Dateline NBC - Suspicion

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

In this Dateline classic, a loft apartment building in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, is home to an eclectic group of residents. When a wealthy businessman starts working with two of them, a chain of events is set in motion that leaves one of them dead and another arrested for murder. Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on February 3, 2012.

I said, have you ever contemplated committing the perfect murder? And he said, yes. The key element to that is making sure that someone is caught. Once they have somebody, they'll stop looking and that's how you can get away. A cold-blooded killing. A victim worth millions. And all kinds of conflicting clues. I've never had a case this complicated before.

Police following multiple leads. Until... We asked, who is that? And he says, he's my neighbor. He lives two floors below. A suspect under arrest. Having someone you love just taken away. Sorry.

Case closed. Or was it it could there be something else or someone else they'd missed there were so many parts of the puzzle that were not adding up someone had pulled the trigger but had someone else pulled the strings he was the type of guy that could take bad luck and turn it into a fortune. Thanks for joining us. I'm Lester Holt. A lot of us complain about our neighbors, but the residents of the building in this story often hung out, partied, and did business together. They seemed to see one another as friends.

Until the terrible day when some began to wonder whether one neighbor was actually a mastermind who saw the rest of them as pawns. Here's Keith Morrison. 7 a.m. November 15, 2007. Dawn in Salt Lake City, Utah. He pulled into the restaurant parking lot, turned off his engine. Sky beginning to brighten. Sun not quite up. And then there they were, the voices, the terror, the nightmare beginning. I immediately ducked down in my car after the first shot was fired. I laid there and thinking, okay, well, this is how it's going to end for me. You're going to be dead.

911, what is your emergency? Somebody just shot some man who's lying dead in front of the village inn. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of Salt Lake City, an old chocolate factory, the grand stage for our story. It was converted to loft apartments in those boom years before the bust, and the style of living and location drew a distinct crowd, outliers of a sort, iconoclasts in this famously Mormon city. I loved this building. It was fabulous.

Bianca Perman Brooks, for example, born into privilege in England, raised in Ireland and Africa. She came here in August 2006 to visit a friend. I came on holiday and I met Christopher and we just hit it off. Christopher Wright, a real estate developer, lived in the same loft building as Bianca's friend. There was a party in the building. Bianca was invited. In one night you knew. Yeah. Yeah. To anyone watching, it was an obvious perfect match. Friends and loft neighbors Dave and Lisa McCammon. Bea is so lovely, and she's kind of quirky, and I think she brought that playfulness out in Chris. He was a positive guy before, he was ecstatic after.

So it was true, blind, passionate love that drove Bianca to give up everything she had known her whole life back in England and move to Utah to be with Chris. Where six months after that first moment they laid eyes on each other, they were married. It made me feel very safe. Her protector and incurable romantic.

This is a man who cries all the way through romantic movies, like The Notebook. It didn't take long for Bianca to become firmly entrenched in loft living. So the lofts were full of incredibly crazy people. Academics, airline pilots, physicians, documentary filmmaker, Olympic speed skater, mortgage broker, socialites. John Fife, an advertising copywriter, was one of the first to buy the building. This building is a fantastic collection of just interesting people.

None more so than perhaps the building's most gregarious and outsized personality, David Novak. He was so nice and entertaining and funny and charming. It's impossible not to be charmed by David. I adore the man. We were, I would say, basically best friends here in Utah. David's huge personality fit his apparently oversized professional accomplishments. Investor, restaurateur, owner of an extremely unusual consulting firm, whose sole specialty was preparing wealthy clients for, of all things, prison.

He was hired to help put their affairs in order before they went to prison, help educate the family what was going to happen, try to get the best sentencing possible for him. That business, as David confessed to his law friends, grew out of personal experience. He himself was a felon, served a year in federal prison for mail fraud. But he was the type of guy that could take bad luck and turn it into a fortune.

So, most everyone in the building seemed to be living large in those good old pre-meltdown days when into the mix was introduced a new ingredient. A businessman with real money. It was Novak, said Bianca, who did the introductions.

Christopher had an office about two or three blocks from here, and there was a Starbucks that he always went to. And he went over there, and Novak was there with Ken Dolezal, and he introduced them. Ken Dolezal lived in a wealthy enclave just south of Salt Lake City, a very nice guy, by all accounts, with a big extended family and money to invest. Truckloads of money.

