[eerie music]
This was something savage. It scared the community.
NARRATOR: The heartless murder of a woman restarting her life.
HUMPHREY: She had at least 10 fractured ribs,
fractured larynx, bruises all over her body.
JOHNSTON: By posing her and making her look
like some type of a sexual deviant,
she is basically being humiliated after
the end of her life.
NARRATOR: Forbidden passion leads to the ultimate betrayal.
JOHNSTON: He is being so secretive, he's being
so careful to cover his tracks.
RICKETTS: Maybe they did have a sexual relationship.
Maybe something went wrong.
Or was it some unknown subject that we had
in our community that I enjoy doing this?
Everybody is a suspect.
NARRATOR: The truth will be revealed.
DRESBACK: She was doing some online dating,
and whoever killed her is in her computer,
and that will tell you all you need to know.
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.
♪♪
Deer Park, Washington,
20 miles north of Spokane.
It's a nature lover's paradise.
It is full of fun things to do, both winter and summer.
People come here to take their vacations,
it's such a nice town,
and so we feel lucky to live here.
It's not overly crowded. People know people still.
Everyone knows their neighbor.
Deer Park is a quiet place,
and it's not knowing for violent crimes, maybe property crimes,
some family disputes that we deal with.
NARRATOR: But on a chilly December evening,
the quiet safety of the town would be violently disturbed
when police get a call from a distraught man looking
for his ex-wife, Chanin Starbuck,
He asked for
a deputy to respond to her house to do a welfare check.
He explained to the deputy that it
was totally uncommon for her to take off
and be gone for periods of time.
Responding deputies walked around the house,
looked through the windows,
looked for signs of forced entry.
Is there some kind of foul play here?
At the time, they did not have enough probable cause
or reasonable suspicion to enter this residence
without a warrant.
NARRATOR: The next day, police get another call,
this time from her panicked mother,
According to her mother,
they spoke at 9 a.m.
in the morning on a daily basis,
and it had been two mornings that they had not spoken,
and that prompted officers to respond again.
They were able to obtain a key, and they made entry
at that time and discovered the body.
[siren chirps and wails]
NARRATOR: Detectives Mike Ricketts and Lyle Johnston of
the Spokane County Sheriff's Office rush to the scene.
JOHNSTON: There was no signs of a break-in.
I didn't see anything obvious within the living room.
When I entered the master bedroom,
here is this white female that's in her mid-thirties
or so, laying on the bed.
She was laying on her back, face-up.
She had bruising near her neck area
and some bruising around her facial area.
The bruising itself would indicate to me
that she was beat.
There were no knife wounds.
There were no gun wounds.
Considered a possibility
that it was suffocation or strangulation.
There was a robe that was kind of awkwardly placed on her.
There was a massage vibrator type of device
that people would use to massage their muscles.
It was wrapped inside of that robe awkwardly,
not like she had done that.
She was posed that way.
Detectives confirm the woman is 42-year-old
Chanin Starbuck.
HUMPHREY: Chanin was a lovely, vivacious woman.
She was married to a man named Clay,
and they had recently become divorced.
DRESBACK: Now they had five children.
Two older boys lived with Clay, and the three younger,
the two girls, and the youngest son, lived with Chanin.
RICKETTS: She was vibrant. She was beautiful.
She was kind.
She was also going back to school
at that time -- she was restarting her life.
HUMPHREY: Who would break into the home of a lovely woman,
the mother of five children, and do such a horrible thing
to her?
This was something savage.
It scared the community.
NARRATOR: To catch her killer,
detectives will need to piece together
the last 24 hours of Chanin Starbuck's life.
They start by processing the crime scene.
I didn't find any sign of a struggle
inside the bedroom.
We collected DNA swabs from her neck and under
her fingernails.
All of the blankets from the bed were inside
the wash machine, which was just right outside
the master bedroom door.
And the front of the wash machine
had been completely wiped down.
It appears to be some type of cleanup of the crime scene
to hide any potential evidence
that may have been left on the bed by the suspect.
At the foot of the bed is what appears be a safe, and inside
there are several sexual toys that are staged in a way
so that they could be obviously seen from anyone
who's walking past.
NARRATOR: Detectives start working up a profile
on Chanin's killer.
JOHNSTON: By posing her and making her look
like some type of a sexual deviant,
she is basically being humiliated after the end of
her life.
This would appear to be someone that has some type of
a vendetta against Chanin, to take
this much time and effort to make her look this bad.
