It started out as a missing teenager.
Her uncle commits suicide a couple of days later.
He's supposed to talk to police. That's pretty weird.
And then I think the reason why we just kept at it
is because it started morphing into something more than that.
Then the child abuse came out the woodwork,
and that had so many twists and turns
that we could no longer imagine where the story would go next.
It's hard to talk about incest on TV. I mean, it is.
Even though we're not shocked by anything anymore,
we've got a new lead every day.
It gets more disgusting as it goes on.
And you could almost lose sight of Brittney
at one point in the story.
She's the one that started it.
Now we've got a beautiful young girl
and, you know what, I hate to say it,
but when you are an attractive young girl,
yes, people will pay more attention to you.
It's unfair, but the viewership,
"She's really pretty. I wonder what happened to her?"
And then their imaginations start running wild,
and then you're hooked into the story.
I wish it would convince somebody
who might know something to say something.
I'd like to think that the players in this
realize that the story has been written, except that ending,
and the... the least they could do
is give us an idea of what happened to Brittney.
I actually contacted Chessie Wood
and told her that the reason I needed to talk to her
was about her daughter's disappearance and...
Because I knew that if I told her
the real reason I wanted to talk to her,
she probably would not have shown.
I appreciate you coming in.
This has been a long time coming.
I apologize that it's taken so long for us to line this up.
They arrested me in front of my two babies,
and put me in a van
with all these people,
a couple I'm starting to suspect
had something to do with my daughter,
not being able to find her.
And you've done heard horror stories
about what they done at this point.
I knew I was in the van with monsters.
I said it then and I still believe it.
And Mendy was next to me.
They had me, um, shackled, which was good for them.
Um, and Mendy was sitting right next to me,
Wendy was behind me, and Dustin was next to her,
and James could have been there and was behind them.
And we're in the van,
and they're laughing.
Okay, they just got arrested for sex crimes towards children,
and they are laughing.
And I remember looking at them, and I looked around the van,
and I said, "What is so damn funny?"
And Mendy looked at me, as serious as she could be,
and she said, "God is gonna take care of this."
And I'll never forget, I looked around the van,
and I said, "It looks like he already is."
Chessie Wood first came onto the radar
during the course of conducting an extended forensic interview
with one of the victims.
During that time, Chessie was implicated
as participating in sex acts with a minor.
And during that time period,
Donnie was actively involved as well,
almost in a threesome-style sex act.
Based on my recollection, she did not confess outright.
However, she did make some admissions
that she was involved sexually with Donald Holland.
And the incident that she described with Donald Holland
was consistent with the description
of the events that occurred with the child victim as well.
Therefore it led us as investigators to believe
that she simply omitted the fact that the child was involved.
She did make some statements and some comments
to being sexually involved with Donald Holland
which coincided with the descriptions
of some the events that the child victim described,
and therefore there was enough corroborating testimony there
that led us to believe as investigators
that these events actually did occur,
and therefore Chessie Wood was subsequently charged criminally.
I knew I was going to jail.
When I get there, these women over here
is beating on their door, and they're telling me,
"I saw you on TV and I'm going to kill you."
Never in my wildest years
did I think it was gonna be my best friend
that was gonna be accused of, you know, such things.
So the night she got arrested,
I was at work, and I got the phone call,
I think it was from Paul, saying, "What can we do?"
Well, when she first went to jail, she didn't have a bond,
because, you know, you're dealing with sex crimes,
you have to go in front of a judge.
And when she got bail,
I posted 'em and got her out as soon as possible.
While we were in the process of bonding her out,
I knew she was gonna have to have an attorney.
I didn't know how she was gonna be able to pay for one,
you know, after having to post money for bond.
But God blessed us with Michael and Eileen,
and we couldn't have asked for a better defense team for her,
because those people worked night and day on her case.
My name's Michael McDuffie, 71 years old today.
I am what is known in the legal profession as a practitioner,
which is an individual lawyer that works basically alone.
I have my legal assistant who's smarter than I am.
And we practice in a wide area of the law,
criminal defense, litigation, immigration, basically.
I'm a trial lawyer. I'm very good at what I do.
In this particular case,
when we very first met Chessie,
Michael, being in the field that he's in,
was highly skeptical of her innocence.
