Original subtitles

This particular Thanksgiving was gonna be

a little bit extra special

because my grandchildren, Nick and Haile,

were gonna be there.

Nick was 17, Haile was 18.

They were cousins and very, very close friends.

Dinner was supposed to start at about one o'clock.

Nick and Haile weren't there yet.

We waited and waited and waited.

It was about 2:30 or three o'clock

before we finally just decided to sit down.

And quite honestly, nobody really ate much.

We were on phones texting Nick and Haile

to find out where they were.

And there was no answer, no answer, no answer.

That was really frazzling everybody.

There was a sense that something was not right.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think what happened would

have actually happened. I believe that evil took over

that night.

The day after Thanksgiving, November 23, 2012,

I was off work.

We were sitting downstairs, my wife Chrissi, at the time,

and my nine-year-old daughter Haile, and we were watching

a Christmas show.

But I was always on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We don't have a huge department with a lot of people.

In fact, there were only two investigators for

the whole county.

And the deputy told me that he received a strange call from

a William Anderson, saying that his neighbor, Byron Smith,

had called the Sheriff's Office wanting to talk to an attorney.

He said, well, Byron's been having some problems with some

break-ins to his place, and I suspect he might have

taken things way too far.

When I heard this description,

something just wasn't sitting right in my stomach.

Smith lived just on the outskirts of town.

It's approximately about a five-minute drive from

the Sheriff's Office to Byron Smith's residence.

And Byron's house, incidentally,

is at the dead end...

...of Elm Street.

When I pulled into the driveway, what I did notice

as I'm pulling up to his attached garage is that

there's no vehicles parked outside.

I thought that was a little odd.

Like, where's his vehicle?

As I'm exiting my squad car, I see an older male come out of

the house with messy gray hair, wearing a blue jean jacket

and jeans that appeared like he slept in them.

His hands raised above his head.

Well, that's not a normal thing that people typically do

when I respond to their house to see what kind of problems

they're having.

The hairs on the back of my neck were starting to stand up.

And it's like, OK, now something more

is possibly happening here.

I asked him, "Are you Mr. Smith?

And he said, "Yes, I am."

Thoughts were racing through my head, trying to figure out

what do I do next?

I said, "I heard something happened at your house here.

Is it OK if we come in and talk to you?"

So Byron open the door and we walked into his residence.

He was very calm.

I didn't notice any erratic behavior or anything from him

at the time.

He was just matter of fact that somebody broke into his house.

There was a window that had been shattered, and the glass

was laying on the inside.

What that indicated is that somebody had broken the window

to gain entry into his house.

Byron told us that the break-in happened on Thanksgiving Day.

I thought that was a little odd when he told me that because

he's not reporting it now until the day after Thanksgiving.

So Byron wanted to show us something in the basement.

And as I'm walking down the steps,

I see a rug.

And I see what looks like a spot of blood.

OK, that's kind of a red flag for me.

Maybe something's going on here.

His walls are white.

And I see what looks like a speck of blood on the wall.

Now the hairs are really starting to stand up

on the back of my neck.

It's like,

what am I gonna find here?

So we get to the bottom of the steps, and this chair was

in an odd location.

I don't know why somebody would set it up like that,

but it was sitting between two bookshelves,

very tall bookshelves.

There were a bottle of water and some energy bars.

Then I also noticed that the light bulbs above

the reading chair in the ceiling had been removed

and we're sitting in a pile.

I'm like... wait, what's going on here?

Why would somebody do that?

Then he goes on to tell me that he's sitting in

his reading chair,

and he had heard somebody walking around

the house outside.

He heard somebody trying the doorknobs.

Byron would have had ample time to make a phone call to law

enforcement and report that, "Hey, somebody is looking to

break into my house here." But he doesn't.

He said, "I see the footsteps coming down the stairs.

"And as he's coming down where I could see his hips...

...I fired."

And I'm like, "Whoa, you fired?"

Now I'm just finding out he has a gun with him.

Byron said, "So I went and I sat back down in my reading chair."

And he goes, "As I'm sitting there, I hear somebody trying

"the door, and then I hear more footsteps coming

down the hallway."

He tells me that it felt like he was being ganged up on.

