[dramatic music]
This is a case where a group of young,
vulnerable individuals fall under the power
of a manipulative psychopathic killer.
♪
A leader who uses fear and intimidation
to maintain absolute control
to commit the ultimate act.
A group of kids turn into a group of sadistic murderers.
If they didn't kill on his order,
he would kill them.
[dramatic music]
♪
[gentle music]
Well, Chapel Hill is the home
of the University of North Carolina,
and it's a quintessential college town.
It's a very progressive, very well-educated area.
But it's still--frankly, it's a pretty small town.
That's why it was so surprising
that somehow things went so bad.
I was at the sheriff's office.
It was afterhours, and I got a phone call.
It was Lynn Giddens.
Lynn has been a friend of my mother
since I was a young child.
She told me about Josh Bailey, who was 20 years old.
And his parents, Steve and Julie,
they had not seen Josh in several weeks.
At the time when the missing persons' call came in to us,
it was one that had been given to another police department.
But the Baileys were not at all satisfied
with their response,
which drove them to reaching out to investigator Horne.
The next morning, I was able to directly ask the Baileys
some questions about Josh
and the circumstances of him being missing.
They said that Josh didn't stay at their home.
He kind of, what they call, couch surfed.
Josh was 20 years old.
He did not want to live at home anymore.
But we spoke often, almost every day.
We told Tim Horne that July 21st
was the last time we saw Josh.
He had come by our offices,
and it was just a normal sort of day.
We made plans about coming for cookout
and coming for my birthday.
He left and I just expected to see him
in a couple days for cookout.
He didn't show up.
[uneasy music]
A week went by.
And when he missed his mother's birthday and didn't call,
they knew something was wrong.
No one that knew Josh thought this was typical.
He just seemed to have dropped off
the face of the earth.
♪
They also indicated that Josh had some mental difficulties.
Josh was eight years old when we adopted him.
He had cognitive issues,
which made him think a little slower,
act a little different.
He worked so hard to fit in and be accepted,
and he was kind and generous.
He was very trusting,
which was not always a good thing.
The first thing I did was a BOLO,
a be on the lookout,
and send that out to surrounding agencies
in an effort to locate Josh.
We tried to make contact with Josh's friends
and see if they can shed some light on where he was
or who had seen him.
We did that for a day or two.
They were all trying to help the best they could.
But no one's seen him in several weeks.
I knew something was really wrong, I knew it.
- - I checked P2 - P, which stands for Police to Police,
and it's a network where I can access reports
that have been filed with other jurisdictions.
When I checked Josh's name, I was stunned
'cause I found him as a possible suspect
in a residential break-in.
I actually felt a little relieved
because at least he had been reported
to have been seen on July the 28th,
a week after his father had last seen him.
But there was gonna be a problem.
The report listed Josh, it listed a Matt Johnson,
and most importantly, it listed a Brian Minton.
I knew Brian Minton.
He was 18 years old.
I had dealt with Brian from the time
he was very young, a juvenile.
He was convicted of a firearms offense.
Brian had the potential to be very violent.
He's also charged with rape.
He was also a suspect in an arson.
Basically, everyone considered him a problem
waiting for a place to happen.
Josh's risk is...
quite substantial
because of this bad crowd.
You can only hope
that he hasn't fallen prey
to either being a victim
or involved in any other activity.
He has a documented
developmental disability,
which can cause numerous
cognitive issues.
He's lacking in many of these higher order
processing abilities
that make us capable of making adult decisions.
So he's more like a child
in that he's likely to be taken advantage of,
he's likely to be trusting of individuals he shouldn't trust.
Based on this, detectives need to find Brian Minton
and the guys he's hanging out with,
'cause if anyone knows what happened to Josh Bailey,
it'll be Minton and his friends.
The break-in that Brian, Josh, and Matt Johnson
were supposedly involved in
happened at the Krombach residence.
So I actually left the sheriff's office,
and I drove to the Krombach's home.
And when I spoke to Sarah, the homeowner's daughter,
I told her the reason I was there,
that I'm investigating a missing persons
and I wanted to ask her about a break-in
in which a number of long guns were taken.
