Rage On The Run

Produced by Paul Ryan

This story originally aired on Jan. 28, 2006.

In 1995, a bodybuilder who sold steroids and was involved in a love triangle in Fort Myers was gunned down inside his home. Police eyed an associate of the victim as a suspect but he disappeared before officers could make an arrest.

Years later and thousands of miles away, the murder of a police officer would stun a nation and reveal to investigators that the two cases were linked.

"48 Hours" correspondent Susan Spencer reports on the investigation, in cooperation with Granada Media and True North Productions.

On Dec. 26, 2003, in Leeds, England, police officer Ian Broadhurst lay dying in the street beside his patrol car. The search for his killer - one of the biggest manhunts in British history - had just begun.

Ian's mother Cindy remembers the day had started so peacefully. It was a holiday, the day after Christmas, what the British call "Boxing Day," and Ian and his wife were visiting.

"They actually came for Boxing Day breakfast and we had a lovely breakfast and a lot of laughs. We sat together and we watched the film and we laughed," she says.

Ian, 34, was a traffic cop in the city of Leeds and, holiday or not, he had to go to work.

"Boxing Day is generally a quiet day. Looking for what we normally look for, stolen cars, anybody that is doing something that draws us attention," says Neil Roper, 43, who had been Ian's partner for only a few months.

The two men had grown close.

"He was my mate, not just a policeman. He was just a genuine fella that got on with everybody," says Roper.

In the short time they were partners, Broadhurst and Roper had developed an almost uncanny ability to spot stolen cars, and this day after Christmas would be no different.

That afternoon the officers turned onto a small side street to check out a BMW that was parked at an odd angle.

"I just basically saw this black 3-series BMW parked up on the causeway in a - how can I put it - a peculiar position," Roper says. "We went slowly past the passenger side of the vehicle. I looked and saw just this white man reading a racing post."

The officers approached the vehicle and then radioed in. Their hunch was right: the car was stolen.

The driver - a very big man - was making Roper nervous.

"In the police car there is a button that you press which gives you the facility, obviously, to record anything that's being said in the car. This is the first time I've ever done this," he says.

The chilling record of what happened next was all caught on tape.

On the tape, one can hear the man saying he was from Leeds but that his country of birth was Canada. He also told officers, "Just to let you know I did not steal the car."

Roper was growing more wary by the minute and decided he should handcuff this suspect and got out of the car to call for backup, leaving Broadhurst alone.

The BMW was towed away. Moments later, Officer James Banks arrived. Broadhurst now got out of the patrol car.

Like most British police, none of the three officers carried a gun.

"I said to James, 'When I'm cuffing him, can you just watch me back,' " says Roper. "As I've looked forward, I've just seen this gun coming up to my face and what can I say from there. I've just shouted, he's got a gun."

Then gunshots could be heard on the tape.

Though Roper was hit in the shoulder and stomach, he somehow made it to a nearby building and radioed for help.

"I've been shot twice. I don't know about Ian, he's down on the floor," Roper radioed.

Neil Roper was critically wounded and James Banks was saved only because the bullet hit his police radio. But Ian Broadhurst died on his way to the hospital.

Broadhurst's mom, Cindy, remembers getting the terrible news.

"I do remember opening the door and seeing the uniforms in the dark," she says. "I can't remember what she tried to say to me. I do remember, bless her, I just got hold of her by her lapels and said, 'Just tell me he's not dead.' I've got some idea in my mind that it didn't matter what had happened. If he wasn't actually dead, I could make him get better. She just said, 'I'm afraid he is.' My whole world collapsed."

What had started as a normal traffic stop over Christmas week was now a national tragedy. After all, Ian Broadhurst was the first British police officer shot and killed in seven years, and his murder sparked a frantic, nationwide manhunt. But police really had very little to go on. All they really knew about this killer was that he was armed, and he was ruthless.

"The first four shots were fired in three seconds. So this happened very, very quickly. One has hit PC Broadhurst in the stomach," explains Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, who was the senior detective on call that day. "Two have hit PC Roper's, who's running away. One of the bullets that was fired at Neil Roper actually went through his left arm and struck this door here. And the other one has gone through Banks' radio.

"But then there is a five second delay. And you can hear the officer now saying, 'Please don't shoot.' It was as cold-blooded execution as you can imagine. This was a dangerous criminal who was on the run."

But he had left evidence behind. In the stolen BMW, he left two newspapers. In the patrol car, a half-eaten candy bar. All had fingerprints on them.

