[Vivianne Bernas] I got a text from him around 4:00 am.
It said, "Viv, I am sorry. I have to leave the country.
I can't tell you why."
[reporter] Police need your help to find the student
who disappeared on Sunday night.
[Stacy Bridavsky] His cell phone pinged at several locations
the night he went missing, into the early-morning hours.
How did he get there?
I was just totally at a loss.
[Vivianne] He had to have someone with him.
It was something that I just felt was very suspicious.
[Bridavsky] Someone out there has to know something.
[Vivianne] I'm determined to get the answers.
It was clear to us he was the last person to be with her.
I suspected foul play pretty quickly.
I just kept going from every angle, and there was nothing.
There was something serious going on.
[Celestra Dewey] When they said, "Hello," it clicked and hung up.
And then nothing.
Fade to black.
Smedley went missing Monday.
Cryptic messages were sent from his phone to his sister,
saying he was leaving the country,
but all week, she remained skeptical.
[reporter] The Smedley family says
there are too many unanswered questions.
They want to shine more light
on the circumstances surrounding Joseph's death.
[Dr. Joseph Smedley] I was just totally at a loss.
Tried to wrap my mind around what, what had happened.
There isn't anyone who was involved initially,
who's willing to come forward and say,
"Here's this missing piece."
[narrator] Growing up in Indianapolis,
Joseph Smedley is known for being as smart as he is funny.
His personality was upbeat and very positive.
He was a jokester.
We're about a year-and-a-half apart, so we were really close.
He was always was trying to play pranks on us, growing up,
and he constantly was practicing
his wrestling moves on me.
He's sharp, he's bright.
And you knew that he was having an impact on you
when you were in his presence.
Just so smart.
I always used to refer to him as the little boy genius.
[narrator] Joseph and Vivianne's parents' divorce when Joseph is in third grade.
We all just handled it a lot differently.
I think Joseph was just really sad.
So Joseph went to actually go live with my mother
in Saint Thomas for a little while,
but their relationship pretty much soured.
So he decided to come back home.
Right about the time that he returned,
Joseph and I were going through a lot of challenges
in terms of trying to get him re-established back in our home.
My father actually had gotten remarried.
And the wife that he was with,
it was just not someone that, um, any of us got along with very well.
[narrator] In 2012, when he's 16 years old,
Joseph becomes legally emancipated
and moves in with a close friend.
Two years later, Joseph's life takes a positive turn
when he's accepted into Indiana University Bloomington.
His classes begin in August of that year.
[Vivianne] I was really excited for him.
I knew that he'd have a ton of friends there.
He would be able to get started off on the right foot.
He was very ambitious,
and he really wanted to pursue a degree
in biochemistry and pharmacology.
We were estranged,
but I kept tabs of him through Vivianne.
I was always hopeful that Joseph and I would reconcile.
[narrator] Joseph and Vivianne talk practically every day,
and she couldn't be happier to see her brother flourishing at college.
Joseph definitely enjoyed college.
I could tell he had a blast, for sure.
[narrator] Then Joseph makes a decision
that surprises his family.
During his second semester of his freshman year,
he decided to pledge Sigma Pi, which is a popular fraternity.
[Vivianne] I'm just not a fan of fraternities.
I feel like there's other organizations and ways
that you can get involved on campus.
I was very upset that he had decided
to throw his hat in with that group of boys.
That fraternity had just a horrible reputation on campus.
[narrator] Joseph spends the summer of 2015
living in an off-campus apartment with friends.
As his sophomore year is about to start,
Joseph moves into a house with two guys from his frat.
I remember him FaceTiming me
and showing me, kind of, his new room,
and how excited he was
to be in a house with his fraternity brothers.
[narrator] Monday, September 21st.
Vivianne receives a call from her brother's former landlord.
[Vivianne] I had actually co-signed for that lease
that he was moving out of.
And, apparently, because he didn't have anyone to replace him,
he still had to pay to break the lease.
So Vivianne had called her brother right away and said, you know,
"What's going on? Your old apartment just called me.
The said you owe around $680."
He said that he would take care of it.
[narrator] Joseph's former landlord
gives him one week to pay the remaining balance,
which means he needs to drop off a check by noon on Monday, September 28th.
