- I'm Kate Snow and this is Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
- It was the strangest call of my life.
She just said, "Is Linda with you?
"She's missing. We can't find her."
That's all she kept saying.
Everything changed from there on out,
and just got uglier and uglier.
- A loving mother one day just disappears.
- Her car was there and she wasn't home.
- The blood was Linda's.
- We all knew
there's something very wrong here.
- But with no body, no evidence,
and no suspects, no arrest.
- The ex-husband and the ex-boyfriend
both had alibis.
- Then lightning strikes again.
- I drove into the driveway--
- How often are a mother and daughter
killed at the same house?
- Who would steal so much from one family?
- Was she afraid of him? - She was afraid of him.
- I just found out they're investigating me again.
- Motive outweighed everything in this case.
- Miles away, buried in the sand,
lay one piece of the puzzle.
- The rest of the mystery
hiding away in a woman's heart.
- She couldn't keep it inside anymore.
- The killer thought his secret was safe.
He was wrong.
- This is as they say, a game changer.
- Our prime suspect no longer has an alibi.
**
- Hello, and welcome to Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
It defied the odds.
Three women gone,
all from the same Tucson, Arizona home.
Though the tragedies took place years apart.
Police believed the disturbing events were connected.
To expose the dreadful secret behind this mystery,
one person would have to come clean.
But would they have the courage to do it?
Here's Dennis Murphy, with "Secrets of the Desert."
- It's a timeless Old West beauty
as the setting sun grazes the mountains,
and the vast Sonoran Desert fades to dark,
covering secrets and old bones for another night.
It's as unchanging out here,
as the heartaches all those people in the valley below
sometimes seem to make for themselves.
With their jealousies, their rages.
When daily routine without warning
gives way to stark terror.
A young woman vanished.
That was the start of it all.
An anguished mother's cry for help
in a case that would take 15 years to untangle.
You didn't have a weapon. You didn't have a witness.
- That's correct.
- Before it was done, there'd be multiple murders.
- They pushed someone who doesn't like to be pushed.
- And maddeningly for law enforcement,
suspects who just didn't quite fit.
- The two key people had alibis.
- A daughter, ensnared in a family tragedy
like few others.
- Did you understand what had happened?
- I don't think I really understood it like fully,
but something bad happened.
- It all started here... Tucson, Arizona.
The Old Pueblo, they call it.
Nestled in the desert at the foot
of the Santa Catalina Mountains,
Dave Watson spent nearly 20 years here
with the Tucson Fire Department.
He fought fires, and was trained as an EMT.
Eventually he made captain, but he never forgot
the camaraderie of his early days at the firehouse.
- Burning through a lot of adrenaline together, huh.
- On occasion, yes.
- Hours of boredom, moments of terror.
- Yeah, pretty much.
- Seemed like everything he needed,
until in 1993, she came along.
- I was out with a friend, it was his birthday,
and met her at an Eastside nightclub.
And so I walked up to her and asked her to dance.
Her name was Linda.
- She was spontaneous, spunky, cute,
and we just seemed to hit it off.
- She was very funny, and just very sweet.
That's always the word I think to describe her.
- Marnel Camp was one of Linda's best friends.
Dave's too.
She was also dating Dave's best friend.
The two couples soon made a young, fun-loving, foursome.
- But we didn't have kids yet. We didn't even have a house.
Neither one of us even had a mortgage yet or anything.
So it was pretty carefree, looking back.
- Lots of barbecuing, swimming,
and yes, a fair amount of drinking too.
This was a hard partying crowd.
But there was no denying that Dave and Linda were in love.
- They were the ones that were well-liked.
A cute couple.
- Mike Bratton was another close friend of Dave's.
- The kids on the float at high school?
- Yeah, exactly.
- So it wasn't a surprise when in 1994,
Dave and Linda married.
- Good bash? - Yeah, oh, yeah.
It was a party. It was a party.
- Bartender was busy that night?
Oh, yes. Uh-huh. Yes.
- Dave and Linda scraped together enough money
to buy their first home,
and take on that first mortgage.
- It was not in the best neighborhood, for sure,
um, but very cute. It had a lot of character.
- Somewhere between a dump and a fixer upper?
- Yeah, somewhere there.
- Linda and Dave were up for the challenge.
They worked to transform that rundown house
into a loving home for themselves.
And after two years of marriage,
baby Jordynn came along.
At first Dave wasn't so sure about having kids, but...
- When Linda gave birth to Jordynn, it was just--
all that nervousness was gone.
So, yeah, it was nice.
You know, kids make a world of difference.
- Jordynn's grown up now,
but remembers fine details of that little house,
and her mom.
- We had a strawberry patch kind of outside of the house.
I remember us picking strawberries one morning
before breakfast, her cooking breakfast.
- How was Linda, as a mother?
- Oh, she loved that little girl.
That baby was her whole world.
Bobbie Kutasy and Pat Hinkle were Linda's aunts.
- She's very attentive that little girl.
Loved her to pieces.
- With Jordynn's arrival,
Dave and Linda got another visitor too.
- Marilyn came out to be the nanny,
because they both worked.
- Marilyn was Linda's mother.
- Was that an SOS that went out from Linda to Marilyn?
- Yes. - To come-- mom come,
I need some help here. - Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
- Not an unusual request from a new mother,
but Marilyn's response was unusual.
- She sold her house,
and drove her car and headed out.
- She did all that for her girl and her grand-daughter.
- She did all that for the family, yeah.
- And where was she living?
- Dave actually built a little guesthouse out back
specifically for Marilyn.
- Not every young husband
likes to have the mother-in-law around,
let's face it.
- It's funny that all the guys at work said
that that's a big mistake.
They said it was going to end up in divorce.
- What was she like? - Very pleasant, polite.
And, uh, but as time went on,
you know, you live with somebody for 24 hours at a time,
you get to know more about them,
and our relationship got strained.
- And soon, that wasn't the only relationship suffering.
Linda's friend, Marnel, who by then was married
and living in Oregon, noticed the change
when she invited Dave and Linda up for a visit.
- You were seeing the cracks right before your eyes.
- Absolutely. Yeah.
- Coming apart was a hard reality for Dave to accept.
- I planned on staying married forever, you know.
That was the deal,
but just didn't turn out that way.
You know, I was no more or longer in love,
but I still loved her.
And she's the mother of my child.
In 1998, Dave and Linda separated,
sharing custody of Jordynn.
That same year, Dave met someone new.
- I saw him and his buddy.
I nudged my friend
and I said I'm going to go ask him to dance,
and I made a beeline.
Her name was Rosemary,
and she ran a successful karaoke business in town.
And she's quite an entertainer I guess, huh, Rosemary?
- Yeah, she is. She says if you want to be successful
in this business, you've got to sell it.
- They fell for each other hard and fast.
Their shared love of music, the outdoors,
and little Jordynn.
- He loves Jordynn very much.
I knew when I met him he definitely had,
you know, parenting time with her,
and it would go back and forth between Linda and Dave.
- Rosemary also had a daughter from another relationship,
and in June 2000,
she and Dave took the big step
of blending their families.
- I have my daughters by my side,
he had his two good buddies,
and we took our vows
and celebrated with everybody around us.
- Linda also seemed to find happiness
in a new relationship.
His name was Carl Barton Junior,
though most people knew him as JR.
He was a firefighter too
for the Air National Guard in Tucson.
- What did you think? - He seemed nice.
You know, I met him a handful of times,
but more than a skin deep,
I didn't know much about him ever.
- Linda called Marnel and gushed about her new flame.
- He was older,
and I remember her commenting
about how he was sexy or something like that.
- Marnel, busy juggling family and career,
really didn't pay close attention.
If her friend was happy, then so was she,
until the phone rang one morning in August 2000.
- This phone call I think was one of the lines in the sand
where your life was different thereafter.
- Absolutely. Changed there.
