Secrets in Seattle

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Speaker 5 He said Nicole's gone missing. We are frantic calling.
All of our friends are calling. You think that that sort of thing happens to other people.
It's the most frightening thing in the world.

Speaker 7 A young wife.

Speaker 8 She always saw the good in people.

Speaker 3 She had a way to make you smile.

Speaker 9 Missing for nine days.

Speaker 10 It's so wrong, and Nicole's somewhere where she shouldn't be.

Speaker 9 It was hard enough when they didn't know. Much worse when they did.

Speaker 11 It came over the TV that a body had been found.

Speaker 11 I'll never forget that as long as I live.

Speaker 9 One mystery solved, another just beginning. What had happened to Nicole?

Speaker 12 This could go down any number of paths.

Speaker 13 And it did.

Speaker 9 Had her troubled past finally caught up with her?

Speaker 14 I thought it fell a lot and freaked out.

Speaker 9 Or was it something much darker?

Speaker 15 He told me that he would put it in her Red Bowl.

Speaker 16 How did she change?

Speaker 15 She became more sexual with people.

Speaker 9 Who wanted her dead?

Speaker 18 He thought he was somewhat of a player.

Speaker 12 Did it make him a killer?

Speaker 9 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with Secrets in Seattle.

Speaker 19 Seattle was raw after a week of relentless winter rain.

Speaker 1 A woman lost had been found in the tangle of the blackberries. A naked naked body, a small tattoo on the back, a necklace, and signs of strangulation.

Speaker 1 The detectives sent to a patch of trees and boggy undergrowth near the Seattle airport's runways guessed it was her.

Speaker 19 They would soon be proved correct.

Speaker 1 Nine days to find her, the answer to where.

Speaker 1 Another seven years still ahead to answer the questions of all homicides, who and why.

Speaker 1 But we have to go back before the crime scene photos and the medical examiner's findings, before she became those chilly words, the victim, to find the dearly loved person named Nikki.

Speaker 7 Nikki Peets, wife and daughter, sister and friend.

Speaker 8 She seemed to be able to uplift people in ways that none of us knew how to do.

Speaker 3 She had a way to make you smile.

Speaker 3 She had a way to let you know that everything everything was going to be okay.

Speaker 1 Gail was her mother.

Speaker 11 Nikki was sunshine.

Speaker 22 She was the kind of person that when she walked in a room,

Speaker 22 the room lit up.

Speaker 1 Gail raised Nikki and her sister Tanya in the suburbs of Seattle. There were carefree days at the nearby lake.

Speaker 12 Is Nikki your annoying kid sister or was she a pretty cool kid?

Speaker 25 How do you remember?

Speaker 5 She was a very annoying kid sister. Mom insisted on dressing us alike.

Speaker 1 In high school, Maya Allward says Nikki was a friend to everyone.

Speaker 8 Every day eating lunch together, she never sat. She would walk around and visit with people.
She always saw the good in people. She didn't see the bad in people.

Speaker 1 After graduation, Nikki brought that winning spirit into the workplace, eventually landing a plum position in the head offices of Valley Total Fitness. Kimberly Thomas was on her team.

Speaker 8 Nikki was a great boss.

Speaker 27 She cared about how how your day was, she cared about how you were feeling. She cared about your birthday.

Speaker 1 Valleys is where Nikki met another employee, David Peets. He was six feet tall, four years younger, and exuded a smooth confidence.
His co-workers recall he seemed to be going places.

Speaker 25 He was definitely a very nice man, easy to talk to, would laugh a lot. You know, he was actually a very compassionate person.

Speaker 26 He was very confident. He spoke well.
He had a presence that demanded attention.

Speaker 1 Dave was set on selling more gym memberships than anyone else, and he wouldn't have denied what everyone saw in him. He was ambitious, with his eyes on bigger management prizes.

Speaker 27 Dave could sell reading glasses to a blind person. It didn't matter what his pitch was.
He had you convinced that whatever it was, you had to have it.

Speaker 1 So there was Dave hustling on the sales floor, and there was Nikki, the buttoned-up blonde from corporate and the boss's favorite hire, it was acknowledged. Before long, Nikki and Dave became an item.

Speaker 3 She definitely would get a little bit of a bounce in her step when she got an incoming message from Dave.

Speaker 29 Out of everybody, he chose her.

Speaker 21 That has to make you feel kind of special.

Speaker 1 Pretty soon, Nikki and Dave moved in together. Gail had remarried and moved to Arizona with her new husband Rod.

Speaker 1 And she could tell by the sound of her daughter's voice on the phone that Nikki had found the one.

Speaker 11 He was her dream man.

Speaker 6 Really?

Speaker 11 He was the man she wanted. She was so in love with him.

Speaker 1 And he apparently with her. Evidenced to her friends and family by the piece of jewelry she was rarely seen without.

