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( narrator ) Kristi Bateson and her husband Charlie
were high school sweethearts.
We actually got pretty serious pretty quickly.
They just seemed to make an ideal couple.
They seemed to be very happy.
But a brutal crime cut their happiness short.
He had been shot while he was sleeping.
The case remained unsolved for almost a decade.
It was gonna be a cold case.
But then Kristi made a shocking confession.
Had the truth finally come out ?
She knew Charlie wouldn't give her a divorce.
Or had the mother of three made a tragic mistake ?
False confessions happen.
The sheriff's department had coerced her.
( woman ) I just thought that if I told them what
they wanted to hear, they would leave me alone.
Captioning made possible by OXYGEN MEDIA, L.L.C.
Redding, California, April 17, 1992.
It was a little past noon on Friday as 22-year-old
Kristi Bateson waited in a mall parking lot
with her two daughters, a four-month-old
and a three-year-old.
My mom took us to Redding that morning
to just run errands and to let my dad sleep
because he worked a nightshift.
She took the kids to a playground where
they often went in Redding and hung out
at the playground for a little while,
then went to the mall.
At around 11:30, Kristi and her girls left the mall,
but they couldn't drive home.
The tire was flat on the car, so I went inside
and used the pay phone and tried calling home.
Kristi's husband, Charlie,
hadn't answered the phone, however.
She would turn off the ringer sometimes
to let him sleep.
Unable to get Charlie on the phone,
Kristi called a friend
and asked her to drop by their house and knock on the door.
( Kristi ) She said, "No problem."
She would go, you know, send him down.
Then Kristi and the girls waited for her husband to make
the drive from their home in Burney,
a small town about 50 miles from Redding.
The girls and I just kind of walked around
a little bit and, you know,
just waited for him to come down.
I mean, it's about a 45-minute drive, 45 minutes to an hour.
However, it was over an hour before someone
arrived and it wasn't Charlie.
( Juliana ) Instead, her grandmother comes
and says, "I have to talk to you."
She told me that Charlie had been killed.
The friend Kristi had sent to the house had found him,
still in his bed, a single gunshot wound
to his right temple.
She found Charlie asleep with, you know,
the sheets pulled up against him.
It was clear he'd been shot while he was sleeping.
Kristi appeared shocked by the news
that her husband was dead.
( Kristi ) I fainted.
I still have the knot on my knee where I hit the cement.
But what Kristi didn't expect was that
the search for Charlie's killer,
and the questions about her involvement,
would last for nearly 20 years.
Kristi Conley was born and raised in Burney, California,
a town nestled in the mountains of the scenic Cascade Range.
( Kristi ) We're way up, almost to the Oregon border.
About 3,000 people-- small town.
It's definitely just its own little mountain community area.
Nice folks, nice place to be, nice place to visit.
If you love the outdoors, you'll probably love Burney.
It was the perfect backdrop for an idyllic childhood.
( woman ) Kristi as a little girl was very active in sports.
She wasn't exactly a tomboy,
but she didn't like me fooling with her hair
or that type of thing.
She'd rather just be just a little girl and play.
( Kristi ) I was a pretty good kid.
It wasn't like I was getting in trouble or anything in school.
Kristi's teenage years wouldn't
be entirely free of trouble, however.
In 1984, the high school sophomore started dating
a senior named Charlie Bateson.
He played football and I cheered.
I was a cheerleader in high school, so, you know,
I knew him from games and stuff like that.
They just seemed to make an ideal couple.
I was happy.
He treated her very well, you know, and they got along.
In fact, Kristi's family was so happy about the match
that it wasn't long before they were
treating Charlie like part of the family.
We actually got pretty serious pretty quickly.
I mean, we spent a lot of time together
and he would go on trips, like, with my family and stuff.
However, the teenage romance did have a stormy side.
They had a few ups and downs, as every couple does.
In 1987, Kristi wanted to enjoy her
senior year in high school, without her boyfriend.
That's when Kristi's parents discovered
that Charlie really was part of the family.
The only reason the parents found out is Kristi
wanted to break up with Charlie.
So Charlie went up the door and knocked on the door
and says, "I have something to tell you."
He said, "Me and your daughter's
been married for a year."
