Valerie Nessler

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A late-night house fire puts three roommates at the center of a gruesome crime.

There was so much smoke, they went to go put up the fire and tripped over the body.

It's grisly, blood spatter all over, trail of blood.

They poured gasoline on him and set him on fire while he was still alive.

This was by far the most brutal murder case I ever worked on.

Shocked investigators sift through the evidence and uncover a mountain of lies.

I had to reopen a murder investigation.

You see the crime scene photos and the autopsy photos?

That never goes away.

She told him something that lit him on fire.

The rage that was demonstrated, it was just beyond imagination.

April 7th, 2010.

It's just past midnight when dispatchers in Stockton, California receive an urgent 911 call from local resident Drew Payette.

Mr.

Payette said, my house is on fire.

Wasn't panicked, but it was urgent.

Drew gives police dispatchers the address, but he also explains to them that he's he's no longer at the house.

He told us he had come home, saw the fire.

He immediately ran down to one of the local convenience stores and called the fire department from there.

Drew returns to the house while firefighters race to the scene.

As soon as they arrive, first responders rush into the inferno and immediately notice something suspicious.

The front door was open.

You could tell where the door jamb had been broken, like someone had kicked it in.

Firefighters battle to bring the blaze under control.

One of the things they do is they ventilate the roof so that the smoke and the heat can dissipate.

While working on the ceiling, they make a gruesome discovery.

There was so much smoke and no visibility that they literally tripped over a body.

The body appears to be male, and he is clearly deceased.

There was no saving him, so as soon as the fire department's responsibilities were done, they called in law enforcement.

Responding officers questioned Drew Payette to find out who the victim might be.

We find out who was living with Drew, which was Valerie Nestler and Jeff Wheelie.

So our concern was to find both of them.

When we got a description of Jeff, we all suspected that that was Mr.

Wheatley in the house.

Jeff Wheatley was born in 1961 in San Jose, California, less than 100 miles away from Stockton.

We had two other sisters.

He was the only boy, and I think a lot was expected of him.

And

he had to put up with a lot of female energy.

We were all really strong, opinionated women.

With such strong influence from his sisters, Jeff had no trouble relating to the opposite sex.

He was just funny.

He's always smiling and always cute.

And so he had women after him his whole life.

He was a rascal.

Didn't graduate from high school.

He was a bit of a wild child.

He needed a little bit of discipline in his life, so he decided to go into the Coast Guard.

while in the coast guard jeff began the first of a string of failed marriages i got to the point where i would say you know jeff you don't have to marry them

but he wanted that so bad he wanted family and maybe never lasted very long he'd get married because he'd fall in love with their children because that's how bad he wanted a family

Jeff criss-crossed the country for decades, bouncing from girl to girl and career to career.

After the Coast Guard, he tried a few different things.

He owned a restaurant.

He was a truck driver.

He also went to nursing school, but none ended up working out.

Jeff was someone who tried a lot of different things in his life, gone a lot of different directions.

Gosh, he lived everywhere.

Alaska, and then he was in Astoria, Oregon, and then I believe he went to Georgia and he came back to the Bay Area.

He was in San Jose again and then to Lodi.

In 2010, another failed relationship brought Jeff to Stockton.

He had broken up with a girlfriend that he was living with in Lodi, and he needed a place to live.

And an acquaintance of his, Drew, offered him a room to rent in his house.

Drew's mother had let him stay there, and then Drew had brought some friends in to live with him.

Jeff was only living there a couple of weeks when Valerie moved in.

Unlike Jeff, 25-year-old Valerie Nessler only knew the tough streets of Stockton.

The part where Val grew up was East Stockton, and that's a pretty rough area.

Valerie and a lot of her friends, they live in a trailer park right around the corner from the school over there.

When you live and grow up in Stockton, especially where she lived, you have to be scrappy and you have to be able to stand up for yourself.

And And she was really good at that.

But the thing that I remember most about Val growing up is her smile.

