Brandy Stutzman

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Speaker 19 She was a soldier's wife holding down the fort at home.

Speaker 21 When you are married to the love of your life and that person is deployed for months at a time, it's hard to maintain a relationship.

Speaker 22 She got lonely, but she put on a good outside appearance.

Speaker 23 He was the breadwinner of the house, sending quite a bit of money back.

Speaker 26 Until a horrific act brought everything crashing down do we know what happened to him i don't know she said there's blood everywhere

Speaker 17 neighbors actually reported hearing a male screaming at about two in the morning his left ring finger was sliced off a clean cut with the knife the search for a killer leads detectives to an unusual fan club

Speaker 16 Everybody that's staying in the house is somehow involved with jugglers.

Speaker 28 And a twisted plot emerges.

Speaker 17 Somebody comes into the house wearing a mask. He's there to do no good.
He's not there to scare. You go back to who's the mastermind of this.
This is evil at its best.

Speaker 2 November 7th, 2010. North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Speaker 27 A quiet neighborhood just a few miles from the Vegas Strip.

Speaker 22 There's a real world in Vegas, where real people live and work.

Speaker 22 Way away from the strip, so you don't have all the hassle of being around there.

Speaker 16 Not a high crime rate. It's not one of our known crime rate areas.
There's a lot of military that live out there.

Speaker 30 But the peaceful side of Vegas is about to receive a jolt.

Speaker 9 Just after 1.30 in the afternoon, Nicole Pritchard hears a frantic ringing at her front door.

Speaker 25 It's her 31-year-old neighbor, Brandy Stutsman.

Speaker 15 My daughter answered the front door.

Speaker 21 She said, Mom, it's B.

Speaker 15 And I said, Okay, tell her to meet me around the garage. And I open my garage.

Speaker 30 The garage door rises, and Nicole gets the shock of her life.

Speaker 15 I realized when I looked down, and

Speaker 15 she had blood on her shirt.

Speaker 15 She had said, Joe's gone. And I said, Joe's gone where?

Speaker 1 Where did he go?

Speaker 34 Brandy tells Nicole that her husband, 32-year-old Joe Stutzman, is dead.

Speaker 15 Initially, I was in a panic.

Speaker 21 I said, did you call 911?

Speaker 15 She said, no.

Speaker 15 I called 911.

Speaker 26 Hi,

Speaker 26 My neighbor just came here. She lives across the street, and she said her husband has passed away.
Do we know what happened to him? I don't know. She said there's blood everywhere.

Speaker 26 Okay, is there any way I can talk to her? Yeah, hold on.

Speaker 26 Okay, Brandy, what happened? I don't know. Okay, did you just get home? Yes.
Okay, did he seem like he's unconscious?

Speaker 4 No, he's cold. He's cold.
Yes.

Speaker 15 She kneeled behind my car and started rocking back and forth, crying on the phone at 911.

Speaker 25 Within minutes, Las Vegas homicide detectives are on the scene.

Speaker 15 There were multiple officers. They cordoned off the street.
They wouldn't let you in or out.

Speaker 16 The victim is found supine or laying face up in the kitchen area, and he's just soaked in blood.

Speaker 23 He had some quite serious injuries that we could see just from on top of him. There's quite a bit of blood, severe wounds to his upper arms and chest.

Speaker 16 I don't know how he's killed, so I don't know if he's been shot or stabbed, but something is causing him to bleed profusely.

Speaker 21 I mean, the biggest questions going through your head was: who would have done this? Who would want to do this? What's going on?

Speaker 35 Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1977, Joe Stutzman always had his sight set on life outside the small town.

Speaker 15 Out tuna's a somewhat depressed area as far as jobs go. At some point, he decided to join the military.

Speaker 17 After making it through high school, he joined the Air Force.

Speaker 16 First time I met Joe, it was on deployment overseas. He was very opinionated, he was very loud, and he kind of would make smart Alec remarks to me.
We both had the same kind of humor, stuff like that.

Speaker 15 I think originally he signed signed up for six years he was a crew chief in the uh air force for the stealth bombers i was pretty proud of that

Speaker 15 joe's military career came at a price frequent deployments cost him his high school sweetheart michelle michelle and joe were first slaves he joined the military got stationed somewhere they lost contact.