And I kind of was hesitant,
and I wanted to take it one step at a time with her,
but talking to her and getting to know her just a little bit,
I came to the conclusion that what was going on with her
was absolutely horrific and deliberate.
In my opinion, law enforcement,
along with the district attorney's office,
whichever one was controlling whichever one at the time,
they were very angry with Chessie
when Chessie got on TV just before her arrest,
probably maybe four or five weeks before,
and called them out because they weren't doing anything
to look for her daughter.
Where did the truth and the justice of this get lost?
Because it was gone.
And Chessie got arrested for that reason.
She got arrested because she dared to say,
"You're not doing anything to help me."
So all of this bad news
was cascading out of her family tree,
and she still was hoping that some of that news
might actually lead to a revelation
of where her daughter was.
Of course, a lot of people still believe she knows.
She swears she didn't.
I'm not sure where I stand on that right now.
Maybe that hesitation... to believe her
is just the newsperson in me.
But she's been a desperate mom.
I mean, there's definitely some grieving going on there.
So I'm not sure.
Which is I guess why this is still a story.
I actually remember them sharing her mug shot
and on social media everybody actually saying that,
"Oh, I see the evil in her eyes."
No, that was sadness, that was despair, that was sorrow.
That wasn't evil.
That wasn't anything of that sort
that you were talking about.
She is a mother that is being accused of something
while her daughter is missing.
So when the sex crimes come out,
everything changed in a blink of an eye.
I lost all the public, once my family members, one by one,
started getting arrested, including me.
Especially the day I got arrested was horrible,
because it wasn't the arrest, it was the public that we lost.
KlaasKids left us.
And then we knew that the police was sure a no-go at that time.
And then social media jumped on with everybody else,
and started bashing me, my family,
didn't wanna look for Brittney no more.
They wanted me to go to prison was their main concern.
It was gonna come down to who people believed.
We needed her to take a lie detector test.
I think Michael, until that lie detector test was done,
he still had that maybe 10% doubt.
And basically I withheld judgment about her
until she took a polygraph examination,
which she volunteered to do, which impressed me enormously,
because people who tend to be guilty
are reluctant to take polygraph examinations
with a good polygrapher.
And I told her going in that this was a good polygrapher
and he has a reputation of being correct 99% of the time.
Chessie Wood was brought into the office
by her attorney's legal assistant.
I had talked to her attorney, Michael McDuffie,
and he had told me about the case
and what she was accused of.
I just sat down and started going through
what the allegations were,
and asking her, did she do this,
was she there on that particular day,
when her... her niece said
that she went into her room
and had sex with her father,
and then she came into the room and they all had sex together.
She said that never happened, never had...
never any sex with him, and had never...
never did anything with either one of 'em,
had no earthly idea.
In polygraph,
you either fail the polygraph test,
or you pass the polygraph test.
In the case of Chessie Wood,
the results were such
that I would say decisively that she was innocent.
I would be willing to go in a court of law, anywhere,
and say that she was completely innocent of this.
In the state of Alabama,
both sides have to agree for it to be admitted,
and the DA obviously did not want it admitted into evidence.
Unfortunately.
They would have brought it into evidence in a nanosecond
if she'd have failed it.
You know...
Oddly enough, I'm glad, if that's true, that's the case.
Um, she has to live with what she knew was happening.
If she didn't do anything, uh,
personally, physically, to a child,
she still knew that there were some things going on
that shouldn't be happening.
At that point, I would think you would try
to get your child out of that,
or you would report it,
although it's not easy when it's your own family.
But on... on such a whole scale...
I mean, this was an entire family.
That part I don't get.
In fact, with Wendy Holland's trial,
Chessie's sister, in Bay Minette, Baldwin County,
uh, Nicki Patterson, the prosecutor of that case,
back-doored the polygraph examination,
not the results of the polygraph examination,
but the inference was that Wendy had taken the polygraph
and had failed it.
So it's okay for the prosecution to use it
if the person who takes it fails,
but they have a real problem
when the person that they're accusing of a crime
takes a polygraph and passes it.
The same person gave both parties the polygraph.
When I was in court facing these charges,
my attorney actually told me,
no matter if you beat these charges or not,
you will... there's people in the public
that you'll always be deemed guilty.
No matter if your jury appears, 12 of 'em found you innocent,
it's not going to change people's minds.
