The Beauty and the Beast Mystery

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Speaker 4 They danced on their wedding day as Beauty and the Beast.

Speaker 4 To stay beautiful, she worked out a healthy habit that one day

Speaker 7 turned deadly.

Speaker 8 He found her at home. The barbell was across her throat.

Speaker 4 A simple, tragic accident.

Speaker 8 This will fall down like a guillotine.

Speaker 5 Or was it?

Speaker 11 Getting that information at that moment had the case changed for you.

Speaker 8 Absolutely.

Speaker 13 What would the weight of evidence show?

Speaker 14 I got goosebumps.

Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 4 Here's Dennis Murphy.

Speaker 16 The images are fuzzy on that old home video of the wedding reception, but anyone who is there remembers the event vividly.

Speaker 20 The bride all in white and the groom?

Speaker 15 He's the dance partner in the goofy beast costume. Kind of a strange way to begin a marriage, some guests murmured.

Speaker 23 Beauty and the beast.

Speaker 22 But then, it was a union that would end strangely.

Speaker 25 Last dance still more than 10 years away at that point.

Speaker 22 Lisa, the bride, of course, had no idea what was in store for the two of them. She glided about with her signature 50,000-watt smile.

Speaker 30 You can't fake a smile like that. I mean, that was just her.

Speaker 22 Lisa had been a single mom raising her small son when she joined her sister for a rare girls' night out at a Fort Wayne, Indiana dance club.

Speaker 27 There in the den, a big guy, a bodybuilder, he said, small talked her and slipped her his business card before Lisa's party called it a night.

Speaker 34 In the car going home, Lisa pulled out the business card and showed it to her sister Christine.

Speaker 35 It said Jean-Claude Van Damme lookalike. And no.
And I said, you're not going to call that guy, are you?

Speaker 36 But she'd remembered him, hadn't she? Yeah.

Speaker 19 Not only remembered him, but was soon dating and being pursued by the guy from the club, who turned out to be Scott Patterson, who worked in construction.

Speaker 16 Within a year, they were married.

Speaker 31 Lisa's mom, Lucy Rich.

Speaker 39 She came in on a white carriage, horse.

Speaker 40 Very beautiful.

Speaker 39 And she was so happy that day.

Speaker 9 She was very happy. I'm Scott Patterson.

Speaker 41 I'm the groom here.

Speaker 41 This is my wife.

Speaker 36 As you left the wedding that night, Lucy, how'd you feel about your daughter?

Speaker 39 I was happy for her.

Speaker 29 The newlywed set up housekeeping in central Indiana.

Speaker 17 He eventually became a self-employed roofing contractor and she, the go-getter marketing manager at a local mall.

Speaker 46 Her son Dylan from a previous relationship grew to call Scott Dad.

Speaker 47 Growing up, I didn't really have a fatherly figure. I mean, I slowly and surely called him Dad.

Speaker 31 And 13 years on, all were living a comfortable life together in a nice big house with acreage out in the country.

Speaker 25 There were vacations in the Caribbean, soaking in hot tubs, snorkeling with the stingrays, island hopping.

Speaker 17 Scott liked that people thought of him as a good-time guy, Mr.

Speaker 22 Big.

Speaker 47 If you knew Scott, then you would know that he wanted everything to be the biggest and the best.

Speaker 50 And he kept up on his fitness regimen.

Speaker 15 The former bodybuilder didn't want to slide into flat.

Speaker 22 He kept after Lisa to stay in shape with him.

Speaker 46 And her best friend from the mall, a woman named Leah Frazier, became Lisa's workout buddy.

Speaker 30 Lisa was always conscious about what she was eating, how she was exercising. She would do aerobics, she would do the stair-stepper.

Speaker 53 Scott installed a few pieces of gym equipment in the basement of the house: a treadmill, a tanning bed, and a weight machine.

Speaker 21 It was there that something catastrophic had happened on the morning of July 2nd, 2009.

Speaker 55 And now Scott was in his truck racing for help, calling 911.

Speaker 56 911, what's your emergency?

Speaker 57 wife has had an accident at a home.

Speaker 22 As Scott sped through summer cornfields, his wife Lisa was in the back of the cab in very bad shape, as he told the dispatcher.

Speaker 57 I need an escort or something to get to the hospital quicker.

Speaker 56 Okay, what kind of accident has she had?

Speaker 57 See, I found her in a workout room with Mars on top of her.

Speaker 31 Scott would say later he'd gone downstairs just before noon and found his wife spraddled face up on the exercise bench with the barbell weight crushing her throat.

Speaker 58 throat.

Speaker 57 She's blue, but she's not breathing, it's nothing.

Speaker 53 Paramedics intercepted Scott's truck minutes from the hospital.

Speaker 44 A police car followed behind, dash cam rolling.

Speaker 31 Doctors could not revive her.

Speaker 16 And at the age of 36, Lisa Pattison was gone.

Speaker 15 How could any of the friends and family adjust to vibrant Lisa with that beaming smile being just a memory now?

Speaker 39 She was always in good spirits. She was always smiling.

Speaker 47 She was just an amazing woman through and through.

Speaker 22 Dylan had been up early that morning off to the job site where he was helping his stepdad and his crew.

