[metal grating]
The case was a true whodunit mystery.
[Jody] We had remains but no identification.
It was just very cold, very calculated.
Whoever did this, they had a plan.
They were methodical.
Who would go through these lengths to get rid of a body?
Investigators had an impossible case to solve.
This is the Super Bowl, the crime of all crimes.
We have to identify this victim in order to catch the killer.
I was wondering, did we meet our match?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Jody] On Friday, July 12, 2002, the Pennsylvania State
Police received a call about a potential body
that was found in Jackson Township, Monroe County.
[distant sirens wailing]
Our team responded to process the scene.
It was a pull-off site along a very rural road.
The body was located in two 55-gallon burn barrels.
Because of the level of decomposition, and the burning,
the smell was absolutely putrid.
So our team had to get
respirators from a local fire company.
It was obvious that there was no way this was an accident.
It was brutal homicide.
[Shawn] I've worked hundreds of homicides, but this is one of
the most gruesome cases I ever experienced.
I knew that this was gonna be a difficult case to solve.
[indistinct radio chatter]
investigators then spoke with the discoverer of the body,
George Newhart.
George Newhart said he was operating a septic business
and so when his truck was full up, he would pull into
the location and pump it out into this tanker.
When he got there, he got out of the truck and now, this is a man
who deals in human waste, and he was overwhelmed by
the -- the stench.
[Shawn] And he found two barrels that were somewhat smoldering and as
he started sifting through some things a little bit, he realized
this was human remains.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[Will] The first person that investigators started looking
at was George.
They checked his whereabouts, they checked his work logs,
it actually checked out.
So George was not a person of interest.
So investigators got to put the body together, they've got
to identify this person.
[Shawn] It was very late when investigators initially got
there, so the investigation really got going on
the following day, on July 13th.
[sustained mysterious tones]
[Jody] In one barrel was the victim's torso,
in the other barrel was the victim's
head and extremities.
Also in the barrel, were maggots, some of which were
burnt, which tells us that
the victim has been dead for -- for some time.
[birds singing]
[Will] So investigators know that at this point from that call
and the time that George, the person who found the body,
was at the properties there's a 10-hour window from when this
body could have been dumped.
[heavy breathing through mask]
[Jody] Our team processed the scene to remove
the victim from both barrels.
And they sort of had to figure out, OK, what body parts do
we have? What don't we have here?
And they put down a sheet on the ground and started
putting this human back together again.
At that point, we couldn't determine if it was
a man or a woman.
Due to the fact that they were dismembered,
decomposing, and burnt.
And given the condition of the victim,
DNA testing was gonna take a while.
It was definitely clear to me that this person or persons
who killed this individual went through great lengths to try
and dispose of the body and make sure that
he or she were never identified.
[birds singing] [distant cow mooing]
[Jody] When removing the victim from the burn barrel,
we discovered a piece of blue plastic or vinyl,
and we recovered duct tape.
We recovered a rope, remnants of clothing,
cigarette butts, all these things that we thought may
or may not be related to our crime.
But how big is your scene?
Was the victim killed and dismembered here
or somewhere else? You don't know.
You're talking about a remote area of the Poconos.
So it already set the case
into a difficult status because they are looking at so much
ground to cover.
We had cadaver dogs go through the woods looking for evidence.
But there's no indication or evidence that this crime had
occurred here.
This person was killed and dismembered somewhere else.
[Shawn] Fortunately, the property did have a cable going across it,
a 40-foot cable, and it was low.
There was a lock on it, and it would have taken two
people to get their vehicle underneath that cable, one to
hold it up, one to drive the vehicle up to the barrels.
So we believe there's two offenders,
and we know that a vehicle had to enter this property because
there was no evidence of dragging from the road.
Then the speculation part started, you know.
Who could have done anything like this?
It's scary to think of the type of person who would go to these
lengths to try and get away with this murder.
[Shawn] So we are trying to think like the offender.
Was it someone that got off the interstate and decided to
dispose of this individual in these burn barrels?
Or that someone had more of an intimate knowledge of this
property, being that they knew that the burned barrels
would be there?
[birds singing] [low, suspenseful music playing]
When the investigation started, there's a lot of people working
on it, multiple agencies.
You have this two-pronged approach.
