The Clearing

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Speaker 7 Tonight on Dateline.

Speaker 8 It's pulse-pounding footage.

Speaker 3 Do not move!

Speaker 9 It's a train. You can't stop it.

Speaker 10 You're being railroaded. You're like, how do I stop this?

Speaker 10 Someone with a finger in my face going, you killed your wife.

Speaker 11 These women had located a body.

Speaker 12 The woods is very thick and almost impassable.

Speaker 13 I kept pushing these vines. That's when I saw Emily.

Speaker 11 There's some sort of cord wrapped around her neck.

Speaker 14 The question is simple.

Speaker 15 Is this homicide or suicide? It didn't look like a suicide. This is a murder case.

Speaker 4 You killed her.

Speaker 10 Oh, I didn't, sir. They did this thing to try to rattle me.

Speaker 17 You killed her, she's dead.

Speaker 18 They search the house, the attic, the car.

Speaker 19 They find nothing.

Speaker 20 Why have the cops fixed on him?

Speaker 18 It's an easy fix and an obvious one.

Speaker 13 The first suspect is always the spouse, right?

Speaker 18 We don't know her journey. We don't know those last minutes.

Speaker 20 Did you do that, Matt? Did you kill your wife?

Speaker 10 What do you think?

Speaker 20 I want to hear you say it.

Speaker 10 Why do you feel the need for me to say that?

Speaker 7 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 21 Here's Dennis Murphy with the clearing.

Speaker 21 She absolutely loved the woods.

Speaker 3 That's something everyone can agree on.

Speaker 5 Deep in the forest, Emily nourished her soul in the joyous quiet.

Speaker 2 It's where she found peace and even food for her table.

Speaker 23 Did she also go there to escape?

Speaker 24 People here in Westerville, Ohio still wonder about that.

Speaker 26 It is a big mystery. I would just love to know the details.

Speaker 27 What happened?

Speaker 26 What really happened that night?

Speaker 3 Take a look.

Speaker 23 What do you see?

Speaker 3 For most of us, it's just a snarl of bushes and brambles.

Speaker 20 Emily Noble saw that and something else.

Speaker 30 Maybe a salad and a soup for dinner, an herbal tea.

Speaker 31 She was obsessed with foraging, the art of discovering food in nature.

Speaker 3 She shared her passion with friends like Celeste Grohn.

Speaker 26 She had a book that was like four inches, maybe even thicker, and it had every single plant in it, and she could identify what they were.

Speaker 34 She liked to go out and forage around her neighborhood, which I think is really cool.

Speaker 36 Emily's friend Kristo Williams bartends at Dick's Den, a music venue in nearby Columbus, one of Emily's favorite hangouts.

Speaker 34 She was way into live music and she used to love to come here. I've cut a rug with her on the dance floor many times.
I would say Emily was very much a free spirit.

Speaker 34 She just was this little fairy, you know, she just had so much light and energy in her.

Speaker 33 People were drawn to her neo-hippie tiny dancer spirit.

Speaker 32 Friends like Wendy Carney Hatch.

Speaker 39 Just really cute, really adorable, with dark curly hair and bright eyes and beautiful teeth, great smile. And when she walked, there was a little,

Speaker 39 like a little rhythm to her step.

Speaker 29 It may have seemed that Emily was dancing through life, but it hadn't been easy.

Speaker 40 She'd survived a lot of crushing sadness over the years. And in 2020, as the pandemic took hold, life got particularly hard.

Speaker 3 Like so many of us, Emily and her husband Matt were in lockdown.

Speaker 41 But on Sunday, May 24th, Emily and Matt wanted to get out and celebrate.

Speaker 42 It was Emily's 52nd birthday.

Speaker 24 It was also Memorial Day weekend. So they dipped their toes back into the local nightlife scene with a trip to some bars.

Speaker 44 It was right after the bars reopened from COVID and they were the only people I had. For the time that they were there, they were there for about 45 minutes.

Speaker 23 Jessica Selfridge was tending bar that night.

Speaker 3 She had time to observe her only customers.

Speaker 44 We talked a little bit about like COVID things, like I had to wear a mask, for instance. And they told me that since it was her birthday, they were going to continue to kind of bar hop a little bit.

Speaker 40 Emily and Matt got home around 7.

Speaker 47 Night turned into morning, into afternoon.

Speaker 32 At 2.47 p.m.

Speaker 46 on May 25th, Emily's friend Celeste Grohn got a call from Emily's phone.

Speaker 26 So I picked up and I said, hi, Emily.

Speaker 26 And it was Matt. And he said, is Emily over there? And I said, no.
And he said that they were supposed to go to a party in the afternoon and he hadn't seen her and she hadn't returned from a walk.

Speaker 26 in the morning and he was assuming it was a walk and I said well is this normal and he said, no, it's not normal. And I said, call the police.

Speaker 3 Celeste jumped in her car. Matt got back on the phone.

Speaker 10 My wife has been missing all day.

Speaker 49 Her purse is here with her ID.

Speaker 50 Her car is here with her car keys.

Speaker 50 And her phone's here.

Speaker 21 With his body cam rolling, Officer Rob Hollis of the Westerville, Ohio Police Department arrived at Emily and Matt's home.

Speaker 23 There was some momentary confusion after Matt came to the door because Celeste was just arriving, too.

Speaker 26 Matt did a double take.

Speaker 26 He's like, oh, there she is.

Speaker 52 You.

Speaker 8 He's looking at you.

Speaker 26 Thinking I'm Emily.

Speaker 53 You look just like her for like a second. Oh my god, there's stupid.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 50 Matt Moore.

Speaker 54 Oh, Officer Hollis.

Speaker 3 Hello.

Speaker 53 Hi. Celeste.

Speaker 3 I've got her.

Speaker 43 In a matter of minutes, Officer Hollis got most of the story.

Speaker 3 What's going on? He heard how Matt and Emily had gone out the night before, how they came home around seven and went to bed early. Matt said he woke up after midnight.

Speaker 10 I get up in the middle of the night sometimes

Speaker 53 to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 53 So I can head up in this bedroom, our second bedroom.

Speaker 20 He told the officer he was noodling around on his phone till the wee hours. not falling asleep again until around 6 and not out of bed until after 10 a.m.

Speaker 23 That's when he says he first noticed Emily was gone.

Speaker 3 He didn't go out to look for her, but said he waited.

Speaker 30 Waited for hours.

Speaker 53 I was just waiting for her to tell me when we should go. I texted her twice and say we wanted to party.
She didn't get back to me.

Speaker 55 He used the PhoneFinder app and learned her phone was still in the condo.

Speaker 32 He thought maybe she went to the woods nearby.

Speaker 53 She forages, she goes for walks and she picks wild edibles. That's kind of her hobby.

Speaker 50 She goes around here.

Speaker 53 It's a real short walk. It's It's 15 minutes the most.

Speaker 10 A lot of the time I was like, well, maybe she's just out doing that.

Speaker 32 The officer's quick check of the condo revealed nothing in disarray.

Speaker 56 No surprises.

Speaker 3 Emily, it turned out, was a housekeeper extraordinaire.

Speaker 20 The garage was immaculate. The house was immaculate.

Speaker 26 Yeah, Emily was very neat.

Speaker 50 She's really meticulous.

Speaker 10 And she just, this is uncharacteristic. She would never go somewhere and not tell you where she was.

Speaker 49 So I see that the bed was made. Did you do that or she did that?

Speaker 53 That is, is, uh, I just noticed that. You're right.
I didn't make the bed. She did.

Speaker 53 That bed was made when I got up today.

Speaker 50 I didn't make it.

Speaker 53 So she was, I'm guessing, fear of this money.

Speaker 5 The officer took off for a few minutes to speak with colleagues outside, then returned with some news.

Speaker 49 Your neighbor saw her in the garage about between 9 and 10 a.m. this morning.
Says she was just standing in the garage. Awesome.
When he was leaving, he saw her. She was just standing there.

Speaker 49 He said hello. She said hello.
So we know

Speaker 3 she's around.

Speaker 10 Somewhere around.

Speaker 53 Okay. Awesome.

Speaker 58 So that seemed reassuring.

Speaker 3 Maybe the case of the missing Emily Noble would be one big false alarm.

Speaker 46 She'd come waltzing through that door any minute, wouldn't she?

Speaker 36 The town of Westerville, Ohio was waking up to a brand new day, and Emily Noble was still missing. Her husband, Matt, hadn't seen her for more than 24 hours.

Speaker 8 And now Westerville PD Detective Steve Grubbs was reading the responding officer's report about the visit with Emily's husband, Matt Moore.

Speaker 11 On my own, you proactively pulled up that report and read the narrative to it. And something about it just didn't simply.

Speaker 23 What made your nose twitch about it, if that's the right word?

Speaker 21 Yeah,

Speaker 11 that inner gut feeling, it just felt like something was off.

Speaker 5 Turns out the neighbor's account of seeing Emily that Memorial Day morning had gotten fuzzy.

Speaker 3 Now he wasn't so sure when he'd seen her last.

Speaker 5 Detective Grubbs figured this missing woman story needed a deeper dive.

Speaker 42 He asked to be assigned to the case and then headed to the condo with some other officers.

Speaker 26 She ever been gone the thong before?

Speaker 54 No.

Speaker 53 Not at all, I think.

Speaker 59 So our next step was this bloodhound to see if we can get a track someplace.

Speaker 47 By noon, a bloodhound was tracking Emily's set.

Speaker 20 The dog led investigators to a gravel drive between two houses just a few blocks away.

Speaker 32 They knocked on the doors.

Speaker 3 No one answered.

Speaker 32 Detectives asked Matt Moore to take them to the nearby woods where Emily liked to walk.

Speaker 11 Matt actually showed Detective Peachy and I that the area that they would go and forage.

Speaker 20 Grubbs and two other detectives returned to the spot a little later, looked around, didn't see anything interesting.

