help loy and welcome to date line extra. brandy daniels just left work and driving on an isolated road when she got the feeling that someone was following her. or could she have been imagining things? sadly brapdy s hunch proved to be right. investigators spent years looking for a killer. it was a chillier than usual monday night as brandy daniels drove home from her shift at kohl s. eastern ohio is the not too big, not too small city where can you be off the downtown grid and into wooded rolling hills in a few minutes. and out there in the dark, that s where this 25-year-old single mom was heading. back home to her daughter
he d found work in the prudo bay oil fields. josh was, in fact, still in alaska that night. so that s a pretty good alibi. yes. because there s domestic turmoil doesn t mean you d necessarily have a suspect though, does it? not necessarily. doesn t explain why she s dead in this vehicle, huh? but it s a good idea to eliminate the husband as a suspect in the get-go. reporter: detective ryan called josh daniels on alaska s north slope. can you discern things like demeanor or attitude through the phone line? not really. i wasn t detectin shock or or grief, or anything like that. but nothing you can hang your hat on either, huh? no. one of the questions i asked him was, who have you been talkin to here in zanesville? and he gave me a list, about a half a dozen people. reporter: daniels told the detective he d return to zanesville as soon as he could. but there was another person much closer that the cops had to figure out: craig berry, the fiancee.
but his story including about his last text to brandy checked out . within two or three days, we were sure that he was cleared. reporter: but craig wasn t a total dead end. the fiance did have a tip for the detectives. he told them they should check out a fellow gym rat of josh daniels, a guy who gave brandy the creeps, someone with an unusual first name, sirius. sirius e. underwood, when they ran the name, investigators found a son of a local preacher, who d had some juvenile offenses but in the years since had redeemed himself. he graduated from zane state, got a good job with a local manufacturer and seemed to charm every woman he met. four days into their investigation, detective brady hittle found sirius at a girlfriend s place. i asked him if i could look at his cell phone, if i could take it back to the office, and download it. he agreed to let me do that. how d he present himself? calm. he claimed he didn t know brandy was killed. just calm, cool, and collected. r
you can an individual come from the southwest side of the parking lot he stuck the gun in josh s face shows a pistol? yes. he ended up falling down. being knocked down. reporter: the tipster claimed that josh wasn t the victim of the robbery but actually one of the participants. and, that his pal sirius had been the mastermind, not only of the department store job, but the prime mover in a crime wave responsible for multiple armed robberies most of them captured on surveillance video. the two bodybuilders secret sideline was a head-snapping revelation. sirius underwood at night is over here robbin drug dealers, or he s robbin tumbleweed restaurants, or they re hittin , you know, gabrielle brothers. but during the day, he s the sweetest guy, loves the women, they love him. he ll train with you. poster boy, just an all-around great american. reporter: the cops believed that linking sirius and his partner in crime josh daniels to the violent robberies would help nai
expert filled them in about some internet searches he d found on sirius device. sirius had opened every news article that had to do with the homicide. reporter: interesting because earlier in the day he claimed he didn t know brandy was murdered. question was sirius the gunman in brandy s driveway? he seemed to be no more than a casual friend of josh s from the gym, but when the i.t. guys cracked josh daniels phone use history it told a different story. what had he deleted? a lot of text messages. to whom? sirius underwood. sirius underwood was, by far, the one he was in contact the most. what s your thinking? when we first talked to josh, he never mentioned sirius underwood. why would they be lying to us about that? reporter: why indeed? the story told by the phones the concealed relationship fed a growing theory of the crime that they were looking at a long distance killing between ohio and alaska. if that was their case, then technology was going to be as valuabl