Buried In The Backyard

In 2007, a construction worker

made a gruesome discovery...

that uncovered a 30-year-old mystery.

It was a smaller town

where neighbors know each other,

not a place where bodies get found buried

in the backyard.

The body had completely decomposed,

and there was nothing left but some clothes and dirt.

You just immediately started to wonder,

Who was it? How long has that body been there?

To get to the truth,

investigators set out to expose

a family's darkest secrets.

He was hounding her.

He was always trying to get her into bed.

I know who killed him.

I just couldn't prove it...

yet.

Once you kill one person, it's easy to kill another one.

There's people that have no regard for human life.

The more you learned, the more sickening it became.

Reporting live in Tacoma,

Molly Shen, KOMO 4 News.

As a veteran crime reporter,

Molly Shen thought she'd seen everything,

until June 4th, 2007.

It started off as a typical day.

Then the call came.

We needed to stop everything that we were doing

and get down to Puyallup.

Molly soon found herself on the scene in Puyallup,

a small, sleepy town 30 miles south of Seattle.

A construction worker had discovered something unusual

while leveling a house

on a secluded street called Canyon Road.

He was out there digging up the land

and scooped something up,

and instead of just dirt and rock

he saw what looked like a bag or something there.

So he got out of the excavator,

went over to check it out...

and opened it up...

and saw bones.

It was human bones.

No one expects to find something like that,

and I'd say he was pretty freaked out,

and so he got out of there and called 911.

After talking to the stunned construction worker,

Molly had what she needed

to begin reporting on the gruesome discovery.

For decades, there was a single house on this property.

For decades, there was a gruesome secret

buried between the house and garage.

Homicide Detective Ben Benson

set upon the grisly task

of examining the remains.

The bones had definitely appeared to be

in the ground for a long period of time.

There was no flesh.

The body had completely decomposed,

and there was nothing left

but some remnants of some clothes and dirt.

We could see a vertebrae inside the bag,

as well as a pelvis, a shoulder bone,

and some other bones that clearly it was a human bones

as opposed to an animal.

You just immediately started to wonder,

Who was it? How long have those remains been there?

How long has that body been there?

As details about the unearthed bag of bones seeped

into this quiet suburban neighborhood,

rattled community members

began gathering at the property

wanting to know,

who was the victim found buried in the backyard?

Could it be someone they knew?

It was a spectacle for that neighborhood.

Everybody was coming by, asking, "What's going on?

What's happening back here?

Why are there so many police cars here?"

We also had a number of people stop by

desperate for information about other missing people.

Can't give up hope that my dad's body is gonna be found.

And I know a lot of other people are missing people, too,

but I still have the hope that it's him.

That was sort of surreal, too,

just knowing that there were people in the area

who were missing loved ones

and almost had this, you know,

sort of awful hope

that it was the person they knew and loved

because that person was missing.

At this point this is a who-is-it, not a whodunit.

You know, we'll figure that out later,

but right now we wanna figure out who this is.

A forensic team began the painstaking task

of searching the yard for additional bones.

After nine hours of digging,

51 were located,

all belonging to the same individual.

When the forensic anthropologist laid the bones out,

she told us that the bones were from a male,

and she was able to determine

that it was someone in their mid-50s.

Because no flesh remained on the bones,

cause of death couldn't be accurately determined,

but all signs pointed to homicide.

The body had been dismembered.

She could see that there were clean cuts

across the bone...

and that a chainsaw was used

to cut up the body.

The shoulder had been cut in two

with a-- approximately quarter-inch blade,

which again was consistent with a chainsaw.

It was pretty horrifying

to realize what had happened there.

The more you learned, the more sickening it became.

For investigators, this brutally challenging case

was about to get even more difficult.

The forensic anthropologist was able to determine

that, based on the condition of the bones,

they were buried for about 30 years.

Investigators were now looking

at trying to solve a crime

three decades old.

Their primary question:

who lived in this quaint little house

on Canyon Road long ago

and attempted to hide a body

so it would never be found?

It could be someone has gone this long

believing they got away with murder.

Detective Benson began his investigation

by talking to the homeowners.

Understandably,

they were utterly distraught and shocked

that a body had been found on their property.

The owners of the property

had lived in the house until 1973.

In 1974,

they began renting the property out

to other individuals.

Because the owners hadn't lived there in decades,

they were ruled out as suspects,

but that meant detectives

would have to investigate each of the renters

who lived in the house

between the late 1970s

and the early 1980s,

a daunting task...

until they caught a lucky break.

The owner told the police

that he remembered a woman

coming by many years before

looking for her father.

She had explained

that he had last been seen

at a house on the property

where the bones were found.

She actually got permission

to walk around the property

and look to see if she could see anything unusual.

She thought maybe he had disappeared

and something had happened to him there.

This new lead, while promising,

only raised more questions.

Who was the woman who came

looking for her father all those years ago?

Was the mystery victim actually her father?

And if it was, who was responsible

for dismembering his body?

I ran a background check.

He had done time in prison

for killing a person.

She was young, beautiful.

I said, "She's only using you for your money."

Once you kill one person,

it's easy to kill another one.

When the bones of a dismembered man

were found buried in a back yard in Puyallup, Washington,

detectives had very few clues

as to who he was

or who could've committed the murder.

Their most promising lead

was a report from the property owner

about a young woman who had come to the house years earlier

looking for her missing father.

So, the property owner thought that he potentially was the person

that was buried in the back yard.

But investigators knew that even if it was true,

finding additional information

about the anonymous man or his daughter

could prove to be an impossible task.

But then, fate intervened.

For decades, there was a single house on this property.

For decades, there was a gruesome secret buried

between the house and garage.

A woman who worked in the King County Sheriff's office