Outside the town of darby. plucked down years and years ago. a few miles as the crow files from the montana, idaho border. jenny was a reporter around here. it s a really beautiful place, i think, that attracts a diverse group of people. you have retirees and young families. then there is kind of another side to the police, to, right? right. there s an interesting group of people in the west. i think that prefer to live on the boundary of wilderness. and in this side of the place, bill bought 20 acres on the road and built this house with its very own hands. you remember anything about that move? i wasn t pleased about it. so, i was a strong dissenter in our move. some of my earliest memories were of my dad telling bedtime stories about montana mike, who would live these adventures. when he moved there, he said, he was going to be montana mike. he was telling the stories as much to himself as he was to me. it was always his dream to live
He argued this. if anne was a cunning mastermind of some diabolical plot, then, why would she dump the gun in the garage? you use common sense. if you are smart enough to do all of that, you aren t going to be dumb enough to stick it in the saddle bag. besides, they said, the towel that it was wrapped in? it was unlike any other towel in the house. maybe it belong to somebody else? you get the picture. then back to the main question. how did bill stout end up with a bullet in his head? when i hired the pathologist, i said, maybe we have a shot. maybe i have a shot how? that he committed suicide? you think there is a chance he committed suicide? yes. all kinds of reasons, said
Well, there was an obvious unstated possibility, the prosecutor did not appreciate the influence. apparently, there was a strategy to point to the very side of using the handgun, for example. the phrase, over, and over, is to use this. we can t prove who moved the handgun, it might have been matt it might have been noah. i did not like. it i thought it was offensive to these young men, and the memory of their dad. the defense attorney said, that wasn t his intention. in fact, he said, if anyone did move the gun, it might have been out of concern for anne, who, remember, who had already lost her son ben two suicide years earlier. the theory, then, is that someone would come in the house, find a person committed suicide, and in order to spare the feelings of the family, or whatever, had taken the gun,
surreal too, for bill s friend, mark, who, by now, had testified, and heard enough of the case against anne to feel betrayed. she duped me. it did not feel comfortable making eye contact with her. just knowing what she had done. to a very dear friend of mine. yes, what she hadn t that prompted prosecutors to make it known, however briefly, they were considering pursuing the death penalty. but, as we all know a competent defense can make all the difference. this is anne s attorney. i guess what you inherited was a bad set of facts. yes, some of it. so, what did she think happened? someone came in the house, and did it. not her. when they were gone, she and matt were gone to missoula. that evidence seemingly pointing to anne? well, they say it was just poorly interpreted.
Or so, of bill s death. that s right around the time that is reporting the kind of missing. exactly. and, after she killed bill? i have every reason to believe, simply, she carried the weapon out into the garage. wrap it in a towel, stuck in the handbag. oh, and, there was insurance, to. a half million. the beneficiary? anne. so, the affair with barbara miller, the 500,000 in insurance money. an angry woman, scorned. if you had to pick a motive here, what was it? it s difficult to ascribe a single motive. the question that stands out is, what would motivate someone to put in multiple years of planning, and carrying it out? there was a level of anger behind this that did not go away. my, my. what could and scouts defense attorney say to that? coming up someone came in the house and did it. not her.
Parents sat my brother and i doubt and said this happened. i don t remember a time like that, but i remember the fights getting more heated. there was more yelling. i remember overhearing what was being yelled and putting two and two together. why were they fighting? because, said anne, that woman, that arkansas woman, wouldn t let it go. and what began to happen here on the road was terrifying. i remember it was late at night, my parents were arguing or something like that. and at one point i hear one of my parents say, she s coming here. i was like, what s happening? and who s coming here? then, said noah, in the still silence of a montana night, he heard a car. grinding up their long driveway. heard it stop outside of the house. i hear the door shut and my parents there still in the
And hit it somewhere? it happens. it happens. yeah. the attorney said he had evidence to back up the idea, that the medical examiner was wrong. that bill was not killed right after the saturday evening meal. that he was still alive, sunday morning, before he killed himself. the evidence? coffee. there was caffeine in his bloodstream. why would that make a difference? because that means that someone got up, and made coffee. suggesting it was morning? yes. and anne said that when they got home, the tv was on, tuned to cnn, bill s favorite channel. but what about the steak, and broccoli, in bill s stomach? the bill the medical examiner used to pin the death to saturday night? well, said the defense, sometimes bill got up and ate leftovers for breakfast. and, likely, did that on sunday, as he sat alone in the house.
No he is not! the ambulance whale d down local highway 93, and then up the west fork on bitter route river. you want to try cpr, and? i can t, i can t. to what a collection of homes, perched, like supplicants beneath the staggering beauty of the tractor peak. on board of the ambulance, was donna. what was it like going out on a call like that? as an emt, or a paramedic. you get this adrenaline rush when you get the call. and you are thinking about all of the things that you are going to possibly be faced with. don t hang up on me. i don t want to wait here. i don t know if somebody is in the house, or wet. for that reason, the woman on the line, anne stout, said she d driven across a broad green meadow to the neighbor s house to make the call. she told the crew that the call was a possible code black,
the thing is, it wasn t just that last meal they wanted to talk to anne about. crime scenes do tend to tell a story, even, sometimes, if it s hard to discern what the story is. from the moment investigators walked into anne and bill s house, something didn t smell right about this. literally. one of the prevailing things, spoken about those who had been in the house, early on, was there was a powerful smell of bleach throughout the house. almost like someone had been cleaning up. sure enough, pretty soon, they came across three loads of still wet laundry, smelling, strongly, of bleach, stuffed into various places. like, in this laundry hamper. inside of the hamper? more than just clothes. what was a holster doing in there? and a rubber glove? what did they find on the glove? on the outside, and inside
Was the house broken into? and we just lost ben. how much can this family handle? as i look closely at his body, his wound, and his bed, investigators were focused on more specific things, they get to who did it, but first a question that just might lead them there. what time did bill breathed his last? in his bed, before a bullet ended his life? when detectives and the coronary first arrived, what was the estimated amount of time that bill had been dead? when they first arrived, there was some indications that he d been dead i believe it was 8 to 10 hours that point. so they arrived at 5 pm, most likely that morning. morning, correct. that morning, and all day, bill had been alone at home. and and their 16-year-old matt spent the whole day 70 miles up the highway, shopping. they both told the detectives bill must have been killed soon after they left.