The Secret in Black Rock Canyon

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We had a victim who was a 16-year-old female that had been stabbed numerous times. I was in a complete state of shock.
Who could do this to my daughter? She was a good kid, somebody that everybody loved at school. Say hi, please.
She, like, laughed at every single joke that I made, even if they were terrible. She made me feel special.
It doesn't happen in a small town. There were rumors upon rumors.
Do we have a madman on the loose? The biggest surprise was really the videotape that we found. Unfortunately, we have the grueling task of killing our two friends.
They were obsessed with kill movies, thriller movies. We're sick, psychopaths, the negative pleasure of killing other people.
I was still waiting for her to walk out of the house. I just remember it was a normal

day. If I would have known that was her last day, I would have treated that day different.

A Young Life Ended by Killer, starring in a homemade horror film. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Here's Keith Morrison with The Secret in Black Rock Canyon. It was Sunday afternoon calm.
No longer quite summer, not exactly autumn yet. Bits of yellow and orange growing here and there in the green.
Around Pocatello, Idaho. It was September 24, 2006.
It was a beautiful day, really. Sunny.
There was no snow or anything on the ground. Idaho State Police Lieutenant Robert Rouch was on weekend duty when the radio squawked.

Emergency 911.

I need an ambulance out of my house. Okay, what's going on?

There's a good deal, dead on my floor.

It came through our dispatch, and when the address came out, I knew exactly where it

was because I grew up there.

A street called Whispering Cliffs.

Lieutenant Rauch raced there,

raced toward the nightmare.

Couldn't know that as he drove, of course,

or that what he would encounter

was going to be almost literally a horror movie.

What did you see in that house?

Um, well, I saw a young lady laying on the floor. Lots of blood.
She had been stabbed again and again. Lieutenant Rouch secured the house, called for backup.
In town, police captain John Gansky got an urgent call from his colleague. Did you get a sense over the phone that this was something different? Yeah, I got a sense from just his voice that we knew that we needed every resource that we could muster up to get on this and see what we could do to solve this.
The victim was 16-year-old Cassie Jo Stoddart, a junior at the local Pocatello High School. That weekend, Cassie and her boyfriend Matt had gone to House and Petsit for her relatives while they took a weekend trip.
Sunday afternoon, the relatives arrived home to this horror and called 911. As Lieutenant Rouch tried to absorb it all, Cassie's parents arrived.
They, of course, wanted to go into the place, but we couldn't let them go in there because it's a crime scene, and, you know, I think any parent would want to go in there. This is Cassie's mother, Anna.
I couldn't believe it. I'm like, I was still waiting for her to walk out of that house and everything be okay.

And it wasn't happening.

I mean, I was in a complete state of shock.

Who could do this to my daughter?

Anna had let her house sit because Cassie was so responsible.

But partway through the weekend, something felt off. Cassie wasn't answering the phone.
Then we got sidetracked doing other things. I'm thinking, well, she'll be okay.
She'll be okay. You know, it's Pocatello, Idaho.
You don't think that... But when I didn't get answers, I wanted to go up there that night, and we just got doing things.
So she told herself not to worry and went to bed. I'm like, oh, I'll just go to sleep.
We'll go up there in the morning. I'm just going to go pick her up and bring her back home.
That's all there is to it. Too late.
Monday morning, like an electric shock, the news spread around Pocatello High School. Our teacher, Bob Beeson, had just arrived when one of his students came up to him.
And at first it was disbelief. She told me, Cassie's been murdered.
It's not something you hear about a 16-year-old girl. No, and it's unimaginable.
I had lost students to car accidents, but never something like that. Cassie's friend Justin Sands heard at school, too.
Everybody did. I didn't believe it at first, because they, you know, I'm like, no, I just saw her on Friday, you know.
Cassie and Justin became fast friends in English class. I sat to the right of her, and she sat to the left of me.
Pretty close together. Yeah, we were friends.
I don't know, she, like, laughed at every single joke that I made, even if they were terrible. So she made me feel funny.

