they laid out their evidence for serrano being in florida that day. they called the nephew who rented a car for his uncle and he told a damaging story. the day after the murders, he said his uncle ordered him to retrieve that same car in the orlando airport parking garage and drop it off at the rental company. weeks later the uncle told his nephew to keep his mouth shut about the incident. he said you can t say anything. you know that because it could jeopardize my marriage and success, cops are not upon going to buy it. they re going to frame me and they re going to try to do something to me. and the prosecution played maybe its best evidence. the orlando airport date-stamped parking ticket with nelson serrano s fingerprints on it. no doubt in your mind that that man left that fingerprint on that card? no, sir. the only way it could have gotten there is if nelson serrano s index finger touched the card? yes. and prosecutors especially
the state had put on three fingerprint experts, two agreed that it was serrano s, but the third surprised the prosecutor when under cross-examination, he testified he wasn t entirely convinced. i had and i still have reservations about this particular latent. an expert in the field, the prosecution s own witness telling the court he had reservations about the fingerprint. why, he wondered, was a finger from serrano s right hand on the ticket and not one from his left. if you re wearing a seat belt, it s extremely restrictive where you are reaching across your body between your body and the steering wheel to hand it to someone over here. the defense leaped into the crack in the prosecution s case and floated the possibility that the all-important fingerprint was bogus, forged by person or persons unknown to implicate serrano in the crime. were you able to determine from them anything about the veracity of those prints? no, i can t.
big part in here. ray and his team tediously pored over hundreds of old parking slips. and suddenly there it was. a car had left the long-term parking garage at 3:49 p.m. and printed right on the receipt, the license plate of the rental car picked up by serrano s nephew. and when lynn, the finger print expert at the state crime lab, started processing that 3-year-old parking receipt, a wondrous thing happened for tommy ray s blossoming theory of the case. lynn called up and said, tommy, i ve got some fantastic news. the fantastic news was that we had prints of nelson serrano. the fingerprint proved that serrano was in florida on december 3rd, 1997. just an hour and a half drive away from eerie manufacturing. not in a hotel room in atlanta nursing a migraine. i knew that was more than enough for an arrest and an indictment against nelson serrano. and in may 2002, almost
committed, he said, we ll work it out. we ll get him out of ecuador. and that s just what tommy ray did with the full cooperation of ecuadorian authorities. when officials there discovered serrano had actually been a u.s. citizen for years, they deported him to america in the custody of detective ray. in september 2002, nelson serrano walked into a central florida courtroom and pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. after a snarl of legal delays in september 2006, nearly nine years after the murders, serrano finally sat before a jury, the accused in a first-degree murder death penalty case. that man sitting right there murdered four people. in court tommy ray sat a few feet away from nelson serrano. the families of the four victims packed one side of the courtroom as the prosecutor, john aguero, called phil dosso to recount the history of bad blood with serrano.
out. we got a phone call from the two detectives that went up to atlanta, they said hey, we have got him here in the afternoon. he couldn t have done it. but that didn t mean the detectives thought serrano s hands were clean of the crime. we thought that nelson was in atlanta and that he had hired someone for a contract killing. for all the red flags flapping around them, detectives never could get enough to arrest nelson serrano. years went by, the twins had other birthdays. nicoletta dosso dressed only in black, a perpetual state of mourning for her murdered son and daughter. you said during that ordeal, you lost your faith in god. did you get it back? a little bit at a time. a little bit at a time. i keep saying why my children? why? i didn t do nothing wrong, why my children? and the father of one of the murder victims, diane s husband george, flew to florida to demand answers from prosecutors