Speaker 3 As police got to know Matt, they also learned more about Emily.

Speaker 57 Tell me about Emily Noble.

Speaker 20 Who is she turning out to be?

Speaker 11 She seemed to be a hard-working woman, worked for the state of Ohio.

Speaker 60 She worked at the Ohio Department of Medicaid.

Speaker 40 She and Matt had been married for two years.

Speaker 8 Matt had worked the tables in a Las Vegas casino before he left that job and moved to Ohio.

Speaker 20 Matt did not work, is that correct?

Speaker 26 He did not work. His mother had passed away and left him a sizable sum of money, so he didn't really need to work.

Speaker 3 The routine.

Speaker 40 He cooked, she took care of the house.

Speaker 3 They hung out, drank a bit, sometimes a lot.

Speaker 32 And when the COVID lockdown took hold, Emily started working from home.

Speaker 3 But life was rarely easy for Matt and Emily.

Speaker 20 He died a lot of death in her life.

Speaker 9 Yes, yes, she had. She had a husband, right?

Speaker 11 Yep. She had a previous marriage, and ultimately, Mark committed suicide.

Speaker 20 By gun.

Speaker 28 Yes, sir.

Speaker 3 Wendy remembers how much Emily loved her first husband, how awful it was when he died in 2011.

Speaker 39 After Mark passed away, there was...

Speaker 39 there was a couple years that were pretty dark. She would get just really sad, you know.

Speaker 29 Emily's parents died a few years later in sudden accidental deaths.

Speaker 32 Those who knew her say Emily turned to nature to heal herself.

Speaker 46 Chris Barton, a lifelong friend, said Emily put aside her own sadness by looking out for the people she loved.

Speaker 10 Thinking about them instead of thinking about what was going on with her, I think a lot of the time gave her something to concentrate on if it wasn't that it wasn't herself.

Speaker 3 She kept a photo collection of the edible plants she grew and collected, a visual progress report of her devotion to foraging.

Speaker 20 She often foraged in this woodland park.

Speaker 10 We took a lot of pictures with our phones. And it was just a place you could sit and just let nature be around you.

Speaker 39 She was a very good photographer. She really liked sunrise and sunset.
She loved fog and water.

Speaker 3 Nature, obviously.

Speaker 33 She took a lot of selfies, so many selfies.

Speaker 56 Four years after her first husband died, she met Matt, and now he was part of the picture.

Speaker 46 Matt took this one showing him and Emily and his son Joey.

Speaker 3 This was their family unit, because when Matt moved in with Emily, his teenage son did too.

Speaker 23 Police noticed that Joey was a painful subject for Matt Moore.

Speaker 7 The morning he reported Emily missing, he mentioned Joey right away.

Speaker 53 I was cutting feeling right here when my son died this evening.

Speaker 3 That was a terrible story.

Speaker 29 By the time Matt and Emily got married, Joey was suffering full-blown schizophrenia.

Speaker 3 Emily and Matt were doing their best with him, but nearly a year into the marriage, Joey died by suicide, just 17 years old.

Speaker 33 He was found hanging in a nature preserve in Westerville.

Speaker 7 This was the second child Matt lost.

Speaker 57 The first son was only a toddler when he died of a sudden illness.

Speaker 64 I can't even imagine.

Speaker 65 Matt's friend, Arturo Ruggieroli.

Speaker 20 Tell me about losing Joey and what that meant for him.

Speaker 64 It was oblivion. It was, there was...

Speaker 64 Nothing left of the person who he was for a while.

Speaker 57 Emily was also devastated by Joey's death.

Speaker 23 And now she was missing.

Speaker 63 Talented, complicated, beloved Emily.

Speaker 66 Westerville police are searching for a woman who has been missing since Memorial Day.

Speaker 3 Calls poured into the police tip line.

Speaker 23 Emily seemed to be everywhere.

Speaker 11 She was at the grocery store. She's at a homeless shelter.
She's sleeping under a bridge. She's sleeping in a doorway.

Speaker 55 The Westerville PD chased down those tips, but nothing led to Emily.

Speaker 20 They headed to the bar where Matt and Emily were seen the night of her birthday.

Speaker 44 When I talked to the detective, he told me that she had gone missing and asked me

Speaker 44 how they were behaving that night and everything like that.

Speaker 44 They had the kind of banter that was like, they were very lovey-dovey one minute, and then they would be more so like, there was tension the next minute.

Speaker 3 There wasn't much more to tell, but police did have one solid clue from those bloodhounds.

Speaker 55 Remember, they tracked Emily's scent to that driveway a few hundred yards away.

Speaker 33 Was that telling police something?

Speaker 11 Did she voluntarily get into a car in that driveway and take off? Was she dragged there and, you know, kidnapped?

Speaker 63 All good questions.

Speaker 20 Maybe police were looking at a stranger abduction.

Speaker 58 Or maybe the disappearance of Emily Noble had nothing to do with any stranger.

Speaker 16 Guys, I did not hurt my wife. I did not hurt my wife.
I loved her.

Speaker 3 The Westerville PD was working the case of the missing Emily Noble, tracking down tips following leads.

Speaker 3 That driveway where Bloodhounds lost Emily scent, detectives went back to the two houses there and interviewed a homeowner.

Speaker 11 The people that resided there had no interaction with Emily, had not seen or heard anything, and they were ultimately cleared altogether.

Speaker 3 Dead end.

Speaker 11 I feel like we were trying to catch a ghost at that point because we didn't know what we were dealing with. You know,

Speaker 11 is she suicidal? Was she kidnapped? Did she run away with the boyfriend?

Speaker 20 All viable threads, theoretically.

Speaker 11 At that point, absolutely.

Speaker 21 Another viable thread, of course, was Matt.

Speaker 46 Investigators keyed in on the fact that he didn't even go out looking for Emily before he reported her missing.

Speaker 11 Didn't leave the house, didn't do any sort of searching on his own, just kind of hung out at the house.

Speaker 33 Police started hearing troubling things from her friends about her marriage to Matt.

Speaker 20 What is he doing during the day?

Speaker 26 Drinking.

Speaker 9 Really?

Speaker 26 Oh, Emily would get so mad.

Speaker 26 If he was drinking during the day, she said, you need to wait till I get home from work.

Speaker 48 Wait till the bell hits five o'clock.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 46 Emily's friend Wendy detected unhappiness in one of those photos from the night before Emily disappeared.

Speaker 39 She's looking at the camera, kind of steely-eyed, and he looks like he's crying.

Speaker 39 And I just think that picture is worth a thousand words.

Speaker 51 Others called the detectives with speculation about darker things.

Speaker 11 They felt that he was almost controlling. They felt that when Matt was in the picture, Emily was not her normal self anymore.

Speaker 11 There was never anything specific that Emily said that Matt has done this to me, but it just seemed to be a lot of speculation from the friends that something isn't right with Matt.

Speaker 32 Two days after Matt reported Emily missing, the husband agreed to sit down with detectives at the police department.

Speaker 4 This is a voluntary interview.

Speaker 16 Okay.

Speaker 16 Obviously, we need to do the best we can to get the full story, anything you take in me.

Speaker 32 Detective Grubbs read him his rights, began probing about events before and after Emily's disappearance, and broke the news that John Kramer, the neighbor who said he'd seen Emily the morning she disappeared, now couldn't be sure of the timing.

Speaker 16 John has since backtracked on that.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 yeah, that's kind of up in the air. And he originally said like 8 to 9, and then he's now saying I can't.
He's saying I can't. He's there.
He's swear to it. And 1889, it could have been Sunday.

Speaker 16 So that makes it look bad for me.

Speaker 63 They turned to Matt's relationship.

Speaker 48 He'd handed over Emily's phone, and they'd been going through it.

Speaker 58 They asked Matt to rate his marriage.

Speaker 16 So scale one to ten relationship with her, ten being bliss, everyday, honeymoon like a honeymoon, and one being

Speaker 16 can't stand each other. I'm just asking,

Speaker 16 what would you rate?

Speaker 16 It would fluctuate like a

Speaker 16 sine wave, but we were on since six months it was an eight.

Speaker 16 Last six months? Absolutely.

Speaker 3 An eight out of ten.

Speaker 63 But then detectives shared a text they'd found from Emily to a friend.

Speaker 16 This was a month ago, okay?

Speaker 16 This is heavy. Matt picked a fight with me yesterday and said some awful things.
I'm not wearing my wedding ring.

Speaker 16 And that doesn't sound like somebody who's in a happy relationship.

Speaker 16 I find out my wife texted that to somebody a month ago.

Speaker 16 I get it.

Speaker 16 I'm not going to say that those things, of course, there was a roller coaster relationship, but it wasn't like anything that was anything that you would think that someone would hurt someone over.

Speaker 16 It's not as heavy as you think it is. She would be like that at times because of

Speaker 16 her anger issues. It always swung back.

Speaker 2 What about some of the things they'd heard from Emily's friends?

Speaker 32 That maybe there was more going on than a burnt-out romance.

Speaker 3 One even suggested Matt had hurt Emily.

Speaker 16 There was a time within the last year where she had bruises on her.

Speaker 16 This friend, hold on.

Speaker 16 Don't eye-roll yet. I know.

Speaker 16 Let me get it out.

Speaker 16 Where the friend was concerned that you were being physically abusive towards her. It never happened.

Speaker 16 Never. Let him finish.
I don't know where you're going with this.

Speaker 3 Again and again, Matt insisted he would not harm Emily.

Speaker 16 Guys, I did not hurt my wife. I did not hurt my wife.
I loved her.

Speaker 3 He took off his shirt when they asked and showed them he had no scratches, no bruises.

Speaker 33 And at the detective's suggestion, he agreed to take a voice stress analysis test, a type of lie detector.

Speaker 3 The tension in this tiny room was about to explode.

Speaker 10 You f ⁇ ing killed her.

Speaker 16 Oh, I didn't, sir.

Speaker 16 I didn't. I didn't kill her.
You killed her.