She made me feel special.

Now once boisterous hallways were filled with hushed whispers and nervous glances.

I mean, we were convinced it had to be somebody outside the school.

It had to be somebody, you know, just passing through.

We wanted answers.

Everybody in the school did.

Police too, of course.

Back at the house in Whispering Cliffs,

now a crime scene,

detectives were methodically, piece by piece,

trying to figure out what happened.

Was the house disrupted at all?

I mean, was it stuff thrown around?

From looking at the scene, it was clear that Cassie put up an extreme fight. She fought for her life.
But the knife, the murder weapon, gone. Along with any concrete reason, it made no sense.
Some of the first thoughts that go through my mind was, you know, do we have a madman on the loose? Because there's no obvious motives. No obvious motive at this point in time.
Did it look as if there had been a break-in? There was no indication of forced entry or, you know, burglary or robbery. But Captain Gatsky knew full well.
The whole town demanded answers.

We know that time is of the essence.

We know that, you know, we have to really get on this quickly.

And so they began.

By piecing together, hour by hour, Cassie Jo Stoddard's last day on this earth,

and somewhere buried, would be the clue they were looking for.

Hey, look, it's Cassie. Hey, hello, man.
Hello, Cassie. and somewhere buried would be the clue they were looking for.

Hey, look, it's Cassie.

Hey, hello, Kyle.

Hello, Cassie.

The hills around the little country house they called Whispering Cliffs, bucolic and quiet on a Sunday afternoon, were lost on police captain John Gansky, focused now on the obscenity of the crime committed here. He had to know everything about Cassie Jo Stoddart.
Cassie was a, you know, a thriving 16-year-old, you know, student at Pocatello High School. You know, all indications.
She got good grades. She was a good kid.
And she was viewed as somebody that everybody loved at school. Detectives retraced Cassie's steps hour by hour, starting with her morning at Pocatello High School.
Friday, September 22, 2006, 8 a.m., Cassie's mom, Anna. I remember dropping her off at school that morning.
Her green shirt and her white jacket. As students filed into their morning classes, art teacher Bob Beeson recalled an air of excitement in the hallways.
People are already gearing up for homecoming and things like that coming up. So the social life in the hallways would be pretty intense at that point, I would think.
Oh, yeah, the hallways are hectic. Half an hour later, a classmate captured Cassie on video

at her locker.

Hey, look, it's Cassie.

Hey, look, I don't know.

Hello, Cassie.

Say hi, please. Hi.
Okay, see ya. Wait.
Her schedule was as it always was on Fridays. Geometry, Spanish, and, of course, English with her friend Justin Sands.
I remember the very last time I saw her. I'll never forget that.
Describe it. I remember walking out of class right behind her as we went different ways.
So you have a recollection of seeing a fleeting glance as she walked away? Yeah. I just remember seeing the back of her head and how she did her hair and just her walking down the hall.

And I remember when I found out that she had got murdered, I remember that vision was what kept going through my head the very last time that I saw her.

After school, Anna picked up Cassie and boyfriend Matt Beckham and then dropped them off at

the house on Whispering Cliffs to house-sit and take care of the two dogs and cats. I dropped her and Matt off.
I set the rules, this, this, that. I called her that night.
I actually talked to her that night. She said, oh, I'll call you in the morning, Mom, okay? Well, you know, trustful mother, you know, you trust your kids, okay.
But 16 years old, as evening deepened, Anna could not resist picking up the phone just to check. I called later on that evening.
It was about 9.30, 10 o'clock. And we're just watching movies.
I'll call you in the morning,

Mom. Okay, I love you.
Bye. And that was, that was the last time I talked to her.
An apparently uneventful night, except for something odd. Sometime that evening, the electricity went off, then came back on again.

