Watching You | 3. The Last Night

Listen to all episodes of watching you, add free right now by subscribing to the binge. Visit the binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The binge, feed your true crime obsession. The big secret, all savvy shoppers know, Rakuten makes your money go further. Shop with Rakuten to get cash back on top of seasonal sales. Discover fashion tech, beauty and more at hundreds of your favorite shops. Like boots, eBay, and Lego. It's free and super easy to use. Just shop as normal and stack cash back on top of sales and savings. Join for free at rakuten.co.uk or download the Rakuten app. That's r-a-k-u-t-e-n, rakuten.co.uk. So I've noticed this pattern lately in my life. I'll be shopping online. Doesn't matter if it's closed, something for the house, or something I absolutely don't need, but suddenly deeply want. 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She was like, Yeah, no problem. Just let Matt know that you're going to go. So I was like, Hey, I'm going. You don't get to say I'm going. You're not my parent kind of thing. So anyways, he was like, Have you talked to your mom? And I was like, Yep, Shardie said I could go don't need to prohibition. Like, I have my keys. I'm leaving. See you later. Very like F you kind of attitude. And he said on the way out, he goes, Well, take this phone with you. I was like, I have a phone. Like, I don't want to any this phone for us. Like this big bulky phone. He was like, Just take it. Well, just not even thinking about it because I wanted out of the house about it through it my purse. Not realizing that this phone tracked everything I was doing. Well, I guess he thought I was going to like to Atlanta straight to the brave scheme when I was going to the friends house for us to go like their mom was driving us to Atlanta. Get to the friends house and we're hanging out. Mom's there. All this stuff. He shows up. Walks in their house doesn't knock on the door. Walks in their house. And he yanks me out so that I didn't have permission to be there. Wasn't allowed to be there. And like literally pulled me out like physically out of their house. It was a moment where I was like, I'm done. Like, no, thank you. I want nothing. I'm done. Alex asked her dad if she could move in with him and he agreed. After 12 years of bickering over Nikki's daughter, Matt finally got his wish. Have Alex completely out of their lives. My dad came to pick me up and all of my stuff. And Matt looked at me and said, just so you know, you're never welcome back in this house again. My mom was behind him and I looked at her in the eye and I said, are you going to stand behind that? Are you going to like, I just remember looking at it was like I could look at what you said exactly was, are you going to let him talk to me like that? I don't even remember saying it. I feel like I, but I remember looking her in the eye and just it wasn't even words. It was just is it no words, but I could read through hers. Like I'm reading through her soul and I could tell she, I could feel the pain behind her as a mother or not knowing what to do. She seemed like she felt like she didn't have a choice, but to let me go. But it also felt in a way, her saying, please go. Like I don't know how else to protect you if you don't go. And as a 16 year old, it was one of the most painful moments of my life because I knew, okay, my mom just let me go. Given all the strife, Alex moving out didn't surprise anyone, certainly not Nikki's sister Amy, but there was something off to her about how it all went down. How Nikki seemed to take it. When Alex made the decision to leave and go live with her dad, obviously Nikki was devastated. And she talked to me about it. She said, and I was devastated on her behalf, but she talked to me about it and she said, well, I think it might be for the best. And I was like, what? To her, she knew something had to be wrong. Why the hell would Nikki put it that way? She had a fierce love of her daughter. There's no world in which Alex moving out would be for the best. And as soon as she was out, Alex felt like a door mat had been waiting to close on her, having slammed shut. Some of my fondest memories as a kid was Christmas and I really didn't want to miss out on Christmas with my sisters, but I had moved out. And so I was like, can I please just come stay for Christmas? I just want to say one night, I just want to see my sisters and they told me that their therapist told them it was best if I was not around. I didn't come. At this point, Alex barely communicated with her mom, didn't talk to her for two or three months after she moved out. For years after that, Alex only talked to her mom sporadically, only when she was in the car. But Alex said she didn't speak to her when she arrived home, and if she was with Matt. Increasingly, Nikki was on an island. So one day, Alex calls up her aunt Amy, tells her about how much she misses her mom. And they called Amy, and was like, I don't ever get to see her without him. Like, it sucks. I was genuinely just like, please get her away from him. Like, I want to see my mom. I got into just my sister and I said, we are going to do a girl's day. No guys allowed, no