Original subtitles

I was in shock.

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

Byron griffy took care

of a lot of funerals for my family.

He was a good man.

There's a darker side to Byron that people didn't know.

The relationship between Tommy and Byron turned into eating

Turkey pot pies and watching porn.

I didn't see that Tommy had any motive to do it.

When we found out my dad was shot,

the first person I thought of was Cory higgs.

Cory is my son.

Charles and Anthony's stories were falling apart.

They were the last ones to see Byron,

so that made it a possibility.

After Byron died, they start buying boats

and they start spending money like crazy.

They had a motive to kill my dad.

It's all about money.

I don't like to use the term "fighting for your life,"

but that's what it felt like.

We were ready to make arrests,

but now we had another dead body on our hands.

I was a police officer in Florence

in the city manager's office...

He gets a phone call that they're calling medical

to Charles and Anthony's house.

So I go racing to the scene

and I find Charles on the floor of the bathroom.

It was obvious that he was deceased.

The ambulance came

and the police covered the whole property

with caution tape.

I remember being out on the yard,

you know, and everybody hoping, hoping, hoping

that it was good news.

And I just remember just shaking my head, like,

"there is no good news."

It was terribly sad.

At that time, Charles was mayor.

And that afternoon,

I went to the city council meeting.

And about halfway through the meeting,

the chief of police comes in.

He said, "look, we've found Charles dead."

I couldn't believe it.

After I got that phone call, I drove to Charles

and Anthony's house. I don't have any idea why.

And I sat across the street from their house.

I just cried and cried the anger.

Like, "how could you do this"

"so that you didn't have to answer for my dad?

If you were going "to kill yourself today,

you could have told me last night."

I never in a million years saw this coming.

The fact that Charles died was just a punch in the stomach.

We're drafting the arrest warrant for both of them

to be charged with murder at that time.

When Charles' death occurred, we kind of took a step back.

It was like, "what else, you know,

are we going to see in this case?"

Well, I was at work.

Somebody called me and said, "Charles died."

I mean, I was just shocked, just stunned.

My first thought was suicide.

Some of us knew that he was being investigated for murder

of Byron griffy,

and I felt like he took the easy way out.

Charles may not have ever seen a way out.

I mean, how could you ever recover

from the mountain of lies?

You start with the brothers.

I mean, think about it...

keeping up appearances, that's all they had done

since they had got to Florence.

The whole church thing, was it all just fake?

Will we ever know the truth of happened to Irene witty?

What happened to all of Byron's gold?

These were life-changing lies. Well, where's the end?

The end for Charles was his death.

The last time I talked to Charles was

the day before he died.

And he told me,

"I'm not going to cause you any more trouble.

"We can work through this.

"We can take care of the business dealings

and do what needs to be done."

And that was pretty much it.

I really wasn't sad about Charles passing away

because that was a part of my life

that I had already chosen to leave.

I know that sounds heartless, but...

After what I had been through,

that was just a small hiccup in the general scheme.

Laura and I were trying to get things worked out

and figured out where we were going to go from there.

At this point in the investigation,

we brought the last person that saw Charles alive in

to interview him, a guy named cj young.

Ok.

As far as Charles' death, your cop brain is thinking,

"he's guilty, so he killed himself."

Part of me thinks he had medications

and did he overdose?

Who knows? I mean, it's all suspicious

any way you look at it.

I didn't think that Charles was suicidal.

The police were trying to push him to crack, basically,

for no reason. He didn't do the crime.

The next week after Tony left,

Charles was getting everything

set up to go forward without Tony.

He didn't plan to die.

I had heard from my son, Eric,

that Charles got his hair frosted,

Charles got his ears pierced,

Charles ordered a teeth-whitening kit,

Charles called... This guy and asked him, you know,

"where does an old queen like me

go to hook up these days?"

No, I wouldn't say he committed suicide.

I got the impression he had plans.

We all gonna have to answer for whatever happens,

but if you have a good life, and all of a sudden

it's brought to an end, it's sad.

It's very sad.

Look it, he was only 52.

He had wonderful cars, beautiful church and a mansion,

lovely mortuary... having stuff, and more stuff

isn't the answer. Guess we found that out.

Charles' death made me stop and think,

"did Anthony have something to do with this?"

I heard people talking about how, "that must be nice.

Now you don't have to deal with any of that."

Well, it wasn't nice. I was considered a suspect.

