Dateline NBC - A Dangerous Man

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

In this Dateline classic, the investigation into the mysterious murder of a Spokane, WA businessman exposes a tangled web of evil that extends from the Pacific Northwest into the North Dakota oil patch. Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on October 14, 2016.

I'm caught up in a horrific story. I've stayed in the shadows for three years. It's the first time I've ever spoke. The fear was terrible. My life will never be the same. He dreamed of making it big. I remember him telling us, I'm going to make millions of dollars

and we're all gonna be rich. And in the oil fields of North Dakota, a glamorous couple said they could make his dreams come true. They look like Ken and Barbie. They're perfectly white teeth and they're tans. Everyone wants the fairy tale. But fairy tales don't end in murder. Oh my God, somebody just shot my husband.

It happened instantly. It's like somebody ambushed him. The only witness, his wife, with an unlikely story. A masked man shooting her husband and leaving her alive. I'm worried, Alf. Did she hire somebody? Did she get one of the children to do it? Or was the answer buried in this boom town, oozing with outlaws?

Everyone saw this big pot of gold, and they were willing to fight and kill each other over it. An oil field gushing secrets and suspects. Greed is what killed my dad. Greed is what caused all of this. I trusted a con artist. I trusted a sociopath. Wow, isn't it what can happen

to a quiet little prairie town when oil comes along? Yeah. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with A Dangerous Man. Among the green and pleasant landscapes of American privilege is a fine historic rise of land called the South Hill. Here, for a hundred years, has been the home of Spokane, Washington's elite in their Queen Anne and Craftsman mansions. Peace lives here, quiet, rectitude, and certainly not the kind of story we're about to tell. The kind of story with ambitious men, dark plots, and dames. I asked him, I said, am I just the dumb blonde who missed it, or did everyone miss it? The one so many people missed before that dreadful event here in the wooded enclave of life's winners. He thought that God was blessing him and my mom.

We thought we were walking on water. Here they were, empty nesters, all alone in their grand house on the South Hill, convinced that their successes, their six grown kids, their good life, were products of an unflinching trust in God. You know, he finally got out of the desert, and he was going to get into the promised land. Yes, the promised land, riches beyond imagining, as the not-so-dumb blonde knew so well.

It was a madhouse. It was the Wild West. So maybe that's why the thing on the South Hill wasn't going to stay here. My life will never be the same. I'm sorry. It was wintertime when it happened. Christmas season, 15th of December 2013. A Sunday evening after church. 911, what are you reporting? Quick, South Garfield. There's been shot. A man just kicked in our house and shot my husband, I think.

This is how our story began, in an ugly splash of violence and terror. What's your address? South Garfield. Say that, Phil, or whatever number. If he hears me, he's going to shoot me. But was this the beginning of the story or the end? That was the evening Spokane police detectives Brian Sesnick and Mark Burbridge were pulled into the strangest case of their careers.

It was the most unique homicide I'd investigated, and I knew that from the first moments of my involvement. Really? Just you knew? Yes. It was Sesnick who drove over first to the address on South Hill, sort of place a homicide detective can go a whole career without visiting a single time. The house, it's in a very upper-class neighborhood. And South Hill, that's like where you want to be in town.

Right. I mean, the street that it's on, I'd never been to before. Why would you as a homicide detective? You're not going to go there. There's just not crime up there in general, so it was very odd. The home, the detective learned, belonged to a businessman named Doug Carlisle and his wife of many years, Alberta. First responders had arrived sometime earlier, put up their crime scene tape. Sesnick walked into the house.

It was just a weird scene, all in all. This was December 15th. There's Christmas music playing throughout the house. That would be bizarre. It was very bizarre. They're very religious people, so there's religious scripture written on the walls. Then you have this horribly violent and gruesome murder with the body laying on the floor that you're investigating.

It was a very, very odd scene. 63-year-old Doug Carlisle was lying on the kitchen floor, clearly the victim of a close-range shooting. There was a lot of blood around the body, a lot of shell casings, a lot of bullets laying around. How badly was this person damaged? He'd been shot seven times. It was obviously a very brutal attack. It wasn't just a one-time shot, and then the person ran out. Clearly somebody was making sure.

Correct. Whoever had done this, we knew that they wanted to make sure he didn't survive. And whatever had happened here didn't appear to have been motivated by burglary or robbery. The entire house was locked up tight. Windows, doors. You know, he still had his wallet. He had his cell phone. Walking throughout the house, everything was still in place.

It hadn't been ransacked. Nothing was missing that we could find. It was Alberta, Doug's wife, who'd called 911 in what sounded like a state of abject terror. Arriving first responders had found her hiding in an upstairs closet. They took her downtown to talk to Burbridge.

Alberta, my name is Mark. I'm going to be the lead detective on the case. I wanted to see my husband. He wouldn't let me see him. The detective was ready to sympathize, of course, but his training, his instinct, his eye told him, not yet, something looked a little off here. What did you make of her?

She's unique, and some of her responses threw up red flags and made me concerned about whether she was involved in this or not. What kind of responses? She didn't care about the police investigation. All she cared about was hugging her husband and praying for him and wanted to pray over her body. She was very upset that the patrol officers would not let her do that. I want my husband. There's nothing we can do for your husband right now.

Well, I could have held him. I could have told him I loved him. I could have prayed for him. And then, when the detective asked what happened, This is what happened. We got home. Alberta told a story. And neither the telling nor the story made any sense at all. A man murdered in his own home.

His wife with a detailed account of exactly what happened. Should be helpful to police, right? I'm worried whether she had a motive, money, jealousy, a boyfriend. He has a girlfriend she's mad about. When we come back, why Alberta's tale raised the eyebrows of investigators. Rehearsed is a good word. It sounded that way to you? Yes, it did. Mark Burbridge had seen a thing or two during his years on the police force, had heard all the lies and dodges and witnessed floods of phony tears. So he paid careful experience attention when Alberta Carlyle told him what happened that Sunday evening in the house on South Hill.

What happened tonight? We went to church. We went to a church function. Nothing. I don't know what happened. A hell happened. A nightmare happened. That's what happened. And Alberta's story said Detective Burbridge just didn't add up. All of a sudden I hear, it's okay, it's okay. And then I hear, back off, back off, back off. And when I heard the back off, I saw, I looked and saw a man standing there in all black. Her story was concerning about a masked man wearing all black coming into the house and shooting her husband and leaving and leaving her alive.

It made me worried that maybe she'd hired a hit man or maybe she was making up the story and she was involved in what happened. Thing was, the killer saw Alberta. She came right out and said so. They stared at each other, soul to soul. So why would a hitman leave an eyewitness alive? Unless she was in on it. I'm worried whether she had a motive, money, jealousy, a boyfriend. He has a girlfriend she's mad about. Did she kill him herself? Did she hire somebody? Did she get one of the children to do it? These are all my concerns.

Besides, said Burbridge, he's seen many people caught by sudden violence and grief, and Alberta was agitated, certainly. But to his practiced eye, her emotional reaction was somehow flat, as if practiced. It bothered him. How long had you been home? It happened instantly. When we got home, it was like somebody ambushed him.

The way she told her story about a masked man killing her husband in 42 years. It almost seemed like it was rehearsed, or like she'd thought about this, and what could I say? Rehearsed is a good word. It sounded that way to you? Yes, it did. But you don't have to take it from the detective.

We were able to arrange an interview with Alberta, too. My whole life was over as I knew it. Alberta told us that when she and her husband returned from church that evening, they drove through the gate of their property as usual. He goes, I'll get the gate, you get the door. Did everything look pretty much the same as when you left? No. No. It just didn't feel right. So I started to head up the stairs by this time,

and I got all the way to the top of the stairs, and I started down the hall when I heard muffled noises headed right back down the stairs. And I got down all the way to the bottom stairs. I called out to Doug, and I said, Doug, is somebody here? And I looked to my left. The man was standing right in front of the doorway. How far away from you?

