Every Parent’s Nightmare: Don’t Click If You’re Watching Alone | True Crime Documentary

Yeah. What’s up,  bro? I got What’s up?  The phone.  Yeah, I already know.  So, we need to change numbers pretty much. You know what I’m saying?  Yeah. Like anybody anybody that called which one? But I talked to Kyla and I talked to you.  Yeah.  Off of that.  Yeah.

 You remember cuz I was looking for your house.  Ah,   Son is  heartless. Because that’s pretty much what you’re telling me. The trade that I know that I’ve known for 15 years could not be capable of something this heinous. If you have any dignity, if you have any semblance  of humanity left in you, Mr. Clark, get back on that plane and come back here to Austin.

 If you’re innocent, prove it. Come over here and face the music.  It’s just after 2:00 a.m. on February 4th, 2015. A patrol officer is making his rounds through a stretch of shuttered businesses on the outskirts of Bassrope, Texas. The kind of place where nothing ever happens. He pulls into an empty parking lot out of habit more than suspicion.

 That’s when his headlights land on it. A black Dodge Charger sitting alone in the farthest corner, away from the road, away from any light. The driver’s door is wide open, and there’s a woman half in, half out of her seat. She isn’t moving. 29-year-old Samantha Dean has suffered fatal injuries. She’s expecting her first child.

 On the seat beside her sits a bag holding a small amount of an illegal substance. Two cell phones rest inside the car. And outside on the pavement near the back tire is something that has no business being there. The Charger’s own back seat ripped out and dumped beside the vehicle. At first glance, this looks like a deal gone wrong. Almost too easy to explain.

 Except nothing about it holds up. The drugs are still sitting right there. So is some of the cash. And when investigators check that bag for prints, for any sign of who actually touched it, they come up with nothing. Not one print, which means somebody placed it there after the fact, hoping detectives would buy a story that was never true.

 They don’t buy it for a second. And once they learn who Samantha Dean really was, this case stops looking like a street crime and starts looking like something planned. Samantha had spent years working in victim services for the Kyle Police Department, helping other people survive their worst days. She’d already survived cancer once, and in just a few months, she was supposed to bring a baby girl into the world.

 The father of that baby was an Austin police officer named Von Tree Clark. When detectives pull Samantha’s phone, they find messages to her closest friends. She told them she was scared something might happen to her. In her own journal, she’d written down the name of the one person she believed could hurt her.

 But the discovery that really cracks this case open comes later. buried in months of phone records, a trail of burner phones, staged meetups, and men with serious criminal histories, all tied to a plan that’s about to fall apart because of one catastrophic mistake. This is a true crime documentary about a woman who built her career helping victims and the conspiracy that turned her into one.

 Before we go any further, drop a comment and let me know what city or state you’re tuning in from tonight. I love seeing where this community is watching from.  And if this is your first time here, hit subscribe because this channel is built around true crime documentary cases exactly like this one. And you are not going to want to miss where this one goes.

 To understand how investigators cracked this case, we need to go back to the beginning, back to that parking lot, and to the woman whose life was about to upend an entire police department. Samantha Dean was roughly 7 months along when she was found in that abandoned lot off the edge of a Basstop Highway. A woman who’d spent her career on the other side of tragedy, comforting victims, not becoming one, had now become exactly that.

 And from the moment deputies arrived, almost nothing about the scene felt right. Someone had clearly lured her there, someone had clearly tried to dress the scene up as something else. And whoever did it left behind one critical mistake, the kind that would eventually unravel the whole operation, person by person. So, let’s rewind to that night.

 At around 2:00 in the morning, a Bassrope County patrol officer making his usual sweep through a row of closed down businesses turned into that empty lot. And there it was, a car sitting by itself, far from the road. As he walked closer, it was obvious the woman inside had suffered serious, fatal injuries. She was identified as 29-year-old Samantha Dean.

 The autopsy would later confirm she’d suffered multiple firearm related injuries. The Dodge Charger she was found in was registered in her own name. And just outside the vehicle, investigators found something strange. The entire back seat was removed and dumped on the pavement beside the car. No ballistic evidence turned up anywhere at the scene, even though it was painfully clear she’d been attacked right there in the driver’s seat.

