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Body in the Water 2025 Season 1 Episode 2
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FunTranscript
00:00To be continued...
00:30Sitting close to the Florida coastline, the city of Pensacola is a magnet for tourists.
00:51Our beaches are beautiful.
00:52People come here for vacations a lot.
00:56We have a lot of up and coming small businesses downtown, our downtown is thriving.
01:03Often dubbed the cradle of aviation, a large swathe of Pensacola and its waterways is home
01:09to the U.S. Navy's Aviator Training School and Air Station.
01:16This military base sits in sheltered waters to the southwest of the city, overlooking
01:21the Gulf of Mexico.
01:24We're heading to an area called Navy Point.
01:31And it's a body of water that is around the outside of the Navy base.
01:38And you see a lot of people out here walking their dogs.
01:46This is an area where you can come and enjoy outdoor activities.
01:50The water is over here.
01:52Jet skiers do use that.
02:00But it's jet skiers who made a discovery around 3 p.m. one November afternoon, a large, overly
02:07stuffed duffel bag washed up on the shoreline.
02:19They thought maybe it was, you know, money or drugs or something of that nature.
02:23But as they got closer to it, they could smell a foulness coming from it.
02:30They didn't open it.
02:32They didn't open it.
02:33It was actually a small lock on the duffel bag that would prevent somebody from opening
02:37it.
02:38They could see that there was insect activity on and around the duffel bag.
02:53The fact that the bag was surrounded by flies and other insect activity leads us to believe
02:59that there is more in that bag than just maybe luggage.
03:03It could be remains.
03:06Blowflies and other insects, they can smell decomposing flesh from miles away.
03:12Once that odor is exposed to air, it does not take them long to find the body.
03:19Having those flies swarm that bag is a key indication that there is something that we need to look
03:24more into.
03:32They can see fluids coming out of the duffel bag, some very unpleasant things.
03:37So they knew enough to call the sheriff's office.
03:46We're on a trail right now, and this is the way we actually went to recover the bag.
03:53When they got close to the duffel bag and opened it, they were able to see that there was a
03:59body of a female inside.
04:06It was found right over here in the duffel bag, washed on the shore.
04:17It was a little chill in the air, a little overcast.
04:21Yeah, this reminds me a lot of exactly what it was like that day.
04:31Faced with a suspicious death, police quickly cordoned off the shoreline.
04:37It is a process of documenting the scene, collecting evidence from the scene.
04:44At that time, it was a sheriff's office assisting as well with their crime scene unit.
04:57Especially in large bodies of water, you never know where the body exactly came from.
05:03So when you're trying to secure the scene, you don't know what you're securing, because
05:08you don't know what's involved versus what isn't.
05:12It's always better to be safe than sorry, and to tape off as much area as you can, and thoroughly
05:21examine all of those areas.
05:26A body in the water that adds a level of complexity to the case makes it that much more challenging
05:32to investigate.
05:39Typically, when a body is discovered, the medical examiner or forensic pathologist is
05:43called out to the scene.
05:44That body is then placed in a body bag, usually on some type of a clean white sheet.
05:51That sheet is also taken to the morgue with the body, and it is examined for trace evidence.
05:56Oftentimes, the hands are also wrapped in baggies to preserve any evidence that may be there
06:01in order to help solve the case.
06:07When we got the body to the morgue and opened the duffel bag, she was crammed in there.
06:16She was in that bag in the fetal position, so her knees were up close to her chest.
06:21And she was clothed only with a bra.
06:23She had nothing else on.
06:30Whenever you find a young woman, especially, who is nude and she's deceased, I think immediately
06:36this raises the question of, is there some kind of sexual component?
06:40The police needed to establish whether the victim was alive or dead when she entered the water.
06:52One of the techniques that we use is we actually float the lungs.
06:55If the lungs float in a pail of water, then there is no water in the lungs.
07:00If they don't float, then they are water-laden.
07:04There was no water in the lungs, and so we know that she was already dead before she was tossed into the water.
07:13She was strangled, and we can tell that because we look for things like petechiae in the eyes, petechiae around the eyelids.
