Original subtitles

This was what we would call basically a vicious murder.

It looked like she was

doing her best to get away from whoever did this to her

but didn't make it.

Ty was loving and caring, and she just wanted to help people.

There was a lot of fear that somebody

may be targeting lgbtq people.

Tyler police promptly dispatch

officer Joshua smedley to the scene,

a vacant house in the northern section of the city.

Due to it being a major accident

and gunshots being fired,

I tried to get there as soon as possible,

and I tried to be as tactical as I could.

I activated my body camera.

Approached the vehicle and noticed that it was

in the dirt off the curb

right next to a telephone pole.

When I looked inside the vehicle,

the driver was motionless.

Usually, when people get into a major accident

and they have a collision with an object,

they're gonna have more blood coming from their nose,

head, mouth area.

But I noticed the blood was coming from the shoulder,

the wrists,

and was pretty heavy on the side of the victim,

which seemed pretty strange.

I noticed that these wounds on the victim in

the shoulder and the wrist area appeared to be

impact wounds from gunshots.

That raised concerns that this is

not just gonna be an accident.

Emts are unable to revive the woman

and pronounce her dead.

Officers also discover the victim's cellphone still

connected to the car stereo -- they collect it as evidence.

There's no telling where

this could've first occurred.

Could be the suspect's riding in the vehicle with the victim

while shooting them or are they chasing

after them in their own vehicle?

There was only one thing we knew for sure,

and that's that we had a homicide.

Investigators also discover that

their victim is a transgender woman.

I spoke to family members.

I spoke to friends.

I spoke to a lot of classmates

and then also with some of Ty's professors,

and they all told me about the kind of

person Ty was, that Ty was loving and caring,

and she just wanted to help people.

She had gone back to school specifically to be in

the medical field to where she could serve others.

Back at the scene,

officers tape off the area

and begin their homicide investigation.

We found a passenger side mirror on the ground.

It appeared that the vehicle had run into this brick mailbox.

And we discovered evidence,

shell casings 100 yards to the west.

With the huge crime scene,

we knew we had quite a bit of work ahead of US at that point.

I then began to knock on addresses nearby

where the incident had occurred in hopes of getting

more leads to the investigation.

Not a lot of people answered the door

due to it being past 3 A.M.

Bianca: I was hoping that she had witnessed

more of the accident,

but all she saw was the vehicle.

She didn't see anyone.

She didn't see anyone inside the vehicle.

So she ended up not having any more leads to

the investigation.

Police in Tyler, Texas, have just found

the body of 24-year-old Ty Underwood...

...shot to death in her car.

She had been shot numerous times, apparently four times

from what looked like outside of the vehicle.

The suspect may have been standing at the door

or sitting in the car -- it looked like

she was doing her best to get away from whoever did this

to her but didn't make it, and she died in her car.

We knew this was what we would call basically

a vicious murder.

Around this time, there was a lot of fear in

the lgbtq community about people being who they were.

When you start talking to family members or classmates,

it stops becoming more of an abstract concept

and this is a real person who had

real family and real friends who are in real pain.

Back on the streets,

the investigation continues.

Investigators look into Ty's background

and come up with her current address.

Detectives Nathan Elliott and Andy erbaugh head

to the apartment to speak with Ty's

roommate, breonna.

When we go contact anybody in a murder investigation,

we don't know how they're involved,

because they could be the suspect.

They could know what happened.

They could have information that is valuable as evidence,

so we don't

want to give up too much of our hand in this.

She was touched emotionally to the point of

crying hysterically,

almost to the point of gagging.

So at that point in time,

we almost check her off as somebody who's not involved.

Ty and her friend were living together,

are best friends,

and she knows pretty much everything that Ty does.

We were hoping that she could provide some details about why

Ty was out at that time of night,

especially when Ty was supposed to be at school

that morning.

Detectives bring breonna

to the station to talk further.

