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a young man died in a mysterious car crash but was it an accident forensic science uncovered what really
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caused that crash and the truth devastated three different families [Music] [Applause]
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[Music] my just before dawn in central texas a motorist saw a car on fire off the side
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of the road down an embankment by the time firefighters got there there was very little left
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i've never seen a car or a vehicle burn that badly before where the wheels were
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melted to the rocks in the rubble investigators found the remains of the driver burned beyond
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recognition we need to identify the body that was in the vehicle which wasn't
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much of a body the car was a 1999 chevy cavalier registered to molly and clay daniels a
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young couple with two small children who lived in nearby leander texas police discovered that molly daniels was
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home with her children at the time of the accident she had called me relatively early that
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morning hysterical because clayton wasn't home and she had to get to work and he had the car
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and she didn't know where he was through his personal effects family members identified the remains as those
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of clay daniels they found the remains of some tennis shoes that clay's family
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members identified as clay shoes they found a harley-davidson pen that had gone on a
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hat that clay used to wear and a silver necklace that they identified as being clays
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i figured that clayton had been drinking was at a party somewhere or just driving fast and lost control
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clay daniels an unemployed automobile mechanic was just 24 years old surprisingly
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not everyone was sorry he was dead absolutely he's a loser i've always felt
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that he was not the best material for her and i wondered about being a daddy material but
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it was her choice to make others expressed the same sentiments at his funeral the memorial that was a very interesting
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thing because there was just so much there his best friend got up and spoke and he
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actually told people the clay was an ass no he wasn't very well liked he seemed
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like sort of a loafer and a layabout and a sex offender so i mean what good could
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you say about him clay was not a model citizen he had recently been convicted for the sexual assault
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of his seven-year-old cousin and was sentenced to 30 days in prison and 10 years probation
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the crash occurred just three days before he was to start serving his time this car fire was june the 18th of 2004
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clay was supposed to be going to jail that monday the 21st of 2004 and so they thought the timing of that
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was a little bit suspicious and police had another angle to pursue the parents of the sexual assault victim
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were angry that clay was sentenced to only 30 days in prison the sexual assault victim's father made comments
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prior to this accident that he wanted clay to go away so we were thinking maybe the father of the victim
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made clay go away nevertheless the community reached out to molly daniels a widow at the age of 21 who had
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two young children to support on an office receptionist salary my gosh she had people sending her money
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people she did not know sent her money people would her co-workers would put groceries in the
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house they would do everything they'd been over backwards for her she got this
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discount babysitter in the neighborhood because she put up signs i'm the poor
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grieving widow and i need help with child care but that generosity ended when less than
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a month after clay died molly told friends that she had a new boyfriend and that she was the
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beneficiary of clay's 100 000 life insurance policy her own mother even turned on her
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absolutely she was raised better than this there were days that i just kicked myself what did i do wrong where did i
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go wrong [Music] clay daniel's family identified his burned remains by some of his personal
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items found in the car there was very little that remained from the fire there's only 14 pounds of body
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mass that was remaining and they didn't have a head didn't have hands or fingers or toes
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nothing to fingerprint but the medical examiner wanted to be sure so he extracted the bone marrow from
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clay daniel's hip bone hoping that enough of his mitochondria survived the fire for dna testing
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since mitochondrial dna is passed maternally scientists would try to compare it to the mitochondrial dna
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profile of clay's mother laurie but testing would take up to six months it's not like on csi on tv at all so it
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doesn't happen within the span of an hour [Music] in the meantime investigators noticed some
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inconsistencies at the accident scene the lack of skid marks on the road indicated that clay took no corrective
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action before the crash the speed limit was 60 miles per hour and the car was barely moving when it
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went down the embankment there was no momentum coming off the cliff it looked as if somebody had just pushed
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it off or just drove off the cliff at a slow rate of speed because all the rocks the
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trees on the way down were disturbed in the path that the vehicle took and the car's gas tank was intact
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this raised questions about the source of the fire my instincts told me that this was not
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an accident that somebody was killed and i stayed with that feeling that's why i
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told the sergeant that i was calling the experts in that expert was arson investigator
