Texas Confidential

By Loen Kelley and Jenna Jackson

This story originally aired on March 11, 2006.

Doris and Bob Angleton lived in an upscale Houston neighborhood, raising their twin daughters and leading, on the surface at least, a perfect life. But there was trouble brewing and the family was shattered in 1997 when Doris was murdered inside their home.

As correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports, the subsequent investigation uncovered a crucial piece of evidence, an audio tape on which two men could be heard discussing the details of this murder. What would follow is a story of secrecy, money, affairs, and murderous accusations between two brothers.

Niki Angleton says it's not hard for her to remember her mother Doris. "I remember really specific things. Like every morning we would wake up to her laughing, and she had an incredible laugh like, really, really loud, really like vibrant, and it just made you want to get up and go downstairs and see what's going on."

Niki and her twin sister Ali Angleton were 12 years old when their mother Doris was murdered.

And then, four months after the twins lost one parent, they lost the other. On their 13th birthday, their father Bob was arrested for killing their 46-year-old mom.

Asked if she understood the charges her father was facing, Niki says, "No. Nothing was ever explained to us very well." The twins say they have never believed the charges are true.

"Well if you knew my dad you would know. I just, I just know," Ali explains. "I know him, and he didn't do it," Niki adds. "That's just the bottom line and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, really."

We've been checking in with Niki and Ali through the years, and now, 10 years after the murder of their mother, the twins are in their early 20's and college educated.

But this story is still not over for them, or their father. In the beginning the question was who killed Doris Angleton and why. Now it isn't so much who did it, it's how to prove it and how many times Bob will have to stand trial for it.

Bob has always maintained his innocence; he spent one full year in jail waiting for his trial.

"Can you imagine when your children come visit you when you're in jail that you have to put on an air of everything being ok, and that it will work out, because they're still counting on you," says Bob.

In July 1998, more than a year after the murder, the trial finally got underway.

By far the best piece of evidence against Bob was a garbled audio tape of two men planning Doris' murder. The prosecution claimed one of the voices was Bob's, a claim he has denied.

In the end, the jury thought the voices on the tape were too muffled to identify and they couldn't be sure if one of them was Bob's.

Bob was acquitted and the girls got their father back. For the next few years they settled into what one could call "normal" teenage life.

When Bob heard "not guilty," he thought his legal ordeal was over but it was far from over.

Lyn McClellan, the prosecutor who lost the state's case against Bob in 1998, is still convinced Bob Angleton is a guilty man.

"I'd love to get him. Yeah, I'd love to have another shot at trying him again," McClellan says.

Asked why he didn't just move on, McClellan says, "Because I didn't think the verdict was correct. You shouldn't get away with murder."

Three and a half years after being acquitted of murder by the state of Texas, Bob was arrested again for his wife's murder, now facing a federal murder charge.

Angleton's attorney Mike Ramsey said the new charges amounted to "double jeopardy," being tried for the same crime twice, which is unconstitutional.

"We shouldn't have two trials just because there's an acquittal and some sore DAs for getting beat," Ramsey said at a press conference.

But McClellan denies it's double jeopardy. "Well, it's not double jeopardy when the feds try you for a state case. So, if they have a federal case that they can make, then they have a right to make that."

Bob's only consolation this time was that he got out on bail. And as his second trial approached, Bob prepared for the worst, facing the possibility of a conviction.

He went to visit his daughters, who had started college that fall, to say what he feared could be his final goodbye.

Asked what he said to his girls, Bob said, "I may go away to jail for the rest of my life. That means when you need something, you can't call me for advice. That means I don't exist."

"Some people might ask why you don't just get up and leave?" Schlesinger asked.

"I'm not allowed to," Bob replied. "I'm not in a situation where I can make plans. The only plans I have right now are in case I am found guilty. Because, the minute that I am found guilty, I will have no time to make any plans."

When Angleton told 48 Hours that back in 2003, he was being somewhat less than honest.

In fact, Bob did have a plan, one he had been setting up for more than a year. Just four days before the start of his second trial, he followed that plan and walked out of his Houston home for the very last time.

