She loved horses.
She was a horse girl.
Well, he was just, he was a cowboy.
You never ever thought that something like this would touch your life.
That somebody would break into your home and kill you.
My sister was stabbed.
Tim was stabbed.
It was pretty much gut-wrenching devastation.
The major scene took place inside the house.
What did you see when you got in there?
A lot of blood. probably the worst scene in my entire career.
There were some strange goings on before this occurred.
Tim's truck was blown up, is that right?
There was an explosion and all of a sudden it was burning.
He had gotten at least one threatening letter.
The letter scared me.
I just said, you need to be careful.
There were a lot of suspects, a lot of people who might have done it.
I thought, that's insane.
There's been a mistake.
In my heart, I know he did not do this.
He's an innocent man.
30 years without an answer, and then finally there is one.
It's pretty tough to talk about.
I mean, murder's shocking, but this?
Two deaths, three decades, one shattering twist.
Murder at the farmhouse.
I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.
Here's Keith Morrison. with Raising the Dead.
The morning was gray and solemn.
It was Friday the 13th of June, 2025.
We are present at Oakwood Cemetery in the city of Wyawega.
This is the official recording for the court-ordered exhumation.
They knew.
Every one of them knew.
It could all turn on this moment.
Raising the dead to solve the murders.
Evidence doesn't lie.
Was the man in the grave the killer?
Did you hear that he had made statements about getting away with murder?
I did.
Or would he, now long dead, point to someone else?
He's not a man.
He is a monster.
It all started on another Friday in tiny Wyawega, Wisconsin.
That was March 20th, 1992.
Tana Togstad and her boyfriend Tim Mumbrew were heading for a night out at a bar.
Tim's sister, Tina.
Their plans were they were going to go watch a band called Sweetwater.
Are you coming?
This is Tana's brother, Rick.
They were up there dancing and stuff.
They liked to have a noisy good time.
Oh, yeah, yeah, they did.
Yeah, Tana and Tim, they enjoyed having fun, yes.
And why not?
She was 23, he 34, and their love was still new, exuberant.
They were on a double date with their friend Jill and her boyfriend.
It was elbow to elbow.
Tim and Tana started dating dancing country swing, which takes up a lot of room and it's a very fast-moving dance.
Not everyone loved that, as Jill could see, even if Tana didn't.
I said, it might be a good idea for us to leave.
I expected an argument, but she's like, yeah, I think I'm ready to go, too.
You don't forget certain moments.
Even now, Jill recalls it fresh and like a wound.
She gave me a hug, which was odd.
We weren't real physically affectionate at all.
And then she said, you know, will you come over to my house tomorrow morning?
When Saturday broke, Jill saw that it had snowed overnight.
She didn't feel like going to see Tana.
I talked myself out of going over there.
We did that often, you know.
I guess, broke commitments.
And I thought maybe she would call me later in the day and say, hey, are you going with us tonight?
But I never heard from her.
All day that Saturday, no one heard from Tana and no one heard from Tim, which was unusual given Tana's family lived right next door.
And then the following day Sunday, they couldn't help but notice Tana and Tim's trucks hadn't moved and Tana hadn't fed her horse.
And so... walked over to her farmhouse, went inside.
What they saw could not be erased or undone.
I was the detective on call for the weekend, and my weekend was winding down.
It was mid-afternoon when Al Crager, then a newly promoted police detective, got the call.
Go to Tanna's farmhouse.
They just said there were people deceased, and I was... to head over there.
The chief deputy was en route.
Oh, boy.
A big deal here.
Yes.
When I got to the scene, everything was roped off with the do not cross sheriff line.
Another detective took him inside the house.
What did you see when you got in there?
A lot of blood.
Then he takes me to the bedroom, and that was like there was a war in that room.
Tim's body was on the floor.
Could you tell what had been done to him?
He had a lot of blood on his chest.
He'd been in a hell of a fight, was stabbed 27 times, his throat cut.
Tana's body lay on the bed.
Totally exposed with no clothes.
And then she had one single piercing to the heart area in the chest.
Man.
Had you ever seen such a thing before?
Never.
Never.
In fact, that was probably the worst scene ever.
I've ever seen in my entire career of 41 years.
Not even Tana's little dog, Scruffy, was spared.
Scruffy, we believe, was stabbed out by the front door.
Did it seem to you like it was done by one person or more than one person?
That was tossed back and forth.
Could it be one?
Could one possibly do that?
Whoever entered took him by surprise.
And was very, very angry.
Yes.
Inside the farmhouse, crime lab techs went about the dismal work as best it could be done in 1992.
Blood was collected from various spots.
There was semen collected on Tana, so we believe she was sexually assaulted.
They lifted what fingerprints they could though, perhaps surprising given that chaotic scene they didn't get any useful matches.
But there was this.
The door was taken because we had a bloody palm print.
They collected anything that they thought might help in the future in case this case didn't get solved immediately.
Just as well, because it did not get solved immediately.
Neighbor-eyed neighbor with suspicion.
Are we next?
As the families lived and relived their pain.
Never giving up on justice.
I don't give up.
No matter what.
They were sure they knew who did it.
Guilty as hell.
He knows that he did it.
The evidence was overwhelming.
And they were sure they knew who didn't do it.
It's not possible.
I was just in disbelief.
There's just no way.
No way.
But of course, that's why we have juries, isn't it?
I said, he'll either be found guilty by the 12 in the jury or by God.
That Sunday in March 1992, amateurs monitoring the crackle of police radios picked up the news that Tana and Tim had been stabbed to death.
Neighbors lit up the phone lines as they tried to reach the couple's families.
Get home as soon as you can.
I said, well, what happened?
Tana's brother Rick was out getting farm supplies when his wife called the store to find him.
Just in a panic.
She said, Tana's dead, Tim's dead.
What happens inside you when, you know, in your stomach, in your heart?
The pain and the anger and... I guess I was completely distraught.
Tana's friend Jill, who remember had planned to see Tana again hours after they'd all left the bar on Friday night, was working when she got the news from her mom.
At first, I...
I thought, well, this has to be some kind of mistake.
And I didn't, I was just in shock.
Tim's sister Tina had been expecting him to visit that weekend.
I can't even explain how horrific it is to have something that savagely, brutally horrific happen.
She called her brother, Todd.
And the phone rang.
It was Tina.
She told me they both had been stabbed to death.
Meanwhile, Tana's family told investigators about some strange noises they heard from their place just a few yards away.
Night of the murders.
Tana's sister heard a dog barking in the middle of the night.
She got up to explore and see what was going on.
And she looked out this window right over here.
She saw a pickup truck leaving the residence and it sped off very fast.
That was after 4 a.m. on Saturday.
The detective figured it could have been the murderer or murderers getting away.
But why would anyone want to murder this young couple, both from local farming families?
