Susan Spencer
Appearances
48 Hours
Exhuming the Truth
I walked up to her and she slaps my hand down. And I said, don't put your hands on me, get out of the way.
48 Hours
Exhuming the Truth
And when I hit the ground, all of a sudden I felt that it was rather warm and I realized that before we hit the ground, she had urinated and I'm trying to get out of the puddle of the urine and handcuff her at the same time.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
That piece of carpet never was found. But the cops did recover the rest and hustled it off to the crime lab.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Further testing revealed that the blood, in fact, was Mona's, which convinced police that indeed she had come home the night she was murdered. They scrambled to get a search warrant. But in the meantime, Jeff Croteen hired a professional cleaning company to go through the house, a company with a snappy little slogan.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Why didn't you have this place cleaned by professional cleaners who normally come in after fires and floods? None of these things had happened in your house.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Two months after the murder, police finally got their warrant, and a forensic team descended on the house. Investigators found more droplets of what they believed to be Ramona's blood in the bedroom, utility room, and on a step in the garage, a step that appeared to have as many as 45 bloodstains.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The police believe that Jeff struck Mona in the bedroom, rendering her unconscious, and then carried her down the stairs to the garage, where he placed her in the backseat of her car and shot her in the head. Your contention, just to make sure we understand this in any case, is that not only did you not kill your wife, but she never came home.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The police didn't buy it. especially after a search of his office turned up four guns, one of them potentially the murder weapon. In February of 2004, Jeff Croteen was arrested and charged with Mona's murder.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But then, 39-year-old Mary Engle went to work at Jeff Croteen's insurance agency, and the rumors began.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Their affair started long before Jeff's wife's murder. You were in love with her?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
There is just no way, Mary says, that Jeff could kill his wife, hide her body, return home without a car, and clean up a bloody crime scene in just eight hours.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Police thought perhaps she didn't need to ask, that Mary may have driven Jeff home from the parking lot after he dumped Mona's body.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Mary Engle had an alibi and never was charged, but the affair gave prosecutors a possible motive. Husband cheats on wife is, in fact, one of the oldest motives in the book.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Richard Drucker is Protein's defense lawyer. So basically we have an odd guy who is having an affair, and you're saying, so what?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But prosecutors moved ahead with a case that two juries so far have shown is no slam dunk, partly because it's so highly circumstantial. Lead prosecutor Steve Dever.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But this is the CSI effect, right? I mean, juries today really do expect footprints, hair, blood. It's all going to lay out and the guy from the lab is going to come in and explain how this implicates the suspect.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
In fact, jurors from the first two trials were highly critical of the prosecution's case.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The state is stuck with the evidence it has. But this time, a new prosecutor will highlight the science, and he thinks this case is winnable.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
He tells the jury Jeff's behavior after Mona's death is not just odd, it's incriminating.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Peculiar. Implying that Croteen burned the headboard to get rid of evidence. Police did find blood drops elsewhere in the house. Endeavor calls DNA expert Carrie Martin to testify.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
In what Dever insists is a blood trail, Mona's DNA also turns up in stains on the bedroom doorjamb.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
So the prosecution's contention that the blood evidence is scientific support for its case. You reject out of hand.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Especially since, as Martin testifies, those impressive 45 stains found on the garage step do not conclusively match Mona's DNA. And what about the gun police recovered from Croteen's office? Do we have a murder weapon here? Assistant District Attorney Anna Faraglia. We have a gun. A gun, not necessarily the gun.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Without direct proof, prosecutors returned to Croteen's behavior, noting that even before Mona was buried, he was on the internet looking at pornography. And they even suggest he faked the apparent heart attack that sent him to the hospital the night her body was found. The nurse who treated him takes the stand.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But she's lying? Yes. But neither push-ups nor porn prove Croteen killed his wife, says his attorney, who's about to tell the jury who he says really did.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The defense scenario is that Mona never made it home that night. That in fact, she was killed during a robbery and carjacking in the hotel parking lot. And the defense attorney has two witnesses who will support that theory. Two witnesses who never before have told their stories to a jury.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Mel Twining, a friend of Mona's, says he saw something strange in the parking lot after she'd left the party.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The other new witness is Paula Smith, also at the party, also a friend, and she says she heard a gunshot.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
That's what I called it. Was there really a gunshot? Paula Smith had had more than a few drinks that night. How many did you have?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
People always say they want their day in court. But 57-year-old Jeff Croteen is way beyond that.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Then a third friend, Sue Ziegler, takes the stand. With an amazing new piece of information, saying someone left an eerie message on her cell phone voicemail. Just hours after the party ended.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
If that voice is Mona's, then she was alive long after the prosecution insists Jeff Croteen killed her. But Ziegler never has testified about this message before, and she didn't save it. Although she did play it once for Mel Twining.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
After hearing testimony about the call, Croteen says he only wishes he had heard that message.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Prosecutors insist Croteen did hear Mona's last words just before he knocked her unconscious in their bedroom. But if that's so, why did Jennifer Croteen not hear something? She was sleeping just a dozen feet away.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But Mona's co-worker Alice Smock is convinced Mona did go home because she was found in tennis shoes, not what she'd had on at the party.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Croteen, indicted for murdering his 53-year-old wife Ramona, has had too many days in court. He just wants it to end.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Mona Croteen, Debra suggests, took her shoes off when she arrived home that night. And after Jeff killed her, he mistakenly put the wrong pair of shoes back on. But Jennifer is adamant. Her mother was never there.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
So is Jennifer right, wrong or lying? In the past, jurors haven't found her very believable.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Their judgment was so harsh that at trial two, neither side even called her as a witness. But this time, all three Croteen children testify. All right, come on up. Jeff Jr., 31, says all these questions about his mother's death have split the family.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Jeff's youngest son, Jason, a former Marine, tells about getting news of his mother's death while in Iraq.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
In a suddenly hushed courtroom, the jury for the first time sees emotion in Jeff Croteen, a Vietnam vet.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Two Cleveland juries have deliberated long and hard on Croteen's guilt or innocence.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
To show that the children believe their father absolutely, Drucker puts Jason on the spot.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
In his closing arguments, prosecutor Steve Dever highlights Croteen's alleged cover-up of the crime.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
And in her impassioned closing statements, Assistant District Attorney Ana Faraglia hammers home Croteen's strange behavior.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Praying that the third time's the charm. that after two hung juries, this one finally comes to a verdict, a not guilty verdict. What is it most that you want them to understand about you?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Local reporters who have lived with this story through three trials. This is a mini OJ trial. Are clearly astonished at the verdict. What do you think of the people who think you got away with murder?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Annoying reporters and pesky photographers aside. Tabloid. I don't want to talk to you. Jeff Croteen's ordeal finally is over.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
So now, at the start of Croteen's third murder trial... I first collapsed to the ground. Mona's family and friends are praying that this time, finally, justice will be done. You have a calculated killer here before you.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Mona's brother, Greg, was the only family member who got to the courthouse in time for the verdict.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Juror Michael Lisi says he went into the deliberations convinced of Jeff's guilt. But then he began having doubts. Lisi says the jury gave a lot of weight to the testimony of Jennifer Croteen.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
And he's not the only one. After the verdict, 10 of the 12 jurors who had just found Jeff Croteen not guilty told the judge that in their heart of hearts, they thought he probably did kill his wife. But with no direct evidence, they just couldn't vote to convict. Despite the verdict, do you feel like you're still under some sort of cloud of suspicion?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
These days, Jeff, no longer an insurance agent, lives in what once was his office. Watch your feet. What do you most want to do with the rest of your life?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But that relationship has shattered his relationship with his own children, who only rarely speak to their father.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
And as long as Mona's relatives insist Jeff is guilty, the Croteen kids want nothing to do with them. Can you see a day when you might reconcile with them?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But Greg consoles himself by remembering all the things that were so special about his sister, Mona.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Mona Croteen was murdered on March 21st, 2003. She and husband Jeff had lived here in this suburban Cleveland house for years, raising their three kids. Perhaps there's no such thing as a likely murder victim, but by all accounts, Mona Croteen was about the least likely you could possibly imagine.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Mona's brothers, Greg and Roger Wolcheski, say that even as kids, the Wolcheskis were a tight-knit clan.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But there was one big problem with this happy picture. Namely, Jeff. How did he fit into the Waltons?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But by 2003, their kids all had left home. Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Protein. Oldest son Jeff Jr. was married, middle son Jason, a Marine, was in the Mideast, and daughter Jennifer was away at college. The Croteen house was empty and Mona and Jeff were alone, though hardly together.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
And different interests. Jeff worked long hours at his insurance agency. And when not there, was often out on the water.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Mona, by contrast, loved people and reveled in her part-time job, managing a concession stand at Cleveland's busy convention hall, the IX Center.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
On the night of March 20, 2003, Mona left her job here at the IX Center and headed off to a nearby hotel for a big party, the end of the convention season bash, an event she looked forward to every year.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
While Mona was out dancing, daughter Jennifer, at home on spring break, tried to stay up until her mother got home. But by 2 a.m., she was sound asleep on the couch.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The next morning, a Friday, Jennifer woke to find her father in the kitchen getting ready for work.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
But both father and daughter say they knew the annual convention party could get a little wild.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
He had left for work already. So your mom doesn't come home all night, doesn't call, and your dad just gets up and goes to work? Pretty much, yeah. But you had gone to work that morning.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Did you try to call the hotel or call any of her friends before you went to work?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
They called the police, who said they had to wait 24 hours before filing a missing persons report.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
10.30 p.m. Greg had been out looking for Mona for hours when, incredibly, he discovered his sister's car.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The dispatcher said no. 24 hours still hadn't passed. It was at that point that Greg took matters into his own hands and made his terrible discovery. His sister, beaten and shot to death.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Police descended on the parking lot. There was blood all over the back seat, and $900 from Mona's concession stand was missing.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
At first, police suspected a botched robbery. Until, that is, they began to get some strange reports about what was going on at the Croteen house.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
From the moment Ramona Croteen was murdered, friends and family all told police the same thing. I always thought he was an odd duck.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
A crime? Perhaps not. But his behavior certainly raised questions. Why weren't you out looking for your wife? Your family was out searching for her. While the Wolcheskis were out looking for Mona, Jeff was keeping a routine appointment with his accountant.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
And police say odd things began happening the very night Mona's body was found.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
When they first tried to interview Jeff. As the night wore on, his health seemed to deteriorate. It just got numb right here. His face was flushed. He looked ill. His sister-in-law, Patty, who's a nurse, began rubbing his back. I was really concerned that he was having a heart attack.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Jeff spent the night in the hospital. Turned out he hadn't had a heart attack after all. But over the next few days, the police didn't bother him with more questions.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
Jennifer provided her father with a rock-solid alibi. But still, people began to wonder. It just didn't jive with me. Mona's close friend, Denise Tarosky. I actually said these words. Is it possible Jeff did it? And it wasn't long before the Wilczewskis were asking the same questions.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
What they heard was a jaw-dropping story that Croteen had taken a saw to the couple's wooden headboard. and then burned it piece by piece in the downstairs fireplace. You were in the house when he did this?
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The police were eager to talk to Jeff, but now, with a lawyer in tow, he no longer was talking to them.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
The investigation dragged on until one day when police drove by Jeff's house. and saw, of all things, carpet installers arriving.
