Secrets in the Ozarks

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Speaker 10 Tonight on Date Live.

Speaker 11 She was a tiny little thing, but she was not scared of anybody.

Speaker 12 Got a golfing dispatch that said that Rebecca was missing. There was bloody items, pillows, and clothing that was shoved under the bed.

Speaker 13 Where did they find the body?

Speaker 14 Right down there close to that big tree.

Speaker 13 Here's your girl in the coffin.

Speaker 15 There's somebody.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 16 A lot of suspects. A lot of suspects.

Speaker 14 Casey was the boyfriend.

Speaker 12 They was on and off again.

Speaker 11 She had Justin, who she went to high school with. Justin was the bad boy.
We had heard a rumor that Chris was covered in blood that day. So that is a red flag.

Speaker 15 We have no forced entry, so she knew who her killer was. There was a car there with Texas plates.
Who were the Texas plates?

Speaker 15 He had a picture of Rebecca's headstone, newspaper clippings about Rebecca's murder.

Speaker 17 We know what you did.

Speaker 18 We know how it went down.

Speaker 19 This is a total bluff.

Speaker 20 It is.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 21 You're free to go anytime.

Speaker 13 The detective doesn't have anything.

Speaker 6 Right, right.

Speaker 15 It was a little bit of shock. Oh my God, it's over.

Speaker 23 Would an investigator's risky strategy doom a case or reveal a killer?

Speaker 2 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 23 Here's Dennis Murphy with Secrets in the Ozarks.

Speaker 1 An awful act.

Speaker 26 One you couldn't unsee or forget.

Speaker 27 And there was no shortage of suspects.

Speaker 30 A small mountain town with relatives and neighbors turned against one another.

Speaker 11 They all went through being accused, every single one of them. It hurt a lot of them.

Speaker 10 Without an arrest, the court of public opinion never really went into recess or stopped spinning fresh theories.

Speaker 35 Old names, new names, whispered about.

Speaker 12 There There was lots of names thrown out there.

Speaker 11 Rumors about Jennifer.

Speaker 15 They flat out told some people that I was the one that done it.

Speaker 36 Chris Cantrill.

Speaker 14 And largely, Casey.

Speaker 12 Everybody was pointing the finger at him.

Speaker 34 So many reputations were dragged through the mud.

Speaker 38 The true killer, meanwhile, following it all from so many miles away, tickled to be getting away with it.

Speaker 32 He was very proud that he was able to fool everybody.

Speaker 40 Until he encountered this man, and all his bravado fell away in a heartbeat.

Speaker 20 The evil laid bare by a simple question.

Speaker 43 Would you be okay with taking a polygraph? I'll just ask you.

Speaker 44 So let's follow the hills into the postcard-pretty Arkansas Ozarks.

Speaker 46 That's where Rebecca, the young woman in our story, was raised.

Speaker 47 If you like, you can just let your ears direct you to the sounds of the fiddle and the sweet song of the dulcimer.

Speaker 27 And there you'll be in the town of Mountain View, the self-designated folk music capital of the world.

Speaker 35 In cozy parlors, you can hear the timeless old hymns and the ballads of faithless lovers come to murderous ruin.

Speaker 50 But one person's timeless and satisfying can be another's claustrophobic.

Speaker 11 There's not a whole lot to do there. I mean, it's a beautiful area, but it's just a small town.
You're lucky if you have a stoplight in your town.

Speaker 42 Tiffany Moore grew up in Mountain View with three sisters.

Speaker 34 Eventually, she enrolled in the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, three hours away.

Speaker 53 She wasn't surprised when her restless kid sisters, Rebecca, that's her on the right, and Danielle moved there too.

Speaker 27 Rebecca, 22 years old, wanted so very much to be a Razorback.

Speaker 11 Well, she was going to a community college because she wanted to get into the University of Arkansas, but she had to get a couple of classes under her belt first.

Speaker 11 And that's what her and Danielle were both enrolled in the same classes, going to the.

Speaker 13 So do the community college thing and then become a razorback.

Speaker 11 Yes, that was the plan.

Speaker 39 College was the future, but Tiffany's sisters missed their mom and friends from the old days.

Speaker 59 So on that third weekend of September 2004, with her little dog Lady and sister Danielle riding shotgun, Rebecca drove home for a visit.

Speaker 34 She planned to spend most of her time in a nearby town at the home of a friend.

Speaker 47 A guy named Casey, huh?

Speaker 11 Casey, yes. Yeah.
And that's who she would stay with a lot of the times when she would go back home.

Speaker 1 Boyfriend of Rebecca, Casey, or not so much?

Speaker 11 At one point, yes, they were. They were kind of on and off.

Speaker 46 Come late Monday, September 20th, 2004, the sisters were supposed to head back to school.

Speaker 48 Rebecca at the wheel.

Speaker 53 That never happened.

Speaker 11 She didn't answer her phone and she never picked Danielle up. But Rebecca was kind of like that too.
You know,

Speaker 11 if she wanted to do something, she was going to do it.

Speaker 55 By Tuesday morning, Rebecca's mom knew something wasn't right.

Speaker 11 She called the police department and asked them to do a,

Speaker 11 what is it, a welfare check or something.

Speaker 59 So when this thing went down, are you already working?

Speaker 62 Are you on shift?

Speaker 14 I've been on shift about 30 minutes that morning.

Speaker 27 Charlie Melton is now the Izard County Sheriff.

Speaker 57 But back in 2004, he was a newly minted deputy when his dispatcher told him to locate one Rebecca Gould.

Speaker 13 Just in general, what do you think your mission is here?

Speaker 14 To go find somebody that has either lost or just for some reason didn't want to go back to where they're supposed to be.

Speaker 9 So you think it's going to be a pretty simple deal, huh?

Speaker 65 Just a pretty routine call.

Speaker 40 Rebecca's mom suggested they track down that friend Rebecca was staying with, Casey McCullough.

Speaker 38 They'd most likely find him at work at this Sonic Ryban.

Speaker 54 So you went to the Sonic?

Speaker 53 Yes, sir. There he was.

Speaker 14 He was pulling out his ice pulling in.

Speaker 58 Casey told the deputy he last saw Rebecca the day before, Monday morning, when she dropped him off for his shift at the Sonic.

Speaker 39 She was supposed to pick him up later that day, but for some reason, didn't show.

Speaker 63 He spent the night out with friends and didn't go home.

Speaker 34 But now, having just swung by his place, he noticed Rebecca's car and dog were still there.

Speaker 31 She was not.

Speaker 54 The deputy asked Casey to take him back to the house.

Speaker 68 So this is Casey's place.

Speaker 13 Yes, sir. Here we are, what, 19 years on?

Speaker 59 Close to it? It's a mess. It is.

Speaker 62 But not so bad then, huh?

Speaker 65 It wasn't. It was pretty well maintained and taken care of at that time.

Speaker 27 Melton says, as soon as he walked into the house, he realized his routine call was anything but.

Speaker 12 And went in. Her purse was on the table, and her dog was there and other personal items, but she wasn't around.

Speaker 12 I was for sure concerned then.

Speaker 39 He asked Casey to show him the bedroom where he and Rebecca slept.

Speaker 17 The linen had been stripped off the mattress.

Speaker 12 I asked him if I could look under the mattress. When I flipped it up, the bottom of the mattress had blood covering a large portion of it.

Speaker 13 And in the laundry room you found something, huh?

Speaker 12 The washing machine was just right outside the bedroom door. I lifted the lid on it and there was the bedding.
And in the bleach dispenser for the washing machine, there appeared to be blood.

Speaker 42 This sounds like trouble, Sheriff.

Speaker 69 It was.

Speaker 12 And at that time, it's when I took Casey outside and called our sheriff and told him what I had found.

Speaker 71 Told the sheriff that Rebecca Gould was more than just missing.

Speaker 27 The deputy suspected the young man standing before him knew where she was and maybe what had been done to her.

Speaker 62 Arkansas police were rolling out.

Speaker 8 22-year-old Rebecca Gould had gone missing.

Speaker 72 Her friend, Casey McCullough's home, a potential crime scene.

Speaker 12 There was bloody items, pillows, and clothing that was shoved under the bed.

Speaker 44 There was blood on the walls behind the bed, but it didn't really describe what was happening at that point.

Speaker 12 It did not.

Speaker 39 It was by then Tuesday morning, September 21st, 2004, a full day since anyone had seen or heard from Rebecca.

Speaker 59 Police told her family little of what they discovered inside the house.

Speaker 11 They had told me that they found that there was blood, but they didn't tell me how much.

Speaker 39 Rebecca's sister, Tiffany Tiffany Moore, and her half-sister, Angela Neubauer, were not alarmed so much as rolling their eyes at their sister's latest stunt.

Speaker 47 They made the long drive over to a town near their old home in Casey's, a place called Melbourne.

Speaker 32 We're probably going to give Rebecca a lecture because she's probably partying somewhere because there's no way this could be happening.

Speaker 6 Tiffany, you agreed.

Speaker 9 You thought this was an incident we'd all look back and laugh at sometime after Rebecca got a school?

Speaker 11 I did, yeah, yeah, I really did.

Speaker 15 She was always going to be the last one to come if you called her.

Speaker 3 Rebecca's father, Larry Gould, lived an hour away.

Speaker 63 When he got word, he wasn't overly concerned either.

Speaker 35 Not at first.

Speaker 20 He says his daughter was a rebel, had been from the word go.

Speaker 15 She had a mind of her own. She was really fearless, even at a young age.

Speaker 11 I mean things that she shouldn't do, like sneaking out, even at us, just to go out and go down to the park down the street. If she wanted to do it, she was going to do it.
Free spirit, huh?

Speaker 11 She was very much. Fearless.
Yes.

