- I'm Craig Melvin,
and this is
"Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
They danced on their wedding day
as "Beauty and the Beast",
lived the good life,
'til that strange, terrible day.
- He found her at home.
A barbell was
across her throat.
- Then, a tragic freak accident.
Or was it?
- I'm like,
"the weight machine?
She doesn't lift weights."
- A home gym mysteriously
turned death trap.
A husband suddenly
turns suspect.
**
- Hello and welcome to
"Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
Lisa Pattison was
the picture of health.
Like her husband, Scott,
she ate right
and exercised often.
Then, Lisa was found
unresponsive in her gym.
At first,
signs pointed to an accident.
Equipment does
at times malfunction.
But so do relationships.
And this one
was loaded with secrets.
Here's Dennis Murphy with
"The Beauty
and the Beast mystery".
- The images are fuzzy
on that old home video
of the wedding reception.
But anyone who was there
remembers the event vividly.
The bride all in white.
And the groom?
He's the dance partner
in the goofy Beast costume.
"Kind of a strange way
to begin a marriage",
some guests murmured,
"Beauty and the Beast".
But then, it was a union
that would end strangely.
Last dance still more than
ten years away at that point.
Lisa the bride, of course,
had no idea
what was in store
for the two of them.
She glided about with
her signature 50,000 watt smile.
- You can't fake
a smile like that.
I mean, that was just her.
- Lisa had been a single mom
raising her small son
when she joined her sister
for a rare girls' night out
at a Fort Wayne, Indiana,
dance club.
There in the den, a big guy,
a bodybuilder, he said,
small talked her and
slipped her his business card
before Lisa's party
called it a night.
In the car going home,
Lisa pulled out
the business card
and showed it
to her sister, Christine.
- It said, uh,
Jean-Claude Van Damme lookalike.
And...
- You're kidding.
- No. And I said,
"You're not gonna
call that guy, are you?"
- But she'd remembered him,
hadn't she?
- Yes.
- Not only remembered him,
but was soon dating
and being pursued by
the guy from the club,
who turned out to be
Scott Pattison,
who worked in construction.
Within a year,
they were married.
Lisa's mom, Lucy Rich.
- She came in
on a white carriage horse.
Uh, very beautiful.
And she was so happy that day.
She was very happy.
- I'm Scott Pattison.
I'm the groom here.
This is my wife.
- As you left the wedding
that night, Lucy,
how'd you feel
about your daughter?
- I was happy for her.
- The newlyweds
set up housekeeping
in central Indiana.
He eventually became
a self-employed
roofing contractor,
and she,
the go-getter marketing manager
at a local mall.
Her son, Dillon,
from a previous relationship,
grew to call Scott dad.
- Growing up,
I didn't really have, uh,
a fatherly figure.
I mean, I slowly and surely
called him Dad.
- And thirteen years on,
all were living
a comfortable life together
in a nice big house
with acreage
out in the country.
There were vacations
in the Caribbean,
soaking in hot tubs,
snorkeling with the stingrays,
island hopping.
Scott liked that people
thought of him
as a good time guy, Mr. Big.
- If you knew Scott,
then you would know that
he wanted everything
to be the biggest and the best.
- And he kept up
on his fitness regimen.
The former bodybuilder didn't
wanna slide into flab.
He kept after Lisa
to stay in shape with him,
and her best friend
from the mall,
a woman named Leah Frazier
became Lisa's workout buddy.
- Lisa was always conscious
about what she was eating,
how she was exercising.
She would do aerobics.
She would do the,
um, stair stepper.
- Scott installed a few pieces
of gym equipment
in the basement of the house;
a treadmill, a tanning bed,
and a weight machine.
It was there that something
catastrophic had happened
on the morning
of July 2nd, 2009.
And now Scott was in his truck
racing for help, calling 911.
- As Scott sped through
summer cornfields,
his wife, Lisa,
was in the back of the cab
in very bad shape,
as he told the dispatcher.
- Scott would say later,
he'd gone downstairs
just before noon
and found his wife
straddled face up
on the exercise bench
with the barbell weight
crushing her throat.
- Paramedics intercepted
Scott's truck
minutes from the hospital.
A police car followed behind,
dashcam rolling.
Doctors could not revive her.
And at the age of thirty-six,
Lisa Pattison was gone.
How could any of the friends
and family
adjust to vibrant Lisa,
with that beaming smile,
being just a memory now?
