Dateline NBC - She Didn't Come Home

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

A mother in Pennsylvania disappears one afternoon after she is last seen by her co-workers leaving for lunch. The case remains cold even after 60 investigators try to crack it. Could the 61st detective finally have the answers? Josh Mankiewicz reports. Originally Aired on NBC on April 26, 2019.

If you admit that she's never coming home, it's like you're admitting defeat or that she's dead. A hard-working wife, a loving mother, a woman with a complicated love life. She was having affairs. They worked in the same office areas. They spent some time after hours together. Kathy was trying to break off the relationship. Now, the secret was out, replaced by a mystery. She never returned from lunch. We did consider that her husband may have known that his wife was having an affair. Where was she? There were just no answers. Nearly 30 years, 60 investigators,

and it all kept coming back to one elusive suspect. He just very calmly said, I know how to get rid of a body so it would never ever be found. To him, I think murder is something that can be done over a lunch hour. You were just a heartbeat away from not having a case. It was basically an hour and ever situation. They couldn't prove it then. Could they prove it now? I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with She Didn't Come Home. Time can be like a river, a long stream of events rushing by. Most barely make a ripple, but a few, like the sudden loss of a close friend, a child, or a parent, have a way of circling back upon us in a ceaseless loop of memory and regret.

That's the way it's been for John Heckle and his sister Alicia Talbot ever since that completely normal morning in 1991 when their mom, Kathy Heckle, kissed them goodbye, left for work, and never returned. You remember her leaving that morning? Yeah. I mean, like any other day, same routine all the time. Every time she left us, she kissed us goodbye. It was a July morning. Alicia, 13, and John, then 9, were home for summer vacation. A little after 9 a.m., Alicia says her mom called from her job.

We discussed having dinner and having pork chops. Yeah, because that was one of my favorite things she cooked. Later, they tried to contact their mom at work. One of the times we tried to call her was around lunchtime, and she had left for lunch. Yeah. And then we waited and called after lunch, and she still wasn't back to work yet. At 40, Kathy Heckle had spent half her life working at the local paper plant in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. I can't remember who I was speaking to at the office, but you could hear in their voice that there was some concern there that she hadn't come back yet. And you picked that up?

Yeah, it was not typical for her to not come back and not tell anybody. With their dad out of town, they kept trying to reach their mom. Nothing. At about 6.30 that evening, Alicia called her grandparents, Clarence and Margaret Dolan. I answered the phone. It was Alicia. She said, Graham, can you get us some milk? And I said, what do you mean, can I get you some milk? She says, well, Mom didn't come home yet. And she says, we don't have any milk. And I said, Alicia, I will be right there.

And you're thinking what? I didn't know what to think. But as a mother, you know that this is something bad, something very bad. That night, Kathy's mother and father contacted everyone they could think of. No one had heard from her. And that was, I remember picking up on that, that they seemed, they seemed worried. I mean, you could just tell. Your grandparents were acting differently. Mm-hmm. Their dad, John, was in upstate New York that Monday,

training with his National Guard unit. He didn't learn his wife was missing until the next day. You get that phone call, it's your mom. Yeah. What'd she say? The gist of the conversation was that Kathy didn't come home from work on Monday night, and they didn't know where she was. And now it's Tuesday.

And now it's Tuesday evening. And you think what? I said, Tom, call the state police. With the permission of his commanding officer, John Heckle immediately left for home. He had plenty of time to think on that five and a half hour ride. He thought about the time Kathy donated a kidney to save her brother's life, and about the December day in 1972 when he first gazed at Kathy Dolan. She just had the biggest brown eyes you could look into. Six months later, they were married.

Like any marriage, I think we had our ups and downs. But overall, I was happy about the fact I didn't have to worry about my family with Kathy. You thought you were going to stay married forever? Yes. The problem was, John was already married to the military. John's career frequently took him away from home, sometimes for weeks at a time. Kathy didn't like that, and John says his wife of 18 years seemed to have that on her mind when she dropped him off for

his latest guard assignment. She asked me why I had to be there so early, which didn't make sense to me because I was always the first one there. And I said, it's my job. She didn't want you to go. She didn't say, I don't want you to go. But you felt it. I could feel that something was wrong. The look on her face when she said it, it just didn't sit right with me.

