Watching You | 4. Caught on Tape

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Speaker 1 Hey, all. Wanted to let you know verbal abuse and domestic violence are a part part of this story.
It's a cautionary tale to listen to with caution.

Speaker 1 Friday night into Saturday morning, and Nikki goes missing. A whole week passes where no one knows where she is.

Speaker 1 During that week, her husband Matt recorded a bunch of his own phone calls. He reached out to Nikki's dentist to ask if she called the office.

Speaker 1 He called Nikki's father to complain that Amy wasn't keeping him in the loop on how the missing posters should look.

Speaker 1 And when a doctor's office called and asked for Nikki, Matt sort of overshared.

Speaker 4 My name is Matt. I am her husband.

Speaker 4 She's incapacitated right now. We don't know where she is.
All right, I'm sorry about that.

Speaker 1 But one fiery call stood out from the many he recorded that week.

Speaker 1 Matt called his older brother, Paul Liley.

Speaker 1 The police were just here.

Speaker 1 What up?

Speaker 1 Apparently, her family has not only been calling the police, but have been secretly meeting with the police about me and foul play.

Speaker 1 Nobody found?

Speaker 1 No, of course not.

Speaker 1 Paul promised to come stay as soon as possible to help give his brother reinforcements.

Speaker 4 The family has now started a war.

Speaker 1 Matt means Nikki's family.

Speaker 1 You have your big brother who's coming to war. Paul, I want to bury the bitch

Speaker 1 Matthew I want to bury the old fucking family

Speaker 1 on the phone. I'm recording.
I'm not worried. I'm not saying anything stupid.

Speaker 5 I want to go to war with them and meet them head-on

Speaker 1 By Monday law enforcement heard about her disappearance Nikki's family had contacted the police department and they naturally had called her husband Matt

Speaker 4 Look when we did an interview with him on Monday just over the phone. You know, two young kids at home.
She leaves, leaves her phone behind, her purse, all her belongings.

Speaker 4 And, you know, he made it seem that she just had maybe some kind of a break with reality or something.

Speaker 1 Richter wasn't buying it.

Speaker 4 She would never leave two days now. You're into it.

Speaker 4 No phone.

Speaker 1 Something else stood out too.

Speaker 4 He also mentions in that first recorded interview over the phone that they had an argument.

Speaker 1 Matt told cops he'd wanted to have sex. He'd expected it because it was date night.

Speaker 4 If she didn't want to, and we're fighting, and

Speaker 4 then, of course, three or four hours later, now she's missing. And he can't tell us when she left.

Speaker 1 After her body was found, some people in Nikki's circle immediately suspected Matt was responsible.

Speaker 6 I just was like, I'm not stupid.

Speaker 7 Like, I know what this is.

Speaker 4 He did it.

Speaker 8 There was a lot of animosity already growing growing between Nikki's family members and then Matt and his kind of side of the family.

Speaker 1 That's Lisa Jones, the DA who happened to be there when they found her body. In fact, when Nikki was missing, her mother, Harriet Garrett, had apparently confronted her son-in-law.

Speaker 1 Here's Matt complaining about her accusation.

Speaker 1 Harriet thinks I killed her daughter. What?

Speaker 5 Harriet said, I think you killed my daughter and you are going to rot in hell and I'm going to do whatever I can to come after you.

Speaker 4 All right, All right. We need to call.
This is fucking bullshit.

Speaker 1 It's one thing to believe, even to know in your heart, who the killer is. It's another thing to investigate that crime, to prosecute the assailant.

Speaker 1 And the medical examiner, the Gwinnett County PD, quickly realized that the true cause of Nikki's death might be harder to determine than it seemed.

Speaker 1 Lisa Jones, who was working at the DA's office at the time, laid out why.

Speaker 8 It would have been different if Nikki had been, you you know, dumped on one day and you find her six days later and the temperatures were in the 30s, but it was July in Atlanta.

Speaker 1 The summer heat, the position of the body worked against investigators.

