(ominous music)
(siren wailing)
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Every suspect accused of a crime
has the right to remain silent.
Many agree to be interrogated anyway,
but they can stop the interview at any moment,
making it a race against time.
(suspenseful music)
Justice hangs in the balance.
(eerie music)
- Eaton County Sheriff's Department
received a phone call from Kristina
who stated she was in fear for her life.
A man was texting from outside of her apartment.
(text tone dinging)
- She told us she had been in a relationship
with him and she was scared
that he was going to find her and do God knows what.
- She said just days prior to this incident
the suspect abused her
to where a personal protection order was granted.
- She relayed information about being choked,
being thrown to the ground.
He had made statements to her
that he would slit her throat while she was sleeping,
in addition to her young son's throat.
(tense music)
Kiernan was an active parolee.
He had been to prison
for an assault involving strangulation.
He was known to be violent toward women.
- Now, Kiernan stopped by her apartment and was outside.
Our patrol deputies get called in to the scene
to get her out of the house and make sure that she is safe.
(sirens wailing)
- First and foremost, we make sure that she was safe.
At that point, I instructed all of my deputies
to go to that area in an attempt to locate Kiernan.
We were very concerned and alarmed
that he may be violent again.
(sires wailing)
(text tone dinging)
When he sent the message stating,
"I see you brought friends to the party,"
it brought a level of, is he gonna harm us as well?
Where is he?
Is he gonna shoot us without us knowing?
Is he gonna ambush us?
We absolutely believe that he was a danger
and most likely
was in possession of some sort of weapon.
We were actively and methodically trying to find him
to the the best of our ability.
(sirens wailing)
- [Dispatch] He's just north of Curwood.
He's gonna pull over. All units (indistinct).
- They got him out of the car,
took him into custody on the side of the road.
He was very cavalier. Not a care in the world.
(tense music)
I took that as, okay, he wants to show me
the messages that his girlfriend sent
and how mean she is, or she's the one contacting me,
I'm just innocent here.
- As soon as I pulled up the photos,
I could start seeing the horrific images of two females.
(dramatic music)
And it appeared that they were murdered.
It was heinous, gruesome.
There's wounds and blunt force trauma.
It was very difficult to kind of wrap our mind
around what we were seeing.
Is this real?
Is this something he just got off the internet
and he's playing a trick on us?
- No police agency had even gotten a call
that there was a potential homicide or crime scene.
We didn't have any information yet.
My approach was casual.
I wanted to do my best
to keep it easygoing conversation between us,
even though we were talking about something so horrific.
(officers speaking indistinctly)
As I spoke with Kiernan, he's telling me
in that same demeanor, where this is just
a regular day for him,
there is no physiological reaction from him
that he was under stress, that his heart was racing,
that he was afraid, that he was questioning
what was gonna happen to him.
He was just very direct.
I have never encountered anything like this.
(suspenseful music)
(engine rumbling)
(sirens wailing)
- When deputies arrived at the scene, it was dark.
It was very early in the morning
and they approached it with caution.
It could potentially be a very dangerous situation
for them to walk into.
Deputies had their guns drawn.
We didn't know if there was still a suspect outstanding
or what they were gonna encounter.
Deputies made entry
and they located Julie Mooney deceased in that hotel room.
(camera clicking)
- Julie Mooney was left in a bathtub.
She had cutting wounds and blunt force trauma.
- It was a very horrific crime scene.
Senior investigators were affected by what they saw.
They had simply never seen anything like that.
(birds chirping)
(soft music)
- Julie was a caring and giving person.
She gave a lot.
She gave her heart and she loved her daughters.
And she really wanted to become a social worker.
She had these aspirations of a person
who was working to help people.
Julie participated in three or four mission trips.
She rebuilt some poverty stricken homes.
Julie was very musical.
She and her friend, they started the Flag Corps
for the marching band.
They did all of the choreographing to the music
with the band director and all of that.
I really miss her. She was a good daughter.
My home is lonely.
(dramatic music) (sirens wailing)
- We responded to the address,
and once we made our announcements
and didn't hear anything inside,
we went ahead and opened the door, which was unlocked.
We enter, we make more announcements.
We still didn't get any response inside.
- [Shattuck] They cleared the first floor.
and then went upstairs.
- And then turning to my left appeared to be a bedroom door,
and that's when I went ahead and opened that bedroom door.
As soon as I opened that door,
you could see a female subject
that was laying face down in the bed.
Her head and the pillow was soaked in blood.
She suffered a pretty serious head injury
from what we could observe,
as well as she had multiple lacerations all over her body.
It was very evident that this was in fact a homicide.
We had approximate weight, eye, hair color,
things like that.