Speaker 51 Fearless and independent by nature, independent by necessity after her parents divorced.

Speaker 15 I tried to get custody of my girls for years and years and years. They went with their mother and lived throughout Arkansas, different places in Arkansas.

Speaker 13 An ugly divorce, not a mercury, but this one was especially painful.

Speaker 16 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 Very.

Speaker 39 It involved nasty allegations.

Speaker 55 Mom against dad, dad against mom.

Speaker 13 It wasn't all a bed of roses for you guys growing up, was it?

Speaker 11 No, no, it wasn't. It was...

Speaker 2 It was...

Speaker 13 Some foster homes along the way?

Speaker 6 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 11 We're in foster home for, I think, a good year or two.

Speaker 57 After which, they reunited with their mom.

Speaker 27 But their father, a dentist, says his daughters lack stability.

Speaker 39 And he lacked consistent contact with them because of their mother.

Speaker 15 She'd live one place and the girls would never be settled. Something would happen and she'd move somewhere else.
So there was never any security in their life. Did that worry you? Of course it did.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 75 Even so, Tiffany remembers Rebecca having a mostly happy childhood, one filled with outdoor adventures.

Speaker 11 We'd go camping a lot. That was our vacations when we were little and Rebecca was always in the water.
She was either swimming or trying to catch crawdads.

Speaker 16 Couldn't get her out of the water.

Speaker 11 Nope, she was little fish.

Speaker 27 The scrappy little mermaid grew into a self-assured and fiercely protective young woman.

Speaker 11 She was only 100 pounds and a tiny little thing, but she was not scared of anybody. But people were drawn to her.
People loved her.

Speaker 13 She doesn't sound like she'd be easily intimidated.

Speaker 11 No, she wasn't.

Speaker 13 She'd stand up and fight for herself?

Speaker 32 Oh, yeah. And anybody else she loved.
Yeah.

Speaker 47 She had the whole family's back, huh?

Speaker 32 Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was the eldest, but I guarantee you, if there was a conflict that I was having, she'd be the first to jump over me to get that person to, you know, protect me.

Speaker 51 Now maybe it was Rebecca who needed protecting.

Speaker 42 Deputy Melton suspected, at the very least, someone had attacked the young woman before dragging her away.

Speaker 47 He believed Casey knew more about her disappearance.

Speaker 12 And I asked Casey again, I said, where is she? He said he didn't know. And I said, what happened to her? And he said he didn't know.

Speaker 77 I left with Rebecca and we went to Mountain View.

Speaker 39 Casey, in a recorded interview, later retraced the hours before Rebecca vanished as state police built a timeline.

Speaker 17 He said the night before Rebecca went missing, Sunday, was nothing special.

Speaker 77 When we got to Mountain View, we really actually drove around trying to figure out something to do, and then we decided to rent more movies.

Speaker 19 They came back to his place and watched the first film.

Speaker 77 After that, she looks out the window and she sees some Monday out

Speaker 77 on the road, the dirt road, and I look out there and I told her it was my cousin.

Speaker 44 Casey said his cousin Billy in town from Texas stopped by that night for a quick hello.

Speaker 78 How long did he stay?

Speaker 77 About 10-15 minutes tops.

Speaker 6 We just really talked about old times and stuff.

Speaker 36 An hour or so later, he said he and Rebecca went to bed.

Speaker 17 On Monday morning, Rebecca drove him to work, just as he'd already explained to the deputy.

Speaker 77 Oh, I remember saying bye and smiling to each other and waving. And that's the last time I saw Rebecca.

Speaker 51 Her plan was to return to his place to catch a nap before picking him up at 4 p.m., then driving back to school.

Speaker 71 When she didn't show that afternoon, he called, but she didn't answer.

Speaker 49 At the time, he said, he shrugged it off.

Speaker 37 It wasn't until Tuesday, when he returned home with the deputy, that he realized something bad had happened.

Speaker 78 Did you have anything to do with Rebecca's disappearance? No, sir. Did you in any way cause any harm to Rebecca?

Speaker 6 No, sir.

Speaker 50 The investigator wasn't wasn't getting much from Casey at all.

Speaker 36 Though when he asked about Rebecca's past, the young man's tone changed.

Speaker 78 You know anybody she's had a relationship problem with or somebody that knows she's out there that she would feel comfortable either letting in the house or that could talk to her to get inside the house?

Speaker 77 I do know.

Speaker 71 Casey told the investigator they should check out one of Rebecca's old boyfriends.

Speaker 76 As it turned out, her sisters were already calling him, a fellow named Justin Gullett.

Speaker 11 Casey kind of just fell over himself for Rebecca, and then Justin was the bad boy.

Speaker 54 Justin, police needed to find him and have a chat right away.

Speaker 5 Rebecca Gould had been missing since Monday.

Speaker 41 By Wednesday, law enforcement had launched a full-scale search.

Speaker 81 It's a lot of national forests. They're used to doing the searches.

Speaker 27 Dennis Simons was an investigator with the Arkansas State Police when Rebecca disappeared.

Speaker 10 He eventually took the lead on her case.

Speaker 34 He knows this part of the Ozarks, lived here for years.

Speaker 81 They did horseback, they did the four-wheeler. Anytime we've ever done a search up in this area, you get the gaming fish, you get the National Forest Service, you get the volunteer fire departments.

Speaker 31 Have to, he says.

Speaker 36 This is challenging terrain, especially in mid-September.

Speaker 81 In that time of year, you're going to have a lot of underbrush, a lot of thorns. I mean, it is very thick, rugged terrain, steep terrain.
You walk 10 feet from something and not see it.

Speaker 81 It's just very thick underbrush.

Speaker 3 When Rebecca's family got to town, police explained they thought it unlikely that Rebecca, on a whim, had decided to take off on her own.

Speaker 13 When did you realize she never really did hit the road?

Speaker 16 Because her car was there, her purse was there.

Speaker 11 Yeah,

Speaker 11 honestly, I don't know that that even sank in. I mean, we were just

Speaker 11 hoping that, you know, she was somewhere else.

Speaker 31 Then police filled the family in on more of the details, starting with the amount of blood found in Casey's room.

Speaker 11 When I found out how much blood it was and that it couldn't be something else, it had to be a little more serious, I started getting concerned, but I still didn't think the worst.

Speaker 35 They continued to believe Rebecca would show up at any moment, explain it all away.

Speaker 47 Maybe she was with that old boyfriend of hers, the one Casey mentioned to police.

Speaker 11 Justin, who she went to high school with, that was her everything, pretty much.

Speaker 73 Justin and Rebecca, that's Justin and Rebecca, yes.

Speaker 26 They had long since broken up.

Speaker 35 But Tiffany says Rebecca still regarded her old flame as the one who got away.

Speaker 11 I think Justin always stuck out in her inner mind that that's who she loves and who she wanted to be with.

Speaker 34 Their hunch that Rebecca was with Justin made even more sense when police handed them Rebecca's personal items, including her purse.

Speaker 79 Inside it, Angela discovered a letter.

Speaker 13 Interesting, a letter.

Speaker 69 From whom and what did it say?

Speaker 32 It was from Justin.

Speaker 35 What was the gist of the letter, Angela?

Speaker 32 That he loved her, you know, and that they belonged together.

Speaker 27 The letter gave her sisters hope.

Speaker 56 Now, they weren't the only ones who wanted to talk to Justin.

Speaker 27 Police did too.

Speaker 31 but he wasn't at home.

Speaker 11 When we couldn't get a hold of him, we couldn't get a hold of her. We just kind of held on to that hope that she was with him.

Speaker 74 After two days of calling, Justin finally answered his phone.

Speaker 11 He was at the casino with his father. We asked if he had seen her, if she was with him, and once he said no, I mean, it was just, it was kind of devastating.

Speaker 59 Justin met with police and they interviewed him.

Speaker 20 It turned out the old boyfriend had been off gambling well before Rebecca vanished.

Speaker 34 Still, the family would not give up hope.

Speaker 32 I just know that she's out there and she needs us.

Speaker 34 Not even when they joined the search.

Speaker 13 You have caves there, you have woods.

Speaker 3 You have woods.

Speaker 16 Lots of waterways. Yes.

Speaker 15 And so she could be anywhere. The only thing on my mind was to find her.

Speaker 76 I just felt like

Speaker 15 we're going to, somebody's going to say, got her, here she is.

Speaker 11 I remember looking at birds and we walk over towards where the birds were flying around and just kind of giving a sigh of relief that we didn't find anything.

Speaker 61 I remember that.

Speaker 13 You do want to find something but you don't, right?

Speaker 11 Right, right, yeah. We definitely wanted to answer.

Speaker 11 We wanted the answers, yeah, but we didn't want to find anything.

Speaker 34 But hope with nothing to sustain it can only last so long.

Speaker 57 By week's end, it was gone for good.

Speaker 68 Sheriff, where did they find the body?

Speaker 14 Right down there, close to that big tree right there.

Speaker 68 She lay there on her side, about 30 feet down a steep embankment off this mountain highway.

Speaker 13 If you could put yourself in his head, the killer's head, why does this make sense for him where we are?

Speaker 14 Because it's a rural area, little traffic, no houses close by, so that may be the reason he chose this spot.

Speaker 38 Despite the decomposition of the young woman's body, investigators were sure it was Rebecca.

Speaker 59 Shortly after, they gathered her family in a room at the station and told them she had at last been found.

Speaker 11 It didn't feel real.

Speaker 11 It didn't. It didn't at all.

Speaker 11 You don't know how to take it?

Speaker 28 Still, police needed a formal ID that fell to her father, the dentist.

Speaker 15 They asked if I happened to have dental records on my daughter, and I said I did, and I provided them to the state police, which went to the crime lab. Yeah, that was hard.

