A Dangerous Man

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Speaker 6 I'm caught up in a horrific story.

Speaker 6 I've stayed in the shadows for three years. It's the first time I've ever spoke.
The fear was terrible.

Speaker 2 My life will never be the same.

Speaker 7 He dreamed of making it big.

Speaker 8 I remember him telling us, I'm going to make millions of dollars and we're all going to be rich.

Speaker 7 And in the oil fields of North Dakota, a glamorous couple said they could make his dreams come true.

Speaker 9 They look like Ken and Barbie, their perfectly white teeth and their tans.

Speaker 6 Everyone wants the fairy tale.

Speaker 7 But fairy tales don't end in murder.

Speaker 2 Oh my god, somebody had something else.

Speaker 10 It happened instantly.

Speaker 11 It's like somebody ambushed him.

Speaker 7 The only witness, his wife, with an unlikely story.

Speaker 12 A masked man shooting her husband and leaving her alive? I'm worried off, did she hire somebody? Did she get one of the children to do it?

Speaker 7 Or was the answer buried in this boom town, oozing with outlaws?

Speaker 13 Everyone saw this big pot of gold and they were willing to fight and kill each other over it.

Speaker 7 An oil field gushing secrets and suspects.

Speaker 8 Greed is what killed my dad. Greed is what caused all of this.

Speaker 6 I trusted a

Speaker 6 call artist. I trusted a silt seal path.

Speaker 2 Wild, isn't it? What can happen to a quiet little prairie town when oil comes along? Yeah.

Speaker 7 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with A Dangerous Man.

Speaker 2 Among the green and pleasant landscapes of American privilege is a fine historic rise of land called the South Hill.

Speaker 2 Here, for a hundred years, has been the home of Spokane, Washington's elite in their Queen Anne and craftsman mansions. Peace lives here.

Speaker 2 Quiet, rectitude, and certainly not the kind of story we're about to tell. The kind of story with ambitious men, dark plots, and dames.

Speaker 6 I asked him, I said, am I

Speaker 6 just the dumb blonde who missed it? Or did everyone miss it?

Speaker 2 The one so many people missed before that dreadful event here. in the wooded enclave of life's winners.

Speaker 14 He thought that God was blessing him and my mom.

Speaker 10 We thought we were walking on water.

Speaker 2 Here they were, empty nesters, all alone in their grand house on the South Hill, convinced that their successes, their six grown kids, their good life, were products of an unflinching trust in God.

Speaker 14 You know, he finally got out of the desert and he was gonna get into the promised land.

Speaker 2 Yes, the promised land, riches beyond imagining,

Speaker 2 as the not-so-dumb blonde knew so well.

Speaker 6 It was a madhouse. It was the Wild West.

Speaker 2 So maybe that's why the thing on the South Hill wasn't going to stay here.

Speaker 6 My life will never be the same.

Speaker 10 I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 It was wintertime when it happened. Christmas season, 15th of December, 2013.

Speaker 2 A Sunday evening after church. 911, what are you all party? Quick, oh, Corpheel.
He's been shot. A man just kicked in our house and shot my husband, I think.

Speaker 2 This is how our story began. In an ugly splash of violence and terror.
What's your help?

Speaker 2 Help Garfield. I'll be that fellow 100 numbers.
If he hears me, he's going to shoot me.

Speaker 2 But was this the beginning of the story? Or the end?

Speaker 2 That was the evening Spokane Police Detectives Brian Sesnick and Mark Burbridge were pulled into the strangest case of their careers.

Speaker 12 It was the most unique homicide I'd investigated, and I knew that from the first moments of my involvement.

Speaker 2 Really? Just you knew, yes.

Speaker 2 It was Cesnick who drove over first to the address on South Hill. Sort of place a homicide detective can go a whole career without visiting a single time.

Speaker 13 The house, it's in a

Speaker 13 very upper-class neighborhood.

Speaker 2 And South Hill, that's like where you want to be in town.

Speaker 13 Right. I mean, the street that it's on, I'd never been to to before.

Speaker 2 There's just

Speaker 2 a homicide. There's just

Speaker 13 not crime up there in general, so it was very odd.

Speaker 2 The home, the detective learned, belonged to a businessman named Doug Carlisle and his wife of many years, Alberta. First responders had arrived sometime earlier, put up their crime scene tape.

Speaker 2 Cessnick walked into the house.

Speaker 13 It was just a weird scene, all in all.

Speaker 13 It was December 15th. There's Christmas music playing throughout the house as we're investigating.

Speaker 2 It's bizarre.

Speaker 13 It was very bizarre. They're very religious people, so there's religious scripture written on the walls.

Speaker 13 Then you have this horribly violent and gruesome murder with the body laying on the floor that you're investigating. It was a very, very odd scene.

Speaker 2 63-year-old Doug Carlisle was lying on the kitchen floor, clearly the victim of a close-range shooting.

Speaker 13 There was a lot of blood around the body,

Speaker 13 a lot of shell casings, a lot of bullets laying around.

Speaker 2 How badly was this person damaged?

Speaker 13 He'd been shot seven times. It was obviously a very brutal attack.
It wasn't just a one-time shot and then the person ran out.

Speaker 2 Clearly, somebody was making sure.

Speaker 13 Correct. Whoever had done this, we knew that they wanted to make sure he didn't survive.

Speaker 2 And whatever had happened here didn't appear to have been motivated by burglary or robbery. The entire house was locked up tight.
Windows, doors.

Speaker 13 You know, he still had his wallet. He had his cell phone.
Walking throughout the house, everything was still in place. It hadn't been ransacked.
Nothing was missing that we could find.

Speaker 2 It was Alberta, Doug's wife, who had called 911 in what sounded like a state of abject terror. Arriving first responders had found her hiding in an upstairs closet.

Speaker 2 They took her downtown to talk to Burbridge.

Speaker 12 Alberta, my name is Mark.

Speaker 2 I'm going to be the lead detective on the case.

Speaker 10 I wanted to see my husband. He won't let me see him.

Speaker 2 The detective was ready to sympathize, of course, but

Speaker 2 his training, his instinct, his eye told him.

Speaker 2 Not yet.

Speaker 2 Something looked a little off here. What'd you make of her?

Speaker 12 She's unique, and some of her responses threw up red flags and made me concerned about whether she was involved in this or not.

Speaker 2 What kind of responses?

Speaker 12 She didn't care about the police investigation. All she cared about was hugging her husband and praying for him and wanted to...

Speaker 12 pray over her body and she was very upset that the patrol officers would not let her do that.

Speaker 2 I want my husband.

Speaker 12 There's nothing we can do for your husband right now.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 11 I could have held him. I could have told him I loved him.

Speaker 2 I could have prayed for him. And then, when the detective asked, what happened.

Speaker 10 This is what happened.

Speaker 2 We got home. Alberta told a story.

Speaker 2 And neither the telling nor the story made any sense at all.

Speaker 17 A man murdered in his own home.

Speaker 7 His wife, with a detailed account of exactly what happened. Should be helpful to police, right?

Speaker 12 I'm worried whether she had a motive, money, jealousy, a boyfriend, he has a girlfriend she's mad about.

Speaker 7 When we come back, why Alberta's tale raised the eyebrows of investigators.

Speaker 12 Rehearsed is a good word.

Speaker 2 It sounded that way to you. Yes, it did.

Speaker 2 Mark Burbridge had seen a thing or two during his years on the police force, had heard all the lies and dodges, and witnessed floods of phony tears so he paid careful experienced attention when alberta carlyle told him what happened that sunday evening in the house on south hill

Speaker 2 what happened tonight

Speaker 2 we went to church we went to a church function

Speaker 10 nothing I don't know what happened.

Speaker 2 A hell happened.

Speaker 8 A nightmare happened.

Speaker 2 That's what happened. Okay.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Alberta's story said Detective Burbridge just didn't add up.

Speaker 10 All of a sudden I hear, uh, it's okay, it's okay.

Speaker 11 And then I hear, I hear, um,

Speaker 2 back off, back off, back off.

Speaker 10 And when I heard the back off,

Speaker 10 I saw, I looked and saw a man standing there in all black.

Speaker 12 Her story was concerning about a masked man wearing all black coming into the house and shooting her husband and leaving and leaving her alive.

Speaker 12 Made me worried that maybe she'd hired a hit man or maybe she was making up the the story and she was involved in what happened.

Speaker 2 Thing was, the killer saw Alberta. She came right out and said so.
They stared at each other, soul to soul. So why would a hitman leave an eyewitness alive?

Speaker 2 Unless she was in on it.

Speaker 12 I'm worried whether she had a motive, money, jealousy. A boyfriend, he has a girlfriend she's mad about.
Did she kill him himself? Did she hire somebody? Did she get one of the children to do it?

Speaker 12 These are all my concerns.

Speaker 2 Besides, said Burbridge, he's seen many people caught by sudden violence and grief, and Alberta

Speaker 2 was agitated, certainly. But to his practiced eye, her emotional reaction was somehow flat, as if practiced.

Speaker 2 It bothered him.

Speaker 12 How long had you been home?

Speaker 10 It happened instantly. When we got home, it was like somebody ambushed him.

Speaker 2 The way she told her story about a masked man killing her husband in 42 years.

Speaker 13 It almost seemed like it was rehearsed or like she'd thought about this and what could I say?

Speaker 12 Rehearsed is a good word.

Speaker 2 It sounded that way to you.

Speaker 12 Yes, it did. My life.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 you don't have to take it from the detective.

Speaker 2 We were able to arrange an interview with Alberta, too.

Speaker 10 My whole life was over as I knew it.

Speaker 2 Alberta told us that when she and her husband returned from church that evening, they drove through the gate of their property as usual.

Speaker 10 He goes, I'll get the gate, you get the door.

Speaker 2 Did everything look pretty much the same as when you left?

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 10 No. It just didn't feel right.