 Inside the car sat two cell  phones. One was Samantha’s. Nobody could immediately say who owned the other. And then there was the bag sitting right beside her, holding a small amount of an illegal substance. On the surface, this had all the makings of a deal that went south. But the cash was still there. The drugs were still there, and that bag didn’t have a single fingerprint on it, which told detectives somebody had planted it after Samantha was already gone, hoping to point the investigation somewhere else entirely. Bassrope County detectives

knew right away this wasn’t a robbery. This was staged. Everything changed the moment investigators realized exactly who Samantha Dean was. For 3 years, she’d worked in victim services for the Kyle Police Department just outside Austin, helping people put their lives back together after the worst day they’d ever had.

 Long before that, she’d already survived her own personal battle. While she was a student at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer in her elbow. She kept going to class through every round of chemo and radiation. She’d originally hoped to become a police officer herself, but the illness left her with a disability that pushed her toward a different path, a master’s degree in forensic psychology, and eventually a job at the Kyle Police Department.

 Samantha and her family were thrilled about the baby. She already had a name picked out, Meline, Maddie for short. She was especially close with her younger sister, Taylor, who was counting down the days to become an aunt. By every account, Sam was the kind of person everyone in her life adored. So, who would want to hurt a woman like that?  I wish I could have spent more time with her.

 But Samantha was an excellent person and uh I think it’s amazing that even  after she was strong cuz she beat cancer and she kept going and until now. But I love her and miss her. Every time that I saw her, especially with  her baby bump now, you know, I’m going to miss her cuz she I knew everybody knew she was going to be  an outstanding mother.

 Samantha was special. She was the most delightful and goofy  person who consumed her body weight and sugar every day. She won’t be remembered as a statistic. She won’t be thought of as Kyle Police Department victim services coordinator  whose life was taken. She will be remembered as Samantha Dean’s friend and family.

 Everyone tells me  as time passes it’ll get better, but I’m just not feeling that right now. I miss her so much. Investigators didn’t have to look far. The father of Samantha’s unborn daughter was a 32-year-old Austin police officer named Vontree Clark. The two had been involved on and off for 7 years, ever since they first met working together at a pharmaceutical company in Austin, long before either of them put on a badge.

The night Samantha’s body was found, Vontree was brought in to speak with detectives from the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Office.  Um, Mr. Clark, like I said, uh, first and foremost, my condolences. Uh, I know you told me a little bit on the phone that, uh, and we’ll clarify exactly what relationship y’all had or didn’t have.

But, um, regardless of the fact, you told me something critical on the phone, and that was that, you know, she had she was carrying your baby.  So, my condolences, but I’m very grateful you’re here so that way  we can figure out um one I get to know her a little bit more, know more  about her life, and hopefully find out what happened to her.

 So, with that said, tell me how long have you known her?  I know for 6 years, maybe 7 years. He told them the relationship had never been serious, just physical, he said, and that he’d kept the whole thing hidden from his longtime partner, Laura Tutin, the mother of his two sons.  When you started back with or when you  started with APD, you said y’all kind of uh pick that back up.

 Did you know did it cause I know these are uncomfortable questions. Did it cause any friction  with your current relationship or did you just keep that secret to yourself?  I just kept it to myself.  Yes, sir. When uh when did Samantha get pregnant? When did she tell you she was pregnant?  Sam told me she was pregnant a Saturday morning.

 I want to say early August.  Early August,   I believe. So,  are you in a relationship right now or you were in a relationship dead in August as well?  I’m sorry.  In August when she told you were you in a relationship?  What did that cause  you any stressors or  I haven’t even said anything.  But his story about that night had problems right out of the gate.

 Vontry claimed he’d made dinner for his family, finished eating around 8:30, and then left the house sometime around 9:00. He said he didn’t get home again until midnight. He claimed he’d swung by the Austin PD substation to read through some reports, and surveillance cameras did confirm he showed up there for exactly 23 minutes.

 Cameras near an elementary school he said he’d also visited never picked him up at all. And Laura told investigators flatly that he was not home during that window. One more detail stood out to detectives. On the night his girlfriend turned up dead, Vontree had left his own cell phone sitting at home. It was enough to get him placed on restricted duty while Austin PD opened its own internal investigation into his relationship with Samantha.

