The Mystery at Lost Dog Road

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Speaker 12 From every direction you can see them, jagged cliffs rising up out of the desert landscape.

Speaker 3 The wind has carved their names.

Speaker 16 Kissing Rock, Castle Rock, Giant's Thumb, tall, rugged, and sometimes in the light of a late afternoon sun, ominous.

Speaker 14 They, the majestic backdrop to the scrabbling little mining town laid out at their base, Green River, Wyoming.

Speaker 21 Green River is small.

Speaker 23 Kind of a one-horse town.

Speaker 21 Yes, people refer to it like that.

Speaker 21 Pretty simple life.

Speaker 1 Simple?

Speaker 24 Well, in some ways, perhaps.

Speaker 23 But the story Roger Brauberger is about to tell is not the least bit simple.

Speaker 29 Tears the man apart, wondering how even he can absorb what happened on and under the cliffs of Green River, Wyoming.

Speaker 23 Before all that, it was just fine to grow up there.

Speaker 25 Roger Brauberger and his pal Bob Duke.

Speaker 29 Funny how kids can be so different and get so close just the same.

Speaker 3 They hung out at a mutual friend's house, a cops kid named Meekum, whose dad watched Roger fall into bad behavior.

Speaker 29 Well, Bob stayed squeaky clean.

Speaker 22 He was always

Speaker 21 a pretty straight kid.

Speaker 34 He knew where he wanted to go.

Speaker 31 Bob's parents were school teachers, and he was ambitious and focused and talked endlessly about going off to college after high school graduation.

Speaker 16 But Roger?

Speaker 20 Oh, yes, Roger.

Speaker 21 I quit school my junior year, and everyone said, oh, you're not going to go back, you're not going to go back, and I don't like people telling me I'm not going to do something, so I went back.

Speaker 38 But he seemed to take trouble with him.

Speaker 3 Drinking, public brawling, marijuana, LSD, eventually cocaine.

Speaker 21 It makes you feel 10 foot tall and bulletproof. Usually someone showed me I wasn't 10 foot tall and bulletproof.

Speaker 23 Got a few bruises along the way.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 21 Learned a few.

Speaker 19 The good kid and the troubled one spent weekends together off-roading in Bob's Jeep, chasing girls, watching Murder for Hire movies.

Speaker 21 We'll watch a movie about Hitman, the easy money involved in just a few seconds worth of work.

Speaker 26 Hitman. Yeah.
But that's killing somebody.

Speaker 22 So what?

Speaker 26 Was it a joke?

Speaker 21 You know, it's shooting in the breeze. It's wow, you know, $50,000 for pulling a trigger.

Speaker 7 They imagined becoming hitmen themselves.

Speaker 31 Just a joke, of course.

Speaker 44 But then, quite suddenly, life got serious for Bob.

Speaker 3 His girlfriend got pregnant.

Speaker 21 He didn't know what to do.

Speaker 21 She wanted to keep it.

Speaker 35 Her name was Liana Davidson, a high school junior, only 17.

Speaker 21 Long brown hair, really pretty. She was really showy.

Speaker 22 She was shy. She was shy.

Speaker 13 Yes, but she was intelligent, a straight-A student. She was going somewhere just like Bob.

Speaker 15 But now, there were issues.

Speaker 21 Her parents were Mormon, LDS, and his parents were school teachers, and there was pressure from both sides, you know, to do the right thing.

Speaker 44 Liana, according to her sister, was scared, didn't know how to tell her parents.

Speaker 16 Bob, however, talked to Roger.

Speaker 21 I think part of him wanted to do the responsible thing. The responsible thing for him was to marry her and support her.

Speaker 41 And so their high school graduation was an event with a double significance.

Speaker 21 We graduated at 10, May 25th, 1991, and he was married at 2 that same day.

Speaker 28 Happy day?

Speaker 21 We just graduated, and what could be happier than that?

Speaker 41 Liana, now carrying their child, had apparently adjusted to the new circumstances rather well.

Speaker 46 Was she a radiant bride?

Speaker 21 Oh, yeah, she was. That was probably the happiest day of her life.

Speaker 39 She was a doting wife from the beginning, says Roger.

Speaker 16 Filled up the house with crafty things, needle points, stenciling.

Speaker 21 She was all about Bob. He told me one time, he goes, Man, I've got it perfect.

Speaker 21 My wife loves me. I come home, dinner's ready, house is clean.

Speaker 19 And it wasn't long before Liana and Bob were joined by baby Eric.

Speaker 21 Eric was as cute as a bug. The kid was

Speaker 21 spitting image of Bob, just a gentle kid. Who seemed to love his daddy.

Speaker 16 Neighbor Karen Yoke remembers how young Eric looked up to his dad.

Speaker 49 Bob had a trick bike, and there was a lot of kids in the complex, and he would go out in the parking lot and do tricks for the kids, and his son Eric would love to watch his dad.

Speaker 16 Bob had given up on college.

Speaker 35 He had a family to support, but he was smart.

