NARRATOR: A young nurse heads out for a quick run
but never comes back.
She was running without her phone and without her dog.
NARRATOR: As a storm rolls in, her anxious husband calls 911.
NARRATOR: While searching for clues,
the cops learn of a marriage in trouble
and a husband with issues.
Sadly, I think Thomas had a volatile nature,
did have a penchant for alcohol and drugs.
NARRATOR: Micah Rine's family were never
exactly fond of Thomas Pate.
It hurts to know that she makes that choice.
NARRATOR: She had chosen a man who claimed to love Jesus.
But Thomas Pate had other loves too.
I think it became clear to her that he was having an affair.
And she may have confronted him with it.
Thomas Pate had charmed a naive young woman
and then he persuaded her family to accept him.
But there was a dangerous side to him
that neither knew existed.
And all too soon, they would.
It was clear that Thomas and Micah both knew about guns.
Nearly half of women murdered are killed by their partners
but plenty of men also fall victim to the same fate.
So if I were you, I would pay attention
to what you're about to see.
It might just save your life.
Searcy, Arkansas, 2003.
College students Micah Rine and Thomas
Pate meet for the first time.
Thomas was an interesting young man.
We teased, and he said it himself,
that he was the biggest redneck city boy that he knew.
Because he was from Atlanta, which
is a pretty good sized city.
But he enjoyed being out in the outdoors, hunting and fishing
and just hanging out really by himself a lot in God's nature.
He's athletic and so it matched up
with my sister wanting to play basketball and be
involved in those things.
NARRATOR: Micah had been raised in a close
knit religious household.
We are a Christian family and we focus on trying to walk,
what we talk about.
We grew up at Camp Tahkodah which is a camp about an hour
north of our home town of Searcy We love spending that time out
at Camp Dakota and swimming and going hiking and spending
that time together.
We wanted to be authentic and actually live our faith.
NARRATOR: As a young girl, Micah attended
Christian youth camps, weekly prayer meetings,
and Sunday church services.
She led a rather sheltered life though.
I must say.
It was a small town in Arkansas.
It's a very, home family-based atmosphere.
There's not a lot of exposure to the underside of the world.
She was very obedient and was a pleaser, very energetic.
She was very talkative.
She also was very driven athletically and academically
and did well on the basketball court especially.
And she enjoyed running.
NARRATOR: At the age of 19, Micah met
fellow student, Thomas Pate.
Micah and Thomas met through a French group.
He was trying to connect one of his friends
with one of her friends and that's where
that relationship started.
So they connected and spent some time
together prior to whenever they really did
consider each other exclusive.
NARRATOR: Thomas Pate's childhood had been
very different from Micah's.
His was a more privileged type upbringing, I would say.
His parents lived outside of Atlanta, Georgia,
a much more metropolitan, open, exposed to just about
everything.
NARRATOR: By the time Thomas met Micah,
there were already signs he was far from a model citizen.
He had a basketball scholarship
to a another college initially.
But he lost his scholarship and he had to leave the school.
And that's when he became a student at Harding
and eventually met Micah.
He was more worldly.
And she considered him tall and handsome.
She seemed thoroughly intrigued by Thomas.
NARRATOR: Micah's family began making
their first impressions of Thomas
a few months after he and Micah met in late 2002.
We hosted a Bible study in our home on Wednesday nights
for years.
We've done that for years.
Micah brought him to home Bible study,
I believe starting in February or March.
And that was probably maybe six weeks
after they started dating.
So they would be regulars on Wednesday night then.
So then it was just a matter of trying to get to know him.
And seeing what he was like and what comments he would make,
how he fit in with the other people that were
involved in home Bible study.
Our impression of him, he's very down to Earth.
And pretty much what you see is what you get from him.
As he came to home Bible study, he had the right words
and knew the Christian lingo so to speak.
And so he would say some of the right things.
And do some of the right things.
