The House on Sidney's Cove

Speaker 1 Digline is sponsored by Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Speaker 1 Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about.
In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply.
See Capital One.com slash bank, Capital One NA Member FDIC.

Speaker 3 If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Grainger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible.

Speaker 3 So when a conveyor motor falters, Grainger offers diagnostic tools like calibration kits and multimeters to help you identify and fix the problem.

Speaker 3 With Granger, you can be confident you have everything you need to keep your facility running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRANGER, clickgranger.com, or just stop by.
Grainger for the ones who get it done.

Speaker 4 There's this pile of leaves, and it's where everything else else is clear and flat. My heart is racing a million miles an hour.
I was using my boots to move leaves and that's when I screamed.

Speaker 4 This blood-curdling scream.

Speaker 6 Nikki Liley, a corporate exec who made time for romance and her three daughters.

Speaker 7 She was the best mom.

Speaker 6 Then she disappeared. Dozens joined the search.

Speaker 8 We need Nikki to come home.

Speaker 6 Then Then they found her.

Speaker 9 You can't make it.

Speaker 6 Launching a mystery that would divide this family.

Speaker 10 I suspected him from the beginning.

Speaker 6 One daughter thought her stepdad, Matt, did it. The other said, no way.

Speaker 11 It's ridiculous the lies they're spreading.

Speaker 6 And Matt, he had a theory all his own.

Speaker 12 This is not the first time she's run away. Okay.

Speaker 6 Had Nikki taken off and found trouble.

Speaker 13 So now you're thinking someone gave her a date rape drug.

Speaker 2 That's a possibility.

Speaker 6 The trail would lead to this house of cameras.

Speaker 2 There's a big server tower that would indicate a large amount of data being stored.

Speaker 6 What they discovered, thousands of hours of tape.

Speaker 9 Let me out of this ring.

Speaker 14 What's absolutely a torture to listen to.

Speaker 6 That would reveal one shattering truth.

Speaker 4 I got down on my knees and just started crying.

Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with the house on Sydney's Cove.

Speaker 1 There's never a good day to search for a missing woman. But this rainy, muggy Saturday in the heat of July made an unhappy task all but unbearable.

Speaker 8 Take some flowers with you.

Speaker 1 They decided, the friends and family, that they'd all wear red shirts.

Speaker 1 They got themselves organized in the parking lot of a Walmart in Lawrenceville, Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta, and then set out to find any trace of a petite corporate executive named Nikki Liley.

Speaker 16 She's been missing for a week now. She's got three kids that would love to see her home.

Speaker 1 Amy Robinson told reporters that her 44-year-old sister, mother of three, was hardly the kind of person who just up and disappear without a word to anyone.

Speaker 17 I'm just so worried about my sister.

Speaker 19 You know, we just have no idea where she is or

Speaker 17 what's happened to her.

Speaker 1 As fate would have it, the question of where Nikki was would be answered soon enough. But even now, the question of what happened to Nikki remains unclear.

Speaker 20 I'm sick of playing your games.

Speaker 1 What is clear from the recording she left behind is that Nikki Liley lived a troubled and tormented life.

Speaker 21 This is what I live day in and day out is keep my mouth shut, my head down, and do exactly what's expected of me.

Speaker 13 Tell me about Nikki's personal life.

Speaker 19 She was very funny. You know, she and I used to laugh all the time.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 19 she was very feisty.

Speaker 19 She would say what she meant.

Speaker 22 You know, she didn't mince a lot of words.

Speaker 1 As sisters, Amy Robinson and Nikki Liley were 10 years apart. But according to Amy, they were always close.

Speaker 13 Boy, you two look alike in the old photos. We do.
I was thinking maybe you're swapping out each other's clothes, but of course you're 10 years apart.

Speaker 18 Well, that didn't stop it from happening.

Speaker 7 I wore a lot of her hand-me-downs.

Speaker 1 By the mid-90s, Nikki had been married and divorced twice. and she and her young daughter, Alex, were sharing an apartment with Amy.

Speaker 23 We had a good time with that, too.

Speaker 7 We just laughed, putting up pictures in the apartment and stuff.

Speaker 13 That sounds like a sitcom.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
And at times, it definitely was.

Speaker 1 Eventually, Nikki moved out, remarried, and had two more daughters with her third husband, Matt Liley, a New Yorker she'd met online.

Speaker 23 He made my sister laugh.

Speaker 18 And so, you know, we would all laugh.

Speaker 1 After brief stays in Oklahoma and Mississippi, Nikki and Matt returned to Georgia and settled into this house on Sydney's Cove in Lawrenceville.

Speaker 1 Nikki, a well-regarded corporate money person, was the primary breadwinner. Matt, a computer guy, ran a small business out of the house.

Speaker 22 He started going to like government surplus auctions and buying these big pallets of old used computer parts and then rebuilding them and selling them on eBay.

Speaker 1 Buy this ring.

Speaker 25 Buy this ring.

Speaker 1 When it was Amy's turn to get married in 2003, her big sis was there, serving as matron of honor.

Speaker 27 I just want to raise a toast to Amy, my best friend, my confidant, my sister, and to the love of her life who makes her head spin to Amy and Dallen.

Speaker 1 Then later that night, boogie into what else, we are family.

Speaker 28 We are family.