husband's, no nothing. We are going to go and we're going to get our nails done. And we're going to get Manny Petty's. And you are going to spend some time with your daughter before she goes off to college. And Matt is not invited. Nikki told her she was in, but she seemed on edge about taking a day off from Matt. She said, well, wherever we go, whatever we do, it has to be quick and it has to be cheap. If she's gone for too long, she's going to be in trouble when she gets home. If she spends too much money, she's going to be in trouble when she gets home. He's monitoring everything, tracking everything. And if she's gone for too long, she's going to get accused of something. But we had our Manny Petty day. We sat at the kitchen table at my dad's house and she helped Alex fill out her apartment stuff, like her application for Elise and all that and like co-signed on it and all that stuff. And we had a lovely time. It was the very last time the girls would have a day like that together ever again. From Sony Music Entertainment, you're listening to watching you. I'm Jonathan Hersh. Episode three. The last night. Cold days, big goals, no time to cook, right? That's been my reality lately. I start the week with the best intentions. I'm going to cook. I'm going to be healthy and then suddenly it's late. I'm exhausted and I'm standing in my kitchen hoping food will just magically appear. 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Carvana is so easy just to click and we've got ourselves a car. See? So many cars. That's a click, fantastic inventory. And check out the financing options. Payments to fit our budget. I mean that's clickonomics 101 delivery to our door. Just a hop, skip and a click away. And what? No better feeling than when everything just clicks. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. And of course money. The most feelingless and definitional of levers in a marriage. Because the sad truth is, you either have it, or you don't. But underlying all those issues is one bedrock principle. Trust. Without trust, marriage can fall apart alarmingly fast. And it had been a long time since there was trust between Matt and Nikki. A major fault line was this email, Nikki had written to her boss back in Mississippi. Well, how can you do intimate things? What intimate things did he know? What? That I was working in you, aren't? That was public knowledge. Oh, okay. In a city like Caziasco, Mississippi, a very old-fashioned valued town, they take very seriously that men support their women. Are they good justifying that too? I'm just telling you, Matt. At first she thought it was kind of harmless, but Matt was terribly upset. And once they got into it, she conceded that she had fantasized about her boss. Even though he was married and according to her, the feelings were not mutual. This started the rewriting of their marriage. Matt saw her as the partner who never told the truth. But even when they met, was flirting with other people. The fights over him were unceasing. You lied to me, you hurt me, and then sat there and say, no, man, I don't do nothing. No, man, I never do that. No, man, I don't talk about it. You know what I don't do this, and you do it all the fucking time. You fucking had to really affair with, partial affair with, whatever you wanted to do. I took you back. Do I get credit for it now? I just get labeled as a fucking schmuck. You have me, as a piece of me. You have beaten on me. You have disrupted our marriage. You have chosen people over me. You've chosen your daughter over me. You embarrassed me and Mississippi. You started having a little online affair or whatever kind of a fair emotional affair. Whatever you want to do with your fucking boss. And then begged me not to go down and kick his ass. Go kick his ass if you want to. You begs me. You protected him. No, I asked over me. You protected him. You chose him over me. I spoke with that boss. He said there was no affair, emotional or otherwise. I asked Amy about this too. I think she would have told her sister if she had cheated on her husband. The nicky said her boss was just her boss. That this was Matt's weird obsession. When we're on the topic of weird obsessions, nicky was still financing Matt's security business. They were now majorly in debt because of it. Money continued to be an issue for them. Unfucking believable. You want to come to me and spend 700 fucking dollars on a yellow pay jab for a business that we've invested over $100,000 in in the past two years that has done nothing. That was the support pin for me. Where's the support pin for you? How the fuck do you think you're here? Okay, so I got carpeting and you're paying the rent so you can embarrass me. You can take my manhood away. You can talk trash about me. Nicky and Matt were clearly in dire straits. On top of a mounting debt and the tension around Alex, they also fought about sex. It seemed that they both recognized it was supposed to be part of the marriage, but it was clear Nicky wasn't interested in being intimate with Matt anymore. I wish it could tell you that the troubles between Matt and Nicky ended there. Like most couples who have been together for over a decade, they work through all