She's executed on the ground with a single shot to the head.
[gunshots]
This is someone who is in a stage of rage, and wants to see her suffer.
[Jesse] Danielle was a single mom.
She had a 9-month-old child, who she cared for deeply.
He was kind of the center of her world.
[Amy] He wanted control of his daughter.
[Nick] I think over time,
it just became kind of a powder keg.
[Lane] He's got a criminal history.
He's a murderer.
He's a thief.
[Amy] Baby momma drama.
She tries to run her over with a car.
Could it be? She has motive.
[Nick] His alibi is completely broken.
He had created an elaborate, false alibi,
because he killed her.
[gunshot]
[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.
Powder Springs, Georgia.
Nestled in the leafy country side, north-west of Atlanta.
It's not the kind of place that's often in the news.
Powder Springs is a small blue-collar town.
Very much a family-orientated town.
It is not as hustle and bustle as Atlanta.
You can walk alone at night.
And you're not afraid that you're gonna get robbed
or assaulted or anything like that.
[Jesse] A lot of residents feel safe enough that they could
even leave their house unlocked in certain circumstances.
[narrator] But when a late night 911 call
comes in to the Powder Springs Police Department,
it shakes the sleepy town wide awake.
[narrator] The caller identifies himself as Joshua Gibson.
He tells the dispatcher he's standing outside the home of his ex-girlfriend.
Who is also the mother of his baby daughter.
[Jesse] He could not get into the home,
and that he wanted, basically, to have a welfare check there.
[siren]
[Amy] Powder Spring's police officers respond around 1:20 am,
and what they found was, Joshua was standing at the front door.
[Jesse] They tried the front door and realized that it was locked.
They asked Joshua to have a seat at the front.
And they walked around the back, and quickly discovered
that the backdoor was not only unlocked,
but it was just a gentle push they were able to make entry into the home.
[Amy] There was no signs of forced entry.
[baby crying]
[Amy] But they can hear the baby crying.
[baby crying]
[Amy] And one of the officers
immediately went to the child, picked her up,
and held her.
As the officers responded to the kitchen area,
they found a black female in a pool of blood.
[Nick] She's laying on her right side
and she appears to be almost in like a fetal position.
She had a gunshot wound to the left side of her head.
[narrator] The victim is 23-year-old Danielle Marshall.
The ex-girlfriend of Joshua Gibson.
Danielle was a single mom.
She had a 9-month-old child who she cared for deeply. He's kinda the center of her world.
She was trying to better her life through study.
She was enrolled and trying to get a nursing degree.
[Amy] What people loved the most about Danielle was her smile.
It was big.
And it just lit up a room.
She was kind to everybody.
[narrator] Lieutenant Lane Cadwell,
and detective Amy Randolph,
from the Powder Springs Police Department,
are called in to investigate.
[Amy] Once I arrived on scene, Lieutenant Cadwell and I
walked into the kitchen area,
and we see Danielle laying on the floor.
[Lane] Just the traumatic scene and...
your heart goes out to somebody that young that lost her life.
[Nick] So the wound on Danielle's left temple was of a star-shaped pattern.
Which indicates that this was a very close-range shot.
There's also a wound down the left side of her face,
that would be consistent with being pistol whipped.
That's probably what put her on the ground.
And that's where she's executed on the ground
with a single shot to the head.
[gunshot]
[Amy] All she's wearing is a T-shirt and underwear.
So in my mind I'm thinking,
it's got to be somebody that she knew,
that Danielle had let into the home.
[Nick] We know there's no forced entry into the house.
This isn't something random.
It's pretty obvious that Danielle knew her attacker.
We have this close contact headshot.
Execution style.
It seems precise.
- [gunshot] - It seems disciplined.
And yet we also have this pistol whipping beforehand.
Which to me suggests in fact the opposite of control.
This is someone who is in a state of rage
and wants to see her suffer.
[narrator] To solve Danielle Marshall's murder,
detectives will need to unravel the final 24 hours of her life.
[gunshot]
[Amy] Touching Danielle,
she was cold, but she wasn't in rigor.
It hadn't been very long
since she was
attacked and killed.
[Jesse] Probably the time of death, if we had to make an estimate,
was within 2 hours of her discovery.
So between 11:20 and 1:15, when the 911 call was placed,
that's a pretty tight window from an investigative standpoint.
[narrator] With a preliminary window of death established,
investigators begin processing the crime scene.
[Nick] We were able to determine that two shots were fired within the house.
