Original subtitles

Marker.

Everything.

Like, if you wrote it on paper, nobody would believe it.

This story...

it's a whodunnit.

It involves sex and power.

You've got wealth and intrigue,

and hiding one's identity.

There's two types of funeral directors.

Some want to help people, and some are in this

to take advantage of people.

OK...

Who could do something like that?

This woman came up to me and said...

So now we had another dead body on our hands.

The things that came to light,

I was just as shocked as everybody else.

What the is happening?

When you move to a small town,

there's things that...

you learn really fast, like...

anything that...

you might want hidden...

doesn't stay hidden.

1994...

is when Charles and I moved to Colorado

from Salt Lake City.

We wanted to be in the funeral business.

Charles and Tony were brothers. They shared a mother.

And they were great funeral directors,

just willing to help anybody with anything.

I had a cat. He was dying.

It was terrible.

So they came and they got him for me.

And they took him and they took care of him for me.

And they cremated him for me.

They were wonderful guys.

If you talk to any mortician,

death does not weigh heavy on their hearts.

They're morticians, man.

They deal with death all the time,

and they have the means to deal with death.

Morticians, that's kind of a... unusual profession.

Morticians make a lot of money,

especially on coffins and caskets.

It's very lucrative... very lucrative.

A lot of people see the money that you can make,

and that's their driving force.

I wasn't like that.

Becoming a funeral director is almost more of a calling.

A lot of it isn't pleasant, but with funeral homes

in small towns, you're pretty much like family.

For us, it was more than just a job.

Byron Griffy was the same way.

Byron was a funeral director, too.

He was a really good funeral director.

He knew what he was doing.

He'd been doing it for a long time.

He was a very generous person.

He helped us with some equipment

when we first got started.

And after that, we just became good friends.

On October 12th...

Charles and I went to Fowler to meet Byron for lunch.

It's usually about an hour's drive from Florence to Fowler.

We were meeting Byron at his farm.

When we pulled up to the gate, it was locked.

Charles tried calling him and didn't get an answer.

That was a little strange.

We finally just...

decided to leave.

My dad took care of everybody.

When I moved back home with three kids,

he bought a house for us which had some land,

and he said it would be fun for the kids to grow up on a farm.

And then, at that point, I met Gina, my wife.

My dad was my biggest support system.

When I told my dad I was gay,

he said, "Well, you know, you're not alone.

There's a lot of people that are."

So, when Linette and I decided to get married,

Byron was extremely supportive.

He took my kids... all of my kids...

just like they were his own grandkids.

Whether I was his favorite or not, he was my favorite.

He was my favorite person in the whole world.

The morning of Byron's death,

which was a day before his birthday,

he was planning to meet Charles and Anthony

out at the farm and go to lunch.

We were sitting down for dinner,

and Byron never showed up.

He wasn't answering his phone.

My dad always answered the phone.

Always.

So, I called Charles.

I said, "Is my dad still with you?"

Charles told her, "We never even saw him."

He never showed up.

We started to get worried about him.

So we drove out to the farm.

Gina said, "I'll check the house."

Then I was yelling for him, you know.

He didn't answer.

And I heard Gina say...

"I found him."

I said, "Is he OK?"

She said, "No."

We received a call of a male that was down.

The address I knew as Byron Griffy's farm.

When I got on scene, EMS was there.

We went in.

We found Byron Griffy laid out on the floor

in the middle of a bedroom that was empty.

He was just off the wall, probably about 2 1/2 feet.

Crime scene was very clean.

I mean, there was nothing there.

The family had moved out of the farmhouse,

so the farmhouse was empty.

There was no forced entry or sign of struggle

of any kind.

No defensive marks on him.

There was very little blood.

I think my words were...

"It's weird."

There was no weapon readily available.

The blood splattering on the wall was not consistent

with what I'm used to.

This was very strange.

Byron is laid out almost like body in a casket.

And he's laying flat on the floor, face up.

He was staged.

Byron Griffy was a pillar of the community.

Pretty much everybody knew who Byron Griffy was.

So, at this point in the investigation,

everybody's a suspect.

And then, as we began to dig deeper,

we learned some of these people

were hiding some deep, dark secrets.

If one of them killed him...

who was it?

When we found out that Byron was dead...

of course, my first reaction is,

"What the hell happened?"

I was shocked.

Charles actually got pretty emotional about it.

The thing that was going through my mind is

we were right there.

