Detective Connor O'Donnell

Do you get a lot of car crashes as the coroner?

This is not something your mom wanted?

Or something that you want to think about? No, I don't want to think about either. Sex lies in a Christian bike club.

Who would have thought?

No, ma'am.

We didn't collect anything at the house. That was just a judgment call.

Wouldn't you, as just being overly cautious as a detective, say, we should do a little more here.

We have it.

We did our job.

I agree 100%.

We don't need it, maybe. But let's get it.

I agree 100%.

Yeah, the camera we had wasn't good at the time.

I struggle with that camera that we have.

No, I didn't.

Absolutely. I've never denied that.

I even gave her a number to a company. They specialize in crime scenes and disaster restorations. I said, somebody has to clean it up.

No, she asked. She asked for help. And that's with anybody else in the case. If they ask advice on how to... Right, but you're giving her advice on how to clean up a potential crime scene, right? Yeah, but at the time, the crime scene, we were done with.

And in this case, Judy's Wrangler had a black box.

How do you get those raccoon eyes? Is there one kind of way?

Most people are aware that planes have black boxes. I personally wasn't aware that vehicles have them too.

No, that is not fair. Was it in love with him? I did love him.

Yes.

I've never been in love with him.

I would say I loved him.

He would say the same to me.

What do you feel would have been better? The scene at home should have been processed with it.

In the Jeep.

After she left the house.

I actually took my flashlight. I looked in. I saw a cloth with blood on it, blood on the seat.

I do. I take it personal. This case was a big learning experience for me. I never dropped the ball on anything. And that night I did. And I'm sorry for it.

It's an accident. Until it's proven something else, it's an accident.

Yeah, because your dad died.

That's really a hard thing to do, to lose both of your parents at such a young age.

Sex lies in a Christian bike club. Who would have thought?

How did you feel that your mom was with a former police officer?

Did they seem happy?

Did you like her? Oh, yes. Everybody liked her or loved her.

We're crossing our T's and dotting our I's. I want to make sure I have everything covered.

I see blood around the mantel and blood on the floor. And I did see the ladder leaned up toward the Christmas tree at the time.

Does the blood look consistent with a possible fall from the ladder?

Yes. It's an accident. As of right now, it's an accident.

Yes, sir. How would you describe his demeanor?

One thing that struck me was he said, that's the good news.

Are you expressing your concerns to Judy's sons, your cousins?

Yes. Yeah, we have to look at the... what the shot selection tells us and the number of shots, what it tells us. If you consider a 10-round magazine with one in the gun, that's 11. That means somebody's most likely emptied their gun.

Emptied, shot it dry.

Yes, exactly. And that's what it looked like, was rage.

Yes.

Yep. Where do you start? You generally start just in the center. I mean, with the immediate family.

Certainly, yeah.

Yes. He was on a canoe trip in Missouri.

Yes.

This is a hard question I have to ask you, but do you think you have any ideas what happened?

Oh, we considered everything.

I believe it was a bank alert. A check was discovered that had been cashed on Mike's account. It was just a blank check forged.

Right.

It's obviously something we have to run down.

The first thing you do is try to find out who it was that cashed it.

An associate. I wouldn't say a friend. Somebody that would have known him.

Obviously, we had to rule it out.

Yes.

Yes. People react to polygraphs in different ways. If they're just, yeah, let's get it over with. When can we do it? If they have that kind of attitude, that we look at them one way. If they're like, Uh, yeah, maybe I will. Then we look at them a different way.

Yes.

Yes.

I'm like...

Okay, all right.

So it sits in the back of my mind that, oh, here's the person we have to check on because it's not likely somebody is driving 500 miles to do this.

She agreed to an interview, but it had to be in her lawyer's office.

She was calm. She was reserved, very put together.

No, she just said generally that Mike had a propensity for getting himself in trouble.

She went to the King supermarket, she went to Target, she went to the AutoZone, and she went to the gas station.

All that's adding up. I mean, the errands were absolutely, that was certain that she did that. There was no question on that.

And I said, what was purchased? And he said, two five gallon gas cans and a cigarette lighter.

That's what we didn't know. That's what we had to try to find out.

We didn't have DNA, fingerprints, anything like that.

Yes, through the King Soopers and the Target and the AutoZone and the gas station.

She had a newer car. So I'm thinking, what on earth could a person in her situation buy at AutoZone?

I called up the AutoZone and said, can you check back through your receipts? And he went back through and I said, what was purchased? And he said, two five-gallon gas cans and a cigarette lighter.

That's what we didn't know. That's what we had to try to find out.

The phone records were blank from 3 o'clock on Saturday till 7 o'clock on Sunday.

