Original subtitles

There was a homicide in the town of Caton.

There's blood splatter.

There's blood on the floor, down the stairs.

There was animus directed at this victim.

The daughter told me that Mommy woke her up,

screaming that the bad man was attacking.

Her husband always had cash, and there was always

a lot of cash in the house.

There's a motive right there.

I come to the realization that he could be our suspect.

His demeanor was very odd.

He was jumpy.

But he has no blood on him at all?

both: No. - His alibi was solid.

There's nothing that connects him.

So now it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere.

Now I'm thinking, holy crap.

What are we missing?

What haven't we figured out yet?

In America, we're the first line of defense.

Drug busts, serial killers, armed robbers,

predators of every kind--

we take them off the streets.

People love telling stories about us.

They don't know the half of it.

We save that for when we're talking cop-to-cop.

This is "PD True."

So September 29, 2015, how do you--what happens?

How do you get involved in this?

I get a call about 1:00 in the morning

from one of our captains,

alerting me to the fact

that we had responded to a 911 call.

There was a homicide in the town of Caton,

which is about five miles from where I live.

So I responded directly to it.

Jim Allard has spent 35 years in law enforcement,

serving as the elected sheriff of Steuben County since 2016.

They arrived at this crime.

Do you know-- do you know the location?

Kenneth Corey is a 34-year veteran of the NYPD

who worked his way up from patrol

to the highest-ranking uniformed officer.

I do know the house.

I didn't necessarily know the people that lived there.

I know the next-door neighbor very well,

and the previous owner, I knew.

OK.

Alli, how do you get involved in this?

So I got a call from my supervisor.

And my role at the time was, I was in computer crimes.

So when we have a major scene,

they send us out with the forensic team.

Allison Regan became a state trooper

with the New York State Police in 1994

and rose to the rank of senior investigator

with a specialty in tech crimes.

And what do you--what do you see when you get there?

There's already a couple of our vehicles there.

There's already a couple state police vehicles there.

We had personnel arriving.

The state police had personnel arriving.

Everybody was kind of converging

on that location at that time.

34 minutes earlier, Steuben County

sheriff's deputy Dean Swan arrived on the scene

at 12:49 a.m.

He is the first to do a walk-through.

10-4.

There comes a point you learn who the victim

of this horrific crime is, right?

And who is that? - Yes. Kelley Stage Clayton.

She's the wife and the mother of two

that resides in that home.

The person outside is her husband.

The kids are not on the scene.

We started doing searches, but this is in the middle

of the night. - Yup.

And we're trying to contain the scene

and get everybody in that we need in order to process this

in a professional manner, trying to make sure that we

didn't misstep, didn't miss anything

from the beginning of this moving forward.

So why are the state police involved?

I mean, you're describing

a pretty big state police presence.

It was.

So we're a pretty rural county.

We're 1,400 square miles with 40 uniformed personnel

to cover it over three shifts.

So each deputy's covering 500 square miles.

We partner with the state police

and work hand in hand with them.

Pretty much any major crime scene,

it's a joint effort in our county.

I arrived with the forensic team.

Paint a picture for me. What does that look like?

Like, what do you see?

Kind of, like, surreal in the sense,

like, this could be my house, you know.

It's just an average home with, you know, kids running around.

Did a walk-through of the residence,

proceeded to gather evidence,

including her cell phone

and other digital evidence in the house.

As I'm going through the house,

I can see where there had been

a violent assault on Kelley.

There's blood splatter.

There's pictures knocked off the walls.

I could see where Kelley had been in her bedroom

at the top of the stairs

and then a path down the hallway

towards the children's bedrooms.

Blood smear on the door handle to the child's room.

And then going down the stairs, blood on the floor,

damage to the walls where someone's either been

forced through or fallen through

and then throughout the living area into the kitchen,

where Kelley was finally assaulted for the last time

and killed.

Severe damage to her face and head.

So it appeared like a blunt force injury.

And so from this, you're putting together that

whatever happened probably started upstairs

and then worked its way down.

Yeah, there was a violent struggle

and someone trying, it would appear,

to get away from it, which was what Kelley was doing.

No weapon right there at the scene or nothing evident?

No, sir.

So the male that you see when you pull up is her husband?

Thomas Clayton.

He discovered the body, called 911,

which led everyone to the scene.

What does Tom say in his 911 call?

I mean, I imagine that's something you review

pretty early on. - Mm-hmm.

He does say that his wife is dead.

- I'll defer to-- - My recollection of the call

was, he said, help me, help me.

- Yup. - My wife is dead.

Weeden Wetmore was elected

Chemung County's district attorney in 2008.

The 911 call to him was over, but the mic was still open.

He was still on the line.

The line was still open, and he was--

he went from this hysterical guy

to being with his daughter in the house, saying,

did you see a robber?

Thomas, how about his background?

I knew him as a hockey player in Elmira.

Like, a professional hockey player?

I guess it's considered professional.

It's--

- East Coast Hockey League. - Yeah.

