Indiscretion

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Speaker 3 I'm getting ready to leave the house, and the phone rings.

Speaker 3 You could see the area where Heidi was.

Speaker 3 I was lost for words. Just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 4 A vibrant young woman stalked by a killer.

Speaker 7 I cringe every time I think about it.

Speaker 4 Found dead by her boyfriend.

Speaker 3 My brother was just a mess. He was devastated.

Speaker 4 The most ominous clue?

Speaker 8 Up on the wall to the left of where Heidi's body was was a number one.

Speaker 9 She's number one and get ready.

Speaker 10 Right. Here comes trouble, huh?

Speaker 8 Exactly.

Speaker 4 It wasn't a break-in. The windows, the door, nothing was broken.
Did the killer have a key?

Speaker 12 The question question always was, how did the person get into the house?

Speaker 4 A decade later, in a state 1,500 miles away, detectives finally found their answer.

Speaker 8 Got a DNA hit.

Speaker 4 And more questions.

Speaker 8 We knew there was more to this story than just some guy coming from Colorado to commit a murder and go back home again.

Speaker 4 Did someone closer to home want her dead?

Speaker 14 You're 99% sure that he had something to do with it, but there's no smoking gun.

Speaker 4 So many secrets still to be revealed.

Speaker 15 I know more about this than I said.

Speaker 4 And one more killer still on the run.

Speaker 8 He knew what was in that house. He knew what he was doing.

Speaker 8 Didn't get any worse than that.

Speaker 1 I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline.

Speaker 4 Here's Dennis Murphy with Indiscretion.

Speaker 13 She was a bubbly woman in her early 20s, just looking for a clean break.

Speaker 13 Heidi Bernadzikowski, a Baltimore Pool League ace, had in recent years endured some tough times. But now the shots were starting to drop.

Speaker 13 A steady job as a receptionist, a boyfriend she could take to meet the parents. Talk even of a summer wedding in Las Vegas.
And then it was game over for Heidi.

Speaker 5 Just like that.

Speaker 13 Someone had made their way into her row house on a Thursday night in April back in the year 2000 and killed her in most brutal fashion.

Speaker 16 Baltimore County, 911. My girlfriend's been murdered.

Speaker 17 What happened? Was she shot? Her throat is

Speaker 19 cut.

Speaker 16 Her throat's throat's cut.

Speaker 14 Any parent opens a door at 6 a.m. There's two cops standing there.

Speaker 14 You know that's not good.

Speaker 13 It was a murder case that wasn't going to be solved in a few hours or a few weeks or even a dozen years.

Speaker 13 The Heidi murder investigation would go stone cold until one day, in a matter of hours, really, everything became clear. And how strange and terrifying it all turned out to be.

Speaker 13 When Donna and Walter Bernadzikowski met at a church social, talk of a family even preceded the engagement ring.

Speaker 20 He used to scare the girls away by saying that he wanted 12 children. And I said, well, I always thought I wanted to have 12 children.
He says, oh my God.

Speaker 13 They didn't have 12, but this devout Roman Catholic couple did raise their five in a Baltimore, Maryland suburb. Heidi, the only girl in a sea of brothers.

Speaker 19 When I hear that, I think, poor Heidi.

Speaker 20 Yep.

Speaker 5 Growing up with all those boys.

Speaker 20 Well, and we had friends that used to say to us, oh, she must be treated like a princess. And I said, are you kidding me?

Speaker 20 She had to be just about as tough as they were.

Speaker 21 She kept them in their place, too. I mean.

Speaker 20 She wasn't treated like she was a little princess, that's for sure.

Speaker 13 Heidi grew up to be a happy, outgoing, athletic girl, surrounded by friends. It was a noisy, loving family with strict rules.
Everyone at the table for dinner, mass on Sunday, and no back talk.

Speaker 13 Heidi's brothers, Frank and Harold.

Speaker 5 True that your mom was known to wash out a potty mouth with a bar of soap, or was that

Speaker 22 metaphor?

Speaker 13 I got it. Did you?

Speaker 23 True.

Speaker 7 Yep. Yeah, they were very strict and, you know, definitely had a bar of soap from time to time.

Speaker 13 As she grew into her late teens, Heidi started to bristle under her parents' strict house rules. By 19, she, the next to youngest, became the first to leave the family nest.

Speaker 13 But the grass wasn't greener. Right away, reality offered up a deadbeat roommate and a succession of low-paying jobs that evaporated like the morning dew.

Speaker 13 And yet she could always count on her girlfriends to buoy her up. And it was one night with her BFF's shooting pool, she caught the eye of a guy holding a cue stick.
It was Stephen Cook.

Speaker 3 They were shooting against one another and he noticed Heidi in the bar.

Speaker 13 Kim is Stephen Cook's sister.

Speaker 3 The first night they actually went home together and three days later they moved in together.

Speaker 18 So it was

Speaker 3 really fast.

Speaker 13 Stephen was five years older than Heidi. His sister says he could be quiet and shy, but always wanted to be around Heidi.