The phone was not used during that 27-hour period. I didn't just have that period of time to look at. I had a period of time before that. There was no other blank periods of that length.

She was regularly using her phone. That period stood out.

To get from Granby, where she said she hiked, the most direct route is through Rocky Mountain National Park, which has video at both ends at the guard gates.

Everyone that comes through there.

We sent detectives out there, and they obtained the video from both ends of the park to make sure that she had not gone through there, and she hadn't.

He's asking her questions like I would ask, you know, where were you? Can you prove that you weren't involved in this? She said, I left Saturday and went for a drive in the mountains, and I didn't come back till Sunday, Sunday night. And he said, well, you got a hotel receipt or something? And she says, no, I slept in my car. Okay, well, did you see anybody?

Did you see the fires that were out there?

Big forest fires.

Yeah.

she could get to Topeka and out of Kansas without stopping for gas.

Yes.

I thought it was a possibility that she would have. And just to cover our bases, I sent a couple detectives on I-70 and hitting every gas station convenience store along I-70 to try to find video or any evidence that she had been in any of those places.

Yes.

There was a clerk that was 70% sure that she had seen Dana on Saturday night, which would have been appropriate to the time it took her to travel from Denver to Topeka.

They showed her a photo, and she said, yeah, that lady looks familiar. I think she stopped here.

As far as physical evidence, no.

Yes.

Right.

Right. It doesn't mean she wasn't there, just we haven't found the physical evidence.

Yeah, I know it's incredibly frustrating for them.

Yeah, it's not usual to get that type of call out here. There's not a lot of gunshots, not a lot of violence out here.

I'd seen murder-suicides before, and that was the first thought that came to my mind. In that neighborhood, it's typically not going to be a typical crime. It's going to be a family affair, and somebody shoots somebody and shoots themselves. And that's what I believed I was walking into.

Right.

g. g. g. g, g, g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g, la. g. g

I didn't turn on any lights when I went down there, I just used my flashlight. I could tell there were casings down there, I could tell there were multiple shots.

I was glad for the family. The work I did on the case was shown to be good, so I was happy about that. But still, you know, you're not jumping for joy after somebody gets convicted of a murder because nobody wins.

And he'd been shot multiple times, too.

Yeah, it's obviously not a murder-suicide.

Because, well, when there was no gun present, way too many rounds in both of them to be a murder-suicide.

Seen some pretty bad ones, but this one was significant.

Yes.

Yes.

It was a long search, and we searched a lot of places. It was a needle in a haystack.

No.

I don't know.

Well, I didn't spend a lot of time counting. I knew it was multiple times by the casings. It appeared that he'd been shot in the belly and then rolled over and he took the sheets and covers with him as he rolled off the bed. But then somebody stood over him and shot down into him as evidenced by the rounds that we found underneath him.

Yeah, it concerned me a little bit. I thought, yeah, it's possible she could be seen as sympathetic to the jury.

Well, I can see that it's not accurate because I've obviously made an error on that. It was coming across as effective.

I always feel a great deal of pressure to solve any murder.

The irony was so thick I could have cut it with a knife.

My belief is the person came in after. But in looking for hiding places, somebody could have hidden in there, but it didn't really make sense to me. It seemed to make more sense that they came in afterwards, waited until they went to sleep, and then snuck in the house.

They know what they're doing. They've got their witnesses in order. They've all been briefed. Everybody's on the same page.

We also have, and it hasn't been mentioned yet, a Patty Williams in Wakini, Kansas.

Yes.

She pointed to the person in position four on the lineup and said she was about 70% sure that the woman in four was the woman that had been in the store.

No, no forced entry, no. The sliding door was ajar, but Mike and Karen smoked on the back deck of the house and didn't lock the door, which in southwest Topeka, that's probably not that unusual.

Yeah, and I believe that's the way the person entered.

There was a coffee cup found on the kitchen table in the house and a coffee cup in Mike's vehicle out in the parking lot in the driveway.

Yeah, we found them on the video.

Honestly, I'm going through robbery, burglary, that kind of thing.

From a convenience store.

Yes. The next door neighbor had spoken to Mike and they'd mentioned that they were going to the casino that night.

We went to the casino, got with security people, got all the videotape that we could.

Yeah, we found them on the video and kind of through the cameras, walked through the casino with them to the different slot machines that they'd played at.

No, no, they're just a regular couple having a good time that night.

Yes. Yes.

No one followed them. They didn't have any confrontations with anybody.

Followed them out, at least to the parking lot. When they get out to the parking lot, it's dark, it's late at night, so I don't believe it gets them all the way to their car.

It could have been.

We obtained videotape from that store and found that they had in fact gone in there, gotten coffee. That's where the coffee cups came from.