Now Kathy was missing, and her disappearance would eventually drag into the open secrets that some in and around Lock Haven would have rather kept hidden. A wife and mother, but also a woman who was sometimes lonely. When we return... I asked her mom if she was seeing anyone, and she said that she had reestablished contact with an old friend from school. And that old friend had a confession to make.

He did admit that they had had a physical relationship, and it had only been a few days before she disappeared. By the time John Heckle returned home from National Guard training in New York State, his wife Kathy had been missing for about 36 hours. When my dad came back, he was the one who told us, we can't find your mom, we don't know where your mom is. And that was the first time I've ever seen my dad cry. And I knew the worst had definitely happened if he was that worried. And that was the first time I saw my dad cry too.

And, you know, he was always this big, strong man. And when you see that, it's like, okay, this is not good. That's got to be a terrible thing to tell your kids because they want you to tell them this is going to be okay. Dad always had all the answers. And you can't tell them this is going to be okay. Dad always had all the answers. And you can't tell them this is going to be okay. No. You don't want fabrications. Across town that morning, Pennsylvania State Trooper Fred Caldwell was on the case.

His first call had been to Margaret Dolan, Kathy's mom. I remember asking her if she had noticed any changes recently or anything in her demeanor that was unusual. And she said that in the last four to six weeks or so, she just wasn't herself. Then the trooper asked one of those probing and indelicate questions that cops have to ask. I asked her mom if she had any indication that she was seeing anyone, and she said that she had re-established contact with an old acquaintance, an old friend from school. That man's name was Dennis Taylor. He and Kathy had recently reconnected at a wedding. Taylor had been singing and playing guitar. The trooper

jotted down the name Dennis Taylor with the idea of calling him later. Next, he dialed the paper plant where Kathy was last seen. One of Kathy's co-workers picked up the phone. She kind of corroborated what her mom had said, that she'd been a little different in the last few weeks. Personality just seemed a little quieter, maybe. Then he asked question number two. I also asked her if she felt that there were possibilities she may have been having an affair or seeing anyone. And she said she had no evidence, but she suspected that she may have been. The co-worker wasn't talking about Kathy's friend Dennis Taylor. She was talking about a man at the plant named Lloyd Groves. They both played on the same volleyball team. They spent some time after hours together.

And I think just the closeness of the two, And she just kind of suspected that they may be. The trooper learned Groves was the quiet type, married with children. Sometimes he led plant tours and gave paper-making presentations at local schools. A call to Groves' office revealed he wasn't in yet. So the trooper left a callback message. And not long after, the trooper says, Mr. Groves showed up in person at the state police barracks. He was very calm. He said that he knew her. They shared, they worked in the same office areas. He said they were friends. I did ask him if he had any type of physical relationship with her, and he said no. Shortly after Lloyd Groves left the state police barracks,

the other man on Trooper Caldwell's list walked in, Dennis Taylor, the guitar man. Like Groves, Taylor was a married man with children, and right off the bat, he told the trooper he had a confession to make. He did admit that they had had a physical relationship briefly, and it had only been a few days before she disappeared, as I recall, the first contact, physical contact. Like a balladeer who knows his audience is hanging on every lyric, the guitar man kept singing to the cops. Taylor told the trooper Kathy Heckle had called him at work the day she disappeared.

Her voice, he said, had a strange tone. She called him just before lunchtime and was upset or anxious and said that she had something she wanted to talk to him about, and he was busy. And he said, I can't talk, I'll call you back, and hung up. He did try to call back then sometime later, and she had gone for lunch. Taylor said he'd played golf with friends that afternoon and had planned to meet up with Kathy later that night. Then he goes to their location where they're going to meet.

Kathy doesn't show up. He was concerned that something may have happened. It was then the guitar man struck a familiar chord. Kathy Heckle, he said, had also been seeing another man, a guy named Lloyd Groves. According to Taylor, this fellow Groves was a bit of a stalker. He said that he had met Kathy at a park, a nearby park. He said that there was a gray van parked nearby.

