S1: E32 – The Search for Bethany Correira, Part 2

Two brothers are blaming one another for the murder of a college student.

I can't imagine what an agonizing decision that would be to have to squill on your brother like that. But your brother's done a terrible thing. Your brother's done a horrible.

Thing, Anchorage. Please have to figure out which brother was telling the truth.

Someday, when I'm eulogized, all I wanted somebody to say is I stood up.

And did the right case.

I always strayed to do the right.

And in the end, one brother would do the unthinkable.

It's a hard decision, but I think it was the right decision to make, and it resulted in this tragedy.

Today we're an Anchorage, Alaska for the conclusion of the search for Bethany Carrera. I'm Sloan Glass and this is American Homicide. Just to note that this episode contained some graphic content. Please take care while listening.

Alaska is a place where people disappear and where people find bodies in the springtime. We have really high rates of violence against women, and women become victims of violent crime a lot.

Journalist Julia O'Malley covered the case of twenty one year old Bethany Carrera.

Bethany was a college student coming to Anchorage looking for a place to stay, but it must have felt pretty exciting snagging a job, getting furniture, setting.

Up Bethany's moved to Anchorage was supposed to be exciting, but instead she disappeared.

So it wasn't somebody who had like lost touch with their family and gone up to Alaska and just kind of quit talking to anybody. It was somebody who like needed to pick her brother up from the airport, and who had a plan with her mom the next morning and was supposed to call her boyfriend.

You know.

She was somebody who was watched after and very connected to other people. So when she just dropped out of her life, it seemed very apparent that something had happened to her.

Inside Bethany's apartment were her keys, cell phone, and purse.

It was as if she had gone out to take out the trash and just not ever come back.

Detectives were looking at Bethany's property manager, Mike Lawson and his brother Bob as suspects.

The Lawsons are just these really shady characters.

If you remember from the last episode, Mike Lawson served time in prison for sexually assaulting his girlfriend back in the nineteen eighties. After his release, Mike moved to Alaska and started a roofing business with his brother Bob.

And the cops were looking for something to bring them in on so that they could have some leverage to see if they could get one of them to talk.

Mike slipped up on a lone application for his business. Mike Lawson failed to disclose that he was a convicted felon, which gave the police a warrant to arrest both Lawson brothers for fraud. Once in custody, detectives hope that one brother would flip on the other, but no one expected both brothers to flip on each other. First, it was Bob who flipped on Mike. Bob told detectives that on the Saturday morning Bethany went missing, Mike phoned him in a panic. Here's what he told investigators.

He said, I'm on the trouble. I need you to help me.

Mike Lawson was in the apartment next door to Bethany's and told his brother Bob to bring him some heavy duty garbage bags and duct tape. Bob said he was reluctant, but did what my guest, and when he arrived, he said he saw Bethany's naked body on the floor.

Did I just remember taking peces? And I said something like, what have you gotten me into? I said, if I was smart, i'd walk right now, and I didn't.

What did your brother say to that?

I didn't say anything.

He said, well, at some point during this thing, he said, it's not your falt. He said, I did it, and he said, I'm sorry I got you into this.

Bob saw bowling ball sized hole in the wall from Mike's struggle with Bethany. If you'll remember, that's where the police found human hair, and Lant has confirmed it belonged to Bethany. Bob said he patched the drywall, helped Mike roll Bethany's body in plastic garbage bags, and put her in the back of Mike's suv.

Then that he and his brother took her north to you know, a gravel pit along the highway and left your body.

Later that night, Bob said he and Mike returned to the empty apartment and set it on fire. Then the two went out to the bars that evening to establish an alibi. And that brings us to Mike Mike was Bethany's landlord, who for months denied having anything to do with Bethany's disappearance. But then Mike said his brother Bob killed Bethany. He even offered to wear a wire to prove it. So now you have two brothers blaming one another. Detectives didn't know who or what to believe, so they

This whole thing ain't going away, Mike.

That's Bob telling Mike how this whole thing was eating him up.

You know, I've been drinking every night.

I go to the bar at two shots, a crowned every mirror.

I just need to talk to you. I don't know how we can talk about this, but I.

Don't want to talk.

I could talk to stark ass naked.

In a moon where I know you're not wearing a wire and nothing's bogged.

I know it's hard to hear, but Mike told his brother Bob he's not talking unless he was sure Bob wasn't wearing a wire.

Well, I don't know how the hell that would ever happen.

Here's more from Bob.

I'm just trying to understand.

I haven't been able to talk to you.

We never talked about it.

Mike told Bob that they did talk about what happened, and that mum was the word. And then Mike went off.

You.

Don't you the cat buried the kitty litter, and your showed everything.