Speaker 39 People liked him.

Speaker 31 And he soon built a solid business as one of Green River's premier carpet installers.

Speaker 21 He always had money. He had a nice car, nice Jeep, nice home.

Speaker 26 You know,

Speaker 21 he took pretty good care of his family financially.

Speaker 38 Roger, meanwhile, spiraled into drug addiction and all of its attendant failures and disappointments and remorse.

Speaker 21 I did envy the fact that he had

Speaker 21 that he was successful. Looked like he had no worries, you know.

Speaker 35 But the friendship survived.

Speaker 14 Bob and Roger, and now little Eric.

Speaker 35 By the time Eric turned five, Liana was pushing for another baby.

Speaker 16 But Bob?

Speaker 21 I think that he'd given up on it long before that and fell trapped.

Speaker 14 Still, no one could have prepared Bob or Roger for what happened then, August 1996.

Speaker 42 It was a blustery summer day, as Bob recounted later.

Speaker 27 He piled Liana and little Eric into his jeep for a family outing, and they meandered up to a high rock ridge overlooking Flaming Gorge Reservoir.

Speaker 10 The rock surface is shale.

Speaker 27 Little Eric was playing near the edge, throwing rocks off, chasing lizards.

Speaker 24 Liana hovering by his side.

Speaker 28 Bob said he went over to the Jeep to get a soda.

Speaker 9 He heard Liana scream his name.

Speaker 2 He turned around.

Speaker 4 They were gone.

Speaker 50 Roger's mother called him with the news.

Speaker 21 She told me something terrible has happened, and I said, What's happened? She goes, Bob's wife and and kid have fallen off a cliff and died.

Speaker 16 By then, a Sheriff's Department lieutenant named Kevin Alvesteffer had arrived at the top of the cliff, had talked to Bob, and felt quite deeply puzzled.

Speaker 51 I couldn't tell you that was an accident, and I certainly couldn't tell you it was a homicide.

Speaker 51 It's just that it would be a good way to commit a homicide and have a reasonable chance of getting away with it.

Speaker 45 Idle speculation, really.

Speaker 15 But as we say, this is Roger Brauberger's story, and he he felt at that moment somehow guilty

Speaker 16 and terrified

Speaker 51 i was advised by dispatch that a male subject had called up stating that his wife and child had fallen off of a cliff.

Speaker 29 They call it Lost Dog Road, a dusty trail that winds up through the open desert, up to the head of the cliff. The road lieutenant Kevin Alvestoffer sped up in response to the 911 call.

Speaker 51 I didn't realize there was a cliff in that area of such magnitude. I thought that the wife and child had fallen off perhaps a 15 or 20-foot cliff and were

Speaker 51 injured.

Speaker 3 But no, it was a towering ridge, and Liana and Eric had plunged all the way down 200 feet to the rocks below.

Speaker 7 At the top, Alvestephar encountered the young husband and father of the victims, 23-year-old Bob Duke.

Speaker 51 He told me that they were out on the cliff, his wife and his child.

Speaker 51 He heard his wife call his name.

Speaker 51 He had went back to his jeep to get a soda, and when he turned around to look, they were both gone.

Speaker 55 What was his demeanor?

Speaker 5 He was quiet,

Speaker 51 very reserved, didn't say anything.

Speaker 55 Did he look like he was in shock? No.

Speaker 20 Alvestephar worked his way gingerly across the ragged loose shale, braced himself against the wind, and approached the precipice.

Speaker 51 When I got to the edge of the cliff face and looked down, you could see the two bodies. You don't want anybody around you when you're standing that close to that edge.

Speaker 51 And on three sides of it, it's a sheer cliff. And it's, I mean, certain death.

Speaker 7 Bob Duke told Alvesteffer he hadn't been able to get down there to see if his wife and child were alive or dead.

Speaker 13 The terrain was too steep, he said.

Speaker 56 Odd, thought the lieutenant.

Speaker 57 The first responders had made it down quite easily.

Speaker 15 Force of habit, the cop watched Bob as the lifeless bodies of his wife and child were hoisted up the cliff.

Speaker 21 Did he go over and try to hold them or?

Speaker 26 No.

Speaker 13 Why, the lieutenant wondered, had Bob Duke parked his jeep on this particular cliff, such a dangerous place?

Speaker 51 Said they went off for a drive and had stopped at several locations before coming to this one. I'd asked him if he'd been in that location before and he'd told me no.

Speaker 28 But even if he'd never been there before, couldn't he see the risk?

Speaker 51 To think that anybody would let their five-year-old son run around on this cliff,

Speaker 51 it was beyond comprehension.

Speaker 50 Still, they were so young, and if they were foolish enough to let their child play on the cliff top, surely it was reasonable she would have reached out to save him and then slipped off herself.

Speaker 51 Nothing else in the autopsy would support anything else other than death by falling.

Speaker 44 And so before long, the Sweetwater County Sheriff's Department ruled the fall a tragic accident.

