Out There in the Dark

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Speaker 8 I got a phone call.

Speaker 10 Something's wrong with Brandy. She's not moving and the car is running.

Speaker 10 Emergency vehicles, officers. And that's as far as I could go.

Speaker 10 There's my baby and I can't do nothing about it.

Speaker 11 She was a hard-working young wife and mom.

Speaker 10 Sweetest girl you could ever ask to meet.

Speaker 12 Just minutes from home, when she saw the headlights, somebody was telling her.

Speaker 13 My sister is in my driveway and her head's bloody.

Speaker 8 So you bury your little girl and then it's a murder investigation.

Speaker 6 Yep.

Speaker 11 There were two people Brandy feared. One in town.

Speaker 8 She thought she was being followed.

Speaker 11 One thousands of miles away.

Speaker 14 Josh was still in Alaska.

Speaker 11 And then there was the new man in her life.

Speaker 14 Anybody close to Brandy, we need to take a real hard, serious look at.

Speaker 11 No fingerprints, no DNA, and no arrests for years.

Speaker 8 You're grieving? How do you put all that awful time together, Molly?

Speaker 10 Day by day.

Speaker 11 Then hints emerge of someone's dark past. You've got robberies going on, the homicide, and one brave woman willing to talk.

Speaker 18 Keep only the same that's happening to Brandon happening to me.

Speaker 2 The question wasn't just who murdered a young mother, it was why.

Speaker 9 There was no money. There just wasn't a reason to do it.

Speaker 10 She didn't hurt nobody. She didn't bother nobody.
Why did they have to kill her?

Speaker 11 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Date Live. Here's Dennis Murphy with Out There in the Dark.

Speaker 20 It was a chillier than usual Monday night in May as Brandy Daniels drove home from her shift at Kohl's.

Speaker 24 Zanesville in eastern Ohio is the kind of not-too-big, not-too-small city where you can be off the downtown grid and into wooded rolling hills in just a few minutes.

Speaker 20 And out there in the dark, that's where this 25-year-old single mom was heading.

Speaker 20 Back home to her daughter waiting to be tucked in at Brandy's mom's house out in the country where she'd been living lately.

Speaker 20 Brandy had been through a rough few months, years really, but one of the big reasons things were finally turning around for her was that soothing voice on the cell phone this night.

Speaker 21 Her fiancé, talking her home.

Speaker 8 Just talking to her as she's driving home, trying to drive a stick shift, which she'd just learned, talking on the phone.

Speaker 21 The fiancée was Craig Berry, her older boyfriend.

Speaker 8 I'm a hairstylist. I've been for years.

Speaker 34 One day, Brandy walked into Craig's salon.

Speaker 8 We hit it off.

Speaker 2 Women are very funny about who they will turn their head over to, isn't it?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 We turned out to be really good friends. The most beautiful eyes you ever saw.

Speaker 21 Like the song, Brandy turned out to be a fine girl for Craig.

Speaker 20 And that right away mutual attraction grew into something more serious.

Speaker 8 Touched my heart. Immediately.
It was a connection like I've never felt. It just kept getting bigger and bigger every time we talked.
We were looking at houses.

Speaker 17 You guys were fixing to marry?

Speaker 8 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 15 Count Brandy's mom, Molly Edwards, among the many people thrilled at the arrival of Craig in her life, just when you needed something nice to happen.

Speaker 36 Craig, what did you think of him?

Speaker 10 He was really nice. He put her first.

Speaker 10 He put her first.

Speaker 37 Growing up, Brandi wasn't much for Barbie dolls, but give her a sketch pad and a pencil, and she was lost for hours.

Speaker 39 She loved to draw.

Speaker 20 She had a deft eye for realistic wildlife portraits.

Speaker 10 She took every kind of art class there was. If it had anything to do with art, she took it.

Speaker 40 Brandy enrolled at her local college, Zane State.

Speaker 19 But before her freshman year was up, she left school to marry Josh Daniels, a part-time student she'd met.

Speaker 41 Not too long after, she had news from mom.

Speaker 10 She called me up, said that she was pregnant.

Speaker 8 You must have been so torn up.

Speaker 10 I was.

Speaker 10 That was my baby.

Speaker 20 Brandy, husband Josh, and the baby daughter were living nearby.

Speaker 44 You couldn't ask for a better mother.

Speaker 10 If it was something that she needed or

Speaker 26 the little girl needed,

Speaker 10 the baby got it first.

Speaker 8 And had a grandmother, like her new baby.

Speaker 10 The baby got everything.

Speaker 6 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 20 The marriage, after seven years of trying, foundered.

Speaker 45 She filed for divorce.

Speaker 8 She seemed to be on the other side, Molly, of a really rough patch in her life.

Speaker 46 Yes.

Speaker 47 But on this May night, as she was driving home from work with fiancé Craig in her ear, he heard Brandy starting to sound edgy.

Speaker 8 She says, somebody was tailing her. You know, these people need to get off my butt.
And the phone just went dead.

Speaker 39 Went dead.

Speaker 8 I text her, you know, what's up. So about 10 minutes passed by, and I called her sister and said, is Brandy home yet? She goes, no.

Speaker 8 I said, well, her call dropped on me, and she should have been coming in the door by now. She said, you want me to go check? I said, would you?

