Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Bingers, welcome back to Binged, the true crime podcast that's a multi-course meal where you can pace yourself if you'd like with our weekly episode drops or as the title suggests, you can wait and binge it all at once. This week we are introducing a new theme, Lost and Found.
there are over 22,000 missing persons on record in the United States. 22,981 to be exact. That's the number of missing persons in the online database at the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. That's as of the recording of this episode. Just under two months ago, the number was 22,740.
So that's 241 people who went missing in just seven weeks. That's nearly 23,000 people who have gone missing and many of them will never be found.
Between 1901 and 2015, the database contains 15,495 entries. Most of those people are surely dead. Some are underground, never to be found. Others are underwater, never to be found. Some have been unrecoverably destroyed, pulverized in junkyards, or cremated in private fire pits.
Then there are those whose remains remain just out of view, daring to be found. And some of them someday will. But on today's episode and in our next episode, we're going to explore some cases where victims were found in unlikely places. Denise Huber had been looking forward to that night, the night of Sunday, June 2nd, 1991. This was the night she disappeared.
She was looking forward to that night because she and Steve Horrocks, her guy friend, had tickets to a concert at the Forum in Englewood in Los Angeles County, which was one county over from where she lived. Denise was 23 years old and had just graduated from college. She was living with her parents in Newport Beach, which is a coastal city in Orange County, California, with mostly well-to-do families.
Denise was in no hurry to go to work. I mean, she had part-time jobs as a sales assistant at the Broadway department store and waiting tables, but she wanted to take maybe a year off and enjoy herself, enjoy her youth before taking on the responsibilities of a full-time career. And Steve, her friend, was a fun, outgoing dude who knew how to show Denise a good time.
He'd scored free tickets to this concert and had invited her, and he was supposed to take her, but then, just the night before the show, he found out he'd have to take a Sunday night shift tending bar at the restaurant where he worked, the Old Spaghetti Factory. And because of this, he asked his pal Rob Calvert, who was also friends with Denise, if he would accompany her to the concert in his place.
And you know, I'm not gonna lie, Rob thought Denise was super beautiful and so he was thrilled to be taking Steve's place and possibly accompanying Denise to the concert. Even if he didn't expect anything to happen between them.
Because, you know, Denise wasn't very serious with Steve or with anyone else. Her relationship with Steve was pretty much platonic. She generally avoided romance and intimacy at this point in her life. And this had the unfortunate side effect of keeping those men in a constant state of fawning over her. You know, because she was just accessible enough as a friend, but inaccessible romantically. Which is something some guys can handle and some guys can't.
Rob seemingly was able to handle it, though. Like Steve, he'd known Denise for four years and had spent a fair amount of time with her. She, too, used to wait tables at the old spaghetti factory when she'd just started college, so that's how the three of them all knew each other. Rob and Denise went to movies together and to concerts. Lots of concerts. Music was the thing that really connected Rob and Denise.
Just a few weeks before this concert, Rob went drinking and dancing with Denise and it felt really good. He felt close to her, but she underscored that boundary with him and he seemed to respect that it wouldn't develop into anything more. And I'm guessing he was still holding out hope though, considering that when Steve asked, he jumped at the opportunity because that's the way it goes. He was pretty excited when he got the message from Steve asking Rob to take his place.
So that night, the night of the concert, Denise showed up at Rob's place at 7:30 p.m sharp, which was their designated time. Denise was someone who was always really good about being punctual. She was nothing if not consistent and reliable.
