And which one pulled the trigger, i don t know. but i know both of them. reporter: billie told the detectives he thought the murder for hire plot began sometime around 2009. i was laying on the couch and the phone rang. reporter: a stranger was on the line. how he got my information from them, i don t know. reporter: the stranger said his name was john. he said you don t know me, told me his name. said, i don t know you but i was told you might be the one to do a job for me. reporter: the job? kill nancy howard. he wanted it done as an accident so it wouldn t come on him. like a carjacking or a purse snatching. reporter: john was a man of means, he told the detectives, who drove a lexus and communicated with a disposable drop phone. see that number right there?
reporter: billie told the cops he never intended to follow through with the hit. i m not going to go kill nobody. reporter: instead he was going to play john, take him for as much money as possible. and for more than two years that s just what happened. how many conversations have you had with john regarding this being done? numerous. more than 10? yeah. more than 20? 50, 60. reporter: detectives say it wasn t just billie playing the john game. members of billie s crew were at it as well and the cops already knew one of them. his name s john. okay? we always called him john, that was it. reporter: remember dustin hiroms? he was the young man pulled over a month before nancy was shot. he spun a crazy story that night about being a hit man. turns out dustin is billie s stepson. maybe his story hadn t been so crazy after all. coming up could the hee-haw gang hold the key to this case? he started laying out the whole thing. when dateline continues. from ve
Photo of her, details about her schedule and even suggested nancy be killed while scrapbooking with friends. she didn t do nothing wrong. she s a christian woman, dude. that s it. you know? who shared with you that she s a christian woman? john did. reporter: dustin told the detectives john liked to spread his money around. he started laying out the whole thing regarding his step-dad, billie johnson, his mom, meetings with john, large sums of money being transferred. he was talking right in the millions. sounds hard to believe. yeah. so he lays out including his grandmother receiving money. billie s other children that were involved. reporter: soon dustin says members of the johnson clan were calling john whenever they needed money. when they re in jail and can t get bonded out, then he decides, short story, that he decides, well, i can do this and start getting all this money. reporter: at one point, dustin said john gave him $24,000 to carry out the hit, money tha
Sheets. how do you get the jury to believe what they re saying? when you re going to go out and hire a hit man, you re not going to hire a good person off the street. you re going to hire a criminal. you re going to hire somebody with a seedy past and that s willing to do that job. reporter: if orange is the new black, this was a fashionable crowd. on the stand the witnesses from east texas corroborated each other s stories. they testified they d received money from a man named john to kill his wife. they had communicated with john by calling his drop phone. and each of them said that john and frank were one and the same. charlie louderman says john didn t seem happy to see his east texas friends again. he didn t want to see me there. he didn t like that. he was twirling on his pen, pop,
his name is john, okay? okay. we always called him john. that was it. reporter: the detectives found dustin staying with friends in a trailer. we were able to locate him, get him in custody and then for the next probably 2 1/2 to 3 days bryan and i spent talking to dustin. you re a good kid. got yourself messed up in a little thing, but you re a good kid. reporter: what was that like? the first night, of course, he was on meth. crying. he was pretty upset. reporter: and so it was dustin, scared and strung out, who provided the detectives with new details about this man named john. a man who wanted nancy howard killed and wasn t shy about suggesting how it could be done. he told dustin that he wanted nancy to be robbed while she was staying at the hotel in grapevine and he wanted it done with a baseball bat. reporter: john provided a