Misook Wang

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Miss Suk Wang lost her mother when she was just a little girl.

It's hard on anybody not having a mom to rely on.

But when Miss Souk married, her mother-in-law filled the void.

She really looked to Linda as her mom.

Linda thought of Missouk as her daughter.

They were really close.

But then Linda mysteriously disappeared.

I had a bad feeling something happened to her.

It was unlike her not to answer her phone.

Miss Sook appeared as worried as anyone.

Miss Suk said that she had been trying to contact her all day as well.

I could tell that my mom was hurting.

But would a stunning piece of evidence reveal a deadly betrayal?

You can see the shock and surprise on Linda's face.

Crest Hill, Illinois, September 5th, 2011.

It was around 8 o'clock that Monday evening when Larry Tida phoned the police in this quiet bedroom community of 20,000, an hour southwest of Chicago.

It is very safe.

I wouldn't think twice about raising a family here.

Usually.

But Larry was calling that to report that his wife Linda, a 70-year-old Chinese immigrant, was missing.

She worked as an interpreter for a number of businesses up in Chicago.

She also worked as an advocate, assisting new immigrants in almost any way she could.

She would help Asian immigrants in securing loans and getting English classes, starting businesses, and generally realizing their dream of America.

And according to her husband, she'd left home before dawn that morning to drive a new client into Chicago's Chinatown.

She would do this routinely for other Asian American immigrants.

She gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, I'll see you in a little while.

She was supposed to be home back with Larry later that morning.

Linda was supposed to be back by 11 a.m.

But as morning turned to afternoon and his wife hadn't returned, Larry began to worry.

About every hour on the hour, I was phone calling her and leaving messages to call me.

But she never returned any of his calls.

He said it was unlike her not to answer her phone, not to get in contact with him and let him know why she was running late.

And by eight that night, with still no word from Linda, her husband had called the police.

I just couldn't take the more.

Larry's going out of his mind at this point in time.

Was he simply overreacting?

The vast majority of time a missing person's report comes back to the person safe sound.

Or had something happened to the 70-year-old grandmother?

I had a bad feeling.

Linda's husband didn't appear to be alone in his fear either.

In the days ahead, her son and her daughter-in-law, 45-year-old Miss Suk Wang, would all join in the frantic search for the missing grandmother.

Although Although she'd married into a Chinese-American family, Miss Suk's story started in South Korea.

Born in 1965, Miss Suk's mother died when she was just a baby.

It's hard on anybody that would have to go through that, not having a mom to rely on.

And with her father unable to take care of her, Miss Suk was sent to live with relatives.

They didn't treat her very nicely.

In fact, treat her more as a servant.

Her upbringing wasn't the best.

A black sheep is what she really basically felt like.

Luckily, Miss Souk's Cinderella story came complete with a prince charming,

an American GI named Andy Nowlin, who met the 22-year-old in 1987 while serving in Korea.

She was a very kind person.

She had a very good heart.

That was, you know, one of the reasons why I fell in love with her.

And in 1988, after Andy left the Army and returned home to Illinois, Misouk followed.

She was here a few months and then we got married.

Soon after, Misouk was pregnant and in 1989, the couple had a daughter.

I stayed at home with my mom.

Her main focus was to take care of me.

Money was tight for the young family, at least in Misouk's mind.

Money was always a key factor in their conversation.

If somebody else has got this car, you know, why don't we have that car?

And eventually, those conversations about money became arguments.

I was working two full-time jobs, working 80 hours a week, and it still wasn't enough.

And by 1998, after 10 years of marriage, the couple had divorced.

She was just so money-hungry.

She wanted to give me the best of the best, to give the life that she did not have.

To support herself and her daughter after the divorce, Ms.ok took a translating job at a local call center.

My mom was bilingual.

She would talk to the Korean customers.

And soon after starting work at the call center, Missouk met a man who appeared to offer everything the struggling young mother wanted for her family.

The son of Chinese immigrants, Don Wang was working at the call center to put himself through college.

He was always going to school.

Don was trying to get his PhD.

And despite the fact that Don was Chinese and Missouk Korean, they started dating.

The two cultures don't always mingle, but in Don and Ms.

case, they did.

Their marriage in 2003 was a celebration of both their cultures.

It was different mixes of Chinese and Korean people, and it was a great time.

It was a beautiful wedding.