Speaker 16 The family outing gone wrong. Still, the lieutenant brooded.

Speaker 51 I thought he got away with it.

Speaker 11 And that remained your thought.

Speaker 24 Yes.

Speaker 42 And that's a look at some sports notes for you here on KUGRP.

Speaker 35 Local broadcaster Steve Corr included the story in his newscast.

Speaker 31 I reported it as an accident.

Speaker 58 That's what I was told by authorities that Leanna and Eric had gotten too close to the cliff.

Speaker 58 And I had talked to some of the authorities, and some of the authorities had indicated that they thought it was kind of suspicious.

Speaker 23 But, you know,

Speaker 58 at this juncture in the game, it was an accident.

Speaker 35 Which brings us back to Bob's friend, Roger Brauberger, who heard the same news everybody did.

Speaker 21 I stored up too because I knew Leanne and Eric. I really truly hurt for the wife and kid.

Speaker 54 There was something else, too, that only he and Bob knew.

Speaker 7 So right away, he arranged to see his grieving friend.

Speaker 21 And I went through about a box and a half of tissues before he showed up. It was two and a half hours later.
And, you know, he'd been planning the funeral already.

Speaker 21 And he says, I need to talk to you outside.

Speaker 45 They stepped outside.

Speaker 21 Also, he says, I need to know that you believe I didn't do this.

Speaker 21 I need to know whether or not I need to cover my ass on this. I told him, no,

Speaker 21 there's no way you could possibly have done that.

Speaker 20 Now, why would Bob have said a thing like that?

Speaker 43 Roger began to get a sickening feeling.

Speaker 16 He found himself brooding over memories of Bob and the lack of warmth he showed toward his son.

Speaker 21 And I remember one time he came back and his son ran up to him and he, you know, kind of, Liana, take care of your son like he didn't have time for him. Pushed him away.
Just kind of stiff-armed him.

Speaker 55 Did he behave toward his wife that way also?

Speaker 21 I'd never seen him really lovey Dovey.

Speaker 15 Liana and Eric Duke were buried side by side on a hill overlooking the town.

Speaker 53 Bob took great care in choosing the headstones.

Speaker 50 Roger was a pallbearer, and he carried Eric's small coffin with a heavy heart and a worried mind.

Speaker 21 It was

Speaker 21 brutal.

Speaker 21 It was emotionally brutal.

Speaker 33 Reporter Steve Corr also attended the funeral in support of his old acquaintance, Bob Duke.

Speaker 58 I'd known him for a couple of years.

Speaker 58 I felt bad. I was saddened by this whole thing, and I just felt the the need to support him and the loss of his wife and child.
I just really deep down felt it was an an accident.

Speaker 32 But even as grief swept through the small desert town, support for Bob was accompanied by whispered questions.

Speaker 19 Why had he taken his little family up to that remote, forbidding place?

Speaker 16 Why did he let Eric play up there on the lip of a deadly cliff?

Speaker 21 She was an overprotective mother.

Speaker 26 Okay.

Speaker 21 He was afraid of bugs. The kid was timid.
Anyone that knew Leanna knew she wouldn't let her kid play on a cliff. They knew it was just a little too weird, and they couldn't put their finger on it.

Speaker 8 But Roger could.

Speaker 31 Roger had a reason to be very suspicious indeed.

Speaker 7 The same reason must have been for Bob's urgent request during that strange post-accident conversation.

Speaker 21 I need to know that you believe I didn't do this.

Speaker 15 But could Roger go to the police with the wild story of what happened a month before the accident?

Speaker 53 After all, who would believe such a tale from a known drug addict like him?

Speaker 21 Well, see, that's the thing. I'm the last person that would have gone to the police.
Not only was I doing drugs, I was selling drugs.

Speaker 55 Besides, your reputation as a believable person is mud.

Speaker 21 Exactly. Well, how believable is that going to be coming for me?

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Speaker 21 A lot of the town was mourning, you know, the death of

Speaker 21 two beautiful people that died on a tragic cliff.

Speaker 33 Everyone in Green River, Wyoming seemed to take it hard, the death of Liana Duke and her little boy, Eric, so young, and the way they were killed falling from that cliff, awful.

Speaker 21 You know, small news is big news in a town like that.

Speaker 7 There was a brief investigation and then the ruling.

Speaker 50 It was an accident.

Speaker 33 And all over town, people offered their sympathy to the young husband and father, Bob Duke, just 23 years old and already a widower.

Speaker 30 Everybody's poor, poor Bob, you know, poor Bob.

Speaker 22 Lost his wife, lost his child.

Speaker 30 I mean, Mont Meekum was that cop who watched Bob and Roger grow up, a narcotics detective with the Green River Police Department.

Speaker 21 And I was like,

Speaker 34 I'm just not buying this.

Speaker 26 This stinks.

Speaker 34 Too many red flags there.

Speaker 34 Way too many for me, okay?

Speaker 24 The case was out of his jurisdiction, though.

