Cestnik: This wasn't a random event.
This was a targeted assassination,
narrator: A family man gunned down in his own home.
There was a large amount of blood.
[ Gunshots blasting ]
Numerous bullet wounds to his torso and head.
He was probably dead before he hit the floor.
Narrator: A laundry list of suspects with motive for murder.
I was concerned about her description of the shooter
being very cliche-ish, almost like a TV movie.
He's a con man. He goes by different names.
So red flags are popping up all over the place.
Arntfield: Risky business deals with shady operators.
He inevitably got himself, in plain English, in over his head.
Narrator: The truth will be revealed.
What this came down to was greed.
Every one of them was convinced
that these two were somehow involved.
Burbridge: I've been a homicide detective for a long time,
and often times, you just try to find the lie.
Narrator: Every day in North America,
dozens of people are murdered.
The key to solving the toughest of these homicides
lies in the final 24 hours of the victim's life.
To crack the case,
detectives must reconstruct that critical timeline,
the minutes and hours containing evidence
that can help unlock the mystery
and catch the killer.
♪♪
Spokane, Washington,
an idyllic town nestled in
the lush green mountains of the pacific northwest.
Burbridge: Spokane is a city of approximately 300,000 people.
It's surrounded by mountains and farm country, uh,
beautiful, with a river running
right through the middle of town.
It is a great place to raise a family and make a life.
Cestnik: We don't have a lot of crime.
We aren't like the big cities where we're
going out on homicides every night.
Narrator: But on a quiet December night,
the piece of this town is shattered by gunshots.
At 7:03 P.M.,
Elberta Carlile called 911, reporting that
someone had just shot her husband, Doug.
Elberta, when she called in,
it was right after she made it to a closet,
locked herself in, and was hiding,
um, and she called immediately, she had her phone with her,
so we knew that this had happened
within a minute or two of the call.
Burbridge: Officers arrived on scene.
Medics came in and immediately began working on him.
They pronounced him dead at 7:18 in the evening.
Narrator: The victim is Doug Carlile,
a 63-year-old businessman,
devoted husband, and father of six.
Douglas, he was -- He was a family man.
He had been married to his wife, Elberta, for 42 years.
This was the love of her life.
She knew everything that he did.
They were always together.
I got the impression that this had broken her.
They had grown children, very religious family,
from all outward appearances,
a completely normal person.
He wasn't criminal, he wasn't causing trouble.
Burbridge: He'd had his own
excavation business in Washington,
had expanded that business to
include the oil trucking business
and was attempting to get into the oil drilling business.
Narrator: Within minutes of the 911 call,
homicide detectives are on the scene.
Burbridge: It was a very affluent neighborhood,
and this was one of the larger houses in the neighborhood.
I was surprised when I was told the address of where
the homicide had occurred,
because typically, we might go 20 or 30 years about having
a homicide in those type of neighborhoods in Spokane.
Narrator: Tasked with investigating the murder
of Doug Carlile are veteran homicide detectives
Mark Burbridge and Brian Cestnik.
When I first entered the home,
there was Christmas stuff all over.
There was actually Christmas music
playing over the stereo
the entire time I was processing the crime scene,
so it was decorated, and they were
obviously ready for the holidays.
The deceased Mr. Carlile was lying on his back,
his arms out to the side.
One round had gone in his mouth.
Doug had numerous bullet wounds to his torso and head.
Cestnik: There was a large amount of blood.
It was obvious that
the wounds had been fatal almost immediately.
He was probably dead before he hit the floor.
Narrator: Detectives begin processing the crime scene,
looking for clues.
Cestnik: Initially, there wasn't a lot of evidence.
I found seven shell casings.
Douglas Carlile was shot seven times.
He was hit seven times.
Five of the bullets exited him,
so I found five bullets in the house.
Two more were recovered at the autopsy.
Burbridge: A 45-caliber handgun had been fired
at Mr. Carlile. The subject had emptied the handgun.
