02x10 - Jones and Keller

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NARRATOR: This time on K*llers Caught on Camera.

In the United States, Beaumont, Texas,

a husband makes a distressing call on Valentine's Day.

I recognize who she was and still

had to maintain my composure.

I had to act like as if I didn't know who she was.

NARRATOR: And in Washington State

near Seattle, a bizarre case.

A survivalist builds a bunker in secret over eight years

to radically change his whole life.

My husband's great.

He really is.

He's very respectful to me.

I can't stand living with my wife anymore.

She's just driving me crazy.

Home sweet home.

SPEAKER ON RECORDING: It just sounds like something

bad is happening to her.

SPEAKER ON RECORDING: We know what happened because the video

tells us what happened.

SPEAKER ON RECORDING: I heard some g*nshots.

POLICE: Drop it.

Whatever it is, drop it.

That does not prove that I k*lled my wife.

SPEAKER ON RECORDING: The camera doesn't lie.

NARRATOR: Beaumont, Texas.

A coastal city 30 miles west of the Louisiana border.

It was home to 38-year-old Olivia Jones.

WOMAN: Turn around.

NARRATOR: Police officer Otis Butler was a family

friend who knew Olivia.

To me, she was very friendly, very kind.

Would do whatever she can to be helpful to others.

Kind of quiet.

Real good person.

Real good.

NARRATOR: Olivia married her high school sweetheart in 1999

and had two daughters she was devoted to.

Who is this?

NARRATOR: She was a driven self-starter

who built a successful career.

She had a tax business here in Beaumont,

and she was well known in the community in that area.

NARRATOR: Olivia's first marriage ended in divorce.

In 2009, Olivia met Chris Jones, a corrections counselor

at a high security prison.

Things were going well.

Chris and Olivia moved in together

and got married in 2016.

They also set up a food truck business.

'Bout cracking my bones.

I'm so-- [laughing] Let's move.

Her and Chris together had a food truck that they

had just started to run.

That's something that they were building together.

On Valentine's Day 2019, Olivia went to the store

to buy groceries and flowers.

Olivia returned home.

She and Chris began unpacking the food.

But 20 minutes later, 911 dispatchers

received a harrowing call from Olivia's husband, Chris.

NARRATOR: Otis was working on Valentine's Day

and heard the call come in.

I got the call from dispatcher.

My heart dropped.

I knew him.

I knew her.

It was hard dealing with that type of call,

but I knew I had a job to do.

NARRATOR: Otis and his partner Carol arrived

on the scene, met by Chris, distressed on the driveway,

and his mother.

We looked inside the room, and we saw the deceased laying

on her stomach area, only in her underclothes,

on the side of the bed.

I recognized who she was and still

had to maintain my composure.

I had to act like as if I didn't know who she was.

NARRATOR: The victim was Olivia.

I escorted him out of the house.

And my partner, she stayed inside the house,

securing the scene where the deceased was lying.

I'm looking at how big this guy is.

He's way bigger than she is.

If she has a g*n, and she actually tried to k*ll herself,

and you grabbing, you struggling trying to get it from her,

how was she able to overpower you to keep this g*n

to her head?

When the police officer says he thinks she's still alive,

it feels like he has this moment where he's going, wait.

Do I need to change my story?

I just gave a whole account.

And you can almost see the reprocessing going, oh,

is this going to make sense?

What if she says something different?

NARRATOR: The emergency services arrived.

Olivia was quickly pronounced dead.

Detective Eddie Shehane documented the scene.

Generally on a sh**ting scene, you're

going to have a place where the person was shot.

They're going to drop right there,

and there's where your body is, and there's

where the sh**ting took place.

We had large amounts of blood in several different parts

of the bedroom.

The g*n had been moved and placed

in another part of the bedroom.

It was not a normal crime scene.

NARRATOR: Also on site was Detective Mendy Freeman.

On the outside of the house was surveillance cameras,

and there was a lot of them.

There were cameras on the inside as well in areas

that you wouldn't always expect them to be.

These cameras the inside of the house

were pointing in, away from the windows.

Almost as if you're spying on my intimate moments

when you're not home.

It would feel like a prison.

He's got cameras inside the house, which presumably

aren't just for burglars.

And so there's that intentional controlling

of that person's environment, which makes

them even more vulnerable.

Forms of psychological control involve extreme monitoring,

and that's classic ab*ser behavior.

The police needed to get hold of the video surveillance

to find out exactly what had happened inside the house.

While Chris was being held in the driveway,

Olivia's 19-year-old daughter Ariel arrived.

