The case is done.
Krystal Matlock is being let out.
The prosecutors and defense attorneys are
almost starting to pack up.
And it was lunch time,
and I was ready to go eat my leftovers that
my wife put in my little lunch box for the day,
and Amanda Martin stood up...
♪
I saw Amanda out of the corner of my eye.
It's almost like double Dutch.
It's like, you know, how do I, how do I jump in?
♪
I'm very often the unexpected visitor to a court room.
She said she wanted to raise the question of whether
these search warrants could now be unsealed.
♪
So, we had these two layers of problem here.
You had a, a sealing order that ran counter to
the North Carolina Public Records Law,
and counter to the cases interpreting
the first amendment.
Usually a search warrant is sealed either to
protect the integrity of an investigation, or,
to ensure the fair trial of any defendants who are charged.
What was it that was in the search warrants that
needed to continue to be sealed? We didn't know.
AMANDA: That the laws of public records are there for
very good reasons, and the interest in that is
never stronger than when we're talking about oversight,
if you will, of law enforcement.
(siren)
These are people who walk around with guns;
they arrest people; they search people's homes.
I mean, they have more power than you can imagine,
and so, I'm not saying they shouldn't have that power,
but I always feel that the tradeoff for that is that
we should be able to see how it gets exercised.
At that point with Matlock being the final defendant,
I saw no reason to keep them secret any longer
because the investigation was concluded.
Everyone had been brought to justice.
♪
Take the kids to school, and you come home and
you turn on the computer, and there's, you know,
a story in the Winston-Salem Journal, Mike Hewlett's
been able to get these search warrants shaken loose.
And then it's that, it's that case that's been
in the back of your mind talking to you.
And I almost clicked on 'em that first time and
kind of hovered over the PDFs.
Then, you know, I go back to the article a few more times
over the next couple days...
Sitting around by yourself thinking,
is it like an addiction?
You know, as journalism is,
it's a nasty business and it's an awful addiction.
And the highs you get from it will never,
never make up for the lows and yet you keep doing it,
you keep doing it over and over again.
Finally, I clicked on that PDF...
And I opened up these search warrants and I read 'em.
♪
I have never seen a single document come across my desk
in my life that was as egregious and that was as
raw an example of signals have been missed,
bad jobs have been done, people have been hurt.
♪
Five years; that's how long it was from when
Josh Wetzler was murdered until the bodies were
found in Pazuzu's backyard.
search warrants proved that this case could have
been solved within weeks of Josh's disappearance.
Where before we only had rumors,
now I got hard facts.
And I'm diving back into the Pazuzu story for one last piece.
My hope is I can get this community some answers.
I can find out why this happened in our hometown.