Speaker 1 As the years passed, the sisters remained close. In late June 2011, Amy organized a spa day out for Nikki and her three girls.

Speaker 22 No boys allowed, only, you know, we're going to go have a girls' day. Where'd you go?

Speaker 18 We went to go get our nails done.

Speaker 1 Day of beauty at the spa, huh?

Speaker 26 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 18 Yep, we got manicures and pedicures, and we went and had lunch.

Speaker 1 Nikki had had her toenails painted pink that day.

Speaker 1 And though she'd sometimes had a difficult relationship with her teenage daughter, Alex says that day at the spa felt like a turning point, a fresh beginning.

Speaker 24 Snapshots, everybody looks pretty happy.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Good girls' day out.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it was fun. And I'm beyond grateful now that we've done it.

Speaker 1 Two weeks later, Nikki had apparently left home in the middle of the night without a word to anyone.

Speaker 1 When the family reported her missing two days later, the police advised them there was little they could do.

Speaker 7 Their response was, we don't even know where to start looking.

Speaker 13 She's not in the 11 o'clock news every night.

Speaker 7 No, because frankly, you know, grown woman having left her house wasn't that interesting a story.

Speaker 18 Well, 100 people getting together all wearing red shirts, so there's an interesting story.

Speaker 7 So they covered that.

Speaker 3 So then the cameras were out.

Speaker 7 Then the cameras came.

Speaker 1 And this is what the cameras saw. Searchers armed with maps literally beating the bushes around Nikki Lile's subdivision for clues as to what might have happened to her.

Speaker 16 Well keep your eyes open. If you see her anything, definitely call 911 and let them know that you've seen her.

Speaker 1 Every searcher had an assignment.

Speaker 8 Oh, look, we got blue sky. It's going to smile almost.

Speaker 1 Harriet Garrett, Nikki's mother, had the job of going door to door,

Speaker 1 leafleting the neighborhood with flyers, picturing her daughter.

Speaker 29 I don't think anybody's at home, but we'll find out.

Speaker 1 Even though Southern hospitality may have been in short supply that day.

Speaker 16 Get out of here before I go the clock.

Speaker 1 Harriet pressed on.

Speaker 5 Good morning, sir.

Speaker 5 My name is Harriet Garrett.

Speaker 16 My daughter's missing. And they're trying to give it, we're trying to get some news coverage.

Speaker 1 Like so many of the volunteers that day, Allison Rockwell wasn't a relative. She was looking for Nikki, her co-worker.

Speaker 4 I love Nikki. Nikki was great.
She was just such so great to work with, very smart, lots of energy, positive, wonderful. Just a wonderful person.

Speaker 1 On the morning of the search, Allison recalls that she and another colleague from work, a man named Derek, were running late. And that would turn out to be an important twist of fate.

Speaker 4 40 minutes late, actually. Everyone else had started searching.

Speaker 13 So were you given a grid or an area to look at?

Speaker 4 Yes, we were given the front of the neighborhood, the very front of the neighborhood on the right.

Speaker 1 It was one of the last unassigned sections of the organizer's search grid, a patch of woods near a busy road.

Speaker 4 Derek and I went into the woods together.

Speaker 4 And I remember having to walk up and go over a large tree.

Speaker 4 And there's this pile of leaves and it's in the middle of where everything else is clear and flat.

Speaker 4 And my heart is racing a million miles an hour. I go up to the pile of leaves.
I was using my boots to move leaves at the bottom of the

Speaker 19 pile.

Speaker 4 As I was doing that, I said, Derek! And Derek came over and he heard the panic in my voice and he started helping me.

Speaker 4 And that's when we saw blonde hair.

Speaker 4 and i screamed this blood-curdling scream and there was no question

Speaker 23 when we come back she said oh my god it's it's her we found her

Speaker 26 there's her hair how awful for you yeah a body and a vital clue the telling factor was the bonds where her feet were clean what did that mean

Speaker 1 At first, it was the unnatural way the leaves were clumped that attracted attention.

Speaker 1 Then, it was the hair.

Speaker 7 And I hear a scream from the woods.

Speaker 1 You hear a scream. Yeah.

Speaker 22 And I tore off running into the woods.

Speaker 7 And then when I got into the woods, her co-worker Allison was there.

Speaker 23 And she said, oh my God, it's her.

Speaker 22 We found her.

Speaker 7 There's her hair.

Speaker 1 How awful for you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Nikki Lile's sister Amy and her friend Allison felt sure the body beneath the leaves had to be Nikki's.

Speaker 7 It was terrible.

Speaker 19 I think everybody was a little bit shocked.

Speaker 22 So I just kind of went into crisis mode and I called 911.

Speaker 1 Within minutes, police, ambulances, and news cameras were converging on the patch of woods where the body was found.

Speaker 1 Nikki's mother, Harriet Garrett, says she heard the news when a cop told her she'd have to stop leafletting the neighborhood.

Speaker 8 Someone in the neighborhood had complained. And while he is talking to me,

Speaker 8 his radio goes off. It's a dispatch.
Body has been found.

Speaker 3 You hear it over the dispatch? Yes, sir.

Speaker 13 Yes, sir. Do you actually go to that place in that little bit of woods?

Speaker 8 Yes. Well, I couldn't.
By the time I got there, they already had the crime scene tape up. And I couldn't get any further.

