on this episode of "death row stories" -- >> they found her body just off a dirt road. >> a 19-year-old is abducted on her way to work. >> she was strangled, raped. >> there was in fact the presence of semen. >> and dna results lead to a death sentence. >> you deserve what the state of texas will be doing to you. >> but when evidence points to someone closer to home -- >> you're failing a polygraph, this is your fiance. did you kill her? >> the state had dna evidence that puts police officers at the crime scene? >> this was something well thought out and staged. >> the state was executing me, they'd made murderers out of themselves. >> there's a body in the water. >> he was butchered and murdered. >> many people proclaim their innocence. >> in this case there are a

number of things that stink. >> this man is remorseless. >> he needs to pay for it with his life. >> the electric chair flashed in front of my eyes. >> get a conviction at all costs. let the truth fall where it may. the lost pines region in texas is an ancient 13-mile stretch of woodlands located 40 miles southeast of austin. in april of 1996, in the nearby town of giddings, 19-year-old stacey stites was weeks away from marrying 23-year-old police officer jimmy fennell. >> they met at the smithfield gymboree shortly after she graduated. he was working security there and they started dating after that. >> jimmy was a great guy.

she asked me what it was like to be married and she was super excited. >> at the time, she was working at heb. she worked in the produce section. she was paid a little bit extra to work their early shift so that she could pay for the wedding. she had to be there at 4:30 in the morning, something pretty early. >> around 3:00 a.m., the morning of april 23rd, stacey left for work driving jimmy's red pickup truck. >> my mom was called early in the morning. stacey had not shown up for work. jimmy and stacey lived upstairs from her, and she called upstairs to ask if stacey was up there, had she overslept. jimmy said that no, she had left for work.

>> jimmy traced stacy's route to bastrop but found nothing. he turned to curtis davis, a fellow bastrop police officer for help. >> i come to work and i walked in and saw jimmy and his first words out of his mouth was "stacey's missing." you could see in his eyes something was wrong. and he sensed it. >> that morning, police found jimmy's pickup truck abandoned at the local high school. bastrop police chief david bored was one of first on the scene. >> when we found the truck and didn't find stacey in it or anywhere around it, we now had a missing person that we believed was in danger. >> police found signs of a struggle. on the ground outside the pickup, a broken piece of stacey's leather belt. >> jimmy fennell recognized that as being part of a belt stacey had worn. also he noticed one of stacey's tennis shoes in the truck, so that was very concerning.

>> but few other clues were found, and the only fingerprints on the truck belonged to stacey and jimmy. >> we knew she had left getting to highway 21 and to bastrop and to loop 150, so those were the routes that we were traveling by air. >> told jimmy, they're going to find her. she's going to be okay and we'll deal with whatever's happened to her. >> early that afternoon, near the lost pines reserve, a man looking for wildflowers for his wife spotted something strange in the bushes. >> it was on a country road, a windy, gravel road, pretty much isolated from the neighborhood. >> in the brush about 15 feet from the road, officers found stacey stites' half dressed body. >> stacey appeared to have been sexually assaulted.

>> alongside the road was the other half of the braided belt, and stacey had a clear braided pattern of abrasions around her neck. >> the coroner confirmed that stacey had been raped and strangled with her belt. >> now we went from search and rescue to a murder investigation. from there it was, you know, whodunit. >> we suspected everybody. was it another police officer? 'twas jimmy? was it random? we didn't know. >> aside from two empty beer cans, the crime scene offered few clues. but an examination of stacey's body resulted in a crucial discovery. >> they took vaginal swabs, and determined that there was, in fact the presence of semen. >> dna results didn't match

stacey's fiance jimmy or anyone else in the criminal database. >> typically a murder cases, people tend to die at the hands of people they know. so we started talking to folks at heb. anybody exert any anger towards her or threaten her in any way? >> they took dna samples from virtually every man that stacey knew. anyone she came in contact with, and all of those came up negative. >> the bastrop heb is offering $50,000 to anyone who has information that will lead to a conviction. >> despite the reward, and the investigation of dozens of leads, no likely suspects were found. but nearly a year after stacey's murder, a similar attack occurred in nearby bastrop. >> a young lady by the name of

