Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Wife Wakes Up Covered In Blood After Husband Is Shot In His Sleep — Is She A Suspect Or Victim?

Transcript

Wife Wakes Up Covered In Blood After Husband Is Shot In His Sleep — Is She A Suspect Or Victim? · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: If you wake up in the dead of night, you know,
• 0:02
  completely disoriented, and you reach out in the dark only
• 0:04
  to find yourself covered in your husband's blood in a
• 0:07
  house with locked doors and well no signs of forced entry.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Right, common sense practically screams that you are a murderer, exactly.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Proximity implies guilt, right, And when the police arrive, they're
• 0:19
  absolutely going to look right at you.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: They have to, it's their job.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: But today we're going to show you how a completely
• 0:25
  deafening shotgun blast, the physics of a microscopic blood droplet,
• 0:32
  and a late night trip to a seven to eleven
• 0:34
  prove that common sense is sometimes just dead wrong.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: It really is a case that forces us to question
• 0:39
  our fundamental reliance on intuition. I mean, we rely on
• 0:43
  common sense to navigate our daily lives, but in a
• 0:46
  homicide investigation, intuition can actually be a massive trap.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's the mission of today's deep dives into
• 0:52
  the source material. We are looking at the two thousand
• 0:54
  and eight murder of thirty six year old Ben Oxley
• 0:57
  in the rural town of Minden, Nevada.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: It's a master class and why investigators have to, you know,
• 1:02
  push past the obvious answers and let the hard forensic
• 1:05
  science do the talking, right, So.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: We're going to explore how the most obvious suspect can
• 1:09
  actually be a secondary victim. We are getting into the
• 1:13
  literal neurology of sleep, which is wild to figure out
• 1:16
  how someone could possibly sleep through a shotgun blast.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: We'll also be breaking down the mechanics of blood spatter
• 1:21
  and gunshot resdue and looking at the really terrifying psychology
• 1:25
  of proxy violence.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: And most importantly, we're going to look at the cold,
• 1:29
  hard calculus of the justice system and why sometimes the
• 1:33
  person who architects and murder just walks completely free.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: We have a phenomenal stack of source material today, I
• 1:40
  mean crime scene data, psychological profiles, and insights from all
• 1:45
  the documentaries that covered this over the years.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: So the goal here is to put you, the listener,
• 1:49
  right in the center of that investigation. It forces you
• 1:52
  to ask, you know, what happens when your absolute darkest
• 1:55
  nightmare becomes your reality and the very people who are
• 1:58
  supposed to help you immediately decide that you the monster.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: It's terrifying. So we need to start right at the
• 2:03
  epicenter of that nightmare, the pre dawn hours of February
• 2:06
  twenty first, two thousand and eight, right in.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: A rural community called Johnson Lane. It's around three point
• 2:11
  three in the morning when the nine one one call drops.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: And the voice on that call is just raw, It
• 2:16
  is completely terrified.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: It's Ben's wife, Melissa Oxley, and she is just screaming
• 2:21
  to the dispatcher saying, it's really really bad.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: For the first responders pulling up to that house. I mean,
• 2:28
  the scene they walk into is staggering.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Describe that for us. What are they walking into?
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Well, you have Ben Oxley, who, by all accounts, was
• 2:35
  a hard working, dedicated father. He had finally rebuilt his
• 2:39
  life after a notoriously brutal divorce, and he's dead in
• 2:42
  his own bed. He had been sleeping either on his
• 2:45
  stomach or slightly on his side, and he had been
• 2:48
  shot in the back of the head with a shotgun
• 2:50
  at point blank range.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: God, that's just terrific. And Melissa is right beside him.
• 2:53
  She wakes up essentially drenched in blood and biological matter, which.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Is a level of trauma that most of us couldn't
• 2:59
  even process, let alone articulate on a panic nine to
• 3:02
  one one call.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but what makes this so instantly suspicious for the
• 3:06
  detectives walking through that front door. Is the specific layout
• 3:09
  of the house, right, like who was actually inside it?
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Exactly? You have Melissa and Ben in the master bedroom,
• 3:16
  Ben's six year old daughter, Alissa is a sleep in
• 3:19
  her room just down the hall.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: And Melissa's teenage brother Craig is also living in the house.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: Right. So, the very first thing patrol officers and detectives
• 3:27
  do when they arrive at a scene like this is
• 3:30
  establish a perimeter. They look for the breach.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: How did the threat get in?
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: Exactly? They are checking every single window for broken glass.
• 3:39
  They are checking the door frames for like pri marks
• 3:41
  from a.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Crowbar, looking for muddy footprints, disturbed dust on the sills,
• 3:46
  anything like that.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: But in the Oxley home they find absolutely zero signs
• 3:50
  of forced entry. Everything is locked up tight.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: See if I'm a detective and there is no broken window,
• 3:55
  no kicked in door, my suspect list instantly strengths to
• 3:59
  the people all inside the walls.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: It is the unavoidable mathematical reality of criminology. In spousal homicides,
• 4:06
  the surviving partner is always, without exception, the primary suspect.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Because statistically It's almost always them.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: It's an unfortunate, statistically proven truth of human behavior. The
• 4:18
  person sleeping closest to the victim is always the starting
• 4:21
  point for the entire investigation.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: It's like the streetlight effect. The streetlight effect, Yeah, you
• 4:26
  know the concept. A guy is looking for his lost
• 4:29
  car keys under street light and a cop asks if
• 4:32
  that's where he drops them. The guy says, no, I
• 4:35
  dropped them in the park. But the light is better
• 4:37
  over here.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: Oh right, I assue you mean.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Police, look where the light is shining, because it's the
• 4:41
  easiest place to see. Melissa was right there in the light.
• 4:45
  She was covered in the literal physical evidence of the crime.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: That is a highly accurate way to frame it. The
• 4:51
  detectives are looking right at her, and because of that
• 4:54
  intense focus, they start interpreting all of her behavior through
• 4:58
  a lens of suspicion.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: They start looking for red flags exactly.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: For instance, they noted that in some of her early
• 5:04
  immediate interviews, Melissa exhibited a remarkably calm, almost detached demeanor, which.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Is something I see over and over in these source materials,
• 5:13
  and it always feels like a massive trap.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: How So, well, as a.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Society, we demand that victims perform their grief in a
• 5:20
  very specific cinematic way, Like, if you are screaming and hysterical,
• 5:24
  people think you're overacting to cover your tracks, And if.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: You are calm and quiet, people think you're a cold
• 5:30
  blooded sociopath.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Exactly, you just can't win.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate double bind for victims of trauma.
