Prime Suspect

Something was happening just outside the door.

And maybe it was better the boy not know what awful choices he and his sisters would one day be forced to make.

Glenn Race and his sisters Joanne and Caitlin, lived in a perfectly ordinary suburb, though other children might well have envied them for their neighbor, California's famous Magic Mountain. The parents he had seen through the peephole were John and Ann Race. they had been married 19 years. He was an ex-sheriff's deputy, she a former teacher, now a stay-at-home soccer mom.

Anyone would have thought they were happy.

Didn't they all have a wonderful time? At Glenn's cousin's wedding? Just the week before he looked through the peephole? Didn't his parents dance happily together? Who could have known about the secret Ann was keeping from her unsuspecting husband? She told me that she was thinking about leaving John.

Long before it happened, Ann revealed her feelings to a select few in her church women's group. Something was wrong with her marriage. She said. Well, I don't feel like I love him anymore, you know, I'm tired of his tightness, he's tight with money.

This is Ann's close friend, D'Ann Wood, a woman who knew Ann's organized, deliberate ways very well, very organized, very meticulous, planned everything. She knew what she was going to do, when and where she put things. And I'm off looking for where, where did I put this, where did I put that? And she would know exactly where it was exactly.

D'Ann knew that in the days after the family wedding, Ann had completed a careful secret plan to leave John Race. She'd researched their finances so she knew what she was entitled to. She'd signed a six-month lease on a condo a mile from the family home. She'd prepared for a quick and seamless departure while John was at work. She just said she was afraid of how John would react when he saw the note and saw that she was gone and some of their things were gone.

And the kids were gone, and now it was the afternoon of April 18, 1991. Ann picked up the children from school. They went to the condo.

And I said, Okay, but I said, Well, just don't let your guard down if you are still worried. Ann spent the day at the beach with her children, and later she reluctantly agreed to meet twice with John and their pastor for counseling. Over the weekend, John begged Ann to return and rethink her decision to move out and file for divorce.

But Ann was adamant about leaving. Still, she didn't want to keep John from the children. And so, April 22nd, 3 p..m. An after-school visit for John. Glenn at his video game, his mother talking to his father outside. Did you see what they looked like, whether they were angry at each other or how they were talking?

After I saw him, saw John, that is, and found him well, not helpful. He seemed to ration the information he had about Anne in small drips.

Image was everything to him, image and money, those two things were everything to him. Which is why Anne was determined to keep John from discovering her plan to leave him. She was afraid he'd try something to stop her.

And so when Deanne heard that Anne had gone missing, the reaction seemed to come right out of her gut. And I said, Oh my God, John killed her, had he? By May 13, 21 days since Glenn and his sisters had last seen their mother. It was clear to both Amy and the local police that a missing persons investigation wasn't enough anymore. It had to be something much more serious.

Which is how these two got involved. We came in late, missing persons came in late. Frank Salerno and Louis the Hat Danoff were veteran homicide detectives with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. They'd seen and solved some of the toughest cases in L..A.

History, The Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler. Just how tough could this case in the suburbs be?

That he was giving her a total of $25,000 and that she left as simple as that. Well, not quite that simple. John Race told detectives he met Anne twice after April 22nd to give her money.

He also said she called him to say she was leaving her car at an airport shuttle parking lot, called the flyaway, that she was going to leave from Los Angeles International Airport. The only thing she didn't say, John told them, is where she was going. Right away. We're thinking, Wait a minute. His story does not hold any water.

As they poked around for clues, Detective Danoff and Salerno felt the familiar tug of suspicion grow. And each time they talked to John Race, that feeling intensified. We could not get by him and it was his story, and then it was all of his little mannerisms and stuff.

And that's what we've been trying to do get beyond you, get somewhere else, go on you.

I'm a good husband, I'm a good.

You gave me two choices, John, I gave you one, but I mean, I know in my mind I didn't do anything improper. Then, John, you are in fact, city. These were two supremely experienced detectives.

They were sure they had their man. There's no doubt he killed her. What happened? Did he follow her? was he able to get into her car?

Was he able to say, Can we talk five more minutes? Can you get into my car? who knows? But without evidence, the investigators match of wits and facts with John Race remained a draw. Did John kill Anne?

And, if not, where was she?

The air hung heavy in the courtroom, the people pressed shoulder to shoulder. They'd heard the gossip and the whispers about a family teeming with passion and hate, about a mysterious disappearance and a pile of bones found burning in a lime pit. And now they wanted to know what really happened, but even they were not prepared for the story that came spilling out.

