In criminal trials, a defendant's prior criminal record can significantly influence sentencing outcomes, even when the prior conviction is not directly relevant to the current charges. This principle was demonstrated in the Susan Grund case, where her 1982 child abuse conviction (for which she pleaded no contest) was revealed during her 1994 murder trial and used as an aggravating circumstance by the judge to impose the maximum 60-year sentence, despite the prosecution's case being largely circumstantial.
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Snapped Full HD 1080p 🔴🔴Susan Grund👮♂️👮♂️ Documentary True Crime PodcastAdded:
In the small town of Peru, Indiana, few couples generated more gossip than attorney Jim Grund and his wife Susan.
Jim and his trophy wife was the perception people had of her. Susan certainly looked the part. Susan had the boobs to Hilton and the high heels. And in a town like Peru, [music] it was perhaps inevitable the two ended up together.
He enjoyed the finer things in life, >> [music] >> was known to like a cocktail, cute girls. There was instant attraction. He found her quite exciting.
But when Jim Grundy shot dead in August of 1992, authorities find themselves asking, had the former prosecutor strayed too close to the edge?
Authorities looked into people that Jim had put away as a prosecutor.
Or had Jim and Susan's instant attraction turned fatal?
Like many mothers, Susan Grund spent the evening of August 3rd, 1992 hauling kids around.
Son Jacob was spending the night at a campground with friends.
Meanwhile, with her big brother gone, daughter Tanael was hosting a sleepover for her cousin.
Susan Grund [music] walked into the house after having brought the the girls home, walked in, thought that her husband initially was asleep. When I called out, he didn't respond. It was late [music] and Jim had been out to dinner with his brother-in-law Fred. So, I thought, well, maybe they had one too many to drink. Sometimes when he would go meet Fred, they [music] would drink a little bit. I had asked Mom if I could kiss Dad goodnight and uh she didn't want me to cuz she said he was sleeping. Susan sat the 7-year-olds down in front of the TV. Then she went upstairs where Jim Grund was sprawled out on a couch in the couple's bedroom.
But he wasn't asleep or drunk. The next thing we heard was Mom crying upstairs.
He'd been shot.
The bullet had traveled through his eye, through his brain, out the back of his head and into the sofa.
A prominent attorney shot dead in his own bedroom. The crime left police scrambling for a suspect.
He was a prosecutor. He was an attorney.
He probably had a lot of enemies. But had the killer come from Jim's past or Susan's?
Jim Grund first met Susan on a blind date in June of 1984, but he wasn't blind for long. He knew right away that Susan [music] came with baggage.
Had a lot of past and a lot of baggage.
So, I actually went overboard in telling him every little everything about me.
Originally from Peru, Indiana, Susan had left home in 1975. [music] Only 17, she'd run off to Oklahoma with her first husband, Ronnie Lovell.
He played in the band and he was just he was just exciting. If you're a rock and roller, you're supposed to have pretty [music] women hanging on your shoulder and Susie fit the bill. Ronnie wasn't the only shoulder Susan had hung on to in those days, either.
Infidelity [music] was commonplace among all the bands. They would just travel the circuit and we slept the circuit.
Susan and Ronnie divorced in 1979.
A second, short marriage to a construction worker named Gary Campbell produced a son named Jacob.
He decided to [music] get a divorce and she gained custody of of my son.
By 1982, Susan had remarried, but that marriage, her third, ended when [music] Susan was accused of beating her stepson.
The boy's father filed for divorce and Susan faced criminal charges.
Although in the end, prosecutors cut a deal and allowed her to plead no contest. The prosecution, it seems, didn't feel that they had a strong enough case. Susan received probation for the child abuse charge. However, the charges did cost Susan custody of her son. One day I got a call from the DHS office and they had said they took my son Jacob away from Susan. In the summer of 1984, Jacob went to live with his father and Susan [music] went back home to Peru.
She was broke, alone, and pregnant.
After she had left her third husband, she'd had a brief relationship with another man.
All of her resources were exhausted. She doesn't have a husband. She's been essentially found guilty of child beating. So, the only thing to do is to return home and regroup. And within weeks of arriving, a chance encounter [music] would set Susan on a path for Peru's social pinnacle. Suddenly, through a friend, comes the offer of a blind date. A recently divorced attorney and single dad named Jim Grund sounded like a hot prospect. Jimmy was a third generation lawyer. She called me and told me she met Jim and she was just so excited about him and Jim was a wonderful man. Jim [music] was bigger than life, just a brilliant attorney.
Jim was 10 years Susan's senior, but he didn't act like it. Jim liked to live on the edge. He flew airplanes. Jim liked to ski. He was pretty good at partying at times. He enjoyed the finer things in life, was known to like a cocktail, cute girls. The blind date with Susan had started out as a joke on the part of Jimmy's friends.
They're telling Jimmy she's pretty hot.
What Jim didn't know is that this attractive lady was pregnant.
>> [music] >> But when the pair met, the supposed joke backfired. He didn't stop looking at me or talking to me the entire evening.
So, we knew that there was instant attraction uh upon first meeting.
The attraction was mutual.
When I placed my hand in his, it was just there, immediately when we looked at each other. Soon they were dating and by the time Susan's daughter Tanael was born in October, things [music] were turning serious.
He was running around looking like a proud papa when Tanael came into this world.
Barely a month later, he officially became Tanael's stepfather. [music] Jim called my mother and told her that uh they had gone to Florida and gotten married. Had a beautiful wedding out on the water and we honeymooned there in Florida. We just traveled around the keys. By the end of the year, Jim and Susan were back in Peru, where she soon settled into life as the wife of a prominent attorney.
Susan became a part of Jim's lifestyle of having a nice place to live, nice cars to drive, nice people on a higher level to go out with, have dinner with.
Really, it was Jim inviting her into his life and family and her sharing those benefits. Jim's family wasn't quite so welcoming, particularly his teenage son David.
As with >> [music] >> any child when their parents are divorced, he wasn't real accepting the relationship. People around Peru couldn't help but notice the difference in Jim and Susan's ages, either. Jim and his trophy wife was the perception people had of her. I don't think many of the wives cared a lot for Susan.
Susan turning their husbands' heads didn't help, either.
She had the boobs to Hilton and the high heels. She would dress in all these frilly >> [music] >> outfits, very revealing, no matter where she was.
She was a center of attention and she [music] made sure that she was.
Jim and Susan were also as close as Peru came to jet-setters, even if Jim's plane was only a Cessna.
And the couple made frequent flights to Oklahoma to see Susan's son.
Him and my mother would fly down, come get me, and I made several trips back and forth from Peru to Oklahoma. But did Jim know why Susan had lost custody of her son? According to his friend Bruce Embry, he did.
Jim did know about If Jim was satisfied with her, I wasn't going to delve into it to any great extent. So, on one visit to Oklahoma, Jim made a proposition to Gary Campbell, the boy's father.
Jim suggested to Gary that we could take care and regain custody of Jacob and he wouldn't have that burden on him anymore. Campbell agreed and signed [music] the paperwork Jim had drawn up.
Although according to Campbell, he was also under the mistaken impression that the arrangement was temporary.
After the year was [music] up and I was well on my feet and I was trying to to get my son back. Well, they had changed his name and >> [music] >> there's nothing I can do about it. Jim formally adopted Jacob. His relationship with his biological children, on the other hand, had [music] become increasingly strained on account of Susan.
The teenagers were less than pleased with their new stepmother. We always laughed [music] cuz they called her the stepmonster. David Grund, in particular, appeared to be especially upset by the way his father carried on with Susan.
>> [music] >> They were huggy, you know, she would come over and sit on his lap and sometimes it was a little much for us to take. The man just doted on me.
I felt like a princess all the time.
Jim also spoiled his two stepchildren.
Life was really good in uh Peru. We never wanted for anything.
>> Dad always gave me whatever I wanted.
Susan gave herself pretty much whatever she wanted, too.
She liked to be high fashion. Every time we went out together as couples, I always felt [music] very inferior because she had all these glamorous outfits. Jim certainly appreciated how his wife looked, but he was less thrilled about how much she spent.
There was a few occasions that I seen Jim and Susan fight. I believe it was over money because he she was spending too much. Susan's spending wasn't all the couple fought over, either.
Susan was known to be flirty and perhaps even a bit >> [music] >> sleazy. But did she do more than flirt?
The gossips around Peru certainly thought so. It's been rumored that she has had affairs with lawyers, doctors, very influential people she that were very close to Jimmy.
By 1992, fights between Susan and Jim had become a regular occurrence, and there were signs that their marriage was coming apart.
There was an incident where they were fighting and she made me help her move stuff down to the basement, and she asked me, "How would you feel if if if Jim and I got a divorce?" The last blow-up between Jim and Susan came at the end of July during a family vacation to Alaska.
I don't know what the fight was about, but my mother was yelling.
And she told us pack your bags, you know, we're flying back home. Jacob and Tonelle did as their mother told them.
By the time they were packed, however, Susan had calmed down.
The family flew back [music] home as planned together.
But Susan and Jim's days at the pinnacle of Peru's jet-set were numbered.
Two nights later, during her daughter's sleepover, Susan Grund walked into her bedroom and saw her husband sprawled upon a sofa.
He's relaxed. He's laying as if napping or or asleep. She shook him trying to wake him up, [music] and all she said she noticed was on one side of his mouth was light little drop of blood.
Susan dialed 911, but when the paramedics arrived, it quickly became obvious that Jim Grund wouldn't be going to the hospital.
They told me they had to take him.
And I didn't want them to. They told me it was too late. Coming up, was the killer someone Jim put away? I had a conversation with the sheriff about a young man that came to mind. Or was it someone he took in?
It went as far as them looking in my locker for a gun.
A little before midnight on August 3rd, 1992, paramedics arrived at the Peru, Indiana home of Jim and Susan Grund.
Moments earlier, Susan had called 911 and reported finding her husband, a prominent local attorney, unconscious on the sofa.
From a distance, he looks fine and appeared to be napping or at rest. But Jim Grund wasn't napping.
He was dead, killed by a gunshot to his left eye.
The bullet has traveled through his eye, through his brain, out the back of his head and into the sofa.
And there's no reviving him.
And when the first police arrived on the scene moments later, word of Jim's death quickly spread throughout the small town.
Bruce Embry, Jim's [music] friend and a county judge, was among the first to hear.
I got a call from Will Siders, who's the prosecuting attorney, saying that he was at Jim Grund's house and there was a need for the execution of warrants.
That's what's going on. Informed of Jim's death, Embry headed to what was already becoming a crowded crime scene.
There were a lot of people that had no relevance to a crime scene investigation, family, business associates, civic leaders that were there that just did not need to be there. Jim was so closely connected to the county's legal authorities, in fact, that the Indiana State Police quickly stepped in and took the lead in the investigation.
