Anatomy of Murder - Up in Smoke

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Within days, two men separately disappear. Did their personal struggles catch up with them or was it something much, much worse?For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

Sometimes cases are built on one thing, a confession, some DNA, something else. And sometimes cases are built on hundreds of little things. And I would say that that is true about this case. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. Today's story takes place in Wisconsin. And I don't know about you, but when I think about Wisconsin, I think about those cold, cold winters.

I've been there. It wasn't quite that time of year. But I remember there was definitely that bite in the air that's a little different than here on the East Coast. And today's story takes place in the middle of the winter there, January of 2019. January is cold. We're talking really cold. I spoke to the prosecutor in this case, Hannah Kohlberg, and she really lays out just what those Wisconsin winters are like. Sub-zero temperatures. Some years you have feet of snow on the ground, some years you have none.

But it can still be incredibly cold even without the snowfall. Today, we're virtually going to be in Franklin, Wisconsin, which is a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It's southwest of there, and it's about 40,000 people. It's mostly rural with a few smaller townships and villages. There is some farmland. There's some hunting land out there. You know, for me, the area reminded me of the show Fargo. But it's this case, which I think is a true test of following the evidence, evidence which is gathered under the most difficult situations I've ever seen.

Police got a call during the early morning hours of January 2nd by the girlfriend of a man named Richard Conklin, and she was calling to report him missing. 4.46 a.m., Mr. Conklin's girlfriend misses a call from him, and that's the last that any outgoing attempts, efforts, text messages, anything from his phone. And Richard Conklin was a man of 35 years old. He worked at Spot Free Cleaning. It did commercial cleaning. So

you have a large store at night. A company comes in, polishes the floors, that kind of stuff. And then also did snow plowing, which in Wisconsin is a rather big industry depending on the year. And they had previously had some relatively large contracts. The girlfriend said that the last time she had heard from him, he was out partying with some friends, one of them being his boss, and that when she had tried to contact him, her phone calls, her texts, they were all going unanswered, and that was very unusual. I have no doubt they took the initial missing persons complaint seriously, but he was an adult male.

He hadn't been missing all that long, and he had a challenging life. And so it didn't initially strike them, I don't think, as being necessarily an emergency of the highest order. He was dealing with some substance abuse issues, definitely alcohol, but likely others as well. And it's important to bring that up because I think so often when we think about these cases and the ones that we often hear about, it's the people that almost seem to have not a checkered past at all. But just because someone

isn't a perfect angel, first of all, all of us have our issues and our struggles, but certainly doesn't mean that someone who has struggled deserves any ill will. It was unusual that she hadn't heard from him, but something else happened simultaneously that caused Franklin to find the whole situation to be especially strange. A 911 call comes in to a police department in Milwaukee. Later that same day on January 2nd, Milwaukee Police Department was dispatched to a vehicle fire on 8th Street. And the Milwaukee Fire Department arrived and put out the fire.

They could immediately tell that it was suspicious in origin. It was a Ford pickup truck. They weren't able to say at the scene what type of accelerant was used. When they took a look at it, they noticed that the vehicle had appeared to be off-roading. By that, I mean it had traveled on something other than a cement road. There was pine brush in the truck bed. There was mud in the wheel well. Just a general indication that this truck had been somewhere. And police on scene would quickly discover the Ford truck was registered to Richard Conklin's boss, Matt Newman. And so Milwaukee police teletyped the Franklin Police Department to make contact with Matt Newman at his residence in Franklin to find out that night about this vehicle fire.

Matt Newman was 44 years old. Matt was the business owner of Spot Free Cleaning and had been a successful business for quite some time. He was married to Tammy and had three children. If you Google him or you look online, you'll see that this wasn't his first sort of running with the authorities, but everything prior to this had been what I would describe as very small scale. And obviously once police got this call, they heard that one of the last people

Richard Conklin had been with was Matt, his boss and friend. So that's the first person they went to see. When the Franklin Police Department goes to speak with Matt Newman, he's inside, and the officers from the Franklin Police Department already can smell a strong odor

of the chemical accelerant. And that is immediately suspicious because the vehicle had just been burned. And there was like a pile of clothing laying in the hallway or nearby as they were speaking to him. As part of that conversation, Matt Newman just brings Richard up.

