00:00:00
My mom knew something was wrong. She's like, what's going on? And I'm like, I just got the phone call that Nikki's missing. My mom's like, what? I didn't tell my mom her daughter's missing.
00:00:17
Nicole was a loving young mom. Nikki was all about her kids. Embarking on a new life and a solo drive across the state.
00:00:26
It is a very wide open, desolate place. I found out my sister hadn't come home. Did she break down on the side of the road?
00:00:34
Did she get picked up by somebody? Kidnapping? Carjacking? Everything was on the table.
00:00:40
They found her car, along with a clue that maybe Nicole had romance on her mind.
00:00:46
There was a calendar, and on February 14th, Valentine's Day, there was a heart. Then, a message on Facebook.
00:00:53
Who is sending me something at this hour of the night? Because I got a message from Nikki.
00:00:58
So she's not really missing. She's off somewhere and she just doesn't want to be found.
00:01:02
Right. But where? I found one surveillance camera that captured the hallway. This is our biggest lead.
00:01:08
But the road to the truth would be bumpy. F*** you. How's that? Maybe even dangerous.
00:01:16
You didn't see that he had a gun. I missed it completely. Could anyone find answers for a frantic family?
00:01:22
Where is she? Why did she have to be? What happened to Nicole out on that lonely highway?
00:01:29
I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with Under the Prairie Sky.
00:01:41
Way out west, the view in every direction is as big as the sky and just about as empty.
00:01:49
across Montana from the better-known, breathtaking ski resorts that bring in a mountain of money,
00:01:58
sits the prairie where our story begins. It's a mystery that, without a doubt, remains to this day.
00:02:09
A tale wound around the slow, downward spiral of a group of longtime friends. You hear people say that life is high school with money, right?
00:02:20
Yeah. Well, this is high school with murder. Very much. The twists start with the discovery of a Ford Expedition,
00:02:31
alone on a bleak highway outside a small town. An expedition like this one that belonged to a woman named Nicole Waller.
00:02:40
She loved animals. I mean, as kids, we had mice, we had frogs, salamanders, and newts.
00:02:53
Childhood memories spill happily from Nicole's sister, Carmen. And as sisters, Carmen and Nicole loved, and sometimes loathed, each other.
00:03:05
The beauty of our relationship is we would butt heads, we could fight and scream,
00:03:09
But the moment we got in trouble for it, we were like in it together. Oh, well, we were just playing around, Dad.
00:03:19
Did that work? Sometimes. As adults, she needed anything and we were there. Nikki was the type of person that if you were low on food, she would be like, you know what?
00:03:32
Come over, have some dinner on me. She would literally give you the shirt off her back.
00:03:37
Nicole, Carmen, and another friend named Cammie all grew up together in the western Montana town of Kalispell,
00:03:45
just a stone's throw from the majesty of Glacier National Park. Cammie loved Nicole's free spirit.
00:03:53
She didn't have really a care in the world. No, we were young. We were kids. And Nicole especially acted like one.
00:04:02
In fact, when Cammy got married back in the late 90s, Nicole was a bridesmaid. And true to her personality, she missed the rehearsal.
00:04:11
But things changed in 2000. Nicole had a little girl when she was 18. How'd she change when she became a mom?
00:04:21
She became like, oh, I'm a mom. I can't go out and party all the time. I have a child. I have to get a job.
00:04:30
I'm going to go do a CNA. Nursing assistant. Yeah. And that's what she did. In 2002, at age 21, Nikki married a guy named Jason.
00:04:40
They welcomed two boys who joined their sister. Then medical problems started. A neurological condition put pressure on her brain.
00:04:50
Uncomfortable, but something she could live with. Her friends and family say it did take a toll on her marriage.
00:04:58
Eventually, she went on disability. It did not stop her. She never let it get her down.
00:05:05
She always thought positive. She didn't let life stop her. By 2012, things seemed to be looking up.
00:05:14
She'd reconnected with an old friend named Cody on Facebook and fallen head over heels for him.
00:05:19
And once her divorce was final, Nicole planned to move with her kids to join him
00:05:25
500 miles across the state on the Montana-North Dakota border, where the discovery of billions of barrels of oil
00:05:32
and an extraction process called fracking had led to a boom in an area known as the Bakken.
00:05:40
But before the final move could take place, during a trip to see Cody in February 2013,
00:05:46
Nicole texted her sister the night before Valentine's Day to say she was returning,
00:05:52
driving back home to see her kids who were staying with their dad And in between is a what eight or nine hour drive Correct A pretty long desolate eight or nine hour drive in some places Yes
00:06:05
But on those long drives across Montana, Nicole did have company. Tell me about your sister's relationship with her phone.
00:06:14
You know, some people love their pillow. My sister loved her phone. I swear she slept with it.
00:06:21
She certainly drove with it. That's why Nikki was the queen of texting. Where are you at? Did you stop and get gas yet?
00:06:28
You need to stay awake? Call me. But on this trip, neither those calls nor those texts arrived from Nicole.
00:06:36
You didn't talk to her every day? No. So the fact that a few days had gone by and you hadn't heard from her,
00:06:42
that was not in and of itself unusual or shy? No, because she'd come home, she'd sleep,
00:06:48
and want to spend that time with her children. so for me to go a couple days without hearing from her wasn't unusual.
00:06:54
What Carmen didn't realize is that while she wasn't worried, some friends of Nicole's were, because they hadn't heard from her,
00:07:01
worried enough to file a missing persons report. Which brings us back to that vehicle, Nicole's Expedition,
00:07:09
found on the side of the highway, about an hour up the road from her boyfriend's house.
00:07:15
It was after dark, on a frigid five-degree night in mid-February, when FBI agent Craig Overby received a call from another agent about that vehicle.
00:07:25
He asked me would I go out and take a look at the car and see if there's any evidence of why she might be missing.
00:07:33
So Overby, one of only a handful of FBI agents posted among the endless prairies of eastern Montana,
00:07:40
drove the 70 miles from his home to the edge of a small town called Potler. The car was locked, but we could see inside the car that it was just packed with belongings from the floor to the roof.
00:07:53
The agent quickly made a decision. Why'd you decide to go inside? It was very possible that an injured or deceased person was concealed under all of those things inside the car that we just couldn't see from the windows.
00:08:05
We opened the car, looked inside. Can you tell there's anybody in the car? No, but we heard sounds coming from the back.
00:08:12
Sound of what? I didn't know what it was. A sound I'd never heard before. It was a sound the agent would never forget.
00:08:24
What was making that strange sound? When we come back, a bizarre discovery. I was really surprised they were alive.
00:08:31
It was five degrees outside. And then it turns out the place where Nicole's car was found has a reputation.
00:08:38
I'm thinking you got to have a lot of stabbings to be called Stab City. Yeah. FBI agent Craig Overby was looking at Nicole Waller's Ford Expedition.
00:09:01
It had been found packed full of her belongings and abandoned on Montana's Fort Peck Indian
00:09:07
Reservation, about a mile outside the small town of Poplar. Overby heard something strange. The agent walked around to the back door, opened it, and...
00:09:19
There were two guinea pigs in the very back cargo area of the expedition. The two
00:09:23
guinea pigs were making squealing noises. They hadn't been fed in a while probably.
00:09:27
That's right. And I was really surprised they were alive. The car had been there for a few days
00:09:31
and it was five degrees outside. Would Nicole, the girl who loved animals, have walked away from those family pets?
00:09:39
It seemed unlikely. But the FBI knew nothing yet about Nicole. Only a highway patrolman's report
00:09:47
that her expedition had been sitting there for four days and that she was nowhere to be found.
00:09:54
The highways here in Montana are long and desolate. If you stop here, if you break down here,
00:10:01
if you're forced off the road here, it might be a long time before anyone comes to help.
00:10:07
And there's one more thing. The place where Nicole's vehicle was found was in an area so violent that decades ago police gave it a nickname.
00:10:16
They called it Stab City. The FBI has jurisdiction over certain crimes that occur on the Indian reservations throughout the country.
00:10:25
And so primarily we work violent crime investigations on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.
00:10:29
I'm thinking you've got to have a lot of stabbings to be called Stab City. Yeah. You know, not a lot of gun crime, but a lot of terrible assaults.
00:10:36
People that live on the reservation are some of the finest people in the world, but there are a few that abuse alcohol and drugs, which leads to a lot of violent crime.
00:10:43
If someone had stopped there or been made to stop there for some reason and was walking at a Poplar, would they be in a position of some danger?
00:10:51
Most of our crime are people who know each other. Random crime is very rare in Poplar.
