i m craig melvin. and i m natalie morales. and this is dateline. i just collapsed. she s dead because she was my friend. first melissa disappeared. where s melissa? that s the million dollar question. i knew right then she absolutely never made it into her house. left behind in her garage signs of a struggle and a strange orange mist, then her boss went missing too. who is he afraid of am. he might have been afraid he s next. he left behind a bigger mess. we three kings be stealing the gold. a missing fortune. ballpark a billion, billion and a half dollars. a missing woman. we have know clue, no leads. some wonder was there a link? this had a twist to it. two crimes, one for money, one supposedly for love, and behind both, a lingering mystery. it s just so ugly and so wrong, and i can t fix it. welcome to dateline. hotshot florida attorney melissa lewis was living large in fort lauderdale dale, but then her seemingly charged life ended
is this woman, melissa, killed because she knew too much? after we think we had this solid, buttoned-up case, we do have the whole scott rothstein ponzi scheme comes into play? reporter: the fbi combed through the detectives files looking into a melissa-rothstein-ponzi link. they spent a week going through every inch of that case to find out if there was a connection to scott rothstein. reporter: with all these messy complications, tony s defense attorney, bruce fleisher, thought about two words, reasonable doubt. a lot of people thought that because of the rothstein ponzi scheme, that he had something to do with the murder of melissa lewis. reporter: and debra villegas was back in the hot seat herself, being grilled by homicide detectives who bluntly asked her about scott, the ponzi scheme and melissa s murder. she had her lawyer with her this time. was melissa aware of anything that scott was involved with? and i m i m gonna use a term the ponzi scheme. no. repo
paying to do it. instead, he found investors willing to fund the lawsuits. they were promised a fantastic return for their investments, once the cases were settled. attorney sam rabin represented a banker who did business with scott. the investor would give the $5 million to rothstein. he in turn would tell the investor, i m gonna give you $6 million in six months. reporter: but behind the scenes there were big problems as debra learned about a week before melissa was murdered. he told me he was in trouble. he had gotten in over his head with some not-so-nice people. and he said, if i don t get this taken care of, these people are gonna put a bullet in my head. reporter: scott then asked her to cross the line and forge signatures on documents. i knew this is something that shouldn t be going on, but you know what? it was gonna be a one-time thing. reporter: it wasn t. scott asked debra, his chief operating officer, to do it again and again. the reason, the cases were ma
on the first day of work. she was smart, capable. she was everything you would want in an associate attorney. she was also one of the nicest people debra say she ever met. the two became fast friends. we were like sisters. she knew all my faults and flaws, and she loved me anyways. deborah and melissa saw the first grow ten-fold ipjust a few years. their gregarious boss scott was the front man. he hob knobbed where the who s who of big deal names in sports, politics, and business. fund raisers, scott was the your man. once your name gets out there you truly cannot imagine how many people knock on your door. and the door scott knocked on was melissa s. melissa was the one he knew she could handle it, she