At first his attorney feared the worst, wondering if Bob might have killed himself.

But the choice Bob made didn't involve leaving this world, it involved just leaving the country. Armed with a fake passport, a fake driver's license, and a fake Social Security card, Bob had decided to become a fugitive.

Angleton wrote about what he did next in a journal, which his daughters have read.

"Going to jail for life is for sure a dead end. So this is the only choice," Niki read from the journal. "Saying goodbye to life and leaving with one small suitcase and one carry on. Imagine trying to repair your life with the possibility that you'll never - you'll never hold or hug your children, your friends every again," Niki read on.

Bob ended up far from home and had become very difficult for 48 Hours to reach but he was still eager to talk, even if it couldn't be face-to-face.

Speaking by phone, he said he decided to flee for the sake of his daughters.

"I figured their best peace of mind would occur if I was safe and that was the only idea I could come up with was to flee," he explained.

When he fled, Bob said he took about $135,000 in cash with him, stashed inside a checked suitcase and a carry-on.

Bob and his money bags landed safely at his first destination, Amsterdam.

Bob knew he committed a crime by fleeing the country but didn't think he had a choice. Bob says he told federal prosecutors who had killed his wife, but they weren't listening.

Niki admits her father's flight didn't look good. "If I was someone on the outside and heard about this guy, who was supposed to go to trial and then he ran, yeah, that's pretty guilty. It looks really bad. But there is so much more to the story that nobody knows."

Part of the story includes a confession letter from the man who admitted he had killed Doris as an act of revenge against Bob. It was a letter jurors were never allowed to see.

So why did Bob decide to become a fugitive? He had been acquitted of murder in one trial and as he faced a second trial, he had a powerful alibi. He wasn't anywhere near the crime scene at the time of the killing and had an entire girls' softball team to prove it.

The afternoon of April 16, 1997 started like any other. Doris dropped off her twin girls for an hour of softball practice before the start of the game. Bob was the team's coach.

After the game, Bob drove the girls straight home.

"As I pulled into my spot, I noticed the back door was open. Now I was concerned," Bob recalls.

Bob called 911, with his girls still waiting in the car.

Police officers entered the home, and then broke the news to Bob.

"He came out, looked me in the eyes and said, 'Was your wife wearing a white shirt?' The message was clear," Bob recalls.

Doris Angleton's body was found lying in the hallway next to the kitchen. She had been shot seven times in the face, five times in the chest.

"I started bursting out crying because I knew by his face that she was dead," remembers Niki.

Doris' brother, Steve McGown, walked through the house the day after she was murdered.

"Nothing was disturbed. No glass was broken on the door, there was no forced entry. I couldn't see anything that was taken. The only reason anyone was in there was to kill my sister. Why? Show me a good reason why?" says McGown.

Niki says "everyone" loved her mother, and Bob says, "Doris was a queen."

In an interview with Bob two years before he fled to Amsterdam to avoid a second trial, he couldn't stop talking about his late wife.

"She was a perfect wife, a perfect mother, a perfect lover. She was perfect in every sense," he said.

"Everyday we'd come home, we'd have perfect dinner set up for us, we'd have everything we wanted. It was perfect," Niki recalled.

The girls say their father had no reason to destroy all that.

For Bob, there was no mystery. The night of the murder, Bob told police he knew who killed his wife - a man who had been on the run since the day after Doris' murder.

Bob said that man was his own brother, Roger Angleton. And Bob said his brother had a motive: to hurt him and his family.

Bob says he and his brother had been rivals from the start. Bob was always the more successful son and Roger was jealous.

"Roger said there was resentment that I was the favorite child. I guess you'd say he was a problem child," says Bob.

Roger couldn't hold a steady job while Bob was supporting a family in style, earning around $1 million a year.

"I put it on the level as a successful doctor, or successful lawyer," Bob said.

But Bob wasn't a successful doctor or lawyer. He was a bookie, taking bets on sporting events, which is illegal in Texas.