Speaker 15 He was in high school whenever he dated her. It broke his heart.
He was really pretty tenderhearted back then.

Speaker 2 In 2002, the Air Force posted Joe to Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada.

Speaker 25 Eager to get over Michelle, Joe took full advantage of Vegas nightlife.

Speaker 15 I can tell you living in Vegas with the temptations and the party atmosphere is definitely a lot of fun.

Speaker 40 The handsome 24-year-old airman caught the eye of an attractive brunette named Brandy Norfleet.

Speaker 15 Joe and Brandi met at a nightclub dancing, going out, you know, hopping bars, baby.

Speaker 6 Unlike Joe, Brandy was a Vegas native.

Speaker 17 She was born and raised in a middle-class family. Her parents, they separated and ultimately got divorced.

Speaker 2 Brandy's mother won custody, but struggled to properly raise Brandy.

Speaker 22 Her mother made some mistakes. Brandy was taken from one place to another and really didn't have a good home life, you know, wasn't provided for all the time.
No stability.

Speaker 25 A few years later, Brandy's father remarried and had a son named Aaron.

Speaker 36 She cared a lot about her brother, just as she did everyone else in her family.

Speaker 6 But when she was 18 years old, Brandy's beloved half-brother suddenly died when he was just a toddler.

Speaker 2 Though tragic, this hardship helped shape who Brandy was as a person.

Speaker 15 She loved to always help. Anything you needed.
You needed a stick of butter, she'd have it. There wasn't anything that she wouldn't do to help.
She's very, very kind.

Speaker 6 By the time Brandi met Joe Stutsman, she had grown into a selfless and caring woman, something Joe found attractive.

Speaker 16 She was funny, very outspoken.

Speaker 39 He was

Speaker 16 always happy, always had a smile on his face.

Speaker 15 Joe and Brandi were happy together. They would come over to my house and spend time with my family.
We would have barbecues.

Speaker 31 On June 14th, 2003, the couple married.

Speaker 22 They got married and

Speaker 22 she found some stability and it was great.

Speaker 34 But just 10 days after the wedding, Joe left for a year-long deployment to Korea.

Speaker 21 When you are married to the love of your life and that person is deployed for months at a time,

Speaker 21 it's hard to maintain a relationship.

Speaker 15 It is. I commend all of our service members, but it's hard to do that.

Speaker 22 I think Brandi got lonely. I think she got lonely, but she put on a good outside appearance.

Speaker 27 In 2004, Joe returned from his deployment, and by August 2005, the couple welcomed a son.

Speaker 2 They named him Aaron after Brandy's brother who'd died when she was a teen.

Speaker 34 Having a child to support rekindled Joe's commitment to his career.

Speaker 16 He wanted everything for Aaron. It's why he did those deployments.
It's why he worked so hard. It's family.
A lot of us do this for family. To have a better life for him.

Speaker 39 Joe eventually left the Air Force for a higher-paying job in the private sector overseas.

Speaker 17 He almost tripled his salary overnight by taking on this job with an independent contractor. Joe Stussman was making very good money by working in Afghanistan and Iraq in war zones.

Speaker 15 He got his top secret security clearance, which made him pretty valuable.

Speaker 41 The money was good, but the new job also meant more time away from his family.

Speaker 39 By the fall of 2010, the couple couldn't ignore the toll the time apart took on their marriage.

Speaker 22 She wasn't there emotionally. He was trying to be there emotionally.
And Brandy was depressed.

Speaker 16 Joe being gone so long and stuff like that, he started noticing that different trends and different attitude in Brandy during that time period.

Speaker 22 He goes, I just don't know what to do. I don't know how to handle it.

Speaker 36 I want my marriage to work.

Speaker 22 Can you pray for me? You know, I mean, he was always wanting me to pray for him, which we did.

Speaker 25 Unfortunately, those prayers would never be answered.

Speaker 8 On the afternoon of November 7th, homicide investigators began inspecting Joe's bloody body on the couple's kitchen floor.

Speaker 16 When you get a little closer, you can see that there was many cuts and stab wounds on his body.

Speaker 23 He had very deep lacerations to his upper arm and shoulders where he had been cut. Apparently, it looked like to the bone.

Speaker 15 It was gruesome.

Speaker 21 Whoever did this, this was somebody that wanted this man dead.

