Out There in the Dark

0:28I got a phone call. My sister is in my driveway and her head's bloody. So you bury your little girl and then it's a murder investigation. Yep. There were two people Brandy feared. One in town. She thought she was being followed. One thousands of miles away. Josh was still in Alaska. And then there was the new man in her life. Anybody close to Brandy we need to take a real hard, serious look at. No fingerprints, no DNA, and no arrests for years. You're grieving. How do you put all that awful time together, Molly? Day by day. Then hints emerge of someone's dark past. You've got robberies going on, the homicide.

1:10And one brave woman willing to talk. He told me the same that happened to me. The question wasn't just who murdered a young mother, it was why. There was no money. There just wasn't a reason to do it. She didn't hurt nobody. She didn't bother nobody. Why did they have to kill her? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with Out There in the Dark. It was a chillier than usual Monday night in May as Brandy Daniels drove home from her shifted coals. Zanesville in eastern Ohio is the kind of not-too-big, not-too-small city where you can be off the downtown grid and into wooded rolling hills in just a few minutes.

1:54And out there in the dark, that's where this 25-year-old single mom was heading. Back home to her daughter waiting to be tucked in at Brandy's mom's house out in the country where she'd been living lately. Brandy had been through a rough few months, years really. But one of the big reasons things were finally turning around for her was that soothing voice on the cell phone this night. Her fiancé talking her home. Just talking to her as she's driving home, trying to drive a stick shift, which she'd just learned, talking on the phone. The fiancé was Craig Berry, her older boyfriend. I'm a hairstylist.

2:29I've been for years. One day, Brandy walked into Craig's salon. We hit it off. Women are very funny about who they will turn their head over to, isn't it? Yeah. We turn out to be really good friends. The most beautiful eyes you ever saw. Like the song, Brandy turned out to be a fine girl for Craig. And that right-of-way mutual attraction grew into something more serious. Touched my heart immediately. It was a connection like I've never felt. It just kept getting bigger and bigger every time we talked. We were looking at houses. You guys were fixing to marry? Oh, yeah, yeah. Count Brandy's mom, Molly Edwards, among the many people thrilled at the arrival of Craig in her life, just when you needed something nice to happen.

3:10Craig, what did you think of him? He was really nice. He put her first. He put her first. Growing up, Brandy wasn't much for Barbie dolls, but give her a sketch pad and a pencil, and she was lost for hours. She loved to draw. She had a deft eye for realistic wildlife portraits. She took every kind of art class there was. If it had anything to do with art, she took it. Brandy enrolled at her local college, Zane State. But before her freshman year was up, she left school to marry Josh Daniels, a part-time student she'd met. Not too long after, she had news from Mom. She called me up, said that she was pregnant.

3:51You must have been so torn up. I was. That was my baby. Brandy, husband Josh, and the baby daughter were living nearby. You couldn't ask for a better mother. If it was something that she needed or a little girl needed, the baby got it first. And had a grandmother, like her new baby. The baby got everything. Yes. Yes. The marriage, after seven years of trying, foundered. She filed for divorce. She seemed to be on the other side, Molly, of a really rough patch in her life. Yes. But on this May night, as she was driving home from work, with fiancé Craig in her ear, he heard Brandy starting to sound edgy.

4:37She says, somebody was tailing her. You know, these people need to get off my butt. And the phone just went dead. Went dead. I text her, you know, what's up? So about 10 minutes passed by, and I called her sister and said, is Brandy home yet? She goes, no. I said, well, her call dropped on me, and she should have been coming in the door by now. She said, you want me to go check? I said, would you? Brandy's kid sister Tess headed up the almost half-mile-long drive from her mom's house to look for her. Just a few minutes later, her sister calls me back and is losing it. She was at the top of the driveway.

5:14And she says, I see her car. Her headlights are on, but it's not moving. Her head's slumped down. And then she's just becoming hysterical. And I said, I'll be there. I said, you need to call the cops. 911, your emergency. The Muskingum County 911 Center fielded the call. My sister is in my driveway, and her head's bloody, and she's not moving. I just need someone to come quick, please. I'm just scared. I need someone to come now. Stand the line with me while I get the squad on the way. Fiance Craig was on his way too. There was his girlfriend's little Nissan Sentry in the drive. I pull in right behind her car, and there's a sheriff there already.