- Kind of semipro or--OK. - Yes, yeah.

He owned a SERVPRO that he did mitigation.

If there was a flood in your business,

they would come and do the mitigation

or any kind of damage.

How about his reputation as a hockey player?

He was an instigator on the ice...

Trash talk and that kind of thing.

Yeah, right, right.

Kelley's sister show up at the scene at some point?

- She does, yeah. - And who's that?

That's Kim Bourgeois.

- So do you talk to her? - I did.

OK, so what does--what does she have to offer there?

She was incredibly upset,

and she wanted to get in to see her sister.

And I wouldn't let her in...

- Of course. - The scene, obviously.

And then she wanted to see the body before it left.

And I told her, no, your sister

doesn't look like she looked in life.

You're not gonna see the body.

She said that Tom had called her

and said that robbers had killed Kelley.

She was talking about people that Tom had recently fired,

that we should look at them, and that Tom always had cash

and that there was always a lot of cash in the house.

There's a motive right there why somebody would have

targeted the house, right? - Absolutely, yup.

So if he's known to keep large amounts of cash

or if he's even thought to keep large amounts of cash

at home as a small-business owner,

that part of the state, the way you're describing

the community, probably not terribly unusual

for people to leave their doors unlocked.

It's possible that somebody entered with the intention

of maybe they expected the house to be empty,

or they don't expect Kelley to be there,

or Kelley wakes up and confronts...

- Or she has company. - The intruder.

- Yeah. - Right.

- Yeah, yup. - Yeah.

All those are possibilities.

She tells you that she doesn't think that Tom

would ever hurt Kelley.

She was pretty adamant that that was an impossibility

and that Tom and Kelley were soul mates.

Tom would never hurt Kelley.

And how long have the Claytons been married?

At least seven years.

I think they'd lived in Caton for about five.

Thomas Clayton was from Binghamton, New York.

- OK. - And Kelley was from

West Elmira, very popular family.

And she was a beautiful girl, I can tell you that.

You said you didn't know him personally.

I know the neighbor didn't like Tom.

He liked Kelley, but he didn't like Tom.

Tom have any criminal history?

No, no.

Nothing that's getting the attention of the police?

Correct.

When he was a member of the Elmira Jackals,

they had an after-hours bar

that they would go to after the games.

And at some point, Thomas jumped up on a table,

took his clothes off.

He had that kind of reputation

of a devil-may-care before all this.

And in hindsight, the people said,

when something off-color might happen,

that's simply Tom.

That's Thomas. - Party guy, I would say.

Yeah, he was a party guy.

Yeah, he was a gregarious, talkative guy.

And so I'm sure he was popular with the ladies.

And Kelley fell under, you know,

his magnetism, so to speak.

Little bit of a local celebrity.

That happened while he was still playing hockey, right?

So that's probably a number of years earlier.

- Mm-hmm. - But nothing recently.

No--you know, no arrest history.

He had absolutely nothing.

What is it that you come to learn about him,

you know, in those early hours?

I asked him where he'd been.

He offered up that he had been at a poker party.

His demeanor was very odd.

He was jumpy, excited-acting.

He was moving around a lot.

At one point in time, he was bouncing from place to place.

He laid down on the driveway and scooped up some water

out of a mud puddle and spit it back out.

Yeah, his behavior is a little erratic,

but people process grief differently.

- Yup. - The two children

were next door with the neighbor.

Mm-hmm.

At some point, do you have an interaction with them?

Or somebody's got to check on them, right?

Yes.

I go in and I talk with his daughter.

Just start a general conversation with her,

where she goes to school.

She went to the same school that my kids all went to,

I think your kids all went to. - Yeah.

And just made some common ground

and said, you know, what happened tonight?

What did you see?

And she asked me if Mommy was dead.

And I said, I don't know.

She then told me that she followed the fight

down the stairs and watched the bad man hitting Mommy,

she said, with a pipe.

So she went back upstairs to her little brother

and watched over him until Daddy got home.

The last things her mother said to her was to run.

Instead she goes and protects her little brother

until Dad can get home.

I'm looking at her, listening to this story,

equating her with my own daughter,

and thinking, holy crap.

It broke my heart.

Was she able to give you a description

of the bad man that she described?

Yeah, she said that he had on a mask and a dark shirt.

And I said, is he taller than me or smaller than me?

And she said, he's about your size.

He's about the same size as Daddy.

And I asked her--I said, well, how do it's a man

if, you know, he's got a mask on, all of this stuff?

The daughter was very matter-of-fact.

And she said it was his eyes.

He had Daddy's eyes.

His eyes looked like Daddy's.

After we leave, she keeps talking about it,

to the point where then she convinces herself

that it could have been Daddy. - Yeah.

'Cause at first, she's like, it couldn't be Daddy,

'cause who would take care of us?

As a law enforcement professional,

you know, we learn how to kind of compartmentalize.

You know, but at the same time, I mean, you know, I mean,

that's got to be really emotionally impactful on you.

It is.

It stayed with me for a long time.