Speaker 17 When a knife is used, it's personal. Every time you plunge that knife into a living, breathing body, it's a very personal way to inflict a violent death on somebody.

Speaker 33 Coming up, police hear stories of a turbulent marriage.

Speaker 22 It was just crazy, and the fights kept getting louder and louder.

Speaker 18 And detectives shift their focus to a suspicious group of teenagers who have ties to a notorious music fan club.

Speaker 16 Many of the juggalos are considered street gang members.

Speaker 28 Just after 1.30 p.m.

Speaker 2 on November 7th, 2010, Las Vegas homicide detectives have responded to a 911 call from Brandy Stutzman.

Speaker 21 Stutsman walked into the home and saw her husband dead, blood surrounding his body.

Speaker 23 There was quite an extensive area, maybe five or six feet in diameter, where there was blood all around.

Speaker 25 Blood evidence leads investigators outside the Stutzman home.

Speaker 17 The crime scene was a bloody mess, for lack of a better term.

Speaker 16 There's blood on the the south gate, pedestrian gate into the backyard of the house, that it appeared that the killing scene was the backyard. There was some trees and some rock landscaping.

Speaker 16 There was blood all over the rocks on the patio, on the wall next to the door, and then the sliding glass door is open. There's a window adjacent to the door that's also open.

Speaker 36 The obvious conclusion is that there was a struggle and he retreated inside and that's where he perished.

Speaker 17 Joe Joe Stutsman probably confronted the perpetrator near the back entrance, the sliding glass door,

Speaker 17 and a fight was brought out into the backyard until Joe was stabbed to death and was managed to crawl himself back into the kitchen.

Speaker 34 Did Joe unknowingly provoke his would-be killer?

Speaker 8 As detectives continue to process the scene, two details eliminate the possibility that this was a robbery gone wrong.

Speaker 21 His left ring finger was sliced off a clean cut with a knife.

Speaker 16 When you get up close and you see that Joe Stutsman had had his wedding ring finger severed and it was missing, that we had this wasn't a burglary. This indicated there was something else going on.

Speaker 17 The police searched everywhere. They looked everywhere in the toilets.
They looked everywhere in the backyard throughout the neighborhood. That finger was never found.

Speaker 16 There are prints. There are fingerprints, palm prints, and none of them have any ridge pattern.
It indicates that the killer is wearing gloves.

Speaker 16 So it also indicates that the killer has come prepared.

Speaker 32 Gloves or not, a knife attack this brutal will likely mark both killer and victim.

Speaker 23 Blood is very slippery. If you get blood on the knife, your hands are going to go forward on it and you're going to get cut, no question.

Speaker 35 Detectives hope that canvassing the area will yield clues.

Speaker 16 Detectives were going to go to the adjacent neighbors. You can't do this kind of killing quietly.
So it's going to make a lot of noise, especially if it's in the backyard.

Speaker 25 Neighbors tell police that there are always loud noises coming from the Stutsman home.

Speaker 16 Things have become very contentious between the two of them.

Speaker 1 It was just crazy.

Speaker 22 And the fights kept getting louder and louder.

Speaker 7 I could hear him at my house.

Speaker 18 I could hear him at night.

Speaker 35 According to neighbors, when Joe was away, things got even worse.

Speaker 20 That's when the Stutsman home became a party house.

Speaker 15 There was kids in and out constantly, all hours of the night. It was intimidating.
It was a flop house.

Speaker 16 Brandy lives there with her five-year-old child. We're hearing from multiple sources at this point that Brandy has multiple teenage males that are staying or coming to the house every day.

Speaker 16 People are worried for the safety of the five-year-old.

Speaker 15 She would let them take her husband's truck and drive and go to the store or run errands, go to school. They would stay up all night and sleep all day.

Speaker 22 They all had to leave when Joe came home.

Speaker 39 Relieved neighbors say that Brandy hadn't hosted a party since Joe returned home about three weeks ago from Afghanistan.

Speaker 32 But one nearby resident says that the previous night at the Stutsman house was anything but peaceful.

Speaker 23 We had a woman that lived in the area where Brandy lived, and she saw her the night before.

Speaker 16 She hears banging and yelling. So she raises her garage door.
She sits in the garage and she... She can see Brandy at the front door banging on the door, yelling for Joe.

Speaker 16 Joe finally answers the door after a long period of time, and then Brandy goes in.

