Original subtitles

♪♪

This lie took on a life of its own.

McGrath: There was a side of the Stepp family

that we had not seen.

Breazile: I knew that they had secrets,

and I had a feeling that we were going to

find out what those were.

♪♪

♪♪

Woman: 911 emergency.

Thrasher: Shortly before 6:30 in the morning,

Stillwater police communications received

a 911 call from a couple.

They indicated that a neighbor was on their front porch

crying, screaming, hysterical,

saying that her parents had been murdered.

The young woman was Francine Stepp.

I'd describe her as a Caucasian female, about 18, 19 years old.

She had spent the night with a friend.

She had come home to get ready for work.

Upon entering the residence,

she discovered that both of her parents were dead.

When you walk into someone's house,

particularly in a case like this,

there are those voyeuristic, you know, feelings, I suppose.

From my perspective, I'm paid to be voyeuristic.

The kitchen looks like they might have gone to bed

without cleaning the kitchen, which, you know, happens.

There was bills, receipts, magazine.

It was clean but cluttered.

The house looked lived-in.

The thing that I noticed,

there was a phone pulled out of the wall in the kitchen.

As we walked down the hallway toward the bedroom,

there were some .22-caliber

spent shell casings on the floor.

[ Alarm clock ringing ]

The alarm was going off and it just kept going off.

That buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz.

There were two air conditioners.

One of them wasn't working.

So in this particular scene, there were the sights,

there was the sound,

there was the heat, and there was the smell.

Don't know that I can describe it.

It's just a distinctive odor that investigators know well.

Shearer: Looking back at that particular crime scene,

it's one that will always stick in my mind

because of the fact that

I always hear that same alarm clock

and often times am taken directly back to that crime scene.

Even the smell is triggered sometimes

by the sound of that particular alarm.

The role of technical investigator

involves looking at all the evidence,

trying to determine what actually took place.

I saw a male subject that was nude laying on the bed.

It was obvious he had a number of stab wounds in his torso.

It looked also like there was

some sort of a gunshot wound to his neck.

And there was a female body laying on the floor.

She was curled up. Her upper torso was wedged

between the dresser and the nightstand.

That body also was covered in blood

and had stab wounds both front and back.

And there was a knife sticking out of her back.

I've never seen an individual stabbed that many times before.

Thrasher: The victims were later identified

as Mark and Delores Stepp.

Tubbs: Mark and Dee, one thing I liked about them,

they were real social people.

Liked to laugh, joke, have fun,

and just be around a lot of people.

I knew Mark from working at OG&E

at the sooner power plant.

He was an instrument and control technician.

He would calibrate, troubleshoot temperature switches,

temperature sensors, pressure switches, pneumatic controls.

So there was quite a bit of stress.

But Mark was kind of laid-back and just did his job.

Delores had an office job at o.S.U., I believe.

At the power plant, we had softball teams.

And Mark and Dee co-coached that.

They seemed a typical middle-class family.

Man, wife, and a child, and liked to have fun.

Johnson: They were a nice couple.

They were a good-looking couple.

They had a Yankee attitude.

We're more... What do they call us?

More redneck.

Attitude kind of.

We just let it all hang out there.

They weren't here long enough to get the Okie attitude.

They were still from the north.

They still had a northern attitude.

♪♪

Delores: Hey, Mark.

Tubbs: Mark and Dee were from up north, Wisconsin,

but they were one of us.

They did all the things we did and enjoyed the things we do.

Mark: Hey, Franny.

Francine, she wasn't real talkative.

Of course, you can't really expect a teenager

to be real talkative

around grownups, you know, I don't think.

Francine was quiet. She was kind of withdrawn.

She didn't seem unhappy,

she just seemed like kind of a loner, I guess.

I just remember seeing her in the school,

walking down the hallways, you know,

kind of off in the shadows, just kind of staying

on the edge of the crowd and staying away from everybody.