But when Ms.

said, I do, she wasn't just marrying Don.

She was joining his tight-knit family, led by its matriarch, Linda.

Born in 1941, Linda had spent more than 20 years in the Chicago area.

And by 2003, the 62-year-old was a prominent member of Chicago's Chinese community.

Linda was very well known in that community.

She'd spent years working as an interpreter for various businesses in the greater Chicago area.

She also worked as an interpreter with the federal government in the federal prison.

And she also worked with individual immigrants, helping them secure visas, housing, and jobs.

Assisting individuals that came into this country in any way that she could.

But as much as she enjoyed helping her fellow immigrants, Linda's priority was her only son, Don.

Don and his mother had a very, very, very close, you know, relationship.

One that became even closer after Linda divorced Don's father.

They called each other other four or five times every day, seven days a week.

Don provided moral support for his mother after the divorce.

In return, she helped support him while he pursued his PhD.

Don got a lot of his money from his mother.

And once he married Miss Souk, Linda would gladly help support her too.

Linda thought of Masouk as her daughter.

Missouk felt the same way too.

Since my mom didn't have that mother figure growing up, she really looked to Linda as her mom.

They were really close.

And at times, they seemed more like BFFs than mother and daughter.

They would go to Chicago and go to the spas together all the time.

They would also go to Peoria on the riverboat.

They would go to the casino.

In fact, thanks to her mother-in-law's generosity, Miss Souk finally had the lifestyle that she had always wanted.

She drove Mercedes-Benz.

She always wanted the latest fashions, lace clothes, lace designers.

She was very attractive.

She always made herself up.

She always had makeup on and looked nice.

Linda even gave Miss Sook the money to open her own sewing and alterations business.

My mom's always really good at, you know, putting things together, you know, sewing-wise, you know, fixing my shirts for me growing up.

So she decided to get a little shop in Bloomington and she was really excited about it.

And in 2006, Ms.

Souk repaid Linda's kindness with the gift her mother-in-law wanted most, a grandson.

There's no doubt that deepened the relationship between Ms.

Souk and Linda.

And four years later, Miss Souk's mother-in-law had her own happy news.

At the age of 69 and after years on her own, Linda had found love.

We met on match.com and I met her at a restaurant and

everything sort of clicked real nice.

Linda and Larry Tida married in January of 2011.

Linda and Larry wanted to live out the rest of their lives with each other, the rest of their golden years with each other.

But it wasn't meant to be.

On September 5th, 2011, just eight months after their wedding, Linda mysteriously vanished.

Coming up, just who was Linda taking to Chinatown?

I think it was a federal.

Was it possible she'd been abducted?

Might have been one of the Chinese gangs.

At around 8 p.m.

on September 5th, 2011, Larry Taida called the Crest Hill, Illinois Police Department and filed a missing persons report.

His wife, Linda, a business consultant and interpreter who worked with the Chinese immigrant community, had left home before dawn that morning to pick up a client in Bloomington and drive them to Chicago.

Which wasn't unusual.

She did these sort of things often.

She was going to be back by

between eight and nine for us to have breakfast.

But the 70-year-old hadn't come home and she hadn't returned any of her husband's increasingly worried calls either.

I started calling her on the hour every hour and I got no response, no answer, no phone call.

So at a little before eight, Larry had made another call to the police.

I had this bad feeling something had happened.

It was only a gut feeling, but it was enough to convince Larry.

She didn't contact anybody, and all of a sudden she's just gone.

Nobody can get a hold of her.

So that's got to be very scary for the family.

Hoping to find a lead on Linda's whereabouts, the investigators pulled her phone records.

Our first thing is to look at phone records.

You know, this day and age, everybody's tied to their cell phones.

But when the investigators looked at Linda's phone records, they made a surprising discovery.

The last bounce off a cell phone tower from Linda's cell phone came from a tower here in Bloomington.

We literally can track from tower to tower all the way to Bloomington, Illinois.

So as far as we knew, that was the last place she was.

An hour and a half south of Crest Hill, Bloomington had been Linda's first stop that morning.

She had a client that she was supposed to come down here and pick up to take that client back to Chicago.

Had the meetup occurred, could it have something to do with Linda's disappearance?

This is not out of the realm of possibility.

However, when the investigators tried to track down the mysterious client, they quickly ran into trouble.

Larry could only provide the sketchiest details.

