'Scenes from a Murder'

This is a story about  movies. Three of them, actually.

The first—pure, simple; about her, the radiant star.

And then those others, those would-be Sherlocks, chasing the riddle down their strange, opposing paths.

But Jennifer, like the center of any Movieland mystery — as you will see — hides her secret well.

His name is Tom Morgan.

His sister Jennifer, 23, tall, attractive, funny, college marketing major, is our star, and the subject of our mystery.

And so, as this strange tale unspooled, Tom would put his suspicions in his own movie.  A fictional tale to point an accusing finger toward truth.

But making movies, someone might have told the man, can be hazardous. Especially when someone else makes the sequel.

So be careful, they should have said.

In our little movie tonight, this will be the opening scene...

Bucolic.  Southern sun.  A charming college campus in Florence, South Carolina, November 9, 1994.

A mother has been trying to phone her daughter, her daughter Jennifer, at the mobile home park which was her off-campus residence.

At the very same moment, across town, a woman in the final stages of labor is also trying to reach best friend Jennifer, who’d promised to be with her for the birth:

They are calling the one woman, who - outside these few frames of video - you will never meet.

The young woman at the center of this tale.

Because at that very moment, Jennifer Morgan,  is lying on her bed.

And she is dead in a house fire.

It was just after 12:30 p.m. By the time the fire department arrived, the intensity of the blaze had roasted one end of the mobile home.

They knocked the fire down,  and discovered the body burned beyond recognition, lying face down on the bed.

Summoned to the scene was a young detective named Kenny Boone.

As the grim wheel of investigation began to turn, the news was sent to Jennifer’s family.  Her mom, Kerry, and her father, Jim, struggled to come to grips with the worst news parents could ever hear. Their baby, the last of their four children, was dead.

The whole family was all but paralyzed by grief.  Jennifer had three siblings, an older sister, a brother near her own age, and Tom, the eldest.

But on that awful day Tom was in Charlotte, North Carolina. He’d just moved there from Michigan and was staying with a friend.

It was late afternoon  when Tom’s dad called.

Though at first what he said didn’t seem to make sense.

It took a moment, then he told Tom what that meant.

And then, said Tom, he virtually collapsed, went numb, cried.  And  waited until the next morning to make the four-hour drive to his parents home in Myrtle Beach.

On his way, said Tom, he stopped at the trailer park where his sister had died. 

There was no police presence, said Tom.  But then, why would there be.  It was an accident, after all.

Time was a blur, as Jenny’s parents planned the funeral.

And then, two days after her death, Kenny Boone called, and they tried to absorb more news:  Jennifer’s death was not an accident after all.  Whoever set that fire was trying to hide a murder.

Only the method was still unknown.

And now their grief was salted with anger and  confusion and impossible questions.

The investigator, Kenny Boone, told them what he knew:  that he saw right away the fire was so intense, it had to have had extra fuel, some sort of accelerant. He’d found milk jugs scattered about, which smelled not of milk, but of gasoline.

Boone sent the body to the forensic pathologist.

But who would have wanted to kill Jennifer?  And why?

Tom Morgan was inconsolable, but found some comfort in believing that his sister’s killer would be found.

And so did that arson investigator in charge of the case.  After all, the murder and the fire to cover it up all happened in broad daylight right in the middle of a mobile home park next to a busy four-lane highway.

Looking back, 13 years later now, Kenny Boone is sheriff of Florence County.

This, he was convinced, would not be so hard to solve.

Of course, things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to.

And that movie idea? It’ll soon be time for that part of the story. There would be two movies, remember— twin parades of hope and folly.

This is the last home video of Jennifer Morgan, recorded the summer before her death. She was a few months from her college graduation and a degree in marketing.  As far as she knew, her whole lifetime was spread out ahead of her.

They buried her, or what was left of her after the fire, in this garden-like cemetery, in the finest casket they could find.

But early on it didn’t look like that precaution would be needed.  Days after the murder, a tantalizing lead in the classified section of a local newspaper. A personal advertisement. “Jennifer,” it read, “I hope that you will be able to forgive me. I am truly sorry.”

