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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Graham Suspect Linked to More Victims; Moore, OK, Beheading Suspect Confessed to Police

Aired September 30, 2014 - 12:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: New evidence linking the case of a missing University of Virginia student to at least two other cold cases. Is there a serial killer out there or do police think they already have their man?

Also this hour, bipartisan lambasting of the Secret Service director after the secret gets out that the guy who ran across the North Lawn of the White House also ran through the White House carrying a knife. The grilling on Capitol Hill getting hotter by the minute.

And ISIS overruns yet another Iraqi city and military base amid new fears that they are joining forces with other militant groups inside Syria.

Hello, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. And welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

A major break in the case of a missing University of Virginia student, Hannah Graham. The suspect in her disappearance now linked through DNA to the 2009 death of another UVA student, Morgan Harrington. Today's stunning revelation from law enforcement sources bringing more credibility to the possibility that many feared, the possibility that Jesse Matthew, the man in the middle of your screen, could indeed be a serial killer preying on college girls. Athena Jones looks at the game-changing evidence.

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ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Police are calling it a, quote, "significant break." Evidence that could link the suspect at the center of Hannah Graham's disappearance to another missing female college student, Morgan Harrington, who was later found murdered.

GIL HARRINGTON, MORGAN HARRINGTON'S MOTHER: There's a suspect and possibility of a link to Morgan's murder. And I am so pleased that that has happened, but it doesn't change a lot for us.

JONES: State police say forensic evidence found in the course of three separate searches links Jesse Matthew, who's facing charges in the Graham case, to Harrington, found dead in 2010.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Cops have confirmed that human remains found on a Charlottesville, Virginia, farm are indeed those of the beautiful 20- year-old coed. JONES: A 20-year-old Virginia Tech student, Harrington vanished after

a Metallica concert on the University of Virginia campus in October 2009. The pair are among several young women who have disappeared in the area in recent years, raising questions about whether the cases are linked, including from Harrington's mother.

HARRINGTON: I really don't know if it's a cluster phenomena that just is kind of a coincidence or if it's actually a pattern of a predator.

JONES: But until now, police resisted making the connection.

CHIEF TIMOTHY LONGO, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, POLICE: It's easy for me to understand why people would ask that question and have their mind go in that direction, but I just don't have enough facts before me to make that determination.

JONES: Now Virginia State Police are perusing DNA evidence linking Harrington and Matthew, according to a law enforcement source. If that evidence holds up, there could be yet another victim linked to the suspect. According to an FBI statement from 2012, the suspect in the Harrington case matched the DNA profile from a 2005 sexual assault in Fairfax, Virginia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BANFIELD: And Athena Jones is live in Charlottesville now.

So what is next for Jesse Matthew?

JONES: Hi, Ashleigh.

Well, Jesse Matthew is due to appear before a district court judge on Thursday morning for a bond hearing. He'll be doing that via video link from the regional jail here. And I just spoke with his lawyer a short time ago. His lawyer told me that he met with Matthew for two and a half hours yesterday. They're waiting for this bond hearing on Thursday. And a lawyer told me that because everything is under seal in this case, he has not yet been provided with any evidence that links Matthew to either of these two case, the Hannah Graham case, which, of course, authorities are still looking for Hannah Graham, and then this other case of Morgan Harrington.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: All right, Athena Jones live for us, thank you for that.

And what may be even more disturbing is in addition to Hannah Graham and Morgan Harrington, there are at least three other missing persons cases in the area. And, yes, they are young women. Nineteen-year-old Dashad Smith vanished in Charlottesville on November 20, 2012. Seventeen-year-old Alexis Murphy disappeared after leaving her home in August of 2013. She was last seen at a gas station in Lovingston. And then there's 19-year-old Samantha Clarke, who vanished after leaving her home in Orange, Virginia, in September of 2010. Our Randi Kaye takes a closer look at two of those cases and how they may be linked to each other via a different killer. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Just this month, another search for Samantha Ann Clarke in Orange County, Virginia, four years after she vanished. The 19-year-old disappeared in 2010, slipping out after midnight from her townhouse, telling her 14-year-old brother she was going out with friends. She never returned.