Tim, remember, was 34, Tana just 23.
She was just a goofball.
She was an absolute goofball.
And captivating. said friends Michelle and Tommy from the minute they met her in high school.
It was her smile.
And it would just light her face up.
And you would just see just behind the eyes, oh, this little bit of trouble.
She loved horses, but also dogs and cats and cowboy culture.
We got along really good.
It was just her love of life and her fun personality.
Fun even when getting busted by the cops.
We ended up getting underage drinking, but not Tana, because she told the cop that she wasn't feeling all that great.
And she's like, sucker.
You got it, not me.
And I'm like, really?
When her father died, Tana moved into his farmhouse.
To pay the bills, this being Wisconsin, she worked at a local cheese factory.
Boys.
Her friends said she was cautious, didn't put up with any BS For her.
I think her knight in shining armor would be a cowboy.
And around Halloween of 1991, she found him.
Tall, slender, great smile, attractive-looking man.
If you saw him standing someplace, you would think he came in on a horse.
Her cowboy, Tim.
All of our family have been rodeo people.
We're all really close.
Tim's friends, Carol and Mark.
He was good to everybody.
Easy going, good with the kids.
Tim was the protector when his sister Tina was 12 years old.
We were hunting and I had fallen through the ice and it was up to my neck and he was the first one up there to run up to me and grab my gun and pull me out of that.
After a stint in the U.S.
Navy, back home, Tim got a job doing maintenance at the local iron foundry.
But his passion...
He would protect the kids by being the clown to distract the bulls, so that the bulls wouldn't hurt the kids.
It was thanks to Tina that Tim first laid eyes on Tana.
He had been looking through Tina's photos.
A picture of Tana was in those pictures because Tana was at my baby's shower.
And he saw her and he's like, who is she?
I need to meet her.
Awkward.
Tim was still married to his second wife, Colleen.
They had a four-year-old son, so Tina said maybe not a good idea.
But Tim didn't listen.
And anyway, he and Colleen were getting a divorce.
It was weeks away from being finalized.
Tim, when he set his mind to doing something, he was going to do it.
So Tim and Tana became an item.
They rode horses, they went dancing, they fell hard for each other, said Tim's brother-in-law, Mike.
He was in love with her.
Devoted, apparently, until his last breath.
He did everything he could until he couldn't do nothing else.
And it was to protect her and to keep her safe.
But why them, of all people?
Neither Tana nor Tim seemed to have any enemies.
There was no obvious motive, not from the crime scene anyway.
Was there any sign of robbery?
Not that we could tell.
Once the family was allowed to go in there.
Once the scene was released, they couldn't pinpoint anything.
That was taken.
So somebody just walked in on the middle of the night as they were in bed?
Yes.
In a town like Waioweka, with fewer than 2,000 people, somebody had to know something.
Tana's brother Rick was sure of it.
We're in a little town.
Well, a little town, as they say.
Everybody knows everybody. and everybody's business.
Way back at the beginning.
Soon after that awful Saturday in 1992, investigators already had some solid leads.
They knew who they needed to talk to.
He had a temper and he was into knives.
The investigators were pretty sure of it.
They'd soon figure out who killed Tim and Tana.
Did the sheriff tell you that he thought it could be solved very quickly?
I think they did think it was going to be solved very quickly.
As Detective Crager interviewed family and friends, he learned that there had been signs, terrible signs, that something bad was coming.
Scary stuff.
About two months before the murders, Tim's truck was parked in the driveway.
Then we heard just the most horrific boom you could imagine.
Something exploded underneath the hood and his truck caught on fire.
And his whole entire truck was engulfed in flames and it was 20 feet in the air.
Everything that he had from his home was in the back of that truck.
And he was in the back of the truck blowing things up.
They were all yelling at him to get out of there.
And it just burned up.
Of course, they called the police right away.
They couldn't find out if there was something put in there to detonate or what.
Nobody knew why or how or who did it.
Right.
Correct.
Then, poison pen letters arrived.
About a month before the murders, one warned Tana that Tim was a jealous, violent man and that he was using her.
Another warned Tim that Tana was sleeping around.
The final threat came just days before the murders.
A message scrawled on a bathroom wall at the foundry where Tim worked.
Tim Monroe must die on Friday or something like that.
And Friday was the day it happened, right?
Friday night into Saturday morning, yes.
Did you get the sense from these incidents that somebody was targeting at least Tim and maybe both of them?
Yes.
But who?
I suspected everybody.
Anybody that looked at me crossways.
And one obvious man to suspect was a guy known as Scooter.
Scooter was Tana's ex-boyfriend.
What did you know about Scooter?
He had a temper.
Uh-huh.
And he was into knives.
Tana's family and friends had stories about Scooter.
He could be scary, they told the detective, and violent, too.
This is where Scooter punched the wall.
This is where Scooter kicked the wall in or broke the door or whatever.
He threw a beer bottle through the back window of his truck and she was sitting in the passenger side.
It came through the window and just ruptured the window.
I don't know if she got hit by the bottle, but I went to see Tana the day after and she was still picking glass out of her hair.
Thing was, investigators learned Scooter was determined that Tana couldn't leave him.
He did not take the breakup well.
He'd threatened her.
If I can't have her, nobody will.
So we just assumed it was him that he finally did it.
He was a good suspect.
Yes, he was.
He had nobody that could give him an alibi.
I interviewed him many times.
I was convinced he was our guy.
But relationships.
If Tana's ex was getting the third degree, so was Tim's.
In fact, Crager discovered that Tim's Not quite ex-wife, Colleen was the one who'd written those menacing letters to both Tana and Tim.
Was it obvious right at the get-go that it was Colleen?
Yes.
The divorce was especially bitter because Tim, who'd moved in with his sister Tina, wanted more access to their four-year-old son.
According to family,
The divorce that he was going through was the most wicked divorce thing I'd ever seen and heard.
I needed to remove my baby daughter from the house because of what was being said on both ends of the phone.
Did you question Colleen?
Yes.
But she was a very small, petite gal, and there was no way that she could do this.
If she wanted it done, she would have to find somebody to do it for her.
So was it a murder for hire?
Certainly there was a motive, a possible one anyway.
There was a $100,000 life insurance policy.
That had to make you think a time or two?
Or three or four.
They couldn't find the murder weapon, the knife.
But they had two viable suspects and they didn't stop there.
They widened the search and rounded up men who lived in the area who were known in the past to have been violent.
One of them was a guy who worked at the foundry where Tim worked and also lived close to Tanna's farmhouse.
His name was Jeff Teal.
He was capable of doing it.
He had a record.
He carried a knife, but his threats usually were with a gun.
Jeez.
Nice fella.
Yes.
A fella, investigators learned, who liked to drop her two of the hard stuff.
