to cover it up. reporter: the only thing that dave mcmannis was guilty of, said bross, was being a sarcastic guy. the majority of the statements that were made were sarcasm, at best. so if he s guilty it s a claim. yeah. and that s kind of an easy out for saying terrible things, isn t it? well, it was inappropriate statements, if said at all. david is known to be a jokester and sarcastic. even during the course of the trial, he would say things that were sarcastic. reporter: the trials, two of them, dragged on for more than 15 months with delay after delay in a case that had taken more than 15 years to get to this point. sharon and keith s marriage didn t make it that long. but they attended both trials together. we started this together, we re gonna finish it together, no matter what. reporter: and after all that time? in each case, deliberations took less than 90 minutes.
the state, that first of october, 2001: tara s landlord asked barr for a repair estimate. barr and his helper, mcmannis, began their work-day by smoking crack. around noon, four hours before veronica arrived home from school, the men most likely knocked on the door and tara let them in, unaware they had robbery not work on their minds. dave mcmannis was taking the property while barr was distracting her in the bathroom. we believe she found out. she heard something or saw something that mr. mcmannis was doing, where he was in a place he shouldn t have been and she confronted him. and two people with impaired minds do things that normal people wouldn t do. and their solution to that was to kill her. reporter: the woman who d been sitting out in the front yard told the jury how the two men had been laughing and joking when they arrived, but later when she saw them backing their truck up to tara s front door
i d ever seen. reporter: the idea worked. the grand jury indicted both phil barr and dave mcmannis for tara s murder. they were arrested in late 2012, 11 years after tara vanished from her home. dave mcmannis was arrested in maryland, where he grew up, while u.s. marshals mounted a manhunt for phil barr. kinda lost track of him. we were actually then able to to locate phil in the vermont area, very close to the canadian border, where we think he had fled with the intent possibly of of leaving the country. reporter: but the case against the men needed more, and so the cold case team kept investigating. and in 2014, one of them came across a name buried deep in an old file. right after tara disappeared, a next door neighbor told investigators she saw barr and another man at tara s house that day, but she couldn t see much because her view was blocked by a fence.
case that could be solved. if it had a new set of eyes, it had somebody that could put the case together, connect all of the dots. what requests did you make of them? we wanted to know more about every piece of evidence, every we have to rule out every piece of dna in that house. so it was closing doors, it was excluding other people. reporter: so, that s what these three did, as a large photo of tara kept watch. but, again, there was no dna to help them. all they had really were lingering suspicions about the workmen who went to tara s house the day she vanished. phil barr, the guy who owned the septic tank business, his helper that day, dave mcmannis, and their buddy peewee st. john, but nothing in this huge trove of investigative material proved anything. kurt, we call him the scribe. he organized it in in such a way that it was easier to understand. what had been difficult to understand? it was confusing to the point where you didn t know what we
and that all were followed up, everyone of them. detective mehl chased down a 2001 walmart receipt, a minor, forgettable purchase, except that the time stamp on the receipt cast doubt on philip barr s alibi didn t exactly wreck it, but it caught him in a significant lie. that s how detailed we were getting. reporter: but then they just happened to run into a guy who said he knew barr and mcmannis and peewee. and he overheard them talking about killing this girl. he heard david mcmannis say, we shouldn t have done that girl that way. if i don t get out of town, i m gonna spend the rest of my life in jail. phillip barr said something similar because peewee is talking about, well, i ve only seen a body. it s not against the law to see see a body. and barr tells him, hey, shut up. we re all gonna end up in prison. and it was somebody with credibility. be better than what we had before, yeah. reporter: but overall, a key problem remained. terrible witnesses.