Resentment. I wish that there werent so much hate and anger in our family. One Family Member seemingly held a grudge against the victim. Hes always the one that had something mean to say. He was always the one that hated him. Another came gunning for investigators. Who chases the police . But who was hiding the darkest of secrets . Got chills going up the back of my neck. This is not happening right now. A blank sheet of paper hiding a diabolical clue. I fell to my knees and started screaming. Im lester holt and this is dateline. Here is Keith Morrison with family business. There is an eden in the american west. A cornucopia whose bounty daily fills the bellies of millions. Great farms employ legions of workers and enriched with their profits, families pass the land down father to son, generation after generation. They live modestly here in californias central valley. Multimillionaires in crop dusters and battered pickup trucks, deeply conservative, selfreliant, tough enough to thrive in a dangerous business that takes guts and brains, too often lives. Here among the churning, thrashing machinery the power that helps grow the food of life, death can take a man unawares, even on a sleepy summer day. We just looked up and there he was. Like today. A little boy burst from the field of sun flowers next to brandys place. He was beet red, sweaty, he was just covered in mud head to toe. He had his tennis shoes in his hand. Carrying his shoes. He was running barefoot . He said he took them off. I think he got stuck in the mud in the sun flowers. Brandy and her kids live in a rambling house next to one of those big farms. Idyllic life out here quiet, predictable, until the saturday afternoon that little boy appeared. Like magic from the sun flower field. No more than 7 years old or so. So what did he say . He said that his dad was on fire and he needed to call for help. On fire . How could that be . He was serious. He was serious. He was very serious. Once he started to talk, was he making sense . Yes. He was able to talk the whole time, answer whatever questions i had. There was no hesitation. Brandy called 911, passed along details as relayed by the little boy. What is the little boy saying exactly, that his dad okay. You said his dad turned something on for the water . Im guessing maybe an irrigating pump . And it blew up like a bomb. As they waited for the Fire Department to arrive, brandy began tending to the boy, fabian ayala. Gave him some water to drink. Then i took the water and rinsed all the mud off and checked under his shirt to see if there was any major injuries or not. Were you hurt . No. Not at all . Uhuh. This is fabian today, who, his family by his side, told us about the last day he spent with his dad. He would take me out when he had something to do. Fabians dad roberto was a farm manager, a demanding, sun up to sun down job so to squeeze in quality time with his family hed often take one of his three kids with him. A proud man. Always pictured with his chest out, his chin up. On july 16th, 2011, that saturday, roberto needed to flood a rice field by turning on a series of high voltage Irrigation Pumps. Fabian by his side in his pickup truck, roberto drove the quarter mile distance from one pump to the next. And then he stopped, got out, walked to the big electrical box. He was just going to the rice field when there was this big explosion. I go out and see what happened. He was just laying on the ground. So what did you do . I yelled his name out and he wasnt answering so i went to try and get help. So what did you do . You ran . Yeah. Through what . The field. The flower field. Yeah. Big, tall yeah. Youre running through them trying to yeah. How far did you have to go . I dont know. Pretty far. Far indeed. More than two miles running, running, running blindly through the field of golden flowers that closed in about him. And i saw the house and i just went toward it. Do you remember what you said to them . Something happened to my dad. He was that way and can you help me and they said, yes. They called the Police Department and they came as quick as they can. When firefighters reached the Irrigation Canal from which little fabian had run for help, it was obvious there was no life left to save. Roberto ayalas body must indeed have been on fire just as fabian said it was. Why became clear when they found burn holes about an inch wide near the bottom of his feet, an obvious sign of electrocution. An electrical box used to turn on a high voltage Irrigation Pump had apparently shorted out and exploded with such intensity metal fragments blew out the windows and covered the passenger side of robertos new ford f250. A miracle little fabian wasnt killed, too. Translator we received a phone call that something had happened. Reporter robertos wife fabiola. Translator it was when we received the call from the Police Department and they said they had fabian and fabian was okay but they couldnt tell us what happened to roberto. We thought he was in the hospital. Reporter and you didnt know what happened . Translator we didnt know what had happened. We called the hospital and the hospital didnt know anything about what had happened. About an hour, hour and a half later, they arrived with fabian. It was my dad. My brother just started screaming that he was dead. What was it like to see fabian in that situation . I think someone, being older, wouldnt be able to handle it as well as my brother did. Reporter pretty amazing, wasnt it . To run all that way. I wouldnt