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Lying for eternity beneath a Texas live oak tree, or so everyone assumed, until one dark
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night a grave yawned open and told a ghoulish tale a story of obsessive love and treachery
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some sick people out here i've never experienced anything like this before along the way so many people would be injured she hurt a lot of people so many had to turn
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their eyes away from what the lovers had done it's ludicrous it's the last thing you would expect
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It's still unbelievable. An outrage as big as the Lone Star State. It began as simply as a car leaving the road in rural Burnett County, Texas.
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It plunged down an embankment and ended up in a ravine in a ball of fire. Inside the burned-out vehicle, they found a single body, but little more than cinders remain.
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Had the driver maybe fallen asleep at the wheel? It had all the earmarks of a grisly highway accident.
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Running County 911, do you have an emergency? Yes, ma'am. I am on FM 1160, and we have a car that's run off the road.
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It's over a steep bluff. It's on fire. By the time William Telemontes, then a corporal with the Texas Department of Public Safety,
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got to the scene on the morning of June 18, 2004, all that was left of the Chevy Cavalier was a burned-out shell.
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It was burned up where I couldn't even tell what color the vehicle used to be. Didn't even know what maker was.
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The wheels were melted. The tires were gone. And the person inside, just 12 pounds of ashy stump remained.
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I didn't see a head, and both legs were gone. You've seen bad stuff. Yes, sir. Where does this fit in?
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This is the worst. I've seen firm bodies before. I worked accidents like that, but never this bad.
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Authorities quickly traced the car to a young married couple, Molly and Clayton Daniels.
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when investigators called molly told them that clayton had driven his car to his mother's house
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the night before and still hadn't come back by morning it was up to the medical examiner in
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nearby austin to confirm that those 12 sad pounds of human remains were those of 23 year old clayton
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wayne daniels the me ruled that they were amy birkenfeld one of molly's friends at the home
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remodeling company where they worked together, got a glimpse of the gruesome autopsy report.
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Did you see the name Clayton Daniels on it? Oh yeah, it was right across the top of the page.
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Clayton Wayne Daniels. Went from head to toe of what everything looked like. It was charred, it was...
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Boy, some hard reading, huh? It was really tough. Immediately after the accident,
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friends and family rushed to comfort Molly at her home in Leander, Texas. How was she?
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Pretty distraught. I mean, she... She was a mess, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Molly's younger sister, Melissa, coming down from Abilene, was all jagged nerve endings, spent.
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I was pretty hysterical myself. I cried majority of the way down there, just thinking, what am I going to say to her?
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Or maybe even tougher, what to say to Molly's two young children, a boy from another relationship and the little girl she'd had with Clayton.
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The person that my nephew called dad, you know, and my niece was never going to have a father.
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I just thought I was devastated. A memorial service was held in Burnett, Texas, where Clayton grew up.
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No dusty old hymns for Clayton. His favorite song, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird, filled the funeral home as a hundred mourners signed the guest book.
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Co-worker Amy Birkenfeld certainly thought that Clayton and Molly had been a love match.
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He was the love of her life, vice versa. She felt comfortable around him, and he loved her for who she was.
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Clayton, an auto mechanic, hadn't worked much lately. Mostly, he stayed home to care for the two kids.
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but if anything competed for his love of molly it was motorcycles loved bikes so much he named his
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daughter harley as in harley davidson she was just a year old too young to understand but not her
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half-brother caleb who was four when told of his father's sudden death on happy news it fell to
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molly and her mother to break to the boy and they told him that he daddy had gone to heaven
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and Caleb asked about the car. He wanted to know where the car was. And my mom told him that he needed the car to get there.
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To get to heaven. To get to heaven, yeah. Clayton and Molly had been living week to week on her paycheck,
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so it was a godsend to the young widow when her co-workers raised $1,000 cash to help with the bills
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until Molly could get back on her feet. It was understood it would be some time before the $110,000 life insurance policy on Clayton paid off.
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Her job, they paid for her utilities for a couple months, put groceries in the house.
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Even while I was there, I watched them carrying loads of groceries. Without Clayton at home, child care was looming as both a worry and a big expense.