It very clearly looks like Anthony would be the one

that gains the most

because I know that, with Charles alive,

that was going to be a huge battle.

Tony definitely had a motive to get rid of Charles

because everything was in Charles' name.

I think if Charles was still alive,

Tony could have ended up with nothing.

Tony is unassuming and you wouldn't think he's dangerous.

But as far as Charles and Anthony's relationship,

Anthony was the muscle.

If there was somebody who was gonna get their hands dirty...

or bloody, it was gonna be Anthony.

Anthony had a lot to gain from Charles dying.

Now Anthony could point the fingers at Charles

for Byron's death.

I knew that because Charles was gone,

Tony was now the prime suspect in the murder of Byron griffy.

It was hard to kind of look at Tony and not sit there

and question, like, "what's going on?"

Like, "are you a murderer?"

After Charles died, there were a lot of rumors

one of the rumors around town was that he'd offed himself

because he killed Byron griffy.

Or maybe he offed himself because Tony broke up with him.

You know, small town stories.

There was a lot of rumors about my brother Tommy

with Anthony and his half brother.

Everybody in town calls it the love triangle.

Supposedly, he had...

It was a love triangle between Anthony and Charles,

Byron and my brother Tommy.

Yeah, it's square, but they called it

"the love triangle." Because there's four, yes.

You know, every rumor ever just starts coming out,

like Charles and Anthony teaming up with linette

and Gina to kill Byron.

As a gay person myself, it's just borderline offensive

that that's what people thought.

You couldn't really talk to anyone that didn't think

that something was up with Charles' death,

and the only person

you could really look at was Anthony.

It was really easy to think that if anyone had the access,

opportunity, and motive to tamper with his medicine,

it would be Anthony,

and it would look like what happened.

After Charles's death, the autopsy report came back.

There was no poison in his system,

and that he had died of natural causes.

It was a massive heart attack that killed Charles.

Under all that stress,

your lover left you for another person.

You're probably gonna go to prison for murder.

That's a lot of stress on a guy who already had a bad heart.

The official story is that his heart gave out.

If you want to romanticize it, he died of a broken heart.

The CBI used Charles' death to be able to get warrants

and to go search my old house.

In the basement, they had what they called the gun room.

They had guns in boxes. They had them on the rack.

They had them all over the place.

During that search warrant in Charles' bedroom,

in the back of a closet,

they found a hidden compartment.

And in that hidden compartment were several boxes of coins,

one of which had Byron griffy's name on it.

They were hidden.

Why weren't they turned back over to his daughter?

My dad trusted them.

They were his friends, and they were helping him

by making sure that his money was safe.

But they already had stolen from him.

There's no explanation as to where my dad's money went.

I believe that Byron probably had close to a million dollars

in collectible stamps and coins and currency.

And he had a lot of gold.

Linette and Gina never saw any gold returned to them.

What happened to all the gold?

I suspect Charles and Tony had a lot to do

with Byron's gold disappearing.

Neither of us took anything of Byron's.

When the investigator came in and took a bunch of coins,

there was one that did have Byron's name on it,

but the other coins were actually my collection

they had linette griffy identify them as Byron's coins,

but they weren't... they were mine.

The coins that Byron had us store for him,

Byron ended up selling most of it to...

Some guy out of the Springs,

but I wasn't even there when he came to pick it up.

I was working on the crematory that day.

Anthony's default position

on anything potentially criminal in this case

was he knows nothing and saw nothing,

including the death of Byron griffy.

Charles' memorial was held at Florence high school

in the auditorium, and, you know,

it had a really huge turnout.

He was the mayor at the time.

They owned multiple businesses along main street.

They had the church,

and so most of the town was there.

I stayed away from Charles's funeral,

just because I didn't want it turning into a circus.

I knew there was gonna be police there.

One of the church members was speaking to everyone,

and he said, "Charles's brother must just be so upset

that he couldn't make it, and our hearts are with him."

And me just shaking my head in disbelief

in that the entire town is in this room

and they all believe something that's not true.

Some of the members of the community

wanted to put a statue up of him out by city hall.

And it's like, "well, wait a few weeks."

"You might see his face on the front page

for something else."

Charles was very good at telling stories,

and no one really thought to question him.

Charles once told me about his ex-wife

and the two kids that he had.

And it was just like these grand stories.

So you would get sucked into them,

but they were always a little unbelievable.

The son, he said, was in the air force,

a pilot or something.

And then the daughter was a scientist.

