WTBL - Walking the Blue Line

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (00:11)
welcome back everyone to walking the blue line where we talk about true crime on our podcast. And this week we have a who done

well. We're going to be joined by the detective that investigated it

Glad to have you

Mike Drapeau (00:25)
I'll

be

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (00:26)
what is our True Crime podcast this week? Well, this is about an older gentleman who lived in the Spokane Valley. name was Ken Cross and he was basically bludgeoned to death. That's what they thought. there was a little twist to that As well, I think that one of the family members is like a key suspect. And then the case maybe takes a twist. Or two.

don't you tell us a little bit about Ken Cross, if you don't mind, and what happened on this fateful September day in

Mike Drapeau (00:58)
I was working for Spokane County as a homicide detective. I was relatively new. It was probably my first year as a homicide detective. And on that weekend, September 20th, 2008, I was the on-call

ended up getting called out around 11 o'clock p.m. to go to a suspicious death, likely homicide in Spokane Valley on Boone

I drove out there.

I got there around about midnight. The weather was really bad. It was raining. It was

property address on Boone is a nice old house on a large piece of property in the corner. It has lots of outbuildings. It had lots of cars parked in the driveway. The patrol information was that the homeowner, Kenneth Cross, who was an 80-something-year-old male who'd had

health problems before, was doing really well

had made plans to go

Ann Turnwall, and they were going to have dinner somewhere, but he never showed up. So they became concerned that he might have had some medical issues. So they called his relatives, who lived just a kitty- corner from the house. They went to the house and his car was there. The house was in its normal condition, but they

anything amiss

they ended up calling another

came and found some blood staining on the carpet. He found some forced entry to the back door.

He found that a lot of the house had been ransacked, the desk had been torn up downstairs. And so he made a more detailed search of the house and found Ken Cross's body inside the master bedroom closet, covered in blood. he ended up moving Ken Cross out of the closet, checking him for vitals and found that he was deceased. they left him there. that's how I ended up getting the call. Patrol went out to the scene. The family members who had lived across the street were still in the

the

they called me enroute and I said, just lock the entire place down. Don't let any cars leave. Don't let anybody leave. Just get the people out of the house and close the

when I got there, it was

What we ended up doing was just waiting till daylight. There were lots of outbuildings. It was rainy and dark and there were some items from the house out in the yard. And I didn't want to go up and start messing with things in the middle of the night, trying to get in the house and walk over evidence that I needed to document

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (03:09)
the way you kind of describe this, did you get all of that information while you were in route as to

this guy was and start formulating your plan while you're headed there?

Mike Drapeau (03:20)
I'll call radio first on my way there and then I can talk to them as I

they can give me like how the call came in, who the initial reporting party was, when patrol got there, if any notes in CAD about what patrol did or didn't do. So I get a kind of a framework of the

then when I get there,

the first patrol guy on scene. And he'll give me his first hand information about what he saw when he got there, who was there, what injuries might be there. I was just going off of their patrol information that it looked like he'd been bludgeoned to death. And it looked like he died somewhere in the master bedroom, master bedroom closet.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (03:56)
seem to recall when you guys got into the investigation, they were trying to put a timeline

there

of him coming out of a store at a certain time,

so they knew he was alive at

20 something like

Mike Drapeau (04:08)
on the family's

go check the store that he was supposed to go to. we find a receipt for something he had purchased at Rosars in the valley with a timestamp. we went to the Rosars and we found him pulling it in his car, going and buying some chicken, getting back in his car and driving towards his house. So we know he's alive then. We didn't see anybody following him, but we knew he was away from the house for a period of time to go get some chicken.

