I am a Killer (2018) s03e03 Episode Script

1
The plan was to move forward
to Alaska
and just finish our lives up there.
That was it.
We always assumed we'd just be together
for the rest of our days.
I didn't know what happened to Leslie.
I thought, "Well, maybe she's okay,
maybe something"
"It wasn't as bad.
Maybe it was a bad dream."
The nurse, she says,
"Well, honey, she's deceased."
"She's been dead for a while."
And then it all kind of sunk in.
- Good to go?
- Yeah.
Alrighty!
I hear you.
Oh, there you are!
Uh
Well, the bullet had gone in
right here
and came out around here.
You can see a scar all the way across
where they had opened it up.
But it looks really odd.
And they said, "You'll probably never
be able to speak again."
My name is Daniel John Paulsrud.
I grew up in Neihart, Montana.
It was a town of 35 people back then.
Everybody knew everybody and their dogs.
I fly fished from the age of five on up.
Did a lot of camping and hunting.
A lot of hunting.
I I loved it. It was great.
We didn't have a whole lot of money,
but I didn't care.
I was an infantryman,
in the Airborne Infantry.
Uh We ended up going to Desert Storm
and Kuwait Liberation as well.
Yeah, it prepared me for a little bit
of life.
It wasn't all, um, blood and guts. It was
I think the more horrific things that
that I saw
was the treatment of people.
I've seen some women
that were beaten almost to death.
Um
Kids that didn't have nothin' to eat,
you know.
Going to combat
with people you've been with
I don't know how to describe it
other than a brotherhood.
There's a trust. Yeah.
Kept going until it was time to go home.
I always wanted to be involved in artwork.
So I ended up in Durango, Colorado
as a sculptor.
And boy, that lasted
for about five years or so.
I ended up moving back to Montana.
You know, and then
that's where I met Leslie.
She was very good-looking,
and, uh, her personality was, uh
wasn't so standoffish.
It was more
more of a friendly type of person.
She had never been the outdoors type,
and I introduced her to that.
And she took to it. She really enjoyed it.
And started hunting
She was spot on.
She was very safety-conscious.
Uh, she wouldn't shoot
unless she was absolutely sure.
She was great.
Oh, there was
nothing but love at that time.
She has one son and three daughters
from her ex-husband.
Leslie, she had a
a style of raising her kids
without discipline or
or consequences.
If we ever had an argument,
it was about her children, usually.
Her oldest daughter liked to take her
to the bars all the time and
She didn't like me a whole lot
because Leslie was spending her time
with me instead of out with her.
Uh, the youngest, Kailee,
was always with us.
She's a good kid. She, uh
She is very smart.
So Leslie went ahead, and then I
I followed.
Did as much moving as I could.
Then right before
we were almost done moved in
is when all this happened. Yeah.
We were hunting that day
right out of, uh, Fort Benton.
But yeah, it was just after daybreak,
I think we went out.
I think she'd gotten several phone calls
from the kids,
and like, "Well, we better just go home."
Started making plans for dinner.
She got a phone call from her oldest
and immediately started arguing.
So I went to the apartment
we were fixing up
and unloaded the tools and put the
the guns in the
in the apartment.
I always unload the guns
before I bring them in.
I just assumed that day I did.
Oh, couldn't have been
an hour and a half later or so,
she came in
and she brought beer.
We sat down
and started enjoying the evening.
I had the pistol on the table.
It was a .357 Magnum.
I carried it, uh
for hunting season, of course.
You know, if you wound an animal,
you can dispatch them quick and easy
without them suffering and whatnot, but
And as I was playing with the pistol,
I cocked it.
Mm
Let it down, cocked it, and let it down.
She had come back from the refrigerator.
I was sitting down.
I cocked it and was playing with it,
and it went off.
She immediately fell back into the chair
and down on the floor, so
I knew it hit her.
And it was so fast.
It died She died so fast.
And it was
All I could say was "I love you"
and "I'm sorry," and
There was nothing
that could be done at that point.
I sat back in the chair and thought,
"Well, I'll just have to shoot
shoot myself in the head
and be done with it."
And I tried.
I couldn't at first, and so I
I went to the refrigerator
and got a vodka we had in there.
I just drank it
and I was able to pull the trigger.
Well, I guess I don't remember
a whole lot after that.
Because I shot myself, it was assumed
after that, that it was deliberate.
I was convicted of deliberate homicide
and given life without parole,
plus ten years.
I never got the chance to,
to tell the kids,
"Hey, this was not deliberate."
"This was a horrific accident."
And I'll never lose the guilt and the pain
that goes with losing her,
and especially being my fault.
Well, I I lost my future.
I lost her kids' future and
I lost the rest of my life
that day.
I think of Leslie all the time.
All the time.