Everything changed from there on out,
and just got uglier and uglier.
- On the phone, Linda's mother with a question.
- She said, "Marnel, it's Marilyn,
"and is Linda with you?"
- With you? Why would she be with you?
- It was the strangest call of my life.
- But things would get much stranger.
- The back door was found unlocked,
there's a broken cup at the entryway.
- We got there. Her car was there,
and she wasn't home.
**
- The week of August 21, 2000 started out like any other,
until Marnel Camp's phone rang.
It was Marilyn, her friend Linda's mom.
- She called and said, "Marnel, it's Marilyn,
and is Linda with you?"
- With you? Why would she be with you?
- It was the strangest call of my life.
- Marilyn said she and Linda had gone to church
Sunday evening.
The next morning, Marilyn couldn't find her.
How'd she sound, Marilyn? - She said-- Very stressed.
Very stressed.
- Marilyn also called the Pima County Sheriff.
Detective Kelly Anderson wasn't on the case back then,
but remembers it well.
- There are not that many adult missing persons
because frankly,
an adult can go wherever they want to
and they don't need permission
or they don't have to tell anybody.
- Still, a deputy was dispatched to Linda's house.
- He doesn't see anything that would indicate foul play.
- Nothing's been tossed in the house?
- No, he doesn't see any blood, he doesn't see any indication
of violence or a struggle.
The only thing he notices is the broken coffee cup,
and some property that Linda has left behind
that may be a little suspicious.
- Linda's Bible was on the counter,
her Jeep in the driveway, and perhaps most telling,
she left her pager behind.
Remember, this was the year 2000.
- When she didn't have her daughter,
she would keep her pager,
so that if anything happened with her daughter
that was the way to communicate with her.
- So this is important. That's a link to the daughter.
- That's a link to the daughter.
- It doesn't mean anything's happened here yet though.
- Not yet.
Her purse is gone,
so the deputy tells Ms. Cox let's just wait.
- Marilyn didn't want to wait.
She called her younger sister, Pat.
- She tells me, "Pat, Linda's missing."
Of course, this don't happen to your family.
It happens to other people.
- Marilyn also called Linda's ex-husband, Dave.
- Marilyn says that
Linda's not home, she's missing.
She sounded panicked and was like,
give us some time. It's Monday morning.
Maybe she went somewhere.
- Three days passed.
It was Linda's turn to take Jordynn.
Dave and then four-year-old Jordynn
drove to Linda's house.
- We got there. Her car was there,
and she wasn't home, and so he was like,
"Oh, that's weird.
"She's probably just out with a friend or something."
- It didn't sound that far-fetched to many people
who knew Linda. - She always liked to party.
Supposedly, she had a couple of relationships
with some crazy people.
- Popping the wrong truck after a night of drinking?
- Maybe.
Yeah, that was the assumption at the time.
- Investigators continued to poke around anyway.
They wanted to talk to Linda's boyfriend, JR.
Marilyn brought him up
when she reported Linda missing.
Silverbell Road, a two lane blacktop
that meanders from Tucson out into the vast desert.
A detective went to JR's home.
- He cooperated in every way that was asked of him.
- JR told the same story others did,
that Linda was a heavy drinker.
The drinking was why JR said
he recently broke up with Linda.
He said too much alcohol cost Linda her job.
And JR said Linda faced an even bigger loss.
Turns out Linda and Dave hadn't yet come to terms
on custody of Jordynn,
and they had an important court hearing coming up.
Are you going for full custody?
- I didn't want to take all the rights away from Linda
by no means because every child needs both parents.
- But after his break up with Linda,
JR did something unexpected.
He volunteered to testify at the custody hearing
on Dave's behalf.
So here's the strange thing.
He now has your back in family court.
- Not so much mine.
I'm sure he could give two shakes about me,
but he cared about Jordynn.
So he was doing it for her, not me.
- More pressure on Linda.
She had joined a 12-step program.
Still shortly before she disappeared,
she went out drinking with her cousin Jay, Pat's son,
at a place away from the bright lights of Tucson
at a bar called the Circle S Saloon.
- Jay was over there and she was needing to get around
some family because things was a little tough for her.
So he told her, well, come on out.
- Linda tried to climb back on the wagon.
About 10:00 PM, the night she disappeared,
she called her church sponsor
and asked to meet the next morning,
but she didn't show up for the meeting,
and hadn't been seen since.
There seemed to be every reason to believe
she was on another bender, except for one thing,
something Marilyn mentioned in that initial 911 call.
- Who had been threatening Linda and her mother?
Police discover a cry for help.
But did it come too late?
- And someone else felt threatened too.
- It made me nervous enough to protect myself
and the kids and everybody involved.
**
- Before she disappeared,
investigators learned Linda Watson
was facing the most trying time of her life.
- She was broken up.
She was upset at JR,
She was going through a custody battle.
- JR told detectives the custody issue
was weighing heavily on Linda.
- So JR said,
Linda's mom shared her doubts with her sister, Pat.
What did Marilyn think about this guy, JR?
The boyfriend is in and out of the picture.
- She didn't like him.
She said that he's very controlling.
- Which is why when Marilyn couldn't find Linda,
her mind immediately jumped to JR.
That very first day, she told her suspicions
to the 911 operator.
- Investigators learned that after Marilyn called JR
to ask about Linda,
JR called Linda's attorney from her custody case
and left this message.
- He phoned someone else as well.
- He called me up and told me that Marilyn had called him,
accused him, blamed him,
and asking, you know, where's my daughter?
- Was JR protesting too much?
Detectives learned while he was dating Linda,
JR sometimes went with her to pick up or drop off Jordynn.
That's how he knew Dave.
- He was also a firefighter.
He had met Dave, not through firefighting,
but while he was with Linda
doing child custody exchanges of Jordynn,
he had met David and Rosemary Watson at that point.
- Rosemary, Dave's new wife of two months.
Keep your eye on that name.
- Keep your eye on that name, yes.
- What is JR's alibi for the night
that Linda goes missing?
- On the night that Linda went missing,
JR was with his girlfriend.
- His new girlfriend.
JR was already moving on, he said.
But he still seemed concerned about Linda.
JR was very helpful offering different ideas
or people to talk to.
- But I think cynically sometimes detective,
guys inveigle themselves into an investigation
when, in fact, they're part of the scheme.
- Sure, that could certainly happen.
- Detectives also had more concrete reasons to suspect JR.
- There was a domestic incident
that they were involved in shortly prior to this.
- Just two days before Linda disappeared,
she had called the Pima County Sheriff's Department.
- She made a report that JR had come to her house on Curtis
and was banging on the windows and banging on the doors.
- JR Said he was just trying to pick up
some of his belongings,
but it prompted Linda to call her attorney
the weekend she disappeared.
She wasn't the only one.
Rosemary and Dave also had a restraining order
against JR.
It stemmed from an incident when he was still dating Linda
and came to pick up Jordynn at their home.
- I was home alone with the kids,
and just banging on the door, the big heavy--
not just a knock-knock, it was kind of a boom.
And it was more his tone at the time.
It made me nervous enough to protect myself
and the kids and everybody involved.
- Of course, after JR and Linda broke up,
things changed.
- JR came to us and said that he had concerns for Linda
and her drinking,
and he said that he would testify about her drinking
in order to protect Jordynn.
- The hearing happened right on schedule,
just four days after Linda disappeared.
Dave and Rosemary were there, of course, JR, too.
Linda was still nowhere to be found.
But her mom arrived, spoiling for a fight.
- JR was in the courtroom,
and she accused JR of harming her daughter.
- She thinks this is foul play.
- Yes, she does.
- With Linda a no-show, the judge awarded temporary
full custody of Jordynn to Dave.
- Were you happy with that?
- Oh, I was definitely happy with Jordynn in my life, yes.
- Marilyn went back to Linda's house dejected,
but not defeated,
and that's when she made a discovery
that changed everything.
