Out There in the Dark

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Speaker 6 I got a phone call.

Speaker 7 Something's wrong with Brandy. She's not moving and the car is running.

Speaker 7 Emergency vehicles, officers. And that's as far as I could go.

Speaker 7 There's my baby and I can't do nothing about it.

Speaker 10 She was a hardworking young wife and mom.

Speaker 7 Sweetest girl you could ever ask to meet.

Speaker 10 Just minutes from home. When she saw the headlights, somebody was telling her.

Speaker 12 My sister is in my driveway and her head's bloodied.

Speaker 13 So you bury your little girl and then it's a murder investigation.

Speaker 11 Yep.

Speaker 10 There were two people Brandy feared. One in town.

Speaker 11 She thought she was being followed.

Speaker 9 One thousands of miles away.

Speaker 15 Josh was still in Alaska.

Speaker 10 And then there was the new man in her life.

Speaker 15 Anybody close to Brandy, we need to take a real hard, serious look at.

Speaker 10 No fingerprints, no DNA, and no arrests for years.

Speaker 16 You're grieving? How do you put all that awful time together, Molly?

Speaker 8 Day by day.

Speaker 10 Then hints emerge of someone's dark past. You've got robberies going on, the homicide, and one brave woman willing to talk.

Speaker 19 Only the same that's happening to Bundy will happen to me.

Speaker 10 The question wasn't just who murdered a young mother, it was why.

Speaker 22 There was no money. There just wasn't a reason to do it.

Speaker 7 She didn't hurt nobody. She didn't bother nobody.
Why did they have to kill her?

Speaker 10 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Date Live. Here's Dennis Murphy with Out There in the Dark.

Speaker 25 It was a chillier than usual Monday night in May as Brandy Daniels drove home from her shift at Coles.

Speaker 30 Zanesville in eastern Ohio is the kind of not-too-big, not-too-small city where you can be off the downtown grid and into wooded rolling hills in just a few minutes.

Speaker 32 And out there in the dark, that's where this 25-year-old single mom was heading.

Speaker 34 Back home to her daughter waiting to be tucked in at Brandi's mom's house out in the country where she'd been living lately.

Speaker 34 Brandy had been through a rough few months, years really, but one of the big reasons things were finally turning around for her was that soothing voice on the cell phone this night, her fiancé talking her home.

Speaker 11 Just talking to her as she's driving home, trying to drive a stick shift, which she just learned, talking on the phone.

Speaker 30 The fiancé was Craig Berry, her older boyfriend.

Speaker 11 I'm a hairstylist. I've been for years.

Speaker 30 One day, Brandy walked into Craig's salon.

Speaker 11 We hit it off.

Speaker 16 Women are very funny about who they will turn their head over to, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 11 We turn out to be really good friends. The most beautiful eyes you ever saw.

Speaker 41 Like the song, Brandy turned out to be a fine girl for Craig.

Speaker 34 And that right away mutual attraction grew into something more serious.

Speaker 11 Touched my heart immediately. It was a connection like I've never felt.
It just kept getting bigger and bigger every time we talked. We were looking at houses.

Speaker 17 You guys were fixing to marry?

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 30 Count Brandy's mom, Molly Edwards, among the many people thrilled at the arrival of Craig in her life, just when you needed something nice to happen.

Speaker 31 Craig, what did you think of him?

Speaker 7 He was really nice. He put her first.

Speaker 7 He put her first.

Speaker 31 Growing up, Brandi wasn't much for Barbie dolls, but give her a sketch pad and a pencil, and she was lost for hours.

Speaker 43 She loved to draw.

Speaker 44 She had a deft eye for realistic wildlife portraits.

Speaker 7 She took every kind of art class there was. If it had anything to do with art, she took it.

Speaker 31 Brandy enrolled at her local college, Zane State.

Speaker 28 But before her freshman year was up, she left school to marry Josh Daniels, a part-time student she'd met. Not too long after, she had news from mom.

Speaker 7 She called me up, said that she was pregnant.

Speaker 13 You must have been so torn up.

Speaker 7 I was.

Speaker 7 That was my baby.

Speaker 45 Brandy, husband Josh, and the baby daughter were living nearby.

Speaker 7 You couldn't ask for a better mother. If it was something that she needed or

Speaker 7 the little girl needed,

Speaker 7 the baby got it first.

Speaker 11 And had a grandmother, like her new baby.

Speaker 7 The baby got everything.

Speaker 23 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 28 The marriage, after seven years of trying, foundered.

Speaker 38 She filed for a divorce.

Speaker 13 She seemed to be on the other side, Molly, of a really rough patch in her life.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 41 But on this May night, as she was driving home from work with fiancé Craig in her ear, he heard Brandy starting to sound edgy.

Speaker 11 She says, somebody was telling her, you know, these people need to get off my butt. And the phone just went dead.

Speaker 13 Went dead.

Speaker 11 I texted her, you know, what's up. So about 10 minutes passed by, and I called her sister and said, is Brandy home yet? She goes, no.

Speaker 11 I said, well, her call dropped on me, and she should have been coming in the door by now. She said, you want me to go check? I said, would you?

Speaker 31 Brandy's kid sister, Tess, headed up the almost half mile long drive from her mom's house to look for her.