When Kristi was just 17, she and Charlie had
gone to Reno, Nevada and married in secret.
( Frank ) He lived at home and she lived at home.
Nobody knew it.
I think it shocked me as much as it did her dad.
Somehow, the couple had obtained a license
without the necessary parental permission.
So once the shock wore off,
Kristi's parents challenged the marriage.
They had it annulled, so it was a mess for a while.
Not only were Kristi and Charlie no longer married,
they also broke off their relationship.
And in the summer of 1987,
Kristi briefly dated another boy named Troy Lunbery.
Then she broke up with him and Charlie and
her started to go together again.
Kristi also started college,
but she quickly dropped out to work instead.
She started junior college but she wasn't happy.
But-- so then she became a nanny.
The job lasted only a few months, but it was clear
that what Kristi really wanted was a family of her own.
I knew from the time that I was little,
I mean, I'm talking early elementary school,
that I wanted to be a wife and a mom,
where, you know, some people might want to be
a doctor or a lawyer.
And after reconciling with Charlie,
Kristi was on her way to achieving her dream.
She finally decided that he was the one for her.
In February of 1988,
Kristi and Charlie, now 18 and 21,
made another trip to a Reno wedding chapel,
but this time it was no secret.
( Kristi ) Our families were there.
We had a friend stand up for each of us.
Married once more,
the couple returned to Burney and quickly settled down.
( Kristi ) Charlie worked at the mill located in Burney.
Just your basic sawmill, I guess, log mill.
And it was a good-paying job.
He worked a lot of hours.
Charlie made enough to support the two of them,
but he and Kristi were determined
to expand their family.
( Kristi ) We decided to have kids right away
and our first daughter was born the following year,
she was born in March of 1989.
Then, in November of 1991, Kristi gave
birth to the couple's second daughter.
She was just the perfect mother.
I don't know, she just has always made
me think of somebody that wanted a family life.
Charlie was just as thrilled.
( Frank ) He loved it.
He loved them girls.
He was a very good father.
They seemed to be very happy.
However, as happy as Kristi and Charlie were,
their growing family soon outgrew their means.
We weren't being able to save money.
And that meant putting their dreams
for the future on indefinite hold.
We wanted to buy our own home.
With two small children, Kristi helped
earn money when she could.
( Kristi ) I did some, like, daycare out of my house and I worked in,
like, the nursery up at one of the churches.
But other than that, I mean, my main focus was,
you know, my girls and my husband.
Still, the couple wasn't making enough
to cover their basic expenses.
They were a little behind in their bills.
But just as their hopes of saving enough money to buy
a home appeared out of reach,
Kristi's grandmother came through with a solution.
In the spring of 1992, she told Kristi and Charlie
there was about to be a vacancy in a rental property she owned.
My grandmother had told us that she was going to
be evicting the people that lived in
a house behind her house.
Her grandmother not only suggested that
Kristi and Charlie move into the house,
she offered them an incredible deal.
She said that we could live there rent-free, you know,
give us a chance to come up with the money
for a down payment for a home of our own.
However, there were a couple of drawbacks to the plan,
starting with the previous tenants.
The grandmother had been told by some neighbors
that the previous tenants were dealing drugs.
Her grandma kicked 'em out and said they'd
drive up and down the road, you know,
and stare and everything else, you know.
The other challenge was the size of the house.
( Ron ) And it was very small.
It had a living room, a kitchen and one bedroom.
Most bathrooms are bigger than this bedroom.
There was barely enough room in the bedroom for a twin bed.
However, despite its shortcomings,
a free house was an offer the cash-strapped family
could hardly refuse.
We thought that we would be able to make that work,
you know, for a few months or a year.
Determined to tough it out,
Kristi and Charlie moved into
the house at the beginning of April 1992.
I thought that would be an
excellent way for them to save money.
The tight living quarters did require
some adjustments, though.
Kristi's daughters took the tiny bedroom.
Kristi slept on a foldout bed in the living room.
And Charlie, working the graveyard shift
at the sawmill, slept wherever he could.
He would come home from work early in the morning,
and if the kids were awake,
then he would bring them out to me
and he would go into the bedroom and sleep in our daughter's bed.
Otherwise, you know, he would sleep with me for an hour
and then go in there once they did wake up.
