"48 Hours Mystery": Deadly Prophecy

"She was my best friend... sometimes she was my only friend. I wish every single day of my life that I could have my mom back," said Faylene Grant's daughter, Jenna. "My mom died when I was 11. Some people think it was an accident… some people think it was a suicide. But I know it was a murder.

"My step dad murdered my mom," she said.

"Faylene is a good person," Doug Grant told "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer. "I have never hurt anybody in my life - ever!"

Friend and Physician's Assistant Chad White said, "Doug called me very frantic. He just said he found her in the tub and that she was not responding to him."

"I had my hand on the door handle to her bedroom as it was happening," Jenna explained.

"I've been working on this story for a number of years," said Reporter Paul Rubin. "By all accounts, Faylene Grant is a wonderful woman. Very, very close to her family - and especially close to her church.

"This is something my mom wrote in her journal, '…it is Heavenly Father's will that I leave this mortal sphere to fulfill a mission on the other side of the veil.'"

Read more of Faylene's journal entry

"She also wrote: 'I must have faith in Doug's vision. He dreams it every night now ... that I will get to go to the Celestial Kingdom."

According to Prosecutor Juan Martinez, "Douglas Grant used organized religion in killing Faylene Grant… The motive in this case is a married man wanting to be with a younger woman."

"I'm the lucky one. Think what you want to think, that's fine," said Hilary Grant, the woman Doug married after Faylene's death.

"Have there been other women in his life? Yes, but he is not a murderer," said defense attorney Mel McDonald.

"I know that my brother Doug is innocent," Tammy Fuentes said. "I mean, if you saw the volumes of letters that she wrote [in] her journals, it's bizarre!"

"Here is woman who has talked to God, God has told her that she is going to die," said McDonald.

"She did not want to die. But it was Mr. Grant's vision that she would and she accepted the death sentence that was meted out by her husband," said Martinez.

"I didn't kill my wife - never in a million years," said Doug.

"This one is a classic," Rubin said. "It's got this epic sweep of sex and drugs and religion. Homicide, suicide or accident? Was there even a murder here?""Things I want to have in a spouse: Loves the beauty of the earth, sunrise, sunset… I will be with you always," reads an entry in Faylene Grant's journal.

It sounds very poetic, but eight years after Faylene's death, her husband, Doug Grant, is fighting for his future - on trial for her murder.

Doug swears he's not guilty.

"I was just yelling Faylene! Faylene!" Doug said on the stand during his trial.

"Objection. Relevance. This has nothing to do with Faylene. He just wants to tell a story," said Prosecutor Juan Martinez.

Indeed he does want to tell his story - one that begins in 1993, the second he laid eyes on a striking, 27-year-old single mother named Faylene Eaves at his gym near Phoenix.

"She was a great person, loved life, loved her family," said Doug.

At the time, Doug Grant was a 27-year-old divorced, single dad and a rising star in the world of nutrition. He had a growing list of celebrity clients, like Charles Barkley and Danny Ainge of the Phoenix Suns.

Doug remembered Faylene from high school. She'd recently divorced and had two kids, Austin and Jenna.

"My mom was the type of lady you meet and you're like, 'Wow. I wanna be friends with her!'" Jenna told "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer. "I came home one day and I had a new CD. And it was that song 'Ain't no mountain high…' and I grabbed the shampoo bottle. She had [the] telephone and we were jumping up and down on the couch, playing the song over and over again…singing. That's my mom."

At first, Doug's sister, Tammy Fuentes, said it seemed a perfect match - especially since they were both Mormon.

"Faylene is a lot like Doug," Fuentes explained." She also loved nutrition and helping others…" They married four months after their first date.

"She's a good person and brought out the good in Doug," said Fuentes.

However, Jenna worried that Doug wasn't bringing out the good in her mother.

"He's the man of the house and she listens to what he says," Jenna told Spencer.

"So there was never any question as to who was ruling the roost here?" Spencer asked.

"It was always Doug," she replied.

Doug needed to guide Faylene, according to Fuentes, who was becoming alarmed by her new sister-in-law's mood swings.