The prints yielded no immediate match but videotape from a nearby shop showed a man buying those very items just minutes before the shooting.

Just as important as his picture was his voice that Roper had recorded on tape. Audio expert Dr. Peter French was called in to analyze it.

"He'd made a claim during the course of the arrest that he was, in fact, Canadian," says French. To French's trained ear, that claim was a lie.

Analyzing the tape, French says the man was not Canadian but American, specifically from the south.

"I couldn't say exactly where in the southern states, because it is quite widespread. You'd find it in Georgia, Alabama and, of course, Florida," French says.

An American from the South. But who could it be? Police made public appeals for help and got it.

"We received an anonymous phone call, from a man who said, 'I know an American guy. He has a gun and he has a black BMW,' " Gregg says. "And he just gave us the name Nathan. And a mobile phone number. Through that mobile phone number we tracked that down to a man using the name Nathan Wayne Coleman.

"We have a name and we know where he's been living, but who this person is, we don't know."

The answer to that mystery was half a world away on the Gulf Coast of Florida, in a cold case involving sex, drugs and murder.

Within days of Ian Broadhurst's murder, police thought they knew two things about his killer. They though he was an American, named Nathan Wayne Coleman.

What they did not know was there was no Nathan Wayne Coleman, - the man they so desperately sought was a none other than David Bieber, who had been on the run for eight years.

David Bieber should have been easy to find. He was huge, being a former professional bodybuilder, 220 pounds of muscle.

"He could've been a model. He was a good looking guy," says Bobby Ammons, who grew up with Bieber in Fort Myers. "The kinda shape he was in is phenomenal. Of course, he drove around in, you know, a nice car. And he always had money."

And it had always been that way, recalls pal Greg Martin.

"When I went over to his house, it was full of swimming trophies," he says. "That really, that kinda started his physique, 'cause even as an 11-year-old he had a better body than the rest of us. He was stronger than us."

In high school, Bieber's lean swimmer's physique became more muscular. He and Martin joined the football team and started lifting weights.

"David was getting bigger than a lot of us. He really was starting to get really good size on him," says Martin. "And some of us were starting to rumor, 'Hey, maybe David is using steroids.' "

In fact, Ammons says he and Bieber did start taking steroids. He remembers that there was an obvious change. "He got even bigger and stronger than he already was."

By the time he graduated in 1984, Bieber had morphed into a He-Man, ready for the Marines. But military life handed him a setback.

"He realized, 'This ain't for me. People here actually tell me what to do.' He didn't like that. The authority thing didn't really fly with him," says Ammons.

After 18 months, he was less-than-honorably discharged. In 1986, he moved back to Fort Myers and focused on bodybuilding full-time.

His friends say that, as his physique grew, so did his appetite for steroids. After all, he now was winning contests.

But competing costs money and Bieber began selling steroids, as well as using them. And he was moving with a new crowd.

"We kinda took different roads," says Ammons. "I was working 50, 60 hours a week and trying to fit the gym in. Where he would, you know, he would go in the gym in the morning and in the afternoon."

That's when Bieber met fellow bodybuilder Markus Mueller, a German immigrant.

Appearances aside, Mueller's little sister Nancy says Markus had a big heart.

"He was probably the coolest brother you can really imagine," she says. "I could stay over at his place at night and watch the scary movies. He was always funny, always happy. I've never seen a sad side of him."

In the 1990s, Mueller flirted with an acting career, playing the tough guy in several low budget movies.

He may have dreamed of stardom, but unbeknownst to his sister, he already had one lucrative career: importing steroids from Europe.

In October 1994, Mueller and his girlfriend Danielle Labelle were arrested on steroid charges. They pled guilty.

David Bieber was also part of their operation, says Bieber's friend John Saladino.

"He would come down from Germany. That was like his main, one of his main sources of getting it," says Saladino.

But Saladino says Bieber eventually wanted to control the business. "He'd got into a couple of arguments with Markus Mueller over the steroids."

And it turns out, Bieber also wanted Mueller's girlfriend, Danielle. They started an affair and, to the shock of his friends, got married just weeks later.

"I could just tell her heart wasn't in the right place," says Ammons. "You know, you hear all these stories about how she was so in love with Markus."

When she spoke Fox TV's "America's Most Wanted," Danielle Labelle said, "I was seeing both Markus and David. I loved Markus but David was just fun to hang out with."

On Feb. 10, 1995, this love triangle came to the attention of Lee County Sheriff's Det. Barry Futch.