Detective Bob Brenton from the Indiana State Police exhibited his authority over Miami County and over Peru Police to take control of the crime scene. Out of abundance of caution, prosecutor wanted warrants before they searched anything in the house. So, in the garage, we took testimony under oath, tape recorded it, and I issued warrants for the search of parts of the house.
Investigators also tried [music] to take a statement from Susan, but she appeared to be so shaken by the discovery of her husband's dead body that she had little to offer.
And there it was, all by myself, with two small children, and my husband is dead. Everything becomes just horribly just frantic at that point. She just kept saying that she didn't know how this could happen or didn't know who could have done this. Police didn't know, either, but a quick search of the bedroom suggested an intruder.
There were drawers that were pulled open in their bedroom, and clothes were kind of all messed up. If [music] an intruder had shot Jim Grund, however, police were unable to determine how he or she had gotten into the bedroom.
Police first looked for any point of forced entry, garage, house, front door, back door, and found none. So, it was puzzling to them how someone could have come in and done this.
Had a door been left unlocked? If so, police were still left wondering who could have harbored a grudge against Jim Grund.
Authorities [music] looked into people that Jim had put away as a prosecutor, and they didn't find anyone that fit the [music] profile or could have been there. Running out of candidates for an intruder, police began [music] to ponder another possibility.
Was there no forced entry [music] because the killer didn't need to break in?
On the morning of August 4th, investigators started taking a closer look at the Grund family, starting with Jim's widow. I went to the police station to answer questions, to tell them exactly what all everyone had done all day long, and anything that I could offer to help.
Then she mentioned something else, something that caught the investigators' attention. Susan suggested that police [music] take a closer look at her stepson.
David and his father argued all the time. They never had a meeting with it something [music] didn't happen. Did David have a motive to kill his father?
Did he have the means?
A quick check of state records revealed that the 21-year-old had recently acquired a 9-mm handgun.
Odder still, he'd reported it stolen just 1 month before his father's death.
The 4th of July, 1992, David Grund reports that his apartment's been broken into and that his gun has been stolen.
Brought in for questioning, David had a ready explanation.
He told police his father had known all about the gun and the [music] subsequent theft.
He had told his dad, Jimmy, that he had gotten a handgun, and the permit would probably come to their house, and he told his dad, you know, will you let me know when the Susan who brought it by the apartment.
Susan took the permit, went out to David's house the afternoon of July the 4th, and said, "Hey, your gun permit came to the house.
Um let me see. Can I see the gun?" David told police he'd taken the pistol out of a dresser drawer, shown it to his stepmother, and then returned it to its hiding place.
When David and his girlfriend got home that evening, the house had been broken into, the screen was slit, and the gun was gone.
Which one of the Grunds was telling the truth? Was Susan trying to divert attention from herself? Or was David trying to steer police back towards his stepmother?
Only one thing was certain. David's information sent police on a frantic search for the murder weapon.
They even had helicopters involved with some kind of metal detectors looking for the gun.
They looked in the river, they looked everywhere they could think of to look.
They even went as far as them looking for a gun in my locker, in my book bag. While police searched for the murder weapon, Peru was pondering the bigger question.
Whose finger had been on the trigger?
The buzz around Peru and Miami County was, "You know she did it." That's what people were saying in restaurants and cafes and after hours at the bars. At Jim's standing room only funeral on August 6th, no one came right out and accused Susan of murder, but she got the message regardless. There was a visitation line for the Grunds, and there was a line for her, and [music] no one was in her line. Because at that point, everybody in town already formed their opinion.
The police, however, weren't so sure.
They questioned David extensively.
Determined to find his father's killer and [music] clear himself in the process, David cooperated with the investigation. He told them where he had fired the gun. They dug the slugs out of whatever it was, telephone pole or wherever he had fired it. The slugs, along with the fatal one recovered from Jim and Susan's bedroom sofa, were sent to the crime lab for comparison.
While the authorities waited for the results, they started digging into Susan's past.
One thing immediately jumped out at them. Susan's child abuse charge from 10 years earlier.
So I read the file, realized this child had been abused very extensively.
Susan had played no contest, >> [music] >> and even if she was capable of child abuse, Indiana authorities would need more evidence to prove she was capable of murder.
On August 12th, the state crime lab confirmed that Jim Grund had been killed by his son's gun.
The police lab was able to match those slugs with the slug that killed Jim Grund.
And as David had already told police, Susan knew where he'd kept the gun. In fact, he'd shown it to her only hours before it had allegedly been stolen from his apartment.
But did that mean Susan had shot Jim? Or was her stepson setting her up?
I never thought I would be a suspect. I thought that David would be implicated.
It was highly suspicious that he bought the gun and within a matter of weeks he reports it stolen.
Coming up, will police find the missing gun? And if so, where? Susan calls her sister and asks her, "Did they find it?"
For years, Susan Grund had been the hot topic for gossip in the small town of Peru, Indiana.
Married to the town's most prominent attorney, a man 10 years her senior, Susan's flirty ways and rumored affairs had kept Peru buzzing.
And the buzz only intensified when Jim Grund was found shot dead in his own bedroom.
There were so many fingers pointing towards Susan.
>> There were no holds barred for me. They didn't even try to camouflage it. By the end of the month, the accusing look she got all over town had become too much to bear. Mother told me she was going to kill herself because she couldn't take the pressure anymore. Susan loaded her children, Jacob and Tynell, into the car and drove to her mother's house 4 hours away in Vincennes, Indiana.
Settling in temporarily, Susan hired a probate attorney and prepared to battle [music] her stepchildren over their father's will.
Jim Grund had amended the document less than a month before his death, and he'd apparently done it at Susan's request.
Jacob had not been in the prior will that he had written, unlike Tynell was in there. And Jim, according to his sister Jane Allen, made the changes begrudgingly.
The marriage was in trouble, torn apart by frequent arguments over finances and infidelity. But Jim didn't want Susan's constant nagging about the matter to sour their Alaska trip. When she rewrote the will at the law office, the secretary said, "Are you sure you know what this will is reading?" And he said, "Yeah, I know. She wants me to change it before this trip to Alaska, and when we return, I will change it back." Jim Grund never had the chance to undo the changes to his will. He was dead within days of returning from [music] Alaska.
Was the timing mere coincidence?
His family [music] didn't think so. She could take off with the money, live happily ever after, and go find husband number five.
Was that Susan's plan? Peru police soon had reason to think so.
On November 2nd, 1992, >> [music] >> Susan's sister Darlene contacted the authorities with a crucial piece of evidence. It was a conversation she'd had with her sister shortly after Susan had moved to Vincennes.
Darlene was living in their house in Peru. Susan had asked her to go to the house and protect it while she was gone.
But when Indiana State Police showed up one day with a warrant, there was little Darlene could do to stop them. She did, however, get word of the search to Susan.
Susan calls her sister and asks her, "Did they find it?"
She says, "What do you mean?" She says, "The gun."
That wasn't the end of Darlene's story, either.
To Susan's relief, Darlene had told her the police left empty-handed.
And that's when, according to Darlene, Susan's behavior became even more suspicious.
Within hours, Susan had rushed back to the house in Peru.
And she'd come, according to her sister, for the gun that police had failed to find.
There'd been a feverish search for the weapon itself all over the house, and they missed it. But little did they know, the gun had been hidden in the house the whole time.
The weapon was actually hidden by Susan Grund in a teddy bear at her and her husband's house [music] in Peru. Susan retrieved the teddy bear, and then the sisters had driven back to Vincennes together.
Darlene said she never actually saw the gun, but during the drive, according to Darlene, Susan had explained what was going on. Susan's in the car with Darlene and confesses to her that she shot Jim.
Of course, being Susan's sister, the poor thing, she didn't know what to do with the information. Darlene said that after two agonizing months, she decided to come forward and betray her sister's trust.
Now, the challenge for investigators was, if Susan had confided in Darlene once, would she do it again?
And could they get it on tape? The police wired Darlene, and they went down to Vincennes. With police listening in, Darlene dropped by her mother's and confronted [music] her sister about the shooting.
But this time, Susan not only denied killing Jim, she denied ever confessing in the first place.
I said, "I don't know why you're saying this. So why are you saying this?"
Because I didn't say that to her. One of the sisters was lying, and the Indiana State Police were pretty sure they knew which one.
On November [music] 2nd, they presented an Indiana judge with Darlene's statement about Susan's alleged confession, David's missing gun, and the changing of Jim's will.
At 4:30 a.m. the next morning, fresh off the judge's desk, the police were back in Vincennes with the warrant for Susan Grund's arrest.
Mom and I shared the same room, and I was sleeping, and I just remember policemen barging into the room, >> [music] >> and they took her.
4 hours later, she was back in Peru being booked on first-degree murder charges.
It was 3 months almost to the day. We were very sure that [clears throat] she had done it, and that was the break that they needed. But would it be enough?
The attempt to back it up with the taped confession had failed. But there was still one piece of evidence that could confirm Darlene's account. While Susan was settling into the Miami County Jail, investigators in Vincennes searched her mother's house for David's missing 9 mm.
They tore the house apart looking for looking for a gun.
They didn't find the gun or the teddy bear Susan had supposedly hidden it in.
And the lack of a murder weapon wasn't the only hurdle standing in the state's way as Susan's trial approached.
Susan's lawyer, Charlie Scruggs, filed for a change of venue, arguing Susan couldn't get a fair trial in Peru, where the Grunds had been prominent attorneys for generations.
The motion succeeded, but only partially. The trial would take place in Peru, but before an outside judge and jury. The jurors were drawn from Warsaw, which is 20-30 miles away from Peru. So there was some detachment there. Would it be the break Susan needed? After all, other than her sister's statement and a wiretap conversation that proved fruitless, the case against her was largely circumstantial.
Based on motive and the statements of her sister, law enforcement had enough [music] to make a case against Susan and bring her to trial, but they don't yet have the murder weapon.
Then in August of 1993, with her trial scheduled to begin in little more than a month, a second member of Susan's family contacted the State Police.
This time, it was Susan's own mother.
Susan's mother, Nelly Sanders, finds this old wash tub that has been around for some time. The tub, as Nelly Sanders [music] told police, had gone missing almost a year earlier when Susan moved in after Jim's death. Nelly had asked Susan [music] what happened to that big heirloom, and Susan told her, "Oh, it was old [music] and ugly, and I just threw it away."
Therefore, as Susan's mother explained to police, she'd been surprised to find the tub in her attic nearly a year later. There at the top of the steps was this big old family heirloom pot.
Odder still was what she had found >> [music] >> in it. The tub was filled to the brim with concrete.
Thinking something was peculiar, Nelly picked up the phone and called the police.
And as soon as the conversation was finished, detectives drove out to Vincennes to investigate the find.
When they break open the cement, they find a handgun.
Not just any gun, either. When they clean the handgun and can read the serial numbers on it, they find that it is the gun that was stolen from David Grund's apartment.
Coming up, Susan's testimony raises [music] new questions. Had she hidden the gun to protect herself or the true killer?
