MARGIE: My daughter was at the grocery store,
and she happened to walk up to the check stand,
and this was right by the check stand, and...
she was quite shocked -- there's her mother.
"Margie, there's a guy on 'America's Most Wanted'
"who looks just like your hubby,
and he's a murderer."
When I first saw this, I wanted to go to all
the stores and gather them all up and take them off the shelf.
It was like, can you believe it?
She was married to a murderer.
Is that going to be what people are going
to say from now on?
I've even had people say,
"I would have never let that happen to me,"
and I said,
"How do you know?"
People think what they think,
but I know the true story and I know what happened,
and I know what I did,
and, um,
the only thing that I want to do was to get my story
out there to help young women be more aware of what's
out there and to be careful.
He fooled everybody -- he was so good at it.
Everybody believed in him,
but I couldn't get rid of this feeling that something was
wrong, and I knew that I had to figure it out.
I had to find out who my husband really was.
But never ever would I think I would
be with someone that had done something so evil.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
MARGIE: I was a little insecure about
getting out there in the dating world.
I had been married for 20 years
when we got divorced, and after a year,
my girlfriends were bugging me to go out,
and I did like to dance.
We walked into the bar, and everybody was
dressed in Western attire.
They had on cowboy boots and cowboy hats.
And then I saw this gentleman sitting at
the bar, and he wasn't dressed in Western attire.
He was very handsome,
and he had a beautiful smile.
He had beautiful blue eyes,
and he kept looking my way.
I kept turning away, because I was, you know, shy.
Eventually, um, he walked over to
the table, and he asked me to dance.
Hey, there.
Hi.
He told me his name was Sean Paul Lanier,
and he liked to be called Sean Paul.
He said he was from New Zealand,
but he didn't have an accent,
but I didn't think anything of it at the time.
He said he worked at a restaurant,
and he wanted eventually to buy his own restaurant.
Now, that impressed me.
I thought, okay, that's -- that's pretty cool.
And we talked a lot that evening.
He did ask for my phone number
and asked if he could take me out.
It was almost too good to be true
that I'd met this wonderful man
the first time out.
Everything he said was so sweet.
He was such a gentleman, and I thought, it's just --
it's too good to be true.
Our first date,
he took me to a beautiful restaurant up in the canyon.
I wanted to know everything I could about him,
and he shared quite a bit, um, with me to begin with.
He told me that his mother, his father,
his sister, and brother had all died in an airplane crash,
and his wife had died in childbirth.
I'm sorry -- this is not what I should be
talking about during dinner.
Well, that must have been so tough.
MARGIE: My heart went out to him.
I'd never really met anyone that was so open with me.
But also, I'm thinking there's
a lot of deaths this guy's been through.
He did tell me he had a daughter that went to college
in California, and he had a son that went to college
in Montana.
And so I knew he was a family man, and I
really liked that about him, too, because I have
three daughters.
It kind of brought me, I think, closer to him then.
We were sitting at the table, and I noticed
a girlfriend of mine was sitting at a table with
some people.
-How are you? -I'm good! I'm good.
MARGIE: Eventually, um, my girlfriend came over
and said hello, and he...
really wouldn't look at her.
He wouldn't really look her in the eye.
He said hardly two words to her,
and she was uncomfortable, and I was uncomfortable.
But at the time, there wasn't any really
huge red flags.
I just chalked it up to, he must be really shy.
The conversation didn't last very long.
She left, and then he turned right back into the charming,
wonderful man that he was before
she had come to the table.
I think, looking back,
the way he acted with my friend was
he didn't want them to look at his face
for too long, because they might remember him
and, um, find out later on who he really was.
There was a time at the restaurant that they wanted
Sean Paul, because he was the head chef,
to go on the news channel to, um, a cooking segment.
He told me he was nervous, he didn't want to be on TV.
He was trying to get the assistant chef to go on
instead, and they said, "No, we want you,
you're the head chef, you need to go on and do this."
So I was pretty excited.
And I turned on the show,
and there he was in this tall chef hat pulled way down.
Um, he was wearing glasses that I'd never seen.
He didn't even look like the same man.
I wouldn't have recognized him if I didn't know it was him.
He looked a little nervous.
He was cooking, but he was looking down,
and he wouldn't really look up.
He wouldn't even look at the host.
When Sean Paul came home from the cooking show,
I said, "Where in the heck did you get the chef hat?
That big tall one?"
He goes, "That's just what they gave me
at the restaurant."
AS SEAN PAUL: Uh, the restaurant gave it to me.
You didn't like it?