Kenny Boone and his investigators swooped hopefully into the newspaper office and discovered the ad had been placed by a local DJ hoping to save his own romance with a different Jennifer altogether.

And so, back to the mobile home park.    Boone  pieced together a timeline for the day of the killing.

Jennifer attended her first class of the day—Grancis Marion campus around 9:30 a.m.

Face down, and dead.  And so the killer...

That included any fibers, hairs or fingerprints that might lead to a suspect.

But what about a motive? The melted television and a few pieces of jewelry left behind, fused by the heat, seemed to rule out robbery.

Jennifer’s autopsy revealed no sign of sexual assault.

There was, however, one very curious discovery. Clutched in Jennifer’s hand - not on her wrist, but in her grip was a watch.

Maybe.  The watch, Boone discovered, had been a gift from Scott Snowden.

Back then, Snowden was Jennifer’s special boyfriend.  They met through his sister Dina, who was Jennifer’s best friend.  And yes, the woman who was having her baby the day Jennifer was killed.

But, when Scott and Jennifer enrolled in different colleges many miles apart, their romance was put on hold.

Investigator Boone confirmed Snowden couldn’t have been the killer.  Professors proved he was three hours away at his college the morning of the Jennifer’s death.  But, what about that watch? Why would a woman likely fighting for her life hold on to a thing like that?

But Scott had questions of his own. Like, why was she at home that morning?

Scott’s sister Dina knew someone, a fraternity boy named Chris.   Dina remembers Jennifer complaining that Chris would come over and stay for hours even when she begged him to leave.

His name was Chris Woodson, a science major Jennifer met at her college campus.  Scott had met him too, in fact. It was the last night Scott saw Jennifer, at her trailer, when Chris showed up.  It was two nights before she died.

The Morgan family also knew about Chris Woodson.  And you know what they say about first impressions.

It was still going on, they said, the weekend before Jennifer’s death as the family gathered for an early Thanksgiving.

Before long Investigator Boone had heard about Chris Woodson, too.  And when he brought the young man in for questioning, his suspicions only intensified.

Kinda, indeed.  Boone was so suspicious, he put a polygrapher on standby, then started his interrogation.

Chris readily admitted he loved Jennifer, and knew she did not love him the same way. He said they had sex the day before she died at his apartment here on campus and he did her laundry for her too. That was the day he said he admitted his deepest feelings for her, even though she didn’t want to hear them.

Here’s a quote from the transcript of the interrogation:

One more thing. Chris told Boone he argued with Jennifer about their relationship and left her trailer about 10:30 the night before her death.

Investigator Boone alerted the polygrapher.  It was time to take that test.

Kenny Boone put his suspect, Chris Woodson, into a car, and drove him the 90 miles from Florence, S. C. , to Columbia, where a polygrapher was waiting at the headquarters of the state police, or sled as they are called.

Less than a week after the murder, Boone felt sure he had his man.

And then, the test result.

Boone says Chris Woodson claimed that the morning of the murder, he’d been paying college fees and played racquetball, too, before going to engineering class.

Was he telling the truth?

But the Morgan family was convinced that Kenny Boone had, in fact, found the murderer.  Chris Woodson.

Why Woodson?  A whole list of suspicions... for one thing, his obsessive phone calls, almost like a stalker, they felt. And they believed Jennifer must have been attacked by someone she knew.

And their suspicion grew. One of the weirdest things happened the day after the incident in the trailer park.  This boy, Chris, and one of his fraternity brothers came over to the Morgan house.  And, out of the blue, unsolicited — offered a bizarre theory as to how Jennifer may have been killed before the fire got to her.

The thing that made the story suspicious, said the Morgans, was that when Chris told it, just one day after Jennifer’s death - no one knew she was dead before the fire.

In fact, Kenny Boone didn’t tell them somebody killed Jennifer and tried to hide the crime with a fire until the day after Chris offered his explanation. Later that same week, the Morgans saw Chris again at the funeral.

That struck me immediately.