Speaker 24 Shortly after, the neighbor saw Brandy leave.

Speaker 23 They had a discussion for however long that took, and then she was gone.

Speaker 20 A few hours later, there was more commotion.

Speaker 17 One of the neighbors actually reported hearing noise or what sounded to them like a scream, a male screaming at about two in the morning.

Speaker 2 Back at the crime scene, detectives ask Brandy for an explanation.

Speaker 40 She tells them she and her son spent the night at the house of one of her teenage friends.

Speaker 17 She chose to stay at Sean's home. So he had an extra room, and apparently

Speaker 17 his parents were okay with Brandy staying there. And so that's why she was not at the house.

Speaker 23 Sean was just another kid that Brandy hung out with over at the house when Joe wasn't there.

Speaker 32 Brandy says her neighbor must have spotted her at the house when she briefly returned to get supplies for the overnight.

Speaker 23 She had left Sean's house to go over and meet with Joe because Joe had diapers and she needed those.

Speaker 2 Brandy tells detectives that the next day she returned home to have a heart-to-heart with Joe.

Speaker 17 Purpose for her going over there is to try to reconcile the relationship, getting back together and going back to the point where they're going to live like husband and wife and raise their son together.

Speaker 6 Instead, she found her husband stabbed to death.

Speaker 36 Brandi was hysterical after discovering Joe's body.

Speaker 16 She picks up his head and she holds his head, and then she realizes that he's deceased.

Speaker 6 When detectives question Brandi about her crew of teenage boys, she appears to be forthcoming with information.

Speaker 36 Brandy was very candid with law enforcement related to her involvement with kind of this group of young people.

Speaker 25 Brandy says that the group of teens call themselves Juggalos and are obsessive fans of the band Insane Clown Posse.

Speaker 16 The Juggalos and the Juggalettes, they follow the Insane Clown Posse, which is a rock music group or rap group. Insane Clown Posse.

Speaker 16 It's basically two white rappers saying about, you know, really outlandish stuff.

Speaker 16 One of the fans of the Insane Clown Posse sent me the lyrics to one of the songs, which talks about cutting the finger off of somebody.

Speaker 6 As detectives dig deeper, they find that most fanatical juggalos try to model their lives after Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.

Speaker 16 Many of the juggalos are considered street gang members. So that was a bit of a twist for us.

Speaker 16 So we are looking at the group that's staying with Brandy even more seriously at this point.

Speaker 25 Brandy reluctantly admits that one of the juggalos had been upset by her recent marital troubles, 19-year-old Jeremiah Merriweather.

Speaker 17 She basically told the police the last person that could have been there or had some dispute with Joe was Jeremiah.

Speaker 16 He has a protective type personality. He's large, six foot five, 280 pound, big guy,

Speaker 16 could take care of himself. Is it possible he took it upon himself and went and killed Joe?

Speaker 17 It was at that point that the police started focusing their attention on Jeremiah.

Speaker 38 Coming up, detectives track down Jeremiah.

Speaker 17 He said she was a victim of domestic violence.

Speaker 2 And the portrait of Brandy's life with the juggalos comes into focus.

Speaker 17 She enabled them into creating more refuge for their drug and alcohol abuse.

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Speaker 2 police investigating the brutal slaying of 32-year-old joe stutsman now have a suspect according to joe's estranged wife 31-year-old brandy stutsman a local teen named jeremiah meriweather had recently grown extremely protective of her brandy tells the police who could have done this

Speaker 17 was that 19-year-old boy, Jeremiah.

Speaker 41 Detectives track Jeremiah down at Sean's house, the same place Brandy spent the night before Joe was killed.

Speaker 23 When we started talking to Jeremiah, he kind of expressed his relationship with Brandy as being more like a brother and sister, you know, that they were really good friends and just spent a lot of time together.

Speaker 2 Jeremiah tells investigators that he was home all night and his physical appearance suggests he may be telling the truth.

Speaker 23 Based on the extent of the wounds that we saw at the scene on Joe, you would have expected to find the person who inflicted those wounds to have some sort of injury on them.

Speaker 23 And Jeremiah didn't have any of those.

Speaker 16 He had no injuries of that nature. Did not appear that he had been in a fight.

Speaker 41 When detectives question others in the Juggalo gang, they learned that life with Big Sister Brandy was a young man's dream come true.

