[Bill] Up next, two women
in love with the same man.
[James] These two women wanna spend time with the bad boy,
I think he was a... kind of a gigolo kind of guy.
[Bill] One member of this love triangle is murdered.
They got to the point where they completely hated each other.
[Kelly] If anyone shot in the back of the head
that's an execution.
Somebody wanted that person dead.
[Bill] But even after an arrest, questions remain.
Everything inside of me had been sucked out.
Hope is gone.
Completely helpless.
[opening theme music playing]
[Bill] Amarillo, the largest city in the Texas Panhandle
was once known as the helium capital of the world.
It used to be one of the most helium rich places on the planet.
At one point helium was much more important
in the manufacture of lots of things,
including a lot of military devices and weapons,
it doesn't play as crucial a role now as it once did.
[Bill] On an April morning in 2014,
local police were called to the outskirts of town to Helium Road.
The name harkening back to Amarillo's former role in helium production.
It's a dirt road, so a lot of people would still use it
uh, for a shortcut to get to where they're going.
[Bill] A sheriff's officer found the body of a young woman lying next to an SUV.
The victim suffered extensive trauma to the back of her head.
She had no ID, no phone, no wallet.
But investigators were able to trace her vehicle.
It belonged to 32 year old Robin Spielbauer.
[Steve] They informed us based on a couple of pictures that my wife had
that it in fact was Robin.
So we were going through our mind of like okay,
what, who, why?
Um, all sorts of questions.
[Bill] The crime scene provided only a few answers.
Blood evidence showed Robin had been killed where she was found.
Despite the massive blows to the back of her head
that wasn't what killed her.
[Kelly] It was during the autopsy that they discovered that,
she'd actually been shot as well with a 22 caliber weapon.
[Bill] The oddest clue at the scene was on one of the windows of Robin's vehicle.
Their appeared to be a slight damage to the
window itself, like a
like your windshield when a rock hits it creates a little star break.
Uh, there were two or three spots like that
and a pink substance of some kind,
and it looked to be associated with these, uh small chips in the window.
[Bill] Robin's murder stunned her family and friends.
[Erin] Robin always had like this here I am personality.
You know, and you knew she was in the room when she was there and
friendly with everybody.
[Bill] Maybe not everybody. Robin the mother of two young girls
had divorced the girl's father
JD Spielbauer just 18 months earlier.
JD and Robin began their romance nearly a decade before Robin's murder.
She was, I think desperately in love with
with Mr. Spielbauer and
very desirous of spending the rest of her life with him and the two of them
uh, raising their children.
[Bill] But JD strayed repeatedly from the marriage.
After seven years together, Robin finally called it quits
and took the kids with her.
JD denied any involvement in her murder.
But even he couldn't deny his place as a prime suspect in his ex-wife's death.
[James] The sheriff's department, they ask him,
"Do you have any information that will be of help to us?"
His response was, No, I don't know of anything, I'm of no help to you.
I just have no information. I don't know anything.
[Bill] When JD Spielbauer and his future wife Robin met in 2003
the relationship turned red hot almost immediately.
They spend all their time together and actually got pregnant within
the first like four to five weeks of them starting dating.
So, it sped everything up a lot faster.
[Bill] Robin's parents were both ex-military.
She grew up at times overseas,
as what some call a military brat.
JD told her he'd done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan
He seemed a solid bet as a responsible husband and father.
She was more like, wanted something stable.
And you know, down home,
she wanted a family and just...
the, uh, proverbial house with a picket fence.
[Bill] After the wedding JD began carrying on a couple of affairs
while Robin raised their two young children.
[Erin] She wanted what her parents had so bad,
that she thought she could find a way to make him happy to what he would stay.
[Bill] But JD finally crossed a line that even Robin couldn't tolerate.
He had an affair with a woman names Katie Phipps.
Why was this worse than the others?
Because Katie was someone Robin opened up to about the troubles of her marriage.
Robin knew Katie before JD did and,
as is always the case with
an affair and an unhappy marriage, it eventually resulted in divorce
by 2014.
And... And after that JD had married Katie.
[Bill] To make matters even worse,
JD and his new wife Katie
moved into a house very near where Robin was raising the children
she'd had with JD.
And the weird thing about it was that it was two houses down from our house.
[Bill] This has an inherently volatile situation,
especially with young children being moved between both houses day after day.
