Secrets of the Snake River

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Speaker 4 When I found out my mom was missing,

Speaker 4 I fought tooth and nail.

Speaker 4 We searched that entire summer, day and night. I even got hypnotized once to try to communicate with my mom to have her tell me where she was.
I did everything I could possibly do.

Speaker 3 Rachel Anderson had one great passion.

Speaker 6 She would have had a child every year if she could have. She just loved being a mom so much.

Speaker 3 And with kids at home, it was extra scary when someone started stalking her.

Speaker 8 We were talking late at night and she got real panicked and she said, I think there's somebody outside.

Speaker 3 Watching her every move.

Speaker 6 Knowing where she's at in her house, which lights were on.

Speaker 3 Making disturbing calls with a disguised voice.

Speaker 10 It's only a matter of time.

Speaker 3 Suddenly, Rachel disappeared and a desperate search began.

Speaker 11 You can see the vastness in all the various places that you could conceal a body.

Speaker 3 Months went by. The case stalled.
Then investigators learned that the plot might be bigger and darker than they ever could have guessed.

Speaker 13 This is a very tantalizing thread that comes together, absolutely.

Speaker 3 Whispers that Rachel was the victim of something out of a Hitchcock movie. A moment of pure evil.

Speaker 15 You got a look in his face that I had described as Satan.

Speaker 3 And just maybe a second woman in the crosshairs.

Speaker 13 If the stories were true, then you had married a stranger.

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 14 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 3 Here's Dennis Murphy with Secrets of the Snake River.

Speaker 19 In country so beautiful as the Palouse, the wheat and bean fields running up and down the bumps and hollows of eastern Washington as far as the eye can see, it's hard to imagine anything bad happening out here.

Speaker 16 But gaze and listen closely and sometimes you'll uncover secrets in the shadows.

Speaker 19 Murder and betrayal as close as the stranger sleeping beside you.

Speaker 27 Here in the city of Clarkston, a 40-year-old single mom was raising her two young sons.

Speaker 19 She also had two older daughters.

Speaker 19 Rachel Anderson was her name, just five foot and a bit.

Speaker 31 And how Susie Jepson enjoyed her company.

Speaker 8 We were just friends from the get-go. She was just spunky and fun and she just loved to laugh.

Speaker 14 Her grown daughters were out of the house.

Speaker 5 Amber.

Speaker 4 She was my hero. She was my everything.

Speaker 4 She just had a really fun spirit about her.

Speaker 5 Ashley.

Speaker 4 She raised us, gave us everything we needed, taught us everything we needed to know.

Speaker 9 Rachel had been married and divorced three times when by the spring of 2009, a new man had entered the picture.

Speaker 8 She told me that she'd met somebody.

Speaker 8 They'd gone out on a date and that she was very impressed because he wanted to have a blessing over the food that he and she thought that was just wonderful.

Speaker 36 A publicly christian man with a notorious gangster's last name charles capone i asked her out for dinner and we went to dinner and we found each other attractive what made you laugh about her how she looked at life everything is to be absorbed everybody should have a good time nobody should fight what was going on in her life i thought she was a brilliant woman i thought oh this woman's focus got direction awesome rachel told her daughters about charles how devout kind and handsome he was and successful he owned a busy auto repair shop up the roadaways in Moscow, Idaho.

Speaker 4 He did services on people's cars for no charge to help, you know, people who didn't have the money in the community.

Speaker 9 The new couple were soon regulars at Sunday worship, and Charles found himself with a new business partner.

Speaker 36 She'd started helping me with the shop. She had that office totally changed around and working more efficiently and saving me money in just a matter of, you know, two months.

Speaker 16 Rachel and Charles dove headlong into a whirlwind romance.

Speaker 40 Introduced in May, they eloped in November.

Speaker 16 The newlyweds made their home at Rachel's place, about 30 miles south of Charles's auto shop.

Speaker 14 Rachel's sons, six-year-old Gavin and 10-year-old Aiden, lived with them.

Speaker 36 We took the kids fishing. They had never been fishing before.

Speaker 35 But the thrill was gone not more than a month after the wedding.

Speaker 9 The couple went their separate ways.

Speaker 23 A lonely Charles moved into a shop for a while until a friend offered him a place to stay.

Speaker 46 Separated, but their lives remained curiously entwined.

Speaker 36 We're talking all the time, and we're either getting along or we're not getting along.

Speaker 36 We could have one phone call that was, you know, just enjoyable, you know, talking about things that needed to be taken care of. And then we have one phone call where we're just

Speaker 36 going at each other.

Speaker 33 As winter turned to spring in 2010,

Speaker 47 Rachel and Charles did have something to talk about.

Speaker 20 Strange, unsettling things were happening to Rachel.

Speaker 5 She told her friends someone was stalking her.

Speaker 8 We were talking late at night night and she got real panicked and she said, I think there's somebody outside.

Speaker 46 And then came a rash of disturbing phone calls.

Speaker 24 No caller ID, disguised voices. It's funny.
You just don't get it.

Speaker 46 She gave her friend Jennifer Norberg the lowdown.

Speaker 5 What kinds of things were going on with her?

Speaker 6 Phone calls? Distorted voices.

Speaker 14 Creepy movie kind of stuff?

Speaker 6 Knowing where she's at in her house, which lights were on.

Speaker 13 Not just I know where you are, I know you're in the bedroom right now.