RICKETTS: Is it somebody that was close to her that knows her,
that was angry with her, wanting to get back at her?
Or was it some unknown subject
that we had in our community that
enjoyed doing this?
NARRATOR: The first person detectives want to speak with
is Chanin's ex-husband, Clay Starbuck.
Oftentimes in these type of investigations,
we're gonna look at domestic partner or the ex.
I met Clay and I said, "Hi, I'm Detective Dresback,
"I understand you have some questions," He said,
"Yeah, I want to know what's going on.
Nobody will tell me anything."
I said, "You don't know what happened?"
He said, "No, nobody will tell me anything."
So I said, "Well, I'm sorry,
but your wife was found dead in her bedroom."
And he just collapsed on the floor,
and it's prudent and appropriate
as an investigator to give them room
to react in whatever fashion they're gonna react.
At one point, he even excused himself,
went into the bathroom, and I could hear him heaving
like he was throwing up, like this was very traumatic to him.
NARRATOR: After Clay gets over the shock of Chanin's death,
detectives ask him when he last saw his ex-wife.
JOHNSTON: Clay Starbuck had told us that he had
a small car that didn't run very well.
So on the day in question, he starts the car up.
He drives it around this community area
where he lives in Deer Park,
and it stalls approximately 2 to 3 blocks
from Chanin Starbuck's house.
He goes back to his house, and then
he goes to sleep, because his back is hurting.
And at that time, his phone must
have died, because the battery wasn't charged.
NARRATOR: Clay says he went back to work
on his car from 11:10 a.m. until 3:30 p.m.,
returning to his home a number of times
during the day to get more tools.
2:45 p.m.,
the children were out of school
and texted Chanin, asking where she was,
who's gonna pick me up.
JOHNSTON: Chanin was supposed to go to
the school and pick up the children,
and she doesn't arrive.
NARRATOR: In the late afternoon, while his phone was dead,
Clay says he missed a number of texts.
RICKETTS: 3:17 PM, Chanin texted Clay,
asking if he could pick up the kids,
and that was the last text from her phone that afternoon.
NARRATOR: Clay wasn't worried at that point, because he
thought he would see Chanin later that night.
There was a basketball game one of the oldest sons was
playing in at the high school that evening,
and Chanin usually would show up at those games.
However, she wasn't there that night.
After the basketball game, Clay and the kids
went to Chanin's house.
NARRATOR: Detectives are now able to narrow down
the window of time that Chanin was murdered.
Chanin's death probably occurred somewhere
on December 1st after 3:17 PM,
and sometime before December 2nd around 9 AM.
JOHNSTON: She had a routine of talking to her mother
at a specific time in the morning,
and that phone call doesn't come, so we begin to operate
under the assumption that she was deceased
by that particular time.
NARRATOR: Investigators check Clay's cellphone records.
It corroborates what he told investigators.
RICKETTS: He was cooperative during the interview,
and he provided a DNA sample voluntarily.
NARRATOR: With his alibi having checked out, they ask Clay,
who he thinks might have wanted to hurt Chanin
in such a brutal way.
The thing that he kept saying was look at her computer,
and that will tell you all you need to know.
He said, "She was doing some online dating,
and whoever killed her is in there."
NARRATOR: Detectives are working a theory that whoever murdered
Chanin Starbuck could be connected to her online dating.
They start by scouring her phone,
looking for recent communications.
One of the first ones that came up
was a guy by the name of Tom,
and Tom had sent her some text messages that very day.
Tom and Chanin had been flirting back and forth,
and it was obvious that they're attracted to one another.
NARRATOR: As they continue reading the texts,
alarm bells sound.
Tom is encouraging Chanin to send him some kind of
racy pictures,
and one of the pictures that he asked for
is very similar to the pose
that we find Chanin's deceased body in.
Is this a coincidence? How is this possible?
RICKETTS: That threw up red flags for us.
We're thinking he is our suspect.
NARRATOR: They track Tom down by calling
the number on Chanin's phone.
When we first talked to Tom, we went to his residence.
Tom told us he met Chanin
through a dating application -- They had met.
They had communications on the phone and via text.
They had not been intimate.
NARRATOR: Detectives ask Tom to account for his whereabouts
during the time they believe Chanin was murdered.
Tom Walker told us that he left from work approximately
9:40 AM to go to a funeral,
and then he returned to work around 10:50 AM.
He said that he had texted her about going to the funeral
and asked her how her day was going.
