A Cool Desert Morning

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Speaker 2 The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological cat and mouse story about guilt and justice and doubt, now playing only on Netflix.

Speaker 3 Tonight, on dateline.

Speaker 4 I'm Mr. Nayman Lemon.

Speaker 5 My wife is unconscious.

Speaker 1 Got a call.

Speaker 6 Susan had died.

Speaker 7 He just said she was acting crazy. She said, I'm going to kill myself.

Speaker 8 Brent takes the detective to the garage and shows him two bottles of antifreeze.

Speaker 8 It made sense to police that Susan likely killed herself.

Speaker 1 Did you for a minute believe that Susan could take her own life?

Speaker 10 Never.

Speaker 11 We never located anything that pointed to suicide.

Speaker 12 He was up the elevator. I think it was six minutes.
What's he doing in six minutes?

Speaker 13 You have an opinion that it's a suicide, right?

Speaker 4 It's not an opinion, it's a fact, but okay.

Speaker 11 I don't have a murder weapon. I don't have a confession.

Speaker 10 We wanted justice for Susan.

Speaker 1 And you did not let it go.

Speaker 10 Nope, we didn't.

Speaker 3 A puzzle for investigators and you to solve. Was a mysterious death a suicide or something more sinister?

Speaker 9 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 3 Here's Josh Mankiewicz with a cool desert morning.

Speaker 14 On Father's Day, I don't get that phone call from my daughter like I used to.

Speaker 14 I loved the way she said,

Speaker 1 Daddy.

Speaker 1 It was a tragic loss, one that might have united a family in grief. Instead, it tore them apart in anger.
It was just very cold and hostile.

Speaker 7 The lines were drawn and he wasn't backing off.

Speaker 1 An open and shut case became a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces.

Speaker 11 There's a lot of trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

Speaker 8 There's a lot of clues in this story, but no easy answers. It seems like it just doesn't add up.

Speaker 1 A family pushed back against the criminal justice system. You knew that was going to be the most uphill of uphill battles.
Yes.

Speaker 7 All we want to know is the truth.

Speaker 1 And they refuse to give up. You're both grieving parents, and you need to let it go.
How many times do you hear that, and from how many people?

Speaker 14 We heard it from everybody that we talked to.

Speaker 10 But we're stubborn people.

Speaker 1 just a short drive from the bright lights of the las vegas strip is the suburban sprawl of henderson nevada the state's second biggest city

Speaker 1 henderson was home to psychologist brent dennis attorney susan winters and their two daughters under this roof they led a privileged comfortable life

Speaker 1 one that exploded on a cool desert morning in january 2015.

Speaker 5 Henderson 911, what's the location of your emergency? My wife is unconscious.

Speaker 8 On January 3rd, around 6.45 a.m., Brent Dennis wakes up and he calls 911.

Speaker 1 Reporter Kate Bricolay covered the story for the Daily Beast.

Speaker 8 He sounds panicked. He's speaking very quickly, and he reports that his wife is unconscious and not breathing.

Speaker 5 Sir, you take a deep breath. I need you to take a deep breath.
They're already on their way. I need you to tell me your phone number.

Speaker 1 This is my number, it's 702.

Speaker 5 That's okay. Are you with your wife now? Yeah, but she's unconscious.

Speaker 8 He says he has to do something. He has to give his wife mouth to mouth.

Speaker 8 And he hands the phone to his oldest daughter, who then takes over, and she sounds pretty composed given these terrifying circumstances.

Speaker 1 Brent's 15-year-old daughter, Allie, took over the call.

Speaker 5 How long are the ambulance going to be here? They're already on their way, okay? I need you to get her on the floor, sweetheart, okay? We're trying, we're trying.

Speaker 5 She's on the floor, she's on the floor. Okay, is she breathing? Look at her right now, sweetheart.
No, okay. She's not breathing.
Okay, listen carefully. I'll tell you how to do chest compressions.

Speaker 5 My dad's already doing them. Tell him he needs to do it 600 times and count it loud so I can count with him.
Dad, you need to do it 600 times.

Speaker 1 With Brent still doing chest compressions, paramedics arrived and took over.

Speaker 8 It's a chaotic scene, and as they're working to save her life, Brent Dennis begins to share details with them, saying that he found her in this state just 10 minutes before.

Speaker 8 He says that his wife had seemed depressed lately and had threatened to kill herself.

Speaker 1 Paramedics worked on Susan and were able to get a pulse. She started breathing again, and Brent called Susan's parents, Danny and Avis, in Oklahoma.
He told her father Susan had attempted suicide.

Speaker 14 Then he took the phone and he handed it to his daughter. He said, here, talk to her.
And I said, Allie, is your mother awake? And she said, no. And then she said, wait a minute.

Speaker 14 And she said, one of her fingers is moving. We got to go.

Speaker 10 I didn't want to believe any of it. I just knew it was bad, but I was like him thinking, okay, they will get her to the hospital and we can get out there and see her and it'll be okay.

Speaker 10 And we waited and waited for another call.

Speaker 1 Waiting was torture. So Danny and Avis booked a private plane so they could be with their daughter as soon as possible.

Speaker 1 Susan had been rushed to an ER with a steady pulse. The bad news, a CAT scan showed swelling around her brain.
The prognosis was bleak. Brent called Susan's parents again.

Speaker 10 We were on our way to that airport. We were at the gate to turn in and he called.

Speaker 14 He said, don't come out.

Speaker 10 I'll call back. I wanted to go and Danny wanted to go.
We felt like we should.

Speaker 10 But it was

Speaker 10 a nightmare.

Speaker 1 Brent asked them not to come to Nevada right away to wait for a medical update. It was a tough decision, but Danny and Avis agreed.

Speaker 1 Waiting would also give their son a chance to join them on a later flight.

Speaker 1 So they returned home, hoping for good news, but also terrified of what they'd hear next.

Speaker 1 That even if she survived, Susan's life and theirs would never be the same.

Speaker 3 This was a marriage that started with so much love.

Speaker 6 When we come back, she was head over heels in love with him. He was head over heels in love with her, too.

Speaker 3 But sadly, if this was a suicide attempt, it wasn't Susan's first.

Speaker 1 She thought about it enough to go in the car, close the garage door, and turn on the engine. And then she didn't go through with it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Susan Winters had been in the hospital for most of the morning, husband Brent by her side.

Speaker 1 Brent had given Susan's parents in Oklahoma a disturbing report. Susan hardly looked like herself.
She was bloated and on life support.

Speaker 10 He said,

Speaker 10 you just don't want to see her like this. He was painting a picture for me.
And that was not my Susan.

Speaker 1 Their Susan was a bundle of energy who embraced life with everything she had. She'd been the apple of her parents' eyes from the day she was born.

Speaker 10 She tried to please everybody. She wanted to do well in school.

Speaker 1 A wonderful daughter.

Speaker 14 If she couldn't do her best, she wasn't ever satisfied.

Speaker 1 Big Brother Chris, a gifted athlete, says Susan's best was really good.

Speaker 7 She wanted to go and do anything any of the older kids were doing. She was going to be right there doing it.
She had no fear.

Speaker 1 She was the tomboy kid's sister who was tagging along.

Speaker 7 Pretty much. She was a lot of fun to have around.

Speaker 1 Fiercely competitive, Susan was an honor student, homecoming queen. and star of her school's track, basketball, and softball teams.
Kelly Sneed was both teammate and best friend.

Speaker 6 She would come into her room and just brighten it up, and she was loud and boisterous, and she was smart, and she was beautiful.

Speaker 1 In eighth grade, Susan had her eye on another bright star, Brent Dennis, quarterback of her school's state champion football team.

Speaker 6 He was more than a jock. He was handsome.
He was smart and almost invincible, you know. I mean, everybody just swooned over him.

Speaker 6 He was amazing.

Speaker 1 Brent, the big man on campus, was 18. Susan was just 14.
It wasn't going to happen. Still, a girl can dream.

Speaker 6 She had a very big crush on him, and she told me one time, I'm going to marry that guy someday.

Speaker 1 After graduation, Susan and Brent went their separate ways. She became a lawyer and settled in Las Vegas.
He was a psychologist in San Diego. By the early 90s, they were both divorced and available.

Speaker 1 Susan's sister-in-law, Julie, took it from there.

Speaker 17 I called his dad and said I was part of the reunion committee and I needed Brent's number. So I gave him Susan's number and they talked for a couple of weeks.

Speaker 17 And then she flew into San Diego to meet him.

Speaker 6 Once they reconnected, she was head over heels in love with him. I think he was head over heels in love with her, too.
He was very compassionate and loving.

