-Sara wanted to provide for her family
and be better and do better.
-She always was there any time I needed her.
She was the world to me.
-A missing mother...
-She didn't show up to work, and we got worried.
-...a gruesome discovery...
-There was a body beside the van burning.
-...a tangled web of love...
-We've got three suspects
that Sara has either had relationships with,
had kids with.
-...deceit...
-Who is telling us the truth?
-...and danger.
-Why was he back there with a gun?
-All leading to...
-Did he get into a fit of rage?
Did he get into it with Sara?
-...a killer relationship.
-I didn't tell her I loved her, and that haunts me.
♪♪
-The Tennessee city of Humboldt
in Gibson County
is quintessential small-town America.
Located between Nashville and Memphis,
it's an idyllic, quiet place where everyone knows everyone.
So, in the fall of 2004,
when Sara Summer, a 27-year-old mother of three, vanishes,
it triggers six days of turmoil,
which begins with a missing person's case,
ends with a deadly fire,
and cracks the foundations of this tight-knit community.
♪♪
-The late afternoon of September the 12th,
a call was received at 911
from an unknown man of a loud explosion in the area.
-First responders from Humboldt
and nearby towns rush to the location.
In the center of a cornfield at a local hangout called The Hole,
they discover a minivan engulfed in flames.
-When you arrive on a scene like this,
you never know what to expect.
Naturally, there's a vehicle there, so you're smelling gas.
But then there's another unusual odor.
When you smell that smell, it's a smell you'll never forget.
And that's the smell of decomposition.
-There was a body inside the van burning.
-Fire department arrives on the scene.
They extinguish the fire.
-Lacking the resources to handle such a complex crime scene,
responding officers call in
the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
-We arrived around 7:00, 8:00 that evening,
and I was shocked, actually, to see the condition of the body.
The body was sort of face-down,
with the chin resting on the running board
of the sliding door of the minivan,
the legs outstretched, the back was bowed.
-It was severely burned and had been burning a while.
-The van was completely destroyed by fire,
but you could still tell the license plate number on it.
They ran the license plate,
and this van came back to an individual named Sara Summer.
She had been missing since the 6th of September.
This was the first solid lead they had,
which had now turned into a possible homicide.
♪♪
-It was September 6th.
My mother had called me because Sara, my little sister,
had dropped her three boys off over there.
Then my mother called me later that evening and she's like,
"Well, Sara hasn't got back yet."
That was extremely unusual.
She was not going to drop those boys off
and not come back for those boys without telling us prior.
-The next day, we didn't hear nothing.
She didn't show up to work, and we got worried.
We started calling her, burning her phone line up,
started contacting all of her friends that we knew.
-You get finally to the point you just --
you have no idea what to do.
-Kathy, Sara's mom,
came in to the police department
and wanted to file a report for a missing person.
Sara didn't say she was going anywhere.
Didn't say who she was going with.
So, we gather as much information as we can.
We have the dispatchers issue a BOLO.
That's all they could do.
-They weren't that concerned yet,
and we kept trying to tell them over and over,
you know, you really need to take this serious
because she's not here and this is not her.
♪♪
-Sara is born in 1977 to Kathy and Charles Summer.
Charles is a registered nurse, Kathy a homemaker,
and Sara is the youngest of their two daughters.
-Sara was born just about two and a half years after I was.
It was always Sonya and Sara, Sonya and Sara.
Everywhere we went, we were a pair.
-She loved anything to do with dolls.
I stood in line for 4.5 hours
to get her a Cabbage Patch doll one year,
and she carried that all around.
-But Charles and Kathy's marriage is rocky.
And when Sara is 3 years old, her parents divorce.
Kathy remarries,
and Sara and her sister Sonya
live with their mother and stepfather.
-When Sara reached high school, it was harder for her.
Sara was always very insecure about herself
because she felt like she thought she wasn't pretty
and she thought she wasn't worthy.
And you know, she had those little girl dreams of Mr. Right
she was looking for, you know, Mr. Perfect.
-In high school, Sara casually dates,
but none of the relationships are serious.
