Murder in the Moonlight - Ep. 4: About Face

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if there's anything like a holy grail, a gold standard, in a high-pressure murder investigation, then surely that must be the confession.

Skilled interrogator leads tormented killer to inevitable and satisfactory conclusion.

thus saving everyone a lot of time and trouble.

Not to mention, giving the family the answers they so desperately need.

But three confessions?

This was very good indeed.

Four would have been even better, of course, there being four suspects after all, but three would certainly do for now.

Confessions from family cousin Matt Livers.

I did the shooting, he said.

I just stuck it to him and blew him away.

Confessions to having been there from the two hopped-up kids in the stolen red truck, Jessica Reed and Greg Fester.

Shut again.

We all run out of the house.

The fourth, Nick Sampson, was a holdout, yes.

Oh, I wasn't there

to swear to God's true.

But a little triangulation by two states' worth of detectives ought to put him in the frame, too.

First, the Wisconsin investigators would have to dredge up evidence to support or refute the stories Greg and Jessica were telling.

Both of them, remember, said they witnessed, but did not commit, the gruesome murders of Wayne and Charmin Stock on an Easter evening six weeks before in Murdoch, Nebraska.

It was Jessica who fingered Nick Sampson after they showed her a picture of the guy.

At least, he looked familiar, is how she put it.

which, if she was telling the truth, would back up Matt Liver's confession rather nicely.

Now it was the job of the Wisconsin detective Jim Rohr to find out if she was telling the truth.

They had a confession in Nebraska.

If she recognizes a picture of one of the people who were the subject of the confession in Nebraska, that's their verification of the original story, right?

That helps.

It certainly helps.

Jessica's accomplice and paramour, Greg Fester, confessed that they had been directed to the Stocks farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska by someone he called Thomas.

Detective Rohr found that helpful, too.

It would help explain how

two teens from Wisconsin end up at such a remote location,

that there is somebody else that's involved, that there is somebody directing them to this remote farmhouse to do this murder.

So, while Jessica was being held in jail, the detective went over to the house where she had been staying, a sort of flophouse for teens, as he called it.

Seemed like a good place to start his search for some explanation.

What we were looking for was anything at all that would tie them to Nebraska or any other location that they were at during their crime sprees.

Like a cell phone.

And like a piece of low-hanging fruit, there it was.

And happily, Jessica had given him permission to get into it, into the cell phone, take a look at her calls and contacts.

I had a signed consent form from her saying I could have that phone.

Where was it?

Right where she said it was, in her little corner of that house where we performed the search warrant.

But the phone was not the only thing Jim Rohr found in that flop house, though the rest of it wasn't quite so obvious.

There was a picture on the wall near Jessica's little corner, a framed picture, and the frame itself stuck out a little bit.

So the detective looked behind it, and,

well, what do you know?

There was a cigarette box hidden in there.

He opened it,

and inside the box,

a shotgun shell, 12-gauge, the same gauge as used in the murders.

And alongside the shell, folded up in that cigarette box, was a letter written by Jessica Reed, apparently to Greg Fester.

It read, quote,

And this bullet,

well, Bunny, it's the only thing left, and I loved it, but that's something we'll talk about one day.

But it's here also because that's something I did for you, me,

and for you to love me as much as I love you.

That is the end of the quote.

Detective Rohr read it again, took it in.

Astonishing.

When you read the material that you found, what did you think?

This was so bizarre.

That gives you a mindset of the type of person we were dealing with.

Rohr went back to his task, excited about it now, and pretty soon he found something else.

It was a notebook, a diary of sorts, but no ordinary diary.

Here were words penned by Jessica Reed herself.

I killed someone.

He was older.

I loved it.

I wish I could do it all the time.

If Greg doesn't watch it, I'm going to just leave one day and I'll do it myself.

Pretty scary.

17 years old.

What this is telling us with this letter is her motivation.

how she's feeling, and that she truly was involved in pulling the trigger on at least one of the people there.