Sarah indicated that she was semi-friends with Brian Minton.
Sarah hung out with Brian Minton
and a group of people that he was friends with.
She basically spoke fairly highly of Brian.
She said, "Hey, he was able to get my dad's guns back."
The story that Brian told her
was that Josh and Matt Johnson came by his home
and they showed him the weapons,
and so he simply returned them to Sarah.
So Matt Johnson and Josh Bailey
are listed as suspects solely on the word of Brian Minton.
But nothing is ever what it seems to be with Brian.
[ominous music]
I actually went to high school with Brian's father, Greg.
And so I call Greg Minton and ask him to have Brian call me.
[phone ringing]
Within just a minute or two,
I'm getting a phone call from Brian.
And Brian was very elusive with his answers
to the questions I posed to him about Josh.
And then he said, "Uh, gotta go."
And he hung up.
And I left numerous messages, he wouldn't call me back.
So that leaves me only really one other lead,
and that was Matt Johnson.
So I went by Matt's home and knock on the door.
Matt was not there, but I spoke with his mother.
She basically tells me
that he was now in a mental institution
that, in late July, he checked himself into.
And she told me that he was in fear of his life
and he basically was on the run.
When you hear this, you start to feel that in your gut
that things are not gonna end well.
As we get closer, we're starting to get a smell
of something decomposing.
We all looked at each other and knew what we had found.
He was the Charles Manson. He ran the show.
He dictated who did what.
This group was driven by loyalty,
but there was also that factor of being afraid.
♪
[tense music]
I'm at a dead-end with Josh at the moment.
He can't be located.
Brian Minton's not cooperating,
and I'm very suspicious of him.
♪
So that leaves me Matt Johnson,
who at the time Josh had disappeared
had checked himself into a mental institution.
So I make arrangements with the facility,
and I go to him.
I assumed they would have a conference room
or someplace that I could speak to Matt, but they did not.
And Matt is so paranoid that anytime someone came close,
he just stopped talking.
But then Matt starts a story,
and he talks about Brian Minton and the Minton garage.
Matt was involved in a group of people.
There were at least 10 to 11 people
involved in this group at different times.
They were all fairly young, 18, 19, 20 years old.
Brian Minton's garage was the gang hangout.
It is where the group convened,
they partied, they did drugs,
they planned criminal activity.
Matt Johnson said that they were involved
in some house break-ins and at least one armed robbery.
So they were involved in some very serious crimes.
Brian seemed to be the ringleader.
He's the one who would give the orders
and lead the discussions
when they were planning their various crimes.
Brian was the enforcer of that group of kids.
They were loyal to one another,
but there was also that factor
of being afraid of what would happen
if they tried to separate themselves from that group.
Matt said that they would allow Josh to party with them,
to hang out with them,
but Josh was not considered a member of the gang.
They saw him as harmless.
Matt had introduced Josh to the group.
Matt brought him in.
Then Matt told me, he tells Josh
that he's been in so much trouble
with the law enforcement that he was kind of thinking,
"Well, maybe I can snitch on a few people,
get myself out of trouble."
"I'll be a narc," is what he called it,
"be a snitch."
And he tells Josh this.
Josh files it away, doesn't really repeat anything.
Until July 29, 2008.
Matt said Brian Minton wanted to buy some marijuana.
And Matt says, "Hey, I know somewhere I can get that."
And then Josh happens to blurt out,
"Well, you know he's a narc."
[suspenseful music]
According to Matt, Brian thought he was being set up.
♪
And so they kind of had a makeshift court
with Brian Minton presiding.
Matt, trying to save his own skin,
introduced Josh as the person who was talking to police.
Then they started questioning Josh about his involvement,
could he be the one talking to the police.
Josh starts to shut down and won't communicate.
And Matt's talking a mile a minute,
trying to convince Brian that he's not the snitch.
And then Brian Minton came up with the twisted idea
that Josh Bailey would fight Matt Johnson.
The winner of the fight would be innocent, not be the narc.
The loser would be the narc.
♪
Brian Minton has these two individuals
sort of fighting it out in front of the larger group.