Speaker 8 And so that prevented the medical examiner from being able to really give a definitive cause of death.

Speaker 8 So she had to rule the death as undetermined because with the body being face down, there was a lot of pooling of blood because obviously the weight of your body and your face is face down.

Speaker 8 I mean, it goes to your eyes, it goes to wherever.

Speaker 1 There was no gunshot wound, no blunt force trauma. But beyond that, her death remained something of a mystery.

Speaker 8 My layman's understanding of it was because of that, you couldn't really see Petiteka in her eyes that you look for when somebody's been strangled.

Speaker 1 But no one in law enforcement doubted for a moment that this was homicide.

Speaker 8 It's very rare that anybody walks down their streets in their neighborhood naked. Okay, so she's nude.
That's a huge indicator that she didn't get that way willingly or didn't go there willingly.

Speaker 8 The bottoms of her feet were absolutely clean, so she didn't walk herself there.

Speaker 8 I remember this very distinctly is that one of the things that Nikki's sister said was that Amy and Nikki, and I think the girls maybe had gone to get their nails done, like right before this had happened.

Speaker 8 Looking at the body itself, her nails were pristine and they had just like they had been painted. And so there wasn't like a bunch of dirt where she was clawing or anything like that.

Speaker 1 All of this led police investigators to focus their attention on Nikki and Matt's home and the hours leading up to when she left. Doug Chatham, Nikki's dad, told the police what Matt had told him.

Speaker 5 He said that they had had a fight the night before

Speaker 5 and that apparently she left the house between four and five. He told me that she left her cell phone, her purse.

Speaker 5 She didn't take her car.

Speaker 1 So where was she going?

Speaker 5 East has told me in the past, she

Speaker 5 would sometimes, you know, after an argument, she would sometimes get out and walk around the block.

Speaker 1 Walking around the block just as she exited the view of the cameras. Cameras that caught her last recorded moments sitting on the deck.
the front of the lily house smoking a cigarette

Speaker 4 and he would believe that he has 19 cameras outside three or four cameras on the inside a command center and he didn't pick up anything you kidding me that she got out of the house and he didn't know is ridiculous and he wasn't the only one who thought that

Speaker 8 there were so many things that pointed that Matt may have had some involvement. You never want a suspect to go, you know, you never want a defendant to get away with murder.

Speaker 8 You never want anyone to get away with murder

Speaker 1 from sony music entertainment you're listening to watching you i'm jonathan hirsch

Speaker 1 episode four

Speaker 1 caught on tape

Speaker 4 where to begin

Speaker 1 no question that matt and nikki had been fighting That night and for a long time.

Speaker 1 Matt said it was after that fight that she exited the frame, made her way with a toothbrush down the street and out of his life.

Speaker 8 He filed for divorce during that week leading up to Nikki's body being found. And so he had tried to portray her as being unstable and that sort of thing and get her civilly committed.

Speaker 1 And you can hear him in one recording dripping with pathos. Like he was exhausted by some long, drawn-out drama that he no longer had the time for.

Speaker 1 Like he was cutting short some elaborate ruse Nikki was performing. Not what we now know to be the truth.

Speaker 1 Nikki was lying dead just a few blocks away.

Speaker 1 That night, the night they found her body, Amanda and Rebecca were at home without a clue.

Speaker 9 Then all of a sudden, Now we look outside and there's an ambulance out there and hear a bunch of commotion downstairs.

Speaker 1 At some point, a police officer came upstairs and said to Amanda, your dad wants to see you.

Speaker 9 And so like, I went downstairs and like he's laying on the floor with an oxygen mask on, grabbing my arm, like, was it her? Was it her? I'm like, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

Speaker 9 Like, was what her? Like, the first thought in my mind was, oh, someone saw her. I wasn't thinking she was dead.
I couldn't handle it anymore. Like, I,

Speaker 9 this was terrifying. Like, I have no idea what's going on.
I was like, I can't do this.