No, there was no one around the store. Nobody followed them in. Nobody followed them out. They were by themselves.

Right. It doesn't appear that they were followed at all.

There was a report from one of the neighbors that they'd heard a car slam around 2.30, 3 o'clock.

Yeah, that's probably Mike and Karen coming home, that they heard a car door slam.

In the basement, Mike had $900 plus, and Karen had $200 or $300 in her clothes, and her purse was there. Everything was there that should have been there, and it didn't appear like anything had been taken. So any jewelry? No, nothing.

Everything seemed to be there.

It appears at this time that her death was caused by an unknown intruder.

They provided resources, DNA experts, testing.

We entered the apartment, searched the room. We kept ordering him out, and eventually he came out.

We searched him. In his back pants pocket, he had a knife.

Yes. Nicole Rice's name came up.

Then, Goodman pulled out a photo of the knife.

We got the physical case files, and they were all in binders. And we got a small bookshelf that would hold all the binders.

We were contacted by Cold Justice.

They provided resources, DNA experts, testing. They brought staff in to help keep track of information, to kind of look at everything.

We were dispatched to a call of someone entering an apartment. There was a male. He had a knife.

It's a load off of all of our shoulders. I really had the focus to stay collected myself. There is so much emotion.

At about 3.25 p.m., 34-year-old Nicole Rice was arrested for murder.

That was my most reasonable assumption at the time, yes.

It would seem to me that the most reasonable conclusion an average person could reach, knowing what I knew at the time, that if they exited through the window, it was inside out.

I have no regrets in how we handled the case. We arrested the suspect we believed killed Anita Knutson. They were found not guilty. To me, it's case closed.

And they weren't just dropped there either. The phones were stomped and damaged, but they did emit some data that morning.

Yes, we did. What did he tell you? He told us that he didn't have any connection.

You know, at the time she came up missing in October, you know, we probably had waist-high kudzu vines. And when December the 10th, as it got colder, the kudzu had subsided. So it made her body visible.

She got another phone to get her through the divorce, let her talk to her attorney, whoever she needed to, have a private conversation if she needed to.

Everything that we saw and discovered pointed straight at him.

He told us, too, that he didn't know she had another phone. And we found the number programmed in his BlackBerry phone, his work phone.

The general public might think it was a cold case, but for us, we're looking every day for that one thing that we need to prosecute, that one nail that we can put in it.

We know it's not him. Now, she's alleging it is. She has no proof. We don't believe it's him.

Yes, she's made many, many false statements. Nobody runs us, and when you see her coming, she's always trouble.

She said, well, just tell me again, how come the case hadn't been indicted? And I said, well, you know, Ms. Carol, the former DA said that we had one shot at this case. One shot. And she said, well, she said, I wish you would tell Mr. Goodman what good is that shot if you never take it.

There would be an avalanche of rumors. Rumors travel fast sometimes in our county. And accusations.

If anyone has any information about her, please, please let us know. We want to know she's okay.

Most cases where wife comes up missing, you know who the most likely suspect is. Look at the husband first.

Two of significance to us were one facing to the southeast and one to the northeast.

6 o'clock at night. I was running home to check in with my family. And as I'm driving north here on Highway 63, I notice at the off ramp here, a black Malibu with the silver mirrors and the characteristics we were looking for.

I decided I would just kind of see where they went and try to identify the driver without actually doing a traffic stop.

I tried to talk to him, but he apparently didn't speak any English. So some older guy working in his yard came over and helped us communicate.

I did. And he said, I heard that there was a girl missing from Brooklyn, but that's all he knew. Is he telling the truth? Is he nervous? He wasn't nervous at all. Seemed cooperative and kind of nonchalant about the whole thing. He let me take his picture, and I took a picture of the car, and I relayed that back to the command post.

It is.

We dispatched search parties, checking road ditches, fields.

We didn't know if she had a medical issue or if she'd been hit by a car or if she'd been abducted. We had no idea.

We had covered systematically not only the canvassing from house to house in town, but also the surrounding countryside, the road ditches, the fields, ponds.

Pretty calm guy. He seemed concerned, but not panicked.

Yeah, he was familiar to all of us at the sheriff's office and has a history of violating no contact orders with women numerous times, stalking, harassment.

No one would believe it.

You're saying, basically, you were at home, on the computer, between the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and surfing the internet, Facebook, and different things, okay? What's going on, sister?

Investigators believed Tony was their man, the only one with motive to kill Rob. They hoped he'd finally break down and admit it. He didn't.

Don't take this the wrong way. What? Was your wife cheating on you with Rob?

They had the business together, but there was no... No large sums of money that Bill would have gotten of Mary's death.

