She Didn't Come Home

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Speaker 5 If you admit that she's never coming home, it's like you're admitting defeat. Or that she's dead.

Speaker 6 A hard-working wife, a loving mother, a woman with a complicated love life.

Speaker 7 She was having affairs.

Speaker 8 They worked in the same office areas. They spent some time after hours together.

Speaker 7 Kathy was trying to break off the relationship.

Speaker 1 Now, the secret was out, replaced by a mystery.

Speaker 10 She never returned from lunch.

Speaker 8 We did consider that your husband may have known that his wife was having an affair.

Speaker 1 Where was she?

Speaker 11 There were just no answers.

Speaker 6 Nearly 30 years, 60 investigators, and it all kept coming back to one elusive suspect.

Speaker 12 He just very calmly said, I know how to get rid of a body so it would never ever be found.

Speaker 7 To him, I think murder is something that can be done over a lunch hour. They were just a heartbeat away from not having a case.

Speaker 7 It was basically a now or never situation.

Speaker 6 They couldn't prove it then.

Speaker 13 Could they prove it now?

Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 6 Here's Josh Mankowitz with She Didn't Come Home.

Speaker 1 Time can be like a river, a long stream of events rushing by.

Speaker 1 Most barely make a ripple, but a few, like the sudden loss of a close friend, a child, or a parent, have a way of circling back upon us. in a ceaseless loop of memory and regret.

Speaker 1 That's the way it's been for John Heckel and his sister Alicia Talbot, ever since that completely normal morning in 1991 when their mom, Kathy Haeckel, kissed them goodbye, left for work, and never returned.

Speaker 1 You remember her leaving that morning? Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, like any other day, Same routine all the time. Every time she left us, she kissed us goodbye.

Speaker 1 It was a July morning. Alicia, 13, and John, then 9, were home for summer vacation.
A little after 9 a.m., Alicia says her mom called from her job.

Speaker 5 We discussed having dinner and having pork chops.

Speaker 11 Yeah, because that was one of my favorite things she cooked.

Speaker 1 Later, they tried to contact their mom at work.

Speaker 5 One of the times we tried to call her was around lunchtime, and

Speaker 5 she had left

Speaker 5 for lunch.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 we waited and called after lunch and she still wasn't back to work yet.

Speaker 1 At 40, Kathy Heckel had spent half her life working at the local paper plant in Lockhaven, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 5 I can't remember who I was speaking to at the office, but you could hear in their voice that there was some concern there that she hadn't come back yet.

Speaker 1 And you picked that up.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was not typical for her to not come back and not tell anybody.

Speaker 1 With their dad out of town, they kept trying to reach their mom. Nothing.

Speaker 1 At about 6.30 that evening, Alicia called her grandparents, Clarence and Margaret Dolan.

Speaker 14 I answered the phone and it was Alicia. She said, Graham, can you get us some milk? And I said,

Speaker 14 What do you mean, can I get you some milk? She says, well, mom didn't come home yet. And she says, We don't have any milk.
And I said, Alicia, I will be right there.

Speaker 1 And you're thinking, What?

Speaker 14 I didn't know what to think, but as a mother, you know that this is something bad, something very bad.

Speaker 1 That night, Kathy's mother and father contacted everyone they could think of.

Speaker 11 No one had heard from her, and that was.

Speaker 11 I remember picking up on that, that they seemed

Speaker 11 worried.

Speaker 5 I mean, you could just tell.

Speaker 1 Your grandparents were acting differently.

Speaker 1 Their dad, John, was in upstate New York that Monday, training with his National Guard unit. He didn't learn his wife was missing until the next day.
You get that phone call. It's your mom.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 What'd she say?

Speaker 13 The gist of the conversation was that Kathy didn't come home from work on Monday night and

Speaker 13 they didn't know where she was.

Speaker 1 And now it's Tuesday.

Speaker 13 And now it's Tuesday evening.

Speaker 1 And you think what?

Speaker 13 I said Tom to call the state police.

Speaker 1 With the permission of his commanding officer, John Heckel immediately left for home. He had plenty of time to think on that five and a half hour ride.

Speaker 1 He thought about the time Kathy donated a kidney to save her brother's life and about the December day in 1972 when he first gazed at Kathy Dolan.

Speaker 13 She just had the biggest brown eyes you could look into.

Speaker 1 Six months later, they were married.

Speaker 13 Like any marriage, I think we had our ups and downs. But overall, I was happy about the fact I didn't have to worry about my family with Kathy.

