The Plan

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Speaker 4 I'm a human being.

Speaker 5 I'm sorry more than I can express.

Speaker 5 Every day, it runs through me.

Speaker 7 What happened?

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 9 try to turn around. It felt like there was something going on.
The multiple red flags.

Speaker 10 Keep an eye on him.

Speaker 11 He's got a firearm on him.

Speaker 2 He is armed with more than one handgun, an AR-15 with him, a shotgun.

Speaker 13 To say cold blood doesn't really capture what happened in that driveway.

Speaker 14 Josh and Amber, they're dead.

Speaker 15 I'm like, oh my god, no.

Speaker 16 It sounded like it was premeditated.

Speaker 17 They had no idea what was coming their way.

Speaker 18 They put explosives in the door. They'd blow the door.

Speaker 12 What a show. It's like a commando operation.

Speaker 18 It was straight off the military.

Speaker 15 It still feels like a horrible boundary.

Speaker 5 I blame myself for everything.

Speaker 23 This story about young couples and their children, their tangled relationships, is so disturbing, you might question what kind of creatures we humans are.

Speaker 26 You've been forewarned.

Speaker 12 We have a lot of strange cases in the course of dateline, but this one has a chilliness to it that's just unmatched.

Speaker 17 It's something you don't usually hear about.

Speaker 24 The trip into the darkness begins actually on a sunny fall day, October 22nd, 2018, in the sleepy town of SOTUS in way upstate New York.

Speaker 32 Tiffany Thayer was heading out to the grocery when her two-year-old got fussy about wanting candy.

Speaker 35 We went to the kitchen to grab gummy bears and saw my neighbor talking with a gentleman outside and did think nothing of it.

Speaker 36 Her neighbor Josh, leaning against his truck, seemed deep in conversation with someone she didn't recognize.

Speaker 21 Josh's girlfriend Amber had just pulled into the driveway.

Speaker 32 Tiffany reached for the gummy bears, and that's when she heard it.

Speaker 41 A gunshot.

Speaker 35 Turned back out my kitchen window and see Josh grab his chest. And Amber, at that point, had threw her car in reverse.

Speaker 35 And right as she was coming past the shooter, he turned and shot her right in the head.

Speaker 36 Tiffany threw herself on top of her child, crawled to her front door, and bolted the lock.

Speaker 43 More shots followed. Pop, pop, pop.

Speaker 34 Too many to count.

Speaker 35 Shots just kept ringing out. It was...
It's crazy.

Speaker 44 She called 911.

Speaker 30 As it turned out, Wayne County Sheriff Sergeant Matt Carr was supervising an eviction just a few houses away.

Speaker 46 He was dispatched to the scene.

Speaker 9 Immediately have people coming at me.

Speaker 12 And these are neighbors. These are not.

Speaker 47 At that time, I'm hoping they're neighbors. I'm not really sure who people are.

Speaker 50 It took the sergeant a moment to get his bearings, but for him, those images would be seared in forever.

Speaker 20 There was the homeowner, the victim, Josh Niles, half under the truck where he tried to take cover.

Speaker 32 He'd been shot multiple times.

Speaker 53 Amber Washburn, his girlfriend, was dead draped over the center console of her car, which had come to rest in the driveway across the street.

Speaker 46 This is a gruesome thing you've come upon.

Speaker 55 Absolutely.

Speaker 56 You got two dead in a pretty quiet neighborhood.

Speaker 55 Absolutely.

Speaker 47 Probably one of the worst things I've ever seen.

Speaker 51 As the sergeant approached Amber's car, he found something as unexpected as it was cruel.

Speaker 20 Poised in a car seat right behind the murdered mom was a child, very much alive, Josh and Amber's four-year-old son.

Speaker 47 I can honestly say I can still see the child in the backseat gripping his four-piece chicken McNuggets. That's still, I can see it vividly.

Speaker 28 So Academy in the streets don't really prepare you for that, Canada.

Speaker 47 No, it does not.

Speaker 23 The sergeant did his best to comfort the boy as he waited for fellow officers to respond.

Speaker 25 The neighbors, witnesses now, were telling the officer they'd seen the shooter, black sweatshirt and green hat, sprinting away through backyards.

Speaker 25 Sheriff's officer, anybody in here, come out right now.

Speaker 61 A manhunt was underway for an apparently stone-cold killer.

Speaker 62 Sheriff's officer, anybody in there?

Speaker 63 Robert Milby was assigned as the lead detective on the case.

Speaker 2 We had no idea immediately where that person had gone. We had a general direction.

Speaker 2 When the calls first started coming out, one of the first parts of the operation was to shut down the school, which was nearby. So the Central School District was immediately put into lockdown.

Speaker 12 So you hope this is all there is? You don't want it, but who knows? Right. Terror's office canine.

Speaker 12 If anybody's inside, speak out now, you will get bit.

Speaker 23 Canines were brought in for the street-to-street search.

Speaker 48 The state police sent up a helicopter.

Speaker 47 So we were checking houses, barns, sheds, houses that people had alerted us to. They wanted their houses checked.

Speaker 64 You didn't see anybody run through here at all?

Speaker 32 You thought the shooter was on the ground there, huh?

Speaker 47 Yes, maybe holed up in a building or car or outbuilding, something like that.

Speaker 39 No running, nobody running through here.

Speaker 46 Meanwhile, news of the shooting was already out there on social media.

Speaker 23 Josh's sister, Nicole, first learned of it on Facebook.

Speaker 30 Her spirits slumped when she saw the name of the street where it happened.

Speaker 66 I called 911 and said, that's near my brother's house. And the operator said, well, what's your brother's name? I said, his name is Joshua Niles.

Speaker 66 And he said, I have no information for you, but a cop will get a hold of you. That's not good.
No, my heart sank.

Speaker 44 The police did call, but they reached Josh's parents first.

Speaker 67 His mom, Barb Niles.

Speaker 15 She goes,

Speaker 15 there's been a shooting, and

Speaker 15 it involved your son. I think she said he passed away or something.
And I just, I broke down. I just kept saying, no, not my Josh.

Speaker 15 Can't be my Josh.

Speaker 15 And I go, what about Amber? And she said, she's gone too. And I'm like, oh my God, no.

Speaker 66 And I just, I lost it.

Speaker 68 She then had to tell her other children, Josh's two brothers and his younger sister, Amanda.

Speaker 14 My mom was calling me, and instantly I knew something wasn't right.

Speaker 69 Just from her cry.

Speaker 14 It was almost like a scream. And I kept yelling at her, Mom, what, what, what?

Speaker 14 And then she was like, Josh, it was Josh. And she was like, Amber, too.
Josh and Amber, they're dead.

Speaker 41 So

Speaker 14 I wanted to do something. Like, I tried to leave.
Like, I ran out the house. I wanted to go him.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 8 I can't.

Speaker 24 As Josh and Amber's families wrestled with grief, the town of Sodus hunkered down.

Speaker 36 Somewhere out there was a killer, still on the loose.

Speaker 12 But where?

Speaker 61 Did you guys see anything at all?

Speaker 41 The search was urgent.

Speaker 21 The fear instant.

Speaker 72 Why did this killer target Josh and Amber?

Speaker 16 I had no clue whatsoever. No thoughts, no suspicions.

Speaker 12 It didn't appear to be a home invasion gone wrong or anything like that.

Speaker 8 Nope.

Speaker 16 Nope, and it sounded like it was premeditated.

Speaker 41 And later.

Speaker 7 What happened?

Speaker 67 The midnight ride in the middle of nowhere that would break the case wide open.

Speaker 73 What's up, are you doing here?

Speaker 9 There was something going on, and it just didn't fit right.

Speaker 58 SODUS, New York was in lockdown.

Speaker 21 A stone cold killing had unsettled the town and left a young couple dead.

Speaker 52 Josh and his longtime girlfriend Amber gunned down in their driveway.

Speaker 74 Amber's sister Angeline got the voicemail from their dad.

Speaker 16 He said, Ange, call me. I've got some really hard news.
And just the urgency and the pain in his voice was just, it was the most difficult thing to hear. I knew at that point what had happened.

Speaker 16 And I'm still thinking, I'm like, you know, maybe she's still alive. Maybe they're still alive.

Speaker 16 And then my brain's going, but they said there was two people dead, you know?

Speaker 32 Amber's parents, Chris and Marcia, had not only lost their daughter, but were now worried about Josh Jr., their grandson who witnessed the shooting.

Speaker 78 Obviously, the first thing is, where's my grandson?

Speaker 66 Where is he?

Speaker 78 Because we knew the time around two o'clock, and we knew that was when she would be getting home with him from school. Hey, they told us that, yes, he was in the back seat of the car, but he was okay.

Speaker 49 Okay, physically, but presumably in shock and otherwise unable to shed light on the crime.

Speaker 51 Four-year-old Josh Jr.

Speaker 24 had been diagnosed with autism and is nonverbal.

Speaker 12 He's right in the back seat in his kids' seat.

Speaker 66 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 79 He saw everything.

Speaker 78 We know he did.

Speaker 12 There's the gun coming through the window, shooting him.

Speaker 65 Exactly. Did you guys see anything at all?

Speaker 39 As the manhunt continued in SOTUS, Amber's family puzzled over the killings.

Speaker 32 They could not figure out who would want to harm Josh and their innocent Amber.

Speaker 16 I had no clue whatsoever. No thoughts, no suspicions.
I was completely clueless. You know.

Speaker 12 It didn't appear to be a home invasion gone wrong or anything like that.

Speaker 8 Nope.

Speaker 16 Nope, and it sounded like it was premeditated from, you know, the little bits and pieces that we could gather for those first couple days.

Speaker 20 24-year-old Amber, with her love of gardening and professional bakery job, seemed an especially unlikely target.

Speaker 16 She was such a sweet old soul. She was kind.
She was easy to get along with. Everyone liked her.

Speaker 51 Josh's parents, Gene and Barb, thought the same thing about their son.

Speaker 25 Josh had no enemies that they knew of.

Speaker 30 His family says he was just a hard-working guy with a flair for cooking.

Speaker 48 He'd picked up a few things at his dad's restaurant growing up.

Speaker 82 We brought him under our wing and became my right-hand man.

Speaker 12 He knew his way around the kitchen by the end of things.

Speaker 2 He was great.

Speaker 71 In fact, Josh had been putting a nice life together for himself.

Speaker 39 A new business was taking off, and just that week, he told his mom that he and Amber were thinking of making it official.

Speaker 15 He says, yeah, and then we're thinking about finally getting married.

Speaker 53 I'm like, hmm, Joshua? They were doing pretty well together.

Speaker 66 Wonderful. Bought a new house, getting their life started.

Speaker 66 Josh had a lawn care business he was starting up.

Speaker 66 Like, they were on the road to start.

Speaker 44 Everything was going up.