My wife and I were sitting down to
Thanksgiving dinner when I got the call.
The, um, call was to an intoxicated
or an injured person.
When I arrived on scene,
there was a person on all fours, um,
against the curb, partly in the roadway.
My initial thought was that
he had tripped and fallen off the curb
and had hit his face.
He was vomiting.
But when I shined my light onto him,
I could see that it wasn't vomit.
It was in fact blood that was,
you know, squirting out of his mouth.
I ask him if he had fallen.
He made a guttural noise
and shook his head no
and pantomimed the, you know,
putting a
doing this under his chin,
which I assume meant
that he had been shot.
And I ask him if someone had shot him,
and he again made a guttural sound
and shook his head no.
I ask him if anyone was with him,
and he nodded his head yes
and made a guttural sound
and pointed around behind him
with his hand.
Behind him,
I could see these pools of blood.
The blood trail
led back to the apartment.
And when I looked in the apartment,
I saw someone laying on the floor.
And immediately I recognized Leslie
when I saw her.
In a small community, you know everybody.
Uh, and everybody gets to know you.
She was laying on her back, and her hands
were in the pockets of her jacket.
She had been shot,
and laying on the floor, um,
not too far from her
was a Ruger GP100.357 revolver.
This particular style of firearm would be
an extremely rare event
if it was accidentally discharged.
Um, it takes a substantial amount of force
to squeeze the trigger on one of them.
You know, Leslie had her hands
in her pockets, and he shot her.
Who Who does that?
To my mind, there's no way
that this could ever be misconstrued
as an accident.
Dan and I really hit it off.
He was always good fun to be around.
He liked making people laugh
and being upbeat,
and he was a great artist.
My name is LJ Planer.
I met Dan Paulsrud in the military.
Uh, he sent this to me in 2018.
It says, "Paulsrud and Planer,
Desert Storm."
He, uh He writes like such a girl.
He's got girly handwriting.
We used to tease him all the time.
I did anyhow.
"Forever family."
We were M60 machine gunners.
And Dan and I got close.
There was one particular time
where on a mission,
our platoon sergeant
came running down the line,
saying there's a bunch of tanks
coming right at us
and there's no way
that we're gonna be able to stop them.
I said, "All right, buddy."
"This is probably going to be it."
"You want to fight or hide?"
And he said, "If you're gonna fight,
I'll fight with you."
Well,
that attack never came,
but I knew that I had somebody beside me
that was willing to fight to the death.
We both wanted to leave the military
and go hunt and fish.
Every time we talked, it was always about
when we are going to get together,
and I was still in the military,
and so it's hard to plan things.
So it never happened.
I got a phone call
from another friend of ours that said,
"Did you hear what happened to Paulsrud?"
And I was like, "No."
And he said,
"Dude, you gotta check the news."
Uh
"He killed his fiancée
and tried to kill himself."
And I said, "There's no way."
"There's no way.
It's gotta be somebody else."
I just didn't understand.
I didn't didn't understand.
I was angry that he could let something
like that happen.
He grew up around guns.
We
We handled them all the time.
How How could that happen?
He told me it was an accident.
I don't know.
The Dan I knew,
I can't believe that he could ever
of killed her on purpose.
I told him, you know,
"I'm sorry for not being there."
Uh
"It's not my place to judge you."
"It's, uh"
"It's my place to be your brother
and support you."
He's responsible.
Um, he understands that.
Dan took a life.
That gun didn't kill her by itself.
He pulled the trigger.
How can you try somebody
in that severe of a case
and give him life plus 10 years
when he doesn't even have the opportunity
to tell his story or his side?
Can't speak, has a traumatic brain injury
with a gunshot wound to the head,
and is medicated to the point
where he is incoherent.
She was always fun,
always smiling,
up for a good time.
When she was bowling with her friends,
they were the party girls.
And I've since joined the party girls,
which is terrible.
What I have
are some photographs of Leslie.
There's my favorite one.
That's one of the times
Leslie had short hair.
But always a smile.
Always a smile.
And these two are with her,
bowling friends,
in the middle, having a good time.
Some crazy bar somewhere.
My name is Susan Yager.
And Leslie is my sister.
Is, was, always will be.
Leslie came to our house when she was two.
She was adopted.
Darling little girl
with a thick head of copper curls.
Her father had killed her mother
in the backyard.
Shot her mother and then shot himself.
She saw it.
So, she came to our house.
She had a lot of friends
and just happy all the time.
That was who she was.
She did basketball and track
in high school,
and then swim team in the summer.
So she had a good, good bringing-up life.
She graduated, she got married,
and she turned 18
all within a week.
Any other boyfriend she had
would be introduced to her friends,
and everybody going out together,
and everybody having a good time.
And this one didn't happen that way.