• 5:37
  From a psychological standpoint, a highly detached demeanor makes perfect sense.
• 5:42
  Trauma response isn't always screaming.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Right, it's shock.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: Very often it involves profound shock and dissociation. The brain
• 5:50
  essentially short circuits to protect itself from the overwhelming reality
• 5:53
  of the situation.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: But police investigators are inherently trained to look for deviations
• 5:57
  from an expected baseline behavior.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they see calm and they immediately log it
• 6:03
  as suspicious. Add to that, the investigators noted that Melissa
• 6:06
  began casually dating again some months later, which people.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Do when they're trying to force some kind of normalcy
• 6:11
  back into a completely shattered life. But I get it.
• 6:14
  To a cop, building a profile looks callous, But there.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Was something much more tangible than just her demeanor too.
• 6:20
  A massive financial anchor.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Let me guess life insurance.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Yes, the single biggest red flag in any domestic murder investigation,
• 6:30
  specifically a four hundred thousand dollars policy on Ben's life.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: And let me guess again, Melissa was the beneficiary, the
• 6:38
  sole beneficiary. Yes, four hundred thousand dollars. I mean that
• 6:41
  is a motive with a capital m. If you have
• 6:43
  a dead husband, a calm wife, and a half million
• 6:46
  dollar pay day waiting in the wings, I can absolutely
• 6:49
  see why the police stopped looking for broken windows. Okay,
• 6:53
  I have to step in here and challenge this on
• 6:55
  behalf of everyone listening, because there is an elephant in
• 6:57
  the room that I just cannot get past. A shotgun
• 7:01
  blast in an enclosed space in a quiet house in
• 7:04
  the middle of the night is completely deafening.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: It's incredibly loud.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Yes, it's not like a suppressed pistol and a spy
• 7:10
  movie with a little pew sound. It is a concussive explosion.
• 7:15
  How on earth is someone claiming to just sleep through
• 7:19
  that and then casually wake up moments later to find
• 7:22
  their husband dead.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: It sounds impossible, right.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: If a detective hears her say I just slept through it,
• 7:27
  their immediate undeniable thought has to be she is lying
• 7:31
  right to my.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: Face, and that is exactly what they thought. Yeah, it
• 7:34
  is the single most counterintuitive part of her entire narrative.
• 7:38
  It completely defies our baseline, everyday understanding of how the
• 7:43
  human body reacts to extreme noise.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Exactly, I'd wake up if someone dropped a book in
• 7:48
  the next room, let alone a shotgun going off inches
• 7:51
  from my face.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: The skepticism you are feeling right now, the exact same
• 7:55
  skepticism that drove the investigators to intensely zero in on Melissa.
• 8:00
  But this is precisely where the narrative has to shift. Okay,
• 8:03
  this is where we have to abandon our common sense
• 8:05
  and look at the actual hard neuroscience of sleep and
• 8:08
  the undeniable forensics of the crime scene.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Let's get into that science, because to me, sleeping through
• 8:14
  a shotgun blast inches from your head just sounds biologically impossible.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: To understand how it is possible, we have to completely
• 8:22
  reframe how we think about sleep. We tend to think
• 8:25
  of sleep as an on and off switch. You know,
• 8:27
  you're either awake and aware or asleep and completely oblivious.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Right like a computer going to sleep mode.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: But neurologically, sleep is a highly dynamic active state. Throughout
• 8:39
  the night, your brain cycles through REM sleep, which is
• 8:41
  rapid eye movement. That's where you do most of your dreaming. Okay, sure,
• 8:45
  And it also cycles through several distinct stages of non
• 8:47
  rem sleep. In the absolute deepest stages of non rem sleep,
• 8:52
  which scientists call slow wave sleep, your brain is doing
• 8:55
  something remarkable. It is actively suppressing sensory input from the
• 8:59
  outside world.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Wait, actively suppressing, So it's basically putting up a firewall
• 9:04
  between your ears and your conscious mind.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: That is a great way to think about it. The
• 9:08
  scientific term is sensory gating. Your brain is receiving the
• 9:12
  audio signals from your ears, but it essentially acts as
• 9:16
  a highly strict filter.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: It decides that unless a stimulus fits a very specific
• 9:22
  evolutionary profile of a direct threat like the sound of
• 9:25
  a snapping twig in the woods or baby crying, it
• 9:29
  is not going to forward that signal to your conscious awareness.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: So it's kind of like a bouncer at a club.
• 9:35
  The noise happens, the sound waves hit the ear drum,
• 9:38
  the ear drum vibrates, the signal travels up the auditory
• 9:41
  nerve to the brain. Yes, exactly, but the bouncer at
• 9:44
  the door of your consciousness just looks at it and says, Nope,
• 9:46
  not on the VIP list. You don't get to wake
• 9:48
  her up.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: Precisely, The brain processes the sound at a lower level,
• 9:52
  but it fails to trigger what it's called the reticular
• 9:55
  activating system.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: The reticular activating system about it.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: It's a network of neurons in the brainstem that is
• 10:01
  fundamentally responsible for regulating wakefulness and sleep weight transitions. It's
• 10:06
  basically the alarm bell.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: But a shotgun is a pretty massive alarm bell.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: It is objectively violently loud. But forensic sleeve studies from
• 10:14
  similar criminal cases, and yes, there have actually been others,
• 10:18
  they show a fascinating vulnerability.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: What kind of vulnerability.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: People who are profoundly exhausted by the accumulated stresses of
• 10:25
  daily life can enter such incredibly deep states of slow
• 10:29
  wave sleep that their sensory gating becomes almost impenetrable.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: And Melissa fits that profile of exhaustion right. I mean,
• 10:37
  she's navigating a newly blended family, she's raising a six
• 10:39
  year old stepdaughter, she's running a household, her teenage brother
• 10:43
  is living with them.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: That is a recipe for serious deep cycle fatigue.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Exactly when you are in that profound state of slow
• 10:49
  wave sleep. A loud noise might cause a physiological reaction
• 10:53
  like your heart rate might.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: Spike slightly or your blood pressure changes, right, but it
• 10:57
  doesn't cross the threshold into conscious wakefl this immediately. It
• 11:01
  might have taken a few moments for the physical shockwave
• 11:04
  of the sound, or the subtle shifting of the mattress
• 11:06
  as Ben was struck, or even the warm sensation of
• 11:09
  the blood to finally break through that deep sleep.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Cycle and activate her conscious brain. Wow. For anyone listening
• 11:16
  right now who wakes up when their dog even shifts
• 11:19
  its weight on the floorboards, this is going to sound
• 11:21
  absolutely insane.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: It does sound crazy, but it.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Really means we are so much more vulnerable in our
• 11:26
  sleep than we ever want to admit.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: We are entirely defenseless.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Okay, let me play devil's advocate here. Even if the
• 11:32
  neurology of the reticular activating system says it is scientifically
• 11:36
  possible that she slept through it, that absolutely does not
• 11:39
  prove she didn't do it.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: That's a fair point.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Just because she could have slept through it doesn't mean
• 11:43
  she didn't. Just pull the trigger herself and lie about it.
