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. 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. jesse came to the station with us voluntarily. told us she wanted to cooperate and wanted to help solve the murder of her husband. and she told him about life with jack, married 14 years, blended family, four kids between them. jack was a patriarch in the jesse clan, she said, a teddy bear of a man. well-liked and well to do. jack was a very, very loving person who doted on his children, stepchildren, grandchildren. but jack was ill. housebound after colon cancer surgery. sandra told the detectives she had been running a bit of a mercy mission for jack and dawdled too long at the mall. five minutes one direction, five minutes the other, traffic, so maybe on the road a total of
me, he says, it s her. reporter: not the only time jack said such a thing, it turned out. he actually told me, i wouldn t be surprised if the bitch killed me. he said that. reporter: so dove picked through all the original files, hoping he might come across something that had been overlooked. and buried inside he found this. a simple two-page report apparently unread by any detective. remember the guy who walked into the bar, the one who told a story about the jessee murder? well, years later when the case had gone cold, the bartender decided to call the placentia cops. an officer took the call, typed up the report and stuck it away in the file where it sat unseen until tom dove came along. two things caught my mind. when i read it. one, whoever the caller is knew how many stab wounds were involved. and two, the caller stated that
paper with the name which appeared to me at that time to say schreiber with no telephone number or no significance to it. just said schreiber, that s all it said? i thought schreiber, yes. reporter: but where would he find this schreiber? doug went back to sandra s interview and unearthed one more clue. when asked about detective wyatt about tom s friend, sandra said the boys were once work buddies. met him at target when they worked together. reporter: so 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.
matter of proving it is a different story. until someone found the perfect bait. hey, dude, it s me. you need to [ bleep ] call me asap. could they set the perfect trap? these people might literally get away with murder. deadly conspiracy. hello and welcome to date line: extra. i m craig melvin. with doting grandfather jack jesse at the helm, his big and blended california family seemed like one big happy bunch, then jack was found stabbed to death in his living room and police wondered if the jesses weren t as close as they seemed. the case went unsolved for years until an ace detective hatched an unconventional plan to catch jack s killers. here is keith morrison. the same is called mousetrap. a little ball on its track, the
it was horrible. what did you think happened then? i thought he had fallen because he had a big gash in the back of his head. i just went to the kitchen phone and called 911. but when she rolled him over, she could see wounds all across his chest. he had been stabbed many times. every time i started doing cpr into him, i could hear like bubbling and air escaping. then i started to hear it feeling it on his chest. it s not often this little town has a murder. about 10:00 at night when i got the call at the time, darren wyatt was the town s sole homicide detective. what did the crime scene itself look like? it was pretty bloody. there was evidence of a violent struggle between jack and his killer. the kind of thing that might happen if it was a home invasion/robbery or something? or an assault between people who knew each other. protocol told him first look at the person who reported the