Speaker 10 So I started to head up the stairs by this time, and I got all the way to the top of the stairs, and I started down the hall when I heard muffled noises, headed right back down the stairs.

Speaker 10 And I got down all the way to the bottom stairs. I called out to Doug and I said, Doug, is somebody here?

Speaker 10 And I looked to my left. The man was standing right

Speaker 10 in front of the doorway.

Speaker 2 How far away from you?

Speaker 10 Ten feet feet at the most, nine feet. And I looked at him

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 10 it was a man all in black and he had a mask on.

Speaker 10 And he had a gun pointed where I knew my husband was standing.

Speaker 2 So you couldn't see Doug?

Speaker 10 I couldn't see Doug.

Speaker 10 I only saw this man in black. He had a mask on.
Only thing I could see was his eyes.

Speaker 2 And he looked at me.

Speaker 10 He never moved the gun.

Speaker 10 And he blinked three times. And I thought, why is he blinking at me?

Speaker 2 And then then I think, why is that guy in my house holding a gun?

Speaker 10 What I thought was, oh my god, what do I do?

Speaker 10 He's gonna kill me before I get up the stairs. I pulled myself up the rail, up the stairs, and because my legs wouldn't work.
And I was just starting down the hall when I heard multiple shots.

Speaker 2 Did you realize right away what must have happened? Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 10 I knew my husband had to have been shot. And so I thought,

Speaker 10 I gotta hide.

Speaker 2 Alberta ran toward a closet on the home second floor, she said, shut the door, and called 911. Please hurry, please hurry.
Oh my god, she's gonna hear me.

Speaker 2 Okay, stay on the line for me, okay?

Speaker 2 Oh my god, somebody's shot me outside.

Speaker 2 Oh God, they're hiding me. Find me.
I'm hiding in my closet. Okay, I want you to stay on the line.
Do you remember what it felt like in there?

Speaker 16 What you felt like?

Speaker 10 Oh, sheer desperation. Just sheer desperation and

Speaker 10 just this overwhelming need to go to my husband. I wanted to go to him.
I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to tell him I loved him.
I wanted to tell him it was going to be okay.

Speaker 2 I wanted to pray for him. Oh, please honor.

Speaker 2 Just want to please.

Speaker 2 My friend shocked. I said, Shock.

Speaker 2 You're coming. He's going back.

Speaker 2 When the police arrived, they found Alberta in the closet.

Speaker 10 I said, I want to go to my husband. They said, said, well, they're working on him.
And I said, no, I want to go see him. Please let me go to my husband.
And they said, no, you can't go down there.

Speaker 2 Did you ever get to see him that night?

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 2 Now Alberta found herself face to face with Detective Burbridge,

Speaker 2 trying to get him to believe a story about a masked killer who stared right at her

Speaker 2 and yet

Speaker 2 left her alive to tell the tale.

Speaker 2 I mean, that sounds a little made up almost. Yes, it does.
Sounds Hollywood. Have you ever heard of a case where somebody laid eyes on a witness to him killing someone and didn't take any action?

Speaker 12 I've never had that happen.

Speaker 20 So you would have expected.

Speaker 12 Something, yes. Yeah.
At least an attempt.

Speaker 2 There was something in Alberta's story that night that did make sense. Before the murder, as she and Doug drove to church, she said,

Speaker 2 They saw something out of place.

Speaker 10 There was a van kind of sitting

Speaker 10 like up against the curb, a white van.

Speaker 2 Like it didn't belong there or something?

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 2 A white van.

Speaker 2 As police canvassed the neighborhood after the murder, a witness across the street said she saw it too.

Speaker 13 She had come home around 5 o'clock that evening and noticed a white van parked in front of her house.

Speaker 13 And it was parked in a way that it made her nervous to the point she thought maybe someone was breaking in.

Speaker 2 I mean, why would she be suspicious of a van?

Speaker 13 Right. It was a van she'd never seen before.

Speaker 13 And in that neighborhood, everyone knows everyone.

Speaker 2 Question was, what did the white van have to do with the murder of Doug Carlisle? Or, the cops wondered, with his wife, Alberta.

Speaker 7 Coming up, a neighborhood security camera. What tales would it tell?

Speaker 13 We actually saw that suspect and saw the path that he ran.

Speaker 2 Could you tell who it was?

Speaker 13 All you could really see is that it was a subject, appeared to be muscular build, wearing all black.

Speaker 7 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 2 Up here on Spokane's Tony South Hill, beat cops and detectives fanned out around a neighborhood utterly unused to violent crime. But downtown at police headquarters...

Speaker 12 This is a secure building, so if you need to go somewhere, knock on the door, okay?

Speaker 8 What? I'm in jail?

Speaker 2 The victim's wife Alberta Carlisle told a crazy story about a man in black bursting into the house killing her husband, looking her square in the eye, but leaving her alive.

Speaker 2 So Burbridge wondered, did she hire him?

Speaker 12 In my world, wives kill husbands, and so the relationship is a probability.

Speaker 2 But then, up at the house, they heard a curious story from a neighbor.

Speaker 2 That very evening, for a couple of hours before the shooting, a mysterious white van was parked just across the street from the Carlisle's house.

Speaker 12 911, what are you reporting?

Speaker 2 Hi, um, I just, I called Crancher because there's a suspicious vehicle in front of my house like 30 minutes ago, and now they just came back and they're just sitting there, and I'm really freaked out.

Speaker 2 Of course, in many, if not most, neighborhoods in America, a parked white van might not attract a bit of attention.

Speaker 29 Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it's really bizarre that a van like that would be in this neighborhood.

Speaker 2 But this is the South Hill, after all. Nondescript white vans don't just show up and hang around here.
So the neighbor noticed. And then Doug Carlisle winds up murdered.

Speaker 13 We didn't know if it was related or not, but it was obviously something that we considered immediately.

Speaker 2 And again, this being the South Hill, another neighbor had the wherewithal to provide a special kind of help.

Speaker 12 Homeowner in the neighborhood had a video camera that covered his driveway, and we picked up what we thought was the van about two hours before the murder.

Speaker 2 Here it is, that video. And sure enough, a white van coming and going on the streets of South Hill that night.
But did it have anything to do with the murder?

Speaker 2 And what about that man in black Alberta said she saw? If he actually existed, hired killer or whatever.

Speaker 2 He must have waited somewhere around the house for the Carlisles to get back from church. He could have killed Doug Carlisle, then possibly escaped in that white van.

Speaker 2 No one saw anyone going out the front door, but what about back here, behind the house? They called in a tracking dog, stood back, and watched.

Speaker 13 Basically, the track went through some arbovida, over a little fence, through the neighbor's backyard, and in the very back corner of their yard is a gate that was left open.

Speaker 13 And just before the gate, there was a puddle of water, and there was a good footprint in that puddle of water, and it was apparent that it was fairly recent.

Speaker 2 Could be your guy.

Speaker 30 Could be our guy.

Speaker 13 Just beyond that, just outside the gate, there was what appeared to be a welding glove lying in the leaves.

Speaker 2 A welding glove? A welding glove.

Speaker 13 So right away we thought, is this something that may have been dropped?

Speaker 13 But it was odd enough, and in a place that we knew the suspect had run after the incident, that we ended up collecting it as evidence.

Speaker 2 Not really knowing whether that had anything to do with your murder.

Speaker 13 Correct. We didn't know.
We,

Speaker 13 you know, in something like this, where it's a complete whodunit, you know, you take everything and hope something ends up helping your case.

Speaker 2 They kept looking. So did the dog.

Speaker 2 Just beyond where the welding glove was found was a small wooded area and across the street an elementary school, which meant maybe the school security system could get them a picture of the guy.

Speaker 13 Another detective was able to get that video almost immediately.

Speaker 2 And sure enough, when they looked at the video, there he was.

Speaker 13 We actually saw that suspect and saw the path that he ran.

Speaker 2 could you tell who it was or care very much about it it was very grainy video all you could really see is that it was a subject appeared to be muscular build wearing all black all black he was hard to make out but there he was in the video the elusive man in black running toward a main road when detective burbridge arrived and got a look at this i've done a lot of homicides and and at that point i i thought that this was a professional hitman probably unrelated to our victim at all or the the person involved in this.

Speaker 12 And I went and found my lieutenant. I knew that this was going to be a very complicated investigation and we needed a lot more manpower to get very fast on the case further down the road.

Speaker 2 And so in a matter of hours, detectives were called in from all over the department. Time off was canceled.
So many questions to answer. What else did the neighbors see?

Speaker 2 What did that welding glove have to do with anything? And who was the man in black? And a more basic question: Was Alberta Carlyle involved in a plot to kill her husband?

Speaker 21 Coming up.

Speaker 10 The closer I got to the Lord,

Speaker 10 it's like the further we got apart.

Speaker 7 Even Alberta admits their marriage had seen its share of trouble.

Speaker 10 I did something drastic. I left him without his knowledge.
Take the kids with you?

Speaker 2 Of course.

Speaker 2 As police combed the South Hill looking for evidence of suspects in the murder of Doug Carlisle, his wife Alberta had no idea that her behavior had raised alarms. Who cares about the stupid evidence?

Speaker 2 But Police 101 the victim's nearest and dearest often becomes prime suspect number one, and Alberta, with her wild story, was certainly no exception.

Speaker 2 And then Detective Burbridge was able to get a close look at the early evidence, and especially that video of the running man in black. And

Speaker 12 immediately it became apparent to me that whoever did this had reconnoitred the scene and spent time planning this because of the very elaborate escape route.

Speaker 12 Made me concerned that Alberta was probably telling the truth about who was involved and what happened.

Speaker 2 When Berbert saw all that planning, along with the videotape showing a man in black, he thought it far less likely Alberta Carlyle was anything but a victim.

Speaker 2 But in her brain, while the detectives kept going on about this question or that, two thoughts blocked out all else.