On one hand, you've got the investigators looking on
the ground, looking for witnesses, looking for anyone
with any information about this crime.
Then on the other hand, you've got the forensic team
in the lab trying to work on identifying the body.
[Jody] As we begin this process, we know
DNA is gonna take a while.
But right out of the gate at the autopsy,
we're looking at the victim's head and extremities.
And there's one thing we know -- the victim is male.
[Shawn] He was stabbed multiple times. His right orbital was crushed.
His nose was fractured. His tibia was broken.
Not only was this person dismembered, they went through
a lot of trauma.
[Jody] Seeing what happened to this individual makes me sick.
He's cut up into pieces, torched, and thrown out
like garbage.
And we consider that a challenge to find the truth
and bring those responsible to justice.
[Shawn] We know that the body was wrapped in a blue plastic.
And our forensic units looked at a logo
and did some research.
[Jody] We discovered the logo on it, and it's a popular brand.
They make air mattresses.
We don't know where or when the mattress was purchased.
We don't know how it's related to this crime,
or where it fits in.
It's just another piece to the puzzle.
We know that there's a killer out there.
So it's very crucial to identify that victim.
[Jody] The quickest way of identifying the victim would be
through fingerprints.
But the hands were severely dehydrated.
They were leathery, very hard. They're shriveled up.
Being exposed to the extreme heat, they're very small,
almost like that of a child's.
That makes dealing with that piece of human
fingertip difficult.
The left thumb was the best fingerprint that we had
to work with, but it was small, so it was a slow process.
[Will] The killers had a plan to cover all their tracks.
You don't put pieces of a body into two separate barrels
and set them on fire unless you don't want to be found.
[fire crackling]
[Shawn] It was so disgusting -- you don't get
that smell out of your head.
Who would go through these lengths to get rid of a body?
We knew that we were dealing with something
very evil at this point.
[crickets chirping]
[fire crackling]
[Shawn] We have an unidentified individual that was
murdered horribly,
dismembered and burned in a couple burn barrels.
We want to identify this person at all costs, because ultimately
we want a family to know what happened to
their loved one, number one.
Number two, we have to identify that person in order to
catch the killer.
[Shawn] So weeks, they turn into months,
and we were thinking outside the box and doing everything
we could to identify the victim.
It's very frustrating with an unidentified person when
you can't make that connection to who they are.
It feels like the investigation stalls.
So my partner reached out to a forensic artist,
and he recreates with clay and his artistry and gives us
a face of this victim.
We were hoping to get some type of face out there.
We're working with the media to get this information out there
because we have to identify this victim.
We were doing everything we could.
However, the victim's identity still wasn't known.
There's a family connected to this person.
The investigators were frustrated.
Can you imagine trying to solve a crime
where the evidence is
basically burned in pieces?
[Shawn] So at this point, we're doing everything we can.
We're looking at new avenues, anything we can do to think
outside the box and move forward with this investigation.
You have the human emotion
and the professional emotion,
but we were never gonna give up.
We weren't going to stop fighting for that victim.
And so we continued and continued and continued
to investigate.
We believe there's two offenders based on the cable.
Whoever did this, they had a plan.
They were methodical.
So you have to think, did the person or people
responsible for this really get away with murder?
Then we get about a year outside of the investigation,
and there was a very well-known case back in the summer of 2003
that came to light with an individual named
Hugo Selenski.
[news broadcast] Hugo Selenski is accused of killing two people,
burning and then burying their remains at
a Kingston Township home where he lived.
Three other sets of remains were found here.
He's a suspect in those deaths too.
These murders were committed in May of 2002, just two months
before they found the body in Jackson Township.
Could Hugo Selenski be connected to this murder?
[Jody] There were a lot of similarities between
Hugo Selenski's crimes and this crime.
He used duct tape to bind his victims.
He brutally bludgeoned his victims.
He burned his victims to ash, literally.
[Shawn] This happened only miles from where our scene was
of the burn barrels and the dismembered body.
So it really piqued our interest, and we wanted to
find out, is there a nexus between the two cases?
Does our victim have any connection to Hugo Selenski?
We knew we had to keep pressing on, and it really all came back
to identifying the victim.
I had this fingerprint from our victim's left thumb,
but it was dehydrated, shriveled up.