07:22Petechiae are very small punctate hemorrhages that appear because of pressure, and that pressure occurs because of tightening around the neck.
07:32She was also duct taped around her entire face. Her wrists were duct-tied.
07:41I think as a psychologist, when you have somebody's face covered up, you always wonder why.
07:45If there is a sense of wanting to kind of, you know, cover this person up.
07:49Maybe they knew her. Maybe there's a sense of shame.
07:52And of course, there's also the obvious question, how did she die?
07:56And if this is the way that she died, if this person actually covered her face up to asphyxiate her, that really does suggest a very sadistic way of murdering somebody.
08:08It is a very personal way to murder somebody.
08:11You are putting your hands on that person, and you are watching that person's eyes, and you can see their expression as you do that.
08:19And it does take several minutes for that person to suffocate.
08:23And you are wrapping that tape.
08:26So it is a very gruesome and brutal and really sadistic way to kill somebody.
08:38Knowing they were now dealing with a murder, detectives searched for any clues that might lead them to the killer.
08:47We were concerned that she was in the salt water for any length of time, really.
08:52You know, you lose DNA evidence.
08:54You lose any evidence of a sexual assault.
08:57Within the bag, there was at least one paper towel.
09:04Once it was allowed to be dried out, you could see very clearly that it had a very distinctive pattern on it.
09:13There was also what looked to be a Clorox-type wipe.
09:20Every time you need one, you just pull the next one.
09:23It was one of those types.
09:24We noticed that she was also missing one earring.
09:28She had one gold hoop in and then one that was not in.
09:31It had a bit of a distinctive design to it.
09:37It was not so normal that it would be just any earring.
09:41It could have very well been matched to another had it been found.
09:45So the thought was that perhaps that earring had come off of her ear someplace where the murder occurred or maybe even in the vehicle that transported her.
09:58A lot of possibilities.
10:02Finding the Clorox wipes and discovering that she might be missing an earring was very crucial.
10:07It was a starting point for investigators.
10:13But one big question remained.
10:16Who was the unidentified victim?
10:37In Pensacola, police are investigating a gruesome discovery.
10:42A duffel bag has washed ashore containing a woman who's been bound with tape and strangled.
10:50It's very common for killers to dispose of a body close to an area where they live, whether they work.
10:57And also if it's water, oftentimes a place they're familiar with that's in water.
11:01And so here we have this duffel bag that's washed up very close to a local naval base, which I think immediately gives investigators a clue.
11:09Could this be somebody who is actually working or affiliated with this location?
11:19For this case, with her being off of the Gulf of Mexico, a salt water that is high on crustaceans.
11:24Eventually, crustaceans could have found their way into the bag, thus eating some of the remains, causing more trauma to the body that was not already there.
11:37Her remains were found to not have a lot of animal activity.
11:40That leads us to believe that the body was not in the water for an extended period of time because the aquatic life did not have time to access the bag.
11:50Now police must urgently find out who the victim is.
12:02I was in contact with our medical examiner who was conducting the autopsy of the body that was found.
12:09It was learned once the body was removed that it was a black female.
12:13They started by reviewing missing person reports recently filed in the county.
12:22As the detective on duty, I was alerted to a suspicious call that our patrol officers had gone to.
12:42The call was from Sylvia Watkins, who hadn't seen her 25-year-old sister Samira, a mother of one, for several days.
12:55She hadn't been seen or heard from.
12:57It was very unusual.
12:59She didn't show up to see her child.
13:01It was around Halloween time, so she wasn't there to take them trick-or-treating.
13:05We decided that we should go ahead and start looking into her disappearance.
13:12Samira Watkins was working as a shift supervisor for a local restaurant.
13:18She was also going to school at night for dental hygienists.
13:23It was very much out of the ordinary for Samira not to have any contact with her family.
13:28They were very close-knit, so the fact that no one had heard from Samira for some time was very alarming.
13:39Police started putting together a timeline of Samira's last movements.
13:46Samira's sister reported that Samira had gotten off from work around 9 p.m.
13:51and drove all the way to roughly the downtown area of Pensacola, where they all lived.
13:58She was responsible.
14:00She didn't disappear without notice.
14:02She had a good job.
