GREG: There's people that think that we were nothing
but a bunch of big, fat bowling drinkers
that smoke cigars and cigarettes,
but we're pretty much blue collar and just fun-loving.
PATRICK: You probably think it's just a normal place
you could grow up and live and raise kids.
You don't think people you talk to every day
are capable of killing someone,
especially something that was that diabolical.
[Jeremy Moore speaking]
LINDA: You see and hear this stuff,
but you don't think it will happen to you or your family.
EDGAR: I saw my family suffering.
You never get over the hurt and pain.
You almost couldn't be human and do what they did to them.
JODI: We didn't know who we had to hide from.
Who can you trust after what just happened?
You can't trust nobody, because you don't know what's going on.
[thunder rumbles]
[theme music playing]
LINDA: It was Monday, early on the 13th of March in 2006.
I went over to my daughter's.
She said, "Have you talked to dad?"
And I said, "About what?"
She informed me that my sister,
Karen, and her husband, Jim, had been robbed,
that it was worse than being just robbed,
and she said...
they were killed.
And to think that
I wasn't gonna have her anymore.
She was my best friend. We did a lot together.
We grew up and kind of learned things together.
Your mind goes nuts.
It's like, was this random, or could
family members have done something like that?
How could that be?
We're a very close family.
I hate that I had those thoughts, but I did.
DET. JONES: I was a detective probably for about four years,
and when we get called out on a homicide,
family life, everything, is put on hold.
We might work 50, 52 hours straight, you know, without,
you know, going home or anything.
[indistinct radio chatter]
When I arrived on the scene, approximately nine a.m.,
we wanted to kind of start processing the house
room by room.
Our patrol deputy assigned myself
and Andy Robberts parts of the house.
♪♪
DET. ROBBERTS: When we first got to the crime scene,
we wanted to move quickly, but you want to make sure
you get the details.
You don't want to miss anything.
It was a two-story home. Uh...
I believe it was tan on the outside, like a stucco.
It had a large deck, but I did remember
a bunch of change that was laying on the ground,
that was in the driveway.
DET. JONES: When I walked in the house,
and I looked at the front door,
There was no signs of any forced entry
like somebody kicked the door in or pried the door in.
When I walked into the master bedroom,
I found Karen Divelbliss
laying on the floor, face-down.
White female, approximately 50 years old,
being Jeremy Moore's mother.
I noticed that on her hands, she had a lot
of defensive wounds, and she normally wore a lot of jewelry.
She had no rings on, no wedding band,
and nothing on any of her fingers.
The room was kind of ransacked.
It was a large bedroom.
They had a large king-sized bed with a huge headboard.
There was quite a bit of blood all around Karen and on
the floor there -- it definitely looked like
somebody had robbed the home and stuff.
There were -- there were footprints down the hallway.
There were some footprints in the bedroom.
She had large jewelry boxes in the closet.
Those were all dumped out and gone through and everything.
I mean this isn't the way you could
tell that these people lived in this home.
It was in pretty bad disarray.
Then there were a set of stairs that went down to a landing.
ROBBERTS: When we looked down the stairway to the landing,
we could see Jim Divelbliss landing in blood.
Jim had two knife wounds to the chest and approximately
four knife wounds to the neck area.
Around the corner from Jim,
there was a closet, and in that closet was
a safe that was open.
So we had two people dead at complete different points of
the home -- one was on the south side of the house, and one was
at the furthest north part of the house, and it was a very --
it was a large home -- it wasn't a small house.
So you have no idea what you're running into,
who's involved, how many's involved?
It could be one, could be two, or he could
have had them both under control in the same place,
one guy, if it was a big enough guy.
At that point, we needed to find
more information about Jim and Karen Divelbliss.
♪♪
IRENE: It's hard to imagine anybody being that cruel
and brutal, to do what they did to Karen and Jim.
They were just so full of life.
You would not expect it to be taken so quickly.
It was just shock.
Everybody was in shock.
Patrick: Every town has its dark side or secrets,
but murders like that don't happen around here.
I knew who they were, they were real friendly.
