Original subtitles

To shoot a man while he was sleeping --

he didn't even have a chance to defend himself.

An execution-style slaying.

So if it's not a random act of violence,

then you gotta find someone who wants to do him in.

A real-life game of clue.

The truth will be revealed.

It's not what you know, it's what you can prove.

I had to be the person to get some justice for him.

Every day in North America,

dozens of people are murdered.

The key to solving the toughest of these homicides

lies in the final 24 hours of the victim's life.

To crack the case,

detectives must reconstruct that critical timeline,

the minutes and hours containing evidence

that can help unlock the mystery

and catch the killer.

Newbury township, Ohio,

a small community with a big heart.

Newbury is close-knit. Everybody knows each other.

People do things together -- they have four wheelers

and dirt bikes in the summertime,

and in the wintertime,

everybody pulls out their ski-doos.

You've got neighbors that are spread out, you know,

um, it's nice. It's safe.

People leave their doors open.

People know one another, and they trust one another.

We had a 911 call come into our sheriff's office

placed by an individual by the name of tig.

Tig has found his 53-year-old

stepfather, Randy scheffield,

unconscious in his bed.

Randy is the owner of a landscaping company in town.

He's known as the snowplow king among friends,

and he's always enjoyed being a big fish in a small pond.

He had a lot of clients.

He cared about his employees, he cared about his customers,

and people respected him.

And, you know, he never really

had anything -- any ill will towards anybody.

He just was a generous, kind, good guy.

Everybody I spoke with just said, "you ask him

for it, he'll give you the shirt off of his back."

Minutes after the call

comes in, first responders arrive at the scheffield home.

We had the deputy, Heather bilicic,

respond to the scene.

And she had worked on an ambulance squad,

so she had quite a bit of medical background

in her history.

And she looked at the scene with

very different eyes than an average deputy.

She noted that there was blood on the bed and was coming out

of what she believed was the back of the head,

and she would immediately recognized this as

something is wrong.

Upon looking at the room to see what caused the injury,

she noted a gun box.

She picked it up to see if there was a gun in it.

And the gun box was empty.

Now her mind started racing.

Could this have something to do

with the wound in the back of the head?

Suspecting foul play, deputy bilicic

calls in veteran homicide detectives --

juanita vetter and Mitch Kelly.

Detective vetter and I have worked

quite a few death investigations.

We've had some pretty gruesome ones, some worse than others.

So in this particular case, would I call this one strange?

I don't know what strange is anymore -- people do weird

things to each other, people are not nice to each other.

To find out who would want Randy dead,

detectives must piece together the final 24 hours of his life,

starting with the crime scene.

I felt that I was behind the eight-ball

immediately when I walked into the room

of the scheffield residence.

What was very bizarre about the scene is that the wallet

was on the floor, and the credit cards were

spewed out.

The drawers are pulled out, but nothing is missing.

To me, it almost looks like

somebody's trying to stage a burglary.

Things get even more unusual when

they walk into the living room.

There's six people sitting in the living room

at one o'clock in the morning,

and there's a dead man

not even 20 feet down the hall.

So now I've got the task of who are all these people?

I don't even have people's names.

When you have a pool of suspects this large,

the process has to focus on

what's called excluding suspects.

So you don't just arbitrarily decide

who's more likely to have done it

than somebody else -- you will actually systematically

and categorically move

through all of the people, because everyone is a suspect.

As vetter works her way around the room,

she starts putting the puzzle together.

Doretta is Randy's second wife.

They've been together for more than 20 years.

She's also the company bookkeeper.

Tig is doretta's son by a previous marriage,

who Randy loved and raised as his own.

Tiggy was a self-taught mechanic.

He was really good.

He'd rip those machines apart

and put 'em right back together.

Gina is tig's girlfriend.

They have a baby son together

and live down the road from the scheffields.

She's a hairdresser.

She was definitely goth-looking, um, you know,

pitch black hair, tattoos covering her entire torso.

Lastly, there's Randy's snowplow drivers --

Trevor, Kurt, and Jason.

They were working in the garage

when Randy's body was discovered.

I'm concerned that my evidence is being destroyed

by all these people being in the house.

So after we get everybody out of there,

I wanted to do an interview with the wife.