Jim had gone on a trip and while he was gone, we went out to dancing and drinking and it began that night.
On the morning of September 27th, 1993, Susan Grund walked into a Peru, Indiana courtroom to stand trial for her husband's murder.
As usual, she turned quite a few heads, but this time the crowd in the courtroom did a double take. She essentially dressed like a very conservative librarian or widow in black, very dressed down for her persona and it was quite unexpected. Prosecutor Will Siders' opening statement, on the other hand, focused on Susan's usual personal appearance, [music] the over-the-top trophy wife Peru was used to.
He described the defendant as a woman unwilling to give up the flashy clothes and fancy lifestyle she enjoyed as a lawyer's wife.
Prosecutor's theory was that her husband was going to file for divorce soon, that she was afraid of losing the financial benefits of being married to him and that she had financial benefits to gain by killing him.
But was Susan the only person with a motive to murder Jim? According to the defense's open, Jim's son, David, had a motive. The theory of defense was he had motive to commit the offense or at the very least to lie about her involvement.
>> And the reason the defense gave stunned the entire courtroom. David wasn't just Susan's stepson. [music] According to the defense, the 23-year-old had also been her lover.
Susan, in her own defense, put David [music] forward not only as a suspect, but as someone that had had an affair with her. The Grunds almost had a heart attack.
Really think so? They were like, "Oh, no, no, no, no." Had David Grund killed his father in a jealous rage? And when the police started asking questions, did he point the finger at his stepmother as a diversion?
Prosecutors discounted the possibility, showing Susan had plenty of opportunity to commit the crime. That afternoon, during testimony from Indiana State Police investigators, they presented jurors with an elaborate timeline tracking Susan's movements the evening of the murder.
Shuttling Jacob to a campsite, coming back home, only to leave again to pick up her daughter and niece for a sleepover back at the house.
They were trying to track her whereabouts down to the minute. Her two trips, according to the prosecution, had left Susan enough time to slip home and shoot Jim.
The state argued [music] that Susan Grund had sufficient time to get from where she had dropped the kids off, out to her and her husband's home, commit [music] the act and then get back to where the kids were.
Prosecutors also claimed that Susan had access to the murder weapon.
Calling her stepson, David, to the stand, he testified that he'd shown Susan the 9 mm handgun just hours before it went missing on July 4th, 1992.
[music] His testimony was important to the state because it established Susan Grund had knowledge of where the handgun was located in his home. But was it the truth? During cross-examination, Susan's attorney questioned her stepson about the alleged affair.
David Grund denied any type of intimate relationship with Susan Grund. It was, according to Susan, a lie. David Grund got on the stand and thought he was Bill Clinton and I knew exactly how Hillary Clinton felt or Monica Lewinsky felt, too, when she was sitting there listening to somebody deny something. If you're denying something that adamantly, if you're lying about it, you're hiding something. But if David was lying and he was the shooter, how did his gun get to Susan's mother's house?
On September 29th, Nellie Sanders, Susan's mother, took the stand and told her story about the tub full of concrete in her attic.
The tub where, according to the prosecutors, Susan had hidden the murder weapon beneath a layer of concrete.
You could see in her the anguish of of telling it and getting it out. The same was true the next day when Susan's sister, Darlene, took the stand. Darlene was nervous and quiet, but you could get the sense that she knew the facts and knew that they needed to come out. And the facts, as Darlene told them, were damning. She told us Susan had talked about the killing and [music] that she needed help in moving the gun.
It was devastating to sit there [music] and watch Darlene say and I confessed to her.
Susan had reason to be devastated. Not only were her mother and sister's statements strong evidence for the prosecution, they'd also led police to the missing gun.
There are two family members that are the least likely people in the world to make up anything.
They don't want Susan to be guilty.
With her own family testifying for the prosecution, Susan had few people to turn to.
When the defense started presenting its case later that afternoon, Charlie Scruggs called Susan to the stand. He didn't call any defense witnesses. It was just her up there by herself. In tears, she described finding Jim's dead body.
But it wasn't all she claimed she'd found that night.
I looked down and there by his hand is the gun. Not knowing what it was or what was going on, I grab up the gun and the phone at the same [music] time to call for help.
But before the police arrived, Susan said she'd realized who the pistol belonged to. Panicking, she'd hidden it.
I honestly thought I was protecting David. Next, Susan admitted that the rumors around town were true. She did sleep around. I did. I had other affairs over a course of several years, possibly. And she claimed her affair with David had started one night while his father was out of town.
He took a yearly trip to Canada to go fishing.
And while he was gone, we went out to dancing and drinking and it began that night. And it continued for about two years, according to Susan, up until the time Jim was murdered.
She painted a very believable [music] tale of passion and clandestine meetings and lovemaking. But would the jury believe it?
>> [music] >> Were Susan and her stepson having a torrid affair?
Could David have killed his father out of jealousy? And did that explain why Susan had hidden his gun?
On September 30th, the jurors retired to consider a verdict.
Several hours later, at 1:30 a.m., they returned to the courtroom. But they didn't return with a verdict. Instead, [music] they announced they were deadlocked.
It's a late hour and you really don't expect anything to come back other than guilty. So, hopelessly deadlocked was really kind of a surprise.
Susan would soon face a second trial and this time around she felt hopeful she would be able to convince an entire jury of her innocence.
In your mind, you want to think that they really won't find you guilty for something that you didn't [music] do.
Susan would have plenty of time to think.
She spent 5 months in jail awaiting her second [music] trial.
When proceedings started on March 7th, 1994, in front of another out-of-town jury, the prosecution's case was essentially a repeat performance. The state said, "Given the motive, given the opportunity and then finally given the fact that the weapon was found in her residence, those are all circumstances pointing to her guilt." But when it was the defense's turn, the case took a very different course. The judge made her refrain from saying a lot of the things that she wanted to say. They told her that she couldn't. They wouldn't let me speak to the jury as I had the first time.
One thing in particular was strictly off limits. Although Susan did take the stand, she didn't make any mention of her alleged affair with David. And why not?
According to Susan, her lawyer advised against it, caving under pressure from Jim's influential family.
I watched the Grunds close ranks in around their wayward grandson. They just wasn't going to allow it.
Or was there another, easier explanation? It's simply [music] not true. It's too outlandish to be messing around with his older stepmother. It just doesn't make [music] sense.
Whatever the reason, the change in Susan's testimony did make a difference.
On March 16th, the jury found Susan Grund guilty of first-degree murder.
Everyone was just very elated. The county police, prosecutors, lawyers from everywhere that knew Jimmy.
Coming up, the judicial system has one more surprise in store for Susan.
Everything about Susan's past was not fair game until sentencing.
April 15th, 1994, a month after she'd been convicted of murdering her husband, Jim, Susan Grund was once again seated in a Peru, Indiana courtroom.
It was the same courtroom Jim Grund had practiced law in as a prosecutor and defense attorney.
Jim Grund worked hard for his community and was a key player in the community.
[music] And it was Jim's prominent position in Peru that, according to friend Bruce Embry, [music] attracted Susan in the first place.
She wanted to be things that she was not, and she relished the role of being the wife of the lawyer. It was a role Susan had locked into 10 years earlier when she'd arrived in Peru broke, pregnant, and alone.
But, as Peru learned that afternoon at her sentencing hearing, those weren't the only reason Susan had returned home.
Everything about Susan's past, for the most part, was not fair game until sentencing. Jim Grant had known all about Susan's legal trouble back in Oklahoma, but it was only after she'd been convicted of his murder that the jury learned of Susan's record. We, as observers and the jury, learned she had pled no contest to the severe beating of a stepchild.
The son of her third husband never recovered from the injuries he'd received at Susan's hands.
The ambulance and stuff had to come and it just seemed like he wasn't Well, he wasn't right after that.
Susan had fared better, [music] receiving only probation for the offense.
But, there'd be no escape this time.
That afternoon, after receiving the jury's recommendation, the judge sentenced Susan to 60 years in prison.
The presumptive sentence at the time was 40 years. 20 could be added for aggravating circumstances, and the judge gave her the maximum sentence based on the prior felony conviction and the brutality of it.
Although, according to son Jacob, despite pleading no contest, Susan has never admitted guilt in regards to the old child abuse charge.
Barely more than a toddler when he witnessed his stepbrother's beating, [music] Jacob recalls once asking his mother about it.
Years down the road, I told her that I remembered this stuff. At the time, according to her son, Susan denied the beating ever occurred.
She told me that he was a very clumsy boy. I know all boys are clumsy, but these were bad.
Today, after serving over a decade in prison for murder, she still denies shooting her husband.
I did not kill my husband.
I I'm not saying that I didn't do wrong when I hid the gun, but that was wrong.
But, while I'm sitting in prison, somebody's out there free.
>> [music] >> It started as an unusual romance between [music] one young woman and three older men.
She appeared [music] to be engaged to three guys at the same time. They all knew about one another, yet they were in close proximity to one another.
Eventually, the tangled relationship would come unraveled. None of the fiancés ever said, "I do."
But, one would be found dead in the Alaskan wilderness.
It was basically an execution. Had the three-way rivalry turned deadly?
An answer would take almost 10 years to uncover, and in a surprising twist, depend largely upon the dead man's own words.
On May [music] 13th, 2005, two cold case investigators from Alaska rang the doorbell of an upscale suburban home outside Olympia, Washington.
It's just what you would call, you know, an I guess an average all-American street, nice houses, nice yards and gardens.
They'd come looking for a woman named Michelle Linehan.
Michelle was a doctor's wife, an educated woman. She has a master's degree in >> [music] >> um in public administration.
They had a daughter together. She was this PTA mom.
She worked for the Washington State Executive Ethics Board, the watchdog group that investigated ethics complaints against state workers.
The Michelle the detectives had come to question was very different from the doctor's wife who invited them in for coffee that afternoon.
In another life, a decade earlier, she had been a stripper [music] in Anchorage, Alaska.
She was once topless dancing, mixed up with a lot of guys. Just by talking and just by flirting, she could make thousands in a night. It just came easily to her. She was just very good actress.
Not only was this suburban PTA mom a former exotic dancer, she was also at the center of a 9-year-old murder investigation. [music] A decade before detectives [music] knocked on Michelle Linehan's front door, Michelle Hughes had been living in Alaska.
A Louisiana native, she'd made the move north in 1994. [music] She went with some friends and just fell totally in love with the place. She loved the outdoors, she loves animals.
Uh it was a breathtaking experience for her.
But, for all Michelle's love of the outdoors, she earned her living indoors [music] at an Anchorage strip club called the Great Alaskan Bush Company.
It's the classiest, I would say, of the the strip clubs in town, definitely. She was quite successful. Perhaps the most successful dancer at the Bush Company.
Michelle was so successful that it only took her a few months to earn a down payment for a house.
Not bad, considering that, according to coworker Laura Aspiotis, Michelle wasn't much for dancing on stage.
Table dancing, she didn't do much of that, either.