She was a Chinese immigrant and needed a ride to Chinatown in Chicago.

And Linda's phone records were little help either.

Although there was one number on her log of incoming calls that the investigators found suspicious.

One from a New York area code.

They had tried to contact it and it always went to voicemail.

With the phone number a dead end, the missing person's investigators hit the streets.

The investigation at this phase goes into talking to everyone she knows in Bloomington.

Linda had friends here in the community

that

operated a number of the Chinese restaurants here in Bloomington.

They went to several of the restaurants, but nobody had any contact with her.

Nobody knew anything about where Linda had gone or who she might have met with.

They also tried to contact Linda's son, Dom, and his wife, 45-year-old Miss Suk Wang, who lived in Bloomington.

They made contact with Miss Souk

that evening.

Ms.

Souk told the investigators that her husband was out of town on a trip to California.

She also said that she hadn't heard anything from Linda all day, which was strange.

Ms.

Souk said that she had been trying to contact her all day as well.

And when the investigators asked what she thought had happened to her mother-in-law, Miss Suk raised a chilling possibility.

Msouk made an indication that it might have been one of the Chinese gangs.

According to Ms.

Souk, her mother-in-law's work with the federal prison system meant she'd occasionally translated for gang members.

She worked as an interpreter for Chinese nationals that were in custody.

Was it possible one of the inmates Linda worked with had criminal contacts on the outside?

Contacts who might abduct the successful businesswoman.

I didn't know what was going on that if

somebody had her, that if it was for money or whatever.

And Larry's fear only deepened as two days passed with no word or sign of Linda.

You don't sleep too much when you don't know what's going on or what's happened.

Linda's husband Larry and her daughter-in-law Misouk weren't the only ones that appeared to be worried sick over the 70-year-old's disappearance.

There was also Linda's assistant in her interpreting and consulting business, a Chinese immigrant named Jenny.

I actually reached out to Jenny when I got the cell phone records to see if she had any other information that she could provide.

She was kind of Linda's right hand.

Unfortunately, Linda's right hand told the investigators she had no idea what had become of her boss.

Jenny seemed generally concerned about what had happened to Linda and

where she was.

Jenny was hardly alone either.

In the days following her disappearance, Crest Hill's Chinese community and Bloomington's launched their own searches for the missing 70-year-old.

Linda was pretty well respected in the Chinese community.

The Chinese community was actively trying to pursue what could have happened to her.

In Bloomington, where Linda's phone records placed her last, police continued the search too.

I asked for patrol officers to go out and check the airport

parking lot, check hotels parking lot to see if we could find Linda Titus vehicle.

And before long, the search expanded to the whole Chicago area and then some.

Basically the entire state had the information to try and find her.

But by September 6th, with Linda missing for more than 36 hours, even the police were starting to fear the worst.

My gut instinct is something bad's going on here.

This isn't just a missing person.

Her son, Don, appeared to agree.

When he sat down with the detectives on the 7th after returning home from California, he told them he'd been unable to reach his mother for days.

Called many times.

My stepfather two times.

No responses.

No responses.

Phone was off.

Okay.

That's very odd.

I could tell he was concerned.

I could tell that he loved his mom.

And he was convinced that the client who wanted Linda to take her to Chicago had been some sort of trap.

More and more, I think it was a setup.

And why would someone want to lure Linda to an early morning meeting?

There's some bad people.

They come from other towns.

Even come in a nice town like this.

You know, they follow you.

you know, they know you're rich.

In fact, Don said that he'd been so worried that his mother had been abducted that he'd left a message for the kidnappers on her voicemail.

I said, you know, if you pick my mom, you know, please return to me, or to me, she's worth more than a million dollars to us.

Is it for money to be resolved?

But if it was a kidnapping, why hadn't anyone contacted the family for ransom?

Don didn't know for sure, but he agreed with the investigators that the mysterious New York number that showed up in Linda's phone records might be be the key to finding out who had set her up.

90% of the clients of the emotion found New York.

Their cell phone number starts with 917,

which is New York number.

After Don's interview, the investigators tried the New York number again, and this time it didn't go to voicemail.

So it's disconnected.

Was Don on to something?

Was the New York number connected to his mother's disappearance?

The investigators thought so.

I had the FBI try and look it up.

But before the FBI was able to track down the number, a stunning break would lead the search for Ms.

