A Missing Mother, A Bloody SUV, and Two Men in Her Life With A Reason to Want Her Dead | Tami Reay

A 41-year-old woman living in Pierre, South Dakota, has a ritual. She calls her mother every single morning without fail. But not on the morning of February 8th of 2006. That call never comes. And her mother waits. And her 12-year-old daughter wakes up for school like any other morning.

 But her mom isn’t in the kitchen. Her car is still in the garage. Her purse is still on the counter. and her phone is sitting right beside it. Everything she would need to walk out that door is still exactly where she would have left it. But Tammy is gone and no one knows it yet, but she isn’t coming back. Hi everyone, welcome to episode 77 of the Dark Lady podcast.

 I’m your host Kimberlya and I’m here with my co-host, Mr. New Haircut. I said I would warn you himself, John. >> Hi. Dark Liberty is the dark downward slope into the degradation of the human mind and the consequences that such darkness brings to light. >> Look at his new haircut. How long was your hair before? It was down to his waist.

>> Yeah, it was pretty long. And I said, “Don’t cut it until I straighten it cuz I wanted to see how long it could get.” >> Oh well, >> well, too late for that. We’ll just have to grow it out again. I mean, >> it is just hair. Now, as far as any updates, I think John has one for you. >> Our bed broke.

 Like, actually broke and the frame gave out, so the mattress started sagging in the middle and well, we just kept sleeping on it. And I’d be telling myself, it’s just fine. >> He wasn’t fine. Every morning, I swear he looked like a gargoyle or something. He was walking like hobbling around. It looked like he aged like 40 years overnight. No offense, babe.

>> And I kept riding it off, but it got to the point where I couldn’t pick up Mazy without bracing myself. That’s when I knew that I needed to see someone. >> And that is where Zach Do came back into the picture, our sponsor for today’s video. You might remember us talking about them before.

 Well, they’re back because honestly, we had to use them again. And I loved using them the first time, but now it was your turn. Yeah. And it was late and I kept scrolling trying to figure out what do I need to do? Who do I need to see? Like a chiropractor, some kind of specialist. I I didn’t have any idea. >> And that’s the thing with Zog.

 You don’t have to figure it out by yourself. You just go to their free app or their website and search to compare local in-et network doctors with no surprise bills and no guessing games. >> You can filter by insurance, location, and specialty. So, I could actually find the right kind of doctor that fits between filming and keeping a toddler alive.

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Had an appointment the next morning. >> Yeah. And the doctor’s first thing he said to him was that you need to order a new bed frame cuz obviously we were still sleeping on the old one that was broken. It only took about a month of me watching him like bracing his back and hobbling around. >> I know.

 Clicking a link feels like a small thing, but it’s actually a real step toward taking care of yourself. So, don’t keep putting it off the way I did. >> Yeah, in all seriousness, taking care of your health is really important and it just got easier. Head to zdock.com/darklivity to get started and check that appointment off your list right now.

It’s also linked below in our description box. >> Thanks so much to ZuckDoc for sponsoring this video. Now, let’s get back into this case. >> It was early morning in South Dakota. The sky over the prairie was still dark, but hundreds of miles away in a house in Wyoming, a woman named Bonnie is waiting for her phone to ring. It always rings.

Her daughter Tammy calls every morning. That’s the ritual. So, when the call doesn’t come, Bonnie notices immediately. By a/4 to 7, she already feels it. That wrongness a mother feels before she can even explain it. She picks up the phone and calls Tammy’s house. It rings and rings. No answer. She tries her cell phone and it goes straight to voicemail.

>> Inside that house where the phone is ringing and ringing without anyone answering, the morning is unfolding. Tammy’s 12-year-old daughter, Haley, gets up for school. She comes out into the kitchen the way she does every morning. The only thing that’s different is that her mom isn’t here. That’s really strange right away because her mom is always there.

>> So Haley goes looking for her. She checks her mother’s bedroom and the bed is empty and unmade. Her mom’s cell phone is sitting on the dresser and she looks in the garage and her mother’s black Dodge Dango is parked right where it always is. If her mom had gone somewhere, why was the car still there? And then why is her purse sitting on the counter right where Tammy always left it? Her phone, her car, her purse.

Everything Tammy always had with her when she left the house was still there. But Tammy isn’t. Two people hundreds of miles apart are arriving at the same impossible feeling on the same cold morning. Tammy’s mother, Bonnie, in Wyoming holding a phone that won’t connect. And Tammy’s little girl, Haley, in South Dakota, standing in a two quiet house.

 Both of them thinking the same thought, the one neither of them wants to say out loud. Something is wrong. To understand why that one missed phone call sent such a deep crack of fear through this family, why a mother knew instantly in her gut that something wasn’t right, you have to understand who Tammy was. Because this was not a woman who disappeared.

 This was a woman who showed up every day for everyone that she loved. >> Her name was Tamara Denell Burns, but to everyone who knew her, she was Tammy. Tammy was born on June 15th of 1964 in Lander, Wyoming to Donald and Bonnie Burns. Lander is a small town tucked up against the mountains. The kind of place where the land is wide open and the families have been there for generations and the people stayed tied to one another across whole lifetimes.

 It was a familyfriendly close-knit heartland community and it was home to Tammy. She was the oldest of three girls and she stayed close to her two younger sisters Raquel and Holly for the rest of her life. Even as a kid, there was something about Tammy, a softness, a kindness that people noticed. Her father, Dawn, remembered that when she was in high school, she had a particular pull to the kids who got left out, the ones who got picked on, the ones who didn’t quite fit.

 If she saw someone was being singled out, Tammy was the type to walk over, take that person under her wing, and make sure they knew they weren’t alone. She graduated from Lander Valley High School in 1982 and she was an athlete good enough that she went on to Central Wyoming College for 2 years on a volleyball scholarship. And after college, Timmy did something that a lot of small town kids dream about but never get to do. She left.

 She wanted to see more of the world than the town that she grew up in. So, she moved to Casper first and she worked at a clothing store called Sweet Brier. Then she spent a little while in Cheyenne before moving much farther away all the way to Sacramento, California, where she worked in women’s retail for about 4 years. >> Retail suited her, and it’s easy to see why. Tammy liked people.

 She liked talking to them, helping them, being in the middle of the everyday flow of a store. The work fit her personality, outgoing, social, easy to talk to, and no one really felt like a stranger. >> Exactly. But here’s the thing about Tammy. No matter how far she went, she never really left home. She loved the idea of city life.

 She wanted more than Lander could offer her. And yet, her family stayed at the absolute center of her world the entire time. Her parents, her sisters, those were the relationships everything else was built around. Wherever she lived, however far away, home was still home. By 1991, when she was 27, Tammy was living in Billings, Montana, the biggest city in the state, and a place that gave her a taste of that bigger life she had always imagined, while still keeping her within a few hours drive of Lander.

>> And it was around this time that her sister Raquel introduced her to a man named Brad Ria. Now, Raquel had worked with Brad at a restaurant that he bartended at, and she waited tables. And knowing them both, she thought the two of them might hit it off. Brad was quiet. He was reserved. In a lot of ways, he was Tammy’s opposite where she was outgoing and warm.

 He was more introverted and low-key. But to her family, that was dependable. He seemed like a good guy. He was hardworking, loyal, and he had an interesting quality about him. He was a twin. His twin brother was Brett, and he also had a younger brother named Brian. The three of them were extremely close, especially the twins.

 Tammy’s family met Brad and really liked him, and Tammy did too. I mean, she wouldn’t have brought him home to her family if she didn’t. And it wasn’t long before she and Brad were in a serious committed relationship. And the cool thing was they had a family of three girls and he had a family of the three boys.

 So, right away they felt like, “Wow, that’s kind of interesting that we grew up the same way.” >> And of course, Raquel knew her sister Tammy and she knew she always had a clear picture of the life that she wanted. That’s why when she was working alongside Brad, she just knew he was exactly the type of guy Tammy would go for.

 Tammy used to say she was going to get married and have a little girl. And that is exactly what she did. About a year after dating, Tammy and Brad got married on June 6th of 1992 and settled down together in Billings, Montana. For Tammy, this was the dream she had for her life coming true. >> In the beginning, Brad worked at a grocery store and he actually made a good living.

 It was focused on building a career and Tammy’s heart was set on starting a family. So, in April of 1993, when their daughter Haley was born, it was everything. Her sister Holly said that having a baby girl was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to Tammy. She was truly living her dream life. >> And Haley was an amazing little girl.

She was happy, personable, full of life, the kind of kid who made friends easily, and was a pleasure to be around. And from the very start, she and Tammy were inseparable. Haley said it was like having a big sister, not just a mom. Haley was truly Tammy’s mini me. For most of Haley’s childhood, Tammy was a stay-at-home mom.

 And the two of them spent nearly all of their time together. Tammy built her days around her daughter. She took Haley to dance, to soccer, to volleyball, to basketball. Whatever Haley was into, Tammy was there for it. Their lives ran on the rhythm of school and practices and games and errands, the busy, ordinary, beautiful routine of a mother and daughter who genuinely loved being around one another.

 But of course, Haley was close with her dad, too. She was just more of a mama’s girl. But she and Brad spent time together doing a lot of activities like fishing, playing outside, and watching their favorite movies and shows together. And even when his career got more demanding and his hours got longer, he’d sometimes bring Haley along to work just so they could have a little more time together.

>> That’s really sweet. It really shows that he didn’t want to miss out on anything important in her life. >> The family did a lot of activities together. They camped on the weekends. They went whitewater rafting. They made the drive back to Lander to visit Tammy’s family. It was a full, busy, happy life, and it was a good one.

>> And then in 2004, everything shifted. Brad had been hired by Walmart and he was focused on climbing the corporate ladder. He wanted to advance into management. He had the experience and it came with a pay raise. And when he got offered an assistant manager promotion, he was thrilled.

 The only catch was that the promotion was in Pierre, South Dakota, and taking it meant moving the whole family there. Now, that would be a big change. I think we’ve at least done one other case in South Dakota, and all I can recall was the weather. It was brutal. To really understand what this move would mean for Tammy, you have to picture the two places side by side and remember the life Tammy was already living. Her dream life.