Speaker 11 Just a few minutes later, her sister calls me back and is losing it.

Speaker 11 She was at the top of the driveway. Yeah, and she says, I see her car, her headlights are on, but it's not moving.
Her head's slumped down. And then she's just become hysterical.

Speaker 11 And I said, I'll be there. I said, you need to call the cops.

Speaker 12 911, your emergency.

Speaker 47 The Muskingum County 911 Center fielded the call.

Speaker 12 My sister is in my my driveway and her head's bloody and she's not moving. I just need someone to come quick, please.
I'm just scared. I need someone to come now.

Speaker 12 Stay on the line with me while I get the squad on the way.

Speaker 26 Fiancé Craig was on his way too.

Speaker 35 There was his girlfriend's little Nissan sentry in the drive.

Speaker 11 I pull in right behind her car and there's a sheriff there already. And I'm walking up to the car and I see her in the driver's seat.

Speaker 11 And I said, what's wrong? He goes, I think she's been shot. nothing can prepare you for that no

Speaker 11 she was dead that's what he told me he told you that at the scene yeah

Speaker 11 you know and stay away you know you don't want to contaminate the crime scene no bridge ahead into the abyss yeah that blew me out of the water brandy's mom was just leaving the bottle factory where she worked

Speaker 7 1105 I got a phone call and I went running out to the truck. Tess said something's wrong with Brandy.

Speaker 49 We get home.

Speaker 13 See emergency vehicles, officers.

Speaker 7 We'll go right off into the driveway, and that's as far as I could go.

Speaker 36 The car with the driver's side window down, the vehicle stalled in first gear, and Brandy inside looking ragdoll.

Speaker 28 Shot three times execution style.

Speaker 52 The detectives were arriving.

Speaker 17 Who would want Brandy dead?

Speaker 10 It's always the husband, right? Maybe not this time. When we return.
return.

Speaker 15 Josh was, in fact, still in Alaska that night.

Speaker 10 But there was someone who lived right in town.

Speaker 14 Did you wonder what was going on with the boyfriend?

Speaker 15 Anybody close to Brandy, we need to take a real hard, serious look at.

Speaker 28 It was May 5th, 2014.

Speaker 31 The car was at the head of the driveway, lights on, and two county detectives arriving to try to figure out what had happened to the young woman dead in the driver's seat.

Speaker 27 Detective Mike Ryan and Captain Steve Welker in the first minutes of what would be a years-long investigation.

Speaker 8 Mike and I arrived at about the same time.

Speaker 13 Did the scene explain itself to you?

Speaker 15 We could see the basics of what had happened.

Speaker 54 Their victim, Brandi Daniels, had been shot three times at close range.

Speaker 46 Crime scene text would later recover three shell casings and a clip for a semi-automatic pistol.

Speaker 30 Brandy's purse and phone were beside her.

Speaker 55 We limited robbery almost immediately because there is an amount of money there that somebody would have took if it would have been a robbery.

Speaker 56 As the CSIs took their photos and estimated bullet trajectories, gathered blood, DNA, Brandy's mom, sister, and fiancée watched on in blank horror.

Speaker 18 What do you remember about the rest of that night?

Speaker 6 Sitting in the vehicle behind her car, just watching it.

Speaker 11 And there's your girl, gone.

Speaker 7 There's my baby, and I can't do nothing about it. It was

Speaker 6 two o'clock.

Speaker 7 Went to the house.

Speaker 7 Four o'clock, detectives came down to the house, said that they removed her in the car.

Speaker 44 Who would benefit from a single mom's death? Of course, the questioning turned quickly to the soon-to-be-divorced husband, the father of the little girl.

Speaker 25 Brandy's mom told them about Josh Daniels, said he was a personal trainer at the gym and an obsessive weightlifter.

Speaker 13 When you ran ran him through the computer, what'd you find out about him? Do you have priors?

Speaker 4 He did not.

Speaker 55 He was not on law enforcement's radar.

Speaker 26 Not on law enforcement's radar, but nonetheless, somebody they wanted to talk to right now.

Speaker 44 But there was a problem, a big one.

Speaker 31 There was every reason to believe he wasn't in the driveway that night, but 4,300 miles away in Alaska. Josh had moved up there to be near his mom, and he'd found work in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.

Speaker 15 Josh was, in fact, still in Alaska that night.

Speaker 13 So that's a pretty good alibi.

Speaker 55 Yes.

Speaker 30 Because there's domestic turmoil doesn't mean you necessarily have a suspect, though, does it?

Speaker 35 Doesn't explain why she stayed in the vehicle.

Speaker 55 But

Speaker 55 it's a good idea to eliminate the husband as a suspect in the get-go.

Speaker 35 Detective Ryan called Josh Daniels on Alaska's North Slope.

Speaker 14 Can you discern things like demeanor or attitude through the phone line?

Speaker 59 Not really.

Speaker 55 I wasn't detecting shock or grief or anything like that.

Speaker 17 But nothing you can hang your hat on either, huh?

Speaker 55 One of the questions I asked him was, who have you been talking to here in Zanesville? And he gave me a list of about a half dozen people.

Speaker 20 Daniels told the detective he'd return to Zanesville as soon as he could.

