Was young Airman's death a tragic accident or murder?

Produced by Gail Zimmerman
[This story first aired on Oct. 13, 2012. It was updated on Aug. 31, 2013.]

The call to Barry Brashers' Illinois home was the call parents dread the most. It was about his daughter, Brittney.

"I got a phone call in the middle of the night -- 2:00 in the morning," Brashers said. "A traffic officer had said that -- Brittney had been in a wreck ... And-- told me that I should go to the hospital."

That hospital was half a continent away in Denver, so he got the terrible news long distance.

"Talked to the doctor, and he told me that we-- that she was no longer with us," said Barry Brashers.

Brittney's brother, John, was there with his dad.

"Honestly, we both just kind of sat there. Like -- I know I couldn't cry. Like that night, I couldn't. I was just in so much shock. Like, there's no way it's actually happened," he said.

They learned someone else also was in the car: Brittany's one-time boyfriend, Robbie Walters, who, miraculously, survived the wreck unhurt. Barry had met him - once -- and was not impressed.

"...guys come and go," Brashers told Spencer. "I'll be honest. I don't even remember one word Robbie said."

"And did she ever say anything about, you know, 'Dad, I really like this guy? I really think this guy is--" Spencer asked.

"No, but she wouldn't have said that to me."

Brittney didn't tell her father much about her personal life. He says she always had confided in her mom. A vibrant woman who shared her passion for the outdoors, her mother died of cancer when Brittney was 17.

"What was the impact of her death?" Spencer asked John Brashers.

"It affected Brittney the most...they were best friends. They did everything together. Talked about everything," he said.

She took it hard and began running with a crowd that, in her father's eyes, partied a bit too much. He was thrilled when, at age 20, Brittney suddenly signed up for the Air Force.

"...she really needed -- the discipline. The part of being a part of something," Barry Brashers told Spencer.

"So you felt this would give her some direction."

"Exactly."

"And she seemed committed to it?"

"Oh, absolutely," he said.

Retired Master Sgt. Art Figeroa was her boss at the Air Force dental lab in Colorado Springs where Brittany was a technician.

"She was one of our top performers and that's how I looked at her," he explained. "She loved what she did. I mean, she -- she helped people out. ...she was easy to like and everybody liked her."

In February 2009, Brittney was deployed to Iraq and assigned to non-combat security. She ended up spending a lot of time with a cute Airman from southern California named Robbie Walters.

"She had so much energy. She was such a free spirit and -- amazing girl," Walters told Spencer.

"But you pretty much immediately clicked."

"Yeah, right away, right away. She was all smiles every time I talked to her," he said.

Brittney's best friend, Tiffany Peeples, watched the relationship grow.

"My impression of him was, you know, this is a really -- he's a funny guy. He always has to be, you know, the clown," she said.

But Brittney was not amused when she learned that Robbie was married. No problem, he told her, it was a marriage in name only.

"Going to Iraq -- they give you family separation pay. They give you all these -- this incentive to get married, like these -- this extra pay and so many--" said Walters.

"So that's the only reason you got married?" Spencer asked.

"That's the main reason I got married," Walters replied.

"And Brittney believed that?"

"That was -- there was no reason for her to believe any -- anything-- anything else," he said.

That July, fun-loving Walters' disciplinary problems got him kicked out of the service with a less-than-honorable discharge.

After a four-month stint in Iraq, Brittney returned to the Air Force dental lab in Colorado. Walters was right behind her.

"...it was all good for probably a month, and then -- Brittney went from being this vibrant girl to just -- and bein' this superstar Airman to just showin' up to work late, wanting, you know, calling in sick," Peeples explained. "Just kinda pushing everybody out of her life."

Everyone, that is, except Robbie Walters.

"I started to really dislike Robbie," said Peeples.

Asked what kinds of things was he doing, Peeples told Spencer, "He would do crazy things like park her car in the middle of a -- you know, of a four lane in traffic with her in the passenger seat, take the keys out and run with her sitting there in the car."

Walters denies ever doing that, but contrary to all his assurances, his marital status was a problem. Adultery is a serious offense in the military and Brittney's boss found out about the marriage.