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

Episode 4: About Face.

Detective Jim Rohr was driving back to the station in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, still shaking his head over what he found in that flophouse used by Jessica Reed.

What did you think?

I thought jail was the safest place for this girl.

She said she loved killing, wished she could do it all the time.

Just don't expect to hear that from a young girl.

No.

Clearly, the detective needed to talk to Jessica again, and so he called the jail.

And sheriff's deputies once again escorted Jessica from her cell to that dingy, gray interview room, where this time there was no holding back.

You got some explaining to do, and I'm going to tell you right now.

I am at the end of my rope over this whole thing between you and young Gregory.

I am giving you one opportunity and one opportunity alone to come completely clean with every bit of your involvement in this.

So you quit dancing around with me because I know the truth.

Craig blew the guy's head off

and he shot a hole through the lady's face.

Laughing about murder?

Well, anyway, there.

She'd said it.

It was Greg Fester who killed the stalks.

But why did she write that note?

The one found by Detective Roar.

I killed someone.

He was older.

I loved it.

I wish I could do it all the time.

If Greg doesn't watch it, I'm going to just leave one day and go do it myself.

You're in a lot of trouble, young lady.

I didn't kill this guy, though.

I didn't have a gun.

How am I supposed to kill somebody without a gun?

I watched Smrig do it.

I didn't kill anybody.

I'm not kidding.

I did not kill anybody.

I promised you guys this.

You know what?

17 years old, and you've just thrown the rest of your life away.

She tried again to explain the words, and in doing so, she changed her story.

Again,

confessed to firing one gunshot.

It depended on the day you interviewed Jessica.

One day, she's pulling the trigger and shooting the man above his eye.

The next day, Greg did it all.

It just was so back and forth with her.

It was a very, very difficult time in every interview with her to really determine how much truth she was giving.

Well, the detective absolutely found Jessica Reed to be credible when she admitted one thing,

that she enjoyed it.

Okay, I'll tell you guys what I did like.

I liked the adrenaline rush.

I know you did.

I didn't like what caused the adrenaline rush, but I liked the adrenaline rush.

I don't want that adrenaline rush again.

I liked it, but I liked it too much.

It's like heroin.

That's why I've never tried heroin in my life because I have heard that you like it too much when you do it.

So I won't ever do it because I don't want to get addicted to it.

And that, investigators believe, might have been the most honest thing Jessica Reed said.

The rest of the story, the Jessica and Greg part of the story, was told by the science.

Ballistics tests confirmed that the shell found in Jessica's cigarette box matched the spent shells found at the murder scene.

And the murder weapon?

Well, that turned out to be a gun stolen from the same Wisconsin farm where they stole the red pickup truck.

The truck they drove from Wisconsin to Nebraska and then dumped down in Louisiana.

And then the forensics lab found blood still clinging to Jessica's clothes and shoes, and so they ran tests and confirmed that blood had once flowed through the veins of victim Wayne Stock.

And also while they were there, while they were at it, they teased out DNA from the gold ring and that marijuana pipe the cops found on the ground near the farmhouse.

And there was no doubt whose DNA it was.

Jessica Reed on the ring, Greg Fester on the pipe.

So both of them were charged.

First-degree murder.

But over in Nebraska, with the exception of law enforcement, no one knew a thing about the discoveries in Beaver Dam.

Even Wayne and Charmin Stock's three adult children were kept in the dark as they struggled to grip the wheel of their new strange lives.

One thing to try to move on.

Quite another to actually do it.

His daughter Tammy.

We have just lost both our mom and our dad.

To lose one is horrible, but to lose both of them

and not have those parent figures that kept this family going,

where do we go?

How do we help Andy with the farm?

How do we let our children have a normal life?

Terrible questions.

None of them ever thought they'd have to contemplate.

And that second set of confessors, Reed and Fester, they might have done their talking on the moon for all the family knew about it.

Same for the accused killers, Matt Lyvers and Nick Sampson.