Speaker 1 They got married in 1995, settled in Henderson, and had two daughters, Allie and Danny.

Speaker 1 Money wasn't really an issue for them. Susan and Brent were professionals and doing well.

Speaker 1 And Susan's family provided a very comfortable security blanket. Hi, how are you doing today? They own more than 100 restaurant franchises, including dozens of Sonic drive-ins.

Speaker 1 Susan received monthly profits from four of them.

Speaker 1 It was a charmed life, except it didn't last. In 2012, after more than 15 years of marriage, Brent and Susan separated.
No one seemed to know why.

Speaker 1 What was not working in that marriage? Or what did she tell you?

Speaker 10 She didn't tell us anything about the marriage.

Speaker 14 She just said that it's not working, but she still loved him and she wanted the marriage to work.

Speaker 1 They agreed to share custody of their daughters, 13 and 10 years old at the time.

Speaker 1 One week when the girls were staying with their dad, Julie went to visit Susan, who was alone in the house and in very bad shape.

Speaker 17 And I still have goosebumps. Remember walking in.

Speaker 18 She was not very receptive and

Speaker 17 The girls were with him, and it just totally flattened her world.

Speaker 1 Susan tumbled into a deep depression, and then one day alone at home, she went to the garage and closed the door.

Speaker 7 And she goes out and starts the car in the garage, right?

Speaker 7 And she's sitting there and she decides it's too cold, so she kills the car and walks inside.

Speaker 1 She thought about it enough to go in the car, close the garage door, and turn on the engine. And then she didn't go through with it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Susan went into therapy and was prescribed medication for depression and anxiety. Avis believed a fresh start would be the best thing for her daughter, and that meant ending her marriage.

Speaker 10 I persuaded her to see an attorney and get divorce papers drafted. She presented them to Brent.

Speaker 10 She told me that he said, Susan, why on earth would you file for a divorce? I love you. She

Speaker 1 cried

Speaker 10 saying, I want my life back. I want my husband back.
I want my kids.

Speaker 1 And she did get them back. Susan reconciled with Brent and the family moved back under one roof.

Speaker 10 I hoped they would work it out and be okay.

Speaker 1 Susan seemed to be getting her life back until that January morning in 2015.

Speaker 1 After just a few hours in the hospital, Susan was in grave condition and taken off life support.

Speaker 1 Not long after that, Brent made one more call to Oklahoma.

Speaker 14 And he said, she's passed, and

Speaker 14 I'm not sure we said anything else to one another.

Speaker 10 No, we didn't talk anymore.

Speaker 10 There was nothing to say.

Speaker 1 Susan Winters was just 48 years old. Her old teammate and lifelong best friend, Kelly, was at work when she heard the terrible news.
I got a call

Speaker 6 from our softball coach, and he said that Susan had died.

Speaker 21 It still gets to me today, you know, about how much I miss her.

Speaker 1 And I was lucky to get to know her and be her friend.

Speaker 1 A woman's sudden death demanded a response from law enforcement.

Speaker 1 This didn't look like a complicated case, but that depends on who's doing the looking.

Speaker 22 Coming up.

Speaker 8 Brent takes the detective to the garage and shows him two bottles of antifreeze.

Speaker 1 Susan's death is ruled a suicide, but her family doesn't agree.

Speaker 14 Nobody would drink that and go through that two days physical pain that it takes to die from antifreeze.

Speaker 3 When dateline continues.

Speaker 1 After Susan Winters died, the Henderson Police Department was notified. The call went to Detective Chad Mitchell.
He headed out to the family home to ask some questions.

Speaker 1 Brent, a psychologist who specialized in treating people in crisis, gave the detective a psychological profile of his late wife.

Speaker 8 He tells the police officer that she had been treated for anxiety and depression, that she takes medication, and that she had threatened to kill herself.

Speaker 1 Brent described the scene in the house on Susan's last day.

Speaker 8 He said that during the day they had been drinking together and that he believed that Susan was mixing her drinks with her anti-anxiety medication.

Speaker 8 They had been arguing about the state of their marriage.

Speaker 1 Things escalated. Brent said Susan flew into a rage and was out of control.
He said it got so bad their daughters left the house to escape the chaos. They They walked to a nearby shopping center.

Speaker 1 Brent said he picked them up that evening and when they got home, Susan was asleep. And then Brent told the detective, he made an alarming discovery on the family computer.

Speaker 1 Internet searches on how to commit suicide by drinking antifreeze.

Speaker 8 Brent confronts Susan about these internet searches and she doesn't want to talk about it. She goes back to sleep.
She's snoring. He lets it go.

Speaker 1 An officer took a picture of the computer screen, and that wasn't all.

Speaker 8 Brent takes the detective to the garage and shows him two bottles of antifreeze. Brent says that he found them on the floor of the garage when he got home from the hospital that day.

Speaker 1 A history of depression and suicide threats, two opened bottles of antifreeze in the garage, and a computer search about how to kill yourself using antifreeze.

Speaker 1 Everything seemed to point in the same direction.

Speaker 8 It made sense to police that Susan likely killed herself on January 3rd. There was a history of suicidal threats, and this wasn't coming out of nowhere.

Speaker 8 I mean, she had a history of serious mental health issues and depression.

Speaker 1 An autopsy was done the next day, and when the toxicology came back, it showed Susan did, in fact, have a lethal amount of antifreeze in her body.

Speaker 1 There was also a lethal level of the prescription painkiller, oxycodone. The medical examiner ruled her death a suicide, and Henderson P.D.
closed the case.

Speaker 1 Except, it wasn't closed for the Winters family. Not even close.

Speaker 1 Did you for a minute believe that Susan could take her own life?

Speaker 10 No, never.

Speaker 1 And Susan drinking antifreeze? To Susan's father, that seemed ludicrous.

Speaker 14 Nobody in her right mind would drink that and go through that two-day physical pain that it takes to die from antifreeze. You don't just die immediately.

Speaker 1 Also, the winters had just spent the holiday season with Susan, and they say she seemed more like her old self, taking care of herself, running again.

Speaker 1 And just days before she died, Susan seemed to be in a good place and excited about the future.

Speaker 23 She was happy.

Speaker 24 She was looking forward to doing things.

Speaker 1 Susan's friend Louis Gazda also says she was upbeat that holiday season. He'd given Susan a Christmas present she loved.

Speaker 23 I had been out at an estate sale and found these records from Elvis.

Speaker 24 It was a two-album set.

Speaker 1 And she loved it?

Speaker 23 She loved it very much. She was very appreciative.
Big Elvis Presley fan.

Speaker 24 Her license plate said exactly 3K Graceland.

Speaker 23 So 3,000 miles to Graceland is what it was.

Speaker 1 That's a fan. She was a fan.

Speaker 1 Lewis says there was no hint of anything being wrong that day, and they agreed to a lunch date after the holidays.

Speaker 1 In fact, Susan was planning a lot of things for the coming year, including joining the family business back in Oklahoma.

Speaker 7 She was going to come back and be our attorney, our legal counsel. I had set it up where she was going to fly in, spend a week, you know, each month.

Speaker 1 It was going to be an exciting year for Susan's daughters, too. She'd already booked flights to Hawaii for Danny's cheerleading competition.
Avis said she'd go too and would make hotel arrangements.

Speaker 10 I said, we're going to stay in a Hawaiian pink hotel. She said, that is great, and I'm planning to take Allie to look at colleges.

Speaker 10 She and I were just talking, talking the things that she had planned and that we were going to do.

Speaker 1 This was not somebody who was thinking about the end of her life. No, certainly not.

Speaker 1 The winners were locked in. Susan did not, would not take her own life.

Speaker 1 So then, how did she die? They decided to do everything in their power and their pocketbook to find out.

Speaker 22 Coming up.

Speaker 9 Susan's family runs into a brick wall.

Speaker 10 We heard it from the police chief. We heard it from the coroner.
I tried to make a call to the DA's office. No, you cannot talk to the DA.

Speaker 10 Every agency that we talked with responded in that way.

Speaker 1 The Winters family was in crisis, coping with Susan's death and refusing to accept. that she had taken her own life.

Speaker 1 Filled with equal parts, grief, and suspicion, her parents, her brother Chris, and sister-in-law Julie, flew to Nevada the day after Susan died and met with Brent and his daughters in a hotel.

Speaker 1 The scene that I'm imagining, which is one in which Brent says, she loved the two of you so much, I'm so sorry this happened, and he throws his arms around both of you. That's just me making it up.