Speaker 66 Everything was going up.

Speaker 51 Everyone thought Josh and Amber were especially devoted parents, too.

Speaker 80 His mom remembers with affection the light-hearted way he had told her that Josh Jr.

Speaker 39 was on the way.

Speaker 15 I got up to make my coffee, like I always do, and there's an envelope right in front of my coffee. And it says, Mom, Dad.

Speaker 15 So I take it down and I open it up, and there's an ultrasound picture and a baby bib, something like

Speaker 15 boys are from heaven or something.

Speaker 15 And I went, what?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Meet your grandson, huh?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 15 So I texted him, do you have something to tell me?

Speaker 12 Baby came with some difficulties. It would be a challenge for some parents.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 15 He was probably a year and a half, two years old before we realized, you know.

Speaker 85 He was on the spectrum.

Speaker 12 That he was autistic.

Speaker 45 Right, right.

Speaker 12 How did they as a couple deal with that?

Speaker 15 They dealt very well with it.

Speaker 82 Very well.

Speaker 66 I didn't know how my brother would react to having a special needs. It didn't faze him.
He's a normal kid to him. And Amber was just wonderful with him, carefree with him.

Speaker 66 He could have a fit and she would just giggle and go about her business like it didn't upset her or anything.

Speaker 42 But Josh Jr.

Speaker 20 wasn't the only child in their lives.

Speaker 46 Josh and Amber were also loving parents to two children from Josh's previous relationship.

Speaker 51 The custody agreement had given Josh and Amber the summer months to care for them.

Speaker 12 Did it matter to your sister that new boyfriend, Josh, came with kids already? He had kind of a long-term relationship?

Speaker 16 No, Amber always loved kids. She did fantastic with my kids, and she wore it well.

Speaker 51 Josh's ex-girlfriend and mother to the children is a woman named Charlene Childers.

Speaker 37 She gave Amber the stamp of approval for being such a loving second mom.

Speaker 53 Were you okay with her being around your children? Yeah.

Speaker 4 I was actually pretty, I was fine with Amber being around my kids because

Speaker 4 she took them in as that she was, they were her own and she loved my children.

Speaker 24 Charlene lives in Texas, some 1,600 miles away.

Speaker 65 How do you find out?

Speaker 86 I got home from work on Monday, the 22nd of October, and I started looking at Facebook and I saw the news articles of shootings and sodas.

Speaker 21 She wanted news of her children, who at that moment were in New York with Josh and Amber.

Speaker 52 Luckily, they were at school out of harm's way.

Speaker 37 She called Josh's mom.

Speaker 65 Charlene's on the phone.

Speaker 15 Yeah, she called me and she said she heard. You know, and I just told her.
I said, somebody killed Josh.

Speaker 25 Charlene hit the road from Texas as Detective Milby was trying to get a handle on the crime scene.

Speaker 88 He was struck by the sheer awfulness of it, with a wounded but still alive Josh having to witness his girlfriend's execution.

Speaker 12 So even though Josh is shot, he's aware that his girlfriend is in peril here.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 27 Probably sees her get shot.

Speaker 2 Yes, he does. Eyewitness accounts tell us that he was yelling for her.

Speaker 12 And then multiple shots as he tries to crawl for cover under his vehicle and doesn't make it in.

Speaker 10 That's correct.

Speaker 56 From everything the detective was seeing, it was a very personal crime.

Speaker 2 There was several casings on the ground that told us that whoever wanted Josh Niles dead was there to make sure that it was, there was no chance he was going to live.

Speaker 59 Josh Niles had been shot 10 times.

Speaker 32 A message killing, but one delivered by whom?

Speaker 16 We were afraid for our families because we don't know the reason. We don't know who did this.

Speaker 41 A mysterious figure.

Speaker 2 There's a couple of different videos of a person matching the description of what the witnesses had seen walking down the sidewalk towards Josh and Amber's home.

Speaker 41 A mask on the ground.

Speaker 12 Did you worry then we've got

Speaker 12 a hoodie wearing gunmen in the neighborhood killing people?

Speaker 14 I was terrified to be home, just with me and the kids. Watch out the window.

Speaker 29 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 78 That was was scary.

Speaker 78 Is that my car up there?

Speaker 33 Police searched through the night.

Speaker 32 Had they missed their gunman?

Speaker 22 The canine sniffer ran out of scent just a short ways from the scene.

Speaker 47 We tracked it to a parking lot.

Speaker 13 Well, that made sense, right?

Speaker 12 I mean, this is probably where your shooter had ditched his car.

Speaker 47 I assume so, yes.

Speaker 63 Schools and SODIS reopened. Residents were told it was safe to go outside again.

Speaker 39 Nonetheless, Josh and Amber's loved ones remained paralyzed with fear.

Speaker 16 We were afraid for our families because we don't know the reason. We don't know who did this.
You know, so we're just constantly being vigilant, looking around.

Speaker 12 Did the tentacles of this thing come back to us in some way that we have no idea?

Speaker 69 And who knows?

Speaker 46 A slower-paced, more tedious shoe leather investigation became the order of the day.

Speaker 2 Knocked on every door,

Speaker 2 knocked on every every neighbor's door.

Speaker 76 Did you get any nuggets, anything?

Speaker 12 A little bit.

Speaker 13 With

Speaker 2 home surveillance systems that people have out there, we were able to get people of interest on video.

Speaker 12 So a person appears before the time of the shooting, I'm guessing, right?

Speaker 2 That is correct.

Speaker 2 There's a couple of different videos of a person matching the description of what the witnesses had seen walking down the sidewalk. towards Josh and Amber's home.

Speaker 83 Here's one of them.

Speaker 60 A person in a black hoodie walks through the frame at 1.57 p.m., about 10 minutes before the murder.

Speaker 39 You can't see the face.

Speaker 21 At 1.58 p.m., the figure appears on camera again.

Speaker 12 So the victims are being surveilled?

Speaker 2 We've come to find out that that is exactly what happened.

Speaker 21 And another critical piece of evidence had been bagged and sent to the lab for analysis.

Speaker 64 We got a black mask

Speaker 64 approximately 30 yards

Speaker 64 east of North Street on Elmwood.

Speaker 49 A ski mask lost or dropped by the shooter, apparently, as he ran from the scene.

Speaker 20 One of the canines sniffed it out.

Speaker 25 Did it look to you freshly tossed or dropped?

Speaker 12 Had been tromped on in the mud or something.

Speaker 89 It was an underarmor

Speaker 47 ski mask. So, I mean, that's not something that usually people just drop or discard.
So, I mean, they're $30, $40.

Speaker 28 Pretty pricey piece of hair.

Speaker 47 Yeah, it's not something that I know if I dropped it, I would have gone back for it.

Speaker 39 Would the lab techs come up with DNA?

Speaker 25 Meanwhile, investigators reviewed the statement the neighbor had given them about what she'd seen out her kitchen window. She said that based on body language, Josh seemed to know his killer.

Speaker 35 The gentleman was standing at a picnic table, and Josh, for some reason, had pulled his truck up next to the picnic table, and he was just leaned up against the tail bed of his truck, just nonchalantly just sitting there talking.

Speaker 61 Detectives needed to do a little more digging into the life of Josh Niles.

Speaker 32 They conducted interviews with his family.

Speaker 15 We all met at Nicole's and the police came to see us personally there.

Speaker 12 Do you have anything for them?

Speaker 15 I didn't know what, I had no idea at first. I couldn't even imagine who would want to do this to him.

Speaker 33 Josh's sister Amanda thought it must be a burglary.

Speaker 14 Maybe somebody did try to rob him or

Speaker 14 wrong time.

Speaker 12 Did you worry then? We've got a

Speaker 12 hoodie-wearing gunman in the neighborhood killing people.

Speaker 8 The schools are online.

Speaker 14 I was terrified to be home just with me and the kids. Watch out the window.

Speaker 35 Mm-hmm. That was scary.

Speaker 30 His dad wondered if it was a case of mistaken identity.

Speaker 31 We thought maybe he's a new homeowner.

Speaker 85 Maybe someone thought, oh, this guy is bad that lived here before Josh.

Speaker 18 Let's go do something.

Speaker 46 Detectives also wanted to speak to Josh's ex, Charlene.

Speaker 56 They first reached this mother of two of his children as she'd been driving in from Texas the night of the shooting.

Speaker 12 So this is only a voice on the phone. What are you hearing? What do you think you have here?

Speaker 2 I think I've got

Speaker 2 a quiet little southern bell, is how she put herself on the phone.

Speaker 12 Demure.

Speaker 2 Very demure, very cooperative.

Speaker 61 But she had some unladylike venting to do about Josh.

Speaker 18 She had

Speaker 2 given us a little bit of information that she had had a problem with Josh in the past, that there were several police reports.

Speaker 71 Charlene told us some of what she shared with the police.

Speaker 39 She says that despite Josh's sunny demeanor, in private, he could be a terror.

Speaker 71 She said he masked his anger issues with drugs.

Speaker 4 He was fine as long as he had his pot, as long as he had his marijuana to smoke. Other than that, he was tranquil, huh? Yeah.

Speaker 4 If he didn't, then things got bad. If things didn't go his way the way he wanted it to, things got bad.
And when I say bad, I mean for me.

Speaker 61 She claims Josh got violent on more than one occasion.

Speaker 4 He threw a bar stool past our nine-month-old daughter's head.

Speaker 28 This is, well, like just throwing a switch.

Speaker 12 All of a sudden, he's a different guy, huh?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And you don't know what's going to trigger him.

Speaker 4 And it just went on that entire day. He beat the crap out of me, and you know, the cops.
And you stayed. Yeah.

Speaker 28 Is there a point where you say, Look, this isn't working out?

Speaker 12 You know, I like you, but it's not working out for the two of us.

Speaker 53 Yeah.

Speaker 76 We're not meant to be together.

Speaker 4 There was, and I had left, and then for some reason, I fell back into it. And we ended up having another child.

Speaker 4 And then

Speaker 6 about

Speaker 4 a year after that is when

Speaker 4 I just said, I can't do it.

Speaker 36 According to police, Charlene called the cops on Josh several times.

Speaker 51 In one incident, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment after Charlene said he tried to choke her.

Speaker 72 She says she was so scarred by the relationship, she went so far as to warn Amber, his current girlfriend.

Speaker 86 Unfortunately, I had to warn her.

Speaker 4 I was like, you know.

Speaker 12 Did you take her side and said, look out for this guy?

Speaker 4 Yeah. I said, be careful.

Speaker 86 About what?

Speaker 4 Be very careful because he does have a temper, and I don't want you to get hurt like I did.

Speaker 81 Anger, drugs, and a warning from the ex.

Speaker 51 If what Charlene was saying was true, it casts Josh and his relationship with women in a whole new light.

Speaker 12 What role does he play in this?

