Secrets on Hot Springs Drive

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Speaker 3 All the things that are coming out about this case are just mind-boggling. Things that you would never believe and never do.

Speaker 4 The killer had been waiting. She walks into the house and she confronts a monster.
A young wife dead. But it didn't stop there.

Speaker 5 Somebody came out from under the trees and he shot me.

Speaker 4 What in the world world was going on? That's what I wanted to know.

Speaker 6 His wife is brutally beaten. Did he hire somebody? We just don't know.

Speaker 4 Her husband had an alibi and something else, a lover.

Speaker 8 You were mentioning with her in your home a few times.

Speaker 3 It was shocking. Would have never expected it.

Speaker 4 As police got closer to the truth, he says, I think I know who did it. The truth got closer to home.

Speaker 6 He just told me, hold on, it's about to get a a lot more crazy.

Speaker 1 You won't find Mayberry, RFD on the map, but if close neighbors, good schools, and just plain old civility is what you're looking for in a place to call home, you could do worse than settle in Grovetown, Georgia.

Speaker 4 Tamara Baldwin has lived here for more than 15 years.

Speaker 3 You see the children outside playing, having a good time. Just a nice, quiet place that you want to move and take your family to.

Speaker 4 The way we think America used to be and seems to be harder and harder to find. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The Army's Fort Gordon is just down the road and a number of the city's 12,000 residents are active or retired military. Crime stats can be measured in stolen bicycles.

Speaker 4 Great place to raise a family.

Speaker 1 Here's a veteran investigator for the county.

Speaker 4 What's your crime rate? It's not that high. We don't have too much violent crime.
Dozens of homicides a year, would you say? No, not at all.

Speaker 4 We might have one a year. One a year.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And in March 2009, they did have one, a homicide, a bad one, that sent neighbors shopping for burglar alarms and maybe fresh ammo.

Speaker 3 You're wondering what's going on, what's happened.

Speaker 1 So many terrible things happened so quickly. So many taboos were broken on an anywhere suburban street that the mind reeled.

Speaker 9 We were so confused. We just kept praying for the families.

Speaker 6 The whole neighborhood was shocked.

Speaker 1 It began here with two houses, two best friends on a street called Hot Springs Drive in Grovetown. Kay Parsons had moved into the neighborhood in 2005.

Speaker 1 She was a devoted wife to her husband David who worked down at Fort Gordon and an active Little League mom cheering on her 12-year-old son Derek.

Speaker 1 Tamara lived just down the street.

Speaker 3 Kay was a sweetheart. You never saw her upset, never saw her mad, always smiling, just a joy to be around.

Speaker 4 What kinds of things did she like to do?

Speaker 3 Well mostly anything dealing with her son and her husband. She was very supportive, always being with them.

Speaker 1 Next door to Kay lived Becky Sears. Becky had her hands full too.
She and her husband Tony had five kids, including two older sons from Becky's first marriage.

Speaker 3 She's one of those people,

Speaker 3 very outgoing, one of those, hey, how you doing, type people.

Speaker 1 Tamara got to know both, but says Kay and Becky really hit it off.

Speaker 3 They were best friends. They were basically inseparable.
They were together 24-7 almost.

Speaker 1 The two neighbors became peas in a pod. They worked at the same physical therapy center called Healing Hands.

Speaker 10 They'd go on vacations with each other.

Speaker 1 Jürgen Cowling was their boss.

Speaker 4 When you think of them being around your office, what do you see him doing?

Speaker 10 Well, we all get along. You know, you knew they were best friends because they were cutting up on each other.

Speaker 10 And then they would also tell stories about their sons' baseball, especially during the baseball seasons because they were best friends, friends, the sons.

Speaker 1 Kay and Becky even joined Weight Watchers together.

Speaker 4 And the two of them were pretty competitive at the Weight Watcher thing. Yes, yes.
Who's up a pound, who's down a pound?

Speaker 3 Yes, every day.

Speaker 4 And one day in March 2009 began like any other. Kay, the Little League mom, got up to take Derek to school.

Speaker 4 And Becky, the mother of five, left her house a few minutes later to drop off her kids before her workday began. All very routine, until 8.30 a.m.

Speaker 1 when contractor Mitch Cozart showed up to do some maintenance work on Kay's back door.

Speaker 4 So here, coming around the corner, you lift up the latch gate and tell me what you see.

Speaker 11 When I walked back into where the back door was, the glasses busted out and I immediately knew that they had been broken into.

Speaker 4 Did you put your head inside the house and look around or call it? All I did.

Speaker 11 I just stuck my head just inside, just enough to holler out for her, and I didn't get no response.

Speaker 1 He tried calling Kay's phone. No answer there either.

Speaker 1 He came back out front and noticed a young man sitting on a rock across the street his name was michael the oldest of kay's friend becky's five kids michael had overheard the contractor talking on the phone i walked up to him and i said hey did you say something about this house being broken into and he was like yeah and i was like well mine has been too

Speaker 1 So now two broad daylight break-ins of across-the-fence neighbors. Was the thief still lurking?

Speaker 11 I carry a firearm in my vehicles.

Speaker 11 And so actually I went out and got one just in case, you know,

Speaker 11 somebody could run out or whatever.

Speaker 1 He called 911.

Speaker 13 Yeah, the back door is broke in and the next door neighbor's door is broke in. I called the omnibus.
She's not here.

Speaker 13 I don't think

Speaker 13 if she's gone, I mean, I hollered at the door.

Speaker 13 Get no response. Yeah, I don't want you to go in, honey.

Speaker 1 The contractor followed instructions, and within minutes, law enforcement responded to the scene, ready to investigate two potential burglaries right next door to each other.

Speaker 1 Police taped off the area. Now Tamara's neighbors were calling her at work, including Kay's husband, David.
He was traveling on business.

Speaker 3 He asked me, have you spoken to Kay?

Speaker 3 And I'm like, no, not today. I'm at work.
And he says, okay, I'm just trying to get in touch with Kay. I'm in California.

Speaker 1 First responders at the scene alerted investigator Jimmy Edmonds with the Columbia County Sheriff's Office.

Speaker 4 It's very unusual to have have two houses side by side, you know, hit it one time. That's, you know, that same way.
So are you thinking, where's this guy going to go next? Correct.

Speaker 4 I'm definitely thinking where's he at.

Speaker 1 But as Edmonds turned his attention to the break-ins at these two homes, he and his team discovered something ugly.

Speaker 4 She was in a pool of blood.

Speaker 1 This wasn't going to be a simple burglary. This was a violent attack with a bloody trail between the homes of two best friends and a female body lying in the garage.

Speaker 4 She was beaten so severely you couldn't even recognize her.

Speaker 1 What had happened on Hot Springs Drive and whose sanctuary was about to be violated next?

Speaker 1 A badly injured victim in one house. Was something worse waiting for police next door?

Speaker 4 The point of entry we could see was the back door also there and we found spots of blood on the back door.

Speaker 1 March 25th, 2009, just after 9 a.m., Sheriff's deputies had rushed to this quiet residential street in Grovetown, Georgia to investigate not one, but two burglaries.

Speaker 1 Worried about her friends and neighbors, Kay and Becky, Tamara Baldwin left work and headed home to what shockingly had become a crime scene.

Speaker 4 Did you see lots of vehicles and uniforms?

Speaker 3 A lot of police cars.

Speaker 4 The entire corner was all taped out for crime tape.

Speaker 3 Now you see two houses that I have to pass to get home and you wonder what's going on.

Speaker 1 And what the responders found inside these homes would put this neighborhood into full-on panic mode.

Speaker 1 Investigator Jimmy Edmonds entered the home of Kay, the Little League mom, through that shattered glass back door. the one the contractor first noticed.
Then Edmonds saw it, a trail of blood.

Speaker 4 Immediately I could start seeing spots of blood on the floor. I could see an empty coffee cup that had been spilled right there on the floor from McDonald's.

Speaker 4 There was a McDonald's food bag on the floor and a purse.

Speaker 4 And I started seeing signs of blood on the sofa, in the living room, on the carpet. And then you go into the foyer area.
There was a lot of blood on the walls, on the door, on the floor.

Speaker 4 So this is suggesting a moving struggle. Definitely.
It looks like the homeowner came home and surprised a burglar in her house, and a struggle ensued where she was beaten.

Speaker 1 The bloody path led Edmonds further into the house to a bloody handprint on the door out to the Parsons garage.

Speaker 4 And you can tell there was more beating going on in the garage. There was blood spatters on the walls.
So she was already bleeding before she got to the garage.

Speaker 1 And that's where this apparent struggle had ended. The deputies found 41-year-old Kay Parsons lying there on the floor.

Speaker 4 Had you ever seen a scene like that?

Speaker 4 Nothing that drastic, no. She was beaten so severely in her head, it was pretty bad.

Speaker 1 But amazingly, Kay was alive. EMTs hurried her to the hospital, her life hanging by a thread.

Speaker 4 She still had a heartbeat. But she was in a very bad way.
Very, very bad way.

Speaker 1 Investigator Edmonds made the call to alert Kay's husband.

Speaker 4 He was in Los Angeles for work.

Speaker 4 I was able to talk to him on the phone,

Speaker 4 let him know he needed to come back here as quick as possible. So how did he take that news? He was pretty devastated.
I tried not to tell him on the phone.

Speaker 4 I tried to tell him, you know, you need to come back. There's been an accident, you know.

Speaker 4 But he guessed pretty much what was going on.

Speaker 1 Kay's husband, David, booked a flight home as investigators turned their attention to the house next door. That's where Kay's friend Becky, the mother with five kids, lived.

Speaker 1 Could there be another victim there?

Speaker 4 The point of entry we could see was the back door also there, and we found spots of blood on the back door.

Speaker 1 Inside, Becky's place was ransacked. But quick relief, as they looked around, there were no new victims.
The blood smears they'd noted appeared to be from the crime scene next door.

Speaker 4 That means you have somebody that is brave enough or just cruel enough to have just beat this woman so severely and then is going to go next door and commit another burglary.

