i yelled her name i don t know how many times. reporter: ashley told the detective it was all just an innocent mistake when she told the art institute she d seen shelley alive and well the night before when in fact shelley was dead by then. which didn t make sense to detective ellzey. anymore than did the next thing ashley said: that it was not unusual for several days to go by without seeing shelley at all. she said that shelley was a very private person. that she just would put her headphones on, go into her own world, close her bedroom door and start drawing. reporter: and close the door from the bathroom? is that what is that what she had two doors. shelley did. one that would allow entry into the living room to her bedroom. and then one from her bedroom to the bathroom. reporter: into the bathroom. correct. reporter: and ashley claimed that door was closed. yes. reporter: you wouldn t buy that? no. reporter: your first reaction when she said that she
and into a more secure apartment complex in a safer part of town. but with the investigation just days old, they didn t know what police were thinking. that this was no random crime that it was personal, an inside job, so to speak. they were looking at people close to shelley. someone who had a key. like a boyfriend or a roommate. someone who knew she d be asleep, and then surprised her, attacked her with a knife. she was small in stature. she was a little girl. it wouldn t take much. but who? as tough as detective ellzey was with roommate ashley and boyfriend nathan, he was not much farther along than when he started. and so he spent some time with a few of nathan s friends, like his roommate, daniel willyam. reporter: you were a little older than the other kids? i was reporter: i mean, they were all kind of 18, 19 and you were yes, i was 26 years old. hadn t always been easy for daniel. he, too, was a little different.
yeah, very nice guy. a nice guy who was telling detective ellzey he was troubled about nathan. and then, when the detective dug a little deeper among other people who knew nathan, he began to hear a different take on the kid who was supposedly too shy to kiss his girlfriend. some people would describe him as a little bitty, scrawny kid, kind of introverted who just lived and breathed his artwork. other people would say, the guy had a temper. ashley said she d heard the same thing. one of my friends would say just like you know, i would never want to see nathan angry. and i asked him, why? and he said, ever see him play a video game? because he just kind of pops if he doesn t get something. then the police searched nathan s bedroom and found his collection of knives which was not the only thing nathan liked to collect. he also kept a very unusual costume which anybody who searched social media could readily see.
students to live. seemed like a perfectly reasonable place, looked quite safe, when we stopped to take some pictures one sunny afternoon. but i wouldn t let my daughter live there. reporter: really? absolutely not. reporter: dallas, like any big american city, suffers from its share of crime. and the falls? you go there during the daytime, it looks very nice. but at nighttime, totally different story. reporter: innocent 20-year-old girl out on the street in that neighborhood at night, you d worry about her? no way would i let my daughter walk that neighborhood at night, no way. reporter: the nances didn t know any better. little italy, after all, presents few of the issues a person can encounter in the middle of a place like dallas. anyway, on that september day when detective ellzey arrived at the falls, he had no idea what sort of scene would confront him in there. all he knew was that a female had been murdered.
tell me how you treat a girl like that. tell me how you do that. i didn t do that, sir. reporter: however, by then, detectives had heard that daniel was not fond of shelley because he felt she was a bad influence on nathan s studies. which wasn t true, by the way. but that s what daniel claimed. and then his friends suggested what might be the real reason daniel disliked shelley because he was jealous. didn t like nathan spending time with a girl. detective ellzey turned up the heat even more. how can you despise a human being that bad? she didn t do nothing to you. how did you hate that girl so much? i didn t you hated her enough to kill her? over a dude? i didn t you hated her that much, that she took nathan away from you, that much, that she caused you so much problems in your personal relationship, that the only answer was to kill her.