Blood Ties

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Speaker 3 On the scrubby hills around Bakersfield, California, the oil derricks pulled at the shrinking black lake far below.

Speaker 7 Way down below, where an answer to a secret may lie, or a victim, or a ghost.

Speaker 17 Whatever is down there, it called out to his sister's devotion.

Speaker 19 I don't go a second of a minute of an hour of a day without the newborn.

Speaker 21 The buried secret tugged at her, took her to dark places.

Speaker 4 no one should go.

Speaker 19 There was guns around and there was bullets. It was the scariest moment of my entire life.

Speaker 3 And in the end, the secret led to the lowest place of all, a human heart bent on murder.

Speaker 3 You want me to do anything else but bump her head and draw her off and have to lost her sister?

Speaker 1 A dark tale, but one illuminated by the unconquerable love shared by twins.

Speaker 19 There was still a uniqueness between us that that I can't hardly describe. It was like she was a part of me, definitely.

Speaker 21 Growing up in the 60s, Teresa and Lisa Siebold were inseparable, sharing late-night confidences and clothes.

Speaker 32 Their bond a refuge from a troubled family.

Speaker 7 Eventually, their parents split.

Speaker 32 Three older brothers remained in California with their grandfather.

Speaker 26 But the twins, just three years old, were sent away to live with relatives in Oklahoma.

Speaker 34 They're like two sides of a coin, they developed into two very different people.

Speaker 19 She liked hanging out and with the guys and going outside all the time and I liked staying in my room and reading books and doing my homework.

Speaker 23 Rick Sieboldt was one of three brothers that had been forced to leave behind, but he remembers how Teresa watched out for Lisa.

Speaker 37 Teresa was like a mother figure. to help her through the hard times and help her along in school and she was just always there to help Lisa.

Speaker 19 I would have these nightmares routinely like I remember them as far back as when I was five and six years old where there would be a monster in the dream and different types of monsters but it was always had the same ending where I would jump out in front of my sister so the monster would get me instead of her.

Speaker 26 Teresa worked hard putting herself through college.

Speaker 28 while Lisa drifted.

Speaker 38 Still, the same inextricable link stuck fast and the same pattern.

Speaker 19 She would call me the exact same time I was calling her. One time she got into some trouble when I was in college and I could feel it.

Speaker 37 They always knew when something was wrong between each other.

Speaker 39 And in fact, much had gone wrong. In 1985, Lisa had tried to take her own life after a failed romance in the death of their mother.
Teresa worried incessantly.

Speaker 39 And then, just two years later, Lisa, by then 25 years old, met her happily ever after, or so she hoped.

Speaker 39 His name was Bryce Thomas, and he seemed the polar opposite of all the ne'er-do-wells piled up in Lisa's past. Bryce was handsome and stable.
He worked the oil fields around Bakersfield.

Speaker 19 I think he kind of kept her settled down, and she seemed to be enjoying life.

Speaker 19 I would come and stay with him about every six weeks, and everything

Speaker 19 seemed to be picture-perfect.

Speaker 13 For Teresa, Bryce became not only a brother-in-law, but a close friend.

Speaker 19 He just was like a real close brother. We were able to, you know,

Speaker 19 open our hearts up about all the, you know, personal things that you can't always even talk to with a brother about, but I was able to talk to him about.

Speaker 27 In October of 1987, Lisa gave birth to a daughter, Christine.

Speaker 32 Lisa and Bryce got married the following year and four years later there was another daughter, Brianna.

Speaker 31 Teresa also got married and had two children and finally after all those difficult years, it seemed like the parallel tracks of the sisters' lives were heading in the right direction.

Speaker 19 I felt like I didn't have to be her parent anymore or worry about her. The worrying was the biggest part.

Speaker 7 But there were secrets even then, and they were buried deep.

Speaker 26 Rick, the brother, caught just a hint in Lisa's behavior and husband Bryce's glare.

Speaker 37 He would have this way of demeaning Lisa, you know, like she

Speaker 37 was stupid or that she didn't understand how to give Christine guidance or discipline.

Speaker 4 And whether it was that reason or some other call of the old wild life, Lisa began to seek the comfort of other men.

Speaker 13 One man in particular and she declared herself to be, again, in passionate, irresponsible love.

Speaker 9 Where are you going?

Speaker 44 Away from you?

Speaker 33 Finally, in the summer of 1996, Lisa and Bryce decided to split.

Speaker 41 But there was something odd about the way it happened.

Speaker 28 Their marriage had been increasingly troubled, as Lisa cheated and Bryce, jealous and angry, seethed.