"It was a little after noon when I heard, probably noontime. We had a person shot," says Futch. "I approached the front door. And there laid this huge man. When I say huge, I'm talkin' about a man that was - muscles. This guy was gigantic."

It was the lifeless body of Markus Mueller, shot in the head and stomach.

The body was found by none other than Bieber's wife and Mueller's ex, Danielle Labelle, who called 911.

Even more bizarre, David Bieber had driven her to the crime scene.

"He had brought Danielle Labelle, his new wife, over because she had forgotten to get her purse from Markus Mueller's house," says Futch.

Futch says Bieber was there when detectives arrived. What was Bieber's attitude when he talked to Futch?

"Just nonchalant. Just like nothing was going on. He did seem like he was concealing something," Futch says.

Futch says he was convinced from the start that Bieber was behind the murder.

"He had two reasons for knocking Markus off. One was the steroid business. And two was Danielle," he says. "So he just decided to get rid of him. And then he would have the girl and he would have the drugs ... And I told him that day, 'You know you're involved in this. And we're gonna prove it.' "

But David Bieber was about to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that didn't happen.

Markus Mueller's death had a profound affect on his sister Nancy.

"It was very important for me to let the police know that there's a family that cares," she says. "And it's very important for us to find out what happened."

Nancy says she feared police would just ignore the murder. But not only were police not ignoring it, says Futch, they already had a prime suspect: David Bieber.

Futch says he became suspicious as soon as he found out Bieber and Mueller were both selling steroids. "We found out that Marcus Mueller dealt in steroids. And, matter of fact, that day he probably had thousands of dollars worth of steroids in his house, which were missing. We figured that David took 'em."

Police weren't the only ones who suspected Bieber. In her 911 call, his own wife, Danielle Labelle, accused him of shooting Mueller.

"I think Dave shot him," she said during the call.

A few weeks later she told Bieber's friend, Bobby Ammons the same thing.

"I ran into Danielle and David, shortly after Marcus was killed, at a club. And this Danielle girl says, 'You're old friends with my husband, Dave.' And I said yeah. She goes, 'Did you know that he killed my ex-boyfriend?' " Ammons says. "She said this to me."

At first, Ammons didn't believe her. And Bieber had a solid alibi: witnesses saw him at a club the night Mueller was killed.

But as the summer of 1995 wore on, suspicions about Bieber grew.

"In the midst of this, there was another incident that happened in the city of Fort Myers," says Futch. "And that was where a guy walked up to a girl who was taking some trash out, and shot at her five times. The girl ended up to be David Bieber's ex-girlfriend."

The target - who escaped without a scratch - was Michelle Stanforth, who had once had a stormy relationship with Bieber.

But a tip to police led them not to Bieber, but to a 17-year-old kid named David Snipes. Futch brought him in for questioning.

"In the midst of that conversation with David Snipes that night, he admitted to shooting at the girl. And, he told me that night 'I thought I killed her,' " says Futch.

Futch says Snipes then dropped a bombshell. He confessed to killing Markus Mueller. "He went into the whole details of how he drove, and how he got to Markus's front door. Knocked on the front door, Markus came to the door, Markus opened it, and he shot him. And he made sure he was dead and he shot him again."

But Snipes claimed he was only a hired gun, and that John Saladino had paid him just over $1,000 for each hit. Police found Saladino holed up with David Bieber.

"We didn't think we had enough evidence to arrest David Bieber. We did think we had probable cause to arrest John Saladino," says Futch. "So we went to the apartment and knocked on the door and, eventually, John opened the door. John Saladino. And, I said 'Hey John, I need you to go downtown with me, and we need to talk.' And David was in the background going, 'You don't have to go, John. You don't have to go.' But he came with us. I started talking to him, and I told him what David Snipes had said."

When he saw Snipes was in custody, Saladino confessed but insisted he was only a go-between. He said that he had hired Snipes but that David Bieber had paid for it.

"When he asked me to find somebody to kill Markus Mueller, I says, 'Why do you want to do that?' And, he's like, 'I have my reasons.' " says Saladino. "David Bieber gave me, it was $1,000. And his address - Markus Mueller lived in Hacienda Village in Bonita Springs. And I asked David Snipes he was willing to do it and he said he would."

Finally, Futch had enough to arrest David Bieber for first degree murder. But Bieber was gone.

"So I called him on his cell phone," says Futch. "I said, 'Why don't you come on in and see me, and talk to me. We need to straighten this up.' And he goes, 'Well, I tell you what, let me call my attorney, and I'll get back to you.' That's the last phrase I ever heard from David Bieber. David just disappeared."

