He was a registered level III sex offender, and if people don't know what that means, that is a status that means that you're most likely to re-offend.

Right.

It's the most dangerous classification, that they assume if you get back out in the public, you will assault someone again.

Now, back in 1979, as far as we know, this is when it all began for Gaff.

He was just 21 years old, and he attacked a woman named Jackie Brown at her home during the day.

Jackie had just finished mowing her yard, and he cornered her in her garage with a gun.

It was revealed later that it was actually a pellet gun, but it was so realistic, Jackie told me she thought it for sure was a gun, and she was afraid Gaff was going to sexually assault her.

No.

What did she mean by that?

Well, it's hard to believe, but Oklahoma has the highest rate of domestic violence of any state in the country.

And Dakota Black told us she, in her own life, has experienced violence in a relationship.

And while McComb only has a population of less than thirty, and keep in mind, Makayla, Frank, and the girls, they make up twenty percent of the population of McComb, uh, it's near an intersection of multiple interstate highways.

And Dakota Black said criminals moving through the area are known to dump victims' bodies there.

And there are people living in Pottawattamie County in poverty.

There-- Some are off the grid with no electricity or, or running water, toilets, or even a roof over their head.

But was Makayla's family worried about the relationship that she had with Frank? Because there must have been red flags.

She's speaking to first responders, and they have very different assessments of what they're seeing, and you guys actually played some body cam footage of that.

That's right, and these two first responders that are, that are of particular interest here, they are trained to observe anything suspicious at a crime scene, as well as trying to save a life.

And so they focus on how things are said.

And at the Davis house, the first two responders were standing by an ambulance, and one officer said, "She doesn't have a normal reaction for me telling her her husband's critical," right? And the EMT said, "I think she's still in shock." That shows you the range of interpretation as you look at these people.

But having watched all of that video, there were some very odd moments.

Allison apologized for wearing pajamas.

Now, n- the normal reaction would be, "Quick, he's in here.

When a jury is faced with two experts with two totally opposing views, how, uh, how do they determine who or what they believe, or I wonder if at times they just cancel each other out?

Do you have any insight into why he would do it there in broad daylight?

Well, first off, it's absolute madness that he did it where he did it.

His own mother even said, "This was stupid." She wasn't involved in, in, in the murder, of course, but to, to have all those eyeballs there where he was spotted, his getaway vehicle was spotted, how he killed her was seen.

But authorities think it's all part of this enormous psychological pressure he was under from Holly that he had to act.

That's the power that she had over him, that he would've done something this stupid, which, uh, put authorities right on top of him so quickly.

And by the way, a quick side, um, I used to live in Carrollton, Texas, when I w- was a reporter in Dallas and ab- about a mile-and-a-half from this site, so it, it's really something.

Carrollton's a great town, and, uh, I loved living there, and this is an extraordinary case for, uh, for those folks.

Mm.

Mm

... police first start their investigation.

But Ken Weatherford had a solid alibi.

He was with Kim's daughter, Tiffany, during the timeframe that her mother went missing.

Frank McCormick's behavior upset Kim, but Frank willingly provided a statement.

Around the time Kim disappeared, he told investigators he was at a grocery store to buy some chips for a poker game, and he had the receipt to prove it.

So investigators determined he had an alibi at the time, and we reached out, by the way, for an interview with Frank McCormick-

Have in- investigators ever looked into Rose as a suspect? Because that was honestly the first thing that I thought.

You would think the last thing she would wanna do is bring authorities to her house.

Absolutely, especially since she, she knows she had committed a murder.

Were it not for Marsha's vindictive nature of reporting a burglary that she knew her own daughter was responsible for, both she and Ashley would likely be free today, and Ashley was the only other person who knew the combination to the safe.

So Marsha knew Ashley was behind this burglary, and Harold, he had a life insurance policy of a hundred twenty thousand dollars.

Marsha had been paying Ashley about one thousand dollars each month since Harold died but had stopped making those payments two months before the burglary.

So she...

Ashley was upset with her mother because she felt she wasn't getting enough money.

Do police believe that they have evidence tying Ashley to Ty's possible murder?

Now, as a dog lover, I love that you have two dogs that really helped be the key in helping solve this case.

Yeah, the handler, Dan Moldenhauer, told us that Radar is a German shepherd rescue from Wisconsin.

And when she detects the presence of human decomposition, she will turn around, sit, and look right at Moldenhauer.

And I witnessed this myself.

After all these years, Radar went through the Herps' house and alerted at the very spot where the new owner said that she had seen this red stain on the floor.

And at the time, Radar alerted, and when we were there, she did it again, which was really something to see.

The dog also alerted at the basement sliding door that led outside, which is where, of course, the neighbors had seen the, the two of them bringing out bags and what appeared to be this rolled-up rug, which when they were talking to each other, they thought, "Gosh, could there be a body inside that?" And all of the areas that Radar detected were also areas where the luminol glowed.

What was it like sitting across from him, hearing all that detail?

It's rare that we see this moment, uh, you know, the hands up, you're under arrest moment, but we actually get it from multiple angles here.

We get it from six different angles.

This is li- this is like a Hollywood movie at this, at this point, and as more and more local law enforcement gets into the, get into the body cam technology, we're seeing, uh, incredible moments like this unfold before our eyes.