Then, at age 17, in her senior year,
Sara finds herself pregnant.
-Of course, she was scared,
as any teenage girl would be -- terrified.
So, now you've just got to move on.
-But while Sara faces the situation head on,
the father-to-be isn't ready to become a dad.
-It hurt Sara that he was not there.
What was wrong with not just her,
but with the child?
She just finally accepted it.
-With the father out of the picture,
Sara finishes high school in 1995.
Six months after graduation,
she gives birth to her son, Christopher.
-She was a real good mother to him.
She loved him like everything.
So, we were proud of her for all that.
-I knew Mama loved me. She always was there.
Any time I needed her,
she just wrapped her arm around me
and we'd just watch whatever was on TV.
-Sara and Christopher find happiness in each other
and the support of their family.
Then, two years later, a new love enters their lives,
a man named Tim Henson.
-I didn't think it was going to be serious at first,
but then she kept getting closer and closer.
Tim included Christopher in just about everything that they did.
That was another part that Sara liked
because he just accepted the fact that she had a child.
-Later that same year, Tim and Sara tie the knot
and she and her son Chris move in.
Sara and Tim have two boys together, Shane and Adam.
She's now a happy mother of three.
But Sara's newfound joy is short-lived.
Less than a year after Adam is born,
Tim starts drinking heavily.
He can't hold down a job
and physically takes his anger out on Sara.
-There was black eyes, there was bruises.
There was cuts.
He'd actually shoved her while she was pregnant.
You know, hit her in the stomach.
-Things get so bad that Sara files
a restraining order against Tim
and moves in with her mother.
Five months later, she musters the courage to divorce him
and receives full custody of their two boys.
With Tim unable to provide any kind of child support,
the pressure falls on Sara
to take care of her young family.
-Sara, she had a plan.
She was focused,
and she wanted to provide for her family
and be better and do better.
When Sara started working at McDonald's,
she realized that she could climb the corporate ladder.
She could become a store manager.
She was affording herself more opportunities to grow.
-Sara also starts dating again,
and in April 2004,
she has a new boyfriend, Clay Webb.
-They had a great relationship, from what I could tell.
They were always laughing, cutting up, having fun.
He was fun to be around. He was kind of a big kid.
-But just a few months later, the relationship abruptly ends.
-I didn't really find out about Sara and Clay breaking up
until just a ways after it had happened.
She just didn't tell me why.
-Regardless of the reasons,
Sara stays focused on her goals,
and it pays off when she's promoted
to assistant manager at McDonald's.
-She's got goals for her and her boys at that point,
so I was very proud of her.
♪♪
-Five months later,
and six days before a burning body is discovered,
Sara goes missing.
And when she doesn't come home for over 48 hours,
the Humboldt police start investigating why.
-As law enforcement, we always interview the family.
You always want to look at who had a problem with this person,
a past relationship.
So, we have to look at those closest to her.
-The investigators make a list
of all of Sara's former relationships
over the last few years,
and immediately two names stand out.
Her most recent boyfriend, Clay Webb,
and ex-husband, Tim Henson.
-Rumor mill going around town
was that Tim Henson had kidnapped her or beat her,
or he was holding her against her will.
-We knew there was a history of him
choking her, throwing items.
There was an order of protection that was issued a year prior.
-He has an anger issue.
He's an alcoholic, been abusive to her before.
-Tim was under the influence
at the time we made contact with him.
We did ask him.
when the last time it was that he talked to Sara.
He said he had not talked to her in over a year.
He had told us he had never checked on the children.
So, there's no reason for him to make contact with Sara.
Is he telling us the truth,
or is he under the influence so bad
we need to come back and talk with him?
-The investigators make a note to circle back to Tim,
then move on to her most recent ex-boyfriend.
-Clay said he had not talked to Sara in over a week,
and he wasn't for sure where she was.
Clay did say, if we need to look anywhere,
we need to look at Tim Henson.
So, that keyed us in back on Tim.
Hey, did we not get enough out of him?
This is starting to worry us a little bit.
-Four days pass,
and after checking with Sara's friends, family, and coworkers,
worry turns to serious concern.