Because mostly what she did was sit and talk. I mean, she was very good at that.
And one night in October of 1994, she ended up talking to a man named Kent Leppink, another recent transplant from the lower 48. He'd come to Alaska to take [music] up commercial fishing.
He loved the outdoors. He always loved hunting, he loved fishing.
Um and he was good at it.
Kent quickly became one of Michelle's best customers.
Kent's parents had loaned him quite a bit of money. He spent a lot of it on on Michelle. By November, um they were talking marriage. He gave her a ring, actually gave her an engagement ring.
Kent moved into Michelle's house, despite the fact that she was also seeing and secretly engaged to another man, a salesman named Scott Hilke.
Like Kent, Michelle had met him at the Bush Company.
He traveled quite a bit, and they dated on and off.
And when he wasn't traveling, >> [music] >> Scott stayed with Michelle and Kent.
But, Kent didn't appear to be concerned with the arrangement.
Michelle told him that Scott was gay and that she didn't have to that he didn't have to worry about Scott.
Likewise, Michelle told Scott that Kent was gay. And once Michelle met John Carlin III, things would get even more complicated.
A widower from New Jersey, John and his teenage son had come to Alaska in 1994.
Not long after, in June of '95, he met Michelle Hughes at the Bush Company.
She came by his table and introduced herself, [music] and they became acquainted.
By the end of the evening, Michelle and John were becoming well acquainted.
I said, "I'm going with my friend to Amsterdam." And she said, "Oh, I always wanted to go to Amsterdam." And being a guy, I said, "No problem. You want to go?"
I thought she'd say no, and she didn't.
By August of that year, um he was taking her to Europe with him.
And when her house was being remodeled in November of '95, John invited Michelle to move in.
I said, "That's fine, you know, while your house is being fixed."
Kent moved [music] in, too.
The unusual living arrangement started to sound like something out of a Hollywood sitcom.
I said, "So, like Jack Tripper?"
It's sort of opposite of Three's Company thing.
Only instead of Three's Company, it was five.
Kent Leppink stayed there, too. Scott Hilke, when he came into town, also stayed there. Sometimes three of them in the same house, and and John Carlin's son, as well. That was kind of an unusual uh family unit, if I can use that word.
Holding it all together was Michelle, who also became a surrogate mother to John's teenage son.
She thought it was her place to be a mother to this child who had, not that long ago, lost his own mother.
She was someone who cared deeply for him. She was someone that he could talk to.
In return, the boy's father cared quite a bit for Michelle.
John gave her a fur coat. He put a lot of cash into her house. And that Christmas, John also presented Michelle with an engagement ring.
John proposed to Michelle during a brief window of opportunity when she had supposedly broken up with Mr. Hilkey.
The breakup came at the end of 1995 when work took Hilkey back home to California.
He ended up leaving Alaska very late 1995, very early 1996.
Kent Leppink was still in the picture, although John didn't consider Kent serious competition.
When she's with John, she was very affectionate with him and there's a lot of physical contact. When she's with Kent, she wasn't affectionate with him.
Kent, however, was undeterred by Michelle's indifference.
For some reason, he still he was totally head over heels in love with her. His obsession and his feelings were so strong for Michelle that probably what was going on with him was some kind of denial.
In the spring of 1996, after a short breakup, Scott Hilkey was back in Michelle Hughes' life.
Scott wasn't, however, back in Alaska.
Michelle every 2 weeks was spending 2 weeks in California with Scott and she was just constantly flying down there. When she wasn't off with Scott, she continued to live with John.
I think John was pretty astute and aware of the situation. [music] Kent, on the other hand, wasn't.
Still living at John's house and undeterred by his fiance's frequent trips to California, he continued to make wedding plans.
He calls his mother in February of 1996 and says, "Mom, guess what? Michelle has agreed and we're we're going to set dates."
>> What Kent shared with me was um she wanted a different life. She wanted a home. She wanted a family.
In fact, Kent and Michelle had already started combining their lives.
They set up a joint checking account.
Kent rewrote his will leaving everything to her and they even took out life insurance policies naming each other as the beneficiary.
I was there the day that they actually went out and got it.
And Michelle was really upset. Kent had asked her if he could be the beneficiary of her life insurance policy.
She didn't like that at all.
Kent's parents, when he told them about the policies, weren't crazy about them, either.
They particularly objected to the amount of his policy, $1 million. dollars.
I said, "Kent, this is just nuts. Let's just cancel it and then move on." Kent's older brother, Craig, was even more blunt about it. The million-dollar policy wasn't just crazy, it was dangerous.
Craig said, uh "Kent, you're walking around with a bull's-eye drawn on your back."
And as spring slipped by with no firm plans for [music] the wedding, Kent's family became more and more concerned.
On April 26th, 1996, >> [music] >> Kent's dad arrived in Anchorage on a mission.
He came up from the lower 48 to visit Kent to try to figure out what in the world was going on with the wedding.
He found his son asking the same question.
All Kent knew [music] is one day he woke up.
Um his father was coming the next day.
Michelle was gone. He was a little bit beside himself. He kept telling me that uh well, John Carlin knows where she's at, but he won't tell me.
I said, "Well, that's that's really neat, isn't it?"
Kent spent five embarrassing, frantic days with his father trying to figure out what had become of his fiance.
I think at that [music] point the light started coming on for him. There's a growing concern by Kent as to what's happening.
Kent was [music] seeing a different side of Michelle.
But the question was, what would he do about it?
On May 2nd, 1996, 3 days after Kent's father arrived home from Alaska, he and his wife received a final message from their son. We received uh like a big manila envelope in the mail from Kent addressed to my husband and I.
The letter, according to the postmark, had been mailed moments after Kent had dropped his dad off at the airport.
Inside, Kent's parents found a short note and a second, sealed envelope. On the outside of that envelope is written, "Do not open uh unless something happens to me."
As instructed, the Leppinks laid the second letter aside, but Betsy also made a worried phone call to her son.
She got his message service.
Of course, he never called back. And he never would.
Coming up, what is inside the second letter?
Is it the crucial clue investigators would need to solve a murder or the final revenge of a spurned fiance?
He said, "If Michelle really loves me and we really are going to get married, this letter will never be read by you."
On May 2nd, 1996, >> [music] >> a utility crew drove up to a remote microwave tower outside Hope, Alaska.
The man who was driving the utility truck looked up this trail and he saw something red in the trail.
It was a man in a red jacket lying dead on the ground.
It was basically a whodunit murder. They found a body and they didn't have a suspect. Within an hour, the remote site was swarming with state troopers.
They isolate the scene, um start taking measurements, marking where things are of significance. The troopers found three.44 caliber shell casings and two distinct sets of footprints.
One for the dead man and one for his killer.
Whether he was taken up there at gunpoint or the gun came out somewhere along the trail, that we we do not know.
Investigators did, however, know the dead man's identity, Kent Leppink.
He had his driver's license on him, so his identity was discovered. Kent had been shot three times in the back, stomach, and finally the face.
Kent was probably still alive at the time that shot entered, although barely.
Then the killer had walked away leaving behind Kent's wallet, his checkbook, and what just might have been the most valuable thing in the dead man's pockets.
He did have a change of beneficiary form in his clothing. Kent had apparently filled out the form a week earlier after Michelle had ditched his dad's visit.
On it, he named his parents as the beneficiaries of his life insurance policy.
Literally just a few days before he was found killed down in Hope, he had gone into the insurance office and changed his beneficiary. The slip of paper didn't list the prior beneficiary or the amount of the policy leaving police puzzled about its significance. [music] Hoping for an answer, they sent two troopers to the address listed [music] on Kent's checkbook.
At 3:00 on Friday afternoon, May 3rd, >> [music] >> they knocked on the door of the woman whose name also appeared on the joint account, Michelle Hughes.
She initially said that he was her boyfriend, but then that they weren't really boyfriend-girlfriend like most boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. We have a unique relationship. It's a um open relationship.
Open relationship?
No, like a conventional not conventional um Explain it to me a little bit if you can.
I have a boyfriend.
Michelle, as she explained to the troopers, had a boyfriend [music] besides Kent.
One she just visited in California.
A few days prior to >> [music] >> uh Kent's disappearance and that she had gone to Lake Tahoe with Scott Hilkey.
And as Michelle told the troopers, she hadn't actually seen Kent since.
Where is he?
He's dead. He's in the body is gone.
And that's why we're here.
Yes, the tissue sample we went and get you.
Once Michelle recovered her composure, she explained that Kent wasn't really her fiance.
The engagement, according to Michelle, was merely a smoke screen to hide a secret he'd struggled to keep from his family.
He likes that. He likes that.
His dad doesn't know that. I see.
So, who was the mysterious shooter who'd left Kent lying dead in the woods outside Hope. The investigators were no closer to an answer.
Fortunately for them, Kent would soon provide one.
On May 4th, Kent's parents in Michigan received word of their son's death.
Immediately, they opened Kent's mysterious letter.
When we opened it up, it explained an awful lot of things. And he named the people that would possibly have hurt him.
There were three names mentioned in the letter: Michelle, [music] John Carlin III, and Scott Hilke.
Kent said, "If I'm found dead, it's either John, Scott, or Michelle.
And to take her down."
In my uh then almost 20 years with the state troopers, I'd never heard of uh uh a victim ever having done something like this.
What motive, police wondered, [music] could Michelle have to kill Kent?
That's when Kent's parents filled investigators in about [music] Kent's million-dollar life insurance policy, the one that had once named Michelle as beneficiary.
Had the entire engagement [music] simply been laying the groundwork for murder?
Kent, it appeared, had suspected as much. Something must have happened to tip Kent off that his life was in danger. But whatever it was, it didn't stop him from giving Michelle another chance.
He said, "If Michelle really loves me and we really are going to get married, this letter will never be read by you."
Had Kent's hope for the best cost him his life?
On May 5th, the troopers drove out to Michelle's house and questioned her a second time.
Do you know if anybody has anything to gain from Kent's death?
No, I didn't know life insurance.
Kent, of course, had taken Michelle's name off the policy.
But did she know?
As beneficiary, he wrote me for um the majority of it and his dad the rest.
I'm not sure what the percentage was.
Okay.
And to your knowledge, this has never been changed? I don't know.
[clears throat] Michelle may have had a motive for murder.
She also, however, had an alibi.
Michelle was at at Lake Tahoe Scott. She had left um on the afternoon of the 25th, Friday.
And she hadn't returned until after Kent was killed.
That left John.
Was he the source of the second set of footprints at the crime scene?
The police were starting to wonder.
The same day, they paid him a visit.
John claimed he didn't know anything about the crime. He did, however, have Kent's car.
Kent Leppink's car was still at the John Carlin residence here in Anchorage.
In the car, troopers found another clue, a printout of an email John had sent Michelle.
It was a description by him of a cabin in Hope that he had purchased.
At the bottom of the note, Michelle handwrote um a response to John saying, "Please don't tell anybody where we are."