Speaker 50 The records were a match to the body.

Speaker 55 For one agonizing week, all eyes had been fixed on finding Rebecca Gould alive.

Speaker 37 Now their attention turned to finding her killer.

Speaker 74 Investigators were pretty sure they already had his name, Casey McCullough.

Speaker 60 They discover a possible motive soon enough.

Speaker 81 I'm going to take revenge on this girl. Definitely a big motive for murder, no doubt about it.

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Speaker 42 The day after searchers recovered the body of Rebecca Gould, the county ME performed an autopsy.

Speaker 64 Deputy Melton saw the report and knew Rebecca's death had been especially gruesome.

Speaker 13 What was the ME's finding about cause of death?

Speaker 44 What had happened to her?

Speaker 16 Blunt force trauma.

Speaker 39 Blows to her face and head.

Speaker 44 To investigators, that suggested rage.

Speaker 13 Any indication she'd been sexually sexually assaulted, could they say one way or the other?

Speaker 12 They couldn't say the body isn't too bad a shape.

Speaker 37 The next heartbreak for her parents and sisters, funeral arrangements.

Speaker 2 It was,

Speaker 11 you know, the only time that I've ever had to really do that.

Speaker 11 But, yeah, you have to go through and figure out which casket, you know,

Speaker 11 she would be happy spending the rest of her life in, or her, you know, however you want to, you know, say that.

Speaker 13 And you found one in pink.

Speaker 11 It was like a pinkish-purple color because that was her favorite color.

Speaker 13 You don't want to pick your sister's casket, but there you go.

Speaker 61 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 So we wanted to make it pretty for her.

Speaker 48 Her father gave the eulogy.

Speaker 15 I'm not a public speaker. So for me to get up there and do that, I'm going to tell you right now, it meant that nothing in this world would have stopped me.

Speaker 44 And there's your girl in a coffin.

Speaker 15 There's my

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 37 Her pink-themed funeral was filled with flowers and those she loved, including her dog lady.

Speaker 15 And I'll never forget that

Speaker 15 something was being said about Rebecca, and all of a sudden the dog barked. It was like it was programmed.

Speaker 6 It was amazing.

Speaker 15 I believe strongly that the only way you get through horrific events in life is you have to have a foundation in faith or it will tear you up.

Speaker 13 And the dog was delivering from channels unknown. Absolutely.

Speaker 15 In my mind, she was.

Speaker 35 A moment of peace, perhaps, to cling to.

Speaker 30 Investigators, meanwhile, were pulling together the pieces from the crime scene, already dusted for fingerprints, gathered for DNA testing, hoping to reconstruct what had happened to Rebecca.

Speaker 81 I think from minute one, the original investigators really felt like she was murdered in the house.

Speaker 26 In that bedroom, where a lot of Rebecca's blood was found, a missing piece of furniture from another room suggested the weapon used on her.

Speaker 12 It was noted that a piano leg was missing.

Speaker 12 It reportedly been loose and would commonly fall over.

Speaker 70 And if you walked, trod on the floor in the wrong way, the piano leg would drop off, huh?

Speaker 12 Yep. And if you went by it and shook the floor enough or stepped just right, the piano leg would fall over.

Speaker 3 Another missing item, her suitcase, offered a window into the mind of her killer.

Speaker 81 I think they truly thought they were going to make people think, in whatever little mindset they had, that she just disappeared. She went, she grabbed her suitcase and left.

Speaker 26 The detective thought if he could find that suitcase, it could lead him to the killer.

Speaker 35 To early investigators, it looked like that person was Casey.

Speaker 78 Tell me, how did you come to know Rebecca?

Speaker 77 We worked at Sonic together, and the very first day that she worked at Sonic, I thought she was the most beautiful creature I've ever seen.

Speaker 6 So, you know,

Speaker 77 that's when we started talking.

Speaker 12 Him and Rebecca had been on and off again, boyfriend, girlfriend, and just being the simple fact of their rocky relationship and that she had been staying there and

Speaker 16 her car was still at his house and her belongings still at his house when she went missing.

Speaker 13 Romantic entanglements can be part of the cocktail of homicide, huh?

Speaker 12 It can be.

Speaker 34 Rebecca's father says in the weeks before her murder, She complained that Casey was possessive, that he hadn't gotten the message.

Speaker 42 They were through as a couple.

Speaker 15 How do you know that, Doctor? Because that's what she told me. She told you.
She told me that she still had to go down and to break it off with him.

Speaker 81 There's no doubt, you know, he wants this girl.

Speaker 81 He wants her. This girl's rejected me.
I'm going to take revenge on this girl. Definitely a big motive for murder, no doubt about it.

Speaker 8 Just a week before, life was simple for Casey McCullough, flipping burgers and strumming his guitar.

Speaker 74 Now it looked as though he was cruising to a murder charge.

Speaker 8 A timely miracle would be helpful, and just maybe the story told by a breakfast sandwich wouldn't hurt.

Speaker 56 In the days after Rebecca Gould's murder, Casey McCullough was pretty much public enemy number one in Mountain View, except perhaps to his family and friends.

Speaker 88 I can remember my gut telling me, and I trust it, that my friend didn't have anything to do with this, you know.

Speaker 33 Larry McClure and Philip Schultz are Casey's former co-workers from that Sonic drive-through.

Speaker 50 They say soft-spoken, musical Casey didn't have a mean bone in his body.

Speaker 88 Yeah, you know, we hit it off, and he was a great musician, you know, played the guitar and sang, you know.

Speaker 69 Well, I don't,

Speaker 89 a lot. He did it, played a lot, and he used to sing a lot in Sonic, which kind of irritated us a little bit, but still at the same time, it was like it would brighten up a mood.

Speaker 64 Now, their friend seemed to be withdrawing from the world and himself.

Speaker 13 Did Casey know that he was twisting slowly in the wind here, this whole thing?

Speaker 9 Investigators were looking at him.

Speaker 24 Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 56 He knew.

Speaker 74 Investigators kept putting him in the chair, and their line of questioning left little doubt.

Speaker 43 Did you and Rebecca have any kind of a disagreement? No, I didn't know the type of just trying to keep him out in the pool.

Speaker 43 Okay.

Speaker 43 That's the only disagreement y'all will have that weekend.

Speaker 27 They only had Casey say so that Rebecca indeed dropped him off Monday morning for work.

Speaker 33 Was it possible he'd killed her before then?

Speaker 3 Or maybe afterward?

Speaker 34 When she didn't show to pick him up after work and he got angry?

Speaker 43 I'm not trying to put words about Casey, but I'm afraid of your pony. You might have just really cleared out.

Speaker 27 They also thought it's strange he decided to stay out all night with friends, something he rarely did.

Speaker 13 Did he do himself no favor by not coming back to his place that night?

Speaker 12 It did make him look more suspicious by not coming home.

Speaker 27 But a vaguely suspicious story wasn't enough to pin Rebecca's murder on Casey.

Speaker 40 Investigators needed to narrow down the timeline of her death and check that against his alibi to rule him in or out as their prime suspect.

Speaker 39 That's how Casey's sonic co-workers got dragged into his nightmare.

Speaker 88 They bring us in, you know, one at a time and interview us.

Speaker 89 But, yeah, they came to our house.

Speaker 89 Dennis Simons then knocked on the door. I'll never forget that.

Speaker 6 Well, yeah, the cop knocks on the door.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was kind of scary.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 62 They and other co-workers proved to be Casey's lifeline.

Speaker 83 They could largely account for Casey being at work all day Monday from just after 8 in the morning to 4.30 in the afternoon.

Speaker 29 That's when Laron and Philip pulled into the Sonic lot to find Casey stranded.

Speaker 55 I was like, hey, buddy, what are you doing?

Speaker 89 He's like, oh, waiting on my ride.

Speaker 24 I'm like, oh.

Speaker 89 He's like, I was like, well, we're going to the movies, you know, if you want to go.

Speaker 63 And he's like, yeah, yeah, you know, I'll go.

Speaker 75 They said Casey was with them for the rest of the night.

Speaker 57 They drove to a nearby town so he could pick up his truck.

Speaker 9 His dad had borrowed it the day before.

Speaker 10 Then they all went to the movies and back to Philip and Laren's for the night.

Speaker 88 We're at, you know, the receipts from Hastings, the movie tickets, and then...

Speaker 34 So the night checks out.

Speaker 88 The night, the night just was what it was, you know.

Speaker 58 The thing that stood out from that night was when Casey checked his phone messages. One was from Rebecca's worried mom.

Speaker 24 And he was something along the lines of

Speaker 89 nobody can get a hold of Rebecca. It was a bit odd.

Speaker 34 The next morning, Tuesday, they watched as Casey got up and left for work.

Speaker 10 Hours later, they heard the news.

Speaker 44 Rebecca was missing.

Speaker 88 They said something's going on. Like, they can't find Rebecca, and the cops come got Casey from work.

Speaker 27 Co-workers and friends could account for Casey's movements that Monday into Tuesday, but what about Rebecca's movements?

Speaker 64 Investigators thought she stopped here after dropping Casey off at work on Monday, a convenience store called the Possum Trot just down the road from the Sonic.

Speaker 33 They believed that for two reasons. This uneaten sandwich and a full cup of cappuccino found in Casey's kitchen suggested she bought the meal to eat sometime later.

Speaker 31 An eyewitness gave credence to the theory.

Speaker 81 The lady at the Possum Trot actually called Daddy in and said, hey, I remember seeing Rebecca at my store in her little vehicle, and she was by herself.

Speaker 81 So she goes to the possum chart, time frame matches, even though they couldn't get an exact time on the purchase.

Speaker 81 And from there to the house, she never eats the biscuit and she never drinks the cappuccino.

Speaker 35 Investigators say that cashier, not Casey, was the last person confirmed to have seen Rebecca alive.

