Dateline NBC - Before Daylight

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

When college student Jesse Valencia is found murdered in a residential neighborhood, investigators are left without any answers in sight. But as police search for the truth, they are stunned to learn that one of their own might be involved. Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on April 24, 2020.

Tonight on Dateline. He kept telling me he was going to die young, but I never dreamed that he was going to die that way. Jesse's body was laying in between two houses on his back. It was obvious that this was a homicide. We had several suspects. I just thought his behavior reeked of guilt. An innocent man doesn't act like that.

He lied, lied and lied and lied. About sex, sex and sex. There are a lot of people that cheat. It doesn't make them a murderer. All of a sudden, this puzzle all came together. At the end of the day, no one else had a motive. Steve's on the phone and he's got a gun. He was crying. I said, fight this. This is crazy. A college student is murdered and detectives discover a trail leading uncomfortably

close to home. Oh my God, it's going to look bad. I'm Lester H, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with Before Daylight. He could have been sunbathing here in the grass, naked but for a pair of blue shorts. His face, turned up toward the June sky, was beautiful. It was afternoon by the time someone noticed him, though he'd been lying here, still, silent, since before daylight, here among the old rooming houses in Columbia, where University of Missouri students were winding down their school year. It was June 5, 2004. Back then, we were on pagers. Of course, I knew my boss's phone number, and it had a 911 behind it, and I was ordered to come to help investigate.

By the time the news got to Detective John Short, uniformed cops had strung up their yellow tape, were taking their pictures. What did they see? It was obvious to them at that point that this was a homicide. The medical examiner arrived. That's her there, sitting on the left. Dr. Valerie Rao waiting for her turn. When I got to the scene there were a lot of people watching what was going on. Even then, as she took it all in, the crowd, the yellow tape, the young male body lying there on the grass,

it was quite obvious to Dr. Rao this was a deliberate, determined killing. He had a gaping wound on his neck, and the blood was oozing out from there onto his neck. She looked closer. The cut across his throat was deep and not quite smooth, as if it had been made perhaps by a serrated knife. When we turned the body, I could see that the grass adjacent where he lay was blood soaked. So much blood.

But not exactly where the medical examiner expected it to be. There was no blood on the front of his body at all. Meaning what? Had to be a reason. She'd work on that. But who was he? No idea at all. Just this slender young man with unseeing eyes. There wasn't a lot known at all. We just know that we had a deceased individual. We were trying to garner information.

They sent officers around the neighborhood with a picture of the body. Did anyone know who he was? As a shocked afternoon deepened into evening, someone did know exactly who he was. The whole time, all day long, I kept having a funny feeling. Far away, in Kentucky, over the rural hills and down country roads, was a mother named Linda Valencia. She was eating dinner with her sister and fretting about her son, Jesse. I told my sister, I said, it's so weird that he's not calling me.

And she said, well, he's probably okay. She just said, you know Jesse. After dinner, Linda's sister dropped her off at her house, and then, it seemed, just a few minutes later. I saw her headlights coming back up the hill to my house, so I went to the door and opened it, and I remember laughing, and I asked her if she had missed me so much that she had to come back. But her sister wasn't smiling.

I said, is it Jesse? And she just, she never answered me. And I remember just backing away, and I just wanted to run. But of course there was no running. Not from this. The police wanted to talk to her. They said that they were sorry to inform me that my son had been killed. And I basically called him a liar,

and I said, it's not true. What's a person to say, to do, deny, deny? Her world collapsing around her, Jessie's mother fainted. In Columbia that June night, crime scene techs busied themselves behind the yellow tape while more cops scoured the neighborhood. They'd noticed a nearby apartment door propped open. And so they walked through it into a mystery that would turn their world upside down.

Coming up. From the time Jesse was six or seven years old, he told me, Mom, I'm not going to live to be very old. Did he tell you where that thought came from? He never did. And later, a surprising friendship

that would shock a city. Did it lead to murder? He said, Mom, guess who showed up on my doorstep? When he was about seven years old, Jesse Valencia asked his mom to sit down. And he said, Mom, I'm not going to live to be very old. He said, I'm going to die at a very young age. Did he tell you where that thought came from or why he thought that? He never did.

He just said he knew that he was going to die young. And now, at the age of 23, Jesse's awful prediction had come true. His half-naked body found lying in a lonely patch of grass so far from home. I never dreamed that he was going to die that way. Whatever happened to him, the investigators figured, must have started here, behind this open door down the block from the crime scene. It was the door to Jesse's apartment. Looked like Jesse may have flung it open, fleeing his killer.

We believe he was headed to a friend's house to get help. And his assailant chased him, caught up to him? Yeah. Attacked him? Yeah. Attacked him? Yes. And showed no mercy. To tales Linda could not bear thinking about. She was just 21 when she had Jesse.

The two of you kind of grew up together, right? Yeah, pretty much. From the time he was born, I took him everywhere with me. Just the two of them. And then a stepdad and two sisters and a family farm in Perivel, Kentucky, a one-stoplight town. Every store we went into, everybody knew him.

Everybody was hollering, hey, Jesse, how are you? Even three and four years old, he would just talk your head off about everything. Read about everything. Knew about everything. Linda's nickname for Jesse was College Prep. Kristen Aravello met Jesse on the school bus in high school. I think bright is a really great word to describe Jesse because of his intellectual brilliance, but also he just was a real bright light. Irrepressible.

Sort of kid who, if it was raining, would dance in it. Or, with Kristen, scrawl graffiti under the town bridge. Jesse just had this real and pure love of life. I can just remember thinking, like, this guy is going to do something big. Like, he's going to do big things.

Erin Bailey met Jesse at a school dance. They talked about movies and music. Jesse told her he wanted to get out of Paraville one day. He tried modeling after high school, proud he could do that. But, said Erin, he was always down to earth, always attentive. He'd get me to sing for him. Ave Maria was his favorite. How would he do that?

There were times he would call me at night, in the middle of the night, and be like, will you sing to me? And I'm like, it's 1.30 in the morning. But she didn't mind. Not really. Back then, she was a little bit in love with Jesse, even though she knew she wasn't his type. Jesse was gay and proud of it.

He loved who he wanted to love, and that's a brave way to be in life. He was the type of boy that would tell you exactly what he thought. Didn't hold back. No, he didn't. And Linda certainly thought he was brave when Jesse packed up the modeling and decided to go to college, first in his family to go. He ended up at the University of Missouri, which seemed as far away from Periville as could be. I was happy and excited that he wanted to do that, but I did not want him to go out of state.

And I just kept emphasizing to him that it was not going to be a good thing for us to be so far apart. No. And now the worst of her premonitions had come true. That lovely son of hers, that promise, horribly snuffed out. I mean, he was my whole life and I just couldn't believe that he was gone. Can you remember what it, what was it like for you?