 I have anything else? Can  you think of anything else that that that you want to tell me that might help me or  The only thing There’s nothing there’s nothing that I I uh I know about Sam that would that I can think of that would help.  Um but when I was talking to Stephanie earlier today, she mentioned some things about Sam called the police on someone in I guess a neighbor or something.

 It’s Bergus. It’s one of It’s Sam’s best friend.  To understand how a rising young officer ended up at the center of a murder investigation, you have to look at who Vontree Clark was before all of this. Friends called him Trey or Trezy. He’d gone to college in Oklahoma and later in Texas before graduating from the Austin Police Academy in 2012.

 As a rookie, he’d even given local news interviews talking about how much he respected his own police chief, Art Oavdo.  It’s incredible. I mean, this is a guy you see on TV. This is the the face of our department. Um,  it means a lot for him to come out and run with us. Um, because it shows us that he’s behind us 100%.

 His first few years on the job were a mixed bag. Two commendations and one  suspension after he rolled his patrol car chasing a driver who’d blown through a red light. But he’d also been the first officer on scene at an apartment fire, going door todo, pulling residents out before backup even arrived.

 Weeks after that, he spotted a wanted offender sleeping in a parked car in North Austin and took him into custody without incident. On paper, Vontry Clark looked like exactly the kind of officer departments love to promote. Behind the scenes, it was a very different story. The day after Samantha’s body was found, investigators searched her home in South Austin and went through her phone in detail.

 What they found changed the direction of the entire case. In the weeks leading up to her death, Vontree had repeatedly pressured Samantha to end the pregnancy. He told her flat out that he didn’t want the baby and that a child would ruin his life. To him, Laura wasn’t just his girlfriend. She was his common-law wife.

And in his mind, this baby was a direct threat to that life. Inside Samantha’s home, detectives also found her journal. In it, she’d written that she was afraid something bad might happen to her, and she named Vontree Clark directly as the person she believed posed that threat. She described an incident from just  weeks earlier when Vontry restrained her during what was supposed to be a private, intimate moment between the two of them.

 Except he never took off his uniform. He never removed his service weapon. Sam later told a friend that in that moment  for the first time, she genuinely felt unsafe around him. And yet, even with a journal entry naming him, even with a shaky alibi,  even with a hidden affair coming to light, Vontrey Clark was not arrested. Not yet.

 Because what investigators were about to uncover  went far beyond one man, one motive, and one bad alibi. While detectives kept circling back to Vontree Clark, plenty of people close to him couldn’t accept that their friend, a decorated officer, could really be behind something like this.  They’re going to let the real killer get away because they’re in the wrong they’re going totally going in the wrong direction.

 One of those people was a woman named Denise Hill. Her son, Kevin Watson, had been Vontre’s closest friends since they  were teenagers. The two were basically brothers. Denise had practically raised them both, and she was proud of who they’d each become. Kevin had been an honor student who grew up to be an electrician.

 Vontry had been a standout athlete who became a cop.  They looked a  lot alike at the time and everybody thought they were brothers, so they just called themselves brothers, you know. Trey ate a lot of meals at our house. I got a police officer first time, you know, so I was very, very proud.  But over the years, steady electrician work dried up for Kevin and he started making money a different way through a legal activity that eventually gave him a criminal record of his own.

 None of that changed how close he and Vontry stayed, and it didn’t change how much Denise supported either of them.  My thought is, how much evidence would somebody have to show me to convince me that my son is heartless? Because that’s pretty much what you’re telling me. The trade that I know, that I’ve known for 15  years, could not be capable of something this heinous.

 The trade that I  knew was when I lived in Austin. He was just a sweet kid. On February 8th, 5 days after Samantha’s body was found, one of her co-workers received a disturbing text. The message claimed responsibility for what happened to Samantha, threatened to come after Vontry next, and warned the coworker that she was about to find out what a real crisis looked like.

 At first, this seemed to point investigators in a totally different direction  toward a man Samantha had reportedly reported to police just weeks before she died. At least, that’s what Vontry claimed. Meanwhile, detectives were still trying to figure out how Samantha had ended up 30 miles from home in a dead parking lot in Bassrop.