Speaker 1 Becky had been at work that morning with her 19-year-old son, Christopher. The two of them raced home to the scene and met up with her older son, Michael.

Speaker 4 They're both there, so your mother and Christopher there.

Speaker 12 Yeah, they pulled up together at the same time with a Columbia County officer.

Speaker 12 We all walk around back to Kay's house and my mom, she sounds very distraught.

Speaker 12 She's screaming Kay's name.

Speaker 4 She shows up at her house while you're all in the backyard there? Right. They show up on scene and they're wondering what's going on and they're

Speaker 4 pretty shaken up.

Speaker 1 Everyone else in Becky's family was accounted for. Her husband, Tony, a long-haul trucker, was away on the road.
Her three younger children were fine at school and daycare.

Speaker 1 The The investigator said Becky's focus then turned to Kay.

Speaker 4 Understandably, she was upset. You know, she didn't know what happened to her neighbor.
She just knew her neighbor had left in the ambulance.

Speaker 1 And in fact, Edmund says Becky was less concerned about that burglary in her own home and more anxious to get to see her neighbor. Michelle Amerson is a longtime friend of Becky who also lived nearby.

Speaker 1 Her sister drove Becky to the hospital.

Speaker 9 She got to the hospital.

Speaker 9 You know, she was

Speaker 6 demanding to get to see see her friend.

Speaker 4 Did you go to bedside for Kay, huh?

Speaker 9 Yeah, she wanted to get there.

Speaker 14 I said, what hospital did they go to?

Speaker 1 News of the attack quickly spread to another close friend of Kay's, Suzanne Frazier.

Speaker 14 I hung up the phone and I was shaken. And so I called my boss and I said, I got to go.
I got to go. And I left.

Speaker 4 Broke some laws, huh?

Speaker 14 I ran red lights. I flew.
I mean, I just went.

Speaker 1 Tamara rushed to the hospital, too.

Speaker 4 Did you get to her bedside or

Speaker 4 be able to take a look in?

Speaker 3 I did not. I just stayed in the waiting room.
There were a whole lot of other people in the waiting room.

Speaker 4 But the prognosis was very bad, wasn't it? Machines were keeping her alive at that point even, huh? Yes.

Speaker 1 The friends all kept an edgy vigil for news about Kay's condition, waiting for her husband to get to her bedside.

Speaker 1 Lives all changed in an instant. A home invasion and burglary in broad daylight.
A woman fighting for her life, and now a perpetrator on the loose.

Speaker 4 You don't know whether you have a guy on the move who could be ready to bust into another house along here, right? Exactly, exactly. We don't know if we had a madman loose here, you know.

Speaker 4 Just setting up security on these streets. On every one of these streets, we're going to every one of these houses.

Speaker 4 We're stopping anything that comes in or comes out of this whole neighborhood, talking to everybody. It's your neighborhood, and there's somebody out there who's apparently a very violent person.
Yes.

Speaker 4 You've got to be terribly scared.

Speaker 3 I was.

Speaker 3 I'm thinking that there's someone who's walking around the neighborhood watching and seeing what people are leaving and basically

Speaker 3 attacking.

Speaker 1 On Hot Springs Drive, the investigators knew for sure they had a serious crime on their hands. But as they learned more from that bloody scene, the shockwaves only kept rolling.

Speaker 14 He said, Oh, God, no.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 1 A husband returns home to tragedy and questions.

Speaker 4 I just got a weird feeling something wasn't right.

Speaker 1 Friends and family gathered at the hospital keeping a vigil for Kay Parsons, a suburban mom who'd been brutally beaten that morning in a home invasion.

Speaker 1 And while her next-door neighbor Becky's home had been burglarized too, Becky didn't seem to care as much about that. Good friend Tamara says that for Becky, it was all about getting to see Kay.

Speaker 3 She continues to ask,

Speaker 3 well, can we go in and see her? Can we go in and see her?

Speaker 3 They tell us no.

Speaker 1 Eventually, one of Kay's closest friends, Suzanne Frazier, did get back to her bedside.

Speaker 4 Could you recognize her if you didn't know that it was her? Not really.

Speaker 4 Not really.

Speaker 4 All puffed up?

Speaker 14 Very, very, face was very full, head-wrapped. So I asked the nurse, I said, is she brain dead?

Speaker 4 And she didn't answer me.

Speaker 1 Kay was just clinging to life. Some wrenching decisions had to be made.
And doctors were waiting for guidance from her husband, David, who arrived back from a business trip in California.

Speaker 4 How did David seen the husband?

Speaker 3 He seemed very distraught. He seemed very

Speaker 3 upset.

Speaker 14 You could hear him screaming through the double doors.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 14 he said, oh, God, no.

Speaker 4 No, Kay.

Speaker 1 Investigator Edmonds saw David too, and law enforcement tends to see things a little differently, especially with husbands.

Speaker 4 At the hospital, you meet him in person, you see him. Right.
His wife's on life support, you know, and

Speaker 4 he's pretty distraught, but I just still, I just got a weird feeling something wasn't right.

Speaker 4 I couldn't tell if it was, you know, if it was overboard or it was just, I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was something that was bothering me.

Speaker 1 So even though the husband had an alibi, that out-of-state business trip, he's on your radar and you both know that.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 So I'm watching him pretty close.

Speaker 1 By that point, Edmonds was trying to determine exactly what had happened on Hot Springs Drive.

Speaker 1 He had his team take pictures of Kay, collecting any physical evidence from that confrontation in the house. And they came up with something: a bit of human hair found under Kay's fingernails.

Speaker 1 It just might be from her attacker.

Speaker 4 She had defense wounds to her arms, to her hands. She was, you know, bruises everywhere all over her body.

Speaker 1 All indicating something else. Kay had fought back and whoever assaulted her had been on the prowl for something.

Speaker 1 Deputy shot video of the upstairs bedroom. It had been looted with jewelry and other valuables missing.
And they found what seemed like a similar M.O. in Becky's house next door.

Speaker 4 The master bedroom in that residence had been ransacked. So both houses had been tossed.
Both houses.

Speaker 1 Becky's most valuable necklace and rings gone.

Speaker 1 And as Edmonds kept examining that grisly scene in the Parsons garage, he determined how the burglar had assaulted Kay with a hammer found underneath the car and a baseball bat.

Speaker 4 So the way the weapons appeared describe a horrendous attack? Yes, it appeared that this hammer, you know, was used and there was so much blood, it slipped out of the attacker's hand. And

Speaker 4 the baseball bat, which we were able to determine belonged at that house,

Speaker 4 was a weapon of opportunity after he lost the first weapon.

Speaker 1 It looked as though the Little League mom was beaten with her own son Derek's baseball bat.

Speaker 3 It really touched my soul knowing how much Derek loved baseball and I'm like, how in the world could someone take a baseball bat and you know beat her?

Speaker 1 An old-fashioned dragnet remained drawn around the subdivision.

Speaker 4 You got a crazy guy in your hands. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean he

Speaker 4 beat that woman severely and we need to find who it was and where he was and get him off the street. Some residents mentioned a mysterious figure they had seen recently.

Speaker 4 We heard about a guy that was supposedly a homeless guy that was living in the woods around there somewhere.

Speaker 4 So the investigator dispatched some deputies to check out the area just a few hundred feet from Kay's house. We checked the woods.

Speaker 4 We didn't see any signs of anybody living there, anything of that nature. And we really couldn't prove or disprove that it was anybody that was living in the woods there.

Speaker 1 So a potential lead dashed, but investigators had another.

Speaker 1 Unlikely as it may seem, tiny Grovetown, Georgia has a few usual suspects, including a young man who lived just around the corner from Kay Parsons' home.

Speaker 4 We look in the neighborhood and see who's living around there. We had a frequent flyer in there that

Speaker 4 a frequent flyer.

Speaker 4 That's somebody that we deal with all the time

Speaker 4 that commit the same type of crimes.

Speaker 4 We knew this guy. We've arrested him several times for burglaries, and he lives close by in the area.
So if a computer's missing or a piece of jewelry's gone astray. If there's cars broken into.

Speaker 4 You go to the frequent flyer and ask him what he knows about it, huh? If he's close by, we definitely talk to him. So in this case, on that day, you do that, huh? We do.

Speaker 4 But we were able to quickly rule him out.

Speaker 4 He had an alibi. There was no way he could be there.

Speaker 1 Then from the hospital, the news everyone feared and expected. Doctors determined Kay's injuries were too severe for her to make it.
The family decided to take her off life support.

Speaker 1 Kay Parsons, devoted wife to David, loving mother to Derek, was gone.

Speaker 3 And so then they let me know that she had passed away.

Speaker 4 You'd lost your friend Kay.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 Yep.

Speaker 4 A beating death, a break-in. Yes.
How horrible is this for you, Suzanne?

Speaker 14 One of the worst days of my life.

Speaker 15 I didn't expect it.

Speaker 4 41 years old. I mean,

Speaker 14 you can see somebody dying of cancer or, you know, in a car wreck or something like that, but to be beaten

Speaker 14 beyond anything.

Speaker 4 Did you go back? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. You said goodbye to Kay?

Speaker 14 As much as I could.

Speaker 1 Now the stakes quickly became much higher for this investigation. Kay Parsons had been murdered.

Speaker 1 And Edmunds started thinking this killer might just be someone who knew both women, Kay and Becky, someone who had been right there at the scene of the crime.

Speaker 1 Police take a closer look at Becky's son, Michael.

Speaker 4 He discovers his mother's house broken into. He's on the scene when we get there.
So that raised a lot of red flags.

Speaker 1 But why would Michael murder his mother's best friend?

Speaker 1 Investigators in Groveown, Georgia now had a murder case on their hands. Kay Parsons had been assaulted and killed in a home invasion.

Speaker 1 And the house of her good friend Becky next door had been ransacked too.

Speaker 4 Is your door-to-door you're canvassing coming up with anything? No.

Speaker 4 Nobody's seen anybody, you know, out of the ordinary in the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 So they turned to the first person in the neighborhood to notice something was wrong. The contractor who'd alerted 911, first man on the scene.
Investigators had to wonder why he was really there.