It was just dread. Like I just wanted, whoever did this, I wanted like them to immediately be apprehended. Like it just was like this feeling of... Urgency. Yeah, of panic. But this one wasn't going to be quick or easy. Although, cause of death was perfectly obvious, said the medical examiner, the gaping knife wound in his neck. But other things were harder to explain.

Usually with knife injuries, one tends to get defense wounds on the hands, so you get knife injuries on the hands. But Jesse's hands were unmarked, which made the ME wonder, maybe Jesse hadn't been conscious when his throat was cut. They found him flat on his back.

If he was that way when the killer cut him, it would explain the lack of blood on his body. If he was standing, then the blood would run down the front of him or the back of him. And if he walked after he sustained the injury, then there would be blood on the bottom of his feet. There was none of this.

There was still one puzzling thing, a pattern of angry bruises across Jesse's chest and back and under his jaw. We had to think of all the possibilities of how this came about. So she sent his fingernail clippings and blue shorts off to the lab for testing and waited. And the detectives? Jesse was kind of a free spirit

from what I understand. Know your victim, investigators like to say. So they started digging, especially into Jesse's life in Columbia. And what they discovered was not so much a long list of enemies, but rather a long list of lovers. Coming up...

Some guy called in and said this kid was crying inconsolably. Tears in the night and persons of interest in the light of day. Ed Bradley admitted that him and Jesse had had sex the day before the body was found. Eric said something to the effect of, I wouldn't care if jolt of anxiety around Columbia, Missouri. Everyone was just so shaken. Barry Bumgarner, a local college professor and crime novelist, was like a lot of people here, full of questions.

There were several articles about, did this happen in broad daylight? Why didn't anyone see anything? And people wanted answers. So the Columbia Police Department worked with all deliberate speed on the few leads they could find. According to Jesse's phone records, the last call he'd made was around 3.15 in the morning. His neighbor, seen here on NBC affiliate KOMU, said not long after that, he heard arguing coming from Jesse's apartment. Just bumping, just like somebody stumbling

and kind of bumping into the wall, like, oh, oh, stop it, you know. Police found another witness who told them he'd seen something odd during the night. A young man walking barefoot near the crime scene. Was he the killer they were looking for? It was about a block or so away, maybe two, from the victim's house. Some guy called in and said this kid was crying inconsolably.

But who was he? Wasn't a lot to go on. So investigators started tracking down Jesse's friends, trying to piece together a portrait of his life in Columbia. He was a junior at Mizzou. Books on history piled up around his apartment. He had a lot of friends. You talked to a lot of them?

Talked to a lot of them, you know. He liked to party, like almost every other college student. Jesse loved to dance. And one of his favorite places was a local nightclub, where, just a few days before he died, he met someone new on the dance floor, an aspiring chef named Ed. Police asked Ed to come down to the station.

He readily admitted that him and Jesse had had sex the day before the body was found. And Jesse's friends said they saw Jesse and Ed leave a party together just a few hours before Jesse was killed. So Detective Short watched Ed very closely in the police interrogation room when he swore he'd left Jesse alive and well on the street outside the party before heading on home. Ed said his roommate had seen him coming in. What did you think about him?

He was an emotional mess, is how I would describe him. Constantly crying, very upset, very scared. The fear of, why am I here? Did he have something to hide? It was a knife that killed Jesse. Ed was a chef. He owned a whole bag of very sharp knives. But it was Ed's roommate, a man called Eric Thurston, who really got investigators' attention. Eric had his own shady past, a rap sheet for drug possession, a stealing, and fighting words about the murder.

Eric Thurston, in his interview, actually said at one point, I could kill somebody, but I have too much faith in humanity or something to that effect. When he talked to police, Eric didn't even try to hide his dislike for Jesse. He said something to the effect of, I wouldn't care if he was dead or I don't care if he's dead, talking about Jesse. Why would he say that to the police? Even more suspicious, Eric told them he'd left Ed at home that night to go out on a date. That would have been around the time Jesse was killed. So investigators searched

the men's home, took DNA samples, and waited. There was this other kid named Zev, I think. Zev Fine, too. Another lead. Zev. A rabbi's son, just 19.

Jesse's friend said he called Zev his boy toy. Police asked him to come down to the station. You know, Zev was very quiet, very low-key. And he did not appear to be a violent person at all. You know, not that

that can't be hid. Zev told them he wasn't even gay. He and Jesse were just friends, not lovers or anything. So he had no reason to be jealous or angry. And anyway, said Zev, he was at home all night. He said that he got up the next morning to have breakfast with his parents. He lived in his parents' house. He lived in his parents' house. Yeah. The only, you know, the only one of the questions posed to him was, well, can you get out of the house without your parents seeing it? And he said, yeah, I can. Phone records showed that Zev had tried to call Jesse several times that night, and Zev failed a voice stress test

indicating he might be lying about something. Not admissible in court, mind you, but certainly curious. At this point, just a few days into the investigation, detectives had three persons of interest, but it didn't feel like they were any closer to solving the murder. So every day we would have what's called a, we nicknamed it the round table. All the detectives would sit down and discuss the leads they had followed the day before, where we're going, what we need to do. Sometimes those round tables get a little heated.

You know, when you end up working 20 hours a day and taking three hour naps for days in a row, people get a little edgy. But, a hundred miles away from the hurly-burly of the police investigation, way off in St. Louis, it suddenly dawned on a friend of Jesse's. He had a clue for the police, something that might actually help crack the case. Jesse and I chatted two, three times a week at least. Patrick Rogers had met Jesse before he went to college. They'd bonded over indie bands and politics, but mostly chatted online. Which allowed you to keep a record of these chats, right?

Yes. I realized that I have these chat logs and that the chat logs say everything. It's time-stamped. I knew it was all right there. What was all right there? Well, Jesse had revealed a secret, a secret lover. He had not revealed a name, but this was something bigger than a name. How would the Columbia Police Department react once they heard that Jesse's secret lover was one of their own. Coming up, Jesse's late-night visitor. He was excited about it.

Excited? I mean, the guy was coming by on duty. Linda Valencia was quite familiar with all of her son Jesse's relationships. She was rare among mothers. She knew things, intimate things, that mothers don't often get to hear. Jesse told her everything. We talked about anything and everything. Jesse, sometimes Jesse would talk to me about things I didn't want to talk about. He had no filter on his mouth when he was talking to me.

