00:00:00
All of a sudden I realized, what's going on? Why are they late? Something definitely was wrong.
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He said your family was an accident. I had my own world just dropped down from underneath me.
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The scene told the story. What did you find? Something I don't want to see again.
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A deadly crash on a dark road. Two gone, one barely alive. A tragic accident. But in all the broken glass and twisted metal, was there a clue to a crime?
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The last thing I wanted was to have to take a double fatality and have to not treat it as a homicide.
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Murder. An accusation no one saw coming. I couldn't deal with it. Two families in torment.
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We were both just... A small town trial with big emotions. You took him. You did it.
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And the verdict. We the jury. That would shake them all. Welcome to Dateline. I'm Lester Holt.
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Big sky country, a small town, and a famously dangerous highway. That was the setting for a deadly crash that would seem to unite two families in shock and heartbreak.
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Except they were about to find out that this tragedy was also a mystery. And the truth about what happened on that late winter night might be darker than anyone knew.
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Here's Keith Morrison. March 19, 2009. Night fell heavy in Montana's Flathead Valley.
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Something off that night, something wrong. At Mary and Randy Winters' house in Kalispell, anxiety spiked.
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Where was she? It just felt like something was not right. It's hard to explain that there's something not normal.
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You could set your clock by their daughter Justine. That reliable. But a new driver to just 16.
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New home at 8 from her boyfriend's house. And though she wasn't very late, the feeling seeped in like a poison.
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Something wrong. I called her starting about 5 after 8. And no answer. Called the house where she was at.
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And they said she had left 15 minutes before that. I was thinking she had, you know, went off the road between their house and us.
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Not far away, another family, the other half of our story, was on the road too. Erin Thompson was driving her son Caden home from a school concert.
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He played the drums. I had always attended all of Caden's concerts. and this was the first one that I didn't attend because I had car troubles.
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This is Caden's stepfather, Jason Thompson. My car was in the shop and finally fixed, and so Aaron dropped me off,
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and that's why I wasn't with them. And soon the poison, the anxiety, seeped under Jason's door,
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through his windows, onto his nerve endings. Just all of a sudden I realized, what's going on?
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Why are they late? And it just struck me that something definitely was wrong. At Justine Winter's house, the fear was deep known.
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Justine's dad, Randy, was a National Guardsman, a volunteer firefighter. He was trained to keep his head, knew what he had to do.
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Randy got in his truck, drove out of town to the road he knew she'd take, coming home from her boyfriend's house.
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And then he saw it in a construction zone on the Highway 93 overpass. What did you find?
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Something I don't want to see again. You could say fireman's worst nightmare. Someone tried to hold him back.
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He kept on. And then I saw her over at the side. His perfect daughter is Justine.
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Obscenely broken. But amazingly still alive. How does she look? I didn't really see a lot of her.
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on the gurney there, but I got to see her at the hospital. She was pretty bad. You don't want to ever see your kid in the hospital.
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Every bit of her was damaged horribly. Broken bones, brain damage, ruptured organs.
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The chance she'd survive? Slim, said the doctors. But the winter's news could have been worse.
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and a few miles away where the phone rang at Jason Thompson's house the news was much worse
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the caller was the county coroner he said Jason I um your your family was an accident and he said
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I'm sorry to have to tell you this on the phone but they're they're just killed and uh
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And my own world just dropped out from underneath me. Jason's wife, 35-year-old Erin Thompson, was four months pregnant.
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Her son, Caden, the boy who just played the drums at a school concert, was just 13.
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And just like that, they were gone. The crash was head on. And in school counselor Jason Thompson's life, the lights went out.
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That night of that realization, I'll never forget that news. Nor, of course, will Erin's mother, Diana.
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We were both just bonkers, just... Or her sister Amber who with David her husband missed Erin so much they made plans to move to Montana to be close Not possible now That was the hardest the hardest piece of news we could fathom
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And to lose both of them and the baby, it just didn't even seem like it could be real.
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And in the little house he shared with the love of his life, where he'd been waiting with such excitement for their baby to arrive,
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Jason, like Job of old, was overcome by the heaviest sorrow of a whole life of sorrows.
