By the fall of 1983, Barry Beach was back in Montana to stand trial for the murder of Kim Nees, a trial many thought to be a mere formality.

All those whispers -- the rumors about girls from the town of Poplar being the real killers, must've been -wrong.

After all, Barry Beach had confessed to her murder. What more was there to say?

Well, actually, there was quite a bit more.

Keith Morrison: You weren't exactly a choir boy, were you?

Barry Beach: No, sir. I was your very typical small-town teen. I drove fast cars, I liked rock'n'roll, I drank.

Keith Morrison: To excess, occasionally?

Beach: To excess quite often.

Keith Morrison: Smoked a joint once in a while?

Beach: Yes, sir. I used dope.

Keith Morrison: And you liked to party?

Beach: Every chance I got, to be honest with you.

In fact, by the time he was 18, Beach had two DUIs and had spent close to a month in jail for traffic offenses.

And on the day of the murder, in June 1979, Barry says, he was doing the usual: drinking too much, smoking some dope, and swimming in the Poplar River outside town, when his car broke down.

Beach: I was mad at my car. I actually ended up hitting my vehicle several times in the door. I banged my fist on the windshield. I vented my anger.

He was then forced to walk the mile back into town, Beach says, with a good buzz on, and no one at home when he finally arrived. His bed looked awfully inviting.

Beach: I actually just went straight upstairs to my bedroom and went to sleep.

Keith Morrison: What time was this?

Barry Beach: That was somewhere between 5 and 6 o'clock in the evening.

Barry Beach says that's where he stayed the night Kim Nees was killed: in bed.

But what about that detailed confession he gave to detectives in Louisiana?

Well, that's where it gets interesting. Beach doesn't deny that he confessed to the killing. Far from it.

Keith Morrison: You said you killed that girl up in Montana.

Beach: Yes, sir, I said that on tape. That I killed Kim Nees.

And that's when the story enters the twilight zone. Barry Beach says he believed he was about to be released from prison, those minor charges called in by his step-mother about to be dropped, when suddenly he found himself in an interrogation room, answering questions about murder. Those detectives seemed to think he had committed those three unsolved Louisiana murders -- those murders they were trying so very hard to solve.

Beach: The next thing I know, they got very accusatory and started not only telling me that I knew these girls, but that I had killed them. And then they started showing me pictures of dead bodies and told me, “Remember doing this?” And I was telling them, I’d say “I didn't do it, I didn't kill anyone.”

And as the day wore on, Beach claims, it was Commander Alfred Calhoun who ratcheted up the pressure.

Beach: He promised me that he would personally see me fry in the Louisiana electric chair and then he spent half an hour to an hour explaining to me the different effects of a person when they are electrocuted. All the way from their hair being singed and catching on fire, how it affects your heart when the electricity hits your body.

Keith Morrison: The kind of thing that sticks in a person's mind.

Beach: It was intense. He was extremely angry, yelling at me.

Keith Morrison: What were you feeling in the middle of all this?

Beach: I was scared to death, Keith. But I knew that he would convict me, he would execute me if given the chance.

Then, says Beach, the talk turned to that murder in Montana: the murder of Kim Nees.

Keith Morrison: You were asked to speculate about how she may have been killed?

Beach: Yes, sir. Well, it started off that they asked me to speculate how it happened and then I was asked to give a hypothetical story using myself as the perpetrator.

By that time, says Beach, he was terrified. Would say just about anything to get out of there. He says he remembers his interrogator telling him he could work to prove his innocence later back in Montana if he just confessed now. And so, though his memory is rather fuzzy, he says that is what he did.

Keith Morrison: Do you remember any of what you said?

Beach: I don't deny that the confession took place, I don't remember all the details.

Keith Morrison: Barry, come on. I really don't think I’m going to tell a police officer I killed a girl if I didn't kill her.

Beach: That is hard for most people in America to believe that a person could be led to confess to a crime they did not commit…

Keith Morrison: But why would you do it?

Beach: I was a 20-year-old kid, 2,300 miles from my real home. They scared me so bad I would have said anything to get away from them.

Keith Morrison: Just to make it stop?

Beach: Anything to make it stop.

And so, Barry Beach now says he confessed to a crime he did not commit.

But in 1984, as authorities in Montana prepared to put Beach on trial for murder, there were complications. That tape recorded confession of Barry Beach's? Somehow, it was gone.