Speaker 26 Okay, we're going to move back. We're going to move back on down, guys.

Speaker 8 They had it isolated by that time, but I got to it as close as I could.

Speaker 1 Soon, Harriet had Nikki's oldest daughter, Alex, on the phone.

Speaker 5 Do you know it's her?

Speaker 5 Where am I? I'm right here. The police won't let me come, honey.

Speaker 28 Yep.

Speaker 5 They won't let me through.

Speaker 10 I just remember fainting or something, but as soon as I came to, I took off off running. And I ran all the way to where the crime scene tape was.

Speaker 5 No, you can't. You can't, baby.

Speaker 10 Of course, they wouldn't let me see her, and I'm grateful that they did it now.

Speaker 1 As Nikki's family struggled to process the news, Amy faced the microphones and once again became the family's voice.

Speaker 32 The only thing I saw was her hair.

Speaker 12 But,

Speaker 23 you know, so we're just waiting for the police to do their job and we'll find out more soon.

Speaker 1 inside the police tape investigators carefully uncovered the body of a middle-aged female she was nude lying face down and tellingly appeared to have a fresh pink pedicure given the decomposition the heat the rain investigators figured the body had lain there for a while it had been out there several days gwinnett county police detective brad everson no clothing whatsoever any obvious injuries to the body lacerations blunt force trauma gunshot, stab wound, anything you could see?

Speaker 2 Nothing.

Speaker 2 And of course at this point there's no, there's no identifying documents around it, so there's nothing around where the body's at that would indicate what happened.

Speaker 1 In the way of these things, dental records confirmed what everyone suspected. The body in the woods was indeed that of Nikki Liley.

Speaker 2 Telling factor was the bodies where her feet were clean.

Speaker 13 What does that tell you? Connect the dots for me.

Speaker 2 Well, that tells you that she didn't walk out there and put herself in those woods and she anticipated she sure wasn't going to cover herself up.

Speaker 1 Later, lab analysis of Nikki's blood revealed something else that was odd. There was a high level of the date rape drug GHB in her system.

Speaker 13 So now you're thinking maybe sometime before this woman's death, almost immediately before, someone gave her a date rape drug.

Speaker 2 That's a possibility.

Speaker 13 Emmy also finds semen.

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 1 Had Nikki somehow been abducted, raped, and then dumped less than a mile from her home? The detective couldn't say.

Speaker 1 But in the days before her body was found, while this was still a missing persons case, Nikki's husband, Matt, had told Everson something intriguing on the phone.

Speaker 1 This wasn't the first time Nikki Liley had walked out in it. My wife has a long history of

Speaker 1 some

Speaker 1 kind of mental imbalances, okay?

Speaker 1 And I've been finding out the past two days. Everything she's been telling me in therapy all these years has been a lie.

Speaker 6 Coming up, the Nikki No One Knew. Stories of unstable behavior.

Speaker 12 This is not the first time she's run away. Okay.

Speaker 6 And even violence. My father is a witness for her throwing a knife at my face.
When dateline continues.

Speaker 17 Get to the heart of the action at the world's biggest soccer tournament. Fly into San Jose, just eight minutes from the stadium and nine minutes from downtown hotels and parties.

Speaker 17 Fly, stay, play in San Jose.

Speaker 33 Go to sanjose.org/slash play sj26.

Speaker 1 Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called literally with Rob Lowe.

Speaker 34 And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J.

Speaker 1 Fox.

Speaker 34 There are new episodes out every Thursday. So subscribe, please, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 8 Try angel soft for your tushi.

Speaker 28 It's made by angels.

Speaker 35 Soft and strong, budget-friendly.

Speaker 28 The choice is simple.

Speaker 8 A roll that feels like paradise.

Speaker 28 And always at a heavenly prize.

Speaker 28 Angelsoft, angel soft, soft and strong, so simple.

Speaker 25 Pick up a pack today. Angelsoft.

Speaker 28 Soft and strong, simple.

Speaker 1 By the time searchers found Nikki Liley's body,

Speaker 1 Police detective Brad Everson already knew bits and pieces of her life story. He'd been working her case since she was reported missing a few days earlier.

Speaker 2 I'd already talked to her dad, talked to her mom, talked to both her sisters, you know, talked to her oldest daughter.

Speaker 1 The picture that emerged was of a woman whose life had revolved around her work, her daughters, and her husband, Matt.

Speaker 4 He would come sometimes and do lunch with Nikki.

Speaker 1 Did she ever talk about her girls?

Speaker 4 Yes. Yes.
She was very proud of all three girls. Yes.

Speaker 13 Photos on the desk kind of thing?

Speaker 26 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Like most marriages, Nikki's had its ups and downs. Early July 2011, when Nikki disappeared, was one of the downtimes.

Speaker 1 Matt freely admitted that when he talked to the detective the day after he reported her missing.

Speaker 12 This is not the first time she's run away. Okay, she's run away, and she's been gone for

Speaker 12 two hours. She's been gone for three hours, four hours one time.

Speaker 12 She's gone to work with a bag of clothes and then come back after work, you know, but she's never been gone overnight.

Speaker 13 So he's telling you this is just the latest of a continuing episode that my wife has.

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 9 Matthew, this is Detective Eric, Grinette County Police Department.