But even with the bedroom door shut,
the girls would often wake their father up,
so Kristi arranged outings most mornings.
Kristi had begun taking the two kids
in the car out to the mall
or a park or something so that she could keep
the house quiet so Charlie could sleep.
By April 17th,
after just two weeks in their cramped rental,
the family had already fallen into a routine.
Charlie had come home at around 3:00 a.m. that morning
and slept a few hours on the foldout beside Kristi
before the girls woke up at around 7:00.
He brought them out to me and then he
went in to the bed and went to sleep.
Then, after making breakfast for her daughters,
Kristi loaded the girls into the car
and drove the 45 minutes to nearby Redding.
I took them to the park for just a little bit.
I mean, my three-year-old, she lost interest pretty quick.
So then after that we went to the mall
and just walked around the mall a little bit.
An hour or so later,
at around 11:30, Kristi and the girls
left the mall.
She noticed she had a flat tire
so she called home.
Charlie didn't answer the phone.
She remembered that she turned the ringer
down so that Charlie could sleep.
So Kristi called a friend
and asked her to go to the house,
but what she found there would change Kristi's life forever.
Coming up:
Charlie is found dead.
There was blood all over the place.
And suspicion turns to Kristi.
( narrator ) Burney, California, April 17, 1992.
It was about 11:45 when a friend of Kristi Bateson's pulled up
outside the tiny rental home
she shared with her husband, Charlie.
Kristi was in nearby Redding, stuck at
the mall with a flat tire.
She called home to get Charlie to come down to Redding.
He wasn't answering.
So, unable to reach Charlie, Kristi had called a friend.
She asked her to go and, you know,
knock on the door and tell Charlie she needed
help because she had a flat tire.
But when Kristi's friend knocked on their front door,
Charlie didn't answer.
She hears the alarm going off that Kristi had
set for 11:30 for Charlie to wake him up.
Worried that something might be wrong,
Kristi's friend tried the front door.
Finding it unlocked,
she walked inside the house and made a horrifying
discovery in the home's only bedroom.
There was blood all over the place.
In the middle of the bloody scene,
sprawled on his daughter's bed, was Charlie.
He had been killed by a single gunshot to the head.
The gunshot wound sprayed blood
and brain matter all over the bedroom.
Kristi's friend called 9-1-1.
Soon, the tiny house was crawling
with sheriff's deputies.
There was no sign of forced entry,
but investigators did find what appeared to be a promising clue.
There was a palm print found on the door to the bedroom.
But in Charlie's truck, parked outside in the driveway,
they also found something puzzling.
Charlie's rifle was missing.
Charlie kept the truck locked all the time
'cause he kept his rifle in there.
Charlie always kept it behind the seat, away from the kids.
Was it possible Charlie had been killed with his own gun ?
While the medical examiner removed his body for autopsy,
the investigators turned to Kristi for answers.
By then, Kristi's grandmother had arrived at the Redding mall
to inform the 22-year-old that her husband was dead.
When she tells Kristi the news, Kristi faints.
I don't remember much after that.
And the next thing I do remember,
I was in the police station.
I was in, like, a small room.
That's what I remember.
And the police were questioning me.
She can hear her kids crying outside of the door.
My three-year-old was asking for me.
In the interview, Kristi told the investigators
that she and the girls had left
the house at around 8:00 that morning.
Asked who might have reason to kill her husband,
Kristi said she had no idea.
Although she did explain the problems her grandmother
had with the previous tenant of their rental house.
Investigators also pressed Kristi
for details of her relationship with Charlie.
Then, the investigators asked Kristi about Charlie's behavior.
They asked her if, you know, he drank or took drugs
or if he might have been having an affair.
She's just so shocked by these questions.
Finally, at the end of the interview,
the investigators allowed Kristi to leave.
I remember my grandparents putting me
into the car, and it was dark outside.
So, as for how long I was in there,
I really don't have any idea.
But just because the investigators
let Kristi go,
that didn't mean they had ruled her out as a suspect.
There for a while Kristi was the person of interest.
When someone is killed and they have a spouse,
the first suspect is always the spouse
and that's where they seem to get hung up.
The suspicion surrounding Kristi only deepened
when the crime scene investigators
recovered the bullet that killed Charlie:
a 30-caliber rifle round.