Speaker 1 That didn't happen. That didn't happen.

Speaker 14 Nothing.

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 10 He didn't approach us at all.

Speaker 14 And Allie was talking and saying

Speaker 14 she committed suicide. And I said, Allie, please don't say that.
And she says, why not? It's the truth. And she's hollered it out.
And her dad come running over and said

Speaker 14 she can say whatever she wants to say.

Speaker 1 Brent then pulled Chris to a corner of the room and gave him some awful details about Susan's final hours.

Speaker 7 He just said she was drunk and acting crazy. She said, I'm going to kill myself.

Speaker 7 And if you try to do anything about it, Brent said, well, I'll call the cops. And she said, if you do anything about it, I'll hit myself in the head with a hammer and I'll tell the cops you did it.

Speaker 1 Did you believe any part of that story? No.

Speaker 1 None of that.

Speaker 1 And so there were no hugs, no memories shared about the wife, mother, sister, and daughter who loved them all. This family was divided in two.

Speaker 1 The winters on one side, Brent and his daughters on the other.

Speaker 7 The lines were drawn and he wasn't backing off.

Speaker 1 The winters weren't backing off either. When Avis went to the house just five days after Susan died, Brent had already laid out her belongings and told her friends they could take whatever they liked.

Speaker 1 Something about him giving away her things was too much for you.

Speaker 16 Yes, it was.

Speaker 10 It was like she was a piece of trash that he could discard at will.

Speaker 1 Avis told him what she thought about that.

Speaker 10 I said, oh, Brent, what happened?

Speaker 10 You've just killed Susan's spirit.

Speaker 10 And he burst out of the bedroom into the kitchen yelling, she's accusing me of murder. She's accusing me of murder.
And I said, Brent, I was

Speaker 10 just lashing out. And he said,

Speaker 10 healthy people don't lash out.

Speaker 10 So, I didn't accuse him of murder.

Speaker 1 But you thought it.

Speaker 10 I thought it, but I didn't say it.

Speaker 1 She didn't say it to him, but the family was more than willing to say it to anyone in a position of authority who would listen.

Speaker 1 So, the Winters went to the Henderson Police Department and spoke with the detective who was at the house the day Susan died.

Speaker 7 We asked him if he'd ever heard that if one spouse dies, immediately suspect the other spouse.

Speaker 7 And he said, no, I've never heard that. And I said, you know, it's on all the shows.
Any criminal show you watch, that's the first thing they say. Oh, no, no, no, that's not what.

Speaker 1 So. You must be the only police officer of the country never seen any date line.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The detective said he understood. They were a grieving family looking for answers.
Except, he said, there was no smoking gun, no evidence of foul play.

Speaker 1 And this case was closed.

Speaker 1 Not satisfied, the Winters family reached out to anyone they could think of and heard pretty much the same thing.

Speaker 10 We heard it from the police chief in Las Vegas. We heard it from the coroner.
We heard it from the investigator. I tried to make a call to the DA's office there in Vegas.

Speaker 10 No, you cannot talk to the DA. Every agency that we talked with responded in that way.
Your grieving parents.

Speaker 1 They'd hit a brick wall. Not sure where else to turn, they held a family meeting.

Speaker 1 Law enforcement wasn't responding. The Winters family was going to have to find answers on their own.

Speaker 7 We needed justice for Susan. That's it.
We said, all we want to know is the truth.

Speaker 10 And Chris said, we start this, we're going to have to continue, and we're going to have to finish it. We cannot stop in midstream.

Speaker 1 So they reached out to Jim Perry, a former FBI supervisor, who now runs a private investigation firm in Las Vegas.

Speaker 26 I had big reservations because it's a difficult case when you have to

Speaker 26 overturn basically what the Clark County Coroner and what the Henderson Police Department had ruled.

Speaker 1 After meeting the Winters family, Perry agreed to try and get some answers. answers.

Speaker 26 My first thought was that he, Brent Dennis, probably had a girlfriend.

Speaker 1 The family had that same thought.

Speaker 1 And so, days after Susan's funeral, Jim Perry began surveillance on Brent.

Speaker 1 He discovered that, yes, Brent Dennis was living a secret life, but it wasn't about another woman.

Speaker 22 Coming up.

Speaker 1 So what was Brent's secret?

Speaker 12 He was up the elevator. I think it was six minutes before he was rushing back down.

Speaker 12 We're trying to figure out, okay, what's he doing in six minutes?

Speaker 3 When dateline continues.

Speaker 1 Susan Winter's parents were heartbroken and outraged. They believed her husband, Brent Dennis, was literally getting away with murder.

Speaker 14 It was terrible that he killed my daughter. It was worse the son of a bitch

Speaker 14 was wanting to smear her name also.

Speaker 1 Danny was outraged at Brent's claim that Susan's depression cost her her life.

Speaker 1 But it wasn't the first time there was tension between Brent and Susan's family. In their eyes, he was arrogant.
and loved to push their buttons.

Speaker 7 Brent always needled. If you said it was light outside, he'd tell you it was dark.
Just dang sure put a wedge between mom, dad, Julie and I, and Brent.

Speaker 1 Brent had made the arrangements for Susan's funeral in Nevada, but it wasn't what the Winters family wanted. They decided to do their own memorial back home nine days later.

Speaker 7 We had a separate celebration of life here in Oklahoma City for Susan.

Speaker 1 More than 300 people came.

Speaker 1 There were speeches and a video tribute, Susan's Life in Pictures, with a soundtrack from, of course, Elvis and his song, Suspicious Minds, ironically about a couple that feels trapped.

Speaker 1 Given the awful tension in Nevada, No one expected to see Brent at the service. But then he showed up.

Speaker 1 What's it like to be celebrating the life of your sister while the man you suspect of murdering her is right there in the room?

Speaker 7 It was pretty tough.

Speaker 21 It was very tough.

Speaker 7 We were just having to eat it.

Speaker 1 Brent had no idea that back in Las Vegas, his in-laws had hired private investigator Jim Perry, who'd put Kent Stout and Lindsey Pipkins on the case.

Speaker 12 We were following every day for 10 to 12 hours a day.

Speaker 25 The Winters family thought he probably had a girlfriend.

Speaker 25 And so that was one of the things we were focused on. Who's he meeting?

Speaker 1 This was Lindsay's first case. Kent, who came with an FBI pedigree, is a veteran.
Car-to-car surveillance sounds exciting, but frequently it's not that exciting, right?

Speaker 25 No, but you got to be a lawyer all the time.

Speaker 1 What's the hardest part about doing surveillance on someone when you're a PI?

Speaker 27 Boredom, probably.

Speaker 1 Kent had two missions. Don't get caught.
And if Brent was having an affair, be sure to catch him on camera.

Speaker 25 He always tried to fight to get in a position to get a picture too. Everybody wants a picture.

Speaker 1 It was a balancing act and constantly on Kent's mind as he tailed Brent everywhere he went.

Speaker 15 Here he comes right there.

Speaker 15 That's his car, the Lincoln MKX.

Speaker 1 This is video of the surveillance as it happened, shot by a production company and used in a documentary about the case.

Speaker 27 I got him. I'll stay with the car.

Speaker 1 Brent Dennis's routine was mostly ordinary. Even so, Kent took note of every detail.

Speaker 15 There he is, getting out.

Speaker 27 He's out of his car heading to the off.

Speaker 15 Well, I don't know what he's on.

Speaker 1 Some moments looked a bit suspicious.

Speaker 27 I don't know if he saw me, but he's staying out of sight right now.

Speaker 15 He might be hiding something.

Speaker 1 And then turned out to be nothing.

Speaker 27 He pulled the trash can in.

Speaker 15 Apparently it's garbage day.

Speaker 1 The truth was that Brent seemed like a typical working dad.

Speaker 12 It was take out food every evening.

Speaker 12 Sometimes he was taking his kids to extracurricular activities.

Speaker 1 And there was nothing to suggest he was having an affair. There's no unidentified women that pop up in that surveillance.
No.

Speaker 1 There was one thing Brent was doing that most working dads don't. He would regularly go to the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, about a 20-minute drive from his home.

Speaker 25 It's an older hotel that's not on the strip.

Speaker 12 And there's a corridor there along Tropicana that is considered a sex worker corridor.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 12 So it wasn't uncommon to see women asking men if they wanted company.

Speaker 1 Is that what Brent was doing there? there?

Speaker 1 Several times Lindsay followed him inside to find out.

Speaker 12 He was up the elevator. I think it was six minutes before he was rushing back down to his car and taking off.
And so then we're trying to figure out: okay, what's he doing in six minutes?

