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I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. He was well liked, he was well loved, he was smart, he was fun.
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I had the most senseless, empty feeling. This is how it ends? Why would somebody do it?
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Now what? White hat, wide open smile, a handsome young veterinarian in Big Sky Country.
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He loved helping animals. He asked me out that night. I was excited. Then they found him dead on the floor.
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Two shots went off and then the third shot into his chest. Three gunshots that launched a long-running mystery.
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Who killed the veterinarian? I think the perpetrator stood there and watched him die.
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There were so many different leads and rumors. I felt like if it wasn't for me, it never would have happened.
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Jealousy? Rage? Revenge? It was your classic whodunit. Could anyone solve it? Look at what it's done to our family.
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It was hard. I wanted justice for my brother. Here's Keith Morrison with Mystery in Big Sky Country.
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There was a broad swath of prairie where the cattle outnumbered the people, and a sad summer breeze sang around a modest dwelling in the grass.
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This is Marlene Pottsman and Geraldine. They called it the bunkhouse, though it was really just an old single-wide trailer.
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That Marion, not himself, my husband just went down Richard, to see if you want to go to the pastor.
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A nondescript little place out on the Montana prairie, a bit worn around the edges.
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Sort of place a young vet could live cheap while he built his business. When the local sheriff's deputies arrived, they found a body in the middle of the kitchen floor,
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lying on its back. Blood had pooled under its head. On one foot was a shoe of the sort people wear in the water.
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The other was bare. A .357 Magnum was on the floor, not far from the dead man's left hand.
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Marlene Protzman saw all this too, same time as the deputies. But she could tell right away, as apparently they could not,
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that she'd been wrong on the 911 call. The man did not shoot himself. Brian had a cut on his nose,
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and the way his shirt was ripped, and just the blood on the floor. It looked like a struggle.
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Yeah, it wasn't a suicide. But the deputies went about their work as they saw fit.
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And thus, on Sunday, July 14, 1996, they clouded a mystery that has come down all the way to us.
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There were so many different theories, different suspects, and so much conflicting evidence.
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It was your classic whodunit. Or perhaps your classic nightmare. I'd lay awake at night and ask God to give me some insight here.
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Where do I go now? The victim, the man on the floor, was Brian Rine, veterinarian.
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Charlene and Teresa's big brother. He was my brother. He was my best friend. He was my business partner.
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They grew up together in Scott City, Kansas. We shared bedrooms. We shared clothing. Everybody shared.
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Brian was the eldest. So what kind of an older brother was he? Protective. Ornery.
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Ornery? We were always playing pranks on each other, and especially Teresa, because she didn't take him so well.
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That Brian was very smart was a given. Maybe a little too smart? I remember turning to him once and saying,
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I just want to know what time it is. I don't need to know how the clock was made.
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Here's what they got to do growing up in a small town. They joined 4-H and Future Farmers of America.
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and they raised their special animals, showed them off in fairs and exhibitions.
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And Brian knew from the very beginning there was one job he was meant to do. I never knew Brian not wanting to be a veterinarian.
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Brian always said that being a vet was way more difficult than being a doctor because an animal can't tell you where it hurts or how they feel.
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You have to figure out how they feel. After finishing vet school, Brian moved to Montana,
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Big, wide-open country, cattle ranches galore. An outdoorsman's paradise, really, which absolutely suited Brian Ryan.
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He took full advantage of what Montana had to offer, and often. And so in 1995, the year before the events in our story,
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Dr. Ryan set up shop in a speck on the map called Geraldine, population 300. It's always a struggle starting a new business.
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and starting a vet clinic is very expensive. But it was doing very well. Young Dr. Ryan hired Marlene to help him run the office
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and moved into the unused bunkhouse. Marlene and her husband owned on their property 11 miles outside of town.
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So she was both landlady and employee. Brian had a heart of gold. He was, you know, part of the family.
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Mind you, a good-looking young vet in such a tiny place, there was interest. lots of it I remember asking him is there anybody there you're dating and he's like well there's
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there's some girls but they're just not the ones it was possibly an overly modest answer the handsome
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young vet arrival was practically a news event heads turned hearts may have followed Certainly gossip did And then summer of 1996 I was like again the same question that I ask
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So what is going on? Do you have another, do you have a girlfriend? Well, there is this one girl. She comes over and she does things for me.
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And I said, things like, and he said, well, she'll clean up my house and stuff. So I was like, shame on you. You should be over there cleaning her house.
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It was strange what began to happen after he took up with that young lady. Weird things.
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Not exactly frightening, more like unsettling. Like the rock that crashed through a window of the clinic.
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Didn't tell you what he thought it was? No. Or who? No. He did find a footprint out in back of the building, but nothing really ever came of it.
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Not long after, Dr. Rine called both sisters with a request. At one point, he told me, quit calling and hanging up.
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I was like, Brian, I'm not hanging up. He just paw-hotted off, you know. And he's like, it's not a big deal, Teresa, it's not a big deal.
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But was it? On July 10, 1996, Dr. Brian Rine drove to Bozeman, three hours away, to attend a conference.
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He returned home Friday evening, the 12th. No one saw him on Saturday. And then on Sunday, the 14th, Marlene's husband drove over to Brian's bunkhouse.
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It was about, I don't know, five, ten minutes later. He came back and walked in the door and was very distraught, crying.
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Such a shock. Which is maybe why her husband got the mistaken idea that Dr. Ryan committed suicide.
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But later that same day, when Marlene heard an undersheriff repeat the mistake to Brian's grandparents,
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here's what happened. Verna May jumped up and she said, no way in hell would my grandson commit suicide.
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Then, next day, when state investigators, led by Agent Ken Thompson of Montana's Department of Criminal Investigation,
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arrived and looked at the ruined crime scene. My partner and I would look at each other and think,
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oh my Lord, you know, it certainly makes things very difficult. Difficult? Oh, yes.
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Difficult was not the half of it. So what did happen to Dr. Rine when we come back?
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We had been told that he had committed suicide. Did you believe that could be true?
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Absolutely not. Blood on the doorstep. Bullets in the kitchen. How can this happen?
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Why would somebody do it? The search begins for a killer. I think the perpetrator stood there and watched Brian die.
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On a summer Sunday afternoon outside tiny Geraldine, Montana, local sheriff's deputies used towels to mop up the blood around what they took to be a suicide.
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The town's veterinarian, Dr. Brian Rine, age 31, was dead. His own 357 Magnum lay near his left hand.
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and the emissaries of sudden death delivered their message to Dr. Ryan's sister, Teresa,
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back in Kansas. I remember saying, Mom, I need to talk to you. I can't imagine what it would be like to tell your mother
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that her firstborn son is dead. Yeah. It was hard. And he was... He was that child.
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that perfect child. It was evening before the news found younger sister, Charlene.
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I was actually in Las Vegas. We had been told that he had committed suicide. Did you believe that could be true?
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Absolutely not. It was a long plane ride home. Do you remember what your mind was doing to you
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during that plane ride? How can this happen? Why would somebody do it? Those questions
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because none of them believe Brian capable of suicide. And sure enough, the next morning an autopsy revealed abrasions
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and contusions on the doctor's head, a swollen right eye. Clearly, there had been a struggle.
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And he'd been struck by three gunshots, two in the lower right forearm, and then a fatal shot to the chest.
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The conclusion? Obvious. It was not suicide. It was homicide. How is it possible at first they thought it was a suicide?
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I can't answer that. I think you have to understand that that county had not had a homicide in, I think,
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it was like 19 years. It was Monday when State Department of Criminal Investigation agent Ken Thompson was called in.
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And by the time he got to the doctor's bunkhouse, the locals had been gone, the scene left unguarded, for more than 24 hours.
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Montana's a remote state. Sometimes you'll drive eight hours to get to a crime scene.
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So it's not like a big city where you can roll in and everything's pristine. No, not even close.
