(tense music)
(phone clicks) (tense music)
- [Narrator] Every suspect accused of a crime
has the right to remain silent.
Many agree to be interrogated anyway,
but they can stop the interview at any moment,
making it a race against time.
(suspenseful music)
Justice hangs in the balance.
- [Reporter] State Troopers received the call
just before noon Sunday.
When they arrived on the scene,
they found 62-year-old Lindsey Champion,
his 60-year-old wife, Joy, and their 31-year-old daughter,
Emily, all shot to death.
- [Reporter 2] As was another man
whom investigators have not named.
They're not saying whether they believe he killed himself
or whether one of the victims shot him.
- [Reporter] The pastor of the family's church
and the couple's son, Ryan Champion,
survived that shooting.
(tense music)
(siren wailing)
- As we approached the house, it looked very well kept,
very nice residence on a very, very nice piece of property.
When I got closer,
I saw the body of Lindsey Champion outside.
- He had a lotta blood coming from his head.
In the basement, I observed Joy, face down,
kind of in the fetal position,
but on her knees with her head on the ground.
(tense music continues)
There was an obvious bullet hole in the storm door.
- We went into the living room.
I saw Emily Champion duct taped, lying in the floor.
(tense music continues)
- She had duct tape wrapped around her face, her feet,
her ankles, and her hands.
And I was just thinking, why is she taped so much?
It was overkill and didn't make sense.
(tense music continues)
- As we entered the dining room area,
there was an unidentified male.
- He was laying on the floor
with a bullet hole right in the middle of his face
and a roll of duct tape by his shoes.
We were able to identify through an ID
that was in his wallet as Vito Riservato.
Well, he was a 22-year-old male
that had been residing in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.
At that point, you know, he was suspect number one.
And I can remember standing there thinking,
now, why'd you do this?
What caused you to flip your switch
and come in here and kill all these people?
(melancholy music)
- The Champions were very well known in the community.
Joy was a longtime teacher who everybody loved.
- Joy was so well loved,
she was honored as Teacher of the Year.
Lindsey Champion was the director of a credit union,
and he had cattle.
- They had a large farm operation,
and they were both very successful at what they did.
- [Alan] Their daughter, Dr. Emily Champion,
was a veterinarian in Louisiana.
Her particular love was for horses.
- Emily was very smart, very ambitious,
had a very successful career,
and very well liked in the community.
- [Alan] The biggest question was, why?
Why did this happen?
(tense music) (siren wailing)
- He's claiming self-defense.
And when you have that,
you gotta take it at face value
until you kind of dig in deeper and get into the details.
- Ryan said that that was enough to fire him,
but he said that the day after Ryan and Vito had gone
to Ryan's parents' house that Vito had showed up back
at the Champion residence.
(tense music)
- His story that he told just kinda sounded very odd.
Was it gonna be a kidnapping?
Was it gonna be a robbery?
Well, what was going on?
When you're dealing with a victim,
everybody responds differently to traumatic situations,
but it sure makes you wanna look at him a little bit more.
(pensive music)
The weapon that was used in these murders
was a .45 caliber 1911 model handgun.
We were able to retrieve it and take it as evidence.
She told me when he ran across the street,
Ryan was still duct taped around his wrists
and she had cut the tape off and it was in the trash.
And she allowed us to retrieve it and take it as evidence.
- There's really no comparison
that could be made on the amount of duct tape
that Emily had on her body
versus what Ryan had around his wrists.
- Also, the tape should have rolled towards Ryan's thumbs
and hands 'cause it was taped, you know, around his wrists.
And there didn't appear to be any stretching
and we're talking about fighting for your life
and fighting a gun away.
And he didn't show anything like that.
- The questions really, really started going
in my head at that point.
(tense music)
- We do a neighborhood canvass and while doing that,
we're able to locate a Ford Explorer
in the woods, adjacent to the Champion residence.
The vehicle came back to a Vito Riservato
who we were able to identify in the kitchen.