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It's like I'm nine years old and in 79 when my sister dies. And then I'm 19 years old and at 89 when my mother dies of cancer.
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And then, you know, then now I'm 39 and 09 and I lose my family. Missing that concert, you lived.
00:06:53
How's that been to wrap your head around? Well, it's been embracing life, right?
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But I definitely didn't fear death anymore. There's times where I would have welcomed it.
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But the dreadful truth of it is that accidents happen all around America every day, every night.
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Still, just as the permanence of loss began to sink in Before anyone had given a thought to a now diminished future
00:07:24
There was another piece of news This time, the fatal accident Might not have been an accident at all
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Coming up The last thing I wanted was to have to treat it as a homicide A prosecutor's stunning decision
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When Dateline continues For decades, Montanans have almost morbidly intoned the words,
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Pray for me, I drive Highway 93. They say it because of nights like March 19, 2009.
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except as everybody would soon know this crash on this night may have been no accident
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a revelation which in jason thompson's devastated mind would register later just now his whole life
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was a bomb crater a ruin erin was like my heart she's so made you know i've waited all these years
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looking but i was always i had an ideal right and i was searching searching for her and she as she
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told everybody had been looking for him. Erin was a single mom when Jason met her brilliant smile.
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She was a hairdresser who loved to dance. And she was a seeker in all matters spiritual,
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her mother Diana. She was single and a young mother and she was wondering what she was going
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to do with her life. She answered her own question and just said, well, as long as I'm about the
00:09:01
business of spreading love. It doesn't matter. Aaron married Jason in the summer of 2006 in the
00:09:08
glorious Montana sunshine and young Caden seemed as pleased as she was. Caden who shared his mother
00:09:16
and new stepfather's craving for outdoor adventures. You know backpacking on the coast in the mountains
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river rafting it was all about just sharing that that time together. Yes and there was that plan
00:09:30
Erin hatched with her sister Amber. We always had a dream of growing up and and living right next door
00:09:37
to each other and you know raising up our families. And soon the plan expanded beautifully when Erin
00:09:44
and Jason announced they were expecting a child of their own. Every day I would praise just my life
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praise my wife and my little baby that I was finally gonna have and you know it all made sense.
00:09:57
and then came march 19 2009 but as the news and the grief spread there was still hope remember
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for one of the victims of the crash justine winter was alive though barely with a broken neck and
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broken legs and major internal injuries doctors told the family they didn't think she'd live
00:10:21
through the airlift to a hospital in seattle what did they tell you they told us three times
00:10:26
She said she wouldn't live. I said, She's flying in that airplane, and don't even give me any grief.
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And she did survive the flight to Seattle and the emergency operations to stitch together
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the broken pieces of her body. She was unconscious when she arrived. The doctors kept her that way,
00:10:48
induced a coma, so she could avoid the pain or any recognition of her desperate condition.
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while her body slowly, slowly began to knit itself back together until more than a month later.
00:11:02
And her eyes just went poof. That was just like the most incredible feeling of she's there, she's in there, and your heart's just beating.
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It was days later before Justine could understand what was going on around her, but the news had to be faced eventually.
00:11:22
And so when she seemed ready, they told her. When you told her what happened in the accident and how those other people had died, how did she react to that?
00:11:33
I was very emotional for her. It was very devastating. And then what was discovered was, well, quite frankly, unimaginable.
00:11:44
For in the middle of that river of tears, relief on the one side, abject grief on the other,
00:11:50
there was an undertow, a twist nobody saw coming. For while Justine spent 45 days in the hospital recuperating and months more at home in Montana healing it didn take investigators very long at all
00:12:05
Matter of hours, really, to solve the mystery of who and what caused this crash.
00:12:14
In fact, the first Montana Highway Patrol officers who raced to the scene in that construction zone
00:12:20
believed that Justine Winter's car was the one that crossed the center line and smashed into Aaron Thompson's car.
00:12:27
But the worst of it, the inconceivable part was, at least as investigators told then Flathead County District Attorney Ed Corrigan,
00:12:35
this was not an accident at all. What was your first reaction, what do you think?