5:55And I'm walking up to the car, and I see her in the driver's seat. And I said, what's wrong? He goes, I think she's been shot. Nothing can prepare you for that. No. She was dead. That's what he told me. He told you that at the scene? Yeah. You know, and stay away. You know, you don't want to contaminate the crime scene. No bridge ahead. Into the abyss. Yeah, that blew me out of the water. Brandy's mom was just leaving the bottle factory where she worked. 11.05, I got a phone call, and I went running out to the truck. Tess said something was wrong with Brandy. We get home. See emergency vehicles, officers.

6:36We go right off into the driveway, and that's as far as I could go. The car with the driver's side window down, the vehicle stalled in first gear, and Brandy inside looking ragdoll, shot three times execution style. The detectives were arriving. Who would want Brandy dead? It's always the husband, right? Maybe not this time. When we return. Josh was in fact still in Alaska that night. But there was someone who lived right in town. Did you wonder what was going on with the boyfriend? Anybody close to Brandy, we need to take a real hard, serious look at.

7:29It was May 5th, 2014. The car was at the head of the driveway. Lights on and two county detectives arriving to try to figure out what had happened to the young woman dead in the driver's seat. Detective Mike Ryan and Captain Steve Welker in the first minutes of what would be a years-long investigation. Mike and I arrived at about the same time. Did the scene explain itself to you? We could see the basics of what had happened. Their victim, Brandy Daniels, had been shot three times at close range. Crime scene techs would later recover three shell casings and a clip for a semi-automatic pistol. Brandy's purse and phone were beside her.

8:08We eliminated robbery almost immediately because there was an amount of money there that somebody would have took if it would have been a robbery. As the CSIs took their photos and estimated bullet trajectories, gathered blood, DNA, Brandy's mom, sister, and fiancé watched on in blank horror. What do you remember about the rest of that night? Sitting in the vehicle behind her car, just watching it. And there's your girl, gone. I raised my baby and I can't do nothing about it. It was 2 o 'clock. Went to the house. 4 o 'clock, detectives came down to the house, said that they removed her in the car.

8:46Who would benefit from a single mom's death? Of course, the questioning turned quickly to the soon-to-be divorced husband, the father of the little girl. Brandy's mom told them about Josh Daniels, said he was a personal trainer at the gym and an obsessive weightlifter. When you ran him through the computer, what'd you find out about him? Did he have priors? He did not. He was not on law enforcement's radar. Not on law enforcement's radar, but nonetheless, somebody they wanted to talk to right now. But there was a problem, a big one. There was every reason to believe he wasn't in the driveway that night, but 4 ,300 miles away in Alaska.

9:23Josh had moved up there to be near his mom, and he found work in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. Josh was, in fact, still in Alaska that night. So that's a pretty good alibi. Yes. Because there's domestic turmoil doesn't mean you necessarily have a suspect, though, does it? Not necessarily. Doesn't explain why she's dead in this vehicle. But it's a good idea to eliminate the husband as a suspect in the get-go. Detective Ryan called Josh Daniels on Alaska's North Slope. Can you discern things like demeanor or attitude through the phone line? Not really. I wasn't detecting shock or grief or anything like that.

10:02But nothing you can hang your hat on either. One of the questions I asked him was, who have you been talking to here in Zanesville? And he gave me a list of about a half dozen people. Daniels told the detective he'd return to Zanesville as soon as he could. But there was another person much closer that the cops had to figure out. Craig Berry, the fiancé. He is the last person known to have talked to her? Yes. Did you wonder what was going on with the boyfriend? He's quite an older guy. He's got 20 years on your victim, right? Yes. So he's a person of interest until he's not, I'm guessing, huh?

10:34Well, at that point, anybody close to Brandy we needed to take a real hard, serious look at. Within hours of Brandy's death, Craig got the third degree. Were they asking you hard questions? You know, where have you been? What are you doing? Did you think, wow, they think I'm a suspect? Oh, yeah. Well, that's common, right? Until you're in it, and there's a cop right in your grill. Right. They asked for my cell phone. I handed it over right then. How long did that last? I got home at 5.30 that morning. Then the legwork of the investigation began in earnest, starting with where she was last seen alive.

