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- I'm Craig Melvin
- I'm Craig Melvin,
and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
- The victim was on the floor of the bathroom
with multiple stab wounds.
His son is the one who called 9-1-1.
- I remember seeing my dad just breaking down and crying.
- There had been a party in the house.
- Correct, it's upwards of, like, 20 kids.
- Maybe one of my friends might have had
something to do with it.
- That folding knife you found? - Belonged to the son.
- There were facts that are weird.
- The lab results come back, and the DNA gives you a name.
- Yes.
- They have quite an extensive history.
All of his burglary MOs fit this case.
All of a sudden we hear that somebody escaped
from a courthouse.
- He's got a crew helping him.
- This is Ocean's Eleven stuff.
- Yeah.
- I think my words were, are you kidding me?
- As you're going back to announce your verdict.
- I'm like, what am I doing? This is not right.
- 35 years, I've never had that happen.
This family desperately needed closure.
- I just remember shaking uncontrollably.
- Hello and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
Jill Halliburton Su was dedicated to her family
and helping others around the world.
But she was at home when she found herself
face to face with a cold blooded killer.
Police suspected someone close to Jill
was hiding a secret.
And it would take two trials to find the truth.
Here's Dennis Murphy with "The Figure in the House".
- Drive half an hour west from the beaches
of Fort Lauderdale, Florida
and you're in cowboy country.
Boots, hats and line dancing.
At least Davie, Florida likes to think of itself
as the Old West.
But really, you'd have to squint to remember that era.
The dairy farms that once ran
all the way to the Everglades are mostly gone.
Cows and horses made way for gated communities
plotted with multi million dollar homes.
And in one of those nice gated homes
lived 20 year old Justin Su,
his mom Jill, and his dad Nan Yao, a professor.
A home that would turn into a scene
out of a bad slasher movie.
All that blood, all those wounds.
It happened on September 8th, 2014.
The night before, Justin's parents
had returned from a trip to Malaysia.
The next morning, his dad shook off the jet lag
and headed to his office at the local campus
of the University of Florida.
He's an entomologist, a bug guy.
Justin's mom slept in but was up
when Justin left the house around 9:30 that morning.
- My mother was in the living room
in her pink robe and she was reading a book.
And I said, see you when I get home from work.
- Justin also worked part time at the University of Florida
as a professor's assistant.
Shortly after noon, he got a call from his father.
- And the first thing he asked me was,
are you-are you home right now?
Like, are you home?
I'm like, no, I'm at work.
- The reason for the call, from his office,
Justin's dad had seen something unusual
on a remote security camera.
- I just saw something weird.
Uh, can you go home and check, like, what's up?
The cameras just went out at the house.
And I'm like, uh, yeah, okay, no problem.
- Justin's dad, Nan Yao.
- Around 12:15, I thought
maybe I should check the camera to see
if it's still working or not.
- So the camera's kind of been flickering
and then a reliability
and you wanted to see what was going on?
- Yeah.
- The camera was in his house near the kitchen.
What he saw, and it wasn't much more than a glimpse,
was a live feed image of a figure in the house.
- He walk in from the kitchen toward the breakfast area
and disappear from the-the view of the camera.
And next thing I know is I lost my image.
- He thought the figure might be his son.
But if it wasn't Justin, who was it?
When he called his wife, Jill, and she didn't pick up,
he became alarmed.
- I remember I sped home
from my dad telling me to go check on what's going on
because the cameras are out.
- Within 15 minutes, he'd arrived.
The son went in through the garage
and passed the dog snoozing in the hallway.
Just outside the kitchen, he checked out
the first security camera.
- And I see a camera ripped out.
I don't see the camera, but I see the wire
that's connected to it.
- It has been messed with, huh?
- It's been-- It's just dangling from the thing.
And I'm thinking, why is my mom going crazy?
Wh-what's--?
Why is she, like, ripping out the cameras?
Is she okay? - You thought your mom
accounted for the camera dangling?
- Yeah, I mean that makes the most sense
because the only other person inside the house,
is my mother.
- The living room cam? The same, gone too.
Just dangling wires.
He made his way to his bedroom
where he says he saw right away something was off.
Someone had been in his stuff.
Justin, an avid hunter and diver,
was a knife collector.
Blades were missing.
Now he says he could hear water running
in his parents bathroom.
And there it was,
the bathtub, red to the rim with blood.
His mother's body, floating.
- Her head is down,
so her face is just inside this bathtub
that is completely to the top,
full of hot, bloody water.
When you see something so horrific,
there aren't words...
...to comprehend.
- He thought immediately of his father, and called him.
- I'm like, I think Mom killed herself.
That's just the most, at the time,
the most rational thing to think.
He says, hang up, call 9-1-1.
I remember saying, like, oh, my God, no.
Like, something just absolute pure panic
in his voice.
I call 9-1-1.
- A suicide. That's what he reported
to both his father and 9-1-1.
- I thought my mother
killed herself at that point.
- You lifted her out of the tub?
- Yeah, lifted her out of the tub.
I had blood all over my body.
I started doing compressions on her,
CPR or something like that.
- You weren't getting flutters of anything?
- Yeah, yeah, she was so very far gone.
I remember after doing that,
just... pure shock,
Just absolute terror.
- And that's when he realized
he'd gotten it all very wrong.
Still on the line with the dispatcher,
but now changing his story.
He saw that his mother was bound
and now told the 9-1-1 people
that this wasn't a suicide at all.
It had to be a murder.
- I'm looking at her hands now,
and, like, her legs,
and I realize they're bound, they're tied.
Then it starts to click.
I think somebody killed my mother.
- Somebody who'd bound her hands with a cloth belt,
her feet with an electrical cord,
then slashed away in a frenzy,
stabbing her more than 20 times.
Davie Police were on their way
to secure the scene.
Detectives followed, and would soon be
rolling their eyes in disbelief.
How could the son have thought this was a suicide?
Weren't the multiple stab wounds apparent?
And investigators would learn something else.
The victim's maiden name was Halliburton,
and she went by Jill Halliburton Su.
She was the descendant of a rich and prominent family
in the American oil business.
So there was an early theory to run down.
Maybe Jill Halliburton Su
had been so brutally murdered for her money.
It was way too soon to know.
- The crime scene horrifies
even hardened homicide detectives
and leaves a son shattered.
- Coming up.
- I remember sitting down in the grass
and there's some mulch right next to me,
and I just started punching it, like screaming.
- Those same detectives would soon have
some tough questions for young Justin.
- That folding knife you found, I understand,
belonged to the son, is that right?
- Belonged to the son. Yes, sir.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
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- Are you going to be able to forget that scene?
- Never. - That woman in the bathroom?
- Never.
That was probably one of the most horrific scenes
that I've ever worked in my, uh, 28 years.
- When veteran Davie Homicide detective Paul Williams
arrived at the Su home,
he wasn't sure whether he had a homicide
or a suicide.
It had been called in both ways.
Officers pointed out the young man sitting
in the grass as the son.
He had found the victim.
- I remember sitting down in the grass
and there's some mulch right next to me
and I just remember looking at it
and just started punching it, like,
just banging it, and stuff like that, screaming.
- EMTs tried to calm him down.
A few minutes later, his dad drove up.
- And I saw Justin sitting there.
And I tried to give him a hug.
He's totally in a state of shock.
But immediate, police come to me
and say, you can't-- you can't get near him.
You two have to separate.
- You can't get near your own son?
- No, I really want to give him a hug.
They would not let me do that.
- Nan Yao may not have realized it,
but this was the first signal
that police were looking at Justin
as a possible suspect.
Meanwhile, Detective Williams got a fill in
on what had already been found that was of interest.
At the front entry to the house,
a folding knife had been recovered
with what looked like a trace of blood.
And that folding knife you found, I understand,
belonged to the son, is that right?
- Belonged to the son? Yes, sir.