Speaker 5 David got her a little tennis bracelet.

Speaker 2 Diamonds on it, eh?

Speaker 5 Yeah, little teeny diamonds in white gold, I think.

Speaker 12 Did she like it? Was it a sentimental piece?

Speaker 5 She loved it. She wore it everywhere.

Speaker 1 Another piece of jewelry from him would follow, a wedding ring. After dating for two years, Nikki and Dave married.

Speaker 12 So tell me about the wedding. Hawaii was the place.

Speaker 5 It was in Hawaii. She looked so beautiful and happy.
They both had laths and beautiful flowers in her hair. And it was on the beach with the waves crashing and sunset.

Speaker 25 It was beautiful.

Speaker 5 It was absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 24 And was your sister a happy young woman on that day?

Speaker 24 Yes.

Speaker 5 I think she found her prince charming.

Speaker 1 Nicole Pete seemed to be on top of the world and stepping confidently into her grown-up life.

Speaker 5 She was pretty excited about getting married. She loved her ring.
She loved her bracelet that he got her. She was excited about getting a new condo and having her own little family.

Speaker 1 January 28th, 2006 was a Saturday. After a hectic work week at their different jobs, Nikki and Dave would chill with a dinner party that night over over at their friend's place.

Speaker 1 That afternoon, Dave called Nikki to hash out the details. They drive there separately.

Speaker 31 Hey, babe, give me a call. I need to know what we're doing if I need to stop and get food or anything for Ellen and Jason and stuff like that.

Speaker 20 So give me a call. I'll love you.
Bye.

Speaker 1 But when Dave Pete showed up at their friend's apartment that evening, Nikki wasn't there. One hour, two hours, and still no Nikki.

Speaker 1 Dave's wife of almost four years was gone.

Speaker 2 Into the night, into the rain.

Speaker 6 What on earth had happened to Nikki Peets?

Speaker 9 Nikki's life hadn't always been so good. She'd had a troubled past.

Speaker 6 Had those troubles finally caught up with her, or was it something else?

Speaker 24 Did you think something was wrong, something more was wrong right from the beginning?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 1 Nicole Peets, a woman just shy of her 33rd birthday, reported missing by her husband.

Speaker 28 And we just want to know if she's safe.

Speaker 1 David Peets told reporters how he waited for her with friends at a Saturday night dinner party. She was a no-show.

Speaker 32 When I got there, she was not there and they hadn't heard from her, hadn't been able to contact her.

Speaker 19 David appealed to the public to keep an eye out for her.

Speaker 18 We wanted to know that we love her very much.

Speaker 1 Nikki's mother was by his side.

Speaker 10 She's not somebody who wouldn't come home. She's somebody that if she's 10 minutes late, she calls you.

Speaker 12 You came up right away. Did you think something was wrong, something more was wrong right from the beginning?

Speaker 22 Yes, because Nikki wouldn't have gone away without calling and telling me.

Speaker 7 If Nikki could have called somebody, she would have called Gail.

Speaker 1 Nicole's mother and stepfather had reason to be worried. They, along with Nikki's other family and friends, remembered another time years before when they'd almost lost her.

Speaker 1 Nikki had been in her teens when she began suffering from abdominal problems related to the onset of puberty. Her medical issues left her in agonizing pain and also heavily medicated.

Speaker 5 She had very painful cramps and was prescribed

Speaker 5 lots of medicine for them.

Speaker 11 And by the time she was 21, she had had three surgeries, pain pills being thrown at her right and left.

Speaker 1 At some point, it seemed all those pills took away not only the pain, but the person, zombified.

Speaker 12 How is she different, Tanya?

Speaker 5 Just spacey, couldn't keep up with the conversation. I felt like I had lost her.
She wasn't really there.

Speaker 1 Before Nikki could crawl out of her hole, she would need to check into a local rehab center to treat her addiction.

Speaker 5 When she finally got clean, I felt like I had my sister back.

Speaker 1 That's when she started working at the Bally Gym office. Her co-workers thought she was in terrific emotional shape.

Speaker 21 The Nikki that I know wasn't in her dark days.

Speaker 26 The Nikki that I knew was on top of her game.

Speaker 1 And yet, friends like Michelle Baltz knew Nikki took her sobriety a day at a time, and that she was terrified of making even one little slip and losing it all.

Speaker 27 She would tell you she'd have a headache and trying to get the girl to take an Advil. I mean, you would think that you were trying to inject her with heroin.

Speaker 1 Nikki's weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and hours drive south of her home were the rock and the foundation of that daily conscious effort.

Speaker 1 And on Saturday morning, January 28th, she was supposed to attend a very special meeting, a celebration to honor her for eight years of sobriety.

Speaker 5 Every year it's your birthday, and it was her eighth birthday.

Speaker 24 As being a clean and sober woman. Yes.

