real murderers. a simple gold ring. >> had they not been able to trace that ring to its owner in wisconsin, i'm really afraid we'd have two guys sitting on death row for something they didn't do. its owner in wisconsin, i'm really afraid we would have two guys sitting on death row for something they didn't do. i'm craig melvin. >> and i'm natalie morales. >> and this is "dateline." there's this pile of leaves and it's where everything else is clear and flat. my heart is racing a million miles an hour. i was using my boots to move leaves and that's when i scream this had blood-curdling scream.

>> nichlt kki, a corporate executive who made time for romance and her three daughter. >> she was the best mom. >> then she disappeared. dozens joins the search. >> we need nikki to come home. >> then they found her. >> you can't. you can't, baby. >> i suspected him from the beginning. >> one daughter thought her stepdad, matt, did it. the others said no way. and matt, he had a theory all his own. >> it's not the first time she's run away, okay? >> had nikki taken off and found trouble? >> now you're thinking someone gave her a date rape drug? >> that's right. >> this trail would lead to house cameras. >> what they discovered, thousands of hours of tape. >> let me out of this room. >> it's absolutely a torture to listen to.

>> and would reveal one shattering truth. >> i got down on my knees and just started crying. >> welcome to "dateline." nikki vanished. detectives discovered something unusual. nikki's last months had been recorded on camera. could that footage lead detectives to her? >> in the heat of july, this made an unhappy task all but unbearable. >> take some flowers with you. >> they decided, friends and family, that they would all wear red shirts. they got themselves organized in

the parking lot of a walmart in lawrenceville, georgia, an hour outside of virginia, and decided to find any trace of a petite corp executive named nikki. >> she's got three kids that would love to see her home. >> amy robinson told reporters that her 44-year-old sister, mother of three, was hardly the person who would up and disappear without a word to anyone. >> i'm so worried about my sister. we have no idea where she is or what has happened to her. >> the question of where nikki was would happen soon enough. >> i'm sick of playing your games. >> reporter: from the recordings she left behind, what's clear is that she live aid troubled and tormented life. >> this is what i live day in, day out. keep my mouth shut, my head down

and do exactly what's expected of me. >> tell me about her personality. >> she was very funny. she was very feisty. she would say what she meant. you know, she didn't mince a lot of words. >> as sisters, amy robinson and nique leili were ten years apart, but according to amy, they were close. >> you look like each other in the old photos. >> we do. >> i thought you would be swapping out clothes but you're ten years apart. >> we used to share clothes. >> sharing an apartment with amy. >> we laughed putting up pictures in the apartment and stuff. >> sounds like a sitcom. >> at times it definitely was. >> eventually nique moved out, remarried and had two more daughters with her third husband, matt leili, a new

yorker she met online. >> he made my sister laugh and so we would all laugh. >> after brief stays in oklahoma and mississippi, nique and matt returned to settle on this house in sydney's cove. matt, a computer guy, rain small business out of the house, nique was the breadwinner. >> he started going to government surplice auctions and buying these paulettes of old computer parts and rebuilding them and selling them on ebay. >> when it was amy's turn to get married in 2003, her big sis was there, serving as matron of honor zblie just want to toast to amy, my best friend, my confidant and my sister, and the love of her life who makes her head spin. >> and then boogieing to what

else, "we are family." >> the sisters remained close. in late june of 2011, amy organized a spa day out for nique and her three girls. >> no boys allowed. we're going to go have a girls' day. >> where did you ge? >> to get our nails done. >> day of beauty at the spa? >> manicures, pedicures and we went and had lunch. >> nique had had her toe nails painted pink that day and although she sometimes had a difficult relationship with her teenage daughter, she said that day looked like a turning point. >> snapshots everyone looks happy, girls' day out. >> it was fun. i'm beyond grateful now that we had done it. >> two days later, nique left home in the middle of the night without a word to anyone. when the family reported her missing two days later, the police advised them there was little they could do. >> their response was we don't even know where to start

looking. >> she's not on the 11:00 news every night? >> no because frankly a grown woman having left her house want that interesting of a story. 100 people getting together, wearing red shirts, that was an interesting story. so they covered that. >> then the cameras came? >> then the cameras saw that. >> literally beating the bushes around nique leili's subdivision for clues. >> if you see anything definitely call 911 and let them know. >> every searcher had an assignment. >> look, blue skies are going to smile on us. >> harriet garret, nique's mother, had the job of going door to door, leafletting the neighborhood with flyers, picturing her daughter. >> do you think anybody is at home, but we'll find out. >> even though southern hospitality may have been in short supply that day -- >> if you hear any word, call the cops. >> harriet pressed on. >> good morning, sir.

