Original subtitles

Why do you think it's important to tell your story?

Well, it's important 'cause my life is on the line,

and I want people to know that I'm not…

I'm not crazy,

and I'm not a murderer and I'm innocent.

-Hello? -Sheriff's office.

Sheriff's office.

And, what is the emergency?

I killed my dad.

The scariest thing about Anthony is I don't know if he has empathy.

I look at him and I don't see any feelings.

He was definitely shooting to kill, there is no doubt about it.

I couldn't understand why Anthony would do that.

Such a quiet, well-behaved young man.

The kid got anything he asked for.

I think he took an opportunity, and he did something about it.

I don't feel like he's guilty.

I feel like he was pushed to that point, and he was young and he broke.

His father pleaded with Anthony, "Don't shoot me anymore."

And Anthony shoots him two more times.

I don't know the truth.

Not absolutely every bit of it.

There is one person on this planet that knows what happened,

and nobody else does.

911, where is your emergency?

Uh…

I just uh… killed my dad.

Um…

What do I need to tell you?

Uh… You…

So you said you just killed your dad?

Yeah.

Okay, and um… Is he…

Is he still alive, or…?

He might be. I don't know. I shot him like three times, I think.

-You shot him three times? -I'm not sure.

There's blood on the floor, so I know he's been shot once.

-I shot three times at him. -Okay…

He's on the ground.

All right, and what's your name?

Anthony Joseph Templet.

I'm an assistant district attorney and I'm the chief of litigation here.

The first time that I heard about Anthony Templet,

it came across my phone because we'd get emails all the time

when there's… there's a homicide.

I just remember thinking "Oh, that's sad.

You know, it's just, any time, you know, a son kills a father

it's something very unusual and it's a sad thing.

And listening to the 911 call was disturbing.

And I thought, "Hm…"

"Gosh. That-- His affect is so flat."

I hear sirens.

You hear the deputies coming?

Yeah.

This was the first time I've come to this neighborhood for a major incident.

There's some places that you don't expect to get phone calls

or dispatches of that type.

And this was… is one of those neighborhoods.

He's waiting outside. What color are you waiting in?

I'm outside.

I'm in blue gym shorts and a gray shirt.

Yeah…

Dispatch told us that the subject said that

the firearm was inside the residence, but you don't take that for granted.

You're always going to get out with the precautions that that person is armed.

Where exactly are you waiting?

By the road, by the mailboxes.

Hands in the air!

He was very compliant.

He did exactly what he was told to do.

He wasn't crying.

Almost no emotions.

For the type of dispatch, yeah, that is odd.

I didn't understand what was going on.

I thought they needed to cuff me for a second,

so that they could figure out what was going on

and then they'd let me go, but it didn't go that way.

We went down the driveway through the carport in the back door,

which led into the kitchen.

I saw one revolver laying on the kitchen island with the hammer cocked back,

and the barrel was facing the entryway into the kitchen.

We made it through the kitchen, making sure that nobody else was in the house.

When I get into the master bedroom…

…located another firearm,

laying on the bed with the hammer back on it.

And it was laying next to a cell phone.

We saw the victim laying there in the hallway.

He was laying there in a puddle of blood, still breathing.

EMS paramedics arrived on the scene.

They immediately move the victim out of the bathroom area.

And they loaded him up and left to the hospital.

Have a seat right there for me, please.

I didn't know how the system worked.

So I figured, "Okay… I'm gonna have to spend a little bit--"

"A couple days in jail."

But they took me down to, like, a holding cell,

and started interrogating me.

When Anthony first arrived at the Violent Crime unit,

he was really calm, he was quiet.

And I informed him that I was the investigator, here to talk to him.

Asked him would he feel like talking about what happened?

He said, "Yes."

Let's start off by um… talking about who live at your house.

Okay, so there's just me and my dad that live there.

And explain y'all's relationship.

Well, it's very off and on.

We've…

We have trouble getting along. And um…

Yeah, I don't really like him.

-You don't? -No.

Could you tell me why?

Well, I don't know. He just holds things over your head.

He said his father would insult him,

call him bad names like a dickhead, or an asshole.

But that was nothing

that would supersede the homicide of his father.

Let's talk about yesterday.

It was pretty normal. Had dinner. It was all good.

And I went to sleep.

And he started looking through my phone in the middle of the night,

and I was like, you know, "Why are you looking through my phone?"

So, like, "What the heck?" And we got into a big argument.

He was accusing me of calling-- Having calls with uh… my stepmother.

Well, why wouldn't he want you to even talk to your stepmom?

Oh, he's in a… I guess they're in a fight or something.

