texts from the evening of the murder that are really pretty disturbing. reporter: at 6:36 p. m., james lapan sent this text to jessica. pitbull. to which jessica replied, his dog. his name is smokey. and then james instructed jessica to delete all their texts. why are you talking about nick s pit bull the night he s murdered? jessica testified she and james had talked about her getting a dog like smokey for her daughter. that said, investigators still wonder if jessica was feeding james information about nick. remember, after the murder, smokey was found in the backyard. did james put him there, and was he able to pacify the dog based on help jessica provided? we wanted to ask jessica about all of that.
frightening. serena recalled a disagreement in which she wanted to step away from him to check on their children. he was physically holding onto my biceps at that point in time. he was just like, we re going to finish this discussion. immediately following that, he said, the children are replaceable. we can make more. i m not. and at that, i m like, oh, you re replaceable, but not like i it s not like i can say it, you know, because at that point and if you had said it, what would have happened? i don t want to know. so i don t know want to know what would have happened. so then it became an issue of pick your battle. and the battle i picked was protect the children. which is why, she says, she turned a blind eye to her husband s affair with jessica. even when james invited jessica home for dinner. what kind of hostess did your husband expect you to be for jessica?
homicide on the north side and that the whole unit needed to respond. pima county sheriff s detective jennifer garcia had been in the homicide unit for all of seven months. this was a call she d prepared for ever since she was a little girl and saw her grandfather in uniform. it was just something that i ve always wanted to do, you know, sort of my dream job. and now here she was, lead detective in the biggest murder investigation in tucson. she began by methodically walking through the scene, nick s house, starting in the garage. immediately i noticed a bucket full of water and some carpet fibers, which at the time i thought was odd. inside the cabinet under the kitchen sink was open. in the living room, cleaning products left out. and in the backyard was a large pit bull.
the same hostess as anybody else. if they re invited over to dinner, i m going to be cook i m going to be the one cleaning up the kitchen. for your husband s mistress? yep. you get some sense that james enjoyed humiliating you like that? absolutely. i think it was a power thing. serena cooked dinner for her husband and his lover and listened to james and jessica talk about nick morelos. it was all demeaning and hateful stuff. james used to pick on her and poke at her about why don t you go back to your go back to nick? you guys were such a couple and a thing. go back to nick. so there was some jealousy there? definitely. now james lapan s only possible hope at trial was serena and her statement to police that her husband was asleep next to her when nick was killed. you wouldn t try to be covering up for him for anything? no. okay. but now a little bit of drama was about to spawn a lot more. in december 2017, as james lapan sat in a pima
i know he was cheating on me with claudia. when he got caught with her, um, and then he kicked me out and then moved her in. give me some sense of the timeframe, of how quickly nick ended one relationship moved on to the next. it was pretty quickly. i would say within a week, or a couple of days. he was done with jessica, and claudia was living with him? yes. he didn t waste any time. no. that s the kind of speed that s going to make people feel bruised and angry. yes. and maybe vengeful? yes. he kept denying it. so i drove by his house, and i took a picture of her truck parked outside and confronted him with it. was the morelos family right? was she the woman they saw poking around nick s house just after the murder? some of the family