-We don't have much to go on.
I mean, nobody in the community has seen her.
Nobody at work has seen her.
And I'm going,
"Are we going to start looking for a dead body?"
-Law enforcement intensify their efforts.
They get permission to search Sara's house
for any clues to her whereabouts.
-In investigations like this, we need to go visit their home.
We need to see if they may have left a note
telling where they were or who they were with.
So, we went into the house and we started looking.
-There's no sign of any kind of disturbance,
but there was a calendar that was located.
-And on this calendar she had dates marked.
-Investigators go through the calendar date by date,
and one note catches their eye
because of the way it's written.
-It says, "Back with Jason," and with a smiley face.
That was on June the 18th,
three months prior to her disappearance.
That brings up the question of who is Jason?
Is she with Jason?
Which direction do we need to go
to figure out where Sara could be?
-With yet another name to track down,
investigators are convinced
that one of the men in Sara's life knows where she is.
-We've got three suspects
that Sara has either had relationships with,
had kids with.
She's been dating them.
It's time to start bringing these people in
and interrogating them.
-Did he get into a fit of rage?
Did he get into it with Sara?
-We didn't know if maybe the killer was still there.
-She screamed the scream that only people
who ever lost a child could scream.
-Is he still going to be there, or is he just going to flee?
-It's been four days since Sara Summer was last seen
dropping her kids off with her mother.
Ex-husband Tim Henson and ex-boyfriend Clay Webb
both claim they haven't seen
or heard from the young mother of three.
But investigators search Sara's house
and discover the first name of another man, Jason.
They check the name against their list
of Sara's recent relationships and get a hit.
But who is Jason?
And could he have anything to do with Sara's disappearance?
-We needed to talk to the family.
-And the family said
that Sara is dating a man named Jason Sanders for a few weeks,
but it ended months prior to her disappearance.
♪♪
-Sara knew about Jason Sanders from school.
Jason was handsome, and he's very outgoing.
He could be very arrogant, though,
and I guess that was part of the attraction
because he was exciting.
-But along with Jason's charm and good looks
comes a controlling personality.
Those around the couple observe
that Sara has difficulty standing up to him.
-Jason was a very dominant person.
I think she just kind of fell into that role
of being submissive.
-Jason constantly needs cash,
and at one point, Sara suspects he's stealing from her.
-Sara had disclosed to me
that Jason had actually stolen money from her checkbooks.
Of course, her working, you know,
she's got to have that for her boys.
-By April, five months before she disappears,
Sara's had enough and ends the relationship.
That's when she starts dating Clay Webb.
-I realized that she was no longer seeing Jason
because she had mentioned something about Clay.
So, at that point, I knew Jason was out of the picture.
-Or was he?
Based on the calendar found in Sara's house,
investigators suspect that Sara dated Clay for two months,
then went back to Jason, possibly in secret.
-I didn't keep up with the relationships
very well at that point,
because I thought she was just focusing right back on work,
keeping her life going, keeping the boys going.
♪♪
-We start looking for Jason, can't find him,
so we go to Jason's fathers house.
Larry Sanders.
Larry told us that Jason was in Kansas City working,
and he would call Jason
and tell Jason we wanted to talk to him.
-But Larry Sanders is suspicious
of why the police want to speak with Jason so badly.
And he has good reason.
-Jason's father was concerned
because there was an active warrant out for Jason
where he had missed a DUI court case.
-We said, Larry, we're not worried
about him not showing up for the court date.
We just need to talk to Jason about Sara.
About 8:30 or 9:00 that night, Jason calls.
And Jason says he's in Kansas City,
but he would come and talk to us
once he got back in town.
-He says he hasn't seen Sara in a few weeks,
and the last he knew, Sara was seeing Clay Webb.
-By day five in the missing persons case
and with no signs of foul play,
detectives have to consider
that Sara Summer chose to disappear.
-Maybe she couldn't provide for her children.
Maybe she decided to leave,
and she just didn't want anybody to know.
-I watched the news.
They were talking about how my mama had abandoned us.
She did not abandon us.
-None of us know what to do.
♪♪
-The family is in limbo, stuck between hope and despair.