Speaker 40 They think Rebecca returned to Casey's after buying that meal.

Speaker 11 She'd do that at home. She'd put her breakfast in the microwave and she'd go back to bed.

Speaker 13 So there was nothing unusual up to that part of the story.

Speaker 11 Not at all.

Speaker 27 They reasoned that Rebecca was killed shortly thereafter.

Speaker 39 Casey's alibi seemed solid.

Speaker 27 He was not arrested, not charged in connection with Rebecca's murder. Investigators had no choice but to start considering other possibilities, like his relatives.

Speaker 81 They started looking at the rest of the family who else had access to the house.

Speaker 20 They asked Casey's dad, Claude McCullough, about that missing piano leg, a weapon that could have been used to kill Rebecca.

Speaker 51 Have y'all ever came up anything on that piano leg?

Speaker 24 Nothing.

Speaker 81 They started looking into to Casey's dad, you know, could he have come back to the residence.

Speaker 1 But Claude, a truck driver, was on the road when Rebecca was last seen.

Speaker 81 They eliminated him pretty quick. He was training a new driver who also confirmed, you know, I believe they were in Kentucky or somewhere during that time frame.

Speaker 34 Next, they considered Casey's brothers.

Speaker 39 He had three of them.

Speaker 1 Likewise, they also had alibis that seemed solid.

Speaker 37 Investigators even tracked tracked down that cousin Billy from Texas, the one who stopped by the Sunday night before Rebecca's death.

Speaker 81 They contacted the Texas authorities who pulled the family in and interviewed them, gave the results of that interview back to the Arkansas state investigators.

Speaker 35 None of the interviews with relatives led investigators any closer to Rebecca's killer, but they weren't discouraged.

Speaker 58 In the weeks that followed, tips poured in.

Speaker 81 We keep pursuing our local leads because they just kept coming in and we could not eliminate people.

Speaker 27 Simon says the focus of the case pivoted from Casey and his family to Rebecca's friends,

Speaker 41 the people in Mountain View she came home every weekend to see.

Speaker 64 She had many admirers here and maybe a few enemies.

Speaker 15 He accused me of killing her for over 20 bucks over the $20

Speaker 15 that she'd owed me.

Speaker 8 If anything, Casey McCullough's friends thought Rebecca's killer would be found closer to home, her home.

Speaker 59 They knew she used to run with a tough crowd in Mountain View.

Speaker 88 The first thing you think of is something must have gone wrong, you know, with whatever she was trying to do with the Mountain View crew.

Speaker 49 That seemed to be the consensus in the months following her death.

Speaker 62 What were people talking about in town?

Speaker 12 Rumor mails just went wild. Everybody had a theory and a thought of who done it.

Speaker 42 A lot of of suspects, all of a sudden.

Speaker 16 A lot of suspects.

Speaker 41 In the weeks that followed Rebecca's death, her sisters had one name in mind: Jennifer Turner, one of Rebecca's former co-workers when she too worked at the Sonic.

Speaker 42 Jennifer had a thing with Rebecca's old boyfriend, Justin.

Speaker 11 He had

Speaker 11 gotten together with Jennifer and she was pregnant, but he still loved Rebecca and Rebecca still loved him.

Speaker 49 Jealousy. Yeah.

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 40 Detective Dennis Simon says early investigators dug into this Jennifer connection.

Speaker 92 I've never

Speaker 92 hated her, never, not one time. I loved her.
She was my friend, my best friend.

Speaker 81 Everybody says, oh, we were best friends. Oh, you know, I love this girl, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I didn't buy into that part of it. That's just somebody trying to deflect heat from them.

Speaker 93 Did you ever tell anybody that you knew she was dead? You were just going to get along better. She was going out.

Speaker 81 Definitely took notice of her. I mean, I brought her in for interviews, subpoenaed a lot of phone records.

Speaker 29 But found nothing really to connect Jennifer to the murder.

Speaker 51 What he did find was an alibi that checked out.

Speaker 81 I determined during the time frame of the murder, she had been at work. She'd went shopping in Conway, which is a town about 60, 70 miles from here.

Speaker 39 But then this case had no shortage of suspects.

Speaker 15 Rebecca's my friend. She's a fighter, and I respected the hell out of that.

Speaker 39 This is J.B. Yates.

Speaker 34 Like Jennifer, he considered Rebecca a true pal and a customer.

Speaker 15 She wanted a sack of weed

Speaker 15 and I knew where I could get her a sack.

Speaker 34 Rebecca, he says, would buy small quantities of pot from him to take back to school.

Speaker 62 Typical college stuff.

Speaker 13 And she owed you 20 bucks from that transaction.

Speaker 12 She did.

Speaker 26 He says he was stunned when Rebecca disappeared and floored by what came next.

Speaker 13 And little birdies in that town are talking and it gets to law enforcement.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah, it just went

Speaker 15 blew up. I mean, it just blew it up and everybody started saying it.

Speaker 72 The scuttlebutt, JB killed Rebecca.

Speaker 51 JB had a formal sit-down with the detective.

Speaker 59 Tense doesn't even begin to describe it.

Speaker 15 He accused me of killing her for over 20 bucks, over the $20

Speaker 9 that she'd owed me.

Speaker 13 So that all goes back to that debt that she had for not paying for the bag of weed, huh?

Speaker 69 Yes, sir.

Speaker 13 And you then, Ethereum goes, killed her.

Speaker 15 That's what they claim.

Speaker 81 JB's interview

Speaker 81 came off as a very cold person.

Speaker 81 Just in general. Just in general demeanor, just a very

Speaker 81 nonchalant, just

Speaker 81 I don't give a kind of personality.

Speaker 39 JB insisted he did not kill Rebecca, that she had settled her debt a few days before she'd vanished.

Speaker 42 Not that he could prove it.

Speaker 15 But she paid me.

Speaker 15 And besides 20 bucks, I had people that owed me way more money than that.

Speaker 13 And you're not in a credit card and receipt kind of business in those days.

Speaker 15 No, sir.

Speaker 57 And yet the detective could not link JB to the murder.

Speaker 34 No evidence either of JB being at the crime scene.

Speaker 81 Got a loose thread there. I never could prove that JB did or did not know where she lived at

Speaker 81 or where she was staying at.

Speaker 72 So he began looking at the man who started that JB rumor.

Speaker 42 His name, Chris Cantrell.

Speaker 81 And he had a reputation for being a badass. People were scared of him.

Speaker 71 Turned out Chris was doing more than tossing JB's name around.

Speaker 39 He was weirdly putting himself in the picture for Rebecca's murder.

Speaker 22 So much so that police grilled him repeatedly over the course of the investigation.

Speaker 81 He bragged to a lot of people about

Speaker 81 being involved in the murder.

Speaker 49 When the detective heard a rumor that Chris had been talking about blood in his vehicle, Simons confronted him.

Speaker 81 Never told us you had blood in that car, Chris.

Speaker 94 I'm going to get a lot of you and say, how no, you're not trying to trick me, man.

Speaker 68 He also found out that Chris sold that very car to another man because the man informed police.

Speaker 81 And said, hey, I bought this car off of Chris Cantrell.

Speaker 81 He made some very weird statements about if you find body parts in the trunk, thank God you had my car destroyed before law enforcement got to it.

Speaker 81 I said, oh, you know, again, why would you make that statement?

Speaker 59 And yet Chris insisted to police time and again he was not involved in Rebecca's murder.

Speaker 71 Eventually, Simons hit another dead end.

Speaker 68 On the one hand, he liked Chris for Rebecca's murder.

Speaker 81 And even anybody else, other investigators would read the case files, like, man, this Chris is your dude.

Speaker 48 But he didn't think Chris had a convincing motive or access to Casey's house.

Speaker 46 Moreover, evidence collected from the crime scene never put him, JB, Jennifer, or anyone else from town inside those rooms.

Speaker 81 We just could not get a break. on DNA evidence, fingerprints, or anything else.

Speaker 38 Still, the detective didn't remove him or anyone else really from his suspect list.

Speaker 55 In the meantime, the Mountain View rumor mill kept turning.

Speaker 81 There were so many people that called in, so much crap that just, you had the psychics, you know, you just had, let's just be honest, just nutty people that sat around and thought about this all day long.

Speaker 27 Until one day, a stranger stepped forward with one particular story.

Speaker 39 He said an old acquaintance of his had confessed to Rebecca's murder.

Speaker 33 A disturbing tale that brought this case and almost everyone in it back to the beginning.

Speaker 18 The way he said it, he just lost it.

Speaker 49 There had been so many suspects, so many tips, but never an arrest for Rebecca Gould's murder.

Speaker 27 Months turned into years,

Speaker 27 and Rebecca's family, including her sister Angela, was losing hope.

Speaker 61 I was mad.

Speaker 69 You know, I'm... What made you mad about it?

Speaker 32 Because there was no explanation, no answers, and she had so much to offer this world, and she had so much going for. She was going to set the world on fire.

Speaker 71 Meanwhile, Larry Gould, who'd watched from the sidelines as the police worked the case, became frustrated.

Speaker 34 By 2010, six years after his daughter's murder, he couldn't take it anymore and felt he had to do something.

Speaker 15 I've given them lots of time. Now it's time to jump in and try to figure out for myself what happened.
As a father, that's the part that ate away at me. I wanted to know how my daughter was murdered.

Speaker 8 So the dentist started peppering officials with letters, lots of them.

Speaker 3 He wanted access to some of the police investigative files.

Speaker 34 Let me see records. Let me see the ME report.