There were at least 27 rifle makes
that could have fired the shot.
One of them was Charlie's gun.
And, since it was missing,
there was no way investigators could rule
it out as the *** weapon.
There was never any ability to compare
the slug with a gun that might have fired it.
However, there were two pieces of evidence
that seemed to point to someone other than Kristi.
One was the mysterious palm print on the bedroom door.
( Carol ) They never identified the source.
The house had just been cleaned and painted
between when the previous tenants left
and when Kristi and Charlie moved in,
so there wasn't a lot of
fingerprint evidence that they
couldn't track to the two of them.
The other had to do with the home's bloody bedroom.
Whoever did this had to have gotten
blood on them, quite a lot of blood.
( Carol ) There was nothing ever found on her clothing,
nothing in the car that she'd been in for,
you know, more than an hour that morning.
There was not a drop of blood anywhere.
But the fact that there was no blood on Kristi's clothes
or in her car didn't deter the investigators.
They kept their focus on Kristi,
looking for evidence of hiding materials
that could have had blood on it.
The investigators did look into the possibility
that she or whoever did the killing
had cleaned themselves.
They took the pipes out of the house.
They, you know, probed them for any blood residue
or even trace amounts of forensic
evidence that would point to Kristi.
And when that failed to produce any results,
they asked Kristi to take a polygraph.
My husband asked, "Well, couldn't they wait
to do it at a different time ?"
Because we were getting ready for the funeral.
And they told us that, no, they had to do it right away.
Once again, the polygraph failed to produce
any indication that Kristi was Charlie's killer.
The polygraph was completely normal.
None of it produced any, you know,
suggestion that she was not telling the truth.
In fact, the investigators would soon begin to wonder
whether Kristi had been onto something in her interrogation
when she mentioned that the house's
previous tenants had been dealing drugs.
There were reports to the sheriff's department within
a couple days of the *** of Charlie Bateson
that this was a drug hit that had gone wrong.
Confidential informants apparently told
officers what they had heard around town.
That one of the dealers who lived
in the house had cheated somebody
and it was this guy who came back to exact revenge.
Had Charlie's death simply been a case of mistaken identity ?
The investigators found little evidence to support that theory.
They didn't result in any interrogations or arrests.
I said, "You-uns are looking in the wrong place."
'Cause down deep, I thought she done it.
But the investigators hadn't turned up
any evidence against Kristi, either.
Eventually the-- the police stopped questioning Kristi.
Weeks passed, then months.
And the *** of Charlie Bateson
moved into the Shasta County Sheriff's Office cold-case file.
They said they didn't have no leads or nothing.
With Charlie gone, Kristi had no way
to support her two small children.
So she moved in with her parents as she
struggled to put the tragedy behind her.
Her main concern was her daughters and taking care of
them and she wasn't sure what she was
going to do or how she was gonna manage.
There were many, many days that I just stayed in bed
or just, you know,
sat in a chair and stared out the window.
But after a year had passed, Kristi decided
it was time to move on with her life.
I heard my dad tell someone something to the effect that,
"I hope she's gonna be okay."
I realized that I needed to put myself together,
you know, maybe not for me but for my girls.
While visiting relatives, Kristi was reunited with Troy Lunbery,
the young man she had dated during
her break up with Charlie back in high school.
And in the spring of 1994,
two years after Charlie's death,
24-year-old Kristi gave birth to their daughter Megan.
She married Troy a month later.
It just didn't feel right how long it was afterwards.
Was the rekindled romance a motive for *** ?
That's what Charlie's father thought.
She knew Charlie wouldn't give her a divorce.
He'd fight for them kids.
But when Frank Bateson took his suspicions to the authorities,
they told him there was little they could do.
They had found no evidence connecting Kristi to the crime.
I said, "It was her."
The police told me, "Well, the only way we'll ever
find that out is if she confesses to it."
Coming up:
Cold-case investigators look into Charlie's ***.
Two detectives came to my door.
And they turn up the heat on Kristi.
( narrator ) By 2001, Kristi Lunbery's first husband, Charlie Bateson,
had been dead for nearly nine years,
his *** officially unsolved.
The investigation, it went for a while then I just,
everything dropped and it seemed like
it was just gonna be a cold case.