Then, tragically, six days after Sara went missing,
the burning van is discovered on the outskirts of town.
-We were going to operate as though it was Sara Summer
and as though we had a homicide.
-The reason that we believe this Sara Summer is several factors.
We have a missing person.
We find the van that we know she's driving,
and it's in a local hangout.
And Sara's local, so she would know where that area is.
-So, you start putting this all together,
and you know the remains that you're looking at
is what's left of Sara.
-When investigators take a closer look at the body,
they discover horrific details.
-It appeared to have been out there for days without notice.
-When the body was rolled over,
you could see on the protected area,
where the fire couldn't burn the body,
maggot activity.
So, you know this body has been here for a little bit.
-We probably have someone that committed this homicide,
and they had returned to the scene
and then set the fire.
And it appears an ignitable liquid was probably poured
on the body as well as the van.
-It was heartbreaking.
It was one of the most gruesome scenes that I'd worked.
This was a big deal for such a small town.
We started looking for evidence.
We'd found some car keys
and some Budweiser beer bottles and beer cans.
We'd found the tire tread at the top of the hole.
They took a cast of that.
-You do a grid search, you start walking,
and you start looking for anything.
-The search party combs every inch of the popular hangout,
but none of them are prepared for what they discover.
-We find a male subject hiding in the woods.
Who is this? Why are they here?
When we approach the subject, we realize he has a gun.
-Just hours after discovering Sara's torched van and body,
investigators draw their guns
and move in on an armed suspect hiding behind a tree
at the edge of the crime scene.
They order the man to drop his weapon
and put his hands in the air.
-Drop your weapon. Put your hands up.
-Why was he out there?
Why was he back there with a gun?
-We have a van on fire. We have a body.
-We don't know that that's not the person
that committed this crime.
-A lot of times people like to stay around
and see what kind of crime they committed.
They like to watch the fire.
-The first thing you're going to do is disarm them.
-Once investigators neutralize the threat,
they ask the man to identify himself.
-It actually turns out that that was the 911 caller.
His name is Joe Tubbs.
-This is his old family land.
-Why are you still hanging out here?
It was strange, but he's cooperative.
-We find out that he heard an explosion.
He's run down to see what it was.
-He told us that there was a dead body there.
-So, he'd run back home and got a gun.
He was scared.
And he waited after he called 911 to watch.
-When asked if he knows who set the fire,
Tubbs claims that he doesn't.
But he does offer one thing that could be relevant.
-He says that he spotted a red pickup truck
that was driving by the road and going slow by the hole
just a couple of hours prior to the explosion.
Is it related to this crime,
or was it just somebody passing down the road inadvertently?
-Word travels fast in a small town,
and it's not long before Sara's sister and father
get wind of the discovery of the burned van and body.
-We go speeding down the road,
and my father and I finally come screeching up there.
My dad started screaming,
"Is it my daughter? Is it my daughter?"
My father, at that point, he was beside himself.
It took several of them to physically drag him away.
-Like any father,
I would fight a mountain to get to my daughter.
but we had to stop him at all costs
because it's imperative
that that crime scene is exactly like we find it.
-Detectives now need to find Sara's killer,
and three suspects crowd the top of their list.
Ex-boyfriends Clay Webb and Jason Sanders
and ex-husband Tim Henson.
Investigators have already talked to Tim,
and they're waiting for Jason to return from Kansas.
But Clay Webb is the last of the three men
to have spoken to Sara,
just a week before she disappeared.
-We know we need to talk to Clay Webb again.
When we talked to him,
he kind of had no emotions at all.
Did he get into a fit of rage?
Did he get into it with Sara?
Did he do this?
-Detectives bring Clay in for questioning.
He's cooperative,
but seemingly unaware of the gruesome discovery
earlier in the day.
-He tells us he hadn't seen Sara.
They're not seeing each other right now.
That day that she supposedly went missing on September 6th,
he had been drinking at home by himself.
-We need to find out what is he driving?
Joe Tubbs has seen a red truck traveling,
kind of a slow pace, going by the scene of the crime.
