The Last Take

Did A Hollywood Actress' Secret Love Diary Lead To Her Murder?

(CBS)  "It's very interesting to go back and talk to these people. Because people can't remember what their lies were. They can remember what the truth is," Brandenburg says.

Brandenburg and Harris returned to the crime scene with the one witness who is happy to cooperate: 83-year-old retired Los Angeles detective Larry Gandsey, who was the lead detective in the case.

They hope to jog the original investigator’s memory about the night Christa died. "We found that she was a party girl and that she had come from a party with a girlfriend. And she was headed over to see her agent, Sandy Smith," Gandsey recalls.

They also show Gandsey photos from the box of evidence he started 31 years ago. "She was bleeding quite profusely there. You could see that she had numerous stab wounds in the chest. We thought we had a rage killing, that somebody was really upset with this girl," Gandsey remembers.

Asked what strikes him as unusual in this case, Brandenburg says, "Well the way she was attacked really sticks out. It was violent. A lot of passion involved. She was stabbed 22 times."

There was a side to Christa that seemed to provoke people. Because while many thought she was a barely passable actress on-camera, off-camera she was an infamous drama queen.

One of her recurring dramas starred her beautiful and younger sister, Marisa, who learned the hard the way the lengths Christa would go to. "We'd party together. And go to this party and that party. I was excited that I was meeting this actor and dating that actor and they were calling me and she knew that and was really upset that it was me. When she started to see that I was attracting more attention than her that started to wear on her," Marisa says.

In an apparent jealous rage, Christa cut her sister off and threw her out of the apartment.

"Would she step over bodies to get what she wanted? Would she use people?" Maher asks.

"Yes, I would say so," Marisa says.

"Is that possible that has played into what happened to her?" Maher asks.

"I've always presumed that that was a part of what happened to her," Marisa says.

Harris and Brandenburg think so too, and wonder if Christa might finally have crossed the wrong man. As they dig deeper into the case, they find a startling confession, of sorts.

"This guy bragged about doing the killing," Harris explains.

His name is Rudy Mazella and he was known for his "anything goes" parties where Christa was a frequent guest. But Mazella was also a known drug dealer with a bad reputation. "He was a violent kinda guy known to carry guns and knives. We spoke to his ex-wife, deathly afraid of him. Said that he would threaten her," Brandenburg says.

Asked what Christa was doing with him, Brandenburg says, "He was in that other circle of friends, what we call the dark side of her life. The street people, the drug dealers that would come to these parties."