I'm not a killer.
And the moment that will make law and order history.
New episodes start Wednesday on NBC.
How different they were.
Teresa Sebold and her twin sister Lisa.
Teresa so stable.
Lisa defiant.
Occasionally irresponsible.
And now on the very night she was leaving her husband, Lisa had vanished.
And Teresa knew to the bones of her shared DNA that something was terribly wrong.
Everyone said that I was letting my imagination go wild.
That she's not dead, she's just out partying, she just needs to be patient.
I was very insulted by all this because I knew she was dead.
Lisa's whole family suspected that Lisa's controlling husband, Bryce Thomas, had something to do with her disappearance.
The police were suspicious too, and they questioned him at his front door, but got no further.
They did not have a warrant to go in or had any reason to be suspicious.
That's why we knew we had to have evidence to be able to get the search warrant.
I said, well the first thing that I'd like to do is go to the apartment where we know she last was.
And it was late at night.
And so we did.
It is bleak in this corner of Bakersfield, hired by the roar of the interstate, bleak and dark outside the apartment of Bryce Thomas.
They checked he wasn't home.
Teresa, Rick and a few friends stood in the dark yard.
But now, suddenly Teresa knew what she had to do.
She turned to the others and said, as far as I'm concerned, Lisa died in that house.
She never left it alive.
And we need to get inside their house.
That's what we need to do.
She never left there alive and she did not leave there voluntarily.
So Teresa says, I'm going to break in.
And I said, are you sure, Teresa?
You know, she said yes.
It was kind of a scary alleyway and there was only a ledge this big for me to stand on.
And the window was up to here.
It would not open.
All of a sudden it slipped magically.
I mean, I went to myself and I went, whoa, like that.
And I had goosebumps all over me.
And I said, OK, here goes.
You know, I knew that.
I just felt like my sister was assisting me.
The silence of the empty house was eerie.
But as she opened the door for her brother Rick, they were assaulted by an unusual odor.
Immediately when the door opens, the place reeks of like a pine cleaner where he had
been cleaning.
And there was a carpet shampoo right in front of the front door.
So we knew that was a bad sign right there.
Teresa tentatively walked through the apartment, afraid of what she might find.
First she noticed that he was not sleeping in the bed.
He had a little bed made on the floor in the spare bedroom.
So we knew he had been sleeping there.
We thought, well, that's strange.
So then Teresa, she noticed that the bed was not made like it normally was.
You said you were standing by the mattress thinking, I'm supposed to be here.
And I didn't even know what I expected to see, but something told me to look there.
So I started stripping the bed.
So you're tearing away at the bed without really knowing why, except you felt like you
were.
Exactly.
Why aren't I seeing anything?
So I went over to the side of the mattresses and put my hands underneath to push it up
to look in between.
And it was all wet in between the mattresses.
And I went, Rick, come here and help me please.
The mattresses are all wet.
And I was almost crying.
He picked up the mattresses and blood was everywhere on both sides, just soaking wet
with blood.
And I just started screaming and I ran out of the apartment.
And it was, I knew of course then she was dead.
There's no doubt that was her.
What was the feeling that made you so certain?
I felt her spirit just come and grasp upon me.
And when I ran out that door, I knew that I had to get the cuffs there and find out
the truth.
Theresa's discovery gave police the grounds they needed to get a search warrant for Bryce's
home.
What they found was disturbing.
Not only was the mattress bloody, but blood spatters were picked up on walls, the chest
of drawers and other bedding.
Rosemary Wall was the lead investigator.
What does it say to you when you see that kind of evidence?
Well that tells us that someone was violently assaulted in that room because of the cast
off and the pattern that the blood spatters left on the furniture and also on the wall.
But DNA testing of blood can sometimes take months.
Police of course had their suspicions, especially when cleaning materials were found.
But Bryce Thomas told police he had no idea where Lisa was.
Where are you going?
Away from you.
After all, he said, she was leaving him.
And about the blood, he had an explanation for that too.
He remembered a time not too long before she came up missing that she had a pretty heavy
nosebleed and that was his reason for the blood being on the mattress.
The story which frankly the police were not inclined to buy.
There was just too much evidence, physical evidence and his statements did not seem to
be that of a husband that was deeply concerned about his wife.
So why not take him into custody at that time?
Well you have to have more than just a gut feeling to make an arrest for a murder.
You have to have probable cause and you have to have your evidence and you only get one
shot at taking a case to trial and we weren't going to blow it.
And what kind of a case did they have anyway?
Was Lisa Seabolt even dead?
