On The Trail Of Another Man

Off and on for nearly a year now, private detective Paul Ingels has been keeping tabs on Lee Furrow, tracking him from afar for Dr. Mary Howell. He had promised her to investigate any other possible suspects in the Ryen murders.

"I track him about every three to four weeks," Ingels said.

Furrow's old girlfriend Diana Roper believes - as she has since 1983 - that Furrow killed the Ryens. "I'm putting my life on the line," she said. "He's an evil, evil person," Roper added. "You can look in his eyes and see it."

In 1974, Furrow strangled 17-year-old Mary Sue Kitts and dumped her body in a canal. Furrow copped a plea and while serving a five-year sentence he met Diana Roper who was visiting another inmate.

Roper was with him for about three years, she said. In 1983, Roper and Furrow lived in a little house just 40 miles, but a world away from the Ryens. "We were into drugs...big time," Roper said.

According to Roper, they were both white supremicists and Furrow was a particularly violent man. "He took a shot at me once," she recalled.

She remembered clearly the early hours of June 5, 1983, the morning after the Ryens were killed.

Furrow and another woman came into the house and Furrow was wearing coveralls, Roper said. "When they came through the door, you could feel something just eerie, real horrible," she said.

Two days later she was cleaning her closet. "Here was these coveralls that I knew didn't belong there," she said. "I picked them up, then I saw the blood."

"From the bottom of the zipper all the way up there was blood," Roper said.

And she laid his clothes out for him. "It was like a beige...light brown colored T-shirt," she noted.

When reports surfaced that a T-shirt had been found, she called the sheriff's office to relay her suspicions and gave deputies the bloody coveralls.

The coveralls were taken into evidence.

But why weren't they sent to a lab for blood testing? We'll never know because three months after Roper turned them in, a deputy sheriff threw them away.

Correspondent Erin Moriarty asked if it was unusual for what appeared to be blood-stained evidence to not go to the lab and to be thrown away prior to a trial?

"Well I don't know whether it was,...if that happened or not," said the now retired San Bernardino Sheriff Floyd Tidwell.

Is he concerned that maybe not all the evidence was available at Kevin Cooper's trial?

"I can't be concerned unless I know about it. You're asking me something I can't answer," Tidwell said.

But wasn't this something that happened when he was sheriff?

"Hey...let's bring this to a screaming halt right now here, OK. That's enough of that crap," said Tidwell, concluding the interview.

48 Hours then tapped Ingels to track down Furrow, now living on the East Coast.

e may have gone there to start over and hide his past, making him reluctant to talk, Ingels said.

But 48 Hours went to his front door anyway. And Furrow agreed to talk.

"Here I am and I am ready to talk to anyone. There was no coveralls; I wasn't living there," Furrow said.

Correspondent Erin Moriarty noted that Roper claimed he was wearing the coveralls.

"I know nothing of the coveralls," Furrow said.

When asked if he killed the Ryen family or Christopher Hughes, Furrow said he denied any involvement.

Furrow admitted he had been questioned about the Ryen murders in 1984 and said he took a lie detector test.

When 48 Hours shared this interview with detective Ingels, he said that Furrow was lying about the test.

Ingels was right.

But according to prosecutor Dennis Kottmeier and California authorities, this is irrelevant.

They are certain Furrow didn't kill the Ryens and that Cooper did.

"The big question is: Was there sufficient evidence to illustrate the guilt of Kevin Cooper, and the answer to that is yes," Kottmeier said.

Will Cooper be executed? Or will the state allow DNA tests that could set him free?