As I'm interviewing doretta,

we have not told her that we found

a bullet in the back of her husband's head yet.

I'm simply asking her about her husband's death

and the relationship that she has with her husband.

But then, when I did finally tell her, "doretta,

I have something to tell you."

She became excessively uncontrollably

crying and hysterical.

And I couldn't even ask another question.

I got so frustrated that I physically left

the room, because there was no dealing with her.

Doretta says that Randy was everything to her,

having rescued her from a desperate situation

two decades earlier.

Randy was in his twenties, and he had gotten divorced.

He would go to the Greenville inn and, um, doretta

was divorced, as well,

so that -- that is where he met her.

She didn't have a lot of money

prior to a meeting Randy.

She was raising three kids on her own.

She was living in a bad part of the county,

you know, kind of like section 8 housing.

She was trying to keep a roof over their head,

and Randy had an apartment.

After they got married,

Randy really did raise the kids,

and doretta started working in the landscaping business.

He's a very basic guy and doretta was like

the mother hen.

She would always make the sandwiches.

She was always doing the cooking.

Randy was the breadwinner,

and she would cater to all of Randy's needs.

Doretta says that Randy woke up at 6:30 A.M.,

excited because the forecast was calling for snow.

That's the first time it snowed significantly

at all that whole year.

So Randy was going crazy,

because he's gonna be wanting to get his guys out.

Just after 7 A.M.,

Randy heads to McDonald's to fuel up for the big day ahead.

He's going through the drive-through.

Hash browns was one of the things he purchased.

He also bought some sandwiches.

He ate those guys on his way back to his house.

Than doretta says he's not feeling well,

so Randy lays down to take a nap.

Doretta says the last time she spoke to Randy

was just before she left the house at 9:30 A.M.

That means Randy could have been killed any time

between then and 9:30 that night.

Randy's death did not immediately

happen prior to him being discovered.

It had to have happened much, much earlier in the day.

Doretta spent the whole day

running errands around town,

not arriving back home until later in the afternoon

at 4:30.

She said that she went, put the groceries away,

went to check on Randy,

peeked in the bedroom, saw he was sleeping,

decided to leave him sleep, and then went outside to see

the boys in the garage.

By the time Jason arrives for work at 9 P.M.,

doretta, tig, Gina, Trevor,

and Kurt have gathered in the garage.

The roads were so horrendously snow-covered.

If you own a snowplow business, you should be

out snowplowing -- if not anything else,

getting your trucks ready to go snowplowing.

Jason was concerned, because, "hey, we're getting

ready to go snowplowing, nobody's called."

Where's Randy?

That's when doretta decides to check on Randy.

And discovers him lifeless in his bed.

So the biggest issue is how does

someone get shot in their home?

People are in a garage, but no one heard anything,

and no one saw anything.

Since doretta was the person who found Randy,

detective vetter is charged with asking her

a tough question.

To me, and everybody reacts differently,

but to me it was just like she was playing to the camera.

This -- "Randy, my Randy.

Randy," just the sobbing and rocking back and forth.

It definitely smells. It smells really bad.

No. No.

After discovering the snowplow king,

Randy scheffield, shot dead

in his bed two days after Christmas,

the pressure is on detectives vetter and Kelly

to find his killer.

The hardest homicides are the whodunit homicides.

It's like putting a puzzle together,

and you have a limited amount of time to get as much

as you can before people change their minds,

start talking to each other,

start getting their stories right.

Right now, everyone's a suspect,

including Randy's wife, doretta,

his stepson, tig, and tig's girlfriend, Gina,

all of whom were at the house when his body was found.

The one thing I always keep in the back of my head

when I'm doing my investigation

is I'm always trying to find who is it that

has opportunity and the motive.

To find that out,

detectives need to narrow down Randy's time of death.

Establishing time of death tells you exactly when

the offender and the victim were in contact.

That needs to be as precise as possible in order for it to be

confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt

in a court that a certain perpetrator

and a certain victim were in the same place

at the same time.

If those don't line up, if the timeline is off,

you have reasonable doubt, plain and simple.

Detectives are still waiting for the official

autopsy report.

