Dateline NBC - The Day She Disappeared

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

In this Dateline classic, a missing persons case quickly becomes a homicide investigation. Police have no suspects, but a grieving family has suspicions. Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on August 19, 2011.

This doesn't happen in our happy little world. Their world shattered. A young mother murdered. Who could have killed her? We had a homicide. We had no suspects. Also no evidence. But police found a dark side behind that bright suburban facade.

She slept with the children and the door locked. And finally, a vital clue. It's the most pointed piece of premeditation. Thanks for joining us. I'm Lester Holt. This story involves a young mother who disappeared one morning. Her husband said she went for a run and never came home. It was a puzzling case. It happened in a safe suburban neighborhood, the kind of place where crime is unexpected. Even more unexpected, the tiny clue buried in a computer that unlocked the mystery. Here's Keith Morrison. Nothing about that morning made any sense. It all seemed like just such a bad nightmare. This doesn't happen in our happy little world.

It was a Saturday morning in July 2008. The happy little world, a sweet and leafy suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, called Cary. Sort of place a young family would aspire to. If you were someone like Hannah Pritchard, for example. There's always lots of friend-making going on through someone you meet, lots of cookouts and family functions. Like the one in the neighborhood the night before. So Hannah would have heard party stories that Saturday morning from her friend,

Nancy Cooper. Would have. Because Nancy didn't show up. I hadn't heard from her. Maybe by like 10 o'clock I called her house. Brad answered, and he said, oh, she went for a run. Nancy was an athlete, had been training for a half marathon. Brad Cooper was Nancy's husband.

And I was like, oh, okay, well, when did she leave? And he told me, oh, I don't know, 6.30 or 7. I was like, well, she's not back. Weird. If Nancy had to cancel their meeting,, she's not back. Weird. If Nancy had to cancel their meeting, surely she would have called. Hannah cooled her heels. At one, the phone rang, and I saw on the caller ID it was her house, and I answered the phone, you know, hey, where have you been?

And he said, no, Hannah, it's Brad. Um, Nancy's still not back. Now, Brad was worried. So I really started to panic. Especially when she learned Nancy had also stood up another of their friends. So they called the local hospitals. No sign of Nancy. They called Nancy's twin sister Krista up in Canada. Have you talked to Nancy today? She went for a run and she hasn't returned yet. And we're very worried about her. Can you call us back? You know about this kind of stuff? You'd think.

Krista calls her older brother Jeff, who's a police officer in Edmonton, Alberta. My first reaction was, well, okay, you know, it's, she's somewhere. You just need some space or some time. She'll turn up. But when Nancy's parents, Gary and Donna Rents, heard she was missing, they were gripped by something dark and cold. Gary said to me, Donna, this story is not going to have a happy ending. By afternoon, the Cary police were involved. All I was told on the phone was that it was missing persons.

When Detective George Daniels arrived, Nancy's neighborhood was already filling up with a small army of her panicked friends. Nancy's family rushed to Kerry to join in the search. Her husband Brad made a public plea for help. If anyone knows anything, I just want them to contact the police with any information they may have. And again, thank you to everyone that continues to come out and help out. Sir, do you have a flyer? Volunteers chased up and down the running trails where she loved to train. They combed the surrounding parks and lakes and woods for this woman they had grown to love

since she and Brad moved down from Canada. When she walked into a room, that's where people wanted to be. She and Brad were like a lot of people in Kerry, raising a family here, having got their start in another place in time. In Brad and Nancy's case, Calgary, Canada. That's where they met, back in 98. I really liked him. As did Nancy's younger sister, Jill.

This is someone who is warm. You genuinely saw how much he cared for her. So Brad became a helpful member of the family, even designed the computer systems in the family business. Our IT guy would say, I just want to meet the guy who did the networking system. So he was kind of a legend in the IT world. He was so good that Cisco Systems invited him to move to Raleigh and work for the company. Smart guy. Smart guy. Yes. Mensa or close, I would say. But if Nancy was to go with him to America, for immigration reasons, they had to be married. So in the fall of 2000, they said their vows, an intimate family affair. How did she feel about going to North Carolina?

She was a little apprehensive, I think. At first, there was lots of tears at the airport, just fear of the unknown a little bit. But I think she was excited. And a few years later, there were two BMWs in the driveway. Nancy had a vast circle of friends. And Brad, a bright future at Cisco, where he'd become an expert in the marriage of internet technology and telephones, one of just 152 such experts in the whole world.