MARGIE: He had an answer for everything,
Why are you wearing glasses?
He said, "Well, I did go to the eye doctor, and I'm trying
out these new glasses," and I said, "Well, it
didn't even look like you," and he says, "Well, that's good,
because I don't want anybody to see me on a TV show."
AS SEAN PAUL: You know how I feel about being on TV.
MARGIE: Again, I thought, well, he's shy, and he never,
ever messed up his lies, ever -- looking back,
I know now he didn't want people to recognize him.
He was still hiding.
We had gotten closer, and, um, he was spending a lot of time at
the house, so he suggested ways
that he could fix up the house to make
me and the girls happy.
He could finish the basement, put in a hot tub,
maybe even a pool, and he could do all the work.
I took out a second mortgage on
the house and gave him the money.
When Sean Paul was working in the house,
my nephew would come and help him.
And there was one time my nephew said,
"Sean!" Called him Sean. -Hey, Sean.
and he didn't answer.
-Sean! -And he called his name again,
"Sean!" He didn't answer.
And, um, finally he yelled, "Sean Paul!"
and he turned around.
Yeah?
-I was calling for you. -Thanks, buddy.
He said, "Why didn't you answer me?"
And he says, "I'm used to being called both names."
I thought it was weird, my nephew thought it was weird,
and it happened several times. -[mouthing words]
Sometimes I would say "Sean." Nothing.
And -- but when I would say, "Sean Paul,"
then he would answer.
But at the time, it was easy to gloss over
everything, because he was
so charming, and he always said the right thing, and he acted
the right way.
Looking back now,
of course he's not gonna answer
by Sean, because that's not his name.
MARGIE: Sean Paul was very generous.
He was always buying little gifts, and sometimes it was just
too much, over the top, and I would feel uncomfortable.
One day, he had bought gym memberships for us.
It was too expensive, and I just could not accept it.
It was just too much.
He says, "Let me buy you and the girls some workout outfits,"
and I told him no.
He would not listen to what I had to say
and respect my feelings.
So a few days later, I took the girls to the mall,
and, um, when we came home, we walked in the house,
and I turned to walk down the hallway,
and there was all these gym clothes hanging on
all the doors of the bedrooms.
I knew immediately that Sean Paul had put them there.
I felt so betrayed, so violated.
It was like you're being in a robbery.
Someone breaks into your house.
I was furious.
And I called him and asked, "How did --
how did you get in my house?"
And he said, "There was a window open,"
and he climbed through it.
He was acting like nothing was wrong.
He wanted to surprise me.
I said, "You can surprise me any other way,
but you don't break into somebody's house."
No, this isn't right!
MARGIE: It scared me.
My instincts were telling me something.
You should be afraid.
I said, "I can't deal with it, I need a break.
I need a break from you. You're too much."
Leave me alone!
"I don't want it, I don't need it, leave me alone."
And I slammed the phone down.
A few days later, Sean Paul called
and said he wanted to take me to lunch.
He was being very, very sincere and apologetic,
and he was saying all the right things,
but I told him I couldn't go, because I was working.
And so he asked me if he could take the girls for ice cream,
and I said, "Absolutely no.
No one takes my girls," and that was it.
I eventually came home from work,
and I was looking around, and I didn't see my girls anywhere,
and I looked in their rooms.
They weren't there.
AS MARGIE: Hello? Anyone home?
Hello?
MARGIE: It was a very eerie feeling.
It was scary.
It was quiet, and I didn't know where they were.
I thought about calling the police,
but I finally found a note at the kitchen table, and it said
"We've gone for ice cream with Sean."
And I was furious that he had taken them when I had
told him no.
It was his way of almost threatening me,
um, that if I don't do
what he says, this is what's gonna happen.
A few hours later, I see Sean Paul's car pull up in
the driveway, and the girls jump out, and they were fine,
they were happy, and they go into the house.
Again, he tries to explain that he was just trying to do
something nice for me and the girls.
He acted like it was okay,
and it wasn't.
I thought it would be nice,
me and the girls spending a little quality time together.
MARGIE: You can never take my girls without my permission.
That -- you just don't do that, and I'm done.
This is not a break, it's over.
AS MARGIE: Get your car out of my driveway.
MARGIE: I wasn't planning on seeing him again.
I thought, he's out of their lives, he's out of my life.
I hadn't heard from Sean Paul for a while,
and then I came home one day from work,
and there was a note,
and I knew it was from Sean Paul, because
I knew his handwriting -- it said it was an emergency.
I need to call him right away.
He told me that his daughter had died.