Speaker 1 You thought you were going to stay married forever? Yes.

Speaker 1 The problem was, John was already married to the military. John's career frequently took him away from home.
sometimes for weeks at a time. Kathy didn't like that.

Speaker 1 And John says his wife of 18 years seemed to have that on her mind when she dropped him off for his latest guard assignment.

Speaker 13 She asked me why I had to be there so early, which didn't make sense to me because I was always the first one there.

Speaker 13 And I said, it's my job.

Speaker 1 She didn't want you to go.

Speaker 13 She didn't say, I don't want you to go.

Speaker 1 But you felt it.

Speaker 13 I could feel that something was wrong. The look on her face when she said it, it

Speaker 13 just didn't sit right with me.

Speaker 1 Now Kathy was missing, and her disappearance would eventually drag into the open secrets that some in and around Lockhaven would have rather kept hidden.

Speaker 6 A wife and mother, but also a woman who was sometimes lonely.

Speaker 8 When we return, I asked her mom if she was seeing anyone, and she said that she had re-established contact with an old friend from school.

Speaker 6 And that old friend had a confession to make.

Speaker 8 He did admit that they had had a physical relationship, and it had only been a few days before she disappeared.

Speaker 1 By the time John Heckle returned home from National Guard training in New York State, his wife Kathy had been missing for about 36 hours.

Speaker 11 When my dad came back, he was the one who told us, we can't find your mom, we don't know where your mom is.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 that was the first time I've ever seen my dad cry.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 I knew

Speaker 11 the worst had definitely happened. He was that worried.

Speaker 5 And that was the first time I saw my dad cry too.

Speaker 5 And you know, he was

Speaker 5 always this big, strong man. And when you see that, you,

Speaker 1 it's like, okay,

Speaker 5 this is not good.

Speaker 1 That's got to be a terrible thing to tell your kids because they want you to tell them this is going to be okay.

Speaker 13 Dad always had all the answers.

Speaker 1 And you can't tell them this is going to be okay.

Speaker 13 No, you don't want fabrication.

Speaker 1 Across town that morning, Pennsylvania state trooper Fred Caldwell was on the case. His first call had been to Margaret Dolan, Kathy's mom.

Speaker 8 I remember asking her if she had noticed any changes recently or anything in her demeanor that was unusual. And she said that in the last four to six weeks or so, she just wasn't herself.

Speaker 1 Then the trooper asked one of those probing and indelicate questions that cops have to ask.

Speaker 8 I asked her mom if she had any indication that she was seeing anyone, and she said that she had reestablished contact with an old acquaintance, an old friend from school.

Speaker 1 That man's name was Dennis Taylor. He and Kathy had recently reconnected at a a wedding.
Taylor had been singing and playing guitar.

Speaker 1 The trooper jotted down the name Dennis Taylor with the idea of calling him later. Next, he dialed the paper plant where Kathy was last seen.
One of Kathy's co-workers picked up the phone.

Speaker 8 She kind of corroborated what her mom had said, that she'd been a little different in the last few weeks. Personality just seemed a little quieter, maybe.

Speaker 1 Then he asked question number two.

Speaker 8 I also asked her if she felt that there were possibility that she may have been having an affair or seeing anyone. And she said she had no evidence, but she suspected that she may have been.

Speaker 1 The co-worker wasn't talking about Kathy's friend Dennis Taylor. She was talking about a man at the plant named Lloyd Groves.

Speaker 8 They both played on the same volleyball team. They spent some time after hours together.

Speaker 8 And I think just the closeness of the two, and she just kind of suspected that they may be.

Speaker 1 The trooper learned Groves was the quiet type, married with children. Sometimes he led plant tours and gave paper-making presentations at local schools.

Speaker 1 A call to Groves' office revealed he wasn't in yet. So the trooper left a callback message.
And not long after the trooper says, Mr. Groves showed up in person at the state police barracks.

Speaker 8 He was very calm. He said that he knew her.
They share they worked in the same office areas. He

Speaker 8 said they were friends. I did ask him if he had any type of physical relationship with her, and he said no.

Speaker 1 Shortly after Lloyd Groves left the state police barracks, the other man on Trooper Caldwell's list walked in. Dennis Taylor, the guitar man.
Like Groves, Taylor was a married man with children.

Speaker 1 And right off the bat, he told the trooper he had a confession to make.