00:10:58
Rare, but not unheard of. Just a year before, Overby was lead investigator when a schoolteacher named Sherry Arnold disappeared during a morning run
00:11:08
in a town less than an hour from the reservation. Massive searches did not find Sherry Arnold.
00:11:16
Her disappearance became national news. Just a week after Arnold vanished, an ex-con and an accomplice were arrested.
00:11:23
Like so many other men and women, they'd been drawn to the Bakken by the prospect of oil jobs.
00:11:29
and two months later, one of her killers led police to Sherry Arnold's body in a shallow grave.
00:11:37
Both men were eventually convicted of her murder. It really changed the nature of the community.
00:11:42
Eastern Montana was like Mayberry in a way prior to the Sherry Arnold case. That investigation was really fresh in our minds when Nicole Waller became missing.
00:11:51
Kidnapping? Carjacking? Everything was on the table From the beginning of Nicole case one clue seemed important Inside the expedition center console Agent Overby found her keys
00:12:06
Did you check to see whether the car could be started? Yeah, I started it. So presumably she didn't break down there.
00:12:13
That's correct. She stopped for some other reason. That's right. But then weirdly left the keys locked inside?
00:12:20
Agent Overby drove the expedition to an impound lot and called in Montana's Department of Criminal Investigation
00:12:26
and Agent Mark Hilliard, who acted as both crime scene technician and detective.
00:12:33
So as you go through the car, what do you find? It was somebody's life thrown into a vehicle.
00:12:38
And it didn't make sense to me. Why? Why is it like that? Nicole had health problems.
00:12:43
Were her meds in that vehicle? Yes, they were. I mean, it doesn't make any sense for her to walk away,
00:12:48
leave that medication when she needed it to survive. There was a calendar on the passenger floorboard,
00:12:54
and on the date of February 14th, Valentine's Day, it was like Cody forever in a heart.
00:13:01
And on the 15th, she had a medical appointment, which I thought was odd. She's got plans.
00:13:06
Across the state of Montana, the same day that search was going on, Nicole's sister Carmen found out from Nicole's friends
00:13:13
that she had never made it back to Kalispell. Immediately concerned or just thinking she's off the grid for a little bit?
00:13:22
Immediately concerned, like freaking out. So you talked to her on a Wednesday. She's going to come back on Thursday.
00:13:28
Correct. And now it's Monday and you're getting a call that no one's seen or heard from her.
00:13:32
Yeah, and I'm angry because nobody got a hold of me prior to that. And my mind is like, why?
00:13:38
And I'm like, OK, let me call the sheriff's office, you know, because I'm in disbelief.
00:13:42
Incredibly, Nicole's friends had filed a missing persons report without ever once checking with Nicole's family.
00:13:52
Any good reason why Nikki would go off the grid for four full days? None at all.
00:13:57
She wouldn't have left her kids. I must have made a dozen or more phone calls to her.
00:14:03
And you texted? Texted her. Where are you? What's going on? You know, please respond. Can you talk to us?
00:14:12
But again, from the woman known as the Queen of Texting, no response. So why would Nicole Waller just disappear?
00:14:21
It was time for investigators to speak with those who had last seen her. Coming up, why some thought Nicole might be just fine.
00:14:32
So she's not really missing. She's off somewhere and she just doesn't want to be found.
00:14:37
Right. And that does sound like Nikki. Very much so. when Dateline continues. Across western Montana,
00:14:56
word spread that Nicole Waller had disappeared while driving more than 500 miles across the state,
00:15:03
a trip that began near the booming Bakken oil patch on the border with North Dakota.
00:15:08
It was left to Nicole's sister Carmen to break the news to their mom. My mom knew something was wrong.
00:15:16
And she's like, what's going on? And I had to tell her. And I'm like, I just got the phone call that Nikki's missing.
00:15:26
My mom's like, what? And she's screaming at me on the phone. And it wasn't that she was mad at me.
00:15:33
It's fear. so I had to tell my mom her daughter's missing Carmen and her mother immediately wondered if Nicole's neurological condition was the cause
00:15:47
my mom and I called hospitals we called sheriff departments all just thinking okay did she have
00:15:55
some sort of medical issue on the way over and is unconscious and they brought in a Jane Doe
00:16:04
And they all told us no. They hadn't seen anybody with that. Looking for support, Carmen called her best friend Angie.
00:16:12
How'd she sound? Frantic. And Carmen's never frantic. Carmen is the most level-headed person I know.
00:16:19
What did you think had happened? Neither one of us really knew what was going on.
00:16:24
She was just disappeared. News of Nicole's vanishing spread via Facebook, where it was seen by longtime friends like Cammie.
00:16:32
And you know, at first you wonder if she's just somewhere, you know, because this doesn't happen in small town USA.
00:16:41
So she's not really missing. She's off somewhere and she just doesn't want to be found.
00:16:46
Right. Or she doesn't want to talk to anybody. Right. And that does sound like Nikki.
00:16:50
Very much so. But before long, Nicole's friends and family wondered if something more sinister was behind the disappearance.
00:16:59
Carmen called Nicole's estranged husband. Did you talk to Jason? Yes. I called him and asked him, have you seen Nikki? Have you heard from her?
00:17:09
And he says, I have not heard from her since the morning of the 14th. She was on her way home.
00:17:15
Detectives, too, called Jason Waller. Jason, you know I'm calling you today? Yes, I do.
00:17:22
Because, uh... Yeah, no one can find her. Jason said he had last spoken with his ex, Nicole.
00:17:28
at about 7 a.m. on Valentine's morning, February 14th, when she called to say she was headed back home
00:17:36
from her boyfriend Cody's house in eastern Montana. By all accounts, Nicole and Jason got along well.
00:17:43
They had an open-door policy regarding visitation for their two boys, and he was known as a good father.
00:17:50
There was, however, a big day coming up, a meeting about officially ending their marriage We were supposed to sign some divorce papers and parenting plans Monday That just why I was kind of wondering where she was at
00:18:06
And she didn't show? No, she hadn't. Is that like her? No, not usually. I mean, if she's going to stop somewhere or her truck's having problems, she'll call me.
00:18:15
Because I'm a mechanic. Do you think he could have had anything to do with this?
00:18:19
No. He had the boys. He was working. Just no way. Carmen felt the same way about Cody Johnston, Nicole's boyfriend.
00:18:29
He'd been an old friend of the family since high school, before he and Nicole had reconnected on Facebook in 2012.
00:18:37
We live in a world in which the boyfriend is always the first suspect. Right. Did you suspect Cody?
00:18:43
Not at all. When you got Cody on the phone, what did he say? I said, hey bud, how's it going?
00:18:47
And I'm like, have you seen my sister? Have you heard from her? And he's like, I haven't talked to her since Thursday.
00:18:53
And I said, Cody, my sister never made it home. Cody, as the last person known to see Nicole alive, also received a call from investigators.
00:19:04
And he volunteered to go to the police department for an interview. I am recording this.
00:19:08
Cody told detectives that on the night before Valentine's Day, he and Nicole had been arguing and decided to break up.
00:19:16
He said he drove to his workplace where he was a diesel mechanic at a trucking firm.
00:19:20
That was 12 miles from the home he owned in a small town called Fairview. Cody said he slept with a colleague in a camper that the company kept to help provide shelter
00:19:30
because of the chronic housing shortages during the oil boom. Still, the next morning, Cody said, Nicole texted him.
00:19:38
And then the last one she says to you is at 6.51 a.m. your dog needs food. Is that correct?
00:19:47
Mm-hmm. Cody said Nicole then called him a couple of times, but he didn't want to talk with her.
00:19:52
I said, fine, I shut my phone off, I go back to bed. Okay. Eight o'clock, I get up, I go in the shop, I get on the computer, her cell phone's on my plan,
00:20:04
so I shut the damn thing off because I can't block her. The only option I have is to suspend service on her phone.
00:20:09
Okay. Yeah, I shut off her phone, and I went to work. So maybe that's why Nicole didn't text that day.
00:20:18
She couldn't. Cody said he knew Nicole was leaving his house that morning, so he avoided her by staying at work until lunchtime.
00:20:27
It was Valentine's Day, February 14th. At lunchtime he went back. And she was already gone.
00:20:35
FBI agent Craig Overby. When he went home, he found it. She and all her belongings were gone.
00:20:40
And he figured she's headed home. That's right. and they had broken up and she was going back to Kalispell.
00:20:46
You know, I just hope she shows up. I hope she's okay. That's what everyone hoped.
00:20:53
And then just two days later came what looked like a break. Maybe a miracle. A Facebook message that changed everything.