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Neighbor Jenna Panis noticed a flyer Molly posted on a fence near the community mailboxes Newly widowed mother of two needs help Jenna with a young boy of her own felt sorry for Molly even though she never met Molly or Clayton before Jenna agreed to look after Caleb and Harley
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in her own home for a cut rate fee of $120 a week. It's your neighborhood. It's your neighbor. And
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you could potentially be in that situation someday. And you kind of want to help. And you get a little
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bit of angel wings for helping somebody. Exactly. You know, I'm going to go to heaven someday.
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But while friends and perfect strangers were going out of their way to do the decent thing
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for Molly Daniels, investigators, including none other than the legendary Texas Rangers,
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were starting to poke about in the accident, and they were asking some pointed questions.
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How could one car end up so damaged? Was it really an accident at all? Or just perhaps
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something much more sinister. After her husband and car exploded in flames in June of 2004,
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Molly Daniels, with two young kids and bills piling up, had little choice but to get on with her life.
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Did she seem like a good mom? Yeah. Jenna, the babysitter, admired her grace under pressure.
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And I thought she was handling the loss of her husband really well. And in Molly's first days back as the receptionist for the home remodeling company,
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her friend Amy was pleased and a little surprised that the young widow was as efficient as ever despite her ordeal.
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You thought you were smart? Oh, yes. You had confidence you told her to do something that would get done?
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Oh, yeah. It always got done. Molly was settling into a new routine, but the investigation into the death of her husband
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was going down quite a different road from what most people had expected. Remember the car leaving the road, plunging down the embankment,
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ending up in the ravine in a ball of fire? But now investigators didn't think they had a grisly accident.
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They thought they had a deadly crime. The first arriving trooper from the Texas Department of Public Safety had doubts early on.
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This was not an accident. Corporal William Talamontes had seen more road wrecks than he could count in his years as a trooper.
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And this one looked fishy from the get-go. Take the road. There were no tell-tale skid marks or other usual signs of a high-speed crash.
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Like the car itself, the dents in it weren't consistent with missing a curve and sailing down an embankment.
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And most of all, the fire itself seemed suspicious. I really thought that was a murder.
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The trooper had more theory than hard evidence. He speculated the victim had first been killed and stuffed in the Chevy, then rolled over the cliff.
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But who might want to kill Clayton Daniels? As it turned out, getting people to say bad things about Daniels wasn't all that hard.
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People like his sister-in-law. I got the worst feeling from him. I just did not trust him.
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I didn't like him. He just flat out gave me the heebie-jeebies. What do you think she saw in him?
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I think she saw the first person who showed interest in her. I don't think that it was him. I think it was the fact that somebody liked her.
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His wife's co-worker thought Daniels was a loser, plain and simple. I always thought she could do so much better. I mean, he just seemed like he could be the troublesome type.
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Amy, the co-worker, remembered the time she treated Molly and Clayton to dinner out,
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and as a bonus, agreed to babysit their kids till they got back. But when the children were dropped off, Clayton, she says, made a scene with the upstairs neighbors,
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complaining they were making too much noise, daring them to come out and fight. Did he have kind of a hair-trigger anger, did you think?
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Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Several scenarios played out in my head. You know, I thought maybe somebody was tailgating him.
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And, you know, Clay was the type to pull over and, you know, confront the person.
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But there was another investigator, a private investigator, who also thought something bigger than road rage had ended Clayton Daniels.
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Maybe something premeditated. My biggest thought at the time was possible homicide.
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Clark Dickenscheidt was a private investigator working for the insurance company that had sold Daniels a $110,000 life insurance policy a little less than two years before.
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Like the Department of Public Safety officers, the private investigator had written up lots of road wrecks, and this one just smelled bad.
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It just sounded a little strange that he would just drive right off the road and burst into flames.
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And his suspicions grew when he conducted what he figured would be a standard interview with Molly Daniels, the beneficiary of Clayton's policy.
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I had never in my career interviewed a wife who had lost a husband in such a manner or even anything close to it and showed absolutely no emotion.
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So that put up red flags for you? Very much so. It was premature to think the wife might have done in her husband for the insurance money.
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But still, something he thought was off here. Not suspecting the wife per se, but obviously she would be the number one suspect.