- Interesting fact to tuck away
as you try and figure out what's happened here.
- Uh, yeah, it was definitely a--
It went sideways.
- Had the killer dropped the knife
while pursuing his victim through the house?
It looked that way.
Out back, officers noted a breach in the glass door
on the porch.
Smallish, like the size of a pet door.
If this had been a crime committed by an intruder,
is that how they got in?
The horror show was in the main bathroom.
It was grotesquely not a suicide.
Did the scene speak to you yet?
Do you know what-what had happened here?
- It seemed to be a pretty violent attack.
Um, it also seemed to me very early on
that she put up a fight
because of the disarray the front doorway was in.
And also for her defensive wounds
that were on her hands from the stabbing.
- Detective Williams couldn't examine the tub yet
because it was still full of blood.
But when it was drained, they found two things
of major interest.
At the bottom of the tub, beneath the victim's body
was a large hunting knife.
They learned it had been a gift from mother to son.
They also found destroyed security electronics.
The alarm box from the house.
- The knife, the alarm panel box,
and some other items that were in there.
- Got thrown into the bathtub.
- Thrown in there. Yes, sir.
- There was no trace of the two missing security cameras.
It was clear to the detectives
that the house had been tossed, rummaged through,
drawers flung open.
Jill had been a kind of neo hippie
and not really big on expensive pieces of jewelry.
To the investigator's experienced eyes,
this didn't look like a home invasion gone wrong.
It looked staged and amateurishly.
Is there a distinction in your mind, Detective,
between a perpetrator who comes with murder on their mind
as opposed to somebody who's trying to get into a house,
steals some jewelry and then has a violent event?
- Uh, definitely a big distinction, so...
Um, and that plays into the victimology.
She was a well respected member of the community,
uh, had no enemies that we found.
Uh, very wealthy family, uh, well to do,
uh, worked for a bunch of charitable organizations.
Uh, just a really, really great lady.
- And to use a knife, multiple stab wounds.
Are you talking about
this is somebody who's taking it personal?
- Personal or in a fit of rage.
Usually when somebody breaks into a home
and you're a burglar,
you don't rise to that level of violent attacks.
- While the crime scene techs took photos,
collected prints and swabbed for DNA,
it was time for the detectives to learn
more about the Su family.
Nan Yao and Jill first met in Japan,
where she was an exchange student
and he was teaching.
He eventually left to do a PhD in the States
and Jill left to travel in Southeast Asia.
About two years later, he was thrilled
when he got a postcard from her.
She was in Thailand.
- There she was volunteering,
helping the Cambodian, uh, refugee
escaping the Khmer Rouge genocide.
And I was really moved when I see that.
She was there for two years.
- What does that experience tell us about Jill?
- She always want to do something she can do
to help those who need help.
- When Jill returned to the States,
the two eventually married.
- This is Amanda.
She was just handed to me a minute ago.
- Adopting daughter Mandy. She lives in Kentucky.
Justin came along about three years later.
And the years that followed were good to the couple.
- Give it up for Justin.
- Jill, a dedicated mom, still found time to continue
her life's passion for volunteer work.
When she first came back to the States,
she again worked with refugees from Southeast Asia.
Years later, she volunteered to make audio tapes
for the blind, reading books and magazines.
- A master in feng shui was consulted.
- This is her reading an excerpt from
a national magazine article.
- It's turn of the century America
with a Chinese overlay.
- This is all very Jill.
- Yes.
And that's the part I fell in love with.
- The Su family was very close,
but in the last few months, there had been tensions.
Justin had dropped out of college,
his father was upset with him,
and there were even arguments with his mother, Jill.
The cops were of course alert to
the maybe important fact that Jill had
that prominent maiden name.
She was a Halliburton.
Her great-uncle Earl Halliburton had once been
among the richest people in America.
His wealth didn't come from oil wells,
but from developing and improving the process
to extract oil from the ground.
- This is the origins of the Texas oil field work.
Halliburton industries.
- Yes, yes.
I didn't know that at that time.
What Halliburton is all about, to be honest with you,
when I first met her.
- Turns out when Earl Halliburton died,
oil rights were distributed to all family members.
But it was parceled out so widely,
little trickled down to Jill
or to her daughter Mandy or her son Justin.
- You being a Halliburton,
lo those many generations down the line,
does that make you a rich kid?
- Nope.
- Do they send you a nice royalty check?
- Yep, for about $13.
- Termites, not oil fields, paid the bills.
Years ago, Nan Yao developed termite traps
used widely today,
and that allowed his family to live comfortably.
The night before the murder, the Sus had returned
from that trip to Malaysia
where the renowned entomologist was lecturing.
- After that exhausting travel, Jill decided she'd sleep in
while her husband went to work.
You go to work and then your life has changed.
- Oh, it's a nightmare.
- Murdered in her own home.
- Yeah.
- But now things were going to get a little uncomfortable.
It was time for the detective to take
the father and son down to the station house
for what would be an exhaustive interrogation.
There'd be lots of questions for the son
about life at home
and where exactly he was when the murder took place.
- Coming up.
- An early lie caught.
Detectives do not like lies.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
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- Just hours after finding his mother stabbed to death
in a bloody bathtub,
20 year old Justin Su, the son, found himself
in a Davie Florida Police interview room
trying to explain what had become a tangled story.
- You can't say, look, I am
the grieving, freaked out son here.
- That's what I-I had-- - Who just found this.
What are we talking about?
- I was going through mental hell.
[chuckling]
- And it was about to get hotter.
Detectives always start investigating
with the inner circle of family
and work their way out.
And in this case, Justin was the one who found her
and made that confusing 9-1-1 call.
At a mobile command post parked at the house,
Justin had been directed to remove his clothes
and photos were taken of his body.
Is that just protocol, something you do?
- It's protocol.
We want to take that clothing to make sure
we preserve any evidence or transfer of evidence
that could possibly be on that.
We provided him with a Tyvek suit,
which is like a jumpsuit thing.
- Now, at police headquarters, detectives look more closely
for any bruising, signs of a struggle or fight.
- One of the worst things about the whole situation
that still is a horrible memory for me
is I still had the blood of my mother on my chest.
- Justin cooperated, answered the detectives questions,
and never asked for a lawyer.
He told detectives that around 9:30 that morning,
he drove to the local community college,
then returned home after his father's call
around 12:30 in the afternoon.
He walked the detectives through the same story
you've already heard,
him coming home to find the security cameras ripped out,
the knife collection in his bedroom vandalized.
Then of course, hearing the running bathwater
and finding what he found in his parents bathroom.
- But the tone of the interview was quickly
going from good cop, bad cop
to bad cop, bad cop.
- Justin had an early on problem with his story
and it had to do with his whereabouts.
When his father called him, he told him
a slightly different story
than he was now telling police.
He told his dad he was working
at the University of Florida,
but that wasn't true.
- He told detectives he was in the library
of the community college
where he was taking classes.
Turned out that wasn't true either.
- Justin said he was concerned how his father
would react to the news
of him sleeping in the car.
And for good reason.
When Justin dropped out of college,
it was a huge disappointment to his parents.
Living at home now, his dad insisted Justin get a job
and go to school part time.
Embarrassed he was doing neither that day,
Justin feared the anticipated arguments back home later.
He even thought that perhaps his mother had
had enough, prompting his first thoughts
that she had killed herself.
- The word suicide, I don't think would come out
of most people's mouths
if they found a loved one bound.
- Problem number one for Justin.
9-1-1 call saying, my mother killed herself.
I'm looking at a suicide victim.
- Correct.
- Detectives zeroed in on those knives
found at the crime scene.
One was found with Jill in the bathtub,
and the other, outside the front door.
Both were Justin's.
- He was an avid knife collector.
- Does that make you wonder? - Yeah, sure.
That's another thing that we later found out,
that the knives actually came from his room.