It appeared Kent had found the note. But how did his dead body end up in the woods outside Hope?
There must have been, from our perspective, some kind of further discussion, if not argument, with John about, "John, where in the hell is Michelle? What is going on?"
And in that context, it seems reasonable to us to conclude that John and Kent end up down on this trail that may well have appeared to Kent to be leading to a cabin.
The pieces, as far as the investigators were concerned, were starting to fall into place.
A million dollars' worth of insurance provided the motive.
John contributed the muscle.
And Scott, thanks to a conveniently timed trip to Tahoe, provided Michelle's cover.
Though it appeared that Scott did play a role, police came to the conclusion that it was an unknowing one.
He was a dupe in the whole thing. His whole purpose in life at that point was to be her alibi.
By June, the state troopers were even closing in on what they believed to be the murder weapon.
The slugs recovered during Kent's autopsy provided crucial clues to the murder weapon's identity.
These bullets, you have what's known as polygonal rifling. That is a very distinct type of rifling.
There was, in fact, only one kind of.44 automatic that could have killed Kent Leppink.
It was pretty clearly a Desert Eagle.44 pistol that was the source of the bullets.
On June 29th, the state [music] troopers brought John in to question him again.
He denied ever owning a.44, much less a Desert Eagle.
Have you ever in Have you been in Alaska or when you were in New Jersey, ever owned a.44 caliber handgun, John?
Since I've been here? Mhm. No.
And what about here in New Jersey?
No.
.44 caliber?
Shot him?
Yeah, friends, but uh No.
The state troopers weren't prepared to take John's word for it, however.
On July 19th, they went to his house with a search warrant.
They seized computers and several guns, but no Desert Eagle.
An empty holster was found large enough to accommodate uh such a large handgun.
Had that holster held a Desert Eagle?
Experts at the state forensics lab in Anchorage suspected so.
The firearms uh people at the uh crime lab here in Anchorage told me that from the pattern and indentations in the holster itself, that it was consistent with having contained uh probably uh a Desert Eagle.
But was it enough for a murder indictment against John, much less Michelle?
The answer, according to the DA's office, was no.
Reviewing a case like that, they're thinking, "If I go with weak evidence and there's an acquittal, I'm never going to be able to do this again."
Weeks passed and the case went cold.
Then months and years.
Although the investigation was never officially closed, the key players moved on, scattering across the country.
Scott in California, John to New Jersey.
Neither of the men ever married Michelle, who moved back home to Loyola University.
She ended up getting her her master's degree in uh public service.
In 1998, after all those Alaska engagements, Michelle actually did get married to an aspiring doctor named Colin Lenahan.
Coming up, marriage and motherhood make for a very different Michelle.
But new evidence brings her past back to haunt her and sends investigators in a promising new direction.
They weren't that far apart in age, relatively speaking, and he became very fond of Michelle.
In 2004, it had been 8 years [music] since Kent Leppink was found shot in the woods outside Hope, Alaska.
The mystery of his death had never been solved.
The case remained open, and that year became a top priority for the state's new cold case squad.
Cold case investigative unit had put together a list of cold cases and had decided which ones looked like uh they might result in prosecutions with a little bit more work, and this was on that uh list, this case.
It was cold comfort to Kent's parents, who'd waited eight long years to see their son's killer brought to justice.
What was eating my husband up, it was eating me up. We know who killed him.
Uh it all it all fits together so beautifully.
The Leppinks, based on their son's last letter, were convinced Michelle and John had conspired to kill Kent.
But would a dead man's hunch hold up in a court of law?
It was a piece of hearsay. The person who said it wasn't available to cross-examine.
Worse, investigators had never been able to track down the murder weapon, a powerful.44 caliber Desert Eagle automatic.
They were missing um evidence that connected suspects to the crime.
There was something else missing from the case, too.
When the trooper who'd headed the original investigation back in '96 >> [music] >> learned the cold case squad had taken the matter up, he picked up the phone and made a suggestion.
I was notified that they may be going to grand jury, and I said, "Did you go see the boy? Go see the boy."
The boy in this case [music] was Carlin's son, John the IV.
Although he'd had a ringside seat as Michelle juggled three fiancés back in '96, >> [music] >> he'd never been asked to give a statement to police.
He was not interviewed um extensively. In fact, he was hardly interviewed at all because he was a juvenile. As a juvenile, police could never question him without his father present.
He was being uh guarded and protected and kept away from uh the police by his father.
Nine years later, however, when investigators tracked the 26-year-old down in Seattle, his [music] father couldn't interfere.
He's finally interviewed when neither his father is around or Michelle is around and he's agreeable or at least he goes ahead and does provide information. I I hesitate hesitate to say he was agreeable because I think he was upset.
He had reason to be.
He was about to rat out two people he cared about, >> [music] >> his father and Michelle.
He became very fond of Michelle. She was like a like a surrogate big sister to him, I think. He recalled after Kent's death seeing Michelle and his father downstairs in the bathroom the a a big gun in the sink and it smelled like bleach.
>> Washing the the gun with bleach would eliminate things like blood and fingerprints and probably get rid of hair and fibers and other trace evidence.
But was the gun the murder weapon, >> [music] >> the missing Desert Eagle?
He can't say Desert Eagle, but it was a gun, a revolver. He said it was the big black gun. He always referred to it as the big black gun.
John told police his father got the gun from an ad in the Anchorage newspaper.
So, I went back and I checked um Anchorage Daily News Sunday classifieds for uh Desert Eagle sale.
Investigator Branch Flower found an ad from January of '95.
Contacting the man who'd sold the gun, he didn't remember Carlin.
But he did remember going to Carlin's house.
He remembered a built-in bookcase in the wall that impressed him.
And shown the empty holster police had found back [music] in '96, the one forensic experts believed had once held a Desert Eagle, the man identified it as the one he'd sold with the gun.
It was fairly reliable proof that unlike his denials, John Carlin had in fact owned a Desert Eagle.44.
On May 13th, [music] 2005, the investigators from Alaska returned to Washington state, this time to Olympia, where Michelle and her husband Colin had settled after leaving New Orleans.
She offered to cooperate. She had the detectives over for coffee.
And that afternoon over coffee, Michelle seemed more than willing to assist the Alaska State Troopers in their investigation.
We said, "Who killed Kent?"
And so then she launched into her theories about what could have possibly happened. She said her worst poss- the worst possible scenario is that John Carlin was involved in the But what about Michelle?
In his last letter, Kent had also [music] fingered her for his murder.
Did the investigators still consider her a suspect? [music] The answer came on September 28th, 2006, when an Alaska grand jury issued two murder indictments, one against John Carlin the III, the other against Michelle Linehan.
All of a sudden it was an indictment.
Then the rest was just a nightmare.
It was just an absolute nightmare.
John turned himself in on October 2nd.
Michelle 2 days later.
Pleading not guilty, she and husband Colin prepared to fight.
And the case against Michelle appeared to give them plenty of ammunition.
You don't have a gun. You don't have a witness. You don't have a lot of stuff.
You got a little circumstantial stuff and pieces parts.
What little evidence there was, particularly regarding the missing gun, pointed primarily toward John Carlin.
He stood trial first in early spring of 2007.
His own son took the stand for the prosecution on March 14th.
I remember coming around the corner and seeing Michelle and my father and there was a a firearm in the sink.
On cross, Carlin's [music] defense didn't deny the gun-washing incident his son witnessed.
However, they explained he'd merely been trying to protect Michelle.
They portrayed Michelle as the one who pulled the trigger.
There was, however, one problem with the portrayal.
Michelle was still in Tahoe when the shots were fired.
The evidence was always pretty clear that it was John who did the shooting and um Michelle who did the soliciting and the encouraging.
Prosecutors presented emails that they said proved Michelle had talked Carlin into committing the murder.
She talks about our getaway in that email. She describes the a trip to the Seychelles.
Why the Seychelles?
According to Michelle's email, the islands were an ideal spot for a getaway, romantic or otherwise.
No matter what crimes you've committed, they will not extradite.
Of course, John Carlin never made it to the Seychelles. [music] Without the million-dollar payoff from Kent's insurance, there'd been no island getaway.
Instead, [music] the best John could hope for was evading a prison sentence.
On April 3rd, 2007, [music] the jury reached its verdict. We the jury find the defendant John Carlin the III guilty of murder in the first degree.
Coming up, Michelle's case goes to trial and jurors consider another possible motive in Kent Leppink's death.
A letter that suggests to some, when you read it, that he wanted to set people up.
The Michelle Linehan that walked into an Anchorage courtroom on September 20th, 2007, was a very different woman from Michelle Hughes, the stripper that had danced on stage at the Bush Company over a decade earlier.
She's a family woman with a child down in Washington state, a physician husband. Uh it was just night and day and a lot of people couldn't believe that she was the same woman.
And how could this woman, this successful wife and mother, be accused of murder?
I remember talking to a neighbor who was very um shocked and stunned [music] and and didn't believe that Michelle could have had anything to do with this.
Michelle's PTA mom image wasn't the only challenge prosecutors faced, either.
Everyone watches CSI and they want all the DNA evidence, all the murder weapon and all these things in the the reality is that those things aren't aren't always there.
In his opening statement, prosecutor Pat Gullufsen explained there was no DNA evidence in this case because Michelle had been careful not to kill Kent Leppink herself.
All she needed was somebody to do the dirty work and she found a able and a willing partner in John Carlin the III.
But what about Scott Hilke, fiance number one, and the man who, according to the police, had unwittingly provided Michelle with an alibi? On September 26th, Michelle's former on-again, off-again boyfriend took the stand and testified that jealousy, at least on Scott's part, was never an issue in his relationship with Michelle, since he never really considered Kent a rival.
Was there anything that you observed, saw, that led you to believe that Mr. Leppink was a problem for you and Michelle getting together?
No.
Next, Scott's [music] testimony laid the groundwork for the prosecution's effort to make jurors forget the successful woman Michelle had become.
Instead, prosecutors wanted the jury to focus on the woman from 1996.
The woman they said was a greedy seductress who preyed upon a string of lonely men.
Scott was another one of the guys that was just thought he was in love with her. He thought he was crazy about her, uh sort of captivated by her. His words were, "I'm lucky that I I got out of it."
And central to the prosecution's case was the setting where Michelle had met all three men, the Great Alaskan Bush Company.
We thought it was very important that the jury understand she worked at the Bush Company and that's where she met people. It was something that [music] prior to going to trial, the defense had done their best to suppress.
The defense asked the judge to preclude the state from putting on any evidence as to where she worked.
A defense attorney gave this real elaborate speech about women are either Madonnas or [ __ ] There's no in between and if you allow Michelle to be referred to as a stripper, she will automatically be considered a [ __ ] The judge, however, had overruled the defense's request.
It was simply a fact that and that's where she worked and those were the circumstances and there [music] were certain things that legitimately you can infer from those circumstances.
But was murder one of them?