48 Hours
Strange Truth
He says that during a bout of heavy drinking after Mona's death, he knocked over a bottle of cognac and a candle, ruining the carpet.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
At the hospital, Dr. Zama says, the situation was downright embarrassing. What exactly was he saying?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Miriam's friend, Leslie Smith, says there was nothing normal about it.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But did he really do it? Where was Dr. Illis at exactly 10.37 p.m. that Friday night? His years as a hunter have taught District Attorney Michael Dinges a valuable lesson. Having the quarry in sight doesn't necessarily mean it's time to act.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But investigators didn't wait to probe Dr. Illis' alibi. He told them he'd been on the road when Miriam was killed, that after picking up Richie at 5, he left for his sister's house downstate around 9.30.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Nevertheless, investigators videotaped and timed the route under good and bad weather conditions. Two minutes, 48 seconds. The key was a stop at McDonald's, 35 miles from the crime scene.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Witnesses saw Dr. Illis there, but were vague as to when, and his story changed.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
At 11.24, cell phone records show Dr. Illis called his sister. He told her the roads were so bad he was stopping for the night. And hotel records have him checking in around 1 a.m., some 90 miles from Williamsport. So what is wrong with his account of how he was spending those critical hours?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
One person may know the truth for sure. Ritchie emerges as your best alibi witness. And yet it took almost two years, in fact, for him to be interviewed. What was the problem there?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
When Dr. Illis finally did let Richie talk, the boy had little to say, and D.A. Dinges thinks he knows why.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But speculation isn't evidence, and the evidence wasn't adding up too much. Police sent the cigarette butt and three hairs found in the silencer for DNA analysis. But ironically, one of the earliest real leads came from Miriam Illis herself. As do many people during a divorce, she'd made a video inventory of household possessions. Police took special note of Dr. Illis' workshop.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
You know a lot about guns, right? I mean, you have the equipment where you conceivably could have made this silencer.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But armed with a search warrant, police found traces of material to make even an amateurish silencer.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Police also took their own pictures in Dr. Illes' house, even down to what was on his nightstand.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Strange book for a doctor, but then this case was strange, and it got a lot stranger when the anonymous letters began. The first, to Illis' attorney, proclaimed that the writer, not Dr. Illis, had killed Miriam because she was a racist. It was signed, Soldier of Equality, Soldier of God, Soldier of Death.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
especially since it was written just as the book on Dr. Illes' nightstand had recommended.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
In May of 1999, four months after the murder, a second letter arrived. This time, the author talked about himself.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
No, not a nut, police thought, but someone who was methodically leaving false clues. In fact, the last anonymous letter arrived with yet another hair stuck in the envelope flap. Search warrants had allowed the police to get a sample of Dr. Illis' DNA, and by now, they had a lot to compare it to.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
A rare Savage 23D rifle, its serial number obliterated. A gun last sold in 1949, before records even were kept.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
After the biggest break in the case, the discovery of the murder weapon in this creek bed, investigators needed to tie the Savage 23D rifle to Dr. Richard Illis. who it turns out had a long history with guns. It just came with the family. His sisters say that Dr. Illis always was an avid hunter. It was just the family sport.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But by fall of 1999, D.A. Michael Dinges was sure that Dr. Illis had used his hunting skills to shoot his wife.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Nearly a year later, while casually looking at photos with Dr. Illes' relatives, investigators were shocked to stumble on this picture of Illes' late godfather, Joe Kowalski.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Two months later, in the same woods where the rifle was found, police discovered size 14 basketball shoes, same size as the footprints at the crime scene.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But still, the DA felt not enough evidence to charge Dr. Illes, who was busy building a new life. Six months after Miriam's murder, he married his girlfriend, Catherine. Then in November 2000, he hit the road. You moved around quite a bit.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a small, picturesque town known around the country for the Little League World Series and not much else, which makes Williamsport a pretty pleasant place to be a cop.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
First stop, Laredo, Texas, for a job as a heart surgeon in a hospital a stone's throw from the Mexican border.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But the job didn't work out, and Dr. Illes next moved to Spokane, Washington, joined by his new wife and son. He applied for a job at a heart surgery practice there.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But then Kathy got a mysterious anonymous package stuffed with newspaper articles about the murder and a letter warning anyone to think twice about hiring Dr. Illis.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Ultimately, Dr. Illis was turned down for the job. What was his reaction?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
In time, his new wife divorced him, and the once prominent heart surgeon seemed to drop from sight, only to resurface in the Spokane newspaper and with a completely new career. You were practicing cosmetic surgery?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But reporter Carla Johnson started hearing complaints from patients unhappy with Dr. Illes' work.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Spokane police, meanwhile, were watching the doctor's house day and night. keeping tabs at the request of the Pennsylvania investigators.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Who, in December 2002, four years after Miriam's murder, finally decided they had enough evidence to make the arrest. 48 hours flew Holmes and McDermott to Spokane to retrace their steps.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
The plan, worked out with Spokane Detective Mark Henderson, was for plainclothes detectives to quietly nab Dr. Illis at his office. What exactly did you expect?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But into any cop's life, even in Sleepy Williamsport, can come a case so absorbing.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Because while Holmes and McDermott waited nervously at the Sheriff's Department... Illis threw a curve.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
To their chagrin, Dr. Illis headed right into the heart of downtown, where he suddenly pulled over.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
After four long years, Dr. Illis' cat-and-mouse game with Holmes and McDermott finally was over. But when it came to the evidence, Dr. Illis wasn't giving an inch.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Nearly four years after Miriam Illis' death, Dr. Illis was back in Williamsport, charged with her murder.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
At trial, District Attorney Michael Dinges argued that Dr. Illes did it to avoid a messy, drawn-out divorce in which he might well lose both his fortune and his son.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Pennsylvania State Trooper William Holmes and Corporal John McDermott Oh yeah, you could go right down here. spent four years trying to solve the murder of 47-year-old Miriam Illis, a woman seemingly without an enemy in the world. You have a picture of Miriam Illis on your bulletin board in your office.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
In fact, Dr. Illis says, the evidence clearly points to someone else.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Do you think that some of this evidence, for one reason or another, was planted?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Well, unless all the stuff that you leave is a red herring that points to someone else, then you certainly do want to leave it.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
And what about the murder weapon, believed to be the very one in this old Illis family photo?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But explaining away the state's last blockbuster piece of evidence was more difficult. When police searched Illis' Spokane home, they found a manuscript on his computer.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
but the characters had the same names as those in the real murder investigation.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Why would you write a book from the perspective of the killer? Wouldn't that just focus more attention on you?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
The jury began its deliberations. Then, after two and a half days... Do you think you'll leave a free man today?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
The jury finds Dr. Illis is guilty of murder in the first degree.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Dr. Illis never wrote the final chapter in his book. In the real world, a judge wrote it for him. Life in prison.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Miriam and her husband, heart surgeon Richard Illis, were once one of Williamsport's most prominent couples.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
They lived, as Dr. Illis's sisters well remember, in a spectacular mansion on a hill. And he was happy? Oh yeah, he was. You were married in 1991?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
And around the area, people are alive today thanks to Dr. Illis. People like Fred Sortman.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
While a resident at St. Louis Medical Center in the early 90s, Dr. Illis met Miriam, who was a surgical assistant. I loved her immediately.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
A few years after they married, the Illises had a son, Richie, and moved here to Williamsport, where Miriam worked side by side with her husband in the operating room, running the heart-lung machine. She also was very active in the community, volunteering at church, at the symphony. By all accounts, an exuberant, dynamic personality who had no trouble making friends.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Friends Dottie Bailey and Karen Young say Miriam was very down to earth, despite the money and the status. He was making a million dollars. They were one of the wealthiest people in Williamsport. She wasn't the rich doctor's wife?
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
In 1996, when Richie was two, Miriam became a stay-at-home mom, quit her job, and never looked back.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But Miriam's friends, who say they rarely saw Dr. Illes, had the impression that he was becoming increasingly distant and demanding.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
And the marriage, says Leslie Smith, seemed under serious strain.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Her friends say that Dr. Illis' emotional distance made Miriam miserable. In the winter of 1998, she hired a divorce lawyer, Stephen Hurwitz, although she seemed not to really want a divorce.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
At the same time, Miriam was growing suspicious. She had the feeling that her husband was having an affair because she's really highly suspected that something was going on.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
And she and her lawyer soon discovered her suspicions were well-founded.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
the best mother in the world there's no doubt about that everyone will tell you that and uh i had my freedom the marriage apparently over miriam moved out and took five-year-old ritchie with her she went from a very secure together professional woman to insecure looking over her back not sure who her friends were who her friends weren't friends of hers have said that she would have reconciled in a nanosecond but that you were not interested
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
A mess neither had a chance to clean up. On the night of January 15th, 1999, Miriam Illis would die. Miriam, it's Susan.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Where are you? Hi, Miriam, it's Susan. Give me a call when you get in. Miriam, it's Sally. Give me a call. Bye-bye.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
No one knows what Miriam Illes' life might have held that final weekend. Hi Miriam, it's Susan again. Friends who tried to reach her Saturday tried in vain.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Dr. Illes' sisters, Romaine and Sue, had spoken to her only the night before.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
Miriam was pleased, Sue says, that Dr. Illes' girlfriend wasn't going to be around for a few days.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
In their call, Miriam said five-year-old Richie had just left with his father, the two planning to drive down for a weekend visit with Illis' sisters, who live some three hours south of Williamsport.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
When on Sunday, Miriam failed to show up to teach Sunday school, worried neighbors checked the house, looked through the kitchen window, and horrified at what they saw, called police. Trooper William Holmes.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
She had been shot once through the heart. Within hours of the discovery of his wife's body, Dr. Illes arrived to drop off his son after their weekend out of town.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But investigators were too busy to think much of it then, because in fact, they were awash in evidence.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
What appeared to be a homemade silencer for a rifle. These are the tracks that are leading up to where the shooting took place. And footprints in the snow. The best footprint we've got is right here. gigantic footprints from a size 14 basketball shoe. But what would turn out to be one of the best clues was the phone found next to Miriam's body. Records showed her last call Friday evening.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
She'd been talking to a friend in Montana, and the friend distinctly remembered being puzzled when their call abruptly ended. It was exactly 10.37 p.m. I mean, this would make a perfect episode of CSI. District Attorney Michael Dinges says that without that call, investigators never could have pinpointed the exact time of death.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
But knowing when the shot was fired did not tell police who fired it. The initial working theory, a sniper with a daring plan.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
And that someone, investigators began to think, was none other than Dr. Illes.
48 Hours
Heartbreak in Williamsport
The couple hadn't yet begun to split up property. But already, a judge had ordered Illis to pay Miriam a whopping $13,000 a month in support. He insists that given his income, that was no big deal.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
Three months after Jennifer and Abby disappeared, the investigators brought Michael Blagg back in for questioning. Again, with no lawyer present.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
By now, the FBI was involved, which meant that this interview, unlike the first, was not taped.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
Investigators also found a suicide note in which Michael Blagg insisted he was not a murderer. You had nothing to do with any of this?
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
But for some, Michael Blagg's suicide attempt was a clear sign of a guilty conscience.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
Now, even Michael's mother-in-law, Marilyn Conway, was beginning to have questions. Michael, it's Mama. I would like it if you would pick up the telephone. She agreed to help investigators by leaving Blagg a series of phone messages. Mike, will you help me out with Jennifer and Abby?
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
Blagg never responded. But Investigator King is sure that he could have.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
The problem may be improving it. Five months after Jennifer and Abby disappeared, volunteer searchers fanned out over the highlands and rivers around Grand Junction.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
By spring of 2002, no bodies had been found. But Blagg certainly was a suspect.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
But if Blagg had put Jennifer's body in his company's dumpster, then her remains should have ended up here, somewhere in the sprawling county landfill. But where? Where was she found?
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Dark Side of the Desert
Did you honestly expect to find her when you came out here at first?
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Dark Side of the Desert
Using global positioning technology and landfill logs, they set up a grid system. much like an archeological site, zeroing in on quadrants where they believe they'd find trash from Blagg's company. Trash dumped the previous November.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Authorities wasted no time. Two days later, they arrested Blagg at his mother's home in Georgia. Has there ever honestly been a moment when you said to yourself, could this possibly be?
