Blind Justice

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Speaker 10 They call it the Gold Coast, the sun, the sea, and in this million-dollar home, a mystery.

Speaker 15 He was talking on the telephone when he heard a loud bang.

Speaker 16 A woman murdered.

Speaker 17 Her husband left blind.

Speaker 19 Are you bleeding? Do you see any blood? I'm bleeding all over, yes. Okay.

Speaker 19 I can't see.

Speaker 20 But who?

Speaker 21 Everyone's somewhat of a suspect.

Speaker 18 And why?

Speaker 22 What brings someone to make a decision that they're going to do this?

Speaker 24 Was it love?

Speaker 15 What we learned was that he was having an affair with Mrs. Sutton.

Speaker 21 Was it money?

Speaker 25 Nobody knows what really happened except for him and Garrett.

Speaker 10 Or was the truth hidden here on this tropical paradise?

Speaker 26 It was an assassination. It was a hit, no question.

Speaker 11 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dayline.

Speaker 27 Here's Keith Morrison with Lying Justice.

Speaker 28 It was August hot in Coral Gables.

Speaker 28 The air was shirt-staking thick as night fell.

Speaker 28 The small damp breeze pushed weakly at limp palm fronds.

Speaker 28 In the artificial cool of Attorney John Sutton's house, an intimate party was winding down early.

Speaker 37 It was Susan Sutton's birthday, attending their son, his girlfriend, and John's law partner.

Speaker 40 Daughter Melissa, just off to college in North Florida, couldn't be there.

Speaker 8 So she phoned her mother to say she missed her.

Speaker 43 Are you too close?

Speaker 44 Extremely.

Speaker 22 It's my best friend.

Speaker 45 I was going to ask how old your mom was.

Speaker 22 57?

Speaker 46 No, you can't put that on the phone.

Speaker 46 She was a nice

Speaker 47 45.

Speaker 48 Let's put it, let's leave it at that.

Speaker 17 The guests laughed.

Speaker 33 The law partner went home.

Speaker 45 Son, Christopher, and his girlfriend went out to to a movie.

Speaker 52 John settled in to watch TV in the master bedroom.

Speaker 54 Susan, in another bedroom, talked on the phone with a close friend.

Speaker 55 A quiet end to a pleasant evening.

Speaker 37 Quiet, but not for long.

Speaker 37 Okay, Lizana,

Speaker 19 I need police. My house just for assault is.
What happened, sir? Somebody came in and shot me.

Speaker 57 He shot you?

Speaker 19 Yes.

Speaker 57 Who did it?

Speaker 19 I don't know. I can't see.

Speaker 19 I need police and I need an ambulance.

Speaker 57 Okay, where did he shoot you? In my head.

Speaker 59 John Sutton, a tough as nails take no prisoner's lawyer, was barely conscious as he begged the 911 operator for help.

Speaker 62 He told the operator blood was gushing from his head wounds.

Speaker 63 He couldn't see.

Speaker 57 Whoops is in the house with his wife.

Speaker 57 And where is he? I don't know.

Speaker 38 Somehow he made it out the front door on his own. He was met by a paramedic.

Speaker 66 The holes in his head and his face, I mean, I couldn't believe how Mr.

Speaker 68 Sutton made it out of the house walking to us.

Speaker 64 They stabilized Sutton, rushed him off in an ambulance.

Speaker 69 An hour north of Sutton's home, homicide detective Larry Bellew was just getting home after a long shift.

Speaker 15 I was just pulling into my driveway when I got the phone call. He was critically injured.
However, he called 911 and he made his way to the door and opened the door.

Speaker 68 They didn't want to go in until he came out.

Speaker 15 No way to know whether the person or persons were involved were still inside. They backed off until the SWAT team arrived and made entry into the house.

Speaker 61 Not knowing if the gunman was still in the house, SWAT teams cleared the house room by room, finally entering the bedroom where Susan Sutton had been on the phone.

Speaker 26 And when they went into the room in which Mrs. Sutton was,

Speaker 26 they didn't see anybody.

Speaker 71 Miami-Dade prosecutor Karen Kagan was on homicide duty that night and was called out to the scene.

Speaker 26 They saw a mound on the bed, covered by a blanket. There were bullet holes in the blankets, and they had to yank the blanket down.
And when they did that, they found Mrs.

Speaker 26 Sutton in bed with her hands up. She had been holding the blanket and covering herself, literally

Speaker 26 ducking under the covers for cover.

Speaker 42 Susan Sutton was dead.

Speaker 75 a bloody phone beside her. She must have dropped it as she pulled up the covers in her vain attempt to hide from her killer.

Speaker 62 House secured, no shooter around, the SWAT team withdrew.

Speaker 75 A dispatcher warned Detective Bellew this might be the deadly result of a domestic dispute.

Speaker 77 Sutton's 911 call, perhaps an attempt to cover up what he had done.

Speaker 15 When I got the phone call and said that there was a murder-suicide down in the city of Coral Gables, we heard that the husband was en route to trauma center and in critical condition.

Speaker 61 En route with two bullet holes to his head.

Speaker 80 Had Sutton killed his wife, then turned the gun on himself?

Speaker 38 No.

Speaker 81 That theory was quickly dismissed when the paramedic who took him to the hospital put out an update over the radio.

Speaker 57 He can't provide any info, but it does look like he has a gunshot wound to the hand. I don't know if it's a defensive wound.

Speaker 15 He had wounds to his hands, which would make it clear like it was defense-type wounds that somebody else must have shot because he put his hands up.

Speaker 14 So obviously, first clue, this is not

Speaker 15 a murder suicide.

Speaker 38 Who or why would anyone want to harm John or Susan Sutton? The Suttons had lived exemplary lives, seemed to have it all.

Speaker 62 A beautiful house with a 31-foot boat out back in exclusive Coral Gables, the upscale enclave south of Miami.

Speaker 72 His law practice, Susan worked as office manager, was booming. Just that week, he'd received a check for a million dollars for a case he'd settled.

Speaker 2 So, was robbery the motive?

Speaker 81 And if so, how did the killer get into the house?

Speaker 61 Officers saw a curtain blowing in the wind through a sliding glass door in the rear of the house near the pool.

Speaker 88 The door latch showed signs it had been broken long before that night.

Speaker 26 The killer had gone in through that sliding glass door, had walked all the way through that house. No ransacking.
Drawers were not opened.

Speaker 26 And in the master bathroom on the vanity was some beautiful diamond and gold jewelry. So clearly, early on, it was pretty easy to detect that robbery was not the issue here.
No.

Speaker 26 And that it was apparent that they were targeted. It was an assassination.
It was a hit.

Speaker 89 An assassination? A hit?

Speaker 36 That sort of crime just didn't happen in state coral cables.

Speaker 73 Whatever the motive, there was little to go on.

Speaker 75 No murder weapon, no fingerprints, no DNA.

Speaker 61 There was, however, one possible lead.

Speaker 92 Susan Sutton, as it was painfully obvious from the blood-stained evidence, had been on the phone when she was shot five times.

Speaker 29 Someone heard the screams screams of bullets ripping through the silence of that steamy August night.

Speaker 33 But who?

Speaker 10 Coming up, what did he know that police didn't?

Speaker 87 He was given a polygraph, wasn't he?

Speaker 15 He passed on certain information, but he was deceptive in others.

Speaker 72 Which is a red flag.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 18 When dateline continues.

Speaker 55 An August morning, 2004, Melissa Sutton, 19 years old, awoke to her new college dorm life in Northern Florida, unaware of what had happened to her parents the night before.

Speaker 95 Unaware that her mother was dead.

Speaker 29 Unaware that in a Miami emergency room, doctors were fighting to save her father's life.

Speaker 98 Who told you and how?

Speaker 99 I actually

Speaker 22 got a call from a friend who said, I hope your dad's going to be okay. And I just went, what?

Speaker 99 Like maybe a heart attack or something, you know.

Speaker 83 Out of the blue. Out of the blue.

Speaker 38 Frantically, Melissa called every number she could back home.

Speaker 99 I called my mom. She didn't answer.
I called Teddy Montoto, my dad's partner and extremely close family friend.

Speaker 99 And he didn't answer.

Speaker 22 I called my brother. He said he couldn't talk right now.

Speaker 98 Were you frantic in the sense that you knew something bad had happened?

Speaker 100 I didn't know what. I didn't know what level.

Speaker 72 Eventually, Melissa reached Montoto, who reluctantly broke the news to her on the phone.

Speaker 39 He brought her back to Miami and the hospital where her father was in intensive care.

Speaker 51 Her brother, 26-year-old Christopher, had already arrived.

Speaker 40 Both of them were reeling from the loss of their mother, and now they kept vigil at their gravely wounded father's bedside.

Speaker 22 We didn't even know if he was going to live for a long time.

Speaker 32 It's pretty touch and go.

Speaker 22 Yeah, to say gruesome is, you know. If I didn't know his hands and know little intricate pieces of them, you wouldn't have known it was him.

Speaker 89 You faced the shocking prospect of becoming an orphan.

Speaker 22 I don't think that ever crossed my mind, actually. I don't know.
He was still alive in my mind.

Speaker 39 Melissa wondered why her parents could have done this.

Speaker 81 Investigators describing it as a hit.

Speaker 98 Did you have any sense at all what

Speaker 98 may have happened?

Speaker 22 Well, Teddy told me what had happened, but I didn't know who had done it.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 104 I just thought it was some sort of break-in was my first instinct.

Speaker 102 That's what I thought for a long time until we started talking about my dad's clients.

Speaker 38 Homicide detectives Larry Bellew and Art Nanny were also thinking about Sutton's clients and those he sued on their behalf. At this point, John Sutton couldn't provide any information.

Speaker 64 He was clinging to life in a drug-induced coma.

Speaker 15 I went several times to try to talk to John Sutton. He was on pain medication.
He was intubated. I mean, we're looking at maybe incidents in his law firm who he maybe made people angry at him.

Speaker 34 You know, civil attorneys, they take a lot of money from people and they make people mad.

Speaker 15 I said, find out if any of these people have reason for revenge on, you know, John Sutton.