I had a friend in band,

and she was in band with Francine,

and she would try to just talk to her.

And she would always just tell her,

"why are you talking to me? Don't talk to me."

The first thing I did was went and interviewed Francine.

Her report was that she came home that morning,

went in the house, and found her parents

in the condition that we found them.

My specialty was dealing with people and interviewing people.

She seemed legitimately upset.

They had the EMTs check her as well

for blood pressure and pulse.

Wasn't too far out of line.

But her outward mannerisms were such that she was visibly upset.

We were totally consumed with processing the scene,

gathering the information,

gathering what evidence was available

before it was destroyed.

McGrath: It took them a great deal of time

to go through that as meticulously as they did.

They were going through the evidence

and what was being collected.

We learned that there was pictures

of Mark Stepp, Dee Stepp, and Francine...

Not very old of a picture.

This picture clearly suggested, if not just told us,

that there's more to this story.

We just called it the flying "w" photograph.

♪♪

♪♪

McGrath: Myself and lieutenant thrasher

escorted Francine to the police department.

In her statement, she said that she had been out all night

with Cindy Wynn.

Cindy is a friend of hers.

They had met after work the preceding day,

spent most of the time together during the day,

and then all night.

Francine told us that she'd been back to her house

several times on the 7th.

The last time she saw her parents,

she knew that they were in their bedroom

because she could hear a toilet flush.

Before that when she was in the house, she saw them up.

Everything was good. No problems with anybody.

She was calm and reflective

and explaining to us what went on,

but she was still a little bit upset.

She's a young female.

An office full of male cops.

Parents are dead.

We don't really know what happened.

So, yeah, we were kid gloves with her.

♪♪

[ Alarm ringing ]

When we concluded the interview,

she had a family member, I believe an aunt, come down

from Kansas that arrived at the police department,

and she left with her aunt.

Francine's boyfriend is named frank Routt.

I didn't know who called him, but he arrived.

We kept them separated

because we wanted to interview both of them.

Didn't want one to contaminate the other.

We wanted to see what he had been doing the night before.

Frank was a small-town, just country kind of kid.

He drove a pickup truck, wore cowboy boots.

One of the techniques that we used in this case

was we would invite somebody up for an interview

and let them set for a little while and just watch them.

He kind of talked to himself,

would look around at the things on my desk.

He took my business cards and shuffled them

like a deck of cards.

Throughout his interview,

frank would contradict himself even on simple, irrelevant items

such as "where do you live" or "what were you doing"

or "what did somebody say?"

And he would say one thing,

and then a moment later, he'd say something different.

McGrath: We asked him to account for his whereabouts.

His explanation was he was at home all night.

We got to asking about firearms and knives,

and he volunteered that he owned a rifle.

The shell casings at the crime scene were .22,

and his rifle was a .22.

So it was certainly a potential murder weapon.

We took possession of a .22 rifle that he had at his house.

We took it back to the police department

and secured it for potential ballistics testing later.

We didn't hold frank.

We had no probable cause.

So we just released him and told him we'd be in touch.

My supervisor called a meeting and told us

that Mark and Dee had been found killed.

That was about all the information that they had.

We just couldn't figure out any reason

why anyone would want to kill these nice people.

Johnson: Everybody was in shock.

We couldn't believe what had happened.

And since they didn't have any family down here,

we didn't know what we do for them.

We just couldn't believe it.

You know, you're still in shock. You just can't believe it.

You just couldn't believe it.

The truth is, I always knew

there was something odd about Mark Stepp.

The first time I really interacted with Mark Stepp,

we were to go to Tulsa, Oklahoma,

for some training.

And when we got out of the training,

Mark said he wasn't ready to go back to the plant yet

and he would like to go for a drive around Tulsa.

So the instrument controls person that was driving said,

"where do you want to go?"

And Mark said, "well, let's go down this way.

Down that road.

Let's take this turn and let's go that way."

