00:00:00
My mom was hysterical. My brother was crying as well. I just remember hearing your dad's gone.
00:00:09
He was in bed. There was something wrong with him. Did they tell you he was murdered?
00:00:15
I don't think they used the term murder right away. I think they said he'd been shot.
00:00:18
Gone? Dead? Murdered? None of that. Seemed real. How could this happen? Was the house broken into?
00:00:30
Did Bill have any problems with anyone? He had an affair a couple of years ago. Bill believes that there's this lady out there stalking him.
00:00:39
Someone starts tapping on the window. Whoa. I knew something was happening. There was just a lot of panic.
00:00:45
My dad was panicked. My family was panicked. Did you shoot your dad? Why would you ask that?
00:00:52
I see the guy for a weekend, but now he's murdered and you're coming to me. What actually happened the other night?
00:01:00
I'm not sure why you want me to respond. Have you ever seen a murder case in which so many people were pointing at the wrong suspect?
00:01:09
No, I just could not, I couldn't fathom this. A level of deviousness that's just hard to get your head around.
00:01:17
How much can one family bear? How do you contain horror? If this happened to you, where would you put it?
00:01:34
In a box? Would you carry it with you everywhere? An anchor? Chain to your soul?
00:01:43
The box is full of demons. Would you live in dread of the day you knew you'd have to pry it open and look inside?
00:01:52
A box full of, like, ghosts of my past. To confront a ghost like that, you gotta be ready.
00:01:59
Or would you put it off? Would you wait till next year? I moved from state to state, and that box followed me with me.
00:02:10
It followed me. Of course it did. It was his past. inside that box. And now, here he was,
00:02:21
prying it open. Will he ever be the same once he looks in there? It's a story. It's a story of a family.
00:02:30
And in this case, it's a story of my family. Here, more or less, is where the whole thing announced itself.
00:02:44
Darby, Montana, deep in the Bitterroot Valley, a town conceived in iniquity and born in crime,
00:02:51
some government man wrote long ago. Maybe so. I mean, diabolical hardly begins to describe it.
00:03:01
People do crazy things. It's just such a waste. You know, it's such a beautiful family.
00:03:07
It was June, a sunny Sunday afternoon, when a woman called 911. My name is Anne Dowd.
00:03:16
I'm the Lundraper Neville's road in Germany. And I just got home. And there's something wrong with my husband.
00:03:24
There's blood. And his eyes are all bruised. And he's cold. Is he really, Cam? Is he really?
00:03:33
No, he's not. The ambulance wailed down local Highway 93, then up the West Fork of the Bitterroot River.
00:03:42
You want to try CPRM? No, I can't, I can't. Toward a collection of homes perched like supplicants
00:03:52
beneath the staggering beauty of 10,000-foot Trapper Peak, on board the ambulance was Donna Renneker.
00:04:00
What's it like going out in a call like that? As an EMT or a paramedic, you get this adrenaline rush when you get a call.
00:04:08
and you're thinking about all the things that you're going to possibly be faced with.
00:04:13
We're getting people on the way, okay? Don't hang up on me. I don't want to wait, Dad.
00:04:19
I don't know if somebody's in the house or what. For that reason, the woman on the line, Ann Stout,
00:04:26
said she'd driven across a broad green meadow to a neighbor's house to make the call.
00:04:31
Dispatch told the crew the call was a possible code black. Meaning? Meaning possibly the person was dead.
00:04:39
But you still don't know what you're walking into. As the ambulance approached the house, Donna's partner suddenly realized something.
00:04:48
She said, you know, this must be Bill Stout's house. And I said, who's Bill Stout?
00:04:54
And she said, well, remember Ben, because it had been a big thing in the community.
00:05:00
Indeed. About which, more later. But just then, memory snapped to attention. And so they couldn't help but wonder.
00:05:11
And I don't want to insinuate anything. Could it possibly be a suicide? What happened when you got to the house?
00:05:17
Well, we walked in the house. And my partner went to the left and I went to the right.
00:05:25
I get almost to the laundry room and my partner says, Donna, in here. Here was a bedroom on the east end of the house.
00:05:36
There was something, someone, under the covers. I lifted the comforter back and then you could see, obviously, it was a gunshot wound.
00:05:46
Did it look like a suicide? Could it have been a suicide? Well, that was my first thought, was did he shoot himself?
00:05:55
Because the way he was laying in the bed As the ambulance crew backed out of the house investigators arrived in force to look at the body in the bed
00:06:07
County Attorney Bill Fulbright. There was definitely some appearances that maybe this was a suicide.
00:06:13
Things started to unravel pretty quickly once the detectives and the deputies got the scene under control.
00:06:19
Was there anything about the body that told them anything? You could tell that his body had been moved.
00:06:26
Bill's body clearly had been rearranged. After death? After death, yes. How could they tell?
00:06:34
There was blood, a lot of blood, dried on his skin, but not in the places that blood would be,
00:06:42
unless somebody rolled him over after he'd been dead for a bit. And then, of course, there were the bed linens, which didn't make sense at all.
00:06:52
There's a pillow that's partially covering his head, which struck everybody as odd if this was a person who committed suicide.
00:07:02
There were blood spatter on some of the bed linens that the comforter had been put over.
00:07:10
And this blood had come very straight down, and yet there was a comforter covering that part of the bedsheets.
00:07:17
And finally, after all that complicated analysis by trained professionals, there was this.
00:07:24
It was a pretty obvious thing right away that the handgun was not around Bill's body.
00:07:32
No gun, not in the bed or anywhere near Bill's body. Clearly this was not a suicide.
00:07:39
That became apparent very quickly, correct. Somebody killed the guy. Correct. Killed by the hands of another.
00:07:45
Hands of another. Such a loaded phrase. Turns out Bill's murder wasn't the only high-profile death in the Stout family.
00:07:59
I will never forget crying on my bed, thinking my life's never going to be the same.
00:08:03
My hero's gone. You're mourning him still. Yeah. For years I'd have these nightmares, and we're getting chased, and I'm trying to carry my brother.
00:08:12
And later, fright in the night. Someone starts tapping on my window. Whoa. I'm facing away from the window, and I'm terrified.
00:08:20
Someone's out there. Like, it's like a horror movie. Noah Stout, slim and strong, loved to run.
00:08:49
Was a cross-country man, Gonzaga University in Washington State. That summer, home from college, he'd taken a weekend trip with old friends and returned on Sunday.
00:09:03
To the nightmare waiting on Trapper Meadow Road. My mom was hysterical, and my brother was crying as well.
00:09:11
I just remember hearing, your dad's gone. and thinking, like, what do you mean he's gone?
00:09:16
Did they tell you he was murdered? I don't think they used the term murder right away.
00:09:21
I think they said, like, he'd been shot. No one knew, more than most, the ways grief can drag a family down.
00:09:29
Though it had begun, the Stout family saga, so well. Bill, his apparently murdered father,
00:09:38
had grown up in California, farm country, Central Valley. It's where he met and married Anne.
00:09:43
adopted her little boy, Ben. Noah and Matt soon followed, and they idolized big brother Ben.
00:09:52
Anyway, their dad, Bill, was a tradesman, a drywall installer. That's how he met Mark and Denise Ecker.
00:09:59
We had a downturn here in construction during the mid-'90s, and he would take the family, load up the three boys and Ann,
00:10:10
and he would start driving to Montana after he got off work on a Friday. Bill wanted something else, and he found what he was looking for on several trips up to Montana.
