The Shadow

Hey everyone, I'm Jenna Bush-Hager from The Today Show, and I'm excited to share my podcast,

Open Book with Jenna. It is back for season two.
Each week, celebrities, experts, friends,

and authors will share candid stories with me about their lives and new projects. Guests like

Rebecca Yaros, Kristen Hanna, Ego Wodum, and more. Like a good book, you'll leave feeling

inspired and entertained. Join me for my podcast, Open Book with Jenna.
Listen now on Spotify. It was one of those moments where you just want to go back two minutes.
Two minutes ago, he was laying beside me and he was alive. Now he's gone forever.
Inside a sleeping house, an armed intruder hunts for prey. I heard Angie scream, oh my God, oh my God.

I could see blood running down his neck.

I nudged Justin and he didn't respond.

Her fiance had just been killed, but she's calm somehow.

To me, very calm.

I thought maybe there was a boyfriend on the side, some kind of love triangle. But on a dark highway, the case would take a dramatic turn.
All the hair on my body was standing on edge. Made you nervous? Extremely nervous.
A mysterious driver carrying ominous cargo. How did he explain that? At that time, you don't.
It's heavenless to suggest that there is some sort of conspiracy.

Unraveling a mind-bending plot to reveal a shattering truth.

Evil is the only word I can think of.

Inhuman, to do something like that.

It was a moonless night in Iowa, four o'clock in the morning, the quietest of quiet hours.

A small-town cop glided down the empty highway out of Des Moines,

bound for the early shift at his rural police department.

That's when he saw it, corner of his eye. What was that in the ditch, maybe 30 yards off the highway? A car? In trouble? He swung around.
Somebody clearly missed a curve on the gravel access road. The driver's door hanging open on it.
Looked like airbags deployed, dome light was on. And then suddenly, who was that? Knocking on his car window.
Gentleman didn't have a shirt on. Seemed agitated, weird.
Eventually, a second cop appeared. He's excited.
He seemed like, you know, if you were to talk to somebody right after they got done running a marathon. Just out of breath, sweating profusely.
The entire time I'm out here, it's just a very, very, it's an uneasy feeling. My stomach was turning.
But no law broken. He called the guy a cab, sent him home.
No idea what was coming. How could they know? It makes you question the goodness of humanity.
It makes you question your faith. It makes you question your beliefs.
It was a point where evil outdid good. Even here in the heart of the heartland, its lovely capital, its famous state fair, all manner of deep-fried delicacies and presidential casting calls here.
Des Moines, a place known for its sweet and gentle nature, for people who are simply nice, like him. He was just very good.
His name was Justin Michael. These are his parents, Weldon and Marie.
He cared about people. He was kind and considerate.
Just a nice guy. Just a very nice guy.
A very good person. Sort of person who volunteered for things like helping to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.
He really enjoyed it. Justin was almost 31, the oldest of three.
His brother Nathan idolized him. All three of us stayed close.
Just always grew up playing sports and hanging out with Justin. He was just a great older brother, very supportive and caring and would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.
In fact, said Sister Sydney, Justin saved her life when, as a teenager, she was caught in a riptide at the beach. It was absolutely terrifying.
I felt like I was literally drowning. And then all of a sudden there was Justin, and he was pulling me up on our boogie board and telling me that everything was going to be okay, everything was going to be fine.
So, you get the idea. Just a good person, a nice guy, who is about to get as lucky as a person can in life.
That is, lucky in love with her. I found him very attractive and interesting and he was fun to talk to.
Her name is Angie Verhuel. And what happened to Angie and Justin was that thing that some people don't even think exists.
They fell in love at first sight. Bingo, Just like that.
Then after our third date, I texted my friend and I said, I'm pretty sure I'm going to marry this guy. Well, he seemed to feel the same way about you.
Yep. It was very easy from day one.
We both knew. So they did what people do.
They tried out each other's interests and Angie discovered the man she was in love with also loved things like skydiving, which of course he wanted her to do too. Lured you out a time or two.
Yeah. He had you jumping out of an airplane? Yes.
Yes. What the? What are you thinking? Yeah.
I am terrified of heights, so... So he took you up there.

Yeah.

It was so exhilarating, though.

I was terrified up until the moment that we got in the plane,

and then I just was calm, and it was so much fun.

Which was a little like their courtship, really.

A jump that some people would find terrifying, but not them. You got engaged very quickly.
When you know, you know. Was there ever any doubt? I mean, no day you woke up and thought, oh God, what have I done? Nope.
So in August 2013, two months after they met, Angie and Justin were an engaged couple. In December, she moved in with him at his house in a tiny place called Grimes, about 20 minutes outside of Des Moines.
And they planned their wedding. Which would be they decided a family event on the beach in North Carolina, where his parents live.
They set the date, July 20, 2014. It was May, excitement building, when Justin's parents came to visit in Grimes.
A Mother's Day weekend. And on the Wednesday evening before that Mother's Day...
We were laughing and talking about Halloween costumes for the next year, and as it grew dusk, we ended up cooking s'mores over their fire pit, which was one of Justin's favorite things to do. Justin's dad, Weldon, was on business in Minneapolis that night, so Marie stayed alone in Justin and Angie's guest room.
As far as she knew, all was well. Across the hall, a couple in love, all good things on their way.
Dark now. Moonless dark.
She closed her eyes and slept. And then...
So I heard the door opening, and my first thought was Angie was coming in to grab a scarf or a piece of jewelry from the dresser. I knew she kept some things, spare things in the bedroom.
The person just stood in the doorway. What did you see? Just a silhouette? I saw a dark silhouette, a person dressed in dark clothing.
And I could see a red laser light shining in my eyes. And then as I was laying there, I noticed the red light shine across the pillow.
And I remember thinking, you know, that's a strange flashlight. And that's when I saw a much bigger person than either Justin or Angie.
So I knew this was an intruder. My heart sank.

I'm sure I froze, and a second or two later, the door was shutting,

and I remember praying,

just please take what you want and just leave us alone.

But of course, leaving them alone

was not what the strange, intrusive presence had in mind.

Not even close.

A night of terror only just beginning.

No one was prepared for what would happen only seconds later.

I heard Angie scream,

Oh my God, oh my god. Marie tells detectives a

horrifying story, but they're not sure they believe it. To me that was very odd.

Hard to think about it now. That night in May 2014, when Marie Michael drifted off to sleep, things were so good, so full of possibilities for her eldest child and his fiancée.
The save-the-date cards had gone out for the wedding. They were just perfect together.
And then that terrifying pinprick of red light

hit her eye in the dark, woke her up,

and she saw him, it, whatever, shrinking away.

And the fear that took over her body, she froze.

Maybe she prayed for those horrifying seconds.

How many seconds? Three? Five seconds?

Across the hall, Angie. I heard the bedroom door open.
And I had been in such a hard sleep, I just assumed it was Justin leaving to go to the bathroom. Then I heard a pop, pop, pop.
And it sounded very muffled, so I'm thinking that could not be a gunshot. And unaware that her world was quite different now, Angie opened her eyes.
And I rolled over and saw somebody running out of the bedroom. And I knew that was bad.
And I nudged Justin, and I said, Justin, Justin.