 She came from a small town. And this was now Billings, Montana, the biggest city in Montana. A place where real momentum happened. Shopping centers, restaurants, traffic, busy streets, things to do. There were neighborhoods full of young families, schools full of kids Haley’s age. a place where something is always going on.

 And for 14 years, that had been Tammy’s world. She had built an entire life inside of it. Friends, routines, a daughter growing up surrounded by other kids, a community she knew how to move through. And just as importantly, Billings kept her within just a few hours of her family back in Lander. Home was always close enough to reach. The people who knew her best were never really that far away.

>> And then there was Pierre, South Dakota. Pierre sits right in the geographic middle of South Dakota. One of the smallest state capitals in the entire country, a town of only 15,000 people, surrounded on every side by wide open prairie, long empty stretches of highway, and miles of land that seem to run out forever in every direction.

Where Billings had bustle, Pierre had quiet. Where Billings had crowds, Pierre had space and a lot of it. It’s the kind of town where, for the people who belong there, that quiet feels like safety. It’s close-knit and proud and sure of its own values. A place where neighbors, no neighbors, and not much ever seems to go wrong.

>> But Tammy didn’t belong there. Not much happened in Pierre. The landscape itself could feel stark, especially in the winter when the wind comes hard and unbroken across that open prairie and the roads stretch out between towns. For Tammy, everything would be so far away. Going from Billings to Pierre wasn’t just trading a big city for a small town.

 It was trading a life that she had spent 14 years building for a place where she knew no one. >> And the distance wasn’t only emotional. Pierre was an 8 or 9hour drive from the family and friends Tammy had leaned on her entire life. Lander, her hometown, her roots, her mother, her sisters, all of it suddenly far out of reach. And for Brad, this was progress.

 His career mattered to him and this was the next step up. But for Tammy and Haley, the decision was so much harder. >> Haley was 11 at the time and she did not want to go. She was angry and heartbroken about leaving her friends, her school, and her whole extended world behind. Moving from a city like Billings to a small town in the middle of South Dakota felt like a catastrophe to her at just 11 when your friendships and your sense of belonging everything.

 And it actually was. I mean, a person’s personal circumstances are real to them. Even if an adult can justify them and make sense of them, a child cannot. But even as an adult, Tammy wasn’t happy about it either. To Tammy, it felt isolating. Not just the move, but not to be on the same side as her husband. But the family moved anyway because Brad’s job was their only income.

 Tammy did take side jobs here and there, including some work at a local high school in Billings, but for the most part, Haley was her job 24/7. >> Walmart was Brad’s focus, his priority. So, in turn, their priority, but the decision was more one-sided than anything else. But Tammy and Haley agreed to try and make it work.

 When the Rios first arrived and Pierre, they didn’t exactly land in comfort. At first, they rented a place to get on their feet, a double wide mobile home. While Brad settled into the new job, and the family found their footing in a town none of them had chosen, but Brad was driven, and at work, he was moving up. Within about a year, as he started doing better in his position, the family was able to move into something more permanent.

 A comfortable three-bedroom, three bath, two-story house on River Rim Drive. It was just under 1,200 square feet on a quiet residential street with an open kitchen, a really nice big deck out in the back and a great view and even a threecar garage. It was a real step up for the family to get on solid ground, settling in, building a life.

But to get that life, Brad worked long hours, sometimes all day and deep into the night, often without anyone in the house quite knowing where he was or when he would come home. It was hard on Tammy. And since she realized that she was alone a lot while Haley was at school, she too went to work. She found a part-time job doing something she had always loved, working in retail in the shoe department at the local Kmart.

 It gave her a chance to meet people, be social. She liked talking to the customers, helping them, being part of the everyday hum of the store. It suited her the same way it always had and also let her make some cash of her own. Haley was also trying. She got involved at her middle school, Georgia Morris Middle School, same as my maiden name, Morris.

She joined volleyball and basketball, and slowly her social world started to open back up. And as Haley settled in, it gave Tammy a little more room, a little more freedom. >> But Brad’s hours just kept growing. And as they did, the strain inside the marriage grew with them. He’d always been a workaholic, but in Pierre, it seemed to intensify.

 The job came first, and those long absences started to wear on the home. And through all of it, one thing kept Tammy tethered. That phone call. Every morning before anyone else was up, Tammy called her mother, Bonnie, back in Wyoming. Tammy was in South Dakota. But during those calls, the distance seemed to shrink down to nothing.

 Bonnie said they would talk before the rest of the world was even awake. Sometimes the call only lasted 5 minutes. Sometimes it stretched on for an hour, depending on what was happening that day. They did it 7 days a week for years. It was a lifeline, a daily thread connecting Tammy back home to the people that she never stopped needing and never stopped wanting in her life.

 Which is exactly why on the morning of February 8th of 2006, when that call didn’t come, Bonnie knew something was wrong. It had to be. Is there a ritual that any of you do that someone close to you would be shocked if you didn’t? So shocked that they would actually think that something bad happened to you? I feel like mine is so varied, my routine.

 I mean, of course, people would notice if I was gone for an extended period of time, but I don’t think there’s anything that I do that would really tip someone off immediately. Is there something you do? >> I don’t think so. >> I know. It’s weird. And I was actually thinking of a really relatable story that I heard recently, though.

 In Florida, there was a 78-year-old man named Charlie Hicks. And he would order the same lunch and same dinner at this shrimp basket restaurant in Pensacola, Florida. Gumbo every day for 10 years. >> Hold the cracker. >> Exactly. Light rice. And he literally was there when the restaurant opened every day.

 And then suddenly he stopped showing up. And the chef, Donnell Stalworth, actually left in the middle of a shift and went looking for Charlie. He went to where he lived. And ultimately that saved this man’s life because Charlie had taken a fall. No one knew how long he had been on the ground. But because of his ritual, his consistent routine, he was saved.

 It is heartwarming, but it also brings us back to that morning of February 8th of 2006. >> By the time the sun is fully up, Bonnie still hasn’t heard from her daughter. And the worry has started to move into something worse. One of Tammy’s sisters, Holly, had stopped by their mother’s house before she went to work.

 And the moment she walked in the door, Bonnie told her she couldn’t get a hold of Tammy. And Holly felt sick almost instantly because that was the whole thing the whole family understood in their bones. Tammy not calling was not a small thing. It was not an oversight. It simply did not happen. Bonnie and Tammy’s other sister, Raquel, kept trying.

 They called the house phone, her cell phone, over and over, but there was nothing. And as it got closer to 9:00 in the morning, Pierre time, Raquel had a thought. Maybe Tammy had gone to her shift at Kmart already. So Raquel called the store and asked for her. >> The woman who answered put Raquel on hold. And Raquel described those next few minutes as some of the longest of her life, just waiting, hoping that any second she’d hear her sister’s voice come on the phone.

 But instead, what she heard was Tammy being paged over the store’s loudspeaker over and over. Tammy Ria to the phone again and again. And then the woman came back on the line and told Raquel what she already didn’t want to hear. Tammy wasn’t there. She hadn’t come in that morning. And now the family had a real problem because they didn’t know what to do next.

 And here’s something you have to understand about this family. When they realized Tammy was missing, Brad was not the first person they thought to call. He wasn’t really someone they turned to. Their relationship with him had always been more distant. It was polite, but it was never close. So instead of calling Tammy’s husband, they started to try to think of someone else in Pierre who might know where Tammy was.

 And if that sounds odd, it should. It really should. I mean, it’s not for nothing. Bonnie knew her daughter. She confided in her mother. Bonnie knew Tammy’s fears, her hopes, dreams, and her worries. She didn’t know Brad as much because soon after Tammy and Brad got together, they were living their own life away from Wyoming out in Billings.

 And Brad was always busy working. So they searched for someone else close enough to Tammy that might be able to reach her. And the person they landed on was Brian Clark. During Tammy’s visit home over Christmas, a visit she made without Brad, she mentioned a man named Brian that Tammy was friends with from work. Bonnie knew only that he was someone Tammy knew from Kmart and that he was a manager there.

 Raquel remembered Tammy bringing him up too. So to the family at that point, Brian was just a name, a person, a coworker, a friend Tammy had mentioned, someone who might know something about her life and Pierre that they from hundreds of miles away in Wyoming simply didn’t. Plus, he was a lot closer than they were. So Bonnie called Kmart and asked for Brian.

 She introduced herself, explained who she was, and asked this simple, frightening question. Have you seen Tammy? Brian said he hadn’t. Bonnie told him the family couldn’t reach her and that they were getting scared. And Brian, trying to be helpful, told Bonnie that Tammy was supposed to be starting a new job soon at her local pharmacy.

 So, he checked there for them. He hung up. He called the pharmacy. Then, he called Bonnie back to let her know that Tammy wasn’t there either. By now, it was clear the family needed to talk to the one person who had actually seen Tammy last, which was her 12-year-old daughter, Haley. Brian knew which school Haley went to, and soon Haley was pulled out of class to take a phone call from her family.

 Raquel asked Haley if she knew where her mother was. Haley told him what she knew. the last time she had seen her mom was the night before. And then she told him the detail that turned everyone’s fear into something harder to sit with, that her mother’s purse and cell phone were still both sitting on the counter at home when her dad took her to school that morning.

 And that didn’t make sense. Bonnie called Brian back and told him everything that Haley had just said. Tammy hadn’t been seen since the night before. Her purse was still home. Her phone was still home. This was no longer something a family could sit on from 8 hours away. Bonnie told Brian someone needs to call the police.

 Brian said he would make that call and that he’d stay in touch. After that, the family didn’t hear back from him. They thought this Brian guy would call right back. This was serious, but all they could do is wait. >> They had been calling him at Kmart. This wasn’t like they had his cell phone number or anything like that. They were waiting on his call back to them.

 And the waiting was its own kind of torture because think about where they were. They were hundreds of miles away in another state, completely helpless. And the person they were now depending on to bring in the police was someone they didn’t even know. All they could do was hope that this stranger would do what he said he would do. And he did.

 At 10:32 that morning, the Pierre Police Department got a call. The man identified himself as Brian Clark, and he said he needed to report a woman named Tammy Ria missing. He told the dispatcher she had been last seen around 5:00 the previous evening. He mentioned she was wearing a black turtleneck. And the reason he knew this we will get into in a little bit.

