Rage On The Run

An American Bodybuilder Becomes An International Fugitive

(CBS)  Broadhurst's mom, Cindy, remembers getting the terrible news.

"I do remember opening the door and seeing the uniforms in the dark," she says. "I can’t remember what she tried to say to me. I do remember, bless her, I just got hold of her by her lapels and said, 'Just tell me he’s not dead.' I’ve got some idea in my mind that it didn’t matter what had happened. If he wasn’t actually dead, I could make him get better. She just said, 'I’m afraid he is.' My whole world collapsed."

What had started as a normal traffic stop over Christmas week was now a national tragedy. After all, Ian Broadhurst was the first British police officer shot and killed in seven years, and his murder sparked a frantic, nationwide manhunt. But police really had very little to go on. All they really knew about this killer was that he was armed, and he was ruthless.

"The first four shots were fired in three seconds. So this happened very, very quickly. One has hit PC Broadhurst in the stomach," explains Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, who was the senior detective on call that day. "Two have hit PC Roper's, who's running away. One of the bullets that was fired at Neil Roper actually went through his left arm and struck this door here. And the other one has gone through Banks' radio.

"But then there is a five second delay. And you can hear the officer now saying, 'Please don't shoot.' It was as cold-blooded execution as you can imagine. This was a dangerous criminal who was on the run."

But he had left evidence behind. In the stolen BMW, he left two newspapers. In the patrol car, a half-eaten candy bar. All had fingerprints on them.

The prints yielded no immediate match but videotape from a nearby shop showed a man buying those very items just minutes before the shooting.

Just as important as his picture was his voice that Roper had recorded on tape. Audio expert Dr. Peter French was called in to analyze it.

"He’d made a claim during the course of the arrest that he was, in fact, Canadian,” says French. To French's trained ear, that claim was a lie.

Analyzing the tape, French says the man was not Canadian but American, specifically from the south.

"I couldn’t say exactly where in the southern states, because it is quite widespread. You’d find it in Georgia, Alabama and, of course, Florida,” French says.

An American from the South. But who could it be? Police made public appeals for help and got it.

"We received an anonymous phone call, from a man who said, 'I know an American guy. He has a gun and he has a black BMW,' " Gregg says. "And he just gave us the name Nathan. And a mobile phone number. Through that mobile phone number we tracked that down to a man using the name Nathan Wayne Coleman.

"We have a name and we know where he’s been living, but who this person is, we don’t know."

The answer to that mystery was half a world away on the Gulf Coast of Florida, in a cold case involving sex, drugs and murder.

Within days of Ian Broadhurst's murder, police thought they knew two things about his killer. They though he was an American, named Nathan Wayne Coleman.

What they did not know was there was no Nathan Wayne Coleman, - the man they so desperately sought was a none other than David Bieber, who had been on the run for eight years.

[jabailo]

One thing that bothered me...isn''t it standard procedure for a suspect to be "patted down" to look for weapons (guns, billy clubs) by police even in Britain.