Valerie's tough yet tender father was her role model.

I always thought of Valerie as a daddy's girl.

Just the way that she would look at her dad.

He had a really big heart.

Valerie really took on that persona like her dad.

She was kind of an anomaly.

She stuck out a little bit as a more tender-hearted kid who she was trying to find her way through.

Valerie loved making people feel good, making people feel better about themselves, being there for people.

In 2005, 20-year-old Valerie was blindsided by tragedy.

In one unimaginably dark moment, her father took his own life.

He shot himself.

It was a shock, of course.

It didn't make sense.

Her dad held everything together, and so that devastated Valerie.

I went to the service for her father,

and it was an emotional time.

Less than a year after her dad's death, Valerie learned that she was pregnant.

When she and the baby's father broke up, Valerie was left to raise the child on her own.

But Valerie's loneliness and grief vanished the first time she held baby Chloe in her arms.

She had Chloe, and she kind of felt like for a minute she forgot about her dad and her heart was full

but just two months after the birth of baby chloe fate dealt valerie yet another dreadful blow valerie went to go check on chloe in the bedroom she said she wasn't breathing

and she tried to do cpr and get her to breathe but she had already passed her child had died of sids

She was broken.

There was no Valerie left.

She just wasn't the same at all.

It devastated her.

After, you know, losing her father and then her baby,

it broke her.

You couldn't be more broken.

Valerie soon found her own way of numbing the pain.

After losing Chloe, she got into drugs really heavily and

that was it.

From the depths of despair, Valerie continued to seek guidance from those around her.

I got in touch and went to lunch and we talked about the struggles of losing a child and how to move forward and how to get through it.

With help from friends and family, Valerie did her best to move forward.

And by February 2010, she was looking for a fresh start.

She started working at San Joaquin County.

She was working for WorkNet.

She was doing clerical work.

That's when Drew Payette rented Valerie a room in his home just down the hall from Jeff Wheatley.

The three roommates forged a fast friendship.

They were all three living in the same house, and everything seemed to be going well.

They were sharing the bills, and it looked like a pretty good living situation.

But by April 7th, only two months after Valerie moved in, their home is host to homicide detectives in the aftermath of a deadly fire.

I was assigned to the homicide unit, and it was my week to be on call, so I got called out to go view the scene.

Even for seasoned homicide detectives, the scene is especially horrific.

The fire had put off a lot of heat,

but not a lot of fire.

There was just a lot of smoke damage throughout the house.

If you walked into the living room, to my left was the body.

His head was facing away from the door.

To the right, there was a blood trail against the walls,

as if someone with a rag had smeared blood on the walls

it's grisly blood spatter all over trail of blood we started analyzing the small details of the crime scene it was horrific

and i want to find who did this

i want to find who did this and held them responsible

coming up The crime scene yields a trove of ominous clues.

A sought-off shotgun that had two shells that were discharged, and there were two kitchen knives that had blood on them.

And an autopsy reveals horrific details about the manner of death.

This was a case where someone had been burned alive.

On April 7th, 2010, detectives in Stockton, California are sifting through the ashes of a gruesome homicide.

The fire department was called to the house, and it was the firefighters who found the body.

The home is shared by three roommates, Valerie Nessler, Jeff Wheatley, and Drew Payette, whose mother owns the home.

As for the victim inside, detectives have their suspicions.

Drew told us that Jeff Wheatley was one of his roommates, so That's how we suspected that was Jeff.

He was shot with a shotgun in his face and his shoulder.

You could see the shotgun pellets that would hit the wall and the cabinet.

So clearly there was a shotgun blast in the kitchen.

There was a struggle.

They found a gas can.

There was accelerant evidence all over the place.

Clothes, wall, floor.

It was inescapable.

You could clearly see that he was stabbed.

I didn't know how many times.

He was murdered in a very horrific way.

There is just no doubt in anybody's mind that this wasn't somebody who was personally enraged who had to commit that.

A blood trail leads police to other rooms and more clues.

