True Crime Vault: Deadly Dance in Texas

Speaker 1 This show is supported by Hot and Deadly, a podcast from ID. Hot and Deadly brings you American true crime that is often stranger than fiction.

Speaker 1 Every week, dive into shocking stories of murder and betrayal, from IRS impersonators in Kentucky to a South Carolina businessman deceived by those closest to him.

Speaker 1 You'll hear first-hand accounts from investigators, witnesses, and family members as they share the chilling details behind each case.

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Speaker 1 This is the 2020 True Crime Vault.

Speaker 4 I had always wanted since I was a little kid, I'd see these older couples dancing. Every step was perfect.

Speaker 5 They were one.

Speaker 4 He was a wonderful dancer and he introduced himself to me. My name's Joseph.

Speaker 8 My dad went, I think on a lark, to a dance class and he got the mojo back like that.

Speaker 10 She's around 49, 50 years old, smoking hot, looks younger than she was.

Speaker 11 The next day, she's like, hey, sorry, I'm in love with my dance partner.

Speaker 14 I was like, really?

Speaker 15 I think my

Speaker 15 Dixon had an obsession with Rochelle Shatina. He either wanted her to suffer or he wanted her back.

Speaker 18 Ma'am, ma'am, what's going on? Dr. Sonye was found shot and stabbed to death.

Speaker 4 There are police cars everywhere. There's crime scene tape all around.
It was just absolute chaos.

Speaker 5 It was an in-and-out job, a hit.

Speaker 21 But who would be out to get this nice, happy man about town?

Speaker 22 Rochelle Shatina felt that she was being followed.

Speaker 24 Is there somebody that's actually watching the doctor and Rochelle?

Speaker 4 To me, it was like it had to be like an ex-girlfriend or something.

Speaker 25 This is the oldest story in the book.

Speaker 26 This is revenge.

Speaker 3 This is pride.

Speaker 5 This is a huge whodunit.

Speaker 27 This once convicted mastermind of a killer, he's out on the streets.

Speaker 8 I cannot believe that they did this. Let's go get these guys.

Speaker 28 Lubbock is on the high plains.

Speaker 28 When you fly in on an airplane, you can't help but notice the crop circles all around.

Speaker 8 Lubbock is a blue-collar town. It's also a college town.

Speaker 22 We get a lot of visitors from all over the world who live and die for Buddy Holly and just want to come and see where the music was made.

Speaker 32 Going faster than a roller coaster.

Speaker 34 The great thing about it is if you look west on any given night, the sunsets are absolutely to die for.

Speaker 27 It's God's wonderful painting dumped on all of us for our enjoyment every day.

Speaker 15 You can't see better sunsets and sunrises and thunderstorms and everything else coming in.

Speaker 15 It's the people that drive it. There's no better people probably anywhere in the world.

Speaker 36 And one of the people who embodied the spirit of Lubbock was Dr.

Speaker 38 Joseph Sonier.

Speaker 37 Dr.

Speaker 39 Joseph Sonier was a successful businessman, multi-millionaire.

Speaker 22 Good-looking guy, sharp dresser, likes to have a good time.

Speaker 27 I think this is probably a guy that a lot of ladies would have their eye on in a hurry, and he was okay with that.

Speaker 8 He was a single man in his late 40s with disposable income and an empty house.

Speaker 41 He's living the single life and having a fun time.

Speaker 38 So it wasn't about getting married.

Speaker 41 I don't think he would have gotten married again.

Speaker 41 He never did the whole dating scene in college. He was married at 19.
He married his high school sweetheart.

Speaker 42 Find the kind of love that people write about.

Speaker 41 We all love Becky.

Speaker 13 Her sister's dad.

Speaker 8 My dad was the most supportive person in my life. My mom was our emotional support.

Speaker 8 He was the one who was going to push us to succeed, push us to follow our dreams.

Speaker 43 Joseph and Becky broke up when, after 27 years of marriage, Becky up and left him for another man.

Speaker 8 She was the only person that he had ever been with and ever dated and ever fallen in love with.

Speaker 8 When they got divorced, it was a shock to him. Everything he'd worked for in his life was

Speaker 8 evaporated in one second.

Speaker 44 Becky remarried and shockingly, her second husband murdered her and then killed himself.

Speaker 16 It was

Speaker 46 just completely

Speaker 47 unfathomable. I mean

Speaker 43 unimaginable.

Speaker 47 My dad, he came in after she was murdered and he became like our guide about how to handle this tragedy.

Speaker 37 So Dr.

Speaker 25 Sonia is 48 years old.

Speaker 39 He's single.

Speaker 38 He wants to do something new with his life.

Speaker 37 He doesn't know what, but he wants to live.

Speaker 25 And he takes a chance.

Speaker 8 He went, I think, on a lark, to a dance class, ballroom and salsa and swing and things like that. And within this dance community, he found his confidence again.

Speaker 8 And as an added benefit, he started to meet beautiful single women who were also in his age range.

Speaker 46 So that's how he was able to start dating them.

Speaker 8 And he got the mojo back like that.

Speaker 51 So how did you feel about the women that he dated?

Speaker 8 The truth is we liked most of them.

Speaker 52 The Sonia children have a tradition with their dad. They all go to a Texas tech game every fall together.

Speaker 39 But one year, Dr. Sonia brings someone new.

Speaker 8 She's blonde, she's tall, she's gorgeous.

Speaker 43 It's the first date, and he's bringing you around his family, which is that's nerve-wracking for some people.

Speaker 4 I mean, it was the first date.

Speaker 4 It really wasn't a big deal to me. I certainly wasn't nervous about it.

Speaker 22 Rochelle Satina is a 52-year-old single mom of four boys.

Speaker 8 She knew how to handle herself in a social situation around his sons, were tough critics, you know, and we gave her a thumbs up.

Speaker 47 I thought that she was a very nice, lovely person.

Speaker 28 My dad and her seemed to have a really good time together.

Speaker 28 Rochelle and Dr. Sonier traveled to California to visit Dr.
Sonia's grandchildren and that seemed to make her very happy.

Speaker 10 Where's your headache?

Speaker 8 She had a great time. She came over to the house.
We played with my kids. It couldn't have gone better.

Speaker 10 I know what's the matter with that.

Speaker 4 She's a smart girl, aren't you?

Speaker 28 It seemed like a good match. They got along really well.
He seemed to be having fun, and he was starting his life anew.

Speaker 8 She was stunning.

Speaker 14 She kept in shape.

Speaker 8 I think they had an incredible

Speaker 8 sexual relationship. I think that they were

Speaker 8 very much enjoying each other.

Speaker 56 So he was smitten.

Speaker 8 He was.

Speaker 28 Dr. Sonia, he may have been a little cautious about, you know, jumping to marriage right away.

Speaker 8 It was constant pressure every step of the way following the LA trip.

Speaker 37 In your mind, he was never going to put a ring on it.

Speaker 23 That's right.

Speaker 57 Some of the Sonier kids have said that their dad told them that you were pressuring him for marriage.

Speaker 4 Right, and I've heard that as well.

Speaker 4 All I can say is there was never a discussion about marriage.

Speaker 57 So when they say she was pressuring dad to marry me, that's not true.

Speaker 4 That's not true. What I was looking for was a committed relationship with a good person and that was it.
That was absolutely it.

Speaker 28 Dr. Sonier for Rochelle's 50th birthday decided to take her on a really big adventure to Paris, the city of lights where you know love is everywhere.

Speaker 8 And I told him to sit her down and have a direct conversation with with her that Paris is not an engagement trip and that he is not going there to buy her a ring.

Speaker 8 And he said, do I really need to do that?

Speaker 47 And I said, I said, yes.

Speaker 4 It was a birthday gift for my 50th birthday. I was just over the moon.
It was really a dream come true.

Speaker 57 You guys put a lock on a bridge.

Speaker 4 It was a love lock.

Speaker 4 Joseph wrote his name on it and I wrote my name on it.

Speaker 57 It's romantic.

Speaker 10 It's very romantic.

Speaker 57 What do you think about when you think about that moment?

Speaker 4 That moment,

Speaker 4 it was very, very special. It locked in that love that we felt at that moment for me.

Speaker 4 The tradition is you write your names on the locks and you put it on the bridge and you throw the key into the Seine River and that locks in the moment forever.

Speaker 49 Rochelle talked about that moment on the Paris Bridge as if their love would last forever.

Speaker 16 But a few weeks later, the unthinkable happened.

Speaker 28 Police were first alerted to something terribly awry having happened at Dr. Sonia's home when a landscaper that he had for his home called 911.

Speaker 4 Evil followed me straight to Joseph's door. And like it or not, Evil followed me right there.

Speaker 4 911, what's the emergency?

Speaker 17 Somebody has broken a window

Speaker 17 in the back, and the doctor did not show up for work today.

Speaker 37 On a hot July morning, Joseph Sonier was found dead in his home.

Speaker 37 Oh no, I'm

Speaker 37 God!

Speaker 37 Ma'am, Ma'am, what's going on?

Speaker 39 His landscaper found him shot and stabbed multiple times.

Speaker 17 There was a bullet that was laying on the ground.

Speaker 10 I need somebody to hurry.

Speaker 42 Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 36 Zach Johnson, a homicide detective with the Lubbock Police, heads to the scene.

Speaker 3 Dr.

Speaker 56 Sonia's neighborhood, what kinds of crimes would typically happen there?