Speaker 8 He did admit that they had had a physical relationship briefly, and it had only been a few days before she disappeared, as I recall, the first

Speaker 8 physical contact.

Speaker 1 Like a balladeer who knows his audience is hanging on every lyric, the guitar man kept singing to the cops. Taylor told the trooper Kathy Heckel had called him at work the day she disappeared.

Speaker 1 Her voice, he said, had a strange tone.

Speaker 8 She called him just before lunchtime and was upset or anxious and said that she had something she wanted to talk to him about. And he was busy.
And he said, I can't talk.

Speaker 8 I'll call you back and hung up. He did try to call back then sometime later and she had gone for lunch.

Speaker 1 Taylor said he played golf with friends that afternoon and had planned to meet up with Kathy later that night.

Speaker 8 Then he goes to their location where they're going to meet. Kathy doesn't show up.
He was concerned that something may have happened.

Speaker 1 It was then the guitar man struck a familiar chord. Kathy Hackle, he said, had also been seeing another man, a guy named Lloyd Groves.
According to Taylor, this fellow Groves was a bit of a stalker.

Speaker 8 He said that he had met Kathy at a park, a nearby park. He said that there was a gray van parked nearby.
He recalled seeing the van.

Speaker 8 And the next time he talked to Kathy, she said, did you see that van? That was Lloyd, and he was following her.

Speaker 1 Was the guitar man being helpful? Or was he trying to implicate a rival to save his own skin? The trooper knew this much.

Speaker 1 If Kathy Heckel had been juggling simultaneous affairs with married men, there could be a lot of people who might have wanted her to disappear, including her husband.

Speaker 8 He was definitely a person of interest.

Speaker 1 Exactly how much did John Heckle know about what was going on in his wife's life?

Speaker 6 Coming up, were police looking for a runaway wife or her killer?

Speaker 11 There were just no answers, and that was

Speaker 7 the worst part.

Speaker 6 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 1 Any investigation in which someone goes missing or turns up dead just about guarantees family members will be considered suspects. Kathy Heckel's husband, John, was no exception.

Speaker 8 We did consider that John may have known that his wife was having an affair and that he may have taken some action on his own.

Speaker 1 Did you feel like you were ever a suspect?

Speaker 13 Never worried about about it. I knew they were trying to find where Kathy was and what had happened and

Speaker 13 if that included questioning me, I have no problems with that.

Speaker 1 At some point somebody said to you, we believe she was having a relationship with some other people. Was that shocking to hear?

Speaker 13 It was surprising because that wasn't the way Kathy was.

Speaker 1 In his interview with Trooper Caldwell, John Heckles said he'd noticed a change in his wife's demeanor in recent weeks and wondered if she might be having an affair.

Speaker 8 He was emotional. There's times when John and I just sat together with my arm around him and he would cry.
He was concerned about his wife, and I

Speaker 8 felt very bad for the man.

Speaker 1 John Heckle's alibi checked out, and police found no evidence he'd paid anyone to hurt his wife. By now, Kathy had been missing for two full days, and John Heckle feared the worst.

Speaker 13 Kathy Heckle would never

Speaker 13 on this earth

Speaker 13 abandon those two children

Speaker 1 trooper caldwell still didn't know if he was working a missing persons case an abduction or a homicide then on the evening of the third day investigators got a big break they found kathy heckel's car parked behind the local hospital the keys were missing i think they recovered one print but i don't know that it was ever identified it was from the exterior of the car investigators were now pretty sure that someone possibly her killer, had moved Kathy Heckel's car to the hospital parking lot.

Speaker 1 And then the case hit a dead end.

Speaker 1 Days turned to weeks. Those weeks stretched into months.
Kathy Heckel was somewhere in the wind.

Speaker 8 We had cadaver dogs come down often. And we would have troopers go out and we would search the area looking for remains or whatever.

Speaker 1 While some investigators focused on finding Kathy Heckel, others others concentrated on finding evidence of a crime.

Speaker 1 As far as investigators could tell, the guitar man, Dennis Taylor, had been honest, confessing his affair with Kathy Eckle. Lloyd Groves, on the other hand, had seemed a bit dodgy.

Speaker 1 Troopers had searched Lloyd Groves's home, office, and van. And while some items of interest were found, the local prosecutor didn't think police had enough to make an arrest.

Speaker 20 There was a big hole from an investigative standpoint.

Speaker 1 Ted McKnight was Clinton County District Attorney at the time.

