Deadly Conspiracy

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Speaker 3 To try to solve this murder, we were going to set a trap for three people and I wasn't sure if it was going to work or not. It had to be perfect.

Speaker 1 He was a family man who didn't seem to have an enemy in the world right up until the night he was murdered.

Speaker 4 There was evidence of a violent struggle between Jack and his killer.

Speaker 1 Someone was keeping secrets, and police thought they knew who.

Speaker 5 Their tone was just scary.

Speaker 1 They thought they knew the motive, too.

Speaker 4 But matter of proving it is a different story.

Speaker 1 Until someone found the perfect bait.

Speaker 1 Hey, did it mean you need to call me ASAP? Could they set the perfect trap?

Speaker 6 These people might literally get away with murder.

Speaker 1 Keith Morrison with Deadly Conspiracy.

Speaker 1 The game is called Mouse

Speaker 1 The little ball on its track, the tiny taunting mice, which, unless every lever works in unison, will not be caught. And how often things go wrong to allow the mice to get away.

Speaker 1 So odd that what really happened could so eerily mimic a children's game.

Speaker 1 These are the people that happen to the Jesse clan of Orange County, California. They vacation together.

Speaker 1 I'm tired. I'm ready.
Shall go home. Shared birthdays.

Speaker 7 This one's for Bib.

Speaker 1 Even got together for a monthly game of tenpins.

Speaker 1 But what these grainy home videos don't show is what is yet to come, which is murder, conspiracy, one branch of the family against the other, a game so twisted, mice so clever, that crafting a trap to catch the plotters just might be impossible.

Speaker 1 To begin with, it was 1998. Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar.
Monica Lewinsky was freshly famous.

Speaker 1 It was a sweltering August night, hottest of the year, when Cheryl Deedham got a strange call from her dad, Jack Jesse.

Speaker 8 I was getting ready for bed, and my phone rings. And it's my dad on the phone.
What time was this? 20 after 9.

Speaker 1 He was worried about his wife, Sandra. She was missing.
What did he think had happened?

Speaker 8 He just thought she maybe got an accident or something.

Speaker 1 She'd run to this nearby mall on the quick errand, said Cheryl's dad, but was gone so long.

Speaker 1 Would Cheryl please find her? Asked her dad.

Speaker 8 Went through there, the lucky is the Burger King, where she was supposed to be Walmart. Back, came back 15 minutes later.

Speaker 1 And when she went back into her dad's house, she found...

Speaker 8 One of the worst sights I've ever seen in my life. He was laying face down on the floor in a pool of blood.

Speaker 9 It was horrible.

Speaker 1 What did you think happened there?

Speaker 8 I thought he had fallen because he had a big gash in the back of his head. I just went to the kitchen phone and called 911.

Speaker 1 But when she rolled him over, she could see wounds all across his chest. He'd been stabbed many times.

Speaker 8 It was every time I started doing CPR to him, every time I breathed into him, I could hear like bubbling.

Speaker 8 and air escaping.

Speaker 8 Then I started feeling it on his chest.

Speaker 1 It's not often Little Placentia, California has a murder.

Speaker 4 About 10 o'clock at night when I got the call.

Speaker 1 At the time, Darren Wyatt was the town's sole homicide detective. What did the crime scene itself look like?

Speaker 4 It was pretty bloody. There was evidence of a violent struggle between Jack and his killer.

Speaker 1 The kind of thing that might happen if it was a home invasion robbery or something?

Speaker 4 Or an assault between people who knew each other.

Speaker 1 Protocol told him, look first at the person who reported the crime, which was his daughter, Cheryl.

Speaker 4 The daughter, we had to look at her as a potential suspect.

Speaker 4 She was the one who found it.

Speaker 1 And back at the station, Wyatt interviewed all of Jack's relatives, including Cheryl and Jack's wife, Sandra, who hadn't been missing at all, just out on a shopping trip.

Speaker 4 Mrs. Jesse came to the station with us voluntarily, told us that she would cooperate and wanted to help us solve the murder of her husband.

Speaker 1 And she told him about life with Jack. Married 14 years, blended family, four kids between them.
Jack was a patriarch in the Jesse clan, she said. A teddy bear of a man.
Well-liked, well-to-do.

Speaker 4 Jack was a very, very loving person who doted on his children, doted on his stepchildren, doted on his grandchildren.

Speaker 1 But Jack was ill, housebound after colon cancer surgery. Sandra told the detective she'd been running a bit of a mercy mission for Jack and dawdled too long at the mall.

Speaker 10 Finally went five minutes one direction, five minutes the other for a trip, so maybe I was on the road a total of 15 minutes.