You have the round that killed Danielle.
And you also have another round that missed,
that went through the cabinets.
Maybe during the struggle,
a round was discharged.
Investigators were able to take the slug from the wall.
[gunshot]
[Nick] They were unable to find any shell casings.
Either the perpetrator took the shell casings with him
or this was a revolver.
A weapon that does not eject shell casings when it's fired.
[narrator] To build a narrative of the murder,
detectives turn their attention
to the remainder of Danielle's home.
[Lane] Definitely no sign of a struggle anywhere else in the house.
There was computers and cellphones.
Whoever did this, this is what they were there for.
It was not a robbery or burglary.
The house was dusted. We dusted,
you know all the entry ways and all
the areas we can think of touching.
But nothing useful came on the fingerprints.
[Amy] What we took from the crime scene as evidence,
was of course cellphones,
and laptop computers.
It will tell you
who they've been talking to, when they've been talking to them.
It's the biggest
key to almost every investigation,
these times.
[narrator] Looking for more information about Danielle,
investigators turn to her mother,
Gloria Marshall.
[Lane] We did have to break the news to her.
That's never fun, to have to tell somebody that.
[Amy] Danielle was living with her mom, Gloria.
She was more than happy to make sure that her daughter
and her granddaughter had everything that they needed.
[narrator] Investigators ask Gloria
about Danielle's movements
in the hours leading up to her death.
[Amy] Gloria left for work about 9 pm.
Danielle, according to her, didn't have any plans,
nobody was to come over.
[Lane] Gloria gets a break around 11,
when she usually calls Danielle, just checks in.
And she had called, and got no response.
[Amy] She didn't think it was too much out of the ordinary at the time.
Sometimes Danielle would go back to sleep.
And she let it go.
[narrator] Investigators shift the conversation to Danielle's relationship
with Joshua Gibson.
[Nick] Gloria tells them that Danielle has been
in this relationship for quite a bit of time with Josh Gibson,
and it has been nothing but a toxic situation.
And Gloria has completely
banned him from the house.
Based off of a past behavior.
[Amy] Danielle and Joshua met
at Goodwill, where they both worked.
So when Danielle brought Joshua home,
it wasn't the greatest meeting in the world.
Gloria found him obnoxious, controlling,
and she wanted better for her daughter.
[Lane] Danielle and Joshua weren't together for very long
before Danielle became pregnant.
[Amy] Seven months into the pregnancy,
Joshua impregnates his old girlfriend, Deandra.
Complicates things a bit.
[Nick] And Josh
then got back together with his ex-girlfriend.
So he's got babies with two different women.
There's a lot of drama going on here.
You can't make it up.
[Jesse] Danielle was fulltime custodian of Ava.
But she also thought it was important
and rightfully so to have her father in the picture.
[Amy] So when Gloria would leave for work,
that's when Joshua would come over.
When I asked Gloria who wanted to hurt Danielle,
who could've had any ill will towards her,
immediately she said Joshua.
[Lane] Gloria feels there's nobody else
that that would do this to Danielle, except for Josh.
[narrator] Detectives begin to consider a possible motive for Joshua.
[Nick] Josh wants nothing more than to have control
over the situation with Ava.
And he doesn't have that control.
Danielle and Gloria don't just let him show up at the house whenever he wants.
[Jesse] You know, it was somebody close to Danielle.
It was somebody that,
that was upset with Danielle.
[Amy] At this point I thought, we're good,
we've got our suspect, he's the one who did it.
[gunshot]
He's got motive. He's got opportunity.
Everything is pointing at Joshua.
[narrator] In the shooting death of 23-year-old
single mom Danielle Marshall.
Investigators are zeroing in on their first suspect.
The victim's ex-boyfriend, Joshua Gibson.
[pistol hit]
When Detective Randolph told him it was Danielle who was dead in the house,
he showed no response, no emotion.
[Amy] He didn't seem concerned about anybody
except for himself and his child.
[narrator] As investigators continue to question Joshua
about the events of that night,
his answers don't add up.
[Amy] He said he was so afraid,
but he didn't jump the fence
to go into the backdoor to see if that was open.
That was very odd to me.
Very odd.
And his only response was, "I didn't feel like it."
Okay.
[narrator] Then, detectives notice something strange about Joshua's car,
which is sitting in Danielle's driveway.
[Amy] The driver's window was broken.
It wasn't even there, it was covered up in plastic.
And then the rear driver's side had a bullet hole in it.