 But there’s something else that’s going to be more of a bombshell. Brian said something that changed the entire nature of this call. He told the dispatcher that he thought foul play was possible. And the dispatcher asked him why would you say that? And that’s when Brian explained that he and Tammy had been having an affair and that they were both married.

He said Tammy’s husband Brad had apparently found out about it and now Tammy was gone. In one breath, this stopped being a routine missing person’s report. >> 911. Where’s Where’s the missing person’s report? >> Your name, please. >> I’m Brian Clark. >> What’s your name? >> Tammy. Ria. >> Uh, last name. R E A Y.

>> Um, foul play could be suspected here. >> Okay. And why do you think that, sir? >> Um, hopefully this is discreet, but me and her have been having an affair. >> Apparently, your husband had found out about it. >> Okay. What is this? >> Brad. R E A Y. Leah, >> do you like to come out to the police station and file that report so you can talk to an officer? >> Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what to do.

>> Think about how unusual that is. In most missing person’s cases, the first call comes from the people closest to the person, which is usually the husband, a parent, a sibling, maybe a child. But in Tammy’s case, the person formerly bringing the police in wasn’t her husband. It was her lover. >> And he wasn’t just reporting her missing.

 He was pointing the finger at Brad right away, telling the police he was afraid of what Tammy’s husband might have done to her, and even letting them know that Brad managed a Walmart right there in town and they should go find him. And later, Brian would go a step further and come into the Pierre Police Department in person, where he laid out more detail about the affair and about his fears regarding Brad Ria.

 But for now, here’s where you have to sit in the same uncomfortable spot the police were now sitting in. Because a call like this cuts two ways, and a good investigator knows it. On one hand, maybe this is exactly what it looked like from a man who cared about Tammy, who knew her husband had found out about them, doing the brave and decent thing by getting the police involved fast and steering them towards the person he genuinely feared.

>> On the other hand, he was the side piece, the lover, the secret, and he was a married man, too, whose affair, if it came out, could blow up his own life as well. and he was the one who inserted himself into this from the very first phone call. So, was he helping or was he getting ahead of something? That’s what they had to figure out.

 But the police had a name and they had a place to start. So, Lieutenant Dave Panzer, following the tip that Brian had given them, pulled in Detective David Deja to help him with the missing person’s case. And the two of them set out to find Tammy’s husband, Brad Ria. Now, I want to pause. I know what some of you might be thinking. I get it.

 She’s cheating and I’m not going to make an excuse for anyone doing that. However, in a way, Brad’s focus outside of the marriage, even if it was not on another woman, but on his career, is exactly the thing that was pulling this family apart. >> Because the long hours that kept Brad away from his wife and daughter, the career that gave them the nicer home and more things, is the career that came first, before the dinners, before the evenings, before Tammy that was more important to him.

 That’s how it felt for Tammy. Not an excuse, but part of the dynamic of Tammy and Brad’s relationship that led her down that path. But let’s get back to what’s more important right now. The first stop was the house. Lieutenant Panzer knocked on the front door and no one answered. Deja Bay went around the back and looked through the window into the garage and there parked inside was a black Dodge Durango.

 He also noticed something on the door, a reddish brown stain. It wasn’t enough to mean anything on its own. Not yet, at least. But with their apprehension building, the detectives didn’t linger. Pancer called in the patrol officer, Lisa McFarland, to keep an eye on the house, especially that garage. And then he and Deja Bay drove to Walmart to look for Brad.

>> When they found him, Brad’s reaction stood out immediately. Brad stopped in his tracks the moment he saw them, saw the detectives, saw the uniformed officer with them. Brad was visibly startled by their presence. They told him that Tammy hadn’t shown up for work and that there were concerns she was missing.

 And they asked him when he had last seen his wife. This is when things get interesting because now Brad has a story to tell. >> He told detectives that he’d gotten home from work the night before and Tammy wasn’t there. Haley was already asleep in the house. And then he said sometime later about 1:00 in the morning, he heard a vehicle pull up outside.

 So that grabbed his attention, thinking it was his wife. He looked and saw Tammy’s black Durango parked in the driveway. So he figured it was her coming back from somewhere. But then Tammy didn’t just get out and come inside the house. Instead, Brad said that he watched her get out of her Durango and then climb into another vehicle with someone else and then drive away.

 He was really confused and concerned, so he decided in the spur of the moment to follow her. I mean, he’s her husband after all, and he wanted to know, “Where is my wife going and who was she with?” >> But he didn’t take his own truck. He ran out and got into Tammy’s Durango and drove after them. It was already in the driveway, and it was quicker just to jump in and take it, so he did.

 And he said he caught up to and began following the other vehicle until the Durango started to sputter. Then it stalled out on him and wouldn’t start. He explained that as he was sitting there, a South Dakota Highway Patrol trooper actually stopped to help him. Brad even said they could probably confirm all of this if the patrol officer had body cam or like dash camera this encounter almost like he wanted to be able to back up his story with evidence. But it was true.

Investigators were able to confirm that Brad had in fact been stopped with Tammy’s Durango at 1:40 in the morning. >> Fadria are eating. You have any ID with you at all? >> Boyfriend to the door real quick. >> But here’s what’s strange about this. I don’t know if you heard that what he said at the time, but out there on the side of the road in the middle of the night, Brad had not told this trooper any of what he’s telling the detectives.

He didn’t say he was following his wife. He hadn’t said anything unusual was going on. And when the trooper asked him for ID, Brad said he didn’t have it on him because he was in a hurry and he just jumped in the car to go to the store real fast. >> Right. The store not following some random car his wife jumped into.

>> But would you tell a trooper all your personal business? >> I don’t know. It’s a lot of info and it could make you look weird and then maybe the trooper would have a reason to sit and talk and dig into it, which most people don’t want. >> Yeah. Or maybe he did have something to hide, >> right? But they have no idea.

 But Brad tells the detectives that once he got the Durango started again, he drove it home and parked it in the garage. >> But now standing in that Walmart, Detective Deja Bay asked Brad a reasonable question. He asked, “Was it possible with everything that they now know that there’s an affair going on that the marriage maybe could be a little rocky? if Tammy could be back at the house right now, maybe packing her things to leave him, especially since she was seen getting into someone else’s car. And Brad said, “Yeah, that’s

possible.” So, he agreed to head back to the house with the officers and even accepted a ride with them. When they got there, officer McFarland was still there watching the house. And additionally, Detective Troy Swinson arrived shortly afterward, so all of them were present as well.

 Panzer asked Brad for written consent to search his home and the vehicles and Brad agreed. He signed the consent form, meaning he was allowing this voluntarily and could revoke it at any time. Then he walked outside while the detectives went in. It started as a welfare check, but it did not stay that for long. >> Almost right away, the officers spotted what looked like a droplet of blood on the garage floor.

 And then there was the Duringo itself. When they got near it, they were hit with the smell, a strong chemical odor, like cleaning solution, almost like bleach. >> It was a smell of a vehicle that had been cleaned recently and aggressively. >> This was the moment the whole thing turned into something else. Detective Deja Ba’s instinct shifted from missing person to something much darker.

 He suspected a homicide and he did the thing a careful investigator does at exactly that moment. He stopped. He directed the officers to halt the search right there so they could do this properly and get an official warrant before going any further. >> Brad at that point agreed to come to the police station for a more detailed interview.

 The husband is always looked at first when a wife is missing. So they bring him in. The detective knew what they had seen and smelled at that home. The stain, the blood droplet, the bleach. But they didn’t lay all of that out for Brad. Not yet. They wanted to talk to him first. They wanted to hear his story again in full in that room and watch how he told it.

 The door closed and the interview began. >> The detectives started over with Brad. They wanted to hear everything again, slowly, deliberately, walking him back through the story he told them at Walmart. And the more he talked, the more they believed the crack showed. He told them again that he’d gotten home the night before and Tammy wasn’t there.

That later around 1:00 in the morning, he heard a vehicle pull up. He looked out and saw Tammy get out of her during climb into another car and ride away with someone else. He said again that he decided to follow them and instead of taking his own truck, he taken Tammy’s Durango. >> The detectives stopped him right there.

They’re like, “Why would you take her vehicle?” They asked, “Why not your own?” And Brad’s answer was that the Durango was already outside and it was also faster and easier to maneuver than his truck. So, he had driven around looking for Tammy and the other car. he said until the Durango broke down on the side of the road.

 And that’s when the highway patrol troopers stopped to check on him at around 1:42 in the morning. And the trooper’s dash cam showed that and confirmed that part. >> But then came the problem that the detectives kept circling back to out there on the roadside in the middle of the night. Brad had told that trooper nothing about following his wife.

 He told the trooper he’d just run out to the store and was heading home. So which was it? When they pressed him, Brad admitted that he lied to the trooper. He said he just didn’t think it was relevant to tell the trooper that he thought his wife was cheating on him. The most important part right now was that Brad explained once the Durango started back up, he driven it home, parked it in the garage, and hadn’t touched it since.

>> That’s where the questions start to pile up faster than the answers. If Brad was telling the truth, if he had innocently chased after his wife in the middle of the night, why hide it from the trooper? And if the Durango had simply broken down during an honest search for Tammy, then how did fresh blood end up dripping off of it hours later? Well, that was the thing Brad didn’t know yet.

 He didn’t know what they had seen in that garage. They hadn’t told him that part, but they did ask him directly if he had done something to Tammy. Had he heard her? And Brad said no. And he asked, “Has something happened to her?” And they were like, “Well, that’s what we’re checking.

” And Brad was like, “Have you found something?” >> “Did you harm your wife?” >> Well, that’s what we’re checking. >> Find something. >> Yeah. Um, we found blood running off the um off the running board, drifting onto the concrete. Do you know how it happened? >> I know what. >> Okay. >> That is when they revealed that they had found blood running off the Durango dripping down onto the garage floor.

They asked if he knew how it got there, and he said no. And he looked very upset, almost shocking, kind of grabbing his head and rocking back and forth. >> Remember, they had not done a thorough search at this point. They were digging for information, and Brad didn’t have an explanation for it.