It will change a very few,
but they had it set that I was guilty
and nothing's gonna change that.
To this day, they still believe I'm guilty.
The only reason that Chessie gave into this
is because it had been three years
of everywhere she went, people whispering,
people talking, people saying, people passing judgment.
It had been enough.
And when they took me up in court
and read each charge of mine,
each charge was 20 to life,
and all I could think of was if I ever go behind bars,
I'll never find her.
Nobody's going to look for her like me.
I mean, there's people that love and care about her, but they...
There's been times I've probably come near to death,
healthwise and everything else,
and I know there ain't nobody's going to get to that extent.
In court, it don't matter
if you're innocent or guilty to begin with.
It's what the jury believes.
And the judge can say, "Well, you can't..."
"That's not submissible. That's not submissible."
And before you know it, you can't even tell your story,
and if you can't tell your story, you're guilty.
She was never guilty of any of this.
Pleading guilty was part of a plea agreement
that I entered into for all the big charges to be dropped,
and the smaller charges she'd plead guilty to
would allow the district attorney to save face.
The fact is, she wasn't guilty of it either,
and I'd have tried the case, and I'd have won.
And they knew I'd have won,
but in doing so, I would have to put my client
through a lot of very unfavorable publicity,
and it was enough.
So it was a misdemeanor, and I agreed to it.
I had to be the voice of reason with both people,
telling Chessie, "It's okay if you don't wanna keep this fight up."
Because I think she felt guilty
that she was caving on any portion of it.
Um, but, "Michael, you need to understand this is her decision,
and you haven't had to live her life for the last three years."
"It's been awful. She can't go anywhere."
I can tell you of an incident
in a drive-through at a fast food restaurant,
where they didn't wanna serve her when they saw who she was.
I mean, it's horrible,
and I don't think people can fathom what it's been like.
Michael was dying to have that trial,
just because sometimes the DA's office needs to be reminded
that they can't step on people
just because they have DA attached.
At that point in time,
the prosecutor's office was inundated with cases,
and this wasn't the only case going on
in Mobile and Baldwin County.
There were hundreds of other crimes being committed monthly.
So...
But this one case took up a lot of time and a lot of manpower,
and so it was a lot easier,
rather than try all of these defendants,
these individuals just needed to be processed through the system
and sent away to pay their debt to society.
And my lawyer that was so steadfast about it all said,
"Chessie, they're offering you a deal."
And I said, "No way." I mean, I was still no way.
What I said was, "I'm never going to take a deal
that has anything to do with harming a child,
'cause I'm just... I'm not gonna do that."
"It's something I would never do
and I'm never gonna plead guilty to it."
He said, "What if the charge has nothing to do with a child?"
And I said, "What do you mean?"
And he said, "They're offering reckless endangerment,
which is the lowest of the totem pole misdemeanor,
class E misdemeanor."
Reckless endangerment is
if I'm driving my car,
and someone is in my car,
and I don't make them, you know, put on their seatbelt,
that's reckless endangerment.
So she was found guilty,
or pled guilty, to a misdemeanor charge.
Nothing to do with a child. Nothing to do... A misdemeanor.
How do you do that?
When she was arrested for sex crimes,
you had no evidence against her, zero evidence,
but you had all the evidence against everybody else,
and the girl didn't wanna testify against her.
So how does she still get charged,
for something that's nowhere near what you arrested her for?
How do you offer a plea deal for that?
Because they knew if they didn't get her with something,
she would sue 'em,
and that would bring down the whole department.
And by the way, for the record, she got no formal probation.
She was given informal probation,
which means she doesn't have to report to anybody.
All she has to do is stay out of trouble.
And she had never been in trouble,
and she's never been in trouble since.
That was the other thing, where is the criminal history
that justifies the way they vilified her in the media?
There is none.
She really was a victim
of both the judicial system,
the media, and the public.
She really was.
And the media, to this minute,
still can't let it go,
which is pathetic.
Yeah, it's hard to shake the banner
of being a child molester,
and if you didn't do it, I imagine it would be maddening.
That is when you have to trust
that prosecutors and law enforcement
have their act together,
and they studied this for a long time.
For me, knowing some of the law enforcement in town,
this is not something you take lightly.
I felt like if they were at this point in the prosecution,
they had their act together,
because this is something you don't wanna accuse anybody of
that didn't do it.