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janine mather the first thing she noticed was that the entire driver's seat had been consumed
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by fire normal vehicle fires with a body inside there usually is body fluids and remains on the seat
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and in this case there was no body fluids located in the vehicle and no remains on the seat
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mather then checked all possible sources for a fire the fuel lines the ignition switch
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the starter the battery everything was intact i looked at the vehicle inside and out and underneath
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and ruled out all accidental causes of ignition crime scene investigators gathered the
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fire debris and placed it in sealed canisters at the lab they inserted activated
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charcoal strips and then heated the cans the strips were then put into a solvent
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and tested with gas chromatograph mass spectrometry this revealed the fire was started with
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large amounts of charcoal lighter fluid when the results came back that it was positive for charcoal starter fluid i
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knew that we had an arson and intentionally set fire [Music] and just as investigators heard this
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news they learned something else molly daniel's sister melissa had been visiting molly when she experienced one
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of the most bizarre incidents she had ever encountered melissa had gone in to get a q-tip out of the bathroom
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turned around and looked and there was a guy laying in the floor of the closet but his head was up in the corner she
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didn't see anything but from the waist down and he was wearing boxers and she
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went out to molly and she goes there's a man asleep in your closet she goes no
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there's not but when molly looked in her closet she didn't see anyone there
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[Music] but things started getting kind of weird after that needless to say investigators found the incident
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suspicious and now wondered whether molly was somehow involved in her husband's murder
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five months after the car crash the sheriff's department in burnet county texas finally got the results of the dna
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test on the remains found in the car the dna revealed that the remains were not those of clay daniels
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when dna came back and wasn't clayton we're like where's clayton and who is
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this person that was in the vehicle to find the answers investigators put clay's grieving wife molly under
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surveillance for days her routine was perfectly normal until she met her new boyfriend jake
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greg for lunch she got into that man's car and then the two of them went off to
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taco bell investigators decided to go inside to get a better look at molly's new
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boyfriend when captain paul nelson walked by their table he noticed that jake greg bore a
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striking resemblance to clay daniels although his hair color was different he looked identical if he could have
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crawled into that burrito he probably would [Music] but the man insisted he was jake greg
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and produced a texas identification card to prove it but captain nelson didn't buy it and
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placed him under arrest [Music] during police questioning he finally admitted he was
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clay daniels clay's brilliant disguise consisted of nothing more than dying his
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hair black and other than that he hadn't changed his appearance at all clay had several
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motives for staging his death he did not want to go to jail for 30 days and he did not want to be a
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registered sex offender and he had a hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy
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molly insisted she knew nothing about clay faking his own death until he came home one day about a month after the
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fire and told her what he had done she just tried to portray it like she didn't
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know that he was alive until he just called her out of the blue about a month later and said hey baby i'm alive
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i find that very hard to believe if my husband came back from the dead i'd be
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asking a lot of questions and i'd be very mad clay admitted it was he who was sleeping
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in the closet when molly's sister saw him he said molly spoke loud enough that
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it woke him up and he was able to get out of the closet before his sister-in-law returned
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see there's no one here i know clay said he planned to start a new life with molly and the children after the
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100 000 life insurance payment arrived they were going to go to mexico and he was going to have plastic surgery done
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on his face and have dental surgery done so he'd have teeth and molly is going to have a tummy tuck
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too apparently a little bonus of the plan i guess they get so much money from the insurance clay daniels refused to
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identify the body burned in the car fire clay never never divulged any information to us to
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help our investigation did they murder somebody did they find a dead homeless man what did they do how did they do
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this however clay was more than happy to talk to his fellow inmates i guess they're sitting
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up late at night you know shooting the breeze and clay had told the cellmate that he had actually dug up a corpse
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from a graveyard and that's what they had put in the car and set it on fire investigators searched pebble mound
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cemetery the one closest to the site of the car fire they knew from experience that criminals
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don't like to travel far with a corpse in the car sure enough they found a grave close to
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the front gate that looked as if it had been tampered with i could tell that the gray was disturbed
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by the crevices and the holes that was left the marker had been moved the flowers had been moved
