Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 28 - Yes, In Deed - Full Episode | Forensic Files

up next her death was first ruled an accident he thought he was going to get away with it until the autopsy proves
otherwise fire in this case was used in an attempt to cover a murder but who wanted this woman dead and why
greed and money are probably the oldest motives in the world for a murder but would he get away with it he thought
he was a pretty smart guy that was the mistakes he made [Music] just after dusk in november of 2000
firefighters in augusta georgia were dispatched to a mobile home fire on the south side of town
they're tinder boxes and you're just talking about a matter of minutes before the entire mobile home is completely
engulfed it took 10 minutes for firefighters to bring the blaze under control when they did they found the homeowner
edith ann haynes dead in the bathroom she became overwhelmed by the smoke and the heat and was unable to you know
escape the fire and died inside edith ann haynes known to friends as ann was divorced and was on disability from
her job at the kendall company makers of surgical dressings a preliminary investigation indicated
the fire started in a spare bedroom used as a storage space officially the cause of the blaze was
ruled undetermined but it was believed to be an electrical fire it was right at the time weather started
getting a little cool and might have been some heat on and that might have started the fire
at the autopsy the medical examiner expected to find evidence of smoke inhalation
instead he found no soot or debris in her trachea and her hyoid bone in her neck was
broken which usually indicates strangulation i've never seen a situation where a bone
in a person's throat has been crushed by accident unless there's been some traumatic
car wreck or some other explanation the medical examiner also found marks on the outer part of her neck
they were consistent with fingernail marks whatever happened before she died was
very very violent because there was obvious they were evidence of blindfolds trauma
the autopsy concluded edith ann haynes was dead before the fire started but who wanted her dead and why
ironically until three days earlier haynes had lived in a larger house about eight miles away
she was in a financial situation where she needed to sell her house steve culberson hayne's nephew
and the administrator of her estate looked through the rubble to find her financial records
i felt that there had to be more evidence there we took everything out of the cabinets and just searched for stuff
there was no evidence of where her keys were her wallet and he and the investigators found
something suspicious one of those was a signed contract between ann haynes and a man by the name of
michael bryant miss haynes sold her home to mr bryant and already transferred the deed but for
some reason hadn't received the proceeds from the sale that was a perry mason moment
he was going to pay her a sum of 25 000 she was selling her house to pay her bills off and eventually retire that was
the whole purpose behind her selling the house at first investigators assumed the fire
in edith ann haynes mobile home was accidental most likely caused by an electrical
problem but when the medical examiner ruled miss haines death a homicide investigators
called in mike lane an expert in the field of fire investigations all i wanted him to be able to do was
tell me was this an arson was it not a northern and if it was how did it start where did it start you
know tell me as much about the fire as you can the first thing he did was to conduct a
room by room search trying to determine where the fire started and how it spread
if you have a large area you can determine heat flow and directionality by cutting this wall
stud in two and when you cut it into looking down on the top you can see that the fire came from this
direction and flowed around this point we have much more degradation right here than we do on this side
lane then drew a diagram of the floor plan and charted the burn patterns using an arrow to point toward the heat source
examining this pattern it indicates the direction of fire flow starting at the bottom of this pattern
where we first see charring and then at the top of this where we see charring if we drew a line across there
it gives us a direction from which fire started then he looked for visible signs of an
accelerant like gasoline which makes the fire burn faster and hotter when i pulled up the threshold there was
a slight odor and that's why i cut it out and put it in a container when i smell fuels that i've smelled for 40
years i get excited because i believe they're there but i don't allow myself to go to the point where i say it's
absolutely lane put debris from the fire into air-tight containers and sent them
to the lab but the larger questions facing investigators were who wanted edith ann
haynes dead and why she didn't have a real big social life she would occasionally go out with
friends maybe have a drink or two after work when it's a murderer so off the wall and
no real logic behind why it had to happen why you know the most logical suspect was 31 year old
michael bryant haines co-worker at the kendall company bryant bought anne's old home as an investment
so she agreed to sell him this house where she had spent like 20 years whatever her whole adult life the deal
was he would pay the mortgages that was left on it which wasn't much and pay her
25 000 cash and help her out a little bit with her new plays when questioned by police
brian said he gave miss haines a 25 000 check and she signed over the deed to the
house but investigators found no evidence that haines cashed the check and no trace of