Speaker 4 Yeah, she was very, very specific about where she had gone, at what times, and why she had gone there.

Speaker 1 As for Cheryl, she told detectives she'd do anything to find out what happened to her dad in those 15 minutes she was away from the house.

Speaker 4 Her actions were very, very consistent with somebody who understands

Speaker 4 the police are looking at me right now. I know I didn't do anything.
I'm going to do everything I can and give full disclosure.

Speaker 1 And then the day after the Jack Jesse murder, a guy walked into a bar, sat down on the bar stool, and told the bartender a story about how the murder happened, about who did it, about what the motive was, the whole story.

Speaker 1 But of course, that was just a story in a bar. Detective Wyatt didn't hear anything about it.
And as he continued to dig for clues, he hit an unexpected wall.

Speaker 1 Sandra announced she had now helped as much as she could. She was done.

Speaker 4 I was referred to her attorney and she refused to meet with us again.

Speaker 1 Same thing happened with Sandra's kids, Jack's stepchildren. Well, Jack's blood relations practically begged to help solve the case.
So what happened to that big happy family in the video?

Speaker 1 The mirage, perhaps? In fact, living with Sandra, said Jack's daughter Cherie and Cheryl, was like a fairy tale.

Speaker 10 It's too late now.

Speaker 1 The kind written by the brothers Green.

Speaker 8 Oh, she was just mean to me. She wanted me completely gone, and she did did everything she could to try to get rid of me.

Speaker 1 But when it came to her own children, they said, Sandra was indulgent, eerily so, with son, Tom.

Speaker 8 He was a really big mama's boy to where it was to the point it was strange. Very weird.

Speaker 1 Very weird.

Speaker 8 Weird thing to watch.

Speaker 5 They're always walking into the other room and closing the door. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Though, Jack seemed quite happy with Sandra.

Speaker 1 Until the spring of 98, that is, just a few months before the murder, when Jack was diagnosed with colon cancer. A shock, of course,

Speaker 1 but one of two shocks for Sandra. And to those around her, the second seemed somehow worse.
Her beloved son, Tom, up and moved to Arizona.

Speaker 5 And she was flipping out about it. Yeah.

Speaker 11 She had to go there.

Speaker 1 She demanded Jack move to Arizona, too.

Speaker 5 That woman was off her rocker. Her tone was just scary.

Speaker 5 It was like somebody else's voice coming out of her.

Speaker 1 But surely that wasn't motive enough for murder.

Speaker 1 And with plenty of suspicion, but little else to go on, Wyatt spent months poring over Sandra and Jack's phone records, bank statements, credit card bills, searching for, well, he didn't know exactly what he was searching for, but he was getting basically nowhere.

Speaker 4 We couldn't establish a pattern that was suspicious.

Speaker 1 Then, as Wyatt's investigation sputtered, Sandra left, sold Jack's house here in California, moved to Arizona to be near her son, Tom, and soon her daughter followed, too.

Speaker 1 And they all lived within a couple of blocks of each other in homes Sandra helped purchase with Jack's insurance money and savings.

Speaker 4 When everything was said and done, she got close to $700,000.

Speaker 1 And as the months slipped past, leads failed to connect, the investigation hit one dead end after another, and Wyatt was promoted out of homicide.

Speaker 1 The case bounced from the Placentia PD to the Orange County Sheriff's Department, where before long it became a case to avoid. Toxic, an unsolvable career killer.

Speaker 1 And so five years after his brother's murder, when David Jesse met a detective named Tom Dove, who said he picked up the case, I said, oh, really? Well, that's great.

Speaker 13 Let me ask you a question.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 13 What are you going to do? You're going to get my case for three, four, five months, a year, and then move up, become

Speaker 13 sergeant or something and move on and tom dove says to me listen buddy nobody likes me in my department he says i'm not going nowhere

Speaker 13 he says i got five years to put in your brother's case he says then i retire and i'm out of here he says but i'll give it my all I will give everything to this case that I have.

Speaker 1 I looked over at him and I said, you're the man.

Speaker 1 What David didn't know, but clearly sensed, was that Detective Tom Dove was the real deal, a legendary lawman who seemed to have stepped out of his own primetime drama.

Speaker 1 There wasn't a whole lot to go on.

Speaker 3 There wasn't any physical evidence. There wasn't any eyewitnesses.

Speaker 1 In other words, the perfect challenge.

Speaker 12 Correct.

Speaker 1 When we come back, that bartender with a customer who liked to talk, now he's talking too.