Charles would pretend that he was talking to one of them

or that he just got off the phone with one of them.

We always believed the story about Charles having

two children, and one in the air force.

But... it was a lie, a huge lie.

Our view was that Charles had been

the mastermind of all of it,

and that when his death occurred,

my entire focus became "how to prosecute this crime."

We had to reevaluate if we had enough evidence to charge

just Anthony in the death of Byron griffy.

After Charles died,

I was just trying to survive, pretty much.

Still trying to run the businesses.

But the last two payrolls, I had to cover myself

out of my own pocket.

And that's when I decided to close the funeral home.

I don't know, it just didn't seem like a place

I wanted to be anymore.

I found the person that I believe I was meant to be with

for the rest of my life.

Charles and Anthony kept that relationship a secret

for over 20 years.

I'm not gonna lie, I was pretty devastated.

And I wasn't devastated about the type of relationship.

It was the fact that it was a lie.

Then I thought, "would my life be better

with him or without him?"

And there was no... There was no delay.

Anthony and my mom rushed to get married.

My mom had me be her wedding photographer.

From their point of view, a murder investigation

was a side thing that was like,

"don't worry about this... Murder."

They didn't have squat for evidence.

I kept thinking,

"did the cops come up with something else?

Is there something else?"

And there never was any... anything else that I heard.

Charles' death made us reanalyze everything.

So, there was a significant delay before we ultimately

filed the charges.

I got a call from chief of police from Florence.

And he told me, we've got your coins here,

if you can come down and pick them up.

So I get in the car,

I go down, and that's when I was arrested.

It was all a setup just to get me to come in.

Once we knew Anthony was going on trial,

he very quickly started liquidating

anything that he could, and with the help of my mom,

trying to get enough money to pay for his defense.

First attorney I had said,

"people always ask, how much does it cost

to defend against a charge of first-degree murder?"

And he said, "everything."

And he wasn't kidding.

Everything started getting sold to try and pay attorney's fees.

All of the vehicles.

It was everything.

I have been a criminal defense investigator

for about 45 years.

Lawyers representing people charged

hire me to investigate the case for the defense.

I've met with thousands of clients,

and some of them would just flat say,

"you know, I did it, and it's your job

to help me get off."

But that wasn't Anthony.

Anthony was, "they're wrong. We didn't do it."

And he was determined to be found innocent

of something he kept maintaining that he didn't do.

The case against Anthony was circumstantial.

Juries like meat.

They want to be able to find DNA at the scene,

fingerprints, hair fibers,

something to put the suspect there.

And, in this case, there was no such evidence.

Everything in my mind pointed to Charles and Anthony

as committing the crime.

The fact that they're there at the farm,

easy access to a weapon, he had motive.

I believed I was gonna be able to meet that obligation

of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Anytime somebody's charged with a crime,

the defense attorneys have an obligation

to investigate.

So I spent a good five months trying to contact witnesses,

going through police reports, documents, photographs, videos.

And finally, I stumble into a 911 call

made by a fella named Rob...

A few months after the murder.

He basically said, "I have information

that Tommy tomlin is involved in Byron's murder."

We knew Rob could change everything.

So, of course, I want to find Rob,

A few months after Byron's death,

a fella named Rob called the 911 operator and said,

"I have information that Tommy tomlin is involved

in Byron's murder and that he told me he was."

So I, of course, had been looking for Rob.

And as it turned out, Rob died about a year

before I was able to try to interview him.

And I couldn't go into any more detail than what appeared

in the police reports.

Those reports were just handwritten notes.

The deputy that took the statement from him,

he said he didn't pay attention to it

and didn't take it serious because he was just a drunk.

I needed to do everything I possibly could do

to prove Anthony's innocence.

And that was hard to do.

There was also a confidential informant

who said that Byron wanted him to kill Cory.

Cory was Byron's grandson.

So there's some evidence that Byron

was talking to a hit man.

Byron was extremely depressed.

Did Byron talk that fella into helping him commit suicide,

knowing that he was willing to kill?

But that confidential informant also died

before I was able to contact him.

Early on, the investigators were trying

to determine if this was an assisted suicide

because there was no evidence of Byron griffy fighting

and no evidence of him attempting to get away.

I don't think there's any way at all my dad

would have ever been suicidal.

He was a mortician long enough to know what...

That did to families. He'd have never done that.

As a prosecutor, our obligation is that we do

not bring a case to trial that we don't have a belief

that we're going to be able to prove

beyond reasonable doubt.

