Transcript for Jurors in doctor murder-for-hire trial on why they voted the way they did: Part 8
Try Any $20 fill up at kfc. The air has just been sucked out of courtroom 72 in a Lubbock courthouse. A bomb has been dropped. David Shepard was supposed to take the stand and say that Dr. Dixon ordered him to kill Dr. Sonnier. Instead, Shepard took all the blame for the murder and insisted that Dixon had nothing to do with it. David Shepard’s daughters were embarrassed, angry and incredulous that their father would not finger Dr. Dixon as the man who hired him. It was cowardly. He has a chance to make it right and he completely ruined it. Why do you think he did that? He was trying to help out his buddy. They took it upon themselves to go to the children of Dr. Sonnier and apologize for what their father had just said on the stand. What did you say to them? We are so sorry for what he has done to you, and what he’s continuing to do to you. The three daughters, we have a mutual understanding, a mutual respect, mutual sadness. We all know what happened. They knew from day one. They couldn’t believe what their dad had done. And I couldn’t believe he put them in that situation. So after David Shepard is taken back to jail, his three daughters go to talk to him and confront him about, “What the heck did you just do?” They were emotional. They were upset. But daddy, you didn’t tell the truth. I did. You didn’t say anything. You just kept saying that you wouldn’t tell them. But I did. No part of this is right. None of it will ever be right. There’s nothing I could do. No matter what you do. They think I’m some kind of a monster. You’ve made yourself a monster, dad. You were literally breaking down in tears. It was frustrating. I felt like I was scolding a child. Like, I just want you to answer my question, and then you can go back to time out. The question now is how much damage did this full on reversal on the part of Dave Shepard do to the prosecution’s case? More importantly, what did it do to the jury? Nobody knew how that might affect the verdict. Everybody’s on edge. It was still sort of anyone’s guess what the verdict would be. But the damage was done. Thomas Dixon was accused of hiring a man to murder — Years of work ending with a hung jury and a mistrial for Dr. Thomas Dixon — If Shepard’s goal was to free his friend, it worked. The judge says, “Mr. Dixon, you are free to go.” Everybody is stunned. Stunned. It was devastating. I mean, I had a moment of just — just silence. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Do you think he was the biggest factor to getting that hung jury? Absolutely, 100%. Justice is a guilty verdict. And, when that didn’t happen, I feel disappointed. I feel like I’ve let the family down. I feel like I’ve let our team down. I feel like I’ve let everybody down. You have to ask the question, how could the prosecutors have let this happen? The prosecutors have to bear some responsibility for calling a witness to the stand, star witness, who does a complete 180 in front of the jury. So before the trial, how many times did you get to speak to him? I talked to him one time. I really don’t spend a whole lot of time with witnesses, you know, getting them prepared and things like that. In hindsight, do you wish that that could have been done differently? I don’t know if there was a way to do that differently. We had no indication he wasn’t gonna tell the truth. I was upset with the jury. How could they not see, you know? The evidence, to me, was very, very clear that he was guilty. He did this. And that was the big question at that point. What did the jury think of this? When he got on the stand and changed his entire story, it just kind of threw me for a loop at first. The prosecutor’s face got red and veins were popping out of his neck. Matt Powell was livid, but he was able to recover because he already had a videotape of Shepard confessing to the crime. He showed that to the jury and that was enough to convince some of the jurors. The video of davehepard’s confession was a revelation I thought. Shepard’s just pretty much giving us all the information right there. It really tied together a lot of the facts we had heard in testimony. And so there was little doubt in my mind at that point of guilty for me. During our deliberations, we had two jurors that were not able to really come to the same place that we were. I felt how do they have any doubts when the evidence was all there in my eyes? But it only took two of the jurors disagreeing to make this a mistrial. Those two jurors had never talked, publically, before about why they voted the way they did, until now. So good to see you. Almost five years. I know. Can you believe it? I knew what we had signed up for, and I did not take any of it lightly. I felt like it was my job to go in there and look at everything. We did see the video testimony of Dave shepherd. And for that to be in such stark contrast of what his in-court testimony was raised a lot of red flags for me. The problem is that the judge specifically said to the jurors, you can use this video, but only for the purpose of determining whether this witness is telling the truth. Not as substantive evidence to convict. For these two jurors, they apparently felt there just wasn’t enough without it. I never felt like he was pushing him to kill. I felt like he was pushing him to take photographs. There were a couple text messages that Matt Powell had mentioned like, “Whip and spur” and “Get her done.” Yeah, get her done. And I think that the effort there was to make those sound a little bit more malicious than they actually were. I always thought that, yes, he probably did give him silver bars, but that doesn’t mean he gave him silver bars for murdering somebody. I just feel like that we had so many people from the time we were supposed to make our decision, and there was no discussion. They said he was guilty, and they weren’t gonna talk about it. It’s frustrating, especially those of us who had our stand and how we believed. And for all that, it seemed like for nothing. After the trial was over, there was still that question. Why did David Shepard go back on his deal and completely burn the prosecution?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