So Linda had her own ideas about who police should be talking to. And it wasn't the aspiring chef or his roommate or the rabbi's son. The detective called me on the phone. She was asking me if I knew of anybody that had anything against Jesse. And I told her, yes, I do. And I said, he's a cop. Linda said she didn't know the officer's name. But she told the detective that two months before the murder, she got a call at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Jesse was on the other end. Excited. He said, Mom, I've been arrested. And I said, oh, my God. And he said, well, I was at a party, and it got too noisy, and the cops came. Jesse, outspoken as always, protested. Didn't go over well. And he told me if I opened my mouth again, he was going to arrest me.

And I said, do what you got to do. And he arrested me. At the police station, said Jesse, the officer wrote him a ticket, told him he'd have to appear in court later, and then released him. All of which would have made for a memorable story. But then, a few hours later, Jesse called Linda again. And he said, Mom, guess who showed up on my doorstep?

And I just said, Who? And he said, That cop that arrested me last night. And I said, so what's going on? It was the beginning of, Jesse didn't know what exactly. It was personal, intimate, and secret. The sort of relationship you instant message one of your best friends about. And all of the time he spoke with me, he wouldn't say his name. He only referred to him as Columbia's finest.

He was excited about it. Excited? He was. I mean, the guy was coming by on duty. He would stop off, they would have sex, and then he'd go back to work. Yeah, and Jesse found all that exciting, and I'm seeing this as a bunch of red flags. Oh, yes. Linda said she saw those too.

Jesse kept talking about how when I ask him where he lives, he kind of dances around it. Or if I ask him anything about family or anything. He said he constantly wants to talk about my personal life, but he never wants to talk about his. And then, Linda said, Jesse discovered why. Why his secret policeman lover wouldn't reveal anything about his own life. He was married. He said he's married, he has a child, and it's wrong. And he said, I'm not going to see him anymore. I just want him to stay away.

So he tried to cut it off. Yeah, he tried to cut it off then. He wouldn't be party to someone cheating. And I remember his exact words to me were, I'm not going to be someone's other woman. And he was mad. And he had every right to be mad. And Patrick had proof Jesse felt that way.

It was all there in their online chats. Patrick printed them out, brought them to the Columbia Police Headquarters. What was their first reaction when you said, I think this is a cop? They didn't seem surprised. I would have expected a bigger reaction. That's because just a couple of hours after they identified Jesse's body, before they talked to Patrick or Linda,

police had gotten an anonymous tip about the affair. Had you ever investigated a fellow cop before? Not for homicide, no. No. Do you remember the first thought that came into your head when you realized, I'm going to have to do that? I think my first thought was, we need to get this right. That's the second thought.

The first thought was, oh my God, it's going to look bad. Coming up, a witness searching photos for persons of interest has an unexpected close encounter. He goes, I don't need to look at those pictures. I passed him in the hallway when you walked me over here. When Dateline continues. On the brow of a hill on the family farm, Linda Valencia visits her son. Visits the memory, still so very raw, of the bright spark he was in her life, of the day they told her he was dead, of the day of his funeral, the day they put him in the ground here.

I just sat there and just held on to the casket handle, and I wouldn't turn it loose. And there were so many people that came. I mean, look how many people love Jesse. And I had a letter that I wrote him with a picture. And I asked Linda if I could just put that in the ground with him. she said of course and so my heels were sinking into the mud and I couldn't stand up and I was watching one of the most important people in my life be covered up with dirt and she sang his favorite song for him. One last time. And how do you measure a loss like this?

The gap it tears in the lives of people, and in the history of things that might have been, had he been around. In Columbia, Missouri, Detective Short was measuring, not lost, but an explosive new lead. A phantom cop. Who was he? And then he got word that one of Jesse's college lovers, a guy named Andy, had seen Jesse with the mystery cop up close. They were at Jesse's apartment. He says, they're in bed together, and he hears a knock at the door. Guy walks in and puts a flashlight on him.

He said when he saw the flashlight come on, he could see that it was a police officer. And then he attempted to have sex with Andy, and Andy was like, no, I don't want no part of this. According to Andy, Jesse and the officer had sex anyway, and when it was over, the cop had a warning.

He looked at both of them and says, you don't talk about this. Don't tell anyone. And he left. Surely Detective Short figured this Andy would be able to identify the officer. So the detective and his partner brought Andy into the precinct and showed him a book of photos, the entire Columbia Police Department. But this was weird. Pretty obvious he's not really looking at the pictures. He's just kind of thumbing through them. And it was pretty apparent to me that he was nervous about me being in the interview room.

So I just got up and walked out. Leaving Andy alone with the detective's female partner. Kind of looks through the pictures again. She says, you're really not looking at me. He goes, I don't need to look at those pictures. I passed him in the hallway when you walked me over here. When she came out of that room, what'd she say? She looked at me and she goes, you're not going to believe this.

It's Steve Rios. Steven Rios, a police officer two and a half years on the force, an up-and-comer, active in several police charities with what looked like an exemplary record. And of course, Rios was married. His wife had given birth to a baby boy just four months before. Detective Short checked Jesse's arrest report. And? Yes, it was Stephen Rios who took him in and issued the ticket.

But that wasn't all. Stephen helped guard Jesse's murder scene. When he got to the police department the afternoon when the body had been found, he saw one of the sergeants writing Jesse's name down, and he says, hey, I know that guy arrested him about a month or so ago. Well, the sergeant told him to go down there and identify the body. So after identifying the body, he actually volunteered, according to the supervisor, to guard the crime scene.

And he would have known he shouldn't be there. Oh, sure. Just having the relationship alone with him, he should have never been involved in the case. Didn't mean that he killed him. That's correct. So Steve and Rios joined a list of people police wanted to take a hard look at.

Nobody was ruled out. And you were preparing the background before you actually brought him in? Oh, sure, tried to get as much information as we can to confront him with what we knew. Detective Short figured he'd get a couple of days to gather information. Before Rios got wind, he was a person of interest in a murder investigation. But for the first of many times, things didn't quite work out as expected. Coming up, Stephen Rios denies an affair.

When I confronted him that there was a relationship, he said, what, sex? You already knew that was a lie. Yes, I did. And his wife has a visitor. An officer of the law is having his house searched by other officers of the law. It was alarming, for sure. It was three days after the murder of Jesse Valencia. Detective John Short had just found out that the murdered man's secret lover was an ambitious, married, up-and-coming cop

named Steven Rios. So, next thought? The hope that this was just an affair, that the cop was not the killer. I mean, I wasn't personal friends with him. I was a co-worker, knew who he was. Nobody wants a bad cop. Nobody wants a bad cop.

That's a perfect statement. But just as Detective Short was trying to figure that out, who walked in the door? Stephen Rios himself. He just shows up, says, I need to talk to you guys. Stephen said he'd heard rumors a police officer was involved, so he'd come to clear things up. Said he'd once arrested Jesse, but that's all there was to it.