So I started thinking, what can we do?
We're looking at this print, looks like
a child's fingerprint.
what if we enlarge it incrementally and run it
through the system as many times as it takes,
little by little, enlarge, submit, enlarge, submit.
And, you know, fortunately, it paid off.
[Shawn] Lo and behold, in November of 2003, we get a hit on
a fingerprint, and our victim is now given a name
of Robert Roudebush.
[Jody] It was such a great victory and great relief.
So as excited as I am, as we all are,
like our work's just beginning. Who is Robert Roudebush?
Who would want to kill him?
So we reached out to the family.
We want to learn as much about Bob as possible.
And once we talked to them, we started getting a better
picture of who Bob is.
Bob was my stepbrother.
His mother and my father were married in 1981.
When I first met Bob and got to know him,
he was very fun-loving, he was kind,
and seemed like someone who just loved life and loved
people, and was just trying to find his own way.
I had moved to Reno and was starting work at the new hotel.
His mother was also starting to work in the same area.
Bob was a security guard at one of the casinos.
So many times we would meet up with him at the casino.
The three of us would just have a really good time together.
Bob was just part of the family.
We all became a family together.
Bob was trying to find his way.
He decided
to go into the Marine Corps.
After the Marines, Bob had relocated to the East Coast.
Bob's mother told me, you know, like, that he had moved
to Pennsylvania, that he had a girlfriend.
She expressed concern,
because he had not contacted her on her birthday.
No matter what, he would never miss her birthday.
And then in the winter, she called me and told me that
the Corning police had come to the home to tell her that
his remains had been identified as a murder victim
in Pennsylvania. I was horrified.
I just couldn't imagine someone doing that to another human
being, and then just dumping like a piece of garbage.
How could they be so cold?
They didn't care about anything except covering up
their own heinous act.
[Shawn] Before we knew Bob's identity, we conducted hundreds
and hundreds of interviews.
Now that we have his identity, we're going to conduct hundreds
and hundreds more.
We are going to get to the bottom of this.
We have to do everything possible to catch the killer.
It was definitely one of those cases where I thought,
maybe we've met our match.
[calm music playing]
So we were working on this investigation for a year
and a half, and finally we have an identification
of the victim,
Bob Roudebush.
[Jody] It's like a shot of adrenaline.
But we still didn't have a crime scene as to where
the victim was killed at.
These individuals were smart enough to transport that body
and did a pretty good job of destroying it almost to
the point of not identifying the victim.
Fortunately, that didn't happen.
Through interviews, we identify Bob's girlfriend.
We go to talk to her.
She had not seen him for quite some time.
She never filed a missing person report because
their relationship was sort of over.
It was strained.
She kind of moved on with her life at this point.
We asked, "Is there anyone that would want to hurt Bob?
"Was there any connection to an individual named Hugo
Selenski, who killed multiple people?"
[Jody] When you have Hugo Selenski burning bodies on his property,
it's only logical to think that there may be --
there may be a connection between the two.
[Shawn] She told us she wasn't aware of anybody that
wanted to hurt Bob.
And she had no connection to Hugo Selenski.
Periodically, I'd find myself going out and searching just to
see if there had been anything new about what had happened
and any suspects.
There was sadness, there was an emptiness that was there,
and it was just so hard.
[Jody] At this point, you can't give up.
You gotta keep on going.
But at the end of the day, it got very frustrating because
every lead, every idea, everything we tried
went nowhere.
Around the time we released the identity to the press,
we received a call from James Britton, an inmate who says
he has information regarding this investigation.
James Britton had recently been extradited from California on
a theft charge, and was sitting in that Columbia County prison.
He said he knew the victim, so this, of course,
gave investigators that hope that this could be
the break in the case.
We went down to the Columbia County Prison,
and I conducted an interview.
He tells us, in 2002, he was living in the city of
Wilkes-Barre with his wife, Stacy.
[Will] James Britton tells investigators that he was
friends with the victim because they were ex-Marines,
but he thinks that the person who may have did this
was his neighbor, Larry Tooley.
Larry Tooley was also a Marine, so the three of them kind of
all got along.
James said that Larry was dating a girl
that Bob was starting to have sort of an affair with.
And as time went on, bad blood started between Bob and Larry.