"When you looked into it, what did you discover?" Spencer asked Figeroa.

"We had a nice conversation," he explained. "I said, '... I understand if you guys have feelings for each other. Fine.' I said, 'But let this situation with his wife play out...and when he's away from her, they're divorced, and then maybe you can pursue a relationship. But anytime in between now and then,' I said, 'it's not legal so I -- I suggest you not do that.'"

Still, the affair continued -- on and off.

"It was always the same thing. 'I want to get out of this relationship. It's not good for me.' But just in a matter of a couple days, they would be back together," Peeples said. "...and I asked her a hundred times, 'Why are you doing this to yourself?' And it was, 'I love him. I love him.'"

Then, on Oct. 24, 2009, just eight months after they'd met, an overheated argument outside Brittney's home turned into a physical fight. Brittney ended up with bruises and Robbie ended up with a few days in jail.

Master Sgt. Figeroa issued a formal "no contact" order. Now, if Brittney saw Robbie again, the Air Force could kick her out.

"... and she had told me that she had broken up with Robbie," Peeples said. "He was coming to get his stuff, he was movin' back to California. ...she was completely done with him. She was ready to move on."

Three weeks later, Brittney -- always an athlete -- had a new passion: Football. She signed up to play in an all-female league. The night before her team's photo shoot, Robbie sent her a text begging to see her just one more time.

"He knew her weaknesses. They were close enough to where he knew what to say, what button to push to get them to meet up," Figeroa said. "... I think she loved him enough where ... she would honor when he said, 'This one time.' And then everything would be OK."

She could not have been more wrong.

Brittany Austin-Goyne says the Foxxy Football League was serious stuff.

"It was a sport that, we didn't get paid to do it, we just did it 'cause we loved it. It was something for us to do as women," Austin-Goyne explained. "It's eight on eight...and it was full on tackle football. ...We had helmets, mouth guards, shoulder pads, elbow pads, knee pads, cleats. It was full-on tackle. It was awesome."

As team captain, she was delighted when Brittney Brashers signed up in 2009.

"She seemed so dainty, almost, because she just looked so fragile, and then when practice started, Brittney was a natural," said Austin-Goyne.

"She was very athletic," noted Susan Spencer.

"Very much so."

On Nov. 16, they drove to Denver for the team's publicity photo shoot.

"We all, at one point, eventually had no top and we would have...a body part of someone else covering. So, you couldn't really see anything, but it's supposed to be, like, a sexy kind of football league," said Austin-Goyne of how they posed.

"And everybody was having a good time?" Spencer asked, with a laugh.

"We had an amazing time. We really did," Austin-Goyne replied.

Not everybody. Although the shoot was supposed to be closed, Robbie Walters tagged along.

"He was kind of hunched over, kind of covering his face ..." Austin-Goyne explained. "You know, he had his hand -- or his phone in his hand, and he kind of looked like he was, shaking or panting, you know when you kinda laugh?

"Then all of a sudden I saw just tears coming down his face, dripping to the ground. And I was like--" she continued.

Walters was sobbing and texting. He was sending text messages to Brittney's boss that night.

"I was sad the relationship was coming to an end," he told Spencer

He was turning Brittney in for seeing him against orders.

"So this is my way of getting back at her. She put me in jail," Walters explained. "And I figured if I got her in trouble, that would be the end of it and I could just leave and go to California."

Whatever anger Walters was feeling about the photo shoot and about the breakup, the couple was seen leaving together around 12:30 a.m.

Asked if Brittney was drunk, Walters told Spencer, "Oh yeah."

"Were you -"

"Was definitely drunk. Yeah, I was definitely drunk," he replied. "I put my head down, and I was listening to the music, and -- I wasn't paying attention to the driving at all."

About an hour later, Brittney's car slammed into a parked vehicle on a dead-end street. That's when Steve Sanchez heard the crash, ran outside and called 911:

911: Hello this is the paramedics.

Steve Sanchez: Yes I got two people in this car right here, and the one don't look good at all.

911: Are you with the person that's hurt now?

Steve Sanchez: I'm standing right outside of the car.

