How NASA Helped Solve a Murder

It was almost a riddle. The evidence pointing to Lori Auker’s killer was something investigators had in their hand, yet they couldn’t really see it.

In June 1989, Auker—a 19-year-old woman from Point Township, Pennsylvania—was found dead in a wooded area. Police traced some of her last known movements to the mall where she worked. In one low-resolution photo snapped by a security camera, a woman could be seen walking across the lot; in another, taken just 10 seconds later, the woman was idling near the passenger door of a car. In the next, both were gone.

Police had good reason to believe the woman was Auker and the driver of the car was her killer. But in order to advance the investigation and make an arrest, they’d have to enhance the photos to extract crucial details, a technological advance that had never been used in a criminal prosecution. And to do that, they turned to the one government agency on the cutting edge of image enhancement: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

1. Blurred Vision
2. Contrasting Opinions

Blurred Vision

At roughly 3:30 pm on May 24, 1989, Lori Auker bid goodbye to her parents to clock in for her shift at work at Pet Place in the Susquehanna Valley Mall in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. When she failed to show up for work, her parents searched for her—to no avail. Her car was still in the mall’s parking lot, but there was no sign of Auker. They notified police.

On June 12, a woman was walking along the road near a wooded area when she noticed a noxious odor. She soon discovered a decomposing body.

Dental records confirmed the body belonged to Auker; an autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed seven to 10 times. Given that her car was in the mall’s lot and that she never arrived for work, it seemed likely something had transpired there.

In a stroke of luck, police discovered that a camera was installed above an ATM machine at Northern Central Bank and had a field of view covering where Auker was believed to have been. But there were issues: For one, it was a camera that snapped still frame images in 10-second intervals, not video. For another, the camera was intended to document the bank’s customers at the ATM, not what might be happening in the background. Worst of all, the tape used to store the footage was constantly being re-used, which meant both the tape and the images were worn down.

Upon reviewing the tape, detectives found that only three images were relevant. (Another was glimpsed only once before the tape degradation made it irretrievable.) The first, time-stamped 3:47:24 pm, showed a woman approaching the mall. The next image displayed the woman, who was wearing clothes similar to Lori’s, leaning over a car's passenger door, as though she were addressing the driver. In the next frame, taken 10 seconds later, both the car and the woman were gone, even though she had originally been walking toward the mall. The conclusion was that she must have gotten in the car.

This could have been anybody, save for one crucial detail. The car in the security footage looked remarkably like a Chevy Celebrity, a four-door sedan first introduced in 1981. It was the same type of vehicle driven by Robert Auker, Lori’s estranged husband.

Robert, 26, and Lori had separated in late 1988, and family and friends told police the split had not been amicable. Robert, they alleged, had been verbally abusive and threatening, motivated in some part by custody issues over their young son. Lori had told co-workers she was frightened of Robert and had asked her current boyfriend to accompany her to her car when her shift ended late at night. On at least one occasion, Robert had been in the lot waiting for her. (She and her boyfriend wound up driving away in his car, circling back after Robert had left.) She even acquired shotguns and mace to protect herself from him.

The Celebrity didn’t belong to Robert: It belonged to his adoptive parents, whom he was living with at the time of Lori’s disappearance. Robert’s father told police his son had been driving the car the day Lori was discovered missing. The following day, a witness observed Robert vacuuming the vehicle. The Aukers then traded in the car just days later. When it was recovered, hairs consistent with Lori’s were found inside. There were also cat hairs. The Aukers didn’t have cats. Lori, however, did.

Circumstantially, Robert Auker was an obvious suspect. But he was in no hurry to confess. Robert told police that he had been at a department store in another mall that day and denied having seen Lori. Later, he said his brother, Steven, had confessed to the crime—though why Steven would have wanted to murder Lori was unclear. (Steven denied making any confession and was able to show he was hundreds of miles away on the day Robert alleged he had confessed.)

Police visited Sears, where Robert purportedly had been to look at appliances, and discovered that he had asked an employee to write a note putting him in the store on May 24. The employee obliged, saying he didn’t initially realize Auker wanted a note for that particular date: “I thought he meant for that night {he visited},” the employee said. “I was not going to say you are lying to me because I wanted to sell a dishwasher. The customer is always right.” But the salesman was not on duty the day of Lori’s death and was unable to confirm Robert had visited the store. No other employees remembered seeing him.