Speaker 1 In this telephone call, which the detective recorded, Matt Liley said his wife was mentally unbalanced. She's not very happy with her life.
She'd never felt accepted. Okay?

Speaker 1 We've been in and out of therapists.

Speaker 1 There's a fear of intimacy. You know, she's got no problem with girls.
But when it comes to a male, they are a threat. They are.

Speaker 1 All my life, guys have used me for sex.

Speaker 13 He's just giving you a hose full of information.

Speaker 2 I have a hard time getting wording edge-wise. She yells at me in front of the kids.
She throws things in front of me in front of the kids.

Speaker 2 And all I'm doing is sitting there going, please stop, please stop. Do you remember what the doctor said? Is this the person you want to be?

Speaker 13 He's telling you that she's bats.

Speaker 2 That's what he's saying.

Speaker 2 As for the night Nikki disappeared, he stated the previous Friday that they had actually gone out to eat. and then gone to a movie after she got home from work.
We had a great time.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 came home. On the way home, I said to her, you know, hey, you know,

Speaker 2 if I wanted sex, so I said to her, you know, hey, how about, you know, how about you put on an outfit?

Speaker 2 I think that might have set her off.

Speaker 24 You wanted to put on a little sexy costume of some kind, huh?

Speaker 3 Correct.

Speaker 3 That fear of intimacy that I thought she was working on getting over

Speaker 3 was gone, but apparently that set her off because she picked the fight.

Speaker 1 As Matt tells it, the fight continued at home and ramped up. Matt's father, who was visiting from New York, was just down the hall.

Speaker 1 When the argument touched on the way Nikki had supposedly been treating her father-in-law, Matt asked his dad to weigh in.

Speaker 2 He called his father Matthias into the bedroom and basically asked Matthias to tell Nikki how he felt about being down there and that Matthias came out with a line that he hadn't felt welcome, that kind of stuff, and that Nikki just reacted to that by basically saying he was lying.

Speaker 1 Then Matt said his wife did something off the wall. I mean, holy cow.

Speaker 1 She rips her shirt off with her hanging out, no bra, nothing, and says, Maybe we should just throws her shirt on the floor and then says, isn't that what family does?

Speaker 13 You kidding. She flashed her father-in-law?

Speaker 15 Correct. My wife has done some weird s.

Speaker 15 That's the weirdest she's ever been.

Speaker 1 Matt said the dust finally settled in the wee hours of Saturday, July 9th. Nikki in the bedroom, he on his couch in the downstairs office.
I wake up about 6 o'clock to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 1 The light is on in the bedroom. I can see it upstairs.
So I go upstairs to see what's going on. She's not there.

Speaker 2 All her stuff was still there. Her car was still there.

Speaker 3 Her keys, her phone, her purse was still there.

Speaker 2 Correct. He assumed she had left on foot, or he assumed somebody came and picked her up.

Speaker 1 Matt told the cop it was then that he realized his home security system had been turned off. Do I have a camera system in the house? Because I sell cameras for the DVR.

Speaker 1 And she always shuts it off when she leaves. And she's pissed off.
Because she knows it pisses me off.

Speaker 13 So that's the first you learn that this place is wired for sound and pictures. Correct.

Speaker 1 When Nikki Liley's body was found days later near her home, learning the story told by those cameras became most urgent.

Speaker 6 Coming up, a treasure trove of evidence.

Speaker 13 Quantified. What are we talking about?

Speaker 14 Thousands of hours of material.

Speaker 6 Just what will it reveal?

Speaker 14 It's absolutely a torture to listen to.

Speaker 1 Within minutes of finding Nikki's body,

Speaker 1 police raced to the Liley home about a mile away. What they observed right away was astounding.

Speaker 1 The home security system that Matt Liley had casually mentioned to Detective Everson a few days earlier appeared more appropriate to Fort Knox than a house in the burbs.

Speaker 2 And when you first see the house on the road, you can see all these huge, these big cameras on the eaves of the house, both sides.

Speaker 1 There were 21 security cameras in all with a tricked-out control room to monitor and record everything.

Speaker 13 He sounds like a one-man NSA.

Speaker 2 I think it was a very low-crime area.

Speaker 2 So it almost boggled the mind as to why he felt he needed quite so much

Speaker 2 surveillance coverage for the house.

Speaker 1 Odd to be sure, an observation to tuck away for later. But the duty that day came first, notification.
The officers telling Matt Liley that his missing wife had just been found dead.

Speaker 2 The uniformed guys told me that he, at one point,

Speaker 2 seemed like he got sick.

Speaker 1 Matt Liley may well have been sick, sick of talking to the cops, because by now he'd lawyered up and wasn't answering any of their questions.

Speaker 13 So you now have probable cause to get a search warrant.

Speaker 15 Correct, correct.

Speaker 13 Do you think, man, maybe this is going to help us?

Speaker 24 Maybe these cameras saw and recorded something that tells the story of what's up with Nikki.

Speaker 2 That was my hope. We're mainly going for anything in the house that has any sort of

Speaker 2 memory, be it computers, be it, you know, he had a DVR hooked up to his surveillance system.

Speaker 1 The detective knew it would take time to review and catalog all of that material.

Speaker 1 So since the police had found no sign of blood nor any signs of struggle in the house, the detective reviewed the evidence he did have, particularly Matt's claim that his wife was bonkers.

