BBC Studios.

Hey everyone, it's Maggie.

The usual warning before we dive in.

As you all know by now, this is a series that deals with adult themes, and this bonus episode of Hands Tied will include references to violence and sex.

So with that warning in mind, I'm really excited to introduce my colleague and friend, the producer of the series, Maggie Latham.

Hi Maggie, Hi Maggie, how are you.

I'm good.

Thanks so much for taking the time to do this.

I really appreciate it.

It's great to catch up with you.

And here's all the latest.

So yeah to Maggie's there's American Maggie and then British Maggie.

And you know, we spend a lot of time immersing ourselves in the story and also getting a glimpse into Lizz's world and what she's been through.

But now that we find ourselves at the end, there are still things that we can't stop thinking about.

Things people told us, details we could only touch on, and conversations that didn't make it into the series.

You know, Maggie, I know you had a lot of conversations with people and sometimes it just doesn't work out for a variety of reasons.

They either don't want to talk or scheduling doesn't work out.

But Maggie, you actually talked to one of the cops at the heart of the story, right, Yeah.

I did.

I tried to speak to him through the Paris County Sheriff's Office press office, because Sogeant Dusa is still employed.

He's still working there, and they said, oh, yeah, we'll reach out to him, and then one evening he wrung me up and we had a sort of forty minute chat.

He didn't want to be interviewed on microphone, which is a real shame, but what he told me during that phone call was really really interesting.

Before we get into the like nitty gritty of everything you talked about, just remind us who is sergeant do you say?

Yeah?

So, he and Detective Carousel were the lead detectives.

They were bodies, They knew each other since childhood, and they both ended up working for Harris County Homicide Unit.

And before I spoke to him, I've done quite a lot of research into the case, and one of the stories that came up was that he nearly died after being goreed by a bull on his farm, and he was sort of did make light of it and joked about, you know, all the near death experiences he had had as a cop, but actually the nearest he got to death was on his own farm.

But yeah, it was a really sort of severe injury, and think he was really he was lucky to survive.

So, you know, he was a veteran detective, and he was quite open about talking about the case, and we had quite a long phone call about it, and I was really hoping that he would agree to an interview.

But after the phone call, he didn't want to do anything else.

If you remember, like what were his versions of events that night.

Well, to be fair to him, he hadn't kind of restudied the file or gone back through his notes or anything like that, so he was kind of talking off the top of his head.

But I mean, he was in absolutely no doubt that Sandra was guilty.

He hadn't kind of thought back over the years or maybe she didn't do it, or this little thing has been niggling away in the back of my head.

There was nothing like that at all.

He had a very sort of clear characterization of Jim and Sandy that Jim was sort of ambitious, He was really healthy.

He was.

I don't know if you remember this, but we came across this a few times, that Jim was really into his health, reducing his diet, he liked to go jogging, and he was really fit.

But according to Duce Sandy, he said, this is his words, had let herself go.

As we know, she had a lot of health conditions, but the trouble had been building up in their marriage, this is what Dusau was saying, and Jim had chosen their thirty second wedding anniversary to basically talk about their future, that he was planning to leave her or have a break, and that she knew that this was coming.

She knew that it was on the cards, So the murder wasn't necessarily spur of the moment thing because she was sort of prepared for it.

So that's what he said, which was surprising to me because having been through all the court transcripts, people that were closest to the Melgars gave evidence in courtant there wasn't one single person that said anything about their marriage being unhappy.

But I think what Dousay was saying is that nobody really knows what goes on in a relationship other than the two people involved.

That was the sort of tenre of what he was saying.

Yeah, I find that narrative so interesting, and I wonder if you know, part of what kind of makes people interested in this case too, is just how the crime scene was found.

You know, it was a romantic evening, their wedding anniversary.

There was still that strawberry and the tub of cream on the side of the jacuzzi, And it seems to me that in a lot of the narratives, and I think in this series we talked a lot about the power of storytelling and how the prosecution story and sort of do Say story too, created this narrative of there was this sort of like sexual undertone to things, and that.

