Original subtitles

Everyone was looking for Micah.

Where was Micah?

Where would someone have come by and tried to abduct her?

You add all the things together

and something's not right.

It was clear that they knew about guns.

He's telling me, I'm sorry. I don't know where she is.

And she kept repeating, he's going to kill me.

And he shoots my daughter.

That's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

You can run, but you can't hide.

Micah, as a child, was the typical little sister.

She had a very outgoing personality.

She had that tomboy kind of a spirit.

We loved sports and we liked being outdoors.

She loved running.

Micah had a way of drawing people in

and making them feel appreciated and making them

feel loved and encouraged.

Micah had a very strong faith.

We are a Christian family.

For Casey and Micah growing up,

we wanted to be authentic

and actually live our faith.

She had such a sweet, tender heart.

I love that about her.

And she was a peacemaker and was real sweet about

how she kind of conducted herself socially.

Micah wanted to be a nurse

and got a job as a nurse's aide.

You don't take on that profession

without having a heart for the vulnerable

and for the broken and the hurting.

Micah was an employee of mine.

She was the loveliest soul.

She was the nurse that you wanted on your side.

The one that you wanted to be there

to help you with a patient.

She was just a kind-hearted young lady.

Thursday night, which was the 30th,

Micah worked late nights,

it was kind of a dreary, rainy night.

I remember leaving that office,

and she was there with patients.

I was probably one of the last two people to see Micah alive.

We got a call that night.

I think it was around 10:00, 10:30.

Micah's husband, Thomas, said, hey,

do you know where Micah is?

She's gone out for a run. She hadn't come back.

Didn't know if you'd heard from her or not.

It was not uncommon for her to go running.

On the final call, it was, OK,

Thomas, you need to be calling the police and start a search,

and we're coming to Memphis to help in that search.

We packed our stuff and headed to Memphis immediately.

It's about a 2-hour drive.

Everyone was looking for Micah.

Where was Micah?

So there's this big search,

this big hunt for Micah the evening of the 30th.

Where could Micah be? Where's Micah?

The dog was there. She wasn't there.

Well, I drive to her house and at her house,

there's yellow tape everywhere.

There's police cars everywhere.

And it starts to make me even more alarmed.

I mean, it is a scary situation.

Well, as soon as we got there,

Thomas said, well, she's gone out for a run.

So I started running...

the routes that I knew that we had been on,

different routes that we had run

from her house around Bartlett.

She was running without her phone and without her dog,

and that would have been unusual for her

to go out without either one of those.

There were severe storm warnings

with lightning and severe rain at that time.

It was uncommon for her to go running late at night

in the dark in a rainstorm.

I'm looking at culverts where she might have tripped,

she have fallen in off the side of a road,

off the side of a sidewalk.

Where would someone have come by and tried to abduct her?

What are some places where that could have taken place?

I'm just looking for any kind of sign about what's going on.

There was very little sleep had by anybody.

Everyone's doing all they can to try and find Micah.

I was like, I've got to go find her.

You know, what do you need me for?

Or what can I do?

We went and got four-wheelers, side-by-sides, and we went

to the Loosahatchie Bottoms to look for her.

So the Loosahatchie is the river,

but we call it "The Bottoms"

where you actually drive down to.

And we went through all the crevices, the ditches.

We did that for a few hours and came up with nothing.

We were standing at every crossroad in Bartlett

near her home handing out flyers,

thousands and thousands of flyers,

and all of us searching.

Lieutenant Halford came to the house about 7:00,

and that's when the investigation

became much more intense

because he took charge of the situation.

I get to the police station and I walk in

and the first person I see when I walk in is Thomas.

And Thomas is across the lobby.

And I walk in and we meet in the middle of the lobby

and we hug and I'm crying and he's crying.

And I'm like, we're going to find her.

It's going to be OK.

He's telling me, I'm sorry.

I don't know where she is. I'm sorry.

I don't know where she is.

One of my first questions for Lieutenant Halford was

why are you taking Thomas to this other place?

And he goes, well, typically in these situations,

the first person we have to eliminate is the spouse,

and so we're going to question him separately from the family.

So that's when it began to sink in that

we've got a problem.

There was one time that I ask Thomas, you know,

just occurred to me, I wonder if they've had a fight.

And I didn't get in his face or scream at him or anything else.

I just said, you know, did y'all have a fight

or did you have a disagreement and maybe she's just left

and spent the night with a friend or something?

