A YOUNG BALLERINA VANISHED HOURS BEFORE LEAVING COLLEGE—THEN A WRONG NUMBER, SIZE-NINE NIKES, AND A BULLET FROM A RENTED HOUSE EXPOSED HER KILLER

A YOUNG BALLERINA VANISHED HOURS BEFORE LEAVING COLLEGE—THEN A WRONG NUMBER, SIZE-NINE NIKES, AND A BULLET FROM A RENTED HOUSE EXPOSED HER KILLER

At approximately 5:30 on the morning of December 20, 1996, residents of an Oklahoma City apartment complex woke to the sound of a woman screaming.

It was not an argument heard through a wall or a startled cry that ended in laughter. One resident described it as a terrible, unnatural scream. He called 911 but admitted that he was afraid to step outside and investigate.

By the time daylight reached the Dublin West Apartments, there was nothing obvious to explain what the residents had heard.

No woman was standing in the parking lot.

No injured person was calling for help.

No abandoned belongings marked the place where something had happened.

But one young woman who lived there had disappeared.

Her name was Julie Buskin.

She was 21 years old, a college student, an aspiring ballerina, and only hours away from moving home to Arkansas. Her parents were already driving toward Oklahoma City to help her pack.

Instead of finding their daughter waiting for them, they would arrive to find police officers inside her apartment.

Twelve hours after Julie vanished, investigators would discover her body beside a lake fifteen miles away.

The person who took her there had left footprints, DNA, a distinctive bullet, and a trail of small mistakes.

Even so, it would take years to understand what those clues were trying to say.

Julie had grown up in Benton, Arkansas, before moving to Oklahoma to attend Oklahoma University. She was working toward a bachelor’s degree in dance and earning money at the university golf course.

Dance was not simply a subject she had chosen because she needed a degree. She hoped to become a professional ballerina, and after college, she wanted to open a studio where she could teach children.

Friends described her as talented, popular, and surrounded by people who cared about her. Investigators would later search those relationships for hidden resentment, jealousy, or a breakup that had turned dangerous.

They found none.

On the evening of December 19, Julie visited Ryan James, a friend who worked with her at the golf course. The two spent time at his grandparents’ house, where they ate dinner and watched a movie.

Before Julie left, they made plans to have lunch the next day.

There was every reason to believe she would keep that appointment.

Julie’s semester had ended, and she was preparing to return to Arkansas. Her final night in Oklahoma was busy but ordinary, filled with the kind of small plans that make a person’s future feel certain.

After leaving Ryan’s grandparents’ house at about 10:00 p.m., Julie met several other friends. They played Monopoly and exchanged Christmas gifts.

Her roommate, Megan, was there as well.

Julie said goodbye to the group because she expected to leave Oklahoma the following day. Before the night ended, she promised Megan that she would drive her to Will Rogers Airport for an early flight.

The two women decided not to sleep.

At around 2:00 a.m., Julie and Megan went to a restaurant called The Kettle. Afterward, they stopped at a gas station, where they bought fuel and a cappuccino.

They returned to their apartment shortly after 3:00 a.m. so Megan could collect her belongings.

Around 4:30, they left again and drove toward the airport.

The trip took approximately thirty minutes. Julie dropped Megan off, and Megan watched her roommate drive away in a red Eagle Summit.

That was the last confirmed sighting of Julie alive.

She was expected to return to the apartment, meet Ryan for lunch, and prepare for the drive back to Arkansas with her parents.

Instead, sometime after she left the airport, Julie returned to the Dublin West Apartments and encountered the person who would kill her.

At about 5:30 a.m., the screams began.

Hours later, Ryan arrived for their lunch date.

Julie did not answer.

Her car was missing, and there was no explanation for why she had failed to meet him. Ryan reported her disappearance.

Not long afterward, Julie’s parents arrived from Arkansas. They had expected the practical work of moving boxes, loading clothes, and bringing their daughter home after the semester.

They found police officers instead.

Investigators searched for Julie throughout the day. Approximately twelve hours after she disappeared, her body was found on the bank of a lake about fifteen miles from her apartment.

Her hands had been tied behind her back with shoelaces. From the waist up, she was lying in the water.

She had been shot once in the back of the head at extremely close range. The autopsy determined that the bullet was a .22 caliber round.

There was also evidence that she had been assaulted.

The crime scene appeared to preserve the final movement of two people.

Investigators found two sets of footprints leading down toward the lake.

Only one set came back.

One trail was believed to be Julie’s. The other appeared to belong to the person who had forced her to the water, killed her, and walked away alone.