Speaker 1 So, what do you think is going on at the Orleans?

Speaker 12 It's not enough time to meet a girlfriend.

Speaker 12 It doesn't really seem like enough time to be visiting with a friend.

Speaker 9 Or gambling.

Speaker 12 And it's happening on multiple occasions.

Speaker 1 How many times a week?

Speaker 12 At the bare minimum, it was every other day. And at the most, I was seeing twice a day.

Speaker 1 Kent and Lindsay continued their surveillance for months. And while they didn't know what was happening inside that upstairs hotel room, they did notice something Brent did on every visit.

Speaker 1 Brent met up with the same guy, sometimes inside, sometimes outside. That's Brent's car at the side entrance to the Orleans one day.

Speaker 1 Kent was watching from his car up the block.

Speaker 25 Got a guy with dark glasses, dark baseball cap wearing all dark, heading to Zavan.

Speaker 25 He's getting in right now.

Speaker 16 Who is this guy?

Speaker 1 That became the big question. Who was he? And what was Brent doing with him? The answer would blow this family's investigation wide open.

Speaker 12 Coming up, Jim Perry tells me: if we can get the room number that he's visiting, then I have a source that may be able to tell me whose names are on the room.

Speaker 3 Tracking the mystery man.

Speaker 12 The doors closed, and we went up to the 21st floor, and they got off, and I just followed behind.

Speaker 1 While private eyes were surveilling Brent Dennis in Nevada, back in Oklahoma, the family that had hired them was doing some investigating of their own.

Speaker 19 Julie and I went to the hospital to get all those records we were out there on the mission.

Speaker 1 In the conference room at their family business, they spent hours poring over police reports, Susan's financial records, literally thousands of documents.

Speaker 1 There was a fair amount of detective work that the two of you did, and

Speaker 1 this is at a time when you're, you know, recovering from losing your daughter. How'd you do it?

Speaker 10 We wanted justice for Susan. That was the only thing that kept us going.

Speaker 1 But after six months, they still hadn't made much progress.

Speaker 14 We kept finding out that we couldn't get anything that we wanted without subpoenas. And the only people who couldn't get subpoenas was attorneys.

Speaker 1 That meant finding a pro, a hired gun, someone like Tony Scroe.

Speaker 11 When an entire family shows up in your office, that's pretty compelling. And when the entire family is unanimous in their position that there's no way this was a suicide, that's compelling.

Speaker 1 Tony is kind of a Renaissance man. He's a guitarist, a restaurant owner.

Speaker 13 So simple, so good.

Speaker 1 And his band sings rock songs in Italian. Those were not the skills the Winters family was looking for.

Speaker 1 However, as a criminal defense attorney here in Las Vegas, Tony knows how to waltz through the local justice system without missing a beat.

Speaker 11 We defend so many murder cases. We know what the prosecution does to put them together.

Speaker 1 Tony typically represents people accused of serious crimes. This case was the opposite.
The Winters family wanted him to build a case against someone who wasn't even charged with a crime.

Speaker 11 I at least wanted to provide them that closure that I felt they desperately were seeking.

Speaker 1 How many people end up working on this? This was not just a couple of people.

Speaker 11 No, the team was probably 10 people deep.

Speaker 1 And the Winters family paid the bills.

Speaker 11 The Winters family paid the bills.

Speaker 1 They were

Speaker 11 going to see it through to the end.

Speaker 1 They asked Kent and Lindsay to step up the surveillance to find out more about the mystery man Brent had been meeting at the casino. The PI's boss, Jim Perry, came up with a plan.

Speaker 12 If we can get the room number that he's going up and visiting, then

Speaker 12 I have a source that may be able to tell me whose names are on the room.

Speaker 1 So Lindsay went to New Orleans and waited for Brent. It wasn't a long wait.
Brent arrived and entered the casino. And then the mystery man appeared.

Speaker 1 He met up with Brent and they headed to the elevators.

Speaker 12 And I got onto the same elevator with them and they asked me, well, what floor? And I just glanced and said, oh, same one.

Speaker 12 And the doors closed and we went up to the 21st floor and they got off and I just followed behind, got the room number.

Speaker 1 Mission accomplished. A little more PI work revealed the name of the man registered in that room, Jeff Crosby.

Speaker 12 Doing some more investigation on our part, we saw that Jeff Crosby had already been arrested for cocaine-related charges, and we found a mug shot.

Speaker 1 That mugshot confirmed Crosby, a convicted drug dealer, was the man they'd seen with Brent all those times.

Speaker 1 It looked like Brent's mystery man was his dealer, and Brent was seeing a lot of him.

Speaker 25 We saw him on numerous occasions coming out of the hotel with Jeff Crosby, getting in Brent's car and then he would go down below the door jam and

Speaker 25 when he'd come up he'd be rubbing his nose and sometimes his hair.

Speaker 1 It sounds like your investigators did a pretty good job of proving that Brent Dennis had either a cocaine problem or something that looked a lot like it.

Speaker 1 But that's not really proving that he's a murderer.

Speaker 11 Correct. And we talked about that a lot.
We often said, just because he does drugs does not mean he killed anybody.

Speaker 1 A lot of people with drug problems also have money problems. So while they were following Brent, they decided to follow his money too.

Speaker 1 The family was also doing that, and one day found evidence that seemed like a major break. It was a check written on an account only Susan had access to.
It was made out for $180,000,

Speaker 1 and it looked different from all the others.

Speaker 10 I gave it to Danny and Danny, brought it out here, and they spent a whole day going over those checks.

Speaker 1 They didn't think the writing was Susan's, adding to their suspicions. The check was deposited just days after Susan died.
The $180,000 is money that was in an account that Susan alone controlled.

Speaker 11 Right.

Speaker 1 Brent put it in the joint account he'd shared with her that he alone now controlled. Susan also had a $1 million life insurance policy.
Brent was the beneficiary.

Speaker 1 And he called in his claim on the first day, in the first hour that the insurance company was open after Susan's death.

Speaker 11 God forbid anyone loses their spouse unexpectedly like that. It probably is not going to be on their mind to immediately call and secure life insurance proceeds.
We all saw that as a red flag.

Speaker 1 There was more. Susan's will also named Brent as the beneficiary of her shares in the family's sonic restaurants.
For the winners,

Speaker 1 no way were they going to keep Brent in their lives as a business partner. So four months after Susan's death, the family bought the shares back.

Speaker 11 The family buys out Susan's interest from Brent for approximately $700,000.

Speaker 1 So they couldn't just expel him. They had to pay him off.

Speaker 11 They had to pay him off.

Speaker 14 We wanted him gone.

Speaker 1 At that point, we didn't want to send any any more dividends out there for him to put up his nose.

Speaker 1 Add up that $180,000 check, the life insurance, and the sonic restaurant buyout. And Brent Dennis banked around $2 million.

Speaker 1 So this is a case in which Susan Winters literally was worth more to her husband dead than alive.

Speaker 11 There's no doubt about it.

Speaker 1 So there it was, a plausible motive. Of course, motive isn't enough.
The biggest challenge was still to come. Could they prove that authorities were wrong about Susan taking her own life?

Speaker 1 And that her murderer was still walking around, a rich man.

Speaker 3 Coming up, every case is built step by step. Those steps were getting closer to Brent Dennis.

Speaker 20 We had concrete evidence that he had lied.

Speaker 3 The next step?

Speaker 11 We believed we could show in a civil courtroom that Brent was responsible for Susan's death.

Speaker 3 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 1 When he agreed to take the Susan Winters case, attorney Tony Scrove felt like a first-time Vegas gambler betting against the house.

Speaker 11 We believed it was going to be something short and sweet.

Speaker 1 He expected his wrongful death investigation to end in disappointment for Susan Winters' family. And he anticipated telling them the medical examiner and the police had been right all along.

Speaker 1 So you start off as finders of fact, not trying to prove the family's theory. Exactly.
But pretty quickly, you're finding stuff that actually backs up what the family believed.

Speaker 11 It was remarkable to us that

Speaker 11 everything that we gathered tended to point to Brent Dennis' guilt.

Speaker 1 It was time to start playing hardball. Tony filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Brent Dennis on behalf of the family.
The winners weren't looking for money.

Speaker 1 They wanted evidence to help prove their case.

Speaker 11 We believed we could show in a civil courtroom that Brent was responsible for Susan's death.

Speaker 11 The other thing it afforded us an opportunity to do was to collect evidence that we couldn't get informally. So now we can send subpoenas.
We can schedule depositions.