00:21:04
Coming up, who's it from? Nicole Willis Waller. That's her Facebook name. Was Carmen now messaging with Nicole?
00:21:12
Where are you? What's going on? Where have you been? Yeah. It went from she's missing to she's just hiding.
00:21:33
As investigators looked into the disappearance of Nicole Waller, The options for where she might be seemed as endless as the plains of eastern Montana.
00:21:44
Department of Criminal Investigation Agent Mark Hilliard. Could she have walked away? Sure.
00:21:50
Could she have been abducted? Sure. Again, you just don't know, never, never know.
00:21:54
Then came a huge break, one week after Nicole apparently abandoned her Ford expedition.
00:22:01
Nicole's sister, Carmen, who'd spent every night tossing and turning since hearing the news,
00:22:06
heard a noise in the dark. My phone kept... It binged at me. And I'm like, who is sending me something at this hour of the night?
00:22:17
While I'm up, so I rolled over, grabbed my phone. And who's it from? Nicole Willis Waller.
00:22:24
That's how her Facebook name was. And I immediately bolt out of bed, and I'm panicking, I'm shaking,
00:22:33
and I read the message. Here it is. That Facebook message reads, everybody had a lovely evening. Not coming home. Don't laugh at me. Sorry I let everybody down.
00:22:48
Carmen got out of bed and frantically phoned her friend Angie. I got a message from Nikki. Sweet. She's live. So I pop on Facebook. I'm sending private messages to Nikki.
00:23:01
You're messaging Nikki on Facebook right then while you're still on with Carmen.
00:23:04
So is Carmen. Carmen's sending these private messages to her sister. I think it was like two or three that I sent back.
00:23:11
Where are you? What's going on? Where have you been? Yeah, we have the FBI and the police. Everybody's looking for you. Where are you?
00:23:18
And you could just hear it with every message sent and no reply. Carmen was getting more and more frantic.
00:23:26
And I just started crying because I'm frustrated. I was thinking, how could you send me something like that and then just leave me hanging?
00:23:34
You call your family and tell them that? No. You didn't tell your family that a Facebook message had come in from Nikki?
00:23:40
No. Because? I didn't want to get their hopes up. I didn't want to crush them that, hey, she reached out, but she wouldn't respond to me.
00:23:50
Okay, but if that message is legit, then she's alive. Right. I didn't want to give my parents false hope.
00:23:56
I had already felt like I had crushed him enough, Having to tell them that their child is missing.
00:24:02
By the light of day, Carmen and Angie took a closer look at the message. Just, please don't laugh at me.
00:24:09
That was Nikki. She didn't want to be the butt of anybody's jokes. I know I've made a mistake.
00:24:15
I want to hear about it. That sounds like her. That was very much sounded like Nikki.
00:24:19
That had to change the way everybody felt about this. Yeah, it went from she's just missing to she's just hiding.
00:24:27
Why would she hide? That's what none of us could figure out. But even though the message sounded like Nicole,
00:24:36
the more Angie and Carmen looked at it, the more skeptical they became. For example, Nicole was notoriously poor at spelling.
00:24:46
Ask anyone who knew her. Most texts sent by the so-called Queen of Texting practically required a translator.
00:24:54
In this new Facebook message, all the words were spelled correctly. and some of the facts were clearly misstated.
00:25:02
Had a lovely night. I mean, she'd been gone for like a week at that point. So she'd had seven or eight lovely nights in which she hadn't contacted anyone.
00:25:10
Right. So, of course, at that time, I have my cell phone with me. I take pictures.
00:25:16
I sent it to Craig Overby with the FBI. And I said, you know, I get this message, Craig.
00:25:21
This isn't right. It sounds to me like you thought she had sent that message, but that something was wrong with her.
00:25:28
Yeah. Maybe she's got too much pressure built up or she's had a head injury and that's why it sounds so odd.
00:25:37
As the FBI went to work trying to trace the message, frustration led Nicole's friend Cammie back to Facebook
00:25:44
to get the word out about her friend's disappearance. With the case of missing and subsequently murdered
00:25:51
schoolteacher Sherry Arnold still fresh in mind, Cammie started the Find Nicole Waller Facebook page.
00:25:59
When Nikki first went missing, there was no talk of it on the news. It wasn't in the newspaper.
00:26:06
And having just gone through the Sherry Arnold case, tons of people came out and looked for her, rightfully so.
00:26:14
But there was no word of a search party for Nikki. There was nothing. And when people go missing, you look for them.
00:26:21
That's what you do. And I was angry. It was like she was forgotten. Very much so.
00:26:25
I told Carmen that I was going to go over to eastern Montana and kick up a ruckus because she deserved to be looked for.
00:26:36
And we were basically told that we were not allowed to go to eastern Montana by law enforcement.
00:26:44
You feel helpless. You feel like you have to do something. something. But according to FBI agent Craig Overby, there was a very good reason for asking
00:26:56
Nicole's family and friends to handle this disappearance differently than the Sherry Arnold
00:27:01
matter. For one, Sherry Arnold was snatched off the street while jogging, a sneaker left behind.
00:27:09
We had leads on where Sherry Arnold may be, but we never had a good lead on where Nicole might be.
00:27:16
And Montana's too big. It's too big. It's just joint hands and people walk across the field.
00:27:20
Needle in a haystack. If I had a place to go look, I would go look. But we just, we never had that.
00:27:26
It's a big state. Plenty of places to hide. Or to hide someone. Coming up, investigators were about to take another look at Nicole's boyfriend.
00:27:40
But everyone seemed to agree Cody was awesome. He always seemed to be able to calm the storm with Nikki.
00:27:47
Which is a valuable talent to have around Nikki. She was a tornado sometimes. Cody was the best thing that ever happened to her.
00:27:53
When Dateline continues. The prairie winter of 2013 was cold, bleak, empty. Much like the mysterious disappearance of a 31-year-old mother of three named Nicole Waller.
00:28:20
There were no answers written on the Montana wind. Only her family left twisting in misery.
00:28:27
You haven't had a good night's sleep since this happened, have you? No. I want to find her.
00:28:34
Carmen clung to hope, especially after she received that Facebook message from Nicole's account.
00:28:41
The one that read, Everybody had a lovely evening. Not coming home. Don't laugh at me. Sorry I let everybody down.
00:28:51
That message seemed far more comforting than the other facts of the case. Nicole's Ford Expedition with all her stuff in it, found on an Indian reservation on the edge of a town once known as Stab City.
00:29:05
FBI agent Craig Overby was studying those facts. For someone who just disappeared like that in Montana is very unusual.
00:29:12
Nicole was the type of person who was in constant communication with her family and friends.
00:29:17
And so for her basically just seesaw communications, something was not right. Investigators circled back to the two men in Nicole's life,
00:29:26
her estranged husband Jason and her boyfriend Cody Johnston. Both men claimed they'd been at work the day she disappeared.
00:29:35
She said, well, there's nothing I can do. you know, if nothing's good enough for you, I'm gonna leave.
00:29:40
I said, okay, yeah, that's fine. So I'm going back to work. In that videotaped interview Cody had given to police,
00:29:47
he'd made no secret of how he and Nicole had been arguing for the 48 hours before her disappearance
00:29:54
and that it was his decision to break up Yeah I said we done I said I can do this Cody would there be any reason why anyone would suspect that you had something to do with her being gone or missing or anything
00:30:08
I hope not. It actually hurts me and upsets me if anybody would think that. I've done nothing but try to help her.
00:30:13
No, the last thing, no matter what she's ever done to me, I love her. And no, I wouldn't hurt her, and I don't want to see her hurt.
00:30:21
In fact, Nicole's family and friends felt that Cody was perhaps the very best thing that had ever happened to her.
00:30:28
They had big plans. We all thought that this was going to be Nikki's happily ever after.
00:30:34
He always seemed to be able to calm the storm, if you will, with Nikki. Which is a valuable talent to have around Nikki.
00:30:42
She was a tornado sometimes. He promised her the moon. He was going to take care of her.
00:30:49
And he was doing just that. Cody made six figures as a diesel mechanic in the oil fields,
00:30:55
and he wasn't shy about sharing it. I know one person that actually tried to do everything for her.
00:31:01
He was helping her manage her money, make really good financial decisions for her and her children,
00:31:08
helped her get a bigger home. He'd become so close with Nicole's daughter Ashland
00:31:13
that with her own father out of the picture, Ashland had started thinking of Cody as a parent.
00:31:19
My niece was always very protective. of my sister. Tried to shove out every boyfriend she ever had. I knew that it was serious when
00:31:28
Ashlyn told me I was ready to call him dad. The perfect guy. Right. Loves you, loves your kids.