Speaker 4 At this point, everybody's a suspect. You know,

Speaker 4 and logically, he's the first one.

Speaker 1 Edmonds brought him down to the substation for questioning, and they went through the story he had told at the scene.

Speaker 16 And I walked up and I hollered, I said, hey, is anybody in there? And anyway, I didn't hear nothing.

Speaker 4 But you also have to ask him if that's really what happened. Oh, yes.
I mean, he's a guy who discovers this violent criminal act, and you wonder if he knows more than he's saying. Oh, definitely.

Speaker 16 They pressed him to find out more about just what work he was to do there and whether he had worked for Kay Parsons before did you have the key of the door open to the house uh do the work uh well we we we was mostly outside the only time that we was really on the inside is when she called me up and said um um i need a little bit fixed on the inside You had the bad luck of being the person to find this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. So that puts you on the list also.

Speaker 4 People that want to get a full story from maybe with some sharp questions, huh?

Speaker 11 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 I knew better to walk in that house, you know, because I did not want anything, my fingerprints anywhere in that house because I just you know watched enough on TV to know better what'd you see in him in terms of demeanor he seemed pretty genuine to me he was pretty shaken up so investigators knocked the contractor off their list but in his interview he helped point them to someone else that boy on the rock then I seen that boy sitting the next door neighbor sitting down on a rock across the street and that made me kind of suspicious right there because I mean as I said what's the guy's a lookout right here I mean it might be still you know something going on here Michael, Becky's 22-year-old son from next door.

Speaker 1 Remember, he was also on the scene that morning when deputies arrived. A neighbor and familiar face to Kay, the victim.
That got Edmonds thinking.

Speaker 4 I thought, you know, if she came home and surprised this burglar and she knew who this burglar was, he couldn't let her get away.

Speaker 4 You can almost see that little movie play out, the motivation, what happened. Exactly, exactly.
So we started looking at Michael pretty hard.

Speaker 1 Michael told them he'd gotten there around 8.30 that morning only to find his house had been burglarized and he'd promptly called his mom.

Speaker 1 But he hadn't called the police, which seemed a bit strange to investigators. What's more...

Speaker 4 There was no forced entry to that residence. There wasn't.
There was no forced entry.

Speaker 1 That was odd, too. And they were about to learn a lot more about Michael.
He was Becky's oldest son. He and his brother Chris were from a prior marriage.

Speaker 1 And Michael came with a history of trouble, mostly drugs.

Speaker 4 So that's going to make your nose twitch a little bit. Most definitely.
He's on the scene when we get get there. He's had a lot of problems in the past with drugs.
So that raised a lot of red flags.

Speaker 4 Opportunity to get quick cash? Most definitely. Drug habit, make a buy.
You know, they've got to get money. And the best way to do that is burglaries.
You know, get the quick cash.

Speaker 4 Did you have trouble with drugs at the time?

Speaker 12 I won't say trouble, but it was.

Speaker 4 You were a regular customer, huh?

Speaker 12 I mean, it was a social thing. We did, you know,

Speaker 12 being

Speaker 12 dumb and young.

Speaker 4 That's all. Smoking weed or harder stuff, Michael?

Speaker 12 Smoking weed and a little harder stuff.

Speaker 4 Pills, things like that. This is methadone? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yes, sir.

Speaker 1 With Michael's presence on the scene and drugs now in the equation, Edmunds' team brought him down to their substation for questioning.

Speaker 17 Don will be

Speaker 17 point blank with you.

Speaker 7 If you knew anything about this, you would tell me, right?

Speaker 17 Absolutely.

Speaker 18 When was the last time you took some methadone?

Speaker 19 Uh, today.

Speaker 17 Today.

Speaker 1 So Michael had used methadone on the morning of Kay Kay Parsons' murder. Now investigators wanted to know more about where exactly he was when the assault happened.

Speaker 1 Michael said his mom Becky had dropped him off at a job site just before 7 a.m.

Speaker 4 to do some house painting.

Speaker 18 When did you tell your mom you had this paint job?

Speaker 17 When did you tell her you told her that a little while ago?

Speaker 18 Um, this morning.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing. He didn't do any house painting that day, and he initially lied to his mom and investigators about working.

Speaker 18 And the whole reason you lied to us was because you didn't want your mom to find out that you didn't really have a job. Yes, sir.

Speaker 17 That just blows my mind.

Speaker 1 And there was something else that really troubled investigators. If Michael was the attacker, he had cleaned himself up before deputies got there.
He had no blood on his clothes or visible wounds.

Speaker 1 But he did have something else.

Speaker 4 I asked him to let me see the bottom of his shoes. And as he lifted his shoes up, I saw small pieces of glass.
stuck into the bottom of his tennis shoes.

Speaker 4 And that glass was the same pipe of glass from the back door at Kay Parsons' Parsons' house.

Speaker 1 In the interrogation room, Michael couldn't explain how the glass from the murder scene got there.

Speaker 7 As far as

Speaker 7 glass that was found in your shoes,

Speaker 21 how can you explain that?

Speaker 12 Glass in my shoes? Uh-huh.

Speaker 12 I guess.

Speaker 17 I don't know, maybe.

Speaker 17 I guess.

Speaker 4 So, what's he doing with that glass underfoot, huh? That's what I want to know. That's what I want to know.

Speaker 1 Investigators talked to Michael's brother Chris, the son who'd arrived at the scene later with their mother, Becky. Chris seemed to have his life together in a way that Michael didn't.

Speaker 1 He had a job, even his own house. That morning, he was helping his mom at the therapy center where she worked.

Speaker 18 Your mom picked you up about what time?

Speaker 21 I get up at 7, brushed my teeth.

Speaker 7 She pulled up 7, 10. Didn't you go to work with her?

Speaker 17 Yes.

Speaker 1 Then they asked him about Michael. Chris said he knew his brother took took drugs, but he said Michael wouldn't have killed anyone.

Speaker 7 Do you think your brother did this or do you think he was?

Speaker 21 Absolutely not. I don't think my brother has it in his heart.

Speaker 7 I just want to make sure that at this point brotherly love is not outweighing common sense because I just saw some stuff in your brother just talking to him for about 20 minutes and I'm sitting there going,

Speaker 20 what?

Speaker 7 People get on methadone, they don't have any money, and they're not working.

Speaker 7 How are they going to get money?

Speaker 21 I agree on that. I do agree on that.

Speaker 7 Well, out of everybody that your brother hangs around with.

Speaker 21 Who would be the most likely to do something like that?

Speaker 17 Yeah. Yeah.
Um.

Speaker 17 You might need to get a dig piece of paper.

Speaker 7 Because of those drugs. I go for 17 hours.

Speaker 1 So Michael's brother confirmed the troubled young man ran with a shady crowd.

Speaker 4 Investigators were all ears. Does his association with the house, his backstory, make him a person of interest to you? He's definitely a person of interest.

Speaker 1 The deputies kept Michael at the station for nearly three hours, but they didn't hold him that day. He gave them a number for his alibi witness, that friend he'd gone to see that morning.

Speaker 1 Would he vouch for Michael?

Speaker 1 Another mystery.

Speaker 10 We had some blank checks in one of our offices that disappeared.

Speaker 1 And a new theory of the crime.

Speaker 4 We didn't know if they were in this together or what.

Speaker 1 Sheriff's deputies were now zeroing in on Michael Bowers as a person of interest in the murder of Kay Parsons, his mother's best friend.

Speaker 4 With the glass in his shoe, him being the one showing up at the house, finding the burglary, and his past history of drugs.

Speaker 4 You know, drugs and burglaries go hand in hand.

Speaker 1 Investigators believe that Kay was beaten at her home in a narrow window of time between 7.10 and 7.20 that morning.

Speaker 1 But Michael said he didn't arrive at the scene until 8.30 and said he had an alibi for the time before that. He'd been hanging out, he said, with a friend named Anthony.

Speaker 4 What's the story he tells you about that day? We pull Anthony in and we interview him and Anthony's a character.

Speaker 4 He's pretty lively. He's very talkative.
He hadn't had time to talk to Michael. We knew Michael hadn't talked to him.
So you got two unwon earned stories. This might work out.
Exactly.

Speaker 4 They haven't had a chance to compare notes. Exactly.

Speaker 22 What time Michael get to your house

Speaker 23 645 roughly are you awake asleep well i was up i was up well i was laying back down i was laid down on the couch getting ready to go back to sleep i didn't expect him that early but but you were expecting him yeah he said he was going to come over how long was he there

Speaker 23 till from when he got there which was roughly 645 till 827 on the dot they were pretty consistent

Speaker 4 you know anthony was his his time was pretty consistent with with michael's but we still you know we didn't know if they were in this together or what.

Speaker 23 Angel was on. That's what I watch in the morning.

Speaker 23 You watched the episode of Angel Wednesday morning.

Speaker 27 That hour.

Speaker 23 Tell me more. No, actually, I talked to Michael for pretty much the entire hour, but Angel was on the boob tube.

Speaker 1 As he sat in the interview room, investigators didn't know what to make of this talkative character.

Speaker 4 So they hooked Anthony up to a polygraph machine and asked him again where he and Michael were that morning.

Speaker 23 You didn't even come close to passing that polygraph. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not lying about it.
I told him I'd take another one. I mean,

Speaker 23 if I was lying, why the hell would I have said I'd take it? But the more important part is.

Speaker 25 Strange things have happened.

Speaker 23 I'm sure. Well, I'm telling the truth.

Speaker 15 So, it is what it is.

Speaker 23 I mean, I don't know what to tell you, sir, but you can, I'll give you whatever you want. You know, blood, they already took my mouth, so but I didn't do any of this, man.

Speaker 1 Anthony repeated over and over that he had nothing to do with Kay Parsons' murder. Didn't even know her.

Speaker 23 Dude, I'm trying to be as straight up with you guys as possible.

Speaker 23 And that's what I want. Yes, sir.
I'm not going to lie about it. I want you to catch the guy.
I just, I don't want you looking at me like I did the s

Speaker 24 because I ain't, dude, I ain't real cool with it.

Speaker 23 I don't think it's really.