He had almost no chance to survive
those wounds for any period of time.
This was a directed attack, and they fired
to make sure he was dead.
Narrator: To track down the killer,
detectives must now focus on the last 24 hours
of Doug Carlile's life,
beginning with the moment he arrived home at 6:55 P.M.
Elberta told me that she and Doug had gone to church
that evening
and had just arrived home from church.
She removed their hidden key,
which she used to enter the house.
She put the key back in position,
walked through the kitchen to a short hallway,
which leads to the upstairs.
She was just getting to the second floor
when she heard voices downstairs.
She heard two males talking in the kitchen,
and she knew one of them was Doug,
and she just assumed that one of them was one of
her four sons.
And so she came back downstairs to see who was at the house.
She came to the bottom of the stairs and stepped to
the entryway to the kitchen,
and she could see Doug to her left,
standing there with his hands in front of him,
telling somebody, "you don't have to do this."
She looked to her right,
and near the kitchen table was
what she described as a large male dressed all in black,
with a black stocking mask on with a hole in it.
She could see the subject's eyes and nose and part
of their mouth and that they were holding a large handgun.
Elberta said that they also had something on their chest
and back, like a backpack or a shoulder holster.
And then she turned around and started running.
As she was running up the stairs, she heard a lot
of gunshots -- She didn't know the number.
[ Gunshots blasting ]
And that she ran upstairs and hid in
one of the closets on the second floor.
Elberta had her cellphone with her
and called 911 from a closet she was hiding in
and directed police to their location.
Narrator: Detectives must first entertain the theory
that Doug's murder could have been a burglary gone wrong.
I examined all the doors,
all the windows, took photographs.
There was a spare key to the house that Elberta
talked about -- I found that.
It was still in the same location it had been,
so there's nothing to indicate that anyone had broken into
the house at all.
I could find no sign that anything had been
stolen or disturbed in the residence.
Douglas Carlile still had his wallet, he had cash on him,
so it wasn't a robbery.
I contacted a k-9 officer,
and he showed me the path that his dog had tracked.
Basically, it showed that the suspect had fled
the back door of the residence,
through some shrubs, over a small fence,
and through the neighbor's backyard.
It was cool out but not frozen.
There was some water in the neighbor's backyard,
and you could see footprints in the mud.
Just beyond the neighbor's backyard was a field,
where we located a glove.
It was a tan-colored welding glove.
Normally, that wouldn't be a big deal, but there was
some dew on the ground, and leaves had fallen,
and this appeared to be sitting on top of everything
and was dry.
So right away we thought this may have been
dropped by our suspect as he fled the scene.
It was strange enough that there was
no way we're gonna leave it.
Burbridge: At a minimum,
I was hoping to get a DNA sample from the glove that went
to the shooter or someone that
was at the scene who has been arrested before,
so that I can identify them by name.
[ Dog barking ]
Our k-9 was able to track the suspect past a school.
We were later able to get the video from the external
cameras on that school,
and we could see a grainy,
uh, figure running down the street just a minute or so
after the shooting, and leading off
into the darkness toward the hidden trail.
This camera was not a low-light camera,
and so the footage just shows a grainy image of
this individual running by.
You can't identify him or tell race in any way.
After looking at the getaway route, taking into account
the hedges, the hidden gate,
and the kind of hidden trail that
the shooter took to get away from the scene,
I told detective Cestnik that I believed this was
a directed attack specifically targeting Doug Carlile,
and I was very concerned.
Cestnik: This wasn't a random event.
This was a targeted assassination.
Narrator: Detectives now consider whether this
could have been an inside job.
Family members or people you know
kill you more often than a random, unknown person.
And so I had to eliminate the family first.
Cestnik: When you have a murder, the first person you're gonna
look at is the spouse,
and in this case, we had a spouse who was not only at
the murder scene but claimed to have seen the suspect.
But the suspect didn't go after her.
So that drew a lot of red flags for me.