00:31:36
Yeah. Takes care of everybody. And they're when you need them. Exactly. With all your faults and
00:31:42
everything. I love her dearly, but she's strained every relationship with every person she's ever
00:31:46
had. You know, I've taken her to every doctor's appointment I could. I've gone to her neurosurgeon
00:31:52
with her. Like many couples, they've been on and off. But by late 2012, just five months before
00:31:59
Nicole disappeared, they were back together. Because, well, if poor choices paid money,
00:32:06
Nicole Waller would have been a Rockefeller. My sister made a pretty big mistake. I think she was
00:32:14
just desperate because she realized that Cody was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
00:32:19
So she told Cody she was pregnant. Even though she was not. Exactly. How did she persuade him
00:32:27
that she was pregnant? She had taken my niece's ultrasound pictures, cut it off, like the date off,
00:32:37
and sent them to him. And I know it makes my sister right now look like a real winner, but
00:32:43
people have done worse to keep relationships. Here's the thing about lies. They work. This one did until about a month before Nicole vanished.
00:32:56
Finally, it all broke down to where she finally admitted to me about a month ago. She says,
00:33:01
I wasn't pregnant. I lied to you. So at that point, we talked, and I said, this is just, I said, you need help.
00:33:13
And it was about that time, Cody told detectives, that with his relationship with Nicole starting to crash,
00:33:20
another player would change the geometry of this story into a triangle. The night after Cody said Nicole left him
00:33:29
and headed for home, Valentine's Day, Thursday, February 14th, there was someone else sleeping in Cody's bed.
00:33:39
Coming up, for investigators, what appears to be an eye-popping clue in a very strange place.
00:33:47
I think Craig said, hey Mark, there's something up on the ceiling. Could it have been blood? Sure.
00:33:51
her name as it turned out was amber she was the other woman who arrived as the saying goes with
00:34:14
the bed barely cold here at cody johnston's house just a block from the north dakota border
00:34:20
That was the day after Nicole's expedition pulled away, pointed toward her home in western Montana.
00:34:27
I figured since I broke up with Nikki, then I would actually, you know, talk to Amber again and see if we could get something,
00:34:34
because she was a great girl. So what, if anything, did Amber Fleming's appearance
00:34:40
have to do with Nicole Waller's disappearance? Well, that was the question. Amber was a schoolteacher,
00:34:48
and in Montana, where everyone seems to know everyone else. She was also a lifelong friend with another woman you've already met,
00:34:56
Cammie. In 1999, at Cammie's wedding, where Nicole was a bridesmaid, yes, that's Amber.
00:35:05
She was the maid of honor. Nikki and Amber were both in your wedding. Yes. What's it like to look at those wedding photos now and see the two of them?
00:35:13
Seems like a completely different life. Nikki and Amber got along. They did? If you'd asked either of them, she would have said, she's my friend?
00:35:21
They were more acquaintances, two separate friend groups. And you're the connection.
00:35:26
Mm-hmm. Cammie considered herself best friends with both Nikki and Amber. In fact, she unwittingly introduced Cody to Amber and felt terrible when shortly after,
00:35:39
Nicole and Cody split, and then he took up with Amber. But remember when Nicole sent Cody those ultrasound photos?
00:35:48
and lied about being pregnant with Cody's child? That was Nicole play to get Cody back from Amber And it worked until Cody found out Nicole was lying I think she came back from Kalispell to try to rebuild their relationship but it was not working
00:36:05
And then investigators learned Cody started texting Amber again, just a few weeks before Nicole's disappearance.
00:36:13
Amber and Cody were texting about Nicole, and she was insisting that he end his relationship with Nicole if she was going to continue to see him.
00:36:21
And with that, the pot was stirred. Now it was up to state and federal agents to find out what was really going on
00:36:30
in what looked like a love triangle grudge match involving Cody, Amber, and Nicole.
00:36:38
He's dating a woman that she knows right in front of her, and she's lying to him about being pregnant and phonying up the evidence.
00:36:47
That's right. He was really upset about the fake pregnancy, and she was really upset about him seeing Amber.
00:36:53
The problem was that despite the way it looked, and for Cody, it didn't look good,
00:36:58
on the day Nicole left, there was no evidence implicating Cody in her disappearance.
00:37:05
None. And so, Cody's story is, I got home, she was gone, all her stuff was gone,
00:37:12
and I don't know how she got 60 miles away and stopped. That's right. He doesn't know anything about her leaving,
00:37:18
other than that she's gone. Investigators served a search warrant at Cody's house.
00:37:25
They took a video camera and searched room after room after room. You don't even really know what you're looking for, right?
00:37:34
No. And a lot of times, too, when you go into these crime scenes, you know, you have the luxury of having a body.
00:37:41
And just looking at the surrounding walls, you can kind of figure out, you tell a story.
00:37:45
This one, I didn't have a story. Any sign that a weapon was fired inside that house?
00:37:49
No. Similarly, no sign of a cleanup. No smell of cleansers. But there was this. I think Craig said, hey Mark, there's something up on the ceiling.
00:38:01
It was in the kitchen, and there were several of them there. It looked like it had some pattern to it.
00:38:07
Could it have been blood? Sure. You test it, and what is it? I came up with probably spaghetti sauce.
00:38:13
It wasn't human. There's some things that raise your eyebrows, but there's certainly no smoking gun in that house.
00:38:18
No, not at all. A contentious breakup. A man with another woman waiting in the wings.
00:38:24
And suspicion swirling. And then something that might change the course of this missing person's case.
00:38:31
A safe with a lock on it. And inside, maybe the answer to a mystery. Coming up. protruding from the safe door were documents.
00:38:45
We did see Nicole's name on the face of those. What could that mean? When Dateline continues.
00:38:55
Continuing our story. Nicole Waller has disappeared. Her family is frantic. I don't want to find her.
00:39:04
The last person to see Nicole, her boyfriend, who was also seeing someone else. Amber and Cody were texting and she was insisting that he end his relationship with Nicole.
00:39:15
Now, detectives are about to question Amber about Cody. I have a list of people that saw him at work.
00:39:25
We're asking questions too, and not everyone likes them. F*** you. How's that? F***.
00:39:33
Here again, the man on the receiving end of that, Josh Mankilis. Nicole Waller's family was teetering on the edge.
00:39:45
There'd been no word, nothing, since that odd Facebook message from her account a week after her disappearance.
00:39:53
As more and more time goes by after that Facebook message. I'm pretty sure my sister wasn't coming back.
00:40:02
Nicole's three children, like everyone else, were desperately waiting for word about their mom.
00:40:09
And Carmen, the rock of the family, was beginning to fracture under the pressure.
00:40:15
My girls were fighting. You know, they're girls. They fight. And something tripped.
00:40:25
And my husband, he said, didn't you ever fight with your sister? And I just lost it.
00:40:30
My husband carried me into my room, and I pretty much cried all night. I remember telling him it's not there.
00:40:42
Where is she? Why did she have to be? Investigators had looked at several possibilities in Nicole's disappearance.
00:40:51
Random crime centered in Stab City where her vehicle was found? No evidence of it.
00:40:57
Nicole hadn't left a single electronic footprint since she vanished on Valentine's Day.
00:41:05
Was she using any credit cards or debit cards? We did not find any activity. That's ominous. It also makes a deliberate disappearance way less likely.
00:41:17
The agents on the case had become suspicious of Nicole's boyfriend, Cody Johnston,
00:41:23
who had quickly taken up with another woman named Amber. had a love triangle played some role in Nicole's disappearance.
00:41:31
But with Nicole's vehicle 60 miles from Cody's house, and Nicole, or her body, still out there somewhere
00:41:39
in the many hundreds of square miles of grasslands, investigators had nothing more solid than suspicion.
00:41:49
With the case a couple of weeks old, investigators asked another pair of detectives
00:41:54
to take a crack at applying pressure on Cody and Amber during a trip the couple took to her hometown of Kalispell Gino Cook and his longtime partner Kip Tkachik
00:42:06
He would never do anything to ever jeopardize me and him. Amber insisted to detectives she'd spent the entire weekend with Cody
00:42:15
after Nicole left. And she said she saw no behavior that concerned her. He doesn't like to fight. He doesn't like to argue.
00:42:23
Is she covering for him? Is he covering for her? Are they covering for each other?
00:42:27
The thought was there. Absolutely. Detective Tkachik decided to lay it on the line with Amber.
00:42:33
What would really hurt me is if we came to Amber and said, Amber, you're now under arrest as an accessory to Nikki's death.