Speaker 2 Her desire to see her husband and an overwhelming need to tell her children what happened.

Speaker 10 I went to call them and I couldn't even see the numbers. I couldn't, I was just frantic.
And I said to the police, help me. And then I thought, wait, you can't help me.

Speaker 10 You don't even know who I'm looking for.

Speaker 2 But finally, an hour away in the town of Moses Lake, the phone rang at the home of Shane Carlisle.

Speaker 14 I received a call from my mother. We were hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, and she said that

Speaker 14 just in a kind of a screaming panic, Shane, you're dead. You're dead.
He was shot six times.

Speaker 2 You called him up? Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah, the thought hadn't even sank in yet. It was just a

Speaker 14 straight up, okay, let's get to work. Let's figure out what we have to do.
I started contacting everybody, and you know, I'd have to listen to everybody's cries and screams over the phone.

Speaker 2 Carlisle's eldest, Milaney, was at her own daughter's ballet recital across the state near Seattle.

Speaker 8 He goes, dad's been shot.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 I said,

Speaker 8 what do you mean dad's been shot?

Speaker 8 Dad has been killed.

Speaker 2 And so Milaney greeted her daughters after the recital with the news about grandpa. Oh, they love their grandpa.
He was the greatest to them, to all three, but

Speaker 8 they had really good relationships with him.

Speaker 2 It was a relationship that almost wasn't for any of them.

Speaker 2 Doug and Bertie, as he liked to call her, were teenage sweethearts, married young. And as often happens, even as their family grew, their marriage shriveled.
What happened?

Speaker 10 Life happens.

Speaker 2 Bertie found God.

Speaker 2 Doug did not.

Speaker 10 The closer I got to the Lord, it's like the further we got apart.

Speaker 2 Until it became clear to Bertie, she won't go into detail, that she and Doug were doomed. Unless...

Speaker 10 I did something drastic. I left him without his knowledge.
Take the kids with you?

Speaker 2 Of course. So you went off on your own with four kids.
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 10 No job, no nothing.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 To a city I didn't know.

Speaker 2 To Seattle, 350 miles from the little town in Oregon where they lived back then. Her church kept her going.
Well, Doug.

Speaker 2 Well, here's the story according to Bertie. He He kept guns, said Bertie, lots of them.
And lost it alone, he decided to use one on himself.

Speaker 10 As he crawled

Speaker 10 toward those guns,

Speaker 10 he

Speaker 10 said that he heard this horrid voice that said, he's mine.

Speaker 10 And then he heard another voice that said, no, he's not. He belongs to me.
And he said it was a thunderous, authoritative, shook the whole room room voice.

Speaker 10 And the next thing he knew, he felt arms picking him up

Speaker 10 and putting him on the bed. He told you this.
Yes, he told me this months later.

Speaker 2 Quite a story. The one that got Doug saved and back with his family.
After that, he started an excavation business. And as his kids grew up, six of them, many, followed him.

Speaker 2 It became the family business.

Speaker 8 He's a salesman, you know,

Speaker 8 he can talk you into something. A charmer.

Speaker 8 Yeah, totally total charmer what was his his business philosophy I mean was he a numbers crunching guy or was he a handshake guy or what was her he was a handshake guy he expected his word and a handshake was good and he knew it was he expected that of others and that isn't always true

Speaker 2 and there were setbacks Two bankruptcies, trouble with the IRS, a string of failed businesses, and fallings out with business partners who accused Doug of being less than honest and of not paying his bills.

Speaker 2 How would Doug react to those?

Speaker 10 He never gave up and we always took care of what we owed and

Speaker 10 we would move forward.

Speaker 2 And as he entered midlife, Doug Carlisle seemed content doing deals while his sons Shane and Seth ran the business.

Speaker 32 You give the shirt off his back to anybody.

Speaker 14 He just had a huge heart. He had enough room in it for everybody.

Speaker 2 Huge heart. And taught you what you know.
Absolutely.

Speaker 14 Every aspect of business, every aspect of life.

Speaker 2 When the kids were grown, Doug and Bertie ended up in Spokane to be near their favorite church, whose pastor preached the prosperity gospel.

Speaker 2 That is the idea that God rewards true belief with financial success. And they certainly looked successful when they bought that sprawling house on the South Hill.

Speaker 32 They wanted to get an older house like that. It was just something they love, but they also

Speaker 32 always wanted all the family to come for all the holidays and spend it with them.

Speaker 2 So there's a bedroom for everybody. We all had our own room.

Speaker 2 It worked out pretty good. Did it look to you as if your dad and your mom were finally at the place where they were on the top of the hill?

Speaker 8 They were doing the best I ever saw them do. They were happy.

Speaker 8 They had got it. They had figured it out.

Speaker 2 But now Doug Carlisle was dead, and detectives tallied up the signs of his earthly wealth.

Speaker 2 Still parked in the drive, Alberta's new Mercedes, Doug's new pickup, and inside in Doug's office, documents detailing the family's fortune.

Speaker 13 There was a lot of financial paperwork and the ones that struck me immediately was there was loan paperwork that it appeared Mr.

Speaker 13 Carlisle had filled out for different businesses and they had his net value at between 6 and 12 million depending on which piece of paper you looked at.

Speaker 2 And then there were the documents the detectives couldn't read. That is the ones written in Arabic.

Speaker 2 Who was Doug Carlisle? Successful, God-fearing businessman?

Speaker 2 Or what?

Speaker 21 Coming up.

Speaker 8 I remember him telling us, you know, I'm going to make millions of dollars and this is going to be it. And this is going to be for our family.
And, you know, we're all going to be rich.

Speaker 7 Investigators take a hard look at Doug's business practices. Had he made any enemies?

Speaker 2 They may have a reason to be pretty mad at him.

Speaker 13 Our suspect list kept growing.

Speaker 12 I was running this investigation eventually in about eight directions, trying to eliminate a lot of business partners, seeing if Mr. Carlisle had a secret life.

Speaker 7 Even seasoned detectives are surprised.

Speaker 12 I just don't believe in coincidences like that.

Speaker 7 When dateline continues.

Speaker 2 It was obvious now. No getting around it.
Spokane detectives Burbridge and Sesta took a look at the clues dug up that first night. Surveillance videos showing a white van circling the area.

Speaker 2 Alberta's story about a masked shooter dressed in black. The video of a black-clad man running away.
All that could mean only one thing. This was a hit, a professional killing.

Speaker 2 Which begged the question, why would anyone want to kill a beloved, God-fearing grandfather? Murdered while Christmas music filled his big old house.

Speaker 13 It was almost a surreal scene, you know, the house is decorated for Christmas, Christmas music playing.

Speaker 2 Perhaps some answers would come from what detectives found in Doug's office. Documents, half in English, half in Arabic.
And those they could read were very interesting indeed.

Speaker 13 There was pre-filled out paperwork promising, you know, 100% return on investment in 90 days if you'd invest in their company.

Speaker 2 So it appeared that your victim had been promising people huge returns on investment.

Speaker 13 Correct. He had a whole binder with paperwork, and it included names of people who had bought into this and invested.

Speaker 2 Wait a minute. Who offers a 100% return so fast? Was this for real?

Speaker 2 The names, reports, and records all seemed to be related to one thing.

Speaker 13 We ended up finding a lot of paperwork related to the oil business in North Dakota.

Speaker 2 The oil business? Why that?

Speaker 2 Doug Carlisle, remember, was an excavator, not an oil man.

Speaker 2 But of course, a whole army of ambitious, hard-working men had fled established careers to grab for a piece of the wealth dangled so enticingly by North Dakota's oil fracking boom.

Speaker 2 Thus were prairie towns on sudden steroids and man camps bursting with pent-up testosterone.

Speaker 2 By the time Doug met his awful fate in December 2013, The wild black gold rush around the Bakken oil fields had peaked. But investors looking for a big payday wouldn't have known that yet.

Speaker 2 And with great wads of eager cash, they chased a stake in what they hoped might be billions still in the ground. Apparently, Doug Carlisle was one of them.

Speaker 2 According to his family, he got turned on to oil by a friend who knew a guy.

Speaker 10 He told us about North Dakota. Hey, it's booming there.
You should go check things out and see what's happening.

Speaker 2 First, Doug partnered in a trucking company that served North Dakota's many oil rigs. An outfit called Blackstone, started by the guy his friend introduced him to.
And then, opportunity knocked.

Speaker 2 One of those opportunities of a lifetime ordained from above, according to Doug.

Speaker 14 The whole thing kind of fell into his lap, and I think he thought that that was his calling from God, is to move forward in that lease.

Speaker 2 An oil lease, that is. A lease that would give Doug and any partners he could bring in the exclusive right to drill for oil on 640 acres of land on the MHA Indian Reservation.

Speaker 2 The catch was that sort of opportunity doesn't come cheap. So you had to raise some money.

Speaker 10 Oh yeah, the lease was almost $2 million.

Speaker 2 And to raise that, Doug Carlyle tapped his friends around Washington State, his business partners, even his kids.

Speaker 14 I put $100,000 into it, and it wasn't for a return on it or anything, you know, it was to help him with his dream to fulfill that.

Speaker 2 But the next step to fulfilling Doug's dream was even more daunting, finding investors to pay for drilling as many as eight wells on the property.

Speaker 2 And that price was much steeper, more than $100 million.

Speaker 2 But the potential payoff was immense. And Doug firmly believed God's will, a reward for his faith.

Speaker 10 We thought we were walking on water, you know, with a whole deal. We thought, this is a miracle.

Speaker 8 I remember him telling us, you know, I'm going to make millions of dollars and this is going to be it. And this is going to be for our family.
And, you know, we're we're all going to be rich.

Speaker 10 We sat on the couch one day, and he said, What would you do if you had all the money you could ever want?