my name is harriet garret. my daughter is missing. and they're trying to get some news coverage. >> like so many of the volunteers that day, alison rockwell wasn't a relative. she was looking for nique, her co-worker. >> she was great. she was so great to work with, very smart. lots of energy. positive. wonderful. just a wonderful person. >> alison recalls she and another man from work, derek, were running late. that would turn out to be an important twist of fate. >> 40 minutes actually. everyone else had started searching. >> were you given a grid or area to look at? >> yes, the front of the neighborhood, the very front of the neighborhood on the right. >> it was one of the last unassigned areas.

>> derek and i went into the woods together and i remember having to walk up and go over a large tree. and there is this pile of leaves in the middle of where everything else is clear and flat. and my heart is racing a million miles an hour. i go up to the pile of leaves. i was using my boots to move leaves at the bottom of the pile. as i was doing that, i said derek! derek came over and he heard the panic in my voice and he started helping me. and that's when we saw blond hair. and i screamed this blood curdling scream. >> and there was no question? >> no. coming up -- >> she said it's her. >> i need to see her. >> there's her hair. >> how awful for. >> you yeah. >> a body and a vital clue.

>> the bottoms of her feet were clean. >> what did that mean when "dateline" continues. sorry, i can't make it. it's just my eczema again, but it's fine. yeah, it's fine. you okay? eczema. it's fine. hey! hi! aren't you hot? eczema again? it's fine. i saw something the other day. myeczemaexposed.com. your eczema could be something called atopic dermatitis, which can be caused by inflammation under your skin. maybe you should ask your doctor? go to myeczemaexposed.com to learn more. ♪ happiness is powerful flea and tick protection from nexgard. a delicious chew that protects for an entire month. ask your vet for more information. reported side effects include vomiting and itching. nexgard. the vet's #1 choice.

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at first, it was the unnatural way the leaves were clumped and then it was the hair zblie hear a scream from the woods. >> you hear a scream? >> yeah, and a tear off running into the woods. when i got into the woods, her co-worker, alison was there and she said oh, my god, it's her. we found her. there's her hair. >> how awful for you. >> yeah. >> nikki leili's friend, and her

sister, amy, felt for sure it was nique beneath the leaves. >> i called 911. >> news cameras were converging on the patch of woods where the body was found. nique's mother said she heard the news when a cop told her to stop leafletting the neighborhood. >> someone had complained and as he's talking to me, his radio goes off. it's a dispatch. body has been found. >> you hear it over the dispatch? >> yes, sir. yes, sir. >> do you go to that place, that little bit of woods? >> yes. we well, i couldn't -- by the time i got there, they had already had the crime scene taped up and i couldn't get any further. >> we're going to move back. we're going to move back on down. >> they had it isolated by that

time. but i got to it as close as i could. >> soon, harriet had nique's oldest daughter on the phone. >> do you know it's her? i'm right here. the police won't let me come, honey. they won't let me through. i'm right here where the police r they won't let me through. where are you? >> i just remember fainting or something. but as soon as i came to, i took off running. and i ran all the way to where the crime scene tape is. >> i need to see her. >> no, you can't. you can't, baby. >> of course, they wouldn't let me see her and i'm grateful that they didn't now. >> as nique's family struggled to process the news, amy faced the microphones and, once again, became the family's voice. >> all i saw was her hair but, you know, we're just waiting for the police to do their job and we'll find out more soon. >> inside the police tape, investigators carefully

uncovered the body of a middle-aged female. she was nude, lying face down and, tellingly, appeared to have a fresh, pink pedicure. given the decomposition, the heat, the rain, investigators figure the body had lain there for a while. >> it had been out there several days. >> reporter: gwinnett county police detective. >> gunshot, blunt force trauma, anything you could see? >> nothing. of course, at this point, there's no identifying documents around. there's nothing around where the body is at that would indicate what happened. >> in the way of these things, dental records confirmed what everyone suspected. the body in the woods was, indeed, that of nique leili. >> the bottoms of her feet were clean. >> connect the dots for me. >> that tells you that she didn't walk out there and put herself in those woods and she