Speaker 23 You know, if you or me or some guy got hurt, that's one thing. You know, but not a lady, you know, not somebody's mom.

Speaker 1 And he started to put the finger more on Michael.

Speaker 23 He knows something.

Speaker 20 Well, I don't, I don't rightly know.

Speaker 15 What do you mean? What does he know? I don't know what he knows. Dude, look, you're not catching me up in something.
He knows something. He saw something.
He did something.

Speaker 23 One of the above. I would assume if Michael or any of his people had something to do with it, they're dope.

Speaker 23 They're going to have enough sense to be able to beat, what, an entire team of investigators? I doubt it, dude.

Speaker 15 I doubt it.

Speaker 23 I figure by the time everybody's DNA comes back, because I know I'm not the only swab you got, somebody will get caught up.

Speaker 22 So you're completely confident your DNA is not in that house anyway?

Speaker 23 I know it's not. I know it's not.

Speaker 4 He keeps saying, you know, I didn't do anything, so I don't have anything to worry about. But was he, in fact, on your list at that point? Oh, he was.
You know, he put himself with Michael.

Speaker 26 Well, I think you know a little bit more than you're telling me.

Speaker 23 Sir, I don't.

Speaker 23 I'm giving you pearls, man. I'm giving you all I got.
I've told you guys everything I know.

Speaker 23 I know that he came over. I know exactly when he left.

Speaker 24 Okay.

Speaker 23 I know I was at my house. All right.

Speaker 15 That's what I know.

Speaker 1 For all his questions, Investigator Edmonds ultimately had nothing on Anthony. A failed polygraph isn't evidence, and nothing connected him to the crime.

Speaker 1 But they were still looking at Michael, and there was the inevitable question of motive.

Speaker 1 Sure, Michael was open about his drug use, but that didn't entirely explain why he would savagely beat his mom's best friend.

Speaker 10 My bookkeeper came to me and said, we've got some issues here.

Speaker 1 Jürgen Cowling has a story to tell about Michael. Becky and Kay both worked for him at Healing Hands Physical Therapy Center, And sometimes Michael would do odd jobs at the office too.

Speaker 10 Michael would come in and do some, well, we had some flooring that had be put in, some carpet, and then he would come in and assist.

Speaker 1 But after a while, people in the office started to notice something.

Speaker 10 We had some blank checks in one of our offices that disappeared.

Speaker 1 Becky and Kay's boss says the checks went missing while Michael had been doing some cleaning in the office.

Speaker 10 So I pull Becky in, and she said she sat down with Michael and talked about it. And of course, Michael said, yes, it was me.

Speaker 4 How much money was stolen in that incident?

Speaker 10 About 800 bucks. 800 bucks? Yeah, three or four checks, about 800 bucks.

Speaker 4 And it was all Michael and he fessed up to it, huh? Yes, sir. So Becky must have been wide embarrassed?

Speaker 10 You could tell she was really distraught.

Speaker 1 The Healing Hands boss agreed with Becky that he wouldn't report the incident to police, as long as Michael never came back there.

Speaker 1 But had Becky's friend and co-worker Kay found out about the stolen check funny business? Could that have led to a conflict between Michael and Kay?

Speaker 1 But here's the thing: the authorities wouldn't even learn about the Healing Hands theft for months to come.

Speaker 1 Even without that story about the theft, Michael was shaping up to be a prime suspect in the murder.

Speaker 4 It wasn't looking real good for him, you know, it just things started piling up.

Speaker 1 Then something happened that would stand the investigation on its head. More violence, more mayhem, with another sudden attack.

Speaker 1 Who was the victim this time? Was Was someone stalking women in this small town?

Speaker 5 Somebody came out from behind the trees and he shot me.

Speaker 1 Two neighbors, two break-ins, a gruesome murder, and one son under the white-hot spotlight of suspicion.

Speaker 4 But there was at least one person who stood squarely behind Michael.

Speaker 1 Becky's good friend Michelle Amerson knew all about Michael's struggle with drugs. Still, she wouldn't accept that he had anything to do with Kay's murder.

Speaker 4 Did you wonder? Well, I wonder what's going on. Is there something about this boy I don't know?

Speaker 9 No, I didn't really because knowing Michael, I knew that, you know, he wasn't, would do anything like that.

Speaker 1 Then, just 36 hours into the murder investigation, another attack. This time, a shooting, just 10 miles from the crime scene on Hot Springs Drive.

Speaker 4 That's the 911.

Speaker 5 Somebody came out from behind the trees and he shot me.

Speaker 1 Sergeant Stephen Douglas was dispatched to the scene.

Speaker 28 My partner and I received a phone call from the Road Patrol Division in reference to a woman who had apparently been a victim of an armed robbery.

Speaker 28 She was leaving work that evening and had apparently been shot in the process.

Speaker 4 Do you know where you did it?

Speaker 1 My legs.

Speaker 4 The location of the shooting sounded familiar. What's the baby's office?

Speaker 5 It's Healing Hands Physical Therapy.

Speaker 1 So did the name of the victim.

Speaker 4 What's her name?

Speaker 5 Becky Sears.

Speaker 1 Becky Sears, the best friend and co-worker of murder victim Kay Parsons.

Speaker 4 This is kind of a holy cow moment. This is the same woman next door to this house where there have been a vicious beating.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 28 it seemed an odd set of coincidences.

Speaker 4 And this is the back door of Healing Hands? This is the back door of the business that we got called to.

Speaker 1 As the sergeant pulled up to the scene, he learned Becky had been working late on the company payroll. She was heading to her car when she was jumped.

Speaker 28 Apparently, when she had turned around, a unknown male subject wearing dark clothes and a white baseball cap rushed out of the bushes at her with a firearm, demanding his money or next time it was going to be her face.

Speaker 1 That's when the assailant shot Becky in the legs.

Speaker 28 The subject apparently

Speaker 28 didn't rob her, didn't take anything from her, but turn around and ran back into the bushes the way that he came.

Speaker 4 i mean she's not known for doing the night deposits with cash there's no cash here exactly not at this time what's the target what are you gonna get has to be personal

Speaker 1 one would think so emts transported becky to the hospital it didn't take long for the troubling news to reach becky's friend michelle did you talk to becky on the phone after she'd been shot i did and i just asked her was she okay and she said i am she said you know just trying to get through this she's your friend you're worried yes worried about her so was tamara Baldwin, first Kay, now Becky.

Speaker 3 It just did not make sense to me.

Speaker 4 What in the world was going on? That's what I wanted to know.

Speaker 1 Sheriff's deputies immediately canvassed the neighborhood, looking for anyone matching Becky's description of the shooter.

Speaker 4 So you could have gunmen on the ground, on the loose. Right.
What are you doing on that score? What do you have?

Speaker 28 We had started sending units out to see if anybody had seen anything, see if anybody heard any gunshots, see if they saw anybody matching the description of the suspect,

Speaker 28 and we were not able to find anything.

Speaker 1 The only forensic evidence Douglas could find in the parking lot was the.25 caliber slug that grazed Becky's legs.

Speaker 28 Her shoes were still laying there. We found a spent shell casing, and then we had also found the actual projectile itself right on the edge of the sidewalk.

Speaker 4 And you didn't find a tossed weapon in the vicinity?

Speaker 28 No, no weapons.

Speaker 1 The shooter had vanished without a trace.

Speaker 4 But you had more questions, didn't you? We did indeed.

Speaker 1 But those questions would be left for Jimmy Edmonds, whose investigation into Kay Parsons' murder had suddenly become a lot more complex.

Speaker 4 Here I've got two neighbors. You know, one has been beaten to death, and the other one has just gotten shot, and they both work at healing hands.

Speaker 4 Do you believe that the gunman who has wounded Becky is also the person who's broken in and fatally beaten Ms. Parsons? Yeah, of course that comes to mind.
I mean, of course it does.

Speaker 4 It's just, it's too much of a coincidence.

Speaker 1 And nothing about this shooting took the heat off Becky's son, Michael.

Speaker 4 What's the working theory? The working theory still is, is Michael still pretty high up on the list. I mean, somebody's looking for some money.
Somebody owes somebody some money.

Speaker 1 Edmonds had some tough personal questions for Becky about her son, Michael. Thankfully, the wounds to Becky's legs were superficial.

Speaker 1 So Edmonds grabbed his notepad and his tape recorder and headed to the hospital.

Speaker 4 Becky, she's in the hospital bed. Right.
Not too badly injured. Not too badly injured.

Speaker 4 When I'm talking to her,

Speaker 4 she's really hurting.

Speaker 1 the investigator then asked becky for details about the shooting what did he say to you

Speaker 8 i do

Speaker 27 the guy that shot you that he wanted his money or next time it would be my face what money is he talking about i have no idea we don't owe anybody any money

Speaker 27 just michael not that i know of

Speaker 26 what you did next

Speaker 27 I don't think Michael knows

Speaker 27 unless he owes money from the past, I don't think he owes any money now.

Speaker 1 To Edmonds, Becky sounded like a mom unwilling or unable to wrap her head around the possibility of her son's involvement in a murder.

Speaker 27 I think he's trying to stay away from all of that to get up, to better his self.

Speaker 1 Edmonds spun through the possibilities.

Speaker 4 Was Becky in denial? Was she covering up for her son? Or was he heading down the wrong path with Michael altogether?

Speaker 1 He decided to cast a wider net.

Speaker 19 Is there any relationships that you're not telling us about?

Speaker 26 Like you haven't had any problems with anybody? No, nobody.

Speaker 26 Family problems?

Speaker 1 That's when Becky revealed an intimate detail from her recent past. She and her husband had gone through a rough patch in their marriage.

Speaker 29 You know, my husband and I

Speaker 29 had been having some problems, which we were thankfully working out.

Speaker 26 Do you have any relationships on the side?

Speaker 26 I did.

Speaker 26 How long has that been?

Speaker 26 How long has that been over? Yeah.

Speaker 26 Three months.

Speaker 1 Suddenly, added to the mix of a brutal murder and a bizarre shooting was this admission of an extramarital romance.