I felt like they probably had their act together.
It turns out they did.
But, yeah, if you are led down that path,
and you are a... a person that wasn't guilty,
but you were caught up in this,
it's sort of like being on death row and being innocent.
"Nobody's listening to me. How am I gonna...?"
"Unless somebody comes along
that befriends me and helps me out."
People think that the media
never tells a lie,
and people think that law enforcement never tells a lie.
And Michael will tell everyone,
"Law enforcement can tell you anything."
"They can lie to you about the color of their shirts."
"You... can't lie to them, but they can lie to you."
And people don't believe that, and people don't wanna think
that law enforcement would use those tactics, but they do.
They're not bad people.
They're doing their job in a sick situation like this,
where there was enough real evidence.
I cannot imagine being the detective in that and going,
"Oh, my God, this is awful."
But does it rise to the level
of making it okay to charge an innocent person?
No. And she's not the only one
that I believe is innocent in that situation either.
I believe that Scott Wood was wrongfully convicted.
Randall Scott Wood was interviewed a couple of times
by me and other detectives with Baldwin County Sheriff's Office,
and during the course of the initial interview
with Randall Scott Wood,
I remember specifically asking him,
"Did you have sex with Holland?"
"Because she said you did."
And he nodded his head yes, while saying no.
Okay, therefore I took that, again,
as a tacit admission that it probably did occur.
His body language throughout the interview was very telling.
The nonverbal cues for deception were all present.
He had very closed posture.
He displayed grooming gestures during key questions.
Again, the verbiage he used was all indicative of deception.
So I knew he certainly had something to hide.
Last night me and Scott sat on my front porch
talking about the moment he nodded to Eric Winberg.
Not even ten hours ago we had this conversation.
It is a repeated habit of Scott's,
no matter what he is thinking in his head,
when he's nodding at you,
it's to let you know he's listening.
He's not agreeing with nothing you say.
Her mother had a brain tumor.
Without my brother, this would still be going on, okay?
They'd still be molesting kids.
Molesters do not stop till they're caught.
That is a known fact.
So Scott was always... he was in the military his whole life.
He raised his daughter by hisself,
because her mother had brain cancer and died.
And so he was always like... He was the only boy.
He had four sisters that he had to protect amongst all of us,
so he was the protector.
He moves in with my sister. Here's these kids.
Of course he's going to make sure they're good.
And when he saw this...
he was blown away and he didn't know who to share this with.
So he said he called the rape hotline, the incest hotline.
He said four... He can prove four that he called.
And nobody even cared.
They would just, like, transfer him to another line.
Okay, so he gets it done. He gets the ball rolling.
Everybody's looking at Donnie.
And all of a sudden, without warning,
my brother, Scott Wood, gets arrested for the same thing.
And when I was in the interrogation room,
I was so stuck on Scott, I didn't even care about myself.
I was stuck on Scott, saying, "Y'all got him wrong."
And they were like, "That's your brother. Of course you're going to say that."
I ain't saying that about Wendy and Mendy, and they're my sisters.
Scott Wood would not hurt a child.
And this is what the cops told me about Scott.
"Well, Miss Wood, we don't think he's, you know, the type of man
that goes to a park to target children."
Detective Winberg said,
"I need to let you know something, Chessie."
Your brother, Scott, probably the most intelligent human being
I've ever had in this room."
And I said, "Yeah, he is. Very smart man."
And I said, "So why did he tell on himself?"
If he's that intelligent,
if he's the smartest person to ever be in this room,
why was he so stupid to tell on himself?
He had to have known if he told on somebody else,
it was going to come back.
And he said that,
"Well, we think that he wanted the victim to hisself."
"He did not want to share."
And I was like, "Back again,
to the most intelligent person in the room."
"He knows when he calls the cops,
she's being taken out of the home."
"That's what we do here to protect children."
"So how is he going to have her by herself?"
"Y'all was never going to leave her
with an uncle to begin with."
So that didn't make sense. None of it made sense.
They could not give me a good answer
why Scott Wood would tell on himself.
Scott Wood, this is what doesn't make sense to me,
the way that he comes to law enforcement
with this allegation of this abuse is happening in the house,
and then all of a sudden the allegation turns round on him,
that he's actually abusing.