Joseph had checks from one of his summer jobs that he hadn't picked up yet,
and that is how he was planning on paying.
So, I called him that Sunday night
and asked if he had anything together for the next day.
And he said, "Yes. I have the check on my desk,
and I'll be dropping it off tomorrow."
[cell phone vibrates]
[narrator] The next morning, Vivianne wakes up to find
a strange message from her brother.
I got a text from him. It came around 4:00 am.
It said something along the lines of
"Viv, I am sorry. I have to leave the country.
I can't tell you why I'm leaving the country, to protect you.
But as soon as I get set up overseas, I'll contact you."
It did not make sense at all.
Joseph did not have a passport.
I thought it was a joke at first, and I responded,
"Shut up. LOL. Better have that check today at noon,"
or something like that.
[narrator] When Vivianne tries to call him, she gets his voicemail.
[Vivianne] I still didn't really take it seriously.
Sometimes he does things that aren't really funny, but are funny to him.
I'm just gonna wait and see if he drops the check off.
So, once noon came around, I called the apartment, and I said,
"Did he stop by?"
And they said, "No. We haven't seen him today."
[narrator] By Monday afternoon,
after not being able to reach her brother,
Vivianne calls the Indiana University Police Department
and asks them to perform a welfare check.
They discover that he didn't attend any of his classes that day.
They went to his home, and he wasn't there either,
so, at that point, no one knew where he was.
[narrator] But later that day, the police call Vivianne back
and say that they've located her brother.
They said that they had found him
and that he was in jail.
And then I got really confused,
'cause he's just not the kind of person
that I would ever think would be in jail.
So then I actually had a couple of other people call the jail,
and they said there wasn't a Joseph Smedley there.
[narrator] Indiana University Police follow up,
and confirm there's been a mix up at the Monroe County Jail.
[Vivianne] I get a call back saying,
"We apologize. We actually did get it wrong.
There was a Jonathan Smedley there,
and Joseph Smedley in not in jail."
[narrator] Tuesday, September 29th.
Joseph is officially declared a missing person.
[reporter] How are you? And police need your help to find a student
who disappeared on Sunday night.
This poster has been shared thousands of times on social media.
Things definitely got more real for me
when they said that they were gonna file him as a missing person.
At that point, I started to feel like
that text message didn't come from him.
There is no doubt in my mind that he did not send that message.
[narrator] The mix up at the Monroe County Jail
has robbed Indiana University Police of precious time.
So Joseph's sister launches her own investigation.
I just immediately started going on his Instagram and his Facebook,
and looking for the most recent people he was tagged in,
and just reaching out,
trying to see if I could find
any information on what his last moves were,
and I just, kind of, blasted it all over her Facebook.
[Dr. Smedley] Vivianne was awesome.
She did everything that a person could do
to try to determine what had occurred.
[narrator] Vivianne pays Joseph's roommates a visit at their house.
[Vivianne] His roommates had said that during the day,
they had just been at home watching a show.
Then they all went to bed around 11:00
on that Sunday night,
and that was the last time they had seen him.
[narrator] When Vivianne checks her brother's bedroom,
nothing seems out of the ordinary.
Nothing seemed to really be missing, except for his backpack.
His check, that he was going to be taking
to the apartment that Monday, was still on the desk as well.
[narrator] Vivianne also learns that when Indiana University Police
checked Joseph's house the day he disappeared,
they found a note on his bed.
It was very similar to the text message,
that he's leaving the country
and do not attempt to contact him.
And here's where it gets especially interesting.
The note was signed Smedley.
Which I found kind of strange because he's never gone by Smedley.
And it was dated 9/28,
which would have been that Monday.
If Joseph left his house on the 27th,
why would he have dated the note for the next day?
It doesn't make sense.
Why even date the note at all?
And I don't really believe that it's his handwriting to me.
Joseph wrote really neat.
This looked very messy.
I had reached out to Bloomington Police Department
to try and do a handwriting analysis.
It ended up coming back inconclusive.
[narrator] As Vivianne keeps digging, she uncovers something else
that unsettles her to the core.
I hacked into a group chat called "groupme,"
and he was using that for all of his fraternity brothers
who were in his pledge class.
They had said that they were gonna start
telling everyone that he wasn't actually a part of Sigma Pi
because he, um, hadn't paid his dues yet.