And even asking him to pray at home Bible study,
he would say a, what I would call a typical prayer.
NARRATOR: In hindsight, Micah's father, Dennis,
wonders just how truthfully Thomas
had been presenting himself.
It was the game that he was playing.
He knew the right lingo and the right things
to say to try to impress us.
But was he really living it?
NARRATOR: Despite their misgivings,
Micah's family held back their opinions of Thomas.
When they started dating, of course we were
paying really close attention.
And early on, when we didn't see that it really
appeared to be a good fit, we started
paying closer attention.
He's OK.
Wasn't over the top impressed.
But didn't have any big red flags to start with either.
We started expressing some of our concerns.
And the problem with that, though,
was that we couldn't really put our finger
on what it was that we wanted to point
out that was not a good fit.
NARRATOR: Even Micah wasn't sure at this stage
whether Thomas was the right guy for her.
There was one incident when they were dating seriously,
two springs before they got married,
and we were on a ski trip and it was just Micah
and I on the ski lift.
And she said, Dad, if you notice any red flags with Thomas,
I want you to point those out to me.
And I said, Micah, you can rest assured I will.
NARRATOR: Before long, there were a few things
Thomas had mentioned that gave Micah's family
a real reason to be concerned.
He shared that he had made some poor choices
during his high school years and even the first year
or so of college.
Part of that had to do with a lot of partying,
a lot of drinking, some promiscuity,
even dabbling in some drugs.
I believe that entered into him
losing his basketball scholarship
with the prior college.
Terri and Dennis couldn't understand why Micah would
want to date somebody whose values seemed
so different from her own.
But Micah believed in second chances.
So when Thomas insisted he'd put his past behind him,
she and her family believed him.
She says, well, he's changed.
We find out later again that that's not true.
NARRATOR: There were certainly enough warnings that Thomas
Pate wasn't on the up and up.
And it wouldn't be long before good Christian girl,
Micah Rine, realized they weren't false alarms.
Micah Rine was a nursing student at Harding University
in Searcy, Arkansas when she met supposedly
reformed bad boy, Thomas Pate.
To those who knew Micah best, her decision to study nursing
was right in line with her core values.
You don't take on that profession
without having a heart for the vulnerable
and for the broken and the hurting.
NARRATOR: Did Micah Rine believe her new boyfriend
Thomas Pate was a broken man in need of saving?
Looking back, Micah's father had no doubt his daughter's
heart was in the right place.
She would stay to try to help him.
And I think she even had a sense of I may be
the only one able to help him.
Not long into Micah's relationship with Thomas,
her family began to see some changes in her personality.
She was very bubbly and friendly and very outgoing
to everybody.
And then all of a sudden, she was very withdrawn.
She was stressed.
She just started having these tendencies that drew her inward
rather than being outward.
And she was very much an outward person.
Now she was very private.
But she was very outward.
Where if they went out, he'd probably say,
you know, why aren't you dressing like that person?
Or why do you have to be so picky about your food,
you know, things that would make her feel bad about herself.
I can easily see that happening.
Because I think a little of that may have happened
to him with his father.
NARRATOR: But Micah was head over heels.
And a little over a year into their relationship
Thomas proposed.
It was about two years from the time they started dating
till the time they got married.
Before Micah and Thomas got married he asked
my dad's hand in blessing.
NARRATOR: Dismayed, Micah's parents
tried to change their daughter's mind.
There was this moment where my sister called me and said,
Mom and Dad don't want this relationship to continue.
When I point out the red flags,
because she was, as Terri said, invested in this relationship
and she had been groomed in this manipulative relationship,
she wasn't willing to listen to Dad's advice at this point.
She was torn because we are a close family.
And she was drawn to Thomas.
NARRATOR: With the date of Micah's wedding right
around the corner, Terri and Dennis Rine
continue questioning her decision.
Just the week prior to her wedding,
we were just hanging out.