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
In the high desert on the Rockies' western slope, the mesas tower over the town of Grand Junction, Colorado, almost as if to protect it from the outside world. But late on the afternoon of June 4, 2002, Grand Junction saw the unearthing of its own shocking secret here at the local landfill.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
When did you get here, Claire? I came in last night. Black sister Claire Rochester arrives in Grand Junction just as the jury is seated, and she too wonders if a fair trial is possible.
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Dark Side of the Desert
But public defender David Eisner, Blagg's lead attorney, says the cops never even considered that.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Resulting, he says, in allegations meant to undermine Michael Blagg's character in the community. Allegations never prove true. Among them, that Blagg, the good Christian, was looking at hardcore Internet pornography the night before he reported Jennifer missing.
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Dark Side of the Desert
nor did what was widely reported in the local media, that Blagg had visited an escort service for sex.
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Dark Side of the Desert
And finally, there were leaks about Jennifer seeking advice on divorce from the local legal aid office.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Otherwise, the Blagg family rarely goes out. too many stairs. None of them is from Grand Junction, and in this town, they have few friends.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
As the murder trial of Michael Blagg begins... I'm trying to figure out why it says 29.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Jennifer's mother, Marilyn Conway, is no longer defending her son-in-law.
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Dark Side of the Desert
The movie plays over and over in the mind of Sheriff's investigator Steve King.
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Dark Side of the Desert
But the families of Michael and Jennifer, once very close, now find themselves on opposite sides of the courtroom.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Arguing that that fatal weekend began with a fight on Friday. A fight Jennifer noted in one of her religious books.
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Dark Side of the Desert
The weekend ended, says Daniels, with Jennifer's murder, sometime late Monday night.
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Dark Side of the Desert
As to why Michael Blagg would murder his wife, Daniels suggests his addiction to Internet pornography had split this once solid marriage.
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Dark Side of the Desert
After killing Jennifer, the DA continues, Blagg transported her body in the family van, which explains the blood traces found inside. Defense has more trouble explaining it. Well, how did it get there?
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Dark Side of the Desert
The decomposed body of 34-year-old Jennifer Blagg, wrapped in a red and black plastic tent.
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Dark Side of the Desert
In court, the defense maintains that finding Jennifer's blood in her own van proves nothing. In fact, Eisner insists the prosecution's whole circumstantial case fails the test of reasonable doubt. He points out that no murder weapon ever has been found, and he says there simply is no believable motive, no reason why this caring husband suddenly should morph into a ruthless killer.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Family friends take the stand to praise Michael's marriage and his character.
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Dark Side of the Desert
And, says Sister Claire, Michael was devastated after the disappearances.
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Dark Side of the Desert
But the defense has a problem making that portrait of Blagg convincing. It's that first taped interview. He seems rather detached.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Jennifer and her six-year-old daughter Abby had been missing for seven months. Abby has not been found to this day, not in the landfill, nor in the desolate mesas nearby. Until one day in November 2001, the Black family lived here in this comfortable house in a quiet cul-de-sac. The mystery of what really happened inside those four walls still haunts this town.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
But more damaging for Blagg's case than his demeanor is some surprise testimony from his mother-in-law.
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Dark Side of the Desert
She says it happened 10 years ago, an incident apparently forgotten until now.
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Dark Side of the Desert
You think she lied outright? Yes. This assault never happened? I don't believe it ever did. But she just made it up? She made it up. As the defense deals with this setback, it also has a big decision to make.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Will Michael Blagg try to save himself on the witness stand? Do you expect that you would take the stand?
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Dark Side of the Desert
With his murder trial coming to its close, Michael Blagg is sticking to what's become a morning ritual.
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Dark Side of the Desert
He quotes from a letter found in Michael's desk just days after her disappearance.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Unless he wins an appeal, Michael Blagg will serve life without the possibility of parole.
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Dark Side of the Desert
I'm glad it's over. But the jury's verdict doesn't answer the looming question. Why?
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Dark Side of the Desert
Why would a man who seemed to have it all commit such a heinous crime against a loving wife and daughter?
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Dark Side of the Desert
Faith also comforts David Lohman, who is keeping up the search for Abby.
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Dark Side of the Desert
A child who sadly never has been found and may never be, at peace perhaps in the quiet beauty of the high desert.
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Dark Side of the Desert
The Reverend Art and Rhonda Blankenship got to know the Blags in 2000 through their small evangelical church.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Both Michael and Jennifer were enthusiastic born-again Christians. Extremely spiritual, they organized personal prayer groups for the congregation.
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Dark Side of the Desert
So if you had had to pick a couple to whom, you know, this would be the most unlikely thing to happen?
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Dark Side of the Desert
The Blags had met 10 years before in California. She was in college.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Jennifer stayed close to her mother, Marilyn, even after she married Michael in 1993. They seemed happy.
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Dark Side of the Desert
This, agrees Michael's mother, Betsy, was a fairy tale couple. And he was absolutely in love with her. What was she like? If she walked in this room now, what kind of person would I meet?
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Dark Side of the Desert
Mother and daughter still were asleep, Michael says, when he headed out the door at 6 o'clock that November morning.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Off to his job as operations manager at a local manufacturing plant, the Ametek Dixon Company. Around 7, he called home. No answer.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Around four, he left for home. Later, he told police he had sensed something was wrong the second he walked in.
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Dark Side of the Desert
But he says nothing prepared him for the horror of what he saw in the bedroom.
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Dark Side of the Desert
The 911 dispatcher told him to check the garage. The couple's minivan was still there.
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Dark Side of the Desert
It was not until the dispatcher asked about his daughter that Michael finally thought to check Abby's room.
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Dark Side of the Desert
The story of a bloody bed, of a missing mother and child, rocked the town of Grand Junction. It was very frightening, very frightening.
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Dark Side of the Desert
But the more the police looked at that crime scene, the more questions they had for Michael Blagg.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Jennifer Blagg's older brother, David Lohman, has no idea how many hours he's spent combing the mesas around Grand Junction.
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Dark Side of the Desert
Searching for his missing six-year-old niece, Abby. He says it's the least he can do for his little sister.
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Dark Side of the Desert
really yeah so the last time you talked to her i love you not long after that last i love you jennifer and abby blagg were reported missing oh my god it's in my house and sheriff's investigator steve king was trying to make sense of a bloody and bewildering crime scene at the time walking out of there you're sort of scratching your head saying well this doesn't look right and this doesn't look right and this doesn't look right
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Dark Side of the Desert
On the dresser was Jennifer's purse. The contents spilled out, including her keys to the van. Also in the purse, an email from Michael, an apparent apology. I would love to take some time to talk through the problems we're having, it reads. Do not give the devil a foothold. And near the blood-soaked bed on the carpet, Jennifer's empty jewelry box.
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Dark Side of the Desert
which was exactly what Michael Blagg repeatedly told Steve King and other officers that night in an intense five-hour interview with no lawyer present.
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Dark Side of the Desert
In measured tones, he conceded the couple had had some rocky times, but he said his marriage was solid.
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Dark Side of the Desert
King found Blagg's manner, composed and collected, strangely unsettling.
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Dark Side of the Desert
After the interview, realizing that Blagg had no place to stay... I decided
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Dark Side of the Desert
Over the next few days, the community reached out to Michael Blagg.
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Dark Side of the Desert
And Jennifer's mother was right by Michael's side. If you know how to pray to the Heavenly Father, pray to him.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
Thank you. The appeals were heartbreaking, but investigators were beginning to have their doubts about Michael Blagg. For one thing, the blood evidence was puzzling. DNA tests confirmed that the blood in the bed was Jennifer's, but strangely, there was no trace of her blood anywhere else in the house. Even more striking was the one other place where her blood was found.
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Dark Side of the Desert
It was in the family van, parked in the garage, small traces of Jennifer's blood on the door and inside. As more questions arose... You talked to him in his car, right? Yes. You talked to him in restaurants? Right. King began meeting with Blagg informally.
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Dark Side of the Desert
In late November, Michael Blagg, publicly so devout, privately admitted to King that he was addicted to hardcore pornography and that when Jennifer found out, she had been very upset. I mean, I would imagine that would have been a fairly heated conversation.
48 Hours
Dark Side of the Desert
But then, Michael says, his equally devout wife decided to join him online.
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Dark Side of the Desert
They used hardcore porn sites, he says, purely as an educational tool.
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Dark Side of the Desert
For King, the explanation hardly fit the profile of a once hard partying Navy pilot. You're missing out on the party, dude.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
Anytime that he would be upset, he would come home and take it out on us. He would throw me against the walls. He would hit me in the face, the stomach, the back. He would kick until he wasn't angry anymore. This was just another fight that got really bad. I told him that I thought that he needed help. That wasn't my place to tell him that he needed any sort of help.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
She wanted it to seem like I did something horrible on purpose, and that night I was just fighting for my life.
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A Fight for Freedom
It could go either way, but I'm not worried. I just don't think that God would have brought me this far.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
That's just not the way that our marriage was. And we began to fight. I didn't want him to die, but I didn't have a choice. I don't want to tell it. I don't want to tell it anymore.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
I would do anything in the world to be able to have them back, just to be able to watch them grow up, to know who they are.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
He put his hands around my neck and he choked me. He began to punch me in the chest over and over again. He shook me over and over again. Over and over again until he wasn't angry anymore. Until he wasn't angry. Until he wasn't angry anymore.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
There's a lot of new information, people coming forward and wanting to testify.
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A Fight for Freedom
It's difficult to get up on a stand and tell a story, but no matter how we come across, the story's still the same. What happened did happen.
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A Fight for Freedom
My heart hurts for everything that happened. We had two beautiful children.
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A Fight for Freedom
Holidays are very hard. Birthdays are hard. Sometimes just waking up and missing everyone, it's very hard.
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A Fight for Freedom
Well, because I had gotten up on the stand and I had told them what happened, and that's just the way that life was. I expected them to believe it.
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A Fight for Freedom
I just thought that we were going to have that fairytale marriage with the kids in the house, you know, the same thing that every other girl dreams about.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
He told me what a fat ass that I was. He told me that I was stupid and that I was worthless.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
He threw me up against the wall and he shook me by my arms as hard as he could until he wasn't angry and he began to punch me in the chest over and over again.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
He had just gotten done with a boxing lesson and he wanted to box with Bradley.
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A Fight for Freedom
Jeff got his hands up in a boxing motion and started making jabs at Bradley's head.
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A Fight for Freedom
That just kept frustrating Jeff. The more that he didn't want to do it, he kept calling Bradley, assisting a little girl.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
He came at me, and he swung me around and threw me against the wall, and he told me not to give him any f****** ultimatums, bitch, that I didn't have the right.
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A Fight for Freedom
My eyes were closed, and I heard his voice. And it was scary. It was calm. And he said, die, bitch, and I opened up my eyes.
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A Fight for Freedom
His head and his chest and his neck and his stomach and his leg from when he kicked me. I stabbed him in his penis for all the time. Then he made me have sex and I didn't want to. I couldn't stop because he was going to kill me and I couldn't stop.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
It's a horrible story and I wish that it wasn't true. I wish that none of that happened and I wished everything was so much different. It's just the way that my life was. My name is Susan Wright. I was charged with murder. I killed my husband. I was convicted of murdering my husband. I just, I couldn't go on how things were. Our whole marriage had been just a really big cover up.
48 Hours
A Fight for Freedom
And then he tied up his right arm to the bed so that he couldn't get up because I was afraid he was going to get up and come after me when I was putting Bradley back to sleep.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Detective George Landry questioned the Colonel shortly after the murder and says his story was inconsistent.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Marachek still insists he didn't kill his wife. In fact, he spent hours frantically searching for her on that night in 1991.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Police patrol the area, but they said it was too early to officially declare Viparat a missing person. So Maracek says he searched on his own, searched in fact until almost midnight.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
The next morning, he says he scoured the area again. And shortly after noon, he found Viperot's body here at this grassy point on the Cape Fear River.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
But Prosecutor Hicks wonders why the colonel didn't go straight to the place the stranger recommended to the Maracheks the day before.