It was parked in a spot where you wouldn't know
that there's a parking lane there
because of the trees and the foliage.
So that was something we had to look into.
- I will never forget Detective Miller sitting
in front of the residence as we were discussing
what Ryan Champion had said
and what we had seen so far at the scene.
Him saying, "Something isn't right here."
(tense music)
(clock ticking)
- At this point, he's either innocent or guilty,
so we needed to really look at him more
and lock him in a story.
(melancholy music)
- When people saw the Champion family,
they saw a lotta love.
Lindsey and Joy decided to adopt a baby
who was a few months old at the time.
And that baby was Ryan Champion.
- And several years later, Emily was born.
- They were very proud of Emily.
She was a young, vibrant woman
and she had her whole life ahead of her.
They were an idyllic family.
There was a lotta love and this came out of nowhere
as far as the community was concerned.
(tense music)
- He told a story and he gave his version of events.
I didn't discard it as as not true,
but I didn't necessarily buy it either.
Something weird's going on.
But to what extent, we didn't know.
(tense music)
- Vito had no criminal history.
I don't even remember seeing a speeding ticket.
We executed a search warrant on Vito's truck.
In the backseat ashtray,
we found .45-caliber shell casings
and they were the same brand and caliber
that was actually used in the shootings.
We just wondered, you know, what if?
What if that handgun had been fired
and produced those empty shell casings,
why would they be in Vito's truck
if Ryan didn't hardly know Vito
and Ryan was in possession of the handgun?
So we thought, okay, you know,
we'll send these off to the lab after we photograph 'em,
but it could take weeks or months.
(tense music)
Ann Plotkin came up in Ryan's initial interview,
so we went and talked to her.
- We knew within a few minutes of talking to her
that she was full of it.
She only was telling us what Ryan told us, almost verbatim.
And she didn't deviate from any of that.
We walked out looking at each other,
after we shut the door, grinning.
- [Brett] Ann knows a whole lot more about this
than she's telling us.
We were determined to figure out
what her involvement actually was.
(tense music)
- So that was very big.
Made us feel that there was a deeper connection
between the two, connecting them even further
with their involvement in this case.
(tense music)
So we made a trip to Waffle House.
We're getting the video ready
and we found the date and time, roughly,
and we started looking and all of a sudden we see
these people come walking through the door.
And there's Ann.
And there's Ryan and there's Vito.
And they walked over to a booth.
Now, that was on the 21st of October.
And Ryan, in all of his interviews so far,
said he had only met Vito on the 23rd.
So he's obviously deliberately lied to us
about how long he had known Vito.
- Things were adding up.
But in order to arrest someone on a felony offense,
you need probable cause.
- In a perfect world, we wanted a confession.
Detective Silfies said he'll never confess.
He's never gonna come off of it.
So we need to have Ryan come back and walk through the scene
and have him demonstrate what happened.
And so we called and asked him and he was all about it.
(tense music)
- There is a lot of pressure.
Is he gonna talk enough
that we can build a case on him based on his lies?
(melancholy music)
- And the whole idea of the walkthrough is to see
if he can stay with his story
while demonstrating what happened.
He was very excited to do this,
but he was also, he had a edge of nervousness.
(tense music)
- And there you go.
There's an inconsistency.
We're about 30 seconds into this.
Ryan couldn't keep his story straight
on where it came from that morning.
(tense music)
- For the purpose of the walkthrough,
we told Ryan that he's gonna be Vito
and Detective Silfies was Ryan and I was Emily.
And we wanted him to show us the manner
in which they were both taped up.
- We didn't really question him in a authoritative way.
It was all, "Oh, really? Okay.
I'm just curious how you did this."
And he's more than happy to show us.
- But what really, really stood out
was it took very little effort for Detective Silfies
to get out of the duct tape.
When Ryan was questioned about that, they did it again.
(tense music)
For him to so nonchalantly reenact
what happened just a few days prior to this to his family,
it was pretty shocking.
