Footprint in the Dust

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Speaker 10 I think that's the hardest day of my life.

Speaker 10 And I've had a lot of hard days, but that was the hardest.

Speaker 11 Losing her,

Speaker 12 but still consuming us.

Speaker 14 To have her get out of a car and then never make it to the front door, 20 steps, and we can't explain what happened in those 20 steps.

Speaker 15 It just didn't make sense to me.

Speaker 16 I wondered about everybody.

Speaker 9 Everybody was a suspect.

Speaker 18 You know, you were a person of interest.

Speaker 19 we still love each other very much

Speaker 22 somebody knew that we were seeing each other and didn't like it there's somebody out there some jealousy probably my stomach was in my throat

Speaker 13 all of us were a little taken back

Speaker 10 this can't be happening it was really hard for my brain to wrap around that

Speaker 23 It was early morning, still dark.

Speaker 6 The spring air was a cold blanket around the pickup parked and running near the main street of Little Glendive, Montana.

Speaker 18 At 5.20 a.m., the passenger side door opened, the woman stepped out and hurried across the empty street toward the entrance to her downtown apartment, her coat disheveled, her bra slung over one arm.

Speaker 34 The man's eyes followed her through the dark, drawn as other men's eyes were, like moss to a flame, to her, to the woman now crossing the sidewalk to her doorway, Susie,

Speaker 34 lightning in a bottle.

Speaker 37 They were all there.

Speaker 33 There,

Speaker 25 at Susie's front door.

Speaker 14 Each one of them was part of that crime scene.

Speaker 39 But how many and who?

Speaker 34 Who owned the eyes in the dark that started that awful cascade of events, of terrible things?

Speaker 10 I just dropped the phone and cried and cried and cried. I just couldn't believe that that could happen three times in one family.

Speaker 3 Sunlight in the badlands of eastern Montana is like nothing else.

Speaker 40 That wide blue arch of unsullied sky, the vast rolling all but unpeopled prairie, dotted sparsely with tiny old hamlets in which business is personal and where friends and families have worked the same sun-baked gumbo for generations.

Speaker 27 Places like Circle, Population 600, Susie's hometown.

Speaker 10 She livened things up a lot.

Speaker 52 This is Susie's elder sister, Carlene.

Speaker 10 It was kind of nice to have that little breath of fresh air in the family because the rest of us were a little more quiet, you know.

Speaker 39 Susie was the fifth of six kids born to Marlene Limisond and her husband Jack, then the county undersheriff.

Speaker 58 She loved them horses and she loved to go riding. Her and I'd

Speaker 58 go riding quite a bit.

Speaker 60 Susie's love affair with horses grew as she did and shaped her work ethic.

Speaker 18 Her sister-in-law, Val.

Speaker 9 She was a very hard worker. You know, everybody thinks the Montana and the cowgirls and the cowboys.
She was one of those hard workers.

Speaker 9 She was not afraid to be out there shuffling manure or fixing a fence or...

Speaker 18 You saw her do that kind of stuff?

Speaker 65 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 63 She was tough.

Speaker 9 She was a feisty thing.

Speaker 40 But if there was one word most used to describe Susie, it wasn't so much feisty as...

Speaker 63 Fun with capital F.

Speaker 10 She was very impulsive, so she didn't think a lot ahead. She just kind of went with the moment.

Speaker 34 And so when Susie went off to a technical school three hours away in Billings and caught herself a boyfriend, Perhaps what happened next shouldn't have come as a very big surprise.

Speaker 10 It was, oh, she's pregnant and well, you know,

Speaker 10 you get married. That's just what you do.

Speaker 68 And so she did.

Speaker 45 They made a big happy thing of it.

Speaker 48 The whole family gathered in circle for a real country church wedding, where Susie introduced her parents and siblings to her new husband, kid named Marty.

Speaker 23 What was that like for you, too?

Speaker 72 Finding out that she was pregnant and that things were going to be a little bit different than you thought.

Speaker 10 You know, the whole family accepted him because it was Susie's choice.

Speaker 53 Before long, Susie gave birth to a little girl named Mariah, followed by a son, Shay.

Speaker 31 But again, no real surprise.

Speaker 4 The marriage didn't last.

Speaker 10 She really loved her kids. They were really a big part of her life.
And then when her and Marty split, they were really everything in her life.

Speaker 66 So, late 90s now, Susie was working as a medical transcriptionist in a town less than an hour from Circle, a place called Glendive.

Speaker 53 And that's where she met Ted Casey.

Speaker 76 He was the real deal.

Speaker 28 A grown-up this time.

Speaker 77 A rancher 14 years older than Susie.

Speaker 58 He had horses, and boy, that was just right for her.

Speaker 49 Wedding number two.

Speaker 42 This was 1998.

Speaker 59 The kids, Shay and Mariah, called Ted Dad.

Speaker 39 Then there were two more kids, girls, Kyanna and Charlie.

Speaker 6 And for almost a decade, the marriage seemed to be just fine.

Speaker 80 But by then, Susie was sharing secrets with Val about Ted.

Speaker 64 He wanted to tame her, I think.

Speaker 9 I guess I kind of joke around and say that he wanted her to be home in time for the 10 o'clock news.

Speaker 82 You know, he didn't want her to stay out and have fun.

Speaker 9 The fun was just beginning at 10 o'clock.

Speaker 2 At the Casey Ranch, love started to feel like one more chore to be put off till tomorrow.

Speaker 9 I think they grew apart. They just really both changed.

Speaker 31 And then one liquid evening out at a bar, things went seriously sideways.

Speaker 60 Ted got mad, dumped a beer on Susie's head, slapped her, spent the night in jail.

Speaker 40 Not long after, Ted pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault.

Speaker 84 Susie was gone from the ranch.

Speaker 9 She wasn't very happy with Ted, and she was starting to make some good decisions to

Speaker 9 to find some happiness again.

Speaker 69 And so by the spring of 2008 Susie and the kids were living at the Ponderosa apartments here in downtown Glendive and a little town like this.

Speaker 36 People noticed what Susie was up to.

Speaker 42 Liked her, said family acquaintance Olivia Rieger, but noticed.

Speaker 22 People thought of Susie as someone that was going through a time kind of sowing some wild oats.

Speaker 65 She liked to have fun. Sure.

Speaker 22 And she was having a lot of fun.

Speaker 25 And then it got to that Friday evening in April.

Speaker 9 When she came in to see me, she was really happy and she had makeup on, which wasn't really a Susie thing, and that was great. So I knew something was up.

Speaker 30 And Sauval watched as Susie bounded out the door to take her two youngest kids to Ted's for the night.

Speaker 67 Well, the two teenagers fended for themselves.

Speaker 34 And Susie headed out on the town.

Speaker 9 I don't like that. This girl's got to have a date tonight.

Speaker 34 And the very next morning. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 89 Pick up.

Speaker 73 When Susie's worried children, an increasingly frantic family called to check on her, I mean, whenever you get demanded, Susie, who always kept her phone within reach,

Speaker 55 did not answer.

Speaker 10 I thought, oh, this is silly. She went somewhere, the kids forgot, and it's all going to be, you know, a funny ha-ha.

Speaker 9 I thought that maybe she had just fainted somewhere or

Speaker 82 had a heart attack or just an accident or anything.

Speaker 77 Susie Casey's sudden disappearance.

Speaker 18 Can the people she loves help solve it?

Speaker 25 I mean, what do you do?

Speaker 14 How do you find somebody?

Speaker 82 I was a detective.

Speaker 9 It's going to backtrack all of her steps. You could tell the house was dark and it was kind of, it was like an eerie feeling.

Speaker 45 The morning sun warmed toward another glorious spring day in Glendive, Montana.

Speaker 23 But in the Ponderosa apartments, it was anxiety that infected the air as 14-year-old Mariah tried again and again and again to reach her mother, Susie.

Speaker 26 Mariah knew very well that her mother enjoyed evenings out and trusted her two older children to look after themselves in the apartment.

Speaker 24 But she'd never once failed to come home.

Speaker 34 Mariah's next call was to her grandparents.

Speaker 91 And she told grandma, Mom made

Speaker 58 her own.

Speaker 29 And so Mariah's anxiety infected Jack and Marlene, too.

Speaker 73 She loved her kids a lot. And her and Mariah were really, really close, very close.

Speaker 73 Sometimes you almost thought that Mariah was the mom and Susie the kid because Mariah was pretty grown up and smart for her age.

Speaker 58 She was the somewhat more level-headed one. Right.

Speaker 73 I mean,

Speaker 73 she wasn't scared to tell her mother her opinion.

Speaker 32 Soon, phones were ringing all over.

Speaker 60 Susie's sister, Carlene.

Speaker 10 I thought, oh, this is silly. She went somewhere, the kids forgot, and it's all going to be, you know, a funny ha-ha.

Speaker 4 The kids were sufficiently independent to get themselves up and leave for their respective activities but from Susie not a word.

Speaker 42 Across town sister-in-law Val hadn't heard yet that Susie failed to come home.

Speaker 61 We had like a craft show in town and I thought that maybe she would want to come with me.

Speaker 92 Hey it's Malory down at Spring Point just wondering if you were coming down.

Speaker 9 And then she didn't respond that morning and I thought that was kind of odd. And when I was

Speaker 82 at the actual craft craft shows, when I got the call from Rusty.

Speaker 69 Rusty Limeson, Val's husband, Susie's little brother.

Speaker 94 What did Rusty say?

Speaker 9 He told me that the kids couldn't find Susie when they woke up and that everybody was just really worried because that just wasn't Susie.

Speaker 9 She would never just not tell her children or be there for them.

Speaker 89 And she wasn't there.

Speaker 31 Val's next attempt to reach Susie wasn't quite so calm.

Speaker 92 You need to call her back as soon as you get this message. Your dad's freaking out because nobody can find you.

Speaker 93 I mean, what do you do?

Speaker 14 How do you find somebody?

Speaker 82 I was a detective.

Speaker 9 I was like, I was going to backtrack all of her steps. And so that's exactly what I did.

Speaker 43 Val made some calls.

Speaker 70 Found Susie had been drinking with friends the night before till about 11 p.m.

Speaker 34 when she left for what was apparently a date with a new boyfriend.

Speaker 60 Someone Susie had just started seeing after her separation from her husband, Ted.

Speaker 57 Val's mind was racing.

Speaker 9 I also thought that maybe she had just fainted somewhere or

Speaker 82 had a heart attack or just an accident or anything.