00:12:41
Nuts. This was the last thing I wanted, was to have to take a double fatality and have to now treat it as a homicide.
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Homicide? Yes. Right there in Justine's car, officers found what amounted to a minute-by-minute narrative
00:13:00
of the events leading up to the collision in text messages. And in those messages, the prosecutor said, was the evidence.
00:13:10
He believed required him to press criminal charges against that girl doctors had quite miraculously saved, Justine Winter.
00:13:18
Charges of murder. Coming up. They're suing you for her pain and suffering. When Dateline continues.
00:13:42
The sorrow ran deep in Montana's Flathead Valley. That awful spring and summer of 2009.
00:13:48
Deep and wide, the whole valley, in fact the country, heard about the crash that killed Caden and Aaron and her unborn child.
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And heard a strange and disturbing story that 16-year-old Justine Winter took deadly aim at Aaron's oncoming car,
00:14:07
crossed the center line, and plowed right into them. On purpose. Shocking. Oh yes, as was the alleged reason.
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Justine said the police was trying to die by suicide. How did they know? They found the evidence on Justine's phone, they said.
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Text messages, which she wrote herself, and which, once county attorney Ed Corrigan saw them,
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gave him no choice, he said. He charged her with deliberate homicide, Montana's equivalent of murder.
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Justine purposely went into the wrong lane of traffic and smashed head on into another car.
00:14:50
And by doing so, she should have known her actions could have killed somebody. And under those circumstances, I think deliberate homicide was the only charge we could fight.
00:14:59
So you decided to charge her as an adult. Why? She was 16. She was. The taking of two lives is not, in my opinion, a delinquent act.
00:15:09
It is a crime. It needs to be prosecuted as a crime. And if convicted, it needs to be on her record for the rest of her life.
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perhaps because of her own massive injuries her continuing operations her age justine after
00:15:22
pleading not guilty was released a house arrest fitted with an ankle bracelet to await trial
00:15:26
she was allowed to attend classes at glacier high and at home her parents fumed no matter what those
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text messages said the idea justine would cause that crash on purpose just crazy you angry about
00:15:40
all of this. It builds up inside and it gets to a point where you can't take it anymore.
00:15:47
Turned out, and it was frankly hardly surprising in a town the size of Kalispell, the two families
00:15:52
actually knew each other. Justine's mother and Aaron's mother had worked at the same school.
00:15:57
Aaron's family made it perfectly clear that what they wanted from Justine most of all was a
00:16:01
heartfelt apology and some sort of indication she took responsibility for the act with which
00:16:07
she was charged. They actually saw that as a way to award forgiveness. And most people around town
00:16:12
thought that was a fine idea. But from Justine and her family, it's just an awkward silence.
00:16:21
And then early one morning in the fall of 2010, an entirely unexpected knock at the door
00:16:27
took emotions to a whole new level. This private investigator, you know, just hands me these papers
00:16:33
like he's serving me papers. And it's, you know, they're suing, you know, Erin's estate.
00:16:40
They're suing you? Suing for her pain and suffering. It was true. In a legal preemptive strike,
00:16:50
Justine Winters' attorneys had filed a lawsuit on her behalf against Erin's estate,
00:16:55
as well as three companies in charge of the construction zone where the crash occurred.
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The lawsuit claimed Erin had negligently operated her car, resulting in the collision.
00:17:06
And also that the companies had failed to adequately construct and maintain the vicinity,
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causing hazardous and confusing conditions for the traveling public. I can't even begin to guess what they were thinking about when they decided to file that lawsuit.
00:17:18
It inflamed the whole town. It inflamed the whole town. This wasn't Justine's decision.
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That was a decision made by her attorneys. Ah, yes, the attorneys. Their names? Maxwell Battle and David Stuffed.
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And according to the Winters, the attorneys assured them the lawsuit, assuming Justine was found not guilty,
00:17:38
would give them a better shot at an insurance company reimbursement later. There was no intent of going for the estate,
00:17:46
making that family endure more than they've already endured. But the optics were awful.