- She was always
in good spirits.
She was always smiling.
- She was just a, uh,
an amazing woman, uh,
through and through.
- Dillon had been up early
that morning,
off to the job site
where he was helping his stepdad
and his crew.
It had been the quickest
of goodbyes to his mom.
- My last words to her
was-was that I love you.
And she said
the same thing back.
- And now, suddenly they were
all gathering at the hospital.
Dillon got the news
from his dad.
- I just lost it.
I mean, I-I've--
you know, the one person
I'd depended on
my whole life was gone.
- Lisa's mom, Lucy Rich,
was taken in
to see her daughter's body.
- I just walked around her body
and just kept--
I couldn't believe
she was gone.
- Because Lisa had been
in her prime and sound health,
her death was categorized
as unattended,
which meant that the police
would take a look
before it could be ruled
an accident.
But what else could it be?
A woman home alone,
working out.
A husband who comes back
to the house for lunch
only to find such a ghastly
scene in the basement.
It couldn't be anything
but an accident... could it?
- Coming up, something
just doesn't make sense.
- He's turning down 911 help.
- It had a red flag to me.
Yes, it did.
**
- When you're
an on-call detective
like Wabash County's Mike Davis,
you know that days off,
like the upcoming 4th of July,
sometimes have a way
of going up in smoke.
The assignment he was catching
didn't sound like one of those.
Check out the death
of a young woman
called in by
the Marion General Hospital ER.
- The other detective
that worked with me,
he said, "Hey, come on in.
I've got a case
we need to work on
on a lady that's passed away
on a weight bench."
- The victim was a woman
who worked at a local mall,
Lisa Pattison.
Even as her friends
and family
were racing
towards the hospital,
a sheriff's detective
had taken Lisa's husband, Scott,
aside in the ambulance bay
for a brief recorded statement.
- Scott explained
what had happened.
How he'd come home from work
to shower and eat lunch
before an afternoon
doctor's appointment
for his bad back.
Lisa had taken the day off.
- He said he lifted
the weights off and started CPR.
As an ex-first responder,
he'd been trained in that,
but said
he couldn't revive her.
- Another officer,
crime scene investigator
Jason Page
with the state police,
was now assigned to document
Pattison's truck
and examine Lisa's body.
He found a bruise
on the woman's neck
and an abrasion
on the left shoulder.
- Seeing those injuries, Jason,
did it explain to you
what had happened?
- You take it at face value.
Her husband stated that
he had found her at home,
a barbell
was across her throat.
Those injuries seem
consistent with that story.
- Signs were pointing towards
an awful accident.
Some clean-up paperwork to do,
and on to the next case.
Still, the detective
whose case it was,
Detective Davis,
elected to bring Scott
down to the station
that afternoon
for a formal
videotaped interview.
- The interview began with
a more detailed accounting
of Scott Pattison's day.
He'd gotten up, he said,
at quarter to five
in the morning,
kissed Lisa goodbye,
and made a run to the landfill
north of town.
He got back home around 6:30,
in time to meet
his stepson, Dillon,
and an employee,
who then all headed out
to the job site together.
- He said
he called out for Lisa,
but she didn't answer.
Music from downstairs
told him she was working out.
Ten to fifteen minutes went by,
he said,
before he actually
headed downstairs
to discover her.
- He said he lifted the bar
off Lisa's neck,
felt for a pulse,
then tried giving her CPR
on the bench.
- As he was backing out,
he told the detective
he called 911.
- He said when he saw
the ambulance,
he rolled down his window
and pulled over to the curb.
- Maybe that's what happened.
- At that time, yes.
We didn't know.
- But there was something
about the way Scott had acted
that wasn't passing
the detective's smell test.
- He's turning down 911 help.
- It had a red flag to me.
Yes, it did.
- Some things make
your nose twitch?
- Yes.
- Then Scott was asked about
the state of his marriage.
- They'd been married
for thirteen years, Scott said.
But just a few months ago,
they'd filed for divorce.
- An affair.
But he insisted the relationship
with the other woman was over.
In fact, the divorce with Lisa
was on hold.
He said they'd had
a change of heart
and had been trying to
work things out.
- Okay,
so there's something else
we're gonna look into.
After taking the statement,
Investigator Page
made a physical check
of the husband.
Noting no fresh injuries
on his face, arms, or hands.
Routine stuff.
Then the officers headed out
to the Pattison home.