And he doesn't like secrets.

Susan and Burt had separated for six months before.

I was left alone in the house with him.

He wanted to talk to her really bad,

and I guess he just didn't want to feel left out, I guess.

He couldn't find nothing on my phone.

And then he started just yelling and going off about random stuff.

Things went from verbal to physical.

Anthony said that Burt was trying to punch him and grab him.

But Anthony pushed him to the side,

and managed to run out of his room into Burt's room.

I locked the door on him. And he started banging down the door.

I was scared.

I was just scared I was going to get hurt.

I didn't really know what to think.

I'd figured I'd just get some guns to defend myself.

You say, "guns" or "a gun"?

Oh, I grabbed two.

One-- I grabbed two in case one didn't work,

because I'd never shot these guns in so long.

When somebody tell you they have a backup firearms,

they basically at the point that they intend to kill you.

He had told me about past experiences with him using the firearm,

how it was easy to pull the trigger with the hammer pulled back.

Did you warn him? Did you say anything?

"Hey." Did you tell him to stop?

No.

Did you say, "Hey, Dad, I got a gun"?

No-- Oh, he did accuse me.

He was like, "You going to shoot me, motherfucker?"

or something, through the door, and I was like…

And what did you say?

Nothing.

I just kept going-- I just kept getting the guns.

I felt like this was the worst I've ever seen him,

and I didn't see any other way

that this was going to get resolved.

And I felt like my life was really in danger.

Burt apparently was trying to force his way in the room.

There was evidence of that from the crack on the door.

He ended up stunning himself,

and I guess he, like, hit it wrong or something.

Heard a big grunt, or something like that.

He stopped banging on the door, and…

I opened the door…

I ended up shooting him.

In your dad's room, is there another door

to get to another part of the house?

Or is there a window, which you could climb out of?

There's a couple of windows, probably locked.

But I guess I could've opened them and got out.

-Is there a phone in there? -Yeah, there is.

-In the room? -There is.

Anthony had other avenues he could have taken,

but Anthony clearly stated he wanted to end everything.

Was there a choice when you opened that door?

I felt like I didn't.

How did you feel after it happened?

I mean, I felt terrible, but, you know, I didn't see any other way.

I don't believe that Anthony was is any danger.

Anthony stated that Burt tried to physically attack him.

I did not see any bruising or injuries to Anthony

indicative of being involved in a fistic altercation.

Your scene'll tell you a lot of things about an incident.

You talk about a fight or anything like that,

you could see overturned furniture, items that have fell to the floor.

The home was very, very clean.

Nothing was out of order.

There wasn't even a dish in the sink.

Based on information learned, Anthony's statements,

and evidence at the scene,

there was probable cause to arrest Anthony.

He was booked for attempted manslaughter.

I woke up to a homicide call on June third

that my husband was in trauma neurocritical care

at Our Lady of the Lake.

I went up to the hospital.

He's on a ventilator.

Machines out of every hole.

I held his lifeless hand,

and I told him I was so sorry, that I loved him.

No matter what, I loved him.

He was four days in the hospital.

And I turned the ventilator off on June 6th,

and he died.

At the hands of his own son.

On June 6, 2019,

the East Baton Rouge parish coroner's office contacted me,

informed me that Burt Templet succumbed to his injuries.

The fatal wound was the gunshot wound to his head.

They removed fragments from his head,

and a projectile from his chest.

The pathologist ruled that Burt's death was a homicide.

Therefore, I upgraded the charges to manslaughter.

Investigators upgraded the charges against this Baton Rouge teen.

He is accused of shooting his father, Burt Templet.

Now, we're told that the father has died from his injuries.

That means 17-year-old Anthony Templet will now face manslaughter charges.

Neighbors we spoke with today say that teen's father, Burt Templet,

was not well known in the neighborhood.

None of the neighbors wanted to go on camera,

but those that we spoke with said hardly anyone actually spent time

or regularly talked with Templet.

When this story fell into my lap, we had the basic information on it,

but we of course wanted to know why.

And that was kind of my task at hand,

to try and figure out, to put on the news that night, was what happened.

My first involvement in this story was knocking on doors in the neighborhood,

trying to just get the most basic information

of who these people were.

It's not a large neighborhood. People know each other.

Neighbors talk to each other.

It's people that you'd have over to watch the game,

or have over for dinner or…

It's just your good Southern American families.

They were shaken a bit that this crime had happened right next door to them,

in a neighborhood that never had anything go on in it,

besides maybe a cookout, right?

They said that Burt was kind of that strange figure,

if they saw him, would appear drunk.