Speaker 42 Still, when her mind settled, her first move was...

Speaker 82 I just figured that I had to go to Ted's.

Speaker 96 Because.

Speaker 82 Maybe she was at Ted's and they were having an argument and she couldn't answer her phone or maybe something happened over there.

Speaker 9 Maybe something happened, exactly.

Speaker 80 Remember, Ted Casey had pleaded guilty to assaulting Susie six months before.

Speaker 76 That's why she moved off the ranch to the apartment.

Speaker 33 But when Thal arrived at Ted's place...

Speaker 9 You could tell the house was dark and there were no cars there and it was kind of,

Speaker 9 it was like an eerie feeling. I just felt like I couldn't get out of the car by myself.

Speaker 50 So she decided to leave and picked up her husband, Rusty.

Speaker 52 The two of them got a key to Susie's apartment.

Speaker 59 They opened the door.

Speaker 32 And here's what they found.

Speaker 52 This is a videotape the police made later.

Speaker 9 I was just kind of thinking that maybe the kids just didn't see her, that she was asleep under the blankets or something.

Speaker 82 You know, you're just kind of like,

Speaker 9 you don't want to go there. Your body doesn't let you...

Speaker 9 mind doesn't let you go there. As we kind of walked through the apartment and really realized that she wasn't there, again, that adrenaline burst of that

Speaker 98 something isn't right, something isn't right it's empty she's not here she's gone she's not here yet so val decided to go find that new boyfriend susie had a date with the last person to be seen with her his name was brad holzer he would know where she was brad lived with his soon-to-be ex-wife less than five minutes from susie's apartment val drove over knocked on the door.

Speaker 9 I said, Susie's not home.

Speaker 64 We can't find find her.

Speaker 17 She's not answering our calls, and we're all really worried.

Speaker 12 And then I remember exactly what he said to me.

Speaker 9 He said, What do you mean she isn't home?

Speaker 12 I dropped her off at 5 a.m.

Speaker 22 That's when it hit that we're going to the police.

Speaker 9 Something's not right.

Speaker 59 It certainly wasn't.

Speaker 6 A man whose marriage was breaking up, the last man to be with her, didn't know a thing.

Speaker 33 Really?

Speaker 99 How long have you known Susie?

Speaker 99 Well, we were out in high school.

Speaker 100 Susie's new boyfriend fields a few questions down at the station.

Speaker 99 Brad, do you know where Susan's at? I have no idea where she is. I wish I didn't.

Speaker 96 Did you ever wonder about Brad and whether he was capable of any bad thing?

Speaker 101 When she went missing, I wondered about everybody.

Speaker 9 Everybody was a suspect.

Speaker 101 Your mind just continues to play and play and play different scenarios of what could have happened and where she is.

Speaker 24 People disappear all the time in America.

Speaker 56 Many of them turn up again.

Speaker 77 And maybe in some big city somewhere, Susie's absence wouldn't have raised the alarm quite so fast.

Speaker 59 But here?

Speaker 4 Olivia Rieger was a young lawyer then.

Speaker 22 I just thought, you've got to be kidding. You know, this is Glendive.
She's gotta be around somewhere.

Speaker 89 But when Susie's brother and sister-in-law roared around town looking, it only made them more upset.

Speaker 82 I have a younger sister and an older brother and two younger brothers, but I just,

Speaker 9 you know, as a kid, when you're younger, you always wish you had things you didn't have.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 101 I just always wished I had a big sister.

Speaker 12 And when I met Susie, she was

Speaker 12 She was my big sister.

Speaker 101 She was that sister that I didn't get to have and that I wished for when I was a kid.

Speaker 12 And I just, I guess I never like imagined that she wouldn't be in my life.

Speaker 5 Mid-afternoon, Val and her husband, Rusty, drove over to the Glendive Police Department. They sat down with then Captain, later chief, Ty Ulrich.

Speaker 15 They said, Susie always answers her phone, always.

Speaker 15 And I've went to my office twice and tried to call in to voicemail.

Speaker 66 In a town the size of Glendive, the police were keenly aware of Susie's history, the abuse six months prior at the hands of soon-to-be ex-husband, Ted.

Speaker 15 I had a little insight and kind of knew the dynamics.

Speaker 52 Then Val told the chief Susie's life had just become even more complicated.

Speaker 52 The night before she disappeared, said Val, Susie was with another man, a guy named Brad, who she said she was crazy about, and who had to have been the last person to see her before she vanished.

Speaker 25 Did you ever wonder about Brad and whether he was capable of any bad thing?

Speaker 16 When she went missing, I wondered about everybody.

Speaker 9 Everybody was a suspect. Everybody was...

Speaker 101 Your mind just continues to play and play and play different scenarios of what what could have happened and where she is

Speaker 42 and well that question remained unanswered

Speaker 99 And you have a secret Brad Holzer came in for an interview appreciating him though no problem Brad told the police that he and Susie actually had quite a long history. How long have you known Susie?

Speaker 99 Well, we went out in high school. Okay.
She was 16, I was 19.

Speaker 99 Company went off a couple months ago.

Speaker 4 Then they lost touch for nearly two two decades, said Brad, until St.

Speaker 42 Patrick's Day, 2008, just three weeks before she disappeared, when their eyes met at a bar downtown.

Speaker 99 The little came up to me and said, I knew who she was right away. Recognized her immediately.

Speaker 45 And in the weeks since?

Speaker 29 Brad said he and Susie spent every possible moment together.

Speaker 56 Though given her kids and their respective tangled marital issues, it was complicated.

Speaker 52 The night before she disappeared, said Brad, Susie had been drinking with a couple of girlfriends before he picked her up and they drove out of town to sit by the Yellowstone River.

Speaker 99 And then that's where we were from,

Speaker 99 what about 10.45 or 11 until 5 a.m. We drove out there and parked.
And we did the same thing we usually did.

Speaker 99 Talk, kissed, and stuff like that.

Speaker 103 It was just about 5 in the morning, said Brad, when he drove back to town and parked across the street from Susie's apartment.

Speaker 99 Did you guys make out or anything before? Probably for five minutes, yeah.

Speaker 99 Before she exited the truck? Yeah.

Speaker 99 She got out,

Speaker 99 walked back across the street to a place like she normally does. I know she was at least halfway across the street when we turned and started backing out.

Speaker 99 So she was that close to getting into that apartment.

Speaker 60 Brad swore he drove straight home and went to bed.

Speaker 3 And then Brad cast suspicion elsewhere.

Speaker 99 Brad, do you know where Susan's at? I have no idea where she is. I wish I did.

Speaker 38 Okay.

Speaker 99 Where do you think she is, if you you had to guess?

Speaker 99 My guess would be Ted. I can't help but think he had to be behind this somehow.

Speaker 11 There was one more thing, said Brad.

Speaker 25 Somebody sent him a weird email the morning before his last date with Susie.

Speaker 104 Maybe Ted was behind it somehow.

Speaker 5 Here it is.

Speaker 105 It reads, How's your girlfriend?

Speaker 106 How does your wife feel about it?

Speaker 75 The sender?

Speaker 86 Uh, Denise Johnson.

Speaker 99 Still in the dark as to who sent that and who the hell Denise Johnson is.

Speaker 67 That made the cops ears perk up.

Speaker 56 A missing woman, a mysterious email, one guy pointing toward another.

Speaker 15 There's somebody out there, some jealousy, probably. I needed to find out who sent those emails.

Speaker 52 So they told Brad, don't leave town.

Speaker 80 And they set out to talk to Susie's soon-to-be ex,

Speaker 34 Ted Casey.

Speaker 38 What do you think about this duel with Brad?

Speaker 108 Well, I wasn't very happy.

Speaker 109 I said, you know, we are still married, even though we're not living.

Speaker 32 The scorned husband in the interrogation room had details of a confrontation with Susie.

Speaker 110 I dumped a drink on her head, but we were both drinking, and,

Speaker 108 you know, didn't mean to just happen.

Speaker 108 But,

Speaker 110 you know, I suppose you get to such a so much pressure, and after a while,

Speaker 109 you know, it explodes.

Speaker 25 Your thoughts about Ted were not very friendly ones at that point.

Speaker 78 No.

Speaker 53 By the Sunday of that anxious weekend in April 2008, the whereabouts of Susie Casey was a local preoccupation in Glendive, Montana.

Speaker 36 What did her disappearance do to the people around town?

Speaker 12 People were...

Speaker 22 interested.

Speaker 82 Really interested, I think.

Speaker 22 A few years prior, probably back when I was in college in Glendive, we had a homicide, and it was a drug-related homicide. But this was different.

Speaker 22 This was a mom who worked at the hospital that interacted with people generally, and here she is, she's gone. There was a lot of talk about, oh man, we saw her walking down the street sometime.

Speaker 22 Maybe someone picked her up.

Speaker 79 The young attorney and family acquaintance, Olivia Rieger, couldn't help but hear what people were saying.

Speaker 22 Did she go home with someone? Did she drive off somewhere?

Speaker 40 Susie's mother was afraid something awful had happened.

Speaker 45 And for the second time, she called Sister Carlene two hours away in North Dakota.

Speaker 10 And that's when I knew something was really, really wrong. And so we packed up suitcases and headed to Glendive to see what we could do to help find her.

Speaker 24 But where could they look?

Speaker 29 Glendive is the biggest town in a sparsely populated county the size of Delaware.

Speaker 78 Far more hiding places than there are people.

Speaker 15 We had a few pings off of cell phone towers, so we kind of thought we had maybe an idea off of her phone where it would have been last.

Speaker 15 We had horseback, we had four-wheelers, airplanes, helicopters, people on foot,

Speaker 15 and nothing.

Speaker 60 Meanwhile, they processed Susie's Chevy Trailblazer for any sort of evidence.

Speaker 98 Same in her apartment.

Speaker 74 And found

Speaker 24 nothing.

Speaker 44 Nothing of particular importance anyway.

Speaker 24 But then they had a look around outside Susie's apartment building and found something kind of curious.

Speaker 44 A couple of curious things, actually.

Speaker 45 Thing one was a shoe print in the alcove of the building next door to Susie's place.

Speaker 111 And thing two, over in the alley, maybe 40 or 50 feet away, looked like something had been dragged, something heavy, along the ground near the dumpster.

Speaker 50 Did either of those things have anything to do with Susie's disappearance?

Speaker 6 Maybe the rejected husband could tell them, Ted Casey.