- Marilyn calls us and said that she found blood
in the entryway to Linda's house.
- Did all these little fragments of observations
suggest a narration detected?
- Something violent happened in this area
that someone had cleaned up.
Now we have a theory of foul play.
- But what police didn't have was a suspect.
- The only two people that might be looked at,
both had alibis.
**
- Linda Watson had just vanished.
She didn't even show up to a custody hearing
involving her four-year-old daughter, Jordynn.
Did you feel abandoned, Jordynn?
- No, not really.
My dad was always right there if I needed anything.
- Linda's mother, Marilyn, however, was very worried,
especially when she returned to Linda's house
after the custody hearing.
- Marilyn calls us and said
that she found blood in the entryway
to Linda's house.
- The blood was under a trash bag hidden from view.
The deputy who responded to Marilyn's 911 call
hadn't seen it.
Now investigators came back and did a luminol test.
- It lit up blue and turned out to be positive
for not only human blood,
but matching DNA to Linda Watson.
- Now that they were looking for blood,
they found more on the vacuum cleaner cord.
- It was apparent from the blood pattern
that it wasn't dripped, it wasn't smeared,
it wasn't wiped.
The cord had been laying in a pool of blood
to get that pattern, and then dried.
- Did all these little fragments of observations
suggest a narration, detective?
- Something violent happened in this area
that someone had cleaned up.
- So now you have a theory of foul play
to explain her disappearance.
- Now we have a theory of foul play.
- Were investigators looking at JR as a potential suspect?
- He was certainly looked at as a person of interest
mostly because Marylin said this guy could have done it.
- But JR also had a defender, Linda's ex-husband, Dave.
- Of course, investigators had to wonder.
After all, JR had backed Dave
in the custody dispute with Linda.
Could Dave be covering for him now?
For that matter where was Dave the night Linda disappeared?
- The detective also interviewed Rosemary,
Dave's wife.
- Dave, she said, was home with the kids.
- So both Dave's wife and JR's girlfriend said
the two men were at their own homes
the night Linda disappeared.
And despite all that blood,
there was still no conclusive proof
Linda was even dead.
- We have no body.
We have no evidence of anything
outside of the entryway,
and certainly the only two people
that might be looked at,
the ex-husband and the ex-boyfriend,
both had alibis.
- The investigation had stalled, and Linda's case
landed in the place no victim's family wants.
- It's the vault. - And what is that?
- Our administration building,
many years ago before we occupied it, was a bank
and on the second floor there is an actual vault,
and that is where we keep the cold cases.
- Locked away, a tomb of sorts,
where mysteries lay buried and forgotten.
But Linda's mom would not forget,
would not give up. - I want to find her.
If nothing else, I want to take her home.
I don't want her in this desert.
I want her to go home.
- That sprawling Sonoran Desert,
what secrets could it be hiding?
Marylin paid for billboards, raised reward money,
organized vigils.
This was the start, I think, of what you would come to regard
as the steel strength of Marilyn.
- Absolutely. Yeah.
- And even if she couldn't find Linda,
she would continue Linda's fight for Jordynn.
- Marilyn sought a lawsuit for grandparents' visitation rights.
- Marilyn filed a lawsuit seeking unsupervised visits
with her granddaughter.
She made her case in court, and in the media.
- I owed it to Linda I owed it to Jordynn
and I owed it to myself to do as much as I could.
- Dave and Rosemary fought back
for fear of what Marilyn might say
or even do to little Jordynn.
- She's flat out told me as soon as she gets finds Linda,
gets Jordynn, she's leaving this God forsaken place.
- Amidst their legal dispute,
Dave and Rosemary grew their family.
In 2001 they had a little boy, Caden.
And then a year later,
Rosemary took a bold step and adopted Jordynn.
- I sent out birth announcements?
- Did you? - It's a girl, 3'2",
whatever, 68 pounds, kind of thing.
I was ecstatic.
- For Jordynn, the feeling was much more muted.
- It seemed like what my father wanted to happen.
I didn't want to displease anybody,
so I just said yes.
- With three kids, the court battle and work,
the Watsons had their hands full,
but Dave always made it a point to check in with Jordynn.
- When I was little, and even now when he goes to work,
still I kind of worry.
- To calm her nerves,
Dave made sure to tuck her in every night.
- Even if he's at work, he'll still call
and say goodnight around the same time
every night, just in case.
- Does he still do that? - Yes, he does.
- Last night you got a tuck and call from him?
- Mm-hmm, I did.
- In January 2003, two and a half years
after Linda vanished,
the court finally issued a ruling.
Marilyn sent Linda's friend Marnel an email with the news.
- In big, bold letters she wrote,
"I've got Jordy."
- After a two-year legal battle, Marilyn won the right
to have unsupervised visits with Jordynn.
- I always thought that Linda must be--
must have given her a little bit of peace
to know that Jordynn was with her mom.
- Rosemary and Dave were not happy.
Rosemary spoke to NBC affiliate KVOA TV
after the ruling.
- Not the state's place to decide where my children stay.
They're turning parents into babysitters.
- At first, Marilyn said the Watsons resisted
the judge's order.
- She attempted to have her visitation,
but Dave Watson made it difficult
by not answering the phone, by not being available.
- Marilyn took them back to court for contempt,
and once again, she won.
On May 7th 2003, Marilyn was due to have
her first unsupervised visit with now seven-year-old Jordynn
since the contempt hearing.
- You remember seeing Jordynn off that day?
Were you off shift? - Oh, yeah. I was off shift.
Yeah, yeah, booted her out the door.
- Have fun, huh? - Yeah.
- Marilyn and Jordynn spent the day together.
Remember what you all did that day?
- I don't. I don't remember that day.
- Maybe the movies. Maybe some shopping.
- Maybe something like that,
but I don't remember it.
- Maybe not,
but what happened next was unforgettable.
- Coming up.
- I said, "Is that my sister?"
And he said, "Yeah."
And I said, "Is she dead?"
He said, "Yeah." - Lightning strikes twice.
- How quickly, detective,
do you start to connect the dots?
- Immediately.
**
- May 7th, 2003,
Linda and Marilyn's friend Marnel Camp
had just moved back to Tucson.
She'd made plans to catch up with Marilyn,
who was elated at just having been awarded
unsupervised visits with Jordynn.
- What were the plans with Jordynn?
- Just to stop at the house and see her and see Jordynn,
and then possibly go with her to take Jordynn home.
- But by the time Marnel made it over to the little house
on Curtis road--
- I drove into the driveway
at 7 about 7:45, um, and it was dark.
Nobody was there.
- Marnel must have just missed Marylin,
who was supposed to have Jordynn
back at Dave and Rosemary's home by 8:30.
That's when Marnel remembered something.
A TV appointment.
- I thought, "Oh, if I leave now,
"I can still catch 'The Bachelor.'"
- Just a short while after she left,
calls started pouring into Pima County Sheriff's dispatch.
- Marilyn's sister Pat was just getting ready to turn in
when the TV caught her attention.
- It was 10:00 news,
and right at how they roll something across there.
It said two ladies shot on Curtis Road.
- Marilyn's street.
Pat rushed over and found an active crime scene.
She saw an officer she knew.
- I said, "Is that my sister?"
And he said, "Yeah."
And I said, "Is she dead?"
He said, "Yeah."
And I asked him, "Would you please let me go to her?"
He says, "No, I can't let you do that."
So I just what of-- what can I do?
I just lost it there.
- It was nearly incomprehensible.
Two tragedies in the same family.
First, Linda disappeared.
Now, Marilyn, having just returned home
from dropping Jordynn off, murdered.
- And Renee also.
Renee was an innocent little neighbor lady.
You know, she was just doing Marilyn a favor.
- Renee Farnsworth, the second victim.
Marilyn's friend and neighbor who had gone with her
to drop Jordynn off.
Someone had ambushed the two women in the driveway.
