Original subtitles

Two loving couples.

Two best friends sharing a dream to make a movie.

But behind the acting lurks a monster.

And we, like a whole bunch of naive lemmings,

just followed him into the abyss.

Caught on tape.

Wo this was a horror movie come to life

on a street that no one expected.

A real-life slasher film...

The pathologist did find 27 stab wounds on this body.

...revealed on video.

September 9, 2000.

Camp hill, Pennsylvania.

The marriage of 24-year-old Brian trimble

and 25-year-old randi peck

draws friends and family from across america.

I, randi... take you, Brian...

To be my husband...

In good times and bad...

In sickness and in health...

I will love you and honor you...

All the days of my life.

It was a gorgeous day.

I felt elated that my son had found someone

that loved him and adored him, and he adored her.

Randi looked gorgeous.

She wanted to so much

to get the perfect gown that met her dreams.

But behind the smiles lies sadness.

Brian has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Randi coped very well with Brian's diagnosis.

She understood what multiple sclerosis was.

It's an incurable condition,

but with the right care,

Brian should live a long and fulfilling life.

Conrad: I remember him being a little worried

that she might not want to stay

with someone who had his condition,

but she stayed with him.

And that was one of the things he mentioned in his toast --

how much he thanked her for being there and supporting him.

But it's not a disease

that will bring tragedy to this marriage.

I know your future's gonna be beautiful

because the two of you are together.

Welcome for their first dance

Mr. and Mrs. Brian and randi trimble.

An ordinary American wedding

and a wedding video to match.

Only later would anyone look back on this footage

to try and find a monster.

Brian and randi live a comfortable life

in suburban Pennsylvania.

And as we stalk through the undergrowth,

we see randi trimble in her natural habitat.

She talked about how well everything was going

and how happy she was, how happy they were together,

and thinking about starting a family.

I don't think I have enough arms for this.

It was all really great. I was very happy for them.

In spite of Brian's health problems,

he manages to hold down an I.T. Job

in a large healthcare provider.

Good afternoon.

Brian was quiet and introverted.

He didn't make friends very easily.

But in early 2002,

Brian trimble meets a co-worker --

Blaine Norris.

They hit it off right away.

Okay. Okay, goodbye.

Blaine Norris was always described

as the ultimate computer nerd.

He was very much into gaming

and sort of the role-playing games

such as "dungeons & dragons."

You play "raider"?

Yeah. -Awesome.

Yeah. -Cool collection, man.

Yeah? -Yeah.

Blaine Norris is also married.

I'm probably gonna break this thing.

How you feeling today, Wendy?

Tired. -Yeah?

He and his wife, Wendy,

have just added baby Mason to the family.

You were up all night? Okay.

Okay, Mr. Director.

Blaine may be happily married,

but his dream is to become a movie director

and crack Hollywood.

Blaine Norris was very into horror films

and was actually working on his own horror film

that was gonna take place on the appalachian trail.

Blaine wants to make a slasher movie

about a group of hikers who get murdered one by one.

Blaine even takes Brian to scout the location.

They really bonded over this,

and Brian trimble was very intrigued by this idea.

Blaine finds in Brian a creative partner,

a fellow movie buff who can help realize his dream.

And looking down...

Brian agrees to be the cameraman on Blaine's movie.

It's great, man.

For Brian, this is a project

that can take him away from his day-to-day reality

of living with m.S.

Are you gonna take care of that?

Brian. -Hey.

Where have you been? -With Blaine.

Randi is a protective individual...

I've been calling you for hours.

...in part because she's worried about Brian's health.

"What's the big deal?"

She tends to keep tabs on Brian

much more so than he thinks needs to be done.

I couldn't get ahold of you. Anything could have happened.

We got talking, and I got distracted.

Brian? Brian, I'm gonna head off, okay?

Yeah, yeah, sorry. Okay.

I'll see you Monday. -Yeah, okay, see ya.

I got an idea for the title of the movie.