Speaker 2 He plays a pretty pivotal role.

Speaker 72 A possible suspect.

Speaker 92 And get this, he's loud and proud.

Speaker 2 He saw himself as celebrity status. He was quite taken with the fact that he was what he called a suspect.
We were just trying to put pieces of the case together. He called himself a suspect.

Speaker 12 I'm guessing this guy's talking himself into a jam.

Speaker 2 He's talking himself into getting questioned again, that's for sure.

Speaker 12 And that happened.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes, it did.

Speaker 22 Two days after the murders, mourners gathered outside Josh and Amber's home for a vigil.

Speaker 57 Amber's sister, Angela, still on high alert.

Speaker 16 I remember just having this sense of, you know, is someone watching me?

Speaker 12 Did you ask law enforcement do we have reason to be nervous here?

Speaker 69 Yep, and they told us we didn't.

Speaker 16 But still, it doesn't always settle your mind.

Speaker 70 Her parents, Chris and Marcia, were struggling with how close they'd come to losing their grandson, too.

Speaker 43 Josh Jr.

Speaker 21 who'd been right behind Amber in the car.

Speaker 12 There might have been three victims in there.

Speaker 8 There could have been, right?

Speaker 78 Thank God it wasn't.

Speaker 36 Shoulder to shoulder with the distraught family and friends was Charlene, Josh's ex, demanding justice as the news cameras rolled.

Speaker 93 Whoever didn't has now made it to where my kids grew up with that a band. And that's nothing a kid should ever have to do.
It's not something that you ever want to find out.

Speaker 93 The most I have to say to y'all is justice needs to be served. My kids need that closure.

Speaker 59 Josh's family hadn't seen much of Charlene since the breakup.

Speaker 67 And truth be told, they hadn't missed her much.

Speaker 44 His sister Amanda.

Speaker 12 What'd you think of Amanda?

Speaker 84 At first I liked her.

Speaker 14 She was nice and always smiley, seemed to make him happy.

Speaker 14 But as the years went on, you could see his very unhealthy relationship.

Speaker 12 When you say that, what are you talking about?

Speaker 14 They would always fight and bicker, not getting along.

Speaker 12 True rumor that sometimes she would call the cops on him?

Speaker 65 All the time.

Speaker 66 All the time. And he would call me and say, Charlene, call cops on me again.

Speaker 31 Josh's sisters say that Charlene, not their brother, was the real hothead in the relationship.

Speaker 52 An instigator with 911 on speed dial.

Speaker 12 Did anybody pull him aside and bro, you got to deal with this?

Speaker 66 We've always pulled him aside and said, this isn't a relationship. This is not how a relationship is supposed to be.
You need to just break it off.

Speaker 15 Those two were like

Speaker 8 fire and water.

Speaker 15 They just couldn't be together.

Speaker 46 Everyone agreed that Josh and Charlene were better apart.

Speaker 58 And in recent years, with more than a thousand miles between them, the agreed-on co-parenting approach seemed to work.

Speaker 4 I had them during the school year, and he would get them a week after school ended to a week before school started, and every other Christmas.

Speaker 36 Still, the history of tension between them put Charlene in the investigators' crosshairs.

Speaker 2 Well, we were very interested in Charlene, and I had asked her to come in, once she got settled. to come in and help us try to figure out who had done this to her ex, the father of her children.

Speaker 20 And very quickly, quickly, they were able to conclude one thing for sure.

Speaker 12 Detective, were you able to rule out right away that she was not anywhere near the driveway that day?

Speaker 2 I believed, because of phone conversations that I had had with her, that she was, in fact, in Texas on the day of the murders.

Speaker 39 So Charlene wasn't the shooter, wasn't in New York on the day of the murder.

Speaker 46 But it turns out she did have close ties to SOTUS, New York.

Speaker 25 Close ties there to a local guy.

Speaker 2 She had also mentioned during one of her phone calls that she wanted her current boyfriend who lived in New York to come and pick up the children.

Speaker 25 His name was Casey, and he lived in a town near SOTUS.

Speaker 20 Josh and Aberd's family members even remember him consoling Charlene after the murders as though an official mourner.

Speaker 66 Casey was with Charlene the whole time. We were doing visuals for my brother and having get-togethers at my house.

Speaker 30 So here was a theory.

Speaker 48 If Charlene did in fact have this explosive relationship with Josh, Maybe her current boyfriend, this Casey, had evened the score by killing Josh as a demented lover's gift.

Speaker 12 What role does he play in this?

Speaker 2 He plays a pretty pivotal role.

Speaker 40 Police say Casey was a person of interest.

Speaker 49 He also had a scrape with the law.

Speaker 51 He and Charlene dated when she was just 14 and he 19.

Speaker 2 They had known each other in the past.

Speaker 2 Casey had actually been arrested in the past for having a relationship with Charlene when she was underage.

Speaker 49 Casey was on the list, someone detectives wanted to speak to, and right away.

Speaker 2 We reached out to him and brought him in for an interview, which he complied 100%

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 told us that he was just a boyfriend of Charlene and he didn't know anything about the shooting.

Speaker 54 But this was weird.

Speaker 24 After he left the sheriff's department, why was he bragging to his buddies about being investigated in a double homicide?

Speaker 2 We found out through some other people that he saw himself as

Speaker 56 celebrity status.

Speaker 2 He was quite taken with the fact that he was

Speaker 2 what he called a suspect.

Speaker 2 We were just trying to put pieces of the case together. He called himself a suspect and started to reach out to people that he had talked to in years to tell them that he was a suspect.

Speaker 12 That's me, me, me, huh?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 25 Also unsettling, Detective Milby learned that Casey was trying to offload a gun.

Speaker 12 I'm guessing this guy's talking himself into a jam.

Speaker 2 He's talking himself into getting questioned again, that's for sure.

Speaker 12 And that happened.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes, it did.

Speaker 36 Police uncover new information about Casey Miller.

Speaker 2 He was actually trying to get rid of a gun.

Speaker 72 And they have a new question for Charlene.

Speaker 41 How many men is too many men?

Speaker 2 Well, there's Casey Miller, but then we also find out there's her husband, Tim Dean.

Speaker 12 And who's Tim Dean?

Speaker 2 Tim Dean is a former chief of police of Sunray, Texas.

Speaker 84 Tim is your husband?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 12 Casey's your boyfriend? Yes. You got a complicated life, Charlene, huh?

Speaker 4 I know I do.

Speaker 67 Amber and Josh had been gunned down in their driveway and laid to rest.

Speaker 96 Now detectives working their murders were talking to a local guy who lived not far from the scene, Casey, Charlene's boyfriend.

Speaker 70 Detectives learned something sketchy about him.

Speaker 2 He was actually trying to get rid of a gun.

Speaker 80 The gun in question was a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, pink in color.

Speaker 54 And cops knew it was the same caliber gun that had killed Josh and Amber.

Speaker 81 And when detectives called Casey back for more details about the handgun, he explained the weapon's backstory. His girlfriend Charlene, who had been so quick to badmouth Josh, she owned a pink Glock.

Speaker 59 And Charlene had worked in private security, I'm told.

Speaker 12 Is that right?

Speaker 2 Correct. She brought that handgun to New York.

Speaker 63 But Casey said it was all totally innocent.

Speaker 39 Charlene had a permit to carry the gun in Texas, but not in New York State.

Speaker 25 In her haste to get up to SOTUS after the murders, she said she inadvertently neglected to leave the gun at home.

Speaker 2 Casey reached out to some of the people that he knew and tried to get those who had permits to take care of that weapon for her.

Speaker 45 Did the story of the pink gun sound a little fishy?

Speaker 74 Maybe, but a ballistics test ruled out that particular Glock as the one that killed the couple.

Speaker 21 And Casey had an alibi that checked out.

Speaker 40 He was at work when the shooting happened.

Speaker 2 He had arrived at work on time. He was at work on the day of the shooting.

Speaker 63 But detectives weren't quite done with poking around in the life of Josh's ex-girlfriend, Charlene, and they found out something quite curious.

Speaker 31 Casey was her local boyfriend, but not the only man in her life.

Speaker 41 There was Tim down in Texas.

Speaker 2 Well, there's Casey Miller, but then we also find out there's her husband, Tim Dean.

Speaker 12 And who's Tim Dean?

Speaker 2 Tim Dean is a former chief of police of Sunray, Sunray, Texas.

Speaker 12 Tim is your husband?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 12 Casey's your boyfriend?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 12 You don't need me to tell you you got a complicated life, Charlene, huh?

Speaker 4 No, I know I do.

Speaker 59 A complicated life that was of keen interest to investigators.

Speaker 92 It went like this.

Speaker 24 Long after Charlene broke up with Josh, she met husband Tim.

Speaker 36 This was when they both worked for the Dumas, Texas Police Department.

Speaker 49 Charlene was the animal control officer there, and Tim a sergeant.

Speaker 45 Charlene says she fell for Tim's aweshux demeanor.

Speaker 4 He was the cowboy. He wore the cowboy hat.
He had the cowboy boots.

Speaker 78 He had the old school manners.

Speaker 28 Why did that work for you at that point in your life?

Speaker 4 Because that's how I was raised. He reminded me of my dad.
He played the guitar just like my dad did.

Speaker 8 Tim did, huh? Yes.

Speaker 52 But not long after they got married, it all took a turn for the worse.

Speaker 57 Tim Dean had a three-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

Speaker 25 He got in serious trouble after he was videoed slapping the child across the face.

Speaker 12 So what was the incident?

Speaker 91 He was accused of abusing his three-year-old daughter.

Speaker 65 His own daughter? His own daughter.

Speaker 12 And Charlene is recording it on a phone or something?

Speaker 2 Charlene recorded the incident on phone, and that information winds up getting out to some of Charlene's friends,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 that is forwarded to the authorities, and they conduct an investigation in Texas.

Speaker 92 As a result, Police Chief Dean lost custody of the young girl.

Speaker 24 And because he was living in the same house with Charlene's two kids with Josh, Child Protective Services in Texas alerted Josh.

Speaker 22 Turns out he was already on his way to Texas to pick up his kids for the summer.

Speaker 66 He got a phone call from CPS.

Speaker 12 Child Protective Service? Yes.

Speaker 66 The agency in Texas. The agency in Texas.
In Texas, okay. You need to come get your kids.
My brother said, I'm on my way to get my kids. Why? What's going on?

Speaker 66 He said, I'll tell tell you when you get here.

Speaker 48 What did he think about that?

Speaker 14 I think he was scared for his children because he didn't really know what was going on.

Speaker 63 So Josh took the kids for the summer as planned and decided to file for full custody.

Speaker 60 Before the summer was over, a judge in New York ruled in his favor that the kids should stay with him and not go back to Charlene and Tim in Texas.

Speaker 24 This was just a few months before the murders.