Speaker 68 John Sutton ran his law firm like he ran most things in life.

Speaker 62 Efficient and hard driving.

Speaker 45 In fact, detectives heard about one woman who lost a $97,000 lawsuit and was so mad she threatened to shoot up John's firm.

Speaker 45 And the very night of the murder, a neighbor heard a boat roaring down the canal just behind John's house, and it turned out that woman owned such a boat.

Speaker 105 She was interviewed down the line also, and she was not person responsive.

Speaker 8 But what about that phone call Susan was on when she was shot to death?

Speaker 51 Detectives found the bloodstained handset Susan dropped when the gunman opened fire.

Speaker 70 Who was she talking to?

Speaker 2 Had that person heard something?

Speaker 50 Detectives got their answer almost right away.

Speaker 107 John Sutton's law partner, Teddy Montoto, had shown up at the house even before the first reports of the shooting hit the news that night.

Speaker 95 He was also armed.

Speaker 15 He was talking to Susan Sutton on the telephone when he heard a loud bang or what he said, maybe gunshots, he didn't know.

Speaker 35 At least that's what he told the police. Depending on the amount of truth in his statement, he could be a suspect.
Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 62 But that, said Melissa, had to be impossible.

Speaker 43 Teddy and Susan worked together.

Speaker 62 They talked often and frequently late at night.

Speaker 99 He was my mom's best friend. Call him my godfather, pretty much, you know, like a relative.

Speaker 6 But police were suspicious.

Speaker 91 Why had Montoto arrived so quickly after the shooting?

Speaker 50 Why was he armed with a handgun?

Speaker 73 They had a few questions, and perhaps more important, some testing to do.

Speaker 15 We interviewed him extensively. We did take gunshot residue from his hands.

Speaker 68 He was given a polygraph, wasn't he?

Speaker 7 Yes, he was. How'd he do?

Speaker 15 He passed on certain information, but he showed that he was deceptive in others.

Speaker 72 Which is a red flag.

Speaker 37 Yes.

Speaker 93 A red flag this early in the investigation.

Speaker 64 What exactly did law partner Matoto have to hide?

Speaker 49 Well, perhaps John Sutton could tell them.

Speaker 13 Because the survivor of the slaughter, it was clear, was going to live.

Speaker 30 And when he came out of his coma, what story would he tell?

Speaker 86 What did he see?

Speaker 10 Coming up, with his victim defenseless in the hospital, would the killer try again? John Sutton's son seemed to think so.

Speaker 104 I do recall him as very adamant that my dad be placed under John Doe so that whoever did this could not finish off what they had started.

Speaker 10 But was the killer already closer than anyone could have dreamed?

Speaker 18 When dateline continues

Speaker 81 Susan Sutton was dead, shot five times by a killer who invaded her home after her birthday party.

Speaker 64 Her husband, John, an attorney, had been shot in the head twice and was in critical condition at a Miami hospital undergoing multiple surgeries to save his life.

Speaker 107 But soon after the shooting, detectives had a potential suspect, John Sutton's good friend and law partner.

Speaker 15 He had a partner who was on the scene when homicide detectives got there.

Speaker 59 Teddy Montoto told police he'd been on the phone with Susan, heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire, rushed over to the Sutton house with a gun of his own to try to help.

Speaker 86 But was that the whole story?

Speaker 50 They gave Montoto a polygraph.

Speaker 106 It showed he'd been deceptive, hiding something.

Speaker 15 What we learned was that he was was having an affair with

Speaker 15 Mrs. Sutton.

Speaker 50 So, Montoto hadn't been straight with them or with his good friend and partner, John Sutton.

Speaker 93 But was he off the hook for murder?

Speaker 96 Well,

Speaker 108 maybe,

Speaker 73 maybe not.

Speaker 72 When they checked phone records, it appeared Montoto was still being deceptive.

Speaker 81 He told them the affair had been recent and brief.

Speaker 2 But that's not what the phone records said.

Speaker 3 Did Teddy Montoto have some secret reason to kill his lover and her husband?

Speaker 72 They tested him for gunshot residue.

Speaker 42 He told them he might test positive.

Speaker 78 He was an expert marksman, had been shooting earlier that day.

Speaker 35 Another twist in the story, but what did it mean in terms of the likelihood that he was involved in this incident?

Speaker 15 Again, it was early in investigation. There was a lot of investigating to do.

Speaker 68 And mostly, for days, they waited with everyone else to see if John Sutton would survive the attack, to see if they'd ever be able to ask him what happened.

Speaker 1 Until now, all they'd heard from Sutton was this.

Speaker 19 Are you bleeding? Do you see any blood? I'll bleed all over. Yes, okay.

Speaker 19 I can't see.

Speaker 86 I can't see.

Speaker 78 It was almost a week after the shooting.

Speaker 3 When Sutton was awakened from a medically induced coma, he was going to live.

Speaker 72 But he was going to live with the scars of the shooting.

Speaker 75 He had lost an eye.

Speaker 78 But worse, far worse, was the news the doctors gave him.

Speaker 82 He would never see again.

Speaker 75 He was blind in both eyes.

Speaker 91 Shortly before I left the hospital,

Speaker 67 some ophthalmologists came around and very bluntly told me there was nothing they could do for my eyesight.

Speaker 113 I

Speaker 83 was

Speaker 67 very unhappy, very upset about the eyesight.

Speaker 98 Did you know right away he was going to be blind?

Speaker 100 No, I didn't.

Speaker 22 We didn't even know if he was going to live for a long time.

Speaker 98 It'd be nice to look into his eyes and know he can see back and see you.

Speaker 27 It's different.

Speaker 106 It's different to look at someone who's blind.

Speaker 22 It's a different expression.

Speaker 85 Though, for a long time, any expression was masked by truly dreadful injuries.

Speaker 54 How many bullets had you been hit by?

Speaker 67 I had two in my head, in the right temple, and I'm told, out the left jaw, one higher towards my ear and one in the lower part of the jaw.

Speaker 81 And those were only the shots to his head.

Speaker 62 The tip of his ring finger was blown off.

Speaker 87 Other shots hit his thumb and shoulder.

Speaker 67 There were six pretty good-sized bullet holes. Couldn't remember the name of them.

Speaker 39 When he was well enough to talk to detectives, Sutton told them what he could.

Speaker 81 the story of a man who barely witnessed the attack that killed his wife and almost killed him.

Speaker 75 He was a former college swimmer, so he was watching an Olympic diving event in the master bedroom, he said.

Speaker 67 Next thing I know, somebody was standing there in a black hat or visor, black shirt, black pants, face shaded by the visor, and open-fired. All I really remember was one bang.

Speaker 78 The bullets destroyed his right eye.

Speaker 62 and severed the optic nerve in his left eye.

Speaker 75 The optic nerve connects the eye to the brain.

Speaker 56 Without it, sight is impossible.

Speaker 39 But the bad news, of course, didn't end there.

Speaker 82 How did you find out about Susan?

Speaker 67 At some point, I asked Melissa, how's mom doing? And Melissa said, well, she's not doing quite as well as you. They're working on her somewhere else, so you need to hang in there.

Speaker 67 Didn't really mean too much to me. I think I was hallucinating an awful lot.
At some point, somebody told me that she had died.

Speaker 86 In fact, for weeks and weeks Sutton drifted in and out of alertness dependent on others to save him.

Speaker 67 Of course my son was there. A bunch of my friends were there because I had multiple surgeries in that hospital.

Speaker 3 And as he lay in that bed, sedated, medicated, breathing through tubes, a thought,

Speaker 81 half a dream, terrified him.

Speaker 116 Was the killer a hit man?

Speaker 107 Was he coming to try again?

Speaker 67 I thought somebody was trying to kill me one night, so I raised help. I I said, you know, call the police, you know, everything I could say to get some assistance.

Speaker 38 He was wrong.

Speaker 95 There was no killer.

Speaker 78 Still, Christopher demanded the hospital take special precautions.

Speaker 110 I do recall him as very adamant that

Speaker 104 my dad be placed under John Doe so that whoever did this could not find him and

Speaker 103 finish off what they had started.

Speaker 82 So you were a pretty paranoid guy aligned in that.

Speaker 67 Most certainly.

Speaker 53 And with good reason.

Speaker 86 Because

Speaker 117 the killer was still out there.

Speaker 40 Knew exactly where John Sutton was.

Speaker 94 Coming up.

Speaker 10 Unfortunately, police had no idea where the killer was.

Speaker 21 Everyone is somewhat of a suspect.

Speaker 33 You start with the family and you keep working your way out.

Speaker 18 When dateline continues.

Speaker 3 The fact that John Sutton was alive at all after that mystery invader killed his wife and shot him in the face was a medical marvel, frankly.

Speaker 72 The rest of the news was not so good.

Speaker 93 When he was finally able to talk, Sutton received a visit from police detectives.

Speaker 75 Susan, police discovered, had been having an affair with Sutton's law partner, Teddy Montoto.

Speaker 67 It's upsetting. I'm not excusing Teddy.
I'm not not excusing anybody. So I don't focus on that.
I can't change it. I can't change any of this.
It's like a bad dream.

Speaker 5 But then the dream got worse.

Speaker 78 Teddy was a possible murder suspect.

Speaker 67 One of the homicide detectives related to me that there had been a problem with the polygraph.

Speaker 78 Because he was actually a suspect.

Speaker 67 I suspect so. Anybody that was probably anywhere near me was a suspect.

Speaker 39 But as Sutton was absorbing the news of his wife's apparent betrayal, Montoto slipped off the list of top suspects.

Speaker 1 For one thing, he couldn't have been the shooter.

Speaker 53 He was on the phone with Susan when it happened.

Speaker 106 Records confirmed he actually called the police before rushing to the Sutton house.

Speaker 81 So as detectives eliminated early suspects like Montoto,

Speaker 78 they went back to the basics of every homicide investigation.

Speaker 21 Everyone is somewhat of a suspect.

Speaker 105 I mean, you know, you start with the family and you keep working your way out.

Speaker 39 Family.