Speaker 22 What was odd was the impending divorce seemed quite peaceful.

Speaker 19 They even had their paperwork and it was all very mutual. They were friends about it.

Speaker 35 A controlling husband and a wayward wife don't usually add up to an amicable divorce, but as far as Teresa and her brother knew, in this case, it did.

Speaker 18 That's why they thought nothing of it when Lisa called them for a favor one August weekend in 1996.

Speaker 37 That's the weekend that Teresa and I got her children while she was going to look for an apartment. So she was left alone in the apartment with Bryce.

Speaker 29 Lisa and Teresa spoke on the Sunday night.

Speaker 2 Everything was on schedule.

Speaker 38 But by Tuesday, August 13th, Lisa had failed to pick up her daughters.

Speaker 26 Teresa was not altogether surprised.

Speaker 19 I had her kids. Everything was fine, I thought.
Lisa would always take advantage of my babysitting, so if she didn't make it till Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Speaker 19 Lisa was known to be flaky, so I kind of let it slide. And

Speaker 19 then by Friday, I was getting ready to pull my hair out from the Corefour kids and getting worried about and mad. I was mad at Lisa.

Speaker 11 That Friday, it was Bryce Thomas who came to pick up the girls, not Lisa. He didn't seem to be concerned about Lisa's failure to show up.

Speaker 33 After all, he said, Lisa's new boyfriend had recently gotten out of jail.

Speaker 30 Maybe they'd left town, taken a trip to celebrate.

Speaker 35 But was Lisa even with her new boyfriend?

Speaker 5 Had the boyfriend actually been released?

Speaker 2 She called the prison to make sure.

Speaker 18 Teresa wasn't prepared for what the official told her.

Speaker 19 He came back to the phone and he said, Yeah, he's here, all right. He hasn't heard from your sister in a couple weeks.
He was kind of worried himself.

Speaker 19 As soon as he told me that, I just said, Oh my god, she's dead.

Speaker 19 I know my baby's dead.

Speaker 25 And with that inexplicable twin's instinct, she also felt she knew something else.

Speaker 2 She knew exactly where to look for her lost sister.

Speaker 11 How different they were, Teresa Sebold and her twin sister, Lisa.

Speaker 3 Teresa, so stable.

Speaker 45 Lisa, defiant, occasionally irresponsible.

Speaker 11 And now, on the very night she was leaving her husband, Lisa had vanished. And Teresa knew to the bones of her shared DNA that something was terribly wrong.

Speaker 19 Everyone said that I was letting my imagination go wild, that she's not dead, she's just out partying, she just needed to be patient. And I was very insulted by all this because I knew she was dead.

Speaker 11 Lisa's whole family suspected that Lisa's controlling husband, Bryce Thomas, had something to do with her disappearance.

Speaker 11 The police were suspicious, too, and they questioned him at his front door, but got no further.

Speaker 37 They did not have a warrant to go in or had any reason to be suspicious. That's why we knew we had to have evidence to be able to get the search warrant.

Speaker 37 I said, Well, the first thing that I'd like to do is go to the apartment where we know she last was.

Speaker 37 And it was late at night. And so we did.

Speaker 7 It is bleak and dark outside the apartment of Bryce Thomas.

Speaker 11 They checked. He wasn't home.

Speaker 2 Teresa, Rick, and a few friends stood in the dark yard.

Speaker 13 But now,

Speaker 2 suddenly, Teresa knew what she had to do.

Speaker 40 She turned to the others and said,

Speaker 19 As far as I'm concerned, Lisa died in that house. She never left it alive, and we need to get inside their house.
That's what we need to do.

Speaker 19 She never left there alive, and she did not leave there voluntarily.

Speaker 37 So Teresa says,

Speaker 37 I'm going to break in. And I said, are you sure, Teresa? You know,

Speaker 47 she said, yes.

Speaker 19 It was kind of a scary alleyway and there was only a ledge this big for me to stand on and the window was up to here.

Speaker 19 So it was not a very feasible thing, but I thought, you know, my sister can do this. So I were very competitive athletically.

Speaker 19 And I tried to open the window, thinking it was just going to open right up, and there was a bar in it.

Speaker 19 I thought, you know, if I don't get in this room, this house tonight, right now, I'm never going to get another chance to do it. So I decided to try one more time

Speaker 19 and I went to go try to push the window open and it just slid right open. Magically.
I mean, it was the weirdest thing.

Speaker 31 I mean, you tried to open it before.

Speaker 19 And I couldn't do it. It would not open.
It would not

Speaker 19 all of a sudden, it slid magically. I mean,

Speaker 19 I went to myself. I went, whoa, like that.
And I had goosebumps all over me. And I said, okay, here goes, you know, and I knew that I just felt like my sister was assisting me.

