In the summer of 2015, I feel that
Molly and Adam were in a good space.
I felt like they were building toward a future.
BILLY: The cabin was Molly and Adam's retirement home.
We would all get together up there
and target shoot and stuff like that.
[gunshot blasts]
RACHEL: It was typical for Nolen to stay off,
kind of on his own.
He was very distant.
He was kind of, like, a weird dude -- in high school,
he would, like, punch walls until his hands were bleeding.
What I see is somebody seething.
Dark -- really, really dark.
DARIAN: You can definitely connect the dots, seeing
every breadcrumb and what it unfortunately led to.
SUSAN: I knew for sure he was lying,
and I knew exactly who he was at that moment.
[theme music playing]
[mellow music playing]
NARRATOR: It's Christmas 2014 in Greenwood, California.
35-year-old Molly McAfee is lighting
a campfire in her own special way.
[woman speaking]
We are cold, we are up at the cabin,
we are trying to light a fire.
[distant gunshot blast]
And, uh,
we put a little bottle of gas in there, and Molly
tried to shoot it out, and she shot it out completely.
It didn't explode like she wanted.
[gunshot blasts]
It was actually hilarious to watch Molly go at it,
back and forth, trying to get this fire going.
[woman speaking]
But boy, when it went, it was -- it was crazy.
NARRATOR: Molly is with her partner, Adam,
her seven-year-old son, Gavin,
and 15-year-old stepson, Nolen.
They're all staying at Adam's cabin.
SUSAN: The cabin was in Greenwood, California.
It's in El Dorado County.
It was pretty deep in the mountains.
BILLY: The cabin was Molly and Adam's retirement home.
The shell of the cabin was there.
But inside the cabin, it was just frame.
There was nothing hooked up.
There was no power to it, no gas to it, no water to it,
anything like that.
Molly and Adam and Gavin and Nolen would probably spend
almost every weekend up at the cabin.
They were working on it, rebuilding it.
NARRATOR: Adam owns a successful construction company
two hours' drive away in Benicia,
where he lives with Molly, Nolen, and Gavin.
SUSAN: Adams, he was a general contractor.
They could build a house from the ground up.
Molly was the bookkeeper,
office manager, taking calls, doing receptionist work.
RACHEL: Nolen was always around his dad's business.
When we first met him,
he was at the job site daily with his dad.
Adam was really professional.
His company did fantastic work,
and it seemed like a successful business to me.
NARRATOR: Adam uses the profits from his construction
company to buy the cabin in 2014.
It's a place where all the family go
to enjoy nature and their passion for firearms.
We would all get together up there, and we would shoot guns,
you know, target shoot and stuff like that.
Guns was something that you had to
have up there for your own protection.
So there were always guns up there, always.
RACHEL: Adam taught my daughter how to shoot his little pistol.
-[gunshot blasts] -ADAM: Whoa!
He shot rifles with my son.
[gunshot blasts]
[Rachel speaking]
NARRATOR: And Adam teaches his own sons,
Nolen and Gavin, to shoot, too.
I didn't like it.
I didn't like Gavin shooting the guns.
I didn't like Nolen having guns from the very,
very beginning when Molly told me, "It's okay,
"mom, we're sending him to gun safety class.
It will be fine."
They wanted him to learn how to shoot them properly, because
their feeling was that if you respect the gun,
you're not gonna cause problems with it,
or people aren't going to get hurt.
[gunshot blasts]
BILLY: I think Nolen was really responsible around the guns.
He knew how to handle a firearm.
Molly and Adam met in January of 2006.
They met on a dating site,
and she fell head over heels with Adam instantly.
By the end of January, Molly was living with him.
It was so quick,
but she was happy, and that's all that mattered.
When Adam met Molly, he had a son, Nolen Buchanan.
He had full custody of Nolen.
Nolen was about six at the time.
She took care of him.
He was never her stepson -- he was always her son.
RACHEL: Molly had a lot of miscarriages,
and her dream was to always be a mom.
Molly was beyond excited when she became pregnant with Gavin.