He'd already loaned Novak $1.85 million to make a movie about his prison consulting business, and soon Ken and Chris began working on a real estate deal. They spoke sometimes and they had contracts back and forth, but I really, I'm a girl. And you weren't interested? No, it was so dull. Fall came to Salt Lake City. Leaves yellowed and fell. The economic crisis scutted toward them like a low black cloud,

as the businessmen Ken Dolezal, Chris Wright, and David Novak continued their interconnected hustle and flow. But the roiling storm bearing down on them was loaded not with economic ruin, but something else entirely. I couldn't believe it. And no one, there was, everyone was there, all of our friends, and we just sat there.

We couldn't move. It was like, um, it was just unbelievable. When Dateline Continues. It was like, um, it was just unbelievable. When Dateline Continues. So now it was that morning, 7 a.m., November 15th, 2007. 911, what is the address of your emergency? Dean Carragher, then a detective with the Sandy Police Department, was on the freeway when his radio came to life. It wasn't for a few minutes that I heard there was an actual shooting, at which time... That's my department. That's where I need to come get busy. He got the address, the parking lot of the Village Inn Restaurant,

just south of Salt Lake City, in a town called Sandy, his town. It was a very violent scene. The victim was shot five times. The fifth shot was done while the shooter was standing over top of him and shot him in the face. The shooter was making sure he was dead before he left. Cold, methodical, like a professional hit. And yet, amazingly, somebody was sitting in a car, maybe six feet away, watched the whole thing. Ordinary guy, minding his own business. Now, eyewitness to a brutal slaying.

Man's name was Lee Carlson. Right hand came up, reached inside of his pocket. Out came a gun, and pointed at the other man right in the face and pulled the trigger. At the police station, Lee told how he ducked out of sight after that first shot,

but not before he got a glimpse of the shooter. As far as I can remember, he had a longer nose. I can tell his eyes seemed to be more bulgy. Let's just see a glimpse. Yeah, I know we're kind of asking a lot. But what stood out most was his hair, long, tied in a ponytail. Looked almost out of place, like a wig.

I looked at that more in his face. Before the shooting, said Lee, he heard the men's voices sounded Eastern European, maybe Slavic. Police believe both men came here in the victim's car, which the shooter then used to flee the scene. And as for the victim, well, you've heard the name by now. Ken Dolezal, the extremely wealthy local investor. My daughter called me just bawling. She told me, Ken's been shot and he's dead. Wow. Matt Beaudry considered Ken Dolezal to be one of his closest friends. They founded and coached a

college hockey team together. But Ken, Matt knew, wasn't just a wealthy businessman. He was deeply concerned for the boys on the team. I watched him pull out his wallet, slip money into kids' pockets because he heard that kids needed tuition money, couldn't buy their books. And now his friend, their friend, was dead. And some of those kids just broke down and balled. At the loft building in downtown Salt Lake, the news rocketed from floor to floor. After all, a couple of residents, including Bianca's husband, were doing business with Dolezal. I know it sounds like rubbernecking at a car crash, but it's kind of like, wow, you know, somebody knows he's been murdered. Who could possibly want a man as nice and generous as Ken Dolezal dead? But then it's almost a truism of police work that where money goes, trouble often follows.

The more money, the bigger the trouble. And in this case, an extra dollop. The dead man's vast fortune, hundreds of millions, wasn't really his, strictly speaking. He'd married into the bulk of it. The fortune came from a company his wife founded with her former husband. The divorce had been nasty, family loyalties bitterly divided, and some family members weren't the least bit happy that Ken was making investment decisions. Detective Carragher contacted Ken's brother and broke the news. Dropped down to his knees, and he said, it's that f***ing Derek. A moment of unguarded grief and

rage, and thus a possible suspect, Derek Maurer, Ken's adult stepson. It was apparent that there was difficulties between those two. But trouble in the family didn't stop with Derek. There seemed to be a riff. But not between Dee and Ken. There seemed to be a genuine love story. But now, a grieving Dee told detectives she was as baffled about the murder as they were. She was not able to provide us any information as to who he was meeting that day or anything about his day. And despite all that friction, the infighting over money and control, Dee's family produced not a single viable suspect, not even Ken's stepson.

