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NARRATOR: A young man died in a mysterious car crash.
But was it an accident?
Forensic science uncovered what really caused that crash.
And the truth devastated three different families.
[theme music]
NARRATOR: Just before dawn in central Texas,
a motorist saw a car on fire off the side
of the road down an embankment.
By the time firefighters got there,
there was very little left.
-I've never seen a car or a vehicle burned that
badly before, where the wheels were melted to the rocks.
NARRATOR: In the rubble investigators found the remains
of the driver burned beyond recognition.
-We needed to identify the body that
was in the vehicle, which wasn't much of a body.
NARRATOR: The car was a 1999 Chevy Cavalier registered
to Molly and Clay Daniels, a young couple
with two small children who lived in nearby Leander, Texas.
Police discovered that Molly Daniels was home
with their children at the time of the accident.
-She had called me relatively early
that morning hysterical because Clayton wasn't home,
and she had to get to work, and he had the car.
And she didn't know where he was.
NARRATOR: Through his personal effects,
family members identified the remains
as those of Clay Daniels.
-They found the remains of some tennis shoes
that Clay's family members identified as Clay's shoes.
They found a Harley Davidson pin that had gone on a hat that
Clay used to wear, and a silver necklace that
they identified as being Clay's.
-I figured that Clayton had been drinking,
was at a party somewhere or just driving fast and lost control.
NARRATOR: Clay Daniels, an unemployed automobile mechanic,
was just 24 years old.
Surprisingly, not everyone was sorry he was dead.
-Absolutely, he's the loser.
I've always felt that he was not the best material for her.
And I wondered about being Daddy material,
but it was her choice to make.
NARRATOR: Others expressed the same sentiments at his funeral.
-The memorial that was a very interesting thing,
because there was just so much there.
His best friend got up and spoke,
and he actually told people that Clay was an [bleep].
-No, he wasn't very well liked.
He seemed like, sort of, a loafer
and a lay about and a sex offender.
So, I mean, what good could you say about him?
NARRATOR: Clay was not a model citizen.
He had recently been convicted for the *** assault
of his seven-year-old cousin and was sentenced
to 30 days in prison and 10 years probation.
The crash occurred just three days
before he was to start serving his time.
-This car fire was June the 18th of 2004.
Clay was supposed to be going to jail that Monday
the 21st of 2004.
And so they thought the timing of that
was a little bit suspicious.
NARRATOR: And police had another angle to pursue.
The parents of the *** assault victim
were angry that Clay was sentenced to only 30 days
in prison.
-The *** assault victim's father
made comments prior to this accident
that he wanted Clay to go away.
So we were thinking maybe the father
of the victim made Clay go away.
NARRATOR: Nevertheless, the community reached out
to Molly Daniels, a widow at the age of 21
who had two young children to support
on an office receptionist's salary.
-Oh my gosh, she had people sending her money,
people she did not know sent her money.
People would, her coworkers would
put groceries in the house.
They would do everything.
They bent over backwards for her.
-She got this discount baby sitter in the neighborhood
because she put up signs, I'm the poor, grieving widow,
and I need help with childcare.
NARRATOR: But that generosity ended when less than a month
after Clay died Molly told friends
that she had a new boyfriend and that she was the beneficiary
of Clay's $100,000 life insurance policy.
Her own mother even turned on her.
-Absolutely, she was raised better than this.
There were days that I just kicked myself.
What did I do wrong? Where did I go wrong?
NARRATOR: Clay Daniels' family identified his burned remains
by some of his personal items found in the car.
There was very little that remained from the fire.
-There was only 14 pounds of body mass that was remaining.
And we didn't have a head, didn't have hands or fingers
or toes, nothing to fingerprint.
NARRATOR: But the medical examiner wanted to be sure,
so he extracted the bone marrow from Clay Daniels' hip bone
hoping that enough of his mitochondria
survived the fire for DNA testing.
Since mitochondrial DNA is passed maternally,
scientists would try to compare it to the mitochondrial DNA
profiles of Clay's mother Lori.
But testing would take up to six months.
-It's not like on CSI on TV at all.
So it doesn't happen within the span of an hour.
NARRATOR: In the meantime, investigators
noticed some inconsistencies at the accident scene.
The lack of skid marks on the road
indicated that Clay took no corrective action
before the crash.
The speed limit was 60 miles per hour,
and the car was barely moving when
it went down the embankment.
-There was no momentum coming off the cliff.
It looked as if somebody had just pushed it off
or just drove off the cliff at a slow rate of speed.
Because all the rocks, the trees on the way
down were disturbed in a path that the vehicle took.
NARRATOR: And the car's gas tank was intact.
This raised questions about the source of the fire.
-My instincts told me that this was not
an accident that somebody was killed.
And I stayed with that feeling, that's
why I told the sergeant that I was calling the experts in.
