The Rocky Mountain Mortician Murder (2025) s01e03 Episode Script

1
I was in shock.
I didn't view that people
would want to hurt Byron at all.
Byron griffy took care
of a lot of funerals for my family.
He was a good man.
There's a darker side to
Byron that people didn't know.
The relationship between
Tommy and Byron turned into eating
Turkey pot pies and watching porn.
I didn't see that Tommy
had any motive to do it.
When we found out my dad was shot,
the first person I thought
of was Cory higgs.
Cory is my son.
Charles and Anthony's
stories were falling apart.
They were the last ones to see Byron,
so that made it a possibility.
After Byron died, they start buying boats
and they start spending money like crazy.
They had a motive to kill my dad.
It's all about money.
I don't like to use the
term "fighting for your life,"
but that's what it felt like.
We were ready to make arrests,
but now we had another
dead body on our hands.
I was a police officer in Florence
in the city manager's office
He gets a phone call
that they're calling medical
to Charles and Anthony's house.
So I go racing to the scene
and I find Charles on
the floor of the bathroom.
It was obvious that he was deceased.
The ambulance came
and the police covered
the whole property
with caution tape.
I remember being out on the yard,
you know, and everybody
hoping, hoping, hoping
that it was good news.
And I just remember
just shaking my head, like,
"there is no good news."
It was terribly sad.
At that time, Charles was mayor.
And that afternoon,
I went to the city council meeting.
And about halfway through the meeting,
the chief of police comes in.
He said, "look, we've
found Charles dead."
I couldn't believe it.
After I got that phone
call, I drove to Charles
and Anthony's house. I
don't have any idea why.
And I sat across the
street from their house.
I just cried and cried the anger.
Like, "how could you do this"
"so that you didn't have
to answer for my dad?
If you were going "to kill yourself today,
you could have told me last night."
I never in a million
years saw this coming.
The fact that Charles died
was just a punch in the stomach.
We're drafting the arrest
warrant for both of them
to be charged with murder at that time.
When Charles' death occurred,
we kind of took a step back.
It was like, "what else, you know,
are we going to see in this case?"
Well, I was at work.
Somebody called me
and said, "Charles died."
I mean, I was just shocked, just stunned.
My first thought was suicide.
Some of us knew that he was
being investigated for murder
of Byron griffy,
and I felt like he took the easy way out.
Charles may not have
ever seen a way out.
I mean, how could you ever recover
from the mountain of lies?
You start with the brothers.
I mean, think about it
keeping up appearances,
that's all they had done
since they had got to Florence.
The whole church
thing, was it all just fake?
Will we ever know the truth
of happened to Irene witty?
What happened to all of Byron's gold?
These were life-changing
lies. Well, where's the end?
The end for Charles was his death.
The last time I talked to Charles was
the day before he died.
And he told me,
"I'm not going to cause
you any more trouble.
"We can work through this.
"We can take care of
the business dealings
and do what needs to be done."
And that was pretty much it.
I really wasn't sad about
Charles passing away
because that was a part of my life
that I had already chosen to leave.
I know that sounds heartless, but
After what I had been through,
that was just a small
hiccup in the general scheme.
Laura and I were trying
to get things worked out
and figured out where we
were going to go from there.
At this point in the investigation,
we brought the last person
that saw Charles alive in
to interview him, a guy named cj young.
Ok.
As far as Charles' death,
your cop brain is thinking,
"he's guilty, so he killed himself."
Part of me thinks he had medications
and did he overdose?
Who knows? I mean, it's all suspicious
any way you look at it.
I didn't think that Charles was suicidal.
The police were trying to
push him to crack, basically,
for no reason. He didn't do the crime.
The next week after Tony left,
Charles was getting everything
set up to go forward without Tony.
He didn't plan to die.
I had heard from my son, Eric,
that Charles got his hair frosted,
Charles got his ears pierced,
Charles ordered a teeth-whitening kit,
Charles called This guy
and asked him, you know,
"where does an old queen like me
go to hook up these days?"
No, I wouldn't say he committed suicide.
I got the impression he had plans.
We all gonna have to
answer for whatever happens,
but if you have a good
life, and all of a sudden
it's brought to an end, it's sad.
It's very sad.
Look it, he was only 52.
He had wonderful cars,
beautiful church and a mansion,
lovely mortuary having
stuff, and more stuff
isn't the answer.
Guess we found that out.
Charles' death made me stop and think,
"did Anthony have
something to do with this?"
I heard people talking
about how, "that must be nice.
Now you don't have
to deal with any of that."
Well, it wasn't nice. I
was considered a suspect.
