marriage to work, i did not give up. soon he was gone, vanished without a word or a trace. he left the young daughter behind. he left the house. was this a husband who did not want to be found? or could this be something else. detectives are not an undercover operation. that would lead to a long hard to say ready for that? i know that it has to happen. disappearance in the desert. could it be the perfect crime. i can only imagine what would be like to keep that. welcome to dateline. i m lester holt. for eight years it was a mystery, a husband who had simply vanished. on the surface it didn t make sense. he had a wife, a lucrative job, a daughter he loved. but investigators were told he also had a secret. so was he missing or was he hiding? that question would lead detectives to a dark discovery because someone else had a secret to. here s josh michael it s. there is an old saying, that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. we never talked about
elizabeth, mike and ellen s 6-year-old daughter was fast asleep in the bedroom. she didn t wake up. but ellen s son michael 17 was in his bedroom and he did. he was calling 911. i told him to hang it up, michael. and he hung up. and he hung up and i sat down on the step waiting for the police to come. but the police never did show. i covered him up. i told michael to get ready for school. i told him i shot mike. you need to just go to school. how is michael doing at this point? i thought he was doing okay. evidently michael was not okay. he skipped school that day, and he told his friend patrick about the horror he had gone through. did you talk to him about this? or from the first minute that this happened, did this sort of become the thing you are not talking about. right. we never talked about it. once you said to him, i shot
mike, go to school we didn t talk about it. later with michael and elizabeth at school, ellen planned to move the body in to the garage, but there was a problem. trying to get him situated to where i could get him, a board under him to move him to the garage. you couldn t do it alone. i couldn t do it alone. so you asked your son. so i asked my son. you asked michael to help you move the body? yes. he didn t want to. i asked him please. and he said, okay. 17-year-old michael reluctantly agreed. were you aware that you were asking him to essentially help you commit a crime? i wasn t in the frame of mind to believe that as such. yet, at the time, you were willing to do that instead of
her then 16-year-old daughter elizabeth was a high school junior. she was only six when her father disappeared from her life. you told her that you d been lying to her all those years. i did. what did she say? she was most concerned about losing her mom. she s been to see me every week. she s such a remarkable young woman. she loves me. but ellen says the greatest regret of her life was putting her son, michael, in the middle of a coverup. you said that you always looked out for him and that he always looked out for you. i didn t do such a good job. you didn t. he s such a remarkable man. i know you wish you d shielded him from that. yep. i get the feeling you have way more regret about that than about what happened. absolutely.
that was the final straw. we were on board that my brother would have definitely shown up for his own father s funeral. but ellen and their children showed up. they no longer kept in touch with the family but seen the death announcement in the newspaper and came to pay their respects. we weren t expecting them. so it was a little strange, kind of caught us off guard but once again we are in a state of mourning. dedon t want to create issues. we weren t going to have them escorted out. after all, mike s deceased father was the grandfather to elizabeth and step grandfather to ellen s son michael. we let them come up to the casket, have their bereavement time and all of a sudden we noticed michael was hysterical, crying uncontrollably. at that point, my sister and i are just looking at each other and poking each other thinking, what? michael cried so hysterically that his mother ellen had to