- But Justin said a stranger must have broken into the house
and taken his knives.
Detectives questioned, how likely was that?
- And then there was a puzzling story
about a third knife.
Justin said he took it from his car for protection
as he first went into the home.
- So after finding his mom dead in the bathtub,
why would he go back outside and put that knife in his car?
The detective's reaction. Nonsense.
They pressed him.
He finally admitted he lied again.
Homicide cops don't like to be lied to.
- But Justin stuck to his theory
that an unknown assailant
broke into the house with the intent to rob.
Detectives saw it another way.
Perhaps he and his mom had argued and fought,
and Justin tried to cover it up
by making it look like a robbery.
- Bad attempt, too, they said.
in pointing to the opening in the back door
where Justin said someone broke in.
It was small.
Too small, detectives said, for a grown man
to squeeze through.
- Detectives weren't done.
They had more questions, both for Justin and his dad.
- He was in the room next door,
heard the yelling, and now he, too,
was about to be confronted.
- Coming up.
Was it Justin his father saw
on the surveillance camera?
- And they say, Oh, your son is skinny and tall.
- And a stunning turn.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
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- We
- Welc
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- Welcome back to "Dat
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- Welcome back to "Dateline: Sec
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secre
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets U
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Unc
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncov
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncover
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Police were grilling Justin Su.
They suspected he murdered his mother, Jill.
But even under intense questioning,
Justin insisted he was innocent.
So detectives were about to take a new approach.
A plan to get Justin to reveal the deadly secret
with his father's unwitting help.
Back to Dennis Murphy with "The Figure in the House".
- The questioning of Justin Su started in the afternoon.
- And by the early morning hours,
detectives were still at it.
- Occasionally, detectives left Justin
to talk to his father next door,
or check with other investigators
about leads they were pursuing.
So far, they weren't buying his story.
[banging on door]
- Please let me out.
- And there were spells, sometimes long ones,
when Justin was left alone.
- Oh, my God, I'm freaking out in here, man.
- What's happening? What are you hearing?
What do you see? - When we leave the room,
he's talking to himself.
Um, he's screaming and yelling profanities
inside the room.
He's obviously not comfortable with the fact of
where we were-we were pushing him to.
- Oh, my God, I just--
I want my mommy.
I'm gonna go postal, man. I can't--
I-I-I just-- I keep on thinking I see my mom's face.
I see my mom's face.
And I didn't-- I can't think of anything else
when I'm in here.
I just wanna be out of here.
- From the next room, Justin's father, Nan Yao Su,
could hear his son's pain.
- I'm scared, man. I'm scared.
- The yelling.
- Why are you doing this to me?
- The cursing.
[banging] The banging on walls.
[sobbing]
- He was begging them to get him out.
It was gut wrenching for me as a father.
- Of course, investigators also had questions
for Justin's father.
Remember, he first became worried about his wife
when he was at his office and logged in to view remotely
the home security cameras.
He saw someone on camera.
- I saw this figure coming in.
His face is covered with some kind of fabric,
maybe a mask.
The only thing I can saw is his head
and lower part of the face
is covered with something white.
I did not know what to make of that.
And next thing I know is I lost my image.
It's just a very brief moment.
Probably two to three seconds.
- Break it down as well as you can.
You're looking at eyes, essentially, huh?
- All I see is a black band around the eye area.
- What'd you think? You have this alarming image,
and then it's gone.
Camera's off. - Yeah, yeah.
Then I thought, what-what is that figure
I just saw-I just saw?
- Nan Yao's first thought, it might be his son Justin.
- So I thought, well, Justin pulling prank on me.
- So after seeing that image,
that's when he called Justin.
- And I say, are you at home?
He said, no.
- And he described to myself and my partner
that he saw an image, and for a brief second,
and then the camera went black.
- So he sees your suspected killer.
- Correct.
- Nan Yao described the person to police.
- Kind of tall and skinny.
And they said, oh, your son is skinny and-and tall.
And I said, what are you talking about?
- The comment threw Nan Yao,
because while at first he thought
it was his son on the camera.
He was now sure it was someone else, the killer.
Detectives asked the person's race.
- White male with something white
covering his head,
and a body shape similar to Justin's.
That kept Justin in the crosshairs for detectives.
And they told him so.
- Detectives tried to play father against son.
- Back with Justin, detectives kept pressing the idea
that his father suspected him of being the killer.
- Then detectives were really pushed Justin's buttons.
They switched tactics,
now implying his dad might be the killer
and that he was trying to frame his son.
- And while detectives may have had Justin
second guessing his dad for a moment,
his father saw right through the game being played.
- Did you know that your name was being part
of the scenario in the other room?
They're saying, Maybe your father's
got something to do with this.
The father frames the son for this?
- Yeah, it was so ridiculous.
I did not take it seriously.
And they probably tried to use my statement to frame him.
- No matter what tack they took,
detectives always returned
to just hammering away at Justin.
- And that's the way it went for nearly 11 hours.
Despite the pressure, Justin insisted he was innocent.
And if investigators could only find
that snippet of video of the intruder
from the home security camera,
then they'd find out who really killed his mom.
Was he right?
- Right or wrong, Justin sure seems certain,
but so do police.
Neither side is willing to give an inch.
Coming up.
A frustrated and increasingly angry Justin.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
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- After hour
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- After hours of detectives in his fa
- After hours of detectives in his face
saying he killed his mother,
Justin refused to buckle.
He maintained his innocence
and said they would end up apologizing to him
when the case was solved.
- They never did.
But if there was one thing that could help solve the crime,
it was that snippet of video of an intruder
his dad saw on his computer.
- Detectives were already working on it.
Analyze it frame by frame, and it might just clear Justin.
Or not.
Easy, you go to the tape, you pull it,
and you all look at it. - Yeah, that'd be great, right?
This camera system that he had
was a drop camera service inside the house.
And you are afforded the opportunity to pay
for a service which keeps the live recordings.
- In fact, the Sus had a trial period for recordings
that lasted two weeks.
It expired two days before the murder
and was not renewed.
That meant there was no video recording to retrieve.
- It was just a live monitor view.
So once that image was gone, it was gone forever.
- But there were other investigators
reviewing videos from outside the house,
including at the front gate,
to see if they could confirm Justin's story and timeline.
Justin told investigators that
after running errands that morning,
he left the house again around 9:15.
The security camera at the front gate showed
his black car leaving.
About three hours later, sometime around 12:30,
his car can be seen again on the same security camera
returning to the gated community.
It was just as he'd said,
responding to his father's request
to check on his mother and the house.
- Based on guard gate video,
we had him coming and going from the house
and from the time that he had left.
And by the time he came back,
that was the opportunity window that we basically
put a timeline of when this murder took place.
- Justin was not at home shortly after noon
when the detectives theorized the murder
had to have taken place.
The comings and goings seen on the security gate video
confirmed Justin had not killed his mother.
- When we were done, we were pretty convinced
that he wasn't the one who did it.
- So all these suspicions you just talked about,
you believed in the end that he was telling the truth?
- I-I did.
- Justin got the welcome news
without trumpets or drum rolls.
He was simply told he was free to go.
- All of a sudden, it's over.
- Yeah, it is.
They just open the door.
- Was your dad there at that point?
- Mm-hmm, yeah. I remember--
The first memory I have of my dad is
he saw me, hugged me, and said,
"Don't worry, don't--"
Obviously, he didn't--
He did not believe for a second
that I did it, no.
- Throughout his ordeal,
Justin was agonizingly aware
he still had his mother's blood on him.
- I had to ask him, like,
can I just go to the bathroom?
I had to go in and go to the sink
and take this water and just try to wash off
my mom's blood in this police bathroom.
And I'm being blamed for this.
- Justin's interview was long, harsh,
and traumatizing.
- If you keep on doing that to somebody
for 12, 13, 14 hours,
that's close to torture.