Speaker 50 John and Susan met on a blind date, were married a year later,

Speaker 74 and from the beginning made family a very big deal.

Speaker 81 But even though they were strikingly good-looking and financially successful and happy, they were stymied.

Speaker 61 No matter how they tried and, oh, how they tried, they could not have children.

Speaker 118 She was sure that as much as anybody else wanted a baby, she wanted a baby more than anyone in the world.

Speaker 33 Susan.

Speaker 36 But if wishing couldn't make Susan pregnant, said her sister Mary, it could make her a mother by adoption.

Speaker 118 She got her wish, and as I said, it was the happiest day of her life when she brought Christopher home.

Speaker 53 Christopher Sutton was born April 13th, 1979, and the day they brought him home, John Sutton remembers every minute, every detail, even the green suit he was wearing.

Speaker 67 When Christopher came to us at about two days old,

Speaker 67 Very cute. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 34 And it was a happy time.

Speaker 67 Absolutely.

Speaker 13 Susan quit her job to be a full-time mom, but Susan kept trying to get pregnant, kept suffering through years of failed fertility treatments and miscarriages,

Speaker 56 and finally adopted a sister for Christopher, Melissa.

Speaker 33 She

Speaker 67 was

Speaker 67 and always has been a little angel. Absolutely.
She would probably be upset with me saying this, but she was pretty close to perfect.

Speaker 64 Which seemed to describe the family, too. They told the kids they'd been adopted.

Speaker 61 Didn't seem to worry them at all.

Speaker 102 My mom and my dad were my mom and my dad. You know, there wasn't, you know, these are my biological and these are my adopted.
Sure.

Speaker 99 And I had a great childhood.

Speaker 109 And there were advantages to having a brother seven years older, especially when he grew to be a six foot, 200 pounder.

Speaker 102 He was my defender, my protector.

Speaker 99 You know, if someone made fun of me at school one time, he came and he kind of gave the kid a stern look, like a big older brother did.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 22 I think he was protective of me.

Speaker 37 After the murder, in fact, Christopher resumed that protective role, this time for his father, who insisted that Melissa should return to college in northern Florida.

Speaker 67 The day after the shooting was her first day of college.

Speaker 33 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 67 And I was then, and I am still,

Speaker 67 proud that she managed to stay in school.

Speaker 83 During the long and arduous recovery, the many surgeries, the lingering fear, a protective layer formed around John's demeanor.

Speaker 68 He learned the hard way to keep focus in and emotion safely at bay.

Speaker 45 It was easier that way.

Speaker 76 Survival mode.

Speaker 23 He just focuses on putting one foot in front of the other, and I think I do the same thing.

Speaker 110 Even if you were to break down emotionally all the time or dwell on what happened, you wouldn't get out of bed.

Speaker 51 The doctors let him go home finally, but since home was not exactly livable, he moved in with Christopher at his townhouse.

Speaker 67 My house was a mess because it was a crime scene. The most logical place for me to go was not where the incident occurred, because we didn't know who was responsible.

Speaker 67 but this townhouse, and that's where I went.

Speaker 82 A full-time nurse looked after him during the day.

Speaker 40 Christopher and his girlfriend Juliet Driscoll were there for him the rest of the time.

Speaker 52 And three months after the August shootings, when John decided he was ready to go home to the house in which the shooting happened, Christopher went with him.

Speaker 73 Eyes for his blind father.

Speaker 67 And at that point, he was more involved in driving me around or some caregiving.

Speaker 55 But now it was almost Christmas.

Speaker 34 Still no arrests.

Speaker 81 Detectives Larry Bellew and his partner Art Nanny were certainly following up leads, trying to find anyone with a motive to kill the Suttons.

Speaker 88 Though understand, the digging they were doing was mostly in mounds of dry, turgid paperwork, records of phone calls and the like.

Speaker 43 Talking to him.

Speaker 2 And then somewhere in the middle of that pile,

Speaker 8 there it was.

Speaker 95 And boy, was it a doozy.

Speaker 94 Coming up.

Speaker 105 He's sitting across from me and I look at him and I go, pal, we got something here.

Speaker 18 A phone call from a killer when dateline continues.

Speaker 53 There's a reason, of course, why parents worry about the company their children keep.

Speaker 80 It was months after John Sutton lost his wife and his own eyesight to an intruder with a 9mm handgun.

Speaker 5 Miami detectives were plowing their way through mounds of interview transcripts and tips and emails and phone records, anything to narrow down their list of suspects.

Speaker 17 And in the pile of material from the phone company, they came across a name.

Speaker 105 We isolated within a three or four hour period of the murder five or six different names. And one of those came back to Garrett Kopp.

Speaker 17 Who was he talking to?

Speaker 105 On the 22nd,

Speaker 105 there was probably,

Speaker 105 I want to say maybe 13 phone calls, if memory serves me right, that were made between Garrett Kopp and Chris Sutton's cell phones.

Speaker 120 A lot of calls. A lot of calls.

Speaker 39 Lots of calls.

Speaker 114 On the day of the murder.

Speaker 4 Quite probably meant nothing at all, of course.

Speaker 8 Still,

Speaker 39 Garrett Kopp was 20, a frequent visitor around the Sutton house.

Speaker 37 He didn't seem to have a job or any direction in life.

Speaker 80 But Christopher saw some good in him, apparently, hired him occasionally to do odd jobs.

Speaker 4 In fact, after the murder, Christopher had Copp rip up and remove the bloody carpets from the crime scene.

Speaker 35 What sort of person did he seem like?

Speaker 67 When Garrett was in the house, he was always, shall we say, at a distance. I honestly cannot recall any conversations whatsoever with Garrett.

Speaker 8 But Copp and Christopher called each other all the time, even the night of the murder, an hour after the shooting, just when Christopher and his girlfriend Juliet were coming out of a movie.

Speaker 15 We pulled the video from the AMC movie theater and it showed him getting right on his cellular telephone right after all the shooting happened.

Speaker 17 Was there a connection with what happened?

Speaker 62 Again, probably not, but just to cover all the bases, Detective Nanny ran a criminal background check on young Mr.

Speaker 30 Kopp.

Speaker 31 And what do you know?

Speaker 105 He was arrested on August 23rd.

Speaker 83 The day after the shooting.

Speaker 105 The day after the shooting. You know, and I still get goosebumps when I remember that because he's sitting across from me and I look at him and I go, pal, we got something here.

Speaker 33 Indeed, they did.

Speaker 117 One day after the murder, Garrett Kopp was arrested for aggravated assault after an altercation at an apartment complex.

Speaker 108 Big no-no.

Speaker 62 He pulled a gun on a couple of guys.

Speaker 81 Happened in the town of Homestead, Florida, about 30 miles away from the crime scene. Detective Belleux called the Homestead Police Department, talked to the arresting officer.

Speaker 15 I said, please tell me it was a handgun.

Speaker 33 He says, it was.

Speaker 15 I said, now please tell me it was a Glock 9mm.

Speaker 17 He goes, it was.

Speaker 15 I said, now please tell me you have that weapon.

Speaker 97 He goes, I do.

Speaker 15 Bingo.

Speaker 15 We got to get that gun.

Speaker 114 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Art went down and picked up the gun, and we submitted it to our firearms techs.

Speaker 41 The report came back clear as day.

Speaker 50 This was the gun that killed Susan Sutton and blinded her husband.

Speaker 35 Which obviously connects Garrett Kopp to that murder pretty intimately.

Speaker 21 Absolutely.

Speaker 61 But detectives did not rush out and arrest Kopp for a simple but very important reason.

Speaker 95 There was a bigger question that needed to be answered.

Speaker 36 Did his friend Christopher know anything?

Speaker 33 Was he even, perhaps, involved?

Speaker 62 Shocking question, of course. This was Sutton's son, the son who devoted himself to nursing his father back to health.

Speaker 29 Again, there's a warning. But something about Christopher bothered them and had ever since he was interviewed the morning after the murder.

Speaker 15 He said that I was at the movies and said, do you want to see the tickets?

Speaker 28 Just had them right there, like that.

Speaker 15 Basically, to me, it was like a red flag there. I want to prove that I'm at the movies.

Speaker 33 Odd?

Speaker 39 Perhaps. Might mean nothing at all.

Speaker 86 The gun implicated cop, of course, but Christopher?

Speaker 95 No real evidence to show he knew a thing.

Speaker 105 I mean, there were still a lot of pieces of puzzles that we're still putting together.

Speaker 20 We sure can't prove it yet.

Speaker 91 Like, for example, this big tantalizing piece of puzzle.

Speaker 61 What in heaven's name might an island in the far-off Pacific have to do with the shooting of John and Susan Sutton?

Speaker 94 Coming up.

Speaker 10 Trouble in paradise for a young Christopher and his family.

Speaker 15 He was kidnapped in the middle of the night and he was 17 years old.

Speaker 26 We knew that Christopher Sutton had complained that he had been hogtied,

Speaker 26 beaten.

Speaker 10 When dateline continues.

Speaker 51 Amazing what that garden variety assault case in Homestead, Florida led to.

Speaker 123 Garrett Kopp was arrested with a gun that turned out to be the murder weapon in the Sutton case.

Speaker 51 The very same Garrett Kopp who'd talked on the phone so often with Christopher Sutton.

Speaker 116 The friend who'd called Christopher right after the shooting.

Speaker 95 So now the complexion of the investigation changed.

Speaker 15 We're trying to think, why would Garrett Kopp do this?

Speaker 15 I mean, he's a like 20-year-old kid.

Speaker 15 Obviously, there's a tie with Christopher Sutton and him.

Speaker 4 And as for Christopher himself, the detectives had no trouble finding people with an opinion about him.

Speaker 26 The cops should be looking at Christopher Sutton because of the lengthy family history of problems that John and Susan had had with their son Christopher, who was a handful from a very early age.

Speaker 39 A very early age, actually.

Speaker 91 As John Sutton recalled all too clearly.

Speaker 6 Did he get into fights at school?

Speaker 67 I can remember that happening early on in preschool.

Speaker 30 It got worse as Christopher got older.

