Helen Moore

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Bravos, the real housewives of Salt Lake City are back.

Here we are, ladies.

I don't like it.

And they're taking things to the next level.

You know, some people just get on your nerves.

You questioned every single thing I have.

You're supposed to be my sister.

I am your sister.

I know you're not.

We have to be honest about this.

I'm afraid.

You should pay the closures off.

No one sues the bottom.

They all go for the top.

Can I have the crazy pill that y'all took?

Apparently, you're already taking it.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, September 16th, I'm Bravo.

And streaming, I'm Peacock.

After losing her husband to cancer, Helen Moore was suddenly the sole support for her four kids.

Helen felt totally alone.

She wondered how she gonna raise these children by herself.

But then the widow met a local cowboy named named Casey Elliott.

We just ended up dating.

We went to rodeos, rode horses, and worked cattle.

I think it was more of a rebound.

But after almost five years together, their relationship came to a sudden and dramatic end.

I just told him to get out.

I just don't want you in this house anymore.

She indicated to us that Casey left in a huff.

And he'd never be seen again.

At least, not alive.

We got a call that a body had been found out on Possum Kingdom Lake.

To have someone murdered and their body dismembered, it was beyond comprehension.

It was missing the head.

It was something like out of a horror movie.

But where was the rest of Casey?

The other pieces had to be out there somewhere.

How had he died?

When they did the toxicology, they found it morphine.

23 times what would be considered a lethal dose.

And why is Helen changing her story after more than 20 years?

I'm not going to live in fear anymore.

January 21st, 1996, Possum Kingdom Lake.

A man-made reservoir more than an hour west of Fort Worth, Texas.

For the most part, Possum Kingdom Lake lives up to its name.

It's the center of a scrubby wilderness full of prickly cactus, white-tailed deer, and of course, possums.

It is very rugged.

It's always been a favorite place for people to build cabins and go fishing and swimming and hunting.

Whether they have permission to be there or not.

Landowners had a lot of trouble with poachers and trespassers.

So when a local landowner saw tire tracks leading into his woods that Sunday morning, he assumed that poachers had been at it again.

They had had problems with deer hunters in that area, so he walked up in there to investigate.

And his suspicions appeared to be confirmed as he neared the lake shore.

From a distance, he thought he saw a butchered deer carcass.

But once he got closer, the landowner realized that the bloody object half hidden in the tall grass grass wasn't a dead deer.

It was part of a human body.

The body of a male with the head missing, the hands missing, and the legs missing.

Horrified, the landowner rushed back home and called 911.

And when deputies from the Palo Pinto County Sheriff's Office arrived at the scene, They faced what appeared to be an almost insurmountable task, establishing the dead man's identity.

Normally you can check for fingerprints, dental records.

When you dismember a body, you remove the normal sources of identification.

However, there was one thing about the dead man that the dismemberment couldn't disguise.

He was a large man, obviously very heavy.

And when the Palo Pinto deputies looked into it, they discovered that a missing person's report had been filed barely 24 hours earlier in neighboring Young County concerning a man named Casey Elliott.

Casey Elliott was described as a Caucasian male with a very large frame approaching 300 pounds.

If the two cases were connected, investigators would have a mystery on their hands.

How did the cowboy who had disappeared five days earlier end up dismembered?

And could his live-in girlfriend, 41-year-old Helen Moore, help them solve his murder?

Born in 1954, Helen Hardin grew up outside of Graham, Texas, an hour and a half west of Fort Worth in the heart of cattle country.

I was raised on a farm ranch.

We did a little bit of everything, taking care of cattle.

We raced horses, I trained horses, we did everything.

She's been around horses, animals all of her life.

And by the time Helen finished high school, she had a collection of barrel racing trophies and had even been crowned rodeo queen.

She was just a country girl typical of small-town Texas.

Her relationships were pretty typical for small-town Texas, too.

Her and her first husband was married very young, right out of high school.

The marriage didn't last, though.

And a second short marriage also ended in divorce.

They got along real good in the beginning.

And then he got to running around on her.

Helen's very unlucky in love.

She couldn't find a man

to love her and to stick around.

So by the late 70s, Helen was a single mother of two working to support her family.