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Even her friends, her sister, said Molly could be sweet and affectionate for sure,
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but they knew not to cross her. You think you're having a conversation, everything was going well,
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and you would say something that she just didn't like, and it was, oh my goodness, you set off a time bomb.
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People did notice how quickly Molly seemed to get through her period of mourning.
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We went out one night. She even asked me and another co-worker when an acceptable time to start dating was.
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So we were like, wow, already. It's only been about a month. Was it suspicious that Jenna the babysitter was hearing about a new man in Molly life from Molly own son Who was this Jake character He talk about his friend Jake And Jake was so much fun and they wrestle and they go to races
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Molly told the babysitter that Jake was nothing more than a family friend. Until, that is, one morning Molly's car needed a jump start, and all became clear about Jake.
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Here we are, two gals. Can't figure out how to hook those cables up. And out comes Jake in his boxer shorts.
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And I went, oh, oh, oh, goodness, what a fool am I? Of course he's not a family friend.
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Jenna, if first impressions do matter, what were your first impressions of Jake?
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It's a terrible class bias, but, I mean, just trailer trash. While Molly's neighbors quickly began buzzing about the widow's new man around the house,
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other whispers would soon draw the attention of Texas Ranger Garth Davis. Ranger Davis would be nursing his own suspicions about what was happening inside Molly's house.
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Would he be investigating a lethal love triangle with the dead husband Odd Man Out?
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Or was it something even more twisted? The slogan warns don't mess with Texas. But most people here would agree you really don't mess with the Texas Rangers.
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They are lawmen descended from tough hombre gunslingers of the 19th century frontier.
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Got a civil disturbance in your town? No problem. The lore goes, one riot, one ranger.
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So whenever the Texas Rangers ride into a case, the investigative ante is raised.
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In late June 2004, Sergeant Garth Davis of the Texas Rangers was called into the Clayton Daniels affair,
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and he'd testify later there was evidence of foul play. The pathologist found that there was no soot in the lungs of the victim.
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That caused us to become involved in the investigation. Smoke-free lungs meant to investigators that the victim was already dead
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and possibly murdered before the car fire ever started. But the nature of the fire may have been the biggest clue of all.
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Deputy Fire Marshal Janine Mather found that the hottest spot of the inferno was the driver's seat.
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Why? Someone had doused it with charcoal lighter fluid. Ranger Davis now knew he had a bona fide criminal investigation,
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giving rise to a whole new set of questions. So he took his case back to basics and asked whether the medical examiner had gotten his
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autopsy ID right in the first place. Was the body recovered here, in fact, that of Clayton Daniels?
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To be scientifically certain, Ranger Davis decided to get a DNA match analysis, a sample
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from the body in the burned-out car compared to a DNA sample taken from Clayton Daniels'
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mother. The body, you remember, had been reduced to a stump of ashes. To extract some viable amount of DNA, the ranger performed an unusually macabre task.
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He opened the remains of a hip bone with a hacksaw. Later, he would recollect the moment in a courtroom.
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Was that something you usually do? Did that have an effect on you? I've never done that. I hope I never have to do it again.
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On TV shows like CSI Miami, DNA Lab Work comes back by the third commercial break.
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In real life, it can take months. And that's what happened with the comparison samples from the body in the car and Daniel's mother.
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An agonizing wait for investigators. Meanwhile, back at the split-level ranch, Molly's new man, Jake, was still topic number one among family and friends.
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Her sister got the lowdown, sort of, spare of much detail. She said that he was somebody she had met at the bar that she met Clay in, the same bar.
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and that he was also a good friend of Clay's. Molly's sister hadn't met Jake yet, told he was a truck driver constantly on the road.
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But she heard lots about him from her nephew. And everything was Jake. Jake this, Jake that. You know, with Caleb.
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The sister did get a peek at Molly's cell phone one day, and the text messages stored there were more than platonic.
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One of the text messages said, I love you. And I thought, whoa, that's a little soon.
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At work, Amy hadn't met the new boyfriend either, even though he'd occasionally pick up Molly in the parking lot.
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She never really talked a whole lot about this person to me because at that point in this whole thing, I had started getting suspicious.
