i still love joe. i don t think that joe was a bad person. reporter: it took some time for cheryl stack to get to this point. for two years, she has struggled. but has found comfort in her music and her faith. i have been more sad than mad. suicide is so painful on so many different levels. then you add the public factor, the public suicide. reporter: it was february 18, 2010. an angry and violent joe stack set his family s house on fire, then drove here to the georgetown municipal airport, boarded his single engine plane.
this is kind of scaring me. reporter: did you think he might do something that wasn t right? i kind of had like a feeling that something was going to happen, like something bad. i told my mom i wanted to leave. she said okay. so we left. reporter: cheryl took her daughter to this nearby ramada inn. she never heard from joe again. the next morning this is what cheryl drove up to. the morning of the fire, they took refuge at a neighbor s home. it would be there that she would discover the fate of her husband on the local news. they interrupted the house fire to show that a plane had crashed into a building.
while he strips my carcass, he wrote. i choose not to ignore what is going on all around me. i have just had enough. today, that manifesto still haunts cheryl stack. what do you say to people that may be listening to you and thinking, how could she not know about this rage, about this manifesto, about this anger? i knew that he was angry, but i thought he was angry at us. about the irs, i didn t know that he was violent. how could i possibly know he would do a thing like that? cheryl met joe stack through a mutual friend in 2005. both loved music. cheryl played piano, joe played bass guitar.
joe and cheryl got audited in late 2008, and once again, joe was in another battle with the irs. a battle he wasn t going to lose. joe stack started to document what would soon become his suicide mission. he wrote desperate times call for desperate measures, and violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. this is what s left of the home that joe stack burned down. is it hard to come back here? that s hard to answer. it s not as hard as it was initially. it was really hard right after it all happened.
reporter: cheryl took her daughter to this nearby ramada inn. she never heard from joe again. the next morning this is what cheryl drove up to. the morning of the fire, they took refuge at a neighbor s home. it would be there that she would discover the fate of her husband on the local news. they interrupted the house fire to show that a plane had crashed into a building. reporter: how did you react when you realized it was his plane and it was him? well, i don t think i did react. i think i was just just in complete and utter shock. rewrote violence is not only the answer, but is the only answer.