Speaker 34 She was so proud of it.

Speaker 5 We were so proud of her. Everyone was proud of her.

Speaker 20 Hi, Nick.

Speaker 13 Mom, I don't know where you are, darling.

Speaker 1 But Nikki never showed up to that important meeting, never received her award. And now, friends and family desperately tried reaching her by phone.
Hi, Nikki.

Speaker 31 This is Rob calling.

Speaker 1 We don't know what's going on. Their pleas relegated to the silence of voicemail.
The anxiety level went off the charts.

Speaker 36 No matter what happened, Nikki, even if it was a relapse, we want you to know that we love you.

Speaker 1 Had Nikki, in fact, fallen back into addiction.

Speaker 5 I started hoping that because then she would have been alive.

Speaker 1 The alternative that Nikki may be dead somewhere was too much to bear. A bulletin went out.
Be on the lookout for a 5-foot-three woman with a tattoo on her back.

Speaker 1 Friends knew she'd likely be wearing a cross necklace and a diamond tennis bracelet.

Speaker 1 Nine days later, King County Detective Kathleen Decker was dispatched to an area near Seattle's SeaTac Airport, south of the city.

Speaker 13 The call came in from my sergeant requesting that I respond to this location regarding a woman's body. She had been found by a passerby in the blackberry bushes.

Speaker 24 This is kind of off the grid right here.

Speaker 13 Yes, it is.

Speaker 1 A woman's body discovered in a nothing patch of scrub at the end of the runway near an all-but-abandoned trailer park.

Speaker 12 What'd you notice about the body?

Speaker 13 First thing I noticed, of course, was that she was, in fact, nude. The second thing I noticed was that her arms were gently across her chest.

Speaker 12 Not just a body abandoned.

Speaker 13 Correct. She had not been discarded like garbage, but she had been gently placed into and under the vines.

Speaker 1 The detective had a special set of skills that she called on now. She'd been trained in tracking, reading trails, disturbed vegetation, just like the scouts in the Old West.

Speaker 1 The pattern of broken branches and tamped-down leaves and soil told her that the body had lain out here about a week.

Speaker 12 Is there anything that suggested to you why this woman would have been abandoned here?

Speaker 13 No, and that was part of the complexity of this investigation. We had all sorts of avenues that we needed to investigate.

Speaker 13 We had the the transient population that may have been frequenting the trailer park we had a mental health facility that was very close by within walking distance

Speaker 1 but detective decker did have a strong hunch about who this victim was the cross necklace the tattoo it all checked out as that local woman nicole peets who'd been missing for a week The diamond tennis bracelet she always wore was not on her wrist.

Speaker 1 But police were confident enough in their tentative ID to pay a visit to Nicole's husband, David.

Speaker 1 And the information information David Peets would soon share with detectives about when his wife was last seen and what she left behind would be critical to the case.

Speaker 9 But it was something that was missing that turned out to be even more important and puzzling.

Speaker 18 There's no indication that anyone else had been behind the wheel of Nicole's car.

Speaker 9 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 12 With a great many bad days, one of the worst ones had to be the day that she was found.

Speaker 11 I'll never forget that as long as I live.

Speaker 1 Found strangled in some burial.

Speaker 11 It came over the TV that a body had been found.

Speaker 11 And we just knew that it had to be her.

Speaker 6 It had to be her Nikki.

Speaker 1 Nicole Peets, strangled to death. Her nude body left for a week beneath some blackberry bushes by the airport.

Speaker 1 The killer unknown. Her gray jettis still missing.
Her family's deep sorrow now hardened into resolve to get justice for her.

Speaker 36 Find out who did it and

Speaker 10 punish him.

Speaker 20 Punish him.

Speaker 1 To begin, the lead detective assigned to King County's newest murder case, Major Jesse Anderson, set out to learn more about the victim.

Speaker 1 He paid a visit to her husband, David Peets, at the condo he and Nikki shared.

Speaker 31 How long have you been married?

Speaker 14 Almost four years.

Speaker 1 David agreed to be audiotaped and told detectives that Nikki had struggled with chemical dependency in the past. He then revealed something disturbing.

Speaker 1 Recently, Nikki had again started taking prescription pills.

Speaker 14 Is Nikki still struggling with Nikki? I thought she wasn't, but she hurt her back right before Thanksgiving, and she slipped the disc.

Speaker 1 Because of a severe painful back injury, David explained, Nikki had reluctantly agreed to let her doctor put her on a carefully monitored prescription for Percocet, a potentially addictive narcotic drug.

Speaker 14 At first, she had me keeping the pills and then giving them to her.

Speaker 1 Investigators wondered: had Nikki's old demons pulled her down again? They delved into Nikki's last known movements.

Speaker 14 When's the last time you saw Nikki?

Speaker 7 Friday night when I got home from her.

Speaker 14 She was asleep in fact.