Speaker 3 This person had specific details unknown to the general public.

Speaker 1 Not only that, he's naming names when deadly conspiracy continues.

Speaker 1 After five years and a string of homicide detectives, the Jack Jesse murder case had become a game to avoid. And then one day, the whole impossible business was handed off to Tom Dove.

Speaker 3 I can't tell you how many times that I thought, just move on, give up, move on.

Speaker 1 There was no hope of any new evidence, of course, like fingerprints or DNA. There was just the infuriating puzzle, which had become more difficult with each passing year.

Speaker 3 After I reviewed the case, I had no feeling for the family, no feeling for Jack Jesse.

Speaker 1 So, to get his head in the game, Dove met with the people closest to Jack, like his brother David.

Speaker 3 And when I met with David, he inspired me. His determination not to let the love for his brother go was a big motivating factor.

Speaker 1 But David also had some provocative information. Something Jack told him after arguing with Sandra about moving to Arizona.

Speaker 13 If anything ever happens to me, he says it's her.

Speaker 1 Not the only time Jack said such a thing, it turned out.

Speaker 5 He actually told me,

Speaker 5 I wouldn't be surprised if Fitch killed me.

Speaker 5 He said that.

Speaker 1 And so Dove picked through all the original files, hoping he might come across something that had been overlooked. And buried inside, he found this.

Speaker 1 A simple two-page report, apparently unread by any detective. Remember the guy who walked into the bar, the one who told a story about the Jesse murder?

Speaker 1 Well, years later, when the case had gone cold, the bartender decided to call the Placentia cops.

Speaker 1 An officer took the call, typed up the report, and stuck it away in the file where where it sat unseen until Tom Dove came along.

Speaker 3 Two things caught my mind when I read it. One, whoever the caller is knew how many stab wounds were involved.
And two,

Speaker 3 the caller stated that the person had used a back door or a window to enter the residence that night.

Speaker 3 That was significant in that this person had specific details unknown to the general public about the murder of Jack Jess.

Speaker 1 Most of the tipsters' information was frustratingly vague, like a riddle. Yet another game to be played.

Speaker 1 There were two killers, though he gave no names. One had a knife, the other had the getaway car.
Both worked at a big box department store.

Speaker 1 The man who told the story in the bar that day had been the driver of the car, and with the blood money, He'd bought a truck and a sea-dew.

Speaker 1 But on the question of who was behind the plot, that's when the story named names, two of them. They were

Speaker 1 Sandra's son, Tom, the mama's boy Jack raised as his own,

Speaker 1 under the direction of the mastermind herself, Jack's wife, Sandra.

Speaker 1 So, with that new perspective on the case, Dove revisited Sandra's old interview, the hours of mostly useless chatter. How many times did you listen to that, Indigenous?

Speaker 3 At least ten times.

Speaker 1 And then it jumped out at him. Right about here on the tape, Sandra is going through slips of paper in her day planner.
She looks at Juan and says, This is my son's friend. Listen to it again.

Speaker 3 This is my son's friend.

Speaker 1 This is my son's friend. One phrase in hours of material, but it got Dove's mind racing.

Speaker 1 If the bartender was right that the killers were friends of Sandra's son, could that slip of paper hold the key to the case?

Speaker 1 Dove tore through bags of evidence, and there it was, the day planner, seized five years earlier, just after the murder.

Speaker 3 I went through that day planner for probably a day or more. Went through every scratch piece of paper, every notation, everything that was put into place in that day planner was looked at.

Speaker 3 There was a small piece of note paper with the name which appeared to me at that time to say Schreiber. with no telephone number or no significance to it.

Speaker 1 Just said Schreiber, that's all it said.

Speaker 3 It said I thought Schreiber, yes.

Speaker 1 But where would he find this Schreiber? Dove went back to Sandra's interview and unearthed one more clue. When asked by Detective Wyatt about Tom's friend, Sandra said the boys were once work buddies.

Speaker 10 Come in a bit, Target, when we work together.

Speaker 1 So Detective Dove crisscrossed Southern California searching through the employment records of every Target store for a guy named Schreiber.

Speaker 2 But Nobody had ever heard of him.

Speaker 3 And we were starting to come to the end of our rope. We were getting to a dead end there.

Speaker 1 That was about the time Jack's daughter Cherie began getting strange packages in the mail from Sandra, who said they were keepsakes Jack wanted his girls to have. Like what?

Speaker 5 Like little boxes of like ashtrays and his bowling ball bag. Just a bunch of junk.
It was just weird stuff that just kept coming.

Speaker 1 Which seemed designed to provoke exactly the reaction the sisters felt.