It was her dream come true to finally have a baby.
Gavin was born on September 5th, 2007.
BILLY: Molly took to being a mom right away.
She was so happy that she finally had
her own child.
I think that's probably the happiest I'd ever seen her.
SUSAN: Gavin was mischievous and playful and funny and fun,
and he liked being the center of attention.
So that's my Gavin.
That's my Spider-Man,
actually, that is Spider-Man.
That's right, get your mask on, Gav -- there you are.
BILLY: He's in the driveway at our house,
and he's doing the Spider-Man web thing.
Psh psh psh psh psh.
I laughed so hard.
I had tears rolling down my face,
I was laughing so hard over that.
That was hilarious.
He was a good boy.
NARRATOR: As well as a playful side,
Gavin also has a soft spot for animals, especially dogs.
RACHEL: In 2012, Gavin saw a nonprofit,
and they were collecting money to
provide police protective gear for police canines.
BILLY: Gavin got his piggy bank and said, "I want to
give my money to the doggies so they don't get killed."
NARRATOR: Molly is a devoted mom to Gavin,
but her relationship with Adam is turbulent.
RACHEL: Molly and Adam had
a very up and down relationship.
One minute they were madly in love, and the next,
they were fighting, and she could never do anything right.
She never had things cleaned enough.
She never did enough at the house.
NARRATOR: Adam is hard on his son, Nolen, too.
RACHEL: I noticed Adam was very strict
with Nolen in his teen years.
You know, he expected him to work.
He expected him to have good grades, which he did not have.
He expected him to, you know,
help around the house and take care of Gavin,
kind of grow up more than he should at that age.
[gunshot blasts]
It was typical for Nolen to stay off kind of on his own.
He did join us at times, but he was very distant.
He was quiet.
NARRATOR: Nolen finds an escape through a film class at school.
DARIAN: Me and Nolen, uh, were in a couple of classes together.
The first time I had met him
was in our film class in middle school.
Nolen was weird.
He was -- he was just kind of a weird dude.
So this is the "Black Jacket" video,
a vampire film -- I'd written the first scene of that film.
We're just kind of, like, watching
this dude be weird, doing weird stuff.
Nolen was doing parkour.
Um, he didn't mind hurting himself doing this.
Nolan, he just liked the antagonistic roles.
I think he just liked being badass.
DARIAN: It's a little scary,
because you can definitely connect the dots.
Kind of seeing what it unfortunately led to.
[voices overlapping]
[woman laughing]
December 31st, 2014, Billy and I
were throwing a New Year's Eve party.
[voices overlapping]
BILLY: It was just one of those
special holidays where we had everybody together,
and everybody was just having a great time.
RACHEL: I had got a selfie stick for Christmas, because
I'm kind of a selfie queen in my family.
Um, and I was taking videos of everybody, taking pictures,
dancing all night with my sister.
[voices overlapping]
RACHEL: Adam always kept this
persona that he was this
amazing man who took care of
his family and had this amazing company.
But behind those doors, we knew how things really were.
BILLY: Everything with Adam was about the Buchanan name.
So it was not uncommon for him to tell Nolen,
"What goes on in this house, stays in this house.
You don't tell anybody anything."
RACHEL: At that time, Molly had moved
into the bedroom downstairs.
I don't necessarily think they were together-together,
but they were living in the same home
so that the boys could stay together.
She would stay down there at night,
but she was also expected to continue taking care of
the house and the boys and making sure
the cleaning and cooking and laundry was done.
Adam would give Molly a hard time about her weight.
She was even given a treadmill
to help her lose that weight, because, you know,
she was too big for him.
And I know that that really hurt Molly's soul
and made her feel like she wasn't good enough.
I wasn't happy with Molly's situation.
I felt she needed to get away.
I don't think it's fair that she had to stay in
the bedroom downstairs and do everything
and be at his beck and call.
It really hurt, and I know it hurt her.
SUSAN: Molly and Adam's fighting had to affect the boys...
a lot, and that it was a tumultuous
household, and I think that they didn't really know...
how long the good times were going to last.