I knew that they were active in the community,
like, had a nice store
that everybody in town has been to at least once.
It was kind of a mom-and-pop shop called D & D Sales.
They had just a little bit of everything,
nothing too fancy,
but a lot of folks went in there and shopped.
I'd actually gotten a bike from there when I was a young kid.
I couldn't believe someone murdered them.
♪♪
Jump over -- no...
WENDY: We knew Karen and Jim for three or four years
when we started to bowl in the same league,
and I started to coach her.
We got closer.
Karen and Jim were always ones that you knew who they were.
You smiled when they came in, because she lit up a room.
She was joyful all the time.
Jim was the quiet one. He was always happy.
But he was the quiet one.
LINDA: Everybody in town shopped at Karen and Jim's store,
because it was a place where they could
find something and afford to buy it.
I felt like a lot of it was directed towards
those that didn't have a lot of money to spend.
You know, they wanted everybody to be
able to get something if they needed it.
They were just that kind of people.
Jeremy, my nephew, worked at the store with Karen and Jim
also -- Jeremy was pretty good when we opened the store,
but as his life became more troubled, he would come in late,
not show, have anger.
Definitely, as he became more troubled,
it was -- it was hard to work with him at times.
♪♪
DET. JONES: Jeremy Moore, who was Karen Divelbliss's son,
he was the original caller on this case,
and he was sitting in his car at the scene.
So it was important for us to interview him.
[officer speaking]
[Jeremy speaking]
DET. JONES: He answered the questions.
Of course, he was upset, so...
it's kind of hard to get a feel on
how people are talking to you when they're that upset.
[officer speaking]
[Jeremy speaking]
[officer speaking]
[Jeremy speaking]
[officer speaking]
After talking to Jeremy Moore at the scene,
he didn't have any solid alibi
to eliminate him right then and there,
so he was somebody that we needed to look at.
DET. ROBBERTS: With no forced entry at the residence,
it could have been possibly somebody they knew,
they opened the door for him, let him in,
just didn't lock the door behind 'em.
Could have entered another way through the house.
In a case like this,
you would think, who has access?
♪♪
DAVID: I used to shop over at the Divelbliss store.
I'd go in there -- they were really friendly people.
And she always had a lot of nice rings on,
you know, something -- something unique that you
wouldn't see very often.
There's not a lot of murder crimes right here.
I mean, naturally, it's gonna be a shock.
We don't know who done it, you know, how they killed them.
All kinds of things go through your head.
TONY: I haven't been in here since they died.
We do all the work here for electric-wise.
I knew Karen and Jim real well.
They was the nicest people you could meet.
They went to church.
They helped people in the community.
They helped people out.
Guys come homeless, they'd give money to go eat next door.
To this day, I still can't believe that
Karen and Jim got killed.
GREG: Jim and Karen,
I met them back in 1990.
It was just an instant friendship, immediately.
They would come in and -- and practice a couple,
two or three days a week sometimes.
Karen definitely liked her rings.
She did wear them while she was bowling.
The rings looked really cool.
You know, her holding onto the ball and kind of sparkle.
They had just got back from Vegas earlier, and then they
bowled that night and was joking about being tired,
you know, and stuff from being out on vacation.
WENDY: Karen and I were supposed to have lunch the week
before they went to Las Vegas,
but she called me and told me that she was not gonna be able
to have lunch with me that day.
Said it was a lengthy story, and she
would explain it to me when she saw me.
Her voice was exhausted in that call.
You could tell that it was strained,
and so I didn't feel that she
wanted to talk about it then, because she would have went
into it more.
♪♪
IRENE: The last New Years before they were killed,
they went to a New Year's Eve party,
and Jim insisted that Karen had black and white diamonds.
It was a lot more elaborate than this,
but you get the idea.
I did sell Karen and Jim a lot of their jewelry.
I did help maintain it and cleaned it.
It made us very close as friends, seeing her so much.
Jim kept a large amount of cash.
Probably people that knew him, knew that.
They were pretty open.
I mean, if they -- if they liked you, and I'm sure
people could see that there was a good bit of money.