It just seemed to be an aimless till we came to our destination.

And at that point, it all made sense.

There was an awkward moment of silence.

Mark acted as if we had randomly come to this spot.

It was very apparent

that he had been directing us there all along.

We were all pretty shocked.

We were sitting there in front of a strip club.

You don't take a company car

into a strip club parking lot in 1988

in the Bible belt.

Are you kidding?

Everybody in this car is married.

Why would you think that

we would want to go to a strip club?

Mark was obviously disappointed when we said

that we didn't want to go,

and he acted as if he couldn't understand why,

which to me was what was really odd about the situation

and why it stuck with me in my head.

A month later, when I heard what happened,

the first thing that entered my mind was that encounter

that we had that day when we went to Tulsa.

♪♪

[ Police radio chatter ]

♪♪

Thrasher: We examined a plethora of evidence in the home.

We looked at the traditional evidence.

We looked at blood, we looked at the injury patterns,

you know, we looked at all these other kinds of things.

But then we uncovered a picture.

Shearer: I do not recall the exact time of day

that photograph was found.

When we actually made that discovery,

it was obvious that there was a little bit more

to this family unit

than what we had initially thought,

that there was a dark secret,

and that secret had been hidden for quite a while.

Now it was starting to unfold.

There was one picture that showed Mark and Dee Stepp

standing on either side of Francine and holding her ankles.

And Francine was doing, like, a headstand.

We just called it the flying "w" photograph.

They were all three naked in that picture.

Just the fact that the three of them were naked,

so it was just unusual for me

to see a naked pose of a mother, father, and their daughter.

♪♪

As the day went on, it seemed to get even more shocking.

As I was processing the crime scene,

I noticed a box of video tapes inside of the closet

there in the master bedroom.

Thrasher: We got back to the police department,

and we had all these videotapes.

I actually went through the entire city hall,

scavenged about every TV and every VCR player

that wasn't tied down and some that were.

We started watching these VHS tapes.

I believe one of them was a Walt Disney tape,

might have been "dumbo,"

and in the middle of that tape, they had dubbed in

of Mark and Dee

at what appeared to be a motel room, having sex.

Appeared that they just set up this video camera

and video'd themselves.

You know, my first thought can best be described

from a good quality, wholesome Oklahoma word.

It starts with a "c."

It was definitely an "aw, chit"...

That's with a "c"... An "aw, chit" moment.

McGrath: The discovery of the tapes and the photographs

certainly opened up a whole new venue

of what needed to be pursued.

We would get updates from plant employees

that had relatives that worked at the police department.

When I heard about all the pornographic material,

it did not surprise me in the least.

It validated everything I had suspected.

It made you feel like they were deceptive

or that they were trying to deceive people,

that maybe some of the secrets that Mark and Dee had

might have led to their murder.

We decided to bring Francine back in and talk to her.

Discussing nudity or sex with somebody you don't know

is like discussing religion and politics.

You don't know where it's going to go.

Thrasher: When I asked the direct question,

"where were these taken?" You know,

"what were the circumstances of this?"

She said, "well, my parents belong to a nudist colony."

We learned that they were members of a nudist camp

in Hutchinson, Kansas,

or as she called it, hutch.

Hutchinson, Kansas, is not that far from Stillwater.

It's maybe 100 miles at the most,

so it's easy to traverse back and forth.

Thrasher: And we asked her, said,

"well, was there ever any sexual abuse?"

And she violently reacted to that.

I mean, she gutturally reacted to that.

"Oh, no."

McGrath: I'm not a nudist.

I don't know what goes into that train of thought.

But if they were going to pose naked with their daughter,

what else would they do?

You can understand why Francine would have tried

to isolate herself.

I mean, I see that.

I would think "I don't want to bring

anybody else into that circle."

You know, "or who can I trust?"

Johnson: Somebody called me and told me what happened,

and I was in shock.

It was just something unreal.