Speaker 44 Not much he could do, except plead with the sheriff's department to take another look at the case.

Speaker 34 And they said, no, we've closed the case.

Speaker 34 I said, man, that's sad.

Speaker 13 Thing is, as we said, it's a small town.

Speaker 56 Bob, with Roger and the cop's old son, once spent long, happy hours in Meekum's rec room.

Speaker 15 So, of course, Meekum knew Bob's parents, too, Larry and Roberta Duke, respected school teachers with impeccable reputations, which thought Meekum might have been part of the problem.

Speaker 34 The fact that mom and dad, because of who they were,

Speaker 26 you know,

Speaker 24 a little bit of politics was in play also.

Speaker 55 Maybe this is a family you have to be a little careful about.

Speaker 34 You You have to, you know, you just don't jump up and say your son's involved in a double homicide.

Speaker 34 In a small town, when you start taking off the school teacher's kids, you know, the bishop's kids and stuff, the small town comes into play, you know, and that politics shows up. It's just

Speaker 27 you don't go over and mess up this kid's life.

Speaker 19 The one person Meekum did not talk to just then, though, was Roger Brauberger, the well-known local druggie.

Speaker 16 Too bad.

Speaker 42 Because Roger was sitting on a a dreadful secret, which put things in a very different light indeed.

Speaker 12 It was July, a month before the accident.

Speaker 53 Bob approached his friend Roger with a rather odd request.

Speaker 21 He goes, well, you know, we talked about, you know, the easy money for making the hit. And I'm like, yeah, he goes, well, I was wondering, you know, would you like to kill my wife and kid for money?

Speaker 47 Kill his wife and kid for money?

Speaker 21 I thought, well, he's just blowing off steam.

Speaker 7 Until a few weeks later, when Bob laid out a detailed plan.

Speaker 21 He says, have you given any thought to that? I said, yeah, he goes, well, how about 20,000? You know, I'll be barbecuing this Wednesday or whatever. And, you know, I'll leave a 22 out behind the shed.

Speaker 21 And you can shoot me in the arm, shoot my wife and kid in the head and chest, and then take out as many neighbor kids as you need to to make it not look so obvious.

Speaker 21 And I was like, you know, this is just crazy, dude. Did he have a straight face when he was saying this thing?

Speaker 56 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 21 Straight as the day is long.

Speaker 59 Why would he pick you, of all people?

Speaker 21 He knew that I was into drugs, and he knew that I was probably the last person that would go to the police.

Speaker 16 Roger wondered, what had happened to that family?

Speaker 33 They seemed so happy.

Speaker 21 And I asked him one time why he didn't he just divorce her. And he told me his parents would hate him.

Speaker 19 Weeks later, Liana and Eric were dead.

Speaker 21 He had figured out a way to do it himself and make it look like an accident.

Speaker 26 You really thought he did it at that point.

Speaker 21 I knew he did it at that point.

Speaker 33 Roger knew he had a moral obligation to speak up, to say something, but it was his word against Bob's.

Speaker 21 He was a good guy. He was a

Speaker 21 pillar of community, you know. I mean, the guy taught taekwondo to children, for Christ's sakes.
My parents absolutely loved him.

Speaker 21 You know, when I told my dad about this at first, Bob offered me money to kill his wife and kid before he did it. My dad didn't believe me.

Speaker 11 I didn't listen to everything Roger told me because I didn't want to hear him.

Speaker 11 Because I thought there's no way that Bob would kill his wife and son, his own son.

Speaker 13 And if his own dad wasn't buying it, the police police surely wouldn't, especially given Roger's reputation as a drug user and peddler.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I wasn't a very upstanding community citizen. You know, I wasn't the Boy Scout.

Speaker 15 What's more, Roger didn't have any real proof that Bob had killed his wife and child.

Speaker 21 I had nothing, and it would have looked like I was attacking someone who had been through a personal tragedy, and I had to

Speaker 21 bow my head and keep my mouth shut. And I had to live with that.
I had to be a pallbearer for his son, knowing that he he'd killed him.

Speaker 21 And that tore me up. That ate the hell out of me for a long time.

Speaker 26 What was it like standing there with a coffin on your shoulder?

Speaker 21 It was

Speaker 21 brutal.

Speaker 21 It was emotionally brutal.

Speaker 21 What if I'd said something, you know? They wouldn't be being buried. So it was tough.

Speaker 22 God, and there you are carrying the casket.

Speaker 54 And now it was too late.

Speaker 41 Liana and Eric were dead.

Speaker 37 Bob collected the insurance, $60,000,

Speaker 47 and Roger kept his mouth shut.

Speaker 21 I was afraid of him.

Speaker 21 I was

Speaker 21 appalled.

Speaker 21 I am at myself for not having said something.

Speaker 21 I never wanted to hear from him again.

Speaker 15 Weeks turned into months, months into a year, then two, Bob moved away.

Speaker 50 And Roger tried to forget.