Renee had been shot once, Marilyn twice.
The second shot at close range to the head.
- This is incredibly rare to have a random act of violence
to two women who have done nothing to anybody.
How quickly, detective, do you start to connect the dots
and say this is the mother in the same house
of the missing Linda Watson?
- Immediately.
Immediately.
- Several hours later,
Pima County Sheriff's investigators
went to the last place the two women had visited.
- Two detectives came over, and had told us
that they were there to do a well check on Jordynn,
and they started talking to us.
- Investigators told them there had been a shooting
at Marilyn's home.
They wanted to know where the Watsons had been.
- The investigator asked if they had any contact
with Marilyn.
- So Dave said Rosemary came to the door.
What did she make of what's going on?
- Same as me,
just kind of speechless, not--
just kind of taking it all in, trying to process it all.
- The investigators never told Dave and Rosemary
exactly what happened that night.
Dave said it wasn't until the next day
that he saw the news and learned that Marilyn
had been murdered.
Did you feel bad about Marilyn?
- Oh, heck yeah. I mean, yeah.
I mean, how could I not?
This is Jordynn's grandmother.
- There was someone else detectives needed to talk to.
JR, Linda's ex-boyfriend who Marilyn had accused
of murdering Linda.
- JR told investigators he spent the evening
with his fiancee and his kids, and for some reason,
he felt the need to tell Marilyn's family too.
- I got a call the next morning from JR telling me
he had an alibi.
- It's kind of a strange thing.
- I never cared for the man.
I told him, I just said,
"What do you need an alibi for, JR?"
"Well, I just wanted you to know."
And I said, "Okay, bye." I just hung up.
- The dawn had risen on the longest day of their lives.
Marilyn, the matriarch of their family, the one
who fiercely fought to keep Linda's case alive was gone.
For family friend, Marnel, the heartbreak was twofold.
- I didn't realize until then
that I never truly let go of the idea
of Linda coming back until Marilyn was killed,
and that's when I realized, oh, she's gone.
That-- she's dead.
- So this is a double nightmare.
- Yeah.
- Had you agreed to take Jordy home for the drop off,
you really would have been in this.
- Most likely, yeah.
- Three years after Linda's disappearance,
investigators had a whole new deadly mystery.
And the key to unlocking it just might be a voice
from the grave.
- Did Marilyn know what was coming?
- She said, and that's a gun laying right there.
I won't be as easily taken as Linda was.
**
- Welcome back.
Marilyn Cox and her friend, Renee Farnsworth,
were dead, ambushed in Maryland's driveway
under the cover of night.
As loved ones grieved, detectives zeroed in
on two men questioned when Marilyn's daughter Linda
went missing three years earlier.
Linda's ex-husband, Dave Watson,
and ex-boyfriend, JR Barton, both had alibis.
But a secret letter to police was about to
raise new questions about one of them.
Back to Dennis Murphy with "Secrets of the Desert."
- For years, Marilyn Cox had been an advocate
for her missing daughter, Linda.
With Marilyn's murder,
that role fell to her sister, Pat.
- I felt like literally she handed me the baton.
I told her, you know,
I might not do as good a job as you,
but as long as there's breath in me,
I will do my best to try to find Linda,
and I will try to find who killed you.
- Pima County Sheriff's detectives were working
to do the same, for Marilyn's family,
and for the family of Renee Farnsworth.
- Renee is as much a victim as anybody else.
- She was moral support for her--
- She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
- Investigators compiled the preliminary evidence
from eyewitness accounts.
- We know as soon as they got out of the car,
they are attacked, accosted by a lone gunman,
6' to 6'2", slender, well-built,
something covering his face, probably a hoodie.
- It looked like a targeted killing.
There's no other motive. There's no burglary.
There's no sexual assault. There's no car theft.
There's nothing.
- But there was potentially valuable physical evidence.
- The bullet casings from the scene
were a, uh, 9 millimeter, and when you combine
the bullet casings with the bullets
from the victims, it was consistent
with a Ruger 9 millimeter P85 semiautomatic handgun.
- Hanging over everything was the question,
who would have wanted Marylin dead?
Detectives knew from the moment Linda disappeared,
Marilyn had accused Linda's ex-boyfriend, JR,
of harming Linda.
It became a nasty feud.
They even tried to get restraining orders
against one another,
but a judge denied their requests,
which is when Marilyn's attention seemed to shift.
- After about January of 2001,
when JR and her had no more contact with each other,
and she totally focused on Dave.
- Detectives knew, the whole town knew,
that she'd been feuding with Dave and Rosemary
over visitation with Jordynn.
Pat said the reason Marilyn asked her friend Renee
to go with her to drop Jordynn off
was that she feared a confrontation with Dave.
- She thought there was safety in numbers.
- Pat recalled an earlier incident,
she said, when she was on the phone with Marilyn,
and Dave showed up unannounced at Marilyn's house.
- She let him in the house which just blew me away.
But she wanted him to feel better
at having Jordynn over there so he could see that it's nice,
it's not dangerous and I'm not planning on taking off.
- But Pat said the visit turned tense.
- So she showed him through the house
and took him towards the little bedroom,
and it was just off to the left there and she said,
"And that's the gun laying right there.
"I won't be as easily taken as Linda was."
- Marilyn warned everyone around her
that if anything happened to her,
there was one person they should look at.
This is a letter she wrote to the Sheriff's Department
in February 2003, shortly after she won the visitation case
and just months before she was murdered.
- She was nervous and she was scared of David Watson.
- Now Marilyn was dead.
Detectives couldn't dismiss the strange coincidence
of two tragedies happening at the same place
to the same family.
How often are a mother and daughter
killed at the same house, three years apart?
That doesn't happen.
- When Linda went missing, two men were blips
on the investigators radar.
First, was her ex-boyfriend JR
with whom she'd had a tumultuous relationship.
JR insisted he was at his house
the night of Marilyn and Renee's murders,
and his alibi checked out,
plus, said Detective Kelly Anderson--
- There's nothing evidentiary at the scene
that would indicate JR had any involvement.
And he doesn't even match the physical description
of the person the eyewitness saw
at the scene running away.
- But then there was Linda's ex-husband, David.
He too, of course, had an alibi.
He said he was home the night of the murders,
and his wife, Rosemary, backed him up.
Rosemary had an alibi too.
She had been at home with the kids
when Marilyn dropped Jordynn off.
- Ever looked at Rosemary as a co-conspirator here,
possibly?
She had interest in retaining custody of the child too.
They've been in on it together.
- Sure.
You don't ignore the wife.
Just because she's who she is doesn't mean
that she's excluded as being looked at.
Obviously, she's not a man running from the scene.
We know that, but could she be involved in it?
And could she be planning it with him?
- Detectives had already talked to Rosemary, of course,
but there was another potential witness at that house.
What did she know.
- Dave's daughter Jordynn sat down for an interview
the day after her grandmother was killed.
She told the detective that her adoptive mom,
Rosemary, greeted her at the door
when Marilyn dropped her off at home.
- A curious response from the little girl
that dad told her he'd been outside.
- The detective prodded further.
- She does not know where dad was at 8:30.
- Detectives wanted to speak with Dave Watson again.
- Police have tough questions for Dave.
- And a disturbing discovery.
- A reflection caught my eye.
I said, "Look at this, look what I found,"
and I picked it up, and it said DDW.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
- Welcome back to Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
I'm Kate Snow.
First, young mother, Linda Watson disappeared.
Then three years later, her mother,
Marilyn Cox, was murdered.
Detectives questioned Marilyn's ex son-in-law,
Dave Watson, about the shooting,
but he had an alibi, or did he?
Turns out Dave's seven-year-old daughter,
Jordynn, had a different memory of her dad's whereabouts
that night.
Now, police wanted to know what really happened.
Back to Dennis Murphy with "Secrets of the Desert."