Bill's not an emotional person, so he didn't seem very upset. He wasn't very outgoing in his emotions. So that was a concern when we first brought him in and talked to him. We're like, he should be more upset. He's not shedding any tears? Well, we're not speaking to Bill until five months later after Mary's death.

He signed a consent. We went to the office, and he was very helpful. I mean, he was very forthgoing. He gave us everything we asked for.

Yes, there was a lot of detail in that letter.

We begin to wonder, was there a relationship beforehand?

If it was before Mary's death, obviously that would have been a motive. Then we would have had to say, well, Bill now has a motive for this.

Yes, and that came up. That was an obvious red flag, and we were very concerned about it.

I received the letter stating that Adam did this. He was responsible. He told this person that he did it.

Yes, there was a lot of detail in that letter.

No, we didn't have anything on Adam.

Why did it say he did it? He thought he'd gain financially. If his mother passed away, he thought he'd have a financial gain. Also that there was arguments between him and his parents that he was upset with his mother. So it listed that as two of the reasonings.

We sat down, we talked as to how we want to go about with Adam. We said, let's bring him up here. Let's see if he comes up in his vehicle. The letter says the colchicine is in the vehicle. We'll talk to Adam. We'll see if he comes up here with the colchicine.

Yes.

We were trying to get a feel for Adam at that point to see, you know, is he responsible for his mother's death? So we spoke to him. We then showed him parts of the letter that said where this Colchicine would be, in which he was taken back.

Yes. But we still had some concerns also by his reactions. In what way? He was just hesitant to let us go look in his vehicle.

They go out there and they search the vehicle right where it says it's going to be in the letter. And we pull out a cardboard sleeve with the colchicine inside the sleeve.

A big moment.

They had an email address. It also had Adam's name on there. And from there, the Mr. Adam Yoder 1990 Gmail account, which was very important to us, was listed on there.

At that moment, we're thinking, would he bring the poison up here with him? I mean, it doesn't make sense. If you killed your mother and you got the colchicine, you wouldn't drive up to the sheriff's office with the colchicine knowingly in your car. You would get rid of it. But again, you have an honest letter saying he admitted to doing it and that the colchicine would be in his car.

So you kind of have a split reaction as to which way are we looking at it.

Yes.

No, we were comfortable enough to let him go, but we didn't say it absolutely had nothing to do with it.

It was frustrating. I mean, there was a lot of nights we were frustrated by this case. We looked at Adam, but yet nothing else was pointing the finger at Adam. It just wasn't fitting. And the same with Bill. We'd want to say, okay, Bill did this, but why did Bill do it?

We were able to verify all this information that he wasn't having phone conversations, text messages with her prior to Mary's death.

We just wanted to speak to her to see if she knew anything about Bill, about Mary, other than, you know, outside of the office.

No.

Yes. They would talk on and off. They would text each other. They would get back together, and then they would break up again.

She makes some comments about Adam's acting strangely and isn't acting right.

Yes. She's kind of hinting that, you know, the way Adam is acting, that he may be responsible for his mother's death.

He took a shot and said, did you write the letter? And what did she say? She said yes.

Mary was a chiropractor, very social, very active.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Yes. Once she admitted to writing that letter, it was definitely a turn of events for us.

Yes, I think at this point she's becoming worried about where things are turning and how it's looking for her. Because if we didn't arrest Adam when we found the culture scene, now she knows we don't necessarily believe what's in that letter.

So anything we asked her, she says, I know things are pointing at me, but it's Adam. She always tried to point the finger back at Adam.

We wanted to speak to her again, but at this point now we also had a lot more police work to do.

There's a kitchen area in the back where they would sit and have lunch and make their drinks. If Mary was out in this other room a couple offices away working on patients, Katie would have the time to go back there and do something.

Correct. Once we learned Katie was the author of this letter, we got a search warrant for her house, for her cell phone. We also, we had the computers from the office that we had already secured. We wanted to get all those items and send them out to the forensic lab, to the computer lab, to have them analyzed and see what data was on those.

Katie had accessed the Mr. Adam Yoder account from not only home, but from the office.

All this evidence comes in against her. Nothing's coming back on Bill, and nothing came back on Adam.

Yes.

Yes.

Absolutely. What would motivate her? Why would this girl kill Mary? I mean, what would be the reason behind it? We started looking at the relationship between Adam and Katie.

Did somebody deliberately give this to Mary? Did somebody poison Mary?

Katie, I believe, has another side to her other than this side that everybody sees from her that she presents to everybody. If this is true, this is a diabolical side. Yes. An evil side.

Protect you from what, Adam?

Did somebody poison Mary? Did somebody deliberately give this to Mary?

She asked if we would get involved in the investigation to determine how Mary got this in her system.

