Alex Kotlowitz

She had to move back home with her parents, where she spent most of her time going over and over trial transcripts and police reports.

She gave up the idea of ever having children.

So you gave that up as well?

Yeah.

And in the years Larry was in prison, he struggled to sustain himself too.

One of the ways he did that was to build these meticulously constructed Western scenes out of toothpicks.

Log cabins, churches, saloons, covered bridges.

He trimmed the toothpicks, sometimes 2,500 of them for one model, with a nail clipper so that they fit together with glue like cut logs.

The hours upon hours spent constructing them helped keep his mind off his case.

Larry and Melody believed there had to be someone out there with some knowledge about what happened that night.

And so Melody, along with Larry's sister, searched and searched and searched.

Of course, the person they were looking for was Carla, but they didn't know she even existed.

And Carla was completely unaware of them as well.

In the 26 years since Christy Ringler's death, Carla had gotten divorced and remarried to a college professor.

She now lived a comfortable life outside Grand Rapids in a spacious A-frame home on five acres of land.

Her father had died in 1999, and all she could think about afterwards was he'd gotten away with it completely, and that tore at her.

And then one day in January of last year, she picked up a newspaper and read for the very first time about Larry Souter.

Melody, Larry's wife, had convinced John Smetanka, a former prosecutor, to take Larry's case.

A medical examiner who had testified at Larry's trial now believed it was unlikely Ringler's wounds were caused by a whiskey bottle.

At that moment, it hit Carla.