What Brian is proposing here
is not about finding out who the snitch is.
It's about exerting his control and authority over this group.
He wants to make sure everyone stays in line.
No one is challenging the process.
No one is asking for more information.
They all want to belong. They all want to be accepted.
They all want to show their loyalty
and trust to Brian in this process.
He's using these individuals as sort of chess pieces,
as pawns to influence the larger group.
And that shows a tremendous amount of insight
into the psychology of the people beneath him,
and it's actually quite impressive.
According to Matt,
they really didn't want to fight each other.
So it was more of just a pushing contest.
Josh was a much more passive person than Matt Johnson.
Josh was not in a good position to defend himself.
So ultimately,
it was determined that Josh was the narc.
According to Matt, Brian, out of frustration,
kind of says, "That's it. We're going."
And Brian and several members of the group took Josh away.
Matt says that about an hour, hour and a half later,
they come back without Josh.
And Brian comes up to Matt and basically says,
"If you [BLEEP] me the way Josh did,
same thing is gonna happen to you."
♪
I was really fearful that Matt was going to
just stop talking altogether
because he was that nervous.
But fortunately,
he gave me a number of names of who had been involved.
And the top of the list is Brian Minton.
And there were a number of other individuals
by nicknames BG, Blackjack, Jake.
I did not know these other names.
It's hard to fake being that scared.
That's why Matt was believable.
He was just that scared.
And after that interview,
I came back to the sheriff's office
and told my supervisors,
"I can't tell you where he is at this moment,
"who all was involved,
but I can tell you that he's gonna be deceased.
Josh is dead."
♪
[uneasy music]
At this point in our investigation,
we have got a number of participants
that we have keen interest in.
Kind of went definitely from missing person
to a homicide type of atmosphere.
So the decision was made
to bring in the State Bureau of Investigation.
The question that we were all asking ourselves was,
"What happened after Josh Bailey
was taken from that garage?"
So following up on information that Matt had provided,
we attempted to identify all of the members
of Brian Minton's crew.
Matt Johnson didn't have the full names of anyone.
He just knew by nickname.
We researched Brian and his associates,
and we got in different vehicles, tinted windows.
We would drive by different homes, see who was there.
We had photographic lineups completed
but we needed Matt to identify them.
Several days after the SBI got involved in the case,
investigator Horne and Phillip and I
went down to interview Matt.
We wanted to see if his story changed
or if it remained the same.
We started out with the photo lineup.
One by one, Matt was able to identify
each player in this game.
Brian Minton was there,
Jacob Maxwell,
Jack Johnson.
All these individuals were somehow involved
in what happened to Josh that day.
Investigators don't know what happened to Josh,
but they do suspect foul play.
Matt Johnson has talked to them,
but they're not sure he's being completely truthful.
And they need to push him a little more,
but not push too hard,
'cause they don't want him to clam up.
They need his cooperation.
How do you get a gang member to talk?
You have to find leverage.
You have to find something that they care about,
that brings meaning to them.
And so the best way to appeal to him
is gonna be appeal to his humanity, his emotional side.
This is not a cold-hearted criminal individual.
This is someone who just wanted to belong.
At this point, we decided to tighten the screws
a little bit on Matt Johnson.
So when the time was right, I simply told him
I wanted him to read a letter that Julie Bailey had written.
One of the things I said in the letter
was that I felt it was important for him
to know that Josh actually respected him
and looked up to him and considered him a friend.
And please, if you have any sense of compassion at all,
if you know where he is, please tell us,
that this was killing us, not knowing.
Matt read it,
and then he put it back in the envelope,
kind of hung his head, and he said,
"I didn't know Josh was adopted.
I'm adopted too."
I simply asked a question,
"Tell me what happened to Josh Bailey."
This is where Matt Johnson decided to change his story.
Matt told us that, in fact, he didn't stay in the garage,
that he went with Josh Bailey and the others.
Josh Bailey was led to a wooded area
to a fallen tree.
There was a hole where the tree used to be.
Brian tells Josh to go stand in this hole.
[uneasy piano music]
Matt was standing about 20 to 25 feet away,
and he closed his eyes.