After Byron died, Charles and I thought we could help,

so we offered to go in to CBI the very next day.

Byron Griffy was a really good friend.

He would help people in need.

Kind of the same theory we had.

Charles and Anthony were very intertwined with the community.

Everybody knew them. Everybody has a story.

Charles became mayor.

He was president of the Chamber of Commerce.

He even started a church down the street.

Charles was the bishop. I actually became a deacon.

We were there just about every Sunday for church.

The sermons that Charles would give were very inclusive,

very, you know, peace and love.

And my son, Eric, worked for them.

So they own several businesses in town.

The funeral home... they own Smashing Good Guitars,

which was the guitar shop that I worked at.

They own the Main Street Grill.

And they're huge collectors.

They collect everything.

I started collecting guitars, guns...

dogs, cats, birds, horses.

If I saw an animal that needed help,

I took it. I even had a squirrel.

There were 37 vehicles.

I had a big bowl of keys on the table.

I would just walk by and pick something out and walk out

front and go, "yeah, that's what I'm driving today."

My brother, like, introduced them,

got them super close into our family.

But at first, it was just like, dinner with Charles and Anthony.

"You're going to concert with Charles and Anthony."

And then we're spending holidays together.

Charles liked to talk about his kids.

He would tell us how successful they were,

and he was proud of them.

But then he had sadness

because they weren't in his life.

You know, something must have happened that that made them

estranged to him.

Charles was the brains

and kind of the mouth, the charismatic one.

He's doing the business deals.

But the person who like,

actually made the things happen...

that was Tony.

When we were able to retrieve Byron's phone,

we could see two calls.

One was about 12:43-ish.

The other one was a little after,

that were made from Charles' phone to Byron's,

that were missed calls.

Before we left town, we drove around Fowler

because I knew that Byron had a little house

that he had moved into downtown.

But I couldn't remember where that was,

so just kind of drove around looking for it.

And then finally just decided to leave.

The autopsy on Byron indicated was shot from the back.

And it was just a single

back-to-front gunshot wound to the neck.

There was soot right on the entrance wound, which means

it's basically a contact wound.

So you couldn't really shoot yourself

the way he was shot, unless somebody was

holding a gun at his neck on the backside.

I was in shock.

I thought, "Who could do something like that?"

I didn't view that people would want to hurt Byron at all.

Definitely, it was not a robbery.

There was a watch on Byron. He had his wallet.

His phone was with him.

But obviously, there had to be some kind of motive.

When we talked to his family members,

we began to realize what it was.

Byron was a huge collector.

He collected stamps, coins, old money, antiques.

My dad had a secret room in the back of the garage.

Only a few people knew that the room was there, and he had,

I don't even know how many safes in there.

Byron bought a lot of silver and gold coins.

It was probably pretty close to...

a million dollars.

Prior to Byron being murdered, there was multiple calls,

and somebody trying to break in to take his safes.

They tried to rob him, but they didn't get nothing.

They made more of a mess than anything.

I have no idea who did it.

But then there was a noose that was hung in the barn.

It was scary.

After the noose was found in the barn,

I just felt like my family wasn't safe out there

at the farm where there wasn't really any neighbors.

So we all just decided to just move back to Fowler.

Byron was very scared.

He was very adamant that somebody was trying to

steal his money.

When we found out my dad was shot...

even before anybody said, "Do you know anybody

who would want to hurt him?"...

the first person I thought of was Cory Higgs.

When we lived out at the farm,

we called the cops many times on Cory.

I was scared of Cory every day.

It was hard to think

that it could have been Cory, because...

Cory is my son.

Right after Byron's death,

Gina and Linette were very quick to point fingers

that Cory Higgs was the one

that had murdered Byron.

Gina is my wife,

and Cory is her son.

I really have trouble saying it.

I love our other two kids to death.

Saying Cory is my stepson, makes me want to barf.

There was a lot of things going on

in the Griffy household before Byron's murder.

When they were at the farm, they were all living there.

Linette and Gina and the kids with Cory and Byron

and Gina's mom.

I believed Cory to be very dangerous on a few...

multiple levels.

Stories I heard from other people,

his own family, in fact.

Life with Cory was not easy from...

ever.

He was extremely intelligent,

but also violent and manipulating.

Cory pulled a knife on his siblings.

When he was younger, he grabbed me by the neck

and choked me out.

When he was 16, 17, Cory went into foster care,

and the court said,

"Least contact with us, the better."