I was thinking, is this someone who's trying to pull
something over my eyes, or is she really the loving wife?
Burbridge: Elberta provided a fairly detailed description
of the shooter's clothing
and the mask and some kind of gear that they had on
their chest and back.
I was concerned about her description of the shooter
being very cliche-ish, almost like a TV movie,
and it concerned me that it was being made up.
Arntfield: A story that is too detailed
is inherently suspicious.
Even if she didn't pull the trigger herself,
could she have either hired or convinced someone to do
her dirty work for her?
♪♪
Narrator: In the brutal murder of 63-year-old business
and family man, Doug Carlile,
suspicion is swirling around his wife, Elberta.
Burbridge: My first interview with Elberta Carlile occurred
at approximately 8:30
in the evening to nine o'clock in the evening.
The shooting had occurred around 6:30.
Elberta Carlile --
She is different.
Um...
I don't mean that in a bad way.
I mean, that when you're talking with her,
there's a lot of religion that comes out.
She would occasionally break down crying,
and she'd want to pray and things like that.
She's very emotional, um,
and that comes across like she's faking it.
So Elberta's reaction in her interview to revert to prayer
and sort of these soliloquies
and speaking to herself and to god
is obviously suspicious and piques the curiosity
of investigators.
This could mean one of two things --
This is a stress response where she's seeking
some kind of solace through prayer,
or it's a convenient
tactic of avoidance and deflection.
Burbridge: As a homicide detective,
I've interviewed a lot of people
who have had loved ones die from a murder.
I've seen the whole gamut of emotion from that from
very stoic, almost non-emotion
to hysterical crying.
I try not to read a lot into that,
but some of the things that Elberta said and some of
her actions concerned me greatly.
She didn't care about us
processing the scene or getting evidence.
Saying goodbye to Doug was more important
to her than us catching the killer.
Narrator: Detectives question potential motives that Elberta
would have to want her husband dead.
She began talking about their finances and that
a lot of what I had seen was just for show.
Um, they didn't have $40 in the bank.
They didn't have any life insurance.
They didn't have medical insurance.
I had had a chance to go through his phone.
There wasn't another woman on the side.
She didn't have anyone on the side.
Basically, every text message and call was,
"I love you," back and forth between them.
And so once I ruled out that there
was a financial incentive for her to be involved,
um, I really believed her when she talked about how
in love they were and how things were going between them.
Narrator: Still grasping for a lead,
detectives press Elberta to recall any details about
the day of the murder that stand out as unusual.
Elberta started telling me that she thought she had
seen a van earlier in the night up in the neighborhood.
Cestnik: One of the neighbors had called 911 a short time
before the shooting,
talking about a suspicious white van.
About 5:45 in the afternoon,
she had come home and noticed a white van parked in front of
her house.
It was in front of her driveway, and she immediately
became concerned,
thinking maybe someone had broken into her house.
So instead of pulling into her home,
she had driven around the block and noticed someone
sitting in the driver's seat of the van.
When this person noticed her watching, they drove off.
A short time later, she looked out her window,
and the van was back again,
parked in front of her house, so she called 911 to report
a suspicious vehicle.
Narrator: Was the mysterious white van
connected to Doug's murder?
Looking for answers,
police canvass the Carliles' neighborhood.
Burbridge: One of the homes had an external video system,
and we actually had videotape footage of this
suspicious van, about two hours prior to the murder,
driving through the neighborhood slowly.
The van was unique in several ways
in that it was an aftermarket extended van,
and one of my detectives spent almost two weeks trying to
identify specifically the make and model of that van, and in
the state of Washington, we can run an all-vehicles request,
and so we requested all the vehicles in Spokane county
and surrounding counties that
matched that van, and we came up with a list of 75.
Narrator: Though detectives believe they may have images of
what could have been the getaway vehicle,
they're no closer to knowing the identity of the killer.
While I was talking with Elberta,
obviously the big question in my mind
is who would want your husband dead?