And I said something to her about the fact
that I'm so disappointed that you're
not going to have any children.
She loves kiddos.
And she said, well, why would I not have children?
And I said, well, Thomas has made it real clear
that he does not want to have children.
And that he has no plans of being a dad.
Before I walked her down the aisle,
I said, Micah, it's still not too late.
If you want to back out of this, I'll support you 100%.
I want what's best for you.
And she just said, no, let's go with it.
And so we did.
We walked down the aisle and the marriage took place.
I believe they still lived here for two
semesters, almost a whole year.
And then she had received a nursing job
with a clinic in Memphis and they moved to Memphis
or rather to Bartlett, which is just
on the outskirts of Memphis.
NARRATOR: Bartlett was a big change for Micah Rine Pane.
At twice the size of Searcy, Arkansas,
it was a completely different world than the small town
Christian girl was used to.
Micah graduated in 2005 and moved to Memphis shortly after.
And worked in labor and delivery at Methodist
and then came about to work with us at MOGA.
She was the loveliest soul.
Business manager, Melissa Conklin,
runs a women's clinic in Bartlett, Tennessee.
She saw Micah blossom as a nurse.
Her co-workers would have said that she was the nurses' nurse.
That she was the nurse that you wanted on your side, the one
that you wanted to be there to help you with a patient.
She worked at an OB/GYN group here.
And they were very close.
They're all women.
They're all very close together.
NARRATOR: Micah's personal life however,
was not running quite so smoothly.
I think they were a little suspicious of Thomas.
And Micah was becoming less happy, I'll say.
They rarely went home.
And it got to be less and less.
They started missing some of the holidays, which were
very important to the Rine's.
The thing that I noticed the most
was her making excuses for Thomas not wanting to be there.
There was an example with my parents' 50th wedding
anniversary and my dad's birthday.
And we had a big celebration.
And everybody was excited to come and spend a good weekend
together Micah came.
But she had to make excuses for Thomas
not wanting to come and have fun.
Thomas was always awkward around our family.
But he knew about us giving advice to Micah
and trying to have her think about that
a lot more than she did.
NARRATOR: On the rare occasions that Micah's family did get
a visit from her and Thomas, they
were able to catch glimpses of his troubled personality.
Thomas had a hunting dog.
And he told the hunting dog to stay in the back of the truck.
And then Thomas went off to do something else,
working on a trailer.
Well, as the dog was still pretty much a pup,
it saw Thomas go over there and work on the trailer.
And then the dog got off the truck
and walked towards Thomas.
Thomas screams at the dog.
I told you to stay on that truck.
And he picked the dog up by the ears
and threw it back in the truck, extreme anger,
extreme violence.
NARRATOR: There were also hints that Tom's
behavior toward his wife could also be highly volatile.
We would talk back and forth at least twice
a week on the phone.
I'd just ask her how things are going.
And she would hint at, well, Thomas and I had a good day.
We were able to work in the yard today without any issues.
Well, we had a good day today.
We didn't have any arguments or fights.
NARRATOR: Looking back, it was readily
apparent Micah was in a relationship
with a controlling husband.
We don't know that he ever hit Michael
physically, but the yelling and screaming and belittling.
You're so stupid.
Why can't you get this right?
And then at the other extreme of saying, oh, you're so sweet.
I love you so much.
It wasn't like bruises and cuts
and scratches and broken bones and cigarette burns.
It wasn't that kind of domestic violence.
It was the kind of scars in her heart and her spirit dampened.
And all those things that made her who she was, many of those
were taken away.
She was basically wearing herself
down trying to be the perfect wife, employee,
and hopefully a mother.
The things that we saw in her relationship
were very typical observations that you
would see in someone who is trying
to manipulate another person.
But at the time, we didn't know that's exactly what it
was because it's so deceptive.
NARRATOR: Micah's friends had similar concerns
about the type of husband Thomas Pate had become.
Micah kept us all very at bay.