Speaker 15 Let me see some depositions i wanted the basics why can't i have an autopsy report it's my daughter

Speaker 13 officials told him they didn't want to release the information for fear it might negatively affect their investigation are you becoming the troublesome father of the victim who just won't stay in his place i hope i'm characterized that way he's there again if anything i should have done a lot more earlier

Speaker 49 Rebecca's dad ended up hiring a private investigator, but felt his findings only added confusion and went nowhere.

Speaker 58 So he devised another idea.

Speaker 6 I want a Rebecca law.

Speaker 15 I want something that makes this system function a little bit better than it does.

Speaker 35 He wanted a new law in Arkansas that would allow loved ones after a certain number of years to see at least a portion of a case file.

Speaker 15 If you have children and you have a daughter that's murdered,

Speaker 15 what would you do? You'd want to know things.

Speaker 53 In 2016, the prosecutor voluntarily released one piece of evidence to Rebecca's dad, and that's when he learned some of the details of how his daughter died.

Speaker 15 He finally did release the autopsy report. So he denied anything else, but he released the autopsy report to me.

Speaker 75 After that, the family didn't hear much until 2018, the 14-year mark of the homicide.

Speaker 87 Rebecca was beautiful, popular, and full of life.

Speaker 22 It was by then a new cultural era.

Speaker 52 Podcasts became a phenomenon, and there was a nationwide fascination with all things true crime.

Speaker 19 And one podcast about the Rebecca case turned heads with its revelations.

Speaker 87 I've come back to Mountain View with one mission, to get justice for Rebecca.

Speaker 35 Helen Gawn is hosted by Catherine Townsend, a writer and private investigator whose family lived in the area.

Speaker 10 Her series made news with a blockbuster accusation.

Speaker 37 He said,

Speaker 37 well,

Speaker 37 he killed her.

Speaker 86 A man told the podcaster he knew who killed Rebecca.

Speaker 62 He said a coworker of his admitted to the crime.

Speaker 47 And who was that person?

Speaker 49 None other than Casey McCullough.

Speaker 13 The podcaster says not only has Casey all these years been the number one person of interest, in fact, he's confessed to it.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 26 The man said he worked with Casey repairing cell towers.

Speaker 42 According to the coworker, one drunken night, Casey confessed and said after Rebecca rejected him, he killed her.

Speaker 42 He said that pretty much that she was telling him that this would be the last time that he saw her because they were, I guess, coming to an end.

Speaker 42 But they got into it and she said some offensive things to him.

Speaker 42 The way he said it, he just lost it. And he said, next thing he knows, he's cleaning stuff up.

Speaker 49 It was information Special Agent Simons couldn't ignore.

Speaker 30 The detective, still working the case more than a decade later, interviewed the co-worker, who then shared details.

Speaker 81 Casey gets drunk and confesses to this witness that he did, in fact, kill Rebecca.

Speaker 62 But there was something off about the coworker's story.

Speaker 71 He said the blurted-out confession had occurred eight years before, and yet he never told police.

Speaker 81 It never made Samsio coming forward that many years later.

Speaker 27 He was very just...

Speaker 81 uncooperative and bitter. And why would you not want to tell me Casey murdered this girl?

Speaker 5 And there was another red flag.

Speaker 60 There was an accusation Casey once had a sexual relationship with the coworker's ex-wife.

Speaker 81 Casey had slept with his wife, and he was trying to get revenge on Casey for sleeping with his wife.

Speaker 34 We reached out to that coworker who asked not to be identified because he's received threats.

Speaker 31 He told us he stands by his story and denies his ex-wife had an affair with Casey.

Speaker 22 Simons considered it a dead end.

Speaker 32 Casey claims that he was afraid of the men.

Speaker 3 She was killed that day

Speaker 73 after work.

Speaker 90 So the killer cleaned somewhat.

Speaker 5 But they did use it.

Speaker 91 Eventually, more than half a dozen podcasts about the case were released.

Speaker 1 And now social media, like the town gossips of years before, was on fire with finger-pointing accusations and speculation.

Speaker 27 The sisters felt at times it was just all so destructive and pointless.

Speaker 13 Every state has got some fascinating, unsolved mystery.

Speaker 69 Right.

Speaker 75 And in Arkansas, that became the story of Rebecca.

Speaker 11 And it did.

Speaker 9 Did that distress you?

Speaker 11 It did. I mean, mean,

Speaker 11 it's hard. It's constantly, you know,

Speaker 11 in your face.

Speaker 82 According to Rebecca's sisters, it got so wacko on social media that some posters suggested Tiffany could be responsible for the murder.

Speaker 32 People are mean. They say mean things and hurtful things.
You know, if it kept the case alive and forefront, I'm thankful for that, but I'm not thankful for all the drama that it caused my family.

Speaker 34 As the years continued to slip by, it was almost closing time for Detective Dennis Simons.

Speaker 10 He was nearing retirement.

Speaker 39 In 2020, he reluctantly handed over his investigation to someone new.

Speaker 81 I didn't want to leave this thing unresolved.

Speaker 27 In his 29-year career, he says it was his only unsolved homicide.

Speaker 34 And he especially regretted never finding that missing suitcase, which his gut instinct told him might be an important clue.

Speaker 81 If I could find the suitcase, maybe I could get physical evidence off of it. Which, throughout the case, we never could get physical evidence, that damn suitcase.

Speaker 81 It just breaks my heart.

Speaker 68 There was about to be a new investigator in town, someone with fresh eyes to take his shot at turning this case upside down.

Speaker 72 Why, thought the new agent, had so much attention been put on Casey McCullough, but not the rest of his family.

Speaker 15 Any male McCullough, I wanted to put them under the microscope because I believed that this was probably a sexually motivated crime.

Speaker 24 And there were a lot of McCulloughs.

Speaker 34 Arkansas, January 2020.

Speaker 29 Could a new year and a new detective finally unravel the mystery?

Speaker 31 Who killed Rebecca Gould?

Speaker 34 Special Agent Mike McNeil with the the Arkansas State Police was newly in charge of the nearly 16-year-old investigation.

Speaker 42 He had a lot of catching up to do.

Speaker 13 I've got a vision in my head of here comes a dolly down the hallway with a lot of boxes on it. That's right.
Filled with depositions, videos, and somebody bring in and say, here you are, have at it.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Well, I think if you stacked it all up in documents, it'd be four foot high.

Speaker 58 Rebecca's dad remained cautious but hopeful about the new investigator on the case.

Speaker 13 So McNeil comes along. Do you think this is a healthy change or we'll see or I don't have much hope in this?

Speaker 15 He did the right thing from the start, which was? Called me on the phone, said, can I come up there and see you?

Speaker 15 He showed compassion and empathy, but more so he really wanted to hear my frustration and the things that I needed at this point.

Speaker 15 And that hit home in me.

Speaker 40 And McNeil, a 24-year police veteran, decided that if he was going to find Rebecca's killer, he needed to start from square one.

Speaker 13 Let's go back to day one of that.

Speaker 15 That's right. Your first focus is on the inner circle of the victim.
Who does the victim know? Casey is obviously suspect number one just because he's...

Speaker 13 His place, his girlfriend.

Speaker 15 His place, his girlfriend. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 84 It's nice to finally meet you. Yeah, I was waiting on you.

Speaker 39 So right off the bat, Casey was questioned yet again.

Speaker 36 An impromptu interview was done from the detective's car.

Speaker 84 There is a lot of people, from what I can gather, that think you had a hand in this, right?

Speaker 77 On social media, yes.

Speaker 24 Yeah, it's not like you were.

Speaker 27 All those podcasts and social media posts mostly pointed to Casey as the killer.

Speaker 13 Rumorville, in the court of public opinion, Casey is the guy.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 15 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 13 He's been tried and convicted.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 72 But the special agent came to believe Casey McCullough was not involved.

Speaker 15 I truly believe that you did not have a hand in this.

Speaker 20 Makes me feel better.

Speaker 66 But McNeil did believe someone related to Casey McCullough had murdered Rebecca.

Speaker 34 So he started looking at his family.

Speaker 58 Remember, the McCulloughs owned the property where Rebecca died, a place that's long since been abandoned.

Speaker 66 Several family members lived in the area.

Speaker 15 I was probably 80%

Speaker 15 of McCulloughs responsible.

Speaker 47 And are they all in your frame?

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 15 Every any male McCullough, I wanted to put them under the microscope because I believed that this was probably a sexually motivated crime.

Speaker 39 McNeil, like his predecessor, thought Rebecca knew her killer.

Speaker 13 We have no forced entry.

Speaker 15 We have no forced entry. So that would lead you to believe that she knew who her killer was.
She knew who she was letting in.

Speaker 79 McNeil quickly eliminated Casey's dad as a suspect.

Speaker 17 He then met with a half-brother, Randy.

Speaker 37 Randy? Yes.

Speaker 26 Hey, can I talk to you a minute?

Speaker 17 In a voluntary interview, Randy was cooperative.

Speaker 84 When this happened,

Speaker 84 the information in the case file says that you were working at the flooring company. No, I was in the Air Force.

Speaker 4 Randy was also quickly cleared.

Speaker 15 He wasn't even in Arkansas when this happened.

Speaker 24 Hey, Chris.

Speaker 84 How are you? Good, mate. You mind having a seat?

Speaker 70 No, I don't care at all.

Speaker 39 The detective decided to more aggressively interview the next brother up, Chris.

Speaker 35 He bluntly asked a shocking question: Did he have a secret sexual relationship with Rebecca?

Speaker 84 Brothers sometimes mess around with brothers' girlfriends.

Speaker 64 Well, it happens.

Speaker 3 It was a bluff.

Speaker 58 McNeil had absolutely no evidence of an affair.

Speaker 13 I never even hugged her anything, so no, there's no way it's going to happen.

Speaker 24 Okay.

Speaker 34 The detective cleared him, but Chris, perhaps unwittingly, opened an investigative door to his brother Corey, involving his whereabouts on the day Rebecca was killed.

