stepchildren. while jack s blood relations practically begged to help solve the case. so what happened to that big happy family in the video? a mirage, perhaps? in fact, living with sandra, said jack s daughter cheree and cheryl, was like a fairy tale. it s too late now. the kind britain by the brothers grimm. she was mean to me. she wanted me completely gone. she did everything she could to try and get rid of me. reporter: when it came to her own children, they said, sandra was indulgent, eerily so with son tom. he was a really good mama s boy, to the point it was strange, very weird. very weird. weird thing to watch. they re always walking into the other room and closing the door. yeah. reporter: though jack seemed quite happy with sandra. until the spring of 98, that is. just a few months before the murder when jack was diagnosed with colon cancer. a shock, of course. but one of two shocks for sandra.
because he had a big gash in the back of his head. i went to the kitchen phone and called 911. reporter: when she rolled him over, she could see wounds all across his chest. he d been stabbed many times. every time i started doing cpr to him, every time i d breathe into him, i could hear bubbling. air escaping. then i started to feeling it on his chest. reporter: it s not often little placentia, california, has a murder. 10:00 p.m. when i got the call. reporter: at the time, aaron wyatt was the sole homicide detective. what did the crime scene itself look like? it was pretty bloody. there was evidence of a violent killer between jack and his killer. the kind of thing that might happen if it was a hope invasion, robbery, or something? or assault between people who knew each other. reporter: protocol told him look at the person who reported the crime, which was his daughter cheryl. the daughter, we had to look at her as a potential suspect.
she was the one who found him. reporter: back at the station, wyatt interviewed all of jack s relatives, including cheryl, and jack s wife sandra, who hadn t been missing at all, just out on a shopping trip. mrs. jessee came to the station with us voluntarily, told us she would cooperate, wanted to help us solve the murder of her husband. reporter: she told him about life with jack, married 14 years, blended family, four kids between them. jack was a patriarch in the jessee clan, she said, a teddy bear of a man, well liked, well to do. jack was a very, very loving person who doted on his children, doted on his stepchildren, doted on his grandchildren. reporter: but jack was ill. housebound after colon cancer surgery. sandra told the detectives she d been running a bit of a mercy mission for jack and dawdled too long at the mall. five minutes one direction, five minutes in traffic, maybe i was on the road almost 15 minutes. she was very, very specific about where she had g
story. reporter: schrauben described the whole affair on tape, laid detail. anatomy of a murder. the conspiracy was launched with a phone call from tom. he told me he d offer $50,000 to kill his dad. reporter: he said he met with sandra in a parking lot. she gave him a $5,000 deposit. she wanted jack dead and she wanted it at the house and to look like a robbery. she told me she would leave for x amount of time and that s when it would need to be done. reporter: schrauben said he hired his good friend, a local drifter, to be the getaway driver. and on the afternoon of august 13th, 1998, while sandra was out having her nails done, schrauben claimed he and his friend drove to the jessee house to murder jack. i was already having a cold feeling on the way there. by the time i was walking down the street, i was really having cold feet. i got in the house, i m standing in the garage now. i put on a rubber glove.
the boys were once work buddies. met him at target when they worked together. reporter: detective dove crisscrossed southern california, searching through the employment records of every target store for a guy named schreiber. but nobody had ever heard of him. we were starting to come to the end of our rope. we were getting to a dead end there. reporter: that was about the time jack s daughter sherry began getting strange packages in the mail from sandra, who said they were keepsakes jack wanted his girls to have. like what? little boxes of like ashtrays. his bowling ball bag. a bunch of junk. just weird stuff that just kept coming. reporter: which seemed designed to provoke exactly the reaction the sisters felt. hatred. more than i had before. reporter: sandra seemed to be telling them she d beaten them, got away with it, won the game. we just said, are we cursed? is there something with this case that s just not going to be solved? it s frustrating for him putti