Byron said that when he saw the hip area of this person,

he shot again.

And she, he used the word "she," fell to the bottom

of the stairs.

And when I heard that, I'm like, "Oh my God,

now a female party's involved?" And I'm just like, whoa.

I look over at the other deputy and he's got this huge

"holy crap" expression on his face, which I'm sure is the same

expression I had on my face at the time because

I've never heard something like this before.

There obviously was something going on here, and I needed to

figure out what the heck it was.

But at that time, I had no idea the impact this case

would have on my life,

and that it would change our small community forever.

I'm asking myself, did I really hear this right?

Did Byron Smith just admit to me that he had basically

executed two people that had broke into his house?

He's very calm about the whole thing, really.

But I could tell that he was not giving me the full story.

So as I'm looking at this little bit of blood that I did

see in the spot where he told me that he shot these two

people, it was very odd to me because there should have been

a lot more blood in that area.

As Mr. Smith is explaining these things to me, I could see

blood now on his jacket, on his pants, and then also

on his shoes.

And this whole time, I haven't seen any bodies yet.

I said, "Well, can you show me where the bodies are?"

And he goes, "Follow me."

There's a closed door that leads back

into his office-workroom area.

And sure enough, I see the bodies

lying next to each other.

I had no idea who these victims were, but I could see multiple

gunshot holes in the body of the female party.

The male party was wrapped in a tarp and all I could see was

his feet and jeans that he was wearing.

And I said, "Mr. Smith, when did this happen?"

And he told me, "Yesterday on Thanksgiving."

I said, "Why did you not report this incident yesterday?"

And Smith looks at me and he says, "Well, just because

"my day was ruined, I thought, I don't want to wreck

your guys' Thanksgiving."

The day was really a bust.

At about seven o'clock that evening, Thanksgiving evening,

you know, the rest of the kids were calling around,

calling friends,

trying to find out where Nick and Haile were.

On Thanksgiving 2012, I was preparing to have dinner

with my family.

I started to worry when I got a call from his sister,

wondering if I had heard from Nick at all.

And that's kind of where I was like, OK, there's something

obviously more going on here.

So it was, uh,

not a good night.

Little Falls is a small town.

Two teenagers just don't go missing.

Little Falls is your typical slow-paced town.

Population right around about 8,000.

We're two hours from the Twin Cities.

It's just kind of its own little corner of Minnesota.

But Little Falls doesn't have a lot

for the younger kids to do.

What teenagers do here, get in trouble, honestly.

I was actually supposed to hang out with Nick that morning,

and I just never heard from him.

We hung out a lot, and I do mean a lot.

I would call him more like a brother to me than a friend.

If you're having a bad day and Nick is there, you're not

gonna have a bad day for long.

He's gonna find a way to get you to smile and cheer up,

even if you don't want to.

Nick was really good at changing the mood into

a positive way.

There's not a whole lot of people that had a bad time

with him around.

To be really honest, Nick lit up a room.

Haile was always polite, always gracious.

She just had that nice air about her.

There was something with Haile

that, you know, you wouldn't expect

her to be rude to anybody. Just genuinely nice.

It was so out of character for Nick and Haile to not respond.

Just unthinkable.

Where are you?

We couldn't file a missing persons claim for 24 hours.

So we had to wait till the next day.

The whole time I'm thinking,

OK, has a crime been committed here?

I knew that Mr. Smith had the legal right to

defend himself.

He had the legal right to use lethal force in his home.

So the law states that.

But the problem, what I see, was these people

were not armed.

So I had to make the ultimate decision to place him

under arrest.

Mr. Smith's answer to me was, "Yes, I understand.

I know you're just doing your job."

As I'm going around the outside of the house, I noticed

surveillance cameras that were set up.

So that was an indication to me that, hey, there's possibly

some video recording of this incident that I could get.

Back at the station, deputies had Byron Smith in

an interview room.

And said they'd be right back.

So they had him in the room by himself.

And they were watching him through double-sided glass.

They needed to figure out if Smith was telling the whole

truth, if this really was self-defense,

or if this was cold-blooded murder.

In the meantime, we got a call

from two Minnesota State Patrol officers.