Speaker 1 The girls didn't know what Matt was talking about. No idea that their mother had been found, let alone that she was dead.

Speaker 9 We were like sitting watching out the windows towards the front of the house and like we see more police coming and like now news reporters are out there.

Speaker 1 Before they could ask their dad or go outside and ask their big sister, The two girls were taken away.

Speaker 9 Then eventually, it was basically like, hey, pack some bags up. And so we're packing bags to go somewhere.
We don't know. My dad's, I think it was the divorce lawyer came and picked us up.

Speaker 1 Alex was just outside, right by the curb of the house. Amy was there too.

Speaker 10 I remember Alex desperately wanting to go back up to the house and saying, I remember her like crying and saying, no, they're my sisters. I need to get them.
I need them. They're my sisters.

Speaker 10 And I was like, baby, you can't. Just simply simply because, number one, there's no way Matt would have allowed her to talk to them or see them or anything.

Speaker 10 And number two, who knows what would have gotten said that would have been somehow damaging or whatever, like when everything is in crisis.

Speaker 1 Looking back, this wasn't just the day the girls lost their mother.

Speaker 1 It was the day they lost each other. This was the moment the girls were split permanently.
Because as things went on, battle lines would be drawn. Words would be said.
Things you can't take back.

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Speaker 1 John Richter knew what his job was with this case. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was, how is he going to book the guy who he suspected did it?

Speaker 4 Cocky, asshole, was good word. You could tell right away he was a narcissistic type of person, controlling.

Speaker 4 You know, he even wanted to be in control of the interview and how it progresses and what we were going to do, trying to lead us while his wife was missing.

Speaker 4 Nothing to suggest that he was upset or anything. It was just

Speaker 4 another day.

Speaker 1 Another day followed by another.

Speaker 1 What evidence was there to prosecute? Even the cause of death remained undetermined.

Speaker 8 The problem was, was that there just wasn't enough.

Speaker 8 You can suspect it all day long, but there was no way that I could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law that he was the person that did it without more.

Speaker 8 I could think his behavior was ridiculous.

Speaker 8 I could think that he set it all up, you know, trying to portray his wife as being crazy, that he had all these security cameras and just miraculously she turned off the security camera that night.

Speaker 1 That's what Matt told investigators. Nikki flipped off Matt's cameras on her way out the door and then somehow ended up dead down the street.
There was no smoking gun that they could see.

Speaker 1 But there was all the years of footage, the surveillance state Matt had set up around the perimeters of the home. Investigators obtained a warrant to search the Liley house and Matt's warroom.

Speaker 4 Well, it's just a small room, maybe the size of this room, 15 by 15, and monitors, like,

Speaker 4 and a big, like five or six TV monitors with different camera shots on each one. And then

Speaker 4 the server was so big, they had to have our experts, our forensic guys, come in and take the server apart because it was so, you know, something they said that you would see in the military.

Speaker 4 So yeah, it was impressive.

Speaker 1 They obtained the videos and soon realized there was a big problem on their hands. One they they hadn't anticipated.
These videos, there were thousands of hours to sift through.

Speaker 1 Before any charges could be brought, Lisa Jones, one of the prosecutors in the DA's office, would need to sign off from the investigators.

Speaker 8 Ultimately, there was, I think, around like 55,000 short videos that were discovered.

Speaker 1 Even if they were convinced that Matt had murdered his wife, Nikki, they'd need to review all the evidence first. And just reviewing the evidence would take them countless hours.

Speaker 1 It took them a while to even open up the files they'd recovered.

Speaker 8 And so the police department had spent the time sending it off to, I think we sent it off to the FBI, maybe?

Speaker 1 On top of that, the videos weren't categorized by date and time.

Speaker 8 So it wasn't like you could just like roll through footage and look at it. It made no sense.

Speaker 8 So then you were trying to put together like when did this happen and kind of go through it and see if you found anything that mattered.

Speaker 1 The detectives on the case hadn't encountered anything like this before. There was a mountain of surveillance tape to now pour through and no clear sense of how to evaluate it.