I worked at the livestock place for the auctioneers.

And then I helped do the cell barn.

I helped run tickets.

But then in 1979, the struggling 24-year-old's life took a very different turn when she met a hardworking landscaper named Terry Moore.

He was a very good Christian man, godly man, and he doted on Helen's four-year-old daughter and infant son.

He treated Helen's kids like his own.

After the couple married in 1988, Helen and Terry had two more boys.

She started working in his landscaping business and she joined Terry's church.

We were youth directors.

We was very involved in our church.

It was a family church.

It was family-oriented, a very nice church.

But in 1990, after 11 years together, the devoted couple received devastating news.

Terry had melanoma.

And it was terminal.

There was nothing the doctors could do.

Her husband was sent home.

in a hospice situation with morphine and instructions to the family on how to administer dosages.

For the next few months, Helen stayed by Terry's side, doing everything she could to make him comfortable.

Helen was essentially his round-the-clock nurse.

And in November of 1990, Terry passed away in her arms.

After Terry's death, Helen felt totally alone.

She wondered how she was going to raise these children by herself.

Only 36 years old, with her future uncertain and her husband gone, Helen fell into a deep depression.

We quit going to church and quit going to church.

They didn't know what to do with the widow and four children.

And since she and Terry had given up their landscaping business when he got sick, she was soon struggling to get by.

She did odd jobs, yard work, worked cattle for herself and for other people.

But less than a year after Terry's death, Helen would have the chance to make a fresh start.

It was 1991 when Casey Elliott came knocking on Helen's door and asked if he could use her bathroom.

Casey Elliott was the local cowboy.

The well went out at the ranch where he was working at.

And Helen, with typical small-town friendliness, said yes.

After that, Casey stopped by regularly for the next few weeks, even after his well was repaired.

He was always around my boys and always doing wanting to do stuff with them.

Helen was more than happy to have a father figure in her sons lives.

He was a good guy, really likable.

More than one person referred to him as being a gentle giant.

And the more Casey came around, the more Helen realized that she and the gentle giant had a lot in common.

He had at least more than a casual interest in rodeoing and involving children in rodeo activities.

And before long, Helen and Casey had become an item.

I don't know, we just ended up dating.

I think it was more of a rebound than anything from Terry.

It may have started that way, just a fling to take Helen's mind off the loss of her husband, but it quickly turned into something more.

One thing led to another and he just started staying more and more at her house.

He ended up just staying.

Although Helen was almost 13 years older than Casey, he filled the hole that Terry's death had left in her life.

We went to rodeos with the children, rode horses and worked cattle.

We roped.

My kids showed goats, show goats, steers.

They showed horses.

Casey, Helen, and her two older kids competed in local rodeos too.

They even built a place in their backyard so they could train for competitions.

It was their life.

And much like Terry before him, Casey all but adopted Helen's children, especially her two young sons.

Over the next several years, he taught the boys to ride, shoot, and raise animals.

He seemed to be like just a good old hardworking cowboy type.

He exemplified some of those typical traits.

It's a salt of the earth folk living here in Young County.

He didn't always work as a cowboy, though.

To help support Helen's kids, Casey took a job with a steadier paycheck.

He was an 18-wheeler truck driver.

He drove across the country.

The company that he worked for principally was a cattle-hauling business.

And while Casey was often on the road for days at a time, Helen stayed home and looked after the kids, the couple's small ranch, and their herd.

We had animals, we had horses.

But just like her first two marriages that ended in divorce, Helen's new boyfriend was about to go astray.

Coming up, was Helen the last person to see Casey alive?

She indicated to us that Casey left in a huff.

And investigators soon realized the true challenge may be confirming whether they found him.

There were no hands, no teeth, nothing.

On January 20th, 1996, the Young County Sheriff's Office received a call from the father of a local cowboy and trucker named Casey Elliott.

He told the deputies that he hadn't seen or heard from his son in about five days.

He was a long-haul trucker, didn't come back home for a few days.

You know, that's not that uncommon.

However, Casey's father told the deputies that his son's rig was currently parked on the trucking company's lot.

He wasn't on a long-haul truck ride because his truck wasn't missing.