Speaker 15 It had been the quickest of goodbyes to his mom.

Speaker 47 My last words to her was that I loved you. And she said the same thing back.

Speaker 61 And now suddenly, they were all gathering at the hospital.

Speaker 26 Dylan got the news from his dad.

Speaker 47 I just lost it. I mean, I...

Speaker 47 You know, the one person I depended on my whole life was gone.

Speaker 31 Lisa's mom, Lucy Rich, was taken in to see her daughter's body.

Speaker 39 I just walked around her body and just kept, I couldn't believe she was gone.

Speaker 15 Lisa's best friend from the mall, Leah Frazier, was likewise enormously saddened.

Speaker 9 I've lost probably my best friend, someone who made me a better person,

Speaker 9 someone who was good.

Speaker 19 Because Lisa had been in her prime and sound health, her death was categorized as unattended, which meant that the police would take a look before it could be ruled an accident.

Speaker 7 But what else could it be?

Speaker 19 A woman home alone working out.

Speaker 31 A husband who comes back to the house for lunch only to find such a ghastly scene in the basement.

Speaker 23 It couldn't be anything but an accident, could it?

Speaker 6 That's what you might have thought at first. But when we return, police do a little investigating.

Speaker 64 Something just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 65 It had a red flag to me. Yes, it did.

Speaker 12 Some things make your nose twitch.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 33 When you're an on-call detective like Wabash County's Mike Davis, you know that days off, like the upcoming 4th of July, sometimes have a way of going up in smoke.

Speaker 22 But the assignment he was catching didn't sound like one of those.

Speaker 15 Check out out the death of a young woman called in by the Marion General Hospital, ER.

Speaker 65 The other detective that worked with me said, hey, come on in, I've got a case we need to work on of a lady that's passed away on a weight bench.

Speaker 19 The victim was a woman who worked at a local mall, Lisa Patterson.

Speaker 23 Even as her friends and family were racing towards the hospital, a sheriff's detective had taken Lisa's husband, Scott, aside in the ambulance bay for a brief recorded statement.

Speaker 9 I'm talking with Scott Patterson, referenced to the defense investigation.

Speaker 21 Scott explained what had happened, how he'd come home from work to shower and eat lunch before an afternoon doctor's appointment for his bad back.

Speaker 22 Lisa had taken the day off. I went downstairs, but that's when I saw

Speaker 22 her

Speaker 22 on the bench with the weight bar thing across her neck. He said he lifted the weights off and started CPR.

Speaker 26 As an ex-first responder, he'd been trained in that, but said he couldn't revive her. So I acted out of impulse and just simply picked her up, carried her upstairs, and threw her into the truck.
And

Speaker 9 that's what I called 911.

Speaker 22 Another officer, crime scene investigator Jason Page with the state police, was now assigned to document Pattison's truck and examine Lisa's body.

Speaker 60 He found a bruise on the woman's neck and an abrasion on the left shoulder.

Speaker 12 Seeing those injuries, Jason, did it explain to you what had happened?

Speaker 8 You take it at face value. Her husband stated that he had found her at home.
A barbell was across her throat. Those injuries seemed consistent with that story.

Speaker 25 Signs were pointing towards an awful accident.

Speaker 15 Some cleanup paperwork to do, and on to the next case.

Speaker 15 Still, the detective whose case it was, Detective Davis, elected to bring Scott down to the station that afternoon for a formal videotaped interview.

Speaker 69 First of all, Scott, I just want to eat on that.

Speaker 70 I'm sorry for your loss.

Speaker 69 Okay?

Speaker 20 The interview began with a more detailed accounting of Scott Patterson's day.

Speaker 22 He'd gotten up, he said, at quarter to five in the morning, kissed Lisa goodbye, and made a run to the landfill north of town.

Speaker 22 He got back home around 6.30, in time to meet his stepson Dylan and an employee, who then all headed out to the job site together...

Speaker 41 11.30, probably.

Speaker 22 He said he called out for Lisa, but she didn't answer. Music from downstairs told him she was working out.

Speaker 31 10 to 15 minutes went by, he said, before he actually headed downstairs to discover her.

Speaker 70 She was on the flat bench, and she had a bar across her neck.

Speaker 71 Okay, what kind of bar was it?

Speaker 70 The bench press, quick lifting bar.

Speaker 41 She was purple.

Speaker 41 Totally purple.

Speaker 70 And her arms were dropped down to her side.

Speaker 32 He said he lifted the bar off Lisa's neck, felt for a pulse, then tried giving her CPR on the bench.

Speaker 70 I probably should have called 911, but at that time I didn't. I just cradled her, picked her up, and carried her upstairs and put her in my truck.

Speaker 27 As he was backing out, he told the detective he called 911.

Speaker 70 I had my flashers on. I was driving like an idiot.
I was turning the corner, and my wife was in the back seat, and she fell onto the floor.

Speaker 70 you know,

Speaker 70 it's hard to drive and reach back to her poor body.

Speaker 17 He said when he saw the ambulance, he rolled down his window and pulled over to the curb.

Speaker 43 Maybe that's what happened.

Speaker 65 At that time, yes.

Speaker 11 We didn't know.