Katie and Robin, there were a lot of hostility between the two women
they both, cared about JD and
and, uh JD had been involved with both and it was a classic triangle.
[Bill] Over the 2013 Thanksgiving holidays
The hostility between these two romantic rivals boiled over.
[Erin] Robin walks into the house to go upstairs to get her girls
and Katie follows her in the house grabs her by the hair,
pulls her down off the stairs onto the floor,
and on top of her where
Robin in turn kicked her off and kicked her into the fire place.
I honestly told her, I said, "She's the kind of crazy that'll kill you."
[Bill] No charges were filed but this did nothing to relieve the tension.
In fact both women were convinced that JD was sleeping which each of them
behind their backs.
Katie was livid about it and made no secret about it.
She was just hammering on JD everyday in text messages,
"I believe you're having and affair with Robin."
JD would deny it,
but Katie wasn't buying it, she was convinced
that he was seeing Robin behind her back.
[Bill] A search of Katie's cellphone showed that
in the four days before Robin was killed,
she sent more than 300 of these texts,
that's an of nearly average of four texts every hour on the hour
twenty four hours a day.
There were text messages with Katie threatening
Robin, either directly or indirectly.
[Kelly] When you read Katie's text messages
she says that, uh she can't do it anymore and she's gonna finish it.
Does that mean murder someone or simply divorce them?
When you see a text message like that, it kind of points
more toward her being guilty.
[Bill] Now, five months after the Thanksgiving altercation
Robin Spielbauer was in a morgue with a fatal bullet wound.
Katie, her romantic rival, clearly had a potential motive to kill her.
But when brought in for questioning her top priority wasn't the murder.
[Bill] Soon Katie had even more things to be upset about.
Detectives located the murder weapon.
They also found this photograph of Katie
holding what looked to be that very same gun.
When I first saw that picture I was like, Oh my gosh she did it.
[Bill] When Katie Phipps emerged
as a possible suspect in the murder of Robin Spielbauer
police searched the home Katie shared with Robin's ex-husband, JD.
During the search warrant
a 22 SIG Sauer Mosquito automatic pistol
was recovered along with several other firearms.
[Bill] This 22 caliber pistol was a distinctive weapon
it had pink polymer plating apparently a marketing device.
With the pink casing you'd automatically assume it's a woman's gun,
misogynistic, yes probably but,
uh, that was one of those things that
immediately pops into your head
The fact that it's pink, fantastic, mine is purple.
It's nothing out of the normal for you know, a lot of people around here in Texas.
[Bill] Investigators now employed a rarely used
but simple forensic technique called a physical fit.
Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
a shard of metal that chipped off the gun and was found at the crime scene,
fit perfectly with the gap left on the gun itself.
And a test fire of the weapon confirmed what this evidence already showed.
It was Katie's gun, there were pictures all over Facebook of her shooting this strange
pink gun.
[Bill] So Katie owned the murder weapon and she clearly had a motive.
[Bill] Katie actually requested polygraph examination.
My lawyer told me, "Do not do this. You are going to fail it,
they want you to fail it. They're going to tell you that you failed it,
hoping that you're going to confess."
Of course I failed it, just like he told me I would.
[Bill] Even worse, Katie did not have a rock solid alibi
for the night of the murder.
She said, she was at a friend's house close to Helium Road
and never saw Robin that night.
But she turned off her cell phone,
so it couldn't be used to track her.
[Bill] And as an ex-husband, JD had to be looked at
as a possible suspect.
A background check revealed that JD's claims to be war veteran were all lies.
I'd rather pissed, 'cause I mean that's uh,
to me it's something you don't lie about.
It just, uh didn't sit well.
[Bill] JD claimed that he had no contact with his ex-wife Robin
on the night she was murdered.
But cellphone records expose this as another lie.
In the text messages, they discovered that
Robin was communicating with JD on the seventh,
several times and making reference to a meeting that was to take place,
with JD.
[Bill] That meeting was set for the night Robin was killed.
When confronted with this evidence JD changed the story.
He admitted meeting Robin at Helium Road
and said someone unexpected showed up in that meeting.
[Bill] But according to JD Katie didn't follow.
He said the two women continued yelling at each other as he drove away.
The next day Robin was found dead.
JD's story or stories were changing by the hour.
But detectives, convinced Katie was the killer, thought there was a good reason.