I heard Angie scream, oh my God, oh my God. I knew something terrible had happened.
I turned on the light, and I just ran out of the bedroom down the hall. Did you see him? I didn't.
You just knew. Yeah.
I looked in the bedroom doorway and I saw Justin laying on his back on the right side of the bed with his head tilted and I could see a bullet hole in his head and I could see blood running down his neck. My instinct was to figure out how they got in the house.

We had a really big window.

I checked to see if that was closed, and it was.

Checked the front door, that was still locked.

Saw that the back door was unlocked,

and I went and I opened it a little bit,

and then I was like, that's not a good idea.

So I closed it.

Did you understand right away that

everything was different that the man you loved was dead? It was one of those moments where you just want to go back two minutes. Yeah.

Two minutes ago he was laying beside me and he was alive. I just want to go back two minutes.

Two minutes ago, he was laying beside me and he was alive.

And now he's gone for forever.

But in that moment, her brain, her fingers, wouldn't cooperate.

What they say about not being able to dial 911 in an emergency is very true. I had to try like three different times.
Somebody just came in and shot my fiance in the head. Ma'am, what's your name? Angie.
Can you go over and check the status of... He's dead.
Okay. I know he is.
Marie called 911, too. Somebody came in and shot somebody.
Do you know who was shot? My son, Justin Michael. A few minutes later, deputies from the Polk County Sheriff's Office arrived and looked around the house as the two women sat in the living room in complete silence.
As we were sitting there across from the TV, we noticed that a DVD player had been pulled out and there was a fluorescent yellow sweatshirt laying there, which didn't belong. We pointed it out to the officer and it was neither one of ours.
Was that what happened? Some awful mistake? A robber hitting the wrong place? The wrong person?

Deputies told them, get your things. We're taking you out of the house.

I couldn't go back into the bedroom.

I didn't have my glasses on.

They were in there.

So, I said I need my glasses.

She asked me if I would grab her glasses from the nightstand in their bedroom. So I did go back into their bedroom one more time.
I looked at Justin and I told him goodbye and, you know, how much I loved him and how I couldn't imagine why that had happened to him. Is it even possible to understand what it does to you to look through the door and see your eldest son lying there with a bullet hole in his head? It was something in a hundred million years you could not imagine.
Who could have done that to my son who wouldn't hurt a fly?

Had never spoken ill of anybody or, to my knowledge, had any enemies or it just was unfathomable.

The sheriff's deputies took Angie and Marie outside, put them in separate patrol cars, where they sat and watched the activity around them, quite stunned.

We are now on the road. The sheriff's deputies took Angie and Marie outside, put them in separate patrol cars, where they sat and watched the activity around them, quite stunned.
Before they took her cell phone, Marie called her husband, Weldon. She begged him to hurry.
I wondered when I heard the news whether they had gotten into the wrong house. I mean, it was so bizarre.
Reality failed to gel in Weldon's head. On the drive from Minneapolis down, I mean, I couldn't believe it.
I expected to see him there when I got there. I thought it was a mistake.
I asked if Justin was all right, and she said no, that he was gone. It was a feeling of isolation, and I could see people in and out of the house.
I could see detectives with flashlights combing the neighborhood and all around his house. Crime scene.
Crime scene. It was a very long three hours of my life, just sitting there not knowing what was going on.
News reporters are setting up everywhere, and there's so many police cars, and they weren't saying, we got the guy. And I just felt they don't have him.
They need to catch him. I know I'm safe, but as everybody else, I love safe.
Eventually, they drove both women separately to the sheriff's headquarters, where they installed them in separate rooms for separate interviews, because something about this didn't smell right. There was just a lack of emotion, and to me that was very odd.

Detectives become concerned about something else, too.

Did it say anything to you?

That these two women in the house, one of them lying right beside the victim, were unharmed?

Yeah, it was suspicious. On the morning of May the 8th, 2014, local TV trucks roared off to a most unexpected place.

Peaceful little Grimes, Iowa, population 9,000, was crawling with cops. Very unusual, said reporter Stephanie Moore of Des Moines NBC affiliate WHO-TV.
It's the kind of place where they have the convenience store and everyone's there drinking coffee in the morning. What about crime? Much of it? No.
No crime and grimes. Neighbors live there, probably don't lock their doors.
It's just a quiet neighborhood. But sure enough, something big was going down, though just what, the deputies wouldn't say.
When we talked to neighbors, they were surprised just to see even more than one police vehicle in the neighborhood. And then the DCI, Division of Criminal Investigation van came, and that's hard to miss.
It's huge. People are coming out with little booties on and full suits going in and out of a house.
There's crime tape up. And nobody's saying what happened.
And neighbors are starting to ask, what's going on here? Anxiety is like a virus. It's spread fast in Grimes.
Yeah, they were nervous. People don't just get shot in Grimes.
They knew Justin, Michael, and Engie and couldn't imagine anything happening there. And if reporters and neighbors were mystified about what happened, so was Detective Robin Bartholomew.
I was the on-call detective. I got called out at 3.30 in the morning.
Who confronted a messy, bloody crime scene. A victim shot point blank in the head.
And here was his fiancee without a mark on her. Blood tends to spatter, but there wasn't a drop on Angie.
I mean, how far apart were they? Right next to each other. Has that ever happened in your experience that you've encountered that before?

Not that I've encountered.

Did it say anything to you?

That these two women in the house, one of them lying right beside the victim, were unharmed?

Yeah, it was suspicious.

Yes.

And also, if the killer was intent on robbery, he certainly didn't succeed.

That DVD player pulled out of its place in the living room? That was it, said Detective Tim Hopper. Nothing else was taken or disturbed.
Well, it didn't make sense. Did it make sense as a burglary? I mean, as an attempted burglary? No.
So if it wasn't an attempted burglary, why would somebody be messing around with this? Stage it, to try to throw people off track. Mind you, there was that sweatshirt that didn't belong in the house.
Had the killer in his rush to escape left it behind? Well, officers tried to track that down. Angie and Marie were at the sheriff's office in separate interview rooms, answering a lot of pointed questions.
Why not kill you, too? And I don't know if he looked in on Angie and Justin, and Justin woke up, and he sensed trouble. I don't know.
I mean, why not kill Angie? And this was weird. Somehow, said Detective Bartholomew, their tone just didn't seem right, especially Angie's.
I thought that, I guess, due to what had just happened, that she would be very emotionally upset. And to me, it was just like a regular interview.
It didn't make sense. Like when she told Detective Hopper about the intruder who had just fired several bullets right through her fiancé, lying right beside her.
An intruder she saw, just a few feet away. Describe this figure the best you can.
It was all black. I'd say probably, I'd say pretty tall.
When you say black, you're talking black. Everything was black.
Shadowly or a black person? I don't know. It was just, I didn't see any color.
Did that arouse any suspicion that maybe she was involved in this somehow? I thought so. So Detective Bartholomew pulled Angie and Marie's 911 calls.
He's dead. Okay.
I know he is. Somebody came in and shot somebody.
And? Same thing. I just really...
Seriously devoid of emotion? Very much so. I think there was a panic, but listening to it, I just think that there was some distance there from the caller to the victim.
Everybody's still suspect in this because we have to find out why did someone isolate Justin and want him dead? We didn't see a lot of emotion from the mother or Angie. And so that was concerning, but ultimately you have to go where the leads take you to.
So you do. But just then, the leads were going in circles, nowhere.
Investors start digging into Justin's past and their line of questioning. Nowhere.