Speaker 1 Tony had also used his new subpoena powers to get access to Brent's banking records and discovered Brent seemed to be living above his means.

Speaker 11 Just at the Orleans withdrawals on the ATM machine, he was taking out more money than he was getting paid as salary.

Speaker 1 The evidence against Brent was this.

Speaker 1 He seemed to be buying and using illegal drugs. He had money problems.

Speaker 1 He'd rushed to collect a million-dollar insurance claim, and had maybe forged a check to get $180,000 out of Susan's private account.

Speaker 1 Tony thought the DA should know about all that.

Speaker 1 So when he found himself on a different trial up against his longtime adversary, prosecutor Mark DiGiacomo, Tony approached him during a break.

Speaker 11 We're in court together often and I just mentioned to him I got this interesting case.

Speaker 16 He says to me, hey, you wouldn't believe what we found. And he starts telling me a little bit more about it.
And then I said something to the effect of, well, like, did you get the cell records?

Speaker 23 He's,

Speaker 16 not yet. Get the cell records.
It's going to tell you a lot.

Speaker 1 Tony agreed. He got a subpoena for Brent's phone records.

Speaker 11 If I had your phone for an hour, I would know everything there is to know about you.

Speaker 11 And again, this is a move the state does all the time.

Speaker 1 In every case.

Speaker 11 In every case, they get the phone and they get the computer. And so the first thing we were able to procure was the cell phone records.

Speaker 1 The defense attorney started looking at the evidence the way a prosecutor would.

Speaker 11 Now, when you get your cell phone records as a customer, you get, you know, who you called, who you texted, etc.

Speaker 11 What you don't get unless you ask for it is the second half of the spreadsheet of the bill, which is your cell tower information.

Speaker 1 Tony's firm requested that data and assigned one of its attorneys, Jamie Richardson, to see if it confirmed Brent's version of events. She began with the story Brent had given law enforcement.

Speaker 20 So Brent had told the police and on 911 that he had fallen asleep next to Susan at night and woke up in the morning to find her not breathing.

Speaker 1 For that story to check out, there should have been no activity on Brent's phone from around 10.30 p.m. until the 911 call Brent made early the next morning.

Speaker 20 Instead, when we got the cell phone records, we found that that was not true.

Speaker 1 According to Brent's cell phone, while Susan's life was slipping away in the wee small hours, Brent was not sleeping in bed next to her.

Speaker 1 He was calling and texting drug dealer Jeff Crosby, and then he was driving from his home to the Orleans Hotel.

Speaker 20 Now we had concrete evidence that he had lied to the police. It was huge.
It was huge.

Speaker 1 Next, Tony turned to the family computer where that search for antifreeze and suicide had been done.

Speaker 11 We had asked for the production of that computer for months and months. And it was always, you know, you take the dog ate my homework and you multiply it by 20 and that's how many excuses we got.

Speaker 1 Finally, after several months, Brent's lawyers said Tony and his computer expert could come to their office and inspect the hard drive. Except there was a problem.

Speaker 11 They said it has a virus and I remember walking into the room that the other lawyers had set aside for us and the expert picks up one of the hard drives and he says, look at this and he shows me a hard drive that's smashed like someone had taken a hammer to it.

Speaker 1 Deliberately.

Speaker 11 Deliberately. Of course it raises another red flag.
Why is the computer destroyed?

Speaker 1 Tony's team believed Brent had a lot to answer for and they wanted those answers on the record. So they subpoenaed Brent for a video deposition.

Speaker 1 You knew in advance those depositions were going to be maybe not everything, but a lot.

Speaker 11 What I fully expected was that he was going to tell me, listen, I messed up. I did go to the Orleans, but it was only to, you know, placate my drug habit.
That's what I expected.

Speaker 11 What came out, the deposition, though, was

Speaker 11 so much more than that.

Speaker 21 You just always read the testimony you're about to give in this case should be the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.

Speaker 29 Yes, sir.

Speaker 22 Coming up.

Speaker 13 You think this is funny? Susan Winters is dead. Do you think this is funny?

Speaker 29 Sir.

Speaker 13 Do you think this is funny?

Speaker 29 No, I do not.

Speaker 3 A challenging witness. And Susan's daughter speaks her mind.

Speaker 21 It's clearly a suicide.

Speaker 1 Susan Winters' family had spent more than a year gathering evidence to try to prove her death was murder and not suicide.

Speaker 1 Now, Susan's husband was finally going to have to answer questions on video and under oath about what happened the the night before she died.

Speaker 30 Just to go over some of the ground rules.

Speaker 1 The depositions were held over several months. The setup always the same.
Attorney Tony Scroe and his team on one side of the conference table. The person being deposed on the other.

Speaker 31 You were employed at the Henderson Police Department as a homicide detective, correct?

Speaker 32 Yes.

Speaker 1 In one session, former Henderson detective Chad Mitchell was questioned about his work on the case. Tony's team wanted to show that police did not investigate Susan's death thoroughly.

Speaker 1 The detective acknowledged Susan and Brent's house was never processed as a crime scene, with no evidence collected. He said he accepted Brent's story, that Susan had taken her own life.

Speaker 32 I never had him ruled in as a suspect.

Speaker 32 This was never considered a criminal investigation.

Speaker 1 Their own records show Henderson Police spent a total of only 88 minutes on the case that day.

Speaker 11 In 88 minutes, there's only so much you're going to be able to observe and see and do. And that included from the time that they got in their cars to get over to his residence.

Speaker 1 Susan and Brent's daughters, Danny and Allie, were witnesses that night, but it wasn't Tony who called them for this deposition. It was their father.

Speaker 1 He was counting on their support in the wrongful death suit against him. Were you surprised to see your granddaughters show up there?

Speaker 1 Brent had added them to his witness list? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah, we were shocked and surprised that he would put them on there and put them through that.

Speaker 1 Tony had no choice. He would have to ask Susan and Brent's daughters painful, difficult questions.

Speaker 1 14-year-old Danny was soft-spoken and seemed nervous.

Speaker 1 Even so, she made clear she blamed her grandparents. for the accusations against her dad.

Speaker 11 Do you criticize your grandparents for wanting to understand what happened the day that she passed away?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 16 Why?

Speaker 33 Because

Speaker 10 they didn't, my mom and

Speaker 34 her parents didn't have a good relationship and I feel like if they did, they would have known that she was depressed and suicidal.

Speaker 1 16-year-old Allie felt the same and was her father's fiercest defender.

Speaker 13 Are you here because you want to protect your dad?

Speaker 21 Yes, because this is all unnecessary.

Speaker 24 What do you think is going on in this case?

Speaker 13 Why are we here? Why are we talking about any lawsuit?

Speaker 21 Because my grandparents think my dad's a murderer.

Speaker 1 Allie softened when she spoke of her mother, at one point describing how good Susan looked in the months before she died.

Speaker 21 She just always had a natural glow to her. She just knew what was like, what worked for her body.
I mean, she ran all the time.

Speaker 1 Despite that, Allie was firm in her belief that Susan killed herself and she wouldn't consider any other explanation.

Speaker 13 My question is about whether or not you would want to know if anything inappropriate happened during the time that your mom passed away.

Speaker 21 No, because it's clearly a suicide.

Speaker 1 The moment Susan's family had been waiting for finally arrived. Brent Dennis sat down to face Tony's questions.

Speaker 1 Avis and Danny flew to Las Vegas and sat in Tony's office to watch a live feed of the confrontation.

Speaker 33 Do you need anything else? Pad paper? You got your documents?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Tony asked Brent about his drug use.

Speaker 13 Did you engage in the use of controlled substances at or around the time of your wife's death?

Speaker 13 Occasionally. What is your controlled substance of choice?

Speaker 29 Not sure I have one.

Speaker 1 Tony asked Brent about purchasing drugs from Jeff Crosby.

Speaker 13 Could you have seen him every day?

Speaker 13 Possible. Did you buy cocaine from him? Possibly.

Speaker 1 Brent acknowledged Susan knew about his drug use and even threatened to expose it.

Speaker 29 When she made threats, they were very general.

Speaker 29 I'm going to turn you in.

Speaker 29 I'm going to call the police. I'll tell your parents.

Speaker 1 Tony pressed Brent to admit he was afraid Susan might make good on her threat and ruin him by causing his psychologist's license to be revoked. Brent appeared unconcerned.

Speaker 13 You knew that if Susan's threat manifested in actually her doing something, your license was going to be at risk, right?

Speaker 29 Hypothetically.

Speaker 1 Tony asked Brent why he deposited that $180,000 check days after Susan died. Brent claimed the bulk of it was for a down payment on a new home for the two of them.