And according to his father, Casey didn't appear to be anywhere else either.

Nobody had seen him for a while.

His father knew for sure that he was missing because the truck was sitting there.

So the next day, January 21st, investigators with the Young County Sheriff's Office contacted Casey's girlfriend, 41-year-old Helen Moore.

Helen Moore was living with Casey Elliott at the time.

The investigators and law enforcement authorities first made contact with Helen after the missing person's report was filed.

The deputies knocked on Helen's door, hoping to get some information on Casey's whereabouts.

Helen was very cooperative the first time we went out there.

Not that she could tell them much about where Casey was.

I didn't have a clue.

I mean, I was wondering why I never heard from him.

And according to Helen, the reason he left explained why she hadn't reported him missing.

According to Helen, the beginning of her relationship with Casey had been good, but things had quickly deteriorated.

I can look back now and see there wasn't anything positive in it.

Helen said that between what she made off their small ranch, and what Casey brought in driving a cattle truck, money had gotten tight.

They were having trouble making the rent and keeping the lights on.

And according to Helen, that led to trouble between her and Casey.

She indicated that they fussed about finances.

They had some money problems.

Problems that had apparently reached a breaking point on January 15th.

Helen said that when Casey came home that Monday, she'd confronted him about their growing stack of unpaid bills.

and he'd blown up in response, shouting that he worked hard while she stayed home home and did nothing.

He had had some unkind remarks to make about in the house.

According to Helen, he said he'd never seen the place so filthy.

Casey's insults had made Helen furious.

I just told him to get out, but I told him don't care what happens where you go.

I just don't want you in this house anymore.

And when Helen returned home from work the next day, Casey was gone.

She said that he had just walked off and left.

And despite the fact that no one had seen or heard from him in more than five days, Helen wasn't all that worried.

She indicated to us that when Casey left, he was in a huff.

She was telling us that he had walked off, but that he would be back.

Or would he?

Five days was a fairly long huff.

But the deputies had no real reason to doubt what Helen told them.

Her reputation was okay in the community.

She seemed to be be a likable person, a normal person, and not have a lot of problems.

And she didn't appear to have anything to hide.

She told us to come on in.

I and a couple other deputies looked around and we really didn't see anything.

But even as the deputies were getting ready to leave,

they got some unexpected news over the radio in their patrol car.

We got a call that a body had been found out on Possum Kingdom Lake.

Possum Kingdom Lake was a remote reservoir a half hour away in neighboring Palo Pinto County.

It's a very popular recreational lake.

There are places down there where you could kind of get lost if you wanted to.

But earlier that day, a rancher on the reservoir's western shore had found a dismembered corpse on his property.

The torso itself had nothing to identify.

There were no hands, no teeth, nothing that would get anything from it.

However, what the authorities did find was enough to suggest that the headless and limbless torso could be Casey.

Casey was over 300 pounds and it was very obvious that this body was of

over a 300-pound man.

Had the missing man been found?

The investigators drove out to the lake to see for themselves.

It was quite a shock when we pulled up and that pasture out on Possum Kingdom and the torso was there.

Whoever the dead man was, it appeared that he had been killed elsewhere.

There wasn't a lot of blood on the ground.

It didn't look like he had been killed at the scene.

However, there was a set of fairly fresh tire tracks leading from the road to where the body lay half hidden in a grassy clearing.

The tracks made a circle back and came out.

And then during that circle is when they dropped and unloaded the body.

Although there were bits of manure and hay scattered around and clinging to the dismembered torso, suggesting it hadn't been lifted out of the trunk of a car or from the bed bed of a truck.

I saw dried animal manure, you know, from livestock, cat manure.

As far as I know, there wasn't any cattle in the area.

We suspected that the body had been hauled there in the horse trailer.

Of course, in West Texas, practically everyone had a horse or cattle trailer.

However, there was at least one clue that could narrow things down a bit.

The cow manure, horse manure around him, had red flanks of paint in it.

But while the red paint might help identify the trailer, positively identifying the body as Casey still presented a challenge.

Not having dental records or fingerprints to possibly or potentially identify this individual, DNA was the next viable option.