Speaker 56 Charlene had lost her kids and it hit her hard.

Speaker 12 This is a huge setback for you, though, Charlene. You've lost the kids.

Speaker 78 Yes, it is.

Speaker 4 It angers me and frustrates me.

Speaker 12 Is it anger directed at the states? Is it aimed at Josh? Is it aimed at Tim, who, in a way, got you in all of this?

Speaker 4 Honestly, it's aimed at everybody.

Speaker 42 But she had a plan.

Speaker 25 Convince the family courts that she was done with husband Tim Dean, divorce him, and he would no longer be an issue.

Speaker 31 Problem solved.

Speaker 79 In August, we had our last custody hearing.

Speaker 6 We were...

Speaker 4 I told them, look, I'll divorce my husband to get my kids back.

Speaker 4 And they said, well, we're going to leave the kids with Josh for right now.

Speaker 4 When you get the divorce settled, then we'll come back and we'll look at it.

Speaker 81 That's what was going on in the weeks leading up to the murders.

Speaker 63 Josh and Charlene at odds over custody of their kids.

Speaker 24 all because of Charlene's husband, Tim Dean.

Speaker 67 To find out if this intriguing bit of drama had anything to do with the crime, the investigation was now headed to the great state of Texas.

Speaker 7 What happened?

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 49 a road trip to nowhere is about to shift this case into high gear.

Speaker 98 Is there anything in there I need to know about? Nah.

Speaker 73 Okay, I've got a shotgun in there, but

Speaker 8 illegal.

Speaker 99 No drugs or... No, no, no, no.

Speaker 10 Stolen guns or anything, right? No.

Speaker 10 Keep an eye on him.

Speaker 84 He's got a firearm on him.

Speaker 9 At that point, I keyed up that there's more than meets the eye here, but I didn't know what.

Speaker 50 Now the investigation of a double homicide in small town upstate New York had moved 1,600 miles southwest to small-town Texas.

Speaker 89 To the Texas Panhandle, farming country, energy.

Speaker 52 Drive north from Amarillo and you come upon a place that's not much more than a shadow under the refinery.

Speaker 41 Tiny Sunray, Texas, population 1,900.

Speaker 25 It's in the county where Lieutenant Tom Flood works investigations for the FBI and the Dumas Police.

Speaker 31 He showed me around Sunray.

Speaker 12 So tell me about towns like this in the Panhandle. Who lives here? What goes on?

Speaker 76 Small town America.

Speaker 18 Farming is pretty dominantly, except for up here they have the Malero oil refinery.

Speaker 12 I saw refineries, I saw a lot of pump jacks coming in.

Speaker 74 A lot of pump jacks.

Speaker 42 And wind farms.

Speaker 18 And wind farms where yes, they're taking over.

Speaker 71 The reason we've come to Sunray is because it's the town where Charlene's husband, Tim Dean, served as a chief of police.

Speaker 28 The department has just three officers.

Speaker 12 So what's the mission of being a small police force in a town like this in the Bandana?

Speaker 18 Narcotics is a haven for small-town America.

Speaker 12 Really? Absolutely. So that's your chronic crime problem, huh?

Speaker 84 Theft and narcotics. Wow.

Speaker 24 Lieutenant Flood knew Charlene's husband, Tim Dean, quite well.

Speaker 49 He'd hired him years earlier and was happy to talk when New York police called asking about his history.

Speaker 46 Tell me about this guy. Who did you meet back when?

Speaker 76 Tim came in.

Speaker 18 He appeared to be, you know, a trainable individual, and that's what we were looking for.

Speaker 12 Did he have a fire in his belly for law enforcement? Had he been thinking thinking about it since he was a kid?

Speaker 18 He was working in Admiral Police Department, went through their academy. It didn't work out for him and so he applied in Dumas.

Speaker 70 A few years later, Dean got the top job in Sunray.

Speaker 21 But that uniform job ended as quickly as a slap to the face of his three-year-old daughter.

Speaker 22 The Rangers looked at that smartphone video of the incident taken by his wife and promptly arrested him.

Speaker 25 Tim resigned his position with the police.

Speaker 22 So goodbye police chief job.

Speaker 18 For him, yes.

Speaker 27 That's going going to be a shocker right away.

Speaker 12 Our police chief is arrested, is out of office because of a child abuse allegations.

Speaker 85 Yes, yes.

Speaker 18 And at that point, things start going south for Mr. Dean.

Speaker 46 With his job gone, the state taking away his daughter and Charlene's two kids as well, plus a pending divorce, Tim Dean's life was in a tailspin.

Speaker 18 He actually had to move out and move to a house in Dumas.

Speaker 12 He's out of his job, away from his kid, out of the house.

Speaker 84 Yes.

Speaker 25 And now, New York investigators were wondering if that tailspin had led to a very dark act, a double homicide.

Speaker 18 It was kind of a shock. I'm like, what's going on?

Speaker 18 Why are we thinking this? Why are we thinking Tim?

Speaker 54 Here's why.

Speaker 25 It's just a theory.

Speaker 36 If losing custody was the reason Charlene was divorcing him, maybe Tim Dean had a reason to want Josh and Amber dead.

Speaker 25 Maybe Tim Dean could save his marriage if he helped Charlene get her kids back.

Speaker 63 One way to do that, kill their dad, Josh.

Speaker 22 Courts would have no choice but to return the kids to their mom in Texas.

Speaker 12 Their question is, is this guy, Timothy Dean, our guy in the driveway with gun? Exactly.

Speaker 25 Is he our shooter?

Speaker 18 Exactly.

Speaker 12 So the question is, where has he been? What's his alibi?

Speaker 84 Exactly.

Speaker 18 So we started trying to piece it together.

Speaker 59 They obtained a warrant for Dean's cell phone records, scrolled through, and found something intriguing.

Speaker 48 Two days before the murders, Tim Dean wasn't at home in Texas.

Speaker 29 He was 400 miles away in Emporia, Kansas, and he'd placed a call to 911.

Speaker 21 Deputy Corey Nicolette of the Lyon County Sheriff's Office is the Kansas officer who responded to the call.

Speaker 9 He had called it in that he had had a wreck and was reporting the wreck.

Speaker 50 It was 4 a.m.

Speaker 97 when Deputy Nicolette came upon Tim Dean by the side of a dark highway.

Speaker 32 The deputy turned on his body cam.

Speaker 7 What happened?

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 9 tried to turn around. He was sitting in a ditch.
about two feet off the roadway, and he got out and told me that he was making a U-turn and hit something.

Speaker 11 Okay, I got your license and

Speaker 101 paperwork for this thing.

Speaker 101 It's gonna be fun. It's again, we're on fire.
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 11 Got your rental agreement? Yeah.

Speaker 98 Come jump in here with me real quick.

Speaker 99 Okay, jump in the front passenger seat.

Speaker 22 Tim explained he was lost and looking for a gas station.

Speaker 99 And he tried to turn around.

Speaker 102 Turn around right here, and it...

Speaker 98 So you just made a big flip around? Yeah.

Speaker 84 And we don't really do that around here.

Speaker 9 As you see why?

Speaker 102 Yeah.

Speaker 33 The deputy requested a tow, then asked him where he was headed.

Speaker 102 Honestly, man, I was just driving. My whole life has kind of gone

Speaker 102 lately.

Speaker 102 More or less living out of my car.

Speaker 99 But you had money to get a rental?

Speaker 8 Yeah, I still work.

Speaker 102 Just off this weekend.

Speaker 98 You didn't want to take your car?

Speaker 102 My car, the starter's acting up on it.

Speaker 51 Cops like asking questions, and Tim Dean apparently liked answering them.

Speaker 98 So you're driving around Kansas from Texas, huh?

Speaker 98 Yeah.

Speaker 22 The body cam was still rolling as they chatted in the patrol car.

Speaker 37 It started to sound like Dr. Phil.

Speaker 99 Where's your wife?

Speaker 10 She's at home.

Speaker 98 Thought you said you didn't have a home.

Speaker 102 Well, where do you have a pending divorce and

Speaker 102 all that fun stuff?

Speaker 102 Yeah, that's mine.

Speaker 98 Pending divorce, huh? Is that why you're out driving around instead of at home?

Speaker 84 Yes, sir.

Speaker 84 That bad, huh?

Speaker 102 Yeah, like I said, it's all gone to.

Speaker 32 He told the officer about losing not just his wife, but also his job.

Speaker 102 I work for Free LA now.

Speaker 10 Used to be a cop.

Speaker 8 Where were you a cop at?

Speaker 102 Dumas first and then Sunray.

Speaker 98 Why'd you quit copping?

Speaker 76 Well, I pissed off the DA and

Speaker 73 I was tackling some pretty big public corruption cases.

Speaker 102 Ended up with a target on my back and

Speaker 102 got arrested by the Texas Rangers on

Speaker 73 charge.

Speaker 59 The officer didn't know that this conversation would be looked at again later.

Speaker 50 He just knew that he was getting a weird vibe.

Speaker 9 That point that I thought, okay,

Speaker 9 you know, this guy just said he'd recently been arrested after being a cop for 10 years. Why is he in Kansas? What's going on?

Speaker 11 Alright, if you would stay here, I gotta take some pictures of the vehicle and stuff, especially since it's insurance.

Speaker 98 They're gonna want more pictures than normal. Is there anything in there I need to know about? Nah.

Speaker 102 Okay. I've got a shotgun in there, but

Speaker 8 illegal.

Speaker 99 No drugs or... No, no, no, no.

Speaker 8 No stolen guns or anything, right? No.

Speaker 98 Okay, well, hang tight here.

Speaker 8 I'll be right back.

Speaker 48 Tim Dean's story was making the deputy twitch.

Speaker 71 He passed on his concerns to the backup officer on scene.

Speaker 10 Keep an eye on him.

Speaker 11 He's got a firearm on him.

Speaker 10 He's got a concealed carry.

Speaker 11 Getting a divorce from Texas, just out driving around.

Speaker 43 From Texas?

Speaker 84 Yeah.

Speaker 73 How's he doing here? Well, I'm going to start fucking around the vehicle a little bit.

Speaker 76 At that point, I keyed up this.

Speaker 9 There's more than meets the eye here,

Speaker 9 but I didn't know what.

Speaker 102 Oh, that's my personal.

Speaker 70 Soon they'd learn a lot more about this disgraced police chief in a roadside ditch in Kansas in the middle of the night.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 102 We should have video of him in the shop. Do you?

Speaker 73 You should have. We got it right there.

Speaker 9 They had video of Timothy Dean showing up to pick up a tote.

Speaker 9 And I could see in the video he walked out with a concealable ballistic vest and a 12-gauge shotgun.

Speaker 92 Timothy Dean's long, strange trip.

Speaker 49 Exactly, what was he up to?