So I think it put them on edge.
When Molly and Adam were fighting,
Nolen would take Gavin into his room, because he was
protective over Gavin.
NARRATOR: Adam's aggression towards Nolen intensifies, too.
Adam would get really angry if Nolen's grades dropped,
those kind of things,
you know, that a normal parent gets frustrated with
their teenage kid about, Adam would get frustrated,
and he yelled and screamed a lot.
RACHEL: I was pretty concerned about Nolen growing up,
seeing the way that Adam was with him,
especially if he was in trouble.
I didn't necessarily agree with it.
SUSAN: I feel like Nolen was frustrated, because it
was not a super happy-go-lucky home life.
There was a lot of turmoil and imbalance in the home.
RACHEL: I'd never seen Adam yell at Gavin
the way that I had seen him yell at Nolen, you know?
And I think
that probably pissed Nolen off more than anything.
BILLY: I was aware that there was stuff
that might have been thrown at Nolen.
I'm absolutely sure that Adam gave him
the business probably pretty regularly.
NARRATOR: Nolen spends more and more
time making films with his classmates.
DARIAN: For all of us at that age, filmmaking was kind of
an outlet, and specifically in Nolen's case,
I think that was something for him to kind of vent out
his frustrations.
So this was Nolen's music video project,
I believe -- this is right before they have
to rescue some, like, damsel in distress.
Yeah, there's a lot of moments here where you can kind of
see Nolen being a little more aggressive than he should be.
Yeah, like, that throw is kind of...intense.
I think all the over-the-top-stuff
that he's doing was definitely all him.
It was all his idea.
What I see is somebody seething, and...
what I thought was just aggressive play
and being a jerk...
I now look at it being much more sinister
and...
dark -- really, really dark
In the summer of 2015,
I feel that Molly and Adam were in a good space.
I felt like they were building toward a future.
The fighting was still going on, but I didn't think
it was as bad as it had been in the past.
BILLY: We were all up at the cabin.
God, it was hot.
So Adam goes, "I think we ought to
go and get that pump."
[indistinct shouting]
BILLY: And Adam's got all the kids
and Gavin and everybody, and they're going...
donuts and donuts and donuts, around and around
and around on these quads in this mud.
And as the mud would dry up and it'd get sticky,
we'd go and fire up that pump, we'd go and make it all
wet again, I mean, they were --
they were covered in mud from head to toe.
All of them.
SUSAN: Blech. [laughs]
That dirt up there is not -- it's not normal dirt,
and it is red, and when it gets in your clothes,
it doesn't come out, either.
That mud is awfully hardy.
[chuckles]
NARRATOR: But the fun comes to a grinding halt
when Nolen has an accident.
We were all riding the four-wheelers, and Nolen
was on his dirt bike, and he took off.
And uh, he ended up
biting it.
SUSAN: I saw that he was hurt, and he was yelling, you know,
"My ankles, my ankles!"
And both of his ankles were terribly swollen.
I thought they were broken.
Initially, Adam was concerned about Nolen,
and then he went straight to berating him.
NARRATOR: Adam scolds Nolen for asking questions
about how to prepare the campfire.
Nolen was asking his dad what he was doing,
and he kind of just, you know...
made him feel like he was dumb.
And telling him, "This is why we do this, Nolen.
That's why we do that, Nolen."
Because he, you know,
got hurt doing something stupid, in his opinion.
BILLY: Adam kept telling him he was a sissy.
He didn't need to go to the hospital, you know,
walk it off, that kind of stuff, and...
Nolen really wanted to go to the ER.
Molly and my mom drove him to one of the local ERs to
get looked at, and thankfully it was just a bad sprain on
both ankles.
I could tell that it really bothered Nolen.
It hurts when you're pretty much being told that you're
stupid and that you're fine and there's nothing wrong with you
when really, you are hurt, and you could just see it
in his eyes how upset and how hurt he really was.
BILLY: The wildfires in California were horrible.
They were all over the place.
You smelled smoke almost everywhere you went.
