The Sweetheart Murders

A Birthday Gift May Yield Clues About A Brutal Double Murder

(CBS)  After being paroled, Hirschfield lived with his younger brother Joe in the town of Arbuckle, some 40 miles from Davis. Authorities believe they were both still living in the area at the time of John and Sabrina’s murders.

Almost twenty years later, in 1999, Joe, an auto mechanic, married Lana.

“And he was just a really kind, gentle person – and happy. All the time happy,” she remembers.

But Lana never met his brother Richard. “Joe didn’t talk a whole lot about his family,” she explains. “He did tell me that the reason he was estranged from his family, that there was some sort of a disagreement.”

She and Joe were enjoying their new life together in Beavercreek, Oregon. But everything changed in Nov. 2002, when detectives came knocking at their door. They wanted to talk to Joe about his brother.

“I noticed that his face was quite red. And I asked him if the detectives had come talk to him. And he said, yes they had. And I asked him if that had upset him. And he said, yes it was disturbing,” Lana remembers.

Detectives had told Joe his brother’s DNA was connected to an unsolved double murder. Lana was completely unprepared for what would happen just one day later: she discovered her husband’s body in his car; he had committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Police seized as evidence a suicide note left by Joe, a note that would finally help unravel the mystery of the murders. In it, Joe expressed his love for his wife but said he had been living with “this horror” for 20 years.

Joe then named the killer. “He said Richard did kill those people,” Lana says. “He said, ‘I didn’t kill anyone’ and that it would just be a matter of time until they found his DNA there also and would be coming after him.”

Detectives always thought that John and Sabrina’s killer must have had help leaving the scene.

“John Riggins’ van was abandoned. So somebody had to be around to pick him up. There’s very little likelihood that this person would have caught a ride along the dark highway,” says Det. Biondi.

At last, police felt they were heading in the right direction in solving Sabrina and John’s murder.

With the arrest of 58-year-old Richard Hirschfield, Sabrina and John’s families believe the prosecution finally has a strong case.

Hirschfield pled not guilty. And his attorney, Linda Parisi, insists the case is anything but a slam-dunk – despite the DNA on the blanket, and the suicide note from his own brother, saying “Richard did kill those people.”

Parisi insists that Joe Hirschfield’s suicide note should not be admitted into evidence.

Whatever role he may have played in the crime remains a mystery: Joe’s DNA was not found at the scene. As for the DNA hit on Richard, Parisi says, "I don’t know if we can rely on that."

"One in 240 trillion," Roberts remarks.

"We don’t even know what that number means," she replies. "Ultimately, we must have confidence in the testing, that there was no contamination either at the lab, or beforehand, in order to trust a result."

But if indeed it is her client’s DNA found on that blanket inside the abandoned van, Parisi claims someone could have planted it there.

“Certainly there have been cases where DNA has been planted,” she says.