When I confronted him that there was a relationship, he said, what, sex? And I said, yeah. And he denied it. Hmm. You already knew that was a lie. Yes, I did. I confronted him with that lie. He breaks down, kind of cries, says, yeah, but only once. And you knew that was a lie? And the problems that I was having at that point personally was,

okay, is he upset and crying because we've just outed him as having a homosexual relationship and he's married and got a child? Or is he lying because he did this? Stephen told the detective he had plenty of witnesses who could prove he wasn't anywhere near Jesse the night he was murdered. Where was he? He'd clocked in at 6 p.m. that evening. It was a busy shift. He made a traffic stop. That's him on the dash cam video. Then helped out on a shooting investigation across town. Said he finished a little after 3 a.m. and joined some other officers for a beer up on the roof of

the station. Then went back inside to go to the bathroom. His entry into the building prior to his departure was at 4.37 a.m. So that's the only thing that we can confirm without a doubt. That's solid evidence, obviously. But Stephen told Detective Short he didn't leave just then, but instead went back up to the roof for a few minutes and drove out finally around 5 a.m. and then went straight home. Talk to my wife Libby, he said. So they did.

They don't announce these things, of course. They just knock on the door. And there was Libby. Surprised? Imagine. Most people an officer shows up at your house, you're immediately on pretty high alert as one would be. Stephen had already told Libby someone he'd arrested had been murdered. But as for the rest of it, the affair, the fact he was being questioned as a person of interest in a murder,

she didn't know a thing. And the cop at the door said nothing about any of that. Instead... She reassured and said, anyone that had contact with the victim were talking to all of their spouses. No big deal. So they rethought for a minute,

then told the officer that Grayson, her four-month-old baby, started crying early that morning, woke her up. I remember 5.15. I remember looking at the clock. I remember 5.15. It's in my head. Libby didn't know, of course,

had no idea how her groggy memory would be poked and prodded and parsed, how crucially important those precise minutes would turn out to be. No. She just told the officer that anywhere between five and ten minutes after waking up, she was in the kitchen warming up a bottle for the baby when her husband walked in. We made eye contact. I think I said something like, long night? And, you know, he said yeah. And he immediately walked to Grayson's room and picked him up and then he handed off Grayson and I started feeding him. So she told the story and the cop laughed. She expected Stephen would come home then but he didn't. Instead more cops showed up to

search the house. An officer of the law is having his house searched by other officers of the law. It was alarming for sure. She wondered, was her husband a murder suspect? And he certainly searched the house as if he was. They even examined the shower drain, looking for what, blood? Other evidence of murder? But the drain didn't come up with anything from a crime scene? No.

No blood? No. No, no nothing. No blood in his car? No evidence on his clothes? Nothing. No sign of a struggle on Rios' body? Because you looked at him, right? Yeah, they took pictures of him and everything. There was no injuries. Nor could they find any possible murder weapon in his possession or in his house. They administered a voice stress test, same one they'd given the rabbi's son. Stephen passed.

And he said, you know, they looked at everything. They cleared me as a suspect. I'm good. So I think even though I was alarmed, I thought, gosh, this was a bad day. But it's done. It's over. Yeah. I mean, I had no idea it was coming. No, she did not. Coming up, how could things get any worse? They do. My sister-in-law ran out of the house and she said, Steve's on the phone and he's got a gun. And police learn of a possible motive for Jesse's murder. He said

distinctly, I'm going to out him to the police chief. And later, Libby offers a new detail. Did you feel like you were being called a liar when you were on the stand? Oh, I certainly think I was. When Dateline Continues. It didn't take long for Stephen Rios' scandalous affair to hit the headlines.

There it was in the morning newspaper, the day after he told his wife Libby he'd been cleared as a murder suspect. His own police chief telling reporters about his personal relationship with victim Jesse Valencia. Back home with Libby, Stephen finally came clean.

I think his exact words were something like, what was in the paper. He said, it's true. Do you remember what you said in reaction to it? I don't think I said much. I think I was just pretty quiet and in shock about it. She was just 21 years old. She just had their baby. And then in an instant, it dawned on her. Everybody knows, you know, we didn't get to handle that the way a normal married couple would get to handle infidelity. Stephen took a temporary leave of absence. Four days after the murder, he told police he was going to visit his father in Virginia. They gave him permission to go, but to his surprise,

made it clear he wasn't out of the woods yet. He was certainly a little agitated, and I think it was then that he really knew they were still looking at him. Something was still going on. So he left, and I went to the grocery store, and when I came home, my sister-in-law ran out of the house, and she said, Steve's on the phone, and he's got a gun. He didn't go to Virginia. He went to a Walmart near the airport in Kansas City, bought himself a shotgun. He was threatening to kill himself.

And I just ran in the house and grabbed the phone and said, you know, fight this. This is, you know, your son needs you. Fight this. This is crazy. You thought he'd do it? Mm-hmm. What comes with that? Panic?

I don't know if panic's the right word. Just, I don't know, sadness. Libby felt helpless. Less than 24 hours earlier, her life was full of promise. And now, was it just gone? She drops to the floor, which I've never seen any of my children do. And, you know, she's hysterical. Libby's parents, Suzanne and John, were there when Stephen called.

And we had called the police department on the other line, and so they knew what was going on, so then they arrived, and they took over talking to him. Police managed to talk some sense into Stephen, persuaded him to drive back to Suzanne and John's house, though he still had that gun, which is why, as cops waited in the driveway, they were armed and ready just in case. To have police officers in your front yard with guns drawn is not any part of our life.

So it was all pretty traumatic and pretty... Overwhelming for us. Yeah. We're in the back of the house waiting to hear a gun fire. But instead, the police led Stephen into the living room and into John and Suzanne's arms. And we gave him a hug.

He's part of our family. And that's, you know, until that changes, that's what you do. The respite was short-lived. Investigators had talked to the cops Stephen had joined for a beer on the roof night of the murder. And they said Stephen left the building earlier than the 5 a.m. time he claimed. Police hauled him back to the station.

Minutes mattered. A lot. Now, as far as what time he got home, initially he said he got home around 5.20, 5.30. That's what Libby had told the police too. So detectives wondered, did Stephen have time to stop off at Jesse's apartment before he got home? We wondered that same thing. All right, so we're leaving the police station. First we drove from police headquarters to Jesse's house. All right, it's coming up here on the left. Now, this trip from the police station,

with some traffic, mind you, has taken us just over four minutes. Your destination is on the left. Then from Jesse's house to Stephen and Libby's home. We kept it under the speed limit, stopped at some lights along the way, too. And there is the Rios house. Our total drive time, just under 15 minutes. Which leaves 20, 25 minutes for whatever may or may not have happened.