Speaker 72 But there was something about the way Scott had acted that wasn't passing the detective smell test.

Speaker 56 Why don't you let me start an angulist toward you, sir? She needs CPR.

Speaker 57 I've tried CPR. I'm an ex-first responder.
I've tried this.

Speaker 74 He's turning down 911 help.

Speaker 65 It had a red flag to me. Yes, it did.

Speaker 12 Some things make your nose twitch. Yes.

Speaker 19 Then Scott was asked about the state of his marriage.

Speaker 70 How is your relationship?

Speaker 41 What Lisa?

Speaker 70 Is there ever a perfect marriage?

Speaker 41 Well,

Speaker 41 I don't know.

Speaker 29 They'd been married for 13 years, Scott said.

Speaker 15 But just a few months ago, they'd filed for divorce.

Speaker 70 When you say we, you, or her,

Speaker 41 I filed for divorce.

Speaker 71 Why were you going to divorce her?

Speaker 41 I had an affair.

Speaker 19 An affair.

Speaker 31 But he insisted the the relationship with the other woman was over. In fact, the divorce with Lisa was on hold.

Speaker 17 He said they'd had a change of heart and had been trying to work things out.

Speaker 65 Okay. So there's something else we're going to look into.

Speaker 15 After taking the statement, investigator Page made a physical check of the husband,

Speaker 55 noting no fresh injuries on his face, arms, or hands.

Speaker 31 Routine stuff.

Speaker 33 Then the officers headed out to the Pattison home.

Speaker 34 The crime scene agent's camcorder documented a house in pristine condition.

Speaker 31 There were no signs of forced entry, nothing to suggest a struggle.

Speaker 54 They did note two security cameras mounted on the exterior stone facade, but they checked the recorder in the garage and the DVD tray was empty.

Speaker 25 We didn't get lucky here. Didn't get lucky.

Speaker 19 Downstairs in the workout room, they found the weight bench.

Speaker 60 It wasn't a free weight system as they'd imagined, but rather something called a Smith machine, a professional gym-type device where the weight bar rides up and down two fixed cylindrical rails.

Speaker 28 The barbell weighed about 105 pounds with weights attached.

Speaker 29 Investigator Page took a close look at the apparatus to see if it supported Scott's story.

Speaker 15 He talked us through the analysis he performed that day.

Speaker 8 Yes, this is the weight bench from the Pattison home.

Speaker 31 Page noticed two things right away.

Speaker 16 When he lay down on the bench as it was set up, the bar lined up not with his chest, the correct alignment for lifting, but rather with his neck.

Speaker 54 So if you complete the lift, it would align with the body in this fashion.

Speaker 44 Bar on the throat.

Speaker 31 That matched Scott's story. Investigator Page also made note of a circular smudge on the center of the bar itself.

Speaker 19 Had that spot been left by Lisa's neck?

Speaker 8 It looked like body oil to me, or perhaps sweat.

Speaker 12 Would that mean you suspected that this part of the bar was making contact?

Speaker 78 It appeared that.

Speaker 28 It appeared to be that with me.

Speaker 38 That fit with the husband's account, too.

Speaker 44 When Investigator Page tried the machine, it appeared to be in working order.

Speaker 19 order.

Speaker 23 He couldn't make it fail accidentally.

Speaker 15 And once in use, the bar felt fairly easy to re-rack and secure using a hook and holes along the frame.

Speaker 8 And you complete your repetitions. And once you're complete, you rotate your wrists and these hooks engage.

Speaker 16 But maybe something important.

Speaker 31 Two safety stoppers, which would have afforded a lifter extra protection, were resting unused at the bottom of each rail.

Speaker 54 When these are engaged, it gives you an added layer of safety.

Speaker 12 That's all cool if they're in place, but if they're not in place, you don't have that protection.

Speaker 10 No safety stops.

Speaker 31 If the bar had slipped while in use, it could have plummeted onto Lisa's neck with bone-breaking force.

Speaker 8 This will fall down like a guillotine.

Speaker 49 C'thunk.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 43 Theoretically, could it be a fatal accident?

Speaker 8 Oh, yes, I would certainly consider it fatal.

Speaker 19 There it was.

Speaker 29 Perhaps Lisa's death happened just as Scott had said.

Speaker 17 Certainly, nothing jumped out and screamed homicide.

Speaker 19 Still, an important voice hadn't been heard from yet and that was the medical examiner his autopsy could prove to be crucial it was

Speaker 4 coming up a clue so small it was almost invisible to the naked eye might have a big impact on the case getting that information at that moment had the case changed for you absolutely when dateline continues

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Speaker 22 36-year-old Lisa Pattison was dead. But Detective Mike Davis and crime scene investigator Jason Page were not sure yet what kind of case, if any, they had.

Speaker 22 On the suspicious side of the ledger, Lisa's husband Scott had raised red flags when he declined emergency services help as he raced with his wife to the hospital.

Speaker 15 Likewise, what he said about that drive in a recorded interview raised eyebrows.

Speaker 70 It's hard to drive and reach back there for her body.

Speaker 65 I wouldn't think someone would refer to their loved one as a body when you're not even sure you're claiming she's not even dead yet.

