A Story Worthy of a Detective Movie Plot. The Shocking Case of Lisa Techel 

A woman was found dead in her own bedroom and from the very start police thought they already knew who did it. But the deeper they dug the more dark secrets started coming out. Each one completely reshaping the case and in the end it seemed like they finally cracked it. Or at least that’s what everyone thought.

Lisa Caldwell was born on May 8th, 1987 in the small town of Agency, Iowa. She grew up in a big family and from a young age she wanted to follow in her dad’s footsteps. He was a deputy sheriff with a local department. She also loved bowling and in high school she made the team that won the state championship three times.

 When she wasn’t in class Lisa worked part-time at a local bowling alley. That’s where she met a guy named Seth whose dad owned the place and before long the two of them started dating. After high school Lisa went to a college close to home and later earned degrees in criminal justice and psychology. All through those years she and Seth stayed together and by late 2011 after seven years as a couple he finally proposed.

 They bought land back in their hometown and planned to build a big house. But while they were saving up they lived in a trailer they’d gotten as a wedding gift by Seth’s parents. Career-wise Lisa was still set on law enforcement and she was actively working toward it. She interned with the state’s criminal investigations division while also working at the local jail.

 Seth wanted to become a cop too and Lisa’s dad helped him get a corrections job at another jail so he could build some experience. On top of that Seth volunteered with the local fire department. So they were both moving toward the careers they’d always wanted while building a life together. A few months after the wedding, Lisa found out she was pregnant and she and Seth were expecting a baby girl.

 They’d already picked her name, Zoey. By late in May 2012, Lisa was 23 years old. She was 5 months pregnant, still working at the jail, and she and Seth were living in the trailer on their piece of land out in the quiet rural area. On May 26th, at around 5:30 in the morning, Seth called police and said someone had shot his wife.

 I got the game plan and we’re going to dispatch. She’s not breathing. Does she have any medical problems? Yeah, she’s been shot. I’m going to try to get anything to wake her up. I ain’t got [ __ ] I can’t run it out. They just shot her in the side of the door. >> [laughter] >> He was screaming and crying so hard that the dispatcher could barely make out half of what he was saying, but an ambulance and officers were sent out immediately.

 And because their family had close ties with law enforcement, it felt like almost everyone showed up. Paramedics found Lisa in bed bleeding heavily and it was obvious she’d taken at least one gunshot wound. They tried to save her, but sadly, she died. Seth stayed outside in shock and he told officers what had happened. He said he woke up around 4:30 a.m.

 and let the dog out. He also mentioned the dog was acting weird, like it sensed something, but he didn’t see anything unusual. He reset his alarm for 5:00 and went back to sleep. When it went off, he let the dog back in and started getting ready for work. He went into the shower while Lisa was still asleep. About 5 minutes after he got in, he heard a loud gunshot.

He ran into the bedroom, flipped on the light, and saw Lisa bleeding. He rushed over and noticed a bullet hole through the blanket and her bra. She was still conscious, but she couldn’t speak. A few seconds later, Seth heard a noise coming from the living room. He grabbed his gun off the nightstand and went to check, but nobody was there.

What he did see was the front door standing wide open. He ran outside onto the porch, but there was no one out there, either. When Seth came back inside, he realized Lisa wasn’t breathing and wasn’t showing any signs of life. That’s when he grabbed the phone and called 911. Among the officers who responded that morning was Lisa’s father.

 And when the medics said she didn’t make it, he immediately told his colleagues to go arrest the person responsible. Because in his mind, there was already one clear suspect, the couple’s neighbor, a man named Brian Tate. Brian was a veteran who’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He lived on the next property over with his mother.

And for weeks leading up to the murder, he’d been in a conflict with Lisa and Seth that kept getting more tense by the day. It started when Seth found a dead deer lying in the road in front of their place. He dragged it into the ditch so he could get through. And then, for a while, he didn’t really think much of it.

 Not long after that, Lisa noticed a deer hide hanging from a tree on Brian’s property. And later, she and Seth found that same hide sitting in a barrel on their own land. So, they tossed it back over the fence into Brian’s yard. After that, Brian kept throwing the hide back over, and Seth kept throwing it right back. Eventually, it escalated even more.

Brian called the police and claimed Seth and Lisa were harassing him. He said they’d dumped a bucket of feces on his property and thrown rocks at his shed. What Brian didn’t realize was that one of the officers who showed up was Lisa’s father. During that interaction, the officer said Brian was acting off to the point where he even wondered if Brian might try to hurt his daughter.