He recalled seeing the van. And the next time he talked to Kathy, she said, did you see that van? That was Lloyd, and he was following her. Was the guitar man being helpful, or was he trying to implicate a rival to save his own skin? The trooper knew this much. If Kathy Heckle had been juggling simultaneous affairs with married men, there could be a lot of people who might have wanted her to disappear, including her husband. He was definitely a person of interest. Exactly how much did John Heckle know about what was going on in his wife's life?

Coming up, were police looking for a runaway wife or her killer? There were just no answers, and that was the worst part. When Dateline continues. Any investigation in which someone goes missing or turns up dead just about guarantees family members will be considered suspects. Kathy Heckle's husband, John, was no exception. We did consider that John may have known that his wife was having an affair and that he may have taken some action on his own. Did you feel like you were ever a suspect? Never worried about it. I knew they were trying to find

where Kathy was and what had happened. And if that included questioning me, I have no problems with that. At some point, somebody said to you, we believe she was having a relationship with some other people. Was that shocking to hear? It was surprising because that wasn't the way Kathy was. In his interview with Trooper Caldwell, John Heckle said he'd noticed a change in his

wife's demeanor in recent weeks and wondered if she might be having an affair. He was emotional. There's times when John and I just sat together with my arm around him and he would cry. He was concerned about his wife and I felt very bad for the man. John Heckle's alibi checked out, and police found no evidence he'd paid anyone to hurt his wife. By now, Kathy had been missing for two full days, and John Heckle feared the worst. Kathy Heckle would never, on this earth, abandon those two children.

Trooper Caldwell still didn't know if he was working a missing persons case, an abduction, or a homicide. Then on the evening of the third day, investigators got a big break. They found Kathy Heckle's car, parked behind the local hospital. The keys were missing. I think they recovered one print, but I don't know that it was ever identified. It was from the exterior of the car. Investigators were now pretty sure that someone, possibly her killer,

had moved Kathy Heckle's car to the hospital parking lot. And then the case hit a dead end. Days turned to weeks. Those weeks stretched into months. Kathy Heckle was somewhere in the wind. We had cadaver dogs come down often, and we would have troopers go out and we would search the area looking for remains or whatever. While some investigators focused on finding Kathy Heckle,

others concentrated on finding evidence of a crime. As far as investigators could tell, the guitar man, Dennis Taylor, had been honest, confessing his affair with Kathy Echol. Lloyd Groves, on the other hand, had seemed a bit dodgy. Troopers had searched Lloyd Groves' home, office, and van. And while some items of interest were found, the local prosecutor didn't think police had enough to make an arrest. There was a big hole from an investigative standpoint. Ted McKnight was Clinton County District Attorney at the time. If you can imagine a yardstick, improbable cause is probably at the two-inch mark, and beyond a reasonable doubt is probably the 34-inch mark. And everything else in between is the difference between are you gonna get a conviction or aren't

you which means you don't go forward unless you're reasonably sure you have the evidence for a conviction correct he says the fact that Kathy heckles body had not been found was a big problem how do we prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she is dead if she was, where did the killing occur? What county did it occur? So maybe it's not even your jurisdiction. Correct. For the Heckle family, Kathy's disappearance was a defining event. I remember being depressed. I didn't know what that meant when I was nine years old, but just thinking about how low and sad I felt all the time. I think people deal with

things differently, and I certainly chose, I think, the avoidance method. Not think about it. And not think about it. There were just no answers, and that was, that was the worst part. In 1998, seven years after Kathy disappeared, John Hackle had his wife declared legally dead. That did not make the mystery any easier for him to understand. Can you accept the idea that maybe there were needs that she felt that she had to meet with men who were not you, but that she still loved you. Oh, no, I believe she did love me. She had a secret life that she wasn't showing anybody else. But you don't know how long that secret life was, and neither do I. It could have been her plan to want to end that

the day when she asked me why I had to leave so early. I don't know, but I'm not going to hate her for being human. You blame yourself? A little bit. 22 summers came and went. John Heckle remarried. The kids grew up. They started new lives out west. Alicia became a ski pro. John, a fishing guide. But through it all, their mother was never far from their thoughts. She missed all those childhood memories. I mean, things like going to the prom and boyfriends and kisses and just everything. She missed our weddings. I mean, she missed our graduations. She doesn't know her only grandchild. And you probably thought about her at each one of those. Clinton County never forgot Kathy Heckel either. She'd become a part of history that just wouldn't go away.