Speaker 25 But there was another person much closer that the cops had to figure out.

Speaker 26 Craig Berry, the fiancée.

Speaker 13 He is the last person known to have talked to her?

Speaker 14 Yes. Did you wonder what was going on with the boyfriend?

Speaker 28 He's quite an older guy.

Speaker 17 He's got 20 years on your victim, right?

Speaker 60 Yes.

Speaker 30 So he's a person of interest until he's not, I'm guessing, huh?

Speaker 15 Well, at that point, anybody close to Brandy, we need to take a real hard, serious look at.

Speaker 25 Within hours of Brandy's death, Craig got the third degree.

Speaker 57 Were they asking you hard questions?

Speaker 17 You know, where have you been?

Speaker 21 What are you doing?

Speaker 11 Did you think, wow, they think I'm a suspect? Oh, yeah. Well, that's common, right?

Speaker 13 Until you're in it, and then there's a cop raid in your grill.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 11 They asked for my cell phone.

Speaker 21 I handed it over right then.

Speaker 6 How long did that last?

Speaker 11 I got home at 5.30 that morning.

Speaker 35 Then the legwork of the investigation began in earnest, starting with where she was last seen alive.

Speaker 13 So you're talking to your victim's coworkers. What's the picture coming together there?

Speaker 15 They all describe Brandy as a very good young lady, a devoted mother in a marriage that she really wanted to get out of.

Speaker 29 Patrol officers traced the route from Coles to the murder scene, hoping they'd find a security cam that recorded Brandy's car headed home.

Speaker 13 The boyfriend story is there's a guy right on her bumper, but that image doesn't show up anywhere, huh? No.

Speaker 31 When the lab results came back, disappointment. No useful fingerprints or DNA.

Speaker 33 And the long slog of getting search warrants to recover data from the cell phone and the towers the signals bounce off of had only just begun.

Speaker 33 A few days after the murder, Brandy's husband Josh returned to Zanesville from Alaska.

Speaker 61 They met him downtown at his lawyer's office.

Speaker 36 He was fully cooperative.

Speaker 52 The detectives asked for his cell phone.

Speaker 55 He and his attorney voluntarily turned it over.

Speaker 20 Now you can look him in the eye and you can check out his demeanor. What are you seeing?

Speaker 15 Josh was very cool and collected. He looked very confident.

Speaker 30 With the data from his phone on the way to the lab, Josh returned to Alaska with his eight-year-old daughter.

Speaker 35 Molly and her family had buried their brandy, but no one was coming to terms with the magnitude of this crime.

Speaker 13 Did the officers tell you anything about how the case would go?

Speaker 7 They figured that it'd be summed up within a couple of days.

Speaker 31 If only.

Speaker 10 Coming up, a new suspect, but he has an alibi.

Speaker 62 I went to my girlfriend's house and I'm kind of staying right there.

Speaker 10 Was he telling the truth?

Speaker 53 The texts tell the tale.

Speaker 57 Get on the clock when detectives

Speaker 55 you were sure he was not in the house.

Speaker 10 When Dateline continues,

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Speaker 29 Brandy, the young mom found shot to death in the front seat of her car in the family driveway.

Speaker 31 Detectives put her fiancé Craig through the ringer, but his story, including the part about his last text to Brandy, checked out.

Speaker 15 Within two or three days, we were sure that he was cleared.

Speaker 46 But Craig wasn't a total dead end.

Speaker 31 The fiancé did have a tip for the detectives.

Speaker 29 He told them they should check out a fellow gym rat of Josh Daniels, a guy who gave Brandy the creeps, someone with an unusual first name, Sirius.

Speaker 27 Sirius E. Underwood.

Speaker 43 When they ran the name, investigators found a son of a local preacher who had had some juvenile offenses, but in the years since had redeemed himself.

Speaker 29 He graduated from Zane State, got a good job with a local manufacturer, and seemed to charm every woman he met.

Speaker 29 Four days into their investigation, Detective Brady Hiddle found Sirius at a girlfriend's place.

Speaker 22 I asked him if I could look at his cell phone, if I could take it back to the office and download it. He agreed to let me do that.

Speaker 13 How'd he present himself?

Speaker 6 Calm.

Speaker 22 He claimed he didn't know Brandy was killed, just calm, cool, and collected.

Speaker 33 Sirius came to the sheriff's office.

Speaker 22 I'll put it in airplane mode.

Speaker 17 While the squad's phone expert examined his cell, Sirius explained how he knew Brandy's husband, Josh.

Speaker 62 We went to the same state together. Okay.
I worked out with him and stuff like that.

Speaker 20 He said he hardly knew Brandy.

Speaker 62 I didn't like Meteor Meter. I seen her one time.

Speaker 45 As for his pal, Josh, up in Alaska, Sirius said they hadn't been in contact for a while.

Speaker 62 When was the last time he sent you a text? He called you? I'll say about two or three weeks ago. About this week.
I didn't talk to him this week, no.

Speaker 56 Sirius said he'd been with his girlfriend around the time cops believe Brandy died.

Speaker 62 And went to my girlfriend's house and we kind of stayed the night there.

Speaker 25 Officers returned Sirius's iPhone and thanked him for coming in.

