stepchildren. while jack s blood relations practically begged to help solve the case. so what happened to that big happy family in the video? a mirage, perhaps? in fact, living with sandra, said jack s daughter cheree and cheryl, was like a fairy tale. it s too late now. the kind britain by the brothers grimm. she was mean to me. she wanted me completely gone. she did everything she could to try and get rid of me. reporter: when it came to her own children, they said, sandra was indulgent, eerily so with son tom. he was a really good mama s boy, to the point it was strange, very weird. very weird. weird thing to watch. they re always walking into the other room and closing the door. yeah. reporter: though jack seemed quite happy with sandra. until the spring of 98, that is. just a few months before the murder when jack was diagnosed with colon cancer. a shock, of course. but one of two shocks for sandra.
attack against pete buttigieg. she took questions where wine bottles were given to donors and she says she no longer holds high dollar fund-raisers. now back to dateline. welcome back to dateline . i m craig melvin. detective tom dove had just secured a warrant to put a wiretap on murder suspect brett schrauben s phone but he was moving to arizona, then he a move that threatened to derail the investigation. dove didn t miss a beat, he simply engineered another plan, an elaborate trap requiring the help of nearly 100 officers across two states. could the detective pull it off? or was he headed toward another dead end?
away, literally get away with murder. oh, isn t that the reporter: patty is tom s wife, been together since high school, knows him better than anyone. she was used to his compulsive perfectionism. it s comforting to me, i think, to just know where things are and where we re going. reporter: his nothing out of place sense of order. he s a very stubborn man. so for him to take a case, he s going to do it and solve it. reporter: and so detective dove decided to start over. take a different approach this time. he immersed himself in sandra s old phone bills. seized by detective wyatt years before. what i did is i went through every telephone call on those phone records looking for somebody related to this case. there had to be some communication. get anywhere? yeah. reporter: what dove found that had been overlooked before was a cluster of calls not long before the murder, all short,
this is my son s friend. reporter: listen to it again. this is my son s friend. reporter: this is my son s friend. one phrase in hours of material but it got dove s mind racing. if the bartender was right that the killers were friends of sandra s son, could that slip of paper hold the key to the case? dove tore through bags of evidence, and there it was. the day planner. seized five years earlier just after the murder. i went through that day planner for probably a day or more. went through every scratch, piece of paper, every notation, everything that was put into place in that day planner was looked at. there was a small piece of note paper with the name which appeared to me at that time to say schreiber with no telephone number or no significance to it. just said schreiber, that s all it said? i thought schreiber, yes. reporter: but where would he find this schreiber? doug went back to sandra s interview. he unearthed one more clue. when asked about detective wyatt
i believe there was a del taco place. there he went inside to clean himself up. the information he provided, if we could corroborate what he said, would blow the case wide open. police questioned schrauben s friend. he denied everything. he said he wasn t in the car and he didn t kill jack jessee. no evidence that he was involved at all. police let him go. investigators focused on building their case against tom and sandra by documenting money transfers, phone calls, air travel. so when you add all that together, what d you think? i thought we were starting to put together a pretty good case. good enough that murray had tom and sandra arrested. and in the summer of 2009, 11 years after the murder, the mother and son team went on trial for the murder of jack jessee. going to court was like going to my dad s funeral every day. it really was. you re around people that you know killed your dad. it was a ridiculous feeling. you can t even put it into words. just soul-wrenching.