Speaker 16 They did everything together.

Speaker 3 I don't think that they really did much much without each other.

Speaker 13 In 1998, Stephen and Heidi moved to this rental townhouse in Dundalk, Maryland.

Speaker 13 Stephen's dad, Steve Sr., says after living together for nearly two years, the couple was talking about taking the next step.

Speaker 5 Was it your understanding, Steve, they were going to get itched?

Speaker 6 Yes, in Vegas. Every time I talked to him, that was their plans.
It never changed. He loved her.

Speaker 13 The timing seemed good. Heidi had just gotten a promotion at the insurance company where she worked.
She was finally a nine to fiver after years of temping.

Speaker 14 She was just getting started or getting settled into a niche when things happened.

Speaker 13 Strange things that rattled Heidi. In April of that year, it appeared someone was trying to break into their townhouse.
There was chipping around a lock on their basement door.

Speaker 22 Looked like the doors had been monkeyed with.

Speaker 20 Yes.

Speaker 13 And not long after that discovery of mischief on the locks, a stranger knocked on the front door one night, saying he was forming a neighborhood block watch.

Speaker 13 He scared Heidi so much that she told her friends and described the stranger as African-American with a tattoo.

Speaker 13 Stephen demanded new locks and keys from the townhouse management. They were installed on April 19, 2000.
The very next evening was when it happened.

Speaker 13 An officer dispatched to their home saw Heidi on the living room floor. Her boyfriend leaned up against the wall, cradling her and crying uncontrollably.

Speaker 13 It appeared she'd been strangled, her throat so severely slashed that her blood had dripped through to the basement. And there was something else, something Manson-esque.

Speaker 13 Scrawled on the wall in red lipstick above Heidi's body was the number one.

Speaker 4 When we come back, was a killer keeping track of his victims.

Speaker 9 She's number one and get ready, guys.

Speaker 10 Here comes trouble, huh?

Speaker 8 Exactly.

Speaker 8 And a possible suspect i'm thinking maybe this is our guy butcher heidi's killed with a knife

Speaker 13 A female police officer was the first on the awful scene.

Speaker 8 She's seeing Stephen Cook holding Heidi up against the wall. The wrapping, you know, he's got her wrapped in his arms.

Speaker 13 Stephen Cook, Heidi Bernadzikowski's live-in boyfriend of nearly two years, told the arriving officer that he came home that night only to find an apparently lifeless Heidi in their living room.

Speaker 13 Nonetheless, he says he tried CPR. At 8.58 p.m., he'd called 911.

Speaker 17 Are you sending somebody?

Speaker 17 They're on the way, sir.

Speaker 17 I want you to stay with me. No, no, I can't stay with you.
I got to go with her.

Speaker 24 No, we're in the house.

Speaker 13 Baltimore County homicide detectives Al Meyer and Gary Childs arrived later that night. It appeared to them Heidi had been strangled.

Speaker 13 It was obvious her throat had been deeply cut with something sharp-edged, probably a knife.

Speaker 5 When you go to a scene like that, Detective, does it speak to you? Does it explain itself about what happened here?

Speaker 8 Well, it was kind of an odd scene. In the living room of the house, there was no real furniture to speak of.

Speaker 8 Up on the wall to the left of where Heidi's body was

Speaker 8 was a number one written on the wall. So found that obviously to be odd.

Speaker 9 She's number one and

Speaker 10 get ready because here comes trouble, huh?

Speaker 8 Exactly.

Speaker 13 Those first few hours left investigators wondering, was this the first signature of a budding serial killer? Was there going to be a number two? Or was it something else?

Speaker 8 The house was tossed, you know, ransacked. You've got a potential motive of burglary, and you've got the other motive on the wall of a serial murder.

Speaker 13 20 miles away, Walter and Donna Bernadzikowski got a knock on the door at their Severna Park, Maryland home. It was the police.

Speaker 20 He says, you have a daughter, Heidi, and yes, you know.

Speaker 20 And I said, you know, what's the matter? You know, she's been in an accident. What, you know, what's going on? And he said, Heidi's dead.

Speaker 21 It is, you know, quite a shock. And I started pincing myself.
I got to wake up from this dream. This has got to be a dream, you know.

Speaker 24 I think our whole world just

Speaker 21 changed.

Speaker 13 A short time later, Stephen's sister, Kim, got a knock, too.

Speaker 3 I remember running to the bathroom and getting sick, and I was kind of, I couldn't, I couldn't do anything.

Speaker 13 Heidi's boyfriend, Stephen, meanwhile, had been down at a police station the whole time being interviewed. Officers snapped this picture.

Speaker 13 His clothes bloodied, he said, from trying to perform CPR CPR and then cradling Heidi's bleeding body.

Speaker 5 Now, how much did you know about him or the victim by that point?

Speaker 8 Not really a lot. We just knew they were in a relationship and the relationship was good.

Speaker 13 Husbands and boyfriends are always persons of interest, but homicide investigators say Stephen was cooperative.