Speaker 20 Brandy's kid sister, Tess, headed up the almost half-mile-long drive from her mom's house to look for her.

Speaker 8 Just a few minutes later, her sister calls me back and is losing it.

Speaker 8 She was at the top of the driveway. Yeah, and she says, I see her car.
Her headlights are on, but it's not moving. Her head's slumped down.
And then she's just becoming hysterical.

Speaker 8 And I said, I'll be there. I said, you need to call the cops.

Speaker 13 911, your emergency.

Speaker 23 The Buskingham County 911 Center fielded the call.

Speaker 13 My sister is in my driveway, and her head's bloody, and she's not moving. I just need someone to come quick, please.
I'm just scared. I need someone to come now.

Speaker 13 Stay on the line with me while I get the squad on the way.

Speaker 25 Fiancé Craig was on his way too.

Speaker 24 There was his girlfriend's little Nissan sentry in the drive.

Speaker 8 I pull in right behind her car and there's a sheriff there already. And I'm walking up to the car and I see her in the driver's seat.

Speaker 8 And I said, what's wrong? He goes, I think she's been shot. Nothing can prepare you for that.
No.

Speaker 8 She was dead. That's what he told me.
He told you that at the scene. Yeah.

Speaker 8 You know, and stay away. You know, you don't want to contaminate the crime scene.
No bridge ahead.

Speaker 8 Into the abyss. Yeah, that blew me out of the water.

Speaker 28 Brandy's mom was just leaving the bottle factory where she worked.

Speaker 10 11.05, I got a phone call.

Speaker 10 And I went running out to the truck. Tess said something's wrong with Brandy.

Speaker 49 We get home.

Speaker 8 See emergency vehicles, officers.

Speaker 10 We'll go right off into the driveway. And that's as far as I could go.

Speaker 40 The car with the driver's side window down, the vehicle stalled in first gear, and Brandy inside looking ragdoll.

Speaker 41 Shot three times execution style.

Speaker 43 The detectives were arriving.

Speaker 8 Who would want Brandy dead?

Speaker 11 It's always the husband, right? Maybe not this time. When we return.

Speaker 14 Josh was, in fact, still in Alaska that night.

Speaker 11 But there was someone who lived right in town.

Speaker 29 Did you wonder what was going on with the boyfriend?

Speaker 14 Anybody close to Brandy, we need to take a real hard, serious look at.

Speaker 20 It was May 5th, 2014.

Speaker 6 The car was at the head of the driveway, lights on, and two county detectives arriving to try to figure out what had happened to the young woman dead in the driver's seat.

Speaker 20 Detective Mike Ryan and Captain Steve Welker in the first minutes of what would be a years-long investigation.

Speaker 14 Mike and I arrived at about the same time.

Speaker 8 Did the scene explain itself to you?

Speaker 14 We could see the basics of what had happened.

Speaker 41 Their victim, Brandi Daniels, had been shot three times at close range. Crime scene text would later recover three shell casings and a clip for a semi-automatic pistol.

Speaker 19 Brandy's purse and phone were beside her.

Speaker 48 We limited robbery almost immediately because there is an amount of money there that somebody would have took if it would have been a robbery.

Speaker 20 As the CSIs took their photos and estimated bullet trajectories, gathered blood, DNA, Brandy's mom, sister, and fiancé watched on in blank horror.

Speaker 8 What do you remember about the rest of that night?

Speaker 10 Sitting in the vehicle behind her car, just watching it.

Speaker 8 And there's your girl, gone.

Speaker 10 There's my baby, and I can't do nothing about it. It was

Speaker 8 2 o'clock.

Speaker 10 Went to the house.

Speaker 10 4 o'clock, detectives came down to the house, said that they removed her in the car.

Speaker 40 Who would benefit from a single mom's death?

Speaker 38 Of course, the questioning turned quickly to the soon-to-be divorced husband, the father of the little girl.

Speaker 52 Brandy's mom told them about Josh Daniels, said he was a personal trainer at the gym and an obsessive weightlifter.

Speaker 8 When you ran him through the computer, what did you find out about him? Do Do you have priors?

Speaker 12 He did not.

Speaker 48 He was not on law enforcement's radar.

Speaker 23 Not on law enforcement's radar, but nonetheless, somebody they wanted to talk to right now.

Speaker 24 But there was a problem, a big one.

Speaker 6 There was every reason to believe he wasn't in the driveway that night, but 4,300 miles away in Alaska.

Speaker 4 Josh had moved up there to be near his mom, and he found work in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.

Speaker 14 Josh was, in fact, still in Alaska that night.

Speaker 8 So that's a pretty good alibi. Yes.

Speaker 33 Because there's domestic turmoil doesn't mean you necessarily have a suspect, though, does it?

Speaker 5 Not necessarily. Doesn't explain

Speaker 4 this vehicle.

Speaker 48 But

Speaker 48 it's a good idea to eliminate the husband as a suspect in the get-go.

Speaker 23 Detective Ryan called Josh Daniels on Alaska's North Slope.

Speaker 8 Can you discern things like demeanor or attitude through the phone line?

Speaker 48 Not really. I wasn't detecting shock or grief or anything like that.