Speaker 104 I'm glad you guys are following us all this, because

Speaker 104 I even told him I had weird vibes about all this.

Speaker 41 And later, one,

Speaker 41 two,

Speaker 22 three, in the interrogation room.

Speaker 94 Who? Why?

Speaker 105 That's what I want to know.

Speaker 41 This double murder would have a triple twist.

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Speaker 75 Hi there, my name is Annie Elise, aka your true crime BFF and host of the podcast Serialously.

Speaker 75 I have been a true crime enthusiast forever, but I wished somebody would break down the cases for me like a friend, giving all the details and discussing every twist and turn.

Speaker 75 So I decided to create a podcast that does just that.

Speaker 75 I do the deep dives in these cases, so you don't have to, diving into all the raw details, saying what we're all thinking, and in a conversational conversational way.

Speaker 75 So join me and let's talk all things true crime. Seriously with Annie Elise.
New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 11 Okay, got your license and paperwork for this thing.

Speaker 63 The sheriff's deputy in Kansas had responded to a guy from Texas putting his rental car in a ditch in the middle of the night.

Speaker 67 License?

Speaker 71 No big deal, but but something about his story was off somehow.

Speaker 102 My whole life has kind of gone

Speaker 102 lately.

Speaker 9 It felt like there was something going on. And it just didn't fit right.

Speaker 64 He'd have had a better day had it been normal.

Speaker 80 The strange encounter had all but left his mind when a few days later, the deputy got a surprise call from the FBI asking about that traffic accident.

Speaker 97 The Kansas 911 call had popped up during the search of Tim Dean's cell phone records, and the FBI was trying to create a timeline for Tim Dean in a murder investigation.

Speaker 9 I thought, well, okay, I don't know what I have to offer for this, but here's everything I've got to try to help.

Speaker 51 So now, Deputy Nicolette of the Lyon County Sheriff's Department in Kansas found himself pulled into a growing multi-state, multi-agency investigation.

Speaker 39 They wanted to hear everything.

Speaker 9 He's asking me if I'd worked this wreck and who was there if he said where he was going.

Speaker 25 With out-of-state investigators so eager to hear more, the deputy decided to backtrack and try to figure out where Dean had gone after the accident.

Speaker 46 The deputy visited the garage where Tim Dean's wrecked car had been towed.

Speaker 25 He again turned his body cam on to record.

Speaker 98 Thanks for coming in on your day off.

Speaker 101 Welcome. Appreciate it.

Speaker 32 The garage mechanics remembered helping him unload a tote bag full of ammo.

Speaker 104 The tote, when I opened it up,

Speaker 104 it was magazines with ammo

Speaker 104 and a

Speaker 98 big magazines or little magazines?

Speaker 104 Big ones.

Speaker 101 A

Speaker 104 AR-style

Speaker 104 miniature

Speaker 104 rifle.

Speaker 49 Also in Tim's car was a long gun.

Speaker 104 That's when I saw the shotgun under the tote. Grabbed the shotgun.
And I saw a sport vest.

Speaker 104 I wouldn't say it was like bulletproof by any means, but it was

Speaker 37 a sport shooting vest.

Speaker 11 With pouches or something?

Speaker 104 I don't remember if there was pouches, but it was all black.

Speaker 48 And I mean, it was probably five,

Speaker 104 eight pounds. Like it had some weight to it.

Speaker 102 He came in the shop.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 102 We should have video of him in the shop.

Speaker 99 Do you?

Speaker 73 And you should have

Speaker 73 it right there.

Speaker 39 They had video

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 9 Timothy Dean showing up to pick up a tote.

Speaker 9 And I could see in the video he walked out with a concealable ballistic vest. and a 12-gauge shotgun.

Speaker 67 The garage crew wondered among themselves what this guy was doing with an arsenal in his car.

Speaker 104 I'm glad you guys are following us on this because

Speaker 104 I even told him I had weird vibes about all this.

Speaker 100 Where did Tim Dean go next?

Speaker 49 The deputy learned he had an Uber waiting and tracked down the driver at her office.

Speaker 70 She said before Tim got into her car, he warned her about the goods he was carrying.

Speaker 86 You know, he warned me, he goes, it's a shotgun. Is that a problem? I said, is it loaded? He said, no.

Speaker 14 I said, well, then that's fine.

Speaker 75 I don't, you know, I'm not scared of guns.

Speaker 34 She dropped him off at a local hotel.

Speaker 11 And that's the last you saw him as of Motel 6.

Speaker 86 The last I saw him.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 34 Tim Dean had left the hotel and gotten out of town.

Speaker 58 But how?

Speaker 51 The deputy assumed Tim rented a new car after he wrecked his first.

Speaker 32 And so he went over to the main car rental company in town, Enterprise.

Speaker 11 So you know who I'm talking about?

Speaker 65 I have an idea, yeah.

Speaker 24 Sure enough, the rental associate on duty said Tim Dean had been there.

Speaker 31 He was the walk-in from Texas who didn't have a credit card on him.

Speaker 108 He walked in, and then uh

Speaker 108 and then they told him that he couldn't rent because he just had a cash on him and he was really upset about that and he just left

Speaker 21 Left but for where back home to Texas or somewhere else this was about 48 hours before Josh and Amber would be executed in SOTUS, New York

Speaker 22 Back at his station Deputy Nicolette thought back on that long chit-chat he'd had with Tim Dean and there on that body cam video was a back and forth that stopped him cold.

Speaker 73 So where are you gonna go?

Speaker 102 Well, I've got a family friend that I was gonna

Speaker 78 go see, but 422?

Speaker 99 Where's that at?

Speaker 102 That's all the way up in New York.

Speaker 60 New York, the scene of the crime.

Speaker 25 Deputy Nicolette relayed the information to the FBI.

Speaker 9 When I said that he was going to New York, everything changed at that point.

Speaker 2 Tim Dean admits that he is coming to New York. He is armed with more than one handgun.
He's also got an AR-15 with him, a shotgun, and a body.

Speaker 12 How did you explain all that to the deputy on the side of the road?

Speaker 2 Well, I guess it's not uncommon for people to be in possession of weapons in Kansas, but it becomes instrumental when he admits that he's going to New York.

Speaker 2 As far as we knew, Tim Dean didn't have relatives in New York.

Speaker 68 But he did, they learned, have a fresh rental picked up at the airport.

Speaker 41 And law enforcement would later have the make, model, color, and license plate of that vehicle passing surveillance cameras on its way to upstate New New York.

Speaker 32 Timothy Dean was a heat-seeking missile on his way.

Speaker 18 We've already got indication this guy's done, killed two people. We're not going to take a chance on him.

Speaker 63 Inside the all-out blowout to capture Tim Dean.

Speaker 12 You've had eyes on the house, you know he's home.

Speaker 18 Yes, we know he's here. They put explosives on the door.
They back out. When they back out and everybody's clear, they blow the door.

Speaker 12 What a show. It's like a commando operation.

Speaker 18 It was straight off the military.

Speaker 92 Could they take him alive?

Speaker 71 As a rule, cops don't show the families of their victims the investigative cards they're holding, no matter how badly they need to know.

Speaker 16 We were cooperating with the police, trying to get as much information from the police that we could, following the news stories the best that we could, you know, just trying to piece things together.

Speaker 15 The police just kept saying, be patient. There's things come out, be patient.
So I was patient, and I didn't want to interfere to stop them from finding who killed my son.

Speaker 42 So the families didn't know that on October 29th, 2018, one week after the murders, five detectives from New York were headed to the Texas Panhandle.

Speaker 80 They wanted to talk with Tim Dean, Charlene's husband.

Speaker 31 You take a road trip?

Speaker 13 Yes, we do.

Speaker 2 Never do it again.

Speaker 2 That's 24 solid hours of driving and never do it again.

Speaker 32 They'd come up with a plan to bring him into custody.

Speaker 2 Texas decided that they had still had some charges for him on the child abuse complaint.

Speaker 12 Oh, so this is really a holding action. You can put him on ice while you develop the case, huh?

Speaker 2 Yes, or try to talk to him.

Speaker 40 Tim Dean lived in a 50s one-story house on the edge of town.

Speaker 20 The cops had surveilled the home and knew he was there.

Speaker 45 They were treating him as the suspect in a double homicide, not a child abuser, so they went in strong.

Speaker 31 After dark, SWAT teams, uniforms, weapons drawn, a takedown right out of SEAL Team 6.

Speaker 76 Texas investigator Tom Flood was there. How come it's not going to be a knock, knock, knock?

Speaker 12 You know who we are, Tim. We're out here.
We got paperwork for you. We're going to serve you.

Speaker 18 We've already got indication that this guy's done, killed two people. We're not going to take a chance on him shooting him.

Speaker 12 You had eyes on the house. You know he's home.

Speaker 18 Yes, we know he's here. They put explosives in the door.
They back out.

Speaker 18 When they back out and everybody's clear and everybody's situated, they blow the door.

Speaker 25 This iPhone footage was taken by a neighbor across the street as explosions blew out the front door.

Speaker 12 What a show. It's like a commando operation.

Speaker 18 It was straight off the military. And eventually he does come out and he actually comes out to about right here and raises his hands.

Speaker 81 And if he hadn't surrendered?

Speaker 25 If he had made a poor decision to resist, he wasn't going to go to an interview room at that point.

Speaker 18 No, he would have been shot.

Speaker 36 With her suspect in custody, Dean, the one-time police chief, was transported to an interview room for questioning by an FBI agent and a Texas Ranger.

Speaker 28 Yeah, college, he was full of water, too.

Speaker 48 But of course, the reason they brought him in had nothing to do with causing injury to a child, the charge on their arrest warrant.

Speaker 71 They wanted to talk to him about Amber and Josh.

Speaker 103 Had you ever met him in person?

Speaker 109 I'd been there when he'd come to get the kids.

Speaker 12 How's his demeanor? What's the line of the questioning?

Speaker 18 He's very quiet.

Speaker 18 He doesn't say a whole lot.

Speaker 56 They asked him about his soon-to-be ex-wife, Charlene, the trouble he'd caused with her kids.

Speaker 109 How did she react to his infestity?

Speaker 109 Obviously not well.

Speaker 109 Like anybody else? Yeah.

Speaker 109 I mean, she's never not had the kids.

Speaker 109 Does she blame you?

Speaker 109 Probably.

Speaker 37 Of course, one of the theories was that Tim had killed Amber and Josh to win his wife back.

Speaker 48 So they put that to Tim directly.

Speaker 109 Did you think he'd get her kids help he'd get her back?

Speaker 103 I know there's no getting her back. There hasn't been.

Speaker 109 I mean, in your mind, is that a possibility that you thought maybe this would help get her back in your breast state and stuff?

Speaker 109 It's done.

Speaker 103 It's been done. There's no getting her back.

Speaker 2 I've accepted that.