00:10:24
Found it here, outside the town of Darby, plunked down years and years ago, a few miles as the crow flies from the Montana-Idaho border.
00:10:35
Jenny Levy was a cub reporter around here. It's a really beautiful place, I think, that attracts a diverse group of people.
00:10:42
You have retirees and young families. But then there's kind of another side to the place, too, right?
00:10:48
Right. There's an interesting group of people in the West, I think, that prefer to live on the boundary of wilderness.
00:10:55
And in this out-of-the-way place, Bill bought 20 acres on Trapper Meadow Road and built this house with his very own hands.
00:11:04
Do you remember anything about that move? I wasn't pleased about it, so I was a strong dissenter in our move.
00:11:10
Some of my earliest memories, my dad telling me bedtime stories about a guy named Montana Mike, who was living all these adventures.
00:11:17
When he moved there, he was like, I'm going to be Montana Mike. He was telling the stories as much to himself as he was to me.
00:11:22
And that was really his dream, to live somewhere that I think he felt he could feel unencumbered, feel free, I think.
00:11:30
And Bill was happy, content. He did all the things Montana men did. You look in the dictionary, there's Bill, there's Montana.
00:11:40
That rugged, handsome, quiet hunter, the fisherman. Bill put up drywall around the valley.
00:11:50
Anne worked at a guest ranch and later at a long-term care facility. Anne put so much of herself into raising those boys and making a happy family life Those boys they were gentlemen Bill would tell me how proud he and Ann were of the grades that the kids had
00:12:09
because academically they were killing it. Until Ben was 18, he'd been away at college, was home on winter break.
00:12:18
and one awful day he left an obscure note on the fridge and walked into the woods and killed himself.
00:12:28
His death, that first family horror, now just a page and a file in a box. But Noah? Noah was just 11 and felt responsible somehow.
00:12:43
I will never forget crying on my bed and thinking my life's never going to be the same.
00:12:48
My hero's gone. You're mourning him still. Yeah, yeah. For years, I'd have these nightmares, and we're getting chased, and I'm trying to carry my brother.
00:12:58
Nothing was really the same after that. There was a stress that piled onto my parents as a result of my brother's death.
00:13:08
Marriage does come under enormous strain when a child dies, especially if a child dies in that way.
00:13:14
It wasn't their fault. Ben had a challenge that he felt that he couldn't overcome.
00:13:18
And he chose to make a decision that was entirely his own. Mark Ecker suggested counseling.
00:13:24
Bill's answer was unyielding. Oh, no, no, no, no, we're good. So it was kind of that pack it down inside,
00:13:35
and maybe we could deal with it some other day. But now, seven years after the day of Ben's suicide on the same property,
00:13:44
Bill was dead. I couldn't fathom this. gone, dead, murdered, none of that seemed real.
00:13:56
Oh, but it was. Did you mind go anywhere in particular? I mean, this is not something that happened in our small town, right?
00:14:03
I mean, there were like two high-profile deaths in our community in a few years,
00:14:06
and they were my family's at that house. Like, how is this happening? How indeed.
00:14:12
What's the old adage? Start close? there were sheriff's deputies coming to the door.
00:14:21
The town with eyes everywhere. I got the best cameras you could get. He monitors speed through the little main street of Darby.
00:14:30
It is often a useful tool during investigations. It's kind of unusual for a little town like Darby.
00:14:36
It's a little unusual. What did those eyes see? And hard questions for a son. Did you shoot your dad?
00:14:45
Why would you ask her? A setting June sun, long and lazy, was busy playing with color on Trapper Peak
00:15:08
as a flock of investigators settled into the house in the meadow with their probing eyes and endless questions.
00:15:15
One of the questions they asked is something like, would anyone want to hurt your dad?
00:15:18
My dad was like, again, like was a very kind person, like fairly introverted. Didn't know enough people to make them angry.
00:15:25
So, said Noah, said Bill's friends, no one would want to kill him. We would sit and talk and try to, how could this happen?
00:15:35
Was the house broken into? Then they just lost Ben. So how much can one family bear?
00:15:40
But as they looked carefully at Bill's body, his wound, his bed, investigators were focused on more specific things.
00:15:49
They'd get to who did it, sure. But first, a question that just might lead them there.
00:15:55
What time did Bill breathe his last, in his bed, before a bullet ended his life?
00:16:02
When the detectives and the coroner first arrived, what was the estimate of the amount of time that Bill had been dead?
00:16:08
When they first arrived, there was some indications that he'd been dead. I believe it was 8 to 10 hours at that point.
00:16:18
So if they arrived at 5 p.m., most likely that morning. Morning, correct. But that morning and all day, Bill had been alone at home.
00:16:29
Ann and their 16-year-old, Matt, had spent the whole day 70 miles up the highway in Missoula, shopping.
00:16:35
They both told the detectives Bill must have been killed soon after they left. What was Bill doing when you left?
00:16:43
Oh, he was still in bed sleeping. Matt confirmed they left that morning. We left him at the house about 8, 8.15, 8.30.
00:16:52
An alibi, if investigators could confirm it. But who would have seen them way out here in rural Montana?
00:17:01
You might be surprised. They put him at the right place at the right time. This is Larry Rose, who's proudly worn the badge for three decades as Marshal of Derby, population 800.
00:17:14
So how long you been Marshal here? 35 years. Larry's office right here on Main Street is a cowboy movie's fever dream.
00:17:24
Animal skins, an old-fashioned jail cell, just like time stopped in about 1880. We tried to keep it as western as we could.
00:17:34
But then, walk over here to the desk in the corner. That is a town-wide, very sophisticated surveillance system.
00:17:42
I got the best cameras you could get. There are video cameras everywhere. Cameras peering from flowerpots, storefronts, planter barrels.
00:17:53
How many cameras 60 I asked Nah more than that said the Marshal He always watching He monitors speed through the little main street of Darby
00:18:06
It is often a useful tool during investigations. It's kind of unusual for a little town like Darby.
00:18:11
It's a little unusual. So, if the Marshal's cameras could verify Matt and Ann had indeed driven up to Missoula that morning,
00:18:20
maybe they'd be in the clear. Matthew and I just planned the night before to just go first thing in the morning and do things in Missoula.
00:18:31
And sure enough, there were Ann and Matt, driving Bill's red truck through Darby, headed for Missoula, 8.28 a.m.
00:18:40
Once there, they had breakfast at IHOP, where Ann placed a call to Bill and got his voicemail.
00:18:47
We're having breakfast right now at IHOP, and then we're probably going to hit Costco last.
00:18:51
So if you can think of more stuff that I need to pick up, call and let me know. I'll see you later.
00:18:57
Love you. Bye. Anne said she and Matt went on to make several stops, Walmart, the mall, and so on.
00:19:04
And later in the afternoon, as promised, Costco, where again she tried to call Bill.
00:19:09
I haven't heard from you yet, so you must not need anything. Call me right away.
00:19:14
Bye. The marshals' cameras showed them heading back through Darby on the way home at 3.40 p.m., just as they said.
00:19:24
We walked in, and we were just putting things away, and I was yelling for Bill. And it was really quiet, so I didn't think anything of it.
00:19:34
I figured he had gone somewhere. But about 40 minutes after no Bill showing up, Ann opened the door to their bedroom.
00:19:44
And? He was in bed, and he didn't look like him. And then, said Matt, panic set in.