00:17:52
Oh the timing could have been who knows better Oh you pick up the newspaper you look at the blogs you hear the radio and what you got was those awful people those disgusting terrible people What are they thinking
00:18:05
They're trying to sue the victims of this crime. That's what was portrayed, but the actual intent was not that at all.
00:18:15
Misunderstood or not, by the time Justine Winters' trial for deliberate homicide started in January 2011,
00:18:22
the tide of public opinion had turned as bitter as a Montana winter. The hearts of Erin Thompson's family, too, had toughened.
00:18:30
And Justine, who showed up in an almost childlike polka dot hairband, certainly didn't look the part of an accused killer
00:18:37
facing as many as 200 years behind bars. But there she was. I can see the debris field.
00:18:44
With the two families just a few feet away, she watched investigators testify to a certainty
00:18:48
that it was Justine's Pontiac Grand Am that crossed the center line. Here you can see all this debris from the initial impact of the crash.
00:18:57
Slamming into Aaron's Subaru so hard, it was driven backward into the highway barrier,
00:19:05
and crash reconstructionists agreed. Justine Winner's car encroached into the northbound lane,
00:19:13
striking Mrs. Thompson's vehicle. But what evidence was there that Justine had done it, as the law says, purposefully?
00:19:24
Investigators pulled the so-called black box out of Justine's Potiac, analyzed the data,
00:19:29
and found another sign that pointed to suicide. She'd taken off her seat belt. The black box also recorded speed, acceleration, and braking, and found...
00:19:41
that Justine was accelerating, flooring it, so to speak, in the five seconds before the crash,
00:19:51
speeding up from 81 to 86 miles an hour before hitting the brakes at the last second.
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She did not swerve, and she drove head-on into that other vehicle. To back it up, prosecutors pulled the speedometer from Justine's car.
00:20:07
Right above the mark indicating 85 miles an hour found an orange mark. It's known as a slap mark.
00:20:14
Made, the experts testified, when the needle smashes against the console at high speed.
00:20:20
And finally, prosecutors revealed the reason, they said, behind it all. Justine, like many 16-year-old girls, had a boyfriend.
00:20:28
Hers was named Ryan. It was quite hot, this relationship. He was her world. But that day in March, there had been a tiff.
00:20:39
It had words. And so that night she drove Ryan home, asked him to get out of the car.
00:20:44
He said they were through. Then Justine drove north to clear her head. She was on her way home when detectives testified.
00:20:52
She began texting Ryan, apparently well behind the wheel. The first text, half an hour before the crash.
00:21:00
Goodbye, Ryan. Just live your life knowing you did change me. My last words, I love you, Ryan.
00:21:06
Then her text became somehow threatening. If I won, I would have you, and I wouldn't crash my car.
00:21:14
And Ryan answered. You kill yourself, I kill myself. So come on, don't be selfish.
00:21:20
That's the only thing I want to live for. You, Ryan, you keep me living. Stop. You hurt yourself, and I'll know, and I'll do the same.
00:21:30
That's why I'm going to wreck my car, because all I can do is f*** up. It shows you would rather me die because I want to kill myself.
00:21:37
Goodbye, Ryan. I love you. Then, the final message from Ryan. You killing yourself is just another way for you to run away.
00:21:47
At just five or six minutes later, the prosecutor said, Justine Witter drove her car into Aaron Thompson's lane of traffic to die by suicide,
00:21:57
but instead killed a mother, child, unborn baby. The prosecution had made his case for murder.
00:22:05
Now the question was, what could Justine Winter's attorneys possibly say to make a jury believe otherwise?
00:22:14
Coming up. The defense takes on the heart of the case. Those texts. When Dateline continues.
00:22:31
Every day in the Montana courtroom, the family of now 17-year-old Justine Winter dutifully
00:22:38
shuffle to the front row seats directly behind the defense table. Their faces, by their attorney's decree, they say, an intentional blank, emotionless.
00:22:49
Their apparent demeanor spur in the side of an already angry town. But almost no one knew what was really going on.
00:22:58
Justine's mother, Mary, who had been struggling with alcohol, caved in to the stress.
00:23:03
Tell me how it's changed your life. I ran away for a while. I couldn't deal with it.