• 11:45
  What actually forced the police to clear the people inside
• 11:48
  the house.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: Hard physical chemistry and physics. The first massive wall the
• 11:53
  investigators hit was the complete absence of gunshot residue or GSR.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, explain how GSR works, because we hear on TV
• 12:02
  all the time, right, But what actually is it?
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: When you pull the trigger of a firearm, especially something
• 12:08
  as massive as a shotgun, you aren't just expelling a projectile.
• 12:12
  The primer in the ammunition ignites, burning the gunpowder, and
• 12:16
  it creates a localized microscopic explosion.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: That explosion forcefully expels a highly distinctive cloud of vaporized particles,
• 12:25
  specifically heavy metals like lead, barium, and antimony. This cloud
• 12:30
  codes absolutely everything in its immediate radius.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: So it's basically an invisible chemical spraytan of evidence exactly.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: And those specific elements lead, barium, antimony, they do not
• 12:41
  just naturally occur together in high concentrations on human hands
• 12:44
  in everyday.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: Life, So if she fired it, it would be there.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: If Melissa had been holding that shotgun and pull the trigger,
• 12:50
  her hands, her arms, and her clothing would be heavily
• 12:52
  coated in this microscopic metallic dust.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: But what if she washed her hands before calling nine
• 12:57
  one one?
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: Even if she tried to quickly wash her hands, it
• 13:00
  is notoriously difficult to completely scrub away every microscopic trace
• 13:04
  of GSR from the pores of your skin and the
• 13:07
  cuticles of your nails in a matter of minutes.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: And what did the tests show?
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: The forensic technicians swabbed both Melissa and her brother Craig,
• 13:15
  and the lab results came back completely, unequivocally negative, zero
• 13:19
  trace of barium, antimony or lead.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Okay, so no invisible smoking gun on their hands. But
• 13:25
  I mean people can wear gloves or wrap the gun
• 13:27
  in a towel, right they can.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: But the investigators had a second, even more definitive piece
• 13:32
  of physical evidence, the blood spatter analysis, And this relies
• 13:36
  on the absolute unchangeable laws of fluid dynamics.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: This is where it gets really dark. But we have
• 13:41
  to understand the mechanics of it. How did the blood
• 13:43
  prove she didn't do it?
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: When a human body is struck by a high velocity
• 13:46
  projectile like a shotgun blast, the resulting blood doesn't just pool,
• 13:51
  It is.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Atomized, atomized like a mist.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: Yes, it creates what forensic scientists call high velocity impacts spatter,
• 13:58
  a fine mistlike ray of blood droplets that travel outward
• 14:01
  from the womb channel at immense speed.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm picturing that.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: Because blood behaves predictively is a fluid under force, analysts
• 14:10
  can look at the shape, size, and distribution of those
• 14:12
  droplets on the walls, the ceiling, and the bedding, and
• 14:16
  they can mathematically reverse engineer the exact trajectory of the blast.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Like drawing strings back from every tiny drop of blood
• 14:23
  on the wall until they all intersect at one point
• 14:25
  in the air.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: Precisely that intersection point is the origin of the blast.
• 14:31
  But even more crucially, they look for something called void patterns.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Void patterns like a shadow.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly like a shadow. If Melissa had been standing over
• 14:40
  the bed, holding the shotgun and firing down at Ben,
• 14:43
  her physical body would have been directly in the path
• 14:46
  of that high velocity blood missed. Oh I see, Her
• 14:49
  body would have blocked the blood from hitting the wall
• 14:50
  behind her, creating a blank, clean space, a void in
• 14:54
  the spatter pattern on the wall. But there was no
• 14:57
  void where a shooter would have been standing.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: And what about the blood that did.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: Hit Melissa that was the final nail in the coffin
• 15:02
  for the theory that she was the shooter. The forensic
• 15:05
  experts analyzed exactly how the biological material landed on Melissa's
• 15:09
  body in her clothing.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: What did it show?
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: The pattern of the droplets on her skin, and the
• 15:14
  specific way the blood soaked into the fabric proved conclusively
• 15:18
  that she was lying down horizontally right next to Ben
• 15:22
  in a natural fleeping position at the exact microsecond the
• 15:25
  shotgun went off.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: The physics of how gravity and velocity acted on that
• 15:30
  blood simply made it scientifically impossible for her to have
• 15:33
  been standing up or maneuvering a weapon.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: That is incredible. So the physical evidence, the chemistry of
• 15:39
  the gunshot residue, and the physics of the blood spatter
• 15:42
  is practically screaming that she is a victim, even while
• 15:45
  human intuition and common sense are whispering that she has
• 15:49
  to be the killer.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: It's a complete paradigm shift for the investigators.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: But I'm still stuck on the four hundred thousand dollars
• 15:54
  life insurance policy. Even if she didn't physically pull the trigger,
• 15:58
  couldn't she have hired someone? I mean that money is
• 16:01
  still a massive hanging thread.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: It absolutely is, and this is where the police transition
• 16:06
  from hard forensic science into long term behavioral analysis. Sergeant
• 16:11
  ron Elgis, who was a key investigator on this case,
• 16:15
  noted something incredibly important about Melissa's behavior over the following
• 16:19
  weeks and months.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: What did he notice?