He said, no, they hadn't had a disagreement.

Nothing had happened.

When Thomas reported Micah missing,

he said that she was out jogging.

Well, a thunderstorm was in the area that evening.

Heavy rain, heavy thunder.

Most people don't go jogging that,

even if they're training for a marathon.

As we were looking through the house,

Micah's purse is still at the house,

Micah's phone is still at the house,

her ID is still at the house.

I mean, even when you go jogging,

you go to the gym, you take your phone with you.

As I was speaking to Thomas, basic information, you know,

how tall is Micah, how much does she weigh,

what color hair does she have,

he would just randomly break down crying.

Very emotional throughout the whole thing.

As I walked around the house, instead of Thomas sitting

or talking to anybody or talking to the officer,

he actually followed me throughout the house,

made small talk with me

while I was looking at different things,

uh, explaining things that, you know, didn't need explanation.

Just very, very uneasy, very nervous that we were there.

It was around noon

that the police separated our families.

I felt like they knew something was happening.

And that's when our conversation started to move to

I think Thomas knows something where she's at, or--

So as that progressed, we became more and more concerned.

Does he know something about it?

Anytime we would ask him a question

that was the least bit pointed,

that would maybe position him to give us an answer

he didn't want to give us, he'd start dry heaving.

You add all the things together

and something's not right.

Out of high school, my sister decided

to go to Harding University,

which is our hometown university.

My sister really wanted to pursue nursing

and that goes to her heart of trying

to help people and love people

and help people through hard situations.

And so because Harding had a good nursing school,

she wanted to be involved with that.

Micah and Thomas met through a friend group.

There was a crew of them hanging out together

and he happened to be friends of friends of hers.

He's athletic, and so it matched up with my sister

wanting to play basketball and be involved in those things.

They liked to be outdoors, they liked sports,

and so I could see how they could match up.

They were from two very different worlds.

She led a rather sheltered life.

It was a small town in Arkansas,

predominantly very Christian.

There's like no alcohol sold in that county.

His parents lived outside of Atlanta, Georgia,

a much more metropolitan, open,

you know, exposed to just about everything.

He was a much more worldly person than Micah was.

We really didn't meet him in person until

he came to our home Bible study.

So then it was just a matter of trying to get to know him

and seeing what he was like.

And a first impression was, eh, he's OK.

Wasn't over-the-top impressed.

But didn't have any big red flags

to start with either.

The more I learned about him,

he was more of an introvert.

He did not like to be around a lot of people,

and so, um,

that was a little bit opposite of Micah's personality.

And so I was a little curious why he was her choice

and why they were dating.

We found out pretty quickly

that much of what he was about was not like Micah,

and we could not identify exactly what it was

and name what it was,

but it just did not seem to be a good fit.

As you learn more about him,

I was like, uh, I'm not sure about this relationship.

As we were learning to get acquainted with Thomas,

we found out different things that he had in his background

that were concerning to us.

Part of that had to do with a lot of partying,

a lot of drinking, some promiscuity,

even dabbling some in some drugs.

And then she would try to justify and explain away

some of the flags that we would point out.

By the time they had dated for nearly a year,

we were starting to really get concerned.

She was very bubbly and friendly

and very outgoing to everybody,

and then all of a sudden, she was very withdrawn.

She was stressed.

I believe Micah went into the relationship open,

whole-hearted, honest, transparent, and vulnerable.

And then this very shining, bright light in our lives,

the light just kind of went out.

He would discourage her from being part

of social things and part of even family things.

The things that we saw in her relationship

were very typical observations that you would see in someone

who is trying to manipulate another person,

trying to instill some power and control over that person

in such a way that they almost answer to them.

And that was what we were having trouble with.

I remember very clearly

there was this moment where my sister called me

and she called me and said,

Mom and Dad don't want this relationship to continue.

I'm drawn to him.

What's your advice?

What's your big brother advice to me?

And I remember being extremely, extremely torn.

And what I share with her was like, I trust Mom and Dad

and I love Mom and Dad,

but you need to make the best choice for Micah.

There's about two years from the time they started dating

till the time they got married.

Just the week prior to her wedding,

I mentioned a young man

that she had a very sweet relationship with,

and it probably could have gone romantic,

but it just never did.

And I said that I spoke with him recently

and I told him that it was, you know,

it's coming up a few days before your wedding.

And he made the statement,

I'm sorry I didn't pursue that any further.

And she perked up and said, he said that?