Ten feet at the most, nine feet. And I looked at him, and it was a man all in black and he had a mask on and he had a gun pointed where I knew my husband was standing. You couldn't see Doug. I couldn't see Doug. I only saw this man in black. He had a mask on. Only thing I could see was his eyes and he looked at me. He never moved the gun and he blinked three times and I thought why is he blinking at me. He never moved the gun. And he blinked three times. And I thought, why is he blinking at me? I would think, why is that guy in my house holding a gun? What I thought was, oh, my God, what do I do?

He's going to kill me before I get up the stairs. I pulled myself up the rail, up the stairs, because my legs wouldn't work. And I was just starting down the hall when I heard multiple shots. Did you realize right away what must have happened? Oh, absolutely. I knew my husband had to have been shot. And so I thought, I've got to hide.

Alberta ran toward a closet on the home's second floor. She said, shut the door, and called 911. Please hurry, please hurry. Oh my gosh, he're going to hear me. Okay, stay on the line for me, okay? Oh my God, somebody just shot my husband, I think. Oh God, how are you going to find me?

I'm hiding in my closet. Okay, I want you to stay on the line. Do you remember what it felt like in there? What you felt like? Oh, sheer desperation. Just sheer desperation and just this overwhelming need to go to my husband. I wanted to go to him. I wanted to comfort him.

I wanted to tell him I loved him. I wanted to tell him it was going to be okay. I wanted to pray for him. Oh, please, Holy Jesus, I just want to pray for you. When the police arrived, they found Alberta in the closet. I said, I want to go to my husband. They said, well, they're working on him. And I said, no, I want to go see him. Please let me go to my husband.

And they said, no, you can't go down there. Did you ever get to see him that night? No. No. Now Alberta found herself face-to-face with Detective Burbridge, trying to get him to believe a story about a masked killer who stared right at her, but yet left her alive to tell the tale. I mean, that sounds a little made up almost.

Yes, it does. Sounds Hollywood. Have you ever heard of a case where somebody laid eyes on a witness to him killing someone and didn't take any action? I've never had that happen. So you would have expected something, yes? Yeah.

At least an attempt. But there was something in Alberta's story that night that did make sense. Before the murder, as she and Doug drove to church, she said, they saw something out of place. There was a van kind of sitting right up against the curb. A white van. Like it didn't belong there or something? Yeah.

A white van. As police canvassed the neighborhood after the murder, a witness across the street said she saw it too. She had come home around 5 o'clock that evening and noticed a white van parked in front of her house. And it was parked in a way that it made her nervous to the point she thought maybe someone was breaking in. I mean, why would she be suspicious of a van?

Right. It was a van she'd never seen before. And in that neighborhood, everyone knows everyone. The question was, what did the white van have to do with the murder of Doug Carlisle? Or, the cops wondered, with his wife, Alberta. Coming up, a neighborhood security camera. What tales would it tell? We actually saw that suspect and saw the path that he ran. Could you tell who it was?

All you could really see is that it was a subject, appeared to be muscular build, wearing all black. When Dateline continues. Up here on Spokane's Tony's South Hill, beat cops and detectives fanned out around a neighborhood utterly unused to violent crime. But downtown at police headquarters... This is a secure building, so if you need to go somewhere, knock on the door, okay?

What, I'm in jail? The victim's wife, Alberta Carlyle, told a crazy story about a man in black bursting into the house, killing her husband, looking her square in the eye, but leaving her alive. Oh, Burbridge wondered, did she hire him? In my world, wives kill husbands, so the relationship is a probability. But then, up at the house, they heard a curious story from a neighbor. That very evening, for a couple of hours before the shooting,

a mysterious white van was parked just across the street from the Carlisle's house. 911, what are you reporting? Hi, I called crime check because there was a suspicious vehicle in front of my house like 30 minutes ago, and now they just came back and they're just sitting there and I'm really freaked out. Of course, in many, if not most, neighborhoods in America, a parked white van might not attract a bit of attention. But this is the South Hill, after all. Nondescript white vans don't just show up and hang around here. So the neighbor noticed.

And then Doug Carlisle winds up murdered. We didn't know if it was related or not, but it was obviously something that we considered immediately. And again, this being the South Hill, another neighbor had the wherewithal to provide a special kind of help. Homeowner in the neighborhood had a video camera that covered his driveway, and we picked up what we thought was the van about two hours before the murder. Here it is, that video. And sure enough, a white van coming and going on the streets of South Hill that night. But did it have anything to do with the murder?

And what about that man in black Alberta said she saw? If he actually existed, hired killer or whatever, he must have waited somewhere around the house for the Carlisles to get back from church. He could have killed Doug Carlisle, then possibly escaped in that white van. No one saw anyone going out the front door, but what about back here, behind the house? They called in a tracking dog, stood back, and watched. Basically, the track went through some arborvitae, over a little fence, through the neighbor's backyard, and in the very back corner of their yard is a gate that was left open.

And just before the gate, there was a puddle of water, and there was a good footprint in that puddle of water, and it was apparent that it was fairly recent. Could be your guy. Could be our guy. Just beyond that, just outside the gate, there was a, what appeared to be a welding glove lying in the leaves. A welding glove? A welding glove. So right away, we thought, is this something that may have been dropped? But it was odd enough, and in a place

that we knew the suspect had run after the incident, that we ended up collecting it as evidence. Not really knowing whether that had anything to do with your murder. Correct. We didn't know. We, you know, in something like this where it's a complete whodunit, you know, you take everything and hope something ends up helping your case. They kept looking. So did the dog. Just beyond where the welding glove was found was a small wooded area at across the street an elementary school, which meant maybe the school's security system could get them a picture of the guy.

Another detective was able to get that video almost immediately. And sure enough, when they looked at the video, there he was. We actually saw that suspect and saw the path that he ran. Could you tell who it was or care very much about him? It was a very grainy video. All you could really see is that it was a subject, appeared to be muscular build, wearing all black. All black.

He was hard to make out, but there he was in the video. The elusive man in black running toward a main road. When Detective Burbridge arrived and got a look at this. I've done a lot of homicides, and at that point I thought that this was a professional hitman, probably unrelated to our victim at all or the person involved in this. And I went and found my lieutenant. I knew that this was going to be a very complicated investigation, and we needed a lot more manpower to get very fast on the case

further down the road. And so, in a matter of hours, detectives were called in from all over the department. Time off was canceled. So many questions to answer. What else did the neighbors see? What did that welding glove have to do with anything? And who was the man in black? And a more basic question, was Alberta Carlyle involved in a plot to kill her husband? Coming up. The closer I got to the Lord, it's like the further we got apart. Even Alberta admits their marriage had seen its share of trouble. I did something drastic. I left him without his knowledge.

Take the kids with you? Of course. As police combed the South Hill looking for evidence of suspects in the murder of Doug Carlisle, his wife, Alberta, had no idea that her behavior had raised alarms. Who cares about this stupid evidence? But Police 101, the victim's nearest and dearest, often becomes prime suspect number one. And Alberta, with her wild story, was certainly no exception. And then Detective Burbridge was able to get a close look at the early evidence,

and especially that video of the running man in black. And... Immediately it became apparent to me that whoever did this had reconnoitered the scene and spent time planning this because of the very elaborate escape route. It made me concerned that Alberta was probably telling the truth about who was involved and what happened. When Burbridge saw all that planning, along with the videotape showing a man in black, he thought it far less likely Alberta Carlisle was anything but a victim. But in her brain, while the detectives kept going on about this question or that,

two thoughts blocked out all else. Her desire to see her husband and an overwhelming need to tell her children what happened. I went to call them and I couldn't even see the numbers. I couldn't. I was just frantic. And I said to the police, help me. And then I thought, wait, you can't help me. You don't even know who I'm looking for. But finally, an hour away in the town of Moses Lake, the phone rang at the home of Shane Carlisle. I received a call from my mother. We were hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree.