And I thought they were robbed
for their jewels and their money.
♪♪
DET. JONES: Everybody thought that they knew something
about this case,
because they either knew Jim, or they knew Karen,
or they'd been in their store.
So they all had their opinion on, you know, who did it
and how they did it,
and a lot of people wanted to blame Jeremy Moore, you know,
because he was the first one to find them.
He was the one that made the 911 call.
He did have some misdemeanor petty theft and everything,
and he was the one that stood to inherit a lot of money.
WENDY: When I got the call that Karen
and Jim had been murdered,
it was a quick flashback to remembering what Karen said
about Jeremy -- I think he took things without permission,
but I think he pretty much just relied on his mother
for her support.
It was a constant thought in my mind
that those issues had to have come into play.
♪♪
This was all flat -- this was actually a cow field.
And my husband, Jeremy, he built the house for us.
He wanted to build a cabin so he can just get up
in the morning and hunt and still be with the family.
I'll never leave.
I always want to be here.
Jeremy was Karen's only son from her
first husband, and Jim was Jeremy's stepfather.
Jeremy looked up to Karen like there was nobody.
Of course, they're gonna have their little arguments.
Everybody does when they're around each other.
It's just family.
Um, but they did, they truly got along great,
but I just was worried that they were gonna try to pin it
on him -- I told him, "I know you didn't do it.
I believe in you."
I think Fairfield County is just like any other town.
You got your rich people,
you got your regular people, and then you got
your poor people, and you can tell who
the wealthy people are and who is not.
I couldn't imagine who would hurt Karen and Jim,
but money is the only motive that I can think of.
I was born here many moons ago.
So I was born in '63.
We've always had our pictures on our mantel here.
Karen and Jim there.
They had a great marriage.
You could just see they were in love with each other.
He cherished the ground that she walked on.
Karen was my sister, and Jim was my brother-in-law.
This is where I grew up, very rural area.
There's very little to do in Greenfield Township.
So in the early '90s, I moved into Pennsylvania
and worked for nine years,
and then I decided
I wanted to be back closer to my family.
As soon as I mentioned moving back to Ohio,
Karen purchased a home for me
and my family and said, "Hey,
you just pay me whatever you can afford."
But something was wrong with my marriage, and it
was time for us to go our own separate ways.
My wife and my boys stayed in the house, and my wife,
Deanna had to go out and clean once a week at Karen's house.
But eventually, Karen would come to me and say, "Hey,
"you know, I haven't seen your wife,
"and she's not coming out to clean
like we originally agreed to."
I believe Deanna did resent my sister, Karen, in a lot of ways,
because it was a lot of jealousy.
So when I first found out about my sister
and brother-in-law being murdered,
I'm trying to think of who possibly could have done it,
why, and then I started thinking about my wife.
♪♪
DET. HARGROVE: We're a small agency,
so the entire detective bureau works the case.
Everybody's got a little piece of the pie, uh,
be directed off into trying to
cover as many avenues as possible.
So after we obtained the information on Deanna Smith,
we decided that we needed to speak with her.
♪♪
DET. ROBBERTS: When we interviewed Deanna,
she didn't say anything about having any
ill will against either one of Karen
or Jim Divelbliss -- raising the rent
and, um, losing employment very well
could have made Deanna upset with her.
She was cleaning.
She had connection with the home,
had connection with Karen and Jim Divelbliss.
So Deanna was someone for us to keep looking at.
LINDA: There were times in our family
that we did have issues with Deanna.
I thought she was very eager to strike out
at people and cause trouble, and Deanna loved jewelry.
Deanna loved anything that was expensive, and in
my opinion, was jealous of what Karen had.
REPORTER: Fairfield County investigators spent a second day
processing this crime scene so they can tell
a grieving family who killed Jim and Karen Divelbliss
and why?
When it had hit the news that evening,
it's a small town and a lot of people, you know, in the town
discussed it and had their opinions
of what went on and different things like that.
It can drastically affect the investigation on the case,
um, depending on what kind of leads you get,
different leads from the public and everything,
and we still have to check into them and see what goes on.