Speaker 13 Are any of her family members corroborating this

Speaker 13 emotional instability issue that's raised by the husband?

Speaker 2 None whatsoever.

Speaker 13 Are any of them suspicious of Matt, the husband?

Speaker 2 Yes, they were all suspicious of Matt.

Speaker 1 Nikki's daughter, Alex, had lived with her mother and Matt until she was 16, and there was plenty she'd had to say to the detective.

Speaker 10 I wanted him to know what was going on in the house. I wanted him to know that I suspected him from the beginning, that my mom would have never left her girls.

Speaker 1 Still, despite the family's suspicion and the fact that the semen found on Nikki's body proved to be Matt's, the police didn't feel they had enough evidence to make an arrest.

Speaker 13 There's no ankle bracelet on this man. You haven't taken his passport?

Speaker 26 No.

Speaker 13 Does anybody say if you're going to be moving around, tell us where you're going to be? Is it that kind of a relationship with the authorities at that point?

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 there's not really a relationship with us.

Speaker 1 What about all that computer evidence, the video files from Matt's hard drives? They appeared to be useless.

Speaker 1 After months of reviewing more than a half million video clips, the best investigators could come up with was this.

Speaker 1 It's a clip of Nikki Liley walking onto the front porch to have a smoke just after midnight on July 9th, 2011, the day she went missing.

Speaker 3 After that, nothing. What happened after midnight in that house?

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 That was the million-dollar dollar question.

Speaker 1 The video files from midnight until 6 in the morning that day were corrupted, according to the tech guy who examined them.

Speaker 2 He could see footage,

Speaker 2 but what it was is it was very disjointed. Most of it was not timestamped.
Most of it was not date stamped.

Speaker 2 So it was not in a manner that you could just go in and play and just play through everything.

Speaker 1 The bottom line, the police had nothing. And so with no compelling reason to stick around Lawrenceville, Matt Liley left town.

Speaker 1 He He and his two daughters, Amanda 12 and Rebecca 9, resettled in Vermont close to his family. All communication with relatives in Georgia ended.

Speaker 1 In the summer of 2012, one year after Nikki's death, the investigative file passed to cold case detective Sergeant John Richter.

Speaker 14 I was actually in the homicide unit as a corporal when her body was found.

Speaker 13 Does that stay with you?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I always say there's certain, you know, there's certain cases that stick with you, and this is one.

Speaker 1 At first, Richter did what all cold case detectives do. He re-interviewed witnesses.
When that went nowhere, Richter took another look at Matt Liley's computer hard drives.

Speaker 13 Do you think somewhere in there is the thing that the nugget that's going to get you to the next step in this investigation?

Speaker 14 I think at minimum, we need to redo it just to see if technology had advanced. So I needed a new forensic guy to look at the...

Speaker 14 video or whatever else he can find on the computer.

Speaker 1 Turns out the techie Richter needed was just down the hall. Corporal Chris Ford had been an IT guy before joining the police force.

Speaker 9 Richter just came down and said, hey, you mind taking a look at this. So I started looking for what we call low-hanging fruit.
What's easily available?

Speaker 9 That was where I really started digging through and finding all these audio files.

Speaker 1 Nobody had listened to the audio files before because investigators were so focused on finding video from the night Nikki disappeared. And that's just what Ford did at first, too.

Speaker 9 I basically looked at that video in raw format, which is basically computer language.

Speaker 13 So something was recorded there.

Speaker 2 Yes, they just wouldn't play.

Speaker 1 Eventually, Ford determined the screwed-up files were no accident. Someone had deleted those files and then run a cleanup program to clear the database logs.
Not once, but twice.

Speaker 9 The only two times those cleanup jobs were run were the days that he reported her missing and the day her body was found.

Speaker 14 I'll never forget the day he comes to my cube and he says these videos were deleted. This isn't corrupted.

Speaker 14 And he turns to leave and I think he just looks back and he says, oh, I got a bunch of audio files that are on there too, if you're interested.

Speaker 13 A bunch of files, quantified. What are we talking about in terms of like hours of material?

Speaker 14 Thousands of hours of material that date back from 2008, you know, up to 2011.

Speaker 1 In the bedroom, the audio recordings are probably best described as cringeworthy scenes from a very bad marriage.

Speaker 20 That's not what I said and how I said it. And don't take my words out of context.
When we got in that damn car,

Speaker 1 damn it,

Speaker 1 damn it, damn it, damn it,

Speaker 1 damn it. Oh, your voice!

Speaker 14 Well, it's absolutely a torture to listen to because we have a woman who I know is now deceased, and I'm hearing how she's living for the years preceding her death and how

Speaker 14 she is just being beaten down psychologically and mentally.

Speaker 1 It took the detective nearly a year and a half to listen to all of the recordings, and by then, he'd heard more than enough.

Speaker 1 When he learned that Matt Liley would be returning to Georgia to testify in a civil suit concerning the payout from some life insurance policies Nikki had, Sergeant John Richter planned to be waiting.

Speaker 6 Coming up, could investigators have it all wrong? Nikki's youngest daughters paint a very different picture of their childhood home.

Speaker 21 It was always happy and loving.

Speaker 6 Why they're furious with their mom's side of the family.

Speaker 11 It's just ridiculous the lies they're spreading.

Speaker 6 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 1 Hey, weirdos!