it was found in the rubble shockingly bryant was unwilling to issue another twenty-five thousand dollar check to ms
hayne's estate we did have to sue him to get the 25 000. he wasn't going to pay that
until we come up and did that brian denied having anything to do with the arson and murder and he had a solid
alibi at the time of the fire michael bryant did have an alibi he was 20 miles away
at a grill with his wife and they'd actually gone to a movie after that bryant and his wife had the movie ticket
stubs and restaurant receipts to prove it his wife verified that this was true and
there was no reason that she was not being truthful to us but something bothered investigators
one of brian's coworkers called him that night after the movie to tell him about
the fire the call said there was a fire at edith's house oh my god oh my are you serious and michael's
started crying well the thing was that the call didn't say anything about youth being dead only
that there was a fire and that told investigators they were on the right track an autopsy revealed that edith ann
haynes was beaten and strangled to death before the fire started in her mobile home
to find out whether an accelerant was used to start the fire samples were collected and sent to the
laboratory there forensic scientist laurel mason took the contents of the airtight containers and prepared them
for testing what i need to do is get the ignitable liquid that was used to accelerate the fire into a gas form
and i do that by heating the sample up that gas is then collected or absorbed onto the charcoal strip
a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer analyzed the samples and compared them to a database of over 750 known
reference samples it is like a doctor looking at an ekg i have to be able to visually recognize what it is that i'm
looking at the sample that was removed from the threshold was positive for gasoline
now investigators wanted to know who was the last person inside anne's home on the day of the fire
interestingly neighbors saw michael bryant's truck at ann's home around 3 p.m but the truck
was gone by 5 pm the fire didn't start until two hours later michael bryant and his wife were in the restaurant where he
went and the movie theater was in evans which is a suburb above augusta another good 15-20 minutes to get there so he
was you know at least a half hour or more away from her when the fire occurred arson investigator mike lane
knew from experience that there was a way that bryant could have killed miss haynes started the fire and still have
been at the movie two hours later the light ignition device is something that an arsonist uh would use uh so that
they can be someplace else when the fire starts and it may be uh for minutes uh it could be for hours in all actual it
could be for days the more sophisticated it is lane says there are numerous ways to
construct the device but he won't say how i really don't want to train folks to uh to be arsonist
as for brian's alibi investigators had one question who keeps a movie receipt it is inconceivable that someone would
keep in their records one movie stub one restaurant receipt unless they were keeping it for a
specific reason and his reason was that he wanted to be able to establish an alibi
scott peebles checked out michael bryant's background and discovered that bryant had been married before so
he called brian's ex-wife we learned from her that he was fascinated with fire and would
frequently dabble with pyrotechnics so to speak she also told peebles that the home they
owned together mysteriously burned to the ground before the house burned down insisted
that she go over to her parents and take the dog with her she recalled that she didn't want to go
spend the night at her parents house on this night brian's ex-wife said the fire resulted in a substantial
insurance settlement and even she believed her ex-husband started it prior to the fire he had already rented
an apartment that his ex-wife did not know he had put into his name brian's car was also
destroyed in that fire it too was insured strangely the car's tires were a special model and
valuable miraculously they survived he removed the tires from his car and placed them far enough away from the
house where they wouldn't be destroyed when the house burned down although this was certainly suspicious
it wasn't proof that bryant had anything to do with anne haines murder and he had a lot of friends and a lot of
support you know they just insisted that there's no way he could have done this crime because he'd never been in trouble
before and investigators also discovered bryant had fighter training he was on the fire
brigade at the manufacturing plant where he worked his training from the fire brigade which
would have taught him how to do you know what what a delayed ignition device was how to set fires how to
how arsonists work what to look for in an arson throughout the investigation bryant had willingly answered all
questions by police but when the questioning got more intense he stopped cooperating
and at some point he was asked to submit to a polygraph examination which he originally agreed to do
but prior to the scheduling of that examination he backed out so investigators had no evidence linking
brian to the crime got away with it once he thought he'd get away with it again with very little evidence against
michael bryant for the murder of ann haynes investigators got a warrant to search
his home they seized his computer and analyzed his hard drive on it was a wealth of information
when his computer was seized we were able to see that in the days prior to the scheduled polygraph that he didn't take
he was looking at websites on how to beat a polygraph and then he didn't take the polygraph
