Murder in the Moonlight - Ep. 5: When It All Falls Apart

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The autumn moon in Nebraska, that troubled year, watched over a crop of confusion.

What happened to that murder investigation?

Who was guilty of killing Wayne and Charmin stock?

If you'd asked around Murdoch, the answer would be those cousins, Matt Livers and Nick Sampson.

locked up for months now.

But after the arrests of Wisconsin teenagers Greg Fester and Jessica Reed, Matt's lawyer and Nick's both adopted an altogether different point of view.

Seemed to them, those boys must be innocent.

Here's Nick's lawyer, Jerry Souce.

That must be a good feeling.

No, it wasn't.

That's a good feeling to know your client's innocent.

It's a bad feeling to know that your client's still in jail.

You can't get him out.

The cops are coming up with every other kind of theory they can think of to drag him in.

And then when we get the Reed and Fester interviews, we see how they're bending over backwards to basically show him a picture of my client and say, isn't that the guy that you met?

So many problems.

There was Matt's confession, which, no matter how he tried to talk his way out of it, could still be used against him.

And that smear of blood, remember that?

It was apparently victim Wayne Stock's blood.

discovered by lead detective Kofod in a car owned by Nick Sampson's brother and spotted near the murder scene right around the time it happened.

So the prosecutor wasn't about to drop any charges.

And meanwhile, sitting in jail, Nick had thoughts of taking his own life.

Nick

was

in really, really bad shape.

And so at that point, I'm holding him together.

It's going to work out.

It's going to work out.

But would it?

Jessica Reed, all of 17 years old, was standing, perhaps shivering, in a hallway outside her meeting with the prosecutor.

She had just been offered a way to salvage her messed-up young life.

Testify against Nick Sampson and Matt Livers that she could plead to a lesser charge, get a chance to go free.

Eventually, her testimony would help the state convict those two cousins of murder.

This would be the most consequential decision Jessica Reed would ever have to make.

She turned to her lawyer, Tom Olson.

She didn't know these guys.

She had nothing connected to them.

Sure.

They weren't friends, family.

She had no reason to protect them.

And she had every reason to benefit herself.

I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Murder in the Moonlight, a podcast from Dateline.

Episode 5: When it all falls apart.

The days dragged along one by one and mounted up and became months.

And all the long while those two boys sat in their respective cells and wondered if they would ever see a free day again

because nothing was working, nothing at all.

So Nick's attorney Jerry Souce decided it was time for a change of strategy.

I'd been a nice guy up to that point.

trying to encourage the county attorney to dismiss the charges as the right thing to do.

And that point, then I had to shift to be much more aggressive, saying, you know, coming at him and here's all the stuff.

And I'd prepared a kind of an extensive motion outlining all of the information, pointing to Reed and Fessors acting alone.

But the county attorney had been busy, too, reviewing evidence, meeting potential witnesses like Jessica Reed,

who in that meeting had asked to take a break to contemplate the prosecutor's offer.

And one look at Jessica told her lawyer, Tom Olson, something wasn't right.

I said, what's wrong?

She said,

I know what they want.

They want me to tell them that those two boys were here.

And they weren't.

And I can't do it.

And I'm going to put myself away for life.

And I told her, I said, you just got to tell the truth.

That's all you can do at this point.

And we went back in, and that's what she told him, that those boys were not there, that Livers and Sampson were never at that farmhouse when the killings occurred, that they had never met them before, that they had nothing whatsoever to do with it, that it was her and Fester.

Jessica's insistence that neither Matt nor Nick was there made the case against Nick, at least, untenable.

So the county attorney had a chat with Jerry Souce.

And finally just said,

whether they did it or didn't, I certainly can't prove it against Nick Sampson.

And then, nearly six months after the murders, the county attorney, Nathan Cox, called a press conference and announced that the murder case against Nick Sampson was being dropped.

Sort of.

Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, the state reserves the right to refile the charges in the future.

Was there a chance Nick Sampson would be charged with murder again?

Well, yes, there was.

But Nick certainly didn't act like it as he walked out of jail arm in arm with his attorney, Jerry Souce.

We did it, all right?

He did it.

We did it.

It was Cloud Nine.

And it was an incredible feeling.

After more than five months in jail, Nick Sampson was free.