SUSAN: Molly, Adam, and Gavin and Nolen,
they were going to the cabin that weekend.
Billy and I were going out of town.
I texted Molly,
I said, "Did you see where your friends in Calaveras
lost their homes?"
And Adam assured me that if there was a fire,
they were smart enough to get out of there.
So with them going up there,
I felt pretty good about it,
because I felt that Adam was prepared,
and I said, "Okay, I love you."
And she said, "I love you."
And that was the last communication I had with her.
NARRATOR: On Sunday, September 13, 2015,
the Garden Valley Fire Department responds
to a report of a blaze
at a cabin in Greenwood, California.
PAULA: There was nothing left of the cabin or its contents.
Complete devastation.
There was no sign of life.
Detectives find a Dodge truck
and a trailer on property at the cabin.
The vehicles that were found on
the property were registered to Adam Buchanan.
The sheriff's deputies traced the owners
back to their home in Benicia.
Two police officers from the Benicia Police Department
show up at the Buchanan home to find out more.
BILLY: According to investigators,
when they showed up, Nolen answered the door.
They asked for Adam.
Nolen told them Molly,
Adam, and Gavin weren't here.
They were up at their cabin in Greenwood, California.
He still is expecting them home,
he tells them, that evening on Sunday.
[phone ringing]
RACHEL: My mom called me in a panic.
She said she needed my help.
Molly and Adam weren't answering their phones,
and there was a fire up at the cabin.
I knew something was wrong.
When I got up to the cabin,
I got out of the car, and I started walking down,
and as I was walking down,
I was stopped by an investigator,
and he told me I couldn't go down there.
He said, "You need to rally the troops
"and prepare them for a tragedy of epic proportions,
because bodies had been found."
NARRATOR: The remains are those of two adults
and a child.
As the coroner examines the bodies,
they found that there was a metal plate
in the shoulder of one of them.
And Molly had had an accident when she was in her twenties
that required a metal plate
being put into the same exact shoulder,
the same exact place.
The coroner was able to do a swab and test for
the DNA, and that was the ultimate
determination of who the victims were.
Adam, Molly, and Gavin.
I wanted to believe that the fire started,
and Molly was able to grab Gavin and go.
It wasn't the case.
NARRATOR: But it was not the wildfires
that torched the house.
Investigators conclude it was gasoline,
which leads to another discovery.
BILLY: The investigators told us that
one of the firemen
saw a piece of skull
with a bullet hole in it.
NARRATOR: The fragment of skull belongs to eight-year-old Gavin.
It was really confusing for me.
I knew the detective told me that it was
a crime scene, and murder-suicide
had come to mind,
but there was Gavin.
I knew that neither Molly nor Adam
would ever hurt that little boy, ever.
I knew that.
PAULA: So at the time, they were looking for a weapon.
Was it murder-suicide?
If it was, there had to be a shotgun nearby or a rifle,
and there was not,
so immediately, they know somebody else was the cause
of the three people being killed in the cabin.
NARRATOR: Investigators visit Nolen at home in Benicia to
break the news that his family is dead.
When they showed up at Molly and Adam's house in Benicia,
Nolen told them
he expected them home Sunday.
This was on Monday.
PAULA: Nolen shows no emotion, no worry, no concern.
There's no crying, no hysteria, just straight-faced.
When officers arrived at the Buchanan house,
the F-150 truck was there, parked in front.
Nolen tells officers that he helped load
the Dodge truck full of supplies for the cabin,
and that he just stayed at
home in Benicia all Friday night, Saturday.
And then on Sunday morning,
he went to church with his girlfriend and her mother,
and then after that, met up with friends
at the nearby mall.
Nolen tells detectives his own ideas about
who could have done harm to his dad.
NARRATOR: Nolen tells investigators that his father's business
is tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
PAULA: He says that his dad's gonna
probably have to lay off some employees,
so he thinks that people are gonna be mad
at his dad for the way the business is in trouble.
So no one tells deputies, "Hey,
"look at them, because they have something to gain
if they get rid of my dad."