So for now, they're basing Randy's time of death on

the amount of rigor mortis,

or stiffness, to his body when he was found.

Rigor mortis does not set in for,

you know, 5, 6, 7 hours.

So I'm working on what deputy Heather bilicic has told me.

She tried to roll him over.

She said he had a death grip on that post,

which was really strong rigor mortis.

So I'm thinking, shoot, if you're there at 9:30,

I'm thinking noon to three is what I'm thinking

for time of death.

Their first suspect is Randy's wife, doretta.

Detectives need to know where she was

when Randy was murdered.

She claims she was running errands around town

from 9:30 A.M.

To 4:30 P.M.

Detective Kelly sets out to verify her alibi.

You can't go more than 1/4 mile anywhere

without being caught on video.

And what we ended up doing is we ended up

making a timeline off of doretta's initial statement.

Her -- the timeline consisted of videos

and the cellphones.

She said, "I left the house

at around 9:30 in the morning."

We were able to verify that with video footage

that we obtained from gas stations.

She said she went to the bank.

She did a bid for the snowplow.

She went to Walmart and did some grocery shopping.

We got video of her walking into the store.

We got video of her in the store,

and then we got video of her coming out.

During that time,

she also makes a phone call to Randy talking about what

she's gonna buy, what she wants to make for dinner.

She

I went to Gina battaglia's, stayed there, and then

eventually made her way home,

and that's exactly what she did.

Detectives believe that Randy died between 12

and 3 P.M., so with doretta out of the house

for most of the day,

they conclude that she couldn't have killed Randy.

Detectives now turn their attention to tig,

Randy's stepson.

He was the one who called 911, and there's

something about that recording that doesn't sit well

with detective vetter.

My dispatchers are trained in emergency response,

so they were giving him step-by-step instructions

on how to do cpr.

Tig, for some reason, said that he couldn't do it,

because his hands were greasy,

because he was working on motorcycles all day,

which in -- when I listen to that phone call,

was an immediate red flag.

Greasy hands is not a legitimate reason to not do

cpr on a loved one,

especially when it's your father,

stepfather, someone so close in the family.

Police need to know more

about tig's relationship with his stepfather.

They turned to Randy's sister, melody.

Him and tiggy were very close

when they -- went tiggy was little.

Randy raised tiggy as if

he was his own son.

He always rode motorcross.

I had a beautiful, beautiful BMW

street bike, and they would go,

like, up into upstate New York and go through the countryside,

you know, so they did all that stuff together.

Randy also taught him

how to fix the machines they raced on.

By the time he grew up, tig was a skilled mechanic,

and it was only natural that he started working

for his stepfather in the shop.

It was always believed that tig was

the next in line to take over Randy's company.

He told people that, "this business is gonna be mine.

I'm gonna be in charge."

But as investigators dig deeper,

they learn there was tension between stepfather and son.

Tig wanted to go in the direction

of getting in the construction part of...

Landscaping, you know, building patios and everything like that.

Randy didn't want to do it, because

it would cost more money for insurance.

He was making a good living off of how he started the company.

There's a good possibility that tig may now

be on the outs, and that company that he thought was gonna be

his is not gonna be his now.

Having found a possible motive,

investigators question tig

about his whereabouts on the day Randy was murdered.

Tig leaves his house about 11:30 in the morning,

because he's gonna go get breakfast with a friend of his.

And so Trevor picks him up, and they go to breakfast.

They then decide to go to the shop,

but on the way to the shop, they have to get snacks

and drinks, so they stop at the gas station.

That was right at one o'clock, and Randy scheffield's house

is not even 30 seconds from that gas station.

So it was like five after one,

he gets to the garage.

So they're hanging out in the garage for most of the day.

Then throughout the day,

different friends are popping in and popping out.

Tig claims

he didn't enter the house until later that night,

when doretta found Randy's body.

Investigators turn to tig's friend,

Trevor, to confirm tig's story.

We talked to Trevor

separate of tig being there and asked him, you know,

"did you go in the house? Did tig go in house?"

So he said, yes, tig rowles had gone

into the house around 3 o'clock in the afternoon

to use the bathroom.

That means he clearly had

the opportunity to kill Randy.

When investigators confront tig,

he vehemently denies having anything to do with the murder.