Speaker 22 Still, maybe it was just a freak accident.

Speaker 23 A first-pass look at the weight bench Lisa had been on when she died suggested an accident was plausible.

Speaker 17 And at the autopsy, the medical examiner didn't find anything to explain a sudden death.

Speaker 19 Nothing like a stroke stroke or heart attack.

Speaker 31 Lisa had been in good health.

Speaker 65 Very healthy, 36-year-old woman who worked out.

Speaker 46 But the autopsy did provide a quite unexpected finding, something that now made the investigators very troubled.

Speaker 66 Lisa had died not from a sudden crushing blow to the neck, the guillotine effect, but rather from a slow neck compression, as if the barbell had rested on her throat and gradually cut off her air supply.

Speaker 43 When you were testing the machine at the house, when you let go that bar, it was a real convincing thunk on the bench.

Speaker 9 Oh yeah.

Speaker 54 And you would have seen that in the autopsy here?

Speaker 8 I would expect that. There would have been crushed fractures, crushed bones, perhaps even her neck.
Did not find that.

Speaker 84 No, did not.

Speaker 53 What had happened to Lisa Pattison that morning?

Speaker 8 We know that her neck wasn't crushed. Her spine hadn't been fractured.
She didn't have an aneurysm, didn't have a stroke, didn't have a heart attack. We didn't know what we had.

Speaker 31 Meanwhile, the people who knew Lisa best were wondering what in the world she was doing on the weight bench in the first place.

Speaker 58 Christine Smith knew her sister liked to work out, but Lisa was a treadmill girl, not a weightlifter.

Speaker 35 She was doing treadmill, you know, doing more aerobic stuff.

Speaker 17 And the dead woman's best friend from the mall, Leah, knew very well that Lisa couldn't lift heavy things.

Speaker 20 Not with a neck injury she'd suffered a couple of years earlier in a minor car accident.

Speaker 32 Even the holiday ornaments in the mall storage room were too much for her.

Speaker 30 I did the lifting, I did the boxes, I did the carrying up. I'm like, the weight machine, she doesn't lift weights.

Speaker 33 Then there was the elephant in the room since Lisa's death, a subject that her friends and family didn't feel comfortable even putting words to.

Speaker 22 And that was how they felt about Scott all the years that he'd been married to Lisa.

Speaker 27 Impressions of him that ran from self-centered jerk to nasty drill instructor.

Speaker 73 Now that circle of Lisa's friends were asking if Scott had something to do with that so-called accident in the basement.

Speaker 73 There he is,

Speaker 41 asleep.

Speaker 60 He was Lisa's husband, but the rest of the family didn't get it.

Speaker 19 He'd long been an awkward fit to them.

Speaker 57 But I have no talent for him.

Speaker 19 At holiday gatherings, they couldn't help but notice how tough he was on Lisa's son Dylan.

Speaker 17 The stepdad bossed him around like a raw recruit and meted out harsh punishments for the slightest misstep.

Speaker 7 Dylan recalled what Scott ordered him to do one winter when the boy neglected to take out the morning mail.

Speaker 47 It was 6 a.m. in the morning and he actually said,

Speaker 47 take your clothes off, leave your underwear on, and

Speaker 47 you're going to go walk out to the mailbox. I had a great mom, but I always wanted like a better fatherly figure.

Speaker 17 Now, when it came to his mom, Scott could put on the charm.

Speaker 57 Give me a hug. Lisa, don't we get it?

Speaker 33 But to Lisa's mother and sister, Scott never measured up.

Speaker 39 I wanted her to be with someone that totally respected her

Speaker 39 and loved her with all their heart. And I didn't see that with Scott.

Speaker 19 It wasn't a big dark family secret that Lisa and Scott had been crashing into the rocks for a while. He was having an affair, and Lisa found out.
They talked divorce.

Speaker 15 When Lisa visited her sister at her home in Virginia about a month before she died, without saying as much, she telegraphed that the marriage was over.

Speaker 23 Sister Christine acted as Lisa's financial advisor.

Speaker 35 She said, well, I need need to make some changes on my life insurance policy. And when she said that to me, I knew that she was getting ready to leave.

Speaker 36 And how much was the policy for?

Speaker 35 $450,000.

Speaker 85 Lisa wanted her policy, which named Scott and her son as co-beneficiaries, quietly switched to Dylan alone.

Speaker 9 Christine mailed the paperwork for Lisa to sign, but hadn't gotten it back by the day Lisa died.

Speaker 16 The day after Lisa died, the family met near the mall where she used to work.

Speaker 83 Scott had gotten wind of the policy change.

Speaker 24 He pulled his sister-in-law aside and asked insurance questions.

Speaker 35 He's asking me, basically, did she sign it?

Speaker 77 He wants to know if he's off the policy.

Speaker 35 Right.

Speaker 22 Back at the Wabash County Sheriff's Office, crime scene investigator Jason Page was still puzzling through the autopsy results.

Speaker 15 Death by slow pressure to the windpipe rather than a bone-breaking catastrophic plunge of the weight bar.

Speaker 8 And we're left with this neck compression. It was like a slow neck compression.

Speaker 31 Then the medical examiner came up with an additional finding.