Speaker 1 Oh, hatred.

Speaker 8 Wow. More than I had before.

Speaker 1 Sandra seemed to be telling them she'd beaten them, got away with it, won the game.

Speaker 3 We just said, are we cursed? Is there something with this case that it's just not going to be solved?

Speaker 6 It's frustrating for him, putting all this work in and to think these people might get away, literally, get away with murder.

Speaker 1 Oh, isn't that the kenya? Patty is Tom's wife, been together since high school, knows him better than anyone. She was used to his compulsive perfectionism.

Speaker 3 It's comforting to me, I think, to just know where things are and where we're going.

Speaker 1 His nothing out of place sense of order.

Speaker 6 He's a very stubborn man, so for him to take a case, he's going to do it and

Speaker 6 solve it.

Speaker 1 And so Detective Dove decided to start over. Take a different approach this time.
He immersed himself in Sandra's old phone bills seized by Detective Wyatt years before.

Speaker 3 What I did is I went through every telephone call. on those phone records looking for somebody related to this case.
There had to be some communication.

Speaker 1 Get anywhere? Yeah.

Speaker 1 What Dev found that had been overlooked before was a cluster of calls not long before the murder, all short within minutes of each other.

Speaker 1 One of those calls was to a target store, one was to a pager, and one was to a boarding house. So he called that last number, asked if anybody there knew a guy named Schreiber.

Speaker 1 And the landlady said, nope.

Speaker 1 But there was once a tenant tenant named Schrauben, she said. Could he be the man the detective was looking for?

Speaker 3 It was Brett Schraubin, not Schriber, Schrauben.

Speaker 1 Dove tracked Schrauben down to a distant suburb in the Mojave Desert. And right there, parked in the driveway, was a 1999 pickup truck and a sea dew.
Just what the anonymous bartender said.

Speaker 1 This was a huge break for us.

Speaker 3 We now had a name of somebody that's involved in Jack Chessee's murder.

Speaker 3 Coming up, often people throw away valuable evidence.

Speaker 1 Detective Dumb finds treasure in trash.

Speaker 3 This is too good to be true.

Speaker 1 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 1 The Jack Jesse investigation had been six years of dead ends, bad breaks, blind alleys. Now on the trail of a suspect, Tom Dove was about to start a new game, one where he could write the rule book.

Speaker 1 But it would be very complicated because Dove wanted more than just the getaway driver, Brett Schrauben. He wanted everyone connected to Jack Jesse's murder.

Speaker 3 And the only way we could tie them together in this conspiracy was to do a wiretap.

Speaker 1 But wiretaps are notoriously difficult to get. Dove needed permission from a judge, and to get that, he needed to prove Schrauben was still in contact with Tom and Tom's mother, Sandra.

Speaker 1 It was a catch-22,

Speaker 1 so time to get creative.

Speaker 3 It had been my experience when I had worked in the narcotics section of the Sheriff's Department that often people throw away valuable evidence.

Speaker 1 Dove asked his fellow detectives to help him because he decided to search Shrauben's garbage. So, what did they tell you when you came up with that idea?

Speaker 3 You're crazy? I think their first idea was I'm really starting to lose it now. I want to dig through somebody's trash.

Speaker 1 So faithfully, once a week on garbage pickup day, Dove got up at daybreak and made the hour-long journey to Brett Schrauben's neighborhood, where a trash truck used just for Schrauben's garbage brought it to a nearby parking lot.

Speaker 3 We would have the truck dump the trash in a somewhat of a pile here, regardless of the size.

Speaker 1 Right on the tarmac.

Speaker 3 Right on the tarmac, scatter everything out, open every bag, get down on our hands and knees, and slowly sift through every piece of paper that looked like it might be a document of some kind.

Speaker 1 And that's how Dove's team found this coffee-stained phone bill, showing call after call from Schrauben to Sandra's son Tom in Arizona. And that number, Tom's number popped up.

Speaker 1 How often would that pop up?

Speaker 3 I think the average we figured out was about 24 times in a billing cycle, about a month. So anywhere from every day to every other day.

Speaker 1 Correct.

Speaker 3 It was almost like going to a crime scene and finding pieces of evidence. It's an excitement that

Speaker 3 you realize this is going to work. We are going to find what we're looking for.

Speaker 1 But there was yet again a problem. Schrauben's phone was in someone else's name.
And to get a wire tapped of would have to prove Schrauben was the primary user. So how would he do that?

Speaker 3 So what we ended up having to do was literally follow Brett Schrauben around until we saw him on his telephone.