His daughter had been in a car accident caused by
a drunk driver, but I didn't hesitate to go over to him.
I wanted to be there for him.
He opened the door, and he was distraught.
He looked almost possessed.
Sean Paul, I'm so sorry.
Glad you're here.
MARGIE: His face was different,
and his eyes were cold, and he was just scary.
And he almost demanded that I come in.
Did you not hear me say to get in here?!
MARGIE: For some reason,
the look in his eyes, I knew I shouldn't go in that apartment.
I just knew it.
MARGIE: Looking back now,
and if I would have gone in that apartment,
I don't think I would have come out.
I really think that he could have -- he could have killed me.
I took off and ran to my car and locked the door.
And the first thing I thought was, like, I had escaped.
I didn't know what I had escaped, but that's just
how I felt at the moment.
I was thinking, what is going on?
Who is this man?
What -- Why am I so afraid?
I was just so confused, and I thought
that I was making something out of nothing.
He would call me.
He would
explain to me that he was acting irrationally
because his daughter had died, and he didn't mean to scare me.
And I thought, that makes sense.
He, little by little, kind of started to wear me down,
and he asked if he could have a fresh start.
I did do a lot of soul searching.
Do I really want this relationship?
Do I really want this man?
He just became a prince charming, basically.
He went to such effort, um, to win me back.
We took things really slow.
I didn't see anything bad -- there was no fear.
Um, everything was going great.
He said all the right things, he did all the right things.
Um, and I was -- I was, you know, happy.
This is me and
Sean Paul Lanier on our wedding day.
The man I thought was Sean Paul Lanier.
I truly thought that he really meant what he said to me,
that everything was gonna be fine.
He had gotten to know a lot of
my family members, and, um, everybody really adored him.
They all thought he was wonderful, and he had
everyone fooled.
To me, he looks in this picture like he's smirking
At the time, I probably wouldn't have noticed it,
but now I do -- he looks like "I got away with it."
I had one week of being married to
this man before it started going really, really bad.
A week after I was married,
my girlfriend called me and told me to turn on
the television set, because there's a new show
called "America's Most Wanted," and she said,
"There's a man on there, and he looks like your husband."
So I turned on the TV, and it was showing
a man from Sacramento, California,
who was wanted for murder.
MAN: We could potentially solve two murders if
you can help us capture our next fugitive.
A man by the name of Paul Mack, and he was on the run.
MAN: A murder warrant for Paul Steven Mack has been issued by
the sheriff's department in Sacramento County.
And I looked at the man, and, I mean,
he had a few similarities,
but he was thin, and he had straight brown hair.
My husband had muscles, and he had curly gray hair.
I didn't think he could be the same man.
He's not a murderer. There's no way.
But I couldn't get rid of this feeling that something was
wrong, and I knew that I had to figure it out.
I had to find out who my husband really was.
He kept documents in the dresser --
death certificates for his father,
his mother, his sister, his brother, and his daughter.
And so I decided I would go through them
and see if there was any answers there.
When I went through the documents,
I started noticing mistakes.
His daughter's death certificate had
the wrong date that she died.
And I thought, wait a minute, there's no state seal.
And I thought that usually makes a document legal.
So my fear started erupting again,
um, thinking what is going on here?
So I decided I'm going to hire a private investigator.
The private investigator told me he needed
a Social Security number to get started.
I waited till he fell asleep.
At night, I would look over at him, not knowing really
who he was, and I felt like sometimes,
um, I was sleeping with the enemy.
I had to really find out if
Paul Mack was really Sean Paul Lanier,
and I had to sneak out and get his wallet
without him seeing me, which was the scariest thing
I've ever done.
I didn't want to get caught.
[change pinging on ground]
If he would have woken up while I
was in the middle of getting his wallet,
I have no idea what he would have done.
My heart was racing -- scared so bad.
And I took the wallet, and I went into the bathroom.
I started going through the wallet,
and I was surprised to find two Social Security cards.
So I wrote down the numbers of both for
the private investigator, and I put them back in the wallet.
I took a deep breath, and...
went out...
[quietly] Sorry.
[voice breaking] Out of the bathroom,
and put it back on the dresser,
and snuck back in bed, and I was shaking.
I was so afraid that I was gonna get caught.
[normally] The private investigator,
he told me that the numbers
belonged to two people that were deceased.
I was shocked. I...
I didn't know what to think.
Why does he have numbers
of dead people?
But I was afraid that, if I went to the police,
the police would think I was just some angry wife.
And so I still wanted to try and find and get
more information.
And so I was going to confront Sean.
Hey.
I asked him, um, I hope you don't mind.