I thought that was really interesting that the police found sex toys under the pillow in the bedroom.

Unsergeant du Say's theory was that, you know, he kind of painted Sandy's a bit of a sex siren, that she'd kind of lured Jim into this promise of sex, got him naked and was doing this seductive dance, so to speak, and then she sort of slushed his throat from behind, and that was again played out in the trial.

So that's what he repeated that that's what he thought what happened.

Yeah, it was very much in the trial, which I think is a perfect segue for us to start talking about the jury.

And as you know better than anyone else, Maggie, we tried really hard to speak to the twelve jurors who were on the case, you know, but there were a lot of wrong numbers, unanswered calls, messages ignored.

But actually one of the people who we reached out to just got back in touch with us, and yeah, I talked to him yesterday.

Oh yeah, he thinks that they came to the right verdict.

But the the first thing he said to me is that he really wanted to believe that Sandy was innocent, and then when the actual deliberation happened, he didn't want to give any sort of sentence.

He wanted to see if there was any way that there could be a mistrial.

Like he felt really really bad putting a number to a prison sentence.

You know.

I asked what the most compelling evidence for him was, and you know, he thought the most suspect thing was the jacuzzie and the jacuzzi water.

That picture was really really laser focus for him, where he didn't think that if people were sitting in a bathtub that the water would be that clear, if they were in the tub for that long, if they, you know, did all of the activities that they mentioned in that night, to him, wouldn't the bath water be dirty?

When this juror was looking at the photo while it was presented in court, to him it felt suspect.

I believe the picture that he's talking about could be the picture that we see where we see the clear bathwater and then at the bottom there's a knife.

And you know, we didn't talk for super long because he was like en route to another job, and so I was talking to him while he was in the car.

But the main thing also that he said, which I know we cover in the story, is that he wonders if he would have changed his mind if Sandy took the stand.

Yeah, but you know, then in the same breath, he was like, but that could also go the opposite way, because when the prosecution grilled her like it could have made her seem even more suspect.

So he was like, it's an impossible decision to make.

And I think the juror Aaron Day said this too when I spoke to him, but I think it's a case that really stays with them.

He thinks about it all the time, and he said that his girlfriend really loves true crime TV shows, and he says, sometimes this case comes up and he has to kind of, you know, relive it.

Yeah, And I suppose from Julie's point of vie, it's interesting, isn't it that they would think that would it have made a difference if Sandy had taken the stand.

But I think looking at, you know, the police interview that we watched them listen to multiple times, and one of her friends said this to me, she was I think it was Tommy said she was so worried about how she would come across.

She's shy, and she doesn't come across as a kind of warm person, especially in that really high stakes, intense period that you know when you're on the stand.

So I don't know if that would have helped.

Yeah, I really don't know that.

I mean, it's you'll drive yourself mad speculating.

And I know Max Screst, Sandy's defense attorney, thinks about that all the time and it really weighs on him.

But I think it kind of goes back to what I was talking about with Amanda is we do have these preconceived notions of how we expect people to act in stressful situations, especially women.

In a lot of ways, we expect them to be crying in a certain way, to be showing grief in a certain way, and I think we kind of see that narrative of when people don't fit into what we believe is accurate presentation of grief, of guilt, of shame, then we start to develop different ideas on what that could be, and that that could, as you were saying, could have happened with sandyas people could read into, you know, her shyness as something else, or it's impossible to know what would have happened.

Yeah, totally, did you ever I was really keen to speak to a woman.

I mean, I don't know if it would necessarily make any difference, but I just I'd really like to have a take from female Jura because I just wonder if obviously it was a unanimous verdict, but I just wonder if that if their thoughts over the years would have changed at all, or you know, yeah, that it had any other thoughts.

It's a great question, and unfortunately, the only people who picked up or called me back.

Were men.

Yeah, But it's a really interesting question, and I think that perspective would have been really interesting to hear.

But in every person I've talked to, I do hear that they did feel like it was a very serious thing that they were deciding, depending on how you feel about the verdict that they reached.