I was ready to, you know,
confront him about it and Detective Silfies was saying,
it's not time yet.
We just wait and let him dig the hole deeper.
(tense music)
- It looked more like acting than emotion.
My personal opinion
and the opinion of family is that Emily
would've kicked Vito's tail, even if he had a gun.
I think it took both of them
to get her corralled and get her taped up
because I think she would've fought tooth and nail.
(tense music)
- As he's trying to demonstrate here
how he got it away from him,
he just can't make it work.
And he's kinda laughing.
I think he thinks,
I've tried to show them what happened
and this isn't working.
It is a I'm-in-trouble laughter.
(tense music)
- Because every time we talked to him up to that point,
it was very casual, really not questioning him on anything.
And this time we wanted
to start kinda putting the pressure on him.
(tense music)
- I thought, no, your communication skills are fine.
You just happen to have killed your family
and you don't wanna tell us what happened.
(tense music)
(clock ticking)
(tense music)
And that was the ruse
'cause we were really confident that they were gonna match.
We had a working theory that
they planned the murders
at the Waffle House,
and Ryan gave Vito the handgun
to go do some target shooting.
(tense music)
- You could see the wheels start turning in his head.
He didn't know they were in that truck.
If he did, he forgot about it
and then he had to come up with some other way
that that happened.
(tense music)
It's go time.
We want him to know that we know what happened,
that he's involved in it,
because we felt that if we didn't get it this night
that we probably wouldn't get it at all.
- During the smoke break,
he told Detective Silfies that he didn't wanna talk anymore.
He wanted an attorney.
But I think he knew that with everything we had
that he had no other alternative
but to stop talking at that point.
You know, and I've got a job to do
and so I don't really care if he thinks I'm nice or not.
You know, I wanna get to the bottom of what happened.
(tense music)
(pensive music)
- [Brett] We had suspicion that Ann might be involved
in the planning or even the execution of these murders
and she just agreed to come in and talk.
- We wanna see if she'd let us see what's in her phone,
messages between her and Ryan, or her and Vito,
'cause we didn't have any records back at the time.
(pensive music)
She was obviously trying to skip past stuff
that she thought would make her or Ryan
or Vito look in a bad light.
(tense music)
- I was sitting in trial
in another murder case and I thought,
what if the duct tape can tell us the order
of who was taped when?
Because I've had some training
and you can place duct tape back together
like a torn piece of paper.
- Ryan was always consistent
that he was taped first by Vito Riservato
and that he could not assist his sister
because he was taped first.
(tense music)
- I got the roll of duct tape from evidence
and I got the tape cut from Ryan's wrist
and lo and behold, it was a perfect match.
So we know Ryan was taped last,
which goes against his story.
- We knew that we had enough to charge him with murder.
- [Reporter] Ryan Champion came into court Monday,
shackled, after investigators charged him
with capital murder and kidnapping.
That's something his friend, Ann Plotkin,
refuses to believe.
- I don't understand it.
I really don't because I know Ryan and no!
There is no way!
(dramatic music)
(pensive music)
- Ryan was in jail,
but the investigation's not even close to over.
I was pretty obsessed with the case
and I went through thousands of pages of records.
There was never direct communication
between Ryan and Vito, but there was
direct communication from Vito to Ann to Ryan
and back and forth.
- When we got that information back,
we knew that Ann Plotkin had assisted
in the planning of the murders.
(tense music)
(clock ticking)
I think she loved Ryan.
I think Ryan used her
and that's how she came to have participated in this.
(tense music)
(clock ticking)
(melancholy music)
I will never forget how horrible it is
that a adopted child,
who Joy and Lindsey had given a great life,
committed this horrendous crime.
- Joy, Lindsey, and Emily were just sweet people
who wanted to do good in their community.
- There's no penalty severe enough
for taking Joy, Lindsey, and Emily's lives,
nor is there penalty sufficient
for the anguish we've endured.
(melancholy music)
- People talk about closure,
but I don't even believe in that.
I think it's an open wound that never really goes away.