Brandy Stutzman

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

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.

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

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

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.

Neighbors actually reported hearing a male screaming at about two in the morning.

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

The search for a killer leads detectives to an unusual fan club.

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

And a twisted plot emerges.

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.

November 7th, 2010.

North Las Vegas, Nevada.

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

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

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

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.

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

Just after 1:30 in the afternoon, Nicole Pritchard hears a frantic ringing at her front door.

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

My daughter answered the front door.

She said, Mom, it's B.

And I said, Okay, tell her to meet me around the garage.

And I opened my garage.

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

I realized when I looked down and

she had blood on her shirt,

she had said, Joe's gone.

And I said, Joe's gone, where?

Where did he go?

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

Initially, I was in a panic.

I said, did you call 911?

She said, no.

I called 911.

Hi, um.

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.

Okay, is there any way I can talk to her?

Yeah, hold on, hold on.

Okay.

Brandy, what happened?

I don't know.

Okay, did you just get home?

Yes.

Okay, did he seem like he's unconscious?

No, he's cold.

He's cold.

Yes.

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

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

There was multiple officers.

They cordoned off the street.

They wouldn't let you in or out.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Altoon is a somewhat depressed area as far as jobs go.

At some point, he decided to join the military.

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

First time I met Joe, it was on deployment overseas.

He was very opinionated, he was very loud, and he kind of of would make smart Alec remarks to me.

We both had the same kind of humor, stuff like that.

I think originally he signed up for six years.

He was a crew chief in the Air Force for the stealth bombers.

I was pretty proud of that.

Joe's military career came at a price.

Frequent deployments cost him his high school sweetheart, Michelle.

Michelle and Joe were first loves.

He joined the military, got

stationed somewhere.

They lost contact.

He was in high school whenever he dated her.

It broke his heart.

He was really pretty tenderhearted back then.

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

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

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

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

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

Unlike Joe, Brandy was a Vegas native.

She was born and raised in a middle-class family.

Her parents, they separated and ultimately got divorced.

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

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.

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

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

But when she was 18 years old brandy's beloved half-brother suddenly died when he was just a toddler though tragic this hardship helped shape who brandy was as a person

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

By the time Brandy met Joe Stutzman, she had grown into a selfless and caring woman, something Joe found attractive.

She was funny, very outspoken.

He was

always happy, always had a smile on his face.

Joe and Brandi were happy together.

They would come over to my house and spend time with my family.

We would have barbecues.

On June 14th, 2003, the couple married.

They got married and

she found some stability and it was great.

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

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.

It is.

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

I think Brandy got lonely.

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

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

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

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

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.

Have a better life for him.

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

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.

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

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

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

She wasn't there emotionally.

He was trying to be there emotionally.

And Brandy was depressed.

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

He goes, I just don't know what to do.

I don't know how to handle it.

I want my marriage to work.

Can you pray for me?

You know, I mean, he was always wanting me to pray for him, which we did.

Unfortunately, those prayers would never be answered.

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

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

He had very deep lacerations to his upper arm and shoulders where he had been cut.

Apparently, it looked like to the bone.

It was gruesome.

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

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.

Coming up, police hear stories of a turbulent marriage.

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

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

Many of the juggalos are considered street gang members.

Just after 1:30 p.m.

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

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

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

Blood evidence leads investigators outside of the Stutzman home.

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

There's blood on 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.

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.

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

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

Did Joe unknowingly provoke his would-be killer?

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

his left ring finger was sliced off a clean cut with a knife

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.

The police searched everywhere.

They looked everywhere in the toilets, they looked everywhere in the backyard, throughout the neighborhood.

That finger was never found.

There are prints.

There are fingerprints, palm prints, and none of them have any ridge pattern.

It indicates that the killer is wearing gloves.

So it also indicates that the killer has come prepared.

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

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.

Detectives hope that canvassing the area will yield clues.

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.

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

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

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

I could hear them at my house.