Speaker 8 But nothing you can hang your hat on either, huh?

Speaker 48 One of the questions I I asked him was, who have you been talking to here in Zanesville? And he gave me a list of about a half dozen people.

Speaker 19 Daniels told the detective he'd return to Zanesville as soon as he could. But there was another person much closer that the cops had to figure out.

Speaker 15 Craig Berry.

Speaker 25 The fiancée.

Speaker 8 He is the last person known to have talked to her?

Speaker 21 Yes.

Speaker 29 Did you wonder what was going on with the boyfriend?

Speaker 41 He's quite an older guy.

Speaker 8 He's got 20 years on your victim, right?

Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 8 So he's a person of interest until he's not, I'm guessing, huh?

Speaker 14 Well, at that point, anybody close to Brandy, we need to take a real hard, serious look at.

Speaker 4 Within hours of Brandy's death, Craig got the third degree.

Speaker 19 Were they asking you hard questions?

Speaker 8 You know, where have you been? What are you doing? Did you think, wow, they think I'm a suspect? Oh, yeah. Well, that's common, right? Until you're in it, and then there's the cop raiding your grill.

Speaker 8 Right. They asked for my cell phone.
I handed it over right then. How long did that last? I got home at 5.30 that morning.

Speaker 38 Then the legwork of the investigation began in earnest, starting with where she was last seen alive.

Speaker 8 So you're talking to your victim's co-workers. What's the picture coming together there?

Speaker 14 They all describe Brandy as a very good young lady, a devoted mother in a marriage that she really wanted to get out of.

Speaker 22 Patrol officers traced the route from Kohl's to the murder scene, hoping they'd find a security cam that recorded Brandy's car headed home.

Speaker 8 The boyfriend story is there's a guy right on her bumper. But that image doesn't show up anywhere, huh? No.

Speaker 24 When the lab results came back, disappointment. No useful fingerprints or DNA.

Speaker 20 And the long slog of getting search warrants to recover data from the cell phone and the towers the signals bounce off of had only just begun.

Speaker 28 A few days after the murder, Brandy's husband Josh returned to Zanesville from Alaska.

Speaker 29 They met him downtown at his lawyer's office.

Speaker 24 He was fully cooperative.

Speaker 36 The detectives asked for his cell phone.

Speaker 48 He and his attorney voluntarily turned it over.

Speaker 8 Now you can look him in the eye and you can check out his demeanor.

Speaker 7 What are you seeing?

Speaker 14 Josh was very cool and collected. He looked very confident.

Speaker 36 With the data from his phone on the way to the lab, Josh returned to Alaska with his eight-year-old daughter.

Speaker 23 Molly and her family had buried their brandy, but no one was coming to terms with the magnitude of this crime.

Speaker 8 Did the officers tell you anything about how the case would go?

Speaker 10 They figured that it'd be summed up within a couple days.

Speaker 6 If only.

Speaker 11 Coming up, a new suspect, but he has an alibi.

Speaker 56 I went to my my girlfriend's house and we kind of stayed right there was he telling the truth the texts tell the tale you're on the clock when you type these

Speaker 48 you were sure he was not in the house

Speaker 11 when dateline continues

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Speaker 20 Brandy, the young mom found shot to death in the front seat of her car in the family driveway. Detectives put her fiancé Craig through the ringer.

Speaker 39 But his story, including the part about his last text to Brandy, checked out.

Speaker 14 Within two or three days, we were sure that he was cleared.

Speaker 22 But Craig wasn't a total dead end.

Speaker 36 The fiancé did have a tip for the detectives.

Speaker 20 He told them they should check out a fellow gym rat of Josh Daniels, a guy who gave Brandy the creeps, someone with an unusual first name, Sirius.

Speaker 35 Sirius E. Underwood.

Speaker 40 When they ran the name, investigators found a son of a local preacher who had had some juvenile offenses, but in the years since had redeemed himself.

Speaker 42 He graduated from Zane State, got a good job with a local manufacturer, and seemed to charm every woman he met.

Speaker 29 Four days into their investigation, Detective Brady Hiddle found Sirius at a girlfriend's place.

Speaker 9 I asked him if I could look at his cell phone, if I could take it back to the office and download it.

Speaker 8 He agreed to let me do that. How'd he present himself? Calm.

Speaker 9 He claimed he didn't know Brandy was killed, just calm, cool, and collected.

Speaker 27 Sirius came to the sheriff's office.

Speaker 9 We'll put an airplane in.

Speaker 50 While the squad's phone expert examined his cell, Sirius explained how he knew Brandy's husband Josh.

Speaker 56 We went to the same state together. Okay.
I worked out with him and stuff like that.

Speaker 41 He said he hardly knew Brandy.

Speaker 56 I didn't like Meteorometer. I seen her one time.

Speaker 42 As for his pal Josh up in Alaska, Sirius said they hadn't been in contact for a while.

Speaker 56 When was the last time he sent you a text? He called you? I'll say about two or three weeks ago. Not this week.
I didn't talk to him this week, no.

Speaker 4 Sirius said he'd been with his girlfriend around the time cops believe Brandy died.

Speaker 56 I went to my girlfriend's house and kind of stayed in her beer.

Speaker 36 Officers returned Sirius's iPhone and thanked him for coming in.