Speaker 78 Did he get into trouble?

Speaker 67 Absolutely. There was vandalism, not only of our own things.

Speaker 67 There were vandalism of other people's property.

Speaker 114 They sent him off to boarding schools then, but he didn't last at any of them, failed or got kicked out.

Speaker 1 Of course, the whole family tried, said his sister Melissa.

Speaker 39 The trouble wasn't a lack of love.

Speaker 111 Not at all.

Speaker 35 Was there a sense that Christopher was

Speaker 17 loved?

Speaker 100 Oh, no, I mean, no doubt about it.

Speaker 41 But neither love nor money could prevent Christopher from always ending back in the same place.

Speaker 86 Trouble.

Speaker 104 I know that he dealt drugs, and at one point he was arrested for it when I was younger.

Speaker 104 And, you know, that was something that my father being a lawyer and as well as a parent, you know, what do we do?

Speaker 123 Finally, in 1995, when Christopher was 16, when counselors and boarding schools and tough love had all been tried and found wanting, John John and Susan looked away, far, far away, to find some help.

Speaker 39 On the Pacific island of western Samoa, there was a place called Paradise Cove, a so-called boot camp for troubled kids.

Speaker 93 Behavior modification, their specialty.

Speaker 33 It's a long way away, Samoa.

Speaker 4 Was that part of it, that it would be a good idea to have them far away for a while?

Speaker 67 We weren't focused on finding the forest place we could possibly send them. And we were very hesitant about Samoa, but we investigated it rather thoroughly.

Speaker 36 It was expensive.

Speaker 40 Paradise Cove charged about $25,000 a year, but.

Speaker 67 We just had enough.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 67 What else could we do?

Speaker 108 But the Suttons knew there was no way Christopher would agree to go on his own. So Attorney Sutton did what attorneys do best and got a court order to have Christopher forcibly sent to Samoa.

Speaker 15 He was kidnapped in the middle of the night and he was 17 years old.

Speaker 34 They actually kidnapped him to take him to this.

Speaker 15 Put him on a plane. He was sent to western Samoa.

Speaker 82 But Christopher would not break so easily.

Speaker 108 And Paradise Cove was no paradise. In fact, there were many reports of physical abuse and restraints used on those who were uncooperative.

Speaker 109 Something Christopher learned when he first arrived.

Speaker 26 We knew that Christopher Sutton had complained that he had been hogtied,

Speaker 26 beaten.

Speaker 30 When his family was allowed to visit him about a year later, there did seem to be a distinct change, a huge improvement.

Speaker 123 They found a buff, cleaned-up young man who excelled at sports.

Speaker 96 It was a happy family reunion.

Speaker 100 It was really happy event.

Speaker 22 You know, we cried, we hugged, we said,

Speaker 100 you know, our hellos and loved each other.

Speaker 102 And he was proud of, you know, what he'd learned and showed off, at least, to us.

Speaker 52 Then, five months after this reunion, Christopher turned 18.

Speaker 123 Time for him to come home.

Speaker 108 Or so he thought.

Speaker 15 He was banking on getting out when he turned 18.

Speaker 15 But we also learned that John Sutton, being a lawyer, had an order signed by a judge that said, when you turn 18, if you haven't completed the course, you're going to stay, which infuriated Christopher Sutton.

Speaker 34 Why did you decide to keep him there when he turned 18?

Speaker 67 We had concerns that he wasn't ready to return. He had not, quote, graduated the program.

Speaker 34 How did he feel about that?

Speaker 67 He was quite upset.

Speaker 96 He wanted to come home.

Speaker 67 He wanted things his way. He always wanted things his way.

Speaker 37 But this time, finally, tough love seemed to work.

Speaker 75 Christopher was 19 and a changed man when he returned from his protracted stay in Samoa.

Speaker 67 We met him at the airport at LAX

Speaker 67 on his birthday, April 13th.

Speaker 4 He was happy to see you.

Speaker 67 Absolutely.

Speaker 97 It was a joyous reunion.

Speaker 96 Thrilled.

Speaker 92 The Suttons went on a family cruise, a reward for their son.

Speaker 43 That's where he met his future fiancée, a young woman from Boston named Juliet Driscoll.

Speaker 38 Juliet moved to Miami and quickly became a member of the family.

Speaker 71 John Sutton even got her a job at his law firm.

Speaker 100 She was, you know,

Speaker 102 what I would imagine if someone was going to marry into the family. My mother embraced her.
Juliet was a great influence on my brother and on the family, you know.

Speaker 91 Christopher got his act together, enrolled in college, started working.

Speaker 82 His parents helped out by buying him a $300,000 condo.

Speaker 104 He started up his own company, which in retrospect, looking at everything he'd done from arrests to drugs, you know, this is good behavior.

Speaker 102 We were all happy that things were better.

Speaker 68 And anyway, by the time of the murder, Christopher was 26, and Samoa had receded into his distant past.

Speaker 105 I interviewed Melissa in the very beginning. All she knew about her brother was that he was a little bit rebellious as most teenagers are at that age.

Speaker 23 I think I said something along the lines of, no, I don't know any reason why he would want to do this.

Speaker 13 I believe her father shared.

Speaker 15 I asked him early on when he was able to talk at Jackson Hospital, could your son have something to do with this? And he says, I don't believe so.

Speaker 56 So perhaps Garrett Kopp acted alone after all.

Speaker 82 But detectives were convinced Christopher had to be mixed up in that awful shooting somehow. Someone must know.

Speaker 81 And they were right.

Speaker 73 Someone did.

Speaker 10 Coming up, John Sutton survived two bullets to the head.

Speaker 39 Could he survive being home alone with his son?

Speaker 15 Christopher made comments that his parents were going to pay.

Speaker 18 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 71 Miami homicide detectives Larry Bellew and Art Nanny had a problem.

Speaker 80 They were pretty sure the man who shot John and Susan Sutton was even now a frequent visitor at the Sutton home.

Speaker 15 Garrett Kopp gets arrested.

Speaker 40 And they at least suspected that the Sutton's own son, now John's caregiver, was all mixed up in it somehow.

Speaker 15 I was becoming more concerned.

Speaker 82 Was John Sutton a sitting duck for another attack, one that might finish him off?

Speaker 55 You must have found it a little worrisome.

Speaker 17 That John Sutton was actually living with

Speaker 17 his son Christopher and being cared for by Christopher.

Speaker 33 Sure.

Speaker 78 Still, they worried, but did not act, even though they knew full well that Garrett Kopp, the shooter they were sure, was still hanging around.

Speaker 35 Isn't that right, that Kopp was there? Absolutely.

Speaker 15 And again, we still didn't want to tip our hand.

Speaker 62 But should Christopher have been a suspect at all?

Speaker 43 After all, does this sound like the behavior of guilty men?

Speaker 62 Garrett Kopp and Christopher Sutton, while ripping up bloody carpets, actually called detectives to tell them they found new evidence at the crime scene, a bullet casing under the carpet.

Speaker 105 yeah it's a helpful handy man to say oh by the way i found another casing you know i mean come on that's an indication maybe they didn't do it right

Speaker 28 i didn't think so but but i mean that's what any good defense attorney is going to point out

Speaker 15 the casing was underneath something and i don't know how you know we all missed it but we missed it we were a little pissed

Speaker 2 Detectives remain convinced that Christopher harbored a lingering anger at his parents for sending him to that boot camp in Samoa.

Speaker 50 So they talked to camp alumni.

Speaker 86 This former Paradise Cove resident was there when Christopher got the news that he would have to stay well beyond his 18th birthday.

Speaker 24 I know he was upset.

Speaker 15 I know he was mad at his family for that.

Speaker 95 But when detectives tracked down another Paradise Cove resident, he said Christopher was a lot more upset than that.

Speaker 15 Christopher made comments that his parents were going to pay for sending him taking years out of his life.

Speaker 62 Then when they took a closer look at Christopher's more recent history, they could easily see that his improved behavior wasn't exactly lasting.

Speaker 62 Even girlfriend Juliet's influence couldn't keep Christopher from slipping up.

Speaker 69 Yes, he went back to college after he returned from Samoa, but soon dropped out.

Speaker 38 And he did form a company, but the company folded.

Speaker 67 And he didn't seem to

Speaker 67 be motivated.

Speaker 67 We tried to get him to stay in jobs. Nothing seemed to be working.

Speaker 71 What John Sutton didn't know was that his son had gone back to the one job he seemed to be good at, selling drugs.

Speaker 62 Nor did he know that Christopher's friend Garrett Kopp was one of his best clients.

Speaker 17 Kopp, it turned out, had been buying and sometimes reselling the drugs, mostly marijuana and Xanax.

Speaker 80 And he and Christopher spent plenty of time sampling the goods, according to prosecutor Kathleen Hoag.

Speaker 118 But it wasn't just drug deals. They hung around a lot, doing drugs, playing video games, whatever.

Speaker 1 In the months after the murder, phone records showed a spike in the volume of calls between the two.

Speaker 61 300 calls in three months.

Speaker 26 That's an awful lot of drugs to be killing in three months if you have 300 semi-phone calls.

Speaker 1 Could they have been talking murder?

Speaker 72 Speculation, of course, but.

Speaker 13 Then, after the murder, when Kopp was arrested on the gun charge, the prosecutors discovered it was Christopher who put up the money to bond him out, even drove him to court.

Speaker 1 Hardly the sort of thing a drug dealer would do for a mere customer.

Speaker 118 Going to court with him, bonding him out. There was more to this friendship.

Speaker 81 John and Melissa Sutton knew nothing of what police were discovering.

Speaker 38 Christopher and his girlfriend were still living with John. Garrett Kopp was still coming around.

Speaker 78 So, solid evidence or no, detectives decided it was time to act.

Speaker 107 They needed a confession to make their case.

Speaker 15 I told the investigators to bring him to me.

Speaker 10 Coming up, a showdown with a killer. What did he want you to do?

Speaker 33 Open the back door, walk in, and assume.

Speaker 10 Case closed?

Speaker 27 Far from it.

Speaker 18 When dateline continues.