Boyfriend Matt said he departed. Except for something odd.
Sometime that evening, the electricity went off, then came back on again.

Boyfriend Matt said he departed around 11.30 p.m.,

leaving Cassie all alone at the Whispering Cliffs house.

You know, he was the last one that saw her.

I didn't know what was going on, who had been there, what happened to her,

what was going on, I didn't know.

Her boyfriend, Matt, was with her for a period of time, but had left on Friday night. And so this was pretty interesting to us.
What happened after Matt left was a mystery. Lieutenant Robert Rauch and forensic technicians scoured the house for evidence and answers.

And one question in particular stuck out to them.

Why did the power go out?

They said, OK, if the power's been getting turned on and off, somebody's been in the fuse box,

so we probably better check that for fingerprints and make sure whose prints there are. And they discovered some prints on the box.
And the prints matched a man. Explore the world's hidden wonders on the Atlas Obscura Podcast.
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For whatever happens next, grab Kleenex. Police investigating the murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart believed they discovered a key piece of evidence.
Perfect fingerprints lifted from the fuse box from which power was turned off and on the night Cassie was killed. And there was a match.
Who did they belong to? They belonged to Cassie's mom's boyfriend, and so, you know, he naturally became the person that the police wanted to talk to next. So they interviewed boyfriend Victor and demanded to know just what was he doing in the Whispering Cliffs house.
Victor told them he'd been there to fix a few things for Anna's relatives. He said that he had done some work at that house and had been in the fuse box, and so naturally his prints would be on there.
They also checked him for an alibi and found out that he was, at the time of this incident, at the next-door neighbor's house playing video games. And that was corroborated by the next-door neighbors.
And then his time back home was corroborated by Cassie's mom. So we eliminated him because we, quite frankly, couldn't place him at the scene.
But, of course, there was Cassie's boyfriend, Matt Beckham, 16 years old. Matt, after all, was the last person known to have seen Cassie alive.
Matt's a person of interest that we really need to talk to. The day Cassie's body was found, Captain Gansky went to Matt's home, knocked on the door.
How did he respond to your, you know, suddenly showing up at his door? Of course, we had to break the news to Matt that his girlfriend had been murdered. And it sticks in my mind that Matt didn't show a great deal of emotion at all.
And that was somewhat of a red flag. The whole thing was flat.
All the way through. Yes.
Kansky made that mental note and then got down to what he had gone there to do. He asked Matt to recount his last hours with Cassie.
And Matt confirmed what Anna had already told police, that after school he and Cassie were dropped off at Whispering Cliffs to house-sit and take care of the dogs and cats.

They watched some movies, you know, they ate food,

and it was his intent to stay there with Cassie.

About 10 p.m., said Matt, the electricity went out, scared them both.

A few moments later, the lights turned on again,

so they decided it must have been a problem of the power company. At 11 p.m., Matt called his mother.
Said that she was coming to pick Matt up, that Matt needed to come home. He didn't really want to come home.
And Matt requested if Cassie could come with them and stay the night. Sure.
But in the background, the mother had heard Cassie say, like, no, no, I promised that I would house sit, and so I've got to stay here and take care of my commitment. When Matt's parents arrived, he kissed his girlfriend goodnight and then got in the car.
And that, said Matt, was the last time he saw Cassie Jo. If she had not been quite so responsible to stay and look after the house, isn't that the irony of it? She was trying to be responsible, she's trying to do the right thing, and it didn't turn out for her.
At 12.30 a.m., worried about Cassie, all alone in that house with the scary blackouts, Matt said he picked up the phone and dialed her number. He was concerned to check in on Cassie.
He'd called the house several times, got no answer. Matt's story seemed plausible, but his flat demeanor worried the detectives didn't add up,

not to police and not to classmates at school.

The rumor went around fast, said Justin Sands,

that Matt was somehow involved in Cassie's murder.

Instantly, everyone thought it was Matt Beckham.