And you can make someone confess to something
just to end it,
just to get out of that situation,
which is horrible.
And I never broke.
- You're telling me about
the before and after moment of your life.
- Yep.
- Was anything quite the same afterwards
after you emerged from that interview room?
- No, no, I'm a completely different person.
- Even some law enforcement professionals
felt that grilling him for 11 hours was extreme.
- I have to tell you that I have seldom
in my 35 years of practice of criminal law
seen an interrogation go that long.
- Prosecutor Maria Schneider would be the one
to try the case
when the killer was finally caught.
Had these guys stepped over the line
into bullying, intimidation?
- You know, investigating the family
or suspecting the family, sadly,
that's kind of par for the course.
Whether I personally think that they went
a little bit too long
and a little bit too hard on Justin,
you know, that's me Monday morning quarterbacking.
- No, 'cause I didn't do it!
- Lead detective Paul Williams
said it was as long and hard as it needed to be.
Did you rough him up more than you needed to
to get your story?
- No, I don't think so.
And I never feel bad about that
because we do the investigation
for the victim who can't speak.
If I had to do it all over again,
I wouldn't change a thing.
He'd be in that room as long, being grilled?
- As-as long as it took, w-without a doubt.
And the optics of it,
it's probably not what you want to see.
My job is to find the facts,
and if we didn't address it, then,
it would have come up later
and it would have made us look worse.
- And the fact is that during his interrogation,
Justin gave detectives a new lead to pursue,
opening up a whole new area of investigation.
The son, it turned out, had thrown a party at his house
two days before his parents came home
from that Malaysia trip.
There were a number of young people
smoking, drinking, wandering around the house.
Could one of those partygoers
fit the profile of a suspect?
The interview list had suddenly grown
by leaps and bounds.
- Coming up...
- I was guessing maybe one of my friends
might have had something to do with it.
- Had Justin guessed right?
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
-
- De
- Dete
- Detect
- Detectiv
- Detectives
- Detectives i
- Detectives inv
- Detectives inves
- Detectives investi
- Detectives investiga
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- Detectives investigating the murd
- Detectives investigating the murder
- Detectives investigating the murder o
- Detectives investigating the murder of
- Detectives investigating the murder of Ji
- Detectives investigating the murder of Jill
- Detectives investigating the murder of Jill S
- Detectives investigating the murder of Jill Su
were back to square one.
Her son Justin was no longer a suspect,
but he did offer them a tantalizing new lead.
So in recent days, there had been a party in the house.
- Correct. - With a lot of kids?
- A lot of kids. Upwards of, like, 20 kids.
20, 25 kids.
- So that's interesting. - Yes.
So there was a lot of people inside the house,
which added to the problems of the contamination
or cross contamination of other people's DNA
and-and fingerprints they could have left on the scene,
uh, as well as what we were dealing with already.
- Justin gave detectives a list of people,
mostly young people in their 20s.
- You gave them names? - Yeah, I gave them
every single one of my friends names.
And they went and background checked
all of them. Um, yeah, it was--
I-I was guessing maybe one of my friends
might have had something to do with it.
- The detectives reached out,
called the people from the party.
Come down to headquarters, they told them.
We need to talk.
- And when they did that, they were swabbed for DNA.
- No one objected.
By then, they all knew what happened to Justin's mom
three days after the party.
Most were happy to answer detectives' questions.
- Are you saying that there might be a friend--?
- Justin told detectives during his interrogation
that when guests arrived,
he made sure he told everyone to be cool
around those security cameras.
He warned them that even though his parents were away,
they sometimes checked the cameras remotely.
- Justin said most party guests were longtime friends,
but he said there were a few he didn't know very well.
And one guy made his way
to an off limits part of the house.
- Detectives took note. The parents' bathroom.
The very place where Jill's body was found.
So they asked the guy about it.
- Actually, there were no cameras in the bedroom.
And the guy on the phone immediately left
to continue his call elsewhere.
- I met him that night. - Okay.
- But he and some of the others told detectives
they should take a look at one partygoer in particular.
Someone who had a record and an unsavory reputation.
- Police traced the guy to his home
and asked him to come down to headquarters
to answer a few questions.
- Hey, what's up, buddy?
- He told the cops he'd actually been expecting them.
- They asked him to take off his shirt
to see if there were any signs of an injury from a struggle.
There were not.
He admitted he had an arrest record,
but for drugs, not burglary. No rough stuff.
- Oh, you are?
- And when it came time for a DNA swab...
- He said his DNA was already in the system
as a result of his arrest.
- The young man had an alibi for the time of the murder.
He was at work, he said.
In all, detectives went through
close to 30 interviews,
and except for that one person,
no one else at the party had a criminal record.
You've canvassed all the kids
and they don't seem to be a lead for you.
- Correct.
- Meanwhile, CSI investigators at the crime scene
had already swabbed a number of items for DNA.
It's an electrifying moment for any detective working a case
when a DNA sample comes back from the lab
with not just a hit, but a name attached.
Detective Paul Williams had one of those a-ha moments
nine days after Jill Su's murder.
They've taken their sample, this genetic sample,
and compared it to a known database.
- Correct, correct.
And they give you a percentage,
like one into some trillion billion people,
that it's a match for this person.
- And more importantly...
Does a hit mean you have a name at that point?
- Yes, they identify a name.
- It wasn't the guy from the party.
It wasn't anyone from the party.
They were all clear.
Rather, it was a 20-year-old named Dayonte Resiles.
Who in the world was he?
The detective didn't have a clue.
- Coming up...
Turns out there was a lot to learn about Dayonte.
- Pulled up a picture, looked at him,
um, saw his history.
He had quite an extensive history.
- And a familiar way of committing burglaries.
- All of them were within gated communities,
and they were all backed up against water.
And most of the entries were done
through a back glass, uh, doorway.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
-
- We
- Welc
- Welcom
- Welcome
- Welcome ba
- Welcome back
- Welcome back t
- Welcome back to
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- Welcome back to "Dat
- Welcome back to "Datel
- Welcome back to "Datelin
- Welcome back to "Dateline:
- Welcome back to "Dateline: S
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Sec
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secre
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets U
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Unc
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncov
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncover
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Detectives investigating Jill Su's murder
were busy chasing leads
that all led them to the same place, nowhere.
But now DNA from the scene
had just handed them a suspect.
The name Dayonte Resiles had not been on their radar,
but he was known to police.
back to Dennis Murphy with The Figure in the House.
- Homicide Detective Paul Williams
was following the evidence where it took him.
And that is what brought him to this moment
when the strongest lead pointed in the direction
of Dayonte Resiles.
- Do you go to your computers and pull up the name?
- Pulled up a picture, looked at him,
uh, saw his history.
Uh, he had quite an extensive history.
- Juvenile stuff. - Juvenile stuff.
Um, burglaries.
Uh, nothing-- No violent crimes.
It was all burglary and property crimes.
- The way Dayonte Resiles pulled off those burglaries,
his MO, sounded familiar to Detective Williams.
- All of them were within gated communities,
and all of the homes were huge,
and they were all backed up against water.
And most of the entries were done
through a back glass, uh, doorway into the home.
- And destroying surveillance equipment, if he could.
- Yes, yes.
- The detective wondered if Dayonte had been
in the Su house legitimately.
Maybe he knew Justin.
If so, that could explain the presence of the DNA.
The detective called Justin and read him three names.
Justin didn't know that two of the names were made up.
He blanked on all three, including Dayonte Resiles.
- Never heard that name.
I've never seen that man in my life.
- The detective told him about the DNA hit.
Justin was relieved.
But he says it was hard to feel anything back then
because of what he'd been through.
He was, he says, shell shocked.
- I don't know what else term to say it,
but mentally scarred.
Like, I was mentally, like, beat up, man.
- But the police were moving fast.
They got an arrest warrant and nabbed their suspect.
It went down like a textbook case.