Suk Wang's mother-in-law in a surprising new direction.

Coming up, the investigators recover a crucial piece of video.

You can see the shock and surprise on Linda's face.

But the real shock is who else gets caught on tape.

You can see Linda backing away from her.

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By September 12th, 2011, it had been a week since 70-year-old Linda Taida had disappeared in Bloomington, Illinois.

The last known ping from a cell tower is here in Bloomington, and that's when the investigation in search for Linda begins.

Linda's daughter-in-law, 45-year-old Miss Suk Wang, told investigators that she worried that her mother-in-law had been abducted or robbed.

But on September 12th, a stunning new new lead would turn the investigation into Linda Tita's disappearance in a shocking new direction.

The break came from Bloomington's Chinese community.

The close-knit Asian American community here in Bloomington becomes aware that Linda is missing.

That leaks throughout the entire community.

And one of the people that heard the news was a waitress at a local Chinese restaurant, a waitress who had a strange story for the police.

She comes forward about a weird thing that she had done on another person's behalf.

According to the waitress, the weird thing had started when a well-dressed woman she'd never seen before approached her at work on September 4th, the day before Linda disappeared.

She went in there and asked the hostess specifically if they spoke Chinese.

And when the waitress said that she spoke Chinese, the mystery woman had asked her for a favor.

She asked her to make a phone call for her.

A phone call to Linda.

She told her to tell Linda that she needed a ride to Chicago.

She would pay $500 for this ride.

Linda accepted.

She'd actually been set up in a ruse of sorts.

And just who was this mystery woman who'd set Linda up?

The waitress couldn't tell the police, but the restaurant security cameras could.

The officers pulled the surveillance video and you could clearly see Missouk going into the restaurant.

But if Linda had been set up by her daughter-in-law, what had she set her up for?

All the waitress knew was that Miss Souk wanted Linda to meet her at a local Bloomington grocery store.

And when the investigators pulled the security footage from that store, they made another stunning discovery.

Linda pulls into the parking lot, stops under one of the light poles, and further back in the parking lot, you see a pair of headlights come on, and you see the headlights drive around the parking lot and come in and pull in next to Linda's vehicle.

The car that pulled in next to Linda was Ms.

Souk's Mercedes.

Ms.

Souk had laid in wait for Linda.

On the video, both women got out of their cars and Ms.

Souk started screaming at her mother-in-law.

You can see the shock and surprise on Linda's face.

You can see Linda backing away from her.

Linda was trying to leave, but Ms.

Souk would grab her by the arm, grab her by her purse, grab her by her shirt.

And then, just as it appeared the argument was on the verge of turning violent, it was suddenly over.

It ends for the two women going back into their respective vehicles and driving away.

What was the confrontation about?

And did it have anything to do with Linda's disappearance?

On the evening of September 12th, the investigators brought Ms.

Suk in for questioning.

As we're talking, I said, so when was it exactly the last time you saw her?

And she says, well, I went to their house and I want to say it was like September 1st.

Which was four days before the parking lot confrontation.

Why would she not be truthful about having a conversation with Linda Tyde in the the parking lot?

She wanted to play the play-dumb routine.

Like, I don't know anything about anything.

Ms.

Suk could deny it all she wanted, but the police had her on tape.

In fact, that wasn't all they had.

While Ms.

Suk was talking to the detectives, crime scene investigators were busy searching her home in Bloomington and her alteration shop, the business her mother-in-law had helped finance.

We have the search warrants.

We want to make sure Mizouk isn't around when we execute him.

And in the dumpster behind Misouk's shop, the detectives found something.

I found a lot of ID cards and credit cards that were cut up into small pieces.

But while the cards had all been cut up, the investigators were still able to read them.

I was still able to make out the name of our missing person, Linda Tita.

And that wasn't all they found either.

A shirt was found in the dumpster with some blood on it.

Crime scene investigators immediately conveyed that information back to the detectives, questioning Ms.

Souk.

And the result was a dramatic shift in Ms.

Interrogation.

Now, my job is to get Mizouk to tell me what happened.

And whether I believe that's what happened, it doesn't matter.

I just need her to start talking about it.

And once the investigators confronted her with what they knew, the video, the cut-up IDs, and the blood, Ms.

Sook finally began to talk.

According to Ms.

Souk, she would never do anything to hurt her mother-in-law.

Linda and Ms.

