Bloody Lies: A CSI Scandal in the Heartland

7. Blood

blood 55 7 blood Matt livers’s new reality settled in and smacked him like a brick in the face. No more home-cooked dinners at his parents’ house in lincoln. No more lounging on his sofa to cheer for Tony Stewart or Dale earnhardt Jr. during NaScar season. Dreams of marrying his longtime sweetheart, Sarah Schneider , in the summer were shattered. Plans to attend commercial truck-driving school in Green Bay, Wisconsin, were deflated. Matt’s life was in the hands of the Nebraska criminal justice system and the employees who controlled the cass county Jail, where he was now a prisoner. Pictures of his face were plastered across several Nebraska newspapers, news Web sites, and television screens. at the jail, Matt traded his civilian clothes for standard orange jail garments. He slept on an uncomfortable bed behind steel bars. Jailers monitored his movements and kept a close eye on him. Despite all he had endured duringthepasttwenty-fourhours,liversremainedcooperativeandcompliant toward his police captors. At one point, jailers escorted the new high-profile prisoner back into one of the cass county law enforcement center’s windowless interrogation rooms. This time livers drew a detailed diagram showing the interior layout of Wayne Stock’s farmhouse. as part of the diagram, livers labeled areas in the hallway where he and codefendant Nick Sampson allegedly stood. livers knew the layout well since he had been inside several times over the years for family gatherings and holidays. That afternoon, NSP investigator charlie O’callaghan also planned to administer another polygraph test. He aimed to gauge the veracity of livers’s statements about Nick Sampson’s apparent involvement as the other gunman. at this stage, livers’s help was paramount 55 56 bloody lies because Nick was refusing to cooperate with police. But before the lie-detector test got underway, something unusual happened. While the police video camera continued to record the exchange, livers started rubbing his eyes. He paused for several seconds. The room grew uncomfortably silent. Something was clearly on livers’s mind. O’callaghan surmised that livers was about to unload another incriminating bombshell, perhaps ready to implicate others. He made an astonishing revelation all right, but it was not what O’callaghan had in mind. livers said, “Well, the absolute truth is, uh, i was never on the scene. i don’t know if Nick is the actual person involved in this. i’ve just been making things up to satisfy you guys, and answering questions just from, you know, basically fitting in answers to what you guys have been asking.”1 O’callaghan’s irish blood began to boil. He grew testy. He raised his voice. He accused livers of jerking him around. “No, sir,” denied livers. “No, you are. i’m telling you. You are!” “No, sir.” Naturally, O’callaghan was accustomed to criminals recanting their involvement after a sobering night of personal reflection inside the unfriendly confines of a jail cell. Livers’s attempt to retract his confession was hardly a rare phenomenon. O’callaghan reminded livers that he had also tried to deny involvement in the murders at the start of his interview with lambert and Schenck, only to confess after flunking the polygraph test. “You took a polygraph yesterday, and i gave it to you, and you were 100 percent involved with this,” O’callaghan grumbled, “and i have no doubt about it.” “right,” livers agreed. “But the truth is i was never on the scene on this. i don’t know if Nick is involved in this because we never, i mean, you can check my phone records. We never talked on Thursday or Friday about this. i mean this has been eating at me.” livers explained he picked his cousin Nick only because he heard through the grapevine that Nick’s brother’s car was used in the slayings. “What are you telling me this now for? What do you think it is going to accomplish?” demanded O’callaghan. “i’m just trying to come clean.” “You were there. . . . You’ve told us things that, unless you were there, you’d have no idea about.” according to livers, his father learned details of the crime from one of Sharmon Stock’s brothers, who had spoken with the investigators. blood 57 “and he told me about it,” said livers. “i mean the only reason that i know about the drug paraphernalia, i heard...