And as one generation of lawmen retired, another rose to take up the unfinished business and discovered enticing details buried in a very old file. Coming up, he was eight when Kathy disappeared. Now, he was in charge of her case. What I remember growing up is, where was she? Where was Kathy at during all this time? And a leading suspect suddenly leaves town. About three weeks after the disappearance of Kathy, he moved his family back to Beaver, PA.

For more than 20 years, Kathy Heckle's children lived with a feeling of unfocused fear. It's an unsettling feeling that, an unsettling feeling of fear that essentially something great in my life can be taken away at any moment. And you think that can all be traced back to your mom? Absolutely. For their father, John, those were years spent struggling to let go and move on. I talked to Kathy a lot about it. What do you say to her? Just talk. Just ramble on. And you just start talking to her out loud? Yeah. Something will come up that will remind me of something we did.

Law enforcement had not forgotten Kathy Heckle. In the summer of 2013, a native son inherited the case, State Police Investigator Curtis Confer. When I obtained this case, it was 22 years old. And it had passed through a lot of other hands. 60 other investigators. 60 other investigators. 60. 60.

And you thought, I'm going to close it or I'm going to be the 61st, and then in a little while there'll be a 62nd. Well, Josh, what was interesting was it was 400 pages of reports, and I just read it. To this 61st investigator, the reports were riveting. He'd heard the story as a child and even had a connection to Lloyd Groves, whose name was all over that file. He came to my elementary school and did a presentation on making paper. You saw a photo of him giving these?

Yeah, and I went, you know what? I remember him doing our school. Confer was now convinced that at the time this picture was taken, Lloyd Groves was having an affair with Kathy Heckel. Only two months later, investigators considered Groves a suspect in her disappearance. What I remember growing up is, where was she? Where was Kathy at during all this time? John Heckel was my brother's soccer coach. The case files were chock full of details. A gun found in Lloyd Groves' desk drawer.

Ammo found in his van. A curious chunk of carpet missing from the back of the van. What was Lloyd's explanation for cutting the carpet out of the van? In 1991, he said that the kids were playing with tar and oil, and they got tar and oil in that section of the van. That confirmed by anybody? No, it was not. That wasn't the only thing to jump off the page. The original investigators had a witness who'd reported seeing Kathy Heckle and Lloyd Groves together in his parked van many times in the weeks before she disappeared. And there was evidence that on the day Kathy Heckle never returned from lunch,

Lloyd came back so late he missed a 2 p.m. meeting. Something that the original investigators found was that Lloyd Groves wrote a letter to his wife announcing to the family that he was going to be arrested for the murder of Kathy Heckel. This is right after the disappearance? This is right after the disappearance, and he wrote detailed notes to his wife how to take care of the tractor, how to take care of the car. This is the guy who likes to plan. He is a planner, yes. Meticulous. But he's not arrested. He was wrong. Yeah, he was not arrested. About three weeks after the disappearance of Kathy, he moved his family back to Beaver PA and then eventually selling his home, leaving a lot of his personal items at his home. When he finished

reading the case file, Confer called the local FBI office, looking for some items connected to the case. It was then that he connected with Mike Hudson, a veteran state trooper assigned to a joint terrorism task force. After Confer explained what he was after, Hudson asked to see the file. I felt it was a very good case. I felt that there was, you know, a very real suspect. When Hudson's partner, FBI agent and former prosecutor Kyle Moore read the file, he too was hooked. This was something that we wanted to do something about. We wanted to see if there was any way that, you know, we could actually bring it to a conclusion. So within days of getting the case, investigator number 61 had a team to help him.

