Forensic Files II

Up next, she had everything to live for.

She was really looking forward to having a baby and being a mom.

So her death raises more questions than answers.

It was pretty obvious that something wasn't right here.

Years pass,

then someone reveals a clue about the victim.

I'm thinking to myself, why are you telling me this?

Can a dead woman buried for almost a generation

solve the mystery of how she really died?

In the spring of 1985,

Margaret Purk and her husband, Scott,

were planning a bright future.

Margaret and Scott met in high school,

and they had been married just a little over three years.

The young couple and many of their relatives

lived in and around Akron, Ohio,

about an hour south of Cleveland.

Scott worked as a security guard.

24-year-old Margaret, an aspiring writer,

was pregnant with their first child

and was thrilled about becoming a mother.

Margaret had written to her grandparents letting them know

that everything was really well with her,

everything was fine, she was happy,

looking forward to the birth of their first child.

"I feel great and full of energy.

Just think, any day now, I'll be a mother. A mother!

It's even hard for me to believe

but I'm looking forward to it and so it Scott.

For the baby coming, she was ecstatic.

Me being the little brother and still not very mature,

it got on my nerves a little bit,

just hearing about it all the time.

Margaret's family and friends were relieved

by her newfound optimism.

She hadn't always been so full of hope.

There was one incident in Margaret's past

where, you know, she was upset about something,

and she had threatened to harm herself by using a cord

from a mini-blind in one of the rooms of the house.

It's more or less a feeble attempt

because, you know, it's really not gonna happen,

and you don't really want to do it.

The family was convinced that any possibility of self-harm

was part of the distant past.

But that changed on March 18th,

shortly before Margaret and Scott's baby was due.

Scott Purk was taking a bath,

and he saw his wife walk past the door a couple of times.

He said he got out of the bathtub

about five minutes later and he observed that his wife

had somehow tied a rope from the banister

on the second floor and had hung herself.

Margaret died a short time later.

And to compound an already unimaginable tragedy,

the baby did not survive.

But the first thought was, "Why would she do this, this close?"

You know, she was within like two weeks of having the baby.

So, you know, it just...

it really didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Everyone was shocked.

What happened seemed so impulsive,

especially with a baby on the way.

Even first responders and Akron police were suspicious.

The detectives really thought there was more to it.

The EMTs thought there was more to it.

No one had answers... not Scott, not the family,

not Margaret's friends.

It was left to the coroner to decide what had happened,

and the fact that Margaret had attempted suicide

years earlier played into his ruling.

With all the information that the coroner was given,

he looked at everything in totality and decided,

"I'm gonna rule it a suicide."

Ultimately, the coroner ruled that it was a suicide,

and the police were really, you know, kind of forced

at that point to just stay with that.

Years... decades, actually... went by.

Margaret's family mourned,

but refused to believe she killed herself.

My mom would call once a year just to see if there's any way

they could reopen it, and, unfortunately,

with that ruling, the case was closed

and they weren't allowed to do anything about it.

In the years after Margaret's death,

there was another series of crimes

that seemingly had nothing to do with her,

until police decided to take a closer look

at who those crimes and why.

After his wife's suicide in 1985,

Scott Purk moved on with his life.

But tragedy's seemed to follow him.

In March of 2009, police were called to a fire

at the house Scott shared with his new wife

and their two teenage children in Stow, Ohio.

When you first pull up, the house was absolutely destroyed.

It was gone. It was unsavable.

Luckily, Scott Purk and his family escaped unharmed.

Scott woke up around 3:00 in the morning

to go to the bathroom,

and that's when he discovered the fire.

He alerted everyone,

and they were able to get kids out of the house.

Veteran arson investigators soon realized

why the house went up so fast.

There was a trail of gas that was poured.

You could see the pour pattern on the grass

leading all the way to the house and around the foundation.

Since detective Ken Mifflin assumed

he was dealing with an arson fire,

he asked Scott Purk the obvious question...

"Was there anyone who would want to harm him or his family?"

And Scott immediately volunteered a possibility.

Scott and his wife had an open relationship.

They were swingers, and they had an interesting lifestyle,

to say the least.

They openly date, even long-term-dating

the same people within the marriage,

and they're both comfortable with that.

They both have their own girlfriends and boyfriends

and so forth.

Was it possible a boyfriend or a girlfriend

from outside the marriage had attacked the family?

That does open a door to the possibilities

that there were other people that could be involved

with this situation.

As police explored this possibility,

they also did a standard background check on Scott Purk,

and that turned up more than a few surprises.

Scott was an ex-convict with an infamous reputation.

He was known by local media as "the ninja burglar."

He was arrested for committing at least 10 different burglaries

or breaking into cars and homes and businesses.

And he was pretending to be a ninja.

He would dress up in dark clothing

and then break into women's homes, single women.

Normally, he would take, you know,

car keys, things like that,

but he would take their underwear, typically,

as his trophies, I guess, for lack of a better term.

This string of burglaries,

for which Scott served seven years in prison,

happened just months after the suicide

of his first wife, Margaret.

There was probably no connection to be made,

but Detective Mifflin couldn't get over an unusual exchange

he had with Scott the night of the fire.

Scott and I are having this conversation about his house

literally burning down right in front of us,

and Scott says to me, just out of the blue,

you know, that he was married back in the early '80s

and his wife, his first wife,

who was nine months pregnant, had hung herself,

thereby killing her and her baby,

their first child together.

So, he just brought that up out of the blue.

No reason for the conversation. I had no idea.

Nothing... I didn't even know Scott Purk

prior to first coming to the scene.

Detective Mifflin didn't know what to make of this.

Neither did his fellow investigators.

We found it very odd that Scott Purk's home is burning

and he just kind of blurts out,

"By the way, my first wife killed herself

when she was nine months pregnant."

Detective Mifflin, a seasoned veteran

with decades of investigative experience,

later said this was one of the strangest moments of his career,

so strange that he decided to look back

into Scott Purk's past.

And what he found unearthed secrets

that were literally buried with the dead.

Detectives investigating the 2009 fire

that burned Scott Purk's home to the ground

found that wasn't his first brush with a nearly fatal fire.

Back in 1980, the home he lived in also caught fire.

If something in your life happens one time,

that's exactly what it is.

It's just an incident that happens.

When it starts to happen more than one time

and bad things happen as a consequence of that,

it's a pattern.

Detectives discovered that in this most recent fire,

Scott took some highly suspicious precautions

before the flames started.

He had loaded up his minivan

with all their important possessions.

They had clothes in there, CDs in there,

but they also had things like photographs

and a very old cookbook,

some things that had some sentimental value

that they wouldn't want to have burn up in a fire.

All the evidence appear to indicate

that Scott set his own house on fire.

But why?