Speaker 48 Detectives Larry Bellew and Art Nanny had a theory to explain the shooting of John Sutton and the murder of his wife Susan, which was that Christopher Sutton hired his dope-smoking buddy Garrett Kopp to kill his parents.

Speaker 54 But it was really just a theory, and while the case against Kopp was fairly strong, remember, the murder weapon was found in his possession, the evidence against Christopher was purely circumstantial, little more than guilt by association.

Speaker 42 The Samoa boot camp might have given Christopher a motive, but...

Speaker 15 I certainly needed more than that to make the arrest. I decided it was time to act.
We're going to need a confession, I believe.

Speaker 64 And given what they had against Kopp, detectives gambled that the shooter might roll over on the sun.

Speaker 98 And he denied all.

Speaker 64 And that wasn't my gun at all?

Speaker 15 It wasn't my gun. I said, looks like we're going to be here a long time today.

Speaker 73 Oh, and they were.

Speaker 101 Hours and hours.

Speaker 128 You know how the house was set up? Yeah.

Speaker 15 Finally, I said, I don't believe you did this on your own. So give me a reason as to how Chris got you to do this.
He basically said, look, you know, you got to...

Speaker 15 You have to look out for me and my family because I'm afraid of him.

Speaker 33 Chris was going to go kill him?

Speaker 15 Yes. If he didn't do this, Christopher was going to take care of him and his young son.
I didn't believe it, but that's the story he wanted to give me.

Speaker 1 And having given himself an excuse, Copp finally confessed.

Speaker 78 Said Christopher was behind it all, gave him the gun, the money to buy the black clothes he wore, hired him as a hitman.

Speaker 128 Did he formulate this plan, or was it a combined effort between two of you?

Speaker 19 He did.

Speaker 128 What plan did he tell you? What did he want you to do?

Speaker 33 Go in the back door, walk in, and assume

Speaker 35 Did it upset him to tell you this story?

Speaker 15 No, not really. Not that I could tell.

Speaker 34 Did he seem relieved that he finally had told someone?

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 15 And during this time, I'm talking to him, and he was pretty calm, as matter-of-factly, talking about it.

Speaker 14 After that confession, Kopp was charged with first-degree murder.

Speaker 88 He was allowed to see his father, his girlfriend, and their son, and then taken off to jail.

Speaker 81 So, case closed?

Speaker 78 Well, you'd think, given what Kopp told the detectives, but it did not give them what they needed to arrest Christopher.

Speaker 78 There's a feature in Florida law which says that the things a person says in a confession about somebody else could be labeled as hearsay.

Speaker 34 They needed more.

Speaker 88 So they turned to the person closest to Christopher, his fiancé, Juliet Driscoll.

Speaker 75 The two were engaged to be married in a few weeks.

Speaker 55 Dress bought, invitations in the mail.

Speaker 15 She sat there and said, I don't know anything about it, John, or Christopher doesn't tell me.

Speaker 28 Didn't tell her anything?

Speaker 35 Or so she said.

Speaker 15 That was my reaction, and I didn't buy it.

Speaker 79 Guess not, because he went on grilling this young woman for more than 12 hours, at the end of which, the detective played to her heart her relationship with Susan and John Sutton.

Speaker 15 I said, look,

Speaker 15 Susan really cared about you. She basically thought of you as a daughter.
This woman didn't deserve to die like this. John doesn't certainly deserve to be blind the rest of his life.

Speaker 15 And I know for a fact, Garrett did this under the direction of Christopher. Finally, she started crying, and I go,

Speaker 34 I think I'm going to have her.

Speaker 89 With the tears came a story, what Christopher had said to her that just might nail him for murder.

Speaker 15 Parents deserve to die for taking years out of his life. She said that this went on for years.
She interjected. She goes, I knew it was going to happen.
I just didn't know when.

Speaker 78 That night they put Juliet, who was living with Christopher, into protective custody.

Speaker 15 The next day I prepared an arrest warrant for Christopher Sutton.

Speaker 14 And a female officer paid a visit to Christopher's father home alone.

Speaker 67 She says, well, I've got good news and bad news. And the good news is that we have arrested the assailant.
He's admitted it. The bad news is he's inculpated your son and said your son set him up.

Speaker 67 I go, man, oh, man. Well, that was a bad night, a real bad night.

Speaker 83 What was it like to hear that?

Speaker 124 Was it a shock or did you have at this point some kind of an idea?

Speaker 67 It was 50 emotions all at the same time.

Speaker 67 One of which is, well, I finally know.

Speaker 67 Two was, I can't believe this.

Speaker 1 John, ever the attorney, wanted to know what the evidence was, had the reports read to him

Speaker 39 and was convinced.

Speaker 104 I think that I was somewhere in between

Speaker 104 being completely outraged and upset and somewhere where I knew that he had done it.

Speaker 89 But Melissa, so grief-stricken, wasn't focused on who did it so much as what she had lost.

Speaker 22 A lot of people chased the killer, and I think I chased me missing my mom.

Speaker 47 Police are looking for 25-year-old Christopher Patrick Sutton.

Speaker 75 And Christopher was nowhere to be found.

Speaker 95 Day after day, as police looked for him, John Sutton had time to think and remember.

Speaker 58 One event in particular, which perhaps he'd suppressed.

Speaker 87 It happened nine years earlier when Christopher was just 16.

Speaker 114 It was the deciding factor in sending him off to Samoa.

Speaker 67 Susan was going through Christopher's room and found a handwritten note planning our murder.

Speaker 43 What did it say?

Speaker 113 Well, it talked about

Speaker 67 killing us

Speaker 67 for insurance.

Speaker 64 A week after a warrant was taken out for his arrest, police found Christopher and brought him to the Miami-Dade Homicide Bureau.

Speaker 50 There he learned that both his alleged co-conspirator Garrett Kopp and his fiancée Juliet Driscoll had somehow implicated him.

Speaker 15 I showed him certain excerpts out of Juliet Driscoll's statement saying I knew it was going to happen. I just didn't know when.

Speaker 15 At that point, he immediately began to sob, put his head on the table, and said, I'm

Speaker 54 but did that mean he was was guilty?

Speaker 75 Or merely that he understood the police believed he was guilty?

Speaker 15 He made comments like, there's no magical way I can tell you where to go to find the truth.

Speaker 40 Christopher Sutton and Garrett Cobb were charged with first-degree murder, a possible death penalty case.

Speaker 123 Both pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 88 And John Sutton got busy.

Speaker 74 He had a mission, two, in fact.

Speaker 123 One, to seek justice, no matter what that might mean for his son.

Speaker 82 And the other, and perhaps even more impossible, to simply see again.

Speaker 10 Coming up, Garrett Kopp's confession should be enough to put him behind bars. But did prosecutors have enough to convict Christopher Sutton?

Speaker 118 This was a circumstantial case, extremely circumstantial, really based on motive.

Speaker 18 When dateline continues,

Speaker 117 John Sutton had survived gunshot wounds to his head, the death of his wife, and his own son's arrest for murder.

Speaker 86 And to top it off, he was blind, apparently permanently.

Speaker 67 It still is unbelievable. I mean, it's like a big, bad dream.

Speaker 77 A nightmare from which there was no awakening.

Speaker 52 But John, if you hadn't noticed by now, is a determined man.

Speaker 29 He'd been a champion swimmer in college.

Speaker 123 Now he swam again.

Speaker 61 He'd been a skier.

Speaker 70 Now he learned to ski blind.

Speaker 114 He fell in love again.

Speaker 50 Her name is Kathy Henry.

Speaker 7 How'd you meet her?

Speaker 67 Blind date.

Speaker 81 Am I supposed to laugh at that line?

Speaker 76 It's true.

Speaker 43 What has it meant to you to have her with you?

Speaker 67 It's meant a great deal. It's just

Speaker 67 tremendous. I wish I could see her.

Speaker 61 And he went back to the thing he'd always done best.

Speaker 56 He went back to court to practice law.

Speaker 124 We did not sue for breach of that contract.

Speaker 1 Where his blindness became

Speaker 37 not exactly the handicap some opponents seem to expect.

Speaker 67 I like to put myself down, so I say, you know, poor old blind guy, you know, I'm just trying to do the best I can. And then I go in and memorize all the citations

Speaker 67 and let them decide

Speaker 67 if I know what I'm doing.

Speaker 53 Not long after returning to work, he won a $9 million judgment for one of his clients.

Speaker 46 I think the blindness is just, I couldn't even imagine. I don't even,

Speaker 22 I can't even try to think what that would be like.

Speaker 46 Yeah, it's heavy.

Speaker 74 Memorizing things and going into court when he's that, he is a pretty determined guy.

Speaker 98 Yeah, he's great.

Speaker 64 But adapting, even successful adapting, using a talking typewriter, for example,

Speaker 64 wasn't enough for John Sutton.

Speaker 30 As he waited for his son's long-delayed trial, he pursued with something like an obsession a quest to regain his eyesight.

Speaker 60 And most people might have given up by then.

Speaker 113 Can't do anything. Not even.

Speaker 67 That's it. You live with it.
Not even. Not you.
No, I won't take no for an answer.

Speaker 40 At some of the best hospitals in the country, Sutton had been told there was simply nothing to be done.

Speaker 87 He'd be blind for life.

Speaker 68 The bullets had permanently destroyed his optic nerve.

Speaker 28 But John had heard about a landmark breakthrough at the Harvard-affiliated Scapens Eye Research Institute in Boston, where a renowned researcher had successfully regenerated the optic nerve in mice using stem cell therapy and drugs.

Speaker 62 Human trials would be next.

Speaker 108 One step up.

Speaker 1 And so in March 2008, almost three years to the day after his son was arrested, Sutton and his girlfriend Kathy were on the cold, rain-swept streets of Boston on the way to an appointment at Scapin's.

Speaker 13 Okay, so there's a chin rest in front of you.

Speaker 70 A doctor evaluated Sutton's one intact eye and discovered that even though the nerve was destroyed, the rest of the eye, theoretically at least, could work.

Speaker 15 My son is in jail, charged with first-degree murder.