We knew he had come home. His car was parked where it normally was. So it looked like he'd gone in, put the chicken in the

had broken into the house and was in the house ransacking it when he came

confronted the intruder and the

him to

ransacking of the house was extensive. So there's some explanations for that. Either they're a burglar who just routinely ransacks, because that's not generally their purpose. They take the high value items and

But in this case, either they knew what they were looking for and had to break in to get it, or they knew what was there and they were just looking until they found it. Or it was somebody who wanted it to make it look like a burglary but didn't know what an actual burglary looked

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (05:10)
you get there and decide to wait till the following day. I'm assuming that some of that time is then spent doing interviews with people on scene or the original reporting parties. Did you have any developed theories or any developed suspects before you even started searching?

Mike Drapeau (05:29)
we went across the street and we talked to the family members and they were all pretty consistent and that nobody really wanted to hurt Ken.

didn't have a secret life or anything. he was just a normal guy living at home. He did have money and he did have nice things in his

The last people to see Ken

a maid

Teresa Nelson

It was just some lady that he met walking down the street one day who said, hey, I'll clean your house for you. so she'd been cleaning the house there the day before

married a lady

Hap had died, but Hap had a son when they got married named Michael Livingston Michael Livingston had been at the house and talked to Ken the day before, he died. there was a contention between Mike Livingston and Ken Cross, because Ken was pretty well off and he had a lot of health problems. He was in the process of going and getting a will so that he could leave

estate the way he wanted

information was that Mike wasn't going to get any of that money he was mad about it. they had had an argument the day before about who was going to get money the family told me that on that next Monday, Ken was scheduled to go meet with the attorney to draw up the final will and testament they felt maybe the

That had something to

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (06:36)
it was Mike's own family that said he might be a potential

Mike Drapeau (06:40)
family said that one of those two may have had something to do with it. Either the

they felt was probably into criminal lifestyle. And they felt that the maid had previously stolen some stuff from Anna Turnwall's house, including the ring that used to belong to Hap.

Haps old wedding ring that Ken got her and they felt maybe she was trying to steal stuff from the house or maybe she'd had somebody break in to help her steal stuff from the house or they felt that Mike was a good suspect because Mike was getting cut out of the will and Mike was pretty pissed about it and him and Ken didn't get along very

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (06:59)
out

Mike Drapeau (07:13)
lots of different

Teresa Nelson

had only cleaned Anne's house one time. after she was done cleaning the house Anne realized that a ring was missing from her house. she just told her not to come back and clean anymore. We were able to eventually identify and recover that ring

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (07:30)
On the pawn slip, it looked like there was two other items. I was curious as to if that was just other items, maybe she had stolen from somebody else or if those were also from Anna's house or

Mike Drapeau (07:41)
the only thing we were able to determine was for sure stolen was the ring from Anna's house.

Ken was dead and we had no idea what was missing from his house. So if that stuff had turned up missing, we couldn't link it to Ken's

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (07:54)
the following morning comes and now you start lining up resources to

us a little bit through processing the

Mike Drapeau (08:02)
it depends on the nature of the case. Sometimes we'll start at the outside and work our way to the

we'll go directly to the body, process around the body, get the body moved and autopsied, and then go from there. In this case,

was a large

started on the outside.

all the way around the house, checking every window, checking every door, checking all the flower beds underneath the windows to see if a burglar

in the window, processed the back porch and the door, and then worked our way into the body.

was a lot of stuff to do inside. It's one of the only times that I've ever fingerprinted the entire house. Normally, everybody thinks we do that all the time, but we don't generally do it. There was one place where blood had been transferred to a door that went upstairs.

But other than that, all the blood was in the bedroom and in the bedroom closet. But still, I had him process the whole house for fingerprints because all the drawers were out. Lots of stuff had been moved and ransacked. We got lots of prints, but none of which came back to anybody we could say was a suspect. And if they came back to Teresa or if they came back to Mike, it didn't mean anything anyway because they had regular access to the house.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (09:08)
That's kind of the tough thing when your suspect is known is that a lot of times their fingerprints and DNA in that place doesn't really mean anything because they're there all the time anyway, right?