Let's go home.

It was incredible.

I'm finally out.

But Nick Sampson, even free, was not carefree not by any means some things could never be the same again as he told me himself i was constantly looking over my shoulder seeing who was behind me you know so there was a real genuine itch in your back fear that somebody was going to come after you come after me come after my family you know

revenge I didn't like being alone, you know.

If there was any place I could go where I was, you know, I was around like my close friends or something, I was over there at, you know, friends' houses.

I was anywhere because I didn't want to be alone.

Why didn't you want to be alone?

Just wasn't sure, you know, what could happen now.

Because around this county in rural Nebraska were a great many people, perhaps a majority, who were still quite certain that Nick was as guilty as can be.

After all, his own cousin Matt had admitted full out that they had both killed those lovely people.

I was upset.

At a loss of why my own cousin could do this to me.

Why would he do it to you?

It wasn't true.

To make himself look better.

Using me as a scapegoat.

My name came up when I asked who you might know who smoked marijuana or whatever.

He's like, well, I know Nick used to.

And so, you know, he'd tell him information like that and pretty much was implicating me and part of this.

And so then, you know, it just kind of came into a snowball effect with him.

Make you angry?

Some points.

Some points, it's depression.

Some points, it's just wish there was a time machine and can go back in time and say,

forget this ever happened.

That's when you go out into the country and do a little target shooting and get away by yourself.

Yeah.

Get out and, you know, enjoy hunting and stuff like that.

So that's kind of getting out and just sitting in the woods is kind of just

just a getaway you know and there's nothing out there to bother you you know you just sit out there and

just relax and don't have to worry about anything

but nothing could soothe the grief agitated minds of the stalk children Starved of real information, they hung on to what little they had been told, what they'd been assured by the guardians of the law, that the two two men who killed their parents were securely behind bars and would be until they were tried for murder.

And yet, now the law had sent one of those suspects home.

Why, they could not fathom.

Son Andy Stock.

It's a difficult situation.

None of us are attorneys.

None of us are in law enforcement.

And

you're just sitting there trying to take it all in, trying to figure out, okay,

how does this work?

Why does this happen?

And yet, their cousin Matt Livers had confessed.

At least he was still in custody.

And then there were those two teenagers from Wisconsin, Gregory Fester and Jessica Reed, who'd apparently also confessed to some role in the whole awful business.

But just what that role was, few people in Murdoch seemed to know.

So confusing it certainly was.

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Jerry Souce was no longer a fresh young lawyer when he met Nick Sampson.

By then, Souce was a man of considerable experience in the area of public defense in Nebraska.

He'd been standing up for the poor and the indigent, criminal and otherwise, for decades.

Had heard just about every sob story, every sneaky lie, every false claim of innocence in the book.

And sometimes, he had discovered, people do strange things when accosted by the law.

So when Susie watched the tapes of Matt Liver's confession, saw and heard him naming Nick as co-killer,

well, let's just say his practiced lawyer I noticed a few things.

There was every indication in there that there was a problem.

When people confess accurately, I mean, the resistance you have from somebody who is innocent, the resistance you have from somebody who is guilty from an interrogator standpoint looks the same.

But at the point at which they finally get over that moral hump and say, you know, you're right, I really did do this.

At that point, you can't shut them up.

They then have to morally justify, okay, I killed my wife because she was cheating on me, and let me tell you what I did.

And then they give you facts and information that you didn't know.

I mean, that's how you verify it.

With Matt Livers, what you had was at the point at which he makes the baby step portion of his interrogation, they then ask that open-ended question.

So tell me what happened, Matt.

I don't remember.

Don't remember.

And then there was something else that was clear to both defense attorneys, though they feared the investigators may not have picked up on it.

Matt Livers, as he himself admitted, was not the sharpest guy.

Matt had his strengths, too, of course, but in any conversation with authority figures, and especially under the sort of pressure that was clearly being exerted in that interview room, Matt Livers was prone to being led.

He

maybe was gullible.

Matt's attorney, Julie Baer.

There was a portion of the questioning where they won't let him finish his sentence.

They're belittling him.

They're screaming at him.

They're threatening him with the death penalty.

Well, I don't think you understand what the death penalty means.