Speaker 17 She basically turned her marital home into a flop house. These teenage boys would come into her home, hang out all day, from all hours of the day to the night hours.

Speaker 16 They would listen to their music. They would talk about their relationships with Brandy.

Speaker 16 Brandy, she liked to be referred to as

Speaker 16 B or Sister B.

Speaker 17 She basically opened her door to her home for these teenage boys.

Speaker 17 She would have alcohol at their disposal.

Speaker 17 She enabled them into creating more refuge for their drug and alcoholic abuse.

Speaker 17 You gotta understand for a teenage boy to see a woman who's in her early 30s and has money and has a house, that's intoxicating to a young man.

Speaker 27 But when detectives reach out to Brandy's friends and family, they learn the seeds of her bizarre relationship with the teens were sown in her own troubled youth.

Speaker 16 Her mother was having a hard time, you know, keeping jobs, especially living in Vegas, odd hours, and everything could be very demanding and stuff like that.

Speaker 16 So that's where she abandoned Brandy to her grandmother. The grandmother, you know, took her in and kept her, but at the same time, you know,

Speaker 16 there were a lot of other factors that didn't help out Brandy's upbringing.

Speaker 30 Though Brandy eventually landed under the care of her father, the instability at a young age was hard on her.

Speaker 20 Friends say Brandy finally began to feel like she belonged to a family when her little brother Aaron was born, but his death reopened her emotional wound.

Speaker 39 Her brother was like two when he passed away.

Speaker 15 She missed her baby brother.

Speaker 27 Befriending and supporting the Juggalo crew many years later was Brandy's way of putting the tragic past behind her.

Speaker 36 She was able to spend time and engage in conversation and activities of a brother-sister nature with people that would have been roughly his age.

Speaker 27 Friends tell detectives it was only because of Joe's hard work that Brandy was able to sustain her partying lifestyle.

Speaker 23 Joe was the breadwinner of the house and making good money, sending quite a a bit of money back to her. And she's using that money to support her little gathering at the house.

Speaker 35 However, friends say, no amount of money could make up for Brandy's disturbing claims about her marriage.

Speaker 17 She said she was a victim of domestic violence.

Speaker 17 And that she was emotionally abused and physically abused by Joe.

Speaker 16 She said Joe's become abusive. He's using drugs.
They can't be around around each other.

Speaker 23 They all believe that Joe's the bad guy. Joe's the primary physical aggressor in the fights that they've had.
And that all the misery that she's going through in her life is because of Joe.

Speaker 40 Detectives find numerous domestic dispute calls from the Stutsman home, but the complaints tell a different story than the one they've heard from Brandi's friends.

Speaker 17 We have true evidence of documentation that she was the abuser.

Speaker 17 We have two situations that were reported to the police where 911 was called and officers came to the scene to investigate Brandy for abusing Joe.

Speaker 23 Brandy had been arrested a couple of times for domestic violence involving Joe, most recently two days prior to the murder where she rammed his car, and so she went to jail for that.

Speaker 29 On November 8th, Brandy Stutzman arrives at the station for a formal interview.

Speaker 27 She admits to losing her temper with Joe, but sticks by her story that they were fighting to make their marriage work.

Speaker 16 She is trying to work it out with Joe. She goes over there.
They have a very nice conversation.

Speaker 16 They decide to meet as a family the following day to work out the relationship and be back together again.

Speaker 8 But when detectives turn up the heat, Brandy begins to crack.

Speaker 16 Brandy then changes because the pressure, homicide detectives, that's what we do. We pressure you.

Speaker 24 Brandy admits that on the night of the murder, she vented about the problems in her marriage while hanging out with the juggalos at Sean's house.

Speaker 16 She says Jeremiah didn't react well to that. He got angry.
He leaves in the truck. She says, I thought he was going home to where his mom lived.

Speaker 23 She finally admits that she's awakened at Sean's house by Jeremiah about four o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 17 Brandy stated that Jeremiah came back and that he had blood on him, on his clothes and both shirt and pants.

Speaker 23 He admits to her that he had gone over and he had a confrontation with Joe and that he had stabbed him and that he was dead.

Speaker 16 He said, I just planned to talk to him.

Speaker 16 And it got out of hand. He came out with a knife, forced me, I had to stab him.