Although in 1996, the technique was still in its infancy.

I remember Sheriff Pettis saying that they were going to send off some skin samples or something, going to do this DNA testing.

And I was going like, what?

What?

What is DNA?

The test results could take weeks.

Testing the early 90s.

It was very laborious.

It took quite a bit of time to develop profiles.

So while technicians from the coroner's office loaded up the torso for autopsy, the young and Palo Pinto County deputies began searching the lake shore.

You have this dismembered torso, so naturally you want to look for other body parts.

We had

cadaver dogs coming in.

We had people on horseback searching.

They even brought in a dive team.

Their thinking was, well, let's see if we can find more body parts in the water.

And while the search continued, news of the gruesome discovery spread.

How do you conceive of something like that happening, especially here in our peaceful little town?

It's just, it was just shocking.

Murders are relatively uncommon in this part of the world.

But while the public struggled to process the horrific crime, the investigators had a few theories about what might have caused it.

Our assumption was there's probably some kind of dope deal where they were trying to hide the body.

However, cross-border drug cartels weren't the only ones who might butcher a body and dump it in the wilderness.

Another theory had the investigators wondering if the murder could be the work of a serial killer.

There were, oddly enough, in a small rural jurisdiction, a couple of missing persons reports.

Were there more victims hidden away in the wilderness around Possum Kingdom Lake?

We just started searching and looking in the searching pastures, looking in creeks.

Or would new evidence lead the search for Casey's killer closer to home?

Coming up, the autopsy leads to a surprising discovery.

It was enough to kill a man, even a man the size of Casey.

And the investigators connect the dots.

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By the end of January 1996, it had been more than a week since Casey Elliott's father had called the Young County, Texas Sheriff's Office to report the 28-year-old cowboy and trucker missing.

And it had been two weeks since he'd apparently walked out on his live-in girlfriend, 41-year-old Helen Moore.

Helen told us when we first started the investigation that the reason he got mad and left, walked off was that they were fighting about money.

The investigators suspected he was never coming back.

A day after the 300-pound cowboy was reported missing, the dismembered torso of a large white male was found near Possum Kingdom Lake in neighboring Palo Pinto County.

It didn't take much of a leap, even missing the head, the hands, and the legs, to assume that that torso probably matched Casey Elliott.

Although official confirmation would require DNA testing and time.

In 1996, we were using a high molecular weight DNA process.

It was much more time consuming.

It also required a larger sample of a biological fluid or a sample to produce a DNA profile.

An effort was made and was successful in obtaining DNA

for comparison from family members.

And while the DNA testing had yet to confirm that the remains were Casey's, the autopsy of the torso did have some interesting things to reveal.

First off, whoever had dismembered the body had done an expert job, severing the head and limbs cleanly at the joints.

Whoever killed Casey knew how to butcher an animal.

However, that wasn't the most interesting thing the autopsy revealed.

When they did the toxicology, they found morphine.

And they found a lot of it, too.

Toxicology report indicated as much as 23 times as much as what would be considered a lethal dose.

It was enough morphine to kill a man, even a man the size of Casey.

Although, while the torso showed no injuries beyond the dismemberment, the medical examiner couldn't determine an exact cause of death.

It's possible due to the missing body parts that his throat could have been cut.

Due to the dismemberment, the investigators couldn't really confirm if that was how he died.

But they had identified a suspect.

They were focused on Helen Moore.

And the reason had to do with the morphine found in the dead man's system.

Mrs.

Moore's previous husband was a victim of cancer.

He died at home and the doctors treating him prescribed morphine to control his pain in the final days.

The doctor had prescribed the morphine, but it was Helen who administered it.

She knew how to inject morphine.

The doctors showed her how to use it.

And the investigators didn't think it was a coincidence that a body fitting Casey's description had turned up with a lethal dose of the drug in his system.

We were pretty sure at that time that she had probably given him morphine.

And that's probably what had killed him.

The question was, could they prove it?

While they waited for the results of the DNA analysis, the investigators paid another visit to Helen's ranch.

She gave us access to her property.

I and a couple other deputies went out there several times and looked around.

And searching the barns behind the house, they noticed something interesting about Helen and Casey's horse trailer.