It's my belief that he wanted exclusive access to ,
because when he learned that Donald Holland
was also having sex with Holland,
he did not like that,
and call it jealously, call it some sort of sick perversion,
but he did not like that
and wanted all to himself.
So I believe that he felt
that if he reported Donnie Holland for doing this,
that Donnie Holland would be taken out of the house,
and he would remain in the home alone,
allowed to pursue his relationship
with this child victim.
When the police showed up,
after Scott called them to Donnie and Wendy's house,
they asked Scott to take the victim to her sister's house.
He had to work that night, he worked night shift back then,
but he agreed to do so to get her to a safety place.
When he took her to her sister's house,
he ran by his hotel room to grab his uniform
for the company he was working at.
His plan was to drop her off and go to work as normal.
Again, in an attempt to build a very strong case,
I knew I had to pursue the leads that the victim had...
and the details that the victim had given,
in order to corroborate her statement.
And therefore efforts were made to travel to Saraland,
which is also in Mobile County,
to an area where she believed that he had taken her to a hotel
for the purposes of having sex with her.
And through a process of elimination,
I eventually located the hotel, found the bedding,
the comforter that was consistent
with her description of the bedding in the room,
description of the room,
and actually found records
where he had rented a room
for approximately $56 for one night
and which he paid cash.
And his name was on the ticket.
Then I hear that this hotel that he rode by with the victim,
um, was supposedly where something may have occurred,
and that the police was trying to figure out
what hotel this was.
And I, to this day, know for a fact
if they would have just called up Scott
and asked him what hotel, he would have told 'em.
He has never denied going by there to pick up a uniform.
No, he never... he never gave a full admission, confession,
if you will, of what he did.
We knew what he did based on what the victim told us,
and then the... those statements were corroborated
with some of the facts and receipts and things like that.
So we knew we could build a decent case against him,
but, no, he never gave a solid admission.
Her daddy's death, Wendy's incarceration,
and her two brothers being snatched out the home,
it's not Donnie and Wendy's fault,
it's Uncle Scott's fault.
And she named him for that reason.
They had no evidence.
He was never on a video either.
They never could place him doing wrong.
But I can tell you that
being the one that blew the lid on the whole thing,
and which is one... he is the one that did that,
he's the one that called, um,
I think that the victim was terrified
that her entire family was gonna disappear.
And she wasn't wrong. It happened anyway.
And I think there was a lot of anger about that,
and she was very angry with him for telling her secret.
But I asked her straight up.
I said, "I wanna know the truth. And don't lie to me."
You know. "Don't sit there and try to sugarcoat anything."
I said, "You know, I'm the oldest of all of you."
"I just wanna know, did Chessie mess with you?"
Which I already knew the answer.
She said, "No, you know Aunt Chessie wouldn't touch me."
And I said, "What about your Uncle Scott?"
"No, Uncle Scott saved me from them people."
You know, she said "them people."
She didn't say "my parents." She said, "them people."
But, yeah, so I know the truth from her mouth,
no... what the judicial system says.
I don't... I have no faith in the judicial system,
haven't for years before all this happened, so, I mean...
I think they got railroaded.
But, yeah, the family lost, the holidays are rough,
'cause I'm used to my house being packed out.
The last holiday we had, Thanksgiving,
we had three turkeys and a ham.
That's how many people was there.
And when I think about all them people,
they're either dead or in prison.
So I attended the sentencing hearing of Wendy Holland,
and while I was sitting in the pew,
there came a point where Holland
had written a letter to her mother
that was to be read prior to her sentencing.
And I remember the letter being read,
and it was almost impossible to hold back tears,
as... not only as a professional but as a husband and father.
You can't help but be affected
by what that young lady went through
and what she read.
It was very disturbing.
The police told me after their arrest,
they were diagnosed with multiple disorders
that was never diagnosed out here,
one of which was being a sociopath.
And, okay, I'm not a doctor, I had to ask,
"Exactly define what a sociopath is."
And this is how he explained it to me.
He said, "Miss Wood, do you have a table by you?"
I was like, "Yeah, I got a table".
He said, "Look at it." I said, "Okay".
He said, "You feel that fuzzy, emotional feeling
you have for that table?"
And I was like, "No."
And he said, "That's how Wendy Holland feels
against human beings."
