PETER VAN SANT:
00:00:22
In December of 2017, the Barron County Sheriff's Office in rural Wisconsin received an unusual 911 call, says Detective Jeff Nelson. From a homeowner reporting that their family dog brought back a human skull. We organized a grid search and, within minutes, located the clandestine grave right off in this area. If you see this little indention in the soil right here, that's where the skeletal remains were found.
PETER VAN SANT:
00:00:56
Authorities soon determined the victim had died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. We were reviewing missing-persons cases throughout the Midwest, but nothing was definitive to who this victim was.
PETER VAN SANT:
00:01:12
Three years later, finally a match from the remains to 57-year-old Gary Albert Herbst. Investigators headed to his last known address. Gary's wife and son had moved out after his disappearance, but former neighbors Chad and Kaia Kraml say Gary was combative. He was just an evil person. Did you feel he was a dangerous man? Absolutely.
PETER VAN SANT:
00:01:40
And they remembered noticing something strange happening late one night around the time he went missing. Chad, what do you see? I see the neighbors scrubbing the floors. I see them scrubbing the walls. We saw them bringing out black garbage bags. They eventually brought out a rolled-up carpet. I didn't know what I was looking at. I had no idea. And I turned to Chad, and I was like, what is going on? And Chad looked at me, and he said, Kaia, I think they finally killed him.
ADRIANA DIAZ:
00:02:16
Whoa.
KELLY O'GRADY:
00:02:17
Peter Van Sant joins us now. Peter, the second you say a dog is involved, I'm hooked on the case. I'm locked in.
VLADIMIR DUTHIERS:
00:02:24
Yeah, a good one. Right. A good boy, I think you said. Yes. Authorities, they spoke to Gary's family eventually. What did they say? Well, this is where the intrigue really began because Gary's wife, Connie, and Austin, who was just 19 at the time, said that after a really heated argument, Gary packs up a suitcase, takes $5,000 in cash, takes his wife's wedding ring, heads out the door, and gets into a car with a total stranger, drives off, and is never heard from again. Well, investigators were really interested. Why did you not report him missing for nine months? And that's when they really started to take a look at Connie and Austin.
ADRIANA DIAZ:
00:03:02
Uh oh.
VLADIMIR DUTHIERS:
00:03:03
So Austin is a major player in this case. How?
PETER VAN SANT:
00:03:06
Is he ever. There's intense interrogations. We have a bunch of this in the hour in which, eventually, he confesses to killing his father, shooting him while he was sleeping on a couch. Well, I get 90 minutes with him. I do as intense an interview as I've ever done with a murderer, and he describes every aspect of this killing, and I confront him on it. He says it's a justifiable homicide, and we go through all the details. They had a cover-up. They lied to authorities, and he took his father's body, put it out in the woods in Wisconsin for animals to eat so that the evidence would be destroyed. And not long afterwards, he and his mom are walking around the neighborhood with fresh-baked cookies--
ADRIANA DIAZ:
00:03:47
Oh, jeez. --as they reconnect with the neighbors. It's a story unlike any I have ever done on 48 Hours, and we've got every step of the way. This interview is worth the price of admission for this episode.
KELLY O'GRADY:
00:03:58
All right, well, Peter Van Sant, thank you so much. You can see his report, "What the Neighbors Saw," tomorrow night at 10:00/9:00 Central right here on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.