And he quickly told investigators that his friend Richard Conklin had his truck and was considering reporting it stolen when he did not hear back from Richard Conklin. These things were starting to kind of click, like what's going on here? Why is he bringing up Richard unprovoked, unasked? He clearly smells like gasoline, so something's not adding up here. And we know that the girlfriend of Richard is having trouble getting in touch with him. His wife was home at the time, a woman by the name of Tammy, and she agreed. She said,

yeah, there's nothing unusual that they could think of at all. And so police left. Now that police know Matt Newman's story and that he lent his truck to Richard Conklin, police are trying to figure out

really where Conklin figures into this situation with the burned-out vehicle in Milwaukee. The same day, another person was reported missing, a guy by the name of Bobby Heyduke. And you know what? He's connected to Richard Conklin, too.

So the next question is, who is Bobby Heyduke, this now second person that's reported missing? Well, he was also an employee of Matt Newman. He had worked at Spot Free Cleaners. And he also was someone that had had quite a few personal struggles and was also dealing with some substance abuse issues. It was his girlfriend also that reported him missing. Mr. Heyduke goes missing. On January 3rd of 2019 at 3 o'clock, Robert or Bobby have their last phone conversation with his girlfriend, where he indicates he's still at the shop, the shop being spot-free cleaning,

and that he's looking to get money from Matt Newman, but Matt Newman says he is bowhunting near Green Bay. That's what he claims Matt Newman had told him. And that is where our prosecutor, Hannah Kohlberg, comes in. I happen to be the only prosecutor in the homicide unit at that time that just happens to be sitting at my desk. And so I got a call from the homicide unit in Milwaukee, which is just the building next door, and said, hey, we have Franklin here.

And it seems strange. And so usually the police department brings the case to the DA's office. But I thought, like, I'll walk over there and see what we got going on. You know, normally a case is going on. And it is true. Detectives often come to our office and sit down and we conference them. But here, just because of the way it worked, she went over there. And maybe that talks about just how unusual this case is going to get. This was, from the outset, an extremely unusual case because Franklin doesn't know what it has on its hands.

It has two missing people reported. They're both employees of Spot Free Cleaning. They have no idea where they've gone. It's starting to get very strange. Matt Newman's truck was burned. And Franklin, being a smaller municipality and there being some involvement with the Milwaukee Police Department, which is a much larger police department, reached out to Milwaukee to say, like, can we put our heads together and see what do we have here and where do we go from here?

People so often think that as prosecutors, we get involved just in the courtroom. But in homicides, we are very often involved from the very beginning. Now, that depends on the jurisdiction and what the person power is in each locale. But in New York City, for example, we're involved every time a homicide is called in or a body is found suspicious. And from that point forward, I pretty much look at it that we are almost like a sidelines coach. It is the domain of law enforcement, but that we serve to give them advice on legal matters, search warrants, different things along the way. And we're certainly consulting because ultimately it is up to the prosecutors to decide when and if there's actually enough to charge. Typically, in Milwaukee, you know, you have a homicide. There's a body. It's found one way or another, or shots are heard.

The police investigate it. They bring you the case. You make a charging decision, and you go from there. This was much more a situation of we weren't even sure what we had on our hands. We need to establish the whereabouts of these individuals, what's happened to them. Where can we collect this evidence, where can we collect this evidence, how can we collect it, how can we preserve evidence that we don't have the ability to collect yet because we don't have probable cause or something along those lines. And we

need to collect everything we can while it's still fresh because I think everyone who works in the business knows things disappear and they disappear quickly, be it phone records, videos, physical evidence. And so let's figure out what's out there and what we need to find and need to get to understand where we are. So the moment Prosecutor Hannah Kohlberg steps into the case, she decided her first move was to send police to the business, Spot Free Cleaning, to do a welfare check. And that is where someone has concerns about the welfare of a loved one or someone who's out of touch. And police go to the last known location to see if all is okay.