And best of all, two little girls, Bella, born in 2004, Katie two years later. The best mother I've ever seen. She played and played and played. She was just so hands-on. And now they were putting up missing posters. Sunday went by, all day Monday. Then Monday evening, someone called 911. As the chief of the Cary Police Department,

it is my very sad duty to tell you that the search for our Nancy is over. It was a man walking his dog who found her, lying face down in water at the edge of a storm drain near a housing construction site several miles from the Cooper home. Our investigation is now a homicide. Now they had to say goodbye. It was a measure of the woman that total strangers

joined Nancy's family and friends to share in the sorrow. I continue to thank the community for their generosity and support. It's overwhelming. I am one of the luckiest people in the world. I'm a twin. Sorry. I have a bond with Nancy that no one in the world has. All I have to do to remember her is to look in the mirror.

She will always be half of me. Nancy, I love you, and I always will. Now, of course, a homicide investigation was underway. But for Detective George Daniels, only this to go on. She'd been strangled. She was found wearing only a sports bra and her diamond stud earrings. There were no marks on her body to indicate a beating. No struggle, no sign of sexual assault or robbery. It was a puzzle that landed in his lap. If she wasn't raped, if she wasn't assaulted in any kind of way, the earrings weren't taken, then what was the reason for her to be over here? And then what was the reason for them to do this if nothing was done to her. Coming up, police soon discover possible reasons

and a reality much grimmer than the smiling facade. She said to me, I don't know what I'm going to do. When Dateline continues. We had a homicide. We had no suspects. So we're dealing basically with a zero balance here. Nancy Cooper had been strangled, her barely clothed body found in a storm drain several miles from home.

But why? There were no signs of rape or robbery or that any struggle had occurred. We start going back to where we started at, saying, okay, let's look at everything again. There were reports from people who said they saw a woman who looked like Nancy running that Saturday morning. One man said he watched her for a good 30 seconds, then saw a van make a U-turn to follow her.

And there were other reports of mysterious vans. Friday night, one sped away from a cul-de-sac with no lights on. Could any of this be tied to her killer? We're not walking away from anything at this point. Everything becomes important. Like his conversations with Nancy's husband, Brad, that weekend of the search, Brad told detectives that he and Nancy were up at 4 a.m. Saturday to calm their crying two-year-old Katie. Then, six o'clock or so, he made two trips to the grocery store, after which Nancy announced she was off to run. Of course, we went to find the video records of him going in and out the store, which we did in fact find. But one of those talks with Brad

struck Detective Daniels as odd when he asked Brad, did you contact Nancy's family? He had told us no, but it could be because he's frantic about the situation and didn't have time to call them. But then a little more talking, and the detective learned there may have been another reason altogether. Nancy and Brad were having marital problems. And he told me that the last two months, they seemed like they were getting better. And so when I asked him why they had problems, he told me that he had had an affair.

And so Daniels tucked that tidbit away and went on with the search for Nancy. But after her body was found, things were different. The Cooper house became a crime scene. Police in and out, turning the place upside down, and Daniels kept his ears open. Because among Nancy's friends and family, people were certainly talking. We're getting all this information, and we're having to separate what's important versus what's just part of a marriage. Brad, remember, told Detective Daniels that he and Nancy were getting past the tension

his affair had caused, but that wasn't quite the story he was hearing from Nancy's family and friends. She felt very trapped, and she just didn't know what she was going to do. The marriage, it turned out, had been rocky from the start. Brad seemed more married to his job than to Nancy. Then, in the spring of 2007, Nancy's close friend Heather told her she had slept with Brad. So Nancy confronted her husband. She just wanted the truth so that they could fix it and go on. And he said it didn't happen.

For a very long time. Made her feel bad about thinking that it happened. Until months later, it was New Year's Eve day when Brad finally came clean. Yes, he told Nancy, it happened. But he said only once and really it meant nothing. So they went to counseling. And that's when Nancy heard what she said was the real story. Brad says to the counselor,

it's been going on for a long time. Changes again from this one-night stand to I think I love the woman. So Nancy came away from that and said, I'm finished. They agreed to split, sell the house. Nancy would move back to Canada with the girls. And then suddenly Brad canceled Nancy's credit cards, blocked her access to the bank accounts, put her on a cash allowance. I recall a time she was in the car with me and she called

him and said, you know, I've got two dollars and we don't have any diapers. Nancy couldn't get a job. She had no green card. So she began painting a friend's house to earn some extra money. And when she did, Brad reduced her allowance. She must have been just furious at him. Furious would be an understatement. He'd also try to help Nan and she's very proud and she'd be guilty. I'm not going to take your money. No, this isn't your job to support me and my kids. Nancy began locking important papers, including the girl's passports, in her car. I went down in February of 08, and it was awful.