And even when Detective Kenny Boone decided not to arrest Chris Woodson, the Morgans remained deeply suspicious.

Partly because the odd things didn’t stop, even after Jennifer was buried and the months began to turn into years.

And it wasn’t just flowers the family found but couldn’t explain.

Surely this was significant, thought the Morgans, and perhaps would trigger law enforcement to take a second look at Chris.

Years went by, and Tom Morgan and his family heard less and less from investigators, growing more and more pessimistic that anybody would ever be charged.

Mind you, Jennifer’s father had been feeling that way since two days after the fire when he came here to the trailer park to pick up her car.

What of the evidence investigators did have? At least they had that watch—the old boyfriend’s gift—found in Jennifer’s hand. Tom thought the killer might have put it there as a message of some sort.

It seemed to Tom that the watch must be important evidence. Did the wanna-be boyfriend, Chris, plant the watch in her hand just to make boyfriend Scott look guilty? Surely an interesting question. And yet  authorities simply sent the watch to Jennifer’s mother.

Now, nearly a year after Jennifer’s death, Tom felt frantic about evidence that might have been missed and opportunities lost.  The wait, he said, was driving him crazy.

But even as Tom says he tried to dampen the anger that was eating him up, he kept finding what looked like evidence.

Jennifer’s grave itself seemed to be throwing up strange, tantalizing clues.

Nine years after Jennifer’s death, her father, Jim, was tending her grave, clearing away weeds.

Odd that after that long a period of time that someone would come and obviously felt this tremendous remorse, or whatever their feelings were, would have to come back to the gravesite and put this under their headstone.  So we took pictures of it and we sent it to Florence County.

But not before they searched the Internet to identify the fraternity that issued such a distinctive ring.

And soon they had their answer: “Tau Kappa Epsilon,” a new and small fraternity then at Francis Marion.

And one of its founders on Marion Campus—number 26 here on the roster of members—was Chris Woodson.

All the old impatience, the frustration, the crazy feeling, came flooding back the minute Tom’s parents found that fraternity ring at Jennifer’s grave.

Tom had sent it to lead investigator Kenney Boone, hoping Boone could trace it back to the jealous would-be boyfriend and thus solve the case!

And well... dream on.

So he took his frustration to the next level of law enforcement,  the state police.  But, says Tom, the dismissive response there was...

Working on it?  Angry now, Tom fired off a legal request - a demand, really - to see whatever evidence the state police had.  And he received a letter instead.  Here it is.  It says, the “file could not be located,” but that the agency would “continue to search for these missing records.”

He was, he was irate. 

And that, strange though it may sound, was the birth of the movie; it came out of anger and frustration.

He had no idea, of course, where that would lead.  He just began to scribble.

It wasn’t even that hard, even though he was a real estate broker, not a writer, the words just fell to page.

He wrote imagined conversations, pent up thoughts and feelings, about his own belief that Chris, the fraternity boy, killed Jennifer.   Tom’s theory?  That Chris,  in a jealous rage about Jennifer’s  old boyfriend, lost his temper, killed her — without meaning to — then got his frat brothers to help him hide the crime with the fire.

Gradually what emerged was a screenplay about one young man’s terrible, deadly, mistake.

And then a decision that would come back to haunt him:  Tom wrote himself into his screenplay. 

Since he was writing fiction, he says, he wanted to make a change. He didn’t want it to seem like his beloved sister had a steady stream of men visiting her trailer.

So he put himself in the place of Scott Snowden, that other boyfriend Chris encountered just before Jennifer’s murder.

Of course, Tom wasn’t really here at the trailer park any more than he knew for certain that Chris was really here. This was a fictional story, based on real events, yes, but spun together with altered names and faces and speculations and shifted timelines. And at the heart of it, a brother’s regret that he hadn’t paid more attention that last weekend to the incessant calls of that fraternity boy.

Tom rattled off the script and threw it into a drawer. It didn’t make him feel better of course.  Besides, all Tom knew about making movies is that he didn’t know anything about making movies.  So it was exciting when a friend said he knew someone who could make the film.