So they go out to the business. They don't get any answers other than he was last seen there and no one knows where he's been. But they do notice something in the parking lot. And it's not the snow. It's Bobby Hayduke's vehicle. It's sitting in that lot, cold. Bobby Hayduke, nowhere to be found. So here's where things start to get even odder, because now a third call comes in,

but it's not anyone else being reported missing. It's from Matt Newman's wife. Matt Newman's wife, Tammy, who had backed up her husband's previous statement to police, but now she was calling investigators to say, what I told you the other day was a lie. So anxious to hear her side of things, investigators arrive at Newman's home, where his wife told investigators during her first statement, she lied. And she even went on to say that on the morning of January 2nd, as she was leaving the home, she noticed a man slumped over on the passenger seat of her husband's vehicle. The man was between 35 to 40 years old. He was bleeding and he appeared to be dead. Newman's wife, Tammy, also said that she and her daughter left the home

and when they returned, her husband and the truck were gone. And he arrived at the house at about 10 o'clock that night. Smelling so heavily from diesel fuel, his wife made him put his clothes outside. The detectives collect the clothes that he was wearing because they hadn't been washed. They'd been tossed out back because they reeked of an accelerant. They gathered the clothes and Tammy showed them a spot of blood on the driveway. At that moment, we knew when they found the blood on the driveway, like this is real. It seemed a strange story, but it was real. So the obvious question out there is like, well, why didn't she do anything?

Let's remember some of the things that we just talked about. People who have struggled with substance abuse, a lot of drinking going on, and that went for her husband, too. Matt Newman was already on Franklin Police Department's radar for much smaller related things. And she knew that her husband had just been out partying. So to her, you know, maybe someone just was passed out and needed to sleep it off before they drove away. We prepared a search warrant based on all of the information that we had. And if it's true that they have seen a body on the driveway at Matt Newman's residence,

we should probably try to bring cadaver dogs. And that's what really launched this whole thing. And Scott, I know that in your work with law enforcement, you worked with canine, with the dogs. So I'm going to hand it over here to you. So my last assignment in uniform was in canine, and I did have a canine partner who was certified for both drugs and for patrol. So I did go through similar

training you would do for a cadaver dog. And I really think it's interesting how they train. So you introduced your target scent to a dog using sort of a play toy, a rubber ball, or something that we called a Kong, which is also made out of rubber. And then you use a series of paint cans, and then you introduce your target scent to one of the cans and in the other cans you have other scents to kind of throw the dog's track off. And when the dog passes the scent that he recognizes, he stops at that can and sits. And the handler will then give positive reinforcement to that dog, whether it's a toy or a treat, and he will continue that same method of sitting the next time and every time,

hopefully, he smells that scent. We don't have cadaver dogs in Milwaukee. They're very specifically trained. And so we used a dog out of Madison, Wisconsin, which had been used previously in other cases. So at spot-free cleaning, the dog hit on four specific spots. What was most alarming, I guess you could say, is that the dog hit inside the business. You know, while we have these hits, it doesn't mean necessarily that there is a body, because they don't find a body. It's just something that they pick up on the smell. So they're unclear what to make of it, but they know they need to look deeper. That was really important to us because we knew at that point

something terrible had happened, that it had at least started at spot-free cleaning, and that it probably involved Mr. Conklin and Mr. Hayduke. So police are definitely eyeing Matt Newman at this point, but let's remember, there are no bodies. And we also, we don't even know that there's evidence of an actual homicide yet. You were dealing with two guys who, because of their own struggles, might just be the type to have gone and picked up,

or maybe it has something to do with their substance abuse issues, why they're both gone. So police aren't really sure what they have on their hands. The goal here is to get to the truth. Our goal wasn't to prove Matt Newman did anything. The goal was to find out what happened to Richard Conklin and what happened to Bobby Heyduke. Where are they? We also executed a search warrant at Matt Newman's residence. During the execution of that search warrant, we spoke with Matt Newman's son.

And what he told police next would send this investigation to a new location and a new direction. He's indicated that his dad did have some kind of hunting property. And this relates to what I talked about with the Ford truck that looks like it had been off-roading and had some like mud and twigs and other things, but that he wasn't sure where it was. And here's why that's important, is because if we're talking about an isolated area,

this hunting ground, that just might be a good place for bodies. We're starting to think that this property is something, but we don't know where it is. So the detectives start making some calls to see what they can learn about a potential property that he might be renting for hunting. Because if it's a cache under the table,

like I just used it to hunt, it's not going to be in property records or anything. He doesn't own the property. And they lucked out because they found that East Troy had a contact with Matt Newman a couple of years back on a property. This property is 40 minutes away. It's convenient. Investigators head up to the property on sort of a reconnaissance mission. We felt like we had a lot to go on, but not enough to search that property. We needed specific and articulable probable cause to enter that property.