Speaker 6 I know what time you came home last night and what time you left today and just watching her every move.

Speaker 10 It's only a matter of time before we get your cell phone number.

Speaker 9 Charles, meanwhile, told Rachel he was getting the same kind of disturbing calls.

Speaker 14 And in April, it got worse.

Speaker 34 Rachel's vehicle was vandalized more than once.

Speaker 38 Tires slashed, windows broken.

Speaker 24 Charles volunteered to fix her car, even though they were living apart.

Speaker 14 He gave her a loner SUV to drive.

Speaker 49 Rachel was pretty sure who was behind all the scary nonsense.

Speaker 14 A guy she'd gone out with a few times and had developed, she thought, an unhealthy thing about her.

Speaker 43 Rachel went to the county sheriff's office and told her story to Captain Dan Halley.

Speaker 10 She was extremely frightened. She believed an individual that she had dated for a couple weeks by the name of William Schlamp, he was the one stalking and harassing her.

Speaker 13 So when Rachel left that day, what was the plan?

Speaker 10 She was going to essentially put together the information that she had, and then we were going to meet again that Friday.

Speaker 13 Did you see her again, Captain?

Speaker 10 I talked to her on the phone, but I never saw her again.

Speaker 20 Not long after leaving the sheriff's office, Rachel applied for a restraining order against William Slap.

Speaker 45 It was the weekend.

Speaker 7 The two boys had visitation with their dads.

Speaker 16 It wasn't until mid-morning the following Monday that people began to realize that something had gone very wrong.

Speaker 28 Rachel's daughter, Amber, got a message that her mom hadn't shown up for work as a medical technician.

Speaker 37 Totally unlike her.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I knew immediately that it was bad.

Speaker 43 Amber got word to Sister Ashley and they raced to their mom's home.

Speaker 14 When there was no answer at the door, they called the police.

Speaker 16 Captain Halley dispatched his lead detective Jackie Nichols.

Speaker 11 There was several people in the front yard, Rachel's daughters, and they were frantic. I searched the house looking for any types of evidence.
Nothing, huh? No.

Speaker 4 The last time I seen her, she said that, I think this will end in my death.

Speaker 3 Where was Rachel Anderson? An all-out search is about to set off a string of alarm bells.

Speaker 53 When we return, the first ominous clues.

Speaker 11 The vehicle was left unlocked with her purse in plain sight, with the keys sitting in plain sight.

Speaker 13 What woman leaves her purse behind?

Speaker 11 It was a bad sign.

Speaker 16 Rachel Anderson's loved ones were filled with dread when she failed to turn up for her job as a medical technician that Monday morning in 2010.

Speaker 6 She would have never left her children. She would not have left her sons.

Speaker 6 Not for a minute, not for a day.

Speaker 24 Investigators had a few bare facts to work with.

Speaker 7 They knew Rachel had canceled that Friday meeting with a Sotin County Sheriff's Captain Dan Halley about the stalking incidents.

Speaker 40 Detectives could find no ATM or cell phone activity since a voicemail Rachel left at 8.09 Friday night.

Speaker 30 That meant Rachel had been off the grid nearly three days.

Speaker 4 I knew there was something very, very wrong.

Speaker 13 You'd swung into action.

Speaker 4 I had about a thousand flyers printed at Staples.

Speaker 25 Monday afternoon, law enforcement pinged Rachel's cell phone and got a weak echo just across the Snake River from her home.

Speaker 11 We got a lot of people out into that field that night. Also uses a bloodhound to do a live search.

Speaker 4 We were looking in trash sacks and tarps and underbushes. We searched all night.
By the time I got home, my knees were bloody in my hands.

Speaker 17 The search was futile.

Speaker 5 Early the next day, Tuesday, Captain Haley formed a regional missing person task force.

Speaker 13 So what's on your whiteboard? What's on your agenda?

Speaker 11 It's this William Slimp.

Speaker 13 The former boyfriend.

Speaker 10 Yeah, we went down the night.

Speaker 11 Other ex-boyfriends, ex-husband,

Speaker 10 family.

Speaker 11 There had been a neighbor that lived across the street from Rachel that had some suspicious behaviors. He'd asked Rachel out on a date and she'd turned him down.
And then he left town very abruptly.

Speaker 55 I mean, that's certainly suspecting.

Speaker 11 And we're checking hospitals, travel information. We checked every bus ticket that was sold that weekend.

Speaker 26 An early lead may have come when Rachel talked to Sheriff's Captain Dan Halley the week before.

Speaker 56 She told him that day she was terrified of the slimp guy messing with her, but the captain had a different stalking suspect in mind after Rachel told him she was divorcing Charles.

Speaker 43 So an early stop for investigators was Charles's shock.

Speaker 5 So who's the guy you met?

Speaker 10 Easygoing. You know, he was very cordial.
He's being cooperative.

Speaker 30 But I didn't have anything to hide.

Speaker 36 What was I going to hide? Here they come, driving up.

Speaker 14 I was like, come on in.

Speaker 21 Charles assured police he had nothing to do with the stalking or damaging of her car.

Speaker 13 You're not vandalizing the vehicle.

Speaker 13 You're You're not scary walking her house?

Speaker 36 Absolutely not.

Speaker 26 Did you slash her tires?

Speaker 36 No, absolutely not. Did you break out the back windshield? No, absolutely not.

Speaker 5 In fact, Charles told the cops he was helping Rachel get to the bottom of the harassment. He said the estranged couple together went out looking for the obsessed ex-boyfriend to sort him out.

