Forensic Files Season 11, Episode 16 - Grave Danger - Full Episode | Forensic Files

a young man died in a mysterious car crash but was it an accident forensic science uncovered what really
caused that crash and the truth devastated three different families [Music] [Applause]
[Music] my just before dawn in central texas a motorist saw a car on fire off the side
of the road down an embankment by the time firefighters got there there was very little left
i've never seen a car or a vehicle burn that badly before where the wheels were melted to the rocks
in the rubble investigators found the remains of the driver burned beyond recognition we need to identify the body
that was in the vehicle which wasn't much of a body the car was a 1999 chevy cavalier
registered to molly and clay daniels a young couple with two small children who lived in nearby leander texas
police discovered that molly daniels was home with her children at the time of the accident
she had called me relatively early that morning hysterical because clayton wasn't home and she had to get to work
and he had the car and she didn't know where he was through his personal effects family
members identified the remains as those of clay daniels they found the remains of some tennis shoes that clay's family
members identified as clay shoes they found a harley-davidson pen that had gone on a
hat that clay used to wear and a silver necklace that they identified as being clays
i figured that clayton had been drinking was at a party somewhere or just driving fast and lost control
clay daniels an unemployed automobile mechanic was just 24 years old surprisingly
not everyone was sorry he was dead absolutely he's a loser i've always felt that he was not the best material for
her and i wondered about being a daddy material but it was her choice to make others expressed the same sentiments at
his funeral the memorial that was a very interesting thing because there was just so much
there his best friend got up and spoke and he actually told people the clay was an ass
no he wasn't very well liked he seemed like sort of a loafer and a layabout and a sex offender so i mean what good could
you say about him clay was not a model citizen he had recently been convicted for the sexual assault
of his seven-year-old cousin and was sentenced to 30 days in prison and 10 years probation
the crash occurred just three days before he was to start serving his time this car fire was june the 18th of 2004
clay was supposed to be going to jail that monday the 21st of 2004 and so they thought the timing of that
was a little bit suspicious and police had another angle to pursue the parents of the sexual assault victim
were angry that clay was sentenced to only 30 days in prison the sexual assault victim's father made comments
prior to this accident that he wanted clay to go away so we were thinking maybe the father of the victim
made clay go away nevertheless the community reached out to molly daniels a widow at the age of 21 who had
two young children to support on an office receptionist salary my gosh she had people sending her money
people she did not know sent her money people would her co-workers would put groceries in the
house they would do everything they'd been over backwards for her she got this discount babysitter in the neighborhood
because she put up signs i'm the poor grieving widow and i need help with child care
but that generosity ended when less than a month after clay died molly told friends that she had a new
boyfriend and that she was the beneficiary of clay's 100 000 life insurance policy
her own mother even turned on her absolutely she was raised better than this there were days that i just kicked
myself what did i do wrong where did i go wrong [Music] clay daniel's family identified his
burned remains by some of his personal items found in the car there was very little that remained from
the fire there's only 14 pounds of body mass that was remaining and they didn't have a head
didn't have hands or fingers or toes nothing to fingerprint but the medical examiner wanted to be
sure so he extracted the bone marrow from clay daniel's hip bone hoping that enough of his mitochondria survived the
fire for dna testing since mitochondrial dna is passed maternally scientists would try to
compare it to the mitochondrial dna profile of clay's mother laurie but testing would take up to six months
it's not like on csi on tv at all so it doesn't happen within the span of an hour
[Music] in the meantime investigators noticed some inconsistencies at the accident scene
the lack of skid marks on the road indicated that clay took no corrective action before the crash
the speed limit was 60 miles per hour and the car was barely moving when it went down the embankment there was no
momentum coming off the cliff it looked as if somebody had just pushed it off or just drove off the cliff at a slow
rate of speed because all the rocks the trees on the way down were disturbed in the
path that the vehicle took and the car's gas tank was intact this raised questions about the source
of the fire my instincts told me that this was not an accident that somebody was killed and
i stayed with that feeling that's why i told the sergeant that i was calling the
experts in that expert was arson investigator janine mather the first thing she noticed was that the
entire driver's seat had been consumed by fire normal vehicle fires with a body inside there usually is
body fluids and remains on the seat and in this case there was no body fluids located in the vehicle
and no remains on the seat mather then checked all possible sources for a fire the fuel lines