"She was either really up, really happy, or she was really really sad or depressed. But never would admit that she needed help," Fuentes said. "I would go to their house and she would be in her bedroom with the door locked. And the children would just be there… and I would want to see her and they would say, 'No …don't bother her.'"

Fuentes said Faylene spent much time alone writing in her journal - not uncommon in the Mormon faith - or praying at the temple, sometimes for hours.

"I do feel it was fanatical," said Tammy of Faylene's behavior. To the point that by the late 1990s, she said Faylene had lost touch with reality.

"She said, 'I've been to the temple and God has told me that I need to divorce Doug,'" Fuentes recalled.

God even told her why: Doug had a girlfriend. Faylene had no proof of an affair, but God's word was enough. She filed for divorce.

"He was devastated!" Fuentes said. "He is truly a family man."

"She thought you were having an affair," Spencer said to Doug. "Yes," he replied.

"Was that true?" "Not at the time."

Maybe not right then, but Doug had had affairs, including one with a Louisiana beauty queen.

Then in 2000, in the midst of his divorce, along came more temptation. Hilary Dewitt, 19, was the new receptionist at his company, and a great person to feature in his promotional materials. Doug Grant fell hard.

"I became romantically involved with Hilary right at the divorce with Faylene," Doug told Spencer, but not before the divorce.

In fact, after his divorce from Faylene, Doug said he'd cleaned up his act, gone through church counseling and planned to marry Hilary.

"I don't know that I can express my love, my devotion. I'm in awe of him to be honest," Hilary told Spencer.

In August 2001, though, those plans hit a big snag.

Fuentes explained, "Faylene had had revelation in the temple from God that she needed to put her family back together."

For the childrens' sake, God was now telling Faylene to marry Doug all over again. Doug claimed nobody was more surprised than he was; the divorce hadn't been his idea after all, and he said he wanted to believe.

"I knew I had to give it a shot," he told Spencer.

"Well, you certainly did a 180 on this didn't you? You ended up not only marrying again, but marrying the person you had divorced!" said Spencer.

"If I have the chance to make things right and get back with her, absolutely," Doug replied.

To celebrate their new beginning, the Grants vacationed in the Timpanogas National Park in Utah. Doug said they were hiking on Sept. 24, 2001. According to him, at one point during the hike, Faylene had some sort of vision - she saw something off in the distance. He said she climbed over a rock wall down to a tiny ledge for a better view.

"She looked up and she could kind of see the image of Jesus in the clouds," Doug explained, even taking a picture of his wife seconds before disaster struck. "She said 'Come out here.' And so I started going over that wall to go out there…and she fell."

It was a 60-foot drop. Doug Grant said he was sure his wife was dead.

"I yelled and I screamed and she said, 'Shut up.' I mean those were her exact words. I knew she was alive," he told Spencer.

"So you knew she was OK," said Spencer. "I knew she was alive," he replied.

Doug took Faylene to a nearby hospital, was very banged up, but alive. Given how far she supposedly fell, that made no sense at all to Chief Park Ranger Michael Gosse.

"The height of that fall, the jaggedness of the rocks below… a fall of that serious nature, a person would have some severe injuries…" explained Gosse.

"She definitely thought she was gonna die young," Doug said, "but it was an accident... it was an accident."

But Doug's sister, Tammy, was about to discover, it may have been no accident at all.When she heard about Faylene Grant's close call in Utah, sister-in-law Tammy Fuentes immediately went to the Grant's home to get it ready for their return.

She got the shock of her life.

"She had prepared her house as if she was not coming home," she told Susan Spencer.

Fuentes said Faylene had left notes of Mormon scripture everywhere; plus, there were bags of personal items, clothing and pictures with instructions to give them all away.

Faylene's fall now made perfect sense to her. "She thought she was going to die on that mountain," Fuentes realized. "She tried to kill herself… I know she did. And I knew then that I wanted to confront Faylene about it. And I was going to confront her about it."

When Faylene came home from the hospital two days later, it didn't seem like the time.