Speaker 25 The silence of the empty house was eerie.

Speaker 4 But as she opened the door for her brother, Rick, they were assaulted by an unusual odor.

Speaker 18 Immediately, when the door opens, the place reeks of

Speaker 37 like a pine cleaner where he had been cleaning, you know, and there was a carpet shampooer right in front of the front door. So we knew that was a bad sign right there.

Speaker 26 Teresa tentatively walked through the apartment, afraid of what she might find.

Speaker 37 First she noticed that he was not sleeping in the bed. He had a little bed made on the floor in the spare bedroom.
So we knew he had been sleeping there.

Speaker 42 We thought, well, that's strange.

Speaker 37 So then Teresa, she noticed that the bed was not made like it normally was.

Speaker 46 You said you were standing by the mattress thinking I'm supposed to be here.

Speaker 19 And I didn't even know what I expected to see but something told me to look there so I started stripping the bed.

Speaker 46 So you're tearing away at the bed without really knowing why except you felt like you.

Speaker 19 Why aren't I seeing anything? So I went over to the side of the mattresses and put my hands underneath to push it up to look in between and it was all wet in between the mattresses.

Speaker 19 And I went, Rick, come here and help me, please. The mattresses are all wet.
And I was almost crying. He picked up the mattresses and blood was everywhere on both sides, just soaking wet with blood.

Speaker 19 And I just started screaming and I ran out of the apartment. And it was,

Speaker 19 I knew, of course, then she was dead. There's no doubt.
That was it.

Speaker 46 What was the feeling that made you so certain?

Speaker 19 I felt her spirit just come and grasp upon me. And

Speaker 19 when I ran out that door, I knew that I had to

Speaker 19 get the cuffs there and find out the truth.

Speaker 35 Teresa's discovery gave police the grounds they needed to get a search warrant for Bryce's home.

Speaker 11 What they found was disturbing. Not only was the mattress bloody, but blood spatters were picked up on walls, a chest of drawers, and other bedding.

Speaker 35 Rosemary Wall was the lead investigator.

Speaker 28 What does it say to you when you see that kind of evidence?

Speaker 44 Well, that tells us that Someone was violently assaulted in that room because of the cast off and the pattern that the blood spatters left on the furniture and also on the walls.

Speaker 29 But DNA testing of blood can sometimes take months.

Speaker 40 Police, of course, had their suspicions, especially when cleaning materials were found.

Speaker 21 Had the spatters been erased, wiped away?

Speaker 44 There were

Speaker 44 what appeared to be evidence of him trying to clean the room, wash the walls down,

Speaker 44 but it didn't take away the blood evidence that was still there.

Speaker 13 But Bryce Thomas told police he had no idea where Lisa was.

Speaker 9 Where are you going?

Speaker 44 Away from you.

Speaker 4 After all, he said, she was leaving him.

Speaker 5 And about the blood, he had an explanation for that, too.

Speaker 44 He remembered a time not too long before she came up missing that she had a pretty heavy nosebleed, and that was his reason. for the blood being on the mattress.

Speaker 45 A story, which, frankly, the police were not inclined to buy.

Speaker 44 But I was not convinced that he didn't,

Speaker 44 you know, that something terrible didn't happen to Lisa that night.

Speaker 44 There was just too much evidence, physical evidence, and his statements

Speaker 44 did not seem to be that of a husband that was deeply concerned about his wife, somebody that he, you know, was supposed to love and was the mother of his children.

Speaker 44 His reaction to everything that occurred just didn't seem right.

Speaker 30 So, why not take him into custody at that time?

Speaker 44 Well, you have to have more than just a gut feeling to make an arrest for a murder.

Speaker 44 You have to have probable cause, and you have to have your evidence, and you only get one shot at taking a case to

Speaker 44 trial, and we weren't going to blow it.

Speaker 35 And what kind of a case did they have anyway?

Speaker 28 Was Lisa Siebold even dead?

Speaker 2 Without DNA results, police couldn't be sure the blood was, in fact, Lisa's.

Speaker 43 There was no weapon, no body.

Speaker 2 Yes, Lisa was missing, but remember, she had been known to disappear before.

Speaker 12 She was, to say the least, unpredictable.

Speaker 18 What if they charged Bryce Thomas with murder?

Speaker 7 And then Lisa showed up alive.

Speaker 44 We sent teletypes nationwide to have other law enforcement agencies check their databases to see if they had contact with her.

Speaker 44 And we had to do everything that we could to show that she didn't exist anymore.