00:42:43
Okay, and I don't want that. Okay, no, and I'll talk, like, absolutely no. No, there's no inkling of anything.
00:42:52
Like, we do not, I mean, he does not know where she is. I do not know where she is.
00:42:57
Leave us out of this. Because we had nothing to do with it. You know, he was at work.
00:43:04
I have a list of people that saw him at work. For his part, Cody gave investigators two interviews that weekend.
00:43:15
As the hours passed and detectives asked him to go over his timeline again and again,
00:43:20
Cody did eventually lose his cool a bit. I just want to run back over a couple of things, get some timelines right, and then we'll be done with this.
00:43:30
I'm going to get my phone and I leave. Okay. Because you know what, Dino? You just out there and tell me that you're trying to get this.
00:43:39
You know, you got these kids that need their mother. You know, I bought them kids Christmas presents and birthday presents, and I've taken them to basketball games.
00:43:46
And I understand the importance of getting their mother back. It got to the point where he was pretty frustrated with the whole interview.
00:43:53
Because he thought you didn't trust him or because he thought I'm under suspicion here and I shouldn't be?
00:43:58
I believe so. I think that he thought he was under suspicion. Cody and Amber soon left the Justice Building.
00:44:04
But authorities, in an effort to find some evidence that might link Cody to Nicole's disappearance,
00:44:10
confiscated his pickup. And in the back of the truck, they found an item that interested them greatly.
00:44:17
An item taken from Nicole's house. It was a like a diamond plate toolbox. When that toolbox was opened up, there was a black plastic bag.
00:44:28
And inside that black plastic bag was the gray safe. And protruding from the safe door, which was locked, were documents.
00:44:35
I didn't know what they were at that time, but we did see Nicole's name on the face of those.
00:44:40
Was there anything valuable in the safe? Not in regards to gold, silver, you know, diamond rings, jewelry, nothing, nothing of that sort.
00:44:49
personal documentation detectives hung on to the safe and its contents amber and Cody returned to eastern Montana and it's a long trip
00:45:00
no one's watching or were they the unblinking eye of a camera perched high above that lonely highway where Nicole disappeared
00:45:11
was about to tell investigators something they needed to know Coming up, the tale of the tape.
00:45:20
This is our biggest lead. This is our best lead. And then, for investigators, a new person to focus on.
00:45:26
And the shock of a lifetime. I missed it completely. You didn't see that he had a gun?
00:45:31
In the book of riddles that lay open before FBI agent Craig Overby, the toughest one to solve was this.
00:45:52
If, in fact, Cody Johnston was involved in the disappearance and possible death of Nicole Waller,
00:46:00
how did her Ford expedition end up more than an hour from his home on Valentine's Day 2013,
00:46:08
at a time when Cody said he was at work? The agent's thoughts returned to that kidnap murder case he'd worked the year before.
00:46:17
It's a protocol in a missing person investigation to get on surveillance videos right away.
00:46:23
We learned that in the Sherry Arnold case. Surveillance videos that we obtained from local businesses gave us a lot of evidence about what happened.
00:46:29
So in this case, we went out and started thinking about videos that might have captured her car going from the Sydney area to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.
00:46:39
This is not Los Angeles or Chicago where anything that happens outside is probably going to be on some piece of security tape.
00:46:48
That's right. In fact, in the 70 miles between Cody Johnson's house and where her car was found in Poplar,
00:46:55
I found one video, one surveillance camera that captured the highway. That one camera is here in Culbertson, a town of about 700 souls along the Missouri River.
00:47:08
It's atop the local high school, and it's aimed at Lonely Highway 2. Agent Overby asked for the tape from that camera from February 14th.
00:47:20
And? And sure enough, there's Nicole's vehicle coming through town. Here is that tape, and right there is Nicole's expedition.
00:47:29
You sure it's Nicole's car? Yes. Nicole's vehicle was two-toned, and this was a two-toned Ford Expedition.
00:47:36
Older model, not so many around anymore. People think that maybe you're going to find some video of an actual crime being committed,
00:47:44
but that's generally not what security video reveals. It's really more about building your timeline.
00:47:51
That's exactly right. And the time that Nicole's expedition passed that camera, which is situated almost exactly halfway,
00:48:00
between Cody's house and the town of Poplar, where the vehicle was found. Well, that only added to the intrigue.
00:48:08
Turns out the last text Nicole sent was on that Valentine's Day, when she texted her caregiver a little before 7.30 a.m., saying she was leaving.
00:48:20
Could you tell what time it was when her car passed that camera? Around 10 o'clock.
00:48:23
So she left at 7.30 and in two and a half hours, she only goes 35 miles? Something's not right.
00:48:30
Not right, but Agent Overby didn't stop there. He wondered, what else might be on that tape?
00:48:38
And right there, not far behind Nicole's expedition, was a pickup. It's a large F-350 pickup truck with an amber light.
00:48:47
Not exactly unusual out here in rural Montana to see a pickup on any road, but...
00:48:53
I was really interested in that pickup truck, and it was distinguishing because it had an amber warning light on its top.
00:48:59
You can't see the license plates. No. You can't tell from the tape who's at the wheel of either vehicle.
00:49:06
But now Overby and Hilliard had a hot lead. Who owned a pickup with an amber light?
00:49:14
Pretty soon they heard a name they'd never heard before. Bill Sordberg. Bill's farm's out in the middle of nowhere, and it's dark.
00:49:22
We go down a long dirt road to get to his house, and there I see the F-350 with the amber light on top in the driveway.
00:49:28
And you think what? that we've got a really, maybe a good suspect here or a very good witness.
00:49:34
Agent Hilliard could barely contain himself. I almost ran to the trailer to confront whomever
00:49:42
because I was so focused on, do we have a bad guy? Do we have a witness? Is Nicole here somewhere?
00:49:48
Could be. You know, I mean, this is our biggest lead. This is our best lead, and I wanted to find the answer.
00:49:55
When Bill came out and his wife came out, Bill kind of had a deer-in-the-headlights look.
00:49:59
on his face. And he said, Bill, can we talk to you in my vehicle? And so Bill said, sure.
00:50:04
The three men walked to the waiting FBI suburban. Bill got in the passenger side.
00:50:10
Mark got in the back seat. I got in the front and I looked down and Bill had a 45 point in my
00:50:16
direction. And I said, Bill, do you mind putting that gun up on the dash? And he took the magazine
00:50:20
out and jacked the round out and threw it up on the dash. I missed it completely. You didn't see
00:50:24
that he had a gun. I was so tunnel-visioned as far as getting him to cooperate. I didn't care.
00:50:29
And I put people in danger. He had a .45. He did. He looked back at me and goes,
00:50:34
I thought you were here to kill me. He thought I was a hit, man. What on earth was going on here?
00:50:41
Coming up, from out of the blue, what could be a serious blow to the case. That's got to be shocking. It was. It felt like the bottom was being dropped out yet again.
00:50:51
when Dateline continues. State investigator Mark Hilliard has been called by many names
00:51:08
over his two-decade career as a Montana lawman. But a hitman? Well, that was a new one.
00:51:16
But that's exactly who Bill Sorderberg thought the agent was when Hilliard and FBI agent Craig Overby showed up at Soderbergh's farmhouse.
00:51:26
A hitman Soderbergh believed had been hired by none other than Soderbergh's friend, Cody Johnston.
00:51:34
Time is 20, 30 hours. This is Agent Hilliard. Now, why would Bill Soderbergh think Cody Johnston would want to kill him?
00:51:42
In a series of interviews over the next couple of days, detectives learn the answer.
00:51:47
There's an old saying, a good friend will help you move, but a best friend will help you move a body.
00:51:57
Investigators thought Bill Soderberg fell somewhere in between. Oh, this is nuts.
00:52:03
Remember, investigators had been looking for an explanation for how Nicole's Ford expedition ended up 60 miles from Cody Johnston's house the morning of Valentine's Day 2013.
00:52:17
A time Cody claimed he was at work. Bill told investigators Cody called him around 8 a.m.,
00:52:25
saying Nicole had run off with another man. It was basically a game, you know. And Bill said the game came with a request.
00:52:33
Meet on the road in his pickup. Bill drives out through the highway and sees Cody driving Nicole's Ford Expedition.
00:52:41
And Bill says, I know something's not right. Does he know that's Nicole's car? He asked Cody about it, and Cody said, I'm just playing a practical joke on her,
00:52:49
and I'm going to take her car out to the reservation and drop it off. I know you all are more trusting out here in Montana than we are in the big city.