Not a word of the confessions in Wisconsin got to them.

And then a few days later, Sampson's defense attorney Jerry Seussi answered the phone and everything changed.

I got a call saying they've arrested Reed and Fester.

up in Wisconsin, and we got no details on it at all.

So he waited, not patiently.

And then, in his frustration, Jerry Susie tried something unorthodox.

And suddenly...

Everything clicked.

He knew exactly what the case was at that point.

Well,

maybe.

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It's a tentative police work, an important and accepted principle, though sometimes adhered to grudgingly.

When big things happen in murder cases like the the one in Murdoch, the public needs to be told at least something.

It's understood, however, that crucial details are to be withheld.

The arrests of Livers and Sampson had been trumpeted far and wide.

But now, two more murder charges in a case that apparently had been solved?

The arrests of teens Jessica Reed and Greg Fester in, of all places, Wisconsin, were announced so quietly that the news, the little of it that was revealed, didn't even get to the people in Murdoch, Nebraska.

They mostly remained in the dark.

Even Nick Sampson's defense attorney, Jerry Souci, knew only the barest of detail, which did not sit well with him at all.

So.

I called a newspaper reporter and I said, you won't believe this, but they arrested two other people.

He called me back about three hours later and he says, you won't believe this, but I got the arrest warrant from Wisconsin.

And he said, you want to read it?

I says, oh, yeah.

And you got that from a newspaper reporter?

I got it from the newspaper reporter.

It didn't come from the prosecutor's office.

No, it was being sealed.

We would have gotten it later, but I wouldn't have gotten it that quick.

Yeah.

And so I met him at a bar, and for the price of a Budweiser, I ended up being able to read the affidavit for the arrest warrant of Reed and Fester.

Those affidavits were a revelation.

All those details culled from the hours and hours of police interviews with Greg Fester and Jessica Reed.

Craig blew the guys out.

Defense Attorney Susie just couldn't believe his eyes as he read the story of the cigarette case, the shells which matched the shotgun, the marijuana pipe those two teenagers had dropped along the way,

the gold ring that set off a whole new investigation, and most tellingly, DNA irrefutably linking Reed and Fester to the crime.

Suddenly, it was all beginning to make sense.

Remember, Susie's client, Nick Sampson, professed his innocence from day one.

I'm getting framed for something I didn't

do.

Meantime, Defense Attorney Julie Bear's client, Matt Libras, confessed, but then told her he didn't do it.

So for weeks after the arrests, these attorneys had been asking themselves the very same simple question.

Where was the evidence?

And they had found,

well,

none.

In fact, the evidence seemed to be pointing to the very real possibility that both Livers and Sampson were

factually innocent.

Why?

Well, for one, both accused killers had pretty good alibis.

Matt Livers' girlfriend, a woman with an impeccable reputation, insisted that Matt was home all night with her.

30 miles away in Lincoln, Nebraska, night of the murders.

Same with Nick Sampson's girlfriend, who swore he never left their house that night.

She took a polygraph and she passed it.

Sampson's attorney, Jerry Souce.

If she would have thought that Nick had done this, she would have thrown him under the bus in a heartbeat.

There was just no doubt about that.

She said he was home with me the entire night, 35 miles away.

Then the defense lawyers went looking for evidence of those alleged phone calls between Matt and Nick in the days before the murders, calls in which they supposedly planned it all, as Matt told detectives during his confession.

Did you talk about it over a cell phone or did you talk face-to-face?

Cell phone.

But phone records don't lie.

And they revealed there wasn't one call, not one, between Matt and Nick in the days before the murders.

Matt's defense attorney, Julie Bear.

That phone communication never took place.

You know, it simply didn't occur.

Because you can check all those phone records.

Right.

But couldn't they have used Jerry, you know, those kind of phones you can buy that you can't trace.

That's theoretically possible, but there's no evidence of that.

I mean, it gets worse than that because what actually they happened with Matt's phone was Matt during this period of time when the murder is supposed to be taken place is texting back and forth with a roommate they had.