I mean she was very separate.
She did have a co-worker that she ran with.
And she would meet her at Micah's house.
And they would go run.
She wasn't allowed inside the house.
If Micah took call at night and on weekends, and if she did,
then she couldn't sleep in the same bedroom as Thomas.
After talking to co-workers, co-employees,
her fellow church members, things of that nature,
she was struggling with being who she perceived
Thomas wanted her to be.
He just belittled her.
And I think that his drinking didn't help that.
Because it would be in those spells that he would
drink and things would come out of his mouth that it shouldn't.
NARRATOR: Thomas swore to Micah his drinking
days were behind him.
But that wasn't true.
Then one day in the spring of 2009,
Micah discovered alcohol wasn't her husband's only vice.
He actually spent the weekend with a young woman in Tunica.
NARRATOR: The fears Michael's family
had about her husband's true nature
were slowly being confirmed.
This was a man who was anything but the devout Christian
he had claimed to be.
Easter, 2009.
While Micah Pate goes to spend the holiday with her parents
back in Arkansas, her husband, Thomas,
says he has other plans.
She had come to our house for a weekend.
And he was going hunting, is what he said.
NARRATOR: The next week, she's back at work as usual.
Now, she went home one day and surprised Thomas.
And he said he was sick so he wasn't going to be working any.
So she thought she would go home and fix him some soup
during the middle of the day.
And when she got there, he was on the phone with somebody
that he seemed to be talking rather intimately to.
NARRATOR: Back at work, Micah can't hide her distress.
Thomas's supposed hunting trip had clearly been nothing more
than a cover story.
I remember Micah seeing a provider in my office,
being totally, totally distraught,
to the point of where I went and got her stuff,
and helped her out the door.
And she went home.
We found it out in investigating for the trial
that he actually had met a woman on a flight to Atlanta.
And he was indeed in communication with her.
And had met her for a weekend at the casinos
in Tunica, Mississippi.
NARRATOR: Micah is devastated.
But when she heads back home to celebrate her 26th birthday
with her family shortly after, she doesn't tell
them about Thomas's affair.
Micah did not confide in us at all
about any struggles that she was having in her marriage.
We were even unaware that there had been indiscretions
with at least one other woman.
We were unaware of his promiscuity and his attraction
to pornography on his computer.
NARRATOR: After her birthday weekend,
Micah returns to Tennessee more determined than ever
to make her marriage work.
Then, two days later on the night of April 30, 2009,
Michael's parents receive an unexpected call.
We got a call that Thursday night.
I think it was around 10:00, 10:30 was the first call.
Thomas said, hey, do you know where Michael is?
She's going out for a run.
She hadn't come back.
She normally would walk her dog and go on runs by herself
because her runs were lengthy.
They would be like six miles, anywhere
from six to 12 miles at a time.
Thursday night, which was the 30th, Micah worked late night.
It was kind of a dreary, rainy night.
That was not uncommon for her to go running.
It was uncommon for her to go running late at night,
in the dark, in a rainstorm.
Where could Micah be?
Where's Micah?
You know, the dog was there.
She wasn't there.
And he just didn't know.
No we haven't heard from her.
But, please, call us and let us know if you hear
anything of what's going on.
And so there was at least one other call, or maybe two,
I can't remember.
But on the final call, it was OK,
Thomas, you need to be calling the police and start a search.
We packed our stuff and headed to Memphis immediately.
It's about a two hour drive.
And at that point when we got to the house,
he had already organized a search party.
And they had been at it for several hours.
He'd notified people in the neighborhood,
her friends, her co-workers, everyone was looking for Micah?
Where was Micah?
So there's this big search, this big hunt for Micah
the evening of the 30th.
We got to Memphis between 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning.
And so as soon as we got there, he said,
well, she's gone out for a run.
So I started running the routes that I knew that we had been
on, different routes that we had run
from her house around Bartlett.