have been able to run that much. I wouldnt even know what to do. To stay strong the way he did. I just i wasnt there and i couldnt control myself. I dont know how he did it. Reporter farm accidents are as old as the wheel. Bad things just happen sometimes. Still, sheriffs investigators scoured the area, taking photos and collecting every bit of debris they could find, whether it looked like it was from an electrical box or not. One of our jobs for the jurisdiction is to investigate all industrial accidents. Reporter because, said the sheriffs detective, in Colusa County the sheriff does double duty as the county coroner. Osha eventually will take over that investigation if it is determined to be that type of thing. Reporter there was an autopsy, too, routine of course. Told us that the victim had been electrocuted. He had been burned and he had been near an explosion. Reporter pacific gas and electric sent a team over, which confirmed it looked like an accident and, sadly, not unique. He said, well, weve seen stuff similar to this. What might happen is the operator will get into the panel with a tool for some reason and cross the leads with that tool and cause a plasma type of explosion and that could have been what happened. Here, the other thing he did say is weve never seen anything this big. Reporter this is what the electrical box would have looked like before the explosion about the size of a high school locker. And after the explosion, that box was nowhere to be found. All that was left was a splintered post where it once stood. Hard to know what to make of that. On the farm, investigators will continue digging as explosives experts try to determine what exactly happened to roberto. When we return, they unearth the first clue. A piece of metal. That piece of metal said to him that there was something more going on. The new Weight WatchersFreestyle Program has over 200 foods that are zero points®. Now you can count less and enjoy more. I freestyle any way i like. Join for free and lose 10 lbs. 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The farm Roberto Ayala ran, worth tens of millions of dollars, all going to just one extended family, the moores. They were very, very private. Reporter this is mary, part of the greater moore clan. Her family, like many of the big Farming Families around here, keeps its wealth private, too. I knew that there was money there, but they didnt flaunt it in any way and you werent told about it. You just knew that it was there. Reporter she learned early, she said, that the family fortune was also a tool to keep the descendents in line. My dad would say like when i was in high school, if you ever get into drugs or do anything im kicking you out of my will. Reporter though she could never have inherited the land, that birth right was passed from father to son, not daughter. The custom started with the moore family patriarch, who handed the farm down to his two sons, roger and dusk now in their 70s. Each of them had a son born just a year apart, paul and peter, who were in line to one day run the farms as partners. Cousins but raised more like brothers. Here they are in 1978 in cut offs fishing bare handed, latter day huck and tom. In 1980 they were on the same High School Football team. Rogers son, paul, was smart and handsome and a playboy, while guss boy peter just two rows down was tough and blunt, hot headed, really. Pete has a reputation, i think, over in Colusa County. His mouth basically has given him a reputation because of the things that he has said. Im a little different than the rest of them. Reporter oh, boy. So he is. Calls them as he sees them even when it comes to his own family. There is too much money involved and everybody is afraid of what they might lose if they Say Something, even if its right. Reporter there was one Family Member pete did have a deep connection with. His grandfather, the family patriarch. He he was special. Reporter he taught peter about farming, about tending the orchards. He had demacular degeneration, so i was his eyes. Reporter but when his grandfather, his patron, died, petes life changed quite suddenly. After we buried my grandpa, in short order i was pretty much told by my dad and my uncle that they didnt need my help anymore. I dont know whether it was animosity because i had gotten so close to their dad or what it was. Reporter after a particularly ugly fight with his dad, pete was exiled from the land of plenty, moved north of this eden into town and started a landscaping business. My wife and i had nothing, i mean, when i say nothing, i mean nothing to do with the moores. Reporter and paul . Paul remained the family golden boy. His doting grandmother made sure he never went without. Paul married a local beauty. This is his wedding video. And he waited for the day when hed reign over the land. But he was never involved in the Big Questions when and what to sow, what to reap. Those multimillion dollar decisions were left up to Roberto Ayala, who had once been a lowly field hand, but anyone could see roberto was a natural farmer and gradually trust and responsibility and the owners affection came to rest with him. Paul and i were the boys in the family. Reporter yeah. We should have been the next in line. It wasnt fair. It was a slap in the face. Reporter and to make matters worse, roberto brought his brother eduardo in as his assistant. The cousins, their birth right withheld, fumed. Paul would come over and tell me horrible stuff about ed and robert, that robert was