Investigators find a key piece of evidence that sends the case in a surprising direction.
Chapter 1: What is the surprising direction of the investigation?
It was pretty impressive, all things considered, the investigation, that is, into the murders of Wayne and Sharman Stock. The people of Murdoch, Nebraska, had been deeply shaken, and quite understandably so, if the Stocks weren't safe in the sanctity of their own bedroom, then who in Murdoch was safe?
And so, when the Cass County Sheriff's Office announced, just two weeks after the murders, that one of the most shocking crimes in this part of Nebraska in decades had been solved... Well, you can hardly blame them for calling in the press and taking a victory lap.
I think there's some relief at the same time some hurt.
Chapter 2: Who were the main suspects in the Stock murders?
And of course, just about everyone was shocked that the culprits would turn out to be who they were. But there it was, Wayne and Charmin Sock's own nephew, 28-year-old Matt Livers, that actually told the whole ugly story, confessed to shotgunning his own aunt and uncle.
I was already fired up, and yes, I have a grudge to settle.
And if his 21-year-old cousin Nick Sampson had managed to resist the confessional urge, well, that wouldn't be unexpected, would it? But Matt had fingered him, and that was that. And now that itch in the back uncertainty, the fear that vicious killers were on the loose, had been put to rest.
Meanwhile, said Cass County Sheriff Bill Brueggemann, they could get on with the legal stuff, button up the case.
People ask, is this a closure on the case? It's not. I think it's another chapter, a turn in the page. There's still a lot of work to be done.
But the message was clear. Everybody could relax. And nobody was thinking of Voltaire just then. Ridiculous thought. Why in heaven's name would they? It was so far off and long ago when that famous French philosopher scribbled in his notebook... While doubt is not an agreeable condition, certainty is an absurd one. Or as somebody in Murdoch might have said, don't count your chickens.
I'm Keith Morrison and this is Dateline's newest podcast, Murder in the Moonlight. Episode 3, The Ring. The arrests of Matt Libers and Nick Sampson brought a measure of relief to the Stalk children. Even though Matt was a member of the family, there had been issues.
And Nick, Matt's cousin, they didn't know him as well, but now at least they could try to move on, as they knew their parents would have wanted them to. Daughter Tammy.
I can hear Mom and Dad say, Tammy, you can let this eat you alive. Or you can go on and be the best that you can be and do what needs to be done, and that is family. So we can dwell on it, but we choose not to because that's not what mom and dad would want.
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Chapter 3: What role did the legal system play in the case?
And as Andy, the youngest sibling, put it... It's not going to bring them back, so why agonize over it?
It is what it is.
And with Livers and Sampson behind bars, the slow grind toward their inevitable trial could begin. Naturally, the same system that had caught the alleged killers also provided them with competent legal counsel, as the law requires. For Matt Livers, attorney Julie Baer...
First thing he says is, look, I told them I did this, but I didn't do this. And you've got to believe me.
They all say they didn't.
Right, right. You know, I've been lied to a lot as a defense lawyer. So the cynical side of me goes, uh-huh, right.
After all, that confession was very graphic. Very.
Put the gun to her face and blew it away. Then as I headed out, I just stuck it to him and blew him away.
And yet, when Julie Bear asked around a bit, she started to hear things. Things like this. Both Matt Livers and Nick Sampson and their live-in girlfriends swore up and down that on the night of the murders they were at their respective homes, sound asleep, miles away from the Stock family farmhouse.
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Chapter 4: How was the mysterious gold ring discovered?
And for what it was worth, although Matt said, remember, that they planned it all out on their cell phones in the two days or so before the murders, Nick Sampson swore up and down that he didn't see Matt or talk to him on the phone, in person, or any other way during that time. Not once. But how could that be? Nick Sampson got a defense attorney, too. His name is Jerry Soucy.
The first thing I simply was concerned about was what was the evidence against Nick Sampson, regardless of whether he did it or not. I just had to know what the evidence was.
Of course, as the law requires, the investigators were getting ready to tell him and show him what they had on his client. They were just in the aforementioned mop-up mode at that point, and that's when the MacGuffins showed up. A MacGuffin, of course, much loved by writers everywhere, is some object or device, often apparently insignificant, that can flip a plot upside down.
They came across this thing in Charmin Stock's kitchen. And not during the first few CSI-type go-arounds right after the murders. In fact, not the next day either. After who knows how many dozens of investigators and first responders had tromped through the place. It was after all that when a sharp-eyed young cop noticed, just lying there on the kitchen floor, a gold ring.
Well, that could have been anybody's, of course. One of the cops, probably, or... Well, who knew? But there it was. And now, crime scene investigator chief David Kofod would have to find an explanation for it.
I thought, well, somebody took it off to wash their hands and it fell down, so now they forgot about it.
But at the time, it could have belonged to the victim. Right. It could have belonged to anybody. It could have. Exactly. Except... Remember, one thing people knew about the stock farmhouse, nothing was ever out of place. The meticulous housekeeper, Charmin, made sure of it. Anyway, they bagged that gold ring and they tagged it as evidence.
It was a size 10, a man's ring, 10 carat gold, and it was engraved with a very personal message.
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Chapter 5: What clues did the gold ring provide?
The inscription said Corey and spelled C-O-R-I and Ryan. Love, always Corey and Ryan.
