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 that wholeheartedly i put my trust in for two years had lied to my face.
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 had never been intimate, but they were dating. and keith was talking long-term. house-hunting for them. he said, i don t want to scare you, but i want you to know that i m looking for properties here in morrisville to buy, so for us to be together. for the detective, deanna s story put a whole new spin on the investigation. keith griffith now seemed like a man with a very big secret. or thinking like a homicide detective, was she the one with the secret? you can spin it another way and say maybe she s driving events here. maybe she wants to get rid of the wife. that s correct. we were open for that being an
within weeks. as police canvassed the 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.
they thought he had done this. son aaron also got called down to the station that same evening. and he, too, was questioned about his parents marriage. notice anything lately in their relationship as far as any problems or anything like that? that you re aware of anything? no. nothing. was there any money troubles? was there any relationship, things that we knew of? 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.
across a curious clue. back now to dennis murphy with consumed. the theory that julie died by accidental fire had collapsed as suddenly as the griffiths house itself. for detective matt carter, a .45 caliber slug recovered from julie griffith s torso turned the charred rubble into the scene of a homicide. i m guessing your day changed a whole lot, detective. it changed a lot. despite more than a decade on the job, the detective had his work cut out for him. no hair fiber, bloody footprints, none of that stuff. right. you ve got an arson that destroyed any chance of obtaining any of that from the scene. for detective carter, the most obvious theory, this homicide was the work of a home intruder. a burglary gone bad. somebody s looking for the laptop or whatever, jewelry, and thing goes down. right. we had had some burglaries within a few miles of this area. within weeks or months? within weeks.