-[distant applause] -[cheerful music playing]
[vocalizing]
Choir was pretty competitive.
You have to definitely fight for it.
She could have a mean girl streak.
A lot of us could.
It was almost like instant, they really liked each other.
But things were getting extremely obsessive.
You want to be a supportive friend,
but she's doing something wrong.
She had a hatred, like a deep-seated hatred.
She woke up, she heard someone busting in the back door.
She has stab wounds all over her body.
That takes some guts -- at that point,
you just don't care.
[theme music playing]
Humble, Texas, is about 20 minutes outside of Houston.
It is your typical suburban neighborhood
just outside of the big city.
I think people live in Humble for more of a simple life.
NARRATOR: Life may be simple for the adults in Humble...
but for the teen girls at Nimitz High,
it's more like survival of the fittest.
Without even knowing, there was this system.
[cheerleaders chanting] Defense! Defense!
There are the cool kids.
There are the not so cool.
NARRATOR: But when the TV show "Glee"
premieres across the country,
the high school pecking order is turned upside down.
[a cappella singing]
OLIVIA: "Glee" was so popular.
Everybody was talking about "Glee."
All those choir kids became the "it" kids.
Choir was pretty competitive.
You have to actually read music and memorize
the songs and the notes and things of that nature.
The freshmen began in JV choir.
Um, and then it was varsity choir, which is typically
sophomores and juniors, some seniors,
and then, um, there was chamber choir,
which is like the top class to be in.
The cooler, more popular kids were in chamber choir.
The ones that you wanted to fit in with.
NARRATOR: Choir culture is cutthroat.
So students will do whatever it takes to be front
and center.
You want to sing and showcase what you have, and sometimes
that opportunity wasn't always given.
So you have to definitely fight for it.
We would have girls who had older siblings in chamber choir
and they would end up in chamber choir,
or girls that were more friendly with teachers,
and they would end up in chamber choir.
There was a lot of favoritism with the choir teacher, and if
she just took a certain liking to you,
I can almost guarantee you, you would be selected for
a solo even if you didn't have that much talent.
♪ Yeah ♪ [vocalizing]
NARRATOR: In the Fall of 2010,
a new batch of freshman girls join
the junior varsity choir at Nimitz High.
COURTNEY: Amber, Heather,
Olivia, Antoinette, and Keri, they all hung out together.
Choir brought in so many different types
of people, and we were a solid group.
I feel like that was
my core group of friends.
AMBER: We were pretty tight.
Heather was semi-quiet, not too quiet.
Um, she's very fun. She's hilarious.
Antoinette was, um, she was quiet.
She had a lot of things going on.
She was nice to talk to.
She was...eccentric.
[short laugh]
Amber sometimes can be rude.
I mean, Amber is very funny. She was my best friend.
But if she was having a bad day,
she would be very rude to you.
I mean, I told it like it was.
NARRATOR: There is no shortage of drama in this choir clique,
especially the kind that buzzes around their Queen Bee.
Keri was outspoken, outgoing, she loved performing,
she loved singing.
ANTOINETTE: A lot of people who were in choir
gravitated towards her and liked being around her.
COURTNEY: Keri was kind of that leader of the pack.
She was the one that those girls looked up to.
NARRATOR: And just like any good diva, Keri knows how to stay in
the spotlight.
Keri could have a mean girl streak if --
if she was really up to it.
Um, a lot of us could, if we wanted to actually,
you know, go that route.
ANTOINETTE: There were just days that she would come to
school and she would just have it out for everyone.
She could get very snarky and very rude at some times.
There were some secrets that were told behind my back,
um, that Keri had talked about, and there were some times
that she was just mean to me because of somebody I liked,
um, at the time, she was like, "He's not gonna be interested in
you, blah, blah, blah, whatever."
NARRATOR: To be in with Keri, you had to follow her rules.
Keri was a possessive, uh, friend,
definitely, um, she was allowed to have other friends.
Um, but if I had a boyfriend specifically, um,
she would want me to break up with him, like,
we would have sleepovers, and she would try to
convince me that I'd be better off alone and that I didn't
need a boyfriend and that he was bad for me.
So she definitely kind of wanted me to herself.
Someone might be friends with Keri and think
she's possessive,
where I see her and think about our friendship
and I see loyalty,
very loyal.
If she loved you, she loved you,
and she would show it, in any way, would fight for you.