The crime scene
agent's camcorder
documented a house
in pristine condition.
There were no signs
of forced entry.
Nothing to suggest a struggle.
They did note
two security cameras
mounted on the exterior
stone facade,
but they checked the recorder
in the garage
and the DVD tray was empty.
- You didn't get lucky here?
- Didn't get lucky.
- Downstairs
in the workout room,
they found the weight bench.
It wasn't a free weight system
as they'd imagined,
but rather something called
a Smith Machine,
a professional gym-type device
where the weight bar
rides up and down
two fixed cylindrical rails.
The barbell weighed about
a 105 pounds
with weights attached.
Investigator Page took
a close look at the apparatus
to see if it supported
Scott's story.
He talked us through
the analysis
he performed that day.
- This is the weight bench
from the Pattison Home.
- Page noticed
two things right away.
When he laid down on the bench
as it was set up,
the bar lined up
not with his chest,
the correct alignment
for lifting,
but rather
with his neck.
- So if you complete the lift,
it would align with the body
in this fashion.
- Bar on the throat.
That matched Scott's story.
Investigator Page also made note
of a circular smudge
on the center
of the bar itself.
Had that spot been left
by Lisa's neck?
- It looked like
body oil to me.
Or perhaps sweat.
- Would that mean you suspected
that this part of
the bar was making contact?
- It appeared that-it appeared
to be that with me...
- That fit with
the husband's account, too.
When Investigator Page
tried the machine,
it appeared to be
in working order.
He couldn't make it
fail accidentally,
and once in use,
the bar felt fairly easy
to re-rack
and secure using a hook
and holes along the frame.
- And you complete
your-your repetitions,
and once you're complete,
you rotate your wrists
and these hooks engage.
- But maybe something important:
two safety stoppers,
which would have afforded
a lifter extra protection,
were resting unused
at the bottom of each rail.
- When these are engaged,
it gives you
an added layer of safety.
- That's all cool
if they're in place,
but if they're not in place,
you don't have that protection.
- Yes.
- No safety stops.
If the bar had slipped
while in use,
it could have plummeted
onto Lisa's neck
with bone-breaking force.
- This'll fall down
like a guillotine.
- Ka-thunk?
- Yes.
- Theoretically,
could it be a fatal accident?
- Oh, yes.
I would certainly
consider it fatal.
- There it was.
Perhaps Lisa's death happened
just as Scott had said.
Certainly nothing jumped out
and screamed homicide.
Still, an important voice
hadn't been heard from yet,
and that was
the medical examiner.
His autopsy could
prove to be crucial.
It was.
- Lisa's body tells a story.
A tiny clue is about to have
a big impact on the case.
- Coming up...
- Getting that information
at that moment,
had the case changed for you?
- Absolutely.
- When "Dateline:
Secrets Uncovered" continues.
- Thirty-six-year-old
Lisa Pattison was dead.
But Detective
Mike Davis
and crime scene
investigator Jason Page
were not sure yet
what kind of case,
if any, they had.
On the suspicious
side of the ledger,
Lisa's husband, Scott,
had raised red flags
when he declined
emergency services' help
as he raced with his wife
to the hospital.
Likewise, what he said
about that drive
in a recorded interview
raised eyebrows.
- I wouldn't think someone
would refer to their loved one
as a body...
when you're not even sure-
you're claiming
she's not even dead yet.
- Still, maybe it was
just a freak accident.
A first pass look
at the weight bench
Lisa had been on
when she died,
suggested an accident
was plausible.
And at the autopsy,
the medical examiner
didn't find anything
to explain
a sudden death,
nothing like a stroke
or heart attack.
Lisa had been
in good health.
- A very healthy
thirty-six-year-old woman
who worked out.
- But the autopsy did provide
a quite unexpected finding,
something that now made
the investigators very troubled.
Lisa had died, not from
a sudden crushing blow
to the neck,
the guillotine effect,
but rather from
a slow neck compression,
as if the barbell had
rested on her throat
and gradually cut off
her air supply.
- You were testing
the machine at the house
when you let go
of that bar,
it was a real convincing
ka-thunk on the bench.
- Oh, yeah.
- And you would have seen that
in the autopsy here?
- I would expect--
- There would have
been a crushed--
- Fractures--
- Crushed bones?
- Perhaps even her neck-
- Did not find that?
- No, did not.
- What had happened to
Lisa Pattison that morning?