It very clearly looks like
Anthony would be the one
that gains the most
because I know that, with Charles alive,
that was going to be a huge battle.
Tony definitely had a
motive to get rid of Charles
because everything
was in Charles' name.
I think if Charles was still alive,
Tony could have ended up with nothing.
Tony is unassuming and you
wouldn't think he's dangerous.
But as far as Charles
and Anthony's relationship,
Anthony was the muscle.
If there was somebody who
was gonna get their hands dirty
or bloody, it was gonna be Anthony.
Anthony had a lot to
gain from Charles dying.
Now Anthony could
point the fingers at Charles
for Byron's death.
I knew that because Charles was gone,
Tony was now the prime suspect
in the murder of Byron griffy.
It was hard to kind of look
at Tony and not sit there
and question, like, "what's going on?"
Like, "are you a murderer?"
After Charles died,
there were a lot of rumors
one of the rumors around
town was that he'd offed himself
because he killed Byron griffy.
Or maybe he offed himself
because Tony broke up with him.
You know, small town stories.
There was a lot of rumors
about my brother Tommy
with Anthony and his half brother.
Everybody in town
calls it the love triangle.
Supposedly, he had
It was a love triangle
between Anthony and Charles,
Byron and my brother Tommy.
Yeah, it's square, but they called it
"the love triangle."
Because there's four, yes.
You know, every rumor
ever just starts coming out,
like Charles and Anthony
teaming up with linette
and Gina to kill Byron.
As a gay person myself,
it's just borderline offensive
that that's what people thought.
You couldn't really talk
to anyone that didn't think
that something was
up with Charles' death,
and the only person
you could really look at was Anthony.
It was really easy to think
that if anyone had the access,
opportunity, and motive
to tamper with his medicine,
it would be Anthony,
and it would look like what happened.
After Charles's death, the
autopsy report came back.
There was no poison in his system,
and that he had died of natural causes.
It was a massive heart
attack that killed Charles.
Under all that stress,
your lover left you for another person.
You're probably gonna
go to prison for murder.
That's a lot of stress on a guy
who already had a bad heart.
The official story is
that his heart gave out.
If you want to romanticize
it, he died of a broken heart.
The CBI used Charles' death
to be able to get warrants
and to go search my old house.
In the basement, they had
what they called the gun room.
They had guns in boxes.
They had them on the rack.
They had them all over the place.
During that search
warrant in Charles' bedroom,
in the back of a closet,
they found a hidden compartment.
And in that hidden compartment
were several boxes of coins,
one of which had
Byron griffy's name on it.
They were hidden.
Why weren't they turned
back over to his daughter?
My dad trusted them.
They were his friends,
and they were helping him
by making sure that his money was safe.
But they already had stolen from him.
There's no explanation as to
where my dad's money went.
I believe that Byron probably
had close to a million dollars
in collectible stamps
and coins and currency.
And he had a lot of gold.
Linette and Gina never saw
any gold returned to them.
What happened to all the gold?
I suspect Charles and
Tony had a lot to do
with Byron's gold disappearing.
Neither of us took anything of Byron's.
When the investigator came
in and took a bunch of coins,
there was one that did
have Byron's name on it,
but the other coins were
actually my collection
they had linette griffy
identify them as Byron's coins,
but they weren't they were mine.
The coins that Byron
had us store for him,
Byron ended up selling most of it to
Some guy out of the Springs,
but I wasn't even there
when he came to pick it up.
I was working on the crematory that day.
Anthony's default position
on anything potentially
criminal in this case
was he knows nothing and saw nothing,
including the death of Byron griffy.
Charles' memorial was
held at Florence high school
in the auditorium, and, you know,
it had a really huge turnout.
He was the mayor at the time.
They owned multiple
businesses along main street.
They had the church,
and so most of the town was there.
I stayed away from Charles's funeral,
just because I didn't
want it turning into a circus.
I knew there was gonna be police there.
One of the church members
was speaking to everyone,
and he said, "Charles's
brother must just be so upset
that he couldn't make it,
and our hearts are with him."
And me just shaking my head in disbelief
in that the entire town is in this room
and they all believe
something that's not true.
Some of the members of the community
wanted to put a statue
up of him out by city hall.
And it's like, "well, wait a few weeks."
"You might see his
face on the front page
for something else."
Charles was very good at telling stories,
and no one really
thought to question him.
Charles once told me about his ex-wife
and the two kids that he had.
And it was just like these grand stories.
So you would get sucked into them,
but they were always a little unbelievable.
The son, he said, was in the air force,
a pilot or something.