James said that Bob was supposed to come to a barbecue
at the Brittons' house on July 4th, but he didn't show up,
and James said he never talked to him again.
Then James said that in July that same month,
that Bob went missing,
James went on to tell us a story how he was assaulted by
Larry Tooley.
[Will] James says that Larry pistol-whipped him
and threatened to rape his wife all over a stolen MP3 player.
But then James drops a bombshell.
Larry tells him to keep your mouth shut, or I will cave in
your skull like Bob.
James was completely putting it out there that Larry Tooley
had to be the person that killed Bob,
and that he didn't want to end up like him.
This is a shocking development for the investigators.
Now, Larry Tooley was well-known to the investigators
because Larry Tooley, at that point in time, was incarcerated
on murder charges.
In November of 2002, Larry killed a 16-year-old
during a home invasion.
Now, Bob was discovered in July of 2002.
This is only four months apart.
So there was a lot of interest in Larry Tooley at this point.
James was very believable, and he became
this investigation's new best friend.
[Will] So at this point, investigators have some
information, but this case is still a mystery.
So of course, police have to start corroborating all of this
information from James.
They want to get ahold of James's wife, Stacy.
She is currently in jail in San Diego.
[Shawn] I reached out to Stacy Britton.
She immediately goes into Larry Tooley and talking about being
assaulted, her husband being pistol whipped by him.
Now this is Stacy's words, which were very similar
to her husband's.
She said, I'm gonna cave your skull in and have
a mother [bleep] barbecue.
So she added that in there too, a barbecue,
burning, burn barrels,
Bob's remains were lit on fire.
At this point, I'm thinking we are really onto something.
Stacy Britton kind of corroborated that same
information, but she gave a few extra tidbits.
[Shawn] So Stacy explained that herself,
Larry Tooley, Bob Roudebush, and her husband, James,
would go back and forth between Wilkes-Barre and Newark,
New Jersey for business.
I said, "Well, would you ever stop anywhere?"
And she said, "Are you talking about North Road?"
She said, "Well, my brother lives near there,
real close to there."
And I'm thinking the whole time
I can't believe that she just said "North Road" to me,
that was a big clue, a light bulb went off.
I knew from that point on, Stacy was gonna be
my second best friend in the investigation.
But I had no idea what was ahead on this case.
[ominous music playing]
[Shawn] I knew that once the victim was identified, we would make moves
in the right direction.
At this point, we're thinking Larry Tooley,
and, or Hugo Selenski, have to be tied into the murder of
Bob Roudebush.
So we're gonna explore every possible aspect before we make
our next move.
[Michael] Larry Tooley was a known killer.
And he had access to where Bob's remains were discovered.
So all of that -- all of that was the focus initially.
Investigators know from James and Stacy Britton that Bob
possibly was sleeping with Tooley's girlfriend.
So this could be a possible motive.
Investigators right away say, "We need to get
more information."
[Shawn] We knew Larry Tooley was incarcerated.
So we went to the next best person.
We went to Larry Tooley's girlfriend.
She says, "Listen, I wasn't having an affair with
Bob Roudebush."
She said, "They're liars, don't believe anything
that they say."
She actually described them as scumbags.
And she said some of the Brittons' information was
kind of exaggerated.
In fact, the girlfriend said she only saw Bob
and Larry Tooley together on one occasion.
It was very different than what the Brittons had told me.
So we thought maybe the Brittons were using that
as a deflection, you know, and trying to give,
like, a smokescreen.
They definitely knew more than they were saying.
[Shawn] The Brittons had been very believable.
However, we were starting to think, I wonder if this is
a story they created to push blame off themselves.
We know that there were some inconsistencies in
their stories that were red flags.
Are they omitting things? Are they lying to us?
[Jody] Anyone could have done it.
We have a pool of people that are possible suspects,
but we still need that one clue or piece of evidence
to push us in the right direction.
[Shawn] So we give it some time.
We heard the Brittons were getting out of prison,
and we tried to initiate another interview with both of
them together.
It seemed to me like James did wanna talk.
However, Stacy was having no part of that,
and she shut down the interview.
[Jody] We have all these leads.
We're looking at all these puzzle pieces floating out
there, but we don't have a focal point
because we don't have a crime scene.
And it's frustrating.