- We know that her neck
wasn't crushed.
Her spine hadn't
been fractured.
She didn't have an aneurysm,
didn't have a stroke,
didn't have
a heart attack.
We didn't know
what we had.
- Meanwhile, the people
who knew Lisa best
were wondering what in
the world she was doing
on the weight bench
in the first place.
Christine Smith knew
her sister liked to work out,
but Lisa was a treadmill girl,
not a weightlifter.
- She was doing treadmill,
you know, doing
more aerobic stuff.
- And the dead woman's
best friend from the mall,
Leah, knew very well that
Lisa couldn't lift heavy things,
not with a neck injury
she'd suffered
a couple of years earlier
in a minor car accident.
Even the holiday ornaments
in the mall storage room
were too much for her.
- I did the lifting,
I did the boxes,
I did the carrying up.
I'm like,
"The weight machine?
"She doesn't lift weights."
- Then there was the elephant
in the room since Lisa's death,
a subject that her
friends and family
didn't feel comfortable
even putting words to.
And that was how they felt
about Scott all the years
that he'd been
married to Lisa.
Impressions of him that ran
from self-centered jerk
to nasty
drill instructor.
Now that circle of Lisa's
friends were asking
if Scott had something to do
with that so-called accident
in the basement.
- There he is.
Asleep.
[hissing]
Gosh!
- He was Lisa's husband,
but the rest of the family
didn't get it.
He'd long been an
awkward fit to them.
- But I have no tinfoil.
- At holiday gatherings,
they couldn't help but notice
how tough he was
on Lisa's son, Dillon.
The stepdad bossed him
around like a raw recruit
and meted out
harsh punishments
for the slightest misstep.
Dillon recalled what Scott
ordered him to do one winter
when the boy neglected to
take out the morning mail.
- It was 6:00 AM
in the morning
and he actually said,
"Take your clothes off,
leave your underwear on,
"and you're gonna go
walk out to the mailbox."
I had a great mom,
but I always wanted,
like, a-a better
fatherly figure.
- Now, when it came
to his mom,
Scott could put on the charm.
- Give me a hug.
- Lisa, don't be
gettin' jealous.
- Oh, for Pete's sake.
- But to Lisa's
mother and sister,
Scott never measured up.
- I wanted her to
be with someone
that totally
respected her
and loved her with
all their heart.
And I didn't see
that with Scott.
- It wasn't a big,
dark family secret
that Lisa and Scott had been
crashing into the rocks
for a while.
He was having an affair,
and Lisa found out.
They talked divorce.
When Lisa visited her sister
at her home in Virginia
about a month before she died,
without saying as much,
she telegraphed that
the marriage was over.
Sister Christine acted as
Lisa's financial adviser.
- She said, "Well, I need
to make some changes
"on my life insurance policy".
And when
she said that to me,
I knew that she was
getting ready to leave.
- And how much was
the policy for?
- Uh, $450,000.
- Lisa wanted her policy,
which named Scott and her son
as co-beneficiaries,
quietly switched
to Dillon alone.
Christine mailed the paperwork
for Lisa to sign,
but hadn't gotten it back
by the day Lisa died.
The day after Lisa died,
the family met near the mall
where she used to work.
Scott had gotten wind
of the policy change.
He pulled his
sister-in-law aside
and asked insurance questions.
- He's asking me, basically,
did she sign it?
- He wants to know if
he's off the policy.
- Right.
- Back at the Wabash
County Sheriff's Office,
crime scene investigator
Jason Page was still puzzling
through the autopsy results.
Death by slow pressure
to the windpipe
rather than a bone-breaking,
catastrophic plunge
of the weight bar.
- And we're left with
this neck compression.
It's like a slow
neck compression.
- Then the medical examiner
came up with
an additional finding.
And it would be as significant
for Investigator Page
as it was minute.
- On her back from her neck
down to her waistline,
he noticed what appeared
to be petechiae.
- Petechiae, minuscule bruises
hardly visible to the naked eye,
not just on the back
of Lisa's neck,
where pressure had been
applied by the bar,
but down her back
and along her waist as well.
What could have
caused that?
- That troubled him.
Perhaps somebody
straddled her
and sat on her chest
or her torso at
the time of death.
- Straddling her?
But she'd been home
alone working out.
The all-but-invisible bruising
wasn't enough for
the pathologist
to officially rule
Lisa's death a homicide.
