Precious Angels: A Shocking Crime

She Claims She's Innocent

(CBS)  Darlie Routier is either a loving mom falsely accused of a heinous crime, or a cold-blooded murderer. On June 6th, 1996 police in the Dallas suburb of Rowlett received a 911 call from Darlie, claiming that an intruder had broken into her home, stabbed her and her two boys, Devon, 6, and Damon, 5. Both boys died. Darlie, badly cut on the neck and arms, survived.

From the outside at least, she and her husband Darin, both in their 20s, were living the American Dream. They had a nice house in the suburbs and three children. Bill Lagattuta reports on this extraordinary case.

The Routiers' home stood at the end of Eagle Drive in Rowlett, Texas, an upscale suburb twenty miles east of downtown Dallas, the kind of place where children were safe and free to roam.

On the night of June 5th, Darlie joined Darin and the boys in the family room to watch TV. Around 10:30 Darin took the couple's third son, seven-month-old Drake, upstairs to sleep. Devon and Damon snuggled into bedding on the floor next to their mother.

“She said she was gonna sleep down there because the baby had kind of kept her up the night before,” Darin says. Then, just before 2:30 a.m., the unimaginable happened.

“The next thing I remember was Damon, and he was pushing my shoulder and he was saying, "mommy, mommy." I sat up,” Darlie remembers. “At first, I just saw a blur of a man, going out my utility room.”

She and Darin say she screamed. He came running down the stairs. They called 911. In less than four minutes, police arrived. They looked for a suspect in the house, and found none. In the garage they found that the window screen had been cut. Officers quickly searched the house and grounds. Satisfied the intruder had fled, they led paramedics to the grisly scene. Devon was already dead. Damon died soon after at the hospital.

“It haunts me every day,” says Darin. “When you lose your children, it’s like everyday you wake up and you’re living in this nightmare that just will not end.”

Darlie herself was also injured; she had a gash on her neck that missed her carotid artery by milimeters. She also had two stab wounds on her right forearm, and bruises that covered her arms from wrist to elbow. Where did they come from? “I don’t know. I mean, I assume that I struggled with this man,” she says.

Darlie says she has difficulty recalling what happened that night. “I believe she was probably fighting and was unconscious after the fight,” Darin says. He believes there are details about the attack she doesn’t remember because she’s traumatized.

Minutes after the Routiers were rushed to the hospital, police sealed off their house. Crime scene consultant Jim Cron, who has investigated more than 4,000 murders, arrived just before 6 a.m. He soon became suspicious.

Starting with the probable point of entry, a slashed garage window screen, Cron began retracing the killer’s steps. “The screen cut was inconsistent with most cuts by any burglar,” he says. “It was a t-shaped cut which made your opening to step through the narrow part.”

Entering the house, the intruder would have seen jewelry on the kitchen counter. “As he progressed through and didn’t pick up any jewelry, there were two children laying on the floor and one adult on the couch. Why kill the kids first?”

The murder weapon, an eight-inch butcher knife, came from the Routier kitchen. Says Cron: “murderers don’t enter a place and then look for a weapon.

Even something about the 911 call didn’t seem quite right. Darlie’s sons were bleeding to death at her feet, yet she seemed overly concerned about having touched the knife, ruining it for fingerprints. “One thing crime scene stagers do is - either tell you where the evidence is, or tell you that you can’t get any evidence, that something happened that ruined the evidence,” he says.

Rowlett detective Jimmy Patterson says that when he went to talk to Darlie, he was surprised that she didn’t ask about how her kids were. “I was a little surprised by that. But I just thought, maybe it’s just that she already knew.”

Something else seemed odd: Hours after fighting for her life with a man who, Darlie said, murdered her sons, Patterson says that she could not describe his face. “If they’re face to face and they can’t describe this face, then there’s a possibility that somebody’s not telling you the truth,” he says.

Several residents on Eagle Drive reported seeing a mysterious black sedan driving slowly past the Routier house the night of the murders.

According to Rowlett crime scene investigator lieutenant David Nabors, blood evidence was key. “On the edge of the couch where she claims she sustained some of her injuries, there was no blood evidence to indicate that she sustained any wounds while laying on the couch.”

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After fighting off the attack, Darlie said, she chased the intruder into the utility room. “She had bloody footprints in the kitchen area but not through the kitchen into the utility room where she said she walked, there were no bloody barefoot prints that belonged to Darlie or anyone,” says Cron.

That night, Nabors used a chemical called luminol to reveal traces of blood not visible to the naked eye. In the kitchen, the luminol revealed that there was a lot of blood in the sink. “It indicated a cleanup,” he says. “Blood in the sink and around the sink and it was cleaned up and it was washed up.”

Could it be possible that Darlie Routier butchered her sons, and then, while standing over the sink, slit her own throat? For nearly a week, police questioned Darin and Darlie separately three times. And according to Detective Patterson, Darlie’s story changed three times, changing the position of the intruder.

The investigation continued to turn against Darlie. She claimed that the suspect went out the garage and exited the backyard. But police found no evidence to indicate that anyone had climbed over a six-foot high backyard fence, or fled through its gate which was closed and difficult to open.

Detectives did find one clue that would support the intruder theory. A bloody sock was found in an alley 75 yards from the house. DNA tests would later prove the blood belonged to the boys. To Darlie, this discovery proved an intruder murdered her sons and then escaped down the alley. But to Cron, the bloody sock was just another red flag. He thought it had been staged. Detectives also believed Darlie had overturned a vacuum cleaner and broken a wineglass to indicate a struggle had taken place.

What happens? Find out in Part II.