If you ran into him in a bar or someplace where he's having a bunch of liquid fight, you just stayed away from him.
He just always carried a knife when he'd come off as a very mean hombre.
I just remember a lot of talk about violence with him, domestic abuse.
Kind of the guy you would think, we've got to look at him for sure.
Well, they did.
They did look at him for sure.
What might his motive have been?
Investigators found out that Jeff Thiel had stolen some wire from the foundry and Tim had turned him in.
What did you think about him as a possible suspect?
With his background and his build and strength, he was certainly a person that we had to go after.
Tim and Tyler, such a bright young couple, were gone.
The whole county seemed in mourning as their families laid them to rest.
All I remember is I could still see her laying there.
And the rest of the whole thing was just, I don't remember any of it really.
I was in shock.
Tana's mom let out such a guttural.
It sounded like an animal.
It was devastating.
She screamed, oh my Tana, why my Tana? and that was the worst thing.
It was pretty much gut-wrenching devastation.
It was like, you don't even know the amount of pain that's involved.
In a separate ceremony, Tim was honored as any cowboy would hope to be.
There was a team of black horses that was the escort out to the cemetery and they wore the capes like you'd see in old movies, or something like that.
So it was like the Old West type of thing.
Tim's brother-in-law, Mike, remembers how investigators roamed through the mourners.
They videotaped the whole thing, and I understood why.
I mean, most times a person does something like this, they may come back and act like nothing's wrong, just to see.
Did it help?
Not much, apparently.
This wouldn't be quick and easy after all.
But every day the investigators chipped away at their leads and one by one, their list of potential suspects narrowed.
This was 1992, remember.
It was two years before the O.J.
Simpson case made DNA a household word.
Back then, Detective Krager and the others could only compare blood types.
But that simple test was enough to rule out their very first person of interest, Tana's ex-boyfriend Scooter.
He did not match.
So then I left him alone and moved on.
Moved on to Tim's ex, Colleen?
The investigators brought her in again and again trying to suss out whether she hired someone to kill Tim for the insurance money.
That was looked at very hard.
In fact, I think we even held that up for a while, the payment of it, until we were totally convinced that she probably didn't have anything to do with it.
Eventually, investigators would rule her out.
But they kept looking at Jeff Teal, that known-to-be-violent character from the foundry.
He had left town three years after the murders in 1995.
But the next year, in 1996, they got a sample of Teal's blood.
That's around the time DNA was becoming an evidence gold standard.
They ran a test with Teal's blood.
And... investigators concluded Teal was not the killer either.
Well, they kept at it, but there were no arrests, no new suspects.
Then, in 2008, Mike Sasse took over the case.
Sasse.
One of the original deputies of the crime scene was, by 2008, an agent with the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation, the DCI.
Myself and my partner started to methodically go, piece by piece by piece, through this investigation, organizing it into the modern day age.
They dug all the way back to the first days of the investigation, looking for leads that back in 1992 didn't look like leads.
It was granular sort of work and it seemed to pay off when, in 2012, they found something, or rather someone.
And they pounced on it.
I get to a name of Glendon Galker.
Glendon Galker was one of the men they'd looked at back in 1992.
Glendon Galker then worked for a man named Lane Shields.
And he ran a Western store at the time.
Why was that an issue?
Tim and Tana bought their cowboy gear in that store, so a kind of connection.
Anyway, back in 1992 they interviewed Galker multiple times, strapped him into a polygraph at one point.
Nothing came of it then.
But now?
I literally go to Google, and I looked at my partner, and I said, is it Glendon C. Gelker?
He said, yeah.
Why?
I said because he's in Oklahoma and he's in custody for a homicide he committed in Oklahoma in 2010.
And it was a brutal murder.
The case was splayed across the internet.
In September of 2010, a 19-year-old man named Ethan Walton drove out with his girlfriend to meet with Galker at his home outside of Prague, Oklahoma.
Galker lived in a trailer home down a dead-end road.
Ethan thought he was there to sell Galker some land.
There was a property deal that was fictitiously put together by Galker.
Instead?
Galker kills him and puts him in 55-gallon drums.
He calls the girlfriend into the shed.
She comes in and he sexually assaults her.
She's naked and literally gets herself free.
She squeezed through a window to escape, then ran for dear life through a field to the nearest neighbor's place and made it.
Galker in hot pursuit, shooting off his gun before the police caught up to them.
And now...
Gawker was facing the death penalty for killing a boyfriend.
As this hits warp speed, like, we might be onto something here.
We now have somebody that's in custody for the same situation.
Yeah.
That's involved in our case and was a suspect back in 1992.
Yeah.
It marries up very similar to Montana.
It sounds to me like this guy fits the profile of a psychosexual serial assaulter, if not killer.
Correct.
You think you got something here?
Yeah, we think we got something.
Absolutely, we do.
After the murders, a certain terror descended on Wapaka County, Wisconsin.
This was a safe community.
Tana never locked her doors.
For the longest time I went through.
Oh my gosh, is it something that did?
They go after Tana and now maybe Michelle's next, or I'm next.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was a definite fear.
Yeah.
As long as the case went unsolved, that fear lingered.
Now, Agent Sasse and his unit had revived a person of interest, Glendon Gowker.
As they dug into his time in Waupaca County...
They discovered police had interviewed him even before Tim and Tana's murders for another crime back in 1990.
Glennon Galker had been a person of interest in a rape in the village of Iola, which is 20 30 miles from this location.
Just your sort of guy who would do this?
Yes.
He's a guy with a violent demeanor.
He was never caught for the rape.
Back in 1990...
In the days before common use of DNA testing, investigators simply didn't have sufficient evidence to charge him.
And the case went cold.
But now Gouker was in jail in Oklahoma charged with rape and capital murder, and Oklahoma had his DNA.
And it matched.
No question, Gouker was the rapist.
So, maybe Gouker killed Tim and Tana, too.
Kind of want to talk to him.
Right.
And Galker agreed to cooperate.
But with one very big condition.
The death penalty he was facing.
They'd have to make that go away.
And after some wrangling, they made a deal.
So we go down and we confront him.
And I said, I know you did this.
You were involved in the Togstead-Mumbrew case.
And he starts shaking.
He just literally starts shaking.
I didn't do anything.
He swore he did not murder Tim and Tana.
So who did?
Gowker pointed the finger at this man, Lane Shields, his former boss at that western shop that Tim and Tana frequented.
Gowker listed off all sorts of crimes he said he'd committed at Lane's behest, anywhere from arson to burying bodies.
Gouker told them Shields had asked him to murder Tim and Tana.
He asked me, he said, we're going to kill two of them.
He said, I don't want them shot.
He said, I want them, quote, slaughtered by cattle.
It freaked me out.
He insisted he refused the job.
