dove. yes i can t tell you, move on. there was no hope of new evidence or fingerprints or dna, just the infuriating puzzle, which had become more difficult with each passing year. after i reviewed the case, i had no feeling for the family, no feeling for jack jessee. reporter: so to get his hand in the game, dove met with the people closest to jack. like his brother david. and when i met with david, he inspired me. his determination not to let the love for his brother go was a big motivating factor. reporter: but david also had some provocative information. something jack told him after arguing with sandra about moving to arizona. if anything ever happens to 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
california, moved to arizona to be near her son tom, and soon her daughter followed too. and they all lived within a couple of blocks of each other in homes sandra helped purchase with jack s insurance money and savings. when everything was said and done, she got close to $700,000. reporter: and as the months slipped past, leads failed to r: connect, the investigation hit t one dead end after another. wyatt was promoted out of homicide. e the case bounced from the placentia pd to the orange county s sheriff s department, where before long it became a case to avoid, toxic, an unsolvable career killer. so five years after his brother s murder, when david ar jessee met a detective named tom dove who said he picked up the case i said, oh, really? well, that s great. let me ask you a question. yeah. what are you going to do? are you going to get the case for three, four, five months, a year, then move up? f
a shock, of course. but one of two shocks for sandra. and to those around her, the second seemed somehow worse.ho her beloved son, tom, up and moved to arizona. and she was flipping out about it. yeah. he just she had to go there. reporter: she demanded jack move to arizona too. te that woman was off her rocker.wo her tone was just scary. it was like somebody else s voice coming out of her. reporter: but surely that wasn t motive enough for murder? and with plenty of suspicion but little else to go on, wyatt spent months poring over sandra and jack s phone records, bank statements, credit card bills, searching to well, he didn t know exactly what he was searching for. but he was getting basically nowhere. we couldn t establish a pattern that was suspicious. reporter: then as wyatt s investigation sputtered, sandra left. sold jack s house here in
get anywhere? yeah. reporter: what dove found that had been overlooked before was a cluster of calls not long before the murder, all short, within minutes of each other. one of those calls was to a target store, one was to a pager, one was to a boarding house. he called that last number, asked if anybody there knew a guy named schreiber. and the landlady said, nope. but there was one a tenant named schrauben, could that be the man the detective was looking for? it was brett schrauben. reporter: jack tracked him down to a distant suburb in the mojave desert. parked in the driveway was a 1999 pickup truck and a sea-doo, just what the anonymous bartender said. there was a huge break for us. we now have the name of somebody that s involved in jack jessee s murder. coming up often people throw away valuable evidence.
look at the person who reported the crime, daughter cheryl. e 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 relativees, 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 a 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: 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 directi