You may have missed it. But Mike yelled at Bob for telling the cops what the cat buried in the kitty litter. Well, that's not a direct confession. It's the closest thing to Mike saying they threw Bethany's body in the gravel pit. And then Mike revealed something that would completely change the way investigators pursued the case.

Something that you don't know about that.

I'm not thanking.

Again, And I know it's tough to hear this audio, but Mike said something happened before she, meaning Bethany ever showed up.

Just give me a name, Mike, who was there and who else?

Cola?

Mike was there with Coca Cola. Well, the cops translated that to cocaine. And that's important because that morning, Bethany was supposed to meet Mike at a vacant apartment in her building, and she may have unknowingly walked into a drug deal.

Can I asked you one more question? Mar was already section round and I'm just trying to figure out why they're no clothes, no running, no what?

No running? No running? Get away?

Oh, Mike claimed Bethany wasn't wearing clothes so she wouldn't run away, And before their call ended, Mike wanted to make sure Bob wasn't cooperating with the cops.

No, I'm not.

I swear my mom's grave.

And then Bob had one final thing to say to his.

Brother, I want to be able to tell you I love you Bike.

The secret recording confirmed everything the police had suspected about Mike Lawson, that he was responsible for killing Bethany Carrera, not his brother Bob.

They allowed us to wire them and they were very incriminating conversations, so that is essentially what still the case.

Ron McGee worked for the Anchorage PD. They were still searching for Bethany's body in early two thousand and four. Bob led investigators to a gravel pit where he and his brother Mike buried Bethany months earlier.

And this is Alaska, and there was three feet of snow on and we couldn't recover the body until some of the snow melted, so we had to wait for the snow to melt.

Mother Nature delivered a warm spring in two thousand and four that meant an early thaw, which allowed the Anchorage police to resume their search for Bethany's body. On May third, two thousand and four, exactly one year to the day she disappeared, a search crew returned to the same gravel pit. Officers very quickly found a blue and black fleece jacket. It was a woman's size small. Then they found a brawl that looked like it had been pierced by a bullet.

When we found a body, the body was partially clad. She was naked from the waist down, so immediately we suspected that there was some sexual aspect to the crime. We had always suspected that, but this just confirmed in our mind that there was some sexual aspect of the crime.

Finding Bethany's badly decomposed body was a bittersweet moment for investigators.

I think everybody had sort of got to know her a little bit and fall in love with her. She's such a wonderful young lady, and I think that the sense was of relief that we can bring this beautiful young lady home to her parents. I was heartbreaking, is a very heartbreaking thing, and I pray. I don't know them, but I pray that they find some peace with this.

The Anchorage police charged Mike Lawson with first and second degree murder, sexual assault, arson, kidnapping, and tampering with evidence.

And of course, the brother's profession was a big part of this.

It was Bob who would be a key witness in the trial against his brother Mike, but a tragedy would change everything. The search for Bethany Correra ended exactly one year after she went missing. Her body was found in a gravel pit just outside of her hometown of Tlkita, Alaska, and nearly two hours from her apartment in Anchorage.

Not only did they find the actual bullet that she was shot with the round, but they found her necklace as well as her remains.

Walt Monaghan was the Anchorage Chief of police.

Such a beautiful young lady was victimized as she was well, she didn't deserve it, you know, losing a child and actually I lost one. It's a wound that will never heal.

Mike Lawson, Bethany's building manager, was charged with her murder.

She said that she had to go meet the manager and that was the last anybody heard of her. He was a convicted sex offender, which kind of doubled down on why he should be a suspect. So it was just a matter of doing due diligence and eventually make a case against him.

Prosecutors had a star witness in the case against Mike Lawson, his brother Bob Lawson, who led investigators to Bethany's body.

And the suspect's brother eventually kind of broke down and revealed what he had done to help his brother dispose of the body.

The prosecution moved quickly with this. They wired Bob, recorded incriminating conversations and had what they needed to convict Mike Lawson of Bethany Carrera's murder. It all weighed heavily on Bob. He saw Bethany's dead body and knew what the future looked like for his brother.

He committed suicide and that kind of took him out of the picture literally.

In March of two thousand and six, Bob Lawson's roommate found Bob dead in the garage of the house they shared.

Basically, it boiled down to he was feeling guilty. He was feeling torn between doing what was right and loyalty to his family.

Sitting among a collection of beer and liquor bottles was a note Bob left behind.

To my family. I'm so sorry. I missed my brother so much. Life has become unbearable. I can't endure the pain any longer. I helped do one of the most terrible things imaginable, and I can't live with that. Please take the money in my wallet and my final wages and give it to Mike.

So what was that terrible thing Bob did. Was it helping to move Bethanie's body or turning on his brother.