What can you tell me about him at that age?

He was just a goofball. He didn't take much things serious.
Why did he suppose she was attracted to him? I guess he wouldn't, I wouldn't ever guess those two to be together, to be honest. Oh, really? They're way different, yeah.
I've known Matt for forever, too. He was a good kid, just trying to make it through.
The detectives decided to give Matt a polygraph. He took a polygraph, and guess what? He passed with flying colors.
Was that a big turn? Because there had been a lot of suspicion just based on his reaction. Absolutely.
It was a big turn for us. It was encouraging at least that, okay, now we don't have to spend maybe more time with him anymore.
The polygraph seemed to clear Matt. But as the interview was ending, he revealed something.
A detail he'd almost forgotten to mention. He just kind of mentioned in passing that, oh, by the way, Tori and Brian stopped by the house on Whispering Cliffs on Friday night.
Just in passing? Just in passing. Which we thought was kind of odd that he didn't say it earlier.
Mind you, said Matt, Tori Adamczyk and Brian Draper were friends, and they left the house before he did. Still, might be something in this.

What did you think when you heard that? Oh, it said

absolutely. So now we've got two

other people that we need to immediately

start talking to.

Two teenagers,

fellow students at Pocatello High

who came and went the last night of

Cassie's life.

What did they know? It was just an offhand remark, really, when Cassie Jo Stoddard's boyfriend Matt Beckham mentioned that two students had dropped by the Whispering Cliffs house on Friday evening. Tori Adamchick and Brian Draper were their names, also 16, also students at Pocatello High.
So police tracked down Tori and Brian at their homes, and they confirmed what Matt had told them. The boys stopped by the house,

watched a movie together, Kill Bill 2,

ate some snacks,

toured the house as curious teenagers would,

and then they departed.

Around 9.30, they left

and decided to go to a movie in Pocatello.

And it was really weird to us

that they weren't able to tell us what the movie was about, which we thought was odd. The detectives drove downtown to the theater.
We did find a person that worked there that happened to be a classmate of Brian and Tori's. And she was able to confirm that for us, that they were absolutely not there.
Now, there's a tell for you. It is.
At that point, did you think we got our guys here? We knew that they were lying to us. Now we have to figure out why are they lying to us.
But when Captain Gansky tried to contact Torrey again, neither he nor his parents seemed to want to talk.

So we kind of focused our efforts on Brian. The next day, you know, day two, we had an interview, a face-to-face interview with Brian.
We've done our homework, okay? Yeah. And I'm here to tell you, you didn't go to the movie.
Okay. You were not at that movie theater.
We didn't go to the movie. Okay.
I can tell you what we're doing.

I was trying to hide this.