Speaker 1 David Peets told detectives that Nikki was sleeping when he arrived home late Friday night. And by the morning, she was already gone.
Off to her special AA celebration, he assumed.

Speaker 14 I just remember thinking that that's where she must be when I woke up.

Speaker 1 But when she didn't show up to the dinner party that night, he returned to their condo to look for her. He described how her purse, car keys, and gray jetta were gone.

Speaker 1 But he said something else caught his eye, and it would turn out to be a big clue for detectives. Nikki's vial of Percocet was sitting out on the counter.
The bottle was empty.

Speaker 1 The 56-pill prescription filled just two days before, gone.

Speaker 14 I saw the pill bottle and I freaked out. I was so scared she relapsed or danced a lot of pills.

Speaker 7 I thought maybe she ought to feed or something.

Speaker 1 As detectives wrapped up the interview with the husband, a narrative was starting to come together about the victim of a former addict possibly re-addicted.

Speaker 12 How does that change the complexion of the investigation early on?

Speaker 24 The woman whose body has been found was a recovering addict and maybe fell off the wagon.

Speaker 13 Well, it makes it far more complex for us because now we have to consider the possibility that she met up with the wrong person at the wrong time and that somehow led to her demise, that this was somehow related to the people that she knew through her AA affiliation, which she was very much into and regularly attended those meetings.

Speaker 24 So doors are opening a possibility rather than closing.

Speaker 6 Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Some old-fashioned gumshoe investigative work would have to come next.

Speaker 1 Tracking down phone records, credit card statements, anything to pinpoint where Nikki may have headed after leaving the condo Saturday morning. Only one more blip on Nikki's timeline surfaced.

Speaker 1 A single phone call made around noon on Saturday from her cell phone to the gym's front desk while David Peets was working.

Speaker 18 It is possible that she was driving and it hit one of the towers there, so we were considering that. We were also considering whoever killed her may have had her phone and was still using it.

Speaker 1 As for that diamond tennis bracelet missing from Nicole's wrist when they found her body, the cops began checking pawn shop records in case someone had tried to hawk it. Nothing.

Speaker 41 A police officer spotted Nicole Peets' car overnight.

Speaker 1 The last major piece of the puzzle turned up two weeks after Nikki had disappeared. Her car, a gray Jeddah, had been found abandoned in a parking lot in Seattle's University District.

Speaker 1 Forensic technicians, hungry for clues, crawled through the car. They noticed the driver's seat had been pushed back, but it's what they didn't find inside it that intrigued investigators most.

Speaker 18 What was found in the car was David's DNA along with Nicole's DNA. There's no indication that anyone else had been behind the wheel of Nicole's car.

Speaker 1 Detectives were now wondering, wondering about the husband.

Speaker 1 Coming up, he was definitely a player.

Speaker 42 Dave chased women inside the club, outside the club, on side of the club, on top of the club.

Speaker 43 But did that make him a killer?

Speaker 1 At the latest gym where David Peets worked, coworkers like Troy Wagman understood understood full well why David looked so rough. Still, it was a hard thing to witness.

Speaker 25 He looked very bad. He looked like he hadn't slept, he had lost weight, he had dark circles under his eyes, and he seemed a little bit more sad.

Speaker 1 While David Peets slowly got back to work after taking time off to mourn his lost wife, detectives intent on solving her murder began interviewing people from the gym world who knew the couple, starting at the facility where Nikki and Dave had first met.

Speaker 21 Valleys was the type of place that most of the rumors weren't really rumors.

Speaker 6 That were true.

Speaker 1 Staff members agreed that Dave, the alpha dog of the sales department, and Nikki, the button-down corporate nice girl, were a hopeless mismatch.

Speaker 26 The more Nikki liked him, the more I knew that she shouldn't.

Speaker 1 What Dave saw in Nikki, according to some coworkers, was a cynical way to climb the corporate ladder.

Speaker 1 Nikki was everyone's favorite, and their boss in particular loved her like family, as CJ Brady saw it.

Speaker 3 Nikki and our supervisor were very close, almost like a father-daughter relationship. And that is why I think he dated Nikki from the start.
I don't think there ever was an attraction there.

Speaker 1 But if he was chilly about his wife, he was super heated about some of the female gym members and his co-workers.

Speaker 42 Dave chased women inside the club, outside the club, on side of the club, on top of the club.

Speaker 1 Detectives found the tales about David Pete's roving eye intriguing, but hardly damning.

Speaker 18 I guess to describe it in kind of current terminology, he thought he was somewhat of a player.

Speaker 12 Did it make him a killer?

Speaker 18 Did it make him a killer? No.

Speaker 1 But David Pete's behavior towards women at the gym did get him fired, detectives learned.

Speaker 1 Several female coworkers had filed sexual harassment complaints against him with Bally's management, including Jackie Morales.