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Often in cases where a spouse orchestrates a murder specifically
• 16:26
  for a financial payout, the perpetrator simply cannot hide their eagerness.
• 16:30
  They are calling the insurance company before the funeral arrangements
• 16:33
  are even finalized.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Right, They are pushing for the death certificate. They are
• 16:37
  chasing the money.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: And Melissa didn't do any of that. Despite being the
• 16:41
  sole beneficiary of a genuinely life changing sum of money,
• 16:44
  she never aggressively pursued the payout.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: How did she act then?
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: To the highly trained, skeptical eyes of the detectives observing her,
• 16:52
  she appeared genuinely broken, She cooperated with every invasive request,
• 16:56
  she didn't lawyer up and block their access, and she
• 16:59
  focused entirely on her grief and the children.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: So the behavioral profile simply did not match a financial
• 17:04
  black widow. Okay, So if the chemistry, the physics and
• 17:08
  the behavioral analysis completely clear the people inside the house.
• 17:11
  We are back to square one, but with a terrifying
• 17:14
  new reality. Someone breached that house.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, the intruder theory, which they dismissed at the very beginning,
• 17:21
  is now the only logical path forward.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: And they actually had a witness to this, didn't they?
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: They did, and it is one of the most heartbreaking
• 17:28
  aspects of the case. Ben's six year old daughter, Alyssa
• 17:32
  oh Man.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: How do you even interview a six year old who
• 17:35
  just slept down the hall from her father's murder?
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Very carefully? She was interviewed by child psychology specialists who
• 17:42
  are specifically trained to speak with traumatized youth without leading
• 17:45
  them or implanting false memories.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: And what did she say?
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: Alyssa provided a fragmented but chilling detail. She told him
• 17:52
  she remembered waking up in the dark, hearing a door creak,
• 17:55
  and seeing a vague, shadowy fotch moving through the house.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: That is the literal definition of a nightmare for a child.
• 18:02
  But from an investigative standpoint, it's incredibly fragmented. It is
• 18:06
  it's the middle of the night, she's small, it's dark,
• 18:09
  and the brain plays tricks when it's tired. I have
• 18:12
  to imagine police are still extremely hesitant to fully buy
• 18:16
  into the mysterious intruder theory just because it's the oldest
• 18:19
  excuse in the book.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: You are right to point that out. Think about the
• 18:22
  Holly Osborne case, which is another very famous bedroom murder
• 18:26
  from the source material.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: Remind me of that one.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Holly Osbourne claimed that an unknown intruder broke into her
• 18:32
  home and shot her sleeping husband, but investigators eventually dismantled
• 18:36
  her story and she was convicted of the murder herself.
• 18:39
  Police are deeply conditioned to view the intruder claim as
• 18:42
  a convenient, desperate.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Cover up, because statistically, strangers rarely break into houses just
• 18:47
  to shoot sleeping people.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: And leave right. If a random burglar breaks into your house,
• 18:52
  they want your TV, they want your jewelry, they want cash.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and if they get startled by a homeowner waking up,
• 18:58
  you might see a panicked, wildly inaccurate spray of bullets
• 19:02
  in the dark as they try to escape. But that
• 19:04
  is not what happened here, not at all.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: Nothing of value was stolen from the Ansley home, and
• 19:09
  the shot wasn't a panic mistake.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: No, It was the exact opposite of a panic mistake.
• 19:14
  The forensics showed it was a highly precise, incredibly targeted
• 19:18
  execution in the pitch black, which.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Means we're dealing with a very specific profile. We are
• 19:24
  looking for an intruder who didn't just stumble in. They
• 19:27
  knew the layout of the house.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: They navigated the hallways in the dark without bumping into
• 19:31
  furniture or waking anyone up.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: They bypassed Craig's room, they bypassed the Lyssa's room, they
• 19:36
  went straight to the master bedroom, and they had a
• 19:38
  single lethal objective.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: The precision of the violence changes the entire scope of
• 19:44
  the investigation.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Okay, So this brings us to the most critical pivot
• 19:49
  point of the deep dive. If it wasn't a random
• 19:52
  burglary gone wrong, and it scientifically wasn't anyone currently living
• 19:56
  inside the house, while who on Earth possesses both the
• 19:59
  intense personal motive to execute a sleeping man and the
• 20:02
  specific knowledge of how to navigate his home in the dark.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: To find the answer to that question, the detectives realized
• 20:08
  they had to leave the physical crime scene in Johnson Lane.
• 20:11
  They had to stop looking at the present and start
• 20:14
  digging deep into Ben Oxley's past.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Who are they looking for?
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Specifically, they had to look at the wreckage of his
• 20:20
  first marriage, and they had to look closely at his
• 20:23
  ex wife, Don Oxley.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Let's spend some time exploring this, because the contrast between
• 20:29
  Ben's current life and his past is incredibly stark. You
• 20:33
  have Ben and Melissa, who, according to all their friends
• 20:36
  and neighbors, were living this idyllic, almost aggressively normal American
• 20:41
  family life.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: Right during the morning school drop offs, managing Meliss's brother Craig,
• 20:45
  living in the house building a home.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: Friends literally described their marriage as a symbol of profound renewal.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: For Ben, it was his fresh start after a dark period.
• 20:55
  But that previous period, his marriage to Dawn had left
• 20:58
  deep festering wounds. When Ben and Dawn divorced, it wasn't
• 21:02
  an amicable split.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: No, it was a vicious, highly contentious battle. And the
• 21:06
  epicenter of that battle was the custody of their young daughter, Alissa.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: And this is where the story takes a very unusual
• 21:12
  turn for the family court system. Right because Ben.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Won, he did, Ben was awarded primary custody of Alissa.