Speaker 29 And anyway, even Teresa was having second thoughts about the main suspect.

Speaker 15 She wavered a little.

Speaker 29 Bryce insisted on his innocence, even established an 800 number, and begged people to call with information about Lisa.

Speaker 11 It was, frankly, confusing.

Speaker 19 It was really hard because it was like I was pointing the finger at somebody I loved, you know, as like a brother.

Speaker 39 And so police went on dredging the depths for secrets. Had Lisa been dumped in some abandoned well? After all, Bryce did know where something could be hidden.

Speaker 39 But the only find came above ground, and it wasn't pleasant.

Speaker 39 The cops went door to door around Lisa's old haunts and discovered she had been using crystal meth, had been drawn into the drug underworld, had been seeing some very dangerous people who did not seem anxious to cooperate with police.

Speaker 19 The cops did tell me they'd left business cards on the people's screen doors and stuff, and they were never contacted.

Speaker 45 Six long months passed, each month worse than the last.

Speaker 41 The fear and guilt were almost overpowering.

Speaker 19 And those nightmares.

Speaker 19 that I used to have

Speaker 19 and that I couldn't put myself in front of her to protect her from getting killed. I should have been the one to jump in front of her and be the one to be killed rather than her.

Speaker 28 In her heart, Teresa knew if anyone was going to unearth the secret of what had happened to her sister, it would have to be her.

Speaker 40 Once again, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

Speaker 48 She was about to go undercover as her own sister.

Speaker 14 It was a decision that would almost cost her life.

Speaker 49 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 49 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 49 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 49 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 45 What happened to Lisa Thomas?

Speaker 41 What would cause a 36-year-old woman, the mother of two little girls, to vanish into thin air?

Speaker 14 Murder?

Speaker 45 It looked that way, but there was no body, no weapon.

Speaker 35 Certainly her twin sister Teresa was suspicious, but that didn't give police much to go on.

Speaker 25 Had Lisa's husband Bryce killed her in a jealous rage?

Speaker 30 He insisted he had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 11 And Teresa spiraled into a deep depression.

Speaker 19 I was desperate to find her body, and they also told me that they couldn't do anything until the body was found.

Speaker 39 But finding a body in Bakersfield, California posed a particularly daunting challenge. It happens to be the cradle of the West Coast oil business.

Speaker 39 Over a century, thousands of wells have been bored into the pool of oil down below, many of them now just deep holes, long since abandoned, as Bryce Thomas, the oil worker, knew very well.

Speaker 39 Was Lisa in one of them?

Speaker 39 And so police sent down probes into the dark. They plumbed the desks of a local aqueduct of nearby rivers,

Speaker 39 and they found nothing. Every lead a dry hole.
And the investigation seemed to stall. Weeks went by.
Teresa began to second-guess the police. Did they think Lisa wasn't worth it?

Speaker 19 My feeling about it was that because of Lisa's background, because she wasn't exactly the doctor's wife, they didn't find her crime to be that high on the list of priorities.

Speaker 13 Remember, that DNA had been sent away months earlier, and still, no results.

Speaker 44 Sometimes the wheels of justice work slowly.

Speaker 25 How did Teresa respond to that?

Speaker 44 Well

Speaker 44 Teresa didn't quite understand the way the justice system works and she tried to be very helpful but she wanted immediate results and she was going stir crazy. She was.

Speaker 37 I remember one time the district attorney

Speaker 37 said that Teresa was driving her nuts because it was a daily thing. where Teresa was

Speaker 37 wanting to know what was going forward with the investigation and

Speaker 37 she wasn't patient with it, so she basically took the investigation on all herself.

Speaker 28 Half a year had passed.

Speaker 45 Teresa could no longer sit and wait for results.

Speaker 28 She had to do something.

Speaker 26 She distributed posters, created her own special twin hotline.

Speaker 2 She pestered her local newspapers to keep the story alive.

Speaker 31 She even arranged for coverage on national TV.

Speaker 23 Private investigators, search and rescue teams, and even psychics were brought in, and there were agonizing forays into the endless oil fields.

Speaker 19 I would be right there in front, leading the pack, and I would go guard if I'm the one that finds it. You know,

Speaker 19 it would kill me, you know, to see her like that.

Speaker 12 Did you feel as if you'd go crazy if you didn't find out?

Speaker 19 Yes, I did. I felt like I couldn't live.

Speaker 9 And then Teresa decided she would have to get down there in the muck, go to the very places where Lisa had spent her last days.

Speaker 3 Remember, police had discovered that Lisa had been using meth, had been hanging out with a rogues gallery of drug dealers.

