The Sweetheart Murders

A Birthday Gift May Yield Clues About A Brutal Double Murder

(CBS)  There was no physical evidence in the case, so detectives leaned on another one of David Hunt’s partners in crime, a man named Doug Lainer. Investigators hoped that he would turn against the others.

“They wanted me to testify that somebody in that group told me about these killings. That's what they wanted,” Lainer recalls.

Lainer openly admits that back then, he was a drug addict and a thief who would steal just about anything—including sheets from motels, which he would sell.

But he insisted that, despite his checkered past, he wasn’t a killer.

Each time detectives visited him, Lainer told them same thing. “I didn't know about these killings. I didn't know about any of that crap. But they thought I did. So, they could put all kinds of pressure on me and squeeze me till I coughed it up. Well, the fact of the matter is, I had nothing to tell,” he explains.

That’s because, Lainer says, they were all innocent.

After months of denials, Lainer was finally arrested and charged with the murders of John and Sabrina. He and the rest of the Hunt Group were facing the death penalty.

But on the eve of trial, a stunning piece of evidence was uncovered. The blanket in the van, Sabrina’s gift for Andrea, yielded a clue.

“It was determined that there was in fact a stain on the blanket,” Biondi says.

The stain was semen that had somehow been overlooked all this time. It was ordered tested for DNA—testing that could make or break this case.

The DNA test of the blanket failed to match any of the suspects. Embarrassed prosecutors had no choice but to drop the charges against all four.

The news was devastating to Sabrina and John’s parents.

“It’s like a scab on your heart, that it breaks open and you bleed from time to time and it never stops,” Sabrina’s mother Kim explains.

Detective Ray Biondi was not surprised when the case collapsed. He had always been troubled by the lack of physical evidence. “It simply appeared to be a case of trying to smash the square peg in the wrong hole. ‘Make it fit; make it fit,’” he says.

Biondi had another reason to feel frustrated: there were actually four stains on that blanket, all semen. Those stains had only been discovered and tested for DNA some 12 years after he had sent the blanket to the county crime lab.

“It’s one of those tear your hair out moments,” Biondi says. “And I’m not sure about this, but the blanket was never turned over and the semen stain was actually on the other side.”

At that time, with no DNA databank in existence yet, there was no way to trace the DNA to any other suspects. So once the charges were dropped, the trail went cold.

“I even thought of suicide. I really did. I mean I really didn’t think I could go on. But you do,” Sabrina’s mother Kim remembers.

What the families didn’t know was that there was someone else who had been changed by John and Sabrina’s murders: journalist Joel Davis.