 He admitted to his knowledge he was the last person to drive that vehicle. So the detectives asked him if he hit anything with that vehicle lately and he said no. Had he run over an animal? Again, Brad said no. >> I have to say he was really calm. He isn’t getting angry or defensive, but he did deny knowing anything about the blood or hitting anything.

 If it was blood, he denied knowing where the blood came from or how it had gotten there. >> But he was open about his marriage. He admitted that he was aware that Tammy had been seeing someone. He didn’t call it an affair, though. He just said he knew that she had been dating another man. >> And even though the other man didn’t want to reveal what was going on, Tammy wanted to come clean.

 And I’m not really sure what the difference is between him saying that she’s dating someone or having an affair because if you’re married, it would be an affair regardless, right? But he said he didn’t know who the man was and claimed he never even asked because he didn’t want to know. >> But he had said something else that seemed pretty telling.

 He told investigators that he and Tammy had slept in separate bedrooms for a while and she had recently told him she wanted to get a divorce. >> I mean, that is a lot. It seems like all the typical signs that the husband, so Brad in this case, would have a motive to want his wife gone. However, he said he didn’t see it coming at all.

 The move was hard on her and there were a lot of changes and he still believed that they would get back together. >> According to Brad, he and Tammy didn’t argue. Even as the marriage fell apart, he insisted the two of them had treated each other with respect. They were going to work it through. But now she’s gone. >> He said that they never ever argued ever.

 And that’s what he meant about treating each other with respect. But to be fair, even if a couple does get into arguments, it doesn’t mean that you are disrespecting each other. It’s the way that you actually go about the argument, right? Because you and your partner are going to have disagreements, but you don’t have to be nasty and you don’t have to always agree, >> right? It’s how you argue.

 But the detectives had seen this many times. They knew all too well that husbands will say the opposite in cases like this. So, they wanted to put more pressure on Brad to make sure. Either they rule him out or he becomes a suspect, but remember this is merely a missing person’s case. They don’t know where she is.

 It had been two hours in that room already and now the tone sharpens. Detective Deja Bay was joined by the state criminal investigator named Guy D. Benadetto. His job was to push Brad harder. >> At this point, what troubled the investigators wasn’t just the evidence. It was Brad himself. Here was a man whose wife was missing, whose wife’s vehicle had what they believed was blood dripping off of it, who admitted he had driven that vehicle in the middle of the night and then lied to a trooper about why he was out there. And yet, he didn’t

seem to be doing the thing an innocent, frightened husband does. >> He wasn’t frantic to find her. He was focused, methodically, almost stubbornly focused on continuing to explain why none of the supposed blood evidence meant what it obviously looked like it meant. They were directly accusing him at this point and he pushed back a bit and said, “Okay, and where are you saying this would have happened?” They said, “I don’t know.

 Maybe inside the house.” And he was like, “Well, wouldn’t there be blood everywhere then?” So, he was just like arguing back and forth with them. And the detectives were like, “Well, maybe there is.” >> It’s hard for me to believe that somehow blood miraculously got inside the vehicle that you were last driving. >> So, where did we have the argument? >> Well, that’s one of my unanswered questions, isn’t it? I’m guessing inside your house.

>> So, there’d be blood everywhere. >> There might be. >> But here’s the thing. This was fresh blood. I mean, dripping blood. The detectives counted. It dripped out of the car every 10 seconds. This was a pretty significant amount. And when the detectives opened the door of the car, they smelled more bleach.

 And they even saw swirl marks in the leather. It looked like someone botched a cleanup job. A very rushed cleanup job in their perspective. So much blood that it could not be cleaned up. So the cleanup was abandoned. You could see it stained the interior carpet. It was thick. That this was truly why a homicide was suspected.

>> But Brad as a person is introverted, calm by nature, and he hadn’t seen what they had. Even then, Brad said he understood why they were focused on him. He’s one of the closest people to her, but he kept denying he’d hurt her, even when the detectives told him, “We know you harmed your wife.

” At which point, he said something that sounded very strange. >> He said that he hoped the police would find Tammy’s body because he believed there would be something on it that would prove he was innocent, like DNA. And the detective agreed that DNA was a great thing, like he would be counting on it. >> I know that you harmed your wife.

 Okay, >> I know if all this evidence points at me, but I’m hoping that the body is found does it’ll be something to set me free. DNA great things. >> After several hours of this, Brad said he wanted an attorney. And with that, the interview was over. It had lasted about 5 hours. And at this point, the detectives are kind of at a crossroads.

They have not ruled out Brian this entire time. And there were other things happening that we haven’t talked about yet, including Brian coming down to the police station, Haley being interviewed, and a much more thorough investigation of the vehicle, which concluded that in their perspective, Tammy had been murdered.

 There was a lot of blood, as we said, too much for a person to have lost that much and still be alive. >> So, at this point, they’re afraid that if they let Brad go, and he does have something to do with this, he could tamper with evidence. So, they decide they have enough probable cause with him admitting he drove the car last, being able to be in possession of both the house and the vehicle, and the fact they were going through a divorce with an affair that they could arrest him for firstdegree murder.

 At least that way they could hold him. >> Uh, bro, we’re going to arrest you right now for first degree murder. >> And this was pretty stunning. This had begun that very morning as a missing person report. And now by that same afternoon, less than a day after Tammy had been officially reported missing, her husband was in custody, charged with her murder, held without bail, and they still didn’t know where Tammy was.

>> That’s a risky move, and detectives know it. But the hard question was still wide open. Where was Tammy? Was she even dead? And if she was, had Brad really killed her, or was someone trying very hard to make it look that way? >> Exactly. Meanwhile, there was Haley. While Brad was being interviewed, Detective Troy Swinsson had gone back to Haley’s school.

 He knew he had to be careful. This was a 12-year-old girl, and he didn’t want to frighten her any more than the situation already had. But when Haley saw the police, she understood enough to be scared. If the police were involved, then something was really wrong. Swinson recorded their conversation because the investigators needed to understand what life had actually been like inside the Ria home and whether Haley had noticed anything strange before her mother vanished.

 She was described as a quiet, meek little girl and she was clearly worried sick about her mom. She told Swenson she knew her parents were getting a divorce. In fact, she said that her parents had sat her down and just told her that past Sunday on February 5th, just days earlier. When Swenson asked if she knew why they were getting a divorce, she said it was because her mother didn’t love her father anymore and because her father was never home from work.

 He asked if her parents argued a lot and she said no. He asked if things had ever gotten physical between them and again she said no. And it was really sad to listen to this. We would play a portion but the audio is really really bad. So we repeated it word for word. It’s just sad the way that she said like her mom doesn’t love her dad anymore and that he was never around and now he’s in jail and her mom is missing.

 But she had more to add. She did tell him that something about her dad had been off lately. After her parents told her about the divorce that Sunday, Haley said Brad wouldn’t eat. He would just sit in his bed and do nothing and he didn’t want anyone to talk to him. He was taking it very hard. while her mother on the other hand seemed to be completely normal.

>> Swinson asked her about the last time she’d seen her mother about the day before. Haley told him about February 7th. She described it as an ordinary good day. That afternoon, her mom had come to Georgia Morris Middle School to watch her play basketball, and the two of them had eaten together right there in the stands.

 After the game, on the way home, they’d stop at Walmart, the one where Brad worked, to pick up a few small things, toilet paper, odds and ends. Then they’d headed home. A normal evening, a mom and daughter doing the small, ordinary things they always did. >> Haley had gone to bed around 9:00. As far as she’d known, when she fell asleep, her dad was still at work and her mom was home.

>> That was the last normal piece of her life, and she didn’t even know it yet. A part of Haley kept holding on to the hope that this was all some kind of terrible mistake and that she would wake up and her mom and dad would both somehow be there and the nightmare would be over.

 But the investigators couldn’t leave her without hope for long. The very next day, Detective Swinson had to sit down with Haley and tell her what they believed, and there was no gentle way to do it. He told her they believed her mother was dead. And he told her that her father had been arrested for killing her. >> Haley said it felt like being inside a television show, like none of it could possibly be real.

 Her father killing her mother made no sense to her. None at all. She had never seen him get angry. There were no fights. Sure, she knew the divorce was pending, but other than that, it seemed unreal. >> She had just been told that her parents were divorcing, and now, almost in the same breath, she was being told that she had lost both of them, one to death and one to a jail cell.

 Swinson told her the investigators would keep looking for her mom and that if there was anything they could do for her, all she had to do was call them. Haley wanted to believe him. Deep down, she already knew that her mother would never have left without telling her. But she was still a child, frightened and stranded in a town that had never really become home, facing something that no 12-year-old has any way to process.

 One of the small, heartbreaking questions she’d asked was whether she would still be able to keep her cat. And that was heartbreaking. And I just felt like that poor little girl. All of this that she had to deal with. After Brad’s arrest, one parent presumed dead and the other one in custody. Haley was placed in a foster home while everyone waited for her grandparents to make the long drive up from Wyoming.

 Don Burns, Tammy’s father, had already endured his own agonizing hours on the road from Lander to Pierre. And when he finally got there to pick Haley up, she gave her grandfather the biggest hug. Then they took her home, back to Lander, back to the place Tammy had always considered home. But the search for Tammy herself was still on, and it had become enormous.

 By the day after Tammy missed that morning call, the effort to find her had grown into something massive. Law enforcement, search teams, volunteers, even members of the National Guard. They searched around Pierre by ground, by air, with planes, helicopters, and eventually a cadaavver dog. >> The land itself made it brutal. Pier sits in the middle of all that open countryside.

 Brush, fields, rural roads, miles of emptiness running out in every direction. If Tammy had been left somewhere remote, she might not be found for a very long time. Maybe not at all. They were racing more than the dark at this point. Hunting season had just ended, which meant fewer people would be out moving through those rural areas in the weeks to come.

 If they didn’t find Tammy during this search, she might stay undiscovered for months, possibly until next hunting season. And by then, the weather and the animals could have destroyed or scattered whatever evidence was left with her. Maybe that was what the killer had been counting on. But then two days after she had been reported missing, as the daylight was running out and a helicopter was getting low on fuel, the searchers made one last pass near the Oah Dam about 10 to 15 miles outside of Pierre.