I did feel that each one of them they understood that this was a person's life, They understood that this was a person's family, but you know, they made the decision based on the evidence that they thought was most likely.

So we're going to take a quick break after which we're going to talk about something that was really central to both Jim and Sandy's lives and, according to her defense team, one of the reasons why she's in prison now.

So another really huge part of the story that we didn't really get to talk a whole lot about, but it was another thing that was used throughout the trial was Sandy and Jim's religion.

They were both Jehovah's witnesses.

For me, when we first started, the only thing I really knew about Jehovah's witnesses that they prophetized from door to door and that they don't celebrate holidays, Christmas, Birthdays, Halloween.

So I'd love to just have a really top level understanding of the core beliefs for a Jehovah's witness.

Well, Jehovah's witnesses.

They believe in God, that God is called Jehovah, and they follow the teachings of the Bible.

They believe that we're living in the end of days and that only a chosen few will be resurrected.

So basically, death is not the end.

Death is like a deep sleep awaiting resurrection.

And this was relevant in the trial.

How did how did Jim and Sandy become Jehovah's witnesses because neither Jim or Sandy were brought up in that religion, right.

No, that's right.

They converted through cold call.

They were interested, they were both open to it, and they were adults when they converted.

So when you say cold call, it was literally someone knocking on their door.

Yeah, yeah, just like we've probably all had the Jehovah's witness knocking on our door.

But yeah, Sandy and Jim went door to door evangelizing, just like other Jehovah's witnesses.

But I think that when Sandy got ill, she couldn't do it anymore, so she sort of didn't didn't go, but Jim carried on.

And do you know how you know, being a part of the Jehovah's Witnesses, how that played a day to day role in the Melgar's life.

Yeah.

I think religion was a really big part of their lives from what I think it was.

Diana, Sandy's cousin, told me that because she lived with them for a bit and went to some Bible study classes with them.

But all their friends were Jehovah's Witnesses.

They went to Bible study classes quite often, several times a week.

Jim was an elder in the congregation, which is a basically a sort of you know, one of the sort of mature people that would help sort out problems within that congregation.

So he was had quite a lot of status within the church.

Yeah, I think.

I mean Sandy and Tammy, who we interviewed, both met at church.

I'm not sure all Sandy's friends were members of congregation.

I'm sure she did have I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that Tammy had friends outside that.

But they were really really involved and went to lots of parties and celebrations.

There were lots of photo shown in court of celebration days that they went to with their friends from the church.

Yeah.

I think it was really central to their life.

And just a reminder, Tammy is Sandy's friend who saw her right after the interrogation.

She was the one who was listening to the news report and then realized that that was Sandy's, that she knew them, and she really stuck by Sandy throughout that whole process.

Yeah, and still goes to see her, still goes to see her in prison.

Yeah.

Yeah, So how was their religion used in the court case.

It's interesting actually remembering what Tammy said because she said religion it was totally irrelevant to what happened to Jim's death, but it became an important part of the narrative built by the prosecution to other Sandy.

Well, that's definitely what the Innocence Project of Texas would say.

So, one of Sandy's close friends was put on the stand as a witness, and the prosecution asked her lots of questions about being a Jehovah's witness and basically just sort of bullet pointed all these things that Jehovah's witnesses don't believe in that.

Lots of other people, do you know Christmas?

You don't believe in Christmas, you don't believe in birthdays, you don't believe in Easter.

So I think the well, definitely, the defense's point was A it wasn't relevant, and B it was used to make samdy seem unsympathetic to portray as an unsympathetic, different, other type of person to the jury.

So she's different to ask, therefore she's guilty.

So I just want to read this one quote from Colleen Barnett's closing remarks, who was the prosecution attorney in the court case, and she said, I didn't really realize the depth of the religious issue because I didn't know that much about Jehovah's witnesses, and I didn't know that Jehovah witnesses didn't allow you to divorce.

You cannot divorce unless someone is cheating, and it's very clear that Jamie was not that guy.

If I get divorced, I get ostracized and I can't talk with my friends.

But if I kill him and nobody finds out, I'm not ostracized and he's just asleep.