Speaker 72 They listened to the awful story of the way John lost his eyesight.

Speaker 75 They explained to him the amazing things they were doing, like growing cornea in a petri dish, and of course, working on optic nerve regeneration.

Speaker 4 John took it all in, amazed.

Speaker 73 And for the first time since the shooting, he felt a surge of positive excitement and a little germ of hope lodged itself in his stubborn mind.

Speaker 29 And you were thinking,

Speaker 97 maybe they can do it for you?

Speaker 67 I said, I am in the right spot.

Speaker 42 He talked to the leading researchers working on optic nerve repair.

Speaker 67 Have you done any studies with severed optic nerves?

Speaker 78 He peppered them with questions, like he was cross-examining witnesses.

Speaker 2 Mike Gilmore, then president of Scapens, offered Sutton a glimmer, at least, of hope.

Speaker 129 We will be able to regenerate an optic nerve.

Speaker 45 It's not so much a question of can we, but when can we.

Speaker 6 And it was a good news, bad news sort of day.

Speaker 76 I do not want to mislead you or provide false hopes.

Speaker 74 Yes, there might be a cure, but perhaps not for five or ten years or more, quite possibly too late for John Sutton.

Speaker 129 How soon depends on how much funding we can get, how many scientists we can put behind the problem to solve it.

Speaker 62 So Sutton told the Scapin's doctors he would somehow help make it happen.

Speaker 30 He wrote checks.

Speaker 87 He joined the board of directors.

Speaker 64 He offered himself as a voice of hope for desperate patients.

Speaker 88 Even though it may never help him as long as he lives, he's okay with that.

Speaker 129 There's a chance that

Speaker 129 we may not be able to restore his vision.

Speaker 129 There is a chance,

Speaker 129 on the other hand, that we may. But if he doesn't get behind it, he does know that

Speaker 129 we're not going to move it as fast as we could.

Speaker 95 Well, it's my pleasure to be be here today.

Speaker 67 As you will hear, I almost didn't make it here today.

Speaker 61 Sutton traveled the country, speaking at fundraisers, using what he calls his shock and awe presentation to tell his story, complete with his 911 call and news footage.

Speaker 107 The body of Susan Sutton is.

Speaker 67 I want to flip this tragedy, this catastrophe, into a positive.

Speaker 88 Meanwhile, in Miami, it was decision time.

Speaker 62 The alleged shooter, Garrett Kopp, had finally agreed to plead guilty and testify against Sutton's son, Christopher, in exchange for a 30-year sentence and no death penalty.

Speaker 51 Sutton confronted the killer the day he entered a plea.

Speaker 130 During the next days, months, years,

Speaker 130 20 years.

Speaker 130 30 years, I want you to think about

Speaker 130 what you planned and what you did that night. You can be assured that with my blindness, every minute of every day, that I will not forget you.

Speaker 48 All right, sweetie.

Speaker 69 And with that, the murder trial of Christopher Sutton could begin.

Speaker 8 And now,

Speaker 73 Florida law again, now prosecutors could use the sworn testimony in court of both the girlfriend and the hitman.

Speaker 93 But even with that, the case was, as Prosecutor Kathleen Hogue knew all too well,

Speaker 92 rather weak.

Speaker 118 This was a circumstantial case, extremely extremely circumstantial, really based on motive.

Speaker 121 John Sutton wanted the law to convict his son of murder.

Speaker 89 But was Christopher actually guilty?

Speaker 94 Coming up.

Speaker 10 In court, a killer returns to the scene of the crime.

Speaker 26 What did you do at the end of the hallway?

Speaker 131 Proceed to shoot.

Speaker 26 Who did you shoot at first?

Speaker 84 John.

Speaker 26 And what did you see Mr. Sutton do when you shot him?

Speaker 131 Flip off the bed.

Speaker 18 When dateline continues.

Speaker 102 Hey, weirdos!

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Speaker 46 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 47 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

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Speaker 64 Summertime in Miami, pounding heat, unavoidable sun.

Speaker 95 Unavoidable, except, of course, inside.

Speaker 64 And six years inside a cell in the county jail had produced a doughy Christopher Sutton.

Speaker 78 By the time his trial finally began, it was July 2010.

Speaker 75 A son charged with hiring the hitman who murdered his mother blinded his father.

Speaker 34 And he sat apparently confident, highly prepared, ignoring, most of the time, the surviving members of his family a scant few feet away.

Speaker 23 You know, we locked eyes, but

Speaker 23 I have nothing to say to him.

Speaker 4 Melissa sat with her father, their father, front row seat.

Speaker 68 Prosecutor Karen Kagan told the jury a horror story, the state's version of what happened the night of the murder.

Speaker 26 The man for whom the gunman had signed on to commit a double murder. A man who was intimately familiar with John and Susan Sutton.
That man, their son, Christopher Sutton.

Speaker 39 Then, graphic evidence.

Speaker 49 A crime scene soaked in blood and littered with bullet casings.

Speaker 68 The medical examiner placed knitting needles in a mannequin to show where Susan was shot six times.

Speaker 6 Her son took a deep breath, recoiled.

Speaker 8 Dreadful.

Speaker 13 But how would the state prove that Christopher was behind it all?

Speaker 36 Raise your right hand, she will administer the oath.

Speaker 13 Here's how for starter.

Speaker 53 This man once worked with Christopher.

Speaker 93 was an occasional pot customer too, but was shocked, he said, when Christopher asked him a certain question.

Speaker 134 He asked me if I knew of any hitman that would kill his parents.

Speaker 26 What reason or explanation did he give you?

Speaker 134 He said that his parents were worth about $500,000 to a million dollars.

Speaker 38 Worth a lot more, actually.

Speaker 40 It was house, insurance, law practice.

Speaker 72 Christopher stood to inherit millions.

Speaker 87 So was money a motive?

Speaker 53 Or was it the stint of the boot camp in Samoa?

Speaker 39 Or both?

Speaker 13 Detective Bellew told the jury he tried to find out when he questioned Christopher.

Speaker 122 I said, Did you hate your parents that much?

Speaker 26 And his answer?

Speaker 9 I said, You tell me. He says, You just don't know.

Speaker 17 But did that answer the question about guilt or motive?

Speaker 39 Or would she.

Speaker 39 Ms.

Speaker 135 Driscoll, if you'll come forward, stand in front of our clerk here, please.

Speaker 1 When Juliet, once his fiancée and the love of his life, walked by him in the courtroom, Christopher's eyes welled up.

Speaker 116 He hadn't seen her in years.

Speaker 40 Now her testimony could send him away for life.

Speaker 26 What did the defendant tell you about getting his parents killed or taken care of?

Speaker 25 Same thing I'd been hearing for the last six years.

Speaker 26 Which was that he could find someone to kill them?

Speaker 25 Find somebody, they deserved it.

Speaker 78 This wasn't easy for Juliet, as she recalled the last time she saw Susan Sutton, the night of that birthday celebration, a few hours before she was killed.

Speaker 25 We went over.

Speaker 25 It was me, Chris, John, Susan, and Teddy.

Speaker 22 We had dinner.

Speaker 26 Do you remember that Melissa was there? Or do you need a minute?

Speaker 135 This might be a good time for a break, anyway.

Speaker 53 That night, whether Juliet knew it or not, Christopher and his drug-dealing hitman, Garrett Kopp, were already leaving a trail for detectives.

Speaker 50 A trail of phone calls.

Speaker 81 17 in all, one just an hour after the murder as Christopher and Juliet left the movie theater that August night.

Speaker 26 The stable called Garrett Koch to the stand.

Speaker 60 And here was the man on the end of that phone.

Speaker 3 The man who said he did it, Garrett Koch.

Speaker 4 25 years old, short, scruffy, the self-confessed killer shuffled into the courtroom and told a horrifying tale.

Speaker 76 How Christopher instructed him to enter the house through a sliding glass door near the pool.

Speaker 106 How he'd made a sketch of the house to guide Garrett down a hallway to John and Susan's bedrooms.

Speaker 26 What did you do at the end of the hallway?

Speaker 131 Proceeded to shoot.

Speaker 26 Who did you shoot at first?

Speaker 131 John.

Speaker 26 Is that Mr. Sutton? Yes.

Speaker 26 Where was Mr. Sutton when you shot at him initially?

Speaker 131 On the bed.

Speaker 26 And what did you see Mr. Sutton do when you shot him?

Speaker 131 Flip off the bed.

Speaker 26 After you fired at Mr. Sutton, what did you do?

Speaker 131 Proceeded to shoot in another room.

Speaker 26 And who was the person with whom you were in a plan to shoot John and Susan Sutton?

Speaker 131 Chris Sutton.

Speaker 26 And what do you remember the defendant telling you about how much money you might expect to get?

Speaker 121 Upwards of $100,000.

Speaker 61 Until this moment, John Sutton had been a spectator at his son's trial, his thoughts and feelings his own.

Speaker 76 But he was a victim, too.

Speaker 50 Staying out of it wasn't an option for him.

Speaker 3 And now came the moment he both dreaded and demanded.

Speaker 64 He testified against his own son.

Speaker 81 First, about the night his world went dark.

Speaker 67 The only thing I saw was for an instant a snap. I didn't even see the gun, but in an instant, bam.

Speaker 91 And then next thing you knew, I woke up and I was on the floor.

Speaker 38 John Sutton answered the questions as if the defendant sitting before him was a man he had never met, as if this was not the boy he had raised from birth.

Speaker 85 Neither father nor son displayed the slightest emotion.

Speaker 67 So it doesn't make any sense to get on the witness stand and cry in front of the jury. It can cause a mistrial.

Speaker 67 So I dealt with it. I did what I had to do.

Speaker 8 So he did.

Speaker 39 But was he right about his son?

Speaker 8 Did the state really have the puzzle solved?

Speaker 76 Or had its key witness been forced to lie?

Speaker 10 Coming up, now it was the defense's turn, and Christopher's old girlfriend, one of the prosecution's star witnesses against him, had a new story to tell about how she was threatened by police.

Speaker 25 They told me that if they didn't hear what they wanted to hear, that they were going to arrest me instead.

