check to see if he was going to pasture. reporter: a nondescript little place out on the montana prairie. a bit worn around the edges. do you know where he shot himself? he doesn t know. is he still alive? there s blood everywhere. reporter: the sort of place a young vet could live cheap while he built his business. well, if you can have somebody go check and see if he s still alive. i have paged the ambulance. reporter: when the local sheriff s deputies arrived, they found the body in the middle of the kitchen floor lying on its back. blood had pooled under its head. on one foot was a shoe of the sort people wear in the water. the other was bare. a .357 magnum was on the floor not far from the dead man s left hand. marlene protsman saw all this, too, same time as the deputies. but she could tell right away, as apparently they could not, that she d been wrong on the 911 call. the man did not shoot himself. bryan had a cut on his nose.
alone. reporter: that s a big step. did you feel safer? yeah. reporter: but then tom, all of 23 years old barged into bryan rein s place middle of the night when she was there, demanding to know the 31-year-old doctor s intentions. what did bryan think of this? he thought he was a stupid kid. reporter: well, he was being a stupid kid. you d have to agree with that. yeah, because i asked him, should i file a restraining order? should i do something? and he said, no, he s just a stupid kid. he ll get over it. just give him time to get it out of his system. reporter: but he didn t get over it. and one night when nobody was home he went into ann s house, into her bedroom. and he said he found my journal and read it. reporter: what did it feel like to have your personal journal read like that by him? it just felt like i d been violated. reporter: how did ann learn about it? tom told her. and quoted from her journal. at the end i said and it
and the way his shirt was ripped and just the blood on the floor, it just reporter: it looked like a struggle? yeah. it wasn t a suicide. reporter: but the deputies went about their work as they saw fit. and thus, on sunday, july 14th, 1996, they clouded a mystery that has come down all the way to us. there were so many different theories, different suspects, and so much conflicting evidence, it was your classic whodunit. reporter: or perhaps your classic nightmare. i d lay awake at night and ask god to give me some insight here. where do i go now? reporter: the victim, the man on the floor, was bryan rein, veterinarian. charlene and teresa s big brother. he was my brother. he was my best friend. he was my business partner. reporter: they grew up together in scott city, kansas. we shared bedrooms. we shared clothing. everybody shared. reporter: bryan was the eldest. so what kind of an older brother
and tomatoes. reporter: and in the bunkhouse? egg shells in the garbage. dirty dishes in the sink. as if he d made breakfast. although dr. rein s sister testified that it was bryan s habit to stay up late, make eggs and work late into the night, the defense said the evidence pointed to dr. rein being killed not friday night but some time saturday. and there was a certain someone who had no alibi for saturday. someone you ve already met. remember him? larry hagenbuch was about to take the witness stand. and it s your statement that you then just went home. is that right? correct. and you were home alone that night? that s right. reporter: no question what the defense was about to imply, that the killer could have been him. coming up he told this woman that mr. rein was shot with his own gun.
veterinarian bryan rein s family went into a tailspin at the news of his death. and when they heard that somebody murdered him? you kind of fell apart after that, huh? yes. it was difficult to figure out where to go, what to do. reporter: bryan s mom was practically paralyzed in her grief. and so, much of the dreadful work that demands to be done after such a death fell on teresa. i can remember sitting through the funeral and sitting there thinking to myself, i am so tired. i just want to go to bed. reporter: and maybe that played a role in teresa s mood. because on that july day in 1996 when dr. rein was buried in his hometown in kansas and a large contingent of montanans made the trip to say good-bye, among them was that young woman from geraldine, the one who had gone over and cleaned his house, the one bryan had recently started seeing.