00:19:53
The mom, yep, left the house and we called 911. So Matt backed up his mom's story about what they did during that day, their movements, their timeline.
00:20:04
Yes, they had gone to Missoula and done various errands, correct. She was telling the truth?
00:20:10
Yes. Still, investigators had to ask the obvious questions. Do you have anything to do with the death of Bill?
00:20:20
No. I love Bill very much. He was very important to my life the way it was. I had had enough bad things happening in my life,
00:20:34
and he was always the stable person. Matt, on the other hand, said things that were a little surprising.
00:21:06
Because there's a wonderful woman in there that needs to know. I don't know. I honestly don't know anything about it.
00:21:15
Okay. Would you suspect that your mother would? I don't think so. I mean, occasionally they didn't really like to have...
00:21:25
I mean, they didn't have their little things. They? Little things? Well, now that was certainly true.
00:21:34
The untold story. Maybe not so little. Someone's out there, and I'm terrified. A late-night visitor who, for some reason, is targeting Noah's father.
00:21:49
Do you remember what you were thinking? Like, what did you do? Noah Stout unpacked the case file of his father's murder,
00:22:10
holed out page by page, and was transported right back to that Sunday evening in June
00:22:17
when Bill's body was found and those investigators were so full of questions. And the only thing I knew was going back to two years before that, right?
00:22:28
Thing was, Noah did know about someone who seemed to want to hurt his dad. So did his mother, Anne.
00:22:37
Though it took a few painful questions to get there. Did Bill have any problems with anyone?
00:22:44
Um, no. He got along well with everybody, but... He had an affair a couple of years ago.
00:22:58
And there it was, a path to follow. and told the investigators that two years before the murder,
00:23:05
Bill attended an old friend's wedding halfway across the country in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
00:23:11
Spent the weekend in a hotel where he became reacquainted, shall we say, with an old flame.
00:23:19
He told me that they only had sex a couple of times, But I think it was more of that they talked on the phone.
00:23:33
It was midlife stupid, said Bill, after Ann found out somehow and confronted him and he confessed.
00:23:41
He swore it was over. And it was. For him, that is. Not for her. When and how did you become aware that something had happened,
00:23:53
that your dad had maybe transgressed? I remember overhearing what was being yelled
00:24:00
and putting two and two together. Why were they fighting? Because, said Ann, that woman, that Arkansas woman, wouldn't let it go.
00:24:13
And what began to happen here on Trapper Meadow Road was terrifying. I remember it was late at night and my parents were arguing or something like that.
00:24:21
And at one point I hear one of my parents say, she's coming here. and I was like, well, what's happening?
00:24:31
And who's coming here? Then said Noah, in the still silence of a Montana night, he heard a car grinding up their long driveway,
00:24:41
heard it stop outside the house. And someone starts tapping on my window. Whoa. I'm facing away from the window and I'm terrified.
00:24:52
and someone's out there. Like, it's like a horror movie. So the next morning we come outside
00:24:59
and our cars have been egged and some other things have been thrown on our cars.
00:25:03
Like what? Like poop. And, like, just things have been thrown on our cars. And I know...
00:25:09
That's pretty disgusting. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Do you remember what you were thinking?
00:25:15
Like, what did you do, Dad? Like, what is happening? 9-1-1. 5 o'clock the next morning.
00:25:27
Yeah, my car just got egged. What's your name? Bill Stout, S-T-O-U-T. Bill called the sheriff's office to report the vandalism
00:25:36
and to tell them about the enraged woman who, with a sister now, was making his life a kind of hell.
00:25:43
It's two people from Arkansas. They've been harassed. It's a remote area, so if you hurry, you might catch them.
00:25:49
Bill told them, too, that he'd been getting weird hang-up phone calls. And he and his kids and even his friends started getting hateful emails from someone with a strange handle.
00:26:03
I started getting an email from... Freak of Ark. Freak of Ark. But I started getting these emails, and the emails would say things like, Bill and Ann are not going to remain married.
00:26:20
And I'm reading this, and I'm thinking, what does this mean? Why are they sending them to you?
00:26:24
So many emails. This one said Freak of Ark was changing her email address to Montana Barb 2001.
00:26:31
Letters arrived, too, postmarked from Fort Smith, Arkansas, one containing an invitation to a Welcome to Montana Together Again barbecue for Barbara and Bill,
00:26:43
an engagement party of sorts. Mark finally decided to say something to Bill. We're sitting in a restaurant in Salinas, and at one point during breakfast, I said to Bill,
00:26:55
I said, hey, I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but I'm getting several emails.
00:27:04
And he stopped me and he said, no, Mark, just it's this crazy person. And I said, OK, so I shouldn't shouldn't be worried about any of these.
00:27:13
And he said, no, no, don't don't be worried about us. We just let the whole thing go at that point.
00:27:18
Then less than two weeks before Bill's death, two things happened. a car followed Noah home late one night.
00:27:26
So what did your dad say about that car following up the driveway? I believe he said something like,
00:27:32
I should have gotten my gun or something like that. Then, a few days later, somebody took the gun.
00:27:40
Yeah, I just thought, well, it's probably you misplaced it or something like that.
00:27:44
The gun, a 9mm pistol, was normally stored in a gun safe in Bill and Ann's bedroom closet.
00:27:50
Bill was in a panic. Had that woman gotten into the house? He called a report in to the sheriff's office
00:27:57
saying this handgun's missing and he's concerned because he knows or he believes that there's this lady out there
00:28:06
who won't leave him alone stalking him. Well, and there's been evidence that she's been right there at the house.
00:28:12
Right. Tapping on the window. Right. Putting feces on the car. Yes. Eggs. It's very clear that this deeply affected Bill.
00:28:21
He was worried. And now Bill was dead. Sheriff's detectives received calls from nearly a dozen friends and family members of Bill's
00:28:31
about the woman in Arkansas. Her name? Barbara Miller. My reaction was, they got a murderer running around.
00:28:41
Put out a dragnet. Find this woman. There were people all the way from here in Montana to down in California.
00:28:47
that were pointing their finger at Barbara Miller, yes. Did that angry woman have something to do with what happened to Bill Stout?
00:28:56
Barbara Miller of Arkansas was about to receive a visit from investigators looking into a homicide.
00:29:07
She was definitely a person of interest to a suspect, somewhere in that category.
00:29:13
Questions. Would there be answers? I'm not going to let you tap any of that. Oh, that's fine. I'm not. I was just wondering.
00:29:20
I'm not going to let you spot on me. Bill Stout had been in the morgue two days when detectives made their move on the woman from Arkansas.
00:29:42
Not personally, though. They didn't rush to the airport. Instead, they'd picked up the phone,
00:29:48
called the sheriff in Fort Smith, Arkansas, asked if he'd mind sending some detectives
00:29:53
round to Barbara place That is the woman with whom Bill Stout had a brief affair who was suspected of harassing him and his family sending humiliating emails perhaps stealing his gun
00:30:05
and maybe killing him. She was definitely a person of interest to a suspect, somewhere in that category.
00:30:13
Hello, is this the Miller residence? At first, she said she had no idea why those detectives were so ramped up about her.
00:30:22
I see the guy for a weekend. and talked to him for a couple of months, and now he's murdered, and you're coming to me?
00:30:30
Well, we're brought to everybody, and so what we're doing is trying to find out, you know,
00:30:34
everybody that he knows. Why am I being questioned? Well, because he knew you, and so we were just wondering.