And Gouker said after the murders, Lane admitted he was responsible.
I asked him directly, did you do it?
He said, I brought somebody in.
When you said no, he said, I brought somebody in from outside to do it.
Gouker offered to take a polygraph to back up his claims.
They conducted it the very next day.
Regarding the two victims, did you stab either one of them?
No.
He fails questions about did he kill Tanatogstead and Tim Umbrough.
So what was true and what wasn't?
The investigators headed back to Wisconsin to try to run down Gouker's account.
They got nowhere.
And so they returned to Oklahoma...
There was some inconsistencies the last time.
And this time, Galker told them a different story.
There's only one thing that I haven't told you.
He admitted he was at Tana's farmhouse the night of the murders.
But he said he didn't stab anybody.
He was just the driver.
And you're saying you never went in that house?
No.
I strictly drove.
I was not in the house.
I was never in that house.
You don't find anything... it was lane who went into the farmhouse he said with that guy lane had hired i drove him and this guy out there that night the night of the homicide i drove all right that's all i did who's the other guy but he brought him from outside lane and the unknown third person, who he said was an Irish guy, committed the homicide.
Tell me what you said when they walk out.
I didn't say anything.
Bulls**t. Are you kidding me?
No.
I'll tell you the guy that Lane brought this guy, this scary guy.
The guy scared the st out of me.
This guy was a predator.
What did you make of his story?
Well, obviously the hair stood up on my neck.
Could they believe him?
The truth and Glendon Gowker were not well acquainted at all.
That was obvious.
So... Are our chips all in on this poker table?
Absolutely not.
I mean, he is a con man.
But a lot was riding on this.
If there was even a chance his Lane Shield story was true, it had to be resolved one way or the other.
Just maybe this admitted murderer, this slippery liar... help them finally catch their killer.
Murderer rapist, admitted career criminal Glendon Galker was hardly the sort of man any investigator could take at his word.
Certainly not Mike Sasse or his partners.
It helped, mind you, that Gouker came clean and pleaded guilty to that whole other murder in Oklahoma.
But his story claiming that his former boss, Lane Shields, was responsible for the Tim and Tana murders.
Well, it might be true, but they couldn't know without learning more about Lane Shields.
And then they caught a break.
We were able to actually draft and go up on a state Title III wiretap on Lane Shields.
This has only been done maybe a few times in Wisconsin.
You wouldn't be able to get one unless it was a pretty good case.
Correct.
How to get Lane talking about the murders?
Well, get everyone else talking.
We beefed the media out of Green Bay and Madison and we put billboards up near the crime scene out on our major highways around there.
If you know any information who killed Tim Montana, their pictures were on the billboards.
Please call.
Now the thinking went a nervous Lane would want to make sure the men with him at the murder would keep their mouths shut.
So they set up a phone call, galkered to Shields.
And of course, unbeknownst to Shields, they listened to every word.
Full of, what, hope?
Expectation?
Instead, what they got was the nasty, deflating feeling of having been had.
They're not saying what you thought they'd say.
Right.
What we were led to believe they were going to say.
Lane didn't sound worried or threatening or indicate any involvement at all.
It was just worthless chit-chat.
So what did they say?
There were no confessions.
There were no admissions.
There were no, they're coming after me now.
We didn't get what we were looking for.
This wasn't the chatter of guilty individuals that you were hearing.
Right.
Yeah.
As for the rest of the so-called evidence Gouker had provided?
We pulled out every investigative, high-end investigative technique that we could.
And we didn't get anything that corroborated what Gouker was telling us.
If that didn't put Gouker's account to rest, this did.
They searched Lane Shields' property.
You come in here and trash my house.
They interviewed Lane.
He was angry, sure, but more than willing to talk.
I gave you everything when you were here.
We've talked that.
I agree.
To the investigators, the hard as nails Lane came off as upfront, even honest.
I should have an evidentiary hearing on these people that are putting heat on me, because it's not true.
I run a f***ing business here.
So when he told them he was innocent, they believed him.
Hard as they tried, investigators could find nothing incriminating.
Agent Sasse walked away knowing Lane was not their guy.
As for Galker, they'd had enough of him.
Was there ever any point in the conversations you had with him when you said Glendon, you're full of it?
Yes, and that was it.
All that time and money they'd spent on Galker and his story, their deal to allow him to avoid the death penalty for his own crimes in Oklahoma, it was all for naught.
They wanted so badly to solve the Tim and Tana murders, and Glendon Galker had simply played them.
For more than two and a half decades, Tim and Tana's families were in the dark about the ups and downs of the investigation.
There were no arrests, no resolutions.
It never got easier.
It's really stressful.
It's very stressful.
Rick Todstad didn't blame the investigators.
He knew how hard they were working.
Still Always seems like right around the anniversary.
You know the newspapers and local TV stations and everybody wanted to know what's going on.
And you know, and then I'd get all nerved up and I'd be hard to live with and I'd be just, you know, wanting this thing solved and it wasn't getting done fast enough.
Tim's older sister, Tina...
There's no closure.
You know, and I watched my family suffer from so much unforgiveness and hurt and that hurt would turn into anger and distrust.
I mean, many of us didn't know who might be over our shoulder or why, because there was no answers.
2018.
Detective Captain Nick Traeger of the Wapaka County Sheriff's Office had taken over the case.
By then, the world of DNA evidence had opened up like a flower and Traeger wanted to try something new familial DNA.
That is the now widely accepted method of finding unidentified suspects by searching for their family members in DNA databases and then using family trees to narrow it down.
Basically means, okay, not this person, but maybe somebody related to this person.
Correct.
In the same genetic, you know, lines.
Yeah, so that was the thought process.
They submitted that semen found on Tana's body to criminal databases and got back nothing.
They were out of new methods to find their killer, out of names.
They were rudderless.
And then, a surprise.
It was April 2022.
A woman called investigators.
She was a child at the time of the murder, she said. but she thought she knew who did it.
A credible suspect, a suspect she knew all about.
30 years after the crime, she was still carrying this around and she wanted to do something about it.
Correct.
She believed, she told them, that her DNA could finally identify the man who murdered Tim and Tana.
And who was that person?
So she turned on her profile and it was like the Christmas tree lit up.
Really?
Yes.
Murder casts its dreadful damage wide, and for a long, long time.
Through the years, Tim and Tana's families never stopped looking for answers.
What is it about you, your personality, that made you push so hard for all these decades to try to solve this?
Well, I don't give up.
Maybe it's just as well.
Rick didn't get to know what he was up against, as he vowed to get justice for his sister.
I just Don't stop.
I won't stop.
I will not stop.
We prayed a lot that somebody would come forth and somebody wouldn't be able to live with themselves.
Three decades after those brutal stabbings in Wayawega Wisconsin, the families seemed to get their wish.