Speaker 26 David was very verbal when it came to his comments.

Speaker 34 So what looks better on Jackie today?

Speaker 21 Her legs, her butt, or her breast.

Speaker 26 I finally got the courage enough to go to the boss.

Speaker 1 After getting booted from Bally's, David moved on to a job at 24-Hour Fitness, where Troy Wagman remembers David talking about how he and his wife Nikki wanted to invite others into their sex life.

Speaker 25 More than once, he would approach me and ask me what I thought about three ways in a relationship. Him and Nikki were exploring the idea of swingers' clubs.

Speaker 1 Nikki's good friends knew it differently.

Speaker 27 She was very appalled at that idea.

Speaker 21 She was like,

Speaker 22 absolutely not.

Speaker 1 A wobbly marriage, a hounddog husband straining at the leash. The circumstantial smoke was getting thicker for investigators.

Speaker 18 It was very apparent to me that, you know, he was leading an alternate lifestyle.

Speaker 12 What I'm not hearing, Captain, is motivation.

Speaker 18 That was a concern for all of us, too.

Speaker 1 Maybe the husband did it. But then again, maybe he didn't.

Speaker 1 As weeks became months, the solid proof, the hard evidence that the investigation needed, just didn't fall into place.

Speaker 1 An investigation hitting a brick wall. Devastating news for Nikki's family, by now convinced of David's guilt.

Speaker 12 When you were out in the emotional wilderness, Gail, 07, 08, 09, what was your lowest moment?

Speaker 11 There were so many low ones. I didn't want to live.

Speaker 22 Just cried my head off every day.

Speaker 22 I just didn't want to live.

Speaker 1 Nikki's mother marked the passage of time by making public pleas to find the killer.

Speaker 10 It has been 839 days since my beloved Nicole was murdered.

Speaker 1 Years went by. David Peets quietly left the fitness industry for a position at Chase Bank.
He started attending church.

Speaker 1 Fellow church member Kim Adams says she got to know a Dave who was very different from the heartless philanderer described by Nikki's friends and family.

Speaker 1 The Dave Kim knew was a forlorn widower who spoke fondly about his lost wife.

Speaker 34 When he would speak of her, I could see a sadness in him.

Speaker 34 We'd have conversations about, you know, he was struggling because he missed her.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, at the county sheriff's office, the three ring binders that made up the Pete's file moved from desk to desk until in 2010, they were picked up by two cold case cops, Jake Pavlovich and Mike Mellis.

Speaker 1 Each was determined to apply some heat.

Speaker 17 I called Galeb and said, I've got this case now, and it's my intent to be the last detective to have this case.

Speaker 1 Pavlovich and Mellis laid out the entire investigation and then honed in on day one.

Speaker 1 That Saturday morning, Nikki Peets presumably left the condo she shared with Dave and headed out to her special AA meeting.

Speaker 1 To the cold case detectives' fresh eyes, a few key pieces of evidence from that morning jumped out. Common sense stuff, really, like Nikki's wedding ring.

Speaker 1 A photo taken in 2006 showed it in Nikki's bathroom near the jewelry cleaner she kept it in overnight.

Speaker 32 And here's the wedding rings left on the counter. And she was proud of the rings, according to all the family.

Speaker 32 And here she's going to this big meeting the next morning, but she's going to go and not take her rings with her.

Speaker 1 Another red flag, this from the autopsy report. Nikki's body had been recovered with her retainer still in her mouth.

Speaker 12 Why did it seem odd that you found the body with the retainer?

Speaker 32 Again, that's something people typically wear when they go to bed. She was in the habit of wearing it at night, but no place else.

Speaker 1 The wedding ring left on the bathroom counter, the clunky retainer still in her mouth. Added up, concluded the detectives.

Speaker 1 And you had a wife who never left the condo for her meeting that Saturday morning. One who'd never made it through the night alive.

Speaker 1 And the only person known to be with Nicole Peets in the condo that night,

Speaker 1 her husband, David Peets.

Speaker 32 When you look at each piece of evidence and figure out how does it relate to everything else, put that puzzle together, and lo and behold, we've got our picture at the end.

Speaker 1 Six years after Nicole Peets was reported missing, her husband David was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in connection with her death.

Speaker 7 Coming up, a lifestyle on trial.

Speaker 44 Who did it involve?

Speaker 30 Me and Katie and Dave?

Speaker 15 He was just trying to loosen her up to get her to do threesome.

Speaker 9 When Dateline continues,

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Speaker 46 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

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Speaker 1 It had been seven and a half excruciating years of waiting. Then in 2013, Nikki's family and friends filed into a packed Seattle courtroom to watch David Peets stand trial for his wife's murder.

Speaker 1 He pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 15 When Nicole married the defendant, she thought she had married the man of her dreams.

Speaker 37 But on January 28th, 2006, that dream would turn into a nightmare.

