she d be paying people off. reporter: the sheriff believes tiffany s story and his sources and witnesses confirm it. you don t believe the hartleys were involved in drugs? no. you don t believe there is an insurance scam going on? where s the body? reporter: you don t believe tiffany hartley herself may have executed her husband. i don t think so. reporter: and now even more evidence tiffany hartley is telling the truth. a surveillance photo taken that very afternoon, one hour after the attack. if you notice there on the front of the boat, you see bundles of marijuana there. reporter: it shows a small boat and a group of men, one in a green shirt, one shirt black, fitting the description given by tiffany hartley, and what gonzalez says is a bale of marijuana in the bow. it s information the mexican authorities have had since the very first day. reporter: sheriff, i ve got to ask you, is that possible that mexico is going to find, catch and adjudicate the killers in
the jet ski was destroyed. my understanding, the jet ski was taken apart. that parts that would float were burned and buried afterwards. and the parts that would not float were just thrown into the lake and of course, they sunk. this here is coming in from mexico. reporter: the sheriff believes hartley s story but may never be able to prove it. david hartley s mother can barely control her emotion. what happened to david and tiffany was an act of terror. plain and simple. it was a senseless violence, but it was an act of terror. and that is not going to end at the border. it s over here already. reporter: and for tiffany herself, it is even more troubling. reporter: do you think your husband is a victim of, in a way, politics? i would say a victim of terrorism, of politics, and, um,
you heard shots. boom, boom, boom? you could hear them, you could feel them. you could feel them flying by you. until i saw the two next to me. that s when it came really clear how close they were. reporter: and you saw your husband get shot and thrown from the jet ski? yeah. reporter: tiffany says she circled back as the three boats encircled her. david was face down, she says, floating, when she jumped into the water in a failed attempt to save him. turning him over, she realized there was nothing to save. why did you turn around? he s my husband. he s my love. he s my life. he s everything to me. and once i saw him flying off, i didn t know where he was shot, but i knew it couldn t have been
reporter: they are also trying to stop the violence of a full-scale drug war from spilling north. are there parts of this border that you would be basically lawless or run by the cartels? absolutely. reporter: smack in the middle of this 21st century version of the wild west, two young americans, david hartley and tiffany young, just teenagers when they fell in love. we started dating in 98. the summer of 98, and dated for quite a while before we got engaged in 2001 and married in 2002. what took so long? we were 18. reporter: they wound up here, in the mexican border town of reynosa, jut south of mcallen. he was a district manager for an oil company. it was a blessing to us and our marriage. yeah.
only people with jet skis are involved with dope. right. reporter: clearly nervous, colette barely slowed down as we approach the church tiffany and david hartley visited on september 30th. he turned the boat and gave us 30 seconds to take the pictures at the exact spot tiffany hartley said they had stopped. this is the last place they came to, the old guerrero church. they took pictures on the front step, according to tiffany hartley. and they set down this channel to head back, and it was about five minutes into their voyage when they were approached by the boats. in an instant, the man who told us this lake was safe was again speeding away from mexico 70 miles an hour. the same path the hartleys were on when tiffany says the attack began. there s a boat on our left and two on our right. on kind of towards the land,