This is supposed to be your brother,
but instead of helping with the investigation,
you're trying to disown him.
So, I decided to go over to Sigma Pi,
but all of them were really just, kind of, closed off.
When I was talking to the president,
pretty much every time I'd ask a question,
he would just refer me back to, um, his roommates and say,
"They were the last ones with him. We don't know anything."
[narrator] By the end of the week, the police confirm
that Joseph hasn't withdrawn or deposited any money since Sunday, September 27th.
They also track his phone signal among local cell towers,
which leads to an even bigger mystery.
His cell phone pinged at several locations
the night he went missing, into the early morning hours the next day.
The first ping on his cell phone was around 4:15
in Downtown Bloomington,
off of Seventh and Walnut.
And then, about 30 minutes later,
there was another ping that had happened near Griffy Lake.
Then there was another ping at 6:30 off of state road 37.
Those three locations are not very close and walking distance.
[narrator] The cell phone data reveals
that Joseph left his house at some point
after his roommates say they thought he went to bed.
The question, was he alone?
How did he get there?
He didn't have a car that was working.
I honestly think that he had to have someone with him.
There wasn't a way for him to get around that fast without being in a car.
There was a lot of chatter
about people seeing him downtown with his fraternity brothers.
But later, when Joseph's father
asks that of Bloomington Police Department,
they respond with, "We were not aware that anyone saw Joseph
out with his fraternity brothers that night."
[narrator] Friday, October 2nd.
Three days after Joseph is declared missing,
a fisherman makes a shocking discovery.
[reporter] We're following breaking news from Monroe County,
where a body has been found in Griffy Lake.
They find a fully-clothed male.
The body is badly decomposed.
And there are binoculars tied around the neck.
[narrator] Vivianne is called down
to the Bloomington police station.
I was really holding on to hope.
And it wasn't until I had stepped out of the car
to walk into the precinct that it had hit me that it could be him.
[reporter] We have learned the body found in a Bloomington lake
is that of a missing IU student.
The coroner says the cause of death
for 20-year-old Joseph Smedley
is consistent with drowning.
[Vivianne] I was honestly just in shock immediately.
They're telling me that my brother's no longer here.
Someone that you've grown up with,
that's literally been by your side your whole life.
[narrator] Two months later, the Monroe County coroner
rules Joseph's death as suicide by drowning.
The Smedleys learn through the autopsy report
that Joseph was weighed down by a backpack
filled with 66 pounds of rocks.
I'm not really sure why the police initially kept that information from me.
But, apparently, the rocks in his backpack
is the reason why they had deemed his death as suicide.
[Dr. Smedley] I was just totally at a loss,
trying to wrap my mind around what had happened.
I spoke to as many of Joseph's friends and family as I could get ahold of,
and not one single person was able to speak to Joseph
having any history of depression
or suicidal ideation in any way.
[narrator] Confusion swirls around exactly what was used
to weigh down Joseph's body.
Different reports from the scene
refer to them as bricks or rocks.
And this is extremely important,
because there aren't any large rocks around Griffy Lake.
[Vivianne] We just don't have all those details,
because Bloomington Police Department has refused time and time again
to release any information about the case.
They won't release photography,
they won't release the notes.
Joseph would have had to walk 45 minutes from his house to Griffy Lake,
and then find rocks to put in his bag,
and jump off of the bridge
into five feet of shallow water.
And I actually went down to Griffy Lake
and tried to find 66 pounds of rocks
to actually put into a backpack,
and we were unsuccessful, even in the daylight, to do that.
How do we know that his body wasn't weighed down with this backpack
in attempt to conceal a crime?
[Vivianne] I absolutely believe that my brother
was a victim of foul play.
Whether that is his body being covered up,
or that it was, you know, something bigger than that.
I'm determined to get the answers.
[Vivianne] I immediately had a second autopsy done.
And then we took that report
and brought it to a new forensic pathologist.
He found a discrepancy from the first autopsy.
And what he found was two deep intermuscular hematomas,
so, basically, bruises on Joseph's back.
[narrator] The private forensic pathologist
isn't able to complete his report,
because the Bloomington PD refuses to share photos of the original scene.
But the forensic pathologist tells the family
he's leaning toward a different conclusion from the coroner.