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She was always on the Internet a lot at her office, and I noticed that because every time I'd walk up front to see her, she would minimize the screens really quick.
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Jenna, the babysitter, was also picking up on changes in Molly. Her getting back into the dating game for one, a rebound that disgusted Jenna.
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Screwing around that soon just kind of set my teeth on edge. And with the guy she was with.
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You're not screaming family man. And all the while, Molly's boy Caleb's behavior was deteriorating, according to the babysitter.
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He's trying to push children down the stairs. He's trying to hurt our animals. You know, he's just really out of control.
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Jenna said she tried to convince Molly that Caleb's problems were very serious. The first couple incidents I brought to Molly's attention, you know, he's had problems.
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It's a tough thing to say to the grieving mother, you know. He's just not quite there. He's not right.
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These behavior problems have reached the point where it's not normal little boy acting out,
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being a little aggressive as little boys tend to be. this has reached kind of epic proportions Mom you need to get him into some counseling You need to get counseling for him There something wrong Did his mother get it jenna i mean what you were trying to tell her no did she see the behavior she said he was fine at home that was that was her he was fine at home she didn
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understand um and we tell her things like well he you know he urinated on the walls in the bathroom
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this this is kind of my my trigger i'm sorry um i just don't want the walls in the bathroom to be
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urinated on you need to talk to your son can can we get something and she just turned to him and
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and pretty much said you know you're you're just going to get it when you get home and apparently
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he got spanked when he got home and and that was that by early december 2004 on a thursday
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Jenna had become so frustrated with Molly's casual parenting that she planned to give her an ultimatum the next day.
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Get counseling for Caleb or find yourself another babysitter. And on Friday, I got a knock on my door,
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and the whole world fell apart as far as I was concerned. It was Texas Ranger Garth Davis at the door,
00:19:04
and he had both questions and some stunning answers. After a five-month wait, the Texas Ranger finally had his DNA work back
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from the lab. And it told him definitively who the charred body found wasn't. It wasn't Clayton
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Daniels. There had been no DNA match between the sample taken by Ranger Davis from the body in the
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car and the one compared to Clayton Daniels' mother. Whose body was it in that car? And how
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did that person come to be dead? Texas Ranger Garth Davis filled in some of the other lawmen
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working the case with him. One of them who got the shocking news was the Burnett Police Department's
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chief investigator at the time, Captain Paul Nelson. He asked me if I was sitting down. Of
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course I was. He stated that he got the DNA results back and that the DNA was not of Clayton Daniels.
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The police detective had had run-ins with Clayton Daniels before, serious ones, and believed there
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was little the local man could do that would surprise him anymore. It's good you were sitting
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yeah yes sir if the body in the car wasn't clayton daniels where was he and who was jake
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on friday december 3rd 2004 the city detective and the texas ranger divvied up a plan
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captain nelson would stake out molly at her house while ranger davis eyeballed her workplace
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about noon the ranger radioed the detective that molly had left work joining up with a male
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companion. Davis tailed the pair to a Taco Bell in North Austin. Captain Nelson then met with
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Ranger Davis at the restaurant. They went in with backup and guns drawn. When I walked through the
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front door, the first person I seen was Clayton eating a burrito. He looked at me and I looked at
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him and he pretty much stated, oh, the jig was up. For a dead man, Clayton was looking pretty good.
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all's that changed was his sandy hair had been dyed black no rubber nose or glasses no he still
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looked like clayton daniels to me though his fake driver's license identified him as jacob
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alexander greg or jake as he'd come to be known to caleb his wife's bewildered and lately
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emotionally troubled young son the texas ranger and the city detective cuffed clayton daniels
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and placed him under arrest. I told him welcome back. Now what's Molly doing all the while?
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She was yelling, profane language, I don't know what all she was yelling. She made the mistake of telling Ranger Davis that he couldn't arrest her,
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at which time she was placed under arrest. Clayton was charged with violation of probation
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and later indicted for arson. Molly was charged with hindering apprehension and later indicted
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for insurance fraud. It was hours after the bust at the Taco Bell that Jenna Panis got that surprise
00:21:57
visit from Texas Ranger Davis. Remember, she didn't know Clayton Daniels. The ranger had photos to
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show her. Does this look like Jake? Is this Jake? I don't look at it. Sure enough, yeah, sure is.