And I thought that was interesting,

because just days before her wedding,

that showed me that

she still had some doubts about what she was doing.

Before I walked her down the aisle,

I said, Micah, it's still not too late.

If you want to back out of this,

I'll support you 100%.

I want what's best for you.

And she just said, no, let's go with it.

Let's take me down the aisle and let's do this.

After that, she had received a nursing job

with a clinic in Memphis.

They moved to Bartlett,

which is just on the outskirts of Memphis.

One of the choices that Micah made in order

to help their family and to spend more time together

was she moved from working in a hospital

where they have more of a hectic schedule,

to move to the MOGA clinic.

She was the nurse that everybody wanted to be.

Patients loved Micah.

She just was energetic and just had this honesty about her.

And our patients just really adored Micah.

Along with her coworkers.

What happened after they got married then,

is we wanted to be their cheerleader.

We tried to affirm and to do everything we could to help

to give our blessing onto this home that they were building.

I believe, because she knew that we were working hard

to build that relationship, then she was unwilling

to share anything about her struggles

that had been taking place in their marriage.

All of us that worked with Micah,

just based on interactions with Thomas,

kind of questioned him

and kind of thought he was a little shady, disrespectful,

and she was such a loving, kind-hearted person.

He just belittled her.

And I think that his drinking didn't help that because

it would be in those spells that he would drink

and things would come out of his mouth that it shouldn't.

We all learned that there was

some marital counseling going on.

She loved helping people

and that ultimately was what fed into her marriage too.

She loved Thomas

and she wanted to help that relationship.

The thing that I noticed the most was the anger.

Thomas had a hunting dog

and he told the hunting dog

to stay in the back of the truck.

And then the dog got off the truck

and walked towards Thomas.

Thomas screams at the dog,

I told you to stay on that truck.

And he picked the dog up by the ears

and threw it back in the truck.

Extreme anger.

Extreme violence.

But then two or three minutes later,

he goes back to the truck and is petting on the dog

and telling the dog how sweet it is.

And so these extreme moods in anger and behavior.

But when I point out the red flags,

because she was invested in this relationship,

she wasn't willing to listen

to "Dad's advice" at this point.

Whatever I would say

really wasn't taken to heart because at this point,

Thomas had her heart.

He would push to get his way,

to get control, to, you know,

he would make her probably feel better

if they stayed at home alone.

You know, he'd give her some compliments.

Or if they went out, he'd probably say,

oh, why aren't you dressing like that person?

Or why do you have to be so picky about your food?

You know, things

that would make her feel bad about herself.

We don't know that he ever hit Micah physically,

but the yelling and the screaming we know was there.

And so there would be this argument and belittling.

You're so stupid, why can't you get this right?

And then at the other extreme of saying, oh, you're so sweet,

I love you so much.

It wasn't, like, bruises and cuts and scratches

and broken bones and cigarette burns.

It wasn't that kind of domestic violence.

It was the kind of scars in her heart

and her spirit dampened

and all those things that made her who she was.

Many of those were taken away.

And she became a little suspicious,

I think, of Thomas.

Like when she came home and he was on the phone

with some other person,

evidently in a very personal way.

At that point, I think it became clear to her

that he was having an affair.

There was no sight of Micah.

And of course, 75% to 90% of the time

that someone ends up dead,

the spouse ends up as a suspect at some point.

Then we have a search warrant

and the police gather things from within the house.

That's where they find hunting rifles.

And it was clear that Thomas and Micah both knew about guns.

Thomas went hunting regularly.

He had all sorts of hunting rifles and he had handguns.

He went hunting all the time with his friends.

The police uncover a lot of different things

from multiple bottles of alcohol

to a history of pornography

to him reaching out to another lady.

The officers tracked back through his phone records

and there were many texts with another woman

who was from New Jersey.

And then they got into the credit cards.

And that's when they discovered

that there were charges made at Tunica, Mississippi.

He used the credit card to play on the slot machines

and to pay for the hotel room that he and this woman

from New Jersey spent the night in.

Micah went home one day and surprised Thomas.

He did work from computers

and on the phone doing medical sales.

He said he was sick,

so he wasn't going to be working any.

So she thought she would go home and fix him some soup

during the middle of the day.

And when she got there,

he was on the phone with somebody

that he seemed to be talking rather intimately to.

And this was very alarming to Micah.

According to her coworkers,

she came back to work and sort of broke down crying.