Speaker 38 Wendy Lemon, the girlfriend in Sirius' alibi, was next up on the detective's list of people to talk to.

Speaker 27 Wendy, a mother of five, said she met Sirius a couple of years earlier at the same place Brandi and Josh got together, Zane State College.

Speaker 66 I just knew from the moment I met Sirius that this is just a new friend. Happy,

Speaker 66 always smiling.

Speaker 31 The midlife single mom back to college and dean's list student Sirius were ambassadors for their school.

Speaker 66 They were just looking for a face for Zane State College that would be friendly and that would be outgoing so that we could go to different events in the community as well as giving tours on campus.

Speaker 61 Sirius had found time to work as a campus security guard and that's where he met Josh who did the same thing.

Speaker 31 Sirius was an overachiever, even featured in brochures about the college.

Speaker 35 Wendy liked almost everything about him.

Speaker 29 They became a couple.

Speaker 66 One year for my birthday, he totally set up an entire day skydiving.

Speaker 66 Happy birthday!

Speaker 66 It was so amazing, so awesome. We took motorcycle rides and went on picnics.

Speaker 44 Now, Wendy found herself caught in the undertow of a homicide investigation.

Speaker 26 Cops had her downtown the same day as Sirius.

Speaker 62 I just want to let you know, you're not under arrest, okay?

Speaker 31 Detective Ryan asked about the night of the murder.

Speaker 39 He used Wendy's text with Sirius to refresh her memory.

Speaker 62 Could you put it here so you both can see? Oh, yeah. May 5th.

Speaker 46 Okay.

Speaker 35 Did Wendy's text that night fit in the timeline they were building of Brandy's murder?

Speaker 20 And did they speak to Sirius' whereabouts?

Speaker 62 11 o'clock when you typed these,

Speaker 62 you were sure he was not in the house. Okay, so 11 o'clock he wasn't there.

Speaker 62 What time is it?

Speaker 54 Sirius arrived, Wendy said, after that 11 o'clock text.

Speaker 4 Sirius had given the cops Wendy as his alibi, and she'd inadvertently only made him someone detectives needed to take a closer look at.

Speaker 11 There's a window of opportunity in there in which he could easily have done this crime.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 31 And there was another thing.

Speaker 28 The squad's phone expert filled him in about some internet searches he'd found on Sirius' device.

Speaker 22 Sirius had opened every news article that had to do with the homicide.

Speaker 41 Interesting, because earlier in the day, he claimed he did know Brandy was murdered.

Speaker 32 Question.

Speaker 46 Was Sirius the gunman in Brandy's driveway?

Speaker 30 He seemed to be no more than a casual friend of Josh's from the gym.

Speaker 28 But when the IT guys cracked Josh Daniels' phone use history, it told a different story.

Speaker 16 What had he deleted?

Speaker 55 A lot of text messages.

Speaker 17 To whom?

Speaker 55 Sirius Underwood. Sirius Underwood was by far the one he was in contact the most.

Speaker 17 What's your thinking?

Speaker 55 When we first talked to Josh, he never mentioned Sirius Underwood. Why would they be lying to us about that?

Speaker 34 Why, indeed?

Speaker 27 The story told by the phones, the concealed relationship, fed a growing theory of the crime, that they were looking at a long-distance killing between Ohio and Alaska.

Speaker 26 If that was their case, then technology was going to be as valuable to them as DNA or bloody fingerprints.

Speaker 32 The first big question, did the killer, assuming he was a man, have a phone on him when he did the shooting?

Speaker 30 And what tower near the murder scene had the phone pinged off?

Speaker 22 We had tons of, and I'm not exaggerating, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of phone calls that hit all these various towers.

Speaker 29 In that electronic haystack, a sharp-eyed cop noticed a call around the time they believed Randy was killed.

Speaker 4 It was made from a number with a 310 area code.

Speaker 46 Now, normally that's Southern California.

Speaker 51 The county lawmen trace that 310 number back to an anonymous disposable phone, a burner, purchased in Zanesville a week before Brandy died.

Speaker 22 I get the call records for the 310 area phone and start coming through those. He only called two people, a second burner phone and Josh Daniels.
Those were the only two.

Speaker 44 Was this their breakthrough?

Speaker 30 That burner phone at the right time, right place had called Josh's phone in Alaska.

Speaker 55 then the phone text did another extraction of josh's phone and they retrieved something josh thought he deleted a voicemail that was left on josh daniels cell phone from this california area code hey what's up man it's me hey hit me up on this phone right here whenever you talk about something hear me holler at me later

Speaker 22 detective hiddle's ears perked up when he heard it I listened to it, and now I know that that phone 310

Speaker 22 is is Sirius Underwood's. That is his voice.

Speaker 42 The detectives wanted another technically deeper dive into Sirius' iPhone, which they'd returned to him.

Speaker 47 Sirius came downtown again as requested.

Speaker 42 But while the cops were preoccupied chasing down a search warrant for his device, he out-foxed them.

Speaker 26 Sirius found a computer and remotely wiped his phone clean.

Speaker 22 When I reached in and got Sirius' phone, I could see that it had been reset. Factory restored from the iCloud.