Speaker 76 The morning Susie vanished, he went to work, helped his brother with a project, and went to a rodeo.

Speaker 40 So by the next day, police were very eager to talk to Ted.

Speaker 25 Your thoughts about Ted were not very friendly ones at that point. No.

Speaker 7 Ted had reasons to be upset with the woman who was leaving him.

Speaker 78 He was angry, humiliated.

Speaker 3 A costly divorce was looming, child support to pay.

Speaker 34 First, they asked Ted about that incident in the bar, the night they arrested him and put him in jail.

Speaker 109 I dumped a drink on her head,

Speaker 109 you know, barely slapped her because she threw herself on the ground.

Speaker 108 I mean, we were both drinking, and he, you know, didn't mean to have this happen.

Speaker 109 But, you know, I suppose you get to such a, so much pressure, and after a while, you know, it explodes.

Speaker 18 Explodes?

Speaker 6 That was a curious thing to say.

Speaker 77 Ted insisted he'd last seen Susie about 7 o'clock, the evening before she disappeared, when she dropped off the two little girls, Kayanna and Charlie, at his house for the night.

Speaker 98 But Ted did admit that he confronted Susie on the phone a couple of hours later after receiving a strange phone call himself around 9 p.m.

Speaker 25 What was this?

Speaker 104 Just

Speaker 110 Brad Holzler or whatever, or however you say his last name's been screwed in the light.

Speaker 108 Click.

Speaker 23 Brad Holzer, Susie's boyfriend of three weeks.

Speaker 108 What did you think about this duel with this brad?

Speaker 108 Well, I wasn't very happy. I mean, I called her up and said, hey, who's this Brad Holzler or whatever?

Speaker 109 I said, I just got a call that you've been doing.

Speaker 25 Oh, no, no.

Speaker 109 I'd never do that. I'd never cheated on you.
I said, you know, we are still married, even though we're not living with it.

Speaker 110 And

Speaker 109 I got by this hunger phone, you know. Well, she called me right back.

Speaker 110 And then she admitted that she knew the guy.

Speaker 38 She knew who he was.

Speaker 109 And that was about the end of the conversation.

Speaker 36 Was he upset?

Speaker 50 Yes, of course, he said he was.

Speaker 4 And yet, Ted told his interrogator he fell asleep right away.

Speaker 29 Then got up around 5 a.m.

Speaker 31 to do chores and drop off his girls with a babysitter and meet a co-worker at City Hall by 6.

Speaker 110 It was by 6 o'clock for, you know, at the very latest, but

Speaker 23 I was thinking it was like 10 to 6 or something like that when i got there but here's the thing ted drove right past susie's apartment he admitted as much on his way to that meeting at the city hall

Speaker 42 and his own timeline put him right there around her front door within minutes of when she walked across the street all disheveled after making out all night with brad holzer the very time susie vanished from the face of the earth

Speaker 79 as the glendive police department checked out the story ted went home to look after the two youngest girls, who were now living with him full-time.

Speaker 84 Well, Susie's two older kids, Mariah and Shay, went to live with Val and her husband.

Speaker 10 Mariah was just tormented. She just didn't know what to do with herself.
She was so close to her mom. It was just really, really hard for her.

Speaker 10 And I just can't imagine kids that age trying to wrap their brains around it. We couldn't wrap our brains around it.
So how can a kid of that age wrap their head around what's happening around them?

Speaker 69 Harder and harder for everyone, as day after day, the search for Susie produced nothing.

Speaker 22 As time went on, it was clear that she wasn't around anywhere. So it was just a really scary time.

Speaker 36 What were those days like?

Speaker 101 They were pure hell.

Speaker 73 You just sat and wait and wait for the phone to ring.

Speaker 46 And then, nearly a month after Susie's disappearance,

Speaker 89 it did.

Speaker 10 I think that's the hardest day of my life. And I've had a lot of hard days, but that was the hardest.

Speaker 25 A horrifying discovery by the river.

Speaker 43 And another discovery at the station.

Speaker 99 They said, can I get a message for Brad? And I said, okay.

Speaker 99 And they said,

Speaker 99 tell him to stop messing around with married women. And he said, what are you talking about?

Speaker 79 Brad Holzer's wife.

Speaker 112 What was she doing there?

Speaker 9 Honestly, you know, sister, right now, both you and Brad are.

Speaker 42 nearly a month after Susie Casey vanished on an early spring morning in Glendive Montana It was the Yellowstone River that finally gave her back.

Speaker 15 I was actually sitting on my desk and the sheriff at the time walked over and said there's a body floating in Fallon.

Speaker 71 Fallon is a small town 28 miles upstream from Glendive.

Speaker 15 And we jumped in the vehicle and by the time we got there it was on shore.

Speaker 15 Took a look. I knew what she was wearing from the description and just the features I knew.
At that point we're changing from missing persons to homicide.

Speaker 15 After we had the positive identification, I had to go tell the family. And that was probably one of the hardest times I had to do that.

Speaker 15 They just got so close to them over the weeks and knowing what they were going through, and especially knowing what those kids, that was tough.

Speaker 18 Susie's family gathered at Val and Rusty's house.

Speaker 97 I knew it couldn't have been anybody else,

Speaker 61 but I didn't go there all the way

Speaker 63 because I had a job to do.

Speaker 9 And my job was to keep this family together

Speaker 9 and to get us through this.

Speaker 9 And the authorities came and

Speaker 12 told us adults that it was her body.

Speaker 9 I didn't let my emotions just run with it

Speaker 9 because I knew we had those children downstairs.

Speaker 79 The older two.

Speaker 42 Mariah, 14, Shay, 12.

Speaker 49 Carlene is the one who told them.

Speaker 10 I think that's the hardest day of my life.

Speaker 10 And I've had a lot of hard days, but that was the hardest, I think.

Speaker 53 As word spread that Susie had finally been found, the town of Glendive both mourned and relaxed to some degree.

Speaker 22 I think it was almost like a sense of relief, like, oh,

Speaker 22 we found her. We can move forward and see what happens.

Speaker 48 By this time, agents from Montana's Department of Criminal Investigation had been called in to help the local police.

Speaker 54 DCI agent Lee Johnson.

Speaker 115 We determined from the autopsy that she was not breathing when she went into the water, so it was not a drowning.

Speaker 18 All right, so she was killed first.

Speaker 115 That's correct. And the autopsy revealed that her hyoid bone was broken, which is consistent with manual strangulation.

Speaker 33 Strangled. But when?

Speaker 33 And by whom?

Speaker 86 At this time, Brad, the last person known to have seen Susie alive,

Speaker 32 had been interviewed time and again.

Speaker 116 When she left, she was wearing my white sweatshirt.

Speaker 117 Okay.

Speaker 28 And they talked, repeatedly to Brad's wife.

Speaker 23 Though she and her husband maintained they had no motive to kill Susie, they were headed for a divorce.

Speaker 99 Basically, I kind of need to start from the beginning with you.

Speaker 53 But how did she feel, really?

Speaker 79 After all, they were still living together.

Speaker 42 Did Brad's wife, who might be considered the odd woman out in a love triangle, have a reason to get rid of Susie?

Speaker 99 Honestly,

Speaker 99 honestly, we have a variety of suspects. And yes, right now, both you and Brad Brad are.

Speaker 40 But Brad's story didn't change.

Speaker 2 He and Susie were out all night.

Speaker 42 He dropped her at her apartment around 5 a.m., then drove a few blocks home and went right to sleep.

Speaker 50 And his wife insisted that was true.

Speaker 35 Said she came home from a date of her own about 6 a.m.

Speaker 33 and found him already asleep.

Speaker 99 I went in and the bedroom door was closed at the night and he was in bed sleeping.

Speaker 111 But Brad's wife added to the mystery as well because it turned out she too claimed she got a strange phone call that week, the week Susie disappeared.

Speaker 99 They said can I give a message for Brad? And they said, okay.

Speaker 99 And they said,

Speaker 99 tell him to stop messing around with married women. And he said, what are you talking about? And then she hung on.

Speaker 20 So it was a female? Yeah.

Speaker 93 A woman?

Speaker 4 This was getting stranger by the minute.

Speaker 34 Tad, remember, claimed it was a male who called him to rat on Susie.

Speaker 27 Brad said a female named Denise Johnson sent him an email asking how his wife felt about his girlfriend.

Speaker 11 What police really needed was something concrete, something physical, proof of Brad's whereabouts to back up his story and clear his name.

Speaker 25 And...

Speaker 15 It was just by fluke that we decided to check the bank for the footage and sure enough there it is.

Speaker 25 The bank.

Speaker 40 A U.S.

Speaker 4 bank branch just a couple of doors down from Susie's apartment.

Speaker 34 Well, of course, it had a camera on its ATM, and so they asked to see the video.

Speaker 24 And what do you know?

Speaker 93 Though very grainy and extremely hard to see clearly, it appeared to back up everything Brad said.

Speaker 42 Early in the morning, just before 5 a.m., 4.52 to be exact, you can see a pickup pull up across the street from the Ponderosa apartments.

Speaker 115 We see Brad Holzer pull up in his vehicle on the security cameras, and Susan Casey is with him in that vehicle for a period of time, over 20 minutes. The dome light comes on.

Speaker 115 We believe that's when Susie exits the vehicle. And this was about 5:19 a.m.

Speaker 81 Then Brad's pickup pulled away out of frame.

Speaker 115 So then, when Brad Holzer's wife is interviewed, she had been out all night. She comes home and said when she got home at 6 a.m.
that Brad was in bed sleeping. We have a timeframe from 5:20 a.m.

Speaker 115 to 6 a.m. where Brad Holzer has to commit this homicide and he has to dispose of the body.
Or he has to hide the body somewhere and dispose of it later. And we just didn't feel that Mr.

Speaker 115 Holzer had strong opportunity in that time period and certainly didn't have much of a motive to murder Susan Casey.

Speaker 28 To hear that was quite a relief, as you might imagine, for Brad, who has replayed the scene countless times, saying goodnight to Susie and pulling away before she got inside the apartment door.

Speaker 21 At hindsight, it bothers me that I didn't wait and watch her.

Speaker 118 But there is no reason that anybody should be there. It's five in the morning, the whole town was dead.
I just remember needing to get home, wanting to get home as soon as possible.

Speaker 118 It didn't cross my mind for a second that anything had happened or that anyone was there.

Speaker 25 The gallant little gesture he didn't make.