Speaker 5 In my experience, it's been residential burglaries, prowler calls, suspicious persons, stuff of that nature. Not murders, right? Not murders, not violent crime at all.

Speaker 53 But this neighborhood had to be freaked out by this killer.

Speaker 3 They were.

Speaker 5 They were very scared because this doesn't happen, especially to somebody that's so esteemed.

Speaker 60 When I first covered this case, Detective Johnson took me to the crime scene.

Speaker 39 As soon as Zach Johnson walked into the house, he knew immediately that this was not a robbery gone bad.

Speaker 9 This is Dr.

Speaker 5 Sonia's house. There was...

Speaker 16 Artwork in the home.

Speaker 5 There were very expensive pieces of furniture. There was iPads, all kinds of things just kind of laying around, you know.
Nothing was taken. It was an in-and-out job.

Speaker 24 Whoever came in this house came in to kill the doctor. In the dining room is an initial scene where you have the windows pushed in and you have a trail of blood.

Speaker 5 And that crime scene was very succinct. It wasn't spread out.
You had the overturned chair, you had the glass on the floor, and you had the casings.

Speaker 62 So you knew that he was shot right here.

Speaker 24 Investigators see now a Gatorade bottle and a shell casing with the hole blown out of the Gatorade bottle suggesting somebody came up with the idea of a crude silencer, which I can tell you doesn't really work.

Speaker 5 We were dealing with something that was a hit of, you know, of sorts, that somebody had come to this house and to kill this person specifically. To me, it was just mind-boggling.

Speaker 5 You know, why is this man dead? He's a well-respected citizen in this community. Why is he dead?

Speaker 38 The Sonia children are devastated.

Speaker 59 I mean, first their mother is murdered, then their father is murdered.

Speaker 38 This just doesn't happen.

Speaker 8 It doesn't happen. Forget about the coincidence of it all, the statistical likelihood that both parents would be murdered, separate occasions, is unfathomable.

Speaker 49 I got the call the day before the two-year anniversary of my mother's death.

Speaker 47 I thought maybe it had something to do with her death. That's how out of left field and completely out of nowhere this was.

Speaker 8 We started racking our brains, well, it's gotta be some type of girlfriend situation. If it's not a robbery, it's somebody he knows.

Speaker 4 His housekeeper, Fran, called me.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 she said that something was going on at Joseph's house. The police were there, and they wanted me to come down.

Speaker 22 When something like this happens, the first person police talk to is the closest loved one, and that would be Rochelle Shatina.

Speaker 4 I was in shock.

Speaker 4 I was devastated.

Speaker 29 This is Rochelle.

Speaker 5 Meeting with Rochelle that very first time, I don't know a lot about her.

Speaker 5 In the very beginning, you always have to consider people the closest because 90% of the time, it's going to be the people that are closest to our victims that commit the crime against them.

Speaker 60 How would you describe your relationship with Dr.

Speaker 5 Sonia?

Speaker 66 He's the love of my life.

Speaker 5 There were a couple of things that were mentioned by her that struck me as odd.

Speaker 23 Rochelle Shatina had felt a little uneasy in the previous weeks before the murder took place.

Speaker 22 That someone was watching her.

Speaker 23 Maybe she was being followed.

Speaker 34 Something didn't seem quite right.

Speaker 66 I'd gone in to work out. And I pulled into the parking lot and there was this big, creepy looking guy sitting there

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 66 at the door like he was looking for someone or watching someone.

Speaker 24 It gives the investigators another sort of perspective. Is there some sort of surveillance or somebody that's actually watching the doctor and Rochelle?

Speaker 66 It's dark outside and Joseph and I both saw a flash from the outside. We laughed and kind of joked about you know maybe somebody was following us.

Speaker 19 Right from the beginning Rochelle's attitude is pointing the fingers at all kinds of people. She starts offering a laundry list of potential candidates.

Speaker 66 There's just, you know, some girls that he dated. Joseph would get this, these horrible

Speaker 66 text messages, you know, calling him,

Speaker 66 you know, you're such a and whatever.

Speaker 37 Rochelle starts telling Johnson about different ex-girlfriends in Joseph Saunier's life as people who could possibly hold a grudge against him.

Speaker 66 I got a letter in my mailbox.

Speaker 66 It was from this girl who said that she met Joseph on the internet

Speaker 48 and that

Speaker 66 they had sex for money, basically. And he said, you know, this is obviously someone trying to drive a wedge in between us.

Speaker 57 Was there a sense of who might be trying to drive a wedge between the two of you?

Speaker 4 To me, it was like it had to be like an ex-girlfriend or something.

Speaker 51 But Johnson has an idea.

Speaker 25 that maybe it's somebody in Rochelle's past that has it in for Dr.

Speaker 37 Sonia.

Speaker 5 So there could be somebody that you think we need to look at.

Speaker 60 A couple of people. Okay, tell me about one of them.

Speaker 66 Dr. Thomas Michael Dixon.

Speaker 66 He's a plastic surgeon in Amarillo.

Speaker 3 Hello, I'm Dr.

Speaker 5 Mike Dixon.

Speaker 69 If you're considering plastic surgery, make sure your surgeon is certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgeon.

Speaker 4 He had a med spa in Amarillo and I went there to get Botox injections.

Speaker 57 What attracted you to him?

Speaker 4 He was funny, he was very witty, and he was enjoyable. It was, you know, if it can be enjoyable to have somebody put needles in your face, you know, I guess that's about as enjoyable as it could be.

Speaker 37 Rochelle and Mike Dixon had dated for about a year and a half, and then they broke up. And then Rochelle started dating again soon after seeing Joseph Sonier.

Speaker 5 Did he know about your current relationship?

Speaker 66 He knew that I was dating Joseph.

Speaker 66 He called him by name

Speaker 66 in a series of text messages trying to get me to go out with him and to meet him for coffee.

Speaker 5 So he wanted you to see him on the side, basically.

Speaker 66 He wanted me to come back to him.

Speaker 66 I told him no.

Speaker 43 But the real question is, was Dixon the kind of man to take no for an answer?

Speaker 37 Johnson wants to know what Dixon knows.

Speaker 52 So he jumps in his car and drives two hours to Amarillo, Texas to talk to Mike Dixon, secretly recording him when they start talking.

Speaker 5 Hi, I hate to come bugging you at your house in all hours of the night.

Speaker 12 What's going on?

Speaker 5 Well, we've had a homicide in Lubbock, Texas today. I told him it was Rochelle's boyfriend, and his first thing was, Oh, I don't know anything about him.

Speaker 6 I don't know anything about him. I haven't talked to her in months and months.

Speaker 39 Zach Johnson knows someone's lying.

Speaker 3 The question is: who's lying?

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Speaker 5 They make everything about themselves.

Speaker 43 I can't.

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Speaker 5 I've got a guy that is dead in his house. It looks like a burglary, but there's nothing stolen.
One of the things that we're trying to establish is, okay, why is Dr. Sonia dead?

Speaker 5 The crime scene pretty much is a little disorganized. And there was evidence at the crime scene that suggested it was a hit.
I'm not dealing with a professional hitman.

Speaker 5 So we have to figure out, okay, what's going on in this man's life? And we talked to Rochelle, and all of a sudden, we may have a reason why it all kind of came together and he was murdered.

Speaker 28 Rochelle, having told Detective Johnson about her former boyfriend, immediately sent up red flags.

Speaker 44 Was there somebody else part of this whole craziness?

Speaker 66 This is Dr. Thomas Michael Dixon,

Speaker 66 plastic surgeon in MRLO.

Speaker 6 Hello, I'm Dr.

Speaker 5 Mike Dixon.

Speaker 37 So you have this information from Rochelle.

Speaker 38 Could have been Mike Dixon.

Speaker 5 So I'm still trying to figure out what's going on. And I knew, well, we're going to get a little bit more insight into this thing.
We talked to Dr. Dixon.

Speaker 5 Well, we've had a homicide in Lubbock, Texas today. I told him it was Rochelle's boyfriend.
And his first thing was, oh, I don't know anything about him.

Speaker 6 I don't know anything about him. I haven't talked to her in months and months.

Speaker 5 And I was like, okay, well, that's a little odd because in our interview with Rochelle, she told us that he knew about the relationship.

Speaker 12 You know, I'll be honest with you, I love, love, loved that woman.

Speaker 5 I really did. He was obsessed with Rochelle.
He was having a lot of problems getting over this breakup. He just couldn't seem to let her go.

Speaker 12 I really had fallen head over heels. In fact,

Speaker 12 made a lot of life changes for her.

Speaker 5 We've learned that he's already had a divorce as a result of this affair with Rochelle, but he's not quite over her yet. You know, I've learned that he still loves her.

Speaker 5 He's got a lot of feelings for her. He's very upfront about, yeah, I wanted her back.

Speaker 80 There probably was a very close relationship there between Mike Dixon and Rochelle Shatina. They grew apart because Mike wasn't interested in marriage.

Speaker 2 Rochelle seemed to think that at one point Dr.

Speaker 34 Dixon was probably going to propose to her.

Speaker 48 And there was a buildup leading to her birthday and she thought it was coming and maybe there's a ring and instead it's a subscription to the Tea of the Month Club.

Speaker 11 And she went ballistic and said, well, it didn't.

Speaker 82 I mean, I remember clearly, it's not a big f ⁇ ing rock.

Speaker 12 And I said, no, it's not. Like a wedding ring.