• 21:19
  We really have to acknowledge how massive a paradigm shift
• 21:21
  that is.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: It's huge.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Historically, family courts heavily default to the mother in custody disputes,
• 21:27
  especially with a child that young. For a judge to
• 21:30
  award primary custody to the father, they must have seen
• 21:33
  something highly compelling in Ben's favor or highly concerning regarding Don.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, and that wasn't the only loss for Don, was it.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: No. Not only did she lose primary custody of her daughter,
• 21:44
  but the court also ordered Don to pay child support
• 21:47
  to Ben.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: That is a recipe for absolute unmitigated resentment. To lose
• 21:52
  your child and then have the state mandate that you
• 21:55
  write a check every month to the man who took her.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: That is a deeply bitter pill to swallow.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: It is a festering psychological wound. You have the loss
• 22:04
  of maternal control, you have the financial strain of the
• 22:06
  child support, and you have the constant agonizing reminder that
• 22:10
  your ex husband is out there successfully building a brand new,
• 22:13
  happy family with a new woman, raising your child exactly
• 22:16
  Dawn is doing in this highly acrimonious reality while Ben
• 22:20
  is moving forward.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: It's an environment just saturated in toxic emotion, but anger
• 22:26
  is one thing. Millions of people go through brutal divorces
• 22:29
  and harbor deep hatred for their exes, but they don't
• 22:32
  orchestrate point blank executions.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: Most people don't know.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Dawn needed a catalyst to take that anger from fantasy
• 22:40
  to reality, and that catalyst introduces a brand new variable
• 22:44
  into the equation.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Wenter James Mattlin, who is James Matley. James Mattlein was
• 22:49
  Don's new live in boyfriend, and the power dynamics between
• 22:53
  them are crucial to understanding this crime. Matt Lean was
• 22:57
  around twenty three years old at the time.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Of the murder, which made him significantly younger than Don.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: Right. Age caps aren't inherently dangerous, but let's talk about
• 23:04
  his psychological profile, because from what I've read in the
• 23:08
  source material, he is the missing piece of the puzzle
• 23:11
  that makes this whole thing ignite.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: What was his background?
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: Malean was a young man who already had a criminal record,
• 23:17
  but much more importantly, he was deeply, profoundly infatuated with Dawn.
• 23:21
  Psychological assessments and witness accounts painted picture of a young
• 23:24
  man who was incredibly malleable. He was desperate to impress her,
• 23:29
  desperate to secure his place in her life and desperate
• 23:31
  to prove his worth as a man to this older woman.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: I see it like a chemical reaction. Don's lingering resentment,
• 23:39
  her intense anger over losing custody, her fury over the
• 23:42
  child support checks. That was the highly flammable fuel. Yes,
• 23:46
  it has just been pooling in the dark for years,
• 23:49
  giving off fumes. But fuel alone doesn't explode. It needs
• 23:52
  a spark, and James Matlean's intense desire to prove his loyalty,
• 23:57
  his desperate need to be the white knight or the
• 23:59
  fixer for a woman he idolized.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: He provided this bark.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: That is a highly accurate assessment of the psychological dynamic.
• 24:06
  The bitter venting about the divorce escalated from angry late
• 24:09
  night conversations into a shared, tangible murderous intent.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: Dawn found a willing instrument for her rage. But, as
• 24:16
  any detective will tell you, having a solid theory of
• 24:18
  motive and having the legal proof to make an arrest
• 24:21
  are two entirely different universes in a homicide investigation.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: Right Because if police just knock on their door and
• 24:26
  say we know you hate Ben, did you kill him?
• 24:28
  Don and James aren't going to just invite them in
• 24:30
  for tea in a full confession.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: They had an alibi.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: They had a very tight alibi, right, yes.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: When questioned, their story was that they were home together
• 24:38
  in their own residence for the entirety of that night.
• 24:41
  They claimed they were having drinks, watching movies and never
• 24:45
  once left the property.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Which is what investigators call a closed loop alibi.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Exactly, it's a closed system. Person A swears person B
• 24:54
  was there, and person B swears person A was there.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: But back in two thousand and eight, how do you
• 24:58
  even begin to break that If it's just two people
• 25:01
  in a room lying for each other, how do you
• 25:03
  prove a negative from the outside.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: It's not like today where our smartphones are tracking our
• 25:08
  GPS coordinates every three seconds.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: Right, So what did they do?
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: You look for the cracks outside the room. You look
• 25:14
  for the one moment where the closed loop interacted with
• 25:17
  the outside world. This initiated a highly intense psychological cat
• 25:22
  and mouse game between the detectives and the couple.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: And the investigators didn't break this case in a windowless
• 25:29
  interrogation room with a spotlight, did they.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: No, they broke it with an incredibly mundane piece of technology.
• 25:35
  Surveillance footage from a local seven to eleven convenience store.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: I find this aspect of modern true crime so fascinating.
• 25:42
  You can spend weeks plotting the absolute perfect, stealthy, untraceable
• 25:47
  murder in the dead of night, you execute.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: It flawlessly, but then you get thirsty.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: Or you need a pack of cigarettes, and you stop
• 25:53
  at a gas station, and the entire master plan falls
• 25:56
  apart because of a grainy security camera in the ceiling that.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: Is decisely would unravel their story. Detectives pulled the security
• 26:04
  tapes from businesses in the surrounding area, and they found
• 26:07
  clear surveillance footage of James matt Lean out about at
• 26:10
  the seven to eleven during the exact late night time
• 26:13
  frame that the murder occurred.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: The time stamp proved it.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: They're perfectly constructed, airtight alibi suddenly had a massive, undeniable
• 26:21
  hole blown right through it.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: And as soon as a detective catches a suspect in
• 26:25
  one concrete lie, the structural integrity of their entire narrative
• 26:30
  starts to collapse. If you are lying about going to
• 26:33
  the seven eleven, what else are you lying about?
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: Exactly? The police now knew for a fact that they
• 26:39
  were lying, But they didn't just rush in with handcuffs
• 26:42
  and arrest them for first degree murder.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Why not? If you know they're lying about their whereabouts
• 26:46
  during a homicide, isn't that enough to bring them in?
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: Lying to police is suspicious, but it isn't absolute proof
• 26:53
  of murder. In a court of law, a defense attorney
• 26:57
  could just argue Matt Lean went to get snacks and
• 26:59
  didn't want to admit it because he knew he'd look suspicious.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: That makes sense.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: The police needed a confession, so they applied a very
• 27:06
  specific investigative tactic. They began a pressure campaign, the slow
• 27:10
  boil exactly. They made sure Don and James felt the
• 27:13
  heat of the investigation every single day. They started tailing
• 27:16
  the couple's.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Vehicle like everywhere they went.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: Yes, when James or Dawn would commit the slightest, most
• 27:22
  minor traffic infraction, a rolling stop, a failure to signal,
• 27:26
  the police would pull them.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: Over just to mess with them.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: And every time they pulled them over, they would casually
• 27:32
  but persistently question them about the night Ben died. They
• 27:36
  wanted them to look in their rear view mirrors and
• 27:38
  always see a.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Squad car They were deliberately turning up the psychological temperature,
• 27:43
  waiting for the paranoia and the crushing weight of the
• 27:45
  secret to fracture their alliance.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: It's brilliant, really. You make them so uncomfortable and so
• 27:51
  paranoid that they start turning on each other. You wait
• 27:53
  for one of them to decide that they need to
• 27:55
  save themselves before the other one does.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: And the tactic worked, didn't it? Dawn broke?