She said that, just in kind of a screaming panic, Shane, you're dead. You're dead. He was shot six times. You called everybody? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the thought hadn't even sank in yet. It was just a straight up, okay, let's get to work. Let's figure out what we have to do.

I started contacting everybody. And, you know, I'd have to listen to everybody's cries and screams over the phone. The Carlisle's eldest, Melanie, was at her own daughter's ballet recital across the state near Seattle. He goes, Dad's been shot. And I said, what do you mean Dad's been shot? Dad has been killed. And so Malaney greeted her daughters after the recital with the news about Grandpa. Oh, they loved their Grandpa.

He was the greatest to them, to all three of them. They had really good relationships with him. It was a relationship that almost wasn't for any of them. Doug and Bertie, as he liked to call her, were teenage sweethearts, married young. And as often happens, even as their family grew, their marriage shriveled. What happened? Life happens. Bertie found God.

Doug did not. The closer I got to the Lord, it's like the further we got apart. Until it became clear to Bertie, she won't go into detail, that she and Doug were doomed. Unless... I did something drastic. I left him without his knowledge. Take the kids with you?

Of course. So you went off on your own with four kids? No job, no nothing. Yeah. To a city I didn't know. To Seattle. 350 miles from the little town in Oregon where they lived back then. Her church kept her going.

Well, Doug, well, here's the story according to Bertie. He kept guns, said Bertie, lots of them. And lost and alone, he decided to use one voice that said, he's mine. And then he heard another voice that said, no, he's not. He belongs to me. And he said it was a thunderous, authoritative, shook the whole room voice. And the next thing he knew, he felt arms picking him up and putting him on the bed. He told you this? Yes, he told me this months later. Quite a story. The one that got Doug saved and back with his family. After that, he started an excavation business. And as his kids grew up, six of them, many followed him. It became the family business. He's a salesman. You know, he can talk you into something. A charmer. Yeah, totally. Total charmer. What was his business philosophy?

I mean, was he a numbers crunching guy or was he a handshake guy? He was a handshake guy. He expected his word and a handshake was good. And he knew it was. He expected that of others, and that isn't always true. And there were setbacks. Two bankruptcies, trouble with the IRS, a string of failed businesses, and fallings out with business partners who accused Doug of being less than honest and of not paying his bills. How would Doug react to those? He never gave up.

And we always took care of what we owed. And we would move forward. And as he entered midlife, Doug Carlisle seemed content doing deals while his son Shane and Seth ran the business. He'd give the shirt off his back to anybody. He just had a huge heart. He had enough room in it for everybody.

Huge heart. And taught you room in it for everybody. Huge heart. And taught you what you know. Absolutely. Every aspect of business, every aspect of life. When the kids were grown, Doug and Bertie ended up in Spokane to be near their favorite church, whose pastor preached the prosperity gospel. That is, the idea that God rewards true belief with financial success.

And they certainly looked successful when they bought that sprawling house on the South Hill. They wanted to get an older house like that. It was just something they loved. But they also always wanted all the family to come for all the holidays and spend it with them. So there's a bedroom for everybody. We all had our own room. It worked out pretty good. Did it look to you as if your dad and your mom

were finally at the place where they were on the top of the hill? They were doing the best I ever saw them do. They were happy. They had got it. They had figured it out. But now Doug Carlisle was dead and detectives tallied up the signs

of his earthly wealth. Still parked in the drive, Alberta's new Mercedes, Doug's new pickup, and inside in Doug's office, documents detailing the family's fortune. There was a lot of financial paperwork, and the ones that struck me immediately was there was loan paperwork that it appeared Mr. Carlisle had filled out for different businesses. And they had his net value at between $6 and $12 million, depending on which piece of paper you looked at. And then there were the documents the detectives couldn't read. That is, the ones written in Arabic. Who was Doug Carlisle?

Successful, God-fearing businessman? Or what? Coming up. I remember him telling us, you know, I'm going to make millions of dollars and this is going to be it. And this is going to be for our family. And, you know, we're all going to be rich.

Investigators take a hard look at Doug's business practices. Had he made any enemies? They may have a reason look at Doug's business practices. Had he made any enemies? They may have a reason to be pretty mad at him. Our suspect list kept growing. I was running this investigation eventually in about eight directions, trying to eliminate a lot of business partners,

seeing if Mr. Carlisle had a secret life. Even seasoned detectives are surprised. I just don't believe in coincidences like that. When Dateline continues. It was obvious now. No getting around it. Spokane detectives Burbridge and Sessner took a look at the clues dug up that first night.

Surveillance video showing a white van circling the area. Alberta's story about a masked shooter dressed in black. The video of a black-clad man running away. All that could mean only one thing. This was a hit, a professional killing. Which begged the question, why would anyone want to kill a beloved, God-fearing grandfather? Murdered while Christmas music filled his big old house? It was almost a surreal scene. You know, the house is decorated for

Christmas, Christmas music playing. Perhaps some answers would come from what detectives found in Doug's office. Documents, half in English, half in Arabic. And those they could read? Very interesting indeed. There was pre-filled out paperwork promising, you know, 100% return on investment in 90 days if you'd invest in their company. So it appeared that your victim had been promising people huge returns on investment. Correct. He had a whole binder with paperwork,

and it included names of people who had bought into this and invested. Wait a minute. Who offers a 100% return so fast? Was this for real? The names, reports, and records all seem to be related to one thing. We ended up finding a lot of paperwork related to the oil business in North Dakota. The oil business? Why that? Doug Carlisle, remember, was an excavator, not an oil man. But of course, a whole army of ambitious, hard-working men had fled established careers

to grab for a piece of the wealth dangled so enticingly by North Dakota's oil fracking boom. Thus were prairie towns on sudden steroids and man camps bursting with pent-up testosterone. By the time Doug met his awful fate in December 2013, the wild black gold rush around the Bakken oil fields had peaked, but investors looking for a big payday wouldn't have known that yet. And with great wads of eager cash, they chased a stake in what they hoped might be billions still in the ground. Apparently, Doug Carlisle was one of them. According to his family, he got turned on to oil by a friend who knew a guy.

He told us about North Dakota. Hey, it's booming there. You should go check things out and see what's happening. First, Doug partnered in a trucking company that served North Dakota's many oil rigs. An outfit called Blackstone, started by the guy his friend introduced him to. And then, Opportunity Knocked. One of those opportunities of a lifetime, ordained from above, according to Doug. The whole thing kind of fell into his lap,

and I think he thought that that was his calling from God is to move forward in that lease. An oil lease that is. A lease that would give Doug and any partners he could bring in the exclusive right to drill for oil on 640 acres of land on the MHA Indian Reservation. The catch was that sort of opportunity doesn't come cheap. So you had to raise some money. Oh yeah, the lease was almost two million dollars. And to raise that, Doug Carlyle tapped his friends around Washington state, his business partners, even his kids. I put a hundred thousand dollars into it and it wasn't for a return on it or anything else to help him with his dream to fulfill that. But the next step to fulfilling Doug's dream was even more daunting.