And I asked her point blank, who are possible suspects?
"You've seen the person who shot him."
Who else could be involved in this?
And the only name that
she ever mentioned was James Henrikson.
Elberta told me that Doug was very afraid of James, who was
one of his business partners,
and that he had told her that if something happens to me,
James did it.
Narrator: An investor and project developer
in the burgeoning oil sector,
Doug Carlile had partnered with James Henrikson in
a venture to extract oil in north Dakota.
James was a businessman in north Dakota.
He owned a trucking company hauling water and oil out on
the oil leases of north Dakota.
Cestnik: There is a lot of similarities
between James and Doug.
They both liked people to believe that they were rich.
They both drove nice vehicles, had nice houses,
liked to show it off,
liked to pretend that they had a lot of money,
and the fact is, neither of them did.
Both were living well beyond their means.
Narrator: Detectives reach out to the Carlile children,
hoping they can shed more light on the relationship
between Doug and James.
Every one of them was convinced that James was
somehow involved in this murder,
and that it had to do with the fact that their dad
and James Henrikson were not
getting along, and their business was going south.
Narrator: Doug's eldest son reveals that
the animosity between Doug and James
had reached a fever pitch in the days prior to his murder.
Doug and James Henrikson got into a verbal argument
about the finances of the company.
James Henrikson was demanding his investment back.
It was a significant sum of money, over $400,000
they were arguing about,
and Doug Carlile was refusing to pay him back that money.
He was concerned enough for their father's well being that
they gave him a handgun
that belonged to them so he could carry it for his safety.
It is not uncommon for people that are potentially going to
lose large sums of money based on either fraud,
theft, or just bad business, to resort to murder,
either to recover their money or just to get even or pay
the person back for costing them their money.
In my experience, I've seen people kill people over $50,
so hundreds of thousands of dollars
is certainly something
that someone might kill somebody over.
[ Gunshots blasting ]
As the cliche goes, follow the money.
♪♪
Narrator: Detectives are zeroing in on
a new suspect in the murder of family man Doug Carlile --
His business partner, James Henrikson.
Cestnik: So early on, every family member is
saying James Henrikson is involved in this.
I just started Googling James Henrikson,
and one of the first things that popped up was
this rip-off report.
He's a con man, he goes by different names,
so red flags are popping up all over the place.
And so, yeah, with his criminal history and everything
that we knew about James at that point,
that's when we decided we've gotta try and talk to him.
I needed to find out his relationship with Doug Carlile
and to see if anything that the Carlile
family members had told me was potentially true.
On the night of Doug's murder,
I -- after I had completed interviewing Elberta
and her sons,
they had provided to me contact information
for James Henrikson to include
his address and cellphone number.
I contacted police radio and arranged for them to ping
James Henrikson's cellphone so I could
locate where that cellphone was prior to me
trying to contact him.
After about 20 minutes, I received a phone call from
police radio who told me
that that phone was being identified as being back in
Watford, north Dakota.
I contacted James Henrikson at home and spoke to him on
the phone.
I identified who I was and told him I was calling
because Doug Carlile had been murdered.
James Henrikson told me he was aware that Doug
had been murdered, because he had received texts from several
people that he and Doug had in common as friends
who were telling him that Doug had been murdered.
He denied having anything to do with the murder.
Burbridge: James Henrikson was guarded in his disclosures
of information to me about Doug Carlile.
I was asking him about how his business was doing,
and he became angry and denied that there were any problems
between he and Doug Carlile and said it was Doug Carlile
who lied to people and didn't pay his bills.
I've been a homicide detective for a long time,
and often times, you just try to find
the lie that helps lead you down the correct path.
And in this case, I either had the Carlile family
that was lying, or I had James Henrikson that was lying,
and now I had to find evidence
to bolster which side was telling the truth.
While I was speaking with James on the phone,
I wasn't comfortable that he was actually in north Dakota.