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That's Jake. No problem. Takes his hand off the name and it's Clayton Daniels. And I'm looking at
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the name reading it, that's her husband. Her boyfriend is her husband, her dead husband.
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I was so stunned and so horrified and so angry. I couldn't speak. Why did they do it? In large part, authorities believe for the money,
00:22:32
a big fat $110,000 insurance payout. Clayton and his wife wanted to start a new life together and
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they need some money. So what better way to do it than fake his own death, get the insurance
00:22:44
money and go live somewhere else. But the even more fascinating question, ghoulish really, was how did they do it?
00:22:53
A car, a body, a fireball. Do you get surprised what human beings will do sometimes?
00:23:00
Or have you seen so much that you're hard to surprise? No, sir, I wouldn't say that.
00:23:06
I was surprised by this. In jail, Clayton wasn't talking to the cops, but he was blabbing to a cellmate.
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A would-be snitch who in turn spilled the beans to the authorities on Clayton and Molly's repulsive and deeply creepy scheme.
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They were body snatchers. Investigators confronted Molly about it and she confirmed, yes, Clayton had dug up a grave way out in the country.
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Some place with a utility works or gas pipeline nearby. She was vague about details.
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Corporal Talamantes, the trooper who'd responded to the initial report of a fatal accident,
00:23:44
recalled coming upon a similar sounding cemetery while working another case. It was in a remote part of the county where they buried the paupers in indigence, a place
00:23:55
called Pebble Mound. I went by that cemetery and I found the grave. Secluded, huh?
00:24:00
Yes, sir. And you just walked in and looked around? I just drove up to the fence and I saw one of the plots there right by the fence that was disturbed.
00:24:08
And you could tell somebody had messed with it. Days after the trooper's discovery, February 2005,
00:24:15
a funeral director with a backhoe was joined by a large team from law enforcement at the Pebble Mound Cemetery.
00:24:22
They dug for two tough hours until they finally hoisted up a damaged and drenched casket.
00:24:28
So the seal had been broken, huh? Yes, sir. And when you pried open the coffin, what did you find?
00:24:32
Lifted it out. We opened up the coffin. There was nothing in there except the pillow.
00:24:37
After that, it became a matter of tying up loose ends. And Molly's work computer proved to be a treasure trove of evidence.
00:24:46
The hard disk tattled on her fevered Internet searches. How-to questions. How to fake a death.
00:24:52
How to come up with a new identity. Texas Ranger Garth Davis explained it all later in court.
00:24:58
There were numerous Internet searches done for burning up bodies, car fires, how hot bodies have to burn.
00:25:07
And still more solid stuff for a jury at the Daniels' home. Phony state records, dummied up school transcripts, credit reports for the fictitious Jacob Alexander Gregg.
00:25:18
And there was reason to believe that Clayton Daniels was thinking bigger than just dyeing his hair.
00:25:23
These documents were in a folder titled Mexico. There were searches to locate plastic surgeons in Mexico and also dental surgeons in Mexico.
00:25:33
The whole sordid business, the car off the road, down the embankment, into the ravine in a ball of flames.
00:25:40
We know now that that was a hoax as big as the state of Texas. Authorities said that she did it for greed.
00:25:46
But Molly Daniels, as you're about to hear, says she did it for love. And now you're going to meet Molly Daniels. Curious? We were too. She didn't look like a
00:26:06
body snatcher so much as a woman swiping barcodes at a big warehouse store checkout counter.
00:26:11
We sat down with her in a Texas jail in 2006, where she'd been serving a 20-year sentence,
00:26:17
the maximum, after pleading guilty to insurance fraud and hindering apprehension.
00:26:22
Molly, my first question is, what could you have been thinking, huh? I mean, how did this whole deal come together?
00:26:27
It was crazy, really. My husband was in prior trouble, and it was just going to change our life dramatically.
00:26:34
And I guess one day watching CSI, one of those shows that just got our minds to thinking,
00:26:41
and we both sort of came up with the idea. Look, let's talk a little bit about Clayton.