Speaker 13 He told them how, after his shift ended at a local Lowe's, he picked up Heidi from her job in the car they shared, a 1994 Red Honda Civic.

Speaker 13 It was 5.45 p.m., he thought, when he dropped her her off at their home.

Speaker 13 It was, he said, the last time he saw her alive.

Speaker 13 The detectives put together a timeline for the boyfriend, who'd run a bunch of errands after dropping Heidi off.

Speaker 13 A stop at the ATM, followed by a haircut, an oil change at a Jiffy Lube, and then a swing-by Home Depot for a plumbing piece needed to repair his sister's sink that night.

Speaker 13 He had time-stamped receipts for virtually everything and turned them over to the police.

Speaker 5 He's got a very solid alibi for his whereabouts from the time he left work until he picks up the phone and calls 911.

Speaker 8 He does. I mean, but you still have to take in account.

Speaker 8 You know, it doesn't take long to do what had been done.

Speaker 8 You know, she's strangled and her throat is slit.

Speaker 8 You know, that could happen in a matter of seconds.

Speaker 13 After about six hours of police questioning, Stephen went home.

Speaker 13 His sister remembers him being a wreck.

Speaker 3 I could certainly tell my brother was just a mess. He was devastated.
I could see in his face that he was, just looking at him, that he's been crying.

Speaker 13 In the days that followed, Al Meyer and other investigators felt a serial killer unlikely. The robbery gone bad theory too, because there were no signs of a forced entry.

Speaker 13 But DNA was found under Heidi's fingernails, presumably from her killer. Their hopes were soon dashed, however, when the sample turned out to be virtually useless.
Detective Gary Childs.

Speaker 12 You had a mixture of DNA from the victim and you had a mixture of the DNA from the suspect. And the technology in those times you couldn't separate it.

Speaker 13 But Detective Meyer did have one suspect he was very interested in finding. That suspicious neighborhood block watch person, the dark-skinned man with the tattoo who'd scared Heidi at her front door.

Speaker 13 And one person of interest was a local butcher.

Speaker 13 Terry Gilliam worked with Stephen's sister at a safe way just miles from Heidi's house.

Speaker 8 I'm thinking, okay, he's African-American. So I'm thinking maybe this is our guy.
Butcher, Heidi's killed with a knife.

Speaker 13 Investigators theorized a connection through Stephen's sister.

Speaker 5 They're looking for somebody that comes to the door.

Speaker 1 Did you ever go to Heidi's door and knock on the door?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 19 Saying you're from the Blockwatch Association?

Speaker 25 No. Actually, I don't even know where Heidi lived at.

Speaker 25 No, never knocked on her door.

Speaker 13 But the cops wouldn't just accept the butcher's denials and be done with him. There were other reasons to dig deeper, they thought, including an irregularity on his work time card.

Speaker 13 A time had been changed on one specific day.

Speaker 8 It's the day of the murder. One of his times is handwritten in.

Speaker 9 So the only day of the month.

Speaker 5 Everything else is machines.

Speaker 8 Now I have him not being able to account for himself the day of the murder.

Speaker 13 And there was something else. Heidi herself had said the suspicious block watch person had a tattoo on his left arm.

Speaker 5 Do you have a tattoo on your arm?

Speaker 25 Yes, I do.

Speaker 5 On your left arm? Yes. Terry, let me ask you now.

Speaker 5 Did you kill Heidi?

Speaker 25 Definitely not.

Speaker 13 Officials weren't done yet with the butcher, and Heidi's boyfriend, Stephen Cook, remained a suspect, too, despite his receipt-heavy alibi.

Speaker 5 A lot of time starts to go by, doesn't it?

Speaker 20 Too much.

Speaker 13 At first, months go by, then years, more than a decade, no arrests. But there would be one advantage to the passage of time, breakthroughs in DNA technology, and it finally gave police a suspect.

Speaker 5 Who it was shocked everyone.

Speaker 13 Coming up.

Speaker 4 It's always the husband or the boyfriend, right? But that didn't seem to be where this investigation was going.

Speaker 13 The headline here is Stephen Cook is not the guy. Right.

Speaker 4 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 13 As the years rolled by, the Heidi Bernadzikowski murder case got colder and colder. Detective Almayer was frustrated.
He was promoted out of homicide, but he never forgot the case.

Speaker 12 Even when he was in another unit, he would come back up to the homicide unit and go through the file.

Speaker 5 Never got squirreled away, huh?

Speaker 18 No.

Speaker 18 No, never.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he never let it go.

Speaker 13 Heidi's grieving family was trying to get on with their lives, remembering her on her birthday by eating her favorite shrimp alfredo. But family events were hardly the same.

Speaker 7 You couldn't fully enjoy these special occasions because you're always painfully aware that you had an empty chair. You got an empty chair, that she should be there and she's not there.

Speaker 13 Heidi's boyfriend Stephen Cook was trying to move on with his life as well. He married, had a child, and landed a steady job with Veterans Affairs.