Still, he spoke with Seth and told him to stop engaging with the neighbor because Brian was unpredictable. And Seth agreed. For a while, it seemed like things had cooled down. But 12 days before the murder, Lisa found the deer hide left out in front of their house again. She told Seth, and this time he decided to get police involved.

 Officers went to talk to Brian, but he kept insisting Seth and Lisa were the ones causing the whole situation. A few days after that, Seth noticed fresh tracks near the fence. Then, he saw their dog acting strangely. He started worrying Brian had poisoned the dog’s outdoor water dish. So, he rushed the dog to the vet. So, when Lisa’s father arrived at the scene that morning, he immediately connected the dots.

 Brian had a history of serious mental illness, and on top of that, he had military and combat experience. With everything that had been happening, Brian felt like the most obvious suspect. So, just minutes after officers arrived, they headed straight to Brian’s house, fully expecting it could turn into a confrontation. Police found him sitting on the porch with his mom, looking completely calm.

He even offered the officers chairs and started answering their questions. Brian seemed almost too relaxed, but he said that was because of new medication his doctor had just put him on. According to him, the ongoing conflict with the neighbors had made his mental health worse.

 So, his doctor told him to take the pills and focus on getting more sleep. Brian claimed he’d gone to bed around 8:00 p.m. the night before and had only woken up recently. That meant he should have still been asleep when Lisa was shot, and his mother backed him up saying she hadn’t seen him leave the house at any point. They both also said they never heard a gunshot.

 Brian did confirm he owned a rifle, and he told officers that because of the conflict with Seth and Lisa, he’d been staying up at night with a gun nearby, basically standing guard outside because he was convinced they might come over and throw rocks or even feces at his place. But he added that he hadn’t been doing that for about a week because doctors said his condition was getting worse.

At one point, Brian said something that immediately stood out. He told them, “For a long time, I was the nice guy, and it didn’t get me anything. People used me. So, now I’ve changed how I live. I’m more serious now, not the nice guy I used to be.” So, Brian insisted he had nothing to do with Lisa’s death.

 And at that moment, police still didn’t have enough to arrest him. Meanwhile, crime scene techs were working the house trying to find anything that could point to the shooter. On the front door, they found fingerprints from Seth and three of his friends, including one guy who’d actually lived with him for a while. Out front, investigators also found two cigarette butts.

 They managed to pull a partial DNA profile off of one of them, then compared it to everyone they knew had access to Lisa’s home, but it didn’t match anyone. As for how the killer got inside, there were no signs of forced entry. Seth told police the door might have been left unlocked after he let the dog out earlier that morning.

 They lived out in a quiet rural area, so they weren’t constantly worried about someone just walking in. The murder weapon seemed like it had to be a hunting rifle or a shotgun, but there wasn’t anything like that in the trailer. Seth gave police a full list of every gun he and Lisa owned, and nothing on it fit what they were looking for.

When it came to Seth’s timeline, investigators could at least confirm part of his story. There really was water in the shower, which suggested someone had used it that morning. After police spoke with Brian, they also brought Seth into the station. He agreed to answer questions, even though he was clearly a wreck.

 He was crying, yelling, and blaming himself for not being able to protect Lisa. He also turned down the lawyer his parents had hired and came in anyway. Seth walked them through his timeline again, and he told detectives he was almost sure the neighbor did it. According to Seth, Brian was constantly sitting on his porch with a gun, and once that conflict started, Seth genuinely thought Brian might end up hurting him or Lisa.

While Seth was being questioned, the crime scene team was still back at the trailer. At one point, a friend of Seth’s named Colton showed up. He said he was there to pick up his puppy. Seth and Lisa had been watching the dog for him. Police saw an opportunity and started talking to Colton. Somewhere in the conversation, he casually mentioned that Seth had a second phone.

That immediately grabbed their attention, and they pressed him for details. Eventually, Colton admitted that Seth had a mistress and that the second phone was how he kept in touch with her. Officers immediately relayed that to the lead detective, who was still sitting with Seth. After reading the messages about the affair, the detective played it carefully.

 He asked Seth if there’d been any serious problems in the marriage and whether either of them had been seeing someone on the side. Seth said no and that set off alarms. The detective kept going and eventually Seth’s story started to shift. He said there actually was a woman named Rachel and there’d been something like a light flirtation, but nothing serious.