She subsequently responded to him a little while later
around 12 asking if he would
like to meet her for lunch at that time.
He thought it was odd, because she knew that he had a funeral
to attend to, and that he would be at work
would not be able to meet on December 1st.
We were able to investigate that
and totally corroborate everything he told us.
His boss eliminated him by verifying when he was at work,
when he went to the funeral,
when he came back, and how late he worked that evening.
He was nowhere near Chanin's residence on December 1st.
Tom also provided us with a DNA sample voluntarily.
His DNA
was not found on Chanin Starbuck
in the place of the injuries.
JOHNSTON: So we were able to rule Tom out
in the death of Chanin Starbuck.
NARRATOR: Still believing Chanin's dating history is
the key to finding her killer,
detectives delve deeper into her personal life.
Similar to going to a bar,
for instance, to meet people and not knowing them, online,
you're also potentially connecting with people
you don't know.
And there is some research to suggest that online
dating behavior is associated with increased
risk of violence.
So sometime shortly after noon, Chanin text messages
the guy by the name of John and appears to be setting up some
type of a rendezvous for later in the evening,
on the same day as her death.
NARRATOR: Detectives set to work finding John Wilson.
We were able to take the photograph off of John's
Facebook account, run it
through the open source search engine,
and we were able to match that photograph with
a doctor out of Maryland.
Once we contacted that doctor,
we were able to verify that that wasn't really a picture
of John, and John is just
an unknown person who's faking
these profiles for the purposes of dating multiple women.
I think 50% of people or more
report lying about their profiles or information online.
So it begs the question, who are you talking to?
NARRATOR: John's fake online persona leads detectives
to theorize that he is somehow involved in Chanin's murder.
JOHNSTON: He's difficult to find,
and he's already being untruthful about his identity.
He seems to have disappeared into
the wind the moment that Chanin Starbuck is murdered.
So we thought, John is our guy,
because he is being so secretive.
He's being so careful to cover his tracks.
We reached out to John directly.
I sent him both an email and messaged him, saying,
"You need to contact the police."
So when John calls me, he is very skeptical.
Sounds like he can't really believe police are
reaching out to him, but I inform that I'm
investigating the death of Chanin Starbuck.
His first reaction was that he wanted
to consult with an attorney.
When you see a suspect immediately lawyer up,
as they say, and engage their attorney, it doesn't
necessarily point to guilt,
but it points to them having something to hide.
NARRATOR: Detectives ask for the man's real name,
but he refuses to give it to them.
RICKETTS: And at that time, I scribbled out a quick note
saying, "Hey, tell him he's got 20 seconds."
"Tell us who he is, identify himself, or we're
"gonna put his photograph out on media everywhere
to find out who he is."
ARNTFIELD: It's called offering the out,
and this is frequently where we see they'll cop to something
that they wouldn't normally
confess to because it's a preferred
alternative to what's being insinuated.
JOHNSTON: At that point, John does give me his true identity,
and we make an arrangement
to meet the following day with his attorney.
NARRATOR: Detectives finally come face-to-face
with their prime suspect, John Kenlein.
So John did lay out the fact
that he is married.
He has a job that is kind of respected in the community,
and yet he's leading this double lifestyle of meeting up
with multiple women.
And so he doesn't want this to be known.
He feels that he's got a lot to lose.
Potentially his job, his marriage, his own children,
his house.
Everything is riding on the line.
Yet at the same time, he realizes the predicament
he's in -- he's the number-one suspect in a homicide,
so it all has to come out.
If somebody is willing to cheat or lie to their family,
they're probably willing to lie to investigators.
NARRATOR: Detectives ask John where he was during
the time they believe Chanin was murdered.
He told us that he dropped his kids off at school
that morning and that he had plans to see Chanin
approximately 10:30 AM in Deer Park.
He drove up to Chanin's house, and there was no answer.
JOHNSTON: He admits that he's been there
at the house, he's made phone calls
on the day that she is murdered.
Everything puts him in the area.
NARRATOR: Detectives suspect John Kenlein
knows more than he's letting on.
What crossed my mind was maybe they did meet up,
and maybe they did have a sexual relationship.
Maybe something went wrong.
We suspected that John was our killer.
[choking noises]
[distant sirens]
NARRATOR: Detectives have zeroed in on John Kenlein as
the prime suspect in the murder of Chanin Starbuck.
John told us he drove up to
Chanin's house, and there was no answer.