And there's this...

this kind of high school argument about you were rude to me at dinner.

You can't talk to me like that way.

So, I mean, you have to have a situation in which he's texting back and forth to the roommate about this argument they had, picks up his other phone, plans this murder, coordinates the meeting in Lincoln.

They get another car, drive out, do the murder, and then get rid of the evidence.

I mean, it was beyond their capability to fake that kind of evidence.

But he's texting during the time the murder is supposed to be taking place.

That's something altogether different.

Oh, yeah.

Add to that two more test results.

Ballistics tests confirmed that the gun found under Nick's bed was not the murder weapon.

And do you remember detectives found a spot of what looked like blood on Nick's jeans?

So that was tested

and it was not human blood at all.

And now the arrests of those teenagers from Wisconsin, two people clearly present at the crime scene, but never mentioned at all in any of Matt Livers' hours and hours of police interviews.

Julie Bear knew what she had to do.

She marched over to the jail to ask Matt Livers face to face about these alleged accomplices.

Reed and Fester.

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It's a bit of a cliche that some defense attorneys won't ask their clients if they committed the crime they're charged with.

Some attorneys just don't want to know.

In this case, Julie Bear had been assigned as Matt Liver's defense attorney, knowing full well that he had already confessed to the gruesome double murder of Wayne and Charmin Stock.

Matt had since changed his story, insisting that he hadn't killed anyone.

And Julie had been dutiful in her evaluation of the evidence, looking for anything that would confirm the truth of the confession or any proof of his guilt.

And she found none.

And now, hearing about the arrests of Gregory Fester and Jessica Reed in Wisconsin for the same murders, she went over to the jail and asked Matt Livers directly if he knew who these two teenagers were.

And?

Not a clue.

Not seen them, never spoke to them.

Maybe he was lying to you.

Not a chance.

It would take another month for copies of those videotaped interrogations of Jessica Reed and Greg Fester to inch their way over to the defense attorneys in Nebraska.

But when they finally did,

well, now this certainly caught their attention.

Jessica Reed had just been asked, who was with you?

Who helped you commit the murders?

Here was her response.

I know there was nobody else there.

It was just me and Greg.

That's what happened.

I am not kidding.

And if no one believes me, then I really want to go back to myself.

There were no other killers.

Just her, just Greg.

And that whole story about meeting Nick Sampson at Bulldog's Bar, she had made it up, she said, after detectives showed her a picture of Nick and asked her if it looked familiar.

And she said yes back then, that he looked like the guy who helped them, and that turned out to be Nick.

So, was Jessica telling the truth in that first interrogation?

Or now, when she flipped the script 180 degrees, said she'd never seen the guy in her whole life.

That's when the prosecutor decided it was time to try a new tactic with Jessica.

A very common tactic, by the way, often used because it often works.

And not to mention one that saves a lot of time and trouble and money.

They would offer Jessica a deal, which was essentially this.

If she would agree to testify against Matt Livers and Nick Sampson, if she would reveal once and for all that those two were in fact there at the murders, then the prosecutor could allow Jessica to plead guilty to a lesser charge, serve less time in prison, and potentially send Matt Livers and Nick Sampson to death row.

The prosecutor set up a meeting with Jessica and her lawyer.

His name is Tom Olson.

Here he is.

We sat down in the conference room and they laid everything out.

And Jessica, tell us the truth.

We need to know right now.

It's time to let us know who was there, when they were there, how long they were there, everybody.

Right now, put it all on the line.

Tell us who was there.

And Jessica looked at me and asked if we could step outside.

And so we stepped outside, and

I'll never forget it.

She looked at me and she said, I'm screwed.

Next, on Murder in the Moonlight.

Who was telling the truth about that awful night on the farm?

And what would happen to Matt Libers and Nick Sampson now when Jessica told her tale?

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

That's all you can do at this point.

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.

Bryson Barnes is head of audio production.

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie.

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