Speaker 3 We later took that even further in that I went into the target store that he was working at one day.

Speaker 3 I noticed he was stocking shelves in a certain section of the store, so I just started randomly picking up items and looking like I was interested in them.

Speaker 3 At that point, I called on my cellular phone to one of my other investigators outside and I said, put a call in now to the phone. And I heard him answer the phone.

Speaker 3 So I was able to say that is his phone.

Speaker 1 He talks on it.

Speaker 3 We've put the phone in his hand.

Speaker 1 But as they continued to sift through trash week after week, they found something even more important than the phone bill, something quite unexpected. This date planner.

Speaker 3 From the years 96, 97, and 1998.

Speaker 1 What were the chances of that? Here, six years later, was the date planner for 1998, the year Jack Jesse was murdered. Crucial evidence tossed in Schrauben's garbage.

Speaker 3 A treasure that we didn't expect to find, but what that day planner did was connected all the people back in 1998 that were associated with Brett Schraubin.

Speaker 1 What'd you think?

Speaker 3 This is too good to be true. I thought good things were going to happen.
Somebody's back on our side again.

Speaker 1 And with this evidence, Dove was able to get a judge to approve a wiretap on Brett Schraubin's phone.

Speaker 1 And then, as Dove waited for his wiretap to go into effect, he continued to go through Schraubin's trash. He'd been lucky so far, maybe he'd find something more.

Speaker 1 And indeed, he did.

Speaker 1 And it turned the case upside down.

Speaker 1 He found rental listings in Arizona. Brett Schrauben was moving out of the state, would be gone before the wiretap ruling took effect.
And in Arizona, the California warrant was worthless.

Speaker 3 This completely took all that work, and we're talking probably six months of work, and just threw it out the window.

Speaker 1 The killers had slipped the trap. Game over.

Speaker 1 When we come back, detectives build a new and better mousetrap. And guess who takes the bait? Hey, dude, it's me.
You need to call me ASAP. When deadly conspiracy continues.

Speaker 1 After two years of relentless police work, Tom Dove's investigation of the murder of Jack Jesse had generated enough evidence to fill this mail cart, all apparently for naught.

Speaker 1 The suspect and his key to cracking the case had skipped the state and Detective Dove's jurisdiction.

Speaker 3 We were so close.

Speaker 1 The Jesse family since Dove had been beaten, and Sandra Jesse had won, had gotten away with murder.

Speaker 5 I'd put his pictures away. I couldn't sit there.

Speaker 1 It's just tough because

Speaker 5 he was so fantastic.

Speaker 3 Put his pictures away.

Speaker 5 I had to.

Speaker 1 I couldn't look at him. I couldn't look at him.

Speaker 1 At the Dove home, Tom's wife Patty began to worry about her husband's health.

Speaker 6 He tends to hold things in, and you can't hold in that kind of frustration and emotion without starting to affect you.

Speaker 6 I mean, with that kind of stress, it takes a toll on them physically and mentally.

Speaker 1 That's what you worry about.

Speaker 6 Exactly what I worry about.

Speaker 1 Because she knew if he didn't solve the Jesse case, he might die trying.

Speaker 6 He's like a dog with a bone. He's going to take it and he's going to do it until it gets done.

Speaker 1 Dove was not alone, mind you. There was a prosecutor, too, who shared his dogged conviction.
A man named Michael Murray, who wanted Sandra Jesse and her group just as badly as Dove.

Speaker 1 This case seemed to be full of obstacles. It would have been probably forgivable just to let it go at that stage.
On some level.

Speaker 1 Maybe to some people.

Speaker 1 So Murray and Dove cobbled together a legal long shot. They flew to Phoenix, Phoenix, presented their evidence to the state attorney general, pleaded for an Arizona wiretap warrant, and they got it.

Speaker 1 The game was back on, if they could make it work.

Speaker 3 We were going to try to set a trap for three people and keep track of those three people.

Speaker 3 And I wasn't sure if it was going to work or not.

Speaker 1 If it didn't.

Speaker 3 In the back of my mind, I gave it probably a 30% chance of success.

Speaker 1 But you're giving yourself a 70% chance of being a GOAT at the end of the day.

Speaker 3 It had to be perfect. We were only going to get one try.

Speaker 1 So Tom began to compile a team of investigators, even called Darren Wyatt, the first detective on the case, to see if the placenta PD wanted in.

Speaker 4 And I just said, let me fall at your feet and do what we can't help.

Speaker 4 You know, I felt like, hey, look, this is going to be good.

Speaker 1 The Phoenix PD also provided scores of officers. So by game day Dove had close to 100 cops working the case.