Without DNA results, police couldn't be sure the blood was in fact Lisa's.
There was no weapon, no body.
Yes, Lisa was missing but remember, she had been known to disappear before.
She was to say the least, unpredictable.
What if they charged Bryce Thomas with murder and then Lisa showed up alive?
We sent teletypes nationwide to have other law enforcement agencies check their databases
to see if they had contact with her and we had to do everything that we could to show
that she didn't exist anymore.
And anyway, even Teresa was having second thoughts about the main suspect.
She wavered a little.
Bryce insisted on his innocence, even established an 800 number and begged people to call with
information about Lisa.
It was, frankly, confusing.
It was really hard because it was like I was pointing the finger at somebody I loved, you
know, like a brother.
And so police went on dredging the depths for secrets.
Had Lisa been dumped in some abandoned well?
After all, Bryce did work out here.
He knew where something could be hidden.
But the only find came above ground and it was unpleasant.
The cops went door to door around Lisa's old haunts and discovered she had been using crystal
meth, had been drawn into the drug underworld, had been seeing some very dangerous people
who did not seem anxious to cooperate with police.
The cops did tell me they left business cards on the, you know, people's screen doors and
stuff and they were never contacted.
Six long months passed, each month worse than the last.
The fear and guilt were almost overpowering.
And those nightmares that I used to have and that I couldn't put myself in front of her
to protect her from being killed, I should have been the one to jump in front of her
and be the one to be killed rather than her.
In her heart, Teresa knew if anyone was going to unearth the secret of what had happened
to her sister, it would have to be her.
Once again, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
She was about to go undercover as her own sister.
It was a decision that would almost cost her life.
You should see there was guns around and there was bullets in bowls, like you'd have candies
in a bowl.
They had bullets in a bowl and they had people's names carved in them, these bullets.
It was the scariest moment of my entire life.
Sunday, a night of all new drama on NBC.
First, a West Wing former opponent could be the next vice president.
I want you to do the job.
Then, law and order criminal intent ripped from the headlines.
A cruise ship murder goes overboard.
Who said anything about murder?
And, Crossing Jordan, a normal day on the job ends as a kidnapping.
Garrett, call me back.
All new West Wing criminal intent in Crossing Jordan, and Sunday on NBC.
Monday, Molly Ringwald in an all new medium.
She's hiding a secret.
He's in the apartment.
You'll want to see.
And coming soon, Kelsey Grammer as the angel of death.
Not exactly Dante's Inferno, but close enough.
All new medium, Monday on NBC.
A marriage torn apart when a husband...
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A Frost Advisory for parts of the area at 11.
What happened to Lisa Thomas?
What would cause a 36-year-old woman, a mother of two little girls,
to vanish into thin air?
Murder?
It looked that way, but there was no body, no weapon.
Certainly, her twin sister, Teresa, was suspicious,
but that didn't give police much to go on.
Had Lisa's husband, Bryce, killed her in a jealous rage?
He insisted he had nothing to do with it.
And Teresa spiraled into a deep depression.
I was desperate to find her body, and they also told me that they couldn't do anything
until the body was found.
But finding a body in Bakersfield, California, posed a particularly daunting challenge.
This happens to be the cradle of the West Coast's oil business.
Over a century, 5,000 wells have been bored to the pool of oil down below.
Many of them now just deep holes, long since abandoned,
as Bryce Thomas, the oil worker, knew very well.
Was Lisa in one of them?
And so police sent down probes into the dark.
They plumbed the depths of a local aqueduct of nearby rivers.
They found nothing.
Every lead a dry hole.
And the investigation seemed to stall.
Weeks went by.
Teresa began to second-guess the police.
Did they think Lisa wasn't worth it?
My feeling about it was that because of Lisa's background,
and because she wasn't exactly the doctor's wife,
they didn't find her crime to be that high on the list of priorities.
Remember, that DNA had been sent away months earlier, and still no results.
Sometimes the wheels of justice work slowly.
How did Teresa respond to that?
Well, Teresa didn't quite understand the way the justice system works,
and she tried to be very helpful, but she wanted immediate results.
She was going stir crazy.
She was.
Half a year had passed.
Teresa could no longer sit and wait for results.
She had to do something.
She distributed posters, created her own special twin hotline.
She pestered her local newspapers to keep the story alive.
She even arranged for coverage on national TV.
Private investigators, search and rescue teams, and even psychics were brought in,
and there were agonizing forays into the endless oil fields.
I would be right there in front, leading the pack, and I would go,
God, what if I'm the one that finds it?
It would kill me to see her like that.