"Faylene was real sore," Tammy said. "She's been injured, you know, in the fall."

Doug said his wife "was hurting pretty bad." He had asked his friend, Physician's Assistant Chad White, to examine Faylene at home.

"She seemed happy to me, regardless of all of her injuries," said White.

Faylene had no broken bones, but was still in pain and couldn't sleep. White prescribed a muscle relaxant and the sleep aid, Ambien, recording in his notes that he specifically told Doug not to fill the Ambien prescription without calling him first.

"I just simply didn't want her taking the two together," said White.

White next heard from Doug just after 7:30 a.m. the following morning.

"He was very alarmed - very panicked," White told Spencer. "He told me that she had gone in to take a bath…that he was laying on the bed and had fallen asleep"

When he woke up, Doug said he found Faylene unconscious in the tub; her head under water.

When asked what happened next, he told Spencer, "[I] got her out… put her on the bed. Started CPR."

"I asked if he had called 911," White told Spencer. "He informed me that he had not called 911. I asked him why and he, he relayed to me that he was afraid."

White jumped in the car and called 911 himself.

Listen to excerpts of White's 911 call

Meanwhile, at the house, Faylene's daughter, Jenna, said her stepfather was freaking out.

"I hear Doug and he's screaming. He's panting. And he's having a hard time. It looks like he's bracing himself… and then he told me [to] take my little brothers to the next door," she said.

Jenna ran to the home of Andrea Rodgers, who raced to the Grants to see if she could help.

"Doug came flying to the door, so upset. My whole body just reacted to the terror in his eyes," Rodgers recalled.

Chad White showed up minutes later and took over. "He had obviously pulled her from the tub. And she was laying there unresponsive… she did not have any vital signs."

With Doug looking on, White tried CPR until the paramedics arrived.

'[Doug] was crying. He's bawling. He was yelling out, 'Please help her. Please help her,'" said White.

Paramedics got Faylene's heart going again and rushed her to the hospital, where Jenna remembers a bizarre scene.

"As my mom is laying in a bed unconscious with tubes running through her nose, in her arm, Doug takes me out into the hallway and he tells me…'If your mom wakes up, she might say weird things,'" Jenna recalled.

Jenna said Doug seemed too eager to accept the possibility that Faylene might not wake up. But as she watched her mother's heart rate on the monitor, she knew Faylene wasn't coming back.

"I kept looking at the screen and it just kept going down and down…from 100 to 75 to 50. And then I realized what was happening," Jenna said. "She was dying."

Soon, doctors said brain activity had ceased and Doug authorized taking her off life support. At 4:37 p.m. on Sept. 27, 2001, Faylene Grant was pronounced dead. The official cause: drowning. But tests showed a whopping 50 milligrams of Ambien in her system. Clearly, Doug had ignored Chad White's orders.

"You didn't call him when you chose to fill the prescription?" Spencer asked Doug.

"I didn't feel I needed to call to fill the prescription," he replied.

Still, investigators seemed unconcerned. In the bathroom and in Faylene's bedroom, they shot just five photos. In the coming days, they would fail to interview key witnesses and they even lost evidence - including the pill bottles. Then again, they had ruled this death an accident the very day Faylene was found.

Faylene's family was upset. It took months of pressure from them before investigators started taking a closer look at Doug Grant.

And that's when Detective Sy Ray got the case.

"I felt there was a lot of unanswered questions... so I primarily focused on just trying to answer some of the real basic questions," Ray explained. "The first thing we looked at that helped us do that was the phone records."

Ray found a slew of calls from the months before Faylene died between Doug's phones and Hilary Dewitt's.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez said authorities became even more intrigued at reports that Doug and Hilary had met in a park only hours after Faylene's death.

"When he saw her, he grabbed her around the hip area… pulled her towards him… and said, 'Ooh I miss this," he said.

"That scenario is chilling," Spencer responded.

"Well it is chilling and it isn't a scenario. It's something that happened," said Martinez.

Hilary admitted meeting Doug in the park, but she wasn't sure when. And she adamantly denied any conversation about her hips, but nobody denies what happened a few weeks later.

