Forensic Files

Up next, a young woman is

murdered after years of domestic abuse.

He's beat her before, he's shot at her.

But the ex-boyfriend isn't the only suspect.

People will report the crime just

to steer suspicion away from them.

It's a crime where things aren't always

what they seem.

There were hamburger buns thrown

all over the bathroom floor.

Even as a youngster, Christina Sanoubane

had dreams of working in the news business.

Christina just want to be a journalist.

She said, mom, I cannot be a doctor for you,

or mom, I cannot be a lawyer for you.

But her plans were stalled

by an unexpected pregnancy in her senior year in high school.

- She'd made some bad choices with the people she associated

with it, and the kinds of things she did for recreation,

including a fair amount of drug use, it appeared.

Christina dropped out of high school, had the baby,

and moved in with Jacob Hadley, the father of her child.

Unfortunately, that didn't appear to work out either.

Jacob regularly knocked her around.

She was seen with bruises, and was very open about it.

Somebody would ask her why she, why, where she got that bruise

and she'd say, oh, Jacob beat me.

No matter what, how he treat her,

she just cannot be apart from Jacob.

I don't know why.

I ask her, can you leave him?

No, mom. Um, I can't.

I love him very much.

In 1999, Jacob shot Christina in the face

with a pellet gun and spent three days behind bars.

- She actually had a diary where she described

some of her struggles and her desire to start out fresh,

and to make a good life for her and her young son.

He criticizes me.

He puts me down and physically abuses me.

After three years, I'm just starting

to realize that I was the only one in love.

Finally, Christina and the baby moved out

into a duplex apartment a few miles away.

Four days after Christina moved, one of her friends

stopped by to see how she was doing.

He rang the bell, but there was no answer.

The door was locked.

When he looked through a screened window,

he saw Christina's two-year-old son, alone and crying.

- Be he thought he heard the child say, "Mommy's dead".

And the prompted him into action.

He removed the screen, climbed inside, and found

Christina semi-clothed, face-down,

in a bathtub full of water.

He rushed outside and asked the next door neighbor to call 911.

Christina was pronounced dead at the scene.

- The child possibly witnessed his own mother's murder

and that's, that's horrifying to me.

Investigators found evidence

that the initial attack took place in the kitchen.

The victim's sandals

were found squarely in the middle of the kitchen.

It was almost as though she was struck with such force,

that it knocked her right out of her sandals.

- Our crime scene investigators found

a metal collar that could have belonged on a frying pan

handle.

She was hit with such force

that it knocked her teeth out.

Christina had been stabbed to death with a knife,

but no knife was found at the scene.

At first, I, I got mad at God.

Why he let her die this way?

Why you take her away from me this way?

To investigators, it was

clear the killer had tried to hide his tracks.

- Well, looked like the person that

killed her had tried to wash away some evidence.

While cleaning up, however, he

tracked the bloody footprints all over the bathroom

floor, into the kitchen, and back.

- It was a curious thing why he, why he was barefoot.

I, I mean, we just really weren't sure.

And there was something else

extremely unusual in the bathroom.

There were hamburger

been thrown all over the bathroom floor.

It looked like a bag of hamburger buns

had just been opened and tossed around.

But they couldn't find the wrapper

anywhere in the apartment.

- You have to wonder what goes through a person's mind that

kills someone and then leaves a child behind to,

to sit there in that bloody crime scene.

Christina's ex-boyfriend,

Jacob, was the prime suspect.

- Jacob certainly had, had motive.

Uh, he was separated from his child.

And, and they had separated, they had a rocky past.

Jacob did this.

Everybody thought, in my family thought that Jacob did it.

The crime scene showed signs

that Christina Sanoubane knew her killer.

There was no forced entry, and nothing was stolen.

I don't believe

robbery was ever an issue.

It was about something else.

Could have been about drugs.

It could've been about rejection.

It could've been about anything.

But, but it wasn't robbery.

At the autopsy, the medical examiner

found evidence Christina had been sexually assaulted.

Her, uh, throat had been cut.

At autopsy, it revealed that, uh, her trachea have been,

uh, totally severed.

- When a knife is use on a victim,

that's very much, uh, up close and personal.

- There's no, uh, toxicology screening test done

on Christina, and this was because Dr.

Ellers could not get any blood.

An x-ray showed a metal

pellet lodged in Christina's face.

A stark reminder of the time her ex-boyfriend, Jacob Hadley,

shot her with a pellet gun just 18 months earlier.

They would had a fight all the time.

And who's going to kill her, except Jacob?

- The most dangerous time for a domestic abuse victim

is shortly after she tries to make

a clean break from her abuser.

And she had just done this in a big way.

She'd moved away.

Investigators interrogated

Christina's ex-boyfriend, Jacob, immediately after her murder.

He said that on the night of the murder,

he was a half-hour away.

Jacob produced two very credible witnesses

to testify that he had been drinking with them.

As a matter of fact, they were members

of the University of Iowa women's track team.

But the medical examiner

estimated the time of death could have been

any time between 9:00 PM and 3:00 AM.

And not all of Jacob's time could be accounted for.

The evidence at the crime scene indicated the perpetrator was

probably someone Christina knew.

Other evidence suggested it was someone who lived close by.

For example, the killer wasn't wearing shoes.

- When you have a barefoot print in blood,

it's obviously someone that's close to the scene.

And whether it's someone that lives in the residence,

or someone close by, people generally

don't run around barefoot as a, a matter of course.

And inside the bathroom,

investigators found a possible explanation

for why the hamburger buns where there.

- They found the clip to the hamburger buns

on the floor in the bathroom.

So it appeared that the hamburger buns

had been opened in the bathroom.

But they never found the bag that the hamburger

buns came in.

- We surmised that the killer may have used the wrapper

to wrap the knife in so that, uh, as he carried the knife out

of the apartment, it wouldn't drip blood anywhere.

This was yet another clue

that the killer lived nearby.

Not only did he have bare feet, but he was concerned

about leaving a blood trail, possibly

one leading straight to his door.

This pointed towards two men who hadn't previously

been thought of as suspects.

The man who claimed he found Christina's body, 32-year-old

Todd Hale, and Christina's next door neighbor,

Carlos Robinson, who had called 9-1-1.

Both men knew one another, since they both helped Christina move

into her apartment three days earlier.

Investigators had been suspicious of Todd Hale's claim

that he'd been able to enter Christina's apartment

through a small window opening without disturbing the items

on the entertainment center inside.

- We thought for Todd to get in through that window,

he would have to, maybe, have an acrobat's

physique, which he did not.

- Todd, they had felt, might have been a suspect because

of the way he entered the apartment.

He wasn't invited in.

He opened the window, removed the screen,

and snaked himself in through this small opening.

So they asked him to do it again while they watched.

We'd now allowed him to demonstrate how he was

able to climb through that window

and around the entertainment center,

and he was able to do that, even wearing

some steel-toed work boots.

Hale got inside again, without touching any

of the items on the entertainment center.

It was a little bit

amazing watching him do that.