00:30:42
Why would someone in Arkansas want to hurt him? He should be looking for somebody who killed him.
00:30:49
Right. I don't see how I could help. So then the detectives changed tack a little and asked her about her email.
00:30:57
And that certainly produced a response. I'm not going to let you tap any of that email.
00:31:02
Oh, that's fine. I'm not. I was just wondering. I'm not going to let you spy on me. I didn't do... I haven't done anything. I haven't seen him.
00:31:09
Barbara Miller's mind raced as the detectives asked their invasive questions. And then the penny dropped.
00:31:17
They think I did it. Well, they certainly suspected it. Which made perfect sense, given what the police had heard about Barbara
00:31:24
from Bill's family and his friends and his co-workers. She was a little reluctant at first to tell us the story of how she got involved in all this.
00:31:35
Her liaison with Bill and all the rest of it. Understandable, really. Given. Barbara said she and Bill sort of slid into a relationship in their late teens.
00:31:51
Bill was a friend of her brother's. And things happened. When you first got together with him, did you have expectations that this was forever?
00:31:59
I did. But before long, it seemed Bill had other ideas. He basically told me he'd already gotten married once, right out of high school.
00:32:10
And it didn't last very long. He was very disillusioned with marriage. How was that for you?
00:32:16
I thought I could change his mind, but obviously he didn't feel the same way about it that I did.
00:32:24
And with that, it was over. It was my decision to move on. How did he take it? He was fine. I mean, as far as I know, I didn't have any more contact with him.
00:32:36
And pretty soon Barbara married someone else, moved with him to Arkansas, had a couple of kids, and forgot all about Bill.
00:32:46
Until it was 2005, a newly divorced Barbara attended her sister's wedding at this hotel in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
00:32:56
And it just so happened Bill was invited too. He'd kept up his friendship with Barbara's brothers.
00:33:03
Were you, like, looking for another husband at that stage? No, I was just, I was fine.
00:33:09
But on the evening, Barbara got to the hotel where the wedding was being held. We had been to the bachelorette party, and when we got back, he was there.
00:33:18
So what was it like to see him at this family gathering? It was surreal. I didn't know he was going to be there. He looked just the same.
00:33:28
Thirty years on? Oh, yeah. Did your heart do a little flip when you saw him? Yes. I had kept up with him at all, so we had a lot to talk about.
00:33:37
And that bar talk turned into hotel room talk, turned into something else. Along the way, for Bill anyway, inconvenient truths took a little holiday.
00:33:52
What did he tell you about his circumstances? He told me that he was separated and living apart from his wife.
00:34:01
Was he looking to get a divorce? Yes. might even have meant it, as biology worked its eternal magic
00:34:10
in that little weekend hotel room. And then Barbara drove home, and Bill flew back to Montana,
00:34:18
still both blissfully wrapped in a gauzy veil. For weeks, there were calls every day, letters, cards.
00:34:25
According to Barbara, plans were made for her to visit, and then move to Montana.
00:34:31
Until, a couple of months later, Something changed. Tell me what your first intimation was that there was something wrong.
00:34:39
He didn't call that night. And the last couple times I talked to him, he sounded distant.
00:34:47
And like, you know, he was having second thoughts. And after that, said Barbara, they never spoke again.
00:34:55
What was that like? It was sad. I was hurt. Oh, yeah. And, uh, but I understood.
00:35:01
Now, two years after she said she last heard from him, detectives were on her doorstep.
00:35:08
Detectives who weren't so sure she was really all that surprised and offended. I mean, you could ask all the questions you want.
00:35:16
That is the story. End of story. Oh, but it wasn't. Not even close. Barbara Miller seemed to be completely baffled.
00:35:30
Not only was she baffled, there was someone she was frightened of. I'm very scared of her.
00:35:37
I don't want to upset her. I don't want to be involved. The End They were all here in the file the pages that revealed his father betrayal of his mother trust And the awkward questions those detectives in Arkansas had good reason to put to Barbara Miller
00:36:09
the woman Bill Stout had bedded, then feared. He was terrified of her, of what she might do.
00:36:16
He was sure it was Barbara who sneaked onto his property, vandalized his home. 911?
00:36:22
one? Yeah, my car just got egged. Who'd tapped on his son's window at night. Who'd repeatedly
00:36:30
emailed Bill's friends and family from an account called Freak of Ark. He said, no, Mark, it's this
00:36:37
crazy person. When Bill told the sheriff that his nine millimeter pistol suddenly vanished,
00:36:43
he said he was pretty sure Barbara was behind it. He said, like, I've had a problem with this woman
00:36:48
in the past, and my dad was killed less than a month later. But a strange thing happened when Arkansas detectives questioned Barbara all about this.
00:36:58
How did she respond to those questions? Barbara Miller seemed to be completely baffled by the sudden appearance of law enforcement
00:37:07
interested in Bill Stout. She said? She said. Barbara's version of events was very different.
00:37:15
Like, after Bill made it clear their relationship was over, she said she sent only one angry email.
00:37:21
And after all that, nothing. No cards, no letters. Said she knew nothing at all about an email address called Freak of Arc.
00:37:30
And didn't do any of the awful things Bill thought she did up in Montana. In fact, Barbara said she was the one living in fear.
00:37:39
Not of Bill, but of Bill's wife, Anne. I'm very scared of her. I don't want to upset her.
00:37:48
I don't want to be involved in this. Scared? Of sweet, kind-hearted Ann Stout? Please.
00:37:57
But that's what she claimed. Barbara Miller told those detectives that after the affair with Bill broke off,
00:38:03
it was she who started getting a series of unnerving emails and phone calls from Ann.
00:38:09
Or so she said. What was the nature of the conversations? Was she angry? Were they friendly?
00:38:16
You know, as far as I can remember, she was trying to, like, be calm about it. I could hear, you know, the animosity and the anger come through every now and then,
00:38:28
but she was trying not to let that come out. I didn't want to be rude. It's almost like she wanted to be my friend.
00:38:35
I didn't want to be her friend, but I didn't want to hurt her feelings either. Southern manners? Perhaps.
00:38:43
Or maybe she was only too aware that Bill's wife might want to teach her a lesson.
00:38:48
My boss called me into his office and told me. What did he tell you? He asked me, you know, what's going on?
00:38:54
Because he got a phone call from a woman who said that I was using the company email for personal business.
00:39:02
Oh. Because she had threatened to put a restraining order on me, have the police come and serve it to me there.
00:39:09
But as detectives stood in front of Barbara's house just outside Fort Smith, Arkansas, none of that mattered now.
00:39:17
The only thing that did was to find out whether Barbara killed Bill Stout up in Montana or not.
00:39:24
Barbara needed an alibi right quick. Well, I showed him my telephone bills. I showed him, you know, I listen.
00:39:32
I go to work every day. I said, what day did this happen? Well, as we told you, it was a Sunday.
00:39:40
Happened to be the 10th of June. So where was Barbara then? And I said, I was at Walmart.
00:39:47
I have a receipt. This Walmart in Van Buren, Arkansas, to be exact. So she said.
00:39:55
So the detectives checked it out. They went to Walmart and got the footage of my husband and I buying groceries for a birthday party that we were going to.
00:40:09
Here it is. Just before 1 p.m., more than 1,600 miles across the country, a good 25-hour drive away from the home where Bill was killed.