Speaker 37 Wendy Lemon, the girlfriend in Sirius's alibi, was next up on the detective's list of people to talk to.

Speaker 22 Wendy, a mother of five, said she met Sirius a couple of years earlier at the same place Brandy and Josh got together, Zane State College.

Speaker 44 I just knew from the moment I met Sirius that this is just a new friend. Happy,

Speaker 44 always smiling.

Speaker 47 The midlife single mom back to college and dean's list student Sirius were ambassadors for their school.

Speaker 44 They were just looking for a face for Zane State College that would be friendly and that would be outgoing so that we could go to different events in the community as well as giving tours on campus.

Speaker 29 Sirius had found time to work as a campus security guard, and that's where he met Josh, who did the same thing.

Speaker 6 Sirius was an overachiever, even featured in brochures about the college.

Speaker 36 Wendy liked almost everything about him.

Speaker 25 They became a couple.

Speaker 44 One year for my birthday, he totally set up an entire day skydiving. Happy birthday.

Speaker 44 It was so amazing, so awesome. We took motorcycle rides and went on picnics.

Speaker 20 Now, Wendy found herself caught in the undertow of a homicide investigation.

Speaker 25 Cops had her downtown the same day as Sirius.

Speaker 56 I just want to let you know, you're not under arrest. Okay.

Speaker 16 Detective Ryan asked about the night of the murder.

Speaker 32 He used Wendy's text with Sirius to refresh her memory.

Speaker 56 Could you put it here so you both can see? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 56 Okay.

Speaker 38 Did Wendy's text that night fit in the timeline they were building of Brandy's murder?

Speaker 33 And did they speak to Sirius's whereabouts?

Speaker 56 11 o'clock when you typed these.

Speaker 56 You were sure he was not in the house. Okay, so 11 o'clock he wasn't in the house.

Speaker 56 What time is it?

Speaker 55 Sirius arrived, Wendy said, after that 11 o'clock text.

Speaker 47 Sirius had given the cops Wendy as his alibi, and she'd inadvertently only made him someone detectives needed to take a closer look at.

Speaker 8 There's a window of opportunity in there in which he could easily have done this crime. Yes.

Speaker 6 And there was another thing.

Speaker 20 The squad's phone expert filled him in about some internet searches he'd found on Sirius's device.

Speaker 9 Sirius had opened every news article that had to do with the homicide.

Speaker 26 Interesting, because earlier in the day, he claimed he did know Brandy was murdered.

Speaker 43 Question.

Speaker 41 Was Sirius the gunman in Brandy's driveway? He seemed to be no more than a casual friend of Josh's from the gym.

Speaker 20 But when the I.T.

Speaker 53 guys cracked Josh Daniels' phone use history, it told a different story.

Speaker 8 What had he deleted?

Speaker 48 A lot of text messages.

Speaker 8 To whom?

Speaker 48 Sirius Underwood. Sirius Underwood was by far the one he was in contact the most.

Speaker 19 What's your thinking?

Speaker 48 When we...

Speaker 48 First talked to Josh, he never mentioned Sirius Underwood. Why would they be lying to us about that?

Speaker 41 Why, indeed?

Speaker 6 The story told by the phones, the concealed relationship, fed a growing theory of the crime, that they were looking at a long-distance killing between Ohio and Alaska.

Speaker 21 If that was their case, then technology was going to be as valuable to them as DNA or bloody fingerprints.

Speaker 4 The first big question, did the killer, assuming he was a man, have a phone on him when he did the shooting?

Speaker 41 And what tower near the murder scene had the phone pinged off?

Speaker 9 We had tons of, and I'm not exaggerating, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of phone calls that hit all these various towers.

Speaker 20 In that electronic haystack, a sharp-eyed cop noticed a call around the time they believe Brandy was killed.

Speaker 30 It was made from a number with a 310 area code.

Speaker 27 Now, normally that's Southern California.

Speaker 28 The county lawmen trace that 310 number back to an anonymous disposable phone, a burner, purchased in Zanesville a week before Brandy died.

Speaker 9 I get the call records for the 310 area phone and start coming through those. He only called two people, a second burner phone and Josh Daniels.
Those were the only two.

Speaker 24 Was this their breakthrough?

Speaker 41 That burner phone at the right time, right place had called Josh's phone in Alaska. Then the phone text did another extraction of Josh's phone and they retrieved something Josh thought he deleted.

Speaker 48 A voicemail that was left on Josh Daniels' cell phone from this California area code.

Speaker 49 Hey, what's up, man? It's me. Hey, hit me up on this phone right here whenever you talk about something.

Speaker 1 Hear me? Holler at me later.

Speaker 32 Detective Hiddle's ears perked up when he heard it.

Speaker 9 I listened to it, and now I know that that phone 310

Speaker 9 is Sirius Underwood's. That is his voice.

Speaker 36 The detectives wanted another technically deeper dive into Sirius's iPhone, which they'd returned to him.

Speaker 41 Sirius came downtown again as requested.

Speaker 27 But while the cops were preoccupied chasing down a search warrant for his device, he out-foxed them.

Speaker 20 Sirius found a computer and remotely wiped his phone clean.