Yes, at this point, we're like, well, we need to get ahold of the ME's office to see exactly, you know, what they have. What did they rule as the cause of death?

That they didn't know. That's when they started looking at different things. She took all these supplements. They looked at supplement contamination. Anything there? Never. We finally got the test back from there and nothing from there. Negative.

If you're talking gout medicine, it's like you'd have to take anywhere from 40 to 60 pills, depending on your size. You'd have to take it all at once to be a lethal dose.

We talked to the family. We started talking to people. We don't believe it's suicide.

Did somebody poison Mary? Did somebody deliberately give this to Mary? We sat down with the ME's office and went through everything, all the autopsy. At that point, we were looking at it as a homicide.

Yes, there is the TV show House, which had colchicine.

Yes. Did a patient come in that day and do something that we don't know about? Did they give Mary, you know, something to eat? Any obvious suspects?

At this point, basically, just because he was the husband. In these types of cases, it always seems to be the spouse is the one responsible if it's a poisoning case.

I received a phone call from my supervisor. He called and said that we were going to come in and assist our missing persons unit with the Jasmine Pace missing persons investigation.

I would say that it was a clean apartment. It appeared that things may have been slightly out of place in terms of where they were located. And you could smell a little bit of a cleaning product inside of the apartment.

Correct.

Yes. It's something that is notated. Along with smelling it, you're also looking for a potential sheen on the floor to see if this was a crime scene location, if anything had been altered in terms of cleaned up, wiped, or anything like that.

just on the right of the futon on the floor on the hardwoods, I saw what appeared to be blood transfer in the form of a hill print on the floor, blood transfer on the floor.

Essentially a bloody footprint.

They first document the scene by photographs and video. We asked for certain items to be collected that we observed in our walkthrough. I also asked for Blue Star Reagent to be applied to that scene. Blue Star Reagent is a forensic tool that will show the presence of wiped, cleaned, or invisible blood to the naked eye that could give further details of how much blood we are dealing with.

So we requested during the application of Blue Star to be present. Upon first spray, it illuminated essentially a third of the living room area.

It showed an extremely large amount of volume of blood, the largest that I had seen to that point in terms of blue star reaction in my career. I vividly remember looking at Sergeant Emery and Detective Siech, and we all said, we have homicide.

Yes. Yes.

There's multiple avenues that are happening. Evidence that we're finding at the crime scene location is providing further follow-up. We also have search warrants being conducted on the phone records of Jason Chin.

He was wearing a very identifiable hat. It was a red and white hat called Anything Goes.

We ended up locating him in Nolensville, Tennessee at his parents' address. So he comes down and what happens? He was wearing items of clothing. that were consistent with what we observed him wearing during different stages of the investigation. What does that tell you? It gives us further details of confirming that it's Jason Chen in the video footage we see.

Correct.

We were more excited that he was wearing it so we didn't have to search for it. Police arrested Jason Chen and charged him with first-degree premeditated murder, but... We attempted an interview with Jason at the Nolensville Police Department, and he invoked his right to counsel, so we were unable to give an interview with him that night.

This was not something that was quick. It was something that was gruesome. It was violent.

Could you smell any smoke in the air or anything? Nope. So he was collecting stuff for the fire? Yes. And that's what he explained to you? Yes. When you left, to your knowledge, what was your dad going to go do?

I'm going to ask you a couple questions. What time did you leave on July 3rd?

Let me ask you a question. What do you guys think happened?

There's a firearm missing from the house. So we need a list of everything of a pistol caliber that anybody has ever seen.

You have not had a sexual relationship with anybody in four years. We're not going to find any evidence of it. When we test your bed sheets, we're not going to find any male DNA in any way, shape, or form. When we test your vehicle, and we swab the seats, and we swab the back seat.

What about Roy?

Last name begins with Bart.

Who's Roy?

How long ago did he pass away?

Okay, so you're not using it. So when we look at the financial records, it hasn't been used in over four years. No. And it's going to come back to somebody that's deceased.

Have you ever had a physical relationship with anyone other than Gary since y'all been married? No.

Knowing that we're going to find in the history of y'all's marriage... I'm talking the whole entire thing. I'm not talking the last five years, ten years, or since it went rocky. I'm talking forever.

Rusty Barton.

So Rusty is his son. Where's Rusty?

When was the last time you interacted with Rusty?

Okay, but in the last year. So was that physical relationship then in the last year?

When was that?

And when we go get Rusty's DNA, where are we going to find it?

Anywhere in your house?

Where did y'all have your relationship a year ago?

Do you have a tattoo?

XOXO? Uh-huh.

What is that in reference to?

What did he have to say about it?

How long ago did you get it?

I'm sorry.

