i don t know if we ll ever know those answers, but i hope some day we ll know. reporter: a postscript? andy has taken over the farm now. built a new house where he hopes to make some better memories. matt livers and nick sampson are file lawsuits against douglas and cass countys and the state of nebraska claiming efland was fabricated and withheld. without admitting wrongdoing the government settled the cases for $2.6 million. and the woman who went beyond the call of duty i heard homicide. i knew it was important. reporter: and two still marvel that poor police work almost did their clients in even as the very same cops brilliantly tracked the one piece of evidence that saved them and finally identified the real murderers. a simple gold ring. had they not been able to trace that ring to its owner in wisconsin, i m really afraid
he not only forgot, but he falsified a lot of stuff on the report. that s a bad thing to say it s okay to plant evidence just because the guy s guilty, because how else do you know who is guilty or who is not guilty? reporter: no matter whom you believe on the blood issue, there are two people who know in living technicolor exactly what happened at the stock farmhouse that night. and one of them is about to tell us. jessica reed, on the evil of easter night. two people are dead because of me. doug s a man on the move. but choosing to go that extra mile can be tough on his body. that s why he wears dr. scholl s massaging gel insoles. they provide all day comfort so he has the energy to keep moving. delivering joy every step of the day.
the investigators remained convinced sampson or livers or both had to be involved somehow. they didn t buy the notion that two drug-addled teenagers just happened to stumble on the place by pure chance in the dark. and anyway, fester, remember, said the main shooter, the guy that led them to the farm was a local named thomas, with whom fester had been communicating by phone before the murder. but detectives could find no evidence whatsoever against this thomas or anyone else. and meanwhile, jessica reid kept trying to persuade investigators that nobody else was there besides her and fester, of course. i am not lying! if i was lying, i would not still be going on about this. reporter: she d been saying that for months. i know what happened and no one will believe me. reporter: and though she was right about that, the detectives did not believe her.
concerned about was what was the evidence against nick sampson, regardless of whether he did it or not? i just had to know what the evidence was. reporter: then quite by chance, this tiny piece of what seemed to be evidence showed up. police missed it the morning after the murder. one sharp-eyed cop just happened to notice it a couple of days later. it was this gold ring on the kitchen floor. i thought somebody took it off to wash their hands and fell down and they forgot about it. reporter: but at the time it could have belonged to the victim. could have been belonged to anybody. it could have. reporter: except one thing people should know about the stock house, nothing was ever out of place. so one of the investigators picked up the ring, bagged it and tagged it as evidence. it was a size 10, a man s ring, bearing a message. the inscription said love always, corey and ryan. they wanted to find out who was a ryan and who was cori. reporter: who was cori and who was rya
evidence properly, even misdated the report. i did make a mistake. i didn t follow procedures. and that bothers me. and there s no way around that. that was wrong because i m a boss, because i m supposed to set the example. reporter: it is a little disconcerting, though. it is disconcerting, but it is also the reason why i say this is ridiculous to accuse me of planting evidence. why would i screw it up? why wouldn t i log the evidence in? why would i make mistakes that point the finger at me. reporter: a federal jury in omaha heard the case and took just a few hours to acquit kofoed of all counts. but the state of nebraska wasn t satisfied. appointed a special prosecutor and charged kofoed with evidence tampering. and this time, after a week-long trial before a cass county judge on what one headline called a dark day for law enforcement kofoed was found guilty. you understand what you were convicted of? yes, your honor.