And to Rob, she looked about as stunning as he'd ever seen her that night. Sure, they were about to have a night out and Denise was always stylishly dressed, but it was hard for him to not think that she dressed this way for him. But maybe he was getting his hopes up a bit. On their way to the venue, they stopped off at a liquor store for some vodka and OJ and
And before the show, they did some tailgating. They didn't get seriously drunk, but they drank just enough to be buzzing by the time the concert began. So at this point, the concert is going good. And during the concert, Rob put his arm around Denise's waist and she seemed okay with it there. He may have seen that as a green light when in fact it wasn't. I don't know exactly what was going on inside either of their heads at the time, but at least for Rob, this was a profound experience.
the intersection of the music, the dancing, the physical contact, and both of them left the concert on a joyous high. One that it gave them much to talk about over drinks that night when they found themselves hanging out at the El Paso Cantina after the show. Before they got there, Denise stopped at a payphone to call Steve and invite him to meet at the cantina for drinks after he finished his shift.
Steve said he tried to make it out, and while they waited, Rob and Denise danced and had some beer. And Steve, because he was trying to save money, ultimately just went home and spent the rest of the night in. But a friend of theirs named Ross did show up. And much like Rob, Ross also had the hots for Denise.
And as I've said, Denise just wasn't interested. But the three of them hung out at the bar till just past 1.30 a.m., which is when last call was announced. It was also a Sunday night and Denise had to work the next day. So this is when the three of them decided to call it a night. At this point, Ross decided to try and make another play for Denise.
Come home with me, Ross asked her. I don't think so, she told him. Denise then indicated to Ross that she also had to drop Rob back off at his home, and that's how it went. Ross and Rob were the last known people to see Denise alive. After she dropped Rob off at his house, Denise Huber vanished without a trace.
At first, when her parents found that she wasn't at home the next morning, they were concerned but not too alarmed. She was a trustworthy, mature adult and they didn't keep tabs on her. They thought perhaps she'd come home after they'd gone to bed, slept, and then left the house. After all, she'd picked up an afternoon shift at her waitressing job, so they expected that maybe they won't see her till early evening.
But when they eventually looked inside her bedroom, it appeared to them that the bed hadn't been slept in. I'm sure she just spent the night at Tammy's place, Denise's mother told Denise's father. It wasn't uncommon for Denise to just crash at her friend Tammy's place. So just to reassure themselves and make that anxiety go away, they telephoned Tammy.
But then upon talking to Tammy, they learned that Tammy hadn't seen her either. And that's when they really began to worry. They called up Rob and he explained that Denise had dropped him home around 2 a.m. And he assumed that she just returned home to Newport Beach immediately after because that's what she had said she was going to do. Following the phone call with Rob, Denise's parents called their son Jeff, but he hadn't seen her either. They called the restaurant where she worked. She never showed for her shift.
Likewise, the department store, which was her other job. They called hospitals to check if Denise had been admitted as a patient, but none of them had any record of her. And the police departments in their town and the neighboring towns had not dealt with any accidents involving Denise or her silver blue Honda. Denise's parents weren't the only ones worried at this point. So was Sam, Denise's beloved black lab, who kept checking Denise's bedroom looking for her.
Her parents spent the entire day phoning friends in a panic, trying to figure out what to do and how to proceed.
Meanwhile, later that evening, when Denise's friend Tammy got off work, she took to the freeways of LA and tried to retrace the route that she felt Denise may have taken on her way home from Rob's house. She drove along the San Diego freeway and just where it merged onto the 73, she saw Denise's Honda abandoned on the right shoulder of the highway with its emergency flashers on. Now remember, this is a whole night later.
Tammy saw this and immediately started to scream and cry. She knew this was a very bad sign. And when she found a payphone, her hands were trembling as she inserted the quarters to call Denise's parents. She called and told them that she'd found Denise's car and gave them directions to where it was, which was about three miles away from the house.
When Lone, Denise's mother, and Dennis Huber, her father, arrived, they parked behind their daughter's car and walked up to it. Right away, they noticed the right back tire was flat. The driver's side window had been rolled down about two inches and the door was unlocked. Lone, her mother, knew she could feel it in her bones that something horrible had happened to her daughter. She and Dennis Huber returned home and called the Newport Beach police to file a missing person report.