- Police were back at the Watson house
with another round of questions for Dave.
- You think I'm in trouble here.
These guys are looking for me for this thing?
- No. No.
I just figured it was just a checkmark on her list
of people to go talk to.
- Once again, Dave told the detective
he was home from his fire department meeting
by the time Jordynn arrived at 8:30.
Remember though the night of the murders,
he said he was in the bathroom
when Jordynn was dropped off.
Now his story was a little different.
- Small inconsistencies.
But detectives also wanted to ask about
their strongest piece of evidence, bullets
and shell casings consistent with a millimeter Ruger handgun.
Did Dave own that type of gun?
- Well, we ended up looking for that ad,
and we were never able to find any ad
for a 9mm by Dave Watson.
- But when they looked in Dave's gun safe,
they did find 9mm ammunition.
Why would he have that if the gun was long gone?
They asked the big question.
- A firm denial, and they had nothing
that placed Dave at either crime scene.
And detectives talked to Rosemary again,
who confirmed what she'd said initially.
- Which meant Dave could not have been the shooter.
But then a few weeks after Marilyn's death,
her sister Bobbi Cortese noticed something
in Marilyn's backyard.
- As I'm coming back toward the gate,
a reflection caught my eye.
I said, look at this. Look what I found.
And I picked it up and it still--
I think I said somebody lost their money clip
and it said DDW.
- Anybody you know is a DDW?
- Well, we know Dave Watson, and his middle name is Dwayne.
- There was no proof it was Dave's.
No fingerprints or DNA.
And even if it were Dave's,
it didn't necessarily mean anything sinister.
After all, he'd once lived in that home, except--
- After Linda's disappearance,
Marilyn got rid of everything that remained of Dave's,
and by every account,
anything that belonged to Dave was long gone.
- So what do you make of the initial money clip?
Is it evidence, just something may be interesting, or what?
- No, it's beyond interesting.
That's certainly evidence.
"DDW" goes beyond coincidence.
- And there was something else, an unusual comment
Dave's friend, Mike, overheard.
Dave allegedly says
somebody brings up Marilyn's murder in the driveway,
and he says, "well, I don't know what happened
but she probably deserved it."
- I did hear him say that.
I don't think that was a good comment either.
I mean, I don't have an answer to that.
Don't like to hear something like that about anybody,
but that was him saying it.
- Bad blood, contradictory statements,
shell casings, and a money clip.
- I imagine in your war room in the homicide offices,
you're batting ideas back and forth that
you're looking at Dave Watson for this thing.
- Absolutely.
- This is a guy who kills when the issue
of his child custody is challenged.
- Those similarities became glaring.
- But it doesn't seem to go anywhere, investigatively.
- It does not.
There is a lack of physical evidence in this case,
and the suspect has an alibi for both nights.
- Three women gone,
and no answers on the desert horizon.
- And now all three investigations
are in the vault.
- All three go cold.
- But for those still grieving,
this case would never go cold.
- I just couldn't believe
that these innocent women were murdered,
and no one was talking about it.
- Apparently, somebody was.
**
- By the spring of 2003,
three women in Dave Watson's orbit
were either missing or dead.
Detectives had their suspicions,
but no hard evidence Dave had committed any crime,
and so the cases of Linda, Marilyn, and Renee
sat quietly, collecting dust in the cold case vault
of the Sheriff's Department.
- We keep waiting and listening and hoping
that something will come up
they'll find something that proves that Dave did this.
- And all the while, Dave continued
to climb the ranks at the Tucson Fire Department,
even if he couldn't quite shake
the shroud of suspicion that surrounded him.
I mean, this is tongues are wagging in Tucson.
- Oh, absolutely.
- Mat McDonald, Courtney Corcoran,
and Richard Johnson all rode horses with Dave,
and worked with him at the Tucson Fire Department.
- I mean, I went in to a station and--
where Dave was working and the phone rang.
And one of the guys picked up the phone
and they go, "hey, killer, phone's for you."
Yeah, I mean- - You guys are tough
on one another. - Yeah, tough on one another.
- Somebody called him "cold case,"
is that true? - Yeah, I-I--
- You did that? - I did.
- One day, his friend Matt
decided to ask Dave point blank
if he had anything to do with the murders.
- He was very candid with me, and we spoke
for probably four hours that morning.
- You had questions, Matt. Did he answer them?
Did he persuade you? - He did answer them.
His buddies were convinced. Dave had done nothing wrong.
- I never had any doubt that he was innocent.
- You don't see him as the guy in the hoodie?
- No, I do not. Not at all.
- I never called him on it, because I never suspected Dave.
- Despite the whispers around town,
Dave never left,
and Jordynn says he remained focused on his kids.
- My dad really tried to make everything normal,
so we could have a normal childhood.
- But the ongoing investigation
took its toll on Dave and Rosemary's marriage.
- I said, "I can't do this anymore,"
and he said "OK."
He asked if there was anything that he could do,
and I said, "I don't think so."
- By 2007, they'd divorced and moved on.
Rosemary worked as a radio disk jockey
supporting her family,
including her adoptive daughter Jordynn,
who lived primarily with her.
Dave was promoted to fire department captain.
- He earned it.
It was not given to him. He earned it.
- Time, as it tends to do, kept moving on.
But here in the cold case vault
sat those three cases.
Linda, who was officially declared dead in 2006,
Marilyn, and Renee.
- I think my biggest concern
was always them being forgotten.
- Linda's friend, Marnel, did what she could
to keep that from happening.
- For years, I sent letters to all the media
just saying, here's the story.
I was always just shocked
that there wasn't outrage in the community.
I just couldn't believe
that these innocent women were murdered,
and no one was talking about it.
- But by December 2007,
it seemed as though there had been
a huge break in the case.
The local papers reported that
the Sheriff's Department had new evidence.
"Information in this case is snowballing
and we have to pursue that." Said an investigator.
In reality it was all a bluff, the cops planting a story,
hoping to pressure Dave.
They tapped his phone too and recorded this call
he made to Rosemary.
- Dave seemed to suspect someone close to him
was talking to the cops.
- Detectives interviewed
a friend of Dave's named Luis,
who told investigators about something
Dave said at a party one night.
- "Not so," said Dave's best friend's wife,
who was at the same party.
She said Dave was talking about a missing dog, not Linda.
Hard to tell if it was just an innocent misunderstanding
or a slip of Dave's tongue that indicated something sinister.
The mystery of Lynda's disappearance
and Marilyn and Renee's murders no closer to being solved.
No way of knowing that out there in the desert,
an answer had already been found.
- Someone took a horse ride out to the middle of nowhere.
What was he looking for?
- It seems very coincidental that you would ride it there
when at that point in time, nobody else knew.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
- Linda Watson had been declared legally dead,
but no body had ever been found.
So there was no proof of a crime,
and no case to make
against her ex-husband, Dave Watson.
Not for Linda's disappearance
or for the subsequent murder of her mother and a friend.
All that changed because of a random discovery
and a long delayed lab result.
- So where are we, Detective? Why here?
- We are outside the Silverbell Mine area,
that being the Silverbell Mine.
- Oh, yeah. - Very remote area,
the Northwest side of Tucson and Pima County.
- Remember, JR had lived off of Silverbell Road.
Silverbell Mine was near the same road,
but 20 miles from where JR lived.
Way back in October of 2003,
not long after Marilyn and Renee were killed,
hunters found a partial human skull here.
- This is a high trafficked area
for undocumented border crossers
and unfortunately, many in the summertime,
in the hot summers of Arizona do not make it
and perish in this area.
- The Medical Examiner's Office in Tucson
runs a unique program to identify such remains,
but it takes time.
So a small portion of the cranium was removed
for DNA testing at a later date.
Much later.
- Eight years later in February of 2011,
we finally get a DNA match back
from that skull that was found in 2003,
and it is a positive match for Linda Watson.
- Suddenly, the skull was a big priority.