Speaker 119 Brad Holzer has all kinds of time to think about that.

Speaker 118 Sometimes I think about her, yeah.

Speaker 118 I wonder what we'd be doing right now. There could have been a future there.

Speaker 75 Susie was laid to rest on a sunny day in May 2008 in the little cemetery outside her hometown.

Speaker 98 No one the slightest aware of how much more was still to come.

Speaker 116 Seems like you didn't make it home last night.

Speaker 60 An angry message from Susie's husband, Ted, and a closer look at his story.

Speaker 18 You know you were a person of interest, huh?

Speaker 119 Yeah, and you can expect that.

Speaker 14 Sure, but how was it to be treated that way?

Speaker 91 It doesn't feel good.

Speaker 105 You know, every place you go, everything you do, you got people watching, talking, you know, pointing.

Speaker 11 Exactly.

Speaker 57 What did he do the morning of the murder?

Speaker 11 Love and money make the world go round, of course.

Speaker 66 Though here, as anywhere, they also happen to be leading motives for murder, husbands scorned, convicted of misdemeanor domestic assault, on the hook for alimony and child support, and a life insurance beneficiary.

Speaker 79 So, of course, the cops had reason to suspect Ted.

Speaker 119 You're not being detained in any.

Speaker 71 Got him to admit that he drove right past Susie's apartment very near the time she disappeared.

Speaker 60 That he was angry, tried to reach her on the phone.

Speaker 110 Actually, I called Susie whatever time I called hers, I left City Hall then.

Speaker 98 And yes, indeed.

Speaker 42 Here is the angry voicemail Ted left.

Speaker 20 Well, Susie, I just called Mariah, and it seems like you didn't make it home last night.

Speaker 116 So

Speaker 116 maybe maybe what somebody called me and said maybe is true.

Speaker 116 Or you're doing somebody else.

Speaker 49 So once again, it seems those age-old motives pointed at the husband.

Speaker 15 90% of the time, you would be right.

Speaker 53 But was it possible Ted could be the exception that proves the rule?

Speaker 23 A little checking revealed that Ted was in fact at work that morning, as seen by a co-worker, exactly when he said he was.

Speaker 15 If he did commit a homicide, when would he have time to dispose of a body?

Speaker 70 Remember, they found Susie in the Yellowstone River, 28 miles upstream from Glendive.

Speaker 4 So, once again, they pulled out that ATM video from the U.S. Bank, the one beside Susie's apartment building.

Speaker 52 Ted said he dropped his girls off at his brother's house that morning about 5.45 a.m., then drove to City Hall to work.

Speaker 34 It's a small town, and City Hall is just blocks from Susie's place.

Speaker 79 Ted said he drove drove right past her apartment.

Speaker 51 And sure enough.

Speaker 15 We could see a vehicle driving by at approximately the time that Ted said he drove by the Ponderosa apartments on the video at the bank.

Speaker 69 The time?

Speaker 29 5.52 a.m.

Speaker 44 Just like Ted told the police.

Speaker 115 So he's basically got a 15-minute window in there where he's dropping his kids off and he's accounted for. And then he drives to City Hall and works there for a period of time.

Speaker 32 Given how close together everything was, it wouldn't have taken much time to kill Susie, hide her body, and retrieve it later for disposal.

Speaker 11 Possible?

Speaker 106 Quite, thought police.

Speaker 2 Mind you, phone records seemed to back up what Ted said about calling Susie the night she went missing, that angry message he left on her voicemail.

Speaker 34 The timestamp proved it was hours after she vanished, meaning that either Ted was trying to fool the police with the voicemail and his public movements that morning, or he didn't have any idea what happened to Susie.

Speaker 34 And therefore this time the husband didn't do it if he was telling the truth, that is.

Speaker 18 You know you were a person of interest.

Speaker 119 Yeah, and you can expect that.

Speaker 78 Sure.

Speaker 46 But how was it to be treated that way?

Speaker 91 It doesn't feel good.

Speaker 105 You know every place you go, everything you do, you got people watching, talking, you know, pointing.

Speaker 25 Whispering behind your back?

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 36 What's that like?

Speaker 96 Walk around sort of feeling a little itch in your back or something?

Speaker 105 Well, you don't realize you're on edge all the time, you know. It's hard to relax.
You don't realize it until you go through it that, you know,

Speaker 105 you just can't relax.

Speaker 16 You do, but you don't.

Speaker 93 Like, it's not normal, you know.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 119 How does that affect your health,

Speaker 18 your fatigue level, all of those kinds of things?

Speaker 105 You know, it probably ages you, you know, but I guess you get used to it. You really don't notice it quite as much until you get pressure off of you.

Speaker 105 You know, like 10,000 pounds of weight off your shoulders, you know.

Speaker 44 But I did nothing wrong, and

Speaker 105 I had nothing to hide from, so.

Speaker 24 Did the police believe that?

Speaker 53 You'd think if they did believe him, they'd make some sort of announcement that Ted was in the clear.

Speaker 42 But they did not.

Speaker 121 And so it was awkward, especially when they were looking for for Susie.

Speaker 44 Did you take part in the search?

Speaker 18 I did.

Speaker 89 What was that like?

Speaker 105 It's kind of a tough situation.

Speaker 91 You know,

Speaker 105 what happens if you find her? If you're by yourself and you find her, you know, what would that look like? And I never did give up hope that she was alive.

Speaker 105 You know, I was hoping, praying that she was still alive, you know, even though she was missing, that she would show up.

Speaker 91 You know, reality, you know, it's probably not going to happen, but, you know, I never give up hope.

Speaker 96 But at the same time, if you found her, that would suggest you knew where she was in the first place because you put her there.

Speaker 18 It could.

Speaker 34 So Ted was still a target of the investigation, and also quite suddenly a single parent of two little girls, Kyana and Charlie, aged six and eight.

Speaker 105 Six days seemed like six months, you know. I mean,

Speaker 105 you weren't sleeping much. I had headaches every day for over a month,

Speaker 11 all day long.

Speaker 96 So how do you tell a little girl that her mother's never coming home, that she's dead?

Speaker 105 Well, I guess I just told them.

Speaker 96 How'd they take it?

Speaker 44 They broke down.

Speaker 18 You know, they didn't let me out of their sight for quite a few days.

Speaker 104 I can imagine.

Speaker 105 And especially when it came nighttime, you know,

Speaker 25 they were glued to you.

Speaker 42 There was, remember, an insurance policy on Susie's Susie's life.

Speaker 40 Ted was the beneficiary.

Speaker 79 Wasn't a lot, but they cut the check, and Ted Casey cashed it.

Speaker 25 What did you do with it?

Speaker 105 Paid her funeral expenses, and then I what was left, I split four ways between the four kids.

Speaker 122 Could have kept it?

Speaker 105 Could have, but that's not the right thing to do.

Speaker 96 Was it enough to be very much help to the kids?

Speaker 91 Not much.

Speaker 105 You know, there was probably maybe

Speaker 105 three, four thousand dollars left

Speaker 105 after funeral expenses.

Speaker 72 But

Speaker 105 it helped Shane Mariah, too.

Speaker 42 So, does Ted sound like a guilty man?

Speaker 34 But if it wasn't him and it wasn't the boyfriend, Brad,

Speaker 102 then who killed Susie

Speaker 33 and why?

Speaker 25 A mystery caller.

Speaker 20 Please call me. I'm worried.

Speaker 47 Someone was desperate to reach Susie.

Speaker 61 Over and over again,

Speaker 9 it was the same voice.

Speaker 113 Please let me know that you're okay.

Speaker 38 Please.

Speaker 116 Everybody is very worried about you.

Speaker 62 I just thought that this guy is strange to call that many times.

Speaker 9 It was really kind of obsessive.

Speaker 11 And we're all worried.

Speaker 93 Call us.

Speaker 9 Yeah, who was he talking about?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And said, boy, this is something we need to look at here.

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Speaker 40 There was something in the air that night.

Speaker 39 No doubt about it.

Speaker 40 Not every deadly sin, but certainly several, swirling on one city block in Little Glendive, Montana.

Speaker 27 Something that put at least two men, Ted Casey and Brad Holzer, on the same street within minutes of one another.

Speaker 80 Who owned those eyes in the dark that watched Susie Casey in the moments before she disappeared?

Speaker 20 Mom.

Speaker 56 From the first moments it dawned on the kids, parents, and siblings that Susie Casey hadn't come home.

Speaker 92 As you know, everybody's looking for you.

Speaker 73 Give me a call.

Speaker 11 About all of them

Speaker 27 tried Tried calling the woman who never went anywhere without her phone.

Speaker 38 Hello, just me.

Speaker 74 That phone was her lifeline.

Speaker 88 As Susie's brother Rusty and sister-in-law Val said during their interviews with investigators.

Speaker 19 Appreciate you guys coming in.

Speaker 31 Among whom was then-Captain Ty Ulrich.

Speaker 15 So I thought, let's see which phone calls she had.

Speaker 77 That is what a very strange story began to emerge.

Speaker 15 And that's where we've seen all these phone calls from a number that we didn't know who belonged to.

Speaker 122 A number nobody recognized, calling Susie again and again, all night long.

Speaker 122 But did that mystery caller leave a message?

Speaker 60 Neither Val nor Rusty knew how to access Susie's voicemail.

Speaker 23 But they did know who just might.

Speaker 9 When I called Naraya and I asked her if she knew her mother's password to get into her voicemail, she knew it instantly. And Ty was sitting across the table from us.
And the messages started to play.

Speaker 87 If you don't call me back till one o'clock.

Speaker 61 Over and over again,

Speaker 9 it was the same voice.

Speaker 116 I would love to hear from you and make sure everything is okay with you.

Speaker 9 And they were starting to get like more desperate and needy.

Speaker 116 I don't know what to do.

Speaker 113 You won't answer me.

Speaker 9 Like really reminded me of... When you're a teenager and you have your first crush and the guy or the girl goes to call them the next day, and they don't answer.
Usually, most of us would stop.

Speaker 113 Please let me know that you're okay.

Speaker 9 But as a teenager, sometimes their emotions aren't really under control, and they'll continue to call and call and call.

Speaker 38 I still need to hear from you, please.

Speaker 9 It was like that, but the messages just continued to get closer together and just more desperate.

Speaker 113 Please let me know that you're okay.

Speaker 35 Please,

Speaker 113 everybody is very worried about you.