Speaker 36 And she tells me about him and then we go driving over to his house because there's a payphone right near his house that's one of the payphones that was making phone calls to her.

Speaker 13 You thought Slimp was a stalker?

Speaker 36 I just thought he was still involved with with her because he had this huge crush on Rachel.

Speaker 10 He tells me he was, you know, being the helpful guy and then he's trying to help her figure out who's stalking her.

Speaker 46 Charles went on to tell the investigators he hadn't seen Rachel since Friday night when she'd stopped by the garage to pick up her car.

Speaker 14 It wasn't ready.

Speaker 10 He described how she was upset because, you know, he's working on her car.

Speaker 14 Charles said Rachel then left to buy a computer.

Speaker 5 She couldn't find what she wanted, but returned with a six-pack.

Speaker 57 They drank a few of the beers, he said, and she left.

Speaker 13 What's the picture that's coming together for you?

Speaker 11 I'm trying to keep all options open because I was concerned that she might have been impaired that evening and could have driven off the road.

Speaker 13 A benign kind of explanation for why she's gone missing.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 22 But a few hours later, that theory was doused when they located Rachel's loaner SUV at a convenience store that doubled as a bus station not far from her house.

Speaker 11 The vehicle was left unlocked with her purse in plain sight, with the keys sitting in plain sight.

Speaker 13 What woman leaves her purse behind?

Speaker 11 It was a bad sign.

Speaker 9 And the detectives had to consider another scenario.

Speaker 27 Had pretty 5'4 inch Rachel, 120 pounds soaking wet, offered an easy target for an abduction by a stranger unknown.

Speaker 28 While detectives were doing their official thing, Rachel's loved ones were widening their increasingly desperate search all across the Palouse.

Speaker 6 We were uphanding flyers from here to Colfax, east, west, north, south. We were out every available minute.

Speaker 5 It was as though the police had just swallowed her up.

Speaker 59 Coming up.

Speaker 14 Finally, a break.

Speaker 3 Police learn there was somebody else with Charles Capone the night Rachel disappeared. But something doesn't add up.

Speaker 11 He provided a timeline for that evening, and it was different than Charles Capone's timeline.

Speaker 3 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 5 Rachel Anderson, a mother of four, had vanished.

Speaker 43 And it was the job of Captain Dan Halley and the missing person task force to find out what had happened to her.

Speaker 13 Rachel has not hopped a bus.

Speaker 38 No.

Speaker 13 She's not in anybody's emergency room.

Speaker 5 That's correct.

Speaker 48 You suspect foul play?

Speaker 5 Absolutely.

Speaker 35 The investigators started working their way through a list of suspects, starting with the men men who wanted to be in Rachel's life.

Speaker 14 There was the neighbor who tried to take her out and been turned down.

Speaker 18 He had an alibi.

Speaker 5 That left the old boyfriend named Slemp, the one Rachel said she was afraid of, but he could account for his whereabouts when Rachel went missing.

Speaker 13 The former boyfriend was not playing out.

Speaker 11 Correct, yeah.

Speaker 5 You had to follow all those

Speaker 5 penalty.

Speaker 11 Yeah, as these threads started, we would follow them as we could, but Charles Capone was the one that never was a dead end.

Speaker 14 Captain Dan Halley had been suspicious of Charles ever since Rachel stopped by to make a stalking complaint about the ex-boyfriend.

Speaker 14 But that same day, Rachel had also told the captain she was in the midst of divorcing Charles Capone.

Speaker 57 The grounds? She said he tried to choke her.

Speaker 9 Well, that was a huge red flag.

Speaker 26 Captain Halley advised her to get a restraining order right away against her estranged husband.

Speaker 18 Rachel didn't want to hear that.

Speaker 10 She was agitated because I'm telling her it's your soon-to-be ex, it's Charles doing this, not Slimp.

Speaker 23 Two days later, on the Friday she vanished, the captain's phone rang.

Speaker 10 She called me and she told me that she was going to see Charles that night. She was going up to tell him that they were done.

Speaker 13 What'd you tell her?

Speaker 10 I told her, don't go. I said, he's dangerous.
Do not go up there.

Speaker 14 Charles' account of that night was looking sketchy.

Speaker 47 And the cops' suspicions grew after Charles decided to stop cooperating.

Speaker 13 They suggest maybe you should go downtown and have a more formal conversation.

Speaker 47 On the 21st, that's cool. You don't do that.

Speaker 30 You don't go to the house.

Speaker 36 No, I talked to my attorney and he told me, he says, you know what, have them contact me if they got any more questions. You don't have to go down there.

Speaker 44 The car mechanic had a secret he knew the police would uncover.

Speaker 18 It turned out that the publicly pious, pray-over his pancakes Christian had a past that Rachel and her family knew nothing about.

Speaker 14 A backstory that included prison time for bank robbery and assault.

Speaker 5 But the one-time felon had apparently changed.

Speaker 36 I'm going and doing everything that a normal person does because I always feel like, okay, I paid my debt. Let me go and move on and do something good and constructive.

Speaker 13 So you're paying your taxes, you're mowing the lawn?

Speaker 36 It's nice to be able to just walk around with your head up.

Speaker 41 The cops weren't so sure and were now chasing down his friends, including his good pal, David Stone, a married high school baseball coach and employee at the Muscow, Idaho Maintenance Department.