In this day and age, with cellphones,
you can forward another cellphone
to another cellphone or to a hard line
at some residence, so he could have been in Spokane,
talking to me on a phone that
was actually pinging off of a cell tower in north Dakota,
and I wouldn't know that.
Cellphones are a really interesting investigative tool.
The use of tower pings can essentially leave a trail
of breadcrumbs confirming where a person
has been or has gone -- At the same time,
a very calculating suspect could put a phone in a car,
leave a phone on a subway, or send their phone with somebody
else in order to lead investigators
into a completely different area.
In essence, a phone could be used to fabricate an alibi.
Burbridge: I later completed search warrants to get
complete phone information from his phone,
because if you get the actual background information, it will
show whether that phone was being forwarded or not
or the actual physical location of that phone,
and I was able to determine that it was not forwarded and was
actually in north Dakota,
1,000 miles away from Doug's murder.
That told me that he was not the murderer.
At that point, we didn't have any concrete evidence.
We didn't have anything linking him to the scene.
Narrator: Unable to put James at the crime scene,
detectives ask him who might be angry enough
to want Doug dead.
He told me that over the years, Doug and
his contracting business had
been sued a lot of times and had done a lot of shady deals,
and there might be a lot of people that were mad at him
that might be willing to hurt him.
Cestnik: Mr. Carlile had 31 liens against him,
so there were a lot of people that were upset with him
and that would have a reason, um,
to murder him.
Narrator: Detectives dig deeper into Doug's business dealings
and discover a desperate man hell bent on success.
Burbridge: Doug borrowed $150,000 from his son, Shane.
Doug was promising investors 100% return on their money in
90 days or -- or six months,
depending on who the investor was, which was ridiculous.
Cestnik: Every dime that he had had been invested in
the business, and they were not bringing any money in.
The business was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
There were IOUs outstanding.
They'd taken loans from people
up to $400,000 and promised repayment.
Those had come past due,
so people were upset and wanting their money back.
He was in dire financial straits.
He had contacted a middleman in the middle east
who was reportedly involved in finding investors
for oil companies.
This individual charged Mr. Carlile $90,000 for
the right to apply for an investment loan.
This was pure fraud, and this individual was --
Had no intent of conducting any true business
with Mr. Carlile, so Mr. Carlile
lost everybody's money again
and didn't further this business.
Arntfield: Risky business deals with shady operators --
Doug got himself, in plain English, in over his head.
Burbridge: I was going to have to expand the pool of
possible suspects to everybody that was involved in lawsuits
against him.
Arntfield: That leaves a very long list
of potential suspects with very viable motives.
Money is more than just dollars and cents.
Money has a high degree of emotional attachment for people.
It's tied to everything from self esteem to status
to identity, and when you begin tampering with that,
people will, not surprisingly, respond emotionally,
including through murder.
♪♪
Narrator: In the face of so many suspects
with the motive to want Doug Carlile dead,
detectives reach out to the media looking for new leads.
Burbridge: I had put out a request in the media
for persons that knew Doug Carlile
or James Henrikson to contact us if they'd had
business dealings with them.
Out of the blue, about a week after Doug's murder,
an individual by the name of Robert Delao
contacted me at the police station
and said that he'd had business dealings with
both James Henrikson and Doug Carlile
and was willing to speak with me.
Cestnik: Robert Delao is a very smooth-talking guy,
but he's a gang member.
He'd been involved in a murder.
He is involved in large quantities of drugs,
and he'd been to prisons numerous times.
He denied having anything to do with the murder.
He denied that James had anything to do with the murder,
but he felt that he needed to come in and let us know
his relationship.
Narrator: Suspicious of Delao's motive for coming forward,
investigators question him about his whereabouts
when Doug Carlile was killed.
Cestnik: He told us he was in north Dakota at the time of
the murder -- we checked phone records, we checked GPS records,
and we confirmed he was in north Dakota,
which is what his girlfriend told us.