The thing that bothered me about Burt is he would really boast about

getting drunk and partying.

He was definitely odd. He was definitely off.

I got a phone call from somebody on Gray Moss.

And they said that Burt had come over there and knocked on the door,

and was threatening with his wife.

And the husband said, "He was drunk, he'd been drinking,

and we told him to stay away from our house and from our property."

No one knew too much about him. No one knew anything about Anthony.

They couldn't even probably tell you his age.

I ran into him when I was at Costco.

And this was the first time I'd ever met Anthony.

Anthony was just very withdrawn, you know.

When I was at their house, I didn't see him.

Anytime I drove by their house, I didn't see them.

-Visually, you never even… -No.

…met or saw--?

-Never. -No.

I didn't talk to anybody for like maybe a week or two.

It was a scary time

because I didn't know where I was going, what I was going to do, or… anything.

This is a collect call from…

…Anthony Templet.

Hey, are you there?

-Yeah. -Hear me?

Calls are recorded, Got to watch what I say.

I know how this works.

My bond has been set to 100,000 now, from 50,000.

Well, I knew it was gonna go up.

Yeah.

He called me. And I had a lot of questions about how the hell it happened.

Nobody indicated to me that there was ever any problems between Burt and Anthony.

He paid for everything for Anthony.

In my eyes, he treated him like a king.

When I first met Burt,

I was at a little sports bar watching the LSU game on my birthday.

Me and my first husband had fallen out,

and a friend introduced us.

We both loved to drink some beer, spend the day in the pool, barbecue.

Eventually, I was living with Burt and Anthony, and my son Peyton.

Anthony was seven.

He had a funny personality.

He was laugh-y,

not a care in the world,

making funny faces, somewhat sarcastic,

non-caring, nonchalant.

We would do things in the kitchen together,

and it was like you gave him a million dollars.

'Cause somebody was doing something with him,

and not critiquing how he did everything.

Whenever Burt came into our lives,

our relationship was more conservative.

For an example, we didn't joke as openly.

And that is why

AJ did not like to come out of his room,

because then he had to deal with his father.

When he was around his dad, he couldn't be himself.

He wasn't comfortable enough, he was too scared.

He always kinda found a way to make me feel like I was doing something wrong.

It made me real-- feel really sad, and I didn't…

I felt really bad and guilty.

Burt, in his own strange way, loved his son.

However, AJ despised Burt.

As he evolved, he became really quiet.

He was mostly to himself.

Susan'd tell me that she was scared of Anthony.

She didn't know if he would shoot her,

if he'd kill her, if he'd hurt her.

She was afraid of him.

Anthony has no emotion.

And you can never tell whether he's angry or happy.

You can never tell anything. It's just a flatline.

I don't know if he has empathy.

When I watched the interview the first time, I was like,

"Oh, my gosh,

there's not a tear shed for his father."

I shot him once or twice-- It was two times more.

At least I shot the gun three times, but I don't know how many times I hit him.

Mm-hmm.

I was just kind of like… you know?

Having been in this system for 44 years,

you normally see folks that are crying.

You're upset, you're angry.

"Why did he make me do it? This was going on. This is why I did what I did."

Just wasn't there, it was flat.

My dad just made me, you know, kind of stop caring about…

about my feelings, and just started to kinda,

I guess, let go of them, I guess.

I probably felt love for my dad in my younger years, but as I got older,

it started to go away.

I just try to have no feelings.

I just try not-- I just try to pretend it never even happened,

and that helps me move on, so…

Do you want to live having no feelings? Do you want to have feelings?

I can have feelings for people. I just choose not to for him.

There was one thing, kind of struck me as,

"Wow, that's very weird."

-Anthony, how old are you? -Seventeen.

-You're 17? -Yeah.

And your date of birth is what?

It's either September 13th, 2001, or two. I can't remember which one.

And what's your current address?

-My home address? -Yes, sir.

Uh…

One-seven… 652 Gray Moss Avenue, I think.

Again, can't really remember.

He doesn't know his own birth date. He doesn't know his address.

Who doesn't know their address?

I had more questions after the interview than I had answers.

When people find out that I'm in Louisiana,

that I'm an attorney here, a criminal defense attorney…

…I get, "Man, you're always gonna be in business."

I mean, there are shootings and murders every week in Baton Rouge.

Like clockwork.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the country.

Is that a product of the criminal justice system?

Or is that a product of the fact that the people of Louisiana are

a little crazy?

Frankly, I have a history of drinking like a crazy person,

and I have been in a hundred bar fights.

Louisianians are survivors.