Speaker 9 When I reached in and got Sirius' phone, I could see that it had been reset. Factory restored from the iCloud.

Speaker 8 So whatever story he was going to tell, you weren't going to hear it.

Speaker 9 There was nothing left on that phone.

Speaker 45 Pretty clever.

Speaker 7 It was like a whole evidence locker going up in smoke.

Speaker 40 Their whole techie crime trail, poof.

Speaker 43 Detectives by then were sure Sirius Underwood and Josh Josh Daniels were behind Brandy's murder, but could they prove it?

Speaker 14 We knew at that time we had a serious problem with our evidence. We were not dead in the water, but we were definitely struggling.

Speaker 36 Coming up, a stalled case.

Speaker 8 Are you starting to lose faith in your police? The investigation?

Speaker 10 It was stressful.

Speaker 36 And then a threat convinces a woman to talk.

Speaker 18 What did he say happened to Brandy? He killed her. He killed her.

Speaker 9 What is the next thing we've got to do then?

Speaker 39 Investigators were pretty sure they had the right guys for Brandy Daniels' murder.

Speaker 6 And they learned a lot about just how awful her marriage to Josh was.

Speaker 29 Cops found a 911 call Brandy had made six months before her murder.

Speaker 43 Seems we'll place them fire.

Speaker 1 I'm in an abusive relationship and

Speaker 1 I'm afraid to go home

Speaker 1 and I

Speaker 1 tell my husband that I want to leave but he won't let me and it gets physical.

Speaker 60 Brandy didn't request a deputy that night but she did file a restraining order against Josh when she left him.

Speaker 7 Cops knew Josh's buddy from the gym, Sirius, was likely involved in the murder, but they just couldn't tie the two of them together despite some suspicious phone traffic between the pair.

Speaker 16 An additional difficulty in the investigation was the fact that Josh was still living in Alaska, about as far away as you could get from Ohio and still be in the same country.

Speaker 4 Josh Daniels was here starting his new chapter, living in Wasilla, about an hour outside of Anchorage with his mother and stepfather.

Speaker 26 Keeping tabs on him from thousands of miles away were the Zanesville police, and they were seeing some patterns.

Speaker 39 When he wasn't working a job on the North Slope oil fields, he was partying, pumping iron, and chasing women.

Speaker 22 Back in Zanesville, meanwhile, the cops kept their pressure up on the person of interest they did have in their zip code, Sirius Underwood.

Speaker 6 The detectives were all over his girlfriend Wendy.

Speaker 44 Every time that I had a little spat or whatever, I was frustrated or disgusted with, you know, Sirius, he would always show up again, just wondered if maybe you remembered something.

Speaker 8 Trying to find you in a vulnerable moment and now you're finally going to spill this.

Speaker 44 Just like I've already told you every single thing. it's never going to change.
If you don't lie, you don't have to cover a lie.

Speaker 41 Brandy's mother was losing faith in the cops ever making an arrest in the case of her daughter's brutal murder.

Speaker 8 Are they saying trust us?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Every time we'd hear something, we'd contact them. Still need to get more evidence.
Still need to get more evidence.

Speaker 47 But something was about to happen, and it was enormous.

Speaker 30 Call it a good luck bolt from the land of the midnight sun.

Speaker 6 Alaska was calling.

Speaker 39 It was three months to the day after Brandy's murder when the Ohio investigators got a phone call from up here in Wasilla.

Speaker 32 It was a woman on the line saying that she had been seeing Josh Daniels and she had a story to tell the police, something he had told her.

Speaker 19 Well, when Detectives Hiddle and Ryan heard that, they were on the plane to Alaska within hours.

Speaker 55 The young woman explained she and Josh had been engaged at the time of Brandy's death, but he had commitment issues.

Speaker 18 He lied all the time. He was dating multiple people at the same time.

Speaker 38 She had the detective's undivided attention as she related what an intoxicated Josh told her on the 4th of July.

Speaker 18 He told me the same that happened to Brandy would happen to me. What did he say happened to Brandy? He killed her.
He killed her. He said that? He said,

Speaker 18 he said, I killed her. Yeah.
Do you remember what his exact words were? He said

Speaker 18 he killed Brandy with a phone call and I believe everything he said. I believe that he killed her and I was so afraid.
Did he say who killed Brandy? He says a black guy at the jail.

Speaker 18 That wasn't his group of people.

Speaker 6 It looked as though the detectives were ready to put a bow on their investigation.

Speaker 36 Take the blizzard of messages between the two men, mix in the geography of the cell phone towers that put a suspect burner phone tied to Sirius right near the crime scene.

Speaker 24 And now, add in the story of the woman from Alaska who'd apparently heard a confession, and you should be ready to swear out arrest warrants.

Speaker 27 Not quite.

Speaker 60 When the detectives got back to Ohio, their first stop was at the office of state's attorney Mike Haddocks.

Speaker 8 And they come to you and say, are we there yet?

Speaker 53 Yes.

Speaker 8 And you're telling them, no, you're not quite there.

Speaker 54 I wanted to make sure that

Speaker 54 before we took the case to grand jury, that we had a motive. Obviously, in the case of Josh Daniels, the husband, we had a motive.

Speaker 54 Marriage was breaking up. He had been violent with her in the past.