Mr. Delao was insistent
he knew nothing about the murders,
and, in fact, he took a polygraph the next day.
And Mr. Delao passed that polygraph.
Narrator: Despite Delao's alibi and polygraph,
something just doesn't sit right with detectives.
I thought it was very odd that Mr. Delao came forward
just to provide information that he knew Doug Carlile
or James Henrikson.
Psychologically speaking, I think there may be a number of
reasons why somebody would want to
insert themselves into an investigation. One reason
might be, I want to get close to the investigation.
I want to control it.
I want to know what's going on.
We often see them show up, for instance,
in volunteer search parties where a body hasn't been found,
and they want to keep abreast
of what's going on so that they can stay a step or two ahead.
Stockdale: Also times, you know, people, when they have
a criminal history are sometimes impulsive.
They don't necessarily have the best judgment,
and sometimes they make decisions that are
ill-advisable.
Sometimes they do this 'cause they're arrogant.
Burbridge: After Mr. Delao left my interview room,
I began working on a search warrant to include
his cellphone, who they had been calling and texting,
try to create some kind of a connection
between Mr. Delao, Mr. Henrikson,
and anybody that might be involved in this murder.
Narrator: Investigators then make a shocking discovery,
that James Henrikson shared a similar
criminal past with Robert Delao.
Cestnik: Robert Delao was James Henrikson's right-hand man.
Um, they had worked out in the same gym together, and then
a couple months later ended up in jail together,
ended up being cell mates.
Um, while sitting in jail,
Henrikson told Robert Delao about his business ventures
and his dreams of striking it rich
in north Dakota and told him, "when you get out of jail,
get a hold of me, I got a job for you."
Narrator: But what was that job?
Looking for answers, investigators do a deep dive
into James Henrikson's partnership with Doug Carlile.
They discover the business was in desperate need
of a bailout from an angel investor.
Doug had developed this dream of being an oilman
and owning an oil lease
and oil Wells without really understanding the full
financial impact of what that meant.
And he was trying to find partners
to buy this oil lease for $2.1 million.
Doug did not have that kind of money.
Narrator: Luckily, Doug and James
knew a contractor named Larry Tormozov
with connections to big money.
Burbridge: Mr. Tormozov was personal friends with
a gentleman in Moses lake
who was involved in the contracting business
and who was very wealthy.
Mr. Tormozov was then contacted by James Henrikson,
where they discussed the possibility of this wealthy
individual becoming involved in the oil lease.
James Henrikson stood to make a lot of money if they could
move the oil lease and the drilling of
the well forward, and they were desperately running out of time
to make that happen, or they were gonna lose everything.
And so he needed this wealthy individual to help fund
this project.
Narrator: There was just one problem.
Mr. Tormozov said that he told James Henrikson,
under no uncertain terms would this person get involved as
long as Doug Carlile was involved
because of his previous dealings with him.
Mr. Tormozov told me that this made
James Henrikson very angry.
Narrator: Turns out the only thing standing between
James Henrikson and millions of dollars is Doug Carlile.
Money is always a motivation for murder.
I mean, when the stakes get higher,
sometimes the danger factor increases.
Money, they say, is the root of all evil.
That may be a bit of an overstatement,
but is it a common denominator in a majority of murders?
Unfortunately, yes.
When you have a trail of bad debts and damaged
business relationships,
greed is going to push to the top
in Doug's case.
Narrator: What investigators learn next
cracks the case wide open.
Doug found an investor who lived in Texas who had
a lot of money who was willing to invest in this land.
He'd done the research.
He knew that there was a lot of money in it.
Doug had convinced this person that really they didn't
need James, but he needed to be bought out,
because they were partners, and he had agreed to do that.
They were set to meet the following day in order to
work out the finances to buy James out
and to actually begin working on drilling oil Wells.
Narrator: Turns out Doug was murdered just days
before he was set to cut James out of the business.
If James had caught wind of the plan,
he'd have even more motive to want Doug dead.