Speaker 27 And it would be as significant for Investigator Page as it was minute.

Speaker 8 On her back, from her neck down to her waistline, he noticed what appeared to be patichii.

Speaker 20 Patichii, minuscule bruises hardly visible to the naked eye.

Speaker 44 Not just on the back of Lisa's neck, where pressure had been applied by the bar, but down her back and along her waist as well.

Speaker 19 What could have caused that?

Speaker 8 And that troubled him. Perhaps somebody straddled her and sat on her chest or her torso

Speaker 9 at the time of death.

Speaker 19 Straddling her, but she'd been home alone working out.

Speaker 31 The all but invisible bruising wasn't enough for the pathologist to officially rule Lisa's death a homicide, but it did set a fire under the investigators.

Speaker 11 Getting that information at that moment.

Speaker 12 Had the case changed for you?

Speaker 8 Absolutely.

Speaker 43 You were now following a homicide?

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 22 A theory of homicide, but the case was mostly innuendo.

Speaker 17 They needed to come up with hard evidence they could show to a prosecutor.

Speaker 31 They needed a lucky break.

Speaker 32 And as it turned out, one was a phone call away.

Speaker 4 Coming up, there's been plenty of attention on that wait bench, but it's another piece of equipment that just might crack this case.

Speaker 14 I got goosebumps.

Speaker 84 I'm like, oh my goodness.

Speaker 21 It's funny in criminal investigations how sometimes things fall into your lap from the most unexpected places.

Speaker 19 And that's what happened in the middle of July 2009.

Speaker 31 Lisa had been dead for a couple of weeks.

Speaker 19 Detective Mike Davis had been at his desk preparing subpoenas for the Pattison case when he took a call from the manager of a local burglar alarm company.

Speaker 74 He told the detective that one of his salesmen had just gotten off the phone with a customer who had had some questions about how his home video surveillance system worked.

Speaker 73 The customer was Scott Pattison. Did the cops want to know something more about all of this?

Speaker 22 Detective Davis said indeed they did, but then he explained how they'd been out to the Pattison house and had checked out that video setup and noticed when he popped the tray on the recorder that there was no no DVD.

Speaker 33 No DVD, no pictures, right?

Speaker 27 Well, Detective Davis almost fell out of his chair when he heard what the burglar alarm man said next.

Speaker 8 He said, well, you don't need one that records to a hard drive.

Speaker 65 And my mouth just kind of opened up.

Speaker 5 A hard drive.

Speaker 60 The detective got a warrant and screamed over to the Pattison house, where the recorder perched still untouched in the garage.

Speaker 19 What a video festival the detective was about to have.

Speaker 65 This is July 2nd, 2009. This is looking from his garage to the side here.

Speaker 60 The unblinking camera documented Scott's run to the landfill at 5 a.m.

Speaker 29 Then its motion detectors came alive again an hour and a half later as he got back home to hook up with Dylan and his employee as they headed out to the job site.

Speaker 17 The camera was showing the same thing Scott had previously talked to the detective about.

Speaker 36 So he's a good storyteller, good accounting of his day at this point.

Speaker 74 Sure.

Speaker 21 And then Scott's timeline went haywire.

Speaker 17 Remember, Scott had told the cops he didn't get back to the house that morning till 11:30, just a few minutes before he came upon Lisa in trouble.

Speaker 41 I came home before

Speaker 41 11:30, probably.

Speaker 15 But what did Scott's surveillance system have to say?

Speaker 63 A completely different story.

Speaker 59 Who's the head? That was Mr.

Speaker 65 Patterson. Scott Patterson.
No question. No question at all.

Speaker 12 And the time was what?

Speaker 65 8:32 a.m.

Speaker 19 Not 11:30, 8:32 a.m.

Speaker 34 And Scott Patterson is walking in the door.

Speaker 11 You and other officers are looking at this for the first time.

Speaker 12 What do you say to one another?

Speaker 71 Holy cow, he really did it.

Speaker 65 He really killed her.

Speaker 19 Fast forward around 10 a.m., there's Scott again, this time in a change of clothes, a t-shirt and shorts, talking into a cell phone outside the garage.

Speaker 60 Zap forward again, 11.40.

Speaker 17 Scott has changed again, back in work pants.

Speaker 19 Then, at 12.10, he's on the move.

Speaker 44 His pickup truck backs into frame, and off he goes to the hospital with Lisa in the back seat.

Speaker 31 When Wabash County prosecutor Bill Hartley laid eyes on the video, he knew he finally had a case.

Speaker 14 I got goosebumps.

Speaker 84 I'm like, oh my goodness.

Speaker 53 In September 2009, a grand jury convened.

Speaker 33 And a week later, Scott Pattison was indicted for murder.

Speaker 52 Detective Davis handcuffed Scott at his mom's house and escorted him to the Wabash County Jail.

Speaker 3 Anything to say, Scott?

Speaker 19 I'm not guilty.

Speaker 22 The state of Indiana versus Scott Patterson went to trial in late October 2010.

Speaker 26 The key, Prosecutor Hartley told the jury, was the timeline, and Scott's own security camera video was the star witness against him.

Speaker 31 No cameras were allowed in court, but the proceedings were audiotaped.