00:40:19
You were at Walmart that time. I was at Walmart. And I'd never even been to Montana, period.
00:40:24
Once they saw that, they were probably a lot nicer to you. Yeah, they were just doing their job.
00:40:29
Sure. But though they searched high and low, detectives could not find even a hint of evidence that Barbara played any part in Bill's murder,
00:40:38
didn't shoot him herself, and didn't hire anybody else to do it either. So it couldn't have been her.
00:40:45
Couldn't have been her. I think this is perhaps the first time that I've sat across from a person accused by at least 10 other people of committing a murder.
00:40:56
And yet you're really kind of a nice person who lived 1,500 miles away from where it occurred.
00:41:02
And had no knowledge of it until after it happened. So then, who did? And what about all those cards and letters and emails?
00:41:16
All the harassment of Bill Stout and his wife Anne and his two sons and many of his friends by someone called the Freak of Ark.
00:41:23
There's a devious architecture to this sort of thing. Unexpected, complicated, even sophisticated.
00:41:34
But almost always with a little flaw. When Antstout came home, Bill had been dead for 8 to 10 hours.
00:41:46
A pretty big window. It could mean Bill was alive when they left. That could mean he was dead when they left, but it was really very much up in the air.
00:41:54
Correct And later Have you ever seen a murder case in which so many people close to the victim were pointing at the wrong suspect That was one of the unique things about this case It was the product of some detailed planning before the crime
00:42:25
A few days after Bill Stout's life was so cruelly ended, his family and friends gathered in Darby to say their goodbyes
00:42:35
to a man who loved Montana. It was packed. People shared a lot of nice memories that I hadn't heard of.
00:42:44
Things like, you know, I was in need, and your dad fixed my house for free and said,
00:42:48
don't worry about it, and things like that. There's so many people there that care about you,
00:42:52
care about your family. and it was a day I'll never forget. But investigators were right back at square one.
00:43:00
Their initial suspect, Barbara Miller, now ruled out as the person who killed Bill in his bed.
00:43:07
And yet there seemed to be so many red flags about her. How could Bill have been so wrong?
00:43:13
Up to the day he died, Bill actually believed Barbara Miller was stalking him and had ill intent.
00:43:19
So, if Barbara didn't kill Bill, who did? Detectives called in Bill's family. More questions to ask.
00:43:30
I'm at the Ravalli County Sheriff's Office in the interview room with Ann Stout.
00:43:35
Again, they went over, hour by hour, the last weekend of Bill's life. Is there something that you feel that I may have missed during our first conversation?
00:43:44
Remember, the first coroner on the scene said Bill likely died about 8 to 10 hours before his body was found.
00:43:54
And that was Sunday afternoon about 5 p.m., meaning he was likely murdered in the vicinity of 8 a.m.
00:44:02
When Ann and Matt were just leaving or had just left for a day of shopping in Missoula.
00:44:07
Both Ann and son Matt repeated what they'd said before. They simply didn't know what happened.
00:44:14
So it could mean Bill was alive when they left. It could mean he was dead when they left.
00:44:19
But it was really very much up in the air. Correct. And Matt said he was absolutely certain he did not hear a gunshot.
00:44:30
So the detectives went back to pay another visit to the Marshal of Darby and his cameras.
00:44:37
Ann had told detectives that on the day before he was murdered, Saturday, June 9th,
00:44:42
Bill went for a ride on his Harley. Said he was going to Missoula. And sure enough, 1.58 p.m. Saturday afternoon,
00:44:51
there is Bill riding his motorcycle through town, heading north. Then, 3.31 p.m., detectives found Bill walking into the Harley-Davidson store in Missoula
00:45:02
and walking back out 10 minutes later, 3.41. But from there... Now, for several hours, it was unknowable.
00:45:10
Riding his Harley, maybe? Did he see anyone? He told his wife he stopped and had a beer,
00:45:17
which, according to Ann, was out of character. Anyone who knows him would tell you that he never drinks during the day.
00:45:24
Never. Was Ann wondering if Bill, given his past affair, had been cheating on her again?
00:45:33
Well, no. The detectives found the bar where Bill stopped and confirmed he had one beer.
00:45:39
Apparently alone. And a few hours later, 7.55 p.m., the marshal's cameras caught Bill riding south through Darby back toward home.
00:45:49
Which meant he would have arrived a few minutes after 8 p.m. Which comported exactly with what Ann had told them.
00:45:59
She said she was grilling steak for dinner. So Bill drove up right when I was barbecuing,
00:46:04
right when I was taking it off the grill or turning it over. I gave to Matthew and I told Bill his will be a second.
00:46:10
Okay. And then I put broccoli on for Bill. We just steamed broccoli and Matthew won't eat broccoli.
00:46:14
Okay. And did you have a potato? Baked potatoes. While Bill and Ann were in for the evening, Matt had plans.
00:46:23
After dinner, Matt had left for a bonfire with the high school friends. The marshal's cameras caught Matt driving through Derby in his suburban at 9.08 p.m.
00:46:34
Ann said she and Bill watched TV. and then made love. At around 10 p.m., Bill called a friend
00:46:42
and made plans to go horseback riding the next day. That would be Sunday. Cameras caught Matt driving back home through Darby,
00:46:50
11.28 p.m. Saturday. Anne said she waited up for Matt, then joined Bill in the bedroom where he was already fast asleep.
00:46:58
So you woke up the next morning in your bed? I would sleep in my bed. I always sleep in my bed.
00:47:06
And it all fit. Most of it confirmed by those cameras. But there was one more little thing.
00:47:16
One more official-looking piece of paper. Noah fished out of that box. What could Ann Stout tell investigators about that?
00:47:29
We now knew we were dealing with a very narrow window of time. Could broccoli solve this murder?
00:47:36
The stomach stops digesting at the moment of death. The delicate things in our food are what you would see disappear first, and they were still there.
00:47:59
Music It was Friday, five days after Ann Stout called 911 to report the death of her husband Bill,
00:48:10
here on Trapper Meadow Road. The scene, the Revali County Courthouse, up the road in Hamilton, Montana.
00:48:19
Today's date is June 15, 2007. And investigators were about to deliver some unpleasant news,
00:48:25
because after Bill's death, an autopsy had been done. And according to the medical examiner, Bill Stout did not die on Sunday morning at around 8,
00:48:35
like the coroner on the scene had guessed. How did they know? Broccoli. That last meal Ann cooked for Bill on Saturday night when he got back from his motorcycle ride,
00:48:48
it was one of his favorites, steak, broccoli, and potatoes. And now, said the medical examiner, that last meal had told its story.
00:48:59
The stomach stops digesting at the moment of death. And what the medical examiner noticed was immediately upon seeing the stomach contents,
00:49:12
things that digest very quickly, potatoes, which they had, hadn't digested. In fact, he used his fingers like this and he said that the florets on the broccoli were still recognizable.
00:49:23
And those delicate things in our food are what you would see disappear first. And they were still there.
00:49:31
Meaning that Bill Stout must have been shot to death after eating his last meal, 9 p.m. or soon after, on Saturday night.
00:49:40
How did that change your theory of this crime? At that point, dramatically changed the landscape of the investigation
00:49:48
because we now knew we were dealing with a very narrow window of time, which became pretty evident was a window of time in which Ann was alone with Bill.
00:50:02
And if Bill Stout was killed when he was alone with Ann on Saturday night, well, that changed everything.
