One suspect is freed, another makes a surprising choice, and an investigator is accused of planting evidence. This episode originally published on March 3, 2025.
Full Episode
The autumn moon in Nebraska, that troubled year, watched over a crop of confusion. What happened to that murder investigation? Who was guilty of killing Wayne and Charmin Stock? If you'd asked around Murdoch, the answer would be those cousins, Matt Livers and Nick Sampson, locked up for months now.
But after the arrest of Wisconsin teenagers Greg Fester and Jessica Reed, Matt's lawyer and Nick's both adopted an altogether different point of view. Seemed to them, those boys must be innocent. Here's Nick's lawyer, Jerry Soucy.
That must be a good feeling. No, it wasn't. It's a good feeling to know your client's innocent. It's a bad feeling to know that your client's still in jail. You can't get him out. The cops are coming up with every other kind of theory they can think of to drag him in.
And then when we get the Reed and Fester interviews, we see how they're bending over backwards to basically show him a picture of my client and say, isn't that the guy that you met?
So many problems. There was Matt's confession, which, no matter how he tried to talk his way out of it, could still be used against him. And that smear of blood, remember that? It was apparently victim Wayne Stock's blood, discovered by lead detective Kofod in a car owned by Nick Sampson's brother and spotted near the murder scene, right around the time it happened.
So the prosecutor wasn't about to drop any charges. And meanwhile, sitting in jail, Nick had thoughts of taking his own life.
Nick was in really, really bad shape. And so at that point, I'm holding him together. It's going to work out. It's going to work out.
But would it? Jessica Reed, all of 17 years old, was standing, perhaps shivering, in a hallway outside her meeting with the prosecutor. She had just been offered a way to salvage her messed up young life. Testify against Nick Sampson and Matt Livers that she could plead to a lesser charge, get a chance to go free, eventually. Her testimony would help the state convict those two cousins of murder.
This would be the most consequential decision Jessica Reed would ever have to make. She turned to her lawyer, Tom Olson. She didn't know these guys.
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