They said "We noticed something odd."

A vehicle was parked in front of our residence here on

Thanksgiving Day yesterday, and we have no idea whose

vehicle it is.

So they ran the license plate on the truck,

and it came back to Byron Smith.

Why in the heck is Smith's vehicle parked a quarter mile

away in front of some State Patrol officer's house?

Early on, as information was trickling out, people were for

sure taking Smith's side.

People feel connected to defending their property.

It was kind of this rumor mill that ended up

turning into pretty big news, and everyone was

picking a side.

It was becoming a powder keg situation.

And the story

was gonna get pretty crazy.

Byron Smith had just admitted that he had shot two people in

his basement claiming self-defense,

but they're not sure if he's telling the whole truth.

After I arrested Byron Smith, our Sheriff's Office dispatch

received a phone call from the parents of two juveniles,

17-year-old male party by the name of Nicholas Brady

and his 18-year-old cousin, Haile Kaifer.

It was reported that both juveniles are missing

over a day now.

Well, we got a description of both of them and it seemed to

add up and match pretty close to the juveniles that we had

currently in the basement at Smith's house.

We live out in the country and this vehicle pulls down

our long driveway.

We were actually hopeful that it was Nick and Haile.

My wife finally looked out our window and saw that it was

the chaplain, and she knew something was not right.

The deputy and the chaplain told us that Nick and Haile had

both been shot burglarizing a house.

No more details other than that.

My first thought was, why would you break into a house?

And it was just devastating, losing my grandson,

losing Haile,

for something that both knew better.

No Thanksgiving has been the same since then.

So,

trying to get myself calm here.

Back at the station, deputies were watching Byron

Smith, trying to figure out what is going on

inside his head.

I looked through the two-way mirror at Smith.

He's sitting there, he's getting a little restless,

getting a little antsy, because now it's been

a little while. So I sit down with Byron.

What I knew about Byron Smith is that he's a 64-year-old

retired man that lived alone.

He told me that the house was his family home that

he grew up in.

He initially had been working overseas,

installing surveillance cameras in embassies

throughout the world.

That's what he did for a living.

Smith was a bit of a loner.

You know, didn't have a lot of visitors come to his home.

But that summer of 2012, uh, decided to hire someone to

come take care of his lawn.

Several boys were cutting this grass.

Nick Brady ended up being one of those kids that came over to

do lawn work for him.

During that time, that's when Byron started to notice things

were missing, including his POW watch and a bomber jacket.

And that's when he fired him and told him

never to come back to his house.

But by October 2012, his house was still getting

broken into. He was clearly angry.

I mean, anybody would be angry if their house was broken

into continually.

Like, he kind of became this target.

And at one point, some arrests were made.

But it just, in his mind, wasn't what he imagined should

happen to someone who was breaking into his home.

And so he went from trying to get the law to help him to

taking the law into his own hands.

Like, I'm going to deal with this myself.

So he had surveillance cameras all around the outside

of his house.

In one camera he had facing there, where his property line

was, you could see one of his neighbors homes, and that

happened to be the one neighbor who he was convinced was

breaking into his home.

During Smith's interview he tells me that he's never

gotten along with his neighbors, the Williams, next door.

And he I suspected that it was the Williams' daughter that was

involved in previous burglaries.

And so he went from being a victim to being a vigilante.

Smith told me that he thought he had killed Ashley Williams,

the girl that lived next door to him.

I shouldn't have been involved.

I shouldn't have even been brought up.

I shouldn't be here right now doing this interview.

Once upon a time, it was a good place to live, on Elm Street.

But Byron Smith is a cruel, heartless man.

He had a deep hate towards me.

I didn't feel safe being his neighbor.

I live in fear, knowing it was supposed to be me.

I felt it important to get my story out there, my truth,

because I don't know what tomorrow brings.

My thought on hiding my identity was because I was

absolutely victimized by Byron Smith,

and I would like to not be a victim or feel like

a victim anymore.

His claims were very absurd, 100% not true.

As far as my record for breaking and entering any place

is null and void.

I have never stole from anybody, and I would never.

When I was in grade school, I went down to his house to

sell him cookies for the school, and he didn't want

nothing to do with it.