00:52:56
I have trouble believing anybody would fall for that. Knowing Bill, it doesn't surprise me that maybe he was just helping his friend out
00:53:05
in a mischievous thing, but not a criminal thing. So Bill said he did what Cody asked and took off following the expedition.
00:53:15
Not long after that is when the two vehicles, Nicole's Expedition and Bill's pickup,
00:53:21
were tagged by that camera atop the high school in Culbertson, Montana. A half hour later, Bill said, Cody stopped the expedition right where it was later found,
00:53:31
just a mile outside Poplar, that reservation town with a violent reputation. Would Cody have known about Stab City,
00:53:39
believe her car there as a way of throwing people off the track? He would, but Poplar is not a violent place to a stranger.
00:53:45
For a random person driving through Poplar, it's a very friendly place. And Cody probably didn't know that.
00:53:51
That's right. Bill said that when Cody jumped out of the expedition Bill thought it was strange that Cody was wearing gloves And I thinking what the hell you got two phones for Bill noticed that Cody was carrying two cell phones
00:54:05
And they actually stopped at a small store on the reservation and he saw Cody take the phone apart and throw it in a trash can.
00:54:11
The agents wondered, did that second cell phone belong to Nicole? And there was one more thing.
00:54:20
Bill said Cody was looking for a barrel. I just can't believe he asked for a barrel.
00:54:27
It was like one of the steel barrels with the red five-gallon drum. Well, I don't want one. I ain't got no lid on him.
00:54:34
For investigators, hearing that Cody was looking for a barrel big enough to hold a body
00:54:40
and one with a lid was confirmation that Nicole was dead and that Cody had killed her.
00:54:48
There has to be discussion about arresting him right then and there. We were talking to prosecutors as this was ongoing.
00:54:55
And prosecutors said, despite the evidence agents had gathered, this case still had one glaring hole.
00:55:02
Nicole's body had not been found. Weeks, then months passed without a word. And it was hard. You know, her birthday was May 22nd.
00:55:15
I decided to make my sister a cupcake and I put a candle in it and I make a wish and I blow it out.
00:55:25
What's the wish? That she'll be mad. Six months after Nicole vanished, though they were not yet ready to make an arrest,
00:55:34
authorities called together Nicole's family and broke the news. They believed Nicole had been killed by Cody, her body placed in a barrel and hidden somewhere.
00:55:46
That was devastating. For somebody that said they loved somebody so much, that's the way you get rid of them?
00:55:53
That she's just like trash? You're going to put her in a barrel and just get rid of her?
00:55:58
For Cammie, the news not only meant her friend Nicole was very likely dead, but it also meant another of her best friends, Amber,
00:56:07
was dating a suspected killer. And not just dating. Just after the first anniversary of Nicole's disappearance in March 2014,
00:56:18
Cody and Amber, seen here at a photo taken at a county fair, got engaged. Soon after, they were married.
00:56:27
Were you invited to the wedding? Thankfully. I was in another friend of mine's wedding.
00:56:32
It was heart-wrenching because Amber was my maid of honor. Were you supposed to be Amber's maid of honor?
00:56:39
I would have been in her wedding. I would have been helping her celebrate her happily ever after.
00:56:50
As Cody and Amber began their life together, Agent Hilliard, who was raised on the prairies of eastern Montana,
00:56:59
was scouring the oil fields and other areas for any trace of Nicole. I found some great holes when I was out looking for her. I jumped into a few of them.
00:57:09
How many times did you think maybe this is it? A few times. But the agent's search hit a snag in the spring of 2014
00:57:18
when he fell into a hole he could never have foreseen. I was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma cancer.
00:57:27
You're a young guy. That's got to be shocking. It was. It was shocking for me. It was shocking for my family.
00:57:33
But for Mark Hilliard, almost worse than the cancer, was having to call Karma and tell her what this might mean for her sister's case.
00:57:42
And it kind of felt like the bottom was being dropped out yet again. Like we couldn't catch a break.
00:57:47
I wanted to reassure her that, you know, nobody's going to forget about Nicole. If something happens to me, somebody's going to run with this.
00:57:56
Sounds like you're worried more about Nicole's family than you are about yourself.
00:58:00
They needed answers. And unbelievably, Agent Hilliard wasn't the only one wondering if he'd live long enough to find those answers.
00:58:09
Because when Hilliard began his cancer treatments, right alongside him was the prosecutor in charge of the case.
00:58:17
The chief of the Attorney General's Prosecution Services Bureau, Brant Light, who had lung cancer.
00:58:25
You and Agent Hilliard were getting chemo at the same time? Yeah, we actually were at the same facility and often talking about this case and working on the case as we were receiving our treatment.
00:58:36
For these two lawmen and longtime friends, how much time they had left on the job and on the earth was an unknown.
00:58:46
All of that might suggest that you would be in sort of a hurry to file this case.
00:58:51
But you didn't do that. You actually kind of slowed it down. I thought the longer that we put it off, the better it was for us.
00:58:58
In the back of our minds, we were hoping that maybe there would be a hunter or somebody who would discover her body.
00:59:04
That didn't happen. Nicole's family and friends were asked to be patient. And as the two-year anniversary of Nicole's disappearance came and went,
00:59:14
her case was featured on Dateline's digital series, Missing in America. Still, no body and no arrest.
00:59:22
I'm thinking that you must have been frustrated at this point, because after realizing that Nicole was never where her car was found,
00:59:31
and having Mr. Soderbergh say, here's what happened, prosecutors won't file a case.
00:59:37
And a lot of time goes by. It's difficult. The problem goes back. There's no body.
00:59:43
And up until this point, there had never been a prosecution of a no-body homicide in Montana.
00:59:48
Until finally August 2015 two and a half years after Nicole disappearance It would be a new development in cell phone tracking technology that would give the prosecutor the confidence to give the go ahead
01:00:05
And Agent Hilliard, back on the job in between cancer treatments, got to snap the handcuffs
01:00:11
on Cody Johnston. I go, you're being arrested for the murder of Nicole Waller. Didn't say a word to me.
01:00:20
It was time to see if Montana prosecutors could send a man to prison for the first time ever in a case without a body.
01:00:29
Coming up, the lack of a body wasn't the only problem. We don't have any of these traditional things that people expect.
01:00:38
Forensics, DNA, physical evidence. But could groundbreaking software save the day for prosecutors?
01:00:45
He was able to show us where Cody Johnston was on the very morning of the murder.
01:01:04
The Richland County Law and Justice Center in Sydney was to be the site where a jury would decide
01:01:10
if Cody Johnston had murdered Nicole Waller. Or maybe not. Because before Cody Johnston's trial started,
01:01:21
Prosecutor Brant Light did this. Reluctantly, we offered him a deal. We were certainly prepared to go to trial.
01:01:30
But you didn't have a body. We didn't have a body, and the family wanted the body.
01:01:34
The state's offer to Cody Johnston, give up Nicole's body, plead guilty, and receive 80 years in prison.
01:01:42
What was in it for Cody? no life sentence and possible parole after 17 years. I looked at it as a window for him.
01:01:51
If he ever wanted to get out, this was his one and only opportunity. And the response from Cody's attorneys?
01:01:56
Absolutely not. We're going to trial. We're going to trial, which was fine with me.
01:02:02
Fine, he says, but it came with a cost. Prosecutor Light was suffering from lung cancer.
01:02:08
He'd been going through chemotherapy, alongside state investigator and fellow cancer patient Mark Hilliard.
01:02:16
Now Light made a life-threatening decision. Three weeks before trial, I stopped treatment.
01:02:22
I have trouble believing that your doctors thought, great idea. No, they didn't think it was a great idea,
01:02:27
but I knew that to do those 16- to 18-hour days during trial, I needed to have energy.
01:02:32
So you're risking your own life to do that? I wasn't going to let this cancer change who I am.
01:02:36
I made such a commitment to the family that I wasn't going to let them down. To be safe in case his health was compromised and he couldn't continue,
01:02:46
the prosecutor brought in two assistants, Joel Thompson and Ole Olson, who understood the task ahead.
01:02:53
I think there was an awareness that you feel like the average person on the street is going to say,
01:02:57
how can you prosecute a case without a body? But the average people on the street, that's who's on your jury.
01:03:01
That was the big challenge for me. We don't have any of these traditional things that people expect.
01:03:06
in a homicide case, forensics, DNA, physical evidence, and is that glaring omission going to be something that the jury says that that is reasonable doubt?
01:03:17
By October 2016, when Cody Johnston's trial began, it had been three and a half years since Nicole Waller had vanished.
01:03:26
For all but a few months of that time, Cody had been a free man, out on bond. At trial, his wife Amber was in the front row, accompanied by their newborn son.