And I think that that's part my personality,

but it's also part of what's ingrained in me about being a Louisiana boy.

I know how to survive.

I embrace that part of me that is kind of crazy,

that is a little out of the box.

And I can see in my clients that there are good people who made serious mistakes.

I heard the public story about Anthony's case,

what's in the newspaper.

But that's it. That's all I've got.

And someone else hooked me up with Susan,

Anthony's stepmom.

And I spoke to her and I said, "Look, this is who I am,

I'm exceedingly good at this."

And I wanted to talk to Anthony. You know, "Is this true?"

"Was this really self-defense?"

Is this what really happened, or is this some made-up story,

and he killed his dad in cold blood one night?

I really don't know what's happening, right?

So I went to the jail to talk to Anthony.

-How you doing? -I'm doing pretty good.

You okay? Okay.

So essentially, AJ-- Can I call you AJ?

AJ or Anthony, whichever you prefer.

-What do you prefer? -Anthony.

Okay.

It was unbelievably difficult.

It was hard to get him to share anything or talk at all.

At that time, he was really, really bad at communicating his own life,

or the instance, or whatever.

It was important to us to know what actually was going on in the house.

So we sent our investigators out

to talk to people that were close or related to Burt Templet.

I wanted to talk to his best friend.

A best friend, usually you can get kind of like a little bit more information.

I was probably about 15 or 16 when I first met Burt.

He was a good friend.

He knew everything.

And he always, of course, tried to be the man of the crowd.

Woo!

He told me he worked in plants at times.

Uh… I really wasn't very clear about what exactly he did.

He said he made a lot of money, supposedly.

He had a lot of nice things, a nice house.

He was a project controls engineer that made $100 an hour.

He was an excellent provider.

We had new cars. We had…

…a beautiful home.

We bought a swimming pool. We put it up together.

We would go on trips out the wazoo.

On the weekends, we'd hang out, and swim and barbecue,

and high-fiving, hugging, telling each other,

"I love you, my brother."

You know?

AJ was pretty much to himself.

We hung out in the pool a few times, not much at all.

Anthony was real quiet.

Every time I'd go in the house, he'd be on his laptop, on the computer,

he would be in there playing his video games.

I couldn't understand why Anthony would do that.

Such a quiet

and well-behaved young man.

How could he shoot your own father?

Now, they say that you never know what goes behind closed doors.

Burt ended up putting cameras up on the house.

Like all the entrances, driveways…

The entire house is on surveillance cameras,

except for the master bedroom.

There's eight cameras outside.

Most people put them up to secure their home.

He wanted to protect us.

Keep the family safe.

I love you so much.

Do I think it's unusual for him to have cameras? No.

Did he have underlying intent?

Maybe.

Anything and everything immediately outside of the house, he saw.

I didn't like it, but I chose to look past it at the time.

Creepy.

That made me think-- That was very creepy to be checking on your child like that.

When I met Anthony, I think he was 16.

Anthony and I worked shoulder to shoulder, most days.

I felt a little bit like a mom for him,

only because, you know, he didn't seem to have a mother figure there.

My boss, Scott, lived in the same subdivision as Burt Templet.

On June 3rd, Scott called me before work started

and said, "Hey, I just got a phone call from some of the neighbors."

"There was a shooting at Anthony's house."

It seemed like, in the news media, it was just a random shooting,

this privileged white boy just shooting his dad.

But I knew there was more with this story.

I just wanted his story to be heard.

Burt knew Scott, and so that's how Anthony had gotten a job at the greenhouse.

It started off with his dad

repeatedly asking me whether I could give his son a job.

I told Burt, "But I don't know your son."

"Maybe if we get a chance to meet each other,

I can give you an answer."

They went out to eat,

you know, just to meet Anthony beforehand, to get an idea.

And I was trying to get to know Anthony.

I couldn't ask him a question without Burt being the one to answer everything.

Burt had-- He wanted to be in control the whole time.

So we put him to work.

My first impressions of Anthony… Uh…

He just seemed--

It was like he had never been outside of his house,

honestly, is what it seemed like.

He had never heard of, you know, Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise.

He did something right, I said, "Hey, up top, Anthony! Up top!"

He looked at me like, "What does that mean?"

And I was like, "You know, give me a high five!"

"You know what that is, right?" "No, I don't know what that is."

I just thought Anthony had been seriously neglected.

He didn't ever meet any of his relatives for the holidays.

He didn't know if he had any grandparents.

He didn't know his mom.

I had asked him, "What is her name?" He didn't know her name.

I knew he was homeschooled.

I have employed many homeschooled kids

and often their social abilities are lacking to some degree.