Speaker 1 Prosecutors Kristen Richardson and Carla Carlstrom promised the jury pieces of a puzzle. Pieces they hoped would ultimately reveal a resentful, hateful husband whose frustrations had boiled over.

Speaker 44 I think it was actually, I hate this phrase, but it truly was a crime of passion.

Speaker 1 At the core of the prosecutor's case, David was a sexist philanderer who viewed his goody two-shoes' wife as a weight around his neck.

Speaker 1 So he put his hands around hers after an argument in their condo to free himself of the burden. David, they said, then turned to Nikki's problem with pills as his cover-up.

Speaker 7 Why kill her?

Speaker 39 You know, it wasn't a planned murder. If it was something he'd planned to do, then sure, you could divorce her.

Speaker 39 This was not a plan. This was something that erupted one night in a fit of rage.

Speaker 1 Because they thought there was no premeditation, David Peets was charged with second, not first-degree murder. But proving he snapped and strangled Nikki in their condo wouldn't be easy.

Speaker 1 This was a highly circumstantial case with little direct evidence pointing David's way.

Speaker 44 In terms of the bedroom or the house, there is no physical evidence left behind.

Speaker 12 Which is a handicap for you guys when you've got to tell this story to a jury that really wants to hear CSI, right?

Speaker 44 They want DNA on everything.

Speaker 1 Prosecutors started by calling a string of the other women in David's life. Women who shared with the jury stories of a lustful cheating spouse with little regard for his wife.

Speaker 1 Stories of a three-way kiss at the bar.

Speaker 16 And who did it involve?

Speaker 30 Me and Katie and Dave.

Speaker 16 You were kissing Katie.

Speaker 16 Katie was kissing you.

Speaker 48 Yes. All three at the same time.

Speaker 1 Stories of a one-night stand.

Speaker 21 And what happened at your place?

Speaker 21 We had sex.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 29 that was the only time that it happened?

Speaker 21 Yes.

Speaker 1 And of a romance that started while David and Nikki were engaged.

Speaker 21 I asked him why he was getting married and

Speaker 21 he said that at that point it was too late to back out of it.

Speaker 1 The romance lasted on and off for two years.

Speaker 48 What did he tell you about how he felt about you?

Speaker 21 He told me he cared about me.

Speaker 24 Dave Pete's lifestyle became the trial here.

Speaker 48 A lot of it. He did because it showed that he was dissatisfied with her.

Speaker 1 Dissatisfied with Nikki, and prosecutors say determined to change her. David went so far as to spike Nikki's drink with the club drug ecstasy, hoping she'd finally agree to that threesome.

Speaker 1 This, according to David's bar buddy, Renee Stewart.

Speaker 15 He told me that he would put it in her Red Bowl

Speaker 15 like when he went to get a drink and

Speaker 15 he was just trying to loosen her up to get her to do a threesome.

Speaker 16 Did you notice a change in her after she drank that Red Bowl? Yes. How did she change?

Speaker 15 She became more sexual with people.

Speaker 24 Here's a guy who knows full well his wife has addiction problems.

Speaker 24 And he puts ecstasy in her Red Bowl.

Speaker 12 Is that the way this goes?

Speaker 29 Right.

Speaker 39 She had fought so hard for sobriety and without even knowing it, her own husband was undermining that.

Speaker 1 Then it was Nikki's sister Tanya's turn to stare David in the eyes and tell the jury how indifferent he appeared immediately following Nikki's disappearance.

Speaker 49 Did the defendant ever help you look for her?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 49 Did you ever see him make any phone calls related to her disappearance?

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 49 Did you ever see him join in searches with people from AA or her workplace?

Speaker 21 Not at all.

Speaker 1 But prosecutors feared evidence of suspicious behavior from a reprehensible husband wouldn't be enough to convince a jury David committed murder.

Speaker 1 So they rolled out their theory that Nikki never left her condo alive.

Speaker 39 Honestly, the best evidence we had was the evidence that showed she never left that condominium.

Speaker 1 Evidence offered of David's little mistakes. Remember Nikki's cherished wedding ring left on the bathroom counter.
And then there was Nikki's retainer.

Speaker 44 He forgot she wears a retainer/slash night guard, and he forgot to check her mouth before he dumped her.

Speaker 1 Something else Nikki's killer would likely overlook, the food found in her stomach by the medical examiner.

Speaker 1 Based on the ME's analysis, prosecutors speculated Nikki was killed sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. that Friday night, soon after David said he came home and found Nikki in bed.

Speaker 1 But it was what the forensic scientists didn't find in Nikki's system that prosecutors believed was even more damning. Evidence, they said, proved once and for all that Nikki had not relapsed.

Speaker 12 Did the ME find evidence of prescription painkillers?