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A Veteran Accused
You're saying that logically that should have been the first place he looked?
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A Veteran Accused
He looks like the least likely person on earth to have committed a crime like this.
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A Veteran Accused
But Maracek says the truth is in a four-page document he wrote after Viparat disappeared. This is a very meticulous document, from saying specific times to noting that your wife had low-fat cottage cheese for lunch.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Rubbish, says Tommy Hicks. The statement was supposed to be an alibi. And it doesn't explain where the colonel really was. The afternoon viperot died.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Remember, Marachek says he hadn't seen his wife since lunchtime. Hicks says that's a lie, and he's got witnesses to prove it.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Off-duty cops Tom and Beth DeLue were driving past Fort Fisher that day at about 4 p.m.
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A Veteran Accused
When Tom says they passed a Caucasian man and an Asian woman on the road. apparently headed away from the beach toward the river.
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A Veteran Accused
Beth isn't so sure. I could not identify either one of them. I couldn't tell if they were coming back from the beach or going to the beach.
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A Veteran Accused
But like Tom DeLue, handyman Dennis Rude says he also saw the Maracheks walking toward the river a few minutes later at about 4.15.
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A Veteran Accused
Prosecutor Hicks says tensions in the Marachek marriage were obvious to many people, including the colonel's own daughter.
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A Veteran Accused
The year before the murder, Maracek had spent weeks at a time in the Czech Republic. Her biggest fear, if you will, was that you were having an affair with your distant cousin, Hanna. Was that true?
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
And he knows the truth about the murder. Why? Because the colonel told him. Now he wants to tell the jury.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
A few weeks before Colonel Marachek's third murder trial, and Butch Hendrick is hard at work. He's been brought in by Marachek's supporters as an authority on homicide by drowning.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
To prove a body put in the river at the critical time... Our primary mannequin is on the move. ...would have been swept away.
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A Veteran Accused
The prosecution says that proves nothing about whether the colonel killed his wife.
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A Veteran Accused
But Marachek's lawyer Cliff Barnard welcomes any good news. Impressed with the colonel, he took this case for free.
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A Veteran Accused
The colonel's son, Michael, testified twice that his dad hinted that he was the killer. Now, he says police brainwashed him.
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A Veteran Accused
But while Michael will testify for the defense this time... I loved my dad.
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A Veteran Accused
His sister Susan is on the prosecution's witness list, a reluctant witness for whom loyalty has lost out to what she fears is the truth.
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A Veteran Accused
Russell Preston is a former Army buddy of Marachek's, and like Susan, at first could not believe his hero was a murderer.
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A Veteran Accused
Why? Because, he says, Marachek all but told him so, almost two years after the crime.
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A Veteran Accused
This wasn't the first time Preston had done his friend a favor. Just days before her murder, Viparat had asked Preston's Czech-born wife to translate some documents she'd found. They appeared to be letters from her husband to his Czech cousin, Hanna, and she suspected they were having an affair.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Instead of translating them for her, you call her husband. Why did you do that?
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A Veteran Accused
And that, says Tommy Hicks, is a motive for murder. The plan is ready. I only need time and your help with it. And it goes on. I'm always thinking of you. I wish to be there with you. It will be soon. Trust me. I have to hurry. I'm sending you a kiss. I love you terribly. That's not a love letter. No.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Just friendly, says Maracek, and lost in the translation, is that he and Vyperat were planning a trip to the Czech Republic. The plan is ready. What does that mean?
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A Veteran Accused
At first, Russell Preston believed Marachek's story, but he says he was surprised when a few months later, the colonel's cousin, Hannah, moved in with him.
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A Veteran Accused
A life insurance policy that paid out $300,000. Marachek bought it for Viparat just six months before she was killed.
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A Veteran Accused
You never took a lie detector test? Not your own attorney, not the police?
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A Veteran Accused
You took a lie detector? Yeah, my own attorney. And how did that come out?
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A Veteran Accused
Flunked it, like, flat out flunked it? Flunked it. As the evidence mounted, Colonel Marachek's one-time admirer became an important witness against him.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
But Marachek insists it's actually Russell Preston who's been living a lie, and he hopes to discredit him in court.
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A Veteran Accused
Does Russell Preston have a shadowy past? And might he be out to frame the Colonel? That's next.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
If Colonel George Marachek is convicted, Russell Preston may be the main reason why. So defense lawyers would love to discredit both him and his story that Marachek once bragged he'd get away with murder. In Preston's checkered past, the Marachek team thinks it's hit pay dirt.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Flashback to 1990, when thrilled by the fall of communism, George Marachek traveled back to his homeland and began making political connections. Preston says he was thinking big.
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A Veteran Accused
But the Colonel's supporters charge that Russell Preston himself set out to make sure that never happened. Why?
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A Veteran Accused
Because Preston was a spy for the Czech secret police. Or so says Maracek's friend Jan Beneš, a former dissident who thinks Maracek was a threat to the communist old guard.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
So the theory goes Preston invented the murder confession to frame the colonel, to end his political hopes. Maracek only hopes the jury buys it. What do you know about his ties to the Czech secret police?
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
And in fact, Russell Preston also had a file in the archives of the Czech secret police. It shows he traveled behind the Iron Curtain in 1987 and 1988, meeting at this Prague hotel with an agent codenamed Needle.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
In Prague, we met with a former high-ranking Czech secret agent, Colonel Jan Belicek.
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A Veteran Accused
Russell Preston is hardly undercover. Relaxing with musician friends in Germany, Preston says emphatically he is no spy out to get the colonel. They wouldn't have sent their former agent, Russell Preston, out to frame him.
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A Veteran Accused
Retired Colonel George Marachek may be 68, but he's still tough as nails. Still, every inch, the Green Beret.
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A Veteran Accused
Preston freely admits visiting Prague in the 80s as a tourist. and says, of course, as a Green Beret, he would interest the secret police. Were you ever in contact with any agent from the Czech secret police, knowingly? Not knowingly. Indeed, the file doesn't indicate that Preston ever responded to attempts to recruit him. Did you ever provide intelligence?
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
We finally located the one shadowy figure who should know if Preston worked for the secret police, Colonel Jaroslaw Brydzik, once in charge of recruiting him. We met for an intense two hours at this hotel coffee shop in Prague, and the ground rules were simple. No cameras, no recording, and no notes. But there was no doubt about what the former agent had to say.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Russell Preston, he insisted, never worked for the Czech secret police. A high-level US military source told us the same thing. And it's clear the spy charges will be hard to get into court.
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A Veteran Accused
But determined to discredit Preston, The defense has another card up its sleeve.
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A Veteran Accused
In 1993, despite his suspicions about the Colonel, Preston looked up two friends of Hanna Marachek's in Prague. A year later, they accused him of rape.
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A Veteran Accused
Maracek did report him to the military, and Czech officials investigated as well.
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A Veteran Accused
Prague detective Pavel Oswald says charges were dropped after the women told him exactly why they'd spoken up.
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A Veteran Accused
The army also eventually dropped the rape charges. It was clear during the investigation proceedings that the alleged committed crimes had been fabricated. Still, the struggling defense may try to get this into evidence at the trial.
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A Veteran Accused
Whether or not they can undermine Preston, the defense has one more card to play.
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A Veteran Accused
A new witness. Do you appreciate the fact that this is, in the defense's eyes, an absolute bombshell information?
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A Veteran Accused
After just 90 days preparing their case, Colonel Marachek and his team of attorneys have their backs against the wall.
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A Veteran Accused
The expert who did their mannequin test is out of the country, and an apparently fed-up judge has denied motions for a delay. That's it.
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A Veteran Accused
Marachek's one-time Army buddy is here to tell the jury how Marachek once boasted he would never be caught. All right, gentlemen.
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A Veteran Accused
From Heartbreak Ridge in Korea to the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, this star-spangled soldier really has seen it all.
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A Veteran Accused
In opening arguments, Prosecutor Hicks tells the jury that Viparat Marachek was terrified her husband was going to kill her. The defense says the evidence, the life insurance and letters, could just as easily show that George Marachek was a good family man and that the state's witnesses are either confused or lying.
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A Veteran Accused
One fight is made harder when the judge refuses to admit testimony about the dismissed rape charges against Preston. And with no proof Preston was a spy, the defense doesn't even bring that up.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Nor will the judge give the defense more time to investigate a new claim by Marachek's supporters that a serial killer in Michigan has confessed to this crime.
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A Veteran Accused
Richard Tobin was a National Guardsman visiting Fort Fisher in June of 1991. He contradicts Dennis Rude and Tom DeLue, saying he saw Veeprot alone around the time prosecutors say she took her death march with the colonel. You are absolutely certain in your own mind that that is who you saw?
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
That's not the same as passing somebody you don't know in the doorway of a grocery store.
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A Veteran Accused
So he did, for nine years, until the defense found him. Do you appreciate the fact that this is, in the defense's eyes, an absolute bombshell information?
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Encouraged by Tobin's testimony and worried that his training in wartime killing might be used against him, Colonel Marachek does not take the stand.
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A Veteran Accused
But they don't have to wait long. It takes the jury less than three hours to reach its verdict. Guilty of second degree murder. The sentence, 30 years.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
For the man Marachek called a traitor and a rapist, it's a final vindication.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
But for the colonel, what mattered in the end was not what he did for his country, but what the jury believed he did to his wife.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
But the most astonishing thing about George Marachek today is not his past glory, but his present situation.
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A Veteran Accused
This American hero stands accused of murder. You have no doubt George Marachek killed his wife.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
June 3rd, 1991. Colonel Marachek and his Thai wife, Viparat, were vacationing, as they often did, at Fort Fisher. a military recreation area near Cape Fear, North Carolina. They both loved the outdoors.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
He says they spent that morning at the beach. After lunch, he says he went back to the beach for more sun.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
When he got home at 5, he found the cottage empty. He says he never saw his wife alive again. The next day, he says he found her bludgeoned body face down in the Cape Fear River.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
He dealt matter-of-factly with death on the battlefields, he says, but this hit too close to home.
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A Veteran Accused
Marachek took authorities to the body. Then they took him to the hospital, a grief-stricken spouse.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Because, says prosecutor Tommy Hicks, George Marachek is the killer, and Hicks thinks he can prove it.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
What really did happen? The Search for Clues leads around the world. Back in time to the shadowy era of Cold War espionage and to a family split apart.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
As an American war hero fights the battle of his life on trial or murder. Next on 48 Hours Investigates.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Retired Colonel George Marachek is about to go on trial for his wife's murder. And this is the third time. He calls it persecution.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second jury convicted Marachek, but he won a new trial on appeal. He has contended from the start that the state is trying to use his military career against him, trying to portray him as a trained killer. The police, he charges, have used him as a scapegoat to cover up a botched investigation.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
He says they ignored crucial evidence at the crime scene, including a pair of shoes, beer cans, and a footprint in the sand.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
The colonel's incredible story starts here in the Czech Republic, in his hometown of Dolny Postevna on the German border. He was born here in 1932, and within a few years, the Nazis were moving in. By the time he was 12 years old, he was in the resistance. But the Germans caught up with him. He says he survived a concentration camp and fled Europe after the war.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
He became an American citizen at 25, but he vowed to one day help free his homeland from communism. That made him a natural for the Special Forces. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. By then he was married. He left wife, Billy, and three kids behind. What kind of father was your father?
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A Veteran Accused
American soldier but son Michael says their relationship was sometimes rocky.
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A Veteran Accused
His first marriage ended in divorce. He found himself single, stationed in Thailand. Viparatse Wong, meanwhile, was in her mid-20s, living in Bangkok.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
in the very neighborhood where her best friend, Jui, today still makes her living selling food on the street.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
And Jui remembers that Viparat wanted more than anything to live a life abroad.