Souk's relationship was great in the beginning.

Msouk thought of her as the mother she'd ever had.

In fact, she told the investigators that she truly loved Linda.

She would even call her mom.

And Ms.

Suk said she'd done everything she could to make mom happy.

In the Asian culture, you want to please your mom and your family, and it's really important.

However, according to Ms.

Suk, something had eventually come between them.

Her marriage to Linda's son, Dawn.

I could just see that their marriage wasn't the greatest.

I could tell that my mom was hurting.

And Ms.

Suk said she was hurting because she suspected Don was cheating.

Msouk believed that her husband was having an affair.

And it wasn't just some casual hookup either.

Ms.

Souk suspected that her husband was having an affair with Linda's assistant, Jenny.

It was devastating on my mom.

She had no idea that this was going on at all.

Jenny and my mom had known each other for a really long time.

And Ms.

Sook said that Linda's attitude about the alleged affair was just as devastating.

Msouk believed that she knew about it and was almost happy about it.

And the idea that her mother-in-law supported the alleged affair hurt Ms.

Souk deeply.

Ms.

Souk had been abandoned by both Don and Linda.

I think this took a heavy, heavy toll on her.

But she also said that she was determined to fight.

My mom didn't want to give up on their marriage.

She didn't want to have another divorce.

And Miss Souk said she had arranged the parking lot meeting as a last-ditch attempt to enlist her mother-in-law's support.

She was actually trying to possibly talk to Linda and trying to get her to see her point of view.

I need you to help me get my husband back.

But Miss Suk said that the meeting had quickly turned angry.

Missouk, she had a temper.

Linda had a temper as well.

She didn't want to talk to my mom.

She didn't want to have anything to do with her.

But if the argument had ended with Miss Souk and her mother-in-law each driving away, how did Linda's ID and credit cards end up in the dumpster outside the sewing shop?

Linda chose to follow Mizouk back to the sewing shop.

Miss Souk told the police that once they arrived at the shop, a second angry confrontation occurred on the sidewalk outside.

And according to Miss Souk, her mother-in-law had turned violent.

Linda started it.

Just started hitting my mom and just started hitting her in the temple and the head.

Miss Suk told the police that she and Linda had soon tumbled to the pavement.

Misouk said Linda was on her back, reached up, choking Mizuk.

And Miss Souk, desperately trying to break free, had done what she could to fight back.

Mizouk was on top of her, choking Linda.

My mom at that point just felt like, this lady is trying to kill me.

But Miss Souk said that in their struggle to the death, her 70-year-old mother-in-law had succumbed first.

The next thing she knew, she was dead.

Miss Souk said she tried to save Linda, a claim she repeated later that night when the investigators took her to the sewing shop and asked her to walk through what happened.

I tried to mouse to my

tried mouth to mouth.

My sister let go of something.

And once she realized that her mother-in-law truly was dead, Miss Suk said she'd hidden the body in the sewing shop overnight.

She puts her behind some clothing and furniture and stuff like that to keep her body hidden.

And the next night, according to Miss Suk, she buried Linda's body in a nature preserve on the outskirts of Chicago.

She drove for hours, hours all over, to find the perfect spot to bury her.

A spot that she led the investigators to early on the morning of September 13th.

She didn't want to come very close to it.

In fact, maybe 20, 25 feet is the closest she would get to it.

She didn't want to be confronted again with the terrible act that she'd committed.

But she would have to confront it again in a court of law.

Because despite her claims of self-defense, by the time the medical examiner's office had finished exhuming her mother-in-law's body, Ms.

Suk was back in Bloomington and under arrest for murder.

I was shocked when I found out that Biesouk was charged with murdering Linda.

Very shocked.

There's just no way my mom's not capable of doing that.

Coming up.

Will the trial reveal Ms.

Souk's sinister motive?

Linda had a life insurance insurance policy.

Or will a shocking new twist suggest that she's telling the truth?

Ms.

Souk would not just murder his grandmother in front of him.

On December 10th, 2012, Ms.

Wang stood trial for murder in Bloomington, Illinois.

Arrested in 2011, the 47-year-old mother of two was charged with the murder of her 70-year-old mother-in-law, Linda Taida, a translator and advocate for Chicago's Chinese community.

The community was horrified by what happened to Linda.

Although no one was more shocked than Larry Taida, who'd been Linda's husband for a mere eight months.