sure wouldn't have covered herself up. >> later, lab analysis of nique's blood revealed something else that was odd. there was a high level of the date rape drug ghb in her system. >> before this woman's death, almost immediately before, someone gave her a date rape drug? >> that's a possibility. >> and he also finds semen? >> that's correct. >> had nique somehow been abducted, raped and dumped less than a mile from her home? the detective couldn't say. but in the days before her body was found, while this was still a missing persons case, ni requenique's husband, matt, told the detective something interestingly. this wasn't the first time she walked out on him. >> my wife has a long history of some kind of mental imbalances, okay? and i've been finding out the past two days everything she's been telling me in therapy all these years has been a lie.

coming up -- >> it's not the first time she's run away, okay? >> the nique no one knew. stories of unstable behavior. >> my father is a witness to her throwing a knife at my face. >> when "dateline" continues. are you ready to take your wifi to the next level?

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her life story. he had been working her case since she had been reported missing a few days later. >> i talked to her dad, her mom, both her sisters. i talked to her oldest daughter. >> the picture that emerged was of a woman whose life had revolved around her work, her daughters and her husband, matt. >> he would come sometimes and do lunch with nique. >> did she ever talk about her gi girls? >> yes. she was proud of all three girls, yes. >> photos on the desk type of thing? >> absolutely. >> nique's marriage had its ups and downs. early 2011 was one of the down times. matt freely admitted that when he talked to the detective the day after he reported her missing. >> it's not the first time she's run away, okay? she's run away and she has been gone for two hours. she's been gone for three hours, four hours one time. she's gone to work with a bag of clothes and come back after work, you know, but she's never

been gone overnight. >> he's telling you, this is just the latest of a continuing episode that my wife has? >> correct. >> matthew, this is detective -- >> in this telephone call which the detective recorded, matt said his wife is mentally imbalanced. >> she's never been accepted. we've been in and out of therapists, there's a fear of intimacy. she's got no problem with girls but when it comes to a male, they're a threat. they're all my life guys have used me for sex. >> a hose full of information? >> i have a hard time getting a word in edgewise. >> she yells at me in front of the kids, throws things at me in front of me and i'm going please stop, please stop. do you remember what the doctor said? is this the person you want to be? >> matt leili said he considered getting a court order to protect himself from his wife. >> i've got pictures of myself with bruises on me. my father is a witness for her

throwing a knife at my face. i'm 250 pounds, she's 98 pounds soaking wet. i'm being beaten up by my wife. who is going to believe me? >> he's telling you she's bats? >> that's what he's saying. >> as for the night she disappeared -- >> they had gone out to eat and gone to a movie after she got home from work. >> we had a great time. we came home. on the way home i said to her, hey, you know -- i wanted to have sex. i said hey why don't you put on an outfit? >> he wanted her to put on a sexy costume of some kind? >> correct. >> that fear of intimacy she was working on getting over was gone but apparently that set her off because she picked a fight. >> according to matt the fight pick picked up and ramped up at home. when the argument touched on the way nique had supposedly been

treating his father-in-law, matt asked his dad to weigh in. >> he called his father, mathias, in the bedroom and basically asked mathias to tell nique about how he felt being down there and mathias came out with a line that he hadn't felt welcomed and that nique reacted to that by basically saying he was lying. >> then matt said his wife did something off the wall. >> i mean holy cow. she rips her shirt off with her [ bleep ] hanging out, no bra, nothing and says maybe we should just [ bleep ] throws her shirt on the floor and then says isn't that what family does? >> she flashed her father-in-law? >> correct. >> my wife has done some weird [ bleep ]. . that's the weirdest she's ever been. >> matt says the dust finally settled in the wee hours of saturday july 9th, nique on the bedroom, he on the couch in his downstairs office. >> i wake up about 6:00 to go to the bathroom.

the light is on in the bedroom. i can see it upstairs. i go upstairs to see what's going on. she's not there. >> all her stuff was still there. her car was still there. her keys, her phone. >> her purse is still there? >> correct. he assume she had left on foot or someone picked her up. >> it was then that he realized his home security system had been turned off. >> i have a camera system in the house. i sell cameras, with a dvr. she always shuts it off when she leaves and she's pissed off because she knows it pisss me off. >> that's the first you learn that this place is wired for sound and pictures? >> correct. >> when nique leili's body was found near her home, learning the story of those cameras became most urgent. coming up, a treasure trove of evidence. >> what are we talking about? >> thousands of hours of material. >> just what will it reveal? >> it's absolutely a torture to listen to. >> when "dateline" continues. b.