We went through cars. Okay, you went through cars.
What does that mean? Uh, we checked for the cars that they're wall-locked. So Brian admitted they lied about going to the movie theater because they didn't want to tell police they were actually burglarizing cars.
Did you have anything to do with the murder of Cassie? No. No, I did not have anything to do with the murder of Cassie.
We have a promise from you that there is no more lies, right? No, this is it. This is it.
I don't even think I would kill my friend. Captain Gansky wasn't buying it, so he arranged for Brian to take a polygraph the next day.
But just before it was to begin, the polygrapher called the captain and said, Now he's very, very upset. He needs to talk to the two detectives, So it was a mad dash.
I knew that when somebody's upset and they're crying and they brought both now, both of his parents are with him. We knew that something's good is about to happen for the investigation.
And here he was, clearly upset. As he told a story that seemed straight from a horror movie.
After leaving the Whispering Cliffs house, said Brian, he and Tori sneaked back in through a basement door, intending to prank Cassie, just scare her. But then, he said, things got crazy.
So we came up the stairs and we walked here and we shut this door. We shut it, just scared.
Cassie was saying, who's there and stuff? And I was about to say, you know, hey. And then she screamed, she was out of this.
When that happens, do you see her? And do you see Tori? And I see Tori walk over there and I, is she still running down? She's just scared. She was standing up and she had a cell phone but like a house over her head.
So I walked closer and it was really astounding. And I was, you know what's going on? Was she laying on the ground? Yes, and she was breathing really hard.
And he was like, I have to kill her, I have to kill her. And she was stabbing her.
What are you doing? So was he stabbing her, was it in the chest? Yes. It was pitch black and then pitch black, and then he shot his flashlight on Cassie, and it was hard to face.
I knew she wasn't there anymore. And I just started to be...
And we walked back downstairs, we turned the power back on, and we went to his car, and... Did you stab her, too? No, I didn't touch Cassie.
I didn't touch her at all. Brian swore that's just how it happened.
It was a prank gone horribly wrong. Yes, he was there when Cassie was murdered, but he was just a witness.
It was Torrey who killed her. Torrey was the primary person behind this assault, and he was the mastermind behind it, and he was just there.
So basically giving it up, but kind of blaming the other guy. Right.
Now we're armed with all this information that we learned from Brian, so now we have to figure it out. How are we going to get it out of Tori? We've put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Finally, the detectives got Tori into an interview room, accompanied by his parents. We know how it went down.
Tell us what happened. We flat.
Out of Cassie's place. We went through the car, stayed right.
Okay. Um, you know, we're not here to you or anything, but we don't believe your story.
Take a deep breath and do it, but you know the truth. If we don't get the truth, we can't come together.
We can't work this thing out. We can't do it.
You're going to be left out in the cold. Can I talk to him in a turn? He can do that.
Can you talk to me? And that was that. There'd be nothing more from Torrey.
They had enough, though, to hold both and charge them with first-degree murder. But Captain Gansky knew he hadn't heard the real story.
Not yet. So Gansky and the other detectives focused on Brian.

And bit by bit, Brian revealed more and even took investigators on a trip. And what he showed them? Horror movie indeed.
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on NBC. It was late past midnight when they broke into the farmhouse.
Never in a million years would you think that you'd see your parents house taped off by that yellow tape. And they said, do you remember being killed? They left behind a wall of blood and a clue that took a case of double murder

on a long, strange trip.

She looked at me and she said,

I'm screwed.

Murder in the Moonlight,

a new podcast from Dateline.

Listen to all episodes now

wherever you get your podcasts. It was out at Black Rock Canyon that the certainty of it all hit police captain John Gansky.
How incomprehensible it was, but now undeniably true. Brian had told them there was evidence buried there, clothing, weapons, some masks.
He led the way in. So Brian and Tori would have parked their vehicle somewhere in this area right here, And then they walked this way up into the canyon

where they dug a hole up here.

And this is where they got rid of the evidence.

We were just amazed when we actually saw

the murder weapons, the clothing that they were wearing,

the masks, and the biggest surprise was really the videotape that we found in the hole. Videotape? Brian hadn't mentioned anything about that.
Maybe because they burned it. It was burned pretty badly.
It looked like something that maybe we won't won't be able to recover what's on it. So they sent it off to the experts and kept their fingers crossed.
And what do you know? I'd received a call that evening and found out that, you know, hey, the tape had been fixed. I think we can watch it and you might want to get out here and see what's going on.
And it was, you know, my fear that we were going to see. The killing.
The whole homicide, the killing. And I don't know if I was ready to see that.
There was silence throughout the whole room, and nobody said a word. You could hear a pin drop.
We're sick psychopaths, the naked pleasure of killing other people. There on tape was a horror movie.
We're going to be just like Scream. Only this one was real.
Scream, huh? The opening scene, Cassie at her locker preparing for class. The male voice you hear is Brian's.
Hey, look, it's Cassie. Hey, look.

Hello, Cassie.

I'm getting you on tape, okay?

Say hi, please.

Hi.

Okay, see ya.

Brian and Tori skipped fourth period

in the school library.