Speaker 16 She's hoping that it's not true that joe's okay that jeremiah's mistaken she doesn't call 911 she goes to bed goes to sleep the next day she doesn't want to go over there because she's worried so she waits till the afternoon

Speaker 20 brandy tells detectives she finally worked up the nerve to go home that's when she discovered the body She said she had nothing to do with this.

Speaker 17 This was not her fault. I did not put this in motion, you know.
It was Jeremiah. Jeremiah was the one who did it.

Speaker 19 Detectives immediately bring Jeremiah in for questioning.

Speaker 16 There was going to be a lot more to this, so we were going to dig even deeper. And we did.

Speaker 28 Coming up, details emerge about a vicious crime of passion.

Speaker 17 Somebody comes into the house wearing a mask. He's there to do no good.
He's not there to scare.

Speaker 25 And a new motive comes to light.

Speaker 16 A lot of money was disappearing from his account. A lot of money.

Speaker 20 Las Vegas detectives sit face to face with Jeremiah Merriweather, the 19-year-old boy accused by Brandy Stutzman of stabbing her husband Joe to death.

Speaker 16 Jeremiah sits down in an interview room with Detective O'Kelly. They go through the entire scenario going again.

Speaker 16 Jeremiah is holding on to the to the first story.

Speaker 8 Detectives don't let up.

Speaker 23 Hey, you're being completely fingered here for what happened. Randy's throwing you under the bus.
So you need to know this is what she's saying.

Speaker 35 Finally, Jeremiah admits that he went to Joe's house that night around 2 a.m.

Speaker 23 He explains that he had gone over to confront Joe about how he was treating Brandy. He just wanted to scare him.
He wanted to confront him.

Speaker 16 He goes to the door to talk to Joe. Joe comes out with a knife.
It leaves Jeremiah no other option. He pulls his knife and they get into a fight.

Speaker 17 He basically disarmed Joe by giving him the first blow.

Speaker 17 And once Joe got that fatal blow where one of his main arteries was severed, He was bleeding to death.

Speaker 23 Jeremiah said, it wasn't a murder. It was self-defense.

Speaker 16 He laid it all on himself. He's cornered.
Nobody else was involved. It was all him.

Speaker 32 Jeremiah vehemently denies one more thing.

Speaker 16 He says that he doesn't cut Joe's finger off. But at one point, Joe is during the fight is yelling, ow, my hand, my hand, my hand.

Speaker 25 It's not the only question Jeremiah's self-defense story leaves unanswered.

Speaker 16 The problem being is he goes there wearing gloves. We know he's wearing gloves.
And then Jeremiah says, well, I had my hoodie up and I tightened it all down so he couldn't see my face very well.

Speaker 16 Why are you doing that if you went there to talk to him? So none of it makes any sense.

Speaker 25 When police press Jeremiah for more details, he eventually cracks.

Speaker 23 Jeremiah finally gave up this information about a power boat.

Speaker 17 The police looked at that boat and they started searching, and sure enough, underneath one of the couches, they found a bag.

Speaker 23 Once the bag gets back to the criminalistics lab, then it's carefully opened up because we're still looking at the potential for fingerprints. They take things out one at a time.

Speaker 23 So we had a black pair of jeans, there was a long-sleeve shirt, there were a couple of pairs of gloves.

Speaker 9 An unexpected item retrieved from the bag deals the last blow to Jeremiah's self-defense claim.

Speaker 23 There was a Jason goalie masked, a black one that was inside the bag.

Speaker 17 It was a hockey mask. And so it covered his face completely.

Speaker 17 Somebody comes into the house wearing a mask. He's there to do no good.
He's not there to scare.

Speaker 20 A final revelation solves the riddle of why Jeremiah had no marks on his hands.

Speaker 23 One of the most significant things about the contents of the bag was the knife. Now finally being able to see the knife.

Speaker 23 Being able to see the length of the blade and in particular the finger holes that were on the handle that completely explained why Jeremiah didn't have any injuries on himself.

Speaker 17 This is first-degree murder at its best because it shows that there was a plan. There was always a plan.

Speaker 21 It almost seemed like it was a little too planned out, which makes you wonder, did he do this on his own?

Speaker 17 detectives revisit brandy and joe's friends and learn that whatever money joe sent or brought home was never enough she's always constantly begging him for money even though he was giving his entire paycheck to her at one point towards the end i think he was making well over two hundred thousand dollars and sending all of it to Brandy.