They had so much knowledge that I didn't have. It was by the grace of God that they helped me with this case. Time, it became clear, was not on their side. It was basically a now or never situation. I always felt we were just a heartbeat away from losing a witness to not having a case. As they worked the case, the investigators knew they had one ace in the hole. In 1991, specks of blood had been found in Lloyd Groves' van.

Advanced DNA tests were done in 2004. Based off the fact that there wasn't a DNA sample from the victim, they essentially had to construct one from the victim's mother and father, you know, essentially building the victim's DNA profile. That DNA test proved the blood was Kathy Heckles. But Trooper Confer says it seems that bit of evidence fell through the cracks because the lead investigator and primary prosecutor at the time took medical leave. One thing was clear to all three of the new investigators. This case needed more resources and more prosecutorial muscle than Clinton County possessed. We requested that the district attorney relinquish the case to the attorney general's office.

And the DA at the time agreed. In early 2014, a grand jury was empaneled to review the evidence. Hudson, Moore, and Confer hit the road. So we did interviews in different states and traveled the country a little bit. The new investigators tracked down old witnesses and even found a new one, a man who remembered an argument between Kathy Heckel and Lloyd Groves on the day she went missing. The question was, did police have enough to make an arrest? Coming up, will it be Kathy who ends up on trial?

Every single indiscretion of hers was going to be announced in open court. She was going to be punished for being murdered. When Dateline continues. As a military man, John Heckle finds solace on old battlefields. The past is always present there. But for John, no peace could be found here as long as his wife's killer walked free. I would always say, where are we? How close are we to getting him arrested?

And police would say, the DA won't go forward. Yeah, no, it's more like we need more. The investigators went looking for more. They tracked down new witnesses and dug deep looking for Kathy Heckle's body, which they never found. Even so, on January 28, 2015, a grand jury indicted Lloyd Groves for murder, largely on the strength of the same evidence that had been in the files all along.

It was literally just like television. We got there early, like 5 o'clock, and we sat up. As he was walking to his car, we rolled right up, jumped out, and when I put the handcuffs on him, I said, you're under arrest for the murder of Kathy Heckle. Did he say anything? Yeah, he told his son that he needed to get a different ride to work. So?

It really didn't faze him. Lo and behold, Lloyd Groves is arrested. What was that like to hear? Inner thankfulness that we were getting somewhere. Still a long way to go. Yeah, there's still a long way to hear. And our thankfulness that we were getting somewhere. Still a long way to go. Yeah, there's still a long way to go. In many ways, the arrest of 65-year-old Lloyd Groves was the easy part. Legal maneuvering delayed his trial another three and a half years. For the defense, that delay gave their investigators time to poke holes in the prosecution's case. This case had holes you could drive trucks through.

Tom Bruno and his wife Amy were the defense team's investigators. We were in the case for nearly four years. We actually talked about him, I would guarantee, every day. Tom, a former cop, knew how to look for flaws in the police work. Amy, a Lock Haven native, had grown up with the Kathy Heckle story. I mean, if you talked to anyone in town, they would all say that Lloyd killed her and he put her in a vat of acid and dissolved her body. That was the working theory for years.

But Tom says the files he read didn't prove any of that. In fact, he says he found a silver bullet in those piles of documents. We actually discovered that in the police reports, in medical records, that she had cut her finger at work. It was bleeding so badly that she had to get it treated three times. And this was at the time that she was allegedly in her Lloyd's van every day. So if the prosecution planned to make a big deal out of a DNA test showing Kathy Heckle's blood in Lloyd Groves' van, the defense response now would be, so what? They think it came from Kathy because Lloyd killed her. But yet here's Kathy's blood because

she cut herself at work. I mean, if this isn't reasonable doubt, what is? As the case went to trial in November 2018, Pennsylvania's senior deputy attorney general, Daniel Dye, knew the defense would do more than just attack their evidence. He feared they would attack Kathy Heckle, too. I got to know this family. I was worried a lot about them because I knew this would be an ugly trial.