Finding investors to pay for drilling as many as eight wells on the property. And that price was much steeper, more than $100 million. But the potential payoff was immense. And Doug firmly believed God's will, a reward for his faith. We thought we were walking on water, you know, with a whole deal. We thought, this is a miracle. I remember him telling us, you know, I'm going to make millions of dollars and this is going to be it. And this is going to be for our family. And, you know, we're all going to be rich. We sat on the couch one day and he said, what would you do if you had all the money

you could ever want? I said, so if we had this money, then we would use it to serve the Lord, to serve ministries, to serve people, our family. But now all those good intentions, all those dreams were gone. Now detectives slogged through the paperwork on Doug Carlisle's desk. Those documents in Arabic? Turned out to be a scam a conman was trying to run on Doug. But Doug, they could see, had been making promises, too, to investors. Promises he couldn't keep. And he must have known it. 100% return practically overnight? Impossible. Meaning these were partners who would come in and now he may have owed them a tremendous amount of money. Correct. They may have a reason to be pretty mad at him. And our suspect list kept growing. How many partners did that guy have

anyway? About 10 that we could find. There may be more. Detective Burbridge began calling Doug's partners and discovered, though most of them lived in or around Washington, any one of them who could be considered a person of interest was hundreds or thousands of miles away from Spokane the night Doug was murdered. It concerned me greatly. I just don't believe in coincidences like that. Well, it's a coincidence that they just happened to be not there. Correct.

In other words, they may have planned not to be there when something was going to happen. Yes, sir. Where do you go? I mean, do you know which one to target? I was running this investigation eventually in about eight directions, trying to eliminate a lot of business partners, seeing if Mr. Carlisle had a secret life. Did he owe somebody else some money because he had a lot of failed business dealings in his other businesses? And so I had a lot of concerns. Angry ex-business partners?

Angry current business partners? And what, if anything, did she have to do with it? Yeah. I mean, obviously I didn't know at the time what he was doing. Coming up, detectives learn about a charismatic couple knee-deep in Doug's oil venture. They look like Ken and Barbie. They're perfectly white teeth and they're tans.

Did they know anything about the murder? And then, finally, investigators have someone to question. I'd researched his criminal history and knew that he had a very significant criminal history, so I was concerned that was he my hitman? We're going to start talking about some things honestly here. Okay, that's fine. People are telling me you're the shooter. Alberta Carlisle was inconsolable. Instantly, that night, that night, I lost everything. Alberta's eldest daughter, Melanie, left her own family for a while to stay with her mom, try to keep her sane. She would wake up screaming every single night, and there was nothing I could do besides just hold her. It was horrible.

The very thing that Carlisle's hope would create wealth, security, happiness, and brought instead nothing but grief. But remember, this, the evidence suggested, was a hit job. Somebody must have ordered Doug's execution. So now the detectives tried to figure out who. Do you guys have any disputes with anybody? Yes. Inevitable, probably, when high-stakes investors go after a prize like an oil lease.

And Doug had been promising potential investors returns that, so far, just hadn't materialized. Any number of partners might have felt they'd been taken for a ride. But who? Alberta, who is no longer a suspect, offered a possibility. Who do you have a dispute with? His name is James Henriksen. James Henriksen. He was the man who'd gotten Doug interested in the oil play in the

first place. The man who, with his wife Sarah, were known as the Barbie and Ken of the oil patch. This guy worked for them. His name is Rick Airy. For lack of a better term, they stuck out like a couple of turds in a punch bowl. Well, one way to put it.

James met Sarah at a drive-thru coffee stand. She was a barista. What was he like? He was very cool, calm, collected, you know. Older man, good looking. He was fun. He had fun and we'd always go out. It was fun. It was fun and we'd always go out. He was nice.

It was easy. You know, I never thought I'd ever marry him or go do business with him. But that's what she did. They moved to the oil patch in 2011, got married in Minot, North Dakota. And by 2013, he was the charismatic face of a major trucking operation called Blackstone. And she was the blonde on his arm and a senior company official.

Sarah signed the checks. Blackstone was the business Doug first invested in before he got interested in the oil lease. It was a big operation, a hundred trucks hauling water to and from oil fracking sites, very profitable. James let it be known that he was backed by a billion-dollar trust fund. You know, I was like, this guy's a winner. A lot of money around, they were doing well. Absolutely. Was the company making money?

Yes, it sure seemed like it. And James was tough and buff and all man. It'd be 20 degrees outside, and he'd be wearing a T-shirt. Everyone else has got a little shiver. He's like standing there shivering, but he's making sure his arms are pumped up. He's a buff guy. Yeah, he wants you to see his guns. He's showing them off, and then they're perfectly white teeth, and they're tans.

They look like Ken and Barbie. They didn't fit in at all. Not a nickname Sarah took to, mind you. No, I feel like I have somewhat of a brain. I don't want to just be called a Barbie. Well, you're living in a town of men. 92 to 1. All jacked up on testosterone.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was rough. I hated it. It was miserable. Every day was a plan on how to get out. With him, presumably? Well, yeah. I mean, we wanted to leave the oil field, but he just saw so much opportunity and money. He's just like, one day we'll get there.

Doug Carlyle liked James and Sarah's entrepreneurial style a lot. So when the chance to buy an oil lease came up, they went in on it together. James kicked in $600,000. Doug, only $40,000. They needed $2 million, remember. Yet Doug was saying he'd be taking over. There were disputes then over control and money, and accusations flew. In fact, said Doug's son, Seth. He basically said, I'm concerned with what James is going to try to do. That was serious. And he said that, you know, if anything happens to me, you know, it's James Hendrickson. But like the other partners, James Hendrickson was far away when Doug was killed.

700 miles away in Watford City, North Dakota, detectives pinged his phone, confirmed it. And then something happened that seems straight out of some noir detective novel. Detective Burbridge put out a plea for information from anybody who had done business with Doug Carlisle. And what do you know? In walked a guy who could just as easily have been a murder suspect himself. Robert, thanks for coming down voluntarily. His name was Robert DeLeo, career criminal gang member and sometimes a police informant. He'd served time in prison on manslaughter, drug,

weapons charges. I'd researched his criminal history and knew that he had a very significant criminal history, so I was concerned that was he my hitman or what was his involvement in this? DeLeo knew Doug Carlisle. He also knew James Henriksen. Why was he here? To tell the cops, just in case they were wondering, that he didn't have anything to do with the murder. Did you shoot Doug? No, no.

Did you drive somebody up there to shoot Doug? No, I had nothing to do with it. Nothing. But Burbridge had seen a thing or two. He pushed. Well, we're going to start talking about some things honestly here. Okay. And I'm going to have a heart-to-heart with you. Okay, that's fine, that's fine.

People tell me you're the shooter. As a hell no. You know what? That night I was in Watford City, North Dakota. You went after him pretty hard, right? Actually accused him of murder? I did. How did he respond to that?

He denied it and didn't even flinch. Did you think he was your guy? I did not think he was the guy. So why'd you do that? Sometimes you do things, try to pressure people or put them under pressure to see their reaction, and he did not flinch. The detectives asked DeLeo to take a polygraph, and he did. Did he pass the test?

Yes, he did. So, curious, certainly. But a real lead or a dead end? Hard to know. So Burbridge and his team of investigators kept working other leads. And Christmas happened, sort of. It was really a rough Christmas. I look back on pictures.

We had smiles on our faces, but you weren't really smiling. And my mom, it was so hard to watch her because she wanted to give the grandkids gifts, but she was just like, almost like a zombie. You can't just not have Christmas, you know? But nobody felt like it. But grief wasn't all the family was feeling. A debilitating fear took hold, too.