Derek had an alibi at the time of the murder. But those initial interviews were not entirely in vain. A clue emerged from Ken's assistant. Night before the murder, she said, Ken got a call on his cell. She knew that he had set up a meeting to meet with whoever he was talking to at 7 a.m. on the 15th. The day and time at which Ken Dolezal was shot to death, was the caller also the killer? If so, they now had his voice,

because earlier that caller left this phone message. Hey, Ken, this is Robert. Talking to you, Dave. You said you'd get to the other producer in here. Detectives traced the prepaid cell from which the call came and went to the store where someone bought it. This phone was purchased with cash with no identifying information provided to the carrier.

But the family did have a suggestion for the detective, something they actually agreed on. He should look carefully at a man named David Novak. Yes, that David Novak. Remember Novak's consulting business for prison-bound executives? Guess what? Dee Maurer was incarcerated in federal prison. Tax fraud.

Ken's wealthy wife Dee was David Novak's client. That's why Ken Dolezal knew David Novak. And something about that consultant and wannabe movie producer made Ken's relatives suspicious. So detectives drove over to the loft where they spoke with Mr. Novak. He was soft-spoken and a bright man. He came across as very intelligent, yes. Answered all of their questions, but didn't seem to be of much help. And then, as Detective Kerrigan was preparing to leave, he tried one more question.

That prepaid cell phone, the one someone used to invite Ken to the fatal meeting. The store had surveillance video of a man buying that very phone. Ken's family said they didn't recognize him, but would Novak? Carragher showed him the photo. We asked, who is that? He says, he's my neighbor. He lives two floors below. And just like that, a big piece of the puzzle popped into place. But fair warning, as you'll hear, puzzle pieces and some residents of the downtown loft might not be quite what they seem. Coming up. There's a massive sense of disbelief. While the investigation takes as many turns as one of the building's hallways. I've never had a case this complicated before. When Dateline continues.

It was almost a month after the murder of Ken Dolezal, his friends still coming to terms with it. And I just think, what if? All the fun we could have had if he hadn't been taken. Until now, the investigation seemed to be going nowhere. And then, as Detective Carragher was about to leave David Novak's apartment in the downtown loft building,

he showed Novak the surveillance photo from that cell phone store. He looked at it and said, that's Chris Wright. He's my neighbor. He lives two floors below. Chris Wright, his good friend and husband of the irrepressible Bianca. This is definitely somebody we want to talk to. Carragher arrived unannounced at Chris Wright's office not far from the loft building, and almost before he could ask a question, he said, Chris launched into a story about Ken Dolezal, claimed the man was so paranoid he wanted Chris to buy a prepaid cell phone so they could communicate in complete privacy.

To Detective Carragher, the story seemed a little too ready or rehearsed. Almost as if he was covering, trying to account for things that we knew. I see. Odd. Then, as the interview went on, he said Chris's voice began to sound familiar. The voicemail that police believed helped lure Ken to his death. Hey Ken, this is Robert. To me, that was Chris's voice on that phone.

The detectives pulled out a search warrant. Bianca was home when the police arrived. It's surreal. You have, you have, they're like roving gangs of toddlers who are ripping everything apart. They turn their sofas upside down and like take out the line. They took apart my toaster. I mean, they take everything apart.

A ballistics report told police the murder weapon was a 9mm handgun. Chris was an avid collector of guns, and among them, police found an empty case for a Springfield Armory 9mm handgun. And what do you know? The gun that went with it was missing. Chris Wright was arrested and charged with the murder of Ken Dolezal. There's a massive sense of disbelief. He was being completely taken out of the blue, and for no reason. The loving husband who cried his way through romantic comedies, a cold-blooded assassin?

Impossible. It quite literally wasn't possible, said Bianca, for Chris to have killed Ken Dolezal that morning. He had an alibi. He was in the loft. I was there. He was home, in bed, with her. He was a foot from me. There is no room for doubt. This surely had to be a colossal misunderstanding. Bianca sought support from her neighbors, including David Novak, her only friend with intimate knowledge of the legal system. He comforted you?

He was brilliant, yeah. He would ask me how everything was going and what was happening with Christopher and whether our attorneys were doing the job they were supposed to. She told him everything, she said, and he assured her the mistake would soon be rectified. She believed him. I don't want to be married to a murderer. I would not fool myself. If there was a second's doubt in my mind, he did not do this.