And so DA investigators went out to the property, but didn't enter it or didn't go on it to just have a look. While they were there, they made contact with a neighbor at the property who was happy to let them walk the property line. So walk up and down the neighbor's property, not property that was involved, but the property next door. And these are large, I mean, hundreds of acres properties. And so when police are out there walking, they see something that catches their attention right away. They go walk the property line. And what do they see? But behind the farmhouse on the neighbor's property is a spot-free cleaning trailer.

And it was odd to them. It was super strange. So they do this reconnaissance mission to look for people, for vehicles, but they do locate two interesting things right off the bat at a distance. It's a spot-free cleaning trailer. It's one of those trailers that you might see someone come to your home with tools in if they're going to do some work. And it's open, and it's got, there's like stuff, you know, strewn about. Why would he have like this trailer on this hunting property just open with stuff out there? You know, it appeared very recent, which was important for our timeline. And that gave us the basis to get a

search warrant for that property. I mean, now clearly I think they have enough for a warrant. You have not only that these two guys are last seen with him, you have the wife talking about a body or what appeared to be a body slumped over in the car that's missing. You have Matt Newman's trailer that is on fire that he says was last with Conklin. You have this cleaning trailer that just seems not right the way it's sitting there and the way it is. It seems that they definitely have enough to go and search that land. And the judge agrees. And that's exactly what police now go and do. This is a hunting property with tons of acres of wooded land. So even with dogs and people, sort of a grid search scenario could take days. They basically called in anyone who was willing

to help because they didn't know for sure what the extent or the scope of this search would be. There are people from the Milwaukee Police Department, from the DA's office, from the Walworth County Sheriff, from the local police department, East Troy, from Franklin. So as they come onto the property, their first focus was that cabin. And as they walked around to the back of the cabin, they noticed a fire pit. And they notice the pine trees around it are singed all the way up to the top. And that really talks about the size of this fire.

And as they get closer, they notice something else. I'm not a forensic anthropologist. I'm not a medical examiner. There are very clearly two human skeletons in that fire pit. The bones sort of just laid there as though a person were there. And remember how we're talking this is January in Wisconsin? Well, for the forensic anthropologist, that made her work that much harder to do.

So first of all, it was January in Wisconsin, and I remember it being so cold. Wisconsin winters pose a lot of challenges, things you would never even think about, which was that the scene was literally frozen, the ground was frozen. And so the forensic anthropologist had to construct essentially a tent with a heater in there to thaw out the fire pit before she could begin excavating it to locate all of the remains that were in there. But it took her days first to thaw it out and then to go piece by piece to document what she found. But what it became clear was is that one of the skeletons was even further degraded than the other one.

So once the bones are sent off to the lab, they wait for the results. And when they get them? Ultimately, there was enough DNA in the fire pit to identify Mr. Hayduke definitively. Now we have a full-blown homicide investigation, and investigators needed to go out and gather more evidence. The fire, it was determined, went on for days at extreme temperatures. What we suspect happened is that Matt Newman learned a lesson that thankfully not a lot of people know, which is that it's extremely difficult to burn a human body. We are made up of water and tissue.

And so when he initially went out there, you know, I don't know what he thought, but we know that over the days he repeatedly went out there with additional things to burn because it probably wasn't going the way he thought it would. You need instruments to help you create this mass of fire. So investigators fanned out to a local Home Depot. There's video of him at like the Home Depot getting charcoal, like pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of charcoal and lighter fluid. And there's video of him collecting pallets. So we have evidence of a massive fire and the identification of the remains of Bobby Haduke. But what about Richard Conklin?

Hannah Kohlberg had a theory about that. Barth believes that Richard Conklin went missing first, that he was brought out there, burned once. Because of the level of degradation, they cannot confirm the second belonging to Richard Conklin. But at the same time, they can't confirm any identity at all. Mr. Conklin was so thoroughly cremated that there was no DNA, which I think resulted in one of the saddest and most difficult parts of this case. So now the question is, how are investigators going to prove that Newman murdered Richard Conklin when evidence of his remains literally went up in smoke?