Speaker 21 By then, I really wanted to believe that maybe it had been an accident. Maybe I was trying to talk myself into it.
Maybe

Speaker 21 it could have been an accident, maybe.

Speaker 47 But not after that night when he picked up his phone and it was Bob.

Speaker 20 And then, as Roger discovered, he had a very big problem indeed.

Speaker 21 Yeah, it all came back. It came back with a vengeance.

Speaker 20 Two years had passed since Liana Duke and her little boy, Eric, fell off the cliff at the end of Lost Dog Road.

Speaker 56 And by now, Roger Brauberger had suppressed his suspicion that what happened that warm summer day was anything but an accident.

Speaker 21 I didn't want to associate the Bob Duke that I knew with the Bob Duke that wanted his wife and Kekil, so I tried to separate it, you know, in the back of my mind.

Speaker 45 Anyway, Roger, the drug addict, was busy hitting bottom.

Speaker 21 I was stuck, man. I was a slave to that.
I was using intermaniously. I'd do anything for my next fix.

Speaker 35 And then one January night, Roger answered the phone.

Speaker 7 And it was Bob calling from Houston, where he'd gone to live with his older brother.

Speaker 21 He called me and wanted to know if I'd get him automatic weapons. He was working security high-rise, and there were people that wanted certain people dead, and he could make money at this.

Speaker 26 What was it like to hear that voice again for the first time?

Speaker 21 It was like the nightmare all over again.

Speaker 3 Bob knew that Roger's drug-dealing friends had connections.

Speaker 43 He knew if anybody could help him, Roger could.

Speaker 47 Why didn't you just say, no, I'm not going to do that?

Speaker 26 I don't know why.

Speaker 21 Maybe because I'm a coward in that way.

Speaker 16 So Roger played along for a while.

Speaker 14 Until Bob called a few weeks later with an even more bizarre request.

Speaker 21 He said, look, I've done family before.

Speaker 21 I didn't enjoy it. You know, I would like you to kill my parents.

Speaker 26 I'm like, what?

Speaker 21 He goes,

Speaker 21 they're going to die whether you do it or not. He goes, but I know that you need the money, so I'm giving you a first shot at it.
He offered me $20,000 to kill his mom and dad.

Speaker 43 Roger got off the phone, shaken, and once again, afraid.

Speaker 21 All of a sudden, I know too much again, way too much.

Speaker 43 What was he to do?

Speaker 16 He called his father.

Speaker 11 I was just blabbergessed. I said, what? Why would he do that? He goes, for the money.
And I said, Roger, tomorrow morning, you go right to the police. You tell him everything you know.

Speaker 21 He said, well, dad, it's going to cause a lot of problem for him.

Speaker 11 And I said, Roger, it don't make any difference.

Speaker 32 It was right then that Roger decided that for once in his life, he was going to do the right thing.

Speaker 21 I went to school with

Speaker 21 a kid named Mark Meecum. His dad was Detective Mark Meekum.
I said, he was a head narcotics detective, but it was someone I could trust.

Speaker 34 I received a call from Roger.

Speaker 26 He was in a total panic.

Speaker 34 Kill me, though. Kill me.
You know, I said, who's going to kill you? You know, I'm not sure.

Speaker 54 Meekum tried to talk Roger down.

Speaker 34 You know, he wanted to,

Speaker 34 you know, swim the river and meet by the cover of darkness, you know,

Speaker 34 no moon and all that stuff.

Speaker 40 They met the following morning.

Speaker 31 What was the first thing out of Roger's mouth?

Speaker 22 Basically, you know, that he knew that Bob had killed his wife and kids.

Speaker 16 And there was more.

Speaker 15 This new plot to kill Bob's parents.

Speaker 24 That was a shocker.

Speaker 22 That was the shocker.

Speaker 13 Only one thing to do now, said Detective Meekum.

Speaker 42 Roger would have to do the one thing he thought he would never do, cooperate with the police.

Speaker 35 He would have to catch his old friend in the act of plotting to kill.

Speaker 38 The FBI was called in.

Speaker 35 They put a tap on Roger's phone.

Speaker 53 Agent Todd Scott gave him directions.

Speaker 66 We needed them to discuss. The plot because up until that point, we only had Roger, whose credibility was undetermined by the FBI.

Speaker 60 This is expected to be a call from Roger Brauberger to Bob Duke reference conspiracy to commit murder.

Speaker 39 A visibly nervous Roger Brauberger dialed his friend's number.

Speaker 21 I had to see if there was any

Speaker 21 validity behind what I was saying.

Speaker 29 Because that was a pretty wild thing you'd told them.

Speaker 21 Yeah, especially coming from me.

Speaker 31 It was like a conversation out of the Hitman movies Roger and Bob had so often watched together.

Speaker 15 This time, it was Bob and his brother who wanted to turn Roger into a real-life hitman.

Speaker 38 They discussed how they'd carry out the hits and set a timeline for the murder.

Speaker 60 Did you have any ideas about

Speaker 60 maybe how I could do it?

Speaker 60 A 22-inch wide enough.

