One suspect is freed, another makes a surprising choice, and an investigator is accused of planting evidence. This episode originally published on March 3, 2025.
Chapter 1: What happened to the murder investigation in Nebraska?
The autumn moon in Nebraska, that troubled year, watched over a crop of confusion. What happened to that murder investigation? Who was guilty of killing Wayne and Charmin Stock? If you'd asked around Murdoch, the answer would be those cousins, Matt Livers and Nick Sampson, locked up for months now.
But after the arrest of Wisconsin teenagers Greg Fester and Jessica Reed, Matt's lawyer and Nick's both adopted an altogether different point of view. Seemed to them, those boys must be innocent. Here's Nick's lawyer, Jerry Soucy.
That must be a good feeling. No, it wasn't. It's a good feeling to know your client's innocent. It's a bad feeling to know that your client's still in jail. You can't get him out. The cops are coming up with every other kind of theory they can think of to drag him in.
And then when we get the Reed and Fester interviews, we see how they're bending over backwards to basically show him a picture of my client and say, isn't that the guy that you met?
So many problems. There was Matt's confession, which, no matter how he tried to talk his way out of it, could still be used against him. And that smear of blood, remember that? It was apparently victim Wayne Stock's blood, discovered by lead detective Kofod in a car owned by Nick Sampson's brother and spotted near the murder scene, right around the time it happened.
So the prosecutor wasn't about to drop any charges. And meanwhile, sitting in jail, Nick had thoughts of taking his own life.
Nick was in really, really bad shape. And so at that point, I'm holding him together. It's going to work out. It's going to work out.
But would it? Jessica Reed, all of 17 years old, was standing, perhaps shivering, in a hallway outside her meeting with the prosecutor. She had just been offered a way to salvage her messed up young life. Testify against Nick Sampson and Matt Livers that she could plead to a lesser charge, get a chance to go free, eventually. Her testimony would help the state convict those two cousins of murder.
This would be the most consequential decision Jessica Reed would ever have to make. She turned to her lawyer, Tom Olson. She didn't know these guys.
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Chapter 2: What was the role of Jessica Reed in the case?
I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Murder in the Moonlight, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 5, When It All Falls Apart. The days dragged along one by one and mounted up and became months. And all the long while, those two boys sat in their respective cells and wondered if they would ever see a free day again because nothing was working, nothing at all.
So Nick's attorney, Jerry Soucy, decided it was time for a change of strategy.
I'd been a nice guy up to that point. Trying to encourage the county attorney to dismiss the charges is the right thing to do. At that point, then, I had to shift to be much more aggressive, saying, you know, coming at him and here's all the stuff. And I'd prepared a kind of an extensive motion outlining all of the information pointing to Reed and Fessler's acting alone.
But the county attorney had been busy, too, reviewing evidence, meeting potential witnesses like Jessica Reed, who, in that meeting, had asked to take a break to contemplate the prosecutor's offer. And one look at Jessica told her lawyer, Tom Olson, something wasn't right.
I said, what's wrong? She said, I know what they want. They want me to tell them that those two boys were here. And they weren't. And I can't do it, and I'm going to put myself away for life. And I told her, I said, you just got to tell the truth. That's all you can do at this point.
And we went back in, and that's what she told them, that those boys were not there, that Livers and Sampson were never at that farmhouse when the killings occurred, that they had never met them before, that they had nothing whatsoever to do with it, that it was her and Fester.
Jessica's insistence that neither Matt nor Nick was there made the case against Nick, at least, untenable. So the county attorney had a chat with Jerry Soucy. And finally just said, whether they did it or didn't, I certainly can't prove it against Nick Sampson.
And then, nearly six months after the murders, the county attorney, Nathan Cox, called a press conference and announced that the murder case against Nick Sampson was being dropped. Sort of.
Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, the state reserves the right to refile the charges in the future.
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Chapter 3: Why was Nick Sampson's case dropped?
And so then, you know, it just kind of came into a snowball effect with him.
Make you angry?
Some points. Some points, it's depression. Some points, it's just wish there was a time machine and go back in time and say, forget this ever happened. That's when you go out into the country and do a little target shooting and get away by yourself. Yeah. Get out and, you know, enjoy hunting and stuff like that.
So that's kind of getting out and just sitting in the woods is kind of just a getaway, you know, and there's nothing out there to bother you. You know, you just... Sit out there and just relax and don't have to worry about anything.
But nothing could soothe the grief-fagitated minds of the Stalk children. Starved of real information, they hung on to what little they had been told, what they'd been assured by the guardians of the law, that the two men who killed their parents were securely behind bars and would be until they were tried for murder. And yet, now, the law had sent one of those suspects home.
Why, they could not fathom. Son, Andy Stock.
It's a difficult situation. None of us are attorneys. None of us are in law enforcement. And you're just sitting there trying to take it all in, trying to figure out, okay, how does this work? Why does this happen?