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In fact, the deputies and local coroner had spent just a few hours tromping around Brian's kitchen, had taken about a dozen photos,
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and in the process had done things that couldn't be undone. Like cleaning up blood on the floor under the victim's upper body
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and tossing into the garbage a telephone handset found under Dr. Reint's head without swabbing for DNA or dusting for fingerprints.
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Those discarded materials were beyond recovery by the time Investigator Thompson arrived.
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The local deputies did tell him they found a water shoe on the bunkhouse doorstep.
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It appeared to have been knocked off in the struggle. The other one was on the brine's left foot.
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And then Investigator Thompson saw the blood drops out on the doorstep We knew that that where the shooting had occurred Blood had dropped straight down Yeah And so it was just just outside the trail Did you find some bullets
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around there? They found two bullets lodged in the kitchen cupboard. So the two shots that went
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through the arm went through the arm and through that wall and came out into kitchen cabinets. I
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on the other side. Thompson and his partner used string to simulate the path of the bullets.
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They even tried to act out what might have happened. And before long, they came to some conclusions.
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How far away was the shooter? Pretty close range. So, if it was a struggle and the gun went off,
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it would be, right? Some kind of conversation went on and a struggle ensued. Two shots went off,
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and then the third shot into his chest. I think that Brian then struggled to get in to call for help, that he sat there.
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I think the perpetrator stood there and watched Brian die. And as for the location of the gun so close to Dr. Ryan's own hand...
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So the killer must have put it there. Correct. But were there any fingerprints on the gun?
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No, and it looked like it had been wiped off with a solvent. So investigators now thought they knew how the murder occurred,
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But when it happened? That wasn't clear at all. Friday night? Saturday? It was an important question, of course.
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But just how important? They might not have fully imagined just then. But there was no clear answer.
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In fact, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy left the space for time of death blank.
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Remember, Dr. Rine returned home from a conference on Friday evening, but his body wasn't found until Sunday.
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Investigators canvassed nearby farms, and... There was a neighbor that lived probably about a mile away,
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maybe a little less, is the crow flies that had seen an ATV go by that night, and then said he heard two loud retorts about that time.
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That is, Friday night. But... Could have been that night or the next morning or something?
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Well, at first he wasn't sure, and then he wasn't sure of the date. Phone records showed the last time Dr. Ryan received a phone call was at 10.15 on Friday night.
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Nobody heard from Brian after that last phone call on Friday night. The thought that he would go all day Saturday without having any contact with anybody was just really highly unlikely.
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On the other hand, Dr. Ryan could have hung around his bunkhouse alone that Saturday morning,
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or maybe he intended to go fishing. There were those water shoes and they found a fishing pole near the door.
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Of course, all this when and how did nothing to shine a light on who killed Dr. Ryan,
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a question that was consuming everyone who knew him. My mind was just spinning, trying to think who, you know, any little lead at all.
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There was, she knew, this friend of Dr. Rine's, Larry Hagenbush, whose behavior had recently been erratic.
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And she also knew that some people in town said they'd heard Larry bad-mouthing Brian in the local bar, though Larry denied it.
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But investigators almost immediately had a different lead that seemed worth pursuing.
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And it was related to that broken window at the vet clinic and those hang-up phone calls Dr. Rine had asked his sisters if they were making.
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So he had no idea who was doing it? After he eliminated me, he had an idea. Oh, he knew or thought he knew who the hang-up caller was,
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but he didn't seem very worried about it. Everything was going to be okay. Brian was not afraid of anything.
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Maybe he should have been. Coming up, a new relationship. I thought he was handsome. I was excited.
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And a jealous ex. Should I file a restraining order? Should I do something? What would investigators make of him?
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I was beginning to form an opinion that it was somewhat a crime of passion. When Dateline continues.
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Veterinarian Brian Rhine's family went into a tailspin at the news of his death.
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And when they heard that somebody murdered him? He kind of fell apart after that, huh?
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Yes. It was difficult to figure out where to go, what to do. Brian's mom was practically paralyzed in her grief.
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And so much of the dreadful work that demands to be done after such a death fell on Teresa.
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I can remember sitting through the funeral and sitting there thinking to myself,
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I am so tired, I just want to go to bed. And maybe that played a role in Teresa's mood,
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because on that July day in 1996, when Dr. Ryan was buried in his hometown in Kansas,
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and a large contingent of Montanans made the trip to say goodbye, among them was that young woman from Geraldine,
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the one who'd gone over and cleaned his house, the one Brian had recently started seeing.
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I was almost annoyed she even came. And she was standing in our home, and I really thought,
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why are you here? I was pretty irritated. And those feelings were not lost on that young lady in the middle of her own grief and confusion.
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I just felt out of place because I felt like, you know, they didn't know who I was.
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Her name is Anne. She was 21 then. She had known Dr. Ryan just two months. Met him at Rusty Bar in Geraldine I thought he was handsome and I was like what is this guy doing in Geraldine It was just kind of surprising to me They talked all night she said and in the morning how did you
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feel? I was excited. I felt giddy. Just excited that somebody would be interested in me. Ah but
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complications. Ann had a live-in boyfriend. A guy named Tom Jaroszewski. Her high school sweetheart.
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They had been together four and a half years, and though their relationship had its issues,
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who knows, she might have married him. And then she had that heart-to-heart with Dr. Rine.
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It's like, you're too young to be settling down and somebody telling you what to do.
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How did that strike you when he said that? I agreed with him. Like, why have I been with that guy all these years?
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Yeah, it made me see that I would be better without it, you know, because it hadn't been a good relationship for a while.
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I had a reason now to move on and let go of that. And she was going to tell Tom as soon as she got up the nerve.
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But then, oh boy, Dr. Rine left a message on her answering machine at the apartment she shared with Tom,
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who, of course, heard the message. He called me up and asked me what the hell was going on.
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Well, a boyfriend would want to know what the hell was going on, right? Yeah. And when she told him?
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They'd start crying and saying he couldn't believe I was doing this and how I was throwing away everything.
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But Ann was done. She moved back to the family farm outside Geraldine, and Tom begged her to come back, promised to do better.
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He told me that Brian would, you know, when he got tired of me, he dumped me, and then I'd see.
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And then the phone call started over and over again. I asked him to leave me alone. I said I needed time. I needed space.
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And he wasn't giving you any? No. One day, Ann agreed to go for a ride in Tom's new pickup truck so they could have the talk.
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Big mistake. Tom drove out of town and kept on driving. Wouldn't let her get out of the truck.
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So I was like, okay. I started looking at the ditch, thinking, that's, you know, I can land in that grass. I'll be okay.
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So I opened the door and I was going to jump out. and he grabbed my arms like, what the hell are you doing?
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How did it eventually end? He finally took me back. Did you go home that night? No, my brother was out of town,
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so I asked Brian if I could stay with him because I didn't want to be home alone.
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It was a big step. Did you feel safer? Yeah. But then Tom, all of 23 years old, barged into Brian Ryan's place middle of the night
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when she was there demanding to know the 31-year-old doctor's intentions. What did Brian think of this?
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He thought he was a stupid kid. Oh, he was being a stupid kid. You would have to agree with that.
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Yeah, because I asked him, I said, should I file a restraining order? Should I do something?
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And he said, no, he's just a stupid kid. He'll get over it. Just give him time to get it out of his system.
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But he didn't get over it. And one night when nobody was home, he went into Ann's house, into her bedroom.
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And he said he found my journal and read it. What did it feel like to have your personal journal read like that by him?
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It just felt like I'd been violated. How did Ann learn about it? Tom told her and quoted from her journal.
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At the end I said, and it was in a sarcastic way, but it was like, here, I can't believe I'm thinking I met the man of my dreams.
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He'll probably get killed in a car wreck and Tom will probably kill himself. Just thinking of the...
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All the negative possibilities. Like, here's something wonderful's happened, something awful's going to happen.