It tore me up, the hurt the daughter had.

NARRATOR: Chris was detained in Ortis's patrol car.

NARRATOR: Detective Sergeant Yvette

Borrero also arrived on scene.

NARRATOR: News of Olivia's death spread through the family,

including her sister, Angela.

It's always very difficult to break

the news to a family member.

It's never easy to hear it.

NARRATOR: Chris Jones was taken into custody for questioning.

The ID unit took pictures of him.

They took blood samples off his hands.

He still had blood on his hands.

NARRATOR: The video from the cameras in the home

became increasingly important to establish the facts.

NARRATOR: But key footage around the time of Olivia's death

was missing.

Chris immediately began saying that his system must be faulty.

His cameras must not have recorded.

That was immediately suspicious.

NARRATOR: The police did find some recordings just

minutes before Olivia died.

At 8:41 AM, Olivia can be seen in the kitchen.

This is the last piece of footage of Olivia alive.

It appears to be a normal day for her.

She's not excited.

She's not agitated.

She's not arguing.

She's just going about her daily business.

It was curious to us that Christopher said

she was suicidal at this point.

The next video was three minutes later.

And that video is of a frantic Chris

running down the hallway on the phone with 911.

NARRATOR: But the crucial three-minute window

when Olivia died was missing.

There was a belief, a knowledge

amongst US law enforcement that he had destroyed that evidence.

NARRATOR: The missing footage would have helped verify

Chris's version of events.

I knew that the g*nsh*t wound to Olivia's head

was in an unusual spot.

Number one, females almost never sh**t themselves

in the head for suicide.

It's a very rare occurrence.

And also the fact that the g*nsh*t wound to her head

was almost to the back, back here.

And that would be an unusual way to try

to k*ll yourself by sh**ting yourself in the head too.

So I wanted Christopher to walk me through exactly

how this thing occurred.

You could tell, as he was doing it,

he was kind of learning as he went, you know?

OK, this doesn't work.

I think I had her hand this way.

He was trying to make his story

fit the small pieces of evidence that we were feeding him.

And it was difficult to do because nobody

kills themselves like that.

NARRATOR: The police also interviewed family members.

NARRATOR: And Chris had a confession to make

about deleting video files.

That was pretty powerful evidence

in a case where your wife just accidentally shot herself

and she's laying dead in a pool of blood on the floor,

does a normal person start going through his phone,

deleting video footage from cameras?

No.

That's not normal.

that's.

Signs of guilt right there.

NARRATOR: But the police needed more evidence to link

Chris to Olivia's death.

It was literally hours and hours

and days of me going through video to see if there was

anything on there that was relevant to what we now

fully believed was a homicide.

NARRATOR: Historic recordings provided

a damning insight into the dynamic of Chris

and Olivia's relationship.

It portrays, I think accurately,

the fact that Christopher is a bully in the relationship.

Olivia is constantly put in her place and physically

and verbally abused.

What you can see here is the four signs of emotional abuse.

He's trying, through this hostility,

to control her, to subdue her, to isolate her,

and to punish her.

That's a very controlling and psychologically manipulative

technique.

It sure is how angry he would get over nothing.

What would he have done if Olivia

had tried to defend herself?

Because when Olivia wasn't defending herself,

he threw her across the kitchen like a rag doll.

It just all started to make more and more sense.

NARRATOR: Detectives looked into Chris's criminal history.

He'd been arrested multiple times, for as*ault in 1996,

domestic as*ault in 1998, and he had

spent a brief period in jail.

We knew that he also worked at a prison and that he

also had confrontations with prisoners

and also with co-workers.

So it went to show that he had a pattern of violence.

NARRATOR: Olivia's daughter, Ariel, spoke with the police

and confirmed what life was like inside the house.

NARRATOR: The extent of Chris's control over his wife

was confirmed by Olivia's sister, Angela.

Psychological domestic violence breaks you down,

and you start to question your own worth.

And once you've questioned your own worth,

you're much more easy to control and manipulate.

And that's how you get stuck in this codependence

with your partner, where you start to accept

what he's saying as true.

And then you start to also think, I do need him,

and I need to stay here, and I can't leave.

There's nowhere else for me to go.

And in doing so, he's inducing humiliation and fear.

NARRATOR: A historic pattern of violent behavior

was revealed by Chris's ex-wife, Leticia.

NARRATOR: Then the results of the g*nsh*t residue test

came in.

If you fire a firearm, you're going to have

g*nsh*t residue on your hands.

Olivia had zero g*nsh*t residue on her hands,

so the g*n could not have been in her hands when it discharged.