Speaker 29 I mean, it wasn't like it was a long-lasting thing.

Speaker 29 It was just a couple of months long.

Speaker 1 Edmonds didn't press Becky any further about the affair. A hospital room immediately following a shooting was neither the time nor the place.
But the investigator was intrigued.

Speaker 1 He left Becky wondering who the other man was.

Speaker 4 I knew there was something there. I just

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There was. Yeah, there was.
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Speaker 1 The story of Kay Parsons and Becky Sears had now become a strange and complicated case for investigators.

Speaker 1 Two best friends, victims, one killed and the other shot outside the office where they both worked.

Speaker 1 It was juicy enough to keep this usually sleepy town wide awake for the late news.

Speaker 6 It was definitely the lead story.

Speaker 4 Ashley Campbell was a reporter reporter with NBC affiliate WAGT near Grove Town.

Speaker 1 After Becky was shot, she was working her contacts.

Speaker 6 I placed a call to one of the Columbia County investigators and just to find out, you know, what is going on? Like, what's the connection here?

Speaker 6 And he just told me, hold on, I can't tell you anything quite yet, but it's about to get a lot more crazy.

Speaker 1 The source wasn't kidding. At the hospital after she'd been shot, Becky revealed she'd been having an affair, but she didn't say the other man's name.

Speaker 1 Then the very next morning, in what could only be considered a lucky break, deputies got a tip from someone close to the family and learned just who that other man was.

Speaker 1 How about David Parsons, Kay's husband?

Speaker 9 That was a shock.

Speaker 1 Becky's friend Michelle could not believe it.

Speaker 4 David and she have had an ongoing flame.

Speaker 1 David, the investigators learned, had carried on the affair with his wife's close friend and next-door neighbor, Becky, for about six months prior to his wife's death.

Speaker 1 The revelation of a love triangle would send the investigation into the realm of soap opera and raise all kinds of new questions.

Speaker 6 You have these next-door neighbors, they're best friends, they're going on trips together, and then behind the scenes, you've got love letters being written between Rebecca Sears

Speaker 6 and David Parsons.

Speaker 1 Notes like these, uncovered later by investigators, which showed things were getting pretty steamy on Hot Springs Drive. In one, David wrote, Rebecca, I hope you like the picture frame.

Speaker 1 I wish I could have given it to you before I went to PA. I love you, baby.
I miss you so much when we aren't together.

Speaker 1 And in another, Rebecca, I just wanted to let you know that even when you don't think I am thinking about you, I am. I can't wait to see you.

Speaker 1 And Becky wrote to David, being apart from you is very difficult, but being in love with you and knowing that you love me makes all of the time that we are apart bearable.

Speaker 1 It was a secret love the two had kept hidden in the small town where gossip tends to travel at warp speed.

Speaker 3 It was shocking more than anything. Would have never expected it.

Speaker 4 Did you know anything about David philandering, messing around?

Speaker 4 Not

Speaker 14 a friend of mine called me on my cell phone and asked me, said, did you hear about David having an affair with Becky? And I said, there's no way. There's no way.

Speaker 1 The news about the affair didn't didn't surface until after Kay had been buried. David was still seen then as the grieving husband.

Speaker 14 If I would have known about that affair,

Speaker 14 I don't think there would have been as much support for David at the funeral or at the hospital.

Speaker 3 Why would you cheat on someone that loved you so much and was always there for you just to have sex, basically? Why? It wasn't worth it.

Speaker 1 Tamara thought back to David's behavior in those days after Kay's death, including an odd exchange between them at the memorial service.

Speaker 3 David went up to me and again being very close with Kay, he hugs me. And he hugs me really, really tight.
And he's boo-hoo-crying.

Speaker 3 And he tells me, I'm sorry, I never meant for this to happen.

Speaker 3 And I didn't know what that meant.

Speaker 4 That's a funny thing to say. What do you think he meant?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I haven't.

Speaker 4 You didn't mean for this to happen?

Speaker 3 I didn't know what he meant. I just, you know, I was thinking he didn't mean to leave her while he was in California.
Right. I didn't mean to have an affair.
It could have meant a lot of things.

Speaker 1 Tamara also recalled that early morning phone call she received from David on the day Kay was found beating.

Speaker 3 And he was asking me if I had talked to Kay. And the thing about it is he's never called me during the day, so it was just very unusual for him to call me and ask me if I had talked to Kay.

Speaker 1 It seemed strange to Tamara then, perhaps even stranger now in light of the new questions about David. People in town whispered and wondered, did David somehow have a hand in Kay's murder?

Speaker 1 A way perhaps to avoid an ugly and expensive divorce?

Speaker 14 She said, well, if I ever found out that David was having an affair on me, I would be gone.

Speaker 14 She said, I would take Derek, I would get half of what his and his retirement from the military, and I'd get what I could get out of the account.

Speaker 4 Did the community really turn on him?

Speaker 14 They did after they found out about the affair. I think there's more to the story.

Speaker 4 So now you got a very lethal soap opera in the midst of this thing, huh? Oh, yeah. You know, things start coming together.
Now you've got to wonder what's going on with David, the husband.

Speaker 4 I definitely do.

Speaker 4 Is he involved in this?

Speaker 4 Does he want his wife gone?

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 we got to look at all those angles.

Speaker 1 All predictable questions. But in an investigation that was never less than startling, more twists awaited around the bed.

Speaker 1 A tale from jail.

Speaker 4 He looks at me and says, I think I know who did it. I said, really? Tell me.

Speaker 1 And this guy wasn't just your ordinary jailhouse snitch.

Speaker 1 By now, Jimmy Edmonds had no shortage of leads to work in the pair of crimes he was trying to solve. The murder of Kay Parsons and the shooting of her neighbor Becky.

Speaker 1 And then another new lead, a big one.

Speaker 4 I get a phone call from our jail. They have an inmate that is requesting to speak to me.
So I'll pull Mr. Jacobs, Jerry Jacobs,

Speaker 4 out of his cell and take him to an interview room.

Speaker 4 Jerry, right?

Speaker 4 Is that what you give up?

Speaker 1 Jerry Jacobs was serving time for a misdemeanor parole violation.

Speaker 4 What's his story?

Speaker 4 He was pretty upset. Jerry tells me that as he was in the jail, he saw the news and he saw what happened to Kay Parsons.
And at that time, he looks at me and he says, I think I know who did it.

Speaker 4 I said, really?

Speaker 4 Tell me.

Speaker 4 He says,

Speaker 4 I believe my sister had something to do with it.

Speaker 1 And who was Jerry Jacobs' sister? Well, Becky Sears, Kay's best friend and neighbor.

Speaker 4 I think my jaw dropped right then.

Speaker 4 Wasn't expecting that. He dropped a bombshell.

Speaker 1 Becky's brother said he knew all about the affair between his sister and David. He told the investigator Becky had once confided in him that David was trying to end it.

Speaker 25 She came to me one day,

Speaker 25 or there in the parking lot, crying, and I was like, you know, what's wrong? And that's whenever she told me she was having the affair.

Speaker 4 He then goes on to say that

Speaker 4 Becky has been pretty upset, crying, because David won't leave Kay. He won't leave his wife to be with her.

Speaker 1 Jacobs then revealed his sister had no intention of giving up on David or letting him stay married to Kay.

Speaker 25 And she had asked me if I knew of anyone or if I knew a way

Speaker 25 that we could do this to kill Kay

Speaker 25 and make it look like an accident, like

Speaker 25 cut her brake line on her car. and make it look like an accident or do something in that effect.

Speaker 1 Jacobs said at first he thought Becky was joking.

Speaker 4 I'd be like, well, Becky, that's okay.

Speaker 25 You know, sometimes we all feel that way about people. You know, she's like, no.
She's like, I really want her dead.

Speaker 31 She said, she said, can we do this?

Speaker 22 So, I mean, she was seriously.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 24 Want somebody to kill her? Yes.

Speaker 25 She wanted me to, and I told her I wouldn't.

Speaker 4 So she's shopping around for someone that can do in Kay. Yes, her romantic rival.

Speaker 1 It was a stunning revelation. A real doozy.
A lovesick woman plotting to kill her best best friend and next-door neighbor so she could have her friend's husband all to herself.

Speaker 4 You've got a wild story and a wild theory on your hands. Most definitely.
I mean,

Speaker 4 this case is taking so many twists and turns, it's unbelievable. I mean, forget about the smash and grab and go robbery.
That's gone out the window. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 We're looking at some premeditation and some planning here.

Speaker 1 But Edmonds had to consider the source of the story.

Speaker 4 Of course, jailhouse stories are always troublesome. Oh, yeah.
Because they're trying to do themselves some good. Definitely.

Speaker 1 One thing the brother said was easy to confirm. He didn't do the hit job.
He was in jail at the time of the murder. So if Becky was behind at all, who helped her?

Speaker 1 Jacob said there was another member of the family investigators should look at, Becky's son Chris, the young man with his own house.

Speaker 1 Jerry had been staying there before he was behind bars and said Chris also knew about Becky's affair and how desperate she was.

Speaker 25 She would call Christopher almost every night and cry and tell him stuff and he would get off the phone and I'm like is that your mom like yeah what's wrong with it you know what it is you know what's wrong

Speaker 25 like yeah I was like David again he's like yeah David again

Speaker 10 he's like

Speaker 1 she just needs Kay out of her life bad you know stuff like that now that was a shocker Investigators had had their eye on Becky's other son Michael from the get-go I was surprised to hear that way.

Speaker 4 I was expecting to hear that it was Michael, really.

Speaker 4 Because, you know, I've been learning so many things about Michael and his past and all of that.

Speaker 24 You had any discussions with Michael about Mike you've had with Christopher?

Speaker 25 Not like with Christopher, no.

Speaker 25 Never.

Speaker 25 Because me and Christopher are a little bit closer than me and Michael.

Speaker 26 Do you know if she

Speaker 24 ever talked to Michael about me?

Speaker 25 No, I don't.

Speaker 4 Have a seat right here for Michael. Still, Edmonds decided it was time to bring in Michael for a second round of questioning.
And this time, the investigator turned up the heat.