It was no kind of a love story.
She moved out several times.
Why would you leave
if it were a perfect relationship?
I knew that he had threatened her,
that he held a knife to her,
that he had a gun across his lap
as she moved out.
He said, "I'll take you out
and shoot myself."
"But you're going to end up
the same way your parents did."
I would say to her, "Are you kidding me?
Why are you even listening to that crap?"
But somehow, he had a pull on her.
Some sort of pull.
She was pissed
and said that Dan had decided
Thanksgiving was with his parents
on Saturday.
And she said, "I'm just done
with this whole mess."
She said, "I'm done
with him deciding everything,
and telling us what to do,
and deciding what my family and I
are doing."
She said, "I'm going back
to tell him just to get out."
"We're done. He needs to leave."
I said, "Stay here. Have dinner with us."
"Nope. I'll go back over
to the apartment."
"Okay."
That was it.
We all miss her
because she shouldn't be gone.
If anybody should be gone,
it should be him.
No, she shouldn't be gone.
Mom!
- I'm here! See?
- Catch!
I'll catch you. I'm right here.
I'm right here. I promise.
One, two, three!
There you go. See?
A lot of things, I see more clearly
now that I'm a mom myself.
Never in a million years would I choose
or let someone come into my kids' lives
and treat them
the way that Dan treated me.
I am Kailee Davidson,
and I am Leslie Davidson's
youngest daughter.
I adored my mom.
Every single night,
she would tuck me in bed and say,
"I'm going to do this, tuck you into bed,
kiss you good night until the day I die."
My parents got a divorce
when, I think,
I was like six or seven years old.
They got along, um, just fine
even though they were divorced.
I was ten years old.
The time from when my dad passed away
to moving in with Dan
was maybe a month.
Maybe a month.
My mom was in you know, infatuated.
And I remember thinking, "But why?"
Like, he was just the
a very heavyset guy.
Didn't I don't think he had a job then.
It was okay for a little bit.
And then, I would say a couple months in,
things started to change.
My mom turned her back to him,
and she was walking down the hallway.
And then he just came up right behind her
and pushed her down, like so hard.
And she flew.
I was sitting on my bed, and she just
her whole body just flew down the hallway.
There was other times when she would have
scratches and bruises all over her.
And I'd be like, "Is that from him?"
And she would say, "No, no, no."
But I knew.
And that happened a lot.
You know, he took a lot of satisfaction
in the amount of power he had over my mom.
He emotionally and mentally abused her
and took advantage of her,
knowing that she would give him
another chance.
And it was just this never-ending cycle.
It's important to every case
when there are things that are wrong
that need to be set right.
We're here to set things right.
My name is Mark Hilyard.
I was the, uh, criminal investigator
for the state of Montana on this case.
I think it was an argument
that escalated to the point
where he took that opportunity
to shoot her,
to kill her.
One of the agents found
inside one of the pockets
a napkin that had been written on.
And that note read,
"For the record,
Leslie has thought about suicide
for some time now."
"She has asked me to end her life
several times."
"She has also asked me
to be abusive to her
so she could call the police
for her own personal vengeance."
"I feel horrible
for striking back at her."
"I have been pushed to that point."
"Never once have I done this in my life,
and I never will again."
So right there,
he admits that, uh, he struck her.
And he's also trying
to formulate the alibi
that she wanted him to shoot her.
What bothers me about this
is, uh, he had time to write this.
So after the shooting,
he went out to his vehicle,
'cause I found napkins in the vehicle
that matched this exactly,
and a pen that he wrote this,
this note on.
Uh
And he brought it back inside
and wrote that note while she lay there.
He could've got help
during that time.
Yeah, it's been a long time
since I've seen this.
My name's Mark.
What we're gonna do is
we're going to get a piece of paper,
a notepad,
and have you write 'em down.
I'd never had anything like this before
where I had to have the suspect
write everything out to me.
So, it was very unusual.
I have the statement right here.
"Went out hunting that day to go hunting."
You know, "Had a wonderful day."
"Leslie put away the rifles."
"I grabbed the .357."
"Now, I don't know what happened next
as far as the gun going off
because I couldn't believe
what had just happened."
I think he's a liar.
I, I You know, I mean,
a liar can't remember all his lies.
I kept telling my mom
to leave him.
If anybody could have gotten
through to her, it would have been me,
and he knew that, and that terrified him.
My name is Amanda Davidson.
Um, Leslie was my mother.
I was the last one
to speak to her that day.
And my sister and my grandmother
had come up from Fort Benton
to meet me and my brother
at Golden Corral in Great Falls.
My mother was supposed to meet us there.
And I get a phone call from her
saying that her and Dan are fighting.
The phone went dead,
and she called me back.
And I'm like, "Did Dan just hit you?"