Speaker 13 Did you have a home picked out that you were going to buy?

Speaker 1 I did not.

Speaker 13 Did she?

Speaker 29 I wasn't aware.

Speaker 13 Had you looked at a single home?

Speaker 29 I can't recall.

Speaker 11 It was a mess, stuttering and stammering.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 11 you know, once somebody is doing that, it becomes much easier to sort of start picking apart their story.

Speaker 13 She did not write that check, did she?

Speaker 29 Well, she wrote it with me.

Speaker 13 You guys, what, trace over each other's words? I mean, what does that even mean?

Speaker 29 I mean, she wrote part of it, and I wrote part. So she

Speaker 29 wrote our names in, the best I can recall.

Speaker 29 And that was typical fashion where she would

Speaker 29 sign the check and make it out to me and her.

Speaker 13 Do you have a specific recollection of you and Susan co-authoring a single check?

Speaker 29 I can't say with certainty.

Speaker 1 Brent's explanation seemed to be crumbling, as did his composure.

Speaker 1 Later came a lunch break, and that's when Brent, alone in the room and apparently unaware cameras were still recording,

Speaker 1 picked up a copy of that check for a closer look.

Speaker 33 He's looking at the $180,000 check.

Speaker 1 When the deposition resumed, Tony turned up the heat.

Speaker 13 Over the lunch break, did you look at the exhibit?

Speaker 29 No.

Speaker 13 You understand that even though we say off the record, there's still a video feed that is continuously recording you?

Speaker 29 Okay.

Speaker 13 Okay, let me ask it again.

Speaker 13 Now that you're aware that there's video that continues to record, is it still your testimony that you didn't look at the exhibit over the break?

Speaker 10 I may have.

Speaker 13 You think this is funny? Susan Winters is dead. Do you think this is funny?

Speaker 29 Sir.

Speaker 13 Do you think this is funny? No, I do not.

Speaker 1 Okay. Brent was on the defensive, but he stuck to his story about the events leading up to Susan's death.

Speaker 1 He suggested the suicide was as much a shock to him as it was to everyone.

Speaker 1 He said that in the days just before, his marriage couldn't have been better.

Speaker 29 We had a celebratory beer

Speaker 29 that was

Speaker 29 symbolic, if you will.

Speaker 13 Symbolic of

Speaker 29 the year to come and

Speaker 29 the changes that

Speaker 29 we wanted to

Speaker 29 make

Speaker 29 in relationship to our family and the girls and our parenting,

Speaker 29 buying a home.

Speaker 1 He talked about the day before she died.

Speaker 13 What do you guys do that day? We had sex.

Speaker 29 I remember her making a comment about

Speaker 29 having a trifecta, and it was nice to have a trifecta, basically a three.

Speaker 29 That was

Speaker 29 referenced to three, you know, orgasms.

Speaker 11 That is the thing that

Speaker 11 convinced all the women in the office that he was responsible for her death because it was perceived to be incredibly

Speaker 11 offensive and completely lacked any level of empathy.

Speaker 1 Tony slowly steered the questions back to Brent's drug use and cornered him with evidence that Brent was still using and still buying from Jeff Crosby.

Speaker 1 Brent's attorney quickly spoke up.

Speaker 24 I want to take another break and give my client some options.

Speaker 1 Tony thought Brent Dennis was close to talking himself into a murder charge, so he tried to keep the deposition going.

Speaker 30 I'll move on to another topic just so we can get through some other stuff.

Speaker 30 I know what you're doing.

Speaker 8 I think I should talk to him.

Speaker 1 Would Brent come back for more or would he walk away?

Speaker 3 Coming up, Susan speaks from beyond the grave.

Speaker 15 I just don't want to go into my 50s with somebody who hates me as much as you do.

Speaker 15 I love you, so. Really?

Speaker 15 If you love me, you got a really f ⁇ ing peculiar way of showing it.

Speaker 3 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 1 Tony Scroll and his team felt certain this bit of legal drama was over for good.

Speaker 24 I want to take another break and give my clients some options.

Speaker 1 Brent Dennis did return to answer a few more questions.

Speaker 30 Mr. Dennis, just a few follow-ups.

Speaker 1 Then he stepped away again

Speaker 1 and he never came back.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure Brent did himself any favors in that deposition.

Speaker 14 No, he certainly did.

Speaker 10 He still thought he could convince people. Tony has used that phrase, smartest person in the room.
And that's what Brent was thinking.

Speaker 11 He was making it up as we went, so much so that even his attorney eventually realized that Brent Dennis was in big trouble.

Speaker 1 To Tony, Brent was so plainly evasive that he turned himself into a murder suspect. Now, Tony had to convince someone at the Clark County District Attorney's Office of that.

Speaker 1 So he turned to Mark DiGiacomo, the prosecutor he'd originally told about the case. DiGiacomo agreed to a meeting where Tony and his team laid it all out.
And DiGiacomo was

Speaker 1 skeptical.

Speaker 16 No case that's ruled a suicide, and now 18 months later, we're going to revive as a homicide is anything you can consider a slime dunk.

Speaker 1 DiGiacomo knew he couldn't just take Tony's word for it.

Speaker 16 They have an interest here, right? They're on the side of the family, and you know, anything that they do potentially is tainted by a bias by them.

Speaker 1 Still, did Giacomo agree to investigate Brent Dennis for Susan's murder?

Speaker 16 Most of my cases, the easiest part about it is a crime was committed. And the hard part is who did it.

Speaker 16 This case was different in the sense that there wasn't any doubt who did it if I could establish a crime was committed.

Speaker 1 What can a prosecutor do that Tony couldn't?

Speaker 16 When a law enforcement officer walks up and says, hey, I'm investigating this, people are more willing to have a conversation. They trust them a little bit more.

Speaker 16 And we also have the power of search warrants. We can request things that can only be gotten by order of a court.

Speaker 1 And so in the summer of 2016, more than a year after Susan's death, the Winters family finally got what they wanted. The Giacomo and a detective from the Henderson PD

Speaker 1 started the Susan Winters case again

Speaker 1 from scratch.

Speaker 16 The very first thing we wanted to do was interview people who knew Brent, who knew Susan.

Speaker 1 What picture emerged of Brent and Susan's relationship in that marriage?

Speaker 16 It was very dysfunctional.

Speaker 1 Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley was the ringtone on Susan's phone whenever there was a call from Brent's phone.

Speaker 1 And when Prosecutor DiGiacomo obtained a search warrant for Brent's actual cell phone, he found recordings of Susan Winters talking about her marriage from beyond the grave.

Speaker 15 I love you, Son. Really?

Speaker 15 If you love me, you got a really peculiar way of showing it.

Speaker 1 Apparently, Brent often recorded fights he had with Susan.

Speaker 15 I don't want anything else to do with you.

Speaker 1 DiGiacomo also found texts Susan had sent to some friends in October of 2014, saying Brent had acknowledged he had a cocaine habit.

Speaker 1 I thought I knew the telltale signs of Coke use, but maybe not, she wrote. Just after the couple rang in the new year, their unraveling accelerated.

Speaker 16 It is fairly clear that her and Brent's relationship is at the breaking point.

Speaker 1 In fact, another friend told DiGiacomo that just days before her death, Susan said she was thinking about dating other men. And there was one piece of evidence that sealed the deal for DiGiacomo.

Speaker 1 Remember that $180,000 check? The one Brent deposited so soon after Susan's death? A friend of Brent's shared a conversation they'd had about it.

Speaker 16 Hey, the

Speaker 16 reason I did that, I took that money is I knew that her parents would accuse me of murder.

Speaker 16 But what his friend didn't know is that at 9 o'clock the night before when Susan's allegedly passed out, Brent Dennis called the automated line for that bank account to check the balance.

Speaker 1 To prosecutors, this felt like proof that would stand up in court. Brent was trying to grab Susan's money before he could be accused of murder by her family.

Speaker 1 And checking the bank account the night before she died to make sure that check would clear suggests that he already knew of Susan's approaching death and that he'd have to act quickly.

Speaker 16 Why does he think he needs the $180,000 out of the account? Because her parents are going to freeze it. It's because he knows she's going to be dead.

Speaker 16 How does he know she's going to be dead nine hours later?

Speaker 1 Because he's going to do it. Right.

Speaker 16 There's no way he knows she's about to commit suicide. This guy killed his wife.
We've seen it before where people who have had past suicidal ideations wind up being the victims of a homicide, right?

Speaker 16 If you're Brett Dennis, it's the perfect cover to kill her.