14:04We reached out to her employer, and they had also expressed concern
14:09because she had not showed up for her shift.
14:11We talked to the school and found out that she also had not shown up to her classes.
14:17We knew what her car looked like.
14:20That vehicle was nowhere to be found.
14:25All these things are continuing to build concern about her well-being.
14:33The sudden disappearance of Samira and her car prompted police to take a closer look at those who knew her.
14:40After looking into Samira's life, we discovered that her son's father had been very abusive, and he had been arrested for it.
14:53She was involved with him for about three years.
14:56It was just an incredibly horrible relationship for her.
14:59He, in fact, as a matter of fact, ends up going to prison for domestic abuse when he kidnaps her and won't let her go for days.
15:05That was an incident that occurred here in Pensacola.
15:11He had gotten out of prison not too long before Samira went missing.
15:18There is now that possibility.
15:23Could that have been what happened to Samira?
15:26Could the father of her child, having gotten out of prison, could he have done something to her?
15:31So, obviously, we wanted to talk to him as well.
15:36Some of the main things we were doing was looking at his criminal history, trying to pull together all the cases, anything that would show us that he had those violent tendencies.
15:52We're looking at his probation status. Is he on probation or on parole, where he's checking in? Where does he live now? What address did he give?
16:05Once he was out of prison, you usually give an address looking at that.
16:11It didn't take detectives long to track him down.
16:15Samira's ex-boyfriend, his alibi was that when he got out of prison, he began to work doing overnight cleaning.
16:26Him and his crew, they would go into offices, things like that, and they would clean all throughout the night.
16:34Samira's ex-boyfriend had a solid alibi.
16:39We were able to determine that he'd worked in different office buildings, and we were able to confirm that he was there through his co-workers.
16:46Investigators hit a dead end.
16:50But soon, another name came to their attention, a man known as Ricky Littleton.
16:59So when I interviewed Samira's sister, she kept talking about this boyfriend of Samira's, and she kept calling him Ricky.
17:06She didn't know his last name, but she knew he was in the military.
17:09And she had explained to me that Samira and Ricky had been seeing each other, that the relationship had turned sexual at some point, and that Samira was pregnant, and she had said that the baby was this guy Ricky's.
17:28She told her sister, I'm going to go meet with Ricky, and we're going to talk about our future, and specifically the fact that Samira was pregnant.
17:43Samira just happened to meet Littleton when she was going on to the Naval Air Station in the earlier part of the summer of 2009.
17:52They met at the front gate. There was a little bit of flirting exchanged back and forth.
17:57Littleton was a very handsome young man, was obviously in the military and responsible, and certainly this was someone that Samira could see building a relationship with.
18:10She has found somebody who is the exact opposite of her abusive partner, or her ex-partner.
18:16This is somebody who is not only in the military, who has a stable career, has no black marks on his record, he's a police officer in the military.
18:26So I would imagine that when she first met him, it must have been so exciting.
18:33Detectives asked Samira's new boyfriend Ricky to help with their inquiries.
18:39There's a couple things that were odd with Ricky. When I called him to ask him to come to talk to me, he actually, when I said, hey, Ricky, he corrected me and said, no, this is Zack.
18:52Well, it was the same guy. So right off the bat, we're being, I'm finding out that he's using a fake name while dealing with Samira and her family.
18:59Not only had Zack been calling himself Ricky, he was also married with a child of his own.
19:10Initially, he wouldn't admit to being even intimate with her.
19:24And he goes on to say that the reason why is because he was accused of adultery several months back and the military really frowns on that.
19:34So he was really scared that he was going to get in trouble.
19:37In the military, you can be dishonorably discharged for having an affair.
19:42And he knows this.
19:44His wife has been stationed out of state.
19:47And so he is basically living a double life.
19:50It was a red flag that he showed very little concern.
19:53He seemed more put off or annoyed that he had to be here.
19:59As opposed to somebody that would at least say, hey, I really hate to hear that this young lady is missing.
20:05Maybe I can do something to help.
20:07It's more like, hey, I need to get out of here.
20:09I got to get back to work.
20:10He mentioned that the last time he had seen Samira was the Wednesday before she was reported missing.