 Phone data pulled from her charger showed she’d driven to a convenience store on William Cannon Drive. Surveillance footage caught her walking in at 9:37 that night, and on that footage, she never once touched her phone. And yet, at that exact moment, somebody else was using her phone to make a call. That same number exchanged several texts with her later that night, telling her to bring $120 in cash and arranging a meetup near the shopping center in Bassrop.

 Store footage showed her at the ATM pulling out $100. After that, her phone started moving east toward  Bassrop. The number that messaged her that night had only been activated hours earlier, a prepaid burner. That evening, the burner was in contact with two other numbers, Samantha’s phone and a second burner.

 Investigators traced the purchase of that first burner phone to a Walmart in Stafford, Texas, where surveillance cameras caught a man in a red hoodie walking in. The entire time he shopped, he stayed on a phone call. He bought a second prepaid phone, walked back out, climbed into a white Toyota, and drove off.

 Detectives ran the plate. The Toyota belonged to a woman named Kyla Fisk. the common law wife of Kevin Watson, the man Vontry had called his  brother since childhood. It didn’t take long to confirm the man in the red hoodie was Kevin himself. Once detectives had that first burner pinned down, it cracked open a whole web of prepaid phones that had been active for weeks  before Samantha’s death.

 The second burner had also been calling a third unregistered number. And on top of that, it had been reaching out to Kyla Fisk’s personal cell. One of those three burners turned out to be the very phone investigators had found sitting in Samantha’s car the night she died. From that point on, every number tied to those three devices became a target of the investigation.

On the night Samantha lost her life, her own phone and all three burners were pinging off the exact same cell tower, the one closest to that abandoned shopping center. After that night, not one of those devices was ever used again. When detectives brought Kyla Fisk in, they discovered that one of the burners her husband had bought had also called  her personal phone and Vontre before the number was suddenly switched.

 Probably an attempt to cover up the mistake of contacting two phones registered in real names. Kyla, for her part, told detectives she didn’t even know who Vontry Clark was. That night, she’d gotten two calls from those burners. one earlier in the evening while she was confirmed to be home and a second one close to 4:00 a.m.

 That still left one mystery. Three burner phones, but only two confirmed  users. If one belonged to Vontry and one to Kevin, who was running the third? It clearly wasn’t Kyla. She’d been home in Houston the whole night. this other we’d like to ask about this other number that was called uh another person was called on that phone before that phone apparently changed  numbers or something uh would like to ask you about  my phone changed numbers  the 213 phone yeah it it it called you know entree court that top

name by Trey. This guy’s a  police officer. There’s a number of family called your number and it called it Trey Clark and then the number was changed uh to a different number uh on the same day. Whoever bought the phone and was using the phone changed the phone number after he contacted you on trade card guy.

 So I didn’t know other people.  But her phone along with both burners had also been in contact with the personal number of a man named Freddy Lee Smith, a longtime friend of Kevin’s. After a string of missed calls from the burner investigators belong to  Vontry, Kevin reached out to Freddy, letting him know Trey was trying to get in touch.

 Freddy had a long record of his own and reported ties to a street gang. He looked like a strong candidate for that third burner. Investigators just didn’t have the proof yet. So, they did what investigators do when proof is hard to come by. They went to the wire. For months, law enforcement listened in on calls between everyone connected to the case.

 Nobody ever flat out admitted to anything on a recorded line, but those calls quietly confirmed almost every suspicion detectives already had. Then in July of 2015, the case finally broke wide open. It started when investigators identified the phone used to send that threatening text to Samantha’s coworker. That device had also come from a Walmart.

 This one in Katy, Texas. Surveillance video showed two men walking in, buying the phone, and driving off. The plate on their car led right back to another friend of Kevin Watson’s, a man named Aaron Williams. Investigators charged Aaron with intimidation for sending the message. While he sat in the Bassrop County Jail, detectives leaned on him hard.

 They already knew he’d been with Kevin when that text went out. Now they wanted to know everything Kevin had told him. At first, Aaron insisted he knew nothing. Eventually, he gave it all up. He told detectives that as far as he understood it, Vontry had paid Freddy and maybe Kevin, too, around $5,000 to make Samantha disappear. That you know a lot more than what you’re telling us.