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: She did. The facade finally cracked. Initially, she began making
• 28:05
  highly incriminating, sloppy statements to acquaintances while she was heavily intoxicated.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: But the formal break happened later right, Yes.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: The formal documented break in the case occurred after Dawn
• 28:16
  was arrested for an unrelated DUI. While she was sitting
• 28:20
  in custody, so bring up in a cell, the accumulated
• 28:23
  pressure of the surveillance and the reality of her situation
• 28:26
  finally overwhelmed her.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: She decided to talk.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: And she explicitly implicated James Matley.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: But how did she frame it? Did she sit there
• 28:33
  and admit to being the mastermind or did she try
• 28:35
  to spin it?
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: She was highly calculated in her admission. She readily admitted
• 28:40
  to her deep festering anger toward Ben over the custody
• 28:44
  and the money. She admitted that she had frequently expressed
• 28:47
  that intense anger to.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: James, but let me guess she denied ordering the hit.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: She adamantly firmly denied that she ever directly ordered a hit.
• 28:56
  She carefully painted a narrative where James was a rogue
• 28:59
  actor that he took it upon himself to violently act
• 29:03
  on her emotional venting without her explicit instruction, which.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: Is incredibly convenient for her. I was just blowing off steam, Officer.
• 29:09
  I didn't know he was actually going to go do it.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: It minimizes her legal culpability perfectly, it does, But she
• 29:15
  wasn't the only one talking. The police got a piece
• 29:17
  of corroborating evidence from a completely unexpected source inside her
• 29:21
  own house, right.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: They did, and it completely undermined her. I was just
• 29:25
  venting defense down had a teenage son from a previous
• 29:29
  relationship named Devin.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: What did Devon say? Detectives interviewed Devin, and he provided
• 29:34
  a chilling piece of testimony. He told police that he
• 29:37
  had explicitly, clearly overheard his mother tell James mattlein that
• 29:42
  she wanted Ben dead.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, so it wasn't just abstract venting. It was
• 29:47
  a stated directional desire for death, and it was loud
• 29:50
  enough to be overheard by a child in the home.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: The walls are rapidly closing in on James mattlein.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: Now yeah, with Down pointing the finger directly at him
• 29:58
  to save herself. With this seven eleven footage destroying his alibi,
• 30:02
  and with Devin's testimony confirming the homicidal intent, matt Lean
• 30:06
  was confronted by detectives with an absolute mountain of evidence.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: He realized he was trapped and finally the dam broke.
• 30:13
  He offered a full confession.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: And the specifics of this confession This is where this
• 30:17
  entire deep dive shifts from a tragic story of domestic
• 30:19
  violence into something genuinely, calculatingly sinister.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: It reveals a level of psychological darkness that is hard
• 30:25
  to stomach.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: What did he actually confess to doing?
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: Matt Lean laid out the exact mechanics of the crime.
• 30:31
  He admitted to leaving the house, driving to the Oxley
• 30:34
  home and the dead of night and breaching the property.
• 30:36
  He described navigating silently through the dark house bypassing the
• 30:40
  children's rooms, making his way into the master bedroom, standing
• 30:44
  directly over the bed, and firing the shotgun into the
• 30:47
  back of Ben's head.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: But wait, we established earlier that this was a precise hit.
• 30:53
  If he had never lived in that house, how did
• 30:55
  he know exactly where the master bedroom was?
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: That's the terrifying part.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: How did he know that a floor plan well enough
• 31:01
  to walk through it in the pitch black without tripping
• 31:03
  over a table and waking up Craig or Melissa.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: Because he wasn't flying blind, he had a guide. Matt
• 31:09
  Lean revealed to the detectives that Don had actually sat
• 31:12
  down and drawn him a detailed map of the interior
• 31:15
  of Ben in Melissa's house.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: She drew a map. She provided a literal blueprint for murder.
• 31:22
  That completely destroys her claim that this was just an
• 31:24
  accidental byproduct of her venting.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: It takes it to a whole new level.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: That requires sitting down with a pen and paper and
• 31:30
  consciously engineering a death. That is extreme, cold blooded premeditation.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: It is the absolute definition of premeditation. But matt Lean's
• 31:38
  confession contained an even darker, more horrifying detail.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: What could be worse than drawing a map to kill
• 31:45
  your ex husband.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: He claimed that Don's instructions and the maps she provided
• 31:49
  weren't just for Ben. He alleged that Don had explicitly
• 31:53
  ordered him to murder Melissa as.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: Well, a double execution eliminate the ex husband who took
• 31:59
  your child and eliminate the new wife who took your place.
• 32:03
  But he didn't do it. Melissa was lying right there,
• 32:06
  inches away. Why didn't he shoot her?
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: According to Matt Lean's own account, after the deafening, concussive
• 32:12
  roar of that first shotgun blast, he simply lost his nerve.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: He panicked.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: The brutal, visceral reality of the violence shattered whatever twisted
• 32:21
  fantasy he had been building in his head. The sight
• 32:23
  of the blood, the NOI, the sudden finality of it.
• 32:26
  It panicked him.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: So he just ran.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: He abandoned the plan, fled the scene without chambering a
• 32:30
  second round, and rushed back to Dawn. His reported words
• 32:34
  to her when he walked through the door were simply,
• 32:36
  it's done.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: I want to pause the narrative right here because we
• 32:38
  need to delve deeply into the psychology of this dynamic.
• 32:41
  You used a term earlier when we were reviewing the
• 32:43
  source material. Proxy violence. Yes, proxy violence, let's explain what
• 32:47
  that actually means in a criminological context.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: Proxy violence is one of the most fascinating and disturbing
• 32:53
  concepts in criminal psychology. It occurs when a highly manipulative
• 32:57
  individual in this alleged scenario on uses a malleable, easily
• 33:02
  influenced partner as a literal.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: Weapon so they don't do the killing themselves right.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: The manipulator desires revenge or financial game, or the elimination
• 33:12
  of an obstacle, but they possess either the cowardice or
• 33:15
  the cunning to avoid getting their own hands.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: Dirty, so they outsource the violence.
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: They achieve their lethal goal while keeping themselves physically distanced
• 33:25
  from the blood.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: It is emotional and homicidal outsourcing, and to pull it off,
• 33:29
  the manipulator has to find someone with the exact right
• 33:32
  psychological vulnerabilities to exploit exactly. It reminds me, on a
• 33:35
  much smaller scale, of the dynamics of cult leaders like
• 33:38
  Charles Manson. Manson didn't physically kill the people at the
• 33:41
  Tate LaBianca houses, but he entirely architected the violence by
• 33:45
  exploiting the vulnerabilities of his followers. He weaponized their devotion.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: That is a very apt comparison. The scale is different,
• 33:53
  but the core psychological mechanism is identical. In this case,
• 33:57
  Matlin's specific vulnerability was a highly toxic cocktail of deep
• 34:02
  infatuation and deeply misguided masculinity like.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: A savior complex.
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: Yes, you have a younger man, perhaps feeling inadequate in
• 34:11
  his own life given his criminal history, who desperately intensely
• 34:15
  wants to prove his worth to an older woman.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: He idolizes, and the manipulator frames their anger in a
• 34:20
  way that makes the vulnerable partner feel like a savior.
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: Matt Lean likely didn't process the act as a cold
• 34:26
  blooded murder. He processed it as an act of noble protection.
• 34:29
  He was slaying the dragon that was tormenting his queen,
• 34:32
  even though.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: The supposed dragon was just a hard working father asleep
• 34:36
  in his own bed. It's a completely warped, inverted reality
• 34:39
  that they constructed together in that house, It really is.
• 34:42
  So let's look at where the investigation stands at this point.
• 34:45
  The detectives have the triggerman's full confession, they have the
• 34:48
  testimony about the map being drawn. They have Devin overhearing
• 34:51
  the murder plot.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: It sounds like an absolute slam dunk, open and shut
• 34:55
  case for a double murder trial.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: Right, put them both in front of a jury and
• 34:58
  lock them away. That is not what happens.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: No, it isn't. And this is where the purity of
• 35:02
  forensics collides with the messy, pragmatic reality of the justice system.
• 35:07
  The system is rarely as clean and absolute as a
• 35:11
  DNA swab.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: What happened?
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: The prosecutors in Nevada were faced with a massive strategic dilemma. Yes,
• 35:18
  they had matt Lean's confession implicating Dawn, but legally convicting
• 35:22
  the architect of a crime requires undeniable, independent proof of
• 35:26
  their direct involvement beyond just venting anger.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: Because Matt Lean is a confessed killer.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: Right, a defense attorney for Dawn could argue that Matt Leane,
• 35:34
  an admitted liar and murderer, was simply trying to drag
• 35:38
  Dawn down with him to reduce his own sentence. Oh,
• 35:40
  I see to absolutely guarantee the conviction of the man
• 35:43
  who actually pulled the trigger, the prosecutors made a highly controversial,
• 35:47
  heavily criticized legal compromise, the Plea deal. Yes, prosecutors offer
• 35:51
  Don Oxley total blanket immunity regarding the murder of Ben
• 35:55
  Oxley in exchange for her formal, on the record testimony
• 35:58
  against James Mattlin.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: I have to express the profound outrage that I know
• 36:02
  every single person listening to this right now is feeling.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: It's infuriating.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: How on earth can the architect of the murder, the
• 36:11
  person who allegedly drew the map, the person who stood
• 36:14
  to gain from the death, the person who allegedly ordered
• 36:17
  a double execution. How can she walk away completely free
• 36:21
  of murder charges while the weapon she manipulated gets locked
• 36:24
  in a cage.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: It's a hard pill to swallow.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Is that actually justice? Or is that just a bureaucratic
• 36:31
  overwork system settling for the easiest, fastest conviction they can get.
• 36:35
  Ben's brother, Billy, famously called it a deal with the devil,
• 36:38
  and looking at the facts, I completely agree with him.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: It feels inherently morally unjust.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: It feels like letting the corrupt CEO of a company
• 36:46
  walk away with a multimillion dollar bonus just so you
• 36:49
  can ensure the low level accountant goes to prison. It
• 36:52
  completely breaks our basic societal expectation of how justice is
• 36:56
  supposed to work.
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: It is entirely understandable to feel that intense outrage, But
• 37:01
  this case serves to highlight the cold, harsh, utilitarian realities
• 37:05
  of prosecutorial negotiations. What do you mean The prosecutor's fundamental
• 37:09
  job is not to seek abstract moral truth. Their job
• 37:14
  is to secure convictions based solely on what they can
• 37:17
  prove in a courtroom to twelve jurors beyond a reasonable doubt.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: But they had evidence, They had Devin, they.
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: Had a child's overheard conversation, and they had the word
• 37:26
  of a confessed murderer. Without Dawn's compelled testimony locking the
• 37:30
  narrative into place, prosecuting matt Lean might have been significantly
• 37:34
  riskier than the general public realizes riskier. How imagine a
• 37:38
  scenario where they go to trial, matt Lean suddenly recants
• 37:41
  his confession and Dawn asserts her Fifth Amendment right to
• 37:44
  remain silent. Oh Man Suddenly, a skilled defense attorney, starts
• 37:48
  muddying the waters, pointing fingers at Melissa again pointing out
• 37:51
  the lack of DNA tying matt Lean to the room,
• 37:54
  The prosecution runs the very real risk of a jury
• 37:56
  finding reasonable doubt resulting in matt Lean walking free.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: So they trade the architect to guarantee they capture the
• 38:02
  trigger man. They accept a partial justice because they are
• 38:05
  terrified of zero justice.
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It's a utilitarian calculus that happens in courthouse hallways
• 38:10
  every single day across the country, and it consistently leaves
• 38:14
  victim's families feeling incredibly betrayed by the very system designed
• 38:18
  to protect them.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: And what was the outcome of the deal?