linda was driving through bastrop at about 3:30 in the morning on the route stacey would drive to work, ride along the railroad tracks and she stopped at long starmart to use the phone, and a man came and talked his way into her car. that man later along the ride sexually propositioned her. when she said no, he informed her he was going to kill her. and he attacked her. >> she was able to escape and ran. and he stole her car. he left and stole her car. >> the victim described her attacker as a young black man, around six feet tall. investigators immediately had a suspect in mind. >> bastrop is a small community. i pretty much knew who the bad guys were. we have this guy named rodney reed that lives in bastrop who has been a suspect in a number of sexual assault cases. >> they later put rodney reed into a photo line-up and linda

picked him out as her assailant. an officer immediately made the connection due to the similarities between that and the stites case. so he asked the laboratory to see if they had any dna on file that could be from rodney reed. they did. >> and that dna rodney reed's dna was a match to the dna that was found inside the dead body of stacey stites. >> david board would question rodney reed. >> i had somewhat of a rapport with rodney reed, because of our long history of encounters. >> do you even know who she is? >> no, i don't know a stacey stites. >> have you ever seen her before? >> no, i haven't. >> rodney reed wrote out a statement in his own handwriting that he did not know stacey stites and had never met stacey stites.

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a bad day on the road still beats a good one off it. ♪ progressive helps keep you out there. ♪ ingenious space- neat nest™ by fasaving design. so you can go from this... to this. farberware neat nest™. stacked & intact™ on may 4th, 1998 rodney reed went on trial for the murder of stacey stites in bastrop county, texas. in her opening statement reed's attorney lid qua jackson made a surprising claim.

>> i told the jury that we proposed to show them a sexual relationship between stacey and rodney, that relationship was not widely known in her circles, but in his circles it was known. >> prosecutor lisa tanner countered by presenting a statement that reed gave, saying he'd never even met stacey. >> that statement was a large part of our evidence to show that his semen didn't get in stacey stites' body due to some sort of secret affair but due to a rape. >> from all the witnesses and all the people that i was involved interviewing, nobody ever, ever said that they ever saw those two together. rodney reed was nobody that she knew. >> the prosecution laid out a time line of events leading up to stacey's murder. jimmy fennell testified that he and stacey were home from 8:00 p.m. until she left for work around 3:00 a.m.

>> she's traveling from highway 21 to loop 150 into bastrop toward heb. >> rodney reed abducted stacey along the way, we believe at the railroad tracks, because we knew the trains ran through there at about that time of morning. he probably talked his way into her car, just like he did with linda. he took her to another area. he raped her, and then he dumped her body. >> investigators said rodney then dumped the pickup truck at the high school, a location which also tied him to the crime. >> her truck was found on the railroad tracks. well, rodney reed lived probably a half mile to a mile from that location. >> in her closing arguments, prosecutor lisa tanner said the evidence was a cinderella slipper. >> dna evidence was enough to convince a jury that rodney reed is guilty, the sentencing phase of the trial starts tomorrow --

>> at sentencing, tanner told the jury that reed's dna also matched semen found in two previously unsolved rapes. >> one was a sexual assault that had occurred six months prior to stacey, in bastrop, along the railroad tracks. the other was a sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl from 1989. >> tanner brought these women and four others to court, to describe in graphic detail how reed had assaulted them. the jury took only four hours to reach their verdict. >> 12 jurors quickly departed the courthouse leaving behind a death sentence for rodney reed. >> consider all the facts and i believe that justice was done. >> if you commit a crime, you need to be willing to accept the punishment that's going to be given with that crime. >> law of the land.

>> rodney reed was now on death row, in livingston, texas. >> the state was to try to kill me. that's what it was. and i'm like, man, this is all crazy, right? i have no witnesses, no alibis, nothing? i don't have a defense. >> reed claims his dna was recovered from stacey because of a consensual encounter they had the day before stacey's murder. he says he first met stacey the year before she was killed. >> i met her at a diamond shamrock in bastrop, right there in the back in the game room area, right at the jukebox is when i met her. it was a michael jackson song, and i got the music playing and she starts bobbing around. it was a good time together. >> i had seen stacey. stacey's been to the home looking for rodney to pick him up.