00:23:10
I just left the house. I didn't come back. Justine's brother, Kyle, dropped out of college to help keep things together at home and get Justine to her medical appointments.
00:23:23
And Randy, her father, the strong and tall-as-a-Montana-Spruce firefighter and National Guardsman,
00:23:30
turned angry and bitter at the continuing prosecution of his little girl. I could be sitting and living and watching TV, and all of a sudden I hear something, I just completely lose it.
00:23:42
Just start crying. The whole world, said Justine's dad, seemed intent on misunderstanding, demonizing his little girl.
00:23:50
Yet, he said she'd always been so good. kind, thoughtful, and responsible. I was getting almost straight
00:24:00
in high school, but mostly wouldn't harm a bug, literally, and cared about people would never, never want to hurt that sweet woman or her son or her baby.
00:24:10
Always had a smile. Always, always wanting to help is who she was. Which kind of little girl was this?
00:24:18
She was just a good girl. But it might interest you to know that as the Winters spoke to us,
00:24:26
They were doing so against the expressed advice of their attorneys. And when it was time for Justine's defense team to make its case in court,
00:24:36
attorneys Maxwell, Battle, and David Stuffed told the jury that everything the prosecution told them,
00:24:42
everything they knew about the case so far, was wrong. What happened out there was an accident.
00:24:49
Including where the crash occurred. Remember, the prosecution's experts testified there was no doubt Justine crossed the center line
00:24:57
and veered into Aaron Thompson's lane, causing the crash. But a forensic engineer hired by the defense said his research turned that finding on its head.
00:25:08
He claimed it was Aaron who drove out of her lane in that construction zone and struck Justine.
00:25:14
And the defense went further, claiming that slack mark near the 85-mile mark and the speedometer of Justine's car was planted there by investigators.
00:25:24
That the black box that measured speed and braking was plain wrong. That Justine always wore her seatbelt.
00:25:32
And finally, a psychologist said, well, actually a lot of experts said, that a spat with a boy wasn't enough to lead to a suicide attempt.
00:25:39
And those texts, they should not be considered a suicide note at all. It was a way of exercising power and control in the relationship to make that kind of threat.
00:25:54
But it was always clear that it was never meant. What would Justine Witter say about what happened that night, about those texts?
00:26:02
The jury would never know. She did not testify on the advice of attorneys, said her family.
00:26:07
And of course, that was her perfect right. But there was another reason, too. Justine suffered a brain injury in that crash, so her recollection of the last few days leading up to the crash on that night itself, she doesn't remember.
00:26:23
She is charged with a crime about which her memory is a complete blank. So then, how could the jury know Justine knowingly crossed the center line having decided to take her own life by hitting the other car?
00:26:39
The question we put to the prosecutor. In order to draw that conclusion, you have to read her mind, essentially.
00:26:46
You've been a prosecutor for years. You know that car accidents happen in the most bizarre ways, that people do crazy things on the road.
00:26:54
But you clearly said this was a situation in which I know what somebody was thinking
00:26:59
when they drove across that lane of traffic and into that other car. No. I just don't know how you can know what she's thinking.
00:27:05
I can't know what she was thinking. Nobody knows what she was thinking at the time.
00:27:08
She doesn't know what she was thinking at the time. All I can do is base my decision on what the evidence shows.
00:27:16
Did the evidence clearly show that Justine Winter had made up her mind to die by suicide by driving into an oncoming car?
00:27:25
Up to the jury now. Coming up. Everyone just cried about it. A verdict comes quickly, but the pain and one final question remained.
00:27:37
when Dateline continues. As a Montana jury prepared to decide the fate of 17-year-old Justine Winter,
00:27:54
the members of Aaron and Caden's family struggled to hang on to the frayed remnants of their former goodwill.
00:28:00
They had tried so hard not to be angry at Justine. That is until they were served with that lawsuit, blaming the crash on Aaron.
00:28:09
And then watch defense attorneys battle in stuffed twist as they saw it anyway But the family believed were the facts of the case You unusual as victims because of this willingness to forgive Justine
00:28:25
It's the adults in her life that are steering her in this direction. It's not her decisions.