 It’s very apparent through the phone conversations you’ve had, Kevin,  through your behavior, through everything else that you know what’s going on. What we’re asking today is we want to know what these other people did, what he saw and do, what he knows, what they do. That’s what we’re asking. what they’ve told him  what they’ve told him because he knows on the phone calls we recorded he’s tal he’s mentioned their names he’s talked about you know putting the pieces they talked about you know they’re not putting the pieces together yet 

they’re not linking you to these people yet there’s a lot of stuff that was talked about at phone calls that leads us to believe he knows about what happened  5 days prior to them going to Bassrop to send that threat  he remembered Kevin talking about how they’d staged the scene to look like a deal gone bad also remembered Kevin panicking afterward ward because the group had left something behind, either a phone or a weapon.

 He wasn’t sure which. From what Aaron understood, this whole plan had been in motion for a long time before that February night. Once Aaron started talking, everything started caving in on Vontry Clark.  I don’t know. Um, but that he was married and I guess he got that girl pregnant and she didn’t want to give it up. [snorts]  Okay.

 And when you say Trezy, what I know you don’t really know his real name. What do you know about Trezy?   I don’t know nothing about him.  You don’t know where he lives or what he does or  I I know he’s a cop and lives in Austin.  Okay. So Tree is a cop in Austin that’s a friend of Kevin  and uh he told me that they killed the girl.

Um I don’t know.  He tell you who who actually pulled the trigger? No, he didn’t tell me who.  You said they  Yeah, they went out there and  they went out there to kill that girl and um and Tree was going to pay him um some money to do it. I don’t know if he did or not.  Can you say how much he was going to pay him? I think 5,000  a piece or all together?  I don’t know.

 You know,  I don’t know. And uh that’s what he told me. I said  So they  basically told you that they  they just went out there.  They went out there and killed her.  Yeah.  They being Kevin and Freddy.  Yeah.  That same month, Austin PD ordered him to appear before internal affairs.

 He refused to show up. Police Chief Art Acavdo, the same chief Vontry had once gone on local news to praise, held  a press conference announcing the officer’s firing, citing confirmed ties to known criminals and flatout insubordination. The reason Vontry never showed for that meeting was simple.

 He’d already left the country.  Department learned uh actually earlier this week, the department learned that uh he had left the country. He  is last known to have arrived in Jakarta, uh, Indonesia. The city of Jakarta, Indonesia. It’s a city of probably  about 10 million people. It is a city in a country or a city, any country that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. I’m sure Mr.

Clark will find this press conference. I have a message to you. If you have any dignity, if you have any semblance  of humanity left in you, Mr. Clark, get back on that plane and come back here to Austin. If you’re innocent, prove it. Come over here and face the music.  Days later, a warrant went out for his arrest.

 Actually, serving it was a different problem entirely since he was now somewhere the US had no jurisdiction, Indonesia. The FBI stepped in to begin the long, painstaking process of negotiating his extradition. I’m looking forward to the day that the Dean family gets justice. And I can tell you that uh I hope that that justice comes quickly.

 Uh because what happened to that beautiful woman and her baby uh there’s no excuse for it. It’s despicable.  Back in Texas, the arrests kept coming. Kevin Watson was picked up on narcotics charges while prosecutors built toward far more serious counts. Kyla Fisk, meanwhile, kept insisting she’d known nothing about any of it, but her own behavior told a different story.

 She’d already lied to investigators once in her first interview. Later, during a recorded visit at the detention center, Kevin asked her to get rid of some stained clothing, claiming he’d worn it for an electrical job months earlier. Investigators believed he meant the red hoodie and gray sweatpants from the Walmart surveillance footage.

 But but but if you’re just some dumb person don’t know anything, you wouldn’t you wouldn’t be going to the to the extent to cover things up like you’re doing.  I mean it  because because people are coming after me who has cases. I People are asking questions. People are asking questions  about somebody I love.

 But see, but the only thing we asked you in the interview was we asked you about three phones  and if you knew Von Trey Clark and you lied about all four of them. It sound like when when y’all talked from the jail and he talked about this electrician job he did three months ago and told you to get rid of that stained hoodie and sweatpants.