Investigators start digging into Justin's past, and their line of questioning triggers concerns for Angie.

I was thinking, was I about to marry somebody that. It didn't dawn on me that I could have been a suspect or Angie, but it didn't dawn on me a bit.
You know, their minds do have to go to strange places when they're detectives. That's what they do, but...
I understand that. But it was the calm demeanor, the apparent lack of emotion in Justin's fiancée, Angie Verhuehl, that attracted the particular interest of the detectives, Bartholomew and Hopper.
Though they pushed her a little, wondered aloud, not so idly, if Angie might have known the killer, or, perished the thought, even colluded with that shadowy person, whoever it might be. Like maybe a love interest, someone in his or her past, more likely hers.
Talked with Angie about Justin's relationships. He had no serious relationships prior to her.
He did, had dated, but no one that seemed to cause a concern. So I went into Angie's relationships.
Angie had been married before, divorced in 2010. And the ex-husband wasn't a concern? No.
And there was no particular bad blood? No, nothing. There was no children involved.
There was nothing other than the relationship that ended. But then Angie revealed she got involved with a guy named Andy.
Andy Wegener moved in with him, lived with him for three years. And then, this was unusual, continued living with him even after their romance ended.
Andy, or so she said, was well in her past when she met Justin. Hard to know what, if anything, to make of that.
But then Angie told the detective about some strange incidents, especially peculiar for Grimes, sort of thing that just doesn't happen here. It was one night back in November, she said.
She'd parked her car on the street overnight in front of Justin's place. And when she emerged in the morning? I saw the back window had been hidden, and I was like, oh my gosh.
And then I went around and I saw that two of the other windows had been hidden. She was shocked, she said.
Went back to the house to tell Justin. They called the police.
A police officer came and looked at it and noticed that it had been keyed, that it looked like somebody had thrown something at the windshield because there was a big dent on the hood. But that wasn't the only incident, said Angie.
Somebody got into the backyard and vandalized Justin's prized fruit trees. There were branches that were snipped off and eventually killed the trees.
Why would somebody come into his yard and ruin things that he had tried to grow? So was the vandalism a warning? Did Justin actually understand that he was a target? Maybe Angie didn't know her fiancé quite as well as she thought she did. After all, execution-style murders, as the detectives knew very well, often turn out to have something to do with illegal drugs.
Did you guys get high? Did you party a little bit? No. No drugs involvement whatsoever.
Did Justin ever sell drugs? Not that I know of. But Detective Hopper felt it in his veins.

Something about this didn't add up.

This morning, Justin was singled out and murdered.

You wasn't.

I know.

Marie wasn't.

Justin was.

I know.

Okay. Look at me a second, Angie.
There wasn't a grocery at your home. That takes away the randomness.
Nothing was taken? I mean... As far as we're aware of right now.
Okay. And somebody came in there for one sole purpose and that was to execute him.
So someone was very personal. If for any reason you'd be protecting somebody that you care about, I need to know.
Because this is not acceptable. When they were doing their police thing and coming up with different scenarios, drugs and money, gambling,

the question just kept being asked, is it possible that these things could have happened?

And of course, everything's a possibility.

For a moment, I was thinking, was I about to marry somebody that I had no idea who he was? Oh, but there were so many questions, one in particular that Angie just couldn't seem to answer. Angie tells detectives about someone else from her past who once did something disturbing.

That to me was kind of like, that's a little creepy.

But does it have anything to do with the case?

Detective Robin Bartholomew was convinced of one thing in particular. Justin Michael's fiancée, Angie, had to be the key to solving their murder case here in Grimes, Iowa.
I maybe thought, even though she was engaged, maybe there was a boyfriend on the side. Right.
And if there's a boyfriend on the side, either the boyfriend wanted to get rid of the competition or she wanted to get rid of this one so she could be with the other one? Yeah, some kind of love triangle. It sounds devious to say such a thing, but these things actually do happen, right? Oh, very much so.
Detective Bartholomew held her suspicions in check, while her partner, Detective Hopper, continued to press Angie about the other men in her life. Very few of those, according to Angie.
Her ex-husband and her ex-boyfriend, Andy. And then, three hours into the interview...
All of a sudden, a name came up of someone that actually she had dated, an acquaintance that she had met in between the breakup with Andy and her meeting Justin. It was not a full-on relationship.
Did you just not remember him when we talked about before? Well, I hadn't, I mean, I had thought about him, but it was kind of like, it was like a couple of months of hanging out and it was kind of like a here or there. And, um, he, I feel like,

I felt like he wasn't being very serious. So I wasn't being very serious with it.

And who was this other guy? His name is Dave. Okay.
What's his name? Um. What is his last name now? I just forgot.
It'll come to me, I'm sure. Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave.
God, I don't know why I can't think of it right now. Wait, she couldn't remember his last name? Which is very odd.
When did you first start seeing Dave? The weekend after Andy and I broke up. And it was kind of just like a silly thing.
Where'd you meet him at? Just at a bar. Okay.
So I was like, all right, whatever. This guy's a funny guy.

Angie told Detective Hopper she didn't spend much time with Dave. They mainly texted each other and met up at bars a few times.
We had kind of had, I guess it was this day and age relationship where we only saw each other about once a week. And then the rest of our conversations were strictly through text messaging.
I don't think we ever spoke on the phone. And it was always just...

It was very, like, playful in nature, almost not like a serious type of relationship. But it was intimate? It eventually did get intimate, but not right away.
And then it was kind of like a once-a-week thing. We would hang out on, like, Friday nights generally.
And then, of course, everything changed. And then I met Justin.
And she got the feeling Justin just might be the real thing. And so she started avoiding Dave.
Did he sense something? Maybe. That's when Dave sent Angie a text that referred to a reality television show.
He had made the comment, I'm going to get your final red rose. And that to me was kind of like, that's a little creepy.
Knowing I didn't feel that same way. Right.
You hadn't given him any sign you felt that way. Right.
We had never talked about being exclusive. I mean, when you're seeing somebody maybe once a week and talking through text messaging, the other times caught me off guard a little bit.
Then just after her second date with Justin. That's when I know, you know, remember?

So she asked her girlfriends, how Should I meet up with them? And they were like, no, like, go ahead and do it through text messaging. You don't owe this guy anything.
So she did. Diplomatically.
She tried to be kind, she said. So I just texted him and I said, hey, I want to be completely upfront and honest with you.
And I've met somebody else that I want to spend my time with, and we're done. His response was, I knew you'd been running around behind my back, and we hadn't seen each other for at least two weeks at this point.
It's hardly a relationship. Right.
He didn't take it so well. Unpleasant.
Yes. I was trying to be kind.
He was not. What did he say? He said some kind of nasty things about me as a person.
And then at one point he told me to eat and die. And then that was then followed by niceties and wanting to work things out.
So it was really back and forth all day. At one point, it became obvious that he wasn't going to let it go, so I just finally quit responding.
You never heard from him again. Yeah, he had texted me the next day saying, I don't feel like this is over.
Can you give me another chance? I didn't respond to that. So then after that, yes, I had not heard from him at all.
That was in June 2013, 11 months before Justin was shot to death. Angie told the detective all that.
So odd, to say the least, that Angie swore she could not remember the guy's last name.