Speaker 1 And the motive was money. Susan's money, her family's money, most of which Brent would lose in a divorce.

Speaker 10 He knew that she was the gravy train and he had known it for a while.

Speaker 1 And he had an addiction.

Speaker 16 Yes, he did.

Speaker 1 Which required money.

Speaker 10 And I'm sorry for him. He should have been stronger.

Speaker 10 But we all could be stronger.

Speaker 1 DiGiacomo was ready to file murder charges against Brent Dennis.

Speaker 1 There was just one problem.

Speaker 1 According to the county medical examiner, Susan's death was still officially a suicide.

Speaker 1 And that alone could be reasonable doubt for a jury.

Speaker 3 Coming up, a medical detective takes a closer look at that suicide ruling.

Speaker 19 I started reviewing the medical records and the autopsy, and that was when I knew strange things were afoot.

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Speaker 1 From the moment they heard the news, the Witters family had tried to convince authorities that Susan would never take take her own life

Speaker 1 the response was the same every time you're grieving parents and you need to let it go yep but we're stubborn people

Speaker 1 at the end of prosecutor mark de giacomo's investigation he was finally convinced that susan witters died at the hands of her husband brent dennis now

Speaker 1 Would a jury believe it? To DiGiacomo, it was a hard sell, since Susan's death was was still on record as a suicide. DiGiacomo thought Dr.
Stacey Hale could help.

Speaker 1 She's a toxicologist Tony Scroe's team had consulted with early on.

Speaker 19 So I started reviewing the medical records and the autopsy, and that was when I knew strange things were afoot at the Circle K.

Speaker 1 Ethylene glycol is one of the main components in antifreeze, but Susan's body had not metabolized it yet, which struck Dr. Hale.

Speaker 19 In order to die from ethylene glycol poisoning, your body has to change that ethylene glycol into substances that are ultimately a lot more toxic.

Speaker 19 And then those substances deposit crystals in your body, and that's ultimately what you die from.

Speaker 1 And that process can sometimes take days. Dr.
Hale said the immediate effect of ingesting ethylene glycol is similar to drinking alcohol.

Speaker 19 If you consume it, you're going to get drunk.

Speaker 1 That seemed consistent with how Brent described Susan that evening. That by midnight, Susan was drunk and passed out.

Speaker 1 And of course, there was the antifreeze Brent said he found in the garage. That all matched up.
So then, what about the oxycodone? Where did that come from?

Speaker 19 She doesn't have a prescription for it. There's not a bottle at the scene.

Speaker 19 And if this is a seemingly suicidal person, then there should have been an empty bottle of oxycodone or at least pills missing. And I couldn't account for it.

Speaker 1 Mark DiGiacomo thought he could, now that he had the records the search warrants had produced.

Speaker 1 DiGiacomo had reached out to the different websites, the ones Brent said Susan visited hours before she passed out.

Speaker 16 Here is the IP address associated with this computer. And here is the web page I want to know.
When did somebody connect to your server with this IP address?

Speaker 1 Did Giacomo learn those antiphrase searches were actually done around midnight? Based on what Brent told police, Susan could not have been on the computer then.

Speaker 1 His story was that by midnight, she was already passed out.

Speaker 16 That's his story. She's already passed out.

Speaker 1 And that's also what the girls say.

Speaker 16 Look, we got their devices too. One daughter is on her computer till about midnight, and then her computer shuts off.
And then the only other person awake is Brent Dennis.

Speaker 16 Then he gets on the internet and realizes, ooh, it takes two or three days for Mantifreeze to kill somebody.

Speaker 1 DiGiacomo thought that undermined Brent's plan A.

Speaker 16 I think he gets the antifreeze. He puts it in a margarita because she liked to drink.
She drank it. She passes out and he thinks she's going to be dead.

Speaker 1 DiGiacomo believes that when Brent Dennis realized after midnight the antifreeze wasn't going to do the job fast enough, he moved on to Plan B.

Speaker 1 Cell phone records show that Brent texted drug dealer Jeff Crosby more than 15 times early that morning. At 3:15 a.m., Brent's phone pinged at the Orleans, where he and Crosby would often meet.

Speaker 16 It's there for a very short period of time, and then it drives back to the residence.

Speaker 1 To DiGiacomo, that explained the oxycodone.

Speaker 16 My belief is that he got it that night from Jeff Crosby.

Speaker 1 DiGiacomo thinks that after Brent brought the oxy home, he somehow got Susan to ingest it.

Speaker 1 Then, a few hours later, when Susan would have been severely impaired from the antifreeze and nearing death from the oxycodone, Brent picked up the phone.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor believes Brent may have called 911 too soon because Susan wasn't dead yet.

Speaker 16 The moment she stopped breathing, he made the mistake of calling 911 because they were able to revive her.

Speaker 16 So his, I think, fear is, look, she's about to wake up and be able to communicate for a short period of time.

Speaker 1 During which time she will say, my husband did this.

Speaker 16 I didn't take it on my own, at the very least.

Speaker 1 That could explain why Brent asked doctors to take Susan off life support. A decision he perhaps made so her family would not see her alive.

Speaker 16 When you put that all together, you look at it in totality and say there is only one answer to the question, he killed his wife.

Speaker 1 Even so, that official ruling of suicide was still an obstacle. So Dr.
Hale had a conference call with the medical examiner's office to discuss her findings.

Speaker 19 We did a mini toxicology lesson over the phone because medical examiners aren't trained in medical toxicology and that's not their fault. I don't do autopsies.

Speaker 1 Dr. Hale was able to convince the ME's office to change Susan's manner of death from suicide to undetermined.

Speaker 1 And with that, there was nothing holding back the prosecutor.

Speaker 1 So in February 2017, the same Henderson police who'd been accused by Susan's family of failing to investigate the case properly pulled Brent Dennis over

Speaker 1 and arrested him for murder.

Speaker 8 We begin at five with the arrest of a psychologist for the murder of his wife.

Speaker 1 For this family, it was the result of a two-year fight for justice.

Speaker 1 An expensive one. Do you have any idea what this all cost you financially to go down this road?

Speaker 14 Well, I'm not going to tell you what it cost, but I'm going to tell you this. It didn't make a damn what it cost.

Speaker 1 Whatever the financial cost, it was worth it. Yes.

Speaker 1 So was justice finally at hand?

Speaker 1 A better question might be, what is justice in this case?

Speaker 9 Coming up, Susan's own daughter could be Brent's most powerful defender.

Speaker 13 You have an opinion that it's a suicide, right?

Speaker 4 It's not an opinion.

Speaker 1 It's a fact, but okay.

Speaker 3 When dateline continues.

Speaker 1 The Winters family could hardly believe it. Brent Dennis was finally behind bars and awaiting trial for Susan's murder.

Speaker 1 Morning.

Speaker 15 Hey, Darrell. We'll call State vs.
Gregory Brent Dennis, 17FA-015.

Speaker 1 Tell me about seeing Brent in government-issue orange and government-issued hardware.

Speaker 1 It was

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 visual

Speaker 11 affirmation that all the work we had done manifested into something positive. The family was going to see justice now occur on Susan's behalf.

Speaker 1 Then, less than a week after being charged with murder,

Speaker 1 Brent was released on bail.

Speaker 33 So frustrating.

Speaker 7 From the moment he got arrested, the elation that we felt at that point

Speaker 7 was great, great, but it was gone when he got bailed.

Speaker 14 We had to fight for two years, and then they finally decided they could do something, and they arrested him, and they put him in jail for the weekend, and he got bailed, and he got out, and then they said.

Speaker 10 $250,000 bail.

Speaker 1 There was nothing Danny and Avis could do except wait. In the meantime, Brent's defense attorney, Richard Schoenfeld, didn't waste any time in making their position known on camera.

Speaker 38 Here is an individual that on a daily basis would contemplate suicide, and a good day was a day where she only thought of it once.

Speaker 1 Schoenfeld spoke to our NBC Las Vegas affiliate, KSNV, about the report by a psychologist who had treated Susan.

Speaker 38 She was on the 95th percentile for suicide symptoms.

Speaker 1 The centerpiece of Brent's defense was going to be his wife's mental health.

Speaker 39 Prior suicidal thoughts and a prior attempt at suicide are such a big deal for the defense that those facts alone might have been enough by themselves to create reasonable doubt and result in an acquittal.

Speaker 1 We asked NBC News legal analyst Danny Savalis to review the evidence in this case. He agreed with the prosecutor it was far from open and shut.

Speaker 1 And he said the most powerful witness for the defense was Brent's oldest daughter, Allie.