BARBARA TINDER, SAMANTHA CLARKE'S MOTHER: She was with me all the time. Everywhere I went, she was with me.

KAYE: Law enforcement spent hours scouring this lake. They came up empty-handed.

CHIEF JAMES FENWICK, ORANGE COUNTY POLICE: Even though we've been at this lake numerous times, our experts in this matter have determined that the lake has not yet been 100 percent cleared.

KAYE: Samantha's cousin believes she always planned to return home.

SUSAN BURNS, SAMANTHA CLARKE'S COUSIN: The only thing she took was her house key. And she said that she would be back before morning.

KAYE: On Samantha's MySpace page, five days before she went missing, a mysterious clue. She posted, "I hate lifer. I need help. I don't know what to do." Samantha's mother believes she knows who took her daughter, this man, Randy Allen Taylor.

TINDER: Randy Taylor come and picked her up. I mean he called her six times and, I mean, why would you call my daughter six times if you ain't trying to lead her on her trying to talk her to come out the house or trying to talk her to do something?

KAYE: Taylor was once looked at by police in Samantha's case. But years later, this past May, in a bizarre twist, he was actually convicted in the disappearance and murder of another girl, 17-year-old Alexis Murphy. Both girls were last seen along the same stretch of Highway 29. Samantha was last seen in Orange, Virginia. Alexis disappeared in Lovingston, Virginia, about 60 miles away. Alexis' family thought they might find her after police found her cell phone, but Alexis' body was never discovered.

TRINA MURPHY, ALEXIS MURPHY'S AUNT: Alexis, if you're out there and you can hear us, just know that your family loves you. We will never stop until you are home. Our family circle is broken right now.

KAYE: Police have surveillance video showing Alexis at a Lovingston gas station in August last year. Randy Taylor was also seen on the video. He's always maintained his innocence, saying that he and Alexis and another man went back to his camper to smoke marijuana. Then he said Alexis and the then-unidentified black man left. Taylor's attorney also argued his client wasn't the last person to see Alexis murphy alive. That instead police should have been focused on a black male, mid to late 20s, with corn rows driving a, quote, 20-year-old burgundy Caprice with 22-inch wheels. KAYE (on camera): Despite all the talk, officials say there is no

evidence linking the disappearance of Alexis Murphy to UVA student Hannah Graham. The Nelson County attorney says the black man later identified and implicated by Randy Taylor was not Jesse Matthew, the suspect in the Graham case. He also said that man had an alibi and was later cleared.

Randi Kaye, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BANFIELD: So investigators say that DNA links UVA kidnapping suspect Jesse Matthew to the death of a University of Virginia student. And as you heard, authorities are looking at other missing women cases that may just be tied to him. But what patterns might they be looking for? What would be the key pieces of evidence that would help them get there? We're going to dig a whole lot deeper with a criminal profiler and our legal panel coming up.

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BANFIELD: Police in Virginia may have a serial killer on their hands. Take a look at the left-hand side of your screen. It's a picture that we've got for you of Jesse Matthew. It's his mug shot in the Hannah Graham case. There he is. And on the right is a sketch of maybe someone different, maybe not. It's the suspect in Morgan Harrington's 2009 death.

And now a law enforcement source says DNA evidence links Jesse Matthew to Morgan Harrington and also to a kidnapping and sexual assault case in 2005. It's pretty strong evidence. But is it enough? And might there be more? And what would they be looking for?

I want to bring in CNN legal analyst Mel Robbins, criminal profiler Pat Brown and forensic scientist Larry Koblinsky. He's a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Larry, I'm going to begin with you, doctor, because when I heard that there was this DNA link, I started to think about the degradation of DNA, since we are talking a number of years. But that might not matter.