It just so happens that the floor of the trailer was red.

That was just one more piece of evidence to put together with everything else that we got that was pointing toward her.

One of the law enforcement officers discovered red paint flecks.

in the manure droppings at the dump site.

The paint wasn't the only thing connecting Helen's trailer to the pasture at Possum Kingdom Lake, where the killer had left Casey's body.

The body was dumped in a prickly pear patch.

We found prickly pears in the tires that indicated that that trailer had been out there where the body was found.

While the paint and the prickly pear spines put the trailer at the dump site, proving it had been used to haul the body might be difficult.

Everything was washed and kind of clean.

But had the person who had hosed out the trailer been thorough enough?

Because when the investigators took a closer look, they made an important discovery.

Deputy Martin went in and cut planks out of the bottom of that trailer and turned them over and they found blood.

That blood was sent to the lab for DNA purposes.

And while they didn't yet know if it was Casey's blood, what the investigators found was enough to bring Helen in for questioning.

I interviewed her in my office at the Sheriff's Department here.

During the questioning, Helen told the investigators that she had used her horse trailer recently, and she admitted that she had hosed blood off of the floorboards.

But Helen calmly explained that it wasn't human blood that the investigators had found on the underside of the trailer.

She said her pet pig had been attacked by a dog when it was in such bad shape that they had to kill it.

They said they found blood in the trailer and that's how it was in there.

And since for the moment, the investigators had no way of proving otherwise, they let Helen go.

We didn't really believe it all

that much, but it was feasible.

However, on February 9th, the investigators would confirm one of their suspicions once they got the DNA results for the dismembered torso found near Possum Kingdom Lake.

From the torso, we were able to

develop a DNA profile and compare it to the biological mother and biological father of Casey.

And the DNA actually was able to identify him.

It was, in fact, Casey Elliott.

Three weeks after he disappeared, the missing cowboy had finally been found.

It was hard on the community, coming from a small community like this where everybody kind of appreciates everybody else.

In addition to the DNA, the lab also tested the floorboards taken from Helen's trailer.

The boards of the trailer tested preserved pasta for blood, for pig blood.

But pig's blood wasn't all that the tests revealed.

One of the samples did test pasta for human blood.

And not just any humans, according to the DNA analysis.

The blood that was on the boards, the underside of the boards of the trailer was proven by DNA analysis to be Casey Elliott's blood.

It wasn't quite a smoking gun, but it was close enough for the authorities.

A very strong circumstantial fence just gradually closed around Helen.

And on March 19th, 10 days after Casey's closed casket funeral, the investigators placed her under arrest.

Helen showed no emotion when we put the cuffs on her.

She wasn't answering any more questions either.

They started questioning me.

They were saying, well, you did this, you did that.

I just, I didn't do it, so I never thought I would go to prison.

If you didn't didn't do something, you're innocent until proven guilty.

That's not the way it is anymore.

But was her decision to stop talking too little, too late?

Because the day after her arrest, the investigators descended on the ranch one last time with a warrant to search inside the house.

When we searched the house, we found morphine.

The morphine helped to tighten the ring of evidence closing in on Helen Moore.

Coming up, is the evidence as airtight as the prosecutors believe?

There was a pretty wide discrepancy between her size and his size.

Or will the case take an unexpected turn?

I expected it to be a war in the courtroom.

By the end of March 1996, it had been almost two and a half months since Casey Elliott's dismembered torso had been found dumped at a rural reservoir outside the small town of Graham, Texas.

And it had been almost two weeks since the authorities arrested Casey's girlfriend, 41-year-old Helen Moore, and charged her with murder.

There was forensic evidence, there was circumstantial evidence, and all of it pointed to Helen Moore.

Still, Helen swore she was innocent.

She was telling us that she didn't do it, that he had walked off.

Something else had to be behind the whole thing.

Because it's not something

that Helen would do.

It just, it wasn't in her

to do something like that.

Not that her claims of innocence had any impact on the investigators.

I was convinced that she committed the crime.

There was

a lot of evidence collected and statements given that just continuously pointed toward her.

And they hadn't given up on finding the rest of Casey's remains either.