Speaker 10 I said, So if we had this money, then we would use it to serve the Lord, to serve ministries, to serve people,

Speaker 10 our family.

Speaker 2 But now all those good intentions, all those dreams were gone. Now detectives slogged through the paperwork on Doug Carlisle's desk.

Speaker 2 Those documents in Arabic turned out to be a scam a con man was trying to run on Doug.

Speaker 2 But Doug, they could see had been making promises too to investors, promises he couldn't keep, and he must have known it. 100% return practically overnight? Impossible.

Speaker 2 Meaning these were partners who had come in, and now he may have owe them a tremendous amount of money. Correct.

Speaker 2 They may have a reason to be pretty mad at him.

Speaker 13 Our suspect list kept growing.

Speaker 2 How many partners did that guy have, anyway?

Speaker 12 About 10 that we could find, or maybe more.

Speaker 2 Detective Burbridge began calling Doug's partners and discovered, though most of them live in or around Washington, any one of them who could be considered a person of interest was hundreds or thousands of miles away from Spokane the night Doug was murdered.

Speaker 12 It concerned me greatly. I just don't believe in coincidences like that.

Speaker 2 Well, it's a coincidence that they just happened to be not there. Correct.
In other words, they may have planned not to be there when something was going to happen. Yes, sir.
Where do you go?

Speaker 2 I mean, do you know which one to target or which?

Speaker 12 I was running this investigation eventually in about eight directions, trying to eliminate a lot of business partners, seeing if Mr. Carlisle had a secret life.

Speaker 12 Did he owe somebody else some money because he had a lot of failed business dealings in his other businesses? And so I had a lot of concerns.

Speaker 2 Angry ex-business partners? Angry current business partners? What,

Speaker 2 if anything,

Speaker 2 did she have to do with it? Yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean, obviously I didn't know at the time what he was doing.

Speaker 7 Coming up, detectives learn about a charismatic couple knee-deep in Doug's oil venture.

Speaker 9 They look like Ken and Barbie, their perfectly white teeth and their tans.

Speaker 7 Did they know anything about the murder? And then, finally, investigators have someone to question.

Speaker 12 I'd researched his criminal history and knew that he had a very significant criminal history, so I was concerned that was he my hitman?

Speaker 20 We're going to start talking about some things, honestly, here.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's fine.

Speaker 12 People are telling me you're the shooter.

Speaker 15 Hey, everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrison.

Speaker 15 It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name and We're Back for Another Season.

Speaker 15 I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it.

Speaker 15 Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrison sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 24 If you're a smoker or dipper ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason.

Speaker 11 But with Zen nicotine pouches, you'll discover many good reasons.

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Speaker 26 Plus, Zinn offers a robust rewards program.

Speaker 27 There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zen.

Speaker 16 Check out Zinn.com slash find to find Zin at a store near you.

Speaker 19 Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Speaker 17 Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

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Speaker 2 Alberta Carlyle was inconsolable.

Speaker 10 Instantly, that night.

Speaker 2 That night, I lost everything. Alberta's eldest daughter, Milane, left her own family for a while to stay with her mom, try to keep her sane.

Speaker 8 She would wake up screaming every single night, and there was nothing I could do besides just hold her.

Speaker 2 It was horrible. The very thing the Carlisle's hoped would create wealth, security, happiness had brought instead nothing but grief.
But remember, this, the evidence suggested, was a hit job.

Speaker 2 Somebody must have ordered Doug's execution. So now the detectives tried to figure out who.

Speaker 34 Do you guys have any disputes with anybody?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Inevitable, probably, when high-stakes investors go after a prize like an oil lease. And Doug had been promising potential investors returns that, so far just hadn't materialized.

Speaker 2 Any number of partners might have felt they'd been taken for a ride. But who? Alberta, who was no longer a suspect, offered a possibility.

Speaker 14 Who do you have a dispute with?

Speaker 10 His name is James Hendrickson.

Speaker 2 James Hendrickson.

Speaker 2 He was the man who'd gotten Doug interested in the oil play in the first place. The man who, with his wife Sarah, were known as the Barbie and Ken of the oil patch.
This guy worked for them.

Speaker 2 His name is Rick Airy.

Speaker 22 For lack of a better term, they stuck out like a couple of turds in a punch bowl.

Speaker 2 Well, one way to put it. James met Sarah at a drive-through coffee stand.
She was a barista. What was he like?

Speaker 6 He's very

Speaker 6 cool, calm, collected, you know. Older man, good looking.
He was fun.

Speaker 6 Fun, and we'd always go out. He was nice.
It was easy. You know, I never thought I'd ever marry him or go do business with him.

Speaker 2 But that's what she did. They moved to the oil patch in 2011, got married in Minot, North Dakota.
And by 2013, he was the charismatic face of a major trucking operation called Blackstone.

Speaker 2 And she was the blonde on his arm and a senior company official. Sarah signed the checks.
Blackstone was the business Doug first invested in before he got interested in the oil lease.

Speaker 2 It was a big operation, a hundred trucks hauling water to and from oil fracking sites, very profitable. James let it be known that he was backed by a billion-dollar trust fund.

Speaker 9 You know, I was like, this guy's a winner.

Speaker 2 A lot of money around. They were doing well.
Was the company making money?

Speaker 2 Yes, it sure seemed like it. Man, James was tough.
And buff, an old man.

Speaker 9 It'd be 20 degrees outside, and he'd be wearing a t-shirt. Everyone else has got a little shiver.
He's like standing there shivering, but he's, you know, he's making sure his arms are pumped up.

Speaker 9 Yeah, he wants you to see his guns. He's showing them off and then they're, you know, they're perfectly white teeth and they're tans.
And they look like Ken and Barbie.

Speaker 31 They didn't fit in at all.

Speaker 2 Not a nickname Sarah took to, mind you.

Speaker 6 No, I feel like I have somewhat of a brain. I don't want to just be called a Barbie.

Speaker 2 Well, you're living in a town of men.

Speaker 6 92 to 1.

Speaker 2 Jacked up on testosterone.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah. I mean, it was rough.
I hated it. It was miserable.
Every day was a plan on how to get out.

Speaker 2 With him?

Speaker 6 Presumably? Well yeah, I mean we wanted to leave the oil field, but he just saw so much opportunity and money. He's just like, one day we'll get there.

Speaker 2 Doug Carlyle liked James and Sarah's entrepreneurial style a lot. So when the chance to buy an oil lease came up, they went in on it together.
James kicked in $600,000. Doug, only $40,000.

Speaker 2 They needed $2 million, remember. Yet Doug was saying he'd be taking over.
There were disputes then over control and money, and accusations flew.

Speaker 2 In fact, said Doug's son said...

Speaker 32 He basically said, I'm concerned with what James is going to try to do.

Speaker 2 That was serious.

Speaker 32 And he said that, you know, if anything happens to me, you know, it's James Hendrickson.

Speaker 2 But, like the other partners, James Hendrickson was far away when Doug was killed. 700 miles away in Watford City, North Dakota.
Detectives pinged his phone, confirmed it.

Speaker 2 And then something happened that seemed straight out of some noir detective novel. Detective Burbridge put out a plea for information from anybody who had done business with Doug Carlisle.

Speaker 2 And what do you know? In walked a guy who could just as easily have been a murder suspect himself.

Speaker 2 Robert, thanks for coming down voluntarily today.

Speaker 2 His name was Robert DeLeo. Career criminal, gang member, and sometimes a police informant.
He'd served time in prison on manslaughter, drug, weapons charges.

Speaker 12 I had researched his criminal history and knew that he had a very significant criminal history, so I was concerned that was he my hitman? Or what was his involvement in this?

Speaker 2 DeLeo knew Doug Carlyle. He also knew James Henriksen.
Why was he here?

Speaker 2 To tell the cops, just in case they were wondering, that he didn't have anything to do with the murder. That's my job.

Speaker 2 Did you drive somebody up there?

Speaker 34 No, I had nothing to do with it. Nothing.

Speaker 2 But Burbridge had seen a thing or two. He pushed.

Speaker 12 Well, we're going to start talking about some things honestly here.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to have a heart-to-heart with you. Okay, that's fine.
That's fine.

Speaker 12 People are telling me you're the shooter.

Speaker 34 That is a hell no. You know what?

Speaker 13 That night, I was in Watford City, North Dakota.

Speaker 2 You went after him pretty hard, right? Actually accused him of murder?

Speaker 12 I did.

Speaker 2 How did he respond to that?

Speaker 12 He denied it and didn't even flinch.

Speaker 2 Did you think he was your guy?

Speaker 12 I did not think he was the guy.

Speaker 30 So why'd you do that?

Speaker 12 Sometimes you do things, try to pressure people or put them under pressure to see their reaction

Speaker 12 and he did not flinch.

Speaker 2 The detectives asked DeLeo to take a polygraph and he did.

Speaker 20 Did he pass the test?

Speaker 2 Yes, he did.

Speaker 2 So curious, certainly.

Speaker 2 But a real lead

Speaker 2 or a dead end.

Speaker 2 Hard to know.

Speaker 2 So Burbridge and his team of investigators kept working other leads. And Christmas happened, sort of.

Speaker 8 It was really a rough Christmas. I look back on pictures.
We had smiles on our faces, but there was, you weren't really smiling.

Speaker 8 And my mom, it was so hard to watch her because she wanted to give the grandkids gifts, but she was just like, almost like a zombie. You can't just not have Christmas, you know?

Speaker 8 But nobody felt like it.

Speaker 2 But grief wasn't all the family was feeling. A debilitating fear took hold, too.

Speaker 2 Whoever killed their patriarch might not be done we armed ourselves i spent about ten thousand dollars on a security camera system around the house went out and bought a attack dog a german shepherd meanwhile the detectives hit the road and that's when they discovered something truly shocking doug carlyle wasn't the only victim of the weird goings-on around the oil patch

Speaker 21 coming up

Speaker 7 For this investigator, a tantalizing tip at his fingertips.