Speaker 5 He's got a normal life for the first time in a long while, huh?

Speaker 3 He does. Things are looking pretty good for him.

Speaker 13 Then in 2011, 11 years after Heidi's murder, Meyer rejoined the homicide unit and once again cracked the file. This time he and veteran Baltimore County Detective Gary Childs got an idea.

Speaker 12 DNA technology had progressed and we knew now that there's a possibility that

Speaker 12 Heidi's fingernails may contain some physical evidence.

Speaker 5 So what's the thought? Let's run it again, see what happens.

Speaker 12 Yeah, the thought was to resubmit.

Speaker 13 To their surprise, the criminal database spit out a match.

Speaker 8 Got a DNA hit. I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 13 But the hit wasn't for anyone in Heidi's known circle, even in her geography.

Speaker 13 It was a name completely off the radar from a state over 1,500 miles away.

Speaker 8 They tell me it's this guy, Alexander Bennett, from Colorado.

Speaker 18 Colorado?

Speaker 8 I'm like, wow, that's not good. I'm hoping it's going to be somebody from Baltimore, somebody that would be local.

Speaker 13 Did that name mean anything in Heidi's circle?

Speaker 18 Alexander Bennett from Colorado?

Speaker 11 Never heard of him before.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 Baffled detectives started to dig. They called the Colorado authorities and learned Bennett was an unlikely suspected killer.

Speaker 13 In his early years, he showed promise as an opera singer.

Speaker 13 Performing recitals and winning a scholarship to the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. After moving back to Colorado, though, he'd gotten into some small-time trouble.

Speaker 13 But then he did something just plain crazy.

Speaker 12 He's a pretty talented guy, but he had some issues with some people he hung with. And one of these issues was with a friend of his named Grant Lewis.

Speaker 13 In 2003, Bennett and Grant Lewis had been arrested in a deucey of a scheme. They'd called 911 and said that a friend of Bennett's wanted to bomb the courthouse.

Speaker 13 But they went further, building a real bomb bomb and planting it in his house. The bomb squad was dispatched and that friend hauled down to the station for an interview.

Speaker 12 They're growing them pretty hard because it's kind of serious crimes. One of the detectives ultimately lets him listen to the 911 call and he recognizes Grant Lewis's voice.

Speaker 5 So it's not all muffled or disgusted. No.

Speaker 22 Normal.

Speaker 18 That's Grant Lewis, I know. Yes.

Speaker 13 Within days, Lewis and Bennett confessed to the whole thing.

Speaker 19 Building the bomb, breaking into the house, even uploading bomb-related materials to the buddy's computer to ensure he'd be arrested.

Speaker 19 Also, that friend who Bennett said beat him up would notice that they'd made off with his Jeep.

Speaker 5 So it's all a hoax, this elaborate caper to plant an explosive device in order to get him out of the house so they can steal the car?

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 19 My word is hairbrained.

Speaker 5 What's yours?

Speaker 1 Yeah, double hairbrain.

Speaker 13 Alexander Bennett was sent to prison and required to give DNA. Now, years later, that DNA was tying him to Heidi's murder back east in Maryland.

Speaker 16 For Baltimore prosecutors Garrett Glennon and Matt Browe, the DNA was an enticing lead, but far from definitive proof.

Speaker 26 It was enough to say, it looks like it came from him, you know, but we can't say it's definitively his. So there was more investigation to do.

Speaker 13 So the detectives went to work looking for another connection between Colorado native Alexander Bennett and the Maryland murder.

Speaker 13 All the usual computer searches failed, but when Sergeant Meyer had the Maryland State Police mine an offline database...

Speaker 8 I get this phone call from the trooper and he tells me, he said, I got Alexander Bennett,

Speaker 8 somebody running a wanted check on him March 30th of 2000.

Speaker 5 A Maryland officer. In Maryland.

Speaker 8 I think, holy cow.

Speaker 13 Three weeks before Heidi's murder, an officer had spotted Alexander Bennett walking down a Baltimore highway.

Speaker 11 When a wanted check is run by a patrolman or officer, that check remains in the computer forever.

Speaker 18 How important was that?

Speaker 1 Incredibly important.

Speaker 13 Detectives Meyer and Childs hopped a flight to Denver. It was time to meet this Alexander Bennett.

Speaker 13 Coming up,

Speaker 1 a suspect's story.

Speaker 4 A surprise to even these experienced detectives.

Speaker 18 I tell you, that's strange.

Speaker 8 That's why

Speaker 27 it is strange.

Speaker 13 In January 2012, two Baltimore County detectives flew to Denver, Colorado.

Speaker 13 Their mission to track down Alexander Bennett, the man whose DNA had been tied to Heidi Bernadzikowski's murder 11 years after the fact.

Speaker 12 His DNA is a good piece of evidence, but we want to find out if Alexander Bennett is really a part of this.

Speaker 13 A day after their plane was wheels down, Detective Childs was face to face with their target.

Speaker 13 At first, the detective kept it vague, trying to confirm that Bennett had indeed been in Baltimore at the time of the murder, the year 2000. Bennett said he was.