i told him, rodney, do you understand where you are? here in this little racist town, anything could happen. >> bastrop is about 30 miles outside of austin, but it's also about 30 years behind austin. there was an atmosphere in the town of -- >> racism. okay? point blank, period. >> jimmy brown was reed's first lawyer, but left the case before it went to trial. from the very beginning, brown saw a troubling racial bias. >> this case seemed to be premised on the fact that good white girls don't have sex with thugs. that is literally the theory of the state. because other than that, what is the motive? all you're saying is that because he had sex with her, that means he had to kill her. >> reed says he lied about knowing stacey because he didn't

believe he'd get fair treatment if the police knew he was having an affair with another officer's fiance. >> when we started seeing each other, it came up she was seeing an officer, and that's why we mainly tried to be as discreet as possible. it's not like i'm trying to hide and dodge, places i felt it was safe for us to be, we were open with each other. >> rodney had gone to the heb, which is where stacey worked. he knew there were people who had seen him with her. when i talked to two of them both gave similar statements about having seen rodney and stacey together, and that they were aware that they were having sex. the next time i tried to meet with those people, i couldn't. >> it had seemed that the witnesses that we had were all intimidated.

so that part of our defense could not be presented to the jury. >> i was expecting people to come. i was expecting to be going home once they testified. they aren't seeking the death penalty, and we are not putting up witnesses, we're not putting on a defense? that's not right. my attorneys are getting billed to defense. i just kind of felt trapped. i was really upset. >> as for the assault victims that prosecutors presented during sentencing, rodney had only faced trial in one of those cases, and in that trial, he was acquitted. >> the complaining witness in the case where rodney was found not guilty, they brought her in to testify. that verdict was so intellectually and factually and ethically wrong. when i left the courtroom, i cried. >> rodney reed spent four years

on death row watching all of his appeals fail. then, in 2002, innocence project attorney bryce benjet joined the case. >> when i was first approached it seemed like a pretty wild story and something that you know, we had to take with a pretty big grain of salt. but as we investigated the case, basically everything that rodney was telling us panned out. >> benjet soon found witnesses to support reed's claims and evidence against the original prime suspect in the case, stacey's fiance, police officer jimmy fennell. >> they subjected jimmy fennell to two polygraphs and he was found deceptive on questions directly implicating him in the murder. (chime)

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rodney, and that she was worried about what her fiance, jimmy, was going to think about it. >> benjet turned his focus to jimmy fennell, stacey's former fiance, who was the original prime suspect in the case. fennell started dating another woman just three months after stacey's murder and his new girlfriend accused fennell of stalking and harassing her. >> she described jimmy fennell as extremely jealous, as possess of a and as virulently racist to the point where he would object to her going to an african-american to cut her hair. >> when benjet met rodney on death row, rodney said that fennell had discovered stacey's affair and one night confronted rodney and his cousin. >> a witness named chris aldridge, who was with rodney that night. >> we was on our way back home from getting my hair braided and

we was on our way to get on the railroad tracks to go back to rodney's house. >> we were walking and a police car pulls up. >> we were like we didn't do nothing so it was good. >> jimmy gets out. he was with another officer and he was talking like he's going to get me, i'm going to pay for this. "i know you seeing my girl. i know this" and he starts talking about what he knows. >> you think you're slick sneaking around with my girl. no, rodney, you're going to pay. >> stacey's boyfriend told her he felt like he was getting sloppy seconds to a niger. >> prior to her death she said if jimmy found out we were together that he would kill her. i just took it as a figure of speech. i didn't take it literally. you know what i mean? >> just three weeks after fennell allegedly threatened rodney, stacey was found murdered.

>> i didn't find out until like that thursday that she was dead. i saw it on the news. >> they found her body just off a dirt road off 1441. >> i'm like, wow, you know what i'm saying? this is crazy. >> benjet wanted to know whether fennell ever mentioned his encounter with rodney so he searched his interrogation records. >> jimmy fennell was the main suspect in this case. he was actively investigated by the police. they interrogated him numerous times. usually there's a report from that interrogation. there's recordings of that interrogation. at least there's notes from that interrogation. there's nothing in any of the case files that document any of what jimmy fennell described as very aggressive interrogations. that leads to wonder whether the documents existed but when they changed suspects were discarded

and we don't know the answer to that. >> among the records that were preserved were lie detector results, which fennell took several months after the murder. >> they subjected jimmy fennell to two polygraphs, and he was found deceptive on questions directly implicating him in the murder. >> fennell was asked whether he strangled stacey, and if he dumped her body by the road. he said no to both, but the polygraph expert judged fennell's answers as deceptive. >> if someone fails a polygraph, even though the polygraph is not admissible evidence and it's not, okay -- really? okay, this is your fiance, and you're failing a polygraph, on did you kill her? bells don't go off for people? they certainly were going off for me. >> when fennell, who is judged deceptive on the second polygraph, he invoked his right to counsel and then stopped

