One Deadly Mistake

A shocking location.

- This was probably the worst place

you could find a victim of a homicide.

She was buried alive

with injuries that were horrific.

- I just couldn't believe that somebody had killed her.

A calculated murderer

disguised beneath a normal appearance.

- This is an individual that is enjoying what he's doing.

- He believed he was smarter than us.

- Investigators desperately search

for a break in the case.

- We are basically working around the clock.

Time is of the essence.

- You start with the one piece of evidence that you know.

We found a grainy, gray video.

- They were able to identify DNA on one side of the gloves.

- If that had not happened, I think there is

a very good chance that you'd still have other victims.

That was a deadly mistake.

- Tuesday, September 13, 2005.

It's a quiet fall morning in Lubbock, Texas,

but the small city, best known as the home of Buddy Holly,

is about to become the backdrop

for a disturbing mystery.

- It was approximately 10:00 a.m. in the morning

when we received the call that a worker

at the City of Lubbock sanitation landfill

had found a suitcase

that looked like it had something in it.

He opened the suitcase,

and he observed a nude female's body.

- The fact that somebody at a Lubbock landfill noticed

what looked like a new suitcase

and decided to stop and open it.

It was pretty incredible.

I mean, what are the chances of that happening?

- Think about the amount of trash that comes in daily.

If he would not have opened that suitcase,

it would've within moments been crushed into the landfill

and would have been gone.

- Detectives quickly arrive on the scene.

The forensics team is already hard at work.

- When I arrived at the landfill,

the suitcase was already contained

so that the medical examiner

and the crime scene specialists

could take custody of it.

- Any type of photographing that they need,

they'll do that at the scene

when the body is at the location.

While the medical examiner

documents the gruesome discovery,

investigators face the daunting task

of searching for clues.

- The landfill was about two years deep of debris

and about three football fields long.

It was probably the worst place

you could find a victim of a homicide, forensically.

You worry about the things

that are gonna be cross contaminated,

and there was nothing that indicated to us

that the crime had actually taken place there.

- So if she wasn't killed there,

her body had been transported there.

We knew that we had a crime scene somewhere else

and that we had to locate that crime scene.

- Detectives accompany the body

to the coroner's office,

hoping that the autopsy will lead them

to the name of their victim.

- She didn't have any ID, no clothing, no anything

that they could figure out her identification.

The only identifying marks that she had was a tattoo

on her ankle that said "Summer."

There was nothing in the suitcase

that was able to give us some form of ID.

- Detectives have seen dozens of homicides over the years,

but this one hits them harder than most.

- What I just remember is the sadness

of seeing a body stuffed into a suitcase.

- The fact that someone would take a person's body

after stripping them naked and dispose of them

in a trash receptacle is heinous in nature.

- Making the crime even more haunting

was the way that the young woman died.

- She had blunt force trauma to her back, to her head,

and some ligature strangulation

to her neck area.

- The wounds suggest that the victim has been dead

less than 24 hours.

- These were fresh injuries, and the medical examiner

said they hadn't started healing yet.

- But even as bad as her injuries were,

what killed her was what the medical examiner termed

as positional asphyxiation.

- That means she was buried alive

with injuries that were horrific,

and then left to be suffocated in her tomb of a suitcase.

- The fact that she may have still been alive

would just boggle the mind.

- The autopsy reveals another heartbreaking discovery.

- There were signs that the victim

was sexually assaulted.

And during the autopsy, it was also found

that she was approximately five weeks pregnant,

and her child was also killed.

In Texas, see

killing two or more individuals

and intentionally taking

someone's life in the course of a rape.

- A search for the young woman's prints

in the motor vehicle database

finally gives detectives her name.

We positively identified her as Summer Baldwin.

- Investigators now face the grim task

of informing Summer's family about the tragedy.

Her mother, Uvah Robak, remembers that terrible day.

- I was in the kitchen, cooking dinner,

and the phone rang.

My husband answered it.

He says, "You need to sit down."

He says, "That was the police,"

and that they had just found Summer's body.

- Ever since she was a baby, Summer's cheerful nature

brought joy to her family and friends.

- You can see in some of those photos

this beautiful young girl with a smile on her face.

- She was such a likable person.

She just seemed to love everything.

She was always the first one to laugh,

and her laugh was such a funny little laugh.

I never forget that sound.

- Three years ago, when she was 26,

Summer moved to Lubbock from her home

in Roswell, New Mexico.

- Summer and I used to talk on the phone just real regular.

We were close that way.

Once she left Roswell and went over to Lubbock,

yeah, I worried about Summer a lot because new environment.

I didn't know how many people she knew or anything else.

But on our last talk, everything was okay.

She seemed to be fine.

I just couldn't believe that somebody could've killed her.

I thought, "Who could do that to her, or to anyone?"

- Everyone knows everyone else in Lubbock,

so investigators have no trouble tracking down

Summer's friends.

- Lubbock still has this small town feel to it.

It's still very much a close-knit community.

- We're moving as quickly as possible

to identify the friends in Lubbock that knew her.

We were able to develop the name Margie Estrada

as being one of Summer's close friends,

and when we located Margie Estrada,

she was able to give us the critical information

as to where Summer was last seen alive.

- Margie tells detectives that she ran into Summer

when they were both out on the town

on Sunday, September 11th.

- Summer and Margie were talking at the 7-Eleven

there at 8th and Avenue Q.

It was somewhere around 11:30 on Sunday night

to maybe 12:30 early Monday morning,

the day before she was found.

This was one of the first important pieces

of information. We have narrowed the time span

to when she was last seen alive to when she was found.

- Margie doesn't just reveal when she saw Summer;

she also tells investigators who Summer was with.

- Summer was in a red pickup truck

with what Margie described as a good-looking male

that had a short haircut.

Margie didn't talk to him,

but that was kind of the first clue

that we knew maybe who Summer might've been with.

- I was elated that we had a viable suspect.

- You think, "How much information

can a black suitcase give you?"

- We're seeing that she's in chat rooms

with various different guys.

- The body of 29-year-old Summer Baldwin has been found

inside a suitcase

in the Lubbock, Texas, landfill.

Police have learned that the young woman was last seen

in a red pickup truck with an unidentified man.

- It was critical for us to try and identify that individual.

We want to know where they might have been going.

We are basically working around the clock

trying to backstep Summer's life.

- But Summer's mystery man seems to have vanished

into thin air.

- Red pickup trucks in Texas are pretty common.

We had no tag number or anything like that.

- Hours into the investigation,

detectives are at a grave disadvantage.

Without a crime scene and its potential evidence,

they have almost nothing to go on.

- All we had as far as physical evidence

at that point