 And from the air, someone saw something in that remote stretch of ground that looked like it could be a body. And upon closer examination, it was a body. It was Tammy. She had been left out in the open, unclothed, lying face up near the brush that could have hidden her. If whoever had left her there would have bothered to hide her at all.

 But they hadn’t. She had just been left there like that, exposed and lifeless. >> But when they recovered her, the brutality of what had been done became impossible to look away from. Tammy had been stabbed not a few times, but close to 40. The wounds were everywhere. her chest, her back, her face, her arms, and one cut straight across her neck.

 This was not an attack meant to wound or to warn. It was an attack to end her life many times over. >> It was classic overkill. There were several bloody pieces of fabric soaked all the way through nearby. But here’s what stopped the investigators. Out there where Tammy was found, there wasn’t nearly enough blood to match the kind of violence that occurred.

 A woman stabbed this many times bleeds catastrophically. That amount simply wasn’t there at the scene, which told them something with certainty. Tammy had not been killed where she was found. She had been killed somewhere else. And then she had been brought out there to the edge of the prairie and left. So now they had a new and pressing question.

 If not here, where? >> With Brad being the one in custody, the most obvious answer was the Ria home. Cruz had already been out there since the day Tammy went missing and they were meticulously combing the entire house. It was eerily clean and tidy. >> Was that a red flag or more evidence that they arrested the wrong man? >> Everything looked like it should.

 The living room was organized. Beds were made in each bedroom. Bathroom was clean. No signs of anything violent or any type of struggle at all. As a matter of fact, when the detectives first went into the house with Brad, they noticed the washer and dryer were running. Just a small detail, but since they were looking for a possible cleanup, they took note of it.

 And now there was a fresh stack of laundry on Brad’s bed. Did it mean anything? They weren’t sure. But if Tammy had been attacked at this house, then the house should show it. There should be blood, some trace of violence, or some sign that violence had frantically been cleaned away. But the house gave them nothing. It was frustratingly, almost impossibly clean.

So they thought, maybe this is where the time was spent. Maybe if Brad did this, he used a lot of that time cleaning the house and didn’t have enough time to clean the car that Tammy was transported in. >> Right. Most of all the blood evidence was found in the back seat. So they used luminol in the bedroom, the chemical that makes hidden traces of blood glow in the dark.

 The stuff that finds what the human eye and a mop can’t. But there was nothing. They examined the mattress microscopically. Nothing. There was no blood trail. There were no obvious signs that Tammy had been stabbed inside that house at all. The beds didn’t even look slept in. That evidence was its own kind of problem because it cut both ways.

 A spotless house meant they couldn’t prove that Tammy had been killed there. And if she hadn’t been killed there, then maybe, just maybe, there was room in the story for Brad’s version to be true after all. Maybe Tammy really had gotten to another vehicle that night and driven off with someone.

 Maybe she’d been killed by whoever that was, presumably Brian. And perhaps the blood was placed inside the Duringo in the garage after Brad parked it there that night because the killer wanted to place blame elsewhere. >> Or maybe Brad’s entire story was made up, just built to explain why a man was out driving his missing wife’s bloody vehicle at 1:42 in the morning.

>> That could be true. So, here is where everything stood. Tammy was dead. They know that she had been murdered savagely by someone who either hated her, feared her, or both. And the blood in the vehicle had been collected, tested, and confirmed to be Tammy’s. >> Her husband, Brad, was in a jail cell charged with killing her.

 But they don’t have a definite crime scene. No weapon. And her lover, Brian, had been the one to report her missing, even pointing straight to Tammy’s husband. >> So, killed where? By whom? >> Nobody knew yet. >> So, let’s tell you about Brian. The night this all began, they brought Brian in and listened to his account.

 Brian told him about his version of February 7th. He said that he and Tammy had spent that afternoon together at the Thawn Motel where their relationship had been sexual. He said he dropped Tammy off at her house around 5:00 that evening and he had never seen her again after that. And that is how he knew what she was wearing that night because he was giving them the description of what he saw her in last.

 He told them that afterward he went home and that he spent the rest of the evening with his wife and his daughter. They had gone to a local basketball game together and then he had been home with his family the entire night. >> On its face, it was an alibi, but it was an alibi that depended almost entirely on one person, his wife.

 and that put her through no fault of her own right in the middle of a murder investigation and also this affair he was having that she was not aware of. She was at that point the one person who could confirm or destroy her husband’s account of where he’d been that night. >> And confronting that alibi meant the affair was about to detonate in Brian’s face. Well, so be it.

 It might blow the entire case wide open. >> They had no choice. The investigators had to go to his wife. and she learned from officers standing in her own living room that her husband was having a secret affair with a married woman who was now dead. So, the detectives needed to know whether her husband could account for himself on the night it happened.

 It’s hard to imagine a worse way to find out such a big secret that your husband was living a double life and cheating on you. But even more, he might have also been living a double life as a murderer. So, think about that. To think that someone would be capable of cheating is one thing, but to believe they might be capable of killing someone is quite another.

>> But Brian’s wife gave them an answer nonetheless. She was angry and devastated, but she told him the truth as she knew it. Brian had been home with her that night, all night, like he said, from about 5:30 on. So her statement held up as his alibi. And so with his wife confirming where he’d been, Brian Clark was moved out of the center of the investigation for now.

>> But I’m thinking two things here. Where was she all night? And what I mean by that is, where was she sleeping? Was she sleeping the entire night? Did she ever get up and look if he was there? Also, did she really not know about the affair? Or could she be involved? And third, what if in that moment, of course, she’s mad about the affair, but she thinks, “Well, the mistress is dead.

” So, I’ll deal with the fact that Brian cheated later. Maybe there’s more to this story. And for some reason, maybe something happened, something went wrong, and Brian had to kill her. I know that sounds crazy, but we’ve heard cases where partners stand by each other’s side no matter what. Anything is possible, but for the moment, the case seemed to be naring toward Brad and away from Brian.

 All due to Brian’s wife putting him at home that night. About a month had passed after Tammy was murdered. Brad still in jail. No new evidence has been discovered and there’s still items to process from the garage. But that’s when something unexpected happens. >> Four letters arrived in the mail. They were handwritten letters and they were identical.

 four copies of the same thing addressed to police and to prosecutors and they were unsigned, but the writer claimed to be related to Brian Clark. He was one of his cousins. I just want to warn you this letter, let’s just say it’s written very poorly, so I’m going to do my best. And he’s also going to leave a list of three items at the end.

So, let me go ahead and read the letter first. Quote, “On February 7th, my cousin came home in a black Durango covered with blood from the Fawn Motel where he had sex twice. Later that night, he went to her house for sex. He grabbed blankets and they left. They went somewhere where they had sex on the blanket for a bed.

 She took her clothes off except for her skirt. She then told him to wear rubber since she planned on having sex.” He asked her with her husband and she then asked about the motel and he jammed it in her ass when she called him an [ __ ] and he flipped out and started stabbing her. He fell and then he started stabbing her. She started running where he stabbed her in the back five times and then her throat.

He then wrapped her body and dumped her body. I helped him wipe down the Durango. We put bloody clothes in three plastic bags from the Durango. He then used his key to go back and park by the silver truck. End quote. And now here’s the list he left. One, she was lost rubber in. Two, wedding ring is gone. Three, only clothes at scene are a shirt and two gloves from Durango was found in Durango.

 She was killed by Econo Lodge or behind the Mauler series. Wow. So, it’s a lot. You know, it’s written grammatically incorrect in a lot of areas. And there’s this weird list of things that possibly only the killer would know, which the supposed cousin is letting these people know in this letter. >> These letters obviously got the investigator’s attention immediately because they weren’t very vague.

 They contained details about Tammy. They knew about the motel she and Brian were at that night. They knew about Tammy’s black Durango. and they described the killing itself in a way that suggested whoever wrote them had actual knowledge of the crime. There were details that had not been made public that aligned with this account.

>> According to the letters, Brian and Tammy had been together, and when she asked him to wear a condom, they got into an argument over it, presumably because Brian didn’t want to and wanted to know if she made Brad wear one, too. at which point he forced himself on her in anger and eventually killed her.

 But the letters offered up a single specific horrifying detail. A detail that if true, no one should have known about. The letters claimed that the condom had been left inside Tammy’s body in a very specific area. >> But here’s the problem with that. The medical examiner hadn’t found any such thing during the autopsy.

 No condom had been documented. We haven’t told you about those facts yet. We wanted to wait until this happened first. So, the prosecutors and investigators were now holding letters that described a piece of physical evidence that, as far as anyone knew, didn’t exist. >> But what if it did? That was the question. >> Well, exactly.

 The letters were so specific and sounded so confident that they couldn’t just be dismissed. So, Agent D. Benedetto went back to the pathologist, Dr. Hob and asked him to re-examine Tammy’s body, which was actually unbelievably still at the morg in Rapid City. >> And if you’re wondering why, the body hadn’t been released yet.

 The medical examiner’s office holds the body until investigators and prosecutors release it. They don’t release it the moment the first autopsy is done. They hold it as long as there’s a reasonable chance the body still has evidentiary value because once it’s released and buried or cremated, that evidence is gone for good.

 Also, in a death penalty eligible first-degree murder case with a suspect already in custody and a trial potentially coming, there’s a strong reason to keep the body available in case the defense wants its own examination or in case something new comes up requiring re-examination. >> I still thought that a month was a pretty long time, but in this case, it was actually a really good thing.

 Now they could conduct a second autopsy, which they did. But first, I need to tell you what the initial autopsy had found. Dr. Donald Hobb concluded that Tammy died of multiple sharp force injuries. The wounds were distributed across her chest, back, face, and arms. There was a cluster on her back and on the front.

 They were scattered all over near her clavicle, shoulders, and one across the neck. The ones on her chest were driven deep, forced into the hilt of the knife, meaning as far as the knife would go. The face wounds showed the anger and disdain. According to investigators, several wounds struck areas that made the attack unservivable. Her heart, her aorta, and her lungs were struck.

>> Tammy had defensive wounds on her hands, injuries consistent with someone trying to fend off or grab the blade. Injuries severe enough that she appears to have grabbed the knife, including one cut down to her bone. Then there were marks on her chest that appeared to be bite marks. >> They could have been abrasions, but the examiner wasn’t sure.