20, 25 minutes for Stephen to confront Jesse, then chase him maybe as far as 200 yards, choke and subdue him, cut his throat, rush back to his car, and drive home. You are content that he had enough time to go and commit this offense?

If he got home at 5.30, yeah, I do. 5.25? Sure. 5.25? Sure. 5.20? The tighter the time gets, the harder it would be to pull it off, that's for sure. Mm-hmm. I don't deny that.

But even if he could do it, why would he do it? Well, maybe the answer was in those online messages between Jesse and Patrick Rogers. He said distinctly, I'm going to out him to the police chief. And if Stephen knew that, what would he do to stop it? Given his suicide threat, he was taken to a mental health center for observation. But when doctors went to check on him, he was gone. A quick manhunt, and there he was at the top of a nearby parking garage. As they closed in, Stephen Rios moved to the ledge.

And as television cameras were trained on him, a police negotiator talked him down. I just thought his behavior just reeked of guilt, to be honest with you. And it was just, an innocent man doesn't act like that. Not in my opinion. One of the common allegations people will throw at homicide detectives is that they've got tunnel vision. As soon as that man got up on that roof and threatened to kill himself, after that they just didn't think about any other possibility. It was done.

That's not true. We could have ignored the rest of the leads from there on out and said, no, we got our guy. But you didn't. No, never. In fact, Detective Short said, his boss made sure to remind the investigative team that Stephen was just one suspect among many. He used to tell us every day, don't put on your blinders.

Even if this guy looks like this is the person, we got to still clear everybody else or not. Like Ed, the aspiring chef, police interrogated him several times. Found no motive. And besides... Kind of felt for the guy, to be honest with you, a little bit, because he just wasn't an emotionally strong person at all.

Was that enough to clear Ed? What about his alibi? His tough guy roommate, Eric? He'd gone out that night, remember, around the time of the murder. So we found the individuals that he had gone to, and they confirmed that during that entire time frame, we could account for his whereabouts. What about Zev, the son of Columbia's highly respected rabbi?

Zev, who denied he was Jesse's lover, but failed the voice stress test. Police wondered, was he the person the eyewitness had seen crying near Jesse's house? So you took this kid's picture out and showed it to the apparent eyewitness, though. What did that person say? I think he said that he wasn't sure. Was there a chance it was Zev? I find it hard to believe. To me, it came down to motive. I couldn't see where there would be motive on his behalf to do anything. A full week into the investigation, police did not have enough evidence to arrest anyone for the murder of Jesse Valencia. But that changed when Detective Short got the DNA results from Jesse's body. Coming up.

I packed up his things, sold our house, did all the things that you would do if somebody dies. A wife moves on, still convinced of her husband's innocence. He wasn't covered in blood. There wasn't anything in our house. There wasn't anything in his vehicle. It does not make sense to me. One month after Jesse Valencia's murder, Steven Rios was again being held at a secure mental health facility. Libby went to see him now and again,

but it was over for them, and she knew it. I packed up his things, sold our house, sold his vehicle, did all the things that you would do if somebody dies. Because it was as if that person that I knew was gone. And then Detective Short got the DNA results. Remember, the medical examiner sent Jesse's fingernail clippings to the lab. And under one of them, there it was. Just a minuscule speck of it, but unmistakable.

Stephen's DNA. Problem was, it wasn't the only DNA the lab found. Ed's DNA was under that same fingernail, too. We were not surprised to find Ed McDevitt's DNA. Ed readily admitted that there was sexual contact between him and Jesse. Steve said he had not had any contact, nor had he seen this individual, since like the 28th or the 29th of the prior month. So we're talking a full week.

At least, yeah. For police, the DNA results settled it. They charged Stephen Rios with the first-degree murder of Jesse Valencia. And ten months later, he stood in the Columbia courtroom, not in uniform, but in handcuffs. A trial lawyer should read the classics, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, because a good trial lawyer is a master storyteller. So, didn't hurt that the prosecutor brought in from a neighboring county to avoid any

whiff of partiality, just happened to be a novelist on the side. His name? Morley Swingle. You need to make sure that every one of those jurors is confident in their soul that this guy has proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, Swingle told the jury about that dot of DNA under Jesse's fingernail. But there was more. Several of Stephen's hairs were found on Jesse's chest. The experts said that every hair on Jesse's chest that had a root, they had tested. They all came

back being Stephen Rio's DNA. Yes, and the kind of hair it was wasn't the sort that tends to just fall out. They were limb hairs, L-A-M-B, hairs from your arm. And here, the prosecutor went out on a limb. He argued Stephen must have rubbed off those hairs when he used a common police chokehold called the unilateral neck restraint. That is how Stephen rendered Jesse unconscious, said Morty Swingle, before killing him. I've been a police defensive tactics instructor for about 30 years, and I was the academy instructor that Stephen Rios went through. I'm going to move in and get underneath his armpit.

This is Todd Burke. The prosecutor called him to the stand to demonstrate the chokehold to the jury. We asked him and Detective Short to do the same for us. Okay, so I'm underneath his arm on this side. I've got him locked up on this side. And then I'm going to push my head into the back of his head and basically shut down most of the blood supply in and out of his head. And remember the bruises the medical examiner found on Jesse's chest and back?

If this was not done properly or he didn't get a grip or Jesse was able to fight his way out of it, the first thing that people do is try to shove the person back into the hold or even striking this way. And that's where the bruising was. So then he goes down on his back, throat's cut at that point. That is the theory, yes. But cut his throat? With what? A knife, just like this, said the prosecutor.

A clip-on knife with a partly serrated edge, which just happened to be quite popular with cops. The prosecutor said Stephen lied when he claimed he never owned one. Multiple officers had seen him with a clip knife, and I put several of them on the stand. Why use such a knife on his young lover? The prosecution called to the stand one of Jesse's close friends, and she told the same story Jesse's online buddy Patrick Rogers did. I believe that this police officer I've been having an affair with must be a married man,

and the next time he comes over, I'm going to confront him about it. And the friend testified out him to the police chief. There it was, said Prosecutor Swingle, a motive to kill. Jesse had confronted him, and Rios chased him and caught him, choked him in his consciousness and cut his throat, and then hurried home and got rid of the knife somewhere along the way. But Prosecutor Swingle did not persuade Libby because she said she saw Stephen with her own eyes when he came home,

walked calmly through their front door. And so when she was asked to take the stand in Stephen's defense, she did. I've seen him upset before, where he was clearly anxious, you know, or agitated. He was none of those things. He wasn't covered in blood. I know that there wasn't anything in our house. There wasn't anything in his vehicle. And I just do not understand how somebody could, in that time frame, not only commit the crime, but clean up after themselves, not leave a trace behind, come home to their wife like everything was normal. It does not make sense to me. After Libby testified, Stephen did too. He

was emotional, impassioned, swore he didn't own the kind of knife that killed Jesse, never choked anyone. And time, discrepancy or not, he simply drove straight home that night. Jesse's mother, Linda, didn't buy it. He's staring at the prosecutor and trying to look him in the eye and answer his questions, but then he averts his eyes. And my daddy always told me that if somebody can't look you in the eye and tell you something, then they're lying to you. It was up to the jury now. Who would they believe? Coming up, a verdict. There was never a doubt in my mind.