LARRY KOBLINSKY, FORENSIC SCIENTIST: No, DNA is a very strong material and they use it in cold cases now, 30, 40 years can lapse and you still have results. I think this investigation broke, the investigation of Hannah's abduction, kidnapping, we don't know where she is, but it led to the warrant to get into the home of Jesse Matthew. And that presumably led to the evidence collection team collecting all kinds of things like hairbrush, toothbrush, clothing. And that kind of evidence could very well be the linkage to the Morgan Harrington murder case because it sounds to me like evidence was collected from the body. And that could be hair evidence. And now that you've got hair and other DNA evidence from Jesse, now you can do the comparison. And that locks us in. That's the link that the police are looking for.

BANFIELD: But right now we don't have all three exactly linked together. We have, you know, separate links to separate cases.

KOBLINSKY: Yes.

BANFIELD: And that could also mean that there might have been multiple perpetrators, which we don't know at this time either.

KOBLINSKY: It's true, but it looks like there's a clustering of these cases in a geographical area. Young people, all about the same page, 18 to 20 years old, college students.

BANFIELD: Yes.

KOBLINSKY: There's more to this than meets the eye.

BANFIELD: Speaking of that, I want to just read this list really quickly. Hannah Graham in 2014. Alexis Murphy in 2013. Dashad Laquinn Smith in 2012. Samantha Clarke in 2010. Morgan Harrington in 2009.

So, Pat Brown, that brings me to you. When you start seeing this, which looks to the untrained eye as a pattern, you have the trained eye. What exactly would they be looking for? What kind of questions might they be asking of the suspect they have in custody to try to maybe figure out if what they have on their hands is, in fact, a serial killer?

PAT BROWN, CRIMINAL PROFILER: Well, we know there - we know there's a serial killer. I keep pushing this concept that, when you have a strange abduction and then you find the woman raped and murdered, you have a serial killer. He's not going to do it just one time in his life. It's ridiculous. We just don't have the other connections yet.

So when we look at the Harrington one, we have the 2005 rape that was linked to that. So the guy was already a serial rapist. Maybe the woman just got away, so he should have been a serial killer back then, too. But clearly with Morgan Harrington, we have a serial killer. And now we have this fellow who is linked to yet another person.

So, yes. So either he is the serial killer or we have more than one serial killer, and that is possible. Although these girls are all college students and they're, you know, one year apart, that doesn't mean there could not be a second one running around. We have found that sometimes they're right on top of each other. It's very strange. But certainly if these women were not all killed by their bad boyfriends, then we have a serial killer out there.

BANFIELD: And there are those myths out there, when you look at the array of the young women's faces on the screen that we just put up, they're different races. They are similar in age. It's not that we had some signature that was so obvious.

Are those simply just myths when it comes to the work you do trying to track the path of a serial killer?

BROWN: Yeah, those myths started a long time ago, and one was m.o., modus operandi, that he's going to do the same type of thing to get these women all the time or that he leaves a signature like tying a bow around their neck. And none of that is true.

The simple fact is, when these women are abducted, usually we just find them raped and simply murdered, strangled, stabbed, and sometimes the guy will have a different weapon with him.

Maybe one time he doesn't have a knife, so he bludgeons the girl. And the next time, he does have a knife.

And as far as who he picks as victims, it's always been who's in the neighborhood. And what happened is, a long time ago, we had whites living in white neighborhoods, blacks living in black neighborhoods, so we -- there was a theory that men killed within their own races. And that's simply not true.

So what we're seeing now is there's a mixture of victims with one perpetrator because, hey, there's a mixture of people around him. He usually kills within a mile of wherever he lives, wherever he works.

BANFIELD: I want to bring in --

BROWN: So those myths are kind of garbage.

BANFIELD: Let me bring in Mel Robbins on this. You're an attorney. And if you're Jesse Matthew's attorney right about now --

MEL ROBBINS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes?