Speaker 87 But these still images from his own system show that he had been home that whole time.

Speaker 19 Hartley had brought the weight bench into the courtroom and planted it right before the jury.

Speaker 19 Crime scene investigator Jason Page demonstrated for the panel how Lisa should have been able to wriggle out from under the barbell, given that she was in good health and the weight hadn't thumped down on her throat with bone-breaking force.

Speaker 31 A demonstration he later repeated for Dateline, first securing the hooks.

Speaker 11 How much effort do you have to expend to get these hooks to catch again?

Speaker 8 It's a little catch your wrists.

Speaker 58 And then you're out of trouble.

Speaker 8 You're out of trouble, yes.

Speaker 46 Or failing that, the investigator says, Lisa could have used her shoulder to shimmy off the bench to the side.

Speaker 7 Could you wriggle out from under there?

Speaker 8 Yes, I could.

Speaker 19 You do it like this.

Speaker 19 But if someone had been straddling over her, sitting on her chest and preventing her from re-wracking that bar.

Speaker 5 You're in a very bad way.

Speaker 3 You're in a bad situation.

Speaker 43 Dead within 30 seconds, would you guess?

Speaker 12 Or at least unconscious within 30 seconds?

Speaker 8 I don't want to speculate, but I don't think it'd take very long.

Speaker 15 If the government's theory that Scott had straddled his wife and killed her was correct, the question arose for the jury, why do it?

Speaker 52 The prosecutor said money wasn't a small thing for Scott, and divorce would have cost him.

Speaker 14 Yeah, he owned some nice trucks and this business, and he's probably concerned that he was going to have to split some of that up with Lisa.

Speaker 22 Then there was the business about being dropped from Lisa's insurance policy.

Speaker 19 His share, a quarter of a million-dollar windfall.

Speaker 33 But investigators had excavated another rich mine of clues, and that had to do with the other woman that Scott had admitted to having an affair with.

Speaker 17 The jury heard Scott claim it was all over by the time of Lisa's death.

Speaker 71 Do you still have a relationship with that female?

Speaker 85 But the prosecution responded that it wasn't, not by a long shot.

Speaker 27 And the real headline grabber was that the other woman was a prominent person in the community.

Speaker 19 The former chief of staff to the mayor of Marion, Indiana, a woman named Stacey Henderson, the wife of a local police officer.

Speaker 88 So you call Stacey Henderson.

Speaker 31 In exchange for immunity, Prosecutor Hartley put Henderson on the stand, and she testified that she was still involved with Scott on the day Lisa died.

Speaker 87 During 2009,

Speaker 87 were you in love with Scott?

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 88 Did you tell him that?

Speaker 87 Yes.

Speaker 88 Did he tell you that he was in love with you? Yes.

Speaker 59 To underscore the point in bold strokes, the prosecutor introduced Scott's phone records.

Speaker 59 The logs reveal that on July 2nd, the day of Lisa's death, Scott and Stacey, who was away on vacation, exchanged no fewer than 130 text messages.

Speaker 22 Plotting those lovers' calls and texts on a timeline, and you see that not only is Stacy the person on the receiving end of Scott's 10 a.m.

Speaker 48 call seen on that security cam video, but she's also getting a text message from Scott that's three characters long while he's at the wheel driving his dead or dying wife to the hospital.

Speaker 14 To me, that was huge that, you know, here he is driving his wife to the hospital, but he's got the state of mind to think about his girlfriend and send her a text message.

Speaker 19 So there it was.

Speaker 31 A divorce in which Scott would likely lose part of his business, a life insurance policy from which he'd gain a bundle, and a continuing relationship with a girlfriend with whom he seemed still very much involved.

Speaker 19 Add up the circumstantial pieces of this puzzle, Hartley said.

Speaker 29 At least his death was no accident.

Speaker 28 It was now the defense's opportunity to chip away at the case.

Speaker 71 Scott, do you have anything to say? No, not this time. Did you kill Lisa?

Speaker 41 No, I did not.

Speaker 65 How can you prove you're innocent?

Speaker 70 Time will tell.

Speaker 86 Coming up.

Speaker 4 At trial, the defense comes out swinging.

Speaker 89 There was no physical evidence that proved to me that Scott Patterson murdered his wife.

Speaker 4 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 61 In Wabash, Indiana, the Scott Pattison murder trial was riveting stuff.

Speaker 19 A bizarre alleged murder weapon, damning security cam pics thought not to have been recorded, and a prominent other woman on the receiving end of a blaze of calls and texts from the accused on the day of the wife's death.

Speaker 33 Now the defense, led by veteran attorney Stanley Campbell, had a small mountain to climb.

Speaker 21 The team started with the illicit girlfriend, Stacey Henderson.

Speaker 58 A fling, the defense contended, not a romance for the ages.

Speaker 13 There was no evidence that Mr.

Speaker 67 Pattison was thinking about killing his wife or that he was going to kill his wife for this other woman.

Speaker 60 So what about that flurry of text messages?

Speaker 25 Just routine chit-chat, Henderson told the prosecutor.

Speaker 34 And the three-character text sent by Scott as he drove to the hospital, that was benign too.

Speaker 88 You remember what that message was?