"He was shaking her when I came out... I told him, 'You're going to hurt her. Quit shaking her, she might be hurt.' And then he looked over at me like surprised and started crying her name out," said Sanchez.

Spencer asked Walters, "Do you remember the actual crash?"

"No. No," he replied.

"Why was she off the freeway in this strange neighborhood?"

"I don't know. I don't even know where we were at," he said.

"And you were asleep?"

"I -- I wasn't asleep. I was in the process of goin' to sleep. I was slipping into unconsciousness, definitely."

Detective Troy Bisgard says at first, Walters' story seemed to make sense.

"He said that he had just woken up to find Brittney's head in his lap and she was unconscious... You can see the windshield there..." he said, pointing out to Spencer where Brittney hit her head.

But homicide was called in because the cops at the scene thought something just didn't look right.

"They're the ones telling me, 'Look, it was a car accident but it wasn't so significant that she should be dead from it,'" said Bisgard.

Medical examiner John Carver was baffled. "Here's this accident, I don't understand why this person's dead, but maybe the toxicology will show something," he said.

Brittney's blood alcohol level was over the legal limit, but only barely. There were no drugs in her system and she didn't hit the windshield all that hard.

"Brittney didn't have any any significant injuries of long bones, or internal organs, or the base of the neck, or the spinal cord, or the skull or the brain," explained Dr. Carver.

The injuries Brittney did have weren't what Carver expected to see.

"There's extensive bruising around her temple and upper right cheek..." he said.

More alarming, he saw telltale signs that she might have been strangled.

"The main thing...were these pinpoint hemorrhages on the skin of the face and surrounding the eyes," Carver explained.

But strangulation was hard to confirm because, Carver says, "Brittney's anatomy was different."

She was missing a piece of cartilage in the throat that usually is crushed when someone's strangled. "There was nothing to injure or to break," he said.

So Dr. Carver was in a bind. Without more proof, he couldn't rule Brittney's death a homicide; but it sure didn't seem like an accident.

"The cause of death to me was undetermined, the manner of death, to me, was undetermined," he said. "Undetermined. I don't know."

"Undetermined" meant no ruling of homicide. So, officially, no crime and no grounds for arrest. But the more Det. Bisgard learned about Robbie Walters, the more convinced he became that this was murder. First, there was a statement Brittney gave police after the October fight that landed Walters in jail.

"The officer's report, it specifically stated that the victim told them that he had threatened to crash the car and hurt or injure them both," said Bisgard.

And Bisgard had discovered something else: A hidden recording on Brittney's phone left after that fight:

Robbie Walters recording: F--k you. I hate your f---ing guts. You f---ed me over. I f---ing hate you. ... I hope you f---ing die. I f---ing hate you.

"She actually disguised the recording as the name of a ringtone and that's where it was, so it was just pure luck that we found it," said Bisgard.

"Why would you leave a message like that?" Spencer asked Walters.

"Why would I leave a message like that? That message was left after Britney called the cops on me and I went to jail. And I was -- I was angry," he replied.

Detective Bisgard also wondered why Walters couldn't remember anything about the crash -- but was crystal clear about one specific detail from that night.

"He told me at some point...that she took her top off during the photo shoot," Bisgard told Spencer.

"What did that have to do with anything?" Spencer asked.

"I don't know. And that struck me as odd. Why would you say that. I don't get that," he replied.

In his grief, Brittney Brasher's father, Barry, was confused.

Spencer asked, "So when you heard that she had not been wearing a seat belt?"

"Oh, that was absolutely a red flag went up," Brashers said. "She would never move a car without...puttin' her seat belt on. Never."

"...you were convinced that he had something to do with it."

"Oh, that he had some -- she was dead because of him. To what extent, I had-- I had no idea what," Brashers replied.

Barry Brashers soon was urging Detective Bisgard to keep investigating -- find something. But "undetermined" on that autopsy report meant Bisgard's hands were tied.

"...it just -- it didn't matter what I thought. It didn't matter what anybody else thought. We had nothing. Without a cause of death for Brittany, I -- I had nothing," he said. "I just did not see a chance of proving this case."

It may not be everyone's idea of a dream wedding -- outside a parking garage in the dead of winter -- but that's where Robbie and Elena Walters tied the knot on a frigid day in January 2009.