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i'm dara brown. tia coleman who lost nine family members in the duck boat accident that killed seven people in missouri. she says she's haunted by her unsuccessful efforts to save her three children after the boat capsized. free maria butino, labeling her arrest on charges of being an alleged spy unacceptable. >> now back to "date lline." welcome back. i'm craig melvin. nique leili was dead and now her husband was telling police that this seemingly happy mom was violent and often mentally unstable. but investigators were about to get a better view into that home than they could have ever

imagined. here again is dennis murphy with the house on sydney's cove. >> within minutes of finding nique's body, police race to the leili's home a mile away. the home security system that matt leili had casually mentioned to detective everson a few days earlier appeared more appropriate to ft. knocks than a house in the burbs. >> you see these huge big cameras on the eaves of the house, both sides. >> there were 21 security cameras in all. with a tricked-out control room to monitor and control everything. >> he sounds like a one-man nsa. >> very low crime area, so it almost boggled the mind as to why he felt he needed quite so much surveillance coverage for the house. >> odd, to be sure. an observation to tuck away for later. the duty that day came firs

notification. telling matt that his wife was found dead. >> the officers said he appeared to be sick. >> he may have been sick, sick of talking to the cops. by now he had lawyered up and wasn't answering their questions. >> you have probable cause to get a search warrant? >> yeah. >> do you think maybe these cameras saw and recorded something that tells us the story of what happened with nique? >> that was my hope. anything in the house that has any sort of memory, be it computers, be it -- he had a dvr hooked up to his surveillance system. >> the detective knew it would take time to review and catalog all of that material. so since the police had found no sign of blood nor any signs of struggle in the house, the detective reviewed the evidence he did have, particularly matt's claim that his wife was bonkers. >> are any of her family members

corroborating this emotional instability issue raised by the husband? >> none whatsoever. >> this is not a woman off her meds? >> no. they're completely shocked by this version of events that matthew leili has given me. >> are any of them suspicious of matt, the husband? >> yes, they were all suspicious of matt. >> nique's daughter, alex, lived with her mother and matt until she was 16. there was plenty she had to say to the detective. >> i wanted him to know what was going on in the house, that i suspected him from the beginning, that my mom would have never left her girls and i wanted him to know he would restrain her or lock her in bathrooms. >> why did he do this, the whole thing with the accuracy? >> he's just extremely controlling. >> still, despite the family's suspicion and the fact that the semen found on nique's body proved to be matt's, the police didn't feel there was enough evidence to make an arrest. >> there's no ankle bracelet, you don't take his passport.

does anybody say if you're moving around, let us know where you'll be? is that kind of relationship with the authorities at that point? zbla >> there's not really a relationship with us. >> what about the computer files from matt's hard drives? they appear to be useless. the best investigators could come up with was this. it's a clip of nique leili walking on to the front porch to have a smoke just after midnight july 9th, the day she went missing. after that, nothing. >> what happened after midnight in that house? >> exactly. that was the million dollar question. >> the video files from midnight until 6:00 in the morning that day were corrupted, according to the tech guy who examined them. >> they could see footage but it was very disjointed. most of it was not time stamped or date stamped. so it was not in a manner you could go in and click play and play through everything. >> the bottom line, the police had zero, nada, zilch.

so with no compelling reason to stick around lawrenceville, matt leili moved back up north to vermont to be closer to his family in 2012, almost seven months to the day that nique's body was found. nique's stepmother said that effectively ended all contact between nique's two daughters, rebecca. >> he was to set up a skype account so we could talk to the girls. nothing. packed up, moved. >> in the summer of 2012, the investigative file passed to cold case detective sergeant john richter. >> when her body was found i was a sergeant. >> does that stay with you? >> certain cases stick with you. this is one. >> at first, richter did what all cold case detectives do, reinterviewed witnesses.