There was no sign of trauma, no evidence of how she died.
Still 11 years after Linda Watson disappeared,
at last here was proof she was no longer alive.
That's when you have a case. - That's when I have a case.
- Indeed, he did have a case.
Three of them, in fact.
Detective Anderson took over as lead detective
after Linda's skull was identified.
- By the time I got the case in 2011,
it was 11 years old,
and there was 11 years of investigative work
that had been done,
and I had to start piecing it together.
- It took him a year just to read through it all.
There were so many things that stood out.
But one in particular caught his eye.
It happened years before Linda's remains were identified.
- It was an "a-ha" moment for me.
- Back in 2007 when detectives planted that news story
about the case heating up,
they also put a GPS tracker on Dave's vehicle.
- I discovered GPS coordinates
that indicated on December 31, 2007,
he drove his truck and his horse trailer
and rode a horse within hundreds of yards,
at least no further than 1.1 mile
of where Linda Watson's skull was found back in 2003.
- Speculate, what do you think was going on?
- I think he was going back to the scene
to see if he saw anything, if we were there,
if we'd been poking around, if nothing had changed.
- After studying every detail of the case,
Detective Anderson found it convincing.
- It was obvious to me
and everybody I presented this case to that
only one person committed these three murders,
and that one person was David Watson.
- And he had a theory
about how Linda's murder went down at her house.
Manner of death, do you see it?
- I have no idea.
Something that creates a great amount of blood.
And I think that he takes Linda
in the very early morning hours
out towards the Silverbell Mine
and buries her in a shallow grave in the wash.
- And as far as Detective Anderson
was concerned,
Dave was the only person
who had motive to kill Marilyn, too.
- Motive outweighed everything in this case.
We have two women who took him to court over his daughter.
He got what he wanted as a result of these homicides.
- Enough to go forward? Maybe.
But this wasn't the only high profile cold case
being rescued from the vault at the time.
"Dateline" covered the case of Gary Triano,
who was killed when his car exploded in the parking lot
of an upscale Tucson country club in 1996.
- They had new leads on that one,
things to follow and do right now.
- Another four years passed.
That other case was solved.
And then in 2015...
- Bam bam bam on my front door.
Thought the thing was going to break in.
And there's cops out there in tactical ware.
They asked me to step out.
Four guys threw me into my gravel driveway,
and I said, "I think you guys got the wrong person."
- I told him that "you're under arrest
"for the murders of Linda Watson,
Marilyn Cox, and Renee Farnsworth."
- And I'm like, "no, I told you before
I didn't do any of this."
And I told them, "I didn't do this stuff.
I'm innocent. I told you."
- Linda Watson's friend, Marnel, saw the news on TV.
- We arrested David Dwayne Watson
for three counts of first degree murder.
- All of a sudden, I just couldn't breathe,
and I said, "Oh, my God. This is it."
And I started trying to call her aunt, Pat,
and she just said, this is it.
And I was like, "Are you sure? Are you sure?"
I just remember screaming and crying,
and she said they just arrested him.
- I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe it.
- This is 15 years after Linda's gone missing.
- Yeah, I just could not.
And I still have to pinch myself.
- Dave's daughter, Jordynn,
couldn't believe this day had come either,
but for a very different reason.
She fully supported her father,
believed there was no way he killed three women.
- All they really had was
that he was in a custody battle,
and it seemed like a vicious custody battle.
- And when it came to a climax, somebody died.
- Yes, and that's all they had.
There's no hard evidence putting him somewhere.
No murder weapon in his hand, nothing like that.
They never found anything.
His DNA isn't anywhere that they were.
- And remember, Dave had a solid alibi.
His wife at the time, Rosemary,
told detectives she was with him at home
when all three women were killed.
He pleaded not guilty
and in a recorded call from jail
told his friend, Mike Bratton,
he was counting on his daughter
and his ex-wife to defend him.
- I want Jordynn to be a witness on my behalf,
and I need Rosemary.
I really need Rosemary to be my witness too.
Otherwise, we were a team once,
we need to be a team again.
- Dave had a big surprise coming. Did he ever.
- Rosemary's dark and dangerous secret.
- How do I look my daughter in the eye
and live the rest of my life knowing what I know?
**
- Welcome back.
Dave Watson was charged with the murders
of Linda Watson, Marilyn Cox, and Renee Farnsworth.
Police believed he killed ex-wife, Linda,
then buried her in the desert.
And that he was the only person
with a motive to kill Linda's mother.
To prove his innocence,
Dave would need the help of his longtime supporters.
But one of them was hiding the biggest secret of all.
Back to Dennis Murphy with Secrets of the Desert.
- I had told nobody.
And when you have a deep, dark secret,
you don't tell people.
- For seven years, Rosemary Watson carried
the knowledge buried down deep.
It festered, eat away at her.
- If I never said a word to anybody,
how do I look my daughter in the eye
and live the rest of my life
knowing what I know and keeping that?
- Rosemary said the seeds of this dark secret
first took root in August 2000, the night Linda disappeared.
She, of course, had been her husband's alibi,
told investigators he was home with her all night.
But she told us that wasn't entirely true.
In the middle of the night, she said, she actually woke up.
- And Dave wasn't in bed,
and I got up and I kind of walked through the house,
and I didn't see him, and I went and I laid back down.
I fell back asleep.
- Sometime later, she said, she woke up again.
- And he was not in bed with me again.
And I was looking for him and through the house
kind of peeking out into the backyard.
And then I saw him.
- Where was he?
- He was standing at the back of his Jeep.
I could see him through our kitchen window.
He appeared to be-- he looked as though he was
just kind of cleaning out the back of his Jeep.
- And then he comes in.
- He does come in, and he said, "I went for a walk."
And I asked him if he was OK, and he said, yeah,
he just needed to clear his head.
- That makes sense to you?
- It did make sense to me.
I had no reason to doubt him at all. None.
- And then Rosemary said Dave handed her something.
- He actually handed me a box of latex gloves
and said, "put these away,"
which I didn't think anything of it at the moment.
- This is your new husband you're in love with.
- Absolutely.
- You don't know all his habits?
- Nope, still learning.
- He might get up and talk to the birds,
you don't know, right?
- He was an early riser.
- And so when investigators showed up
and asked where Dave had been the night Linda disappeared...
- I didn't mean to lie.
That wasn't my intent
was to lie to law enforcement.
- Did you say, "Dave is in a jam here.
I got a cover for him?"
- I said, I love my husband.
He went for a walk.
It looks really bad and very suspicious
that he went for a walk,
now suddenly all this is happening.
He said, "I'm home," and I'm like, "he's home."
- So no walk. He was home all night.
That was her story and she stuck with it,
although privately, she said, she couldn't help
but turn things over in her mind,
and at one point even confronted her husband.
- What I said was, please tell me
that you're not involved,
that this has nothing to do with you.
- What did he say? - "I didn't do anything."
And that was enough for me. And I said OK.
- And so three years passed.
Rosemary gave birth to her son, adopted Jordynn,
and battled over visitation rights with Marilyn.
And then on May 8, 2003,
the investigators were at the door again.
Marilyn and Renee had been shot.
Where, they asked, had Dave been
around 8:30 that night?
Dave and Rosemary, as we know, said he'd been at home.
But the truth...
At that moment, Rosemary, was Dave home?
- Dave was not home.
- According to Rosemary, Dave did not get home
until after Jordynn was already tucked into bed,
sometime after 9:00 PM.
- And he walked in, and I saw his face,
and it's something
that nobody will ever, ever take away from me.
- Tell me.
- Panicked. Which panicked me.
White as a ghost, sweating.
I mean, his eyes were huge,
and it just instantly scared me
to where the first thing-- the very first thing
I said to him was, "what's wrong?"
And he didn't say anything.
And I said, "Dave, what is wrong?"
And he didn't say anything.
And he leans down, kissed Jordynn,
and he shut off the light.