To know that they're having to live in this kind of fear,

to know that they're even scared to walk on the street,

too scared that they might be killed just for who they are,

it just kind of lights a fire under you,

because obviously you definitely

don't want that to keep happening and want to catch

who did this, you know, even more.

While detectives work to access Ty's phone,

they continue to speak with Ty's friends

to learn more about the people in her inner circle.

We didn't know what Ty needed the money for -- was it

she was late on bills?

Was she owed somebody some money,

where she's going to meet somebody,

to pay 'em the money?

We didn't know if Ty was gonna

go buy something from an individual and got robbed.

Once we learned that Ty was dating

somebody who went to Texas college and played football,

and from the roommate that the name was Carlton,

so now we had a lead to follow.

So our next step is to go to Texas college,

find out who Carlton is.

Detectives travel to Texas college,

where a 21-year-old football player named

Carlton champion, Jr., is brought in to talk.

At this point, it was suspicious that Carlton

would delete the app,

but this doesn't make him a murderer.

Champion:...

Carlton was adamant, stumbling over his words,

that he hadn't had sex with Ty --

being a football player,

being that now a trans woman has been

killed a few blocks from the college.

Word was getting out, so I don't know if he didn't

want to be associated with Ty

where everybody else would know it.

Detectives press Carlton about his movements

that night after he returned from Dallas.

When we told Carlton that Ty had been killed,

Carlton was quick to say that he had nothing to

do with it, said that other people could vouch for him.

Just kept denying that he was involved in any way.

He really didn't have any emotions,

no emotion about somebody being killed at all.

Kind of raised some red flags.

The murder of Ty Underwood

has left the city of Tyler, Texas,

struggling for answers.

Ty's death was a really scary

moment for people in this community,

and there was a lot of community outrage about what had happened.

Now detectives set their sights on one suspect,

Texas college football player, Carlton champion, Jr.

As detectives try to verify Carlton's statements,

they focus on another hopeful source of information --

Ty's locked cellphone.

We knew that we needed to get in the cellphone,

but we didn't have the pass code.

We know that if you try the wrong pass code on an iPhone

too many times, it's gonna lock the phone up.

And luckily, we typed in Ty's birthday,

and it opened the phone.

When we looked in Ty's cellphone,

we saw that Ty had been texting another person.

We tracked down that phone number and saw

that Ty have been texting with another male at Tyler.

Detectives give the man, Dalton Howard, a call.

He seemed very surprised that a detective would be

calling him to begin with, and he said that

he didn't know anybody by the name of Tyrone.

Not sure if Dalton is telling the truth,

detectives swan and Matthews visit him at his home

and press him about the murder.

...

He seemed pretty convincing that he had never met her,

but as an investigator, I have seen people who lie very well.

When he told me that he was willing to let US look

at his phone or whatever,

he certainly seemed willing to help in some way.

Then he tells US that he deleted it,

and suddenly we're thinking okay, what does he have to hide?

Detectives aren't convinced

Dalton is telling the truth,

so they return with him to the station for

further questioning.

Any time somebody makes absolute statements like that,

I never do things that might cause US to want to go down

that path,

but for somebody to tell US that they never leave the house

at night,

especially when they are texting somebody

that closely before a crime

certainly brings suspicion upon him.

Detectives hunting Ty Underwood's killer

in Tyler, Texas,

have their eye on two suspects that Ty met on social media.

Now, the one they've been questioning, Dalton Howard,

has requested to take a polygraph test.

As the interview progressed, he became much more

uncomfortable as I began to question him

more and more about the timing and also whether or not

he ever met

Ty, so we gave him a polygraph,

and at the conclusion of that polygraph,

we considered the fact that he had not

contacted or texted Ty after the,

last text, which was about two hours before the death,

and that,

there was no plans to meet Ty in those texts.

I determined that he was no longer a suspect.

Detectives next turn their attention

back to the other man

Ty had been communicating with, Carlton champion Jr.

When I started looking at Ty's cellphone, I turned

the airplane mode off,

which a lot of times we turn it on to preserve evidence.