I don't know. I think that he knew what had happened was wrong, and I think that was weighing heavy on him. But again it's hard to judge family.

Bob's lawyer told reporters that Bob struggled with doing what was right versus his loyalty to his brother.

I think that his personal guilt of what he was feeling and what he had done, was his choice to avoid being disloyal and possibly going to jail himself.

Not only was this sad news for Bob's friends and loved ones, but of course it was also damaging to the state's case against Mike Lawson.

It would have been better if the brother had not committed suicide.

I think.

At the press conference I mentioned that this case will haunt me for a while. Still does.

All eyes were on the courtroom as Mike Lawson's trial began.

People were worried because Bob Lassen had killed himself. They were worried that the prosecutor like would have enough to go on.

Journalist Julia O'Malley covered the trial.

This case really high profile. The public's paying a lot has been paying a lot of at time attention to it. You know, there is a way in which the whole state is a small town in which one person's child is everybody's child. That might have been one of the reasons why the public followed that case so closely.

The case got even more challenging for prosecutors when the judge ruled to exclude testimony about Mike Lawston's sexual assault conviction from the nineteen eighties.

The jury is just there to look at what the prosecution can tell them and what the defense can tell them about the facts of the particular case and how that applies to the charges, and then consider the evidence and whether it fits. So they're not trying to convict him on a previous crime.

Mike Lawston faced eight felony charges, including first and second degree murder. During opening statements, Mike's defense attorney gave a surprising admission.

The defense admitted that he had killed her. They said it was an accident.

Mike laws It, who repeatedly told the police he had nothing to do with killing Bethany, now said he did do it, but he was an accident.

They were going for a lesser charge than murder.

Mike's lawyer confidently told the jury that it was manslaughter, which carries a lighter sentence, but the prosecutor wasn't having any of it.

Well.

The prosecution story was that she had entered the apartment and she may or may not have witnessed some illicit activity because there was some evidence that he was involved in sort of cocaine trade.

That's where the taped phone call between the two brothers came into play.

Bob Lawson's in jail. He's calling his brother and he's trying to get him to say, if there's anybody with him at the time of the.

Killing, just give me a name, Mike, who was there and who else.

Michael is like all cagy and he just says, you know, it was me and coca cola. So the prosecution took that to me and that he had been cutting cocaine at the time. They never found evidence of drugs in the apartment, but it was like a theory that was put forward by the prosecution.

Since Bob Lawson took his own life before the trial, that recorded phone call was key for the prosecution. It also meant that Mike's colleague, Franco bez Nice would now be the prosecution star witness for me.

I was ready. I was willing to do whatever it took, and when I was testifying, Mike was so frustrated with everything I was answering and I could see the frustrations in his eyes and the way he was. He couldn't stand me. He hid me so much that he didn't want to even see my face.

Franco told the jury about Mike's white suv, how it was always filthy, and how Mike's suspicion had it detailed right after his first visit by detectives, and how a week before Bethany's murder, Mike's fourth wife left him. That night, Franco remembered Mike being livid.

He told me that he went out to some bar and had met some woman, and he was basically telling me that when he was with this gal that he just met, that he was beating her. Why he was having sex with her. To me, that's right. So you don't meet somebody for the first time and do that and call it sex. That's not what it is. A week later, Bethany Krere comes up missing. That drew attention to me to really think that he has something to do with her disappearance.

Franco remembers being at Mike's house right around the time Bethany was first reported missing.

So I've been there numerous times and I've always had free rein just to walk around do whatever I wanted to do, and never had any problem about where I can go and can't go. For some reason, we wouldn't let anybody, including me, go upstairs. Nobody was allowed to go upstairs. So I thought that was odd, and that was always why I thought he had something to do with in the first place.

Franco said. He eventually relayed his fears about Mike to the police, and that's soon afterwards the police had him wired up. So throughout their investigation into Mike, the police were always listening.

Literally every encounter that I had with Mike was.

Recorded for nearly six months. Franco's toolbox and tool belt contained recording devices, and at some point he thinks, Mike caught on.

This is you know, two thousand and three, and they handed me this like basically like a walkman little cassette recorder and at the end of the cassette it makes us loud beat and it was so loud it was bet and I'm sitting there, I turn out the radio, I roll down the window, and I'm hitting my chest. He heard it, but he didn't know what it was.

And that's when Mike turned on him.

So my boss calls me and said, hey, Mike says, you're stealing money from the company. He goes, I got to let you go. So I got fired. And I looked at my boss and said, you're making a huge mistake. I can't tell you anything about what's going on. Maybe someday I will. My own boss turned against me, So Mike had a way to manipulate people into believing that he was in a sand or whatever was going on.