I never thought Msouk would ever do anything to Linda like that.

I thought they were friends.

But Miss Souk had done it.

In fact, she had basically confessed to the police.

After hours of talking, she admitted to murdering her mother-in-law.

Although, in Miss Souk's version of events, it wasn't murder, it was self-defense.

In her opinion, they were mutual combatants.

A fight that Ms.

Souk said began as a violent argument over her husband's alleged affair.

I think Ms.

Souk was upset, extremely upset, but extremely angry that Linda wouldn't take her side in this supposed extramental affair.

But was that really what happened?

In their opening statement, the prosecution said it was true that a divorce had been in Don and Ms.

Souk's future.

Don was going to divorce Missouk.

Probably he was going to file for the divorce when he returned from his trip from California.

And according to the prosecution, it wasn't over Don's so-called affair with his mother's assistant, Jenny.

When talking with Don and Jenny, it was just a friendship, a platonic friendship,

no sort of physical aspect to it whatsoever, or romantic aspect.

But if Don wasn't leaving Miss Souk for Jenny, why get divorced?

To explain, the prosecutors put Don on the stand, and he told the jury that the marriage had initially been a good one.

From the beginning, it seemed like they were a happy family.

But Don testified that they became less happy with each passing year.

Ms.

Souk's lust for material gain and for wealth started to consume the marriage.

She liked wealth.

She liked nice clothes.

She liked nice cars.

She always wanted this.

She always wanted that.

She needed more of everything.

Ms.

Souk also wanted people to know that she had money.

Even if that wasn't technically true.

She was just charging everything on her credit cards, so it created a lot of debt with opening new credit cards up and maxing them out.

Dawn said that Miss Souk's spending soon led to trouble.

She had a more extravagant lifestyle than I think Don liked.

And I think they did have quite a bit of disputes about money.

Her materialism, her wanting of wealth, and

the fights they were having about money put a strain on the relationship.

In fact, Don claimed that Miss Souk's materialism eventually pushed the marriage to the breaking point.

Miss Souk had a penchant to steal things.

She got arrested for her shoplifting.

a month or two before the murder.

Don testified that he and his mother had been embarrassed by the arrest.

They refused to postpone for.

Don said that Miss Suk had been furious, so mad that when she did get out, she'd gone to the bank and cleaned out the couple's joint checking account.

She basically raided the checking account for thousands of dollars.

Don testified that the theft had been the final push he needed to file for divorce.

And the prosecution believed the missing money would also play a crucial role in his mother's murder.

According to the prosecution, the key pieces of evidence were a series of jailhouse letters Ms.

Suk wrote to her daughter and several Korean friends while she was awaiting trial.

All of her correspondence was in Korean, and I think she felt that we would not be able to know what she was saying because she was saying it in Korean.

But she was wrong.

We had an assistant in our office who was Korean.

And the prosecutors claimed that those letters, translations of which were provided to the jury, revealed the true motive behind Linda's murder.

In her letters, Ms.

Souk spoke about the fact that Linda had a life insurance policy that Don was the beneficiary of.

If something happened to Linda,

Don would get all this money.

But not all of it.

Ms.

Souk believed that if Linda died, she would be be entitled to at least half of that life insurance policy in a divorce settlement.

And the result was a murder plot, according to the prosecutors.

It was not something that just happened spontaneously.

It was not something that was an accident.

She was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that she was financially set.

And on September 4th, she'd asked the waitress to place the call that set up the ambush.

Ms.ouk had paid her $20.

But according to the prosecutors, the real bait was the money Ms.

Souk stole from Don's checking account.

A lot of the money that was put into that checking account was from Linda.

The prosecutors claimed that was how Miss Souk was able to lure Linda from the grocery store parking lot to the sewing shop where the murder occurred.

Linda was following her because she promised to pay Linda the money that she owed her that she had taken out of the checking account.

And Miss Souk's claim of self-defense?

The prosecution countered that by putting the medical examiner on the stand, who testified that in order to kill Linda, Miss Souk would have to keep strangling her mother-in-law long after the 70-year-old had gone unconscious.

The threat would have been over with, and yet Mizouk continued to choke Linda Titer to her death.

Self-defense ends when someone can't fight back anymore.

But according to the prosecutors, prosecutors, the most chilling thing about the murder was the fact that Miss Souk didn't commit the crime alone.