00:50:11
Ann Stout quite obviously had no idea what she was walking into with her attorney just off screen here that day at the sheriff's office.
00:50:20
Ann, in this folder are the results of our investigation. Okay. Can we pull up to the table together, you and I?
00:50:27
Okay. I do not want to see. I already shared with you. I don't have any pictures of graphic.
00:50:41
Yeah, I don't have that. Okay. Thing is, it wasn't just that last meal they wanted to talk to Anne about.
00:50:49
Crime scenes do tend to tell a story, even if sometimes it's hard to discern exactly what that story is.
00:50:56
And from the moment investigators walked into Anne and Bill's house, something didn't smell right about this one.
00:51:03
Literally. One of the pervading things spoken of by people who had been in the house early on
00:51:11
was that there was a very powerful smell of bleach throughout the house. Almost like someone had been cleaning up.
00:51:18
And sure enough, pretty soon they came across three loads of still wet laundry smelling strongly of bleach and stuffed into various places,
00:51:28
like in this laundry hamper. And inside the hamper? More than just clothes. What was a holster doing in there?
00:51:37
And a rubber glove? What did they find on that glove? On the outside of the glove and on the inside of the glove, DNA matching and stout.
00:51:48
Of course, there might have been an innocent answer. These could have been her regular cleaning gloves.
00:51:53
Who knew, really? But as for the holster, it was made for a 9mm pistol. and now things were about to get worse for Ann
00:52:02
because remember that gun Bill had reported missing from the safe just before his death?
00:52:09
It turned up to maybe 50 feet away from Bill's prostrate body. The handgun was found to be in the garage
00:52:19
inside of one of the saddlebags on Bill's motorcycle. It's a big clue, of course.
00:52:25
the gun, the glove, the cleanup was there another logical explanation? one that pointed not to Ann
00:52:36
but to another person in the household? maybe, as the killer? so far she'd had an explanation for everything
00:52:43
so maybe she had another one maybe what actually happened the other night? I don't know what you're asking or I'm not sure what you want me to respond.
00:53:04
Anne in the hot seat. I've got a time of death that shows that Bill wasn't alive when you left that morning.
00:53:25
All the transcripts were here for Noah Stout to read if he dared. Read, for example, about the moment in the police interview with his mother
00:53:37
when things got real. When those detectives in the room with Ann were about to attempt to link her with Bill's murder,
00:53:45
her husband, Noah's father. The moment was this. They read her her rights. With those rights in mind do you want to talk to me Yes I clear everything up Then they seemed to back off a little They complimented Ann for the fine young men she and Bill had raised
00:54:06
Their interviews, too, had gone into the box. Noah's and Matt's. Uncomfortable interviews about their mother, their father, about what happened.
00:54:15
We thought they were wonderful young men. I wanted to just ask you, though. Is your impression of your boys that they're truthful?
00:54:22
Yes. Okay. Very much so. Okay. And then here it came. No more niceties. I guess at this point I would ask you, what actually happened the other night?
00:54:42
I don't know what you're asking, or I'm not sure what you want me to respond. Well, here's what I would ask you to respond.
00:54:52
I'll tell you that we can, we will, if you want, work our way through all of this.
00:55:00
But I'll tell you also that the results of our investigation show that you killed Bill.
00:55:05
They do not show that. They do not prove that. And you do not know that because it did not happen.
00:55:12
Her reaction was one of, how could you say that about me? Oh, but they were just getting started.
00:55:20
We know the gun wasn't stolen. It was taken. We know because Noah told us, and you just told me, that he's truthful.
00:55:29
Noah is very truthful, and so is Matthew. The bill told him, I didn't leave that gun safe unlocked. I didn't misplace that gun. Someone took it out of there.
00:55:43
Someone with a key opened that gun safe and took that fire. both of your boys have told me they didn't do it.
00:55:56
I don't think that they did. And you asked me, and I didn't do it. You know, and I've got a time of death
00:56:02
that shows that Bill wasn't alive when you left that morning. You told me that he spoke to you.
00:56:11
He died before you left. Oh, damn. Okay? Now, that's science. That's not me. No, that's not science.
00:56:21
What was his time of death? Well, actually, I wish that you would tell me that. Oh, God.
00:56:31
See, I would like to work through this with you. You are asking me a question that I don't have the answer for.
00:56:40
He is going to take you into custody. Oh, God! I'm not that tough. You have to take me into custody.
00:56:53
You know where I'm at. I'll give you my passport. I have it. You can take every, any physical object.
00:56:59
You can release me to somebody's custody. You don't know me. You don't know me. Ann?
00:57:06
What? You're under the arrest for the murder of Bill Stout. Nothing was wrong that night.
00:57:14
Good stuff happened. I need to have you turn around and put your hands together.
00:57:18
Oh God, I've never been in trouble, please. I'm a one-time. Put your hands behind your back.
00:57:25
Oh God, I've never had this. Everything I've lost in my life, everything with Bill died.
00:57:32
You don't know what happened. I didn't think I even needed an attorney. Yeah, and I want to remind you that I probably shouldn't say anything.
00:57:48
Here's what happens now, Ian. Another officer in aisle escort you to the detention center,
00:57:58
and you'll be booked into the Ravalli County Jail. You will continue to be able to have access to your counsel.
00:58:08
Please don't leave me! That Friday, I went running, and when I came back, my cell phone had a voicemail from the sheriff,
00:58:23
and he said, Noah, just want you to know we've arrested your mom. What was it like to hear that?
00:58:28
I was shocked. I'm still mourning my dad. I've lost one parent. Five days later, essentially, I'm losing another parent.
00:58:38
Noah was not the only one in shock. Out in California... To get this phone call, and I'm thinking to myself,
00:58:46
this is crazy. She was, you know, wife of the year, mother of the year. Hit me hard.
00:58:55
Not Anne, they thought. Not Anne. Unthinkable. Impossible. All that planning, that careful
00:59:03
orchestration. Not the sort of thing kind-hearted Anne would do. Was it? Had detectives made a massive mistake?
00:59:14
I was leading a charge up the mountain that you got the wrong person and did not do it and would not do it and could not do this.
00:59:39
When word spread through Montana's Bitterroot Valley that the suspect in Bill Stout's murder was his wife,
00:59:48
well, the reaction was, Ann? Surely not Ann. Former reporter Jenny Levy She was very kind and very well liked and I think when it came out in the public she charged with homicide That a very big gasp in a very small town
01:00:05
Back in California, the Stout's close friends, Mark Ecker and his wife Denise, weren't just gasping, they were yelling, hell no.
01:00:13
I was leading a charge up the mountain that you got the wrong person, and did not do it, and would not do it, and could not do this.
01:00:25
But when Anne's trial began a year later, it soon became apparent that prosecutors believed the murder was just the final act
01:00:38
in a richly complex and inventive two-year campaign. Her intent? To humiliate Bill.
01:00:48
And long before she pulled the trigger to kill him, to make sure that family, friends, colleagues, the police,
01:00:56
would point the finger of blame at the woman with whom he'd had his fling, Barbara Miller.
01:01:04
Have you ever seen a murder case in which so many people, close to the victim, were pointing at the wrong suspect?
01:01:13
That was one of the unique things about this case, was the success Ann had at diverting attention to a very specific person.
01:01:23
A level of deviousness. It's just hard to get your head around. It was the product of some detailed planning before the crime.
01:01:32
But that so often happens with would-be diabolical killers. There were mistakes.