I remember Micah being totally,

totally distraught to the point of where

I went and got her stuff

and helped her out the door and she went home.

He actually had met this woman

from New Jersey on a flight to Atlanta

and he was indeed in communication with her

and had met her for a weekend

at the casinos in Tunica, Mississippi.

So he indeed wasn't very happy with Micah,

and he was going after

a much more worldly woman.

All of these things were news to our family.

And so it was sort of shocking seeing all of these things.

All through that search afternoon,

more and more doubts began to arise about

what's going on here?

We're not getting the whole story.

There's things here that don't add up.

And they start going through more personal items.

And it turned out that Micah kept a journal.

The journal was very revealing.

There was one entry in her prayer journal in February

before this happened in April

and she had a whole paragraph that spoke to

Thomas's indiscretions and unfaithfulness.

"My heart is broken.

"I am so angry, sad, mad,

"disappointed at Thomas.

"If he truly loved me, how would this happen?

"My mind cannot fathom what he's done.

Am I so naive that I didn't see this coming"?

It clearly showed the dissolution of a marriage.

And this was a sacrilege

that was held very sacred by Micah,

who's a very religious person.

"All I want to do is cry and sleep

"and forget this relationship ever happened.

"I've worked so hard on our marriage.

"I never thought I would be talking to You

about unfaithfulness."

She's miserable and losing touch with herself,

and only feels comfortable being herself

when she is in this journal speaking with God.

And, you know, her ask for help

or ask for guidance

is just very heart-wrenching.

It's tragic and it's sad.

Micah's prayer journal ties it all together

of her talking about her rocky marriage,

the things that she's going through.

It was very shocking and very painful.

Thomas ends up in an interview room

at the Bartlett Police Department

and he's not telling the Bartlett police anything

except for her leaving,

she's gone jogging, he doesn't know where she is.

Thomas lied to the police.

You know, he failed a polygraph test.

The agent told us that he did not feel,

based on Thomas's results,

that Thomas was being 100% truthful.

And when Thomas's father came to town,

I think that's sort of when things changed.

He went from being very aggressive

and telling Thomas, you know, don't lie to me.

Tell me if you hurt, you know, tell me where Micah is.

He went from that within a matter of minutes to

it'll be OK.

We had people around us praying,

saying, God, reveal something, make something happen.

That night,

the police pulled me and my Mom and my Dad

into this side room and they shared with us

that Micah was shot by Thomas

and that he had left her body at the Loosahatchie River

and that he was taking them to her body at that time.

He shoots my daughter

and he leaves her out there for over 24 hours.

Wild animals, elements, it didn't matter.

He takes the police to her body.

I personally walked out to where they found her

and it is way off the road

in the middle of thorns,

brambles, mud, leaves, everything.

There was a very off-the-beaten-path place

to leave her and it looked as if

he had probably carried her there

probably with the intention

of throwing her in the Loosahatchie River.

But he couldn't make it quite to the river,

so he left her there

face-down with a gunshot hole

in the back of her head.

And the interesting thing is she's not wearing her shoes

and she's wearing white socks

which are not dirty on the bottom.

And this is a muddy, muddy place where she is

and it would be extremely doubtful

that she went there of her own free will.

We were just so eaten up with anger,

just so mad that this man

allowed her family, her friends

to spend this time looking.

Looking for her, hoping to find her.

For you to know all along that you had shot her

and left her at the Bottoms with ants and mud.

Wow.

The fact that he knew that whole time

and was lying to us the whole time is so painful.

It's so, so painful.

Thomas, in trying to explain what had happened to Micah

and how she ended up shot,

came up with this story of

they went here frequently to fire guns.

And according to Thomas,

they would go target shooting out there

and that somehow there was a mistake

and he accidentally shot her in the back of the head.

Something about her gun misfiring

or her getting in the way of him when he's shooting.

It just didn't make a lot of sense.

I have lots of doubts about his story

of the series of events.

We spent a lot of time at a Christian youth camp

at Camp Tahkodah and one of the things we do

at Camp Dakota is target shoot.

We would have three or four rifles

shooting at the target at the same time

and she would be aware of the safety issues

of making sure the rifles are put away

when you go check the target,

that before you shoot,

there's nobody between you and the target.

She would have had to gone through gun safety

to get her carry permit that she had.

And so she was well aware

of the safety issues involved with guns

and to not be in front of someone

with a loaded gun.

He raised her to know about a gun.