Speaker 13 He'd spent about a month on the streets there after being ditched by some friends on their way to a concert.

Speaker 29 I gotta tell you, that's strange.

Speaker 30 That's why

Speaker 27 it is strange.

Speaker 29 Real strange.

Speaker 29 You did not remember anybody you stayed with or hooked up with.

Speaker 13 Then the detective played his hand, laid out the reason for his visit.

Speaker 29 This girl's fingernails were taken at the time of her death.

Speaker 12 And under their fingernails is your DNA. Now, there's no denying it.

Speaker 13 But Bennett did have an explanation.

Speaker 13 And it had nothing to do with committing murder in a house.

Speaker 12 He remembers a confrontation that he had in a bus stop with a female in Maryland, in Baltimore, right around the time of the murder.

Speaker 27 I got kind of scared because,

Speaker 27 you know, I was trying to fight back and I think I heard her.

Speaker 21 I'm not sure.

Speaker 13 The detective didn't buy it and thought he'd use Bennett's story to his advantage. He presented Bennett with several photographs, a technique police typically use to help identify criminals.

Speaker 13 Except this time he was asking a potential killer to identify his victim. Could Bennett pick out the girl from his supposed fight? Heidi's picture was included.

Speaker 12 He knows that he can't give this explanation about having this fight in the bus stop and pick some other girl. So our belief is that if we show him these pictures that he will pick her and he does.

Speaker 13 And also two kind of looks like her.

Speaker 13 There was one more crucial detail. Remember the neighborhood block watch guy who frightened Heidi? The one with the distinctive tattoo?

Speaker 29 Do you have any tattoos on your left arm?

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 28 Can I see them right here?

Speaker 12 When I saw the tattoo on his arm and he picked Heidi's picture out, I knew it was him.

Speaker 5 He was the Block Watch guy.

Speaker 12 He was the Black Watch guy.

Speaker 13 But they didn't have enough evidence to book him. So they decided to call in Bennett's buddy from that crazy bomb plot, Grant Lewis, to see what he knew.

Speaker 13 And Lewis was nervous.

Speaker 28 Sorry, if I'm shaking, I was kind of shaking up.

Speaker 13 He was evasive about his friend's time in Baltimore. But the detective didn't buy a story.

Speaker 13 Then, because Lewis had an outstanding warrant, the Colorado authorities arrested him the next day detective childs kept pressing i think you don't want to tell me certain things because you don't want to hurt a friend of yours and what i'm trying to explain to you is nothing you say hurts him because what's done is done

Speaker 13 at last grant lewis cracked he divulged a drunken conversation the two had down by a river after bennett got back He said, I heard someone bad, and I told her I knew him, and I said, I don't want to know.

Speaker 28 and he said they think someone's dead I think that's how he said it they think someone's dead and then he said I knight for someone

Speaker 13 that was it corroboration 12 years after Heidi's murder Alexander Bennett was charged he was extradited to Maryland to stand trial Heidi's brother Frank got the news from their dad it is another one of those things that just brings you to tears just because you all that comes flooding back in.

Speaker 14 It's such a great feeling to feel like finally something's happened.

Speaker 13 Stephen Cook's family was relieved as well.

Speaker 13 There'd been such a cloud of suspicion around him for so long that news that someone else had been arrested for his girlfriend's murder felt like vindication.

Speaker 3 I was just, gosh, I was ecstatic. I was, wow, this is great.

Speaker 18 This is relief. This is what we've been saying for years.

Speaker 5 It's not Stephen Cook.

Speaker 3 I was so excited for my brother. I was just so happy.
He can finally put this behind him.

Speaker 13 Two years later, in March 2014, both Stephen and Heidi's families converged on the Baltimore County Courthouse for the start of Alexander Bennett's trial. Grant Lewis was headed there, too.

Speaker 13 He'd been flown in to testify.

Speaker 22 He's going to be your star witness.

Speaker 8 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 13 But for detectives, the idea that Bennett killed Heidi all on his own had never made sense. They held out hope that Bennett would come clean, but he maintained his innocence.

Speaker 13 Then came the morning of jury selection.

Speaker 8 Gary and I are out getting breakfast, and Gary's phone goes off and he looks down at it, he looks up at me and he's like,

Speaker 8 Alex wants to talk.

Speaker 1 I'm like, wow, here we go.

Speaker 13 A heart-to-heart with his mother had convinced Bennett to spill everything. Prosecutor Garrett Glennon.

Speaker 11 She basically told Alexander if he did this, it was time to come clean, that Jesus would forgive him.

Speaker 5 What they call a come-to-Jesus moment was

Speaker 5 the beneficiaries of, huh?

Speaker 11 It appeared that way.

Speaker 13 Bennett confessed that he killed Heidi, but he hadn't acted alone, he said. He had an accomplice, and that person was who else but the state star witness.

Speaker 12 He and Grant Lewis, as in the bomb scheme, had developed an idea as being contract murderers.