It's really interesting that she says this last thing of he's just asleep, right, because that does directly play into some of the things that we've learned about Jehovah's witnesses and their beliefs, right.

Yeah, So this whole question of divorce is really interesting.

And I think that according to the written word of Jehovah's Witnesses and what it says on the website, because I did go back to them and check about this, and they said that the only scriptural grounds for divorce is sexual immorality.

The Bible encourages marriage mates to stay together even under less than ideal circumstances.

Nevertheless, in extreme situations such as extreme physical vs.

Islands, some Christians have decided to separate from a marriage mate.

But it's that what it says on paper.

And actually that doesn't mean that you'd actually murder your spouse instead.

Yeah, And I mean, you know, you talked to both Liz and Tammy, and what did they say, as you know, Tammy's still are practicing Jehovah's Witnesses, and Liz was.

Yeah, Tommy said, she knows people who are divorced.

She knows people who were in the religion who divorced.

So people don't stay together through thick and thin, or just in cases of extreme physical abuse.

So that's the reality is a bit different.

Always, is what she said.

The reality is always different for so many things.

Yeah, you know, this was one thing that when I was writing to Sandy that I was curious to hear if if she's still practicing, she still is a Jehovah's witness, And she did tell me that it is something that gives her strength while she's in prison.

I know Liz said the same thing, that her faith is something that does keep her going.

And you know you talked to Tammy about this too.

Yeah, so I talked to Tummy about Sandy's faith and this is what she told me.

I do believe that Sandy would say her faith is what's keeping her going in prison.

She is.

I know for a fact that if anyone has a Bible question, they'll say, oh, I don't know, go ask miss Sandy.

She'll know.

So Also, Tummy said that after Jim died, her and Sandy would talk about it a lot, and obviously Sandy was, from Tommy's point of view, really really distraught.

But one thing that gave a comfort was knowing that she would see Jim again in the resurrection, knowing that that wasn't the end, and that aspect of her faith really really helped her.

We're going to take another quick break and when we're back, Maggie and I are going to talk about the defenses theory on what happened that night and December welcome back.

So far, we've heard quite a bit about the prosecution's argument and what the jury made of it, but I also want to talk to you about what Sandy's legal team believe happened that Jim was killed and a home invasion gone wrong.

Now, Maggie, I know you've done a ton of research into this, more than we could possibly fit into the series, and I'm sure you know everyone who's listening already knows.

But what's a home invasion?

Yeah, we don't have this phrase in the UK, so it was a new one on me.

But it's basically a robbery in a house when people are at home.

So there's people in the house.

What do you call them burglaries?

Well, there's no specific word because a burglary could be an empty house.

Yeah, we haven't got a word for that.

So interesting, but I'm curious to hear little bit about some of the people that you talked to who were on the ground during this time.

Yeah, I mean, I started off by going through all the archive of the Houston Chronicle, which is like the big regional paper, all the old stories that they covered at the time of the just the amount of home invasions.

There were so many headlines about people dying in home invasions, people being shot in home invasions, home invasion gangs targeting residents who kept cash at home.

There was just stacks of them.

And through that I found Mike Glenn, who is a veteran reporter.

He worked on the Houston Chronicle for twenty years.

He's now the Pentagon reporter for the Washington Times, and he was in Houston when Jim was murdered.

And what he told me was really illuminating.

Yeah, let's hear a little bit of your conversation with Mike Glenn, the reporter.

I mean, it's a rough town.

It has murders and crime and break ins, and there are lots of guns in the city.

It's a rough town.

It can be.

Yeah, So it kept you very busy as a crime reporter.

I mean, and really that's all I did, you know, for almost twenty years is covering crime, and you know, there was so much of it that you would just go from scene to scene to scene.

People would ask me how many like dead bodies quote unquote have you seen on the job, And I said, I stopped counting.

I really, I have no idea how many murder scenes or murder victims I've seen.

I mean murder victims, car fatalities, that sort of thing.

So how did it work?

Then?

Do you do you get tipped off by the police.

Did you listen to police radio and then turn up at the house.

