Page 51 - John Sutton News Today

>> teddy montoto told police he had been on the phone with susan, heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire, rushed over to the sutton house with a gun of his own to try to help. but was that the whole story? they gave montoto a polygraph. it showed he had been deceptive, hiding something. >> what we learned was that he was having an affair with mrs. sutton. >> so montoto hadnt been straight with them, or with his good friend and partner, john sutton. but was he off the hook for murder? well, mayb...

At that point he immediately began to sob, put his head on the table, and said, im [ bleep ]. >> but did that mean he was guilty, or merely that he understood the police believed he was guilty? >> he made comments like, theres no magical way i can tell you where to go to find the truth. >> christopher sutton and garrett kopp were charged with first-degree murder, a possibly death penalty case. both pleaded not guilty. and john sutton? got busy. he had a mission, two, in fact. one, to seek justic...

Testimony in court of both the girlfriend and the hitman. but even with that, the case was, as prosecutor kathleen hogue knew all too well, rather weak. >> this was a circumstantial case, extremely circumstantial. really based on motive. >> sutton wanted the law to convict his son of murder, but was christopher actually guilty? coming up, in court, a killer returns to the scene of the crime. >> what did you do at the end of the hallway? >> proceeded to shoot. >> who did you shoot at first? >> jo...

To talk to john sutton. he was on pain medication. he was intubated. were looking at maybe incidents in his law firm where people may have been angry at him. >> civil attorneys take a lot of money from people and they make people mad. >> i said, find out if any of these people had reason for revenge on john sutton. >> john sutton ran his law firm like he ran most things in life. efficient and hard-driving. in fact, detectives heard about one woman who lost a $97,000 lawsuit and was so mad, she t...

Hitman who murdered his mother, blinded his father. and here he sat, apparently confident, highly prepared, ignoring most of the time the surviving members of his family a scant few feet away. >> you know, we laughed at it. but i have nothing to say to him. >> melissa sat with her father, their father, front-row seat. prosecutor karen kahgan told the states story, what happened the night of the murder. >> the man who hired the gunman signed on to commit a double murder. a man who was intimately ...

Positive excitement. and a little germ of hope lodged itself in his stubborn mind. and you were thinking maybe they can do it for you? >> i said, i am in the right spot. >> he talked to the leading researchers, working on optic nerve repair. >> have you done any studies with severed optic nerves? >> he peppered them with questions, like he was cross-examining witnesses. mike gilmore, then the president, offered sutton a glimmer at least of hope. >> we will be able to regenerate an optic nerve. i...

>> what john sutton didnt know is his son went back to the one job he seemed good at, selling drugs. he didnt know that kopp was one of his best clients, who had been buying and sometimes reselling the drugs, mostly marijuana and xanax. and he and christopher spent plenty of time sampling the goods, according to the prosecutor, kathleen hogue. >> it wasnt just drug deals. they hung around a lot, doing drugs, playing video games, whatever. >> in months after the murder, phone records showed a spi...

He was an expert marksman, had been shooting earlier that day. >> another twist in the story, but what did it mean in terms of the likelihood that he was involved in this incident? >> again, it was early in the investigation. there was a lot of investigating to do. >> mostly, for days, they waited with everyone else to see if john sutton would survive the attack, to see if they would ever be able to ask him what happened. until now, all they had heard from sutton was this. >> are you bleeding? d...

His head. the tip of his ring finger was blown off. other shots hit his thumb and shoulder. >> there were six pretty good sized bullet holes. >> when he was well enough to talk to detectives, sutton told them what he could, the story of a man who barely witnessed the attack that killed his wife and almost killed him. he was a former college swimmer, so he was watching an olympic diving event in the master bedroom, he said. >> next thing i know, somebody was standing there in a black hat or visor...

Theory of the shooting of john sutton and the murder of his wife, susan. that christopher sutton hired his friend garrett kopp to kill his parents. while the case against kopp was fairly strong, remember, the murder weapon was found in his possession, the evidence against christopher was purely circumstantial. the samoa boot camp might have given christopher a motive, but -- >> we needed more than that to make the arrest. i decided it was time to act. were going to need a confession, i believe. ...