I could hear him at night.

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

That's when the Stutzman home became a party house.

There was kids in and out constantly, all hours of the night.

It was intimidating.

It was a flop house.

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.

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

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.

They all had to leave when Joe came home.

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

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

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

She hears banging and yelling, so she raises her garage door.

She sits in the garage and she can see Brandy at the front door banging on the door, yelling for Joe.

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

Shortly after, the neighbor saw Brandy leave.

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

A few hours later, there was more commotion.

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

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

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

She chose to stay at Sean's home.

So he had an extra room and apparently his parents were okay with Brandy staying there.

And so that's why she was not at the house.

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

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

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

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

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.

Instead, she found her husband stabbed to death.

Brandy was hysterical after discovering Joe's body.

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

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

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

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

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

Insane Clown Posse.

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

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.

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

Many of the juggalos are considered street gang members.

So that was a bit of a twist for us.

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

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

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

He has a protective type personality.

He's large, six foot five, 280 pound, big guy,

could take care of himself.

Is it possible he took it upon himself and went and killed Joe?

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

Coming up, detectives track down Jeremiah.

They said she was a victim of domestic violence.

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

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

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Police investigating the brutal slaying of 32-year-old Joe Stutzman now have a suspect.

According to Joe's estranged wife, 31-year-old Brandy Stutzman, a local teen named Jeremiah Meriwether had recently grown extremely protective of her.

Brandy tells the police who could have done this.

It was that 19-year-old boy, Jeremiah.

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

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.

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

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, and Jeremiah didn't have any of those.

He had no injuries of that nature.

Did not appear that he had been in a fight

when detectives question others in the juggalo gang they learned that life with big sister brandy was a young man's dream come true 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

They would listen to their music.

They would talk about their relationships with Brandy.

Brandy, she liked to be referred to as

B or Sister B.

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

She would have alcohol at their disposal.

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

You got to 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.

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.

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

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, there were a lot of other factors that didn't help out Brandy's, you know, upbringing.

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

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.

Her brother was like two when he passed away.

She missed her baby brother.

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

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.

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

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

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

She said she was a victim of domestic violence.

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

She said Joe's become abusive, he's using drugs, they can't be around each other.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

On November 8th, Brandi Stutzman arrives at the station for a formal interview.

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

She is trying to work it out with Joe.

She goes over there.

They have a very nice conversation.

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

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

Brandy then changes because the pressure.

Homicide detectives, that's what we do.

We pressure you.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

He said, I just planned to talk to him and it got out of hand.

He came out with a knife forced me i had to stab him 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 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.

This was not her fault.

I did did not put this in motion you know it was jeremiah jeremiah was the one who did it

detectives immediately bring jeremiah in for questioning

there was gonna be a lot more to this so we were gonna dig even deeper and we did

coming up Details emerge about a vicious crime of passion.

Somebody comes into the house wearing a mask.

He's there to do no good.

He's not there to scare.

And a new motive comes to light.

A lot of money was disappearing from his account.

A lot of money.

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

Jeremiah sits down in an interview room with Detective O'Kelly.

They go through the entire scenario again.

Jeremiah is holding on to the first story.

Detectives don't let up.

Hey, you're being completely fingered here for what happened.

Brandy's throwing you under the bus.

So you need to know this is what she's saying.

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

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.

He goes to the door to talk to Joe.

Joe comes out with a knife.

At least Jeremiah no other option.

He pulls his knife and they get into a fight.

He basically disarmed Joe by giving him the first blow.

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

Jeremiah said, it wasn't a murder.

It was self-defense.

He laid it all on himself.

He's cornered.

Nobody else was involved.

It was all him.

Jeremiah vehemently denies one more thing.

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.

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

The problem being is he goes there wearing gloves.

We know he's wearing gloves.

And then Jeremiah is saying, well, I had my hoodie up and I tightened it all down so he couldn't see my face very well.