Speaker 9 911?

Speaker 88 The number is 911?

Speaker 87 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Simply, she suggested, Scott's way of signaling to someone he loved that he was under duress.

Speaker 31 The phone call at 10 a.m., him to her and seen on the surveillance video, was Henderson said more of the same, just checking in on each other's day so far.

Speaker 88 Did Scott ever indicate to you that he was responsible for Lisa's death?

Speaker 60 As for the divorce, maybe it was on hold just as Scott had told the cops.

Speaker 15 A retainer fee for Lisa's attorney had been returned to her bank account.

Speaker 19 And about Scott being taken off her insurance policy, the defense claimed Scott knew nothing of that until the son, Dylan, told him hours after Lisa had died.

Speaker 43 Not being a husband of the year with any of this kind of evidence, but nothing to say that he was a killer.

Speaker 67 Nothing to say he was a killer, no.

Speaker 78 So if you're the defense, what do you do about the weight bench? The defense team maintained that the police had never understood the difficulty of getting out from beneath its grip.

Speaker 78 Sure, a fit-state trooper could wriggle out from beneath 105 pounds, but what about Lisa, someone not used to working out with weights?

Speaker 54 Maybe she was overtired or disoriented.

Speaker 27 Plus, accidental asphyxiation is not unheard of on these kinds of machines.

Speaker 78 The defense had referenced a case in Iowa of a young boy there working out alone, very similar kind of equipment.

Speaker 11 He suffocated.

Speaker 49 An accidental death.

Speaker 87 Who dies on a benchmark, huh? Boy, then that's suspicious. That's bizarre.
That's strange.

Speaker 49 People in Iowa die on benchmarks.

Speaker 18 And in that Iowa case, the safety stops had not been secured in place, just as they hadn't on the Patton machine.

Speaker 73 The defense moved on.

Speaker 19 It would call its own expert witness, a medical examiner from Kentucky named Dr.

Speaker 27 Greg Davis, to give a counter-explanation for that minute bruising with a funny name, the patichii.

Speaker 11 You thought maybe it wasn't patichii at all?

Speaker 89 That's correct.

Speaker 33 After reviewing the autopsy photos, Dr.

Speaker 50 Davis concluded the bruises weren't patichii caused by someone straddling Lisa when she died, but rather bruises that occur naturally when blood pools after death purple areas of discoloration that can be easily mistaken for patichii but they're actually caused by a different mechanism and the same witness offered a different picture of the murder scenario had scott pattern indeed been on top of lisa pressing that bar down onto her throat dr davis said he would have expected to see more significant damage to her neck i would expect to see a fracture of that cartilage right here the Adam's apple, more injury.

Speaker 78 And the defense introduced a new theme.

Speaker 78 They talked to the jurors about a toxicology report that showed that Lisa had what the defense characterized as a dangerous cocktail of drugs in her system, particularly a diet drug that's known to sometimes produce side effects like fainting spells and irregular heartbeats.

Speaker 78 Lisa, the defense said, had three times the therapeutic amount of that drug in her system.

Speaker 89 She's already exerting herself, heart pounding.

Speaker 89 That could tip her over the edge. And at that point, the bar comes down on her neck.
It could take anywhere from just a few seconds at that point for unconsciousness to occur.

Speaker 5 That quick.

Speaker 72 That quickly.

Speaker 17 The conclusion from the expert witness, Lisa Patterson's death is not a homicide, but one of an undetermined cause.

Speaker 89 There was no physical evidence that proved to me that Scott Patterson murdered his wife.

Speaker 72 But what about the defense's biggest obstacle?

Speaker 17 That damning surveillance cam video?

Speaker 31 They conceded that Scott had lied to the police about not coming home till 11.30 in the morning.

Speaker 15 His rationale, said the defense, was that Scott knew right away that husbands with suddenly dead wives always look suspicious in police eyes.

Speaker 31 So he simply panicked and made the bad choice of lying about his timeline.

Speaker 27 But a liar, argued the defense, isn't a killer.

Speaker 13 The fact that he was there doesn't necessarily mean that he was responsible for her death.

Speaker 43 You know, as a a lot of people look at this case, they ask themselves the question they might have asked of Richard Nixon. Why didn't you destroy the tapes?

Speaker 9 Well,

Speaker 67 maybe the answer is that if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have any concern or fear about what's going to be on the tapes.

Speaker 34 And by the way, wouldn't you think that Lisa, fighting for her life, would have been able to put some scratches or marks on Scott, and there were none?

Speaker 20 Add it all up, the defense concluded, and you've got reasonable doubt.

Speaker 46 The prosecution's case, little more than theory and speculation.

Speaker 22 So the case went to the jurors.

Speaker 85 They took a straw poll and were surprised to find themselves split seven to five.

Speaker 43 That's a big gap.

Speaker 9 It's huge.

Speaker 4 The jury conducts its own experiment with a weight bench. Could that help them reach a verdict?

Speaker 15 After three weeks and nearly 30 witnesses, the case against Scott Patterson was finally in the hands of the jury.

Speaker 50 Either they believed the defense's version, at least at Pattison's death on a weight bench, was a horrible accident, or they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant killed his wife by suffocating her with a barbell.