Then they told him the charge he was facing.
Police told Dayonte to remove his clothing
and put on a jumpsuit.
And Dayonte asked again about the charge he was facing.
Dayonte was assigned a court appointed
defense attorney
and an investigator working for the defense
went to talk to him in jail.
Gentry Chambers was surprised by the young man he met.
- He's a scared kid.
To me, that says a lot, because this case,
the person who did it,
I don't think they're gonna be too scared.
I think this was a case where whoever did this,
they either did it before or, you know,
t-they were a real gruesome person, so...
- You thought they would have had tougher, thicker skin
than you're seeing in Dayonte. - Right.
Because this is what I do for a living.
I talk to people that's incarcerated.
- Gentry learned Dayonte Resiles had grown up
not far from the Su family.
His single mom worked minimum wage jobs.
He was nicknamed Moochie, as a boy.
- I get up every morning...
- As a young man, he could be charming.
Driven too, if these selfie videos
retrieved from his phone mean anything.
A known burglar talking like a motivational speaker.
- If you're not ambitious, you're not gonna get far.
You wanna be rich?
You can't get rich sitting on your (BLEEP).
- When he was living the good life,
he could show off.
- Got a beautiful view of the beach though.
You see all that? - This video, a tour of his room
during a hotel stay.
- I wish everybody have a nice day.
You know, enjoy your summer vacation and get money.
That's all.
- He could have been anything he wanted to be.
- Y-You feel that strong about him?
- I feel that strong about him.
I feel that if-if he would have got
the right direction or if one thing
that would have changed in his life
that would have led him to see something good,
he could have been anything he wanted to be.
- Instead, he landed in jail, charged with murder one,
possibly facing the death penalty.
- You'll be held without bond until further order
of the court on that.
- But Gentry had his doubts about Dayonte's guilt.
The savage way Jill Su was killed didn't seem like
something a breaking and entering guy would do.
- To kill a woman in that fashion, in that way?
No. - Tell me about that way.
Killing in that way. - In that way is to--
To bound her and to stab her multiple times.
Almost like torturing, right?
- Police have a word they use, overkill.
- Right.
- But the case moved forward.
In the months that followed, Dayonte Resiles
made one court appearance after another.
Then came July 15, 2016, almost two years
after Jill Su was murdered.
Dayonte was in court that morning for another hearing.
- All of a sudden, we hear that the courthouses shut down.
The area around the courthouse is shut down.
- David Neal, a reporter with the Miami Herald,
was in his office covering breaking news that day.
- There's unusual numbers of large police vehicles
in the street,
and we're not sure, exactly sure w-what's happened.
- Then Neal and his colleagues learned...
- Somebody escaped from the courthouse.
- Sitting in a courtroom. - Right.
And so we're calling around and going,
"Wait a minute, hold on."
- Coming up...
- He's up and out. He's gone.
You see a bunch of heads turn, like the utter shock.
- A suspected killer on the loose.
When Dateline: Secrets Uncovered continues.
♪
♪♪
- It started out as just another pretrial hearing
at the Broward County Courthouse.
Didn't end that way.
David Neal of the Miami Herald.
- Then suddenly, he's up and out.
He's gone. - He's bolted?
Wait a minute, a prisoner, cuffed and shackled,
had somehow escaped from a packed courtroom?
Yes, he had.
- The guy got up and escaped from a courtroom.
- The guy, of course, was Dayonte Resiles.
- I was like, "Did that guy just really do that?"
- He did.
At 9:06, Dayonte entered the courtroom
first in the line of inmates heading for the jury box,
out of camera range,
waiting for his case to be called.
At 9:36, a new group of inmates entered the room.
Seconds later, Dayonte, still off camera, raced out,
a bailiff on his heels.
- Suddenly you see a bunch of heads turn,
like the utter shock of everybody,
and then you see him head out the door.
The biggest resistance he got was when he hits the door,
which is kind of a heavy door,
but someone was on the other side of the door.
So he hits the door, kind of bounces b-back,
then pushes through again. - And made it out.
Why didn't somebody try and tackle him in a hallway?
- Because nobody expects that
because it was just so out of- out of-out of norm.
- Courtroom 4810 is on the fourth floor
of the courthouse.
Once Dayonte was on the other side
of that courtroom door, he was off.
He's out of shackles. He's out of handcuffs.
- He's out of the jumpsuit. - Jailhouse garb.
- Yeah, he's gone. - Past sheriff's deputies,
I imagine. Bailiffs. - Yeah, yeah, past everybody.
- All sorts of court officers are there.
- Right, this guy was just blazing through.
- Charging through this hallway, racing down that staircase.
Caught on security camera as he busted out a back door
to a waiting car.
- They're gone. They beat the perimeter.
- Before they could set it up.
- Before they could even set it up.
- A suspected killer was roaming free.
Law enforcement swung into action.
The courthouse was locked down.
A manhunt launched and a hugely embarrassed
Broward County sheriff faced the cameras.
- There'll be investigations and debriefings,
but right now, my main concern is where he is right now.
- Davie Detective Paul Williams heard the news from a colleague
at the Broward County Sheriff's office.
- I think my words were, "A-are you kidding me?"
And I said, "Well, whatever help you guys need."
- So you're working with what, known associates
and family members? - Correct.
I ran through all my criminal histories,
all the contacts that I had with them.
- Like everyone else, Justin Su couldn't believe his ears
when he learned about the escape.
- Got a phone call from the victim advocates, I believe,
saying, "Hey, you might want to pull over."
I remember stopping at the gas station and saying,
"He escaped from prison."
And, you know, we're having all the--
Assured me there's all these resources out
to try looking for him.
- Detective Williams called the Su's as well.
- Obviously, their concern was their safety
and whether he was going to come back to their home.
- Look over your shoulder, right?
- Correct. I arranged it with our police department
and our command staff to have Davie police officers
maintain security at the home, uh, for the Su family.
- And we have the latest on the search tonight.
- The story was all over the local news.
The sheriff at the time appealed to the community
to be on the lookout.
- If you think you know where he is,
you think you know where he might be,
you think you know where he might be going,
or you think you see him, call us up.
- Two days, three days, four days passed.
A crime stopper's reward grew to $50,000.
But the fugitive continued to elude the law,
and the rumor mill exploded.
Dayonte was here, Dayonte was there.
Law enforcement running down the tips,
chasing down the rumors.
- We'd actually heard at one point
he pulled into a hospital in West Broward,
and he died in the emergency room there.
I happened to have an ex girlfriend
who worked in that emergency room,
and I quickly texted her, "You have a dead guy there?
Uh, maybe in his early 20's, Black guy."
And she's like, no. - Stuff is all floating around.
- Yeah, the rumors were flying.
- And when investigators turned up
at Dayonte's old hangouts to talk to friends
and family members,
they didn't always get a warm welcome.
In fact, just the opposite.
- They're incredibly not receptive,
and they're not having it.
- The case reinforced a sentiment
in parts of Broward County's Black community
that they couldn't get a fair shake.
Dayonte's supporters asking, as others had,
why a burglar was facing a charge of murder.
- He's got a past of, you know, robbery,
but he doesn't have a violent past.
The feeling is they needed a Black guy to pin it on,
and they picked him.
So that was the feeling out of a lot of his friends
and associates and a fair amount of the Black community
in Broward that knew him.
- Dayonte's audacious escape generated sympathy for him
on social media.
He became something of a folk hero to his supporters,
known by that childhood nickname, Moochie.
There's a rap song. - There was a rap song.
- Run, Moochie Run. Is that right?
- Yeah, there was a hashtag, Run, Moochie Run.
There was this outcry on social media
from his friends and associates
saying they should take this opportunity
to look back into that case, which is not quite
the way things work, folks.
- But then suddenly, Moochie stopped running.
- Coming up...
The Great Escape and how it was done.
- He's got a crew helping. - You know,
helping him get out of the shackles.