The Honda was impounded by police and carefully examined. Nothing inside the car indicated that a struggle had taken place. There was no blood, no damage, nor any unidentified fingerprints. The tire did not appear to have been tampered with, and the flat was caused by the tire being under-inflated, which essentially caused a blowout.
Denise's purse, car keys, and shoes were not inside the car, so it looked as though she had simply gotten out of her car and just walked away, probably looking for assistance. But then what happened to her? Neither of the call boxes close to Denise's vehicle had been used that night. And call boxes, which stranded motorists could use to call for roadside assistance, were once standard fixtures on highways in the days before everyone had cell phones.
A witness who later contacted police reported seeing Denise's car with its flashers on stopped on the shoulder at around 2.25 in the morning, which was about 25 minutes after Denise had dropped Rob off at his house. But the car had been abandoned, according to the woman who saw it. No one was inside of it or near it.
Bloodhounds were brought to the scene and the dogs picked up Denise's scent on the side of the freeway, but the trail went dead nearby. It seemed as though Denise may have walked a short distance from her car and then possibly got into another vehicle. A police canvas of business and homes in the neighborhood turned up nothing. No one in the area that night remembered seeing Denise. Search helicopters were sent out. In fact, Lone and Dennis Huber could hear the helicopters from their house.
And they knew what those helicopters were looking for. A body. They hoped and prayed that they wouldn't find one. They hoped and prayed that Denise would come home alive.
Meanwhile, the first person police wanted to talk to was Rob Calvert. He had attended the concert with her and he was the last person known to have seen her. They also talked to Steve, her platonic boyfriend. Both of these young men were cooperative and transparent. And neither Steve nor Rob raised any red flags with the investigators. Nor did Ross, the mutual friend who had invited Denise home with him. He had an airtight alibi for the rest of the night and the following day.
Police considered the possibility that Denise maybe had a secret boyfriend with whom she maybe eloped with, but that was quickly dispelled. No one who knew Denise saw this as even plausible. So investigators quickly found themselves dead-ended with nothing. They had a young woman who simply vanished and the trail went cold there.
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And then, less than 24 hours later, another woman, 34-year-old Diane Prescott, this is a pseudonym, vanished after dropping her two children off with her estranged husband.
APBs went out on both Denise and Diane at the same time. But then, two days after she went missing, Diane's parents received a phone call from their daughter who was 80 miles away in Riverside. She told them she was okay and had made a decision to get away because she needed some space to rethink her life.
And although Denise Huber was not the sort of person to just disappear on her own accord, her parents, upon learning about Diane Prescott turning up safe, had hoped to get a similar phone call from their own daughter. Police and the family finally turned to the media as a resource. They made sure to get Denise's picture on the news, in the papers, and to get the story out. The Newport Beach police had buttons made that featured Denise's picture on it and the words, "'Pray for Denise.'"
Bumper stickers were distributed across the area. A billboard was put up along the 73 near where her car was found. An airplane with a banner was even flown across the area to generate and increase awareness of the case. A $10,000 reward was offered for any information leading to Denise Huber's whereabouts. And all of this resulted in a flood of tips. Yet none of them, not a single one, yielded any information that would lead to Denise.
All of them ended up being a waste of time. But the amount of time wasted varied from tip to tip. One tipster, a woman from northern Orange County, claimed she knew who abducted Denise and her kidnapper was in a Mexican street gang that was holding Denise captive south of the border in Tijuana.
But when pressed for further information, the informant clammed up. So the investigators put the woman under 24-hour surveillance and even convinced a friend of the woman to wear a wire and try to pry information out of her. Eventually, they ended up traveling with her to Tijuana to try and find the hideout where Denisa was allegedly being held. And it turned out the whole thing was a hoax. She just wanted a free trip to Mexico.
So there was a lot of time and resources wasted in the investigation. And then it came to the attention of the investigators that a man who lived in Newport Beach was going around and telling strangers that he knew what happened to Denise.