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And that, actually, it turned out to be kind of a prophecy, didn't it? Yeah. It plays back like a bad dream now.
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How she told Brian what Tom had been doing, and then discovered it was even worse than she thought.
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He goes, well, I got one better than that. He came over here last night saying he had car trouble and asked to use the phone.
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He said he let him use the phone and went back to bed. had to have been a ruse, Brian figured,
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designed solely to see if Ann was sleeping there. Must have confirmed that you made the right decision
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of breaking up with him. The more he did, the more it solidified that I'm not going back.
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All that was just before that conference Brian attended out of town, the one he returned from on Friday night.
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That last phone call he was on, 10, 15 p.m., he was talking to Ann. All of a sudden he's like, well, I gotta go.
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and before I could say goodbye, he hung up. Really? I thought it was kind of weird, but, you know, it was late.
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I didn't want to read too much into it at the time. You know, I kind of wondered.
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And now that Brian was dead, Anne wondered a lot about something she remembered Tom said years earlier.
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If you ever cheat on me, I'll kill him and I'll kill you. So, it will not surprise you to know that when he heard all this,
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investigator Ken Thompson made arrangements to call on young Tom Jaroszewski. right away.
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You don't know the kind of person you're going to encounter. And just with my limited knowledge of what had happened here,
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you know, I was beginning to form an opinion that it was somewhat a crime of passion.
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So I thought, well, let's see where this goes, you know, that maybe if this is heavy on his heart
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and it was just a tragic situation, maybe we will get to the truth tonight. Oh, if only the life of an investigator were that simple.
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Coming up... The first things I thought everybody was going to suspect me. Police have some questions for the EnVyous X.
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It was dusk that Monday in Montana after the weekend murder of Dr. Brian Ryan, when investigators drove out to a farm 11 miles east of Geraldine.
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Here, Agent Ken Thompson and the local undersheriff intended to confront 23-year-old Tom Jaraseski,
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the young man who'd lost in love and didn't take it well. When you arrived, what was his demeanor?
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Well, I think his demeanor was to be helpful. He was welcoming, very polite. When my mom told me about Brian, one of the first things I thought of,
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everybody's going to suspect me, the ex-boyfriend. But that is not the case at all.
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Tom Jaraseski admitted loving Ann and being upset when he heard another man, Dr. Ryan,
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leave a phone message for his live-in girlfriend. So what I did is I called Ann right away and I said,
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oh, you got a call here from Brian. She didn't say anything. And I said, so what the hell's going on?
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She didn't say anything again. I said, you tramp, because I knew right then she must have cheated on me.
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Tom did not deny that he behaved badly then. He freely admitted that he phoned Anne's family and her friends.
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He even called some of Brian's former girlfriends. What did that say to you, that behavior?
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He was literally doing his own investigation on Brian. He was calling Anne's friends, trying to get all the dirt he could on Brian
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so that he could turn around and give it to Anne and give it to Anne and say, you need to end this relationship.
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This is a bad guy. He's just using you. and you need to come back and be with me.
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In fact, Tom admitted nearly all the strange behaviors Anne described. The constant hang-up calls, showing up at Brian's place in the middle of the night,
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sneaking into Anne's empty house at 3 o'clock in the morning, snooping around in her bedroom and reading her diary.
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So after reading it, I knew that, you know, Brian was the big reason why she dumped me.
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He was actively pursuing her, aggressively pursuing her for her to change her mind,
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to end that relationship with Brian and come back and start over. It was just a continual spiral, the things that he was doing.
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The more obsessed he got with her. It was, by his own admission, pathetic. Like when he drove an ATV over and hid outside Ann's family farmhouse,
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just hoping for a glimpse of her. and was then chased off by Ann's brothers. I used to apologize to him.
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I said, I'm so stupid and I can't believe I did this. And I told him, you know, I'm lower than life.
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I don't deserve to live. And they were like, oh, no, don't say that. There's nothing to beat your head over.
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But Tom had an alibi, and a pretty solid one, for most of the weekend when Dr. Ryan was murdered,
00:26:41
except for Friday night. Oh, and yes, he did admit he phoned Dr. Ryan that night.
00:26:49
So my intentions were to call him and just tell him that, you know, I didn't have any grudges against him
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and that I wasn't going to interfere with him and Ann's relationship and that, you know, I hope that you take good care of Ann, you know, because she's a really special person.
00:26:59
He answered the phone and he said hello twice and I just couldn't do it. I chickened out.
00:27:04
And when was that? This is this last Friday, about quarter to ten. Investigators have been thinking that, though the medical examiner couldn't tell them,
00:27:12
Friday night was possibly when Dr. Ryan was murdered. And after they heard Tom's story how he didn't have an alibi for Friday night,
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that seemed to them to clinch it. You called him up at 10 o'clock on Friday night to say,
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I don't hold any grudges against you. That's right. Within hours, the guy's dead.
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And then Tom dug a deeper hole for himself. Remember, it appeared Dr. Rind scuffled with somebody before he was shot dead.
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Well, guess who told the agents that he'd hurt his back that very Friday night, falling out of a pickup truck?
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I hurt my back. Did you get any bruises or anything? No, I didn't. I had no bruises on your chest.
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But the next day, Tom went to a hospital and was treated for back pain. The only things Tom denied in that interview?
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Faking a vehicle breakdown 10 days before the murder and knocking on Dr. Ryan's door to use the phone in the middle of the night.
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That didn't happen? No. But investigators weren't buying Tom's story. All the facts are pointing to you, Tom.
00:28:20
Everything. Everything we've got is pointing to. What evidence at his place do you have against me?
00:28:24
That's all you've got to worry about. Tom, it's all being worked on. Trust me. Okay, good.
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Because you won't find anything against me. There will be a carload of stuff going to the crime lab.
00:28:33
Oh, good. Because you won't find one thing against me. How do you? When you left at the end of that first interview, what did you think?
00:28:41
Did you think this is our guy? I thought clearly he was a suspect. He clearly had done some things that were very troubling.
00:28:50
Sure. But did that mean he was the killer? What would Tom Jaraseski say if we asked him?
00:28:59
Coming up. They started accusing me of killing Brian. I was scared to death. I was worried that they were going to charge me that night.
00:29:06
An arrest? Hang on, could there be another person of interest in this case? We look at him very seriously.
00:29:14
When Dateline continues. The Plains of Montana are no stranger to sudden violent death.
00:29:33
History is littered with it. But for the people living the history, in July 1996, after the murder of the town veterinarian
00:29:41
Brian Ryan, it was all very, very hard. Mom, for probably the next five years, crawled in a hole and didn't come out.
00:29:50
And Ann, that young woman in the middle? I was devastated. I just thought here you know here I met somebody that treats me nice and treats me like an equal Somebody you felt special when you were with him Yes and to have that ripped away and not even know nothing may have ever came of it
00:30:09
but I, you know, didn't get the chance to find out. But what was worse, Ann felt an overpowering sense of guilt.
00:30:18
You felt responsible? I felt like if it wasn't for me, it never would have happened.
00:30:26
Because, of course, she broke up with him. It's just unbelievable. And here he is, Tom Jaroszewski, Ann's ex, otherwise known as the prime suspect.
00:30:39
It seems like a bad dream that I couldn't wake up from. How did you find out that he was killed?
00:30:46
From my mom. And she just said that she'd gotten a phone call that the veterinarian, Geraldine, had been killed.
00:30:52
And of course, Tom knew perfectly well who his mother was talking about, his rival,
00:30:57
the man who'd taken his girlfriend and made his life so miserable. And so... You had to be sort of a little bit okay with that.
00:31:07
No, not at all. I had no ill feelings towards Brian. Oh, really? Come on. You had to have had ill feelings towards Brian.
00:31:15
not for somebody to lose their life. He took your girl away. Yeah, but not for somebody to lose their life.