Speaker 39 No, she had less than one therapeutic dose of Percocet in her system. It was clear that she had not been using Percocet probably for a few days prior to her death.

Speaker 1 And then there was Nikki's bracelet, that gift from David, the source of her joy. David had told police it had vanished along with his wife.

Speaker 39 Everybody assumed that, who knows, the killer took it.

Speaker 1 Soon after David's arrest, police learned from one of his coworkers that he had the bracelet all along.

Speaker 37 David said that he had a bracelet that he had taken to a pawn shop, and he thought that the guy was trying to rip him off.

Speaker 12 And was trying to hawk it, make a few bucks.

Speaker 39 Trying to make money at some point.

Speaker 24 And that spoke to his cover-up, his involvement.

Speaker 39 Sure, absolutely. And certainly that he'd lied to police in the beginning and saying that he didn't know where that bracelet was.

Speaker 1 Still, one piece of the puzzle didn't fit the prosecution's theory. That Saturday phone call made from Nikki's cell phone to the 24-hour fitness gym where David worked.

Speaker 2 This is evidence that at around noon, she's alive on Saturday.

Speaker 1 Using telephone company records, prosecutors argued the origin of the call could be traced to within a few blocks of the gym where it was received.

Speaker 29 What you're saying is there's a 90 to 95 percent probability that the phone was in this reddish-orangish sector when it was being placed.

Speaker 18 That is correct.

Speaker 39 It became very clear that call was placed from the 24-hour fitness gym when David Peets was working there.

Speaker 1 Hardly conclusive evidence on its own, but detectives had found something else on the gym security video that made that call a jawdropper.

Speaker 1 At just about the same time the call is made from Nikki's cell phone, David can be seen stepping away from his work area, out of the camera sight.

Speaker 1 That was David, prosecutors say, heading off to use Nikki's phone to call the gym receptionist.

Speaker 39 He went back and placed that call and then came back out front as if nothing was happening.

Speaker 39 He had to convince the police she had left the house that morning because if she she hadn't left the house, he was the killer.

Speaker 1 That video and that cell phone call were presented as the final pieces of the prosecution's now completed puzzle.

Speaker 44 We had needed just one more thing to put us over the top. Just one more thing.
And that call, that put it over.

Speaker 1 But the jury had yet to hear from the defense, which wasn't about to let such a circumstantial argument go unanswered.

Speaker 9 Coming up, who really had something to hide? Was it the accused killer or Nikki, who certainly had a lot of pills around?

Speaker 28 On January 12th, she got 56. On January 18th, she got 56.
And on January 26th, she got 56.

Speaker 1 Rows of Nicole Petz's family and friends listened to the prosecution describe the accused as an oversexed, run-around louse of a husband.

Speaker 1 A guy who strangled his inconvenient wife and left her to rot in a scrubby bog.

Speaker 48 We know how she died.

Speaker 48 We know how he lied.

Speaker 1 Each day, David Peets remained emotionless in court, and trial watchers noted, alone. Few, if any, family or friends showed up in the rows behind him to have his back.

Speaker 1 But he did have supporters, like Kim Adams, a friend from church.

Speaker 34 He does have a very strong network of friends and people who care about him and love him.

Speaker 1 She says Team Dave chose to back him quietly from outside the courthouse, hoping to avoid the many cameras both in and outside the courtroom.

Speaker 34 I have a lot of respect for those people that didn't go. He knows who loves them.

Speaker 1 She watched the news in disbelief, not recognizing the man prosecutors described as a cold-hearted killer. Surely, this wasn't the Dave she'd known for almost seven years, her trusted confidante.

Speaker 34 I kept thinking thinking to myself, they're talking about my friend, but that's not my friend. That's not the friend that I know.

Speaker 1 But in court, his defense team would not call on Kim and the silent friends as character witnesses. The defense was mounting a stripped-down argument.
Jurors, there's nothing here.

Speaker 1 Nikki left the condo that morning, and Dave had no idea where she ended up.

Speaker 19 Nicole Peets was missing.

Speaker 28 And her husband, David Peets, never saw her again.

Speaker 6 What happened to Nicole is a mystery.

Speaker 1 After 10 days of trial with more than 40 witnesses, the state, the defense lawyers argued, had failed to produce a smoking gun or even a plausible motivation for murder.

Speaker 28 In this case, there are many reasonable doubts.

Speaker 1 Could anyone say with absolute certainty that she always wore her wedding ring? That she never went out in public with her retainer?

Speaker 1 The picture the defense portrayed was of a a David Peets open and honest with detectives right from the start. A husband hoping the police would locate his wife.

Speaker 1 Detective Kathleen Decker took the stand.

Speaker 41 When you first saw David at his residence, I believe you described him as very anxious and upset.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 1 The defense willingly conceded that David Peets was a crummy husband, but skirt chasing didn't give him a motive for murder.