20:19I know from talking to her sister that now the day of her disappearance, she indeed was leaving to go to Zachary Littleton's apartment.
20:36When I reviewed the first interview, he tried to distance himself from any sort of relationship or contact with her.
20:44When I reviewed the second interview, he seemed to be a little more forthcoming as far as his relationship with her, his sexual relationship with her, and the fact that he knew she was pregnant.
20:58He also was using terms in the past tense, so that was a little unusual.
21:07Despite their suspicions, police still didn't have anything concrete against Littleton.
21:13But I didn't have sufficient evidence to be able to arrest him or do anything further, so I had to let him go.
21:19In Florida, police investigating the disappearance of mother of one Samira Watkins are waiting to identify the body of a woman washed up in a duffel bag on the Pensacola shoreline.
21:42This body that was found in a duffel bag was identified by using fingerprints.
21:49Some of the challenges when a body has been in water in particular are things like identifying that person.
22:02However, we can often get fingerprints even if bodies have been in water for some time because we can infuse that finger with other water to puff it up, if you will, and actually obtain that fingerprint.
22:16Another technique that we often use is something called degloving, and that's where the skin actually slips off of the hand.
22:24We put on a gloved hand, and we put that skin over our glove, and then we can actually roll that person's fingerprint onto a fingerprint identification card and hopefully get an ID that way.
22:37At the time of our autopsy, only one gold earring was found.
22:42There was an impression in the other ear, but the earring was not there.
22:45Samira's family represented to us that she wore a gold pair of earrings all the time.
22:51They were a very unique set of gold earrings.
22:54Together with DNA and physical evidence found at the scene, the body was confirmed to be that of missing young mom, Samira Watkins.
23:04When we found out that it was definitely Samira in the bag, we knew that she was very close to the family.
23:14They all lived in a house together.
23:16Her young child stayed there with her, so we knew that telling the family was going to be very difficult and very emotional.
23:25With Samira no longer a missing person, but the center of a homicide case, detectives focused their investigation on her boyfriend, Zach Littleton.
23:38When Samira told Zach she was pregnant, he was not supportive, didn't want anything to do with co-parenting with her.
23:47In fact, he didn't believe it was his.
23:50He said that he always used protection, and he asked her to have an abortion.
23:57And his wife was soon to arrive here in Pensacola as well.
24:00The other thing that also focused our attention on Zachary Littleton was the fact that he was in the military.
24:08And having extramarital affairs is against the code of contact for the military, so that certainly raised some concerns.
24:15It's very, very clear he has no intention of having any kind of long-term relationship with her by the fact that he uses a false name when he introduces himself.
24:24So this is somebody who's used to deception and deceiving women.
24:30Once the body was identified to be Samira Watkins, obviously the investigation at that point sort of ramps up.
24:37Now we are pretty certain that this is in fact Zachary Littleton's doing.
24:44Now detectives had to find evidence to support their suspicions.
24:49At that point in time in 2009, the cell phone technology analysis was pretty new.
24:56So at that point, law enforcement reached out to NCIS because they had some newer technology and they were able to analyze Samira and Zachary's cell phones.
25:07Samira's cell phone showed that shortly after she left her home and left her child with her sister, you can see her travels using mapping and the cell tower hits.
25:22And you can see her leaving and going really across town to a tower that is located basically adjacent to Zachary Littleton's apartment.
25:33When Zachary Littleton was initially interviewed, he mentioned to law enforcement that he had two different cell phones.
25:44He had one with an area code of 843 that he never let Samira have.
25:49He also had another number that started with a 777 and that was the primary phone that he communicated with Samira.
25:57Detectives also discovered an unidentified phone number on Samira's cell phone.
26:07There is a brand new phone number that Samira is calling at that time.
26:12There ended up being 47 calls in that nine day period to this, what I would call a mystery phone number.
26:23Equally concerning was the fact that that number all of a sudden just went cold.
26:29It really implied that whoever owns that number knew something happened to Samira and she wasn't going to be able to answer the phone even if they called.
26:40Once they got the cell phone records for this unknown number, it turned out to be a track phone or a prepaid phone.