He said he would have done either accidental or undetermined,
but definitely not suicide.
[Bridavsky] As I was starting to do the podcast,
we brought in some forensic pathologists
and also an aquatic death investigator.
I really wanted to get some clarity around
Joseph's cause and manner of death.
[Andrea Zaferes] Bodies found in the water are some of the most
misdiagnosed types of deaths that there are.
There's no universally accepted medical test to prove
whether or not somebody drowned.
[Bridavsky] What I discovered was that less than 1%
of deaths by suicide are suicides by drowning.
We know from Joseph's autopsy and toxicology reports
that he was presumed under the influence at the time of his death.
And most people who die by suicide,
specifically suicide by drowning,
are not under the influence when they do so.
[narrator] Could the rocks found in Joseph's backpack provide further clues?
It is not uncommon for people who commit suicide
to add weights.
Some suicides in water are extremely elaborate.
That's also what happens in some homicides,
where you want to dispose of bodies,
or you're actually drowning the person.
[narrator] Andrea Zaferes has many unanswered questions about Joseph's backpack.
[Zaferes] I have read documents that said it was tied in the front.
His toxicology was pretty significant.
I would like to have a forensic knot examiner examine the knot,
and see if in that state of intoxication,
could you have tied that yourself?
Part of what needs to be done in this case is a reconstruction,
which is what they're used to doing if this was a gunshot wound,
if there was blood stain analysis,
if it was a vehicle death, right?
[narrator] And questions about Joseph's cell phone continue to linger.
When Joseph's body is recovered,
they don't find Joseph's cell phone
until they do a second sweep of the area.
And they then find Joseph's cell phone,
but it is not on his person.
Is it possible the phone went into the water
at a different time than Joseph did?
[narrator] The physical evidence is only one piece of the puzzle
in trying to decipher if Joseph really did die by suicide.
I really think a psychological autopsy
would be useful in the case,
and that requires a forensically-trained psychiatrist.
They look at life factors, risk factors, protective factors.
Could this be a bet, a dare?
Could this be hazing, that he...
You know, "Hey, can you put this backpack on
and, you know, get out of the water?"
Psychological autopsy would help with that.
Would he have been the type of person
to be willing to do high-risk behavior?
[narrator] April 2021.
Indiana University suspends Joseph's fraternity, Sigma Pi, for two years
because of hazing and violating COVID regulations.
As of today, over 120,000 people
have signed a petition urging Bloomington PD
to reinvestigate Joseph's death.
Someone out there has to know something,
someone has to have seen Joseph that night.
Seen him either driving with someone, leave with someone.
And all of these details make a big difference in Joseph's case.
[narrator] While Joseph's family awaits answers,
they continue to mourn his loss.
I don't know any parent who expects to lose a child.
The fact that I've been unable to see
what he would have developed into
with his brilliant mind, his personality, and his intelligence,
that's what I miss.
It's definitely a big gaping hole in my life
that's missing now.
It's just sad that, you know, I have to miss out on,
you know, our adulthood.
He was just getting started.
[narrator] Elsewhere in Indiana,
the heartbroken family of a young woman
is also searching for answers.
July 2004, Indianapolis,
a bustling Midwestern city known for its down-to-earth friendly people.
But when a college student goes missing...
Police have never found her body,
and no one has been charged with murder.
The mystery haunts the city
and baffles this young woman's family for years.
[Keri Dattilo] We knew something was not right.
Everything of importance
was still left in her apartment.
Didn't make any sense, given who she was.
And so the wheels start spinning.
What happened?
Every time I'd be talking about it, I just start crying.
It was just the most awful thing that you could imagine.
[narrator] 22-year-old Molly Dattilo is known for her friendly spirit
and boundless energy.
She was very bubbly, she was very outgoing,
and she never really met a stranger.
She was very kind to people,
she was very encouraging,
and really thought the best of everybody.
[narrator] Growing up in a big family
in the small town of Madison, Indiana,
Molly is the youngest of nine children.
She stands out from an early age.
I just remember she was...
You know, sometimes she was so smart,
I didn't even know what she was talking about.
She was very talented and extremely driven.
[narrator] Molly excels in the classroom and is a star athlete,
regularly seen on the front page of the newspaper.