But it did set a fire
under the investigators.
- Getting that information
at that moment,
had the case
changed for you?
- Absolutely.
- You were now
following a homicide?
- Yes.
- A theory of homicide.
But the case was
mostly innuendo.
They needed to come up
with hard evidence
they could show
to a prosecutor.
They needed a lucky break.
And as it turned out,
one was a phone call away.
- Coming up, there's been
plenty of attention
on that weight bench,
but it's another piece
of equipment that just
might crack this case.
- I got goosebumps.
I'm like,
"Oh, my goodness."
**
- Welcome back to "Dateline:
Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Investigators believed
Lisa Pattison's death
was no accident.
The medical examiner
determined she died
from a slow
neck compression,
as if something
or someone
gradually suffocated her.
Now, new evidence was about
to expose a chilling secret
about the morning
Lisa died.
Here again is
Dennis Murphy
with "The Beauty
and the Beast Mystery."
- It's funny in criminal
investigations
how sometimes things
fall into your lap
from the most
unexpected places.
And that's what happened
in the middle of July 2009.
Lisa had been dead
for a couple of weeks.
Detective Mike Davis had been
at his desk preparing subpoenas
for the Pattison case
when he took a call
from the manager of
a local burglar alarm company.
He told the detective
that one of his salesmen
had just gotten
off the phone
with a customer
who'd had some questions
about how his home video
surveillance system worked.
The customer was
Scott Pattison.
Did the cops want to
know something more
about all of this?
Detective Davis said,
indeed they did.
But then he explained
how they'd been out
to the Pattison house
and had checked out
that video setup and noticed
when he popped the tray
on the recorder that
there was no DVD.
No DVD,
no pictures, right?
Well, Detective Davis
almost fell out of his chair
when he heard what
the burglar alarm man said next.
- He said, "Well,
you don't need one.
"It records to
a hard drive."
And my mouth just
kind of opened up.
- A hard drive.
The detective got a warrant
and screamed over
to the Pattison house
where the recorder perched
still untouched
in the garage.
What a video festival
the detective was about to have.
- This is July 2nd, 2009.
This is looking from his
garage to the side here.
The unblinking camera
documented Scott's run
to the landfill at 5:00 AM.
Then its motion detectors
came alive again
an hour and a half later,
as he got back home
to hook up with Dillon
and his employee
as they headed out
to the job site.
The camera was showing
the same thing
Scott had previously talked
to the detective about.
- So he's a good
storyteller.
Good accounting of
his day at this point?
- Sure.
- And then Scott's
timeline went haywire.
Remember, Scott had told
the cops he didn't get back
to the house that morning
'til 11:30, just a few minutes
before he came upon
Lisa in trouble.
- But what did Scott's
surveillance system
have to say?
A completely
different story.
- Who's the head?
- That was, uh, Mr. Pattison.
Scott Pattison.
- No question?
- No question at all.
- And the time was what?
- 8:32 AM.
- Not 11:30,
8:32AM.
and Scott Pattison is
walking in the door.
- You and other officers
are looking at it
for the first time.
- Mm-hmm.
- What do you say
to one another?
- Holy cow,
he really did it.
He really killed her.
- Fast forward
around 10AM.
There's Scott again, this time
in a change of clothes,
a T-shirt, and shorts,
talking into a cell phone
outside
the garage.
Zap forward again 11:40,
Scott has changed again,
back in work pants.
Then, at 12:10,
he's on the move.
His pickup truck
bats into frame.
And off he goes to the hospital
with Lisa in the backseat.
When Wabash County
prosecutor, Bill Hartley,
laid eyes on the video,
he knew he finally had a case.
- I got goosebumps.
I'm like,
"Oh, my goodness."
- In September 2009,
a grand jury convened,
and a week later, Scott Pattison
was indicted for murder.
Detective Davis handcuffed Scott
at his mom's house
and escorted him to
the Wabash County Jail.
- You have anything
to say, Scott?
- I'm not guilty.
- The State of Indiana
versus Scott Pattison
went to trial in
late October 2010.
The key, Prosecutor Hartley
told the jury, was the timeline,
and Scott's own
security camera video
was the star witness
against him.
No cameras were
allowed in court,
but the proceedings
were audiotaped.
- Hartley had brought
the weight bench
into the courtroom and planted
it right before the jury.