And that every single indiscretion of hers was going to be announced in open court. She was going to be punished for being murdered. The prosecution's case, almost entirely circumstantial, began with testimony from Kathy Heckle's children. It was a little difficult, but it felt good to be in front of Lloyd Groves

and have him look at me and listen to my story. And how scary it was. According to friends and family, Kathy Heckle was a devoted daughter, a loving mom. At the same time, she was also restless. Tell me what was going on in her life at that time. Her life at that time was a lonely life. John Heckel is a good guy, but his first love was the military. And Kathy was, you know, having affairs. And one of them was with Lloyd Groves. Another lover, the guitar man Dennis Taylor, said Kathy had told him all about that unraveling

affair. Kathy was trying to break off the relationship. We know that. Lloyd did not want the relationship to end, and he specifically wanted to meet for lunch on that day. Did Lloyd Groves know about Denny Taylor? He did. We had evidence in the case that Groves was following Kathy.

Dennis Taylor testified that Kathy had expressed some fear about Lloyd. Right. Raise your right hand. In a special hearing, two former paper plant employees who'd been in poor health had their trial testimony pre-recorded. One said he'd overheard Kathy Heckle and Lloyd Groves arguing the day Kathy went missing. Just loud. The other said she saw Lloyd Groves staring the day Kathy went missing. Just loud. The other said she saw Lloyd Groves staring daggers at Kathy Heckel

as she left for lunch that day. His face was so red, just like he was terribly angry, and he was looking at Kathy. Kathy pulls out, Lloyd pulls out after. We believe that they did meet, that somehow, someway, Kathy was cajoled into one last meet just to hear Lloyd out. And at that point in time, Lloyd shot her, shoved her in that van, likely with a head wound. According to witnesses, Groves was back at the plant sometime between 2 and 3 that afternoon.

You think Lloyd Groves kills her, disposes of her body, and manages to get back to work that day and act like nothing's wrong, and gets away with it? I think it's because he's smart and a good planner. To him, I think murder is something that can be done over a lunch hour. The prosecution wrapped up its case with two witnesses, people who only surfaced shortly before trial. The first was Lloyd Groves' now ex-wife. There was something she had been holding back on telling for the past roughly 30 years,

and that was that Lloyd Groves did come home over the work hour on July 15, 1991. Something he almost never did. Which he never did, and changed out of his clothes. And she never saw the condition that those clothes were in. The next person to testify was this woman, Gail Taylor. She also had a story to tell that she'd kept to herself for decades. It was the mid-90s. Taylor said she and Groves worked together in Ohio. According to Taylor, she went to Groves one day to vent after she discovered drugs in her son's room. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this kid. He's going to get into trouble. He's going to end up dying.

If the drugs don't kill him, his mother will. And Lloyd was sitting at his desk and he just very calmly said, well, I know how to get rid of a body so it would never, ever be found. The defense's argument was he was joking. I sure wouldn't joke about being able to dispose of a body where no one could ever find it if I had been investigated for killing somebody and they'd never found the body. The prosecution closed its case by asking who but Lloyd Groves could have killed Kathy Heckel. And in return, the defense stood ready to ask a provocative question of its own.

Could Kathy Heckel have simply run away? Coming up. Did you really think she lived past that day? I certainly have a reasonable doubt as to whether she died that day. Would the jury have the same doubt? It was a nervous moment, absolutely. The Lloyd Groves defense team could hardly wait to make their case to the jury. It was like you're playing cards and you have four aces and you're waiting to play them. That's what we felt like over the last few years.

George Lepley was one of two lawyers defending Groves. I don't think there was enough evidence. And what evidence they did present had issues questioning whether it was reliable enough to justify taking the rest of a man's life away. For a defense team that had spent years reviewing police reports, one thing seemed obvious. When the police learned of something that implicated Lloyd, they were on top of it. Whenever there was another avenue to pursue, it just kind of falls by the wayside. This was more about the police trying to prove that it was Lloyd Groves that did this crime than it was about them trying to find out who killed Kathy Heckel, if indeed she was killed.

