and then your being looked at for it. imagine, your shaken in the dead of night. my ears were ringing. i thought i was dreaming. in bed, right next to you. your husband, murdered. hearty wrap around your head, is it? yes. and here s the twist. you are the suspect. it s the worst feeling, thinking you re gonna be blamed for your husband s death. could she have been the killer? or, with someone keeping a secret? he said, what did you do. what did you do? i don t know what to tell you. just of the truth. hello, and welcome to dateline . it s the stuff of nightmares. and a traitor creeps into your bedroom in the middle of the night and opens fire. but for melissa oxley, the bad dream was all too real. she told investigators she d been startled from her sleep to find her husband, ben, dead from a gunshot blast. it seems streams, they thought, that no one else in the house was hurt. including melissa, who was sleeping by his side. stranger still, was
assert the sort of thing a three year old finds hard to understand. she said i love you, and i said don t talk to my dad that we. but as we said, it was a love story. then for both of them. as jamie a friend and future bridesmaid put it he was truly her best friend and he was the best dad. that s all he cared about was alyssa. that was his priority. to take care of. her so, it was melissa and ben and alyssa. the threesome. he was so involved in every aspect of her life. they were really like two peas in a pod. and one september day in 2006, as the sun was setting into the sierra nevada mountains, ben and melissa got married. the ceremony at nearby lake tahoe. melissa was a glowing bride. alyssa, a little flower girl. it wasn t just melissa and ben getting married. it was melissa marrying alyssa, to. seriously. they made a particular ceremony of. it alyssa will you promise to share in the love of this family?
told her. all she knew. but you re pretty confident that james of something to do with it? i don t know. but was that really all she knew? don remember had a 16 year old son named devin who, detectives learned, was at home and listening in the hours before ben oxley was murdered. so if anyone can confirmed on version of the events, surely it would be wet devin. he wasn t talking yet, anyway. coming up. the question haunting this whole case. what s our? evidence? was there anything against anyone? prosecutors were about to make a deal to get the evidence they need. you want to talk about this case? you know i do. when dateline continues. yeah. i respect that. but that cough looks pretty bad. try this robitussin honey. the real honey you love, plus the powerful cough relief you need.
it s a rare thing to do to sit in the jail room just as this, where a murderer confesses chapter and verse. denial is the more common language here. i pulled the trigger but james matlean will he murdered then oxley in his sleep and must live with that for the rest of his day with. and suffered 2011, he told his story in court. it was after the da took the penalty off the table, and james decided to plead guilty. and that s one melissa said sitting in the courtroom, her for the first time about something else james was supposed to kill her to. don asked me if i would kill melissa. i just said yeah. there was a bullet there for
but everyone agreed with. don if she was happy, we were all happy. but after five years of marriage, neither benn nor don were happy, and the marriage went up in flames. ben had cheated on john. i can see that. this probably wasn t something that she was going to get over. don changed after that, said cindy, didn t seem to want to act like a parent anymore. she met a guy and she would stay the night at his house. when her kids are calling us to tell us that we have no more food in the house, there s no food, there s a problem. so when ben and john went to court to fight for the custody of melissa, sunday had to tell the truth. i told the judge that don was not taking care of her kids anymore. they were not a priority, they were not even number five. when ben won custody of