Speaker 9 I just thought that this guy is strange to call that many times. It was really kind of obsessive.

Speaker 93 And we're all worried.

Speaker 89 Call us.

Speaker 9 Yeah, who was he talking about?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And more to the point, who was this guy?

Speaker 50 Who was he to Susie?

Speaker 42 And why, in less than four hours, did he leave not one or two or four or six,

Speaker 111 but 22 voicemail messages for Susie?

Speaker 38 Please call me. I'm worried.

Speaker 34 Then, Val suddenly knew.

Speaker 104 Susie had only hinted at it, but there was another man in her life.

Speaker 4 Someone from her past, with whom she'd reconnected as her marriage to Ted fell apart.

Speaker 28 This man.

Speaker 111 Her long ago first husband, the father of her two older children, Marty Larson.

Speaker 29 Did she talk about him at all?

Speaker 9 I knew that she had had a previous marriage in Shamaria, but I didn't know anything really more beyond that.

Speaker 60 Marty had been out of Susie's life for nearly a decade.

Speaker 111 No contact, no child support, nothing.

Speaker 52 But then in 2007, Mariah, curious about her biological father, found him on the internet and reached out.

Speaker 6 And Marty came to visit a time or two.

Speaker 52 At least once, Susie took the kids to see him three hours across the prairie in Billings, Montana.

Speaker 42 Her parents were among the very few people who knew.

Speaker 69 They were not happy.

Speaker 73 We got into an argument and I said, Susie, you don't want to do this. And I said, you know, the family isn't going to really go for this.
And she said, you mean everybody's going to disown me?

Speaker 73 And so I just backed off and I told him, I said, I'm not going to lose my daughter over him.

Speaker 73 And that was the end of it.

Speaker 42 How serious it got, nobody knew, really.

Speaker 40 Maybe they were just friendly.

Speaker 52 Maybe it was more than that.

Speaker 51 Now, Investigator Ulrich typed Marty Larson in the database.

Speaker 25 And it popped up.

Speaker 15 And I've seen criminal trespass.

Speaker 52 Remember, Susie married Ted pretty quickly after she left Marty back in 1998, but that wasn't the end of it.

Speaker 54 Not long after the wedding, apparently in a fit of peak, Marty drove three hours down the highway from Billings to Glendive and turned up outside the newlyweds house.

Speaker 111 with a shotgun.

Speaker 91 And he admitted, you know, that

Speaker 105 Susie and the kids were probably safe, but Ted probably wasn't. So that's pretty much saying that he'd blow you away.

Speaker 105 You know, a 12-gauge shotgun isn't to wound you.

Speaker 96 But that would be for you, not for her.

Speaker 93 Yeah.

Speaker 5 What he intended to do with a shotgun was never made clear, but he was convicted of criminal trespass and was slapped with a lifetime restraining order. No contact with Susie or Ted.

Speaker 123 Ever.

Speaker 15 At that point, I had a little red flag go up and said, boy, this is something we need to look at here.

Speaker 70 To judge from his 22 phone messages, Marty, and by the way, his given first name was Walter, was very worried about Susie, desperate even, as those nighttime hours went by without a word from her.

Speaker 3 But Marty still lived three hours away in Billings.

Speaker 90 So is that where he was calling from?

Speaker 42 One surefire way to find out.

Speaker 121 Check the cell towers.

Speaker 15 We looked at Marty's cell phone and we actually started seeing him pinging from Billings all the way to Glendive.

Speaker 19 Can I ask you one question? For sure.

Speaker 19 Am I

Speaker 19 under arrest for something? No.

Speaker 124 Being charged with something? No.

Speaker 25 Marty has a revelation for police.

Speaker 19 We still love each other very much.

Speaker 124 Were you kind of thinking that you two would get back together?

Speaker 20 That was the plan.

Speaker 42 It's a long, lonely road under the Montana moon.

Speaker 2 And even at the elevated speeds allowed on I-94,

Speaker 67 it's a good three hours east-northeast across the rolling prairie.

Speaker 70 From Billings to the Ponderosa Apartment Building in downtown Glendive.

Speaker 3 Ping, ping, ping, past the ever-listening cell towers.

Speaker 70 And suddenly the cop had some homework to do.

Speaker 15 I didn't know who Marty was, had no idea.

Speaker 50 But he knew from the towers that Marty Larson was the third man to put himself near Susie Casey the night she vanished, which is why he called the State Department of Criminal Investigation.

Speaker 42 And soon after Marty returned from Glendive, Agent Lee Johnson found himself standing outside Marty's apartment, staring at this freshly washed minivan.

Speaker 25 Video, again, courtesy of the police.

Speaker 115 It was obviously very clean on the exterior because it had been through an automatic car wash. The interior of the vehicle had heavy condensation on the windshield.

Speaker 96 What did you find inside?

Speaker 115 The vehicle had been shampooed, the carpets had been cleaned.

Speaker 115 When you get into the cargo area, the back of the van had been vigorously cleaned out with some type of solution, water, and maybe some cleaning solution.

Speaker 85 And in Marty's apartment?

Speaker 115 There was an empty bottle of toilet bowl cleaner in the kitchen garbage. Detectives looked at the toilets in the residence.

Speaker 115 They didn't look like they'd been recently cleaned, but yet we had an empty container of

Speaker 115 Lysol bathroom cleaner.

Speaker 32 That wasn't all they found in the garbage.

Speaker 85 There was this.

Speaker 28 It appeared to be a list of expenses, as if someone was planning quite seriously for a Las Vegas wedding.

Speaker 115 Basically, a breakdown of the trip for lodging,

Speaker 115 paying for a minister to marry them, and the return trip home.

Speaker 66 Then, when investigators asked Marty to take off his shirt, they saw scratches on his back.

Speaker 45 Now, how in heaven's name would he have gotten those?

Speaker 25 Some sort of struggle, perhaps?

Speaker 50 Okay.

Speaker 83 So, while the search for Susie was still going on, the agent suggested they all sit down for a little Q ⁇ A.

Speaker 3 And Marty said, sure,

Speaker 33 but.

Speaker 19 Can I ask you one question for sure?

Speaker 19 Am I

Speaker 19 arrest for something?

Speaker 124 Not being charged with something? No.

Speaker 70 Marty said he and Susie had reconnected the year before, mostly for the children.

Speaker 53 But right away, said Marty, they fell for each other all over again, like true soulmates.

Speaker 48 That time ten years prior, when he had taken a shotgun to Ted and Susie's house, all forgiven.

Speaker 45 He was a different man now.

Speaker 19 The ten years we were apart, I spent thinking she hated me. She thought I hated her.

Speaker 19 And in fact, we still love each other very much.

Speaker 125 Were you kind of thinking that you two would get back together?

Speaker 19 That was the plan.

Speaker 86 So, said Marty, just before Susie went out, the night she vanished, he talked to her on the phone.

Speaker 19 And I told her before she went, I said, make sure you eat, make sure you don't drink too much,

Speaker 19 don't, you don't need to get a DUI and get in trouble like that.

Speaker 79 And she promised to call him back later.

Speaker 19 I said, if I'm sleeping, don't worry about it. It's okay.
Wake me up.

Speaker 34 After all, thought Marty, they were a couple again.

Speaker 50 It was his business to worry about her.

Speaker 42 And when she didn't call...

Speaker 19 Then I called her at 12.30 because I hadn't heard from her and I thought I'd, you know, make sure everything was okay. If you don't call me back till one o'clock, I didn't know whether

Speaker 19 she'd gotten arrested or what was going on.

Speaker 37 Okay.

Speaker 19 And then I thought,

Speaker 19 I'm going to go up there, I'm going to see if she's okay.

Speaker 19 Make sure that she got home, make sure everything's okay.

Speaker 125 What time did you leave Bellings to recall?

Speaker 14 1.30-ish.

Speaker 3 And sure enough, when police pulled video at the blue basket where Marty said he gased up, timestamp said 1.39 a.m.

Speaker 44 And so he drove, he said, calling and leaving voice messages for Susie during the entire 220-mile trip.

Speaker 116 I just need to hear from you.

Speaker 38 Please, please call me.

Speaker 20 I'm worried.

Speaker 23 I don't hear you. Expecting to hear back from her, saying I'm fine.

Speaker 103 Don't come.

Speaker 67 But Susie's call never came.

Speaker 125 What time did you get in Glendive then?

Speaker 19 4.30, quarter to 5.

Speaker 24 Again, the truth.

Speaker 69 Marty's cell phone pinged on a tower in the Glendive area just before 4.30 a.m.

Speaker 88 He said he parked around the corner, walked to her apartment.

Speaker 79 Her car was parked outside, as if she was home.

Speaker 14 I went in the building.

Speaker 19 I went up and I knocked on the door softly because her bedroom is near the door, hoping, you know, it would wake her and not any of the kids,

Speaker 19 and hoping, you know, she'd come and tell me she was okay.

Speaker 19 And there was no answer, so I went out and called and texted a few times, hoping to wake her up.

Speaker 125 So did you ever encounter Susie at all? No.

Speaker 125 Okay.

Speaker 19 I wish I would have seen her.

Speaker 60 He swore he didn't see Susie arrive just before 5 a.m.

Speaker 25 with Brad.

Speaker 60 Didn't see what they were doing in the truck.

Speaker 95 Didn't see her cross the street to her door at 5.19 a.m.

Speaker 29 But he did leave town, he said, and video from another nearby bank seemed to back him up at 5.45 a.m.,

Speaker 43 leaving one last frantic voicemail.

Speaker 43 Hello, just hoping to hear you're okay.

Speaker 50 Police, of course, are paid to be skeptical.

Speaker 125 There's no doubt in my mind you saw her this morning.

Speaker 19 No, I didn't.

Speaker 40 But Marty stuck to his story.

Speaker 88 And when detectives asked him why his minivan was so freshly washed...

Speaker 19 On the way up there, I did have one sort of major thing.

Speaker 19 There's a dead deer in the road that I hit, and there's a bunch of

Speaker 19 deer stuck to the bottom of it.

Speaker 37 Okay.

Speaker 19 So I went and cleaned the bugs off the van and hoping that going through one of the drive-through car washers would spray the deer off. It didn't do a very good job, though.

Speaker 24 A deer?

Speaker 90 Really?

Speaker 33 But...

Speaker 88 Did you check into whether or not he actually did hit a deer?

Speaker 25 We did.