His business was booming and Bob realized he needed help. At the time, his brother Roger needed a job. Despite their troubled past Bob hired him. It turned out to be a big mistake.

Less than a year later, in the summer of 1990, Bob fired his brother. And that's when things started getting nasty.

"He felt like I owed him money," Bob explains. Roger believed Bob had cheated him out of a lot of money, some $200,000.

Despite their fallout, Bob says his brother showed up months later on Halloween dressed as a big bunny rabbit. Bob says Roger was trying to get close to the family again. "Little did I know it was part of his extortion plot," he says.

It almost worked. After winning back his brother's trust, Roger convinced Bob he had scheduled a closing for him on a real estate deal. He told Bob to bring along $200,000 in cash and to meet him beforehand in this parking lot.

"He's sitting in the back seat, saying 'I want the money, Bob, I want the money,'" Bob recalls.

Roger pointed a gun at him. "And I'm going 'Whoa.' Yes, this is my brother," says Bob.

Roger had a hard time keeping his mouth shut and told the whole story to his lawyer, Jim Skelton.

"He had planned to kill Bob, unless Bob paid him. He was telling me about it," says Skelton.

Bob was able to speed away without getting shot. And Roger didn't get his money. "That's when I realized he was truly off the edge," says Bob.

But Roger wasn't about to give up; Bob says his brother knew another way to hurt him.

Bob says Roger threatened to put him out of business, by reporting him to the IRS.

"At first, I didn't take him seriously. Then he actually did make phone calls to customers, posing as an IRS agent. And I quickly started losing customers," recalls Bob.

Bob realized Roger could actually shut down his bookie business and finally agreed to start paying off his brother in installments.

Bob says he paid Roger $2,500 per month.

Paying off his brother worked for a while but Bob says Roger demanded even more cash and in 1997, Roger made one more threat.

Bob says he received a letter from Roger saying if he didn't get the money - quote - "I will hurt you in a way that will be with you for the rest of your life."

Bob says he ignored the letter. Six weeks later, Doris was dead.

"Whoever walked through that door was getting blown away. That's what I think," says Bob.

That's Bob's story. So why didn't police believe him? Because they started learning more about him, and his marriage.

Although investigators had little to tie Bob to the murder of his wife, they never took their eyes off him and the more they dug up, the more they believed Bob had a few reasons to want his wife dead.

For starters, Doris had filed for divorce just two months before she was murdered.

Bob says he was shocked and surprised when he learned about the divorce. "Because to me, I thought things were pretty good. And to her, obviously she was seeing another side of it," he says.

According to Tom O'Connor, Doris' divorce attorney, she was about to become a very rich woman.

Asked if he was willing to give Doris half his money, Bob says, "I hate to say we were in a situation that was so comfortable it really wouldn't have made a difference. It irked me, but it didn't get me that angry."

But there was more. When Doris thought her husband might not pay her what she wanted, just like Roger, she threatened to expose Bob's multi-million-dollar, strictly cash bookie business to the IRS.

"Is that a motive for murder?" Schlesinger asked.

"No, and there is no motive for murder," Bob answered.

"There's plenty of motives for murder," Schlesinger said.

"There's not enough motive for murder for anybody," Bob replied.

But police kept digging and found what they thought was one more potential motive.

"Their marriage toward the end was not good. She would stay on the Internet most of the night, in chat rooms and stuff," says Doris' close friend and hairdresser Larry West.

Doris told Larry that she was having an affair with a man she met online.

"In fact just a week before Doris' murder, she was in the salon. And she was telling me about the boyfriend. And she had been to see him that prior weekend," says West.

Bob says he never even knew about the affair. "I did not know about any boyfriend until after she was dead," he says.

Even with all that information, there still wasn't enough to tie Bob to his wife's murder. And Bob was still insisting to police his brother was the killer. It took two months to find Roger; when police finally arrested him in Las Vegas, they found an audio tape in Roger's briefcase.

On the tape was a conversation between two men planning Doris' murder.

"I think you ought to blow her away. Go out the front door and just blow her," a male voice on the tape could be heard saying.