Speaker 19 I'm Elena, and I'm Ash, and we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 37 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 19 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 37 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 19 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

Speaker 37 Find us us wherever you listen to podcasts. Yay! Woo! Aye!

Speaker 25 Just got a new puppy or kitten?

Speaker 5 Congrats!

Speaker 25 But also, yikes! Between crates, beds, toys, treats, and those first few vet visits, you've probably already dropped a small fortune, which is where Limon Aid Pet Insurance comes in.

Speaker 25 It helps cover vet costs so you can focus on what's best for your new pet. The coverage is customizable, signup is quick and easy, and your claims are handled in as little as three seconds.
Pro tip.

Speaker 25 LemonAid offers a package specifically for puppies and kittens. Get a quote at lemonaid.com slash pet.
Your future self will thank you.

Speaker 31 Your pet won't.

Speaker 25 They don't know what insurance is.

Speaker 31 A mochi moment from Sadie, who writes, I'm not crying, you're crying.

Speaker 31 This is what I said during my first appointment with my physician at Mochi, because I didn't have to convince him I needed a GLP-1.

Speaker 19 He understood, and I felt supported, not judged.

Speaker 17 I came for the weight loss and stayed for the empathy.

Speaker 19 Thanks, Sadie.

Speaker 31 I'm Myra Ammeth, founder of Mochi Health.

Speaker 38 To find your Mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com.

Speaker 35 Mochi members have access to licensed physicians and nutritionists and are compensated for their stories. Results may vary.

Speaker 1 In March 2015, Matt Liley returned to Georgia for the first time since he'd left the state three years earlier.

Speaker 1 It was money that brought him back, a court proceeding concerning a payout from his wife Nikki's life insurance policies.

Speaker 22 I knew he was coming down.

Speaker 18 That made me uneasy. It made me feel really creeped out.

Speaker 24 This is three years later. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7 But what we didn't know was that the whole federal courthouse was actually crawling with plainclothes Gwinnett County police.

Speaker 13 They were taking him down that day.

Speaker 3 They were.

Speaker 18 We had no idea.

Speaker 1 Sergeant John Richter says the plainclothes cops waited all day for just the right moment to make their move.

Speaker 14 Get him on the outside of the courthouse.

Speaker 13 Who makes the collar? How's it going?

Speaker 14 Myself and Detective Washington were there. We put the handcuffs on him.
It felt pretty good.

Speaker 1 Nikki's family knew the feeling.

Speaker 8 I raised my hands and said, praise God.

Speaker 8 That was my reaction.

Speaker 1 In addition to facing a murder charge, Matt Liley was eventually charged with sexual assault and multiple counts of eavesdropping.

Speaker 1 A few weeks after his arrest, Nikki Liley's daughters, Amanda and Rebecca, posted an edited video on YouTube in support of their dad. So girls, tell me what life was like growing up in your home.

Speaker 21 Um, it was always happy and loving.

Speaker 11 Most of the time, my mom was traveling. My dad was mostly the one taking care of us.

Speaker 1 In the video, the girls claimed that their mother hated her own family, and those same spiteful relatives were the primary reason their dad was in jail.

Speaker 8 They never liked my dad, and

Speaker 11 I've been reading things online. I've been watching the news and I can see the hatred that they have for my dad and

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 11 just ridiculous the lies they're spreading.

Speaker 1 For Nikki's family, that video was devastating.

Speaker 1 What they wondered had happened to those girls in the four years they'd been in Vermont.

Speaker 22 As far as I can tell, he poisoned them against us.

Speaker 18 And I can only attribute that to

Speaker 22 You know, them living in a house with a master manipulator.

Speaker 1 The notion of Matt Liley as a master manipulator would become a central theme when his murder trial began in January 2016.

Speaker 29 Morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 1 In her opening statement to the jury, prosecutor Lisa Jones depicted Matt Liley as a couch potato sponging off his hardworking wife.

Speaker 29 Nikki Liley was the breadwinner.

Speaker 40 That that family was in debt, up to $300,000 in debt.

Speaker 1 Furthermore, Jones said, Matt Liley tried to control his wife by turning their home into a virtual North Korea with cameras and recording devices everywhere.

Speaker 1 Lenses aimed at them as they sat on the couch and watched TV.

Speaker 39 You will take a look into this marriage, ladies and gentlemen, in this case. You will hear the voices of Nikki Liley and the defendant in this case arguing.

Speaker 1 Nikki's murder, she claimed, was simply Matt Liley's final act of control.

Speaker 29 I think they got into an argument that he wanted to have sex, that he drugs her, that he has his way, that she's loud, she's not able to resist as much as it progresses, that he silences her, that he strangles her, he sits on her, he asphyxiates her to where she can't breathe.

Speaker 1 Not meaning to, maybe.

Speaker 29 Oh, I think he meant to. I think he'd had it.
And I think he knew that she was leaving him because she had made it clear she was done.

Speaker 39 Raise your right hand, please.

Speaker 1 The state's first witness was Nikki's oldest daughter, Alex.

Speaker 41 They'd be arguing and he would end up locking her in a bathroom. She'd been shoved downstairs.

Speaker 41 There were several nights that I would lay up at night and listen to her say, please get off of me, get off of me, you're hurting me.

Speaker 1 Next, Nikki's sister Amy told the jury about the constant monitoring at the Liley house.