Speaker 5 So Grant Lewis is the brains of this operation?

Speaker 12 Yeah, it was a lack of brains.

Speaker 13 Grant Lewis had been sitting in a hotel room preparing to testify. Now detectives brought him in and turned the tables on him.

Speaker 15 Grant, you're in the middle of this thing. I'm not in the middle of this thing.

Speaker 13 At first, Lewis denied involvement, but as the detective revealed details from Alexander's confession, he started to open up.

Speaker 12 Did you send him to Baltimore?

Speaker 24 I didn't send him to Baltimore, but I know more about this than I said.

Speaker 13 Lewis ultimately admitted to being involved in a murder for hire scam, but said Bennett was never supposed to kill anyone, only to get the upfront money before turning the person who hired them over to the FBI.

Speaker 5 Did you believe that story?

Speaker 11 Not in the least.

Speaker 5 So now do you read Grant Lewis's rights?

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 11 And the cuffs went on.

Speaker 13 But there was still one major detail left. Who hired them to kill Heidi?

Speaker 13 Coming up.

Speaker 13 What really happened the day Heidi died?

Speaker 4 A first-person account from the killer.

Speaker 30 I was making sure if she was alive, I didn't know that's when I had the knife.

Speaker 4 When dateline continues.

Speaker 31 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 31 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 31 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 31 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 13 For more than a decade, detectives tried to untangle the mystery of 24-year-old Heidi Bernadzikowski's brutal murder.

Speaker 13 On the morning of his own murder trial, Alexander Bennett unexpectedly confessed to an opportunistic plot. He was really a cash-for-hire hitman.

Speaker 30 You alright?

Speaker 13 Bennett agreed to a deal, tell the truth to investigators, and avoid the possibility of getting sentenced to life in prison.

Speaker 13 Interviewed by Detective Childs, Bennett laid out the bone-chilling details of Heidi's murder. Grant

Speaker 30 was discussing about receiving money to

Speaker 30 kill somebody.

Speaker 13 According to Bennett, he and Lewis had been brainstorming ways to raise seed money for a nightclub. So Lewis placed a coded message online advertising discrete house cleaning services.

Speaker 5 Prosecutor Garrett Glennon.

Speaker 11 And by discrete house cleaning, Grant Lewis apparently meant and hoped that someone out there on the internet would understand that to mean that they were hitmen.

Speaker 13 Bennett says a client did respond to the ad and offered $60,000 to kill Heidi.

Speaker 30 I know from the client, from the person, you know, emphasized to Grant and Grant emphasized to myself that it needs to look like an accident.

Speaker 13 Bennett's role was the muscle to do the actual hit. Lewis, the middleman, communicated with the client and organized everything.

Speaker 13 In late March 2000, Bennett arrived in Baltimore from Denver. He says he waited for the signal to act.

Speaker 13 In the meantime, he scoped out his victim, breaking into Heidi's home by tampering with the locks, then posing as that neighborhood watch volunteer who's so scared Heidi.

Speaker 30 But I do remember her answering the door.

Speaker 12 Did you go to the door and talk to her more than once?

Speaker 30 It was just that one time. Just the one time.

Speaker 13 On April 20th, Bennett says he heard through Lewis that the plan was a go.

Speaker 13 After getting into Heidi's house, he hid behind the front door.

Speaker 30 Now,

Speaker 30 my plan was to just try to

Speaker 26 get her and like

Speaker 30 still make it look like an accident-you know, like maybe

Speaker 30 snap her neck or something to look like she fell down the stairs or something.

Speaker 13 Heidi walked in through the door, and Bennett says he pounced.

Speaker 30 When she came in,

Speaker 23 she

Speaker 30 saw me, panicked, I panicked and rushed at her at the front and

Speaker 30 you know try to muffle her scream. I was making sure if she was alive, I didn't know.
That's when I had the knife

Speaker 30 and

Speaker 30 to make sure,

Speaker 30 had cut her throat.

Speaker 13 Then Bennett said he wiped the place down. And to throw forensics off, he ransacked the bedroom and used Heidi's lipstick to make that number one on the living room wall.

Speaker 13 After that, Bennett says he fled.

Speaker 5 That's it.

Speaker 19 That's it. Poor Heidi's dead.

Speaker 12 Heidi's dead.

Speaker 13 Detective Chiles pressed. Who was the client? He showed Bennett a photo array of six suspects.
Assistant state attorney Matt Brough.

Speaker 26 He immediately separates four photographs and says it's definitely not these four. And he's left with two.

Speaker 26 And he takes a couple of moments and stares at them.

Speaker 13 First, number one.

Speaker 26 And eventually he says, yes, this is him. I remember him.

Speaker 30 This one.

Speaker 30 I recognize him as the boyfriend.

Speaker 13 Bennett picked out Stephen Cook. Heidi's boyfriend was arrested for first-degree murder.

Speaker 20 Deep in our hearts, we all had feeling that he had something to do with it.