Speaker 1 Many of the files obtained from Matt's computer were unreadable to forensics investigators at the time.

Speaker 1 After some months, Matt left Georgia. He took his two girls to a cabin in Vermont.
At this point, he'd lawyered up and wasn't cooperating with the investigation.

Speaker 10 He just wanted to

Speaker 10 take everything.

Speaker 10 That's what it felt like, was that he was just taking everything

Speaker 10 from us,

Speaker 10 and particularly from Alex.

Speaker 1 What appeared to be an open and shut case stalled out. What exactly makes a case go cold? The exhaustion of leads? The failed pursuit of time-worn investigative measures?

Speaker 1 Or is it simply that pieces don't fall together in the right way at the right time?

Speaker 10 The investigation had been going on for a year

Speaker 4 and they had hit a wall.

Speaker 10 And I remembered I called and spoke to Detective Everson

Speaker 10 on my birthday

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 10 he said, well, we're almost through going through all the video.

Speaker 10 But it doesn't look like we're going to find anything.

Speaker 10 I didn't know what to say to that. I said, what? So, what does that mean? That he just gets away with it?

Speaker 10 That was when Detective Richter came in and he said, this is my case. And

Speaker 10 I'm going to leave no stone unturned. And I'm not going to rest until

Speaker 10 we know we've done everything we possibly could.

Speaker 1 John Richter is a big guy, short, cropped, salt, and pepper hair. This case had stayed with him from the moment he was across it.
He'd been there on the day they found her.

Speaker 1 He had made a vow then to himself, his words, to find justice for Nikki.

Speaker 4 Because I was invested in this case from the day I saw her laying there in the woods, right? I was invested.

Speaker 4 So I wanted it bad.

Speaker 1 But no one on his staff had had been able to recover all the materials they'd gained through searching the house.

Speaker 4 And I would go back to him every six months, every two months, every three months. Please look again.
Give me something.

Speaker 1 Two years passed without an indictment or a meaningful break in the case. Richter was convinced that those files had the answers he needed.

Speaker 1 The truth about what had happened that night seemed to be in danger of slipping away.

Speaker 10 They were combing through all this evidence,

Speaker 10 trying to find the one place where he made a mistake. And that was the thing that they said to us is like, they always make a mistake.
They think they're perfect. They never are.

Speaker 10 So they were like, don't give up.

Speaker 1 Digging into the surveillance tape was their best shot. So investigators turned to a man who knew his way around computers.

Speaker 13 My name is Chris Ford. I'm an investigator with the district attorney's office.
Currently, I'm an assistant chief supervisor in the DA's office, but for 10 years, I was a computer physics examiner.

Speaker 1 Chris Ford is a bulky guy, a buzz cut of silver hair and broad shoulders. Looks more like someone you'd imagine running a boot camp at the gym.

Speaker 1 Ex-military, reserved, not examining ones and zeros in the coding logs of surveillance tape.

Speaker 4 You know, he helped me get to where I needed to be.

Speaker 1 John Richter approached Ford about the materials found on Matt's computer.

Speaker 13 I know these two guys have already looked at it. Hey, Ford, why don't you look at this case for me? And just, you know, just a new set of eyes.
That's what he said.

Speaker 13 I just need a new set of eyes to look at it. We're at a standstill with the case.
I'm like, sure, I'll take a look at it. And that's where I started with it.

Speaker 1 Pretty quickly, Ford discovered some things that the investigators had no idea about.

Speaker 4 He goes, oh, do you want any of those digital recordings or any of those audio recordings that are on this? And I'm like, what?

Speaker 4 i had no idea and he goes yeah there's just thousands of hours of just random he's like i listen to a little of it but i go yes i want them and that's when it started

Speaker 1 ford was able to realize that there were tons of audio files on one of the computers that had been seized for years detectives had been focused on the surveillance tape a dizzying uncatalogued tic-tac-toe board of silent footage.