There was blood like someone was cleaning up in the bathroom.

Police were wondering if it was blood from the victim or if it was blood from the perpetrator.

We thought whoever we were going to catch could have a cut on their hands and we were going to have a DNA profile on that blood.

A pair of gloves was found and those gloves had blood on them.

Then police make another startling discovery.

Towards the kitchen, there was a garbage bag that was just sitting there, very out of place.

The bag's contents give detectives their first clues about the killer.

In the bag was absolutely a treasure trove of evidence.

It had a shotgun in there, a sawed-off shotgun.

The gun had two shells that were discharged.

And there were two kitchen knives.

Both of them had blood on them.

Also, a bag of clothing was left in the house.

Whoever committed the crime decided not to take it with them.

They had men's clothes in there and boots that had blood on them, like someone was using these boots to kick kick somebody, and now they were changing their clothes.

I think they're planning on taking it all, but I think they panicked and just left it all there.

Crime scene techs swab and tag the forensic evidence and turn the body over to the medical examiner.

But veteran police know that for the time being, they're on their own.

DNA takes months, so there's the processing the house that we are doing.

Everything from the accelerants to DNA to processing for fingerprints fingerprints and

all the forensic evidence that gets done.

With crime scene investigators continuing to gather evidence at the house, the medical examiner attempts to confirm the victim's identity.

He called wanting me to identify Jeff's tattoos.

I told him about Jeff's tattoos.

He called me back and said, yes, it's him.

I'm just trying to put my reaction into an emotion.

I was heartbroken.

The autopsy details the utter brutality of the crime.

He had stab wounds, 32 of them, all over his body.

Some were very pronounced, very deep in the thorax.

He was stabbed in the eye, across the bridge of the nose.

But there were about 12 stab wounds in the side of his head.

that were very shallow and very close together, as if somebody was taking a knife and just repeatedly stabbing.

One particular post-mortem detail shocks even seasoned investigators.

My forensic pathologist had tested the carbon monoxide levels of Jeff Wheatley's blood, and it was elevated, and he had microparticles of soot in his esophagus down in his deep lung tissue.

So we had solid forensic evidence that Jeff Wheatley was alive as he was being burned.

The shotgun blast would have killed him.

The stab wounds alone would have killed him.

But being burned alive killed him.

You just looked at, quite frankly, the carnage that whoever did this exacted on Jeff Wheatley.

And there was no doubt that this was personal.

So obviously we're going to start looking for people who have got a motive to be enraged with Jeff.

Who could possibly want Jeff to die so horrifically?

And why?

With still no sign of the third roommate, Valerie Nessler, detectives begin to worry.

Where's Valerie?

She's one of the roommates.

She's living at this house.

And where is she?

You know, is she dead?

Has she been hurt?

detectives turn to live-in landlord drew payette for answers the first thing we want to do is interview the occupants of the house drew's statement was i left the house came back a couple hours later the house was on fire

he said i went back to the convenience store and called the fire department Detectives then ask Drew about his activities prior to leaving the house, and they are stunned by his response.

One of the things that Drew Payett had told us was that he had got a call from Valerie to get out of the house.

So we assume that Valerie knew something about this case.

Though Drew has dropped a potential bombshell on the investigation, police remain cautious of trusting him completely.

You start casting a little bit of suspicion on him and who's he protecting?

Is he protecting himself?

So we were always a little skeptical of Drew,

but we wanted to talk to Valerie.

While officers scour the city for Valerie, detectives develop theories based on the location of the crime.

Every good neighborhood in Stockton has a bad neighborhood a few blocks away.

And where the house was is just a few blocks away from a street which has historically been associated with a certain amount of violent crime.

There seems to be a lot of gang activity in town and a lot of drug trade.

The location of the city on both the I-5 and 99 freeways, I think, is a contributor because that plays a role in drug trafficking.

Could Jeff be involved in the neighborhood's shady underbelly?

A search of police records reveals minor drug busts in Jeff's past.