A lot of police radio.

I'd multiple scanners.

I had scanners in my car, I had scanners in my office, and I would hear something going on and I would, you know, jump in my car and rush down.

That was my mindset.

You know, you get there first, and you get there as fast as you can because that's where most of the information comes in the first moments of the scene.

Because as you know, I don't know if it's the same in the UK, but you know in US television news, especially the local variety, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.

So what can he tell you about the violent home invasions.

I mean, the thing that really shocks me is that he said these crimes were just so run of the mill, so normal, that he didn't even bother turning up with them.

I mean, he was the crime reporter, but he was overwhelmed with the amounts of crime, so he couldn't report on all of them.

In Houston, with my experience of violent home invasions were pretty common events.

And then unless there was something some other variable involved, if somebody was murdered during it, or if it was in a particularly upscale neighborhood, very rare, that's really the only way that would really peauk my interest.

It's not that I, you know, disregarded, is the fact that I had so many other events on my plate that I had to deal with.

The thing in Houston is that in my experience, that's only my experience, so I can't even say if it's absolute, But by my experience, most home invasions there was usually some kind of connection with the victim or somehow or they were involved in drug trafficking.

A lot of the home divisions I covered were drug traffickers because they would try to go there to rob a drug dealer.

That happened a lot.

You kick the door down, rob a drug dealer.

It was very rare when these home invasions where the victim was some kind of completely anonymous, you know, citizen who had no connection at all.

Did he cover the Belgar's case at all.

No, So again, you know, like you said, there was so common that that would have just been another kind of run of the mill home invasion from his point of view, So he didn't cover it.

But from what he told me, it clearly didn't fit into the usual home invasion pattern that was rife in Houston at the time, because home invasions didn't normally involve knives.

I've been on a couple of stabbing crimes, and that was usually because that was a weapon of opportunity at the sign.

You know, somebody picks up a steak knife from the cutlery drawer and goes at it.

But if you're a respectable criminal in Houston and you want to break in, you use a gun or multiple guns.

They really they don't want to kill anybody because in Texas that turns it into a death penalty case.

So they would tie these people up quite often as long as they weren't struggling.

In my experience, the invaders were looking to grab the drugs and the money, not so much to leave a bunch of bodies around.

Just going deeper into the same issue.

That's when I found out about this task force that had been set up.

So it was because the home invasion problem was so big in Houston at the time, a special task force was set up with a lot of different partners, So Houston PD were involved, federal agencies were involved.

But I found the guy that led that task force.

He's called Ron Oliver, who's a retired ATF special agent that's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and his intelligence told him that it was a group of Colombian immigrants who were sort of behind these violent home invasions.

He told me that they were often in the country illegally and carried fake IDs, and he worked to try and crack the crews that were carrying out the invasions, get them quickly through the court system, and then deport them.

So that was the sort of strategy behind it.

There were other crews, other gangs.

He didn't actually call them gangs, he called them cruise that were not Colombians, but that was his particular target.

So here was Ron Oliver chasing these Colombian gangs.

And Liz had read independently about a home invasion that happened in the residential area very similar to the one that her mum and dad lived in, and it was led by a Colombian woman and there was a photo fit image of her in the paper, and when she showed it to Sandy, she said, Sandy was like, oh, this looks a bit like the woman that she remembers sort of catching a glimpse of just before she was tied up.

So, you know, Liz thought there might be a link with the Colombian home invasion gangs and thinking that maybe they were behind what happened to her parents.

But when I talked to Ron Oliver, he again said there were some similar patterns.

You know.

Again, they targeted people who had cash, but it was very rare for them to use knives.

They didn't start people.

They generally shot people, and they were pretty sophisticated.

They often target a particular household and watched them for several days, knew when people were coming and going, that kind of thing.

So it seems to me like, yes, it was a rampant problem during this time.

Yes, there were homes that were targeted, and there was one ring that was more violent than the other.

But still, to these two people who you talk to, not everything lined up or didn't fit the patterns for what happened in the Malgar's case.