cooperating with the investigation. >> investigators had trouble placing fennell at the scene of the crime because of the distance between bastrop and his apartment in giddings. >> just a simple logistics of it didn't work. the problem was, how jimmy could have possibly gone with stacey that morning, murdered her, left the truck in bastrop next to the railroad tracks and then somehow gotten back home in time to be back in bed, when stacey's mom called him at 6:30. and it didn't work. >> when benjet looked for additional evidence on fennell, he discovered that contrary to standard procedure, police never searched jimmy and stacey's apartment. >> it's unheard of, when a person is found murdered, to not search the last place that they were seen, and especially in this case, where jimmy fennell

became the main suspect, it is just outrageous that the police did not go and search that apartment. >> it was hard being, having the finger pointed at you. it was hard for them saying that yeah, you killed stacey, your fiance, that you did it because of these reasons, these reasons, you know, but you know, i kept my mind that i didn't do it, they would eventually find the right person. >> though cleared of stacey's murder, fennell would eventually find himself in prison for a very similar crime. hey, joy! hello, thomas. hey, what's the worst part about paying for things you don't want? the-- paying! exactly. and what's the best part about getting things you do want for free? free stuff. precisely. that's why verizon decided everyone in the family should get the unlimited they want without paying for the things they don't, and why it now comes with six months of free apple music. i like music. hey, look at that. i like popcorn. (joy) oh, didn't even ask. how dare you! (vo) this holiday, get the gift you want. the music you love, on the network you deserve.

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shortly after the rape and murder of stacey stites, her fiance, bastrop police officer jimmy fennell, became the prime suspect. after investigators turned their attention to rodney reed, fennell moved to nearby georgetown, texas, to continue his work as a police officer. one night, in 2007, fennell and his partner responded to a call involving a young woman named connie lear. >> my boyfriend and i had got into a pretty bad argument with each other. the police officers showed up and fennell walked over. they arrested my boyfriend.

it left me and officer fennell alone, and he put me in the front seat of his patrol vehicle. he drove down a dirt road into a park, and he stopped his car, and he asked me to step out of the vehicle. and he grabbed me and slammed me at the back of his patrol vehicle. he removed his gun and placed it on the trunk, pointing at my head. he held me against the back of his car, where i couldn't fight back and he raped me. i was telling him to stop, and he just kept telling me to shut up. after he was done, fennell told me that i was going to keep my mouth shut, because if i told

anybody, when he got out of prison, he would hunt me down and kill me. >> this young woman has the courage to call 911, and report what had happened, and what happens? >> i was waiting outside for the ambulance. fennell and the other police officers pulled back into the apartment complex. i started yelling at 911, why did you send the same cop i told you raped me? and one of the officers grabbed my phone and hung up on 911. >> and he gets her in the patrol car and he attempts to cover it up, attempts to get her to deny it. >> fennell's partner had lear record a statement on the squad car's camera saying she was lying about the rape. they then arrested her for public drunkenness. >> and it isn't until she's in

jail that somebody actually listens to her and starts looking into what she has to say. >> lear believes fennell's fellow officers failed to investigate and possibly covered up her rape. >> all they cared about was covering their butts, hiding what had happened. i was treated like i was some criminal, not a victim. >> i was reading the sunday newspaper and i just happened to glance down and it said -- >> "georgetown police officer arrested for sexual abuse" that's jimmy fennell. i was shocked. >> he's charged and ultimately he pleads guilty to lesser charges, and is sentenced to ten-year sentence which he's still serving time for. >> i think the public should be reassured that a rogue officer is going to prison, that he will

not be treated any differently than anyone else, and that officers are not above the law in williamson county. >> this wasn't the person that we knew. he was not like that when he was engaged to my sister. >> the last thing he told me was to keep my mouth shut or he was going to kill me. i'm terrified for when he gets out. because he will come. i know he will. >> i hope i can get my life back together, you know, get this where it's not on my mind all the time. >> the picture of jimmy fennell at rodney's trial was that he was a good, caring partner to stacey, and a victim, and once his conduct becomes public, i think that changes this entire picture for who he really is. >> i saw the look in his eyes when he did what he did to me, and he's truly a monster.