It was heartbreaking to hear

because she's processing it as a seven-year-old.

Jim did a great job.

It's a very delicate situation.

It's not something you do every day.

Yeah.

Why do we look at spouses in domestic homic--

or in homicides, you know, why do we look at spouses?

There's a high percentage that are committed by spouses.

Tom's gonna go from there back to the station,

I guess, to kind of be formally interviewed?

He goes to the Painted Post State Police Barracks

for interview, yeah.

So what does he tell you?

When he rode to the police station,

he also said, hey, you'll find out that I wasn't here.

I was at a poker game. - Right.

Yeah, he doesn't know who did it

and that obviously it was a robbery

and that he was at a poker game

and he has a solid alibi.

And he could think of no one that could have had

any animosity toward his wife.

However, at the scene, the Bourgeois family

had told the police that there's a couple people

from Tom's business who--

- That he had recently fired. - Recently fired,

and you might want to look at them.

Yeah, yeah.

And those people certainly would have known, you know,

the kind of business that Tom did

and whether or not he was gonna have

money in his house. - Absolutely. Yup.

You know, maybe looking for a way to get back

just to steal his money. - Correct.

When Deputy Swan did the initial walk-through,

they determined there was no forced entry.

There was no broken windows, no broken doors,

no forced locks.

There was no sign whatsoever of anyone entering

unlawfully into the residence.

No valuables missing.

- No valuables missing. - Right.

In our area of the country,

I would say robbery is pretty rare,

very rare in that location.

So to say it was a stranger broke in and, you know,

was trying to burglarize a home

would be very rare.

So Thomas, what are they looking for?

You know, if they're looking at him physically,

what is it that they're looking for?

So they're looking for any kind of blood splatter,

any kind of offensive wounds, offensive--

or wounds that would show that he's an attacker,

looking for anything from the scene

that might be on him.

Looking for anything from Kelley

that might be on him, on his clothes.

And there was nothing found.

- Nothing? - Mm-hmm.

Alli, given these--

the way that you paint the picture of the scene...

Mm-hmm.

It would be impossible for the offender

to not have gotten Kelley's blood on them.

Absolutely.

So he has no blood on him at all?

- No. - Tom doesn't

in any way make contact with his deceased wife's body?

He didn't.

When the investigators were talking with Clayton

at the State Police Barracks,

they introduced--said, hey,

your daughter's saying it looks like you.

And he was shocked.

He--how? It's not me.

Couldn't possibly-- how could she say it?

There's no way.

But now word's traveling pretty quickly,

even in the middle of the night...

Yeah.

That something terrible has happened.

I imagine there's a level of fear in the community.

- There is. - Yes.

The neighbor approached me at the scene

where he's like, hey, can I get back to my house?

If there's a killer out there,

I need to get home, because his wife and kids

are there unprotected and he's at the scene.

You know, now we're looking at Tom's alibi, right?

And, you know, he volunteers he was at a poker game.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, you're gonna try to verify

both of those things. - Mm-hmm.

So how do you go about doing that?

So we sent two investigators up to the Millers' residence

to verify the poker game.

That's where the game

was taking place? - Yes.

So, you know, when you go talk to the Millers,

they kind of verify that he's there.

Mm-hmm.

But they're friends, right?

I mean, we're not gonna put a whole lot of--

- Right, right. - Not necessarily put a whole

lot of weight behind that. - Right.

Offer anything up about, you know,

his relationship with Kelley

or anything going on in the household

that they were aware of?

I think they kind of mimic what Kim said

is that they're kind of the all-American couple,

and they loved each other and were, you know,

madly in love and what have you.

Are you able to get any video that's helpful?

Yeah, from the Byrne Dairy in South Corning,

there was video of the vehicle going by at the time when--

- Tom's vehicle. - Yes,

the SERVPRO vehicle going by within the time frame

of when he said he left the poker game

to when he arrived at home and made the 911 call.

Yeah, would have supported-- it supported his alibi.

- Yes, yup. - You take a look at Tom

because that's what we do, right?

I mean, you've got-- you've got--

we always look at the people closest.

And when you have a dead spouse,

you always look at the surviving spouse first.

But everything, you know, kind of eliminates Tom

from the picture at this point, right?

He's got no--he's got no blood on his clothing.

He's got no physical injuries, which surely he would have had

if--you know, this--the way the crime scene looks.

Right, he's got witnesses who are saying

he's with them during the time that you believe

that the murder happened.

His alibi was solid.

Next time on "PD True"...

He's got a solid alibi.

There's no physical evidence connecting him to the crime.

Everything eliminates Tom from the picture.

But we couldn't get rid of the thought

that somehow he's involved.

There's a lot of deleted material,

deleted text messages.

And this is who Tom is calling

shortly before his wife is murdered.

We learn that he's got money trouble,

that he's been fired a couple times for stealing.

There was something going on between the two of them,

but it was all circumstantial evidence.

At this point in time,

we don't know who killed Kelley Clayton.

You've got a real mystery on your hands.