Dateline NBC - The House on Sidney's Cove

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

In this Dateline classic, a wife and mother of three disappears without a trace. Could her home’s security cameras hold the key to solving the mystery? Dennis Murphy reports. Originally aired on NBC on May 8, 2016.

There's this pile of leaves and it's where everything else is clear and flat. My heart is racing a million miles an hour. I was using my boots to move leaves and that's when I screamed this blood-curdling scream. Nikki Liley, a corporate exec who made time for romance and her three daughters. She was the best mom. Then she disappeared. Dozens joined the search. We need Nikki to come home.

Then they found her. No, you can't. You can't, baby. Launching a mystery that would divide this family. I suspected him from the beginning. One daughter thought her stepdad, Matt, did it. The other said, no way. It's ridiculous, the lies they're spreading. And Matt, he had a theory all his own.

This is not the first time he's run away. Okay. Had Nikki taken off and found trouble? So now you're thinking someone gave her a date rape drug. That's a possibility. The trail would lead to this house of cameras. There's a big server tower that would indicate a large amount of data being stored. What they discovered, thousands of hours of tape. Let me out of this room. It's absolutely a torture to listen to. That would reveal

one shattering truth. I got down on my knees and just started crying. I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with the house on Sidney's Cove. There's never a good day to search for a missing woman, but this rainy muggy Saturday in the heat of July made an unhappy task all but unbearable. Take some flowers with you. They decided, the friends and family, that they'd all wear red shirts. They got themselves organized in the parking lot of a Walmart in Lawrenceville, Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta,

and then set out to find any trace of a petite corporate executive named Nikki Liley. She's been missing her a week now. She's got three kids that would love to see her home. Amy Robinson told reporters that her 44-year-old sister, mother of three, was hardly the kind of person who'd just up and disappear without a word to anyone. I'm just so worried about my sister. We just have no idea where she is or what's happened to anyone. I'm just so worried about my sister. You know, we just have no idea where she is or what's happened to her. As fate would have it, the question of where Nikki was would be answered soon enough. But even now, the question of what happened to Nikki remains

unclear. I'm sick of playing your games. What is clear from the recording she left behind is that Nikki Liley lived a troubled and tormented life. This is what I live day in and day out is keep my mouth shut, my head down and do exactly what's expected of me. Tell me about Nikki's personality. She was very funny. You know, she and I used to laugh all the time. And she was very feisty. She would say what she meant. You know, she didn't mince a lot of words. As sisters, Amy Robinson and Nikki Liley were 10 years apart. But according to Amy, they were always close.

Boy, you two look alike in the old photos. We do. I was thinking maybe you're swapping out each other's clothes, but of course you're 10 years apart. Well, that didn't stop it from happening. I wore a lot of her hand-me-downs. By the mid-90s, Nikki had been married and divorced twice. And she and her young daughter, Alex, were sharing an apartment with Amy. We had a good time with that, too.

We just laughed putting up pictures in the apartment and stuff. This sounds like a sitcom. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And at times it definitely was. Eventually, Nikki moved out, remarried, and had two more daughters with her third husband, Matt Liley, a New Yorker she'd met online. He made my sister laugh. And so, you know, we would all laugh. After brief stays in Oklahoma and Mississippi, Nikki and Matt returned to Georgia and settled into this house on Sidney's Cove in Lawrenceville. Nikki, a well-regarded corporate money person, was the primary breadwinner.

Matt, a computer guy, ran a small business out of the house. He started going to, like, government surplus auctions and buying these big pallets of old used computer parts and then, you know, rebuilding them and selling them on eBay. Buy this ring? Buy this ring. When it was Amy's turn to get married in 2003, her big sis was there serving as matron of honor. I just want to raise a toast to Amy, my best friend, my confidant, my sister, and to the love of her life who makes her head spin to Amy and Dallin. Then later that night, boogie into what else? We are family. As the years passed, the sisters remained close. In late June 2011, Amy organized a spa day out for Nikki and her three girls.

No boys allowed, only, you know, we're going to go have a girls' day. Where'd you go? We went to go get our nails done. Day of beauty at the spa, huh? Mm-hmm. Yep, we got manicures and pedicures, and we went and had lunch. Nikki had had her toenails painted pink that day. And though she'd sometimes had a difficult relationship with her teenage daughter, Alex says that day at the spa felt like a turning point, a fresh beginning.