This was that someone. His name was Pat Moug.  He agreed to read his script and said he liked it.

Yes, and somehow larger than life.  Pat Moug, the Livonia, Mich., acting cop, looked like a cross between “Mr. Clean”and Kojak. A big, friendly bundle of gung ho.

And Moug had already done it.  He had made an independent film, directed and starred in it himself—a movie called “The Ugly One.”

The fact Moug was a detective was a bonus, Tom figured.  Another experienced set of eyes to consider the evidence.

Plus, Moug had a great idea.  Why not make a promotional video about Tom’s project?  Neither one of them had the money to make Tom’s movie.  A good video, suggested Pat, could attract investors.

So Moug traveled down to South Carolina, interviewed Jennifer’s friends.  He took some footage on her college campus.

And he even interviewed Tom about the murder itself, about the movie project and about fundraising.

So the project languished for a couple of years until, again, a happy accident. A banker from Charlotte, N.C., named John Schwert heard about the script, loved it, and offered to finance Tom’s film. If, and this was a condition, if he, the banker, could direct it.

Of course Tom now had to call Pat Moug up at the Livonia, Mich., police department and tell him the news.  The movie about Jennifer’s death now had financing, and would be made. But Pat would not be directing.

It was the fall of 2004.  It happened on makeshift sound stages around Charlotte, N.C.

The false start with the film-making cop from Michigan was forgotten now.

Tom Morgan watched a local production team piece together his story - Tom’s fictional imagining - of the murder of his little sister Jennifer. Part art, part desperate effort to prod the police to reviving the investigation.

It was a shoestring  budget.  Tom’s screenplay was shot in a fast and furious 24 days. 

And  finally, here it was: 11 years after her death, Jennifer’s story, flickered to life on the screen.

In the audience, her parents and older sister.

The story was based on fact, but Tom had made some significant changes to real events and added lots of speculation. And then the director took over, and made some more changes.  So this certainly wasn’t a non-fiction movie.

Still, Tom’s suspicion of what really happened to his sister did come true.

“Among Brothers”  was set in a college fraternity.  Chris Woodson’s real-life identity was never revealed in the movie.  Still, if you knew him it wasn’t hard to see that the “Ethan” character was based on him.

The audience saw that character hide in the bushes, growing jealous as Jennifer character’s meets a male visitor.  In the film the visitor is her brother; in real life it was Chris Woodson’s rival, Scott Snowden.

As the story progresses, the fraternity boy has an argument with Jennifer.  That part is true; it came right from Chris Woodson’s statement to police.

But then Ethan loses his temper and accidentally kills her, and that part is Tom’s speculation.

Fraternity brothers help him cover up the crime by setting fire to the scene—again, the circumstances of the fire—something Tom imagined.

And here is a version of the awkward true scene the Morgan’s remembered so vividly the day after Jennifer died when the real fraternity boy, Chris, came by their  house and offered that theory that sounded more to the family like a cover-up.

The film ends with some wishful thinking by Tom. A cop zeroes in...

And the Ethan  character is left tortured by what he’s done, but unwilling to turn himself in.

Not in the audience that night was, of course, the very person Tom hoped would be compelled to admit what really happened....the real fraternity boy, Chris Woodson.

Still, the screening of the film was a moment of triumph.  At least now in this unconventional way, Tom had put all of his suspicions and the evidence he thought had been overlooked out there in public for all to see.

For a start-up independent, the film did pretty well; it broke even.  Fifteen international film festivals asked to screen “Among Brothers” and in the end, the little independent made with the director’s second mortgage got a distribution deal.

So now, the waiting game started up again. Would someone come forward? Well, yes, in fact, someone did— the South Carolina State Police.

Of course Tom had not forgotten this was the same state police agency which once admitted it lost the file on the murder years before.

Tom Morgan: One of the first questions to them was why’d you pick this why’d you pick this case now? They made it sound like it was just luck.  We were the lucky lottery winner that they’d pulled up our case.