And I believed I had the evidence.

The stakes were pretty high.

I don't like to use the term "fighting for your life,"

but that's what it felt like.

The defense team had two alternate suspects,

Tommy tomlin and Cory, Gina's son.

There were other suspects, but none of them ever Rose

to the level that would show us that they were

a valid alternate suspect.

Throughout the course of the day that the homicide took place,

Tommy was always with someone, from the start to finish.

That removed him as a suspect in our eyes.

We didn't think Cory had the ability to do it,

and there was no evidence whatsoever that indicated

that he was there.

The judge allowed us to kind of talk about them

in closed chambers without the jury present,

but then wouldn't allow us to use it in court.

There was a significant amount of circumstantial evidence

that pointed toward Charles giebler and Anthony Wright.

They were at the scene of the crime during the time

the crime occurred.

We have inconsistencies in the car that they drove.

When they're both confronted with it,

the response is exactly the same.

You know, after the fact, they realized,

"we made a mistake in our statements,

"so let's both get back on the same page

and have the same response.

And a lot of the details just doesn't make sense.

Charles and Anthony had been to the farm plenty of times,

and for them to say, "the gate was locked",

"whatever," I don't buy it.

Charles and Anthony drove an hour

to get their good friend to take him for a birthday lunch.

They didn't drive around to the other gate

or even walk up to the house.

There was almost an entire hour that was unaccounted for.

Either one could say

where they were for that hour that was lost.

So it gave us more indication

that they were hiding something from us.

I know that I was at the farm twice before,

maybe three times.

But I'd only been there a couple of times.

I'd never actually been in the house before.

There's layer after layer after layer of lie and deceit.

You start with the brothers,

and then you go all the way down to the death of Charles

and everything in between.

As we dug into Charles and Anthony's past,

we found that they had been crime scene cleaners

for the Utah coroner's office.

They had the knowledge

and the know-how to clean a crime scene

so that there wouldn't be any evidence left behind.

These were individuals

who were comfortable around death.

I suspect that they were gloved up with latex gloves,

and there was a real attempt to avoid fingerprints and DNA.

My gut feeling was there had to be

more than one person involved.

When somebody dies, that is dead weight.

So that dead weight becomes a very difficult thing to move.

But if somebody moved him, you could find some drag marks.

There was none of those.

So it looked like several people

moved him to that final resting position.

Those all made us to the conclusion that it was

Charles giebler and Anthony Wright.

But did Tony kill Byron?

I always thought he did.

Charles had it in him to order Tony to do it.

But I'm not sure if Charles would have pulled the trigger.

Tony was more cold and calculated.

Not once during the trials or anything did Anthony

ever say, "I didn't do it."

Like, if you were innocent,

you would plead at some point and say, "I did not do this."

The trial, I mean, it was an agonizing couple of weeks.

The jury goes in to deliberate.

And that was the first time it really hit me

that that's what I was facing, was life in prison.

The jury in Anthony's trial, they were out two days,

very, very stressful.

I'm looking at real punishment if I'm found guilty.

They're gonna send me to prison for life.

We were all there, the whole family.

I was confident that Anthony was gonna be convicted.

Anthony's just sweating it.

Nervous, of course. So the jury comes back.

It was a hung jury, and I was extremely upset.

They "hung," meaning the jury couldn't make

an unanimous decision.

Everybody sat there completely dumbfounded.

When they came back as a hung jury,

I didn't know how the system worked.

I'm thinking, "sweet, it's over. I'm going home."

Nope.

The district attorney right away stated

that he was gonna try it again.

You just don't know what to even think at that point.

It was very traumatizing.

"Bottom line, man, you're gonna have to get another couple

"hundred thousand dollars together to defend yourself

the next time."

I was ready...

For another trial, but the attorney kept telling me,

"if you have to go back after a mistrial,

it very rarely goes in the defendant's favor."

Tony was just burned out. He was tired.

He was exhausted.

He was just like, "I can't keep doing this."

And then the head da there, for whatever reason,

offers Anthony a plea bargain.

We made the decision that we had to get

any conviction we can.

And my primary goal in doing that was to have Anthony Wright

make a statement that says, "yes, I'm responsible."

Conspiracy to commit murder.

Didn't require jail time,

but it would be a few years of probation.

Anthony didn't want to do it.

The attorneys and myself basically started begging him

to take the plea offer.