When a woman called investigators in 2022, her name was Heather.
She told the investigators she had heard about those murders when she was just a little girl.
And ever since, she'd had this awful feeling that her father had something to do with it.
And this got investigators' attention because her father was Jeff Teal.
Remember him?
Teal, a known violent offender, was one of the original suspects.
But why did Heather wait so long?
It turned out she didn't.
She told investigators the same thing way back in 2010, when Agent Mike Sasse had the case.
Do you remember Heather Thiel coming forward?
Yes.
What did she have to say?
She was emotional.
She says, I think my dad had something to do with this.
And I knew that he was ruled out.
That's because three years after the murders back in 1995, Jeff Thiel got into an armed standoff with law enforcement and then escaped and skipped town.
It didn't end well.
He dies by suicide, I believe, in the state of Washington.
It's how investigators were able to get his DNA.
The Sheriff's Department and detectives at that point in time are sent his clothing of when he died.
That was blood on the shirt, is that correct?
Yes.
And that is sent in to a private lab and he is compared to the semen left at the crime scene and he's not a match.
In other words, the DNA on his shirt said he didn't do it, and he was cleared.
Jeff Thiel was buried near his home in Wisconsin, and the suspicion about his involvement in the case was buried with him.
But Heather Thiel was so sure her father was behind the murders.
30 years after the crime, she was still carrying this around and she wanted to do something about it.
Correct.
So Captain Traeger and his partner went to see Heather and her mom Marie.
You've always believed he's involved in this.
What made you believe that?
Because he did it and then said, it's funny how you can get away with murder these days.
Jeff even saying to Marie, I've gotten away with murder.
And his ultimate dream was to kill somebody.
He used to tell me that all the time.
Did you believe him?
Oh, yeah.
He's had a gun in front of my face that if I ever called the cops on him, he's going to use it.
A lot of childhood memories.
My biggest memory of my dad.
It's his obsession with knives, too.
Sitting in his chair, his rock recliner, sharpening his knives.
On top of all that, they said, Jeff made it pretty obvious how he felt about Tana.
He was obsessed with Tana.
How do you know that?
I had heard, and I can't remember who I had heard it from if it was Tana herself.
Jeff wanted to date Tana.
Tana wanted nothing to do with Jeff.
I always would think back when I heard that she was murdered or whatever, that...
Okay, Jeff doesn't live far from her, wanted to date her.
She wanted nothing to do with him and how he always said he wanted to kill somebody.
And remember, Tana's dog Scruffy, was stabbed to death too, apparently trying to protect him and Tana.
Well, Marie told investigators Jeff had a history of killing dogs, two of them right in their neighborhood.
They were two huge dogs.
I mean, they were really, really big.
And Jeff shot them both.
I saw him shoot them and kill them.
He picked them up and he threw them in the back of his truck.
Hold on, you saw Jeff shoot whose dogs?
Neighbors' dogs.
But DNA doesn't lie, and DNA cleared Jeff's deal.
Just to be thorough, they did a cheek swab anyway of Heather.
So we collected her DNA, which she gave along with her mom.
And I guess there was really no intent other than to, I guess, kind of have it because...
Jeff was eliminated.
Then, just as they were getting ready to leave, Heather offered investigators something else.
I'm on Ancestry, too.
She had explained that she does the genealogy as well.
She told investigators she'd been working on her family tree on Ancestrycom and offered them access to her account.
The FBI had been helping with the investigation and got to work.
And the FBI agent had reached out to Heather to turn the feature on where law enforcement can view your profile.
So she turned on her profile and it was like the Christmas tree lit up.
Really?
Yes.
Heather was right.
There was a connection with her father.
But here came the twist.
And it was a big one.
So the FBI agent said, we are very close in the family, but it's not Jeff Thiel.
After 30 years of waiting, investigators finally had a DNA match and a new name.
Was this their man?
Summer of 2022, 30 years after the murders of Tim Mumbrew and Tana Togstad, investigators finally had a new suspect.
Genetic genealogy pointed to Heather Thiel's first cousin and Jeff Thiel's nephew, a man named Tony Hayes.
Nobody had ever heard of Tony Hayes in the case file.
So we started looking into you know where does Tony Hayes live, who is he and realized that he lives less than two miles from the original crime scene.
Like a lot of men in town, Tony worked at the Iron Foundry.
But unlike his uncle Jeff Teal, he had no criminal record.
Just unbelievable.
He's been there his entire life, and he's a nobody.
Hiding in plain sight.
Correct.
So we spent several weeks following Tony, and it was...
The same thing almost every day.
He went to work at the foundry and he went home and he worked around the farm.
What to do?
Get the man's DNA.
So they rifled through his garbage, but nothing.
So we had to get creative.
Yeah, I would think.
I mean, because you're chasing him around looking for him to drop.
Yeah, throw something out the window.
Yeah.
They noticed that Tony's car was missing its front license plate.
So they came up with a plan.
Let's write him a warning for no front plate and have him touch a brand new pen, and then we'll send the pen down to see if he's a match.
Clever idea, but it would involve you kind of conducting this ruse traffic stop, right?
That's what we did.
Hi, I'm Trevor Pullman with the State Patrol.
I stopped you for no front plate on the vehicle today.
I'm just going to ask that you sign to acknowledge that you received a warning.
I've got a pen right there for you as well.
They sent the pen with Tony's DNA to the lab, and...
It was a match.
Wow.
What was that moment like?
It was unbelievable.
I've never felt so joyous in my life.
And yet, nothing about him looked like a killer.
He was just a regular guy, a father of four, with no criminal record of any kind.
Not even a hint of any impropriety.
He lived quietly on the same farm his family had owned for decades.
We spent a lot of time together. goofing off at the farm and with our grandparents.
Tony's sister, Cherry Hayes Gust.
But as we got older, he was my defender.
I always looked up to him.
Jody Lynn Morgan met and rode the school bus with Tony when they were just five years old.
He's the gentle giant.
As long as I've known him, always, always has been.
So they grew up liking each other and then loving each other.
They lived together for about two years, had two kids, before deciding to go their separate ways.
And then a couple of years after that, Tony went on to marry Tracy.
How'd you meet him?
We both liked to fish, so we met in a bait shop.
Yeah, that was his thing, right?
Yeah, both of ours.
Tony and Tracy had two kids of their own, and eventually, grandchildren.
The couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in June of 2022.
And two months later investigators went to the iron foundry, found Tony and asked to speak with him.
So he came in very nonchalant.
It was low-key.
Hi, Tony.
We introduced ourselves.
We asked just kind of some basic background questions of him who he was, where he lives, some work history.
He knew Tim and Tana personally?
He said he had never met Tim.
He knew of Tana only because they lived in the same town.
Interesting.
Did he wonder why you were talking to him about this all these years later?