Police studied the second set of impressions and consulted Nike. The tread was consistent with a men’s size-nine Nike running shoe, specifically a Nike Air 2.

It was an unusually precise detail.

But a shoe size was not a name.

About twenty feet from Julie’s body, investigators found a crumpled pink leotard. The initials “JB” were written on its label.

It belonged to Julie.

Male DNA was recovered from the garment. In 1996, however, forensic technology could not turn that sample into the immediate identification investigators needed.

The leotard was carefully stored.

For the moment, the most important evidence in the case could tell police only that an unknown man had been there.

Investigators began interviewing Julie’s friends, classmates, coworkers, and acquaintances. Because she knew so many people at the university, the list was long.

They searched for someone who had been rejected, humiliated, angered, or obsessed with her.

No obvious enemy emerged.

There had been no dangerous breakup. No one admitted to hating her. Nothing in her recent life suggested that she expected violence.

Her apartment offered no explanation either.

Everything inside was in order. There were no visible signs of a struggle and nothing to suggest that someone had attacked her after entering the home.

Then police found Julie’s red Eagle Summit.

It had been left at another apartment complex only one block from where she lived.

The location created a troubling question.

If Julie had been abducted near her apartment, driven fifteen miles to the lake, and killed there, why would the attacker bring her car almost all the way back to the place where the crime began?

Red sand found inside the vehicle appeared similar to the sand along the lake’s banks, supporting the belief that the Eagle Summit had been driven to the scene.

Yet the car had yielded almost nothing else.

Investigators found no useful foreign fingerprints, hairs, or fibers. There were no clear indications that a fight had taken place inside it.

Julie’s telephone was missing.

Her records, however, revealed one of the strangest details in the investigation.

Two calls had been placed after Julie was dead.

One was made to a weather-forecast service.

The other went to a telephone number that was not in service.

Neither call identified the person who had Julie’s phone, but both suggested that the killer had kept it and used it after leaving the lake.

The weather call seemed almost casual.

The second call looked meaningless.

Years later, investigators would discover that it may have been one of the most important mistakes the killer made.

Police announced a reward that eventually reached $70,000, but the money did not produce the breakthrough Julie’s family needed.

A month after the murder, a man contacted investigators with a delayed but potentially valuable memory.

On the night Julie was killed, he had been driving near the lake when a vehicle resembling her Eagle Summit pulled in front of him. The two cars nearly collided.

Angered, the witness followed the Eagle Summit for approximately five miles because he wanted to confront its driver.

The man behind the wheel repeatedly looked at him through the rearview mirror. He then accelerated and escaped.

The witness had seen only a glimpse of the driver’s face, but police asked him to help create a composite sketch.

The resulting image showed a young, muscular man with long dark hair. The witness believed he might have been Hispanic and possibly a college student.

Local news stations repeatedly broadcast the sketch.

No one came forward with a convincing identification.

The case entered a long silence.

Four and a half years passed before investigators received a letter from a woman incarcerated in the Oklahoma County Jail.

She claimed that a former acquaintance might have killed Julie.

The man she named was Dennis Stermer, a 23-year-old construction worker with no criminal record. At the time of Julie’s murder, Stermer had lived approximately four blocks from her apartment.

He also resembled the composite sketch.

When police approached him, Stermer refused to answer questions and would not voluntarily provide a DNA sample.

Investigators obtained a court order.

The result appeared, at first, to be the break they had spent years waiting for.

Stermer’s genetic profile was extremely close to the male DNA found on Julie’s leotard.

But close was not the same as a match.

The result suggested that the unknown donor might be related to him. Stermer had only one immediate living male relative: his brother.

Investigators turned toward that brother, believing Julie’s killer might finally have been narrowed down to a single family.

Then the brother was tested.

His DNA did not match.

Stermer and his brother were eliminated, and the case returned to uncertainty.

For Julie’s parents, every failed comparison carried its own kind of loss. Each promising development briefly opened the possibility that they might learn who had taken their daughter.

Then the answer disappeared again.

Investigators became determined to prevent the case from dying with its evidence still locked away. They began collecting DNA from men connected to Julie’s life.

Friends were tested.

Acquaintances were tested.

More than 200 men eventually provided samples.

None matched the DNA on the pink leotard.

The killer had left behind a genetic signature, but police could not find the person who carried it.

Six years after Julie’s murder, a man named Anthony Castillo Sanchez was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend.

Because of the arrest, he was required to provide a DNA sample to law enforcement.

At first, the arrest appeared unrelated to a college student murdered years earlier. Sanchez had never been one of the hundreds of men tested during the original investigation.