Speaker 13 An idea came up that basically said beware of these two people and they were and then a potential suspect gives cops the brush off.

Speaker 12 He leaned out the door and slapped me on the shoulder.

Speaker 30 At the door.

Speaker 7 When dateline continues.

Speaker 2 Spokane Police Detective Mark Burbridge called in the troops.

Speaker 2 A few hours after the execution-style killing of Doug Carlisle in the kitchen of his big house on Spokane's South Hill, it was all too clear this had to have been a professional hit.

Speaker 2 Burbich would need all the help he could get. And now, every available investigator, nearly 20 of them, chased the scattered clues.
Did you actually need them all?

Speaker 12 Yes, I kept them busy. One detective, his whole job was to try to identify that white van.

Speaker 2 Remember the white van the neighbors saw?

Speaker 12 The van was unique enough because it was an after-factory extended van that they make for certain professions.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 12 And eventually once we were able to identify the make and model, we had a Washington DOL provide us with all the vans registered in Spokane County and there were 75 of them.

Speaker 2 Which possibly fit that description.

Speaker 13 Yes, sir.

Speaker 2 Of course every one of those vans had to be tracked down. And that welding glove, the one found outside a back gate.

Speaker 2 Maybe the killer dropped it as he escaped, or maybe it just happened to be there. They swabbed it for DNA, anyway.

Speaker 2 They scoured social media, the internet, looking for connections, looking for anything.

Speaker 2 And then one night after Christmas, a couple of weeks after the murder.

Speaker 13 I was at my desk and I got a hit on what's called a rip-off report, which I'd never heard of, but I clicked on it and a flyer came up that basically said beware of these two people.

Speaker 2 What do you know? The Kennon Barbie of North Dakota's oil patch, James Hendrickson, and his wife Sarah Krebling, Doug's primary North Dakota partners.

Speaker 13 It said they're known frauds, they're running fraud schemes in North Dakota, don't do any business.

Speaker 2 Of course, as the detectives had figured out by now, rivalries, disputes, grievances were rife around that oil lease project in which Doug and James and others were involved.

Speaker 2 The rip-off report was put out as a flyer in stores and businesses all around the oil patch. It was payback, apparently, by one particularly disgruntled former partner.

Speaker 2 But then, not everybody was a Boy Scout. James, for example, had a criminal record going back to his teens.

Speaker 2 Anyway, when Detective Cesnick read the flyer, his eye landed on a very curious detail.

Speaker 2 One of James's employees, a man named Casey Clark, had up and disappeared.

Speaker 13 I printed it off and handed it to Mark and said, hey, what do you think about this?

Speaker 2 What did you think about that?

Speaker 13 It was the first time we'd ever heard of that name.

Speaker 2 So, who was Casey Clark?

Speaker 9 He was funny, well-mannered.

Speaker 2 Didn't take long to find out. Casey was an old friend of James Hendrickson.
He'd moved to the oil patch specifically to work for Hendrickson at Blackstone, James' trucking company.

Speaker 2 Rick Airy knew him well. So what'd you do, the two of you? We'd go up to the bar.

Speaker 9 We'd chase the girls. We'd do the normal things a guy would do and during a boom, you know.

Speaker 2 Rick and Casey were field superintendents for the trucking company, which Sarah was helping to run. How were you involved in the business?

Speaker 6 I worked directly with the accountant, make sure they got signed off so we could get paid. You know, make sure payroll was turned in on time to the accountant.

Speaker 6 So, sort of the middleman for all the paperwork.

Speaker 2 But you were really kind of a minor partner, if I can put it that way.

Speaker 6 It was the James show,

Speaker 8 for sure.

Speaker 6 As much as people saw me all the time.

Speaker 2 Time off was rare. Eventually, Rick, Airy, and Casey made secret plans to work for a rival trucking company.

Speaker 20 He was extremely worried about about James Feynenau, about this whole transition.

Speaker 2 On February 22nd, 2012, Casey dropped briefly into Blackstone's headquarters and then was gone.

Speaker 2 So, did he leave in a huff? Or was it something else? Because nobody ever saw him again.

Speaker 12 No sign of him wall and he'd been missing for about a year, almost two years at that point. Was Hendrickson ever questioned about it?

Speaker 12 He had been questioned extensively and actually taken a polygraph with the North Dakota law enforcement.

Speaker 2 And that passed.

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 2 Still, James Henrickson had to know something about KC Clark and Doug Carlisle. And so the two detectives got in a car and drove 700 miles to Watford City, North Dakota.

Speaker 13 With the wind chill, I believe it was 60 below when we were there.

Speaker 2 Their destination? The home of James Henriksen and his Sarah.

Speaker 12 We went to the side door. From there, you can see the garage, and in the garage was like a two-year-old Bentley,

Speaker 12 flat tires, kind of almost laying on its belly.

Speaker 2 A Bentley, an almost new Bentley?

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 2 Obviously not taken care of at all.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 2 Sarah answered the door, very pleasant, said the detectives, and went to get James. How did James Hendrickson greet you? Did he, you know, tell you a story? Did he sit you down for a cup of tea? What?

Speaker 12 He leaned out the door and slapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, it's too bad you drove all that way. My attorney told me not to talk to you, and then he shut the door.

Speaker 2 And you got nothing?

Speaker 30 Got nothing.

Speaker 2 You got nothing except a kind of a rude reception, which might have told you something or not.

Speaker 12 He's a big man. He was probably 5'10, 250 pounds of steroid rock muscle.
He bragged he was benching over 500 pounds, and he looked like it.

Speaker 12 But I don't intimidate and just kind of grew werewolf fangs when he reached out and tried to belittle me.

Speaker 2 But.

Speaker 2 Nothing to do but suck it up and drive those 700 miles back home again, empty-handed. Along the way, Detective Cessnick got a blood clot.
It nearly killed him.

Speaker 2 A month after Doug Carlisle's murder, they had suspects. Oh, yes,

Speaker 2 but nothing was coming together.

Speaker 21 Coming up,

Speaker 2 finally, a clue, and it's a big one.

Speaker 12 The very top of the paper is the word glove, and then there's show getaway route on Google Earth, practice with pistol.

Speaker 2 What killer makes a to-do list?

Speaker 7 Who does it point to?

Speaker 2 Jackpun. Jackpun.

Speaker 15 Hey everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrison. It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name and we're back for another season.

Speaker 15 I'm so excited to be joined this season by friends like John Mulaney, David Spade, Sarah Silverman, Ed Helms, and many more. You don't want to miss it.

Speaker 15 Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrison sometimes, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 24 If you're a smoker or dipper ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason.

Speaker 11 But with Zen nicotine pouches, you'll discover many good reasons.

Speaker 16 Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand.

Speaker 26 Plus, Zin offers a robust rewards program.

Speaker 27 There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zen.

Speaker 16 Check out Zinn.com slash find to find Zin at a store near you.

Speaker 19 Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Speaker 17 Nicotine is an addictive chemical

Speaker 35 on deck is built to back small businesses like yours whether you're buying equipment expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps on deck's loans up to 250 000 help make it happen fast rated a plus by the better business bureau and earning thousands of five star trust pilot reviews on deck delivers funding you can count on apply in minutes at on deck.com depending on certain loan attributes your business loan may be issued by on deck or celtic bank on deck does not lend in north dakota all loans and amount subject to lender approval

Speaker 2 Back from North Dakota, suspicious but empty-handed, Spokane detectives Burbridge and Cessnick got back to grunt work. Cessnick still recovering from a near-fatal blood clot.

Speaker 13 I got ordered to go home, I don't know how many times over the next couple days, but obviously I wasn't going anywhere.

Speaker 2 And the case?

Speaker 2 Well, they knew they had something, but what exactly?

Speaker 13 It was just one of those cases where we knew we were on the right track, but we also knew that there was a lot of work left.

Speaker 2 And for the Carlisles, a lot of grief. Alberta was a barely functioning mess.

Speaker 8 I didn't lose just my dad. I lost my mom, too, because she wasn't the same person for a really long time.

Speaker 2 And adding insult, Doug's secrets were exposed for the whole world to see. That big house on the South Hill, heavily mortgaged.
The fancy cars, not paid for.

Speaker 2 The paperwork that claimed he was worth millions, a facade. Doug Carlyle was flat broke.
Hadn't even bought life insurance.

Speaker 2 Do you ever feel angry at all at Doug for not providing more, like an insurance policy or something?

Speaker 10 No, not at all. Because he was a very good provider all the days that he was alive.
And I really didn't believe in insurance policies like that.

Speaker 10 I believed in trusting the Lord for our finances, and that's what we did.

Speaker 2 Secrets, just another casualty, as the little army of detectives searched the neighborhood for clues.

Speaker 2 Like, for example, the strange find that turned up on the killer's escape path, that weirdly out-of-place welding glove.

Speaker 2 They swabbed it for DNA on the off chance, really, just a shot in the dark, that something in or on that glove might match a known person, like a felon, say, whose DNA would be stored in a data bank.

Speaker 2 And how about that? It did. What was the name?

Speaker 13 Timothy Sukow.

Speaker 2 Have you ever heard that name before?

Speaker 13 I've never heard the name before.

Speaker 2 Who was Timothy Sukow?

Speaker 12 A violent individual, been to prison for robbery.

Speaker 2 What did you think when you found this out?

Speaker 12 I thought this could be our guy.

Speaker 2 Was he local? He was local?

Speaker 13 He was working at IRS Environmental, which is an asbestos removal company.

Speaker 2 They don't drive around in white vans by any chance at IRS, do they?

Speaker 12 I checked that list and lo and behold, IRS Environmental was one of the companies that owned a van that matched our van in the video.

Speaker 2 Well well well, what were the chances? Timothy Suko must have been the muscular man in black seen on this video running for dear life toward the equally mysterious white van. They looked him up.