[Lane] We wanted to search that vehicle,
because we have somebody here shot in the house,
but we have a bullet hole in the truck sitting in the driveway,
I wanna see what's going on with the truck, also.
[narrator] With their suspicion mounting,
detectives bring Joshua down to the station
for a formal interview.
[dog barking]
[Amy] He tells me that he is
currently living with his second baby momma, Deandra.
[Lane] But he still comes and sees Ava, his daughter,
usually at night when he gets off work.
[Nick] It was under the guise that he was coming to see Ava,
to get to see his child.
But there was also a continued sexual relationship with Danielle.
[cellphone ringing]
[Nick] I think over time,
it just became kind of a powder keg.
Joshua Gibson has ample motive in this case,
he may want custody of his child.
He may also want to control Danielle.
Imagine how stressful this might be.
To manage two relationships,
multiple children.
You may resort to certain strategies, including violence
in an effort to control the various players of these relationships
and get what it is you want.
[narrator] Investigators drill down on Joshua's timeline
for Saturday night and early Sunday morning.
[Amy] That night,
Joshua was supposed to go over to Danielle's
around 9 o'clock after Gloria left.
Joshua got home about 7:30 pm.
And he texted Danielle and said, "Hey, I'm tired, I'm not gonna come over tonight."
[Nick] So Josh said that his girlfriend came home from work,
she came home from work later than him.
They went to bed.
He said he woke up about midnight.
And he said he just decided "I'm gonna call Danielle,
and see if I can go see my child."
[Amy] He's texting Danielle.
She's not responding.
And in his words,
that was odd because Danielle is always on her phone.
[Lane] He woke his girlfriend up and said,
you know, "I'm gonna go over there, because something's wrong."
[Amy] So by the time he gets there, it was about I am.
And he's knocking on the door, he's knocking on the window.
He's calling.
Sometime after 1 o'clock. 1:10, 1:15,
he panics.
So he calls 911.
Joshua was asked who he thought could've done it.
The one person he brought up was a guy named Darnell.
He said that Danielle had been seeing him.
And that he was a bad dude.
[Amy] He was just worried about his daughter.
He didn't want his daughter in any kind of harm's way.
So to me
that could've been
a motive for murder.
He wanted control of his daughter.
[Lane] But we had no charges on him at that point.
We would be back in touch,
but he was released from custody at that point.
[narrator] With Joshua still in their crosshairs,
detectives dig into Danielle's phone records,
to see whether his alibi holds up.
What we found was that the last time that she used her phone
was at 10:34 that night.
And once we looked at his phone,
his story, what he said was true.
[Lane] Text messages he told us about as he was getting off work.
No activity on his phone
when he said he was asleep.
[Jesse] The geo-location analysis show
that he was not at this crime scene prior to making
that 911 call at 1:15 in the morning.
[Amy] Everything else he said wasn't holding water,
but data doesn't lie.
We found that he was where he said he was,
at the time that he said he was.
[Lane] We had to break his alibi.
[narrator] But the data confirming Joshua was not
at the crime scene at the time of the murder.
He is eliminated as a suspect.
Detectives then shift their focus to the bullet hole
they observed on Joshua's vehicle at the crime scene.
They wonder if it can be connected to Danielle's murder.
Joshua tells us two weeks prior
somebody shot at his vehicle.
[Nick] He says he saw a compact car
coming toward him.
A hand and a pistol come out of one of the windows.
[glass breaking]
And opened fire on his car as he passed by.
[Amy] Joshua reported to the police
that the only person that he thought could do such a thing,
would be Danielle.
[Jesse] Police quickly realized that she was home
with Ava and Gloria the entire time
and she was not somehow involved in this.
[Amy] So when looking at the dates
and the times, and who's all involved,
we're thinking that, somehow, his drive-by shooting,
and her murder,
something has to be connected here.
[narrator] Looking for evidence connecting the two shootings,
police process Joshua's car.
[Nick] The projectile that was lodged in the side door of the car
was actually compared with the projectile that was found in Danielle's house.
And a firearm scientist was able to determine
they were fired from the same weapon and it would've been a .38.
It's a match.
So the bullet
that killed Danielle,
was fired from the same gun
that Joshua said was a drive-by shooting.
[Nick] That's a huge lead in any investigation,
because now you know that these cases are definitely connected.
[Amy] Who would wanna kill Joshua?
And who would wanna kill Danielle?
Why would they want both of them dead?
