oh. you know i m a flirtatious person. and i just became flirtatious. reporter: detective kemp scanned the recent texts between the two from heather s cell phone and it appeared that things had heated up even more a few days before she went missing. there was some sexual content that i had noticed. reporter: ed says it was heather who first turned the texting into sexting. what did you think? it was partly that, you know, she was in a highly flirtatious mood that day. i wasn t really quite sure. did you bite? i bit. reporter: detectives wanted to know how much and whether ed was truly willing to drop everything to help heather start a new life in secret. no matter what it took, i would protect her.
reporter: he knew it probably didn t look good to police. i guess me admitting that i would hide her if that s what she wanted, you know, i can understand them saying that, you know, maybe he s hidden her. did you hide her? i wish. did you drive to see heather that night? no. were you with heather that night? no. did you have anything to do with her disappearance? no. reporter: ed told police he was at home, far away in eastern tennessee. and revealed that despite those steamy texts, he and heather hadn t actually seen each other in person, in years. we had discussed seeing each other. i guess it would ve been, well, about another month. reporter: ed insisted to police he had no idea where heather was, but he did give them a big clue. he told investigators that in fact, ske to her rd something on that call that was alarming then, and even more alarming now. i called her. she answered. and immediately i could hear kind of arguing. reporter: ed said he hea
today. reporter: but, he insisted, heather never made that call. and there was more. ed told detectives he was surprised by the first question he was asked when initially contacted by the police. detective cook called me and he said, is your girlfriend there? and i said, yes, she s in the backyard. and he said good, okay, so heather s, okay? and i said, heather s not my girlfriend. she s a friend of mine and we ve been friends for 20 years. reporter: so if ed and heather weren t an item, and he was dating someone else, what exactly was going on? the detective wanted to hear from you immediately. once they learned a name. oh yeah, once they knew who i was. you were an important piece of the puzzle to them. yeah. reporter: detectives learned from ed that his relationship with heather went back decades, long before heather married chris. ed said he and heather met in 1993 when they were both teens living in florida. ed remembers they fell fast for each other. it
chris admitted he and heather continued arguing when she hung up with ed, but he insisted she was alive when he went home. and he said she sent that disturbing goodbye email only after he left. i m freaking out, because still, i don t know if this is a game. reporter: detectives had been analyzing that strange e-mail and asked forensic experts to comb through chris s computers seized at his apartment. a theory began to emerge. investigators now believed chris had written the email himself. did you suspect that chris was posing as heather, sending that email? yes i did, because chris was an expert when it came to computers. reporter: and what s more, they suspected it was actually chris who sent those sexy texts to ed, not heather. they believed he d stolen her phone and was pretending to be her. that is really weird that you re getting sexting from her husband. yeah, her husband. it s kinda one of them things, okay, i need to put that out of my mind. reporter: chris s p
but that puppy love was something he never got over, even after heather married. were you still carrying that torch? yeah. but i didn t really let it show. i respected heather too much. reporter: around heather s birthday in the spring of 2013, after she had lost all that weight, ed told detectives he reached out to wish her well and got more than a thank you. heather had big news. she and chris had separated. at that moment in her life, she needed a friend. and that was what i was there for. i was there right when she needed me the most. reporter: but ed said that shoulder to lean on soon turned into something more. talking. just, you know, listening to her problems. and then it just, you know, progressed from there. progressed in what way?