But someone from your work called,
and I looked in your wallet.
They needed your Social Security number, for some reason,
they didn't have it, and you have two Social Security cards.
One of these is my son's card.
That's when he told me that he sometimes carries
his son's, because they have the same name, he said,
and he always forgot to give it back to him.
Why does that matter to you?
He finally grabbed them, and he put 'em in his briefcase,
and, um,
shut the briefcase, locked the briefcase.
It was getting to the point now
I did not believe anything he was saying.
I just said, I need to get to the bottom of things.
I don't know who you are.
-You're a stranger to me. -Okay, Margie.
I am completely in the dark here!
I was so mad that the words just came out.
"You could be a murderer for all I know.
I have no idea who you are."
He had this most evil look in his eyes.
And it was the scariest thing I've ever seen.
I've never seen anything like it before.
He said, "I'm gonna tell you the truth."
MARGIE: I think my heart dropped.
I thought, "Oh, finally, I'm gonna get somewhere."
And he looked at me very serious, very serious,
and he said,
"I'm actually in the witness protection program."
He said his parents were in the mafia in New Zealand,
and he had testified against them,
and so they had to put him in the witness protection program.
He was trying to make that the reason for all
the little lies and all the little things and all
the inconsistencies.
You understand?
MARGIE: I pretended to believe him so that
he would not get upset with me.
Good.
But the honeymoon is over.
I mean, we were only married a week or so.
I knew right then it was time to do more.
[sighs]
I talked to a gentleman there, and he said that he couldn't
give that information out because it was the witness
protection program.
But he could tell, I think, in my voice how desperate I was.
And he said to me, um, I will tell you this.
I've never heard that name before.
I've never heard of a Sean Paul Lanier.
I knew that that had been another lie,
and it made me realize
I need to face what's ahead of me, and I have to be strong
and do what's right.
Not just for me, but for my daughters, too.
I finally got to the point where
I was tired of beating around the bush.
I wanted to try and get his fingerprints, because I
knew that I could maybe find out more with his fingerprints.
So one morning, we had breakfast,
and he had a glass of orange juice.
Left it on the table and went to work.
I was able to put on some rubber gloves,
and I took the glass and put it in the plastic bag,
and I hid it in the back of the closet,
thinking
I'm gonna take this to the police or something eventually,
but I need to keep this hidden.
I knew
I had to keep going, and I knew I had
to get everything together before I went to the police.
Here I am with fingerprints and rubber gloves, and I never
imagined I would ever be in a place like that, ever.
Who knew it would come to this?
Sean Paul was very good and very clear at sending
messages without words,
and I believe that he was suspecting things I was doing.
One day, I had come home from work,
AS MARGIE: Hello?
and the girls weren't there.
I called Sean at work, and he said, "They're fine.
You don't need to worry about it."
I said, "What does that mean?
Where are they? What's going on?"
And he goes, "You just sit home and be a good girl and wait."
And it felt like a threat to me.
Eventually, he comes home.
I wanted to know where my children were.
He looked at me with a stare,
and he said, "You just be a good girl
and wait, and they will come home."
Like, if you don't sit there
and be good, then you're gonna regret it.
I was so mad at that time that I said,
"If you hurt my children, I will kill you."
He just had this look on his face like he won.
It was, like, a nightmare to me, and I felt helpless.
I didn't know what to do.
So I wait and wait and wait, and I was trying to be quiet
and trying to be good like he said, because I didn't know what
was going on, and I was afraid if I did anything wrong,
that they wouldn't come home.
Finally, the girls come home.
My girls told me that Sean had told his friends to
pick them up from school and take them to amusement park.
Sean never told me why he did it.
But I just got the impression that he
was doing it to keep me in line.
He's threatening me. I need to be quiet.
I need to quit asking questions.
I knew that if I didn't do what he said,
it could be worse.
That was the last straw.
It was time to do something more drastic.
It was time to try and find out who this man really was.
I had finally come to realize that it was
time to go to the police no matter what.
I didn't care if they thought I was just
this crazy housewife making up stories.
I said, "I need to talk to someone, because
I don't think my husband's who he says he is."
And I think that kind of caught his attention.
I showed him, you know, the glass with the fingerprints.
I showed him the documents, the death certificates,
two social security cards that belong to dead people.
He took the glass
and left with it.
When the detective came back in the room,
I could see by his face that something was up,
and he told me that the fingerprints matched
a man by the name of Paul Steven Mack,
and he said, "This man, um,
is wanted for murder."
They had told me that he had been in Ohio.
He was the manager of a country club there.
