Broken Hearts - Encore
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I've been a writer for almost 50 years. And I have never encountered a story like this that was such a combination of utter tragedy and happiness. We call this story the beating heart because a heart survived a tragic event. So it was Christmas 1986, all the Christmas cheer of the season, everyone's happy, smiling. So it was the best Christmas ever, I was falling hard in love and then it all ended. Police got a call around 2am that shocks were fired at an apartment complex and they rushed to the scene. The first detective on the scene was Detective Tommy Lee. I went up to the second floor to the apartment, walked in and a young 19-year-old female was laying on the floor with what appeared to be blood coming from her face and her head and her eyes. The victim was Karen Ermert. At 2.30am Saturday, Karen Ermert was found dead in her apartment shot three times in the head. Lee is looking at this horrifying scene and suddenly a woman shows up and it's the victim's mother. We looked at each other in the face and I said I hate to tell you this but your 19-year-old daughter is dead, she was murdered and she collapsed in my arms. Tommy, I can't imagine there's anything you learn in the academy that prepares you for a moment like that. I'll never forget it. You never forget telling a mother that her 19-year-old daughter has been murdered. I was shocked, I didn't believe it at first. My name is Rich Leib. I had known Karen Ermert for several years and we had recently started dating. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't imagine what happened. Went upstairs to my room, laid down in my bed and I think I cried for 12 hours. It was just, she's gone. I didn't get to say goodbye to her, it just kind of left a hole. But that's not where this story ended. Something amazing came out of something horrifying, doesn't happen that often. [Music] If there are two things in this world that Washington Post columnist Gene Winegarten loves, they are writing, "Old clocks are timeless" and tinkering with time. This was made around 1895 and when I'm done with it, it'll be working like new. When you're repairing a really old clock, you feel as though you're in touch with time itself. Gene has long believed there is no such thing as an ordinary day that countless stories lay hidden in space and time, some lost forever, others destined to be discovered. My theory has been that if you take a day, midnight to midnight, a single day, you would find encapsulated in that day the entire human experience. And I decided to challenge that theory by pulling numbers randomly out of a hat. Gene and his editor, Tom Schroeder, went to the old EBIT grill in Washington, D.C., through 20 years of random dates into a green fedora, and picked one to prove Gene's theory that something extraordinary happens every day. We came up with December 28, 1986. It was the slowest news day of the week, a Sunday, during the slowest time of the year, the Christmas holidays.
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A story of tragedy and triumph -- the murder of a young woman and how a her killer’s heart saves the life of a dying woman. CBS News' Jim Axelrod reports for "48 Hours."