Speaker 25 To the investigator's astonishment, David volunteered that he'd been hanging out with Charles and Rachel at the garage the Friday night she went missing.

Speaker 12 It's absolutely

Speaker 13 another guy. Someone with information.

Speaker 10 Somebody with information immediately raises the question, why didn't Charles Capone ever mention David Stone to me during the entire time I interviewed him?

Speaker 14 Three days after Rachel was reported missing, the task force detective sat David Stone down and grilled him.

Speaker 11 He provided a timeline for that evening, and it was different than Charles Capone's timeline.

Speaker 52 The husband's friend told the cops Rachel came by the shop about 5 p.m.

Speaker 14 and waited for Charles to finish her car.

Speaker 52 David Stone says he then left to get some food at an AW, and when he got back to the garage around 8, Rachel was gone.

Speaker 5 Stone said he drove Charles to a local bar, swung by his home for a while, then went out later to pick up Charles at the bar.

Speaker 42 Many of the investigators knew David Stone and his wife Alyssa.

Speaker 49 She worked in Moscow City Hall as a grants writer.

Speaker 13 Who was your Dave? Personality, character?

Speaker 32 Yeah, someone that was very caring, was a really good stepdad, you know, was on the volunteer fire department.

Speaker 5 Charles Capone, were they friends?

Speaker 65 Yes.

Speaker 5 Did you know Rachel?

Speaker 32 I knew her only from church.

Speaker 14 Alyssa knew her husband was at the garage that Friday night and said nothing seemed amiss.

Speaker 13 What did he say was going on with her?

Speaker 32 He said he dropped Charles off at Mingles and that there had been some interaction with Rachel that wasn't happy and Charles said he wanted to have a drink and so he dropped him off and he was going to go back and pick him up and he'd be home.

Speaker 41 Intriguing perhaps, but the two friends' mismatched stories did nothing to advance the cops' case.

Speaker 42 With Rachel still missing, there was no evidence an actual crime had even occurred.

Speaker 21 All they had were their suspicions about David Stone and Charles Capone.

Speaker 9 So now you get two different versions of the story.

Speaker 38 Two different versions.

Speaker 10 They were supposedly together, but they're telling two different stories.

Speaker 21 Tangled somewhere in the differing accounts, the cops thought, there must be a buried clue about what had happened to Rachel.

Speaker 14 Meantime, her heartbroken daughters did what they could to fill the awful hours, organizing searches, building a web page, and pressuring the police.

Speaker 4 We searched ditches, we searched, gosh, abandoned buildings, we searched

Speaker 4 for

Speaker 4 flyers in towns hoping that someone would see her passing through.

Speaker 10 Their mom meant so much to them,

Speaker 10 and they did not want this to just become another cold case.

Speaker 34 The investigation was heading that way until the detectives revisited an early lead.

Speaker 41 A nefarious scheme, if true. Hard to believe that something as evil as that could happen in the police.

Speaker 13 So this is a very tantalizing thread that comes together. This is the stuff of the movies.

Speaker 37 Absolutely.

Speaker 59 Coming up.

Speaker 3 The case is about to go in an unthinkable direction. With the clock ticking, police realize another woman may also be a target.

Speaker 10 We wanted her to know that she was potentially in danger herself.

Speaker 42 The high and low search across the eerily beautiful Palouse country for any trace of Rachel Anderson was turning up nothing.

Speaker 42 Months after her disappearance, detectives were convinced they had identified their prime persons of interest, Rachel's estranged husband Charles, and his church-going buddy, David Stone.

Speaker 16 But the investigation had stalled and was at an apparent dead end.

Speaker 50 No secret what the biggest obstacle was for lead investigators Captain Dan Halley and Detective Jackie Nichols.

Speaker 13 It's an axiom in law enforcement, no body, no crime.

Speaker 11 At this point, we don't even know for sure that we have a death.

Speaker 5 We

Speaker 11 believe that in our gut.

Speaker 58 As the cops dug deeper into the background of the husband's friend, David Stone, the case suddenly became way more complex, a mind-blowing mind-blowing theory.

Speaker 47 Maybe this wasn't just about one wife, Rachel.

Speaker 58 Maybe it was about two.

Speaker 19 The investigation had led them to the city maintenance yard where Stone worked.

Speaker 31 A fellow employee there had related a conversation he'd had with David Stone a while back.

Speaker 10 It surfaces that there had been some conversations between David Stone and this individual about a plan to kill Stone's wife for $10,000.

Speaker 40 Then Stone, the story went, came back sometime later and told the maintenance yard guy to forget they talked.

Speaker 46 He'd arranged a plan B for murder.

Speaker 10 And later, that deal was canceled because Stone had reached an agreement with Charles Capone that they would kill each other's wives.

Speaker 14 I'll kill your wife if you'll kill mine.

Speaker 13 This is the stuff of the movies, right?

Speaker 37 It is. Absolutely.

Speaker 59 Let's say that you'd like to get rid of your wife.

Speaker 28 To be specific, a 1950 Alfred Hitchcock thriller titled Strangers on a Train.

Speaker 29 In the movie, two strangers each agreed to commit a murder for the other.

Speaker 3 They swap murders.

Speaker 21 Did Capone and Stone each agree to do in the other's wife?

Speaker 50 Could that be?

Speaker 11 Do you believe it? I think there was something to it.

Speaker 13 I definitely believe that Mrs. Stone is alive and well in Among Us.

