[music playing]
NARRATOR: Just after sunset, on a warm summer evening,
four-year-old Heidi Jones is about to drift off
to sleep when her 24-year-old single mother, Loretta, cracks
open the bedroom door.
That night, my mom came to my bedroom, and she told me,
don't come out.
And I believed that if I heard any sound
or anything that night, I did what my mom told me to do.
And I didn't go out.
In the morning, I looked out of my keyhole
before going into my front room.
When I opened the door, I saw something lying on the floor.
My next vivid memory is, I am out on the front porch.
And my next door neighbor is out there, digging for worms.
He says, Heidi, come here.
I have to show you something.
And I says, I can't.
I think my mom is dead.
DAVID BREWER: When police arrived,
they saw Loretta half-clothed, laying on the floor, deceased.
HEIDI JONES-ASAY: There was blood on the couch.
There was blood on the floor.
There was blood everywhere.
DAVID BREWER: Loretta had been sexually assaulted.
And she was stabbed twice in the chest and 17 times in her back.
And her throat was attempted to be cut.
WALLY HENDRICKS: The investigation
didn't reveal any forced entry, any real signs
of tremendous struggle.
There wasn't tipped-over furniture.
There wasn't broken windows.
The door jam wasn't broken.
DAVID BREWER: The police at the time
did take quite a bit of forensic info--
fingerprints, blood samples, carpet fibers, and some couch
fibers as well.
CAROLYN KENDALL: It was just such a shock
because I felt like nothing bad would ever happen to my family.
NARRATOR: With her grandparents now at her side,
detectives ask Heidi what she saw and heard the night before.
I know that I have something trapped
in my brain of something that happened that night.
I believe it was too traumatic for me to remember.
I don't believe my mom screamed or cried that night.
If I had heard my mom scream in the next room,
I probably would have came out of the room
to see what was going on.
So I believe my mom was my hero that night by protecting me.
NARRATOR: The four-year-old's memory is murky, except for one
very important detail.
HEIDI JONES-ASAY: I remember telling my grandma
what I could possibly remember.
I said Tom did it.
Tom killed my mom.
During the investigation, Heidi's grandma
was jotting down everything Heidi was saying at that time.
And there was an entry on this notepad.
On the morning that the body was discovered,
Heidi told her grandmother it was Tom that killed my mom.
They had a first name.
NARRATOR: Just Tom.
No last name.
No description.
That's all little Heidi can remember about the man
who killed her mother.
I know that I knew Tom.
Tom was a person that came around my mom,
our house quite a bit.
Because as a four-year-old, I knew his name.
NARRATOR: On August 1, a tip is called
into the sheriff's office.
The caller suggests deputies look into a local railroad
worker named Tom Egley.
I knew that Loretta had dated Tom
Egley one time on a blind date.
I thought she didn't like him, and she didn't want
anything to do with this guy.
But Heidi was always right to the same story every time.
I know Tom killed my mom.
He just seemed like he was a perfect suspect.
At the time of this murder, Tom was living
in a motel in Helper, Utah.
He was living with his girlfriend,
who was eight months pregnant.
NARRATOR: Detectives pick up Tom and take him to the sheriff's
office for questioning.
DAVID BREWER: Tom Egley explained to the police
on the night of the homicide, he hitched a ride
with a couple of younger teens.
He'd been dropped off in Price at a little local fast food
joint.
He said he grabbed a burger and sat down on the curb
and ate it.
NARRATOR: Egley insists that while in Price, he
did not attack Lori, or even visit Loretta.
DAVID BREWER: Tom says he wound up at a bar
called the Highway Rendezvous on Springland Road,
probably 11:00, 11:30 at night.
NARRATOR: Investigators set out to corroborate Egley's story.
DAVID BREWER: At the Highway Rendezvous, the owner
of the bar, she said that Tom did come in that night
kind of skittish, nervous.
Tom had red speckles on his shirt.
And he said he had been painting.
Red paint must have got on him.
And the cops met up with Tom at his apartment,
and he allowed them in to let them search his room.
They did take a pair of Levi's that Tom said he was
wearing that night and a shirt.
NARRATOR: Detectives bag the clothing
and collect hair, blood, and fingerprint samples from Egley.
So the fibers that they discovered on Tom's clothing
did match the fibers that were found to be similar to those
on Loretta Jones's rug.
Investigators feel that they had enough
probable cause to arrest Tom.
And that is what they did.
During this preliminary hearing, prosecutors
did bring up the witnesses for Tom being in town that day,
seeing him at the bar.
The prosecutors said the fiber evidence
that the FBI produced out of their lab was similar in nature
to the rug that Loretta had in her home.
But Tom was known to have been in her home before.
NARRATOR: The case is thin.
There's almost no physical evidence
and no reliable witnesses.
The judge ruled there was not enough evidence
to bind him over to trial.
So Tom Egley was released.
Tom Egley just happened to be a guy
at the wrong place at the wrong time, walking around.
Shortly after, I ran a newspaper article for more information
in this case because I was hoping the public
could be my case file.
So I get a call from this gal who said that she
had info for me on my case.
She said, have I ever seen that Loretta wrote
the killer's name in blood?
And I says, how would you know this anyway?
I mean, you weren't allowed in the crime scene.
And she says, yeah, I was.
She says, I was living with Heidi's grandmother
at the time, going to school.
And the day after this happened, Heidi's grandfather
asked her and one of Heidi's aunts to go to the house.
The police let us go into the home,
long enough to get clothes and a few things for Heidi.
DAVID BREWER: So they went into the living room, and she says,
I saw it right there with my own eyes.
Didn't write the whole name.
She only got the T and the O out.
We pulled the photo up, blew it up,
and there it was, definite T and an O written in blood.
Wow.
That is heavy-duty stuff.
I get goose bumps right now, thinking about that.
DAVID BREWER: Loretta was trying to tell the story herself
and help us out and it looks like the last thing she did
on this Earth was write the letter O.
And she couldn't get the M in there for Tom.
WALLY HENDRICKS: Lisa Carter knew Tom personally,
so she had almost a daily contact with him.
And wow, then I started thinking,
we can use an undercover agent here.
I went to Tom with the idea that I
was going to betray my husband.
So I explained to Tom Egley that my husband
had been in training in Utah.
And I let him know that during that training, that Tom was
the topic of the class and that he was known as a suspect
in the murder of Loretta Jones.
NARRATOR: Lisa spends two more days gaining Egley's trust.
And then she strikes gold.
He said he just was in the neighborhood,
and he knocked on the door.
He said that Loretta Jones let him in.
It totally blew me away.
He never changed his voice, and I think that's what got me.
It was just like as if I was telling
you about Sunday dinner.
He acknowledged that she wasn't dead, that she was moaning.
And I said, well, did you have sex with her?
And he said, yeah, of course I had sex with her.
He said it was consensual.
And I said, Tom, you stabbed her.
How is that consensual?
And he said she didn't tell me no.
And it took me a while before I was able to process
what I just heard.
I don't believe there's any remorse to Tom at all.
I don't believe he even cares.
That just blew me away.
I could not react.
I didn't know what to say.
I know a good admission when you hear one, and I had it.
I had a lawfully obtained admission to murder.
Tom stood up, and the judge asked
him if he had anything to say.
And the only thing he had to say is, I'm sorry I killed her,
and I'm surprised you're doing something about it
after 46 years.
And our family sitting there in the courtroom, like, really?
What do you mean, after 46 years?
It doesn't matter if it was 46 minutes, 46 days, 46 years.
The fact of the matter is, you killed our sister.
For somebody like that not to show any remorse,
it was just mind-boggling.