NARRATOR: While her husband searches for signs of Micah,
Terri tries to piece together what might have happened.
There are too many things that make no sense.
One of the interesting things that Terri discovered early on
was Thomas had put out the trash that day.
And in the trash were quite a few bottles of tequila
and I forget what else.
And Terri asked him about it said,
hey, what are all these bottles doing in your trash?
And Thomas said, well, sometimes people come by and just
put their trash in my trash.
During the night, I asked, Thomas, you know,
just occurred to me.
Did you all have a fight?
Or did you have a disagreement?
And maybe she's just left and spent the night
with a friend or something?
He said, no, they hadn't had a disagreement.
Nothing had happened.
Detective Todd Halford is also suspicious of Thomas's version
of events.
As I walked around the house, instead of Thomas
sitting or talking to anybody or talking to the officer,
he actually followed me throughout the house.
Made small talk with me while I was looking
at different things, explaining things
that didn't need explanation.
Lieutenant Halford checked the weather reports against when
Thomas said she went running.
And there were severe storm warnings
with lightning and severe rain at that time when
she was supposed to be running.
Heavy rain, heavy thunder, most people
don't go jogging in that, even if they're
training for a marathon.
As we were looking through the house,
you know Micah's purse is still at the house.
Micah's phone is still at the house.
Her ID is still at the house.
I mean, even, when you go jogging or go the gym,
you take your phone with you.
NARRATOR: 12 hours after Micah supposedly went missing,
Casey Rine arrives in Tennessee to help with the search.
I drive to her house.
And at her house, there's yellow tape everywhere.
There's police cars everywhere.
And it starts to make me even more alarmed.
I believe Lieutenant Halford came to the house about 7:00.
And that's when he moved us to the police station
to continue the investigation there.
So I go on to the police station.
And the first person I see when I walk in is Thomas.
And I walk in.
And we meet in the middle of the lobby and we hug.
And I'm crying and he's crying.
And I'm like, we're going to find her.
It's going to be OK. We're going to find her.
It's going to be OK.
And he's telling me, I'm sorry.
I don't know where she is.
I'm sorry.
I don't know where she is.
And that's the last time that I've spoken to Thomas.
NARRATOR: In the meantime, word of Micah's disappearance
spreads.
We called husbands.
We went and got four wheelers, side by sides.
And we went to the Loosahatchie Bottoms to look for her.
NARRATOR: The Loosahatchie Bottoms
is a remote wooded area just a few miles
from Thomas and Micah's home.
We did that for a few hours and came up with nothing.
NARRATOR: Back at the Bartlett Police Department,
investigators are already working on the assumption
that Micah had not simply had a fall
or become lost while jogging.
The interrogations started at the police station.
One of my first questions for Lieutenant Halford,
why are you taking Thomas to this other place?
He goes, well, typically in these situations,
the first person we have to eliminate is the spouse.
And so we're going to question him separately from the family.
And I was like, OK.
And of course, the husband is one of the suspects.
Almost 75% to 90% of the time that someone ends up dead,
the spouse ends up as a suspect at some point.
NARRATOR: This is the moment when it suddenly
dawns on the Rines that their son-in-law had
a hand in their daughter's disappearance.
That's when our conversation started to move to, well,
does he know something about it?
So that's when it began to sink
in that we've got a problem.
When we were interviewing him up here at headquarters
without the door closed, just a regular room,
just sitting there talking to him,
any time we would ask him a question that was the least
bit pointed, that would maybe position him to give
us an answer, he didn't want to give us,
he'd start dry heaving.
Around noon is when we started to move towards,
I think Thomas knows something, where she's at or--
so as that progressed, we became more and more concerned.
NARRATOR: As Bartlett Police go through the home
they have one question in mind.
Had Thomas Paine harmed his wife?
They take computers.
They take phone bills.
They take the actual phones.
The police uncover a lot of different things,
from multiple bottles of alcohol,
to a history of pornography.