Speaker 37 Did you talk to her?

Speaker 37 Yes, we did.

Speaker 13 Boy, what a table conversation, huh?

Speaker 13 The cops are telling me that you're trying to kill me.

Speaker 10 We wanted her to know that she was potentially in danger herself.

Speaker 13 You get some devastating news, but you continued to share a house with him, huh?

Speaker 32 I did.

Speaker 32 I remember many times when I would question David and say,

Speaker 32 something's not right.

Speaker 9 David Stone was able to convince Alyssa that the cops had dreamed up the murder plot story as a way to put pressure on him to turn against his friend.

Speaker 21 And putting pressure on that friend, Charles Capone, is what happened next.

Speaker 9 He'd been found in possession of a gun, a big no-no for a former felon.

Speaker 47 Capone was placed in the county jail while awaiting awaiting federal charges on a firearm violation.

Speaker 14 In a cell, the visiting detectives had his full attention.

Speaker 36 And I get this interesting visit from Dan Halley and Jackie Nichols.

Speaker 10 And I essentially opened up with, today, Charles, you're going to tell me you killed Rachel and where her body is. And his response was, well, you only got one of those right, but I didn't kill her.

Speaker 5 If Charles didn't kill her, who did?

Speaker 5 The investigators landed heart on David Stone, the only other person known to have been with Rachel that night.

Speaker 10 And we confront him with, Stone, we know you got blood on your hands. His response was he just sat back and he said, I need a drink of water.

Speaker 10 Never denied it, but that's when then he wanted his attorney after that.

Speaker 14 With no reason to hold him, David Stone was free to go home to wife Alyssa, the woman cops feared he wanted dead.

Speaker 48 But not Charles.

Speaker 44 He was about to be put on ice.

Speaker 21 Five months after Rachel disappeared, he pleaded guilty to the federal firearms charge and was sentenced to almost three years.

Speaker 33 So Capone wasn't going anywhere, but still the task force investigation focused on him and Stone appeared to be at a dead end.

Speaker 9 The missing woman's daughters were in limbo too.

Speaker 4 It just went on for years, years of one nightmare.

Speaker 5 As happens, Rachel became old news and the case receded from the headlines.

Speaker 24 Fresh cases demanded the attention of Detective Jackie Nichols.

Speaker 19 No problem, she took to looking for Rachel on her days off.

Speaker 11 As you look around here, you can see the vastness of the countryside here and all the various places that you could conceal a body.

Speaker 13 And going up in the mountains, coolies and gorges.

Speaker 42 The mountains, ravines.

Speaker 11 We even did some searches based on psychic visions and dreams.

Speaker 5 Oh, really?

Speaker 43 Rachel's family, at as much of a dead end as the cops, also turned desperately to the supernatural.

Speaker 4 We did some pretty extreme things to find her. I even got hypnotized once to try to communicate with my mom, not alive, to have her to tell me where she was.
I did everything I could possibly do.

Speaker 31 The hunt for the slightest trace of Rachel continued for years.

Speaker 21 Meanwhile, David Stone was on the street and by 2013 his fellow suspect, Buddy Charles Capone, was about to be released from jail.

Speaker 11 He said, now is the time. We have to charge these guys.
We have to charge them both. We know.
We know that they did this crime.

Speaker 10 This case wasn't going to get any better.

Speaker 14 The Idaho Layton County prosecutor agreed, and on May Day, 2013, three years after Rachel vanished, David Stone and Charles Capone were charged with her murder.

Speaker 21 They pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 36 This case is all about smoking mirrors and convincing people from day one that I murdered my wife.

Speaker 28 In the preliminary hearing, prosecutors laid out their theory of the crime, producing that maintenance yard worker who told the story about Charles and David's alleged, you kill my wife, I'll kill yours plan.

Speaker 5 Stone's wife, Alyssa, hung on every word.

Speaker 9 Frightening connections were being made in her head.

Speaker 5 And with that came the sudden, awful awareness that the sheriff's officers may have been right after all. Her husband did want her dead.

Speaker 22 She immediately filed for divorce.

Speaker 32 The pieces all came together for me.

Speaker 13 And there's this account of him going to a coworker and saying,

Speaker 13 I'll give you $10,000 if you'll kill my wife.

Speaker 5 You.

Speaker 5 What do you think of that story?

Speaker 49 That he was soliciting someone to kill you.

Speaker 32 Yeah, I'll never know.

Speaker 13 This is beyond marital deceit.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 13 If the stories were true, then you had married a stranger.

Speaker 32 Exactly.

Speaker 39 Who is Dave Stone?

Speaker 32 It's a mystery to me at this point.

Speaker 15 Some of the things that came up in that preliminary hearing, I look like a monster, and I'm not.

Speaker 59 Coming up.

Speaker 3 David Stone tells a chilling tale of what he says happened the night Rachel disappeared.

Speaker 15 I said, what the f you doing?

Speaker 15 And he looked at me, had a look on his face that I had described as Satan.

Speaker 3 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 27 Almost four years after that weekend, Rachel Anderson never came home. Her family believed they might finally get some answers.

Speaker 29 Police had arrested her estranged husband, Charles Capone, and his pal, David Stone, in connection with her death.

Speaker 35 But in September 2014, it was only Charles Capone in the Leyton County Courthouse facing a murder charge.