But some of their friends in the loft weren't so sure. I started to feel sorry for her thinking, oh my gosh, you poor naive girl. You know, you're going to be crushed by this. At the Sandy, Utah Justice Center, the case that police turned over to Josh Player, then the assistant district attorney, seemed very clear. The evidence was exceptionally strong in this case. It all kept pointing in the direction of Mr. Wright. There was the surveillance photo, the voice message, which was placed from a spot near the loft, according to CELTAR tracking,

and the eyewitness. He'd been shown a photo lineup with Chris in it, and now he remembered some details a little differently than he had that first traumatic day. Like Chris's blue eyes in the photo, he said, jarred something in his mind. I was 80 to 90% certain that this was the man that I saw. Then he found a picture of Chris on the web and tried photoshopping in a few details, like a wig.

I looked at that and said, yeah, that looks almost exactly like what I saw. Reinforcing a memory. But was the memory accurate? As for the rest of the case, the investigation wasn't over yet. The story just begun. The first puzzle pieces placed where they seemed to fit. But... I've never had a case this complicated before.

Oh, even more than complicated. As those friends in the loft began to believe, something darker than that. When Dateline Continues. Strange times around the loft building in downtown Salt Lake. So shocking that one of their own, Chris Wright, had been arrested and charged with killing wealthy businessman Ken Dolezal. All of the evidence we obtained led up to Chris Wright being the trigger man. In the SUV, Ken drove to his fatal morning meeting, for example. The killer used that vehicle to flee the scene.

And when the cops found it and scoured the interior, they got a hit. Chris's DNA. We had a DNA result from the inside door handle of the SUV. It was a tiny sample, not a perfect one, but it seemed to put Chris in Ken Dolezal's car, driver's side, which certainly helped the case. But it wasn't quite airtight, not yet.

The murder weapon had not been found. Yes, they found an empty gun case in Chris and Bianca's apartment, but nothing to connect the case to the murder. And just about then... A sergeant for the district attorney's office just happened to call me and ask, hey, did you ever look in that gun case? Was there shell casing or anything in that gun case? Turns out the gun's manufacturer includes a test-fired shell casing with each gun itself.

So the detective went to the evidence locker, he said, retrieved the gun case. Looked inside and there was a casing. Big moment. Big moment. Big moment because when ballistics tested that shell casing... It was a match. That shell casing was fired from the same gun as the shell casings recovered at the scene where Kendall Lazar was killed. Chris Wright's missing gun must have been the murder weapon.

Now, the case looked very strong indeed. Though Chris's wife, Bianca, certainly didn't think so. I know for certain, categorically, that Christopher didn't do it. In fact, the police and prosecutor had it all wrong, she insisted. And it wasn't just that Chris had an alibi for the morning of the murder. No, she said it was the whole case. It was all wrong. Chris's DNA in the car, for example? Of course it was there, she said. Chris admitted he'd been in the car, but weeks before the murder.

But, get this, the steering wheel especially, and all of the car, was covered with DNA and fingerprints that did not match Chris. Nor did Bianca buy Lee Carlson's story. He said that the guy had an Eastern European accent. Christopher is American, born and bred. He also said that he had only seen a glimpse of his face. In fact, said Bianca, He also said that he had only seen a glimpse of his face. I only saw a glimpse of it. In fact, said Bianca, the eyewitness account more properly eliminated Chris as a suspect.

All agreed to remember that Ken and his killer arrived at the crime scene together in the same car. But think about it, said Bianca. It's going to go on until I just look at him. I don't want somebody wearing a wig. Would Chris wear a wig to a meeting with someone who already knew him, had met him? Particularly someone as cautious as Ken? You have a deeply paranoid man, Ken Dozer, who is doing business with Christopher and has met him.

You don't think that if Christopher got into the car all wigged up, that he would think that that was slightly strange. And if the eyewitness was right, the killer shot with his right hand. Christopher is staggeringly left-handed. Staggeringly left-handed. Then there was the business of eye color. Now, long after the event, the eyewitness was saying the killer had brilliant blue eyes. But right after the murder... I can tell eye color, but his eyes seem to be more bulgy. He just got more and more refined in each interview with the police. Brilliant blue eyes. Brilliant, yes. Which, of course, you can see brilliant Nordic blue eyes from the side.