[James] We believe that JD Spielbauer,
was telling false stories and the stories were changing
because he was trying to protect his wife, Katie.
[Bill] Three days after Robin's body was found
Katie was arrested and charged with capital murder.
[Katie] And I looked over and there's my son
getting out of my sister in-laws car.
And he watches them put me on the ground at gun point,
and handcuff me.
And I remember just looking at my son like,
I'm not gonna see you for a long time.
[Bill] Katie Phipps maintained from the beginning that
she had problems with Robin Spielbauer
but would never resort to murder.
Detectives weren't buying it
and Katie remained behind bars for more than a year
while they built their case.
[Katie] I spent my 29th birthday in jail.
I lost my kids to CPS.
My ex-husband took all of my stuff,
except for the little bit of clothes he allowed my brother to come pick up.
I lost everything.
[Bill] JD Spielbauer's cellphone put him at the scene of the murder.
Since Katie's phone was off it could not be used to track her.
But then detectives found out about a relatively new way that
they could pin point her location at the time of the murder.
Mark Sedwick is a member of the FBI's cellular analysis survey team or CAST.
What we do, our biggest thing if there's a kidnapping,
uh, we will do, exploit any phone
social media type data that gives us any location
to try and locate that missing child.
[Bill] This method targets the cellphone's wireless capacity or Wi-Fi
and can provide a nearly exact location.
It doesn't rely on cell towers.
It goes directly to your phone.
You get a lot more accurate readings and the GPS
is your GPS and it works off the satellite
uh, your satellite signals that your phone's GPS antenna saves.
[Bill] Since Katie's phone was off on the day of Robin's murder
this wasn't an option with her phone.
But she was seen at numerous points at that day and night
with her eleven year old son Diego.
And the Wi-Fi on his phone was up and running the whole time.
The targeting of that phone left no doubt,
Katie was not at Helium Road when Robin Spielbauer was shot
at about 9:50 that night.
We had three adult eye witnesses who all agreed
Diego and Katie were together all day.
She never left or left him there, she never left without Diego.
Katie could never have killed Robin
she was never there, she was never at Helium Road that night.
[Katie] Mr ... said today I am dismissing her case.
And I fell out the chair, and I hit the ground,
and I cried and I cried
and I don't know how long I cried.
[Bill] Following Katie's release,
JD Spielbauer found himself a charge of facing capital murder.
Prosecutors are convinced JD planned the murder.
He lured Robin to Helium Road and had
Katie's pink plated 22 caliber in his trunk.
Robin had no idea what awaited her.
In fact she also wanted the meeting.
[James] She was gonna meet with JD and tell him no more bully calls
it's over she told several other friends,
"I'm ending this affair with JD."
From now on, I only wanna see him if it involves the girls
and I want all of my child support.
[Bill] The couple while in Robin's SUV started fighting.
JD apparently got out of the SUV,
went back to his truck and came back brandishing the pink plated pistol.
Robin hit automatic lock on all her car doors.
JD pounded the gun on the rear window.
Strike marks from the plastic handle,
and the piece of metal chipped of the gun
related match back to Katie's gun.
Ultimately it appears Robin exited her SUV.
Apparently, thinking JD would never actually shoot her.
-[Bill] She was wrong. -[gunshot]
He fired once hitting her and intended to fire again.
But the gun jammed.
It appears he walked back to his truck
came back with some type of tool,
possibly a tire iron and made sure Robin was dead.
His attempt to frame Katie for Robin's murder almost worked,
after all the ballistics tied the shell casing
back to Katie's pink pistol.
But JD failed to realize,
cellphone evidence put him at the sight of the murder
and showed Katie was not there.
To pull Arthur Conan Doyle through the lips of Sherlock Holmes
when you have eliminated every other possibility whatever is left
is the truth.
[Bill] In January of 2018,
a jury found JD Spielbauer guilty of first degree murder,
and sentenced him to life in prison.
Katie, forever grateful for the cellphone technology that proved her innocence,
is now using her experience on both sides of the law
as a criminal paralegal near Dallas.
[Katie] Cellphone records are the new DNA.
It doesn't matter,
where you come from in life, how much money you make
you have a cellphone,
and that cellphone is traceable.
If it wasn't for today's technology
and all the advances that we've made,
I would surely be spending the rest of my life in prison.