Speaker 8 That's why I've been in the f state of mind.

Speaker 109 Is it true you hated Josh?

Speaker 109 I never even met the man.

Speaker 25 The investigators told Tim they knew he traveled to New York State around the time of the murders.

Speaker 67 But why did he drive all the way there?

Speaker 103 I was originally gonna go see

Speaker 8 her uncle

Speaker 109 and see if I could talk to him and get him to talk some sense into her and maybe

Speaker 109 get her to ride this thing out with me.

Speaker 58 Maybe Tim did think he could win her back, but in the end, he admitted he never did see her uncle, just drove, slept, and drank.

Speaker 25 For a while, the investigators played good cop with Tim and seemed to speak to him with a sense of compassion.

Speaker 109 I mean I could tell you life is hard, but my version of heart and your version of heart is two different things.

Speaker 109 I can't say my life's been that hard, but goodness, I can't sympathize with you.

Speaker 70 Tim told them yes, he had hit a low point.

Speaker 36 and offered an explanation as to why he was driving so far from home.

Speaker 109 I left home with the intention of going somewhere far away and putting a fill in my head so nobody that knows me would have to be the one to find me and work it.

Speaker 109 Okay.

Speaker 109 What changed? And I turned my phone off so nobody could call me and figure out what I was doing and try and talk me the f ⁇ out with.

Speaker 94 Okay.

Speaker 45 The interrogators ever so gently turned the conversation back to the murderers.

Speaker 109 So what changed?

Speaker 109 What made it change to what happened that day?

Speaker 109 If you think I'm going to sit here and say that I did that, you're crazy. I think you're crazy if you don't, quite honestly.

Speaker 109 Tim, it's not a question if you did. It's a question of why, and are you sorry?

Speaker 109 Do you think these

Speaker 109 five different detectives from New York drove down here for no reason? I have no idea why the FBI is here.

Speaker 109 What happens when you drive to commit a crime?

Speaker 109 I didn't drive to commit a crime

Speaker 109 well suicide is on the

Speaker 109 FBI's radar

Speaker 21 the interrogators weren't buying it and urged him to come clean you're not a monster man

Speaker 109 you have up there's no doubt about it

Speaker 109 but there can be redemption in life man there really can

Speaker 109 what you're showing me right now is that you're a real person and not only that you're a good cop at sometimes right

Speaker 109 I mean, we all screw up in life. There's a path to redemption and everything else, Timmy.

Speaker 33 When that approach failed, investigators tried to rattle him by talking about the victims.

Speaker 109 Are you sorry Amber and Josh got killed?

Speaker 109 Do you hear what I'm saying?

Speaker 12 I hear what you're saying.

Speaker 109 Are you sorry they got killed? I'm not saying you killed them. Are you sorry they got killed?

Speaker 109 Can you say their names?

Speaker 109 Josh and Amber.

Speaker 109 Say, I'm sorry Josh and Amber got

Speaker 109 Not that you did it.

Speaker 109 No, I want no, you didn't. You're saying it in parts.
You can't even.

Speaker 109 You know, because you can't.

Speaker 109 You realize you're talking about being in soldiers and everything. I mean, that's no doubt.
You're saying that, but you didn't do it. You know, who's going to believe that?

Speaker 109 I didn't do that. They took my chances, I guess.

Speaker 80 The investigators pushed hard to break him, but they never did get a confession.

Speaker 111 I've never been in the presence of a bigger caliber.

Speaker 36 Fortunately, Tim Dean wasn't the only person they wanted to talk to.

Speaker 31 There was, can you believe it, another local cop on their list of persons of interest.

Speaker 112 You like policeburg?

Speaker 90 Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 41 Two cops in the middle of a murder plot?

Speaker 62 Ron has a decision to make, whether he wants to be a good witness or he wants to be charged with conspiracy to commit two murders.

Speaker 110 You definitely don't want that.

Speaker 12 So he's way in the slime at this point.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah. He was just hit with all the truth.

Speaker 49 Soon he would have a killer secret to reveal.

Speaker 112 You overheard Dean say, what?

Speaker 45 Tim Dean stuck to his story.

Speaker 24 He'd driven to New York with suicide in mind.

Speaker 109 The suicide is on the FBI's radar.

Speaker 36 His interrogators didn't believe him for an instant, but they had another lead to pursue.

Speaker 41 Another cop, in fact, a man named Braun.

Speaker 36 So Braun, how do you say his last name?

Speaker 8 Bowler.

Speaker 12 Bowler, I'm not sure I ever heard him say that out loud.

Speaker 13 Braun Bowler.

Speaker 12 So he's a police officer as well. He is.

Speaker 25 34-year-old Braun Bowler had served 11 years as a Texas cop.

Speaker 33 He had worked for the Cactus Police Department and most recently at Sunray after Tim lost his job there.

Speaker 24 And he was a family man, a husband, a father, and a friend to Tim Dean.

Speaker 48 So how did Officer Braun come onto the police radar?

Speaker 11 Okay, got your license and

Speaker 101 paperwork for this thing?

Speaker 25 Well, it goes back to that rental car Tim Dean put in a ditch in Kansas.

Speaker 39 It was Braun's name on the rental papers, not Tim's.

Speaker 63 The Kansas deputy picked up on that right away.

Speaker 29 Who's Bowler Brown?

Speaker 102 He's a buddy of mine.

Speaker 98 Yeah, that's going to cause you more problems than anything. I know.
So he rented the car for you?

Speaker 99 Yeah.

Speaker 102 Because I was stuck stuck at work. I wasn't going to make it in time.
I'm not looking forward to that phone call.

Speaker 9 That'll bite him in the ass pretty big.

Speaker 8 There we go.

Speaker 112 Tim seat right there.

Speaker 72 Investigators in Texas called in the Sunray cop for an interview.

Speaker 112 You like police bird?

Speaker 113 Yes.

Speaker 90 I've done it for seven years.

Speaker 67 Ron didn't hesitate about the rental car.

Speaker 51 Sure, he'd rented it for Tim, he said. That's what friends do.

Speaker 80 After all, Tim's life at that point was a mess.

Speaker 113 His credit cards are maxed out and he's two months behind.

Speaker 90 He told me, hey, I need a vehicle for the weekend. I was like, okay, not a problem.

Speaker 74 So, did he know where Tim was planning to go with it?

Speaker 51 No, answered the cop.

Speaker 32 Tim's phone call about the wreck in Kansas came as a surprise.

Speaker 112 Did you question what he's doing up in Kansas?

Speaker 113 At first, no, because I thought you just had to go up there for a free-to-lay, yeah.

Speaker 90 I was like, okay.

Speaker 113 You know, I took it up at face value

Speaker 113 and was like, okay, hey, are you okay? That's the main thing. He goes, yeah,

Speaker 90 I'm good.

Speaker 113 But the car is pretty effed up, excuse me, but

Speaker 113 and I was like, okay, you know, we got insurance, we'll get it fixed.

Speaker 112 Dean never mentioned that he was gonna go on the road trip, that he was gonna go to New York, that he was gonna go anywhere, he was just gonna use that car, a rental car, locally.

Speaker 90 Yes, sir.

Speaker 112 So, if I were to ask you, are you lying about knowing that Dean was taking that rental car to New York, what would you say?

Speaker 113 I'd say no.

Speaker 112 Okay, that's the truth, right? Yes, sir. Okay.

Speaker 21 Ron agreed to take a polygraph.

Speaker 31 He failed miserably.

Speaker 112 You failed that question, okay?

Speaker 34 The investigators now approached him cop to cop.

Speaker 62 I'm really sad.

Speaker 111 I'm sad. We're brothers.

Speaker 36 It was fish or cut bait time.

Speaker 62 Braun has a decision to make whether he wants to be a good witness or he wants to be charged in conspiracy to commit two murders.

Speaker 110 You definitely don't want that.

Speaker 12 So he's way in the slime at this point.

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 18 He was just hit with all the truth.

Speaker 70 Braun chose to cooperate and told a startling story, how a murder plot came together.

Speaker 112 So you're saying you overheard Dean say

Speaker 8 what?

Speaker 113 Eiffer's gonna die.

Speaker 112 Eiffer's gonna die?

Speaker 45 Braun said the goal of Tim's trip had never been suicide.

Speaker 51 He'd gone to New York, he said, to murder Josh, plain and simple.

Speaker 113 He was going up there to kill him?

Speaker 111 He said he was going to go up there to kill him. Yes, sir.

Speaker 61 And the chilling details.

Speaker 51 He said the murder had been planned at a meeting at Tim's house inside his garage.

Speaker 50 That same house the SWAT team would later blow their way into to make the arrest on Dean.

Speaker 111 So the plan was laid in then that you rent the car, not in his name, so he wouldn't get caught up. I'm down.

Speaker 111 You're a very important witness, bro.

Speaker 112 Yes, sir.

Speaker 32 A witness who could describe how two cops could come to plot a murder.

Speaker 12 And this is the garage.

Speaker 18 This is where the meetings took place. And at least one of those meetings, Braun, was here while he was on duty, while he's working.
So there's a marked unit sitting out front.

Speaker 12 Wow, so he's in uniform. You know, I can't help thinking, Tom, here we are, 1,500 miles away.
There's a guy in upstate New York who is dead man walking.

Speaker 12 He has no idea what's going down in this garage in Panhandle of Texas.

Speaker 18 Not right now, he doesn't. He knew what did.

Speaker 27 What's his dog in the fight here?

Speaker 18 What's he got going on? Other than the fact that he worked here as a police officer, Tim was his friend, and he was going to do whatever he needed to to help him out.

Speaker 88 Including

Speaker 12 Get you a rental car so you can drive all the way across the country and kill him. Exactly.

Speaker 48 When Braun's interview ended, Lieutenant Flood followed him back to his house while the authorities prepared an arrest warrant.

Speaker 18 When he got home, we arrested him.

Speaker 12 Does it embarrass you that we're talking about two guys who are sworn officers here?

Speaker 18 It's embarrassing to think that

Speaker 18 they felt like they could do this and get away with it.

Speaker 51 And that put the majority of Sunray's three-man force past and present under arrest.

Speaker 24 But the investigation was far from over.

Speaker 41 Someone else they'd eyed all along was still in their crosshairs.

Speaker 74 They were back to where they'd started with a certain embittered young woman from Texas.

Speaker 89 I called his mom

Speaker 89 and she's like, Charlene, yes, what's going on? Josh is dead.

Speaker 89 I hit the floor.

Speaker 89 Really? What the hell is going on?

Speaker 15 Yeah. Like, it still feels like a horrible bad dream.

Speaker 51 Josh's ex, Charlene.

Speaker 15 You need to look at Charlene.

Speaker 12 Did you say, oh, no, that can't be done?

Speaker 15 I said, oh, no, I pray it's not.

Speaker 23 What story would she tell?