Imagine that you're Bethany Carrera's parents who had to wait a year to lay their daughter to rest. Their family would forever be broken, but their fight for justice had just begun. Bethany's parents sat in court every day.

They're paying close attention. They're just really witnessing it and it's super hard.

Journalist Julia O'Malley was also in the courtroom.

You gotta imagine losing someone like that and then having to go through the trial and having to hear all the things that happened, Like, no one needs to go through that.

Throughout the trial, there was something else present in the courtroom.

There's this backpack sitting with her dad, and in it were her ashes.

Bethany's favorite backpack the Great North Face was sewn on patches from New Zealand, Nepal and Australia. Was perched on a chair next to Bethany's dad. Her dad said he thought it was appropriate for Bethany to have a present in the courtroom.

I think it was important for them, though, to have closure in a certain way.

For two long weeks the career, our family heard graphic testimony, learning in real time what happened to their daughter. At times it was just too much for Bethany's mother, who would exit the courtroom in tears, plus her parents.

I can't, I really can't even process what that must have been like for them.

It was a tent setting as prosecutors struggled to make their case without their key witness, Bob Lawson. Their one saving grace was that they could play the thirty two minute taped phone call between Bob and mikel.

You was me.

The cat litter.

You showed everything, You showed them what the cat buried in the kitty litter.

It was pretty damning, just that recording, which they were able to play.

Mike Lawson's defense was that he accidentally shot Bethany. That's where the prosecutor honed in. She said that there was one thing in that conversation that Mike Loston told his brother. That one thing weakened Mike's defense that he accidentally shot Bethany.

I'm just trying to figure out where. No clothes, no running, no what, no running, no running, get away.

Oh, Mike said, he accidentally shot Bethany, but he removed her clothes so that she wouldn't run away. In her closing arguments, it was something the prosecutor wanted the jury to think about. So all this.

Time you have her sitting there without her clothes on, alive, with the bullet interest.

The prosecutor argued that this was no accident and it definitely wasn't manslaughter. And here's where Alaska stay law comes into play. If Mike was involved in some sort of drug activity, that meant a felony was happening when Bethany was killed. When a death occurs during another felony, Alaska loss says, it cannot be called an accident. It's automatically

I mean, it was clear that he killed her, and he admitted it early in the trial. But why, like what caused it? That never got totally answered for me.

Chances are if a journalist sitting in the courtroom is thinking that SO two is one of the jurors. And when the case went to the jury, deliberations dragged on for days, four days to be exact, and then the judge announced the jury had reached a verdict. Bethany's parents nervously sat next to their daughter's backpack, the one that contained Bethany's ashes. Whether Mike Lawson knew it or not, he had to face Bethany one more time on the most serious charge of first degree murder. The jury found

WI.

The jury find the dependent Michael Lawson, guilty of murder in the second degree.

The jury didn't buy Mike Lawson's claim that Bethany's murder was an accident and convicted him of second degree murder as well as tampering with evidence.

Because that would have meant the difference between like a twenty year sentence for manslaughter or like ninety nine years.

Mister Lawson, I sentenced you to ninety nine years.

The judge was really forceful in the sentencing, and it was his opinion that Michael Lawson was a predator, a ticking time bomb like that he was just waiting to harm somebody else.

Coincidentally, Mike's ninety nine year sentence was the same sentence he would have received if the jury found him guilty of first degree murder.

So that verdict was announced and all along, I was just smiling knowing that I helped put this man away, and it mattered.

Franco Beeznis was Mike's former colleague. They used to play chess together. After the verdict, Franco couldn't help but think about one match with.

Mike early on. I remember in one of the games, I actually lost my queen, which is for sure loss, and they kept telling me, hey, we got you, we got you. I said no, we're going to continue to play, and I ended up winning that game, which even frustrated me even more. The game of chest is like you must know what the other opponent's doing as well as has strategy or self. It actually played forward into the courtroom at the end when they are giving him his sentencing.

Mike Lawson remains incarcerated at an Alaska state prison. He'll be eligible for parole in twenty and seventy three.

For me, it felt so good to be able to put this man away, and so there was peace for me, unlike peace for the parents. And in there they lost the child. There's really no peace to that. And I met the father for the first time right outside the courtroom, and he actually looked at me and we were talking, and he said that he goes Franco. He said, I can't keep going on. The pain that I'm feeling is so bad because I have to forgive him. I said, you're going to forgive Mike Lawson. He said, yeah, so's

I'm slung glass. Thank you for listening to this season of American Homicide. Make sure you're subscribed to our feet to be notified of any updates on future, bonus episodes and brand new content. If you enjoyed American Homicide, leave a review. It helps others find the podcast. You can contact the American Homicide team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod