[music playing]
NARRATOR: March 12, 1992.
On the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas,
a man is walking his dog through a thick woods when it suddenly
runs off into the brush.
When the dog returns, it has something
shocking in its mouth.
RODRIGUEZ: He's telling me his dog went into the wooded area.
And as he called him back, he noticed what he believed
was a rock in his mouth.
He reached free the rock from his jaw,
and that's when he realized that it was a human skull.
NARRATOR: Rodriguez searches the scene
and discovers more human remains.
Three months after discovering the body,
Rodriguez catches an unrelated arson
case that takes him 40 miles southeast
to Kelly Air Force Base.
There, while trading stories about cold cases,
Rodriguez learns the Air Force has
been looking for a 26-year-old Sergeant named Scott Prince.
He went missing on November 9, 1990,
around the time the ME determined
Rodriguez's victim had died.
Dental records confirm Rodriguez's hunch--
his victim is the missing airman, Scott Prince.
Nine years later, Rodriguez is now
the sheriff of Medina County.
And Scott's murder remains a mystery.
Then in 2001, a California inmate named Timothy Thomason
breaks the case wide open.
I went, and I got a guard.
And I said, come on.
I need to talk to you.
And I sat down right there, and I told
him about the entire crime.
I must admit I did this 11 years ago,
and I can't live with it no more.
NARRATOR: Veteran Detective Randy Brown
takes over the investigation.
Thomason tells Brown that on the night of the murder,
he was with his girlfriend, Judy.
Judy was a childhood friend, sweetheart,
who later became my wife.
NARRATOR: Thomason says the plan that night was to rob a driver
to fuel his cocaine habit.
We went out one night walking around,
hitchhiking up and down 410.
And we probably walked for about a mile.
NARRATOR: Then a Nissan pulls over.
He talked about posing as hitchhikers
and that this Air Force guy stopped, picked him up.
NARRATOR: The driver is Scott Prince.
Thomason says that he and Judy forced
Scott at gunpoint to drive to an ATM and withdraw $100.
But after driving away with Scott, Thomason became anxious.
I'm thinking to myself, you know,
what are you going to do now?
This dude's seen your face.
You're going to go to jail.
NARRATOR: Thomason says they took the only way out.
They drove Scott to a secluded woods,
killed him, and dumped his body.
But if Thomason thought that killing the witness
would end his paranoia, he was wrong.
I had a picture of the military
looking for me the next day--
helicopters, a Blackhawk flying.
That was the picture that was in my mind.
I killed one of their people, man.
They're coming.
NARRATOR: So they got out of Texas
and drifted for years, stealing to get by.
Thomason eventually wound up in California,
incarcerated for grand theft.
The law never caught up with Thomason for Scott's murder,
but he says he couldn't shake the memory.
I committed the perfect murder.
I had a revelation one night that said,
you need to confess what you've done.
NARRATOR: Brown can't believe his luck--
a full confession and a killer who's happy to cooperate.
He had a desire to give me information
that he thought made me happy, and that made him happy.
NARRATOR: With the confession checking out,
Brown then arrests Thomason's girlfriend, Judy, for
conspiracy to commit murder.
But in the Medina County Jail, she
refuses to make a statement.
For the longest time, she wasn't talking because she
was that afraid of Tim.
It had to do with fear.
He was pretty good about putting fear in people.
NARRATOR: For six months, Brown patiently
tries to convince her to talk, until one day, she does.
I think she finally just kind of realized,
you know, I'm not a bad guy, and I was just
there to find out the truth.
And I wasn't there to put nothing
on her that she didn't deserve.
NARRATOR: Thomason knows Brown has Judy in his custody
but doesn't know what she's telling him.
Suddenly, he tells Brown he wants to change his story.
It just didn't add up right.
It was a crazy story.
I couldn't keep it straight.
And then finally, I told him, look, man,
it's not the way it happened.
This is the way it happened.
Let's get this right.