So Tom packed his years’ worth of notes into his car and drove over to state police headquarters in Columbia, and there, for two and a half hours with investigators, he reviewed every detail, everything he knew about the case.

And then came, quite suddenly, another one of those moments. The air seems different.  Right then and there, the complexion of Tom’s world changed.  The detective asked one simple question:

But there it was.  It was all different now.

He waited for the polygrapher, and an awful feeling washed over him.

He was no longer the brother campaigning for justice, the nagging critic of the police investigation.

Now he was Tom Morgan, murder suspect.

Jarring questions, said Tom.  But ridiculous. And when they were finished he sat waiting, somewhat impatiently, to be dismissed.

Tom Morgan left state police headquarters in a daze.

He had gone in there - a brother looking for justice for his sister. As a man who’d gone to the media to criticize the police, who’d written a script and made a movie in an effort to re-start an investigation.

He had left, he says, feeling like a suspect but not knowing why. 

So, had the state police decided to teach him a lesson?

But as it turned out, Tom was wrong.

It wasn’t his harping about the police that had him in a polygrapher’s clutches.

It wasn’t payback.  It wasn’t even political.

No. The reason Tom was hauled in for questioning was because somebody had offered new evidence that suggested the real suspect all along should have been Tom Morgan.

And who might that mysterious suspicious somebody have been?

Well, you’ve heard about him already.   It was Pat Moug, the filmmaker and policeman Tom had first chosen to direct his film.

Pat, remember, had been replaced as the movie director when a new man was brought aboard. But Pat persuaded Tom to let him use the video he’d already shot... as part of a documentary about the making of the movie.

What Tom did not know is that Pat was only pretending to make a documentary.  He’d reverted from filmmaker to cop.  Why?

Because, says Pat, of something he saw in Tom’s fictional movie script.

Pat Moug: And all of a sudden in the middle of the script I get to the murder scene. And the person who he told me in real life that he based the script on, this fraternity brother—he goes to the trailer and when he gets there there’s a man already there and he listens from underneath the window and the man leaves.  This makes him jealous.  He goes in and he kills her.  Well the man that’s there is Tom Morgan.

Pat instantly thought back to his police training... in part, to acourse in criminal psychology he’d once attended.

At first, said Pat, he wanted to back out of the project.

But then, with his investigator’s instinct engaged, he came up with his plan to follow his suspicions.

And, it worked. Tom had no idea the whole thing was a ruse. Investors would never see this tape, but Pat had every intention of ensuring that investigators did. 

The undercover road. The old policeman’s trick of using a lie to get at the truth.

First, Pat looked through the interviews he’d shot before he was dropped from the movie project.

For example, the conversation with Tom. Back when they were making that investor’s video.   This, it seemed to Pat, justified his suspicions.

As the interview continued, Pat heard other suspicious statements. For one thing, that odd story of the way Tom’s dad told him about Jennifer’s death.

To Tom, it showed how deeply shocked his dad was by Jennifer’s death. 

But to Pat, Tom’s story about the way he was told took on a completely different meaning.

Over the months they worked together, Pat says he discovered other worrisome discrepancies.

Pat showed his tapes to some of his fellow cops in Livonia, Michigan.

Pat says his colleagues agreed  he was right to be suspicious.

And so surely, that investigator down in Florence county, South Carolina, Kenny Boone, would jump all over what Pat had learned.

But—

And what did Pat Moug do?  Why, he followed in the very footsteps of his quarry, Tom Morgan.  He went over the head of the florence county sheriff and marched right on over to state police headquarters.

Unannounced.  With his tapes.  And his story.

And that is how Tom Morgan found himself attached to the state police poligraphy machine.

In the summer of 2005, Tom Morgan’s movie about the killing of his sister, showed up here and there in independent film festivals.

It was an apparent success. And all the while,  though Tom was utterly unaware of it, the man once pegged to direct his movie was now working against him.

Now, it looked as if Pat Moug’s policeman’s passion had paid off. 

Tom Morgan, the brother who’d been pestering investigators for years to solve his sister’s murder, had been hauled in for questioning, and now seemed to be a suspect himself.