-We asked him, "Do you have a red truck?
Do you have access to a red truck?"
And he's like, "No, I got a blue Chevy Blazer."
-Then the agents break the news.
-We tell Clay.
What you don't understand is Sara's gone.
Sara's deceased. It's been a murder.
At that point, Clay broke down.
He was just emotionally upset and devastated.
-We asked him if he would take a polygraph the next day,
and he said that he would.
We told him he was free to leave.
Don't go anywhere. We were going to watch him.
-Investigators turn their attention
to the other two men in Sara's life --
her abusive ex-husband, Tim Henson,
and ex-boyfriend, Jason Sanders.
First, they circle back to Tim
and check on his alibi
for the evening Sara went missing.
-He said, I left home and I went up to the store
and talked to a few people.
We had to corroborate what he was telling us.
We found somebody that could tell us they were with Tim
at the store and they were talking.
-So, he's kind of put on the back burner.
-Which brings investigators back to Jason.
They have been waiting for him to return from Kansas City.
Turns out they don't have to wait long.
-Humboldt Police Department received a tip,
and they said that Jason Sanders
was staying at a house in Gibson,
roughly ten miles away,
which means to us he wasn't in Kansas City.
Had he ever been in Kansas City?
And the person that called in the tip
also said that Jason said,
"If anybody asks for me, you've never seen me.
I'm not here."
-20 hours into the murder investigation of Sara Summer,
police get a tip from an individual
who ran into Jason Sanders.
Not in Kansas City, as he claimed,
but at a house just outside of Humboldt.
Now investigators want to know why did he lie
and what is he hiding?
-Jason knows this guy has seen me.
He knows I'm in town.
-Is he still going to be there,
or is he just going to flee?
-Lead investigator goes to the house,
knocks on the door, asks, "Jason here?"
Female points that he's in the back room.
So, investigator goes in, finds him in the back room.
-He doesn't fight. He doesn't run.
-They arrest him based on the DUI warrant
that he failed to appear in Madison County.
We don't question him about anything
because we want him to stay with the same mindset
that it's only about the DUI arrest.
-The house is owned by Beth Kaiser,
who lives there with her daughter Victoria.
-Beth Kiser agreed to speak with me,
and she said that Jason is a friend
who had been staying there about two weeks.
Beth made it clear that he had not left the house
until the day before, September 12th, about 3:30,
when he went to run some errands,
which means he was never in Kansas City.
-Beth also mentioned something
that grabs Agent McClure's attention.
-She said that the week before,
there was a girl calling him constantly.
Beth did not know who this girl was,
but she said that Jason said,
"This is an ex-girlfriend of mine."
-Agents McClure and Shannon
relay the new information to local investigators,
who are in the process of interviewing Jason Sanders
for his outstanding DUI charge.
-An investigator asked him where he's been.
He says, I've been in Kansas.
And the investigator said, no, you haven't been in Kansas.
He said, yeah, he lied because he owed his parents money
and that he was just trying to keep his parents off of him,
trying to get some money up to pay his parents back.
-He further told them that the day before is the first time
he had left their house in two weeks.
-Detectives try to keep Jason focused on the DUI charge,
but they inch their way to the topic of Sara,
and Jason agrees to answer a couple of questions.
-He said he had some stuff at her house,
that he went, he got it,
and that's the last time he's seen her.
And they asked him, when's the last contact he had with Sara?
And he said that she kept calling him,
but he just refused to answer.
-Then they asked how long ago this happened.
-He said about a month and a half.
That pretty much ended the interview,
and at that point they take him back
where they're holding him on the DUI charge.
-Agents Shannon and McClure
take stock of their main suspects.
-We have Clay Webb and Jason Sanders.
We know Jason lied.
Said he was in Kansas City,
but all along he was in town at Beth Kaiser's.
So, was he lying because of the DUI warrant,
or was he lying because he committed this heinous crime?
Clay Webb, on the other hand,
did he do this?
Once he's told that she's deceased,
he breaks down crying.
So, why is he crying?
Is it because he did it,
or is it because he loved her?
-With more questions than answers,
investigators have nothing solid to build a case on.