"The same concern you have
about that old wooden table in your house."
I mean, you just listen to testimony, you know,
and you shake your head,
and then you hear some gasps and some sighs
from people in the audience,
which were either family members or relatives,
people who were surprised too about what they were hearing.
But then, you know, when she was found guilty,
and others were found guilty, you know,
you... you think, well, you know, maybe justice was done.
But, you know, was it? Because it's...
Everybody was abused in some kind of a way.
And if it went on for generations,
who knows who else is out there?
She condemned her mother
for allowing this to go on,
for allowing, um, her to be taken advantage of.
And not just be taken advantage of
by her father and other men,
but for her mother to actively participate as well.
And it was heart-wrenching.
Well, at the trial, the witness said,
"The only time my mother touched me
was to lead me to the monster in the shadows."
And that kind of resonated throughout the courtroom.
All the reporters, you know,
they were jotting that down in their notepads,
and they later on more than likely repeated it
in their live reports or stories that they put together, yeah.
Wendy Holland's charges were the most heinous
of every one of 'em, I believe.
Um, well, she was charged in both counties,
Baldwin County and Mobile County.
Baldwin County was rape of a child under the age of 12,
sodomy in the first degree,
and sexual torture of a child.
And when they told me this, I had to ask the police,
what... number one, what is sodomy?
I mean, if you're not a career criminal,
you don't know all these terms, so...
He explained to me
that sodomy is pretty much, um, intercourse
without the normal vagina.
Anywhere else of the body would be called.
And I said, "Okay. What is sexual torture of a child?"
And he said, "That is when..."
I wanted to know how is that different than rape?
And he said, "It's when you use an object on a child, sexually."
The jury might have been gone 45 minutes to deliberate.
They come back, find her guilty.
They sentenced her to 229 years.
She got the most time of any female
in the history of the state of Alabama.
My thought was, "Oh, now this makes sense." You know.
Makes sense in a weird way, you know.
I can see why all these people were charged,
and I can see why she went missing.
I believe the problem with me finding my daughter
is the police will not be truthful here.
If we can get to maybe some of things I've done inaccurate,
um, trying to find Brittney,
and some of things they done wrong
to find Brittney and the truth,
I believe if we could put it all on the table honestly,
we probably could find Brittney Wood.
Every now and then,
remains are found,
and we all immediately go, I wonder if it's her?
Not that I believe there'd be much left at this point,
'cause if you're out in the wild,
you're scattered to the wild.
But maybe there's a shallow grave somewhere.
Maybe there is a plastic container buried in a landfill.
I mean, you always wonder, where did she go?
What happened to her?
And at one point, I do remember basically
being given the instructions to shut it down.
What does that do to a child?
You'll always have that monster in the shadows.
I mean, you never shake this.
There's a lot of parties involved here
for someone not to, at some point, say,
"I've been living with this guilt
as long as I can handle it, and I'm glad you're here."
Part of the whole issue is,
all the people that were involved
are either in prison or dead.
So there's a lot of opinion
that you'll get her remains, like it's no big deal,
but the one person that's probably involved
that's still alive is in prison for the rest of her life,
plus 200 more years,
and the other one's dead,
that we think were directly involved
in the disappearance of Brittney Wood.
Well, that doesn't mean
that she shouldn't be charged if she's involved.
That doesn't mean that the family doesn't deserve answers.
It doesn't mean that they don't need to bring her home
and give her a proper burial.
No closure, no place to visit. I mean, it's awful.
And that, I think, is probably what's driven
most of our continued involvement.
Chessie is my friend now.
We went... We crossed that bridge a long time ago.
Mainly because I couldn't believe
the way they treated her, and they did treat her horribly.
I have a few hopes making a documentary like this.
I'd like to find my child.
My number one goal has always been to find Brittney Wood.
Number two, get justice for Brittney Wood.
Once I find her, the story's not over.
I know, and I've accepted,
if I find her, that's a whole new story.
Why is she here? Who did this?
How did they do it? When did they do it?
But that's a story I'd like to take on.
We're gonna look everywhere today. I mean everywhere.
Not just where they could have went,
but where she could have ended up at.
You all got it?
Yeah, so I got a message
on Facebook
from one of the people in prison
telling me what happened to her,
that she was killed and she was put at Rice Creek,
so here we are.