Speaker 20 If you can imagine a yardstick and probable cause is probably at the two inch mark and beyond a reasonable doubt is probably at the 34 inch mark.

Speaker 20 And everything else in between is a difference between are you going to get a conviction or aren't you?

Speaker 1 Which means you don't go forward unless you're reasonably sure you have the evidence for a conviction. Correct.
He says the fact that Kathy Heckle's body had not been found was a big problem.

Speaker 20 How do we prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she is dead? If she was killed, where did the killing occur? What county did it occur?

Speaker 1 So maybe it's not even your jurisdiction. Correct.
For the Heckel family, Kathy's disappearance was a defining event.

Speaker 11 I remember being depressed. I didn't know what that meant when I was nine years old, but

Speaker 11 just thinking about how low and sad I felt all the time.

Speaker 5 I think people deal with things differently, and I certainly chose, I think, the avoidance method.

Speaker 1 Not think about it.

Speaker 5 And not think about it.

Speaker 11 There were just no answers and that was that was the worst part.

Speaker 1 In 1998, seven years after Kathy disappeared, John Hackle had his wife declared legally dead.

Speaker 1 That did not make the mystery any easier for him to understand.

Speaker 1 Can you accept the idea that maybe there were needs that she felt that she had to meet with men who were not you, but that she still loved you?

Speaker 13 Oh no, I believe she did love me.

Speaker 1 She had a secret life that she wasn't showing anybody else.

Speaker 13 But you don't know how long that secret life was, and neither do I. It could have been her plan to want to end that the day when she asked me why I had to leave so early.

Speaker 7 I don't know.

Speaker 13 But I'm not going to hate her for being human.

Speaker 1 You blame yourself?

Speaker 13 A little bit.

Speaker 1 22 summers came and went. John Heckle remarried.
The kids grew up. They started new lives out west.
Alicia became a ski pro.

Speaker 1 John a fishing guide.

Speaker 1 But through it all, their mother was never far from their thoughts.

Speaker 5 She missed all those

Speaker 5 childhood memories. I mean, things like going to the prom, and boyfriends, and kisses, and and just

Speaker 5 just

Speaker 5 everything.

Speaker 11 She missed our weddings. I mean she missed our graduations.
She doesn't know her only grandchild.

Speaker 1 And you probably thought about her at each one of those.

Speaker 1 Clinton County never forgot Kathy Hackle either. She'd become a part of history.
that just wouldn't go away.

Speaker 1 And as one generation of lawmen retired, another rose to take up the unfinished business and discovered enticing details buried in a very old file.

Speaker 6 Coming up, he was eight when Kathy disappeared. Now he was in charge of her case.

Speaker 10 What I remember growing up is, where was she? Where was Kathy at during all this time?

Speaker 6 And a leading suspect suddenly leaves town.

Speaker 10 About three weeks after the disappearance of of Kathy, he moved his family back to Beaver PA.

Speaker 1 For more than 20 years, Kathy Heckle's children lived with a feeling of unfocused fear.

Speaker 11 It's an unsettling feeling that

Speaker 11 an unsettling feeling of fear that essentially

Speaker 11 something

Speaker 11 great in my life can be taken away at any moment.

Speaker 1 And you think that can all be traced back to your mom? Absolutely. Absolutely.
For their father, John, those were years spent struggling to let go and move on. I talked to Kathy a lot about it.

Speaker 1 What do you say to her?

Speaker 13 Just talk.

Speaker 1 Just ramble along.

Speaker 1 And you just start talking to her out loud?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Something will come up that will remind me of something we did.

Speaker 1 Law enforcement had not forgotten Kathy Hackle. In the summer of 2013, a native son inherited the case.
State police investigator Curtis Confer.

Speaker 10 When I obtained this case, it was 22 years old.

Speaker 1 And it had passed through a lot of other hands.

Speaker 15 60 other investigators.

Speaker 10 60.

Speaker 15 60.

Speaker 1 And you thought, I'm going to close it or I'm going to be the 61st, and then in a little while, there'll be a 62nd.

Speaker 10 Well, Josh, what was interesting was it was 400 pages of reports, and I just read it.

Speaker 1 To this 61st investigator, the reports were riveting. He'd heard the story as a child and even had a connection to Lloyd Groves, whose name was all over that file.

Speaker 10 He came to my elementary school and did a presentation on making paper.

Speaker 1 You saw a photo of him giving these.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and I went, you know what? I remember him doing our school.