I think Keri, to the public, to her friends carried herself
in a way that she looked confident,
but on the inside, her self-confidence was really
kind of rattled during this time.
Keri was very tall,
taller even than the boys.
She towered over everyone.
She carried a little bit more weight.
AMBER: She had freckles on her face.
She was very pale. She was, um...
not super impressive to look at.
Um, I don't know if that's kind of rude to say, but...
so that's just -- she just wasn't a -- a looker.
HEATHER: She was never as thick as she thought she was,
but of course, if you're not stick thin,
especially back when we were kids,
you might as well be a house.
NARRATOR: But Keri's looks aren't the only
reason for her mean girl ways.
There's also her home life.
She had two loving parents, hard-working parents.
She had an older brother.
AMBER: Keri and her brother were super close.
They did a lot together, they hung out a lot together.
BRANDY: Keri's dad, Don, worked nights as a machinist.
You're gonna find dirt under his nails
is the way we like to say it here in Texas.
From the outside, Keri's family looked great.
There was a lot of love between Keri and her mother.
But Keri's parents' dynamic, from what I heard,
wasn't the best.
COURTNEY: Unfortunately, at this time,
Mary Ann and Don's relationship is rocky.
They're not sleeping in the same room.
He's sleeping on the couch.
They're arguing, if they're even speaking,
ANTOINETTE: Seeing that aggression on a daily
possibly made her seem
like it was normal to treat people the way
that her parents would treat each other, and she just wanted
to make everyone feel what she was feeling inside.
NARRATOR: And Keri's casual cruelty isn't limited to
her girlfriends.
Zein was a upperclassman at school.
[vocalizing]
I'm not sure how Keri and Zein came to be involved.
He had a crush on her, but she didn't feel that way about him.
[vocalizing]
HEATHER: I believe that Zein had a slight obsession with Keri.
But Keri looked at Zein as just a friend.
She was never interested in him, never found him attractive.
It was just Zein for her.
AMBER: Zein was a loner.
Um, I didn't really see him hang out
with a whole lot of people in high school.
HEATHER: He had a long ponytail and kind of a soul patch.
He was on the shorter side.
Um, and I remember him having like a --
kind of like a emo attire.
He would wear baggy jeans and chains,
and imagine somebody coming out of Hot Topic.
[choir vocalizing "Carol of the Bells"]
Every December, the choir puts on a holiday performance.
This is a big deal for choir.
We all would come together and sing, and sometimes all of
the choir would be up singing at the same time.
AMBER: As a freshman in junior varsity choir,
it was a blast to get
together with the varsity and the chambers
as one big choir family.
NARRATOR: And that's the night Keri's life changes forever.
AMBER: If I could go back in time and change something,
I would probably change Keri meeting Rebecca.
Unfortunately, it took a turn for
the worst, and somebody had to lose their life.
[vocalizing]
BRANDY: Keri met Rebecca at choir rehearsal when
they were rehearsing for the Christmas concert.
Rebecca was in varsity choir as a senior.
AMBER: Rebecca was skinny, she wore glasses.
Um, she had blonde hair, always wore jacket and jeans.
She was bisexual.
It wasn't like a big thing in
our high school that there was gay kids.
Everybody called her Bunny.
I have no idea how she received the nickname Bunny.
We just all called her Bunny.
ANTOINETTE: I believe she did cross country,
and she was a loner and very quiet.
NARRATOR: But senior Bunny finds a kindred spirit in
freshman Keri.
OLIVIA: It was almost like instant that
they really liked each other.
I think there was something magnetic there.
NARRATOR: Their fast friendship snowballs.
And after a few weeks, Rebecca tells Keri
she wants to be more than just friends.
And previously heterosexual Keri is all in.
HEATHER: I never knew Keri was gay.
I always thought she was kind of going
to follow what her mother wanted for her,
but we all welcomed Keri with open arms.
Um, we weren't worried about her sexuality.
Her parents were another story,
definitely, because they are Southern.
They are Christians.
COURTNEY: A few months into their relationship,
Rebecca urged Keri to talk to
her family and come out to them.
Keri was really nervous about talking to her parents,
especially her mom, Mary Ann.
Mary Ann was strict.
She had her Christian upbringing.
OLIVIA: I think she was extremely nervous,
terrified, unsure of how her mother would respond.