It just don't happen in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

I would never have thought

Mark and Dee would be in anything like that.

They were living two lives,

one that they portrayed to you

and then another one hidden behind doors.

McGrath: When we first learned of the camp connection,

we didn't know what that level of participation was.

We didn't know how people mingled.

If they had photographs of their family nude,

did they have photographs of other people?

Was there a potential for blackmail?

I didn't know if there was jealousy from other parties.

We didn't know.

We couldn't get anybody to tell us

who participated or who visited up there.

We talked to somebody that was in charge

and got a feel for what it was.

But as far as being able to extract identities

or where those people might be, didn't get anything.

It was frustrating trying to follow that up

and not get any information, but it wasn't surprising.

♪♪

There were a lot of lines of investigation

that could have been followed, but in any investigation,

you follow where the evidence takes you.

I believe that there is more evidence in this case

than we uncovered.

And we examined a plethora of evidence in the home.

I thought, "hey, maybe there's some invisible stuff

that we haven't seen

or that might be important to us."

Shearer: In a particular crime scene,

you never know when something might have been cleaned up

or moved or hidden.

And so with luminol, we would be able to see

where potential blood may exist.

We turn off the lights,

and the investigator held this aerosol can

that we had attached to this bottle of stuff.

And he sprayed it

as he began walking backwards down the hallway.

As luminol sifted down to this carpet,

you could see in the total darkness

two sets of footprints begin to glow.

And then these footprints came almost like they came

almost to us and one turned and went toward the back door,

and one turned and went toward the front door.

There were at least two people involved,

and there at least had been two people in that room.

♪♪

♪♪

McGrath: Mark and Dee Stepp were not tiny people.

That weren't large people, but they were good size.

If one person would have gone in to carry this out,

it would have had been by surprise and sudden.

Or there had been some way that they could protect

or overpower both the Stepps if it came to that.

So I'm not really surprised that there was two people there.

Thrasher: We were starting with a clean slate,

and we really didn't know where we were going to end up.

Their daughter, Francine, had told us that she had spent

the night with her best friend, Cindy, Cindy Wynn,

and said that Cindy lived with her boyfriend

and gave us the apartment number.

Cindy and Francine, I would say

that their relationship was different.

[ Indistinct conversation ]

Cindy was loud. Francine was quiet.

So maybe they evened each other out.

Maybe Francine finally needed that.

You know, maybe that was Francine's way

of trying to fit in with somebody finally.

Cindy carried enough character for both of them.

Cindy Wynn and I were best friends for two years.

Cindy liked attention.

If there was a center of a crowd,

she wanted to be the center of the crowd.

But we stopped being friends after our junior year,

that summer, sometime.

Because of all the drama that she would cause.

Cindy was a liar.

She liked to stretch the truth.

There was this one time where Cindy showed up

and she had a little extra money.

She bragged about it, and then we kind of questioned

where she got it.

And then we felt like she'd taken it from somebody.

And then there was a guy that I talked to

that I found out she was talking to and causing issues there.

She just had a hard time always just stretching the truth.

♪♪

McGrath: We asked for Cindy to come down to the police department,

took a written statement from her.

When somebody sits down to write out a story,

they will tend to include much more detail

than just telling you about it,

because they have the freedom to think, describe it,

whatever adjectives they want to use.

And we asked her about her boyfriend, Randall Vick,

who was a local Stillwater gentleman,

and they'd been dating for some time.

Thrasher: I knew Randall. He was just a local child

that the police had kind of raised.

He'd been in some minor issues.

Oftentimes, it's not a good thing

when the police know you by name.

Cindy had indicated that her father disapproved

of a relationship with a black boyfriend,

even to the point that he felt like

that it was a sin and told Cindy that if she didn't

break off her relationship with this black man,

that she couldn't live with them.

And Cindy responded to that by leaving home

and moving in with her boyfriend, Randall Vick.

