15 minutes. she was very, very specific about where she had gone at what times and why she had gone there. as for cheryl, she told detectives she would do anything to find out what happened to her dad in those 15 minutes she was away from the house. her actions were very, very consistent with somebody who understands the police are looking at me right now, i know i didn t do anything, i m going to do everything i can and give full disclosure. then the day after the jack jesse murder, a guy walked into a bar, sat down on the barstool and told the bartender a story about how the murder happened, about who did it, about what the motive was, the whole story. but, of course, that was just a story in a bar. detective wyatt didn t hear anything about it. as he continued to dig for clues, he hit an unexpected wall, sandra announced she had now helped as much as she could. she was done. i was referred to her
sandra s old interview. the hours of mostly useless chatter. how many times did you listen to that interview? at least ten times. reporter: and then it jumped out at him. right about here on the tape, sandra is going through slips of paper in her day planner. she looks at one and says this is my son s friend. reporter: listen to it again. this is my son s friend. reporter: this is my son s friend. one phrase in hours of material but it got dove s mind racing. if the bartender was right that the killers were friends of sandra s son, could that slip of paper hold the key to the case? dove tore through bags of evidence, and there it was. the day planner. seized five years earlier just after the murder. i went through that day planner for probably a day or more. went through every scratch, piece of paper, every notation, everything that was put into place in that day planner was looked at. there was a small piece of note
the neighborhood while his friend snuck inside and stabbed jack jessee to death. we had walkie-talkies. afterwards he called when he was done and told him to pick him up. so i m turning to go back. he had a little blood on his legs. we looked for a place for him to clean himself up. i believe there was a del taco place. there he went inside to clean himself up. the information he provided, if we could corroborate what he said, would blow the case wide open. police questioned schrauben s friend. dehe mied everything. he said he wasn t in the car and he didn t kill jack jessee. and there was no evidence to indicate he had been involved at all. police let him go. investigators focused on building their case against tom and sandra by documenting money transfers, phone calls, air travel. so when you add all that together, what d you think? i thought we were starting to put together a pretty good case. good enough that murray had tom and sandra arrested. and in the summer of 2009
son tom and soon her daughter followed, too. they all lived within a couple of blocks of each other in homes sandra helped purchase with jack s insurance money and savings. when everything was said and done, she got close to $700,000. and as the months slipped past, leads failed to connect the investigation, hit one dead-end after the other and wyatt was promoted out of homicide. the case bounced from the pd to the orange county sheriff s department, where before long it became a case to avoid, toxic, an unsolvable career-killer. so five years after his brother s murder when david jesse met a detective named tom dove, who said he picked up the base case i said, oh, really, well, that s great. let me ask you a question? yeah. what are you going to do? are you going to get my case for three, four, five months, a year and then move up, become a
sergeant or something and move on? and tom dove says to me, listen, buddy, nobody likes me in my department. he says i m not going nowhere. he says, i got five years to put in your brother s case. he says then i retire and i m out of here. he said, but i ll give it my all. i will give everything to this case that i have. i looked over at him and i said, you re the man. what david didn t know but clearly sensed was that detective tom dove was the real deal, a legendary lawman who seemed to have stepped out of his own prime time drama. there wasn t a whole lot to go on. there wasn t any physical evidence. there wasn t any eyewitnesss. other words, the perfect challenge? correct. after five years of dead ends, tom dove jump started the investigation and quickly uncovered an intriguing new clue. coming up that bartender with the customer who liked to