There are a lot of people that cheat. It doesn't make them a murderer. When Dateline continues. On the third floor of the Boone County Courthouse, jurors were holed up, deliberating the fate of disgraced cop Stephen Rios. Hours passed. Linda and Libby waited on opposite sides of the courtroom. There are a lot of people that cheat every day, unfortunately, but it doesn't make them a murderer. I knew he was the one that killed him, and there was never a doubt in my mind. And nine hours later, the jury agreed with Linda.

Stephen was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. Libby was devastated. The jury came back and said, guilty. What was that like for you? I mean, I don't know if there's another word for it, but shock. And that was when local crime novelist Barry Bumgarner got a call from a friend on the police force. She kept saying, you know, you really ought to look into this. You can't make this stuff up. You just can't make this up. So more on a whim than anything,

Barry, who read about the trial in the local paper, decided to send Stephen Rios a letter, see if he'd give her an interview. And he said yes. So I was having these visions of I want justice for Jesse. I'm going to interview Rios and get Rios to confess to me. But he didn't. Anything but. In fact, what Stephen said persuaded Barry to start all over to investigate the facts of the case herself. So what what is all of this here? What do we got here? This is a binder of interviews, which I also have on recorders. Police reports, police reports, police reports, police reports. Something like 400 interviews. A wealth of information about Jesse and about Stephen that the jury mostly never got to see. And somewhere in all that, said Barry,

she saw a pattern in the lovers' liaisons. She said Stephen would usually show up at Jesse's during his shift sometime after midnight, never as late as the time prosecutors said he did on the night of the murder. Why would he go up on the parking garage and have a couple of beers and wait until 4.45 a.m.

when he had never gone over there and he had known Jesse was asleep and his wife's at home waiting for him? And remember how Jesse talked about confronting Stephen, said he'd expose him? Some of Jesse's friends told Barry he enjoyed shocking people a bit. And those stories he told them about confronting Stephen, about outing him to the police chief, could have been just that. Stories. What's more, said Barry, despite what Jesse had told his friends, she could find nothing. No voicemail, no text, no phone call even, to prove the men talked that week. At all.

So it wasn't like there was a phone call that said, hey, you better get over here and make right with this or I'm going to out you. There wasn't any of that. So for me, the motive and opportunity, it's just, it's just missing. And when she talked to the jurors, it did not reassure her about their verdict. Several of the jurors, five different jurors said, well, I just couldn't wrap my head around if not Rios, then who? Weren't the police right, though, when they said, you know, nobody else had a motive? I would venture to say the young man with a rabbi father who didn't know his son was gay, I think you maybe had a similar motive for him. Zev, the rabbi's son, had always denied being gay, let alone sleeping with Jesse.

But Barry said Jesse's friends told her he'd joked about outing Zev to his dad. So was that just a joke? Barry wondered if Zev might have been that unidentified young man spotted crying in the street middle of the night. The eyewitness was shown a photograph of Zev and said, no, I don't think that's the guy. He has shown a high school yearbook picture is what they showed him. He did not look like the same young man. I saw his picture from when he was 19, from when he was in high school, and he looked nothing like that picture. I asked her how many times has she interviewed Stephen? More than a hundred, she said. Is it possible that you've spoken to him too much, that you see the world through his eyes maybe more than is comfortable? I don't think so.

Do you think he's innocent? I don't think he should have been convicted. You won't go to innocence? I don't think he did it. I don't. I don't think he had time been convicted. He won't go to innocence? I don't think he did it. I don't. I don't think he had time. That was just her opinion, after all. And then an amazing thing happened. Two years after Stephen's conviction, an appellate court ruled that the jury should not have been allowed to hear testimony from Jessie's friend about what he had told her. The business about outing Stephen. That, said the appeals court, was hearsay. Didn't count. Stephen Rios would get a brand-new trial.

Did you think they were just going to release him, let him go? I didn't know what they were going to do. I had so many people tell me that, oh, he'll get out of it, because he's a cop. He's going to get out of it. And I said, not as long that, oh, he'll get out of it because he's a cop. He's going to get out of it. And I said, not as long as I live, he will not. Coming up. You're going to hear that this man committed this murder out of lust and blind ambition.

Was Stephen Rios on trial for murder or morality? The prosecution in this case was based around several things. One of them was the fact that Rios lied. Lied and lied and lied. About sex, sex, and sex. There was a chill in the air and a hint of some sacred thing unspoken. The day we climbed up from the hollow to Jesse's hill, the place where he is buried on the family farm.

What did this area mean to Jesse, this hill, this spot? This was the... He would walk out the path from our house and come out here and climb over the fence and then go over to my mom and dad's. Which is over that way. Yeah, over that way. It was the place Linda came to find her courage for the second trial of Stephen Rios. She was going to need it.

Yes, my client had gay sex with Mr. Brian Sears. Stephen Rios had a brand new defense attorney, a man not interested in winning any prizes for sensitivity. His name, Gillis Leonard. I like to think I'm sort of like Jimmy Stewart in Anatomy of a Murderer. Just a good old down-home lawyer that just likes to drink now and then and just likes to do well for people.

The defense attorney faced no big surprises. The prosecutor's case was mostly a replay of the trial three years before. Ambitious cop, desperate to keep his secret, kills gay lover. You're going to hear that this man committed this murder out of lust and blind ambition. Science, the prosecutor promised the jury would prove it.

Who else but the murderer would leave DNA under Jesse's fingernail or hairs on Jesse's chest? And the crime lab had unmasked who that murderer was. The profiles from the three hairs are consistent with each other, as well as with the profile from Stephen Rios. But this time around, the prosecutor's case was hobbled by that appellate court ruling. This time, the jury would not get to hear what Jesse told his friends about his plans to expose Stephen. And that was the motive, I believe, and so the jury didn't

get to hear that the second time around. Still, the prosecutor drove home the essentials, a timeline that fit the murder and the behavior of a guilty man. That threat of suicide and all those lies. The prosecution in this case was based around several things. One of them was the fact that Rios lied, lied and lied and lied. About sex, sex and sex. Instead of hiding from the lies? Yes. Leonard said, so what? He was a married man with a small baby at home having an illicit affair with a young boy. Well, young man. And so, yes, your first inclination is to lie.