Speaker 3 I reminded him of that mousetrap game you played when you were a kid

Speaker 3 in that this huge ball bearing was going to have to go through a tremendous amount of obstacles that were kind of thrown together

Speaker 3 in order to lower the trap and catch the mouse.

Speaker 3 And anywhere along the line, there could be a snag. There could be something that we hadn't planned for that could throw this ball completely off the board.

Speaker 1 Okay, so what was the plan?

Speaker 1 What was the nature of your trap, of your mouse trap?

Speaker 3 We believed that if we did something to get these people up tight, if we were able to rattle the tree, if we were able to put some fear into them, that maybe the police were onto them, that they would talk about the murder of Jack Jesse.

Speaker 1 So what was the little piece of cheese you put into that trap?

Speaker 3 We mailed a simple copy of the newspaper article when Jack Jesse Jesse was murdered anonymously to Sandra Jesse, Tom Eiler, and Brett Schraubin.

Speaker 3 The significance of that was that they didn't know we knew about Brett Schraubin. And if they're going to know, something's up.

Speaker 1 And sure enough, as soon as Tom heard Brett got an anonymous letter, he called his mother, Sandra. Whoever was sending out all that crap sent one to Brett, too.

Speaker 1 Give me a break.

Speaker 1 Brett, you're kidding. Well, why wouldn't I kid about something something like that? They sent one to Brett.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Why would they send one to him? How would they even

Speaker 1 I have no clue

Speaker 1 next Dove started poking Brett's friends in California who of course called Brett

Speaker 1 leave your name and number and I'll get back to you. Thank you.
Hey dude, it's me. You need to call me ASAP.

Speaker 1 This is no fing joke.

Speaker 1 Some guy from the sheriff from the Orange County Sheriff's Department homicide Division

Speaker 1 was calling me

Speaker 1 asking about you.

Speaker 1 Brett, in turn, called Tom. Hello.
Hello. Tom? Yeah, hey, what's up? Hey, I just got a call from Scott.

Speaker 1 The Orange County Homicide Division

Speaker 1 called Scott left a message on vatching machine. They want to talk to him about me.

Speaker 14 About you?

Speaker 1 Yeah. What are you on right now? I'm on my cell phone.

Speaker 3 Are you comfortable or no?

Speaker 1 No. That little mousetrap doll was making its way through the maze.
But after a few days of the game, Sandra, Tom, and Brett began to wonder if they were getting played.

Speaker 1 Suspected their phones were tapped. Maybe even their houses bugged.
I want to talk to you for a couple seconds, but that's

Speaker 1 no, I don't want to talk. No, I'd rather just pick you up and go back to the church or something.
I don't want to talk.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, just somewhere outside. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Away from your place or my place. Okay.
And not on the cell phone, so. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 1 When would you have time? Now.

Speaker 1 And so they started meeting in shopping centers.

Speaker 3 We decided to put surveillance teams on each of the individuals, Sandra Jesse,

Speaker 3 Tom Ehler,

Speaker 3 and Brett Schrobin,

Speaker 3 during the duration of the wiretap to capture certain things they may not do that may not be normal while the wiretap was in place.

Speaker 4 They'd stand

Speaker 4 shoulder to shoulder in a parking lot, watching out in the parking lot and not looking at each other.

Speaker 1 There it was, like a scene from some mafia movie. The suspects out of range of recording devices, apparently deep in conversation, as they peered out into the parking lot.

Speaker 3 I think the photographs of Tom Ehlert and Sandra Jesse was worth a million words as to the depth of their involvement and how far they would go to conceal what they had done.

Speaker 3 In their minds, they had thought they got away with the perfect crime.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Dove would hop on flights back to Orange County to pressure Schrobin's friends for information.

Speaker 1 He was, of course, relentless, chased down anybody who knew the man, followed one tip to another, until Dove finally encountered the man he'd been hunting for years, the bartender who called in the anonymous tip years earlier.

Speaker 3 And the first words out of my mouth were, hi, Mike, I'm here about Brett.

Speaker 3 And his face went completely flush, and he said, I knew you were going to find me sooner or later.

Speaker 1 What story did he tell you?

Speaker 3 That Schraubin, for whatever reason, had confided in him and told him specific details of the murder of Jack Jesse, including his involvement.

Speaker 3 That was a huge, huge quantum leap for us in putting this case to rest.

Speaker 1 Now the time had come to spring the trap. Brett Schraubin was arrested and soon thereafter, Sandra Jesse herself was in handcuffs, finally to be held accountable for Jack Jesse's murder.