But for some reason, the foster system here

decided that it was good for him

to spend time with my dad.

So, Cory always seemed like he needed a father figure,

until... Cory met Byron.

Cory told my dad he wanted to be a funeral director.

My dad always wanted somebody to take over his business.

So Cory was this...

ray of hope for him.

They were really inseparable.

Byron would take him on funeral calls.

So, when they would do funeral business,

Cory was dressed just like Byron.

Things started going south between Cory and Byron

when Cory attacked me.

He was in trouble for something,

got up, went running for a gun,

which I stepped in front of him and stopped him.

He turned violent, broke my shoulder.

After that, Byron was very hard on him.

I think Cory felt that Byron looked at him different,

which he did.

When Cory aged out of foster care,

he moved right across the street from our farm.

So Cory could have known that Byron was at the farm that day.

I think Cory's motivation for Byron's murder

would just be that that thought was just

another way to hurt us.

I had known Cory from previous incidents

where I'd been to the farm.

And so I interviewed Cory.

At the time of the murder, Cory told me

that he was watching TV at home.

At that time, Cory was living about a mile and a half

down the road.

He could have walked to the farm

and murdered Byron and walked back.

Cory was... sad.

I think Cory truly loved Byron.

Carol Coates, she's a good cop,

but he's a master manipulator and controls every situation.

He played her just like he does everybody else.

I feel guilty being his mom

and feeling the way that I feel...

but I know he did it.

Or had something to do with it.

I 100% believe that.

There were a lot of people at Byron's funeral.

Pretty much the whole town.

It was beautiful.

We asked Charles to do the eulogy.

He got up there and told how he met my dad,

and what a great guy he was to help them out

when they were trying to get started.

Charles and Anthony did a good job.

Handling a service for another funeral director is...

the ultimate way of learning you did your job right.

If another funeral director or their family

would trust you to do it, that's a good sign in my opinion.

CBI told us sometimes the killer shows up

at the funeral, so keep your eyes and ears

open as to what might be going on.

After the funeral, we were all eating and socializing,

and this woman came up to me and said,

"You know, Tommy did it."

She said, "Tommy came home the other night",

"and he was covered in blood.

Tommy did it."

So Tommy Tomlin was Harry Tomlin's brother.

They are complete polar opposites.

I would trust Harry with my life.

Tommy Tomlin is scary.

My brother, Tommy Tomlin, did have a drug problem,

meth, heroin, whatever drug was out there.

Tommy was violent.

He was capable of doing anything.

Tommy had been doing odd jobs for Byron, so Tommy was

obviously on the suspect list.

We were able to call Tommy in.

Colorado Bureau of Investigation did

most of the interview.

Byron was like family to me.

Byron Griffy took care of a lot of funerals

for my family.

He was a good man.

When I heard the news,

there was a lot of stuff going through my mind.

And then stories are going around of who did it.

One was my baby brother, Tommy Tomlin.

Tommy Tomlin never had a steady job, so when my dad

needed help doing anything at the farm,

he just got Tommy.

Tommy was around when he needed money, which was all the time.

When you do drugs, you do things that you really

shouldn't be doing.

He went to a party and was...

supposedly had blood all over him,

and told everybody,

"Did you know Byron Giffy got murdered?"

The rumors of Tommy Tomlin showing up to a party and being

covered in blood were false.

We had heard that the day after Byron's murder, Tommy was

flashing around $100 bills that he normally didn't have.

So we were questioning where Tommy had gotten this money.

And so we did set Tommy up for a polygraph.

Thank you very much.

This test is not complete.

Yeah, I'm serious.

And we're gonna get your story...

At this point in the investigation,

we did pull DNA from everybody involved.

But the crime scene was very clean.

Whomever killed Byron was very meticulous on making sure that

there wasn't much left behind.

So the results came in

that there was no DNA matches for anybody.

We didn't have a murder weapon.

We didn't have any real DNA that could tell us

who was there with Byron.

We were back at square one.

So, without physical evidence,

you start looking at circumstantial.

We start looking at timelines.

The last person that saw Byron Griffy alive

was Harry Tomlin.

They met at the bank in downtown Fowler,

and that was about 12:10.

Byron handed me my check,

and he goes, "I'm gonna go to lunch."

He specifically told me he was gonna meet up

with Anthony and his brother.

We believe that Byron probably arrived back at the farm

approximately 12:15 to meet with Charles and Anthony.