So he utilized a public phone in the Deer Park area,
and he tried to call her. Still didn't get any answer.
He actually drove back to her house.
Still no sign of Chanin.
Nobody answered the door.
He also went around the house knocking on
windows, and there was still no answer.
NARRATOR: After he left,
Kenlein claims he finally heard from Chanin.
She texted saying she was out for lunch and was sorry
she missed him.
So sometime shortly after noon,
Chanin text messages John
and appears to be setting up some type
of a rendezvous for later in the evening,
making plans for that night.
So John went back that evening
and tried to meet up with her,
and there was no answer.
NARRATOR: Detectives are suspicious of John's story.
His own alibi put him at the house during that
timeframe when Chanin was murdered.
There could be a variety of motivations that John
would have in showing up at her house.
It could be that she was about to expose him
for the charlatan and the fraud that he was.
It could be that he felt she had ghosted him,
and how dare she?
It could be that he was just wanted to take the relationship
to the next level and then found when he was there that,
in fact, his fantasies were more twisted
maybe then even he knew.
NARRATOR: There's just one problem.
At the time, John did provide us with a DNA sample,
which we tested along with other samples,
and he was eliminated
as a contributor to DNA.
ARNTFIELD: The fact John's DNA is ruled out
doesn't necessarily mean he's not the killer.
Every alibi should be independently
corroborated through some secondary source.
JOHNSTON: John seemed to be our number-one suspect.
He's just not admitting to having been in
the house or having direct contact with her.
We still had a lot of investigation
to do before we could rule him out.
NARRATOR: With John stonewalling them,
the investigation hits a wall.
I think it did shock the people
of Deer Park as well as the Spokane community.
A mother of five children murdered inside her own home,
no apparent signs of forced entry.
Did she answer the door and someone forced their way in?
That type of incident without answers scares people.
RICKETTS: We had a very serious threat on the streets for
the community at large,
and that was very stressful for me at the time,
because I didn't want to miss anything.
I wanted to make sure recovered all of our bases
and that we were headed in the right direction.
NARRATOR: But soon, their hard work pays off.
We always request records directly
from the cellphone provider.
And in this case, when I was able to get records for
Chanin Starbuck's phone, I was able to go through them,
and I found a 911 call that was not listed in her call
records on her phone.
Some cellphones actually mask 911 calls,
and that would be if you were a victim and you called 911,
as soon as you hang up,
the suspect wouldn't be able to grab your phone and see that
you had called.
So it's kind of a safety feature.
NARRATOR: The discovery of the 911 call
rocks the investigation.
And I can actually remember standing up on at desk
and announcing to all the other
detectives in the room, "She called 911,"
and it was extremely exciting.
We're working on the premise that Chanin
died somewhere in a 24-hour time span.
So looking at those phone records,
it timestamps 9:17 in the morning
as the time that this event is taking place.
We were able to verify that with 911,
and it was an oh, my gosh moment
of we really know when this happened now.
To me and the other investigators, that
indicated that was the time she was attacked.
[woman gasping]
And she was killed shortly thereafter.
Obviously, this revelation is shocking.
And the fact that investigators are hearing this
for the first time, I mean,
this was under their noses all along.
She was essentially in the throes of death.
[static noises]
[dial tone]
NARRATOR: Detectives have learned that Chanin Starbuck
called 911 in distress
in the early morning of December 1st,
the day she was killed.
So we were unaware up until weeks into the investigation
that she had ever called 911, but once we saw it
in the phone records,
I was able to contact the 911 dispatch center, have them pull
the records for that specific date and time,
and they found a recording that they didn't know existed.
[woman gasping]
When you listen to the recording,
you can hear a grunt and a muffled noise in
the background
that sounds like someone possibly being assaulted.
[woman gasping]
It was eerie in the sense that you knew
this is a struggle that's going on, and this person's
fighting for their life, and it doesn't turn out well.
The 911 receiver actually talks at the exact
same time that that noise is in the background.
[woman gasping]
And it would be my belief that he probably talked
over it and didn't realize that there was anyone on the end.
He did call the phone number immediately back,
but there was no answer.
It goes to voicemail, because the phone has
been shut off or disabled by this time.
And therefore, there is no further contact.
Almost without exception, in every jurisdiction,
911 hang up calls are at least a one-officer dispatch.
THOMAS: Would it necessarily have stopped what was occurring?
Not likely, but maybe perhaps her killer
could have been found much earlier.