Right, okay. -"Through hike." Okay?

Okay.

God. -Whoa, sorry, Alan.

I didn't mean to scare you.

Three months later,

Blaine's movie script "through hike" is finished,

and actors are being cast in the roles.

I mean, I don't believe in ghosts.

But I do believe in homicidal rednecks

lurking through the woods.

Doug?

Blaine films the auditions so he can watch them back later.

Doug, please come out.

I'm worried.

Man, there's some huge spiders down here!

A ghost is after US. We're gonna die!

Whoa!

In Blaine's script,

the five hikers are to be murdered

by the ghost of an ancient miner called Samuel toone.

The character I played in "through hike: A ghost story"

was Samuel toone.

And for the audition, I only had one line in the film.

Why don't you come join me in my mine?

Blaine was a smooth talker.

Let's get rehearsing. -Yeah.

Yeah?

He was very thorough and meticulous

in every aspect of that film.

You guys on stage, yeah.

Blaine's movie now has a script,

actors, a location, and the cameraman.

Great job, great job. Okay? You ready?

I mean, we were very enthusiastic,

wondering "how did Blaine Norris pull this off?"

The one thing he doesn't have

is the $20,000 he needs to make the movie.

But Brian does.

He and randi have thousands of dollars saved up.

You could put the money up for the movie.

Randi trimble was very frugal with her money.

Well, okay, randi's got it.

She wanted to have a nest egg

so that if her husband could not work anymore,

her family would be secure.

It's all coming along really well.

So Brian had to go to his wife

and ask for thousands of dollars.

And as you would expect, she said...

No, Brian.

What? Why not?

I'm not gonna invest our money in Blaine's horror movie.

It's -- it's not Blaine's movie.

But it's not just the money

that randi takes issue with.

She's worried about Brian's m.S.

...where you've got no signal.

You have a condition, Brian. You can't just live like...

He wanted to go

and live on the appalachian trail for a week

and shoot this film.

I'll be with other people.

She puts he foot down and she says no.

"That's not good for you."

Come on, don't you want me to be happy?

It's a crushing blow.

We've got actors. We've got props.

We've got an amazing script.

I'm relying on you to shoot this movie.

I got to go, really.

No, you -- no, don't. Brian, don't go.

Come on, man.

Brian!

Suddenly, Blaine finds himself

without a partner and without a budget.

But the amateur filmmaker

decides to go ahead and make the horror film,

whatever the cost.

No one knows it yet,

but the real horror is still to come.

Wo dum, Dee, dum, Dee, do. There's the wawa.

Just filming.

I've never been on a movie set before.

Which is, I'm sure, gonna be a first

for the rest of the cast and crew.

August 2002.

A small group of actors

is heading for the appalachian trail

to star in Blaine Norris' horror movie.

We were all so amped up and excited

that we were driving into the woods

and camping out for an entire week

and filming a horror movie.

What are you most dreading?

Blaine's sexual comments.

I'm just kidding.

Towards you or towards anybody?

Wo Blaine's dumb jokes.

Just kidding.

Blaine's camera work.

Blaine Norris has spent his own money

hiring crew and buying equipment for the shoot.

He actually rang up debt

to the tune of $20,000 of his own money,

trying to produce this movie.

It's a massive gamble.

And without best friend Brian trimble on board,

Blaine is now director and cameraman.

The first day of filming was an absolute disaster.

When we got there

and tried to film those first scenes,

I mean, it was take after take after take.

There was problems with the camera.

There was problems with the audio gear.

It's the worst possible start

for a shoot that Blaine had planned methodically.

Do you want to give US the update

where we're at right now on filming?

We're getting nowhere.

Okay?

It's 12:00. We've shot half of a scene.

Blaine's movie falls behind schedule,

and each scene brings new challenges

for the rookie filmmaker.

The cost of transforming the woods into a horror movie set

maxes out Blaine's credit cards.

It goes with the broken ones?

Yeah. Jake's got the broken ones.