You ever think about what his last name is yet?

I keep trying to think of it.

Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave.

Dave, Dave, Dave.

I do not know why I'm drawing something.

Really?

Detective Hopper turned up the heat.

About one of the first things I'd asked you,

Thank you. I do not know why I'm drawing such a blank.
Really? Detective Hopper turned up the heat. About one of the first things I'd asked you at the very beginning was, before Justin, who was your relationship? You said Andy.
And you left Dave out. Right.
For whatever reason, and it doesn't matter at this point either. Is there any possibility that with Dave or anyone else that while you've been with Justin, that you've maintained any relationship with anyone? No.
And then finally, after more than 30 minutes of questions about this Dave guy, it suddenly

came to her, she said.

I remember Dave's last name, by the way.

And that is?

Moffat.

Moffat.

Moffat.

David Moffat.

A name that meant nothing at all.

Another dead end, most likely.

But remember that business about luck? Most useful investigative tool there is. New suspicions are raised as detectives realize two of the people in the case are connected by one remarkable coincidence.
A company of 10,000 people here in Des Moines, what are the odds that they would be in the same? In the same cubicle they were. And then, a roadside encounter goes from odd to downright unnerving.
All the hair on my body was standing on edge. And that is...
So finally, Angie remembered the name. The name of the man she dated just before she met Justin Michael.
David Moffat. And who was he? A sometimes local accountant, for one thing, but also the scion of a wealthy Iowa farm family.
Not very memorable, said Angie. Just a guy who liked having fun.
Though there was, she said, this one remarkable coincidence, a couple of months after she stopped seeing David and just before she got engaged to Justin, David got a job in the same small unit of the same department of the same Wells Fargo office building as Justin. David left under some kind of clouds at Angie months before the murder, but really, what were the chances? Their desks were just feet apart.
And did he know that Justin was dating you? He figured out that Justin was dating me. Justin told his parents about it.
He just said it was an awkward situation, but there was no problem. The alignment of that is astronomical.
In a company of 10,000 people here in Des Moines, what are the odds that they would be in the same... In the same cubicle they were.
But they got on fine, never any bad blood, and David Moffat had no criminal record. So should detectives add him to their list of suspects or what? At this point, I don't know if I have the complete story regarding Dave or not.
Coincidences. Sometimes they come in clusters, don't they? Not long after Angie's memory coughed up the name Dave Moffat, there was another coincidence.
We figured we needed to continue and focus on Dave and see where that leads us. The first thing that was done was a background makeup of Dave to include to see if he had a weapons permit.
And so while that check for the weapons permit was being conducted, another office person heard the name and recognized Dave Moffat. And she immediately said he had a car impounded this morning.
Not only was it impounded, it was impounded approximately within 30 minutes of the homicide, approximately 4 o'clock in the morning, and it was six miles approximate north of where the homicide occurred. And Dave Moffitt resided approximately 28 miles southeast of where the homicide occurred.
Wow. Well, that would be a red flag, that's for sure.
Through a further investigation, we learned that he had actually had an accident. So they pulled the accident report and read about those two cops and their strange encounters just off Highway 141 starting at four o'clock that morning.
Place which by all rights, Corey Rose, cop number one, should never have been that particular morning. But life happens to everybody.
And early on the 8th of May 2014, Officer Rose was adjusting. I was traveling back from the hospital in Des Moines.
My fiance's grandma was ill in the hospital. Still in his own clothes, not in uniform yet, he was on his way to a 5 a.m.
patrol shift in the town of Boone, 25 miles or so up the road, where Officer Rose is an investigator with the local police department. And it was very dark on the highway.
No moon at all at that hour, so he almost missed it. There, in the ditch, maybe 30 yards off the pavement.
And what did you see? As I was traveling up the road, I saw a car would be off here to my right, sitting on top of the ditch, just on the other side of this pole. What, just over here where the grass is? Yep, sitting there with the driver's door hanging open on it.
Looked like airbags deployed, dome light was on. It appeared the car was headed for the highway, but missed a sharp curve on the gravel access road.
So Corey pulled up near as he could to the crashed car.

Just as soon as I had stopped

and noticed that there was nobody in the car,

nobody around the car,

I was sitting in my vehicle.

Some of the mail approached my vehicle,

knocked on the door,

and he'd come from kind of off behind me to my left.

Knocked on my window, kind of startled me a little bit.

He was asking if he could get some assistance, get a ride. Offered to pay me to give him a ride.
And I told him that quite frankly I didn't feel comfortable with doing so. Between that and having to get to work and this not being his jurisdiction, Corey called his dispatch.
Said, hey, I'm out with a vehicle in the ditch. Could you contact the authorities in Polk County, see if we get somebody to come out here? And they said they'd have somebody out there as soon as possible.
They're tied up on a shooting and grinds. So Corey left for his shift.
And when Polk County Sheriff's Deputy Jason Tartt responded to the call from dispatch a little while later, all he knew was there had been an accident. So it hit that ditch at some speed then.
Yeah, he was going pretty fast. Just missed the corner.
Just unfamiliar with the area and driving too fast for gravel. But it was odd because once again, the driver of that car, David Moffitt, was nowhere to be seen.
So I get out of the car and immediately I'm thinking, okay, maybe they were ejected. So I go and start searching the area to make sure they weren't thrown out of the car.
I was just getting ready to get back into my car and I hear somebody yell, I need help. I was like, is this your car? Yeah, that's my car.
As soon as he gets close to me, he has this real, like a very sweet smell coming off of him. So I automatically, I was like, okay, this is an OWI.
Why would you say a sweet smell means it could be a drunken driving thing? Just the time of day, and there's a car accident involved, single vehicle. I mean, it's just, just kind of goes with it.
Definitely smelled like he'd been drinking. Was he glad to see you? I don't know if he was glad to see me, but...
mean, you were potentially going to rescue him from a bad situation. You'd think he saw somebody that might be able to help him, but I don't know if he was necessarily happy to see me.
David Moffat told him he was on his way home from visiting his brother that night. So I basically asked him, there's no way and chance maybe you visited a friend in Grimes tonight.
Now, why would you bring that up? There had just been, within an hour, a homicide had taken place in Grimes. The suspect was still unaccounted for.
And you got a guy sweating and smelling sweet. Exactly.
Hmm. What did he say? I don't even know where the town is.
Everything about David Moffin made the deputy feel anxious. All the hair, not on my head, but all the hair on my body was standing on edge.
That's weird. I mean, he's just a regular guy, right? Didn't seem to be armed or anything.
You're a cop and you got your weapon and you're still feeling nervous? I knew he wasn't armed because I did just a pat down for weapons before. Because if you're going to sit in my car, you're not going to have a weapon on you.
But he still made you nervous? Extremely nervous. But it turned out David hadn't been drinking.
There was no reason to arrest him. Still, the deputy's instincts kicked in.
So I looked through his car and I couldn't find insurance, so I impounded it for not having insurance with an accident. Not that it was drivable anyway.
He sent David home in a cab. After reading Deputy Tartt's report, Detectives Bartholomew and Hopper knew they had to act fast.
There could be clues still on Highway 141. And surprises, too.
One of those surprises, this crinkled receipt. See why it would raise more questions than it would answer.
Tuesday morning on the Today Show. An incredible concert from the one and only Kelly Clarkson.
The City Concert Series kicks off with superstar Kelly Clarkson

bringing her powerhouse voice to our iconic stage,

performing her new music and some of your favorites to start your morning.

