Nightmare In Napa

Newly-Released Evidence Helps Cops Crack Halloween Double-Murder

(CBS) 
The murders shocked Napa. “People were shocked. Scared,” remembers Napa Register reporter Marsha Dorgan. “Nothing like this has ever happened in Napa before.”

Adriane’s friend Lily says everyone had a theory. “There was talk about the girls were doing drugs, and that maybe they owed somebody money.”

Some even thought it might have been a mob hit, because the three women had Italian last names. “It was ridiculous,” says Lily.

And as improbable as it might sound, some people even thought that because Leslie’s boss – Francis Ford Coppola – had made a famous mafia movie, he had connections to the mob.

Just hours after Leslie and Adriane were brutally stabbed to death in the house on Dorset Street, detectives went into a house one block away and pounded on Christian Lee’s bedroom door.

“I was fast asleep and I opened the door and about five detectives jumped backwards,” recalls Lee. He says officers asked him if he had any weapons in the home. “I said I had one and I asked if I could get it for them. ‘No, no, no. Just point to where it is.’”

Officers collected a knife from the corner of his room. Christian says they also took samples of blood, clothes and bed sheets, and asked him to come to the station for questioning.

Christian was Adriane’s “on-again, off-again” boyfriend. He told police he had seen Adriane late the previous night when she dropped by after handing out candy to the neighborhood children. She had left at 10 p.m., Christian said, and it was the last time he saw her.

Christian says their relationship had been rocky, and they had been arguing for weeks. She wanted a commitment, but he says he wasn’t ready.

“She would say things that would make me mad. I would say things. I would make her mad. She’d end up finding someone to go out with,” says Christian. Adriane told Christian she went to a party the week before and met a guy, something he admits made him jealous.

Christian says their relationship had its problems, but that he has never touched a woman in anger.

As it turned out, he was just the first of many people police would talk to as they began to sort through this brutal crime. Their instinct was that this was not a random attack, that either Leslie or Adriane, or both, were targeted by the killer.

To find out, investigators would have to dig deep into the victims’ lives. In Adriane’s case, that included talking to her mother.

Adriane’s mother Arlene was on vacation in Australia when she got the news about the murder from her youngest daughter, Allison.

Of all her three girls, Arlene says she had worried the least about Adriane. After all, Adriane was the one who had beat all the odds once already and escaped death. At 16, Adriane survived a near-fatal car crash. “The car kind of rolled at least three times and every time Adriane’s head hit the pavement through the open window…. It was a miracle she survived,” remembers Arlene.

A few months later, Adriane was back in school but still suffering from temporary brain damage.

But over time, she healed and again excelled in school. A group called “If Given A Chance” noticed her story and gave her a scholarship to California Polytechnic State University so she could pursue her dream of becoming an engineer.

Eventually, the city of Napa hired Adriane to be an engineer, and she started dating Christian.

Ten years after the accident that nearly killed her, Adriane celebrated with her best friend, Lily Prudhomme. “We went out and took the day off work,” Lily remembers, “and celebrated her tenth anniversary of what she used to call, ‘The day she was supposed to die.’”

They spent the day at an amusement park. It was just four months before a killer would take Adriane’s life.

The two friends spent hours gossiping about their love lives. Lily was engaged to marry her high school sweetheart, Eric Copple. Inevitably, the conversation would turn to Adriane’s relationship with Christian.

“She would come to work crying one day. And, of course, being friends, we would console her. But you sort off start to get to see Christian in this negative light. Because she wouldn’t necessarily tell her friends when they had gotten back together,” says Lily.

The idea that Christian could be a suspect in her daughter’s murder didn’t occur to Arlene. Her first thought was that the killer had to be someone Leslie knew.

“Leslie was a newcomer to the area, and she really wanted to make the most of her time here. She really wanted to go out and meet people,” says Arlene.

Compared to Leslie, Arlene says Adriane had a much quieter life. “Knowing Adriane and knowing she had spent most of her time with people she had known for years – it was just a completely different lifestyle. So I believe it was the lifestyle that Leslie was living that invited this perpetrator to come in unbeknownst to any of them and have this murder happen.”