That doesn't make you a murderer. It makes you a liar. One of the investigating officers said when he got up on that rooftop, he was going to kill himself. Yes. I knew then for sure he was the killer. So apparently God, the Holy Ghost, or Jesus Christ was in a police uniform and was able to look into Stephen's heart and know that that's why he was jumping off. The defense attorney hoped that if the jury could look past Stephen's lies and adultery, they'd begin to see holes in the prosecution's evidence, like a timeline police worked out. Sheer fantasy, said the defense. Look at all that he would have had to accomplish.

He would have had to chase this boy down. I don't know whether you've been out to the scene yet. I have. But it's not a short little across the street. You gotta go up and over. He had to, quote, sodo him with what I used to refer to as the secret ninja chokehold. Execute him, get rid of the clothes, clean up. What the defense asked the jury to do was think of the prosecution's theories as something like a work of speculative fiction. Consider the neighbor, said Leonard. The neighbor who said he heard a commotion in Jesse's apartment. Do you recall telling police officers that you believed that it was any time between 3.30 and 4.30? I gave them a guesstimate, and that was what I had told them at the time.

Between 3.30 and 4.30 a.m., the defense pointed out, at least four people saw Stephen drinking beer on the police station roof. A gathering that broke up around dawn, according to this detective. I remember making a comment about daybreak. In the far, I guess, northeast sky, I believe, the sky started to lighten up. But hang on a moment. When the defense got to question the medical examiner, she told him the crime happened before daybreak.

Do you believe now that the sun had not come up when Mr. Valencia had met his end? It was dark, that's correct. If that was true and Stephen was on the roof until dawn, would that mean he didn't kill Jesse? Just as fantastical, said Leonard, was the prosecution's theory of how Stephen would have killed Jesse. He showed the jury that dash cam video from the traffic stop Stephen made the night of the murder. Might be hard to see, but the defense attorney said it showed there was no knife on Stephen's belt.

In fact, Stevens said he never owned a serrated clip knife. As for what he called the secret ninja chokehold... In about three to seven seconds. Todd Burke had demonstrated the chokehold for the jury in the courtroom on the prosecutor. Why use yourself? Well, what could be more dramatic than the prosecutor's choked and uncautious right in front of the jury? But defense attorney Leonard had his own dramatic demonstration. Okay, Alan, take your left arm and grab Mr. Burke's elbow in his arm. He wanted the jury to see Jesse would have been able to fight back,

to scratch whoever was attacking him. How do you do that and not leave a scratch, not leave some more skin under the fingernails, not leave some kind of mark? Again, there were no marks on Stephen. And of course there'd be a bit of Stephen's DNA under Jesse's fingernails, argued Leonard. They'd had sex. A week earlier, sure, but maybe DNA was left over from that encounter.

Sex could explain the hairs on Jesse's chest too, he said. The crime lab had found several hairs belonging to Stephen on Jesse's comforter. His bed, Lennon's were days old. His bed linens were days old, so he could have easily gotten those hairs rolling

around in the bed that him and Stephen had rolled around in a few days before. And there was one final piece of scientific evidence the defense wanted the jury to consider. Remember, Stephen was not the only person whose DNA was under Jesse's fingernails.

That aspiring chef, Ed McDevitt, one of the last people who had seen Jesse alive, his DNA was there too. And here was a central theme of the defense. Police may have gotten the wrong man. Coming up, Libby takes the stand and adds an intriguing twist to her testimony. I know that that clock was set fast. I know that. When Dateline continues. It had been harder than Libby expected to sit through another trial.

She hated listening to the lawyer score points over her son's most intimate secrets, his lovers, even his bedsheets. I'd laugh at some of it and then I would get mad because I did feel like Jesse was on trial. You can't say anything about it. And you can't do anything. Can't say anything. Defense attorney Gillis Leonard aggressively poked holes in the prosecution's case. He argued Stephen was the victim of a witch hunt.

I firmly believe that the Columbia Police Department, once they focused on Stephen, they didn't even bother to go anywhere else. Of course, the detectives took issue with that. Remember their vow to guard against tunnel vision? Well, that was just spin, said Leonard. It was obvious from the way investigators had handled their search of Ed McDevitt's apartment. Jesse's new lover, the wannabe chef.

Did you find a bag of knives in that apartment? No, sir. Did you secure any? So you didn't find a bag of knives in the apartment? I didn't. And yet Ed himself said he kept the knives in his bedroom in plain sight. Leonard called that half-hearted, sloppy detective work. Equally sloppy, according to the defense,

was investigators' failure to follow up on what Ed's roommate Eric Thurston had told them. Did you tell Detective John Stewart that when Ed McDevitt uses alcohol along with prescription pills, he does become out of control and very violent? Yes. Remember, Eric was the one who'd given Ed his alibi.

Said he'd seen him come home. Nonsense, said the defense attorney. How could he? Eric had been out on a date at the time. So the truth is, you weren't home. Mr. McDevitt did not come home while you were home. I don't know at this point. I'm not sure at this point.

I'm not. I'm not going to give you one way or the other. I'm sorry. The jury got to hear from Ed himself when the prosecutor called him to the stand. If I didn't put him on, then he'd be the big phantom that the defense was trying to make sound so terrible. There is no video of Ed's testimony. Then he'd be the big phantom that the defense was trying to make sound so terrible. There is no video of Ed's testimony, but he told the jury he had never been violent toward Jesse or anyone else.

So here comes this phantom, and this phantom turns out to be kind of a shy, soft-spoken guy. Very, very, very clean-cut, shy young man who was devastated. Ed did not agree to an on-camera interview. But he told us he did not kill Jesse. He had nothing to do with it. And he grieves for him to this day. But of course, there was someone else investigators had considered a person of interest, wasn't there? Zev, the rabbi's son. His vehicle may or may not have

been seen in the area. Jesse's friends told me that he was breaking up with them, and this was this kid's first gay love affair, and he was deeply hurt. The defense attorney grilled Zev about his relationship with Jesse. Just to find out, so isn't it true that Jesse was your first alternative lifestyle experience? You mean my first gay friend? No, the first time that you had a gay relationship. No, that's not true. I never had a gay relationship. Zev did not deny trying to call Jesse the night of his death.

You called him at 12.01? Yes. Then you tried again at 1.07? Yes. Then at your testimony, you went to bed? Yes. Didn't you really just drive over to Jesse's apartment about 3 a.m. Yes.

No. No, I didn't do that. Zev denied it all. He lived in his parents' basement, and if he had taken that car out in the middle of the night, the garage door would have gone up, they would have heard it, and, you know. Well, how would we know if they heard it? What, the parents were going to come in and go, oh, hey, on the morning of the murder, our son, who was having an affair with him, we heard the garage door go up and the car leave? On the witness stand, Zev's mother was adamant.