What about Chris's suspiciously missing handgun, the one linked to the crime? Bianca says she is certain Chris did not use it to kill Ken Dolezal that morning. Impossible, she said, because he no longer had it. That gun, I lost back in the summer. I lost? Yeah. You just lost a gun? I have a horrible habit of losing stuff.

Before Chris ever met Ken Dolezal, she took some visiting British friends on a shooting excursion to the Great Salt Lake. They finished at sunset. And I put down this little gun, the Springfield, on the ground right next to the back. And I went to help somebody with something else. And then she got distracted, she said. Packed up the rest of the gear, went home, and neither she nor Chris ever saw that gun again.

Bianca's proof the gun was missing? A video made just over a day later by her British visitors who wanted to document their uniquely American experience. In their video, there is no sign of a Springfield Armory 9mm. I lost stuff constantly, and it was a bone of contention between Christopher and I. And while the prosecution scoffed at Bianca's lost gun story, her lost friends did not. If you knew sweet Bianca, she accidentally threw her gorgeous wedding ring away.

We had to dig it out of the garbage. I was standing there. She can be an absent-minded dingbat. But remember the day police searched the loft? They took apart my toaster. She was focused like a laser that day, said Bianca, watching intently, she said, as an officer looked in the empty 9mm gun case. I was sitting beside her.

No test-fired shell casing, she said. I don't mean to sound cynical, but I know it wasn't there. Only possible conclusion, said Bianca. It was her accusation. The Sandy police must have planted the shell casing in order to link Chris's missing gun to the crime scene. One thing that will be hard for people to accept is the idea that this detective would do something as unethical as plant evidence.

It was not there. I know that. The Sandy Police Department categorically denied the accusation. But as those loft friends heard more of Chris Wright's side of the story from Bianca, they became convinced he was innocent. There were so many parts of the puzzle that were not adding up. Unless they reasoned, unless someone they knew very well wanted Chris to take the fall, a dark suspicion wafted through the corridors

of that old chocolate factory. Perhaps the police, they said, arrested the wrong neighbor. He had the perfect part, seeing Christopher. Coming up, the focus falls on another resident as some wonder whether the right neighbor is under suspicion.

We were astounded and I remember saying to him, what? When Dateline continues. Among residents of the downtown Salt Lake Loft, an idea took root and grew around the story of the murder of Kent Dolezal. It was planted just weeks after Chris was arrested. Loft residents Dave and Lisa McCammon were having dinner with their best friends, the Novaks. He announced, we're moving. And we were astounded. And I remember saying to him, what? You've put all this money into your loft. You've got all this investment here. Why are you leaving? He said, it's just time to go. He claimed to be their great friend,

sociable, gregarious, larger than life. Then said his neighbors, once Chris was arrested, he seemed nervous. And now he was gone. And so they wondered, was David Novak running from something? The Loft friends began reexamining all those stories David told them over the years, particularly those about his criminal past. We started comparing notes and stories, and it becomes clear, wow, you know, David told me a different version of that. They'd been lying, to put it rather bluntly.

Certainly not full truths. The brief prison term for mail fraud Novak told to meet Sir? Turned out there was more to that story, a lot more. Novak had confessed to a con that played out like a cinematic thriller. He'd used a private flying club he owned to run an insurance scam. Then, as it caught up to him, he attempted to escape by faking his own death. Ditched his airplane in Puget Sound.

He faked his death in order to avoid an insurance audit. That was not a crime of passion. That was a crime of calculation. Or so the law friends believed. And if that was true, what might he have done in Salt Lake? Their suspicion only grew when the friends found out Novak left town without mentioning it was he

who fingered Chris in that surveillance photo. Did he ever tell you, I identified Christopher as the guy who brought the cell phone? No, no. And of course, that prepaid cell phone was the very clue that led police to Chris. A phone which Chris bought, said Bianca, after Novak assured him. Novak had said that this guy routinely used these throwaway phones. What's more, said Bianca, Chris could not have left that voicemail.

