Nightmare In Napa

Produced By Paul LaRosa

There was a time when a house on Dorset Street, not far from downtown Napa, felt like the perfect place to live.

As correspondent Bill Lagattuta reports, Arlene Allen's daughter Adriane lived in the house and loved it. "She was looking forward to living in that home a long time," Arlene remembers. "She just felt really at home there."

At first, there were only two roommates, both locals. There was 27-year-old Lauren Meanza, who coached volleyball at a community college, and 26-year-old Adriane Insogna, an engineer for the Napa sanitation district.

Lily Prudhomme knew both women, but was especially close to Adriane. "It was sort of a fast friendship. We worked together. We saw each other after work. We worked out at the gym together," Lily explains.

Lily remembers Adriane as being outgoing, funny, strong and tough.

Adriane had proved just how tough she could be: in 1994, while still in high school, she had been in a near fatal car crash. "There were a lot of physical obstacles to overcome and also emotional obstacles: feeling un-pretty," Lily explains. "Like she didn't fit in with her regular life anymore."

But those problems were long behind her by June 2004, when Adriane and Lauren invited a third young woman to share their home – Leslie Mazzara, a transplanted Southern beauty queen.

"When she was a little girl she used to say she wanted to be a mother, a teacher, and a nurse and Miss America before she was 21," remembers Leslie's mother Cathy Harrington.

In 2004, after breaking up with a boyfriend, Leslie moved to Napa. She got a job as a greeter at the Niebaum-Coppola winery, run by "Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola.

On Halloween night, the three roommates handed out candy and were asleep by 11 p.m.; Leslie and Adriane were upstairs in separate bedrooms, Lauren was downstairs.

Then, just after 1 a.m., Lauren was startled by loud noises coming from the upstairs bedrooms. "I was in my bed and just opened up my eyes and realized something is not quite right. And then I heard a scream," she remembers.

"I jumped out of bed and stood there for a second trying to figure out what was going on and … opened up my door and went outside and listened," she told the real crime TV program "America's Most Wanted."

Suddenly she heard him. Whoever was in the house was running down the stairs, right at Lauren. "My gut told me to go out the back and I remember thinking, 'I'm opening up the door for this guy to follow me out,'" she remembers.

Terrified, Lauren stood defenseless in the backyard. But, for whatever reason, the intruder fled the way he came in, through a ground floor window. Lauren said she never laid eyes on him.

Lauren climbed the stairs, unaware what she was going to find.

Adriane and Leslie lay in Adriane's bedroom, bleeding from multiple stab wounds. Adriane was still alive, but barely. Lauren slipped on something and realized it was the blood of her roommates. She fled the house and called 911.

When police arrived soon after, both women were dead.

It wasn't long before all of America knew what had happened in the house on Dorset Street, including Adriane and Leslie's heartbroken friends.

"I assumed it was an accident but they told me no, that's it's worse than that. She had been killed, murdered," remembers Lily.

Half a world away, in Australia, Adriane's mom Arlene heard the news. "And I completely lost it as you can imagine," she recalls.

Leslie's mother Cathy was in her Michigan home, all alone, when she got the news. "I just have a broken heart. It's hard for me to understand how anybody could get to the point of rage that they would murder these two young women, my beautiful daughter," she says.

Who was the mysterious intruder and why did he kill Adriane and Leslie?

Over the years, Amy Brown, who had grown up with Leslie Mazzara, had met a lot of Leslie's boyfriends. But none seemed like a killer.

"I try to think of everybody that she's ever known and there's too many people," says Amy. "I can't narrow it down to anybody. I don't know who would do this to Leslie and Adriane."

That was the job of the Napa police. Because the killer seemed to know where he was going and who he was after, investigators concluded that this was not a random attack. Police released very little information but it didn't matter – the guessing game had begun.

"The kinds of rumors right away were: number one, Leslie was the target and that Adriane had come to her aid," says Adriane's mother Arlene.

Arlene based her feelings on what she had seen. "Leslie, being new to the area, was really wanting to meet new people so she was being set up on a lot of blind dates," she says. "I saw a number of young men over several months be there at the house with her."

Napa Detective Dan Lonergan says the killer most likely entered Leslie's bedroom first.

Asked if Leslie was aware of what was happening in her final moments, Lonergan says, "I would think that she probably died very soon after the attack. She was possibly attacked while she was sleeping; Adriane probably did wake up and heard what was going on."

