there were boats actually traveling the roads and the only communication we have is through our phones. thank god our phones were working. crystal s husband jade cherry was stranded in her mom s home with a pair of newborns. i have two screaming twins 4 months old half breastfeeding, half formula. i wasn t making milk, scared to run out of formula. the search for crystal was no longer a priority for the chambers county instruct the sheriff s office. i had no choice but to rescue citizens. you don t have the manpower and resources for an event like this. when you have this kind of storm and devastation, you can never have enough manpower. so jade picked up the slack. house bound with twins she did the only thing she could think of to find kcrystal. immediately, we went to social media. what did you put up? pictures of her, her license plate. because her car was missing. yes.
tv before your guys have even seen it? that s correct. that didn t sit well with the sheriff. the bottom line was the jeweler was a prime suspect for me. but d. a. leak had the opposite take when it came to the surveillance footage. she thought the time stamped videos backed up the boyfriend s alibi. all that did is confirm what i thought, he didn t do it. you weren t looking at the boyfriend? no, he didn t is a motive. the motive rests with the ex-husband because any logical person is saying okay, they re divorced. she spends the night with new boyfriend and she comes home the next morning? and ex-husband is supposed to be okay with that? no, i don t care who you are, you re not okay with that. so the d. a. was looking hard at the husband while the sheriff was betting on the boyfriend. it had to be one or the other, right? well, maybe not. did i mention that crystal s life was complicated? her name is crystal because her parents named her after crystal meth. you re
absolutely. steal me. absolutely. nobody seemed to have taken the bait. well, there was a couple that tried but the problem is the water was too high. crystal s car was later toeed to a garage where a csi team went through it. forensically what happened. did they come up with anything? nothing. that s when dateline posed a missing in america report but the story generated no usable leads. by the time the last remanence of the storm howled out of texas, a week had gone by with this county in shambles, the sheriff knew he needed an outside assist on the mcdowell case and put out a call for help. one answered by texas ranger steven jeter. what do you do? ground zero. went back in like nothing had been done before. on day one of this investigation, jeter had ex-husband mcdowell sitting in a chair for his first formal interview.
night and then she goes home to spend the night at his place. that is correct. he told us the last time he had seen her is he was getting in the shower, and she had gotten dressed and left. that makes him the last person known to have seen her alive. correct. which puts him in an investigative jam. it puts him as a person of interest, that s for sure. but hargrave s investigative status was soon upgraded. remember that security camera footage of crystal leaving for work? those videos were recorded at hargrave s home. we know that because he gave us and other news organizations the footage but the sheriff said hargrave didn t give those videos to his investigators, didn t even tell them about it, not at first. they released some of the video and pictures to the national media before our detectives even had it. it s being played on cable
i m not telling you where zest at. sorry, you re not getting away with that. you killed her and don t have the right to do that and you don t have the ligright to leav her somewhere and nobody knows if she ll wash up somewhere and everyone wondering where is she? that night an exhausted mcdowell asked the rangers to present a counter offer to d. a. leak. he told holland let me go home and tomorrow morning i ll tell you everything. and i ll take you to where crystal is at. with that verbal agreement, the district attorney and ranger jeter allowed mcdowell to walk out of the sheriff s office knowing it was a risky decision. did you feel at all weird about letting him walk that night? i did. i felt like he s fixing to break because i thought he was going home for probably to take himself out. on the morning of saturday, september 9th, rangers jeter and holland went knocking on his door not sure what they d find. but to jeter s surprise, mcdowell answered the door. he said i