Instead, he tells them he thinks he knows

who may have done it.

The story is that there was two former employees.

They're drug addicts.

They're thieves, they're crooks.

These two guys had it in for Randy.

Tig says right before Christmas, Randy fired

two transient workers from Cleveland for using drugs,

and they swore revenge on him before leaving town.

Randy ran a good, clean business.

He really did, and so he kept people on the books.

But there was no record of these people existing at all.

So we went back to other snowplow drivers

and asked them,

did Randy have anybody in the landscape

snowplow business that were let go before Christmas?

No. Across the board.

Police conclude

that the ex-employees never existed.

Why is tig misdirecting?

Trying to redirect towards these nefarious people

from Cleveland who were mad about being fired?

We realized that tig was making this story up,

and it makes tig look very bad.

The investigation into snow plow king,

Randy scheffield's, murder

is narrowing in on his stepson, tig,

after detectives discover he was alone in the house

the afternoon Randy was killed.

We went to talk to tig,

and we got a call from tig's attorney, and we're no longer

allowed to talk to either of them.

So any follow-up interviews and all questions involved,

we weren't -- we weren't allowed to go there.

With tig freezing them out,

detectives turn to Randy's longtime friend Jason for

insight into tig's demeanor that night in the garage.

That's as far as

Jason will go in pointing the finger at anyone,

but he tells detectives to look

at Gina, tig's girlfriend and the mother of his child.

He says tig's life started going south

the moment he hooked up with her.

Gina is insane.

She's just crazy.

She was always in trouble.

She was on drugs,

and she -- you know, just partying.

Investigators learn that Gina continued her wild

lifestyle even after she moved in with tig.

At one time, tig and Gina lived in the basement of

Randy's house.

Randy is a quiet kind of guy.

He's a little bit older, he said to tig,

"I have raised you to be a good man,

"and it's time for you to live on your own, and you need

a place of your own."

I guess Randy just said he could not stand

the constant fighting and screaming

that was going on in the basement

between her and tig.

The family says that while

tig accepted Randy's decision,

Gina did not.

This is a very entitled, spoiled girl who just

can't believe she's not getting her way.

She's angry at Randy, because she deserved to be there,

tig deserve to be there.

But what detectives find out next takes

their suspicions of Gina to the next level.

During the course of the investigation,

talking to people,

we ran into an individual who was best friends with Gina.

She had told US about a time that

her and Gina were walking with the kids.

Gina said, "Randy just sits in the truck all day,

"and tig is the one who makes all the money.

"He is the one who works. He's the backbone.

And all Randy does is sit there and put his hand out."

And then she continued on by saying that,

"we've got to figure out a way to off Randy.

We would be so much better without him."

With Gina now in the investigators' crosshairs,

she's brought into the station for questioning about

her whereabouts the day Randy was murdered.

Gina said she never left the house.

She says she got up, she took care of her son.

And then when

Kurt came over, they got in the car.

They went to a friend of theirs,

and then made their way with pizza up to the garage.

But when detectives pull her cellphone records,

they reveal a different story,

some of the calls that she received that morning

were bouncing off of a tower near the scheffield residence.

And the only way that that would happen is if

she left her home, and she went to the residence.

That puts Gina near Randy's house in the timeframe

they believed he was killed.

We sat down to talk to Gina for a little bit,

and it just exploded.

We kept asking her about her cellphone moving.

She got very nervous.

She got very antsy in her seat.

I think if it wasn't cool in there,

she would've started sweating.

And every time I would ask her, she came up with, "

"I must have been at so and so's house, I forgot.

I must have --" I checked that with the cell --

no, that would be a totally different cellphone tower.

I'd hit her back with that -- "Gina, that doesn't make sense.

Just tell me, where did you go?"

She gave me five different answers

about where she went during that day.

Now there's nothing she can say to make it right.

In an effort to clear her name,

Gina agrees to take a new form of lie detector test called

a computerized voice stress analysis.

Cvsa is a new technique that looks at patterns

in your voice and stress

of the voice to determine whether or not you're telling

the truth about a crime.

It's done with a computer, you can't fake it.

She failed it miserably.

I informed or "hey, listen, this is gonna go south.