The defense argued the guitar man, Dennis Taylor, should have gotten a closer look. Yes, she had an affair with Lloyd, but she also is having an affair with Dennis Taylor. Taylor had told police he played golf the afternoon Kathy Heckle went missing. They went to check his alibi out 13 months later, not right away, and when they go there, a log that he has to write in to show that he was golfing there,

the pages are missing. Isn't that convenient? And of course, the defense argued Kathy Heckle's affairs could have also provided her husband with a motive for murder. Weeks after Kathy disappeared, the defense noted, John Heckle discarded some of her personal items. Her husband throws away her purse, her wallet, her photo ID. It isn't that he throws it in a garbage can in front of his house where somebody might see it. It's in a dumpster in the back of the reserve base. You're saying that he wanted to conceal that? What more logical conclusion is there?

Did John Heckle have something to hide? The defense didn't offer an answer for that, and John Heckle says he doesn't remember much about those days. I don't recollect throwing anything like that out. The defense even suggested that Kathy Heckle may not have died on July 15th, 1991. Did you really think she lived past that day? I certainly have a reasonable doubt as to whether she died that day. To support that theory, the defense introduced statements John Heckle made more than 20 years ago. In one, Heckel said he thought his wife may have siphoned thousands of dollars from a joint bank account. In another, he asked investigators if a woman pictured in a Swingers magazine might be his wife.

Is there any credible argument that Kathy Heckel squirreled away money, vanished, ran out on her husband and her family, and then posed for pictures that were put in a swingers magazine that anybody could have seen? I certainly don't think it has been disproven beyond a reasonable doubt that that could have occurred. On the stand, John Heckel said those decades-old statements had been the frantic musings of a desperate man. I was grasping anything I could think of to try to find out what happened to my wife. The defense conceded. Groves did go home that day to change his shirt, but said that was because he'd gotten dirty at the plant

where he had to lead a tour for a group of children at 3 o'clock that afternoon. And that lunch hour trip home, they argued, simply made the prosecution's version of events even more unlikely. If you factored in all of the witnesses when they saw him at the plant, how does he have anywhere near enough time for him to have done what they claim he did? For 27 years, the question of what had happened to Kathy Heckle had hung over Lock Haven. Now it was up to a Clinton County jury to finally provide an answer. It was contentious. Sean Sanford, a toddler at the time Kathy Heckle disappeared,

was the jury foreman. The very first vote we took was 7-5, 8-4 for guilty. I thought it was going to be the other way for acquittal. Why'd you vote for acquittal in that first vote? If you looked at every piece of evidence individually, you could poke holes in all of it piece by piece. After breaking for the weekend, the jury returned on Monday morning, rested but still deadlocked. There was one juror in particular who was voting for acquittal originally, who couldn't get over the fact that he thought the prime suspect should be John Heckle. Over and over, jurors reviewed and discussed the evidence.

Then, just before three that afternoon, jurors notified the judge they had reached a verdict. It was a nervous moment, absolutely. I was nervous and we were all holding hands. On the charge of first degree or premeditated murder, the verdict was not guilty. Then, in what seemed to be a compromise decision, the jury found Groves guilty of third degree murder, which is legally considered a spontaneous act in the heat of the moment. You look at Groves during that time? No, I spent more time looking at Kathy's picture and crying. In a letter to Dateline, Lloyd Groves once again denied ever having had an affair with Kathy Hecle and said he'd been wrongly convicted.

At the age of 69, Groves was formally sentenced to serve 10 to 20 years in prison. Even with the third degree sentencing, he'll still spend the rest of his life in prison. That's enough for you? It's been more than a quarter century since the summer morning when Kathy Heckle kissed her children goodbye. And although their wait for justice is finally over, they're still no closer to knowing where their mother is than they were on that summer night in 1991 when she didn't come home. So unless your mom's remains are found accidentally, you might not ever know.

You going to be okay with that? We have to live with it. I mean, it's sad and it's disappointing that we will never know or we may never know, but we have to be okay with it. That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again next Friday for an all-new two-hour Dateline at 9, 8 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.