Speaker 17 So whatever story he was going to tell, you weren't going to hear it.

Speaker 22 There was nothing left on that phone.

Speaker 57 Pretty clever.

Speaker 31 It was like a whole evidence locker going up in smoke.

Speaker 29 Their whole techie crime trail, poof.

Speaker 27 Detectives by then were sure Sirius Underwood and Josh Daniels were behind Brandy's murder.

Speaker 32 But could they prove it?

Speaker 15 We knew at that time we had a serious problem with our evidence. We were not dead in the water, but we were definitely struggling.

Speaker 10 Coming up.

Speaker 52 A stalled case.

Speaker 13 Are you starting to lose faith in your police? In the investigation?

Speaker 7 It was stressful.

Speaker 9 And then a threat convinces a woman to talk.

Speaker 19 They told me, they say, that's happening to Barney happened to me. What did he say happened to Brandy? He killed her.
He killed her.

Speaker 22 What is the next thing we've got to do then?

Speaker 25 Investigators were pretty sure they had the right guys for Brandi Daniels' murder.

Speaker 31 And they learned a lot about just how awful her marriage to Josh was. Cops found a 911 call Brandy had made six months before her murder.

Speaker 67 Seems we'll please employ it.

Speaker 48 I'm in an abusive relationship, and

Speaker 48 I'm afraid to go home.

Speaker 48 And I

Speaker 48 tell my husband that I want to leave, but he won't let me. And it gets physical.

Speaker 40 Brandy didn't request a deputy that night, but she did file a restraining order against Josh when she left him.

Speaker 47 Cops knew Josh's buddy from the gym, Sirius, was likely involved in the murder, but they just couldn't tie the two of them together despite some suspicious phone traffic between the pair.

Speaker 31 An additional difficulty in the investigation was the fact that Josh was still living in Alaska, about as far away as you could get from Ohio and still be in the same country.

Speaker 31 Josh Daniels was here starting his new chapter, living in Wasilla, about an hour outside of Anchorage with his mother and stepfather.

Speaker 30 Keeping tabs on him from thousands of miles away were the Zanesville police, and they were seeing some patterns.

Speaker 57 When he wasn't working a job in the North Slope oil fields, he was partying, pumping iron, and chasing women.

Speaker 25 Back in Zanesville, meanwhile, the cops kept their pressure up on the person of interest they did have in their zip code, Sirius Underwood.

Speaker 31 The detectives were all over his girlfriend Wendy.

Speaker 66 Every time that I had a little spat or whatever, I was frustrated or disgusted with, you know, serious, you would always show up again, just wondered if maybe you remembered something.

Speaker 56 Trying to find you at a vulnerable moment and now you're finally going to spill this.

Speaker 66 Just like I've already told you every single thing. It's never going to change.
If you don't lie, you don't have to cover a lie.

Speaker 28 Brandy's mother was losing faith in the cops ever making an arrest in the case of her daughter's brutal murder.

Speaker 13 Are they saying trust us?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Every time we'd hear something, we'd contact them. Still need to get more evidence.
Still need to get more evidence.

Speaker 4 But something was about to happen, and it was enormous.

Speaker 31 Call it a good luck bolt from the land of the midnight sun. Alaska was calling.

Speaker 57 It was three months to the day after Brandi's murder when the Ohio investigators got a phone call from up here in Wasilla.

Speaker 57 It was a woman on the line saying that she had been seeing Josh Daniels, and she had a story to tell the police, something he had told her.

Speaker 57 Well, when Detectives Hiddle and Ryan heard that, they were on the plane to Alaska within hours.

Speaker 20 The young woman explained she and Josh had been engaged at the time of Brandy's death, but he had commitment issues.

Speaker 19 He lied all the time. He was dating multiple people at the same time.

Speaker 54 She had the detective's undivided attention as she related what an intoxicated Josh told her on the 4th of July.

Speaker 19 He told me the same that happened to Brandy will happen to me. What did he say happened to Brandy? He killed her.
He killed her.

Speaker 19 He said that? He said I killed her. Yes.
He said, I killed her? Yeah. Do you remember what his exact words were? He said

Speaker 19 he killed Brandy with a phone call and I believe everything he said. I believe that he killed her and I was so afraid.
Did he say who killed Brandy?

Speaker 19 He says a black guy at the jail that wasn't his group of people.

Speaker 31 It looked as though the detectives were ready to put a bow on their investigation.

Speaker 34 Take the blizzard of messages between the two men, mix in the geography of the cell phone towers that put a suspect burner phone tied to Sirius right near the crime scene, and now add in the story of the woman from Alaska who'd apparently heard a confession, and you should be ready to swear out arrest warrants.

Speaker 31 Not quite.

Speaker 58 When the detectives got back to Ohio, their first stop was at the office of state's attorney Mike Haddocks.

Speaker 13 And they come to you and say, are we there yet?

Speaker 17 Yes. And you're telling them, no, you're not quite there.

Speaker 60 I wanted to make sure that

Speaker 60 before we took the case to grand jury, that we had a motive. Obviously, in the case of Josh Daniels, the husband, we had a motive.

Speaker 60 Marriage was breaking up. He had been violent with her in the past.

Speaker 13 But he was thousands of miles away from Alaska at the time.