So I thought maybe that was the biggest part of it.

But the boy just couldn't talk.

You know?

I would try to engage him in conversation,

and ask him, you know, about where he was in school.

He never could quite tell me what classes he was in though.

I knew, you know, it wasn't right, but it wasn't enough for me to look into.

His dad was keeping serious tabs on him with a GPS tracker on his phone.

There was a couple of times when Burt called my boss and said,

"Hey, I noticed on Anthony's GPS tracker he hasn't moved in the last 30 minutes."

"What's he doing? What's going on?"

It would be because he was standing there fertilizing like a set group of pots.

It was in one location.

That was weird.

After June 3rd, I went back

and I looked at Anthony's application a little more closely

and realized that Burt had typed up the application for Anthony.

I was looking on there to see what it said for education,

and it said "Kaplan Prep."

When I went back and researched Kaplan Prep School,

it was actually not a prep school.

It was a website to order standardized testing materials.

So he actually never went to-- Was never homeschooled.

That's when I kind of thought, "Okay, maybe something is going on."

"This is not just a random shooting. You know, like maybe there's a reason."

The question then also was,

"Where is Anthony's mom?"

And that's when I called Shayna Landry.

Anthony came into my life

by sheer accident.

My husband called me one day and he said,

"Hey, have you heard anything about this kid in the news

that shot his father?"

And I said, "Well, it seems pretty cut and dry to me."

"I read the story and it sounds like snobby, rich kid

that got mad at his dad and shot him."

He told me that his coworker knew Anthony's manager,

and there was a lot more to the story.

He suggested that Elena call me

because of my background in solving DNA puzzles.

I had a little shock a couple of years ago

and found out that the man that I originally thought was my father wasn't.

And I did a DNA test

and found out that my father

was someone totally different and he had no idea that I existed.

So I continued to help other families find their DNA matches

or solve their mysteries.

I've located,

I guess almost 40 fathers

or other family members that show up in people's DNA.

I called Shayna…

…and I said, "Okay,

someone needs to find his mom."

I was like, "Let me give it a shot."

I wanted to do a DNA test.

The initial jail he was in, though,

was very rough,

and they did not allow outside visitors at all.

But I couldn't let it go.

I was blasting social media,

trying to find out if anyone knows something about Anthony,

but I couldn't find anything.

Due to Anthony being a minor,

I knew that none of his information would show up online.

So I started looking at Burt pretty hard.

I found some criminal records.

There were some felonies, some misdemeanors,

but they were all assault charges.

And one of them specifically jumped out to me

because it said "assault with bodily injury of a family member."

And that one was done the same year that Anthony was born.

I knew that he was born in Texas.

I have a private investigator friend who drove to Houston

looking for more details.

He was trying to find out if we could figure out who the victim was

in the domestic violence cases.

Shayna starts looking, and I thought,

"How long is this gonna take her?"

"Because Anthony is locked up in jail

and I don't want him to just kind of get lost in the system."

"So I don't want to tell her to hurry up,

but I need her to hurry up," and so…

I started using this website that I use to find family members.

It's like a paid version of WhitePages,

but it gives anyone who maybe got mail

at the same home as them

at any given time, as an "associate."

I wanted to see if I could find any associates from Texas

since I knew Anthony was born there.

And I found this girl

associated with Burt.

And the way she spells her name, "Netasha," is very unique.

She has an "e" in the beginning of it instead of an "a."

So it's "N-E-T-A-S-H-A."

So it wasn't hard to just find her on Facebook.

She sent me a picture and said, "Do you think this could be his sister?"

And I was like,

"Oh, my gosh, that's absolutely his sister."

I sent her a Facebook message that day.

But the way Facebook works,

is because we weren't friends, it went into the secret mailbox

that she didn't see for a few days.

After reading my message,

Netasha immediately got with her mom and gave me a call.

And I happened to be on the phone with Elena,

so I actually conference-called them in.

We told them together that we were looking to help Anthony.

They actually called him AJ at first.

Neither of us knew him by that nickname,

so we were a little confused at first.

I started digging for the story,

and immediately they sent me the missing poster.

He was legitimately a missing child, with the poster and everything.

That shocked me.

As soon as I heard that,

chills go up my spine.

We start with a major development in the case.

Just weeks after Anthony Templet

is accused of shooting and killing his father,

we learned he may have been snatched from his home more than a decade ago.

Part of the puzzle is this flier that actually surfaced from over a decade ago,

claiming Templet was taken from his own home by his own father.

There was all these questions in my head about what could have happened.

Had the kid been caged in his home?

Now, I've since learned

just how bad it was.