Several of these people then went to police, so they had multiple reports of the same individual. And it took them dozens of man hours to track this guy down. And he agreed to meet with the lead detectives, but it had to be on his terms. It had to be in a public place, he said, with a lot of people around. And it had to be a place of his choosing. So the investigators didn't really see a problem accommodating these terms up to this point. So what's the place that the man chose as their meeting place?
Chuck E. Cheese. Now, I don't know what it is exactly about Chuck E. Cheese, but this is at least a third case we've covered in recent months where Chuck E. Cheese has played some kind of minor role.
So this guy who claimed he had inside knowledge of Denise Huber's murder is insisting on meeting with the lead detective at a very public Chuck E. Cheese. But the game didn't end there. The witness refused to describe himself or set a designated meeting point. He insisted that the detective describe herself and what she'd be wearing and that he would then find her in the crowd.
Because this was feeling a little bit sketchy, several plainclothes detectives were positioned throughout the restaurant. When the informant finally presented himself to the detective, he had his wife and several children along for the ride. They all sat down and ordered the whole menu entirely, while the informant started spitting barely comprehensible word salad about having seen a blue Honda on the side of the freeway, even though the location he gave was wrong.
He said he'd seen two guys struggling with a woman in the grassy area next to the shoulder and that as the witness drove slowly by to get a better look at what was going on, one of the men pulled a gun and fired through the passenger side of his window, leaving a hole. Now, after dinner, the detective allowed him to drop off his family and then lead the investigator to the spot where he claimed all of this had gone down.
He pointed to a few shards of broken glass on the pavement, which he claimed was from his broken window, which he'd already replaced, by the way. And then after that night, he refused to continue cooperating. Even when Lone Hoover personally begged him to continue sharing information with police, he coldly told the missing woman that he didn't want to get involved.
And after all this, police were pretty confident he was just after the reward money and had nothing of value to actually contribute to the investigation. Meanwhile, Denise's parents were hounded by a celebrity psychic who was insisting on a shot at finding Denise. The Hubers didn't believe in psychics, but this one finally wore them down and so they invited the psychic into their home.
The woman closed her eyes and began describing dogs. First, a black lab like Sam, the one the Hubers owned, which was not in the room and therefore not visible to the psychic at the time. Then she described a white poodle, a brown mutt, and a tan spaniel, two of which were former pets of the Hubers, and one of which was a family friend's dog that had accompanied them on a vacation. Now, the Hubers were quite impressed by this. It gave them hope that this psychic could maybe be the real deal.
But then the psychic's output deteriorated into nonsense with no connection to the Hubers.
And when Sam, the family's normally friendly black lab, made an appearance, the dog was quick to growl and snarl at the medium. Uncharacteristic behavior of this pet, who perhaps had a sixth sense that the fraud in their midst lacked. It was at this point that Bill Hamilton, the owner of the restaurant where Denise sometimes waited tables, contributed money to help the Hubers pay for a private investigator into their daughter's disappearance.
But the private investigator the Hubers hired turned out to be as useless as the sidekick. He told them that he believed Denise was dead, abducted and killed, and that the flat tire had been staged to look as though it had been a blowout. He said he'd interviewed people who drove past the area between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. and they didn't see her Honda there.
The evidence police had collected, both from witness interviews and the location where the car was abandoned, contradicted what the PI was claiming. All his theories were incorrect, unsubstantiated. The family was beginning to run out of hope. Denise's friends, like Steve Horrocks, grew to believe that Denise was dead. Years passed without a clue.
The Hubers changed their answering machine greeting to include the message, "We will accept a collect call from Denise Huber," hoping that someday their daughter would emerge from wherever she was and if she was trying to get in touch with their parents there wouldn't be any obstacles. But the more time passed, the colder the case became. And then in 1994, there was, at first glance, what would appear to be a completely unrelated event.
350 miles away in the city of Prescott, Arizona, Elaine Canalia and Jack Court were business partners as well as boyfriend and girlfriend. They owned a paint manufacturing business in Phoenix, Arizona, and a few times each month they drove up to Prescott to trade products at the flea market that was near there.