The detectives go talk to everybody at
the office and confirm things aren't always in black.
Adam is in the red.
The employees all say the same thing,
that Adam was a tough boss.
He wasn't a mild-mannered boss.
He used words, and he didn't keep it inside.
On September 19th, there is a coastal cleanup job.
Volunteers are out combing the neighborhood.
One team of volunteers is in a field that's nearby
the Buchanan Construction Company.
SUSAN: They had, in fact, found Molly's purse
with her identification and a rifle.
[police siren wailing]
NARRATOR: Forensic tests prove that the rifle is the weapon
that shot Adam,
Molly, and Gavin.
PAULA: It could be possible that one of
the employees did stash it there,
because it was so close to the yard
where the construction company had its offices.
Was somebody else at the cabin?
They're still not sure of who was involved.
SUSAN: Nolen was staying with Adam's dad
and stepmom, and Adam's stepmother called me
and asked if we could all meet for lunch,
that Nolen wanted to meet up with everybody.
When Nolen got there, I went and hugged him,
and he just seemed cold.
And then we started asking him about the business,
and he says, "Well,
"I don't know what I'm gonna do with
the business, because it was Buchanan & Sons Construction."
He goes, "But...
"I'm the only one left. So it's...
you know, mine."
SUSAN: During that lunch, Nolen was stoic.
He didn't shed a tear.
He was matter-of-fact.
He said, "I am no longer an heir, I am an owner."
RACHEL: As soon as we left,
we all immediately contacted
the investigators saying, "Something's not right.
"He's talking about being emancipated.
He's talking about taking care of the company."
SUSAN: The detective responded to me that this was all
good information to have,
and please keep all of my notes on the luncheon.
NARRATOR: After the discovery of the rifle,
investigators take a closer look at the security footage at
Buchanan & Sons Construction.
PAULA: Investigators started looking at the CCTV,
and they saw that Nolen and his dad were
loading up rock on the back of the trailer
to take up to the cabin for work.
NARRATOR: The surveillance footage reveals that Adam
and Nolen hitch the trailer to Adam's F-150 truck.
In his first statement to police,
Nolen said his family traveled from Benicia
to Greenwood in the Dodge.
PAULA: No one tells investigators that,
"Oh, yeah, that happened.
"We did load it on the back of the 150.
"But when we got home, my dad and I switched it to the back
"of the Dodge, because the F-150
was at the house on Sunday morning."
The story about the Dodge work truck going down to Benicia,
I knew that was...
a lie as soon as I heard it.
It never left the property.
It would have never made it from Greenwood,
California, to Benicia, California,
much less make it back.
It was a piece of junk.
NARRATOR: Investigators secure a warrant
to search the Buchanan home in Benicia.
Detectives look at the F-150 as part of that search warrant
and find on it a red dirt,
and it's very common dirt for where the cabin is up in
the mountains of El Dorado County.
Red dirt isn't anywhere in the Bay area.
So that truck has been recently at
the cabin in that area, because it had rained previously,
so it's fresh.
NARRATOR: Police search the cab of the truck.
So investigators had found a receipt from Taco Bell in
Fairfield, California.
And that showed that there was four drinks,
there was enough food for four people.
The Taco Bell is key to the investigators' story,
because now they're proving that
there were four people that made the trip to the cabin.
But Nolen says he wasn't in the car with them at that time.
And another key part about that meal at
Taco Bell is that it's caught on CCTV.
The camera at Taco Bell sees the F-150
going through with the trailer hooked up at the back.
You couldn't really see who's inside,
but now the story that the F-150 stayed at home is not true.
NARRATOR: Investigators recover Adam's bank card
from his home in Benicia.
Adam's banking activity reveals that he bought drinks at
a bar in Penryn several hours before the cabin fire started.
PAULA: On Saturday night,
the CCTV picks up the F-150 at the Valencia Club in Penryn,
which is right about a 20- or 30-minute drive from the cabin.
It shows that Adam and Molly,
they had been there for a couple of hours and left
at approximately 2:30 a.m. on Sunday morning.