This is not looking good for you."

We had put a lot of pressure on Gina,

and...

We honestly felt that she was gonna crack.

But surprisingly, Gina holds firm to her story.

And with nothing but circumstantial evidence

against her, detectives are forced to release her.

After weeks of sleepless nights,

investigators are no closer to finding Randy's killer

than they were on day one.

I'm very good at compartmentalizing things.

I keep work, work, home, home,

you know, and this case, I couldn't compartmentalize it.

I just thought about it 24-7, and...

To shoot a man while he was sleeping is...

I'm disgusted by it.

He didn't even have a chance to defend himself.

And I did feel that I had to be his voice.

I had to be the person to get some justice for him.

Unwilling to accept defeat,

detectives start canvassing the neighborhood,

looking for any new leads.

So we got to hit the ground,

and you gotta start knocking on doors.

You gotta talk to people.

What did they see? When did they see it?

Who is wearing what?

What vehicles were parked where?

The minute details, the stupid little things.

Those are the things that we're looking for.

Finally, their tenacity pays off.

One of the neighbors came forward and said, "yeah,

"I remember in the morning, I was in my kitchen window,

"and I saw a guy in a red flannel shirt walking

down the road, going towards the scheffield house."

He's wearing a red flannel, and he's got a hoodie on.

And he comes right past their house.

He's traveling southbound.

We ended up going to the gas station,

which is 200 yards from the scheffield house.

And their surveillance video

show him walking right into the gas station,

plain as day -- you can see his face.

You can see what he buys. Looks up at the camera.

This could be a gold mine

if we could identify this individual.

Detectives are following up

a tip about a suspicious man in a red shirt

seen lurking in the neighborhood on the day

Randy scheffield was murdered.

We wanted to talk to him.

Is he a person of interest or not?

So our little neighborhood canvass turned into

a door-to-door canvass

of a one-mile radius around the house.

We toyed with the theory --

could this be a murder-for-hire,

that maybe the family had hired red shirt man to

commit this? No.

Thomas: So professional killers are generally hired

in a spousal situation by women

to distance themselves from the act.

They won't necessarily feel comfortable committing

murder themselves, but they will try to

reach out to somebody to essentially assist them.

We were looking for red shirt man up and down.

We went as far as to pull

who got out of the jail that morning, were they

on foot, did they get picked up?

But their efforts are in vain.

The red shirt man has vanished without a trace.

But just as they've reached their wits' end,

they get a call from the pathologist.

She's found someone undigested food in Randy's stomach.

So I get ahold of the medical examiner's office,

and they're like, "well, we don't know exactly what it is,

"but it looks like it's pretty much 1/2 of a meal.

It's only partially digested. It's pretty fresh."

And they're able to do tests

on it that we ask for -- the trace evidence man,

he's able to determine that they are hash browns.

We are going --

it's the McDonald's food from that morning.

It's -- it's got to be, um,

so we go back to the video.

Randy's in the drive-thru it McDonald's.

It's 7:05 in the morning.

So from doretta's own statement,

we know that Randy ate his as soon as he got it.

The pathologist tells US, okay, with that,

I can tell you that he died anywhere from 7:30 to 9:30

in the morning, no later than that.

With that, we're like, "this is a game changer."

Until now, detectives had eliminated doretta from

the suspect pool, because she had

an alibi for the time in which they believed Randy died.

But with this new information,

they now know that Randy actually

died between 7:30 and 9:30 A.M.,

making doretta their prime suspect.

Doretta is seen on video leaving her residence in

Randy's truck at 9:30 in the morning by herself.

Nobody else was in that house.

It leaves the question, it was like,

she was the only one there,

so who else could possibly have shot Randy?

Detective vetter starts digging into

the company's public records, looking for answers.

Doretta is the bookkeeper of the company.

So I pull up Randy scheffield in our clerk of courts,

and I see all these financial liens on

Randy scheffield from the state of Ohio.

Randy had not been paying his state sales tax

since 2005,

and it was quickly escalating to over $100,000.

So with that in mind, I started asking Randy's mom,

who used to be the bookkeeper of the company, I said,

"were you aware of this?"

And she was like, "I got a letter in the mail,

and I opened it, and I saw that he had a tax lien."