Whoever killed their patriarch might not be done. We armed ourselves. I spent about $10,000 on a security camera system around the house. Went out and bought a attack dog, a German Shepherd. Meanwhile, the detectives hit the road. And that's when they discovered something truly shocking. Doug Carlisle wasn't the only victim of the weird goings-on around the oil patch. Coming up, for this investigator, a tantalizing tip at his fingertips.

I came up and basically said, beware of these two people. And then, a potential suspect gives cops the brush off. He leaned out the door and slapped me on the shoulder at the door. When Dateline continues. Spokane Police Detective Mark Burbridge called in the troops. A few hours after the execution-style killing of Doug Carlisle in the kitchen of his big house on Spokane's South Hill, it was all too clear this had to have been a professional hit.

Burbridge would need all the help he could get. And now every available investigator, nearly 20 of them, chased the scattered clues. Did you actually need them all? Yes, I kept them busy. One detective, his whole job was to try to identify that white van. Remember the white van the neighbors saw? The van was unique enough because it was an after-factory extended van that they make for certain professions. Okay. And eventually, once we were able to identify the make and model, we had a Washington DOL provide us with all the vans registered in Spokane County, and there were 75 of them. Which possibly fit that description. Yes, sir.

Of course, every one of those vans had to be tracked down. And that welding glove, the one found outside a back gate? Maybe the killer dropped it as he escaped, or maybe it just happened to be there. They swabbed it for DNA anyway. They scoured social media, the internet, looking for connections, looking for anything. And then one night after Christmas, a couple of weeks after the murder. I was at my desk and I got a hit on what's called a rip-off report, which I'd never heard of. But I clicked on it and a flyer came up that basically said, beware of these two people. What do you know?

The Ken and Barbie of North Dakota's oil patch, James Hendrickson and his wife Sarah Creveling, Doug's primary North Dakota partners. It said they're known frauds, they're running fraud schemes in North Dakota, don't do any business. Of course, as the detectives had figured out by now, rivalries, disputes, grievances were rife around that oil lease project in which Doug and James and others were involved.

The ripoff report was put out as a flyer in stores and businesses all around the oil patch. It was payback, apparently, by one particularly disgruntled former partner. But then, not everybody was a Boy Scout. James, for example, had a criminal record going back to his teens. Anyway, when Detective Sesnick read the flyer, his eye landed on a very curious detail. One of James' employees, a man named Casey Clark, had up and disappeared. I printed it off and handed it to Mark and said, hey, what do you think about this? What did you think about that?

It was the first time we'd ever heard of that name. So, who was Casey Clark? He was funny, well-mannered. Didn't take long to find out. Casey was an old friend of James Hendrickson. He'd moved to the oil patch specifically to work for Hendrickson at Blackstone, James' trucking company. Rick Airy knew him well.

So what'd you do, the two of you? We'd go up to the bar. We'd chase the girls. We'd do the normal things a guy would do during a boom, you know. Rick and Casey were field superintendents for the trucking company, which Sarah was helping to run. How were you involved in the business? I worked directly with, like, the accountant to make sure they got signed off so we could get paid. You know, make sure payroll was turned in on time to the accountant. So I was sort of the middleman for all the paperwork.

But you were really kind of a minor partner, if I can put it that way. It was the James show, for sure. As much as people saw me all the time. Time off was rare. Eventually, Rick, Ari, and Casey made secret plans to work for a rival trucking company. He was extremely worried about James finding out about this whole transition. On February 22, 2012, Casey dropped briefly into Blackstone's headquarters and then was gone. So, did he leave in a huff or was it something else?

Because nobody ever saw him again. No sign of him at all. He'd been missing for about a year, almost two years at that point. Was Hendrickson ever questioned about it? He had been questioned extensively and actually taken a polygraph with the North Dakota law enforcement. And it passed? Yes. Still, James Hendrickson had to know something about Casey Clark and Doug Carlisle. And so the two detectives got in the car and drove 700 miles to Watford City, North Dakota. With the wind chill, I believe it was 60 below when we were there. Their destination, the home of James Henriksen and his Sarah. We went to the side door. From there you can see the garage, and in the garage was a two-year-old Bentley,

flat tires kind of almost laying on its belly. A Bentley, an almost new Bentley? Yes. Obviously not taken care of at all? No. Sarah answered the door, very pleasant, said the detectives, and went to get James. How did James Hendrickson greet you? Did he, you know, tell you a story? Did he sit you down for a cup of tea? What? He leaned out the door and slapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, it's too bad you drove all that way. My attorney told me not to talk to you. And then he shut the door. And you got nothing? Got nothing. Got nothing except a

kind of a rude reception, which might've told you something or not? He's a big man. He was probably 5'10", 250 pounds of steroided rock muscle. He bragged he was benching over 500 pounds, and he looked like it. But I don't intimidate, and just kind of grew werewolf fangs when he reached out and tried to belittle me. But nothing to do but suck it up and drive those 700 miles back home again, empty-handed.

Along the way, Detective Sesnick got a blood clot. It nearly killed him. A month after Doug Carlisle's murder, they had suspects. Oh, yes. But nothing was coming together. Coming up, finally, a clue. And it's a big one. The very top of the paper is the word glove.

And then there's show getaway route on Google Earth. Practice with pistol. What killer makes a to-do list? Who does it point to? Jackpot. Jackpot. Back from North Dakota, suspicious but empty-handed, Spokane detectives Burbridge and Sesnick got back to grunt work,

Sesnick still recovering from a near-fatal blood clot. I got ordered to go home I don't know how many times over the next couple days, but obviously I wasn't going anywhere. And the case? Well, they knew they had something, but what exactly? It was just one of those cases where we knew we were on the right track, but we also knew that there was a lot of work left. And for the Carlisles, a lot of grief.

Alberta was a barely functioning mess. I didn't lose just my dad. I lost my mom, too, because she wasn't the same person for a really long time. And adding insult, Doug's secrets were exposed for the whole world to see. That big house on the South Hill? Heavily mortgaged. The fancy cars? Not paid for.

The paperwork that claimed he was worth millions? A facade. Doug Carlisle was flat broke. Hadn't even bought life insurance. Do you ever feel angry at all at Doug Doug Carlisle was flat broke. Hadn't even bought life insurance. Do you ever feel angry at all at Doug for not providing more, like an insurance policy or something? No, not at all.

Because he was a very good provider all the days that he was alive, and I really didn't believe in insurance policies like that. I believed in trusting the Lord for our finances, and that's what we did. Secrets, just another casualty, as the little army of detectives searched the neighborhood for clues. Like, for example, the strange find that turned up on the killer's escape path, that weirdly out-of-place welding glove. They swabbed it for DNA on the off chance, really, just a shot in the dark, that something in or on that glove might match a known person, like a felon, say, whose DNA would be stored in a data bank. And how about that? It did. What was the name? Timothy Sukow. Have you ever heard that name before?

I've never heard the name before. Who was Timothy Sukka? A violent individual been to prison for robbery. What did you think when you found this out? I thought this could be our guy. Was he local? He was local. He was working at IRS Environmental which is an asbestos removal company. They don't drive around in white vans by any chance at IRS do they? I checked that list and lo and behold IRS Environmental was one of the companies that owned a van that matched our van in the video. Well, well, well. What were the chances? Timothy Succo must have been the muscular man in black seen on this video, running for dear life toward the equally mysterious white van.

They looked him up. He lived in the suburbs. A wife, kids. His house was 10 miles from the murder scene. We had the SWAT team sitting on him for about 12 hours waiting for him to move because we didn't want to take him at his house. The potential of firearms. But when Suko and another man left the house, the police moved in to make the arrest. Here, a few hours later, the police photographed Suko's many tattoos. Mr. Suko is a very hardened prison-type individual, very large man, 275 pounds of solid muscle.

