team and they certainly coordinate amongst themselves but then we have the main emergency operations center here which is the multi-jurisdictional, you know, all of the coordinating goes on at the highest level here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Over there by the -

DEARDEN: Across from the sheriff's office.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is there a camp out there, a field base that people are gathering in?

DEARDEN: I don't believe so, no. I don't believe so.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How people are being provisioned and taken care of? Where is everyone staying? How is everyone being taken care of?

DEARDEN: Well, they just got here this morning. Most of these teams just came in here early this morning and so we absolutely are going to make sure that they have a place to stay, a place to sleep. Make sure that they get food and water. I mean their safety is a top priority for us. I don't know where that will be at this point but that's certainly a concern. Certainly something that we keep track of and make sure that they are taken care of.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you know where all the FBI is from? Are they all from one location?

DEARDEN: No. Various locations. We have teams here from San Francisco, Portland, Salt Lake City and Quantico, I believe.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These include S.W.A.T., snipers?

DEARDEN: They include tactical teams. I don't know the exact kind of certification and things that these teams have but they are highly trained tactical teams.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you using any -

(END OF LIVE PRESSER COVERAGE)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: All right, everyone, welcome to the NEWSROOM. It's just past 4:00 Eastern Time here in New York City, and we're going to begin in Idaho where you saw the press conference there, a massive manhunt continues to intensify today and you see authorities in Cascade County, Idaho, just wrapped up a news conference.

They are looking for this man to the right of your screen James Dimaggio, who is suspected of killing Christina and Ethan Anderson in San Diego on Sunday and kidnapping 16-year-old Hannah Anderson. The search for the pair now focused on the rugged mountain area in central Idaho where the suspect's car was discovered on Friday. Following all of this for us is CNN's Paul Vercammen. He is live in San Diego where the search, began there. Paul, new details. What are we learning from? We heard from the press conference there that they're searching for? What other new details are we learning?

PAUL VERCAMMEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Don, I also was able to talk to detectives off camera just before we started here and here's what's going on. You've got 150 well-armed officers in this hunt. They are not sending any rookies with just a handgun, let's say, and a nightstick. If you look at the video, you can see many of them have automatic assault rifles.

They are taking this so seriously, they are so worried about James Dimaggio or Jim and his level of dangerousness, that's because not only is he accused of one murder and soon to be two, but also of arson and of kidnapping, all these charges still to come. They have fanned out throughout that wilderness area, Don, and they're going to have to go about it on foot. You just can't get any vehicles in there.

They may get help from horseback or all-terrain vehicles later. Of course, they're going to get helicopters into the action here, but don't forget, Don, this couple has not been seen since last Wednesday. So, they had an opportunity to try to get themselves into the backcountry and a detective telling me again just a short time ago here that Dimaggio well armed himself with camping equipment, had bought camping equipment as a run-up to this, so there was quite a level of premeditation there, Don.

LEMON: All right. Paul Vercammen in San Diego. Paul, thank you very much.

We're going to continue to follow this story, of course. Let me give you a look at how the events surrounding the case unfolded this week. It began on Sunday when San Diego county firefighters responded to calls of Dimaggio's house engulfed in flames. They found the body of Hannah's mother inside and on Monday, August 5th, California goes statewide with an amber alert for Dimaggio for Hannah and Ethan.

For the first time California sent amber alerts to cell phones nationwide and then by Wednesday the team is spotted with Dimaggio by a horseback rider in the remote and rugged area about 70 miles from Boise, Idaho. Friday, August 9th, Idaho State Police searching trailheads in the area find the blue Nissan Versa registered to Dimaggio near a remote trailhead in the River of No Return Wilderness area.

Then this morning confrontation - confirmation from the San Diego sheriff's department the second set of remains found in the burned-out house are those of eight-year-old Ethan Anderson.

Up next on CNN, a major flood threat across a big portion of the United States. 12 states in danger of high water. We're live from one state that already's been hit hard and it's in the threat zone again today. That's next.

And a brutal murder. The victim's picture posted on Facebook by the suspect. Her husband. And it stayed up for hours. What should social media sites do to keep this from happening?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Dangerous floods hit 12 states today. Right now three people are missing in Colorado where floods and mud slides hammered a small town.

Cars were swept away by floods in Manitou Springs, Colorado, at least one person was killed. Police found a man's body under a huge pile of debris on this highway. And right now Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee face extreme flood risks just days after fatal floods - fatal foods - or floods, excuse me, devoured areas in all three states.