Speaker 16 We talked about it and he said a lot of money was disappearing from his account. A lot of money.

Speaker 16 I mean, we can account for, you know, buying food, diapers, and stuff like that for the family, but when it's thousands of dollars at a time,

Speaker 16 it was pretty, you know, outstanding.

Speaker 16 Like, what's going on?

Speaker 20 Discovering that Brandy and the Juggalos were blowing the money he sent home was the last straw for Joe.

Speaker 17 The week that he died, he had already met with the local attorney here. She had prepared his divorce petition.

Speaker 17 He came in, he signed it. It was ready to be filed when he was murdered.
That's when it came out that Joe had moved on.

Speaker 17 He came back in contact with one of his old girlfriends from his high school days, Michelle.

Speaker 16 When things started to fall apart with Brandy, Joe made contact with Michelle and they had re-entered each other's lives and started making plans for a future.

Speaker 15 Joe loved Michelle a lot.

Speaker 15 He was very happy when they started rekindling because of the disarray going on in his home. He was very happy.

Speaker 30 Friends say that news hit Brandy hard.

Speaker 17 Quite frankly, Joe came clean and told her exactly what was going on and why he had started this relationship with Michelle. Well, Brandy became unglued.
She became violent.

Speaker 17 She became absolutely toxic towards Joe to the point where Joe's safety was a concern to many of of his friends.

Speaker 31 If Joe left Brandy for good, her free ride would be over.

Speaker 16 She would have lost everything that she had.

Speaker 17 Here's somebody who's uneducated, no working skills whatsoever, now with the fear of knowing that she may be a divorced woman in the very near future with no source of income.

Speaker 17 And the lifestyle that she had grown accustomed to, that is, hanging out with teenagers and doing drugs and alcohol, maybe come to an end.

Speaker 15 The final straw for Brandy was Joe was on his way out the door and she was going to lose her financial support and possibly the custody of her son. That was the final straw.

Speaker 30 However, detectives discover that there was an upside for Brandy if Joe died.

Speaker 16 He had a life insurance policy. It was worth approximately $213,000 to Brandy if Joe's dead.

Speaker 16 So she gets all the property. She gets $213,000 in cash and she gets the child.

Speaker 25 Detectives now have many more questions for Brandy Stutzman.

Speaker 16 You go back to who's the mastermind of this? Who needs Joe dead? It's all Brandy. Brandy's the center of everything.

Speaker 16 I call her up and I said, could you come in and help us with the investigation of Joe's death? She said, sure.

Speaker 40 Confronted with new evidence, Brandi changes her story again.

Speaker 17 She indicated that there were several plans that were devised, not by her, but by Jeremiah and the others. One was that they were just going to go in there and scare him

Speaker 17 and rough him up a little bit. The second one was that they were going to break into the house, make it look like a burglary.
She didn't think it was going to happen, that it was just talk.

Speaker 25 Detectives are not buying it.

Speaker 36 At the conclusion of her second interview with law enforcement, she was placed into custody and arrested.

Speaker 20 Prosecutors charge Brandy and Jeremiah with felony murder.

Speaker 19 But even with a murder weapon in evidence, they worry that a jury won't connect the dots between Joe, his wife, and his killer.

Speaker 16 We had our murderer. The person that caused the death of Joe Stutsman was in custody.
But it still didn't make any sense to us. There were things that just didn't add up.

Speaker 21 Why would Jeremiah do it instead of Brandy?

Speaker 32 Coming up, prosecutors paint a brutal picture for the jury.

Speaker 16 You can see where he's clutching the walls and the door. Joe Stutzman died horrifically in a very slow, painful death.

Speaker 25 And the question of guilt is front and center.

Speaker 36 There is no evidence of a a formal plan.

Speaker 21 What else do you need?

Speaker 4 He killed him.

Speaker 21 Brandy had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 20 Clark County, Nevada prosecutors hope to prove that in 2010, 31-year-old Brandi Stutsman and 19-year-old Jeremiah Meriwether conspired to kill Brandi's husband, 32-year-old Joe Stutsman, for his his life insurance.

Speaker 20 If they succeed, Brandy could pay the ultimate price.

Speaker 21 She was potentially facing the death penalty.