Speaker 3 Did my card go through? Oh, no.

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Speaker 42 After an hour and a half in a cramped interview room, the detectives prepared to give Matt a kind of lie detector test called a voice stress analysis test.

Speaker 16 I want you as relaxed as possible.

Speaker 11 What the microphone?

Speaker 71 Okay. What's up?

Speaker 50 I just need to say

Speaker 60 you can just clip that to your Detective Grubbs told Matt a computer would measure the stress in his voice when he answered questions.

Speaker 7 Some random, some not.

Speaker 69 Do you know where Emily is?

Speaker 71 No.

Speaker 16 Is this the month of May?

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 16 Did you kill Emily?

Speaker 58 No.

Speaker 57 Voice stress analysis tests are considered unreliable by many experts.

Speaker 2 Still, the police told Matt the results of his test indicated deception.

Speaker 10 I don't know what happened to Emily.

Speaker 16 I don't know what happened to her.

Speaker 16 I took it. If I failed this test, I failed it.

Speaker 51 The detectives kept returning to the question at hand.

Speaker 16 What do you think happened to Emily?

Speaker 16 I would be guessing, but I think she hurt herself.

Speaker 16 How do you think she hurt herself?

Speaker 10 She would say that

Speaker 16 if she was going to do it, she would hang herself.

Speaker 22 Emily had been surrounded by suicides.

Speaker 3 So Matt was guessing that's what might have happened.

Speaker 16 She would do it where

Speaker 16 she would be easily found.

Speaker 3 They kept pressing him, prodding, until the pot boiled over. You fing killed her.

Speaker 16 No, I didn't, sir.

Speaker 16 You killed her, and it was an accident, and we need to get this resolved to do that. It didn't happen.
It didn't happen. It did happen.

Speaker 16 She's dead.

Speaker 16 Where is she? What are you talking about? That's why we have

Speaker 16 people are saying they have seen her.

Speaker 46 At that point, Emily was still a missing person.

Speaker 3 Gone only two days.

Speaker 57 Was it too soon to hit him with the big stuff?

Speaker 11 I don't think so.

Speaker 20 You didn't have evidence that she was even dead, not to mention murdered.

Speaker 11 That's correct. But we also don't know what we're dealing with.
And if Emily is alive and needs help, time is of the essence. And we are trying to recover her as quick as we can.

Speaker 3 But there'd be no more talking to Matt Moore.

Speaker 28 He refused to communicate directly with the police after that interview.

Speaker 3 Instead, he called his friend Arturo.

Speaker 64 When he spoke to me, he told me he went and did an interview, and by the end of the interview, they had accused him of murdering his friends.

Speaker 20 They were right in his teeth, weren't they?

Speaker 64 The way he made it sound was

Speaker 64 very much of a panic, of a fear of,

Speaker 64 I'm looking for help from these people. They're accusing me of murder.
Now I don't know what to do. I need help.

Speaker 3 Help did come pouring in, but not for Matt.

Speaker 23 We're going to focus on the Alum Creek area today.

Speaker 32 As May 2020 ended and June began, the country was still in the grip of the first wave of COVID with millions in lockdown.

Speaker 23 But in Westerville, scores of people took part in a socially distanced activity that might do some good.

Speaker 28 Searches, organized by the Facebook group Finding M.

Speaker 41 Noble, started by her friend Wendy.

Speaker 39 A lot of us became really obsessed with the whole thing.

Speaker 34 I had a lot of time on my hands. So I would go to searches and do whatever I could to try to get Emily home because she would do that for anyone.

Speaker 34 We will continue this until we get some kind of closure.

Speaker 63 Lisa Gordish, one of Emily's acquaintances from high school, signed up to search early on.

Speaker 13 They had a public search that met at the high school where we had graduated from, and I showed up and went on that search.

Speaker 20 It was exhausting work, but Lisa did it again and again, even organizing her own searches.

Speaker 43 Her sister, Sherry Reynolds, joined her.

Speaker 12 It was just this thing that kind of grabs a hold of you and you can't let go.

Speaker 57 It's sort of like what you did in the summer of 2020.

Speaker 13 Yes, yes. We'd have probably five, six, seven people on most searches with us.

Speaker 33 But you know who was not out there on those public searches?

Speaker 3 Matt. The cops thought that was odd.

Speaker 61 Celeste, often out searching herself, asked Matt directly, where was he?

Speaker 26 And he said, oh no, those people hate me.

Speaker 48 He wasn't entirely wrong at that point, was he, Celeste?

Speaker 3 No surprise, social media had picked up the story, and many posts were negative about Matt, even cruel.

Speaker 17 Comments like this, can we all just agree the husband is guilty as F and hope the police act?

Speaker 2 And this, and his 17-year-old son hung himself almost a year ago.

Speaker 3 My daughter was close friends with him and said Matt was an awful father.

Speaker 31 Cameron Kissel, Joey's good friend, had stayed in touch with Matt after Joey's death.

Speaker 32 He says Matt was far from an awful father and had tried everything to help his son.

Speaker 61 And in the months after Emily disappeared, Cameron says Matt was searching in his own way.

Speaker 10 Every Monday, I would get off of work and we would go out searching for Emily, hanging flyers, passing out these business cards he had made, brainstorming where she could have been, what could have happened.

Speaker 33 Matt's brother traveled to Westerville to help out.

Speaker 3 So did Arturo.

Speaker 64 We held out hope all the way through that this was some kind of mental break, perhaps, that she needed some time away and she's going to turn up.

Speaker 40 The drumbeat of negative comments in town continued.

Speaker 46 There was even a rumor going around, which police heard, that Arturo and Matt's brother had come to Westerville not to help find Emily, but to help Matt cover up some nefarious deed.

Speaker 18 This is episode 246 of The Vanished.

Speaker 3 After his police interview, Matt was getting legal advice to stop talking.

Speaker 40 But he did speak to The Vanished, a true crime podcast about missing people.

Speaker 3 Even then, he didn't say much.

Speaker 50 I feel horrible because I can't help. I can't help find my wife.

Speaker 10 It's this thing I want to. They told me to shut up and I can't.

Speaker 50 I can't shut up because I'm just trying to find her.

Speaker 32 If he had been trying to help his case, it didn't work. A podcast producer spoke to Detective Grubbs after she interviewed Matt.

Speaker 5 She told the detective she believed Matt killed his wife.

Speaker 30 The dark cloud that had settled on Matt would not budge, and Emily's whereabouts were still unknown. But that was about to change.

Speaker 3 It was a long, hot summer of fruitless searching.

Speaker 33 Detective Brubbs kept a progress report that reads like a litany of dead ends.

Speaker 11 1120 a.m. searched the area underneath the bridge on Polaris just west of Cleveland Avenue.

Speaker 11 I traveled to the UDF to follow up on a previous tip line call. I checked Confluence Park for Noble.

Speaker 63 As the summer waned, the tips did too.

Speaker 23 The big searches weren't so frequent, but sisters Lisa and Sherry were still out there searching every week.

Speaker 12 We grew up with a family of puzzle solvers and so once that puzzle was there it became very difficult to stop.

Speaker 28 Over that summer the sisters picked up another teammate, Sue Sexton.

Speaker 33 Sue was happy to search anywhere and motivated for a particular reason.

Speaker 74 22-23 years ago this year a neighbor of mine named Patty went missing

Speaker 75 and to this day she hasn't been found.

Speaker 47 Not resolved, huh?

Speaker 75 Never resolved.

Speaker 60 This time she hoped it would be different.

Speaker 3 On a late summer day, they came across something that looked like evidence.

Speaker 43 It was a ceramic Christmas ornament.

Speaker 63 Was it connected to Emily?

Speaker 41 They sent pictures to Emily's family, but no one recognized it.

Speaker 76 The family and friends of missing Westerville woman Emily Noble continue their search for answers.

Speaker 61 In September, local media covered another big community search for Emily, another exercise in frustration.

Speaker 40 But with fall coming, Lisa, Sue, and Sherry believed time was running out.

Speaker 12 I was afraid when the leaves started to fall that that evidence would be covered up. So I felt this urgency, you know, we have to go now, we have to go now, we can't wait.

Speaker 42 So one day in mid-September, they decided to go back to where they'd spotted that ornament.

Speaker 3 Maybe it meant something.

Speaker 12 And we had talked to Detective Grubbs the week before that and

Speaker 3 he

Speaker 12 said to us specifically, don't be afraid to go someplace we've already gone.

Speaker 23 They showed me around the spot they were intent on researching.

Speaker 33 The first thing we did was look for the ornament.

Speaker 20 After all this time, they thought it might still be there.

Speaker 77 Lisa, you found it?

Speaker 48 Remarkably, it was.

Speaker 12 Here's the little ceramic angel that we found.

Speaker 20 I'll be.

Speaker 65 You found that very piece here.

Speaker 12 It was right here on the ground.

Speaker 32 But on that day back in mid-September 2020, they wanted to push past this spot.

Speaker 12 It was getting close to dark.

Speaker 74 Yeah, it's September.

Speaker 75 It's getting chillier.

Speaker 13 My feet were soaking wet.

Speaker 3 Oh.

Speaker 3 We were tired.

Speaker 79 And I said to Sue, when we were here before, there's an area that goes down over that way that we haven't done yet.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 79 before it got dark, I just needed to go that way.

Speaker 23 They split up. Sherry peeled off to check one area.

Speaker 36 Sue headed to the creek.

Speaker 8 And Lisa headed to a spot she'd noticed before.

Speaker 3 It looked all but impassable, even with a bustling four-lane highway just yards away, right over there.

Speaker 23 This particular section of woods was thick with branches and vines.

Speaker 57 Clearly, no one thought to wade in, but on that early evening, September 16th, 2020, Lisa Gordish did.

Speaker 48 So you're walking and pushing.