Speaker 115 We did. We checked with the Highway Patrol, and they said it was consistent with a deer.
It was not a live deer that he hit running. It was actually laying in the interstate.

Speaker 40 And when they tested the tissue on the van, sure enough, it was not human.

Speaker 56 It was animal tissue.

Speaker 49 But then, when police asked if there was any way they'd find Susie's DNA in, on, or even under the van,

Speaker 42 Marty said something, as he often did, that made police wonder.

Speaker 19 Well, I I guess what I'm saying is, what I know is, what I thought is that was a deer.

Speaker 19 I guess I don't know for certain that it couldn't have been her.

Speaker 20 What?

Speaker 100 Was he trying to tell police he ran Susie down?

Speaker 58 Is there something you want to tell us?

Speaker 20 No.

Speaker 19 I haven't done anything.

Speaker 20 You can go.

Speaker 19 You can scrape everything out from underneath that van. It's deer.

Speaker 19 As far as I know.

Speaker 75 And if that wasn't weird enough, as the detectives left the room.

Speaker 38 Oh, Susie, where are you?

Speaker 38 Where are you?

Speaker 38 Those kids need you.

Speaker 38 They need you.

Speaker 38 I love you, Susie.

Speaker 38 Just wish I knew where you were.

Speaker 75 Need hardly say it.

Speaker 28 Marty was now the prime suspect.

Speaker 51 The man in the crosshairs.

Speaker 77 But

Speaker 77 suspicion is so easy.

Speaker 103 The real question was, did he provably do it?

Speaker 90 What cop or prosecutor would want to stake his or her career on a wild bet like that?

Speaker 12 Susie's death

Speaker 11 consumed him.

Speaker 101 He wouldn't sleep much at night.

Speaker 12 And he told me one night that he just wanted

Speaker 64 to stop feeling.

Speaker 64 I think it just haunted him.

Speaker 9 He was going to get justice for our family, even if he had to do it himself.

Speaker 25 A whole new tragedy is about to hit Susie's family.

Speaker 10 I get a phone call in the middle of the night. It was really impossible to believe that.

Speaker 10 We've already lost Susie. This can't be happening, too.

Speaker 54 Once Susie's family found out that her ex-husband Marty Larson had been in Glendive the night she disappeared, reaction was quick and to the point.

Speaker 58 If I'd have knew all this

Speaker 30 ten years earlier, I'd have took him for a ride.

Speaker 38 Well, meaning, well, you know.

Speaker 70 Here's what most of them thought pretty well right away.

Speaker 22 It just didn't add up that it was Brad.

Speaker 22 And it didn't add up that it was Ted.

Speaker 33 But Marty, perhaps?

Speaker 7 There were signs, like those obsessive voicemails. Please call me.

Speaker 79 And the bank video.

Speaker 70 His own admission that he hoped to reunite with Susie.

Speaker 59 The probability he saw Susie canoodling with Brad.

Speaker 24 The minivan washed to a fairly well on his return home.

Speaker 42 And yet, Marty Larson was not arrested.

Speaker 10 I think that frustration was really, really hard for the family.

Speaker 96 What was your expectation that they would look at this material that they had and then just go and arrest Marty?

Speaker 9 You know, when you watch shows like this, things move, they progress. I guess I just anticipated that these things would move forward

Speaker 9 and that who was responsible would be held accountable.

Speaker 9 And time just kept on going.

Speaker 70 Thing is, at that point, Susie's sister-in-law Val and her husband Rusty were still hearing that Marty and Ted were both suspects.

Speaker 85 At the time, Susie's two youngest kids were with Ted.

Speaker 106 The older two, Shay and Mariah, were living with Val and Rusty.

Speaker 9 It was extremely difficult for Shay

Speaker 62 and Mariah both.

Speaker 9 I remember we were so excited for him to have his own bedroom, his own space, but at night he couldn't he couldn't sleep in his room.

Speaker 82 He had to sleep with Mariah.

Speaker 65 Because

Speaker 12 I think he was scared Marty was going to come take him.

Speaker 89 His own father.

Speaker 61 I don't think he ever really called him father.

Speaker 62 I don't think any of us really did.

Speaker 114 I think that he was just afraid of Marty.

Speaker 33 Val had a newborn of her own to go along with those extra responsibilities.

Speaker 25 And an overwhelming sadness that sneaked into her bed, her kitchen, her life, an unwelcome house guest that simply refused to leave.

Speaker 12 My son was four months old when Susie was taken from us.

Speaker 114 I don't remember.

Speaker 114 I don't remember him walking.

Speaker 12 I don't remember those moments I should remember as a mother.

Speaker 44 Meanwhile, the investigation was stuck in the weeds.

Speaker 15 I was thinking a couple months and we're going to have an arrest. And we just didn't have the pieces at that time that we needed.

Speaker 90 2008 went the way of all years.

Speaker 44 Ted kept to himself.

Speaker 45 Marty moved, left Billings, went to Phoenix, got a job.

Speaker 25 And at home in Glendive, Susie's brother, Val's husband Rusty, was having trouble with the rage.

Speaker 82 Susie's death

Speaker 12 consumed him.

Speaker 101 He wouldn't sleep much at night.

Speaker 65 And he told me one night that he just wanted to

Speaker 64 to stop feeling.

Speaker 64 I think it just haunted him that he

Speaker 59 felt

Speaker 9 like he could have done something.

Speaker 45 And by the time a representative of Montana's Attorney General's office met with the family, many felt they were teetering on the edge of sanity, still wondering, Marty or Ted,

Speaker 18 what was the holder?

Speaker 62 That day, I asked if she could tell us

Speaker 9 as a family that Ted was no longer a suspect.

Speaker 9 And she asked me why I'm asking the question first. And I told her because I've, um,

Speaker 9 the two little girls were living with Ted at the time and Mariah and Shea were living with me.

Speaker 9 And I just felt like I was the only person trying to salvage the relationship with the little girls and their siblings.

Speaker 9 And I just really wanted her to kind of crash that wall down and say that he wasn't a suspect and then her response to me was

Speaker 9 that the case is still moving forward and he's still a suspect.

Speaker 25 It's quite a thing to hear. Yeah.

Speaker 9 I mean I just I just really felt like I needed to hear that at that time and I didn't get to hear that and that it was still possibly he could have had involvement.

Speaker 56 Ted, who still lived under a cloud of suspicion, believed that Marty killed Susie.

Speaker 105 There was a lot of nights I didn't sleep real good, wondering if somebody was going to show up in the middle of the night with a gun.

Speaker 34 But it was Rusty during his many sleepless nights who devised a plan to do what police and prosecutors seemed unable or unwilling to do.

Speaker 9 He was going to get justice for our family,

Speaker 9 even if he had to do it himself.

Speaker 89 What do you mean by that?

Speaker 9 He had made several plans about how he was going to

Speaker 9 kill Marty, take Marty's life, just like Marty took Susie's.

Speaker 96 What would you say to him when he said things like that?

Speaker 12 That the case was moving forward and that that wasn't something he needed to do.

Speaker 9 We had a son and our son needed him and me.

Speaker 62 And that he couldn't leave us.

Speaker 79 Eventually, it all came to that anyway.

Speaker 59 First, Bell and Rusty divorced.

Speaker 7 And then in November 2011, three and a half years after the night Susie was murdered.

Speaker 10 I could phone call in the middle of the night. It was really impossible to believe that.

Speaker 60 Rusty, her brother, 32 years old, committed suicide.

Speaker 10 We've already lost Susie.

Speaker 10 This can't be happening too, you know.

Speaker 10 And so it was really hard for my brain to wrap around that.

Speaker 42 And so Jack and Marlene went to the little cemetery in Circle to lay another child to rest.

Speaker 10 It crushed them. And then to lose their two youngest.
It just seems like they aged 15 years.

Speaker 25 Do you think Rusty would be around today if they had moved quicker on that case?

Speaker 65 I try not to go there.

Speaker 101 I mean, there's all these what-ifs, what-ifs.

Speaker 74 But then, wasn't long after her Rusty was put in the ground, a new county attorney was elected in Glendi.

Speaker 81 You've already met her, Olivia Rieger.

Speaker 22 I really felt like we had a duty to give some sort of explanation to Jack and Marlene and their family as to what was going on.

Speaker 22 If the case was going to go somewhere or if it wasn't, they needed to know.

Speaker 11 They couldn't be

Speaker 22 left dangling out there.

Speaker 58 And they certainly were dangling.

Speaker 22 Absolutely.

Speaker 23 And if that were all, the hope for an answer and justice might have simply ended there.

Speaker 87 But one morning as Olivia was settling into her new office, there was a knock at the door.

Speaker 33 A man had come to call,

Speaker 84 and he smiled and said, Hi, I'm Brant Light, and we're going to try a homicide.

Speaker 22 I think my stomach was in my throat because, especially when he said we're going to try a homicide. And I thought,

Speaker 101 are you kidding me?

Speaker 106 An arrest at last.

Speaker 25 And new anguish that no one in the family saw coming.

Speaker 88 That hit you pretty hard, didn't it?

Speaker 10 I just dropped the phone and

Speaker 10 just cried.

Speaker 10 Cried and cried and cried.

Speaker 41 I just, I couldn't believe that that could happen three times

Speaker 10 in one family.

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Speaker 3 Olivia Rieger could scarcely believe her eyes.

Speaker 48 The man at the door, the man who clearly intended to enlist her in some sort of cause, was one of the best-known prosecutors in all of Montana.

Speaker 29 So, when you saw him at the door that day, what happened to you?

Speaker 22 I think my stomach was in my throat because, especially when he said, We're going to try a homicide. And I thought,

Speaker 101 are you kidding me? Because I am new here.

Speaker 22 You know, he brought boxes of files and he said, I'm going to be back in six weeks and I want you to get on this and read all this stuff and we're going to talk about how we're going to do this.

Speaker 90 This is Brad Blight, who, before he showed up at Olivia's door, was appointed the State Attorney General's chief prosecutor.

Speaker 49 The AG's office often helps small jurisdictions handle big cases.

Speaker 25 How did you get involved in this particular case?

Speaker 14 Well,

Speaker 14 I had come to the Attorney General's office.

Speaker 14 There was another chief prosecutor at that time. Simply didn't think it was enough evidence.
I then took her position and I told my team, let's look really hard at this.

Speaker 13 And months later, after a very hard look, I thought it was a great case.

Speaker 14 I thought circumstantially it was overwhelming.