Speaker 57 When Dixon talked to police, he talked about how he gave you this Tea of the Month club birthday gift. And it really, really angered you.

Speaker 4 It wasn't about the fact that it was tea. Tea is lovely.
I don't happen to drink it. It wasn't the gift that upset me.

Speaker 4 He could have shown up at my doorstep and given me a hug and said, happy birthday. I am so glad to be here with you today.

Speaker 4 And I would have been the happiest girl in the world. He was not present in any emotionally supportive aspect of my world.

Speaker 37 Despite the breakup between Dixon and Michelle, they stayed in contact with each other.

Speaker 56 They texted, they went to dinners together, and they even planned a weekend getaway.

Speaker 12 She was like, hey, you want to put this back together? I was like, yeah, I did.

Speaker 12 And so let's plan a trip, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 5 They had agreed to go on a trip. All she had to do was go up there.

Speaker 12 The next day, she's like, hey, sorry I'm in love with my dance partner. Okay.
Wide around. I was like, really?

Speaker 5 But boom, she drops the hammer on him and says, oh, by the way,

Speaker 5 I'm in love with my dance partner.

Speaker 57 Some would say, well, you're throwing it in his face a little bit.

Speaker 4 Well, no, I wasn't throwing it in his face. There was, you know, an ugliness.
from him to me. And it's like, you know what? If you want to have a getaway, enjoy it.
Go, enjoy your getaway.

Speaker 4 I don't want to be a part of it.

Speaker 28 After Rochelle ended the relationship with Dr. Dixon, he started dating a medical student who was a couple of decades his junior.

Speaker 37 This young medical student, Ashley Wolbert, actually happened to be his alibi because they were having sushi the night of the murder at a restaurant in Amarillo.

Speaker 17 What has he told you about Rochelle?

Speaker 17 She was

Speaker 17 like his girlfriend,

Speaker 17 she was really pretty.

Speaker 17 They dated. dated.

Speaker 17 Him and his wife were separated. They started dating.

Speaker 38 Johnson is just stumped.

Speaker 37 The alibis of Mike Dixon, of Rochelle, and of Dr. Sonia's ex-girlfriends, they all check out.

Speaker 25 There's still the stalker that Rochelle thinks is following her, this big burly man that Rochelle saw in the backyard.

Speaker 5 There's something not right here, but

Speaker 58 that's all that I have.

Speaker 5 This is a huge whodunit.

Speaker 46 What was it that broke this case wide open for you?

Speaker 5 When Paul Reynolds called the police department.

Speaker 23 My name's Paul Reynolds.

Speaker 6 I think we got a crime that happened down here in Lubbock.

Speaker 17 It's a homicide.

Speaker 36 Who is Paul Reynolds?

Speaker 5 Believe it or not, there are good people in the world, and Paul Reynolds is one of them, and he was scared.

Speaker 25 Paul Reynolds is an aspiring nurse who's fallen on hard times.

Speaker 45 So he's crashing on the couch with his friend in Amarillo, who then tries to commit suicide by cutting his wrists and taking pills.

Speaker 49 And then that friend starts talking about murder.

Speaker 84 I'm in with this friend of mine. He said he went down there and he said he shot the guy.
And what is your

Speaker 84 roommate's name? His name's Dave Shepherd.

Speaker 15 S-H-E-P-A-R-D.

Speaker 45 And that was a name that Detective Johnson had heard before.

Speaker 19 We have Dr. Mike Dixon, we have Paul Reynolds, we have Dave Shepard.

Speaker 79 He's quick-witted and kind of a sexy smart.

Speaker 19 A picture is starting to emerge. How could they possibly be related to the murder of Dr.
Sonier?

Speaker 37 Detective Zach Johnson has just gotten his biggest lead in the murder of Joseph Sonier.

Speaker 50 And that suspect's name is Dave Shepard.

Speaker 45 The divorced father of three unemployed salesmen with a criminal record, that was a name that Detective Detective Johnson had heard before when he was talking to Mike Dixon's girlfriend, Ashley Woolbert.

Speaker 66 He said that Dave was going to come over because he had some cigars for Dave from Bermuda.

Speaker 15 He's just a common criminal. And, you know, I don't know how to put it any other way.

Speaker 80 David Shepard has a very long list of people that he's wronged over the years.

Speaker 69 David Shepard had been convicted of stealing $30,000 from a business that he was involved in.

Speaker 74 Dad didn't have money. Dad wasn't good at keeping money.
I was 17 working part-time after school and he borrowed money from me.

Speaker 24 As the police look into the background of Dave Shepard, they quickly learn that his new best friend is Dr. Mike Dixon, the former boyfriend of Rochelle.

Speaker 45 These two were an odd couple.

Speaker 43 I mean, you got the down-and-out con man and the respected doctor, but they did have something in common.

Speaker 80 Shepard was going through a divorce. Dr.
Dixon was going through a divorce. That relationship formed over the shared experience.

Speaker 22 This entire situation began, as police found out, when these two men, Mike Dixon and Dave Shepard, bonded over cigars and martinis.

Speaker 85 Dad wanted to be Mike.

Speaker 85 Buy the nice house that's right outside of town. In the canyon, it's all private, like the whole nine yards.

Speaker 86 Mike had it all. And he would always promise us, one day I'm going to get you these things and we're going to live in the big house and you're all going to have your own rooms.

Speaker 86 You can just paint it however you want. You get whatever you want.
And he wanted that and Mike had it.

Speaker 38 So he wanted to live the dream life of this wildly successful person, it sounds like.

Speaker 43 But was he willing to do the work to be that person?

Speaker 44 No.

Speaker 25 And Paul Reynolds had been living with Shepard for a few weeks.

Speaker 38 So he gives police insights into who this guy is as well.

Speaker 87 Personally, I think he's just got super low self-esteem. I think he's just out there trying to find anybody that will convince him that he's something.

Speaker 37 Detectives are beginning to believe that Mike Dixon found the perfect person to help him get back with Rochelle.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I'll be honest with you, I love, love, love that woman.

Speaker 25 And if not, get back with her, disrupt her new love life.

Speaker 87 Something happened between these two

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 made Dave

Speaker 42 think that he needed to avenge Mike.

Speaker 42 And apparently Dixon was not only going along with it, but he was going to pay him to do it.

Speaker 19 In the minds of investigators, Dixon, they think, is a puppet master and Shepard the puppet.

Speaker 24 It's around this time that police learned that Dave Shepard recently had a financial windfall.

Speaker 86 Dad had money out of the blue. He didn't ever have money.

Speaker 74 We asked, how do you have money? He said, I'm doing some work for Mike and he paid me early.

Speaker 37 With the hotline tip from Reynolds linking Shepard to Sonia's murder and with the recent evidence that Dixon made a payment to Shepard, Zach Johnson's investigation kicks into high gear.

Speaker 5 And so we move on to arrest warrants.

Speaker 36 Who do you bring in first?

Speaker 5 We went and we brought in David first.

Speaker 5 And he goes, I want my attorney.

Speaker 48 Dr. Dickens, do you have anything you want to say?

Speaker 5 Dr. Dixon comes in.
And of course, he's madder than a hornet.

Speaker 15 I mean, this is. You're under arrest at 2.15 in the morning.

Speaker 12 You're under arrest, correct. And this is probably your only opportunity to tell me what happened.

Speaker 82 I want an attorney then.

Speaker 46 Shepard and Dixon are both arrested and each is held on $10 million bond.

Speaker 37 Neither one of them talks until the investigators offer Shepard a deal.

Speaker 19 For three months, he stays silent. Finally, they say to Shepard, if you confess to this murder and you do it on tape, we in turn will take the death penalty off the table.

Speaker 15 It was real important for us in the Sonia family to figure out what happened. And so it answered a lot of questions for a lot of people.

Speaker 14 What are you going to be calling Dave, David?

Speaker 10 That'll be fine, sir.

Speaker 5 What he tells us is pretty chilling because it's very cold. This whole thing was like this stair step.
We knew where it stopped, stopped with the murder, but it had been building for months.

Speaker 11 Tell me about y'all's relationship, how it evolved.

Speaker 16 Two or three years ago, we were at a smoke shop.

Speaker 12 He's quick-witted, I'm kind of sassy-smart, and we just kind of hit it off. Smoking cigars is a very sociable thing, and we just connected and hooked up.

Speaker 12 When was the first time that he ever mentioned to you

Speaker 12 this

Speaker 14 Rochelle Shatina?

Speaker 78 My best estimate is September, October.

Speaker 9 She's around 49, 50 years old, smoking hot, looks younger than she was, thought she was great.

Speaker 10 He pretty much wanted to break up Dr.

Speaker 9 Sonia and Rochelle.

Speaker 36 They had this book, a complete book of dirty tricks that they were trying to execute on Dr.

Speaker 51 Sonia.

Speaker 43 What were some of the things they came up with?

Speaker 5 They were going to get this porn subscription, like child gay porn, and they were going to send it to Dr. Sony's office.

Speaker 78 I gave him one suggestion to go to an adult bookstore and buy the most obscene, nastiest man-boy love association book you could and buy him a subscription and send it to his office.

Speaker 78 Because I said, that's a gift that'll keep giving.

Speaker 5 They were thinking that was going to ruin his reputation, his professional reputation.

Speaker 16 He asked me if I knew of a girl in Lubbock

Speaker 9 that

Speaker 10 wouldn't mind making $1,000 to cause a problem.