>> former georgetown police sergeant jimmy fennell was sentenced to ten years in prison today. >> some believe today's move could have had an impact on a decade's old murder conviction. >> fennell's conviction shined a new light on stacey's murder. >> it did give me hope, because it was saying what i had been saying all the time, you know? >> but reed's defense was making little progress in the courts. desperate for a new strategy, rodney decided to go through his old case documents and discovered results from tests that had not been completed before his trial of two beer cans found near stacey's body. they yielded dna with a surprising potential match. >> the texas department of public safety reported that david hall, who is a friend and neighbor of jimmy fennell, and

another officer, ed somella and stacey stites could not be excluded as contributors to saliva on that beer can. >> investigators had never figured out how fennell could have dumped stacey's body, abandoned his truck at the high school, and made it home on foot in time to answer a worried morning phone call from stacey's mother. >> one of the prime issues was, did jimmy fennell have an accomplice? the state had dna evidence that puts police officers with the victim at the crime scene? that alone should have resulted in a new trial. >> in 2001, bryce filed a motion for a new trial based on the dna evidence, but the court struck it down. after more than 15 years on death row, the state set an execution date, leaving rodney reed with just months to live. inferior phone detected.

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after an excution date was set for him today. >> the state argued the case has gone on for years. courts denied reed an appeal. the judge set reed's execution date for this january. >> by 2014, many independent observers began questioning reed's guilty verdict, and as his execution drew closer, public outcry grew. >> free rodney reed! free rodney reed! >> honesty, integrity, truth. that's all we want is the truth. that's what justice is about, the truth, and they in bastrop made a mockery of justice. >> so we at that point had roughly seven months to prepare the last round of appeals to save rodney's life. >> benjet rushed to make a final appeal. someone who never heard stacey stites' case was about to change

the course of rodney's life. retired nypd investigator kevin gannon was working for a television series leading a team that reconstructed crime scenes. in the fall of 2014, gannon was given crime scene evidence from stacey stites' murder. and in the pictures of the abandoned truck, gannon noticed something out of place. >> the seat belt in the vehicle was connected. if the individual had moved that body out of the vehicle the seat belt should be out. right away, came to us, the individual might have been involved with this could have been a police officer. officers never wear their seat belt. we see a man with a gun, something, a robbery taking place we want to get out, we don't have time to unbuckle the seat belt. >> gannon and his team also examined photographs from the time scene. >> what caught our eye was the fact that her body and clothing was still intact so they wanted

to basically preserve their dignity. her name tag was like between her knee, sticking out, it was almost as if somebody wanted that body to be found very quickly. and then it becomes obvious to us that this was something that was well thought out and planned and what we call staged. >> photographs of stacey's hands also supported this conclusion. >> the first thing that we all noticed was that fingernails looked clipped. we found that later on stacey was a nail biter but i used to bite my nails, too, and these weren't bitten. they were clipped and straight across. >> police often use dna left underneath the victim's fingernails to identify suspects. 'killer had known this, it would explain the shape of stacey's nails and possibly who tried to destroy this dna evidence. >> who else would do this,

somebody with forensic evidence or somebody in law enforcement, police officer. >> gannon is an expert at postmortem forensic analysis and he discovered something else surprising. blood had settled on top of stacey's arms and face, even though her body had been lying face up. >> she had to be face down for a period of almost two hours for that blood to settle. that shows that the victim was deceased for a period of time somewhere else, was probably moved. >> at rodney's trial the medical examiner had testified that stacey was killed between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. but looking at the crime scene video, gannon believes her time of death was much earlier. >> all of a sudden, when they moved her and they let her go the head fell back to the right all by itself. and then about 20 more minutes into the video, the elbow bent, the wrist flopped. so at that point i said, oh my

god, she's coming out of rigor. >> gannon believes had the medical examiner's time of death been correct stacey's body would have been entirely stiff from rigor mortis. >> she had been deceased for a 24-hour period more than 12 hours. >> gannon estimates the actual time of death was around 11:00 p.m., the night before her body was discovered. >> gannon saw things that were glaringly obvious that frankly both the state and the defense missed, and really it changed our entire perspective of this case. i began a ground-up reinvestigation of the case. >> benjet asked three of the top forensic experts in the world to review the evidence. >> i said you know what? kevin gannon's right.

the state's linchpin evidence is medically and scientifically impossible. there is no way she was killed at 3:30 a.m. she was killed before midnight. body was found, and that places the time of the crime at precisely when stacey was at home with jimmy. this case was entirely about the forensic evidence, and we know that the state's case, their forensic theory of guilt is a sham. >> on february 5th, 2015, ben jet filed a desperate final appeal to stay rodney reed's execution. reed was scheduled to be put to death in just three weeks. minimums and fees.