I'm going to walk out that door and I'm going to do my level best to hang your ass from the highest tree.

And he believed them when they said those things.

Very much so.

And one moment stood out, said the defense attorneys, when the detective should have realized just how little Matt Livers understood of what was happening to him.

It was when one of the cops told Matt he needed to be a man to tell them the truth.

You consider yourself a man.

Stand up.

Stand up.

In other words, take responsibility.

But this was on videotape, remember?

And Julie Bear watched.

He takes them very literally and starts to rise up out of his chairs, you know, and he's going to stand up.

He's going to stand up.

No,

stand up and be be up, Maya, okay?

As Julie Bear watched the tape, what stood up for her was the hair on the back of her neck.

Seemed to her those detectives just weren't paying attention to the sort of man they were talking to.

Or maybe, she thought, maybe they knew he was not the sharpest guy, but just wanted that confession.

You got a guy.

Right or wrong, right.

It all led to one conclusion.

There was now no doubt in the mind of either defense attorney.

If you, you know, you look and start examining the case in context, how it happened, what took place,

it's really a textbook false confession.

A false confession.

He'd made it all up.

But as Julie Baer contemplated what, if anything, she could do about that, she got a surprise.

Not long after Nick Sampson's release, with Matt Liver still in jail, Julie received a DVD she'd never seen before.

Even though she had asked months earlier, as was her right, for all the available discovery, all the prosecution's material in Matt's case, this DVD contained a new interview with Matt.

A second interview that the defense had never been told existed.

Again, I'm going to read to your rights.

This interview had been taped the day after the first 11-hour interrogation, the one in which he had confessed.

By then, after a night in the local jail, Matt had a chance to regain his equilibrium.

And here it came.

I've been just making things up to satisfy you guys.

Making it up?

To satisfy them?

And absolute truth is

i was never on the scene

i don't know if nick is the actual person involved in this i've been just basically fitting an answer to what you guys

have been asking

needless to say this recantation did not go over well

these were the same investigators who had just taken his confession the day before and now he wanted to take it all back

well not a chance.

And here they hammered away at Matt.

There's absolutely no doubt you are involved with this.

And don't start over with me from the very beginning.

You telling me the truth, and now you're going to pull up.

I'm jerking you guys around deal.

I mean,

I wish I would have said that from the beginning.

Yeah, no, from the beginning, you did say that.

You had nothing to do with that.

You took a polygraph yesterday, and I gave it to you.

and you were 100% involved with it.

I got no doubt about it.

I just told you that.

Right.

But the truth is I was never on the scene of this.

I don't know that Nick is involved in this because we never, I mean, you can check my photographers.

We never talked on Thursday or Friday about this.

And the only reason I picked him, I heard to the graveyard that his brother's car was used.

What are you telling me this down for?

What do you think is going to accomplish this now?

nothing I mean I'm just trying to

come plain I mean you know

I don't believe it you put yourself there you were there and you have told us things but you told us things that nobody else even knows about

you told us things that unless you were there you'd have no idea about

I mean I've been making answers

left and right I can't believe they're even coming out of my own mouth.

And when that interview ended, after Matt recanted any involvement in the murders,

well, into the ether it went, never to be seen or heard again, until a package from the DA finally showed up at Julie Baer's office.

How long was that withheld?

Months.

A little over five months.

And months after, because he said those things the day after his confession.

Right.

And for all those months, while Matt's own attorney was in the dark, no idea her client had recanted every word of that confession.

He was stuck in jail.

So basically, from the official story, his recantation simply disappeared.

Right.

We asked the Cass County, Nebraska Sheriff's Office for an explanation for that.

They declined to provide one and didn't want to talk about any other parts of the case either.

There seemed to be only one one thing that could happen now, but in this case,

well, when did anything ever go the way it should?

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Well, issues with Matt Livers' confession had now surfaced.

Some of the investigators would not, and said they could not, let go of the belief that either Sampson or Libers, or both of them, were involved somehow.

They didn't buy the notion that two drug-addled teenagers just happened to stumble on a hard place to find by pure chance way out in the country in the dark.

Though this is how Sampson's attorney Jerry Souce saw things.

Number one, you had two lead investigators who'd never done first-degree murder cases before this one has lead investigators.