Pat waited for word of an arrest.

And waited.

Well, there was no arrest. And now the state police also stopped returning Pat’s calls. But he was a fellow officer.  Surely, he thought, somebody at least owed him an explanation.

What do you do? If you’re Pat Moug, you make a movie.

Just as Tom Morgan had done.

Remember, as a complete ruse, Pat had shot some interviews with Tom.  And now he decided he really would make a documentary.

He called it “Bold as a Lion.” But it certainly wasn’t to raise money, as his fake undercover alibi had suggested…

But to lay out his case, piece by piece, that Tom Morgan should be a  prime suspect in the murder of his sister Jennifer.

All along, something Tom told Pat had made him very suspicious.  Tom said he’d been living in Michigan when Jennifer was murdered, when in fact, a few weeks before she died, Tom moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.  And Charlotte was just a 2 and a half hour drive from the scene of the crime.  If Tom  lied about where he lived on the day of the crime, was he lying about his actions that day, too?

Here, Pat seems to have caught Tom, as he tries not to reveal that he’s been lying about his moving date from Michigan.

Pat was very suspicious of that fudging.

Also, there was the way Tom talked about the weather on the day of the murder

...as if he was actually right there when it happened.

And remember that watch police found in Jennifer’s hand after the fire?  And the bracelet and ring Tom said his father found at the grave?

Tom suggested those were left by his suspect, Chris Woodson.  But Pat came to a different conclusion.

Then there was Pat’s suspicion that Tom knew too much about the murder if he wasn’t around to witness it.

That’s about the point Pat’s theories took a turn toward something way out there, something no one else had ever even  imagined... some sort of sexual dysfunction between Tom and his sister.

What set it off was that phrase.  Pat recalled that the Florence county investigator, Kenny Boone told him that an unidentified substance may have been found in Jennifer’s body.

What could the substance have been?  Well how about ice cream?

In his fictional movie script, Tom had put himself at his sister’s home just before the murder bringing ice cream.

That became part of Pat’s evidence—that Tom may have sexually assaulted and killed his sister.

But remarkably, Pat had even darker suspicions. If Tom killed his sister, then according to Pat, Jennifer’s own father and her other brother may have helped cover up the murder by dousing her body in gasoline and setting it on fire.

All these years, Pat suggested, Jennifer’s whole family may have been involved in a massive cover up.

The documentary ended with what Pat intended as the climactic interview.

Here Tom has no idea that a microphone and two cameras are placed in the room.

Pat is moving in for the kill for what he hopes will be Tom’s confession.

Hardly a confession. Pat did get Tom to admit, however, that he had lied when he told Pat he lived in Michigan at the time Jennifer was killed.

How else should I act?

Embarrassed, Tom told Pat, about running away from some financial and romantic mistakes he’d made up in Michigan.

Pat wasn’t buying it. Instead, his interview clips and charts and speculations boiled down to this: 

Pat Moug is a 4^th generation policeman. He believes, he says, that his is an effort to right a wrong.

And so, here it was, on a winter-frigid night in Livonia, Michigan, in a donated theater in a giant suburban multiplex—the premiere of Pat Moug’s “Bold as a Lion.”

Its a big crowd; Pat has invited his many friends, many of them from law enforcement.

Finally, they’ll get to see the work that’s consumed three years of his life.

The audience knows virtually nothing about the story, beyond the selectively-prepared case that Pat is presenting to them.

And yet, there is not much doubt: these are friends, and they’re hugely supportive.

And many of them are puzzled why S.C. law enforcement hadn’t welcomed Pat into the investigation.

Pat’s movie audience is eating out of his hand. “Bold as a Lion” had raised some very serious questions... but were they legitimate?

It was a friendly crowd for the premiere screening of Pat Moug’s film “Bold as a Lion” offered enthusiastic praise for Pat’s efforts.

Many, though they’d never met Tom Morgan were now deeply suspicious.

After all, Pat had put together material that implied without much subtlety that Tom had killed his sister and that Tom’s father and brother helped cover up the crime by burning her body.

