When firefighters extinguish the flames of an apartment fire, they discover the charred remains of Missy Grubaugh. Several of her coworkers soon come under scrutiny, and detectives must use the timeline to determine which one of them is the killer.
19-year-old Missy Grubaugh, a beloved honor student and college freshman just weeks from her 20th birthday, is found stabbed to death in her Arlington, Texas apartment after a fire is set to conceal the crime. As detectives work to reconstruct her final hours, they uncover a growing list of suspects from her workplace — an ex-boyfriend with a troubled past, a coworker with a grudge and a history of threats, and a former houseguest who fled the state after stealing from her.
With DNA evidence taking weeks to process, investigators are forced to rely on old-fashioned detective work, chasing down alibis, interviewing terrified witnesses, and eliminating suspect after suspect. Just as the case appears to be spiraling in multiple directions at once, an unexpected detail from Missy’s own mother redirects the entire investigation toward someone no one had considered — a man hiding in plain sight.
This episode follows the detectives who refused to let a calculated cover-up succeed, and the painstaking work it took to bring Missy’s killer to justice.