manner of issues that life presents us, parenting, money, and sex. But that's not this story. This story is about something much worse because the fights between this doomed couple crossed a line from words to action. A work colleague told cops she'd noticed her injuries. He'd already pushed Nicky when she was pregnant. Alex as a young girl had seen it firsthand and promised to always have eyes on Matt. But now she's been exiled and Matt's eyes were trained on Nicky. What am I supposed to tell her, man? Out of respect for me and sleep in. I had no respect for you when you talked to her. This is bullshit. This is what people said. This is never gonna happen. I did not put my hands around your throat. Get away from me. I don't know, Matt. You tried to tonight. I did not. Oh shit. You don't, you sat in and beat me 98 fucking pounds with 6.5 250 fucking cut plus pounds. With your hands around my throat. My hands were not on your throat. You can justify that shit to yourself all day long. With your fucking hands were around my throat. You had me pinned to the fucking wall. It's true that Alex was no longer the centerpiece of these violent altercations between Matt and Nicky. But she wasn't the only daughter in that house. Amanda and her little sister Rebecca, now 9 and 12 years old, were living in the middle of these fights. These recordings are chilling. They were like the soundtrack of their lives. And one time Amanda woke up to screaming. I was like, seven AM or something like that. Come downstairs and like my mom's yelling at my dad like, let me out of the house. I need to go to work. Like, let me go. And every time like she would move towards the door, he would kind of stand in front of it. And she wound up calling 9-1-1 and saying, my husband won't let me leave the house. And then my dad, the phone from her, said, we don't need police. My wife's just having a temper tantrum. And eventually that one, one call ends and then my mom went and she had a suitcase with her as well. Which also confused me. I wasn't sure what was going on with the suitcase. But then she goes out and she sits on the front porch. The police come. They talk to both of them. And then she goes to work. Had Nikki packed the bag to leave and go to a hotel? Was she coming home that night? Later, Matt asked Amanda to do something for him. And then I had to call her that day. She wasn't answering his calls. He had me call her. The only thing I remember telling her was what my dad wanted me to tell her. We need to save this family. Let's go on vacation or something like that until I was kind of a pawn in that situation. After that, I kind of hit her. I'm crying because I'm like, oh, my parents are getting divorced. I'm the only one that can save them apparently. But she wound up coming home that night. Each is accusing the other of abuse. The fighting is just too intense for this to go on much longer. The marriage seems to be hanging on by a thread. I remember that night. That whole week I had woken up almost every single night to them fighting. Then I remember Friday night. It was date night. And they went out for their date. And we're back and I were old enough at that point pretty much be left home alone. But they weren't alone. By then, Matt's dad, who was retired and live back east, came to stay. Matt had called him. I remember going to bed and just waking up the next morning, Saturday morning, and my mom was an early riser. And so every morning she was up. She grabbed her coffee. She was sitting at her desk playing farcule. But she was addicted to that. I was playing it all the time. And I remember waking up that Saturday and she wasn't there. And I looked for her car. And her car was in the driveway. And what was even stranger was my dad was make. I think it was probably eight, nine o'clock in the morning. Meanwhile, Alex was in Gainesville near her school. The University of North Georgia. Yeah, Friday night. Ironically, I had gone to like a college party. I got a super, super drunk. And texted my mom. I was like, I'm never drinking. You're getting a little stupid. That was the last text message I ever sent to her. But I never heard back from her. She had called me Friday actually that morning. And I didn't answer. She left a white voice mail. And was like, hey, babe, like thinking about you, love you. Call me back later. Mickey was gone. Infamous is the gossip show that's smart. We talk about Tyra Banks and bringing down top model. We talk about Jenna Jamison and how she dominated the 90s. You know, she's horny and she's in charge. She just was very smart about marketing herself. We talk about celebrities who maybe shouldn't be celebrities, like the Beckham guy. Brooklyn is their first kid. He's had a little bit of the nepotbaby curse. We investigate orgasm cults. A woman's erotic power can unlock many other powers in her life. And of course, we discuss people who have gotten into lots of trouble. My name is Molly McLaughlin. I am one of Jen Shaw's many victims. 