All through that search afternoon, more and more doubts
began to arise about, what's going on here?
We're not getting the whole story.
There's things here that don't add up.
And they start going through more personal items.
And it turned out that Micah kept a journal.
The journal was very revealing.
This journal was intended to be between Micah and God.
There was one entry in her prayer journal
in February before this happened in April.
And she had a whole paragraph that
spoke to Thomas's indiscretions and unfaithfulness.
Through Micah's journal, cops begin
to build a picture of the troubled days and weeks
before her disappearance.
I think it became clear to her that he was having an affair.
And she may have confronted him with it.
And they were beginning to argue.
And they were arguing.
And I think it got more and more frequent.
I was one of the last people that saw Micah alive.
NARRATOR: Confronted by police with evidence
of his infidelity, his drinking, and his wife's
obvious unhappiness with the state of their marriage,
Thomas Pate begins to crack while being interrogated.
It became clear that he was more involved
in the disappearance and the ultimate demise of Micah
than he was letting on.
NARRATOR: Under intense questioning,
Thomas denies that he knew anything
about his wife's whereabouts and demands
to speak with his father.
And he's not telling the Bartlett Police anything
except for her leaving, she's gone jogging,
he doesn't know where she is.
And the father comes in and just wants him to tell
the police where Micah is.
Just tell them where she is.
He went from being very aggressive and telling Thomas,
you know, don't lie to me.
Tell me if you hurt--
tell me where Mike is.
He went from that, within a matter of minutes,
to Thomas confessing.
Around 8:00 that night, the police pulled me and my mom
and my dad into the side room.
We found that Thomas had made the statement that he had shot
her and left her lying in this low lying area that
was real muddy and marshy and during a rainy season,
it floods.
NARRATOR: This area was the Loosahatchie Bottoms,
the very place that Melissa Conklin
and Micah's other worried colleagues
had searched for much of the day.
Thomas had taken Micah there just a few days before.
It was her birthday just two days prior to this.
And so we had visited with her on the weekend, I had.
And said, oh, what did you do?
And she said, well Thomas found this new place
for us to go target shooting, I believe, and run the dogs.
But it's not very far from our house.
It's just you know just down the road.
NARRATOR: Thomas told detectives that on Thursday, April 30,
they had gone out for another target practice session,
but that a terrible accident had occurred.
According to Thomas, they would
go target shooting out there.
And that somehow there was a mistake
and he accidentally shot her in the back of the head.
The fact that he knew that whole time
and was lying to us the whole time, it's so painful.
It's so, so painful.
But we were just so eaten up with anger, just so mad,
that this man allowed her family to drive in, her mom, her dad,
her brother, her friends, to spend
this time looking, looking for her, hoping to find her.
for you to know all along that you
shot her and left her at the bottoms with ants and mud.
NARRATOR: As Micah's family processed the news,
a police search party was set out to recover her body.
I personally walked out to where they found her.
And it is way off the road in the middle of thorns,
brambles, mud, leaves.
And it looked as if he had probably carried her there.
Probably with the intention of throwing
around the Loosahatchie River.
Typically, if that rain would have continued, and it did,
her body probably would have washed
away had he not taken her to--
taken us there to get her.
Many bodies end up in the Loosahatchie unfortunately.
But he couldn't make it quite to the river.
So he left her there, face down, with a gunshot
hole in the back of her head.
And the interesting thing is, she's not wearing her shoes.
And she's wearing white socks, which
are not dirty on the bottom.
And this is a muddy, muddy place where she is, full of you know,
dried leaves, dead grass, thorns, things of that nature.
He will tell you that some extraordinary, unbelievable--
that her boots fell off her feet is why she had no shoes on.
She had all the same clothes that she had on when
she was at my office that day.
NARRATOR: It was yet another piece of evidence
that this may not have been a terrible accident.
On May 2, 2009, Thomas Pate was charged
with second degree murder.