when that went nowhere, he took another look at matt leili's computer hard drives. >> do you think somewhere in there is the nugget that will get you to the next step in this investigation? >> at minimum we need to redo it to see if technology had advanced. i needed a new forensic guy to look at the video, whatever else he could find on the computer. >> the techie richter needed was just down the hall. before joining the police force, he was an i.t. guy. >> i started looking for what we call low-hanging fruit, what's easily available? i found all these audio files. >> nobody had listened to the audio files before, because investigators were so focused on finding video from the night nique disappeared. >> i basically looked at that video in raw format, computer language. >> something was recorded there? >> yes. they just wouldn't play. >> eventually ford determined the screwed-up files were no

accident. someone it deleted those files and then run a clean-up program to clear the database logs. not once, but twice. >> only few times those clean-up logs were run were the day she was reported missing and the day her body was found. >> he said these videos were deleted and this is corrupted. he turns to leave and says i've got a buvennch of audio files. >> quantify it, what are we talking about in terms of hours of material? >> thousands of hours that date back from 2008 up to 2011. >> the audio recordings are probably best described as cringe-worthy scenes from a very bad marriage. >> that's not what i said and how i said it and don't take my words out of context. when we got in that [ bleep ] car [ bleep ] [ bleep ] >> lower your voice! >> it's absolutely a torture to listen to because we have a woman who i know is now deceased and i'm hearing how she's living for the years preceding her death and how she is just being

beaten down psychologically and mentally. >> it took the detective nearly a year and a half to listen to all the recordings. by then, he had heard more than enough. when he learned that matt leili would be returning to georgia to testify in a civil lawsuit, sergeant john richter planned to be waiting. >> could investigators have it all wrong? nique's youngest daughters paint a picture of her mother's inner battles. >> the voices in her head were telling her that people were talking bad about her. >> why they're fiurious with their mom's side of the family. you okay? eczema. it's fine. hey! hi! aren't you hot? eczema again? it's fine. i saw something the other day. myeczemaexposed.com.

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in march 2015, matt leili returned to georgia for the first time since he left the state three years earlier. it was money that brought him back. a court proceeding concerning a payout from his wife nique's life insurance policies. >> i knew he was coming down. that made me uneasy and creeped out. >> this is three years later? >> uh-huh. what we didn't know was that the whole federal courthouse was actually crawling with plain clothes gwinnett county police. >> they were taking him down that day? >> they were. we had no idea. >> plain clothes cops waited all day to make their move. >> get them on the outside of the courthouse. >> who makes the call?

how does it go down? >> myself and detective washington were there and put the handcuffs on him. it felt pretty good. >> i raised my hands and said praise god. that was my reaction. >> in addition to facing a murder charge, matt leili was eventually charged with sexual assault and multiple counts of eavesdropping. a few weeks after his arrest, nique leili's daughters amanda and rebecca post aed a youtube video in support of their dad, saying that their mom hated her family and those same spiteful relatives were the reason their dad was in jail. what they wondered had happened to those girls in the four years they had been in vermont. >> as far as i could tell, he poisoned them against us and i can only attribute that to, you know, them living in a house with a master manipulator. >> the notion of matt leili as a

master manipulator would become a central theme when his murder trial began in january 2016. >> morning, ladies and gentlemen. >> in her opening statement to the jury, prosecutor lisa jones depicted matt leili as a couch potato, sponging off his hard-working wife. >> nique leili was the bre breadwinner. that family was up to $300,000 in debt. >> furthermore, jones said, matt leili tried to control his wife by turning their home into a virtual north korea, with camera devices, lens aimed at them as they sat on the couch and watched tv. >> you will take a look into this marriage, ladies and gentlemen, into this case. you will hear the voices of nique leili and the defendant in this case, arguing. >> nique's murder, she claimed, was simply matt leili's final act of control. >> i think he drugs her, has his way, that she's loud.

she's not able to resist as much as it progresses, that he silences her, that he strangles her and asphyxiates her. >> and maybe not meaning to. >> oh, he meant it. he knew she was leaving, she was done. >> the first witness, her daughter, alex. >> they would be arguing. he locked her in the bathroom. she had been shoved downstairs. there were several nights i would lay up at night and listen to her say please get off of me. get off of me. you're hurting me. >> next, amy's sister told the jury about the constant monitoring at the house. >> we knew that he would record phone conversations that came into or out of the house. >> were you aware at any time whether there were ever gps trackers or tracking devices on any types of the phones or vehicles at the residence? >> yes, i knew that he had

trackers on nique's phone and when alex was old enough to have a cell phone, that he tracked her phone as well. >> then the prosecution gave the court a fly on the wall look inside the leili home by playing those promised recordings of the couple's fight. >> let the record show i am now locked in a room again. i don't want to be here. i don't want to have this conversation. >> the records show she's being an absolute [ bleep ]. wants her way no matter what. >> it was hard to listen to. bitter screaming matches frequently about sex. >> i know that when we go two days without sex, you're going to automatically assume i am on strike mode no matter what else is happening. don't touch me. sit down if you want to sit down. >> i'm reaching out to you. >> i don't want to hold your hand right now. >> in retrospect for the prosecution, the recordings seemed to have the ring of approve essie. >> hands around my throat. >> they weren't around my throat. >> i don't care what the

[ bleep ]. you think, they were my throat they were around. >> get it through your head, they were not around your throat. stop telling that story like that. >> bull [ bleep ]. you threatened to kill me. >> her best chance leaving her marriage came 12 days before she disappeared. yet another argument, she called 911. >> gwinnett county, 911. >> my husband won't let me leave the house. >> my wife is screaming and woke up the children. >> officers dispatched to the home offered to help nique leave. >> she wanted him to go, he wouldn't go. she wanted to go but wouldn't leave the girls. >> two days later, nique leili was dead. in a house that practically everything was recorded, the prosecutor said there was no

accident that during the time that was needed there was no recording. >> matt said somehow she turned off the police department by calling chris ford. >> detective, did an individual have to go in and purposefully corrupt and delete those files? >> that's correct, yes. that's the only way i can explain why with all the dates that i can recover, that's the only date i can't recover from. >> no one knows exactly what was on that missing video, the prosecutor suggested it was probably video of matt leili carrying his wife's body out of the house. in closing, the prosecutor let nique leili have the last word. >> you need to listen to what she says and what she lived. >> welcome to my world. you killed me a long time ago. >> welcome to my world. you killed me a long time ago.

find him guilty. because that's exactly what he is. coming up, has the prosecution really proved anything? >> it's what you call a circumstantial case. >> yes. >> nique and matt's daughter say in their parents' marriage, matt was the victim. >> she took a heel and threw it, and i, myself, had to duck from it. >> was it being thrown at your dad? >> yes. >> when "dateline"continues. nd . the only one to combine a safe sleep aid, plus the 12 hour pain relieving strength of aleve. i'm back. aleve pm for a better am. ♪ happiness is powerful flea and tick protection from nexgard. a delicious chew that protects for an entire month. ask your vet for more information. reported side effects include vomiting and itching. nexgard. the vet's #1 choice. it's just my eczema again,.

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by early, february, 2016, the prosecution had rested its case against matt lyle. the husband was portrayed as an eavesdropping control freak who killed his wife during an argument. his defense attorney, tom clay, insisted that matt lyle was an innocent man, falsely accused by the state of georgia. >> they have a theory, and that theory is nothing more than a hunch. it is a guess. so if you were to ask yourself questions that might have been posed of you if you were to have gone to journalism school -- who, what, where, why and how -- you will find that, during the course of this trial, the state of georgia will fall woefully short in proving the allegations that they are making against this man.

i think their gut feeling was, come on, she's naked, she's buried this close to the house, she's obviously hidden. it's got to have been him. >> what you call a circumstantial case. >> yes. >> the defense attorney concedes he had some difficult circumstances to overcome in this case, beginning with the six hours of missing surveillance camera video from the night nique leili disappeared. clegg insists his client did not erase those files as the prosecution claimed. >> the video surveillance system was shut off at some point in the morning. matt believes that nique shut it off. he is insistent that he did not shut it off, that the system was shut off by nique. >> so whatever happened to her, the cameras didn't see it. >> the cameras did not see it. that is absolutely correct. >> as for those audio recordings of the couple's screaming arguments, clegg pointed out that most were recorded in 2008 and 2009, two years before nique died. according to the defense attorney, matt made the recordings with the