♪
He didn't see it. He just heard two gunshots.
[gunshot]
Matt told us Jack Johnson was the one who shot Josh.
And he said that he could take us to where the body was.
We wanted to find that crime scene as quick as possible.
Matt didn't know the names of any of the roads
that we really needed to take to get to this location.
But as we're driving, we end up this dirt drive,
it's called Twisted Oak Drive.
And he said, "Hey, this is it."
It's already starting to get dark,
and we're all headed out through the woods
trying to find this site.
I could tell that Matt Johnson was nervous.
I was even nervous.
I'm physically with somebody who's showing me
where somebody has been killed
and where somebody's body is located.
And it's intense.
We just keep on and on, going down through the woods.
We're probably a couple of hundred yards
from the road at this point.
Every so often the wind would blow,
and you could smell decomp.
Anybody that's worked homicide and death investigations,
you know the smell, and so we knew we were close.
The smell gets stronger and stronger and stronger,
and Matt Johnson stops us and tells us,
"This is where Josh Bailey was shot."
Matt told us that Josh was buried here.
We look down, we look around,
and we see a hole in the ground.
We don't see Josh. Josh is not there.
That's when one of the gang members drives past us.
We had to act immediately.
We couldn't let him make a phone call.
[siren wails]
The next step was to get somebody to talk.
[tense music]
The fact that Josh wasn't at this location
was a big punch in the gut.
But I could smell what I was smelling,
and it looked like, to me,
Matt Johnson is telling the truth.
Matt was white as a ghost, white as a ghost.
And he was totally stunned that that body was not there.
Did the body get moved? You know, what's going on?
I was called to the scene for Joshua Bailey's case.
We went to two different spots in that location.
One was an uprooted tree.
This is where we had been told by Matt
they decided to place the body because they thought,
"We'll just use the hole that's already been made.
That way we won't have to dig it quite as deep."
There's no body in this hole,
but you can smell the decomp from the hole.
The second spot, there were several trash bags
filled with dirt and one that was unused.
And in those bags, there's a lot of odor of decomposition.
And so it was apparent that whoever came out there
was trying to get rid of that evidence,
but they just overloaded these bags.
I think they got tired and they realized,
"We can't do this and this is not gonna work."
Investigators saw evidence there
that supported that Josh had been killed.
They could smell that there had been a dead body there.
Clearly, the body had been moved.
We were convinced that he had been killed.
We just needed to find him.
During this crime scene processing,
myself and Justin were at the edge
of this cul-de-sac talking.
And one of the gang members, Jacob Maxwell, drives past us.
He looks at us, and we look at him,
and there's just that "oh crap" moment.
You've got a big crime scene truck there,
and he would have known that we were onto him.
[indistinct radio chatter]
We had to act immediately at that very second
'cause we couldn't let him make a phone call.
We couldn't let him get away, so he was arrested.
And then we had to get arrest warrants rapidly
on Brian Minton and Jack Johnson.
And that's what we did.
Without Josh's body, myself and Tim Horne
were uncomfortable charging anyone with murder.
So we decided to charge this group of friends
with kidnapping.
This gave us the ability to sit them down
and really interrogate them about who killed Josh Bailey.
[ominous music]
♪
Matt Johnson had told us that Jack Johnson was the one
who was responsible for killing Josh.
So it was really important for us to interview Jack Johnson.
We start off with very easy questions.
We interviewed him for hours and hours,
and then I finally just asked him...
Jack responded very adamantly
that he didn't kill Josh, it was Matt.
I don't know if Jack is telling me the truth
or if Matt's telling me the truth.
All right.
And Jack went on and on
and gave a lot of details about everything.
Beef was Brian's street name.
He was a heavyset kid, and they all called him Beef.
Jack Johnson is telling them
he didn't fire the shot that killed Josh Bailey.
It was Matt Johnson.
But one thing that Jack and Matt agree on
is that Brian Minton ordered it.
And that means that, legally,
Brian Minton could be implicated
in the murder of Josh Bailey.
Charles Manson was never actually convicted
of killing anybody.
He had others kill for him,
which is exactly what Brian Minton has done.