He'd had a medical condition and because of that medical condition got involved in illegal drugs.

While he was in the Coast Guard, he had a bad fall and hurt his knee pretty bad and he had his first knee surgery and then he had another fall, re-injured his knee.

He became addicted to pain pills, then the VA took him off of pain pills and

he resorted to street drugs.

He tried really hard a few times and there were times where he was clean.

But he always fell back.

That affected his life in every single way.

Financially, ties with the family.

He got arrested a couple of times.

Could Jeff's small-time drug use have really led to such a violent death?

Detectives hope the answer lies with Jeff's missing roommate, Valerie Nessler.

Finding Valerie was primary.

We needed to talk to her, find out what her side of the story was.

Coming up, detectives tracked down Valerie.

We confronted her with, wait a second, you warned Drew to get out of the house.

And details of an alleged kidnapping begin to emerge.

They weren't going to let somebody who was a witness live.

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In April 2010, investigators in Stockton, California are looking into the brutal murder of 48-year-old Jeff Wheatley.

The most immediate concern is locating Jeff's missing roommate, Valerie Nessler.

Forensics was off.

It was all sent out for the crime lab.

So our concern was to find her and confirm she's okay and two, take a statement from her.

Late on the evening of April 7th, detectives locate Valerie alive and well and bring her to the station for questioning.

We told her that Jeff was dead and she was emotional.

She initially said she knew nothing about it.

Then, detectives ask about the call she supposedly made to her live-in landlord, Drew.

We confronted her with, wait a second, you warned Drew to get out of the house.

That's when Valerie changes her tune.

She said, I was in the house, two guys come barging through the door, kick down the door, and I run.

I was so scared, I ran.

The question for detectives is, why would someone be targeting Jeff?

Clearly, whoever did this to Jeff came with extreme prejudice.

They weren't going to let somebody who was a witness live.

They were prepared to kill Jeff, so we sat there going, yo, there's got to be something more.

We thought she wasn't giving us the full story.

Pressed for descriptions of the assailants, Valerie admits she did recognize one of the men as someone who runs in her same circle.

She mentioned the name AJ, and then we we put together A.J.

Perryman.

Detectives hope finding AJ will shed some light on what Valerie has told them.

They were all suspicious of Valerie's story from the beginning, but they had nothing to hold her on, so they had to let her go.

Detectives immediately issue an APB for AJ Perryman, and it's not long before patrol officers are leading him into the station.

Before they begin the interview, detectives run a quick check on AJ's car.

Detective George ran the license plate, and sure enough, Officer Seriram of the Lodi Police Department had stopped the car that night while the fire was going on.

He didn't write a report because all he'd found was a meth pipe.

Investigators start their interview with AJ by questioning him about the traffic stop the night of the murder.

A.J.

Perryman said, I picked up these guys.

I didn't know what had happened.

But since Valerie has already pointed the finger at AJ, police believe he knows more than he's letting on.

So we process his car and all the carpets are gone and the car's been bleached out.

I mean, it's been washed clean.

Inside,

why are you cleaning your car out?

Unless you knew what had just happened or what that car was involved with or the people in your car.

So to me, that was significant to pin part of the culpability on A.J.

Perryman.

We had arrested him, and that interview ended like that.

But we still got to develop the physical evidence.

Detectives then turned to Officer Nick Serirem to get more information about A.J.

Perryman's traffic stop the night of the murder.

I was on patrol, just a normal night, and I noticed a car that seemed to be trying to get away from me.

From there, I just got behind the vehicle.

It made a quick U-turn, pulled onto a side street in a residential area,

and the front seat passenger ended up running from the vehicle.

Experience dictated Seri Rem's next move.

I know it's important to stick with the car, make sure there's no threats in the car, and then just try and gather as much intelligence as to who ran and why.

Officer Seriram tells detectives that when he spoke to the driver, AJ, there was another passenger in the vehicle.

Sitting there in the rear passenger seat was Valerie Nestler.

