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Margarette eby's family, as well as nancy ludwig's, were losing faith in the idea that the killer would be apprehended. >> after ten years, i guess i thought we had done just about everything we could. to this day, it remains a mystery to me why, why it didn't work. female announcer: get on board for better sleep.
Shortly after his wife was brutally murdered in a detroit hotel room, art ludwig received a curious letter. it was from a man who had read about nancy's murder in the newspaper and said her death sounded strikingly similar to his own mother's murder five years earlier. >> and i read the letter, and yes, it did seem like there were some similarities. insofar, they were both women about the same size, same appearance, so on and so forth. >> the victim was 55-year-old margarette eby, a music professor living in flint, michigan, about an hour's drive from detroit. she was found stabbed to death in...
Witness saw in the hotel parking lot on the night of nancy ludwig's murder. and there was another surprise. gorton worked for a water sprinkler company that serviced the sprinkler system in margarette eby's yard. >> that same company had been to margarette eby's residence several days before their death in order for them to blow out the sprinkler lines for the season. >> but that could have been easily explained why his fingerprint would have been inside eby's home. >> you're working with metal sprinkler equipment and maybe there's a sharp edge and you slice your finger. you come in, you wash ...
>> back in 1986, flint police could only compare the prints to others in michigan and the search turned up no matches. but improvements in computer technology led to the creation of an automatic fingerprint identification system, that compares thousands of fingerprints in seconds. when the print from the water faucet was placed into the new nationwide fingerprint database, the computer identified a matching print in florida. it matched the right thumbprint of 39-year-old jeffrey gorton, who was now living in a suburb of flint, michigan. >> he was a married man, wife and children, would appear ...
Photographs, it was amazing. the body was positioned almost the same way, the wounds were almost the same. >> and security at her home was as lax as nancy ludwig's hotel. >> the gatehouse where she stayed at this beautiful estate had its own entrance that was supposed to be gated, but the gate was usually open. no guard there. >> there were no signs of forced entry, and no valuables were missing. margarette eby had a habit of leaving her doors unlocked and had no curtains on her windows. >> the estate had a number of people who came on regularly to do work, lawn care people, electricians, pain...