Speaker 13 Stephen's trial began in June 2015. He pleaded not guilty.
Glennon and Brough had the task of convincing a jury that Stephen was capable of orchestrating a cold murder for hire.

Speaker 13 Their case would rely heavily on the word of one man, the killer himself, Alexander Bennett.

Speaker 4 You really had to believe this guy, Bennett.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Your case was going to rise and fall on that.

Speaker 11 He was going to be the star witness against Stephen Cook.

Speaker 13 Bennett told jurors the same story he told investigators, how he killed Heidi. Video cameras weren't permitted, but Bennett's testimony was audio taped.

Speaker 13 He decided to confess, he says, because of his faith and for Heidi's family.

Speaker 33 I wanted to be a human being.

Speaker 33 I wanted to give

Speaker 33 a family some type of peace. I wanted to have faith enough and to grow up into a man and to accept and take responsibility for what I did.

Speaker 13 But the question still remained, if Stephen Cook had planned Heidi's murder, why had he done it? According to Stephen, they were in love and planning to marry.

Speaker 13 But some of Heidi's friends testified that she was so miserable in the relationship, she was preparing to leave.

Speaker 11 And she had asked a friend of hers for a small loan for an easy storage facility in an effort to move out.

Speaker 13 And the real reason for the murder, the prosecutor told the jury, was pure and simple greed. $700,000.

Speaker 13 Two months before Heidi's death, Stephen and Heidi had taken out hefty life insurance policies on each other.

Speaker 9 Do I wonder why an hourly employee at a hardware chain is buying

Speaker 5 almost a million dollars worth of coverage?

Speaker 11 As we explained to the jury, they had one car between them, which was hers, a red Civic. They were not married, they didn't have any children, and they really didn't have many belongings.

Speaker 11 There really wasn't anything to insure.

Speaker 1 So once they buy the policy, it's TikTok. Correct.

Speaker 13 Heidi had no idea time was running out for her. No idea what was going to happen when her boyfriend dropped her home that night.

Speaker 13 But according to investigators, Stephen knew there was a hired killer in the house.

Speaker 8 He set the wheels in motion,

Speaker 18 driving her home to her death.

Speaker 8 He knew what was in that house. He knew what he was doing.

Speaker 8 Didn't get any worse than that.

Speaker 13 But the defense would have an answer for those insurance policies and everything else. And the person to explain it all to the jury would be Stephen Cook himself.

Speaker 4 Coming up, the defense. Just how strong was the prosecution's case?

Speaker 3 All you have is a confessed murderer's words. That's all.

Speaker 13 Alexander Bennett, the admitted killer on the stand, had spilled out a gruesome account of the plot to murder Heidi. Stephen Cook, he testified, had hired him via the internet to kill his girlfriend.

Speaker 13 The motive? The boyfriend wanted her life insurance payout, $700,000.

Speaker 13 But Stephen's defense attorneys conceded nothing. They thought the prosecution had a weak case overall and one big problem in particular.
Its star witness, Alexander Bennett.

Speaker 35 Bennett obviously had something something to gain by changing his story.

Speaker 5 Our old friend quit pro quo.

Speaker 18 Plei deal.

Speaker 13 Tara LeCompte and Breon Johnson were Stevens' defense attorneys. They said before the Colorado man's so-called confession, Bennett faced life in prison without the chance for parole.

Speaker 13 But once he cut a deal with the state to testify, he could look forward one day to walking free.

Speaker 5 So he's singing for a supper here.

Speaker 35 I couldn't have said it better myself, exactly. The less time he would spend in jail for his own deeds.

Speaker 13 The defense argued another glaring hole in the prosecution's case was the lack of any physical evidence tying Stephen to the crime.

Speaker 13 The computer in the house that Stephen and Heidi shared was never taken in as evidence.

Speaker 5 It's a digital crime at heart.

Speaker 35 Not in this case. Not in this case.

Speaker 1 What happened?

Speaker 3 Heidi and Steve did have a fairly new desktop computer and that was never seized by the police.

Speaker 5 So to this day, we have no idea what that hard drive on the home computer would have shown.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 5 So your guy is being charged with a contract killing, but nobody can produce the contract? No.

Speaker 13 Not only did investigators not have any computer records, they didn't have a record of Bennett's plane ticket, phone records, credit card receipts, eyewitnesses who saw Bennett and Cook together.

Speaker 13 Not even the murder weapon. Stephen's sister, Kim.

Speaker 3 All you have is a confessed murderer's words.

Speaker 18 That's all.

Speaker 3 There's not one piece of evidence in this whole entire trial that points to Stephen, other than the confessed murder and these detectives with, oh, their belief.

Speaker 13 And when it came to motive, they turned the case on its head. The defense version.

Speaker 13 This isn't about Stephen searching for a contract killer online, but rather Heidi, looking for love on a dating website and finding Alexander Bennett, who surprised her by showing up in Baltimore.

Speaker 3 We thought that he met her online, came here to be with her, and she rejected him and he killed her. It made sense to us.
It made sense with the forensics. It made sense with the physical evidence.