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A Veteran Accused
The boyfriend was Marachek. Jouy had her doubts about him from the start.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
But her best friend in America, Inga Shaw, says things were not what they seemed. From the beginning, I didn't think it was a very happy marriage. The year before the murder, Maracek made three trips to the new Czech Republic. Now retired, he talked of moving there, even running for office. Inga Shaw says Vyperat felt her marriage crumbling.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
He remembers that they took that fateful vacation to celebrate their ninth anniversary.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Because, she says, just before the couple left for Fort Fisher, Viparat was scared to death.
48 Hours
A Veteran Accused
Prosecutor Tommy Hicks remembers the very moment his boss gave him his daunting assignment. Good morning. Convict a war hero of murder. You look at Colonel Marachek's record, he looks like the least likely person on earth to have committed a crime like this.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Not only was it fun, but it paid well. And Michelle continued stripping for nine years, long after she began her banking career.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Neither did her bosses, and that wasn't her only secret. Did you even have a background in finance? I did not have a background in finance at all.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Michelle had been on her own since running away from an abusive home at 15. She started as a teller in a small town bank, and 13 years later, with a lot of hard work, she was a bank manager, albeit a bank manager seemingly incapable of managing her own money.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
A month before the robbery, Michelle had filed for bankruptcy for the second time, leading investigators to wonder, was that motive enough to rob her own bank?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
It was crushing, Michelle says, to realize that the cops weren't sure she was either innocent or a victim.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
She fled to a hotel, barricaded herself and her daughter inside, and tried to cope with both her fears and Bria's.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
But for all their suspicions, investigators could find not a shred of hard evidence that Michelle was involved. By contrast, Christopher Butler seemed to have gone out of his way to build an airtight case against himself. Not only was there that business card, his thumbprint also matched one left in the red paint on the fake dynamite. Big mistake.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Dale Martin, Randy Demers, and Rudy Zamora began tracking Butler and his friends.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Chris Butler was under surveillance when police nabbed him at this intersection. In the car with him was his girlfriend, Lisa Ramirez, whom police suspected was the woman in the bank.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
They thought they were such master criminals they could never be caught, or what? Correct.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Wow, that's a lot of money. And in the glove compartment, this gun. It's a BB gun. It's not a real weapon, but... This is a BB gun?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
The treasure hunt continued at this house, where Butler and Ramirez had been staying. How important was the evidence that you found here?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Here, investigators discovered all the ingredients for making fake dynamite. Bits of wooden dowels, red paint, wires, and empty rolls of duct tape. Everything you could ask for in one convenient place. That same day, some 50 miles away, police picked up a third suspect, Christopher Huggins. They also recovered $93,000 stashed in a safe.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
For as bumbling as they seemed, Michelle was the key witness against them, and she was afraid of retaliation, especially since Robert Ortiz, the last suspect, was still on the loose.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
If you know where Ortiz is hiding, please call our hotline right now. But after Ortiz was featured on America's Most Wanted... He was caught in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The four suspects now all were under arrest. The ringleader, Christopher Butler, wasn't talking.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
And though it took her a while, Lisa Ramirez wouldn't shut up. She admitted being the voice on the radio. She even bragged that she was the mastermind.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
She took credit for the idea? She took credit for the idea. She did it. But her most intriguing claim was about another woman Ramirez said was involved.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Here was Lisa pointing the finger at Michelle. Determined to find the truth, investigators again asked Michelle to reenact the crime, this time with props. Though they had reservations, they put fake dynamite on her, Kimbra, and even on little Bria and took those pictures. Were you testing her?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Adding to their uncertainty was another troublesome question. Who had the rest of the money?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
It was a nerve-wracking year and a half after the kidnapping and robbery before the first two defendants, Chris Butler and Lisa Ramirez, went to trial.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Michelle was the state's key witness, and she was feeling the pressure. She could no longer bear to work at the bank. She left her dream house, and now she had to face her captors.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Early on, Manning felt pretty good about his case. Along with an abundance of evidence, he had Michelle's roommate to back up her story. And better yet, he had a confession from Lisa Ramirez. Even Lisa's own lawyer, Herb Weston, saw this as a long shot for his client.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
He wasn't expecting miracles. Things didn't look too bright at the beginning. Things really stunk. But he got a miracle. The judge threw out Lisa Ramirez's confession.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Ruling it implicated Lisa's co-defendant, Chris Butler, who had never admitted anything to police. By the time of the trial, though, Butler dropped a bombshell. He now claimed the robbery was all Michelle's idea.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
It was here at this hillside home in Vista, California, where Michelle Renee once felt happiest.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
From the very beginning, defense attorneys raised suspicion that Michelle was involved.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
They cast doubt on her story. Wait a minute, there's something wrong here. And then Chris Butler went one shocking accusation further, claiming that he and Michelle were having an affair.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
there was no evidence at all of any affair but the very suggestion of it fed into the defense strategy of attacking michelle's credibility and unfortunately for her she made it easy for them because she had told a lie a little lie but one that would have a big impact right out of the gate i was completely up front with the jury and i told him in my opening statement that she lied
48 Hours
The Money Trail
It all began when a band of masked terrorists... Michelle had misled prosecutors about, of all things, an appearance on America's Most Wanted.
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The Money Trail
Manning tried to point out that the lie was trivial, but the damage was done.
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The Money Trail
Then, on day eight, the prosecution's star witness took the stand and tried to describe the trauma of that day. Dynamite strapped to her daughter, she herself forced to rob her own bank.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
She was 35, a divorced single mother raising her daughter Bria and working full time as a bank manager.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
I'm going to be strong. But Michelle was her own worst enemy. She even argued with the prosecution.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Was there anything that she did well as a prosecution witness? Showed up. When it was the defense's turn, Weston went gunning for Michelle.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Specifically, why would Michelle race home to her daughter if she believed the dynamite was real?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
The defense also zeroed in on Michelle's money problems. They had a field day with your finances. Oh, God. They portrayed her as a financial wreck, a bank manager with a history of unpaid loans, bad checks, and two bankruptcies. Last time I checked, filing bankruptcy wasn't against the law.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Remember Michelle's claim? It just clicked. That she recognized the voice on the walkie-talkie the night of the kidnapping?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
the voice of lisa ramirez michelle insists she immediately identified lisa's voice to investigators you told them the next day i did without any question without any question i feel like this person on the other end of that line said hey chris was the woman that was in the bank she was interviewed i think four times
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Until that awful night nine years ago when the three masked men charged through her back door. And everything was slow motion in that moment.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Michelle did tell investigators about the voice on the walkie-talkie, but nowhere in any FBI report is there any record of her saying that she recognized that voice.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
The truth is, it was Lisa Ramirez on that walkie-talkie. She had even admitted it in her confession. But remember, the judge threw that statement out. And so all the jury had to go on was Michelle's own story. And the defense was determined to rip it apart. The more Weston went after her... I felt like I was the one on trial. ...the more combative Michelle got.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
That first hour of jury deliberation stretched into a day. Then another day. I was waiting and waiting and waiting. Finally, after five days, the jury came back.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
She heard nothing of the kind. While the jury found Christopher Butler guilty of kidnapping Bria and Kimbra, he was not convicted of kidnapping Michelle. What happened? What went wrong? Jurors said later some believed Butler's claim that he and Michelle were having an affair. although there was no evidence they even knew each other.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Equally shocking was the verdict for Lisa Ramirez, who had confessed, though the confession never was heard in court.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
When the judge threw out her confession, the case against Ramirez hinged on Michelle's testimony. And she'd done herself no favors.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
When the trial ended, did you say to yourself, you know, I did a pretty good job up there? No. What did you think?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Michelle got a chance to redeem herself two months later when she took the stand in the trial of Christopher Huggins and Robert Ortiz. Night and day.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Confessions in which they never once accused Michelle of being involved. It's my understanding that the jury has reached a verdict. This jury was out for only a day.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
It found both Huggins and Ortiz guilty on all charges, including the kidnapping of Michelle Renee. The two men, along with Christopher Butler, were each given three consecutive life terms in prison. Which leaves just one nagging question.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Remember, $360,000 was taken from the bank. So in the end, you recovered, what, a third? Yeah. Yeah. And you've never known where the rest of that money is? Nope. Gone.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
To this day, police have no idea what happened to that missing money or who ended up with it. If you're going to ask me if Michelle has it, no. Former colleague Loretta Myers feels that the trial left an unfair cloud of suspicion hanging over Michelle. Michelle was not a part of this.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Do you still run into people who say, you know what, I wonder if she had anything to do with this?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Bria is 16 now and focused on high school activities. Cheerleading, gymnastics. But she still has flashbacks to that awful night.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
In fact, Michelle discovered she liked talking about her experience. and soon turned it into a new career.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
But it turns out this was not just some random crime. We've been following you for weeks.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Now, Lifetime has turned her book into a TV movie. Action. With Michelle in a cameo role. Let's do it. I can count still. As a bank teller.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Michelle continues to embrace it. I know what post trauma feels like. With motivational speaking engagements.
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The Money Trail
TV and radio appearances. Her name is Michelle Renee. And an upbeat website. It's inspirational on so many levels. with links to all things Michelle. Seems like you've done everything possible to keep this more or less as the focus of your life.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
the intruders turned off all the lights, duct taped Michelle and Bria's wrists and ankles, and then dumped them on the couch.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
At 11 p.m., Michelle's roommate, Kimbra, came home. The gunman overpowered her, duct taped her too, and dragged her over to Michelle.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
At one point, Michelle heard a female voice over the walkie-talkie. Oh my gosh. She says she recognized it immediately. It just...
48 Hours
The Money Trail
clicked it belonged to a customer who had been in the bank with her boyfriend earlier in the day okay michelle stay stay calm just breathe just you know stay calm and when a light briefly was turned on she got a glimpse of the ringleader i knew those eyes the second i could see them she says she knew the man behind the mask was the boyfriend
48 Hours
The Money Trail
The next morning, the gunman strapped the sticks of dynamite to their hostages.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Then they tied up Michelle's roommate, shoved her down on the bed. They had duct taped her eyes, her mouth, her hands, her feet. And pushed Bria into a closet.
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The Money Trail
Michelle was given a chance to say goodbye to her daughter. She prayed not the last.
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The Money Trail
Michelle recalled the ringleader was crouched behind the driver's seat, aiming a gun right at her back as she drove to work, the dynamite hidden under her jacket.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
The gunman had warned her they would be watching everything. Don't make any phone calls. Do not call the police. None of it. When she got to the bank, Michelle parked in her usual spot. She came into the branch and she was very stoic, just off center. Loretta Myers was already at work when a subdued Michelle walked into the bank. It just wasn't like her.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Michelle says she was trying to act normal, but counting the minutes till the money was delivered. I knew what I had to do, and that's all I could think about. At 8.50, an armored truck finally arrived. And all the money is now in the vault.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
For security, the bank required two people be in the vault to take out any money. So Michelle had to ask one of the tellers to join her. She has no idea anything's wrong. No idea whatsoever that anything's wrong.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Just after 9, as the bank opened, Michelle walked out with $360,000. I robbed a bank to save our lives. The gunman directed her to a nearby apartment complex.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
And then he took off with the money. leaving her with dynamite still taped to her back. Tick. Tick.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Terrified and with sticks of dynamite cutting into her back. I didn't know what I would find when I got home, if I made it home.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
She found Kimbra on the bed and Bria in the closet, right where she'd left her.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
I've got dynamite on my back still. But Kimbra and Bria's dynamite was gone. Kimbra said one of the men just ripped it off. Later, police took these photos to illustrate what happened. And I was like, okay, get it off of me. Get it off of me. And she did. Kimbra dashed outside and put the dynamite on the retaining wall. Then all three ran up the hill to the nearest neighbor. That security gate.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Police, the FBI, and the bomb squad arrived and quickly determined that the dynamite that had so terrified Michelle was fake. Here it is. It's pretty obvious when you really look at it that this is nothing more than some painted wooden dowels and a few bits of colored wire, and it's absolutely harmless. Investigators then turned their attention to Michelle, questioning her for several hours.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
And I'm saying stuff like, I know who did this. Michelle told them she was sure her captor was a customer, the same man who had been in the bank just hours before the robbery. You honestly could be absolutely sure of this looking at his eyes through his mask. No doubt. Through these holes in his mask. No doubt in my mind.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
In fact, Michelle said he'd given her his business card and it was still in her desk.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
I mean, this is beyond dumb criminal. Beyond. Beyond. Tell me about this. Investigator Dale Martin showed us the card so thoughtfully left behind. Butler's card, yes. It identified him as Christopher Butler, who investigators soon discovered was an ex-con with a history of robbing banks.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
But if Michelle had met him only once, investigators wanted to know, how could she be so sure it was Butler?