Then all of these messages started coming through.

Then going through all the kik messages, I saw

that Ty and Carlton were

messaging back and forth at two o'clock in the morning,

just minutes before Ty was shot.

They're arguing back and forth, and they end up

agreeing to meet.

Ty says she's coming to the college.

Carlton says, "no meet me on 25th."

And she says, "I'm on my way."

Detectives visit Carlton at his dorm room

as they ready a search warrant.

Now that we know he's lied,

that's an advantage to US as detectives,

because now we have something that we can

interrogate him on.

He pretty much was...

Throwing it in our face.

Like, "how dare you ask me that?

How dare you ask me if I killed her?"

Investigators carry out their search.

He would not admit to anything.

He was just adamant that he did not send those messages,

and he did not know who did.

So we did what we did and served a search warrant

and seized some of his belongings.

With the amount of blood spatter

that was sprayed through the car,

if he had been in the car with her

or even standing outside the car when she was shot,

there may be biological evidence

or blood evidence on that shirt

or on his pants or especially on his shoes.

But then investigators find something revealing

as they review the security footage from Texas college.

During the interviews with Carlton,

he continued to say that he never

left his dorm room past 9:30 or 10 the night before.

We were able to attain video from

the surveillance cameras of the dorm hall,

which showed he left the dorm about

a little after two o'clock that next morning

and returned about 20 minutes later,

which would have gave him enough time

to kill Ty and run back to his dorm.

Given all that we had

learned up until this point, it was time to bring Carlton in.

Tyler, Texas, police have prime suspect,

Carlton champion, Jr., at the station,

where they confront him about his relationship with Ty.

When I was interviewing Carlton,

he knew he was at the center of our investigation

at this point, and for his attitude --

to be smirking, to want me to go

buy him some food, to be nonchalant, is not

ordinarily how a suspect or a person being interrogated

for a homicide acts.

I could tell that Ty wanted more in this relation,

something Carlton did,

Ty was more emotionally invested in the relationship.

Ty tells Carlton that she's not coming.

They're pretty much through with,

and then Ty messages

a few hours later and says, "no, I'm coming to pick you up."

We explained everything we had --

the messages, the video, everything.

It didn't seem to matter to Carlton.

We gave Carlton every opportunity to tell US,

you know, his defense,

what actually happened in his words,

and during all the interviews,

he wouldn't tell US what happened.

He'd just continued to say he wasn't there, he didn't do it.

Unfortunately, without evidence to connect

Carlton to the crime scene,

detectives don't have enough for an arrest

until they receive word back from the lab.

There are some investigations

when you have a lot of evidence against somebody,

sometimes people will eventually say, "okay,

I'm guilty."

With Carlton champion,

he just dug his heels in the dirt and continued

to say that he had no involvement in

the homicide of Ty when clearly there was

evidence against him.

I think Carlton was threatened.

I think he didn't want his football players

or his friends to know that he was dating a transgender woman.

He didn't want that.

And so that's why he killed her.

Based on the evidence, Carlton champion, Jr., is

charged with the first degree murder of Ty Underwood.

Through the trial, Carlton was still flippant and cold,

and denying and denying it.

Going so far as to lash out in the courtroom,

caught on news cameras.

I don't think that sat well with the jury,

and in the end, they convicted him of murder and sentenced him

to life in prison.

There was a vigil for Ty after the murder, when everybody

began to learn more about Ty as a person.

It brought together a large cross section of the community.

We had probably about 50 people

together from all over the community,

family members, friends, coming together to celebrate who Ty was

as a person and the fact that Ty was going to get justice.

When Ty's death occurred,

that also sparked a lot of other conversations

that weren't going to be had in this community,

and lgbtq advocates in the community

to take a harder stance, to speak up.

They needed to demand humanization

in their own community,

and I don't think that we would have the strong dynamic

base of lgbtq advocates

in this area had they not taken that stance when

Ty was murdered.