If any of them speak, they can be arrested.
And so by having everybody there,
he's sort of implicating everybody in his own crimes.
It makes the investigation that much more complicated
because they're loyal to the gang,
they're loyal to Brian,
and they'll do anything to cover up what they've done.
All right.
We felt like, at this point,
it was important to talk to Brian Minton.
Brian's lawyer told him
he needed to keep his mouth shut.
The next person in line was Jacob Maxwell.
This group was driven by loyalty and fear to begin with,
and then it became, "What am I gonna do to protect myself?"
So the next step was to try to ramp up anything we could
with anybody else that might know something
about what happened or to get somebody to talk.
That's when we reached outside of
just the initial arrestees that we had
and started contacting other members of the group,
and Phillip spoke to Garry Bright.
When I met Garry Bright, we got in the car,
but I could see in the background
that somebody was actually watching us.
And so Garry said, "If you take me to this area
"where I feel comfortable talking to you at,
then I will tell you what I know about Josh Bailey."
I jumped on that.
Garry said that, after the shooting had occurred,
Brian was at his house laughing about the way
Josh fell after he had been shot.
And then Garry told me that Matt Johnson got intoxicated
and got emotional and confessed
that he was the one who killed Josh.
Garry Bright told us that Matt had admitted to him
that he had to do it
because they were gonna kill him also
if he didn't pull the trigger.
And also Garry said that he thought he knew
where Josh's body was moved, and I simply said,
"Garry, will you show me how to get there?"
It's one of the most critical parts of this case.
As far as I was concerned,
this is our best chance to find Josh's body.
[light dramatic music]
We believed Josh was initially killed
in one location
and his body was moved to another location and buried.
Garry Bright said he knew where the body was.
But he had no idea exactly where it was at.
He just knew it was on a road near Jordan Lake.
When we arrived, we turned down a dirt road
and he told me to stop when we got to this path.
And he said, "This is it."
So we walked on foot back into the area.
But we didn't see anything that stood out to us
as where Josh's body was at.
This point, I'm trying to figure out
if Garry is telling the truth.
The next morning, on September 12th,
the cadaver dog met us in this wooded area
and the handler let the dog search.
Jordan Lake's very similar to the first location
at Twisted Oak.
It was just lots of trees,
a lot of leaf coverage on the ground.
Very soon, after the dog was let out,
he focused on a specific area.
The area was not very remarkable at first glance.
Somebody could walk right over top of it and never seen it.
There was a shallow depression
covered by leaf litter.
We excavated using troughs and spoons and scoops
to place the soil into buckets.
Somewhere between 18 inches and 24 inches down,
we found the fingertip of a latex glove.
There was a chance that you could find a fingerprint
or some type of DNA material inside of that.
As we continued, we began to observe
that some of the metal tools
started to etch on the surface,
and some people's shoes even fell apart.
At the time, we didn't know for certain,
but it's consistent with applying acid to the remains
intentionally to accelerate the process of decomposition.
As we dug further, we found a bundle of tarps
that were blue and black,
clear plastic secured with tape.
And this object was long, probably about five feet long.
You could feel that something was inside that bundle.
We all looked at each other and knew what we had found.
We believed it was Josh Bailey's body.
Because it was wrapped, you face a decision:
do you cut through it to confirm that it contains
the physical remains of the victim you're searching for
or do you extract it in situ, in place,
and transport it to the medical examiner?"
We decided on the latter.
The medical examiner was able to identify
the body as Josh Bailey
and determine that Josh was a victim of two gunshots.
He was executed.
He was shot in the back of the head.
We couldn't say for sure,
but we believed he was shot at very close range.
[gunshot]
He fell from the first shot,
and then he was shot again to make sure he was dead.
[gunshot]
[somber music]
♪
It's a Saturday morning,
and I went out
and started sweeping the front porch,
and I saw car pull in our driveway
and I--I thought, "Well, that's funny.
That looks like my preacher's car."
And then Tim came walking up,
and I saw my preacher behind him.
And I knew.
[sniffles]
I just fell down.
I remember thinking, "Well...
at least we found him."