"Boom, boom, boom. And then when she's down, I go up to her and finish her off," a second male voice could be heard saying.

Everyone thought the voice of the trigger man was Roger's but it was the other voice that intrigued prosecutor Lyn McClellan.

McClellan was convinced it was Bob Angleton, the alleged brains behind the operation and the man who had pointed police toward Roger in the first place.

"You're waiting she comes in, alright? You hit her," the male said.

"Right," the second man replied.

"So that means you kill her and go," the man said.

"Right," the second male replied.

For McClellan, it wasn't just the speaker's voice that was convincing - it was the words he used.

The unidentified man talked about a dog. "I thought you decided you were gonna put her in a little cage?" the male said.

"What other hit man worries about what they're gonna do with a dog?" asks McClellan. "The owner of the dog, Bob Angleton."

Also on the tape, the man could be heard saying he didn't want any fingers cut off.

"You said go for the diamond," the second man said.

"You don't have to cut the f****** finger to take the diamond," the other voice replied.

"You're killing the woman. What do we care if we cut her finger off or not, but Bob didn't want that," says prosecutor McClellan.

"She'll have to tinkle, so she'll go right in the bathroom by the door," the unknown voice said on the tape.

"Some hit man is not going to be telling Roger, 'Okay when she comes home, she always goes to the bathroom.' How would he know?" asks McClellan.

Asked if it is his voice on the recording, Bob maintains it is not.

The tape was all the police needed to arrest Bob for murder. And Lyn McClellan was prepared to offer his brother Roger, the trigger man, a very sweet deal.

The deal could have resulted in Roger walking out of jail a free man. All Roger had to do was testify against his brother Bob and describe their murder-for-hire plan. And for that, he would walk out of jail a free man.

McClellan says he expected Roger to accept the deal. But what McClellan didn't know - and neither did Bob - was that there were even more secret audio tapes. Roger had already started talking, and the listener, was all ears.

When Vanessa Leggett heard about the high-profile case, she starting visiting Roger in jail. At the time, she was just an aspiring true crime writer looking for a story. And this time, she got lucky.

Leggett says Roger told her it was Bob's idea to kill Doris. Asked if she believed him, she said, "Yes, I do."

In January 1998, Leggett visited Roger in jail and tape recorded about 50 hours of conversations.

"Bob had asked him for some help on something. That he had a problem. And would Roger come to Houston?" says Leggett.

According to Roger, Bob wanted his wife dead and he asked him for help.

"I knew he was dead serious," Roger told Leggett, because of the way he allegedly acted, saying his brother was "calm and determined."

"Bob said he's having a problem with Doris, were the words that he used and that he asked Roger to help him have her killed," Leggett recalled.

Roger even confessed to Leggett that he had killed Doris. "He said he came through the front door at around 7 o'clock that evening. And he waited there," Leggett explained. "And he said when he felt she was really close he said and 'I jumped out on two feet with both guns.'"

Roger said the brothers had made a deal that Bob would pay him to kill Doris, disappear and keep quiet forever.

"Roger asked Bob to give him 24 hours to get out of town," Leggett said.

Remember when Bob went to the police after the murder and told them his brother Roger killed his wife?

"What was going thru his mind? Rage," says Bob.

Roger said that too was all just part of their plan.

"So Roger wrote out letters that were threatening to Bob saying 'you owe me money if you don't I'm going to hurt you or someone you love. Pay up,'" says Leggett.

Roger told his attorney, Jim Skelton, the same story and swore him to secrecy.

"The fee was for a million dollars. I think that was it. It was supposed to be $100,000 down and $100,000 every year for ten years," says Skelton.

But their elaborate plan unraveled, Roger says, when he got arrested in Las Vegas, and police found those audio tapes in his briefcase.

Roger told Leggett that he recorded his brother helping him plan the murder in case he ever needed the tape to use against him. Skelton believes the tape was Roger's insurance policy.

"He was worried about Bob paying him so he kept a lot of incriminating evidence on the murder he could later use to blackmail Bob if Bob didn't pay him the money," says Skelton.