Mike Drapeau (09:20)
stranger homicides are a rarity, right? Somebody usually knows the person is arguing with the person related to the person and the vast majority of homicides are DV related where their intimate partner. So the husband, the wife, estranged children. the difficulty with DV is that because they're

DNA is normally co-mingled anyway. Their DNA is at the scene. They live at the same house. Their fingerprints should be there. Their fingerprints and DNA might be on the murder weapon if it's one from the house, So it doesn't really mean anything. you have to eliminate the possibility of anybody else. So you're not looking for the suspect so much as looking for the presence of anybody else in a DV. So it's more difficult as far as DNA goes.

than a stranger homicide. If you find a stranger's DNA inside the bedroom on the murder weapon, well then, hey, that's a clue, it's not supposed to be there. If you find the husband's DNA on a murder weapon in the house it's supposed to be there it doesn't mean as much.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (10:16)
If I remember right the bludgeoning was so bad didn't you call in Washington State Patrol to do blood spatter analysis in this

Mike Drapeau (10:25)
were

complex bloodstain patterns in

So I ended up calling the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab and they brought out their crime scene response team to augment our forensics unit that was already on scene. And we broke it up. So they did just the master bedroom and the master bedroom closet for blood. And we

everything else while they did that. Once they were done with the blood stain, we went in and did the actual search for evidence and processing of other evidence non-blood related in the master bedroom. And we finished about the same time, took us about two whole

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (10:55)
So after you guys have done

you've got two suspects that you're thinking

One was the housekeeper and one was his stepson. what happened after

Mike Drapeau (11:03)
while we were at the scene on that very first day, myself and some property crimes guys were processing the scene with forensics. And I got a notification that Mike Livingston was at the crime scene tape. So I went out to talk to him. By then, we knew that not only did Ken Cross get bludgeoned with a large, cylindrical object like a pry bar,

But he'd also been shot in the head, likely with a .22, at least one time. we knew the murder weapon was, amongst other things, a .22 caliber pistol that was not at the scene still. it might have been Ken's own gun that they found while they were ransacking, because he was missing a .22 caliber

when I went out to talk to Mike

had what looked like blood on his pants and on his

I asked could that be blood on your pants and shoes? And he said, yeah, maybe. we also had the conversation that him and Ken didn't generally get along, that he had seen Ken just before he'd gone to the store the day that he was murdered. If you ask Terry, she left when Mike was still there. And if you ask Mike, he left while Terry was still there. But one of those two was the last to see him alive. I ended

getting Detective Ricketts to come help me another major crimes detective because everybody else was busy, including you,

Ricketts came out and just ended up taking Mike Livingston and talking to him. As it turned out, Livingston had some Tyvek suits in his

kind of living off the grid.

presents oddly to normal

the family admits he's a bit

he tells Mike Ricketts that he's been test firing 22 caliber bullets into this phone book in his car. So we go out there and he lets us look at his car. And sure enough, he's been measuring loads in 22 caliber reloads so that they penetrate just enough. So he's been shooting them into phone books.

So he's got 22 caliber bullet holes and phone books in his car. His car's got Tyvek suits in there that he uses for painting. we ended up getting him to give us his clothes right away because we think there's blood on them. We phenolphthalein tested the stains on the shoes and they came back as

we ended up taking all his clothes and Mike dealt with

we continued to search the house

Nelson showed

We got statements from them and their statements didn't really

you ask Terry, she left and Mike was the only one there with Ken and they were arguing. And if you ask Mike, he left and left Terry there to clean the

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (13:11)
she was a character as well. Didn't she turn out to be kind of a habitual liar? she would tell one story and then she kind of switched it around and tell another story. she had a couple different stories,

Mike Drapeau (13:22)
Terry's boyfriend was a known burglar. He was in jail at the time, so he couldn't have done the burglary. But one of the thoughts was that maybe Terry had hired somebody because she knew it was in the house. She knew Ken was going to be gone to the store and they knew what they were looking for.