Less than a month after Faylene's death, Doug and Hilary became man and wife.

"I know how people feel about us getting married so quick," Hilary told Spencer. "I don't care what people perceive about me. I am who I am and that's my life…"

Doug and Hilary had started a new life, but Det. Sy Ray had no intention of moving on.

"I had a lot of concerns about the way he reported things happening," Ray said. "Just some real common sense things that I felt just didn't quite fit in."

Chief among them, Ray said he just couldn't get over that Doug never had called 911.

"I know with every fiber of my being that I called them," Doug told Spencer. "I called 911!"

Phoenix-area records show no such call. Still, Ray didn't have enough for an arrest until the sudden appearance of a new and reluctant witness.

"I didn't want to get involved because I knew what was going to happen once my name hit the papers," said Jim McElyea.

Caught on tape with a story about what Doug Grant told him really happened the day Faylene died.

According to Ray, "It's the missing piece of evidence that we're looking for."After Faylene Grant's death, Jenna and her brother, Austin, went to live with their biological father. Doug Grant and his new wife, Hilary, settled into life with a blended family - four children from various marriages, including a daughter of their own named Neveah - Heaven spelled backwards.

Despite such wholesome appearances, Det. Sy Ray remained convinced Doug Grant was a killer… but, he admitted, "Nothing really jumped out and said, 'This is what happened.'"

Faylene's sisters always suspected it was Doug.

"He didn't call 911," Jodi Stratton said. "He married Hilary three weeks later."

Hear more from Faylene's sisters and mother

Three years passed. Then, one day, Faylene's sister, Cherlene Patterson, called Ray with explosive news: an old friend of Doug's was claiming Doug had confessed to killing Faylene.

"He told me… she was ready to go to heaven," Jim McElyea explained. "And he said, 'I put her in the bathtub until she was under water.'"

But there was a problem with McElyea's story. Before he'd tell it to the cops, he wanted $10,000 from Faylene's family.

"He's very clear that it's a loan," Ray told Spencer. "I have a hard time buying a lot of things that Jim said. But at that point, we were obligated to see it through, to see what this information is and see if there was any validity to it."

So Det. Ray set McElyea up. He told Cherlene to arrange a meeting in a Walmart parking lot. Hidden cameras were rolling.

When the money changed hands, Ray moved in and told McElyea he could charge him with extortion. Instead, he got McElyea to agree to help get a confession out of Doug on tape.

"The plan at that point," Ray explained, "is to bring Jim and have him confront Doug on this information while wearing a wire."

McElyea did just that. Later that day, wired for sound, he met Doug and told him police were asking him questions.

"They are threatening to arrest me because they think I have information," McElyea tells Doug during the sting.

And he needed to know exactly what happened to Faylene.

"I don't know what you want me to say?" Doug is heard saying on tape.

"I believe his initial response was, 'I did help her into the bathtub…'" McElyea told Spencer.

"She fell asleep in the tub... she had to have so many of those painkillers and stuff," Doug was recorded telling McElyea.

Doug admitted nothing directly, but when McElyea tried to leave, McElyea said, "He kept saying, 'Tell me what you are gonna say...' saying how damaging it sounded... trying to get me to reword it."

Doug: "What you gonna say?"

Doug: "If they have anybody saying Doug Grant put her in the tub and put her to sleep… then it's over…"

Doug: "If it were me, I would say, yeah we were good friends and you were there to console me and you don't remember. It's been years ago, end of story, get out of my face."

Listen to excerpts of the wiretap

It was hardly a full confession, but to Sy Ray, it was more than enough. So in the summer of 2005, police arrested Doug Grant for the murder of his wife, Faylene. Doug immediately made bail and soon returned home.

Doug's lawyer, Mel McDonald, said there's no evidence Doug even wanted Faylene to die; just the opposite.

"When you look at Doug's efforts after her fall - crying for help, running to her rescue, taking her to a hospital, leaving her alone with people - that is hardly the evidence of a murder," McDonald said.

As far as Ray is concerned, it was all part of an act.