Speaker 91 What about your other brother during this period of time?

Speaker 84 Where was he?

Speaker 24 Corey.

Speaker 2 You know, I have no clue.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 15 I really didn't have

Speaker 15 any concerns with any of the McCulloughs except Corey.

Speaker 15 And I... And who was he? He was the younger brother.

Speaker 16 Why him?

Speaker 15 Well, if I believed that a McCullough was responsible for this, and I had already went through all of them and Corey's my last,

Speaker 70 well,

Speaker 15 Corey's my guy.

Speaker 8 Corey had worked in law enforcement himself as a parole officer.

Speaker 54 McNeil asked him to come in for an interview.

Speaker 53 It didn't go well.

Speaker 15 I think the interview with him ended with me telling him, I believe that next time I see you, I'm going to be putting handcuffs on you.

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Speaker 98 Regarding the death of Rebecca, do you intend to answer each question truthfully?

Speaker 95 Yes.

Speaker 39 Special Agent Mike McNeil and another officer had a prime suspect seated across the table from them, Corey McCullough, Casey's brother.

Speaker 96 I told you when I first met you

Speaker 98 that we believed that we had the DNA from the killer at the crime scene.

Speaker 52 As captured by a camera on the table, McNeil told Corey he had some new blockbuster evidence, and it involved him.

Speaker 8 His DNA had been found on a cloth under the bed where Rebecca had been murdered.

Speaker 96 The problem that we have, Corey,

Speaker 98 is that washcloth right there, that has your DNA on it.

Speaker 94 I seriously doubt that.

Speaker 18 I don't believe you.

Speaker 94 If it's got mine, it's from a long time ago.

Speaker 91 It don't work like that, Corey.

Speaker 27 Corey seemed to be admitting his DNA could be at the crime scene, yet he remained defiant.

Speaker 94 Okay, well, do what you got to do. I'm innocent.

Speaker 94 And I knew nothing about this until I was told about it.

Speaker 6 I don't believe you.

Speaker 94 I'm not going to sit here and let you do this to me.

Speaker 94 Either let me go.

Speaker 83 Or arrest me. He didn't have anything.

Speaker 58 McNeil then said he had even more evidence.

Speaker 47 He found the old truck Corey owned back when Rebecca was murdered.

Speaker 75 Remember, detectives believe Rebecca's body had been transported from the crime scene to that ravine five miles away.

Speaker 98 You know where your Blue Ford Ranger is right now?

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 96 It's at the Arkansas State Crime Lab.

Speaker 18 Cool.

Speaker 94 I'm glad you found it.

Speaker 15 I am too.

Speaker 98 Because whenever you got in that truck, you were covered in blood.

Speaker 96 And I guarantee you, we're going to find Rebecca's DNA in the cab of that truck.

Speaker 94 I know how this works and I know what you're trying to do. I'm completely innocent and you're looking at the wrong people.

Speaker 94 I mean I'm sorry. I don't want to be a to you but you're being a to me.

Speaker 56 There was one thing McNeil didn't tell Corey.

Speaker 10 He was bluffing.

Speaker 35 A standard but controversial police interrogation technique. McNeil used the ploy because he thought it might help him crack the case.

Speaker 48 In fact, he didn't have Corey's DNA at the crime scene and he didn't have his truck.

Speaker 94 Completely innocent to this, man.

Speaker 98 I really hope I was able to help you with this. You were.

Speaker 94 I really do.

Speaker 40 With that, the interview ended, and so did the theory that Corey was the leading suspect.

Speaker 63 McNeil concluded he was not the killer.

Speaker 26 So it was time to move on to his next suspect.

Speaker 15 What you do is you find out who was at the McCullough residence last,

Speaker 15 and then you focus on that person.

Speaker 15 That was Billy.

Speaker 86 Billy? Billy Miller.

Speaker 41 Who was he?

Speaker 76 He was Casey's cousin from Texas who'd stopped by the house the night before the murder.

Speaker 20 He was interviewed in 2004, but police didn't consider him a viable suspect.

Speaker 91 Back then, Billy told investigators he'd stopped by Casey's house the night before Rebecca was killed.

Speaker 31 McNeil decided to take a second look and do a deep dive into Billy's background.

Speaker 15 What came back? So, in 2002, two years before Rebecca's murder, he is a suspect in an aggravated sexual assault on a minor. Now that investigation concluded with no charges.

Speaker 13 But that's an interesting thing for you.

Speaker 15 Oh, that's huge.

Speaker 39 Billy, it turned out, had also been arrested in 2010.

Speaker 27 He allegedly used his elbow to push his ex-wife after he forced his way into her Aranza's Past-Texas home.

Speaker 58 The charges were later dismissed.

Speaker 15 Now I've got two police reports that show me exactly what I'm looking for. He's checking the sexual component box.
He's checking the forcible entry,

Speaker 15 physical harm to a female.

Speaker 9 He's the focus of the investigation.

Speaker 15 I did this kind of systematically, one at a time, and now I'm on Billy. Let's see how far this takes me.

Speaker 22 McNeil wanted to meet with Billy in person, but there was a problem.

Speaker 13 Where is he physically at this point?

Speaker 15 He is currently married with a family living in the Philippines, an an offshore oil rig worker.

Speaker 59 Billy, who was 44, had moved to the Philippines where he said he owned a 30-acre farm, including a banana plantation.

Speaker 17 He had married a Filipino woman he'd met online.

Speaker 39 They had two children together.

Speaker 8 And while living overseas, McNeil could see that Billy joined a Facebook group that actively followed Rebecca's case.

Speaker 13 Is he also posting notices to

Speaker 15 he made a number of comments? He's trying to keep tabs on the investigation from the Philippines. Well, why? Why is that?

Speaker 34 McNeil would have to patiently wait.

Speaker 20 He put an alert on Billy's passport to be notified if he returned to the U.S.

Speaker 13 And you asked Customs, if you guys get a hit, give me a call.

Speaker 15 Yeah, absolutely. Did that in fact happen?

Speaker 70 It did.

Speaker 58 In October 2020, about 10 months after McNeil started working the case, Billy flew home to see his mother Linda in Oregon.

Speaker 49 At that point, the detective gave Billy's mom a call and that's when she said something suspicious.

Speaker 60 Her son was still in the Philippines.

Speaker 84 When's the last time he was in the U.S.?

Speaker 84 It's been it's he he came

Speaker 84 last

Speaker 84 so the last the last time Billy made it home was sometime last year or

Speaker 84 I

Speaker 15 don't know. She told me that she hadn't seen Billy and she hadn't talked to Billy.

Speaker 13 Which you knew clearly was Elias

Speaker 52 because he had. Immigration had eyes on him, huh? That's right.

Speaker 52 Hello, this is Linda Miller.

Speaker 91 But a few days later, Billy's mom called back with a new story, saying her son was going to be in the U.S.

Speaker 39 She was unaware authorities knew he was already here.

Speaker 84 When's Billy coming back in? She'll be here November 7th.

Speaker 84 That's when we want to have our meeting with you. Okay, November the 7th.

Speaker 57 She said Billy would voluntarily come in for an interview with Special Agent McNeil.

Speaker 13 Did you have any guarantee that he was going to be a show?

Speaker 15 No, no guarantee. He didn't have to be there if he didn't want to be.

Speaker 38 Undeterred, McNeil traveled from Arkansas to Cottage Grove, a picturesque town in Oregon where Billy's mom lived.

Speaker 84 Billy, if you want to have a sick bank, can't certainly.

Speaker 8 And on the designated day, Billy willingly came into the local police station.

Speaker 15 He didn't have any idea what we had in store for him.

Speaker 39 16 years had gone by since Rebecca's murder.

Speaker 30 For her sister Tiffany, those years were filled with regret and what-ifs.

Speaker 62 She struggled over whether back then she could have done something differently.

Speaker 11 There's so many times I've, you know, wished I could do things and you know, turn everything around and go back.

Speaker 20 Meanwhile, Agent McNeil was busy, very busy, researching and prepping for his meeting with Billy Miller.

Speaker 13 How are you going to play this thing? What's your strategy?

Speaker 15 We knew Rebecca had been transported from the crime scene, so I knew a vehicle was involved.

Speaker 22 This time, McNeil decided he would try to actually locate the truck Billy owned back in 2004.

Speaker 33 A Black Chevy S10.

Speaker 62 16 years later, would it still be around?

Speaker 13 A lot of time's gone by. This thing could be in a junkyard or not above ground.

Speaker 15 It could be in a junkyard, could be, it could be anywhere.

Speaker 58 Surprisingly, the truck was still on the road.

Speaker 39 Billy had sold it long ago, but the detective found the new owner and had photos taken of the vehicle.

Speaker 13 The 16-year-later photograph was useful to you, wasn't it?

Speaker 15 It was. I ended up using a couple of them in Billy's interview.

Speaker 76 The detective had already decided how and when he would use those photos.

Speaker 76 Billy, if you want to have a sick back, yes, sir.

Speaker 34 Because this agent was about to deploy every technique from his investigative toolbox for Billy Miller's interview.

Speaker 64 And he would once again use a potent weapon, the bluff.

Speaker 64 You're not being detained. You're free to go at any time.

Speaker 83 Billy, visiting his mom in Oregon, arrived 30 minutes early at the local police station.

Speaker 26 It was time to execute the detective's game plan. I'm going to be honest with you and truthful with you.

Speaker 16 And there he is, you guys are eye to eye.

Speaker 15 And there he is.

Speaker 15 You never know how this thing's going to play out.

Speaker 38 The special agent wanted Billy to take a polygraph on the spot, but feared he wouldn't agree.

Speaker 51 So he came up with a less threatening offer.