The secrets, the lies, the confessions, and the ending so unimaginable. And now you will hear it too. The Dead Alive on Morrison Mysteries, a true story that became a classic novel. Listen now to wherever you get your podcasts.

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This is the secret story of a young Russian oligarch who hacked his way to a $93 million fortune. I'm CNBC's senior Washington correspondent Eamon Javers. In our new podcast, The Crimes of Putin's Traitor, I'll take you inside a shocking Russian crime targeting the American financial system. Attacks that sources tell me were welcomed by Vladimir Putin's government. Follow and listen to the crimes of Putin's traitor wherever you get your podcasts.

And Glenn Race's father was their only suspect. We couldn't get by the guy that's closest to the victim, and that is the husband, John Race, an ex-deputy sheriff, had never wavered from his story that the only mystery about his wife's disappearance was where she was vacationing, which, to Salerno and Danoff, made no sense at all, went against everything we learned about her.

She didn't travel alone, she always let people know where she was. Everything he told us went against her life patterns. She was a woman of precise organization and preparation, unbelievably organized.

The detectives discovered that Anne had left a roadmap of her life, an amazing paper trail of detailed calendars, notes, lists for her everyday activities and future plans. And they also found a letter which arrived after she disappeared from a guy named Bob. A desperate plea from a worried man who wasn't her husband. Bob, the detectives learned, was an old high school friend of Anne's.

They'd been writing to each other for more than a year, sometimes almost every day. Then, suddenly, in late April 1991, her letters suddenly stopped. The detectives tried to check out the clues an unworried John offered about his wife's movements, and they became increasingly suspicious.

Clue number one John told them he met Anne twice after her departure to give her money. Both times at local eateries, and not a soul could remember seeing either one of them in either restaurant.

Clue number two John said he moved Anne's car into the shade at the flyaway parking lot. Really, at the time, there wasn't a single shade tree in the entire lot. Clue number three.

Anne supposedly parked the car there on Thursday morning, almost three days after she left John. But here's the thing. They call it the flyaway, because a shuttle from there takes you directly to your flight at L..A. airport. And yet John claimed Anne did not call him from the payphone at the airport until the next day.

If she parked at the flyaway on Thursday, why didn't she call from the airport until Friday? And clue number four if she left John on Monday but didn't leave town until Friday, where did she sleep? Certainly not at the condo. When the cops got there, they found a life interrupted.

A bag of groceries purchased Monday, April 22nd, remained untouched. The crust for the pizza, the kid said she'd promised them that night was sitting on the counter. Her clothes, makeup, passport were all there, untouched. So there was all these little things. And that's what makes a circumstantial case.

By itself, that doesn't mean anything. When you start adding up 15, 20, 30, 50 of those inconsistencies, that's what makes the case, and it makes it, you know, unbelievable what he's saying, unbelievable that. Her life ceased on the 22nd of April. So there was enough circumstantial evidence to implicate John Race in the disappearance of his wife.

In fact, the detectives assumed it was murder, but you know what they say about assumptions? Besides, one of them had been burned before in a major circumstantial no-body case, a jury acquitted.

And when the body was found, well, it was too late. Double jeopardy applied. A killer walked. So this time around, the detectives decided to keep their heads down and go on looking for Anne Race. This would have driven you crazy, wondering where that body was.

Well, Glenn had to live, as did they all, and life with father was not bad at all.

And then, in 2001, he retired, too. Reports unwritten, though it never ever stopped bothering him.

In this particular case, I had a file cabinet that had five drawers worth of material that had to be reviewed. It took Detective Scott nearly eight months to decipher it all. But by April 2006, 15 years after Aunt's disappearance, all that old material seemed finally to come together. It was very obvious to me that John Race was the primary suspect. There was enough evidence.

Detective Scott's massive report went to a grand jury. The verdict, an indictment against John Race. Now would the truth finally be known.

Glen Race approached the trial of his father, John, in the grip of unruly emotions. You already lost one parent, now the possibility was you were going to lose another one.

Or was the D.A. In a circumstantial case like this, if a jury looks at what's possible, you're going to lose, if they look at what's reasonable, you're going to win. The prosecution team, John Lewin and Beth Silverman went in confident. The fact that so much time had passed made our case so much more powerful.

Absolutely no question time is on our side in a case like this. People don't go on 16-year vacations, but juries can be unpredictable.