He did use her job as a stripper to explain the lengths someone would go to for money and uh money was her goal in the strip club and the prosecution portrayed it as money was her goal for this uh killing.
The defense, when they started presenting their case on October 11th, painted a totally different picture of Michelle.
Taking the stand, husband Colin testified that while Michelle may have been a stripper when she met Kent Leppink, the woman he knew was a saint.
It kills me that in their hearts it that they think Michelle had anything to do with that because I know from the bottom of my heart and soul that she did not.
What's more, Colin testified that Michelle had admitted to her stripping past not long after they'd met and together they'd put her previous life behind them.
Colin knew that she was an exotic dancer in in Alaska. That was not an issue for him.
So who did kill Kent Leppink?
The defense offered several alternatives.
The defense had said at one point that Colin acted alone over jealousy.
They also suggested that Kent had somehow killed himself.
The defense did bring up the possibility of a suicide that he had staged his own [music] death.
>> Some other theories that were that that he had paid somebody to kill him.
It was a possibility that the defense claimed might be buried in the fine print of Kent's last letter.
That's a very odd letter.
That's a letter that suggests to some when you read it that he wanted to set people up.
There's not one bit of evidence that Michelle in any way wanted it to happen or knew that it was going to happen.
And the proof, according to the defense, had [music] been caught on tape.
On October 15th, the defense rested their case by playing a recording for the jury.
It was the tape state troopers had made 11 years earlier, moments after telling Michelle Kent had been murdered.
His body was gone and that's why we're here.
Coming up, a verdict and more tears.
We cried.
We just cried.
I was shaking so hard. He was just holding me for all he was worth.
On October 22nd, 2007, [music] Michelle Linehan sat in an Alaska courtroom accused of the 1996 murder of Kent Leppink. She calmly awaited the jury's verdict.
She had reason to be confident.
There was a lot of hearsay in this case, a lot of speculation in this case, a lot of stitching together of details with hypotheses.
When the foreman [music] rose to read the verdict, it was almost too much for Kent's mom to take.
The assistant [music] to our prosecutor, I was shaking so hard. He was just holding me for all he was worth. We, the jury, find the defendant Michelle K.
Linehan guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment.
There was a little a faint little gasp, but Michelle, she looked just dead ahead. Maybe she was in shock.
Husband Colin certainly was.
He just looked uh you know like he'd just been hit by a train. You know, you couldn't help but your heart go out to him.
In January [music] of 2008, John Carlin III was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
And Michelle, convicted of putting John up to the crime, [music] at her sentencing on April 2nd, she finally spoke in court.
Prosecutors had claimed she could talk a man into murder.
Could she sway the judge's decision?
I'm not the monster that the paint that has been painted by the prosecution more than a decade ago.
I made the choice to work at the Bush Company.
While working there, I made poor choices.
I accepted gifts and money from Kent Leppink.
Michelle was convicted because she was a stripper. They just figured she was a manipulative stripper and that's what they do.
I think it's really unfortunate what a a young girl at 19 did for a year and a half of her life and be judged by that.
But as the judge handed down his sentence, he made one thing clear. He believed that Michelle had not only taken Kent [music] Leppink's money, she'd also taken his life.
I can find no distinction between the puppet who pulls the trigger and the puppeteer who pulls the strings.
Yeah, I sentence Ms. Linehan to 99 years.
>> [music] [crying] >> A veteran police officer vanishes without a trace. I knew when he didn't show up to pick his son up that something wrong. He wouldn't [music] have wouldn't answer his cell phone.
Sending Memphis police on a search for one of their own. Nate really knew that something was wrong because [music] missing work is something that he didn't do. Was the officer's disappearance work-related?
He handled high crime areas. We handled narcotics. Or was there another explanation? There was certainly a double life going on. Tony was very loving, very smooth. Tony would make you feel like you were the only one. [music] But in Tony's case, sometimes there wasn't only one.
We know he was involved with a sheriff's deputy, a jailer.
And with Tony missing, his jailer girlfriend would have some explaining to do to make sure she didn't spend time on the other side of the bars.
Labor Day, September 4th, 2006.
The party was breaking [music] up in her South Memphis backyard when Ethel Hayes glanced anxiously at her watch.
Her son, Memphis police officer Tony Hayes, had missed the party.
We know something was wrong because uh we hadn't hadn't heard from him and he wouldn't wouldn't answer his cell phone.
And and that's very strange for him.
Worried, Ethel Hayes contacted the police department later that evening and [music] filed a missing person's report.
The next morning, Memphis detectives were briefed that one of their own was missing.
It was first >> [music] >> level as a missing person's report and it had not risen to the level of a homicide investigation.
>> The Memphis Police Department had gone through his home, had had searched the outside of his property.
Investigators also turned to Tony's girlfriend, Monique Johnson, [music] to see if she had any idea where he might be.
But the 37-year-old [music] corrections officer seemed as perplexed as police.
She was asked over and over again if there had been any problems between her and Tony Hayes and she replied no, none at all. I told them that um I didn't know where he was.
Did that mean Tony was truly missing or just that he didn't want to be found?
Tony was a ladies' man and Tony talked to other women. When Monique and I first discussed that he was missing, [music] I told her, "Oh, girl, he probably didn't get with one of them women."
Over the next several days, police talked with Tony's family and friends hoping to find a clue to their fellow officer's whereabouts.
And when Tony didn't show up for work on Thursday, his first day back on the job after the Labor Day holiday, the search intensified.
They thought maybe maybe he might have just packed a bag and went out of town for a few days. They called the roll and he didn't answer roll, so that's when they really knew that something was wrong.
Memphis [music] police also feared that Tony might have run into trouble on the job. Tony Hayes had had an altercation with some suspects and there were some [music] threats leveled against him by those suspects that they would report him for being too aggressive with them.
But, were the allegations true? Or as the mystery of Tony's disappearance would prove, does the line between aggressor and victim depend on [music] who's doing the talking?
By 2005, 36-year-old Tony Hayes had been in his share of tough spots.
He went to the Persian Gulf. He served his country during wartime. He went to the Marine Corps and uh when he came back, [music] he was blessed to get on to the Shelby County Police Department at that time. After that, he applied with the Memphis Police Department. Uh started out in uniform patrol, just regular uniform patrol just as I did, and moved up to a plainclothes position.
Tony also moonlighted as a security guard in an apartment complex on the city's east side.
That's where he met Monique Johnson in 2005.
A corrections officer at the Shelby County Jail, Monique lived at the apartments [music] with her teenage son, Donald. He used to talk to flirt with a lot of women when they come through the apartments trying to talk to them.
Quite a few women appreciated Tony's attention, including Monique.
I thought he was a nice-looking man.
He was, you know, well-dressed.
He was actually outside talking to my son when I first met him. I walked out the house to get in the car. That's when Tony and I exchanged phone numbers.
But despite Tony's good looks, Monique wasn't quite ready to jump into a new relationship.
A two-time divorcee, she was in the process of trying to rebuild her life.
Monique did have a history of [music] unhealthy relationships, if you will, of men who didn't treat her right, didn't appreciate her.
Tony soon called, but Monique, unsure of what to do, turned to her friends for advice.
She was like, "And I don't know if I should talk to him because, you know, how my relationships has been." And I was like, "Well, if you feel you need to take it slow, take it slow."
>> [music] >> Eventually, Monique returned Tony's call and agreed to go out with him on one condition. I told him I didn't want to be involved with anybody that was in a relationship with somebody. He talked about his prior marriages, but that he was was was single and was not married.
Tony also told Monique that since he, too, was twice divorced, most recently from the mother of his young son, he understood why she was being cautious.
Then, over the next few weeks, Tony worked to gain her [music] trust.
He would bring her flowers. He was spending time with her. They were having two-and-three-hour phone conversations.
Things finally seemed [music] to be going Monique's way.
She moved into a new house with her son and continued to see Tony on a regular basis.
They went out of town together a couple times.
They used to go out to eat a lot. He was involved in Monique's son's life. They were close. Things were good.
>> [music] >> But a few months into the relationship, according to Monique, things started to change.
He used to call all the time.
And text. [music] And if I didn't answer, that was a problem.
It was like, >> [music] >> "Where you at? Where you been? Who you with?"
Why didn't Tony trust Monique?
One afternoon, while Monique was complaining to some friends about Tony's need to keep tabs on her, Monique's cousin [music] suggested an answer.
My cousin was like, "He sounds like somebody that's married."
Did Tony suspect Monique was sneaking around on him because he was also cheating in order to be with [music] her?
There was, according to Monique's cousin, one way to find out.
Monique called the County [music] Clerk's Office and found out that Tony had told the truth about his number of divorces, but not his number of marriages.
They told me yes, he was married. They gave me the date he was married, which was actually he got married 3 months >> [music] >> before I met him. He's having this relationship with Monique, he's married at the same time, you know, has ex-wives. So, certainly this starts to come out.
Monique, however, >> [music] >> wanted to hear it from Tony.
I asked him why did he lie about not being married. He hesitated and I was like, "Don't lie because I already know."
Reluctantly, Tony admitted that he was still married, but he also offered an explanation.
He convinced her, "Okay, my wife and I are separated. It's not anything going on anymore. You know, you and I are together. You and I are the relationship."
He said oh, that he was in the process of trying to get a divorce, but money was tight. And once he got some money, that he was going to file for a divorce.
Monique agreed to give Tony a second chance, but not before setting the record straight with the wife.
Monique Johnson called her directly [music] and stated that she was seeing Tony. She did confirm they were separated, but she didn't say how long they had been separated.
With Tony's skeleton out of the closet, [music] he and Monique gave their relationship another shot.
And for a few months, it seemed to return [music] to stable ground.
That is, until Tony's cell phone started ringing at all hours of the night. There would be times when they would be together at the house during bedtime hours, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, his cell phone would ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. Finally, Monique confronted Tony about the calls. And I was like, "Why won't you answer the phone?" And he was like, "Uh there's nobody there. I'll call back." On May 19th, Monique managed to sneak a peek at Tony's phone.
It just had just various text messages in there from women. They was texting him with some of the text messages saying, "Good morning, baby." Uh stuff like that.
Later that afternoon, Tony returned home to a house that was in shambles.
She put uh oil in his shoes, ripped clothes, ripped to shreds, pants, shirts, just tore them apart.
Keyed his car outside, keyed them up and down, and back and forth. I wrote [ __ ] on it because that's how I felt about him. And that's to me, that's what he was acting like. She was out of control.
She let her She let her jealous rage take the best of her.
Her rage spent ransacking the house, Monique calmly told Tony they were through.
I said it's over and he's like, "No, it's not over.
You can't leave. You going to be with me." He said, "If you leave me, then I'mma go ahead with the order have them, you know, to press charges."
Monique's outburst had given her lover leverage.
If Tony pressed charges over the property damage, [music] she could lose her job as a corrections officer.
She wouldn't be able to pay her bills or care for her son.
Monique, for the time being, felt trapped in the relationship.