- This is Ocean's Eleven stuff. - Yeah.
- But there would be no Hollywood ending
when Dateline: Secrets Uncovered continues.
♪
♪♪
- After Dayonte Resiles pulled off that crazy caper
at the Broward Bounty courthouse and went on the lamb,
a promising new lead came in.
A tipster claimed Dayonte was hunkered down
at a Day's Inn about an hour away.
Law enforcement hightailed it north
and showed up in force.
- The information that we were receiving is that
he was gonna go down with a fight.
So obviously, the SWAT teams were called.
- It was six days since Dayonte had busted out
of the courthouse.
Any dramatics in the takedown? - No.
He was taken in custody without any incident
and brought back to the Broward Sheriff's office.
- A greatly relieved, Broward County sheriff
wiped giant omelette amounts of egg off his face
and announced the arrest.
- Broward County in South Florida is a safer place.
- So how did he do it?
How did a 21 year old jailhouse prisoner
pull this thing off?
Well, by enlisting the help of devoted friends
and family members, that's how.
- This is Ocean's eleven stuff. - Yeah.
- We're gonna break this guy out of a courtroom.
- Very coordinated.
- Dayonte's recorded phone calls from jail exposed the plot.
Once investigators listened to them,
they learned they'd been outwitted by a confederacy
of mostly teenage plotters.
He rounded up the Impossible Missions Force
and, you know, lit the match and pulled it off.
- This is video of Dayonte in jail
on the morning of the escape,
preparing to put a plan into play
that investigators believed he'd been hatching for months,
beginning with a key that would unlock his cuffs
and shackles.
How did he get his hands on such a key?
Prosecutor Maria Schneider.
- There was a deputy at the jail who a couple of months
before this reported having lost a handcuff key.
Losing a handcuff key in the jail is a very big deal.
So if you lose one, you have to file a report
indicating where you had it, where you lost it.
- So we don't know whether that key in fact
unlocked his handcuffs. - We don't know it exactly.
- But you wonder.
The investigators listened to a phone call
recorded just days before the escape.
Dayonte was talking to a friend in the courthouse
who was describing the route Dayonte should take
to get out of the building.
- We know that his friend walked from the courtroom
down the stairwell that leads to the third floor
to the secondary stairwell that leads outside.
- And if you don't know the setup,
you could walk into some dead ends?
- Correct, correct. You need to know where to go.
- Especially if you're in a hurry.
On the morning of the escape, security video shows Dayonte
getting patted down.
You can see he's already ripped apart the legs
of his jumpsuit to make it easier to kick off.
And underneath the jumpsuit, he's wearing street clothes.
Later, the inmates approach the courtroom fully shackled.
One prisoner then blocks Dayonte's torso from view
and unlatches his waist chain,
giving Dayonte's hands room to maneuver.
- Speaks to Mr. Resiles' kind of intelligence
that he was able to organize this whole thing.
- He's got a crew helping him. - You know,
helping him get out of the shackles.
- When Dayonte enters the courtroom
with the other inmates, he heads for a seat
in the jury box.
Investigators believe that's when he unlocks his cuffs
and shackles.
Now he's ready to make a run for it
as soon as all his confederates are in position.
So there's two twins who are eyes and ears in the court.
- Yeah. - Who are they talking to?
- They're talking to the people in the car.
- The getaway. - Right.
And so when the car's in position,
one twin signals the other twin, twin signals Resiles.
And he's like, okay, now everything's in place
for you to roll. - And roll he did.
The sheriff picked up the story.
- One of the twins coughed into a cell phone.
That cough was a message to alert them
to know that Resiles was on his way down to the vehicle.
- The rest is history.
Defense investigator Gentry Chambers.
Look, was there a part of you, Gentry,
who said, "Man, that was incredible."
- Of course, I mean, I'm saying to myself,
"How many guys actually evade the police and get away?"
And away for a week.
- Except for one postscript that punctures the idea
the young plotters had thought of everything,
rather than just being very lucky.
- This is a poor kid from the hood
who didn't probably even think this was gonna go down
the way that it went down.
The car that picked them up didn't even have gas in it.
They had to stop to the gas station.
[laughing]
- In the months ahead, all eight of those
who helped Dayonte were charged and convicted.
- He's very smart. He's very charming.
Because he got all these people to put their own freedom
on the line for him.
- As for Dayonte Resiles, he may have been back
behind bars on 23 hour lockdown
and facing new charges, but he wasn't done.
- The escape is not the end of it for this young man.
Oh, no, no, no, no. No, he continues.
- Not long after he was captured,
Dayonte wrote this letter to the judge whose court he fled.
He apologized for bolting.
Said in his defense that he didn't stray far.
Then he offered an explanation.
- "I was clearly trying to just gather evidence
for my defense." - Yeah, what did --
"I had to bust myself out so I could be my own detective."
- Detective, right.
- To find exculpatory information.
- Right, to clear myself.
And, you know, you're a very fair judge.
Like I said, he buttered him up.
- Far from trying to gather evidence to help his case,
Dayonte was actually busy doing other things,
while he was hunkered down in that motel room.
- He was just hanging out and talking to friends
and going on porn websites.
- But Dayonte now had other business to pursue.
Top of that list, feeding the social media machine
to keep the Justice for Dayonte campaign alive,
recording this message, which was posted on Facebook.
But Dayonte did sit in jail for years.
The trial finally took place in 2021.
And like everything in this story,
it would end with a can-you-believe-it twist.
- Coming up...
Disorder in the court.
- As you're going back into the courtroom
to announce your verdict... - I'm like, "What am I doing?
This is not right."
- In an extraordinary moment, a juror changes her verdict.
When Dateline: Secrets Uncovered continues.
♪
♪♪
Welcome back.
Six days after Dayonte Resiles' astonishing escape from
a Broward County courthouse, a tipster gave up his location.
Surrounded by SWAT teams, Dayonte quickly surrendered.
Now he was about to return to court to face murder charges.
But if you thought this was going to be an ordinary trial,
think again.
Another jaw dropping surprise was in store.
Back to Dennis Murphy with The Figure in the House.
- In 2019, five years after Jill Su's murder
and three years after Dayonte Resiles' notorious
courtroom dash for freedom,
a billboard went up in downtown Fort Lauderdale.
It was provocative in both its wording and placement.
This billboard, which reportedly
the sheriff could see from his window
showing the victim and the person
accused of killing her.
Saying two victims, one truth. - And with a hashtag
Justice4Moochie.
And it says, who killed Jill Halliburton?
Who framed Dayonte Resiles?
- To this day, no one has figured out
who paid for that billboard with its message
that Dayonte Rosales was yet another
wrongfully accused Black man.
How provocative was that?
- It was a direct shot at Broward Sheriff's office.
- It was really a middle finger to law enforcement in Broward.
- Right, right, and it didn't really--
I don't think it swayed opinion.
- To Jill Su's family, it was a poke in the eye.
How painful was that?
- It wasn't more painful than just made me a-angry.
- Dayonte's supporters were angry, too.
NBC 6 South Florida covered some of those rallies.
Dayonte once more a symbol of a system
his supporters believed was stacked against them.
- So many people, so many of our people
that have just been railroaded through the justice system.
It's just not fair.
- Dayonte's trial was looming and the Justice4Moochie campaign
played right into the defense's strategy.
- Allari Dominguez, one of Dayonte's attorneys.
- It's not a unique experience or a unique thing to happen
that someone could be falsely arrested,
especially if they're Black.
- Prosecutor Maria Schneider.
So you've got a very noisy court of public opinion
looking over your shoulder here. - We do, we do.
And the defendant-- - And you have to deal with it.
It's a factor. - Yeah, a-and Mr. Resiles
is very charismatic and he has a group of friends
who are very, very devoted to him.
- In late 2021, seven years after Jill Su
was stabbed to death, Dayonte Resiles went on trial
for first degree murder.
