oh, but they were mistaken. a piece of evidence that had gone unnoticed turned the case upside down. when we were dating, we used to get excited about things like concert tickets or a new snowboard. matt: whoo! whoo! jen: but that all changed when we bought a house. matt: voilà! jen: matt started turning into his dad. matt: mm. that s some good mulch. i m awake. but it was pretty nifty when jen showed me how easy it was to protect our home and auto with progressive. [ wrapper crinkling ] get this butterscotch out of here. progressive can t protect you from becoming your parents. there s quite a bit of work, cause this was all this was all stapled. but we can protect your home and auto when you bundle with us. but we can protect your home and auto but choosing to douggo that extra mileve. can be tough on his body. that s why he wears dr. scholl s massaging gel insoles. they provide all day comfort so he has the energy to keep moving. delivering joy every step of the day. dr. sch
examined by csi chief david kofoed s team. we had a pair of pants. the pair of pants had it look like it had blood on it. we tested that with phenolphthalein and that tested positive. that was the real smoking gun. i mean, we ve got him. reporter: then there was more. remember that car seen by the newspaper carrier parked a mile from the farmhouse the night of the murders? detectives had found it, they believed. a 1997 ford contour owned by nick sampson s brother. and it had been cleaned and detailed actually at 5:30 easter monday morning just hours after it had apparently been used in the murders. who details a car at 5:30 in the morning? that s exactly why the detectives thought it was pretty suspicious. reporter: but wait, it gets even better. the car had been searched for evidence once and nothing was found, but then csi chief kofoed got a call from one of the lead investigators. when matt confessed, he said he threw the shotgun in the
it? i said, oh, yeah. reporter: you got that from a newspaper reporter? i got that from a newspaper reporter. reporter: it didn t come from the prosecutor s office. no, it was being sealed. i met him at a bar and for the price of a budweiser i was able to read the affidavit of the teenagers reed and fester. reporter: those affidavits slipped to attorneys by a reporter contained details culled from the hours and hours of police interviews with greg fester and jessica reid. greg blew a guy s head off. reporter: and told the story of the 12 gauge shotgun. the shells, the ring, the marijuana pipe and, most tellingly, that dna. irrefutably linking reid and fester to the crime scene. suddenly, it was all beginning to make sense to those public defenders. remember, they d been skeptical when their new clients professed innocence, but ever since then, they d been asking themselves one very simple question, where was the evidence? and in their six weeks of looking for it, they had
about a mile from the stock farmhouse down there. and just here outside this cemetery, they saw a car just parked here. strange cars just don t get parked on country roads outside murdock, nebraska, at 3:00 in the morning. it was tan or light brown, four-door sedan said the young man. and what really stuck out was that this car later passed them in the same area that same night. this time driving 60 or 70 miles an hour. it was in a rush, it appeared, to get away. investigators now had a number of clues. that car, seen by the newspaper carrier. the flashlight with what appeared to be blood on it. the marijuana pipe. and detectives were probably looking for more than one killer. but a motive? who knew? not a thing was missing. wallets, purses, gun collections, even a safe hidden in the bedroom floor, all untouched. but all that evidence.
they still suspected livers and sampson of some involvement. why? remember way back at the beginning of our story, that speck of evidence that csi chief kofoed found in a car connected to nick sampson and spotted near the murder scene? here s the stain right here on the filter paper that kofoed swiped under the dashboard of the car. a second search of the car, by the way. the first by an officer under kofoed turned up nothing. this was blood from the murder victim, wayne stock. how would it get there? it was the fbi that started asking that question. not of livers or sampson. the fbi s investigation was aimed at the local investigators who handled the case. in fact, at csi chief david kofoed himself. and after months of digging, the fbi concluded that kofoed must have planted that swipe of blood himself. phony evidence to nail down a shaky case.