A MOM and daughter have helped investigators crack their own case with a clue they noticed while being kidnapped and forced to rob a bank.
Michelle Renee and her seven-year-old daughter, Breea, were taken as hostages by three masked gunmen who broke into their San Diego County, California home more than 22 years ago.
The group of people had been watching her as they knew she was the manager of a local bank and Renee said she'll never forget when they fulfilled their plan in November of 2000.
When the gunmen forced Renee to rob the bank, the mom recognized something about the ringleader during the 14-hour hostage situation that might have saved her and Breea.
Renee told CBS News in a 48 Hours episode that airs Saturday night that "sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago, sometimes it feels like it was last week."
When they broke in after months of following her, Renee explained that she lost sight of her daughter as the gunmen forced her to the floor with guns in her face.
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"I heard my daughter say ‘are you going to kill my mommy, are you going to kill me,'" she said.
"And they said ‘no, not if your mommy does everything that we tell her to do.'"
Renee got a chance to look up from the floor and saw her daughter was on the ground with her hands and feet bonded with duct tape.
She said Breea was "face down, with a gun to her head."
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"It was very much that mind control thing that they were doing, that, 'we know everything about you,'" Renee added.
WHAT THEY WANT
The gunmen took their time explaining to the mom: "You're gonna rob the bank for us," she recalled them telling her.
"Or you will die, your daughter will go first."
Renee said she and young Breea were strapped to dynamite the next morning and the gunmen told her the sticks would detonate within a 10-mile radius if she made one false move.
Her daughter was reportedly put in a closet while Renee drove to the bank with the gunmen's ringleader hiding in her car.
By the time the bank opened at 9 a.m., Renee walked out with a duffel bag filled with $360,000, CBS News reported.
Unsure of what she'd find once she got there, Renee rushed home after the ringleader took off with the cash to find Breea still in the closet where she had left her.
The gunmen reportedly forgot to remove the dynamite from Renee's back and the bomb squad found that it wasn't real.
What they made to look like dynamite were just two broomstick handles that had been cut up, painted, and taped together, according to Tom Manning, a prosecutor in the San Diego County District Attorney's Office.
THE CLUE
During the time they held Renee hostage, she said she recognized the leading gunman's eyes because he had posed as a customer at the bank on the day they broke in.
"My brain was going, 'Oh my gosh, don't let him know that you know,'" Renee said.
He even left a business card behind before a female companion whisked him away, she added, which acted as a huge lead that'd ultimately help crack the case.
"Through that card, they started the investigation," Renee said.
For detectives, the business card revealed the suspect's real name, Christopher Butler.
The FBI very soon discovered that Butler was a convicted felon with a history of robbing banks and through surveillance, even found the woman who was with him at the bank - his fiancée Lisa Ramirez.
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They were arrested ten days later during a traffic stop and investigators found that they were still in possession of physical evidence tying them to the crime.
When they were taken into custody, Butler and Ramirez had a BB gun that matched the one that Renee described, ski masks with cutout eye holes, and Renee's credit cards also.
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