Months passed, then years. A new investigator, Charlie Ferrante, inherited the case and quickly became consumed with the search.

He put Bieber's family and friends under surveillance, and says they were hiding and assisting him.

He pored over their phone records, monitored their travel and kept tabs on Bieber's old hang-outs.

He scoured the country to follow up on leads but leads that initially seemed promising, led nowhere.

"We obtained a Tennessee driver's license in his name," says Ferrante.

Ferrante believes Bieber used his own name to mislead investigators and focus their search on Tennessee.

Bieber wasn't there. And now, complicating their search, police noticed that his appearance was starting to change. He changed his hair and started gaining weight, leading Ferrante to believe that Bieber was off the steroids.

What police didn't know was that Bieber was hard at work on a whole new identity. But he needed a name, someone roughly his age, with an innocent past.

David Bieber found that identity in a Georgia cemetery, on the gravestone of a 6-year-old boy, Nathan Wayne Coleman, who had died in 1975.

Bieber bought a copy of the Coleman's birth certificate and got a passport in his name. In September 1996, the fake Nathan Wayne Coleman fled the United States.

Days after British policemen Neil Roper and Ian Broadhurst were shot, lead detective Chris Gregg was hot on the trail of Ian's killer, and finding out more about the man British police knew as Nathan Wayne Coleman.

Bieber, Gregg found out, was doing security work. "And that's where he was earning his legitimate money. He's into bodybuilding. He was certainly working at his fitness. Gambling was a major part of his life. And we calculated that in the three years he'd gambled around £300,000 ($535,000)."

Bieber had lived in England for seven years, and worked as a nightclub bouncer.

"He wanted to be a gangster. He just wanted to be a big shot. He wanted people to fear him, he wanted people to respect him," remembers Pearce Coyle, who worked with him.

On Dec. 28, 2003, police raided Bieber's apartment. He wasn't there, but he had left plenty behind.

"We found items in there which we knew were connected to the shooting. Whoever had this flat had got the interest in gambling. A gun cleaning kit was under his bed. There was a bulletproof vest in there," says Gregg.

Meanwhile, Bieber - a.k.a. Coleman - was popping up on security cameras all around Leeds.

The day after Broadhurst's murder, he had been to several banks, withdrawing thousands in cash.

Then police got another tip.

David Costello, who operates a storage facility in Leeds, recognized the name. "So I instantly got on the computer system here and just made sure that Nathan Coleman was one of the people that stored here, and it just stood out."

In Coleman's storage unit, police made an ominous discovery.

"There were hundreds and hundreds of rounds of home-made ammunition, nine millimeter bullets," Gregg says. "And there was a bullet reloading machine there. So, there was a bullet press to make all the bullets, there was the gunpowder, the primers, the cartridge cases. The bullet heads. It was all there."

Surveillance tape showed Bieber had just been there, apparently arming himself.

"It (the surveillance tape) showed this character going in with one bag and coming out with another. And we thought that rucksack is probably packed with ammunition. We were very, very concerned that now there's a man on the run, he's dangerous, he's killed one cop, he shot another. He's probably realizing that he's gonna be facing the rest of his life in jail. What has he got to lose?" says Gregg.

Having found no fingerprint match in their own database, police had submitted the prints to the FBI. On day four of the manhunt, they got a hit, and Gregg remembers it did not put their minds at ease. "Those fingerprints were identified in the States as those of David Bieber."

Gregg says the Americans told him a great deal about David Bieber. "The fact that he was wanted in the States for conspiracy to murder. And that they had seen nothing of him since 1996. Learning about David Bieber's background answered the key question for us, which was 'Why had this person reacted so violently in the way that they did?' "

Knowing who their fugitive really was added even more urgency to the hunt. Because police now feared that Bieber might try to flee the country. And on Dec. 30, day five of the chase, a tip was called in that he had been spotted at a train station in York, only about 20 miles from the scene of the crime.

By the time police arrived, there was no sign of Bieber. In fact, he was nearly 100 miles away, having arrived that very afternoon in the town of Gateshead, in the far northeast corner of England. He had checked into the Royal Hotel, a modest place off the main highway.

Vicky Brown, who was on duty that night at the hotel, remembers what Bieber looked like. "Very big, very tall and he looked quite broad and he was wearing this black, wooly hat pulled right down over his ears, and a big pair of old fashioned glasses."

Brown says Bieber's room overlooked the main street.

Brown went back to the reception area, but couldn't stop thinking about the stranger upstairs. She had heard about the manhunt briefly on the news but then saw a photo of the fugitive in the newspaper.