"I was like, 'Elena, I love you. You're my girlfriend. We've been together for several years. If I get married right now, I can get paid more before I go to Iraq," Walters told "48 Hours." "And she was like, 'Well, I -- I don't really want to get married for money. I want to get married because I love you.' And I was like, 'Well, I love you...'"

Days later, the groom was deployed to Iraq, where he soon would both lie to and cheat on his wife, Elena. She apparently took her wedding vows much more seriously than her new husband.

After Brittney died, and knowing all about their affair, Elena took Robbie back. The couple reunited in California.

In Denver, meanwhile, Det. Troy Bisgard was frustrated, convinced that Walters was getting away with the murder of Brittney Brashers.

"All I could think about was -- was Barry," Bisgard said. "I'm talking to the guy whose baby girl was murdered and I am never gonna be able to prove this. Never."

Then, four months into the investigation, Bisgard got word that Walters had had a big fight with his wife. Looking for any possible shred of new evidence, he gave Elena a call.

"I said... "It's time for you to tell me what you know," Bisgard told Spencer. "She started tellin' me everything."

Elena Walters: He's like - "I did it." I'm like, "You did what?"

"He had confessed to strangling Brittney and covering it up with the car accident," said Bisgard.

Elena Walters: And he's like - "I killed her. And I was like. 'Robbie, you're talking crazy you've been through a lot' and he's like, 'No, I did it."

"I didn't have to pry this stuff out of her," Bisgard remarked. "Once she started talkin', she didn't stop talkin' for a couple of hours."

Elena Walters: I think he said that they were on the freeway?

Det. Bisgard: OK.

Elena Walters: ... the highway, something like that. And then that's the first time he reaches over, and he punches her in the face.

"... she started tellin' me -- how many times he had told her this. He just kept tellin' her over and over again," Bisgard continued.

Elena Walters: I guess he said he tried to stop her from breathing so he pushed down his forearm ...

Elena was in a quandary -- reluctant to believe that the love of her life was capable of murder.

Elena Walters: He's always had imagination. ... always been different in the head, like, so it's hard to want to be - to think that this person that I know, who I've known my whole life --

Det. Bisgard: -- could do something like that, right, right.

And, as she unburdened herself, she dropped another bombshell:

Elena Walters: He just started from the beginning and I had my phone, it was in my boots, I turned it on, I hit the record and I got a good 20 minutes of him talking about the whole entire thing

With her cell phone, Elena had captured grainy, fuzzy images -- and Robbie's confessions -- more than a dozen times!

"Did you grasp the volume of this and what she's talking about?" Spencer asked Bisgard.

"I don't think I grasped him at that point until I heard him, his voice on those recordings," he replied.

Robbie Walters recording: I look over at her and just took a shot in the dark where her head would be and bam! I punched the girl with all my might. ...She felt it. She felt like a f---in' house dropped on her.

"What was her reason for not having come forward on her own?" asked Spencer.

"...she's hearing this information from Robbie but in her mind," Bisgard explained, "there's no detectives beating down her door."

"She's hearing her husband confess to murder," noted Spencer.

"She's talking to his friends. In fact at one point, a good family friend of theirs says, 'They're not stupid. If he killed her like this, they can tell. ...He would be in jail.' So I see that wall that she was up against," said Bisgard.

John Carver, the medical examiner, says Walters' confessions explained everything that had puzzled him at the autopsy.

Robbie Walters recording: "I hit her, I hit her. I can't stop."

"...the fact that most of the bruising...on the right side of the head fit very well with his descriptions of punching her several times from the passenger side," said Carver.

Robbie Walters recording: "Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then she let a small squeal like, 'Robbie', and then she goes, 'uuuuh!' Like try and scream..."

"The description of the forearm across the neck was entirely consistent with the lack of fingernail marks... [the] larger hemorrhages on the whites of her eyes," Carter explained. "All of a sudden, there's the best possible explanation I can think of for their presence."

Elena's information was all Carver needed to change the manner of Brittney Brashers' death from "undetermined" to homicide. And three days after talking with Elena, Det. Bisgard flew to California and arrested Robbie Walters.