Mike also,

if he was staging it to look like a burglary because he's the obvious suspect, that made sense as well for the scene. any of them fit the suspect. So we had some pretty good suspects right

start. I was kind of

with the scene at least for the first couple days. But then we started bringing people in for interviews and doing some follow-up

we're processing the Mike Ricketts goes with Mike Livingston to his residence and executes a warrant there. And they recover all of his firearms, several of which are 22 caliber rifles and pistols. They look for blood. They don't find any blood at his residence, no bloody

they collect it all

store it for later processing. And then we take Mike's clothes at the scene and we send those to property as well for later processing. We search Terry Nelson's car and there was no blood in her car that we could see. We did eventually search her house and find some documentation there. you calling Terry a habitual liar is

She routinely denied things we knew were absolutely true. for no other reason than to lie about them. I don't think anybody in the family trusts her very much. we certainly had to verify everything she told us. And some of that turned out not to be true.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (14:42)
this way. ⁓

did you have any suspicion that Mike Livingston and Terry Nelson worked together,

Mike Drapeau (15:03)
we knew they were acquainted with one another. They knew who each other were. we tried to find any connection for them outside of the basic connection to Ken Cross, but we never did find

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (15:14)
the end of processing Ken's house, what evidence do you have to walk away with? What can you build this case on?

Mike Drapeau (15:22)
as in all cases, we throw out a ton of theories. We keep a wide net as far as theories go as to what might be important, what might have happened. Ken's house was clean, so clearly Terry had cleaned it. The rugs were freshly vacuumed. The kitchen was clean. But there were things out of place. There were puzzle

from some puzzles we didn't find in the house, on the floor, in the living room, when everything else was clean.

There was a little tie strap from a, sweatshirt on the floor. So we took all of that stuff. There were some paper, little bits of paper. Like if you write on a notebook and you pull it off the notepad, those little pieces of paper fall down. We took those. There was a notepad in the kitchen by the phone that matched that. And it looked like the top sheet had been torn off. So we didn't know if they'd made Ken write his.

pin code on there and then taking it off and killed him and went and drained his account. we took as much stuff as we thought might be possible to need. A lot of that never became evidentiary. When we did kind of figure out the most likely scenario, we went back and tested those things. But in Ken's pocket of his shirt,

is the phone number and the date for the meeting with the attorney. So we did know that he was gonna meet an attorney on Monday to talk about the will and testament. We found no weapon capable of killing Ken Cross, so we're missing a 22 caliber pistol. We never found a weapon capable of bludgeoning him. And it looks like maybe that same device was used to break into the back door.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (16:33)
Well.

Mike Drapeau (16:51)
The break on the back door was a linear break across the middle, like they tried to take a baseball bat and hit the doorknob and missed it and hit the center of the door. So it was a long, cylindrical, round object, probably the same object that was used to beat Ken extensively about the head and face.

we found bullets in Ken's head at autopsy. So we knew they were 22 caliber bullets. We found a 22 caliber bullet in the floor of the closet. We found extensive blood staining in the closet indicating that Ken was probably fatally injured, but alive when he was put in the closet. since the cartridge case was in the floor of the closet, it looked like he was thrown in the closet then

we were able to find

impression in Ken's blood on a couple of items inside the closet, ⁓ a piece of batting from a bed and a black pair of jeans. Those had a bloody shoe impression on it. So we were able to at least get a picture of that for later

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (17:44)
when you look at how badly Ken is beaten what would you say about the assault on him?

Mike Drapeau (17:51)
So Ken was hit probably 24 plus times in the head. His skull was extensively cracked and broken from the beating. A lot of his ribs were broken as well from being struck with the same object over 10 times, in the ribs. And then in addition to that, once he was in the closet, they shot him three times in the head.

once in both sides and once through and through,

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (18:12)
in the past, they've said It's personal, you're taking it out on somebody. in more recent studies, they seem to have Change their way of thinking about that.

they're trying to kill somebody and they're not dying. So they just keep going. What do you think about that?