Speaker 67 We are convinced that you will find the only possible verdict, finding the defendant, Charles Capone, guilty of first-degree murder.

Speaker 18 As the trial opened, the state's case had zigzagged another unpredicted turn.

Speaker 35 The maintenance yard worker had backpedaled on his murder for hire story and wouldn't testify to it.

Speaker 14 So now the jurors wouldn't hear of a juicy, you kill my wife, I'll kill yours plot, but rather a straightforward and nonetheless terrifying story of a lousy marriage turned fatal.

Speaker 33 County prosecuting attorney Bill Thompson and Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Mia Vowles knew they had their work cut out for them.

Speaker 53 Our approach was to convince the jury through the evidence not only that Rachel was dead, but there's only one person in this world who could have been responsible for it, and that's Charles Capone.

Speaker 13 What was the biggest hill to climb in this?

Speaker 51 Because we didn't have a body, it was mostly a circumstantial case.

Speaker 34 Mia Vowles took the lead and called a parade of witnesses to convince the jury that Rachel was indeed dead.

Speaker 15 Good mother, had a good attitude toward family.

Speaker 5 Her ex-husband, Dennis Plunkett, had missed a call from her at 8.09 that Friday night.

Speaker 32 And that was the last contact I ever had with her.

Speaker 22 Rachel's two sons testified they'd never seen their mother again after that Friday.

Speaker 67 Have you seen your mom since?

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 7 To show jurors just how nasty Charles and Rachel's divorce was, they played back some of those eerie, stalking phone calls.

Speaker 64 It's funny. You just don't get it.

Speaker 10 I'm very concerned for her safety and well-being.

Speaker 14 Captain Dan Halley testified that the defendant had been behind those head game calls all along.

Speaker 21 Capone even admitted as much to him.

Speaker 10 He told me that he had been involved in the stalking and harassment.

Speaker 32 Yeah, and I know she was afraid because she was.

Speaker 14 Ashley and Amber, the daughters, recounted the terror of their mom's ordeal.

Speaker 4 She had the feeling like her life was going to end. A dreadful feeling.

Speaker 27 The prosecutor zeroed in on Charles's character.

Speaker 29 Jennifer Norberg recalled what her friend's neck looked like after Charles allegedly attacked Rachel four months before she disappeared.

Speaker 6 I observed that she had some

Speaker 64 red,

Speaker 6 dark-colored marks on her neck.

Speaker 64 The same grudge door here.

Speaker 24 Then prosecutors produced a business neighbor, an actual eyewitness who saw Charles arguing with a woman outside his auto shop that fatal night.

Speaker 10 She jumped out of the car, flailing her arms and right up into his face.

Speaker 42 Raise your right hand to be sworn, please.

Speaker 51 You do solemnly swear our affirmative.

Speaker 39 So far, the testimony was all appetizers before the prosecutor's main course.

Speaker 9 Their head-snapping, all-or-nothing star witness.

Speaker 42 None other than Charles' good buddy, David Stone.

Speaker 56 No longer a co-defendant for murder.

Speaker 15 David Stone.

Speaker 42 Now the man pointing the accusing finger.

Speaker 15 S-T-O-N-E.

Speaker 26 Stone's journey to the witness stand began a year earlier during that preliminary hearing when Capone whispered something to him.

Speaker 15 Charles leaned over to me and said, you shouldn't even be here.

Speaker 15 And I thought, how right you are, you son of a bitch.

Speaker 20 A shaken stone listened to the state's mounting case against him and decided he wasn't going to take the fall for Charles.

Speaker 15 The prosecution did a real good job making me out to be a monster, and I'm not.

Speaker 13 They told you something like, we know there's blood on your hands here, huh?

Speaker 15 Well, that was probably one of the things that they said.

Speaker 38 In cop talk, they flipped you.

Speaker 13 They flipped you against him.

Speaker 13 They were going to give give you some consideration in exchange for your colour.

Speaker 15 Your cops had nothing to do with Meek telling the story.

Speaker 33 Stone says there was no deal with the cops.

Speaker 48 Rather, his pastor convinced him to come clean.

Speaker 15 Throughout numerous visits, we prayed in closing prayer that the truth would set me free.

Speaker 14 Maybe so.

Speaker 40 But the prosecution counted on his testimony to put his former friend away for a long, long time.

Speaker 42 Do you know the defendant Charles Capone?

Speaker 15 I do. He's sitting next to Mr.
Monson.

Speaker 23 Once on the stand, Stone set off in his tale about the events of Friday, April 16th, 2010.

Speaker 15 I was inside the shop

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 I'd heard a noise.

Speaker 15 What kind of noise? Kind of like a thud or a bang or just something kind of loud.

Speaker 39 When he looked outside, a struggle.

Speaker 15 As I came around closer toward the back side of Rachel's car, Rachel was on her back and then Charles, but he was on top of her strangling her.

Speaker 64 Was Rachel moving?

Speaker 5 Very little.

Speaker 64 What'd you say?

Speaker 15 I said what the f you doing

Speaker 15 and he turned around, he looked at me, had a look in his face that I had described as Satan

Speaker 15 and he told me to shut up,

Speaker 15 get a hold of myself.

Speaker 15 You're in this with me now.

Speaker 15 I know where your family's at.

Speaker 64 Why didn't you intervene at this point?

Speaker 5 Fear?

Speaker 64 What were you afraid of?

Speaker 64 I'm just...

Speaker 15 I'm watching somebody kill his wife.