Christopher had traces of g*nsh*t residue

on his hands, which completely destroyed his story of the g*n

was in her hands when it went off.

NARRATOR: All the evidence was suggesting that it

was Chris who shot Olivia.

When the case went to trial, his defense team tried to argue

that Olivia had been suicidal.

We found surveillance footage of her picking out the flowers.

If you're buying flowers for your husband on Valentine's day,

are you planning on k*lling yourself shortly thereafter?

NARRATOR: Hours and hours of Chris's behavior

were caught on camera.

Persuasive evidence for the jury.

It physically put the jury in the living room in the house

as this crime took place.

Even though there were pieces of the puzzle missing that he

had deleted, they're actually watching

events unfold and escalate.

NARRATOR: Chris Jones was found guilty

and sentenced to 30 years in prison

for the m*rder of his wife.

When the court convicted him, I felt good about it.

Justice stepped up and did what justice had to do,

and I felt real good about it.

I miss her, and I really hate this for her and her family.

NARRATOR: Before she was m*rder*d,

Olivia Jones was a victim of both physical

and psychological abuse.

You might think that physical abuse might

be the worst kinds of abuse.

But actually, the psychological abuse, a, often

comes with the physical abuse, and b,

it often is the thing that sort of traps people

because it breaks you down, and you start

to question your own worth.

And once you've questioned your own worth,

you're much more easy to control and manipulate.

And that's how you get stuck in this codependence

with your partner, where you start to accept

what he's saying as true.

And then you start to also think, I do need him,

and I need to stay here, and I can't leave.

There's nowhere else for me to go.

NARRATOR: An individual's isolation, combined

with a partner's unresolved mental health issues,

can be a toxic mix.

In our next case, years of internal monologue

went unchallenged and erupted in a lethal conclusion.

In Washington state, North Bend, 30 miles east of Seattle.

A former sawmill town known as the home of the TV series, Twin

Peaks, and notoriously, in 2012, a double m*rder

that shocked the community.

Now it is unclear if a m*rder suicide happened here.

NARRATOR: Ava Glass is a former crime

journalist who has examined the case, which

involved the Keller family.

NARRATOR: Lynnettee Keller was a central figure.

The mother Lynnettee had a chronic illness.

But she was very active, and she liked crafting.

She liked to video her crafts on the internet.

Hey, everyone.

It's me, Lynn.

OK.

It's time for the 50 sub giveaway.

NARRATOR: Lynette's daughter, Kaylene,

had just graduated from Mount Si High School in 2011.

Watching the videos on that graduation day.

In particular, the happy daughter who is on her way

to college, where she's going to study video gaming,

and she's got this bright future.

They seem truly happy.

NARRATOR: Kaylene's father, Peter Keller,

worked with computers.

Let me get a picture of me and sell me on eBay.

NARRATOR: He also had an artificial intelligence project.

But his passion was the outdoors and building a secret camp

in the woods above North Bend.

All right.

It's a first entry into the video log.

Basically, come up here on the weekends.

And I tend to stay up here for about,

probably around nine hours a day each time, which is a long time.

There is the American ideal of the survivalist.

The man living on his own on a mountain side.

OK, here I go.

That is the romantic kind of ideal of the Wild West.

And obviously, Washington is pretty much as west as you get.

NARRATOR: In complete contrast--

Hi, guys.

I'm just looping through all this stuff

that Christina sent me.

Oh, my gosh.

NARRATOR: Lynneette loved talking to people,

sharing her passion for crafting online.

My little puppy is looking outside.

OK.

I got a lot of stuff to show you guys.

NARRATOR: Then in the early hours of Wednesday,

April 22nd, 2012, the Keller home was on fire.

This was clear immediately this wasn't a normal house fire.

They found what appeared to be expl*sives, one of which

hadn't gone off as apparently intended.

They found bodies, the bodies of Kaylene and Lynnette,

both in their bedrooms, both shot.

NARRATOR: The family had been erased,

including the dog and the cat.

The first real clue came in the house

on the day of the fire.

When police explored the hard drive in Peter Keller's office,

they found disturbing evidence that he had developed

a sort of a plan and had been putting

that plan into action over weeks, months, maybe even years.

PETER KELLER: This is kind of an outside look.

NARRATOR: The footage helped the police unpick what happened

and who committed the crime.

What emerged was Peter's survivalist mentality.

He showed his daughter, Kaylene, how to use an automatic weapon.

NARRATOR: But building a bunker was

his most time-consuming hobby.

PETER KELLER: This is how I get my logs across.

Transportation system.