You have a few minutes. We got some paperwork to do and some stuff that we got to be in, okay? Tell you what's going on, for sure. When the interview began, detectives made no bones about it. They thought they had Suko dead to rights. Today is the day to help yourself out. I didn't come to you by accident. My killer left something up at the house and your DNA

is all over it. No joke. The van at your work that you drive is on my video up there. You're just scaring me now. You should be scared. that you drive is on my video up there. You guys are scaring me now. You should be scared.

You're looking at federal conspiracies to commit murder, fraud, life in prison. S***. S***, yeah. Do I need a lawyer before we even do anything? That's your choice. Probably be smarter. Some serious accusations you're making. At this point, we're probably beyond accusations.

You are under arrest. Okay. And you can help yourself out. You can take me to jail. We'll iron this out in court because you guys are out of your tree. I'm not kidding you about having your DNA. I'm not kidding you either, man. I have your DNA up there.

Let's go to jail and take it to court. Okay. Timothy Suka was done talking. And? He just looked me in the eye and laid his head down and went to sleep. Seriously? Seriously. It's like a big emotional release to him that it's finally over.

After that, the detectives rounded up some search warrants for Suka's house and his car. In his car, we found a very significant piece of evidence. What was that? It was a piece of notebook paper with a list of items to be done. At the very top of the paper is the word glove with a question mark. And then there's statements about wheel man and wing man, show getaway route on Google Earth, practice with pistol. That's almost like a confession, right, on a notepad, right?

What killer makes a list of to-do list? It was a to-do list of how to prepare to go do this murder. What did you think when you saw that? It's almost Hollywood-like. It was kind of shocking to find that. This is a month after the murder and we arrest who we believe is our shooter and he has a to-do kill list in his car. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Suko also had a storage unit where a surveillance camera picked up a white van pulling up soon after the murder. Suko had to be their shooter.

Question was, who put him up to it and why? Suko wouldn't tell them, refused to say a word. So then they got a search warrant for his phone. His contact list said James in ND. Jackpot. Jackpot.

So that was the first time we had ever connected him with Henriksen. James and Sarah arrived to become the Ken and Barbie of the oil patch, and before long, one man is missing, another is dead. And the suspected hitman has James on speed dial. And as for Sarah, there was a shock in store for her, too. I mean, emotionally difficult to deal with. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's ruined my life. Coming up, Sarah becomes suspicious about her husband. Did you think at the time, I wonder if James had something to do with this? It seemed fishy to me. Then she gets a call from the sheriff.

He said, you need to come to my office right this second. When Dateline continues. Sometimes the best detective is named Luck. A drop welding glove leads to a tattooed presumed hitman named Timothy Succo, whose phone provides a direct connection to the man who may have ordered the murder of Doug Carlisle, James Henriksen in North Dakota. Investigators were now able to rule out all of Doug Carlisle's business partners in Washington State. By this point, did you feel as if you had the outlines of what the conspiracy was? I thought we had a pretty good idea of what had actually been going on, but it turned out to be a lot more. A sentiment which, as the investigation turned rapidly back to North Dakota, Sarah Creveling, aka Mrs. James Henriksen, could have put in exactly the same words, but for more personal

reasons. Best I remember is there was rumors of James having an affair. It's an old story, of course. Husband cheats on wife with a younger woman, even younger than Sarah, who was only in her 20s. What was it like to hear that he was cheating on you in the first place? Well, I mean, that was hurtful, but it was so off the wall, I just didn't believe it. Like generations of wives before her, until the truth was impossible to avoid. What was that like to hear? Horrific. And especially when I found out with who, I just thought absolutely not. Like no way. Wouldn't believe it.

Wouldn't believe it. I mean, she was like my little sister. This is her, the young woman in the unpleasant little triangle. But she wasn't just some other woman. This is Peyton Martin, daughter of Tex Hall, the chief of the MHA nation, on whose tribal land was the oil lease, the one James and Doug Carlyle wanted so badly. Peyton was 19. You knew her? Yeah, I had vacation, family vacation with her quite a bit. In fact, here they are in Hawaii. James in the water, Sarah there on the paddleboard, and there on another board was Peyton. I think I found a picture of her on Facebook where she was pregnant, and so I called her and asked her, and she said it's none of my business, but if it's my husband's, then get over it. Peyton denied saying that, by the way.

But when the baby was born, a very healthy and happy-looking little boy, James and Peyton named him... Bentley, of all things. Bentley. Just like that expensive automobile James bought for Sarah, then left in the garage with flattened tires. You can't make it up? It's weird. It's so strange. Bentley. Yeah. As you can see, he was the one who wanted the car and the name and the show. Chief Tex Hall, as you might imagine, was not pleased about any of that. He banished James from the reservation. But there was something neither Tex nor Sarah knew

just then. Not just that the Spokane cops were investigating Sarah's wayward husbands. Out on the North Dakota prairie, another lawman had been poking around for more than a year. Homeland Security agent Derek Trudell had heard from a colleague about the missing Casey Clark and the ripoff report and other possible crimes. He told me the story and it just sounded, it sounded unbelievable is what it did. Derek Trudell was hooked. So by the time Burbridge started showing up, Trudell could tell him a thing or two about James Henriksen. How would you describe him?

Yeah, I mean, he comes across as a... You're at a loss for words. I mean, you could say that he comes across as a used car salesman, but that's really not fair to used car salesmen. I mean, the guy is just... He's a scumbag. By the time Doug Carlisle was murdered, Trudell had, really just coincidence,

been on James' trail for more than a year, looking into possible illegal drug imports and the mysterious disappearance of friend and employee Casey Clark. He had to look like Hendrickson was behaving like some sort of latter-day Wild West outlaw. He's a sociopath. Above all that, I mean, the guy's a coward. You know, he didn't get his hands dirty in any of it.

Trudell already suspected Hendrickson may have ordered someone to kill Casey Clark. Then Doug Carlisle was murdered out in Washington, and Trudell began working with Detective Burbridge, if Timothy Succo was the hitman in Spokane, did he kill Casey Clark, too? Agents pulled records of all the cell phones being used around the time of Casey's disappearance in North Dakota, and they checked Mr. Succo's number at the time against the phone records they had acquired back when Mr. Clark disappeared, and Mr. Succo's number was in those records. Meaning, Succo was in the area when K.C. Clark disappeared. Sarah, meanwhile, her marriage falling apart, had begun to harbor suspicions about James, and not just his cheating ways.

It went back to the day James told her about Doug Carlisle's death. He just walked into the room and was like, Doug's dead. Straight-faced. Nothing. It was the strangest thing ever. Did you think at the time, I wonder if James had something to do with this?

You know, it seemed fishy to me. It did. But again, you don't... Your life's already crumbling. You don't want to think that your husband could be doing anything like that, you know? I mean, why didn't you get out of that marriage? I was scared of him. You know, everyone wants the fairytale.

Everyone wants to be married with a good life with kids. And it kind of came crashing quickly. So finally, Sarah started talking about divorce. I told him. And he'd be like, how are you going to feel if you divorce me and you find out all this isn't true and the kid's not mine? And he's like, you'll be the horrible person and I'm going to destroy you. And he was very threatening.

Was he serious? A month after the murder of Doug Carlyle, January 2014, Sarah got a call from her local sheriff. He said, you need to come to my office right this second. Coming up, Sarah gets some frightening news. Homeland Security was waiting for me, and they were like, their husband is trying to have you killed today. What was that moment like for you?