26:47So it's rather difficult sometimes to get information on those phones.
26:53But we did get lucky and we did discover that this particular phone number was registered to a Zach Littleton.
27:06So I learned a lot of things from Zach's friends and co-workers.
27:11One thing I learned is that he had a reputation of being a womanizer.
27:16That Samira was not the only girl who he had had a relationship with even though he was married.
27:23That he had skirted some punishment with the military previously for infidelity.
27:33This was somebody who was willing to break the rules, who was willing to lie.
27:38He was willing to have relationships with women under false pretenses to get what he wanted.
27:45He's somebody who on the surface is an upstanding police officer and military guy.
27:55From the very beginning, while Samira sees him as somebody who could be a knight in shining armor in some ways, he sees her as just another fling.
28:03He tells investigators so many different lies about his alibi, about his relationship with Samira, about where he was.
28:13I mean, he is obviously somebody who's very comfortable with lying.
28:17And I think this, of course, backfires.
28:19And so all this deception really becomes more damning evidence against him.
28:24They started canvassing the apartment complex where Zachary lived.
28:34And they were able to speak with one of the tenants who mentioned that they had seen a male and a female arguing close to Zachary Littleton's apartment the night that Samira went missing.
28:46Coupled with everything else that law enforcement had at that point, they had enough probable cause to obtain a search warrant to search Zachary Littleton's home.
28:59Officers descended on the apartment where they believed the suspect lived at the time Samira went missing.
29:09The original apartment of Zachary Littleton was searched by law enforcement.
29:13Because he had already moved out of it, there was not anything found that was significant to the investigation.
29:19Furniture was gone. The belongings were picked up and moved.
29:23There were no obvious signs of a struggle or blood or anything of that nature because he had already moved and the apartment had been cleaned out.
29:32It was a blow for police, desperate to get justice for the victim and her family.
29:38It's a cold-hearted thing to do, to place somebody in a bag and to throw them in this waterway like their life wasn't worth anything.
29:48And that is very sad.
29:51Despite a lack of hard evidence linking him to the crime, police were still convinced Zachary Littleton had killed Samira Watkins and dumped her body in water near the Pensacola Naval Base.
30:11So I do have a theory on how Samira got placed in the water.
30:22There is a bridge there. That's the bridge that enters into the Navy base itself.
30:28I don't really think that Littleton used that bridge to throw her body into the water.
30:33I think that there's too much security on that bridge. There's cameras.
30:38And I think what he actually did use is this bridge over here.
30:42And this bridge would have been a more quaint bridge. It doesn't have all the traffic on it.
30:51This one barely has the first car going across it.
30:54And I think that that makes better sense also because I think that this body of water tends to want to flush things out.
31:01I think that she went into the water there and that duffel bag made its way through that short period of distance over to the spot where it was found.
31:11But detectives needed more proof before they could arrest Littleton for murder.
31:18Could the waters at the crime scene help prove that Samira's body was dumped not far from the naval base where Littleton worked?
31:27Anytime we find evidence or a body in the water, we always collect a water sample.
31:39And that way, if we ever need to compare them, we can.
31:43Ideally, what we want to see is that the organisms, the bacteria and the water makeup found within the lungs, sinuses or around the remains match that type of water where the remains were found.
31:58In this case, it's believed that Samira's remains were not dumped too far from shore.
32:03Detectives now turned their attention to the next address Zachary Littleton had lived at.
32:17What we learned was that Zachary, when he left that apartment, he moved into a home.
32:25He was looking to bring his wife, their child to this home.
32:30So it wasn't an apartment, it was an actual house.
32:35When law enforcement executed a search warrant at Zachary Littleton's new home, they found some Lysol wipes.
32:41They found gray duct tape.
32:45They found paper towels that were consistent with the pattern of the paper towel that was found in the duffel bag with Samira's body.
32:52I was tasked to search one of the front rooms of the home, and in there was one of those clear, like, comforter bags that a comforter comes in with just miscellaneous stuff in it.
33:04And I sort of scooped my hand down and got a handful, and there was the gold earring that she had been wearing that matched the earring that was on her.