"Their version of the story is just nonsense. I think something happened to her while they were here," Ray told Spencer as they stood at the site where Faylene supposedly fell, "but I don't know what."

"So what do you do when there's no evidence. Let's throw in the infidelity. Let's throw in the younger woman," McDonald said. "It's got nothing to do with the question of homicide. But let's just throw the dirt on the wall, maybe it'll stick."

What the defense wants to stick is that Faylene Grant's death was not a murder, but rather, an accident or a suicide. If you doubt it, they say just listen to Faylene's own words… from those astonishing journals. It's right there in the writings - repeated references to her upcoming death.

"I can't tell you how devasted I feel in that I'm suicidal. I think of crazy things to do to myself," Faylene wrote. "I feel like I should just drive off a cliff and quit wasting space and air on this plant."

Read more of Faylene's journal entry

But Jenna can't seem to reconcile the words in those letters and journals - with the mother she knew. "She would have never commited suicide. If you only read a small portion of something taken out of context, it won't be what the writer intended."

"My mom didn't want to die," Jenna told Spencer. "She was a happy lady. She was a great mom, a great wife. I don't think that points to someone that's suicidal."

Jenna reads from her mother's journals

And if the writings suggest otherwise, Jenna said it can only be because Doug planted the idea.

"Her husband, who obviously she trusted, who she remarried, is telling her she's gonna die!" Jenna exclaimed.

"I never encouraged it, nor did I ever dream it nor did I ever say it," said Doug.

Even harder to explain, much less understand, is Faylene's relationship with Hilary, a rival for Doug's affections whom you would think she had every reason to hate.

But it is clear from Faylene's writings, by the time of her death, the two weren't just on speaking terms, they were good friends. Faylene called Hilary "a neat girl" and added "I just feel like I wanna do everything for her while I'm here."

"Faylene, she filled voids in my life at a time period when I needed it," Hilary said, "And she's part of this family."

Faylene wrote in her journal, "I'm so thankful Hilary is able to share her feelings with me and me with her. I want so much for her to know of my love and respect for her."

Read more of Faylene's journal entry

So much does Faylene love her, that she names Hilary the perfect new wife for Doug Grant. She wrote, "This desire for you to be married immediately and to see you sitting together as husband and wife at my funeral has been so strong."

And even the perfect new mother for her children.

In a letter to her children Faylene wrote, "I have asked Hilary to sit at the table as your mother while I'm away. Treat Hilary with the utmost love and respect, and you will always make me very happy."

Read Faylene's letter to her children

"I think Faylene was right," Hilary said. "These kids needed a mom."

So just what was Faylene really saying? What do the bewildering entries tell about her and about how she died?

As the trial begins, how the jury answers those questions may well determine Doug Grant's fate.

"What role did you have in Faylene's death?" Spencer asked Doug. He replied, "I've never been asked that."On day one of Doug Grant's trial for first-degree murder, Prosecutor Juan Martinez highlighted what he said was Doug's heartless manipulation of his wife.

"He's telling her that he's had visions that she's going to die," Martinez told the court.

He will try to convince the jury that Doug's obsessive phone communications with Hilary and his failure to make the call that counted most - to 911 - reveal a plot to kill the woman he'd married twice so he could marry the woman he really loved.

"He had told Hilary that they were going to be together, and that they were going to be married," Martinez said.

But Defense Lawyer Mel McDonald argued, however Faylene died, Doug didn't kill her.

McDonald told jurors, "She writes, 'I am choosing to give up the life I have that is perfectly the way I want it.' She is choosing, ladies and gentlemen, to give up her life,"

After years covering the Grant case, reporter Paul Rubin said no one theory fully explains what happened to Faylene.

"I can see under one theory that Doug did just what Juan Martinez accused him of doing," Rubin said. "I also can see it being a terrible, tragic accident. And I also can see suicide."

But if this was murder, what was the motive? Money?

Faylene had a hefty new life insurance policy, but it hadn't kicked in yet. If Doug were after the money, why wouldn't he wait? As for love, even if Doug desperately wanted to marry Hilary, he didn't have to kill Faylene to do it; they could have simply divorced. After all, they'd already done it once.