And then the daughter was a scientist.
Charles would pretend that
he was talking to one of them
or that he just got off the
phone with one of them.
We always believed the
story about Charles having
two children, and one in the air force.
But it was a lie, a huge lie.
Our view was that Charles had been
the mastermind of all of it,
and that when his death occurred,
my entire focus became
"how to prosecute this crime."
We had to reevaluate if we
had enough evidence to charge
just Anthony in the death of Byron griffy.
After Charles died,
I was just trying to survive, pretty much.
Still trying to run the businesses.
But the last two payrolls,
I had to cover myself
out of my own pocket.
And that's when I decided
to close the funeral home.
I don't know, it just
didn't seem like a place
I wanted to be anymore.
I found the person that I
believe I was meant to be with
for the rest of my life.
Charles and Anthony kept
that relationship a secret
for over 20 years.
I'm not gonna lie, I
was pretty devastated.
And I wasn't devastated
about the type of relationship.
It was the fact that it was a lie.
Then I thought, "would my life be better
with him or without him?"
And there was no There was no delay.
Anthony and my mom
rushed to get married.
My mom had me be her
wedding photographer.
From their point of view,
a murder investigation
was a side thing that was like,
"don't worry about this Murder."
They didn't have squat for evidence.
I kept thinking,
"did the cops come
up with something else?
Is there something else?"
And there never was any
anything else that I heard.
Charles' death made
us reanalyze everything.
So, there was a significant
delay before we ultimately
filed the charges.
I got a call from chief
of police from Florence.
And he told me, we've
got your coins here,
if you can come down and pick them up.
So I get in the car,
I go down, and that's
when I was arrested.
It was all a setup just
to get me to come in.
Once we knew Anthony
was going on trial,
he very quickly started liquidating
anything that he could,
and with the help of my mom,
trying to get enough
money to pay for his defense.
First attorney I had said,
"people always ask,
how much does it cost
to defend against a charge
of first-degree murder?"
And he said, "everything."
And he wasn't kidding.
Everything started getting sold
to try and pay attorney's fees.
All of the vehicles.
It was everything.
I have been a criminal
defense investigator
for about 45 years.
Lawyers representing people charged
hire me to investigate
the case for the defense.
I've met with thousands of clients,
and some of them would just flat say,
"you know, I did it, and it's your job
to help me get off."
But that wasn't Anthony.
Anthony was, "they're
wrong. We didn't do it."
And he was determined
to be found innocent
of something he kept
maintaining that he didn't do.
The case against
Anthony was circumstantial.
Juries like meat.
They want to be able
to find DNA at the scene,
fingerprints, hair fibers,
something to put the suspect there.
And, in this case, there
was no such evidence.
Everything in my mind
pointed to Charles and Anthony
as committing the crime.
The fact that they're there at the farm,
easy access to a weapon, he had motive.
I believed I was gonna be
able to meet that obligation
of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Anytime somebody's
charged with a crime,
the defense attorneys have an obligation
to investigate.
So I spent a good five months
trying to contact witnesses,
going through police reports,
documents, photographs, videos.
And finally, I stumble into a 911 call
made by a fella named Rob
A few months after the murder.
He basically said, "I have information
that Tommy tomlin is
involved in Byron's murder."
We knew Rob could change everything.
So, of course, I want to find Rob,
A few months after Byron's death,
a fella named Rob called
the 911 operator and said,
"I have information that
Tommy tomlin is involved
in Byron's murder and
that he told me he was."
So I, of course, had
been looking for Rob.
And as it turned out,
Rob died about a year
before I was able to try to interview him.
And I couldn't go into any
more detail than what appeared
in the police reports.
Those reports were
just handwritten notes.
The deputy that took
the statement from him,
he said he didn't pay attention to it
and didn't take it serious
because he was just a drunk.
I needed to do everything
I possibly could do
to prove Anthony's innocence.
And that was hard to do.
There was also a confidential informant
who said that Byron
wanted him to kill Cory.
Cory was Byron's grandson.
So there's some evidence that Byron
was talking to a hit man.
Byron was extremely depressed.
Did Byron talk that fella into
helping him commit suicide,
knowing that he was willing to kill?
But that confidential informant also died
before I was able to contact him.
Early on, the investigators were trying
to determine if this
was an assisted suicide
because there was no
evidence of Byron griffy fighting
and no evidence of him
attempting to get away.
I don't think there's any way at all my dad
would have ever been suicidal.
He was a mortician long
enough to know what
That did to families.
He'd have never done that.
