'She Could Have Gone Anywhere She Wanted to'

So three weeks after Sepulveda gave up his old life and his fiancee and moved 1,600 miles across the country to be with Servo, her family says she kicked him out.

Riordan said that Sepulveda was upset, but not angry. "I know that he came back over to her apartment and try to rekindle it and get a second chance out of her about a week after the initial breakup. But she said, 'I just can't do it.' And he said 'OK,' and that was it."

Sepulveda moved to another apartment complex in Abilene and found a job, and as far as anyone knew, seemed to be moving on.

People at KRBC say Servo seemed like a different person. She fell in with her new friends from the station, worked hard and played hard. One of them was someone who wanted to be more than friends. His name was Brian Travers, a 23-year-old weather forecaster at the station, with all-American clean-cut looks. Travers said they were briefly intimate, but that, "she said she's not going to let any guy come in her way, so she had told me that she just wanted to just be close friends."

According to Riordan, Servo "felt like he was very into her and she didn't want to hurt him."

The Night in Question

After doing the news Sept. 15, 2002, Servo and Travers picked up a coffee table from a friend's apartment, and then stopped at a Wal-Mart for a late-night shopping run. Along the way, Travers says Servo told him she thought they were being followed.

"She's like, 'I'm pretty sure, Brian. That's the same car.' And I was like, 'You're just imagining things,'" he said. Servo declined when Travers offered to walk her to her car, but he insisted.

After Servo dropped off Travers at his apartment, phone records indicate that she drove back to her apartment and then called ex-boyfriend Dave Warren, a weather forecaster working in Montana. "We talked about seeing each other in Dallas in December, which was three months away," Warren said. "She never said anything about anyone following her home."

But sometime after Servo hung up with Warren, someone climbed the stairs to her apartment and murdered her. After two days of unreturned messages, the station's news director called the apartment complex manager to check on Servo. She was found bludgeoned and strangled — there were no murder weapon and no signs of forced entry.

Early attention focused on the two men who had been in her life in Abilene: Sepulveda and Travers. According to lead Detective Jeff Bell of the Abilene Police Department, "those two guys were the ones who we knew had a personal relationship with Jennifer."