I'd never seen Nancy stressed out before. I'd never seen her raise her voice in the house, and she was just miserable. Miserable, stressed, each day uncertain, a painful struggle, an angry contest. She said this is just I think a game to show me how difficult it's going to be. It's his attempt to force me back into this relationship. Then as Nancy was preparing to move back to Canada and with Brad's blessing take the girls. One of those moments on which lives can turn. The arrival from Nancy's lawyer of a proposed separation agreement. Alimony, child support, private schools for the girls.

Brad would have to travel to Canada for his twice-monthly visits. He made no counteroffer, just told Nancy the move was off. He saw what he was going to have to pay, and all bets are off. And then Brad got a hold of the girls' passports, found them in Nancy's car. Now they couldn't leave, and Nancy was trapped too. But as the father, it's his perfect right to prevent those kids from leaving. Yes, it's also a way to say if I'm doing half the child care, then I'm not going to have an alimony issue.

To get her away from her troubles, Nancy's family took her and the girls on vacation. And how was it at the end, when you had to say goodbye? It was heartbreaking. I had Nancy in my arms in the airport in Charlotte, and she was sobbing. And she said, Mom, I just want to come home and I'll never forget that day. It was the last time they saw her alive. And now that she was dead, Nancy's family was sure Brad

had to be involved somehow. But Detective Daniels knew the demise of a marriage, bitter though it may have been, did not prove murder. There was a lot more work to do. Short statistics say we should go back and key on the husband, things like that, and we're not going to walk away from that. But at the same time, we're letting the investigation lead us wherever it goes. Coming up, or was it something Brad Cooper did? If anyone could do that, it was the defendant. Piecing together what happened to Nancy when Dateline continues. In the days after Nancy Cooper's killing,

the police chief in Cary, North Carolina, tried to calm her jittery town. But her message was curious. Seemed to imply that her officers knew something more than they were revealing. We still believe this is an isolated case. Cary continues to be one of the safest places to live in the nation. Isolated? How could she know, really? And we still have not named a suspect or a person of interest. Oh, but Nancy's family

had. The very day Krista learned her twin sister was missing, she called Brad. And I'd asked him point blank at that point. What have you done? Where is she? She didn't wait for an answer. She just hung up the phone. Then, the day after Nancy's body was identified,

her family went to court to try to get those two little girls away from Brad. By four o'clock in the afternoon, we had papers in the judge's hand for temporary custody of Nancy's children. The family acted so fast because, according to their complaint, Brad's behavior was so disturbing. Before she disappeared, they'd seen emotional abuse. And they were sure she never went jogging on July 12th. And then after she went missing? He was very standoffish and aloof with the family.

And he didn't contact anybody, and he just didn't want anybody around, didn't want any help. And it was strange enough to be alarming. And so they feared for Bella and Katie's safety. Did you think they were in danger too? If he's in a place where he can do this, could he bring harm to those kids?

And the answer to that was absolutely. At the end of the day, you just have to live with the fact that if we're wrong and this is way over the line we did it for the right reasons the judge determined that the intense scrutiny brad was likely to face during a murder investigation put the children at risk in late july 2008 the girls went back to canada to live with krista their slain mother's twin, and her husband. Kind of in a hurry. But Brad, remember, had not been charged with any crime, wasn't even a declared suspect, and he fought hard to get his daughters back.

Afterwards, I thought about it. Which meant three months after Nancy's murder, sitting for a recorded deposition in which Brad answered questions under oath about his marriage, his affair, and what happened the morning Nancy disappeared. So, were police investigators listening? Oh, yes, they were. Was Nancy a good wife? I would say so, yes. She was supportive of myself and of the children, and very loving and generous.