He pleaded not guilty.
The trial came down to one key issue--
The DNA at the crime scene.
But the best thing you have going is the DNA, right?
- Absolutely. The DNA is indisputable.
- Turns out investigators found Dayonte's DNA in two places.
Inside the house on a belt and outside the house
on one of Justin's knives.
It should have been a slam dunk,
but the county lab where the DNA was processed
had a history of controversy.
- Listen, nothing is ever simple.
The BSO lab in 2015 was accused by a local expert
of mishandling how they calculated the numbers,
the statistics of how often in a population
it is likely that you would find similar DNA.
- It was a dispute over numbers, the prosecutor said,
nothing more.
- No one ever has accused the Broward Sheriff's office
of getting the DNA processing wrong.
- Nevertheless, Dayonte's defense attorneys
worked mightily to keep those doubts
about the lab work front and center.
They were also laser focused on Justin Su,
arguing that even the police initially thought
Justin was the killer. - I didn't do it!
- He was back in the hot seat.
That years ago intense interrogation,
relived now in court,
Defense attorney Michael Orlando.
- I think it was focusing in on-on his behavior
and where he lied to the police.
- Justin Su is gonna go on trial, virtually,
for murdering his mother. - Yeah, yeah.
Basically, they put him on trial.
- When jurors went out, deliberations dragged.
Finally, day five, a verdict.
Remember, Dayonte was charged with first degree murder.
A stunner was coming.
- The defendant is guilty of the lesser included crime
of manslaughter.
- Guilty of manslaughter with a considerably lighter sentence
than murder one.
A blow to the family. So why?
As is customary, the judge polled the jurors,
asking each if this was their verdict.
He started with the foreperson.
Another stunner.
Let's play that again.
The camera was not allowed to show jurors faces,
but this was unheard of, a juror changing her verdict.
- He asked me, do you agree to manslaughter?
I took a pause.
It felt like forever, and then I just said no.
- Meet the juror who recanted. Her name is Jackie.
We changed her appearance because she's concerned
about her safety.
- I sat there, and I took a deep breath,
and they're just waiting.
And I see them leaning forward, like, waiting for me
to give the answer.
- Minutes earlier, she says, she'd been disturbed by
the reaction at the defense table
when the verdict of manslaughter was announced.
- They were patting each other on the back.
And they were all smiles and giggles.
- And that didn't go down well with you?
- It did not. It just bothered me so much.
- It stiffened her resolve. - And then I just said no.
And I felt relief.
- Jackie was convinced Dayonte Resiles deserved
the more severe penalty of murder one.
But she says she presided over a deeply divided jury.
The dividing issue, she says, was race.
Jackie herself is Afro-Latina.
Remember, the country was still gripped by
an anguished debate about racial justice
following George Floyd's murder.
And so, Jackie says, was Dayonte Resiles' jury.
- One of the men started crying and was like,
"I can't send another young Black man to jail."
And I looked at him and I said, "Excuse me."
I was like, "If it was my brother
that committed this murder, I would have no problem
sending my brother to jail for the rest of his life."
- They'd been sequestered for five days.
They'd argued and argued again.
Eventually, Jackie says she and others gave in
and went with the lesser charge.
So you voted for manslaughter in the jury room?
- I voted for manslaughter, correct.
- But as you're going back into the courtroom
to announce your verdict, what are you--
Are the wheels moving in your head?
- The wheels were moving, sir. Yes, sir.
And I'm like, "What am I doing?"
This is not right.
- So she did what she did, said that one little word.
The judge dealt with the divide.
- ... jury going back.
They'll continue with their deliberations.
- Back in the jury room, Jackie says things got ugly.
She says she felt threatened by one juror.
- He said, "You (BLEEP) Puerto Rican!
If I was to see you out in the street,
I would smack you in the face."
- But Jackie wasn't budging.
- I knew that what I was doing was the right thing.
- So you come back into court and,
"Judge, we're not gonna get there", right?
- And he just said, "Thank you for your time served."
And that was it. - A mistrial.
We spoke to five other jurors, and some, not all,
agreed race was a divisive issue
during deliberations. After she was dismissed,
Jackie spoke with Jill's husband.
- Dr. Su is a lovely man, very humble, very kind.
Um, we spoke about it and he started crying.
I started getting a little teary eyed as well.
And you know, I told him, you know,
I had to be the voice for Jill because no one else wanted to be
and give her the justice that you and your family deserve
to least get a little bit of closure.
- In a matter of months, a new group of 12 would gather
in the same courtroom
and begin to weigh the matter of Dayonte Resiles
all over again.
- Coming up...
Three little letters that no one can agree on.
- That man's DNA.
DNA.
- His DNA was nowhere in her bedroom,
or the bathroom, where this murder occurred.
- And Justin back in the hot seat.
- He lied about his whereabouts.
When Dateline: Secrets Uncovered continues.
♪
♪♪
♪♪se
♪♪sed
♪♪sed of
a gruesome murder has started.
- Three months after the mistrial of Dayonte Resiles,
prosecutor Maria Schneider was hoping this time
the verdict would match the crime.
To her, unquestionably first degree murder.
- I know the strength of the evidence that I have.
I don't need to play games.
I just have to tell these people what it is.
- The state's theory of the crime was this--
Dayonte broke into the house to rob it,
unexpectedly came across Jill and the two fought.
At some point, Jill tried to escape out the front door.
A neighbor said it was noon when she heard
an unsettling cry coming from the Su house.
- I heard a high pitched, um, shrieky sound
and I saw a light colored object at the front door
and it was going back into the house.
- The woman thought it was the Su's dog,
but the prosecutor said it was Jill
who let out that shriek
as Dayonte dragged her back inside.
- She puts Mrs. Su at noon when Justin and Dr. Su
are not at the house alive.
- The prosecutor has a theory as to how Dayonte was able to
drag Jill back in and tie her up.
- It is possible that during the struggle
when she tried to escape through the front door,
that she was hit on the back of the head
and that could have knocked her out.
- The knife used to stab Jill had a sharp edge
at the end of the handle.
The medical examiner said an injury on Jill's head
matched that shape.
Once unconscious, the prosecutor said,
Dayonte dragged her into the couple's bathroom
where he murdered her.
- There's very little blood in and about the bathroom,
so that indicates to us that she was stabbed
while she was in the bathtub.
- The bedrock of the State's case
were the three letters all juries love to hear.
- That man's DNA.
D-N-A.
- And in the second trial, prosecutors again pointed out
those two items, the belt and knife,
that contained Dayonte's DNA.
But in this trial, there was something new,
a third hit with Dayonte's DNA.
It was found on that broken glass door.
- The point of entry, which I think is very important.
You know, that glass that he went through.
- T-the shimmy under the glass? - Correct.
- How certain was the analyst who tested the DNA?
This is what she said about the broken glass door.
- That is one number with 27 zeros behind it.
That is multiple times more than the population of the world.
- And when prosecutor Schneider told jurors about
that infamous breakout,
she said it was evidence of his guilt.
- Dayonte Resiles escapes from a packed courtroom!
- And there was more.
After his capture, Dayonte tried to enlist friends
to help him fabricate an alibi for the day Jill was murdered.
So he bribed a corrections officer to get him a phone.
- He was looking to get a- get a cell phone
smuggled into the jail.
- Sergeant Jason Hendrick testified that with that device,
Dayonte started enlisting people in his conspiracies.
Little did Dayonte know, the phone was tapped.
In one of those calls, he asked someone to lie for him,
saying he was in Georgia, not Florida,
on the day Jill was murdered.
Jill's murder was on the 8th of September,
and Dayonte's own cell phone record
showed he was in Florida that day.
- He posted, um, posted and received messages,
a-and the GPS put it in the location of Pompano Beach.
- And in an attempt to counter the state's strongest evidence,
his DNA at the crime scene,
Dayonte asked one friend to lie about that, too.