Did you feel as if you'd go crazy if you didn't find out?
Yes, I did.
I felt like I couldn't live.
And then Teresa decided she would have to get down there in the muck,
go to the very places where Lisa had spent her last days.
Remember, police had discovered that Lisa had been using meth,
had been hanging out with the rogue's gallery of drug dealers.
But for police, getting access to that bunch had been impossible.
They wouldn't even open the door to the cops.
They wouldn't have anything.
In fact, they'd just act like they weren't home, probably.
But what if they knew something?
Maybe Teresa decided there was one way to find out.
Tell me, how was it that you decided to play the part of your sister?
I needed to find out as much about her life at that time as I could.
So I decided that the best thing for me to do is just try to pretend like I'm Lisa
as much as I can, so they would open up to me like they would her.
If anyone understood Lisa inside and out, it was her twin sister.
They weren't identical twins, but Teresa felt sure she could assume her sister's identity,
like a second skin, and maybe unlock the mystery of her disappearance.
Remember, Teresa had always been the good twin.
Not now.
Now she would be as wild as Lisa.
She traded her jeans for short skirts, painted her face, and like a stranger in a strange land,
Teresa walked into the smoky bars of Bakersfield undercover.
I would drink beer.
I'd never drink beer.
Yeah, I tried to be just like her.
I even tried to hold my cigarette like her.
It worked beautifully.
What was your assessment of how dangerous it was for her?
I cautioned her a number of times to be careful and not to go into situations that may cause
harm to her, but she was on a mission.
There were times when Teresa would disappear, and I wouldn't hear from her for days.
I just had to say my prayers and hope I'd hear from her again.
In that dangerous world, Teresa befriended anyone who may have known her sister in her
last weeks.
She was frightened, but not exactly alone.
There's no doubt that I feel as my sister handing me things, and I think that she realized
at that point that if I didn't find out something, I was going to go crazy.
She cruised the bars, made small talk with criminals.
What could they tell you?
How could they help?
One of the things they told me opened up to what happened the night before she died.
She heard that Lisa and Bryce had met with a well-known drug dealer the night before
Lisa disappeared.
She managed to arrange a meeting with that drug dealer, and when she arrived, was met
by gun-toting bodyguards and a private lair that looked like a scene from a bad gangster
movie.
It was like he had all these metal boxes and shelvings and stuff to protect him from anybody
getting to him, like a shield from weapons or something.
It was weird.
He had monitors of every single angle from his house, from the outside, so he could watch
everything going around his house.
He had guys at the doors with guns.
It was the scariest moment of my entire life.
Did you think that maybe these people had something to do with their death?
Oh, yes, most definitely.
You should have seen there was guns around and there was bullets in bowls, like you'd
have candies in a bowl.
They had bullets in a bowl, and they had people's names carved into these bullets.
It could have been them.
It could have been somebody in that group that killed your sister.
As scared as she was, she wasn't too scared to get what she came for, information about
her sister's last hours.
The dealer confirmed that he and his girlfriend had visited Lisa and Bryce around 10 p.m.
the night before her disappearance.
Bryce was out on their balcony, and he had a gun in his belt kind of, you know, like
stuck behind here, which was unusual for him to even have a gun out or gun, period.
I didn't know anything about it.
And he also was acting very funny.
According to the story, the whole group, Bryce included, got high in crystal meth.
But something about Lisa's demeanor was unusual.
She was listless, froggy, almost helpless, not her usual meth high at all.
Theresa listened to the story and wondered, had Bryce had dated her sister, making her
powerless to resist a coming attack?
So why were you able to find these things that the police hadn't found?
I truly believed that throughout this whole ordeal that my sister was guiding me and communicating
with me from the other side, I felt that I was never into this kind of thing.
I wasn't even a believer in it, you know, that speaking to the dead or whatever.
I was not a believer in any of this.
Theresa went to police and told them the story she'd heard.
But remember, these weren't hard facts.
Much of it was hearsay.
But now there were more witnesses to check out.
And then disaster.
Somehow word got back to her source in the drug hangout.
Theresa was a police informant.
Her cover was blown.
How do those people feel about your having infiltrated their world?
I think I was shot at the next day.
That was when I was chased on the freeway and shot at.
Theresa could become a target.
Peek-a-boo.
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And she'll absolutely love it.
Peek-a-woo.
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Heartburn?
Painful.
Zantac.
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Dinner?
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Heartburn?
Yeah.
Prescription.
Slow.
The leading prescription can take a day or more to fully work.
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For heartburn, why wait?
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Watch this.
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