One suspect is freed, another makes a surprising choice, and an investigator is accused of planting evidence.
Chapter 1: Who was initially suspected in the Stock murders?
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: Why did new suspects change the course of the investigation?
I was constantly looking over my shoulder, seeing who was behind me, you know.
So there was a real, genuine, itch in your back fear that somebody was going to come after you.
Come after me, come after my family, you know. Revenge. I didn't like being alone, you know. If there was any place I could go where I was around my close friends or something, I was over there at friends' houses. I was anywhere because I didn't want to be alone. Why didn't you want to be alone? Just wasn't sure, you know, what could happen now.
Because around this county in rural Nebraska were a great many people, perhaps a majority, who were still quite certain that Nick was as guilty as can be. After all, his own cousin Matt had admitted full out that they had both killed those lovely people.
I was upset. I had a loss of why my own cousin could do this to me. Why would he do it to you? It wasn't true. To make himself look better. Using me as a scapegoat. My name came up when I asked who he might know who smoked marijuana or whatever. And he's like, well, I know Nick used to. And so, you know, he'd tell him information like that and pretty much was implicating me and part of this.
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.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did the defense face in proving innocence?
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.
Right.
And for all those months, while Matt's own attorney was in the dark, no idea her client had recanted every word of that confession, he was stuck in jail.
So basically from the official story, his recantation simply disappeared.
Right. We asked the Cascadia, Nebraska Sheriff's Office for an explanation for that. They declined to provide one and didn't want to talk about any other parts of the case either. There seemed to be only one thing that could happen now. But in this case, well, when did anything ever go the way it should? Well, issues with Matt Liver's confession had now surfaced.
Some of the investigators would not, and said they could not, let go of the belief that either Sampson or Liver's, or both of them, were involved somehow. They didn't buy the notion that two drug-addled teenagers just happened to stumble on a hard place to find, by pure chance, way out in the country, in the dark. Though this is how Sampson's attorney, Jerry Soucy, saw things.
Number one, you had two lead investigators who had never done first-degree murder cases before this one as lead investigators. Number two, having made the arrests, holding the press conference, they were committed to trying to build a case against Livers and Samson. And then when Reed and Fester showed up, I think it was just beyond their ability to comprehend that they had made a mistake.
And so that somehow, someway, they needed to fold Reed and Fester's cross-country crime jaunt into somehow having some contact with the Nebraska people, whoever they were.
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