But there were two issues that troubled the Coopers' marriage. One was money. The couple had serious debts. Just this last week, I looked at the American Express card from January 2007 to December 2007. And of that, $27,000 was accredited to Nancy's credit card. And mine was $17,000 was accredited to Nancy's credit card, and mine was $17,000. It was to rein in Nancy's spending, he said, that he put her on a cash allowance.

How much cash? At least $300. But Nancy said Brad was angry that they didn't have more money to spend. She referred to me as the budget Nazi, so I'm sure she probably has said that once or twice in a heated conversation. The other issue? Brad's sexual relationship with Nancy's best friend, Heather. The issue which finally brought the marriage to an end. He called it his indiscretion. I had sexual intercourse with Heather Matour once. It happened sometime at

the end of 2004, early 2005, he said. And where did the sexual intercourse take place? It took place in our home, in the closet of the master bedroom. Did you initially deny the relationship? Yes, I initially denied it for approximately one year. Why? I thought that if, by denying it, it would go away and we could remain as a whole family. But when it became time for the family to split, Brad said he found the monthly terms of the proposed separation agreement unreasonable. Child support, medical, private school, extra activities. Yeah, I kind of added it up, and I ballparked it at over $5,000 to $6,000.

He also explained why he called off Nancy's move back to Canada. I realized that seeing the girls every other weekend would not be sufficient. And Brad gave his account of the hours before Nancy went missing. They were at a party across the street Friday night. He left about 8 p.m., got the girls ready for bed. The kids fell asleep about 9 p.m. I probably fell asleep soon after. He was awakened briefly about 12.30, he said, when Nancy came home. When she opened the front door and I heard her come up the stairs.

He was awakened again at 4 a.m. by Katie's crying. He said, took her downstairs, followed by Nancy about 20 minutes later. Nancy and I kind of tag-teamed off and on, trying to keep her occupied, trying to calm her down. Brad said he made two trips to the store that morning. On the second trip, Nancy called him, he said. He remembers being at an intersection when the call came in. Do you know what time that would have been? I think, looking at the cell phone records, I think it said it came in at 6.40 a.m.

When he came back from the store the second time, Katie had calmed down, he said, and Nancy told Brad she was going for a run. I took Katie upstairs, went in front of my computer, read some emails with Katie in my lap. And then, around 7, he said, Nancy left. How do you know that she left the home? I'm not too sure if she actually said goodbye. Either way, I somehow knew that she had left. Either the door closed or she said later or something.

That, he said, was the last time he saw her. Three weeks after the deposition, three months after Nancy's body was found, in late October 2008, Brad Cooper was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife. So, was it something he said? Coming up.

She too, the defense suggested, had been unfaithful and they found a witness to prove it. She began taking her clothes off. I took my clothes off. But did that have anything to do with the day she disappeared? He was just the right sort of guy when she found him. Bright, quiet, stable.

And now, Brad Cooper was on trial for murder. We are ready to have the opening statements. It began in March of 2011, two and a half years after Nancy's death. Nancy Rents Cooper never went for a run from her house on July 12th of 2008. The prosecutors Howard Cummings, Amy Fitzhugh, and Boz Zellinger, had their own idea of what happened to Nancy, beginning the night before she disappeared. We think that she came home from this party, and she had said some things in front of him that might have upset him a little bit,

and that he choked her. Killed her then, their theory goes. Put her body in the trunk of his car. Drove her to that drainage ditch. Returned home to manufacture an alibi. Why? They started with that shredded marriage, Brad's affair, his cutting off Nancy financially, stopping her move back to Canada. She was, testified Nancy's friends, increasingly desperate. She said, Jennifer, he's breaking me. She said, I don't know how much I have left to fight. She told me that when she slept at night,

she slept with her jeans on and the keys in her pocket with the children and the door locked. He never beat her. It wasn't physical, said the prosecutors, but he used financial power to exert absolute control. This, they said, was a form of domestic violence. She was in this abrasive, rough relationship at that point. He trapped her. He controlled everything about her life. But wait a minute. Nancy's allowance, remember, was $300 a week. Would a jury think that was evidence of abuse? How do you tell a jury that he's depriving her? It's difficult, but the facts still remain that there are these signs of control emanating from that Cooper household. It doesn't matter whether it's $1,000 a week or $10 a week. The fact of the matter is, is that it caused friction between the two of them.