Speaker 13 Until I come to this clearing

Speaker 67 and

Speaker 79 stopped and turned and jumped because there was

Speaker 13 what I thought was a little girl sitting on her knees facing away from me. And I said, hi there!

Speaker 79 Because I just was startled that there was another person here with me.

Speaker 20 And then it started to sink in?

Speaker 13 Yeah, that something's wrong. Like, this isn't what I think it is.

Speaker 3 The small figure was clothed, upright, with long dark hair, and terribly still. In one of those split-second moments that seemed to take forever, the truth dawned on Lisa.

Speaker 7 It had to be Emily Noble, the little that remained of her anyway.

Speaker 13 I made my way back to behind that log to have a sense of protection.

Speaker 72 Protection?

Speaker 79 My first feeling was really fear.

Speaker 2 She called out to Sue and Sherry.

Speaker 12 I could tell by the pitch of her voice that it was getting higher and higher, and that alarmed me, and

Speaker 12 I knew something was wrong.

Speaker 75 And it took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at.

Speaker 75 realized that my brain was telling me. It was a small skeletal thing, but I still couldn't completely wrap my eyes around it.

Speaker 13 So I pushed through just a little bit further.

Speaker 75 That's when I could put it together that I was seeing a smaller skeletal remains.

Speaker 31 Tests would later confirm what the searchers knew to be true.

Speaker 23 This was Emily Noble.

Speaker 12 She wasn't going to let us leave without her, Emily.

Speaker 51 You thought there was a spiritual dynamic here, huh?

Speaker 80 I think there had to be.

Speaker 13 Yeah, Emily wanted to be found. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Naima, what what's your emergency?

Speaker 71 Hi, um,

Speaker 71 we are searching for Emily Noble. We are in the wooded area.

Speaker 50 There's a person here and I don't know if it's

Speaker 71 a dead body. It is a dead body.
It is.

Speaker 54 Do we need guns or not?

Speaker 23 The sun was setting when the police pulled up.

Speaker 20 Body cams rolling.

Speaker 48 Shock all across the county. Yeah.

Speaker 3 All this time.

Speaker 48 Law enforcement hasn't found her.

Speaker 20 The dogs haven't found her.

Speaker 20 You guys, searching on a Wednesday, have found

Speaker 42 missing Emily Noble.

Speaker 42 We're at

Speaker 42 like straight, straight ahead.

Speaker 72 We were there quite a long time.

Speaker 79 Yeah.

Speaker 72 Gave our statements.

Speaker 54 I'm going to need information from you guys, okay?

Speaker 54 What were you guys doing back then?

Speaker 50 Looking for Emily. Okay.

Speaker 54 What we got? It's Emily.

Speaker 38 The image of Emily's remains is blurred in this police video.

Speaker 51 With more officers arriving, the police took stock of the awful scene.

Speaker 32 Detective Grubbs arrived about an hour later.

Speaker 54 I would say, let's keep this dark for right now, since we're so close.

Speaker 20 At that point, are you starting to worry about blowback? My goodness, she's been here for almost four months and we missed her.

Speaker 10 Absolutely.

Speaker 11 It's it was the blowback is a good word for it, but it was almost

Speaker 11 It was embarrassing.

Speaker 61 Because now he knew what Lisa, Sherry, Sue, and everyone else knew.

Speaker 3 After that long summer of searches, big and small, from downtown Columbus to rural areas miles away, Emily never got very far. Those houses, that's right where she lived.

Speaker 3 And that's where Matt Moore was that very night when he got the news.

Speaker 61 Next, he tells us his story.

Speaker 10 My sister called me, and she's like, they found a body by your house. And I was just like,

Speaker 10 what?

Speaker 9 What? Where?

Speaker 54 Yeah, locking down, lock this wood for the ball.

Speaker 54 Make it as big as we can.

Speaker 33 After Emily Noble's remains were discovered in a tiny clearing in the woods, Westerville police officers and emergency responders worked into the night processing the scene.

Speaker 20 That's a

Speaker 81 computer cord.

Speaker 15 That's a USB at the USB.

Speaker 20 Yep.

Speaker 58 Emily's skeletal remains were found in a kneeling position.

Speaker 3 A USB cord suspended from a branch was looped around her neck bones. And a water bottle containing alcohol was lying nearby.

Speaker 22 Emily, it seemed, had hanged herself.

Speaker 20 Can you imagine her finding her way down to that clearing in the woods in that dense brush and doing what she did?

Speaker 10 She was a brave person. Brave, extremely brave.
It was just she had enough.

Speaker 3 Matt Moore wanted to share his side of the story, to tell us of the grief and guilt and terrible sadness he says he felt when Emily's body was discovered. Another apparent suicide.

Speaker 22 Emily's first husband, Matt's son, and then Emily herself.

Speaker 10 I've never been more in love with the person in my entire life. I feel awful that I didn't spend more time thinking about how she felt, that she would do something like this.
But

Speaker 10 she wasn't sick like Joey.

Speaker 10 It was Emily.

Speaker 57 From the moment Emily disappeared, Matt was well aware that he was the subject of intense scrutiny, that he was seen as a killer.

Speaker 32 He wanted to tell us he's not the bad guy he was made out to be.

Speaker 56 And he wanted to talk about the good times with Emily, starting with their love story.

Speaker 33 Emily and Matt were together for the better part of five years.

Speaker 3 They met online.

Speaker 28 It was 2015.

Speaker 3 He called her, but he says she picked him.

Speaker 20 Tell me, first impressions about you. She's an online name to you, huh?

Speaker 10 She was, yeah, this

Speaker 29 is click-right, click-left kind of thing.

Speaker 10 Dark-eyed,

Speaker 10 small, petite, kind of, who's that? And we met, and we just right immediately, she picked me. You know how girls, they pick you.
I got picked. So I became Emily's boyfriend.

Speaker 2 Two years into the relationship, Matt moved back to Las Vegas, the romance apparently over.

Speaker 33 Matt says he was focused on Joey, struggling with his signs of serious mental illness.

Speaker 10 He went from being an amazing guitar player to not being able to play anymore. And then he would all of a sudden get better again.

Speaker 10 It's a weird, it's just, it's horrible.

Speaker 20 Hearing voices, that kind of thing? Sure.

Speaker 10 Yeah, by then he was in the hospital. When you got someone that's sick like that, I needed help.

Speaker 10 And she just, there she was one one night she emily she's what on the phone or you know yeah text me and just hey what's going on i'm just like

Speaker 10 hey i need help you want to get married she's like yeah really just as simple as that

Speaker 10 yeah it's like magic it literally was like magic she knew that offer was sort of you get joey too right yes she knew i was i needed help with joey she knew

Speaker 33 That's when Matt and Joey packed up the car and drove east to Emily's tidy little condo in Ohio.

Speaker 60 As Matt tells it, the three of them made it work.

Speaker 10 She taught us so much. This is the way I want things done here.
And we did it.

Speaker 20 It sounds like she's Charles in charge here, huh?

Speaker 10 She is. She ran the show, every aspect of it.

Speaker 20 Emily has rules and they will be followed.

Speaker 10 They will. And it was a good, they were good rules.
We needed it. There were structure.
It was

Speaker 10 folding laundry, loading the dishwasher. That was one of his jobs.
Everything.

Speaker 22 Then after the dreadful event, Joey hanging himself, Matt and Emily struggled.

Speaker 3 Both grieving, Matt drank heavily.

Speaker 7 Emily saw a therapist fighting anxiety and depression.

Speaker 10 I knew she had her serious problems, but it was just I didn't have the bandwidth in my head to deal with her. She

Speaker 10 was suicidal. She made it apparent.
She said she would say it, I'm going to kill myself if you leave me.

Speaker 20 That was conversations spoken up.

Speaker 10 I don't know, like three times she said it. She would just come into the room.

Speaker 9 What triggered that thing?

Speaker 10 Because I just wasn't paying attention to her, I think.

Speaker 51 This is actually

Speaker 10 thing, yeah, and just like, you know what?

Speaker 10 Just you gotta leave me be.

Speaker 10 Had you ever said, i'm no absolutely not i was never gonna go anywhere i was so in love with her and i was just i couldn't have made it without her no i needed her did you also love her to death different things needing and loving to death

Speaker 10 she was perfect

Speaker 3 that's how matt says he saw the relationship but what about emily matt said some awful remember that text police confronted him with the one emily sent a friend saying she wasn't wearing her wedding ring

Speaker 63 in fact when her body was found her wedding ring was nearby.

Speaker 51 As Matt recalled, it was just part of the back and forth of life with Emily.

Speaker 10 Emily would go from this extreme, I'm taking my wedding rings off, and then the next day would be right back to everything was fine.

Speaker 3 Fine, and even fun.

Speaker 23 Like the day Matt flew a drone inside the condo just two weeks before Emily disappeared.

Speaker 24 That's Emily laughing in the background.

Speaker 32 And then she was gone.

Speaker 17 And the police refused to believe that he wasn't involved.

Speaker 16 You killed her, and it was an accident.

Speaker 10 They did this thing to try to rattle me, but there was nothing rattle because I didn't do anything.

Speaker 57 He says at first he did want to help police find his wife.

Speaker 10 I took a lie detector test. Why'd you agree to that?

Speaker 20 Why'd you agree to a lie detector test?

Speaker 10 Why would you be afraid of a lie detector test if you don't have anything to lie about? I didn't think anything of it. I didn't know.

Speaker 3 While the police in much of the town had branded him a killer, he says he was clinging to hope that Emily had decided to take off on her own.

Speaker 3 He even gave $10,000 to Crime Stoppers so they could offer a reward for information.

Speaker 10 The dogs took them to this guy's driveway and lost her set in the middle of the road like she had gotten in a car. I'm hopeful that's what happened.

Speaker 20 Were you a little hesitant to go over to the parking lot at the church and join all the searchers?

Speaker 10 The police, yeah. You don't join police on searches after you've been accused of murder.

Speaker 20 Was this the case that law enforcement had left the station and could not be slowed down?