It doesn't seem real. It's like a movie. Sarah Kredley didn't know which way to turn. With investigators in two states closing in, her husband, James, had vanished. Their marriage was on life support, and she'd just been summoned by her county sheriff. So I went into his office, and Homeland Security was waiting for me.

And they were like, sit down. We need to talk to you. And they said, we just received in the last 10 minutes that your husband is trying to have you killed today. Sarah? On a hit list? But why? Sarah had a pretty good idea. He wanted all the money. And he knew I had it locked up with the divorce getting ready. So get her out of the way and we'll get all the money. And he knew I had it locked up with the divorce getting ready.

So get her out of the way and we'll get all the assets. Until they could run to Brazil. But Sarah, marked for death? Yes, the sheriff told her. She was supposed to die that very day. What was that moment like for you?

You can't even describe it. It doesn't seem real. It's like a movie. I sat there and spoke with them all day and I'd asked, can I call someone? Like, I don't know what to do. They said, nope,

we have to take you into a safe home. Call no one? Not even your mom? Nope, no one, because they were afraid that James would harass my family and friends to find my location, because once he realized I wasn't responding to him,

he went into panic mode. He didn't know if I was working with the police, if I was dead, if I was on the run. The cops knew her husband was lurking somewhere out there, but they couldn't find him. He was harassing a lot of my friends and family, trying to see if they'd heard from me, which they hadn't. Now the cops

were Sarah's best hope to stay alive. They tried a ruse to throw James off the scent. They even drove me to the border in Canada to make it look like I had, like, jumped the border to see if James would chase me. He did not.

But where was he? No one seemed to know. With Sarah close enough so they could actually see her, investigators tried to track her husband's phone. You're sitting in Homeland Security's office, and you're listening to them ping him across the state, and he's on the run, he's on the move. I think a car backfired in the parking lot, and all these agents pull their guns out and

run to the windows, because they didn't know James was in town. It's a surreal thing. Even if they found him, though, they couldn't charge him with murder or conspiracy. Didn't have enough evidence for that. But they did have something quite useful. A few days earlier, search warrant in hand, state and federal agents, including Homeland Security's Derek Trudell, descended on James and Sarah's empty house while they were out of town. What'd you find in the house? Found a lot of financial records. Found some firearms. Some firearms? Yeah. I mean, I can't remember the exact number. But it doesn't matter if there was one there.

He was a convicted felon, right? Correct. Grounds for immediate arrest. Agents fanned out around North Dakota. And a few days later, in a little place called Mandan, there he was. What was he doing? He was over at his girlfriend's friend's apartment. That is, the apartment of a friend of Peyton, the chief's daughter.

We had guys staked out around it doing surveillance on it, and as we drove by, I recognized him. And that was him. On the street? Walking to the street, yeah. We stopped, we hopped out, told him to turn around, show me his hands. James Hendrickson was surrounded by cops with guns drawn and pointed. So what happened then was very odd. He had his hands in his box and so kept telling him to show

me his hands, but he wouldn't show me both hands at the same time. And he's got this stupid smirk on his face. Like he's playing with you. Yeah. So then eventually enough was enough. So we just helped him to the ground, put handcuffs on him. Helped him to the ground? He's just smiling up at me and asked me, you know, like, hey, how are you? He instantly went into, like, trying to charm us. He was trying to pull a con on the cop. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he thought he was going to build rapport with me in a relationship and, you know, we were going to be buddies. Bizarre, though the arrest was, James Hendrickson was at least in custody.

And Sarah, no choice, they told her, had to stay in deep cover herself, hiding in a secret shelter, unable to call friends or even her parents, just in case the hit was still a go. I had a bunch of friends call the sheriff and the police. They were asking, they said, we think that he's had her killed I mean will you drive around and look in ditches because no one was allowed to know they wanted him to think

that it had gone through to see what he would do I can't imagine what it would be like for your family it was hard for them and James agreed very civilized to talk to investigators. But what he did not do was tell them the

real story of what he'd been up to. It had to do with the cartel and the M.A. I don't know about this, right? Mexican Mafia and drug cartel and the MA. What's it? I don't know if that is right. Mexican Mafia and drug cartel.

He gave us, I mean, it was a story. I mean, he talked about the cartels, the triad, I mean, all these organized crime groups that he implied having connections to. I don't know. Like I said, I mean, if I just go through with it, then I'm not worried about it. You know what I mean? You guys put all the charges that you want on me,

and if I don't say anything, then they don't say anything. And they kill me in prison or whatever. Did he think you were buying it? Oh, I think in his mind, he thought that we were buying it. But it was so outlandish. Nobody's going to believe that. Trouble was, investigators in North Dakota and Spokane still didn't have enough solid evidence to tie James Hendrickson to the murders of Casey Clark and Doug Carlisle. For that, they'd have to keep digging while Hendrickson waited in jail.

That is, if they could keep him there when he had other ideas. Coming up, preparing for the great escape. They knocked out that window, dropped some bed sheets down to the ground. Nine stories. Oh my God. When Dateline Continues. James Hendrickson was one of the stranger perps Homeland Security agent Derek Trudell had ever encountered and had an attitude. But as Trudell discovered,

Hendrickson was also an inept criminal. Rarely seemed to get his illegal schemes to work. It's almost like a tragic comedy when you see this group of people that were involved with this case. Like the time they put out a hit on another business partner, but the hitman ran off with the money. The guy rips him off for $10,000. And as he said, it was the easiest $10,000 he ever made.

Gradually, Agent Trudell and Spokane detectives Burbridge and Sesnick amassed circumstantial evidence to show Hendrickson, for all his criminal fumbling, did orchestrate two murders, Casey Clark and Doug Carlisle. But it was not quite enough circumstantial evidence to take to trial. Until finally, the break they needed. Timothy Succo, remember him? Admitted he killed both victims on orders from James Henriksen. And the

middleman caved too. Robert DeLeo, the man who came snooping around the investigation a couple of days after the Carlisle murder and passed a polygraph. Which might say something about polygraphs. Now, DeLeo admitted he recruited Succo and transmitted

Henriksen's orders and the money. So how did Tim get paid for Casey's murder, do you know? It was cash. So, in September 2014, nine months after his arrest on weapons charges, James Henriksen was flown from North Dakota to Spokane, Washington, and charged with multiple federal counts of conspiracy, solicitation, and murder for hire in the deaths of Casey Clark and Doug Carlisle, and attempts on the lives of three more business partners.

He was not charged, however, with trying to kill his wife, Sarah, because, said the prosecutors, they went with the charges that were easiest to prove. So, Hendrickson was toast. Unless, as he sat in the Spokane jail awaiting trial, Hendrickson did his best to see that the trial would never happen. He tried to hire people to attack the marshal van that was transported in between our jail and the U.S. courtroom, shoot the driver, set fire to the van, and break him out the back of

it while the van's on fire. Good Lord. He was still letting on that he had a lot of money. And in jail, obviously, it doesn't take too long to find people that'll bite on that. Unfortunately he found one that also needed help with his current charges, so he turned him in pretty quickly. And thus the plan was foiled. Yes. one that also needed help with his current charges, so he turned him in pretty quickly. And thus the plan was foiled.

Yes. But Henriksen wasn't done. He was in a cell with another person suspected of murder. Our Spokane County Jail, there are windows at each of the cells. They knocked out that window, dropped some tied-together bedsheets down to the ground. Nine stories. Oh my God. Some people showing up for work at the jail saw the rope hanging out the window. Can you really see anybody squeezing

through a window that size? They're purposely designed so that an adult human head won't fit through that window, so there was no way they were getting out that window. They could have charged him for his escape attempts. They didn't. The prosecutor had bigger things to do. And finally, in January 2016, James Hendrickson encountered them. I was so mad I couldn't see straight. Doug Carlisle's still grieving family. I had to close my eyes several times and actually say a prayer.