Speaker 60 Right. I can't think it's anything more than a door slam.

Speaker 60 Okay, so you would think it would be on like a Friday night. So we thought they might be going to Salt Lake or something for a day.

Speaker 60 The whole thing relies upon us being able to say we are where we are.

Speaker 26 You know what I'm saying? Right.

Speaker 26 For an alibi.

Speaker 66 Yes.

Speaker 67 A good time would be over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend.

Speaker 67 If they could kill them on Friday, they would have three days to be totally out of their alibi themselves and no one would even begin to look for their parents until Tuesday.

Speaker 60 I can get you in too.

Speaker 60 You can get me in.

Speaker 60 So it's just walk in and do it and walk out just like it was like I lived there basically then. Yeah the best thing to do would be when no one be there when no one's there.

Speaker 60 Right. You know when they come in and then catch them off guard.
Got to be together. Okay.
Because my dad does have a gun in the house.

Speaker 21 I couldn't just bust in and give him a chance to get the gun to shoot me. I had to be there to surprise him.
Hey, uh,

Speaker 60 as far as like afterwards, like getting paid, like, is there insurance on him or something? There are many things going on there.

Speaker 13 Bob had collected $60,000 in life insurance money after Liana and Eric's deaths.

Speaker 47 And now it seemed he was planning to collect money on his parents.

Speaker 60 Okay, well, let me kick around the $20,000 for a couple days and I'll get back to you. I've had it with this whole thing.
I'm tired of hearing about it. Right.

Speaker 60 If you did it, we could probably up at another five.

Speaker 60 Okay.

Speaker 60 But

Speaker 60 the key is AFAP.

Speaker 66 They were in a hurry.

Speaker 67 They just wanted to be done with this, so they solicited Roger to actually conduct the murders.

Speaker 60 You're not talking about this, are you? No.

Speaker 60 No, I haven't said a word to no one.

Speaker 55 Were you nervous that he would realize somebody was overhearing this thing?

Speaker 21 Oh, God, yes. But I don't know how he ever didn't figure it out.

Speaker 55 Because you sounded so nervous.

Speaker 21 That was damn near hyperventilating.

Speaker 50 The FBI was nervous, too.

Speaker 37 They assigned extra cops around Bob Duke's parents' home, around Roger's home, and they surrounded Bob's apartment in Houston, ready at a moment's notice.

Speaker 60 Today is January 8th, 1999, at 11.59

Speaker 38 a.m.

Speaker 60 This is in reference to conspiracy to commit murder.

Speaker 20 Still, they needed more from Roger.

Speaker 54 Though he'd extracted evidence of the murder plot against Bob's parents, Roger hadn't asked Bob to admit he killed his wife and son.

Speaker 15 He'd have to make one more call.

Speaker 60 You said you were going to send me the key?

Speaker 60 You were not thinking about that. Uh-huh.
I don't think that's a good idea. Why is that? Because it won't look like an accident.
It's going to look planned. Okay.

Speaker 60 Is there any way we can make it look like an accident like you did with your wife and kid? Dude, I did not do that. You didn't? No, I fing didn't do that.
So I thought you said you did that. No.
Huh?

Speaker 60 No.

Speaker 60 No. But we talked about it and I didn't want nothing to do with it.

Speaker 21 He vehemently denied it. And we got upset.

Speaker 47 Bob Duke wasn't confessing to the murder of his wife and son.

Speaker 37 But the FBI felt they had enough on the plot to kill his parents and there was danger involved.

Speaker 50 They'd take what they could get.

Speaker 66 The decision was made that we would arrest him while he's on the phone.

Speaker 68 25-year-old Robert Duke was arrested at his home in southwest Houston. His brother, 31-year-old Patrick Duke, was arrested at a business office near downtown.

Speaker 50 Bob Duke was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Speaker 38 His brother with failure to report the plot.

Speaker 7 Finally, it looked like Bob Duke was going to prison. Roger had done the right thing.

Speaker 18 It was finally over.

Speaker 21 It felt like a weight off my shoulders. I went out and got drunk that night.

Speaker 15 Only, the law is not always so predictable.

Speaker 7 And Roger's nightmare was far from over.

Speaker 21 The only way I can guarantee the protection of my family is to meet Bob when he gets off that bus and kill him.

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Speaker 21 I thought I made it up. So half the town hated me, and the other half town patted me on the back or bought me a beer.

Speaker 16 Roger Brauberger, drug addict, had accomplished something quite remarkable.

Speaker 30 He'd foiled a murder plot.

Speaker 37 Imagine his own childhood friend, Bob Duke, wanted to kill his own parents.

Speaker 17 Both of them well-known and respected Wyoming school teachers.

Speaker 21 He came to me and he put me in this position, and he has turned my life upside down with this.

Speaker 37 And yet those very parents who refused to listen to the telephone recordings also refused to believe that their sons wanted them dead.

Speaker 29 And more than a few people made it clear to Roger they agreed with Bob's parents.

