On New Year's Eve 1984, Tonya Ethridge McKinley, 23, the mother of an eighteen-month-old son, was last seen at Darryl's Bar & Grille behind University Mall in Pensacola, Florida, at about 1:30 in the morning. Before dawn on 1 January 1985 a family on the way to an emergency vet found her body in an empty lot on Peacock Drive, near Scenic Highway. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted. Dozens of interviews went nowhere, and the case went cold. Thirty-five years later, a genetic-genealogy lab took the crime-scene DNA into a public database and built a family tree that ended at one name. Detectives could not ask him for a sample. So on 4 March 2020 they followed him to work and picked up a cigarette butt he threw out of his car window. It matched. On 18 March 2020, Daniel Leonard Wells, 57, was brought into an interview room at the Pensacola Police Department. For the first thirty-five minutes he says he has never heard her name. This is that recording, in order. He was charged with first-degree murder and sexual battery that night. He was never tried: on the morning of 2 April 2020, six days before his first hearing, he was found hanged in his cell at the Escambia County Jail. Every recording in this film is from the public release. Narration facts are drawn from the Pensacola Police Department's statements and reporting by the Associated Press, WEAR, WKRG, the Pensacola News Journal and NorthEscambia.com. Three document boards (the 1985 Collier County arrest, the criminal history, the evidence log) are re-set from what is said on the tape and are labelled as reconstructions. CHAPTERS 0:00 The cigarette 2:14 New Year's Day, 1985 4:55 The name 9:26 The history 13:26 Irrefutable 21:45 Unless 28:03 The cutting board 36:48 The autopsy 40:46 Nan, and the cell Sources - Pensacola Police Department statements, 18 March 2020 and 2 April 2020 (PIO Mike Wood) - Associated Press (18 March 2020, 2 April 2020) · WEAR (18–19 March 2020, 2 April 2020) · WKRG · Pensacola News Journal · NorthEscambia.com - Interview recording as released (Pensacola PD), 18 March 2020

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