Randy's mom asked doretta about it,

and she said she knew all about it,

"but please, I've got it handled.

"I'm gonna make good on all those taxes,

"so we'll be back to square one.

"Please don't tell Randy, because he would be

really upset with me."

So we know that the company is hurting financially.

Does Randy know it? Probably not.

Does doretta know it? Absolutely.

Does tig know it?

There's only one person who can help them

answer that question --

Randy's friend, Jason.

Detectives ask him down to the station

for a second interview

and explain what they've just discovered.

This time, he doesn't hold back.

Detectives now believe Randy scheffield's

family conspired to kill him.

To find out who was involved,

they start tracking the money.

Where's the tax money gone?

What happened? Where's -- where's that cash?

So we started realizing that tig is

getting money outside of his paychecks from doretta.

Gina is getting money from doretta.

She's funneling money, unbeknownst to Randy

to the entire family.

Detectives are working a theory that Randy

found out about the embezzlement just

before Christmas.

Just prior to Randy's death,

Randy does go back to his mom and asks his mom

if she would take over the books for -- for him.

So at that point, we do believe now that Randy's

catching wind.

Investigators suspect that doretta, tig, and Gina

knew they were about to be exposed.

They made the decision that

it's time to take out Randy.

He's not taking this away from US.

Now it was a game of chess.

Because we know that they're slowly unraveling.

Investigators now believe they have enough

to piece together the final

24 hours of Randy scheffield's life.

I think in Randy's head, he wanted out of this marriage.

He wanted doretta away from his business.

I think tig knew it,

Gina knew it, and doretta knew it.

I think they all knew it.

December 27th was significant in that

Randy absolutely loved dirt bike racing.

His race number was 27.

So they decided to kill Randy on December 27th,

because that was his racing number, and it was symbolic.

That day, Randy goes,

gets breakfast, buys some cigarettes, gets gas,

eats his breakfast on the way home.

He gets home, and doretta's sitting there watching TV.

She's watching the news, 'cause it's gonna snow.

Randy gives her her breakfast.

She's not happy with it, because fast food,

and the hash browns are cold.

Randy lays down to take a nap.

Doretta

takes a gun.

The only gun in the house.

Puts it to the back of Randy's skull.

She was, like, within three foot of his head.

The gun was three foot away from his head,

and it was point blank.

I mean, she knelt down to do it.

It was like, god, I visualized, you know,

what would you have to do to do this?

She had to literally sneak up in there,

quiet, kneel down, and pull that trigger.

I think it takes a very cold heart

to murder the man who's given you your life

and given your family a home and given them a place

to be a family.

It takes a very cold-hearted person to do that,

to take that man's life.

And the person you're supposed to love

and the one that's supposed to love you puts a bullet

in the back of your head? Does it get any more callous?

The one missing piece of this case was the gun.

Randy's gun was taken out of his room,

taken out of his box, taken out of his home,

and we never did find it.

I think it was Gina.

The gun's missing because of Gina.

She helped hide the crime.

On march 2015,

doretta, Gina, and tig our arrested

for conspiring to kill Randy scheffield.

Gina battaglia pleads guilty to tampering with evidence

and is sentenced to two years in prison.

It was a terrible plea bargain, but...

It's what we had.

Doretta scheffield is convicted of aggravated murder

and is sentenced to 27 and a half years in prison.

The timeline made this case.

We referred to the timeline.

The pathologist assisted US in the timeline.

The jury listened to the timeline,

and doretta scheffield

cooked her own goose by this timeline.

Would she have done this again,

given the opportunity, the motive for money?

Absolutely.

If you can do it once and be that cold,

you're cold to the bone.

It's just who you are.

The only person who never sees

any jail time is tig rowles.

Ultimately, we couldn't tie tig to the murder.

There was enough evidence to indict him.

Randy was a caring, loving man whose biggest

fault is that he trusted people.

Randy lived his life and did what he wanted,

and he enjoyed that.

A lot of people, you know, they sort of wait,

you know, "I'll do that when I when I get the time,

I'll do that when I get older."

I always tell my mom, Randy had fun, and he lived

the way he wanted to,

and you just had to be thankful for that.