McGrath: The night of the murder,

Cindy asked Francine if she could give him a ride

to go watch a basketball game,

and Francine told her no,

that her parents didn't like him being in her car,

'cause he was black.

And if they got caught, she'd be in trouble.

I didn't know Mr. Vick well enough,

but that could be a motive, that he wasn't worthy enough

to date Cindy or be Francine's friend.

But then Cindy developed a potential lead.

One of the details that Cindy gave us

was a gentleman by the name of Joe Anthony.

The story was that Francine and Joe

had a dating relationship and had to break up

because Francine's parents didn't like him,

and he was upset with her parents

because he couldn't see Francine anymore.

Joe Anthony, he had an unusual lifestyle.

He dressed in black, had black earrings or black fingernails,

or this sort of thing.

Francine's parents were opposed to that.

He was different. He was kind of scary-looking.

He dressed crazy.

He acted crazy.

He did his hair funny, wore white makeup.

I mean, he was weird.

If someone would have came to me

and told me that he was involved,

I wouldn't have had any trouble believing that.

♪♪

I interviewed Joe.

He came up to my office. He sat down.

I asked him what he knew about the case.

I asked him what he had heard about the case.

There's what we call holdbacks in every investigation.

There's a piece of information

that we don't put in the press release.

So I asked him questions that would lead him

to providing me holdback information.

We hadn't released any photographs of the crime scene.

So the number of stab wounds, you know, the type of weapon

that was used, you know, all of that kind of stuff,

you know, was information

that he just didn't have any information of.

He was very calm.

He was self-assured that he wasn't involved,

and he was forthcoming with anything that I asked him.

He provided the names of the friends that he was with.

He told us they were out all night,

even gave us some times, as I recall.

I asked Joe about his relationship with Francine

and how it ended.

And he just related a story

that, you know, it was just a relationship

that had played its course, come to an end,

and that there wasn't anything dynamic.

He had no animosity toward Francine's parents at all.

He didn't have anything to support

some of the allegations that Cindy had made.

And at the end of the interview, this was just an individual

that had gotten involved in what I consider

to be an aberrant or a strange lifestyle

that really had no connection with the case.

The other side was all of a sudden,

Cindy is giving us this information,

but she never volunteered that information.

She was sent home and called and said,

"hey, McGrath, I just happened to think of Joe Anthony."

It wasn't until we tried to extract more information

out of her that she came up with that.

So it was suspect.

Thrasher: Cindy had made these suggestions

that appeared to originate from her

wanting us to lead the investigation

in other directions and away from her.

I would say that I didn't believe

that any of the information that she gave was genuine.

I felt like that she was a very accomplished liar,

although well practiced at it.

She felt like that she was smarter than everybody else

and didn't mind you knowing that.

McGrath: She was trying to deflect everything away from her.

Those actions on her part

at that point in the investigation

certainly made us pursue her

with a lot more interest.

We identified some of her friends

and people that Cindy associated with

and began going through those interviews with them

to see if we could learn anything else.

Hooten: Cindy came to me after it happened,

and I think I might have asked her

if she knew anything about it.

And she was like, "no, I was with Randall."

You know, like, played it off like she didn't know nothing.

♪♪

♪♪

We interviewed a gentleman by the name of Michael Reed.

It was quite revealing in the statements that he gave us.

You know, 30 years in law enforcement,

and I was a prosecutor.

Nothing prepares you for the idea

that somebody's child did this to what we found.

I knew that we were on the right track.

We decided to bring Francine back in and talk to her.

We felt that Francine was more likely to break

sooner than Cindy was,

that Francine had an emotional connection to what was going on.

You started and what happened that night because your last.

I begin asking her questions

and just couldn't get anything out of her.

Every time I would ask Francine about something that she did,

she'd close down.

So finally, what I did was I said,

"Francine, there's the door,

and you can leave just like you did before.

And I'm not going to stop you."

And that seemed to put her a little bit at ease.