Speaker 17 Even though she may not have been the person who actually plunged that knife into Joe's body, she set it in motion. She knew about it and she planned it and she was part of this conspiracy.

Speaker 30 At trial in January 2017, Brandi's defense goes on the attack.

Speaker 25 Jeremiah, they say, acted alone.

Speaker 21 The defense's argument was he has already confessed. What else do you need?

Speaker 15 He killed him.

Speaker 21 Brandy had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 36 While she was the beneficiary of a nominal amount of life insurance, the reality of the situation is she would have obtained a lot more money from Joe if he would have remained alive.

Speaker 36 There was no evidence that anyone helped him go to and from the crime scene. There was no evidence of a formal plan.

Speaker 15 I didn't think that she was going to be convicted. I thought Jeremiah was going to have to take the whole fall

Speaker 15 for her terrible choices.

Speaker 7 Prosecutors call a key witness to the stand.

Speaker 17 I struck a deal with Jeremiah and he agreed to be a witness for the state.

Speaker 28 Jeremiah tells the jury that Brandy was more than just a big sister figure.

Speaker 36 He actually used the term playing house and he referred to it as a family unit. He enjoyed being part of that that family unit while Joe Stutsman was away.

Speaker 8 But Jeremiah insists under oath that it was Brandy who urged him to kill on the evening of November 6th, 2010.

Speaker 17 The night of the murder before Joe got killed, Brandy was actually, according to Jeremiah, fixing his hair, braiding his hair, and telling him how much this would mean to her if he did this for her.

Speaker 17 He was going to save her family. he clearly was in love with her thought the world of her always doing things for her cooking for her taking care of her son

Speaker 16 and

Speaker 36 that played such a powerful manipulation into poor jeremiah's head

Speaker 42 prosecutors say when brandy went to the stutzman home at 1130 that same night it wasn't to get diapers she went to dose joe with sleeping pills Brandy went over to the house that night to see what condition Joe was in.

Speaker 23 He's fallen asleep while they were talking. So now she's able to go back to Jeremiah and go, now's the time because he's going to be out of it.

Speaker 6 Jeremiah returns to the house wearing gloves and a hockey mask.

Speaker 18 Despite the pills, Joe fought back hard, but it was too late.

Speaker 16 He was on his feet. He hit the ground outside.
He got back on his feet. You can see where he's clutching the walls and the door.
He's on his feet. He makes it inside.
He hits the island.

Speaker 16 He goes back down.

Speaker 16 There was a lot of stabbing and a lot of cutting done.

Speaker 16 Joe Stutzman died horrifically.

Speaker 21 It was extremely severe. As a reporter, you're sitting in the courtroom.
You put up the pictures of this man's body, and it was gruesome. It was very disturbing to look at.

Speaker 2 On February 2nd, the jury reaches a verdict.

Speaker 17 The jury came back rather quickly, finding her guilty of murder in the first degree.

Speaker 35 The judge sentences Brandy to life.

Speaker 17 Brandy Stutzman will never step out of a prison wall for the rest of her natural life.

Speaker 15 I was relieved that they found her guilty. She was the main factor in this.
The death of her husband.

Speaker 27 a question that neither the defense nor the prosecution can answer remains

Speaker 41 what happened to joe's missing ring finger

Speaker 17 i absolutely to this day believe that jeremiah took the finger to grandi and said it's finished she knew exactly how to pick the individuals that she needed to do her dirty deed.

Speaker 17 She would focus her attention by manipulating these young kids, impressionable teenagers.

Speaker 16 This is evil at its best.

Speaker 25 For Joe's friends and family, there's one thing that gives them peace.

Speaker 16 We just need to remember Joe for what he's done, how he affected other people's lives, and how happy he made people around him, and how, you know, he had been such a good friend to me and to everyone else.

Speaker 15 I want him to be remembered for the benefit that he did for the Air Force and the guys over in Afghanistan.

Speaker 15 Because he wanted to make a difference in life. He was kind and loving.

Speaker 15 And I think most people that knew him would attest to that.

Speaker 12 Jeremiah Merriweather was sentenced to 21 years to life and is serving his life sentence at Lovelaw Correctional Center in Nevada. Brandy's father has custody of Brandy and Joe's son, Aaron.

Speaker 29 For more information on Snap, go to oxygen.com.

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