And then, the intruder entered Adriane's room. The two struggled mightily. During that vicious fight, the killer was injured says Napa Detective Todd Shulman.

Asked if the killer left any fingerprints or other physical evidence when he entered the house through the window, Shulman tells Lagattuta, "We did find some blood evidence on the blinds. There was blood on the blinds as he was leaving."

Now the police had the killer's DNA, and there was yet another important clue found at the house: "We located several cigarette butts outside the residence and these were cigarettes that had been smoked down to the filter," says Det. Shulman. "It could be someone who's nervous, trying to work up the courage to go inside and do this or again, it could be someone who's very deliberate who is thinking through this thoughts and through his plans that he's already made in his mind of what he's gonna be doing when he gets into the house."

The cigarette brand was Camel Turkish Gold, a new and unique brand. But police chose not to reveal that information to the public. Instead, they sent the cigarettes to a crime lab to determine if DNA matched the DNA from the blood found at the house.

Police started their investigation with those close to the victims, and in Leslie's case, that meant her many admirers.

One was Brian West, a college boyfriend. Leslie's friend Amy says West bought Leslie a car, after they had just been dating for a few months. "That's just what guys could do for Leslie," she says.

After the breakup, Brian built a Web page tribute to Leslie.

"Does that strike you as normal? You break up with a woman and you're not happy about it and then you make a website about her?" Lagattuta asks Amy.

"No, that's not normal but I think because I know Brian, it's kind of normal to me. I just know that he idolized her," says Amy.

Then there was William Lee Youngblood, Jr., a lawyer Leslie had been living with. But they broke up shortly before she moved to Napa. "She really did love Lee," says Amy. "'I could marry Lee,' she said, 'But the family, the dad just makes me feel uncomfortable.'"

William Lee Youngblood, Sr., also a lawyer, often called the house, not to speak with his son, but with Leslie. "There got to be a point where he would call her all the time," says Amy. "And she got to the point where she just stopped answering the phone."

Asked if she thinks the father, in some way, was obsessed with Leslie, Amy says, "It seems to me."

Amy was questioned about the Youngbloods by a Napa detective. "He said, 'Well, if I told you that Lee Sr. called Leslie twice on Halloween night, how would that make you feel?' And as soon as he said that, my hair stood on edge. And I said, 'I don't like that at all, at all,'" Amy recalls.

The Napa police traveled to South Carolina to question Youngblood, Sr. He denied he was involved in the murders and insisted the calls on Halloween were an unfortunate coincidence and that he was not infatuated with Leslie. He and his son each agreed to provide a DNA sample and neither father nor son was a match.

Back in Napa, investigators went around collecting DNA from the men Leslie had met there.

At the time of her death, Leslie was regularly dating two men. "Leslie was definitely looking for 'the one' but Leslie wasn't going to settle for anything less than perfect," says Katie Norris, who along with Vanessa Schnurr, was a college buddy who had visited and stayed with Leslie at the house on Dorset Street just three weeks before the murders.

"We spent weeks going through every conversation, talking about every person that we met there just looking for that one little thing that might have been a hint as to who did this," Katie remembers.

The women both thought there was something odd about one of the men Leslie was dating. "One particular night when we went to a bar in Napa, Leslie was approached by a friend, solely a friend," Katie recalls.

The demeanor of Leslie's boyfriend, who was there at the time, changed dramatically. "It was obvious he was not comfortable with her talking to another man," says Katie. "It was a very eerie feeling and that was very haunting after we found out what had happened to Leslie."

Vanessa and Katie told the Napa police their suspicions. Cops questioned the man and took his DNA, but, as with so many others, the test came back negative. Leslie's mother Cathy was not surprised.

"I'm not convinced that whoever killed the girls was after Leslie," she says. "I also think that it could have been somebody that was taken with Adriane."

One name that police focused on soon after the murders was Christian Lee, who according to Lily, was Adriane's on again, off again boyfriend.

Lily says the relationship sometimes caused Adriane pain. "She'd come to work crying and of course being friend, we would console her and towards the end, we only saw the negative side of Christian," she says.

Not surprisingly, Napa police soon were pounding on Christian's bedroom door. Police entered his home, and collected a knife from the corner of his room.

"They took samples of blood, they took my clothes, they took the sheets of my bed," Christian remembers. "And they want to take me to the station for questioning."