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-i can still taste it in my mouth! ♪ there's no place likargh!e ♪ i'm trying... ♪

yippiekiyay. ♪ mom. ♪ rodney reed's execution was scheduled for march 2015. now just three weeks away. >> every day that went by where we didn't get a stay we're thinking about all the different permutations if we're denied on one front, what do we do next? and so there's constant planning, but there's a

powerlessness. >> just ten days before being moved to the texas death chamber, the court stayed rodney's execution, rarjlargely based on kevin gannon's findings. when rodney first heard the news, he thought it was a jailhouse prank. >> first my neighbor told me he heard it on the radio. yeah, right. some guys play game, even to the end of the line you've got guys playing games, and then i heard it myself, and yeah. i was elated. i was happy. i was really happy. >> that just gave me hope and i'm living off of hope and faith. >> when i found out that the execution had been stayed, i mean, you would expect for there to be some sort of joy or exuberance, but frankly all i felt was relief and exhaustion. >> but many involved in the case still believe rodney is guilty, and that despite jimmy fennell's

incarceration, jimmy had nothing to do with stacey's murder. >> fennell, he was a cop. he's a bad cop. he was then apparently, and he is now, but that doesn't mean he killed her, you know. if we had evidence to convict him of the rape and murder of stacey stites, believe me, he would have been in jail a long time ago for that crime. >> to take an item and place it around her neck and pull with the force that it took to strangle her, jimmy fennell did not do that. it did not happen like that. if i could say something to rodney, i would probably say i forgive you, but you deserve what the state of texas will be doing to you, and that is ending your life. >> in addition to stacey's murder, reed was charged with two additional sexual assaults after dna linked him to previously unsolved rapes, and many see a pattern in rodney's

defense. >> he was pulling from the same play book in that case in 1987 when he was first asked about it he denied the rape completely, and it was only after he was tied to it by dna that he started to tell a whole different story that he was having sort of a secret affair with her. >> that jury gave him a second chance. they believed him. i think most people don't know the whole story of rodney reed. they don't know that the only reason he was caught is because he tried to do it again, and she was just lucky enough to get away. >> benjet feels these other accusations should not determine reed's fate. >> the issue is whether rodney reed committed the murder, and whether or not you believe he committed these other crimes for which there's been no finding of guilt all of the evidence points to jimmy fennell. >> as far as freedom, i hope that they let me go. i need to hold my mom, you know?

my mother, she's my heart. >> i just want him home. he's lost so much, but if he's home, you know, and god forbid he can live a good life. >> the court only stayed the execution and so we are still in a land of uncertainty. harris county executes more people than any other state in the country, but texas is also one of the leaders in the country in wrongful convictions. >> if the state was to execute me, they've made murders out of themselves. i'm an innocent man. >> he needs a new trial, and at that new trial, rodney reed will be found innocent. >> in 2013, texas passed a law addressing convictions tainted by faulty scientific evidence, which may provide an opening for rodney. >> the thought of rodney reed

being released from prison is absolutely terrifying to me. and it should be terrifying to anyone who has daughters or mothers or female loved ones because he truly is frightening. >> stacey's family remains divided. >> i believe that jimmy fennell killed my cousin stacey that evening before she even left to go to work. i believe she was dead before midnight, and i do not believe that rodney reed killed my cousin. i believe rodney reed is innocent. he's followed all of the appeals that he was due, and we definitely want him to have his due justice. unfortunately, i feel like not only did he take my sister's life, he's stolen her memory with his lies. >> i feel like he's shown no remorse whatsoever. >> none. it's a nightmare that just doesn't end.

on this episode of "death row stories". >> a man accused of beating a 4-year-old girl to death and stuffing her body inside a tv box. >> an unthinkable crime. >> if this doesn't fit the death penalty, nothing does. >> lands the victim's neighbor on death row. >> this nightmare is finally over. >> when a secret deal is discovered. >> don't put your nose where it doesn't belong. >> and a confession is called into question. >> they went after the guy who was vulnerable. >> an execution date is set. >> they're going to kill this guy, and he's innocent. >> there's a body in the water. >> he was butchered and murdered. >> many people proclaim their