COURTNEY: One day at dinner, Keri essentially ripped
the band-aid off, and she came
out to her mom and told her mom that she was in
a lesbian relationship.
Clearly, Mary Ann was shocked at this news, had no idea.
But after discussing with Keri, I mean,
really wanted her daughter to be happy
and was giving her her blessing.
NARRATOR: Before long, Keri and Rebecca's Juliet
and Juliet romance becomes a full-on love affair.
AMBER: Keri was excited.
She always wanted to hang out with Rebecca.
Um, and I felt like Rebecca made Keri feel seen.
They were very lovey dovey with each other, holding
hands, hugging,
kissing each other all of the time.
It didn't bother me at all.
But Keri was a freshman.
Rebecca was a senior.
So the age gap was definitely pretty huge.
NARRATOR: Keri and Rebecca spend every
waking moment together, and mean girl Keri
starts to sing a different tune.
ANTOINETTE: Whenever she did interact with the group,
um, she became more mellow, more level-headed.
She didn't really get into that many arguments.
She wasn't quite that mean girl anymore.
She was a little bit more happy.
NARRATOR: Although her friends are glad
that Rebecca has softened Keri's sharp edges,
not everyone is thrilled with the happy couple.
At this point, Zein is observing this relationship.
He feels sort of left out.
I think he misses the friendship with Keri.
NARRATOR: But as far as Keri is concerned,
Zein is yesterday's news.
HEATHER: I heard nothing of Zein.
He might as well have been on the back burner.
He might as well have moved to another state.
Keri never brought him up. Um, he was a non-issue.
COURTNEY: Close to the end of the school year,
Keri's mom, Mary Ann, finds out Rebecca's age.
She was 19, about to graduate from high school.
Remember, her daughter is 15 and a freshman.
At this point, Mary Ann tells
Keri that the relationship needs to end.
HEATHER: By the time that Mary Ann found out,
the cement had already set.
There was no undoing that bond.
She was going to do whatever it
took to stay by Bunny's side.
When Bunny graduated, all she did was focus on Keri.
I didn't hear much about jobs from her.
I didn't hear much about plans
for the future that didn't involve Keri.
She was just living at home and thinking
about the next time she could see Keri.
AMBER: Keri, um, would sneak out of her house.
They would go to Jesse Jones Park, uh, her and Rebecca.
They would hang out there at the park talking, um,
like all night long.
Um, and then there were some times where she would say
she was going to Heather's house, and, um,
she would just meet up with Rebecca and, you know, lie to
her mom and, you know, um,
they would just hang out all night.
I didn't think too much of it, that
they were sneaking out and hanging out together.
I thought, okay, you know, you're just --
you're trying to see each other, fine.
You're rebelling, fine.
NARRATOR: But it isn't long before Keri's mom catches on.
Mary Ann was a hard ass,
and she was serious about her rules.
So when she found out that Keri was sneaking out,
she was pissed.
AMBER: She had, like, grounded her, took away
the phone, said that she wasn't allowed to go anywhere.
But everything that Miss Mary Ann tried,
it just didn't work.
HEATHER: She would sneak out the back door.
She would sneak out the front door.
She was going to find her way to Bunny.
That was not going to stop her.
So after a while, I do remember Rebecca giving Keri a phone
so she was able to still have that line of communication
through Rebecca.
HEATHER: It had a name, the Bunny Phone.
We all knew about the Bunny Phone.
It was a...
out and open secret between her friends.
ANTOINETTE: It just became very unhealthy.
At one point,
they couldn't talk to anyone without the other one knowing.
And if they did, it would cause
a lot of tension between the two.
AMBER: They would have like, you know,
secrets with each other,
like talking in low tones.
It was very secretive, very, like...
spy-like? Yeah.
NARRATOR: After a year of dating, Keri and Rebecca
decide to take a dramatic step in their relationship.
HEATHER: Keri told me that Bunny had proposed to her,
which took me by surprise.
We were 16.
ANTOINETTE: There was a plan to just hop in the car with
nothing and just run to California
and build a life there.
You want to be a supportive friend.
At the same time, you know
that she's doing something wrong.
And so it -- it was uncomfortable.
AMBER: Whether it had been Keri or it had been Rebecca,
somebody was gonna get hurt.
HEATHER: Things were extremely obsessive
with Keri and Bunny.