encouragement of a marriage therapist that the couple had been seeing at the time. >> he is talking, and he is conciliatory in my opinion. he is trying to calm things down, and it is impossible to calm nique down. >> please, don't do this. please, nique. >> you do not want to do this with me right now. i mean it. you do not want to tangle with me right now. at all. >> what did i do? >> according to clegg, the prosecution cherry-picked scenes from the leili marriage, highlighting the bad and downplaying the good. bright spots like the 2010 trip matt and nique took to hawaii. they even renewed their marriage vows on that trip. >> the tapes reflect both of them at their worst. now, the flip side is, when they're getting along well, when they are affectionate towards one another, when they renew their wedding vows in hawaii, they don't tape that stuff. >> it's always the darkest side of the moon? >> the darkest side, absolutely, yes. >> as for the night nique disappeared, the defense tried to show that nique leili was

once again acting unstable, behaving erratically. the defense attorney called matt's father, matthias, to verify his son's version of the last fight between matt and nique. the one where she allegedly flashed him. >> she tore off her top and says, come on, let's go, let's act like a family. >> were you expecting any sort of comment like that? >> never. i -- never. >> once nique disappeared, clegg says, matt leili inquired about having his wife involuntarily committed and even hired a divorce attorney. a man who knows his wife is already dead, he says, wouldn't have done either of those things. >> he did not really want to divorce her. he wanted to let her know, look, here are your options. you can go get help for yourself, or i'm going to go forward with a divorce.

>> the defense wrapped up its case by calling matt and nique's two daughters, rebecca, now 14, and amanda, 17. >> did you ever see your dad hit your mom? >> no. >> did you ever see any obvious injuries or bruises to your mom? >> no, sir. >> according to the girls, their mother was the one with the violent temper, not their dad. >> she took a heel and threw it. i myself had to duck from it. >> was it being thrown at your dad? >> yes. >> on the day nique made that 911 call, amanda said her mother complained about hearing voices in her head. >> she was pacing back and forth saying that she was tired of people talking bad about her behind her back, and my dad asked her who was talking about her, and she said that, um, she was hearing voices and like the voices in her head were telling her people were talking bad about her. >> throughout, neither girl made eye contact with their mother's relatives, who hadn't seen them in four years.

whatever affection might once have existed seemed to be gone now. >> we made our own decision. we don't like that side of the family. so we want to stay away. it's not him forcing us to stay away from them. >> in closing, tom clegg argued that, while the state may have proved matt leili unlikable, it had not answered any of the basic journalism questions. who, what, where, when, why or how. >> in closing i said, you have heard all of this evidence. the state still cannot answer any of these particular questions. what does that tell you? that tells you they have fallen woefully short of proving matt's guilt. >> after eight days of testimony, both sides of the family prepared for a long and anxious wait for a verdict. turns out they didn't have to pace long. after just three hours of deliberation, the jury announced it had reached a verdict. >> i'm going to ask you at this time if you would stand and read the verdict out loud. >> as to count one, we the jury find the defendant guilty of murder.

>> though not a sound came from nique leili's family, their expression said it all. >> thank you, sir. >> before passing sentence, the judge gave matt leili once last chance to have his say. >> mr. leili, is there anything you want to say? >> i didn't do it. and i'll be filing an appeal. >> with that, the judge asked matt leili to rise and receive his sentence. >> i'm going to follow the state's recommendation as to count one and have you sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. >> it was a bittersweet ending for nique's family. they'll likely near see matt le-ile again. but as nique leili's youngest girls left the courthouse to go back north with their grandfather, it seemed just as likely that they would never see them again, either. >> they were my girls. i still love them to this day. taught them how to read. got them ready for school in the mornings. >> you'd like to have a relationship with them. >> i would love to have a relationship with them again.

i don't know that that day will ever come. but i want them to know my door is always open. but i don't know if that day will ever come. >> one murder, so many victims. >> that's all for this edition of "dateline extra." i'm craig melvin. thanks for watching. i'm krig melvin. >> i'm natalie morales. >> and this is "dateline." my dad on the phone told us jenny was gone. >> a house in flames. the body of a woman inside. >> we have a body. i need a medic. >> but it wasn't the fire that killed her. she was dead before it started. >> accidents will happen. this was no accident. >> who wanted her dead? her boyfriend said he knew. >> there's people after us. >> what does that mean? >> they're trying to get us. >> but police knew better. >> strangulation is a very pers