01:01:39
When detectives visited Ann's office at the long-term care facility and took a little dive into her computer,
01:01:46
They uncovered what looked like research into something uncaring. The internet search histories included things like how to poison people, how to murder somebody.
01:01:59
Those hang-up phone calls? Bill thought it was Barbara breathing into the phone before hanging up.
01:02:06
Investigators traced the calls to this payphone, steps from Ann's desk. And when they ran down the Freak of Ark email account,
01:02:15
the IP address was the Stout's own home computer. So it all fit together in everybody's mind
01:02:22
that this Yahoo email was actually Barbara Miller. And then it turns out to come from Ann's basement.
01:02:30
Correct. And the letters and cards starting soon after Bill confessed to his intemperate weekend, the Bill and Barbara barbecue invitation,
01:02:40
they were all postmarked Fort Smith, Arkansas. Clever. How did she do it? Detectives talked to the Fort Smith postmaster,
01:02:50
who'd received occasional envelopes full of letters addressed to Montana, which were dutifully stamped Fort Smith and put into the outgoing mail.
01:03:00
Detectives discovered the subterfuge in Ann's car, unsent copies of those same cards and letters.
01:03:08
Anne's fingerprints are on the outside of the envelope, which would not be unusual.
01:03:12
But when they opened it, not only did her DNA seal the envelope, but the only things found on the letter inside were latent prints from Anne Stout.
01:03:24
So many mistakes. So many mistakes. Mistakes, yes, but also more a level of fiendishness.
01:03:32
It sort of smelled like really incredible sublimated anger that was really calculated and directed at hurting Bill and embarrassing him and humiliating him.
01:03:43
First you destroy him while he's alive and then you kill him. My goodness. I think, too, that there was a lot of sympathy for this victim.
01:03:51
And it seemed that Bill really tried to recover from that affair and wanted to. And maybe Ann falsely welcomed him back in and said, let's move forward.
01:04:06
But then immediately thereafter, there were this trail of letters and phone calls and this trail of harassment.
01:04:17
The state's theory? The culmination of Ann's multi-year plan came just 10 days before Bill's murder,
01:04:24
when, they claimed, Ann Stout stole Bill's gun from the safe, stashed it and its holster in the laundry hamper,
01:04:32
where Bill would never look. But there was a problem. Ann had no experience firing a gun.
01:04:41
So look at this. Detectives found this list in her bedside table with an entry Ann claimed were
01:04:47
instructions to use the washing machine. But? Our lead detective looked at that and said that if you kind of read between the lines,
01:04:59
that might be instructions on how to load and shoot a firearm. The red being when the safety's on, there's no red showing.
01:05:08
When the safety's off, there's a little bit of red color showing. But to make sure she could actually fire the gun,
01:05:17
the state believed and tried it, fired a practice round. How'd they know? A neat piece of detection,
01:05:25
beginning in this box of ammunition from Bill's gun safe. When they opened the box, toward the middle of the box,
01:05:32
were three missing rounds. In addition, there was a little flower that was inside of this box
01:05:38
and inside of a box of ammunition. A flower? Now that was a puzzle. Until an investigator noticed an unusual plant
01:05:48
just outside the stout's front door. Same little flower. So he looked at the dirt beneath the plant
01:05:54
and there it was A spent shell casing One of the missing rounds We believe that she took a practice round When nobody was home the spent shell landed by that plant
01:06:08
One of those little flowers gets in the box, she puts the box back, and the botanist narrowed the time that that plant blooms to about a 10-day window of time.
01:06:21
That all happened within 10 days or so of Bill's death. Which is right around the time he's reporting the gun is missing.
01:06:29
Exactly. And after she killed Bill? I have every reason to believe she simply carried the weapon out into the garage,
01:06:36
wrapped in a towel, stuck it in the handbag. Oh, and there was insurance, too. Half a million.
01:06:45
The beneficiary? Anne. So the affair with Barbara Miller? Correct. The $500,000 in insurance money, angry woman, scorned.
01:06:56
If you had to pick a motive here, what was it? It's difficult to ascribe a single motive.
01:07:02
The question that stands out is what would motivate someone to put in multiple years of planning and carrying it out.
01:07:10
There was a level of anger behind this that did not go away. My, my. What could Ann Stout's defense attorney say to all that?
01:07:26
I guess what you inherited was a pretty bad set of facts. Would that be fair to say?
01:07:32
Some of it, yeah. So what did she think happened? Someone came in the house and did it. Not her.
01:07:38
When they were gone, she and Matt were gone to Missoula. And those searches for how to kill someone on Ann's computer.
01:07:46
Other people had access. Noah Stout was not allowed to sit through his mother's trial, since he was a witness after all.
01:08:10
That's why when he opened up the box holding her case file, he finally learned what he wasn't privy to,
01:08:18
as he waited patiently here outside the courtroom for his turn to testify. Time seemed to just take forever. I got to know that little hallway pretty well. It was definitely surreal.
01:08:32
Surreal, too, for Bill's friend, Mark, who by now had testified and had heard enough of the case against Ann
01:08:39
to feel betrayed. She duped me. I did not feel comfortable making eye contact with her,
01:08:47
just knowing what she had done to a very dear friend of mine. Yes, what she had allegedly done
01:08:56
prompted prosecutors to make it known, however briefly, they were considering pursuing the death penalty.
01:09:03
But, as we all know, a competent defense can make all the difference. This is Ann's attorney, Ed Shee,
01:09:09
I guess what you inherited was a pretty bad set of facts. Would that be fair to say?
01:09:16
So what did she think happened? Someone came in the house and did it. Not her. When they were gone, she and Matt were gone to Missoula.
01:09:25
And all that evidence that seemingly pointed to Ann was, said she, just poorly interpreted.
01:09:34
Examples? Ann, he said, didn't know anything about that half-million-dollar insurance policy
01:09:39
on Bill's life, despite what appears to be her signature on it. Or that Welcome to Montana barbecue invitation
01:09:48
sent in envelopes bearing Anne's DNA. How did that get there? Well, who could know, he said.
01:09:55
The freak of arc emails created on the family computer? Wasn't her. And at Anne's workplace, those searches on her office computer,
01:10:05
how to poison someone, how to kill someone? Other people had access. Why would other people be looking at a way to kill somebody
01:10:14
when her husband's the one who winds up dead? There's lots of stuff you can't explain.
01:10:21
What about Bill's 9mm, the pistol that went missing shortly before his murder and then was used to kill him, and was later found in the saddlebag of Bill's Harley?
01:10:32
She argued this. If Ann was the cunning mastermind of some diabolical plot, then why would she dump the gun in the garage?
01:10:44
You use common sense. If you're smart enough to do all of that, then you're not going to be dumb enough to stick it in the saddlebag.
01:10:53
Besides, he said, the towel the pistol was wrapped in was unlike any other towel in the house.
01:11:00
Must have maybe belonged to somebody else. You get the picture. So then back to the main question.
01:11:08
How did Bill Stout end up with a bullet in his head? When I hired the pathologist I had, that's when I thought, maybe we have a shot.
01:11:19
Maybe you have a shot how? That he committed suicide. You think there's a chance he actually did commit suicide?