Catch me live on the Plaza.

Feel the beat and share the moment.

Kelly Clarkson performs live on the City Concert Series on Today.

Tuesday morning on NBC.

See you next week. Share the moment.
Kelly Clarkson performs live on the City Concert Series on Today, Tuesday morning on NBC. Every morning brings a fresh new energy.
And no matter what the day holds, we come to the Today Show for all of it. We get the best start to the day because we start it together.
Watch the Today Show weekdays at 7 a.m. on NBC.
Hey everybody, I'm Al Roker from the Today Show. Let's kickstart

your wellness journey with the all new

Start Today app. Everything you need for

a healthier you, all in one place.

Fitness challenges for all levels.

Meal plans that are easy and

delicious, and so much more.

It's built to fit your lifestyle, and

our experts will guide you every

step of the way. Come on, let's do this.
To subscribe, download Start Today from the App Store on your Apple device now. Terms apply.
Cancel anytime through Apple under profile settings. The media people Angie and Marie saw hovering around the patrol cars they'd been placed in that awful May morning.

Had no idea what had just happened in Justin Michael's bedroom, middle of the night.

The reporters knew only this.

They'd been sent here because of a suspicious death.

And it was related, somehow, to this house.

Then, as they waited for somebody to tell them something, they got a tip. Local reporter Stephanie Moore.
We heard that sheriff's deputies were walking the fields along Highway 141, so that would be the highway you would take from Des Moines to go to Grimes. And they were just walking these fields, and we asked them, are you looking for a body? No.
Are you looking for someone? No. Are you looking for a weapon? We can't say.
But the public's not in any danger. We think what happened in Grimes is related to this, and it's an isolated incident.
And they're just walking up and down, looking for something. Just walking the fields, you know, in a line so they don't miss anything.
Kind of how they do if there's a missing child. But we thought maybe they were looking for a gun or a weapon.
Good guess. In fact, that small army of cops was looking for anything that looked like evidence.
Because hours earlier, David Moffat's car went off the road around here, and facts were piling up. Moffat had worked with Justin, dated Angie, and wrecked his car the morning of the murder just six miles away.
Of course, that piqued our interest very quickly. That moved David Moffat to the top of the list.
Polk County prosecutors Steve Foritano and Brett Lucas had been involved all along. We sent the detectives and the patrol officers to that location, Highway 141, 141 to see what else they could find in that area that might be of use or might be telling in terms of the investigation.
That's why the locals saw all these police officers wandering up and down the field as if they were looking for something. They were.
They were. And imagine what they found.
They're in a ditch along the highway. Probably the most important thing was they found loaded magazines.
They had the same type of ammo that was found at the crime scene. The shell casings found at the crime scene matched that type of ammunition found in the ditch at Highway 141.
Right there in the ditch near where the car crashed. It was actually across the highway and a little bit farther down, but within 500 yards of where the crash occurred.
They also located in that ditch some paper targets that you would use for shooting target practice, some shooter's earmuffs, a camo neck cloth that you'd wear, you could wear as a mask. Like somebody preparing for an act of terror

or an execution. Clearly, David Moffat was their killer, had to be.
And then, well, you know what they say about assumptions. Those cops found something else near the accident scene.
Sort of thing that could make a person wonder, what in heaven's name is going on here? It was one little in a shoebox.

The shoes were not in it, but the

The shoes were not in it, but there was various paperwork. One of the things that were found was a receipt from a local car dealership.
And the receipt was for a purchase of three oil changes. It had the name of Andrew Wagner.
Andrew Wagner, the boyfriend Angie lived with before Justin. Weird.
Another guy without a criminal record. Another apparently ordinary person.
A Des Moines funeral director in his case. And yet, there it was in black and white, among all those other pieces of evidence.
Andrew Wegener. How did he explain that?

At that time, you don't.

So, did Andy Wegener kill Justin Michael,

the man who replaced him in Angie's heart?

We immediately went to Andy's place of business and brought him back to headquarters for questioning.

And we asked him about his relationship with Angie.

And more to the point, perhaps,

his relationship, or the lack of it, with Justin.

Have you ever met Justin?

Thank you. We ask him about his relationship with Angie.
And more to the point, perhaps, his relationship, or the lack of it, with Justin. Have you ever met Justin? Once.
And where was that at? It was at Joe's Pub in Johnston. Just a random run-in, or was it a gathering? It was a gathering with kind of a group of friends.
It was an engagement party. Was Justin the person who she was in a relationship after you broke up with her, or was there someone else? There might have been somebody else in between.
I have no idea. No.
The last time you talked to Angie would have been when? She sent a text message to me that said, happy birthday. I said, okay, thanks.
That was it. I'm asking Andy about whether or not he's missing anything.
And he never tells me about the receipt for the oil changes. The receipt in the shoebox, the reason for suspicion, and all these questions.
And I stay on the receipt because that's where my interest is at. And he believes that he's in possession of the receipt.
Andy he said he thought the receipt was either in his car or in his house. If it turned up somewhere else,

how would that happen?

If it's somewhere other than your car or at home?

Put the food away?

That's about it. Any ideas how it could turn up in this investigation? No.
Then Detective Hopper asked Andy about guns. Do you go shooting at all? Shooting? Yeah.
Do you have any... I have a 12-gauge.
I haven't shot it in six years. Do you have any handguns? No.
Okay. And what he did the night before.
Yesterday, what time did you get off work? Yesterday I got off at four. Okay.
Can you walk me through what occurred from 4 o'clock yesterday until we showed up at your doorstep this morning and you were so thrilled to see us? Andy said he spent the evening and night with his current girlfriend. So you spent the night with your girlfriend? Oh, yeah.
How long has she been there? Three years. Oh, okay.
Do they have good security there? Uh, no. Is it a safe area? Yeah, it talks to me.
Do they have gated to get in, cameras coming in, anything like that? No. He had spent the night with his current girlfriend at that time, and we verified that before he left the office, before he had a chance to make a phone call or anything else.
At least according to this girlfriend. According to the girlfriend, yes.
But that would give him an alibi for the time of murder. It would give him an alibi, whether that was preconceived or whether or not that was legitimate.
We did not know. And he swore detectives would find no evidence against him in Grimes.
When was the last time you were in Grimes? For any reason? There's a basketball court in the U is what they call it. That was a while ago.
What's a while mean to you? Three weeks to a month or three to four weeks at least. It's been a while.
There's a bunch of guys that get together and we pay five bucks and are able to shoot around this place for a couple hours. Let me double check, make sure we're good to go.
The detectives exhausted their questions, took Andy back to work, apparently in the clear, unaware that Andy's name was about to turn up one more time in a very suspicious place.

Investigators have been looking for a single killer,

but a fresh clue may send this investigation

in a whole new direction.

