yes, sir. his full name was billy earl johnson. his rap sheet showed he was a career criminal with a reputation for being mean and scrappy. a reputation billy didn t mind discussing. i ve got a reputation for being a bad-ass. i ain t everybody s claiming to be tough and bad. i don t claim to be tough and bad. i m mean. i m going to hurt you. if you jump on me, i m going to hurt you. if billy was mean, he was also calculating. police would soon learn that whatever tale he had to tell could be theirs. for a price. coming up there was two of them that done it. he s providing a lot of information that he should not know. billy seems to know all about the plot to murder nancy, and it may be a family affair. they re certainly a strange cast of characters. some people might depict them as the hee-haw gang. the hee-haw gang? they re about to hit this case like a monster truck. when dateline continues. ents. (vo) red lobster s finer points of fun dining ents. how to endl
reporter: when they examined that phone, they realized frank wasn t the devoted husband he appeared to be. nancy s husband had been having an affair. we noticed on his cell phone that there were several text messages to a contact in his phone which was identified as s. tahoe cell. those text messages, it was clear from the content of those messages that frank was involved in an extramarital affair. reporter: there was more. photos that showed frank with the other woman. there was photos on his phone of frank and this female that we believe to be the person that was sending those text messages back and forth with frank. reporter: the detectives asked the fbi to find out more about frank s mistress. they learned she was a 40-something
moments when the shooting was almost forgotten. like the day her youngest daughter got married and frank walked brianna down the aisle. it was very special that he was able to do that. and for me there was, you know, never a doubt in my mind that my dad would be walking me down the aisle. and we actually had a very good time. it was a very joyful time. i can remember walking with him and then saying, hmm, well, we ended up doing this together after all, didn t we? reporter: hard to imagine? not really if you remember that frank and nancy always put family first. for a long time, nancy refused to believe the worst about frank. as the months passed, she had a change of heart, though she kept hoping she was wrong. i believe he had relationships with the kind of people who would do something like this. but i am going to
and which one pulled the trigger, i don t know. but i know both of them. reporter: billie told the detectives he thought the murder for hire plot began sometime around 2009. i was laying on the couch and the phone rang. reporter: a stranger was on the line. how he got my information from them, i don t know. reporter: the stranger said his name was john. he said you don t know me, told me his name. said, i don t know you but i was told you might be the one to do a job for me. reporter: the job? kill nancy howard. he wanted it done as an accident so it wouldn t come on him. like a carjacking or a purse snatching. reporter: john was a man of means, he told the detectives, who drove a lexus and communicated with a disposable drop phone. see that number right there?
please don t leave me. she said, no, miss howard, i will stay here with you until they come. because anyone who is fighting for their life and has called 911 knows that they could die. they don t want to die alone. and i wanted to live. reporter: now three days later, nancy was able to give police a more detailed description of the man who shot her. he had a strong chin with facial hair. he was wearing dark rimmed glasses and a dark baseball cap. reporter: could you see his eyes? i did look him in the face and i did look him in the eyes. but i don t know how to describe what that felt like. reporter: did he just look blank? did he look evil? he looked intent on doing what he came to do. i would say he certainly had no pity, no emotion of doing to some homemaker what he was doing. reporter: the detectives now had something to work with. but then their investigation developed a new and surprising twist. they discovered the cell phone frank had handed over contained some jaw