33:17It was just kind of one of those almost eureka moments that it was the nail that was going to seal his coffin because this gold earring was unique and so important to the investigation.
33:32The discovery of the earring was a major breakthrough in the case against Littleton.
33:39But there was more to come.
33:42Every investigator was tasked with little things to follow up on.
33:46We knew that her car was missing, so the thought was, you know, if somebody did do something to her, they had to get rid of her car.
33:56And then after a little while, her car was discovered at a vacant house over in an area called Bellevue.
34:03And then they had to get a way back home.
34:06So back then, taxi cabs were still pretty popular.
34:10We didn't have the Uber or the Lyft.
34:12So I went to the local Gila Cab location and asked if they kept records of their fares and where they picked them up at, what phone number they called from, maybe they had a name.
34:24And sure enough, there was a person named Zach who called to get picked up from the Waffle House that was not too far from where her car was discovered.
34:36I went to that restaurant to look at their video.
34:42They pulled up the date and time that matched when that taxi cab had picked up this individual.
34:49And what it showed was Zachary Littleton.
34:54He's holding in his hands a canister of wipes, the exact kind that you would use to clean up things.
35:01So by seeing the Clorox wipes in his hand, we figured that that was pretty immediately after the crime.
35:08He was probably wiping the car steering wheel down or whatever to remove DNA or fingerprints.
35:13But he walks in and he asks one of the employees if he could borrow their phone.
35:18They get the phone for him.
35:20And that's when he calls the taxi right there from the restaurant.
35:25We believe the reason that Zachary Littleton used the phone inside of the Waffle House was so that it could not be traced back to him.
35:32Obviously, we know that he had three phones.
35:35And so he could have used any one of those three.
35:37But instead, he decided to go inside and use a landline phone that he probably hoped wouldn't be traced.
35:44It was my goal to present this case before a grand jury in an effort to seek a first degree premeditated murder indictment.
35:57Police in Pensacola are investigating the murder of a woman found washed up on the Florida coastline.
36:20Their prime suspect, married military man, Zachary Littleton, has still not been charged with killing his pregnant lover, Samira Watkins.
36:34I think the motive for Zach doing this was he wanted to be here and play until his wife got here.
36:41And I think that Samira being pregnant and now his wife is due to arrive in Pensacola any day was his motive to get rid of at least the baby and Samira.
36:55My belief is that Samira likely was attacked by Littleton, that he grabbed her by her throat and strangled her to death.
37:10He added the tape around her mouth and nose when she was unconscious to make sure that she was not going to come back.
37:23The fact that he dumped the body in water was obviously in an attempt to try and get rid of the body number one as well as any evidence.
37:35It is likely that Mr. Littleton put Samira's remains as well as the other pieces of evidence in that bag and dumped her in the water in hopes that she would sink and none of that evidence would ever be found.
37:48In most cases though, bodies once they start to decompose, those gases build in their system and no matter how they're weighted down, in most cases they are going to float.
37:59And that's exactly what happened in this case.
38:03She floated along with all of the evidence that he had trapped inside the bag.
38:16We discovered on his computer Google searches that were to the effect of how to speed up a body decomposition, the salt water speed up body composition.
38:28Those two searches were made days before Samira went missing.
38:38You have to think that it was a huge surprise to Zachary Littleton when Samira's body washes up.
38:45I don't think he was anticipating that.
38:47And as the bag is open and they start uncovering all these clues and the earring and those kinds of things,
38:54and investigators began looking at him more closely because they've now ruled out her ex-partner,
39:00I think he does have to scramble around and start making up things.
39:04And I think what we start seeing is, you know, again, some of the lies he's telling are really end up becoming the best evidence against him.
39:13And some of these lies can be so easily disproven.
39:15He really shoots himself in the foot by a lot of the lies that he tells.
39:19After Samira's car was discovered, it then got towed back to a vehicle impound where it is processed for any sort of evidence and DNA.
39:32The steering wheel was swabbed for DNA and was later determined to have Zachary Littleton's DNA on it.
39:40Zachary Littleton had told me previously he had never driven her car.
39:45And his DNA being on the steering wheel does tend to show that he did drive it.