Speaker 9 He was asking me if I knew somebody that would pretend to be like a sugar baby of Dr. Sonia.

Speaker 65 I think Mike would have been embarrassed to tell me he was doing that because he knows I would have told him, quit being a dummy.

Speaker 3 You know, this is ridiculous.

Speaker 47 Why are you wasting this time?

Speaker 78 He said, we have to follow him.

Speaker 79 Let's take a little trip to Lubbock.

Speaker 10 We drove down to Lubbock.

Speaker 78 He was already trying to tell me where they'd go and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 37 Pretty soon Dave Shepard is taking trips to Lubbock on his own and police, well they think that's at the direction of Mike Dixon.

Speaker 9 And he paid for everything, paid for my gas, paid for my meals.

Speaker 14 And so

Speaker 14 when you went to his house, tell me about getting out and actually going back there to do the recon.

Speaker 10 Don't know exactly the first time I had done it. Enter his backyard,

Speaker 10 opened the gate, took a picture, closed the gate, and left.

Speaker 4 It looked like a camera flash.

Speaker 58 We kind of shrugged our shoulders and said, that was weird.

Speaker 14 Did you ever ask Michael Dixon, what are we doing?

Speaker 14 What's the next course of action?

Speaker 13 We were at a club in Amarella.

Speaker 10 Somebody volunteered.

Speaker 13 They said, hit him with a board.

Speaker 9 I said, you can probably kill him.

Speaker 13 And Doc went.

Speaker 13 Like that. We'll talk about that later.

Speaker 23 So they're having drinks one night and so so far it's been nothing more than casual pranks, but you're talking about what comes next.

Speaker 20 And you got to outdo what you did the last time.

Speaker 22 And now the talk turns to something a little bit more sinister.

Speaker 37 What he says about the last moments of Dr.

Speaker 51 Sonia's life would surprise even investigators.

Speaker 30 Coming to Disney Plus in Hulu.

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Speaker 40 Can't wait to see you guys. We love you.

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Speaker 23 What's going on? Our tour plane burned? No.

Speaker 69 We cannot miss Christmas.

Speaker 32 Nothing can stop us from getting off now.

Speaker 17 Only

Speaker 17 you won't be alone this trip.

Speaker 28 You lost all three of your passports?

Speaker 32 It's Christmas. Anything can happen, right?

Speaker 30 A very Jonas Christmas movie, now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu with a TVPGDL.

Speaker 90 It started with a phone call. In the early hours of the morning.

Speaker 28 911, what is the address to your emergency?

Speaker 90 A terrified woman tells the operator she's been kidnapped, assaulted, and that she's trapped in a room with her attacker.

Speaker 90 He's fallen asleep, so she quietly and ever so carefully finds his phone and calls for help.

Speaker 28 Is there any way you can get out of the building? I don't know without waking him out again.

Speaker 90 This 911 call began an investigation that would turn the town of Ashland into a crime scene.

Speaker 92 We've got something something big going on here.

Speaker 71 The first thing that hit my mind is a monster.

Speaker 90 A new series from ABC Audio and 2020, The Hand in the Window. Out now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 79 Anyone a break? Are you alright?

Speaker 82 If If you need a bath, let me walk just a second.

Speaker 79 That's fine.

Speaker 24 When you have a suspect, we literally provide you in a very straightforward manner.

Speaker 9 He was saying, well, I'd just like to cost him some problems.

Speaker 24 Play by play, frame by frame.

Speaker 9 He said we have to follow him.

Speaker 51 Of a crime that's occurred from the very beginning.

Speaker 65 How could this get any better?

Speaker 34 David Shepard is singing like a canary, implicates Dr. Dixon in the plot, said he had to get even with this guy for basically taking his girl away.

Speaker 10 And he pretty much wanted to break up Dr.

Speaker 9 Sony and Rochelle.

Speaker 19 Shepherd tells police that while they're drinking the whiskey and sharing the cigars, they are now in the midst of developing a plot to actually commit murder, the murder of Dr. Sonye.

Speaker 10 He wanted him hurt.

Speaker 79 and then it gradually developed into having him killed.

Speaker 78 I asked him,

Speaker 69 you sure you want to do this, Mike?

Speaker 9 I said if you ever

Speaker 9 you kill somebody that'll affect you for the rest of your life.

Speaker 14 You'll have nightmares. It'll bother you.

Speaker 88 And he goes, doesn't bother me.

Speaker 5 They plan and they plan for months and months and months.

Speaker 12 As this plan developed between Mike and me, the plan was laid out.

Speaker 12 The best way to carry forth his objective was to stay galaxyard, wait for him to come home.

Speaker 12 Let's talk about the actual day that this happened. Yes, sir.

Speaker 82 I believe it was a Tuesday.

Speaker 37 Tuesday, July 10th.

Speaker 38 Today in Lubbock, cooler temps that will dip into the upper 70s and lower 80s.

Speaker 25 Shepard makes the drive from Amarillo to Lubbock, Texas.

Speaker 50 A two and a half hour drive and gets to Joseph Sonier's house at around 4 o'clock.

Speaker 79 Hugged the fence down the alley and entered his backyard.

Speaker 12 Pulled a chair from his outdoor dining table. He has a curved brick fence by his driveway.

Speaker 79 On the west side, there's a tree by that fence, and I have to sit underneath there.

Speaker 12 And were you still having contact with Michael Dixon during that time?

Speaker 82 Yes, sir.

Speaker 12 Michael's encouraging him, keep the faith, be patient, be patient.

Speaker 79 He'll be there eventually.

Speaker 24 For Dave Shepard, the only person he can trust and go to with any issue in this case is Dr. Dixon.

Speaker 19 In Dr. Dixon's mind, Shepard's the perfect guy to carry out this mission because Dixon's like the boss.

Speaker 19 He's the prominent physician, and Shepard is essentially a loser and the Patsy's ready to do whatever he's told.

Speaker 50 And he's waiting for two and a half hours and the guy falls asleep.

Speaker 19 He's awoken by the sound of someone knocking on the window from the inside and it's none other than Dr. Joseph Sonier.

Speaker 9 I wave at Dr.

Speaker 82 Saunier. and get up.

Speaker 12 I walk to the window.

Speaker 79 He has lowered the window about this far from the top down.

Speaker 82 What happens at that point?

Speaker 12 I point the weapon with the bottle at him,

Speaker 82 discharges several times.

Speaker 9 After three or four discharges, he's backing away, he trips on his feet and falls to the ground.

Speaker 28 Shepard admitted that he had used a Gatorade bottle to try and muffle the sound of the gunshot and that he had learned that technique by watching a movie that starred Stephen Seagal.

Speaker 79 So I push in the window and crawl in.

Speaker 79 Go around the corner. As I turn around down the hallway, right into the garage, he's laying on the floor.

Speaker 13 Not moving, not breathing, nothing.

Speaker 82 I check his pulse and his neck.

Speaker 17 He's dead.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 what happens?

Speaker 17 I pull the knife on my left back and I

Speaker 13 stamp him in the vital organs two or three, four times.

Speaker 45 I find that bizarre.

Speaker 24 It's like he is so determined to make this right for whatever his relationship might be with Dixon that he wants to complete the task.

Speaker 51 According to Shepard, after he kills Dr.

Speaker 49 Sonye, he then drives back to Amarillo.

Speaker 12 So did you recount for Michael Dixon the events?

Speaker 13 Yes, sir.

Speaker 82 He was happy about it. He was fine with it.
Said, I sound like you got a wicked claim.

Speaker 50 And the very next day, he's caught on camera having a meal with Mike Dixon.

Speaker 19 Shepard told police that Dixon became extremely rattled by the fact that detectives had come over to talk to him about the death of Dr. Saunier.

Speaker 14 He was nervous.

Speaker 12 So I had to get out of town.

Speaker 28 Dixon recommended that David Shepard get the heck out of Dodge, that he leave the area, which would, in Dr. Dixon's mind, keep him from being investigated by Lubbock police.

Speaker 22 But David Shepard seems to be overcome by what has happened and maybe his role in this. He attempts suicide, cuts his wrist.

Speaker 82 If you can imagine the disgust

Speaker 79 that you can feel with yourself during being involved with what I did, And I pull out a filet knife and try to cut myself. It's bleeding like a stunk pig.

Speaker 49 First person he calls after that, Mike Dixon.

Speaker 37 Dixon and Shepard are caught on surveillance, heading into Mike Dixon's office, where Mike Dixon stitches them up.

Speaker 24 Dave Shepard has basically given you a roadmap as to what happened, and you see how he directly ties Dixon into planning this murder.

Speaker 61 You now clearly have built a case against Dr.

Speaker 24 Dixon.

Speaker 41 Two suspects are in custody in connection with the murder of a loved one. When Dr.

Speaker 19 Dead and two people are on the city, police arrested Dr. Thomas Dixon and David Shepard

Speaker 19 and stabbed to death in his living room.

Speaker 8 I cannot believe

Speaker 23 that they did this.

Speaker 8 It makes me so angry.

Speaker 8 A low-life scum

Speaker 34 and a piece of doctor.

Speaker 4 Like it or not,

Speaker 4 Mike Dixon is an evil man

Speaker 4 and David Shepard is an evil man.

Speaker 28 It seemed like a slam dunk for prosecutors. They had the man who admitted to killing Dr.
Joseph Sonia as a witness.

Speaker 28 As they say in West Texas, everybody thought this case was done and dusted.