NARRATOR: The discovery of the 911 call sends
the investigation into a whole new direction.
Initially, it appeared that Chanin was
most likely alive in the afternoon of December 1st.
She's texting to multiple people,
both Tom, John, Clay at some point and the kids, as well.
NARRATOR: Detectives now believe it was likely Chanin's
killer trying to pretend Chanin was still alive.
Your scope of possible suspects really starts to
slim down, because now you can
check out their alibis and know whether
or not it was possible for them to have been involved or not.
NARRATOR: With the new evidence, detectives take another look at
their prime suspect, John Kenlein.
RICKETTS: We discovered that at 9:20, he's taking
the kids to school.
So to me, it's pretty closely ruling John out as being
involved in getting back
and forth between those locations with the amount of
time it would take to go from Spokane to Deer Park.
I am now convinced John Kenlein was
not involved and the murder of Chanin Starbuck.
ARNTFIELD: This is a case that would be and has been
extraordinarily frustrating for investigators,
in that you have some pretty specific crime scene behaviors
and a puzzling scene and a number of
viable suspects, and nothing is shaking out.
The unanswered questions are gonna keep you up at night.
NARRATOR: After ruling out John Kenlein
in the murder of Chanin Starbuck,
detectives go back to the drawing board.
We're looking at saying,
"Okay, somebody got on her phone
"and was communicating with John Kenlein,
"was communicating with Tom Walker,
was returning messages."
NARRATOR: Detectives do a deeper dive into Chanin's personal life
and make an alarming discovery.
DRESBACK: While I'm talking to the friends of Chanin,
they are informing me that Clay has
been nothing but trouble for Chanin.
He has harassed her.
He has done damage to her place.
He has done damage to her vehicle.
He has threatened her.
JOHNSTON: He owes her a significant amount of
child support, he's a very much controlling person.
He's not happy with the fact that she's dating other men,
that he has no control over her,
and he has been stalking and harassing her for some time.
When it's learned that Clay has been stalking
Chanin, it's particularly troubling to me as
a psychologist -- we know from the research in intimate partner
homicides that when stalking's involved,
it increases the risk 2 to 3 times that somebody is gonna
end up murdered.
We discover she was so concerned about Clay stalking
her essentially that she did ask for
and receive a domestic violence protection order.
ARNTFIELD: Tragically, the use of restraining orders,
like we see in this case -- I mean, it's a piece of paper.
The existence of that paper is actually seen by the offender
as a voucher to actually act on
what they've already been planning.
It actually infuriates and escalates their behavior to
the point that it has the opposite of the desired effect.
RICKETTS: She had told individuals in the community
that if something happened to her,
if she was harmed or killed,
that it was Clay Starbuck that had done it to her.
NARRATOR: Based on these new revelations,
detectives take a second look at Clay Starbuck.
So Clay had given us a story about his vehicle breaking down
and how he had
sent some text messages to Chanin to try to get her to
take the children to school
and then after his car broke down,
he went back to his house and fell asleep.
Somewhere in there,
he said that his cellphone battery died and his cellphone
was off for a majority of the day,
and that in itself wasn't contradictory to anything
we found in the cellphone records.
His phone was actually off for a majority of the day.
But when we examine cellphone records, frequently,
we don't look a just a very small,
frequent timeframe, because people live and breathe on
their cellphones in this day and age,
you develop patterns.
So for Clay Starbuck, over a one-year total of cellphone
records were obtained,
and what we were able to see was that at no other time over
the preceding year has his phone ever been off for
the amount of time that it was off
on the day that Chanin Starbuck was murdered.
He had never in the prior year had text messages sent to him
that he didn't respond to
in a timely fashion or go for periods of time
where there was no activity.
Yet on the day of Chanin Starbuck's murder,
all of those things happened.
NARRATOR: Detectives meet with Clay,
testing his alibi against the new timeline.
We asked him to go for a little ride with us
to show us the route that he drove and where
his vehicle broke down and how he walked back to his house,
which he agreed to do.
Now this is a golf course community,
and there are actually greens in between
some of these residences,
and where the vehicle stalled is across from one of
these greens that goes in between
these houses and would have been the most likely direct
route to walk back to his house.
And in this particular December,
there isn't a lot of snow.
There wasn't anything really impeding
someone from taking that route.
But Clay insists that he walked down
the sidewalk and stayed off of the golf green,
at which point he turns and goes east through
the neighborhood, back to his own residence.