Speaker 1 Confer was now convinced that at the time this picture was taken, Lloyd Groves was having an affair with Kathy Haeckel.

Speaker 1 Only two months later, investigators considered Groves a suspect in her disappearance.

Speaker 10 What I remember growing up is,

Speaker 1 where was she?

Speaker 10 Where was Kathy at during all this time? John Haeckel was my brother's soccer coach.

Speaker 1 The case files were chock full of details. A gun found in Lloyd Groves' desk drawer, ammo found in his van, a curious chunk of carpet missing from the back of the van.

Speaker 1 What was Lloyd's explanation for cutting the carpet out of the van?

Speaker 10 In 1991, he said that the kids were playing with tar and oil and they got tar and oil in that section of the van.

Speaker 1 That confirmed by anybody?

Speaker 10 No, it was not.

Speaker 1 That wasn't the only thing to jump off the page.

Speaker 1 The original investigators had a witness who'd reported seeing Kathy Heckel and Lloyd Groves together in his parked van many times in the weeks before she disappeared.

Speaker 1 And there was evidence that on the day Kathy Heckel never returned from lunch, Lloyd came back so late he missed a 2 p.m. meeting.

Speaker 10 Something that the original investigators found was that Lloyd Groves wrote a letter to his wife announcing to the family that he was going to be arrested for the murder of Kathy Haeckel.

Speaker 1 This is right after the disappearance.

Speaker 10 This is right after the disappearance, and he wrote detailed notes to his wife how to take care of the tractor, how to take care of the car.

Speaker 1 This is a guy who likes to plan.

Speaker 10 He is a planner, yes. Meticulous.

Speaker 1 But he's not arrested. He was wrong.

Speaker 10 Yeah, he was not arrested. About three weeks after

Speaker 10 the disappearance of Kathy, he moved his family back to Beaver PA.

Speaker 10 and then eventually selling his home,

Speaker 10 leaving a lot of his personal items at his home.

Speaker 1 When he finished reading the case file, Confer called the local FBI office, looking for some items connected to the case.

Speaker 1 It was then that he connected with Mike Hudson, a veteran state trooper assigned to a joint terrorism task force. After Confer explained what he was after, Hudson asked to see the file.

Speaker 7 I thought it was a very good case.

Speaker 7 I felt that there was, you know, a very real suspect.

Speaker 1 When Hudson's partner, FBI agent and former prosecutor Kyle Moore, read the file, he too was hooked.

Speaker 7 This was something that we wanted to do something about. We wanted to see if there was any way that

Speaker 7 we could actually bring it to a conclusion.

Speaker 1 So within days of getting the case, investigator number 61 had a team to help him.

Speaker 10 They had so much knowledge that I didn't have, it was by the grace of God that they helped me with this case.

Speaker 1 Time, it became clear, was not on their side.

Speaker 7 It was basically a now or never situation. I always felt we were just a heartbeat away from losing a witness to not having a case.

Speaker 1 As they worked the case, the investigators knew they had one ace in the hole. In 1991, specks of blood had been found in Lloyd Groves's van.
Advanced DNA tests were done in 2004.

Speaker 7 Based off the fact that there wasn't a DNA sample from the victim, They essentially had to construct one from the victim's mother and father, you know, essentially building the victim's DNA profile.

Speaker 1 That DNA test proved the blood was Kathy Heckles.

Speaker 1 But Trooper Confer says, it seems that bit of evidence fell through the cracks because the lead investigator and primary prosecutor at the time took medical leave.

Speaker 1 One thing was clear to all three of the new investigators. This case needed more resources and more prosecutorial muscle than Clinton County possessed.

Speaker 7 We requested that the district attorney relinquish the case case to the Attorney General's office, and the DA at the time agreed.

Speaker 1 In early 2014, a grand jury was impaneled to review the evidence. Hudson, Moore, and Confer hit the road.

Speaker 10 So we did interviews in different states and traveled the country a little bit.

Speaker 1 The new investigators tracked down old witnesses and even found a new one, a man who remembered an argument between Kathy Haeckel and Lloyd Groves on the day she went missing. The question was,

Speaker 1 did police have enough to make an arrest?

Speaker 6 Coming up, will it be Kathy who ends up on trial?

Speaker 1 Every single indiscretion of hers was going to be announced in open court.

Speaker 7 She was going to be punished for being murdered.