They would go back to a piece of evidence that we talked about at the top of this show. So remember when we talked about Matt Newman's burned-out truck? Well, now police went back and really took it apart. The ATF, along with the Milwaukee police officers, processed the vehicle. They x-rayed the vehicle to determine what was going on, because a lot of interiors of vehicles are plastic, and so it can be difficult after a large fire to make heads or tails of what it was. They discovered there was a bullet hole in the B pillar,

which is that pillar of the door by where your seatbelt is, So let's just kind of catalog what we have right here. Both of the missing men had last been seen with Matt Newman. Newman's wife sees a body slumped over in that truck. The truck that we now know later is found burned. You have the bones of two people found in Matt Newman's fire pit on his property. Surveillance footage shows that it was Newman buying tons of charcoal right around that same time. And you have Richard Conklin's blood found inside Matt Newman's truck. I mean, for me as a prosecutor, that's enough to jump over that finish line right to an arrest.

He's arrested on a homicide charge. It's a summary arrest, which means that he's been charged with nothing, but it's a probable cause arrest. I mean, it sounds like a fantastic circumstantial case, doesn't it? But at this moment, we do not have any evidence that directly puts Matt Newman at the scene of the disappearance or Matt Newman at the scene of where the bodies were burned. Yes, it's his property. And yes, there's evidence in his home connecting him to the fire in Milwaukee of his F-150 truck. But at a certain point, the circumstantial case has to get across a certain line of beyond a reasonable doubt. If he's going to talk and be interviewed, you got to be able to ask intelligent questions. You know, you can't just go in there and let him

talk at you necessarily without understanding the larger context. So they're ferociously putting together a timeline. They're pulling receipts from different bars and restaurants and getting different statements. And then he's in custody. And Matt Newman decides to talk, which was a surprise. You never do know whether someone's going to give a statement or not. He actually ended up giving two different interviews that were extremely lengthy. And according to investigators in his statements, he would throw in some actual facts. Like places he was at certain times, which was ultimately corroborated, but some of the stuff wasn't accurate.

You know, like where did you go in between here and there? Now, Siga, we've seen this before in interviews where they believe the defendant that you may have evidence to prove they were a certain place. So by agreeing to the evidence, it makes your story more palpable. But he also floated another theory. At some point, he posits this theory that Mr. Heyduke must have killed Mr. Conklin,

and then this guy, Anthony Bartline, must have killed Bobby. Mr. Bartline plays kind of an interesting peripheral role in all of this. He's a guy that also kind of hangs out around the shop, is friends with them, and was around a couple of times when Matt was picking up pallets or going to the hardware store or other things, and would go back and forth, although then he would drop

Mr. Bartlett off at a bar near the hunting property before he actually went out there, and then kind of came back and picked him up. And he also stated that, quote, if I had killed these people, you wouldn't have found them. He said something about, I wouldn't be stupid enough to throw them on the side of the road. Do you watch TV? Who's that dumb? Making a murderer. He tried burning a body and it didn't work. Would have stuck them in the freezer. Why would I put them on a property

that links to me? And I think Anastasia, the investigators were shocked that he was so open and ready to discuss the case with them. Here's the thing as a prosecutor. Well, yeah, when someone chooses to talk, they can say anything, but they don't normally come up with this alternate theory at the time when they're being talked about to people, employees in this case, friends that have now been confirmed dead, murdered. And, you know, I have certainly found many times in my career that often when someone is kind of lying to put their own conduct on someone else, that they make up kind of a fantasy person. And while Matt Newman made up the name of someone that was real and they actually knew, none of the evidence when you looked at that third person really added up at all. We had Mr. Bartlett's text messages, phone records.

We knew kind of where he was, and it just didn't add up what he was saying. But we knew it was something that we would have to be prepared for at a potential trial is how do we prove that that's not accurate. So it's really, you've all know the saying that I say quite often by now, the one line, admit what you have to, deny what you can. It certainly seems to me like that's what he was doing here. And so his stories just didn't make sense at all. So this is where the cell phone evidence really started to come into play, because when they analyzed the cell

phone data from all three men, they found that Richard Conklin on January 2nd, 4.46 a.m., that there was the missed call to his girlfriend. That is the last time he has ever seen or heard from. You have Bobby Hayduke showing that his last known whereabouts were in the vicinity of spot-free cleaning, exactly where his girlfriend said that he had last been. And I think today more than ever, that's really significant

because like a lot of people, they were on their phones a lot. So when calls started to go unanswered, that's really significant because like a lot of people, they were on their phones a lot. So when calls started to go unanswered, there's no outgoing calls, there's no outgoing texts, it was a pretty good indicator that something had happened around that time frame. And when they look at Matt Newman's cell phone, it really shows him traveling back and forth from his home to that hunting cabin. But there was still a lot of big hurdles for the prosecution walking into trial. Yes, you have more than 300 pieces of evidence and locations all over the Wisconsin map.