00:31:21
Tom said he knew immediately that he would be high on the list of suspects, as of course he was.
00:31:27
So he wasn't surprised when Agent Kent Thompson and the local undersheriff showed up at the family farmhouse.
00:31:34
I was nervous. I mean, both guys had guns on their hips and came into my house, and, you know, I proceeded to tell them all these things that I was doing
00:31:45
as far as the phone calls and the stalking. And when I told them all about that,
00:31:53
then they totally changed their tune and started accusing me of killing Brian. I was scared to death.
00:32:00
I was worried that they were going to charge me that night. But they didn't. While it was true, as we said, that the crime scene was compromised,
00:32:09
there were hairs and fibers and fingerprints and blood samples yet untested. So the investigators said their goodbyes and told Tom they'd be back.
00:32:21
All these years later, what's... Sitting here now, two decades later, Tom told us, yes, he did love Ann.
00:32:27
He thought they had a future together. You know, I felt like she was the one and we'd be together forever.
00:32:33
But when he heard that phone message left by Dr. Ryan at the apartment he shared with Ann...
00:32:38
What did that feel like? Like my heart was torn in half. You did some things then, which in retrospect probably you must think were not the brightest in the world.
00:32:48
Yes. What bothers you as you think about it? Well, I didn't know anything about Brian, so I started calling up some of Ann's family and some of Ann's friends to see what they knew about Brian.
00:33:00
I was concerned because he was a veterinarian and he had access to drugs. I thought maybe he was giving Ann something.
00:33:10
Because why would she leave you for another guy? It must be drugs involved or something like that.
00:33:15
Something other than just wanting to make a switch. Yeah, that was my initial impression.
00:33:20
And all that other stuff, the hang-up phone calls, the stalking, going into her bedroom to read her diary.
00:33:28
Not great behavior. No, it was wrong of me to do that. I wanted to see her thoughts, what she had to say about me,
00:33:34
what she had to say about Brian. You're having a lot of trouble letting it go. I did, yes.
00:33:38
There's no manual on how long it takes to get over a relationship. And for me, it took a while.
00:33:44
But he swore to us here, as he did when he talked to the investigators way back when,
00:33:49
that he had nothing to do with the murder of Dr. Ryan, even though it looked pretty bad for him.
00:33:57
They told me right away that this happened on a Friday night, and I was home alone on a Friday night.
00:34:03
I had no alibi. and so I was kind of stuck. Although remember, the medical examiner was unable to settle on a time of death.
00:34:16
So despite what the detectives told Tom, the murder could have happened on Saturday when Tom did have an alibi,
00:34:24
which made another of the detectives' interviews particularly interesting because,
00:34:29
yes, in fact, there were other persons of interest. and another man they went to visit did have an alibi for Friday, but not Saturday.
00:34:39
That man happened to be a close friend to the victim. His name was Larry Hagenbush.
00:34:44
How seriously did you look at Larry? We looked at him very seriously. Hagenbush was the one who encouraged Brian to move from Kansas to Montana.
00:34:54
But Larry wasn't a stable man just then. His wife was leaving him. He'd been drinking a lot.
00:35:00
he'd tried to commit suicide a month before the murder using animal medication he'd gotten from Brian.
00:35:08
In fact, it was Dr. Ryan who intervened to help save Larry. And here's the thing.
00:35:14
Detectives had heard that Larry seemed to know intimate details of the crime scene,
00:35:19
which had not been made public, as if he was right there when it happened. The problem?
00:35:26
His story never stayed the same when he was even revealing it. I mean, at one point he said that there was bullet holes everywhere.
00:35:34
Later he would say there was only two holes. At one point he indicated that it was a rifle and that it was a pistol.
00:35:42
This is Agent Kenneth E. Thompson, Montau, criminal investigation. Still from the sound of this 20-year-old recording,
00:35:48
Agent Thompson wasn't accusing Larry of murdering his friend in cold blood. More like things got out of hand somehow I could just see this happening I couldn see Larry thinking well s he gets to drinking again whether he depressed whether he mad I don know whether it just going out to talk to somebody and just
00:36:08
ending up in a stupid s*** damn shouting match. Oh, well, here's the gun that's always playing around, but I'll take care of this myself.
00:36:15
I'll go out here and shoot my s*** damn self then and fight. No, he ain't going to do that.
00:36:19
Let's fight over the gun and bang, bang, bang, or whatever. I can see all that happening.
00:36:23
Yep. No, we got an accident. You know, we got a goddamn tragic accident. Is that what happened?
00:36:29
No. Makes sense, doesn't it? Makes sense, but it didn't happen with this guy. It could happen like that.
00:36:34
It could happen, but not with this guy. Not much more the detectives could accomplish at that point.
00:36:39
In those days, DNA took its sweet time getting tested. With the results, but either of those men at the crime scene firing the gun at Dr. Ryan?
00:36:49
Seemed like maybe it was time for something hands-on. or nose on, if you will. Enter Calamity Jane.
00:36:59
Well named, that dog. Coming up... That was the closest thing we had to a link. Calamity Jane sniffs out a clue
00:37:10
and a sister's discovery is about to change the case. I said, well, where's the gun case?
00:37:16
The gun case was missing. The week after they buried Brian Ryan near his childhood home in Kansas,
00:37:38
Sister Charlene came to Montana curious about the progress of the investigation.
00:37:43
And that's when local deputies told her about the mess-up at the crime scene, how they threw away some potential evidence.
00:37:50
Charlene was horrified. Have you ever heard of such a thing before? No. He goes, no, we cleaned it up.
00:37:57
We didn't want the family to see it. I'm like, why? Where is everything? We got rid of it.
00:38:03
But then, when she went to her brother's bunkhouse, Charlene discovered that someone else must have gotten rid of something too.
00:38:12
Something the cops didn't know existed. And in an instant, Charlene's discovery changed the whole theory of how the murder happened.
00:38:21
They had found the gun beside him. And I said, well, where's the gun case? The gun case was missing. It was a gun case that Brian had made.
00:38:31
And so the gun was always in the gun case? The gun was either in it or beside it.
00:38:40
A perimeter search of the property was organized, and lo and behold, the gun holster,
00:38:46
a leather case inscribed with Brian's initials, was found lying in tall grass 84 feet from Dr. Ryan's door.
00:38:53
How did it get way out there? Well, as he thought about it, the whole scene seemed to gel in Ken Thompson's mind,
00:39:00
the way it happened, that is. The killer must have stolen Brian's own gun in its case while Dr. Ryan was away at his conference.
00:39:08
Then brought it back that night expressly to kill Brian, discarding the holster on the way to the door.
00:39:14
If it hadn't been for that holster out there, It could have been somebody came to the door, knocked to the door,
00:39:19
Brian came to the door with a gun to maybe threaten him, and there was a tussle, the gun changed hands, and boom, boom.
00:39:26
It could have been. Absolutely. But that holster being out there, there's just no other reason why that holster would be out there.
00:39:37
That was Agent Thompson's theory, anyway. Was Tom Jaraseski capable of such a thing?
00:39:44
Well, he'd already admitted he sneaked into Ann's house when it was empty, and so, thought Agent Thompson, he must have been perfectly capable
00:39:52
of walking into Dr. Ryan's place, too, and stealing that gun. He had plenty of opportunity to get the gun.
00:39:59
The trailer was never locked. But why would he get Brian's gun? He could get a gun anywhere.
00:40:03
It's Montana, for God's sake. Everybody's got a gun. He certainly had the ability to go over there undetected
00:40:08
and walk into that trailer ample time to look around to grab the gun. So that became the leading theory.
00:40:18
Larry Hagenbush, the doctor's troubled friend, if that's truly what he was, remained a person of interest.
00:40:25
But the primary suspect, no question, was still Tom Jaroszewski. But how to prove it?
00:40:33
Well, as luck would have it, a bloodhound was at the crime scene that day, owned by a local guy, a dog named Calamity Jane.