Speaker 25 They threw my purse across the room.

Speaker 10 What would that do to the prosecution's case when Dateline continues?

Speaker 117 She tells them, stay away.

Speaker 13 It takes a special sort of skill to defend a man facing a charge of first-degree murder.

Speaker 72 And in Miami, Bruce Fleischer has owned the skill as well as anyone.

Speaker 3 But what he could see right away, knew it long before the trial, was that the scene in that courtroom was about as bad as it could be.

Speaker 78 Because there they were, just feet apart, his client and a blind father, the survivor of Christopher Sutton's alleged plot to kill his parents.

Speaker 17 The fact that

Speaker 113 John Sutton survived and was blind, to me, was the greatest prejudice in the case.

Speaker 31 And there he was, right behind the bar the whole time.

Speaker 113 The jury would hear something bad, and they'd look over at John Sutton. They had to be thinking, this poor man, look what he has to go through life with.

Speaker 49 For the victim, Fleischer knew.

Speaker 72 He must display only sympathy.

Speaker 116 So instead,

Speaker 3 he'd attack the murder investigation itself, the way the police came up with their two star witnesses, Juliet Driscoll and Garrett Kopp.

Speaker 3 After all, without them, the state's case was weak. And why do you suppose they came forward anyway?

Speaker 72 Because they were forced to, or so reasoned Fleischer.

Speaker 14 Juliette Driscoll, for example, why did she tell police Christopher talked about killing his parents?

Speaker 113 They eventually tell her, if you don't tell us

Speaker 113 what we want to know, you're going to be arrested in this murder conspiracy. And what does she do?

Speaker 113 She tells them

Speaker 113 what they want to know.

Speaker 16 In fact, the defense attorney got Juliet to admit the state wouldn't even have had that if detectives hadn't intimidated and threatened her.

Speaker 25 They told me that if they didn't hear what they wanted to hear, that they were going to arrest me instead.

Speaker 25 They threw my purse across the room. They slammed their hands on the desks.

Speaker 113 Did they tell you it was going to be for first-degree murder?

Speaker 25 They told me they were going to arrest me for murder.

Speaker 113 And you

Speaker 113 eventually told them what they wanted to hear?

Speaker 25 After 13 hours, yes.

Speaker 60 Before Christopher was arrested, the two planned a wedding and honeymoon in Samoa, of all places, which begged the question.

Speaker 113 If he was going to take the lives of his parents, why would you stay with him and why would you marry him?

Speaker 25 I can't think of how many times I've heard somebody say, oh my God, I hate this person so much.

Speaker 25 I could kill him right now. And when you hear it for six straight years, you just don't believe it.

Speaker 78 Finally, Juliette testified, detectives lied when they said she told them, I knew it would happen.

Speaker 29 I just didn't know when.

Speaker 25 I never believed he was going to do it. And that's why the whole thing with my statement, that I knew he was was going to do it, and which I've said, I didn't know he was going to do it.

Speaker 25 I'm still confused about the whole matter. I don't know if he did it or not.
Nobody knows what really happened except for him and Garrett. Thank you.
That's what I've been saying.

Speaker 82 So, why not just play a tape of the interrogation?

Speaker 41 Well, they couldn't.

Speaker 61 The police didn't record a word of their long talk with Julia Driscoll.

Speaker 35 She said, certainly he said those things,

Speaker 7 but whether he did it or not is up in the air as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 113 Right, and I think that gives rise to a major reasonable doubt in this case.

Speaker 1 But remember, Garrett Kopp, the confessed shooter, testified that he was merely Christopher's puppet on a string when he killed Susan and tried to kill John.

Speaker 112 How do you get a jury to doubt a statement like that?

Speaker 113 We now had to go after him with hammer and tongs.

Speaker 86 Oh, and he did.

Speaker 81 Fleischer went after Garrett and the cops.

Speaker 113 Every time you denied

Speaker 113 being involved in this, they got aggressive with you, didn't they?

Speaker 131 Somewhere. They just like got pushed you a little bit.

Speaker 111 Got push?

Speaker 113 They walked over to you and they pushed you a little bit on the shoulder?

Speaker 131 Getting in my face.

Speaker 113 Did they touch you?

Speaker 131 Leaned up against me.

Speaker 48 Yeah, like this?

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 113 And when they got close to you like this, what are they saying? Garrett.

Speaker 113 Garrett.

Speaker 131 Something like that.

Speaker 113 You need to tell us something, Garrett, because they're going to fry your ass in the electric chair.

Speaker 84 Excuse me.

Speaker 8 Excuse me.

Speaker 26 Thank you, Mr. Pleasure.

Speaker 135 Is that an objection?

Speaker 111 That is an objection. Okay, well then.

Speaker 122 The question is, is that what they said to you?

Speaker 131 Something like that. I'm going down for murder.

Speaker 113 You're going down for murder?

Speaker 131 I'm going to get the death penalty.

Speaker 113 You're going to get the death penalty. What finally made you

Speaker 113 give them some information?

Speaker 131 Saying that Juliet was confessing in another room. Well, they told me I was going, I was going to go to jail for murder already.
So

Speaker 131 I ended up confessing.

Speaker 87 There was no doubt that Kopp committed the murder.

Speaker 36 But maybe the case against Christopher wasn't quite so watertight after all.

Speaker 79 Maybe Christopher himself could set the record straight.

Speaker 77 We're calling Chris Sutton.

Speaker 91 Would jurors listen?

Speaker 94 Coming up.

Speaker 10 Accused of murdering his mother and blinding his father, a son sheds tears on the stand for himself.

Speaker 90 That was what they called in denial.

Speaker 90 Yep.

Speaker 18 When dateline continues.

Speaker 77 Judge we're calling Chris Sutton.

Speaker 3 Jurors had to be deeply curious about the man accused of putting a hit on his own parents.

Speaker 117 For one thing, in his buttoned-down shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, he looked more a law student than a murder suspect.

Speaker 76 And besides, for two weeks, they'd watched his careful note-taking, his whispered asides to attorney Fleischer.

Speaker 113 He felt that he was wrongfully prosecuted, and the only way that we could tie up a lot of things and actually prove things or disprove things was by him testifying.

Speaker 113 He's about to give me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Speaker 50 How would he convey his innocence?

Speaker 43 First, by describing his hospital vigil, a concerned son on the night of the shooting.

Speaker 113 Did he acknowledge that he

Speaker 111 was there?

Speaker 136 He could squeeze your hand, but he couldn't speak.

Speaker 113 How did you feel

Speaker 113 when you saw your father at the Ryder Trauma Center? Shocked, hurt, worried, scared?

Speaker 64 Not that Christopher was claiming to be a perfect son.

Speaker 81 In fact, he told the jury he was a drug dealer.

Speaker 68 Garrett Kopp was one of his best customers, but had good reason to turn on him.

Speaker 8 Why?

Speaker 119 Because years earlier, Christopher said he turned police informant to get drug charges dropped.

Speaker 70 And who did he finger?

Speaker 84 Garrett Kopp.

Speaker 113 What happened, if anything, with your relationship with Garrett Kopp after he was arrested?

Speaker 136 I didn't speak to him for a while, or he didn't speak to me, I should say, for a while.

Speaker 113 Was he mad at you?

Speaker 91 Yes.

Speaker 81 So, was it payback time now?

Speaker 61 Yes, says Christopher, it must have been, and thus his theory of the murder.

Speaker 62 Christopher said he had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 77 Told the jury he never asked Copp to kill his parents.

Speaker 2 Copp made it all up.

Speaker 121 The police had it all wrong.

Speaker 76 What really happened, he said, was that cop stormed into the house that night to steal Christopher's hidden stash, boxes full of drugs.

Speaker 113 How much marijuana did you store in these boxes?

Speaker 136 In the top box, about two pounds.

Speaker 113 And what was the value of that?

Speaker 106 $7,000.

Speaker 39 In fact, the very day of the murder, said Christopher, a hopped-up cop called him again and again, desperate to buy drugs.

Speaker 1 Christopher told him that between his mother's birthday party and a movie that night, he couldn't do it.

Speaker 113 Why did you tell him

Speaker 113 that you couldn't get the drugs?

Speaker 111 Overrule.

Speaker 136 I told him that I had left it in my room at my parents' house.

Speaker 113 And that's what gave cop the idea as to where to go to get the drugs.

Speaker 31 But that still doesn't explain why he would, in cold blood, murder and attempt to murder these two people.

Speaker 113 He went to get the drugs. He found the Suttons home and they could recognize him.
He panicked. He was in a drug stupor and he shot them both.

Speaker 29 So if you were Garrett Kopp, wouldn't you try to implicate the man who turned you into police?

Speaker 62 Here's the thing, said Christopher.

Speaker 49 He could understand Kopp turning on him.

Speaker 78 But Juliet, his own fiancé, when he heard what she she told police, he said, he broke down in tears.

Speaker 50 Not because of what she said, but why she must have said it.

Speaker 136 As soon as he started reading parts of Juliet's statement, yeah, I started crying.

Speaker 56 And why were you crying? Objection.

Speaker 136 Overall, I was crying because the woman I was going to be marrying in five weeks had lied to save herself.

Speaker 14 His were tears of frustration, too, said Christopher.

Speaker 49 How could he defend himself against lies when his police interrogator kept accusing him of murder?

Speaker 136 I told him he's not going to believe anything I say. And he's just going to try to twist my words to use them against me or,

Speaker 67 you know,

Speaker 136 like he did with Juliet. Because there's no proof that I did anything because I know I didn't do anything.

Speaker 16 So there it was.

Speaker 32 Another theory for the jury to consider.

Speaker 28 But there was one more thing the defense had to do, if possible.

Speaker 28 Knock down the allegation that his banishment to Samoa had given him a motive to kill his parents.

Speaker 40 But what you'll hear probably wasn't in the defense strategy.

Speaker 136 A level two is allowed to go to the bathroom on his own,

Speaker 136 is allowed to

Speaker 81 have some more privileges.

Speaker 8 And then

Speaker 84 as Christopher described the program, something in the memories on that island struck a nerve.