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's like a train comes pulling out of the down. Is that what you were feeling? Yeah, like a, and you can't, it's on a train track.
It's a train. You can't stop it.

Speaker 10 You're like, you're being railroaded. You're like, how do I stop this? Well, they found her.
Maybe that would stop it.

Speaker 48 Emily found. And it looked like she died by suicide, not murder.

Speaker 46 Those cruel accusations from the police and the court of public opinion were all behind him, right?

Speaker 7 Remember, you're watching Dateline.

Speaker 43 There's more to come for Matt right around the corner.

Speaker 3 The question, what had happened to Emily Noble, had been answered, at least as far as Matt Moore and his friends were concerned.

Speaker 10 I remember the day they found her body, that's when things like, you know, definitely changed because now we knew what happened.

Speaker 10 He was lying on the couch with his hands over his eyes, hands over his head, because

Speaker 10 he couldn't believe it. He didn't want to believe it.

Speaker 20 What details of the discovery stuck with you?

Speaker 64 That she had hung herself.

Speaker 65 That

Speaker 64 it was somewhere she was familiar with.

Speaker 51 That USB cord, the kneeling position.

Speaker 3 Matt Moore says the awful truth was clear, to him anyway.

Speaker 10 She put the thing around her neck and she just leaned into it. It's a partially suspended hanging.

Speaker 20 Looking back on her last day before their birthday night out, he wonders if he missed the signs.

Speaker 2 They had taken a drive out to the country.

Speaker 10 We collected spring water on the way back. Halfway through, we stopped.
It's gorgeous. Sun's shining.
It's just a beautiful day. She was a little quiet.

Speaker 20 And when you're using that word quiet,

Speaker 20 what was different?

Speaker 10 What were you thinking? I would say things because I'm a clown to try to make her laugh. And she didn't laugh at all.
She just like looked out the window.

Speaker 3 And now, maybe Matt thought that discovery in the woods would put an end to all the questions.

Speaker 32 But police were not ready to declare this case closed.

Speaker 42 Just seeing her finding remains, did it explain what had happened here?

Speaker 32 Did it tell its story?

Speaker 11 At that point, no.

Speaker 11 It still didn't seem right.

Speaker 11 It just, it's that inner gut feeling that you have. It just, it seemed like there was more to the story than what we were seeing at this trip.

Speaker 20 She took off, she went into the woods and she hung herself.

Speaker 11 That's one theory, absolutely. And another theory is that this was staged to look like a suicide.

Speaker 28 The question quickly took shape.

Speaker 23 Was it suicide or homicide?

Speaker 11 The only way that we're going to be able to get a better feel for that is through Emily's body itself.

Speaker 20 She'd been out in the elements all summer.

Speaker 10 That's correct.

Speaker 58 Her remains were mostly bones by then. Okay.

Speaker 20 There's no going back, but if you had found her two days in, it would have been a different story.

Speaker 11 Absolutely. You could have had visible bruising.
You could have had marks around the neck, any defensive wounds,

Speaker 11 any other evidence that could have been there. It was just gone due to the passage of time.

Speaker 33 Emily's friends, the ones we spoke to, didn't need an autopsy to confirm what they already believed.

Speaker 3 Despite what Matt had said about Emily, they were convinced she would never, ever end her own life.

Speaker 10 It's just not in her nature to me, you know.

Speaker 20 I just don't.

Speaker 10 Of all the things that she's been through, I can't think of anything that would bring her to do that.

Speaker 10 Or anybody

Speaker 10 could drive her over the edge like that.

Speaker 3 And remember, Emily's last night was her birthday. Friends say she wouldn't harm herself on that day of all days.

Speaker 39 Her sister's birthday is the day after hers, so they always talked on the 25th because they were the same age for a day. And she promised her sister she would not kill herself.

Speaker 39 So I know she didn't kill herself.

Speaker 5 Despite her past troubles, many friends say she loved her life too much to end it.

Speaker 34 She was always full of life and love and bubbly

Speaker 34 and just so much fun.

Speaker 33 Detective Grubbs was listening to Emily's loved ones and their concerns were mirroring his own.

Speaker 46 He knew Emily had been ripped up by Joey's death, but his takeaway, Emily was dealing with it.

Speaker 3 Matt was not.

Speaker 11 She had been seeing a counselor, and the most striking thing with that is that she was concerned about Matt's mental health after Joey's suicide.

Speaker 11 And she was trying to figure out the best way possible to help Matt through all of this.

Speaker 20 So she's telling the therapist,

Speaker 47 I'm worried about my guy here.

Speaker 11 Yes.

Speaker 57 Delaware County Assistant Prosecutor Mark Sleeper was looking hard at the Emily Noble case and noticing even little details.

Speaker 58 Remember how the bed was made the morning Emily was reported missing?

Speaker 49 So I see that the bed was made. Did you do that or she did that?

Speaker 41 That seemed to be a clue for investigators.

Speaker 8 They suspected Emily never actually got to bed that night because she was already dead.

Speaker 15 I find it ultimately very ridiculous to think that Emily woke up that morning after having a nice evening out, decided to make her bed before she wandered off into the woods to hang herself.

Speaker 20 On the other hand, she is a neat nick. There's a house that you could literally eat off the floor.
I mean, I don't think that's totally inconsistent.

Speaker 15 I find it in light of all the other evidence to be an absurd version of events.

Speaker 23 So if not suicide just because it couldn't be, it had to be homicide.

Speaker 29 That notion started percolating through social media and took hold.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden the Facebook page that read Finding M.

Speaker 3 Noble changed to justice for Emily Noble.

Speaker 3 Matt felt law enforcement was bearing down on him. His friends did too.

Speaker 10 The police started following him around everywhere. You'd see him on his security cameras.
They would just pull up and wait right outside of his house at weird hours in the morning and night.

Speaker 10 He became very paranoid of going anywhere because

Speaker 10 he was afraid something was going to happen to him.

Speaker 3 Matt Moore had every reason to worry him.

Speaker 2 Put your hand in WI! Hand him your back, Dad! Do not fing move!

Speaker 3 Put your hands back on your head!

Speaker 57 A takedown in Sleepy Westerville.

Speaker 3 The Westerville Police Department, in a suburban village with tidy houses and manicured lawns, takes pride in its community relations and crime prevention.

Speaker 20 Steve Grubbs had been a full-time detective about two and a half years when he asked for the Emily Noble case.

Speaker 35 This was his first time leading a homicide investigation.

Speaker 20 Police had already searched Matt and Emily's neighborhood, their cars, their home, all just a short distance from the woods where she was found.

Speaker 20 Was there any reason to believe that she had been killed somewhere and then brought to that place?

Speaker 11 No, we didn't strung up.

Speaker 11 You know, the condo obviously had been thoroughly searched at that point.

Speaker 57 With no trace of a crime anywhere else, Detective Grubbs operated on the theory that Emily was killed in the woods and that Matt was clearly the killer.

Speaker 63 Even Celeste, who Matt considered a friend, had come around to the police point of view.

Speaker 20 Did you believe at that point, Celeste, that she was in fact murdered and had not committed suicide, and that Matt had something to do with it, maybe the person who killed her?

Speaker 26 Yes. I have a friend who is a former homicide detective, and she went through the fact that usually when a person disappears, the killer is the spouse or someone very close to them.

Speaker 20 Put together your theory in one place of what happened to them, say, from the time they returned from their evening of birthday celebration and the drinks.

Speaker 26 I would suspect that Emily might have got a little snippy because sometimes she does. You know, we're all human, and it probably just kind of backfired.

Speaker 20 Court of public opinion calls these things pretty quickly.

Speaker 48 We don't need to go to trial.

Speaker 20 We've got it figured out.

Speaker 15 You've done enough of these shows. I mean, you know, the house is always a suspect, right?

Speaker 9 That's the bias out there.

Speaker 65 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 32 Does it bleed into official investigations, I wonder?

Speaker 15 I don't think so. I mean,

Speaker 15 I think that law enforcement knows that that's a person that they have to look at and either clear or figure out that they've got a real suspect there.

Speaker 15 But I don't think that had any impact in this particular case.

Speaker 32 For now, public opinion had to wait in the wind.

Speaker 29 The mechanics of strangulation were about to take center stage.

Speaker 20 I think it's a story going to be told by bones. This is going to be an expert and experts duel.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think that's fair. Once her remains were found, they ultimately ended up with Ohio State.

Speaker 32 Emily's remains were so dried out and decomposed, the coroner decided they needed a special kind of examination.

Speaker 8 So he called on some experts at the Ohio State University to analyze Emily's bones.

Speaker 40 They issued this report, which concluded that Emily suffered fractures in her neck and her face, some old, some from around the time of death.

Speaker 3 It's called perimortem trauma.

Speaker 15 A fracture along the nasal bones, and the second is the perimortem fracture of in the neck.

Speaker 3 No surprise, perhaps, that the bones in her neck were fractured, but a new nasal fracture, that was interesting.

Speaker 20 Could it have been an old ski accident or car accident or something?

Speaker 11 And it just healed itself? No, according to the doctors, it happened around the time of her death.

Speaker 32 So something she's been beaten about the face.

Speaker 10 That's correct.

Speaker 23 Prosecutors sent the report to an emergency physician with special training in forensic medicine.

Speaker 60 His name is Bill Smock.

Speaker 7 He produced his own report with an illustration, concluding that Emily Noble was murdered.

Speaker 28 This, he said, was a stage suicide.

Speaker 15 After Dr. Smock's report came back, I think it confirmed what I believe, that we had a homicide and it was worth prosecuting.

Speaker 20 Is Smock the most important development in your case?

Speaker 15 Oh, he's very important, for sure.

Speaker 43 The Westerville police also knew this.

Speaker 33 Matt's first wife had accused him of domestic violence two decades earlier in Las Vegas.

Speaker 46 She told police he choked her.