01:03:38
That was a shock. I did not know about the baby. And at the same time, it's anger because here he'd been out living his life,
01:03:46
and my sister is not out there living her life. Ladies and gentlemen, this week, we're going to take you back to Valentine's Day of 2013.
01:03:57
That Valentine's Day, prosecutors argued, was the final day of Nicole's life. It was the last day the woman her sister called the Queen of Texting had used her phone.
01:04:08
Since then, they said, Nicole had left no electronic trace, spent no money using credit or debit cards.
01:04:16
And in today's world, if somebody hasn't used any of those things, it can reasonably be presumed that they're no longer alive.
01:04:22
Exactly. And perhaps most revealingly, the state argued never after that day had Nicole reached out to the three children she loved so much?
01:04:33
She was, they argued, undoubtedly dead. As you sit here today, I'm sorry to ask you this.
01:04:40
Do you have any doubt in your mind as your sister that Nicole was gone? She's gone.
01:04:47
I don't believe she's alive anymore. But how was she killed, and why? Prosecutors began their case by calling a former detective
01:04:56
who's developed a groundbreaking software technology to accurately turn the route a cell phone travels
01:05:03
into something that looks like Google Maps. He was able to basically show us as if we had a tracker on his car
01:05:11
where Cody Johnston was on the very morning of the murder. And where Cody Johnston was, the state argued,
01:05:18
was not where he claimed he'd been. Remember, Cody said he and Nicole were fighting,
01:05:24
So he spent the night before Valentine's Day in a camper in Sydney, 12 miles away from
01:05:30
his home where Nicole was staying in Fairview. Cody said Nicole texted him at 6.51 a.m., then called him around 7.
01:05:39
But Cody didn't want to talk. I said, fine, I shut my phone off, I go back to bed.
01:05:44
8 o'clock, I get up, I go in the shop. But it turns out this map of the location of Cody's cell phone showed something else.
01:05:54
after that 7 a phone call from Nicole Right after that phone call he leaves and he heading to Fairview Fairview back to Cody house where Nicole had been staying
01:06:06
Here's the map, the state said, that proved it. So by 7.13, we see the device start to move towards Sydney.
01:06:13
Here's 7.18, just north of Sydney. Another one at 7.23. On the way up to Fairview to confront her, he calls her five, six times.
01:06:22
It wasn't her that was harassing him. It was him calling her because he was angry and getting more angry as he went up there to confront her.
01:06:30
At 7.25 a.m. in Fairview, records showed Nicole texted her caregiver, saying she was on her way back home.
01:06:37
She's moments from getting in her car and going back to Kalispell. He arrives at 7.26, according to the cell tower analysis.
01:06:47
Cody does. Cody does, and I think they had a horrible fight, and I think he exploded, whether he strangled her, whether he suffocated her.
01:06:55
That's one of the things we don't know because we don't have the body. Nicole's family and friends had always said Cody was such a great guy, and prosecutors agreed,
01:07:05
until they said he suddenly lost his cool and became so upset and so angry that he drove home and committed murder.
01:07:15
Though prosecutors said Amber had nothing to do with the crime, they said her calls and texts to Cody those last weeks
01:07:23
may have helped light the match that led to the killing. She was putting pressure days before Valentine's Day
01:07:30
that he had to make a choice. It's either her or me. And he kept reassuring her that she was the one
01:07:37
and that he just needed some time. Time, prosecutors argued, not only to break up with Nicole,
01:07:42
but also to get her out of that home he purchased for her over in Kalispell. You think this is not about love? You think this is about money?
01:07:50
Yeah, I think by the time we get to February 14th, love was kind of out the window then.
01:07:56
He had already seen Amber without Nicole knowing it. This was simply about how is this breakup going to go and who is going to get the home.
01:08:04
In fact, that night before Valentine's Day, Cody was so angry at Nicole that he had this man place a padlock on the home.
01:08:12
When Nicole talked to her estranged husband, Jason, on Valentine's Day morning, she found out what Cody had done.
01:08:18
I told her that there was padlocks on it. How, if at all, did she react to that?
01:08:25
Very upset. So upset, in fact, prosecutors theorized, that Nicole reminded Cody in that 7 a.m. phone call that he had sold her that home,
01:08:35
that she had a sales agreement in the safe showing she owned it, not him. To prosecutors, that's why Cody exploded and drove over,
01:08:45
and days later showed up at her home to take that safe, with the sales agreement still inside.
01:08:52
Cody Johnson had plenty of money. Why kill somebody over a mobile home? He'd put a lot of money into the home. He had basically told Amber, we are going to get this back.
01:09:02
And I think that was just the vehicle that started that angry argument that morning.
01:09:06
And he lost his cool and killed her. And after, prosecutors said what really proved Cody Johnston was a killer
01:09:13
was what they called the cover-up that followed Nicole's disappearance. What did he want? Did he ask you for anything at that time?
01:09:21
A barrel. By 9.30 that same morning, Cody had visited his friend Bill Sorderberg's house.
01:09:27
Prosecutors said he was looking for a way to dispose of Nicole's body. What else did he ask you for?
01:09:34
Get him a ride back from Poplar. Poplar, where Cody had driven and dropped Nicole's expedition, 60 miles up the road.
01:09:44
And during that time, from 9.30 a.m. until about 12.30 that afternoon, Cody Johnston turned his cell phone off,
01:09:54
reappearing, as this security video shows, shortly after 1 p.m. How often did he turn his phone off for three hours in the middle of the day?
01:10:03
Never. This was the only time he really went off the grid. And finally, prosecutors argued the cover-up included Cody asking friends
01:10:11
to send that Facebook message using Nicole's account, the one that gave false hope to her friends and family.
01:10:19
Two men turned him down. Another sent the message and said he felt terrible about what he'd done.
01:10:27
Yeah, after I did it, I realized it was probably not the best thing to do. If he had her password, why would he involve other people who could end up testifying against him?
01:10:36
I don't think Cody thought things through very well. I think that's the bottom line.
01:10:41
Finally, the prosecution rested. But did the state have enough to convict Cody? The defense was about to present its case.
01:10:50
And its star witness, Cody Johnston. Coming up, a disarming strategy. I was behaving badly.
01:10:59
I was being very childish and very vindictive. Cody, boldly owning his mistakes.
01:11:05
Actually, people believe you now. I've had just shy four years to run, and I'm here for my day in court.
01:11:11
The surprising case he would make to the jury when Dateline continues. I'm going to be up front with you guys.
01:11:29
When defense attorney Clark Matthews began his opening statement, he admitted his client, Cody Johnston, had done some strange things.
01:11:39
But murder, or as it's called in Montana, deliberate homicide? He said that was absurd.
01:11:46
Keep in mind your task is to determine whether they've proven to you beyond a reasonable doubt
01:11:51
that Cody deliberately killed Nicole. It's not Cody's responsibility to give you this explanation of why she's missing.
01:11:59
so You can't do it. If Matthews and his fellow counsel, Casey Moore, both of whom declined Dateline's request for an interview,
01:12:07
could convince even one of the jurors of reasonable doubt, Cody Johnston would walk out of this courtroom a free man.
01:12:15
Mr. Matthews, you may begin when you're... It turned out the first witness the defense called would be its only witness.
01:12:22
We would call it a stand, Cody Johnston. It was a move that shocked everyone at the prosecution table.
01:12:28
I would have bet my house that he wasn't going to take the stand. But Cody did, and portrayed himself as a hard-working father who'd bought Nicole a home,
01:12:38
taken her to doctor's appointments, and loved her children as his own. He told the jury he was an honorable man, who, despite dating Amber in the fall of 2012,
01:12:49
did the right thing when Nicole claimed she was having his baby. I broke up with her, and I went back to Nicole.
01:12:59
And did you eventually confirm with Nicole that she was not, in fact, pregnant? I told her that I loved her, but we couldn't do this.
01:13:14
That to carry on a lie like that for that long and stick to it. And Cody said the pregnancy wasn't the only thing Nicole was lying about.
01:13:28
He said she was also lying to herself. It turned out that over the years, Nicole had become addicted to painkillers.
01:13:37
She was making trips to a methadone clinic every two weeks to deal with her addiction.
01:13:42
I thought she needed to go to a treatment center and just get some help. Although prosecutors said medical records showed Nicole had been cleaning from narcotics or any non-prescription drugs for 10 months prior to her disappearance,
01:13:59
Cody claimed Nicole's refusal to go into treatment was the reason they broke up just before Valentine's Day.