Speaker 56 How were you feeling physically

Speaker 113 during that time?

Speaker 90 I was what they called in denial.

Speaker 113 You need a break.

Speaker 113 Yeah.

Speaker 86 Strange.

Speaker 53 Stoic for the rest of his testimony, yet in the process of trying to dismiss Samoa as a murder motive, he cried about his experience there.

Speaker 40 So, revealing?

Speaker 53 Attorney Fleischer put the best spin on it he could.

Speaker 113 I think that showed his honesty as a witness.

Speaker 136 I cried when I got off the plane.

Speaker 112 When court resumed, Christopher told the jury that while he was initially upset about being sent to Samoa, he got over it, made the best of it.

Speaker 43 And when his parents and Melissa came to visit, they all had a wonderful time together.

Speaker 49 Hardly a dysfunctional family.

Speaker 113 Were you happy to be with your parents?

Speaker 136 I was very, very happy to see my parents. You know, I love them very much.

Speaker 86 So.

Speaker 38 He'd given the jury an alternative.

Speaker 112 He'd tried, at least, to defuse the Samoa motive.

Speaker 54 Enough?

Speaker 42 Not nearly, said Prosecutor Kagan.

Speaker 26 What motive did Garrett Kopp have to go in and attempt to assassinate both those people? None.

Speaker 26 What motive did Christopher Sutton have to want both his parents dead? Plenty.

Speaker 113 And what's the story here? They have the statement of Garrett Kopp,

Speaker 113 the drug-crazed little thug who gives this story to save himself from the death penalty, and the coerced statement of Juliet Driscoll? Where's the evidence in this case? What do they have?

Speaker 70 Nothing.

Speaker 38 Seven men, five women on the jury, and real doubt in the air.

Speaker 124 When he first started saying his testimony, I mean, he put doubt in my mind.

Speaker 94 Coming up,

Speaker 10 the jury speaks. We have the jury looks.
And so does Christopher Sutton.

Speaker 57 Sure, Rick.

Speaker 44 I could have been a better guy.

Speaker 33 As his father hopes for a miracle when dateline dateline continues

Speaker 66 now you may deliberate and all rise for the jury please

Speaker 69 not an easy task these people were given

Speaker 53 did christopher sutton mastermind a plan to kill his own parents we battle for a while

Speaker 95 who knew that those 12 were butting heads all day in the jury room and split down the middle after seven hours, they went home.

Speaker 90 It was mostly Garrett Kopp they had trouble with.

Speaker 38 How could they believe a cold-blooded hitman who rats on a friend to save his own skin?

Speaker 124 He's making his deal because he doesn't want to go to the death penalty.

Speaker 80 Which would mean what?

Speaker 68 That you can't really believe what he's going to say because he's an opportunist.

Speaker 113 Yeah, I mean, anything to save himself.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 95 Next day, they tried again.

Speaker 50 Ten hours went by.

Speaker 95 Swept in the air-conditioned hallway.

Speaker 83 A deadlock?

Speaker 95 And then 7 p.m., two words set the halls abuzz.

Speaker 31 A verdict.

Speaker 61 John and Melissa Sutton took their seats in the front row.

Speaker 113 Bring in the jury, please.

Speaker 78 Christopher Sutton stood stone-faced as jurors filed in.

Speaker 111 Thank you for being seated.

Speaker 89 Were those tears from some members of the jury?

Speaker 135 All right, ladies and gentlemen, I understand you have breached a verdict as acting.

Speaker 62 Judge Stanford Blake read the verdict.

Speaker 135 State of Florida versus Christopher Sutton, we, the jury, in Miami-Dade, Florida, this 21st day of July, 2010, find the defendant Christopher Patrick Sutton. As the count one,

Speaker 115 guilty of first-degree murder, is charged in the indictment.

Speaker 135 Guilty.

Speaker 39 As the count two.

Speaker 8 With that, Christopher's head snapped back as if he'd been struck.

Speaker 135 As the count three, guilty of attempted first-degree felony murder, Melissa wept.

Speaker 61 Her father

Speaker 48 their father

Speaker 86 locked his jaw, stared ahead, sightless.

Speaker 81 Sentencing would be immediate.

Speaker 95 John Sutton was offered time to speak, speak, and years of stoic resolve crumbled.

Speaker 67 Regardless of the result,

Speaker 6 this is a bad case.

Speaker 67 We are now

Speaker 67 at five years,

Speaker 111 eleven months.

Speaker 90 I lost Susan.

Speaker 6 I lost Christopher long before that.

Speaker 64 Christopher did not look at his father.

Speaker 95 Had he done so, he would not have seen tears. The bullets that tore into his head left John Sutton unable to cry.

Speaker 67 I lost my eyesight.

Speaker 70 How was it in that courtroom?

Speaker 117 It needs people.

Speaker 50 Raw, personal.

Speaker 95 Here's the judge.

Speaker 135 So ironic for me, I have a son who was born the exact same date as Christopher Sutton. When I heard his date during the trial,

Speaker 135 remembered the joy of bringing my son home, just like Mr. Sutton had.
So at this time, as the Count One, Mr. Sutton, the court poses a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 39 And that was that. Christopher Sutton will die in prison.

Speaker 76 A result he found so shocking, he decided he needed to explain that they got it so very wrong.

Speaker 28 The verdict did seem to be a big surprise.

Speaker 136 Yeah, I definitely wasn't expecting to be found guilty. I mean, I was shocked, you know, like to know you didn't do something, but yet to have people feel you did, you know.

Speaker 72 The words fairly gushed from his mouth as if there just wasn't time to say everything that needed to be said.

Speaker 136 Well, I mean, like a lot of this comes down to there's me and there's Garrett.

Speaker 136 And then everybody else is just kind of talking about, you know, what I did years before or maybe after or, you know, like even Juliette said that, like, the only people that could know anything are Christopher and Garrett.

Speaker 28 But this idea that he would break in looking for drugs.

Speaker 34 Yeah, absolutely. You wouldn't have drugs there, though.

Speaker 136 I had stuff in my bedroom still that I was moving out and in of that room. Garrett Copp helped me move some of that stuff.

Speaker 77 You need some water?

Speaker 33 No, I'm not bad.

Speaker 54 The jury told us Christopher's tears on the witness stand when he talked about Samoa made some of them believe his incarceration there on the island was a motive for murder.

Speaker 88 It seemed kind of broken up talking about the camp,

Speaker 88 but not so broken up when you talked about your parents' death.

Speaker 136 When I initially talked about it, I would cry a lot.

Speaker 12 It would be really hard.

Speaker 136 Now, the program, I mean, like, I've done my best to seal that away and forget about it. Just all of a sudden, boom.

Speaker 136 That was the first time I had sat there in a long time and been like, wow, what really did happen, you know, there.

Speaker 58 How do you feel about your your dad now?

Speaker 136 I mean, I'm devastated that, you know, like, that, you know, he said things against me or bad, you know. But like, my dad turning on me in hard times isn't anything new.

Speaker 64 And then he talked about his circumstances, his fate, and his self-control abandoned him.

Speaker 34 The way it's set right now, this is home.

Speaker 33 You'll never get out.

Speaker 136 Well, at some point in time, I mean, like, if you have, if you have integrity inside yourself, you know, you have to stand up for what you believe in, even if your life's online.

Speaker 33 How does that feel?

Speaker 83 It's hard.

Speaker 136 It's hard to know that I'm going to go to jail for something I didn't do.

Speaker 44 You know, I mean, like, I'm not going to sit here and deny that I had problems with my parents or that any of that stuff happened. That's why I wanted to get up there and explain.

Speaker 44 Explain to the people that, you know, it's like I might not be the best person.

Speaker 44 I mean, sure, I could have been a better guy, you know, but I mean, I was trying and I didn't have anything to do with this. I didn't create this system.
I'm just stuck in it.

Speaker 44 Trapped.

Speaker 44 But that's why I'll fight all the way till the end. I mean, like,

Speaker 44 I'm innocent and I'll always maintain my innocence.

Speaker 124 Now, show me how it looks like the lion.

Speaker 49 John Sutton still recalled the suit he wore when he brought Christopher home from the hospital.

Speaker 1 And now it had all come to this.

Speaker 56 When we last sat down with him, he shared his thoughts about the boy he did his best to raise.

Speaker 32 What about Christopher?

Speaker 98 Do you still think of him as your son?

Speaker 67 I guess technically he is, but someday I may go see him and confront him and say, what were you thinking of?

Speaker 67 You know, what a stupid, criminal, ridiculous, crazy thing all this was.

Speaker 34 Reconciling, if it ever comes, is a long, long time.

Speaker 33 That ain't happening.

Speaker 67 No way.

Speaker 33 No way.

Speaker 49 It's complicated, says Melissa.

Speaker 119 Ridiculously difficult.

Speaker 89 But what choice does she have?

Speaker 86 I have a brother, you know.

Speaker 99 I'm not going to ignore that fact, you know. I have a billion family pictures with him in them.

Speaker 83 A brother who blew up your whole family.

Speaker 46 But in the same picture, I have a mom who passed away, a brother who's in jail, a dad who's blind. You know, that's my family.

Speaker 48 And that's kind of

Speaker 46 what it is.

Speaker 23 But at the same time,

Speaker 46 you know, I believed he did what he did, and I have no intention of ever speaking with him again.

Speaker 81 But life indeed did go on.

Speaker 97 Melissa moved up north and found a career in media services.

Speaker 81 Detectives Art Nanny and Larry Belyu retired from the force.

Speaker 56 Belyu adopted a little boy, just like John Sutton did all those years ago.

Speaker 58 And John Sutton continued to pursue his dream to see again.

Speaker 59 Are you prepared, or has it sunk in that you're going to be blind for the rest of your life?

Speaker 67 Well, that's not my plan. I may not be that smart, but boy, I'm motivated.

Speaker 29 I mean, the enthusiasm coming out of you is kind of inspirational.

Speaker 67 I'm ready to roll. I got plans for this eyesight.

Speaker 109 That's all for now.

Speaker 11 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 12 Thanks for joining us.

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