The "Unsolvable" Murder of Roxanne Wood
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(upbeat music) - Little small town Niles has this brutal, savage murder. They're kids that grew up locking their doors and being scared when they went to bed at night just because of this case. - Roxanne Wood in 1987 was married to Terry Wood. Roxanne and Terry went to the bowling alley and arrived in separate cars. Roxanne left earlier than Terry and he just wanted to keep with the fun he was having and Roxanne wanted to get home and go to bed. Terry arrives home and notices Roxanne laying in the kitchen. He notices a pool of blood on the floor. She was bleeding profusely from her neck. - Oh my God, my wife has been murdered. My wife has been murdered. - I answered the phone and I could tell something was bad wrong. He just broke down. He just said, "Someone murdered your sister." Rock being the rock of the family, she didn't have an enemy out there. Who just randomly breaks in and does this to someone? - She was sexually assaulted. The assailant left his DNA. - But in terms of the essential evidence based on what was there, this went cold fairly quickly, did it not? - Based off on what they had to go on, yeah, the DNA technology wasn't there to really to follow up and go through on and there was absolutely not a lot more to go off. - How frustrating was it that no one had been arrested? - No, beyond frustrating. I was starting to lose hope. Dr. Ashlyn Kursen and I had been talking about involving the students at Western in a cold case project. - When we first got the file, it was just an amazing amount of data. It just looked overwhelming. Some of the documents are older than I am. Then we would have to sort through if it was relevant information or not. Hours upon hours to scan all this stuff. - They were able to organize that report where we were able to put a keyword in and search across that entire document. 3,500 pages. - How important was that? - Hugely important.
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How a DNA “detective,” an undercover cop and a cast-off cigarette butt helped catch a killer. "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant reports.