Speaker 10 It was wrong. I shouldn't have put my hands on her, but it was a long time ago.

Speaker 10 it was what it was they came arrested me they let me go i went home no charges no no they dropped everything and there wasn't any problem after that we had we had joey there wasn't any violence after that

Speaker 3 but that old story looked bad 20 years later now armed with those forensic reports the westerville police and prosecutors figured they had what they needed i think that

Speaker 15 There were no other suspects in this universe that could have committed this crime on that timeline.

Speaker 32 On June 17th, 17th, 2021, law enforcement descended on Matt Moore like SEAL Team 6. The police video looked like an action movie takedown on a suburban street.
Put your hands over your eyes!

Speaker 32 Hand to your back! Do not fing move!

Speaker 83 Use your left hand and unlock the door!

Speaker 3 Put your hands back on your head!

Speaker 3 Do not move!

Speaker 10 They were ready for me, perfect.

Speaker 8 It's pulse-pounding footage.

Speaker 10 It's pouring for the blue line crowd. It got over a half million views, just that alone on YouTube.

Speaker 20 I mean here are these guys with body armor tactical weapons.

Speaker 10 These guys could have just called me. It's just kind of a joke, right? I was like, what are you doing?

Speaker 10 What's with all this? You know, literally, you could have just called me.

Speaker 20 And then you were charged with first-degree murder?

Speaker 10 Two counts of murder and one count of felonious assault.

Speaker 32 With that, Matt Moore was issued a jail jumpsuit and waited for trial.

Speaker 43 More than one year later, his fate would hang on the opinion of forensic forensic experts.

Speaker 60 One in particular was prepared to tell the jury that Emily's bones proved she was murdered.

Speaker 77 This

Speaker 81 death is a homicidal death based upon the nature of the fractures in Emily's neck.

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Speaker 3 On August 17th, 2022, the courthouse in Delaware County, Ohio was abuzz as TV cameras began covering the trial of Matthew Moore.

Speaker 15 This is a staged suicide scene.

Speaker 39 I watched as much of the trial as I could stand to when I wasn't there.

Speaker 34 It was just a sad story. It was really sad to see

Speaker 34 it unfold.

Speaker 43 It had been more than two years since Emily Noble's disappearance, and the case against her husband, according to the prosecution, was clear.

Speaker 31 Emily's bones showed she was murdered, and Matt Moore's behavior gave him away.

Speaker 10 I was dispatched to an address on a report of a missing person.

Speaker 37 Sergeant Robert Hollis, the responding officer with a body can, testified the first day.

Speaker 49 Hey, how you doing?

Speaker 3 He told the jury about his conversation with Matt Moore, how Matt actually described the spot where Emily would eventually be found.

Speaker 53 We're on that bridge, there's where she likes to go where a lot of the edibles are. So literally, that's her walk.

Speaker 49 Did you go there today looking for her? No, I didn't.

Speaker 15 If your wife is missing and you think you know where she is, why not just go walk that path?

Speaker 57 Emily's loved ones testified, of course.

Speaker 26 I was called to the stand.

Speaker 20 Tell me about that moment. You're here, he's there, you're looking in his eye, what's going on?

Speaker 74 Do you see him in the courtroom today?

Speaker 26 I had to look around.

Speaker 26 He was all shaven and his hair short and dressed nicely.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 20 It wasn't Wild Mountain Meadow.

Speaker 26 No, it wasn't. No.

Speaker 10 I love Celeste. She was Emily's best friend.
Absolutely. It broke my heart when I finally came to realize that she thought I did something to her.

Speaker 28 Celeste told the jury that Emily seemed just fine a couple of days before she disappeared.

Speaker 2 Certainly not depressed.

Speaker 74 What was Emily's demeanor while you guys were together?

Speaker 26 She was very happy while we were together.

Speaker 8 Another friend, Suzanne Cavanaugh, testified that if Emily had a problem, it was Matt.

Speaker 28 She said he drank to excess and seemed possessive of Emily.

Speaker 58 What's more, the last time she saw Emily, there were bruises on her arms.

Speaker 4 Did you ask Emily about it?

Speaker 67 I did.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 15 could you describe for the jury her emotional state

Speaker 15 based on what you asked her about the bruises?

Speaker 44 Very defensive.

Speaker 79 Our conversation became very heated.

Speaker 33 The prosecution continued to build its backdrop story of a marriage in trouble.

Speaker 32 They used text between Emily and Matt to bolster their theory.

Speaker 35 This is one of the exchanges Detective Stephen Grubbs read to the jury, starting with a text from Emily.

Speaker 11 It's difficult to impossible to talk with you when you have vodka brain.

Speaker 10 And what was the defendant's response to that?

Speaker 11 Matthew Moore says, that is an excuse. You are afraid to be confronted with things you don't agree with.
Your intellect is shallow.

Speaker 43 Prosecutors showed the interrogation.

Speaker 49 Not the part where police accused Matt of murder, but this part, where Matt early on seemed to bring suspicion upon himself.

Speaker 10 I want to get this going because I didn't do it, and I want you to find whatever the hell happened to her.

Speaker 50 Me too.

Speaker 10 I want it to happen.

Speaker 15 Detective, as you began that discussion with Mr. Moore, did anything stand out to you about your initial interaction with him?

Speaker 5 Yes, he stated he didn't do it.

Speaker 15 Did you accused him of doing anything in particular at that time?

Speaker 10 No, sir.

Speaker 20 The jury heard that Matt stopped talking directly to police and didn't participate in the public searches.

Speaker 33 And remember the public speculation that Matt's friend and brother helped him in some mysterious, possibly possibly nefarious way?

Speaker 24 The prosecutor didn't get specific, but he did tell the jury that Matt wrote each man a check for $5,000.

Speaker 11 This is another copy of a check that was filled out and signed by Matthew Moore.

Speaker 15 And who was that check written to?

Speaker 11 Arturo Rogeroli?

Speaker 3 On day five of the trial, the prosecution got down to the all-important science.

Speaker 57 The state's expert, Amanda Agnew, director of the Skeletal Biology Research Lab at the Ohio State University, issued the report that jump-started the case against Matt Moore.

Speaker 63 She concluded there were four fractures in Emily's neck bones.

Speaker 45 The hyoid bone,

Speaker 62 which is very high in the neck,

Speaker 62 sort of underneath your jaw, as well as the laryngeal cartilages.

Speaker 62 that surround your voice box, essentially.

Speaker 3 She also testified, see those red arrows, that Emily's nasal bones were fractured around the time of death.

Speaker 62 There was some perimortem trauma in the or on the nasal bones and around the nasal aperture or where the nose is on the face.

Speaker 42 See they call the next witness.

Speaker 32 And then came the prosecution's star witness, Dr. Bill Smock, who serves as medical director for the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.

Speaker 46 He told the jury Emily suffered what he called an acute fracture to her face.

Speaker 59 Ms. Emily Noble sustained significant blunt force trauma to her face.

Speaker 81 If there is enough force to create a fracture, even a small fracture, that says there is significant blunt force trauma to the nose.

Speaker 20 And you see that?

Speaker 68 Yes.

Speaker 22 His point, Emily was punched in the face when she died.

Speaker 33 That's certainly not consistent with suicide.

Speaker 23 But the overriding question was, did Emily kill herself with that USB cord?

Speaker 29 Dr. Smock's answer was, no way.

Speaker 3 He used that illustration from his report along with a model to demonstrate the location of those fractured bones. They are too far apart, he said, to have been broken by one thin cord.

Speaker 81 So you've got

Speaker 69 a significant distance between these four and or two on either side. Anatomical structure here and here.

Speaker 3 Smock testified someone's hands broke those bones in Emily's neck, not a ligature.

Speaker 32 Then he added some details that didn't appear in his original report.

Speaker 74 Now in your training and experience, have you ever seen the same fracture pattern to a woman weighing less than 110 pounds?

Speaker 69 No ma'am, never seen it personally and it's not in the medical literature.

Speaker 81 Nowhere in the history of forensic medicine are there fractures like Emily had in her neck associated with an incomplete hanging for somebody that's her weight. Never been reported.

Speaker 20 Where is this database? Where do you go to?

Speaker 81 You go to the forensic medical literature.

Speaker 28 Do you trust that database, Doctor?

Speaker 81 I do. It's the only database that we have.

Speaker 15 Ultimately, as we sit here today, I still believe the strongest piece of evidence is Dr. Smock saying that those quadruple fractures could not have been caused by that ligature.

Speaker 33 This was making sense to friends like Wendy.

Speaker 39 She didn't weigh enough to break her own hyoid bones by hanging from a little bush on her knees.

Speaker 3 So at this point, you may be wondering, experts, okay, but where's the good stuff that all juries want to hear?

Speaker 2 The DNA, the blood evidence, crime scene analysis, maybe a witness or surveillance camera shot.

Speaker 3 Nope, they had none of that.

Speaker 22 And if you're going into trial with a physical evidence-like case, as this was, you certainly don't want to be opposed by this lawyer.

Speaker 28 She has a fearsome success record in lost-cause cases.

Speaker 56 Up next, Diane Maneschi for the defense.

Speaker 83 Detective Harrier.

Speaker 63 Matt Moore's defense attorney got straight to the point in her opening statement.

Speaker 19 The evidence will show that the state's theory is based on speculation and inferences.

Speaker 23 Diane Menashe said prosecutors didn't have any evidence that Matt Moore killed his wife.

Speaker 45 And simply, members of the jury, their theory doesn't make sense.

Speaker 28 Even so, Matt Moore became the only suspect within days of Emily's disappearance.

Speaker 20 Why have the cops fixed on him?

Speaker 3 What's happened?

Speaker 18 Well, because it's an easy fix. You know, it's an easy fix and an obvious one.
And I think that you can't just focus on one person, right? You need to exhaust all possible avenues and suspects.

Speaker 18 And they just didn't do that.

Speaker 83 Detective, how are you?

Speaker 56 I'm okay, ma'am. How are you?