They'd found the torso, but they knew the other pieces had to be out there somewhere.

We sent deputies and teams out to look at all the bridges and all those places that she could throw things off.

And on March 31st, while checking a bridge just a few miles from Helen's Ranch, the investigators may have finally caught a break.

The sheriff and I, we saw a black bag down in the bottom of the creek.

Policeman's intuition, I suppose, and he said, let's go down there and check that out.

He reached out into the creek and the bag ripped slightly and it revealed a human ear.

And of course, we knew then that we had found his head.

He was, you know, taken aback.

Even though they were basically looking for body parts, I don't think he really expected to find a human head inside that bag.

And digging into the couple's troubled finances had revealed another surprise.

Helen had never hidden the fact that money was a problem for her and Casey.

Helen told us that she and Casey had fought over money.

But despite what appeared to be a a very tight budget, the couple had made one purchase that caught the investigators' attention.

She had taken a $150,000 insurance policy out of him within the last few months before he passed away.

She was listed as the sole beneficiary of the life insurance policy.

So if her intent had been to collect on that, that would be pretty strong motivation.

We had a financial motive, direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, and of course forensics.

I was convinced that it was an extremely strong case.

One that just might cost Helen her life.

Texas law at that time only offered two possible punishments, and death penalty was one of them.

But would a jury hesitate to send a mother of four to death row?

Not if the mood around town was any indication.

People in Graham wanted Helen to get the same lethal injection that she had given Casey.

We're not that far removed from the days of public hangings.

Or was there still room for the defense to make a case for reasonable doubt?

There was a pretty wide discrepancy between her size and his size.

How are jurors, how are lay people going to deal with this notion that she was too small to to pull this off with such a large man.

As spring turned to summer with Helen's trial date rapidly approaching, the prosecutors fully expected a fight.

Her lawyer had been very aggressive, very thorough, very confrontational, and I expected it to be a war in the courtroom.

But then in August of 1996, the prosecutors received an unexpected call from Helen's defense attorney.

In the days immediately before the trial was scheduled to start, discussions developed about perhaps Helen was willing to plead guilty.

Helen's sudden reversal caught the prosecutors and investigators entirely by surprise.

Up until that point, she denied that she had done anything.

That realization of the death penalty was still an option.

That's what, if anything, led her to confess.

That and her belief that the prosecutors would get it, according to Helen.

I knew I couldn't get justice from where where the trial was held because of all the publicity on it.

However, while Helen was convinced that a conviction was all but guaranteed, the authorities weren't so sure.

You never know what a jury's going to do.

So after conferring with Casey's family, the prosecutor agreed to make a deal on one condition.

I took the capital count off the table.

and recommended that if she would plead guilty and elocute, tell us how it happened and what she did with the rest of the body parts, that I would recommend to the court a conviction for murder with a life sentence.

At the end of August, Helen sat down with the investigators and prosecutors and proceeded to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear.

She not only confessed to the killing, but she provided certain details of how she gradually administered morphine to him.

He had been sick with a cold or flu-like symptoms, and she was the one taking care of him, and that she had administered dosages of morphine.

Slowly, over several days, she had poisoned him.

And on the morning of January 16th, Casey lay unconscious in their bed.

She indicated that she administered the final dose to him, then took the young children who resided in the home to school.

According to Helen's confession, Casey was dead by the time she returned home.

And while the children were in school, she tackled the most difficult part of the job, moving his 300-pound body.

She secured a tarp and laid it next to the bed and rolled Casey's large body off of the bed onto the tarp.

And then she took a lariat rope and ran the lariat rope out of the bedroom around the corner through the little kitchen and out to the back porch stoop.

She backed the horse trailer up to the back door,

unhitched it, ran the rope through the horse trailer,

and tied the end of the lariat rope to the trailer hitch, and then gradually drove away from the horse trailer, thereby dragging Casey's body.

out of the bedroom, around the corner, and out the back door, ultimately into the horse trailer.

And then once Casey's body was was securely in the trailer, the truly gruesome part began.

She indicated that she used a bow saw, if you can imagine, and proceeded to cut Casey's body into eight separate pieces.

Helen cut up his body at his joints just the way you would slaughter a cow.