She said she just fled and hunkered down and hid somewhere.

Well, now we've got definitive proof that she's lying about that.

Sari Ram ordered Valerie and AJ to identify the man who ran.

He said, what was the name of the guy that fled?

And I forget the name she gave him, but she gave him a fake name.

When his vehicle search turned up drug paraphernalia, Seri Ram's experience led him to one conclusion.

My presumption was that the passenger who ran had a warrant.

I didn't think it was anything major.

News of this traffic stop cements Valerie Nessler as a key suspect.

We knew she lied to us on the April 7th interview.

So she was lying before, she's lying now.

What else is she lying about?

Investigators turn up the heat on Valerie.

She was brought in for further questioning.

Just, you know, your typical, hey, we need to clarify additional information.

Valerie admits there is more to the story.

She tells detectives that after AJ and the other man killed Jeff, they kidnapped her.

She was now changing her story in that not only they come in and bust through the door, and she fled, she says now they bust in the door and now they took me with them.

And I fled in the car with them.

She also reveals the real name of the second male attacker, the man Officer Serirum watched sprint from AJ's car during the traffic stop.

She gave up in that interview a guy named Robert Turner.

Like Valerie, Robert Turner was a child of tragedy.

Robert has two brothers and a sister.

He is the baby of the family.

His father died when he was five years old and I know that impacted him.

Robert's older brother Moose did his best to fill in for their absent dad until in 1994 Moose died from a gunshot wound.

Robert was like 16 years old and

it was very sudden and tragic.

Everything looked

like

it was an accidental discharge.

It affected my Uncle Robert a lot because he had already lost his father.

So now the oldest man of the family is gone now, too.

He stayed with me.

Then he was working like two jobs.

He was doing really well.

And then I believe he got laid off of one job and then he pretty much gave up.

He started hanging out with that crowd and started doing drugs.

Valerie, AJ, and Jeff all ran in the same circles because they all partied together and they saw each other a lot.

Now, Valerie Nessler is implicating Robert in a heinous crime.

Valerie told detectives that Robert was one of the men who had killed Jeff Wheatley.

A record search confirms that at least part of Valerie's news story could be true.

A 33-year-old Robert Turner in their database fits her description to the letter.

We put out warrants for Robert and, well, we had people looking for Robert Turner everywhere.

A bolo for Robert Turner goes out to all surrounding counties.

I was at home with my kids and I received a phone call to turn the TV on

because my uncle Robert was on the news.

He was wanted for murder of a man in Stockton.

Coming up, a cornered fugitive makes a cry for help.

I could hear

desperation in his voice.

He sounds almost hysterical, upset, remorseful, lost.

And a motive emerges.

They could have believed he had been responsible for the death of Robert Turner's brother.

Detectives in Stockton, California are getting to the bottom of the brutal slaying of 48-year-old Jeff Wheatley.

Jeff's roommate, Valerie Nessler, told police that A.J.

Perryman and Robert Turner killed Jeff and kidnapped her.

But in the eyes of detectives, Valerie is walking a tightrope between witness and suspect.

The detectives, Detective George and Villanueva, they're like,

she's good for this.

Let's arrest her.

I'm like, well, we don't have enough yet.

Meanwhile, the hunt is on for 33-year-old Robert Turner.

We had Shasta County Sheriff's deputies looking for him up there, driving past his old places of residence.

We had people driving past and the marshals looking for him down in Stockton.

I just watched the news as much as I could to find out what had been going on.

I was shocked that he was wanted for murder.

Finally, detectives receive the news they've been waiting for from their own switchboard.

Robert Turner walked into the detective's building and turned himself in.

In custody, Turner confesses that a phone call to his family gave him the courage to surrender.

My Uncle Robert called me and was crying.

I could hear desperation in his voice.

He sound almost hysterical,

upset, remorseful, lost.

I told him to turn himself in.

But his family's help is the only thing Robert will admit.

He had invoked his right to remain silent.