Here's the thing. If we don't do our job by pushing this, then that... I'm doing what you're supposed to do. No, hey, hey, hey. I'm not just doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm giving you an opportunity that I ain't got to give you.

Y'all are talking on the phone every single day. You wake up, Melody. Melody and coffee. You go to bed, Melody. She has talked to you beforehand and since then. No, sir. Don't let me find out.

So somebody is going to spend the rest of their damn life in prison for this. And whoever helped them, if they don't get on the front end of it, they're going to do the same damn thing. You follow me? That ain't speculation, brother. That's a fact.

He was Ashley's husband, 59-year-old Doug Benefield. Detective Dan Dickerman with the Manatee County Sheriff's Office raced to the scene.

Just start walking out front.

When you lived with Douglas Benfield, was there domestic violence?

That's right. It's not a normal event unless he's having an affair with this lady. She's a mutual friend.

We did not know that was something, sometimes you think you heard everything and something new comes up.

Yeah, it was no big deal. We needed to find out as much as possible about their relationship. Was there a major jealousy going on?

All the suspects I've interviewed over the years, that's one of the first times I've seen that. He was just like, he's really psyching himself up that he wanted to have his emotions in control.

Very suspicious, very suspicious.

That's correct. That was sent to the lab.

The person who made that print had stepped in some blood.

If we found the correct shoe that would match that, that would be very huge.

There was nothing that we could even come remotely close to charging him with the murder of his wife. Just because he was acting funny.

That's correct.

It was later that morning. It was around 8, 9 o'clock that morning.

We probably talked with her an hour, hour and a half.

Didn't seem to be too concerned.

That's correct.

Scott was still involved with her, and I'm not sure if Desiree knew that he was still involved with her.

We asked her if Scott had told her to... give him an alibi or tell her what to tell the police or anything like that. And she said, no, he never talked to her other than he notified her that Desiree had been killed.

If you know anything regarding this death and you're trying to make up a story or protect Scott, the truth is going to come out eventually. And the longer you hide things, you're not being honest with us and truthful with us, you could be charged.

For the most part, yes.

There was. We weren't sure if she was really telling us the truth.

Yeah, we need to find out how deep a relationship they have. Do they see each other more than what she was telling us or what Scott was telling us?

Just a couple days after the funeral, he was talking to a young lady at a motorcycle dealership. He asked for a hug, which is kind of normal and, you know, need a little emotional support. Then he asked her out to dinner.

Yeah. It just didn't seem to add up that he was really devastated by the death of Desiree.

That's correct. Each individual handles different stress in their lives, handle it different. We did not know what would be normal for his reaction.

That definitely would be a motive to get Desiree out of the picture.

It makes us work harder to find out if there's any connection that would, did Paige commit this crime? Or did Scott have Paige do it for him? It was just more unanswered questions for the investigation.

It was not.

We had nothing in the house that matched any type of shoes that he had in the house.

It showed that he was in the Tri-Cities area during those times. He was on the route that he would take. So nothing was suspicious.

Oh, yes.

Oh, certainly. We wanted to find out the relationship that he had with Paige. Did he know anything about the relationship between Scott and Paige? Did he know anything about Desiree?

Certainly.

He was home in Moses Lake area.

He was not being very honest with us. He was not being forthright about his relationship with his wife or his relationship with Paige.

It was deteriorating. They weren't the friends that they started out to be, and that there was becoming a wedge in Scott and Desiree's relationship, that Desiree was becoming more jealous of Paige and just did not want her involved at their home.

As far as we can tell, Desiree did not know that this affair was going on.

That's right. Is he having an affair?

It gave us an indication that maybe there was a motive, that they wanted Desiree out of their relationship, so Scott and Paige to move on with their life.

Well, that gives us a new spark in our investigation. Now we have a name.

It said that the person that killed Desiree Sunford was a Marty Grismer.

No other details. It's just a name that had never come up in the investigation before.

Now we got somebody to go after.

So we had to do some tracking to find out who called that tip in.

It was Paige Blade.

It came out of the blue.

We brought H.G. Yakima. We sat down and, okay, you just can't drop this bomb on us. How do you know this? Tell us everything that you know about this Marty Grismer.

What does he do for a living?

with you and Scott?

No, I've never had a case like that before. It just didn't make sense.

That's correct.

Right.

He made it look like a burglary. He took the board off the door and made it look like that's how the entry was.

Locked the door, put the key back where it was hiding, and this all happened around 3, 3.30 that morning.

Very emotional. She broke down and cried. She just couldn't believe that he would do such a thing.

We didn't have any reason not to believe her at this point. She certainly brought Marty to the front of the investigation, and we needed to do as much research in investigating how he would be involved.

We were wanting to believe her that this was the suspect that was involved. We were also wanting her to maybe get him to tell this story again.