Speaker 52 But for police, getting access to that bunch had been impossible.

Speaker 19 They wouldn't even open the door to the cops. They wouldn't have anything.
In fact, they'd just act like they weren't home, probably.

Speaker 4 But what if they knew something?

Speaker 12 Maybe Teresa decided there was one way to find out.

Speaker 37 Tell me, how was it that you decided to play the part of your sister?

Speaker 19 I needed to find out as much about her life at that time as I could,

Speaker 19 so I decided that the best thing for me to do is just try to pretend like I'm Lisa as much as I can, so they would open up to me like they would her.

Speaker 21 If anyone understood Lisa inside and out, it was her twin sister.

Speaker 41 They weren't identical twins, but Teresa felt sure she could assume her sister's identity, like a second skin, and maybe unlock the mystery of her disappearance.

Speaker 26 Remember, Teresa had always been the good twin.

Speaker 13 Not now.

Speaker 4 Now she would be as wild as Lisa.

Speaker 40 She traded her jeans for short skirts, painted her face, and like a stranger in a strange land, Teresa walked into the smoky bars of Bakersfield undercover.

Speaker 19 I would drink beer. I'd never drink beer.
You know, I tried to be just like her. I even tried to hold my cigarette like her.
It worked beautifully.

Speaker 9 What was your assessment of how dangerous it was for her?

Speaker 44 Well, she was dealing with drug users and people that had criminal backgrounds, you know, people that had been in custody for different crimes. And,

Speaker 44 you know, she was just trying to find answers and it didn't matter to her that she was

Speaker 44 having contact with these type of individuals.

Speaker 44 You know, I cautioned her a number of times to you know, be careful and not to go into situations that may cause harm to her, but, you know, she was on a mission.

Speaker 37 There were times when Teresa would disappear and I wouldn't hear from her for days. You know, I just had to say my prayers and hope I hear from her again.

Speaker 45 In that dangerous world, Teresa befriended anyone who may have known her sister in her last weeks.

Speaker 41 She was frightened, but not exactly alone.

Speaker 19 There's no doubt that I feel is my sister handing me things. And I think that she realized at that point that if I didn't find out something, I was going going to go crazy.

Speaker 40 She cruised the bars, made small talk with criminals.

Speaker 12 What could they tell you?

Speaker 32 How could they help?

Speaker 19 One of the things that they opened up to what happened the night before she died.

Speaker 9 She heard that Lisa and Bryce had met with a well-known drug dealer the night before Lisa disappeared. She managed to arrange a meeting with that drug dealer, and when she arrived,

Speaker 31 was met by gun-toting bodyguards in a private lair that looked like a scene from a bad gangster movie.

Speaker 19 It was like he had all these metal boxes and shelvings and stuff to protect him from anybody getting to him, like a shield from weapons or something. It was weird.

Speaker 19 And he had monitors of every single angle from his house from the outside so he could watch everything going around his house. And he had guys at the doors with guns.

Speaker 19 It was the scariest moment of my entire life.

Speaker 43 Did you think that maybe these people people had something to do with that?

Speaker 19 Oh, yes, most definitely. You should have seen there was guns around and there was bullets, you know, and bowls like you'd have, you know, like candies in a bowl.

Speaker 19 They had bullets in a bowl, and they had people's names carved into these bullets. It could have been them.

Speaker 31 Could have been somebody in that group killed your sister.

Speaker 12 As scared as she was, she wasn't too scared to get what she came for.

Speaker 10 Information about her sister's last hours.

Speaker 34 The dealer confirmed that he and his girlfriend had visited Lisa and Bryce around 10 p.m.

Speaker 2 the night before her disappearance.

Speaker 19 Bryce was out on their balcony, and he had a gun in his

Speaker 19 belt kind of, you know, like stuck behind here, which was unusual for him to even have a gun out or gun. Period.
I didn't know anything about it. And he also was acting very funny.

Speaker 2 According to the story, the whole group, Bryce included, got high in crystal meth.

Speaker 26 But something about Lisa's demeanor was unusual.

Speaker 21 She was listless, groggy, almost helpless, not her usual meth high at all.

Speaker 26 Teresa listened to the story and wondered, had Bryce sedated her sister, making her powerless to resist a coming attack?

Speaker 46 So why were you able to find these things that the police hadn't found?

Speaker 19 I truly believed that throughout this whole ordeal that my sister was guiding me and communicating with me from the other side. I felt, and I was never into this kind of thing.

Speaker 19 I wasn't even a believer in it, you know, speaking to the dead or whatever. I was not a believer in any of this.