Det. Bisgard: Do you know what you are under arrest for?

Robbie Walters: No.

Det. Bisgard: First-degree murder.

In custody, Walters again told his tale of dozing off before the car crash.

Robbie Walters: Very last thing I said to Brittney was "I love you Britt." The very last thing she said to me was "I love you too, Robbie."

"He was trying to act very sincere," Bisgard told Spencer. "I said, 'it's just not gonna work with me.'"

Det. Bisgard: I'm a homicide detective and I look at - you know, I've seen all that stuff before. The stuff on her neck, the stuff on her face. [Bisgard moves in his seat and gestures] ...all on the right side. Right. 'Cause you're sitting on her right side."

"He doesn't know that you have seen or heard the recordings," Spencer noted of Elena's cell phone recording.

"Right. And once that stuff came up, he didn't wanna talk anymore," said Bisgard.

Det. Bisgard: She recorded you when you were telling her what you did to Brittney.

Robbie Walters: I don't what else to f---ing tell you...

Walters still refuses to talk about what he actually said in those recordings, except to say it was all a big misunderstanding. He claims it was Elena who started the whole thing.

"She would come over with these accusations, and then there were times where I just agreed with her to get the conversation to end," Walters told Spencer. "If I just was like, 'Yeah, Elena. You're totally right.... I broke her neck. Totally my fault.' Little did I know she was recording the conversation." He laughed and said, "So evil."

Prosecutors Phil Geigle and Helen Morgan now had plenty of ammunition to build a case around Robbie's own words:

Brittney. I never once thought about killing her in detail. Ever. Until she took her top off that night...and I was like, I'm killin' her tonight.

"When he got in that car I think he confronted her. And for all that we know about Brittney Brashers, we know that she's her own woman," said Geigle.

Added Morgan, "I can imagine her telling [him] it's none of his business anymore."

The first blow, they say, came while Brittney was driving on the highway.

"... once he hit her as he described it himself, he has to kill her 'cause he can't take her to the hospital," said Geigle. "I was surprised she didn't go unconscious right there, that one punch."

Robbie took control of the car, stopped someplace, and continued the assault.

Then, he tried to cover up his crime by staging the accident.

"So he turns in to this very dark street...gets in the passenger seat himself, puts his seat belt on, unclips her, puts her back to where she was and then he guns it," said Morgan.

"Did that ever happen?" Spencer asked Walters.

"Do you think that even sounds logical?" he asked back.

"Did that ever happen?"

"It d -- no. Do you think that even sounds logical?" said Walters.

"I'm asking you, did you kill her?" Spencer pressed on.

"No."

Robbie Walters was sent to a Denver jail to await trial. Even then, prosecutors believe, he was scheming for a way to avoid punishment.

"He is a dangerous, dangerous man," said Morgan.

And this time, they say, he had his sights set on the State's star witness -- the woman who betrayed him.

"No question he wanted her dead," said Morgan.

In August 2011, Prosecutor Phil Geigle's opening statement at Robbie Walter's trial stuns the courtroom as he simply reads Robbie's own words:

"'I took a shot in the dark. I took a swing where I thought her head would be. Like a ton o' bricks, like a...house fell on her. Bam,'" Geigle addressed the court. "'And she screamed, "Robbie! Robbie!" And I hit her again and again and again. She slammed on the brakes.'"

"As long as I do this job I'll never forget this case and those words," said Geigle.

The defense insists all that was just bravado, just "Robbie being Robbie" -- an immature, smart aleck who made up a story to scare away his annoying wife.

"Did you kill Brittney Brashers?" Susan Spencer asked Walters.

"No ma'am. And I hope to make that apparent," he replied.

Asked what was it like to walk into the courtroom and see Robbie Walters sitting there, Barry Brashers told Spencer, "Oh, you don't know how bad I wanted just to go hit him (laughs) -- just go hit him. Just like you 'Boom! How does that feel? Didn't see that one comin', did you?' Oh, it was so hard."

Prosecutors point to the fact that Brittney's car crashed around 1:40 a.m. -- odd, because witnesses said she and Robbie Walters left the photo shoot an hour before that.