We had a team of undercover officers. We were hoping to actually hear what Marty had to say about it. in his own words.

But it did not... go as we planned. Marty seemed to be looking around like he was being set up. Kind of like he was onto you. Maybe, maybe he caught a glimpse of somebody or Paige was hinky about how she was trying to ask him.

We didn't get anything. He was acting suspiciously, but you can't take that into court.

It was. We thought he would tell her everything again, but that just didn't happen.

He wasn't going to get any type of relationship with Paige. So he married this other woman.

Yes. He was just moving on with his life.

We just told him that we're investigating the death of Desiree Sunford. He said, no problem. He got a shirt, got dressed, came down to the office. He didn't lawyer up.

Okay, Marty, if you didn't do it, and Paige or Scott did it, you're covering it for them.

Correct. He didn't seem to be under too much stress at that point.

Yeah. Marty was kind of a gun nut. He liked to buy guns and buy gun parts.

The lab came back that the barrel that we found, that barrel... was used to kill Desiree.

That's correct. That is the smoking gun, so to speak.

Exactly.

There's a vein in the side of his head that just was really protruding. He was under a great deal of stress during this interview. And you could tell by his eyes that he was just trying to think before he spoke. He was in hyper stress.

His emotions were all over the page to a point where he was almost physically sick.

Yeah, he said he was about ready to get sick.

When did you come to your conclusion that The detectives weren't buying it. It was his gun barrel, and they'd found it right where he left it.

And that is what they did. He just couldn't believe that he was being charged with murder. But two other people remained on the detectives' radar, Scott and Paige.

It was just that thought in the back of our head that still she's got to be involved and Scott's got to be involved. We still have nothing to tie them other than this relationship that they were all involved in.

That's right. A name that had never come up before. She's trying to set me up saying that killed someone.

It was just that thought in the back of our head that still she's got to be involved, but we still have nothing to tie them other than this relationship that they were all involved in.

There were some red flags that just didn't seem to add up.

They were cleaning out a dumpster and they found the jewelry box. They found the laptop and the iPad.

That's huge. Marty must have done the first burglary, too. And he didn't get rid of anything. He was not very bright to keep all this stuff involved in a burglary and a homicide.

Yeah, Marty's talking about the evidence that's against him.

Yeah, he's trying to save his own skin at this point.

Certainly. It could have easily been used. That's why we offered the plea.

It just was not the normal response for an individual thinking his wife was hurt or in danger.

Yes, he's well trained. He has served in combat. So he would be able to handle the situation in our opinion.

Nick's name came across my desk, just a regular compliance check.

Nick had a warrant for his arrest of technical violation on a domestic violence charge.

We went to his last known residence to ensure that he lived at that address, and we were going to arrest him on his outstanding warrant.

We put his picture and his warrant up on Rhode Island's Most Wanted.

It didn't take too long. We got a phone call from Nick.

Yeah.

Claimed he had moved out of the country and then proceeded to lecture me about how I didn't know the general laws in the state of Rhode Island and that by moving out of this country, he didn't have to notify of a change of address.

He was arrogant, egotistical.

He had, in fact, left on an outbound flight out of an airport in New York to Ireland.

We made numerous attempts through Interpol, numerous countries for any proof of death. All were negative. Nothing came back.

Yes. It wasn't easy, but yes.

It was not. We received numerous emails from the same email address that Nick had corresponded with me prior to his death from that same email address, but this time the signature was his widow.

The way that he wrote, the way that he spoke, the use of big words was 100% Nick. The only thing that was different was instead of Nicholas Alliverdian, it was Luis.

He does. He was a devil spawn. He really was. I learned that Nick was being sought by the FBI for fraud.

That's exactly right. It is a lot of, I don't recall. I'm not sure. She's like, hmm.

You know, it does leave him frustrated. But at the same time, I think he's trying to use that to show the jury that this woman is really trying to just confuse them and trying to play with the facts.

Well, the judge is really exhorting Dana to kind of wrap it up. Because don't forget, the people on this jury, I mean, they've got their lives to get back to. And this is kind of dragging on.

Well, you know, she's got a lot of the lingo down. She certainly has read into rules of evidence and procedure. But then she repeats things. She gets emotional at odd moments that you wouldn't expect someone to get emotional.

She interrupted her testimony at one point to say she was cold and she needed to get her jacket. So she... She basically sat the rest of the time on the stand in her winter coat, her puffer jacket. That I just never seen that before. I think she even uses a composite notebook that like the kind we had in school.

So there are some things that are kind of jarring and other things that go, OK, she's she's doing an OK job.