Prosecutor Martinez ignores the motive question for now, beginning with his star witness, Faylene's daughter, Jenna, who remembered being unable to get into the bedroom that horrible morning.

"I grabbed the door handle, jiggled it, and it was locked," Jenna testified.

The bedroom door was locked, said Martinez, because a killer was at work on the other side. The locked door is a crucial point, and curiously, something Jenna never once mentioned in two interviews with police.

"I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to think about it," she said, "But its part of the story."

Jenna was just 11 when her mother died. But according to Martinez, "…that doesn't mean she doesn't remember exactly what happened."

Next, Martinez tried to get Hilary to admit she knows more than she had been letting on.

"I was definitely still in love with Doug, absolutely…" Hilary said on the witness stand.

"You knew that if she died that there would be a chance for you and the man that you love, right?" Martinez probed.

"Mr. Martinez…that is…" Hilary said.

"Yes or no?"

"No!"

"Your case certainly wasn't hurt by being able to paint this guy as a really sleazy womanizer," Spencer observed.

"I didn't paint the defendant as a sleazy womanizer," Martinez replied. "That's what the facts showed!"

"Exhibit A," he said were the phone records - hundreds of calls from Doug's phones to Hilary's. But Doug's lawyer claimed that many of the calls weren't made by Doug at all. "It was Faylene making the calls," he told the jury.
Remember, the defense says the two women were friends.

"The contacts that were going on during this period of time was Faylene preparing Hilary to take her place," McDonald explained.

Doug's case got another boost when the prosecutor called Medical Examiner Archaius Mosley to the stand.

"I had no evidence to support this being a homicide," Mosley testified.

Just as the defense claimed all along that there was no crime, also helping the defense was Det. Sy Ray, who spearheaded the case against Doug Grant. Ray had to admit that, on many important points, there was also no evidence. There were no sheets, pill containers or underclothing.

"Detective, the evidence at the scene is gone, isn't it? McDonald asked in court.

"No. Not all of the evidence at the scene is gone," replied Ray.

As for the Ambien - when, how and how much Faylene took - a toxicologist said the evidence is totally inconclusive.

As the months dragged on, and the defense picked up steam, Prosecutor Martinez voiced his objections over and over and over.

"You objected, by our count, more than 100 times one day," Susan Spencer noted. "I assume that is part of the tactic."

"No. It was not a tactic to throw him off his game," Martinez replied, adding that he'd object "200 [times] if necessary!"

In closing arguments, Martinez outdid himself with another carefully calculated move - finally spelling out exactly what the state thought Doug Grant did to Faylene. It's a stunner.

"What he did is he dragged her over there… and then he placed her head inside the tub and began to hold her down," Martinez told jurors. He said Doug held her up against the outside wall of the tub, drowning her by forcing her head under water.

Martinez said bruising and water stains prove it. The defense disagreed.

"There is no doubt that Douglas Grant killed Faylene Grant," said Martinez.

But just in case the jurors don't buy that, Martinez reminded them they still can punish Doug without convicting him of first-degree murder. "There are lesser included offenses - second-degree murder and manslaughter."

Doug Grant doesn't testify and his lawyer bid the jury a fond, if unorthodox farewell.

"Thank you so much for your commitment and your time. And may God bless you. It's been a privilege," McDonald said. Martinez objected, calling it pandering.

In an interview with "48 Hours Mystery," McDonald said, "I will be devastated if this is not an acquittal."

And he is not the only one.

"Every time the phone rings, you know, I'm wondering if it's the last time you're going to see your family, you know, in person. Uh, it's real tough," said Doug said from his Pima, Ariz., home while awaiting a verdict.

"This is our life and I believe with every fiber of my being, Doug will continue it with us," said Hilary.

"This is a case that took on a life of its own," reporter Paul Rubin said. "It's an unlikely arrest followed by an unlikely prosecution, followed by… we'll see!"While the jury is out, Doug Grant retreated to his home in Pima, Ariz., savoring whatever time he has left with Hilary and his kids.