[Wilbur] Everybody in the town knows
that she was a super talented runner.
She was consistently, you know, winning races
even, you know, at the state level.
[narrator] Molly's running earns her a scholarship to Eastern Kentucky University.
In the summer of 2004, Molly is picking up some extra credits
at a college program in Indianapolis,
and she's living in an apartment with her brother, Nick.
But everything is about to change
for this thriving young college student.
Tuesday, July 6, begins like any other day.
She went to school, she prepared for classes, she went shopping.
She'd bought some stuff to, um, store her files on for school.
[narrator] At around 7:00 pm, Molly walks to a nearby fast food restaurant
to drop off a part-time job application.
Along the way, she sees a friend,
who notices she's carrying her cell phone.
We know she returned back to her apartment,
because her cell phone was later found in her apartment.
[narrator] That evening, she joins up with neighbors at her apartment complex.
Even though it's Tuesday, people party on Tuesdays.
It's still July 4th week.
And she decided to go hang out and go to this party.
[narrator] She runs into a friend who works at the apartment building,
and he introduces Molly to his brother.
And he asked her if she wanted to go on a boat ride,
because Westlake Apartments had retention ponds.
And Molly accepted that offer.
[Coursey] And they go out on this boat ride,
and people saw it, so, you know, there's witness accounts to that.
[narrator] Then a few hours pass.
And at around 11:00 pm, Molly is at a gas station
about three miles from her home.
She uses a pay phone to call a friend.
She made a phone call to someone
who she was supposed to be meeting up with.
And we don't know if she was calling to cancel,
we don't know if she was calling to maybe say,
"I need help."
We don't know what the conversation would have been like,
because before he could pick up, the call was ended.
[Dewey] When they said, "Hello," it clicked and hung up.
That's the last contact that she tried to make with any of us.
And then nothing.
Fade to black.
[narrator] The next morning, Molly's brother, Nick, notices she hasn't come home.
Nick wasn't necessarily worried about it,
because she's an adult.
Maybe she spent the night at someone's house.
[narrator] But after two days of silence,
on July 8th, Molly's brother knows something isn't right.
So he makes the phone call to police
to file a missing person report.
[narrator] From the beginning,
police don't treat Molly's case as a priority.
[Wilbur] I imagine they get a lot of calls like this,
and, you know, nine times out of ten,
that person has just wandered off,
or they'll come back later or whatever.
[narrator] But Molly's family tells police
it's not like her to go away without telling anyone.
And when her loved ones converge on her apartment,
they are alarmed by what they find.
She left behind her car, her identification, her wallet.
So, really, she had nothing with her.
The only thing that Molly had on her
was her lanyard with the key on it.
[Ben] She left all kinds of stuff
that you would need if you were going to run away.
I suspected foul play pretty quickly
after going through those details of the story.
[narrator] For Molly's loved ones,
it's obvious that she didn't intend to disappear.
But the Marion County Sheriff's Department has other theories.
They said that, you know, maybe Molly got tired of living the straight life
and just wanted to run away.
You know, she was a female.
She could live on the streets better than a male.
Molly was, obviously, giving applications at Wendy's,
she was not looking at the strip club.
Um, but the police, they took her detail to the strip clubs.
He said, "Yeah, we've been looking at the strip clubs."
It was just insulting.
[narrator] In the days after Molly's disappearance, there's not a single lead.
Her family is frantic with worry,
and they're furious that the police aren't doing more.
After two weeks, Molly's sister marches into
the Marion County Sherriff's Office.
And I just don't take crud from people.
So, I went in there, and... [sighs]
Yeah, I came out defeated.
I just kept going from every angle,
and there was nothing we could do.
He hadn't even looked in her car,
he hadn't looked anywhere in her apartment.
They weren't doing anything.
[narrator] Molly's loved ones decide to take matters into their own hands.
They retrace Molly's last-known steps, searching for clues,
and fan out across Indianapolis
to spread the word about her case.
They put flyers up with her photo on it.
"Have you seen me?"
They started putting billboards up.
You know, just everything that they could.
[narrator] Volunteers search the woods where Molly often runs,
and scent dogs work the area around her apartment.
Miraculously, they turn up a clue.
The dogs went up to the apartment.