11:07So you're talking to your victim's co-workers. What's the picture coming together there? They all describe Brandy as a very good young lady, a devoted mother in a marriage that she really wanted to get out of. Patrol officers traced the route from Kohl's to the murder scene, hoping they'd find a security cam that recorded Brandy's car headed home. The boyfriend story, there's a guy right on her bumper. But that image doesn't show up anywhere, huh? No. When the lab results came back, disappointment. No useful fingerprints or DNA. And the long slog of getting search warrants to recover data from the cell phone and the towers the signals bounce off of had only just begun.

11:46A few days after the murder, Brandy's husband Josh returned to Zanesville from Alaska. They met him downtown at his lawyer's office. He was fully cooperative. The detectives asked for his cell phone. He and his attorney voluntarily turned it over. Now you can look him in the eye and you can check out his demeanor. What are you seeing? Josh was very cool and collected. He looked very confident. With the data from his phone on the way to the lab, Josh returned to Alaska with his eight-year-old daughter. Molly and her family had buried their brandy, but no one was coming to terms with the magnitude of this crime.

12:19Did the officers tell you anything about how the case would go? They figured that it would be summed up within a couple days. If only. Coming up, a new suspect, but he has an alibi. I went to my girlfriend's house and I'm kind of staying right there. Was he telling the truth? The texts tell the tale. You're on the clock and you type these. You were sure he was not in the house. When Dateline continues.

12:59Brandy, the young mom, found shot to death in the front seat of her car in the family driveway. Detectives put her fiancé, Craig, through the ringer. But his story, including the part about his last text to Brandy, checked out. Within two or three days, we were sure that he was cleared. But Craig wasn't a total dead end. The fiancé did have a tip for the detectives. He told them they should check out a fellow gym rat of Josh Daniels, a guy who gave Brandy the creeps, someone with an unusual first name, Sirius, Sirius E. Underwood. When they ran the name, investigators found a son of a local preacher who'd had some juvenile offenses, but in the years since had redeemed himself.

13:41He graduated from Zane State, got a good job with a local manufacturer, and seemed to charm every woman he met. Four days into their investigation, Detective Brady Hiddle found Sirius at a girlfriend's place. I asked him if I could look at his cell phone, if I could take it back to the office and download it. He agreed to let me do that. How did he present himself? Calm. He claimed he didn't know Brandy was killed. Just calm, cool, and collected. Sirius came to the sheriff's office. We'll put an airplane mode. While the squad's phone expert examined his cell, Sirius explained how he knew Brandy's husband, Josh.

14:17We went to the same state together. Okay. I worked out with him and stuff like that. He said he hardly knew Brandy. I didn't like meet her, meet her. I seen her one time. As for his pal Josh up in Alaska, Sirius said they hadn't been in contact for a while. When was the last time he sent you a text, he called you? I'll say about two or three weeks ago. About this week? I didn't talk to him this week, no. Sirius said he'd been with his girlfriend around the time cops believe Brandy died. I went to my girlfriend's house and kind of stayed right there. Officers returned Sirius' iPhone and thanked him for coming in.

14:54Wendy Lemon, the girlfriend in Sirius' alibi, was next up on the detective's list of people to talk to. Wendy, a mother of five, said she met Sirius a couple of years earlier at the same place Brandi and Josh got together, Zane State College. I just knew from the moment I met Sirius that this is just a new friend. happy, always smiling. The midlife single mom back to college and Dean's List student Sirius were ambassadors for their school. They were just looking for a face for Sainte State College that would be friendly and that would be outgoing so that we could go to different events in the community as well as giving tours on campus.

15:35Sirius had found time to work as a campus security guard and that's where he met Josh, who did the same thing. Sirius was an overachiever, even featured in brochures about the college. Wendy liked almost everything about him. They became a couple. One year for my birthday, he totally set up an entire day skydiving. Happy birthday! It was so amazing, so awesome. We took motorcycle rides and went on picnics. Now, Wendy found herself caught in the undertow of a homicide investigation. Cops had heard downtown the same day as Sirius. Okay. I just want to let you know you're not under arrest. Okay. Detective Ryan asked about the night of the murder.