And he kind of pulled me around the corner,
and I kept asking him,
"what is wrong? What's going on?"
There were a lot of "what the hell is happening?"
He started to take off his clothes
in the kitchen and quickly,
and he said, "Wash those. I'm getting in the shower."
And he made a beeline for the shower.
- And then when the investigators
showed up at the door...
- He clearly stated, "been home."
- And they asked you directly, "was Dave here?"
- Yes. - You told them a lie.
- I absolutely did. I followed Dave's lead.
- But Rosemary says her insides churned.
- I mean, it really took a toll on me
physically and mentally.
Just everything terrified me.
Dave terrified me.
He handed me knowledge that I didn't want to know.
I didn't ask for it. I didn't want it,
and he left me there holding it.
And it became a very, very heavy burden.
- Is that when your marriage becomes unraveled with Dave?
- It definitely starts there.
It never was the same after that.
It never was the same.
- The dominoes, said Rosemary, quickly began to fall.
Dave's behavior changed, and he had an affair.
Months after Marilyn's murder,
Rosemary confronted him again.
- I said, "I think you killed three women."
And his response to me was, are you afraid of me?
- Dave, she said, blamed her for the suspicion
that had fallen upon him.
- He had made statements, you know, saying
people are saying that you're telling this town
that I did it.
And what he told me was you need to shut your mouth.
And what I said was, I'm your ----ing alibi.
That was a quote. And it--
And it was kind of left at that.
- A few years later, Rosemary and Dave were divorced.
And it was in the midst of an argument
over child care arrangements that Rosemary
said everything came to the surface.
- The moment it hit me, it was just when I said,
please don't make me take you back to court.
And when I said that, he took off his sunglasses
and he said don't (BLEEP) with me, Rosemary.
And it did, it scared me.
- Did you fear for your life at that point?
- I... - Linda, Marilyn, Renee,
I might be next here.
I might be the subject of this,
whatever is going on with this guy.
- There is a moment, yes, that I did.
- After this confrontation,
Rosemary confided in her best friend,
who urged her to call the Sheriff's Department.
She met with an investigator.
- And I told him straight out.
I said I lied both times.
And I think as we went through conversation, you know,
it kind of ended with, I never believed you anyway.
[chuckling] Um...
- But the alibi had gone up in smoke.
- Yes, and there was no turning back.
It was-it was the truth.
- Detectives kept Rosemary's confession secret,
as they slowly built their case against Dave.
When he went on trial,
she would be the star witness.
But by her own admission, Rosemary had lied for years.
Why would a jury believe her now?
- Coming up...
- Did any of that get to you, Jordynn?
Did she plant a seed?
- No, knowing my father, I really don't feel could go
as far as to kill a woman.
- A daughter defends her father,
and explains herself.
- Being a seven-year-old, I probably wasn't very clear.
- Pima County prosecutor, Jonathan Mosher,
spends his weekends about as far away
from a courtroom as one can get.
- I need a way to get it out of my head.
Rock climbing, you have to be
completely focused in the moment,
not worried about you, yourself, your life, or anything.
- All the chatter in your head stops.
- And it's liberating.
It just scratches an itch that I need to be able
to go back and do the next case.
- And there were few cases as daunting
as the one he took on in 2014.
The defendant, Tucson Fire Captain David Watson,
accused of killing three women.
- This is the pinnacle for a prosecutor
to take a challenge,
make the challenge almost insurmountable,
make it big, and overcome it.
Mosher and his co-counsel, Nicole Green
felt they were up to the challenge.
- We had no doubt.
No doubt that David Watson killed these three women.
We just wanted a chance to put it in front of a jury.
- We will start with the State.
- That chance came in October 2016.
- Two women battled David Dwayne Watson
for control and custody of Jordynn Watson.
Two women who are both dead.
- The prosecution called Jordynn,
who still believed her dad was innocent,
to testify about that interview
she gave at age seven.
- That is number one corroboration
for when Rosemary comes forward later
and says that David Watson was not home.
- Being a seven-year-old,
I probably wasn't very clear, of course,
but yeah, I have no memory of that at all.
- And she told us her relationship with Rosemary
was never the same after Rosemary
started expressing doubts about Dave.
Did any of that get to you, Jordynn?
Did you start to turn these ideas around in your head,
did she plant a seed, well, is there something to this?
- She really tried. I'll give her that.
Um, but no,
knowing my father I really don't feel
could go as far as to kill a woman.
- Don't let the helpful fire captain image fool you,
said the prosecution.
Dave's training, they said, is exactly why
he was capable of killing three women.
- What does a paramedic do?
Responds to bloody scenes.
They remain calm in such circumstances.
And this was David Watson's, uh, key attribute.
- That, along with a mountain of
other circumstantial evidence,
the money clip, the .9mm shell casings,
Dave's statements to his friends,
the horse ride near Silverbell mine in 2007,
all pointed to a guilty man according to the State.
- You prove this case by 1,000 cuts,
1,000 little cuts.
And there's not going to be the one aha moment
that comes down from on high and solves this case.
- Wrong, said the defense.
There wasn't an aha moment because Dave didn't do it.
Representing Dave Watson,
husband and wife legal team Michael Story and Natasha Ray,
and much like their prosecution counterparts,
not ones to shy away from a challenge.
- This is the most monstrous undertaking we've ever had
in our careers together.
- According to the defense, there were any number
of reasons why Linda, Renee, and Marilyn died,
reasons that had nothing to do with Dave Watson.
- As much as the State says,
Dave Watson, Dave Watson, Dave Watson,
you're going to see it going in other avenues
of people and circumstance.
- Other avenues such as suicide, whether Linda's--
- With the drinking,
the ex-boyfriend testifying against her,
losing her job--
- Or even Renee's.
The defense said Marilyn's friend
had once discussed suicide,
and they suggested she may have chosen
an unusual method.
- We all know insurance won't pay
if you commit suicide.
- Is your theory, or at least you're willing
to consider it that Renee, the friend
has somehow commissioned her own murder?
- That was something that we had thrown out
during other theory. - I mean, Natasha, really,
what movie are you seeing?
- There's some crazy people out there.
- Then there was the idea that maybe
Linda's ex-boyfriend, JR, was the culprit here.
DNA consistent with JR and not Dave was found
on a trash bag that had Linda's blood on it.
Although JR himself testified,
nothing surprising about that.
He said he'd been helping Linda fix up her house,
and that he had nothing to hide.
- I have cooperated with the Sheriff's Department
in their investigation 110%.
- And remember how Linda went out drinking with her cousin
a few days before she disappeared.
The Circle S Saloon isn't far from
a rural part of town called Green Acres.
A witness testified she had heard someone in Green Acres
talking about moving Linda Watson's body.
- She reports that that body was being moved
to Silverbell Road,
and that is within four miles of
where the skull was found. - So the geography matches.
- She had it.
- And this would fit the theory that Linda
got into the wrong pickup truck,
as I think of it. - Right.
- The defense said Dave, an avid rider,
had ridden out near the Silverbell mine before,
but as for that specific trip on New Year's Eve, 2007...
- I don't think that happens.
- You don't believe he went for the ride?
- Uh-uh.
- The defense highlighted
that while Pima County Sheriff's investigators
provided a printout of the GPS coordinates,
they never saved the raw data.
And what about that money clip with the initials DDW?
The defense theorized maybe Marilyn's family planted it.
- We have our theories that this family
was looking for a scapegoat
and they believe Dave did it,
and so they planted the money clip.
- Ludicrous, said Marilyn sisters.
- We may be old, but we ain't senile.
- No.
- If I was going to do something that stupid,
I woulda took it up front where the crime scene was.
Why would I put it clear in the back?
- The defense also pointed out that there was
no provable link between the Ruger Dave once owned,
and the gun that killed Marilyn and Renee.
- It's not conclusive that it was a Ruger.