The jury would soon learn that even Matt Newman is charged with the murder of two men. Richard Conklin's ID was only from blood evidence. Remember, they could not confirm the second body that was in the burn pit was him. It's truly a circumstantial case, Anastasia, and I know that you love those cases, but you still have to convince a jury of it. How do you tell the story? I don't, there are so many details. Do you tell it chronologically, like how it happened, how it played out? Because sometimes it makes more sense to tell it how you discovered and how you put the case together so that people understand why you think this show is what it shows. So just the logistics of how you present this much information to a jury is extremely challenging. So Hannah Kohlberg has a great wrap-up of what she believed and what the jury heard of exactly what happened to these two victims on those days. So I believe that Matt Newman

and Richard Conklin had been partying for days at this point. January 2nd, some sort of argument took place inside the truck in the parking lot of spot-free cleaning. Matt Newman shot Richard in the head, drove home in an effort to figure out what to do, and somehow passed out. Was awoken in the morning when his wife and daughter discovered the body in the truck on the driveway, cleaned himself up, took Richard out to the hunting property, burned him, came home, dropped the truck off in an area of Milwaukee that he thought would be, that this wouldn't be suspicious, lit it on fire to destroy the evidence, got picked up by his brother, got dropped off at home. A couple hours later, Franklin police come knocking to say, hey, your car has been burned. He gives them this story. The next day, Bobby Heyduke is at the store. The evidence suggests

that Bobby may have been present inside spot-free cleaning or was around at spot-free cleaning when this happened. I think maybe he heard or saw something and started asking questions the next day about what happened to Richard. And I think Matt Newman very quickly decided that this wasn't sustainable, that he wasn't going to be able to keep this secret for long. That he killed Bobby Heyduke, loaded him into the spot-free trailer, brought him up to the property where he had already begun burning Richard Conklin and added him to the fire pit and burned him as well. So after trial, this jury with all those pieces of evidence, it didn't take too long for them to come back with a verdict. Matt Newman was convicted of all counts, homicide included.

And when he was sentenced, it was to over 70 years. And Matt Newman, then at the time of his sentencing, and to this day, as far as I know or have read, he contests his guilt. And he says that he's an innocent man. Part of me wonders if he put himself so far in denial that he doesn't even recognize what he's done here. I wonder if he looks back on it and can't even imagine himself doing that, you know, if there was some sort of break. So, you know, we started talking at the top of this show about Fargo, the television show,

which does have a clumsy killer depicted in it. And here, I think it's life imitating art. The creative work, but truly fictional. The crime, but truly depraved. I always like to say in these types of cases, a good case is a sum of all of its parts. Multiple agencies working together at locations all over the state of Wisconsin. And while technology factored in here,

this case really factors into just good old-fashioned police work. I think this is a classic example of, you know, looking at the trees and failing to see the forest, right? There are a lot of explanations for potential individual pieces of evidence. And that might be true individually, but when you take tens or dozens or hundreds of individual pieces of evidence, you start to see the larger picture for what it is. I want to end by bringing it back to Bobby Hayduke and Richard Conklin, because it was their stations in life that really speaks to me on this one. You know, every person matters. You don't need to be a cookie cutter persona,

like what you're used to seeing on standard true crime shows, you know, the person matters. You don't need to be a cookie cutter persona like what you're used to seeing on standard true crime shows. You know, the innocent victim. Well, these guys are innocent, too. And their personal struggles, whether it's substance abuse or whatever challenges they were facing in their lives, it doesn't make them any less worthy. And I really think that Matt Newman thought that this case wouldn't be followed in the same way and that he might get away with it because of that fact. But law enforcement and prosecutors proved him wrong, that these two men mattered and they worked as hard for them as anyone else to get them justice. Tune in next Wednesday when we'll dissect another new case on Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original,

a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production. Sumit David is executive producer. Thanks for watching!