Speaker 16 We knew he didn't pull the trigger.

Speaker 46 He didn't pull the trigger.

Speaker 60 When we came up with Sirius Underwood, the most obvious is there's been some sort of a payment. We spent about a year.
looking through bank accounts, couldn't find any.

Speaker 28 Almost two years went by and nothing.

Speaker 11 How do you put all that awful time together, Molly?

Speaker 8 Day by day.

Speaker 13 Are you starting to lose faith in your police, the investigation?

Speaker 7 It was stressful.

Speaker 7 Mike Ryan, he would call, and I said, have you heard anything?

Speaker 7 We still have to get some more.

Speaker 7 More evidence, more evidence.

Speaker 30 But it's funny how things sometimes work out because the investigators were about to get another bolt out of the the blue lead like the one from Alaska.

Speaker 37 It began with of all things a message to the Facebook page of the Zanesville PD.

Speaker 38 The tipster had volunteered that her husband was part of a stick-up gang.

Speaker 50 We came in and spoke with her and obtained a lot of valuable information for this investigation.

Speaker 27 Detective Phil Michael of the Zanesville PD had been working for two years on a string of armed robberies.

Speaker 25 When he got the Facebook tipster in for an interview, guess who she identified as two members of the robbery crew?

Speaker 27 None other than Sirius Underwood and Josh Daniels.

Speaker 43 If the tipster could be believed, they'd been bandits together two years before Brandy would be found shot to death.

Speaker 40 The woman confirmed something Detective Michael had long suspected but been unable to prove: that the robbery of a local department store had been an inside job.

Speaker 28 Josh Daniels had been working at the store at the time and handed over $7,000 to a masked gunman.

Speaker 30 If we had been here on January 1st, 2012, what might we have seen?

Speaker 65 You can see an individual come from the southwest side of the parking lot. He stuck the gun in Josh's face.

Speaker 58 Shows a pistol.

Speaker 65 Yes. He ended up falling down, being knocked down.

Speaker 44 The tipster claimed that Josh wasn't the victim of the robbery, but actually one of the participants, and that his pal Sirius had been the mastermind, not only of the department store job, but the prime mover in a crime wave, responsible for multiple armed robberies, most of them captured on surveillance video.

Speaker 43 The two bodybuilders' secret sideline was a head-snapping revelation.

Speaker 22 Sirius Underwood at night's over here robbing drug dealers, or he's robbing Tumbleweed restaurants, or they're hitting Gabriel Brothers.

Speaker 22 But during the day, he's the sweetest guy, loves the women, they love him, he'll train with you, poster boy, just an all-around great American.

Speaker 29 The cops believe that linking Sirius and his partner in crime, Josh Daniels, to the violent robberies would help nail the two for Brandy Daniels' murder.

Speaker 50 We're on the right track for the robberies. We're going to go try to confront Josh.

Speaker 52 Back to Alaska.

Speaker 26 When Josh landed at Anchorage International on his way home from the North Slope, airport police whisked him into their office.

Speaker 45 Detective Michael showed Josh photographs of the department store robbery suspects.

Speaker 13 Have you ever seen him before?

Speaker 68 Around the store or anything like that?

Speaker 29 No.

Speaker 29 Detective Michael then handed Josh another photo.

Speaker 68 Have you ever seen Sirius Underwood?

Speaker 68 Not at all. No.
Really?

Speaker 44 The cop accused Josh of lying, of being up to his eyeballs in the robberies.

Speaker 68 So if you guys came up with some dumbass scheme to take some money, then you'd be honest with me.

Speaker 52 Josh stuck to his story, then lawyered up.

Speaker 35 The detectives flying home to Ohio knew they had more work to do.

Speaker 26 But in any conspiracy, there's a weak link.

Speaker 26 They just had to pick their man and break him.

Speaker 55 Show in the car.

Speaker 9 Coming up, who would crack first?

Speaker 6 We get the phone call saying, hey, let's make a deal.

Speaker 26 Let's talk.

Speaker 10 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 45 A dogged investigation with a generous dollop of luck had revealed that Josh and Sirius were more than gymbuts spotting each other reps.

Speaker 2 They were armed robbers together.

Speaker 27 Detectives surmised that Brandy, their victim, must have known about Sirius and her husband's part in the holdups.

Speaker 54 For state's attorney Mike Haddocks, the homicide case had achieved critical mass.

Speaker 13 So what was the final green light for your investigators?

Speaker 2 When did they have it?

Speaker 60 When we found that these two guys

Speaker 60 were criminal conspirators, violent criminals in several robberies, there was our motive. And once I felt that we had the motive for Sirius Underwood to be involved in this murder, we were go.

Speaker 30 Which is, Josh's wife might be a risk for him.

Speaker 60 That's correct.

Speaker 46 She might snitch him out.

Speaker 60 She might snitch him out.

Speaker 26 Haddocks convened a grand jury.

Speaker 20 Assistant state's attorneys Ron Welch and John Lytle would present the case.

Speaker 40 There would be a lot of convoluted storytelling and evidence for the jurors to follow.

Speaker 18 You've got robberies going on, the homicide, the cell phone data, how you link all these people up.