We follow this route, and we specifically look
for home security cameras, and we find one.
We contact the homeowners and ask them
if we can look at their security footage.
And after looking at the footage numerous times,
we cannot once find Clay Starbuck
walking past this residence that he claims he walked
past four times on that day,
I questioned him on this at least 2 to 3 times.
Are you sure this is the route you've taken?
And he is adamant that that's the route he's taken.
And now, after looking
at the footage from the surveillance video,
it's obvious that Clay Starbuck isn't being
truthful with us
about where he was and what he was doing.
NARRATOR: Detectives have now shifted the focus
of their investigation in
the murder of Chanin Starbuck to her ex-husband, Clay,
when a surprising piece of evidence emerges.
DNA that was identified as belonging to male
Starbuck lineage
was found in the area
where Chanin was strangled and suffocated.
So it wasn't DNA just found on a ledge or an item
of clothing or something that had been there
for a while -- this was DNA
that was found on Chanin Starbuck,
where she was injured, part of the cause of her death.
NARRATOR: In order to link the killer's
DNA left on Chanin's body to Clay,
detectives must prove it belongs to him
and not one of his sons.
We were able to eliminate the adult male Starbuck children,
because one of them was at school during that day,
and the other one was at work.
That left us with Clay Starbuck
as being the provider of the DNA
on Chanin Starbuck.
NARRATOR: Closing in on their killer,
detectives bring Clay Starbuck down
to the station to confront him with the damning evidence.
Clay Starbuck agreed to be interviewed.
He waived his rights, so we proceeded
with a recorded interview with him.
I said, "I understand that, Clay.
Let me go get something."
I went and grabbed the lab report, and I showed it to him.
He started breathing heavy, he's almost hyperventilating.
At that point, he shut down, he didn't make anymore statements.
NARRATOR: Detectives arrest Clay Starbuck and charge him
with the murder of his wife, Chanin.
Sadly, Chanin's fatal mistake was daring
to start a new life without Clay,
and it really drove him crazy.
Clay killed Chanin, I think,
because he was jealous, and he did not want to have to pay her
child support every month.
And at the time of the murder, he owed her more than $9,000.
And so it appears that Clay decided that he could
get out of these financial problems by simply killing her.
NARRATOR: Detectives now believe they know what happened to
Chanin Starbuck in the last hours of her life.
December 1st, around 8 AM,
Clay text messages Chanin
asked her to take the children to school.
Most likely, during the timeframe that she's away from
the house taking the children to school,
Clay has snuck into the house,
and he lays and wait for her while she is going about
her morning routine.
NARRATOR: While Clay is waiting for Chanin to return home,
he turns off his cellphone.
JOHNSTON: Shortly after getting back to the house,
he attacks her.
[dramatic music]
She attempts to call 911, but that call is cut short.
[woman gasping]
DISPATCHER: 911, what are you reporting?
And her phone is turned off,
and then he murders her
through a struggle, strangulation.
He positions her in a humiliating fashion
for the rest of the community to be aware of after the fact,
and makes her look like the bad person because
she's doing some online dating
and things that he doesn't necessarily approve of.
After she was attacked,
I believe Clay got on her phone and on her computer
and started looking through it
and communicating back with these individuals,
trying to frame either Tom Walker or John Kenlein as
being the ones that committed murder.
NARRATOR: Clay then returns home,
turns on his cellphone, and waits for
his kids to get home from school.
Clearly, this festering jealousy had led him to
the point where he was prepared
to commit murder, but at the same time,
he was able to keep things under control and keep his
behavior premeditated and organized enough that he uses
these texts to artificially engineer this alibi.
NARRATOR: Detectives also believe that Clay
texted himself from Chanin's cellphone
to fool police into thinking she was still
alive for most of the day on December 1st.
For me, I also wonder,
is there an element of sadism here?
Is there a deeper quality to him that
really wants to have Chanin experience pain and suffering?
NARRATOR: Clay Starbuck is found guilty
of first degree murder and sentenced
to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Clay definitely planned this out.
There was a significant amount of premeditation,
and I think that someone that could be that calculating
and that terrible to any other human being...
spending the rest of his life
in prison is definitely what he deserved.
It's horrendous, but not just because of
what happened to Chanin.
It's what it did to this family.
When Clay Starbuck killed Chanin,
he robbed their children of their mother
and then, because of his life sentence,
he robbed his children of a father.
It was a selfish act based in greed and jealousy,
and it just didn't have to happen.