He didn't say anything.

To investigators' relief, Robert didn't have to speak in order to demonstrate his guilt.

We were looking for somebody who had a cut on his hand.

And Robert Turner turns himself in.

He's got that cut across his finger

that was very deep and consistent with thrusting a knife down, hitting a hard object like a bone, and then having your hand slide down.

Before we even had the DNA back, I knew we had our guy.

Police are convinced that both Robert Turner and Valerie Nessler are directly involved in Jeff Wheatley's murder.

But until conclusive DNA evidence comes back from lab analysis, they can only hold Turner.

In about two months, we had what we believe to be the balance of the forensic evidence.

Finally, in mid-June, blood swabs taken from the murder weapons confirm what investigators believe about the wound on Turner's hand.

The knife had Robert Turner's blood on it from being cut during that stabbing process.

That's unassailable forensic evidence, so I felt very confident in our theory of the case.

Another big break in the case comes with the lab results from the latex glove found in Valerie's bedroom.

DNA analysis would show that not only did the glove have Ms.

Nessler's DNA on it, but the blood on it was Jeff Wheatley's.

We're pretty excited.

We are vindicated and that we're going to go forward and we're going to hold these people responsible.

As for Valerie and Jeff's other roommate, Drew Payette, the evidence is

Drew's story checked out, and clearly as we are developing the forensics, nothing pointed towards Drew.

With Drew Payette cleared, Stockton detectives bring Valerie in on June 23rd for what they hope will be her final interview.

We already had a game plan that we are going to press her.

and we're going to confront her with the forensic evidence.

After going over her story once again, investigators spring their trap.

The detective slid a picture over to Valerie of Jeff in the house, how we found his body.

She started screaming

and crying

and wailing.

And then like a fountain, she just turned it off.

It was the most fake scream and cry I'd ever heard.

And I knew she was crumbling.

From there, she said she had participated in it and she had stabbed him.

But Valerie's confession comes with a caveat.

She said I only stabbed him a couple times and she completely tried to play up that I was fearful of Robert Turner and A.J.

Perryman, and if I didn't go along and do what they said, that they'd hurt me.

She clearly is trying to put all culpability on Robert Turner and A.J.

Perryman.

Just what was Valerie's role in the killing?

And why did Jeff have to die in such a gruesome and painful way?

According to Valerie, the answer lies in her friend Robert Turner's tragic past.

Valerie Nessler and Robert Turner had developed a theory that Mr.

Wheatley had been responsible for the death of Robert Turner's brother some many years before.

According to Valerie, Jeff told her he'd killed a man the same year that Robert's brother Moose died.

There might have been some allegations that the victim at one point had been bragging to Valerie about a killing that he was involved in in 1994.

And Valerie ended up telling Mr.

Turner that the victim had said that.

Mr.

Turner then theorized that the victim killed his brother and at that point came up with a plot to kill him.

Robert knew he and Valerie couldn't carry out their plan alone and reached out to A.J.

Perriman for help.

Mr.

Perriman appeared to have some loyalty to Mr.

Turner and

was at least

protective.

By the time the interrogation ends, Valerie is in handcuffs.

She's immediately arrested and booked for the murder of Jeff Wheelie.

Coming up, prosecutors fight to disprove one killing in order to get justice for another.

I had to reopen a murder investigation.

And a gruesome play-by-play in court leaves a jury stunned.

The DA brought out a knife that was bent completely around.

They poured gas on him as part of that torture process.

By June 2010, detectives in Stockton, California have three suspects in custody in the brutal murder of 48-year-old Jeff Wheatley.

But in order to convict them, prosecutors need to be confident of the motive.

My Uncle Robert did believe that the victim was involved with the death of my Uncle Moose.

Prosecutor Mark Ott now has two investigations rolled into one, Jeff Wheatley's murder and the 1994 death of Robert Turner's beloved brother, Moose.

I had to reopen a murder investigation.

I had to bring all the forensics back, bring all the detectives.