Because by the time of the murder, she says, he'd given the phone away. He gave it to Novak. And Novak gave it to Dolezal. Yes. Yes. I mean, as far as we know. But it's Novak, so we don't know anything. And now a theory about motive drifted from loft to loft. Hadn't Novak borrowed almost $2 million from Ken? The friend said they watched him spend lavishly on high living and never saw evidence of that movie the loan was supposed to pay for.

But really, was their old friend capable of orchestrating murder and pinning it on Chris? There's one person that bragged about knowing Russian mafia. But how hard would it be to find somebody that looked like Chris? And he introduced Chris from the very beginning with that in mind of setting Chris up. I mean, I know it sounds like just a really dumb movie, but if you had ever met Novak, the man has a Byzantine mind. She recalled all those supportive chats she had with Novak after Chris's arrest.

It turned out he was probably fishing for information. It reminded friend John Fife of a conversation with Novak one night after they dined together. John posed a question. He said, mostly in jest, of course, just hypothetical. I said, David, have you ever contemplated committing the perfect murder? And he said, yes. The key element to that is making sure that someone is caught and charged with a crime. Once they have somebody, they'll stop looking, and that's how you can really get away. And now Novak had taken off. And even though their questions didn't amount to hard evidence,

of course, Chris's defense attorneys wondered as they prepared for the trial why the police had so readily dismissed Novak as a suspect. Dismissed him and a few other quite puzzling discoveries, like, for example, the one about Ken's widow, Dee. Remember, she was in prison at the time of his murder. When she first talked to police, she told them she had no idea her husband had a meeting the morning of his murder. No clue who he was meeting with. Turns out, she was not telling the truth.

Hello? You have a call from an inmate. Hello? Hi, honey. It's standard procedure for prisons to record inmates' phone calls. This is Ken talking to his wife, Dee, night before his murder. I'm actually meeting with my friend tomorrow at 7 a.m. Go figure that out. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, exactly.

So tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. So tomorrow night I should know more. Police confronted Dee in prison, recorded the interview. In it, she claimed the stress of losing her husband caused her to forget about that phone call. And then she dropped a bombshell. She said she knew who the friend was Ken was supposed to meet. And it wasn't Chris Wright. She'd never heard of him before. David Novak. That's who I believe he was meeting.

Chris's defenders wanted to know why the police didn't seem to follow up on that or probe more deeply into all that tension in D. Maurer's family. Odd, all of it. The feeling to them that something was missing, that the case against Chris

simply didn't hold together. So as Chris's trial finally got underway, Bianca felt her husband was as good as home. It was just like, brilliant, you know? We now, you know, they go away, they do their thing,

they come back and I get my husband back. Coming up, Chris Wright makes his case to Dateline. The people who are going to watch your show, I urge them to make their own decision. When Dateline continues. Chris Wright's murder trial began in April 2010. It had been more than two years since Ken Dolezal was shot dead in the Village Inn parking lot in Sandy, Utah. Chris's defense did more than challenge the evidence. It made a provocative claim that Chris Wright was the victim of a conspiracy. A conspiracy hatched right there in the loft by former neighbor David Novak to protect the real killer by setting up Chris to take the fall. A conspiracy the prosecution brushed off as nonsense.

You would have to believe, for it not to be Chris Wright, that it was somebody that looked like Chris Wright, sounded like Chris Wright, had the phone bought by Chris Wright, used the gun bought by Chris Wright, had Chris Wright's DNA, and had a connection to Ken Dolezal to find that it wasn't Chris Wright.

But all of that claimed Chris's defense that clever Novak was quite capable of setting up. He could have nailed from start to finish. Like a chess game somehow, 20 moves ahead. Yep. But that didn't explain Lee Carlson, the good Samaritan eyewitness who sat in court and pointed his finger at Chris Wright.

I am very certain and very clear of what I saw, and I may not have told it initially right off the bat under the full stress of what I saw, but I know what I saw, and I know who I saw. Except there is one person who said he is most certainly sure Lee Carlson is mistaken. Chris Wright himself. I will answer any question you want to ask. Chris was jailed right after his arrest. He wanted to make his case to Dateline in the flesh, but authorities wouldn't allow it, so we talked to him on the phone. So, you say you didn't do it? I absolutely did not do it. We discussed all the allegations at length. He offered detailed refutations and some allegations of his own.

