48 Hours - 48 Hours Interview: Road to Redemption

Episode Date: November 25, 2015

Correspondent Maureen Maher talks to Jeanne Bishop about her journey to forgive the killer of her sister and brother-in-law.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to this podcast ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app today. Even if you love the thrill of true crime stories as much as I do, there are times when you want to mix it up. And that's where Audible comes in, with all the genres you love and new ones to discover. Explore thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. Listening to Audible can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits,

and even your overall well-being. And you can enjoy Audible anytime, while doing household chores, exercising, commuting, you name it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert

to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military. And when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. In this week's 48 Hours interview podcast, we look at the murder of a young husband and wife found shot to death in their suburban townhouse. 25 years later, the story and a family's search for answers is still playing out. I'm 48 Hours correspondent Maureen Maher.

I'm 48 Hours correspondent Maureen Maher. On Palm Sunday, 1990, sirens rang out in the well-to-do Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. Nancy and Richard Langert, a young couple, were brutally murdered. It appeared to be the work of a hitman. In this week's podcast, I speak with Jean Bishop, the sister of Nancy Langer. She went out to dinner with the couple the night before, then learned of the murders the next morning. The night before, your family is together. Yes. And what was the occasion that brought you all together and where did you go? Two occasions, really. One was that my father's birthday was

April 2nd, and so April 7th was the closest date that we could get together to celebrate his birthday. But it was also a celebration of Nancy and Richard's, you know, anticipating this first child that was going to be born into our family. Because Nancy and Richard, that would have been the first grandchild for my parents, would have been my first little niece or nephew. And so we were all over the moon. My older sister couldn't come to dinner that night, so it was just my parents and me and Nancy and Richard. And we went to this Italian restaurant on North Clark Street in the city.

They came up from the suburbs, and I came from my apartment on Chestnut Street in the city. And we had pasta and wine, and I had a baby gift already for Nancy. And we were just the happiest family you can imagine. What do you remember being the last words that you said to her that night? Oh, I remember exactly, because I never say them now. I hugged her goodbye and I said, I'll see you tomorrow. And I never say that to anyone anymore because I don't know that that will be true.

And you stopped after that day. Right. It seems to me now this kind of foreteller of doom. So the next morning, you're at church. Yes. Tell me what happens. So I'm at church, and I'm singing in the choir at my church, Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago.

It's this big downtown church, and I'm in my choir robe, and I have my music folder and my little palm branch, and I'm ready to go into the church to sing. Because it's Palm Sunday. Right, it's Palm Sunday, big day, you know, the brass, children are all, you know, going to process down the aisle. And the church secretary came to me and touched me on the arm, and she said, you have a phone call. And I was shocked because I thought, who would be calling me at church? And so I said, I'm about to go sing. Can you take a message? And she said, no, you need to come with me.

And that's when my heart started to pound because I thought something's wrong, really wrong. And the first thought I had was that it might be my father. That something's wrong, really wrong. And the first thought I had was that it might be my father. That something was wrong with his health. Right, because, you know, he's an older man, not an elderly man, certainly, but older. And so when I got to the office and the phone was off the hook, I was standing up and I started to pick it up. and the secretary said, sit down. And I said, no, I'm fine really. And she said, sit down. And I sat down and picked up the phone and now my heart's just racing. And it was my father on the phone. So now my mind is reeling thinking if it's not him, what is it? And the first thing he said to me is that Nancy and Richard have been killed. And I said, what do you mean they've been killed?

And now racing through my mind is an image of them in their little car, you know, on the Eden's Expressway in a semi-trailer, you know, slams into them and, you know, smashes them into some embankment. And he said, someone killed them. And then he told me that the minister of his church, Dr. Gil Bowen, was going to come and pick me up and that I should sit and wait there for him to come. But when he said to you, someone killed them, did the word murder register in your mind at that moment? Yes. I knew what he meant. He meant that someone had deliberately killed them. And I couldn't take that in, this happy young couple with everything to live for, with no enemies, you know, with no reason that anyone in the world should want to take their lives. And all I could

think of in that moment is why? Why? Why them? You write in the book that you had a very specific thought in that time that you were sitting there. And it wasn't just everything that you're telling me now, but it was something about hating someone. Can you tell me what that was? Oh, I mean, I knew that if someone killed them, that evil had intruded into our lives like nothing that we had ever known before,

and that that evil would require a response. You couldn't not respond to it. And I knew that one of those responses could be hatred and vengeance and feeling horrible bitterness towards whoever had done this terrible thing. And I knew instantly that I didn't want to hate anyone. And I said those words, I don't want to hate anyone. So how would you, I think this is astonishing,

it's one of the things that I just found remarkable that in this moment, you've just found out your little sister who's pregnant and her husband have been murdered and you're waiting there with all these thoughts running through your mind and you turn to an idea of I don't want to hate anybody. I find that fascinating because most people would give in to it immediately and say I'm going to find this person and I'm going to do something to say, I'm going to find this person and I'm going to do something to them. I'm going to make them pay. And instead you went the other way. You know, I wasn't thinking of whoever did it in that moment. I was really thinking of Nancy

and Richard and where were they now? I mean, I knew that their bodies were lying dead in the townhouse in body bags, but I knew that that wasn't all of Nancy, that she had this beautiful spirit. If you looked in her eyes, they sparkled and that that soul was somewhere. And even at the time that I'm kind of, you know, inside shaking my fist at God saying, where were you? Why didn't you stop this? I also knew that Nancy and Richard were safe in the arms of God and that now everything in my life had to be different because I had already gotten to live, you know,

