i m craig melvin. and i m natalie morales. and this is dateline. i just collapsed. she s dead because she was my friend. first melissa disappeared. where s melissa? that s the million dollar question. i knew right then she absolutely never made it into her house. left behind in her garage signs of a struggle and a strange orange mist, then her boss went missing too. who is he afraid of am. he might have been afraid he s next. he left behind a bigger mess. we three kings be stealing the gold. a missing fortune. ballpark a billion, billion and a half dollars. a missing woman. we have know clue, no leads. some wonder was there a link? this had a twist to it. two crimes, one for money, one supposedly for love, and behind both, a lingering mystery. it s just so ugly and so wrong, and i can t fix it. welcome to dateline. hotshot florida attorney melissa lewis was living large in fort lauderdale dale, but then her seemingly charged life ended
brought us right to this parking lot. reporter: the car was about a half mile from melissa s house in this medical office parking lot that melissa never went to. and through onstar, you could remotely open the vehicle, huh? they were able to unlock the vehicle for us. reporter: inside the suv, disturbing clues. what do you find? we find a suit jacket that she was wearing the night before and on the suit jacket, there was a missing button. and that s significant because the corresponding button was found on her garage floor. reporter: the jacket smelled of pepper spray, too. there were two shoes found in the car, but nothing else. melissa had been wearing a sterling silver ring, diamond earrings and a $5,000 watch. she also had an expensive prada handbag and an iphone. could very well be a target of some opportunistic grab and run. at the point we find her vehicle, we have no clues, no leads, and we don t have any suspects identified. reporter: police did find a
i said, oh, no. he better not have done anything to her. reporter: who was he? my ex-husband. because we had just gotten divorced. and he knew my sister. he got served by her firm. reporter: so you thought he if she s gone missing, he might have something to do with it. yup. she said that he had come to her house. just it kind of scared her. reporter: detectives found out he had a record, so they checked out the sister s ex. he was a subject of interest early on in the investigation. he came in. he consented to any type of questions we asked of him. he voluntarily answered them. he had been released from prison in the past. reporter: so you haven t ruled him out yet? not yet. reporter: with the list of possible suspects shrinking, detectives shifted their focus to something that might provide their first break in the case. with melissa s iphone missing, detectives put in an emergency request to the phone company to see if it could help track her cell.
caught, debbie s still there to raise their kids. reporter: although tony would later deny it, debra told detectives he had been violent with her and her kids in the past. because of that, debra said she had decided on her own that tony had to go. you thought he was physically gonna hurt the kids? no, he was already physically hurting them. i thought he was going to go too far. debbie was scared of tony. but didn t raise any suspicion as to why he would want to ever harm melissa. reporter: she couldn t connect the dots that put him in that garage with her friend. absolutely not. reporter: maybe senseless to the wife, but those dots were starting to connect for detectives. they eventually shared their suspicions with debra and how the evidence of the travelling iphone pointed to tony. i remember that i couldn t stand up. i wasn t able to stand on my feet. reporter: melissa s murder was devastating and frightening for everyone at the law firm, especially it seemed for sco
when he got the report, detective kendall couldn t believe what he saw. melissa s iphone had been active ( after the murder and someone had actually gone into her voicemail and played back messages, read texts. we try to make sense as to why he would want to do something like this. reporter: police were dumbfounded that someone wouldn t know that a smartphone was a detective s best friend and police could track them using cell towers. it was either bold or stupid or both. people know this concept of pinging off towers. it s the cell phone is telling the towers, here i am ? yeah. so it s giving us a general vicinity and of an area, where that cell phone communicated. reporter: and the phone records showed that person had been on the move from the believed time of the murder into the next day. how important is the story told by the cell phone? very important. cell phone s almost like someone dropping pieces of popcorn, leaving a trail. reporter: but the trail was a