neighborhood for leads and witnesses, the investigator also had to consider the perpetrator may have been someone julie knew. you re not ruling anyone out or in. you re simply going through the motions. you re speaking to the immediate family first. working your way out. the sheriff s department did not tell the griffiths julie had been murdered. we were not told anything by the police at that point. but anyone at the scene might have guessed foul play was somehow involved. there was just cops all over the property. you said, why the cops? exactly. yep. naturally the first person detective carter interviewed was julie s husband, keith. first of all, we are sorry for your loss. appreciate that. at first, keith talked about what everyone perceived was the cause of the inferno, an accidental fire set off by a new newly installed heating unit. you had it installed tuesday? it was a whole new system. keith explained the contractor was a friend of his
the development brought aaron to a tipping point. were you no longer wavering at this point, aaron? had you come down on the side of, oh my god, my father killed my mother? yeah. yeah. now aaron, too, wrote his dad a letter. if he was guilty it s time. it s time to man up and do what you should have done two years ago. keith s defense attorneys went to the prosecutor to hammer out a plea deal. they agreed on 30 years in prison for the murder and for soliciting the hit. moments later, keith was standing in a paducah courtroom speaking the words his family and friends never in a million years thought they d hear him say. yes, he murdered julie. there s no excuse for what i did. and i can t take it back. and she was my best friend. and i don t know what happened to me. but i did it. there s nothing i can do about it. temple bradley who works near the courthouse was there. my heart was breaking. that the person that i have
for dinners. and she says, he seemed excited to show off the new post-surgery keith. he goes, you re not going to recognize me. and he goes, i ve lost over 100 pounds. i said, you have? did he look okay? he looked fine. i mean, he felt i think he was more confident, as well. deanna says keith now began aggressively courting her, showering her with gifts, flowers, notes of affection. it was all, she said, a bit much. he kept pushing for more. and i kept telling him, you need to back off, you need to slow down because i m just not there. deanna said she couldn t put her finger on it, but there was something about keith that was holding her back. maybe it was the fact that he still seemed unusually bound to a woman he called his ex-wife. from the very beginning, deanna says, keith told her that he was divorced. very first conversation. i m a divorced guy. right. by the time she was sitting across from detective carter in that interview room, deanna says she and keith
but to a person in the griffiths circle, the very idea that keith might know something about julie s death was, well, just flat-out crazy. i knew he didn t do it. there wasn t any way that keith was involved in this. i remember sitting there, and looking over at keith, just watching him for a while. and finally i just said, you can t even grieve, can you? and he said, no, they ve taken it all away. the friends working theory was a botched break-in. they had heard about the neighborhood s recent rash of burglaries. maybe that s what happened to julie. they come in, and they startled cleo. the dog started to bark. go for them? caused julie to wake up and got scared and shot her. it made perfect sense. but for detective carter, the burglary theory of the crime wasn t panning out. even as they sorted through the rubble, detectives at the scene found untouched valuables, two safes, a cache of guns and julie s purse sitting in plain sight. you would think an intruder
they would do their job, they would take him, and the truth would come out. i was 100% convinced that he was innocent. and they were taking the wrong person in. meanwhile, the person who actually did it was getting away. family and friends were for sure distressed to learn that keith had another woman on the road. but the revelation wasn t enough to shake their support for him. it was a shock. but it was something that we accepted as a mistake. but that did not mean that he killed julie. there s no way he did it. not to julie, his wife. yeah. kids mother. no way keith did it. but when keith griffith went to trial in february 2015. all rise. prosecutor raymond mcginty laid out a formidable circumstantial case. on january 17th, 2014, keith griffith decided that he could kill his wife a cornerstone of the case was that hotel security video.