Speaker 40 Then Brent Light met with Susie's family, asked for their patience, and promised he would issue an arrest warrant for the man he was now convinced was the killer, Marty Larson.

Speaker 14 I just, I saw my family and their family, a good, strong family, and to have this death occur, to have her get out of a car and then never make it to the front door, 20 steps, and we can't explain to them what happened in those 20 steps, I thought they deserved to find out.

Speaker 48 In February 2012, almost four years after Susie's murder, a Phoenix SWAT team descended on Marty Larson as he walked out of his apartment on his way to work.

Speaker 43 Back in Glendive, a certain ex-suspect finally relaxed.

Speaker 96 When you knew he was under arrest and in jail, how did it change your life?

Speaker 105 You know, it took a lot of stress off me. Mr.

Speaker 127 Larson, I'm Assistant Chief Ty Alderput at the Glendive Police Department. How are you doing?

Speaker 18 And the man who took Susie's original missing persons report sat down to interview Marty.

Speaker 15 I just arrested a guy for homicide. When I walk in, I'm expecting somebody to say, you're crazy.
I didn't do this. I don't want to talk to you at all.

Speaker 15 But I find a guy sitting in a chair with his legs crossing, arms, you know, across the side.

Speaker 127 The only thing I have to say is I have no idea what happened to her. I don't know how she passed away.

Speaker 127 That's it.

Speaker 127 I pretty much knew when I was targeted years ago that something like this could happen at any time. I knew this day could come, so.

Speaker 65 What did that say to you?

Speaker 115 That said to me that he'd always been thinking in the back of his head that he would be arrested for this crime.

Speaker 4 They took Marty back to Montana, stuck him in the county jail to await his murder trial.

Speaker 45 And as the spring of 2012 arrived, it seemed that things were finally looking up for Susie's family.

Speaker 10 It was a lot of relief, especially mom and dad, I think, really felt like Susie would finally

Speaker 10 get some justice.

Speaker 60 And there was another reason, finally, for the family to celebrate.

Speaker 2 Susie's eldest child, Mariah, was graduating from Circle High School.

Speaker 45 Senior photos were taken.

Speaker 42 Announcements were printed up and sent out.

Speaker 28 A party was planned in Circle.

Speaker 3 And then, the day before the ceremony.

Speaker 73 She had said, you know, it's going to be my graduation, and my mom is not here to see me.

Speaker 73 And I said, I know, but I said, she'll be with you.

Speaker 73 And she cried.

Speaker 7 And so Mariah and Marlene dried their tears, and the young girl bounded out of the house and drove away.

Speaker 20 What happened anyway?

Speaker 73 It's well, they said she fell asleep.

Speaker 14 Went off the road.

Speaker 58 There were no skid marks or nothing until she hit the ditch and it rolled. And that kid would never leave without her seat belt on.
And that night she didn't have it on and it throwed her out.

Speaker 33 Mariah Larson.

Speaker 44 was just 18 years old.

Speaker 10 All I remember is answering the phone and mom telling me. And that's all all I remember.
I just dropped the phone and

Speaker 10 just cried.

Speaker 10 Cried and cried and cried. I just, I couldn't believe that that could happen three times

Speaker 10 in one family.

Speaker 17 I never really grieved for Susie,

Speaker 12 just like I never really grieved for Rusty

Speaker 12 until Mariah's accident.

Speaker 114 And that was the day I grieved for all three of them.

Speaker 44 I can't imagine that scope of loss.

Speaker 104 I don't know how you managed it.

Speaker 65 I don't know either.

Speaker 96 That hit you pretty hard when

Speaker 96 she was killed, didn't it?

Speaker 44 Is that the point?

Speaker 14 that gets you every time?

Speaker 93 Yeah.

Speaker 42 Mariah was laid to rest in that little cemetery outside Circle, next to her uncle Rusty and her mom, Susie.

Speaker 73 She had a hard time living without her mom.

Speaker 73 And I guess that's why she finally went to be with her mom.

Speaker 65 It was tough.

Speaker 73 Just about didn't make it through that one.

Speaker 73 Three of them.

Speaker 25 And right along with the family that day was the new prosecutor on the case.

Speaker 22 It showed me a lot about Brant Light because he traveled from Helena after only meeting that young girl one time. He came from Helena to her funeral.

Speaker 24 And he had a message for the family and from Marty Larson.

Speaker 14 It was very clear in this case from both sides that there was not going to be any plea negotiations. We never talked negotiations.
We simply talked about trial, let's go to trial.

Speaker 33 Bravado?

Speaker 28 Circumstantial cases, especially like this one, can be tricky things.

Speaker 74 That shoe print, those drag marks, and the surveillance video from the bank, would any of it point to Marty?

Speaker 14 But he looked like a different person. My belief was he tried to change his look so he would not look like the person who was on the bank ATM.

Speaker 14 There's a big husky guy, maybe 210-pound man, and here's a person who might now be 150 pounds, 160 pounds all of us were a little taken back

Speaker 56 Glendive is as we have said not a very big place to walk from Susie's apartment door to the Dawson County Courthouse would take less than a minute Five years from crime to trial, five years and one city block Where in April 2013, Marty Larson finally faced a jury.

Speaker 14 Clearly to me, he was the person that committed that crime. Now my chore was to go out and prove it.

Speaker 11 But when Marty walked in, the courtroom gasped.

Speaker 9 He sure didn't look like the picture that I was shown of him.

Speaker 14 He had lost like 77 pounds or something like that. So he looked like a different person altogether.
So I think there was a little shock in everyone's mind that all of us were a little taken back.

Speaker 28 Wait, was it intentional?

Speaker 39 More on that in a minute.

Speaker 42 First, Prosecutor Light listed what he said were motives for Marty to kill Susie.

Speaker 68 Motives as old as time.

Speaker 33 Jealousy, pride, rage.

Speaker 14 I think Marty was absolutely convinced that he and Susan were going to get back together.

Speaker 14 that his family was going to be reunited, that they were going to move out of state, away from her family, and that they were going to have this close-knit relationship.

Speaker 60 He was prepared to marry her.

Speaker 14 He was making financial plans to marry her. And I really think he thought that was going to happen.
I don't think Susan did, but he certainly thought that. And all of a sudden, here comes Brad.

Speaker 14 Here comes somebody telling him that she's seen this other guy.

Speaker 31 That's why I said the prosecutor, and phone records backed it up.

Speaker 45 Marty made those phone calls to Brad's estranged wife and to Ted Casey shortly before the murder, alerting these estranged but still married people that something untoward was going on.

Speaker 14 I think at that point he thought, well, let me just break this up.

Speaker 13 You know, so his efforts were all just about breaking them up.

Speaker 42 And that effort included emails, though Marty denied it.

Speaker 125 Did you send the emails?

Speaker 20 No, I did not.

Speaker 54 A search of Marty's computer revealed that he had created that email account under the name Denise Johnson and sent those emails to Brad asking how his wife felt about his girlfriend.

Speaker 22 And when police showed up at Marty's door the very first time, you know, he's erasing things on his computer and defragmenting the hard drive.

Speaker 29 Appeared to be getting rid of something.

Speaker 22 Something. Yep.

Speaker 95 On the night Susie disappeared, phone records revealed that she and Marty last spoke at 9.51 p.m.

Speaker 40 By then, Susie was aware that Marty had been trying to sabotage her relationship with Brad.

Speaker 56 After the phone call, Susie called her daughter, Mariah, with a question.

Speaker 117 She wanted to know how to restrict a number.

Speaker 93 Okay.

Speaker 114 And I asked her why, and she told me because Marty was calling like

Speaker 117 he was calling Ted and saying stuff about her mother.

Speaker 80 The phone record showed Susie stopped returning Marty's calls.

Speaker 45 That's why, at 1.39 a.m., Marty was caught on that gas station surveillance camera, leaving Billings to head toward Glendive.

Speaker 14 I think when he left Billings, it was never his intent to kill her. I think it was his intent to confront her, to find her and confront her about what's going on.

Speaker 38 Please call me.

Speaker 2 The jury heard that Marty left 22 voicemails as he drove over the next three hours, his cell phone pinging in Glendive just before 4:30 a.m.

Speaker 56 Then, by his own admission, Marty parked right around the corner from Susie's apartment building next to the bank.

Speaker 49 And that's when the bank's ATM started telling a story like nothing else could.

Speaker 28 4.27 a.m.

Speaker 42 Prosecutors argued this figure right here is Marty walking towards Susie's apartment.

Speaker 14 Our theory was he got to Susan's apartment before Brad, before she returned, and there's a little concave, a little storefront, and we believe that's where he was standing.

Speaker 56 That, said the prosecutor, is when he left that footprint found in the dust in the alcove of the building next to Susie's.

Speaker 44 Then the tape showed at 4:52 a.m.

Speaker 53 Brad and Susie pulled up in Brad's truck.

Speaker 49 5.19 a.m., the dome light came on.

Speaker 100 Susie opened the door, got out, just steps from her apartment.

Speaker 14 When she stepped out of Brad's car, after he had stood in that concave for 15 to 20 minutes as they were in the car doing whatever they were doing, I think he was extremely angry.

Speaker 14 And when he saw her, I think he confronted her. I think she confronted him right back.

Speaker 22 I think when she told him that she was going to continue a relationship with Brad and that Marty and her were done, I think he was the no-one's going to have Susie sort of guide.

Speaker 14 It came to a head in that little alley there. And I think that's when he strangled her.

Speaker 7 Strangled her, prosecutors argued.

Speaker 40 But not before Susie left those telltale scratch marks found on Marty's back.

Speaker 50 The state's theory?

Speaker 40 That Marty dragged her body across the alley, leaving those drag marks near the dumpster.

Speaker 29 Then, at 5.38 a.m., a figure walked back toward Marty's minivan.

Speaker 14 After he walks back, the next thing you see is that silver van pulled back in front of Susan's.

Speaker 14 There's about a five-minute wait. I believe he's putting the body into the back of that van, and then you see the van pull aside.

Speaker 66 That, said Prosecutors, is when Marty started driving back to Billings.

Speaker 22 You have a body in your van. I think the river was the fastest and easiest way for him to, and to buy him some time.

Speaker 23 Prosecutors produced this video, showing Marty at 8.15 a.m.

Speaker 6 78 miles down the road, stopping for gas, wearing a white t-shirt and black shoes that were never found.

Speaker 49 Did he throw them away when he dumped her body?