They filmed themselves creating a death list of classmates

and their plan for that night.

September 27th, 26th.

We're skipping our fourth hour.

Our death list.

For when?

For actually tonight.

They were so excited. I mean, they were ecstatic.
The moment has finally come. Because I met this home run.
So you got to, I'll play it all right down now. She just happened to be the person who fell into the trap simply because she was house-sitting.
That was it. Right.
She was their friend, but, you know, it's just, it's sorry. Sorry, but, you know, it has to be you because you're a perfect victim.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry to ask his family, but she had been in the one.
We had sick of the plan. When Brian and Tori arrived at the Whispering Cliffs' house, they watched Kill Bill 2 together and ate some snacks.

At one point, Brian sneaked away and unlocked the basement door.

Around 9.30 p.m., Brian and Tori left the house,

but instead of actually leaving, they went to their car and recorded this video.

Unfortunately, we have the grueling task of killing our two friends, and they are right in a house just down the street. We just talked to them.
We were there for an hour. The boys stopped recording.
Then, Brian said, they sneaked back into the house through the basement door, dressed in scary masks, wearing gloves, wielding hunting knives. They opened the fuse box and turned the electricity off and then on again.
They were trying to lure the victims to come downstairs, but because Cassie and Matt were so afraid of the lights going on and off and the dogs standing at the top of the stairs, growling into the basement, that there was no way they were going downstairs. Around 11.30 p.m., Matt's parents arrived to take him home.
He didn't want to leave Cassie. I mean, he wanted to stay with her because it was scary.
Shortly after Matt left, it was time for the final act. Tori cut the power again, said the police.
And with the house cloaked in darkness, the two teenagers crept upstairs from the basement and attacked Cassie. It was our belief that they would have killed Matt as well.
There would have been a double homicide. Afterward, Brian and Tori returned to their car to record one final video.
Just killed Cassie. We just left your house.
This is not a f***ing joke. Tori and Brian stopped at a local convenience store to buy matches in hydrogen peroxide.
And then they drove to Black Rock Canyon where they tried to burn the evidence, the knives, the masks, the clothes, and that videotape.

The tape that revealed the truth.

I mean, it went by so fast. Shut the f*** up, we gotta get our act straight.

It's okay.

They both did it, the police concluded.

Brian and Tori together, just as they planned all along.

Dude, I just killed Cassie.

As for Matt Beckham,

he had nothing to do with Cassie's murder.

He was almost a victim himself.

The fact that Matt left and lived

is kind of, he's the key to unraveling this whole thing.

Had he been murdered as well,

I don't know if we would have ever known

that Tori and Brian had been to that house. Tori and Brian.
Why did they do it? What happened to those two? Hello? Is this Keith? It is. More than 15 years after the murder of that wonderful young woman named Cassie Jo Stoddard,

one of her killers would try to tell us.

Everyone asks me, like, what were you thinking?

Why did you do that?

Brian Brian Draper and Tori Adamczyk were 16 years old when Cassie Jo Stoddart was murdered.

But the two teens were tried as adults,

so serious was the charge of murdering their friend.

Tried separately, and each time the one on trial claimed the other one was the mastermind. By then, investigators had assembled evidence that the two teens had been living in their own personal horror movie fantasy.
There should be no law against killing people. Prosecutors discovered a kill list with a dozen other student names.
Their goal? To commit another Columbine-style school shooting. I think I'm a perfect game to be a school shooter.
That would be a perfect end of the year.

In 2007, both Torrey and Brian were found guilty of first-degree murder.

Both were sentenced to life without parole.

Banished from society, never to return.

So maybe that why question would never be answered.

And then, 15 years later,

we learned that Brian had been struggling with the question himself.

Hello?

Is this Keith?

It is.