As a prosecutor, our
obligation is that we do
not bring a case to trial
that we don't have a belief
that we're going to be able to prove
beyond reasonable doubt.
And I believed I had the evidence.
The stakes were pretty high.
I don't like to use the
term "fighting for your life,"
but that's what it felt like.
The defense team had
two alternate suspects,
Tommy tomlin and Cory, Gina's son.
There were other suspects,
but none of them ever Rose
to the level that would
show us that they were
a valid alternate suspect.
Throughout the course of the
day that the homicide took place,
Tommy was always with
someone, from the start to finish.
That removed him as
a suspect in our eyes.
We didn't think Cory
had the ability to do it,
and there was no evidence
whatsoever that indicated
that he was there.
The judge allowed us
to kind of talk about them
in closed chambers
without the jury present,
but then wouldn't allow
us to use it in court.
There was a significant amount
of circumstantial evidence
that pointed toward Charles
giebler and Anthony Wright.
They were at the scene
of the crime during the time
the crime occurred.
We have inconsistencies
in the car that they drove.
When they're both confronted with it,
the response is exactly the same.
You know, after the fact, they realized,
"we made a mistake in our statements,
"so let's both get back on the same page
and have the same response.
And a lot of the details
just doesn't make sense.
Charles and Anthony had
been to the farm plenty of times,
and for them to say,
"the gate was locked",
"whatever," I don't buy it.
Charles and Anthony drove an hour
to get their good friend to
take him for a birthday lunch.
They didn't drive around to the other gate
or even walk up to the house.
There was almost an entire
hour that was unaccounted for.
Either one could say
where they were for
that hour that was lost.
So it gave us more indication
that they were hiding something from us.
I know that I was at
the farm twice before,
maybe three times.
But I'd only been there a couple of times.
I'd never actually been
in the house before.
There's layer after layer
after layer of lie and deceit.
You start with the brothers,
and then you go all the way
down to the death of Charles
and everything in between.
As we dug into Charles
and Anthony's past,
we found that they had
been crime scene cleaners
for the Utah coroner's office.
They had the knowledge
and the know-how
to clean a crime scene
so that there wouldn't be
any evidence left behind.
These were individuals
who were comfortable around death.
I suspect that they were
gloved up with latex gloves,
and there was a real attempt
to avoid fingerprints and DNA.
My gut feeling was there had to be
more than one person involved.
When somebody dies,
that is dead weight.
So that dead weight becomes
a very difficult thing to move.
But if somebody moved him,
you could find some drag marks.
There was none of those.
So it looked like several people
moved him to that final resting position.
Those all made us to
the conclusion that it was
Charles giebler and Anthony Wright.
But did Tony kill Byron?
I always thought he did.
Charles had it in him
to order Tony to do it.
But I'm not sure if Charles
would have pulled the trigger.
Tony was more cold and calculated.
Not once during the trials
or anything did Anthony
ever say, "I didn't do it."
Like, if you were innocent,
you would plead at some
point and say, "I did not do this."
The trial, I mean, it was an
agonizing couple of weeks.
The jury goes in to deliberate.
And that was the first time it really hit me
that that's what I was
facing, was life in prison.
The jury in Anthony's trial,
they were out two days,
very, very stressful.
I'm looking at real
punishment if I'm found guilty.
They're gonna send me to prison for life.
We were all there, the whole family.
I was confident that Anthony
was gonna be convicted.
Anthony's just sweating it.
Nervous, of course.
So the jury comes back.
It was a hung jury, and
I was extremely upset.
They "hung," meaning
the jury couldn't make
an unanimous decision.
Everybody sat there
completely dumbfounded.
When they came back as a hung jury,
I didn't know how the system worked.
I'm thinking, "sweet, it's
over. I'm going home."
Nope.
The district attorney right away stated
that he was gonna try it again.
You just don't know what
to even think at that point.
It was very traumatizing.
"Bottom line, man, you're
gonna have to get another couple
"hundred thousand dollars
together to defend yourself
the next time."
I was ready
For another trial, but the
attorney kept telling me,
"if you have to go back after a mistrial,
it very rarely goes in
the defendant's favor."
Tony was just burned out. He was tired.
He was exhausted.
He was just like, "I can't keep doing this."
And then the head da
there, for whatever reason,
offers Anthony a plea bargain.
We made the decision that we had to get
any conviction we can.
And my primary goal in doing
that was to have Anthony Wright
make a statement that
says, "yes, I'm responsible."
Conspiracy to commit murder.
Didn't require jail time,
but it would be a few years of probation.
Anthony didn't want to do it.
The attorneys and myself
basically started begging him
to take the plea offer.