Who was Corey? Who was Ryan? Detectives asked the Stark children, of course, and, well, none of them knew anybody by those names. They didn't recognize the ring either. It was a sort of glitch within a mystery that will keep bugging a man or a woman forever. By which I mean one of the women on Kofod's detective squad, who noticed, on the inside of the ring, three tiny letters. A. A. J.
This is actually really good detective work. She had gotten a jeweler's manufacturing book from Borsheim's here in Omaha. There was only two manufacturers that had AAJ stamps. One of them had been out of business since, I think, the 90s. And the other one, she got a hold of them.
That manufacturer turned out to be a place called A&A Jewelers. It stamped all the products it made in Buffalo, New York, with the letters AAJ for A&A Jewelers. And so it was in Buffalo where Kofod's investigator found a woman working at AAJ by the name of Mary Martino.
I remember one of the girls in shipping had indicated that there was a call from somebody in the Nebraska Police Department.
Mary Martino was running what was left of Buffalo's A&A jewelry office just then. Why what was left? Because the place was going out of business. They'd already laid off the workforce 200 jobs. Gone. Just like that. By the time that Nebraska investigator started calling, Mary was one of only three people left. Their job was to clean up the Buffalo office and... close it down.
And right in the middle of that crushing and depressing work, Mary gets a request to track down a single, not very fancy, not very unusual ring that the company had likely shipped away somewhere years ago. And you said, what? You gotta be kidding.
I said, that's like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, she mentioned homicide.
And that is when Mary Martino heard that the ring had been found at the scene of the double homicide of Wayne and Charmin Stock in far-off Nebraska. And it might be important. And then the Nebraska cops said that she, Mary, was literally the last person on earth who could, at least possibly, solve that last vexing little mystery.
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Chapter 6: What connection does the ring have to Wisconsin?
It was possible, after all, the company might have taken the order, might have made that very ring and inscribed it, Love Always, Corey and Ryan, and shipped it somewhere. That's what the company did for a long time. So Mary went out to the warehouse, where tens of thousands of old order forms were stuffed into hundreds of boxes, just waiting for Mary to throw them all away.
Instead, she opened up the first one, and page by yellowed page started reading.
So I started with just box number one, stores one through 25. Then box number two, stores 25 through 30. And you went through each one? Yes. Until I got to like 100 and I believe it was 108 or 118, I said, this is going to be impossible.
How long did that process take?
It took me probably three days and two nights.
Does that seem a little over the top? I mean, you can look for an hour or so and say, well, I can't find it. Sorry. And that would be that.
I heard homicide. I heard it was important.
And then, well, then she had a thought. There might be one more way to go about it. So she abandoned the warehouse and asked one of the few colleagues she had left to help her narrow down the search on the company computer, make a kind of grid. First, she entered the stores A&A shipped to, more than 3,000 of them, coast to coast, which didn't narrow it down at all, of course.
But then she took a guess that the ring was ordered within the past few years, and she entered those dates, and, well, that narrowed things down quite a bit. And then she input the inscription, Love always, Corey and Ryan. And out came a printout. And lo and behold, after three days and two nights of searching, there it was.
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Chapter 7: How did a stolen vehicle link to the murder case?
I got up from my chair and I said, bingo, I found it, I found it.
Any specifics about what you found out on that order form, where it was sent, do you remember that? It was Wisconsin, I do know that.
Wait, Wisconsin? Not Nebraska? What in the world would a ring sold in Wisconsin have to do with a double murder a day's drive away in Nebraska? When Mary Martino finally found the record that made her say, bingo, she picked up the phone and she called back that investigator who'd asked her to somehow track down the origins of the gold ring found on the floor of the stock farmhouse.
Now, all these years later, we can only imagine the look on the Nebraska investigator's face when Mary mentioned where the ring had been sent. It was Wisconsin. Actually, she was far more specific than that. A&A had sent the ring to a Wisconsin town about 500 miles from the farm where the murders occurred. They sent it to the town of Beaver Dam.
Beaver Dam bills itself as a sort of outdoor paradise. Fishing, boating, snowmobiling, that sort of thing. It's northwest of Milwaukee. And in Beaver Dam, as in thousands of other towns like it across rural America, there was a Walmart. That store is where Mary's company sent the gold ring. And so, investigators from Murdoch contacted the Walmart in Beaver Dam and...
unearthed a sad and oft-repeated story. Once upon a time, learned those detectives, there was a girl named Corrie, who thought the world of a boy named Ryan, and she bought him that symbol of permanence, the gold ring. She had it engraved with the words, Love Always. But it was not Love Always. And after Corrie and Ryan broke up, The gold ring gathered dust in the cab of Ryan's red pickup truck.
And that is where the strangest thing happened and why it appears in our story. That red pickup truck was stolen. Somebody just took it from Ryan's farm outside of Beaver Dam. Naturally, Ryan filed a police report. It was dated just a few days before Wayne and Charmin's stock were shot to death in far-off Nebraska. But of course, it was a Wisconsin detective who took the theft report.
Name of Jim Rohr. We treat it just as a simple missing vehicle. When it's recovered, if it's somebody taking it for a joyride, you know, we'll get it back. So, really nothing more than a standard missing vehicle.
Experience suggested police would likely find the truck somewhere nearby. But instead... There was another surprise.
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