00:26:47
What did you see in Clayton? Because there had to be more there than other people seeing him.
00:26:52
He was a really wonderful person. Yes, he had a reputation for being bad. Yes, he had a reputation for being just a pain in the butt in general.
00:27:02
But he actually has a very good heart. You fell for him, huh? Yes, sir. Hook, line, and sinker.
00:27:09
But Clayton was far more than just the local bad boy rogue. He'd been charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child for raping his seven-year-old cousin when he was 16.
00:27:19
The girl came forward several years later confiding in Captain Paul Nelson, then the chief investigator for the Burnett Police Department.
00:27:27
The detective brought Clayton down to the police station for a talk. He denied his cousin's allegations.
00:27:33
He asked me what made it aggravated. And I told him that when he sexually assaulted her, that he beat her up real bad,
00:27:43
and that's what made it aggravated. and at which time he got real upset and stated, I didn't beat her up when I raped her.
00:27:50
So you fed him a little story and he took the bait, huh? Yes, sir. I didn't beat her, but I did rape her.
00:27:56
And once he said that, he just put his head down and I asked him if he was ready to confess his sins.
00:28:04
And he said, yes, he was. In June 2004, seven years after that sexual assault, Clayton Daniels pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation and 30 days in jail.
00:28:16
Molly claims she didn't know about the sex charges pending against Clayton when she married him a few
00:28:20
years earlier But I the type of person who takes all the information given to me analyzes it and makes my own decision regardless of what other people think Molly says she convinced herself that Clayton wasn a sexual predator of children
00:28:34
just a hard-lucked guy who'd been unfairly railroaded into accepting a guilty plea.
00:28:39
Now with Clayton about to go away to serve 30 days in jail, her single-minded plan to keep her
00:28:45
family together at all costs shifted into high gear. His conviction meant Clayton would be
00:28:51
registered as a lifetime sexual offender. More than just a shameful scarlet letter,
00:28:56
it would be an earthquake, altering every aspect of their lives as parents, husband and wife.
00:29:02
It would even dictate where they could live, not across from a school as they were now.
00:29:07
We'd lose our house. We were going to have to move. We'd lose a lot of different things that
00:29:12
had to do with our kids. He wouldn't be able to be a stay-at-home dad anymore. He wouldn't be able to take the kids to school,
00:29:19
pick them up from school. The grave back in. So what did you all decide, Molly, how we're
00:29:25
going to get out of this? We decided to give him a new life. He was going to go away, become somebody different.
00:29:37
And I was going to start over again, get back on my feet, and we would meet in the future if that was the way it was supposed to be.
00:29:44
How are you going to do that? We created a new identity for him, and we faked his death.
00:29:50
You had to kill Clayton Daniels to pull this off, huh? We faked it, yes, sir. I admit now that it was an absolutely crazy idea.
00:29:58
It wasn't something I should have done, but hindsight is 20-20. Did you come up with the ideas?
00:30:04
I think I probably came up with the majority of them. I pretty much came up with the idea to get rid of Clayton Daniels.
00:30:10
Now, this is where it really gets ghoulish. The two of you have got to come up with a body, am I right?
00:30:16
Yes, sir. You either have to kill somebody or find a corpse. Yes, sir. And killing somebody was never on our list to do.
00:30:24
Was it? No. From the get-go, we had thought about obtaining a corpse through a mortuary or a grave.
00:30:31
Do you realize now how creepy this all sounds? We're talking about very ghoulish things, Molly.
00:30:37
Molly said they drove around looking for out-of-the-way grave sites and came upon the remote Pebble Mound Cemetery and searched for a candidate in the headstones.
00:30:48
The body had to be, you know, a certain amount. If it was too old, it wouldn't work.
00:30:53
If it was too new, it wouldn't work. Wouldn't work how? Too old, it wouldn't probably be feasible to get the body out of the grave.
00:31:01
Too new, it wouldn't burn the way it needed to. You'd done some research on... Yes, sir.
00:31:05
What happens to bodies in fire, didn't you? Yes, sir. You went into your computer and you did search on stuff like
00:31:11
how hot does a body have to be to be unidentified in a fire, huh? I went to crematory websites.