 Her body was swabbed for DNA and there was no usable DNA recovered. >> Now, for the second examination, Dr. Hob found the condom, and it was exactly where these letters said it would be. So, whoever wrote those letters knew about a piece of evidence that the medical examiner himself had missed the first time around.

 Evidence that had not been ever made public, that had not even been discovered yet. The letters hadn’t just made an accusation. They had predicted a hidden fact and had been proven right. And that gave them a terrible kind of credibility. Suddenly, the case that had been narrowing towards Brad cracked wide open again because the letters pointed at Brian and the letters appeared to know things.

 All the while, Brad’s been locked up. So, he did not send these letters. >> The investigators had to go back and test Brian’s alibi all over again. Harder this time. And when they did, it got more complicated. Brian’s wife had said he was home that night, but the investigators learned that although Brian and his wife usually slept in the same bed, she sometimes slept downstairs in a recliner because of her bad back.

>> I told you, I was like, I wonder where she was sleeping. Whenever there’s one person in a household that says they’re another person’s alibi, I’m always like, what about when they were asleep? What was happening at that point? You can’t be asleep and also know what’s going on with your partner whether they left the house even for 30 minutes or an hour or maybe longer.

>> Yes. And it just so happens that Tammy disappeared the same night Mrs. Clark had been sleeping in the recliner which raised a possibility no one could rule out that Brian could have left the house in the middle of the night without his wife ever knowing he was gone, committed the murder and came back. >> This was by any measure a disaster for the case against Brad.

 Everything investigators had built on his charges, the blood in the Durango, his midnight drive, his lies to the trooper, the divorce, the fresh laundry, all of it had pointed at the husband. And now there were these anonymous letters written in apparent inside knowledge pointing at the lover. And the lover’s alibi had just developed a hole in it.

But they couldn’t convict anyone with a letter. They couldn’t prove someone close to Brian had written it or that it was even true. And when they tried to pull DNA from the condom, they got nothing. The evidence had been degraded. They were exposed too long to be of any help.

 So the letters couldn’t convict Brian either. They were impossible to ignore and impossible to prove. Someone had known about that condom before the investigators did. The question was who? >> So was it really written by a cousin of Brian, or was it written by Brian himself trying to wrap a confession in someone else’s voice? Or was it something else? Someone trying to drag the investigation away from Brad and aim it at Tammy’s lover.

 Brad was in a jail cell. His calls and his mails monitored. He was the one person who couldn’t have orchestrated a letter campaign, but maybe asking him about it would stir something up. So, the investigators went to him with it. And Brad denied any part of it. His argument was simple. On the surface, it was airtight.

 How could he have written a letter framing Brian Clark when by his own account he didn’t even know the man’s name? He’d said it from the beginning. He knew Tammy was seeing someone he never asked who. He didn’t want to know. >> But that denial is exactly where Brad’s entire construction begins to come apart because there was something investigators kept circling back to something Brad had said more than once in that interview room back at the very beginning.

 He had said that when Tammy’s body was found, there would be DNA evidence on it or in it that would prove someone else was the killer. And at the time, it had sounded like a desperate man grasping for innocence. But now, after a conum had been found inside Tammy’s body, something no one was supposed to know about, those words sounded like something else entirely.

They sounded like a man who already knew what was there. Now they think, “What if he had been following his wife like he said he was that night, except it was on a different timeline at a different time, and he saw them go to the motel, so he had knowledge of the motel, so he could put that in the letter.” >> And he somehow obtained a condom that Brian had discarded.

 And because he knew he had Brian’s DNA on it, he thought he could plant it on his wife’s body because he already knew he was going to kill her. I mean, it does sound kind of far-fetched for sure, especially because his argument has always been, like he said, he doesn’t even know who this guy is. >> And so, investigators set out to prove the thing that Brad insisted wasn’t true, that he had known Brian Clark’s name all along.

 And ironically, they found proof in Brad’s bedroom. >> In a later search of the real home, investigators found a small digital recorder tucked away inside one of Brad’s dresser drawers. And when they played it back, at first there was nothing. Just long stretches of silence. 15, 20, 30 minutes of it. And then finally, a voice. It was Tammy’s.

 She was on the phone. She was calling Kmart. And she was asking to speak to Brian Clark. The recorder had captured Tammy’s side of a private, intimate phone call. Her talking to Brian, telling him she just needed to hear his voice. and also telling him about a long note that Brad had left her in her car with some roses.

She told Brian that Brad was making things very hard because he didn’t understand. And at the end of that call, Tammy told Brian that she loved him very, very much. Wow. I mean, that was it. It was all a setup. And that’s at least what it looked like. >> The recording destroyed Brad’s central lie.

 He had told police over and over that he didn’t know who Tammy’s boyfriend was and that he never asked, never wanted to know. And here, hidden in his own dresser drawer was a recording he had made of his wife calling that man by name and saying she loved him. >> And the recorder gave up more than that. When investigators examined it closely, they found deleted files, test recordings.

 They found Brad’s own voice counting, practicing, apparently checking whether the device was sensitive enough to pick up a conversation. This was not something Brad had stumbled into. He had set it up. Investigators came to believe he had planted that recorder inside Tammy’s Durango. And that long note he left for her with the flowers, it wasn’t a husband’s clumsy attempt at romance at all.

>> They were bait. Brad had staged a romantic gesture designed to make Tammy emotional. >> Yeah. Emotional enough to reach out to the man she actually loved and tell him about it. And she had. She picked up the phone never knowing her husband had put a recording device inside her car to listen. And she walked straight into it.

Which meant Brad had known exactly who Brian Clark was. He had known before Timmy was killed. He had pressed play and listened to his own wife tell another man she loved him. >> And it meant something about those letters, too. They no longer looked like a tip from a guilty man’s cousin. They looked like a frame.

 Investigators came to believe that Brad had indeed planted the condom inside Tammy’s body himself to point at Brian and that when he later realized the medical examiner had missed it, the whole frame was in danger of falling apart. If no one ever found the condom, it couldn’t implicate anyone. And so the letters may have been Brad’s way of making absolutely sure the police went looking for the very evidence he planted.

>> Exactly. He realized like, “Oh, wait. It’s falling apart.” But Brad was in a jail cell. So, how does a man in jail mail four letters? >> The answer investigators came to believe was sitting across from him at the Glass, his twin brother Brett. Just one day before the attorney general’s office received one of those anonymous letters, Brett had visited Brad in jail.

 And at the time, the jail’s meeting rooms weren’t recording video, only audio. When officers later went back and listened to that audio of the visit, what they heard was strange. The shuffling of paper and long stretches where neither brother said much of anything at all. >> Interesting. Then the investigators caught a break through Brad’s own mouth on monitored jail communication.

 Brad can be heard asking Brett to come down to the jail and bring a pencil and paper. He mentioned letters that needed to be sent. How did they not know they were being recorded though? I mean, you’re already in jail, so shouldn’t you assume you’re being monitored because you are? So now they’re going to look for Brett with a warrant.

 And when they searched his car, they found a notebook, a yellow legal pad, and it wasn’t a stray note or a few scattered words. It was a drafted version of the anonymous letter, a narrative that pointed at Brian Clark and laid out intimate details of Tammy’s murder, written to sound as though it came from someone else, which erupted knowledge of the killing.

>> Brad eventually told the officers what the shuffling paper on that audio was. It was Brad holding a written template up against the glass divider between them line by line while Brett sat on the other side and copied it down by hand. And then Brett had mailed those copies out to a magistrate judge, to prosecutors, to law enforcement, all of them pointing at Tammy’s lover.

>> Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like this, which is exactly why we had to tell you about this case. The frame was no longer a theory. It was a thing you could hold in your hands. A man in a jail cell had reached through the glass through his own brother and tried to author the story of who killed his wife.

 And the letters weren’t the only thing Brad tried to move through Brett. >> Brad had also sent letters from jail that seemed to be about something almost mundane, a good fishing spot near Pierre. He’d even drawn a map. a man sitting in a cell charged with murdering his wife taking the time to sketch out a map of a fishing spot around the Oah Dam.

 To investigators, the timing and content were strange enough to follow up on. So, they did, and the map led them to a traffic island outside the city. >> And there they found three large trash bags. And inside were bloody bed sheets, a fitted sheet, quilts, pillow shams, and a large blue tarp. The bedding was riddled with stab holes and the blood on all of it would come back as Tammy’s.

That was it. This was the crime scene that they were unable to find. This was why the bedroom had been so impossibly clean. Why the lumininal had found nothing. Why the mattress had been spotless. There was no blood in that bedroom because the bloody bedding had been stripped out of it, bagged, driven away, and dumped.

 And then a man had drawn his brother a map right back to it. >> And the tarp told them the worst part, that this had been planned because you do not have a tarp ready by accident. Investigators came to believe that Brad had laid that tarp down and covered it with the bedding, building a surface where Tammy could have been attacked while contained, where the blood could have been caught and carried away instead of soaking into the room.

 And inside those bags, alongside the bedding and the tarp and the gloves, was one more thing. A box of condoms with one missing. >> So, he never went to the extreme then to go follow Brian and get a used one. He was just staging it. >> Well, actually, we hadn’t talked about this cuz it really didn’t come up.

 But Brian had mentioned one thing. When Tammy and Brian would hook up in their vehicle, he had a habit of throwing out the used ones out the window. >> Interesting. So, either way, it makes sense. The DNA, if any was on it, was too degraded by the time the second autopsy was conducted because of decomposition.

 So, it didn’t work the way he might have intended. By now, what Brad Ria had done was coming into focus. And it was so much larger than a single terrible night. This was no longer just a man who had killed his wife. This was a man who had killed his wife, cleaned the vehicle, stripped and hidden the crime scene, driven her body out to a prairie, and left her there, and then lied to a trooper, lied to detectives for 5 hours, and then from inside a jail cell, reached back out into the world to build an entire false story.

>> He had planted evidence on his wife’s body to frame her lover. He had used his own twin brother as a hand to mail that frame out into the world. He had drawn a map to the very bedding soaked in her blood. Each time investigators pulled one thread, another piece of construction came apart in their hands. >> And the more they learned, the clearer his motive became, because Brad had told them himself in his own writing, almost without meaning to.