And some of it can be misleading and stuff like that.
Some of it's very time consuming, too.
At this point, we did have a large amount of jewelry that
we believe was missing from the home,
and that is our strongest lead that we have.
[crow cawing]
♪♪
Even though we didn't have a clear idea of what may have
been stolen from the Divelbliss home,
we began checking local pawn shop tickets.
At that point in time, we located some expensive
jewelry at A & A Pawn Shop
that might have belonged to Karen Divelbliss.
The question was, who pawned it?
[dog barking]
JODI: This is where we all come to relax.
Kids like to have friends over.
We hunt for mushrooms back there.
Kids ride their quads, shoot paintball guns,
stuff like that.
After Karen and Jim passed away, Jeremy and I ran
D & D Sales,
and I know Jeremy felt the pressure.
You could just tell, I mean, you could see it in his face,
how skinny he got, and just...
It changed Jeremy.
He was a totally different person,
because he didn't have enough people believe in him.
I can't imagine how that would feel.
It broke him. He was never the same.
Jeremy's not here today because he overdosed
and passed away.
He felt like some of the family
thought that he was still guilty,
and that hurt him more than anything,
because family is supposed to be there for you.
♪♪
Scott Jones and Andy Robberts were the mouthpieces.
They did a lot of the interviews,
and I was more of a --
uh, an evidence type kind of guy.
I would work the crime scenes and let them do all the talking.
♪♪
We had learned from Karen's brother, Edgar,
that the Divelblisses had a number of rental properties in
the city of Lancaster.
We also began digging into their financial records
to see if any checks,
credit cards, et cetera, had been used after their deaths.
We had a lead that someone may have pawned some
of Karen's jewelry at A & A Pawn Shop.
David!
It's been a long time, hasn't it?
Been a lot of years, young man.
DAVID: I know it.
I've had doctors, I've had lawyers in here.
I've had real estate people in here.
Every class of person in here,
selling jewelry and pawning jewelry.
Everybody hits a rough patch every now
and then, I don't care who you are.
Everybody needs short-term money.
A lady came in, said she wanted to sell some jewelry.
That's when I took a look at it.
I evaluate the clarity of the diamonds
and see how good the diamonds were.
I could tell it was high-end jewelry, and, uh,
we made an offer on it, and she took it.
DET. HARGROVE: While checking pawn tickets,
I came across a pawn ticket in the name of Deanna Smith
and discovered that Deanna Smith had, in fact,
pawned some jewelry on March 11th.
Her sister-in-law was found dead on the 13th.
We had heard that Deanna Smith was known to have
disagreements with Karen Divelbliss
and was divorcing Karen's brother, Edgar.
We decided to execute a search warrant and seize that jewelry.
[rooster crows]
Lucy!
These are our babies right here, and we have one
that has some deformed legs, and that is this one
right here, Pez.
They've been laying right inside the door there.
I'll go look and see if we have any eggs.
Hi, guys!
Oh, somebody's laying right now.
Karen was a very good businesswoman.
She knew her stuff.
Karen was out front, kind of like the front person,
became the front person,
and Jim kind of stepped back and kept his role as,
I'm going to the auctions.
She could tell if somebody could afford something
or if they needed a little more time.
She was so good to people.
And that's why their business grew.
That's why everybody loved them.
♪♪
EDGAR: Karen has given plenty of gifts to Deanna.
Karen would have given her jewelry.
That's just who Karen was.
She gave things to people just
out of the goodness of her heart.
I couldn't believe that Deanna could hurt anyone.
I mean, she might mentally hurt somebody, hurt their heart
and things of that nature,
but to actually harm somebody or kill somebody,
I truly, in my heart, didn't think Deanna had
that capability.
♪♪
DET. HARGROVE: Once we had the jewelry in our possession,
an employee of Duncan's diamonds and gold
that dealt with Miss Divelbliss on a regular basis
came into the detective bureau and viewed those items.
Through her, we were able to eliminate
that as the jewelry that Deanna Smith had
pawned as being anything that had been removed from
the Divelbliss home.