He questioned why we were talking to him.
We explained that his name had come up in the investigation.
Now investigators asked him directly if he'd be willing to give his cheek swabs and fingerprints to us, and he agreed to.
Tony also agreed to take a polygraph, so investigators took him down to the sheriff's station, performed a cheek swab and had him take that polygraph, and then they placed him in an interview room.
I'm sure you want to know how you did.
Okay, you did not pass, okay?
It was very clear when it came to the questions regarding Tim and Tana's deaths. that you're lying.
You continue to deny and lie, and we will show you the evidence that we have.
It's not gonna look good for you.
Does that make sense?
Oh, it makes sense.
I... I don't believe that I could have done something like that, so... And did he actually fail it?
Yes.
So they confronted Tony and explained that...
He was the match to the semen of the DNA that was left at the crime scene.
And what I found interesting was he never said, hang on guys, you're talking to the wrong person.
That's not me.
He just kind of sat there and was like, I don't understand.
Did he ever say anything that would suggest that maybe he did remember doing something?
So Tony took a long time to kind of get going.
But once he did get going.
It's going to sound stupid, but I never knew I did it.
OK.
August 11th, 2022.
At the sheriff's office, investigators led Tony Hayes to an interview room and asked him questions about the murders of Tim Mumbrew and Tana Togstad.
That is where he first mentioned what he called clicks or blurbs from the night of the murders.
Memories of some sort.
Over the years, little by little.
You know I'd see a little click here and there.
But But then he recalled going on a binger that night and ending up at Tana's house.
Which, when you look at the crime scene photos, there's a dumbbell. in the bedroom.
What's another blurb?
I remember walking down the road.
I got into my truck and drove home.
Could that be the truck Tana's sister saw driving away late that night?
But even as his memories seemed to incriminate him, Tony remained adamant.
He could not have done this.
I don't remember nothing about hurting any people. investigators pressed him for a possible motive.
You were never attracted to Tana when you saw her?
No.
Never wanted to date her, never jealous of some guys that were dating her?
No.
Tony was dating Jody at the time and denied any attraction to Tana, but then he started describing what sounded like a motive of sorts.
It happened when Tony was just seven years old.
His dad had been racing snowmobiles with Tana's dad and another friend.
And suddenly the belt on Tony's dad's snowmobile blew and he was hit by the snowmobile coming up behind him.
Killed my dad instantly.
The third guy coming up ran that guy over.
It was a horrible accident.
Only Tana's dad survived, though he died a few years later.
His father's death, said Tony, resurfaced 14 years after the fact on the night of the murders.
I was drunk, and all I could think about was that accident.
I didn't go there to hurt anybody.
I didn't.
But I honestly can tell you that I don't know what started, what happened, what started it all.
I don't.
It took you so long in this room to tell us the story about your dad and the snowmobile and Tana's dad being involved.
Because I didn't want it to sound like I had this planned, because I didn't.
Planned or not, investigators felt they had enough.
It's 1.39, Tony.
I have to place you under arrest for the homicide of Tana Togstead and Tim Mulgrew.
Investigators were convinced they finally had their man.
Tony's family was blindsided.
Our youngest son messaged me in the afternoon and said that the cops were at our house.
And I couldn't even drive down my road that I live on because I had it all blocked off.
Did you Tracy, have to somehow deal with that question that you might be, you know, married to and living with a man who had done a very very, very terrible thing all those years ago?
No.
Not even when they got the DNA comparison with the semen that they found on their body?
No.
In my heart, I know he did not do this.
There is no possible way he could have ever done something like that.
So, no.
The investigators talked to Jody, too, of course.
Well...
The first thing I said was, no, you have the wrong guy.
You have the wrong guy.
Back in 1992, Jody and Tony had only just moved in together.
And yes, the murder happened nearby.
But Did you notice any changes in Tony's behavior after that?
No.
No, nothing.
Nothing at all.
But then, landing with a sickening thud...
That DNA.
Antony placing himself at Tana's house?
Remembering that barbell?
The snowmobile accident?
Why do you think those things came out of his mouth?
And what do you think it all meant?
He didn't say any of those things until he had proclaimed his innocence a hundred times and was shown pictures and videos.
They repeatedly told him he must have done it.
He did it.
He did it.
They kept coming down harder on him.
Tony's family knew they needed help and they turned to defense attorneys John Birdsall and Nicole Muller.
Usually when we get contacted, we get contacted by maybe one family member.
Yeah.
And the interesting thing was is that everybody believed in Tony Hayes' innocence so much all his family, all his friends that we had a conference call for people that wanted to help him financially to hire us.
On that conference car, there were 55 people.
And right there, before I even met Tony, I was like, there's something going on here.
There's something wrong with this picture.
Bert, Saul and Mueller got to work that summer of 2022 trying to get their heads around 30 years of records they received from the prosecution.
It took months.
It was almost as if they just brought a truck with a bunch of boxes and dumped it out on the front lawn and said there you go, work it out.
And in the middle of all that working out, they read about the sheer depravity of the crimes.
This is not somebody who just got drunk and had a bad night, like the interrogators tried to suggest to Tony.
Something else was going on here.
Which, it seemed to them, fit those other suspects.
Remember?
The suspects we've told you about.
Basically, there was three there.
Three?
Yeah.
Yeah.
London Goker, Lane Shields, and Jeffrey Teal.
But remember, all three had been pretty thoroughly investigated, and all of them were cleared.
In Teal's case, by his own DNA, which excluded him back in 1996.
But 26 years later, thanks to familiar DNA technology, it identified his nephew, Tony Hayes, as the likely killer.
So now, pre-trial, a legal skirmish began.
Defense versus prosecution.
The defense wanted to claim Jeff Thiel was not excluded from all the blood evidence of the crime scene and because of that remained a potential suspect.
Wapaka County DA Kat Turner objected.
Jeff Thiel seems like an obvious suspect to go after.
He's dead.
He was a bad guy.
So he had already been excluded in 1996.
The judge sided with the defense.
So investigators decided Let's show for a third time that he's been eliminated, and that way the defense can't use Jeff Thiel as the person who committed these crimes.
But testing Jeff Thiel's DNA wasn't easy.
He was six feet under, which brings us back to that gloomy day in the cemetery.
So we asked the court to allow us to exhume Jeff Thiel.
We did.
The man in this casket had kept his secrets to himself for almost 30 years.
But Jeff Thiel was about to give one up.
We rushed the testing.
The DNA analyst worked on nothing but that until he had the analysis complete and again excluded Jeff Thiel from all of the blood evidence that was available.
All of the other evidence prosecutors said pointed straight at Tony Hayes, who was due to stand trial for murder in just two weeks.
But when the prosecution revealed the new evidence, Tony's attorneys argued they didn't have time to prepare a response.
