Page 11 - Inside Nick News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

I no longer had a son. >> he was the best friend i ever had. he was the best friend to anybody that he ever met. he was very easy going, very happy-go-lucky. just kind of a cool kind of kid. >> since there was no motor oil on nick's body, and oil was throughout the passenger compartment of his car, this was further proof that he wasn't inside when it crashed. at the autopsy, the pathologist found evidence that nick had been beaten. >> there were internal injuries, specifically bleeding inside the neck muscles, also called strap muscle hemorrhage. that alone is a pretty good indicator of manual...

>> you never know what's going to be important at a scene, so you collect everything. sometimes it's the smallest thing that you didn't think would be involved is what breaks your case open. >> prosecutors believe ralph marcus was angry with nick's mother for the years of rejection going all the way back to high school. >> ralph marcus believed that he and patty should have been star-crossed lovers. she had turned him down from the outset. and toward the time when nick howard was killed, he'd actually gotten to threatening her by saying things like, you should know what it's like to lose a chi...

Wasn't there. he had never not been in his room. it let us know right away something was very wrong. >> the howard family called police to report nick missing. the search began at the restaurant where nick had stopped the night before. it was on a treacherous road that ran parallel to the sacramento river. >> you make a mistake and drift off of the roadway, you're liable to go to the bottom of the levee. on one side, it's a river. on the other side, it's a 30-foot drop. >> asleep or intoxicated or not paying attention, there's a good chance you could end up in the water. >> and that's where th...

Photogrammetry helped convince the jury. >> photogrammetry was the key element and it was used to solve the case. without photogrammetry this case would have gone unsolved. a car runs off the highway a car runs off the highway into a river. yet the driver is nowhere to be found. for answers, investigators recreated the crash and the evidence revealed a plan almost 20 years in the making. the result of a deadly obsession that ended in tragedy. nick howard was just 18 years old, fresh out of high school and working in his father's car repair business. he was trying to decide what to do wit...

Inside. we were pretty surprised when we did not. >> nick's broken glasses were on the floor of his car. and the side windows were open. >> i was still hoping that we would find him alive. i was hoping that he had swam out of the car and had been injured and didn't know who he was and that we were going to find him. >> the way the car went in, the fact that he got out, none of it made sense. >> inside nick's car, investigators found a greasy film on the dashboard and upholstery. >> it was kind of a light white milky substance that we didn't know what it was initially until we started touching ...