Why are you doing that if you went there to talk to him?

So none of it makes any sense.

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

Jeremiah finally gave up this information about a power boat.

The police looked at that boat and they started searching.

And sure enough, underneath one of the couches, they found a bag.

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.

So we had a black pair of jeans.

There was a long sleeve shirt.

There were a couple of pairs of gloves.

An unexpected item retrieved from the bag deals the last blow to jeremiah's self-defense claim

there was a jason goalie mask a black one that was in inside the bag it was a hockey mask and so it covered his face completely

somebody comes into the house wearing a mask he's there to do no good he's not there to scare

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

One of the most significant things about the contents of the bag was the knife.

Now finally being able to see the knife.

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.

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

There was always a plan.

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

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 $200,000 and sending all of it to Brandy.

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

A lot of money.

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,

it was pretty, you know, outstanding.

We're like, what's going on?

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

The week that he died, he had already met with the local attorney here.

She had prepared his divorce petition.

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.

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

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.

Joe loved Michelle a lot.

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

He was very happy.

Friends say that news hit Brandy hard.

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.

She became absolutely toxic towards Joe to the point where Joe's safety was concerned to many of his friends.

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

She would have lost everything that she had.

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 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.

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.

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

He had a life insurance policy.

It was worth approximately $213,000 to Brandy if Joe's dead.

So she gets all the property.

She gets $213,000 in cash, and she gets the child.

Detectives now have many more questions for Brandy Stutzman.

You go back to who's the mastermind of this?

Who needs Joe dead?

It's all Brandy.

Brandy's the center of everything.

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

She said, sure.

Confronted with new evidence, Brandy changes her story again.

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

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.

Detectives are not buying it.

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

Prosecutors charge Brandy and Jeremiah with felony murder.

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.

We had our murderer, The person that caused the death of Joe Stutzman was in custody.

But it still didn't make any sense to us.

There were things that just didn't add up.

Why would Jeremiah do it instead of Brandy?

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

You can see where he's clutching the walls and the door.

Joe Stutzman died horrifically in a very slow, painful death.

And the question of guilt is front and center.

There was no evidence of a formal plan.

What else do you need?

He killed him.

Brandy had nothing to do with it.

Clark County, Nevada prosecutors hope to prove that in 2010, 31-year-old Brandy Stutzman and 19-year-old Jeremiah Meriweather conspired to kill Brandy's husband, 32-year-old Joe Stutzman, for his life insurance.

If they succeed, Brandy could pay the ultimate price.

She was potentially facing the death penalty.

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.

At trial in January 2017, Brandy's defense goes on the attack.

Jeremiah, they say, acted alone.

The defense's argument was he has already confessed.

What else do you need?

He killed him.

Brandy had nothing to do with it.

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.

There was no evidence that anyone helped him go to and from the crime scene.

There was no evidence of a formal plan.

I didn't think that she was going to be convicted.

I thought Jeremiah was going to have to take the whole fall

for her terrible choices.

Prosecutors call a key witness to the stand.

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

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

He actually used the term playing house and he referred to it as a family unit.

He enjoyed being part of that family unit while Joe Stutsman was away.

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

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,

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.

And

that played such a powerful manipulation into poor Jeremiah's head.

Prosecutors say when Brandy went to the Stutzman home at 11:30 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.

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.

Jeremiah returned to the house wearing gloves and a hockey mask.

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

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.

He goes back down.

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

Joe Stutzman died horrifically.

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.

On February 2nd, the jury reaches a verdict.

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

The judge sentences Brandy to life.

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

I was relieved that they found her guilty.

She was the main factor in this, the the death of her husband.

A question that neither the defense nor the prosecution can answer remains.

What happened to Joe's missing ring finger?

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.

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

This is evil at its best.

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

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.

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

Because he wanted to make a difference in life.

He was kind and loving.

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

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.

For more information on Snapped, go to oxygen.com.

It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

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I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

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Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

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