In the years since Charlie's ***,
Kristi, now 32, had managed to rebuild her life.
She'd not only married an old boyfriend named Troy Lunbery,
she'd also launched a new career.
I passed the state test to become
a certified nurse's assistant.
Kristi had worked at a local hospital for several years
before shifting to home-based care
for the disabled.
I could do it out of my home and,
you know, still be there for my girls.
By 2001, her daughters with Charlie were ten and 12,
while her daughter with Troy had just turned seven.
I remember all my friends always wanting to
come and have sleepovers at my house
'cause they loved my mom and she was always
like a mother figure to other-- my other friends, too.
They always called her Momma Kristi.
But on December 20, 2001, five days before Christmas,
Kristi's life was about to unravel once again.
Two detectives came to my door and they said that
they were going over old cases, cold cases.
About ten years ago, cold cases became
quite the rage with law enforcement.
Generally, the renewed interest was due
to breakthroughs in forensic DNA analysis.
But since there was no DNA to analyze in the Bateson case,
the Shasta County Sheriff's Office
fell back on more traditional methods.
There was a new homicide chief
at the sheriff's department
and he wanted to clear up some of the cold cases.
So he reassigned them
to a number of detectives and said,
go out, and, you know, shake the bushes
and see what you can find out.
Those marching orders had sent the investigators
straight to Kristi's door.
They just wondered if they could come in
and talk to me a little bit and, you know, just
that they were re-interviewing everyone.
So, I said, "Sure, no problem."
( Carol ) Kristi invited the detectives in, completely,
you know, agreeable to being questioned about it.
At first, the interview appeared to be routine.
The two detectives started out their questioning
with just going over my statements
from ten years earlier.
They didn't suggest at the onset that they still suspected her.
But in the middle of the almost
two-hour interview, something changed.
The tone changed very drastically.
They just started kind of saying that they didn't really,
you know, believe what I was saying.
And they knew that I had done this
and I just started feeling very uncomfortable.
Sensing that Kristi was growing uncomfortable,
the detectives pressured her to confess.
They kept saying, you know, "We know you did it.
We have witnesses who will testify to this," you know,
"Why don't you just admit it and make it easier on your family ?"
And they started suggesting that, you know,
her children could be taken away from her if she didn't,
you know, come forward and-- and admit that she did this.
They were saying that, basically, if I didn't
tell them what they wanted to hear,
that they were gonna take my kids away from me.
And then, once Kristi was convinced that
her children's future was on the line,
they pressed once more for a confession.
According to Kristi, shooting Charlie had
been a spur-of-the-moment decision.
But if Kristi had shot Charlie, she appeared
to be a bit fuzzy on the details.
They asked her, you know, "What was the weapon you used ?"
And she said she didn't know.
Where she'd found the *** weapon wasn't all
that Kristi appeared unclear on, either.
All she claimed to know was that she
was sorry for what she had done.
Kristi had just confessed to ***,
and that meant she would face charges
for the death of her first husband, but not just yet.
Kristi said no.
And as soon as the detectives left, she called her mother.
She said that she thought she told
them that she had killed Charlie.
But that didn't mean it was true, according to Kristi.
( Kristi ) I'm not the type of person who is going to confront someone
or stand up to someone basically and
tell them to get out of my house.
That's not how I was raised.
So I just thought that if I told them what they wanted to hear,
they would leave me alone and it would go away.
People think, "Well, who would ever confess to
a *** if you didn't do it ?"
It just sounds totally unreasonable.
It happens a lot.
On the day after Christmas,
the authorities contacted Kristi
and asked that she turn herself in.
They actually told me that I could either come
to the police station in Burney
or that they would come
to my house...
and cuff me in front of my kids.
My husband just took her down to the police station.
Kristi's two oldest daughters stayed with their grandparents,
but Kristi's husband Troy took their daughter and moved out.
The day my mom was arrested,
my dad packed up my-- our stuff
and me and him moved to Nebraska.
Kristi's marriage was over.
And after she was released on bail awaiting her trial,
she spent the next two years building her defense.
( Mike ) Their defense was that the sheriff's
department had coerced her into a confession.
