The Han Family Murders

0:00Music

0:06We don't want to accept that there's actually evil that walks amongst us.

0:13But it does. And this was pure evil.

0:22The Hahn family, I felt better whenever I spent time with Henry, Jenny, and Emily. Henry was born to be the healer. Henry was the guy. In the alternative medicine world, patients would come in from all different parts of the country to see him. When you go to the clinic, it just kind of oozed of peacefulness. He had the magic. Emily had her own little table and her crayons. Her mom, Jenny, was there working in the clinic. It's kind of good therapy to be with the three of them. They did make a good team.

1:02Natalie Morales:We were business partners with Henry, and we were becoming friends. We really had a beautiful road ahead of us.

1:12He had a 10 a.m. meeting with his normal investment group.

1:16Natalie Morales:It was probably, you know, a good 45 minutes after the meeting was supposed to start that we all kind of went, where is Henry? If he was going to be two minutes late, he called. We're trying to call Henry and was going straight to voicemail. So for him to miss this meeting would be a big deal. He just wouldn't. Something was not right. We all had a pit in our stomach, and we were trying to find a reason why that pit shouldn't be there. Emily's birthday is coming up. Maybe they took her to Disneyland. Somebody's got to go over to their house and check on them. Mark finally gets in touch with Don Goldberg.

1:50Very unusual not to get any communication from either Jenny or Henry. By midday, I decided to go to the home. From the outside, it looked normal. Went to the front door. The door was closed, but it was not locked. The two vehicles were in the garage, which you could see through the windows at the top of the garage door. Then I called 911. They came over and did a welfare check. Around 5.30 that evening, two deputies arrived, made entry, called out, no response, and then started to look to see if there was any sign of foul play. And that's what led them to open the garage door. And then if you walk around the first car, they can see what appears to be three bodies wrapped in plastic and duct tape.

2:39Within a minute or two, sunk in that the three bodies were Henry, Jenny, and Emily. my friends were gone. There's a certain amount of shock that sets in.

2:53Natalie Morales:We didn't hear back from Don. We didn't eat that night. We didn't sleep that night. A five-year-old, three days short of her birthday. It shook us all to our core. It was rough. Things started rapidly going into the next phase. Who, how, and why. It's a huge home. There was biological evidence throughout, primarily in the upstairs in the bedrooms where the murders took place. The smell of bleach was there, indicating a clean-up attempt. The entire family killed, presumably, while they slept. We knew there was a monster out there, and we were going to find him and get him.

3:46The Han Family Murders

3:54Mark and Marla Palumbo were concerned when their friend and business partner, Dr. Henry Han, failed to show up for a meeting on March 23rd, 2016. They would learn the horrific reason why the following day from a news report.

4:11Natalie Morales:I was in the kitchen on my computer and I kept checking and I just remember screaming, they're all dead. Dr. Hahn, his wife Jenny, and their five-year-old daughter Emily were found dead in the garage of their Santa Barbara home. Mark had just seen them on his way back from a business trip. We went out for dinner, played Connect Four with Emily. He's brought his phone to me, and I'm just looking at all these pictures of Emily. And they were taken the Friday before. Just horrific. Yeah. And she was just goofing around with a book, making all these funny faces. And you could tell she was loving life.

5:02The Palombos had recently embarked on a new business venture with Dr. Hahn. I really loved the guy. I mean, he really was smart and curious and open-minded.

5:12Natalie Morales:He had to come with food and in shorts and flip-flops, you know. Just no air about him. But what made you trust him? His passion. Yeah, the way he cared about people. Don Goldberg had known Dr. Hahn for more than 25 years and thought of him as a brother. To Don, he was just Henry. I was approximately 10 years older than Henry, but he still called me his younger brother. You just don't come across a friend like Henry. It's once-in-a-lifetime friendship. When they met, Henry was making a name for himself after emigrating from China, where he came from a family of physicians. He would soon take over the Santa Barbara Herb Clinic.

6:00I had several patients who had had medication side effects. They would say, I went to see Dr. Hahn and it went away. And it was like, I got to meet this guy. Dr. Glenn Miller, a psychiatrist, says he and Henry developed a mutual respect and even partnered on a book about how Eastern and Western medicine could work together to improve patients' quality of life. Henry's practice was flourishing. As far as active patients, he would see like in a month, it was hundreds. But he also tried to balance it. In 2009, that balance he was seeking became a reality when Henry met and married Jenny Yu. He seemed incredibly happy.

6:50It was good to see Henry that happy.

6:52Natalie Morales:Jenny was absolutely warm and lovely. When they had Emily, the dream was complete. Henry was just on cloud nine. He was a very proud father. They were often together at the clinic, where Jenny had quickly become Henry's right hand, says her friend Isaiah Oregon. He really trusted her and let her kind of take the reins. In the spring of 2016, they were getting ready to celebrate Emily's sixth birthday. Where should I go? Go wherever. Go wherever? We were making plans for a birthday party and, you know, had all her presents wrapped. But just three days shy of her birthday, her loved ones were stricken with grief.