 Sound sound like you knew exactly what he was talking about on that phone call.  You got rid of it?  Yeah. I said you already got rid of it. Don’t worry about it.  I did. I got rid of all this  out of there.  What’ you do with it?  Was gone.  Where?  That’s what I’m talking about. Kyla, you’re not being completely honest with this.

 Kyla was arrested and charged with tampering with evidence. About 5 weeks after that, the FBI finally secured Vontry Clark’s return from Bali. He was picked up first on a simple visa violation, but far more serious charges were waiting for him back home. He was put on a Department of Justice aircraft and landed in Austin just after midnight on  September 2nd.

 The officer who once stood in front of cameras praising his own chief was about to face him in handcuffs. Here’s section four in full, the final one. Section four, the reckoning.  Police officer Von Trey Clark was taken into custody pursuant to an arrest warrant for the offense of capital mu

rder at 12:03 a.m.  on today’s date.  Samantha was part of our law enforcement family here in Central Texas. We thought we had to to go to great lengths to do what we could do uh to bring back Vontre Clark uh for in the interest of justice.  Samantha Dean, wonderful individual. This should not have happened.  Prosecutors handed down indictments against both Vontree Clark and Kevin Watson before Freddy Smith’s case had even been resolved.

 At that point, even investigators didn’t have a complete picture of who had actually done what that night. And once prosecutors announced they’d be pushing for the maximum sentence possible, the stakes shot through the roof for everyone involved. Whoever talked first, whoever gave the most believable, most consistent version of events, had the best shot at cutting a deal, testifying against the others, and walking away with a lighter sentence.

 So both men sat down separately with state prosecutors. Both told their own version of that night. And to a lot of people’s surprise, Vontree Clark started by claiming total innocence along with a handful of unfounded accusations about Samantha and her pregnancy that investigators never found a shred of evidence to support.

 That was what she wants to know.  I didn’t I didn’t I did not kill Samantha. And that’s that’s where I’m at right now. That’s what I’m charged  with. That’s that’s what I’m that’s what I’m facing. Sat I remember the day I wake up on a Saturday morning. Um I guess it was September  u a text from Sam and it said something like I need to talk to you.

 Okay, tell me what do you need to talk to me about? I’m afraid to tell you. Just tell me.  She tells me she’s pregnant. No,  actually you guessed she was pregnant, right?  Was it me?  Mhm. I don’t I I don’t know if if you’re saying it was it was.  Yeah. And we have the text.  Okay. Well, so I guess she was pregnant.

 Um I don’t want to I don’t want to have a child with her. I I don’t want to have that type of relationship with her. So, um I told her I I’ll come talk to her.  Um and at that point, she tells me that how she got pregnant. She took the condom and she turned it inside out and she used a condom to get pregnant. That’s what set this  whole thing off.

 That’s when I I said, “I’m going to hurt this girl.” I end up telling Kevin um that I got this girl pregnant and I wasn’t going  to let her have this baby and I was going to do something to her. At the time,  I didn’t know what, but I was essentially I  had planned to kill this girl.  Yeah. [clears throat]  He did admit to two earlier moments when he claims he planned to hurt Samantha and backed out at the last second.

 One of those was the same incident Samantha had written about in her journal. The one where he restrained her under the pretense of an intimate moment, still in full uniform, guns still on his hip. According to Vontry, his real plan that night had been to handcuff her in the back of a car and leave her sealed inside with the engine running.

 He claims he couldn’t go through with it. Eventually, Kevin offered to step in. Vontry says Kevin told him he’d bring in Freddy Smith to handle things instead. Vontry insists he never actually agreed to it, knowing that agreeing would make him just as responsible.  He had talked to  Freddy and that Freddy was willing to do it.

 And Freddy is Freddy Smith. He tells me, Kevin told me about the girl. Um, and he says that if you want to get it done, I’ll I’ll kill the girl for you. And he said, “You pay me 15,000, 15 racks is what he said, and I’ll I’ll get this to go away for you or get her to go away for you.”  But he also admitted he still wanted Samantha out of his life entirely.