That was the one and only time I ever been to his house.

I didn't feel safe being his neighbor.

Growing up, I had cats and a family dog go missing, because

they went onto his property, and I think that he killed them

because of that.

I wish I knew why he had so much anger towards me.

When Byron Smith's house started being broken into

in October of 2012, he made her the bad guy

and invented this whole plan of vengeance against this girl.

But it actually made no sense.

She didn't actually live there at the time.

The timeline of when his jacket went missing

didn't actually make sense.

She would have been a baby at the time.

So I would say his mental state was

shaky at best.

A lot of his peers talked about how he had a bit of

a short temper.

He was becoming a very disturbed individual and it was

becoming a powder keg situation.

It was only a matter of time before he was gonna explode.

He said he fell down the stairs and was laying wounded at

the bottom of the stairs.

And he goes, "As I'm sitting there, a little while later,

I hear more footsteps descending the stairs."

He says, "Ashley Williams fell to the bottom of the stairs,

and she's wounded."

Again, he said, "I just want her dead.

"I take my rifle,

I point it at her."

You could see almost that, when people describe him as being

a bullied kid, you could see that come out in that moment.

You know, it's like he heard things

that didn't really happen.

"So I grabbed my pistol I had at my side, I aimed at her chest

and I shot and I shot and I shot."

And I'm like, wow.

He said, "When she quit moving,

"I then grabbed her and laid her

on the tarp next to him."

And he said, "I just sat with the bodies in the basement,

"fearful that the Williams family was gonna come over with

firearms, you know, to kill me."

I would describe Byron Smith as like, kind of a Norman

Bates-type character, like Norman Bates from

the movie Psycho.

If you've ever seen the end of Psycho where he's kind of just

sitting in a rocking chair, just super calm,

watching the fly fly around the room.

But in his head, he's having a psychotic break.

He's already killed people.

That was kind of Byron's demeanor a lot of the time,

like just not wanting to break in front of people,

But then, at any moment,

he could snap.

It was vitally important that we keep Smith in custody,

or there's a strong likelihood that somebody else could be

shot and killed.

After I finished my interviews with Byron, I drafted up five

separate search warrants.

From the search warrant at Smith's house, we found out

that he had moved the rugs at the bottom of the steps

where I initially was talking with Byron.

What they discovered was brain matter, pools of blood,

and also blood marks dragging across the carpet that led back

to his office workroom.

So it appeared very deliberate and intentional on Byron's part

that he had taken those rugs and covered up the spot.

Well, I was in the back office workroom where the bodies were,

And I found a digital, handheld audio recorder sitting

on top of his desk back there.

And we found the same exact type of recorder hidden in

the bookshelf above his reading chair.

I had this odd feeling in the pit of my stomach.

And what we found was the holy grail piece of evidence

in this case.

It recorded a monologue of Byron Smith basically

rehearsing what he was gonna do if anybody

broke into his house.

Over and over again, practicing saying,

"I think I need to speak to an attorney."

Just insane.

And it turns out that recorder actually recorded everything.

I had five separate search warrants at hand.

And I met with the county attorney

at Byron Smith's house.

There were some very important key pieces of evidence that

we needed to get in this case.

What we found in the surveillance videos was

that around 11:00 AM on Thanksgiving Day, Smith went

outside and got into his pickup and drove the pickup away.

Little while later, we saw him walking back through the woods

to his house, hiding his vehicle away from

the house to make it look like nobody was home.

You know, we have a lot of deer hunters in Minnesota,

and this is what we do.

We sit in a deer stand, and we have food and water

and that, so we can sit for the long haul and wait

for the prey to come in.

Well, that's what it seemed like Byron did.

To be sitting in your basement in the middle of the day in

complete darkness, waiting for someone to break into your

house and to make it appear that you're not home, so that

they want to come in, so that you can kill them, is like

another level of depravity.

What we captured on that digital recorder paints

the perfect picture of what I basically suspected

when I placed Smith under arrest,

is that this was a murder and not self-defense.

When Nick initially came in,

you can hear the window break.

You can hear the footsteps descend down the stairs.

And then you hear

the initial one shot.