Speaker 60 But is the case against Mike Dixon too good to be true?

Speaker 36 You've got to remember, the prosecution's star witness is Dave Shepard.

Speaker 50 I mean, this is a guy with a history as a con man and a swindler.

Speaker 19 Shepard is known for telling all kinds of tall tales.

Speaker 69 Dave Shepard is a con artist of the ultimate magnitude.

Speaker 38 The prosecution painted Mike Dixon as this puppeteer.

Speaker 35 If he was that manipulative, this was the dumbest planned murder in the history of the United States to choose David Shepard.

Speaker 19 What he ends up doing in the courtroom just turns this case upside down.

Speaker 25 He made jaws drop in that courtroom.

Speaker 70 This is the kind of moment that you typically see in a movie.

Speaker 37 The case is going to blow up in the prosecutor's face and a convicted man walks free tonight.

Speaker 15 This is the eldest story in the movie.

Speaker 26 This is revenge. This is pride.

Speaker 87 So there was some kind of a triangle things going on.

Speaker 66 He knew that I was David Joseph. He wanted me to come back to him.
I told him no.

Speaker 19 What did they have on this prominent doctor? Maybe he was in love. Maybe he was in lust.
Whatever, did that make him a killer?

Speaker 12 I'm kind of a sassy smart,

Speaker 12 and we just kind of hit it off.

Speaker 19 These two men, Shepard and Dixon, it's a very, very strange romance. Think of the goofiest buddy film that you can, and here's these two guys.

Speaker 85 Dad wanted to be Mike.

Speaker 37 Mike had it all. Once Dave Shepard got in that chair and started speaking, he made jaws drop in that courtroom.

Speaker 27 This once convicted mastermind of a killer, he's out on the streets.

Speaker 19 So we think the case is closed? Not even.

Speaker 37 It's October 2014.

Speaker 25 And you can feel that fall chill starting to roll into Texas.

Speaker 49 But at the Glebbook County Courthouse, things are starting to heat up.

Speaker 9 Got anything to say, Dr. Dixon?

Speaker 23 Likely one of the bigger murder trials that this city has seen in a long, long time.

Speaker 28 The gallery was packed. Everybody was there to see how this trial was going to go.

Speaker 58 This prominent plastic surgeon

Speaker 58 was accused of hiring a hitman, friend, and business partner, David Shepard.

Speaker 19 This case is nothing short of surreal. First, you have the victim, Dr.
Joseph Saunier, a very prominent pathologist. Then you have another prominent physician, Dr.

Speaker 19 Mike Dixon, and he's accused of placing a hit on Dr. Sonier.
And in the middle of all of it, you have a beautiful blonde named Rochelle Shatina.

Speaker 4 Going after someone I loved would hurt me, and that's what he was going to do. He wanted to hurt me as badly as he could.

Speaker 15 I think Mike Dixon had an obsession with Rochelle Shatina. based on the evidence.
I don't think there's any doubt about that. And ultimately, that cost Dr.
Sonier's life.

Speaker 3 I promise I will be totally compliant. I won't cause any problems.

Speaker 19 Dave Shepard is sort of the oddball friend of Dr. Dixon, and he tells police that Mike Dixon paid him in advance to do the hit.

Speaker 10 He wanted to be hurt, and then it gradually developed into having

Speaker 13 killed him.

Speaker 15 I think Mike Dixon controlled this situation. I think David Shepard was the perfect patsy.

Speaker 14 I think he loved the lifestyle that Dr.

Speaker 15 Dixon could give him. I think he likes the expensive cigars and expensive scotch and everything else that came with being a buddy of Mike Dixon.

Speaker 53 Many people make the argument that Mike Dixon never laid a hand on Dr.

Speaker 43 Sunday.

Speaker 15 He's just controlling the knife. Dave Shepard's just another instrument for Mike Dixon.

Speaker 43 What was your mindset going into that trial?

Speaker 8 Let's go get these guys.

Speaker 8 We knew they had the right guys. In my mind, there was no other possibility.

Speaker 38 There's always two sides of these kinds of cases and on the other side you have Andrew Dixon, Mike Dixon's son, who has a very different view of this case.

Speaker 9 He was a good dad.

Speaker 93 He did dad things, you know, kind of American dream kind of stuff. Go camp and hike and play baseball and football and all those things.

Speaker 93 They're trying to prove him guilty, you know, and he's fighting for his life. I mean, it's just terrifying and so sickening.

Speaker 57 I've known Mike Dixon for 25 years.

Speaker 81 He's as solid as they come.

Speaker 57 There was no intent to kill him.

Speaker 76 I know that with all my heart.

Speaker 34 He's harmless.

Speaker 43 But in courtroom 72 of the Lubbock County Courthouse, the prosecution paints a far different picture of Mike Dixon.

Speaker 28 Somebody who was arrogant, somebody using Shepard as a pawn

Speaker 28 to keep up with Rochelle and Dr. Sonia's relationship, and goodness knows what else.

Speaker 15 This is the oldest story in the book.

Speaker 26 This is vengeance. This is revenge.
This is pride.

Speaker 55 One of the big pieces of evidence that the public prosecutors used against Dixon was this.22 caliber pistol, which David Shepard told police that he used to shoot Dr. Sonia.

Speaker 28 Prosecutors presented evidence that the gun that was used to kill Dr. Sonia was given to him by Dr.
Dixon. Circumstantial evidence, pretty strong stuff.

Speaker 5 David Shepard tells us that he told Dixon, I don't have a gun. And Dixon says, don't worry about it.
I got it covered. I have a gun.
He says, it belongs to my brother who gave it to me.

Speaker 5 And it's clean.

Speaker 89 Police divers were seen pulling something from the lake.

Speaker 19 Shepard was on hand to point police to areas in the lake to search.

Speaker 55 He said he'd thrown the gun into a lake in Amarillo behind Dr. Dixon's office.

Speaker 37 Also, prosecutors have a wealth of text messages between Shepard and Dixon when Shepard was stalking Shatina and Sonia.

Speaker 5 When he was arrested, the SWAT guys told me he had actually jumped into a swimming pool and tried to ruin the phone. The problem was the man had plugged the phone in and backed it up to his computer.

Speaker 5 So all of the stuff that he thought was not going to get him in trouble was backed up to his computer.

Speaker 25 Prosecutors here are saying that they found text messages from Dixon to Shepard urging Shepard to kill.

Speaker 36 We're talking text messages like, go get him, whip and spur,

Speaker 37 get her done, and put it on him.

Speaker 15 If you look at the text messages, put it on him, you know, those types of things. There wasn't any doubt in my mind what they were talking about.

Speaker 20 A real eyebrow raiser is how the payoff supposedly happened to the alleged hitman here.

Speaker 23 Three silver bars and a box of cigars.

Speaker 2 It's hard to find a good Cuban cigar, but the silver bars are worth some $9,000.

Speaker 3 According to prosecutors, one of which was sold to this pawn shop in Amarillo, Texas before the murder and two after the murder, sold by none other than Dave Shepherd.

Speaker 25 What was he like? Do you remember any of his affect?

Speaker 38 He was a pretty good-sized guy. He seemed

Speaker 25 just like a normal guy to me.

Speaker 81 I didn't notice anything different about him.

Speaker 25 In terms of demeanor, he didn't strike you one way or the other, it sounds like?

Speaker 3 Not at all.

Speaker 38 So he sold you something just like this.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 81 very similar, yeah.

Speaker 64 He leaves.

Speaker 37 A couple days later, he's on the front page of the paper.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 81 Yeah, it was kind of pretty much a shock. I mean, I just, I was blown away.

Speaker 25 All the evidence that prosecutors have against Mike Dixon is strong, but their primary piece of their case is Dave Shepard.

Speaker 28 He pleaded guilty for a life sentence with no opportunity for parole.

Speaker 37 And so after the death penalty was taken off the table, that's when Dave Shepard agreed to testify against his old drinking buddy, Mike Dixon.

Speaker 28 It seemed like a slam dunk for prosecutors. They had the man who admitted to killing Dr.
Joseph Sonia as a witness.

Speaker 8 He had a chance to get up there, confirm his story,

Speaker 8 point to that guy as the person who paid him to kill my dad, and end it all.

Speaker 19 But what he ends up doing is an absolute shock to the prosecutors and to the family of the victim.

Speaker 22 The star witness was about to blow up in the prosecution's mix.

Speaker 89 Shocking testimony today at the Capitol murder trial for Amarillo Dr. Thomas Dixon.

Speaker 55 The prosecution's case against Dixon was very strong.

Speaker 8 You got a payoff to an alleged hitman. You've got a murder weapon.

Speaker 27 The circumstantial case here seems to have a lot of elements that would favor the prosecution.

Speaker 19 Everything that the prosecution laid on the table was countered by the defense, including Shepard's access to the gun.

Speaker 36 See, the defense claimed that Shepard stole the gun gun from Mike Dixon's house. And Frank Sellers, one of the defense attorneys, showed me where he thought Shepard stole that gun from.

Speaker 69 They came in here, they're picking out a cigar to smoke, and Shepard opens this drawer here, and it's a gun.

Speaker 46 So that's how Shepard knew a gun was in that drawer.

Speaker 25 Exactly.

Speaker 2 The defense team admits, hey, the silver bars changed hands, but this wasn't to pay off some murder for hire scheme. This was the seed money for some new business collaboration between the two.