And the judge agreed with the defense.
He ruled that if the trial went ahead, the prosecution could not tell the jury about any DNA evidence involving Jeff Thiel.
Did you think that was a good decision?
No, I did not.
And we very very very, very strongly argued to the court that it was inappropriate because everyone in the room, with the exception of the jury, knew that Jeff Thiel had been excluded as a potential contributor to any of the biological evidence.
Tough luck, said the defense.
They had years to do this.
And they were trying to act like they were the victims.
And even the judges, like, that's really, he used the word twice, disingenuous.
For the prosecutors and Tana and Tim's families, it meant an agonizing choice.
Go to trial with a weaker case, as they saw it?
Or set a new trial date, who knew when, with a stronger case?
In the end, they decided to go for it.
Tana's friend, Jill.
They said the case is strong enough, we will go forward.
And so on July 17, 2025, it began.
Please be seated.
One of the biggest trials in Wapaka County history.
Finally, a jury could deliver justice, said Tana's friends and family.
What was the most important thing in your mind that they had against him?
Well, the confession was huge to me.
I mean, it was just like, wow, it's on tape.
There was things that he said that unless you did it, you don't make that kind of stuff up.
No, he wouldn't know.
Did you feel a kind of weight on you as you're trying to bring this case to a successful conclusion?
Absolutely.
This is a small, small town and you want, as the prosecutor, to get justice for those people, people who you care about.
For three decades, this crime went unsolved.
Assistant Attorney General Amy Ohtani opened for the state.
For three decades, the person that committed these crimes believed he would never get caught.
Ohtani told the jury that Tony Hayes stabbed Tana and Tim in the early morning hours of March 21 1992.
And she said... the prosecution had the receipts.
So what ties Tony Hayes to this crime?
His semen on Tana's body?
His handprint in blood on Tana's door?
His own memories of killing Tim and Tana?
The handprint evidence first, found on the door, for years a bloody emblem of this case.
A forensic analyst for the state crime lab testified, She was able to make a match to Tony Hayes.
Item ABFRD2 was identified to the left palm of Tony Garrett Hayes.
ABFRD3 was identified to the left palm of Tony Garrett Hayes.
How confident can you be in a handprint?
I believe they're reliable.
However, I would not feel confident if that was the only evidence.
It wasn't.
Remember that male DNA on Tana's body?
Over 30 years, it had been seriously depleted by repeated testing.
But new testing methods require very few cells.
So when the analysts retested the DNA for investigation, they used the minuscule amounts that remained.
Were you confident there was enough, even at that level, to think you'd get an accurate result?
From speaking with our genetics DNA analysts, I was confident.
It's a principle of DNA testing that there cannot be 100% certainty.
So the prosecutors called a DNA analyst with the Wisconsin State Crime Lab who had worked out an exact probability to show it most certainly was Tony Hayes' DNA.
The randomized probability, the profile would not be Less common than 1 in 234 quintillion.
Okay.
And that's 2, 3, 4, followed by 18 zeros, right?
Correct.
In other words, the likelihood of the DNA on Tana's body being from anyone other than Tony Hayes was astronomically small.
But perhaps the most compelling evidence came from Tony Hayes himself during that marathon interrogation.
I remember getting into the scuffle You're in a scuffle with who?
With Tim.
Would you call it a confession?
I would call it an admission.
Uh-huh.
I don't know that he confessed to everything, but he did acknowledge remembering committing the crime.
Prosecutors played that interview for jurors, all five plus hours of it.
They heard Tony recall fragments from that night.
Whatever...
He said that he recalled some details of the order that Tim and Tana were killed in, and he said he remembered a knife.
There was a knife.
I remember having a hold of his arm, and we tussled, and then I had the knife.
He said he remembered trying to have sex with her.
I had sex with her.
What made you, okay, I'm sorry, keep going.
She started to stir, and I had to have stabbed her.
And this as the interview was ending.
I remember thinking, holy ****, what did I do?
In the end the prosecutors told the jurors it was the weight of all the evidence that pointed to Tony Hayes.
Despite living a seemingly law-abiding life for 30 years, he remembered and he knew what he was hiding.
He knew what he had done.
I'm confident. you'll find him guilty.
Not so fast, said the defense.
The prosecution had it all wrong.
When they lie and manipulate to get someone to make a statement, that is not discovering the truth.
That's planting it.
Tracy Hayes dealt with the trial, just as she had dealt with the years of heartache since her husband's arrest in 2022.
She took it day by day, going to court, sitting right behind her husband, stoic and silent.
We were told we couldn't talk to him.
I couldn't give him a hug.
Couldn't tell him I love him.
Anything.
What'd you do?
I knew he was there.
He knew I was right behind him.
And she listened intently to defense attorney John Birdsell.
What kind of a sick, twisted, psychopathic person would commit a crime like this?
Not gentle Tony Hayes.
The state had the wrong man, he declared, thanks to a deeply flawed investigation.
You're going to see...
The utterly botched crime scene collection of both fingerprints and DNA and blood for that matter.
And it's like once you have a compromised crime scene.
How do you trust anything from that scene?
It's just not possible.
That door, for instance, with handprint evidence on it.
Other prints were on it as well.
Prints that should never have been there, said Birdsall.
One of the detectives, the main detectives, fingerprints on it.
Fingerprints on the palm print or just on the door?
What's more, the defense insisted no one could be certain any of the prints on the door actually belonged to Tony.
The problem is that it's subjective.
And I'm not even going to call it a subjective science because it's not a science.
But the whole point of trial, the analyst, she had to admit she couldn't be 100% sure.
And the DNA from the crime scene?
Utterly unreliable, the defense attorneys argued.
Its quality undone by repeated testing. and decades of storage.
And so, they said, the state was driven to extreme measures examining DNA residue in tubes and spin baskets.
So they're just retesting their old equipment, basically.
As well.
The defense alleged the state's analysts had added data to the DNA profile developed from the crime scene.
Those were used to compare to Tony, correct?
Correct.
We saw the DNA profile was a engineered profile.
And when you are engineering facts, you're not finding the truth.
The analyst denied engineering facts.
On redirect, he testified that he updated the DNA profile to reflect new standards.
So you didn't add anything, right?
Objection.
Objection.
Correct.
But the defense attorneys reserved their greatest outrage for that hours-long interrogation.
They argued that any admissions from Tony Hayes were false, pried out of a frightened man by investigators using a controversial interrogation procedure called the Reed technique, which critics say uses manipulation and pressure tactics.
You can't just keep saying, I don't want to remember this.
I don't want this to be true.
That stuff's got to go.
Now it's got to be, I did it, and now I've got to come up with the answers.
There's a lot of people who are waiting for your explanation.
I don't have one.
I don't.