Speaker 23 Teresa went to police and told them the stories she'd heard.

Speaker 25 But remember, these weren't hard facts.

Speaker 45 Much of it was hearsay.

Speaker 5 But now there were more witnesses to check out.

Speaker 25 And then, disaster.

Speaker 31 Somehow, word got back to her source in the drug hangout.

Speaker 5 Teresa was a police informant.

Speaker 48 Her cover was blown.

Speaker 33 How did those people feel about your having infiltrated their world?

Speaker 19 I think I was shot at the next day.

Speaker 31 Teresa Siebold had gone to hell and back in a desperate search for her twin sister, Lisa, had scoured the scummiest neighborhoods of Bakersfield, California, had entered her sister's world to dally with drug dealers and low-life thugs.

Speaker 4 And then her cover was blown.

Speaker 2 Her new friends in the drug world learned she'd gone to the cops.

Speaker 40 That they were not happy was made frighteningly clear a few days later as she drove down the freeway.

Speaker 19 But I tell you, when I got shot going down the freeway, I learned I felt like I was Rockford, you know, and I had to lose the person to keep from getting killed.

Speaker 36 Surely that just happens in the movies.

Speaker 19 We saw the bullet, you know, the bullets on, you know, we heard them. They passed us.
We were going down the freeway 65, 70 miles an hour, and I heard a

Speaker 19 go past my ear. So whatever, it was definitely someone was chasing us.

Speaker 26 It certainly seemed like Lisa's friends had something to hide.

Speaker 13 One by one they were brought in for questioning, but no matter how many were interrogated, all leads kept pointing to one person.

Speaker 44 It was Bryce. That's where we kept coming back to.

Speaker 21 Even though you'd question some CD characters. Yes.

Speaker 45 Then, finally, a break.

Speaker 13 After 10 months, the DNA results from the spatters of blood in the bedroom were back.

Speaker 3 The result?

Speaker 41 There was a 99.86 probability it was Lisa's blood.

Speaker 45 The DNA results, along with the crime scene evidence, convinced police they now had enough to charge Bryce Thomas with the murder of his wife, Lisa.

Speaker 9 Where are you going?

Speaker 44 Away from you!

Speaker 48 After an excruciating wait, a warrant went out for his arrest, and

Speaker 13 Bryce Thomas had vanished.

Speaker 31 What had happened to him?

Speaker 44 About three weeks prior to the arrest, he decided to relocate to Anchorage, Alaska, and live with his mother.

Speaker 41 Police did find Thomas in Anchorage, and after much legal wrangling, he was extradited to California.

Speaker 45 But the biggest challenge was yet to come.

Speaker 4 Now, you have to go to trial, and you have nobody.

Speaker 36 It's taken you a long time to prove for certain that she was even dead.

Speaker 21 That must be a difficult case to prove.

Speaker 44 Well, as a general rule, a circumstantial evidence case is

Speaker 44 difficult. It is a difficult case to put on and to win.

Speaker 38 The trial lasted three weeks.

Speaker 41 Despite Teresa's hard work, the case was far from a sure thing.

Speaker 19 You just couldn't prove guilt without a body.

Speaker 19 And so the whole town, including the DA's office and everybody, said they're going to have a no-guilty verdict.

Speaker 39 The defense at the Kern County Courthouse painted Bryce Thomas as a hard-working husband and father, whose willful wife had spiraled out of control. He just woke up one morning and found her gone.

Speaker 39 It was Lisa who had the bad reputation, said the defense, not Bryce. And sure enough, she was known as somebody who could be wild.

Speaker 39 But the prosecution painted a very different portrait of Bryce Thomas.

Speaker 37 He had a side that he would show at work as the upstanding, stable, good guy. And then he had this dark side that he kept from everyone.

Speaker 44 It was not uncommon for him to go through her things, to follow her when she went places, to put recording devices in her vehicle.

Speaker 44 to take conversations that she might have with friends or, you know, possibly another man.

Speaker 35 The prosecution argued that the apparently quiet, steady Bryce was filled with rage at his wife's last infidelity.

Speaker 2 Several friends testified Bryce had threatened Lisa's life on more than one occasion, even saying he would kill her first before she could leave him.

Speaker 29 Testimony from another friend told an even more frightening story, that Thomas had offered the friend $5,000 to kill Lisa's boyfriend.

Speaker 2 But it would be Teresa herself who offered perhaps the most damning testimony.

Speaker 40 In chilling detail, she recalled her discovery of the bloody mattress in Lisa and Bryce's bedroom.

Speaker 43 She also recounted what she had learned on her journey to the dark side of Bakersfield, where Lisa had spent her last days and nights.