According to Seth, they knew each other through work and there was never anything physical. He claimed it was basically just talking and that Lisa knew about it and didn’t care. But at the same time, police were still speaking with Colton and he told them Rachel had been sending Seth explicit photos.

 He said Seth had even shown him a few of them. And meanwhile, Seth was still telling the detective nothing like that had ever happened. To investigators, it looked like Seth was trying to hide an uncomfortable truth and they started seriously considering whether he could have been involved in Lisa’s murder. The detective tried to steer the interview in that direction, but Seth denied having anything to do with it and eventually he decided he was done talking.

So now, detectives were staring at two possible suspects, the husband and the neighbor. The problem was they still didn’t have any hard evidence pointing to either one and they had to figure out where to go next. Another issue was that right after the murder, police missed some basic steps that could have made the investigation a lot easier.

They didn’t take gunshot residue swabs from either suspect’s hands. They didn’t seize their clothes for testing, and they skipped a few other standard procedures that only work if you do them immediately. By the time a full day had passed, that window was basically gone. But then, something happened that nobody expected.

When officers went back to Lisa’s place, which was still sealed off as a crime scene, someone suddenly spotted a shotgun in the grass. It was about 100 ft from the front door, lying right by a tree that had police tape wrapped around it, which meant officers had clearly been right in that area, and somehow missed a full-sized gun sitting out in the open.

Ballistics quickly confirmed this was the gun that killed Lisa. Police traced it back to a friend of Seth and Lisa’s, a guy who lived with him for a while, but had moved out recently. He told investigators the shotgun was his, but he hadn’t picked it up yet, and it should have been inside the house. He also added one more detail.

He always kept it loaded. And when the gun was examined more closely, there was another weird fact. One shell was jammed inside it. The owner said that had never happened before. His guess was that whoever fired it wasn’t familiar with that model, and that’s why it locked up. At that point, detectives still weren’t ready to cross Brian off the list, but the weapon choice felt odd.

Brian had his own gun, so if he was the killer, he’d have to go into Lisa’s home already planning to grab a weapon from inside. And that didn’t really make sense. And then, there was Seth. Because from the very beginning, he hadn’t said a single word about his friend’s shotgun being in the house. The detectives’ next move was to talk to Rachel, the co-worker Seth had been kind of involved with.

Rachel confirmed there’d never been anything physical between them, but her version of the relationship didn’t match what Seth had been saying. She told investigators Seth had confessed he loved her and wanted to be with her. She also confirmed she’d sent him intimate photos more than once. According to Rachel, Seth constantly talked about divorcing Lisa, but whenever she pressed him on when, he dodged the question.

Eventually, Rachel told him she’d started talking to another guy and was thinking about dating him. Seth’s response was basically “Give me a couple of weeks. I’ll finally settle the divorce.” And Rachel agreed. Then, just one day before the murder, Seth texted her and said that the very next day, he and Lisa were finally splitting up and Lisa would be leaving the house.

The problem was detectives couldn’t find anything to back that up. Lisa hadn’t told a single friend or family member she was planning to leave. Her messages with Seth didn’t suggest anything like that, either. If anything, the day before she died, Seth and Lisa were out together running errands, and people who saw them said they seemed totally normal.

Another detail came from one of Seth’s co-workers. He said that a few weeks before the murder, he’d overheard Seth arguing on the phone, and from what he could tell, it sounded like Lisa on the other end. After Seth hung up, he made a comment along the lines of “It’d be easier if she just got in a car wreck and died.

” One of Seth’s friends also told police Seth had talked about wanting to leave Lisa, but he didn’t want to pay child support. And then, there was the neighbor drama. A few of Seth’s friends admitted that they’d actually been the ones throwing feces onto Brian’s property and pelting his place with rocks. And they said they did it because Seth asked them to.

So, after learning all this, detectives started leaning towards Seth. In their view, he wanted out of the marriage and wanted to be with someone else, but two things stood in his way. First, divorce would mean child support. And second, it would blow up his relationship with Lisa’s father, which could have killed his dream of a law enforcement career right there.

 Lisa’s dad was respected in the area, and detectives believed he could have easily blocked Seth from ever getting hired or promoted anywhere local. So, prosecutors argued Seth may have come up with a plan that solved all of it in one shot. Literally. The theory was that he decided early on he’d pin everything on the neighbor, Brian, a man with serious mental health issues.

And then, he deliberately stoked the feud to make Brian look like the obvious suspect. He even pulled his friends into it, having them toss feces onto Brian’s property and throw rocks at his place. Then, they believed Seth used his friend’s shotgun to kill Lisa and called 911.