00:40:42
So they let the dog sniff Tom's baseball cap. And? The dog went into the trailer, went right out the back door,
00:40:51
went right to where the holster had been found, went right to the caragana bushes,
00:40:56
where there was an indication that somebody had been standing in there. What did you think?
00:41:03
Well, we believe that that was a connection. That was the closest thing we had to a link from Tom to the holster to a possible hiding spot.
00:41:13
So you must have thought, we got him. Well, it was the best that we had, given that we had no physical evidence.
00:41:20
Of course, they kept trying to find some of that, too, at Tom's place. What did they want from you?
00:41:27
They took everything imaginable. Shoes was the biggest thing. They probably took at least 10 pairs of shoes.
00:41:32
And they took other items like sleeping bag, binoculars, the inside lining of a winter coat.
00:41:39
But not one thing from those searches could link Tom to the crime. Months passed, a year, and more.
00:41:49
Back in Kansas, Brian Ryan's sisters watched their mother suffer. It got very difficult to talk to her on a daily basis because she was so down and she wanted answers
00:42:06
She also frequently called Agent Thompson. And this was curious. So did Thompson's prime suspect, Tom Jaraseski.
00:42:15
He was always wanting to know where we were in the investigation. Finally, January of 98, a year and a half after the murder,
00:42:24
detectives ran a bit of a bluff with Tom. We just posed it to him that, you know,
00:42:29
why would we find anything in the house that would lead us to believe you were in that house?
00:42:34
And he says, okay, I'm going to tell you something I didn't tell you before. Perhaps you remember, detectives heard that Tom once showed up
00:42:41
at Dr. Ryan's place in the middle of the night, saying his truck broke down. He needed a phone.
00:42:47
Back then, Tom swore up and down that didn't happen. But now, 18 months later? Well, this is something I didn't tell you guys the first time that I talked to you.
00:42:56
Well, that did happen. It was at night, and I just wanted to see if man was there.
00:43:01
And I asked if I could use his phone. What type of evidence would you have left in that place?
00:43:07
What could you have left? Could I have left? Prints. I could have left some prints on the table.
00:43:14
They didn't have Tom's prints. Anywhere on the table, of course, but Tom had admitted lying the first time
00:43:20
and now was explaining how they might have found his DNA or prints at Brian's place.
00:43:27
He was only telling us things he knew he could confirm. And in your experience, that's what guilty people do?
00:43:32
That they change their story when they realize they have to? The story evolves, yes.
00:43:36
And it wasn't long before... I was leaving my apartment to go to work. Some guy that was standing behind the stairs said,
00:43:45
Tom and I turned around and with guns drawn they put the handcuffs on me. What was that like?
00:43:50
Shocking. I couldn't grasp that it was actually happening. Tom Jaraseski wrote in that police car to Fort Benton
00:44:00
where they booked him into the county jail and charged him with deliberate homicide.
00:44:08
What was it like to hear that? Refreshing. Good to have it solved and put it behind us.
00:44:15
and hopefully mom and dad could pick up and keep going again. All neat and tidy-like.
00:44:23
Except, of course, that's not the way things happen, is it? Coming up... It was just devastating.
00:44:31
Another family distraught. I feel angry. You want to do anything you can to help them.
00:44:38
And help would arrive for Tom Jaraseski in a most unusual way. when Dateline continues.
00:44:57
A half hour down the highway from little Geraldine is a living remnant of America's old west.
00:45:04
Fort Benton, Montana, still holding out against wind and weather and occasional outbursts of the worst humans can do to each other.
00:45:13
This is where, in a cell in the county courthouse, they installed Tom Jarosowski.
00:45:18
It was 1998. He was 25 years old. And he was charged with the deliberate homicide of Dr. Brian Rine.
00:45:27
Tom's parents and five siblings tried to get their heads around, but seemed to them an outrageous accusation, cruel and unjust.
00:45:35
What's it like to have your little brother charged with murder facing life imprisonment?
00:45:39
You feel angry. You want to do anything you can to help them. It was just devastating. We've never been through anything like that in our family.
00:45:49
There simply wasn't the money to hire some fancy, high-priced attorney, so Tom got a state-appointed lawyer, Bob Peterson.
00:45:57
What were your impressions of this kid? When I met him, I knew that he couldn't have done it.
00:46:03
And so then as the evidence started rolling in, then I became very certain that he wasn't the one.
00:46:11
Attorney Peterson could have said lack of evidence, because in fact, despite test after test,
00:46:16
not a single physical thing, not DNA or fingerprints or anything else connected Tom to those few square feet where it all happened.
00:46:26
Except there was plenty of circumstantial evidence. The phone calls, the stalking, the middle-of-the-night visits to Dr. Ryan's bunkhouse in the days and weeks before the murder.
00:46:38
But most of all, there was that dog, Calamity Jane, who, with one sniff of Tom's baseball cap,
00:46:45
led the cops from the doorway of the bunkhouse to a grove of bushes where the cops found and marked some footprints.
00:46:53
The theory being that Tom lay in wait for his opportunity to confront Dr. Ryan at the door.
00:46:59
Mind you, Calamity Jane did her sniffing a full 10 days after the body was found.
00:47:06
So what did Attorney Peterson think of that? To me, it wasn't evidence. I made a motion before the judge to decide whether or not it should go before a jury.
00:47:17
Besides, he said, Tom already admitted he'd been around there days earlier. Maybe that's what Calamity Jane hit on.
00:47:25
So Bob Peterson got Calamity Jane's handler up on the witness stand at a hearing here at the courthouse.
00:47:32
And what do you know? Neither dog nor handler were properly certified. When I asked him for all the paperwork, he told me about how he had put the paperwork about the dog and himself up on the top of his suburban.
00:47:47
And it unfortunately had all blown away, so he couldn't provide it. Not quite the dog ate my homework, but close.
00:47:55
so what did the judge do he threw out the evidence. And just like that, the state dismissed the case against Tom. Because without
00:48:07
Calamity Jane, the prosecution decided, there simply wasn't a provable case. Tom Jaroszewski
00:48:14
was a free man. I've got like a weight that's been lifted off my shoulders. I can go on with my life.
00:48:19
But Brian's family felt like they'd lost him all over again. That was very disappointing.
00:48:26
Yeah. Yeah. Did you think at that point, okay, it's all over, we're never going to find out?
00:48:31
I, you know, I think back in your mind, you think, well, maybe one day. There was a reason she kept that in the back of her mind, why both sides did.
00:48:41
Because the judge, that day in 1998, dismissed the charge without prejudice. Meaning?
00:48:48
Meaning that the state can bring it back up if they choose to. How much of a worry was that to you?
00:48:54
You always have this nagging thing in the back of your mind as a defense attorney
00:48:58
when something is dismissed without prejudice. You know that something could happen in the future.
00:49:05
Agent Ken Thompson could simply have filed it away as one lost cause. Tough case, it didn't work out.
00:49:13
I mean, you talk about a case where it seemed like everything was stacked against you.
00:49:20
This was that case. But he didn't let it go, just couldn't. Mind you, there were new assignments and lots of other cases.
00:49:31
Years went by, but... I kept, you know, those ten foreign binders. I moved them from one office to another office to our third office.
00:49:42
I mean, it was always on a bookcase in my office. It was always on your mind. It was always on my mind, you know, and that's to solve it.
00:49:51
There were times that Ken would call us and say, we're working on it, or, you know, we just don't have anything.
00:49:58
It just laid there. Two years, five, ten, thirteen, the file stared down from its shelf like an accusation.
00:50:09
But, of course, we wouldn't be telling you this story if something didn't happen, now would we?
00:50:16
But what turned out to be quite a surprise. Coming up, this is a homicide. We owe it to the family to go forward.
00:50:26
Another chance to solve the case? I was wondering what the hell's going on here.