Snapshots, everybody looks pretty happy. Yeah. Good girl's day out. Yeah, it was fun. And I'm beyond grateful now that we've done it, so. Two weeks later, Nikki had apparently left home in the middle of the night without a word to anyone. When the family reported her missing two days later, the police advised them there was little they could do.

Their response was, we don't even know where to start looking. She's not on the 11 o'clock news every night. No, because frankly, you know, grown woman having left her house wasn't that interesting a story. Well, a hundred people getting together all wearing red shirts, so there's an interesting story. So they covered that. So then the cameras were out. Then the cameras came. And this is what the cameras saw. Searchers armed with maps literally beating the bushes around Nikki Liley's subdivision for clues as to what might have happened to her. Well, keep your eyes open. If you see her,

anything, definitely call 911 and let them know that you've seen her. Every searcher had an assignment. Oh, look, we got blue sky. It's going to smile on us. Harriet Garrett, Nikki's mother, had the job of going door to door, leafleting the neighborhood with flyers picturing her daughter. I don't think anybody's at home, but we'll find out. Even though Southern Hospitality may have been in short supply that day, Get out of here before I call the cops.

Harriet pressed on. Good morning, sir. My name is Harriet Garrett. My daughter's missing, and we're trying to get some news coverage. Like so many of the volunteers that day, Allison Rockwell wasn't a relative. She was looking for Nikki, her co-worker. I love Nikki. Nikki was great. She was just such, so great to work with. Very smart, lots of energy, positive, wonderful. Just a wonderful person. On the morning of the search, Allison recalls that she and another colleague from work, a man named Derek, were running late. And that would turn out to be an important twist of fate.

Forty minutes late, actually. Everyone else had started searching. So were you given a grid or an area to look at? Yes, we were given the front of the neighborhood, the very front of the neighborhood on the right. It was one of the last unassigned sections of the organizer's search grid, a patch of woods near a busy road. Derek and I went into the woods together, and I remember having to walk up and go over a large tree, And there's this pile of leaves, and it's in the middle of where everything else is clear and flat. And my heart is racing a million miles an hour.

I go up to the pile of leaves. I was using my boots to move leaves at the bottom of the pile. As I was doing that, I said, Derek! Derek came over, and he heard the panic in my voice, and he started helping me. And that's when we saw blonde hair. And I screamed this blood-curdling scream. And there was no question? No.

When we come back... She said, oh my God, it's her. We found her. There's her hair. I'll go for you. Yeah. A body and a vital clue. The telling factor was the bonds where her feet were clean. What did that mean? At first, it was the unnatural way the leaves were clumped that attracted attention. Then, it was the hair.

And I hear a scream from the woods. You hear a scream? Yeah. And I tore off running into the woods. And then, when I got into the woods, her co-worker Allison was there and she said, oh my God, it's her. We found her. There's her hair. How awful for you. Yeah. Nikki Liley's sister Amy and her friend Allison felt sure the body beneath the leaves had to be Nikki's. It was terrible. I think everybody was a little bit shocked,

so I just kind of went into crisis mode, and I called 911. Within minutes, police, ambulances, and news cameras were converging on the patch of woods where the body was found. Nikki's mother, Harriet Garrett, says she heard the news when a cop told her she'd have to stop leafleting the neighborhood.

Someone in the neighborhood had complained. And while he is talking to me, his radio goes off. It's a dispatch. Body has been found. You hear it over the dispatch? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Do you actually go to that place in that little bit of woods? Yes. Well, I couldn't.

By the time I got there, they already had the crime scene tape up and I couldn't get any further. Okay, we're going to move back. We're going to move back on down, guys. They had it isolated by that time, but I got to it as close as I could. Soon, Harriet had Nikki's oldest daughter, Alex, on the phone. Do you know it's her? Well, I'm right here. The police won't let me come, honey. They won't let me through. I'm right here where the police are. They won't let me through. Where are you?