Speaker 2 He lived in the suburbs. A wife, kids.
His house was 10 miles from the murder scene.

Speaker 12 We had the SWAT team sitting on him for about 12 hours waiting for him to move because we didn't want to take him at his house, the potential of firearms.

Speaker 2 But when Suko and another man left the house, the police moved in to make the arrest. Here, a few hours later, the police photographed Suko's many tattoos.

Speaker 12 Mr. Suko is a very hardened prison-type individual, very large man, 275 pounds of solid muscle.
Give me a few minutes, we got some paperwork to do and some stuff that's going up to the end, okay?

Speaker 12 I'll tell you what's going on.

Speaker 2 Sure. When the interview began, detectives made no bones about it.
They thought they had Suko dead to

Speaker 2 Today

Speaker 13 is the day to help yourself out.

Speaker 12 I didn't come to you by accident, okay?

Speaker 12 My killer left something up at the house, and your DNA is all over it.

Speaker 2 No joke, the ban at your work that you drive is on my video up there.

Speaker 2 You guys are scared of me now.

Speaker 34 You should be scared.

Speaker 12 You're looking at federal conspiracies to commit murder, fraud, life in prison.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 12 That's your choice.

Speaker 2 Probably be smarter.

Speaker 2 Some serious accusations you're making.

Speaker 13 At this point, we're probably beyond accusations.

Speaker 2 You are under arrest.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 29 And you can help yourself out.

Speaker 2 You can take me to jail. We'll learn this out in court because you guys are out of your tree.

Speaker 30 I'm not kidding about having

Speaker 2 me either, man.

Speaker 12 I have your DNA up there.

Speaker 2 Let's go to fing jail and take it to court. Okay.
Timothy, Suko. I have a search warrant.

Speaker 12 And he just looked me in the eye and laid his head down and went to sleep. Seriously.
Seriously. It's like a big emotional release to him that it's finally over.

Speaker 2 After that, the detectives rounded up some search warrants for Suko's house and his car.

Speaker 12 In his car, we found a very significant piece of evidence.

Speaker 2 What was that?

Speaker 12 It's a piece of notebook paper with a list of items to be done. At the very top of the paper is the word glove with a question mark.

Speaker 12 And then there's statements about wheel man and wingman, show getaway route on Google Earth, practice with pistol.

Speaker 2 That's almost like a confession, right, on a notepad, right? What killer makes a list of to-do lists of?

Speaker 12 It was a to-do list of how to prepare to go do this murder.

Speaker 2 What did you think when you saw that?

Speaker 12 It's almost Hollywood-like. It was kind of shocking to find that.

Speaker 13 This is a month after the murder. And we arrest who we believe is our shooter, and he has a to-do kill list in his car.
I mean,

Speaker 13 you can't make this stuff up.

Speaker 2 Suko also had a storage unit where a surveillance camera picked up a white van pulling up soon after the murder. Suko had to be their shooter.
Question was, who put him up to it and why?

Speaker 2 Suko wouldn't tell them, refused to say a word.

Speaker 2 So then they got a search warrant for his phone.

Speaker 13 And his contact list said James in ND.

Speaker 2 Jackpot. Jackpot.

Speaker 13 So that was the first time we had ever connected him with Henriksen.

Speaker 2 James and Sarah arrive to become the Kenneth Barbie of the oil patch, and before long, one man is missing, another is dead. And the suspected hitman has James on speed dial.

Speaker 2 And as for Sarah, there was a shock in store for her, too. I mean, emotionally difficult to deal with.
Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's ruined my life.

Speaker 7 Coming up, Sarah becomes suspicious about her husband.

Speaker 2 Did you think at the time... I wonder if James had something to do with this?

Speaker 6 It seemed fishy to me.

Speaker 7 Then, she gets a call from the sheriff.

Speaker 6 He said, you need to come to my office right this second.

Speaker 7 When dateline continues.

Speaker 2 Sometimes the best detective is named luck. A dropped welding glove leads to a tattooed presumed hitman named Timothy Succo.
Timothy, you're King Succo, though.

Speaker 2 Whose phone provides a direct connection to the man who may have ordered the murder of Doug Carlisle, James Henriksen, in North Dakota.

Speaker 2 Investigators were now able to rule out all of Doug Carlisle's business partners in Washington State. By this point, did you feel as if you had the outlines of what the conspiracy was?

Speaker 12 I thought we had a pretty good idea of what had actually been going on, but it turned out to be a lot more.

Speaker 2 A sentiment which, as the investigation turned rapidly back to North Dakota, Sarah Creveling, aka Mrs. James Henriksen, could have put in exactly the same words, but for more personal reasons.

Speaker 6 Best I remember is

Speaker 6 there were rumors of James having an affair.

Speaker 2 It's an old story, of course. Husband cheats on wife with a younger woman, even younger than Sarah, who was only in her 20s.
What was it like to hear that he was cheating on you in the first place?

Speaker 6 Well, I mean, that was hurtful, but it was so off the wall, I just didn't believe it.

Speaker 2 Like generations of wives before her, until the truth was impossible to avoid. What was that like to hear? Oh, horrific.

Speaker 6 And especially when I found out with who,

Speaker 6 I just thought absolutely not. Like, no way.

Speaker 2 Wouldn't believe it. Wouldn't believe it.

Speaker 6 I mean, she was like my little sister.

Speaker 2 This is her. The young woman in the unpleasant little triangle.

Speaker 2 But she wasn't just some other woman. This is Peyton Martin, daughter of Tex Hall, the chief of the MHA nation, on whose tribal land was the oil lease, the one James and Doug Carlyle wanted so badly.

Speaker 2 Peyton was 19. You knew her.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I had vacation, family vacationed with her quite a bit.

Speaker 2 In fact, here they are in Hawaii, James in the water, Sarah there on the paddle board, and there on another board was Peyton.

Speaker 6 I think I found a picture of her on Facebook where she was pregnant,

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 so I called her and asked her.

Speaker 6 And she said it's none of my business, but if it's my husband's, then get over it.

Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 Peyton denied saying that, by the way. But when the baby was born, a very healthy and happy-looking little boy, James and Peyton named him

Speaker 6 Bentley, of all things.

Speaker 2 Bentley. Just like that expensive automobile James bought for Sarah, then left in the garage with flattened tires.
You can't make it up?

Speaker 8 It's weird.

Speaker 6 It's so strange.

Speaker 2 Bentley. Yeah.

Speaker 6 As you can see, he was the one who wanted the car and the name in the show.

Speaker 2 Chief Tex Hall, as you might imagine, was not pleased about any of that. He banished James from the reservation.
But there was something neither Tex nor Sarah knew just then.

Speaker 2 Not just that the Spokane cops were investigating Sarah's wayward husband. Out on the North Dakota prairie, another lawman had been poking around for more than a year.

Speaker 2 Homeland Security Agent Derek Trudell had heard from a colleague about the missing Casey Clark and the rip-off report and other possible crimes.

Speaker 31 He told me the story and it just sounded unbelievable, is what it did.

Speaker 2 Derek Trudell was hooked. So by the time Burbridge started showing up, Trudell could tell him a thing or two about James Henriksen.
How would you describe him?

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean he he comes across as a

Speaker 2 I mean just you're at a loss for words.

Speaker 31 I mean you could say that he comes across as a used car salesman but that's really not fair to used car salesman. I mean the guy is just

Speaker 31 he's a scumbag.

Speaker 2 By the time Doug Carlisle was murdered, Truddell had Maybe just coincidence, been on James's trail for more than a year, looking into possible illegal drug imports and the mysterious disappearance of friend and employee Casey Clark.

Speaker 2 He had to look like Hendrickson was behaving like some sort of latter-day Wild West outlaw.

Speaker 31 He's a sociopath. Above all that, I mean, the guy's a coward.
You know, he didn't get his hands dirty in any of it.

Speaker 2 Trudell already suspected Hendrickson may have ordered someone to kill Casey Clark.

Speaker 2 Then Doug Carlisle was murdered out in Washington, and Trudell began working with Detective Burbridge. If Timothy Suko was the hitman in Spokane, did he kill Casey Clark too?

Speaker 2 Agents pulled records of all the cell phones being used around the time of Casey's disappearance in North Dakota.

Speaker 12 And they checked Mr. Suko's number at the time against the phone records they had acquired back when Mr.
Clark disappeared. And Mr.
Suko's number was in those records.

Speaker 2 Meaning, Suko was in the area when Casey Clark disappeared.

Speaker 2 Sarah, meanwhile, her marriage falling apart, had begun to harbor suspicions about James and not just his cheating ways. It went back to the day James told her about Doug Carlisle's death.

Speaker 6 He just walked into the room and was like, Doug's dead. Straight-faced, nothing.
It was the strangest thing ever.

Speaker 2 Did you think at the time...

Speaker 2 I wonder if James had something to do with this.

Speaker 6 You know, it seemed fishy to me. It did.
But again,

Speaker 6 you don't,

Speaker 6 your life's already crumbling. You don't want to think that your husband could be doing anything like that, you know?

Speaker 2 I mean, why did you get out of that marriage?

Speaker 6 I was scared of him.

Speaker 6 You know,

Speaker 6 everyone wants the fairy tale. Everyone wants to be married with a good life with kids and it kind of came crashing quickly.

Speaker 2 So finally, Sarah started talking about divorce.

Speaker 6 I told him and he'd be like,

Speaker 6 how how are you gonna feel if you divorce me and you find out all this isn't true and the kid's not mine and he's like you'll be the horrible person and I'm gonna destroy you and

Speaker 2 he was very threatening. Was he serious?

Speaker 2 A month after the murder of Doug Carlisle, January 2014, Sarah got a call from her local sheriff.

Speaker 6 He said, you need to come to my office right this second.

Speaker 7 Coming up, Sarah gets some frightening news.