Speaker 26 Would Billy agree to take the test later in Arkansas?

Speaker 26 If you ever make it back to Arkansas, maybe we could, you know, get you to take a polygraph because a bunch of people have taken polygraphs in that thing. Whatever you want, I'll give it to you.

Speaker 26 I don't have nothing to hide.

Speaker 86 It worked. With no immediate pressure, Billy quickly agreed.

Speaker 15 Billy hasn't been to Arkansas since 2004, and he's never coming back to Arkansas, willingly, in my opinion.

Speaker 15 But what does he say? Absolutely. So now I've got him locked in on a polygraph.

Speaker 74 The detective was setting Billy up and would soon come back to that question about taking a lie detector test. I go to work for a month, that's, you know, like close to 25 grand.

Speaker 57 Right. In the meantime, the detective made Billy feel comfortable.
I live in high on the hall, man, out in the Philippines. $1,500, you live like a king.

Speaker 15 Billy likes to talk. Yeah, he's kind of like a chatty Kathy.
I'm pushing for moms or retirements. We talked about the kids.
You know, hey, how's it doing?

Speaker 15 I always talked about going to the Philippines or Thailand. He thought he was the smartest one in the room.
My transportation was a bike. So

Speaker 35 Billy was friendly, happy just to shoot the breeze.

Speaker 62 With his suspect relaxed now,

Speaker 17 McNeil saw his opening coming.

Speaker 26 He changed subjects.

Speaker 35 Getting back to that polygraph test, would Billy stand by his word and take one right now?

Speaker 35 Would you be okay with taking a polygraph? I'll just ask you. Yeah, I don't have a problem with it.
I'll call the sergeant up here to see if they may have a polygrapher in town.

Speaker 35 You know, it's a shot in the dark.

Speaker 59 Does he know you have a guy waiting outside the door?

Speaker 15 Absolutely not.

Speaker 22 Polygrapher Damian Acosta with the Oregon State Police was already at the station.

Speaker 41 McNeil had set it up all in advance.

Speaker 53 Billy had no clue.

Speaker 27 This was shot.

Speaker 8 McNeil acted as though he was trying to find a polygrapher at the last minute.

Speaker 21 Do you happen to have a polygrapher in town?

Speaker 19 Of course they did.

Speaker 86 McNeil had him in the on-deck circle.

Speaker 86 Half an hour, but that worked. Awesome.

Speaker 3 Yes, sir. Now Billy Billy appeared hesitant.

Speaker 39 He wondered, could the polygraph result be used as evidence against a defendant? But it doesn't hold up in court, correct?

Speaker 99 Both the prosecution and the defense would have to agree to it. So anyway, I'm asking you, I'm a suspect.
No, I'm not saying you're a suspect.

Speaker 22 Then came the big swing of the hammer.

Speaker 34 The detective told Billy falsely they had the killer's DNA from the crime scene and asked if Billy would mind giving a sample.

Speaker 56 Remember, Remember, police didn't have any usable DNA evidence.

Speaker 15 It really doesn't matter if he provides me with his DNA or not. I've got nothing to compare it to.
I just want to see how he feels about it.

Speaker 9 Does he get a little anxious when he did?

Speaker 15 He did. Obviously, we've never gotten your DNA.
You know, it's my job to ask.

Speaker 15 If you don't feel comfortable with it, now it seems like, you know, you're in the window to meet it and you're saying that I had something to do with it. If you don't feel comfortable doing it,

Speaker 15 I'm not going to push you or try to put any pressure on you. It's fine to do a lie detector test and all that stuff.

Speaker 91 He said he'd take the lie detector test, but balked at a DNA swab.

Speaker 57 McNeil, not wanting to spook his suspect, moved on.

Speaker 57 It was time to bring in the polygrapher.

Speaker 55 My name's Dayon State Police Detective.

Speaker 75 But now Billy was having serious second thoughts about taking it.

Speaker 75 If I refuse, then I would be more

Speaker 75 looked at more for not incorporating with the police and all that stuff.

Speaker 64 Special Agent McNeil watching a police monitor in another room now waited to see how his plan would play out.

Speaker 31 My heart's beating out

Speaker 22 and he still had a few more surprises in store for his suspect.

Speaker 76 What you're experiencing as normal?

Speaker 8 After almost two decades and dozens of interviews, there had never been a break in this case.

Speaker 91 But was that about to change?

Speaker 18 I have anxiety, really bad anxiety.

Speaker 31 Could this at long last be the face of Rebecca Gould's killer?

Speaker 3 Billy Miller, now suspect number one, was about to undergo a polygraph test.

Speaker 40 But before that, the test administrator, Detective Damian Acosta, asked him questions about his visit to Casey's house on that Sunday night before the murder.

Speaker 40 Well, I think we pulled in and he saw the light or whatever and he came out and then he realized it's me and mom.

Speaker 58 As he told police in 2004, Billy said he briefly talked with his cousin in the driveway that Sunday night when Rebecca was staying over at Casey's.

Speaker 9 That's the same story Casey told investigators back then. He said that he had company and so that he, you know, kind of get lost, might get

Speaker 57 However, Billy added some new details.

Speaker 39 He had been in Casey's house before, meaning his DNA might be found inside.

Speaker 52 Remember, Special Agent McNeil had falsely told Billy they had the killer's DNA.

Speaker 48 Their DNA is going to be. But he didn't.

Speaker 48 I think there was two times that I went into that house. I remember sitting down in the living room and all that stuff, and I remember going to the restrooms and all that stuff.
Okay.

Speaker 74 Billy added that there was a whole bunch of furniture, including chairs, couches, and beds, that his mom gave gave to the McCulloughs.

Speaker 57 Furniture that ended up in Casey's house. So that's impossible your DNA could be on any bed or bedding that could be.

Speaker 57 Yeah, okay, perfect.

Speaker 57 Because all that furniture came from my mom that, you know, that came from our house.

Speaker 5 The detective continually assured Billy his story made sense. If we didn't talk to you, we wouldn't know that, right?

Speaker 15 Damon followed the script, did a super job interviewing Billy, building rapport with Billy, and then putting Billy through the polygraph.

Speaker 34 When it came to taking the polygraph, Billy was instructed not to respond verbally.

Speaker 39 Instead, he should only shake his head yes or no to answer the questions.

Speaker 39 Did you cause that woman to die?

Speaker 39 Are you responsible for causing that woman's death?

Speaker 8 He shook his head no.

Speaker 37 And after about 45 minutes and a slew of repeated questions, the test concluded.

Speaker 37 Yes, yes. And so my heartbeat felt like it was just beating out of my chest.

Speaker 28 Yeah.

Speaker 47 The detective did conclude Billy wasn't telling the truth.

Speaker 57 At that moment, Special Agent McNeil returned to the interview room. All right, Billy.

Speaker 42 Gone was his good cop demeanor.

Speaker 29 He was showing Billy bad cop attitude.

Speaker 63 Because your mom.

Speaker 35 McNeil said he wasn't buying Billy's story about why his DNA would be all over Casey's house.

Speaker 21 You even said that it would be reasonable for your DNA to be on the bedding, which is absolutely absurd. No, I didn't say that.

Speaker 5 Actually, he had said that.

Speaker 40 Now McNeil felt it was time to show those pictures he had been holding back.

Speaker 19 Ones of Billy's truck from 16 years before.

Speaker 18 That truck looked familiar? Yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah. That's your truck.
Biological evidence, Billy, lasts for decades.

Speaker 18 Blood,

Speaker 18 skin cells,

Speaker 18 all kinds of stuff. That was a really bloody crime scene.

Speaker 18 What happened,

Speaker 18 you got blood on the side of your shoe. We got

Speaker 18 Rebecca's DNA next to the gas pedal in your truck.

Speaker 18 No question about it. Her DNA is in your truck.

Speaker 35 Did you have traces of her blood? No.

Speaker 15 We had no physical evidence.

Speaker 19 So, this is a total bluff.

Speaker 24 It is.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 21 You know who did.

Speaker 22 Sensing he was making progress.

Speaker 91 The detective chipped away at Billy Moore.

Speaker 21 Dude, I'm telling you, you have got to come forward right now with what you know because you cannot get around biological evidence in the floorboard of your truck.

Speaker 21 Okay? So tell me what happened, Billy. Tell me, I did not kill her.
Who did?

Speaker 21 Who did? I don't know who the people are.

Speaker 22 In a dramatic moment, Billy suddenly changed his story and shared for the first time 16 years later that he actually did see who killed Rebecca. What I saw was it looked like somebody was cleaning up.

Speaker 55 Billy said it all happened early that Monday morning.

Speaker 35 He'd gone hunting on his grandfather's property where he could see the back of Casey's house.

Speaker 44 Suddenly, he saw some men.

Speaker 44 I saw a white vehicle and a young blonde-haired guy on the back porch and it looked like he had gloves on and

Speaker 44 he jumped over the back porch. I jumped over, kind of walked into the house to see what the hell was going on.

Speaker 15 He sees the rear of the McCullough residence and sees two white males fleeing the residence, getting into a vehicle, and speeding away.

Speaker 13 So he's giving you the unknown perpetrators.

Speaker 15 Right. Two guys.
Right. He's telling me something I have never heard before.

Speaker 41 But before Billy would tell him more about the killers, he made an unusual request.

Speaker 41 I speak to my mom outside.

Speaker 21 Let me bring your mom in here

Speaker 21 and let's talk to her together if that's what you want to do. I want to talk to her outside.

Speaker 15 His mom. His mom wants to talk to his mom.
He wants to leave the interview room and meet with her.

Speaker 39 This is when McNeil's plan went off script.

Speaker 71 Basic interrogation techniques dictate you don't stop an interview when a suspect is giving valuable information.