Her poor five-year-old son was with her the whole time.

He's sitting in the car and I can't imagine what was going through his head.

Would that sickening revelation turn the jury against her?

I don't know how a person

allows their child to witness such a violent act against the child's grandmother?

Or would it strengthen Missouk's claim that the crime wasn't premeditated, that she'd killed Linda in self-defense?

Misouk would not just murder his grandmother in front of him.

And to prove that Missouk wasn't the monster that the prosecutors made her out to be, the defense called her to the stand on December 17th.

If anybody was in her situation, they would want their voice to be heard.

Through tears, Miss Souk admitted to luring Linda to the parking lot.

But she also claimed that murder wasn't what she'd had in mind.

She said, I just wanted to talk to her and say I'm sorry.

Ms.

Sook said that she'd been shocked by what happened next.

When she got to the sewing shop, according to Miss Souk, that's when Linda attacked her.

It was just a fight that went wrong and it resulted in Linda's death.

And according to Ms.

Souk, she'd had no choice.

She felt like this was a life or death situation.

But if that was true, why not call the police afterwards?

Ms.

Suk claimed that she feared losing her five-year-old son.

She didn't know what was going to happen with him.

Will I ever get to see him again?

It was emotional and powerful testimony.

Just sitting there, I felt so helpless for my mom.

I felt so bad for her.

But would the jury share her daughter's sympathy?

Coming up, will Misouk go to prison?

Whatever she got, she deserved.

Or will she go free?

It really came down to just one thing, one thing only.

On December 18th, 2012, the jury in Ms.

Suk Wang's murder trial announced that it had reached a verdict.

The 47-year-old mother of two was charged with first-degree murder, accused of strangling her mother-in-law, 70-year-old Linda Taida.

The evidence really was overwhelming and really came down to just one thing and one thing only.

Do you believe that Mizouk was acting in self-defense or not?

On the stand, Ms.

Souk had tearfully made the case for self-defense.

She didn't do it out of spite.

She didn't do it out of hate.

But the prosecutors claimed that Ms.

Souk had been motivated by anger and greed.

Don was the sole beneficiary of his mom's insurance policy.

And if their marriage ended up in divorce, she would be entitled to, in her opinion, 50% of it.

She gets revenge on the mother.

She gets revenge on Don and she gets the ability to be financially set and secure.

And now, after just two and a half hours of deliberation, the jury had made its decision.

It didn't take the jury long based upon the evidence that we had to come back and return with a guilty verdict to first-degree murder.

Ms.

Suk broke down when the verdict was read.

Ms.

Zouk seemed very beside herself.

That's what I thought.

Like she had been through hell.

And her friends and family were just as surprised.

I wasn't thinking that she was going to get, you know, first degree.

I think she should have been convicted of manslaughter.

At her sentencing hearing on March 1st, Ms.

Souk received a total of 55 years in prison.

Ms.

Sentenced to 50 years for the murder and five years for burying the body.

And the fact that the 47-year-old had essentially been put away for the rest of her life suited Linda's grieving husband just fine.

She never apologized to me or anything like that or said anything to me about she's sorry that she did it.

I'd probably never forgive her for what she's done.

Whatever she got, she deserved.

Miss Souk tore apart her family with this act.

Although even after the conviction, Miss Souk's daughter, who was 23 when her mother went to prison, continued to stand by her.

I need to be strong for her and to keep her going and to help her out and just get her through day to day.

Because she remains convinced that her mother killed Linda in self-defense.

The only sigh that people ever saw of her is that she hurt the people that was closest to her.

And I just hope that people can see her side and realize that, you know, she's a good person.

She's got a caring heart.

Masuk Wang has appealed the court's decision.

Don Wang has full custody of the couple's son.

Did you see that?

I love this.

On Boxing Day 2018, 20-year-old Joy Morgan was last seen at her church, Israel United in Christ, or IUIC.

I just went on my Snapchat and I just see her face plastered everywhere.

This is the missing Sister, the true story of a woman betrayed by those she trusted most.

IUIC is my family and like the best family that I've ever had.

But IUIC isn't like most churches.

This is a devilish cult.

You know when you get that feeling where you just, I don't want to be here.

I want to get out.

It's like that feeling of, like, I want to go hang out.

I'm Charlie Brent Coast Cuff and after years of investigating Joy's case, I need to know what really happened to Joy.

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