Speaker 26 Michael,

Speaker 20 it's over.

Speaker 26 Okay.

Speaker 24 I'm not playing games anymore.

Speaker 1 At first, Michael said he didn't even know that Becky and David were having an affair.

Speaker 24 I know about the affair with your mom and David.

Speaker 22 And my mom, don't play stupid with me.

Speaker 26 Don't play stupid with me.

Speaker 24 I'm telling you right now, it'll get ugly real quick. Okay?

Speaker 22 This is your one and only chance to get yourself out of a whole load of trouble.

Speaker 4 It gets pretty hot and heavy in that interview room.

Speaker 22 Listen to me.

Speaker 1 Listen to me.

Speaker 24 I know what's going on, okay?

Speaker 7 I know your mom wanted Kay dead.

Speaker 23 Okay? Do you want to go to prison for the rest of your life?

Speaker 20 Huh?

Speaker 23 You need to start talking here and now, okay?

Speaker 22 I didn't know what to do.

Speaker 22 I swear to you, bull.

Speaker 1 Then Edmonds moved on to the million-dollar question. Did Becky ever ask Michael to kill Kay?

Speaker 24 She has asked you specifically if you would kill Kay.

Speaker 22 No, she has not.

Speaker 23 I know it's your mother, and I know you want to protect your mother.

Speaker 20 Alright?

Speaker 22 You're 22 years old, right? Yes, sir.

Speaker 23 You might want to look out for number one right now, okay?

Speaker 22 She's never come to me and said, would you kill Kay for me?

Speaker 21 She's never said, would you kill someone for me?

Speaker 1 Even after a three-hour grilling.

Speaker 13 I will burn you, I am telling you.

Speaker 1 Michael never cracked.

Speaker 1 Edmonds had to face the fact that Michael was in all likelihood telling the truth. By then, they'd come to believe his alibi was solid.

Speaker 1 And they'd figured out that the glass from the crime scene that had so suspiciously turned up on Michael's shoes could be easily explained.

Speaker 1 Michael had gone to look at the smashed-in back door with a contractor just before police arrived.

Speaker 4 Did you have anything to do with that day?

Speaker 12 If I did, I wouldn't be sitting here.

Speaker 4 Did your mother ever ask you to go home, Kay?

Speaker 12 Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
The only thing she has ever done is just like anybody else, you know, riding on the road, somebody cut them off.

Speaker 30 Oh, wish you'd drive off the face of the cliff.

Speaker 12 That's the only thing I'd ever heard her saying about harming anybody.

Speaker 4 Did you think that your mother could possibly have done the thing that they were accusing her of?

Speaker 12 Nah. And I don't think she could do it.

Speaker 1 Jimmy Edmonds wasn't so sure, and he still had to wrestle with the vexing problem of Becky's shooting. Who was behind that and why?

Speaker 1 It was time to go talk to the object of Becky's affection, David, and find out what he knew.

Speaker 1 A guilty man or just a worried one?

Speaker 4 We get up and briefly walk out of the interview, and he starts talking to himself.

Speaker 20 Oh, man, they're not gonna bite me.

Speaker 1 For investigators in Grovetown, Georgia, it had been one wild story after another.

Speaker 1 Now they were hearing Becky orchestrated Kay's murder all for the love of Kay's husband, David. The next question was the logical one: What did the husband know?

Speaker 4 You obviously got to look at the husband. You know, she's having an affair with the husband, the wife's dead.

Speaker 4 You know, you got to look at the husband as well.

Speaker 1 Reporter Ashley Campbell said the community was thinking the same thing. And David being away in California at the time of Kay's murder didn't seem to absolve him.

Speaker 6 You know, oh, how convenient. He's in California and his wife is brutally beaten.
Did he hire somebody? We just don't know.

Speaker 1 Of course, David had been on Edmonds' radar from the moment investigators first met him outside Kay's hospital room and thought he was acting strange.

Speaker 4 I knew there was something there. I just

Speaker 4 couldn't figure out what yet.

Speaker 1 But after finding out about his affair with Becky and hearing that Becky could be behind the murder, Edmonds called David in for his first formal interview and got it on tape.

Speaker 19 What I need you to do is tell me about your relationship

Speaker 8 with Becky.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 1 David came clean. He admitted to being an unfaithful husband to Kay and explained how it all began.

Speaker 8 We would have been playing tennis, you know, working out before it was. We would go play.
It would actually be Becky and I against her and Tony one day.

Speaker 8 She said, you know why I suck so bad to tennis is because you distract me out there.

Speaker 8 You know, kind of, you know, a little flirt thing going on.

Speaker 1 A flirty game of mixed doubles that turned into a hot and heavy affair between next door neighbors.

Speaker 7 You were intimate with her in your home?

Speaker 8 Two times?

Speaker 19 Twice.

Speaker 17 Or with the other locations be?

Speaker 8 Most of the time in one of our two vehicles.

Speaker 8 at her mom's house.

Speaker 1 But David insisted he decided to end the affair. He told Becky it was over.

Speaker 8 We're like, look, this is getting too close. I want Kay to find out.

Speaker 8 You know, I'm done with it.

Speaker 8 You know, I'm done with it. You know,

Speaker 8 done seeing each other.

Speaker 1 At least that is until his young son, Derek, went off to college.

Speaker 8 Told her multiple times, and I did not,

Speaker 8 you know, I would not want the situation to change

Speaker 17 because of Derek.

Speaker 1 Right after David called it quits, one month before the murder, Becky decided to confess confess to her husband Tony, sending aftershocks across the lawn to Kay's house.

Speaker 17 But she told Tony everything.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 19 And Tony picked up the phone call with Kay. Yes.

Speaker 1 The secret was out.

Speaker 8 I know that hurt her so bad, and I apologize to her so much.

Speaker 8 She said

Speaker 8 she'd forgive me and we worked through it together. We were just going to move away from that and put it behind us and move on.

Speaker 4 She said, they're going to try to make it work. They're going to sell their house.
They immediately put a for for-sale sign in front of the house and they're going to move. You can be away from Becky.

Speaker 1 David told Edmonds an icy chill fell on Hot Springs Drive. Kay quit the job at Healing Hands and quit talking to Becky.
But that didn't stop David and Becky from continuing to communicate.

Speaker 4 They would still talk and they would still meet for five minutes here and there.

Speaker 1 David insisted it was all above board, nothing physical.

Speaker 8 Yeah, we did a little bit of email and talked on the phone, but I was, you know, just checking to see how how she was doing. And, you know, like I said.

Speaker 1 But as Edmund soon learned, that wasn't entirely true. As the interview continued, David revealed he called Becky from California the night before Kay was killed.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't just to ask how she was doing.

Speaker 8 Tuesday night, we had a long conversation

Speaker 17 about

Speaker 8 nothing in particular. We just talked for a little while about what was going on and then we got involved in

Speaker 8 getting your phone sex over the phone.

Speaker 4 This is the night before Kay is killed. The night before Kay is killed.
They're having phone sex for an hour.

Speaker 1 Then the next morning, right around the time of Kay's murder, David called Becky again, this time because he said he was worried about Kay.

Speaker 4 Is it weird that the husband should be calling the mistress? Oh, definitely. To check on this wife.
Asking her to look in on the wife?

Speaker 4 What's up with that? That's what I'm thinking. I mean, is he calling to say, hey, is it done? You know.
You got to wonder, right? Oh, definitely. Are these these two in cahoots? Most definitely.

Speaker 17 I just got to believe it.

Speaker 17 It's the last thing, so far from the last thing I wanted to take care of away from my son.

Speaker 17 Away from her family and all of her friends.

Speaker 1 Throughout the interview, David repeatedly denied having any involvement in Kay's murder or being a part of some plot to have her killed.

Speaker 8 Never once has there been any kind of insinuation. not even insinuating that I would ever want anything to happen to her.

Speaker 1 As for those repeated calls from California the morning of the murder, David insisted he was genuinely concerned about Kay.

Speaker 20 Is it normal

Speaker 19 for you to call her that early in the morning, call Kay at 7 in the morning?

Speaker 8 Always.

Speaker 8 So I always call her because I talked to Derek before he went to school. And I started getting worried, I thought maybe she's an accident or something out Columbia Road or something.

Speaker 1 Edmund started thinking David was telling the truth. So he changed course and asked David whether he thought Becky had it in her to mastermind Kay's murder.

Speaker 19 He's He's deep down inside.

Speaker 20 Do you think she could do this?

Speaker 8 I never thought that

Speaker 19 she would be able to

Speaker 8 argue straight or said something up like this.

Speaker 8 I did not think that.

Speaker 32 Desperate people do desperate things.

Speaker 15 Huh? She's desperate for what?

Speaker 20 You.

Speaker 8 You.

Speaker 26 To hurt my wife, kill my wife?

Speaker 8 To have my wife killed?

Speaker 8 I did not believe that.

Speaker 1 Edmonds kept pushing. Eventually, David revealed that more than once, he'd wondered just how desperate a housewife Becky had become.

Speaker 1 He told Edmonds a month before Kay's murder, someone sent bizarre texts to her that hinted of the affair. David now suspected those texts came from Becky.

Speaker 32 Did it ever run across your mind at that time that maybe the text messages were coming in because your timetable and Becky's timetable weren't the same?

Speaker 26 It crossed my mind.

Speaker 8 She was trying to let Kay know that she thought that if she found out that Kay would leave.

Speaker 1 David's interview went went on into the night.

Speaker 4 We get up and briefly walk out of the interview, and he's still in there, and it's still being recorded. And he starts talking to himself, you know, about what have I done.

Speaker 4 Oh, man, nobody's going to blame me.

Speaker 4 This cannot be real.

Speaker 1 But David's interview wasn't over yet. He had more to share, including a clue that would bring Edmonds and his team of investigators one step closer to the truth.

Speaker 1 Investigators learn more about another man in Becky's life.

Speaker 4 It was a real, real strange mother-son relationship. When his mother called, he would drop everything and go to mom.
Whatever she wanted, he was there.

Speaker 31 Hey, weirdos, I'm Elena and I'm Ash and we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.