In the spring of 1994, they became acquainted with a fellow vendor named John Famolaro, a painting contractor who sold paint supplies from a booth at the market. John was 39 years old and he told him he had recently relocated his business from California to Arizona, hopefully to make a fresh start. He was friendly enough and the couple established enough of a rapport with him that they would stop and chat with him each time they'd set up at the market.
A couple of months later, in July, John, the contractor, happened to mention he had a surplus of colors at his home in the town of Dewey, about 18 miles away. Jack and Elaine told him they were interested in buying some, so John invited them to follow him back to his house.
After they packed up, they took Elaine's 10-year-old grandson, who'd made the trip to Prescott with them, and followed John's van back to his home, which was in an upscale housing tract of luxury homes. They approached a large L-shaped two-story house with a two-car garage and were led to a parking pad at the side of the house where they parked. Also in the same parking pad, two other vehicles were parked.
One was a white pickup truck and the other was a yellow Ryder rental truck with Massachusetts plates partially covered with a canvas tarp and surrounded by paint cans. Now, this struck the couple as odd. Why did the contractor have a Ryder rental truck parked beside his house? What was he using it for?
And furthermore, the truck looked as though it had been there for a while, given the tarp that covered it and all the junk that was around it. And the dust that covered the body of the truck. I mean, normally you would return a rental truck. Elaine and Jack both had the same thought at the same time. This truck must be stolen. Suddenly, Elaine's grandson told her that he needed to go pee. She asked John the contractor if he'd mind allowing the little boy to use his bathroom. And the contractor's demeanor suddenly sharpened.
"'No,' John said. "'Not possible. The water in the house was turned off, so there was no toilet.'" This only raised the couple's suspicions. They weren't buying it. While John had walked away and had his head turned, Elaine quickly jotted down the license number of the Ryder truck and the serial number, which was just above the cab. After they finished their business and bought the colors, they got back into the car with Elaine's grandson and shut the doors."
Something's not right here, Elaine said to Jack. I agree, he told her. And they both agreed that the truck must be stolen. When she got back to Phoenix, she put the piece of paper with the truck's info into a drawer inside the warehouse they owned.
The following week, a friend of theirs, who was a detective, was visiting their warehouse to buy some paint. It was Detective Steve Gregory of the Phoenix Police. And Elaine happened to tell him about the strange situation with this John guy and the rental Ryder truck. She gave him the plate number and he said he'd look into it. After leaving, Detective Gregory was curious enough to look into the vehicle to see if it had been reported stolen.
He called the Ryder company and gave them the plate and serial numbers. And within an hour, the security division of Ryder phoned the detective back to tell him that yes, the vehicle had been missing since January of that year from a rental facility in Orange County, California.
He asked for the VIN number, which the rider people gave him, and then he asked if they wished to press charges, which they absolutely did. He then called up to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department to advise them that a stolen rider truck was parked in a residential driveway in Dewey. He provided the license number and a deputy went out to investigate.
When the deputy, Deputy Joe DiGiacomo, arrived at the house, he indeed found that Ryder truck in the side driveway. But the truck didn't have Massachusetts plates anymore. It had main plates and a different license number. Deputy DiGiacomo then called Detective Gregory back and told him, hey, something is weird here. There's different plates on the truck.
And perhaps this is why Detective Gregory was a detective and Deputy Giacomo was a deputy. He smartly proposed that maybe someone switched the plates overnight. So Deputy Giacomo returned to the house in Dewey and checked the writer's truck's VIN. And what do you know? It matched. The plates indeed had been switched overnight. It was the same truck.
He took a look around the truck and found buckets and cans of various sizes surrounding the truck and also on the other side of the fence inside of the yard. There were countless buckets and cans. And then he noticed an extension cable extending from inside of the truck, out the back, beneath the padlocked rear cargo door, and into an outlet on the side of the house. So the deputy is like...