We were able to look up in our programs,
everything was matching up
that this was in fact Kaylee Brock.
- When I found out that Kaylee was murdered, I was in shock.
I had so much shock that somebody would do this
to such a sweet and innocent soul.
I was sad.
I was angry.
It was really hard to believe and grasp.
Kaylee was very much a people person.
Her smile just lit up the room and everybody loved her.
Kaylee loved cooking and she loved watching
the Rachael Ray shows and she loved reading
and going to craft shows with her family.
She still had so much life left.
(suspenseful music)
- Because he confessed on the side of the road,
doesn't implicate him in everything.
There's still a lot of details
needed from the investigative side
to lock him into a statement to prove that it was him.
- We didn't know, was he in collusion with somebody else?
Was there more than two victims?
And you gotta be on your A-game to get out of them
what you need them to say.
Right now, the most critical part
of this investigation is to get him talking.
(suspenseful music)
- When you see a forensics van outside,
you know that, you know, something, you know,
drastic has happened.
- [Reporter] Sheriff's officials say
deputies found the two women killed,
one in Holt and the other in Meridian Township.
A man from Eaton County was arrested early this morning
after an old girlfriend called police.
During the arrest, he told deputies
he had pictures to show them of the two women he killed.
(soft music)
- I was running errands.
When I got home, there were police cars in my driveway
and my husband was on the front porch
with one of the officers at that time.
And I was told that Julie had been murdered.
(tense music)
(Denise sighing)
I was running a horror story through my head
and I couldn't believe the horror story I had in my head
could have been any worse than what actually happened.
(tense music)
- All right.
You have the right to remain silent.
You do not have to talk to anyone,
you don't have to answer any of my questions.
You understand that, buddy?
- [Cramer] During the traffic stop, he was pretty open
that he had just murdered a couple of people.
- That little bit of time that he sat in a jail cell
leading up to it, changed the demeanor drastically.
- We thought he changed his mind
or he just decided he was gonna play a game with us
and stop talking.
- Now he refused to make eye contact.
He was in a very defensive, kind of shelled position,
so I was trying to keep my line of questioning soft,
my tone calm and quiet.
I wanted to mimic his tone to keep building a rapport
and switch the topic to get him to open up.
- This is the first time that he
really started talking on his own.
He opened up rather than one word answers.
I knew that if I can keep him comfortable,
he's gonna continue to talk with me.
The next direction to go was we needed to figure out
how Kaylee and Julie ended up victims.
(clock ticking)
(tense music)
- He was very difficult to deal with
and it seemed like he was playing games with us.
I had to get every potential detail out of him
before he shut down.
It was pretty direct pointed questions from then on.
(suspenseful music) (birds chirping)
(clock ticking)
(dramatic music)
- That was a very difficult confession for us to get.
Once I got him to admit to killing Kaylee,
it was a matter of delicately withdrawing
the facts about Julie.
You don't wanna trigger any remorse, regret,
anything in him to think that he shouldn't be talking.
(tense music)
- It's very shocking as an investigator
to have somebody willing to answer
pointed questions with zero remorse.
I was looking in the eyes of just pure evil,
but if at any point in this
we would've shown our disgust or anger,
you don't know how that would've affected him.
And so us remaining calm and emotionless
was key to allow him to keep talking.
(ominous music)
- We had a solid confession.
Next, was very important for us to show
he was perfectly competent while planning it
and perfectly competent while executing it.
- Suspects could be crafty and they'll come back and say,
"Well, I was crazy that night,"
or "I didn't know what I was doing."
Kiernan could be planting the seed
about being insane at the time.
- I needed to shut down a future insanity defense.
So the more intimate details
that I could get him to give me was all to show
he very clearly intended to do this strategically
with a purpose and not get caught.
(dramatic music)
(tense music)
- This was a difficult interview.
You know what he's done and you know what he's capable of,
and it was kind of like pulling teeth
to get anything out of him.
- Sometimes there's a cat mouse game, right?
I'm not just gonna come out and say it,
you're gonna have to get it outta me.
But the more you can keep him talking
about what he did that night,
then we're winning in that interview.
- It just showed that he calculated the steps, the risks,
and it was just one more cognitive step
that he made to cover up process
and continue this killing spree.
We shut down that avenue of,
"I blacked out. I don't know what happened."
He didn't lose all cognitive abilities
and he knew leading up to this what he was going to do.
(birds chirping) (tense music)
We located the backpack in his car
that contains our murder weapons,
both the hammer and a folding knife that was used.
All of the weapons had been cleaned
but still had DNA on them.
(suspenseful music)
We also received surveillance video from the hotel.
- The video at the Knights Inn
showing both him and Julie is extremely significant,
puts him with Julie at the time of the murder.