the ignition switch the starter the battery everything was intact i looked at the
vehicle inside and out and underneath and ruled out all accidental causes of ignition
crime scene investigators gathered the fire debris and placed it in sealed canisters
at the lab they inserted activated charcoal strips and then heated the cans the strips were then put into a solvent
and tested with gas chromatograph mass spectrometry this revealed the fire was started with
large amounts of charcoal lighter fluid when the results came back that it was positive for charcoal starter fluid i
knew that we had an arson and intentionally set fire [Music] and just as investigators heard this
news they learned something else molly daniel's sister melissa had been visiting molly when she experienced one
of the most bizarre incidents she had ever encountered melissa had gone in to get a q-tip out of the bathroom
turned around and looked and there was a guy laying in the floor of the closet but his head was up in the corner she
didn't see anything but from the waist down and he was wearing boxers and she went out to molly and she goes there's a
man asleep in your closet she goes no there's not but when molly looked in her closet
she didn't see anyone there [Music] but things started getting kind of weird after that
needless to say investigators found the incident suspicious and now wondered whether
molly was somehow involved in her husband's murder five months after the car crash the
sheriff's department in burnet county texas finally got the results of the dna test on the remains found in the car
the dna revealed that the remains were not those of clay daniels when dna came back and wasn't clayton
we're like where's clayton and who is this person that was in the vehicle to find the answers investigators put
clay's grieving wife molly under surveillance for days her routine was perfectly normal
until she met her new boyfriend jake greg for lunch she got into that man's car and then the two of them went off to
taco bell investigators decided to go inside to get a better look at molly's new
boyfriend when captain paul nelson walked by their table he noticed that jake greg bore a
striking resemblance to clay daniels although his hair color was different he looked identical if he could have
crawled into that burrito he probably would [Music] but the man insisted he was jake greg
and produced a texas identification card to prove it but captain nelson didn't buy it and
placed him under arrest [Music] during police questioning he finally admitted he was
clay daniels clay's brilliant disguise consisted of nothing more than dying his hair black
and other than that he hadn't changed his appearance at all clay had several motives for staging his death
he did not want to go to jail for 30 days and he did not want to be a registered sex offender and
he had a hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy molly insisted she knew nothing about
clay faking his own death until he came home one day about a month after the fire and told her what he had done she
just tried to portray it like she didn't know that he was alive until he just called her out of the blue about a month
later and said hey baby i'm alive i find that very hard to believe if my husband came back from the dead i'd be
asking a lot of questions and i'd be very mad clay admitted it was he who was sleeping
in the closet when molly's sister saw him he said molly spoke loud enough that it woke him up and he was able to get
out of the closet before his sister-in-law returned see there's no one here i know
clay said he planned to start a new life with molly and the children after the 100 000 life insurance payment arrived
they were going to go to mexico and he was going to have plastic surgery done on his face and have dental surgery done
so he'd have teeth and molly is going to have a tummy tuck too apparently a little bonus of the
plan i guess they get so much money from the insurance clay daniels refused to identify the body burned in the car fire
clay never never divulged any information to us to help our investigation did they murder
somebody did they find a dead homeless man what did they do how did they do this however
clay was more than happy to talk to his fellow inmates i guess they're sitting up late at night you know shooting the
breeze and clay had told the cellmate that he had actually dug up a corpse from a graveyard
and that's what they had put in the car and set it on fire investigators searched pebble mound
cemetery the one closest to the site of the car fire they knew from experience that criminals
don't like to travel far with a corpse in the car sure enough they found a grave close to
the front gate that looked as if it had been tampered with i could tell that the gray was disturbed
by the crevices and the holes that was left the marker had been moved the flowers had been moved
and i knew by looking at the other grave sites that that was not normal the headstone bore the name charlotte
davis she died six months before the car crash at the age of 81. their suspicions were confirmed when
they exhumed charlotte's casket and discovered it was empty investigators now wanted to know whether
molly daniels was involved and if so they needed evidence to prove it clay daniels confessed to starting the
arson fire and defrauding the insurance company of 100 000 in life insurance his wife molly denied any involvement
but investigators didn't believe her when molly first talked to the police and told him that ridiculous story that
she didn't know that clay was still alive until a month later she was sticking by that story for quite
