As investigators removed Alan and Diane's bodies from the house, they too noticed a coldness and distance from Sarah, something Femling remembers asking his team to take note of.
"I said, 'There is something going on here.' I mean, most 16-year-olds would be hiding," he said. "They would not want to sit there on a fence and watch their parents come out in body bags. No way!"
Sarah's friends were also becoming suspicious. Her grief, they decided, didn't appear genuine, and she was oddly preoccupied with hair and nail appointments. Hardly the expected behavior of a girl who'd just lost her parents. Sarah's friend Chante Caudle remembered a chilling moment during volleyball practice.
"She came up to my side, and she said, 'Chante, find Bruno and tell him that I love him no matter what happens,'" she said. "And when she said that, it was just this awful feeling and my heart just sunk, and was just like, 'She did it!'"
Police also wondered if Sarah had some part in the killing of her parents, and after hearing about the heated arguments she had with her parents, investigators took her fingerprints and DNA samples and questioned her.
Though there was no evidence of a break-in, Sarah stuck to her story about an intruder who'd committed the murders. By now, her mom's sister, Linda Vavold, didn't believe her niece.
"Every time she went in to be interrogated by the police, her story kept changing," Vavold said.
The forensic evidence that came back from the lab showed that there was no match to Santos. Sarah's grandfather Dean Dishman remembers talking to Femling about the case.
"I finally just asked him. I said, 'Walt, who pulled the trigger? Was it Bruno?", Dishman said.'" He said, 'No.' I said, 'Then who?' And he said, 'Sarah.'"
'We Got Her'
By mid-October, six weeks since the brutal murders of Alan and Diane Johnson, the wait was finally over.
"When the state lab came back, and they said we have Sarah's DNA inside the glove," Femling said. "We said, 'There it is! We got her!'"
Convinced they had the final piece of forensic evidence in place, investigators questioned Sarah one last time, hoping for a confession. She wouldn't budge. After 45 minutes, Femling made the move he had dreaded: he arrested the high school junior on two counts of first-degree murder.
Sarah's arrest made headlines everywhere -- a rare case of a 16-year-old girl charged with the murder of her parents. It's called parricide and typically involves boys. One recent study shows that only four girls have been convicted of such a horrific crime here in the United States over a period of 24 years.
As the trial began in February 2005, lead prosecutor Jim Thomas believed his team had the forensic evidence to convict Sarah but worried whether they could prove that a bright, athletic high school girl suddenly became a killer.
Defense attorney Robert Pangburn still thought Santos was involved in the crime, "Bruno very easily could have recruited cohorts of his." However, Pangburn decided not to question Santos.
The trial took a toll on family and friends as many were called to testify against Sarah. Her brother Matt spoke in court of the open warfare between Sarah and their mother.
"Her and my Mom didn't get along," Matt testified. "It was fairly rocky. Constant fighting, bickering back and forth!"
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