Brandon Best

He was an Uber driver at the time. So I was able to send a lead to a field office up there and basically did what we call a trash run.

So that's what they did. They surveilled his house and then went and snatched a bag of trash and sent it to me. So I brought that stuff to Houston to the DPS crime lab. And from there, they tested it.

I got a text from a DPS lab technician and she said, go get his ass.

We backed him into a bunch of hard corners. He claimed that he didn't even know that she was dead.

You know, did you know where she lived? No, I had no idea.

And we had those denials several times. And then so towards the end of the interview, we asked them, well, if all those things are true, can you explain how your DNA ended up on her and on her bed?

So as he got out, down the hallway, headed towards the elevator, we stopped him and arrested him for the murder of Catherine Edwards.

If you remember back when we were talking about the crime scene, she was handcuffed. So we had talked to the DA's office beforehand and got permission to use those handcuffs.

Yeah.

We felt that genetic genealogy was going to be the answer to this case.

What did it?

I personally believe that there are more victims out there. We just hadn't found them yet.

Originally, they believed that she might have been drowned, but there wasn't enough fluid in her lungs, so then it kind of became a suffocation by compression.

It was almost talked about like a ghost story around a campfire.

Maybe it was somebody in law enforcement or somebody in security. Could it have been somebody that we knew?

They focused on him early on because there was no forced entry.

Ranger Best approached me and he asked if I thought we had a case that would fit the bill for that type of investigation. I said, absolutely, I know the perfect case for this. And it was the Katherine Edwards case.

January 13, 1995 was the last known contact with Katherine.

There they would give us familial matches and from there we would start trying to build a family tree to get us closer to our suspect.

When the family tree began to grow beyond my computer screen, I started to get a little bit confused and that's when Tina jumped on board.

So from that point, Brandon Best would drop around Texas and go talk to these people.

Aaron Llewellyn. I'm a detective.

There were times when we would come across a name, and you'd get the butterflies in your stomach, like, hey, maybe this is our guy. And then it turns out it's not our guy.

The first name I ran was Clayton. And then when I came across his prior conviction for the sexual assault, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I'm like, this is our guy.

This was back in the early 80s. We didn't have sex offender registry, no DNA database.