Speaker 6 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 1 As a military man, John Haeckel finds solace on old battlefields. The past is always present there.
But for John, no peace could be found here as long as his wife's killer walked free.

Speaker 13 I would always say, where are we?

Speaker 13 How close are we to getting

Speaker 13 him arrested?

Speaker 1 And police would say, the DA won't go forward.

Speaker 13 Yeah, no, it's more like

Speaker 13 we need more.

Speaker 1 The investigators went looking for more. They tracked down new witnesses and dug deep looking for Kathy Haeckel's body, which they never found.

Speaker 1 Even so, on January 28, 2015, a grand jury indicted Lloyd Groves for murder. largely on the strength of the same evidence that had been in the files all along.

Speaker 10 It was literally just like television. We got there early, like 5 o'clock, and we sat up.

Speaker 10 As he was walking to his car, we rolled right up, jumped out, and when I put the handcuffs on him, I said, you're under arrest for the murder of Kathy Hackle.

Speaker 1 Did he say anything?

Speaker 10 Yeah, he told his son that he needed to get a different ride to work.

Speaker 1 So?

Speaker 8 It really didn't phase him.

Speaker 1 Lo and behold, Lloyd Groves is arrested. What was that like to hear?

Speaker 13 In her thankfulness that

Speaker 13 we were getting somewhere.

Speaker 1 Still a long way to go.

Speaker 13 Yeah, there's still a long way to go.

Speaker 1 In many ways, the arrest of 65-year-old Lloyd Groves was the easy part. Legal maneuvering delayed his trial another three and a half years.

Speaker 1 For the defense, that delay gave their investigators time to poke holes in the prosecution's case.

Speaker 15 This case had holes that you could drive trucks through.

Speaker 1 Tom Bruno and his wife Amy were the defense team's investigators.

Speaker 15 We were in the case for nearly four years. We actually talked about him, I would guarantee every day.

Speaker 1 Tom, a former cop, knew how to look for flaws in the police work. Amy, a Lockhaven native, had grown up with the Kathy Hackle story.

Speaker 23 I mean, if you talk to anyone in town, they would all say that Lloyd killed her and he put her in a vat of acid and dissolved her body. That was the working theory for years.

Speaker 1 But Tom says the files he read didn't prove any of that. In fact, he says he found a silver bullet in those piles of documents.

Speaker 15 We actually discovered that in the police reports, in medical records, that she had cut her finger at work. It was bleeding so badly that she had to get it treated three times.

Speaker 15 And this was at the time that she was allegedly in her Lloyd's van every day.

Speaker 1 So if the prosecution planned to make a big deal out of a DNA test showing Kathy Heckle's blood in Lloyd Groves's van, the defense response now would be, so what?

Speaker 15 They think it came from Kathy because Lloyd killed her, but yet here's Kathy's blood because she cut herself at work.

Speaker 23 I mean, if this isn't reasonable doubt, what is?

Speaker 1 As the case went to trial in November 2018, Pennsylvania's senior deputy attorney general Daniel Dye knew the defense would do more than just attack their evidence.

Speaker 1 He feared they would attack Kathy Heckel, too.

Speaker 7 I got to know this family. I was worried a lot about them because I knew this would be an ugly trial.

Speaker 1 And that every single indiscretion of hers was going to be announced in open court.

Speaker 7 She was going to be punished for being murdered.

Speaker 1 The prosecution's case, almost entirely circumstantial, began with testimony from Kathy Haeckel's children.

Speaker 11 It was a little difficult, but it felt good

Speaker 11 to

Speaker 11 be in front of Lloyd Groves and have him look at me and listen to my story.

Speaker 1 story and how scary it was.

Speaker 1 According to friends and family, Kathy Haeckel was a devoted daughter, a loving mom. At the same time, she was also restless.
Tell me what was going on in her life at that time.

Speaker 7 Her life at that time was a lonely life.

Speaker 7 John Heckel is a good guy, but his first love was the military. And Kathy was, you know, having affairs.
And one of them was with Lloyd Groves.

Speaker 1 Another lover, the guitar man Dennis Taylor, said Kathy had told him all about that unraveling affair.

Speaker 7 Kathy was trying to break off the relationship. We know that.
Lloyd did not want the relationship to end, and he specifically wanted to meet for lunch on that day.

Speaker 1 Did Lloyd Groves know about Denny Taylor?

Speaker 7 He did.

Speaker 7 We had evidence in the case that Groves was following Kathy.