Speaker 21 Why did you do this and why did you make this up?

Speaker 16 And then it got worse.

Speaker 50 Bob Duke was charged with conspiracy to commit the murder of his parents, but not with the murder of his wife and son. He took a plea bargain, the sentence 10 years in federal prison.

Speaker 54 By 2009, Bob Duke would be a free man.

Speaker 15 Roger was now married with a baby and another on the way, and he was certain Bob would seek revenge just as soon as he could.

Speaker 21 For every day he's sitting in prison, he's going to be thinking of 100 different ways to kill me.

Speaker 47 He asked the FBI for protection of his family.

Speaker 56 They told him he wasn't a candidate.

Speaker 21 My life is turned upside down, and I've been through hell for this.

Speaker 21 You know, to gain what? To do the right thing?

Speaker 55 Around Green River, the sense of something unfinished festered.

Speaker 55 Bob Duke's parents still went to school every day, still professed their belief in the innocence of their son, still held their heads high.

Speaker 7 But people wondered if Bob Duke was capable of plotting to kill his own parents, was he also capable of murdering his wife and child?

Speaker 58 I think the majority of people in town were thinking they need to reopen that case.

Speaker 33 And then finally, prosecutor Harold Moneyhun and Investigator Mike Dayton agreed to take a fresh look at that accident on the cliff.

Speaker 26 I thought about it often over the course of several years, and the idea of him getting away with it simply didn't sit very well.

Speaker 21 I'm pretty sure he did it, but we're going to have a hard time proving.

Speaker 28 Investigator Mike Dayton went out to the cliff at the end of Lost Dog Road.

Speaker 33 He was taken aback by the harsh wind, the pygmy rattlesnakes, the severe drop.

Speaker 23 No place for adults, let alone a child.

Speaker 21 This is a scary place. And it's gravel on top, but it's layers of thin rock

Speaker 21 laid on layers of thin rock. Shale, kind of shale.
Yeah, and you step on it, and every step shifts a little bit.

Speaker 21 It is far steeper than it appears in pictures.

Speaker 38 But they needed forensic evidence, physical evidence.

Speaker 47 They examined the autopsy photos.

Speaker 26 There was a linear

Speaker 26 mark,

Speaker 26 a bluish, reddish bruise on

Speaker 26 Liana's throat. And there was a suspicion that there may be evidence of strangulation prior to her being pushed off the cliff.

Speaker 16 If Bob had strangled her, they were sure the hyoid bone, a small U-shaped bone of the neck, would be fractured. They were granted a court order to exhume the bodies.

Speaker 26 I mean, if that's, you know, if that bone's broken, we thought, you know, we had him.

Speaker 43 They waited, hoping this was the evidence they needed.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 16 the injuries were horrific, but the hyoid was intact.

Speaker 47 She had not been strangled.

Speaker 26 Everything that they saw would be consistent with an accidental fall.

Speaker 41 So they brought in an expert in the way things and people fall.

Speaker 17 The expert built dummies the same size and weight as Liana and Eric and threw them off the cliff.

Speaker 26 We were trying to determine whether there was a difference as to the resting place or point of impact. if someone were pushed with some lateral force or whether someone just slipped off.

Speaker 71 But in the end, it didn't matter if the dummies were hurled off or gently dropped off the face of the cliff because they were funneled to the very same landing place each time.

Speaker 26 You guys were really ridiculous.

Speaker 26 I think at that point we knew that we weren't going to get a lot

Speaker 26 of additional forensic or physical evidence, and so we knew our case hinged on the credibility of Roger Brauberger.

Speaker 3 Roger Brauberger, who was certain that Bob Duke had murdered his wife and child, but whose reputation as a drug addict and peddler was terrible.

Speaker 53 Would a jury believe him?

Speaker 2 Roger wasn't a choirboy.

Speaker 26 You know, he had some past.

Speaker 13 Still, Moneyhun decided to take the chance.

Speaker 53 Five years after Liana and Eric plunged off a cliff to their deaths, Bob Duke, father and husband, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

Speaker 56 I think the general...

Speaker 42 Feeling among people in Green River was it's about time.

Speaker 27 At the trial in the Sweetwater County Courthouse, rescue workers testified that when they arrived on the clifftop that day, Bob Duke seemed oddly unemotional for a person who just witnessed the deaths of his wife and son.

Speaker 52 Liana's parents said that their daughter wasn't the sort of mother who would let her little boy play around on the clifftop like that.

Speaker 10 Still others testified that Bob was unhappy in his marriage.

Speaker 28 and they'd heard him be verbally abusive to Liana.

Speaker 13 And then there was the most important witness, Roger Brauberger.

Speaker 42 He would testify in a case that could put his old friend away for life.

Speaker 21 And I thought, you know, he's probably going to glare me down.

Speaker 21 And I started thinking, you know, the reason I'm here is because of him. I started getting angry.

Speaker 16 Roger told the jury specific details of how Bob had offered him $20,000 to kill his wife and child.