I just remember fainting or something. But as soon as I came to, I took off running. And I ran all the way to where the crime scene tape was. No, no, no, you can't! You can't, baby! Of course they wouldn't let me see her, and I'm grateful that they did it now. As Nikki's family struggled to process the news, Amy faced the microphones and once again became the family's voice. All we saw was her hair. But, you know, so we're just waiting for the police to do their job,

and we'll find out more soon. Inside the police tape, investigators carefully uncovered the body of a middle-aged female. She was nude, lying face down, and tellingly, appeared to have a fresh pink pedicure. Given the decomposition, the heat, the rain, investigators figured the body had lain there for a while. It had been out there several days. Gwinnett County Police Detective Brad Everson. No clothing whatsoever. Any obvious injuries to the body? Lacerations? Blunt trauma, gunshot, stab wound, anything you could see?

Nothing. And of course, at this point, there's no identifying documents around it. So there's nothing around where the body's at that would indicate what happened. In the way of these things, dental records confirmed what everyone suspected. The body in the woods was indeed that of Nikki Liley. The telling factor was the bonds of her feet were clean. What does that tell you? Connect the dots for me. Well, that tells you that she didn't walk out there and put herself in those woods. And she's in this phase that she sure wasn't going to cover herself up.

Later, lab analysis of Nikki's blood revealed something else that was odd. There was a high level of the date rape drug GHB in her system. So now you're thinking maybe sometime before this woman's death, almost immediately before, someone gave her date rape drug. That's a possibility. Emmy also finds semen. Correct. Had Nikki somehow been abducted, raped, and then dumped less than a mile from her home? The detective couldn't say. But in the days before her body was found, while this was still a missing persons case, Nikki's husband Matt had told Everson something intriguing on the phone. This wasn't the first time Nikki Liley had walked out on him.

My wife has a long history of some kind of mental imbalances, okay? And I've been finding out the past two days, everything she's been telling me in therapy all these years has been a lie. Coming up, the Nikki no one knew stories of unstable behavior. This is not the first time she's run away. Okay. And even violence. My father is a witness for her throwing a knife at my face. When Dateline continues.

By the time searchers found Nikki Liley's body, police detective Brad Everson already knew bits and pieces of her life story. He'd been working her case since she was reported missing a few days earlier. I'd already talked to her dad, talked to her mom, talked to both her sisters, you know, talked to her oldest daughter. The picture that emerged was of a woman whose life had revolved around her work, her daughters, and her husband, Matt. He would come sometimes and do lunch with Nikki.

Did she ever talk about her girls? Yes, yes. She was very proud of all three girls. Yes. Photos on the desk kind of thing? Oh, absolutely. Like most marriages, Nikki's had its ups and downs. Early July 2011, when Nikki disappeared, was one of the down times. Matt freely admitted that when he talked to the detective the day after he reported her missing. This is not the first time she's run away.

Okay, she's run away and she's been gone for two hours. She's been gone for three hours, four hours one time. She's gone to work with a bag of clothes and then come back after work, you know, but she's never been gone overnight. So he's telling you this is just the latest of a continuing episode that my wife has. Correct. Matthew, this is Detective Harrison. In this telephone call, which the detective recorded, Matt Liley said his wife was mentally unbalanced. She's not very happy with her life. She never felt accepted.

OK, we've been in and out of therapists. There's a fear of intimacy. You know, she's got no problem with girls. But when it comes to a male, they are a threat. They are. All my all my life guys have used me for sex. He's just giving you a hose full of information. I have a hard time getting word in edgewise. She yells at me in front of the kids.

She throws things in front of me in front of the kids. And all I'm doing is sitting there going, please stop, please stop. Do you remember what the doctor said? Is this the person you want to be? He's telling you that she's bats. That's what he's saying. As for the night Nikki disappeared... He stated the previous Friday that they had actually gone out to eat and then gone to a movie after she got home from work.

We had a great time. We came home. On the way home, I said to her, you know, hey, you know, because I wanted sex. So I said to her, you know, hey, how about you put on an outfit? I think that might have set her off. You wanted her to put on a little sexy costume of some kind, huh? Correct.

That fear of intimacy that I thought she was working on getting over was gone, but apparently that set her off because she picked a fight. As Matt tells it, the fight continued at home and ramped up. Matt's father, who was visiting from New York, was just down the hall. When the argument touched on the way Nikki had supposedly been treating her father-in-law, Matt asked his dad to weigh in. He called his father, Matthias, into the bedroom and basically asked Matthias to tell Nikki how he felt about being down there

and that Matthias came out with a line that he hadn't felt welcome, that kind of stuff, and that Nikki just reacted to that by basically saying he was lying. Then Matt said his wife did something off the wall. I mean, holy cow, she rips her shirt off with her tits hanging out, no bra, nothing, and says maybe we should just f***ing gross her shirt on the floor, and then says, isn't that what family does? Are you kidding? She flashed her father-in-law? Correct.