And after all, there was no body nor even physical proof that a murder had occurred. And without that proof, argued John's defense attorney, Phil Israels, there was no case. It's very easy to make a person look like he's not telling the truth, especially when you're talking about statements that were made 16 years ago, the defense believed. Even though the case was very old. And even though John had cooperated and told the police everything he knew, there was a rush to judgment. During that 16 years, John was always a suspect.

And yet John stayed in the area. He raised a family. He did not leave. No, he did not leave. He was a model dad.

But was he also a homicidal husband? The evidence will demonstrate, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Anne Race is dead. She was murdered by that man more than 16 years ago. The prosecution called on 42 witnesses over 20 days, witnesses who knew Anne Race and had nurtured their suspicions about her husband for all those years.

She felt that she was being controlled by her husband, that she was being forced to do things she did not want to do. She said in the last six months that he made her have sex every night. She said that her husband, that she was afraid her husband was going to kill her, her pastor remembered. He warned the couple not to meet alone.

Because sometimes things happen when in the heat of the moment. But Anne wasn't alone when she dropped by with the children the afternoon of April 22, 1991. That's the day Glenn looked out the peephole and saw his parents talking. The same moment one of the neighbors claimed to have witnessed from across the street.

Anne was on her way to McDonald's when she was last seen alive by that neighbor. And John followed her, said the prosecution, and killed her, and then, in the ensuing days, hid her body. So well, it has never been found. To which the defense simply responded Where's the proof they're saying that he did all these things?

That he followed her, murdered her, disposed of the body, did all of these things, and nobody saw anything. I mean, it's ludicrous. Had John ever been violent? they asked. He had not been abusive.

I had not witnessed any abuse. If she had said to you, John had said he was going to follow her and kill her, you would remember that is that correct? I don't remember that. The defense challenged those famous detectives when they came to the stand.

In all of these searches that you conducted, did you find any physical evidence at all that tied John Rays to any sort of crime here?

Did anyone really know, Ann? you were aware that she had a boyfriend, a lover? No, so you really didn't know whether or not there was a sexual relationship? She never shared that with you.

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She'd been cheating on their father with a man named Bob Russell, whom the prosecution called as a way of showing that Ann had plans she would not simply have gone away. Bob read the last letter she wrote to him the day she disappeared. At this point, I feel I can say to you, I'm exclusively yours. I will never have sex with John again.

Bob never heard from Ann again. Of course, the children didn't either. But now, in court, all three of them would have to choose between loyalty to their father and the memory of their mother. We went round and round on, you know, the issue of subjecting the kids to anything more in terms of the harm that they had already endured. Uniform to state the testimony you may give.

It couldn't be avoided. They would take the stand, but could they agree? Even after all these years, do you still love your mother?

Yes, and even after everything, do you still love your father? Yes, and do you feel devoted to your father?

Yes, Joanne was the prosecution's star witness, or so they hoped. She was the eldest, she had the clearest recollection. Her discomfort was obvious.

But she told her secrets how she knew, for example, her mother would leave her father a year before it happened. How careful and quiet the planning had been.

And she was no dummy. My question is, did you believe your father? did your mama go on a trip?

No, and yet saying these things here in this silent courtroom, said Joanne, was very hard. Do you remember what your father said about your mother?

Are you going to be thinking with your answers how they may or may not affect your dad in terms of this case?

Uh, yes, Glenn, it appeared, had picked to side his father's. Do you believe that you and your sisters were the center of her life?

So now we have a case in which there is nobody, no crime scene, no murder weapon, nobody saw anything. Does that make sense to you? Why is that? The most reasonable explanation is that it didn't happen, would the jury agree.

The defendant's fate now rested with 12 strangers. Well, quietly and alone, a loving son was thinking about judgment, too.

By the time his father's long trial wound to its close and a jury took the case away to consider Glenn, Race had begun to feel the ground shift beneath his feet. Those 12 strangers would have their way, of course, but Glenn was a jury of one.

The actual vote was unanimous. We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, John Race, guilty of the violent murder. The evidence was enough to convince the jurors it was murder in the first degree, but Glenn Glenn's jury of one was still out.

What he was about to say We'll never know. You are a murderer. How tragic you've been in a sentence to stay prison for the term prescribed by law, which in this case is 25 years to life.

Anne's children struggled with the truth, each in his or her own way Caitlin in her father's corner, Joanne, the sad finality of bitter victory, and Glenn needing something to break the deadlock in his heart.

That, Glenn decided was a long shot.

It's not reasonable.

But it's funny. I think something in me definitely misses her a lot.