Is that right, Yeah, I mean there were a lot of patterns that did fit.

So for example, the fact that there wasn't any break in.

They would often rush the door using a ruse like a fake delivery, or they used a woman to knock on the door, so that was you know, there were no signs of a break in at the Melgars, which made police think that it couldn't have been a home invasion.

But that just isn't the case because in a lot of these other home invasions there weren't there wasn't a sign of a break in.

It was very common for them to tie people up.

They used robe ties, telephone cords, zip ties.

Sometimes they came equipped, but other times they used what was to hand.

They would take pillar cases off the bed to load up the stolen goods.

They were after cash, firearms, jewelry.

Remember that in the Mailgars, there was that green and black backpack which was actually lizes from the childhood.

The bag that had the Xbox in it, right.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And it had twenty items of Sandy's jewelry as well that was found in the garage, So you know, could that have been another similarity?

Was that of another parallel But they always had guns, that's the thing that Ron Oliver said.

They would pistol whip people, they would threaten them at gunpoint, and people were shot and killed.

He doesn't remember any stabbings at all.

Stabbing is a really of intimate, visceral thing that can go wrong, so it's not really the type of thing that a professional gang would do.

Yeah, that's what he said.

Yeah, And you know, I think that this is the hard thing about stories like this is we may never know exactly what happened.

And this is exactly why we dive in and talk to experts and talk to our sorts of different people on it.

But as we heard last week, you know, this case is not set in stone.

Things are moving all the time.

Things are changing.

I mean, for Liz it's incredibly slow, but things are changing.

For example, the DNA with the hair could be quite significant.

Yeah, they are allowed to test the DNA that are to test the hairs that we're found in Jim's hand.

Yeah, And what really strikes me about that is it was Liz that brought that to the attention of the Innocence Project when we were on the phone on that conference call with them.

They had sort of looked, I mean, not through any fault of theirs, but they'd overlooked the hair just because the case is so complex and it's gone back over so many years.

But Liz, with her sort of very clever brain, remembered the hair.

She remembers the details, and the Innocence Project of Texas and Sandy is so lucky to have Liz.

She's the one that's been across it from day one and she's still there.

Yeah.

I actually forgot about that, I mean, and that that is where like, Liz is such an incredible investigator and has really combed through this entire case, and I can only imagine what an asset she is to the Innocence Project, where she knows it in and out.

She is her mother's strongest advocate, isn't she.

Yeah, she is for sure.

So in kind of wrapping up this conversation is there anything that you'd like to share, any final thoughts on working with a story or.

I mean, you just can never imagine being in the situation that Liz is in, you know, losing your mother and your father in those sort of circumstances and having to pick up the pieces of your life and try and carry on after that.

It's just so difficult to imagine.

For sure.

Yeah, very well said, I think that that is exactly true, and it's just a shame that, you know, she never got to fully grieve both her mom and her dad, and she just has to fight every single day and continues to fight.

Well, now I was working with you, Maggie, Yeah, you too, Thank.

You, Thank you so much, Thank you so much for doing this.

It was really great.

Yeah.

It made me feel like we were on our like constant phone calls just figuring out this story.

So it was good to relive that with you.

Yeah, thank you.

As I said in the last episode, will continue to follow away that happens, so please stay subscribed and I'll bring you any updates when I can.

But I want to end the series with a thought from Liz.

We caught up with her recently and she told us she's thinking about moving back to the US, to California one day, to a house big enough to have relatives stay and big enough to have Sandy live with her and her family when she gets out of prison.

Thank you again for listening to the series.

I'm Maggie Robinson Catz signing off you've been listening to Hands Tied.

I'm Maggie Robinson cats And the producer is Maggie Latham.

Sound design and mix is by Tom Brignoll.

Our script consultant is Emma Weatherall production support is from Dan Martini, Elena Bautang and Mabel Finnegan Wright.

And our production executive is Laura Jordan Raul.

The series was developed by Anya Saunders and Emma Shaw at iHeart.

The Managing Executive Producer is Christina Everett, and for BBC Studios, the executive producer is Joe Kent.