I wanted to prove that Jeff Wheatley had nothing to do with that killing.

Investigators quickly discover that Jeff Wheatley wasn't even in the same state as Moose at the time of his death.

According to Wendy, his sister, he was in the Merchant Marine in Atlanta, Georgia, so clearly could have never been part of that.

By June 2011, San Joaquin County prosecutors have secured murder indictments against both Robert Turner and Valerie Nessler.

I did a double jury, one jury to decide Robert Turner's fate, one jury to decide Valerie Nessler's fate.

You put on the exact same evidence.

I had to do Alan Perryman's trial after I did Valerie and Robert's together.

Prosecutors carefully walk the spellbound jurors through exactly what happened on the night of Jeff Wheatley's murder.

The DA brought out a saw-off shotgun.

He brought out a knife that was bent completely around

and brought out a gas can.

All three of the defendants kick in the door.

They immediately go to the right,

and Jeff is in the kitchen.

I believe Robert Turner immediately fires two rounds from a saw-off shotgun.

It hit him pretty solid.

It knocked him down.

It didn't kill him right away.

So they needed to do something about that.

There was a kitchen drawer where all the steak knives were kept.

They got those knives and proceeded to stab Jeff.

Robert Turner took the kitchen knives and tortured him to try to get him to confess to killing his brother 10 years earlier.

Then they poured gas on him as part of that torture process.

Jeff survived the torture, but there would be no way to survive what happened next.

They flick the match on him, and he goes up in a fireball.

Prosecutors present proof that Robert Turner's twisted attempt at justice was directed at the wrong man.

They allege Valerie got the ball rolling when she convinced Robert that Jeff killed his brother Moose.

She had spun up Robert Turner about Jeff Wheatley killing Moose to be part of a drama.

There was a kind of foliad between the two of them that just spun and spun and spun and magnified and resulted in this terrible crime.

Valerie takes the stand and points the finger elsewhere.

Valerie Nessler's defense was that she was under arrest.

The defense attorneys, they want to do everything they can to focus on Robert Turner and not focus on her.

She said that she was forced into it,

that if she didn't participate in the stabbing, that they were going to hurt her.

Then, in the middle of the trial, a jailer intercepts a note within the courthouse holding cells.

It was a note from Robert Turner to Valerie Nessler that said, if you put $10,000 on my books, I'll get on the stand and say, I did it all.

You had nothing to do with it.

They read it in court, and he told her she was like a sister to him, and he would take the fall.

Well, if she was innocent, there's no need for him to say, I'll take the fall.

Valerie's already weak defense crumbles.

You're saying you're afraid of this guy.

You're saying that he's the evil one, that you're not working with him.

You're still working with him.

And so I use that incredibly powerful evidence against Valerie Nestler that

she wasn't afraid of him, that this wasn't a duress

type situation.

On July 20th, Robert's jury announces their verdict.

Robert Turner was convicted of first-degree murder, but I had special circumstances alleged that were found true, which gives him life without the possibility of parole.

So Robert Turner will never get a parole date.

A few days later, Valerie is also found guilty and sentenced to 26 years in jail.

The possibility that Valerie may someday see life outside of prison sours the victory for Jeff's family.

She got less than she deserved.

She should have gotten the same sentence as Robert Turner.

This was by far the most brutal murder case that I ever worked on.

They're all brutal.

They're all terrible.

You know,

a loved one is no longer with us, but

the rage that was demonstrated, it was just beyond imagination.

It was so terrible.

It's hard to mourn and be angry at the same time.

Now I think of Jeff with happy memories, but I think of that trial and I have a lot of anger at them.

How stupid and unnecessary and ridiculous.

Valerie Nessler is currently serving 26 years to life at the Central California Women's Facility.

She will be eligible for parole in November of 2027 at the age of 43.

A.J.

Parraman was found guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years to life.

The official cause of Robert's brother, Moose's death, remains an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot.

for more information on snapped go to oxygen.com

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