There was the Bunny Phone, there was the sneaking out.
Um, there was seeing each other by any means necessary,
continuous lying, continuous hiding.
The absolute final straw for Mary Ann was when
Keri's father, Don, came home
and found Keri and Bunny in the shower together.
One, she's not supposed to be in the house at all.
Two, you are doing sexual things in the shower at home.
That takes some guts like, I mean,
at that point, you -- you just don't care.
NARRATOR: Mary Ann lays down the law.
The next time she catches them together,
she's calling the police.
Mary Ann had gotten up in the middle of the night to go
check on Keri and make sure that she was still in the house.
And when she had walked in there,
she had found Rebecca in bed with Keri.
I think Keri was pushing her mom, um, past her limit just to
see how far she could push her,
just push and push and push until, you know,
her mom finally snapped.
[siren wailing distantly]
Mary Ann is furious, and she is going to hold her promise.
She doesn't let Rebecca leave the room.
She calls the authorities.
HEATHER: She called the police, and Bunny was
arrested for trespassing, as she should have been.
COURTNEY: And also, she gets a restraining order.
There is no contact to be made between Keri and Rebecca.
I think that was the breaking point for Keri, truly.
ANTOINETTE: I think that there was now too much trouble
and toxicity in the relationship with Rebecca
to even remotely think about keeping it going.
I knew it was done.
[choir vocalizing]
So, at the end of the sophomore year,
we had our final performance and, um, Keri did participate.
HEATHER: And we had a really good one that year.
Keri loved it, Mary Ann was there,
my mother was there.
Um, it was a really good time.
NARRATOR: Keri's choir friends aren't the only
ones happy to have her back.
There is now more time for
Zein and that friendship with Keri.
HEATHER: I'm sure that Zein probably thought, "This is
"my chance, Bunny's become a thing of the past.
It's -- it's my turn."
At this point, Keri's laying low.
She's trying to abide by her mom's rules.
So it really felt like things were
going to get better from the outside
at that point.
NARRATOR: Keri and her mother are alone in the house.
Her brother and father are working overnight shifts.
-[numbers dialing] -[phone ringing]
[operator speaking] 911 emergency.
COURTNEY: A phone call comes in to 911,
and it's Keri Murphy.
Keri tells 911 that she woke up.
She heard someone busting in the back door,
and then her mom screaming, "Stop, stop, stop."
The first responders enter through the back door,
and they start making their way through the home.
COURTNEY: They're not seeing anything
until they get to a back bedroom.
BRANDY: As they enter the room,
they find Mary Ann Murphy lying face up on her bed.
She is covered in dry blood.
She has stab wounds extensively all over her body,
her arms, her chest, her legs.
COURTNEY: Mary Ann was stabbed 73 times.
It was brutal.
NARRATOR: First responders break the news to
Keri that her mother is gone.
Keri calls her brother and her father,
and they return home immediately.
At this point, detectives are really
trying to figure out what happened.
And so Keri, Scott, and Don make their way
to the police station to give their statements.
Keri tells investigators that, at 11:15 p.m.,
she was scrapbooking
and noticed some suspicious lights,
headlights, around the house.
Didn't think anything of it.
At about 12:15, she went to bed,
and shortly after that is when she awoke to her mom's screams.
She heard footsteps, somebody running in the house.
She gets up, opens the door,
calls for her mom, and gets no response.
And as she did that, she saw two men leaving
out the back door, didn't know what direction.
She then ran to a neighbor's house to call 911 because she
didn't have a phone because her mom had taken hers away
as punishment.
REPORTER: Mary Ann Murphy has lived here with
her two children and husband for years.
Murphy died as a result of multiple stab wounds.
My mother sits us down in the living room, and she
just told us, "Mary Ann was stabbed to death this morning,"
and I heard the word "to death," and I was like,
"Seriously? To death?
She's dead? Mary Ann's dead?"
My choir director calls me, and I was like, what?
And she's like, "Yeah, she died last night."
And I was like, what?
So after my mother broke the news,
she drove us over to a family friend's house,
which is where Keri was at the time.
I saw her, and I ran to her.
I hugged her, she hugged me, and we cried.
We sat there for maybe 10 minutes
in the middle of the road just crying.
It was surreal.
AMBER: Seeing Keri lose her mom was very sad,
especially at a young age like that
and in the manner that Mary Ann had passed away,
you know, it was traumatizing.