And so the jury heard about that last week of Nancy's life, the week of war with Brad. With Nancy's father on the stand, prosecutors played the phone message Nancy left her parents after she returned home from that vacation with her family. As that last week went on, the fighting escalated. On the Friday, friend Diana Duncan testified, Nancy was shaking with anger when she revealed Brad withheld her allowance that day because she earned her own money painting a friend's house. Did she tell you what kind of day this was? This was an I hate Brad day. She said that at least three times that day, she said, I hate you, Brad Cooper.

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Diana lived across the street. It was her party that Friday at which Brad and Nancy fought openly, she said. Her tone at that point was angry, but also there was a tone of, you're an idiot. Brad went home with the girls around eight. Nancy stayed on, bitterly complaining about Brad, even to strangers like Donna Lopez. And once in a while, said Donna, Nancy nervously looked across the street to her own house. How did you feel when you left that night?

I was very worried for someone who I didn't know well. I thought I'd met someone really, really nice and told my husband something really bad was going to happen over there. It's really bad. So when Nancy disappeared, her friend's eyes all turned to Brad. After all, they knew about the conflict, and Jessica Adam knew Nancy was supposed to be at her house at 8 a.m. that Saturday to paint. When Nancy didn't show up, she called the police. I was very concerned. I had seen Brad in my house, and he was agitated that week, related to the painting.

But evidence of marriage gone bad is hardly proof of murder. Nor was Brad's conspicuous absence from her memorial service, nor his apparent lack of interest or cooperation as the police saw it in the murder investigation. These were suspicions, but there was no physical evidence linking Brad to the crime. The prosecutor would say it was because he cleaned the house. He covered his tracks well, but there it was. So what was the best evidence against Brad? Ironic, perhaps, given the defendant's particular expertise. We knew that we had this fabricated alibi that we needed to address. The issue was that phone call. The morning Nancy disappeared, Brad's cell phone registered a call from home at 6.40 a.m. when he went back to the store.

Proof, surely, that Nancy was alive at 6.40. Unless, that is, unless Brad placed the call himself. Brad, the world-class expert in Internet phone technology. If anyone could do that, it was the defendant. Ultimately, he had the potential to make that phone technology. If anyone could do that, it was the defendant. Ultimately, he had the potential to make that phone call. In testimony that was, frankly, mind-numbing. That leverages something called either TAPI or J-TAPI. An expert from Cisco, Brad's former company,

explained about ten different ways someone as accomplished as Brad could have remotely made that call. The main ways to do it are using a computer where you can program something into your computer and delay it so that a phone call can be made from your computer, from the computer's modem. But to do that, Brad needed a certain router. One prosecutor said conveniently disappeared from the Cooper home. We know he had this router. In fact, said the prosecution, a Cisco chat log proves Brad borrowed that router.

The 3825, it's called, took it home months before the murder. You know that the defendant had one of those two 3825 routers? That's correct. I only had two. Okay. And you never got that 3825 router back? That's correct. I only had two. Okay. And you never got that 3825 router back? No, sir. Cisco doesn't have it back. Where did it go? We know it was never returned. But it was Brad's own computer examined by the FBI, which coughed up the most accusing evidence of all. Evidence he'd already lied under oath.

The kids fell asleep about 9 p.m. I probably fell asleep soon after. In his deposition, Brad said he was asleep with his daughters when Nancy came home from that party Friday night. But Brad's computer said otherwise. He was online until about midnight when Nancy came home. He's been awake on his computer and when she comes in shortly after midnight, we think they argued and that a fight ensues, and that's when he strangled her. And then the closest thing the prosecution had to a smoking gun, a Google Maps search. Prosecutors allege Brad typed in the numbers 27518, the zip code for Carrie, then zoomed into the exact location where Nancy's body was found. When do they claim he did this? 1.15 in the afternoon on Friday, July 11, 2008, the day before Nancy went missing.