It's evidence to suggest that there is some sort

of conspiracy involved here. Justin didn't deserve this.
He always thought of everybody else, always wanted to do for other people. As much in love as Angie said she was, the detectives had learned over the years, you never know, they needed to search her phone, see who she talked to in the hours and days just before Justin was shot to death.
They also got a search warrant for David Moffat's house. And inside? No, they didn't find the murder weapon.
But they did find these strange notes. Seemed to have been written by someone who'd been watching Justin and Angie's neighborhood.
Those surveillance notes listed addresses in the immediate area around the crime scene. And they were very specific about when neighbors were turning on and off their lights.
The creek behind the house, is it wide enough where I can jump

across that? Obviously, it looked like a way to make an escape once the murder was done. But then, they found what looked like the mother load, a bill of sale.
It was in Andy Wegener's name, but there it is in David Moffat's house. That is, the bill of sale for a nine millimeter carbine, and the name on the document, Bold as Brass, was indeed Andy Wegener.
How was that remotely possible? It's more evidence to suggest that there is some sort of conspiracy involved here. It's too early to really rule anybody out.
We wanted to find out if Andy was the actual purchaser of that weapon. Fortunately, that bill of sale gave us the lead to where the weapon came from.
His name was right here, Drew Ballman. And here he is.
He's a small-town high school English teacher in a little place called Sigourney, 90 miles or so from Des Moines. There is something you can do with a degree in English.
Yes, there is.

Yes.

And I love my job.

An English teacher who likes to tell stories.

And this one?

The sort of thing that would make an interesting plot for a novel.

For a novel, perhaps, yes.

Drew is a self-described nerd.

He also is a target shooter and a metal detector enthusiast. He's forever digging up old coins and such.
Loves it. Mind you, there's only so much a person can ferret out using equipment that's, well, to say down market may sound cruel, but...
The metal detector that I wanted was about $600. Are you out of your mind? No.
You buy a $600 metal detector? That's even like

the mid-range. You can spend upwards of $9,000 on a metal detector if you wanted to.
You're

getting toward being an uppercase nerd. Very much so, yes.
So he figured he'd sell the gun

and use the cash to buy that new metal detector. It's what the state of Bible calls a long gun.

It's something that you put to your shoulder and you shoot like a rifle or a shotgun. So I listed it online on Arms List.
It's like Craigslist for guns. What did you ask for it? $360.
About a month later, he got a nibble via email. I told him that I needed cash and I needed a photo ID, so I knew he was who he said he was and that he was at least 21.
Who did he say he was? He said his name was Andy Wegener. And that was the email address that he had contacted me from was andywegener something or other at gmail.com.
Where'd you meet? I work part-time at a gas station. It's public.
There are cameras in the area. And if something bad were to happen, I know of at least two or three people that are there a lot that would probably come to my rescue.
Is that the kind of thing you have to do when you sell a weapon? That's the thing I do when I sell a weapon because I've got entirely too much to lose. I have a family, I have a job that, you know, I love them both.
I did not want to jeopardize those. We met at the station.
I showed him the rifle in the back end of my car and then I filled out a bill of sale because I wanted to make sure that this was trackable. I kept a copy, he kept a copy.
We reviewed everything to make sure that it was what he wanted and made sure everything was up to snuff. You saw his photo ID.
I saw his photo ID. And how carefully did you store the information? I'm kind of a pack rat by nature.
It's my teacher nature. You don't throw anything away.
So all of the email conversations that he and I had, I kept. All the text messages between he and I, I kept.
I still had pictures that I had originally posted on arms list. Those were still on my home computer.
And as he was leaving, again, to cover myself, I wrote down his license plate number. You are a careful guy.
I am. Was he a nice fellow? For the very limited interaction we had, yeah, he seemed very nice, very normal.
He asked me how to load it. I showed him how.
And that was it. Off he went.
Off he went. And then a few days later, the school secretary gave Drew a message.
A Polk County detective wanted to talk to him right away. And my very first thought was, is I interpreted the law wrong when I had looked up the Iowa codes and I'm going to jail.
You immediately thought about selling that weapon? That's the first thing that came to mind. Why else would a Polk County detective be calling me? I was going to jail.
Scary thought. It was very scary because I had taken so many precautions.
I called the detective and he said, Drew, did you sell a firearm recently? And that was my second thought. Yes, I am going to jail.
I have completely screwed everything up. And I told him, you know, be forthright, be honest.
I said, yes, I did. He asked me to describe what it was.
I told him it was a nine millimeter carbine. He said, Drew, we have reason to believe that that weapon was used in the commission of a crime.
And my heart just sank. What happened? I have no idea.
And he told me it was used in a murder. And I about dropped my phone.
What that does to you, I unwittingly took part with an accessory in somebody's death. I felt terrible about that.
You felt that way that you're an accessory?

How would you feel? I mean, I sold something to a man, to a person who later used that to take somebody's life. Terrible.
Just, oh God. And still today, I've rationalized it.
I've gone to a counselor about it. I still feel bad about it.
What's the expression? Guns don't kill people, people kill people. And I still believe that, but I provided him that method.
Later that day, Detective Hopper drove out to meet with Drew, who turned over all the emails and text messages. He'd saved them all, as well as photos of the rifle, three ammo magazines, a scope, and a red laser pointer attached to the weapon, part of the deal.
And I asked him if he had any shell casings from the weapon that he sold. He went and left and came back shortly after and had 63 casings.
Wow, he's a person who likes to keep things. Yes, Most of those casings were tulammo, 9mm.

The same ones that were found in the murder scene.

And at the crash site.

But who bought the carbine?

We still don't know where we're at with David versus Andy.

So could Drew ID the guy in a photo lineup?

Detectives show Drew pictures of David and Andy. He said, that's very odd.
He said,

this is strange. Then could the killer's true identity finally be revealed in this most

unlikely place? The red tub ended up being a goldmine of evidence. I really thought it was a random home invasion.

So during the course of that day, you were completely buffaloed.

Correct.

While the investigation raced forward,

the Polk County Sheriff's Office told Justin Michaels' family virtually nothing. Didn't tell them they found the man who sold the murder weapon, nor that they had to figure out who he actually sold it to.
Because surely whoever bought the gun must have been the killer. I asked him at that point to look at the photo lineups.
The first set of six photographs I showed him contained the photograph of David Moffitt. Mr.
Bowman looked at it and he said, I can't be 100% certain. He said, the guy had a hat on, had sunglasses on.
He goes, I wish I would have had him take it off. And then he pointed at the picture of David Moffitt and said, I'm 90% sure that's the person that I sold the gun to.
What happened when he looked at the picture involving Andy Wagner? When I showed him the full lineup with Andy Wagner, he looked at it and he immediately looked at it and pointed at Andy Wagner and said, that's very odd. He said, this is strange.
He was confused. He goes, that looks like the ID.
That looks like the person I sold the gun to. He picked out both of them.
So we still have our questions. It was all very confusing.
Didn't help that David Moffat and Andy Wegener looked similar. So one last thing to try.
Earlier, when deputies searched David Moffat's house, they found the bill of sale for that carbine. But they also discovered a receipt for lemonade and a candy bar bought at a Dollar General store in the very town where the rifle was purchased.
So I requested video from that store. Person walks into the store, still wearing the hat, but the sunglasses are hanging off of his shirt.
And the video depicts David Moffat. Well, well, well.
And he purchases a lemonade and a candy bar. Which may have settled the question of who picked up the murder weapon.
But here was another question. How did David Moffat get hold of Andy Wegener's ID? The detectives had all kinds of reasons for wanting to talk to David Moffat.
They picked him up about 15 hours after the shooting, took him to headquarters, installed him in an interview room, and no dice. He requested a lawyer.
And just like that, you're done? I sat there for approximately an hour with him, offering him a phone book, a means to reach his attorney, because we still wanted to attempt to talk with him, even if his attorney was present. He never reached an attorney.
David Moffat wouldn't talk, but it hardly mattered. The evidence they already had was enough to arrest him and charge him with first-degree murder.
By now, detectives understood that Angie had nothing to do with the murder, that what seemed like a lack of emotion in Angie's demeanor, and Marie's too, for that matter, was shock, pure shock. In fact, the thought that David could be the man who killed the love of her life hit Angie while she was still being questioned.
And finally, after her apparent calm, she was overcome. When Dave came up, we talked about that, and the detective came back with a picture of him.
Do you know this person? That's Dave. And I said, that's him, and I immediately started shaking and was very visibly upset.
I'm just surprised that he has something to do with it and what if I've lost all this? The detective was like, what's going on? And I said, if he's the one who did it, then it's all my fault. What do you mean by that?