Okay, this looks like some kind of meth lab. That was the most obvious explanation for why an extension cable would be powering something inside of the stolen truck.
24 hours a day. So Deputy DiGiacomo summoned the narcotics team, which arrived that afternoon and immediately began testing the contents of the buckets and cans on the outside of the truck for illegal drugs. But they didn't find any. They tried gaining entry into the truck, but it was secured with a heavy padlock. So they had to call a locksmith. Once they gained entry into the truck,
Instead of finding a meth lab, they found, amid more stacks of containers and cans, eerily isolated at the far end of the cargo bay, an industrial-sized freezer, which was switched on and running. That's what the extension cable was for, a freezer locked inside of a stolen truck. Now, the freezer was also locked, and masking tape had been placed all around it to keep it sealed.
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Inside the freezer, they saw a large black garbage bag with something bulky inside of it. When one of the narcs touched the bag, he felt the frozen arm of a human being. And that there was the end of the narcotics team's investigation, because that's when homicide took over.
Homicide investigators prepared to open the freezer by donning hazmat-type suits, and once they did, they began to cut the bag open. The first thing they saw were two human arms handcuffed behind the body.
Beneath the body, there was frozen blood and body fluids, intermingled with ice crystals. And the head of the victim was covered with two additional plastic bags, so they didn't yet know what the gender was. But there had been some level of decomposition, so it seemed like this body was not frozen immediately after death. The entire truck, with the freezer inside of it, was towed to the Arizona State Crime Lab.
Before the body was taken out of the freezer, a forensic examiner was careful to obtain the fingerprints while the body was still frozen, because it's the fingers that are the first part of the body to lose their shape once it begins to defrost.
They rolled them with ink the same way they do when they arrest people. The still frozen body was taken to the medical examiner, who was faced with a level of challenge she'd never before come across. She would need to thaw the body in order to perform an examination and determine exactly how the victim died.
but thawing the body would cause it to rapidly decompose. So she'd be racing against the clock to secure valuable evidence before it disappeared. As the body began to thaw, the medical examiner took fluid samples and collected them in jars. Remarkably, among those samples, she was able to collect intact semen, despite being frozen for three years. And this established that the woman had probably been raped.
which was later confirmed at autopsy. Meanwhile, John Famolaro, the contractor, had just pulled into his driveway when he stumbled upon this scene. His truck's gone, sheriff's deputies are everywhere, and they place him under arrest for the theft of the Ryder truck. His mother had been inside his Jeep with him at this point and was quite confused as to what was happening.
She lived in a house on an adjoining property. So detectives accompanied her back to the house and explained that the Ryder truck her son had been keeping in his driveway was stolen.
This was news to her, she claimed, but she didn't ask any questions about it. She assumed it was connected to his business. She was shocked to hear that a body had been found inside the freezer. She didn't know anything about any of it, nor did she seem to know much about her son other than girls have just broken his heart. Please pray for us, she asked the homicide detective. Within two hours of the initial discovery, search teams arrived at the property, saying
While John's mother sat in a lawn chair across the street and watched, the search team entered the house and went through every room. Several incriminating items were found. On a shelf inside the garage, police found a box labeled Christmas, and inside of it was a second box containing a nail puller, which is a roofing tool similar to a crowbar,
And this nail poler was stained with what looked like blood, an empty handcuff box, a blood-stained cloth, and duct tape. They found handcuffs much like the ones on the victim. They found handcuff keys. They found ID documents with various women's names. And then there was another box marked Christmas. And inside of this was a blood-stained backpack and a bloody claw hammer.
and then a blood-stained plastic bag inside of which were items with a woman's name on them. And that name was Denise Huber.
The fingerprints they took from the body in the freezer were entered into the missing person's database, and this confirmed the frozen corpse was that of the long-missing Denise Huber. Also inside the Christmas box, they found Denise Huber's driver's license, credit cards in her name, a checkbook in her name, the keys to her Honda, her high-heeled shoes, and the clothes that she'd been wearing when she was last seen. Those clothes were stained all over with blood.