00:50:29
Accusations like the one leveled at Tom Jaraseski can do corrosive things to a person.
00:50:55
Sour the joy of a sunrise on the Montana prairie. alter the look on a neighbor's face down at the local store.
00:51:09
After prosecutors decided to dismiss murder charges against him, John felt like he just couldn't live here anymore.
00:51:17
I couldn't stay in Montana. I needed to move away. And I decided to move to South Dakota.
00:51:22
So you set up a new life there. I did. I got married, had a couple kids. Life was good.
00:51:31
And truly, you thought it was over? I really did. I never thought it would ever come back again.
00:51:38
Neither did Tom's old girlfriend, Anne. Though she firmly believed Tom killed Brian, the man she'd left him for,
00:51:46
Montana soured for her, too. She went to visit a sister in Arkansas and stayed. Never found out that Tom moved away.
00:51:55
I didn't feel like I could go back home to Montana. Why? Because Tom was there. And I thought if he's willing to kill somebody to be with me, I didn't know what he would do.
00:52:11
Corrosive. That's what it was. But then, 13 years after Dr. Ryan's murder, this man got a new job.
00:52:21
This is Brant Light, who in 2009 became the top prosecutor in the Montana Attorney General's office.
00:52:28
And one of his duties was to help small counties prosecute particularly difficult cases, cold cases.
00:52:34
We don't get the slam dunks turned over to us. We get the older cases, we get the difficult cases, and we're expected to go forward with those cases.
00:52:43
Like the one Light's old friend Ken Thompson had never really given up on solving.
00:52:48
So I felt comfortable to go to Brad and say, would you just review this, see what you think?
00:52:52
What did you think as you reviewed the information? Was it something that was worth trying again?
00:52:57
Yeah, well, we had some work to do. I wanted them to go back out and to make sure everybody's still around.
00:53:04
We had to see what kind of shape the evidence was in. Evidence was resubmitted to the crime lab.
00:53:09
Witnesses were re-interviewed. More years passed. Is there ever a case to be made to just let it go?
00:53:16
How do you look at these things? I will let it go if we don't have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:53:21
I'm not going to roll the dice with somebody's life. This is a homicide. We owe it to the family to go forward.
00:53:28
In my bureau, that's what we do. And then, in February 2014, nearly 18 years after the murder,
00:53:36
Agent Thompson traveled to South Dakota with an arrest warrant for Tom Jaroszewski,
00:53:41
who heard his name called out one day at work and was ushered into the back of a police car.
00:53:48
I was wondering what the hell's going on here. And maybe a minute went by and then Ken Thompson popped his head through the door and said Tom remember me Told you I be back for you Tom called his family and asked them to track down that attorney
00:54:06
who'd helped him so much all those years before, Bob Peterson, who, for some reason, had been listening to a nagging little voice in his head all those years
00:54:16
that told him, keep the file. Usually I'd destroy all my files after ten years, but for whatever reason, I maintained his files.
00:54:27
And so, when Tom was charged again with murder, Peterson got busy. First he got Tom out on bond attached to a GPS monitor
00:54:36
and then he read through his old files and asked to see the prosecution's new evidence.
00:54:43
My whole position was, let's see what they think they have. When he did, Attorney Peterson could not have been more surprised.
00:54:54
It was almost verbatim the same affidavit that was used in 1998 to charge him. No new evidence?
00:55:03
None. I couldn't believe that they would bring these charges back up again and not have one piece of new evidence to justify them doing that.
00:55:17
You were mad? It made me mad, yes. And I know I'm not being very outraged about that.
00:55:23
We defense attorneys have to control our emotions. Who was the defense attorney angry with?
00:55:31
We had a prosecutor with a big ego, fashioned himself to be a cold case expert, and an investigator who has stewed about this case since the beginning of it in 1996
00:55:47
and had an obsession with Tom. Then all he wanted to do was get this case squared away before he retired.
00:55:57
You're not really suggesting that a detective would persuade a prosecutor to go ahead with a case, a favorite case of his, just because he happened to be retiring.
00:56:13
Yeah, I really am. To which both investigator Thompson and prosecutor Light replied,
00:56:20
no, it was justice they had in mind, not retirement. Oh, and when attorney Peterson asked a judge to throw out the murder charge,
00:56:29
the answer was, oh no, it wasn't going to go away. Not this time. Coming up. It was murder.
00:56:39
After almost 20 years, the case heads to court. If you ever cheat on me, I'll kill him and I'll kill you.
00:56:46
Tom Jaraseski in a fight for his life when Dateline continues. The veterinarian's little bunkhouse is long gone now,
00:57:06
burned its embers ground into the prairie dust. The young woman who'd fallen hard for the dashing vet is a happily married Arkansas mother of three,
00:57:17
and the young man, accused of killing Dr. Brian Ryan, has growing sons of his own.
00:57:23
But two decades were a mere whisker of time to the law and the historic Choteau County Courthouse,
00:57:30
where in September 2015, six years after the case was reopened, 19 years after the murder,
00:57:38
Tom's sister and the rest of the Jaroszewski family assembled on one side of the courtroom.
00:57:43
It was hard seeing people that you thought were your friends sitting on that other side of the courtroom.
00:57:52
That would be a number of local people, along with Dr. Ryan's family, whose attitude, must be said, was unlike that of many victims' families.
00:58:03
I remember having a huge sinking feeling in my heart, thinking, can we not just let this go and be done with it?
00:58:11
Well, a tough case, to be sure, said Prosecutor Brent Light, but to just throw up your hands and say, well, this is too tough,
00:58:18
or I don't want to lose a case, that's just not right. Mind you, Prosecutor Light himself could not be in the courtroom.
00:58:26
He had another fight on his hands against lung cancer. So he handed the trial to two trusted deputies,
00:58:33
Dan Gazinski and Mary Coconar. It was murder. It was murder that was planned. It was a murder that was premeditated.
00:58:43
And it was a murder where no evidence would be left. The big evidence was, of course, Tom Jaroszewski's bizarre behavior in the weeks after Ann broke up with him and began dating Dr. Ryan.
00:58:55
This friend of Ann's testified. I thought that Ryan should watch his back. Ann herself told the jury about the hang-up calls,
00:59:05
about the time Tom snuck into her house and read her diary, about his middle-of-the-night visits to Dr. Ryan's trailer.
00:59:12
I'm scared. I didn't know what was going to happen after Tom had been acting so weird.
00:59:20
The stalking was just unbelievable. I mean, he was overwhelmed by the fact that he had lost Ann Wishman.
00:59:29
And he had done everything he could to try to break them up. And I think at the very end, when he understood that that wasn't going to happen,
00:59:38
the only thing left was to take Brian out of the picture. In fact, remember this?
00:59:46
Ann testified about that time she said Tom once threatened to do just that. Should she ever cheat on him with any other guy?
00:59:54
He said if you ever cheat on me I kill him and I kill you or I want to kill you Tom by the way has long denied ever saying that But even after the murder Ann said Tom kept pursuing her
01:00:09
Letters, cards, phone calls. He said he dreamed that we had gotten married and we had kids
01:00:15
and was telling me, you know, like we went into detail about a life we were living together.
01:00:24
So, how did he do it? He put his plan into action, said Prosecutor Light, when Dr. Rine was away at that conference
01:00:31
before returning home on Friday, July the 12th. I think Tom Jaroszewski had finally made up his mind,
01:00:39
and I don't think he had any problem going in the trailer, and I think he located the gun.
01:00:43
Yes, he argued, Tom stole Dr. Rine's own gun. And then that Friday night, Tom placed a hang-up call to Dr. Ryan at 9.45 p.m. to ensure he was home.
01:00:55
And soon after that, a second call to a second location in another town a half an hour down the road.
01:01:02
He calls and answers. He hangs up. So now he knows Ann's in Great Falls. That's 36 miles away.
01:01:10
So he knew that he could go over there and not find anybody there besides Brian.