48 Hours
The Money Trail
They acted like they found it implausible. That wasn't the only thing investigators found implausible.
48 Hours
The Money Trail
Rudy Zamora, Dale Martin, and Randy Demers worked on the case. And what was your first impression when you all met Michelle? Michelle, they learned, had a colorful past. Drugs. Drugs. Sex. Lots. And it was coming back to haunt her.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Now armed with all this new evidence, Masters lawyers have come up with their own scenario of what they think really happened to Peggy Hetrick.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
key to Wymore's theory are Peggy Hetrick's boots. If you look at these two boots, you'll see that this boot has normal wear. But in this police photo, abrasions are clearly visible on the sole of the right boot. What the right boot shows us is that she stuck her foot out of the car. In tests, the master's defense team was able to reproduce these abrasions.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
And they believe Peggy Hetrick is stabbed being pulled back into the car because, Barry Goetz says, the holes in her clothing prove it.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Wymore theorizes that her killer, or killers, next took her somewhere that gave them privacy, light, and room to work. They lay her on a table.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Back at the field, Barry Goetz says the evidence leads him to conclude that the body was dragged only a short distance down the embankment.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
You would expect, were she being dragged, to find heel marks?
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Marks like these on Goetz's own daughter after she helped him reenact a dragging scenario.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Noget says two people carried Peggy Hetrick's body to its resting place, her bloody coat painting a trail.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
If true, that makes Tim Master's drag drawing, a linchpin of the prosecution's case, a lot less relevant.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Because as damning as that list sounds, these hearings are far from over. The prosecution has yet to present its answers to the defense's many charges. This is, at the end of the day, a search for the truth. The bar for granting a new trial is very high. It's so hard to undo a conviction.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Wymore and Lew would love some new evidence to lower that bar a bit, and modern science could provide it.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
With Tim Master's future hanging in the balance, the defense team is about to go halfway around the world and risk everything to find out.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Oh, yeah. It wasn't their job to solve it. I believed in him, and I believed in the case. But Tim Master's attorneys, David Wymore and Maria Liu, knew that new evidence of another killer might be the only way to get their client out of prison.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
So in the winter of 2007, they took a huge gamble, betting that there would be DNA on the clothes Peggy Hetrick wore when she was killed, and that it would help identify her murderer. DNA was such an infant science back then that although investigators did analyze hair, blood, and fibers, no DNA tests ever had been done on the clothing. But now that testing was possible, was it also smart?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Would it help Tim Masters? My job was to exclude Tim. There's not a moment when you said, yikes, you know, what if this DNA comes back and it's Tim's?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Former Fort Collins cop Linda Wheeler, by now a firm believer in Tim's innocence, was all for it. Go where the evidence leads you.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Richard is Richard Eichlenbaum, a DNA expert who, with his wife Selma, a forensic medical examiner, loves nothing more than a chance to use hard science to ferret out the sordid secrets of crime. And Linda was very persistent.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Show me around a little bit. The only problem for the defense... Why did you want to bring this out here? They had to travel thousands of miles to, of all places, here in the Netherlands, to a tiny lab in this quaint farmhouse some 60 miles from Amsterdam.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
What is all that? What you see there is an arterial gush. The Eichlenbaums jokingly call it the crime farm. Crime farm.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The prosecution fought hard to prevent it happening this time, but in the end... Judge Weatherby went, okay, I'm going to allow that. The judge did insist that someone had to escort the clothes to Holland.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
barry getz volunteered i assume you didn't you didn't check this right this was this was carry on getz had been with the colorado state crime lab for 22 years in january of 2007 clutching his priceless suitcase of evidence he flew to amsterdam took the hour-long drive to the eichlenbaum crime farm
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
good morning good morning you had a good trip i did and began helping richard carefully unpack peggy hetrick's clothes jeans a blouse underwear this is all the victim's clothing okay readying the individual pieces for testing so we've got the bra so the bra is it's jt47 as usual richard eichlenbaum would use a most unusual approach.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Skin cells and so-called touch DNA are Richard's specialty. He's a pioneer in this approach, the same that finally cleared the parents of JonBenet Ramsey of her murder.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The technique, which they've used in dozens of cases, involves not just being able to retrieve the skin cells, but in knowing exactly where to look. How important is force to this? Like if I just reach over and go like that, have I left...
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Before he even looks for the DNA, Richard tries to reconstruct the murder, step by step.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
After being pursued for years, Tim Masters now was in prison for life without parole.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Richard and Selma often will even reenact the crime, as they did here with the help of Barry Goetz.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
And remarkably, more than 20 years after the murder, it all paid off. What exactly did he find?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Not only was there DNA, there was enough to analyze. And the results were?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Just as his supporters expected. But they also knew that not finding Tim's DNA wasn't by itself going to set him free. So when the DNA came back and it's not him, why isn't that alone? enough to vacate the conviction.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
At his lowest point, he says he even considered suicide. But it just seemed too much like giving up.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Was it perhaps from Tim's neighbor, Dr. Richard Hammond, who eight years after Peggy's murder was arrested for videotaping women in his bathroom?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
But they didn't have a sample of Dr. Hammond's DNA for comparison. And without it, the Dutch couldn't rule him in or out. The thing is, that was just fine with the master's defense because they needed to keep suspicion of Dr. Hammond alive. If DNA cleared him, then the spotlight would be right back on Tim.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Putting Dr. Hammond aside then, the Dutch ran more tests on DNA samples from cops, investigators, even from Matt Zollner. Remember him? Peggy Hetrick's ex-boyfriend.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Whose date gave him an alibi for the night Peggy was killed. You basically tested the ex-boyfriend's DNA in order to rule him out.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Matt Zollner, who told police that except for that brief encounter in the parking lot, he'd not even seen Peggy Hetrick for a week. Not only was Zollner's DNA on the inside waistband of Peggy's underpants, it also turned up on the cuffs of her blouse, where one might grab if picking up a body. There's no question this is the ex-boyfriend's DNA inside the waistband of her underpants?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Clearly Zollner has many questions to answer. But what, if anything, does this bombshell mean to Tim Masters, in prison for the last nine years?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
He appealed his conviction. He lost. He appealed that. He lost again. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, he appealed again, this time claiming ineffective counsel.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
For Tim Masters, that old cliche finally is true. This really could be the first day of the rest of his life.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Tim is waiting for word on whether the Dutch DNA findings will persuade the judge to grant him a new trial. Certainly, his excited lawyer thinks they should.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Tim's gigantic family packs the courtroom, joining legions of other supporters.
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Not on hand is Jim Broderick, called out of town on a family emergency. But from their crime farm in Holland, Selma and Richard Eichlenbaum are here.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The state confirmed the Dutch DNA results. And with that, the prosecutor takes bold action. Instructing his deputy to move for Tim Masters' immediate release.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
With that, the hearing abruptly ends. The state's witnesses never even testify. And after more than nine years, Tim Masters is suddenly a free man. He is almost speechless.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Three days after his release in 2008, the state dropped all charges against Tim Masters. Do you think we'll ever know who killed Peggy Hetrick?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The DNA that freed Tim Masters leaves lingering questions about Peggy's ex-boyfriend, Matt Zoellner. He today lives in Fort Collins, keeping a low profile.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Then 36-year-old court-appointed attorney Maria Liu says that when the gigantic master's file landed on her desk in 2003, she had no idea what to think.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Zoellner did not respond to repeated attempts to contact him. I mean, we're talking about skin cells inside her underpants.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Exactly. That was enough to get Tim Masters freed. It's not enough to get anybody else arrested.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The Colorado Attorney General now has the Hetrick case, but won't comment on any aspect of it. Do you think realistically anybody, absent a confession, could be convicted for this crime?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
There's no way. He still may be the defense's favorite suspect, but using a sample of Dr. Hammond's DNA provided by his wife, the state says he has been ruled out as the killer.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The court never ruled on whether the original defense lawyers did their jobs, but Eric Fisher accepts some blame.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
If the original prosecutors are upset, they're not talking. Both were publicly reprimanded and fined for failing to disclose information to the defense. But Tim doesn't blame them for what happened.
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
If Jim Broderick were sitting where I'm sitting right now, what would you tell him?
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Looking back, Jim Broderick, the man who pursued Tim Masters across decades, made absolutely no apology for his actions. Do you believe he did it?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
They find the ex-boyfriend's DNA inside her underpants, on the cuffs of her blouse. Does that not give you any pause?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Ironically, Broderick says, Tim's lawyers only had that crucial information because of him and his passion for saving everything.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
she hunkered down and started reading. And I didn't think he was innocent right off the bat. Then she watched those police interrogation tapes.
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Linda Wheeler, the first cop to ever suspect he was guilty.
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Barry Goetz, who travels with him in Europe, beginning with Amsterdam.
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Hey, what's going on? Hey, what's going on? Whose office he still visits regularly.
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Not surprising then that he relishes walks in the great outdoors.