-And then all of a sudden, out of the blue,
we get a phone call.
-It's Beth Kaiser, Jason Sanders' friend,
whose house he had been staying at for the past two weeks.
And she wants to talk.
-This time, she's bringing her 15-year-old daughter, Victoria,
because Victoria needs to tell me something
also involving Jason Sanders.
Wow. What is this?
I'm thinking this is huge.
-Why does he never call her again?
Because he knows she's dead.
-Is this my red truck that was seen by Joe Tubbs?
-We wanted death penalty,
whether it was by the court system
or personal justice, I don't care.
-On September 13th at 10:30 p.m.,
while Jason Sanders sits behind bars on a DUI charge,
his friend Beth Kaiser shows up
at the Gibson County Sheriff's Office.
With her is her daughter, Victoria.
Beth had told investigators
that Jason never left the house until September 12th,
six days after Sara vanished.
But Victoria claims to know something her mother doesn't.
-Victoria says that Jason left
on the day that Sara went missing.
He shows up at the house about 9:30 or 10:00 at night.
His clothes are muddy, knees are out of his jeans.
And he'd come in and she said, "Where have you been?"
And he wouldn't tell her.
-Victoria also tells investigators
that on the day Sara's scorched minivan and body
were discovered in the cornfield,
Jason left the house again.
-She said that Jason wanted to use Beth Kaiser's truck
and go get some beer.
I asked her what color was the truck,
and she said red.
My response was,
"Is this my red truck that was seen by Joe Tubbs
the day of the fire?"
-Victoria says that she rode with him
to the little general outside of Trenton.
-They went to the store.
He got a gas can.
He filled it up with gas,
and she said, "What do you need that for?"
And he didn't answer her.
Then he went inside and bought some beer
and came back to the truck.
He came back around 4:00.
-But then a little while later,
he asked her if he could borrow the truck again,
and he went by himself.
He was gone 30, 45 minutes and returned.
First thing we do is we got to see
if there's a video of Jason Sanders
purchasing gas from the clerk
so we can corroborate what Beth Kaiser is telling us.
So we sent officers out to the little general in Trenton.
-They go through the CCTV,
they look at the video the day the fire happened.
-And sure enough,
the surveillance camera clearly shows the red truck
pulling into the parking lot of the little general.
And then it shows Jason Sanders buying gas
and a 12-pack of beer.
-Everything about that corroborates the story
that Victoria Kaiser gave us.
We have Jason Sanders in a red truck
at the convenience store, filling up a gas can,
on the 12th, the day the fire happened.
I don't want to say it's the smoking gun,
but it's a pretty good indicator.
-The pieces are starting to fall together now.
-But there are still some loose ends.
Even with Victoria's statement and the surveillance video,
in order to get an arrest warrant,
investigators have to rule out Clay.
Two hours later, they've got Clay Webb down at the station.
-We hook Clay up to the polygraph.
We ask him, "Did you have anything to do
with burning of the van?
Did you have anything to do with the death of Sara?
Did you kill Sara Summer?"
And he responded, "No."
-A polygraph examiner told us that he passed,
that he felt he was being truthful
and that he didn't have anything to do with it.
We asked for DNA.
He was more than glad to give it to us,
so we were leaning towards clearing Clay.
-As investigators move away from Clay Webb,
they lean towards Jason Sanders,
but the evidence against him stands on shaky ground.
They need solid proof
or their entire case could crumble.
-Well, so far, this is a circumstantial case.
So, we really need something
to tie Jason Sanders to that minivan
and that crime scene.
He was being held not on a homicide,
but over the DUI.
To get justice, we need him for a first degree murder.
We didn't want Jason to walk away.
-Investigators double down on their efforts,
looking for anything and everything
that might boost their case.
-We started receiving our lab results in
from all our tested evidence.
The body was positively identified as Sara Summer,
through her parents' DNA,
with blunt force trauma to the head as a cause of death.
-The report also confirmed
that the body would have been there between 5 and 10 days,
which fit the time frame
between Sara disappearing on the 6th
and the body being set on fire and found on the 12th.
