On the morning of January 21, 1998, 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe was discovered dead in her bedroom by her grandmother in Escondido.
She was found lying in her doorway but had been stabbed in her bed nine times. Police were unable to find fingerprints or DNA at the scene of the murder. They never found the murder weapon, either. Amazingly, none of Stephanie’s family members claimed to have heard or seen anything suspicious during the night. Nothing in her bedroom was in disarray, and her door showed no signs of forced entry.
A schizophrenic drifter named Richard Tuite had been seen in the Crowes’ neighborhood the previous night, banging on doors and shouting for a girl he called “Tracy.” However, the authorities let him go due to a lack of evidence.
Their investigation then turned to Stephanie’s older brother, Michael. He said that he had walked past Stephanie’s bedroom in the early morning yet hadn’t seen her body in the doorway.
Police accused Michael of being jealous of Stephanie, and he eventually confessed to his sister’s murder after a series of brutal and manipulative interrogations. His friends Josh Treadway and Aaron Hauser were also implicated and questioned. Although Josh admitted his role in the murder, Aaron denied having anything to do with it. He offered a detailed hypothesis about how the murder might have been carried out, yet he never gave a confession.
The three teenagers were initially charged with murder but never prosecuted because their confessions were forced. Suspicions turned again to Richard Tuite, whose shirt was found to have traces of Stephanie’s blood. Tuite’s lawyer argued that her client’s shirt, which had been taken by the police when they arrested him, had been contaminated due to sloppy handling of crime scene evidence. Although Tuite was convicted for Stephanie’s murder in 2005, he was acquitted after a retrial in 2013 due to lack of evidence.