saying about me, like he said that robert was told paul that he was going to get my share of what my dad was going to leave me of the ranch. Reporter fair to say though that your nerves were a little bit raw about ed and robert. Oh, no. I was mad. Im going to be honest with you. There was a lot of animosity. Reporter so much so that one day pete jumped into his truck and drove down to the farm and called roberto out. I told him, well lets go. Reporter your intention was to fight him. Oh, yeah. It settles things. Reporter but roberto politely declined. He had a farm to run. The next time pete heard anything more about Roberto Ayala, it was that he was dead. What did you think when you heard that he was dead . Well, i was told it was an accident. Reporter which is certainly what it was. At least according to the experts from pg e. But just to be sure, the detective called explosives experts from a neighboring county. Just to ask them, hey, have you ever heard of an Electrical Panel like this blowing up . And they hadnt. And at their own insistence came out to look at what we had and formed the opinion that it was possibly an explosive device. They, in turn, called atf and fbi. Reporter to some, that felt like jumping the gun. Last thing he wanted was the big city feds treating him like a country cop crying wolf. Now ive got atf and fbi showing up. I was a little overwhelmed. I was a little concerned that maybe, you know, were calling these big agencies for help and really what we have is an accident. We had bomb guys saying it was a bomb, but theyre bomb guys. Reporter right. Were not a hundred percent convinced its a bomb yet. Reporter then, three days after the explosion we got a visit from paul moore. Reporter paul, petes beloved cousin, the handsome golden boy of the pair told the detective he found something out at the scene of the accident, something that shouldnt have been there. He came across a piece of metal that he found. It looked like galvanized iron or metal and that piece of metal said to him that there was something more going on. Reporter did he have any other ideas about what may have happened . He did. He told us his cousin pete had made some threats toward the victim and the time leading up to the incident. Reporter and there was more. Paul showed the detective texts he received from peter sent from the very rice field where roberto was killed. That text was dated and timed the day before. Coming up the focus shifts from the nuts and bolts of electrical explosions to an explosive personality. Pete had a reputation for being a real hot head without hardly an effort pete could tick you off. Reporter when dateline continues. For just 10. Exactly. sup, fellas. Hey, man. sup. Oh, wait. Build whatever meal you want with favorites on mcdonalds new 1 2 3 dollar menu. with favorites on mcdonalds new 1 2 3 dollar menu. Were told the robots are coming for our jobs. But with great change, comes even greater opportunity. Search for greatness. Search indeed. Adjusting a tropical mood. We let it transport us. Adventure. We have a fragrance for that. New Glade Plugins car. Crafted by glade. Sc johnson. The District Attorney is one of colusas most popular. Been in Office Nearly 30 years. Knows where the skeletons are buried and knows just about every prominent family in the county including the moores. If i said they were odd, that would be a pretty good way of summarizing it. Odd. Yes. Odd how . You dont hear a lot about a lot of families but you hear about the moore family. Reporter because they complain publicly about other wings of the family or at least complain in such a way that people complain in a way that other people found out about it. Reporter now the two cousins . Pete ive known for years almost since ive been here. Had a reputation for being a real hot head. A lot of mouth. He couldnt back it up. But he had a lot of mouth. Without hardly an effort pete could tick you off. Reporter so when paul came to the authorities and said, i think pete is responsible for this, did the suspicion seem plausible . Yes. Reporter yeah. It did. We knew pete didnt get along with his family. We knew pete had a hot head. We knew pete had access to the property. Reporter and for paul to denounce peter who was like his brother, sad, perhaps, but made sense to the das office, which signed off on the warrant to have petes house searched. It was just a few blocks away. Went out to grab a bite to eat. When we came home weerks saw them all at the house searching the house. Mary ellen is peter moores house. Couldnt believe it. Reporter did you think it had something to do with what happened to roberto . Well, i didnt think that at first. I said, what are they doing at our house . I got out of the house and said what the is going on here . Two cops came over and grabbed me and escorted me to the front of my house. Reporter mary ellen and peter asked investigators what was going on. They were handed the search warrant stating investigators were looking for anything connected to bomb making. I said how do you know it was a bomb . We dont even know it was a bomb. Reporter that was the first you heard of such a thing . Because we thought it was an accident. Reporter did they seem to be accusing the two of you . Yes. Reporter both of you. Yes. Reporter were you frightened . Oh, yes. Reporter what were you afraid of . That they thought we did it. Reporter around colusa the raid on peters house just days after robertos death was big news. The neighbor began sending out real time