And she's like, "Yes."
I'm like, "Mom, I'm coming to get you."
She's like, "No, you don't need to.
You're fine."
She goes, "I'm leaving.
I'll be, I'll be up there."
And
I said, "I love you," and the last thing
she said to me is, "I love you more."
We went ahead and ate.
Um, I Hadn't heard from her.
And I had to work that night.
My sister kept
Kailee kept calling me and calling me.
I'm like, "Oh my God, come on.
I just saw you." You know?
And, uh, finally, I picked up.
I'm like, "What?!"
And John Turner, the sheriff at the time,
was on the phone,
and I could hear my sister just howling.
And he's like, "We found your mom's body."
And I collapsed.
So, I went into shock mode.
So I went to work.
Um And then it came up
on the ten o'clock news.
You kind of got to know
that's when it's real.
So this is the letter
that I've held on, um, from Dan,
for many, many years.
It's a reminder
of what kind of a coward he is
and who he will blame.
Anybody but himself.
It says, "Amanda, it is difficult
to put into words
everything I need to say to you
without fear of provoking
that hate and disdain
so common in your character."
"All I have ever known of you
is hostility, alcoholism,
and your trouble with the law."
"But none of these things you've done
to me or the rest of your family
should reflect you deserving
to lose your mother the way you did."
As you can see in what I've read to you,
there's nothing but hatred.
This letter didn't surprise me,
him blaming me,
because I knew who he was.
I knew what kind of a monster he was.
And as I was playing
with the pistol,
I cocked it and let it down, cocked it,
and it went off.
And she was gone,
almost immediately it seemed like.
Yeah, I don't believe that
one bit.
That's the first time I've heard his
"explan" See? I'm shaking
That's the first time
I've heard his explanation, and it
It makes me irate.
She died with her hands in her coat.
She was leaving. Her car was running.
Knowing my mother, she was leaving him,
and I think it was for good.
This has been a good release for me
because I will never think about this man
ever again.
As far as I'm concerned,
Dan can burn in hell.
We were hunting that day.
Yeah, it was just after daybreak
I think we went out.
I think she'd gotten several phone calls
from the kids,
and like, "Well, we better just go home."
Started making plans for dinner.
She got a phone call from her oldest
and immediately started arguing
'cause she had been at the bar and
"All right. Just come over whenever
and tell me"
That whole entire thing is a lie.
They didn't go hunting.
I mean, I I saw my mom that morning.
She picked me up that morning.
The plan was to have
a Thanksgiving dinner with all of us.
My sister,
she wasn't out at the bar.
She was not arguing with my mom.
I was sitting across from her at the table
when my mom called her
and said that Dan punched her in the face.
And to act
like they were this happy couple
and that they weren't fighting
that entire day,
it's not an accident.
It happened behind closed doors.
You don't want anyone to know.
I was the only person
who saw how he treated my mom
for two and a half, three years.
I I witnessed it.
I grew up with it.
That was my normal.
And I know the truth.
Leslie is the love of my life.
I miss her a lot.
I have to drudge forward with her in mind
without being stuck in that pit
of grief and shame
for causing that.
I do believe we would still be together
had she not been hit,
or if she had survived, or any of that.
Yes, I think we'd still be together.
"Leslie has thought about suicide
for some time now."
"She has asked me
to end her life several times."
"I feel horrible
for striking back at her."
"I have been pushed to that point."
"Never once have I done this in my life,
and I never will again."
That sounds like something
that was written right when
before I pulled the trigger, I'll bet.
And I had vodka by then.
I'm trying to think
what I was thinking at the time and
I'm drawing a a blank.
It sounds as though
you killed her deliberately.
Oh, ma'am. No, no, no.
No.
Um
I wonder if it was more for closure,
but I wouldn't
I wouldn't say I killed her deliberately
and then wrote that, no.
You killed our mother
in cold blood.
She died with her hands in her coat.
She was leaving. Her car was running.
Knowing my mother, she was leaving him,
and I think it was for good.
I don't think the car was running.
That doesn't sound right to me, but
I wish
I wish I could've talked
during the trial.
It seems to escalate
every time with her, but
I never really got along with Amanda.
I wish I could help her to move on.
They didn't go hunting.
I mean, I I saw my mom that morning.
She picked me up that morning.
The plan was to have a Thanksgiving dinner
with all of us.
My sister, she wasn't out at the bar.
I was sitting across from her at the table
when my mom called her
and said that Dan punched her in the face.
And to act
like they were this happy couple
and that they weren't fighting
that entire day
That's too bad.
No, we weren't fighting that entire day.
We did go hunting that day.
I feel like she's being influenced
as far as what she is
told to say.
It's not nearly as, uh, horrific
as what some have explained.
It was not intentional,
and that's the truth.