01:11:26
Yep. All kinds of reasons, said defense attorney Sheehy. Bill was underwater on his mortgage
01:11:34
couldn't pay his bills was facing tax liens my pathologist demonstrated to a jury
01:11:41
how you could put the gun behind the the back of your head and and he testified that he had had
01:11:48
prior autopsies where people had done that had committed suicide that way yep how would he commit suicide
01:11:55
when there was no gun on the bed with him well I have a theory. Which is what? That someone moved the gun, not her.
01:12:05
Who would have taken a gun, put it in his Harley, but not killed him? I mean, who would do such a thing?
01:12:14
I have some ideas, but I don't really want to discuss that. The defense seemed to imply that, if not Ann, it must have been someone else in the house.
01:12:27
So, who might it be? Well, there was an obvious of unstated possibility. The prosecutor didn't appreciate the inference.
01:12:37
There was apparently a strategy to point to the various items using the handgun for an example.
01:12:44
And the phrase over and over is used, well, we can't prove specifically who moved that handgun.
01:12:51
It might have been Matt. It might have been Noah. That's not a strategy you like.
01:12:56
I did not like it. I thought it was offensive to these young men and the memory of their dad.
01:13:07
But the defense attorney said that wasn't his intention. In fact, he said if anyone did move the gun,
01:13:15
it might have been out of concern for Ann, who, remember, had already lost her son Ben to suicide years earlier.
01:13:23
The theory then would be that somebody would come in the house, find a person committed suicide
01:13:28
in order to spare the feelings of the family or whatever, had taken the gun and then hit it somewhere.
01:13:34
It happens. That's just... It happens. And Attorney Sheehy said he had evidence to back up the idea that the medical examiner was wrong,
01:13:44
that Bill wasn't killed right after that Saturday evening meal, that he was still alive Sunday morning
01:13:51
before he killed himself. The evidence? Coffee. There was caffeine in his bloodstream.
01:14:00
Why would that make a difference? Because that means someone got up and made coffee.
01:14:06
Suggesting it was morning. Ann Stout said when she and Matt returned home, the TV was on and tuned to CNN, Bill's favorite channel.
01:14:17
But what about the steak and broccoli in Bill's stomach? The dinner the medical examiner used to pin time of death to Saturday night.
01:14:24
Well, said the defense, sometimes Bill got up and ate leftovers for breakfast. And he likely did that on Sunday as he sat alone in the house.
01:14:34
But to ask anybody somebody got steak and broccoli in their stomach it not breakfast you talking about He would eat it for breakfast according to his sons and her That just weird I think it weird my own son eats pizza for breakfast
01:14:51
Uh-huh. You know, you never know. Was all this a little too clever? Even cynical?
01:15:00
Well, there's one more thing you never know. And that is what a jury might do. The verdict.
01:15:11
It's like riding a roller coaster. When they read it, she was standing up, and I had to push her back down into the chair.
01:15:20
She was in shock. Yep. The streets of the county seat, little Hamilton, Montana, were alive all that June.
01:15:43
The whole town seemed to be watching as this soft-spoken, respected woman, this mother of three,
01:15:50
stood trial for a crime so calculating, few could even conceive of it. There were a lot of people in the courtroom every day. It was packed.
01:16:00
And Stout's defense attorney, Ed Sheehy, had argued this was no murder at all, but a suicide by Bill Stout's own hand.
01:16:08
They all waited six hours while the jury decided what to believe. And then... Is it possible to describe what it was like
01:16:19
when you're watching them come back in and you're waiting for them? It was like riding a roller coaster.
01:16:24
Like these 12 people are making a decision that's going to impact you the rest of your life.
01:16:33
There were no cameras present. for the verdict. But the picture is vivid still in attorney Sheehy's mind. When they read it,
01:16:43
she was standing up. She had her hands on the table. She became as stiff as a board,
01:16:50
and I had to push her back down into the chair. She was in shock. Yep. In shock because the verdict
01:16:59
was guilty. And seconds later, Ann Stout was led out of the courtroom and into this hallway.
01:17:07
The judge said, you can say goodbye to your mom now. And so we go in there, my brother and I,
01:17:13
and I've never seen someone in as much shock as she was. And she was just bringing us close to
01:17:20
her and telling us that she loved us And that was the last time that I saw my mom outside of a prison
01:17:33
Except for one time, for her sentencing. When the prosecutor asked the judge to send Anne to prison for life without parole.
01:17:42
And Noah, just 19 at the time, took the stand on his mother's behalf. I really take offense at the fact that someone recommends
01:17:51
that my mother has no redeeming social value. And when I think about justice, I don't
01:17:57
think that the fact that the only contact that my father's grandchildren will have with my mother,
01:18:05
with their grandmother or grandfather, will be through putting their hand against a bulletproof
01:18:11
glass. And that's not justice to me. It was a slightly surreal scene in the courtroom.
01:18:21
And even more so when Anne herself rose to speak. I cannot explain to you how this death had devastated my life and that of our families.
01:18:34
Today I speak not only for myself. I speak as the widow of my husband Bill. It was, in a word, bizarre.
01:18:46
Bill's death has left those who cared about him. Mourning for the man that he was.
01:18:57
God forever is the friend he was to me. The son he was to his mother and mine. and father to the young men that he was so proud of.
01:19:21
And that is what he was to be. It also left the judge unmoved. The reason that your children will be deprived of your custody
01:19:34
is not because you've been convicted of this crime, it's because you committed this crime.
01:19:38
So, of course, the judgment in this case, you'd be committed to Montana State Prison for women for the rest of your natural life.
01:19:52
Anne Stout, who declined our request for an interview, will be eligible for parole.
01:19:58
But not until 2038, when she is 73 years old. I think giving someone something like a life sentence removes someone from the equation and thinks that we don need to think about this person anymore
01:20:18
Son Matt declined our request for an interview, but he keeps in touch with his mom
01:20:23
and visits her in prison when he can. And Noah does too. In fact, after his mother went to prison,
01:20:31
Noah attended law school, where the murder of Bill Stout was used as a case study for students in a class on evidence.
01:20:39
The young man who finally had the courage to look in the box, the case file that told his family story.
01:20:49
Has it helped to look inside? It didn't help right away. Definitely pretty sad when I was reading it,
01:20:58
because it's something you live with every day. knowing that I've opened it, I've looked at it,
01:21:04
and it doesn't change me as a person. It doesn't make me view my family any differently.
01:21:13
No. Oh, he read those dreaded files, saw the terrible evidence in there, and relived the worst days of his family's life.
01:21:22
What has happened to you has been a terrible thing, a series of terrible things.
01:21:26
But you've chosen a deliberately positive, kind of uplifting path to follow. And that's not easy.
01:21:35
So it seems to me it's like walking along a ridge of a mountain. You can get knocked off pretty damn easy.
01:21:42
Yeah, it's kind of putting one forward in front of the other and life happens. He's a bright man, is Noah Stout.
01:21:48
Sees the world clearly. But this, this is just different. But did you have a profoundly sad feeling that your mother killed your father?
01:21:58
It didn't matter to me. She's still my mom. I know that my dad raised me, that regardless of the worst possible thing my mom could do, I would still defend her and I would be her supporter.
01:22:10
Did you take her at her word? Yeah. But she didn't do it? Yeah. I mean, it was my mom. It was my mom.
01:22:17
No matter what he saw in that box, he told us, no matter what it proved to a court of law,
01:22:27
or what others may say about his choice, he is and always will be his mother's son.
01:22:34
And he loved them both up here in their place of paradise under Trapper Peak. Still does, regardless of the horror he carries around in that box.
01:22:47
you