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The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Peggy's brother, Tom Hetrick, who has long doubted Tim Masters was his sister's killer, greeted the news of his release with mixed feelings.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
And the murder that so shocked this peaceful town more than 20 years ago seems as big a mystery now as it was back then.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
With so much at stake and with little trial experience, Maria called in flamboyant defense attorney David Wymore. Usually there's some evidence that indicates somebody, right?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Even so, he knew that requests for new trials almost never are granted. When you went into this, what did you think the odds were? 100 to 1. Then 100 to 1, I'd lose. 100 to 1, you'd lose? Yes. Wymore nevertheless joined Lou in digging through 10,000 pages of police and court files, some 20 years old. It was just a lot of hard work.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
To their amazement, they soon realized that there were important items of evidence never given to Tim's original lawyers, although by law, they were entitled to them.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
By November 2007, hearings were well underway. Tim Masters' best shot at winning a new trial.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
I'm the district attorney for... Special prosecutor Don Quick and his team, representing the state of Colorado, were new faces in court, but the original investigator, Jim Broderick, was there as well to advise. He told a local interviewer at the time he had an open mind.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
On the stand, Tim's original lawyers, Nathan Chambers and Eric Fisher, who lost the case, defended the job they had done, given all they didn't know. Roderick knew about Hammond and just ignored it. Especially about the existence of Dr. Richard Hammond.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Dr. Hammond, a neighbor of Tim's, was arrested some years after the Hetrick murder for secretly videotaping women in his bathroom.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
A great alternate suspect, the defense says, but his name was never mentioned in the original trial.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
And David Wymore argues that Dr. Hammond's very existence so close to the crime scene defines reasonable doubt.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
It's over. In court, Wymore presents a long list of other crucial evidence he says was withheld from the defense, and as it turns out, from prosecutors as well. It includes Broderick's notes on conversations with a former FBI profiler.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Roy Hazelwood, according to the defense, questioned the very meaning of Tim's drawings.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Then there was the testimony of the state's star witness, Dr. Reed Beloy, who analyzed the drawings.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
but he now says his opinion was based on incomplete information provided by the authorities. Dr. Molloy also had written that Peggy Hetrick's wounds appeared to be surgical, an opinion the jury never heard because Jim Broderick didn't turn over the doctor's full 300-page report.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
And that big question of surgical skill came up with yet another expert police consulted.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
But the views of Dr. Richard Choi never surfaced in court either. Not, says former cop David Michelson, that it takes all these experts to see the obvious.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The defense says police never revealed to either side exactly how far they went to get Masters to incriminate himself.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
but this was equal opportunity withholding. Material wasn't turned over to the defense, but not to prosecutors either. Broderick concedes it may not look very good. So you're just sitting there listening to them say, there's this, this, this, and this, and this looks like a frame job.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
He says that while he may not have turned over all his notes, the defense had the same information in reports he did turn over.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
One special prosecutor's report called aspects of the police investigation disturbing.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
But Don Quick insists that not only was it not a frame-up, the work of Broderick, a 29-year veteran cop, was meticulous and detailed. But all the things that didn't get turned over are things that potentially could have helped the defense. Yes. I mean, it doesn't seem to be any omission of things that hurt the defense. I would agree with your characterization.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
And the question is, why was just exculpatory stuff withheld?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
So any mistakes that were made here were honest mistakes? Sure.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
I want to draw your attention to page 1242 on a police report. Toward the end of the hearing, the sheer volume of Broderick's material became an issue itself.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Personal files just sitting there in court. Frustrated, the judge decides it all should be turned over immediately.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
But ironically, because Broderick kept everything... Footprint number four looks like Tom McCanshew. The defense is able to produce what it says is the most convincing argument yet, that he and the prosecutors had this murder all wrong.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Veteran crime scene investigator Barry Goetz, now working for Masters Defense, says he realized the extent of Jim Broderick's tunnel vision only as the hearings to win a new trial for Tim neared an end.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
The showstopper emerges from Broderick's box of personal files. Where'd this thing come from?
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Yeah, the whole envelope. I never saw it, Judge, until today. In that envelope, enhanced photographs of footprints from the crime scene, two of which the defense says are consistent with a Tom McCann dress shoe. There's two Tom McCanns along the blood trail.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
Tim Masters never owned a pair of Tom McCanns. How much of this did the original defense know? They don't know this.
48 Hours
The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2
On this point, Lieutenant Broderick is adamant. Fisher, under oath or not, is flat out wrong. Every enhanced picture there was of every footprint was turned over to them. The problem, he says, is that the prints aren't clearly identifiable as Tom McCann's. To this, the defense pulls out another note from that treasure trove of documents.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
They find a stain on a shirt that they believe at that time is blood. I mean, you know, it's not like they went in there and there was absolutely nothing here at all.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The defendants and their families charged that the police rushed to judgment out of fear that an unsolved murder would hurt Tortola's image.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Are these four apparently clean-cut young men falsely accused, or is there more to this story?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
More than a year after Lois McMillan's brutal death, her parents finally will see these four Americans tried for her murder.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Hopes the judge simply will dismiss the charges against her son, William, and his three co-defendants, Evan George, Alex Benedetto, and Michael Spicer.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Everything, including hiring a team of high-priced lawyers, six from the Caribbean and three more from the United States.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Facing them, the prosecutor, 35-year-old Crown Counsel Terrence Williams.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
His case against the defendants is based on an investigation led by Deputy Police Commissioner John Johnston, a Scottish homicide detective with 30 years experience.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Investigators pieced together the story of a fight that began in Lois McMillan's car.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Under British law, cameras are forbidden in the courtroom. But as the case progresses, Williams takes the entire court, all nine jurors, the judge, even the defendants, on a dramatic tour of the crime scene.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Williams believes she was trying to make it to this police station, less than 150 yards away from where her body was found.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The jury sees the precise spot where Lois McMillan's desperate struggle ended.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Meanwhile, the men Russ McMillan believes murdered his daughter bask in a rare moment outside prison walls, possibly their last for many years to come. Authorities think they have a strong, although circumstantial, case.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The police collected 85 items from the house, clothing, shoes, even nail clippings.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
And Scotland Yard was even brought in. Tests showed that the specks on Michael Spicer's shirt were indeed blood, not barbecue sauce. The prosecution says the blood did not come from the defendants, but it could have come from Lois McMillan. A Scotland Yard geologist also inspected Spicer's sandy shoes.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Finally, there's that ATM receipt the defense is using as an alibi. Prosecutors say it actually puts the four men in the same area as Lois McMillan at a crucial time.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Ridiculous, says the defense, which calls all this so-called evidence, like sandy shoes on an island, inconclusive and meaningless.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But the prosecution's case is more than physical evidence. Its biggest weapon, testimony about an alleged confession by William Labrador.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Jeffrey Plant, a Texas businessman in jail awaiting trial for passing bad checks, says that Labrador unburdened himself when the two were cellmates.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
For the authorities, Plant pulled the case altogether. He fingered the killer and even provided a motive.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The prosecution rests after three weeks, but even before the defense starts its case, it takes a surprising turn. That's next.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
For 475 days, William Labrador and his three co-defendants have watched beautiful Tortolan sunsets from their prison cells.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But tomorrow could change that. Tomorrow could bring freedom. It took the prosecution three weeks to wrap up its case. Now the defense wants the judge to dismiss all the charges, claiming there just isn't enough evidence implicating any of the four men in Lois McMillan's murder. But the parents of Lois McMillan firmly believe Tortolan Justice has found the killers of their daughter.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Prosecutors may have a tough time convicting anyone. Results from Scotland Yard's labs, far from being the slam dunk they expected, are inconclusive at best.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Defense lawyer Sean Murphy, who also is a personal friend of William Labrador, scoffs at the prosecution's evidence.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
As for the grains of sand on Spicer's sneakers, sand traced to the same side of the island where Lois' body was found.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Not to say that anyone's out of the woods, especially not Murphy's friend Labrador. The other three were seen partying that night. No one saw Labrador, who says he went home early to go to sleep.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Now it's all up to the court to weigh a month of evidence, hours of argument over a speck of blood, a grain of sand, that alleged confession that Labrador supposedly gave to a jailhouse snitch. The judge takes a full 24 hours to think about it all and then issues a ruling that seems to surprise even the defendants.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
For the villa and yacht set, Tortola in the British Virgin Islands is simply paradise. a place where the well-heeled can mix and mingle and sail and sun on private beaches and private yachts.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
After a year and a half in prison... I felt like crying right when I was told because it's been just so long. I thought it would never happen.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Evan George never even had been out of the country until his dream vacation in Tortola 15 months ago. Three days after arriving, he was behind bars.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But as pleasant as the ocean swim is, what all three want most is to get off this island. While the Benedettos steal away to the airport.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Spicer and George catch the first ferry to St. Thomas, the U.S. Virgin Islands. A forlorn William Labrador is left behind, although his family now seems more certain than ever that he, too, soon will be a free man.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The damning testimony of fellow inmate Jeffrey Plant that in prison, William confessed to the murder.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
William's mother says the defense will prove beyond any doubt that Plant is lying about her son.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
William Labrador is sitting in a Tortolan prison, largely because of the testimony of one man. Jeffrey Plant. You're absolutely telling the truth about this confession.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
A very convincing Texan who testified that when the two shared a prison cell, Labrador told him in no uncertain terms that he killed Lois McMillan. Why would he choose to tell you this, do you think?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Labrador's lead attorney, Richard Hector, is about to show a different side to Jeffrey Plant.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
He will pull back the curtain on the prosecution's star witness and reveal Plant's far from reputable past. More weddings than Elizabeth Taylor. Shannon was wife number...
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
And a rap sheet that stretches back to the early 60s. I mean, we're talking about convictions for theft or bad checks. I mean, looking at your record, people would say, why in the world would we believe this guy?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Well, the contention is that there certainly was potential benefit to you, that you've had charges reduced over this.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Defense attorney Hector knows his entire case could depend on discrediting Jeffrey Plant. And he has his own star witness, Tisha Neville, all the way from Texas, Plant's former parole officer.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
As the defense rests, the Labradors are convinced his credibility has been destroyed.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But the prosecution hopes jurors will focus not on Plant's shady past, but on his specific account of the murder.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
As the exhausting six-week trial ends... I haven't felt like this in so long. ...the Labradors are upbeat.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
judge must instruct the jury, and under this system he is allowed to tell them his opinion of the evidence. He certainly does. He says he finds some of William Labrador's story implausible, but that much of Jeffrey Plant's detailed testimony could be true. With that, he sends the jury off to make up its own mind.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
For more than 20 years, Josephine and Russell McMillan and their daughter Lois fled the cold winters of Connecticut for their villa here on Tortola. Lois liked it?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Afternoon turns to evening. A large crowd gathers outside the courtroom. And finally, after almost eight hours of deliberation, the jury decides. Guilty. Hold it there.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
William Labrador is found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Labrador's friends and family are furious, lashing out in court at Lois McMillan's parents.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The McMillans had little response that night. Mrs. McMillan simply saying, my heart has been lifted.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
She's leaving Tortola for home, but vowing to continue to fight for her son as he begins his life sentence.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
At the time, that seemed the final chapter in one of Tortola's most notorious murder cases. The island was quiet again. William Labrador sat in prison and he languished there for another two years after his conviction. Through it all, his mother Barbara never lost hope.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
labrador faced his final shot at freedom he appealed to the island's highest court based in london the news could not have been better the british court threw out labrador's conviction and ordered him released it will be so nice to have him with me and not having to go
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
In its ruling, the judges labeled Jeffrey Plant, the prison informant who claimed Labrador confessed to him, a compulsive liar.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
At the end of 1999, Russell McMillan fell seriously ill, so Lois planned a longer-than-usual holiday stay with her parents.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
On April 7, 2003, after serving almost three and a half years for Lois McMillan's murder... 39-year-old William Labrador walked out of prison a free man. How does it feel?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
As William Labrador returned to New York and a new life, Lois McMillan's parents and family just tried to put the case behind them.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
And, in fact, it was. On the evening of January 14th, 2000, 34-year-old Lois McMillan told her parents she was going to a local hangout to listen to music. She never came home. At what point did you begin to get worried?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The body turned out to be that of Lois McMillan. Police believe she was attacked somewhere along this deserted stretch, just a few miles from where she last was seen. Her car was found less than a mile away at the ferry dock, handbag and money still inside.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Police think that after a violent struggle, she broke away from her attacker and took off across the seawall, down onto the rocks, leaving behind a trail of personal possessions. A gold necklace, a can of mace, a hair clip, one shoe. They found her body here in the shallow water. Shirt and bra pulled up, her breasts exposed.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But the medical examiner can't say whether her attacker followed her down there and held her under or whether, dazed, she simply fell, hit her head, and drowned.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Crime of any kind is rare on Tortola. News of this murder shocked the island.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
especially because this victim seemed not to have an enemy in the world.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Lois was the McMillan's only child. Clearly, their pride and joy. Oh, these are sweet. Oh, look at this. Oh, what a great picture. Now, how old would she have been in that one?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
As an adult, Lois had drifted through careers, once an aspiring actress, then an artist, and graduate of the Parsons School of Design. It's a happy painting. She'd recently been living at home in Connecticut. This is Lois' bedroom. Oh, you've got to tell me about that. That looks like Salvador Dali.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But her sometimes quirky behavior did not provide either a motive or any clues to her murder. So the police started retracing Lois's steps the night before her body was found.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Louis Schwartz owns the Jolly Roger and, except for her killer, may be the last person to have seen Lois alive.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
No one knows where or when Lois met up with her killer that night. Guys at bars always know what people are thinking. What are people here on Tortola thinking?
