love helping a family out. marshburn was convinced holbert had buried kelli close to the froggy bottoms bar somewhere in the thick forest surrounding fayetteville. how daunting of a task was it? it is like i don t know, taking a rock no bigger than this and just throwing it out here and saying, go find it. and you miss it by an inch, you might as well have missed it by a mile because it is not that easy to find something. marshburn needed help, so several months into his very private search he added two new members to his team, an assistant named marcia ward and a specially-trained search dog with a keen sense of smell named cass. he s trained on tracking, trailing, whatever you want, what odor you want. including buried bodies. together marshburn, marcia and cass slogged through ponds, fields, forests, thousands of acres and searched for months, but no trace of kelli. i got really frustrated and disappointed, and i m at my wit s end.
and there s the sun coming down. then in that very same spot, cass seemed to pick up a scent. all of a sudden he starts crawling to it, like, whimpering, crawling. and he stops. that was our spot. they carefully pushed a metal rod into the ground. the soil was loose, like a hole had been dug and filled in. it was at that moment marshburn was overwhelmed with emotion. at that time, i said, you re going home, baby girl. you re going home, baby girl. i m sorry, i get emotional. had you even seen her yet? hmm-mh. you just knew? we just knew. but they had to be sure. so then the grim task of digging began. we find a little piece of a jacket. when we pulled that jacket back, that s when he stopped. we said, this is her. this is it. throughout the day, marshburn had been texting fayetteville police about her
it out. we knew we were going on wild goose chases. we had to do it. i mean what else you got? marshburn needed to turn up the heat on holbert and had an idea. nick was always worried law enforcement was watching him. that was his achilles heel? uh-huh. so i knew that was a weakness. which marshburn exploited by enlisting a friend who owned a vehicle that looked like an unmarked police car. he had him park near holbert s house and conduct surveillance, fake surveillance. it worked like a charm because he saw him right out the gate when he come outside and got paranoid. so paranoid that marshburn tried yet another trick to push holbert to give it up. he had his wife pose as a paralegal and drop phony indictment papers charging holbert with kelli s murder.
question was, could the admitted killer make good on his promise and give kelli s family the peace they deserved. here s andrea canning with the conclusion of deep in the woods. it was a long night in north carolina. nick holbert was holed up in a hotel. while a few miles away, david marshburn was wide awake, wondering, worrying, hoping that tomorrow would be the day that he could finally bring kelli bordeaux home. i couldn t sleep that night. marcia couldn t sleep. we were just all excited for the next day. so the next day comes, we go to pick him up and he s real quiet. he, of course, was nick holbert, who was now back in the forest outside fayetteville. it was may 14th, 2014. two years of searching had now come down to this one sweltering spring morning. but holbert still couldn t remember exactly where he had buried kelli s body and went off searching in a different direction. we re standing there, i m like, darn it, i cannot figure this out. and all of a sudden, i looke
i took one of his old charges, changed who the detective was, changed the charges. he was being indicted and i got ceecee my paralegal person on the phone who is your wife? yeah, who is helping me. the plan was working good and he was worried. holbert took one look at the indictment papers and went into a panic. sensing nick was near his breaking point, marshburn reminded him about the sweetheart plea deal if he confessed. so, they took a ride to froggy bottoms, back to where it all began. i said, look, nick, you re fixing to be indicted on this. they evidently got evidence. you need to get me to where kelli s at. he s standing there looking straight down, and it feels like he s imaging all of this stuff going on of what he done. do you think he s finally going to reveal to you? oh, i know he is. this is it? oh, yeah, this is it. i had chills. marshburn then applied one