Speaker 2 For over 10 hours, Teresa recounted what she'd found in her zealous search for her sister.

Speaker 37 Teresa was so overwhelmingly convincing as a witness,

Speaker 18 but testifying against her brother-in-law was devastating.

Speaker 19 Worst week of my life. I totally fell apart the first half hour on the stand.
Totally fell apart.

Speaker 19 I couldn't stop crying, and it was the first time I'd seen him. And of course, my chair was like pointed right at him, even though I tried not to look at him.
I felt very guilty.

Speaker 18 Guilty?

Speaker 19 It was like telling on my brother or sister. It was like telling on somebody that I really cared about.

Speaker 2 And if Teresa was conflicted, the jurors were facing their own dilemma.

Speaker 45 How to return a murder verdict without a body or even a weapon.

Speaker 30 And so the jury worked through the case, digging down, trying to find the truth about what had happened, Telisa Seepo.

Speaker 21 It would take three days for the jury to reach a decision.

Speaker 19 I was walking inside the courtroom when they were coming out of the courtroom and someone yelled,

Speaker 19 Teresa guilty, or something like that. They yelled my name and said guilty.

Speaker 2 She had done it.

Speaker 29 She had made a difference.

Speaker 9 Bryce Thomas was found guilty of second-degree murder.

Speaker 12 He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Speaker 29 And the two-year nightmare, it seemed, was over.

Speaker 46 So tell me how that felt.

Speaker 19 Like the world was lifted off my shoulders completely. I felt so light, finally, because everything felt so heavy before that.

Speaker 19 And I felt like, you know, my hard work finally paid off and that it was just a good thing I didn't give up.

Speaker 14 But sometimes murder cases are not so easy to button up all neat and tidy.

Speaker 16 Yes, Thomas was behind bars for now.

Speaker 7 But he wasn't finished with Teresa.

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Speaker 23 Bryce Thomas had been found guilty of brutally murdering his wife, Lisa.

Speaker 26 The key witness against him, her twin sister, Teresa.

Speaker 29 Justice was finally done.

Speaker 43 Or was it?

Speaker 29 No sooner had the verdict been delivered than one of the jurors stepped forward with a problem.

Speaker 19 Oh, there was a juror that was trying to do a mistrial, claiming that there was jury misconduct.

Speaker 18 He would have got out of prison. Yeah.

Speaker 46 On a mistrial.

Speaker 41 One juror insisted that her fellow panelists had not followed the judge's instructions.

Speaker 2 Lawyers and judges returned to court to wrangle over the juror's allegation.

Speaker 21 Thomas remained in prison while his lawyers tried to secure a mistrial.

Speaker 18 But Thomas did not simply sit in his jail cell and wait. Word spread around the prison that Thomas wanted a favor, and only a certain kind of person could do it for him.

Speaker 37 So while he was incarcerated in prison,

Speaker 37 he set up a $10,000 hit on Teresa.

Speaker 29 If there was a new trial, Teresa would again be the prime prosecution witness.

Speaker 16 So in prison, Thomas made a few useful friends who approached a very large, very tough hitman.

Speaker 5 What did they tell you they needed?

Speaker 56 They told me they needed somebody to act as a professional murderer, otherwise known as a hitman.

Speaker 39 What Thomas didn't know was that the hitman was actually J.R. Rodriguez, then an undercover investigator for the Kern County Sheriff's Department.

Speaker 39 Skillfully, Rodriguez adopted the guise of Garrow, a killer with no conscience. A phone call was arranged between Garrow and Bryce.
Rodriguez's instructions were very clear.

Speaker 39 He had to walk a verbal tightrope, reeling in information without tipping his hand. The phone call that Bryce made was secretly recorded.

Speaker 15 I'm just looking away to get out.

Speaker 15 She's the prime witness, so

Speaker 15 without her, they are nothing. She's caused a lot of hell in my life.
She took my kids from me and everything else.

Speaker 57 So you just want me to bumper away, this huh? Yeah, I want her to disappear. Well, I couldn't make it happen, eh? But, you know, you got to pay.
Without a trace. Well, I need to know how much.

Speaker 57 Well, depending on how hard, maybe

Speaker 57 $10,000.

Speaker 57 Well, I can do it, but it'll take me a little while to do it.

Speaker 45 Unaware that he's being recorded, Thomas negotiates.

Speaker 29 He thinks he's arranging a murder for less money down than it would take to buy a used car.

Speaker 57 Maybe $500 to get started?

Speaker 57 I can come up with a few hundred. It's about all I can come up with right now, and I'll have to weasel my grandma out of that.