Speaker 47 You're going to have multiple snitches who are all going to be testifying who all have their own issues the grand jury sat for three months and heard more than a hundred witnesses in march 2016 it returned indictments against josh daniels and serious underwood at the request of authorities in ohio the alaska state troopers located josh at his mother's home in wasilla once ohio gave the green light to the troopers to move on their suspect they did The cuffs went on without incident.

Speaker 57 A bulked up Josh was put in the backseat of a cruiser and driven downtown.

Speaker 46 Detective Michael confronted him.

Speaker 70 You've been charged with several counts, including the robberies that occurred at Gabriel Brothers,

Speaker 70 Tumbleweed, the one that you're going to do at Campbell's, and the murder of your soon-to-be ex-wife, Brandy.

Speaker 28 Josh was shown a graphic crime scene photo of poor Brandy.

Speaker 70 This is what you are responsible for.

Speaker 24 This is what happened to your ex. And I'm willing to talk to you to get your side of the story if you're willing to talk to me.

Speaker 67 I think you're a good investigator but I'm gonna have an attorney.

Speaker 23 So, okay. We're gonna do that.

Speaker 18 That's fine Josh.

Speaker 27 Meanwhile back in Zanesville police surrounded Sirius Underwood's car and arrested him.

Speaker 25 His interrogation didn't last long.

Speaker 62 You know why you're here?

Speaker 62 Tell me. Okay.
We've had a grand jury and you've been indicted. For what?

Speaker 62 Aggravated murder. Aggravated robberies, attempted robberies, weapon under disability, tampering with evidence.
Josh Daniels is also arrested.

Speaker 62 Josh is up there talking, and I think it's the proper thing to tell you that you have the opportunity to tell me too. Would you like to talk to me about this?

Speaker 62 No lawyer. You want a lawyer? Yeah.

Speaker 62 Okay.

Speaker 33 Josh waived extradition and was brought back to Ohio.

Speaker 43 Brandy's mother got word at the end of her shift.

Speaker 7 I get a phone call. You need to get down here now.

Speaker 11 There you are in a courtroom. What's going on?

Speaker 7 Josh is there doing his plea, and then they go over details that we weren't aware of.

Speaker 11 So it's got to bring all the pain right back again, huh?

Speaker 17 How did he look to you in the courtroom?

Speaker 7 Not a care in the world.

Speaker 40 Wendy was in the courtroom as well.

Speaker 13 This is big news. Sirius is charged.
He's in jail.

Speaker 6 Do you believe that he killed Brandy Daniels, that he shot her to death on that road?

Speaker 66 No, I don't. Sirius had just so much going for him, and he had worked so hard, and I would just say, why?

Speaker 66 What did he have to gain from doing something like that?

Speaker 46 Over the next few months, Welch and Lytle prepared their cases.

Speaker 58 Josh would be tried first, then Sirius.

Speaker 61 They laid out their case on index cards. Motive was looking more complicated than ever.

Speaker 25 In opening arguments, they'd have to explain to jurors just who these defendants are.

Speaker 26 Sirius, the overachieving charmer, and bad husband Josh, who'd been abusing anabolic steroids for years.

Speaker 22 Josh was roided out. He was out of his mind using steroids, serious as a sociopath.
Whereas for Josh, it was a status of being enraged and jealous.

Speaker 46 I think he still loved her, and she was just done with him.

Speaker 26 Josh sat behind bars for seven months.

Speaker 36 Deprived of elephant doses of steroids, his chemically enhanced muscles deflated like spent balloons.

Speaker 54 They'd found their weak link.

Speaker 18 We get the phone call from Josh's defense attorney saying, hey, let's make a deal.

Speaker 33 Let's talk.

Speaker 18 The issue that we had was, you know, who do you make the deal with? The guy that had his wife killed or the guy that shot her point-blank range in the face?

Speaker 39 The state's attorney agreed to a plea deal.

Speaker 52 But Josh Daniels would have to tell all.

Speaker 67 I want to start off with the murder.

Speaker 10 Coming up.

Speaker 9 One down, one to go.

Speaker 14 What was the weakness in the case?

Speaker 13 You're still going to have Josh come in as your witness.

Speaker 46 Josh.

Speaker 13 The jury wouldn't like him. So within that, there might be wiggle room for Sirius.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 29 Decently. As part of pleading guilty to murdering his wife Brandy, Josh Daniels had to admit what he'd done, provide what lawyers call a proffer.

Speaker 36 He was brought to a conference room at the prosecutor's office.

Speaker 22 When was the first time that this

Speaker 22 idea came about?

Speaker 67 I've known Sirius Underwood for

Speaker 67 Go Wild. We were having a conversation one day at his apartment, and I was telling him about

Speaker 67 how hard this was on me.

Speaker 67 Me and Brandy splitting up, and how pissed off I was that she was seeing that guy, Craig.

Speaker 67 And

Speaker 67 he made the comment, well,

Speaker 67 f that bitch, let's just offer it.

Speaker 67 And

Speaker 67 at the time, being emotional and mad, you know,

Speaker 67 I made the decision that maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea.

Speaker 33 Josh helped him stalk his wife.

Speaker 67 Sirius asked me where she lived.

Speaker 67 I told him.