But proof of intent? Maybe, maybe not. It wasn't much of a search. It lasted just 41 seconds. Well, he didn't look anywhere else. Generally, you search a whole bunch of different places, and this is one place, and it's only 41 seconds long. I don't think it would take very long. If you look at the map and you immediately recognize this desolate area, this beige area in a sea of green,

and then zoom into it, zoom into it, zoom into it, and see where it is. Of course, every prosecution has its flaws. And this one? Maybe, said the defense, they didn't have the right man at all. And maybe they didn't know Nancy so well either. Coming up,

was there enough evidence to find Nancy's husband guilty? Even her family wasn't sure. If I was hearing this for the first time, would I feel comfortable sending someone to prison? What would the jury decide? When Dateline continues. The idea that they're in a bad marriage, that they're contemplating divorce, it gets you to the point where you say, I need to take a second look at this. This is Howard Kurtz, defense attorney. And here's what he thought about the murder case against his client, Brad Cooper. You need actual evidence to convict. And actual evidence is something that they did not have. No physical evidence, said defense attorneys Kurtz and Robert Trinkle to tie Brad to Nancy's murder. And those awful scenes from the Cooper marriage, the jury heard? No witness for either

side had ever seen Brad physically violent toward Nancy. And as for the $300 a week allowance, there was a reason, the defense argued. Remember, the couple had serious debt. And the defense offered contrasting scenes of the Cooper marriage from another set of friends. People who had known the couple for years did not jump on this bandwagon to paint this as an abusive relationship. Remember that I hate Brad day? The day the prosecution said the marriage hit its boiling point? On that very day, said Laura Hiller, Nancy was making plans for Saturday night, the day she disappeared. She wanted my husband and I to come over and play sequence with her and Brad. And was that a game that you had played with the Coopers before?

Oh, yeah. Nancy introduced us to that game. And when Nancy's friend Jessica testified they had plans to paint her house at 8 o'clock Saturday morning, she had to have been mistaken, said the defense. Because Nancy knew Brad had a tennis game at 9 a.m. with Mike Hiller. I specifically sought out Nancy to make sure it was okay with her. Didn't indicate that she had any other plans. You know, there was talk that she was going to jog, and she would be back by then. And there were people who claimed they saw a woman they believed was Nancy running,

and it was proof, the defense says, that she was alive that morning. She was about 5'9", good shape. This witness said she reported her sighting to the police after she saw Nancy's missing poster. How is it that the next day when you saw the flyer, you believed it was her? Because she was so close to me, and she had an elongated face. That's what drew my attention. She wasn't the only one. This man said he got a 30-second look at her as he was driving to work. I saw a lady jogging on the right-hand side of the road, jogging towards the bridge. But did the police follow up? Not for a long time, said these

witnesses. They ignored everybody that believed they saw Nancy for three months. Same with those suspicious vans, said the defense. It was clear that the police had focused on Brad to the exclusion of other people. It wasn't just Brad who'd been unfaithful, implied the defense. Could someone else have wanted to silence Nancy permanently? Someone suggested the defense like John Pearson, who at first didn't tell the police about an indiscretion with Nancy. Pearson said he held back to protect his family. It happened after a very tipsy Halloween party back in 2005.

She began taking her clothes off. I took my clothes off, and we, I believe, started to have sex. I believe we stopped and got dressed and decided to never speak about it again. It seemed to observers as if you two were somehow blaming the victim. You were looking for other people she may have had relationships with. Why was that important? The reason that people look to the spouse first is because affairs of the heart frequently lead to crimes of passion. So anyone with whom she had a relationship

should be the subject of a police investigation. And there may have been other secrets, the defense charged, clues to Nancy's life that they'll never know because, and this was big, a Carrie detective erased the contents of her BlackBerry. Accident, said the prosecutor. Nonsense, said the defense. It's not something that happens accidentally. A prime example, the defense said, of its shocking allegation that the police investigation was dishonest.

Why would the police have any motivation whatsoever to get rid of evidence in this case? Not only did they start with an eye toward building a case against Brad, they also started with an eye toward attempting to preserve Nancy's reputation. And that phone would carry emails, text messages, pictures, videos. And you think it would have been exculpatory evidence for your client? I don't know what it was, because we never did get in that phone. And that call Saturday morning from Brad's house to his cell phone, the one the prosecution alleged Brad actually made himself with that now missing

router. They claim that he checked out a router and never returned it. The question is, did he generate a phone call? Not did he have the technological skill? They also took photographs of the house, they searched the house, and they have not once introduced any evidence that the router was in the house. But hard drives don't lie, or do they? That was the question the defense raised when it came to those apparently damning results of the FBI's search of Brad's computer. You're talking about a computer that we know was tampered with. You're alleging what? I'm not alleging. I'm stating as fact the computer was tampered with. There were significant anomalies that we found in the computer itself. Meaning, he says, that Brad's computer was hacked.