Speaker 1 Dennis Taylor testified that Kathy had expressed some fear about Lloyd. Right.

Speaker 10 Raise your right hand.

Speaker 1 In a special hearing, two former paper plant employees who'd been in poor health had their trial testimony pre-recorded.

Speaker 1 One said he'd overheard Kathy Haeckel and Lloyd Groves arguing the day Kathy went missing. It's just loud.
The other said she saw Lloyd Groves staring daggers at Kathy Haeckel

Speaker 1 as she left for lunch that day.

Speaker 8 His face was so red,

Speaker 8 just

Speaker 1 like he was terribly angry.

Speaker 5 And he was looking at Kathy.

Speaker 7 Kathy pulls out. Lloyd pulls out after.

Speaker 7 We believe that they did meet. That somehow, some way, Kathy was cajoled into one last meet just to hear Lloyd out.

Speaker 7 And at that point in time, Lloyd shot her, shoved her in that van, likely with a head wound.

Speaker 1 According to witnesses, Groves was back at the plant sometime between 2 and 3 that afternoon.

Speaker 1 You think Lloyd Groves kills her, disposes of her body, and manages to get back to work that day and act like nothing's wrong and gets away with it.

Speaker 7 I think it's because he's smart and a good planner. To him, I think murder is something that can be done over a lunch hour.

Speaker 1 The prosecution wrapped up its case with two witnesses, people who only surfaced shortly before trial. The first was Lloyd Groves's now ex-wife.

Speaker 7 There was something she had been holding back on telling for the past roughly 30 years, and that was that Lloyd Groves did come home over the work hour on July 15th, 1991.

Speaker 1 Something he almost never did.

Speaker 7 Which he never did. and changed out of his clothes.
And she never saw the condition that those clothes were in.

Speaker 1 The next person to testify was this woman, Gail Taylor. She also had a story to tell that she'd kept to herself for decades.

Speaker 1 It was the mid-90s. Taylor said she and Groves worked together in Ohio.
According to Taylor, she went to Groves one day to vent after she'd discovered drugs in her son's room.

Speaker 12 I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this kid. He's going to get into trouble.
He's going to end up dying.

Speaker 12 If the drugs don't kill him, his mother will.

Speaker 12 And Lloyd was sitting at his desk and he just very calmly said, well,

Speaker 12 I know how to get rid of a body so it would never ever be found.

Speaker 1 The defense's argument was he was joking.

Speaker 7 I sure wouldn't joke about being able to dispose of a body where no one could ever find it if I had been investigated for killing somebody and they had never found the body.

Speaker 1 The prosecution closed its case by asking who but Lloyd Groves could have killed Kathy Hackle.

Speaker 1 And in return, the defense stood ready to ask a provocative question of its own: Could Kathy Hackle have simply run away?

Speaker 1 Coming up, did you really think she lived past that day?

Speaker 9 I certainly have a reasonable doubt as to whether she died that day.

Speaker 6 Would the jury have the same doubt?

Speaker 11 It was a nervous moment, absolutely.

Speaker 1 The Lloyd Groves defense team could hardly wait to make their case to the jury.

Speaker 15 It was like you're playing cards and you have four aces and you're waiting to play them. That's what we felt like over the last few years.

Speaker 1 George Lepley was one of two lawyers defending Groves.

Speaker 9 I don't think there was enough evidence, and what evidence they did present had issues questioning whether it was reliable enough to justify taking the rest of a man's life away.

Speaker 1 For a defense team that had spent years reviewing police reports, one thing seemed obvious.

Speaker 23 When the police learned of something that implicated Lloyd, they were on top of it. Whenever there was another avenue to pursue, it just kind of falls by the wayside.

Speaker 9 This was more about the police trying to prove that it was Lloyd Groves that did this crime than it was about them trying to find out who killed Kathy Heckel, if indeed she was killed.

Speaker 1 The defense argued the guitar man, Dennis Taylor, should have gotten a closer look.

Speaker 15 Yes, she had an affair with Lloyd, but she also is having an affair with Dennis Taylor.

Speaker 1 Taylor had told police he played golf the afternoon Kathy Heckel went missing.

Speaker 15 They went to check his alibi out 13 months later. Not.

Speaker 15 right away. And when they go there, a log that he has to write in to show that he was golfing there, the pages are missing.
Isn't that convenient?

Speaker 1 And of course, the defense argued, Kathy Heckle's affairs could have also provided her husband with a motive for murder.