My wife has done some weird s***. That's the weirdest she's ever been. Matt said the dust finally settled in the wee hours of Saturday, July 9th. Nicky in the bedroom, he on his couch in the downstairs office. I wake up about 6 o'clock to go to the bathroom. The light is on in the bedroom. I can see it upstairs. So I go upstairs to see what's going on. She's not there. All her stuff was still there. Her car was still there. Her keys, her phone. Her purse was still there.

Correct. He assumed she had left on foot or he assumed somebody had come and picked her up. Matt told the cop it was then that he realized his home security system had been turned off. I have a camera system in the house because I sell cameras for the DVR. She always shuts it off when she leaves, when she's pissed off because she knows it pisses me off. So that's the first you learn that this place is wired for sound and pictures. Correct. When Nikki Liley's body was found days later near her home, learning the story told by those cameras became most urgent.

Coming up, a treasure trove of evidence. Quantified. What are we talking about? Thousands of hours of material. Just what will it reveal? It's absolutely a torture to listen to. Within minutes of finding Nikki's body, police raced to the Lylee home about a mile away. What they observed right away was astounding. The home security system that Matt Liley had casually mentioned to Detective Everson a few days earlier appeared more appropriate to Fort Knox than a house in the burbs.

And when you first see the house on the road, you can see all these huge, these big cameras on the eaves of the house, both sides. There were 21 security cameras in all, with a tricked-out control room to monitor and record everything. He sounds like a one-man NSA. I think it was a very low-crime area, so it almost boggled the mind as to why he felt he needed quite so much surveillance coverage for the house. Odd to be sure, an observation to tuck away for later. But the duty that day came first, notification. The officers telling Matt Liley that his missing wife had just been found dead.

The uniformed guys told me that he, at one point, seemed like he got sick. Matt Liley may well have been sick, sick of talking to the cops, because by now he'd lawyered up and wasn't answering any of their questions. So you now have probable cause to get a search warrant? Correct, correct. Do you think, man, maybe this is going to help us? Maybe these cameras saw and recorded something that tells the story of what's up with Nicky. That was my hope.

We're mainly going for anything in the house that has any sort of memory, be it computers, be it, you know, he had a DVR hooked up to his surveillance system. The detective knew it would take time to review and catalog all of that material. So since the police had found no sign of blood nor any signs of struggle in the house, the detective reviewed the evidence he did have, particularly Matt's claim that his wife was bonkers. Are any of her family members corroborating this emotional instability issue that's raised by the husband? None whatsoever. Are any of them suspicious of Matt, the husband?

Yes, they were all suspicious of Matt. Nikki's daughter, Alex, had lived with her mother and Matt until she was 16, and there was plenty she'd had to say to the detective. I wanted him to know what was going on in the house. I wanted him to know that I suspected him from the beginning, that my mom would have never left her girls. Still, despite the family's suspicion and the fact that the semen found on Nikki's body proved to be Matt's, the police didn't feel they had enough evidence to make an

arrest. There's no ankle bracelet on this man. You haven't taken his passport. No. Does anybody say if you're going to be moving around, tell us where you're going to be? Is it that kind of relationship with the authorities at that point? No, there's not really a relationship with us. What about all that computer evidence, the video files from Matt's hard drives? They appeared to be useless. After months of reviewing more than a half million video clips, the best investigators could come up with was this. It's a clip of Nikki Liley walking onto the front porch to have a smoke just after midnight on July 9th, 2011, the day she went missing. After that, nothing. What happened after midnight in that house?

Exactly. That was the millionaire question. The video files from midnight until six in the morning that day were corrupted, according to the tech guy who examined them. He could see footage, but what it was is it was very disjointed. Most of it was not time stamped. Most of it was not date stamped. So it was not in a manner that you could just go in and play and just play through everything. The bottom line, the police had nothing. And so with no compelling reason to stick around Lawrenceville, Matt Liley left town. He and his two daughters, Amanda, 12, and Rebecca, 9,

resettled in Vermont, close to his family. All communication with relatives in Georgia ended. In the summer of 2012, one year after Nikki's death, the investigative file passed to cold case detective Sergeant John Richter. I was actually in the homicide unit as a corporal when her body was found. Does that stay with you? Yeah, I always say there's certain cases that stick with you, and this is one. At first, Richter did what all cold case detectives do. He re-interviewed witnesses. When that went nowhere, Richter took another look at Matt Liley's computer hard drives.