Speaker 8 But he was thousands of miles away in Alaska at the time. We knew he didn't pull the trigger.

Speaker 26 He had the gun in his hand.

Speaker 8 He didn't pull the trigger.

Speaker 54 When we came up with Sirius Underwood, the most obvious is there's been some sort of a payment. We spent about a year looking through bank accounts, couldn't find any.

Speaker 12 Almost two years went by and nothing.

Speaker 8 How do you put all that awful time together, Molly?

Speaker 10 Day by day.

Speaker 8 Are you starting to lose faith in your police, the investigation?

Speaker 10 It was stressful.

Speaker 10 Mike Ryan, he would call. I said, have you heard anything?

Speaker 10 We still have to get some more.

Speaker 10 More evidence, more evidence.

Speaker 33 But it's funny how things sometimes work out because the investigators were about to get another bolt out of the blue lead like the one from Alaska.

Speaker 34 It began with, of all things, a message to the Facebook page of the Zanesville PD.

Speaker 37 The tipster had volunteered that her husband was part of a stick-up gang.

Speaker 51 We came in and spoke with her and obtained a lot of valuable information for this investigation.

Speaker 12 Detective Phil Michael of the Zanesville PD had been working for two years on a string of armed robberies.

Speaker 39 When he got the Facebook tipster in for an interview, guess who she identified as two members of the robbery crew?

Speaker 21 None other than Sirius Underwood and Josh Daniels.

Speaker 24 If the tipster could be believed, they'd been bandits together two years before Brandy would be found shot to death.

Speaker 60 The woman confirmed something Detective Michael had long suspected but been unable to prove, that the robbery of a local department store had been an inside job.

Speaker 7 Josh Daniels had been working at the store at the time and handed over $7,000 to a masked gunman.

Speaker 19 If we had been here on January 1st, 2012, what might we have seen?

Speaker 39 That you can see an individual come from the southwest side of the parking lot. He stuck the gun in Josh's face.

Speaker 52 Shows a pistol.

Speaker 39 Yes. He ended up falling down, being knocked down.

Speaker 19 The tipster claimed claimed that Josh wasn't the victim of the robbery, but actually one of the participants.

Speaker 26 And that his pal Sirius had been the mastermind, not only of the department store job, but the prime mover in a crime wave, responsible for multiple armed robberies, most of them captured on surveillance video.

Speaker 30 The two bodybuilders' secret sideline was a head-snapping revelation.

Speaker 9 Sirius Underwood at night's over here robbing drug dealers, or he's robbing tumbleweed restaurants, or they're hitting, you know, Gabriel Brothers.

Speaker 9 But during the day, he's the sweetest guy, loves the women, they love him, he'll train with you, poster boy, just an all-around great American.

Speaker 25 The cops believe that linking Sirius and his partner in crime, Josh Daniels, to the violent robberies would help nail the two for Brandy Daniels' murder.

Speaker 51 We're on the right track for the robberies. We're going to go try to confront Josh.

Speaker 36 Back to Alaska.

Speaker 23 When Josh landed at Anchorage International on his way home from the North Slope, airport police whisked him into their office.

Speaker 36 Detective Michael showed Josh photographs of the department store robbery suspects.

Speaker 45 Have you ever seen him before

Speaker 17 around the store or anything like that?

Speaker 55 No.

Speaker 55 Detective Michael then handed Josh another photo.

Speaker 62 Have you ever seen Sirius Underwood? Yeah, I used to live with him. Would you have talked to Sirius that day by having a guy called you or text you or anything like that?

Speaker 62 Not at all. No.

Speaker 8 Really?

Speaker 41 The cop accused Josh of lying, of being up to his eyeballs in the robberies.

Speaker 62 So if you guys came up with some dumbass scheme to take some money, then we would be honest with you.

Speaker 43 Josh stuck to his story, then lawyered up.

Speaker 16 The detectives flying home to Ohio knew they had more work to do.

Speaker 32 But in any conspiracy, there's a weak link.

Speaker 19 They just had to pick their man and break him.

Speaker 11 Show in the core. Coming up.

Speaker 4 Who would crack first?

Speaker 17 We get the phone call saying, hey, let's make a deal.

Speaker 38 Let's talk.

Speaker 11 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 42 A dogged investigation with a generous dollop of luck had revealed that Josh and Sirius were more than gym buds spotting each other reps.

Speaker 64 They were armed robbers together.

Speaker 43 Detectives surmised that Brandy, their victim, must have known about Sirius and her husband's part in the holdups.

Speaker 38 For state's attorney Mike Hannix, the homicide case had achieved critical mass.

Speaker 8 So what was the final green light for your

Speaker 8 Which is Josh's wife might be a risk for him.

Speaker 54 That's correct.

Speaker 41 She might snitch him out.

Speaker 54 She might snitch him out.

Speaker 41 Haddocks convened a grand jury. Assistant state's attorneys Ron Welch and John Lytle would present the case.

Speaker 60 There would be a lot of convoluted storytelling and evidence for the jurors to follow.

Speaker 17 You've got robberies going on, the homicide, the cell phone data, how you link all these people up.

Speaker 17 You're going to have multiple snitches who are all going to be testifying, who all have their own issues.

Speaker 12 The grand jury sat for three months and heard more than 100 witnesses.