01:01:16
Then he got into his ATV, headed over to the bunkhouse. Was that what his neighbor saw?
01:01:25
Well, later towards the evening, I did see a four-wheeler go by. The ATV was dark green.
01:01:31
Mr. Jaroszewski owns a green and black ATV, and within 19 years, no one has ever stepped forward
01:01:38
to determine who else in that small community had a green and black ATV. Nobody did.
01:01:45
When Tom arrived at the bunkhouse, said the prosecutor, he waited in the bushes where he could see Dr. Ryan's door.
01:01:52
He's got the weapon there, and I think at the appropriate time, he decides that he's going to walk up to the back door.
01:02:01
And that must have been when Tom threw the holster in the grass, where it was found later, said Prosecutor Light.
01:02:08
Now, it just so happens that Ann makes a call to Brian. They even talk about getting a restraining order against Tom Jaroszewski.
01:02:16
And then Ann says that Brian almost abruptly gets off the phone as if somebody's there.
01:02:21
According to Ann, that was about 10.40 p.m. I think Brian then heard him, went to the back door,
01:02:30
and I think at that point, when there's Thomas Jaroszewski sitting on that back porch, has a gun,
01:02:36
I think immediately Brian knew what was going on and the fight was on. and I think it was a struggle.
01:02:44
I think he shot him twice in the arm. I think he then, Brian struggled back to try to get the phone
01:02:51
and Thomas shot him in the chest, left the weapon, got on that ATV and took off.
01:02:59
And then he had hurt his back, so the next day he had to go to the hospital and there you go.
01:03:05
And that was the prosecution's case. All circumstantial, no physical evidence was ever found to link Tom to the murder scene.
01:03:14
But the pieces, said the prosecution, fit together to tell quite a story. But only a story, Tom's defenders were about to say.
01:03:24
A tall tale, if you will. Which they added, a good Montana steak would undo in a hurry.
01:03:34
Coming up. The state had concluded that the time of death was Friday night. Why?
01:03:40
A whole new theory of the crime. It doesn't seem like a plausible time of death.
01:03:47
Dr. Rhyne's last meal would tell a tale of its own. A harrowing thing happened to Brian Ryan's sisters at the murder trial of Tom Jaroszewski.
01:04:10
They re-felt all the searing anger, loss, grief they tried to put behind them. I can distinctly remember sitting there almost feeling, great, we're going to have to relive this all over again.
01:04:27
Like attending a nightmare version of his funeral. But at this funeral, we're not saying anything nice about him.
01:04:33
Why would that be? Because the sister's new defense attorney, Bob Peterson, and his new co-counsel, Jennifer Striano,
01:04:40
would not only attack the case against Tom Jaraseski, They'd bring up all the old, long-forgotten gossip about Brian,
01:04:49
about what a ladies' man he was purported to be. When they went on about how he was a womanizer and he was having multiple affairs.
01:04:58
So she knew it was coming. But in fact, the defense went beyond that and cast doubt on the very idea that this 19-year-old mystery could be solved at all.
01:05:09
Throughout this trial, you will have the urge to want to solve this, and that's only natural.
01:05:21
But this case cannot be solved. All that immature behavior, said the defense, couldn't change two facts.
01:05:30
That Tom had never been a violent person, and that not a shred of physical evidence linked Tom to the murder scene.
01:05:38
said this forensic scientist. You never found any fingerprint belonging to Tom Jarazeski
01:05:46
in any of the items that you tested, did you? I did not. I mean, they had all of his creepy
01:05:54
behavior sure But beyond that they had nothing I mean they had nothing inside the house that connected him to this offense Those first responders all those years ago certainly gave the defense a juicy target
01:06:08
given how they treated Dr. Rine's murder at first like a suicide. You did not take any blood swabs that day.
01:06:16
Not that day. You did not take any fingerprints that day. Not that day. And what about throwing away potential evidence,
01:06:24
like that telephone they found under Dr. Ryan's head? We all looked at it, and I'm sure we decided there was nothing on it to save it,
01:06:32
or we wouldn't have thrown it out. The defense called them to the stand one by one to admit their mistakes.
01:06:39
Looking back now, Deputy Dallum, you probably shouldn't have done that. Yeah, we shouldn't have.
01:06:47
And if the state could make such a mess of things at the crime scene confusing the manner of death, said the defense. Maybe its theory about the time of death was wrong,
01:06:57
too. The state had concluded that the time of death was Friday night, and our question to them
01:07:04
always has been, why? Why did they choose that time other than it's the only time, really, Tom
01:07:11
doesn't have an alibi? But what if the state was wrong? In fact, said Tom's defenders, the state was
01:07:18
wrong. How did they know? Well, for one thing, there was Cody, Dr. Ryan's dog. If the state's
01:07:28
theory was correct, Cody then would have been left in that trailer with no exit for Friday
01:07:37
to Saturday night, Saturday till Sunday morning without going to the bathroom at all. There was
01:07:42
no evidence that he had gone to the bathroom at all in the house. Dr. Rine's sisters disputed the
01:07:50
idea that Cody couldn't have found some way in and out of the trailer, but the defense said it
01:07:55
had even more dramatic evidence that the murder did not happen until at the earliest Saturday
01:08:01
morning when Tom had an alibi. Remember, Dr. Rine returned home from a conference on Friday night,
01:08:08
But at about 7 p.m. that evening, two local men testified Brian stopped for dinner
01:08:15
at a place called the Square Butte Country Club. We ate and visited with him. And what Dr. Ryan had for dinner,
01:08:24
according to these witnesses, destroyed the state's theory of time of death. It was this retired rancher,
01:08:30
too ill to testify in person, who delivered the haymaker. By remembering clearly, he said,
01:08:37
what Brian had on his plate. Okay, and do you recall what he was doing when you sat down across from him?
01:08:49
I, uh, other than, uh, sitting there eating a good Montana steak, that's what he seemed to be most interested in.
01:09:00
A steak? Why was that important? because the autopsy, the one in which time of death was left blank,
01:09:09
did not reveal any steak in his digestive tract. How could that be if he died Friday night?
01:09:17
The defense called a forensic pathologist. So if he had eaten a steak at 7 o'clock at night
01:09:23
and was shot and killed at 11 o'clock at night, would there be steak still in his stomach contents?
01:09:33
Yeah, my opinion is that it doesn't seem like a plausible time of death. So what was in Dr. Rine's stomach?
01:09:43
According to the doctor who did the autopsy... There appeared to be scrambled eggs and green pepper and tomatoes.
01:09:52
And in the bunkhouse, eggshells in the garbage, dirty dishes in the sink, as if he'd made breakfast.
01:09:59
Although Dr. Rine's sister testified that it was Brian's habit to stay up late and make eggs and work late into the night,
01:10:07
the defense said the evidence pointed to Dr. Rine being killed not Friday night, but sometimes Saturday.
01:10:14
And there was a certain someone who had no alibi for Saturday. Someone you've already met.
01:10:22
Remember him? Larry Hagenbush was about to take the witness stand. And it's your statement that you then just went home, is that right?
01:10:35
Correct. And you were home alone that night. That's right. No question what the defense was about to imply, that the killer could have been him.
01:10:46
Coming up. He told this woman that Mr. Ryan was shot with his own gun. The 19-year-old mystery takes a sudden, dark twist.
01:10:56
He started describing things that you wouldn't know unless you had been there. When Dateline continues.
01:11:13
On day eight of his trial, Tom Jaroszewski's defense team attempted to flip the playing field.
01:11:20
Not only did they challenge the prosecution theory that Dr. Brian Rine's murder occurred on a Friday night,
01:11:28
they also pointed their suspicion at a man who had no alibi for Saturday. Larry Hagenbush.
01:11:39
That friend of Dr. Rine's, whose wife was leaving him, who had used medication he purloined from Dr. Rine to try to commit suicide a month before the murder.