Because I was the one who had broken off the relationship.

I was the one who ignored him the next day.

You really think if you hadn't ignored him, he'd suddenly become Mr. Sweetness in life?

Well, no, but I just felt like it was... I brought this monster into Justin's life.
But the prosecutors needed more evidence if they wanted to prove that David Moffat was the man Angie saw as a monster. How, for example, did David get an ID with Andy Wegener's name on it, unless Andy was somehow involved? One of the discoveries during that first search warrant was a computer box for a laptop, and that laptop was never found during that first search warrant.
So the prosecutors wrote a second search warrant, and voila, they found it, but maybe too late. They discovered it in the bottom of a red tub that had a few inches of water in the bottom of it.
And you know how computers hate water. But the waterlogged laptop wasn't all they found.
The red tub ended up being a goldmine of evidence. Like what? They found ammunition that ended up being consistent with the ammunition found at the crime scene.
And remember that shoebox they found near the car crash? It was a Nevado's brand shoebox. And in David Moffat's red tub? What do you know? In that red tub were those Nevada shoes, size 11.
It was almost like he was laying the trap for himself. Absolutely.
They sent the wet laptop off to the computer lab, hoping maybe the techs could find something on it. And, surprise, surprise, they did.
And off of that computer, we were able to find the work that David Moffat had done to create a fake ID in Andy Wegener's name. That's the one David presented to the school teacher, Drew Ballman.
He also created a fake Andy Wegener email address and stole that oil service receipt from Andy's car, all of which made it obvious, said the prosecutors. David Moffat planned to get away with murder

by framing a perfectly innocent man, Andy Wegener.

What kind of a mind is behind that sort of behavior?

Very cold, very calculating,

tremendous amount of planning and premeditation

that went into this murder.

And he tried to execute it so that he would not be blamed,

that he would get away with it. And remember that sweatshirt left behind after the shooting, as if the killer had been sloppy? In the sweatshirt was a boat registration that we could not figure out why it was there and what its meaning was at the time.
Ultimately, several months later, we learned that that boat registration belonged to the father of the registered sex offender that lived within a few blocks of the crime scene. So it appeared to us once we made that connection that that was just another attempt to cast the blame for this on somebody else.
So convicting David Moff of the first-degree murder would surely be about as easy a task as a prosecutor could ask for.

Or maybe not.

The trial begins, and everyone will learn new details about the night of the murder.

It's just unfathomable, like the twilight zone.

Revelations no one will believe. That's pretty crazy, isn't it? Now they had the final answer.
Or did they? Nothing has more suspense than a Dateline mystery. And no one wants to wait to find out what happens next.
That's why everyone needs Dateline Premium, where listening is always ad-free. You get the whole story and nothing but the story.
Or do you? Yes, actually, you do. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or DatelinePremium.com.
Hey guys, Willie Geist here reminding you to check

out the Sunday sit down podcast on this week's episode. I get together with country music

superstar, Eric Church to talk about his new album and taking an unconventional and

uncompromising route to the top in Nashville. You can get our conversation for free wherever

you download your podcasts. Trials are really interesting because you get to really hear the whole picture.
Several detectives as well as law enforcement officials. Finally, said TV reporter Stephanie Moore.
After months of secrecy, they gathered in June 2015 at the Polk County Courthouse in Des Moines for the trial. And the prosecutors revealed all those wild details behind the murder of Justin Michael.
First time the public heard any of it. First time Justin's family and fiancé finally understood what happened.
The detectives and the prosecutors had shared no information with us other than the fact of who they arrested. And the little they learned during the pretrial hearings could be confusing and painful.
As things started to come out a little bit, I texted Andy and I said, how did he get your ID? And he was like, I don't know. And I just had that feeling of what if Andy had something to do with this? But prosecutors have good reason for keeping the details of their cases from the public and even from the family.

We don't want the publicity of the evidence to taint the jury panel. But now as the trial began, they were quite confident they had all the evidence they needed, even without the still missing murder weapon.
What happened to it? I mean, he, you know, he crashed the car apparently right away. Either got rid of it before then or...

Our theory at at least, is that sometime between him getting home after the murder, before officers were back out there doing that extensive search, and being arrested that evening, he was able to get back and retrieve the weapon and throw it into Sailorville Lake. And then once it's in the lake, there's no way you're going to find it.
Not a lot of work. But with all the other evidence collected, prosecutors felt they had enough.
With the physical evidence that we were able to get, specifically from Drew Ballman and at the homicide scene and at David Moffitt's house from a ballistics perspective, we were able to connect all of those dots. The state showed the jury bullet casings and ammunition magazines, targets for practice shooting, David's reconnaissance notes, a Kindle containing a map of Justin's neighborhood, a can of pepper spray, even a flashlight that for all of David Moffat's careful planning, ultimately betrayed him.
It was something that caught the attention of Justin's sister, Sidney and brother Nathan. There were two times that he reacted significantly in the whole trial, and one was they found a fingerprint on the battery in the flashlight, and so he wore gloves when he was carrying the flashlight, but not when he was putting the batteries in the flashlight.
And when they said that, he goes, As if David just then understood his error. It was at the trial, said Justin's mom, that she finally learned what that red light in her eyes was.
It was not some kind of strange flashlight, as she thought. It was a red laser pointer, most likely attached to the murder weapon.
Pointed at my face. That's a very sobering thought.
That's sitting at the trial brought back a lot of trauma issues, and that being one of them. And the other thing that really bothered me was finding out that this guy had the gun six inches from Justin's face when he shot him four times.
Because we had thought, you know, he was in the hallway at the doorway, and somehow it makes it even more invasive, you know, that he's that close and just executes somebody. And you actually look at somebody's face and make that choice to kill them.
To me, that's just beyond troubling.

It's just unfathomable still, like the Twilight Zone.