Speaker 43 In March 2016, it returned indictments against Josh Daniels and Sirius Underwood.

Speaker 52 At the request of authorities in Ohio, the Alaska State troopers located Josh at his mother's home in Wasilla.

Speaker 39 Once Ohio gave the green light to the troopers to move on their suspect, they did.

Speaker 23 The cuffs went on without incident.

Speaker 53 A bulked-up Josh was put in the backseat of a cruiser and driven downtown.

Speaker 39 Detective Michael confronted him.

Speaker 59 You've been charged with several counts, including the robberies that occurred at Gabriel Brothers,

Speaker 59 Tumbleweed,

Speaker 59 the one that you're going to do at Campbell's, and the murder of your soon-to-be ex-wife, Brandy.

Speaker 20 Josh was shown a graphic crime scene photo of poor Brandy.

Speaker 60 This is what you are responsible for.

Speaker 59 This is what happened to your ex, and I'm willing to talk to you to get your side of the story if you're willing to talk to me. I think you're a good investigator, but I'm going to have an attorney.

Speaker 8 So,

Speaker 8 we're going to do that.

Speaker 62 That's fine, Josh.

Speaker 12 Meanwhile, back in Zanesville, police surrounded Sirius Underwood's car and arrested him.

Speaker 20 His interrogation didn't last long.

Speaker 56 You know why you're here?

Speaker 56 Don't tell me. Okay.
We've had a grand jury and you've been indicted. Don't worry.
Aggravated murder, aggravated robberies, attempted robberies, weapon under disability, tampering with evidence.

Speaker 56 Josh Daniels is also arrested. Josh is up there talking, and I think it's the proper thing to tell you that you have the opportunity to tell me too.

Speaker 56 Would you like to talk to me about this?

Speaker 1 No. No, I'm a lawyer.

Speaker 56 You want a lawyer? Yeah.

Speaker 56 Okay.

Speaker 28 Josh waived extradition and was brought back to Ohio.

Speaker 7 Brandy's mother got word at the end of her shift.

Speaker 10 I get a phone call. You need to get down here now.

Speaker 8 There you are in a courtroom. What's going on?

Speaker 10 Josh is there doing his plea. And then they go over details that we weren't aware of.

Speaker 8 So he's got to bring all the pain right back again, huh? How did he look to you in the courtroom?

Speaker 10 Not a care in the world.

Speaker 60 Wendy was in the courtroom as well.

Speaker 8 This is big news. Sirius is charged.
He's in jail. Do you believe that he killed Brandy Daniels, that he shot her to death on that road?

Speaker 44 No, I don't. Sirius had just so much going for him, and he had worked so hard, and I would just say, why?

Speaker 44 What did he have to gain from doing something like that?

Speaker 26 Over the next few months, Welch and Lytle prepared their cases.

Speaker 43 Josh would be tried first, then Sirius.

Speaker 39 They laid out their case on index cards. Modem was looking more complicated than ever.

Speaker 19 In opening arguments, they'd have to explain to jurors just who these defendants are.

Speaker 41 Sirius, the overachieving charmer, and bad husband Josh, who'd been abusing anabolic steroids for years.

Speaker 9 Josh was roided out. He was out of his mind using steroids.

Speaker 64 Sirius is a sociopath.

Speaker 9 Whereas for Josh, it was a status of being enraged and jealous.

Speaker 64 I think he still loved her, and she was just done with him.

Speaker 20 Josh sat behind bars for seven months.

Speaker 38 Deprived of elephant doses of steroids, his chemically enhanced muscles deflated like spent balloons.

Speaker 30 They'd found their weak link.

Speaker 17 We get the phone call from Josh's defense attorney saying, hey, let's make a deal.

Speaker 64 Let's talk. The issue that we had was, you know, who do you make the deal with?

Speaker 17 The guy that had his wife killed or the guy that shot her point blank range in the face?

Speaker 32 The state's attorney agreed to a plea deal.

Speaker 43 But Josh Daniels would have to tell all.

Speaker 1 I want to start off with the murder.

Speaker 11 Coming up,

Speaker 11 one down, one to go.

Speaker 8 What was the weakness in the case? You're still going to have Josh come in as your witness.

Speaker 64 Josh, the jury wouldn't like him.

Speaker 8 So, within that, there might be wiggle room for Sirius. Right.

Speaker 20 As part of pleading guilty to murdering his wife Brandy, Josh Daniels had to admit what he'd done, provide what lawyers call a proffer.

Speaker 12 He was brought to a conference room at the prosecutor's office.

Speaker 9 When was the first time that this

Speaker 9 idea came about?

Speaker 1 I've known Sirius Underwoodford.

Speaker 1 We were having a conversation one day at his apartment, and I was telling him about

Speaker 1 how hard this was on me.

Speaker 1 Me and Brandy splitting up, and how pissed off I was that she was seeing that guy, Craig.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he made the comment, well,

Speaker 1 f that bitch, let's just offer it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 at the time, being emotional and mad, you know,

Speaker 1 I made the decision that maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea.

Speaker 42 Josh helped him stalk his wife.

Speaker 1 Sirius asked me where she lived.

Speaker 1 And I told him.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he asked me about her work schedule. And I told him.