00:31:19
You went to crematory websites? Mortuary websites. The plan was in place. On the night of June 17, 2004, the Thursday before the Monday,
00:31:30
Clayton Daniels would be sent to jail, Molly said she stayed home while he went to the dark of the Pebble Mound Cemetery to dig up a corpse.
00:31:39
Did he tell you anything about that night, Molly, about going out there, what he felt, what he was thinking?
00:31:43
Digging the body up, driving across the countryside with this corpse in the car?
00:31:48
We never talked about that, sir. It wasn't a subject he wanted to dwell on, and I never asked him.
00:31:54
Clayton sped away from the fiery scene on a motorcycle that the couple had hidden in the bushes.
00:32:00
So what did we get to? The next morning, Molly, or how does this go together? The next morning, about 6 o'clock approximately,
00:32:09
he called me and let me know it was done. How did he say it? What were the words?
00:32:15
Just done. What did you say to him? Nothing. Hung up the phone. Composed myself to become, I guess, an award-winning actress for the day.
00:32:27
You could put some tears on and be the grieving widow? The tears were real. The grieving widow part was not.
00:32:35
I used other emotions for it. The hardship we were going through, the fact that we actually went through this.
00:32:41
And what about the friends and family who grieved put themselves out and supported her with time and money I didn want their money I didn ask them for it And though I took it which was the wrong thing to do it was upsetting I shouldn have done it Molly
00:32:58
the events that happened later, were they driven by that insurance policy? No. We need to pretend
00:33:04
that you're dead in order to get the money, and that's mainly why we're doing this? No. The reason
00:33:08
behind it was to get him a new life. Did you want the money? No, sir. It would have been nice to have.
00:33:14
$110,000 payoff, huh? It would have helped, sir. But it wasn't about the money. Molly insisted killing off Clayton and replacing him with Jake
00:33:24
was a ruse to keep their family intact, even though her own child would be tortured by their harebrained scheme.
00:33:32
Molly, inside your house, Caleb, he has known Clayton as his father. In comes Jake with a little hair color on.
00:33:42
it's the same man. Yes. How confused did your little boy get? He was a little confused at first.
00:33:56
A little? I know that he acted out a little bit, but he was four years old. All four-year-old boys act out,
00:34:02
regardless of their circumstances. You know, of all the crazy things that you two did...
00:34:06
That was the worst. The jury said they wished they could have given you more than 20 years for what you did to your boy.
00:34:12
messing with his head like that? And I believe that to be very ridiculous. My crime was not hurting my son.
00:34:23
My crime was insurance fraud. You're telling him his daddy's dead? You say, here's Jake.
00:34:29
Yes, sir. That's not being very destructive to your own child? It was hurting him, yes, sir.
00:34:35
Why would you do that, Molly? To get on with the plan, sir. In the plan, Molly and Clayton were supposed to stay apart, assume new identities, and later find a new place to restart a life together.
00:34:50
In fact, Molly was set to move to Florida in mid-December 2004, except for one small detail.
00:34:57
She'd been arrested at the Taco Bell two weeks before. Their best-laid plans had been undone by some dogged investigators.
00:35:04
but undone also because Molly hadn't moved away and because the scheming lovebirds just couldn't keep their hands off one another.
00:35:24
I plead guilty. Are you pleading guilty simply because you are in fact guilty of that offense?
00:35:30
Yes, sir. In January 2006, in a court in Burnett County, Clayton Daniels acknowledged guilt for the felonies he committed, arson and desecration of a cemetery.
00:35:41
In sentencing Clayton to 10 additional years on top of the 20 he was already serving for probation violation on the aggravated sexual assault, the judge said the evidence.
00:35:50
It allows the court to see deeply into the heart and soul of this defendant, and the court does not like what it sees.
00:35:58
Mostly what repulsed the court was the ghoulish ransacking and incineration of the human remains,
00:36:05
which turned out to be those of an elderly woman who deserved to rest in peace. Her name, Charlotte Davis, and in an awful irony, she had but one wish before dying, not to be cremated.
00:36:18
Why would you pick the body of an older woman to be posed as the body of a young man?