"There's only a few things that keep you sane," he told Susan Spencer. "You know, out doing yard work with the family brings a little bit of normalcy to life."

"The thought of Doug being taken away and having to go to jail for something that he didn't do is crippling. I don't wish that upon anybody," Hilary said choking up.

Faced with months of evidence, jury deliberations drag on for three agonizing weeks.

"It's tough from 9 to 4 while the jury is deliberating. Pins and needles, you know…," said Doug.

And then, finally, a verdict:

"We the jury do find the defendant Douglas D. Grant as to Count One, first-degree murder, unable to agree. On the lesser included offense of second-degree murder, unable to agree. On the lesser included offense of manslaughter, guilty."

Guilty, but only of manslaughter - the least serious charge Doug faced.

"It's a hollow victory for the state and for Faylene's family. It's a crushing blow for Doug and the defense.

"Probably the most devastating result in any case I've ever tried," said Doug's attorney, Mel McDonald, told Spencer.

Jurors said though they thought Doug did "something;" they just couldn't agree that it was murder. So they compromised… despite their strong feelings about the man on trial.

"Nothing was proven, but it was just a gut feeling," said a male juror.
"Manslaughter was a fallback," said a female juror.
"We thought he was a… pretty much a scuzzbag," said the male juror.

Doug's supporters aren't giving up. Manslaughter means he could face up to 12-and-a-half years in prison, but he could get no time at all - just probation.

"How have you managed to hold it together all this time Hilary?" Spencer asked. "It's easy when you know he's innocent," she said.

"There's a community that will suffer a great loss if he is in for very long at all, because he is a good man," Doug's sister, Tammy Fuentes, said.

It may have been too risky to put Doug Grant on the stand before the verdict, but as the court considered sentencing a few days later, his lawyer bets that an emotional plea from his client now just might work.

Doug is on the edge. After his first weekend behind bars, he's on suicide watch.
His lawyer, Mel McDonald said, "He looked like Jack Nicholson in 'The Shining.'"

"I was yelling, 'Faylene, Faylene," Doug cried on the stand, in tears.

"He did cry," Spencer noted. "Well, it looked like he attempted to cry!" said Martinez. "Does he turn the tears on and off?" she asked. "It appears that he does, doesn't it?" Martinez responded.

Faylene's family took the stand to argue for the longest sentence possible.

"All that I have left is memories because he took her from me!" said her sister, Jodi Stratton.

The usually stoic Hilary pleaded with the judge not to take Doug from her.

"If Doug received probation, he would still be allowed to pay a debt to society and continue to provide for us as his family," she said.

Doug and Faylene's own sons, Marley, 12, and Braven, 11, tell the judge losing one parent is enough.

"I am here because I know my dad is innocent," Marley said. "I want my dad back home."

"I miss my mom, but taking my dad away isn't going to bring her back," added Braven.

The appeals seem to hit home.

"The suggested sentence of the court is that the defendant be in prison for the presumptive term of 5 years," the judge said.

Five years with good behavior, Doug Grant will be out in three. The Prosecutor Martinez puts on a brave face. "Justice, I believe, was served," he said. "It took a while, but we finally got there."

Hilary is loyal to the end, saying it's just what her dear friend, Faylene, would have wanted. "They're always going to mourn the death of their mother, always. This is what she would want. I mean…that's just how I feel."

Jenna has trouble accepting the verdict, let alone the sentence. "A man took away someone else's life and he's gonna be in prison half a decade? You're telling me that's justice?"

But she vows not to let the past destroy her future.

"I'm gonna be OK," she said. "I've been OK the past seven or eight years."

And she takes comfort in Faylene's journals - "This will be such a blessing as I go into the next world…" her mother wrote - in those haunting reflections not just about dying, but also about living life with zest every day, which is how she wants to remember her mother.

"Love means never having to say goodbye. I will be with you always. I love you. Faylene."

Jenna is suing Doug Grant for the wrongful death of her mother.

Faylene and Doug's two sons live with Hilary Grant, who is their legal guardian.
Produced by Joshua Yager