Speaker 6 Homeland Security was waiting for me and they were like, their husband is trying to have you killed today.

Speaker 2 What was that moment like for you?

Speaker 6 Doesn't seem real. It's like a movie.

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Speaker 2 Sarah Krebley didn't know which way to turn. With investigators in two states closing in, her husband, James, had vanished.

Speaker 2 Their marriage was on life support, and she'd just been summoned by her county sheriff.

Speaker 6 So I went into his office, and Homeland Security was waiting for me, and they were like, sit down. We need to talk to you.

Speaker 6 And they said, we just received in the last 10 minutes that your husband is trying to have you killed today.

Speaker 2 Sarah on a hit list? But why?

Speaker 2 Sarah had a pretty good idea.

Speaker 6 He wanted all the money.

Speaker 6 And he knew I had it locked up with the divorce getting ready.

Speaker 6 So get her out of the way and we'll get all the assets.

Speaker 6 So I could run to Brazil.

Speaker 2 But Sarah? Marked for death? Yes, the sheriff told her. She was supposed to die that very day.

Speaker 2 What was that moment like for you?

Speaker 6 I can't even describe it.

Speaker 6 It doesn't seem real. It's like a movie.

Speaker 6 I sat there and spoke with them all day, and I'd asked, can I call someone? Like I don't know what to do. They said nope, we have to take you into a safe home.

Speaker 2 Call no one?

Speaker 2 Not even your mom?

Speaker 6 Nope, no one, because they were afraid that James would harass my family and friends to find my location. Because once he realized I wasn't responding to him, he went into panic mode.

Speaker 6 He didn't know if I was working with the police, if I was dead, if I was on the run.

Speaker 2 The cops knew her husband was lurking somewhere out there, but they couldn't find him.

Speaker 6 He was harassing a lot of my friends and family, trying to see if they'd heard from me, which they hadn't.

Speaker 2 Now the cops were Sarah's best hope to stay alive. They tried a ruse to throw James off the scent.

Speaker 6 They even drove me to the border in Canada to make it look like I had jumped the border to see if James would chase me.

Speaker 2 He did not.

Speaker 2 But where was he?

Speaker 2 No one seemed to know. Was Sarah close enough so they could actually see her? Investigators tried to track her husband's phone.

Speaker 6 You're sitting in Homeland Security's office and you're listening to them ping him across the state and he's on the run, he's on the move.

Speaker 6 I think a car backfired in the parking lot and all these agents pull their guns out and run to the windows because they didn't know if James was in town.

Speaker 2 It's a surreal thing.

Speaker 2 Even if they found him, though, they couldn't charge him with murder or conspiracy. Didn't have enough evidence for that.
But they did have something quite useful.

Speaker 2 A few days earlier, search warrant in hand, state and federal agents, including Homeland Security's Derek Trudell, descended on James and Sarah's empty house while they were out of town.

Speaker 2 What'd you find in the house?

Speaker 31 Found a lot of financial records. Found some firearms.

Speaker 2 Some firearms? Yeah.

Speaker 31 I mean, I can't remember the exact number of them.

Speaker 2 But it didn't matter if there was one there. He was a convicted felon, right? Correct.
Grounds for immediate arrest. Agents fanned out around North Dakota.

Speaker 2 And a few days later, in a little place called Mandan,

Speaker 2 there he was. What was he doing?

Speaker 31 He was over at his girlfriend's friend's apartment.

Speaker 2 That is, the apartment of a friend of Payton, the chief's daughter.

Speaker 31 We had guys staked out around it doing surveillance on it. And as we drove by, I recognized him.

Speaker 2 And that was him on the street, walking to the street.

Speaker 31 Yeah, we stopped, we hopped out, told him to turn around, show me his his hands.

Speaker 2 James Henriksen was surrounded by cops with guns drawn and pointed. So what happened then was very odd.

Speaker 31 He had his hands in his pockets and so kept telling him to show me his hands, but he wouldn't show me both hands at the same time. And he's got this stupid smirk on his face.

Speaker 2 Like he's playing with you.

Speaker 31 Yeah, so then eventually enough was enough, so we just put him, helped him to the ground, put handcuffs on him. Helped him to the ground?

Speaker 31 He's just smiling up at me and asked me, you know, like, you know, hey, how are you? He instantly went into like trying to charm us.

Speaker 2 He was trying to to pull a con on the cop.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he thought he was going to build rapport with me and in relationship and

Speaker 31 we were going to be buddies.

Speaker 2 Bizarre, though the arrest was, James Hendrickson was at least in custody.

Speaker 2 And Sarah, no choice, they told her, had to stay in deep cover herself, hiding in a secret shelter, unable to call friends or even her parents, just in case the hit was still a go.

Speaker 18 I had a bunch of friends call

Speaker 6 the sheriffs and the police, and

Speaker 6 they were asking. They said, We think that he's had her killed.
I mean, will you drive around and look in ditches? No, because no one was allowed to know.

Speaker 6 They wanted him to think that it had gone through to see what he would do.

Speaker 2 I can't imagine what it would be like for your family.

Speaker 2 It was hard for them. And James agreed, very civilized, to talk to investigators.
But what he did not do.

Speaker 2 You guys are 100%. 100% sure that you couldn't protect me.
Was tell them the real story of what he'd been up to. It had to do with

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 cartel

Speaker 2 and the MA.

Speaker 2 What was it?

Speaker 2 Mexican mafia and drug cartel.

Speaker 31 He gave us, I mean, it was a story. I mean, he talked about the

Speaker 31 cartels, the triad, I mean, all these organized crime groups that he implied having connections to. I don't know.

Speaker 31 Like I said, I mean, if I

Speaker 31 I mean, they can just,

Speaker 31 you know, put all the charges that you want on me. And like, you know, if I don't say anything, you know, and they don't say it, I,

Speaker 31 you know, and they, whatever, they kill me in prison or whatever.

Speaker 2 Did he think you were buying it?

Speaker 31 Oh, I think in his mind, you know, he thought that we were buying it. But, I mean, it was so outlandish.

Speaker 31 Nobody's going to believe that.

Speaker 2 Have to handcuff you before we could bring you back up to the judge.

Speaker 2 Trouble was, investigators in North Dakota and Spokane still didn't have enough solid evidence to tie James Hendrickson to the murders of Casey Clark and Doug Carlisle.

Speaker 2 For that, they'd have to keep digging while Hendrickson waited in jail.

Speaker 2 That is, if they could keep him there when he had other ideas.

Speaker 7 Coming up, preparing for the great escape.

Speaker 13 They knocked out that window, dropped some bed sheets down to the ground nine stories.

Speaker 2 Oh my god.

Speaker 7 When dateline continues.

Speaker 2 James Hendrickson was one of the stranger perps Homeland Security agent Derek Trudell had ever encountered and had an attitude.

Speaker 2 But as Trudell discovered, Hendrickson was also an inept criminal, rarely seemed to get his illegal schemes to work.

Speaker 31 It's almost like a tragic comedy when you see this group of people that were involved with this case.

Speaker 2 Like the time they put out a hit on another business partner, but the hitman ran off with the money.

Speaker 31 The guy rips him off for $10,000.

Speaker 31 And as he said, it was the easiest $10,000 he ever made.

Speaker 2 Gradually, Agent Trudell and Spokane detectives Burbridge and Cesnick amassed circumstantial evidence to show Hendrickson, for all his criminal fumbling, did orchestrate two murders, Casey Clark and Doug Carlisle.

Speaker 2 But it was not quite enough circumstantial evidence to take to trial.

Speaker 2 Until finally, the break they needed.

Speaker 2 I don't know why I did it.

Speaker 2 Timothy Succo, remember him?

Speaker 2 Admitted he killed both victims on orders from James Henriksen.

Speaker 2 And the middleman caved too, Robert DeLeo, the man who came snooping around the investigation a couple of days after the Carlisle murder and passed a polygraph, which might say something about polygraphs.

Speaker 2 Now, DeLeo admitted he recruited Suko and transmitted Henrickson's orders and the money.

Speaker 34 So how did Tim get paid for Casey's murder, Demo?

Speaker 8 It was cash.

Speaker 2 So, in September 2014, Nine months after his arrest on weapons charges, James Henriksen was flown from North Dakota to Spokane, Washington, and charged with multiple federal counts of conspiracy, solicitation, and murder for hire in the deaths of KC Clark and Doug Carlisle, and attempts on the lives of three more business partners.

Speaker 2 He was not charged, however, with trying to kill his wife, Sarah, because, said the prosecutors, they went with the charges that were easiest to prove.

Speaker 2 So, Henriksen was toast,

Speaker 2 unless

Speaker 2 as he sat in the Spokane jail awaiting trial, Hendrickson did his best to see that the trial would never happen.

Speaker 12 He tried to hire people to attack the Marshall van that was transporting him between our jail and the U.S.

Speaker 12 courtroom, shoot the driver, set fire to the van, and break him out the back of it while the van's on fire.

Speaker 13 Good lord. He was still letting on that he had a lot of money.
And in jail, obviously, it doesn't take too long to find people that'll bite on that.

Speaker 13 Unfortunately, he found one that also needed help with his current charges, so he turned him in pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 And thus the plan was foiled. Yes.
But Henriksen wasn't done.

Speaker 13 He was in a cell with another person suspected of murder. Our Spokane County Jail, there are windows in each of the cells.

Speaker 13 They knocked out that window, dropped some tied-together bed sheets down to the ground.

Speaker 12 Nine stories.

Speaker 13 Oh my God. Some people showing up for work at the jail saw.

Speaker 13 The rope hanging out the window.

Speaker 2 Can you really see anybody squeezing through a window that size?

Speaker 12 They're purposely designed so that an adult human head won't fit through that window, so there was no way they were getting out that window.