Number two, having made the arrests, holding the press conference, they were committed to trying to build a case against Livers and Samson.

And then when Reed Reed and Fester showed up, I think it was just beyond their ability to comprehend that they had made a mistake.

And so that somehow, some way, they needed to fold Reed and Fester's cross-country crime jaunt into somehow having some contact with the Nebraska people, whoever they were.

Whoever, indeed.

At one point, remember, Greg Fester said the main shooter, the guy who led them to the farm, was a local Nebraska boy named Thomas, with whom Fester had been communicating by phone before the murders.

And detectives have knocked themselves out trying to find such a person, this Thomas guy, or any guy who might be that particular one.

But he seemed to be a ghost.

Couldn't find anybody.

at all who might be there Thomas.

And meanwhile, Jessica Reed kept trying to persuade investigators that nobody else was there besides her.

And Fester, of course.

I didn't know I was lying, though.

If I was lying, I would not still be going on about this.

And she was going on about it.

I've been saying that for months.

I know what happened, and no one will believe me.

Well, she was right about that.

The detectives did not believe her.

They still suspected Livers and Samson of some involvement.

Why?

It all went back to that speck of evidence that CSI Chief David Kofod found in a car connected to Nick Sampson and spotted near the murder scene.

It was a stain that turned up on a sterile piece of filter paper that Kofod himself swiped under the dashboard of that car.

That was during a second search of the car, by the way.

The first by an officer under Kofod that turned up nothing.

But that stain, the DNA test proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, was Wayne Stalks' blood.

So how would it get there?

Only one way, from Nick Sampson or Matt Livers after they murdered the stalks.

It was actually the FBI that started asking questions about that.

But they didn't ask Matt Livers or Nick Sampson.

Instead, the FBI's investigation was aimed at the detectives who handled the case.

In fact, at CSI Chief David Kofod himself.

And after months of digging, the FBI came to a truly stunning conclusion that Kofod must have planted that swipe of blood himself.

Phony evidence to nail down a shaky case.

To say that came as a shock would be the understatement of the year.

David Kofod was a respected officer, division commander of the CSI unit in Douglas County, Nebraska.

And then he was an indicted officer.

There were four federal charges, including falsifying records and violating Livers and Sampson's civil rights.

When I was accused, I was angry, and then I felt the overwhelming power of the federal government.

I mean,

and that's something I had.

It's a Mac truck hitting there.

It was unbelievable.

Kofod pleaded not guilty to all charges, defiantly told reporters he'd rather go to prison than resign.

He even passed a polygraph and was cleared in an internal sheriff's department investigation.

You wake up one morning and they say you're a criminal.

Well, it kind of was like that, but it was a little different than that.

It was more of a long process, and I didn't do it.

I just didn't, and it doesn't make any sense.

Kofod blamed the stain on accidental contamination.

Somehow, he said, blood from the victim, Wayne Stock, must have ended up on that sterile filter paper, probably out of the murder scene.

And then somebody goofed, and that same filter paper was what he later used on the car.

That was his defense.

But Kofo did admit he broke the rules.

I did make a mistake.

I didn't follow procedures.

And that bothers me, and there's no way around that.

That was wrong because I'm a boss, because I'm supposed to set the example.

I bet there's a phrase you've heard over and over again.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably

a barnyard duck.

Oh, absolutely.

But you know what?

This doesn't look like a duck.

It doesn't quack like a duck.

It just doesn't.

How many more ways could this prosecution go sideways?

Well, it turned out plenty.

Coming up in the final episode of Murder in the Moonlight, how could Matt Liver still be in jail now that evidence had apparently been planted and his confession proven untrustworthy?

And a killer tells her tale.

Two people are

dead because of me, you know?

And I have a very hard time with that still.

What was it like to watch those people die?

Hell.

Murder in the Moonlight is a production of Dateline and NBC News.

Shane Bishop is the producer.

Brian Drew, Kelly Laudine, Bruce Berger, Marshall Hausfeld, and Candice Goldman are audio editors.

Brittany Morris is field producer.

Leslie Grossman is program coordinator.

Adam Gorfane is co-executive producer.

Paul Ryan is executive producer.

And Liz Cole is senior executive producer.

From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Bob Mallory and Katie Lau.

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