they also searched the storage spaces when i went into that attic things just kind of got eerie from there and
basically what i saw was similar to an altar for what i would certainly think was satanic worship
with a pentagram candles and burned items in the garage investigators found a coil of detonation
or fuse wire the kind used to construct a delayed ignition device most people probably don't have
detonation cord laying around their house but michael bryant did a search of brian's financial record
showed he was deeply in debt he made between 80 and 90 000 a year but he lived like he made twice that much
this was someone who was kiting checks between different financial institutions to get by he may have had this 200 000
home but he was living well outside of his means and he was in over his head and with this evidence michael bryant
was arrested and charged with arson and murder prosecutors say the motive was obvious
besides love and money greed and money are probably the oldest motives in the world for a murder
michael bryant worked with miss haines and when she bought the mobile home and put her old house up for sale bryant
offered to buy it as a rental property bryant paid off the loans on the house and had anne sign over the deed
then he gave haines a check for 25 000 the balance of the purchase price so he had written a check to ann haynes
for 25 000 asking her to hold the check not cash it until he could put the funds in the account
this kept getting delayed continually by him and on the day of the fire she indicated that she was going to cash
that check whether he wanted to or not she may have realized that bryant had no intention of paying her since she had
already signed the deed and didn't yet have the 25 thousand dollars he owed her prosecutors believe
bryant went to haines mobile home on the day of the murder to ask her again to delay cashing his check for the 25 000
dollars what am i trying to pull no one knows what took place but the evidence shows
bryant struck her on the back of the head strangled her to death then dragged her body into the bathroom
[Music] [Music] he took the incriminating evidence his 25 000 check the evidence shows he poured gasoline on
hane's body down the hallway into the living room and to the front door but he couldn't set the house on fire in
broad daylight with his truck outside he needed time to establish an alibi he used fuse wire and other household
items to construct some type of delayed ignition device then he left the scene the evidence shows that brian picked up
his wife and they drove to a restaurant 20 miles away for dinner [Music] they left at 6 41
then went to a seven o'clock movie around 7 30 the device bryant set in ann haynes home
started the fire while he and his wife were in the movie theater surrounded by witnesses
despite his well-laid plans michael made one huge mistake while walking out of the theater his
friend called to tell him that the hanes mobile home was destroyed in a fire aren't you kidding me
oh my oh my art are you serious michael reacted inappropriately given the fact the
caller said nothing about anne having been involved in the fire let alone killed
he thought he was a pretty smart guy that was the mistake that he made because he wasn't quite as smart as he
thought he was the fire didn't eliminate everything as in most arsons it actually created
more evidence than it destroyed essentially she's killed over 25 thousand dollars
in october of 2002 michael bryant went on trial for malice murder arson and burglary
in this case it was premeditated it was planned it was schemed he took the day off work and
he planned this murder it started out to be just a little small transaction deal of
a person selling a house not going through a real estate agent you know friends at work and turns out
to be a murderer just it still blows my mind every time i think about it bryant maintained throughout his trial
that it was impossible for him to have set the fire michael bryant's defense was he had an
alibi he wasn't there his mom was away he had no reason to kill her that it's it wasn't really a big deal that he owed
her this money but the jury didn't believe it michael bryant was convicted and sentenced to life in
prison plus 40 years this was one of the most interesting cases that i ever worked on
when i heard the verdict i was speechless reached over and hugged my wife and just shed a few tears i
wanted nothing to say but thank god thank god they got him without forensics we would have not
convicted michael bryant this is a man who did believe he was smarter than everybody else and he
thought he could manipulate ann haynes he thought he could manipulate investigators
and he believed that he was getting away with it you

In a tragic twist of fate, just days after the woman sold her home and moved to a modest trailer, a fire took both the trailer and her life. But the autopsy proved this was no accident.

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

Edith Ann Haynes was murdered by Michael Bryant over a financial dispute, leading to his conviction for arson and murder.

Key points

The Mysterious Death of Edith Ann Haynes. A fire leads to the discovery of a murder, unraveling a web of deceit.
The Investigation Unfolds. As investigators dig deeper, shocking evidence points to a calculated crime.
Michael Bryant's Alibi. Despite a solid alibi, Bryant's behavior raises suspicions during the investigation.
The Trial and Conviction. Michael Bryant is found guilty of murder and arson, sentenced to life in prison.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He thought he was a pretty smart guy.

Reflecting on the suspect's overconfidence.

19:48WatchJan 28, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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