reporter: billie told the cops he never intended to follow through with the hit. i m not going to go kill nobody. reporter: instead he was going to play john, take him for as much money as possible. and for more than two years that s just what happened. how many conversations have you had with john regarding this being done? numerous. more than 10? yeah. more than 20? 50, 60. reporter: detectives say it wasn t just billie playing the john game. members of billie s crew were at it as well and the cops already knew one of them. his name s john. okay? we always called him john, that was it. reporter: remember dustin hiroms? he was the young man pulled over a month before nancy was shot. he spun a crazy story that night about being a hit man. turns out dustin is billie s stepson. maybe his story hadn t been so crazy after all. coming up could the hee-haw gang hold the key to this case? he started laying out the whole thing. when dateline continues. from ve
in college and in nashville. you were so close with your kids. was it hard as one by one they started leaving the nest and going off to college? sure. yeah, it was. i mean, i m proud of them. but it was difficult. i mean, change is difficult. now nancy was often home alone. frank s work with his new client, a wealthy defense contractor, had him traveling to florida, california, even kuwait. there was a little bit more, you know, freedom or whatever. and like i said, a lot of it was work. and so you know, i was out there kind of trying to build it and she was sitting at home. still, nancy had her faith and church activities to fill the empty hours. in fact, that s where she d been the evening everything changed for the howard family. it was a saturday night. august 18th, 2012. you re out of town. yes. you got a call that something horrific has happened to nancy. there s been a robbery at your own house. yes. it was just just beside myself. i didn t know what was happ
chase. make more of what s yours. howard was shot in the face and left for dead, she tried to move on. she divorced frank and found comfort in the sheltering embrace of her faith and family. isn t that pretty? she even enjoyed happy
there s no witnesses. we basically had nothing to go on. no witnesses. and precious little in the way of leads. they wondered if the shooting was part of a pattern of crimes in the area. it seemed unlikely, but they couldn t rule it out. there had been some break-ins in the area? there were some home break-ins that we were looking at to see if they may be related to this, but at this point we were kind of checking out everything to see if there was anything that may be related to this. but there had not been any robberies for people actually being robbed at gunpoint for their property. the cops knew they had to notify nancy s family. but as it turned out, her husband was out of town. a police officer who belonged to the howards church got word to nancy s eldest daughter ashley. it s a close friend of me mom s calling to say your mom s in the hospital with a gunshot wound. and i m like, i m sorry, what? that must be the most bizarre phone call. it s the weirdest phone ca
who gladly took that money were not charged because they were either doing time or facing prosecution for other crimes. still jamie beck and her team wanted to link frank to the men who they believe actually shot nancy, the men in the silver car. first they tried to establish that frank had paid the alleged driver. they played a snippet of the jailhouse call recorded a few weeks before the shooting. and so i basically, you know, gave michael every i said, i m all in with you, buddy because i don t know what else to do. i was all in with him. reporter: even more incriminating, prosecutors said phone records proved frank was communicating with the alleged driver the day of the shooting. as for the alleged shooter, the other michael, the prosecution called a witness who testified he confessed to her the night