Speaker 39 Allie has firsthand knowledge. She observed the husband-wife relationship.
That's something that almost no other witness can testify to.

Speaker 1 And Allie stood by her father and his version of events from the start. During depositions, she made her position clear.

Speaker 13 You have an opinion that it's a suicide, right?

Speaker 4 It's not an opinion.

Speaker 1 It's a fact, but okay.

Speaker 1 Moreover, Allie said her mother had been unstable for years.

Speaker 21 It's clear that she wasn't murdered.

Speaker 13 Because why?

Speaker 21 Because she was extremely mentally disabled. She hated herself.
She starved herself. She had an eating disorder for multiple years.
She still did.

Speaker 21 She talked to me about it like two weeks before she even killed herself. She had a lot of problems that her parents didn't know about.

Speaker 13 And all those problems led her to kill herself. Yeah.

Speaker 39 There's no real direct evidence in this case. There's no testimony, of course, that somebody saw Dennis kill Susan.

Speaker 39 The thing is, in this case, the prosecution's circumstantial evidence can be explained by other circumstances.

Speaker 1 Danny Savalla says Brent's defense attorneys could have a plausible explanation for his actions.

Speaker 1 Even the lies he told police about the day Susan died.

Speaker 39 Of course he lied about where he went the night of Susan's death. He's a drug addict and he's a psychologist.
He's trying to conceal this because he doesn't want to suffer those consequences.

Speaker 39 It doesn't mean that he killed Susan.

Speaker 1 Prosecutor Mark DiGiacomo knew he didn't have a perfect case.

Speaker 16 I had small, little pieces of circumstantial evidence that would have allowed me to weave a version of events, but I mean that that was certainly a weakness in the case.

Speaker 16 I couldn't tell you everything that happened.

Speaker 1 And you can't really put the antifreeze or the oxy in Brent's hands.

Speaker 16 I can't put the antifreeze and the oxy in his hands. And what I thought I could do was establish it it wasn't in Susan's hands.

Speaker 1 And of course, there were the people who lived with Susan and saw her every day.

Speaker 1 Everybody else in Susan Winter's house was saying suicide.

Speaker 11 Her husband and her two daughters.

Speaker 16 True, but when you look underneath the surface, the two daughters didn't have any real knowledge about what happened.

Speaker 1 No, but these are all the people who supposedly know her best and

Speaker 1 would have known her state of mind.

Speaker 16 That's true, too. And look, don't get me wrong, somebody who's suicidal could still be the victim of a homicide.
Um, you know, that was always sort of our thought, right?

Speaker 1 Was Susan murdered by her husband, or had she taken her own life? Maybe police and the medical examiner had it right the first time.

Speaker 1 It would be up to a jury to decide.

Speaker 3 Coming up, after a seven-year fight, an angry family waits for justice.

Speaker 14 There ought to be a special place in hell for him, and I hope he goes there. If you need to cut that out, cut it out.

Speaker 1 Actually, I'm pretty sure we're going to use that.

Speaker 1 From the moment Brent Dennis was arrested and charged with murder, prosecutor Mark DiGiacomo felt ready to go to trial. He was certain Brent would never accept a plea deal.

Speaker 16 I'm accusing a mental health professional of killing his wife for the money. And his story is she committed suicide and his daughters believe him.

Speaker 16 This guy's never admitting that he did this, not while his two daughters are still alive.

Speaker 1 This case would never have reached DiGiacomo's desk if not for the wealth of the Winters family. It's a reminder of the role money can play in the justice system.

Speaker 1 A family that didn't have those resources might be stuck with the result that they had originally. I think almost certainly would be.

Speaker 11 There's no doubt about it. Stars had to line up that this particular victim was related to individuals that had the financial wherewithal to be able to do what they did.

Speaker 1 The family had been immersed in all the details of the work done by the PIs and the lawyers they'd hired.

Speaker 1 And once the case went to the Clark County District Attorney's Office, all they could do was watch and wait and wait.

Speaker 18 There would be a court date. We would fly out there and nothing happened.

Speaker 7 Yeah, there were a lot of times you'd get on the plane, coming back home, or get in the truck, driving from the airport back home, and just beat

Speaker 7 on the steering wheel or whatever just to get the frustration and emotion out.

Speaker 1 Danny, I know at one point you called the prosecutor and Tony and said,

Speaker 1 we got to speed this up because I want this to happen while I'm still on this earth. That's right.

Speaker 14 Who knows how long you got to go to live? As a father, your job is to protect your children. I had to at least see him

Speaker 14 go to jail for what he did to

Speaker 1 when COVID hit, courts shut down. delays and frustrations mounted.
Then, seven years after Susan died, and with a trial date finally on the books, DiGiacomo got a call from Brent Dennis' lawyer.

Speaker 16 He said to me, look, if you made me an offer, Mark, what would it look like?

Speaker 16 And that sort of opened the door to a conversation just between his defense attorney and I.

Speaker 1 Those conversations led to a meeting that included attorneys, the Witters family, and Brent Dennis. to discuss a possible plea deal.

Speaker 18 It was like something out of a comedy. We'd go in and we'd sit down and they would throw something on the table.
It was like we were kind of auctioning Susan's life off.

Speaker 1 What would we accept?

Speaker 18 What would we accept for Susan's life?

Speaker 1 Ultimately, the deal was this.

Speaker 1 Instead of facing a jury, Brent Dennis took an Alford plea to manslaughter. Officially, it's a guilty plea, but it doesn't require the accused to admit to actually committing the crime.

Speaker 1 How'd you feel about the Alford plea? I'd never never heard of it.

Speaker 18 It was a slap in the face.

Speaker 1 You didn't have to admit anything?

Speaker 1 It left a very bitter taste in my mouth after the seven years.

Speaker 16 The two biggest victims in this case, other than Susan, were Allie and Danny. I knew that a trial was going to be vicious for them.
The only thing that was going to help is if we resolved the case.

Speaker 34 Mr. Dennis.

Speaker 1 Sentencing came in May 2022. Danny, Avis, Chris, and Julie sat on one side of the courtroom, Allie and Danny on the other.

Speaker 1 Their dad's defense attorney spoke for them.

Speaker 31 We decided as a family to take this path for the sole reason that it is time for us, as a family, to put this behind us and not because we believe for a second that he had any involvement in our mother's death.

Speaker 1 The judge sentenced Brent Dennis to a prison term of three to ten years.

Speaker 1 Officially, a win for the Winters family. but it didn't feel like one.

Speaker 1 For Danny, prison is too good for Brent Dennis.

Speaker 14 For me to think about my daughter laying there going through that with the antifreeze, the oxycodone, and whatever everything else he put in her body, they ought to be a special place in hell for him, and I hope he goes there.

Speaker 14 If you need to cut that out, cut it out.

Speaker 1 Actually, I'm pretty sure we're going to use that. Okay.

Speaker 1 The sentencing was the first time in seven years that Danny and Avis were in the same room with the granddaughters they adore

Speaker 1 and with whom they now have no contact at all.

Speaker 10 Danny has told me many times when I am depressed about not getting to see them anymore. He says, Avis, we had the best time with them when they were growing up.

Speaker 1 Do the two of you think there's going to be a day when you will have that relationship with your granddaughters the way you used to?

Speaker 10 I pray for that every day,

Speaker 10 and I believe it can happen,

Speaker 10 but the time is drawing short for us.

Speaker 1 Anything you want to say to them?

Speaker 10 Ellie and Danny, we love you.

Speaker 1 In 2023, a civil court ruled in favor of the Winters family in their wrongful death suit, naming Brent Dennis as Susan's killer. The judge awarded the family just more than $1 million.

Speaker 1 Dateline requested interviews with Brent Dennis, his daughters, and his attorneys, as well as the Henderson Police Department. They all declined.

Speaker 1 All that's left for the winters now are the reminders of a beautiful life taken too soon.

Speaker 1 Susan's childhood scrapbook.

Speaker 10 She wanted to save all the things that went on.

Speaker 10 Every place we went, she would find a souvenir t-shirt and keep it.

Speaker 1 A quilt of Susan's shirts.

Speaker 1 Memories of the daughter they loved

Speaker 1 and still long for.

Speaker 1 What do you miss most about her?

Speaker 10 Her laughter, her wit.

Speaker 10 I still want my daughter back.

Speaker 17 There's not one thing I don't miss about her.

Speaker 38 I just miss her spirit.

Speaker 16 Nothing was ever too big for her.

Speaker 3 That's all for now.

Speaker 9 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 3 Thanks for joining us.

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