I just stayed in it.
And they [music] didn't No charges was pressed against me. It was just his report where he had initially called and filed it.
Over the next several months, Monique and Tony tried to reconcile.
But it wasn't long before their relationship had once again broken down into an endless cycle of arguments and accusations.
They're fighting about what they usually fight about. Yeah, "You're cheating on me. [music] I know you're cheating on me. I've checked your phone. Why are you checking my phone?" You know, the back and forth. So, there was certainly jealousy on both ends.
Labor Day, September 4th, 2006.
Tony Hayes' 11-year-old son sat waiting for his father to pick him up and take him to a mid-afternoon barbecue at his grandmother's house.
But by sundown, the boy hadn't seen or heard from his father.
He tried to call his father several times, got no answer.
Called some more, never heard from Tony, and knew that there was something wrong.
Concerned, the boy called his mother, Tony's ex-wife. He called me on Labor Day and he said, "Mom," he said, um "My dad's not answering the phone."
Latonia also tried calling Tony.
She didn't get an answer, either, so she called Tony's mom. And I said, "Something is not right." I said, "I don't want to scare you. Please go fill out a missing person's report." I said, "Something is not right." So, I called the the precinct where he worked and asked them if they would send a car out to the apartments where he worked to uh see if they could see him. While Tony's mother spoke with Tony's friends at the police department, his ex-wife Latonia decided to do some investigating of her own.
She called Monique Johnson to see if she knew where Tony might be.
And I said, "Have you heard from Tony?"
She said, "He's probably on a date."
And I said, [music] "On a date?" But she was screaming it. "He's probably on a date. He's nothing but a liar and a cheater."
Coming up, police, desperate to find their fellow officer, uncover a possible clue.
That morning, about 7:00 a.m., Tony Hayes got a text message.
On the afternoon of September 5th, 2006, Memphis Police Officer Tony Hayes had been missing for more than 24 hours.
Investigators had been busy searching for their lost colleague.
They said, "This is not a man who would go missing. This is not a man who shows up late for work. [music] This not a man who doesn't call his family.
Could Tony have run into trouble related to his job?
Tony worked in the West Precinct of Memphis, which is a rough precinct.
[music] And when one works in a rough precinct, there's all the more likelihood to get into physical encounters with suspects.
A search of his house revealed [music] Tony's Lexus was missing from his garage.
But there were no signs of forced entrance or foul play.
Detectives [music] paid a visit to Tony's girlfriend, Monique Johnson, to see if she could shed any light on the case.
Her being very close to Tony Hayes, they figured that she would have a lot of information.
But when detectives asked the 37-year-old corrections officer if she knew anything about Tony's whereabouts, she insisted she didn't.
She had no other explanation other than I haven't heard from Tony since 11:00 a.m. that day.
However, she did mention that Tony had run into trouble at the apartments where he worked as a security guard.
She said, "I had talked to him about some guys at the apartment where he worked. He had got into with them."
Investigators, [music] however, couldn't help but notice Monique's demeanor as she spoke about her missing boyfriend.
She appeared to be very calm, very collected, and stared at them with this very stern gaze that frightened the detectives a little bit.
At the end of the interview, detectives handed Monique a card with their phone number and asked [music] her to call them if she heard anything.
An entire 2 days passed, and Monique Johnson never called Sergeant Mason to ask about the status of the investigation.
By Thursday afternoon, with Tony missing for more than 72 hours, Sergeant Caroline Mason contacted Monique a second time.
She told me that they needed me to [music] come downtown. They had some, you know, wanted to take a statement.
Once inside an interrogation room at Memphis PD, detectives pressed Monique [music] to tell them everything she knew about Tony's disappearance.
She was not [music] cooperative. She started to grow very defensive.
She stared at the police a lot, and it took her a very long time to answer questions. And of course, this struck the police as suspicious.
Meanwhile, outside the interrogation room, more detectives [music] poured through Tony Hayes' subpoenaed cell phone records in hopes they'd find some clue to his location.
And they did.
That morning, about 7:00 a.m., Tony Hayes got a text message from a female friend of his named Kim Chisholm.
The investigators immediately called Kim [music] and asked her to come down to the station.
Asked about her relationship with Tony, Kim admitted she'd been casually dating him.
Kim Chisholm and Tony Hayes had been seeing each other for a couple of months.
But the last she'd been in contact with Tony, according to Kim, was on the morning of September 4th.
She texted him asking him if he would like to go for a jog.
Later that morning, according to what Kim told police, she'd received a call from Tony's phone. She'd answered it expecting Tony.
Instead, Kim [music] told police, it had been Monique.
Monique actually called the woman who had been repeatedly calling Tony.
The call had abruptly dropped, but not before, according to Kim, she'd heard Monique [music] screaming at Tony in the background.
Kim could hear Monique yelling at him that she had had it with him seeing other women.
Within minutes of taking Kim's statement, detectives confronted Monique with the new information.
They knew all about her heated conversation with Tony.
Then, they accused her of killing him.
Detective asked Monique Johnson that for the sake of closure and for the sake of the family to just tell them where the body is.
>> I end up telling them.
They asked where was it? I told them I couldn't tell them where it was, but I could take them.
Monique explained to the police it had all started when she discovered a text message on Monday morning, September 4th.
I was in the bathroom getting [music] ready to go home. His phone started vibrating, and I picked it [music] up, and that was a text message.
And then it said, "Good morning, baby."
Suspecting [music] Tony was cheating on her again, Monique said she'd pocketed his phone.
Then, kissing Tony goodbye, she'd driven back to her house.
On the way, however, she'd placed a call on Tony's phone. I went to that text message and pushed send and it and it called that person that sent the text.
And just as Monique had expected, a woman answered. She was like, "Hey, baby." And I was like, "No, this isn't babe. This babe's girlfriend."
Monique had essentially caught Tony cheating. And Tony, as she explained to police, knew it.
As she was having this conversation on the telephone, she looks in her rearview mirror and sees that Tony's following very closely behind her. He was almost run into the back of my car.
And when she pulled into her garage minutes later, according to what Monique told police, Tony parked behind her and ran [music] up to her car.
And he was telling me to get out the car so we could talk, and I told him it was nothing to talk about. He had pulled on the door handle a couple times.
And my door was [music] locked.
>> He's telling her to get out of the car, to give him his phone. He needs to talk to her. He wants to be with her. He's tired of all of this. And Monique's [music] telling him it's over. This is the last straw.
Eventually, according to Monique, she'd open the car door.
And that's when she claimed Tony had lunged at her.
She gave them the story that Tony Hayes started a physical confrontation with her while she was still sitting in her car, and she got frantic and grabbed the gun that was sitting in her seat and just started firing at Tony.
Monique told investigators that she'd shot three or four times, leaving Tony dead on the garage floor.
She was afraid police wouldn't believe [music] her story.
So in her panic, she asked her 16-year-old son, Donald Wallace, to help her get rid of the body.
She says she freaked out. Uh she went into shock. She didn't know what to do. So the only thing she could think to do was have her son help her hide it.
Later that evening, Monique was in the back of a police cruiser as it pulled into the parking lot of an East Memphis apartment complex.
I was in the vehicle with like three three detectives.
And cars followed in, I showed them, you know, where the apartments were.
From her seat inside the squad car, Monique pointed out Tony Hayes' Lexus.
One of the detectives stayed with Monique Johnson inside [music] the car that they went in, while other members of the department went and opened the trunk.
Tony Hayes, presumably, was no longer a missing person. When they opened the trunk, Tony Hayes' body had been sitting in there for several days and was rotted and decomposed beyond recognition.
Monique Johnson was sitting in the car.
It was about 25 ft away from where the trunk was.
And she turned on the air conditioner because the stench from the body was so bad.
Calling in crime scene technicians to remove and identify the body, detectives also paid a visit to Tony's family, who had gathered at his mother's house.
They were already expecting the worst.
I already knew he was dead, but, you know, I was like, it it just took a lot out of me.
Meanwhile, the detectives hauled Monique back to the station. Then they took her back down to the Justice Center, and that's when she was placed under arrest.
But once Monique was booked on murder charges, the authorities faced a dilemma. She worked at the jail. This woman was a jailer. [music] Could they put Monique in the same jail where she worked?
At the police station, Monique was taken back to an interrogation room while investigators tried to figure out what to do next.
I sit in a room till >> [snorts] >> I probably like after midnight, one maybe that morning, uh they took me to Germantown jail, I think it was.
Held temporarily in a suburban Memphis jail, Monique had to adjust to life on the opposite side of the bars.
Only thing they feed you, uh is Banquet TV dinners. A lot of times, they would still be cold.
Sometimes, they would be so hard from where they let them stay in the microwave too long.
How long would Monique have to endure TV dinners behind bars?
If her account of Tony's death was true, it was a clear case of self-defense.
But was it?
Coming up, the physical evidence, according to the prosecution, raises questions about Monique's story.
Tony Hayes is 6'1".
And Monique Johnson is 5'6". She was standing over him while he had dropped.
On the morning of September 8th, 2006, [music] Monique Johnson awoke for the first time in her life inside a jail cell.
The 37-year-old corrections [music] officer had been locked up the night before after leading police to the badly decomposed body of her boyfriend, >> [music] >> Memphis cop Tony Hayes.
One could not recognize his face. We had to use a fingerprint expert to identify his body.
Monique admitted shooting Tony, but although charged with murder, she also swore she was innocent.
This was all Tony being the first aggressor, Monique being afraid and fearful for her life.
Hayes' corpse inside the trunk of his Lexus for 3 days, they began to suspect there was more to her story than a simple case of self-defense.
That body cooked. His eyeballs were starting to pop out. His skin was starting to slide off. It To me, um it almost looked like a horror movie.
The following morning, while Monique sat in jail, Memphis homicide detectives began a full investigation into her claims.
They began by questioning Monique's son, Donald Wallace, at police headquarters.
Donald Wallace was very cooperative with the detectives and told them about how his mother had to chain him to get rid of the murder weapon.
With Donald's help, detectives recovered the pistol Monique [music] used to kill Tony from a dumpster in an East Memphis suburb.
The murder weapon that Monique Johnson used to kill Tony Hayes and told her son to get rid of was a.40 caliber handgun that was Tony Hayes' personal weapon.
And that wasn't all detectives learned when they questioned Monique's son.
The night of the murder, Monique Johnson, by her own admission, left Tony Hayes to rot and heat in the trunk of his own car while she went with her family and her son to a movie and dinner.
After she shot him six times and put him in the trunk of his Lexus, she went uh and met her girlfriends and with her son for dinner and went and saw Snakes on a Plane.
It was certainly bizarre behavior, but was it merely an irrational [music] act by a woman in shock?
Or was it a deliberate attempt to disguise what she'd done?
An answer suggested itself minutes later when Monique's [music] son, Donald, revealed a surprising detail he recalled from the night of the shooting.
Donald Wallace told the police that he heard the shooting up in her master bedroom and master bathroom.
