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
is this woman, melissa, killed because she knew too much? after we think we had this solid, buttoned-up case, we do have the whole scott rothstein ponzi scheme comes into play? reporter: the fbi combed through the detectives files looking into a melissa-rothstein-ponzi link. they spent a week going through every inch of that case to find out if there was a connection to scott rothstein. reporter: with all these messy complications, tony s defense attorney, bruce fleisher, thought about two words, reasonable doubt. a lot of people thought that because of the rothstein ponzi scheme, that he had something to do with the murder of melissa lewis. reporter: and debra villegas was back in the hot seat herself, being grilled by homicide detectives who bluntly asked her about scott, the ponzi scheme and melissa s murder. she had her lawyer with her this time. was melissa aware of anything that scott was involved with? and i m i m gonna use a term the ponzi scheme. no. repo
bring debra s ex-husband to trial. here s dennis murphy with the conclusion of betrayal. reporter: a funny thing happened to tony villegas on the way to the courtroom. he d exhibited bizarre behavior and stopped communicating with his attorneys and was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. still in custody, he was in and out of treatment facilities for years until doctors found him competent again. finally, in the summer of 2016, eight years after the murder, tony went on trial. the defendant in this case reporter: the prosecutor shari tate argued that tony, fueled by a jealous rage, waited in the bushes for melissa to come home, followed her into the garage and then launched a brutal attack on his wife s best friend. it is a hands on, personal murder. it takes time. it takes premeditation.
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.
tiny drop of melissa s blood in her car and on a tile in her house. but there were no fingerprints other than melissa s in either place. dna testing would take longer. now the question is, where s melissa? that s the million dollar question at this point. reporter: two days after she went missing, a worker made a gruesome discovery as he was clearing debris from a water pump at a nearby canal. poking around with his rake, huh? guess the first thing that comes to his mind is, ah, it s just a mannequin. then he realizes it s actually a body. reporter: it was 38-year-old melissa lewis. the missing persons case was now a murder investigation. still a whodunit. we have no idea. workers discover lewis body floating in this reporter: the news media quickly picked up on the story. my husband told me. he saw it on the news. reporter: how did how did he tell you? what was the he came to my work and told me. and i just broke down. i couldn t believe it. reporter: po