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But that is not what the police are thinking. Just hours after Lois's body is found, they put four suspects behind bars for murder. Four vacationing Americans more used to country clubs than prison cells. They are Michael Spicer, a well-to-do neighbor of Lois's on Tortola, and his 23-year-old friend, Evan George. Alex Benedetto, the son of a wealthy publisher who had dated Lois a few years before.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
And William Labrador, his best friend and partner in a New York modeling agency. News of the arrest electrified the island. Spicer and Labrador are well-known here, and their friends and family insist they are innocent.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But these four suspects are about to find out that on the island of Tortola, different rules apply.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
For wealthy New York publisher Victor Benedetto's 37-year-old son, Alex, Christmas 1999 ended here. In Her Majesty's Prison, he found himself charged with killing Lois McMillan.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The one consolation, Alex is not alone. Also charged are friends Michael Spicer, 39, a rich law school grad from Virginia, his companion, 23-year-old Evan George, and Alex's boyhood friend and business partner, William Labrador, 37.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Labrador's mother, Barbara, echoes the outrage of all the families that the four have spent almost 16 months in prison.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
William Labrador and Alex Benedetto grew up together. Alex spent summers in Tony South Hampton, the Long Island resort town where William lived. Barbara Labrador says that although William grew up around money, the family was not wealthy.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Still, William loved the New York social scene. He reveled in working for an agency representing top models. And when things didn't work out at the big agency, he and Alex, backed by Alex's dad, started an agency of their own. In late 1999, when business was slow, Christmas in Tortola seemed like a great idea. Once there, they hooked up with pal Mike Spicer, the third defendant.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Justin Cohen is Spicer's best friend. In the press, he's been described as, I believe the phrase is, trust fund baby.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The last defendant was Spicer's other house guest, Evan George, young and handsome.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
All but Evan George knew the glamorous and eccentric Lois McMillan. She lived just down the hill and loved to go out. They all loved to party, especially at places like the Bomba Shack.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Former New York homicide detective Jay Salpeter has been hired by Alex Benedetto's family.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
The men's defense is simple. They say they never even saw Lois McMillan on the night she died. For most of the night, three of the four were together in public places. Only William Labrador can't prove what he did that night. His friends had dropped him off some distance from Zebra House to walk home after he told them he was tired.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
Now, in an interview from Her Majesty's Prison, Labrador tells his version of what happened that night.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
No one except the police, who routinely began interviewing Lois' friends. Their search for clues led the Tortolan police here to Zebra House, where that afternoon they turned up three pair of wet, sandy sneakers and a shirt with a stain on it, thought to be blood. The police also noticed a small, fresh cut on William Labrador's nose. He said he got it the previous day while hiking.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
But the officers found their explanations very suspicious. And before the day was out, they had arrested all four.
48 Hours
Murder in Paradise
J. Saul Peter says it was not enough evidence to even think of an arrest.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
No. As many fights as they'd had and as much bad blood as there was at this point? It did not.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Investigators weren't so sure. As Linda Height slowly recovered, they all wondered the same thing.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
By noon, the day of the murders, Robin Height had admitted to investigators that the shocking rumors were true. Yes, she was having an affair with her brother-in-law, Craig.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Over the next few days, when talking with police at the crime scene, Craig made several more startling statements.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
A shotgun, boots, a gas can, all missing, all possibly related to the crime, and all tied to Craig Height. Did he have an alibi for that night?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
He lied, says Muldrew, even when taking a lie detector test. What questions did he fail?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
And when Agent Howard asked Craig directly had he killed his father and brother and shot his mother in the face, Craig said he didn't know.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But the answer investigators most wanted was from the grievously wounded Linda Hite. Could she identify the killer? Though improving in a Savannah hospital, she was still unable to talk. And then one day, an officer guarding Linda saw something that set off alarm bells.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Linda Heitz says that is ridiculous. How do you interpret that? What do you think was going on?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Weeks later, investigators finally were able to interview Linda. Could you identify the person?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But investigators zeroed in on Craig Height early on, and their case got stronger when Agent Howard followed up on a colleague's hunch.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But Craig insisted the bruises came not from a shotgun, but from a freak fall, a misstep in the shower that sent him head first over the toilet.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
The bruises, the affair, the lies, the missing items, all were circumstantial, and investigators wanted a stronger case. So the GBI just kept watching Craig Height and Robin, and so did everyone else in town. It was very, very difficult.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
And then, four months after the murders, Craig Height moved in with his brother's widow and their three kids.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But now prosecutors had their motive. Craig wanted not just his brother's wife, but his brother's life. and had killed to get it.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Nine months after the Height family murders came bombshell news. Craig Height was about to marry Robin, his dead brother's wife. You were going to get married to Craig, take the kids, get out of Effingham. That was the plan, the future plans. The community had some questions.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Finally, in May 2009, the GBI made its move, arresting Craig Height for the murder of his brother. Did that shake your faith in him?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Craig also was charged with killing his father, Phillip, and attempting to kill his mother, Linda. But she is convinced that her oldest son is innocent, denying suspicions that she secretly knows otherwise.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But prosecutors think a jury will decide that's exactly what he is. On December 1, 2010, the murder trial of Craig Height begins here in the Effingham County Courthouse.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
District Attorney Michael Muldrew argues that the shooting made perfect sense, if you thought about it as Craig did.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Craig's lawyer, Dow Bonds, says the public perception that Craig somehow was trying to become his brother is completely distorted.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Perhaps the prosecution's strongest physical evidence are the bruises on Craig's arms.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But Craig sticks to his story that he got the bruises in that bizarre bathroom tumble onto the toilet.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Prosecutor Muldrew shows the video in court, telling the jury Craig could not possibly have gotten those bruises falling on a toilet.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Chris says a shotgun would have to be held at a ridiculous angle to get those bruises, and Craig knew better. But in the heat of murder... It can come off this way. Firearms expert Myrick thinks a shotgun easily could slip.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
So in an ideal world, if you were shooting, the bruising would be... but if you're maneuvering around something or in a hurry or whatever, you can also suffer bruises more toward the outside of your arm.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
The prosecutor thinks Craig smashed the pane of glass to fake a burglary, when in reality, he simply opened the door with that spare key.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
The cops later found that key in the door. Once inside, according to Muldrew, Craig methodically went room to room, shooting his brother, his father, and his mother. All for the love of Robin. Do you think their affair had anything whatsoever to do with the murders?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
His mother and brother stand by him. But if Craig Height thinks his former lover and sister-in-law is still with him, he's about to get a nasty shock.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Only seven months after she planned to walk down the aisle to marry Craig Height, Robin Height instead walked to the witness box to testify against him. Murder charges will do that. I wasn't comfortable with the relationship anymore. After some soul searching, Robyn says she realized the man she'd once loved just might be a murderer.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
She knew he was lying to her, she says, especially when he said he and Carrie had patched things up before the shootings. The only things coming out of Carrie's mouth about Craig were negative. But the jurors apparently were getting that same negative vibe about everything Robin said.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
And these jurors weren't ready to throw Craig Height under the bus without something, anything, that directly linked him to the murder scene.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
That was precisely the message defense attorney Dow Bonds wanted to get across.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Yes, it's Phillips. Asking Linda to read a letter her husband had written two weeks before the murders. Proof, Bonds said, that Craig had made peace with his dad and had no reason to kill him. Son, I appreciate everything you do.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Craig Height never took the stand. And on day eight of the trial, the case went to the jury.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
The verdict was guilty. The jury convicting Craig Height on all 11 counts of murder, battery, burglary, and attempted arson. What went through your mind when you heard those words?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
August 25th, 2008, hours before dawn. Sheriff Jimmy McDuffie was called to a house on Springfield, Egypt Road. He braced himself for what lay ahead.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Craig and his family were devastated and frustrated. insisting he didn't get a fair trial.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
The judge sentenced him to the maximum, two life terms plus 85 years, making parole almost impossible. So how did you find out the verdict? A friend of mine told me. And the sentence? I felt like it was fair. Two life terms plus 85 years? You felt like that was fair? I mean, it has to be a part of you that was heartbroken over this.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Is there any real evidence to link Robin to the crimes? Where along the spectrum do you think her actions fall?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Today, life in Effingham County has returned to normal, or as near normal as it can be in a small community where so many suspicions linger. Do you see much of Robin these days?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
For Linda Height, healing has been a much slower process. When you look at the future now, and I assume you're doing your best to look ahead, what do you see for the Height family?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Phillip was Phillip Hite, a man to be reckoned with in Effingham County, Georgia, and a pal of McDuffie's.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Height was a successful real estate developer who'd made millions in the sprawling county, which is about an hour north of Savannah. Patriarch of a close-knit family, he'd been married to wife Linda for 42 years.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
It was Carrie who followed his dad into real estate, becoming his business partner. And he and wife Robin had three kids of their own.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
When he asked you to marry him, then, this just seemed like this was meant to be. It was definitely meant to be, yes. The Haight clan was turning out just as its patriarch had hoped.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Murder just didn't fit with the seemingly perfect family the sheriff knew so well. Too well for him to oversee the case, he decided. So that first day, he turned it over to the GBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
In charge was agent Eugene Howard, who quickly realized that the crime scene was not what it seemed.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
So you think that's just because the person panicked and fled before they had a chance to take anything?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Based on those injuries and the pellets found at the scene, medical examiner Dr. James Down says the shooter used a 12-gauge shotgun. Up close and personal. How close roughly are we talking about here?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
To get an idea of the damage a 12-gauge shotgun does at such close range, we asked the sheriff's firearms instructor, Ed Myrick, to demonstrate. What exactly do we have here?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
The gun is similar to the one used by the killer, loaded with the same type of 3-inch shells and the same type of buckshot.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Given the close range, Linda, too, probably would have died instantly had she not turned her head at the moment of impact.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But almost as if the power of those shotgun blasts wasn't enough, the gunman next drenched the entire house in gasoline. A lot of gasoline.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But the killer never set the gas ablaze, perhaps panicking when he heard Linda's desperate call to 911.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
News of the murders spread quickly in this rural southern community, and so did fear. They must have thought a killer was out in the woods.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Investigators checked the alibi of a local drug dealer but quickly ruled him out. They next turned their attention to the Heights real estate dealings.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
They found no motive and no suspect. But then, McDuffie recalled an unsettling conversation he'd had with Carrie Height only a month earlier.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Hardly. As the whole county soon would learn, not only was Robin having an affair, it was with none other than Craig Height, her husband's own brother.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Only hours into the Height murder investigation, as Linda Height fought for her life, the whispers began. Rumors that this seemingly perfect Southern family was anything but.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Robin Height's mistake was having an affair. That happens. But with your husband's brother? Robin admits she made the first move on her brother-in-law, Craig.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Craig Height, self-described black sheep of the family, was divorced, owed child support, was unemployed, and lived off disability checks. And Robin found him irresistible. What, you were head over heels in love? I was infatuated, not love. You still loved your husband? I did. Where did you think this was going to go?
48 Hours
A Family Affair
But telling her husband about the affair didn't stop Robin from pursuing it. Never mind that brother-in-law thing, never mind her three children, who at that point were 10, seven, and three years old.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
the relationship got more intense, with Robin and Craig often sneaking off to this isolated hunting cabin. Whenever people hear about these situations, I say, this is why there's divorce, you know? People just, sometimes these things happen and people get divorced.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Her husband was distraught, but he was no fool. A few weeks before he died, Carrie Height changed his $3.5 million life insurance policy, removing Robin as the beneficiary.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
And his father, Philip, told Craig flat out, knock it off with your brother's wife or lose your entire inheritance.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
I got to tell you, Robin, this is a mess. It was very much a mess. The weekend before the murders, August 2008. Once again, Robin was at Craig's cabin.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Phillip had tracked them down, enlisting a friend with a helicopter to take photos to get hard evidence of Robin's infidelity.