And although Monique had confessed to shooting Tony in the garage, investigators had found one peculiar detail earlier that day [music] that suggested Donald was the one telling the truth.
One thing that struck them as unusual was in her master bathroom, there were double doors that did not match. One tint was slightly darker than the other.
Lieutenant Mason was saying that the doors didn't match up. And uh she had they saw a bucket where she had been mopping, you know, getting stuff up off the floor.
Between Donald's statements [music] and the suspicious findings in Monique's bathroom, detectives suspected Monique may be hiding something.
A few hours later, they hauled her back down to police headquarters and confronted her with their findings.
They confronted her with those facts on Friday, the day after the first statement, [music] and then Monique Johnson gave a second statement and then admitted that she killed him in her master bathroom, but gave a different story [music] surrounding the murder.
According to Monique's new story, she'd eventually wrestled away and bolted up the stairs towards [music] her bedroom, but Tony, Monique claimed, had been right behind her.
This time her story was that he started a physical struggle with her in the garage and continued to hit her as she walked through her house up the stairs.
He closed the door behind us and he shoved me and I kind of like stumbled a little bit to on the bed.
Monique said that cornered in her bedroom and scared for her life, she begged Tony to leave.
I said, "Get out and leave." I said, "Cuz I'm sick of it just like you are.
I'm not willing to keep going through this."
But her words, according to Monique, only made Tony angrier.
He uh like mugged me.
And I fell up against the frame of the door and we got to fighting there. And he pushes her and she falls into the bathroom.
Scrambling to her feet, Monique said she'd retreated to her bathroom closet where she kept a gun hidden for protection.
But once she grabbed the pistol, she said Tony had merely laughed.
And he said, "You won't shoot me." And I was like, "If you don't leave, I will."
He turned around as if he was going to go.
But just as Tony reached the door, Monique said he'd suddenly whipped around and charged at her with his fists clenched.
I feared that he was going to beat me senseless and I fired the gun.
Then Monique claimed she blacked out.
And the next thing I remember, I heard my son beating on the bedroom door and calling [music] me.
He asked me what had happened and I told him that uh I had shot [music] him.
Monique told investigators she'd asked her son, Donald, to help her hide Tony's body in the trunk of his Lexus.
Then after stashing Tony's car at an East Memphis apartment complex, Monique's son picked her up.
Then she'd returned home and begun a hasty cleanup. A bullet had gone into one of those doors and she went to a construction site that was abandoned at the time, got a door and replaced it.
Monique claimed she had concocted her first story about shooting Tony in the garage to protect her son from his role in helping dispose of Tony's body.
I hate that my son had to be there. He had nothing to do with it.
And what about Monique? Was she as innocent as she claimed?
To authorities, her shifting stories cast doubt on her self-defense scenario.
[music] Even with me and him in a heated argument, he just rather leave the house.
He would never put his hands on a woman.
It just It's It's not him.
She was trying to cover for herself. Any facts [music] that were adverse to her, she was going to try to make up for.
Was Monique's account of Tony's death the truth?
According to his autopsy on September 8th, Tony Hayes had been shot a total of six times.
However, it wasn't how many times Monique shot Tony that suggested she hadn't acted in self-defense.
It was where she shot him.
Five of those shots, at least, were from the back, in his head and in his shoulders, in his back. And according to the autopsy, most of the bullets that entered Tony's back were fired from a downward trajectory. Tony Hayes is 6'1" and Monique Johnson is 5'6".
And I don't see any other way that she could have pulled off those shots if not for the fact that she was standing over him while he had dropped. He was already down by the time at least half of those shots came out. So, why did she keep shooting?
To prosecutors, the answer was clear.
Monique had aimed to kill Tony.
Monique Johnson's burning of Tony Hayes was no frantic reaction to any kind of an attack. It was deliberate and it was premeditated and it was bullet by bullet.
On February 8th, 2007, the Shelby County District Attorney's Office brought Monique's case to the grand jury.
Based on the strength of the evidence, the grand jury indicted Monique with first-degree premeditated murder.
She was given a bail of $1 million, to which one would have to post 10%. She was never able to do that and stayed in custody until trial.
Coming up, Monique takes the stand and tells her story a third time, adding a twist that just might offer the former corrections officer a ticket out.
On February 12th, [music] 2008, Monique Johnson walked into a Memphis courthouse to stand trial for murder.
She was accused of killing her boyfriend, Tony Hayes, and hiding his body in the trunk of his car.
Charged with first-degree murder, the 39-year-old corrections officer faced life in prison if convicted.
She was a cop killer. And then she involved her 16-year-old son, Donald, uh helping her to put Tony's body in a trunk.
In their opening statement, prosecutors portrayed Monique Johnson as a scorned and vindictive woman who'd savagely murdered her boyfriend after she discovered his latest act of infidelity.
He was cheating on her and she wasn't going to take it. It was cold-blood murder. It was very malicious. It was out of anger. It was out of jealousy.
It was out of rejection.
Citing the number of rounds fired, the trajectory of the bullets, and the callous means by which she tried to cover her tracks, prosecutors argued Monique murdered Tony Hayes by shooting him six times in the head and back as he cowered helplessly beneath her.
That's what this case is about.
An execution and evasion. If she was shooting one shot to get him from to stop him from coming towards her, then what explains gunshots in the back of his head and at a downward angle, which means he was down?
He was not coming towards her anymore.
There was not a threat of attack any longer.
>> Monique Johnson executed Tony Hayes by putting six bullets in him, including in the back of the head and several to the back. And then as soon as she executed him, began a course of evasion, including a path of lying and deception to his closest family members, to law enforcement officers.
In their opening argument, Monique's attorneys attacked Tony's character, describing him as an abusive man who had attacked his girlfriend after being questioned about his unfaithfulness.
It wasn't a a situation that Monique [music] planned to kill him, dump the body, and then go to see a movie and go to dinner. This was all Tony being the first aggressor, Monique being afraid and fearful for her life, and then defending herself. And after the fact, panicking.
Not knowing what to do, not knowing who she could trust, not knowing who to turn to.
But Monique's attorneys [music] asserted that September 4th, 2006 wasn't the first time Tony had assaulted Monique.
According to the defense, Monique had been pushed to the breaking point by Tony's abuse.
This case was about the things that happened during the course of their relationship to lead up to the day in the bathroom when uh Monique was faced with uh with the choice of uh sparing her own life or taking Tony Hayes's life.
As evidence of the abuse Monique suffered under Tony, the defense presented several family members who were called observing bruises on Monique's body.
She said I have a bruise on her neck and her face. I used to always ask her, "What happened?" She wouldn't tell him.
I have seen a bruise that was on her upper thigh that looked more like a foot bruise.
I have um seen like the finger marks around the neck where she tried to hide it with the makeup.
On cross, prosecutors fired back, arguing there were no official reports or evidence of physical abuse in Tony and Monique's relationship.
There was nothing on paper. There was nothing on the record that showed Monique Johnson had ever been abused.
She had never gone to the hospital and filed a report. She had There were no pictures on documents Instead, the prosecutors argued it was Monique who was the true aggressor in the relationship.
As evidence, [music] they pointed to her rampage in May of 2006, months before the shooting. She not just vandalized his property, but did it in a very deliberate and methodical way, cutting clothes garment by garment, keying words on his car and his headboard. She didn't seem like she was afraid or that she was an abused woman. [music] Yeah, cuz if you were an abused woman, the first thing you would not do is vandalize somebody's [music] house, because you would think he's going to come after me.
Which Monique was the real one?
The abused girlfriend described by the defense or the jealous lover who, according to prosecutors, would lash out when crossed?
On February 14th, Valentine's Day, the jury would get to see for themselves.
That afternoon, Monique took the stand in her own defense.
During Monique's testimony, we walked through the entire relationship, how after about three or four months, there was the first incident of violence and Tony uh hit her.
It was abuse that, according to Monique's testimony, she had frequently suffered at Tony's hands.
He would punch me in my thighs, in my upper thighs, my upper arms.
And I mean I'm easy to bruise, so it didn't take much, but I say I my leg my thighs would be sore from where he would be in to punch me in them when we be fighting. She described episodes of him throwing her up against the wall and having his neck uh hand on her neck choking her. And him her begging him to let her go. And then she described vivid sexual abuse of him forcing her to have sex. And she got very choked up at the trial when she started talking about this.
Then, Monique explained how she feared for her life the day of the shooting.
I thought he was going to beat my ass. Before I could blink, he had turned back around and had took like one step toward me and that's when I just thought shoot. Did you want to kill Tony Hayes?
No.
It was the only time in the trial [music] we saw emotion from her.
And it was explicit emotion. [music] On February 15th, the trial broke for deliberations.
As the jury filed out of the courtroom, everyone was left wondering the same thing.
What would the jury consider more credible?
The physical evidence presented by the state or Monique's dramatic testimony?
Coming up, the verdict in Monique Johnson's trial [music] is revealed.
On February 15th, 2008, 39-year-old Monique Johnson sat in a holding cell at the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis, Tennessee.
Accused of shooting her boyfriend, police officer Tony Hayes, Monique admitted to pulling the trigger.
She said it was self-defense, but the prosecutors called it murder.
And that afternoon, as the minutes slowly ticked by, it was up to a jury to decide.
When the jurors went to deliberate, um it seemed like forever. I was just in this little tank waiting.
Finally, at 7:00 p.m., the jury announced it had reached a decision. But which one would it be?
Everybody that was watching the trial, the public, the family, the friends, even the media, seemed to be pretty sure that this was going to result in a first-degree murder conviction.
And Monique seemed just as certain.
When bailiffs led her into the courtroom minutes later, she avoided the jurors' gaze.
Little could have prepared Monique or anyone else there for what they heard when the foreman rose and read the verdict.
Instead of first-degree murder, jurors found Monique guilty of the lesser charge of reckless homicide.
I was shocked by the result. The jury heard the same facts that we did.
Rather than facing life in prison, reckless homicide meant Monique faced a maximum [music] sentence of just four years.
I wanted to scream.
I ran out of that courtroom. It it was like they found his body all over again.
I knew it was less of a charge than what they had charged me with, but what it was exactly was I did not know.
Not only had Monique avoided a first-degree murder conviction, she'd also avoided going to prison.
In light of the jail time Monique had served prior to trial, Judge Paula Skahan commuted her four-year sentence to probation.
The requirements was that Monique was to go to counseling, maintain full-time employment, uh do some community service, and um report to her probation officer. I just couldn't understand how they could just let her just walk away with just you know, just with so less of time and knowing that she had admitted that she had killed him.
Following her trial, Monique retreated home to her family and attempted to restart her life.
But not, she claims, without regrets.
I hate that it happened the way it did.
To this day, I still care about Tony. I was in love with Tony. And let's I miss him. Tony was shot four times in the back and then once in the back of the head. Monique Johnson got away with cold-blooded murder.
>> [music] [crying]
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