And the scuff marks on her shoes were consistent with her having been dragged across the rough asphalt pavement of a highway. During the search, they found more clothing that was stained with blood, and this was men's clothing, clearly belonging to John.
In the basement of the house, investigators stumbled upon a dungeon lined with paint cans. They also found firearms and a police uniform and videotapes with content about Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson. They began to fear, based on these findings, that Denise Huber may not have been John Famolaro's only victim.
They brought cadaver dogs into the dungeon area, but they didn't find anything, nor did they find anything of note inside the neighboring home of Familaro's parents. At this point, the Costa Mesa Police Department in Orange County, California, were notified of the discovery, and then the Huber family got the answer they'd been long waiting for and dreading. Denise, their daughter, was dead.
only it still wasn't known exactly how she had died. When she was first recovered from the garbage bag in which she had been placed in the freezer, she had two smaller plastic bags covering her head. When those were removed, it revealed a gag over her mouth duct taped over her nose and part of her mouth. And once Denise was defrosted, it was found that her skull had been extensively damaged.
And so to determine what exactly may have happened, a forensic anthropologist had to reassemble like a puzzle the many pieces of Denise's skull, which had fallen apart after Denise's body had thawed. And once the skull was reconstructed, two different types of injuries were found, suggesting two different weapons.
and small pieces of plastic were lodged inside the skull fractures, suggesting she'd received at least some of those injuries while the bags were already over her head.
It was later found that the nail puller and the claw hammer recovered from John's Christmas boxes, the ones containing Denise's stuff, were probably the murder weapons. Now diving into the investigation and in interviewing an ex-girlfriend, the girlfriend shared that John had violent, weird sexual fantasies involving bondage and he once left her handcuffed and exposed naked to an open window.
They connected with another woman who said John had driven her deep into the desert, forced her to strip, and tried to strangle her. She fought him off and ran naked through the desert till she reached safety. Another woman came forward to say that John had bound them with handcuffs without their consent and behaved in other violent and disturbing ways. Further investigation into Familaro's background revealed that he had been in the Newport Beach, California area around the time of Denise's murder.
He had rented part of a warehouse for his painting business, which was located just a few miles from where Denise's car broke down. And credit card receipts showed that John had purchased the freezer in June 1991, a few days after Denise went missing.
If this wasn't all enough to charge John Famolaro for Denise's murder, the fact that his DNA matched the semen recovered from Denise's body was. And the blood from his clothes matched Denise's blood.
And the people who rented the warehouse in Orange County after John abandoned it had reported to police having seen a large brown stain on the floor of the unit. When it was sprayed with luminol, this stain lit up. The blood stain was then processed and it matched Denise Huber's DNA. So from the elements of the crime they could piece together, they believed that John likely stopped to offer Denise help after her tire blew out.
But then he abducted her, drove her to his warehouse in nearby Laguna Hills, raped her and brutally beat her to death. He bought a freezer shortly after, stored Denise inside of it for over two years before he stole a Ryder truck and drove it with the freezer inside of it to Arizona where he moved.
John was expedited to Orange County, California to stand trial where he pleaded not guilty. And then on June 20th, 1997, six years after Denise first went missing, John Famolaro was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death. He appealed the verdict in 2011, but the verdict was upheld. He's currently awaiting execution at San Quentin.
Now, it's heartbreaking how a radiant woman like Denise, whom absolutely no one disliked, met such a harrowing end and how her family spent three years looking for her, all the while she was hidden, frozen inside her killer's freezer. To everyone who knew her and loved her, Denise was complex, conscientious, kind, and full of promise, with a rich life ahead of her.
To John, she was a thing to be used, destroyed, and kept like a trophy. And it was that bizarre need to keep her around that was ultimately his undoing. And thank goodness for that. That's it for today's episode. We have a new one right around the corner. So bye for now.