Speaker 43 Did Mike Dixon ever pay David Shepard in silver bars and cigars to kill Dr.

Speaker 38 Joseph Sonia?

Speaker 14 Absolutely not.

Speaker 28 The defense said that the surveilling that David Shepard was doing was really only to get pictures of Dr.

Speaker 28 Sonia out with other women so that he could show them to Rochelle and say, this guy is cheating on you.

Speaker 69 Shepard's reporting back, oh, I couldn't find him. And I think Mike became frustrated with it, and it's evident from the messages that he was sending.

Speaker 53 So then go get and whip and spur.

Speaker 16 Go get who?

Speaker 35 Use of lots of Texas panhandle colloquialisms like get her done, put it on him, go get them. He had a history of using that language with lots of different people.

Speaker 37 And the reason they say Mike Dixon was so upset was they felt Rochelle Shatina was trying to throw the relationship with Joseph Saunier in Mike Dixon's face.

Speaker 60 In court, the defense points to text messages between Shatina and Dixon when she backed out of that planned vacation.

Speaker 3 She texts, I'm in love.

Speaker 37 Enjoy your getaway.

Speaker 60 When Dixon asks, who's the lucky guy?

Speaker 37 Rochelle replies, new dance partner.

Speaker 40 And so Mike, his ego was deeply bruised, and he wanted to show Rochelle that she was wrong.

Speaker 25 So from your perspective, it was about Mike Dixon and his ego.

Speaker 38 Right.

Speaker 43 The defense really grilled you about these text messages.

Speaker 4 Oh yeah, they absolutely did. They did.
Text messages that I hadn't seen in years. It came out of the blue.
It was crazy.

Speaker 57 Is there anything in this that you regret from these text messages?

Speaker 4 To Mike Dixon?

Speaker 83 No.

Speaker 37 No. Anything you wish you would have said differently?

Speaker 4 I suppose if I went through each individual text message, yeah, maybe.

Speaker 35 Mike is morally responsible for David Shepard being down here, but not for the purpose of killing Dr.

Speaker 76 Sonia.

Speaker 40 Mike Dixon never wanted that to happen.

Speaker 28 Defense attorneys were really eager to make it clear that Shepard decided to become a rogue. And even though Dixon wanted him to surveil Dr.

Speaker 28 Sonia and Rochelle, he just decided on his own to go down and kill this man.

Speaker 36 But there's one big problem with that theory. Remember, back when Shepard was talking to police, he said that Mike Dixon asked him to kill Dr.

Speaker 37 Joseph Sonia.

Speaker 78 I asked him,

Speaker 69 you sure you want to do this, Mike?

Speaker 79 I said, if you ever,

Speaker 78 when you kill somebody, that'll affect you from the rest of your life.

Speaker 12 You'll have nightmares.

Speaker 82 It'll bother you.

Speaker 12 And he goes, doesn't bother me.

Speaker 46 When you saw the interview police did with him, were you thinking, slam dunk?

Speaker 50 We got him?

Speaker 15 I don't know if I've ever thought something's a slam dunk. If you watch Dave Shepard on that interview, he's calm, he's relaxed, he's telling things that flow very naturally.

Speaker 13 He's laying on the floor, not moving, not breathing, nothing.

Speaker 15 We certainly believed it because it matched up the physical evidence.

Speaker 70 Without Shepard,

Speaker 70 you've got suspicion, you've got circumstantial evidence, but he's the one who can bring it all together.

Speaker 40 Matt Powell calls David Shepard to the witness stand and the jury's about to hear, at least Powell thinks, that Dixon set him up to go down there and paid him to kill Sonia.

Speaker 37 Shepard not only had to face the jury, but he had to face the victim's family and his three daughters, Rachel, Abigail, and Haley.

Speaker 25 And they weren't there to support their father.

Speaker 53 You were in that courtroom to get closure.

Speaker 74 We were there more in support of the Sonia family.

Speaker 10 Right. Yes.

Speaker 74 Our heart was broken for them.

Speaker 38 And do you think that Mike Dixon paid your father to kill Dr.

Speaker 43 Sonia? Yes. Yes.

Speaker 89 There wasn't a single seat open in the courtroom this morning.

Speaker 95 It was the moment many had been waiting for. The courtroom filled with those wanting to hear testimony of the convicted killer, David Shepard.

Speaker 52 Once Dave Shepard got in that chair and started speaking, he made jaws drop in that courtroom.

Speaker 28 Shepard takes the stand and this bombshell drops. No, I did it at my own choosing.
I'm the one who decided to co-kill Dr.

Speaker 42 Sunkey.

Speaker 28 It just flipped the whole trial on its head.

Speaker 70 This is the kind of moment that you typically see in a movie where the star witness suddenly decides, I'm not going to testify against him.

Speaker 51 That stuff doesn't typically happen in real courtrooms.

Speaker 68 It was definitely easy today to see why District Attorney Matt Powell seemed a little bit frustrated.

Speaker 43 You begin to question him, what happens.

Speaker 15 Willie can completely digress from what his statement was to law enforcement and the fact that Mike Dixon didn't have any involvement in this deal.

Speaker 16 What's going through your mind?

Speaker 15 Okay, game on. We impeached him with his prior statements where he's laying out in great detail what Mike Dixon did.

Speaker 8 When he got up there on the witness stand and created that circus, I've never hated anyone more than I've hated him in my entire life.

Speaker 19 The question now is how much damage did this full-on reversal do to the prosecution's case? More importantly, what did it do to the jury?

Speaker 94 When he got on the stand and changed his entire story, it just kind of threw me for a loop.

Speaker 94 Two rings surrounded by a steel cage.

Speaker 94 Oh my god, are you kidding me? This is gonna be a war!

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Speaker 19 The air has just been sucked out of courtroom 72 in a Lubbock courthouse. A bomb has been dropped.
David Shepard was supposed to take the stand and say, Dr. Dixon ordered him to kill Dr.
Saunier.

Speaker 19 Instead, Shepard took all the blame for the murder and insisted that Dixon had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 28 David Shepard's daughters were embarrassed, angry, and incredulous that their father would not finger Dr. Dixon as the man who hired him.

Speaker 83 It was cowardly.

Speaker 74 He has a chance to make it right, and he completely ruined it.

Speaker 57 Why do you think he did that?

Speaker 85 He was trying to help out his buddy.

Speaker 28 They took it upon themselves to go to the children of Dr. Sonia and apologize for what their father had just said on the stand.

Speaker 37 What did you say to them?

Speaker 86 We are so sorry for what he has done to you and what he is continuing to do to you.

Speaker 8 The three daughters, we have a mutual understanding, a mutual respect, mutual sadness.

Speaker 8 We all know what happened. They knew from day one.
They couldn't believe what their dad had done. And I couldn't believe he put them in that situation.

Speaker 28 So after David Shepard is taken back to jail, his daughters go to talk to him and confront him about what the heck did you just do? They were emotional. They were upset.

Speaker 84 But daddy, you didn't tell the truth. I did.

Speaker 84 You didn't say anything. You just kept saying that you wouldn't tell them.
But I did. Go for it if this is right.
None of it will ever be right.

Speaker 84 Nothing I could do. No matter what you do.

Speaker 46 They think I'm some kind of a monster.

Speaker 84 You've made yourself a monster, Dad.

Speaker 53 And you were literally breaking down in tears.

Speaker 72 It was frustrating. I felt like I was scolding a child.
Like,

Speaker 72 I just want you to answer my question, and then you can go back to timeout.

Speaker 19 The question now is how much damage did this full-on reversal on the part of Dave Shepard do to the prosecution's case? More importantly, what did it do to the jury?

Speaker 28 Nobody knew how that might affect the verdict. Everybody's on edge.

Speaker 55 It was still sort of anyone's guess what the verdict would be.

Speaker 37 But the damage was done.

Speaker 54 I'm Brian Mudd. And I'm Lauren Modder.

Speaker 89 Thomas Dixon's accused of hiring another man to murder Lubbock Dr. Joseph Saunier.

Speaker 77 Years of work ending with a hung jury and a mistrial for Dr.

Speaker 40 Thomas Dixon.

Speaker 37 If Shepard's goal was to free his friend,

Speaker 16 it worked.

Speaker 28 The judge says, Mr. Dixon, you are free to go.
Everybody is stunned.

Speaker 1 Stunned.

Speaker 8 It was devastating. I mean, I had a moment of just

Speaker 14 silence.

Speaker 8 I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think.

Speaker 37 Do you think that he was the biggest factor to getting that home jury?

Speaker 8 Absolutely 100%.

Speaker 15 Justice is a guilty verdict. And when that doesn't happen, you know,

Speaker 15 i feel disappointed i feel like i've let the family down i feel like i've let our team down i feel like i've let everybody down you have to ask the question how could the prosecutors have let this happen the prosecutors have to bear some responsibility for calling a witness to the stand star witness who does a complete 180 in front of the jury so before the trial how many times did you get to speak to him i talked to him one time i really don't spend a whole lot of time with witnesses, you know, getting them prepared and things like that.

Speaker 37 In hindsight, do you wish that that could have been done differently?

Speaker 15 I don't know if there was a way to do that differently. We had no indication he wasn't going to tell the truth.

Speaker 4 I was upset with the jury. How could they not see? You know, the evidence to me was very, very clear that he was guilty.
He did this.

Speaker 22 And that was the big question at that point. What did the jury think of this?

Speaker 94 When he got on the stand and changed his entire story, it just kind of threw me for a loop at first.