We're asked to believe that the police were incompetent and definitely crooked, that David Novak is crooked, and the only person who was innocent as the driven snow is you. It's not my fingerprints. It doesn't match my description. I had an alibi. I have no motive. And there's clearly a person who's pointing the finger at me who got two million dollars. This is just too cloak and dagger for a jury. I understand how difficult it is to believe, but the alternative is that I just simply got up one day and decided to go shoot some poor person in a disguise. Chris wanted to talk about that voicemail, the one that helped lure Ken to his death. The voicemail Detective Carragher was sure was left by Chris, though no voice analyst ever studied it. I mean, people who are going to watch your show are going to listen to my voice and are going to listen to that recording.

And I urge them to make their own decision. Yeah, let's listen to it right now, all right? Absolutely. Go right ahead. Hey, Ken, this is Robert. Talk to you, Dave. You said you get to gather pretty soon here. So that isn't you, huh? That is absolutely not me. The jury got the case April 29th 2010. A jury

that certainly heard about but never saw the mysterious David Novak. So, were they by the prosecutor's evidence? Or Bianca's explanations? Her alibi for Chris. I was concerned because I'd been told that sometimes it can be a crapshoot

was the phrase that was used. The jury deliberated for 11 hours. And the verdict? Guilty. I can't even begin to explain. It's like the bottom falls out of your world. And he wouldn't let me hug him. Sorry, just give me a sec.

It's all right. Take your time. Crying is not acceptable. And why is that? Because I'm English. Oh. And why is that? Because I'm English. But for Ken's friends, at least Matt Bouldry, the verdict was vindication. He looks like a smug killer. And then a jury of his peers listened to all the evidence

and with that weighty choice decided that he was. I'm satisfied with that. Chris Wright was sentenced to 15 years to life. And David Novak has not been charged with or accused by the police of anything, though whether or not authorities want to talk to him is less clear. Do you know where he is? I don't know where he is, no. Are your people trying to track him down?

Well, part of the rules that I'm constrained by is I don't speak about ongoing investigations or the existence of ongoing investigations. But if law enforcement was mum about David Novak, Ken Dolezal's widow was not. Dee Maurer filed a lawsuit against Novak on grounds including wrongful death, conspiracy, breach of contract,

and fraud. Her suit alleged a third theory, that Novak paid Chris Wright $25,000 to kill Ken Dolezal. Novak didn't answer the suit nor attend the proceeding. So, in November 2011, a judge granted a default judgment on the breach of contract and fraud claims and awarded Maurer $7 million. In August 2012, the court granted her a motion to dismiss the wrongful death and conspiracy claims, so that a final judgment could be entered in the case. Back in the loft, some imagined the worst about their former friend and neighbor. What would you advise them to do if you could talk to him? Talk to you guys.

Tell the story. If you have nothing to hide. Refute me. Tell me why what I'm saying is not correct. We used to be friends. I'm more than willing to hear what you have to say, David. So where was he? Turned out David Novak wasn't so hard to find after all. We found him in an upscale

neighborhood in a certain northwestern city. Didn't look like a man on the run. Just a guy getting a coffee with his wife at Starbucks, of course. He wasn't answering his calls or emails from his former loft friends, and he didn't want to talk to Dateline. Telling us over the phone, he was not involved in Ken's murder. Has been cleared by the police and anyone who says otherwise is a liar and liable to be sued. Bring it on, he said. So, is Chris Wright a liar? Bianca an unwitting or perhaps willing accomplice?

Some people are surprised that you stayed, because you could go. I wouldn't leave a dog in Christopher's situation, and I will work until my dying day to make sure he is, that his name is cleared, isn't, you know. Wait for him as long as you have to. Yep. No problem. And out in suburban Sandy, Utah, the case still resonates around the shiny new courthouse where then-ADA Josh Player struggled with his emotions a bit as he told us he is sure he did not send an innocent man to prison, but rather achieved justice for everyone.

I was glad for the family of the victim. You take this stuff to heart, don't you? I do. I do. And while they stand on opposite sides of that chasm between innocence and guilt, there is no dispute about the man whose life was lost. Ken Dolezal was a man who loved a woman, just as Chris loved Bianca, who loved hockey, loved helping kids, and tried to do right

by all that money, which is mostly still around, though he is not. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thank you for joining us.