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Search for Blink wherever you listen and subscribers to the Binge will get the entire season. Add free. Plus you'll get exclusive access to the over 60 other true crime stories on the Binge podcast channel. Hit subscribe on Apple podcasts or head to get the binge.com. Saturday passed then Sunday. It was the Monday of that week. Nikki was officially missing. I got a call that Monday and I was actually in Connecticut because my then boyfriend now husband and I had traveled up there because his dad was at Yale University Hospital and he was like an ICU. Her phone started ringing. It's Nikki. Her phone called my phone but Matt was on the other line which I thought was weird. He said, hey, have you have you heard from Nikki? And I said, no, why? What's going on? And you know, we had elderly grandmother, you know, on the like, you know, we had old stirs all over the place. I thought maybe some family thing had happened. So I said, I said, no, why? What's going on? And he said, I don't know why don't you tell me like accusing me of something. And so again, me being me, I said, I don't know you psycho. You called me. I've been in Connecticut since Friday. How would I know? Matt told Amy that Nikki left. I said, what? What the hell are you talking about? He said, yeah, she just up and left. And I was like, have you called the police? And he said, no. And I said, why? And I said, well, I didn't want it, you know, if I call the police, then the news will get a hold of it. And then it'll be on the news and then she'll be embarrassed and she won't want to come back. It just sounded so dumb and bullshitty. Alex hadn't heard from her mom either. Not since she sent the Friday texts. It wasn't like her to not get back to her. And then her phone rang. She was at six flags with a friend actually. We're in line to ride a ride and I get this call and it's my mom. So answer and it's Matt. It's calling someone from Nikki's phone again. And he's immediately, where's your mother? Have you heard from your mother? Where's Nikki? I was like, what? He immediately before I could even hardly start talking, goes, do you remember that time she hit me with a knife? And my brain just clicked into a drive and I went, something's wrong. Why the hell did he just, I knew I was being recorded. I knew something was wrong by the panic in his voice and why he asked me about that. I just hung up. I was like, nope. I know you too well. I know you're, nope. So Matt's calling Amy and Alex but still hasn't informed the police. Several days have passed. Anyways, we had between us eventually that afternoon reported her missing. In the end, more than one person reported Nikki missing. And for the time being, everyone seemed to be working together to find her, including that. And between Monday and Wednesday of that week, he was playing ball. It was, we need to check the local shelters. We need to put flyers up. But again, he was like communicating with the family per se until Wednesday. Wednesday, all of a sudden, I don't know where he completely cut off communication and he said, you'll have to communicate with my lawyers. Lawyers? Why would he need one lawyer? But alone too. And one of them was a divorce lawyer and one of them was a criminal attorney. Hey. How are you? Not good. This is Matt on Sunday. That's fine, not. I'm fine for the worse. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not reading around. Nikki's just missing, right? And he wants a divorce. You can hear him laying out what he says happened the night Nikki disappeared. We had a little bit of a spat and my dad came in. My dad expressed his opinions and my dad pretty much told her how she is not very welcoming and that she talks to me like shit and that he doesn't feel comfortable here. Nikki's pregnant. How she's made all these changes and how she's doing whatever she can to make things work and my dad was saying the same thing I am to her. My dad said, how have he changed? I mean, I came down here. I've noticed several changes that in my son. And he's pretty much went ballistic. She was yelling. She was screaming. She started packing her bags. I put my hand on her suitcase and I said, please don't go. Just calm down and then finally she just dropped her suitcase and she just walked out the fucking door. It's just like this morning. The cameras. Surely the cameras would have seen Nikki? And she's enough. She's captured in a grainy video of smoking a cigarette on the front porch of the house early in the middle of the night. What is spreading about Nikki's disappearance? A missing person's report has been filed. Co-workers are calling the Gwyneth County PD looking for any information about what happened to her. How can they help? She okay? I'm going to investigate you into the nervous. Detective Arbor said, hi, this is Phil Wien and Woody Alderman with the ECG. I know where you are. Pretty good. You and I spoke a few days ago and Woody and I are the owners of H.A.P. and Nikki is our controller and we really just wanted to get an update as to where the investigation stands with regards to Nikki. She hasn't been located. She's a valued employee here and we're concerned obviously. We'd love to see her back here but at this point, can you give us an update on she hasn't been located? That's all you got. Yes sir. How much money did we look in? Okay sir, she's a person who's an adult who lived in