For weeks, he and Adriane had been arguing; she wanted a commitment, but he wasn't ready.

"We'd have our problems. We'd argue," Christian says, looking back. "But I've never ever touched a woman in life in anger. It disgusts me just thinking about it."

Police kept digging, but the investigation was going nowhere.

Leslie's mother Cathy felt haunted. "I would wake up with these images in my mind that were just so horrible," she says. "As my grief counselor told me, 'Leslie died once but you keep reliving it over and over again.'"

The lack of information was also frustrating for Adrian's mother Arlene. She lived with Adriane's presence every waking moment.

"This car is Adriane's car and I'm so pleased to be driving it. Makes me feel so close to Adriane. I haven't changed the pre-set radio buttons," she tells Lagattuta. "Every time I get in this car and turn on the radio, I feel very close to Adriane and every day is gonna be a good day."

Adriane's memory touched others as well. Her best friend Lily and boyfriend Eric Copple came to a decision, marrying after dating almost eight years.

Lily and Eric had once before put their marriage plans on hold; it turned out to be the worst possible timing. "Eric and I were originally planning to get married on November 1st, which is the day Adriane ended up dying. And if we had gone through with that wedding, it was planned in Hawaii, Adriane and Lauren would have been in Hawaii with us that week. It's something that haunts me," Lily explains.

Arlene was invited to be part of the ceremony and read scriptures to the couple. It was a day full of joy but Lily says she can't get beyond the fact that there's been no arrest in Adriane's murder.

"Somebody must know something. Somebody would have had to notice their friend acting strange or had bruises. Doesn't seem like someone could walk away from it and be fine," Lily tells Lagattuta.

By the following summer, police seemed truly baffled. Investigators said they met with more than a thousand people, ruling them out one by one, starting they said with the inner circle. They looked at people who knew the victims, like boyfriends, friends and friends of friends.

Two hundred of the men they met with gave them DNA samples. But none of DNA samples matched the suspect, and that includes Adriane's boyfriend Christian Lee.

Then in Sept. 2005, 11 months after the murders, there was something.

Remember those cigarette butts found outside the house on Dorset Street? Months later, the crime lab results finally arrived. In fact, the saliva on those butts did match the killer's DNA.

"We feel like its something that may prompt someone in the public to make that one phone call that's going to lead to the identity of the killer," Det. Shulman said.

Police were right. Just five days later, police made an arrest.

No one knew it at the time, but there was one young man in Napa County who was feeling intense pressure after police released information about the cigarette butts found outside the house where the two women were murdered.

He was feeling so much pressure, that within days two parents in the Napa Valley opened their mail to find suicide notes from their own son.

The man who wrote the notes may have sentenced himself to death, but he didn't carry out that sentence. After family members got his suicide notes, they confronted him and convinced him to turn himself in to the Napa Police.

His name? Eric Copple, the 26-year-old husband of Adriane's best friend Lily.

Arlene, Adriane's mother, was heartbroken. "I'm feeling as much grief now as I did upon hearing of Adriane's death," she tells Lagattuta.

The revelation was all the more shocking because it was only months earlier that Arlene had been invited to speak at Eric and Lily's wedding.

Just who is Eric Copple? Little is known. He was the classic shy, quiet guy who worked as a land surveyor and was never in trouble with the law, not even for a traffic violation.

Ben Katz was Adriane's close friend and socialized with Lily and Eric. "Whenever he was with Lily, she'd do all the talking and he would just … he'd just be there. He wouldn't say much. But I just figured, just because he was shy," Katz tells 48 Hours.

But how could Lily have gone for nearly an entire year, marrying and living with the man who murdered her best friend, without suspecting a thing?

Asked if he thinks Lily knew anything about her husband's involvement, Napa County District Attorney Gary Lieberstein says, "It's hard to believe that she laid next to him 11 months and didn't have any suspicions."

When lily sat down with 48 Hours nearly two years ago, not long after her wedding, she said she couldn't imagine the killer would go unnoticed.

"Somebody must have seen something. Somebody out there knows something. Somebody would have to notice a friend of theirs acting strange," she said.

What now seems chilling is the fact that Lily's husband, Eric, was actually sitting right there in the room with the 48 Hours team during our interview.

"It's important. It's important to find out who did this and to find out why. In some sick way I want to know. I want to know how it happened. I mean this is my friend, I want to know what happened to her," Lily said during that interview.