The allegations had been couched words like ‘suspicion,’ avoiding direct accusations.  But only an idiot would miss the obvious message.

But, we wondered, was any of it built on actual evidence? How had Pat come to the conclusion that Tom could be a sociopath?

Why did he suspect that, behind Tom’s very public crusade for justice, lurked a killer?

Well, Pat told us he taken some special training in criminal psychology that has enabled him to detect possible guilt based on  what people say — and how they say it.

But if Pat wasn’t a exactly trained psychologist, he was—and is—an experienced policeman. He has bee on the force for 18 years.

So what about that milky white substance he says the sheriff told him was found in Jennifer’s body, which was at the heart of Pat’s suggestion that Jennifer’s death could have been caused by some inappropriate sexual event involving Tom?

So what about that substance?  For Pat it was crucial. It was the only evidence he offered to imply an incestuous relationship between Tom and Jennifer.

But... did it even exist?

Pat Moug says he got the story from Florence County Sheriff Kenny Boone, who said he learned about it from the forensic pathologist.

But she told us simply this: As far as she remembers, there never was any milky white substance.

Here is her autopsy report.

And, remember how Pat ferreted out Tom Morgan’s fudging about his movements around the time his sister was killed?

Now, in his film, Pat offered a whole new set of locations, and timelines. Pat speculates that Tom lingered at his parents house in Myrtle Beach for several days after a family reunion ended, and then - on his drive home to Charlotte, stopped off to kill his sister.

But Pat offers no evidence that this actually happened—no receipts, or eyewitnesses along the way that can place Tom anywhere on this route.

In fact, in that hidden camera interview, Tom tells Pat he was at work in North Carolina, 170 miles away, on the day of the fire.

Later, at his movie premiere, Pat admits he never did check out the alibi.

But remember, one of Pat’s insinuations went way beyond all the others.  And that was this: Based on nothing more than his own analysis of a fictionalized story, Pat surmised in his very public film… that Jennifer’s father and brother helped Tom get away with her murder.

Is he?  Some people down in South Carolina have suggested this is all payback because Tom dropped Pat from the movie project.

Nothing to do with it, responds Pat. Though he does claim Tom didn’t even have the courtesy to tell him he was dumped. He says he found out about it after the movie was made.

For Pat, this was the way to justice… a film crammed with insinuation,  accusation and an angry challenge to the sheriff of Florence county.

We could hardly wait to get back to South Carolina to confront with Pat Moug’s theories the two men he’d spent most of his film attacking:

Florence county sheriff Kenny Boone.

And Tom Morgan. By now, Tom had spent well over a decade trying to get police to investigate his sister’s 1994 killing. Had even made his own movie pointing at a particular suspect.

And we had - for years - been asking some, well, difficult questions.

This, just after he failed that polygraph.

Now, suddenly, 13 years after the murder, Tom was very publicly accused.  He didn’t seem thrilled to be in front of our camera... again.

We watched “Bold as a Lion” together, with frequent stops when Tom objected to Pat’s allegations.

Those apparent contradictions for example, about where he was when his sister was killed.

We stopped again during the scene at Jennifer’s old trailer park.  That’s the time when Pat suggested Tom knew too much about the killing—that he knew things only the murderer would know.

Then a few minutes later, the most damning — or outrageous — part of Pat’s theory. First Pat implies Tom may have launched some sort of sexual attack on his sister....

Then, because a couple of accomplices to the crime in Tom’s fictional movie script seemed to resemble Tom’s father and brother, Pat suggests that the real father and brother may have helped burn Jennifer’s body.

Tom’s mother says she could scarcely believe Pat Moug could imply such an awful lie about her family.

And angry, said Tom’s dad, that police would consider his son a suspect based on what Jim Morgan claimed were Pat’s lies.

And wouldn’t the police want to, in light of Pat Moug’s allegations?

And didn’t Florence County Sheriff Kenny Boone appreciate all of Pat Moug’s suggestions about what happened on that warm November day back in 1994?

Well, actually... no.  He would... and did not.