Certain people are very susceptible to the pressure of,
you know, police interrogators
and just-- just to kind of make
it all go away they'll-- they'll say what
the investigators want them to say.
It was a description that fit Kristi perfectly,
according to Dr. Richard Ofshe,
the Berkley sociologist consulted by the defense.
She would be a prime candidate for--
to be the kind of person who would give a false confession.
She is not a person who confronts people.
She's very, um...
she's very passive.
So when her case went to trial on March 17, 2004,
Kristi fully expected to be acquitted.
I did believe in the justice system
and that everything would be okay.
But halfway through the trial, Kristi says her attorneys
chose not to call in the expensive expert witness.
They didn't--
Chose not to call Dr. Ofshe in my defense.
I was really surprised.
That was the basis of the case.
That wasn't the only blow to Kristi's defense, either.
They did not allow into the trial any of the reports
that had been made to the sheriff's
department about potential, you know,
drug dealer involvement or this being
the result of a, you know, mistaken identity.
Which left the jury with one lingering question.
Who would say that they killed somebody if they hadn't ?
Coming up:
The jury returns with a verdict.
I wasn't sure if I heard them right.
And Kristi faces her future.
I thought she was gonna be gone forever.
( narrator ) On April 8, 2004, 34-year-old Kristi Lunbery
was awaiting the verdict in her *** trial.
In 2001, she had confessed to the 1992 ***
of her first husband, Charlie Bateson,
a confession she later claimed was false.
This was all part of a-- sort of a breakdown
that she had while she was being interrogated.
But without an alternative explanation for the ***
or psychiatric testimony to back up
the defense's claim that the confession was false,
the jury found Kristi guilty of second-degree ***.
I felt numb.
My stomach just, like, dropped, you know.
I wasn't sure if I heard them right.
And on May 14th, the judge sentenced Kristi
to a prison term of 19 years to life.
We thought that it was gonna be okay, and it wasn't.
There were a lot of things that were
not admitted in her trial that could have helped her.
One was evidence that Charlie's ***
may have been a case of mistaken identity.
The other was a sociologist's opinion
that Kristi's confession was false.
If the trial attorneys had presented the expert testimony
to explain that false confessions happen
and argued this other evidence,
I think she would have been acquitted.
Kristi maintained her innocence
and pinned her hopes on an appeal.
( Kristi ) I actually never thought that I would be there forever.
And, um...
I always felt that
because I knew that I didn't do it.
But could she convince an appeals court ?
Kristi decided to contact Juliana Drous,
a San Francisco attorney with a passion for cases like Kristi's.
When I went to law school being, you know,
a product of the '60s, I went with these high ideals
to fight injustice and the greatest injustice
is when an innocent person gets convicted.
After Juliana met Kristi in person,
she agreed to take the case.
She is a very sweet, really wonderful person,
which is one of the reasons why
I fought for her like I did.
And after contacting Dr. Richard Ofshe,
the sociologist who had evaluated Kristi's confession,
Juliana became even more convinced
that she had been wrongly convicted.
And he said, you know, "This is the worst
confession I have seen."
And he was really angry about
the whole horrible thing to have happened to Kristi.
Starting with Dr. Ofshe's opinion that Kristi's confession
was false, Juliana spent several weeks drafting
a petition to overturn the verdict in Kristi's trial.
The heart of the petition was that her lawyers,
where the only evidence was this ridiculous confession,
should have presented Dr. Ofshe to tell the jury
that false confessions happen.
But the sociologist's opinion wasn't all that Kristi and her
attorney pinned their hopes on.
There was also the bloody palm print.
Her lawyers should have been allowed to present
this evidence and if they had,
there's a good chance that she would not have been convicted.
Then, when the petition was complete,
Juliana began the process of getting it through the courts.
Juliana would just reassure me that it's a procedure
and these are steps that we need to take
and these things take time.
After being denied by the California courts,
Juliana took Kristi's case to federal court.
It was filed in the district court in Sacramento.
We lost there.
After each appeal was denied I was, you know,
just got this-- just a sinking feeling in my stomach.
But Juliana wasn't ready to give up.
In 2010, four years after
she initially took on Kristi's case,
the attorney appealed the district court's decision
to the Ninth Circuit Court, in San Francisco.
She just did not let go of the case.
It's awful for an innocent person to be
imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit.
