love is dead. and then your being looked at for it. imagine, your shaken in the dead of night. my ears were ringing. i thought i was dreaming. in bed, right next to you. your husband, murdered. hearty wrap around your head, is it? yes. and here s the twist. you are the suspect. it s the worst feeling, thinking you re gonna be blamed for your husband s death. could she have been the killer? or, with someone keeping a secret? i said, what did you do. what did you do? i don t know what to tell you. just of the truth. hello, and welcome to dateline . it s the stuff of nightmares. and a traitor creeps into your bedroom in the middle of the night and opens fire. but for melissa oxley, the bad dream was all too real. she told investigators she d been startled from her sleep to find her husband, ben, dead from a gunshot blast. it seems strange, they thought, that no one else in the house was hurt. including melissa, who was sleeping by his side. stranger stil
ben was a good guy. they had their problems. everybody loved him. he didn t deserve to die. reporter: so for the time being it s a he said/she said story. and the d.a. s deal with dawn to the dismay of james matlean s attorney means she may never face a murder charge. the prosecutor made a deal with the devil. now we just need to show him how far in hell she is. deal with the devil? the d.a. says without dawn s testimony at the preliminary hearing, the murder charge against james would never have stuck. but dawn wasn t totally off the hook because there was one possibility still. if the d.a. could find hard evidence that dawn lied when she was given that get out of jail free deal for implicating james it s still an open book on dawn oxley for murder. if somebody comes in today with credible evidence that shows she did in fact go, we could prosecute her. reporter: in 2011 dawn was
he didn t deserve to die. for the time being, it s a he said/she said story. the d.a. s deal with dawn to the dismay of james mat vi an s attorney means she may never face a murder charge prosecutor made a deal with the devil. now we need to show how far she is. deal with the devil? the d.a. said, without dawn s testimony at the preliminary hearing, the murder charge against james would never have stuck. but dawn wasn t totally off the hook because there was one possibility still. if the d.a. could find hard evidence that dawn lied when she was given that get out of jail free deal for implicating james. it s still an open book on dawn oxly for murder. if somebody comes in today with credible evidence that shows she did, in fact, go, we can prosecute her. she was sent to prison on another offense. she pleaded guilty to using her teenage daughter brandy to sell
now you can bit dawn wasn t about to tell them anything, but that doesn t mean she wasn t talking. we had another young lady that was getting out of jail, and she came to us and said that dawn had been talking about the murder. but that could have been just gossip, mind you. from a jailhouse snitch who couldn t back it up. but dawn did have a cellmate. she was kind of in a jam herself. and she wanted us to try to help her, you know, we can put a word in to the d.a. or put a word in to the judge. that was enough to get her talking. she needed to get her
anything about what had happened. as far as evans could see, the case was a maybe , at best. she had no reason to kill teresa, so to bring a case against her would be pretty tough, i would think. the case with dawn is puzzling. when you re working with a circumstantial case, every piece of evidence is important. not that they thought for a second that they were wrong. they believed dawn was the killer. they told the prosecutor not only was dawn the murderer of teresa but that she tried and failed to kill her with a xanax overdose at the casino. the sheriff s department believed that was an attempt on her life, but we had nothing to really support that. but if tim evans was to get a conviction, he needed more, more evidence. some concrete proof that dawn had pulled that trigger. now you can bit dawn wasn t about to tell them anything, but that doesn t mean she wasn t talking.