BILLY: You can see the white F-150
come up to that stoplight and make the left and go towards
Greenwood, California.
And then later on that evening, around 3:30 a.m.,
you see
the white F-150 headed westbound that'll
take you back to Benicia, California.
At this point in time, Adam, Molly, and Gavin are dead.
The fire has already been started.
And here is their truck being driven and then found in
the driveway the next morning
at the house in Benicia when the police officers
show up to talk to Nolen.
So immediately, they know somebody else
was driving that truck.
Detectives signed find Adam's ATM card was
used on Sunday morning at 9:21 a.m.
at Starbucks.
Then, at 9:51, that same card was used at the McDonald's
drive-through, and in the drive-through camera,
we see Nolen driving the family's Excursion,
using that debit card.
Nolen had been lying the whole time, because
the ATM card that was used in the Valencia Club
and used at McDonald's
and used at Starbucks,
it's the same card.
There was no duplicate card.
There was only one ATM card that Adam had.
The ATM card really was the game-changer,
because the ATM card
couldn't have traveled if it had been at the cabin
with Adam
and if Nolen hadn't been with the card.
NARRATOR: Detectives visit Nolen at his school in Benicia.
PAULA: On October 1st, when the detectives are talking
to Nolen and present all the evidence they have,
and they ask him point blankly if he was responsible,
they ask him questions,
and at this point in time,
they know that they have their person.
He's arrested in the hallway.
He is charged with three counts of first-degree murder
for the murder of his dad, Adam,
his dad's fiancee, Molly, and his half-brother, Gavin.
Nolen tells the court that he was
in the cabin with his brother.
They fell asleep, and he woke up
to hear him screaming and shouting and shooting.
[gunshot blasts]
He saw a person coming into the cabin,
and the person that shot his brother, shot Molly.
[gunshot blasts]
And Nolen, he's laying down, just waking up, and grabs
the rifle from the person that just intruded into the cabin.
And Nolen starts shooting the intruder
that he later found out was his dad.
So in the 16-year-old mind of Nolen Buchanan,
he sets fire to the cabin.
He pours gasoline over the bodies in the cabin
and sets it afire, and he thought he had
tricked everybody, and he was gonna get away with it.
BILLY: According to what the prosecution believes
happened is that
Molly and Adam left to go to Valencia Club,
and while they were gone,
Nolen got the gun
and executed his little brother, Gavin.
[gunshot blasts]
Then laid in wait
for Molly and Adam to come home.
Molly and Adam got home
somewhere around 2:30 in the morning,
Nolen got up and...
shot his dad.
He would have not even had to move his feet
from where he shot Adam to turn and fire on Molly.
[gunshot blasts]
RACHEL: Nolen's motive for killing Molly
and Adam and Gavin was to live his best life.
He thought if he could get rid of all of them,
then he could do anything he wanted to do.
I think he thought he was
gonna get away with the perfect murder.
BILLY: I think he thought he was gonna be big daddy
on the block.
"I'm gonna have a house in Benicia on the hill.
I'm gonna have Buchanan & Sons Construction."
RACHEL: I think he thought Gavin would be in his way,
and just
getting rid of him helped him out, in a sense.
It is a relief that he's probably never going to see,
you know, the real world.
He's never gonna get to grow up and live
the best life that he thought he was gonna have, um...
It's sad at the same time,
because four lives are taken completely now.
I miss the smiles.
I miss the dinners around the bonfire.
I want to remember the laughter.
[indistinct talking, laughing]
I want to remember all the good.
SUSAN: And in the wake of this tragedy,
my family knew that we had to do something to, uh,
remember this little boy.
So Gavin Buchanan Memorial Foundation
was founded in October of 2015.
Gavin just always loved police dogs.
We've raised,
gah,
well over $100,000.
We've donated all over the country to K9 officers.
This is the best way we know how to keep this little boy's
memory alive and to carry on his legacy of wanting to
protect these dogs.
He was proud of himself for what he did, and we are
proud of him, and we want him to be proud of us for
keeping this going.