God calmed me down. I wanted to put my hands on him for sure. Yeah, and then you'd be in trouble. It'd be worth it. On the Ahmed and Scott Jones were the federal prosecutors assigned to the case, and they were not exactly confident. Proving Casey Clark's murder was the toughest part that I was thinking of. We didn't have a body. We had no forensic evidence.

So to get a conviction, they'd need these two sketchy characters who allegedly on orders from Hendrickson had done some truly awful things. If they didn't tell the story and make the jury believe it, Hendrickson would get away with murder. But if they did tell it, what sort of credibility would a person like that have? My concerns are most important witness is going to admit that he killed two people, literally beat Casey Clark's brains out. So how do you handle that? You have to embrace it. Our number two witness has a tattoo on his back of him urinating on the headstone of the last guy that he killed. These are our two-star witnesses. Still, Tim Suko, the actual killer, was by far the more important witness.

After all, Suko could tell the jury chapter and verse about the many twisted and homicidal plots set in motion by James Henriksen. So, two nights before the trial was to begin, attorneys Jones and Ahmed went to see Suko, preparing for his testimony. And that's where it all went south. Suko is bipolar. He was laying down on the floor of the prison cell in a fetal position. And so this is two days before our star witness is going

to testify. And he's basically sucking his thumb on the floor of a jail cell. I mean, we're there at 10 o'clock at night trying to make sure that this guy gets his medication so he can effectively testify before jury. Would James Henriksen, the desperado of the oil patch, go free? Coming up, the entire courtroom stunned. I had decided long before then that James Hendrickson was crazy. I didn't know he was that kind of crazy. It was no easy task preparing Tim Succo to testify at the trial of the man accused of paying him to kill two people. He was off his meds. He was a mess emotionally. So when the trial began in federal court, no cameras allowed, the prosecutors held their breath.

And? Succo, back on his meds, came through. And in court, he repeated just what he said here in his pretrial interviews, that he met DeLeo when they both worked for the company that owned the white van they drove the night he shot Doug Carlisle. But a year before that job, he said, DeLeo told him he could make money for roughing up some guy in North Dakota. But then the boss, that is James Henriksen, changed the plan.

He started telling me about Casey. I was threatening Tom to leave the company and take some of the truckers with him. And that's when he asked me if I'd kill him. So when Casey

showed up at James' office before going on vacation, Suko was behind the door with a heavy truck jack. And I hit him back in the head. And he stumbled and fell. He tried to get up, and I hit him three, four more times. He stopped moving. They ditched Casey's truck in a nearby town, said Suko.

And then they took Casey's body to a lonely spot 20 miles out of town. Suko said he did the digging while Hendrickson stood nearby. I remember standing in the hall and he said something like, How much is this going to cost me? Hendrickson stood nearby. Anyway, he said he got the 20 grand and he burned the bloody clothes. Investigators found buttons and other evidence of that burn pile. But though they took Suko out to the prairie twice to look for the burial site, they never found Casey Clark's body. Casey Clark was simply killed for the reason that he just wanted to leave James Hendrickson's employment. He felt wrong.

So I'm going to kill him? Yeah, it was almost like a jealousy, cheating spouse kind of thing. And why, according to the prosecutors, did James Henriksen want Doug Carlisle killed? He really thought that the oil deal that they were involved with was worth tens of millions of dollars. And he thought that Doug Carlisle was standing in the way of him getting most, a large share of those tens of millions of dollars. Mr. Carlisle had already threatened Mr. Hendrickson that he was going to get him out of the oil drilling business. And that was the thing that triggered this whole business? Yeah.

They were each trying to get each other out of the deal. At the trial, prosecutors introduced hundreds of text messages, an almost play-by-play account, as the plan rolled out. You can watch a text message go from Hendrickson to DeLeo, and then the content is passed from DeLeo to Succo,

and then back the other way. Negotiations over payment, who's going to be there, does he have an alarm system? So when Doug Carlisle returned from church that evening in December, Suko was waiting. He'd brought a heavy welding glove in case back up and get in the house. And I saw Mrs. Carlisle come in the side from the hallway. She backed away. Mrs. Carlisle moved his hand and I fired.

It seemed like the fourth shot and he didn't move. I ran. I ran fast. And then, somehow the welding glove got left behind. The glove that revealed Sukho's DNA and broke the case. Without the glove, we would probably be unsolved to this day. And what could have happened then? James Hendrickson, according to prosecutors, was a very dangerous man, was actively planning more murders.

Eventually, they said, had Succo not lost his welding glove, Hendrickson might have become that worst of all criminals. A serial killer is someone who causes the death or murder of three people. And he certainly got an A for effort because he tried. There were about 11 people that we know of that he tried to have murdered. James Hendrickson's defense attorneys declined our request for an interview. But they blamed the murders on Succo and DeLeo, not Hendrickson, and essentially argued the jury should not believe two such unsavory characters.

Alberta Carlyle watched the trial play out day after day, same prayer on her lips. I prayed for justice for my husband. I prayed that the truth would come forth and that there would be a way to go on in life. Deliberations took less than a day. On all 11 counts, murder for hire, solicitation, conspiracy, and more, the jury found James Henriksen guilty. We wanted to jump up and down and clap, you know, as a family, because our whole family was there. It was great.

In the weeks that followed, Robert DeLeo, the go-between, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. When Timothy Suko, the hitman, faced the judge... The only thing that he ever asked for was that we do what we can to ensure that he was sent to a prison with appropriate mental health facilities so he could figure out what was wrong with him. Then in court, he turned around and faced Alberta. He said, please forgive me. I'm so sorry for what I've done. Did he seem genuine? He did. He said it in tears, and he said, I can't forgive myself, but can you forgive me?

And I told him yes. I said, I forgive you. And God forgives you. 30 years for Tim Succo. When it was James Hendrickson's turn, a ripple ran through the court. Would he, too, ask forgiveness, admit guilt, apologize, reveal the location of Casey Clark's body? Well, no, not a chance. He read a short story that was very graphic about abortion, so much so that everybody in the courtroom was very uncomfortable with what he was saying.

And I think he just did that to purposely upset people. I had decided long before then that James Hendrickson was crazy. I didn't know he was that kind of crazy. James Hendrickson received two consecutive life sentences. He is appealing. In August 2023, Hendrickson successfully petitioned the court to vacate two of his 11 convictions, but that ruling does not impact those life sentences. And here in the vast North Dakota grasslands, K.C Casey Clark's friends and family are still searching, vowing to stay with it until they find him. You just want to like, all right, James, you son of a bitch,

we're going to get him ourself. We don't need you. We're going to go bring him home, and we're going to finally get some closure for everybody here. And Alberta? Sometimes grief overwhelms me. You know, I'm just in a pile of tears. And I've not lived alone, ever. Takes some figuring out.

It takes some figuring out. Sarah, thoroughly investigated, was held blameless, not involved in James' violent conspiracies. Though in the community, and among some in law enforcement, suspicion lingers. In June 2017, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Sarah was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay over $340,000 in restitution. So as you look at all of these events

and you think, gosh, what sin did I commit to be in this spot? What would you say? I trusted a con artist. I trusted a sociopath. Since I married the monster, some people think I should be one too, but I'm not. Wreckage. Lots of it. Once upon a time, in a flat and gracious land where tough men wrestled for oil, murderous ambition

bubbled up with the crude and made a play as old as humankind. What was it all about, really? Why? Greed. Plain and simple, it just came down to greed. It was all about money. That's all for now.

I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.