Speaker 13 To back up its theory, the defense pointed to this police photo of Heidi's keys and bag.

Speaker 13 If, as Bennett testified, he jumped her when she walked in the door, how did her door keys and makeup bag end up tidily on the kitchen table in another room?

Speaker 5 So the bag on the kitchen table is not a trivial thing for you.

Speaker 3 No, I think she made it to the kitchen. I don't think he attacked her at the front door.

Speaker 30 To make sure that she was dead.

Speaker 13 And if prosecutors thought Bennett was the foundation of their case, the defense felt it had its own star witness, Stephen Cook. He would take the stand.

Speaker 35 The bottom line is, by this time, we had come to the conclusion that it's Bennett versus Cook. It's who you believe.

Speaker 36 For a second, I just looked at her like, what in the world's going on?

Speaker 13 Stephen told of finding Heidi, the love of his life, slumped on their living room floor that night.

Speaker 34 And then I just held her in my arms and was rocking her and crying, just calling her name and all.

Speaker 13 Stephen testified the couple were planning on a future together. He was surprised when others said that they were finished.

Speaker 37 Mr. Folk, you keep saying that you and Heidi were going to get married, but we've heard from other individuals that she was thinking about leaving you.

Speaker 34 I've never heard anything like that until now.

Speaker 13 They were also planning for kids, and that was the reason he wanted a big insurance policy on himself.

Speaker 34 We were going to start a family, we were going to have children, and I wanted to make sure that there was enough money for Heidi Heidi in case I died.

Speaker 13 He added it was Heidi who wanted insurance for herself. He never pushed her to get it.

Speaker 34 Heidi then asked me if it was all right if she could get $700,000 worth of life insurance. And I said fine.

Speaker 13 The defense added there was proof Heidi was actively nudging along the life insurance policy application. She'd faxed over some final documents just days before her death.

Speaker 13 It's a fact of the case even Heidi's own brothers, Harold and Frank, can't quite account for.

Speaker 5 There's persuasive stories that she was going to leave him, and yet there's also pretty compelling evidence that she was trying to get this insurance policy up and running.

Speaker 5 I mean, she's active in getting the insurance gone.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah, that's the biggest mystery

Speaker 24 to date.

Speaker 7 That's one of the things we don't fully understand.

Speaker 13 As for the murder, Stephen flatly denied ever meeting Alexander Bennett and said he had nothing to do with Heidi's death.

Speaker 32 Now, Steve, you've heard through testimony that you arranged for Heidi's murder via the internet.

Speaker 37 Did you do that?

Speaker 36 Not at all. Not at all.

Speaker 34 I didn't have anything at all to do with Heidi's murder.

Speaker 37 Why are you testifying?

Speaker 36 I'm testifying because I want my family and friends, and I want Heidi's family and friends, to know the truth. And for 15 years, they haven't heard the truth.

Speaker 36 For 15 years, I've been blamed for something I didn't do. I didn't kill Heidi.

Speaker 13 Both sides rested. Which argument would jurors believe? Which man would they choose?

Speaker 13 The state and its key witness, Alexander Bennett, the acknowledged murderer, or Stephen Cook, the man with a good job, middle-class lifestyle, and father of a seven-year-old son.

Speaker 13 The jury was out, but Stephen Cook's sister knew the verdict she wanted to hear.

Speaker 3 He's not guilty. They're going to say not guilty.
They're not going to say not guilty.

Speaker 13 But after a day and a half of deliberations, that wasn't the jury verdict.

Speaker 37 Guilty or not guilty? You found him guilty.

Speaker 13 Stephen Cook was found guilty of first-degree murder, hiring a long-distance killer to murder his girlfriend.

Speaker 3 I felt like I lost my breath. I just was in shock.
I just could not believe that's what they've said.

Speaker 3 I remember

Speaker 3 screaming, oh, no.

Speaker 20 Thank you, Lord. Prayers are answered.
It's relief, joy, and happiness, and also sadness because

Speaker 20 we still don't have Heidi.

Speaker 13 Grant Lewis, the Denver middleman, was sentenced to life life in prison. Alexander Bennett was given 30 years.

Speaker 13 Stephen Cook, meanwhile, who claimed his innocence to the end, was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole. And remember the butcher, Terry Gillian.

Speaker 13 Police have totally cleared him of any involvement and, in fact, offered him an apology.

Speaker 25 It's not everything, but it is a start. It does mean something.

Speaker 13 As for Heidi's family, their days are all about the kids and grandchildren.

Speaker 13 And parents who believe devoutly in a hereafter always remember, of course, Heidi.

Speaker 19 Did you talk to Heidi?

Speaker 8 Oh, yes.

Speaker 20 I did.

Speaker 19 What did you tell her?

Speaker 20 I just said, sweetie,

Speaker 20 we finally got the answers we've been praying for.

Speaker 16 Holy Mary, Mother of God, and justice will be served.

Speaker 1 That's all for now.

Speaker 8 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 11 Thanks for joining us.

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