Speaker 8 And somehow, I think the focus in the beginning had been so much on the video files. Can we see what happened? Because there's so many surveillance cameras.

Speaker 8 There's got to be something that we could see that was odd. And so I think the focus at that point was there.

Speaker 1 And now they discovered a massive archive of recordings, too. It's as though they've been watching a movie in black and white that suddenly burst into color.

Speaker 8 So we found all these audio files that had been there, but just hadn't been listened to.

Speaker 1 And the recordings weren't just inside the house. It was clear that some of them were Nikki's car.
And Matt's obviously not there because she's talking to somebody about him.

Speaker 9 So I said, say, my marriage is over.

Speaker 4 It's never good enough. And

Speaker 7 everything I do is suspect. And I'm just, I'm just fed up.
I'm fed up with trying to meet his expectations. I'm fed up with the bullshit.
And

Speaker 7 I just, just you know I just told him and I was nice about it I said Matt look you know

Speaker 7 I do the best I can take

Speaker 4 so that's when I start me and my analyst Amy McLeod a saint my partner probably because it's you know it was just me so she sat across from me you know she was the analyst you'd go to her for hey analyze these phone records or Help me look at this and she always would help me like so I said you take this app I'll take this app and these are the notebooks I know I got maybe 10 of these 100-page notebooks.

Speaker 4 So, we just started from the beginning and started taking notes. And the information was just unbelievable.

Speaker 1 Unbelievable because of what was on the tapes, no doubt, something you've already heard, but also because of the sheer volume. A story suddenly locked into place where there hadn't been one before.

Speaker 1 A record of years of Matt's controlling behavior.

Speaker 4 Eight hours a day for at least a year. You know, I was consumed.
I didn't work a lot of other things at the time. I just did this.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 you know, you're living her life.

Speaker 1 Detective Richter's life, day in and out, was defined by this puzzle that he began to unravel as he listened to the countless hours of recordings.

Speaker 4 Who was Nikki and what happened to her?

Speaker 4 So we just start.

Speaker 4 Hey, you know, the recording is starting easy. We're going to talk about all the things you did wrong today or didn't do right

Speaker 1 This is your recorder. It's on right now.
I'm gonna make the first file

Speaker 4 Now this is after her work day you can tell she just got home from work because she's like I'm tired. I just want to

Speaker 4 He didn't work all day. He's just

Speaker 4 and I remember one he would say oh you passed me I was sitting on the couch watching TV and you walked down the hall and you didn't give me a kiss and she said I'll give you a kiss.

Speaker 4 He says yeah, but not a not a real kiss on the lips, like, you know, passionate. You just gave me a little peck.
I guess each time she passes, like, a ship in the night, she has to,

Speaker 4 you know, passionately kiss this slob of a man.

Speaker 1 Coincidentally, you forget to say you love me.

Speaker 14 It's because you make me feel guilty.

Speaker 4 Stuff like that. And that would go on for hours and hours until she had to go to work.

Speaker 4 You could tell how frustrated she would be and just mentally drained.

Speaker 4 Like, it would go from midnight to six in the morning, and then she would just go to work and then come back, and then that conversation would start again.

Speaker 15 I don't ask for money. matt bullshit all you have to do is not lie to me give me attention i'm not lying like a piece of shit and give you all the attention you demand

Speaker 1 imagine being a homicide detective john richter being reasonably convinced that this man matt lily had something to do with his wife's death and then years after her body is found with still no conviction having to listen to these recordings eight hours a day monday through friday every week i was not a happy person for that year because I was listening to this stuff, right?

Speaker 4 And my girlfriend at the time, who's not my wife, thank God,

Speaker 4 she could have laughed because I was just an asshole. I was mad.

Speaker 4 I was frustrated, right? We're hearing all that. This is...

Speaker 4 Nobody knows like me and the analyst, Amy, the amount. Nobody listened to any of it, really, except us.

Speaker 1 Just listening to these recordings was messing with Richter's mind. Nikki was living through it.