- To pretend that some guy had a fight with the defendant,
caught him, took his blood,
and planted it at the crime scene.
- That's correct. - Okay.
Only problem is, none of the DNA from the crime scene
is from blood, is it? - No, it is not.
- No. Okay.
- So was this case impossible to defend?
Far from it, said Dayonte's defense attorneys,
Michael Orlando and Allari Dominguez.
Their strategy was similar to that in the first trial--
attack the DNA evidence.
- Our main theory in the case was that he never
was the person that killed Jill Halliburton Su
because his DNA was nowhere in her bedroom
or the bathroom, where this murder occurred.
- His DNA might have been found in other parts of the house,
but not where Jill's body was found.
- Why is his DNA not in the place
where there's a clear struggle?
The person was put in the bathtub.
Somebody turned on the sink, threw things inside,
and DNA survived in the bathtub.
But Dayonte's DNA is nowhere there.
- And then there was that murder weapon
found in the bathtub with Jill's body.
Dayonte's DNA simply wasn't on it.
- He's excluded from being any type of a contributor
to the DNA they found that night.
- Prosecutor Schneider disputes that.
She says it is possible for DNA to dissipate in water.
Still, the defense remained critical of all the DNA
collected at the scene.
Are you saying that is his DNA but somebody planted it?
Or it was the lab got it wrong?
- I wish we could have a crystal ball
and go back and find out how exactly it got there.
- We focused in on a couple things.
One was to highlight the issue of potential contamination.
The other was to bring out the-- some of the issues
that the lab has had.
- The defense also raised the possibility
of other potential suspects for the jury to consider.
- Did the people that Justin had invited over to the house
have a role in the murder of Jill Halliburton Su?
- And in its cross examination of Nan Yao Su,
the defense made sure jurors heard his description
of the person he saw on the security camera.
- You said that the person that you saw was white.
- Appeared to be white, yes.
- And if the defense went hard at Justin
during the first trial,
they drilled down even harder during the second.
- Justin was a suspect in this case.
But after Mr. Resiles was arrested,
then they no longer pursued that angle.
- But police should have pursued him, the defense said,
reminding jurors of Justin's inconsistencies.
- When I was being interrogated, I possibly said that.
I was under a lot of stress.
- He lied about his whereabouts,
saying that he was at the library.
And then it was like, "Oh, no, I was in the parking garage
in the middle of September in South Florida
and I was taking a nap in my car."
- In closing arguments, the defense said
the state didn't do its job.
- What they've shown you here today
is not in any way proof that Dayonte
killed Jill Su at all.
- But the state doubled down on its physical evidence.
- The science puts him there.
The science puts his hands on a weapon.
The science puts his hands on an item that tied him
to Su's body.
- Jurors started their deliberations.
The last time it took five days.
- Once the jury went into a second day of deliberations,
I started despairing. - Groundhog Day.
- I thought, "Oh, my God, it's either going to be
another hung jury or there's some jurors in there
who just are not seeing the evidence
for what it is."
- Coming up... After seven years, a verdict.
- And you hear the words. Tell me what's going through
your brain and your stomach here?
- I-I know that my body was clenched so tightly.
- When Dateline: Secrets Uncovered continues.
♪
♪♪
- Dayonte Resiles' first murder trial
ended in a mistrial.
Now, after three days of deliberations,
in this second trial, there was a verdict.
Everyone braced for the reading.
- Ladies and gentlemen,
it's my understanding you have reached the verdict.
Is that correct?
- The defendant's supporters and family sat near him.
But Jill Su's family chose not to attend court
for this verdict,
not after their experience the last time around.
Guilty of murder in the first degree.
Quiet gratitude at the prosecution table.
And you hear the words.
Tell me what's going through your brain and your stomach.
- I don't even know.
I-I know that my body was clenched so tightly
that when I heard the words, I just felt my whole body, like,
relax and say, "Thank you, God."
You know. Justice was done.
- Jill's husband was driving when he got the news.
- Oh, my God, I have to stop my car.
I scream and I say, "Finally, finally, finally.
All these years. Finally."
Maybe we'll start to heal again.
Maybe we can start to heal, really heal.
- Across the room at the defense table,
little reaction from Dayonte Resiles.
- He knows that any reaction he would have, you know,
at that point it wouldn't matter.
It was not going to change the verdict.
But he knew. It was a-a somber event.
- A manslaughter verdict would have meant
a 15 year max sentence.
A first degree murder conviction meant the death penalty
or life without parole.
And now he's coming out of Corrections
in a pine box, probably.
It's that severe. - Yeah.
- And the jury believed the state's version of events.
- But a verdict is a verdict.
Both sides now had urgent business.
Should Resiles get the death penalty or not?
- We strongly felt that this should not be
a death penalty case.
- There was a lot of mitigating circumstances.
The Su's were also consulted
and they wrestled with the decision.
- I think in some respects that he should die
just because of what he did.
And in another sense too,
I want him to suffer in another way.
Just living the rest of his life in a--
In a smaller enclosure that he did that--
than the bathroom that he took my mother's life in.
- Hmm. What do you think Jill would have said?
- Jill would say, no, she doesn't want to
take another life.
- In the end, the state took the death penalty
off the table.
That meant the judge had no discretion in sentencing.
Dayonte Resiles would serve mandatory life in prison
with no parole.
At sentencing, the Su's got the chance
to confront the now convicted killer of their beloved Jill.
- Dayonte, Jill is the kind of person
who could have helped you.
Instead, you kill her.
You kill her in cold blood, like a psychopath.
- Then he dismissed his wife's killer.
- After this, today, Dayonte Resiles,
I'm going to erase you from my memory.
In my mind, you do not exist.
- From Justin, the son whom Resiles' side had tried to
portray as the real killer, came another dismissal
and a grim prophecy.
- Dayonte, I found watching everyone you know,
that you think love you and that love you
slowly go on with their lives
and just forget about who you were.
You slowly become nothing.
- Normally, when the sentence is mandatory,
defendants have little to say.
But Resiles spoke for 25 minutes.
- Mr. Resiles, you can have a seat.
- He made the inevitable declaration of innocence.
- I don't possess the hate, rage inside my heart
to commit such a heinous crime.
- And then the insistence that he, Dayonte Resiles,
was another wrongfully accused Black man.
- This courtroom that I currently sit in
is no place for people of my skin color.
- Finally, it was the judge's turn.
- The court now finds you guilty,
adjudicates you guilty and sentences you life in prison.
- Afterwards, the Su's, Nan Yao, Justin
and sister Mandy went to a local park.
The ordeal was behind them, but scars lingered.
Justin still battles the effects of trauma.
First from finding his mother's body
and then being accused of killing her
during that painful interrogation,
reprised again and again in the courtroom,
One positive, he did get the apology
he demanded from the police.
- I took it upon myself to go talk to him.
And I told him, listen, if your feelings are hurt,
basically I'm sorry,
but I'm here to do the job for the victim.
And that's m-my responsibility, is to the victim,
to find out who did this to her.
- Justin says the apology felt matter of fact.
- I went to the police station. They apologized to me.
And then right after, they just went into, like,
business stuff.
I don't think they really know even to this day,
don't really know what doing something like that
to somebody, like, can cost them.
- In the park where the family gathered,
there's a bench dedicated to Jill,
embossed with her artwork.
They remembered the woman who made helping others
her life's work.
- It's Turn of the Century America.
- The hundreds of hours she spent recording books
for the blind.
She touched more lives than you'll ever be able to count.
- Yeah, definitely.
She touched a lot of people's lives, you know,
and it's a true fact that if she were still alive,
she would be helping out.
- Justice now done for Jill Su, the gentle woman
with a huge heart and generous spirit.
And an unfinished agenda of good works remaining.
- That's all for this edition of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
I'm Craig Melvin. Thank you for watching.