"We know that it takes them an hour to get about five miles," said prosecutor Helen Morgan.

Shortly after they left, two 911 callers reported a car stopped in the middle of the highway:

Video: Listen to one of those the 911 calls from the highway

911 caller: The car next to me just all of a sudden locked up their brakes completely and came to a stop.

"And that's how we know when that first punch happened," said Geigle.

There is some physical evidence, notably blood spatter in the car -- a sign Brittney was bleeding before the crash, says state expert Jonathyn Priest.

"Had she been involved in a traffic accident, where she moves forward in the car and hits her head on the windshield, the first injury that can cause bleeding is this impact with the windshield," Priest explained. "Yet there is blood that is in the car that has to occur before she hits the windshield. And those two places are...the airbag and...the dashboard."

Predictably, the defense's blood experts argue just the opposite, but this is not a forensics case. This case will rise or fall on Elena -- and she's had a long, complicated history with Robbie.

Elena Walters interrogation: I have no idea what to do, no idea what to say, no idea whether to believe it or not.

Before the trial, when Elena spoke with police, she told them that while Robbie was confessing to murder, he was also threatening her.

Det. Bisgard: How does he threaten you?

Elena Walters: Telling me how he'll kill me if I say anything, how he did it once before and he'll do it again, how he'll just punch me in my face, how he'll snap my neck...

Robbie Walters on Elena's recording: "I'm so close to killing you it's unreal. I want to punch you in the face so bad..."

Despite that, Elena stayed with him. Even when he was in jail awaiting trial, she took Robbie's calls, apparently eager to believe that he simply made it all up.

Robbie Walters: I wish you never recorded me.

Elena Walters: I wish you never told me any of those stories that were never true. Because that was not cool to do to me.

"She loved Robert Walters and that's beyond dispute. She was in her early 20s. She'd been with him since she was in high school. He was all she knew," said Geigle.

Elena Walters : Robbie, I love you. I love you so much.

Robbie Walters: You're going to be given an opportunity to prove that.

"You can see Robert Walters evolving," Geigle noted of the phone call. "You see his plans evolve."

At first, the prosecutors believe, Walters thought he'd just control what Elena would say when she testified.

"I think initially he would say things along the lines, 'Just tell 'em I was drunk or something like that,'" Geigle continued.

They say then, that his plan grew more sinister -- that Walters enlisted a fellow inmate to help him arrange to have Elena killed.

"He thought this was really going to happen?" Spencer asked Geigle.

"Absolutely. Robert Walters is the smartest guy in the room in his own mind," he replied.

That inmate turned State's witness in exchange for less prison time and Robbie Walters was charged with another crime: Soliciting Elena's murder. Remarkably, Walters still seemed to think she'd stick by him:

Robbie Walters: Hi Elena! ...I hope that you don't believe anything that these people are saying. I don't know -

Elena Walters: Robbie, I don't believe any word that comes out of your mouth.

And by the time Walters stands trial, there is no doubt. Elena is firmly on the State's side.

"Probably the second most painful thing I ever had to go through was watching Elena get on the stand and just cold blooded -- cold blooded, no emotion, totally heartless. Didn't even look at me, not one time even when they said, 'Point out Mr. Robert Walters', she didn't even look. She said, 'He's over here,'" Walters told Spencer.

"But she can't be trusted?"

"No. She was like a puppet," he replied.

"What was her motive for lying?"

"Oh, that -- oh, revenge for sure, for sure, for sure. She thought we were gonna be together. I fell in love with someone else. And broke her heart, broke her heart, tore her to piece -- tore it to pieces," said Walters.

"You think she would've cooperated if he'd been nicer to her?" Spencer asked Morgan.

"I think she would've done everything in her power to convince herself he didn't do it," the prosecutor replied.

"What gave her the most trouble?"

"Explaining why she stayed over and over and over again," Morgan replied.

Through it all, Elena finds an unlikely new friend... the father of her one-time rival.

"Very, very good girl, very-- very much so, stuck in a bad place. ...I'm glad that she did what she did," Barry Brashers said. "But if she was my daughter I would have wished she would have just got the hell out of there and not worried about recording how Brittney Brashers was dead."