Speaker 1 And as Richter listened, what started to come into focus was how unrelenting and impossible the situation was. And how patient Nikki was.

Speaker 4 I heard him

Speaker 4 the first few years before she's killed. And she's

Speaker 4 beautifully calm.

Speaker 4 Could you imagine sitting in the command center with this doof

Speaker 4 about all the things you did wrong this week? You talked to your mom too much. You were on Facebook too much.
You this, and she would go, okay, I'm sorry, Matt. I'll try to.

Speaker 4 You didn't give me enough oral sex this week. Oh, I, well, three times.
You think, oh, three times

Speaker 4 in a week. Ugh.

Speaker 4 Think about that part of it.

Speaker 4 She had to do that. She probably hated him.

Speaker 4 I know the real her.

Speaker 1 He also could see that she was running out of options.

Speaker 4 She's a 95-pound five-foot foot three or something. He's 6'5, 2, 260, right? So what defense does she have against him other than her voice? Get the fuck away from me.
Leave me the fuck alone.

Speaker 4 That's all she has because he can physically.

Speaker 4 So think about it. That's her only way is to scream.

Speaker 4 He was an asshole and she dealt with him for a long time. So anybody who says that it was an equal thing where she was loud and feisty and yelling at him, are you kidding me?

Speaker 4 There might be one or two out of 2,000 that are like that.

Speaker 4 The rest are him with his mind control and his manipulation and his torture.

Speaker 4 You hate me.

Speaker 15 You trash me around town. You trash me with your family.
You call the cops on me in a second. You have called the cops on me.
You lie about me. You lie to me,

Speaker 15 but I'm the one disrespecting you.

Speaker 4 How do you listen to that kind of thing and then not be emotionally involved?

Speaker 4 Now, I didn't realize to the extent it was affecting my,

Speaker 4 but it affected my personal life, friends, family. Um, you know, you just withdraw a bit, and I'm not like that usually, especially if you get a couple of beers and me and a whiskey or two.

Speaker 4 You know, I'll talk and we'll have some fun.

Speaker 4 It wasn't just a rough year, it was a year year that changed him forever.

Speaker 4 She's dead. I've never met her, but I know her better than any other person I've ever met.

Speaker 4 I know her

Speaker 4 attitude. I know her little traits.
I know how intelligent she is, witty, a great mother, all these things just from these recordings.

Speaker 4 But I know the end.

Speaker 4 And I think she knew the end too.

Speaker 4 And she protected those girls.

Speaker 1 the recordings between Matt and Nikki showed a relationship in turmoil. And in Matt, a spouse who had become obsessed with tracking every micro-movement of his family's whereabouts.

Speaker 1 Up until, of course, Nikki and her toothbrush allegedly disappeared without a trace. And Matt announced his plans to file for divorce.

Speaker 1 To investigators and the county prosecutors, there was now a clear motive for Matt to kill Nikki, a controlling husband with a long, now documented history of manipulative and abusive behavior.

Speaker 1 Here's Lisa Jones again.

Speaker 8 Not only was there emotional abuse, there was physical abuse, which led us to, you know, start thinking, like, oh, he's capable, you know, without question.

Speaker 8 He's absolutely capable of physical violence as well.

Speaker 1 Still, as of yet, no one had seen or heard Matt carry out the act of murdering his wife in a fit of rage. Nikki's sister Amy was beyond frustrated.

Speaker 10 I was angry because I was like, are you kidding me? We all know he did it and you're going to let him get away with it because he didn't leave you a videotape

Speaker 10 of him strangling her.

Speaker 2 That's what you need.

Speaker 10 I mean, and I realize how petulant and childish that sounds now, but that was the emotion I was having at the time was I was like, are you serious?

Speaker 10 You're going to throw in the towel because he didn't leave you video of him actually killing her.

Speaker 1 But there was no evidence of Matt carrying out the body from the house and driving off towards the woods. Ford looked for just that.