NARRATOR: He wasn't completely alone.

The camera was his companion through which

he processed his thoughts.

I really do feel stupid talking into this camera,

but I guess eventually I'll get used to it.

It's hard to watch myself because I look so bad.

NARRATOR: What started as a journal of a build

became a chronicle of his personal history

and the evolution of his mental state.

Me and my wife have been, you know, gone through

some [bleep] in our life.

Bad family lives.

Just terrible [bleep], horrible things.

And you know, it's also why I can't live like a normal person.

He'd film himself talking about his unhappiness

about his life, his unhappiness about his family,

his concerns about a world that was

somehow perhaps unacceptable.

All the things, you know, that have happened to me,

there's just no way.

I mean, I'm surprised I made it this far.

NARRATOR: But the camera didn't judge him,

and the monologue became unfiltered.

NARRATOR: Dr. Roberta Babb is a clinical psychologist.

She's examined the video diary to try

and understand the Keller family and what

Peter was going through.

I'm short.

No personality.

Peter Keller describes himself as not very good-looking,

not having really a personality, not

having achieved much in life.

I've tried to make it in this world,

and it just isn't happening.

I'm 40 now.

And I am running out of time.

There's a real sense of hopelessness, and despondency,

and futility in his narrative, which feels incredibly sad.

I just feel like I'm getting knocked back every time.

I just don't have a choice.

I know what I am.

There's a level of resignation to this as a fact

as opposed to it being a perception.

And as this is his truth, he feels that he's bound by it

and is controlled by it to some extent.

NARRATOR: Peter struggled to sleep.

I'm going to work with almost no sleep most of the time.

Just can't even barely function.

I've been doing that for 16 plus years now,

and it's just driving me insane.

NARRATOR: The only thing that helped

Peter was building his shelter.

Getting ready to leave.

Got a lot of work done.

This project probably had the function for Peter of escape.

PETER KELLER: This is, you can't really tell too well,

but this is what I've been digging out.

It gave him a sense of purpose in life.

It's a way to actively and tangibly see

his achievements, which challenged the belief

he had that he was a failure.

There's also a real sense to creating a sanctuary.

Literally a man cave that would protect him,

that he could look after himself within, and essentially

cut himself off from the world, which he felt

was quite hostile and persecutory

and something that he needed to be disconnected from.

And unfortunately, that also included his family.

NARRATOR: Peter's wife, Lynnettee,

appeared unaware of how Peter was feeling.

My husband's great.

He really is.

He's very respectful to me.

I mean, he spoils me.

He takes care of me.

I can't stand living with my wife anymore.

She's just driving me crazy.

But in a way, I still love her.

He's one of those guys who does stay through sickness.

And if I leave her, there's no one else to take care of her.

She's not going to make it.

She can't take care of herself if I'm not there.

And I was getting to the point where

I just can't take it anymore.

NARRATOR: There was a disconnect between how Peter and Lynnettee

viewed the family finances.

Financially, my wife is just--

just going to suck all the money out that I have.

My husband spoils me hates seeing me in pain.

So tonight, he came home, and he gave me another $20 because he

knows I'm going to the doctors tomorrow,

and he wants me to stop at Michael's

and get some more stuff.

Such a good guy.

Peter felt very exploited by his wife financially.

But he was the one that often, unprompted, gave her money.

So there's a really ambivalent relationship

to money but also his wife and what care looks like.

My anniversary is in two weeks.

It's going to be--

I'm going to be married for 20 years.

I'm so excited.

She feels very supported and seen by him.

She feels very privileged to have such a caring partner.

He's a great guy here.

You know, he stuck around with me.

All those medical bills are just wiping me out now.

So I'm trying to get up here while I still have savings.

It's most likely a reflection of what it feels like to live

in the 21st century, where we are consumed by this

need to take on more, to acquire more, to constantly do better.

This idea of just being content has

been perverted into stagnation.

Peter appeared to value material assets much more

than the relational assets he had in terms

of his wife and his daughter.

I guess it's also because I don't have anything.

I never did.

No money.

And essentially, that's that he resigns himself

to this view of himself.

I find being numb to everything

is more comforting than me trying

to make it through real life.

NARRATOR: As Peter spent more time with his own thoughts

than with his wife and daughter, Camp Keller felt more like home.

NARRATOR: By the start of 2012, his shelter was complete.

PETER KELLER: Well, this is it.

Home sweet home.

Got the lantern going, so you can see a little bit.

Not a lot.

The build itself was impressive.

It had a beamed ceiling that supported

all the earth that sat on top of it, hiding it from people.