Speaker 15 Upstairs in the jury room, tense deliberations began.

Speaker 77 It's like, game on, it's time.

Speaker 54 You've got this, it's your decision.

Speaker 24 We spoke with four from Pattison's 12-member jury.

Speaker 31 Their first order of business, a straw vote.

Speaker 19 Foreman Larry Vaughan was stunned by the results.

Speaker 77 Seven to five.

Speaker 19 Wow. And that shocked me.

Speaker 43 That's a big gap.

Speaker 9 That's huge.

Speaker 31 Seven guilty, five not.

Speaker 23 For those in the guilty camp, the pivotal piece of evidence, evidence, they say, was the surveillance tape.

Speaker 17 Scott at home when Lisa died, then lying about his day to the police.

Speaker 31 But those voting not guilty, like juror Dan Ford, weren't convinced.

Speaker 69 Okay, that makes him a liar, not necessarily a murderer.

Speaker 20 The jurors did agree on one thing, Mistress Stacey Henderson.

Speaker 31 To the jury's eyes, Scott Patterson was still very much smitten.

Speaker 77 One of the questions was, are you still in love with Scott? And when she said no, and I watched Scott's reaction, he was devastated.

Speaker 15 But as for those petite eye bruises the prosecution thought so critical to its case, for the jury, not so much.

Speaker 74 The petiki eye just didn't do it for me either way.

Speaker 69 Granted, it was there.

Speaker 13 Very hard for us to see.

Speaker 26 As the jurors debated, the absence of evidence placing Scott in the workout room with his wife kept them locked in a near-even balance.

Speaker 69 There was no smoking gun, no witness that saw this happen.

Speaker 69 It depended on us making what we we thought was the right decision.

Speaker 15 Eight hours of deliberations, however, swayed one side to agree with the other.

Speaker 31 Word came down that a verdict had been reached.

Speaker 46 Lisa's sister, Christine, held hands with family in the first row, praying.

Speaker 35 And I just kept envisioning the word guilty in my mind. It's got to be guilty.

Speaker 87 The verdict reads as follows. We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of the crime of murder, a felony.

Speaker 19 Guilty as charged.

Speaker 75 Lisa's family couldn't hold back the tears.

Speaker 35 We just couldn't stop. We were just weeping of relief.

Speaker 59 Scott hung his head when the verdict was read and remained silent, stonefaced as he was escorted back to jail.

Speaker 77 Scott, do you have anything at all to say?

Speaker 19 Jurors said the foremost factor that bridged the divide was an experiment they conducted in the courtroom.

Speaker 31 They asked the judge if they could re-examine the weight bench. One of the female jurors agreed to play Lisa.

Speaker 7 They wanted to know how easy it would be for her to wriggle out from beneath that bar.

Speaker 77 It wasn't two seconds and she was out. And then we said, okay, one of you ladies, straddle her.
I must do the same thing. And she couldn't move.

Speaker 74 Lisa Pattison had died on a hot July morning.

Speaker 33 Now on a cold December day, Scott Pattison was sentenced.

Speaker 52 The judge cited unusual harm to Lisa's son Dylan in giving Scott an enhanced sentence of 60 years.

Speaker 87 On July 2nd, 2009, you were human disaster, sneaking death and destruction in your wake.

Speaker 58 Scott left the courtroom defiant and pledged continued silence.

Speaker 47 Scott's have anything to say?

Speaker 8 Wise man, the Eastmoke, know to keep his mouth shut, so that's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 22 Scott declined Dateline's request for an interview. His appeal has been denied.

Speaker 66 So the beauty from all those years ago is gone, and the friends and family who toasted them are left to reflect on whether her life's companion really was the beast in more than just costume.

Speaker 19 Was the last face she saw that of her husband looming over her, easing that bar down onto her throat?

Speaker 9 I hope not. I hope not.

Speaker 62 I hope that's not the last thought she had of someone that she loved, someone that she thought loved her, someone that she was loyal to.

Speaker 26 And now her son Dylan has had to come to terms as best he can with that terrible day

Speaker 19 and the man he once called dad.

Speaker 43 You believe Scott Patterson murdered your mother?

Speaker 47 I do.

Speaker 43 Press that bar into her throat?

Speaker 47 Sir.

Speaker 9 Why?

Speaker 47 Greed.

Speaker 47 Money.

Speaker 9 Stuff that really means nothing in the end.

Speaker 47 Stuff that means nothing.

Speaker 25 Dylan graduated from Virginia Tech and by all accounts is doing well.

Speaker 5 With the steady support of friends and his mother's family, he's doing his best to navigate life without his guiding star.

Speaker 47 The worst part is not hearing I love you from her and not hearing her words of encouragement. You know, hey, you're an awesome kid.
I love you. Keep up the good work.

Speaker 36 What's he stolen from you?

Speaker 39 My precious Lisa.

Speaker 39 Just her smile.

Speaker 35 She would call me, you know, every morning, say, hi, mom.

Speaker 39 Took that away from me.

Speaker 39 And just our whole family is not complete without her.

Speaker 23 There will always be an empty chair at the family table.

Speaker 33 Only images of the smile and memories remain.

Speaker 5 That's all for now.

Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.

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