Speaker 5 That was wonderful.

Speaker 8 Best three-day weekend I had.

Speaker 5 Oh, me too. That was a pretty good day.

Speaker 1 Didn't last. For one thing, Tom was not arrested.
Insufficient evidence, said the prosecutor. And then, as he rolled out the case against the others, that little ball came off the track again.

Speaker 1 This time it happened at Sandra's preliminary hearing. Judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence to hold her.
She was free to go. Oh,

Speaker 5 I sobbed all the way home. I don't even know know how to make it back to Marietta from Santa Ana.

Speaker 1 Only Brett Schraubin was to face a murder trial. It was the summer of 2006, eight years after Jack Jesse's murder.
And justice?

Speaker 1 Not yet, if ever.

Speaker 1 Coming up, finally, the break detectives had been waiting for.

Speaker 12 She wanted Jack dead.

Speaker 2 The information that he provided would blow the case wide open.

Speaker 1 Until something slammed it shut again.

Speaker 1 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 15 Hey, weirdos, I'm Elena, and I'm Ash.

Speaker 7 And we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 15 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 15 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 7 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

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Speaker 1 Sitting in a cell month after month can do a lot to alter a person's take on the world. Even more so if the inmate is looking at a possible life sentence.

Speaker 1 And that's when Brett Schrauben had an epiphany. Just days before his murder trial was to begin.
He said he was finally willing to testify against Tom and Sandra, but he wanted out now.

Speaker 1 The deal had to be for time served or nothing at all. What did you think when you heard what he wanted in order to get his cooperation?

Speaker 2 I thought it was outrageous, but it's not a perfect world.

Speaker 2 And the people who are likely to have some of the best, most detailed information about what takes place inside a conspiracy is a co-conspirator.

Speaker 1 We needed Brett Schrobin. So what was his story?

Speaker 2 The story was a pretty detailed and amazing story.

Speaker 1 Schrauben described the whole affair on tape, laid it out in all its chilling detail. The anatomy of a murder.
The conspiracy was launched, he said, with a phone call from Tom.

Speaker 12 He told me that his mom would offer $50,000 to kill the dad.

Speaker 1 Shraubin said he met with Sandra in a parking lot. She gave him a $5,000 deposit.

Speaker 12 She wanted Jack dead, and she wanted it done at the house, and it looked like a rocker.

Speaker 12 She told me that she would leave for X amount of time, and that's when it would need to be done.

Speaker 1 Shraubin said he hired his good friend, T.J. Garrick, a local drifter, to be the getaway driver.

Speaker 1 And on the afternoon of August 13th, 1998, while Sandra was out having her nails done, Shraubin and Garrick drove to the Jesse house to murder Jack.

Speaker 12 I was already having cold feet on the way there, and by the time I was walking down the street, I was really having cold feet.

Speaker 12 I got in the house. I'm standing in the garage now,

Speaker 12 and I put on a rubber glove and reached inside the door and I locked it and shut it. I was chicken.
I couldn't do it. I went back to the car.

Speaker 12 I told TJ that the door was locked, so that way it wouldn't look like I had chicken out.

Speaker 12 I called Tom, and I told Tom that the door was locked, and he said that he would

Speaker 12 call his mom and get back to me.

Speaker 1 And according to Sharpen, Tom called back within minutes with a backup plan.

Speaker 12 He told me that his mom was going to go out that night, and that

Speaker 12 it needed to happen tonight because his mom just can't take anymore. And he said if we didn't do it tonight, his mom was going to do it.
When I told TJ what was said, I told him

Speaker 1 I wouldn't really do it.

Speaker 12 And he said that he would do it if I drove.

Speaker 1 So they returned that night, about 9 o'clock. Chobin said he dropped TJ off of the house, then drove around the neighborhood while TJ snuck inside and stabbed Jack Jesse to death.

Speaker 12 We had walkie-talkies, and afterwards he called on Walkie when he was done, and he told me he had to pick him up. I make a hut turning back.
He has a little butt on his legs.

Speaker 12 We looked for a place for him to clean himself up.

Speaker 12 I believe it was a double taco we found and put an outside place for him to clean himself up.

Speaker 2 The information that he provided, if we could corroborate what he said, would blow the case wide open.

Speaker 1 T.J. Garrick was questioned and denied everything.
Other than Schrauben's statement, there wasn't enough evidence to hold him. So he was allowed to walk.

Speaker 1 And investigators focused on building their case against Tom and Sandra by documenting money transfers, phone calls, air travel. So when you had all that together, what did you think?