"It wasn't until I looked at the photograph and I seen this picture of what this guy might look like. So, I sat and drew a pair of glasses on this paper and that's when I thought, 'Yeah, could be,' " recalls Brown.

She called her boss at home, who then called police.

Vicky waited for police to arrive, alone with the most wanted man in Britain. She remembers being "terrified."

Meanwhile in Florida, Lt. Ferrante was reeling from the news that David Bieber had resurfaced after eight long years. "I was called and told a police officer lost his life because of David Bieber. I remember hanging up the phone, closing my door, and I actually broke down," he says.

Thousands of miles away, David Bieber was hoping to slip away one more time, but British police had been tipped.

Police arrived at the Royal Hotel shortly before 2 a.m. New Year's Eve. David Bieber was upstairs in his room alone and, they assumed, ready to shoot his way out. But this time he wasn't facing three unarmed men. This time he was facing a S.W.A.T. team, armed with high-powered rifles.

Police cautiously climbed the stairs to Bieber's room.

"When he first came to the door, we didn't actually see him. The door opened by about an inch, an inch and a half, and then slammed shut quickly after that," recalls one of the officers who was there.

For seven tense minutes there was silence while Bieber considered his options.

"He couldn't go out of the window, he had to go out of the door," says Gregg. "And I think he was weighing up his chances of surviving. And I think he realized that if he was going into a shoot out here, he would end up being killed himself."

Bieber may have thought so, too. He opened the door and gave up without a fight.

"After that, the door fully opened and the subject stood in the doorway fully dressed and the most distinctive part was his hair," remembers one of the arresting officers.

His hair was distinctive because the one-time master of disguise had done a rather bad job dyeing it, which was now an odd orangey-blonde. He fooled no one.

"But there was the most cruel irony in his surrender," says Gregg. "He said to the officer, 'You wouldn't shoot an unarmed man would you?' Now, considering what this character had done to an unarmed police officer, David Bieber using those words, I think he knew exactly what he was doing at that point."

Police found the gun that killed Ian Broadhurst - fully loaded - under Bieber's bed, along with almost 300 rounds of ammunition. Bieber was taken to a high-security jail, held at gunpoint every step of the way.

"When David Bieber was arrested, he never spoke one word to us," says Gregg. "He never opened his mouth. He never uttered one word."

But that would all change a year later, when Bieber had his day in court.

David Bieber's two-week murder trial took place in a Newcastle courtroom. And at its end he testified in his own defense. He admitted being on the scene when Ian Broadhurst was murdered, but he said the actual shooter was a friend of his from Florida, somebody he refused to name. Prosecutors dubbed this the mystery man "Mister X" and ridiculed the entire story.

Bieber even denied ever being in the patrol car, but prosecutors found a novel way to convince the jury he was lying.

"We tracked down the gambling companies that he had been using, telephone betting," says Gregg. "And the gambling companies tape record the calls. So, we managed to gather quite a lot of recordings of the person who was using the name Nathan Wayne Coleman."

Voice expert Peter French compared the gambling phone calls to the patrol car tape and says he found "very similar pronunciation to the one that you found in the car recording."

"This is one of the most clear-cut cases in which I've ever acted," says French. "Short of a fingerprint, it doesn't get much better."

Of course, prosecutors had Bieber's fingerprint as well, on that candy wrapper in the back seat.

The jury wasted little time, finding Bieber guilty in just three hours. The sentence was equally emphatic - life behind bars.

"This is a whole life sentence, which is very unusual in this country," says Gregg. "Very few and far between a sentence of whole life. So, he will never be granted parole."

For Ian Broadhurst's family, it was scant consolation.

"I'm old enough to be able to remember the time when if the news told us that somebody had been shot in this country, you stopped what you were doing and said, shot? Not here," says Broadhurst's mother, Cindy Eaton. "That happens maybe in America, but not here. We don't stop any more."

Ferrante says the case will always hurt him. "Every time I think of the officer in the United Kingdom, this Ian Broadhurst, it will always hurt me, it will always bother me."

He also doesn't have the satisfaction of making the arrest. "But that's the selfish part of fugitive work. The real part of fugitive work is the bad guy's in jail."

British prison officials foiled an escape plot by David Bieber in October 2007. He apparently planned to escape by helicopter with an arsenal of weapons.

Danielle Labelle divorced Bieber in 2003.

Since he is serving life without parole, there are no plans to try David Bieber for Markus Mueller's murder.