the investigation. reporter: there was no hope of any new evidence, of course, like fingerprints or dna. there was just the infuriating puzzle which had become more difficult with each passing year. after i reviewed the case, i had no feeling for the family, no feeling for jack jessee. reporter: so to get his hand in the game, dove met with the people closest to jack. like his brother david. and when i met with david, he inspired me. his determination not to let the love for his brother go was a big motivating factor. reporter: but david also had some provocative information. something jack told him after arguing with sandra about moving to arizona. if anything ever happens to me, he says, it s her. reporter: not the only time jack said such a thing, it turned out. he actually told me, i
and to those around her, the second seemed somehow worse. her beloved son, tom, up and moved to arizona. and she was flipping out about it. yeah. just she had to go there. reporter: she demanded jack move to arizona too. that woman was off her rocker. her tone was just scary. it was like somebody else s voice coming out of her. reporter: but surely that wasn t motive enough for murder? and with plenty of suspicion but little else to go on, wyatt spent months poring over sandra and jack s phone records, bank statements, credit card bills, searching for well, he didn t know exactly what he was searching for. but he was getting basically nowhere. we couldn t establish a pattern that was suspicious. reporter: then as wyatt s investigation sputtered, sandra left. sold jack s house here in california, moved to arizona to be near her son tom, and soon her daughter followed too.
and they all lived within a couple of blocks of each other in homes sandra helped purchase with jack s insurance money and savings. when everything was said and done, she got close to $700,000. reporter: and as the months slipped past, leads failed to connect, the investigation hit one dead end after another. wyatt was promoted out of homicide. the case bounced from the placentia pd to the orange county s sheriff s department, where before long it became a case to avoid, toxic, an unsolvable career killer. so five years after his brother s murder, when david jessee met a detective named tom dove who said he picked up the case i said, oh, really? well, that s great. let me ask you a question. yeah. what are you going to do? are you going to get the case for three, four, five months, a year, then move up? become a sergeant or something and move on? and tom dove says to me, listen, buddy, nobody likes me in my
stepchildren. while jack s blood relations practically begged to help solve the case. so what happened to that big happy family in the video? a mirage, perhaps? in fact, living with sandra, said jack s daughter cheree and cheryl, was like a fairy tale. it s too late now. the kind britain by the brothers grimm. she was mean to me. she wanted me completely gone. she did everything she could to try and get rid of me. reporter: when it came to her own children, they said, sandra was indulgent, eerily so with son tom. he was a really good mama s boy, to the point it was strange, very weird. very weird. weird thing to watch. they re always walking into the other room and closing the door. yeah. reporter: though jack seemed quite happy with sandra. until the spring of 98, that is. just a few months before the murder when jack was diagnosed with colon cancer. a shock, of course. but one of two shocks for sandra.
within minutes of each other. one of those calls was to a target store, one was to a pager, one was to a boarding house. he called that last number, asked if anybody there knew a guy named schreiber. and the landlady said, nope. but there was one a tenant named schrauben, she said, could that be the man the detective was looking for? brett schrauben. reporter: jack tracked him down to a distant suburb in the mojave desert. right there parked in the drive way was a 1999 pickup truck and a sea-doo, just what the anonymous bartender said. there was a huge break for us. we now have the name of somebody that s involved in jack jessee s murder. coming up often people throw away valuable evidence. detective dove finds treasure in trash. this is too good to be true.