 So when Kevin showed up on February 3rd and asked for a ride to Samantha’s place, Vontree drove him there. From there, Vontre’s account shifted almost all the blame onto his oldest friend. He claims he watched Kevin walk up to Samantha’s door, talk her into leaving with him in her own car.  When the Charger came back later, it didn’t pull into the driveway.

 It stopped farther down the street and Kevin got out of the back seat. Bree claims somebody else was now behind the wheel and he assumed it was Freddy and convince her to leave. By then he says in her own car Samantha had already lost her life return sometime.  Bree maintains he never actually saw any of it happen.

 Instead he just sat in his own car near the house waiting for everyone to come back at all about why would she park  somewhere other than her house.  It wasn’t it wasn’t sad to park your car. He’s saying Kevin’s in the car. Kevin in the car. That’s what you just said earlier, right?  Yeah.  Third  is your personal phone is geocating a bass drop the day before.

 So what were you doing down there then? That’s not possible. That’s that’s what the records show. Couple days your phone is showing to be down there and then that’s when the text comes in. I thought you had a place picked out is what what Kev was asking you. And yeah, it’s your 1168 number five.  At at some point you were down there in Bassrop.

Kevin Watson told investigators a completely different story. According to Kevin, Vontre’s fixation on the pregnancy had been building for months. He couldn’t stop talking about how the baby was going to wreck his life until eventually it was the only thing on his mind over and over that she had to go.  She posted a sonogram on Facebook.

 Mhm. And I think that this was around the time that he goes crazy and you know becomes like starts really pressing about this issue. [clears throat] You got Freddy’s number. I’m like yeah like well look man I really need to you know get rid of this girl. You think Freddy be interested? I was like I mean you know I can give you his number.

 He might be.  Kevin knew Freddy through his own criminal connections. He was moving drugs and Freddy had a reputation for theft and worse. So Kevin introduced the two and the three of them put together a plan. The setup was simple. Lure Samantha somewhere isolated where Freddy would be waiting, then dressed the scene up like a deal gone wrong.

 They grabbed a cheap bag of marijuana for the prop since Vontre didn’t want to spend more money than he had to. Vontre was the one who actually reached out to Samantha, posing as someone selling a new iPad for $120 and steered her toward that empty shopping center lot. According to Kevin, once Samantha pulled up, Freddy walked toward the carrying a small handgun while Kevin drove laps around the area, waiting for the call to come back.

 But the gun didn’t fire right. Freddy told Samantha he’d forgotten the charger for the tablet and needed a few minutes, then called Kevin for a ride. How did Trey convince her to leave that house with him, 7 months pregnant at that time of night, and go out to Bass Drop for  to buy a tablet?  Yes, sir.  Uh, I don’t know.

 I don’t know. As far as I know, it was he was meeting us under the guise of buying a tablet. That’s that’s what I do know. The two of them swung by a gas station where Freddy got the gun working again and tested it before they drove back to where Samantha was still sitting, completely unaware that anything had gone wrong at all.

Freddy later told Kevin he climbed into the back seat and finished what they’d come there to do. Kevin claims Vontree was involved in that final part, too. When investigators searched the scene, they only recovered two pieces of ballistic evidence, not three. The group never found the missing piece. That’s why the back seat ended up ripped out and left on the pavement.

 They tore the car apart searching for it and came up empty. Afterward, they pulled over on a rural road where Freddy and Vontry changed out of their clothes and packed everything else. Gloves,  burner phones, the pieces of evidence they could find into a disposal bag. Then everyone scattered. Vontree drove back into Austin.

 Kevin made the 2-hour drive home to Houston. But the mistakes kept piling up. Freddy’s like this  guy [laughter] and he, you know, jokes about him, you know, panicking and all that stuff a little bit. And he tells me about how he was in the back seat and he shot it twice. Bam. Bam. And then Trey wanted a gun and then he handed Trey a gun and Trey was he said something crazy and then shot it once and that’s and that’s pretty much what happened.

 And he’s like, “That’s why we couldn’t find a 35 occasion cuz this guy can’t even find an occasion.”  When you say Nick said something crazy, any idea what that would be? Do you remember at all?  Something like, “Fuck you, bitch.” Or something, you know, some TV  Something that people don’t really do.