00:36:24
There wasn't supposed to be anything left, sir. Charlotte, who died in 2003 at the age of 81, had been a mentally handicapped woman.
00:36:37
Her favorite song in the memory of those who tended to her reflected the joy she found in each new day.
00:36:44
Charlotte, a fundamentally happy person despite a lifetime spent in a wheelchair and group homes.
00:36:50
Charlotte just hit my heart so special that I wanted the world to know that Charlotte meant something to someone.
00:37:00
I wanted her to go out of this world with dignity. When Charlotte passed away her caretaker Laura Loveless had her buried in a special dress in a donated burial plot at Pebble Mound Cemetery Her spot was behind the gate because Charlotte was always a tight person She always wanted to see what was going on Charlotte looked so peaceful and so at rest and so dignified in her confidence
00:37:27
But it don't happen anymore. Not since Molly and Clayton Daniels cooked up their scheme to let him, a convicted sexual offender,
00:37:38
be born again by violating Charlotte Davis in her grave. Those people out there who are upset with me about it
00:37:45
are supposedly God-fearing Christian people, and they need to understand it was just a body.
00:37:52
Just a body? You were body snatchers. She was in heaven, like they said. She was a good woman who went with God.
00:38:00
It was just a body. When humans put their loved ones and people who passed away in the ground
00:38:05
in a cemetery with rituals, they usually let them stay there. Yes, sir. They don't dig them up a few years later to have this greedy little scheme come together for them.
00:38:14
No, sir. You don't seem to show much remorse about all of this. Do people look for something in you that they're not finding and get disappointed?
00:38:25
I can tell you that being locked up 13 months has made a great impact on my life,
00:38:30
and I don't feel right now. There's a wall up, and I wish people could actually see how I feel on the inside.
00:38:41
What do people not know about you? That I care about what I did, that I'm sorry for what I did,
00:38:47
that I want to be a good mom, that I can't believe that I did this. Molly's sister couldn't believe it either,
00:38:55
and when we spoke to her, wasn't ready to forgive Molly for the emotional damage she caused her own son.
00:39:00
What they did to Caleb, convincing him that Jake was not his daddy. This is your dad, but you can't call him dad.
00:39:10
I mean, that is where my anger comes from. How much did she mess with your nephew's head?
00:39:19
Enough that within about a month of having Caleb at the house with us, I had gone and had my hair done, got it, and had it colored.
00:39:28
and he was not happy. He did not. You didn't look like Aunt Melissa to him anymore?
00:39:36
I made a change with my hair, with my appearance, and when is it going to grow back?
00:39:43
I want it back the way it was. I don't like it. He didn't like it. It took some convincing, you know, that it's just my hair.
00:39:50
It's not me. It's my hair. How can you expect a 4-year-old who fully trusts both his parents
00:39:58
because he has nothing in him to not trust them. You're not taught to not trust your own parents.
00:40:04
You have full love. You have full trust. Those are the anchors of your universe.
00:40:10
To have your mother sit there and lie to you on such a grand fashion and completely change reality for you.
00:40:18
How can you lie to your kid in such a fashion and expect them to even come out of it slightly normal?
00:40:25
Her supportive co-worker Amy felt betrayed, but also a little sorry for her former friend.
00:40:31
She really messed up her life royal, didn't she? Yeah, she did. And it's sad. Wrong guy syndrome?
00:40:37
I think so. She really could have went somewhere with her life. Was it really love?
00:40:42
What was it all about, do you think? Why would you make such a mess of your life for such a mess of a guy?
00:40:48
Because I like to fix things. I like to make things better. Oh, you sure did, didn't you?
00:40:53
Yeah. You fixed yourself good. And I did. And I made a mistake. A mistake for which she has now paid. Molly Daniels pleaded guilty to her remaining charges
00:41:06
and was sentenced to 15 years in prison for arson and 10 years for desecration of a cemetery
00:41:11
to be run concurrently with her sentences from Williamson County. She was released in 2016.
00:41:18
Molly Daniels' mistake still haunts the people who love Charlotte Davis. Her remains were returned to the plot at Pebble Mound Cemetery, just inside the gate,
00:41:29
back again under a live oak. The innocent with a cruelly interrupted eternity.