Do you think somewhere in there is the nugget that's going to get you to the next step in this investigation? I think at minimum we need to redo it just to see if technology had advanced it. So I needed a new forensic guy to look at the video or whatever else he can find on the computer. Turns out the techie Richter needed was just down the hall. Corporal Chris Ford had been an IT guy before joining the police force. Richter just came down and said, hey, you mind taking a look at this? So I started looking for what we call low-hanging fruit, what's easily available. That was where I really started digging through and finding all these audio files. Nobody had listened to the

audio files before because investigators were so focused on finding video from the night Nikki disappeared. And that's just what Ford did at first, too. I basically looked at that video in raw format, which is basically computer language. So something was recorded there? Yes, they just wouldn't play. Eventually, Ford determined the screwed-up files were no accident. Someone had deleted those files and then run a cleanup program to clear the database logs.

Not once, but twice. The only two times those cleanup jobs were run were the day he reported her missing and the day her body was found. I'll never forget the day he comes to my cube and he says, these videos were deleted. This isn't corrupted. And he turns to leave and I think he just looks back and he says, oh, I got a bunch of audio files that are on there too, if you're interested. A bunch of files, quantified. What are we talking about in terms of like hours of material thousands of hours of material that date back from 2008 you know up to 2011 the audio recordings are probably best described as cringe-worthy scenes from a very bad marriage that's not what i said and how i said it and don't take my words out of context. When we got in that car. It's absolutely a torture to listen to because we have a woman who I know is now deceased

and I'm hearing how she's living for the years preceding her death and how she is just being beaten down psychologically and mentally. It took the detective nearly a year and a half to listen to all of the recordings. And by then, he'd heard more than enough. When he learned that Matt Liley would be returning to Georgia to testify in a civil suit concerning the payout from some life insurance policies Nikki had, Sergeant John Richter planned to be waiting. Coming up, could investigators have it all wrong? Nikki's youngest daughters paint a very different picture of their childhood home. It was always happy and loving.

Why they're furious with their mom's side of the family. It's just ridiculous the lies they're spreading. When Dateline continues. In March 2015, Matt Liley returned to Georgia for the first time since he'd left the state, three years earlier. It was money that brought him back, a court proceeding concerning a payout from his wife Nikki's life insurance policies. I knew he was coming down. That made me uneasy. It made me feel really creeped out. This is three years later. What we didn't know was that the whole federal courthouse was actually crawling with plainclothes Gwinnett County police. They were taking him down that day.

They were. We had no idea. Sergeant John Richter says the plainclothes cops waited all day for just the right moment to make their move. Get him on the outside of the courthouse. Who makes the collar? How's it go down? Myself and Detective Washington were there. We put the handcuffs on him. It felt pretty good. Nikki's family knew the feeling. I raised my hands and said, praise God. That was my reaction. In addition to facing a murder charge, Matt Liley was eventually charged with sexual assault and multiple counts of eavesdropping. A few weeks

after his arrest, Nikki Liley's daughters, Amanda and Rebecca, posted an edited video on YouTube in support of their dad. So girls, tell me what life was like growing up in your home. It was always happy and loving. Most of the time my mom was traveling. My dad was mostly the one taking care of us. In the video, the girls claimed that their mother hated her own family, and those same spiteful relatives were the primary reason their dad was in jail.

They never liked my dad, and I've been reading things online, I've been watching the news, and I can see the hatred that they have for my dad, and it's just ridiculous the lies they're spreading. For Nikki's family, that video was devastating. What they wondered had happened to those girls in the four years they'd been in Vermont. As far as I can tell, he poisoned them against us, and I can only attribute that to them living in a house with a master manipulator. The notion of Matt Liley as a master manipulator would become a central theme when his murder trial began in