16:18He used Wendy's text with Sirius to refresh her memory. Can you put it here so you both can see? Oh, yeah. May 5th. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Did Wendy's text that night fit in the timeline they were building of Brandy's murder? And did they speak to Sirius' whereabouts? 11 o 'clock when you typed these, you were sure he was not in the house? Because at 11 o 'clock he wasn't in the house. He was not in the house then. Sirius arrived, Wendy said, after that 11 o 'clock text. Sirius had given the cops Wendy as his alibi, and she'd inadvertently only made him someone detectives needed to take a closer look at.

16:55There's a window of opportunity in there in which he could easily have done this crime. Yes. And there was another thing. The squad's phone expert filled him in about some internet searches he'd found on Sirius' device. Sirius had opened every news article that had to do with the homicide. Interesting, because earlier in the day, he claimed he didn't know Brandy was murdered. Question. Was Sirius the gunman in Brandy's driveway? He seemed to be no more than a casual friend of Josh's from the gym. But when the IT guys cracked Josh Daniels' phone use history, it told a different story. What had he deleted?

17:29A lot of text messages. To whom? Sirius Underwood. Sirius Underwood was by far the one he was in contact the most. What's your thinking? When we first talked to Josh, he never mentioned Sirius Underwood. Why would they be lying to us about that? Why indeed. The story told by the phones, the concealed relationship, fed a growing theory of the crime. That they were looking at a long-distance killing between Ohio and Alaska. If that was their case, then technology was going to be as valuable to them as DNA or bloody fingerprints. The first big question, did the killer, assuming he was a man, have a phone on him when he did the shooting?

18:07And what tower near the murder scene had the phone pinged off? We had tons of, and I'm not exaggerating, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of phone calls that hit all these various towers. In that electronic haystack, a sharp-eyed cop noticed a call around the time they believed Randy was killed. It was made from a number with a 310 area code. Normally that's Southern California. The county lawman traced that 310 number back to an anonymous disposable phone, a burner, purchased in Zanesville a week before Brandy died. I get the call records for the 310 area phone and start combing through those.

18:50He only called two people, a second burner phone and Josh Daniels. Those were the only two. Was this their breakthrough? That burner phone at the right time, right place had called Josh's phone in Alaska. Then the phone techs did another extraction of Josh's phone, and they retrieved something Josh thought he deleted. A voicemail that was left on Josh Daniels' cell phone from this California area code. Hey, what's up, man? It's me. Hey, hit me up on this phone right here whenever you talk about something. Hear me? Holla at me later. Detective Hiddles' ears perked up when he heard it. I listened to it, and now I know that that phone, 310, is Sirius Underwood's.

19:33That is his voice. The detectives wanted another technically deeper dive into Sirius' iPhone, which they'd returned to him. Sirius came downtown again as requested. But while the cops were preoccupied chasing down a search warrant for his device, he outfoxed them. Sirius found a computer and remotely wiped his phone clean. When I reached in and got Sirius' phone, I could see that it had been reset, factory restored from the iCloud. So whatever story he was going to tell, you weren't going to hear it. There was nothing left on that phone. Pretty clever. It was like a whole evidence locker going up in smoke.

20:08Their whole techie crime trail, poof. Detectives by then were sure Sirius Underwood and Josh Daniels were behind Brandy's murder. But could they prove it? We knew at that time we had a serious problem with our evidence. We were not dead in the water, but we were definitely struggling. Coming up, a stalled case. Are you starting to lose faith in your police, the investigation? It was stressful. And then a threat convinces a woman to talk. He told me this ain't that habit of running to me. What did he say happened to Brandy? He killed her. He killed her.

20:58What is the next thing we've got to do then? Investigators were pretty sure they had the right guys for Brandy Daniels' murder. And they learned a lot about just how awful her marriage to Josh was. Cops found a 911 call Brandy had made six months before her murder. Seems to be some fire. I'm in an abusive relationship and I'm afraid to go home. And I tell my husband that I want to leave, but he won't let me. And it gets physical. Brandy didn't request a deputy that night, but she did file a restraining order against Josh when she left him. Cops knew Josh's buddy from the gym, Sirius, was likely involved in the murder.