I mean, I used to say,
"no way I'd plead guilty
to something I didn't do."
Well, you're not looking
down the barrel of 25 to life.
It's real.
I wasn't giving up by any means,
but I didn't see a way out.
I just had to take the plea.
My thoughts of Anthony
taking a plea deal was,
what did he pay the da?
That's truly what I think.
You take somebody's
life and you get, what?
Ten years of probation?
I was sick to my stomach.
How could something like that happen?
Take a person's life
and it really has no value.
All of justice costs money.
You want to prove yourself
innocent over something?
You could lose everything.
And where would it get you?
So sometimes you
take The easy way
admit to something, get it over with,
and put it behind you.
Only god knows.
We all wrote letters to the judge.
And he said, "you've
agreed to the plea bargain."
And I said, "we didn't
agree to the plea bargain."
Bullock agreed to that plea bargain.
The district attorney, James
bullock, screwed us over.
I don't think that Anthony is innocent.
I don't think Charles was innocent.
Do I want to really
ask Anthony anything?
I would like an answer.
I would like him to just
Fess up, be a man, tell
me he did it, and why.
He's too much of a coward, though.
I guess that's why they shot
him in the back of the head,
and that's why he won't tell me.
I absolutely 100%,
without question, did not kill Byron griffy,
and Charles did not either.
I didn't do it. I don't know who did it.
I have an idea who I think might have.
The suspects that I believe
possibly had a part in.
Byron's murder were
Tommy tomlin, Cory higgs,
and Byron's daughter, linette.
The biggest motive linette
had was financial reasons.
Byron told me he was tired
of just having to continually
support her and put money
out for every little whim,
and he was talking about
just not doing that anymore.
We did not hear any
stories at all of Byron griffy
cutting her off in any way.
She was at work all day the
day that Byron was murdered.
Linette had an airtight alibi
unlike Charles giebler
and Anthony Wright.
Here are the facts.
Charles and Anthony had
hundreds of thousands,
close to a million dollars
worth of this guy's money.
Yes, other people had reason
to do something terrible to Byron.
Can't argue that.
But the people who
gained the most financially,
it was them.
It was all about lies
and greed and deceit.
And I'm not sure if we'll
ever know really the full truth,
the full extent of it.
There's one person that
knows the truth 100%.
That's Anthony Wright.
I don't suppose that we can ever trust
a damn thing that he says.
How could you really
trust anything that he says
at this point?
Having Laura there gave
me something to focus on,
trying to start our life together.
You know, it's a good distraction, still is.
That's sage from the lake pueblo.
That doesn't even
smell like sage anymore.
There it is.
So this summer, it'll be 12 years
that Tony and I have been married.
So, I mean, Anthony and
I, all we ever, ever wanted
was to be together. That was it.
We just wanted to be
together. And we are.
And we always will be.
I said this at the very beginning,
'cause, you know, right
away the attorneys are like,
"well, we got paid and
you didn't go to prison,
so all's good."
Yes, he gets to walk
around and have a job and,
you know, kiss me goodnight
every night or whatever.
I said, "but do not think for a minute
that this was some kind of damn gift."
This is not a "best-case scenario."
Give me a break.
I don't know that there'll ever be closure
because we didn't get justice.
Anthony gets to walk around
and do whatever he wants to do.
I would have really liked
for my dad to get justice.
There was no justice.
It doesn't matter that it's 12 years later.
It hurts just as bad today.
I'd do anything I could
to prove my innocence.
But, you know,
everybody's gonna think
Something different.
I struggle a lot still with,
"is Anthony innocent
or is he guilty?"
We're a decade later
and we just have
questions and some things
that probably will never
be able to be answered
because it's too late.
Who killed Byron?
I'm convinced Anthony
didn't, but there's
No evidence, and probably never will be
unless somebody makes
a deathbed statement
declaring that they did it.
There's so many rabbit holes
in this case to chase down
that I suspect if we
were to reopen the case,
there's additional evidence
that we would find
that would just be more
than we could deal with.
I'd like to say that the moral
of this story is don't trust
somebody who says
that they're your friend,
but then what kind of life do you have?
Like, I'm still gonna trust
and I'm still gonna be giving
and loving and caring
because that's what my
dad would have wanted.
A lot of this could have been avoided
if people could just be
themselves and tell the truth.
Truth is the thing that everyone seeks.
It's hard to come by.
Just be honest.
Say what happened
or what didn't happen.
Because someday they're
going to have to answer
to their maker for whatever they did.
Both you and I, we're
going to have to answer
for our misdeeds and our mistakes.
One day, they will too.