FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Vince Zavala looked the man in the eye. He shook his hand. And as the two walked out of a mall together, the man turned to him and said something Zavala can’t forget.
“I hope you catch him.”
“I looked him in the eye. I shook his hand,” Zavala recalls.
“Five seconds later, he’s arrested.”
The man was Nickey Stane, and the “him” he hoped would be caught was, prosecutors say, himself.
Saturday’s episode of “Evil in the Archives” starts at that moment and works its way back through more than two decades of dead ends and one survivor’s promise.
That survivor is Beth, known in court as Jane Doe 1. In 1999, three years after Debbie Dorian was murdered in her northeast Fresno apartment, Beth was sexually assaulted in Visalia. She had one thing to say to the man who attacked her, and she kept saying it.
“You’re not going to get away with this.”
Her case would link to Dorian’s. But it took years, and a new kind of DNA technology, before anyone had a name.
Zavala, a retired Fresno police detective, explains how the search ended at Stane, a man who didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a suspect. “His work history was very solid,” Zavala says.
Then came the hard part: getting proof without tipping him off. “We had to be very careful that we weren’t discovered,” Zavala says.
The arrest is only the beginning. The episode follows the case into court, where Debbie’s family faces a decision no family should have to make.
“No, no, I won’t accept that,” says Debbie’s mother, Sara Loven.
What happens next, and the words Loven chooses when she speaks for her daughter, are the heart of the episode.
“Evil in the Archives: The Murder of Debbie Dorian, Part Two” airs Saturday, Nov. 7, at 9:30 p.m. on ABC30.
You can watch part one here.