[gunshot]
[narrator] Detectives are convinced the execution-style
killing of young mother Danielle Marshall
is connected to a drive-by shooting
that targeted her ex-boyfriend
Joshua Gibson.
[Nick] They both been shot at,
and we know that the same gun was used.
[gunshot]
[Nick] So we have to look into the possibility
that we have somebody out there that wants both of these people dead.
[Lane] Doing our background investigation,
we did find a report
between Josh's current girlfriend Deandra
and Danielle
where they had an altercation
at the Goodwill.
[Amy] They get into a verbal argument.
And Deandra tries to run her over with the car.
Hits her slightly.
And the police are called.
But nothing ever happened with the case.
So, we're wondering
could it possibly be Deandra?
He's cheating on her.
She hates Danielle.
Could it be?
She has motive.
So we call her in.
She is a hostile witness.
She didn't wanna talk to me.
She is very short with her answers.
When I asked Deandra about the Goodwill incident,
she just brushed it off.
She's just like, "Yeah, I did it.
So what?"
She doesn't care one bit
that Danielle was dead.
When we interviewed Deandra, we asked her to account for her whereabouts.
You know, during the time of the homicide.
And she said she had work that night,
she worked at the Walmart.
[Amy] Thank God, you know,
Walmart has great cameras.
So, of course we pulled all the video footage.
So what she's telling me
time for time, lines up exactly
with what the Walmart video shows.
And she gets back to her house about 10 pm.
[Lane] They went to sleep.
She got woke up midnight or so
by Josh saying, "I've been trying to reach Danielle."
She provides the same timeline.
About 12:45, he leaves and goes to check on Danielle.
So she's solidifying and supporting his alibi he's given us.
[Amy] The data from phones confirms her story,
confirms Joshua's story.
At this point in the investigation, I'm frustrated.
Because I have got two people that have the means and the motive,
and the opportunity.
But everything else,
the actual facts
and the actual evidence,
is leading away from them.
[narrator] With Deandra's alibi clearing her as a suspect,
detectives go back to the drawing board
looking for new leads.
In Josh's own interview with police, very early on,
he revealed that a potential suspect could be
this prior boyfriend that Danielle had been seeing.
So, we really wanted to look into that
and see if there was a possibility that perhaps
some scorned lover was the actual perpetrator of this crime.
[narrator] As investigators dig into Darnell Jones,
they soon make a surprising discovery.
[Lane] So as we looked into Darnell,
he's got a criminal history.
He's a murderer. He's a thief.
[Jesse] He had a probation warrant that was outstanding for him.
These were certainly red flags that anyone
involved in an investigation like this would want to look into.
[Amy] It's 100% possible
that he could have gotten jealous of Joshua.
He just could've been angry.
You never know when somebody is gonna snap.
[narrator] Detectives have a new suspect
in the cold-blooded murder of Danielle Marshall.
An ex-boyfriend with a criminal record
named Darnell Jones.
[gunshot]
[Nick] Any place where there could've been some level of tension,
you gotta look into that.
And it was very important to find Darnell.
[Lane] Darnell did have an active warrant.
So, we knew getting him to talk to us was gonna be
a tricky thing.
[Amy] I call up the phone number.
And I said "Okay, listen,
I'm gonna meet you.
I'm not going to arrest you for your active warrant."
So, finally he agreed.
Darnell was very sad that she was gone.
He very much enjoyed her and they had a great time together.
But Darnell explained
that Joshua was very controlling.
Whenever they had any interactions,
Joshua was rude, aggressive, violent.
[Lane] So he just kind of stepped away from the relationship,
because she wouldn't get rid of Josh.
[Amy] I point blank asked Darnell, "Did you try to kill him?"
His response was no.
[narrator] Investigators asked Darnell to account
for his time on the night of the murder.
[Amy] Darnell said that he was at a hotel room
with three or four other people,
they were partying all night long.
He got a ride home, went back to his girlfriend's house.
We were able to verify that he was nowhere near the homicide
and not involved in the homicide.
[narrator] After ruling out three strong suspects,
detectives revisit Danielle's email and phone records
looking for new leads.
So we're looking through her phone,
and we see some racy conversations between her
and another male.
He had sent some...
What's it called? [bleep] pics.
Of course.
So I thought, "This is a guy we should look into, for sure."
[narrator] Investigators learned that the man's name is Willie Sandoval.
And he and Danielle were friends from the neighborhood.
[Nick] The conversation seemed to be somewhat one-sided.
This same man had been at the house several days before.
Danielle had actually had to ask him to leave the house.