Good, old Arkansas way.

You learn how to fire a weapon,

you learn how to take care of it,

you learn what to do with it, to clean it, load it,

fire it, and everything else.

There's no accident when you shoot somebody

in the back of the head.

One shot with her own gun and you don't call anybody?

You don't call 911? That wasn't an accident.

Early on, he was offered a plea deal

of second-degree murder and 15 years.

And we asked our friends to pray that he would take that.

And he did not.

It was a disappointment to us that

he did not take the plea on the front end.

He could have saved us all those months of grief.

We wanted to grieve the loss of our daughter.

We wanted to get used to this new normal of having a daughter

that was no longer with us.

Instead, we had to concentrate on all the stuff

that was going on in Memphis and make trips over there

that were very emotionally laden.

For all those months, we just felt like we were, you know,

we were just dangling on somebody else's string.

Seeing the crime scene photos

and going through the autopsy with the medical examiner,

it seemed evident that his explanation

of what happened that evening

did not fit with the facts very well.

Thomas is like over 6'.

I want to say 6'4". She's maybe 5'4", 5'5".

The gunshot wound is in the middle of her back--

the back of her head.

It goes through her ball cap.

And it's not quite a contact wound, but it is close.

And Thomas was very experienced in firing weapons.

And Micah had grown up with guns.

I can't see that she would ever be in front of the gun,

in front of Thomas with a gun.

We were ready for jury selection.

We were ready to go over and be there for this week-long trial.

At the last moment, he made an Alford plea.

The Alford plea says, I'm not confessing

to doing this, but the evidence against me is overwhelming.

And so therefore, I wave the white flag.

The judge clapped his gavel on the desk and said,

you are guilty of second-degree murder.

There was some comfort in that.

When Thomas is told by the judge,

you're guilty of second-degree murder

and he walks through the door to go to prison,

there was part of me that felt some relief that this is over.

And so I say that is God's way of saying,

here's the best blend

of justice and mercy.

We get to feel some justice,

that there's a consequence being paid

for what happened to Micah.

So he was convicted for 25 years with no appeals.

And seeing some justice gives me the chance

to offer a little bit better forgiveness.

Because that's what Jesus has asked me to do as well,

is to give forgiveness, so I forgive Thomas.

Micah has an amazing family.

Yeah, the strongest people I've ever met.

And as a mom...

I don't know that I could have done what they did.

That was their only daughter.

They forgave him.

I just don't know how you do that.

I believe that she caught him

in his adulterous exploits.

And as she realized what was going on.

In my mind, I believe that was the turning point

that led to her death.

Sadly, I think Thomas had a volatile nature

and he may have felt like

he would have to get rid of her to keep his little world going.

Sort of like a good church member

that can't divorce his wife, so he has to kill her.

I think she got out of the car or whatever

and was mad, maybe perhaps,

ready to run back home in the rain...

And he just shot her.

And then he got rid of her body

in the best place he could.

And I think for some reason,

he carried her out there and took her shoes off.

And I think that was to throw off

being at the muddy bank of the Loosahatchie.

Why look there? Her tennis shoes are clean.

I miss my sister so much.

And she was a light

and she is just an incredible example

of what love looks like.

And if I could talk to her now

and then in a way, talk to other people

that are in struggling relationships,

I pray that if you're in a struggling relationship,

don't keep it to yourself.

Talk to someone about it.

There was one entry in her prayer journal

and she had a whole paragraph that spoke to

Thomas's indiscretions and unfaithfulness,

and she said, "I can't believe

I gave my family up for this."

She didn't give us up.

But in her eyes, it was him or us.

And that makes me so sad.

And she used to, as a little girl,

when she would get upset about something,

and even as an adult, you know,

when she'd get upset, her eyes would just be wide open.

And she had little freckles on her nose.

And when I read that in her journal, I can just see that.

You know, I can see that sweet little girl

with her eyes wide open, like oh, my goodness,

now I get it, now I get it.

And that was--that was just-- that was hard as a mom

to read because she could have come to us.

We could have prevented this.

This did not have to end this way.

Even though the marriage was pretty bad,

she kept her faithfulness and her love for God.

And that lets us live with hope.

All she's doing is a New Year's day,

taking a hike with her dog.

The blood was wet.

It was fresh. That was disturbing.

It was a calm place, she thought.

And then she was kidnapped.

The way in which this person gets money

is by abducting these victims.

He fits the definition of a serial killer by far.