Jay Via: I went to pull the tapes out of evidence and the custodian of records said he'd erased the tape. And we went ballistic. Because this was a murder investigation!

Keith Morrison: This stuff's not supposed to be erased.

Via: The reason given to us is that this was an out-of-state case. It wasn't ours.

But detectives breathed a sigh of relief: Jay Via himself had made a transcript of the confession. And, then there was another bombshell, this time from the police department in Montana.

It turned out that shortly before the trial, a pubic hair had been found on Kim Nees's sweater, itself strangely found folded neatly near the truck.

A scientist said the hair had 'characteristics' similar to the hair of Barry Beach, but couldn't tell if it was Barry’s -- just that it could have been.

But just before the trial began, there was another stunning development: Poplar's police chief came forward to reveal that the night after the murder, somebody – deliberately, he said -- broke into the room where Kim Nees' sweater and the other crime scene evidence was stored. Somebody actually kicked down the door and broke open a padlock, even though the signs quite clearly said keep out. And the person who did it was a police officer -- and the father of one of the girls listed as the original suspects.

So when the trial began at the courthouse in Glasgow, Mont., there'd be no confession on tape to play for the jury. They'd read Jay Via's transcript instead.

That one strand of hair that might have been used as physical evidence to connect Beach to the crime was ruled out, too, since it had been compromised by that break in.

Still, the prosecutor was confident.

Marc Racicot: I had a detailed confession that only the killer could have given.

Within a decade, Marc Racicot would be elected Montana’s governor. And in 1984, he was an assistant Montana attorney general, called in to prosecute Barry Beach.

Racicot: He gave a very detailed confession that matched the things that were discovered at the crime scene. From the two different murder weapons to what he did with the body, why the blood spots were located where they were, by the truck and down by the river. On and on and on.

But what about all that other physical evidence that seemed to point not at Beach but toward one or more other attackers?

There were lots of fingerprints in and on the truck, and none of them belonged to Beach.

There were footprints on the drag trail from the truck to the river where Kim’s body was dumped. The footprints were not his, either.

That bloody towel, found in town, on which a couple of hairs could have been Kim Nees’?

The blood was not Barry Beach's.

The prosecutor told the jury to ignore it all, because police had contaminated the crime scene.

Racicot: This is not CSI Miami where people show up with the latest equipment, the latest capacity. They did the best they could with what they had available to them.

So did the prosecutor at trial. About, for example, that bloody palm print found on Kim Nees' truck? Remember an FBI report said if you find the owner of that print then you'll have found the killer -- and it didn't belong to Barry Beach. But the prosecutor told the jury that another FBI report suggested the print might have been left by Kim Nees herself. And so the jury could ignore that evidence too.

As the trial wore on, Barry Beach, sitting at the defendant's table, had a sinking feeling.

Keith Morrison: What did that feel like?

Barry Beach: You want to scream at somebody and say “Wait a minute, you're wrong.” And you can't. The only thing you can do is sit there, and do as your attorney tells you to do. But man, I wanted to jump up and tell them they were wrong.

When testimony was finished, the jury was back in just six hours.

The verdict: guilty.

For Barry Beach's mother, it was devastating.

Keith Morrison: Do you remember that moment?

Bobbi Clincher: It's something a person wouldn't ever forget.

The victim's sister, Pam, heard the news from her father.

Pam Nees: Yeah, he told me that he would never be able to get out and that it was over and…

Keith Morrison: You didn't really feel a sense of relief, did you?

Pam Nees: Yeah, I did. But then again it was also pain, you know like, why? Why him?

Keith Morrison: Why would Barry do that?

Pam Nees: Because he was never mean to me, you know? I didn't know him to be crazy or anything.

Yet at sentencing, Barry Beach's life was, for all intents and purposes, finished.

Beach: I looked the judge in the eye and I told him again I was innocent of this crime, and I asked for his mercy. I asked him to give me a chance to have a future. And he wouldn't do it.

Keith Morrison: How long is your sentence?

Beach: I'm doing 100 years, dangerous. No parole. No furlough. Hard labor.

In the spring of 1984, Barry Beach entered Montana State Prison as a dead man walking. He'd surely die here, never be eligible for parole. Never have a chance.

Would he?

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