The prosecutors saved David Moffat's computer searches for last,

and then the jury and everybody else heard what David looked up on his laptop in the days before the murder. A window into the mind of a killer.
The only murdering murder guide you'll ever need. Seriously.
Convicted crimes of passion in Polk County. Traffic cameras in Grimes.
What does hell look like? And so on and so on. Interesting that he would ask what hell looks like.
There's some reference to the confessional times. That is, times when some local priest would be available, a priest whose oath would swear him to secrecy.
He obviously was concerned about what was going to happen to him had he commit this murder. That day that all of the computer stuff came out was a particularly brutal day in court for me.
It was hard for me to handle. I had to leave and decided I couldn't go back in the afternoon because it was just, it was overwhelming.
You say it was too hard to hear. You couldn't actually go back.
But what made it so hard? Just seeing my name, seeing Justin's name. You know, he had Googled my name, looked at my Facebook page or whatever for months, seeing the locations from where he was to our house, and just knowing that he was that close.
And here you were, totally oblivious, living through the happiest stage of your life. In his closing, prosecutor Steve Forotano told the jury what must have happened.
David Moffat, I think, was obviously fixated on Angie Verhuehl, that she broke off with him, which caused him some pain and hurt. And then that wound was probably reopened when he started working with Justin.

And Justin wound up getting engaged. And David obviously would be concerned about the fact that it was Justin that was with Angie and that he couldn't be with her because of him.
So he gradually formed a plan that somehow he was going to get rid of Justin, possibly even get Angie back again. I realize that there is a very high bar to cross to be considered insane by the legal

system.

But that's pretty crazy, isn't it?

Well, he had a goal, and he worked to achieve that goal.

So his trying to commit this murder, trying to plan and make sure that he got away with it.

Maybe, and maybe something else was going on. Maybe David Moffat could blame somebody or something else.
And sure enough, he did, with a legal defense that could defeat the best evidence in the world. David Moffat had no intention of going to prison.
Moffat's lawyers call a controversial witness to, said the prosecution. And then it was time for the defense.
That was the worst day of the trial. Defense attorney Keith Rigg did not dispute the wealth of evidence the state presented.
All true, said Mr. Rigg.
David Moffat did kill Justin, said the defense, because he was legally insane and therefore not guilty. What the facts are in this case are really in dispute.
The fact that this happens because of a mental disease isn't really a dispute. Because this makes no sense otherwise.
What happens here, for lack of a better term, is crazy. And why should the jury believe that? This was the Defensive Star Witness, Dr.
Peter Bregan, a famous, if controversial, psychiatrist with a resume of television and other appearances, in which he has condemned the use of psychotropic drugs. Dr.
Bregan testified that David had been taking antidepressants on and off for years, and that what David did was the drug's fault. So I think the whole thing evolves out of a progressive hammering of his brain by the drugs.
It was drug-induced violence, the doctor told the jury. Drug-induced murder.
Back in the courtroom, Angie listened to this, and upset would not be quite the right word. It was laughable, almost.
And just that you can, how much money they had to spend to find this guy who's going to say exactly what the defense wants him to say. Were you afraid the jury would buy it? Um, of course you're always a little afraid because it's scary to think that he could potentially get off with an insanity plea and the more he talked the more it was it was frustrating to sit there and listen to him.
You walked into somebody's bedroom with an assault record. Yes.
It's horrible. He told you he thought about whether it was right or wrong, right? No, he told me in the beginning he thought about whether it was right or wrong,

and then it didn't enter his mind anymore.

It was like he was in a video game or like in an activity that was outside of the normal reality.

He even thought about killing somebody else.

So toward the end, I mean, he's just become, I believe,

the victim of this manic episode driven by the drugs.

It's just not him.

It's the jury that gets to make the decision, right?

Of course.

They do.

You never know quite what a jury's going to do.

It's always an anxious moment when you're trying to wait for them to return a verdict.

Oh, but it wasn't a moment.

Hour after hour, they waited.

And then, almost seven hours later...

The judge asks, do we have a verdict?

The jury says they do.

We find the defendant guilty of murder to the first degree.

If David Moffat felt anything in that moment, he didn't show it. Nothing.
Stone cold reaction. Almost gave you chills up your spine.
The insanity defense clearly did not work. The threshold that you have to reach for an insanity defense is that you don't understand the nature and consequences of your actions or you don't understand the difference between right and wrong.
That's an incredibly high threshold. You look at the degree of premeditation, the degree of planning that went into that, those are not the actions of an insane person.
It does nothing to bring Justin back. But it would have been horrific if he had not been found guilty.
So it did help. And can you imagine if that person was still free in our society? Who knows who he would have attacked next? And he would have.
I think he would have. I think he enjoyed...
The planning. The planning and seeing if he could accomplish his task.
The verdicts are always hard, I think, because nobody ever wins in this situation. His family is obviously still in pain.
The Moffitt family is obviously in pain as well. So there really is no winner here.
We want to hold him responsible for what he did, and the jury's verdicts did that. Would they have caught him without those lucky brakes? Had David Moffat not lost control of his car on that gravel road? Had the cop not spotted the wreck off in the dark? If you hadn't stopped, if you just went on your merry way.
My involvement was as just the citizen driving up the road, stopping to check on somebody that morning, you know.

Had the deputy's instinct not pushed him to seize David's car,

he probably would have been caught, eventually.

But... What do you think about this now, when you look back on it?

Thankful.

Very thankful that I, one, trusted my gut,

because we're trained to do that from day one.

Because it's the only thing you really got to back yourself up on, on calls when you're by yourself. Sure.
If somebody seems a little hinky, maybe he is. And you just seem to investigate it further.
It's not prying, it's trying to figure out if there's something more to the story than what you're hearing. And a lot of the times when you trust your gut, it's right.
Neither David Moffat nor his attorney agreed to be interviewed. He appealed and lost, but is still trying to get a new trial as he sits in prison.
His sentence was mandatory in Iowa, life without parole. Cold comfort for Justin's family.
Only photos of him now, and memories of the good person he was. Habitat for Humanity, his favorite charity, built a house in his honor.
His colleagues at Wells Fargo worked on it. It's a perfect memorial, I think, for him.
He would like to see something good come out of the terrible thing that happened. There's a thing that happens to people when they truly grieve.
It isn't voluntary, and it takes a long time. Grief is a wave, and sometimes it's, it just fills you, and it takes you away, and it happens less frequently now than it did six months or nine months ago but it's still debilitating and we knew then that physically he was gone and and in our hearts we still haven't let him go it's just still hard to believe that a person could be that evil.

Evil is the only word I can think of.

Inhuman.

To do something like that.

He just seems like, you know, he was a swill.

He didn't get his way.

And he took Justin's life for no reason.

And the woman at the center of it all? What kind of a life would she have had with him? A thought perhaps best packed away, like a lot of things. Had the wedding dress, had the houses booked, had the venue booked, had catering booked.
I mean, we were just a little over two months out. Boy, oh boy, a wedding dress is such a symbol.
What do you do with a thing like that in a situation that you're in? I haven't even looked at it. Where do you put it? It's in my mom's basement.
She's moved a couple of times and it's in her basement. A true crime story never really ends.
Even when a case is closed, the journey for those left behind is just beginning. Since our Dateline story aired, Tracy has harnessed her outrage into a mission.
I had no other option. I had to do something.
Catch up with families, friends, and investigators on our bonus series, After the Verdict. Ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with strength and courage.
It does just change your life, but speaking up for these issues

helps me keep going.

To listen to After the Verdict,

subscribe to Dateline Premium

on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

or at datelinepremium.com.