Speaker 42 And it wasn't just brandy Josh wanted dead.

Speaker 1 I told him

Speaker 1 see if he could go over to her boyfriend's house, Craig's, see if he can find him where he lives. And

Speaker 1 break into his house and kill both of them. Did he? Huh?

Speaker 61 Did he find out where he lived? Yeah.

Speaker 55 Did he try to break in the house? No.

Speaker 55 Not that I know of.

Speaker 38 They schemed together on the eve of the murder.

Speaker 1 He asked me a day before,

Speaker 1 are you sure

Speaker 1 that you want this done? And I've been drinking and

Speaker 1 swelling, I had alcohol problems and steroid problems, and I was just mad.

Speaker 1 I said, yeah.

Speaker 3 How did it go down?

Speaker 1 I told him that she was getting off work. I would text Ceres and and just say the word close.
He just said that I've got this, a Search Corr. I don't know actually what took place on the night.

Speaker 1 I mean, I know that she was shot, so I don't know if he parked his vehicle somewhere and came running out of the bushes. I never talked to Sirius after the murder actually happened.

Speaker 1 He certainly confirmed with you that it happened. He said, Done.

Speaker 23 They asked, how could Josh live with himself after killing the mother of his child?

Speaker 1 I thought that

Speaker 1 they would just go away.

Speaker 1 That this day would never come.

Speaker 1 That me getting arrested would never happen.

Speaker 1 After Brandy's death, I became an alcoholic.

Speaker 1 Drinking every day and

Speaker 1 taking using heroin, downers,

Speaker 1 just anything to numb that pain.

Speaker 38 The killer husband sounded almost contrite. If I could go back and I could change it,

Speaker 38 I would.

Speaker 1 Brandy didn't deserve what happened to her. She was a good girl.
And ultimately, years down the road,

Speaker 1 having Brandy gone, seeing how that affects my, that's going to affect my daughter's life.

Speaker 1 She don't have her mom.

Speaker 1 And knowing that I played a part in that,

Speaker 1 I can't live with that.

Speaker 36 With Josh about to throw himself at the mercy of the court, prosecutors still had the accused trigger man to deal with.

Speaker 38 But Sirius was hanging tough, not saying a word.

Speaker 33 So with only one of the two accused going to trial, the state star witness would be Josh Daniels.

Speaker 36 As prosecutors prepared him to testify, they were still trying to wrap their arms around Sirius's motive for the murder.

Speaker 55 What's he telling you?

Speaker 17 When I pushed Josh on why,

Speaker 64 why would he do this? And he says, that's what dudes do for dudes.

Speaker 17 That's what Sirius told him. He's asking him, he's like, you do that for me?

Speaker 64 And he just said, that's what dudes do for dudes.

Speaker 8 Kill your wife. Right.

Speaker 43 Crunch time for the prosecutors.

Speaker 6 Sirius's trial was looming, and they were far from confident.

Speaker 8 What was the weakness in the case? You're still going to have Josh come in as your witness. Josh.

Speaker 64 That the jury wouldn't like him.

Speaker 17 You're asking the jury to rely upon somebody that's admitted to having their wife executed.

Speaker 37 That's a tough pill to swallow.

Speaker 8 So within that, there might be wiggle room for Sirius. Right.

Speaker 33 Just days before Sirius' trial was scheduled to begin.

Speaker 9 I was writing my opening. I got a text message from the defense attorney saying, you guys do an Alfred plea?

Speaker 22 Sirius' lawyer was proposing a plea deal, an Alfred plea, the screwball pitch of American jurisprudence. Alfred plea.

Speaker 8 To civilians, to laymen. Has a very sketchy kind of feel to it.
Do you want to take a crack at trying to explain what an Alfred plea is? Sure.

Speaker 9 It basically is when somebody says,

Speaker 9 I'm willing to say that you have lots of information and

Speaker 9 I'm going to plead guilty, but I'm not going to say I actually did anything wrong.

Speaker 8 And I say, huh?

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 4 And then I turn to Ron and say, how's this go again?

Speaker 17 So he's going to take responsibility without saying he did it.

Speaker 33 The state's attorney signed off, and the trial judge accepted Sirius Underwood's Alfred plea.

Speaker 45 Sirius was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 38 years. Josh Daniels got life with a possibility of parole after 28 years.

Speaker 23 Not enough time for some of Brandy's loved ones.

Speaker 8 So where do we stand now? They've both been dealt with, huh? Yeah.

Speaker 8 I guess. Your opinion.
Do you think they both got off easy? Yes, they did.

Speaker 8 They're still still breathing. She's not.

Speaker 38 Josh and Sirius are serving their sentences in separate maximum security prisons.

Speaker 27 Brandy's parents took in their granddaughter.

Speaker 33 The family is left with a snapshot album itself getting older, but the young woman pictured in the pages inside staying the same.

Speaker 6 Never to have her own album of her daughter graduating, getting married.

Speaker 30 Time ran out for Brandy on a dark hilltop before she could kiss her daughter good night.

Speaker 11 That's all for now.

Speaker 17 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 11 Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 65 Hey everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrelson.

Speaker 65 It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name and we're back for another season.

Speaker 65 I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it.

Speaker 65 Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrison sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.