00:28:31
You know, it's these adults. So I've had plenty of anger towards them. But for Justine's family, too, there was considerable strain.
00:28:40
so much that Justine's father, Randy, buckled under the pressure and was rushed to the hospital and not present in the courtroom.
00:28:47
I will ask the clerk to file the verdict and to read it, please. When after just four hours of deliberation, the jury came back.
00:28:57
We, the jury, enter the following unanimous verdict. To the charge of deliberate homicide for the death of Aaron Thompson, guilty.
00:29:06
for the death of Caden O'Dell, guilty. This was an absolutely horrible, numbing experience
00:29:14
that put my head into my knees. It was like the whole courtroom, I felt like everyone just cried about it.
00:29:26
How did she look, Mary? She was led off to jail. Your little girl. She looked very stunned.
00:29:36
She didn't look... Just a week after that verdict, Justine Winter marked her 18th birthday in a jail cell.
00:29:46
And then came sentencing day. And everyone wondered, would Justine finally tell Erin's husband, her family,
00:29:54
what they desperately wanted to hear? In your ideal world, what would you like to hear from Justine?
00:30:04
To be sorry. for what she took from us because it was huge. But just before sentencing,
00:30:13
the family received a statement written by Justine. And it wasn't even close to what they were looking for.
00:30:20
In it, she called herself a miracle who was wrongly convicted of a horrific crime.
00:30:25
She wrote that she would never, ever in a million years take her own life or anyone else's,
00:30:31
that this was an accident that had been blown out of proportion, that she didn't need time behind bars,
00:30:38
just a chance to turn a horrific situation into a positive one. And so with this statement in mind,
00:30:45
the family of Aaron and Caden took the stand to have their own say. I want for you to make something positive of your life through this,
00:30:55
but you still have yet to grasp the truth. Caden's father, the same message, more anger.
00:31:02
You took him. You did it. And you need to own it. You killed my boy. You need to own it.
00:31:13
And finally, Caden's stepfather, Jason, the elementary school counselor, first displaying compassion, then a rare stream of venom aimed at Justine's defense team.
00:31:24
The attorneys battle and stuffed. I've chosen not to believe that you, in crashing your car that night,
00:31:31
wanted to harm or would ever think about harming them. But it has been very, very, very difficult to hold on to that thought,
00:31:41
given that you've been led by these two men and influenced by them to not do what is most important in all of this,
00:31:49
in this show and demonstrate to us that you are sorry for having taken them. Then, finally, the moment as Justine Winter herself took the stand
00:31:59
to speak for the first time. I've wanted to speak with you for two years now. I've wanted to let you guys know that my heart goes out to you.
00:32:13
And as every single one of you came up here today, my heart was breaking. But I just hope that you guys will be able to forgive
00:32:25
that I will never be able to say that I intentionally crossed the center line wanting to take three lives from all of you But before the judge allowed Justine to leave the witness stand the prosecutor stepped to the podium
00:32:44
and asked a question on behalf of the victim's families, a question that froze the courtroom.
00:32:52
What they've wanted to hear from you for a long, long time also is, I'm sorry. Can you tell them that?
00:33:02
I'm sorry for your loss, but I cannot... I don't know what you're meaning by you want me to say that I'm sorry.
00:33:14
And so the hammer came down. It's the order of the court. The defendant is committed for a period of 30 years, with 15 years suspended.
00:33:24
Justine was sentenced to 15 years in prison. And her father, back on his feet and in court for sentencing day, began his own prison term.
00:33:34
The one deep inside his own soul. The system betrayed me. You could say you served a country, and then you feel betrayed about it.
00:33:43
You feel betrayed by the country you fought for? Mm-hmm. About the judicial part of the system.
00:33:50
They took her, this once promising college-bound honor student, to a cell in the Montana Women's Prison,
00:33:57
where she instantly became the youngest inmate in the place. And two months later, those attorneys,
00:34:03
stuffed and battle, who declined our requests for interviews, were off the case.
00:34:09
That civil lawsuit was dropped. And that's when Justine Winter decided to tell us
00:34:15
her side of the whole sad story. Coming up, an exclusive interview with Justine If you say it's probably you who caused that accident, are you able to say I take responsibility for that?