Now, he's laying there wounded.

Then you hear a final shot,

where Byron shot Nick in the head.

You can hear the body dragging across the floor to his back

office room.

A little while later, we see Nick's cousin,

Haile, come walking up to the house.

But then that's the last thing we see of her on video.

Smith said that he went and sat back down in his chair.

But what he didn't tell me was he had actually

reloaded his gun.

11 minutes later, Haile came in the house.

When she got to the top of the stairs, you could actually

hear Haile whispering.

She slowly started to descend the stairs

looking for her cousin.

That's when you hear

Now she's laying there wounded.

Smith says he goes to finish her off.

He aims the gun at her.

That's when his rifle jammed on him.

When Smith told me that Haile was laughing at him,

that was a lie.

She was pleading for her life.

He wrapped both of their bodies in tarps and just kept them

there overnight.

He had no regard for their remains, just totally

disconnected himself from them as humans, much less kids.

It'd be awful to happen to anybody, but the fact that

they were children was really, really just disturbing.

So he was initially charged with two counts of

second-degree murder, and then a grand jury was convened

and they agreed that he should be charged with two counts of

first-degree murder.

When this broke, there was only a couple reporters covering it.

It was me and Horsome County Record.

I mean, I'd say "hi" to him in the morning.

Byron Smith comes across as a really kind person.

He's very quiet and has a very soft demeanor.

But then when he feels cornered or he feels humiliated,

something happens.

There is another person that just comes out, and he just,

it's-- it's scary.

During the trial, I listened to the recordings.

They still haunt me.

I learned that he was targeting me, which to me was a blind

side, and to this day, it affects me.

Sitting in the courtroom, listening to that,

I've been angry.

I've never experienced rage in my life.

Listening to him talk about my grandson and Haile that way,

I literally could have gotten up and attacked him

right in the courtroom.

He's a monster.

No regular human being could go to that extent.

I don't know any way to put it besides a monster.

He just wanted to be judge, jury, and executioner.

Haile was looking for Nick. She was not a perpetrator.

I don't believe that she was doing anything other than

searching for her cousin.

And she certainly bore the--

bore the brunt of Smith's rage.

In the Little Falls trial of Byron Smith, the man charged

with killing two people in his own home, two very

different pictures are painted by the prosecutor and defense.

Smith's defense attorneys are trying to see

if self-defense holds up.

And jurors in the Byron Smith case will now consider four

counts, two of which are first-degree murder.

Smith was tried and convicted of two counts of first-degree

murder and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.

I would say it set a precedent for Minnesota case law here in

just how self-defense works.

The news media really hyped this case up about the Castle

Doctrine Law and it became national news.

You're in your home, you're broken into,

you can shoot the intruder to protect yourself.

This is called the Castle Law in Minnesota.

It was very divided.

We would get a parade of cars past our house,

people harassing us.

Well, that was very hard on my family.

My wife finally had enough and wanted a divorce,

and I ended up getting divorced.

I remember going into town, and a couple of people

made some hurtful comments that, you know,

this was my fault or this was my family's fault.

There's times when I actually have a bulletproof vest

that I wear.

I had people stalking me, so.

I would read online the people that sided with Byron and their

opinions about Nick and Haile.

I just wished at the time that I could tell my story.

He is a cruel, heartless man.

I think we paint this picture that this town is divided.

I just think that this town is sad.

For people who pay attention to the news, there's always two

sides to the story.

Be open-minded enough to get both sides.

Mr. Smith wanted revenge, and he didn't care how

he got it.

I've had properties broken into before and you feel violated,

but it's stuff,

you know, stuff can be replaced.

Taking a human life is way, way different than that.

If I could talk to Nick or Haile, I'd probably tell

them both that I miss them and everybody down here misses

them and it's just, it ain't the same.

My hope for Nick would have been that he had consequences

for his actions, that he learned from them

and that he moved on.

Haile would have found true happiness.

She was such a nice young lady that, you know, if she would

have chosen to get married, there'd be 100 guys out there

that would be dying to marry her.

Nick's personality would have gotten him certainly

high places.

Do I miss them? Every day.

There isn't a day goes by that I don't think about them

with a smile on their face.