EDGAR: I don't know what she would have pawned,
but I knew that Deanna was trying
to do anything to get a little income.
You know, maybe our wedding set that, you know,
she was pawning to get money or even a diamond
tennis bracelet.
We had to move on from Deanna Smith
and look at other possible suspects.
♪♪
DET. ROBBERTS: When a murder investigation comes in,
you go until you run out of leads.
Then you go home and get some sleep.
Hopefully, by the time you get back to the office,
you get a lead.
I don't think you want to trust any lead that comes in.
But you follow up on that lead to
make sure that it's going to head that direction.
You want to get in there and find out
if that is the information and if it's right.
♪♪
DET. HARGROVE: As the investigation progressed,
we were, on a daily basis, trying to sort out tips,
and somebody came forward to us
because he felt he had some important information related
to the Divelbliss double homicide.
It was a case breaker.
DET. ROBBERTS: We received a tip from someone by the name of
Tony Littrell,
and we found out that Tony's father did electrical work
at the rental properties
and would have Tony go out and do odd jobs
on rental properties in the Divelbliss residence.
DET. JONES: Tony Littrell had a record.
He did a lot of burglaries and stuff.
He wasn't good at it, but he did a lot of burglaries.
A lot of times when you get stuff like that
and somebody's coming forward, there's usually motive why --
they want to cut themselves a deal.
They want to strike a deal with the prosecutor's office.
They, you know, they don't want to go to prison for it.
They may not have had as big of a role as somebody else
in it, so you have to see
if you can put some facts to his story.
We went back to the detective bureau,
and we brought Tony Littrell in for an interview.
He told me about a party where
they were all using narcotics and drinking.
There was a group of people at this party
that, uh, were discussing the Divelblisses.
[detective speaking]
[Tony speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Tony speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Tony speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Tony speaking]
When I was doing the interview with Tony,
he seemed as if he was upset that the Divelbliss
murder even took place.
[detective speaking]
[Tony speaking]
After we spoke to Tony Littrell,
Tony Littrell voluntarily took a polygraph
at PCI&I
and ultimately passed the polygraph.
So we were 100 percent sure that Tony Littrell has
nothing to do with either Jim or Karen's death.
TONY: I had nothing to do with that crime at all.
Never in my life have I ever stole anything from
the Divelblisses, never.
And never would I, I mean,
They would give you anything you wanted.
I mean, there was no point to
ever stealing from Karen and Jim.
DET. JONES: So, at this point in this case, we wanted
to look into Eric Hockman and Heidi Kidwell.
♪♪
JODI: Eric Hockman did side work for Karen and Jim.
He was somebody that needed money, and Karen
always and Jim always had extra stuff to do,
um, and that didn't have the time to do it theirself.
They were busy people.
Eric Hockman painted the D&D Sales sign
for Karen that year -- later,
Eric went up to Karen, told 'em that he needed money,
and Karen says, "No, you owe me from work before.
You ain't getting no money."
So she ended up giving him another job
for him to finish that.
And the job was taking care of
a wet spot we had in our mud room.
But I couldn't imagine Eric Hockman being a killer.
He seemed so normal, and so did his wife, Heidi Kidwell.
♪♪
PATRICK: I worked at a local moving and rental
storage facility company.
It is a regular day, like any other.
I arrive at work, pull into my parking lot, and see
a couple waiting at the door about a half hour
before opening.
The female looked a lot younger than the male.
She was scared.
She looked like she was well kept
and everything, looked very tired.
Saggy-eyed, maybe hung over.
The male was rough, looked like he'd
been rode hard and put away wet.
He was very, very scraggly.
They were very polite.
They asked if I'll open early.
They are nervous and asked if they could get a truck to
move from our location in Lancaster to a part of
southern Florida, which was strange.
When I tell them the price, they ask if they can pay cash
and then instead of having a purse,
she pulls out a large grocery-looking sack with
miscellaneous bills,
as much cash as I've ever seen
when I'm working in that type of business.
It was over $3,000.
Gave him the keys, and off the -- off the parking lot
they went.