Speaker 45 Did you have anything to do with him shooting Josh and Amber?

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Speaker 7 What happened?

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 45 that accident in Kansas proved the undoing of Tim Dee.

Speaker 32 Found with a car full of guns and ammo on his way to New York State, the very place where the murders would occur.

Speaker 99 Where's that at?

Speaker 102 That's all the way up in New York.

Speaker 51 But here's a question about the theory of the crime: was Tim a desperate, depressed man on a mission to win back his wife, a lone wolf, or was his wife in on it?

Speaker 32 All along, detectives had considered the possibility that Charlene not only knew about the plan to murder Josh, but maybe had talked him into doing it as payback for his blunder in losing the kids.

Speaker 12 So you owe me, Tim Dean. Yes.
You owe me a big one here. Yes.

Speaker 77 It was a theory that came to resonate for some of Josh and Amber's loved ones.

Speaker 15 He had a couple friends that, you know, they were like, you need to look at Charlene.

Speaker 12 Did you say, oh, no, that can't be, Don?

Speaker 15 I didn't say, oh, no, it couldn't be.

Speaker 15 I said, oh, no, I pray it's not.

Speaker 21 In fact, Josh's sister, Nicole, had given police an earful about Charlene early on.

Speaker 66 The cops came to my house and told me what happened and asked me if my brother had enemies. I said, no, my brother does not have enemies, but he's got a Charlene.

Speaker 13 Nicole right away says, it's her.

Speaker 14 Her and Josh's best friend, Keith. They both said, I don't think she should be here.
I think it might have been her. And I was like,

Speaker 14 that's crazy.

Speaker 61 By the time of the funerals, even Amber's Amber's sister, who'd never met Charlene, thought she might be involved.

Speaker 16 I saw her for the first time in my life at the funeral, and I just got cold chills.

Speaker 16 And I remember, you know, speaking at the funeral, giving my sister's eulogy, you know, seeking her out in the crowd, you know, just to make eye contact with her when I was talking about how good of a mother my sister was to her children.

Speaker 12 And you had suspicions already at that point.

Speaker 69 At that point, yes.

Speaker 63 And beyond her badmouthing of Josh, depicting him as a violent, bad guy, there was this in the case against Charlene, and it was a big factor.

Speaker 24 In an early phone call, she claimed she learned of Josh's death on Facebook, that she'd seen a picture of the house and the street address.

Speaker 32 But that, in fact, didn't happen.

Speaker 23 The street was made public, but not the house or number.

Speaker 2 That was a lie because that was not a photograph of Joshua.

Speaker 2 She couldn't have seen it.

Speaker 46 So how did she know unless she was part of the plot?

Speaker 48 Eight days after the murders, detectives picked up Charlene at her boyfriend Casey's house.

Speaker 2 We knocked on the door and

Speaker 2 asked Charlene to come with us. She didn't seem phased by the whole thing.
She didn't seem shocked.

Speaker 72 She didn't say, I've got a lawyer.

Speaker 53 Not at all. We're done here? No.

Speaker 88 So she came down.

Speaker 2 Yes, she did. She willingly talked to us for quite a while.

Speaker 105 Okay, nice to meet you.

Speaker 49 Conversation was cordial as they walked through her backstory.

Speaker 57 Charlene told them how surprised she'd been when she found out her ex-boyfriend was dead.

Speaker 105 So I called his mom.

Speaker 105 And she's like, Charlene? Yes. what's going on? Josh is dead.

Speaker 105 I hit the floor.

Speaker 105 Really? What the hell is going on? Yeah. Like, it still feels like a horrible bad dream.
Right? How cro? Why? That's what I want to know.

Speaker 32 Could Tim have been the shooter, they asked her.

Speaker 54 Did he harbor ill will toward Josh?

Speaker 105 Tim knew the stuff that Josh had done to me.

Speaker 105 Like, what do you mean? Josh used to beat the hell out of me. Oh, really?

Speaker 8 That's all.

Speaker 105 But, you know, you know, Tim had never really spoke too bad about him, you know.

Speaker 105 It was more of, you know,

Speaker 105 if I could ever get into a fight with him, I would fight him. Do you think Tim's capable of shooting somebody?

Speaker 105 I can't see it.

Speaker 105 Like unless it was like on the job protecting his life.

Speaker 105 Right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 105 I can't see it. He's not that type of person.

Speaker 74 Charlene denied knowledge of Tim's murderous plans, but detectives had learned something else about her, and it went back to that rental car he ended up crashing.

Speaker 32 Charlene had driven Braun to pick it up at the start of the road trip.

Speaker 105 Did you take somebody to go rent a vehicle?

Speaker 93 I took a friend to go rent a vehicle.

Speaker 8 Who's that?

Speaker 105 Braun...

Speaker 105 Well, I can't say his last name.

Speaker 8 Braun?

Speaker 68 Braun.

Speaker 49 She said she was simply doing a friend a favor, never asked him what or who it was for.

Speaker 43 Did she think it was unusual?

Speaker 103 You guys didn't talk on the way while you rent the vehicle?

Speaker 103 No, I...

Speaker 103 Isn't that kind of unusual?

Speaker 105 I mean... I just keep people's privacy.
I mean, we talked, but we didn't talk about that.

Speaker 49 But there was so much more to the saga of the wrecked rental car.

Speaker 70 Remember how Tim had trouble renting a replacement because he only had cash?

Speaker 108 He was really upset about that. He just left.

Speaker 32 Detectives now learned it was Charlene herself who'd driven almost 500 miles, credit card in hand, to get Tim Dean back on the road?

Speaker 94 Did you help him?

Speaker 105 I drove up there,

Speaker 105 took him to the rental car.

Speaker 12 Didn't tell you where he was going or what he's doing? Nope.

Speaker 105 I don't ask questions. I don't care.
Honestly, I assumed it was for work because he works for Free delay now. Okay.
So he travels all the damn time.

Speaker 74 The more she talked, the more radioactive she became as a suspect.

Speaker 105 I got there around Saturday night, I think. Okay,

Speaker 105 how long is that? About five hours for me.

Speaker 38 Holy cow.

Speaker 105 That's awful.

Speaker 105 He filled up my gas tank, so I don't care. Put your attention to your gas tank.
Yeah. And I was like, last resort.

Speaker 105 I was like, ask anybody else that you can, because I don't feel like coming up there afterwards. I don't feel like doing s ⁇ for you.
I don't, you know.

Speaker 105 But if you're stranded, I'm not going to just be that kind of person that's like, you know what, f ⁇ you, you know? Oh, I understand. Absolutely.

Speaker 105 Wow, that's f ⁇ ing bitch. And it comes around.

Speaker 39 But Charlene didn't seem like someone who'd do a big favor for the man who'd essentially ruined her life by costing her custody of her kids.

Speaker 25 They cut to the chase.

Speaker 105 Did you have anything to do with Tim shooting Jackson Amber? No.

Speaker 105 Did you put Tim up to it? No.

Speaker 2 I'm seeing a woman in her 20s who is actually trying to convince a police officer, an experienced police officer, much like a teenager would, that her story is real.

Speaker 2 And watching her interview,

Speaker 2 it's just not believable.

Speaker 105 All right, I got a couple things that are not driving that I want to talk to you about specifically.

Speaker 49 They were about to turn up the heat.

Speaker 28 Before I do that, I'm going to read that, Miranda, right?

Speaker 4 I had just lost my kids, and I said, you know what, I can't deal with this. I can't deal with the depression and the sadness anymore.
I need my kids. My kids are my life.

Speaker 4 And he looked at me and he's like, what do we do?

Speaker 49 A desperate mom.

Speaker 46 How deep did this plot go?

Speaker 4 I didn't think it was going to happen.

Speaker 5 I blame blame myself for everything.

Speaker 92 Charlene, what Charlene had done her best to bat it all away.

Speaker 48 Those investigative details that seemed to tie her to Josh and Amber's murders.

Speaker 2 Where did he go after that?

Speaker 49 But the detectives grilled her deep into the night.

Speaker 4 It was 1:30 in the morning.

Speaker 5 I had had about two hours of sleep in two days.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 all I could think about was getting home to my children.

Speaker 12 Did you ever get back to them?

Speaker 79 No.

Speaker 12 That was it, wasn't it?

Speaker 69 Yes.

Speaker 46 Never saw them again because Charlene started to spill.

Speaker 77 Watch and listen now as she gives it up.

Speaker 25 The story she told us is much the same as the story she would eventually tell the authorities, how she became a killer.

Speaker 5 I blame myself for everything.

Speaker 49 Charlene says it started after that August court hearing in New York State where she lost custody of her kids.

Speaker 81 She and Tim were on the long drive back to Texas when she came on Dung.

Speaker 4 I had just lost my kids, at least for the school year. And I said, you know what, I can't deal with this.
I can't deal with the depression and the sadness anymore. I need my kids.
My kids are my life.

Speaker 4 And he looked at me and he's like, what do we do?

Speaker 38 Charlene had the answer.

Speaker 86 I I was like, he's got to go.

Speaker 4 He's got to go.

Speaker 12 So you say to Tim, we got to do something. And what does he say back to you?

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 8 Okay?

Speaker 12 I will kill him. Is that what you understood him to say?

Speaker 79 He said, okay.

Speaker 28 Did you realize you'd crossed a line there?

Speaker 86 Not at the time, because it was just talk.

Speaker 46 This is the moment you became the architect of a murder.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 4 But at the the time, I didn't think it was going to happen.

Speaker 59 Maybe not right then and there, but after visiting her children in New York two months later, the wheels in her head were still turning.

Speaker 4 My son is bawling his eyes out to me, saying how he hates it up here. He wants to come home with me.

Speaker 86 He wants me to steal him away.

Speaker 4 That hit me, because

Speaker 4 anybody that knows my son knows he doesn't, he doesn't just bawl his eyes out like that.

Speaker 12 Did this put you back in that place where where you had that conversation back when?

Speaker 87 Yes.

Speaker 97 She says when she returned home to Texas, she told her husband Tim, it was showtime.

Speaker 4 I'm telling him that, you know,

Speaker 4 now it needs to be done.

Speaker 12 And what needs to be done is Josh needs to be killed.

Speaker 87 Yes.

Speaker 12 And Tim is going to be the agent of bringing that off? Yes. He's going to be the killer.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 12 That missile is off and going at this point, isn't it?

Speaker 57 Yes. You've lit the fuse.

Speaker 92 So they planned it in that garage.

Speaker 50 Yes, Charlene was there too.

Speaker 25 She, Tim, and his friend Braun Bowler working out the logistics of the murder plot.

Speaker 52 Braun agreed to rent the car, Tim would drive it to New York.

Speaker 40 What was his understanding of what was going on and what you were asking him to do?

Speaker 86 To go up to New York to handle business.