And without Brian trimble's support,

Blaine is taking on all the responsibility.

Hi, mom.

Back at the trimble house,

Brian is forbidden from taking part in the film shoot.

Yeah, tell me.

From Brian trimble's perspective,

things were not all sunshine and rainbows.

Wait, wait, sorry.

He was growing increasingly upset

with his mundane life,

with going to work every day

and coming home to a wife

who wanted to know where he was all the time.

Hi, everyone.

He said he and randi were having problems

and that they had gone for counseling.

I wish I was there.

We're gonna move up to this little clearing here.

In contrast,

Blaine's life is far from mundane.

He's living his dream.

I'm gonna have to direct, run the camera,

and I'm gonna play Doug from now on.

But his dream is about to become a nightmare.

The crew filming behind-the-scenes footage

captures Blaine's wife, Wendy, visiting the set.

But her smile hides more problems for Blaine.

Hey, Mason.

He confessed to US that -- Blaine and Wendy --

that they were having some marital problems.

In his bid to raise money for the film,

Blaine has done something unbelievable.

He even went as far

as to put his own home on the market,

a home that he shared with his wife and his young son.

Blaine has gambled his house on making the movie,

and his blind ambition

has now seriously jeopardized his marriage.

He just said,

"I'll work out my situation with my wife

after we shoot this film."

Rather than facing his problems with Wendy,

Blaine throws all his energy into the movie.

Right now I don't know if you can see but it is --

sorry to shine the light in your eyes --

but it's 12:30 in the morning.

So I'm guessing till we get out of here,

filming all the scenes we need to film

right here at this campsite,

it's probably gonna be around 4:00, 4:30.

The working days get longer.

And the conditions get worse.

They were on everything.

I mean, if you sat a bag down for like two minutes,

there was at least five or six of these things,

like, all over the bag.

And it's a horror film.

The line between staged horror

and genuine fear starts to blur.

Blaine was leading US into the darkness,

and we, like a whole bunch of naive lemmings,

just followed him into the abyss.

Five days into an exhausting film shoot,

director Blaine Norris' marriage is at breaking point.

With his personal problems mounting,

his movie has to succeed, or it will be all for nothing.

Blaine pursues his dark vision with unrelenting determination.

In this scene,

the murderous ghost drowns one of the female hikers

using his supernatural powers.

Blaine is so intent

on having the most realistic death scene

that he won't stop filming until he's satisfied.

Action.

After 17 takes,

Blaine is finally happy with the scene

of the hiker being drowned by Samuel toone.

This is the most exciting part of his whole life.

He's finally achieving his dream.

It's coming together.

It's working, and he feels great.

He feels quite powerful.

I actually said to Blaine

while we're walking through the woods, I said,

"I can make a connection

to every one of these characters that are in this film

to you, your character, your personality."

I said, "the only character that I can't connect to you

is Samuel toone,"

who was the murderer.

And I'll never forget it

because he turned and he looked at me,

and he just said, he goes, "how 'bout that?"

You know, and he smirked, and we just continued on.

The filming of "through hike"

is coming to an end.

Never imagined my camera work would be so good.

And I never imagined the actors would be so good.

But Blaine's movie shoot

isn't the only thing that's over.

Wendy?

It's kind of ironic

that Blaine Norris was on this professional high.

I mean, he had just seen

the realization of his biggest dream...

Honey?

...this movie, "through hike."

And at the same time,

everything was falling apart for him personally.

He had racked up a tremendous amount of debt.

His marriage was failing.

Wendy was no longer with him,

and she had packed up and taken their son with her.

I've maxed out my credit cards.

Blaine Norris is now alone and heavily in debt.

There's only one person he can turn to --

his friend Brian trimble.

Wish I could help you.

After the movie's been shot,

Brian and Blaine begin to hang out together.

Blaine still has faith

that the movie is good enough to make money

if he can just get it finished.

What do you think? Does it look convincing enough?

Man, it looks -- it looks great, man.