While Juliana fought to have her conviction overturned,
Kristi and her family struggled to stay connected.
We tried to take the girls at least once
a month to visit with their mom.
Well, which is about a thousand-mile round trip.
But their mother's incarceration took
its toll on Kristi's daughters.
It was hard.
We all had to grow up a lot.
I was so used to my mom tucking me in
and getting me ready
and all of a sudden my dad had to start
taking care of me and I wasn't used to that.
As the years wore on, the girls began to lose hope.
We just figured, you know, she wouldn't
be there for weddings or kids or anything.
I thought she was gonna be gone forever.
But if Kristi ever doubted she'd eventually be
reunited with her daughters, she didn't show it
when her family visited her in prison.
I said, "How come every time I come down
here you're always smiling ?"
She says, "I choose to be happy."
She's a very strong woman.
She never quit.
When she was in prison, she did not quit.
Neither did her attorney.
And on May 25, 2010, more than six years
after Kristi's conviction, their persistence finally paid off.
The Ninth Circuit reversed Kristi's conviction.
As soon as the ruling came down,
Juliana called Kristi with the news.
She actually had to say my name a couple times
because I just was, like, silent on the phone, you know.
I was just trying to think if I really heard what she just said.
Kristi's conviction had been overturned,
but not the original indictment.
She would be re-tried for Charlie's ***.
The appeals court did not invalidate the confession.
They cited some problems with it
and a lot of reasons to suspect
that it was given under pressure.
They let that stand.
But for the moment, released on bail while awaiting re-trial,
Kristi was finally reunited with her daughters
after six long years in prison.
I just, I, like, stood there for a second and looked at her
then I just ran up to her and hugged her
when I saw her for the first time.
The first week was kind of like a dream.
I would wake up at least-- and first thing,
check to make sure she was still there.
Coming up:
Kristi faces another trial.
I did not want to be away from my daughters anymore.
And she makes a tough decision.
We just wanted it all to be over.
( narrator ) On March 28, 2011, almost seven years
after she had been found guilty of murdering
her first husband, Charlie Bateson,
41-year-old Kristi Lunbery was back
in a Shasta County, California courtroom.
In 2010, a federal appeals court
had overturned the 2004 conviction
that had sent her to prison.
The Ninth Circuit sent the case back to the state court.
Which meant that Kristi still faced a *** charge.
They were planning to try her a second
time for her husband's ***.
And since Kristi had admitted to killing her husband,
an acquittal wasn't assured, despite the fact
that she had later recanted the confession.
It's really hard for jurors to believe that
somebody would confess to doing something they hadn't done.
But would Kristi's fate be up to a jury ?
Shortly before her trial was scheduled to begin,
the prosecutors approached her attorney with a deal.
( Juliana ) The DA came up with an offer that if she
pled no contest to a manslaughter,
that she would receive credit for the time already served.
But for Kristi, even a no contest
plea felt like an admission of guilt.
( Juliana ) You know, she was really uncomfortable pleading
no contest because she knew she didn't do it.
However, with credit for time served, Kristi
would be eligible for immediate parole.
It meant that I would not be going back to prison.
I did not want to be away from my daughters anymore.
I didn't want to miss anything else in their lives.
( Kayla ) I was scared that she wouldn't be heard again
and that things would go on like they did
before and that she would be taken away from us.
So when Kristi came to court that Monday morning,
it wasn't to stand trial.
Instead, she entered a plea of no contest
to a charge of manslaughter.
Kristi's plea was the only option she actually had
if she wanted to come back home and be with her family.
We just wanted it all to be over.
But while Kristi's family welcomed
the outcome, Charlie's father was outraged.
How can you sentence somebody to 19 years
to life and let 'em out in six years ?
It just ain't right.
Since her release, Kristi has tried to move on with her life,
reconnecting with an old high school classmate.
( Kristi ) I got married in July of 2011
to a great guy.
You know, we just wanna just live
a, you know, peaceful, normal life.
She's a loving and caring person and life means
a lot to her and everybody around her.
It's what she deserves, according to her family.
We know, you know, that Kristi's innocent.
But there are others who still believe that
Kristi essentially got away with ***.
You can say what you want.
I still think that she done it.
I still think that she done it.