-And we were able to establish
that there was an ignitable liquid used to set the fire.
-And then, based on Jason Sanders' samples,
his boots revealed the same type of ignitable liquids.
All this evidence just keeps growing and growing and growing.
We subpoenaed phone records on Jason Sanders' phone
and Sara Summer's phone.
-We got calls up until the very last minute
on September 6th.
-Then her phone went dead,
and there were no more phone calls made.
-Why does he never call her again?
Because he knows she's dead.
He knows she's not going to answer.
-Investigators impound and search Beth Kaiser's red truck.
The same red truck Victoria says Jason used to buy gas
on the day Sara's body was found.
-They found corn stalks stuck up in the front end,
up underneath the truck.
-That looks like somebody drove through a cornfield.
We're starting to build this case.
We just need a D.A. to listen to us.
-It's Monday, September 21st,
two weeks since Sara Summer disappeared
and nine days since her charred body was discovered.
And the investigators' focus is squarely on one suspect,
Jason Sanders.
The case is still largely circumstantial,
and without a smoking gun, Jason may go free.
But while Agent Shannon and McClure
worked to strengthen their hand,
Sara's family gathers together to say their goodbyes.
-We had a memorial service.
We're trying to grieve. We're trying to mourn.
We're trying to, I don't know, just live.
-I was 8 when she passed.
From what I remember of it,
nobody could hear the preacher over my crying.
I was crying that hard.
-I still live with it every day.
If you ever lose a child, it stays with you.
♪♪
-It was a heartbreaking experience for the family.
-I kept seeing those kids.
Sara's kids.
It means something more than just trying to solve a crime.
It's trying to find justice for babies.
-At this point, investigators have enough evidence
to at least form a theory
as to what may have happened to Sara Summer.
-Jason has a history of taking money from women.
-We know he stole Sara's money.
She was infuriated about it.
-And I think she was trying to get her money back from him.
So, he said, hey, meet me down near the hole on the cornfield.
I think she's like, okay, I'll go meet this guy, get my money.
And it didn't turn out like that.
Something happened. I think he got mad.
I think he killed her with a blow to the back of the head.
He left the body there.
-And then six days later, on September the 12th,
Jason made eye contact with the tipster in Gibson,
instead of several hundred miles away in Kansas City.
-Did panic set in? We don't know.
-We believe Jason got scared.
He has to go get a gas can,
and then he has to go torch her and the van
to conceal the evidence.
-A few hours later is when the fire occurred.
♪♪
-Six and a half months after Sara Summer's death,
investigators feel they're finally ready
to present their case to the district attorney.
-I think the D.A. was pretty confident
with the first-degree murder charge.
-Jason is indicted on three felonies --
first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse,
and destruction of private property.
-From day one, we wanted the death penalty,
whether it was by the court system
or personal justice, I don't care.
-Pretrial hearings drag on.
More than a year passes,
but in July 2006,
Jason comes to prosecutors with a surprise move.
-We're all preparing to go to trial.
Jason Sanders takes a plea to second-degree murder
and received a 15-year sentence in the state penitentiary.
-My first thought was, you've got to be kidding me.
You killed someone and you're going to prison for 15 years?
-That was an absolute slap in the face.
We were physically sick and upset about that.
-Jason Sanders serves a total of 12 years
and eight months in Tennessee's
Whiteville Correctional Facility.
He is released on December 22nd, 2017,
nearly two and a half years earlier
than his plea deal called for.
-Sara was somebody.
She was bettering herself.
She was Is overcoming every obstacle
that had come into her life.
And I want everybody to remember that that's what Sara was about.
She was trying her hardest to make her life something
and to make something for her boys.
-Me and Mama always told each other,
"I love you and I'll see you later."
I didn't tell her that day
because she said she would be right back.
And she never come back.
So, to this day, I beat myself up over that.
I didn't tell her I loved her,
and that haunts me.
-Sara Summer had a plan to work hard,
raise her boys, build a future.
Her dreams were within reach.
But she trusted the wrong man.
A man who betrayed her,
stole her money,
and then took her life.
It wasn't a romance.
It was a killer relationship.