I couldn't think of a single soul
that would want to hurt Mary Ann.
It felt so random.
NARRATOR: Something else that seems random are
the details of the crime scene.
The investigators notice a busted window
by the back door,
but it was too small for anyone to fit through,
and you couldn't actually physically
open the back door if you stuck your hand through this window.
COURTNEY: And for the most part, the inside
of the house does not look ransacked.
It is kind of put together as you would expect to see
a house.
And detectives find a 22-caliber pistol
under Mary Ann's pillow.
Mary Ann slept with this gun
under her pillow for protection.
She knew how to use one, and it was there
if she needed it, which means she had no time
to react to what was happening to her.
She was completely and 100 percent ambushed
while she was sleeping in her bed.
NARRATOR: The clues suggest the scene
was staged to look like a break-in,
leading investigators to wonder if this was actually
an inside job.
The husband is always first to be looked at.
So they had to verify where Don was.
COURTNEY: Detectives now talk to Don,
and what detectives notice is that his reaction,
his demeanor, is slightly different, is a little kind of
like red flags are flying up, because he's not super
emotional about his wife's murder.
And Don admits that their marriage had some rocks.
Keri would confide in me about her parents arguing all
the time, how sometimes, like,
it was physical and that she,
you know, felt like she had to step in.
NARRATOR: But Don's alibi checks out.
He was at work when Mary Ann was murdered.
So was their son, Scott.
While investigating, detectives find Mary Ann's phone,
and they look through it for any evidence at all,
and they discover the last person that she spoke to was
actually a coworker of hers.
Investigators track down the coworker.
His name is Mike.
They go to him, and he's visibly
upset to hear this news about Mary Ann.
He tells investigators they were having an affair.
Now detectives have to look
at another possible suspect here.
Was this a crime of passion?
He says that it only happened at his house.
He had never been to her house and shared
his phone records with detectives
and also gave them an alibi.
And it checks out -- he was not involved.
So they were able to clear him.
NARRATOR: Police now turn their attention back to
the last person to see Mary Ann alive.
BRANDY: You know, Keri is the only
one at the house when this happens.
COURTNEY: And so they want to do a polygraph test.
Keri does the polygraph test and does not do well.
Detectives tell Keri,
and she completely breaks down,
and she tells detectives
she knows who did it.
HEATHER: I forgot who got the call.
But somebody got the call that police were going
to Zein's house, and that he was getting arrested.
Keri told investigators that the person responsible
for killing Mary Ann is Zein Ahmed.
I thought that it was, you know,
impossible, because I didn't think that Zein had ever even
met Mary Ann.
So it was kind of like, you know,
it doesn't make any sense, it wasn't adding up,
um, why Zein would, you know, murder Mary Ann.
Keri tells detectives this all stems from a few days ago.
Mary Ann caught Keri sneaking back into
the house and accuses her of seeing Rebecca.
[rustling noises]
BRANDY: Keri says that she heard something suspicious outside,
saw two men by her window,
and that she went outside to check it out.
NARRATOR: Mary Ann didn't believe a word
of her daughter's story -- as punishment,
she took Keri's phone, totally unaware
Keri still had the Bunny Phone that Rebecca had given her.
Two days later, the Bunny Phone comes in
handy when Keri needs to call in a favor.
Keri asked Zein to come over to the house to knock on
the walls and really just to scare her mother.
She wanted her mother to believe the story
about the two strange men.
He loved her so much that
he would do absolutely anything for her.
NARRATOR: That's when her plan goes off the rails.
Keri tells investigators when Zein showed up,
he had a knife with him.
He comes into the house, and he
goes directly back to the mother's bedroom.
Keri says she hears her mom screaming,
[distant scream]
and she goes to her room,
and that's where she sees Zein stabbing Mary Ann.
BRANDY: He comes out of the room, throws a brick through
the window, and tells her to say it's a robbery.
COURTNEY: Keri said he thought he was proving his love to her,
and she lied to detectives in the beginning, because she knew
Zein was coming over.
So she had to lie.
NARRATOR: At first, Zein denies any involvement,
but he changes his tune when detectives
hook him up to a polygraph machine.
About halfway through,
the polygraph examiner comes out of the room
and tells police, "He's ready to confess."
Zein says that he didn't mean to kill her,
that he just wanted to scare Mary Ann.
