‘Buried in the Backyard’ Shocker: Detective Reveals ‘to This Day No One Would Have Found’ Justine Vanderschoot Without Confession [Exclusive]
Detective Angela Ford, who worked on the 2003 Justine Vanderschoot murder case, said the true crime case may not be closed without Brandon Fernandez’s confession.
Vanderschoot’s boyfriend Daniel Bezemer and his friend Brandon Fernandez were ultimately charged with her murder. But during a recent interview with Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Ford said if Fernandez didn’t provide details of Vanderschoot’s murder, including where they left her body, the case could still be open even today.
Oxygen True Crime revisited the tragic case in the latest episode of Buried in the Backyard.
Brandon Fernandez’s confession is why detectives found Justine Vanderschoot
After a significant amount of questioning, Fernandez said that Bezemer killed 17 year old Vanderschoot. He also revealed the exact location of the body in the woods, weeks after Vanderschoot went missing.
Ford said detectives wouldn’t have found Vanderschoot as quickly as they did without the statements from Fernandez. “She was buried in a very secluded place in an area where I wouldn’t think, even to this day, no construction or anything has occurred to where anybody would have accidentally found her,” Ford said.
Why did Brandon finally confess?
The boys were questioned several tims about Vanderschoot’s disappearance after Bezemer said he brought her lunch at work the day she went missing and told her mother she wasn’t at work. Bezemer had never brought lunch to Vanderschoot, which seemed suspicious.
The boys were questioned separately, which was when a detective asked Fernandez if he’d ever seen someone die. “I don’t remember if Chris asked him, ‘Have you ever seen somebody killed?’ Or ‘Have you ever seen somebody die?’ But however that question was phrased, he, pretty quickly decided that he wanted to make a deal and he wanted to tell everybody where she was,” Ford recounted.
“He said that it was the most horrifying experience he had ever had and that Danny made him do it,” she continued. “And, through all those excuses, all of those defenses, he threw them out right at the beginning.”
“My guess would be that he knew what was in front of him,” Ford said of Fernandez. “And both of them are so smart and they’re just very smart. And so there’s no doubt in my mind that he knew that if he were to offer some assistance, that it would go easier on him.”
The boys tried to hide evidence
The boys must have known that the walls were closing in on them. “The two of them had Googled a lot of stuff,” she recalled. Fernandez and Bezemer also turned on each other during questioning.
“Danny had a different account, making Brandon sound equally responsible,” Ford said. “So to this day, we really don’t know the whole truth about who did what. But we were able to go out and corroborate a lot of the information. They had changed the tires on the car and they didn’t need the tires changed. It was kind of a fun way that we found out about this because we served the search warrant on Brandon’s place of employment. There was a shred bin right next to his desk.”
“And so we took everything that had been shredded,” she said. “We had a volunteer in our office. An 80-year-old who sat for days and pieced these little pieces of paper together. Just amazing. And so what we found was a shredded receipt for a nearby tire place.”
“When I went in there to interview the owner, he said, that was really weird because they brought the car in and the tires didn’t need to be changed,” Ford recalled. “There was nothing wrong with them, but they wanted us to change the tires. So we put four brand new tires on that car. And that happened the day after this occurred, when they realized, oh, my gosh, maybe we left tire tracks out there.”
Bezemer and Fernandez are both in prison. Bezemer was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Fernandez was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
Buried in the Backyard is on Saturday from 8-9 p.m. ET/PT on Oxygen True Crime.