We're trying to piece everything together.
Delao had been in north Dakota since
at least Thanksgiving.
He hadn't been back to Spokane.
We knew Henrikson had been in north Dakota, consistently,
even longer than that.
Neither of them had been to town recently,
which, again, creates issues when these are
your two suspects,
and you know that they haven't been anywhere near the murder.
Narrator: Police finally get a breakthrough when DNA is
pulled from the glove found at the crime scene.
25 days after the murder,
I received a phone call from the state patrol crime lab
and was told that they had a hit
to an individual by the name of Tim Suckow.
When we first hear the name Timothy Suckow,
I got very excited, but it was --
It was hampered a little bit by we'd never heard that name
before, and it came off a glove that I found in a field.
What if it's just a coincidence?
What if Timothy Suckow is the next door neighbor?
We didn't know who it was at that point.
I immediately began researching Timothy Suckow
and found that he was a multi-time
convicted felon of violent crimes --
First-degree robberies, gun crimes,
and that he lived in the Spokane area.
I started looking for Timothy Suckow's
connection to anybody associated with Doug Carlile,
because he didn't know Doug
and didn't have a motive for killing him.
Narrator: Knowing there's a small crime world in Spokane,
detectives start piecing together a potential conspiracy
to commit murder.
Could Timothy Suckow have been hired to kill
Doug Carlile?
Burbridge: Robert Delao was also a true bad guy in Spokane.
He comes across as very
gregarious and friendly, but he's dangerous,
and...
I wondered his contacts in Spokane,
did they have something to do with Doug's murder?
And what was his real involvement with
James Henrikson?
I believed we had a true hitman case.
♪♪
Narrator: Investigators now theorize
James Henrikson masterminded
the murder of Doug Carlile by hiring
Robert Delao to contract out the job to local criminal,
Timothy Suckow.
Murder-for-hire schemes are, fortunately, fairly rare.
Most people act impulsively and do their own dirty work.
Whoever's concocted this murderous scheme simply doesn't
want to get their hands dirty
or wants to leave themselves an alibi.
So you're essentially looking for an absolute stranger
who committed the murder for some kind of payoff.
The key to finding them, in that case, is to find
the person who did have the motive and, ideally,
linking them to the killer.
Cestnik: So the first thing we do is try
and connect Timothy Suckow to James Henrikson
and Robert Delao, but he doesn't connect to any of them.
Narrator: Detectives place Timothy Suckow
on 24-hour undercover surveillance.
Cestnik: We begin following Timothy Suckow around,
trying to find out everything we can about him.
We find out that he works for
an asbestos removal company in the Spokane valley.
As we start looking at the company, we see some vans
parked out front -- one of them,
which looks exactly like the van that had been described
to us at the crime scene.
I checked our list of 75 vehicles that we received from
the state of Washington as
potential owners of those suspect vehicles,
and that asbestos removal company was listed as an owner
of one of those matching vans.
I had undercover detectives go out and view that van,
and that van had some very unique identifying marks on it,
which exactly matched the van at the crime scene.
I was very certain that this was
the vehicle used in the murder of Doug Carlile.
Narrator: While the evidence connecting Timothy Suckow
to the crime scene is strong,
it's not enough to charge him with Doug Carlile's murder.
We began diving into cellphone records.
We began looking at towers.
Timothy Suckow had left his cellphone
at home because he didn't want to be tracked.
He knew a little bit about how police worked.
His driver got bored and turned his phone back on
and was playing on the phone while he was waiting,
so we were able to place the van and the driver
at the scene for about two hours beforehand.
Narrator: With the evidence now stacked against him,
Timothy Suckow is arrested for the murder of
Doug Carlile.
Not only do we have
DNA linking this person there,
we find no other reason for him to be in that area.
And now we have our van that was used as the getaway van.
So we start putting everything together, and we bring him in.
On the night I arrested Mr. Suckow, he was in denial,
refused to speak with me,
and, in fact, he fell asleep on the interview room table.