39:52Police now felt they had enough evidence, including phone records and Samira's earring found at his home, to charge Littleton with her murder.
40:04It is a good feeling to know that, at that point, that we would be able to make the arrest.
40:09And I, you know, I especially felt good with him knowing he wasn't going to slide.
40:15He wasn't going to get past this.
40:17Perhaps he may have been thinking that at that point.
40:19He was in the clear.
40:23There was no reaction.
40:25He was as calm as he was in the interview room at the time of his arrest.
40:30As I was putting all of the evidence together in preparation for the jury trial of this case, I felt relatively confident that, in fact, once I could put everything together, it would, it would paint a clear picture that Zachary Littleton was the one who committed this crime.
40:49The prosecution also hoped to establish that more than one life was taken by Littleton that day.
41:04In Samira's case, there's actually some concern that she may have been pregnant at the time of her death.
41:10Medically, during the autopsy, of course, we always examine the female uterus.
41:16It was not found that she was pregnant at this time.
41:23Samira's body had been submerged in water for at least five days.
41:27And so the medical examiner was not able to make a determination as to whether there was a fetus.
41:34We did have evidence from the doctor that confirmed Samira's pregnancy that she was, in fact, pregnant, but we could not confirm it through the autopsy process.
41:47This was very important because that would affect the charging process.
41:52Someone could be charged with two cases of homicide in that, in that case, but she was not medically found to be pregnant.
42:00Littleton was therefore only charged with one count of homicide.
42:06After Zachary Littleton was arrested in this case, he went for a first appearance in front of a judge within 24 hours.
42:14And it was at that point that his lawyers entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf.
42:18So I was nervous come trial time because I could see the picture here, the story of what happened.
42:34I could see that because I lived it and I was involved in it.
42:38But you never know how a jury is going to see it.
42:40The case of Zachary Littleton took approximately three days to try in front of a jury in Escambia County.
42:50I believe once the full picture was painted for the jury of the different pieces of evidence.
42:54Again, the gold earring, the Waffle House video surveillance, the DNA on the steering wheel, the neighbor that saw the two arguing.
43:05Everything put together, I believe, painted a clear picture for the jury that Zachary Littleton was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
43:12The defense attorneys don't go easy on you.
43:19They don't because it's not in their best interest or their clients.
43:23Most of it was pretty cut and dry, but they always do try to find the weak points.
43:33But the evidence against Littleton was overwhelming.
43:36The jury returns with a verdict after approximately three or four hours of deliberations.
43:47They saw all the evidence and they came back with a guilty verdict.
43:54It was at that point that I turned around and looked in the audience and I saw Samira's family members that just wept openly.
44:02And then the judge sentenced Zachary to life in prison without parole.
44:14So when I heard the guilty verdict for Zach, it was very satisfying.
44:20But it was also overwhelming.
44:22There was a lot of emotion.
44:24This is a very hard case to investigate.
44:26It involved a young, successful girl who was pregnant.
44:32Very sad, a victim that was in many ways had some vulnerabilities that were exploited by Littleton.
44:43Being at the front gate, you're wearing a uniform.
44:47You're a person of authority.
44:49Could he be looking for people that were a little vulnerable?
44:52Absolutely.
44:53He could have been doing that all along and that was part of his, the way he would find women.
45:00And Samira would have been a prime target for that in many ways.
45:06It's one thing to be a police officer who may be investigating crimes on the base.
45:14It's another thing to try to be a sophisticated criminal.
45:18And he wasn't.
45:19He left so many things behind.
45:24Part of that was him, you know, in that situation, feeling desperate and trying to get rid of everything.
45:31And I think the other part of it was kind of just being naive about the fact that, you know, or either overly confident about the fact that he can just put all this stuff in a bag and dump it.
45:42He wanted to erase the whole thing and maybe by packing this bag, he kind of fooled himself into thinking, this is my way of just getting rid of everything, which was the exact opposite of what happened.
45:59The satisfaction from proving this case really goes for the family members.
46:05Samira was such a young, beautiful girl with her whole future ahead of her.
46:09So to be able to get some level of justice for this family is certainly rewarding.
46:39So.
46:41We'll see you next time.
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