Speaker 36 There's no question what he wanted you to do.

Speaker 20 Yes, sir.

Speaker 3 What did that feel like inside?

Speaker 56 Well, like I said, it was chilling to have somebody

Speaker 56 want somebody killed, number one, but number two, in the manner that the body would be found.

Speaker 9 The voices on the tape are almost casual, like a couple of men planning a surprise party. Bryce tells Rodriguez he wants Teresa killed in her sleep.

Speaker 31 But even more shocking, he knows during the planned murder, Teresa's children will be sleeping just feet away, and his own small daughters will be there too.

Speaker 57 So you want me to get rid of these beasts forever?

Speaker 16 How about the kids? Oh, no. No.
Two of them are mine. The oldest one there will be mine.
She's 10.

Speaker 16 So if they wake up and find no auntie, she'll be able to handle the situation until

Speaker 16 authorities arrive.

Speaker 28 What kind of a man would want a thing like that?

Speaker 43 A sick man.

Speaker 48 In court, Thomas had steadfastly denied he had anything to do with Lisa's disappearance.

Speaker 13 Now he seemed intimately aware of the more gruesome details. Actually, what I'd like to happen is I'd like to leave a little blood trail there.
You leave a blood trail? Yeah.

Speaker 13 Because that's similar to what happened

Speaker 13 to their mother, to the one that I'm accused of murdering.

Speaker 13 She disappeared. Hmm, you know what I mean.
Do you want me to do anything else but bump her in the head and drop her off, huh? Yeah. Get rid of her completely.

Speaker 13 The man who had claimed he was innocent of Lisa's murder was now caught on tape trying to arrange the murder of Teresa, the woman who had brought him to justice.

Speaker 16 Or had she

Speaker 39 Teresa Siebold had risked her life helping police put her sister's killer behind bars.

Speaker 39 Now that man, her brother-in-law Bryce Thomas, had attempted to hire a hitman to kill Teresa, the prosecution star witness.

Speaker 39 His biggest mistake? The hitman was actually an undercover investigator, and the phone call arranging the hit was recorded.

Speaker 39 But as we sat down together in 2005, Teresa was about to hear that tape for the first time.

Speaker 39 We listened.

Speaker 7 So did she.

Speaker 57 You know, I'm going to have to watch this bitch for a couple days and see what she does, you know.

Speaker 16 I understand.

Speaker 4 And we watched her body stiffen.

Speaker 57 Anything else you want me to do to her? Do whatever you want with her. Okay.
We can handle that, Miss A. I just want a gallon.
What's her name, Missa?

Speaker 19 Teresa.

Speaker 19 That's the first time ever that I've heard that tape. I'd forgotten all about

Speaker 19 the details of how he wanted me dead. And what kind of gave me the

Speaker 19 Willie's worst was his description of how to get to my bedroom,

Speaker 19 you know, and the blood trail.

Speaker 32 Kill you in just the same way Lisa was killed.

Speaker 20 Leave a blood trail.

Speaker 42 Make her disappear.

Speaker 20 Talked about you as coldly as a person possibly could.

Speaker 19 There's no doubt about it. I felt it.
I felt something go, you know, like pull my guts in or something.

Speaker 37 It made me realize that, you know, our family's, as long as Bryce is alive, our family's not safe.

Speaker 39 Bryce Thomas's plot failed. Instead, he received a 12-year sentence for trying to arrange the murder of Teresa Sieboldt.

Speaker 39 And for the murder of Lisa, the trial verdict was allowed to stand. No mistrial.
The sentence, 15 years to life, was upheld. But still, a mystery.
Where is the body of Lisa Thomas?

Speaker 39 Out there at the bottom of some well?

Speaker 39 Maybe.

Speaker 37 There was a story that he told that he had burned her in a tank in the oil fields. Because he had access to hundreds of miles of oilfields, keys to the gates and all that.

Speaker 37 I'm hoping that someday getting him to tell us exactly what happened with the remains.

Speaker 46 Is there any way to describe the damage that you feel has been done

Speaker 28 inside there?

Speaker 19 I don't have any insights left, I feel. I feel like it just was exploded and can never be put back together, really.

Speaker 39 No, not for Teresa Sieboldt, anyway. She was never the same after losing her twin sister, Lisa, in 1996.
Twenty years later, Teresa died. According to Rick Sieboldt, His sister's heart just stopped.

Speaker 39 She was only 56.

Speaker 39 Rick told us that over the years he has often thought of visiting Bryce Thomas in prison to let him know he didn't just kill Lisa. He killed the whole family.

Speaker 24 The end result of murder.

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