Back in basic homicide school,
you learn that when someone's done a serious crime,
they're constantly looking over their shoulder.
They have trouble sleeping, they're waiting for the police
to show up, knocking at their door.
So when you arrest someone, and you tell him they're under
arrest and you know they did it, all that pressure is off now,
and it's not uncommon for suspects to fall asleep.
And so we knew we had our guy.
I got a search warrant to access Tim's phone,
and in that phone was James Henrikson's name.
It says "James north Dakota,"
and it was James's phone number attached to it.
So at that point, I knew that, at least in some way,
Tim Suckow knew James Henrikson directly.
About an hour after the murder,
Timothy Suckow sent a text message to Robert Delao saying,
"tell the boss to watch the news."
This was obviously letting Henrikson know
that he had carried out the murder.
At this point in the investigation,
I've got an overwhelming amount of evidence that's
pointing toward Mr. Delao and Mr. Henrikson's
involvement in Mr. Carlile's murder.
Narrator: Detectives haul Robert Delao into the station
for questioning.
Burbridge: I told Mr. Delao, "you know the game,
first to the table gets the best deal."
And he was trying to beat Mr. Suckow
to the table to provide information.
Ultimately, Delao admitted to brokering
the murder of Doug Carlile for James Henrikson.
Narrator: With the confession that James Henrikson was
responsible for the hit on Doug Carlile,
detectives are able to piece together his final 24 hours.
Cestnik: Timothy Suckow had been up at the house for
a couple hours, waiting for the Carliles to return home.
They'd been at a church function
that began at about five o'clock.
They drove home, parked their car
probably about 6:55 in the evening.
Burbridge: They entered the residence.
Elberta's started up the stairs...
...when she heard voices in the house,
so she came back downstairs to see who was there.
She actually saw the shooter
and saw him with a gun.
Cestnik: At 7:02, Timothy Suckow
shot Doug Carlile seven times...
[ Gunshots blasting ]
...and ran away.
At 7:03 P.M.,
Elberta Carlile called 911,
reporting that someone had just shot her husband.
Medics pronounced Doug dead at 7:18 in the evening.
Narrator: Timothy Suckow then disposed of the murder weapon.
Timothy Suckow had driven out to the Spokane valley,
out to a bridge, and tossed the murder weapon into the river.
My biggest takeaway in this case is that Doug is not unlike
a lot of investors who has this sort of modest demeanor
or veneer,
and he likes to take risks in financial games.
But when they begin losing money,
the stakes are even higher than I think
Doug and a lot of these people initially guessed.
Narrator: Robert Delao pleads guilty
to conspiracy and solicitation to
commit murder and is sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Mr. Delao's a sociopath who has
no guilt feelings about anything he's done.
Narrator: Timothy Suckow pleads guilty to murder
and receives a sentence of 30 years.
Burbridge: He's gonna be, like, 80 years old
if he ever sees daylight again.
So basically, it's a death sentence he got,
so I think his sentence was fair,
provided the information he gave and the help
he gave to the case to get
the actual person that I believe is responsible.
[ Gavel pounds ]
Narrator: James Henrikson is found guilty of murder
for hire and sentenced to life in prison.
This was a case where we took down some real bad people.
These -- these weren't people that just
lost their temper and killed someone.
These were preplanned murders.
What this came down to was greed -- James saw
a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,
and he was willing to kill anyone
who got between him and that money.
And Doug Carlile was going to buy him out,
and he wasn't gonna get that money,
so he had him killed.
It was all about money. It was all about greed.
Burbridge: This case was the most complicated case
that I've ever worked on.
It meant a lot to the Carlile family that
I was able to bring this case to resolution.
I received phone calls from every son, from Elberta,
thanking me.
They're just good people who are
appreciative that their dad got justice.
Cestnik: Doug Carlile was a truly innocent victim
in this case, and the people involved are sitting in prison
where they deserve to be.