It wasn’t at all surprising, said Boone, that Tom seemed to know things about the crime that perhaps only the killer would have known.

As for Pat’s conclusion… that Tom is the suspect in his sister’s murder, and that his father and brother may be complicit?

But what about that failed lie detector test? Well, said both Boone and the state police, it was all the available evidence that made them decide that the polygraph result was simply an error.   And that neither Tom Morgan nor any member of his family had anything to do with Jennifer Morgan’s death.

But Pat Moug was right about one thing: Kenny Boone did not cooperate with a fellow police officer—the one from Livonia, Michigan.

But the fact is, Tom Morgan and Pat Moug may both have missed the real story.

In the almost 13 years since Jennifer Morgan was murdered,  her family has grown. Tom is now happily married and father to three members of the new generation.

It’s a family just as close as it says it’s always been.

And able to laugh again, though the gaping hole left by Jennifer’s death is, they tell us, just as painful as ever, along with the newer wound that comes from being accused.

And though his days as a suspect are apparently over, Tom Morgan still worries that a cop might someday come  knocking at his door.

It seems unlikely, however, that Sheriff Boone would want to arrest him.  Why?

Because, says Boone, both Tom Morgan and his nemesis Pat Moug have likely been looking in all the wrong places from the very beginning.

But far from being botched, as both the Morgans and Pat Moug seemed to think,  The sheriff says his investigation was quite thorough… and that he looked pretty carefully at the suspect Tom Morgan made into a character in his fictional movie, the real-life frat boy, Chris Woodson, who seemed to be obsessed with Jennifer.

But, it turned out, there was an alibi, said Boone, and a pretty solid one.

Do you remember that possible evidence the family found at the grave?

Somebody had left a bracelet, and a fraternity ring at the headstone.  To Tom, they were evidence that his suspect, Chris, had left them there out of his continuing remorse…

To Pat Moug, they were evidence that Tom Morgan had staged those items to direct attention away from his own guilt.

Well, as it turns out, they were both wrong....

Dateline found another of Jennifer’s college buddies. His name is David Deitz.

And guess what? It was he, said David, who left the bracelet and the ring at the grave, as tributes to a good friend. 

David showed how he tucked the ring into the ground beside the headstone.

Just where Jennifer’s father found it.

And one more piece of evidence that had seemed to point at Chris or Tom suddenly vanished.

These days Chris, the one-time fraternity boy, owns a radio station here in union, South Carolina. He has repeatedly declined our attempts to see him and hear his side of the story.  As for the business of not yet being fully eliminated as a suspect, Chris is reported to have told a friend... "I’m tough, I can take it.  The people I care about know I didn’t do it, and that’s good enough for me.”

As for Kenny Boone, he says he’s determined still that someone will be charged with the murder of Jennifer Morgan.

What evidence there is, or most of it, anyway, is still in the sheriff’s issue cardboard box.

There’s that ring... and here the burned bits that once looked like clues.

But, as we took a stroll through Jennifer’s woodsy trailer park, the sheriff gave us some graphic reasoning for his view that the murderer was none of the suspects you’ve heard about, but someone else altogether.

Though there is no particular rush to find the man.  At this very moment in fact he is sitting in prison for a breaking and sex crime which, according to Sheriff Boone, followed a similar pattern to the attack on Jennifer Morgan.

So, case closed?

Well, not exactly... because now, on they go, these three contending investigators, down their opposing paths.

Pat Moug, the actor-cop from Livonia, Michigan is out there with his own cinematic point of view— that Tom may have killed his sweet sister, helped out by his own father and brother.

Tom, the budding screenwriter, still doesn’t believe the sheriff… and still suspects the fraternity boyfriend.

And Sheriff Boone thinks they’re both wrong—that quite possibly the neighbor did it.

And so, the pictures yellow, the memory of her smile dances still across the aging family films... and all the possibilities that never were.

And at the glacial pace the investigation has moved, the new generation of the Morgan family may be in college themselves before Tom can finally let it go.

But not yet, in spite of all that’s happened, not yet.