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Speaker 31 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

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Speaker 1 After almost three and a half hours of questioning about his wife's murder, David Parsons sat alone and wept.

Speaker 17 So sorry, Derek.

Speaker 1 It wasn't the first time Edmonds heard tears coming from his interview room, but to this veteran cop, David's emotions seemed real.

Speaker 1 And in the end, Edmonds had no reason to believe that David played any role in a plot to kill Kay.

Speaker 4 We had no evidence whatsoever to prove that he knew or was involved in any of this.

Speaker 17 I really don't want to have to come back, you know,

Speaker 17 come back to you with something else that comes out that you haven't told me. You know what I'm saying? You can ask me anything.

Speaker 8 I don't know what else can you hear from me.

Speaker 19 I'm not trying to keep anything for you guys, I promise.

Speaker 1 Before Edmonds turned off his recorder, David did share one tidbit, something that linked up with what Becky's brother had told Edmonds earlier.

Speaker 1 It was the name of the other person Becky had confided in about her affair with David. Becky's son, Chris.

Speaker 8 I asked her who knew, you know, if anybody else knew, and she did tell me that Christopher knew that she was with somebody else. I don't know if that means anything or not.

Speaker 1 Sheriff's deputies spent a lot of their investigation looking at the relationships in Becky's life. First, her son, Michael, then David.

Speaker 1 But it was Becky's relationship to her other other son, Chris, that would prove to be the most intriguing.

Speaker 4 It was a real, real strange mother-son relationship. When his mother called, he would drop everything and go to mom.
Whatever she wanted,

Speaker 4 he was there.

Speaker 1 Becky, investigators discovered, doted on Chris and showered him with extravagant gifts. Money, a motorcycle, a car.
Nothing was too expensive for Chris. Not even the house he lived in.

Speaker 4 There's a house that was purchased by his mother. 18-year-old kid with his own house?

Speaker 4 That's kind of strange, you know. Was he a mama's boy?

Speaker 12 Well, I mean, I guess he was a mama's boy. You know, anything he needed, he got.

Speaker 1 But according to Michael, Becky's over-the-top generosity always seemed to come with strings attached.

Speaker 12 It was that, hey, I'm going to need something from you. Here's the keys to your new car.
Hey, I'm going to need something from you. Here's your house.
Hey, I'm going to need something from you.

Speaker 12 Here's an envelope full of money.

Speaker 1 And whatever Becky asked for, Chris would eagerly deliver.

Speaker 12 He said, it may be very hard for you to understand, but I would do anything in this world for our mother.

Speaker 1 Could anything have included killing his mother's romantic rival?

Speaker 1 Michelle Amerson, who knew the family well, says over the last several years, Chris had grown distant. She worried he was heading down a dark path.

Speaker 9 He had changed a lot, so we weren't around him a lot.

Speaker 4 When you say he changed a lot, Michelle, what are you thinking about?

Speaker 9 You know, I hate to say, but, you know, he just appeared to be in a different type of crowd than we were hanging with. So, you know, he might have had some issues going on.

Speaker 1 Remember, investigators did interview Chris right after the attack. They were looking for dirt on his brother Michael.

Speaker 7 Do you think your brother did this or do you think absolutely not?

Speaker 1 But something about Chris struck them as odd.

Speaker 4 Right from the get-go,

Speaker 4 we sit down with Christopher and he's trembling.

Speaker 7 You sitting here shaking like a dog trying to crap out for cinnamon seats. Okay.
I understand it's traumatic, but

Speaker 7 you're extremely over nervous.

Speaker 4 And immediately we asked him,

Speaker 4 what's wrong? Why are you shaking that bad?

Speaker 21 Honest to God, thank God Parkinson's.

Speaker 7 I've always shaken like this.

Speaker 4 Parkinson's is. He's like, Christopher, you're 19 years old.

Speaker 4 That makes no sense.

Speaker 4 It was a bizarre little detail they tucked away while they focused on other suspects.

Speaker 1 And when they went back over that interview, something jumped out.

Speaker 4 The only alibi Chris had for the time of the murder was Becky.

Speaker 7 You and your mom are at her work, which is Healing Hands.

Speaker 4 Christopher says that he didn't go to work at his regular job that morning. He was supposed to go to his mother's work.
She picked him up.

Speaker 1 So a conspiracy that morning between Becky and Chris seemed plausible, even if it didn't explain the later shooting at Healing Hands. Now Edmonds looked for a way to link Chris to the murder scene.

Speaker 1 And he got another helpful call from Becky's brother, Jerry Jacobs, in jail. They had shown Jerry photos of the murder weapon before.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 You can say you've seen. Right.

Speaker 25 I mean, it's brand new.

Speaker 1 Then, in a follow-up interview, Jacobs came back and told investigators he recognized the hammer. He said it came from Becky's garage, a place Chris often went to borrow tools.

Speaker 25 I've seen the hammer. In the toolbox, in the garage.

Speaker 35 What toolbox? Where were we talking about?

Speaker 25 In my sister's garage.

Speaker 1 Sheriff's deputies found Chris in front of the home Becky had bought for him, packing his truck for a weekend getaway.

Speaker 4 They asked, what's going on? No. Didn't really say anything.
Put him in a car. We'd take him up to our office and put him in the interview room.

Speaker 35 Everything's not happening the way you said it happened, so I want you to really think long hard.

Speaker 35 I'm telling you, you're a young man.

Speaker 4 Right now.

Speaker 4 Basically, you just call me a liar.

Speaker 1 Chris, no longer shaking, defiantly asked for a lawyer.

Speaker 12 I won't speak to a lawyer right now.

Speaker 4 As soon as we read him his rights, he clammed up. So he's lawyered up, Chris.
He's lawyered up.

Speaker 1 For Investigator Edmonds, the puzzle pieces had finally fallen into place. Becky had the motive to kill Kay, and Chris, with his devotion to his mother and access to the murder weapon, was her means.

Speaker 35 Word now, stand up. Please need behind you back.

Speaker 35 You're under arrest for murder.

Speaker 4 Chris would do anything for his mom, and she knew it. Including kill the lady next door.
And he did.

Speaker 1 And the woman behind it all, they arrested her and charged her with murder as well.

Speaker 4 Where did you take down Becky? She was staying at a hotel at a holiday inn. We took her down in the hotel room.

Speaker 1 Tamara Baldwin could not begin to comprehend the news of their arrests.

Speaker 4 The Becky with the murderous plot and the Becky you knew from

Speaker 4 sports games and on your cruise and backyard get-togethers. How do you put those two halves of Becky together?

Speaker 3 You can't put them together. It's like a square and a circle trying to fit together.
I didn't see the square.

Speaker 4 All I saw was the circle.

Speaker 1 It didn't make sense to Tamara, and it didn't make sense to Becky and Chris's defense attorneys either, as they saw the state's case was riddled with reasonable doubt.

Speaker 4 What was the weakest part about it?

Speaker 36 The weakest part about it was the lack of physical evidence connecting them to the crime, putting them in that house.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 And they were just itching to get into the courtroom to try to tear apart the state's case.

Speaker 1 If, as prosecutors allege, Becky plotted to kill Kay, then who shot Becky?

Speaker 4 He was the guy in the bushes. He was the guy in the bushes with the gun.

Speaker 1 Becky Sears and her son Chris had been charged with the murder of Becky's neighbor and romantic rival, Kay Parsons. And they'd hired a pair of veteran attorneys to prepare a vigorous defense.

Speaker 37 It was a tough situation.

Speaker 1 Brothers Vic and Jacques Call saw a prosecution case full of titillating soapy drama.

Speaker 1 But when they started looking at the actual evidence, they were unimpressed. No forensics linked their clients to the murder.

Speaker 30 You think about it,

Speaker 38 they did all kinds of

Speaker 36 CSI type of testing within the house. Nothing connected either Becky Sears or Chris to the offense.

Speaker 1 No DNA, no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses. And that one hair recovered from under Kay's fingernails didn't match either one.

Speaker 1 The crime, they said, looked like a botched burglary, not a premeditated plot.

Speaker 37 You think about it, if you're going to go commit a murder, you know, what are you going to pick? You're going to pick a gun? You're going to pick a knife?

Speaker 37 You're going to pick some sort of weapon that you can dispense with somebody fairly quickly. Okay, what are we going to do this murder with? Let's get a hammer and a bat.
That seems crazy.

Speaker 4 How'd you feel about your case, Jacques? Oh, I felt great.

Speaker 37 I felt like this was a very winnable case.

Speaker 1 They did what lawyers do. They went through the case file, pestered the state to turn over evidence, and then they saw it, and it was devastating.

Speaker 38 It made it much more difficult.

Speaker 19 Yes. That was the data.

Speaker 1 The piece of evidence in the case file was a recorded interview with Becky, a surprise to the defense.

Speaker 37 I mean, I was floored because I was under the impression that she had made a statement.

Speaker 37 And then we find out not only was it a statement, it was a five-hour statement and with every kind of detail that messed the case up.

Speaker 1 Right after her arrest, Becky had spoken, and what a story she had to tell. She began by insisting her relationship with Kay's husband was over.

Speaker 39 David was going to make his marriage work, and I was going gonna make my marriage work. I don't love him anymore.
I love my husband and my husband and I are trying to make our marriage work out.

Speaker 1 But she admitted she did talk with David on the night before Kay's murder.

Speaker 19 What'd you tell?

Speaker 9 We talked about ball games, the kids, and

Speaker 39 sex over the phone. Which is something that I mean we had never done that before and I don't even know how it ended up that way, but she basically had phone sex.

Speaker 26 I guess that's what you call it.

Speaker 4 Did you ask her bluntly, did you kill Kay or did you cause her death? We did.

Speaker 4 She denied it.

Speaker 1 But other details came spilling out when investigators challenged her.

Speaker 19 You have asked people, more than one person, on more than one occasion, to kill her.

Speaker 39 I have never asked anybody to kill her. The only thing I have ever done is say,

Speaker 39 well, I take that back. I did say to my brother one time, I wish that she was just gone.