Speaker 1 Weeks after Kathy disappeared, the defense noted, John Heckle discarded some of her personal items. Her husband throws away her purse, her wallet,

Speaker 9 her photo ID. It isn't that he throws it in a garbage can in front of his house where somebody might see it.
It's in a dumpster in the back of the reserve base.

Speaker 1 You're saying that he wanted to conceal that.

Speaker 9 What more more logical conclusion is there?

Speaker 1 Did John Heckel have something to hide? The defense didn't offer an answer for that, and John Heckel says he doesn't remember much about those days.

Speaker 13 I don't recollect throwing anything like that out.

Speaker 1 The defense even suggested that Kathy Haeckel may not have died on July 15, 1991. Did you really think she lived past that day?

Speaker 9 I certainly have a reasonable doubt as to whether she died that day.

Speaker 1 To support that theory, the defense introduced statements John Heckel made more than 20 years ago.

Speaker 1 In one, Haeckel said he thought his wife may have siphoned thousands of dollars from a joint bank account.

Speaker 1 In another, he asked investigators if a woman pictured in a swingers magazine might be his wife.

Speaker 1 Is there any credible argument that Kathy Haeckel squirreled away money, vanished, ran out on her husband and her family, and then posed for pictures that were put in a swingers magazine that anybody could have seen.

Speaker 9 I certainly don't think it has been disproven beyond a reasonable doubt that that could have occurred.

Speaker 1 On the stand, John Heckel said those decades-old statements had been the frantic musings of a desperate man.

Speaker 13 I was grasping anything I could think of to try to find out what happened to my wife.

Speaker 1 The defense conceded, Groves did go home that day to change his shirt, but said that was because he'd gotten dirty at the plant where he had to lead a tour for a group of children at 3 o'clock that afternoon.

Speaker 1 And that lunch hour trip home, they argued, simply made the prosecution's version of events even more unlikely.

Speaker 9 If you factored in all of the witnesses when they saw him at the plant, how does he have anywhere near enough time for him to have done what they claim he did?

Speaker 1 For 27 years, the question of what had happened to Kathy Eckle had hung over Lockhaven.

Speaker 1 Now it was up to a Clinton County jury to finally provide an answer.

Speaker 17 It was contentious.

Speaker 1 Sean Sanford, a toddler at the time Kathy Heckle disappeared, was the jury foreman.

Speaker 16 The very first vote we took was 7584 for guilty. I thought it was going to be the other way for acquittal.

Speaker 1 Why'd you vote for acquittal in that first vote? If you looked at every piece of evidence individually, you could poke holes in all of it.

Speaker 16 piece by piece.

Speaker 1 After breaking for the weekend, the jury returned on Monday morning, rested but still deadlocked.

Speaker 16 There was one juror in particular who was voting for acquittal originally, who couldn't get over the fact that he thought the prime suspect should be John Heckel.

Speaker 1 Over and over, jurors reviewed and discussed the evidence. Then, just before three that afternoon, jurors notified the judge they had reached a verdict.

Speaker 11 It was a nervous moment, absolutely. I was nervous and we were all holding hands.

Speaker 1 On the charge of first-degree or premeditated murder, the verdict was not guilty.

Speaker 1 Then, in what seemed to be a compromise decision, the jury found Groves guilty of third-degree murder, which is legally considered a spontaneous act in the heat of the moment.

Speaker 1 You look at Groves during that time?

Speaker 13 No, I spent more time looking at Kathy's picture and crying.

Speaker 1 In a letter to Dateline, Lloyd Groves once again denied ever having had an affair with Kathy Haeckel and said he'd been wrongly convicted.

Speaker 1 At the age of 69, Groves was formally sentenced to serve 10 to 20 years in prison.

Speaker 11 Even with the third degree sentencing, he'll still spend the rest of his life in prison.

Speaker 1 That's enough for you.

Speaker 1 It's been decades since that summer morning when Kathy Haeckel kissed her children goodbye.

Speaker 1 And although their wait for justice is finally over, they are still no closer to knowing where their mother is than they were on that summer evening in 1991 when she didn't come home.

Speaker 1 So, unless your mom's remains are found accidentally, you might not ever know. You're going to be okay with that?

Speaker 5 We have to live with it. I mean, it's sad and it's...

Speaker 5 Disappointing that we will never know or we may never know, but we have to be okay with it.

Speaker 6 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 7 Thanks for joining us.

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