reporter: family members drove him back to raleigh. during the drive, he said his friends called. ryan and josh had said that the investigators were asking really ugly questions and pointing their finger at me and doing things like that. they said you don t need to talk to anybody. you need to get a lawyer before you talk to anybody. reporter: and then the explanation for his long silence. the lawyer that i got after talking with him, he actually advised me to not go talk to the police. did you take that advice? yes. i did. did he also tell you not to talk to anybody about it? that s exactly what he said. he said don t talk to anybody about anything. the defense also addressed the motives prosecutors had laid out that jason wanted to escape a bad marriage and keep custody of cassidy and spend time with his new love. did you have any designs in your own mind of leaving michelle young for michelle miney? no, sir.
just trust that it will be the right result. reporter: but was it? a year and a half ticked by. and then this. attorneys for jason young demanding a new trial saying the trial that led to his conviction had significant errors. reporter: december 2013. jason young s new attorneys launched his appeal. who is the killer? is jason young the person responsible for ms. young s death? and it seems fundamentally unfair. reporter: what was fundamentally unfair? remember during the trial, the attorney pointed out, the prosecution introduced testimony about those civil cases against jason brought by michelle s family. they accused jason of murder. jason young brutally murdered michelle young. the defendant brutally murdered michelle marie fisher young. way out of bounds, said the attorney. the jury should not have been allowed to hear about any of that. outside the court, michelle s sister meredith predicted the appeal would be thrown out. the jury came to the right
huh? huh? huh? huh? by all accounts, jason was a good dad. he was a great playmate. he knew how to sit on the floor and play with his daughter, you know? reporter: the youngs moved into the big fine house on birchleaf in 2005. both of them worked. he a salesman. she a financial specialist. in the summer of 2006, michelle got pregnant again. they kept the news to themselves, but it was clear something good was happening. the comment he said to me was he s excited to have another baby. not implying she was pregnant. but he was excited at the prospect of it. but just a few months later, michelle was dead. jason was 170 miles away in virginia on a business trip the night of the murder. he heard the news the next afternoon and returned to raleigh. stacia grossman got word from her mother. my mother called and said michelle is dead. i said, michelle who?
spared, did that mean anything to you? or would that mean anything to a jury? certainly. it meant that the person that killed the mother, we felt, cared about cassidy. i do. thank you. fiona childs took the stand. prosecutors pressed her about a life insurance policy. jason arranged. it did raise a red flag to me after her death that she brought up specifically her life insurance. she brought it up several times, asking me did i think that a million dollars was too much and did they really need that? reporter: after michelle died, fiona found out the true amount of the policy was $4 million. i was just like in total shock. that is incredibly excessive. reporter: and prosecutors also told the jury about civil lawsuits against jason, brought by michelle s mother and sister. one was a wrongful death case filed in 2008, a year before he was charged with murder. over the defense s objection,
actually by judge stevens. reporter: judge stevens, the very judge sitting before them in this trial. the jury hearing that, it is just something that is going to carry a lot of weight. this is the complaint that was filed in december seeking custody of cassidy. reporter: prosecutors also called the attorney involved in that custody case over daughter cassidy, and those same allegations were repeated yet again. the jury heard several times through these two civil complaints that jason young brutally murdered michelle fisher young. reporter: but the headline came when prosecutors played jason young s entire testimony from the first trial i wanted her to have that. and began to rip it apart. i don t remember. reporter: prosecutors tried to show jason s call to meredith to pick up the e-bay printouts was merely a ploy to get her to discover the body and find cassidy. why else would he print an e-bay