The 41-second Google map search was planted. The prosecution had no smoking gun. So you're saying he didn't even search for that map. That's right. Somebody else put it on his computer. Yes. An FBI agent had testified that he saw no evidence of tampering, but the defense said it had experts who did, two of them, both of whom wrote reports. But trials have referees, and in this case, the judge ruled that neither one of those defense experts could testify about tampering.

One said the judge wasn't sufficiently qualified. The other was brought in too late in the trial. But even if they had testified, it was one question they couldn't answer. If there was a hacker, who was it? I can tell you that police had access to it. I can tell you that anybody within wireless range had access to it. What possible reason would the police have to put that map on his computer? I can't say that the police put it on the computer. I don't know who manipulated the computer. What I can say is that a possible reason

is if you believe somebody's guilty and that you don't have any evidence against them, well, it's perfect evidence, isn't it? Could those 41 seconds put Brad Cooper in prison for the rest of his life? When Dateline continues. For two long months, attorneys from both sides hammered at the question, what happened to Nancy Cooper? The defense charged the police more than dropped the ball.

Their investigation was dishonest. The erasing of Nancy's BlackBerry, for one thing, had to be intentional, said the defense. Nonsense, replied the prosecution. Besides, they claimed they already found what they needed from that phone through other sources. We had her phone records, so we knew everything that she had done. We had the billing so we could tell how much texting she did or didn't do. We already knew all her friends. And the idea the police might have inserted the Google Maps search on Brad's computer,

well, they couldn't have, said Detective Daniels. None of the people that work for me or work in the department would have had the knowledge to go in and do something like that. The defense charged that police ignored those possible sightings of Nancy and those mysterious vans for months. The defense was thinking that the jury wasn't listening. The police indicated that they followed up with every one of those people. As for John Pearson, whose indiscretion with Nancy should have made him a suspect, at least according to the defense, he had an alibi.

On that Friday night, Pearson spent the night with Heather, the very same woman behind Brad and Nancy's breakup. At the beginning of the case... Still, as the long trial finally wound down, the defense hammered home its claim that the police and prosecution bought into a whispering campaign by Nancy's friends against Brad. It made it easier for them to simply let the gossip about Brad become their reality, even when the facts and the evidence did not fit it.

And now the police department and the prosecutors are willing to send an innocent man to rot in a dungeon, in essence, for the rest of his life. But there were facts, said the prosecution, to send Brad Cooper away for life. Fact. The defendant googled where he was going to place his wife's body. Fact, the router that could help him automate a phone call is also now missing. Fact, Nancy Cooper never left that house the morning of July 12th. So, the jurors adjourned to deliberate. Guilty of first degree murder, second degree, or not guilty?

And Nancy's family, having listened to weeks of confusing and circumstantial evidence, worried. If I was hearing this for the first time, would I feel comfortable sending someone to prison for the rest of their lives? The jury stayed out for two days. And then... Has the jury reached a unanimous verdict? Yes, sir. The verdict of the jury reads, we the jury, by unanimous verdict,

find the defendant, Bradley Graham Cooper, to be guilty of first-degree murder. I cried for hours. Yeah, I cried for hours. Relief, yes, it's over. There's a conclusion, and it's justice for Nancy. And now we can all go home. And Brad?

Obviously, Brad was upset, but he knows and feels that this is not over. In 2013, an appeals court overturned Bradley Cooper's conviction, deciding the judge should have allowed more defense testimony regarding the laptop evidence. A new trial was ordered. But while awaiting his second trial, Cooper pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to approximately 12 to 15 years. And Nancy, there's a black granite bench in a Cary Park, a place she once ran, her adopted town's way of remembering. Itchy, itchy dog. Scratch, scratch.

The Cooper girls, Bella and Katie, are growing up in Canada with Nancy's twin sister Krista and her husband Jim. Woo! her husband Jim. Their cousins were with them the day we came to call and so seven little girls scampered happily about their pleasure infectious and for the adults bittersweet. There you go. It's just sad that Nancy's not here seeing it. Yeah absolutely that's the tough part for me. What do they understand about mother and father? Well what we've told them is that Mommy Nancy was killed by a bad man, and that she's in heaven, and the man went to prison. Tell them the tragic story of a man and a woman who sank in the undertow of what once was love.

We get an outcome that Nancy deserves, but it's also not a winning hand for anybody. And Brad lost his life as well. There's many things that were lost, lives that have been forever changed. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, thanks for joining us.