In Nashville, dozens of families are in shelters, their homes swallowed by floodwater. In southern Missouri now, floods killed at least two people this week. Crews rescued more than a dozen people in Hollister, Missouri, some had scrambled to rooftops of their flooded homes waiting for help. I want to go down to CNN's Zain Asher. She's in Hollister for us today. Zain, you just spoke to a flood survivor with an amazing rescue story, what did you hear?

ZAIN ASHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely, yes. I spoke to a woman named Tracy Nelson, who actually up until this week used to live in this mobile home right here. She said on Thursday early in the morning when the floods came gushing in, she heard people banging on her door desperately telling her to escape. A few minutes later she realized that her mobile home, get this, was floating. It started off over there and then it floated all the way here. Here it is now. It floated with her inside it, by the way.

I just want to show you what it looks like inside right now. You can actually see a lot of her belongings have completely been destroyed. Completely drenched in mud right now. Just completely gone. She came back here a little while ago to sort of survey the damage and her eyes were welling up with tears and it's really hard when someone shares this kind of story with you, it's really hard to kind of not get emotional.

She said when the water came in at 85 miles an hour reaching 15 feet high, she said her children ended up on the roof here waiting to be rescued. She ended up, by the way, clinging, take a look over there, clinging to that basketball hoop for several hours as she waited for the fire department to come and save her. Take a listen to what she said to say -

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TRACY NELSON, FLOOD VICTIM: It was just - it was traumatizing. But I felt safer there than I did in the water, you know? I was in the water for a couple hours. You know?

ASHER: You were clinging to the basketball hoop for a couple of hours as well. What was that like?

NELSON: You know, I mean, it felt like forever. It was, you know, I was wondering are they going to be able to get to us?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ASHER: And I asked her, you know, what do you plan to do now? What are you going to do now? And she said to me that initially when her things were destroyed by the flood, she said that she did spend a little bit of time in a shelter. She then moved her family into a motel, but she doesn't really know what she's going to be doing next. Everyone in this community here right now is really focused on trying to protect themselves from looters, Don?

LEMON: Sad, thank you very much, Zain. Zain Asher reporting.

A newborn killed and returned to his family two years later. At least that's what everyone thought. Next, the truth revealed after nearly five decades. So, who is he? And what happened to the infant snatched from a hospital?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: You want to know how Tiger Woods is doing at the PGA championship? Well, just take a look at the leader board. There it is. Well, way, way down the leader board. Say, around 49th place so far, or so far. Yes, he's playing that badly. And at the top is Jason Dufner trying to win his first major who until today was best known for weird internet trend.

Rachel Nichols, I had never heard of this. Where have I been? She's covering the tournament for us and she joins us from Rochester, New York. Dufner lit up the course yesterday. How is he doing today? And tell us about this weird internet trend.

RACHEL NICHOLS, CNN SPORTS: He just double bogeyed but still enough to keep him in the lead and he's just plodding through the course which you know Jason Dufner is an (INAUDIBLE). He's a laid-back guy, and there are times you wonder does the guy have a pulse. And that leads to our weird Internet trend.

I want to show you this picture, Don. Take a look. Dufner is actually doing a good thing visiting a bunch of school kids in Texas but here he is just sitting on the floor with them and he looks kind of half dead there to the point where his fellow PGA golfers started posting their own pictures guys all around the tour of themselves Dufner-'ing and this led to thousands of people online if you google it, google dufner'ing and they're all in their red shirts dufner'ing themselves.

So had a little bet with your producer whether you guys and you guys in the control room would Dufner by the end of the show, but I can promise you if for some reason he does win this tournament you will see Monday morning pictures all around online him Dufner'ing with the trophy, because he does it better than anyone. He's Jason Dufner.

LEMON: Rachel, you're setting me up, you're saying looking half dead in the control room -

NICHOLS: I am.

LEMON: I don't want to say that about my crew but my producer just said we do that every day in the control room. So, there you go.

NICHOLS: See, there you go.

LEMON: I did see the pictures after I got that nice note from you to check it out. Thanks, Rachel Nichols.

NICHOLS: Have fun, guys. LEMON: All right. A 49-year-old recently discovered something amazing about himself, his name, his parents, his background. None of it was true. Paul Fronczak grew up believing he was kidnapped as an infant in 1964 and returned to his parents as a two-year-old, right? But he recently took a DNA test and he found out everything he had been told was actually wrong. He didn't know who he was. Now he's eager to learn the truth about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PAUL FRONCZAK, SUBJECT OF 49-YEAR-OLD CASE: I've been struggling with the fact that I want to know if the real Fronczak baby is still alive and what happened. I also want to find out who I am and why I was abandoned at a variety store in Newark, New Jersey, back in 1965.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: So, the FBI is now back on the case, opening files no one has looked at in decades and using new technology in an effort to learn who might have kidnapped the real Paul Fronczak.