Mike Drapeau (18:25)
Yeah, so

at the time I felt that it was probably a personal attack. It can be somebody that doesn't like somebody and just takes the rage out that they felt for a long time. that was the hook I tried to use with Mike. So if it had been Mike, that would have explained maybe the over the top aggression. But also it was clear that whoever was there wanted Ken Cross to not be alive because he was a witness to the crime

And eventually that turns out to be the most likely theory is that they just wanted him to be dead so he couldn't tell anybody. And so they went to great extents to make sure he was gonna die.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (18:56)
Right.

you finished processing and it sounds like you've got more things missing from your crime scene than you actually found in your crime scene. You've got firearms are missing, personal property,

Mike Drapeau (19:10)
the cartridge cases were missing. So it wasn't a semi-auto

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (19:14)
but you didn't really find a lot there that would identify your suspect.

Mike Drapeau (19:19)
we found nothing that even in the best circumstance, would lead us to a suspect ID. And I was pretty sure that I wouldn't get lucky enough for that shoe impression to be the suspect's shoe impression. I figured it was probably one of the family who reached in and pulled Ken's body from the closet and it already stood in a pool of blood. even though we

documented as well as we could it was probably not going to identify the suspect. I was pleasantly surprised by that at the end of the day.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (19:46)
we move on then to you've now finished your processing and you've done all of these interviews. What happens next?

Mike Drapeau (19:53)
we end up getting Mike Livingston and putting him in a room and interviewing him for hours and hours, myself and Mike

he didn't say anything other than the story that he wasn't there when he was killed and deny

I didn't

anything to book him on. So we just let him go. And then we interviewed Terry again one more

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (20:12)
out of the blue, you guys received some information that blew this case open, right?

Mike Drapeau (20:16)
on the 28th of September, I get a call from the patrol lieutenant at the time, Martin O'Leary. And he

went on this call and we found some stuff belonging to Ken

in a shop out on the West Side. And so we want you to come out.

And I said, do we know who that stuff belongs to? And they said, yeah, it belongs to a guy named David Brzezinski,

was renting that place from the guy who found

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (20:44)
owner of the rental place

doing an inventory or looking through some stuff of David Brzezinski's because he kicked him

Well, there was a bunch of paint he said he kept down there.

Mike Drapeau (20:54)
he owns a shop out on the West

a private contractor, sometimes painter. he paints for friends and does odd jobs for them on occasion. He just grabs paint from wherever he can get it or anything excess paint. And he's got a room downstairs that's all concrete.

It's huge and it's just chock full of hundreds of paint cans, maybe a thousand, ⁓ in the little apartment part of the shop, he rents that out to friends And he had been letting David Brzezinski live there, but David had been bringing stolen

items to the house and he didn't want that going on at his house. So around about the 23rd of September, he said, look, David, you can't be doing that here. You can't stay. You got to get out. he ended up changing the locks. so David couldn't get access to the property. then at some point he let David come in and get some stuff, but he didn't get everything. And then David took off and he didn't see him anymore.

On the 27th of September, he has more friends staying in an RV out back, and they needed some paint he goes downstairs, and he's looking through all the paint cans. And in a five-gallon paint can, a white paint, he finds a metal can shoved down in the paint can. So he pulls the metal can out, and in this crushed metal paint can is a little, tiny flip-top lunchbox.