For Brian, Blaine's movie is reminder

that his life is tightly controlled by his wife, randi.

Brian trimble was fed up with his relationship.

He felt that his wife was controlling him,

and he started to confide in Blaine Norris.

I just look ahead,

and I see my whole life being, like, baby, office,

baby, work, baby, you know, like forever.

And randi, you know, she thinks she's --

she thinks she's caring for me.

She just wants me there for her.

I can't see an end to it.

It's the evening of January 10th.

The trimble family's Christmas lights are still up.

Randi comes home from work,

just like any other night.

She pulls into the garage, turns off the car.

Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

At 8:29 P.M.,

Pennsylvania police receive a hysterical 911 call.

It's Brian trimble.

The phone rang, and I answered it.

And it was Brian, and he's like, "mom," and he was crying.

Something's wrong with randi.

Something really bad has happened to randi.

I said, "well, what's happened?"

He said, "mom, she's bleeding. Mom, she's bleeding."

And I said, "well, why is she bleeding?"

And he was just sobbing.

Police and emergency services

arrive at the trimble house to find a terrible scene.

Wo 28-year-old randi trimble was found dead inside her home.

She had been strangled and stabbed multiple times.

This quiet street in this town

that everybody wants to live in because it's so safe

was suddenly completely shut down.

I mean, this was a horror movie come to life

on a street that no one expected.

The pathologist in this case

did find 27 stab wounds on this woman's body.

I'll be candid with you -- that's excessive.

Detective les freehling is drafted in

from cumberland county's district attorney's office

to investigate.

What time was the call?

I went down, and I viewed the crime scene.

There had been

some brief discussion about what had happened,

but I wasn't told a lot of facts.

Brian trimble is in a state of shock.

I'm so sorry, sir.

Do you want to tell me what happened?

He has been out all evening, having dinner with a friend.

So, I went out and had dinner with a friend.

It's a claim confirmed by a waitress at the restaurant.

No, no.

We had his, in my opinion, airtight alibi.

Brian called 911

after returning to find his home ransacked

and randi in the garage,

lying motionless in a pool of blood.

And she wasn't moving.

Did you touch the body, sir?

No. No.

No.

Are you sure? Yeah.

Okay.

With husband Brian apparently not involved,

police must explore other avenues

in the hunt for randi's killer.

I don't know what to do.

Wo police from local, county, and state agencies

today tracking down leads,

trying to find out who killed randi trimble,

the woman they say was respected in the community.

We know that from every indication

she was a fine young woman, god-fearing woman.

A few days after randi died,

they held a viewing in the church

where randi and Brian had been married.

Brian said he wanted to go in and see her first.

I want to see her, mom. That's fine.

And we said, "okay, that's up to you."

And we were talking, and I heard this anguished cry.

It was Brian.

He still could see some of the stab wounds

and defensive wounds on her hands.

And it was just so emotionally painful.

At first, detectives are stumped.

There were no fingerprints.

There was no DNA.

There was no witness.

There was nobody that saw somebody

going in and out of that house that shouldn't have been there.

There was no smoking gun in this case.

With no leads,

detective freehling returns to the crime scene.

He calls Brian trimble

to talk him through exactly what happened that night.

And the detective is having it all filmed.

Detective freehling now turns to the discovery of randi.

Randi was killed in the garage.

Okay.

Freehling goes over Brian's discovery of randi

again and again.

He did tell me that he had opened the garage door.

He had gone out, and he touched the body.

That was in contradiction

as to what he had told the investigators previously.

He had told them he looked out there

but never said a word to them

about going out and actually touching her.

Did you touch the body, sir?

No. No.

Brian's changed his story.

In spite of an airtight alibi,

he's just put himself right back in the frame

for randi trimble's murder.

Detective freehling believes

Brian trimble may know more about his wife's murder

than he is letting on.

In my mind, Brian knew something.

But investigators need something more solid

than the discrepancies in his story.

Hey, detective.

And it comes from the forensic team.