BANFIELD: -- my guess is you told him, shut up, don't say a word, because you are in a lot of trouble.

ROBBINS: I think the strategy if you're representing this monster is you basically know they're going to march him to the electric chair unless he does something very soon to start giving up any kind of information.

These are death-penalty cases. Virginia is a state with the death penalty. I'm sure they will seek it. I agree with Pat. We've got a serial offender against women, for sure, and I think a serial murder. And I think we're going to see more victims beyond what we just saw on that screen. That's just my hunch.

But if I'm his attorney, I'm basically saying, you are screwed. They've got DNA on you, which is just like the best kind of physical evidence that you can have if it's a clean match. You also were the last person seen with Hannah.

You better start talking to me because the only thing that's going to keep your butt out of the electric chair is you giving up information and us copping a plea right here and right now.

BANFIELD: If he is the person in fact -- and these are all allegations at this early stage of this situation -- if he is the person behind any of these missing women, whose, by the way, cases have actually been adjudicated without a body being found in at least one of these --

ROBBINS: Yes, they have, but when you have DNA evidence, it's a whole different ball game.

BANFIELD: But if you start giving up the locations, if you start leading investigators to these locations of these missing women and solving these cases, it does make a big difference for you.

ROBBINS: Yes, it does. If you're the defense attorney, that's your only strategy.

BANFIELD: But you're never going to walk the streets again.

ROBBINS: Oh, my god, no. Not in this case. Are you kidding me? You have allegations of a rape at Liberty University, allegations of a 2005 rape. You have the body with his DNA on it.

You have Hannah Graham who's gone missing, and presumably they've found some kind of evidence connecting him to her because they were able to execute a search warrant and charge him with abduction and attempt to defile.

You also now have all these other cases. Even in Alexis Murphy, if I'm in charge of this case, I'm running DNA evidence on everything that they have physically in her case, and I'm also running it in his house, looking for evidence on her.

BANFIELD: Just look at all these papers. I've got to be honest with you. This is one of the most complex cases.

I'm looking at this 2005 sexual assault in Fairfax, Virginia. The DNA is linking back to the Harrington case. The Harrington case, thank you, Dr. Kobilinsky, is now linking to Hannah Graham's case.

And these other missing cases, I would imagine that's exactly what might be going on as well to see if there's any other link. And by the way, you mentioned it quickly. I need to clear this up.

The Liberty University, there was a rape reported in 2002 at Liberty University in which he was named. He said it was consensual sex. She decided not to go forward and fight this because there are very strong rules, some say at university, Liberty University, no sex of any kind, or you're out.

So ultimately, I think, potentially we could start seeing some developments in that case as well.

We're going to have to have all of you back. This is absolutely fast- moving and really fascinating. Thank you all, Mel Robbins, Larry Kobilinsky, as always, and Pat Brown, thank you to you as well.

Pat, I'm going to ask you to stick around as well because we have very unusual crimes that have been developing in this hour.

To the beheading case in Oklahoma, the man accused of that brutal killing now officially charged with murder today, the worst kind, first-degree, the one that can bring the death penalty.

The man who will be prosecuting the case says that's exactly what he intends to seek. We are going to talk with an investigator about where this case is going in just a moment.

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BANFIELD: I've got some information that I want to bring you from Cleveland County in the state of Oklahoma where that grisly beheading case took place within the last several days. I've just gotten in my hands the affidavit.

You'll have to bear with me as I'm reading through it for the first time and it is very grisly. Just a warning, if there are small children in the room, this is a good opportunity to get them out of the room or turn the sound down. There won't be any pictures, but I'll read what the officers have described as this crime and how it took place.

The defendant in this case apparently left the office, driving to his residence to retrieve a large-bladed knife from inside his residence, returned to Vaughan Foods with a large knife in his shoe. Walked into the office where the first victim was standing.