January 2016. In her opening statement to the jury, prosecutor Lisa Jones depicted Matt Liley as a couch potato, sponging off his hard-working wife. Mickey Liley was the breadwinner. That that family was in debt, up to $300,000 in debt. Furthermore, Jones said, Matt Liley tried to control his wife by turning their home into a virtual North Korea, with cameras and recording devices everywhere, lenses aimed at them as they

sat on the couch and watched TV. You will take a look into this marriage, ladies and gentlemen, in this case. You will hear the voices of Nikki Liley and the defendant in this case arguing. Nikki's murder, she claimed, was simply Matt Liley's final act of control. I think they got into an argument that he wanted to have sex, that he drugs her, that he has his way, that she's loud. She's not able to resist as much as it progresses, that he silences her, that he strangles her. He sits on her. He asphyxiates her to where she can't breathe. Not meaning to, maybe. Oh, I think he meant to. I think he'd had it. And I think he knew that she was leaving him because she had made it clear she was done. The state's first witness was Nikki's oldest daughter,

Alex. They'd be arguing and he would end up locking her in a bathroom. She'd been shoved downstairs. There were several nights that I would lay up at night and listen to her say, please get off of me, get off of me, you're hurting me. Next, Nikki's sister Amy told the jury about the constant monitoring at the Liley house. We knew that he would record phone conversations that came into or out of the house. Were you aware at any time whether there were ever GPS trackers or tracking devices on any types of the phones or the vehicles of the residents. Yes, I knew that he had trackers on Nikki's phone and when Alex was old enough to have a cell phone that he tracked her phone as well. Then the prosecution gave the court a fly

on the wall look inside the Liley home by playing those promised recordings of the couple's fights. Let the record show I am now locked in a room again. I don't want to be here. I don't want to have this conversation. I've asked out of it. Let the record show that she's being an absolute wants her way no matter what. It was hard to listen to. Bitter screaming matches frequently about sex. I know that when we go two days without sex, you're going to automatically assume I am on strike mode, no matter what else is happening. Don't touch me. Sit down if you want to sit down.

I'm reaching out to you. I don't want to hold your hand right now. In retrospect for the prosecution, the recording seemed to have the ring of prophecy. Your hands around my throat. My hands were not on your throat. I don't care what the f*** you think. the recording seemed to have the ring of prophecy. The prosecutor said Nikki Liley's best chance for leaving her marriage came 12 days before she disappeared. After yet another argument, Nikki had called 911. Officers dispatched to the Liley home that day offered to help Nikki leave.

But as this still photo shows, she wouldn't budge from the front porch. She wanted him to go. He didn't want to go. He wanted her to go. She wasn't going to leave without the girls. So the argument, they were pretty much at an impasse. Two weeks later, Nikki Liley was dead. In a house where practically everything was recorded, the prosecutor claimed it was no accident that the video covering the crucial hours when Nikki Liley went missing was somehow corrupted. The surveillance system was in fact recording during that time period. Is that correct? That is correct, yes. The prosecutor countered Matt's claim that Nikki had somehow turned off the security system by calling the police department's

IT guy, Chris Ford, as her last witness. So, Detective, in your expert opinion then, did an individual have to go in and purposefully corrupt and delete those files? That's correct, yes. That's the only way I can explain why, out of all the dates and video that I can recover, that's the only date range I can't recover from. Though no one knows exactly what was on that missing video, the prosecutor suggested that it was probably video of Matt Liley carrying his wife's body out of the house. But you heard her. In closing, the prosecutor let Nikki Liley have the last word. You need to listen to what

she says and what she lived. Welcome to my world. You killed me a long time ago. Welcome to my world. You killed me a long time ago. Find him guilty. Because that's exactly what he is. Coming up, has the prosecution really proved anything? I think their gut feeling was she's buried this close to the house. It's got to have been him. It's what you call a circumstantial case. Yes.

And then, Nikki and Matt's daughter says in her parents' marriage, Matt was the victim. She took a heel and threw it, and I myself had to duck from it. Was it being thrown at her there? Yes. By early February 2016, the prosecution had rested its case against Matt Wiley. The husband was portrayed as an eavesdropping control freak who'd killed his wife during an argument. Liley's defense attorney, Tom Clegg, insisted that Matt Liley was in fact an innocent man,

falsely accused by the state of Georgia. They have a theory, and that theory is nothing more than a hunch. It is a guess. If you were to ask yourself questions that might have been posed of you, if you were to have gone to journalism school, who, what, where, why, and how, you will find that during the course of this trial, the state of Georgia will fall woefully short in proving the allegations that they are making

against this man. I think their gut feeling was, come on, she's naked, she's buried this close to the house, she's obviously hidden, it's got to have been him. It's what you call a circumstantial case. Yes. The defense attorney concedes he had some difficult circumstances to overcome in this case, beginning with the six hours of missing surveillance camera video from the night Nikki Liley disappeared. Clegg insists his client did not erase those files as the prosecution claimed. The video surveillance system was shut off at some point in the morning. Matt believes that Nikki shut it off. He is insistent that he did not shut it off, that the system was shut off by Nikki.