I think the clearest argument is that which can't be refuted. It's that they really do not have physical evidence tying her to these murders. They really don't even have any kind of direct evidence. No one says, hey, I saw her there. I saw her in Topeka, Kansas. on this date, at this time, around the time when these murders occurred.

Yes. What was that? There was two bodies there that were connected to you that you were known to dislike one of them and hate the other one.

Yeah, this is something fairly new that's come up, that she went to an AA meeting on the day that basically— The prosecution says she left Denver to go commit these murders. And she's saying, no, no, listen, this woman was in need of gas. I met her at an AA meeting. I didn't know who she was. She was in need. She didn't have any money. I went to go...

goodness of my heart, to get her five-gallon cans of fuel. I even brought them back. And then I went inside to my AA meeting. So where is this woman then? Can she call her to the stand? Well, here's the thing. We're talking about Alcoholics Anonymous. Anonymous.

Well, you'd have to ask the jury, but let me tell you, just sitting in that courtroom— It did sound damning. Everything he asked her, are you saying your daughter, are you saying your son, misspoke or lied when they said you did this back in the day? Yes, that's not true.

Yes, that's incorrect. So what's coming across is that everyone else is wrong or lying about her.

Best of my recollection, my exact words were, I'm sorry to tell you that your roommate's deceased and she's been killed. I used the word she's been killed.

She didn't. She was flat. Just no real reaction at all.

It was unusual, and I remember thinking, what's going on here?

She just kind of fixated on that. All of a sudden, she was animated. And she was animated about this listening device, and I thought, this is what excites you here? This is what you're concerned about?

So as it turns out, Harris's license had been previously suspended. But in this case, the suspension was ended by a judge in 2022, two years before this all took place. So, I mean, he had every right to be driving. The court just didn't have that up-to-date information. Harris ended up spending two nights in jail after this court appearance for the misunderstanding.

And he called the whole experience very embarrassing.

Yeah, it really did. Anna Delvey, or Anna Sorkin, is the woman who inspired that popular Netflix series, Inventing Anna. And she posed as a wealthy German heiress in New York City, scammed people. Anyway, in 2019, after being found guilty of eight charges, including grand larceny and theft, Delvey was sentenced to four to 12 years in state prison, but was let out in 2021 on house arrest.

So that's that backstory.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, she sure did. I mean, and what would you wear if you've done some time inside and you're let out? Ankle bracelet. With a little special monitor attached to it. There you go. A judge granted her permission to leave her house arrest to compete, though she was eliminated in the first week of the show. So you might remember the viral moment after learning she was eliminated. Yes, yes.

Just last month, according to the California Department of Insurance, four residents of Los Angeles submitted claims to three car insurance companies. And they sent along video footage from the San Bernardino Mountains of a bear in their cars, a Rolls Royce, of course, and two Mercedes. But the insurance companies realized that that wasn't really a bear. It was someone in a bear costume.

The four individuals were arrested and charged with defrauding three insurance companies of nearly, get this, 142,000.

And it was a really sweet moment, right? Isn't that? I mean, the two officers, they go to the man's house, they sing to him. I mean, they didn't have cake, actually, but they did bring a banana muffin and some candles so we could make a wish. What a heartwarming story.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

The insurance companies realized that that wasn't really a bear. It was someone in a bear costume.

Did you actually see the shot, or did you just hear it?

I think at some point I asked her something to the effect if she would step out of the van to talk to me. And at that point she said that she already knew because she was there, which was kind of a surprise. I wasn't necessarily expecting that.

No. No.

I was asking you to step out of the van. And you said, I was there, I already know.

That Charles had died? I was trying not to tell you in front of your daughter.

Sustained.

I do not.

So there isn't one way to act. There's just behavior that is striking. Striking behavior? Correct.

Sustained.

I believe so.

I'm living as quickly and as efficiently as I can. But I do need to report.

Yes. What was that? There was two bodies there that were connected to you that you were known to dislike one of them and hate the other one.

There was sobbing. There was visual cues of her being upset. But I did notice there were no tears.

Yes.

The focus was on building a case, sir.

We wanted to find the truth of what happened, and I believe we did.

Best of my recollection, my exact words were, I'm sorry to tell you that your roommate's deceased and she's been killed. I used the word she's been killed.

She didn't. She was flat. Just no real reaction at all.

It was unusual, and I remember thinking, what's going on here?

She just kind of fixated on that. All of a sudden, she was animated. And she was animated about this listening device, and I thought, this is what excites you here? This is what you're concerned about?

Actually, I'm pulling into my doctor's office, actually. So just give me one second. I'm parking right now.

What are you going to take away from this competition? Nothing.

The texts start revealing this really kind of devious plot. They try to put that in his margaritas. I do believe the defense will rest today.

No.

You missed all the Christmas tree talk.