some time and apparently that's what she'd been telling her lawyer too investigators examined molly's work
computer but they weren't optimistic by this time six months had passed since the car crash
depending on how often the computer is used there's a possibility that some of the evidence that we would have
recovered ordinarily would be overwritten but investigators got a huge break molly's computer had been invaded by a
keystroke virus right before the staged accident what the worm actually did was it
recorded every letter every window she opened every email just any kind of thing that she's
typing in the computer it recorded and into a text file and saved it computer forensic experts did a word
search to identify what kind of information molly had been looking for on the internet
we were finding words like unidentifiable body forensics on a body burned body burned
car gasoline fire 1500 degrees fahrenheit just words like that this proved that molly
not only knew about clay's plans but was actively involved it was the happiest day of my life when
we got that computer forensic exam it was just i mean there was no way she could deny
that she had been involved from day one of the planning when we saw that computer forensic
evidence what does surprised me is that she was too stupid to do this she was so stupid
that she did this kind of thing and didn't think about the consequences and didn't think about possibility of
getting caught police obtained a search warrant for molly's house and found even more forensic evidence
during the search warrant of their residence we found in the kitchen two containers of
charcoal starter fluid both of them were tested and one was consistent with what
was found in the vehicle prosecutors believe that clay and mali planned this crime for months
they looked in the obituaries to identify a grave to rob ideally someone elderly who didn't have many
family members visiting her grave they chose 81 year old charlotte davis six months after her death they dug up
her body drove to the ravine and set fire to their car with charlotte's body inside
[Music] play through some of his personal items in the fire so they could be used for
identification but the dna testing proved the body wasn't clay daniels and gas chromatography found
remnants of the lighter fluid when confronted with all this evidence molly daniels finally confessed
she said that they watched a lot of law and order and csi and they got the idea to do this from
those shows and i asked her do y'all not watch the end of the shows because usually the
criminals get caught and she just laughed molly daniels pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and hindering her
husband's apprehension she was sentenced to 20 years in prison you do the crime you do the time
clay daniels pled guilty to insurance fraud arson and desecration of a corpse he was sentenced to 30 years in prison
plus an additional 20 years for the sexual assault charge the body of charlotte davis was
reinterred the people carrying her casket with the ones who put clay and molly behind bars
texas investigators say it is among the most bizarre cases they've ever seen they were also appalled by the deception
molly and clay perpetrated on their own children to tell a little boy who's four almost
five years old that the man that he has known his whole life as his father is not his daddy when he runs to him and
hugs him and says hey daddy i love you to have the man say oh i'm not your daddy i'm mommy's new
boyfriend jake and to have molly tell him that over and over no no that's not daddy that's jake
you can't even imagine what that would do to a child's mind we just hope that their children
get proper mental care the next couple years and get get raised well by their grandparents because
otherwise you can have another one there clayton daniels on our hands in 15 years without the science
investigators were convinced that clayton and molly daniels might have gotten away with it they thought that
the fire would destroy all evidence and there wouldn't be enough remains for dna testing and they were almost
right lowest scum walks of life i mean they don't they don't deserve to be on this planet but
that's just my personal opinion if it hadn't been for everybody being on their toes in
this case listening to their gut listening to their instincts and then pursuing all the dna
the forensic investigation the arson investigation we wouldn't be where we are today with these two people in
prison [Music] [Music] [Music] you

A young man was killed in a mysterious car crash, but the evidence at the scene led investigators to believe it was not an accident. Forensic science revealed what really happened, and the truth devastated three families.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Clay Daniels faked his death to escape jail and collect insurance, leading to a bizarre investigation and eventual prison sentences for him and his wife.

Key points

Mysterious Car Crash. A young man dies in a fiery car crash, raising questions about whether it was an accident.
The Truth Uncovered. Forensic science reveals the shocking truth behind the car crash and its aftermath.
Bizarre Confession. Clay Daniels is discovered alive after faking his own death, leading to a shocking confession.
The Deception Unraveled. Molly Daniels' involvement in the crime is uncovered through forensic evidence.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

You do the crime, you do the time.

A reflection on the consequences faced by Clay and Molly.

18:51WatchJan 20, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

More from Forensic Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.