 And because everyone already knew about the conflict with Brian, police immediately focused on the neighbor, which meant Seth didn’t go through the standard steps that might have exposed him. Gunshot residue testing, clothing being taken right away, that kind of thing. In the end, Seth was arrested. About 6 weeks after the murder, he was formally charged.

 He pleaded not guilty, and the trial kicked off in February 2013. Friends, co-workers, and Seth’s mistress all took the stand and testified against him. Seth’s attorney argued that detectives had fixated on his client from the very beginning, and that they never properly investigated the person who, in his view, was the far more likely killer.

Brian. Over the entire investigation, Brian was never fingerprinted, and police never took a DNA sample from him. And overall, the defense said, investigators pretty quickly stopped treating him as a real possibility. A few months before trial, Brian died, which basically killed any chance of fully digging into whether he had anything to do with Lisa’s murder.

Still, the defense came to court with several points they believed supported Brian’s guilt. First, Seth’s attorney called Brian’s treating doctor. The doctor testified that just a few months after Lisa’s death, Brian’s condition took a serious turn, and he had to be involuntarily committed. He also said Brian wasn’t just dealing with paranoid schizophrenia.

 He’d also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Brian believed that the government was plotting against him, and he genuinely feared for his own safety. And on top of all that, Brian was using weed because he thought it helped. The doctor disagreed, saying that with Brian’s mental health issues, it only made him more unpredictable and more dangerous.

After that, the defense called several of Brian’s neighbors. One of them testified that after Lisa’s death, Brian made a comment along the lines of “If the sheriff’s office its job, none of this would have happened. The defense also pointed to a couple of items police never really followed up on.

 Officers had found a half-eaten sandwich and a glove on the victim’s porch. Seth attorney argued that Brian could have been watching the trailer while Seth and Lisa were asleep, waiting for the right moment before going in and committing the murder. In the end, the jury deliberated for 4 days, but they still couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict.

 Two jurors insisted Seth was not guilty, so the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial. A new trial started 2 months later, and that jury couldn’t agree either. So, once again, the case ended in a mistrial. The third trial was scheduled for the summer of 2014, and right before it began, something completely unexpected surfaced.

All that time, both the defense and the prosecution had been digging for anything that could strengthen their side. And in the lead-up to the third trial, Seth’s attorney came across something major. He got access to Lisa’s messages and found a conversation with a man named Jason, a co-worker from the same jail.

 And based on those texts, it was clear they’d been having a secret relationship. More than that, Lisa and Jason had even talked about the possibility that she might be pregnant by him, not by her husband. The defense attorney immediately pointed out something else. Investigators had known about this affair from the very beginning.

They’d seen it early on when they went through Lisa’s phone, but for some reason, it never made it into the case file. The affair was essentially buried. It never came up in the first two trials, and Seth’s attorney argued this could completely change the picture. Back then, Jason denied having anything going on with Lisa, but just days before the third trial, he finally admitted it.

He said he lied because he didn’t want his wife and four kids to find out. Now, he claimed he and Lisa met at work and started seeing each other in secret. At the time, Lisa still had more than 6 months before her wedding to Seth, but she’d already been with Seth for years. Jason admitted that they’d been sleeping together regularly, and that they had genuinely wondered if he could be the baby’s father.

 According to him, they ended the affair a few weeks before the murder because it was starting to damage both of their families. Seth’s attorney suggested Jason could be the real killer, and that because police never truly investigated him, he might have gotten away with it all this time. Jason’s wife defended him and said he was home at the time of the murder.

Investigators also later confirmed Jason wasn’t the father of Lisa’s baby. And, on top of that, his DNA didn’t match the sample found outside the victim’s house. So, in the end, the jury didn’t buy the idea that the co-worker was responsible. This time, they reached a unanimous verdict, and Seth was found guilty of first-degree murder along with the termination of Lisa’s pregnancy.

He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 25 years. After that, Seth tried to appeal the conviction, but the appeal was denied. To this day, he insists he’s innocent, but at this point, there’s basically no realistic path for him to ever get out. Lisa’s family has no doubt Seth is the one who killed her, and they don’t believe anyone else was behind it.

So, that’s where this messy case ultimately landed. Even though some people still think Brian was the more likely killer. But after three trials and a failed appeal, that verdict probably isn’t going anywhere. Share your thoughts on this story in the comment section, and don’t forget to press the like button if you enjoyed my video. Thank you for watching.