When a woman is found dead in her home, it's ruled a suicide. But when a new investigation begins, police question if this is a murder case. Will the truth be revealed? Keith Morrison reports.
Chapter 1: What happened on that fateful Christmas Eve?
Tonight on Dateline.
I see her laying there. My dad is kneeling. That was the first time I'd ever seen him cry. They had a tumultuous marriage. There'd be yelling and slamming doors.
It's initially ruled a suicide. Her sister went to the Missouri State Highway Patrol to express their belief that this, in fact, was a murder.
She had been having an affair with her boss. It was obvious there was something that just wasn't right.
The only thing I've ever wanted was for everyone to hear the truth.
I thought they made one of the worst mistakes I'd ever heard of.
I told him I would fight with everything I had in me.
That's the promise I made to him. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with A Crack in Everything.
It was his secret that started it. A secret gift. It was Christmas Eve in the year 2006. A little farm not far from a little town called Buffalo, Buffalo, Missouri. And on that farm, in the fine new house Brad and Lisa Jennings had built for their family, the stockings were hung. The children were snug in their beds. And Lisa was sitting up very late, drinking wine and crying.
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Chapter 2: How was Lisa Jennings' death initially ruled?
We had a fairly good life.
There were three kids, Amanda, 16 that Christmas Eve, Dallas, who was 11 then. Lacey, Lisa's daughter from a first marriage, was 19 and had just moved into her own place in town. And as Amanda said, life was fairly good.
We would do lots of things, go on vacation a lot, go out and eat. I mean, my dad made pretty good money, so we were good on that end.
It seemed like a very good and stable environment.
Brad loved cars. Especially classic muscle cars. And extra specially, the 1970 Chevelle Supersport he'd so carefully restored.
By the time he was 12, he was redoing motors and helping put motors in and out of different vehicles.
So Brad opened a used car dealership. He was a great people person. And I guess that's what you have to be when you deal cars and stuff. And their mom, Lisa?
Very pretty. She could be really happy and sort of like the life of the party kind of person.
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Chapter 3: What secrets were revealed about Lisa's life?
Yeah, really fun to be around. Well, Brad ran the farm and his car business. Lisa worked at a local internet company.
She was really good at it. And she became like their top employee.
At home, Lisa was the mom who actually liked video games. With Dallas, mostly.
Video games and movies. We had a big projector screen that we would put on the wall and like watch movies really big.
Did it seem like a happy household? Overall, yeah. But of course there is, as Leonard Cohen used to sing, a crack in everything. And in the Jennings house, those were the sudden blow-ups when the mood went dark and the kids scattered.
They would fight maybe once every couple weeks or something. Mostly later in the evening, at night, after they'd been drinking. They'd be yelling and maybe slamming doors, things like that. But just arguing about anything, nothing.
I never really thought too much about it.
Anyway, now it was that calamitous Christmas Eve, 2006. As always, there'd been a happy dinner celebration with Brad's side of the family.
Christmas Eve, we would go to my grandma's there in town.
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Chapter 4: What evidence suggested a murder instead of a suicide?
She went back to her house in Buffalo.
So by the time she left, your dad was outside in the workshop, although you didn't really know where he was, right?
Well, he was outside. He does that a lot. He'll go outside and go out to shop.
So Amanda sighed and closed her eyes and drifted off. And then sometime after 1.30 a.m., that loud, frantic sound, her father on 911. She ran downstairs to her parents' bedroom.
I opened the door and, you know, I see her laying there and my dad is kneeling next to her. And as soon as I had opened the door, he gets up and kind of pulls me out of the room and he's hugging me and crying.
Their mother was dead. Of that there was no doubt. But how and why and who?
When we come back. What had happened in that bedroom? I thought there'd been an accident. The truth would be much worse.
Did you have any inkling, any suspicion that Brad might have had something to do with this? Dallas Jennings was only 11 that awful Christmas morning in 2006, the morning he lost his mother. And it's probably a blessing that something in his brain has blocked the memory. A lot of it's a blur to me. Amanda, 16 at the time, remembers every dreadful detail.
Just shock. Obviously very upset, but didn't know what to do, you know.
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Chapter 5: Why did Lisa's sister question the investigation?
But Lisa's younger sister, Sean, was talking. She saw a rocky marriage, and her sister would not be a person that would have committed suicide.
This is Steve Polkin, writes a column in the Springfield News-Leader called Polkin Around, which he did, and discovered that Lisa's sister, Sean, got busy soon after that deadly Christmas morning.
In early January, she went to the office of the Missouri State Highway Patrol to express their belief that this, in fact, was a murder. She looked into a highly experienced detective named Dan Nash. Long-time investigator who's been involved in several high-profile murder cases in the Ozarks.
And when Sergeant Nash took one look at that file, something forensic seemed off. He was inclined to agree with Sean. Didn't look like suicide at all.
He was just struck by the fact that if Lisa Jennings had shot herself using her right hand, that there would be more blowback from that wound than one drop of blood.
Three months after that Christmas Eve, Investigator Nash drove over to Brad's farm, told him he was looking at the case again.
and wanted the bathrobe that Mr. Jennings was wearing that night.
The robe he had on when he said he found Lisa dead and held her in his arms. Why three months later would a bathrobe be of any use at all? Surely it had been cleaned or something after this event.
Apparently it had not. Mr. Jennings had spent a little time going back into that bedroom, where from his perspective, his wife had taken her life.
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Chapter 6: What was the turning point in the investigation?
Later we were told there were people around that knew it was going to happen.
People like Lisa's sister, Sean, who went to the highway patrol in the first place, and Lisa's daughter from her first marriage, Lacey. We asked for interviews. They declined.
When my dad got arrested, Lacey and Sean showed up at the house to pick me and Dallas up, and then my grandma showed up as well to pick us up, and my aunt and my grandma kind of got into it.
Chapter 7: How did the community react to the case?
It sounds to me like that is sort of the moment when the family broke apart.
That's when it really blew open. That's when, you know, Lacey quit coming around and everything just fell apart.
That evening, Brad's brother-in-law, Paul, who's married to Lisa's other sister, said he met with the highway patrol sergeant who led the investigation.
And I asked the one patrol officer if he'd ever been wrong, that there was a small part of me that wished or hopes that he is correct, because if not, he's going to ruin a lot of people's lives. And he looked at me and told me straight up, I've never been wrong.
Never been wrong?
Never been wrong.
Was this Investigator Dan Nash? It was. Brad posted a million-dollar bond and was allowed to remain free until his trial. Brad's attorney said the state had no case.
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Chapter 8: What new evidence emerged months later?
And every time that I spoke with him, he said it couldn't go to trial. He didn't say it wouldn't. He said it couldn't.
was still saying that the Friday before the trial was to begin, in August 2009.
He said, we'll go in there Monday morning and we'll see what motions are flying around.
But by midday Monday, the jury was picked and the trial began. How shocking was that?
It was very shocking and we hadn't been there an hour before. Until I was getting sick to my stomach just listening. Prosecution was just running rampant with it.
That is, saying terrible things about Brad. And I was wanting to jump up and object. Because to Marsha, it seemed like Brad's attorney, Daryl Deputy, wasn't objecting at all.
Mr. Deputy wouldn't say anything in Brad's defense.
What was it like to be you sitting back there watching that?
It was the most miserable time of my life, and I didn't know what I could do. I wanted to stop it, and I didn't know how. And Mr. Deputy would say, it's all going to come together here, and don't worry about it.
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