Speaker 51 So when it came time to cross-examine lead investigator Steve Grubbs, the defense attorney zeroed in on basic things she said the police failed to do.

Speaker 72 And the shirt that is pictured here was found in the hamper.

Speaker 25 Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 3 In other words, the very shirt Matt was wearing on his last night with Emily.

Speaker 72 That shirt, was that submitted for testing?

Speaker 25 I don't think it was, no.

Speaker 63 Investigators never found anything to connect Matt to the crime.

Speaker 43 No blood, no tissue, no fibers.

Speaker 33 And remember the dogs that tracked Emily Sent here?

Speaker 55 Did the investigators drop the ball when it came to following up?

Speaker 72 Just want to make sure the jurors know that you never conducted any surveillance with respect to that house that's located where the bloodhounds tracked on two different occasions.

Speaker 3 Is that correct?

Speaker 25 That's correct.

Speaker 45 I didn't see in your police report either that you ever requested any CCHs or criminal histories on anyone that lived in that house or in and around that area.

Speaker 72 Would you agree with me on that?

Speaker 25 That's correct.

Speaker 57 And what about those text messages that Emily and Matt sent one another?

Speaker 41 Prosecutors presented them as proof of a failed marriage, evidence of a motive for murder.

Speaker 51 On Cross, the defense lawyer dug in.

Speaker 83 Let me be very clear.

Speaker 83 Messages from Matt Moore's phone do not include the following words. Let's go through this.

Speaker 45 I hate you, correct?

Speaker 69 That's correct.

Speaker 72 I want you dead, correct?

Speaker 45 Correct. That is never in there.

Speaker 83 I am going to kill you, correct? Correct. I am going to divorce you, not in there, correct?

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 72 In fact, the one message you did read was where he said,

Speaker 83 if you want to divorce me, let me know.

Speaker 62 Isn't that correct?

Speaker 10 That's correct.

Speaker 43 As for the very first lead police had, the across-the-street neighbor who said he saw Emily on Memorial Day morning.

Speaker 49 Your neighbor saw her in the garage about between 9 and 10 a.m. this morning.

Speaker 46 Police said the neighbor, John Kramer, later changed his story.

Speaker 55 But when Defense Attorney Menashe sent her own investigator to talk to him, the investigator reported that Kramer just wasn't 100% certain he saw Emily that morning.

Speaker 78 John Kramer, for the record, did not retract his testimony or his statement to police. What he said is, he can't be positive.
He's not positive now that he saw her on the morning of the 25th.

Speaker 72 That's what he said.

Speaker 8 When she wasn't going after testimony, Menashe was picking away at the prosecutor's actions, saying they put up evidence without explanation.

Speaker 19 What about those checks?

Speaker 19 What about those checks?

Speaker 33 Like those $5,000 checks Matt wrote to his brother and his friend Arturo.

Speaker 78 It's like that expression that we all know when you just throw things up and you see what'll stick.

Speaker 20 And the rumor Mill had it to hear the guy from Vegas coming in, aiding and abetting. Right.
Maybe helping him clean up and move things around.

Speaker 64 You know, a good fella coming out there and money transacting over a missing person. Hmm, something weird must have happened.
But if I was that guy, would I have accepted a check?

Speaker 23 In the end, Arturo says Matt was just helping him with his expenses during a tough time.

Speaker 23 One by one, the defense attorney went after the prosecutor's witnesses.

Speaker 3 When she crossed Emily's friend Sue Kavanaugh, who testified she'd seen bruises on Emily's arm, Menashi made the point the two women were no longer close.

Speaker 78 February of 2019 is the last time you see Emily in person.

Speaker 44 Is that right? Yes.

Speaker 19 You're aware that she went missing on May 25th of

Speaker 78 2020.

Speaker 72 Correct.

Speaker 43 As his attorney chipped away at the state's case, Matt started to feel that maybe, just maybe, this would all be behind him soon.

Speaker 20 As you watched her work the case, I couldn't work the room. I couldn't.
What were you saying?

Speaker 10 There was things, I can't be real specific about it, but there was things that she would figure out on the fly. They would do what they were doing, and she would get up there.

Speaker 10 I'd be like, wow, there's things that I need to tell her

Speaker 10 so that she can get up there and argue that point that they just make. And she would get up there and she knew exactly what to say.
I'm like, how would she know that?

Speaker 58 That said, the defense faced a huge challenge taking on the renowned expert who insisted that Emily Noble died by manual strangulation after a punch in the face.

Speaker 3 But what if that wasn't what really happened?

Speaker 73 I did not see any skeletal evidence that she was punched in the face.

Speaker 3 Emily Noble had a lot of friends, and almost everyone we spoke to was rooting for the state.

Speaker 39 I was hopeful there would be a conviction.

Speaker 9 I thought he killed her.

Speaker 26 I thought he was guilty, and I thought there was enough evidence to convict him.

Speaker 3 They heard the forensic evidence that Emily was punched in the face and strangled by someone's hands, presumably Matt Moore's.

Speaker 39 You can't punch yourself in the face.

Speaker 46 And then they watched as Diane Menashe attempted to take apart the prosecution's forensic evidence bit by bit.

Speaker 18 You're only as good as the information you get.

Speaker 3 In court, she suggested that the first scientist to handle Emily's delicate remains may have damaged them.

Speaker 78 Well, the bones were soaked in bleach, and we know that bleach weakens and whitens bones.

Speaker 19 We also know that the bones were moved everywhere.

Speaker 78 They were moved to the morgue, to a cooler, to the slab, to a cooler, to OSU.

Speaker 18 If you get the bones that haven't been properly handled and preserved and are more brittle than they should be, right,

Speaker 18 you're getting garbage.

Speaker 72 This is not.

Speaker 46 It's an expression Diane Menashe likes: garbage in, garbage out. Meaning, when you put bad data in the pipeline, you get bad results.

Speaker 28 So when she got a crack at the prosecution's star witness, Dr.

Speaker 56 Smock.

Speaker 72 Have you ever heard the expression garbage in, garbage out?

Speaker 10 Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 32 She suggested all his damning conclusions were based on faulty and certainly not first-hand information.

Speaker 83 You were not at the scene to see how the ligature was around her neck, correct?

Speaker 25 That is correct.

Speaker 83 There is no one that saw that, right?

Speaker 72 Well, the pictures, we don't have any.

Speaker 83 And you were not there.

Speaker 81 That is correct, I was not there.

Speaker 83 You also were not there and do not know

Speaker 25 if

Speaker 83 over the course of four months the ligature began in one place and ended up in the other as the corpse went from a 90-pound woman to being 18 pounds of skeleton.

Speaker 72 You do not know that either because you were not there.

Speaker 22 That is correct.

Speaker 3 Once the defense was through with the prosecution witnesses, she got started on her own.

Speaker 33 There were only two, and this was the one who counted.

Speaker 87 I'm Dr. Heather Garvin, and where do you work? I am a full professor of anatomy at Des Moines University.

Speaker 3 Dr. Heather Garbin is also a board-certified forensic anthropologist, someone who analyzes skeletal remains to help solve criminal cases.

Speaker 32 She examined hundreds of photos photos of Emily Noble's remains and came to at least one surprising, case-altering conclusion.

Speaker 60 Emily wasn't punched in the face when she died.

Speaker 3 She saw old fractures from a broken nose that had healed years before, but found no evidence of perimortem, time-of-death fractures in her face.

Speaker 87 No evidence of perimortem fractures to the craniofacial region.

Speaker 73 I did not see any skeletal evidence that she was punched in the face.

Speaker 18 If you could take out the blow to the face, right, that was just one more thing to take out of their theory.

Speaker 56 And remember how Dr.

Speaker 33 Smock demonstrated that a USB cord, the ligature, could not break those bones in Emily's neck?

Speaker 46 Well, the defense argued he's getting his anatomy all wrong.

Speaker 3 Starting with a drawing he used in his report.

Speaker 45 So it was in response to this drawing that you included these images in your report?

Speaker 87 Yes, because I felt it was misleading.

Speaker 7 Misleading, she says, because the bones that were broken in Emily's neck look far apart in this picture and in Dr.

Speaker 58 Smock's model.

Speaker 56 Dr.

Speaker 58 Garvin pointed out that's not what the human neck looks like.

Speaker 51 She showed us a 3D printout, a model of the throat structure that's very close to real-life scale.

Speaker 58 These bones are close together and connected with a membrane.

Speaker 3 Dr.

Speaker 43 Garvin says given the right circumstances, those bones could break with a USB cord.

Speaker 73 If the ligature is going around the neck and puts pressure right here on either side, you're going to get get bending of the bone and a fracture of the hyoid bone here and a fracture of the thyroid cartilage there.

Speaker 2 Dr.

Speaker 46 Garbin says no one can say for sure how Emily's neck bones were fractured, no matter what Dr.

Speaker 30 Smock says about the medical literature.

Speaker 73 I'm trained at looking at skeletal material and determining what kind of mechanism would cause those fracture patterns.

Speaker 73 In Emily Noble's case, the two fractures on either side appear to occur from some source of compression, but you're going to get that same compression whether there's a ligature there or manual strangulation.

Speaker 73 You can't differentiate between them.

Speaker 13 Nothing further.

Speaker 3 Watching in court, Matt Moore says he was still wondering when the proverbial other shoe would drop.

Speaker 10 I didn't know. There had to have been something.
I'm arrested for murder. There must be evidence, something.
There must be something that's there.

Speaker 63 If he was waiting for a moment of truth, it happened, sort of, at the prosecution's closing argument.

Speaker 41 Only then did Assistant Prosecutor Mark Sleeper offer the state's state's theory of when and where Matt Moore killed Emily Noble.

Speaker 15 Emily Noble comes home and goes on a walk while the defendant's on a long phone call and playing around on his phone.

Speaker 15 After he gets off that, there's a 40-minute gap of time where there's no activity on his phone between 8.42 p.m. and 9.23 p.m.