I mean, you've been on a roller coaster ride
for quite some time, and finally, the roller coaster
stops because you're at the end.
And then all of this now is a lie.
NARRATOR: He claims he wasn't with Judy
on the night of the murder.
In his second version of events, he was
with a friend named Mike Eck.
There was a towel, so I grabbed the towel,
and I wrapped it around my hands.
I came up behind him.
I threw the towel around his neck.
He went down on the ground.
At that time, Mike took one side of the towel,
and I took the other side of the towel,
and we both pulled on it.
And I'm pretty sure at that time, he was dead.
I told Mike-- I said, we can't leave him here.
I said, this is your mom's lot.
So we loaded the body back up into the trunk,
drove it down the road about a half a mile,
found a little turnoff, went back there,
and it was like a cul-de-sac.
NARRATOR: They stop at a dead end in the woods,
open the trunk, and take out Scott.
I remember his head hit the bumper,
and it made this weird noise.
It just stuck in my head forever.
And then Mike said, do you want me to stomp on his neck
to make sure he's dead?
And then he did.
And Mike broke his neck and then drug him
over there into the woods.
NARRATOR: They bury Scott's body under a shallow pile
of leaves and twigs.
Then we got in the car.
I dropped Mike off.
He went to his house.
I went to my apartment.
The next morning, he came over.
I said, you all right? He said, yeah.
He said, are you all right?
I said, yeah.
Forensics doesn't support what he says about the night
that Scott died.
He says he had Mike stomp on Scott's neck,
but that was not supported by broken bones.
NARRATOR: And Detective Randy Brown
sees a self-serving reason behind Thomason's
twisting of the truth.
He was looking at the death penalty at that point,
and he knew it.
And that's when he starts pointing the finger at Mike,
saying, no, Mike's the one that killed him.
I didn't kill him. I didn't kill him.
I choked him out.
I know how to do that.
I'm good at it.
Mike killed him.
Mike stomped on his throat with a pair of work boots.
NARRATOR: Thomason may have lied about Eck's involvement,
but the question remains, why did
he confess in the first place?
There was only one way to make amends
and suffer the consequences.
To do that, I had to risk dying.
I had to risk dying.
Let these people know what happened.
Let the family know.
Let the children know.
Give the mother some type of closure, some type of relief.
I felt that they deserved that.
NARRATOR: But Brown learned about an altogether different
motive behind the confession.
We would just have an unsolved murder
if it wasn't for him being mad enough
at somebody to run his mouth.
NARRATOR: Instead of remorse, another emotion may
have sparked the admission--
jealousy.
Just days before coming forward, Thomason
is serving time for grand theft when he says he made
a life-changing phone call.
One day, I called Judy, and there
was some guy at the house.
And she told me it was her friend.
But I knew she had a boyfriend.
She was cheating.
And I was furious.
And that was like the little match
that set the pile of fire--
set the wood on fire.
I cared about her, loved her.
I took care of her.
She never went without nothing.
I could have just never said nothing about Judy, period.
But the fact that she was doing what she was doing to me,
it made me angry enough that I said, you know what?
OK.
NARRATOR: Whether Thomason's story about the phone call
with Judy is true or not, Brown believes
the killer's temper did him in.
I don't think it had anything to do with love.
He was trying to throw her under the bus.
It's just to make a point, because I'm in charge,
and you don't get to do what you want to do.
And I can fix it from here.
He's doing time, and he wants to get her locked
up just like he's locked up.
And he doesn't care if it's going to cost him more.
NARRATOR: Brown charges Thomason and Eck with murder
and Judy with accessory to robbery.
So they gave me 45 years.
NARRATOR: Thomason escapes a death sentence.
Judy makes a plea deal for robbing Scott
and receives 10 years probation.
Mike Eck pleads guilty and catches 30 years for murder.
If Tim would have got what I believed he should get,
he probably wouldn't be sitting here, because he would
have got the death penalty.