Jermeir had decided that she would have an abortion. and the way she told the story made an impression on pate. when shannon said, jermeir, i m pregnant, what are we going to do? he said, i don t want to have a baby with you. he told me that s how he said it. and she quoted it back to me verbatim. and she said, i remember those words. reporter: not just i don t want to have a baby or i don t want to have a baby right now. i don t want to have a baby with you. i imagine that sucked just a little bit of her soul out. reporter: is that your motivation right there? i think that s where the seed was planted. i really do. because that implies that there is someone else that you would like to have a child with. reporter: maybe someone like jermeir s fiance, denita smith. detective pate now thought shannon crawley had the means, the opportunity and the motive to commit murder. and it got to the point we thought, this is all we re going to get right now. and it s more
She s already charged. before we ask any questions, you must understand your rights. reporter: tape rolled as shannon calmly began telling a new story surrounding the death of denita smith, and in this version shannon said she d been framed. she did show some emotion. but not a whole lot. she was very matter-of-fact, and talked a lot. i think the interview went on for hours and hours and hours. reporter: shannon said the trouble began after she and jermeir broke up, that he was upset that she had aborted the pregnancy, and that jermeir began harassing and stalking her. he would continuously call me on my cell phone at work. it would interrupt the radio. he would come into communications and stand in the hallway and stare at me. i decided then that it may be a good idea to have something to protect myself. reporter: in her first police interview in greensboro, shannon denied ever owning a gun. now detective pate challenged her on that changing story. do you still stand by
You, what s his answer? he says, no, that s preposterous. you can check my phone, you can check my work logs, you can see where i was. i ll do whatever you need me to do. reporter: but shannon told police all the evidence they needed just might be sitting in jermeir s garbage can, which was where she suggested he stashed the knife. and sure enough, jermeir s going out to put his garbage in his can and sees the knife in there. he immediately calls his police department and that s when they find the neighbors who said, yeah, they saw the night before some other car come up and heard a thump and somebody saw somebody throwing something in his can and leave. it wasn t shannon. no identification was made about that. reporter: just a dark figure in a hoodie. that s correct. reporter: was the knife planted? there s no proof either way, but it was tested, and there was nothing that connected it to jermeir. as for his whereabouts at the time of the alleged rape? he actually was
Charged with first-degree murder. now her family was mourning, too. it s devastating, the fear that you have at that point for your child. and no one can convince me that my child did that. i know her. reporter: shannon s dad, himself a former deputy sheriff, was convinced his daughter was a victim of a shoddy investigation by the durham police, perhaps deliberately so. i m not saying that they framed her. i m saying that they simply allowed themselves to be led in that direction. and if they had any suspicions that another police officer was involved, they decided not to follow that up. you were in law enforcement. you cover up crimes by other officers? no, i never did. and what you re suggesting is that durham cops, who didn t even know jermeir, looked away from a murder committed by a guy who worked for another department in another city? they re risking prison time for this guy they don t even know?
you know why. because somebody s listening. no. betting on it. reporter: if he s calling to intimidate her, what s the point in disguising his voice? correct. it was just no way in my mind that that was jermeir. because when i heard these tapes i knew i had the right person. reporter: the crawley family was infuriated. they were certain the calls cleared their daughter and revealed jermeir as denita s killer. they also insist jermeir was lurking in the charlotte neighborhood where shannon was staying. what we went through in charlotte with him stalking her because he was, to me, he was stalking me as well. honestly, i believe that he was his intention was to kill both of them. i do. i think they both rejected him and he was going to kill both of them. reporter: then something happened that seemed to bear out their worst fears. shannon was out on bail and