Speaker 2 They could have charged him for his escape attempts. They didn't.
The prosecutor had bigger things to do. And finally, in January 2016, James Hendrickson encountered them.

Speaker 32 I was so mad at Ken C Street.

Speaker 2 Doug Carlisle's still grieving family.

Speaker 14 I had to close my eyes several times and actually say a prayer. God calmed me down.
I wanted to put my hands on him for sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then you'd be in trouble.

Speaker 12 It'd be worth it. Seemed good thing.

Speaker 2 On the Ahmed and Scott Jones were the federal prosecutors assigned to the case, and they were not exactly confident.

Speaker 30 Proving Casey Clark's murder was the toughest part that I was thinking of.

Speaker 2 We didn't have a body.

Speaker 30 We had no forensic evidence.

Speaker 2 So to get a conviction, they'd need these two sketchy characters who allegedly, on orders from Hendrickson, had done some truly awful things.

Speaker 2 If they didn't tell the story and make the jury believe it, Hendrickson would get away with murder. But if they did tell it, what sort of credibility would a person like that have?

Speaker 20 My concerns: our most important witness

Speaker 20 is going to admit that he killed two people, literally beat Casey Clark's brains out.

Speaker 2 So, how do you handle that? You have to embrace it.

Speaker 20 Our number two witness has a tattoo on his back of him urinating on the headstone of the last guy that he killed. These are our two-star witnesses.

Speaker 2 Still, Tim Suko, the actual killer, was by far the more important witness.

Speaker 2 After all, Suko could tell the jury chapter and verse about the many twisted and homicidal plots set in motion by James Henriksen.

Speaker 2 So, two nights before the trial was to begin, attorneys Jones and Ahmed went to see Suko, prepare him for his testimony.

Speaker 2 And that's where it all went south. Suko is bipolar.

Speaker 30 He was laying down on the floor of the prison cell in a fetal position. And so this is two days before our star witness is going to testify.

Speaker 30 And he's basically sucking his thumb on the floor of a jail cell.

Speaker 30 I mean, we're there at 10 o'clock at night trying to make sure that this guy gets his medication so he could effectively testify before a jury.

Speaker 2 Would James Henriksen, the desperado of the oil patch, go free?

Speaker 2 Coming up, the entire courtroom stunned.

Speaker 20 I had decided long before then that James Hendrickson was crazy. I didn't know he was that kind of crazy.

Speaker 2 It was no easy task preparing Tim Suko to testify at the trial of the man accused of paying him to kill two people. He was off his meds.
He was a mess emotionally.

Speaker 2 So when the trial began in federal court, no cameras allowed, the prosecutors held their breath. And

Speaker 2 Suko, back on his meds, came through.

Speaker 2 And in court, he repeated just what he said here in his pre-trial interviews, that he met DeLeo when they both worked for the company that owned the white van they drove the night he shot Doug Carlisle.

Speaker 2 But a year before that job, he said, DeLeo told him he could make money for roughing up some guy in North Dakota. But then the boss, that is James Henriksen, changed the plan.

Speaker 2 He started telling me how

Speaker 2 Casey, how he was threatening Tom to leave the company and take some of the truckers with him. And that's when he asked me if I'd kill him.

Speaker 2 So when Casey showed up at James's office before going on vacation, Suko was behind the door with a heavy truck jack.

Speaker 2 And I hit him back in the head.

Speaker 2 And he stumbled and fell.

Speaker 2 He tried to get up and I

Speaker 2 hit him up three, four more times.

Speaker 2 He stopped moving.

Speaker 2 They ditched Casey's truck in the nearby town, said Suko. And then they took Casey's body to a lonely spot 20 miles out of town.
Suko said he did the digging while Hendrickson stood nearby. I remember

Speaker 2 It's the death penalty.

Speaker 2 I turned back around and took a couple more shovel roads and I turned back and looked at him and I said, Do me a favor, don't shoot me in the back of the head head while I'm digging this hole.

Speaker 2 He really should have.

Speaker 2 Anyway, he said he got the 20 grand and he burned the bloody clothes. Investigators found buttons and other evidence of that burn pile.

Speaker 2 But though they took Suko out to the prairie twice to look for the burial site, they never found Casey Clark's body.

Speaker 30 Casey Clark was simply killed for the reason that he just wanted to leave James Henriksen's employment.

Speaker 2 He felt wrong. So I'm going to kill him?

Speaker 20 Yeah, it was almost like a jealousy cheating spouse kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And why, according to the prosecutors, did James Henriksen want Doug Carlisle killed?

Speaker 20 He really thought that the oil deal that they were involved with was worth tens of millions of dollars.

Speaker 2 And he thought that Doug Carlisle was standing in the way of him getting most, a large share of those tens of millions of dollars.

Speaker 30 Mr. Carlisle had already threatened Mr.
Henriksen that he was going to get him out of the oil drilling business.

Speaker 2 And that was the thing that triggered this whole business? Yeah.

Speaker 20 They were each trying to get each other out of the deal.

Speaker 2 At the trial, prosecutors introduced hundreds of text messages, an almost play-by-play account, as the plan rolled out.

Speaker 20 You can watch a text message go from Henriksen to DeLeo, and then the content is passed from DeLejau to Suko and then back the other way.

Speaker 20 Negotiations over payment, who's going to be there, does he have an alarm system?

Speaker 2 So when Doug Carlisle returned from church that evening in December, Suko was waiting. He'd brought a heavy welding glove in case he had to punch in a window.
He didn't have to.

Speaker 2 I had my pistol pointed at him

Speaker 2 and I told him to back up and get in the house. And I saw Mrs.
Carlisle come into sight from the hallway.

Speaker 10 She backed away, and Mr. Carlisle

Speaker 2 moved his hand in her face.

Speaker 2 I fired.

Speaker 2 It seemed like the fourth shot, and he didn't move.

Speaker 2 I ran

Speaker 2 my fast.

Speaker 2 And then, somehow the welding glove got left behind. The glove that revealed Suko's DNA and broke the case.

Speaker 12 Without the glove, we would probably be unsolved to this day.

Speaker 2 And what could have happened then? James Hendrickson, according to prosecutors, was a very dangerous man, was actively planning more murders.

Speaker 2 Eventually, they said, had Suko not lost his welding glove, Hendrickson might have become that worst of all criminals.

Speaker 30 A serial killer is someone who causes the death or murder of three people. And he certainly got an A for effort because he tried.

Speaker 30 There were about 11 people that we know of that he tried to have murdered.

Speaker 2 James Henrickson's defense attorneys declined our request for an interview, but they blamed the murders on Suko and DeLeo, not Hendrickson, and essentially argued the jury should not believe two such unsavory characters.

Speaker 2 Alberta Carlyle watched the trial play out day after day, same prayer on her lips.

Speaker 10 I prayed for justice for my husband. I prayed that the truth would come forth and that there would be a way to go on in life.

Speaker 2 Deliberations took less than a day. On all 11 counts, murder for hire, solicitation, conspiracy, and more, the jury found James Henriksen guilty.

Speaker 8 We wanted to jump up and down and clap, you know, as a family, because our whole family was there. It was great.

Speaker 2 In the weeks that followed, Robert DeLeo, the go-between, was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Speaker 20 When Timothy Succo, the hitman, faced the judge, the only thing that he ever asked for was that we do what we can to ensure that he was sent to a prison with appropriate mental health facilities so he could figure out what was wrong with him.

Speaker 2 Then in court, he turned around and faced Alberta.

Speaker 10 He said, please forgive me. I'm so sorry for what I've done.

Speaker 2 Did he seem genuine? He did.

Speaker 10 He said it in tears, and he said, I can't forgive myself, but can you forgive me? And I

Speaker 10 told him yes. I said, I forgive you, and God forgives you.

Speaker 2 30 years for Tim Suko.

Speaker 2 When it was James Hendrickson's turn, a ripple ran through the court. Would he too ask forgiveness, admit guilt, apologize, reveal the location of Casey Clark's body? Well,

Speaker 13 no,

Speaker 2 not a chance.

Speaker 12 He read a short story. that was very graphic about abortion, so much so that everybody in the courtroom was very uncomfortable with what he was saying.

Speaker 12 And I think he just did that to purposely upset people.

Speaker 20 I had decided long before then that James Hendrickson was crazy. I didn't know he was that kind of crazy.

Speaker 2 James Hendrickson received two consecutive life sentences. He is appealing.

Speaker 2 In August 2023, Hendrickson successfully petitioned the court to vacate two of his 11 convictions, but that ruling does not impact those life sentences.

Speaker 2 And here in the vast North Dakota grasslands, Casey Clark's friends and family are still searching, vowing to stay with it until they find him.

Speaker 9 You just want to like, all right, James, you son of a bitch, we're going to get him ourself. We don't need you.

Speaker 9 We're going to go bring him home and we're going to finally get some closure for everybody here.

Speaker 2 And Alberta?

Speaker 10 Sometimes grief overwhelms me. You know, I'm just in a pile of tears.
And I've not lived alone ever.

Speaker 2 Takes some figuring out.

Speaker 10 It takes some figuring out.

Speaker 2 Sarah, thoroughly investigated, was held blameless, not involved in James' violent conspiracies. Though in the community, and among some in law enforcement, suspicion lingers.

Speaker 2 In June 2017, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Sarah was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay over $340,000 in restitution.

Speaker 2 So as you look at all of these events and you think, gosh, what sin did I commit to being in this spot? What would you say?

Speaker 6 I trusted a con artist. I trusted a sociopath.
Since I married the monster, some people think I should be one too, but I'm not.

Speaker 2 Wreckage, lots of it. Once upon a time, in a flat and gracious land where tough men wrestle for oil, murderous ambition bubbled up with the crude and made a play as old as humankind.

Speaker 2 What was it all about, really? Why? Greed.

Speaker 31 Plain and simple, it just came down to greed.

Speaker 2 It was all about money.

Speaker 7 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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