Speaker 97 The prosecutor's face got red and veins were popping out of his neck.

Speaker 22 Matt Powell was livid, but he was able to recover because he already had a videotape of Shepard confessing to the crime. He showed that to the jury and that was enough to convince some of the jurors.

Speaker 97 The video of Dave Shepard's confession was a revelation, I thought.

Speaker 94 Shepard's just pretty much giving us all the information right there.

Speaker 97 It really tied together a lot of the facts we had heard in testimony. And so there was little doubt in my mind at that point of guilty for me.

Speaker 97 During our deliberations, we had two jurors that were not able to really come to the same place that we were.

Speaker 94 I felt how do they have any doubt when the evidence was all there in my eyes.

Speaker 91 It only took two of those jurors disagreeing to make this a mistrial.

Speaker 62 And those two jurors had never talked publicly before about why they voted the way they did.

Speaker 21 Until now.

Speaker 3 Almost five years. I know, can you believe it?

Speaker 73 I knew what we had signed up for and I did not take any of it lightly.

Speaker 96 I felt like it was my job to go in there and look at everything.

Speaker 73 We did see the

Speaker 73 video testimony of Dave Shepard

Speaker 73 and for that to be in such stark contrast of what his in-court testimony was raised a lot of red flags for me.

Speaker 70 The problem is that the judge specifically said to the jurors,

Speaker 14 you can

Speaker 70 use this video, but only for the purpose of determining whether this witness is telling the truth, but not as substantive evidence to convict.

Speaker 70 For these two jurors, they apparently felt there just wasn't enough without it.

Speaker 96 I never felt like he was pushing him to kill.

Speaker 96 I felt like he was pushing him to take photographs.

Speaker 73 There were a couple text messages that Matt Powell had mentioned,

Speaker 73 like whip and spur, get or done. Yeah, get her done.
And I think that the effort there was to make those sound a little bit more malicious than they actually were.

Speaker 96 I always thought that, yes, he probably did give give him silver bars, but that doesn't mean he gave him silver bars for murdering somebody.

Speaker 96 I just feel like that we had so many people from the time we were supposed to make our decision and there was no discussion. They said he was guilty and they weren't going to talk about it.

Speaker 94 It's frustrating, especially those of us who had our stand and how we believed and for all that seemed like for nothing.

Speaker 19 After the trial was over, there was still that question.

Speaker 19 why did David Shepard go back on his deal and completely burn the prosecution?

Speaker 37 To get that answer, I went to a maximum security prison where Dave Shepard was serving a life sentence to sit down face to face with the man who murdered Joseph Sonia.

Speaker 38 You said that Mike Dixon

Speaker 44 was a part of this.

Speaker 54 Right.

Speaker 3 Why did you tell them that?

Speaker 25 After Dave Shepard's flip-flop in in court, everybody wanted to know why.

Speaker 37 Why did he change his story? I went to a maximum security prison in West Texas where Dave Shepard was serving a life sentence and I sat down face to face with him.

Speaker 49 This is a mountain of a man.

Speaker 38 I mean, he's got to be 6'7 ⁇ , 6'8, maybe 300 pounds.

Speaker 61 He is intimidating.

Speaker 61 How you doing, David?

Speaker 32 I put myself in a bad position, and I've got no one to blame but myself.

Speaker 49 I asked him point-blank, right off the bat, what happened inside that house.

Speaker 25 And his claim wasn't a cold-blooded killing, it was a tragic accident.

Speaker 32 I'm in his backyard.

Speaker 48 He knocks on the window, and I waved it, waved it, walked to it.

Speaker 32 I said, I'm showing you some stuff.

Speaker 16 He goes, oh, and I list stuff up, and then the world went.

Speaker 48 Things got out of hand.

Speaker 43 Unintentionally,

Speaker 55 Gun fired.

Speaker 32 I'm leaning in to see if he's okay. I fall in the window and then he's getting up and going around.

Speaker 48 I'm running around to see what's going on. I said, Dr.

Speaker 32 Sonia, are you all right?

Speaker 48 I don't hear anything.

Speaker 32 Go in the garage. He's laying prone.

Speaker 10 I hear his last breath.

Speaker 32 I reach down.

Speaker 16 There's no pulse.

Speaker 3 Did you stab him?

Speaker 32 I did stab him a couple of times. I can't reconcile the number that the prosecution says.
11, I think they've said. I had Dr.

Speaker 32 Sonia's phone in my hand, and I considered dialing 911 just to call the authorities, and I didn't.

Speaker 48 And I put it back in,

Speaker 32 mutilated his bodily remains, and tried to cover it, make it look like something else.

Speaker 43 Do you consider yourself a cold-blooded killer?

Speaker 48 No, absolutely not.

Speaker 79 An idiot, you know, careless. I mean, but no,

Speaker 49 no.

Speaker 19 Remember, in David Shepard's interview with police, he told them that when he notified Dr. Dixon that he in fact carried out the murder of Dr.
Sonia,

Speaker 19 Dr. Dixon was very pleased to hear the news.

Speaker 82 I'm just happy about it.

Speaker 79 I'm just fine with it.

Speaker 10 I said, Mike,

Speaker 48 things didn't go like I hoped. He goes, what are you talking about?

Speaker 16 And then I broke the news to him.

Speaker 12 And he's like,

Speaker 32 so you're, are you telling me?

Speaker 48 I said, yeah.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 32 I said, Mike, I'm just telling you what happened.

Speaker 48 I said, I almost called the police.

Speaker 43 I should have.

Speaker 10 I didn't.

Speaker 32 I'm thinking now I should have, and I didn't.

Speaker 48 And he goes,

Speaker 48 well, we'll just have to see what happens.

Speaker 16 He goes, I don't know.

Speaker 49 I don't know.

Speaker 63 But why wouldn't he have shared all that with police who were then coming by his house, talking to him?

Speaker 56 Hey, I just

Speaker 56 didn't even mention your name.

Speaker 32 Well, probably try to keep me out of that situation so they wouldn't even know about me. I don't know.
You'll have to ask Dr. Dixon about what he's thinking is.

Speaker 16 What Shepard told me was totally at odds with what he told police.

Speaker 38 He told police that Dixon told him, I want you to kill Sonia.

Speaker 10 You wanted him hurt, and then it gradually developed into having him killed.

Speaker 37 Did Mike Dixon ever ask you to kill Dr.

Speaker 3 Joseph Sony?

Speaker 16 Absolutely not.

Speaker 37 Absolutely not.

Speaker 38 When the police interrogated you, you said that Mike Dixon was a part of this.

Speaker 57 Right. Why did you tell them that?

Speaker 48 I embellished. I felt that's what I had to do because I'd already had an agreement with Mr.

Speaker 3 Matt Powell.

Speaker 32 He was the DA, to get rid of the death penalty.

Speaker 37 So in your mind, you made up the story that Mike Dixon was involved in.

Speaker 43 Seems kind of silly.

Speaker 48 Looking back, I didn't want to offend anybody.

Speaker 32 I don't want to hurt anybody, and I sometimes have a hard time saying no, I guess.

Speaker 38 There were all these text messages that Mike Dixon was sending to you.

Speaker 49 Go get him, whip and spur.

Speaker 46 So those text messages were referring to...

Speaker 32 I would assume staying on target so you can get him a picture of him with another girl besides Rochelle. I didn't mean to kill Dr.

Speaker 9 Sonia.

Speaker 32 I have nothing against Dr. Sonia or his family or Rochelle Shativa.

Speaker 48 I have nothing against any of them.

Speaker 9 I really don't.

Speaker 56 What would you say to them right now if they were watching?

Speaker 59 I tell them that I'm very sorry.

Speaker 54 I took your loved one.

Speaker 56 You get on the stand.

Speaker 38 You see Mike Dixon there. You see your family there.

Speaker 37 You change your story.

Speaker 53 What was that moment like for you?

Speaker 32 It was antagonizing.

Speaker 16 It was very hard.

Speaker 46 Your daughters told us that they were so upset that this was your chance to get up there and to tell the truth, and that in their mind you lied.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 56 How does that make you feel?

Speaker 32 Pretty bad. They know me, they should know when I'm telling the truth and when I'm not.
And I was telling the truth on the stand.

Speaker 43 Do you miss them?

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 16 every day.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry.

Speaker 74 The damage is done. There's not anything that's going to repair our relationship.
There's nothing that can fix it or make it right, even if he were to get out.

Speaker 51 Do you think your dad should spend the rest of his life in prison?

Speaker 67 Absolutely.

Speaker 67 We have absolutely, you know,

Speaker 11 accepted it and proven that we can move on and we can be better and we can absolutely overcome it and be stronger because of it.

Speaker 19 Despite what happened with David Shepard's extraordinary turnaround, the prosecution was not about to give up. One year later, they're back in court, ready to try Dr.
Dixon one more time.

Speaker 8 Matt Powell, without blinking, he says, we are going to get this guy. We are going to do this again.

Speaker 7 Don't you worry.

Speaker 34 I've got you.

Speaker 8 And that's all I needed to hear.

Speaker 58 Amarello Dr. Michael Dixon is back on trial for capital murder when the witness list comes out for the second trial.

Speaker 28 David Shepard's name is not to be found. But on the list is his daughter, Haley.

Speaker 8 The number one most important thing from this second trial was the unbelievably courageous testimony of Haley Shepard.

Speaker 51 But what Haley would say about just a simple steak dinner would turn this case on its head.