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When Dateline continues. Shortly after Justine Winter walked out of the courtroom in Kalispell, Montana,
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she landed more than 450 miles east across the state at the women's prison in Billings.
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she sat down with us quite well aware of how all this time she'd been the target of so much
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curiosity and anger I'm curious to know what your thought process was as you went about deciding
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yeah I think I'll talk now I don't know I guess it was probably that I was being shown in a different light
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than what I wanted to be shown in when you read accounts of your case. When you see the comments people write,
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what's that like? They were really hard to read. I heard one that said I need to hang from a noose on a tree.
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What does it feel like inside when you saw that comment, for example? I'm really weird,
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and with my brain injury, I feel it in the second, but it's hard to recall it afterwards.
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That brain injury is the reason she says she sometimes smiles when she doesn't mean to. Why everything came out wrong, she says,
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when she took the stand and spoke at sentencing. And why she says, and even the prosecutor says he
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believes this, that she recalls nothing about the crash. I don't remember the night of the accident,
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but I remember events that I know had to have happened right before the accident happened.
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What events would those be? I remember doing stuff to get ready for prom, because prom was supposed to be two days after when the accident happened.
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But other than that, I don't really remember a whole lot about March. What do you remember of the last time you saw your boyfriend?
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I have no idea. I remember we spent oodles of time together. You were inseparable, basically.
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Pretty much. In love? Kid love. Yeah Well it pretty strong love that kid love isn it Yeah I remember if I wasn with him I was texting him all the time But as for those texts following the argument with Ryan just before the crash
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Justine said despite what many believe, she would never, ever have tried to kill herself,
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knowing, as she does, that her grandmother, Randy's mother, took her own life when her dad was just a boy.
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In fact, she said the most likely explanation was she was just playing a game of sorts with Ryan.
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He liked controlling everything having to do with, like, my life. And he'd threatened suicide twice.
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That's what I would think was happening, is that I was playing his own card back at him.
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Well, I'm going to kill myself, eh? Yeah. I don't think that they were text messages that were to be taken seriously.
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Well, if you look at them through Justine's eyes, they don't look like a serious threat.
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But the jury didn't look at it through your eyes. No. Despite her conviction and all that evidence and the fact she has no memory of that night,
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Justine still claims she must have been wearing her seatbelt and cannot imagine driving her car at 85 miles an hour.
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Just not the sort of thing she ever did. She says, Something happened, you swerved across and hit that other car.
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Does that sound about right? Yeah. It's probably you who caused the accident. That's fair to say.
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Mm-hmm. And if you say, it's probably you who caused that accident, are you able to say, yeah, you know,
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if I did it, and I probably did cause it, I just feel horrible about that. Mm-hmm.
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And I take responsibility for that. Is it possible for you to say that? I mean, if I knew, then I would take responsibility for it.
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You know, if it was me, I'd take complete and utter responsibility for it. And I do.
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And now, finally, having said the words almost that Erin and Kayden's family longed to hear,
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Justine says she is finally through with what she called a pity party she held for herself.
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All I would change about the accident is that they lived. And if it had to be so be that they lived and I didn't, I'd be okay with that.
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Because I don't like seeing anyone else in pain. I know my family was put in a lot of pain because of the accident.
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But they've got to see me grow up. And the other family can't see that. Yep. And I don't want to put them in any more pain than they've already had to be put through.
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And I want to make everything, everything okay for them. After serving a little more than four years of her 15-year sentence in prison,
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and in 2015, Justine Winter was granted parole. For Aaron's widower, Jason, his dream is gone.
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Only an empty chair and empty ache remain, as he and so many in the family, as if climbing those Montana mountains,
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try to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's a dance between the grief of their loss
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to the joy and the blessing of having experienced them. It's like seeing a meteor.
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You wouldn't curse your luck that you saw this meteor. You'd just be thankful that you were blessed to see it.
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And so we just have to cling to that, just that, wow, how amazing that we got to spend a good part of our life
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with two of the most precious people on the planet. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
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Thank you for joining us.