does he live here locally, obviously, in germantown? no. memphis, do you know? not that i know of. i don t think he lives in memphis. reporter: detectives had to find edward another way, so they accessed heather s facebook account and mined it for clues. and there it was, a profile with a last name attached. and what was that name? edward raulerson. reporter: police dialed a phone number they found for ed. he told them he lived 500 miles away from eastern tennessee and agreed to make the eight-hour drive to germantown to be interviewed. detectives wondered had he made the trip once already that week, to take heather away? and most importantly, could he tell them where she was now? just because you ve got somebody living 500 miles away does not mean that they didn t have anything to do with this disappearance. reporter: police recorded ed raulerson s interview. during questioning, ed made a potentially important admission. i love her to death, i would do anything f
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. 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. 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 was young love.
and he said she sent that disturbing good-bye email only after he left. i m freaking out because i 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 computers seized at his apartment. a theory began to emerge. investigators now believed chris had written the e-mail himself. did you suspect that chris was posing as heather, sending that e-mail? yes, i did, because chris was an expert when it came to computers. reporter: and what s more, they suspected it was 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. oh, yeah, her husband.
they say you don t know what love is, but i do. reporter: ed said they dated for two years before he moved away. 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? oh. you know, i m a flirtatious person. and, you know, 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: ed knew it probably didn t look good to police.