Speaker 48 At 10.29 a.m., Marty was back in Billings, leaving his first voicemail in almost five hours.

Speaker 7 This one, with a decidedly different tone.

Speaker 116 Good morning, sweetie. I was just hoping that you would be willing to talk to me.
I have my other phone charging right now, so if you could give me a call on this one, thank you.

Speaker 14 Totally different tenor when he still hadn't talked to her. I would have thought that you would have been even more angry as time went by that he still hasn't returned your calls.

Speaker 14 They still don't know where you are. Now he's gone into alibi mode.

Speaker 94 And the final piece of the puzzle for prosecutors?

Speaker 54 Remember how Marty vigorously cleaned his mid event inside inside and out

Speaker 14 not quite enough one hair was found it was in the back of the van where you had put a body and of course you know we did the mitochondrial dna and it was hers was in the back where we believe he laid her

Speaker 96 so a strong circumstantial case

Speaker 34 except the marty who showed up in court did not look a bit like the man in the videos.

Speaker 14 My belief was he tried to change his look so he would not look like the person who was on the bank atm you know there's a big husky guy maybe 210 pound man and here's a person who might now be 150 pounds 160 pounds

Speaker 25 but would it work good question after all the state's case was entirely circumstantial there were no eyewitnesses the bank video was so bad even the judge wondered at times what he was looking at.

Speaker 86 And they never found shoes to match the footprints in the alcove.

Speaker 29 So Brad Light had taken a chance all right on a difficult case.

Speaker 96 And the defense was yet to come.

Speaker 17 I don't think anyone knows how this crime happened. There was not enough evidence to bring this case.
Ted Casey, I believe, was the only one who had a real motive.

Speaker 27 A shot from the defense was the wrong man on trial.

Speaker 94 I couldn't have done that.

Speaker 36 Listen, you put yourself there.

Speaker 25 That's the point.

Speaker 29 You put yourself at the crime scene.

Speaker 94 I put myself in a position for them to look at me.

Speaker 18 Right. You had the opportunity.

Speaker 25 You had the motive.

Speaker 3 Marty Larson speaks.

Speaker 89 Can you see how it looks?

Speaker 107 Oh, yeah, I can.

Speaker 3 And so does the jury.

Speaker 56 Marty Larson's defense attorney had one big headline for the jury.

Speaker 17 I don't think anyone knows how this crime happened.

Speaker 54 Randy Hood is a seasoned and respected Montana defense attorney, and her review of the prosecution was harsh.

Speaker 24 Sheer speculation, she said, made for a good story, but offered very little in the way of actual proof that Marty killed Susie.

Speaker 17 I believe that there was not enough evidence to bring this case, and that's one of the the reasons why it wasn't filed for

Speaker 17 all those years, because other prosecutors had determined there wasn't sufficient evidence.

Speaker 44 Much more evidence against Ted Casey, she said.

Speaker 17 Ted Casey, I believe, was the only one who had a real motive.

Speaker 17 They were fighting about the children, the monetary aspects of their marriage, and she had indicated to Marty on several occasions that she was fearful of Ted.

Speaker 17 And I believed that his recounting of what he did that morning, had it been properly investigated, would have found to have been less than a perfect alibi.

Speaker 24 Prosecutors, of course, argued that there was no evidence that Ted, or for that matter, Brad or his then-wife or anyone but Marty Larson killed Susie.

Speaker 100 The defendant himself testified at the trial and agreed to sit down with us too.

Speaker 58 So, what do you want people to know about you?

Speaker 94 I guess the main thing is just that I had nothing to do with killing Susie.

Speaker 94 I

Speaker 94 would never have done anything

Speaker 94 to her or to take her away from my kids or her two little girls. I couldn't have done that.

Speaker 94 It's

Speaker 94 it's hard to imagine

Speaker 94 being

Speaker 94 in a frame of mind where a person could do that.

Speaker 25 Uh-huh. It is hard to imagine.

Speaker 25 For anybody.

Speaker 93 Yeah, it's.

Speaker 94 I mean, there were times where I wasn't happy with her, but

Speaker 94 I've never done anything

Speaker 94 to physically hurt her.

Speaker 94 I

Speaker 94 it just wasn't anything I

Speaker 94 just. I...
I could never get that angry, I guess.

Speaker 94 Usually, if

Speaker 89 I was angry, if I'm

Speaker 94 even now, when I'm angry, it's

Speaker 107 more verbal.

Speaker 94 I tend to say things I shouldn't say and

Speaker 94 hurt that way, I guess.

Speaker 60 Marty insisted that his very last contact with Susie was that phone call, 9.51 p.m., eight hours before she disappeared.

Speaker 89 What happened in that conversation? Why did she not want to talk to you at all afterwards and block your number and the rest of it?

Speaker 94 During that call, she called to

Speaker 94 ask me.

Speaker 94 I don't remember if she asked me or if she accused me of calling Ted.

Speaker 25 And in fact, you had.

Speaker 65 I did.

Speaker 89 And she was mad about that?

Speaker 94 Yes.

Speaker 94 I told her I didn't do it and it wasn't me.

Speaker 65 Why? Why would you do that?

Speaker 25 A lie about it.

Speaker 94 The lying about it was because I knew I had done something stupid and I felt guilty about it.

Speaker 107 The why I did it,

Speaker 94 a lot of it was because of being hurt.

Speaker 94 Because what she had been telling me

Speaker 107 was that

Speaker 96 whatever she had

Speaker 94 as far as a relationship with Brad,

Speaker 94 she had been telling me for a week to ten days or so that that was over.

Speaker 65 Apparently it wasn't.

Speaker 65 No.

Speaker 94 And I guess somewhere in my head I suspected that, and that's why I sent the emails.

Speaker 107 There was a lot of confusion.

Speaker 24 Confusion?

Speaker 103 Or something else?

Speaker 56 That made him decide to drive three hours to Susie's place in the middle of the night.

Speaker 25 That's a bad decision, right?

Speaker 96 You see that now.

Speaker 11 Oh, yeah. The whole time I was driving,

Speaker 94 I was hoping that she would respond and say, I'm fine, so I could just turn around and go home.

Speaker 44 That was...

Speaker 94 That was all I wanted, was to know she was okay.

Speaker 23 And still, Marty insisted that when he got to her apartment, he just didn't see Susie right across the street with that guy, Brad.

Speaker 42 No, he claimed he waited for her in a spot where he couldn't have seen her walking to the door.

Speaker 96 That's the part sticks with me.

Speaker 29 I'm thinking, here's a guy who cares deeply about this woman and what she's up to.

Speaker 96 And he sits where he can't see the entrance to her apartment building.

Speaker 89 Don't give me that. That's crazy.

Speaker 94 I can't make people believe.

Speaker 45 believe anything.

Speaker 94 I know what I did.

Speaker 65 I know where I was.

Speaker 36 Listen, you put yourself there.

Speaker 25 That's the point.

Speaker 29 You put yourself at the crime scene.

Speaker 94 I put myself in a position for them to look at me and.

Speaker 107 Right.

Speaker 18 You had the opportunity.

Speaker 25 You had the motive.

Speaker 94 If just being in the vicinity.

Speaker 11 You could have, in other words.

Speaker 94 Within that time frame, yes.

Speaker 89 Can you see how it looks? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 65 I can.

Speaker 107 I can.

Speaker 94 There are a lot of things I don't understand myself why I did them.

Speaker 94 I don't understand why.

Speaker 94 Especially now, why I couldn't have just stayed home and tried to contact her a few times. And I guess in my head, I had some sort of thought that I could do something to help if she needed help.

Speaker 89 Sometimes with a girl like Susie, the thing you can do to help is to walk away.

Speaker 25 Yeah, probably...

Speaker 107 probably would have been best.

Speaker 94 At least for me.

Speaker 70 Marty Larson's jury was out for about as long as it took Marty to drive from Billings to Glendive the night poor Susie left this life.

Speaker 84 Three hours.

Speaker 33 The verdict?

Speaker 119 Guilty.

Speaker 58 What was it like to hear that guilty verdict?

Speaker 37 Oh, there was yours.

Speaker 58 Everybody hooped and hollered and

Speaker 58 hugged.

Speaker 58 It was just like a big weight just

Speaker 58 lifted off you.

Speaker 48 There's something hugely important about justice.

Speaker 25 Couldn't bring her back, of course.

Speaker 34 But did the verdict matter?

Speaker 25 Oh, yes.

Speaker 10 It did really set my mind at ease. It really did help us to move on.

Speaker 14 Every time we get a guilty verdict, the first thing I do is turn to the family.

Speaker 14 I love for that two or three minutes to look in their eyes and then to see the smile on their faces and to see them, the joy that they have. For me, that's what it's all about.

Speaker 22 I'll never ever in my probably whole career have a time that I loved being a prosecutor like I did right then.

Speaker 77 This is where Marty Larson lives now.

Speaker 43 Crossroads Correctional in Shelby, Montana, up near the Canadian border.

Speaker 96 What did they sentence you to?

Speaker 94 110 years.

Speaker 96 What does it do to you? What does it do to your soul?

Speaker 94 It's hard for me to put it into words, but when you wake up in the morning, I look around a lot and just have trouble

Speaker 107 believing that it's real.

Speaker 107 That I'm here.

Speaker 89 Your first parole possibility is what?

Speaker 11 Way, way 2042.

Speaker 25 It's a long wait.

Speaker 65 Yes, it is.

Speaker 33 But of course, it's far more than just a long wait for Susie, Rusty, Mariah.

Speaker 3 The cascade of grief begun that night was deep and long.

Speaker 64 I just can't understand how

Speaker 41 the guilt

Speaker 9 and the emotions aren't just consuming him.

Speaker 12 Because losing her,

Speaker 63 it's still consuming us.

Speaker 73 He took her life and he took part of our heart.

Speaker 73 But he'll never break this family up.

Speaker 94 And he hasn't.

Speaker 11 No, he hasn't.

Speaker 42 Shay, just 12 when his mom was murdered, graduated from high school in 2013.

Speaker 34 Ted and Susie's daughters, Kyana and Charlie, were junior bridesmaids when their aunt Val remarried.

Speaker 56 But there there are too many from this family in the Circle Village Cemetery.

Speaker 6 Not something a family gets used to.

Speaker 74 They just learn to work around it.

Speaker 25 They go on.

Speaker 9 We're not victims, we're survivors, and survivors keep on living life.

Speaker 65 And

Speaker 82 we're survivors.

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