Speaker 15 40-minute gap.

Speaker 15 The defendant knows

Speaker 15 the place where Emily goes to forage,

Speaker 15 knows where he could find her. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd submit to you that's an opportunity at that time for him to go leave the house and to go confront her in the woods.

Speaker 15 And where the physical evidence shows she was struck in the face, causing fractures to her nose, and she was manually strangled,

Speaker 15 causing four fractures to her neck.

Speaker 57 The prosecution offered no new physical evidence as it laid out its theory of a murder in the woods.

Speaker 9 I heard.

Speaker 83 No, no.

Speaker 19 You heard the first time that the state thinks Emily was killed in the woods.

Speaker 18 If the state doesn't know until the end of their case in closing where they believe, you know, this alleged murder happened. I mean, if that isn't reasonable, Dad, what is?

Speaker 19 Our justice system has to be better than this.

Speaker 20 Was it coming out of the blue late?

Speaker 84 No, I think the point taken,

Speaker 15 let me just explain it this way. So is it possible that

Speaker 15 a homicide or murder would have occurred inside the condo?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 15 Is it possible the murder had occurred in the woods?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 15 We didn't have any evidence that said definitively which one of those two places. If I had to bet, I would bet it happened in the woods.
I think that makes the most sense given the other evidence.

Speaker 72 And so I'm going to say this. 24 years, over 150 jury trials, I've never had a harder closing argument than this.

Speaker 19 Because honestly, in most, I've got evidence to attack.

Speaker 72 This case is totally speculation.

Speaker 58 Menashe said police and prosecutors were laser focused on anything that made Matt Moore look guilty, and they ignored behavior that suggested he was innocent.

Speaker 20 Not only did he tell police where Emily liked to forage, he also brought them right to the edge of the woods where her remains were later found.

Speaker 20 If he had killed her, why would he have directed police to the evidence?

Speaker 19 He takes them

Speaker 19 to the exact area.

Speaker 78 and says this is where she forages and then even the state of Ohio in their closing argument just now had to concede that you know what he says?

Speaker 83 You might want to go in.

Speaker 83 Oh,

Speaker 19 that's a bad fact, right?

Speaker 78 And you know why he wouldn't want to go in?

Speaker 19 Is it because he doesn't want to find her?

Speaker 34 Actually, I agree with that.

Speaker 19 And you know why he doesn't want to find her?

Speaker 19 Because 10 months earlier, his son was hanging from a tree.

Speaker 78 in the woods.

Speaker 78 I wouldn't want to go in a wooded area either.

Speaker 43 Once the closing arguments ended, Matt Moore's fate was in the hands of the jury.

Speaker 20 Matt Moore, guilty of homicide or no?

Speaker 57 He'd sat in jail for 14 months, thinking about how he got to this point, the case against him.

Speaker 3 And that question everyone was asking.

Speaker 20 They say you punched her in the face and then put your hands on her throat and manually choked the life out of her. And then strung her up in this.

Speaker 10 And then dragged her in the woods 60 feet in the dark and found a branch and did all this weird.

Speaker 20 Did you do that, Matt? Did you kill your wife?

Speaker 10 What do you think?

Speaker 47 I want to hear you say it.

Speaker 10 Why? Why do you feel the need for me to say that?

Speaker 20 Well, did you do it?

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 9 I mean, no.

Speaker 10 There would be evidence of it, no?

Speaker 20 Wouldn't you think? So the case is all made up?

Speaker 10 It's It's not made up.

Speaker 10 Police do what they do. They're like any other business.
They look for crime, and it was an opportunity for them to spend money.

Speaker 10 That's the only way I can put it in an easy way. I mean,

Speaker 10 you would have to talk to them, but as far as me killing him, no, I loved her. Why would I do that?

Speaker 23 After seven days of testimony, the jury faced the same question, guilty or not.

Speaker 79 Oh my gosh, I was so eager to hear what the other jurors were thinking because you know.

Speaker 51 We spoke with three jurors from left to right, Connie, Carol, and Jen.

Speaker 8 They told us that more than half the jury came to deliberations thinking Matt was innocent.

Speaker 20 The rest thought he might have killed Emily.

Speaker 80 I thought she was a homicide victim.

Speaker 65 You did?

Speaker 18 To me, it did look staged.

Speaker 20 Matt Moore, guilty of homicide or no?

Speaker 10 Absolutely not.

Speaker 41 Carol Matt Moore.

Speaker 57 Did he kill his wife or not?

Speaker 27 If he did, he is a mastermind. And I just don't think, I think he's an average Joe.

Speaker 24 But on this, they agreed.

Speaker 28 The prosecution's case had problems.

Speaker 27 It was all little pieces and trying to

Speaker 27 knit them together into a particular view.

Speaker 27 And I just felt that

Speaker 27 it was just too

Speaker 86 incoherent.

Speaker 51 They had particular problems with the prosecution star witness.

Speaker 39 It was a stretch for him.

Speaker 80 He was more concerned with giving his resume than trying to

Speaker 62 help with the case.

Speaker 27 I felt like he was stretching quite a bit to make some of these assumptions.

Speaker 3 Jurors deliberated for a short time on day one, then returned the next day.

Speaker 20 You come back that next morning and you do have what I call a straw vote. You go around the table.

Speaker 61 Were you surprised at the result?

Speaker 27 I think I was a little bit surprised.

Speaker 3 They had a verdict. As they filed back into court, Matt Moore took one look at them and feared the worst.

Speaker 10 It's like they're not looking at you. It was too quick.
I was just like, they need time to think this through. They didn't spend a lot of time doing that.
So I was just, I was ready to go.

Speaker 20 You thought that was it?

Speaker 10 That was it. I was done.

Speaker 82 Verdict on count one.

Speaker 82 We, the jury, being duly impaneled and sworn, find the defendant Matthew L. Moore not guilty of murder as he stands charged.

Speaker 3 Not guilty on all three counts, murder and felonious assault.

Speaker 32 After more than a year in jail, Matt Moore was a free man.

Speaker 10 I didn't want to cry in public.

Speaker 20 You did? You were holding your head in your hands weeping.

Speaker 10 Yeah. But I caught myself and I gathered myself up and I was just, okay, great.
Let's get out of here.

Speaker 45 I was just very, very happy for Matt.

Speaker 18 And so for me also, it was just such a joyous moment.

Speaker 3 At the other table, a bitter defeat.

Speaker 10 It was very difficult.

Speaker 29 You were certain he'd killed his wife. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Still am, frankly.

Speaker 23 As for Emily's friends, Celeste didn't see it coming.

Speaker 26 Dumbfounded?

Speaker 26 Dumbfounded? Like, how did this happen?

Speaker 42 Wendy kind of did.

Speaker 39 I just had a feeling of dread that it wouldn't end in a conviction.

Speaker 28 Maybe Krista spoke for many.

Speaker 34 Based on the evidence presented, I wasn't surprised that he wasn't found guilty, even though in my heart, I think he's guilty.

Speaker 34 And it's not just because I'm malicious or anything, but I 100% don't believe she would ever take her own life. Ever.

Speaker 33 With the verdict rendered, the judge addressed Matt directly.

Speaker 82 Mr. Moore,

Speaker 82 I think from day one,

Speaker 82 Everyone's wanted justice for your wife, Emily. But I think the jury has also said

Speaker 82 justice for Emily is not injustice for you.

Speaker 28 Despite the jury's verdict, Emily's death certificate still reads, homicide.

Speaker 23 Do you think there's a chance that Emily Noble was murdered?

Speaker 44 I do.

Speaker 13 I do.

Speaker 67 Not by Matt.

Speaker 3 Not by your guy? No.

Speaker 18 But it's, and I think this goes back to all things are possible. And the only thing that isn't possible and wasn't shown beyond a reasonable doubt is that Matt did it.

Speaker 46 Matt knows he'll live with some level of whispers and suspicions for the rest of his life.

Speaker 20 The people who are out there think he got away with murder, and some of those include the old friends.

Speaker 10 Sure, and probably some family.

Speaker 20 What do they not get? What do they not understand?

Speaker 10 Well, they, I mean, they've known me for so long, it's just hard for me to believe. I'm not a violent person.
I'm not, I don't get upset. I'm like really laid back.

Speaker 10 But if they think what they think is because of what the media and police, what they're capable of, they've manipulated you.

Speaker 51 Freedom gave Matt a chance to live his life again, but also the space, he says, to grieve for Emily.

Speaker 10 I didn't have any time to think about her because I had all this police pressure and community pressure and all this, just this weird thing.

Speaker 10 And when he said not guilty, and it just like though all of a sudden Emily just, I could deal with it. I could, okay, now it's time for Emily, you know.

Speaker 60 His old life is gone.

Speaker 52 He's broke, trying to scrape together a new life.

Speaker 46 And he's angry, mostly at the police.

Speaker 57 He's written an e-book called Emily: A Stage Suicide in Ohio.

Speaker 10 I needed to write my story for me more than anything because I want people to know what happened.

Speaker 33 He's back in the Las Vegas area now, far from Westerville, Ohio, where most of Emily's friends still live and still think about her.

Speaker 65 I miss her laugh

Speaker 39 and her smile.

Speaker 39 She was just fun to be around.

Speaker 26 Everybody was her friend and all of her friends were her best friend.

Speaker 10 I miss her being here.

Speaker 65 I miss her laugh for sure.

Speaker 3 Turn her head back and.

Speaker 3 Just, yeah.

Speaker 32 She left behind images for her loved ones to ponder.

Speaker 3 Exquisite skies, her collections of edible plants, the woods she loved,

Speaker 3 and her own face.

Speaker 23 Gazing back into the camera, what was she thinking in the days and weeks before her death? Years after she went into the woods. It's the biggest mystery of all.

Speaker 77 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Thursday at 10 9 Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 77 For all of us at NBC News, good night.

Speaker 3 Hey, everybody.

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