The body dismembered.

Helen said she'd driven the trailer out to the lake to dump the torso, stopping on the way there and back to dispose of the other body parts.

Those body parts are scattered in different locations.

She couldn't really specify where the other five body parts were.

And according to Helen, she couldn't remember exactly where she dumped the rest of Casey's remains because of what she'd done to get through the grisly business of butchering him.

She had been taking pills, Percadan was her description, and drinking vodka straight.

And the next day, once she'd sobered up, Helen said she'd slaughtered a pig in the trailer to help cover her tracks.

If she slaughtered a pig there, then theoretically, most of that blood would be pig blood.

Helen said she'd also poured bleach in the bloody trailer and then hosed it out.

She did a pretty good job of trying to hide everything.

Just not quite good enough to outsmart the investigators.

They

tied this case together just as well as big city detectives can do.

Once they had Helen's story, the prosecutors held up their end of the bargain.

On August 30th, 1996, Helen formally pled guilty to the murder and dismemberment of Casey Elliott.

She got a life sentence, so she'll be there probably until she passes away.

Even if the 41-year-old was technically eligible for parole.

She couldn't even ask to be considered for parole until after serving 40 years.

For Casey's family, it was the end to a seven-month-long nightmare.

They were happy with the outcome and felt like the person that killed their son was brought to justice.

So I feel good about it.

And around Helen's hometown, most people were pleased that the brutal killer would probably be spending the rest of her life behind bars.

You could almost feel a big sigh of relief in the community knowing that

this has brought it to closure.

That closure has lasted more than 20 years.

But now, will a shocking new claim reopen the case?

Coming up, Helen changes her story.

I'm not going to live in fear anymore.

Could it explain everything?

She was trying to cover up for someone she loved.

By 2016, Helen Moore had spent two decades behind bars for the murder of her boyfriend, Casey Elliott.

In 1996, 1996, she pleaded guilty to killing Casey, dismembering his body, and scattering his remains across Young County, Texas and neighboring areas.

We were pretty pleased that she pled out and took the deal.

But was Helen?

Now serving a life sentence, the 61-year-old says that a guilty plea was her only option.

I decided it the night before I pled guilty because they were, my attorney told me that they was going to go for the death penalty if I didn't.

But now, Helen says it's time to tell her story.

According to Helen's news story, her boyfriend wasn't the gentle giant people believed him to be.

He was abusive, verbal at first, and then it became physical.

And she claims that for almost five years, she'd essentially been a prisoner in her own home.

He did a lot of mental abuse, like, nobody wants you.

You couldn't find anybody else.

If you try to leave me, I'll either hurt you or one of your children.

There's no way Helen could have fought back on Casey because he was just so much bigger than her.

Despite the abuse, Helen said she had nothing to do with killing Casey or dismembering him.

I couldn't do that.

I couldn't do that to a human being.

But if she didn't do it, who did?

According to Helen, one of her teenage children killed Casey.

He was sexually abusive to him.

And according to Helen, rather than see one of her children suffer in prison, she'd sacrificed herself instead.

She was trying to cover up for someone she loved.

I didn't want to put their lives in jeopardy or

fear at that time.

But now, after two decades in prison, Helen says that she's tired of suffering for someone else's crime.

I'm not going to live in fear anymore.

It's an incredible story, but is it the truth?

Her friend Petta Canceler has always believed in Helen's innocence.

I would hope that Helen could get out and get a new,

get a trial, and be able to tell her side of the story.

But the prosecutor who put Helen in prison remains convinced that her original 1996 confession was genuine.

To my knowledge, she was not coerced by anything other than the tightening noose

as the day of reckoning, beginning of her trial, crept closer and closer.

And the fact that Helen had turned on her own children and accused one of them of murder.

To some, it's not much of a surprise, especially considering what she had already done to Casey.

How could one human being do that to another human being?

It was almost like the definition of evil.

Helen Moore will be eligible for parole in 2026 when she's 71 years old.

The rest of Casey Elliott's remains were never found.

Did you see that?

That was crazy.

I love this.

How hard is it to kill a planet?

Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our top.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

There is no accident.

This was 100%

preventable.

They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

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