01:14:06
He said she'd fallen off the wagon. You discussed with her a need for her to go to treatment.
01:14:16
Yes. Did she agree to do that? She told me that, well, first she said she wouldn't be able to do it because of her kids.
01:14:25
Yes, I made the decision that we just couldn't go on. There was a complication, he said.
01:14:31
That home he'd bought for Nicole. And despite that signed sales agreement found in the safe, Cody claimed Nicole had never paid him for the home.
01:14:42
And you believed you still owned the house? Yes. It was clear from texts sent by Amber that she wanted Cody to get Nicole out of the house as part of the breakup the morning of Valentine's Day.
01:14:56
Cody said he woke up in a camper at his workplace and Nicole called him and started yelling at him because Cody admitted he'd had the place padlocked.
01:15:04
I got concerned about her well-being, and I left then and I went towards my house.
01:15:14
Cody drove to Fairview. He admitted lying to investigators earlier when he claimed he never left work.
01:15:22
Her car was there I went into the house I didn find anybody there My assumption was that either she had went to the store to get cigarettes before she had left
01:15:39
or I didn't know she had left with somebody. So, are you saying when you went home to Fairview, you didn't see Nicole at all?
01:15:50
No, I did not. And Cody said it was another childish act to enlist the help of his friend Bill
01:15:56
to move Nicole's expedition 60 miles away to the town of Poplar. I was behaving badly. I was being very childish and very vindictive.
01:16:06
I figured I would move her car, I would drop it off, and she would call me later on,
01:16:11
and I would say, there's your car, get your stuff, please go home. Cody insisted he was never looking for a barrel large enough to put a body in,
01:16:20
only a small grease barrel to wash tools in. And he said he knew the lies he told,
01:16:26
especially enlisting his friend to send a message from Nicole's Facebook account,
01:16:31
did not make him look good. I was scared, so I thought it would be a harmless thing.
01:16:37
I'd get left alone, and she would come back. How do you feel about that decision?
01:16:42
She had terrible, terrible about it. Why should people believe you now? Well, I guess the only thing I can say is that I've had just shy of four years to run,
01:16:54
and I'm here for my day in court. Cody, did you kill Nicole Baller? No, I did not.
01:17:01
Before Cody Johnston could leave the stand, there was one more attorney waiting to question him,
01:17:08
Prosecutor Brant Light. Even though I never thought he would testify, I had prepared hundreds of questions for him anyway.
01:17:16
This was all about you getting away with murder, correct? No, sir. No body, no case, correct?
01:17:22
No, sir. I didn't really care what his answer was. I knew he was going to say no, no, no.
01:17:26
After dumping Nicole's vehicle, after hiding her body, you then spent the weekend with Amber, correct?
01:17:35
Yes. So you, let me get this straight. Wait a minute, sorry. No, no, I did not dump her body.
01:17:41
Yes, I spent the weekend with Amber. I was able to outline my case, really make my first closing argument to the jury and get him upset.
01:17:50
Just by cross-examining him. Just by crossing him. You're hoping this jury gives you a break because you successfully hid her body, correct?
01:17:57
No, sir. The prosecution had had its shot with Cody Johnston. It would soon be our turn.
01:18:05
Coming up. F*** you. How's that? A startling confrontation and the verdict. Will there be justice for Nicole?
01:18:18
I just started crying. Not long after the jury deliberating Cody Johnston's fate left the courtroom,
01:18:37
came word that the wait for a verdict would not be a long one. Joel calls me. He's like, get to the courthouse. The jury's back.
01:18:47
I'm like, but it's only been like two, three hours. We got to go. The record reflects that all of the members of the jury are present Any prosecutor will tell you a quick verdict is either very bad or very good news Sitting there next to Carmen Carmen not an emotional person She guarded
01:19:05
But my anxiety was at a 12 out of 10. Carmen's had to be at a 50 out of 10. Would Cody Johnston become the first defendant in Montana history
01:19:15
to be convicted of deliberate homicide in a no-body case? Count one. The answer was...
01:19:22
On the charge of deliberate homicide, we the jury find the defendant guilty. Guilty of Nicole's murder and of tampering with evidence by hiding her body.
01:19:33
I just started crying because finally the person that had taken my sister away was being punished.
01:19:40
The prosecutor, who stopped cancer treatments to save his strength for trial, now turned to Nicole's family in the front row.
01:19:48
When I see the look on their face, it's why I do this. Cody Johnston emptied his pockets, preparing to go to jail while awaiting sentencing.
01:20:02
Minutes later, he hugged his wife Amber and his baby boy for what could be the last time as a free man.
01:20:09
As we walked out of the courthouse that day, after it was just Carmen and I, she goes, is it bad I just wanted to go give Amber a hug?
01:20:16
It was so heart-wrenching to be so relieved for one person and yet feel so sorry for somebody else.
01:20:27
Before sentencing, the prosecutor again offered to give Cody a break, if he'd give up the location of Nicole's body.
01:20:34
We made an offer and it didn't go anywhere. We just kind of threw it out there and they didn't want to hear it.
01:20:40
Sentencing came in January 2017. And for the first time in the courtroom came Ashland, Nicole's daughter,
01:20:47
who was 12 when her mother disappeared. She was once so close to Cody that she thought of calling him Dad.
01:20:54
I want to know why. I mean, I know why this happened. But I want to know why someone would do this.
01:21:04
and I'm not saying that he is forgiven by me because he's not. I do feel like it is my fault that she's gone.
01:21:19
If I could have been there, I could have saved her. You know that this is not your fault.
01:21:31
Yes. I'm starting to believe it wasn't my fault, but it's still kind of hard. Twelve-year-olds are not supposed to save adults from other adults.
01:21:46
Yeah. He's not going to ruin me. I'm not going to let him. You're stronger than that.
01:21:53
Stronger than him. Even though I want to hurt him for what he's done to my mom, I'm not going to because that's stooping down to his level.
01:22:04
And my mom wouldn't want that. The sentence? Life in prison. And in March 2017, the Montana State Prison is where we found Cody,
01:22:17
who agreed to speak with us still claiming he knew nothing about Nicole disappearance I have to tell you having spoken to that family if you know anything if you know where she is you putting people through agony
01:22:32
Yeah, if I did, I would be, yes. And I don't know where she's at. But I do know if she showed up tomorrow,
01:22:40
things would be a lot different. I don't think she's going to show up tomorrow. I don't either, but I'll pray for it.
01:22:48
You have a new son? Yeah. When he grows up, what do you want him to think of you?
01:22:54
Well, I'm going through the appeal process, and hopefully at some point in time I'll get out of here.
01:23:00
But if not, what I want him to know about his father is that I love him and that I didn't do this
01:23:05
and that whether I'm here or with him, I'll always be there for him. Regrets? What did you do wrong?
01:23:15
Lied. Clearly. I don't know what else I can do but say I'm sorry. What are you sorry for if you didn't do this?
01:23:25
For moving your car. For not telling the truth to the police. Remember, prosecutors said Cody Johnston was a great guy until he wasn't.
01:23:35
Until his temper caused him to snap. And after we pressed him for a while, we saw a little of that.
01:23:42
If you had nothing to do with this, if you're innocent... I'm done. We're done. We're done.
01:23:48
I'm not doing this. Done. You're not going to make me look like an a** anymore. I've had enough of that.
01:23:56
Okay. F**k you. F**k you, you arrogant f**k. F**k you. How's that? I'm done. Thank you.
01:24:08
We persuaded him to stay long enough to answer the big question. Did you kill Nicole?
01:24:13
No, I did not. No, I would not. I'm not a killer. and nothing in my character has ever, ever spoken to the fact that I would be.
01:24:23
And with that, Cody Johnston returned to his new life in prison. He'll first be eligible for parole in 2049.
01:24:35
Two of the lawmen who put him behind bars live to fight again. Brant Light is still in treatment, but Mark Hilliard's cancer is in remission.
01:24:46
I think there may have been times when you didn't know whether you or Brandt were going to make it to the end of this case, but you both did.
01:24:53
Yeah, and we were taking on new cases. Glad to see that. Probably not as glad as you are, though.
01:25:00
Yeah, I'm glad to be here. The search for justice is over. The search for Nicole Waller is not.
01:25:10
There remains so much sadness. a daughter, sister, mother, and friend gone. Would it be easier if you had a grave to go visit?
01:25:23
Yeah, at least with a grave site. Or even if you go to Spread Her Ashes someplace,
01:25:28
there's someplace special where you can go talk. I don't have that. We're still in limbo.
01:25:36
Where's her body? She's out there someplace. We don't know. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
01:25:47
Thanks for joining us.