 It was in that fishing letter, the one with the map. On its surface, it was strange, almost mundane. a note from a man in jail to his brother about a good place to fish near the dam. But inside, Brad had written something else, something that pulled back the curtain on why. He wrote about the things he claimed he had learned about Tammy.

 The disturbing stuff he called it, things he said he hadn’t known before. He wrote about her sneaking around hotels, about going to recreation areas out by the lake, about taking walks with Brian during her lunch breaks. And he wrote about how all of it made him feel. That thinking about it made him sick to his stomach.

 That it made him feel stupid for not catching on sooner. >> And there it was. Not grief, not fear for a missing wife. Humiliation, rage, the fury of a man who had been made a fool of. A man who felt like he worked so hard to give his wife everything she wanted, but she had stopped loving him anyway. >> She found someone else and told him she was leaving.

 Brad had built his whole identity around control. The long hours, the climbing the ladder at work, the hovering closeness her family had always found suffocating. The secret recorder in her car. And the one thing he could not control was the one thing that mattered most. Tammy was leaving. And in those letters, self-pittitying lines about hotels and lunchtime walks.

 You could see exactly what had been building inside of him. He’s a monster. And sure, it’s devastating to learn that someone you love doesn’t feel the same way anymore. It happens. But killing them in such a brutal manner is entirely selfish. She was also his daughter’s mother, someone’s child. You don’t get to decide whether those people get to see her anymore just because she doesn’t want to wake up next to you anymore.

>> With that, the state began assembling the case to hold him accountable. Brad Rio was indicted by a grand jury in connection with Tammy’s murder. The indictment laid out alternate counts of first-degree murder and manslaughter along with a charge of aggravated kidnapping. He was held in the Hughes County Jail on a $500,000 bond and the state made one significant decision early.

 It chose not to seek the death penalty against Brad. He pleaded not guilty to all of it. >> His twin brother Brett did not walk away clean either. Prosecutors charged Brett as an accessory built on the allegation that he had helped Brad after the murder, including those anonymous letters that were meant to drag suspicion off of Brad and onto Brian Clark.

 Brett, too, would have to answer for his part in all of it. The case moved towards trial. By now, the people who knew Brad were struggling to make sense of any of this. From jail, Brad called his friends. People had known him for years as a quiet, mildmannered family man. And to them, the accusation seemed almost impossible.

 This was not a man anyone had pictured doing something violent. He had no criminal record, no history at all of any violence. And Brad told them what he was telling everyone. That he hadn’t killed Tammy. He told them the police had found her body and that he hoped there would be something on it that would prove he wasn’t the one. Yeah, well, that backfired.

 I guess it was a nice try. And Brian really didn’t have a motive anyway. I mean, sure, his wife could have found out about the affair and then left him, but then even when she did find out, she didn’t blow up. I mean, she was angry and devastated, but she still told the truth that he was there. But also, that theory fell apart fast with the letters and the fishing map.

>> For Haley, hundreds of miles away in Wyoming, that uncertainty was its own kind of torment. She had lost her mother, and some part of her still did not want to believe that she had lost her father, too. She still hoped that against everything, the police had it wrong. She was 13 now, and she was living with her grandparents, trying to exist inside a life that had been blown apart, and the trial that was coming would force her to confront something no child should ever have to because nobody knew yet what Brad’s defense was going

to be. >> Oh, and there is more to the story. Just wait. Brad’s trial began in January of 2007, and from the very first moments, his defense strategy was something almost no one in that courtroom saw coming at all because it’s so over the top and crazy. His attorney was a man named Tim Wren, and Wren did not stand up and argue that Brad was an innocent man caught in a terrible misunderstanding.

 He didn’t deny that Brad had lied. He didn’t deny that Brad had moved Hammy’s body. He didn’t deny that Brad had staged the scene, hidden the bedding, and planted evidence, and tried to cover the whole thing up. The defense conceded all of that. Instead, the defense attorney told the jury that Brad had done all those things for one reason.

 Are you ready for this? >> I’m ready. >> Because the prosecution didn’t find out until roughly 30 minutes before the trial started. He said he did it to protect his daughter. >> From what was he saying? that Tammy was dangerous. >> Well, no. This wasn’t really the Chris Watts type of defense strategy where Brad is going to say that he witnessed, you know, Tammy hurting Haley and then he snapped and he killed her because according to the defense, Brad had not killed Tammy at all.

 He was saying that Haley did. In his opening statement, the defense attorney told the jury that Haley, who was only 12 years old at the time, 13 now, sitting in the life that her father’s actions had handed her, had killed her own mother. That she had done it in a fit of rage over the divorce. That it was tearing the family apart.

And that afterward she had blocked the memory out completely, just buried it under all the trauma so that she genuinely did not remember doing it, according to the defense, of course. And Brad had discovered what his daughter had done and a father’s love overriding everything. He panicked and he covered up the crime to save his little girl from herself.

 Now, it is really hard to overstate how stunning this was. That’s why I called it crazy. This was a man whose wife had been stabbed over 30 times. A man caught in one lie after the next, frame after frame. And his final move, the story that he chose to tell to 12 jurors to save his own life, was to take the daughter who had already lost her mother, the girl who had hugged her grandfather and asked if she could keep her cat, the child who had been told her father killed her mother, and to name her as the killer.

>> First, Brad had tried to pin it on Brian Clark, and when that fell apart, he aimed everything he had left at his own child. >> It’s beyond selfish. It’s sociopathic. >> But the defense has made its claim. Now the trial had to bear it out or break it. And one by one, the people who knew the truth took the stand.

>> And Haley was one of them. And I can’t even imagine what she’d been going through. >> She’s just 13 years old when she walked into that courtroom and sat down in front of a jury. And she testified in a soft, quiet voice. She told them the truth of her family as she had lived it. That she had never been especially close with her father, but that she and her mother had been very close, deeply, completely close.

 And when she was asked directly and plainly whether she would ever have hurt her mother, Haley said no. Prosecutor Todd Love wanted the jury to understand in physical terms just how absurd the thing they were being asked to believe really was. So, we asked Haley about her size. At the time of the trial, she was about 5’1 and 94 lb.

 When her mother was murdered a year earlier, she had been even smaller, only around 80 lb. The jury was being asked to believe that this child, only about 80 lb, 12 years old, had stabbed her mother over 30 times and driven her wound so deep enough that it reached the hilt of a knife. On cross-examination, the defense pressed her about being athletic, and Haley acknowledged that yes, she was good at basketball, soccer, and volleyball, but being a healthy, sporty kid and being physically capable are not the same thing. And everyone in

the room knew it. >> And then Haley testified about that night. She told the jury about waking up, and it was all because of the cat. The family cat woke her up in the middle of the night. the most ordinary thing in the world, a pet moving through a quiet house. And when she woke up, the first thing she noticed was that her bedroom door was shut.

 And that was strange because her door was always open at night and then her father appeared in the doorway. Thinking back on that, that must have been really terrifying now that she knows. But in the moment, he was just holding an arm full of clothing. Nothing too dramatic, unless you knew why he was holding them. >> She asked him what he was doing.

 He said nothing. Go back to sleep. And later he came into her room. He told her he loved her and actually laid down on her bed beside her and stayed there until she drifted back off to sleep. >> So think about what that testimony actually means because the jury had already heard that when crime scene investigators first searched that house, the washer and dryer were running and there was fresh laundry on Brad’s bed during the second search.

 And now here was Haley describing the same thing from the inside. In the middle of the night, her own father, who she trusted, moving an armful of clothing past her door while her mother’s body and the bloody bedding was being cleared away. >> She had watched her father carry the aftermath of her mother’s murder right past her bedroom.

>> And think about how he stopped, told her he loved her, and then actually laid down next to her and fell asleep. That’s creepy and it’s heartbreaking all at the same time. >> That was the child Brad Rio was now asking the jury to believe was the real killer. >> But there was a detail in his own story that didn’t survive contact with her.

>> Brad would claim he had taken the murder weapon from Haley’s right hand. But Haley was left-handed. It was a small thing. It was also the kind of small thing that betrays a lie built by someone who didn’t actually know the truth he was inventing around. >> Exactly. And then came the medical and forensic testimony. Dr.

 Hub, the pathologist, testified to Tammy’s wounds. When the autopsy photographs were shown in the courtroom, some of the jurors visibly reacted. But interestingly, Brad did not. He showed no obvious emotion at all watching those images of what had been done to his own wife. And I was thinking about that. If he loved her, even if he did, there were so much resentment built up that he wasn’t even moved by those photos.

 And then there were the marks on Tammy’s chest. They raised a darker question, whether she had been bitten, whether the violence had carried an additional dimension on top of rage. But this was a question the evidence never actually answered. Under cross-examination, Dr. Hob acknowledged that he could not say for certain that the marks were bite marks.

>> The crime scene specialist, Michael Brily, did not believe they were >> right because they could have been marks left by the top of the knife, like the hilt of the knife. No bitemark expert was ever brought in to settle it. >> So it remained exactly that, an unanswered, unsettling question that was never proven.

>> But what Brayley could reconstruct was how the attack unfolded. And it was chilling in its deliberateness. Based on the evidence, the bed sheet, Tammy’s t-shirt, riddled with holes in it, the tarp, investigators believe Brad had first stabbed Tammy over and over in the back, the throat, the shoulders while she slept to incapacitate her before she could fight or flee.

>> The tarp was a 6×8 ft blue plastic tarp stained with a 4×6 ft patch of Tammy’s blood. And within that stain were 16 cuts. And those 16 cuts corresponded in number and shape to 16 puncture holes in the front of the t-shirt that Tammy had been wearing. The bed sheet had four bloody slits matching the wounds on her back.

 It’s almost too much to imagine, but the crime scene specialist believed that Tammy had still been alive during the attack and that at some point Brad had moved the tarp onto the floor to contain the blood and transport Tammy and that she was again stabbed repeatedly through the tarp and through her shirt. The tarp wasn’t just for disposal. It was part of the method.

 One detective testified that the wounds appeared consistent with a knife found in a brass dresser in the home, but Brley cannot say that any knife recovered in evidence was definitively the murder weapon. Investigators had clipped Tammy’s fingernails, swabbed her body, searching for the killer’s DNA, and they found nothing usable.