And yet their cousin Matt Livers had confessed. At least he was still in custody. And then there were those two teenagers from Wisconsin, Gregory Fester and Jessica Reed, who'd apparently also confessed to some role in the whole awful business. But just what that role was, few people in Murdoch seemed to know. So confusing it certainly was.
Jerry Soucy was no longer a fresh young lawyer when he met Nick Sampson. By then, Soucy was a man of considerable experience in the area of public defense in Nebraska. He'd been standing up for the poor and the indigent, criminal and otherwise, for decades. Had heard just about every sob story, every sneaky lie, every false claim of innocence in the book.
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Chapter 4: How did Matt Livers' confession affect the case?
There was every indication in there that there was a problem. When people confess accurately... I mean, the resistance you have from somebody who is innocent, the resistance you have from somebody who is guilty, from an interrogator standpoint, looks the same. But at the point at which they finally get over that moral hump and say, you know, you're right, I really did do this.
At that point, you can't shut them up. They then have to morally justify, okay, I killed my wife because she was cheating on me, and let me tell you what I did. And then they give you facts and information that you didn't know. I mean, that's how you verify it. Mm-hmm.
With Matt Livers, what you had was, at the point at which he makes the baby step portion of his interrogation, they then asked that open-ended question, so tell me what happened, Matt. I don't remember.
Don't remember? And then there was something else that was clear to both defense attorneys, though they feared the investigators may not have picked up on it. Matt Livers, as he himself admitted, was not the sharpest guy.
Matt had his strengths, too, of course, but in any conversation with authority figures, and especially under the sort of pressure that was clearly being exerted in that interview room, Matt Livers was prone to being led. He maybe was gullible. Matt's attorney, Julie Baer.
There was a portion of the questioning where they won't let him finish his sentence. They're belittling him. They're screaming at him. They're threatening him with a death penalty.
I don't think they understand what the death penalty means. I'm going to walk out that door and I'm going to do my level best to hang your ass from the highest tree.
And he believed them when they said those things. Yes, very much so.
And one moment stood out, said the defense attorneys, when the detectives should have realized just how little Matt Livers understood of what was happening to him. It was when one of the cops told Matt he needed to be a man to tell them the truth.
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Chapter 5: What were the reactions of the victims' family?
Stand up. In other words, take responsibility. But this was on videotape, remember? And Julie Bear watched.
He takes them very literally and starts to rise up out of his chairs, you know, and... He's going to stand up? He's going to stand up.
No, stand up and be a man, okay?
As Julie Bear watched the tape, what stood up for her was the hair on the back of her neck. Seemed to her those detectives just weren't paying attention to the sort of man they were talking to. Or maybe, she thought, maybe they knew he was not the sharpest guy, but just wanted that confession. It all led to one conclusion. There was now no doubt in the mind of either defense attorney.
If you look and start examining the case in context, how it happened, what took place, it's really a textbook false confession.
A false confession. He'd made it all up. But as Julie Bear contemplated what, if anything, she could do about that, she got a surprise. Not long after Nick Sampson's release with Matt Liver still in jail, Julie received a DVD she'd never seen before. Even though she had asked months earlier, as was her right, for all the available discovery, all the prosecution's material in Matt's case...
This DVD contained a new interview with Matt. A second interview that the defense had never been told existed. Again, I'm going to read your rights. This interview had been taped the day after the first 11-hour interrogation, the one in which he had confessed. By then, after a night in the local jail, Matt had a chance to regain his equilibrium.
He had something he needed to weigh in on.
He needed to tell me about it. Though indeed he did have something weighing on him. And here it came.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Nick Sampson face after his release?
Making it up? To satisfy them?
The absolute truth is, I was never on the scene. I don't know if Nick is the actual person involved in that. I've been just basically fitting an answer to what you guys said. have been asking.
Needless to say, this recantation did not go over well. These were the same investigators who had just taken his confession the day before, and now he wanted to take it all back? Well, not a chance. And here, they hammered away at Matt.
There's absolutely no doubt you are involved with this. And don't start over with me from the very beginning. You're telling me the truth, but now you're going to pull a jerking guys around deal? I mean, I wish I would have said that from the beginning. Yeah, from the beginning, you didn't say that. You had nothing to do with that. You took a polygraph yesterday.
I gave it to you, and you were 100% involved with it. I had no doubt about it. I just told you that. Right. But the truth is, I was never honestly into that. I don't know that Nick is involved in this because we never, I mean, you can check my phone records. We never talked on Thursday or Friday about it.
And the only reason I picked him, I heard through the grapevine that his brother's car was used. What are you telling me this now, or what do you think is going to accomplish this now? Nothing. I mean, I'm just trying to complain, I mean, you know. I don't believe you. You put yourself there. You were there. And you have told us things. But you told us things that nobody else even knows about.
You told us things that, unless you were there, you'd have no idea about.
And when that interview ended, after Matt recounted any involvement in the murders, well, into the ether it went, never to be seen or heard again. Until a package from the DA finally showed up at Julie Baer's office. How long was that withheld?
Months and months and months after, because he said those things the day after his confession.
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