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and i knew by looking at the other grave sites that that was not normal the headstone bore the name charlotte
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davis she died six months before the car crash at the age of 81. their suspicions were confirmed when
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they exhumed charlotte's casket and discovered it was empty investigators now wanted to know whether
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molly daniels was involved and if so they needed evidence to prove it clay daniels confessed to starting the
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arson fire and defrauding the insurance company of 100 000 in life insurance his wife molly denied any involvement
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but investigators didn't believe her when molly first talked to the police and told him that ridiculous story that
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she didn't know that clay was still alive until a month later she was sticking by that story for quite
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some time and apparently that's what she'd been telling her lawyer too investigators examined molly's work
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computer but they weren't optimistic by this time six months had passed since
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the car crash depending on how often the computer is used there's a possibility that
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some of the evidence that we would have recovered ordinarily would be overwritten
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but investigators got a huge break molly's computer had been invaded by a keystroke virus right before the staged
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accident what the worm actually did was it recorded every letter every window she opened every
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email just any kind of thing that she's typing in the computer it recorded and
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into a text file and saved it computer forensic experts did a word search to identify what kind of
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information molly had been looking for on the internet we were finding words like
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unidentifiable body forensics on a body burned body burned car gasoline fire 1500 degrees fahrenheit just words like
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that this proved that molly not only knew about clay's plans but was actively involved
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it was the happiest day of my life when we got that computer forensic exam it was just
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i mean there was no way she could deny that she had been involved from day one of the planning
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when we saw that computer forensic evidence what does surprised me is that she was
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too stupid to do this she was so stupid that she did this kind of thing and didn't think about the consequences and
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didn't think about possibility of getting caught police obtained a search warrant for
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molly's house and found even more forensic evidence during the search warrant of their
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residence we found in the kitchen two containers of charcoal starter fluid both of them were
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tested and one was consistent with what was found in the vehicle prosecutors believe that clay and mali
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planned this crime for months they looked in the obituaries to identify a grave to rob
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ideally someone elderly who didn't have many family members visiting her grave
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they chose 81 year old charlotte davis six months after her death they dug up her body drove to the ravine
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and set fire to their car with charlotte's body inside [Music] play through some of his personal items
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in the fire so they could be used for identification but the dna testing proved the body wasn't clay daniels
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and gas chromatography found remnants of the lighter fluid when confronted with all this evidence
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molly daniels finally confessed she said that they watched a lot of law and order and csi
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and they got the idea to do this from those shows and i asked her do y'all not watch the
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end of the shows because usually the criminals get caught and she just laughed molly daniels pleaded guilty to
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insurance fraud and hindering her husband's apprehension she was sentenced to 20 years in prison
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you do the crime you do the time clay daniels pled guilty to insurance fraud arson and desecration of a corpse
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he was sentenced to 30 years in prison plus an additional 20 years for the sexual
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assault charge the body of charlotte davis was reinterred the people carrying her casket with the
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ones who put clay and molly behind bars texas investigators say it is among the most bizarre cases
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they've ever seen they were also appalled by the deception molly and clay perpetrated
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on their own children to tell a little boy who's four almost five years old that the man that he has
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known his whole life as his father is not his daddy when he runs to him and hugs him and says hey daddy i love you
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to have the man say oh i'm not your daddy i'm mommy's new boyfriend jake and to have molly tell
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him that over and over no no that's not daddy that's jake you can't even imagine what that would
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do to a child's mind we just hope that their children get proper mental care the next couple years and
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get get raised well by their grandparents because otherwise you can have another one there
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clayton daniels on our hands in 15 years without the science investigators were convinced that
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clayton and molly daniels might have gotten away with it they thought that the fire would destroy all evidence and
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there wouldn't be enough remains for dna testing and they were almost right lowest
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scum walks of life i mean they don't they don't deserve to be on this planet but
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that's just my personal opinion if it hadn't been for everybody being on their toes in
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this case listening to their gut listening to their instincts and then pursuing all the dna
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the forensic investigation the arson investigation we wouldn't be where we are today with these two people in
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prison [Music] [Music] [Music] you