And when Hayes insisted he did not commit the murders, the investigators kept at him, told him they knew what happened that night.
We are telling you, and this is true, your semen was on her body, okay?
So, regardless of whether you're the kind of guy that could ever do that, regardless of the guy doesn't want to believe he did that,
When I say, Jay says, you did that, no dispute, how do you feel about that?
Well, I sure wish that I remembered it.
As for those fragments of memory, he'd told them about.
Those were flashbacks, investigators said, to a nightmare he'd been trying to suppress for decades.
You know, you stabbed her through the chest when you were having sex with her or right after.
You see it, but you don't want to say it.
But Those are the facts.
Yeah.
And we can see that from the scene.
The defense called an expert in false confessions to the stand.
He believed what they said, that he was.
There was no question that he was there and that it was his semen.
So now he had to figure out how that could have happened.
Dr David Thompson testified that When he evaluated Tony Hayes, he found them to be suggestible, vulnerable to the investigator's tactics.
When you look at those personality characteristics and then you look at the investigator's tendency to provide suggestive questions to him, that combination, I think, is very significant.
When they lie and manipulate to get someone to make a statement, that is not discovering the truth.
That's planting it.
Well, but, you know, he's a grown man.
He's not some kid.
No, there's no buts about it, okay?
But the defense attorneys weren't done.
Instead, they put a different man on trial.
Jeff Thiel.
Remember the judge had ruled the jury could not hear the prosecution's DNA evidence which they said excluded Thiel as a suspect.
And now the defense went after Thiel hard.
They called his ex-wife, Marie Stanchik, to testify to his bad character.
I do.
Did he ever physically hit you?
Yes.
I was pregnant with Heather then and we were on our way to Lamaze classes.
And he hit me in the mouth and I got a fat lip.
And then, just months after Tana and Tim were murdered, this.
He held a gun in my face and said he was going to use it on me, and she told law enforcement.
Jeff Thiel told me that he was going to kill me and get away with it, just like the Togstead-Mumbrew homicide.
They told jurors Jeff Thiel had reason to murder Tim and Tana.
Tim had reported Thiel for a theft to the foundry, and Tana had rejected his advances.
So we have direct connection and direct motive to both the victims.
How did it go down on that long-ago night?
The defense leaned on the tale told by convicted criminal Glendon Gowker that he Gowker, drove two men to Tanna's house that night, and one of them an Irish-looking guy.
The guy the defense decided was Jeff Teel.
Surely there was more than enough reasonable doubt.
The defense told jurors to find Tony Hayes not guilty of the murders.
If you pause or hesitate Considering all of the manipulation mistakes cover-ups, lying that you heard in this trial, that I didn't make up.
If that makes you pause or hesitate, you know your duty.
Now, it was the jury's turn. always more to the story.
To go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, listen to our Talking Datelines series with Keith and Andrea.
Available Wednesday.
In August 2025, a jury of 12 at the Wapaka County Courthouse went out to decide if Tony Hayes murdered Tana and Tim.
Tim's sister, Tina... leaned on her faith.
We walked around that courthouse seven times praying.
I was praying for God's justice.
Tana's brother Rick, on his 33-year journey for justice, was trying to stay calm.
When they went out, were you feeling relatively confident at least?
I felt as though we were going to get a good verdict.
Even though the defense had persuaded the judge to throw out all the DNA evidence clearing alternate suspect Jeff Teel.
So the jury never got to hear about it.
Tim's family remained upbeat.
I was feeling real confident because I thought the prosecution did an amazing job.
We thought for sure we had a slam dunk.
Jurors would later reveal that, when their deliberations began, six jurors believed Tony Hayes was guilty and six not.
It was extremely hard to know that his life was in somebody else's hands.
Tony's family and friends were all too aware that a guilty verdict had to be unanimous.
Was I confident when they went in?
You can't be confident.
I'm confident that he's not the guy, but it's not me, it's them.
Of course you're worried and you're scared, but...
I feel like it had been proven.
But then the days went by, right?
One after the others.
It meant that they were really looking this over.
Among Tana and Tim's family members and friends, anxiety was setting in.
I was more and more nervous the longer the jury stayed out.
You could hear those guys arguing in the room.
The jury.
And you could tell they were arguing about something, but we didn't know what.
On Monday, August 11th, 2025, day four of deliberations, the moment of truth was at hand.
The jury came back and the judge read its verdict.
We, the jury, find the defendant, Tony Garrett Hayes, not guilty.
When they came back and they said not guilty, that was beautiful.
Tony's friends, Joe, Jason, and Liz.
I cried.
Tears of joy.
They got it right.
Thank God the jury.
I was just thinking of Tony, right?
I can't imagine what he'd been through, you know, during that three years of being put in that position right,
Tony's wife, Tracy, would get her husband back.
What was it like to give him a big hug when he finally came out of there?
It was awesome to take him home to our children.
And he got to see his grandpa.
His grandpa said that was the best day of his life.
Of course, it was a different reaction on the other side of the courtroom.
What was that was like when the judge read the verdict?
I couldn't believe he even said it.
What?
It's just like, wow.
My heart just dropped.
My stomach turned.
A complete shock that 12 people could be that deceived.
Took you outside of your body almost.
Pure rage.
I couldn't breathe.
Today, Tony is back home with his family, breathing the clean air of Waiowiga's farmland, feeding his cows.
He's a free man.
His wife, Tracy, feels free too.
So what now?
Just live day by day.
We'll see what happens.
See where God takes us.
How are you and Tony adjusting to this?
Good.
He finally gets the sunshine and the fresh air.
Have you gone fishing lately?
No, not yet.
We will, though.
He owes me that.
On the advice of his attorney, Tony himself did not speak with us.
His criminal case is over.
Hard to accept for Tim and Tana's family members and friends.
Those people on that jury let out a man that butchered two people.
And he is now walking around, going to have family time, play with his grandkids.
Tana never got to have a kid.
Tana never had a life.
It's a hard pill to swallow.
Yeah.
Was he found innocent?
He was found not guilty.
Tanner's brother Rick, who lives just three miles from Tony, filed a civil wrongful death lawsuit against him.
Said it isn't about financial gain.
I don't want his house and I don't want his retirement.
Acknowledgement is what I want.
It's going to be expensive, that acknowledgement.
Rick set up a GoFundMe page.
And meantime, the crime against Hannah and Tim remains officially unsolved.
Even though investigators and prosecutors believe they know the answer, nothing to do about it now.
You going to be able to get used to it, live with it?
I don't know if I'll ever get used to it.
Sometimes not knowing is better than knowing.
That was a piece of wisdom right there.
As Tana and Tim's families and friends try to make peace with the outcome, they take some comfort from their memories of the vibrant young couple, taken far too soon, who lived long enough to find each other and fall in love.
That's all for now.
I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.