So he opens lunchbox because he's never seen it before. And in there is a break top old carriage gun, 22 pistol, pair of gloves, a bunch of knickknacks and little things, and a couple of IDs, including one for Ken Cross. Now he didn't know who Ken Cross was, but he did know that there was a murder.

of an older man. So he thought, well, that'd be weird. So he goes up and shows this to his friends living in the RV and says, Hey, look at the stuff I found. And they start going through it. Like, that's weird. Wouldn't it be weird if that was the old guy who was murdered? So he calls and says, Hey, what was the name of the old guy that was murdered? And they tell him it's Ken Cross. And he's like, Holy crap, I have his stuff here. So he puts it right down and calls us and I eventually go out there with the search warrant.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (22:53)
wow. So what all did you find out there?

Mike Drapeau (22:56)
initially, I just collected the items that he found.

And then under that was just some like old buttons

a bunch of old glass beads like you would find in the bottom of an aquarium and a bunch of like an old Hot Wheels car and just the most random stuff. But it all looked like it belonged to Ken Cross, including Ken Cross's ID and a couple of cards.

We locked it down and then I just went and got a search warrant and came back the next day.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (23:20)
Come back the next day, do you find anything additional that belonged to Ken?

Mike Drapeau (23:24)
We didn't find anything additional belonging to

We ended up finding a pair of boots, size 10 and 1 half Pacific Crest hiking boots, just sitting next to the chair in the living portion. We took

we had that one shoe impression in the closet in blood. And when I looked at them in the light of this little apartment, I didn't see any blood on them but it looked like they might be close match and they belonged to David

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (23:46)
And did the shoes turn out to actually be the ones that made the print and they had Ken's blood on them?

Mike Drapeau (23:53)
They did.

knew we'd taken pictures of the bloody shoe

I went to property and I signed them out.

And I opened the bag and as soon as I looked at them in a good light, I'm like, holy mackerel, these are covered in blood. They have blood staining on the top. They have blood in the treads. So I took some pictures of the tread. They're a close match. So close that I couldn't tell that they weren't the same. so that became the thing we sent to the lab

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (24:15)
what's next? You try to locate David Brzezinski.

Mike Drapeau (24:18)
I put out a bolo, a be on the lookout for David

I sent the other major crimes guys out to find David Brzezinski, who had an active warrant for a probation

we could detain him if we found him. They knew he was driving a specific truck. He didn't really have a place that they knew he was living.

they went and started looking for him. And they eventually found him driving his truck at a gas station and took him in custody on his

they ended up getting a warrant for his person and searching him, taking pictures of him, taking his clothes, and left his truck for searching

I wrote a warrant for his truck and we searched his truck for the items we were missing from the case.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (24:53)
Did you find

Mike Drapeau (24:54)
found a large metal pry bar, a big spade on one end and a tip on the other for breaking concrete, which is consistent with what Ken Cross was beaten with, but we didn't find any blood or DNA from Ken Cross on that item. We didn't find any blood in his car from Ken Cross. We took that car apart. We took all the carpets out of it. We took the seats out of it. We took every item out and basically looked it over.

with chemicals and alternative light sources for blood. And we didn't find any hairs and fibers from Ken or any blood in the car. And we hadn't had the shoes compared to the tread yet. And we didn't know if it was Ken's blood on the shoes, but we were pretty sure it probably

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (25:30)
So does this give you enough then to make an arrest and take him to trial?

Mike Drapeau (25:35)
once David Brzenc became a suspect, we did a deep dive into David's criminal history. And what we found with David's criminal history was he was a notorious burglar and he targeted older people in their homes. most of his victims were older, elderly people in nice houses. He would ransack the entire place, which was consistent with what we saw at Ken's place. He had previously tied up an old man

pointed a gun at

there were some tied clothes inside the closet that indicated maybe he had tied Ken or tried to tie Ken with his own clothes for a period. Those were all consistent with criminal history that we knew David had done

he didn't have an alibi for where he was. the fact

shoes likely belonged to him. So I ended up

getting a warrant for his arrest and we arrested him for the

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (26:23)
two years later, he goes to trial. Did David Brzezinski take the stand at his own trial?