They came down from the apartment and went out to the road,
like, on the sidewalk, by the road,
to indicate that Molly got into a car.
[narrator] Whose car did Molly get into,
and where was she taken?
For weeks, these questions haunt Molly's family.
But they're not getting any answers from the police,
who still don't seem to consider her case a high priority.
So, in August, just over a month after Molly disappears,
her loved ones organize a run in Indianapolis
to try to keep Molly's name in the news.
The media coverage quickly yields another clue.
A man was fishing,
and he found a lanyard with a key on it.
[narrator] It's found in a river
near the gas station where Molly is last seen.
He had picked it up and taken the key off,
because he really liked the lanyard,
and kept the lanyard and tossed the key.
And then, once he saw the media, you know, stories on Molly,
he thought this might be hers.
And so he contacted law enforcement
and brought the lanyard to them.
[narrator] But because the key is missing,
police can't be certain the lanyard is Molly's.
It's a dead end.
But Molly's case is now headline news,
and investigators agree to assign a new detective
and intensify their efforts.
[Keri] They did search Westlake Apartments,
they did search the retention ponds.
They did searches tracing the area that Molly was last seen.
[narrator] As the months go by, momentum in the case stalls.
Then, in 2006, two years after Molly's disappearance,
there's a bombshell development.
Molly's family hires a private investigator,
and he learns police have identified a person of interest.
His name is John Shelton,
the man Molly met at the party and took a boat ride with
the night she was last seen.
John said he took her to Taco Bell,
and he was with her when she was at the gas station.
[narrator] He says he was at her side
when she made that final, mysterious call on the pay phone.
But he could not answer as to why she was placing the phone call.
[narrator] John Shelton doesn't give investigators much more to go on.
He basically said, "Well, I didn't do anything.
I just took her back to the apartment and dropped her off."
It was clear to us he was the last person to be with her,
and, therefore, we had pretty strong suspicions that he was, in fact,
the cause of her being missing.
[narrator] Investigators zero in on the puzzling route
Molly and John drove that night.
After eating at the fast food restaurant,
why did they go past Molly's apartment for another two miles
before stopping to make that call at the gas station?
It's away from the apartment complex, not towards it.
So it wouldn't be "We're gonna go and get some gas,
and then go back to the apartment,"
because you pass several gas stations getting there.
So, what was the reasoning to go that far out?
[narrator] If the police know, they're not saying.
The private eye digs up more information
about John Shelton from Molly's family.
And what he finds is chilling.
When we first learned about John, we saw that,
you know, he has a history with law enforcement.
It's unbelievable how many times he has been arrested
and then back out.
[narrator] January 2007.
Molly's loved ones go public with John Shelton's name,
against the wishes of the police.
We believed that if, um, enough people who knew John Shelton
were aware that he was a crime suspect in this situation,
that might lead to some answers
about what happened to my sister, Molly.
And from there, we received many more tips
of people who knew John
and had information that, you know, that they could share.
[narrator] Some of the most terrifying information about him
comes from past girlfriends.
They would contact me saying they were afraid of him.
And that he had bragged to them
about doing something to Molly.
And that if they didn't straighten up, he'd do it to them.
[narrator] The tips paint a dark picture of John Shelton.
But they don't yield anything new
about Molly's disappearance at first.
Then, in October 2008,
four-and-a-half years after Molly is last seen,
someone from a local church
calls the police with an explosive lead.
This tipster reported that...
John contacted his father
on the night of Molly's disappearance.
John said, "I accidentally killed somebody."
And the dad, he says, "Go in the shed, or in the garage,
and get a shovel and bury her."
[narrator] By 2008, there's finally enough evidence
for the police to reclassify Molly's case
from a missing person to a homicide.
But it's not enough to arrest John Shelton or his father, Edward Shelton.
Without a body, it is very difficult to have any kind of case.
It's hard to arrest somebody,
it's hard to prosecute somebody,
it's hard to do anything without a body.
[narrator] Her loved ones say they've always worried
that Molly could make an easy target for a predator.
The thing about Molly's personality was,
she was not afraid of anybody.
Um, she really was very naive.
She would just talk to anybody,
and talking to anybody was a worrisome thing for us.
So, personality wise, there was this trusting streak
that I always thought was a little bit dangerous.
