i was what they called in denial. do you need a break? yeah. reporter: strange. stoic for the rest of his testimony. yet in the process of trying to dismiss samoa as a murder motive he cried about his experience there. so, revealing? attorney fleisher put the best spin on it he could. i think that showed his honesty as a witness. i cried when i got off the plane. reporter: when court resumed. christopher told the jury that while he was initially upset about being sent to samoa, he got over it, made the best of it. when his parents and melissa and his parents came to visit they all had a wonderful time together. hardly a dysfunctional family in the story the photos told. were you happy to be with your parents? i was very, very happy to see my parents. i loved them very much. reporter: he had given the jury an alternative. he tried at least to diffuse the samoa motive, enough? not nearly, said prosecutor keagan.
do you remember that melissa was there? or do you need a minute? this may be a good time for a break. reporter: that night, whether juliet knew it or not, christopher and his drug dealing hit man, garrett kopp were leaving a trail for detectives. the trail of phone calls. 17 in all. one just an hour after the murder as christopher and juliet left the movie theater that august night. the state will call garrett kopp to the stand. reporter: here was the man on the end of the phone. the man who said heap did it. garrett kopp. 25 years old. short, scruffy. the self-confessed killer shuffled into the courtroom and told a horrifying tale how christopher instructed him to enter the house through a sliding glass door near the pool. how he made a sketch of the house to guide garrett down a hallway that john to john and susan s bed rooms.
first about the night his world went dark. the only thing i saw was for an instant a snap, i didn t see the gun, but in an instant, bam, and then, the next thing you knew, i woke up and i was on the floor. reporter: john sutton answered the questions as if the defendant sitting before him was a man he had never met, as if this was not the boy he had raised from birth. neither father nor son displayed the slightest emotion. it doesn t make any sense to to get on the witness stand and cry in front of the jury it can cause a mistrial. so, i dealt with it. i did what i had to do. reporter: soap he did. so he did. but was he right about his son? did the state really have the puzzle solved? or had its key witness been forced to lie? now, it was the defense s turn. and christopher s old girlfriend
reporter: john ever the attorney wanted to know what the evidence was. had the reports read to him and was convinced. i think that i was some where in between being c completely outraged and upset and some where i knew he had done it. reporter: melissa so grief stricken wasn t focused on who did it so much as what she had lost. a lot of people chase the killer. i think i chased missing my mom. police are looking for 25-year-old christopher patrick sutton. reporter: and christopher was nowhere to be found. day after day as police looked for him. john sutton had time to think and remember. one event in particular which perhaps he suppressed. it happened nine years earlier when christopher was 16. it was the deciding factor in sending him off to samoa. susan was going through christopher s room. and found a handwritten note planning our murder.
because of the lengthy family history of problems that john and susan had had with their son christopher who was a handful from a very early age. reporter: a very early age, actually. as john sutton recalled all too clearly. did he get into fights at school? i can remember that happening early on in preschool. reporter: it got worse as christopher got older. did he get into trouble? absolutely. there was vandalism, not only of our own things. there were vandalism of other people s property. reporter: they sent him off to boarding schools then. but he didn t last at any of them. failed, got kicked out. of course, the whole family tried, said his sister melissa. the trouble wasn t the lack of love. not at all. was there a sense that christopher was loved? oh, no doubt about it. reporter: but neither love nor money could prevent christopher from always ending back in the same place, trouble. i know that he dealt drugs.