Crime scene investigator
Jason Page demonstrated
for the panel how Lisa
should have been able to
wriggle out from
under the barbell,
given that she was
in good health
and the weight hadn't
thunked down on her throat
with bone-breaking force.
A demonstration he later
repeated for "Dateline."
First, securing the hooks.
- How much effort
do you have to expend
to get these hooks
to catch again?
- You just have to
rotate your wrists.
- And then you're
out of trouble?
- You're out of
trouble, yeah.
- Or failing that,
the investigator says,
Lisa could have
used her shoulder
to shimmy off the bench
to the side.
- Could you wriggle out
from under there?
- Yes, I could.
You do it like this.
- But if someone had been
straddling over her,
sitting on her chest
and preventing her
from re-racking that bar...
- You're in a very bad way.
- You're in
a bad situation.
- Dead within thirty seconds,
would you guess?
Or at least unconscious
within thirty seconds?
- I don't wanna speculate,
but I don't think
it'd take very long.
- If the government's theory
that Scott had straddled
his wife and killed her
was correct,
the question arose for
the jury, why do it?
The prosecutor said money
wasn't a small thing
for Scott, and divorce
would have cost him.
- He owns some nice trucks
and this business,
and he's probably concerned
that he was gonna
have to split some
of that up with Lisa.
- Then there was the business
about being dropped
from Lisa's
insurance policy,
his share, a quarter of
a million dollar windfall.
But investigators had
excavated another rich mine
of clues, and that had to do
with the other woman
that Scott had admitted to
having an affair with.
The jury heard Scott
claim it was all over
by the time
of Lisa's death.
- But the prosecution
responded that it wasn't.
Not by a long shot.
And the real headline grabber
was that the other woman
was a prominent person
in the community.
The former chief of staff
to the mayor of Marion, Indiana,
a woman named
Stacy Henderson,
the wife of
a local police officer.
- In exchange for immunity,
Prosecutor Hartley
put Henderson on the stand
and she testified that
she was still
involved with Scott
on the day Lisa died.
To underscore the point
in bold strokes,
the prosecutor introduced
Scott's phone records.
The logs reveal
that on July 2nd,
the day of Lisa's death,
Scott and Stacy,
who was away on vacation,
exchanged no fewer
than 130 text messages.
Plotting those lovers' calls
and texts on a timeline,
and you see that not only
is Stacy the person
on the receiving end
of Scott's 10:00 AM call
seen on that security cam
video, but she's also
getting a text message
from Scott
that's three characters long,
while he's at the wheel driving
his dead, or dying wife
to the hospital.
- To me, that was huge
that, you know,
here he is driving his wife
to the hospital,
but he's got
the state of mind
to think about his girlfriend
and send her a text message.
- So there it was.
A divorce in which Scott
would likely lose
part of his business,
a life insurance policy
from which he'd gain a bundle,
and a continuing relationship
with a girlfriend
with whom he seemed
still very much involved.
Add up the circumstantial
pieces of this puzzle,
Hartley said, and Lisa's
death was no accident.
It was now
the defense's opportunity
to chip away
at the case.
- Scott, do you have
anything to say?
- No, not at this time.
- Did you kill Lisa?
- No, I did not.
- How can you prove
you're innocent?
- Time will tell.
- Coming up,
at trial, the defense
comes out swinging.
- There was no physical
evidence that proved to me
that Scott Pattison
murdered his wife.
- In Wabash, Indiana, the
Scott Pattison murder trial
was riveting stuff--
A bizarre alleged
murder weapon,
damning security cam pics
thought not to have
been recorded,
and a prominent other woman
on the receiving end
of a blaze of calls and texts
from the accused
on the day of
the wife's death.
Now the defense, led by veteran
attorney Stanley Campbell,
had a small
mountain to climb.
The team started with
the illicit girlfriend,
Stacy Henderson--
A fling, the defense contended,
not a romance for the ages.
- There was no evidence
that Mr. Pattison was thinking
about killing his wife
or that he was going
to kill his wife
for this other woman.
- So what about that
flurry of text messages?
Just routine chitchat,
Henderson told the prosecutor.
And the three character
texts sent by Scott
as he drove to the hospital,
that was benign too.
Simply, she suggested,
Scott's way of signaling
to someone he loved
that he was under duress.
The phone call at 10 AM,
him to her,
and seen on the
surveillance video,
was, Henderson said,
more of the same--
Just checking in on each
other's day so far.