After collecting money, counting it,
and looking it over,
I noticed there were stains on it.
You could definitely tell they were stains of blood.
I immediately called the police station.
DET. ROBBERTS: The moving company gave us the names
of the two individuals that rented the truck,
Eric Hockman and Heidi Kidwell.
The moving company also gave us
a location where the truck was heading to.
So me and Scott Jones, we started setting
everything up for us to go
to Key Largo, Florida -- with them taking off,
it definitely appears like they're running from something.
When we were meeting with the manager of the moving
company up here, he'd given us
the information Eric Hockman and his girlfriend,
Heidi Kidwell, rented the truck -- would say it was
probably 2 to 3 days after the crime scene was discovered,
and probably three days after they rented the truck was when
they turned it in down in Key Largo, and we were --
we were kind of hot on their trail going down there.
After we received the search warrant from the judge,
Jones and two or three of them
went to the back to watch the back door.
We approached from the front, announced,
you know, sheriff's office.
He opened the door up.
In we went.
Jones headed back to the bedroom.
That's where we started searching.
There was a safe that was located, coins,
money was in that, 40,000 in the floorboard,
and there was jewelry.
DET. JONES: The jewelry that we recovered down
in Florida at Eric and Heidi's place,
we were pretty sure that that was stuff that belonged
to Jim and Karen, and we knew that she had
an individual jeweler back home that she bought
all her jewelry from, and we were hoping that
they would be able to identify some of that jewelry.
IRENE: I met them at the detective bureau.
I brought a diamond tester, a loupe, to verify that
what I was looking at was Karen's jewelry.
When I louped Karen's diamond,
I knew immediately that it was hers because of the markings,
but when I saw Karen's blood on the diamond,
my lungs just went empty.
I just didn't have any air when I saw that.
DET. ROBBERTS: Eric Hockman and Heidi Kidwell were arrested.
Heidi was ready to tell us the truth.
She stated that they knew that the Divelblisses had
quite a bit of money in the residence,
and Jim carried a lot of money on his person.
They knew the jewelry was there,
and that's why they went to the residence.
They went to do a burglary, and they had to do
it when they were there, because they had
an alarm system.
Heidi says that her and Eric got out,
walked up to 'em, and Eric explained to them
that he wanted to talk to 'em.
[Eric speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Eric speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Eric speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Eric speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Eric speaking]
Heidi said Jim had to open the safe.
So Eric took Jim down to the safe in the basement,
got the safe open, and that's when they were bagging up money
or whatever, and Heidi
says that she heard a fight or a scuffle,
and then Eric came back without Jim.
[Eric speaking]
[detective speaking]
[Eric speaking]
The only motive that I could come up with was
greed, jealousy.
They wanted what Karen and Jim had and, you know, they decided
one night that they were gonna go take it.
♪♪
PATRICK: I feel personally for the people,
the family and stuff that it happened to.
I don't think you walk into evil people every day.
It was a chance happening.
I'm glad that they got caught and they got punished.
I'm glad I was able to help the way I could.
JODI: When I found out Heidi Kidwell was getting out
14 years, not 15, she didn't do her 15.
I was so angry. It wasn't fair.
She got to go home to her kids.
She got to go home to her mom.
It wasn't right.
Eric Hockman
is not here no more, because he hung himself in jail.
I thought
that Eric got off easy.
But, in the end, God took care of it.
Karen got her first granddaughter,
and she wanted to do everything with 'em.
I wish they would have gotten to know Karen and Jim
like I got to know 'em.
I think about 'em often -- I'll miss 'em so much.
EDGAR: Karen was always there to take care of me and my family.
She was definitely my big sister -- she looked out for us,
and, uh, she was my protection.
For sure.
I'm sorry. I miss her.
Hi, guys!
My sister always wore tons of rings.
This ring I asked for.
Um, she wore this a lot.
I wear it occasionally to make -- you know,
sometimes, I just need to feel close.
But this ring is really, really special to me,
really special.
It was made for her.
It was made for her finger, and now it's -- now it's for mine.