Defendant grabbed the first victim from behind and immediately began cutting her across the throat with a large knife with a back-and-forth sawing motion. Defendant severed the victim's head from her body, and then came in contact with the second victim.

The defendant then grabbed the second victim and cut her across the throat and the left side of her face with the knife. It was at that point that he was shot by a Vaughan employee.

I also want to tell you this, the defendant was apparently, according to the affidavit, read his Miranda rights, the defendant agreed to talk to detectives. The defendant openly admitted to beheading the first victim with a knife and cutting and attempting to behead the second victim with a knife that he had gone to his apartment and retrieved.

And now we are just starting to see some of the first photographs of the Oklahoma victim of that beheading, the first victim.

And we also just learned in the last hour that the suspect in this case may, in fact, face the death penalty. Here's how the d.a. put it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GREG MASHBURN, CLEVELAND COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY: It is highly likely that I will seek the death penalty in this case.

Before that decision is made, I will talk to the family of Mrs. Hufford. That decision is not fair to make without consulting with them first.

But that's definitely highly likely at this point.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: So, again, he mentioned Ms. Hufford, the victim in this case, Colleen Hufford. Friends and family had posted those photographs, among other photographs. on a memorial Facebook page for Colleen.

The police say that she was at her job, just going about her daily routine, when all of this happened.

The person who is at the center of so much of this is 30-year-old Alton Nolen. He is the person listed as the defendant in this affidavit, and he is the person who you just heard may be facing the death penalty for these crimes.

I want to bring in now Jeremy Lewis, who's a spokesperson for the Moore, Oklahoma, police department. Mr. Lewis, thank you so much for joining me.

There's so much that we're learning so quickly about this, but I didn't see in the affidavit -- it's not to say it's not in further documents that I haven't had a chance to read yet -- about what this defendant was saying and what he was doing at the time he was committing these crimes.

Can you enlighten me?

SERGEANT JEREMY LEWIS, SPOKESMAN, MOORE POLICE: I believe the district attorney somewhat gave a statement on that. There was some Islamic phrases being shouted during his assault on the victims.

As far as exactly what was said, that's still part of the investigation and is still ongoing.

BANFIELD: There was some mention that he had been yelling, among Arabic phrases, perhaps he had yelled, "I hate white people," or suggested something along the lines of hating white people.

Does that mean we may be looking at hate crimes that could attach to this as well?

LEWIS: As I've said earlier, there's -- everything is still being looked at. Nothing is being ruled out. There's a lot more details to this that have yet to come out, which we just can't release part of the investigation.

But there were phrases that led him to being terminated from his job, all of that is being looked at at this time.

BANFIELD: Sergeant Lewis, as you obviously have been able to glean, not only as the affidavit suggests, statements from the defendant himself, but also, I'm sure, witnesses who sadly had to be a part of this horrific crime, is there any video evidence because so often, cases show that there is surveillance video? Do you have that kind of evidence in this case?

LEWIS: Unfortunately, there is no surveillance video in this part of the business or outside, so we don't have any video of him coming to the business or the acts inside. There's just not any video in that area. And it occurred so quickly, there's not any cell phone video, that we know of. Nothing's been presented to us at this time.

BANFIELD: What is Alton Nolen's demeanor? What is this person like as he just, it seems from the affidavit, casually admits to beheading his co-worker and attempting to behead the second co-worker?

LEWIS: As detectives met with him, he was unusually calm and very cooperative with our detectives, giving them information that we in fact did not have. So just a very calm, explained exactly what he did and gave us a lot of information.

BANFIELD: Has he retained an attorney?

LEWIS: I do not know that. At this point, he did not retain an attorney. He freely spoke with our investigators, I believe, on Friday afternoon.

BANFIELD: And did he ever say anything to indicate that he was inspired by what's been happening with ISIS leaders who have requested that lone wolves attack in the lands where they're from, specifically America and the West? Did he say anything to connect him to ISIS terrorists?