Byron's phone showed two missed calls

from Charles's cell phone number.

Since Byron had his cell phone on him, Byron probably didn't

answer the call at 12:43, because he was probably dead.

The body wasn't discovered until approximately 8:00 PM

by Gina and Linette.

So, from the time that Byron was last seen in Fowler

and the first call being missed at 12:43,

that's how long it would have taken to murder him.

Tommy said that he was at an abandoned house

with a friend during the time Byron was murdered.

Cory Higgs, he was home alone, but he was living down the road

from the farm.

Everybody's a suspect until you can rule them out,

but trying to definitively rule them out was very, very hard.

It was something that we just continued to pursue.

I think many people in town started to wonder,

what happened to all of Byron's gold?

Where did it all go?

Now, that's the million-dollar question.

So, after my dad's murder, Gina and I were trying to find

my dad's money.

A year before my dad was murdered, he was really worried

that whoever had broke in before was gonna come back

and take all of his coins, or somehow Cory knew

it was there, and so Cory was going to take it.

And there was no way that he could take that to

a safety deposit box or something like that.

And so my dad called Charles and Anthony.

Byron asked if we could watch some coins for him.

I had a gun room, is what everybody called it,

in the basement of my house.

My dad wanted to make sure that his money was in

a secure place.

They talked about a secret room in their house,

to where nobody would ever see it.

And so Charles and Anthony agreed.

They had called me at like 10 o'clock at night.

Charles and Tony, they're like,

"Hey, come over and give us a hand."

It was just boxes on boxes of quarters.

$500 boxes of quarters from each state.

I mean, I'm talking a whole truck bed.

I was like, why is this all in coins?

Like, this is ridiculous.

Charles explained to me, "Well, if you put all

"your money into quarters, then it's technically

a coin collection, so it can't be taxed."

Byron did not keep a full record of what he sent to

Charles and Anthony.

He called them several times after they took the coins

and said, "Hey, can I come up?

I need to document what I gave you."

Charles and Anthony were always busy.

They always had a funeral, or something.

It begins to paint the picture that Charles and Anthony

might be hiding something.

Charles and Anthony drove an hour to take Byron

for a birthday lunch.

The fact that they didn't even walk up to the house,

it was a little strange.

Charles and Anthony said,

"This is where we're gonna meet."

It's odd to me that that's where they met,

because we didn't live at the farm anymore.

Charles and Anthony had been out to the farm

at least three times.

The only entrance ever accessible was

the back entrance.

And that's the only entrance they used when they came to

get the coins.

That's the only entrance they used to leave.

I told him no, because a polygraph...

it doesn't prove or disprove anything.

And then he asked, "Would you give a DNA sample?"

I said, absolutely. That's not subjective.

That's... actual. So we did give DNA samples.

And soon it became pretty clear that maybe I was

considered a suspect.

CBI had reached out to me a couple of times asking,

"What did I know about Charles and Tony?"

I was shocked.

I couldn't imagine that either one of those brothers

would do anything to Byron.

My family... they were always like,

"You know, we had nothing to do with the murder."

Yeah, I don't know. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised

we didn't talk about it more.

We'd known these brothers for years.

We were really close to Charles and Anthony,

and Anthony was so kind,

and he really inspired me to be kinder and more patient,

not so jaded, because my job was a little dark.

Laura was a probation officer.

I was talking with her about how I can deal

with being a suspect.

We started talking more.

I gave her my phone number, which I'd never done before,

so we could text, and we just began texting.

And at some point,

I was starting to have feelings for her,

but that's how it started.

I was away at college, and I could tell that something

was up with my mom.

She wasn't acting like herself anymore.

The first week of the semester,

I had missed a call from my mom's good friend, Mandy.

I remember checking the voicemail.

I knew something horrible had happened.

I'm just getting information... really slowly.

And I'm trying to talk to my mom,

and she won't pick up my calls.

I got a surprise phone call from one of my mom's friends.

And my mom's friend, she's like,

"Eric, your mom is hysterical.

"She's just like, screaming and crying,

'He's gonna kill himself.'"

Like, you know, "I never meant for this to happen."

And I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

I'm going down the street looking for my mother.

She got like even more hysterical, crazy,

to where like they're trying to get her into an ambulance.

They didn't take her to the hospital.

They took her to the jail...

to question her.

Yeah.

Charles and Tony are not brothers.

They're together.

They're lovers.

Ooh.