But when investigators began examining his background, details from the old case started appearing around him.

Sanchez had lived approximately one mile from Julie’s apartment.

One of his former girlfriends had kept a diary during December 1996. In it, she recorded that Anthony had purchased a pair of Nike running shoes for her and another pair for himself.

Sanchez wore a men’s size nine.

The shoe evidence alone could not prove that he had walked down the sandy bank with Julie. Many men owned Nike running shoes, and many wore that size.

Then investigators examined the telephone evidence.

Another former girlfriend of Sanchez had once used a telephone number that was only one digit different from the disconnected number dialed from Julie’s phone after her death.

The call that had seemed meaningless for years suddenly suggested a possibility.

Someone trying to dial the former girlfriend’s number from memory could have entered one digit incorrectly.

Had the correct number been dialed, the records might have led investigators to Sanchez immediately.

Instead, the mistake produced a dead end that remained unexplained for years.

Then came the bullet.

Sanchez and his father, Glenn Sanchez, had an unusual and dangerous habit of firing .22 caliber guns into a wall inside the house they rented.

Investigators recovered a bullet from that residence.

Forensic examination determined that it had been fired from the same weapon used to kill Julie.

The grooves found on the bullets were distinctive. According to the investigation, only six companies manufactured .22 caliber firearms capable of leaving that particular pattern.

The evidence that had once seemed separate was beginning to form a single path.

A size-nine Nike impression led away from the lake.

A diary showed that Sanchez had bought Nike running shoes.

A useless telephone call was only one digit away from the number of his former girlfriend.

A bullet embedded in the wall of a house connected to Sanchez matched the gun that killed Julie.

But the decisive answer was still waiting in the evidence room.

In 2004, Anthony Sanchez’s DNA was compared with the male DNA preserved on Julie’s pink leotard.

It matched.

Sanchez had been only eighteen years old when Julie was abducted and murdered.

For nearly eight years, the evidence had preserved his identity even while investigators searched through hundreds of other names.

The leotard had waited for forensic science and the criminal-justice system to bring the correct person within reach.

Sanchez was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to death.

The conviction did not end his attempts to contest the case.

As recently as March 2023, Sanchez continued challenging the verdict. He claimed that his father, Glenn, had committed the murder.

Glenn Sanchez had died by suicide in April 2022. According to Anthony’s later claim, Glenn had told a girlfriend that he had been responsible for Julie’s death.

Investigators had already considered whether the DNA on the leotard could have belonged to Glenn.

They concluded that it did not.

Court documents described the statistical strength of the match to Anthony Sanchez as extraordinary. Depending on the population used for comparison, the probability of an unrelated person sharing the profile was calculated at figures ranging from one in tens of quadrillions to one in tens of quintillions.

The genetic evidence did not point vaguely toward the Sanchez family.

It pointed to Anthony.

For years, Julie’s case had seemed built from fragments that refused to connect.

A scream heard before sunrise.

A car returned almost to the place from which it had been taken.

Two trails entering the lake area and only one leaving.

A pink leotard with male DNA.

A size-nine Nike footprint.

A weather call.

A disconnected number.

A bullet hidden in a wall.

Individually, none of those details gave Julie’s parents the answer they needed. Together, they reconstructed the movements of a young man who believed he had escaped without leaving his name behind.

The most haunting clue was not the one he had intentionally concealed.

It was the call he had tried to make.

A single incorrect digit kept the telephone records from leading police directly to someone connected with Sanchez in 1996. That mistake delayed the identification instead of producing it.

But the call remained in the file.

So did the shoe impression.

So did the bullet.

And so did Julie’s leotard.

The evidence survived the years when witnesses had no more useful memories, when the composite sketch produced no name, when the wrong family appeared to be linked by DNA, and when more than 200 comparisons ended in disappointment.

Julie had been preparing to leave Oklahoma on the morning she disappeared. Her friends had already exchanged Christmas gifts with her. Her roommate had watched her drive away from the airport. Her parents were traveling toward an apartment she intended to empty.

The ordinary pieces of her future were still in place.

A lunch appointment waited.

A move home waited.

A dance career waited.

Children she hoped to teach would never meet her.

What remained instead was a case file filled with objects and measurements: sand, shoe tread, telephone digits, grooves on a bullet, and a DNA profile stored until science could give it a name.

Those details could not restore the life that was taken beside the lake.

They could, however, prevent the person responsible from disappearing into the same darkness he had created around Julie.

Years after that scream woke the apartment complex, the evidence finally identified the man who had driven away alone.

The smallest traces had endured longer than his anonymity.