Speaker 17 and how three years later, he offered him a similar amount to kill his own parents.

Speaker 3 Had it been enough to convict?

Speaker 26 No witnesses, no physical evidence. Three people went out to the cliff.
One survived. He claims it's an accident.
There's no physical evidence to disprove the

Speaker 26 accidental theory.

Speaker 2 A classically losable case.

Speaker 26 Let's say we weren't overly confident.

Speaker 13 And then one day, toward the end of the trial, Moneyhan went back to his office to have lunch.

Speaker 25 and fret about the case.

Speaker 26 I was trying to eat my sandwich and I got a message that there was someone that needed to talk to me about this case.

Speaker 53 It was with some reluctance that he relented and had his secretary bring in a young, attractive woman.

Speaker 22 Just kind of

Speaker 26 danced in and

Speaker 26 sat down and told me she had some stuff, some information that I really should hear.

Speaker 26 A small town,

Speaker 58 12,000 people in Green River, Wyoming. When something like this happens, people talk, and it was talked about pretty much everywhere you went.

Speaker 42 The Bob Duke murder trial was on everybody's mind in Green River, Wyoming that summer.

Speaker 7 Bob Duke was 29 by then.

Speaker 42 Liana and Eric had been in their graves six years.

Speaker 56 And Prosecutor Moneyhunt believed the conviction was a moral necessity.

Speaker 26 To me, if you're capable of killing your own son for insurance money, there's not much beyond that.

Speaker 38 But inside the Sweetwater County Courthouse, the prosecutor was preparing to rest an iffy case.

Speaker 3 No real forensic evidence, no real physical evidence. And his main witness was a known addict.

Speaker 35 And then over lunch, there she was.

Speaker 72 It was just spur of the moment.

Speaker 35 Her name was Crystal Robinson.

Speaker 50 And she had a story to tell.

Speaker 72 I wrestled with it for a while because I did.

Speaker 56 I looked horrible.

Speaker 72 You know, I looked like a homewrecker.

Speaker 36 Crystal told the prosecutor she met Bob Duke at the Green River Mini Mart.

Speaker 13 Crystal was just 13 years old then.

Speaker 16 And Bob, she said, came on to her.

Speaker 72 It was just so flattering that an older man would have any kind of interest in, you know, a girl that was so young.

Speaker 47 They started hanging out together. Well, actually drinking and making out together, she says, even though Bob had already been married three years and she was just entering her teens.

Speaker 36 He took her for rides on his four-wheeler.

Speaker 13 Lots of times they went out into the country.

Speaker 72 I've been out there since I was little. So

Speaker 72 I had a lot of experience on the roads and everything and knew where I was at.

Speaker 20 So she knew exactly where they were when Bob drove up Lost Dog Road to the very cliff he told police he'd never once been to before Liana and Eric fell to their deaths.

Speaker 72 He had taken me. to that very cliff at least 20 times.

Speaker 26 Bob had always claimed that he had arrived at this point on the cliff by accident. He'd taken a wrong turn.

Speaker 8 But he lied.

Speaker 32 And while they were up there, said Crystal, he told her stories about his wife and son.

Speaker 72 He was very miserable, and that was the only part of his conversation that had ever went bad. It was whenever he talked about his family, because he felt like he was trapped.

Speaker 72 I asked him a few times, you know, if you're that miserable, why stay? You know,

Speaker 22 get a divorce.

Speaker 72 He wanted to find a way out of getting divorced without having to pay child support.

Speaker 52 The prosecutor put Crystal on the stand, of course.

Speaker 52 And then he told the jury that Bob Duke's way out of his marital dissatisfaction was to shove his wife and child off that cliff and then claim it was an accident and collect the $60,000 in insurance.

Speaker 52 And when that money ran out, said the prosecutor, then Bob and his brother concocted the scheme to have their parents killed for their insurance money.

Speaker 7 Bob Duke took the stand himself to deny the allegations against him.

Speaker 50 denied, for example, Crystal's story, although he agreed they did hang out together.

Speaker 36 Reporter Steve Kaur found his testimony flat, expressionless.

Speaker 58 He came across as arrogant. He came across as not remorseful.

Speaker 13 But the jury, apparently, had a lot to talk about.

Speaker 3 An hour went by, then five, then ten.

Speaker 7 It was late when Roger Brauberger got a call.

Speaker 13 He had just put his children to bed.

Speaker 20 He rushed down to the courthouse to hear the verdict.

Speaker 55 You must have been enormously nervous about this.

Speaker 21 I was a wreck. My future really hung on what they said.
Exactly. You know, and whether or not I can sleep at night.

Speaker 5 But his nightmare finally came to an end.

Speaker 45 Thanks to Roger's courage, Bob Duke is serving life in prison for the murders of his wife and son.

Speaker 21 I did the only thing I could do.

Speaker 21 I still look myself in the mirror and say, look, you know, I like this guy.

Speaker 21 That's a big step for you. That is a big step.
It took a long time time to get there.

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