She swore Zev never left the house at all that night. Did you see Zev go to bed? Yes. What time was it he went to bed? About 1.30. There's always that mystery man defense. Detective John Short listened to the defense attorney call his investigation sloppy, incompetent, blinkered. The real story, he said, was far from that.

This case file turned out to be almost 1,300 pages. We interviewed a lot of people. Every lead was followed up on and completed. Nothing and no information or evidence led us to anybody else. But what would the jury believe? The defense attorney had one more ace up his sleeve. Libby. By this time, Libby was Stephen's ex-wife.

She was in a new relationship, and she wasn't happy to be back in court. I was angry about it. I remember fighting with my parents about it and just being, I was, I wanted to move on. She told her familiar story, waking up at 5.15 a.m. to baby Grayson's cry, seeing her husband walk through the door without a scratch, 5.20 or so. Then she volunteered a detail she had told others for years but did not bring up at the first trial. I know that that clock was set fast. I know that.

Libby testified that Stephen must have arrived home even sooner than she first told police. So you set your own clock fast. Right. So you wouldn't be late for work. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. How fast? It was, I would say it was probably seven minutes fast usually. Which said the defense meant Stephen got home even earlier than police thought and had

even less time to commit the murder. Prosecutor Morley Swingle was skeptical. Didn't exactly accuse Libby of lying, but close. I just wanted to point out what her previous statement had been so the jury would see that, well, she's tried to shorten that time frame a little bit. Do you feel like you were being called a liar when you were on the stand? Oh, I certainly think I was. For me, it was important to set that record straight. Because you believe it to be true?

I 100% believe it to be true. You don't think it's your memory is adjusting and editing? No. Libby's revised timeline, Attorney Leonard's attack on the police investigation, Linda Valencia, grieving mother, hated it. Stephen Rios, once convicted cop, saw possibilities. And the jury went out and closed the door. Coming up, two families await the verdict and Stephen Rios talks. Some people think I'm a killer. Some people think I'm not. What will the jury think? The jury will now retire to liberate and reach their verdicts. Stephen Rios watched the 12 strangers who would be deciding his fate file out of the courtroom.

Jurors who had not heard his story. Not from him, anyway. He had chosen not to testify. Some people think I'm a killer. Some people think I am not. You know, I know I'm not. He did speak to us by video link from prison, and he had a lot to say about Libby, about Grayson, about his once perfect life. What happened that made all this go south? What was the first thing, first mistake? Probably crossing paths with Jesse, I mean meeting him.

The night he arrested Jesse. With a lot of people in that circumstance, they're not very friendly. But he was, it was like 20 questions and he didn't have, he didn't feel any ill will. But you're a cop. You arrest people before. Some of them are very nice. But you made a decision. You said, OK, I'm going to go back there. Something might happen. Something sexual might happen because I'm attracted. And so obviously is he. Yeah, well, I didn't set out kind of for that end result.

No, he said he only wanted to make sure Jesse was OK. The sex was a surprise, he said. It is widely understood that he was enjoying this relationship with you, maybe as much as you were with him, but he found out you were married and intended to confront you about that. So did that happen? No, that never.

Well, why would he tell his mother he was going to? Why would he tell his friends he was going to? Why would he tell his friends he was going to? Why would he say those things to people if they never happened? The point was, said Stephen, he didn't know that Jesse might have been planning to expose him, so he simply had no motive to kill him. Though he agreed it might be hard to just take his word for it, given how he lied to Libby, the police, to everybody. Had you come forward and said,

look, I did have a personal relationship with this guy and laid all your cards on the table, if you're innocent, why wouldn't you do that? Well, having a same-sex relationship when you're a married police officer... Well, you know you're a human being as well. They do that. Well, it's easy to say now, but it wasn't anything that I was proud of. It wasn't anything that I wanted to reveal to the guys that I worked with. So he said he did want to hide that from the investigators, but he didn't. He swore he didn't want to hide anything else.

Quite the opposite, he said. He'd done everything he could to help investigators. If you want to search my car, search my car. If you want to search my house, search my house. If you want to clear your name, the way to do that is not jumping off a building. It's staying and telling the truth. Wouldn't you agree? So why threaten suicide?

Everything was crazy. I was pissed off. And I know people say stay and fight, but the life you had is over. Now the question was, would he get it back? Libby's parents thought he might. While the jury deliberated,

they began making plans for Stephen for a life outside of prison. We all decided he couldn't stay in Columbia. Where was he going to go? You know, didn't have a job. Crime novelist Barry Bumgarner felt confident too. She had shared some of her research with the defense, was sure he'd made his case. There was enough reasonable doubt to drive a truck through. She was across the street having lunch when the word came, a verdict.

We, the jury, having found the defendant Stephen Arthur Rios guilty of murder in the second degree. There was a gasp in the courtroom. Jesse's friends cheered, but there was a gasp from a lot of people who were watching it. Stephen Rios was found guilty of second degree murder this time. He'll be up for parole in 2049. Way too soon for Linda. It still wasn't enough. I wanted the death penalty. But the prosecutor sees some justice in it.

24 jurors with no dog in the fight came in and heard this evidence, and it's 24 to 0 that the prosecutor has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Stephen Rio has committed this murder. Libby still had her doubts. In fact, told us she'll believe Stephen is innocent until she dies. It's why she talked to us all these years later. It's why she encouraged her son's trips hundreds of miles three times a year to visit his dad in prison.

We went with him and Libby on one of those long rides. He's a young man now. Wow, that's crazy. You're so big. Well, you've chosen a pretty interesting path. And I think it's interesting that you say that I've chosen that path because I don't feel like it was a choice. I think if it was a choice, I... 100%, it would be easier for me if I could have believed that he was guilty. Sure. And moved on with my life and not looked back.

And Linda has her grandchildren now. Said little Braden is a spitting image of Jesse. They keep me busy. I got a full schedule. But most days she climbs the steep little hill to the place her Jessie will forever be, watched over by the statue of that very Maria of the Song. Here at the start of his favorite path, the one that goes over the fence and through the woods to the barn over there. After Jesse's death, going through his things, Linda found a poem he'd written about this very place. I remember it.

The summer heat. The long walk down the road. And it's all too familiar as I stroll down the beaten gravel path, and the Indian winds blow through the high cornfields. It's youth, escaped from all harm of the unpleasant memories that touched me here. They certainly can't touch me now. The song of a young man trading his past for a better future. It has a different meaning now.

I miss him still. I mean, I think about him every day. Every day? Every heartbeat. That's all for this edition of Dateline. And a reminder, we'll see you again Sunday at 7, 6 Central. And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Good night.