So at this point now we have two separate people telling us
that Matt Johnson was the actual shooter,
Jack Johnson and Garry Bright.
Matt Johnson was responsible for giving us
so many details about this case.
He had been our star witness.
Our best witness throughout the whole case is the suspect.
We decided that we needed to go talk to Matt again.
And we start telling him what we know
and who we've talked to.
He kind of hangs his head.
Matt said, "Look, I couldn't tell you this at the beginning,
but a lot of what I've told you is the absolute truth.
I just left out certain parts as this thing has gone on."
And so that didn't satisfy Brian,
so then he has the whole group all go
and assault them one at a time.
They forced Josh Bailey to get into
Brian Minton's parents' SUV.
Brian drove.
Jacob Maxwell was in the front passenger seat.
Matt Johnson was in the backseat.
Jack Johnson was in the backseat in between them.
They go to Twisted Oak Drive. It's late in the afternoon.
They get out of the car and they go to the woods.
Matt had a different look on his face,
and so we knew we were really close.
This is when Matt Johnson decided to tell us the truth
about what happened to Josh.
[gunshot]
Matt shot him in the head and the body fell.
[gunshot]
I think Matt was relieved that it was finally over.
Then we put him in the handcuffs and we arrested him.
The whole time when Matt Johnson was helping us
with the investigation into Josh Bailey,
we were talking to the killer.
We served a search warrant
on Brian Minton's mother's sport utility vehicle.
We towed it to the Orange County Sheriff's Office
because according to Matt,
Josh Bailey was driven to the woods in that car.
And we found a lot of evidence inside of it.
We found some 9 millimeter rounds.
We also found two receipts
from Lowe's Home Improvement in Chapel Hill
for two separate purchases of muriatic acid.
After concluding the excavation,
it was confirmed that muriatic acid
had been poured on the remains.
That's why the soles of the investigators' shoes
disconnected from the shoe that they were wearing.
Brian Minton was the Charles Manson.
He ran the show, he dictated who did what.
He was the most culpable of the group.
Everyone put Brian at the scene of the crime
and being the primary driver of the crime.
Also we had physical evidence.
We had Brian Minton's DNA on the fingertip
of the latex glove that was with Josh's body.
The most disturbing thing about this case
was the participation of so many people.
Jack Johnson was there.
The gun was handed from Jacob Maxwell
to Brian Minton to Matt Johnson.
And Matt was told that he had to shoot Josh Bailey.
Sometimes, we underestimate criminal activity
as it relates to gangs.
And this case really kind of exemplifies
how far they are willing to go.
I mean, it really was a case of kill or be killed.
Brian Minton had such control over these gang members
that they knew if they didn't kill on his order,
at least they believed, he would kill them.
Brian Minton has not
only taken the life of Josh Bailey, indirectly,
he's also ruined the lives of an entire group of young people
who potentially never would have been in that scenario
and potentially never would have ended up in prison.
Matt Johnson got 25 to 26 years in prison.
Jack Johnson got a sentence of 25 years in prison.
Jacob Maxwell got a minimum of 30 years in prison.
Brian Minton got life without parole for murder,
and then an additional 35 years for the other crimes,
kidnapping and the conspiracies.
According to Jack Johnson, Josh's last words were,
"It wasn't me."
So tragedy, no doubt.
It should have never happened.
But see, Matt wasn't a narc. That's just it.
He wanted to be.
He contacted the Chapel Hill Police Narcotics division,
but then he failed to show up when he was supposed to.
And then it fell apart, and he never told Josh that.
So he was killed over just-- he was killed over nothing.
Those men in the garage,
they just felt like Josh was disposable.
He was someone they could erase and no one would ever miss him.
And Josh was not erasable.
Josh made an impact in this world,
and he is missed.
Year and a half after Josh died,
we decided that what happened to Josh didn't have to.
And we came up with this idea
to start Josh's Hope in Josh's memory
and provide training and therapeutic support
with the hope that it would prevent
what happened to Josh from happening to others.
We did that in the beginning as a survival technique.
It gave us a purpose, and then it became an obsession
and now it's like--you know, now we're passionate about it.