 The weapon itself was never recovered. >> And then Brad took the stand in his own defense. Of course, he did. And he admitted freely that he had lied. He told the jury in his own words that he lied his butt off during his police interviews, but he insisted he had not killed Tammy. He told them he loved his wife and his daughter very much.

 He said Tammy had wanted a divorce because he worked too much. He claimed he’d been working as many as 112 hours a week in the month before she died. And he said he had driven her away, but he hoped to fix it. He claimed he hadn’t known before her death that she was actually having an affair. He explained the separate bedroom was a matter of his restless leg syndrome and insisted they were still intimate together, that he thought things were getting better.

>> And then he told the jury his version of the murder. He testified that he had woken in the night and found Haley standing over Tammy with a knife in her hand. He said he asked her what she had done and she didn’t answer that she was catatonic like she was in shock. He said Tammy was on the bed and he tried to give her mouth to mouth but she had no pulse.

 He claimed Haley had used one of his knives and that he had later thrown that knife into the Missouri River below the Oahi Dam, which was why it had never been found. He said he had cleaned the blood off his daughter, put her back in bed, and asked her again what she’d done, and that she had looked at him as though she had no idea what he was talking about.

 He said he didn’t want to wake her up to the nightmare he was living. But he said he feared that if she remembered, she might hurt herself, saying, “I would have done anything to save my daughter.” >> It’s so far-fetched that I can’t even take him seriously. But he admitted on the stand to staging the scene to make it look like someone had forced themselves on Tammy.

 He admitted that he’d been the one to put the condom in Tammy to point the suspicion at Brian. He claimed Haley had gotten a bloody nose during the attack and that her blood had ended up on Tammy’s hand and that he deliberately positioned Tammy’s hand on her chest when he left her body where he did because he wanted police to test that blood and find the DNA wasn’t his. He was betting on that.

 And that’s what he was saying that they were going to find. Now he’s saying, “Oh no, it wasn’t the condom that I thought you guys were going to find. It was my daughter’s blood.” and that was going to make you believe it wasn’t me. >> It was an extraordinary thing to watch a man say out loud. And then the prosecution ripped him apart.

 On cross-examination, Chief Deputy Attorney General Mark Barnett pressed Brad on the contradictions. Brad insisted he hadn’t known Tammy was having an affair with Brian Clark until his arrest, that he’d known she was dating, but the dates were from a different boyfriend. >> Yeah.

 And that’s how he was clarifying the whole dating versus having an affair thing. >> Barnett confronted him with the recording device, the one that the investigators found in his dresser, the one that Brad himself had planted to capture his wife, on which Tammy’s own voice called Brian Clark by name and said she loved him 4 days before she died.

 The man who claimed that he didn’t know his wife’s lover had recorded her professing her love to him by name. And he kept the tape like a dumbass because he’s either that dumb or he thinks he’s smarter than everybody else. The left hand, the right hand, the recorder, the planted condom he just confessed to. The story he had built to save himself collapsed.

 The defense made its last argument. Rens pointed out that investigators had Haley’s DNA, but had never tested it against an unknown sample found in the washcloth believed to be used in cleaning the Durango. He argued police had failed to seriously consider Haley as a suspect. He reminded the jury that however rare, children do sometimes kill their parents and suggested there might have been a conflict between Haley and her mother that no one else knew about.

 I know it’s the defense’s job, but sometimes I’m like, how far would they really go for their client? The prosecution’s answer was simple and devastating. Brad’s story was not a father’s confession of sacrifice. It was one more redirection, one last chance. That’s all he had left. First, like you said, he tries to frame Brian Clark. That didn’t work.

 So, he turned everything on his own daughter. It was the same move made twice by the same man for the same reason, to save himself. Because it’s clear all he cares about and always did was himself. The jury did not take very long to deliberate either, and they found Brad guilty. >> In March of 2007, Brad was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

 The court also barred him from ever writing or having phone contact with Haley or with Tammy’s family. Before he was sentenced, Brad said he loved his daughter, but he did not turn around to look at her. >> Of course, he didn’t. He couldn’t look her in the eye after he just accused her of killing the mother.

 She lost the mother that she was close to her entire life. And Tammy’s family stood and spoke. Holly, Tammy’s sister, told the court that Brad had carried a selfish obsession with controlling his wife and that he had finally fulfilled it by killing her and then blaming their daughter. She asked, “What kind of father could lie so viciously about his own child?” Bonnie, Tammy’s mother, read a statement as a video tribute to Tammy, and they played it in the courtroom.

Brad never looked up and Bonnie told him that the family had trusted him for years and that he had deceived them all. She told him he had taken everything he could take from them on this earth and that no punishment would ever be enough. With grief that turned into steel, she said she was surprised he hadn’t turned and blamed the cat.

 That’s how outrageous this entire case was. and she revealed something that the family had carried for years that long before when they all lived together back in Billings, Brad had secretly recorded Bonnie and Holly while they were showering in the family home. So, the hidden recorder in Tammy’s Dango wasn’t the first time he had recorded something secretly.

>> The judge did not mince words. Brad Ria, he said, was a calculating, cold-blooded murderer who had killed his wife out of vengeance after she had an affair and told him she wanted a divorce. Brad wanted to be seen as a victim, the judge said. But Brad was not the victim. Brad was the predator.

 His twin brother Brett was sentenced separately and Brett received 172 days, essentially the time he had already served with the possibility that if he met the conditions of his release, the record would eventually be sealed. Brett said his brother deserved exactly where he was going and admitted he had made a mistake by helping him.

 And he had already paid his own kind of price. The brother’s mother had suffered a fatal aneurysm after visiting her sons in jail in 2006. And it is very sad. I know that some people like to say karma, and you can think what you will, but it’s still heartbreaking for everyone involved. >> Brad would later appeal his conviction, claiming in a letter to Dineine that crime scene investigators had failed to collect evidence that might have helped him and falsified other evidence.

Prosecutors denied it. His appeal was denied in 2009. >> Also that same year, Tammy’s family won a civil lawsuit against Brad. And a judge awarded them $5.3 million, a judgment that let them seize and sell Brad’s belongings for Haley’s benefit. And there was one more quiet act of reclaiming.

 When Tammy was laid to rest, her headstone no longer said the name Ria. It had the name Burns, the name she was born with. inlander before any of this. The family gave her back her own name. In the end, she was Tammy Burns again. And I always think about that when a husband kills his wife and then her last name remains on the gravestone, it always bothers me.

>> And I kind of feel like if that’s the case, the last name should automatically be stripped away from her cuz I feel like it’s kind of gross to still see it associated with the killer >> when the victim had no choice in it. It’s almost like they’re remembered on their gravestone. >> Brad Ria never walked free again.

 He died in prison in February of 2024 at the age of 64. He spent the rest of his life exactly where the judge sent him. And he never had contact with the daughter he had tried to destroy. But this was never really his story. It was Tammy’s and it was Haley’s. >> Haley went home to Lander, Wyoming. Back to the town her mother had loved.

 Back to the family that wrapped itself around her. Her grandparents, Don and Bonnie, became her legal guardians and raised her through her teenage years. Stepping back into the work of raising a child at the time in their lives when they should have been slowing down. Tammy’s sister Holly and Raquel became part of that village around her.

 They got her through high school, through the ordinary milestones, the prom, the graduation that Tammy would never get to see. Holly said the best thing they could do was try to stay strong for Haley. Losing Tammy, she said, was like having a limb cut off. A piece of yourself was simply gone. But they still had Haley. And in so many ways, she reminded them of her mother.

 And the first thing I thought when I saw her was she looked exactly like Tammy. >> Haley grieved in her own way. She wrote poems for Tammy. She made videos. And in one poem, she wrote about her mother’s face beginning to fade, about wishing she could have stayed, about her belief that the two of them would eventually meet again.

 Because to Haley, mothers and daughters are forever, and nothing can break that. >> Years later, Haley married and she became a mother herself. She said she loved being a mom, even though the joy carried heartache inside of it, because Tammy isn’t there to share it. Her children will never meet their grandmother.

 One of their baby’s outfits read, “Handpicked by grandma in heaven.” And that made me tear up. Detective Swenson, the man who once had to tell a 12-year-old that her mother was gone, stayed in touch with Haley over the years. When she called to tell him that she was pregnant, it moved him. He called her a special kid, someone who had survived something no child should ever have to.

>> And Haley took the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she turned it outward. As a teenager, she stood up in front of her own high school and told her fellow students that if anyone ever felt threatened, they should seek help and leave. And as an adult, she became a victim advocate and a speaker.

 She tells her mother’s story. She talks about the warning signs of control in the relationship, the insecurity, the obsession, the hovering, the need to possess another person completely. She has said she never wants to assume the worst of people, but she sees her father clearly now for what he was. >> Her focus has never really been on him.

It was always on Tammy. Haley wants her mother remembered as an amazing mom, someone kind to everyone she met, someone who took in the kids who got left out, someone who touched and changed lives. She knows her mother lost her life to one man’s violence and need for control. But she also believes that by telling Tammy’s story, she might help save someone else.

>> If she could say one thing to her mother, she has said she would tell her that she loves her and that she hopes she’s making her proud. and I’m sure that she is. If there is anything to take from Tammy’s story, it’s the thing Haley now spends her life trying to tell people. The warning signs are rarely loud.

 They don’t always look like bruises or screaming or obvious cruelty. Sometimes they look like a man who can’t let his wife out of his sight. A man who needs to know where she is, who she’s talking to, and what she’s thinking. A man whose love feels less like a partnership and more like ownership. Control is the warning sign. The hovering, the isolation, pulling someone away from the people who know them best.

Those are the things to watch for in the lives of the people you love and in your own. >> Tammy’s sister Holly said it best. Before she lost Tammy, domestic violence felt like someone else’s problem, something she could feel sorry about from a safe distance. After she understood the truth, it became her problem overnight. So pay attention.

Take the quiet sign seriously because the time to notice is always before. But don’t let what this monster did be the thing you remember. A monster may have taken her life, but he didn’t get to decide what she meant. Her daughter made sure of that, and so does everyone who hears this story and looks a little harder at the people they love and say they love them back.

>> Thank you so much for being here for Tammy’s story. >> We will see you in our next video. Bye.