NARRATOR: That expert was arson investigator Janine Mather.
The first thing she noticed was that the entire driver's
seat had been consumed by fire.
-Normal vehicle fires with a body inside there
usually is body fluids and remains on the seat.
And in this case, there was no body fluids
located in the vehicle and no remains on the seat.
NARRATOR: Mather then checked all possible sources
for a fire, the fuel lines, the ignition
switch, the starter, the battery.
Everything was intact.
-I looked at the vehicle inside and out and underneath
and ruled out all accidental causes of ignition.
NARRATOR: Crime scene investigators gathered the fire
debris and placed it in sealed canisters.
At the lab, they inserted activated charcoal strips
and then heated the cans.
The strips were then put it into a solvent and tested with gas
chromatograph mass spectrometry.
This revealed the fire was started
with large amounts of charcoal lighter fluid.
-When the results came back that it
was positive for charcoal starter fluid,
I knew that we had an arson, an intentionally set fire.
NARRATOR: And just as investigators
heard this news they learned something else.
Molly Daniels' sister Melissa had been visiting Molly when
she experienced one of the most bizarre
incidents she had ever encountered.
-Melissa had gone in to get a Q-Tip out of the bathroom,
turned around and looked and there
was a guy laying in the floor of the closet
but his head was up in the corner
and she couldn't see anything from the waist down.
And he was wearing boxers.
And she went out to Molly and she goes,
there's a man asleep in your closet.
She goes, no there's not.
NARRATOR: But when Molly looked in her closet she
didn't see anyone there.
-But things started getting kind of weird after that.
NARRATOR: Needless to say, investigators
found the incident suspicious and now wondered whether Molly
was somehow involved in her husband's ***.
Five months after the car crash the Sheriff's department
in Burnett County, Texas finally got the results of the DNA test
on the remains found in the car.
The DNA revealed that the remains
were not those of Clay Daniels.
-When DNA came back and wasn't Clayton, we were like,
where's Clayton?
And who is this person that was in the vehicle?
NARRATOR: To find the answers, investigators
put Clay's grieving wife Molly under surveillance for days.
Her routine was perfectly normal until she
met her new boyfriend Jake Gregg for lunch.
-She got into that man's car and then the two of them
went off to Taco Bell.
NARRATOR: Investigators decided to go inside
to get a better look at Molly's new boyfriend.
When Captain Paul Nelson walked by their table
he noticed that Jake Gregg bore a striking resemblance to Clay
Daniels although his hair color was different.
-He looked identical.
If he could have crawled into that burrito
he probably would have.
NARRATOR: But the man insisted he was Jake Gregg
and produced a Texas identification
card to prove it.
But Captain Nelson didn't buy it and placed him under arrest.
During police questioning he finally
admitted he was Clay Daniels.
-Clay's brilliant disguise consisted of nothing
more than dying his hair black.
And other than that he hadn't changed his appearance at all.
-Clay had several motives for staging his death.
He did not want to go to jail for 30 days,
and he did not want to be a registered sex offender,
and he had a $100,000 life insurance policy.
NARRATOR: Molly insisted she knew nothing about Clay faking
his own death until he came home one day about a month
after the fire and told her what he had done.
-She just tried to portray it like she didn't know that he
was alive until he just called her out of the blue
about a month later and said, hey baby, I'm alive.
-I find that very hard to believe.
If my husband came back from the dead,
I'd be asking a lot of questions, and I'd be very mad.
NARRATOR: Clay admitted it was he who was sleeping
in the closet when Molly's sister saw him.
He said Molly spoke loud enough that it woke him up,
and he was able to get out of the closet
before his sister-in-law returned.
-See? There's no one here.
-I know that there was.
NARRATOR: Clay said he planned to start a new life with Molly
and the children after the $100,000 life insurance payment
arrived.
-They were going to go to Mexico,
and he was going to have plastic surgery done on his face
and have dental surgery done so he'd have teeth.
-And Molly was going to have a tummy tuck too.
Apparently, a little bonus of the plan, I guess,
they'd get so much money from the insurance.
NARRATOR: Clay Daniels refused to identify
the body burned in the car fire.
-Clay never, never divulged any information
to us to help our investigation.
Did they *** somebody?
Did they find a dead homeless man?
What did they do? How do they do this?
NARRATOR: However, Clay was more than
happy to talk to his fellow inmates.
-I guess, they're sitting up late at night,
you know, shooting the breeze and Clay had told his cell mate
that he had actually dug up a corpse from a graveyard
and that's what they had put in the car and set it on fire.
NARRATOR: Investigators searched Pebble Mound Cemetery, the one
closest to the site of the car fire.
They knew from experience that criminals don't like
to travel far with a corpse in the car.
Sure enough, they found a grave close
to the front gate that looked as if it had been tampered with.