four years longer than Nancy had had on this earth. And that meant that every moment I had going forward is a moment she didn't get to have, would never get to have. And that that was all a gift. Well, I'm going to take you forward as that day progressed. But because your dad is not here to speak and tell us what his experience was, can you, if you're comfortable, relate to me what his experience was and his version of the story, what happened to him and how he found himself in the house that morning? It was so terrible. He had gone to church that morning and, you know, like me,

had planned to, you know, get together with them later in the afternoon. And so he had gone to the townhouse and rung the doorbell and there was no answer. And he thought that was strange. And I think he also had a kind of a foreboding. And he had a key because he owned the place. And so he let himself in. And the first thing he noticed was that the sliding glass door in the back of the townhouse had been shattered

on the jagged edges of the glass. And Nancy and Richard's dog, a cocker spaniel named Pepsi, running around the living room on the ground floor as if in distress, and then noticing the light on in the basement. And so when he went to the top of the basement stairs, he looked down, and there were Nancy and Richard. And he could see them.

Frozen to death. Yeah, his youngest daughter and his son-in-law. Did he go downstairs? No. Into the basement? No, he didn't. No, he called the police. And tell me where you ended up first.

Where did you go, or where were you taken first that morning? Well, the first thing that I needed to do was to stop at my apartment a few blocks away from the church and get my belongings because I knew I wasn't going to stay alone. I knew that once this had happened, I was going to go and stay at my parents' house for some period of time. time. And so I just kind of blindly, you know, got a duffel bag and started stuffing in, you know, toothbrush, you know, underwear, you know, things that I needed. And I went to the closet and I started pulling this thing off of the hanger before I even thought what it was. And I looked at it and it was a black dress. And I just started to cry because I thought, I'm picking out a dress for my sister's funeral. It was surreal. What was your understanding of what happened that night based on the evidence, based on what investigators had told you?

What happened that night to them? What you could tell had happened that night from just the evidence of the crime scene was that someone had broken in through the back sliding glass door. Not by breaking the glass, because that would have alerted the neighbors. They would have called the police if they'd heard the sound of breaking glass. Whoever did it was smart enough to know that and had used a glass cutter to silently cut pieces of glass from the door and then reach in and open it up. And you could see at the crime scene these pieces of glass silently stacked on the ground. And they had let themselves in and actually pulled a chair into the middle of the living room floor so that you could see every possible entrance and exit, the front, the back, the side.

And we also could see from the crime scene that there was a bullet lodged in the living room wall, that the gun had gone off and fired a bullet into the wall. And that there was nothing taken, nothing. No jewelry, no electronics, $500 of cash that Nancy had gotten from cashing her paycheck that day, strewn on the ground. Almost as if it had been handed to him like, here, take this, and he had tossed it aside like, that's not why I'm here. And when you found out that information, that there had been circles of glass cut out from the sliding doors and neatly stacked, obviously trying not to make any noise or alert neighbors to an intruder's presence, and that the money was thrown on the floor and that no jewelry was taken.

What did that say to you? That said to me, this is a crime that is meant to be seen not as a burglary gone wrong. This is a crime that is meant to be seen as an assassination, as an execution. That it was planned, methodically planned. Yes. And now, if it's okay, if you could tell me what you know based on the evidence about how Nancy and Richard were found downstairs and the way in which they believed at the time the murders took place. Yeah, so in the basement you could see from blood marks on the floor and the marks on Nancy's body what had happened in her last moments because the coroner estimated she lived about 10 minutes after she was shot first she tried banging on that shelf and you could see these indentations in this metal shelf remember this is in the days before cell phones and there was no landline in the basement and so there was no way to call

for help except for her to try to make a sound and then I think at some point point, she must have realized she was dying. And so you could see these scrapes on her elbow. She dragged herself by her elbows over to Richard's body where he lay. And right before she died, she drew this message in her own blood. By his body, there's the shape of a heart and the letter U. Love you. There has been so much speculation about what that drawing in the blood was, that it was somebody's name, that she was trying to spell out someone's name. And for a long time, it was debated. Why are you so sure that it was a heart and a U? Well, two reasons. One is that I've seen the pictures. The police were able to show us the photo. And it clearly is this heart shape of the letter U.

And I also know that because that's how she used to sign her love notes to him. That's how she signed cards to him. That's her way of saying, I love you. And you believe in the last moments of her life, that's the message she wanted to leave for him. Oh, yeah. I think it wasn't even just for him. I think it was for the whole world that she was leaving behind. She loved this world. She loved backyard barbecues and going to the beach together and cooking pasta together in the kitchen and holidays, birthdays.

I think it was her benediction on this whole world that she was leaving. That is heartbreaking. You know, it's a beautiful message that she left, but it's heartbreaking to know that there was 10 long minutes that she was there suffering. Yeah. Were you thinking that day, like, who, what, why? How does this happen to a couple in their 20s who seemingly has no enemies? Yeah. Could you even begin to fathom what happened or why it happened? I couldn't. I mean, if you knew Nancy, if you knew how good she was and how loving, how kind, how beautiful she was,

you know, if she looked at you and spoke to you, it couldn't, I could not grasp that someone could do this and pull a trigger and end her life. But what Jean Bishop did not know at that time was that more than two decades later, she would find out exactly why her sister and brother-in-law were murdered, and that her questions would lead her on a road to redemption, as well as a face-to-face meeting with the killer himself. Join me at 10 p.m. Eastern time on CBS for this Saturday night's 48 Hours, as we take this journey with her. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy

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