Speaker 4 So she admits to wanting to have Kay gone. She does, but she doesn't say that she's the...

Speaker 4 No, she says she's the person that does it. Right.

Speaker 1 And as she kept talking, she admitted she wasn't quite so vague about her wishing ill on Kay. Her story started changing slightly.
Maybe she did talk to her brother about hiring a hitman.

Speaker 39 I was upset one day and my brother came over to my office and I was like, you don't know anybody that'll take anybody. And I didn't even say Kay.

Speaker 39 I just said, you don't know anybody that'll take anybody out, do you?

Speaker 19 That you were talking about Kay.

Speaker 39 I was.

Speaker 1 Then came another revelation, this one about her son.

Speaker 4 She starts telling us that she knew that whatever she was saying, that

Speaker 4 she wanted Kay gone and that would make her happy, that Christopher was listening and that she knew what he wanted to do was make her happy.

Speaker 1 Becky began pinning it all on Chris.

Speaker 4 Turning on her boy. On her own son.

Speaker 1 She admitted that on the morning of the murder, she picked up Chris and drove him to her house on Hot Springs Drive. She just hedged a bit on the reason.

Speaker 39 The implied reason was he was going to go next door.

Speaker 7 To Kay's house to do what?

Speaker 39 We didn't talk about it. It was an implied reason he was going to go to Kay's house because he was going in his mind to do whatever it took to make me happy.
And that would be to get rid of Kay.

Speaker 4 So she's the puppeteer putting all of these things in place for him to be tempted and act on it? She's pulling all the strings.

Speaker 4 I'm not saying do this, but you and I both know what you're supposed to do here. Yes.

Speaker 1 In her interview, Becky continued to insist she didn't know what happened in Kay's house. That is, not until Chris called her later that morning and asked for another ride.

Speaker 23 When he got in the vehicle, could you see blood on his clothes and stuff?

Speaker 39 I didn't see any blood on his clothes, but he had blood on his, I think he had blood on his face, and I asked him, what did he do?

Speaker 39 I said, oh my God, what did you do?

Speaker 39 And that's when he said he beat the f ⁇ of her. And I said, Christopher, please tell me that she is okay.

Speaker 39 Please tell me that you did not do this.

Speaker 18 And what did he say?

Speaker 39 He said, I beat the f ⁇ of her.

Speaker 4 She's giving up her son as a killer here.

Speaker 4 She's throwing him under the bus. This is extraordinary.
It is. Do you realize how extraordinary it is as you're taking the story down? Oh, yes.
So she's groomed him as her little killer?

Speaker 4 Most definitely.

Speaker 4 He was her little monster.

Speaker 39 I messed up because I made Christopher think that I wanted him to do something that was horrible when I didn't want him to hurt anybody. And I made him think that I did.

Speaker 39 And he was convinced that he was helping me.

Speaker 1 Becky told investigators that Chris got rid of his bloody clothes, stuffed them in his backpack, and she drove him back to her office.

Speaker 1 And then they later showed up together at the crime scene, pretending to know nothing, but alarmed that Kay was still clinging to life.

Speaker 39 We had a conversation that Christopher and I had was at the hospital when I talked to him.

Speaker 27 And I was crying and he said, not to worry about it, then everything's going to be okay. And I told him I didn't know what to do to help him.

Speaker 27 He said I didn't need to do anything, that he was going to take care of everything.

Speaker 39 And I told him i was scared

Speaker 1 after that becky said she and chris worked together to throw investigators off the trail which meant that shooting at healing hands was a total setup it was christer he was the guy in the bushes he was the guy in the bushes with the gun chris had shot his own mother a roost to throw off the cops and a bumbling one at that becky said their plan was for chris to shoot and miss

Speaker 39 He didn't mean to shoot me. He was just going to shoot at me to scare me, for me to say that somebody chased after me wanting money.

Speaker 17 Your own son.

Speaker 39 He didn't mean to.

Speaker 1 Becky Sears had told investigators quite a story in a version that showed her slightly less culpable than Chris.

Speaker 1 The legal fight now had shifted to mother against son, and Becky had one more card left to play.

Speaker 1 It's the question everyone was asking: Who is this woman?

Speaker 4 Evil.

Speaker 1 Becky Sears and her son Chris were both facing the death penalty for conspiring to murder Kay Parsons. But their attorneys, Vic and Jacques Hawk, suddenly had a colossal problem on their hands.

Speaker 39 I couldn't want him to hurt anybody.

Speaker 1 Becky's all but a confession on tape. Vic represented Becky and Jacques represented Chris.
Facing this tough new set of facts, the brothers decided to sever their cases.

Speaker 1 Mother would now be pitted against son in two separate trials.

Speaker 37 I didn't have any question in my mind that his mom would testify against him if it benefited his mom.

Speaker 4 And Chris is going to go to trial first here? Yes. Does it make a difference in the scheme of things?

Speaker 37 Well, I think it puts pressure on her because then that gives him some reason to maybe, if he is hit with a significant sentence death penalty whatever a good bit of impetus to come and testify against his mama the state still didn't have any physical evidence against Chris but that was about to change I get a message that a box of bloody clothes and shoes been turned over Becky had an 11th hour reveal She told authorities where to find the clothes Chris wore during the murder.

Speaker 1 She'd stashed them in her mother's attic. Turning them over was a play to get herself a better deal.

Speaker 4 So she can do herself some good and get the death penalty off the table?

Speaker 36 I think that's the obvious.

Speaker 4 What'd you see when you opened it? Saw the backpack.

Speaker 4 Black backpack, just like she described. We found the jewelry taken from the Parsons' home.
We found the jewelry taken from the Sears' home. It was all there.
Signed, sealed, and delivered.

Speaker 4 That was it. There was nothing else to do.
Say goodnight. There was nothing else to do.
No, not at all.

Speaker 1 There would be no trial now. Instead, a plea agreement in May 2012.
Becky Sears and her son Chris Bowers pleaded guilty to murdering Kay Parsons. They were spared the death penalty.

Speaker 1 But in the end, Becky didn't get a better deal than Chris. The judge sentenced them both to life in prison without parole.

Speaker 1 Becky appeared in court that day, looking hardly like the well-put-together suburban mom from days past.

Speaker 4 Do you remember seeing Becky on the news when she came to court?

Speaker 3 I did.

Speaker 4 What did you think?

Speaker 3 I was like, wow, I understand why she was going to Weight Watchers.

Speaker 3 She had gained so much weight and, you know, really no remorse either.

Speaker 1 Even her defense attorney, who withdrew from the case before that plea deal, said he could not fathom the taboos broken in this case, the families ripped apart.

Speaker 36 She's turned the mother-son relationship upside down. No mother would do what she's done.

Speaker 38 No

Speaker 38 real mother.

Speaker 38 And to have turned on her own son, that says more than anything else about

Speaker 36 Becky's ears.

Speaker 1 And even as she headed off to prison, this saga wasn't over yet. Her old boss at Healing Hands says that while she was working for him, Becky had her hands in the till.

Speaker 4 How much money, Jürgen?

Speaker 10 About $250,000.

Speaker 4 Was stolen by Becky from your Healing Hands account. Yeah.
So nice, friendly, gregarious Becky out front has been stealing from you with both hands.

Speaker 4 I'm guessing she was your best-paid employee and you had no idea.

Speaker 10 And you would guess right.

Speaker 4 That's before you even get to the whole other thing of the business with Kay.

Speaker 4 So who is this woman?

Speaker 4 Evil.

Speaker 1 Becky was never charged with the theft. The DA says they had the evidence, but with her guilty plea and life sentence, it all became a moot issue.

Speaker 1 And remember how Michael was blamed for stealing checks from Healing Hands? He told us what really happened.

Speaker 4 It wasn't me, that was my mother. She blamed you and you took the heat, huh?

Speaker 12 Yeah, she basically told me, hey,

Speaker 12 if I didn't do that for, you know, all the money she was making,

Speaker 12 she couldn't make it no more.

Speaker 4 But you had nothing to do with it. Nope.

Speaker 4 Sure didn't.

Speaker 4 It's been years since he spent all that time in the interrogation room, taking the heat for his mother and brother's crimes. Michael told us he still has nightmares about it all.

Speaker 12 I'm torn up inside.

Speaker 4 You're still part of the wreckage of this whole deal.

Speaker 4 Have you talked to or seen your mother since? No.

Speaker 4 I sure haven't. Sure haven't.
Do you want to?

Speaker 4 Do you have questions for her?

Speaker 12 I do. I sure do.

Speaker 4 She's sitting here. What do you ask her? What do I ask her? I would like to ask her what happened.

Speaker 12 You know, what happened to the mother I had, you know.

Speaker 1 Until then, Michael is trying to focus on the future. And his family friend, Michelle Amerson, says she's there to help him.

Speaker 4 You're still kind of a second mom for Michael. Yes.
How's he doing, in your opinion, Michelle?

Speaker 9 Michael's doing better. You know, we

Speaker 9 have had a lot of heartache over his loss and, you know, what he's been through, but he's a trooper and he has a lot of people standing behind him.

Speaker 1 Becky Sears and her husband, Tony, are now divorced.

Speaker 4 And Kay's husband, David, he's remarried and moved away away from the house where it all happened. Derek, just 12 years old when he lost his mom, is now serving in the Marine Corps.

Speaker 4 It's been more than a decade since Kay's death. For her friends, it seems like yesterday.
What were your last words to her? And you know, they're never going to be the last words.

Speaker 4 They were.

Speaker 14 I said, I'm sorry.

Speaker 14 I said, you know, I love you, girl. And she says, I know.

Speaker 4 I know.

Speaker 14 And I said, I'll talk to you later.

Speaker 4 And that was it.

Speaker 1 Grovetown quietly bustles along with few traces of the tragedy that happened on Hot Springs Drive. But Tamara says that for her, Kay's spirit is still there, right down the street.

Speaker 4 Do you offer up a little prayer to Kay when you drive by her place?

Speaker 3 Of course, and also to Derek.

Speaker 3 It has to be hard on him.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 always, always pray to make sure that he knows that even though his mother's not there, she loved him more than anything.

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