her own so no law has been violated. Nikki is an important part of our company here. We just feel like we should do something. This is when the search party is organized. We met at the Walmart, like down the road from there. I was over 100 people I feel like that showed up. So we split up into groups. Like you go here, you go here. Detective John Richter, one of many law enforcement personnel on the scene that night, recalled what happened next. She is violent just outside the neighborhood so maybe a quarter, a half a mile from their house if you wouldn't be able to be. And she was just maybe 30 feet from the wood line as it starts and she was covered with debris like pine straw leaves, naked, completely naked and just covered up with just some hair showing us a little bit of her hair. Nikki's body is found naked in their subdivision, covered up with leaves and dirt. But chillingly, one part of her body was clean, untouched, her feet, which investigators immediately understood to mean that this mother of three, Dominique Lyle from Lawrenceville, Georgia, hadn't walked off into the night of her own accord. She'd been placed there in the woods by someone else, her killer. Nikki's friend Allison had uttered that fateful scream in the woods captured that night on live television. She had made the gruesome discovery. It was obvious. There was a branch on top of the pile and I'm Comin, Derek and I are Comin, you know, started the very top of the hill and just start walking down and Derek was on my right and I was on the left side and I just see this huge pile that looked like it had been put there. I started kicking away at it and I see bloatedness, like bloated, it looked like a stomach or purple and so I screamed, Derek, before that I had called Derek's name out and said Derek because I knew that I had found something. And when we saw the blonde hair, the coordinator of the search had told us, you know, if you find anything, you know, don't touch it, don't do anything and call 911 and her sister called 911 right there because she heard me scream. So yeah, the body was laying like this way. Okay. Now you said at one point you said he'd be covered her up with stopping her white and you're assuming her husband or something? Yes. Hello, how are you? Why are you so convinced today? Because they got in a fight on Friday. Okay. Okay. And she never came back to work on Monday. Next time on watching you. And then ultimately there was I think around like 55,000 short videos that were discovered. And audio recordings too. Years of the lily family's life immortalized. Two detectives take it upon themselves to listen to it all. She's dead. I've never met her but I know her better than the other person I've ever met. I know her attitude. I know her little traits. I know how intelligent she is. Whitty, a great mother. And Amanda had no cavities. Wow, that's a good thing. So when are they going to do all these cavities? I don't know. I think they told daddy but they didn't tell me. Did they say anything about Amanda's braces? Yeah, they said she's going to get braces in a month. In a month? Yeah, in a month. All these things just from these recordings. But I know the end. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. And I think she'll be on too. Watching you is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment. It's hosted and reported by me, Jonathan Hirsch. Jason Hoke of Waveland Media is our lead producer and co-reported the series with me. Catherine St. Louis is our story editor. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch, Sound Design and Mixing by Scott Somerville. We use music from Epidemic Sound and APM. Our fact checker is Naomi Barr. Our production managers are Tameka Balanced Colasney and Sammy Allison. Our lawyer is Minakshi Krishnan, Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rossak, Jamie Myers, and the whole team at Sony Podcasts. If you're enjoying the podcast, please rate and leave us a review. Thank you so much for listening. Sabrina. Karen. I have been listening to a new show from the binge called Fatal Fantasy. I am obsessed. Wait, I need to know more. Tell me everything. Okay, well, so it's very shocking. It's this like ultra weird crime story of a murder for a higher plot that... What? Yeah, wait for it. Leverage the dynamics of the Underworld and Underworld being a medieval fantasy game. Wait, so it's live action role playing Gone Wrong? Horribly wrong. And you can binge all episodes now. Oh, man, that sounds so good. I know what I'm doing on my drive home today. Search for Fatal Fantasy and subscribe to the Binge podcast channel on Apple Podcasts or at GetTheBinge.com. I'm going to be doing a video on the podcast. I'm going to be doing a video on the podcast. And then subscribe to the Binge podcast channel on Apple Podcasts or at GetTheBinge.com. And then once you're done, you can listen to one of the over 60 true crime and investigative podcasts, a part of the channel while you wait for the next month's drop. I really need to know what happens. Selfishly, you do so that we can talk about it. So whenever you listen, search for Fatal Fantasy and his subscribe to the Binge to get all episodes. All at once, add free.