- But at the end of the day,
both prosecution and defense agree.
The case hinged on the believability of
one witness, Rosemary Watson.
- If you do not believe Rosemary,
we don't have a case.
- It just chilled me to the bone, and everything--
- Rosemary explained to the jury why she decided
to come forward in 2007.
- And I knew that I could not...
hold this in any longer because...
three women lost their lives and their lives matter.
- And then there was a critical detail.
Rosemary testified that on the same day Linda disappeared,
Dave found out his own mother was planning
to testify on Linda's behalf
at the upcoming custody hearing.
- He begged her not to.
- Did he succeed?
- Um, no.
She was very adamant about testifying for Linda.
- The prosecution said everything was coming
to a head that night.
- It's about control,
and that's a man who's seething inside
the night that he finds out he can't get his mother
not to testify against him.
His own mother.
And that's how vicious it had become.
- So you see the fuse being lit here.
- Yeah, I mean, I, you know,
I don't know when the fuse was lit,
but it was getting down close to the explosives
at that night.
- But according to the defense,
Rosemary Watson was just not credible.
- She's either lying back when she gave the alibis,
or she's lying when she recants the alibi.
- Jurors pick it.
- Oh, they shouldn't pick it.
They should take it and say,
I can't believe anything she says
because I don't know what to believe.
- So for a seven year span, you have this story
you're calling a lie now, right?
- It is a lie.
- And then the last seven years is the truth, right?
- I came forward and told the truth.
- I understand.
They're completely different versions of those nights, yes?
- They are.
- One of them is a complete lie, yes?
- Correct. - That's all I have.
- The defense in a nutshell,
hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
So she's lying to stick it to her ex,
that's your theory.
- Exactly right.
- A point the defense drove home in closing arguments.
- She's a liar.
And when you have a blatant bald faced liar like that,
you cannot consider their testimony.
You have to throw it out.
- The prosecution argued
the jury should believe Rosemary,
and not the wild theories floated by the defense.
- The truth is, folks,
in August of 2000,
that man killed Linda Watson.
2003, that man killed Marilyn Cox
and killed Renee Farnsworth.
There is no other...
evidence based in reason
to any other answer than that.
- And now it was in the hands of 12 jurors.
And right before Thanksgiving, they'd surprise everyone.
- Coming up...
After so many years and one last twist, a verdict.
- We were all pretty positive that, you know,
this is going to be over. He's going to come home.
- My hands were sweating.
I was nervous because I know the victims' families
are behind me,
and this is everything to them.
- Jordynn Watson firmly believed her father was innocent,
and expected to have him home for Thanksgiving.
- You know, we were all pretty positive
that, you know, this is going to be over.
He's going to come home.
- Then, three days after deliberations began,
the jury came back.
But it wasn't what anyone expected.
- Was there any possibility that the jury would want
to consider further discussions?
- Not at this time. Or not-- No, no, sir.
- The jury was hung.
Dave Watson soon learned he'd been just a few votes shy
of walking out of jail a free man.
It was 10 to 2 acquittal in the case of Linda,
and 8 to 4 for acquittal
in the case of Marilyn and Renee.
- Yeah, it-it-it brought tears to my eyes
that it was even a hung jury.
- The defense contained their excitement
and braced themselves.
- Anything short of conviction is a win,
um, but it's a hollow win in that the State
can come right back and charge it again.
- Which is exactly what happened.
The retrial began on January 25th, 2017.
The prosecution led with its star witness.
- The State calls Rosemary Watson.
- But this time, they retooled their case a bit.
- I read the transcripts from the first trial,
and one thing I saw too much of was me speaking.
And so I doubled down on the idea
that the jury needed to hear from Rosemary,
and so I got out of the way.
I asked shorter questions.
Did anything unusual happen that night?
- Yes, I woke up in the middle of the night,
a couple of times, and Dave was not there.
- The second time around was different for Rosemary too.
- Now I'm a little mad.
Not only is he lying,
he's making me out to be just a boldfaced liar.
- She testified about how she had lied
to protect her family,
and about what coming forward with the truth had cost her.
- Jordynn doesn't speak to me very often anymore.
- Correct.
- The prosecution called Jordynn next,
so the jury could hear how her interview at age seven
backed up Rosemary's claim that Dave wasn't home.
Not so fast, said the defense.
- I can only imagine if my seven-year-old
was interviewed about a key fact that's going
to decide a guy's life, it would be scary.
The defense maintained Dave was home the nights in question.
He didn't kill anyone, they said.
They once again presented multiple other scenarios
of what could have happened to Linda.
She died by suicide.
She was murdered by a mysterious killer
from Green Acres.
Or by the one suspect who stood out for the defense.
- If not Dave Watson, then who?
- It would be Carl.
- Carl Barton, junior, JR.
Nonsense, said the prosecution.
- There is no evidence linking JR
to any of these three murders, none.
After seven weeks of testimony,
Dave's fate was once again in the hands of a jury.
- We were getting indications from questions
out of the jury
that they might actually go into the next week.
I was thinking they're-they're pretty hung.
- But then after a day and a half of deliberations,
the jury buzzed with a verdict.
It was St Patrick's Day.
Detective Kelly Anderson
hoped luck would be on his side.
- My hands were sweating. I was nervous.
I'm nervous over every verdict,
but I'm more nervous now
and it's because I know the victims' families
are behind me
and this is everything to them.
- The stakes were high for him personally too.
He was retiring,
and this was his last homicide case.
The moment of truth, the one that had taken
17 years to arrive, was finally upon them.
- We, the jury, do find the defendant,
David Dwayne Watson, guilty of the offense
of second degree murder of Linda Watson.
- Oh, when she said Linda, I didn't even have
to listen to the rest of it
because we knew if we'd got him for Linda,
the other two was just an automatic.
- Slam dunk, yeah.
- David Watson, father, friend, and fire captain,
was also convicted for the first degree murders
of Marilyn and Renee,
the loyal friend who didn't even play a lead role
in her own murder case.
- So she was forgotten a lot,
but my mom was kind of the meek, mild,
quiet person in the back,
and just kind of went with the flow
and she was always there for anybody that needed anything.
- Jordynn was heartbroken.
Dave says he could not believe it.
I would have never imagined that in a million years.
From what was being presented in court,
I thought there was no way,
no way beyond a reasonable doubt
you could think I would have done any of this.
- Did you go over to Linda's house,
abduct her, kill her? - No.
- Drop her in the wash up by Silverbell?
- No, not at all. - Did--
Did you get a .9mm, your Ruger,
did you put on a hoodie and go kill Marilyn and her friend
in the driveway of their house?
- Sure did not. - Point blank range?
- Nope.
- But the jury believed otherwise.
And the man who made a career out of saving lives,
is now doing time for taking them.
Dave Watson was sentenced to life in prison.
Is it a kind of nice, sentimental ending
for your career as a homicide detective?
- It's kind of bittersweet.
There's a little bit
that makes me want to do it again.
- The vault is three cases lighter now,
and the families of Linda, Marilyn and Renee
have some measure of closure,
thanks to an enemy-turned-ally.
- One of the ironies here is that you ended up
delivering for women
that you had been fighting earlier in your life.
You delivered for Linda.
You delivered for Marilyn and her friend, Renee.
- Ultimately, I did. Didn't I?
- She hopes Jordynn will one day
come to understand that.
Speak to her directly now.
- Everything that I didn't want for her
has happened.
And so speaking to her,
I guess the only thing that I can say is that
I'm sorry, but I am always here for her.
- You're sorry, but you say you also did the right thing.
- I did do the right thing.
If this was me, and I died fighting,
you know, for justice for my daughter,
I would hope that everybody would just tell the truth.
- But the truth sometimes is murky and hard to see
as the desert with night closing in.
What with all those secrets and old bones
scattered about unchanging.
- That's all for this edition of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Kate Snow. Thank you for watching.