21:41But they just couldn't tie the two of them together, despite some suspicious phone traffic between the pair. An additional difficulty in the investigation was the fact that Josh was still living in Alaska, about as far away as you could get from Ohio and still be in the same country. Josh Daniels was here starting his new chapter, living in Wasilla, about an hour outside of Anchorage with his mother and stepfather. Keeping tabs on him from thousands of miles away were the Zanesville police, and they were seeing some patterns. When he wasn't working a job in the North Slope oil fields, he was partying, pumping iron, and chasing women.

22:18Back in Zanesville, meanwhile, the cops kept their pressure up on the person of interest they did have in their zip code, Sirius Underwood. The detectives were all over his girlfriend, Wendy. Every time that I had a little spat or whatever, I was frustrated or disgusted with Sirius, he would always show up again, just wondered if maybe he remembered something. Trying to find you at a vulnerable moment and now you're finally going to spill this? Yes, yes, and it's just like I've already told you every single thing. It's never going to change. If you don't lie, you don't have to cover a lie. Brandy's mother was losing faith in the cops ever making an arrest in the case of her daughter's brutal murder.

22:54Are they saying trust us? Yeah. Every time we'd hear something, we'd contact them. Still need to get more evidence. Still need to get more evidence. But something was about to happen, and it was enormous. Call it a good luck bolt from the land of the midnight sun. Alaska was calling. It was three months to the day after Brandy's murder when the Ohio investigators got a phone call from up here in Wasilla. It was a woman on the line saying that she had been seeing Josh Daniels and she had a story to tell the police, something he had told her. Well, when Detectives Hiddle and Ryan heard that, they were on the plane to Alaska within hours.

23:32The young woman explained she and Josh had been engaged at the time of Brandy's death, but he had commitment issues. she had the detective's undivided attention as she related what an intoxicated josh told her on the fourth of july he told me the same that happened to brandy happened to me what did he say happened to brandy he killed her he killed her he said that he said yes he said i killed her yeah Do you remember what his exact words were? He said that he killed Brandy with a phone call. And I believe everything he said. I believe that he killed her, and I was so afraid. Did he say who killed Brandy?

24:15He said it's a black guy at the gym that wasn't his group of people. It looked as though the detectives were ready to put a bow on their investigation. Take the blizzard of messages between the two men. mix in the geography of the cell phone towers that put a suspect burner phone tied to Sirius right near the crime scene, and now add in the story of the woman from Alaska who'd apparently heard a confession, and you should be ready to swear out arrest warrants. Not quite. When the detectives got back to Ohio, their first stop was at the office of state's attorney, Mike Haddix. And they come to you and say, are we there yet?

24:53Yes. And you're telling them, no, you're not quite there. I wanted to make sure that before we took the case to grand jury that we had a motive. Obviously, in the case of Josh Daniels, the husband, we had a motive. Marriage was breaking up. He had been violent with her in the past. But he was thousands of miles away in Alaska at the time of the killing. We knew he didn't pull the trigger. Couldn't put the gun in his hand. He didn't pull the trigger. When we came up with Sirius Underwood, the most obvious is there's been some sort of a payment. But we spent about a year looking through bank accounts.

25:27Couldn't find any. Almost two years went by and nothing. How do you put all that awful time together, Molly? Day by day. Are you starting to lose faith in your police, in the investigation? It was stressful. Mike Ryan, he would call. I said, have you heard anything? We still have to get some more. More evidence, more evidence. But it's funny how things sometimes work out, because the investigators were about to get another bolt out of the blue lead like the one from Alaska. It began with, of all things, a message to the Facebook page of the Zanesville PD. The tipster had volunteered that her husband was part of a stick-up gang.

26:14We came in and spoke with her and obtained a lot of valuable information for this investigation. Detective Phil Michael of the Zanesville PD had been working for two years on a string of armed robberies. When he got the Facebook tipster in for an interview, guess who she identified as two members of the robbery crew? None other than Sirius Underwood and Josh Daniels. If the tipster could be believed, they'd been bandits together two years before Brandy would be found shot to death. The woman confirmed something Detective Michael had long suspected but been unable to prove, that the robbery of a local department store had been an inside job.