It also takes away any chance that anyone else was involved.
We also had a video of Kiernan buying the murder weapons
at one of the local grocery stores.
The biggest thing is, is just showing the intent,
showing the planning.
There was no other reason to buy those things
at that time in his life
so it was clearly that he was preparing to commit murder.
(tense music)
- He seemed to kind of perk up when he heard the videos play.
His body language and posture and everything changed,
almost where he was proud of his work and what he had done.
He was demonic like a sociopath,
making me question, are there more victims?
(suspenseful music)
- The disturbing part about it is
this is when he's becoming the most open,
this is when he's elaborating more,
this is when he's comfortable talking
is getting into these dirty secrets
that he's had his whole life.
(tense music)
- You know that he wants to talk about what he did.
If it's been on a psychopath's mind for so long,
you're gonna want to play on that
and you're gonna wanna delve into it.
- When Kiernan started talking about the other people
he was intending to target that night,
that was bone chilling.
It was important to identify who those individuals were
and physically make contact
to make sure that they were alive.
- I opened Kiernan Brown's phone
and I pulled up his Facebook
and located the friends by the names that he'd given me
and began sifting through the text messages
with his contended victims.
- One of 'em, he had sent a text message to
and asked if he could come over and sleep on her couch.
The other one, he sent text messages to
was a classmate of his.
(suspenseful music) (text tone dinging)
- She was a single mother who borrowed a book from him
and Kiernan in his ploy stated that he needed the book back.
I sent those profiles out to the team,
outside to find those individuals.
- As we got the information,
we call it run code, lights and siren.
We had as fast as we could determine
where these young ladies lived
to get there as quick as we could.
This was potentially two young ladies
that had been harmed or even murdered by this guy.
(tense music)
- We have the three teams out trying to find
and identify these two other intended victims.
My goal was to continue digging through the details
that I needed for the case.
(tense music)
- When he asked me if I thought he was a serial killer,
he was looking for that,
he wanted that reputation, that title.
And it was important for me not to give him that credit
and not make him as glorified as he thought he was.
- At that point, we ended the interrogation.
We had everything we needed
and personally we couldn't tolerate the vile nature
of the things he was saying any longer.
- Okay. - Yeah, thank you.
- Mm-hmm.
When we walked out of the interview,
we were certain that we had a solid confession.
He was perfectly competent while planning it,
perfectly competent while executing it,
and perfectly competent while providing us details.
(tense music)
- The other potential victims that were named by Kiernan
were ultimately located and found to be safe.
One of 'em, he had sent a text message to
and asked if he had come over and sleep on her couch.
She just flat out said no.
- The other one he sent text messages to
told me she was asleep and didn't see them.
And had she not fallen asleep,
would have left to get him that book
because she felt bad that she still had it.
He was lining them up for the night
and luckily the two victims
didn't respond the way he wanted.
- We can't say enough about the incredible police work
done by the Eaton County Sheriff's Office.
I don't think there's any doubt that the suspect
was on a killing spree and his quick capture
probably saved many lives.
(birds cawing)
(dates ticking)
(tense music)
- While in jail, Kiernan Brown altered his appearance
by tattooing his entire face.
- It's almost like he's trying to really
show the world what he's like on the inside.
He really looks like the monster that he is.
(tense music)
- You killed because you are evil.
You came from behind because you are a coward.
If you weren't, you would've killed yourself
just like you told Julie you were thinking about.
You leave our family and friends with undescribable grief.
- You took two individuals
who all they wanted to do was provide help to you.
You embody hate and selfishness and cruelty.
- Ultimately, Kiernan Brown pled guilty
and received a 70 to 100 year sentence,
which puts him at 100 years old
at his first available chance of parole.
- The interrogation in this case was really difficult.
There's no one size fits all when it comes to interviews.
You need to be really good at reading people,
reading both verbal and nonverbal body skills
to get to the truth.
Detective Cramer did a really good job with Kiernan Brown
and getting out of him exactly what he had done.
(solemn music)
- This is the most gruesome
and emotionally difficult cases
that I've gone through in my career.
Being able to eliminate people like Kiernan Brown
just solidify and motivate me
to keep doing what we do every day.
- The world is missing a very special person.
It is very hard to believe and grasp.
Kaylee had a motto, let the light lift you up.
And she did live by that.
We would have bad days
and Kaylee definitely helped lift us up.
- I had a sensation come over me
a couple of days after she passed.
(soft music)
I was in the kitchen
and I felt her arms around me
and it was just like some other time
when she'd had her arms around me.
It just felt that way.
A couple of friends had dreams of Julie
and Julie says she's fine.
I don't know how I feel about spirits,
but I know I'll see her again.