This was found in Brian trimble's computer.

Brian's computer had been forensically analyzed

by the Pennsylvania state police.

And the investigator was able to pull up pieces of a book

called "how to commit a murder."

Brian called me in the afternoon and said,

"mom, can you go with me?

The detectives want to talk to me."

I had Brian come in.

Already had our game plan.

There's something

about the grieving husband's story

that freehling doesn't like.

Thank you.

Um...

The reason I -- I brought you back...

If Brian comes clean now,

then the district attorney

will take the death penalty off the table.

...off the table.

That's just for today.

And at that point,

Brian turned to me and said, "mom, I want you to leave."

Are you sure, honey?

Yeah, mom, can you -- I could stay.

No, can you leave the room, please?

Just for five minutes.

You're sure?

And it's like, "my god, he's involved."

Because I never did suspect.

Thank you.

And that's when I looked at Brian,

and I said, "who did kill your wife?"

So, who killed your wife?

And he said Blaine Norris.

Amateur filmmaker, best friend.

Detectives move in immediately on Blaine Norris' apartment.

Wo earlier today,

police searched this apartment on second street in Harrisburg

in connection with the case.

We executed a search warrant to obtain two things --

the search of the premises, the second floor apartment...

And in the car, we found a receipt,

which had listed items described by Brian

that Blaine had purchased.

One black pants.

You get black pants, a black t-shirt.

You get gloves, a ghoul-y mask, a camouflaged mask.

Right.

And, of course, you get a knife

that matches the wounds that were done.

It's almost like a prop list from a horror movie.

And like, randi, if she thinks she's helping...

Brian trimble was unsatisfied with his life.

He felt like he was trapped in the marriage with randi.

He didn't see another way out.

In his own words, he says,

"I didn't want to put her through the pain of a divorce."

You know, we could do something about that.

For Blaine, he could pay his bills

with the money that Brian was going to pay him.

Think about it.

We'll just grab her, just slam her on the floor.

The killers spend months planning.

They stage it...

You don't know I'm there.

...choreograph it... right.

...and purchase props just like they planned their horror movie,

only this one would be for real.

On the night of January 10th, the plan goes into action.

Brian trimble invites an old friend out for dinner

to establish his alibi.

Hello?

While he's gone,

Blaine lies in wait at the trimble house.

Hello?

When randi comes home, he strikes.

Blaine Norris strangles and stabs randi trimble to death.

A lot of the people connected to this case

thought that they had watched entirely too many TV shows

and entirely too many movies.

I'm pleased with the killer.

They really thought that they were smart enough

to be able to get away with this.

Hello?

I received a call,

and they told me what he had confessed to.

And there's no way even to respond to what they tell you.

It's just heart-wrenching.

The detective told me it was pure greed.

Brian had never been greedy. I never saw that.

Wo 26-year-old Blaine Norris says

he did stab and strangle randi trimble.

Prosecutors say he was hired by her husband, Brian,

who was also charged with murder.

Blaine decided to plead guilty to murder

with a life sentence without parole,

as did Brian.

Wo he then told the court he's found god,

and god forgives him.

The first part of the Bible has that one simple phrase,

"thou shalt not kill,"

and he somehow missed that part in the beginning.

So he certainly needs as much forgiveness as he can get.

Wo Brian trimble told the court he loved his wife,

and he is sorry he had her murdered.

Brian is a chronic liar.

And I don't believe anything he says.

Nothing. It means nothing to me.

Do you wish you could bring her back?

Yes.

Wo randi trimble's mother had the last word in court.

She said her daughter was murdered by two monsters.

My heart still aches for randi's mother.

She's lost her only child,

and nothing I can do, nothing Brian can do --

there's just no way to make randi come back.

Chavez: I know your future's gonna be beautiful.

Brian, I know that you are gonna be very strong for her.

I wish you the best. I love you both so much.

I know my daughter loved him till the minute she died.

But he never saw that, and that's what's really sad.