Mike Drapeau (26:28)
I don't think he testified. It was a long trial. There was a lot of argument about collecting processes specifically as it referred to the shoe impressions and blood in the closet. That was

three days worth of testimony just on that one item, because it's the item that links Brzezinski to the

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (26:46)
he's eventually found

Mike Drapeau (26:47)
He's found guilty in a short amount of time. It was probably three, four hours. It was like a couple of week trial and the jury came back in a couple hours they found him guilty of first degree premeditated aggravated murder and first degree burglary theft of a

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (27:01)
pretty

Mike Drapeau (27:02)
if David had been convicted of this as a burglary, he would have been a three time striker and he would have got life which is why he had a motivation to make Ken Cross and never tell anybody.

the murder is a strike

it's his third strike. the charge by itself carries a life without the possibility of parole

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (27:19)
how many years later did he end

committing

Mike Drapeau (27:23)
August 31st, 2013. I was advised that David Brzezinski had killed himself in prison in Washington state. So I ended up calling the agency that investigated that, which was the correctional facility and the local law

they said that he had left a note

ended up seeing if I could get a copy of that suicide note to see he had mentioned the murder in it he did

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (27:44)
hindsight's always 20-20, so as you look back on this ⁓ investigation now, if those items hadn't been turned over by

the property owner, do you think that you would have been able to solve this case with any of the other evidence you had?

Mike Drapeau (27:57)
I think that we would not have identified him if we hadn't found those boots and that paint can. I think David Brzezinski

would never been

We might have thought, hey, this guy's probably on the short list, like, because he's a burglar, he does this kind of thing. But we would have had no probable cause to arrest him or charge him. And he wouldn't have told us what happened. No way. So unless he told somebody who came and told us later, and even then we would have no physical evidence to link him to the scene if we hadn't gotten lucky or and that guy hadn't found that stuff and called us,

Yeah, we would have never been able to arrest David Brzezinski for this.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (28:32)
Talk about a wild chain of

that kind of was shocking to me that

Brzezinski

didn't take that bucket,

Mike Drapeau (28:38)
David was a good burglar. David wore gloves, which is why we didn't find any of his fingerprints at the

knew better than to leave fingerprints behind. He'd been caught that way before. He wasn't so good with blood, though.

if he knew he would have taken those boots and burned them and we never would have found him. But he didn't even think about it. It wasn't on his radar. He wasn't a very good murderer, but he was an excellent

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (28:52)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mike Drapeau (28:59)
That was to

my advantage in the end. And we ended up testing Ken Cross's fingernails, thinking perhaps he got in a struggle with Brzezinski and had his DNA on her. We never found anything linking Brzezinski DNA-wise to the body of Ken Cross or to the scene itself. We were able to link him because he kept things that linked him to the scene. If he had gotten rid of those, we never would have linked him.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (29:18)
Right.

what I was surprised about is like he left that bucket there and then even being allowed to come back, I thought he would have taken the

Mike Drapeau (29:28)
would think that he would have, but he didn't. And I'm fortunate every day for it.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (29:32)
I'm so

glad he

the stuff that he did come back and

when he had the opportunity, it makes you wonder how many other burglaries did he conceal evidence of that, he just got away with.

Mike Drapeau (29:43)
He was the suspect in a couple of burglaries between the time of Ken Cross's murder and the time we caught him. So in that short

he had burgled another

and he would have continued the burglar. It's how he made a living. It's what he did. And he was good at it. So he would have continued to burgled places and conceivably kill somebody

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (30:00)
He killed once. He probably figured he was going to get away with

Mike Drapeau (30:03)
kudos to all the people that worked that scene. They worked it super hard. They did everything I asked them to do and more. And in the end, when we did find that little bit we needed, we were able to just punch it right into the equation we'd already figured out. a lot of hard work by lots of people at the lab and at

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (30:19)
Well. We appreciate you coming on again. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Drapeau (30:21)
Anytime.