Speaker 42 I don't know what he's going to do to me.

Speaker 29 The two men moved Rachel's body into the shop.

Speaker 29 David Stone testified they ditched the loner vehicle Rachel was driving at the convenience store bus depot near her home and then returned to Stone's garage.

Speaker 29 After that, Stone said he went to his job site and rounded up some old truck tire snow chains like these. They wrapped up Rachel's body.

Speaker 15 Once we placed Rachel across the chain, we rolled her also in the chain.

Speaker 40 Then he said the two put Rachel's trussed up weighted down body into his SUV.

Speaker 34 With David Stone at the wheel, they drove south and onto the Red Wolf Bridge over the Snake River.

Speaker 15 He just said, stop. I put the Durango in park, got out,

Speaker 15 opened the hatch,

Speaker 15 we pulled Rachel out,

Speaker 15 went to the side of the bridge, and

Speaker 5 threw her over aside.

Speaker 39 Prosecutors prosecutors interrupted stone's narrative to play for jurors a recording made at the bridge

Speaker 29 he was pulling the package out and i assisted him and we proceeded to the side of the trom wall here and threw the package over the side what was in the package

Speaker 10 the body of rachel anderson

Speaker 31 into the fast-moving river never to be seen again

Speaker 14 What would the jury make of this man giving them such critical evidence, the play-by-play of the crime itself?

Speaker 13 You know they're going to hate this guy.

Speaker 12 That's the reality of the case.

Speaker 13 Did it matter whether the jury sat in moral judgment on your star witness, Mia?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 51 They won't like that he didn't intervene and that he helped dispose of her body, but that doesn't change the fact that he witnessed what he did.

Speaker 16 As the state rested, it looked ironically as though its star witness would prove to be the best thing the defense had going for it.

Speaker 39 David Stone.

Speaker 19 Would the jury believe a word he said?

Speaker 59 Coming up.

Speaker 3 And what about the other man at the center of this case? Though he won't take the stand, Charles Capone takes the tough questions from us.

Speaker 13 This whole threat of this thing: I'll kill your wife if you'll kill mine. Did that happen?

Speaker 64 You may find yourselves in a quandary as to what actually happened.

Speaker 48 Charles Capone's defense team had to convince the jury that their client hadn't strangled his estranged wife, Rachel, and tossed her body into the Snake River with the help of his friend, David Stone.

Speaker 7 Charles had maintained his innocence.

Speaker 36 This is this just can't be what's going on in life right now. I can't be at this point right now sitting here with a guy from Dateline.

Speaker 13 And the guy from Dateline is here because of what is believed to have happened by the authorities on that Friday night.

Speaker 47 His attorney's strategy was threefold: discredit the buddy's damning eyewitness testimony, sow reasonable doubt about the state's evidence, and offer alternate suspects.

Speaker 39 Right off the bat, they suggested to the jury that there was another person who just might have had a hand in Rachel's disappearance.

Speaker 5 Maybe that infatuated one-time boyfriend, William Slemp.

Speaker 16 Slemp died before the case came to trial.

Speaker 45 Yes. So the defense attorney asked daughter Amber what she knew about him.

Speaker 64 Did you also, in your conversation with your mother, consider another person as being this arch?

Speaker 67 Yes.

Speaker 64 And was that William Slemp?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 27 And was the boyfriend perceived as a menace?

Speaker 9 The defense produced a request for a restraining order against Slemp that Rachel had filled out.

Speaker 52 During cross-examination, the defense got Detective Jackie Nichols to concede another connection between Rachel and Slemp.

Speaker 16 After ceding the thought with jurors that maybe someone other than Capone did it, the defense team turned its sights on the cops, all the things they hadn't found in their investigation.

Speaker 33 For starters, there was no physical evidence recovered at Charles's garage.

Speaker 64 Or he didn't see any signs of a struggle outside.

Speaker 42 That's correct.

Speaker 65 And when cops recovered Rachel's vehicle, there were fingerprints, but not Capone's.

Speaker 13 They didn't match anybody that was in the system.

Speaker 9 But attacking the evidence wouldn't be enough.

Speaker 42 Everyone may be seated.

Speaker 9 Justice for the prosecution, the defense case lived or died on the credibility of David Stone.

Speaker 9 During a grueling day-long cross-examination, Charles's lawyer attacked David Stone's veracity and his motives.

Speaker 43 David claimed he helped dispose of Rachel's body and then kept quiet all those years because he was in fear of his life from Charles.

Speaker 24 And yet, they continued to pal around.

Speaker 64 Why did you keep that contact every day?

Speaker 15 Well, I'd kind of like to know where someone's at if I'm concerned about my safety.

Speaker 33 Capone's lawyer suggested that David Stone was only out to save his own neck.

Speaker 64 And were you hoping for teleniency?

Speaker 15 And still am.

Speaker 14 Hour after hour, the lawyer hammered away at David, who'd easily admitted to lying his way through any number of police interviews.

Speaker 64 Did you feel your word might not be real good?

Speaker 15 I mean, based on the fact that I'd been lying for three and a half years,

Speaker 5 wouldn't you?

Speaker 9 In the defense close, it came back again to a central question.

Speaker 34 Could the jury believe David Stone?

Speaker 68 At the end of the day, what Stone is telling you, it can't be true. There's no physical evidence of any foul play anywhere at or near that shop.

Speaker 65 Charles Capone declined to testify in his own defense.