Speaker 53 So he says, Yeah, I'm okay, I'm good for that, huh?

Speaker 12 What's the understanding between you and Tim about what is afoot at this point?

Speaker 4 He was going to drive up,

Speaker 4 kill Josh and come back.

Speaker 12 Charlene, that makes you a murderer. Do you realize that?

Speaker 12 You have commissioned this. The gun is in your hand every bit as much as it is his when you say, go do this thing.
We're in it together. Do you get that?

Speaker 79 Yes, I do.

Speaker 12 So, what are your words to Tim when he heads out?

Speaker 4 That I love him.

Speaker 37 She still loved him.

Speaker 28 Their broken marriage wasn't so broken, the divorce talk was just part of a plan to win the children back.

Speaker 71 And so her husband, former chief of police of Sunray, Texas, began the journey north with his bag full of guns.

Speaker 42 It all looked normal.

Speaker 26 Then came the hiccup, that car accident in Kansas.

Speaker 6 Calls me at 4 a.m.,

Speaker 8 says, I wrecked the rental car.

Speaker 12 And what are you supposed to do?

Speaker 28 Get him a fresh set of wheels?

Speaker 4 I tried.

Speaker 12 You guys both know how law enforcement works.

Speaker 83 You're on the record.

Speaker 27 This would be an excellent time to call this thing off, right?

Speaker 12 Maybe a sign this wasn't meant to be. We tried to go to New York and ended up in a ditch in Kansas.

Speaker 28 But you go up there.

Speaker 12 What do you do?

Speaker 4 I picked him up from the motel and I drove him to an airport

Speaker 79 so he could rent a vehicle.

Speaker 12 On you go, part two.

Speaker 84 Plan is on.

Speaker 40 Do you give him encouragement?

Speaker 78 Not really encouragement.

Speaker 4 But I give him the debit card and credit cards if he needs them.

Speaker 28 Here's your new ride.

Speaker 12 Go to New York and kill the father of my children.

Speaker 48 For Charlene, there was no turning back.

Speaker 70 She drove back home to Texas and waited.

Speaker 12 How do you find out?

Speaker 79 I got home from work on Monday, the 22nd of October.

Speaker 86 I saw the news articles of shootings in SOTUS.

Speaker 36 So, according to her own words, Charlene talked her husband into murder.

Speaker 25 A skillful manipulation.

Speaker 74 Now that she'd been caught, would she try to manipulate the system as well?

Speaker 17 She's a master manipulator.

Speaker 15 It made me sick to my stomach.

Speaker 82 Taking us for a bunch of patsies.

Speaker 41 Could Charlene strike one more deal?

Speaker 12 Do you realize how much misery you've caused, Charlene, to so many human beings? Yes. How many families are destroyed

Speaker 12 because you wanted to have what you wanted to have?

Speaker 12 Do you have any remorse for that?

Speaker 79 Tons.

Speaker 12 I gotta say, it doesn't really show. I don't know how remorse is supposed to look, but I don't think I'm seeing it.

Speaker 29 On November 5th, 2018, two weeks after Josh and Amber were gunned down in their driveway, Charlene Shilders and her husband, Tim Dean, were charged in their murders.

Speaker 32 Josh and Amber's parents weren't exactly surprised by the news, but that didn't make it any easier to take.

Speaker 15 It made me sick to my stomach, thinking that she sat with us the whole week

Speaker 15 with the grieving family.

Speaker 82 Taken us for a bunch of patsies.

Speaker 79 She hugs me and tells me she is so sorry for everything.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 12 And knowing what you know now.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 78 I can't wash that off of me.

Speaker 70 Who's Josh? Not to mention the show that she put on at the digital.

Speaker 93 Whoever did it has now made it to where my kids grew up with that dad.

Speaker 93 And that's nothing a kid should ever have to do.

Speaker 12 What do you think about that conduct?

Speaker 66 I think she's a narcissist. I think she

Speaker 66 made herself believe she had nothing to do with it to have a straight face during the whole thing. Like she was part of us, and she was not.

Speaker 12 That's really monstrous behavior. I mean, there's the crime in itself of setting it all in motion, which you do.

Speaker 12 But then this other thing of coming right into these people's homes and to say, I'm so sorry for your loss and you're responsible for the loss. This horrible thing.

Speaker 48 How could you do that?

Speaker 4 It was hard.

Speaker 36 The families were also disgusted by Tim Dean.

Speaker 67 How could a police chief suddenly become a stone-cold killer?

Speaker 15 He didn't even know my son.

Speaker 15 And to come up here, drive thousands of miles

Speaker 15 and shoot him?

Speaker 89 For what?

Speaker 24 I'm not asking you to.

Speaker 52 Assistant District Attorney Christine Callanan says, not for what, but for whom.

Speaker 12 You describe her as a master manipulator.

Speaker 30 Special manipulative skills when it came to men.

Speaker 17 Absolutely. She always utilized men in her life.
She utilized Tim to kill Josh. I mean, she was in two active relationships throughout the case.

Speaker 17 She was still writing letters to Timothy Dean, professing that he was the love of her life, but then also Casey Miller visited her 60 times at the jail.

Speaker 56 Charlene and Tim were potentially facing life in prison as their trials approached.

Speaker 39 The DA wondered if they would turn on one another at trial.

Speaker 17 Her statements to police end up being admissible, and at that point, her attorney reaches out and wants to talk about her coming to the table and cooperating.

Speaker 23 But could she be trusted?

Speaker 17 I didn't think she would be able to tell the truth.

Speaker 17 She's a master manipulator, so I came into that proffer thinking that it wasn't going to work out, that she would do the one thing that she's always done throughout the case and is protect herself and do what's best for her.

Speaker 24 So the DA was skeptical as they cut Charlene a deal.

Speaker 67 pleading guilty to manslaughter in exchange for telling the truth and nothing but the truth to a jury.

Speaker 12 So she's a wild card going into trial.

Speaker 17 Absolutely. At this point, I don't know if she's going to stick to the agreement and come through and testify and actually sit on a stand in public and admit to what she had done.

Speaker 36 Even without Charlene, the case against Tim Dean was strong.

Speaker 51 His DNA was found in that ski mask the police dog sniffed out a block from the murderers.

Speaker 49 And though police never did track down the gun, They think it came from, where else?

Speaker 28 The department where Tim used to work.

Speaker 17 What is believed is that it was taken from the Sunray Police Department.

Speaker 65 Property room?

Speaker 22 Yes.

Speaker 41 When she took the stand, Charlene did lay it all out for the jury.

Speaker 36 How she dispatched her husband on a mission to kill Josh.

Speaker 41 And it played out more or less as she'd hoped, except for one important detail.

Speaker 25 She says she never wanted Amber to die.

Speaker 5 She was not supposed to be involved.

Speaker 12 And it would have been okay if Josh is dead. Because that was the plan.

Speaker 86 It was the plan, yes.

Speaker 4 Okay,

Speaker 4 no.

Speaker 86 I mean, it still.

Speaker 86 It still was a shock that it actually happened. Yes, it was planned to happen.

Speaker 13 It was planned by you.

Speaker 87 Yes.

Speaker 65 You liked this girl.

Speaker 46 I did. You thought she was a good surrogate mom for your kids.

Speaker 12 And there she is with a gun right up against the back of her ear. Blew her brains out.

Speaker 12 Your guy, on your orders.

Speaker 4 No, those were not my orders.

Speaker 86 She was never

Speaker 86 in the plans.

Speaker 8 ever.

Speaker 48 At trial, Charlene's credibility was an easy target for Tim's defense attorney.

Speaker 12 She's a walking-talking

Speaker 12 contradiction of herself.

Speaker 48 She, I don't know if she's capable of telling the truth.

Speaker 75 Would the defendant please stand?

Speaker 23 But in the end, her story was too evil, too cold to dismiss.

Speaker 25 It took the jury just four hours to convict Timothy Dean of double murder.

Speaker 108 We, the jury, find the defendant defendant guilty.

Speaker 16 We all knew what it was going to be, but still, we were all just so relieved to hear that first, you know, strong guilty verdict.

Speaker 56 Tim was sentenced to life in prison.

Speaker 51 Braun Bowler got one to three years for second-degree conspiracy.

Speaker 25 And Charlene is serving 28 years.

Speaker 41 Got arrested.

Speaker 63 Wayne County District Attorney Mike Calarco.

Speaker 54 In the final analysis, Tim Dean is the one who pulled the trigger.

Speaker 12 We felt the proffer and resolution as to Charlene was appropriate under the circumstances.

Speaker 36 28 years is plenty of time for Charlene, if she chooses, to think about all the carnage she unleashed.

Speaker 12 Do you realize how much misery you've caused Charlene to so many human beings in the course of this? Yes. How many families are destroyed?

Speaker 12 Because you wanted to have what you wanted to have.

Speaker 12 Do you have any remorse for that?

Speaker 79 Tons.

Speaker 12 I gotta say, it doesn't really show. I don't know how remorse is supposed to look, but I don't think I'm seeing it.
You seem to be okay with what's happened.

Speaker 4 On the outside, maybe.

Speaker 84 What happened to you?

Speaker 5 I made bad choices, and I regret them every single day.

Speaker 46 Near the end of our interview, Charlene stepped away and spoke to her attorney. I need a break.

Speaker 51 She returned to her chair, more emotional this time.

Speaker 12 What do you tell people who's pretty quickly to call you a monster, just flat-out evil?

Speaker 4 I'm a human being.

Speaker 87 I make mistakes.

Speaker 86 This was ultimately the biggest mistake I've ever done.

Speaker 5 I'm sorry more than I can express. Every day, it runs through me.

Speaker 12 In your predicament now, that's not going to get you so much as an extra bologna sandwich.

Speaker 86 I know what I did was wrong.

Speaker 6 And I know sorries are not good enough, and it will never be good enough.

Speaker 70 Both Amber and Josh's families are trying to put this all behind them now.

Speaker 92 If not for their own sakes, for the children involved.

Speaker 16 They are the light of all of our lives.

Speaker 20 Josh's sister, Nicole, has custody of Josh and Charlene's two kids.

Speaker 13 They're your babies now. They're my babies.

Speaker 66 They're my piece of Josh. I wouldn't know what to do without them.

Speaker 48 And Amber's parents are bringing up that little boy who witnessed it all, the boy in the back seat.

Speaker 43 Josh Jr.

Speaker 78 This little guy has been our godson.

Speaker 8 You know, without him, I don't know how we would have made it through.

Speaker 8 Josh is literally the glue that holds this family together right now.

Speaker 12 How are you keeping Amber's memory alive for Josh Jr.?

Speaker 78 Oh, we've got pictures all over the house.

Speaker 17 You know, every night before he goes to bed and every morning, we all say goodnight to him.

Speaker 79 Grandma and Grandpa love you.

Speaker 78 Mom and dad love you more.

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