Speaker 46 What did you say on the standard?

Speaker 58 Amarello Dr. Michael Dixon is back on trial for capital murder.

Speaker 54 Is Dixon back in a Lava courtroom preparing for his

Speaker 37 officials announced the start of the second trial in court?

Speaker 28 Everybody thought going into the first trial that prosecutors had a pretty rock-solid case.

Speaker 28 Second trial, everybody was wondering, what is the prosecution going to do this time around to make it so that they can get a conviction?

Speaker 15 Our strategy was basically, we're going to let the facts do the talking. We're going to show you what happened.
We're going to show you the relationship between these two folks.

Speaker 15 And we're going to convince you that Mike Dixon is running this show and that he orchestrated this whole thing.

Speaker 23 David Shepard had no reason

Speaker 8 to kill my dad if it wasn't for Mike Dixon.

Speaker 70 In a retrial, prosecutors can take any mistakes that they made in the first case, try to refine it, try to change it, and present an often stronger case in the second trial.

Speaker 28 Clearly, they were not going to take any chances with David Shepard's testimony this time. And lo and behold, who comes up but his daughter, who has information that could prove very damaging to Dr.

Speaker 28 Dixon's case.

Speaker 4 That was his chance to

Speaker 74 make it right with them.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 74 he threw it away.

Speaker 8 The number one most important thing from this second trial was the unbelievably courageous testimony of Haley Shepard.

Speaker 15 Haley Shepard testified, and her testimony was extremely important in the fact she basically described her dad for everybody.

Speaker 28 She told jurors that her father took herself and her two sisters out to dinner at a pretty decent steakhouse and had all sorts of gifts for them. And she found that very suspicious.

Speaker 86 He bought Haley a phone, he bought a new grill, he bought tires, and he never had that much money ever.

Speaker 74 We all remember this same exact moment at dinner.

Speaker 67 We all asked him, how do you have money?

Speaker 74 And his words were, I did some work for Mike.

Speaker 32 What would you do?

Speaker 16 He wouldn't tell me. Don't worry about it.

Speaker 86 I just did some work for Mike. Don't worry about it.

Speaker 27 The Sonier family has some hope that that testimony was the game changer that didn't exist in the first trial.

Speaker 70 The defense had its own star witness in Mike Dixon himself. But having the defendant testify is always a risk.

Speaker 19 It's a lot of times a defense attorney's nightmare because the prosecution sees that as red meat.

Speaker 20 And now the jury gets to hear from the man who's in the fight for his life and his freedom at this point.

Speaker 35 Our strategy was to show that there was a reason that Mike Dixon was asking David Shepard to be at Sonia's house and to follow him.

Speaker 35 If the jury only has the text messages without any explanation about what they were about,

Speaker 35 it's over.

Speaker 35 Mike needed to say,

Speaker 81 I was wrong.

Speaker 7 I'm morally responsible.

Speaker 35 If I hadn't have asked David to get these pictures, maybe it wouldn't happen.

Speaker 35 But I did not intend for Joseph Sony to die. I didn't ask.

Speaker 35 Shepard to kill him.

Speaker 70 Part of the decision in whether to call a defendant to the witness stand is not just the substance of what he's going to say, but how is he going to say it?

Speaker 70 What's his demeanor like?

Speaker 70 Are the jurors going to like him or not? Those are all relevant factors.

Speaker 16 We learned from jurors that they didn't like Mike Dixon.

Speaker 2 Not necessarily his testimony.

Speaker 34 They didn't like him.

Speaker 93 I thought he was his worst witness.

Speaker 14 The longer he was on the stand, the harder he rose to believe.

Speaker 33 He had an ego that was larger than life. And

Speaker 33 anytime he starts talking about whether something is morally right or wrong,

Speaker 33 I knew at that point

Speaker 33 I could not believe

Speaker 33 what he was testifying to.

Speaker 22 The jury, they seemed to appreciate Haley's testimony.

Speaker 33 Shepard's daughter,

Speaker 33 that was tough to sit and

Speaker 33 and watch her have to go through this.

Speaker 2 But they did what you would hope jurors would do.

Speaker 23 It wasn't one thing.

Speaker 3 They looked at all the evidence.

Speaker 33 And you could tell Dixon was running the show. I mean, there was no doubt when you go through the evidence that he was,

Speaker 33 as Mr. Powell, you know, stated, he was driving the school bus.

Speaker 23 This time around, the jury did not take very long and there were no holdouts.

Speaker 27 In just a handful of hours, they were back with a verdict.

Speaker 8 And my hand was shaking like this.

Speaker 89 The verdict is in. Unanimous verdict.

Speaker 22 Guilty on two charges.

Speaker 93 At first, you're thinking, I didn't hear that right.

Speaker 93 You really are.

Speaker 3 You're thinking, there's no way.

Speaker 93 You know, there's no way.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 16 it's unreal.

Speaker 78 It's like a nightmare.

Speaker 46 I'm disappointed in the justice system. You know, I always thought they were supposed to be the good guys.

Speaker 47 After a few minutes, I had to turn to my wife and I had to say, he said guilty, right?

Speaker 24 He said guilty.

Speaker 47 We've been waiting for that moment for over three years.

Speaker 12 I cried.

Speaker 4 I cried. I burst into tears.
I was so relieved.

Speaker 8 When you look at the photos of him, smug smile. When you look at his mugshot from his arrest, smug smile.

Speaker 23 And it was so

Speaker 8 great to be able to know that we finally wiped that smile off his face. And I think he'll disappear into the prison system for the rest of his life.

Speaker 25 We'll never hear from him again.

Speaker 19 The jury's done its job. The prosecution wins.
And there's at least some peace of mind for the family of Dr. Sonier knowing that justice was served.
Case closed, not

Speaker 19 even close.

Speaker 16 People were floored.

Speaker 28 They were like, this is unbelievable.

Speaker 22 After his 2015 conviction for the murder of Joe Sonier, Michael Dixon is serving his life prison sentence at the all-red maximum security prison.

Speaker 38 You would would think in this case that justice has been served, but has it?

Speaker 95 Thomas Michael Dixon gets a new trial.

Speaker 21 Just when all of us think this case is finished, the Seventh Court of Appeals in Amarillo overturns the conviction.

Speaker 16 People were floored.

Speaker 28 They were like, this is unbelievable.

Speaker 70 The defense listed something like 50 issues on appeal, and they succeeded on two of them.

Speaker 55 The cell phone tower location information that was used in Dixon's trial was deemed inadmissible because it was obtained without a warrant.

Speaker 70 And that the judge had closed the courtroom at times that he shouldn't have?

Speaker 80 These are really big deals. Do law enforcement get to just go grab anything they want from our personal lives and invade our privacy without probable cause to do so.

Speaker 80 And the other matter is we don't have secret trials where we get to expel the public from the courtroom for whatever reason.

Speaker 19 The Circuit Court of Appeals in Amarillo reversed Dixon's conviction.

Speaker 80 He starts with a clean slate. He's presumed innocent, so we start over from scratch.

Speaker 19 He's now out of prison, living in the Amarillo area.

Speaker 22 The second big bombshell is this convicted man is now out of prison. His bond reduced from 10 million to 2 million.

Speaker 80 He was thrilled. He was really delighted and hopes to finally achieve his vindication.

Speaker 64 He's doing good. His spirits are high.

Speaker 36 He got to see his grandson for the first time.

Speaker 64 He wears an ankle monitor. They keep an eye on him, and he has to let them know where he's going and what he's doing.
He can go all around Amarello and do daily activities.

Speaker 43 If he needs to go to Walmart, he can certainly do that.

Speaker 70 There's a gag order which prevents family members from talking about this case. But you can understand

Speaker 70 why the Sonia family

Speaker 78 would be furious.

Speaker 39 In their mind, the man who ordered the hit on their dad, now he's walking free.

Speaker 80 Mike Dixon and his family are victims too. It's horrible that they're having to go through this over and over again until they can get a fair trial.

Speaker 76 They had a rush to judgment on Mike.

Speaker 59 Stop that train and do what's right.

Speaker 64 Find justice, not just a conviction.

Speaker 22 The new Loba County District Attorney, she's filed her own petition to get the conviction put back in place.

Speaker 8 But if that's rejected, we're going to trial number three.

Speaker 37 Mike Dixon is free right now.

Speaker 38 Andrew Dixon has his dad.

Speaker 39 On the other hand, his life is once again hanging in the balance as he faces another trial.

Speaker 53 He could end up right back in prison.

Speaker 4 The loss of such a dear and decent and good man is a tragedy beyond words. This whole thing is nothing but darkness and evil.
To be at the center of all of that is

Speaker 4 horrible.

Speaker 64 It wasn't a love triangle. It was, Rochelle was telling Mike how great a person Sonia was, and that's how all this snowballed into a horrible tragedy.

Speaker 63 I challenge each one of us to focus on what he left behind and the man who touched us all.

Speaker 12 I thank the Lord for every moment that we had with Joe.

Speaker 47 My son was born after my father was murdered. He will never know my father.

Speaker 24 It's heartbreaking.

Speaker 47 And it's also a challenge to make sure that my son knows

Speaker 47 what kind of man my father was and that I pass on

Speaker 55 that legacy.

Speaker 15 It's amazing the things that people will do for nothing.

Speaker 25 Look how many lives have been destroyed by this over nothing.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes.
See you then.

Speaker 31 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.