So whatever happened to her, the cameras didn't see it? The cameras did not see it. That is absolutely correct. As for those audio recordings of the couple's screaming arguments, Clegg pointed out that most were recorded in 2008 and 2009, two years before Nikki died. According to the defense attorney, Matt made the recordings with the encouragement of a marriage therapist that the couple had been seeing at the time. He is talking and he is conciliatory in my opinion. He is trying to calm things down and it is impossible to calm Nikki down. Please don't do this. Please, Nikki. You do not want to do this with me right now. I mean it.

You do not want to tangle with me right now at all. What did I do? According to Clegg, the prosecution cherry-picked scenes from the Lylee marriage, highlighting the bad and downplaying the good, bright spots like a 2010 trip

Matt and Nikki took to Hawaii. They even renewed their marriage vows on that trip. The tapes reflect both of them at their worst. Now, the flip side is when they're getting along well, when they are affectionate towards one another, when they renew their wedding vows in Hawaii, they don't tape that stuff. It's always the darkest side of the moon with this marriage. The darkest side, absolutely, yes. As for the night Nikki disappeared, the defense tried to show that Nikki Liley was once again acting unstable, behaving erratically. The defense attorney called Matt's father,

Matthias, to verify his son's version of that last fight between Matt and Nikki, the one where she allegedly flashed him. She tore off her top and says, come on, let's go. Let's F like a family. Were you expecting any sort of comment like that? Never. Never. Once Nikki disappeared, Clegg says, Matt Liley inquired about having his wife involuntarily committed and even hired a divorce attorney. A man who knows his wife is already dead, he says,

wouldn't have done either of those things. He did not really want to divorce her. He wanted to let her know, look, here are your options. You can go get help for yourself, or I'm going to go forward with a divorce. The defense wrapped up its case by calling Matt and Nikki's two daughters, Rebecca, then 14, and Amanda, then 17. Did you ever see your dad hit your mom? No. Okay. Did you ever see any obvious injuries or bruises to your mom? No, sir.

According to the girls, their mother was the one with the violent temper, not their dad. She took a heel and threw it, and I myself had to duck from it. Was it being thrown at your dad? Yes. On the day Nikki made that 911 call, Amanda said her mother complained about hearing voices in her head. She was pacing back and forth saying that she was tired of people talking bad about her behind her back. And my dad asked her who was talking about her and she said that she was hearing voices and like the voices in her head were telling her that people were talking bad about her. Throughout, neither girl made eye contact with their mother's relatives

who hadn't seen them in four years. We made our own decision. We don't like that side of the family, so we want to stay away. It's not him forcing us to stay away from them. In closing, Tom Clegg argued that while the state may have proved Matt Liley unlikable, it had not answered any of those basic journalism questions. Who? What? Where? When? Why? Or how? In closing, I said you've heard all of this evidence. The state still cannot answer any of these particular questions. What does that tell you? That tells

you they have fallen woefully short of proving Matt's guilt. After eight days of testimony, both sides of the family prepared for a long and anxious wait for a verdict. Turns out they didn't have to pace long. After just three hours of deliberation, the jury announced it had reached a verdict. I'm going to ask you this time if you would stand and read the verdict out loud. As to count one, we the jury find the defendant guilty of malice murder. Though not a sound came from Nikki Liley's family, their expression said it all. Thank you, sir. Before passing sentence, the judge gave Matt Liley one last chance to have his say.

Mr. Liley, is there anything you want to say? I didn't do it. With that, the judge asked Matt Liley to rise and receive his sentence. I am going to follow the state's recommendation as to count one, have you sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. It was a bittersweet ending for Nikki's family. They'll likely never see Matt Liley again. But as Nikki Liley's youngest girls left the courthouse that night,

the prospects of repairing their relationship with the girls seem very much in doubt. One murder, so many victims. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.