It had a generator for electricity.

It had a wood burning stove for heat.

It had huge stores of food and water.

PETER KELLER: Pretty well stocked up my window.

So it's just big enough to live in.

NARRATOR: Over the best part of nine years,

it was a major investment.

NARRATOR: Peter was prepping for a significant event.

Today we're hauling up a 55-pound pack.

Basically a big bottle full of beans and some winemaking stuff.

And then it's the weight of the g*n and the pack.

I can last months up here without ever leaving.

I've got propane, gasoline, food.

Having to rely on others meant in Peter's mind

that he was weak, or he had a weakness

that could be exploited.

And therefore, he needed to protect himself at all costs

by being on his own in his man cave by himself.

NARRATOR: As Peter got deeper into the forest,

it got darker in his mind.

He reached a conclusion.

Getting more comfortable with it.

Still nervous sometimes.

But every time I think this is a crazy idea, I think about it,

and I always come up to the same conclusion

that this is the best thing.

It's the only way that I'm ever going to be happy.

He was isolated, and he was very much with his own thoughts.

And the interesting thing about this process,

if seen over a long time, is that what initially

started as a thought then becomes fact

and then part of his reality.

Kaylene's unhappy.

I'm unhappy.

You know, what's the point?

So without the diversity of thought

that we get from other people, we can become very

concretized in our worldview.

And in Peter's sense, it was a very persecutory worldview

which he had to protect himself from because no one else would.

NARRATOR: Peter developed a radical escape plan.

It's actually more comfortable for me

to think about living out here, robbing

banks, pharmacies, just taking what I want for as long

as I can.

At least it'll be exciting.

It won't be boring.

And I don't have to worry about Lynnettee or Kaylene.

And everything will be taken care of.

It'll just be me.

I think that was really important for Peter

because he felt so, I would use the word oppressed and trapped

in his current life experience.

And paradoxically, reducing his life

to an isolated life in a bunker represented

limitless freedom for him.

NARRATOR: For Peter to be truly free,

there was one last thing he felt he had to do.

NARRATOR: With Peter's mind made up,

he returned home to his wife and daughter.

[barking]

[g*nshots]

NARRATOR: Kaylene and Lynnettee had been k*lled.

Peter was gone.

I'm gonna burn the house down.

Destroy everything, hopefully any evidence of anything,

and move out here.

We'll see how long I last doing this.

I don't know.

A few days, or weeks, or maybe even years.

My goal is to make it 10 years.

Detectives do say they are looking for the husband who's

been missing since yesterday morning

and is now considered a person of interest.

NARRATOR: Peter Keller's car was found abandoned

on the edge of the woods.

They also found that he'd withdrawn more than $6,000

from the family bank account.

NARRATOR: The manhunt was a matter of urgency.

They tried to work out exactly where the bunker was.

A forensic examination led them to narrow down their focus

to a certain section based on the kinds

of trees, the amount of daylight, the hills around it.

NARRATOR: The terrain was vast.

They only had a few tiny landmarks to go on.

A helicopter was deployed.

The police knew the area very well.

And so from that point, it was simply a matter

of searching the woods.

A m*rder suspect accused of k*lling his wife and daughter

remains in an underground fortified bunker.

NARRATOR: Six days after the double m*rder,

evidence of human activity.

AVA GLASS: There was smoke rising from the bunker.

There was nobody living out there.

NARRATOR: A SWAT team was dropped from the air.

They knew he was probably armed.

They had a very good idea when they arrived,

he might not come voluntarily.

NARRATOR: As the SWAT team drew close--

NARRATOR: They tried to flush him out with gas

and an expl*sive device.

Initially, no response.

Moments later, reports of a single g*nsh*t.

As Peter Keller predicted, always a potential outcome.

When police finally did get access to that bunker,

they found very quickly that Peter

Keller had taken his own life.

Even in death, I think Peter got freedom.

He wanted freedom from his current life experience.

And he got that by k*lling his wife and his daughter

and then ultimately taking his life.

You can't come back from m*rder.

It is a irreparable action.

And this was very much about Peter

really severing his ties to his family life and the world

as we know it.

Every m*rder impacts everybody they knew.

It's like throwing a pebble into a pond,

and these ripples go out, and everybody gets hit by them.

He didn't just k*ll Lynnettee and Kaylene,

he injured, damaged, and broke the hearts

of hundreds of people.

NARRATOR: Lynnettee and Kaylene's memory

is being kept alive by their remaining relatives.

They've set up a scholarship in Kaylene's name

to help fund young woman to study technology.

[closing theme]