I knew that at that point she was under arrest,

whether I said it or not.

I knew in my mind that she was not leaving.

[ Crying ]

The question that I had then was, "what did she do?"

♪♪

♪♪

[ Crying ]

♪♪

I did not get a narrative from her.

I was not able to say, "tell me what happened,"

and for her to tell me anything.

We couldn't quite get her over that hump,

so I'd called a friend of mine, Russ Higbie,

with the state bureau of narcotics,

and asked him to come up and polygraph her.

We needed something more concrete.

She didn't have any outward appearance

of any kind of problem,

the way she answered the questions.

♪♪

And of course, the relevant question on this exam was,

"did you yourself have anything to do with

or cause the death of your mother and dad

on that particular date?"

And of course, she said no.

As I looked at the chart,

I could tell that it was very, very deceptive.

And she hadn't just flunked it. She had flunked it miserably.

At that point, I was just flabbergasted,

I thought, "I've never seen anything like this."

So I just sat there for a few minutes and looked right at her.

Finally, she darted her head and looked over at me and said,

"well, how'd I do?"

And I said, "well," I said, "Francine,

I now know what you knew

"when you came in here this afternoon."

She says, "well, what does that mean?"

And I said, "that means we need to talk.

And I mean, serious talk."

She told me about the .22.

And how her dad put his hands up

and how the bullet went through and got him first.

Then she went over and started in on her mother.

The last time that she stabbed her,

the knife was in there so tight that they couldn't get it out.

I asked her what were the reasons why would you do

something like this, and her answer was

they were practicing nudists, and she hated that.

She says, "I have to take off all my clothes and walk around

and be on exhibition like that."

She said, "it's just horrible. It was just horrible."

Hooten: She had lived a lie her whole life,

and the abuse that she had been going through,

it caused a lot of damage.

She never had a childhood. She didn't get to be a kid.

And I don't know what finally pushed her over the edge.

If that had been going on her whole life,

maybe she was tired of living that lie.

She had to make a choice to save herself or to not.

Thrasher: What we ultimately learned was that

the girls had made plans to kill both sets of parents,

and the plans were specific enough

that Cindy would kill Francine's parents,

and then Francine would kill Cindy's parents.

There may be a number of motives in this case.

There usually are.

The one that we were able to articulate most strongly

was that Cindy was estranged from her parents

because of her relationship with a black person.

And Francine was estranged from her parents

because of the nudist lifestyle.

McGrath: When Cindy came down after Francine's confession,

I think Cindy felt that she had gotten away with this.

She admitted to being there.

She admitted to discussing with Francine killing her parents,

but she denied pulling the trigger or holding the knife

or any of the fatal acts... She denied any of that.

After we were able to extract enough information from her

for a confession,

she asked if she could talk to her boyfriend.

So we let her.

Brought them up to lieutenant thrasher's office.

She put her hands on his knees and began to tell him a story.

He immediately jumped up, pushed her away from him,

pushed her hands off him, and backed up as far as he could,

almost to the door to get out of the office.

Just total shock on his part.

At that point, I was convinced

Randall Vick didn't have anything to do with it

and didn't know about it.

We were pretty certain that it was Francine and Cindy.

At that point, Francine's boyfriend, frank Routt,

I was confident at that time that he was not involved.

Frank's behavior, albeit a little

on the bizarre side, does not make you a murderer.

♪♪

Johnson: Only thing I could think that would drive a child

to that would have been abuse, some kind of abuse, to me.

You really think you know people and you don't.

You don't realize they put on one face for you

and then there's another face.

Tubbs: I feel like their actions

and their influence on their daughter

is definitely what caused their demise.

Their double life did catch up with them.

♪♪

I think Cindy was able to lie to everybody else

in the hopes of getting away with it.

If she would have disclosed a level of participation

equal to or almost equal to Francine's,

she'd still be in a penitentiary with Francine.

♪♪