Brian agreed to talk to us by phone from the Idaho State Correctional Institution. Everyone asks me, like, what were you thinking? Why did you do that? When people ask you that, do you try to explain? What do you do? I tell them it's really complicated.
It's not an easy thing. And I felt like nobody, and I felt like I'd be somebody if I did something, you know, big and bad.
And I say that I regret it every day of my life. He was in middle school when it began, he told us.
He had a stutter, didn't fit in. You felt like you were a loser.
Yeah, I felt like I was a loser. I felt like I didn't matter.
That's when I started going online and I would go into chat rooms with people who were obsessed. I would call them by high school shooting.
When he met Torrey Adamchick in high school, he said he felt like someone finally understood him. He's the one who got me into the whole horror movie thing.
You were doing the chat rooms, he was doing the movies. Is that right? Yes.
And so we were skipping a school assembly and we were hiding out in the bathroom and we were talking about screen. Yeah, okay.
And he said, Brian, have you ever thought about doing that for real? And I said, well, yeah, I think I have. And that's how this whole thing started.
I was struck by the cruelty of frightening that poor girl, turning the lights on and off and really scaring the crap out of her, knowing you were gonna go upstairs and kill her. I mean, that's hard to get your head around.
It is very hard to get your head around. I understand.
When you were doing it, did you know, did you realize how terrible you were being? No, I felt like I was being watched by an audience. That's how I felt.
And I felt like I was there to be in the movie streamream Is there anything more that you would say to some kid who was sort of wrapped up in these violent fantasies I would say that it's fear you're afraid of being a nobody you're afraid of being a loser but the other half of this that no one talks about is when you go to prison, you lose your entire life. You lose everything.
Except for this particular torment. With him every day for the rest of his life.
I would pay any amount of money for the rest of my life. I would give my life if I could change it.
If I could go back in time and say, hey, it's us, Cassie. It's us.
We're just joking around. It's us.
I would do anything for that. And I think about that all the time.
Tori Adamczyk is also locked up for life in the same prison as Brian.

Tori's family still believes that you were the main instigator in this whole plot.

Is that true?

No, that's not true.

If he wants to blame me and hate me and have his family hate me, that's fine.

Do you see him around?

Yeah, oh yeah, I see him in passing all the time. I don't talk to him and he doesn't talk to me.
Tori and Brian, who once bonded over violence, are now strangers, locked away together in their own version of hell. As you sit in your prison cell and live your prison life, I'm sure you think from time to time about Cassie's family.
And I will say, and this is for the record, that you were very concerned about how they would greet the fact that you're talking to us. You didn't want them to be hurt any more than they already had.
I'm concerned about that too. But what would you want to say to them? Is there something you'd like to say to them? That's hard, I know.
I'm sorry. And I promise that I will live the rest of my life as best as I can and do as best as I can to show that I'm sorry, because I'm sorry.

You can't bring her back.

I'm sorry, and it's not fair. It's not fair that I'm here talking to you.
It's not.

No, and it wasn't fair either that in April 2022, Cassie's mother Anna died, cancer. She was 57.
The Stoddard family, deeply wounded by all of this, quite understandably declined to participate in our story. Though, about Brian, Anna's husband told us,

there is no making amends.

This interview with Anna is from 2009.

The way she was taken from us

just wasn't fair.

Too young.

She had too much more to do

in her life.

Cassie Jo Stoddart.

Responsible, caring, kind,

even to those two high school misfits.

Her loss, a wound all the regret in the world, can never heal.

That's all for this edition of Dateline.

We'll see you again Friday at 9, 8 central.

And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

I'm Lester Holt.

For all of us at NBC News good night some sometimes. Doing this podcast is a chance for me and my good bud Woody to reconnect

after Cheers wrapped 30 years ago.

Plus, we're introducing each other to the friends

we've met since, like Jane Fonda,

Conan O'Brien, Eric Andre,

Mary Steenburgen, my wife,

and Flea from the Red Hot Chili

Peppers. And trust me, it's always

a great hang when Woody's there.

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