Speaker 28 Dave Peets isn't the first guy

Speaker 28 to step out on his spouse. All of you certainly know of people that have done that.
Have they killed their wives or husbands or anything like that?

Speaker 1 And the defense countered that if anyone had secrets to hide, it wasn't Dave. It was Nikki.

Speaker 28 There's another side to all this.

Speaker 1 The defense now turned the focus to Nicole Peets and the last few weeks of her life.

Speaker 23 Raise your right hand.

Speaker 1 The lawyers called to the stand their main witness, Nikki's doctor, Carol Waymack. She'd been Nikki's primary physician for five years.

Speaker 12 You knew Nikki's history, that she'd had trouble as a young woman.

Speaker 24 I did, and had actually been in rehab at one point.

Speaker 11 And we had talked about it

Speaker 30 throughout her care with me.

Speaker 1 So when Nikki came into the office complaining of severe back pain at the end of 2005, Dr. Waymack said she had Nikki's past addiction in mind.

Speaker 1 The doctor testified that she did put Nikki on pain medication, but said she tightly monitored Nikki's weekly prescription right down to counting the number of pills.

Speaker 28 On January 12th, she got 56.

Speaker 28 On January 18th, she got 56.

Speaker 28 And on January 26th, she got 56.

Speaker 1 Nikki was getting hundreds of pills, but the defense reminded the jurors that Nikki's toxicology report had shown something unusual.

Speaker 1 Despite being prescribed all those pills, the forensic scientists said she apparently hadn't been taking many of them.

Speaker 25 Is it your opinion that this just reflects like a one-time use?

Speaker 15 I believe so. It's such a small amount.

Speaker 1 Almost no drugs in her system meant something was very fishy, said the defense.

Speaker 28 Nicole was lying to her doctor. She was doing something with those drugs other than taking them.

Speaker 1 So what was she doing with them?

Speaker 28 Inferentially, circumstantially, you could find that she was out giving these drugs away.

Speaker 28 giving them away to old friends of hers, coming into contact with drug users and dealers, pretty tough tough people, pretty dangerous.

Speaker 1 The Lurit story may never be known, argued the defense. They said it was clear that Nikki and not Dave had something to hide.

Speaker 28 Something went terribly, terribly wrong, and she died as a result. That it wasn't David, but it was somebody else.

Speaker 1 Now it would be up to a jury to decide.

Speaker 1 A husband who never loved his wife, who lost it on one very bad night, or a woman with an addiction she never beat, in some final hour doling out narcotic painkillers to the wrong person.

Speaker 1 At the courthouse, the jury retired to deliberate. Kim Adams waited at home for news.

Speaker 34 I kind of made a promise to myself to support him no matter what the verdict was

Speaker 34 because I feel he would do the same for me.

Speaker 1 As the hours went by, Nikki's family prayed and the prosecutors replayed the case in their heads.

Speaker 44 I felt like there was absolutely nothing we missed in closing or in presentation.

Speaker 39 But that's not to say when they're out deliberating, you're not wondering every second what's going on and whether you're going to succeed.

Speaker 12 Please be seated with the exception of the presiding juror.

Speaker 1 And then more than seven and a half years since Nikki's body had been found, the jury was coming back with a verdict.

Speaker 43 We, the jury, find the defendant Martin David Peets guilty of the crime of murder in the second degree as charged, signed by the presiding juror.

Speaker 12 Is this the verdict of the jury?

Speaker 6 Yes, sir.

Speaker 1 David Peets, guilty of second-degree murder for strangling Nikki, his wife of almost four years.

Speaker 11 Oh, absolute elation.

Speaker 10 I just wanted justice for my daughter.

Speaker 18 And we got it.

Speaker 29 What do you want to say to David Peets now?

Speaker 22 David,

Speaker 22 I hope that you find it in your heart to be sorry, because if you don't, you'll burn in hell forever.

Speaker 1 Three weeks later, David Peets returned to court for his sentencing presiding judge michael hayden expressed disgust that david had strangled his wife who trusted him i don't know what was going through her head as she looked into the face of the man she thought she loved as he took her life away accordingly the sentence will be judge hayden sentenced david peets to 18 years in prison

Speaker 1 the maximum time allowed in this second-degree murder case Before her daughter's convicted killer was led away, Nicole's mother had this to say.

Speaker 11 I've let David take my life for the last seven and a half years, but I'm not going to anymore. David, I forgive you.
I'm not going to allow myself

Speaker 11 to let you rule my life anymore.

Speaker 6 But Gail says one question will always haunt her.

Speaker 11 I wish David would tell me why.

Speaker 22 And how could he ever harm such a nice person?

Speaker 11 I mean, Nikki was

Speaker 11 such a good person.

Speaker 1 The hardest question, always the why.

Speaker 1 The coldest fact, the young woman, gone too soon.

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

Speaker 9 Thanks for joining us.

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