Speaker 67 And

Speaker 67 he asked me about her work schedule. I told him.

Speaker 26 And it wasn't just brandy, Josh wanted dead.

Speaker 67 I told him, well,

Speaker 67 see if you could go over to her boyfriend's house, Craig's, see if you can find him where he lives, and

Speaker 67 break into his house and kill both of them. Did he? Huh?

Speaker 22 Did he find out where he lived? Yeah.

Speaker 54 Did he try to break in the house? No.

Speaker 67 Not that I know of.

Speaker 29 They schemed together on the eve of the murder.

Speaker 67 He asked me a day before,

Speaker 67 are you sure

Speaker 67 that you want this done? And I'd been drinking and

Speaker 67 swelling and I had alcohol problems and steroid problems and I was just mad. I said yeah.

Speaker 54 How did it go down?

Speaker 67 I told him that she was getting off work.

Speaker 67 I would text Sirius and just say the word close. He just said that I've got this Sear car.

Speaker 67 I don't know actually what took place on the night and I know that she was shot so I don't know if he parked his vehicle somewhere and came running out of the bushes.

Speaker 67 I never talked to Sirius after the murder actually happened.

Speaker 52 He certainly confirmed with you that it happened.

Speaker 67 He said done.

Speaker 29 They asked, How could Josh live with himself after killing the mother of his child?

Speaker 67 I thought that

Speaker 67 they would just go away.

Speaker 67 That this day would never come.

Speaker 67 That me getting arrested would never happen.

Speaker 67 After Brandy's death, it became an alcoholic.

Speaker 67 Drinking every day

Speaker 67 and

Speaker 67 taking her using heroin downers.

Speaker 67 Just anything to numb that pain.

Speaker 29 The killer husband sounded almost contrite. If I could go back and I could change it, I would.

Speaker 29 Brandy didn't deserve what happened to her. She was a good girl.

Speaker 29 And ultimately, years down the road,

Speaker 67 having Brandy gone, seeing how that affects my, that's going to affect my daughter's life. She's not going to have her mom.

Speaker 67 And knowing that I played a part in that,

Speaker 67 I can't live with that.

Speaker 31 With Josh about to throw himself at the mercy of the court, prosecutors still had the accused trigger man to deal with.

Speaker 29 But Sirius was hanging tough, not saying a word.

Speaker 25 So with only one of the two accused going to trial, the state star witness would be Josh Daniels.

Speaker 44 As prosecutors prepared him to testify, they were still trying to wrap their arms around Sirius' motive for the murder.

Speaker 17 What's he telling you?

Speaker 18 When I pushed Josh on why?

Speaker 18 Why would he do this? And he says, that's what dudes do for dudes. That's what Sirius told him.
Because they asked him, he's like, you do that for me? And he just said, that's what dudes do for dudes.

Speaker 16 Kill your wife.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 54 Crunch time for the prosecutors.

Speaker 40 Sirius's trial was looming, and they were far from confident.

Speaker 14 What was the weakness in the case?

Speaker 13 You're still going to have Josh come in as your witness.

Speaker 46 Josh.

Speaker 18 That the jury wouldn't like him. You're asking the jury to rely upon somebody that's admitted to having their wife executed.
That's a tough pill to swallow.

Speaker 13 So within that, there might be wiggle room for Sirius.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 58 Just days before before Sirius's trial was scheduled to begin.

Speaker 22 I was writing my opening. I got a text message from the defense attorney saying, you guys do an Alfred plea?

Speaker 38 Sirius's lawyer was proposing a plea deal, an Alford plea, the screwball pitch of American jurisprudence.

Speaker 14 Alfred plea to civilians, to laymen.

Speaker 13 Has a very sketchy kind of feel to it. Do you want to take a crack at trying to explain what an Alfred plea is?

Speaker 6 Sure.

Speaker 22 It basically is when somebody says,

Speaker 22 I'm willing to say that you have lots of information and

Speaker 22 I'm going to plead guilty,

Speaker 22 but I'm not going to say I actually did anything wrong.

Speaker 14 And I say, huh? Right. And then I turn to Ron and say, how's this go again?

Speaker 18 So he's going to take responsibility without saying he did it.

Speaker 40 The state's attorney signed off and the trial judge accepted Sirius Underwood's Alfred plea.

Speaker 33 Sirius was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 38 years.

Speaker 36 Josh Daniels got life with the possibility of parole after 28 years.

Speaker 31 Not enough time for some of Brandy's loved ones.

Speaker 13 So where do we stand now?

Speaker 16 They've both been dealt with, huh?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 11 My guess.

Speaker 16 Your opinion, do you think they both got off easy? Yes, they did.

Speaker 11 They're still breathing. She's not.

Speaker 29 Josh and Sirius are serving their sentences in separate maximum security prisons.

Speaker 38 Brandy's parents took in their granddaughter.

Speaker 39 The family is left with a snapshot album itself getting older, but the young woman pictured in the pages inside staying the same.

Speaker 31 Never to have her own album of her daughter graduating, getting married.

Speaker 14 Time ran out for brandy on a dark hilltop before she could kiss her daughter goodnight.

Speaker 17 That's all for now.

Speaker 24 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 10 Thanks for joining us.