Robbie Walters does not take the stand. His attorneys argue the medical examiner got it right the first time: The cause of Brittney's death just can't be determined. Now it's up to jurors.

The hours tick by as the jurors deliberate Robbie Walters' fate... and Barry Brashers steels himself.

"One of us is gonna do a life sentence because he -- he's not gettin' off," Brashers told Susan Spencer. "He's not gettin' away with this."

"Are you serious?" Spencer asked.

"I'm absolutely serious. How could you do that -- as a father? You couldn't allow that. You couldn't. You couldn't," he replied.

Two days later, the jury finds Robbie Walters guilty of murder.

"Do you remember the second that you heard that word?" Spencer asked. "Guilty?"

"Oh!" Brashers exhaled. "Just -- just instant -- relief."

Asked if he was shocked when the jury came back with guilty, Walters told Spencer, "Oh, definitely."

"What was that like?

"Definitely, definitely. Totally hopeless, helpless," he said.

Walters does score one small victory. Jurors acquit him of conspiring to murder his wife, Elena.

"No question in my mind that Robert Walters solicited Elena's death," prosecutor Helen Morgan said. "I understand that 12 people who haven't been living it the way you've been living it, say you have not met your burden. And I respect that."

For practical purposes, the murder conviction is enough. Walters is sentenced to life without parole.

"...you know, you don't wanna say, 'Yeah!' and cheer because it doesn't really change anything. I mean, my daughter's not gonna come back," said Brashers.

"Is there a part of you that feels like justice was served?" Spencer asked John Brashers, Brittney's brother.

"Maybe a little bit, but no," he replied.

"Not when you don't have your sister, right?"

"Right."

"They're great people. ...my heart goes out to 'em. They have a loss that can never be filled," said Det. Troy Bisgard.

The detective admits he got lucky in this case - and shudders to think what might have happened had things gone just a little bit differently.

"Had her neck had in fact been broken by that impact, you'd have had no case," Spencer noted, "because you couldn't have proved it wasn't an accident."

"No, absolutely not," Bisgard replied as they stood next to the crashed car.. "It would have most likely proved that it was an accident ... with that on the windshield like that, yeah."

Robbie Walters has nothing nice to say about Detective Bisgard.

"What specifically did Bisgard do that you feel-- that you felt was unfair?" Spencer asked.

"Oh, wow. There's a list," Walters replied. "The guy is just a villain, just straight up villain.... This guy goes behind the scenes and he just twists everything up.

"He gets Dr. Carver to change his autopsy," he continued. "He flies out to California, convinces Elena that I tried to have her killed to get her to testify 'cause she wasn't gonna testify originally."

As for Elena's recordings, in California, it's usually illegal to record someone secretly. Walters believes the Denver trial judge should not have made an exception to allow the recordings in as evidence.

"I think I've got a really good chance of getting a retrial on appeals because of the illegal recordings," he said.

"Would Robbie Walters be in prison today if he'd kept his mouth shut?" Spencer asked prosecutors Phil Geigle and Helen Morgan.

"No," they both replied.

"No, Robbie Walters convicted Robbie Walters. Thank you, Robbie Walters," Morgan replied.

Elena is now divorced from Robbie.

"My sense is that she may have moved on?" Spencer asked Walters.

"Oh, definitely, definitely. Nobody knows where she's at," he replied. "I really hope that Elena's watching this. ...Sorry for breakin' her heart. But I'm not a murderer."

Elena had known him since childhood, but Brittney's tumultuous time with Robbie Walters was far more brief. Just nine months after she happened to meet him in Iraq, she was dead.

"Brittney Brashers was a young woman who should be alive today -- was that close to being alive today. ...She was doing well," Morgan said. "She met somebody who sucked her in. But she was getting out. And she just didn't have another night to do it."

"The one thing I always think of when I think of her is she lived every single minute," John Brashers said of his sister.

"Could she make you laugh?"

"Oh, always."

"What did she teach you?"

"Just have as much fun as you can 'cause tomorrow could be the last day," he said.

Asked how he wants people to remember his daughter, Barry Brasher said, "Full of life. Full of life. That's all."

Elena Walters now lives in an undisclosed location under a new name.