So for detectives few things are as rewarding like cracking a cold case like the one you just saw and putting a criminal behind bars years after the crime, but what if they get the wrong guy? Next hour we're going in-depth and learning about a case where some people say justice was served but not everyone is convinced.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: On December 3rd I went out to play a game called duck the cars with Maria. A man approaches us coming down the street and asked us if we'd like a piggyback ride. That's the last place I had seen either one of those two were on that corner.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The police were out with the spotlights and the megaphones.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The police all started showing up asking the same questions over and over and over. But I never did come across a picture of Johnny, and I think everybody was disappointed because everybody wanted that person to be found.

REPORTER: Prosecutors allege this 71-year-old grandfather hides a sinister secret.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why are you treating me like a suspect? I don't like this.

REPORTER: Jack McCullough was arrested in Seattle and indicted on kidnapping and murder charges in the 1957 death of seven-year-old Maria Ridulph.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was no question in my mind that we have the individual that killed Maria Ridulph.

JACK MCCULLOUGH: I did not kill Maria Ridulph. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The evidence that I saw tells me that Jack didn't do it. He couldn't have done it. He's up the road.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Primarily we had an eyewitness to the crime itself.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You just don't forget a face. You do not forget the face of somebody that has snatched somebody from the street corner.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A 55-year-old identification by a girl who was then eight years old.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I would like the truth to come out and I don't think it has.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The right man's been convicted and he's sitting in prison where he belongs.

MCCULLOUGH: My name is Jack Daniel McCullough. I've been accused and convicted of a murder I did not commit.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: You really don't want to miss next hour. We'll break down the case, the victim, the suspect and why some people say they got the wrong guy. "The Coldest Case" coming up next hour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Viral videos nothing new, but this week something different hit Facebook a viral crime scene. Derek Medina faces a first-degree murder charge for allegedly killing his wife. What makes this case so notable is that he posted the photo on Facebook. I'll give you a moment to look away before we show you the picture, it is blurred, but still it is very disturbing. So here it is.

This is the victim, Jennifer Alfonzo. The picture and the confession stayed up for five hours. CNN Money tech correspondent Laurie Segall joins me along with Casey Jordan, a criminologist out of Bar Harbor, Maine. Thanks to both of you for joining us.

So, Laurie, Facebook took down the post but it took a while, do they have a responsibility to pull stuff like this down and do it quickly?

LAURIE SEGALL, CNNMONEY TECH CORRESPONDENT: I mean, absolutely. This was up there for five hours. As you said it was shared over 100 times on Facebook. It went viral on buzzfeed. You know, via their terms of service, they do say they reserve the responsibility and the right to take down violent images, images that depict a crime.

Now the big question is legally do they have that responsibility? I actually spoke to CNN's legal analyst, I think you're going to be surprised to what he had to say. Listen to this, Don -

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, as offensive as it was to post the photograph of someone who had been murdered, there's nothing illegal about it from the standpoint of Facebook. Facebook took it down in five or six hours. In fact, Facebook was under no legal obligation to take the picture down at all. Nor is Buzzfeed or any other entity that runs it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LEMON: Interesting. So, Casey, to you now, having heard that, how much of a help is this to police? People are still committing crimes and going out of their way to preserve the evidence online?

CASEY JORDAN, CRIMINOLOGIST: And you have to ask yourself what sort of personality really wants to do that. I mean, he killed his wife. He actually went and - to his family members and confessed and then went to the police station and turned himself in. But not before posting that on Facebook. And ironically he didn't mention the Facebook posting to the police at all when he was there.

So, you really have to wonder whether or not this is the sort of thing that can inspire people who are completely entrenched in social media, maybe even addicted to it. For them posting the update that they killed someone on Facebook is just as normal to them as posting what they did on vacation. That's the real question. What kind of brain really can think that's really just part of everyday life?

LEMON: Absolutely. Laurie, I just have a few seconds left here. So, Facebook I imagine, they're reviewing their policies here and they're going to be more dogged about finding these things, right?

SEGALL: Absolutely. I mean I spoke to a source close to the company and what they say is oftentimes the police and the investigators can come and they can ask for them to reserve a Facebook profile if there's evidence. Now, this person did say to me, we have to scrutinize it if investigators give us an affidavit because we don't want people to overstep boundaries especially when we think about the NSA and we think about how much our information is shared. There's this fine line between privacy and protection, but more crimes are happening online and it's, you know, this is a digital landscape now.

LEMON: Casey, Laurie, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

SEGALL: Thanks.

LEMON: Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks weed right now.