The only time I got a true impression of Thomas was
when I was cross-examining him on the stand
for that bond hearing.
NARRATOR: Thomas succeeded in securing bail.
As he awaited trial, investigators
set out to prove that Micah's death
had been a deliberate act.
The gunshot wound is in the middle of her back,
the back of her head.
It goes through her ball cap.
And it's not quite a contact wound, but it is close.
We spent a lot of time at a Christian youth camp.
And one of the things we do at Camp Tahkodah is target shoot.
She was well aware of the safety issues involved
with guns and to not be in front of someone
that was with a loaded gun.
NARRATOR: Micah had plenty of experience with firearms
and so did her husband.
Thomas was very experienced in firing weapons.
He was also experienced at being with other people who
had weapons.
He went hunting all the time with his friends.
And going through the autopsy and seeing the crime
scene photos, and looking at the clothing, which was a ball
cap with the hole in the back of it,
and the blood and a little powder burn--
NARRATOR: The pathologist and ballistics experts
believed the shot had been fired at close range
and with some precision.
To them, this was no stray bullet.
Other evidence considered were his actions
after Micah's death.
There's no accident when you shoot somebody
in the back of the head.
One shot with her own gun?
And you don't call anybody?
And you don't call nine one one?
That wasn't an accident.
That's not an accident.
And I think that speaks something to the manipulation
and the heart.
That's a very telling thing to me that's very difficult for me
to give up.
He left Micah out there for over 24 hours, wild animals,
elements, it didn't matter.
And I do think that the evidence
from the texting, the leading us on a wild goose chase,
all of those different things led to that this
was more than an accident.
NARRATOR: To further prove that, there was the evidence
that police had found in the couple's home, signs
that their marriage was increasingly troubled.
The officers tracked back through his phone records.
And there were many texts with another woman
who was from New Jersey.
And then they got into the bills for the credit cards.
And that's when they discover that there was
a charge, charges made at Tunica, Mississippi,
charges made for actually the slot machines.
He used the credit card to play on the slot machines
and to pay for the hotel room that he and this woman from New
Jersey spent the night in.
I believe that she caught him in his adulterous exploits.
I believe that she caught him in some lies.
And she realized what was going on.
I don't know that to be true.
But in my mind, I believe that was the turning
point that led to her death.
NARRATOR: Micah's loved ones waited almost two years
for Thomas Pate's trial to begin with mixed emotions.
We wanted to hear what he had to say.
We wanted to know why.
Early on, he was offered a plea deal of second degree
murder and 15 years.
And we asked our friends to pray that he would take that.
And he did not.
It was a disappointment to us that he did not
take the plea on the front end.
He could have saved us all those months of grief.
We wanted to grieve the loss of our daughter.
We wanted to get used to this new normal of having a daughter
that was no longer with us.
Instead, we had to concentrate on all the stuff that was going
on in Memphis and make trips over there that
were very emotionally laden.
NARRATOR: On Monday, March 7, 2011,
Pate entered an Alford plea.
The Alford plea says, I'm not confessing to doing this
but the evidence against me is overwhelming.
And so therefore, I wave the white flag.
So there's not a confession.
There was part of me that felt some relief that this is over.
And so I say, that is God's way of saying,
here's the best blend of justice and mercy.
We get to feel some justice, that there's
a consequence being paid for what happened to Micah.
Micah Rine trusted she was marrying a good Christian man
and her faith gave her comfort when things began to go bad.
But in the end both her trust and faith
had been tragically misplaced.
I'm Michelle Trachtenberg.
And I'll see you next time on "Meet Marry, Murder."
Micah was stubborn.
Michael had a very willful personality.
And so I do believe that she was trying to make it work.
Even though the marriage was pretty bad,
she kept her faithfulness and her love for God.
And that lets us live with hope.
There will be a day when I'll see
Micah again because of the resurrection of Jesus.