BRANDY: He tells police that he went upstairs to her bedroom.
He holds a knife over to her neck, and he says, "Boo,"
and then he doesn't know what happened next.
He just starts stabbing her.
He freaked out, he panicked, and stabbed Mary Ann
four times.
Zein even tells police where they can
find the knife that killed Mary Ann.
It's in his bedroom. It has a red handle.
NARRATOR: The knife is right where Zein
told them it would be.
Doesn't look like any residue is on it,
but they do take it to the crime lab to be processed.
Zein is arrested for the murder of Mary Ann.
I think he wanted to gain Keri's love and trust and say,
"Hey, you know, I took care of your problem,
"and, you know, now you can be
with me, and, you know, you owe me."
HEATHER: At the funeral,
when we went to go see the body,
she was dressed up.
The neck had to be covered, and I found
out it was because of such deep lacerations to the neck.
That's not a good time, at a funeral,
to hear the brutality I had heard.
NARRATOR: While Mary Ann's family and friends mourn,
detectives continue to work the case,
and they realize Zein's story has several false notes.
He told police he stabbed Mary Ann four times, and she was
stabbed well over 70 times.
He also told police that he went upstairs to get to
her bedroom, but this is a one-story home.
NARRATOR: Could Keri's wanna-be boyfriend
have given a false confession?
COURTNEY: Zein's parents tell investigators that
he was home all night playing video games.
They actually have photographic evidence that
timestamp that he was at home.
Also, that knife came back from the crime lab as
totally clean.
Zein then tells police, "Look, I didn't do it."
He said he gave a false confession because he was
scared and nervous, and he felt
that perhaps if he said that he committed this crime,
they'll let him go home.
BRANDY: Based on this evidence,
police dismissed the charges against Zein
for the murder of Mary Ann Murphy.
OLIVIA: I didn't really know what to believe,
because everything was so misleading.
Everything was so
like a feather in the wind.
You couldn't grab any truth.
NARRATOR: Investigators call their star witness in for
more questioning.
Keri told me about the police investigation.
She said that they were giving her details about the murder.
She thought they were trying to break her down with all of
this information, and they were
trying to get her to confess to something that
she didn't do, and she seemed horrified
by all of these details, and she stopped talking.
NARRATOR: But a background check on
Keri shed some new light on the investigation.
COURTNEY: And they learn about this restraining order against
Rebecca, and a little light goes off,
and they think, "We need to look into this
a little bit more."
They bring her in for questioning, and she comes in
and tells them that yes,
there was a relationship, and it didn't continue.
It didn't work out. And, as a matter of fact,
they haven't even seen each other or spoken to each other
in months because there was
a restraining order against Rebecca.
But Rebecca's lying.
Detectives bring in Scott, Keri's brother, again to try
to get to the bottom of Rebecca
and Keri's relationship.
Scott tells them that they had
this secret way of communicating.
They called it the Bunny Phone.
So the phone records to the Bunny Phone were subpoenaed.
There's multiple phone calls,
multiple text messages,
including the night of the murder.
So police want to talk to Rebecca again about
the phone records, and they confront her
with the fact that they know they were talking even up to
the day of the murder.
NARRATOR: Rebecca knows it's finally time to come clean.
Rebecca says, "Keri's been talking
about killing her mom for months."
Rebecca tells investigators that Keri has been talking
about killing her mom for months,
but everything started to unravel when Mary Ann takes
Keri's phone away and threatened to unlock it.
NARRATOR: Keri still has the Bunny Phone to make calls.
That's not why she wants her phone back.
Keri knew what Mary Ann would discover would be
nude photos of her minor daughter, sexting with an adult.
All of this was going to land Rebecca in jail.
Keri refused to give the code to her mother
to get into the phone,
but Mary Ann said, "I'll bring the phone with me to work on
"Monday, and I will have someone
at the office get in this phone."
NARRATOR: Keri couldn't bear to lose Rebecca.
So the couple puts a murderous plan into action,
and the Bunny Phone comes in handy.
Rebecca and Keri were texting back
and forth, waiting for Mary Ann to go to bed.
Once Mary Ann goes to sleep,
Rebecca comes over to the house.
Keri enters her mother's bedroom, stabs her to death.
Rebecca watched from the hallway, then together,
they staged the scene to make it look like a home invasion.