As for the divorce,
maybe it was on hold,
just as Scott
had told the cops.
A retainer fee for Lisa's
attorney had been returned
to her bank account.
And about Scott being taken
off her insurance policy,
the defense claims Scott
knew nothing of that
until the son, Dillion, told him
hours after Lisa had died.
Not being husband
of the year
with any of this
kind of evidence,
but nothing to say
that he was a killer.
- Nothing to say he
was a killer, no.
- So if you're the defense,
what do you do
about the weight bench?
The defense team maintained
that the police had never
understood the difficulty
of getting out from
beneath its grip.
Sure, a fit state trooper
could wriggle out
from beneath 105 pounds,
but what about Lisa,
someone not used to
working out with weights?
Maybe she was overtired
or disoriented.
Plus, accidental asphyxiation
is not unheard of
on these kinds
of machines.
The defense had referenced
a case in Iowa
of a young boy there
working out alone,
very similar
kind of equipment.
He suffocated.
An accidental death.
- And in that Iowa case,
the safety stops had not
been secured in place,
just as they hadn't
on the Pattison machine.
The defense moved on.
It would call
its own expert witness,
a medical examiner from
Kentucky named Dr. Greg Davis,
to give
a counter explanation
for that minute
bruising with a funny name,
the petechiae.
- You thought maybe it
wasn't petechiae at all?
- That's correct.
- After reviewing the
autopsy photos,
Dr. Davis concluded the bruises
weren't petechiae
caused by someone straddling
Lisa when she died,
but rather bruises
that occur naturally
when blood pools
after death.
- Purple areas
of discoloration
that can be easily
mistaken for petechiae,
but they're actually caused
by a different mechanism.
- And the same witness
offered a different picture
of the murder scenario.
Had Scott Pattison indeed
been on top of Lisa,
pressing that bar down
onto her throat,
Dr. Davis said he would have
expected to see
more significant damage
to her neck.
- I would expect to see
a fracture of that
cartilage right here,
the Adam's apple,
more injury.
- And the defense
introduced a new theme.
They talked to the jurors
about a toxicology report
that showed that Lisa had
what the defense characterized
as a dangerous cocktail
of drugs in her system,
particularly a diet drug
that's known
to sometimes produce side
effects like fainting spells
and irregular heartbeats.
Lisa, the defense said,
had three times
the therapeutic amount
of that drug in her system.
- She's already exerting
herself heart pounding.
Um, that could tip
her over the edge,
and at that point, the bar
comes down on her neck.
It could take anywhere
from just a few seconds
at that point
for unconsciousness
to occur.
- That quick?
- That quickly.
- The conclusion from
the expert witness--
Lisa Pattison's death
is not a homicide,
but one of
an undetermined cause.
- There was no physical
evidence that proved to me
that Scott Pattison
murdered his wife.
- But what about the
defense's biggest obstacle,
that damning
surveillance cam video?
They conceded that Scott
had lied to the police
about not coming home
'til 11:30 in the morning.
His rationale,
said the defense,
was that Scott knew
right away
that husbands
with suddenly-dead wives
always looked suspicious
in police eyes,
so he simply panicked
and made the bad choice
of lying about his timeline.
But a liar, argued the
defense, isn't a killer.
- The fact that he was there
doesn't necessarily mean
that he was responsible
for her death.
- You know, as a lot of
people look at this case,
they ask themselves the
question they might have asked
of Richard Nixon-- why didn't
you destroy the tapes?
- [chuckles]
- Well, maybe the answer
is that, uh,
if you haven't, uh, done
anything wrong,
you don't have
any concern or fear
about what's
gonna be on the tapes.
- And by the way, wouldn't
you think that Lisa,
fighting for her life,
would have been able
to put some scratches
or marks on Scott?
And there were none.
Add it all up,
the defense concluded,
and you've got
reasonable doubt.
The prosecution's case,
little more than
theory and speculation.
The case went to the jurors.
They took a straw poll
and were surprised
to find themselves
split seven to five.
- That's a big gap.
- It was huge.
- The jury conducts its own
experiment with the weight bench
when "Dateline: Secrets
Uncovered" continues.
*
- After three weeks
and nearly 30 witnesses,
the case against
Scott Pattison
was finally in the hands
of the jury.
Either they believed
the defense's version,
that Lisa Pattison's death
on a weight bench
was a horrible accident,
or they were convinced
beyond a reasonable doubt
that the defendant
killed his wife
by suffocating her
with a barbell.