01:11:48
But you took this combination of pills So that you could check out You wanted to kill yourself
01:11:54
It was time I mean I was done with all the BS It's To me, very plausible, Larry goes to Mr. Ryan's trailer.
01:12:05
He's upset. He's been drinking. He wants either more pills from Mr. Ryan. Mr. Ryan refuses, and Larry goes for the gun.
01:12:16
Thing is, the day Brian's body was discovered, Larry admitted he had gone over to the bunkhouse.
01:12:22
And the morning after, Larry broke down crying in the waiting room of a counselor's office.
01:12:28
And while people around him listened, He described things only someone with intimate knowledge of the crime scene would know about.
01:12:35
He started describing things you wouldn't know unless you had been there. That Mr. Ryan was laying on his back with his feet crossed, blood all over.
01:12:47
But the one fact that I think that's the most important that stood out to me was that he told this woman on Monday morning that Mr. Ryan was shot with his own gun.
01:12:59
In fact, this woman who worked in the office overheard Larry. Mr. Hagenbush make any statements about whose gun that was?
01:13:08
He said it was Brian's. Sunday, during that investigation, these officers did not know that this was Mr. Ryan's own firearm that had been used in this shooting.
01:13:22
So to me, that stood out as a major red flag. How did you know Brian was shot with his own gun?
01:13:28
I don't. I probably said a gun. By that time, I was in pretty good shock. Do you recall telling her that Brian was shot Saturday night?
01:13:39
No. Do you recall telling her that you were going to go out and have a six-pack of beer with him?
01:13:45
No. So if she knows all of that information Monday morning, do you know where she would have gotten that information?
01:13:54
I guess for me, but I don't remember any of that because I do remember telling our counselor that my best friend got shot.
01:14:02
So nobody saw you from Saturday morning, 7 in the morning, until they didn't see you all Saturday night.
01:14:12
Is that right? Correct. And Sunday you hear you come out to Brian's trailer, right?
01:14:19
Yeah. So that's the first time anybody sees you from Saturday morning to Sunday morning.
01:14:24
Correct. Larry denied any role in the shooting, and remember, detectives didn't charge him with anything.
01:14:31
But the defense had made its point. It comes back to they made a decision that Mr. Ryan died on Friday night.
01:14:39
And so Larry was around some people Friday night But all day Saturday and Saturday night and Sunday morning he wasn around anyone And then finally as if to twist the knife the defense brought up one more thing
01:14:54
The thing that so upset Dr. Rine's sisters. The fact that in the underwear Dr. Rine was wearing at the time of his death, there was DNA that was unidentified.
01:15:05
So my question would be as to when that would have gotten there and how and more importantly who.
01:15:14
The implication, of course, that he was seeing and having sex with someone in addition to Ann.
01:15:21
Another potential suspect added to the plot. We're just saying Tom may not be the only ex-boyfriend out there who would have been upset with Mr. Ryan.
01:15:30
That, in essence, was Tom Jaroszewski's defense. Anyone but Tom. Did you kill him?
01:15:37
No, I didn't. Do you think Larry Hagenbush did kill the doctor? You know, I have no idea who killed Brian.
01:15:48
I know what it's like to be an innocent person, wrongly accused. And I'm not going to sit here and accuse somebody else.
01:15:57
The end was coming very soon. Coming up. He committed this crime masterfully. Did he or didn't he?
01:16:07
This was an incredibly tough case. The jury's decision. What would it be? I put my head down on the table and I cried.
01:16:27
Imagine the poor jury was such a decision to make. The dreadful loss of a young man with a bright future.
01:16:34
but 19 years, a whole generation ago. Bad and suspicious behavior by the defendant,
01:16:41
but no physical evidence. But they did have to answer the question, did Tom Jaraseski pull the trigger?
01:16:49
For prosecutors, the question for the jury was, who else could have done it? Tom Jaraseski was the only person with the opportunity,
01:17:00
the only person with the motive to take Brian Ryan out of this world. And he did it.
01:17:08
And he committed this crime masterfully. The defense, in its closing, took a swipe at Ken Thompson,
01:17:15
the agent who for two decades wouldn't let the case go. We don't convict people because the lead investigator is retiring
01:17:29
and wants this case resolved just so we can close the book The jury went out first thing in the morning the next day
01:17:40
They did not return as quickly as one side at least expected. It's just the worst time when you have a jury out.
01:17:47
Every hour that went by was pretty painful. And then, minutes before the 5 o'clock whistle.
01:17:55
All right, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?
01:18:00
Yes, sir. I kept thinking if they said guilty, I thought, I'm going to fall down.
01:18:06
My heart beating so hard, so fast. Either I was going to have a life or I wasn't going to have a life.
01:18:15
We, the jury, duly impaneled and sworn to try the issues in the above entitled cause,
01:18:21
enter the following unanimous verdict. to the charge of deliberate homicide, not guilty.
01:18:27
Not guilty. I cried. I put my head down on the table and I cried. I just put my arm around him and said, it's finally over.
01:18:36
The case is dismissed. The defendant is free to get. Thank you. Let's go on out.
01:18:41
Go get a group on you. Yeah, you can get out there. His family, overjoyed, watched them cut off the GPS monitor.
01:18:53
Did you realize it was finally over? Yeah. It was a sense of relief. And seeing tears of happiness from my family.
01:19:08
It's the greatest thing ever. Calling my boys up in South Dakota. Telling them I'm coming home.
01:19:23
That was a wonderful call to make. But while that was going on, across the courtroom...
01:19:31
Do you remember that moment? Do you? Yeah. Almost like you lost them all over again.
01:19:49
I remember walking out of there and thinking, and it turned out exactly the way I thought it would.
01:19:55
Why did you waste our time? Did he? Ken Thompson didn't think so, of course. But...
01:20:03
Of course I was disappointed. My heart fell, but I truly was more a piece of people got to hear it all.
01:20:08
Because a jury said he was not guilty, I don't think that changes things. For most people he either believed he did or believed he didn What do you believe That he got away with murder Clearly not what the jury believed We asked Judge Greg Pinsky who spoke to the jurors after the trial
01:20:28
This was an incredibly tough case to prove. It was a tough case to prove in 1998.
01:20:35
It became an incredibly tough case to prove in 2015. What did the jury think were the weaknesses in the case?
01:20:45
Timing. They wanted to know why this case was coming to trial after 19 years. I think juries are motivated a lot by what they see on TV.
01:20:56
And when they see an old case on TV, they expect that there was some new scientific technological advance.
01:21:08
Some DNA or something. some DNA that suddenly cracked open this cold case after 19 years and brought it forward.
01:21:18
And that's not this case. A couple of months after the verdict, we went to Arkansas
01:21:22
to spend some time with the woman at the center of that long-ago love triangle and discovered she is still tormented by a guilt that will not go away.
01:21:34
She wonders, if it hadn't been for her, would Dr. Ryan be alive? It's odd, really.
01:21:40
whether or not Tom killed Dr. Rine, and especially if he didn't. Anne could have had nothing to feel guilty about.
01:21:47
And yet, she does. I know everybody says this to you, but stop it. It's not your fault.
01:21:54
It really isn't. Not even for a moment. I was hoping that if he was convicted, maybe that feeling would go away.
01:22:06
That's what I wanted. I wanted to say he's guilty. And then I could quit feeling guilty.
01:22:16
And they didn't. No, they didn't. So now I've got to figure out a different way.
01:22:26
So do they all. The prosecutor, believing he had the right guy all along, has closed the case.
01:22:32
But the judge? I mean it. When I told the jurors, when they wanted to find out who did this, when they wanted to solve this crime,
01:22:41
that literally, if they believe there's another world that they go to someday, look up Brian Ryan when you get there and ask him who killed him.
01:22:49
Because that's the only way that we're ever going to know who killed Brian Ryan.
01:22:58
That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us. you