And his secretary was a young,
beautiful 19-year-old girl named Annette Huddle,
and they found her floating in
a river, and she had been strangled.
And immediately, they went to him and questioned him,
but they didn't have enough evidence.
So they had to let him go.
And from there, he met this young, beautiful girl,
21-year-old Karen Winslett in Sacramento.
He poisoned her and put her in the trunk
of her car and left her in a parking lot.
That's when he fled
and came to Utah.
He was on the run for months and months,
and that's when he met me.
Both girls had rejected him.
And the detective was thinking
maybe that's why they were murdered.
And I thought back to when I was trying to reject him,
and I think if I would have gone in that apartment
that night, I might not have come out.
This is a picture of Paul Mack.
This is a picture before I knew him.
He looks completely different
than when he was with me.
He's thinner, he has brown hair,
he didn't have a mustache with me, and he had curly gray hair.
I don't know
that I would have recognized him.
He was so good at disguising the way he looked.
He was very,
very good at conning people and getting what he wanted.
But he always had a smirk on his face.
He always looked like he had gotten away with something,
and I can see that same smirk on his face in this picture,
thinking that he was gonna get away with murder
and never be caught.
The police told me that they had a plan of action.
They still had to get an arrest warrant.
They had to get everything together, and they
wanted me to take my daughters and leave.
But
I told them that if he came home, and I wasn't there,
he's already suspicious enough that he would probably flee,
and you'd never get him.
And I said, "I want to go home.
"I will get my daughters out of the house, but I need to
be there so that he will be caught."
I didn't want anyone else to be hurt,
and I was willing to do what it took.
They did not want me to be there.
But I knew I had to be,
and that's exactly what I did.
I went home, I took my daughters to their father's
house, and waited for him to come home from work.
I was more terrified than I'd ever been,
because now I knew that this man was a murderer.
I couldn't do anything. I just sat there, and I waited.
I tried to act normal, let's do the normal thing.
Let's have dinner.
The police did tell me that they were going to
raid the house the next day early on and arrest him.
I had to spend the evening with this man that I
didn't know, this murderer, and I had to pretend
everything was okay.
I was trying not to have a panic attack.
I was trying to be calm.
I was thinking of all these scenarios of
how am I going to escape if I have to, and
all night long, my mind was racing.
It was very difficult to try and calm myself, waiting for...
that night to be over with,
and it seemed to go on forever.
And I waited and waited and waited and nothing,
and I thought, what's going on? Where are they?
Really early in the morning, he received a phone call,
and I said, "What's going on?"
He said, "They need me at work. I need to leave."
I have no idea who called him,
but he got out of bed, and the next
thing I knew, someone was banging on the front door.
He jumps out of bed, and he throws on his clothes,
and he slams open the window.
He pushes the screen out, and he jumps out of the window,
and he's gone.
He didn't even look at me.
Later on, I found out they had
a SWAT team down the street waiting for him.
Once he was caught and jailed,
I was hoping that that would be the end of it.
But then every time I would change my number,
he would somehow get the number, and he would call me,
and he terrorized me like this
from jail in California for months and months.
I had gotten a new job with an insurance company,
and he didn't know where I worked.
He didn't know what I did.
But one day, I got a phone call, and it was Paul.
Hello?
And I said, "How did you know I work here?
How did you get this number?"
And he said, "I have my ways."
And he said, "It's really a pretty building.
You've got a waterfall out front. That's kind of cool."
And he said, "You look really pretty in that red dress."
I hung up the phone, I went outside and looked around, and
it was the eeriest feeling knowing
someone had to be watching me for him.
How else would he know?
Because he knew people on the outside.
I realized that he had to be found guilty
and be behind bars for the rest of his life.
So I knew I had to testify against him.
I was glad that he was gone for good.
He can't escape.
He can't lurk, he can't have anybody following me.
He's gone.
Paul Mack was the main suspect in Annette Huddle's murder.
They just didn't have enough evidence.
But before he died, he did
confess to killing Annette Huddle in Ohio,
and I was glad.
Sometimes I feel guilty.
Why am I alive,
and these two women aren't?
Why was I the one that survived
when I was actually living with him?
I'm very lucky in the fact that I can see my children
grow up, and I can see my grandchildren and be with
my family, and I...
I think of the families that lost their daughter.
I wish they could have had that, too.
I think the biggest thing that I take away from
this experience,
and I just want everyone to know that my instincts
played the biggest part in saving my life.
And I totally believe in if there's a little voice telling
you something, you better listen to it.
Wherever you go, listen to your -- your heart,
but also, listen to your brain.