It's, you know, hard as hell, but Robert has a family,
and we'd like to give them answers and give them
some closure.
The police were working diligently to try
and solve his murder.
It was just so hard.
We needed to know what happened and why it happened.
[Will] Whoever committed this crime planned this in such a way
where they wouldn't get caught.
There's a lot of roads that lead off in different
directions but it doesn't seem like it's leading to the person
or people who committed this murder.
[Jody] Finally, in 2015, we get a call from Stacy Britton.
Apparently, she wants to talk to us.
I couldn't believe that she was reaching out again
after all these years.
She said she and James weren't husband and wife anymore,
but they were living together and things weren't going well.
She says she's in fear of James, and her life's coming
apart, and she needs to talk to somebody about this,
and I could tell she was upset,
but she wanted to tell us a story.
I knew that that was a tipping point,
and I was never prepared for what she was about to tell.
On August 14, 2015, we finally got that break.
During the phone call from Stacy,
she told us that her ex-husband, James Britton,
actually killed Bob Roudebush.
If James Britton killed Bob,
I knew that we had to act on it quick.
The case was ice cold and then it went red hot,
just like that.
And we felt we had enough to charge James.
So we took James into custody and we set up
a recorded interview.
And that's where James went into his version of what
actually happened on July 4, 2002.
At this point Stacy and James are both trying to pin it on
each other and investigators have to figure out
what really happened to Bob.
[Michael] Now it started to become more like a cat and mouse scenario
and with every increase in detail, Stacy was becoming more
and more of an active participant.
[Shawn] We had more questions.
So my partner brought Stacy back to one of our state police
stations, and that's where they conducted
her videotaped interview.
She sort of excluded herself from all the heavy duty,
the killing part.
However, she proceeded to talk about
what had happened to Bob and the dismemberment,
her own confession to what she had done.
I was ecstatic.
[Michael] Stacy went into all that awful detail about how she disposed
of the body, and using garden shears, and a sledgehammer,
and an axe, just awful stuff.
[Shawn] She said after the dismemberment, they had to
get the body out of there. So they used an air mattress.
They carried Bob's remains.
And they proceeded to go to North Road.
And someone had to hold the cable.
[Shawn] And Stacy
lit the remains on fire
and they fled there.
I think Stacy thought because she had blamed her husband for
killing Bob, that she was going to be OK,
and wouldn't be arrested.
[Michael] It appeared Stacy was going to beat James to the punch by
blaming it on him before he could blame her.
I called it "the nuclear option," because it wound up
bringing both of them down.
They each admitted enough about their own involvement to
clearly make them culpable in the murder.
[Shawn] For years, we heard this story from the Brittons about Larry
Tooley committing this crime, and there was
the Hugo Selenski angle as well.
Deep down inside myself and my partner, we always thought,
there's just more to this. It doesn't make sense.
[Jody] They thought they committed the perfect murder,
but they were wrong.
[Shawn] They got rid of the body, got rid of evidence.
Their stories were very similar, however,
the devil's in the details.
And I think ultimately it was their own words that --
that was the best evidence.
So investigators arrest both James and Stacy.
In October of 2016, James took the plea and was sentenced to
15 to 30 years in state prison for murder in the third degree,
abuse of corpse, and perjury.
But Stacy insisted on going to trial.
[news broadcast] After 14 years of police trying to find the person
who allegedly killed 46-year-old Robert Roudebush,
Stacy Britton is heading into a Monroe County courtroom to
face charges.
[Will] November of 2016, Stacy Britton is convicted of
first-degree murder, hindering,
apprehension, and conspiracy.
She's sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
What she did to
get rid of Bob, it was worse than a horror movie.
You can't do this to a human being and get away with it.
[Jody] This is the Super Bowl,
the crime of all crimes, and I'm proud to be a part of
the team that brought justice to the victim.
I think it's so interesting that it was their own mouths
that ended up doing them in.
They had to tell on one another.
They just had such a volatile relationship
that it got the best of them.
And I am very, very thankful that the police stayed on this
because nobody deserves what was done to Bob, nobody.
♪♪
[metal dragging]
You have no choice but to think the worst.
Christina had been missing longer than she had been alive.
We had always hoped to bring Christina home.
Whoever did this really knew what they were doing
and did not want her found.