 Let’s go back to changing clothes,  right?  At some point we got another case,  right? This is where this is where we find  Okay. Okay. Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. I’m sorry. So then I closely change. So he pop when he pops out the thing. He’s like, “Oh,  vacation.

 What was the case? I was in my pants.” In your pants.   Right.  Once Kevin got back to Houston, Freddy called to tell him the gun was missing and that they needed to get back to Bassrop to find it. Vontry, meanwhile, drove straight to the Austin Police Department, apparently trying to build himself an alibi.

Kevin headed back out toward Bassaro, but around 4 in the morning, he locked his own keys inside his car. He called hoping she had a spare set.  So, he broke a window and kept driving toward Bastard,  only to find sheriff’s deputies already swarming the scene by the time he got there. He turned around and headed home.

That’s when he finally realized the gun had been in his car the entire time, wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console, the whole night, the whole drive. It had slipped out of Vontre’s waistband while the group was leaving. Nobody’s entirely sure when they realized one of the burner phones never made it out of that parking lot at all.

 Later, Kevin personally walked investigators through that entire route, point by point, matching his account against the timeline and evidence detectives had already pieced together  on the side of the damn uh on the driver’s side from when Trey got when Trey was driving the car.  Mhm.  It felt like right here.  Oh, in your car.

 Right. So, when we hopped out the car at Freddy’s  house, I looked down like I was gone right here.  And you’d already gone to the bus driver? All right, going to the garage shop. We came back.  Making fun of Trey because he’s the worst  criminal anybody’s ever seen. He’s pretty much in the mouth too.

Like this guy is jumpy.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing. You know, he’s just  scary. He’s a really bad crook. You know, the reason why he’s the reason why you’re a cop, not a crook, cuz you’re really bad. You know, one of those things.  They drove past the shopping center, then to the gas station where Kevin said Freddy got the gun working again.

 then to the spot nearby where he said Freddy tested it before they went back.  We’re sitting right here at this light.  Yeah, that’s what I was talking about because it doesn’t look like going. We’re waiting to see if there’s any cars. So, we’re taking a left shoot.  Everything Kevin described lined up with the physical evidence.

 Vontre’s version never did. Eventually, Kevin agreed to a deal. He pleaded guilty to the highest charge against him in exchange for a sentence that allows the possibility of supervised release after 35 years and agreed to testify against both Vontree and Freddy. With Kevin cooperating, prosecutors formally charged Freddy Smith.

 He maintained his innocence through every interrogation and every hearing that followed.  Have you ever heard there’s an old saying that three  people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead? You ever heard that saying? I’ve heard of you before.  Okay. So, we didn’t just by accident  show up 4 and 1/2 years after a murder and arrest  you.

 We obviously received information from somebody. So,  you have you have an opportunity to talk about this today. Whatever information  you receive is not it can’t be if y’all are charging me for this. It  can’t be accurate because I had nothing to do with it.  Even though  Freddy finally went to trial in June of 2022,  nearly 10 years after Samantha lost her life, the case having been delayed repeatedly by the pandemic.

 During the investigation, detectives found a photo on Freddy’s phone from 2013 showing two small caliber handguns. A forensic ballistics expert later testified that every projectile recovered from the case came from the same weapon  and that one of the guns in that photo matched the kind capable of leaving the exact markings found on the evidence.

Kevin Watson and Kyla Fisk both testified at the trial. The charges against Kyla had been dropped years earlier once investigators concluded that whatever she eventually learned about the plan, she learned after Samantha was already gone. The jury found Freddy Smith guilty. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of supervised release.

Years later, after exhausting nearly every pre-trial delay available to him and racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in courtappointed defense costs, Vontry Clark finally admitted guilt, too. The plea spared Samantha’s family from sitting through another trial. He avoided the maximum sentence prosecutors had originally pushed for, but the outcome was the same.

 Life without the possibility of supervised release. A woman who spent her career helping victims find peace. And the daughter she never got to meet finally had something close to justice more than a decade after that February night in Bastrop. If you want to keep following cases like this one, true crime stories that go beyond the headlines, make sure you’re subscribed and drop a comment with your thoughts on this case before you