when he didn t return it, she went to the police and filed a report. which more often than not would have led nowhere at all. except a policeman in austin with a little time on his hands decided to check up on an out of state license plate he just happened to notice. and discovered first the report for the missing car and then travis forbes. so my lieutenant said, grab your search warrant for his dna and head to texas. so i hop a plane that night. reporter: a few hours later gurule was face to face with travis forbes again. you know what? they sent me to texas because they think you re running to mexico. what would i do in mexico? he d call me nash, i d call him travis. it was similar to you and i just talking.
suspect was still out there somewhere on the street at large, potentially targeting his next victim, and it would stay that way unless detectives could prove that the attacks were both the work of travis forbes. there was one possibility and really only one. sitting at the denver police crime lab were several swabs of travis s dna, which detective nash gurule had obtained when the two talked in texas. we needed that obviously quickly to compare it to what had been collected from lydia tillman when she was transported to the hospital. but she d been sprayed with bleach and every and she d been burned. i mean, was there actually any dna left? there actually was. it was pretty amazing. it s amazing how resilient dna is. reporter: so on a friday evening just four days after lydia s attack the dna found under her fingernail and the sample taken from forbes were taken to the colorado bureau of investigation for processing to see if they matched. i didn t sleep.
gurule used a little reverse psychology to make sure he meant it. i told him i think you re full of it, i don t think you re going to do this. i think you re going to back out. and i think you re spineless. and i think it s all about you, it s a game. i said i think you re going to pull out. he says, no, i won t. i said, travis, you do what you say you re going to do, i ll be the first one to shake your hand. he knew the fort collins authorities would buy in. so all he needed now were the crossed ts and dotted is. the legal formalities. i left the jail, went out to my car, and thought to myself, did i just hear this right or am i dreaming? i even played the recording back to myself.
reporter: all that. the cleaning, the cooler moving, happened two nights after kenia went missing. so detective gurule checked with several of the bakery s employees to see what else travis was up to that evening. he burns some stuff in a barrel. we found that barrel down the alley at the other end of the parking lot. and monica poole told one of the detectives, hey, that s my grease barrel. what s it doing down there? reporter: travis claimed he was using it to burn some moldy marijuana. the barrel was sent to the crime lab. we ran that for dna. we ran that for fingerprints. reporter: but nothing turned up. if there were any clues in that barrel, they had been burned. travis forbes, despite all his suspicious behavior and his strange story, was still just a person of interest. people do weird things in
their normal life. how do we know that he s just not a weird guy? reporter: and then a few days later gurule s investigation turned up more surveillance video, which seemed to tell a whole new story because there was kenia with another man entirely. this caught the two of them in the lobby of an apartment building near the club where kenia had been drinking. was she going up to his place? well, if she was, she didn t stay long because a few minutes later kenia showed up in yet another surveillance video, weaving somewhat unsteadily across the lobby of a nearby hotel. and the way kenia was acting caught the attention of d.a. kerri lombardi. i think that from all the surveillance she was very obviously intoxicated. it was scary. she was someone that you would look at and think this is a victim waiting to happen. reporter: this according to family and good friends was not like kenia. she didn t drink to excess. she would never run off with a