It doesn't sound like Lily had even an inkling.

"I think that Lily was like another sister to Adriane. She could not have even suspected that her husband was involved with that," Arlene says.

There is no proof that Lily knew what Copple had done and people also wondered about the investigators: why didn't they find him sooner? How is it that police took over 200 DNA samples from men all over the country but somehow skipped over Copple, who lived and worked in the Napa Valley?

Now that there finally was an arrest in the case, there was a great sigh of relief, and not just in Napa.

Leslie's mother Cathy, now a minister living in Michigan, can't help wondering what was going through Copple's mind. "My granddaughter says it so well: 'Why would anybody want to hurt aunt Leslie?'" Cathy says.

Even after Eric Copple confessed, Adriane's mother Arlene still wondered about his motive. "That is the burning question. Why? What caused him to lose control and commit these horrible murders," she wonders.

The answer, says D.A. Gary Lieberstein, lies in Copple's relationship with Lily. "He wanted Lily to be there for him. And I do think that he was resentful of other friendships that she had and time that took away from their time together," he argues.

On Halloween night, he got so drunk that an angry Lily refused to spend the night with him at their apartment. "He felt his relationship was slipping away with Lily," says Lieberstein.

Copple found himself all alone on what was supposed to have been his wedding day. His memory of what happened next, he told cops, is sketchy.

"He claimed that while he had some memory of leaving his house and taking a knife, that he didn't know how he ended up at the house on Dorset, says D.A. Lieberstein. "He remembered smoking the cigarette out front, remembered going in the window but didn't remember much else. He would not admit that he knew what he did. He knew he was responsible but he claimed his eyes were closed."

Asked what Copple did with his bloodied clothes, Lieberstein tells Lagattuta, "He recalled going home and starting a fire in his fire pit and burning his clothing and his shoes."

What does that say about his frame of mind? Says Lieberstein, "He knew exactly what he did and he was doing everything he could to avoid being caught."

Copple told investigators he did not remember what he did with the knife he used to stab Adriane and Leslie. He offered no motive for killing Leslie.

In order to spare the families the ordeal of a trial, Copple and the district attorney struck a deal. Pleading guilty to two counts of first degree murder, Copple was spared the death penalty.

At his sentencing last January, Arlene Allen finally got her chance to confront Eric Copple. "Eric, you knew Adriane," Arlene said in court. "You know me and Eric, I know you. You are a man who violently stabbed to death the best friend of the woman you loved. That is not love Eric. You cannot love Lily and bring a knife into Adriane's home and stab her again and again and again and again and again and again and again and yet again."

As Arlene drove home the brutality of his deed, Copple sat stone-faced. But his demeanor started to change when the final speaker stepped up to the podium: his wife, Lily.

Lily was given special permission to speak on her husband's behalf. "I wish with all my heart these events had been avoided," she said.

But her expression of sympathy and regret took a quick turn when she spoke directly to her husband. "Eric, there is nothing you could do to make me love you any less. These words are just as true today as they were on that afternoon," she said.

Because Lily and Adriane's mother Arlene had been so close, the words stung. "I was very shocked and stunned. I found that a very—shocking statement," Arlene says.

And then it was Copple's turn. The courtroom waited anxiously as he tried to compose himself.

"I am a broken man. A man splintered...by a penetrating awareness…of my own potential for wickedness. While I cannot fathom... the full extent of the anguish that I have caused...I recognize that my sinful deeds have inflicted terrific agony on a number of people. The words evade me to articulate the depths of my sorrow," he said in court.

The judge only allowed the first minute of Copple's statement to be recorded. But he went on to say, "I was afraid my relationship with Lily – the singular ray of light in my black world – was in peril of collapsing."

In his own tortured mind, Copple believed Adriane was poisoning Lily's feelings for him.

Because of the plea deal, Copple's sentencing was a mere formality: life behind bars, without the possibility of parole.

The case of the Napa murders is solved now.

Leslie's mother Cathy refuses to dwell on her grief. "Leslie's life speaks for itself," she says. "Her 26 years were full and rich and productive and she was a gift. … I'm so grateful that I got to be her mom and that she brightened our lives. I miss her a lot."

And Arlene also clings on to memories of her daughter. "I sometimes expect to see her walking in the door. I see her face clearly beside me and then I understand just what a loss is."