You always have to think about the idea of rejection
being a motive for murder.
So that's something that you just got to look into.
[Amy] When we met with Willie, and we're talking to him,
"and saying "Here's exactly what you said,
and here's what she said." And he's like,
"No, that's not true, that's not true."
And then I show him the picture of his penis, and he says,
"Uh, no, that's not me."
[Amy] And at that point, he was like,
"Okay, alright, that was me."
So, you just got to build a rapport with people sometimes.
When I asked Willie where he was
the night that she was murdered,
he said that he was at work.
And come to find out
later on, we were able to alibi
exactly what he said.
That he was at work.
At this point we've determined that Willie is not her killer.
[narrator] With no new leads or suspects,
the investigation into the murder of Danielle Marshall
hits a wall.
It's heartbreaking to have a case go cold.
Danielle, she's a person.
She had life, she had love, she had fear, she had friends and family.
And you get to know all of that,
and it's gone.
[narrator] One year after Danielle's murder,
the Cobb County district attorney's office
creates a new unit dedicated to solving cold cases.
Detective Nick O'Conor is given the unit's first assignment:
reinvestigating Danielle Marshall's murder.
[Nick] I felt like we could get somewhere with this case.
Also there was this 9-month-old baby that had been left at a crime scene.
So it was one of those cases
that just kinda pulled your heartstrings a little bit.
[narrator] With fresh eyes,
cold case investigators revisit all the evidence in the case file.
We noticed that, on Josh's girlfriend Deandra's records,
there was a phone call made at 11:22 on the night of the murder.
And that was very interesting to me,
because the time of that call would've been
when she was supposed to be asleep, and Josh was supposed to be asleep.
[Jesse] We had every reason to believe that Danielle was killed
you know, between 11:20, 11:30, and 1:15
when the 911 call was placed.
Suddenly, we have a new lead that needs to be looked into
that's pretty close in time to the perpetration of our crime.
[narrator] To help determine whether it was Joshua or Deandra
who made the phone call,
detectives need to track down who they were calling.
[Nick] We were able to determine that the subscriber
was a guy by the name of Trevor.
Trevor and Josh had gone to high school together.
And he is also friends with Josh's girlfriend as well.
We did a search warrant to obtain the cell tower records
so we could get the coordinates.
What was very interesting about what we found,
is you could see Trevor moving to the apartment complex
shared by Josh and his girlfriend.
And then from there,
moving to Powder Springs,
where Danielle lived.
Right smack dab in our time period of when Danielle was murdered.
Trevor may not have had a specific motive personally,
but we know Josh did.
And we know that Josh's girlfriend did.
So we have to consider him a suspect at that point.
This is a big lead that we've got to follow up on quick.
[Michael] Investigators would have to consider
the possibility that Trevor Green
was retained to do the dirty work.
Could we have a situation where Trevor Green
is the trigger man?
But Joshua Gibson is the puppeteer?
[gunshot]
[narrator] Detectives have uncovered a new suspect
in the murder investigation of 23-year-old Danielle Marshall.
Trevor Green,
a good friend of her ex-boyfriend Joshua Gibson.
This was the first person we can say,
without a doubt, you were at the house at the time of the homicide.
We wanted to catch him off guard.
We were able to do some background, and find out where he worked.
[narrator] Face to face with detectives,
Trevor is caught by surprise.
Initially, Trevor lied.
He tried to create another reason
why he would've been
in that neighborhood or in the area.
I confronted him with the phone records,
with the cell tower analysis.
[Nick] Eventually he had admitted that,
"Yeah, I had, I did go over there that night."
He explains that on that night, Josh called him
from his girlfriend's phone
to come pick him up
and to take him to Danielle's house.
Supposedly to have a threesome.
[Lane] He said that this was Josh's idea,
and that Josh called him and said that, you know,
tonight's the night, she's down for it, she's ready to go.
[car screeching]
[Nick] When they arrived at the house,
he explained that Danielle seemed to be kinda shocked
that they were there.
Trevor says he stays in the living room with Ava, the baby
while Danielle and Josh go into the backroom.
[Danielle] What are you doing? You can't be here.
[Joshua] I'm here, what's happening?
[Danielle] You're such a psycho!
And then, Josh reappears,
and basically says, "Hey, she's not into it.
Let's get out of here."
So at this point,
I begin to question him. "Did you hear a gunshot?"
Trevor says he doesn't hear any gunshots or anything at all.