[narrator] As the years go by,
every dead end brings Molly's family back
to the last-known person to be with her, John Shelton.
In 2010, they win a $3.5 million civil lawsuit
that blames Shelton for Molly's death,
and names his father as an accomplice in covering up the crime.
But since neither Shelton nor his father
ever appeared in court,
Molly's loved ones feel like they've run into another brick wall.
[Dewey] We knew we'd never see any money, and we haven't.
The only thing we were really trying to do is to get John on the stand,
so it didn't work.
[narrator] The lawsuit does unearth one detail
from the police investigation
that Molly's family did not know.
They discover that early on in the case,
investigators were able to track down the car John Shelton drove Molly in
the night she went missing.
[Keri] He had sold the vehicle,
but law enforcement was able to get that vehicle from the new owner,
do a whole crime scene with that,
and they found what appeared to be vomit.
When someone is strangled, they often will vomit.
I had two different girls contact me and tell me that
when he would be drunk, he would choke them.
[narrator] Police take what they find to a lab,
but determine that the car has been scrubbed so clean
by the time they get to it,
it's impossible to confirm it's Molly's DNA.
It's another painful blow for Molly's loved ones.
[Ben] I expect him to cover his tracks,
but I didn't expect law enforcement
to be so slow in responding
that it would give him a lot of time.
[narrator] In the years that follow,
John Shelton cycles in and out of jail
for crimes unrelated to Molly Dattilo.
But tips continue to trickle in, linking him to her case.
He's told numerous people, he's told neighbors,
he's told, uh, fellow inmates
that, you know, they're not gonna find Molly.
[narrator] Then, in 2014, on the 10th anniversary of Molly's disappearance,
a local Indiana reporter tracks down John Shelton at his home,
and presses him for answers.
The conversation takes an unexpected turn.
To me, that kind of aggression
when you're just being asked questions is very telling.
[narrator] John Shelton tells the reporter
he'll only speak if the interview is off camera.
During that interview, John said that
he was the only person dumb enough
to admit he was with Molly that night.
[narrator] He again denies any involvement in her disappearance.
Then, the reporter says, he suddenly gets flustered.
He ended up punching a hole in the wall,
and she grabbed her camera guy and ran out.
[narrator] To this day, John Shelton is the only individual
police have identified as a person of interest in this case.
But he's never been charged with anything relating to Molly's disappearance,
nor has his father.
In 2017, the family decides it's time to find closure,
and Molly's mother and eight siblings consent
to a court's finding that she is gone.
More than 13 years after an EKU student went missing,
a judge has formally declared her dead.
We felt like she had been deceased for a long time.
We just wanted, you know, things to be settled,
and just giving our family some peace after that long.
[narrator] Molly's family channels their grief and frustration
into advocacy,
working with state legislators in Indiana to create Molly's Law.
[Keri] Molly Dattilo's Law, it mandates that
law enforcement accept a missing persons case.
They can't say, "Come back in 24 hours, 72 hours,
and let us know if the person is still missing."
Red flags don't seem to stand out for law enforcement,
but they sure do stand out for families of the missing.
And in Molly's case, the family knew in the very beginning
that this was a critical situation.
[narrator] As of 2022, John Shelton is in jail
for armed robbery and drug charges.
His release date is in 2038.
For Molly's family, after all these years,
they still believe that one day they will get justice for Molly.
I think that there are, uh, people out there
that do know more information,
and that still can come forward to help.
Please come forward, help us solve this,
so that we don't have to go on
without ever knowing what happened to our sister, our daughter.
She was so fun.
And she was just so kind to people.
You know, the value of a person
isn't in some great thing that they do,
it's that they live.
I wish she was around to meet my kids.
And I think she would have been
a role model to them in, kind of, a way,
so I'm sad that she's not here for that.
One of the things that she had written in her diary
was that "I truly want to do something to better the world,"
and she definitely has.
[narrator] Molly's legacy lives on in her hometown of Madison.
Every year, residents take part in Molly's Run
to honor Molly and the sport she loved.
I know that she is smiling down from heaven every time that race comes,
because it doesn't matter if it's the first kid or the last kid,
there are crowds of people cheering.
It is the most beautiful thing
you've ever seen in your life.
That whole race embodies her.
That's why I love that run every year.