Upstairs in the jury room,
tense deliberations began.
- It was like,
"Game on. It's time."
"You've got this.
It's your decision."
- We spoke with four from
Pattison's 12-member jury.
Their first order of business,
a straw vote.
Foreman Larry Vaughn was
stunned by the results.
- Seven to five.
- Wow, big split.
- And that shocked me.
That shocked me.
- That's a-that's a big gap.
- It was huge.
- Seven guilty, five not.
For those in
the guilty camp,
the pivotal piece
of evidence, they say,
was the surveillance tape--
Scott at home
when Lisa died,
then lying about his day
to the police.
But those voting not guilty,
like Juror Dan Ford,
weren't convinced.
- Okay, that makes him a liar,
not necessarily a murderer.
- The jurors did agree on
one thing-- Stacy Henderson.
To the jury's eyes,
Scott Pattison was still
very much smitten.
- One of the questions was,
"Are you still
in love with Scott?"
And when she said no,
and I watched Scott's reaction,
he was devastated.
- But as for those
petechiae bruises
the prosecution thought
so critical to its case,
for the jury,
not so much.
- The petechiae just didn't
do it for me either way.
- Granted, it was there, um,
very hard for us to see.
- As the jurors debated,
the absence of evidence
placing Scott in
the workout room with his wife
kept them locked
in a near-even balance.
- There was no smoking gun.
No witnesses
saw this happen.
Um, it depended on us
making what we thought
was the right decision.
- Eight hours of
deliberations, however,
swayed one side to
agree with the other.
Word came down that a verdict
had been reached.
Lisa's sister, Christine,
held hands with family
in the first row, praying.
- And I just kept envisioning
the word guilty in my mind.
It's gotta be guilty.
- Guilty as charged.
Lisa's family couldn't
hold back the tears.
- We just couldn't stop.
We were just
weeping of relief.
- Scott hung his head when
the verdict was read
and remained silent,
stone faced,
as he was escorted
back to jail.
- Scott, do you have
anything at all to say?
- Jurors said
the foremost factor
that bridged the divide
was an experiment they
conducted in the courtroom.
They asked the judge
if they could reexamine
the weight bench.
One of the female jurors
agreed to play Lisa.
They wanted to know how
easy it would be
for her to wriggle out
from beneath that bar.
- It wasn't two seconds
and she was out.
And then we said, "Okay, one
of you ladies straddle her,
"and let's do
the same thing".
And she couldn't move.
- Lisa Pattison had died
on a hot July morning.
Now on a cold December day,
Scott Pattison
was sentenced.
The judge cited unusual harm
to Lisa's son, Dillon,
in giving Scott an enhanced
sentence of 60 years.
- Scott left the
courtroom defiant
and pledged
continued silence.
- Scott, do you have
anything to say?
- A wise man needs to know
to keep his mouth shut,
so that's what
I'm gonna do.
- Scott declined "Dateline"'s
request for an interview.
The beauty from all
those years ago is gone.
The friends and family
who toasted them
are left to reflect on whether
her life's companion
really was the beast
in more than just costume.
Was the last face she saw
that of her husband
looming over her,
easing that bar
down onto her throat?
- I hope not.
I hope not.
I hope that's not
the last thought she had
of someone
that she loved,
someone that she
thought loved her,
someone that she
was loyal to.
- In the months following
Lisa's murder,
her son, Dillon, had to come
to terms as best he could
with that terrible day
and the man he
once called "dad."
- You believe Scott Pattison
murdered your mother?
- I do.
- Pressed that bar
into her throat?
- Yes, sir.
- Why?
- Greed. Money.
- Stuff that really means
nothing in the end.
- Stuff that means nothing.
- Dillon, by all accounts,
is doing well.
With the steady support
of friends
and his mother's family,
he's doing his best
to navigate life
without his guiding star.
- The worst part is not
hearing I love you from her
and not hearing her
words of encouragement.
You know, "Hey, you're
an awesome kid.
"I love you.
Keep up the good work."
- What's he stolen from you?
- My precious Lisa.
Just her smile.
She would call me,
you know,
every morning
and say, "Hi, Mom".
He took that away from me.
So-- And just
our whole family,
it's not complete
without her.
- There will always
be an empty chair
at the family table.
Only images of the smile
and memories remain.
- And that's all
for this edition of
"Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Thank you for watching.