I mean, I used to say, "no way I'd plead guilty

to something I didn't do."

Well, you're not looking down the barrel of 25 to life.

It's real.

I wasn't giving up by any means,

but I didn't see a way out. I just had to take the plea.

My thoughts of Anthony taking a plea deal was,

what did he pay the da?

That's truly what I think.

You take somebody's life and you get, what?

Ten years of probation?

I was sick to my stomach.

How could something like that happen?

Take a person's life and it really has no value.

All of justice costs money.

You want to prove yourself innocent over something?

You could lose everything. And where would it get you?

So sometimes you take... The easy way...

admit to something, get it over with,

and put it behind you.

Only god knows.

We all wrote letters to the judge.

And he said, "you've agreed to the plea bargain."

And I said, "we didn't agree to the plea bargain."

Bullock agreed to that plea bargain.

The district attorney, James bullock, screwed us over.

I don't think that Anthony is innocent.

I don't think Charles was innocent.

Do I want to really ask Anthony anything?

I would like an answer.

I would like him to just...

Fess up, be a man, tell me he did it, and why.

He's too much of a coward, though.

I guess that's why they shot him in the back of the head,

and that's why he won't tell me.

I... absolutely 100%,

without question, did not kill Byron griffy,

and Charles did not either.

I didn't do it. I don't know who did it.

I have an idea who I think might have.

The suspects that I believe possibly had a part in.

Byron's murder were Tommy tomlin, Cory higgs,

and Byron's daughter, linette.

The biggest motive linette had was financial reasons.

Byron told me he was tired of just having to continually

support her and put money out for every little whim,

and he was talking about just not doing that anymore.

We did not hear any stories at all of Byron griffy

cutting her off in any way.

She was at work all day the day that Byron was murdered.

Linette had an airtight alibi

unlike Charles giebler and Anthony Wright.

Here are the facts.

Charles and Anthony had hundreds of thousands,

close to a million dollars worth of this guy's money.

Yes, other people had reason

to do something terrible to Byron.

Can't argue that.

But the people who gained the most financially,

it was them.

It was all about lies and greed and deceit.

And I'm not sure if we'll ever know really the full truth,

the full extent of it.

There's one person that knows the truth 100%.

That's Anthony Wright.

I don't suppose that we can ever trust

a damn thing that he says.

How could you really trust anything that he says

at this point?

Having Laura there gave me something to focus on,

trying to start our life together.

You know, it's a good distraction, still is.

That's sage from the lake pueblo.

That doesn't even smell like sage anymore.

There it is.

So this summer, it'll be 12 years

that Tony and I have been married.

So, I mean, Anthony and I, all we ever, ever wanted

was to be together. That was it.

We just wanted to be together. And we are.

And we always will be.

I said this at the very beginning,

'cause, you know, right away the attorneys are like,

"well, we got paid and you didn't go to prison,

so all's good."

Yes, he gets to walk around and have a job and,

you know, kiss me goodnight every night or whatever.

I said, "but do not think for a minute

that this was some kind of damn gift."

This is not a "best-case scenario."

Give me a break.

I don't know that there'll ever be closure

because we didn't get justice.

Anthony gets to walk around and do whatever he wants to do.

I would have really liked for my dad to get justice.

There was no justice.

It doesn't matter that it's 12 years later.

It hurts just as bad today.

I'd do anything I could to prove my innocence.

But, you know, everybody's gonna think...

Something different.

I struggle a lot still with, "is Anthony innocent

or is he guilty?"

We're a decade later

and we just have questions and some things

that probably will never be able to be answered

because it's too late.

Who killed Byron?

I'm convinced Anthony didn't, but there's...

No evidence, and probably never will be

unless somebody makes a deathbed statement

declaring that they did it.

There's so many rabbit holes in this case to chase down

that I suspect if we were to reopen the case,

there's additional evidence

that we would find that would just be more

than we could deal with.

I'd like to say that the moral of this story is don't trust

somebody who says that they're your friend,

but then what kind of life do you have?

Like, I'm still gonna trust and I'm still gonna be giving

and loving and caring

because that's what my dad would have wanted.

A lot of this could have been avoided

if people could just be themselves and tell the truth.

Truth is the thing that everyone seeks.

It's hard to come by.

Just be honest.

Say what happened or what didn't happen.

Because someday they're going to have to answer

to their maker for whatever they did.

Both you and I, we're going to have to answer

for our misdeeds and our mistakes.

One day, they will too.