Speaker 91 Yet, the detective threw the dice and let him leave.

Speaker 13 Are you worried about breaking the flow here?

Speaker 44 I mean, you're dangling him right over the edge.

Speaker 59 He's put himself at the scene in the critical time period.

Speaker 13 It's time to close the news.

Speaker 15 It goes against

Speaker 72 Then something unexpected happened in our interview with the agent.

Speaker 15 It goes against everything that

Speaker 15 you know as an investigator.

Speaker 15 You know.

Speaker 39 It came to a sudden and abrupt halt.

Speaker 44 And Special Agent McNeil's decision to let Billy leave that interrogation room proved to be one of the biggest mistakes of his career.

Speaker 13 You guys good?

Speaker 6 Good.

Speaker 17 We didn't see it coming.

Speaker 72 Special Agent Mike McNeil had stopped our interview.

Speaker 8 When he sat back down a few minutes later, he explained why.

Speaker 15 Investigations

Speaker 15 like this,

Speaker 15 you allow the investigation to kind of consume you. It's the last thing you think of before you go to bed and it's the first thing you think of when you wake up.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 that's how this one has been. You get emotional.

Speaker 35 He got emotional, he said, because of his pivotal decision to let Billy walk from the interrogation room, just when he was starting to reveal crucial information.

Speaker 13 Did you think you were on the edge of getting this thing?

Speaker 65 I did.

Speaker 15 I did. When he wanted to leave the interview room, that's like a kiss of death for an interview.

Speaker 13 You've lost the momentum, huh?

Speaker 15 Well, yeah, very rarely will you get a suspect to go back into an interview room.

Speaker 49 Nonetheless, the detective decided to take a risk and follow his gut.

Speaker 57 Billy was allowed to meet his mom in the police station's garage.

Speaker 37 Agent McNeil and another officer stood by.

Speaker 15 They embrace, they hug. He is whispering something to her in her ear.

Speaker 15 I can't make it out.

Speaker 15 I don't know what he said to her.

Speaker 27 Billy wasn't under arrest, free to leave the station at any time.

Speaker 48 But he didn't.

Speaker 48 Okay,

Speaker 48 I held up my end of the deal. Let's talk.

Speaker 68 And that's when something remarkable happened. One thing about this is it's been reeling in your head like a movie reel since it happened.
There isn't anything about this that you forgot.

Speaker 68 I know that because I've been doing this a long time. I'm going to tell you that I did it.
I did it.

Speaker 68 I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what I did.

Speaker 15 He starts to confess to the murder of Rebecca Gould.

Speaker 27 It was a rare and stunning about face.

Speaker 68 A full confession. I'm telling you that I did it.

Speaker 94 Everybody that I've associated is a victim of me. Absolutely.
A victim. Absolutely.
And I played everybody as a fool.

Speaker 94 Everybody.

Speaker 94 I never told anybody but you right now.

Speaker 71 Billy said he confessed because he thought Rebecca's DNA was found in his old truck.

Speaker 15 He says, you've got my DNA. I'm telling you I did it.

Speaker 30 He totally took your bait.

Speaker 6 He did.

Speaker 15 He did.

Speaker 17 And now Billy was ready to tell all, including the hard-to-hear details of how he killed Rebecca.

Speaker 20 Early that Monday morning, he said he parked his pickup truck on his grandfather's property.

Speaker 63 He went around and knocked on Casey's door.

Speaker 63 Rebecca answered.

Speaker 39 The two had never met, but he knew she was in the house from his visit the night before.

Speaker 45 He said he was Casey's cousin and asked to use the phone. Do you ever really call anybody?

Speaker 45 No. That was just a ruse to get inside, because you'd already made up your mind what you was going to do.

Speaker 45 right now you can set it up

Speaker 13 he said rebecca went to the bedroom while he paced back and forth in the living room and by chance that previously broken leg from the piano fell off on its own he grabbed it

Speaker 13 she goes back goes to the bedroom

Speaker 13 you get the piano leg

Speaker 13 and enter the bedroom.

Speaker 13 What did she say? Nothing. She's sleeping.

Speaker 13 she didn't see it coming how many times do you remember hitting her twice

Speaker 13 and then that the thing fell apart

Speaker 13 and i went in like a rage

Speaker 59 he said the wooden piano legs fell apart as for why he did it billy didn't have an answer and it remains unknown he claims it was not sexual What was your intentions?

Speaker 59 Your intentions were to go in there and just kill her?

Speaker 59 Why? I mean, it was like a light switch that just went off, and I just...

Speaker 59 I don't know. It just...

Speaker 59 I was like angry or just kind of... I don't know.
But she made fun of you?

Speaker 59 No,

Speaker 59 she didn't. I just went in there and it was like

Speaker 59 bam, bam, bam.

Speaker 59 And that was it. Then I freaked out.

Speaker 39 He said after he hit Rebecca, she was still alive.

Speaker 34 So he used a man's tie he found there and strangled her.

Speaker 41 He then scrambled to clean up.

Speaker 41 I took the bedding, put it in a suitcase, and then flipped a mattress because there was blood on it, and then wiped up everything the best that I could. What about the laundry?

Speaker 41 I put stuff in the laundry. What did you put in the laundry?

Speaker 41 There was bedding. So bedding went in the laundry and in the suitcase? Yeah.

Speaker 50 It all matched what had been documented at the crime scene.

Speaker 35 And he knew about that missing suitcase, a fact never made public by police.

Speaker 71 The piece of evidence Detective Simons had so desperately searched for and never found.

Speaker 35 Billy was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. You're under arrest for the murder of Rebecca Gould.

Speaker 35 Okay.

Speaker 68 Soon after, Rebecca's dad got the call he thought might never come.

Speaker 13 We have made an arrest after all these years.

Speaker 15 Yes, I think it was more a little bit of shock because I didn't know the name and I felt, oh my God, it's over.

Speaker 13 And there he'd been all those years. Yeah.
While everybody else was in the hot seat. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Off living his life and, you know,

Speaker 11 fooling everybody.

Speaker 47 And proud of it?

Speaker 11 I'm very proud.

Speaker 58 It's clear the other suspects, Casey, the rest of the McCullough family, Jennifer, J.B.

Speaker 34 Yates, Chris, Justin, none of them had anything to do with Rebecca's death.

Speaker 74 Still, this case wasn't yet over.

Speaker 28 It was crucial for police to locate that suitcase to corroborate whether Billy was telling the truth.

Speaker 27 He gave investigators a general location in a wooded area where he said it would be found.

Speaker 27 A search party was sent out, and of all people, it was Detective Simons, not yet retired, who found it.

Speaker 81 I know that I got emotional, but I dang sure

Speaker 81 I got a little excited. I knew that was the nail in the coffin.
I knew that we had our man when I found that suitcase.

Speaker 52 But just when it seemed it was all over, came a bombshell development, and it involved Billy's confession.

Speaker 18 Number three, he had the right to talk to a lawyer.

Speaker 38 It might not be admissible in a court because his defense argued he didn't get read all his Miranda rights.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 71 After reading three of the Miranda rights, Officer Acosta got distracted by a question from Billy. So you have to go get a lawyer?

Speaker 94 I can't give you that advice. I'm not a lawyer.

Speaker 30 He was never read his fourth right.

Speaker 57 And according to Billy's attorneys, Gray Dellinger and Joe Denton, that was a violation of his rights.

Speaker 78 If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

Speaker 99 That warning has to be given to every person in America if the police want to use anything that they develop in that interrogation later at trial.

Speaker 31 After being extradited back to Arkansas, Billy pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 33 Now not only could his entire confession be thrown out, so too could key evidence.

Speaker 42 Eric Hance was the prosecutor for the case.

Speaker 95 If there's a confession that is tainted, any evidence we obtain as a result of that confession is inadmissible at trial as well.

Speaker 95 So the suitcase and all of the clothing and all of those things that corroborated the confession would go out with it.

Speaker 8 It felt incomprehensible.

Speaker 27 After all these years, it seemed the case might fall apart.

Speaker 95 And we told the family that. The confession goes out,

Speaker 95 he goes back to the Philippines, and it's game over.

Speaker 35 A tense three-day hearing was held about whether the confession could be admitted at trial.

Speaker 52 Because Billy signed a document acknowledging his Miranda rights, the judge ruled the confession was admissible.

Speaker 19 In the end, the family agreed with prosecutors to accept a plea deal.

Speaker 57 They didn't want to risk that even one juror could set Billy Miller free.

Speaker 37 He got 40 years with a chance of parole.

Speaker 11 We have justice. We have the person behind bars.
He cannot roam. He cannot find somebody else.
And he can't do this to somebody else.

Speaker 29 As for Casey McCullough, he sent us a statement.

Speaker 35 In part, it read that his heart goes out to Rebecca and her family.

Speaker 72 He thanked his friends and family who stood by him during the social media attacks and said he can now live his life in peace.

Speaker 39 And speaking of Casey, Billy had a question about his cousin, the man who'd endured years of scorn and suspicion. Do you think it's possible that I could tell Casey that I'm sorry?

Speaker 39 I want to go to Arkansas.

Speaker 6 I think you'll have that opportunity.

Speaker 72 After Billy's sentencing, Rebecca's sister Danielle passed away after a long battle with cancer.

Speaker 50 As for Rebecca's father, he's still working on getting Rebecca's law passed.

Speaker 39 He's now found some peace in that he finally fulfilled a pledge he made the day he buried his daughter.

Speaker 44 One he talked about and read at Billy's sentencing.

Speaker 15 Nothing would ever stop us

Speaker 15 from finding the person who murdered Rebecca.

Speaker 15 Today I look to heaven and I simply whisper, promise made, promise kept.

Speaker 23 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again next Friday at 9-8 Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

Speaker 8 I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 23 Good night.

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