Speaker 13 Once I got the audio files and I started thinking, okay,

Speaker 13 here's the working theory, right? That he killed her, removed the body from the house, and dumped it in the nearby woods, right?

Speaker 13 So it was either a crime of passion or a crime of just accident or something where he panicked, right? So he's not thinking straight. He takes the body, wraps it up, carries it out in the woods.

Speaker 13 There's got to be video of this. And the video was probably destroyed or he destroyed it.
And I talk about this all the time. There's never a clean crime scene.
Same thing with computer forensics.

Speaker 13 There's always a digital crime scene at every crime scene. There's always some kind of digital footprint there.
And no matter how hard you try to scrub, clean, or

Speaker 13 not involve, you know, digital forensics is always there. Cell phone towers, hits, Wi-Fi hotspots, just everything that tells on you.

Speaker 1 Ford knew that for the prosecutors to bring a case against Matt, the digital crime scene needed to be tied to the physical one.

Speaker 13 So I started thinking, how would he hide this? What would he do to get rid of it? What would he have to do to try to clean up his crime scene, not just physically, but digitally as well.

Speaker 1 And that's when Ford realized that the smoking gun in this case wasn't going to be an image of Matt exiting the house with Nikki's body or DNA at the scene of the crime.

Speaker 1 It was going to be the absence of that evidence and who made it go away.

Speaker 4 He says that footage was deleted.

Speaker 1 I go, what?

Speaker 4 He's like, it was deleted. Someone had to physically go in there and delete the camera footage.
And I said, deleted, huh? Not corrupted. So that's when I knew.

Speaker 1 The key to solving this case would be finding who covered up Nikki's murder.

Speaker 1 Next time on Watching You, Nikki left behind life insurance. After her death, A new front opened up in the war between Matt and his stepdaughter.

Speaker 10 Matt contested Alex being a beneficiary. And so there's a huge legal battle that went on for years.
He wanted the money for himself, but mostly he just didn't want Alex to have it.

Speaker 10 He hated her that much.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Nikki's daughters take sides.

Speaker 1 Two take to social media to defend their father.

Speaker 7 Honestly, we can't wait to face his family in court and call out their lies.

Speaker 9 And they've done nothing but cause us pain and torment and

Speaker 4 our day in court will come and

Speaker 9 hopefully my dad will be able to come home.

Speaker 10 He is the only parent they have left in the world and so they're clinging to him. It doesn't matter that he was a monster.
They don't care. That's their dad.

Speaker 1 And Alex is surprised to find herself on the other side of the aisle. from her sisters.

Speaker 6 It was hard to feel like I couldn't rescue them. It was hard to feel like I cared for these kids for so many years of my life and now I have no way to help them.

Speaker 1 Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of watching you ad-free right now by subscribing to the binge podcast channel.

Speaker 1 Search for the binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page.

Speaker 4 Not on Apple?

Speaker 1 Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month.

Speaker 1 Check out the binge channel on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to learn more.

Speaker 1 Watching You is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment. It's hosted and reported by me, Jonathan Hirsch.

Speaker 1 Jason Hoke of Waveland Media is our lead producer and co-reported the series with me. Catherine St.
Louis is our story editor. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St.

Speaker 1 Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville.
We use music from Epidemic Sound and APM. Our fact-checker is Naomi Barr.

Speaker 1 Our production managers are Tamika Balance Kalasny and Sammy Allison. Our lawyer is Minakshi Krishnan.
Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rossik, Jamie Myers, and the whole team at Sony Podcasts.

Speaker 1 If you're enjoying the podcast, please rate and leave us a review. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 4 Hear Hear that?

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 That's quiet.

Speaker 1 The kind you can breathe in.

Speaker 1 The kind you find in Montana valleys or the wide spaces of the Rocky Mountain West. Out here, the days don't blur together.
They open wide.

Speaker 1 When you're ready for this place, Clearwater will help you find it. Clearwater properties.
Claim your space. Licensed where required.
Equal housing opportunity.