The tragedy when he was out at that supermarket because his daughter was gonna be performing in The Nutcracker that night and they wanted to get some flowers.

Um, but on the day of the murder, Dan insisted to police that he wanted to be the one who told his three children that their mother was dead.

Well, at the time of arrest, you flip the script here, and Detective Martinez who had, uh, eh- such enormous frustration during the course of this investigation and some self-doubt whether he should've acted earlier to pursue Anthony Hall and reach out to him earlier, he finally had a moment where he's looking at him and he says basically, "Hey, you want me to tell the kids that you murdered their mother or someone else?" And it was, I'm paraphrasing there, but it was, uh, it was such a powerful moment there, uh, and I, I felt good for the detective that he finally got one jab at the sword at this, at this creep.

I mean, I don't know when people are gonna learn, uh, eh, like, your Google searches will become part of the case against you.

The Google searches, first off, were incredible, where he was asking about, you know, basically...

What did she mean by that?

Well, it's hard to believe, but Oklahoma has the highest rate of domestic violence of any state in the country.

And Dakota Black told us she, in her own life, has experienced violence in a relationship.

And while McComb only has a population of less than 30, and keep in mind Mekayla, Frank, and the girls, they make up 20% of the population of McComb, uh, it's near an intersection of multiple interstate highways.

And Dakota Black said criminals moving through the area are known to dump victims' bodies there.

And there are people living in Pottawatomie County in poverty.

There...

But was Mekayla's family worried about the relationship that she had with Frank? Because there must have been red flags.

She's speaking to first responders and they have very different assessments of what they're seeing, and you guys actually played some body cam footage of that.

That's right, and these two first responders that, uh, that are of particular interest here, they are trained to observe anything suspicious at a crime scene as well as trying to save a life.

And so they focus on how things are said.

And at the Davis house, the first two responders were standing by an ambulance and one officer said, "She doesn't have a normal reaction for me telling her her husband's critical, right?" And the EMT said, "I think she's still in shock." That shows you the range of interpretation as you look at these people.

But having watched all of that video, there were some very odd moments.

Alison apologized for wearing pajamas.

Now, the normal reaction would be, "Quick, he's in here.

When a jury is faced with two experts, with two totally opposing views, how, uh, how do they determine who or what they believe, or I wonder if at times they just cancel each other out?

In your experience, just how unusual is this?

It's very unusual.

Generally, when outsiders come into a community and bring some sense of, of ruin and, and shame and shock, locals want to forget those people as quick as possible, but the folks out there on the Forgotten Coast are gentle souls.

They live in this part of Florida that is so underdeveloped.

It's like what Florida must have been like 100 years ago, where you have much more of the tropical feel to it, and, and instead of shunning her, they, they embraced her as one of their own, and it was really special, and you guys felt the same way, didn't you?

Um, what was it like to speak to her?

Francesca, um, was so good to agree to s- talk to us about something as deeply personal and painful as this.

Uh, she's heartbroken, uh, and so I approached this obviously with as much sympathy, uh, as possible and respect for her.

Can we talk about how Melanie was discovered?

discovered?This was a story that, um, Paul managed to find a woman by the name of Charlotte Pottle, and this was literally as we were finishing up our hour.

We'd already written the show and most of our editing was done, but Charlotte Pottle was worth the, the effort.

Back in, in 1993, she was riding along the canal when she drove through a, a dark puddle.

She instantly felt like, "Something's not quite right here.

That was really bizarre." She rode for just a few minutes and decided to double back and realized that it was a pool of blood, and she got off of her bicycle, and Charlotte noticed that there were drag marks in the dirt.

The first drag marks went off away from the canal to a, a single tree.

Mm-hmm.

Big, what is that?

So this was a unit within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an undercover unit, that would pose as a organized crime family, and they had the ability, when they had a target, to get that person entwined in their illegal business, what the, what the target thought would be illegal.

One of the undercover officers told me, "Peter, we have never had a target who we did not successfully pull into our organized crime family." And he said, "I'm talking doctors, lawyers, bankers." They were brilliant at this.

And so the, there was, the house was bugged, and an undercover officer hears that Sebastian is gonna get his hair cut at a, uh, salon in downtown, um, uh, Vancouver, and they decide this is our moment to make an approach to him.

They'd also learned that Sebastian and Atif had been working on a screenplay-

(laughs)

So, I'll, I'll leave her name out of it.

She's been through so much.

Uh, as someone who believes in second chances, I have mixed feelings about that, but I really want people to understand the brutality of this crime.

The lead investigator who I interviewed who'd been in many, many homicide situations had never seen anything like this.

Keep in mind, you know, with a typical murder on a 48 Hours show, somebody shoots someone, or if they're going to use something like a knife, they get a butcher knife, they go for the heart, they go for the jugular for a quick kill, right? It was just the opposite in the way that Lee Jones died.

She wasn't stabbed as much as...

this is difficult to listen to... as she was sliced.

This was a filet knife, uh, that had a curved end to it.

It's a kind of knife that, that you might have to cut your steak, right? It was not a butcher knife.

So just before her death, how would you describe their relationship?