7:41I don't really have adequate words to describe how I felt. The sadness is too deep. As night fell on the Hahn estate on Wednesday, March 23rd, Don tried to process what he had just witnessed. He had called 911 when he couldn't find the Hons anywhere, and he was with sheriff's deputies when they discovered the bodies in the garage wrapped in plastic. None of it made any sense at all. Prosecutor Ben Lodinig says it was shortly before midnight when Santa Barbara Sheriff's investigators obtained a search warrant and began to piece together what had happened inside the house. It appeared the family had been shot while they slept upstairs on the second floor.

8:33Henry in the couple's bedroom and Jenny and Emily across the hall in Emily's room. Emily's room was tough to see. Mom probably read her stories to have Emily go to sleep that night and was sleeping with her. What did that tell you about the depravity of the kind of person who could do something like that? What were they after? We didn't know what he was after, but the depravity, I've never seen anything like it. Detectives picked up on the distinct smell of the murderer's attempts to cover his tracks. The smell of bleach was there. We had bleach bottles found. There were bleach stains on the carpet and throughout other items upstairs.

9:17And then you see bloody things in a washing machine. All the bedding, which had been stripped from the beds, was found piled in the laundry room and in the machine. The washing machine, the alarm had gone off because the load was unbalanced. And within there are a huge group of bloody sheets. Wedged in pillows in the laundry, crime scene investigators found a.22 caliber bullet and bullet fragments. Three matching shell casings were found within the wrapping of Jenny's body. And one was later found lodged between the baseboard and box spring of Emily's bed. We had one bullet that was a through and through.

9:59It was perfect for comparison for the murder weapon. As things are going, we start to find clues as to who potentially could be involved. Inside a paper bag next to Henry's bed, detectives found a document signed the last day Henry was seen alive. It provided a name. It's basically a four-page business contract between two partners. Partner one, Pierre Hopch, and partner two, Dr. Hahn. Don Goldberg knew a Pierre that Dr. Hahn was associated with. But Don thought he was harmless. I did not think that Pierre was capable of murder. I never really saw Pierre become angry or agitated. But the Palombos had a bad feeling.

10:50You didn't trust him? I did not.

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12:04This community was left with a scar. The indelible scar left by the murders was the kind that not even Dr. Han could have healed. It was like a bomb exploded. Nobody could move for weeks. There was something very, very, very dark going on. Kimberly Ruff says Dr. Hahn treated her family for two decades. He could do anything. Ever since she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer shortly after giving birth to her son. Kimberly says Dr. Hahn's holistic approach allowed her to nurse her newborn while still treating her tumors. No matter how scared you might be or frightened, you just left feeling like it's going to be okay.

12:53Yeah, he was something. Instilling hope may have been one of the secrets to why his patients say Dr. Hahn could heal just about anything. Dr. Hahn, like, saved my life. Sherry Pierron was also a young mother with cancer when she went to Dr. Hahn. My daughter, Abby, was 15 months old. I felt a lump under my armpit. Even though she had the prescribed surgery and chemotherapy, she credits Dr. Han with her survival. There were so many people that passed away around me. He got me through it. What was the impact for you of his loss? It's the fear of if something comes back. And I'm trying every day to be positive and try to stay with his level of calm and how much confidence he had that, like, everything's taken care of.

13:42That conviction is what had drawn the Palombos, who worked in the skin care industry, into their partnership with Dr. Hahn, hoping to treat various skin maladies. Henry was very interested in CBD. Having used CBD in his practice to treat pain and inflammation, Henry wanted to harness its full potential. It was groundbreaking science at the time, and he wanted 25-year-old Pierre Hopch to help develop it. Pierre, from what we gathered, had a lot of experience in laboratories, in this case relating to CBD. Henry had taken a liking to Pierre after meeting him through another associate. But the Palombos were uncomfortable with Pierre from the start.

14:28Natalie Morales:You know how when you meet somebody, you can't put your finger on it, but something's not right? That was Pierre. There was always this kind of little boiling simmer. When it came time to do the lab work, the Palombos say the results were disturbing. What we came to find out was he was using toxic materials. When we called him on it, he said, you know, I'm just learning more about the molecules. It was just weird. As it turned out, Pierre wasn't a formally trained scientist. He didn't even have a college degree. The more you got onto that surface, the more you realized that he could talk a game.

15:08and stay over the folks' heads a bit, scientifically. Sounds like he was sort of a snake oil salesman type, right? He was. Sophisticated one, but yes. Yeah, very sophisticated one. There was more eyebrow-raising behavior. Pierre had also made odd charges on Henry's account. I was doing all the finances, and I'm like, this doesn't look right. Not a business expense. Not at all. After Marla flagged the charges to Henry, he discovered they were for escort services. Henry was, you won't believe this. Pierre's out. That was the final straw. That was Henry's final straw. But then a few weeks before the murders, Mark and Marla say Henry brought up Pierre out of the blue.