Speaker 43 We knew that he would record phone conversations that came into or out of the house.

Speaker 39 Were you aware at any time whether there were ever GPS trackers or tracking devices on any types of the phones or the vehicles at the residence?

Speaker 43 Yes, I knew that he had trackers on Nikki's phone and when Alex was old enough to have a cell phone that he tracked her phone as well.

Speaker 1 Then the prosecution gave the court a fly-on-the-wall look inside the Liley home by playing those promised recordings of the couple's fights.

Speaker 20 Let the records show I am now locked in a room again.

Speaker 19 I don't want to be here.

Speaker 20 I don't want to have this conversation.

Speaker 1 I've asked out of it.

Speaker 3 The records show that she's being an absolute

Speaker 1 wants her way no matter what.

Speaker 1 It was hard to listen to. Bitter screaming matches, frequently about sex.

Speaker 20 I know that when we go two days without sex, you're going to automatically assume I am on strike mode no matter what else is happening. Don't touch me.

Speaker 20 Sit down if you want to sit down.

Speaker 1 I've been reaching out to you.

Speaker 20 I don't want to hold your hand right now.

Speaker 1 In retrospect for the prosecution, the recording seemed to have the ring of prophecy. Oh, hands around my throat.

Speaker 2 My hands were not on your throat. I don't care what the f you think, but it was my throat they were around.
Well, get it through your head. They were not around your throat.

Speaker 2 Stop telling that story like that. Bull.

Speaker 2 You threatened to kill me.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor said Nikki Liley's best chance for leaving her marriage came 12 days before she disappeared. After yet another argument, Nikki had called 911.

Speaker 12 Yes, my husband won't let me leave the house.

Speaker 12 My wife is yelling and screaming and just woke up with children.

Speaker 1 Officers dispatched to the Liley home that day offered to help Nikki leave. But as this still photo shows, she wouldn't budge from the front porch.

Speaker 29 And she wanted him to go. He didn't want to go.
He wanted her to go.

Speaker 19 She wasn't going to leave without the girls.

Speaker 29 And so the argument, they were pretty much at an impasse.

Speaker 1 Two weeks later, Nikki Liley was dead.

Speaker 1 In a house where practically everything was recorded, The prosecutor claimed it was no accident that the video covering the crucial hours when Nikki Liley went missing was somehow corrupted.

Speaker 39 The surveillance system was in fact recording during that time period.

Speaker 9 Is that correct? That is correct, yes.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor countered Matt's claim that Nikki had somehow turned off the security system by calling the police department's I.T. guy, Chris Ford, as her last witness.

Speaker 39 So, Detective, in your expert opinion, then, did an individual have to go in and purposefully corrupt and delete those files?

Speaker 9 That's correct, yes. That's the only way I can explain why, out of all the dates and video that I can recover, that's the only date range I can't recover from.

Speaker 1 Though no one knows exactly what was on that missing video, the prosecutor suggested that it was probably video of Matt Liley carrying his wife's body out of the house.

Speaker 39 That you heard her.

Speaker 1 In closing, the prosecutor let Nikki Liley have the last word.

Speaker 39 You need to listen to what she says and what she lived.

Speaker 21 Welcome to my world. You killed me a long time ago.

Speaker 40 Welcome to my world.

Speaker 40 You killed me a long time ago. Find him guilty.

Speaker 35 Because that's exactly what he is.

Speaker 6 Coming up, has the prosecution really proved anything?

Speaker 30 I think their gut feeling was she's buried this close to the house. It's got to have been him.

Speaker 24 It's what you call a circumstantial case. Yes.

Speaker 6 And then Nikki and Matt's daughter says in her parents' marriage, Matt was the victim.

Speaker 42 She took took a heel and threw it, and I myself had to duck from it.

Speaker 44 Was it being thrown at your lip? Yes.

Speaker 1 By early February 2016, the prosecution had rested its case against Matt Wiley. The husband was portrayed as an eavesdropping control freak who'd killed killed his wife during an argument.

Speaker 1 Wiley's defense attorney, Tom Clegg, insisted that Matt Liley was, in fact, an innocent man, falsely accused by the state of Georgia.

Speaker 44 They have a theory, and that theory is nothing more than a hunch, it is a guess.

Speaker 44 If you were to ask yourself questions that might have been posed of you if you were to have gone to journalism school, who,

Speaker 45 what, where, why, and how,

Speaker 44 will find that during the course of this trial, the state of Georgia will fall woefully short in proving the allegations that they are making against this man.

Speaker 30 I think their gut feeling was, come on, she's naked. She's buried this close to the house.
She's obviously hidden. It's got to have been him.

Speaker 24 It's what you call a circumstantial case. Yes.

Speaker 1 The defense attorney concedes he had some difficult circumstances to overcome in this case, beginning with the six hours of missing surveillance camera video from the night Nikki Liley disappeared.

Speaker 1 Clegg insists his client did not erase those files, as the prosecution claimed.

Speaker 30 The video surveillance system was shut off at some point in the morning. Matt believes that Nikki shut it off.
He insisted that he did not shut it off, that the system was shut off by Nikki.

Speaker 13 So, whatever happened to her, the cameras didn't see it.

Speaker 30 The cameras did not see it. That is absolutely correct.