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: In March of twenty twelve, based in large part on
• 38:23
  this legal structure, James matt Lean pleaded guilty to first
• 38:27
  degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without
• 38:30
  the possibility of parole.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: And Dawn, did she really just walk away.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: Down faced absolutely zero murder charges for the death of
• 38:38
  her ex husband. She was never prosecuted for her role
• 38:41
  in the plot.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: It's important to provide the full context that she was
• 38:45
  later imprisoned for completely unrelated subsequent offenses involving drug possession
• 38:50
  and child endangerment, but she was never held legally accountable
• 38:53
  for Ben Oxley's death.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: That is an incredibly bitter pill to swallow. It brings
• 38:59
  us from the cold, calculated environment of the courtroom. Back
• 39:02
  to the deeply human tragic element of this story, the aftermath,
• 39:06
  the survival. Because the gavel drops, the lawyers go home,
• 39:10
  but the survivors have to figure out how to continue existing.
• 39:14
  How does someone like Melissa even begin to pick up
• 39:17
  the pieces of a life that were shattered in such
• 39:19
  a violent and highly public way.
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: We really must reflect on the immense unseen cost of suspicion.
• 39:27
  Think about the astronomical psychological journey Melissa was forced to navigate.
• 39:33
  She goes to sleep as a happy wife. She wakes
• 39:35
  up drenched in her husband's blood in the literal waking nightmare,
• 39:38
  and within hours she is thrust under the intense, unforgiving,
• 39:42
  accusatory spotlight of police interrogation and massive public scrutiny.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: It's not just the police, it's the community. It's the
• 39:50
  whispers in the grocery store aisle. It's the side eyes
• 39:53
  from neighbors when you pull out of your driveway.
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: It's suffocating.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: It's the agudazing reality of knowing that the people you
• 39:58
  live around are actively wondering if you are associate apathic
• 40:00
  master manipulator who got away with murder for a life
• 40:02
  insurance payout.
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: And she had to endure the crushing weight of that
• 40:06
  public suspicion while simultaneously navigating the profound, paralyzing grief of
• 40:12
  sudden widowhood. Furthermore, she had to take on the immediate
• 40:17
  responsibility of raising her stepchild, Alissa.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Who was essentially orphaned by the violence down the hall.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: Yes, but the source material for this deep dive really
• 40:26
  emphasizes Melissa's remarkable resilience through all of this. She didn't
• 40:30
  retreat into a shell of bitterness and anger, which would
• 40:33
  be entirely understandable.
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: It didn't let it destroy her.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: She cooperated fully with every invasive police request. She endured
• 40:39
  the suspicion with grace, and astonishingly, she later advocated publicly
• 40:43
  for forgiveness, speaking about the vital need for closure rather
• 40:47
  than vengeance.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: Her focus shifted entirely from our own trauma to protecting Alissa.
• 40:51
  She wanted to provide a semblance of a normal life
• 40:53
  for a little girl who had to grow up at
• 40:55
  the unimaginable trauma of not only losing her father to violence,
• 40:59
  but having that violent's occur in the presumed safety of
• 41:01
  their own home.
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: Melissa's ability to compartmentalize a betrayal of the justice system
• 41:06
  regarding dawn and focus on the daily, grueling task of
• 41:09
  raising that child is a testament to extraordinary human resilience.
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: And the trauma wasn't just contained to those four walls.
• 41:17
  The ripple effects of this murder hit the entire community
• 41:20
  of Minden like a shockwave.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: That's a crucial sociological point. The Johnson Lane area of Minden, Nevada,
• 41:27
  was consistently described as the kind of idyllic rural community
• 41:31
  where people felt so inherently safe that locks were optional.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: Oh wow.
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: It was a place where people left their front doors unlocked,
• 41:39
  They left their keys in the ignition trusting their neighbors
• 41:42
  and their geographic isolation to protect them from the dangers
• 41:45
  of the outside.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: World, the ultimate illusion of safety.
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: Exactly. This murder violently, permanently destroyed that illusion. The psychological
• 41:53
  impact on a community, but a horrific execution style crime
• 41:56
  happens without warning, without forced entry in the dead of night,
• 41:59
  is profound.
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: It shatters everything.
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: It completely shatters the communal sense of security. The day
• 42:05
  after the news broke, everyone in town went out and
• 42:08
  bought dead bolts. Hardware stores sold out of alarm systems.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: The entire atmosphere of the town irreversibly changed from one
• 42:15
  of open trust to one of pervasive, lingering suspicion.
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: It literally changes the DNA of a town.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: So to pull all of these complex threads together, this
• 42:25
  deep dive forces us to confront some deeply uncomfortable truths
• 42:28
  about human nature and the systems we rely on.
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: We see how love, or at least the bonds of marriage,
• 42:36
  can curdle over time into a hatred so toxic it
• 42:38
  becomes a deadly physical threat. We see how incredibly easily
• 42:42
  the heavy crushing weight of suspicion falls on the most innocent,
• 42:45
  traumatized person in the room, simply because of proximity.
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: And we are sourced to recognize that our justice system
• 42:51
  is not a flawless mathematical mechanism for righting wrongs. It
• 42:55
  relies on deeply imperfect compromises plea deals that spare the
• 42:59
  guilty architect to secure a conviction against the weapon they.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: Wielded, leaving families with the hollow feeling that true justice
• 43:05
  was never fully served.
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: Melissa Oxley lived the unimaginable experience of being both the
• 43:10
  prime suspect and the ultimate victim, first judged by everyone
• 43:13
  in her life, and only vindicated when the true monsters
• 43:16
  operating in the shadows were finally exposed by science and
• 43:20
  the surveillance camera.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: It is a profound, incredibly sobering cautionary tale, and as
• 43:25
  we wrap up our exploration of this source material, there
• 43:28
  is one lingering, deeply unsettling thought that I want to
• 43:32
  leave you with is something you can maul over on
• 43:34
  your own tonight. We all think of our bedrooms as
• 43:37
  the ultimate safe haven. It's the one place where we
• 43:39
  can lock the door, pull up the covers, and literally
• 43:42
  physically close our eyes to the dangers of the outside world.
• 43:46
  We assume implicitly that we are protected, but the tragic
• 43:49
  story of Ben Oxley leaves you wondering, when you fall
• 43:52
  into that deep, completely defenseless sleep tonight, how much of
• 43:55
  your absolute safety actually relies on the simple, fragile hope
• 43:59
  that the people from your passed have finally let you go.