15:51Natalie Morales:Henry mentioned that he had learned a lot more about Pierre's upbringing, how much Pierre had to overcome from his childhood. Mark nor I really responded. We didn't want to have Pierre back in our fold at all. The Palombos were not alone in being wary of Pierre. Jenny's friend Isaiah says Jenny also had concerns and confided in him about them four days before the murders. It was weighing on her heavily. Do we trust him? Do we give him another chance? I was like, absolutely not. If he stole from you before, he's going to steal from you again. But Pierre had already ingratiated himself back into Henry's goodwill.

16:35Henry had a very trusting nature. Henry had shared with me that Pierre told him that he was ill, that it was late-stage cancer, and that he was going to do what he could to help Pierre. Using Henry's good nature by lying to him, by manipulating him. Authorities learned that Pierre had been an overnight guest at the Hans home before the murders and had formed a new partnership with the healer. There was that contract found in the master bedroom they had signed the last day of Henry's life. But prosecutor Ben Ledenig says it didn't seem legitimate. It was like a college sophomore drafted it. It was not notarized, not witnessed.

17:20Detectives had found something else of interest. A brilliant detective found packaging to the plastic wrapping that all three of the Hahn family were wrapped in, in a trash can in the kitchen area, next to packaging of 3M duct tape, similar to the duct tape that was used to wrap all three of the bodies. He recognized the plastic wrap was a Home Depot brand and reached out to the company's security department. And Home Depot was, within hours of us getting an entry into the house, able to run those two items together to see if they had been purchased in the Southern California region within the last several days or weeks.

18:05A Home Depot in Oceanside, California had security footage of a man who matched the DMV photo of Pierre Hopche, who also happened to have an Oceanside address. And that was bam. We knew. He's walking out with three huge plastic rolls. and, sure enough, duct tape. So within hours of the crime scene being discovered, Pierre Hopsch became a person of interest. Yes. But where was Pierre now? Detectives had a hunch. Data from the Hans' cell phones, which were missing, showed they were traveling south, further and further from Santa Barbara. Then, inexplicably, Henry's phone goes dark, but Jenny's is still on, and it keeps going south.

18:53We're getting basically digital footprints leading down to the Oceanside area from a dead woman's phone.

19:13Any time you're trying to stop somebody that is wanted for homicide, the stakes are going to be high. The day after the Hahn family was found murdered, A manhunt was underway in Oceanside, California, nearly 200 miles from the crime scene. Sergeant Anthony Flores and his partner were part of the local Oceanside police team assisting the Santa Barbara investigation. We had come in to work with our special enforcement section, and we were going to be the stop car for that day. We had given a window of opportunity to take him into custody or potentially stop him. Meanwhile, undercover detectives were conducting surveillance at the residence Pierre Hopp shared with his father and updating all units, including the homicide team that had driven down from Santa Barbara with Prosecutor Ben Ledeine.

20:02All of a sudden, we get chatter on our intercoms. Dad's on the move. The surveillance team followed Pierre's father as he drove to a Walmart parking lot, where security cameras captured him meeting up with none other than Pierre. That's Dad driving in sedan. And then you see the Lexus following shortly behind. They appear to be communicating briefly together. You can just see that trunk pop on Dad's car. After transferring two large duffel bags to Pierre's car, they both drove off. We got to move quickly. It was a little after midnight, and we just got the update that the suspect was on the move.

20:47As we're traveling, we're hearing that he's pulling into the Arco station. We had a few miles of a head start. The other units and Lodinic had pulled over by the ARCO station, waiting for the arrest team to arrive. And all of a sudden you see an unmarked car drive right through the middle of that intersection. Sparks fly and it just basically comes in and pulls in and lays on the brakes. Two huge dudes get out of the car and pull a gun on him and prone him out. And our eyes are like saucer. We're like, whoa! Wow. It's 200 miles away that this investigation started and it culminated here. Sergeant Flores had handcuffed Pierre.

21:25What do you remember about that arrest? I remember it going down really fast. All of our senses were heightened. Within 48 hours of the murders, investigators had the Hahn family's alleged killer in custody. Pierre Hopsch waived his Miranda rights and started talking to detectives. What he told them was something out of a spy thriller. He claimed that his life was in danger. Over the past couple of days, I kid you not, I've been shot at probably about five individuals so far that I shot in self-defense. He claimed he was being targeted because of a scientific marvel he had invented. What does it do?

22:09It's a very, very advanced energy source. It's a quantum kind of energy source. I think probably at least 15 individuals who have been connected to this project are dead. Pierre said he had gone to Dr. Han's house earlier in the week to install one of his perpetual energy devices and that the plastic wrap and duct tape he was seen purchasing were for that purpose. Dr. Henry, we signed a contract together. He was going to facilitate taking the technology out to China. Loved the guy to death. He really, really liked this project. Pierre said he had left Santa Barbara around 2 p.m. on March 22nd, the day before the murders, after signing the contract.