Speaker 1 As for those audio recordings of the couple's screaming arguments, Clegg pointed out that most were recorded in 2008 and 2009, two years before Nikki died.

Speaker 1 According to the defense attorney, Matt made the recordings with the encouragement of a marriage therapist that the couple had been seeing at the time.

Speaker 30 He is talking and he is conciliatory, in my opinion. He is trying to calm things down and it is impossible to calm Nikki down.

Speaker 12 Please, don't do this. Please,

Speaker 38 you do not want to do this with me right now.

Speaker 20 I mean it.

Speaker 20 You do not want to tangle with me right now at all.

Speaker 1 What did I do? According to Clegg, the prosecution cherry-picked scenes from the lively marriage, highlighting the bad and downplaying the good.

Speaker 1 Bright spots like a 2010 trip Matt and Nikki took to Hawaii. They even renewed their marriage vows on that trip.

Speaker 30 The tapes reflect both of them at their worst.

Speaker 30 Now, the flip side is when they are getting along well, when they are affectionate towards one another, when they renew their wedding vows in Hawaii, they don't tape that stuff.

Speaker 13 It's always the darkest side of the moon with this.

Speaker 30 The darkest side, absolutely, yes.

Speaker 1 As for the night Nikki disappeared, the defense tried to show that Nikki Liley was once again acting unstable, behaving erratically.

Speaker 1 The defense attorney called Matt's father, Matthias, to verify his son's version of that last fight between Matt and Nikki, the one where she allegedly flashed him. She tore off her

Speaker 26 top

Speaker 1 and says, come on, let's go, let's act like a family.

Speaker 44 Were you expecting any sort of comment like this?

Speaker 1 Never, I expect, never.

Speaker 1 Once Nikki disappeared, Clegg says, Matt Liley inquired about having his wife involuntarily committed and even hired a divorce attorney.

Speaker 1 A man who knows his wife is already dead, he says, wouldn't have done either of those things.

Speaker 30 He did not really want to divorce divorce her. He wanted to let her know, look, here are your options.
You can go get help for yourself, or I'm going to go forward with a divorce.

Speaker 1 The defense wrapped up its case by calling Matt and Nikki's two daughters, Rebecca, then 14, and Amanda, then 17.

Speaker 44 Did you ever see your dad hit your mom? No. Okay.

Speaker 44 Did you ever see any obvious injuries or bruises to your mom?

Speaker 11 No, sir.

Speaker 1 According to the girls, their mother was the one with the violent temper, not their dad.

Speaker 42 And she took a heel and threw it, and I myself had to duck from it.

Speaker 44 Was it being thrown at your dad? Yes.

Speaker 1 On the day Nikki made that 911 call, Amanda said her mother complained about hearing voices in her head.

Speaker 38 She was pacing back and forth saying that she was... tired of people talking bad about her behind her back and my dad asked her who was talking about her and she said that

Speaker 38 she was hearing voices, and like the voices in her head were telling her that people were talking bad about her.

Speaker 1 Throughout, neither girl made eye contact with their mother's relatives who hadn't seen them in four years.

Speaker 38 We made our own decision. We don't like that side of the family, so we want to stay away.
It's not

Speaker 38 him forcing us to stay away from them.

Speaker 1 In closing, Tom Clegg argued that while the state may have proved Matt Liley unlikable, it had not answered any of those basic journalism questions.

Speaker 26 Who, what, where, when, why, or how.

Speaker 30 In closing, I said, you've heard all of this evidence. The state still cannot answer any of these particular questions.
What does that tell you?

Speaker 30 That tells you they have fallen woefully short of proving Matt's guilt.

Speaker 1 After eight days of testimony, both sides of the family prepared for a long and anxious wait for a verdict. Turns out, they didn't have to pace long.

Speaker 1 After just three hours of deliberation, the jury announced it had reached a verdict.

Speaker 46 I'm going to ask you at this time if you would stand and read the verdict out loud.

Speaker 6 As to Count 1, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty of malice murder.

Speaker 1 Though not a sound came from Nikki Liley's family, their expression said it all.

Speaker 44 Thank you, sir.

Speaker 1 Before passing sentence, the judge gave Matt Liley one last chance to have his say.

Speaker 46 Mr. Liley, is there anything you want to say?

Speaker 26 I didn't do it.

Speaker 1 With that, the judge asked Matt Liley to rise and receive his sentence.

Speaker 46 I am going to follow the state's recommendation as to Count 1 and have you sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 1 It was a bittersweet ending for Nikki's family. They'll likely never see Matt Liley again.

Speaker 1 But as Nikki Liley's youngest girls left the courthouse that night, the prospects of repairing their relationship with the girls seemed very much in doubt.

Speaker 24 One murder, so many victims.

Speaker 9 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 6 Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 33 Hi, I'm Jenny Slate. And believe it or not, someone is allowing us to have a podcast.

Speaker 1 I'm Gabe Leidman.

Speaker 36 I'm Max Silvestri. And we've been friends for 20 years.
And we like to reach out to kind of get advice on how to live our lives.

Speaker 1 It's called I Need You Guys.

Speaker 36 Should I give my baby fresh vegetables?

Speaker 33 Can I drink the water at the hospital?

Speaker 1 My landlord plays the trombone and I can't ask him to stop.

Speaker 33 You should make sure that you subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

Speaker 28 I need you, girl.