Speaker 64 And do you feel comfortable in that decision?

Speaker 42 Yes, sir, I do.

Speaker 16 Prosecutor Bill Thompson had the final word for the state.

Speaker 53 Rachel's gone forever.

Speaker 11 He ensured that her body, her physical essence, is also gone forever.

Speaker 53 But we can't let that allow him to escape responsibility.

Speaker 26 After seven days of testimony, the case went to the jury.

Speaker 13 Let me ask you that cut-to-the-chase question. On Friday that night, at the garage, did you get her down on the ground? Did you throttle your wife and kill her?

Speaker 36 I can tell you, honestly, no. It's a lie.

Speaker 36 It's been portrayed as stuff that absolutely didn't take place. I've done many things, you know, that I'm not proud of.
You know, paid my dues, moved on, you know, try to be a better person.

Speaker 13 This whole threat of this thing, I'll kill your wife if you'll kill mine. Did that that happen?

Speaker 36 I can't answer that for you, right?

Speaker 55 You can't answer it.

Speaker 42 I can't.

Speaker 39 Capone says he's made mistakes along the way, but did not kill Rachel.

Speaker 36 I don't have that in me. I don't have it.
I want to care about people.

Speaker 5 I want to love on people.

Speaker 36 I don't want to take somebody's life. You know, one officer, she says I'm a sociopath and I have no heart and I don't care and I haven't suffered from this.

Speaker 13 Yeah, okay. Are you a sociopath?

Speaker 36 No, I don't believe so. I've seen my share of psychologists and stuff like that, and I think I'm pretty normal.
I mean, I think like a lot most men I just make poor decisions.

Speaker 15 Charles was on top of Rachel Strangler.

Speaker 13 Why does he tell the story in court that he does?

Speaker 48 Because he sinks you.

Speaker 36 Because he's going to get charged with

Speaker 36 solicitation for murder. How much time was he going to do for trying to hire somebody to kill his wife? You know, wouldn't you try to get out of that?

Speaker 26 It took the jurors nine hours to decide whether they believed David Stone's story.

Speaker 5 There was a verdict.

Speaker 16 Rachel's family and friends were called back to the courthouse.

Speaker 8 When the jury came in and we stood there, it seemed like for an eternity.

Speaker 5 And Madam Clerk, if you would read the verdict of the jury.

Speaker 8 You know, our hearts were pounding.

Speaker 54 Is the defendant Charles Anthony Capone guilty or not guilty of murder in the first degree?

Speaker 5 The clerk read the jury's verdict.

Speaker 42 Guilty.

Speaker 8 It was like this weight just was lifted from everyone.

Speaker 34 Rachel's daughters had waited four and a half years for this death.

Speaker 13 So you hear the words, huh?

Speaker 4 It's just bittersweet.

Speaker 13 You're You're not getting your mom back.

Speaker 5 No. The end of this.

Speaker 4 All it is is protecting other women and children from being harmed by him.

Speaker 39 Charles Capone was sentenced to life without parole in February 2015.

Speaker 31 David Stone, who pleaded guilty solely to failure to notify authorities of a death, served three years behind bars.

Speaker 38 He was released in July of 2016.

Speaker 64 I want to apologize to Rachel's family.

Speaker 57 When we spoke with Stone, he expressed remorse for what he had done.

Speaker 15 It's a day that I think about every day,

Speaker 5 and I will the rest of my life.

Speaker 5 If I could change it, I damn sure would.

Speaker 13 Why didn't you go get your phone and call 911?

Speaker 14 You knew you had just witnessed a murder.

Speaker 15 And all the way up to

Speaker 15 that point, I thought he was my friend.

Speaker 7 Did you solicit a hit on your wife?

Speaker 5 Never.

Speaker 13 Did you want her dead in those days?

Speaker 55 No.

Speaker 13 So where does this story come from?

Speaker 15 That's a good question.

Speaker 56 David Stone's former wife, Alyssa, still doesn't know for sure if he wanted her dead.

Speaker 13 I bet there are very few people on earth that could put themselves in your shoes and even understand what you've been through, Alyssa.

Speaker 32 You know, I've been through a lot, but nothing compared to what Rachel's family's been through. I don't think my pain's comparable to what her daughters and sons have been through at all.

Speaker 16 Ever since the day in November 2013, when David Stone gave his horrific tale to the cops, there have been intensive searches made of the Snake River below the Red Wolf Bridge.

Speaker 16 Captain Dan Halley enlisted multiple agencies, including the Coast Guard and volunteers with specialized sonar, to help.

Speaker 19 But the depths of the swift-moving snake have yet to surrender Rachel's body.

Speaker 13 Is she gone forever?

Speaker 5 I know we're not going to give up.

Speaker 11 Hopefully, Lou might still find her remains.

Speaker 17 For the justice system, it's case closed.

Speaker 43 But for those Rachel left behind.

Speaker 4 You know, there's no true justice. It doesn't bring her back.

Speaker 13 Is there a new chapter opening up for you?

Speaker 32 It's just begun.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 when I found out my mom was missing,

Speaker 37 I fought tooth and nail.

Speaker 4 So did Ashley. That's what we did.

Speaker 5 And so...

Speaker 4 At this point, it feels like the fight is over. The grieving process for me has just begun.

Speaker 5 because there's nothing left to fight for.

Speaker 14 That's all for now.

Speaker 12 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 3 Thanks for joining us.

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