Rebecca made Keri strip down all of her bloody clothes.
They put them in a garbage bag, including the knife.
BRANDY: Rebecca then leaves the home with the garbage bag.
She jumps the fence behind Keri's home,
goes into the school parking lot,
and puts that bag into a trash can.
NARRATOR: The confession is enough to
arrest both Keri and Rebecca.
OLIVIA: I would have never thought
Keri was capable of murder.
I would have never thought that.
I was not completely convinced that Keri was guilty of this.
I felt like, you know, maybe the cops were
just trying to find somebody to pin it on and, you know,
the daughter's, the,
you know, easy target because, you know,
mom and daughter were -- were having problems.
A few months after Keri was arrested,
her grandmother was able to come up with the bail,
and she got out.
Um, Bunny stayed in jail.
I visited Keri, I saw her often, she was fine.
She gave me a picture of me
and Mary Ann together at Chuck E. Cheese
when we were still kids.
She talked about Mary Ann, how much
she loved her and missed her.
She was normal.
Keri told me that she missed me,
and she said that she wanted to see me.
We ate at the food court.
She could tell that I was uncomfortable.
She seemed like normal Keri.
I had asked her, like, "You know I wanna ask you,"
and she said, "Ask me what?"
And I was like, "Well, did you kill your mom?"
And she looked me dead in my eyes, and she's like, "No,
I didn't."
NARRATOR: Keri may seem like she's moving on,
but she just can't quit Rebecca.
BRANDY: Both Rebecca and Keri still communicated
when Keri was out on bail.
Rebecca and Keri would have
phone conversations, um, from the jail.
Police start listening to these jailhouse conversations.
COURTNEY: While the police are listening in
to one of those jailhouse phone calls,
Rebecca tells Keri, "I'm just glad
you didn't see what happened in there."
Keri said, "I did, I was in the hallway, and I looked."
Rebecca says, "You weren't supposed to see.
I told you to stay in your room."
NARRATOR: Rebecca has simultaneously confessed to
premeditated murder
and admitted Keri was an accessory.
[vocalizing]
I would have never thought in a million years that, you know,
two -- two girls in --
in high school, in choir, you know, living life,
16, 19 years old
would have turned what was puppy love,
super cute, super fun,
into super crazy,
massive murder.
Keri did what she did,
but...
I think if she didn't have the influence of Bunny,
it wouldn't have turned out like this.
But it broke my heart that Keri was involved.
Just there's one thing thinking and having that
question but to have the answer for sure --
it destroyed me and my mom.
OLIVIA: I didn't want it to be true.
I don't know.
I was so hopeful. I was so hopeful.
I feel like
I was played in a way, like I was
just another person that
she could manipulate or -- or, uh, I don't know, lie to.
Yeah, I definitely feel betrayed.
I feel disappointed,
honestly in myself.
Oh God. [crying quietly]
NARRATOR: With the phone call confession as evidence,
the investigation comes to a quick end.
Both Keri and Rebecca ended up pleading guilty.
Keri is sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Rebecca is sentenced to 60.
HEATHER: I felt like 30 years was about right.
She might not have murdered her mom,
but her actions led to it,
and 30 years is a long time to sit
and think about it, long time.
I think they both should have gotten life.
30 years?
You get 30 years because you sat
there and you watched your mom get killed?
It's not enough time.
If I could go back to the day that Keri met Rebecca,
I would say, "Turn away.
Don't do this. Just -- just listen to your mom."
AMBER: Your life could have been totally different
had you not met Rebecca,
had this not unfolded to what it did.
It could have led Keri on
a whole other path to being something great.
ANTOINETTE: It starts making you think,
how well do you know a person?
And you may think you know someone, but
you never know if they're gonna betray you,
or if they're gonna portray somebody that they love,
and just knowing that I knew her and she was
able to do something like that just blows my mind.
♪
On season 2 of Mean Girl Murders...
Nine more mysteries that are bigger,
badder and meaner.
She was pretty, and I think that gave her
confidence which then turned into power.
She was nummber one in everything she did...
even murder.
She wasnted to be part of the "it" crowd.
But she didn't fit in.
These girls grew up on the other side of the tracks.
Nobody messed with them.
She wanted that girl to suffer.
I think she did it with full joy in her heart.
She said, "If you tell anybody I'll kill you."
"Love you. Bye."