When Josh gets back to the car,
he said that he acted completely normal.
And he just took him home.
[narrator] Detectives conclude their interview with Trevor.
Leaving him noticeably rattled.
As soon as we leave,
we know that he's gonna be calling Josh.
So, I had a plan to have a search warrant ready.
So I could actually just take his cellphone,
so I could find any kinda contact between him and Josh
during that time period.
So we found a text conversation where Trevor kinda just went off on him.
"Did you get me into some kind of murder?"
Josh responded to him,
and said, "Hey, man, I didn't do it.
But I know who did."
He's not saying
"Trevor, you're crazy, man.
We didn't go over there that night.
I can't believe you said that to the police."
He isn't denying any of this.
[Jesse] Josh had been denying the whole time that he knew what happened.
He was essentially corroborating the fact
that the friend was actually being truthful about having driven him to the crime scene,
at the time of Danielle's murder.
It was the big break in the case
that we'd all been searching for, hoping for.
[Nick] So Josh's best thing that he had going for him
in this investigation was an alibi.
That alibi is completely broken.
He had created an elaborate,
false alibi.
Because he killed her.
[narrator] Having broken Joshua Gibson's alibi,
detectives are now able to piece together Danielle Marshall's final 24 hours.
[gunshot]
Josh obviously had a plan.
He wants custody of Ava.
He realized that there was no other way for him to get custody
without taking Danielle out of the picture.
[Amy] Joshua had plans to meet Danielle,
and to see Ava that night.
However,
Joshua had different plans.
[cellphone buzzing]
[Amy] He cancelled.
Deandra gets home from work about 10 o'clock.
They go to bed about 11.
Joshua pretends to be asleep.
At 11:22, he uses Deandra's phone
to call Trevor.
[Nick] He's got a kind of bank on the idea that they're not
gonna check his girlfriend's phone records.
He knew they would check his records,
so he had to use something different, and that's what he chose.
He knows that Danielle's mother has a neighbor that kind of keeps a lookout
for his vehicle.
So he didn't have to worry about that issue,
because he's gonna be going in Trevor's car.
[Lane] And they get to Danielle's house at 11:41.
They go in,
still under the eyes of having the three way.
And Danielle,
she's not having it, she's upset.
So they leave,
walk back out to the car.
Josh tells Trevor, "Hold on for a minute, I gotta go back in,
I gotta do something."
[Jesse] Josh's friend is waiting outside,
playing loud music in the rain.
So he is not really cognizant of what's going on around him.
[Jesse] Meanwhile, Josh
is able to get into the house without any forced entry.
[Nick] And there is the confrontation in the kitchen.
There was some kind of physical altercation.
[gunshot]
I think the first shot was by surprise.
He missed the first shot.
[Lane] And that's where Josh struck her.
[gunshot]
[Lane] And shot her with the weapon,
and committed the homicide.
[baby crying]
[Amy] By 12:15,
Joshua was back at his house,
texting Danielle,
knowing that she is dead, and she is not going to respond.
[Jesse] He then wakes up his girlfriend so that he can create
another layer to this false alibi.
At 12:45, he leaves his house,
goes back to Danielle's house.
He gets there.
Finally at 1:15, he makes the 911 call.
[Nick] Now we know,
the first shooting was basically a set-up.
[glass breaking]
[Nick] Josh shot his own car up,
and immediately said that Danielle was the prime suspect on this
to get her arrested so he can get custody of the child.
That didn't work.
You're talking two weeks later is when Danielle's murdered.
[gunshot]
[Amy] Baby momma drama is what it all boiled down to.
And a guy that was so narcissistic,
that he had to murder
this girl just to get his way.
[narrator] Joshua Gibson is arrested, and charged with first degree murder,
aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm.
At trial, he is sentenced to life in prison,
without the possibility of parole.
In my 20-year career, this ranks as one of the cases
that has more premeditation and planning than I've ever seen.
[Nick] Josh is probably one of the more cold and calculating
people that I've ever dealt with.
And it's just hard for me to imagine
my baby crawling across a floor
of a living room when the mother
of my child is dead in the other room.
[narrator] To this day, Danielle's family and friends
continue to make sure her beautiful spirit lives on.
[Lane] I just hate that Ava doesn't have her mom,
but at least Gloria can
teach her who her mom was, and eventually let her know
that justice was served for her mom.
I want Danielle to be remembered by her smile.
Every single picture that you look at Danielle,
and that smile,
and those dimples,
says a thousand words.
She was beautiful.