The heart of Nelson Serrano’s defense was simple: There’s no evidence to prove that Serrano ever set foot in Erie Manufacturing the day of the murders.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: What was the biggest obstacle in trial, you had to overcome here?

Bob Norgard, defense lawyer:  The biggest obstacle is four dead people, It’s a lot easier for jurors to find somebody guilty on "maybe" evidence.  They’re not supposed to.

Defense team Bob Norgard and Cheney Mason were relentless in their cross examination of prosecution witnesses, starting with the crime-scene technicians who gathered evidence...12 bullet casings, for instance, that told them nothing about who loaded the guns.

Norgard (in court): With respect to the casings, no fingerprint evidence linking those casings to Mr. Serrano?

Sgt. Brooks: That’s right.

No Serrano fingerprints found anywhere around the crime scene.

Norgard: Not a single fingerprint was linked to Mr. Serrano in that building, isn’t that true?

Sgt. Brooks:  None of the latents from the building were linked to him.

The dusty footprint on the chair seemed to be Serrano’s shoe size but...?

Norgard: Can you tell me how many shoes there are that match?

Oral Woods, shoe expert: No, I cannot.

Norgard:  I mean, a million, two million, ten millions?  Hundred million? Do you know?

Oral Woods, shoe expert: I really don’t know.

Murphy: This is all part of a circumstantial case.  You have to believe each link in the chain to get him to make that footprint in the chair.

Cheney Mason, defense attorney: What is the theory here that there’s three men in there, 200-plus—lbs.each, “’Excuse me fellas, I need to borrow this chair so I can climb up there and get a gun and shoot you with it?”  How silly is this? 

Serrano’s son, Francisco, had been called by the prosecution but the defense used him to flip the tables, testifying that it was his father’s partners who actually stole business money from him, not the other way around.

Francisco Serrano, Nelson Serrano's son: Well, a million dollars had disappeared and George and Phil were not willing to tell us what they did with the money.

Then the defense went after the busy here, there and everywhere of Serrano’s alleged travels the day of the murders, in and out of airports, boarding planes, driving around. How come no person or camera saw him?

Norgard: Not a single witness was found who saw Mr. Serrano leave that hotel, drive to the airport, park at the airport and get on a plane? isn’t that true?

Tommy Ray: That’s correct.

Norgard: You’re sure that there are no videotapes from Atlanta, Tampa or Orlando showing Mr. Seranno anywhere near those airports on this day, isn’t that true?   

Parker: I have no personal knowledge of any tapes of that nature, no sir.

And in that day of travel, the defense argued that there just wasn’t enough time for Serrano to have pulled off the crime he was charged with.

Leaving the Orlando airport garage at 3:49 p.m. as the timecoded parking record indicated...

Detective Tommy Ray testified it had taken him an hour and fifteen to drive from the airport to Erie Manufacturing.

That would have put Serrano at the shop just after 5 pm, leaving him only fifteen minutes to kill four people.

Murphy: Your important point of the timeline is: look when the last victim is killed.    Has to be 5:20.

Cheney Mason: You’d be stretching your imagination to believe you could drive that distance, in the traffic, and get there, and be able to commit this crime.  I do not think so. 

And the last part of the timeline, the defense argued was even more implausible.

In less than half an hour, Serrano would have had to get off a wide body jet, exit Atlanta airport—one of the busiest in the world—and arrive back at his hotel five miles away.   All in time to be photographed looking up at that surveillance camera.

Mason: I challenge anybody to show me, I’ll pay them a million dollars if they can do it.

Murphy: If they can do it in the time alloted?

Mason: 28 minutes. Can’t happen. Didn’t happen. 

The biggest hurdle for the defense  was just ahead, starting with the testimony given by the nephew that he’d arranged a car rental at Orlando airport for his uncle on the QT.

The defense grilled the nephew, portraying him as someone who was just interested in saving his own skin.

Defense attorney: You weren’t just someone that they wanted to question as a witness, but that they had you pegged as a suspect in the quadruple homicide.  Isn’t that true?

Alvaro Penaherrera: Yes.

Defense attorney: You wanna tell the jury how much that scared you?

Alvaro Penaherrera: I already said I was very scared.

Defense attorney: Yes.  They broke you down and got you to change your story, right?

Alvaro Penaherrera: Yes, I changed the story.

In a circumstantial case that the prosecution had the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt, it came down to one crucial piece of evidence, nothing less than the foundation of the prosecution’s charges against Nelson Serrano: his fingerprint on that parking ticket that put him in Florida on the afternoon of the murders.

The state had put on three fingerprint experts. Two agreed that it was Serrano’s, but the third surprised the prosecutor when under cross examination he testified he wasn’t entirely convinced.

Expert: I had—and I still have reservations—about this particular latent.

An expert in the field—the prosecution’s own witness—telling the court he had reservations about the fingerprint?

Why, he wondered, was a finger from Serrano’s right hand on the ticket and not one from his left?

Expert: If you’re wearing a seatbelt, it’s extremely restricted, where you are reaching across your body, between your body and the steering wheel, to hand it to someone over here.

The defense leaped into the crack in the prosecution’s case and floated the possibility that the all important fingerprint was bogus, forged by person or persons unknown to implicate Serrano in the crime.

Mason: Were you able to determine from them anything about the veracity of those prints?

Expert: No, I can’t...

Mason: Can fingerprints be planted and not detected even by experts?

Expert: I had a great deal of experience with the so-called forged and altered fingerprints.

Murphy: Are you saying that the cops did it?

Mason: I don’t know who did it.

Murphy: The cops planted a bogus fingerprint on this—

Mason: There’s a high likelihood that that print was an act of desperation after years of frustration in this very high profile, very significant case.

Had the defense made the jury wonder? Had they put some cracks in the prosecution’s theory of the crime?

After 60 witnesses, 400 exhibits and five weeks of trial, closing arguments were at hand. 

The defense going first.

Bob Norgard, defense attorney: Not a single person on the planet earth, not one single person has put Mr. Serrano at Erie Manufacturing on December 3, 1997.

The prosecutor countered that Serrano had a volcanic grudge against his former business partners and the parking ticket and the long chain of circumstantial evidence was the proof that he was the killer.

John Aguero, prosecutor: It’s getting harder and harder and harder to think that all of these things could just be coincidences and they happen to poor Mr. Serrano. That’s one diabolical son of a gun sitting over there. 

It was now up to a jury to decide.

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