None of this was about to sway police, but they still had the problem of the blurry surveillance footage. No license plate could be seen in the still frames; it was possible a good defense attorney could argue that identifying the make and model of the car in such poor-quality images would be a stretch, and perhaps that would be enough to introduce reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors.

Nearly a year into the investigation, someone had an unusual piece of advice for Northumberland County District Attorney Robert Sacavage.

They told him to call NASA.

Contrasting Opinions

There was some precedent for the space agency aiding a criminal investigation, though it hadn’t exactly taken an active role: In 1965, they launched a communications satellite, Intelsat I, that was able to facilitate a television simulcast of a program about wanted fugitives. The technology enabled viewers in Florida to catch a glimpse of notorious Montreal bank robber Georges Lemay, who had been on the run since 1961 and was living in south Florida.

The Auker situation was much different. Robert Auker was easily found but not easily charged. In order to secure the case, Sacavage first turned to the state police and the FBI for assistance in enhancing the two images. The FBI was able to make some slight improvements, but the pictures still weren’t as detailed Sacavage needed them to be. Next, Sacavage consulted with Eastman Kodak, but they didn’t have any experts who could help.

It was at that point that someone—according to some sources, state police officer Tom Brennan; according to others, Don Brager, chief of the FBI’s Video Investigation Unit—put Sacavage in touch with NASA [PDF].

At the time, NASA was at the forefront of computer enhancement of images in order to improve the quality of photos taken during shuttle and rocket launches, as well as photos taken during missions or by the Hubble Space Telescope. By dividing photos into pixels, then lightening or darkening them for contrast, the agency was able to clarify details and objects within the images.

Sacavage traveled to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to consult with Al Tietjen, a computer systems engineer and video expert who had worked on investigating the 1986 Challenger explosion, and Andy Casey, an employee for NASA subcontractor EG&G Florida.

It was the first time Tietjen had ever worked on a criminal case. Breaking the images up into 250,000 pixels, he adjusted contrast and reduced blur to better visualize the vehicle. Nothing was added or removed, Tietjen would later explain; it simply made things in the images easier to see. Ultimately, he spent three days enlarging the images so they were three times bigger.

In May 1990, Sacavage divulged NASA’s involvement in the case to the press and said he was awaiting word from the agency. It would be the first time digital enhancement was being used in a criminal case, and Sacavage hoped for the best. Though he declined to publicly name a suspect, he told The Patriot-News he would make an arrest as soon as NASA was finished with the images.

In February 1991, Robert Auker was arrested for the murder of Lori Auker. At his trial, which commenced in the spring of 1992, Tietjen explained that he had used de-blurring, contrast, filtering, magnification, and other techniques to help better define the Chevy Celebrity in the bank camera images. Though the defense team representing Robert protested, the judge permitted the touched-up frames to be admitted into evidence.

But Sacavage went a step further. Working with FBI Agent Don Brager, he recreated the bank footage so the jury could compare the actual surveillance to new images of a Celebrity parked in roughly the same spot. An expert from General Motors also confirmed that the taillight assembly seen in the bank images was consistent with that of a Celebrity produced in 1983 or 1984. Robert Auker’s family had owned a 1984 Celebrity.

No expert could conclude Auker’s car was the one in the footage, but the frames were part of a tapestry of evidence against Robert Auker, who had also taken out a life insurance policy on Lori while they were separated and amended that policy days after Lori’s body was discovered to include spousal coverage. A former co-worker of Robert's also testified that Robert had said he planned on killing Lori. “I said that might solve your problem but you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail,” the co-worker recalled. “He said he’d never go to jail.”

Though Auker’s attorney argued that the car couldn’t be definitively linked to Robert because there was no license plate in the images, the jury wasn’t swayed: They returned a guilty verdict for first-degree murder and kidnapping that came with a death sentence, which was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Image enhancement has obviously taken great strides since the Auker case, and law enforcement agencies devote entire teams to reviewing and cleaning such footage. But NASA can still be leveraged. In Delhi, India, in 2021, two suspects in a murder case were told that a NASA satellite had captured video of their crime. They promptly confessed, though they soon learned they had been fooled. No such video existed.

Additional Sources: Hard Evidence

Correction 3/17/25: The original version of this article misspelled the name of Robert Auker's brother. It's Steven, not Stephen.

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