Speaker 2 I thought we were starting to put together a pretty good case.

Speaker 1 Good enough that Murray had Tom and Sandra arrested. And in the summer of 2009, 11 years after the murder, the mother and son team went on trial for the murder of Jack Jesse.

Speaker 5 Going to court, it was like going to my dad's funeral every day. I mean, it really was.
Being around people that you know killed your dad. It was a ridiculous feeling.

Speaker 8 You can't even put it into words, it's just soul-wrenching.

Speaker 1 Shraven testified against them in court. It was argued Sandra had a variety of motives for killing Jack.

Speaker 1 She wanted his money before medical bills ate up their savings, and she couldn't bear being away from her son, Tom.

Speaker 1 Did you think the case had gone well?

Speaker 2 I thought the case had gone extremely well.

Speaker 1 Except,

Speaker 1 once again, that little ball came off the track.

Speaker 1 What happened?

Speaker 1 Coming up, the story of a murder caught on tape.

Speaker 12 I saw Jack over at my front window, and Jack came at him and threw the phone at him, and he took him to the ground.

Speaker 1 When deadly conspiracy continues.

Speaker 1 When the jury went into seclusion to deliberate, the Jesse family thought justice was just ours away. But as the sun set on the courthouse, nothing, no word.

Speaker 1 Same thing again next day and the day after that.

Speaker 1 The problem?

Speaker 1 There was a holdout.

Speaker 4 It got very heated in the deliberation room.

Speaker 1 These members of the jury told us 11 voted for conviction. But there was one lone juror who felt some level of compassion for Sandra.

Speaker 18 She related to Sandra Jesse's concern that Jack Jesse's illness would eat up their nesting.

Speaker 15 I kind of felt like she was

Speaker 6 enjoying the control she had.

Speaker 18 There was nothing, nothing we could do or say.

Speaker 4 These people were getting so heated and there was so much anger that she started to shut down even more.

Speaker 1 And that scene played out for three and a half days until the judge said enough and declared a mistrial.

Speaker 18 I was in tears. I was in tears.
I was too.

Speaker 15 And thinking of the family and what they've gone through,

Speaker 11 that was heartache, just heartache.

Speaker 5 I thought I was going to pass out.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was horrible.

Speaker 1 It was just soul.

Speaker 8 It was like the whole night out happened all over again.

Speaker 13 That one's your, you know, I saw her. I went and talked to her.

Speaker 1 What did you say?

Speaker 13 I said she was an idiot.

Speaker 2 It was certainly difficult for me.

Speaker 2 It was far more difficult for the family.

Speaker 1 Murray promised the family justice, spent two years putting a new case together. And just weeks before trial, he got a call.

Speaker 1 It was from Tom's attorney saying his client was ready to cut the apron strings and testify against his mom.

Speaker 3 There's no way that we ever suspected that Tom Ehlert would ever turn on his mother. He was known to be a mama's boy.

Speaker 1 But a mama's boy who decided he didn't want to die in prison. Tom pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, got 15 to life.

Speaker 1 Sandra's case went to court one month after her son went state's evidence. Question was,

Speaker 1 would a jury believe Tom's story? And as the jury deliberated and the family waited, there was no euphoria. They knew from bitter experience that anything could happen.

Speaker 5 It's a lot harder this time, just not knowing what's going to happen.

Speaker 1 On the second day they got word, the jury had a verdict.

Speaker 9 Oh, my stomach's in nuts.

Speaker 15 Hey, I'm shaking.

Speaker 1 We're just really

Speaker 3 very nervous at this moment.

Speaker 1 13 years after Jack Jesse's murder, Sandra Jesse was found guilty.

Speaker 1 Finally, that little ball stayed on its track. The key mouse was caught.

Speaker 5 I hope that she rots in hell. I just really do.

Speaker 5 I'm glad it wasn't the death penalty. I want her to stay there and suffer with all the other miserable people that go to prison.

Speaker 1 What does it feel like to get justice finally?

Speaker 13 Oh, it feels good. It feels good, but not complete.

Speaker 13 Not complete.

Speaker 1 Not all the way there.

Speaker 13 Lost a guy. The nicest guy I ever met.

Speaker 1 And for Tom Dove, he's now retired from the Sheriff's Department. And at his going away party, his fellow detectives gave him this:

Speaker 1 it honors his commitment to the Jesse case.

Speaker 3 It means more to me than any other plaque or award I've ever received in my life.

Speaker 1 And in retirement,

Speaker 1 Tom says he hopes to set up a shelter for stray dogs. The urge to rescue runs deep.

Speaker 1 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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