-I could tell that the grave was disturbed by the crevices
and the holes that was left, the marker had been moved,
the flowers had been moved.
And I knew by looking at the other grave sites
that that was not normal.
NARRATOR: The headstone bore the name Charlotte Davis.
She died six months before the car crash at the age of 81.
Their suspicions were confirmed when they exhumed Charlotte's
casket and discovered it was empty.
Investigators now wanted to know whether Molly
Daniels was involved.
And if so, they needed evidence to prove it.
Clay Daniels confessed to starting the arson fire
and defrauding the insurance company
of $100,000 in life insurance.
His wife Molly denied any involvement,
but investigators didn't believe her.
-When Molly first talked to the police
and told them that ridiculous story that she didn't know
that Clay was still alive until a month later,
she was sticking by that story for quite some time.
And apparently that's what she'd been telling her lawyer too.
NARRATOR: Investigators examined Molly's work computer,
but they weren't optimistic.
By this time, six months had passed since the car crash.
-Depending on how often the computer is used,
there's a possibility that some of the evidence that we would
have recovered ordinarily would be overwritten.
NARRATOR: But investigators got a huge break.
Molly's computer had been invaded by a keystroke virus
right before the staged accident.
-What the worm actually did was it recorded every letter,
every window she opened, every email, just any kind of thing
that she's typing in the computer it recorded.
And into a text file and saved it.
NARRATOR: Computer forensic experts did a word search
to identify what kind of information
Molly had been looking for on the internet.
-We were finding words like unidentifiable body, forensics
on a body, burned body, burned car, gasoline fire, 1,500
degrees Fahrenheit, just words like that.
NARRATOR: This proved that Molly not only knew about Clay's
plans but was actively involved.
-That was the happiest day of my life
when we got that computer forensics exam.
It was just, I mean, there was no way she could deny that she
had been involved from day one of the planning
when we saw that computer forensic evidence.
-What does surprise me is that she was too stupid to do this.
She was so stupid that she did this kind of thing
and didn't think about the consequences
and didn't think about the possibility of getting caught.
NARRATOR: Police obtained a search warrant
from Molly's house and found even more forensic evidence.
-During the search warrant of their residence
we found in the kitchen two containers
of charcoal starter fluid.
Both of them were tested and one was
consistent with what was found in the vehicle.
NARRATOR: Prosecutors believe that Clay and Molly
planned this crime for months.
They looked in the obituaries to identify a grave to rob,
ideally someone elderly who didn't have
many family members visiting her grave.
They chose 81-year-old Charlotte Davis.
Six months after her death, they dug up her body,
drove to the ravine, and set fire to their car
with Charlotte's body inside.
Clay threw some of his personal items in the fire
so that could be used for identification.
But the DNA testing proved the body wasn't Clay Daniels.
And gas chromatography found remnants of the lighter fluid.
When confronted with all this evidence,
Molly Daniels finally confessed.
-She said that they watched a lot of Law and Order and CSI.
And they got the idea to do this from those shows.
And I asked her, do you all not watch the end of the shows,
because usually the criminals get caught?
And she just laughed.
NARRATOR: Molly Daniels pleaded guilty to insurance fraud
and hindering her husband's apprehension.
She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
-You do the crime, you do the time.
NARRATOR: Clay Daniels plead guilty to insurance fraud,
arson, and desecration of a corpse.
He was sentenced to 30 years in prison plus an additional 20
years for the *** assault charge.
The body of Charlotte Davis was reinterred.
The people carrying her casket were the ones
who put Clay and Molly behind bars.
Texas investigators say it is among the most
bizarre cases they've ever seen.
They were also appalled by the deception Molly and Clay
perpetrated on their own children.
-To tell a little boy who's four almost five years old
that the man that he has known his whole life as his father
is not his daddy.
When he runs to him and hugs him and says, hey daddy,
I love you to have the man say, oh, I'm not your daddy.
I'm Mommy's new boyfriend Jake.
And to have Molly tell them that over and over,
no, no, that's not Daddy.
That's Jake.
You can't even imagine what that would do to a child's mind.
-You just hope that their children
get the proper mental care the next couple years
and get raised well by their grandparents.
Because otherwise, you're going to have another one,
another Clayton Daniels on our hands in 15 years.
NARRATOR: Without the science, investigators
were convinced that Clayton and Molly
Daniels might have gotten away with it.
-They thought that the fire would destroy all evidence
and there wouldn't be enough remains for DNA testing.
And they were almost right.
-Those *** walks alive, I mean, they
don't deserve to be on this planet.
But that's just my personal opinion.
-If it hadn't have been for everybody being on their toes
in this case, listening to their gut,
listening to their instincts, and then pursuing all the DNA,
the forensic investigation, the arson investigation,
we wouldn't be where we are today
with these two people in prison.