Asked if he hired his brother to kill Doris, Bob says, "No."

Bob says there never was a plan. His theory is that Roger wanted to destroy him and so Roger not only killed Doris, he also tried to frame Bob as his accomplice by making a fake audio tape.

Each brother was pointing the finger at the other. According to Bob, the whole murder-for-hire story was part of an elaborate lie, dreamed up by Roger to incriminate Bob.

"If I was going to hire somebody to do something, why would I hire a person that had been extorting me?" Bob says.

Schlesinger replied, "Because it would give him a motive and it would divert attention away from you and here was a guy who wanted to hurt you so he killed your wife. It made a good story. Good cover."

"If they want to convict me they have to have a theory of why I did it. To me it makes no sense," Bob said.

But in 1998 the state of Texas thought it had a decent case against Bob, especially with that audio tape from Roger's briefcase.

But McClellan had no idea what was about to hit him. Right before McClellan was about to offer Roger the plea deal to testify against Bob and get out of jail, Roger chose a different way out. He shocked everyone when he committed suicide in his jail cell by cutting himself more than fifty times with a razor.

But what he left behind was an even bigger surprise: Roger left a suicide note that said he had killed Doris on his own, Bob wasn't involved, and the murder was exactly what Bob had been saying it was all along: an act of revenge.

The note read, in part, "I began an elaborate plan to frame Robert for Doris' death as further leverage to get my money…. He is innocent."

"He did tell me that he had planned to kill himself to save his brother," says Leggett.

Leggett believes, as strange as it sounds, that Roger killed himself and left that note because he had promised his brother he would take the rap for killing Doris.

"He even showed me this letter over a week before he ended up dead. And told me that he had to do this to help his brother, so that hopefully his brother would get off the charges. And he said he really didn't know whether the judge was going to accept it," Leggett says.

Although the prosecutor's star witness had flipped sides on him and killed himself, in the end, it didn't matter. McClellan convinced the judge that the suicide note was hearsay, and therefore, inadmissible.

Going into trial, McClellan still had the audio tape found in Roger's briefcase as his best evidence against Bob and hired an audio expert who once worked for the FBI to identify the voice.

Steve Cain spent hours analyzing the tape.

McClellan was pretty confident but he got some bad news when he called Cain.

"I am very confident that it is not Robert Angleton's voice on those tapes," Cain said.

Cain had no idea whose voice it was but that didn't matter to Bob's defense attorney, Mike Ramsey. "Truth of it is, it was a godsend. I mean how can you have better piece of evidence fall in your lap?" says Ramsey. "It's a lawyer's dream."

Bob Angelton's dreams were about to come true. After listening to that tape over and over again, the jury acquitted Bob and the state of Texas had to set him free.

But federal prosecutors were now determined to get him. And three and a half years later, they did. And they planned to use evidence the state never used - the Vanessa Leggett tapes of her conversations with Roger.

Facing a second trial, Bob saw only one way out: run. He boarded a plane in Texas, intending to leave behind his past even though he had no specific plans for his future.

Asked what his plan was, Bob admitted he wasn't that prepared. "I would be able to subsist, at least, for six months to a year. And then find myself some type of employment."

But just after he arrived in Amsterdam, Bob learned he wouldn't have to plan that far ahead. The fake passport he was using looked a little too fake.

"As I walked up to the immigration or passport agent, when he put his hands on the passport, I knew right then and there, I was done," remembers Bob. "He started rubbing at it, looking at it. I think in my mind, I was thinking, 'Oh, should I turn around and run? No, that's not smart.'"

Bob was taken into custody by Dutch officials after just 24 hours on the run.

"I was angry, disappointed and somewhat surprised. I didn't expect him to run," says Stan Schneider, who was the only attorney on Bob's defense team who agreed to keep representing him after he fled the country.

Asked if he blamed him for running, Schneider says, "Probably not. I thought we had a chance of winning. But the pressure of another trial? Who knows what a jury would do?"

The United States immediately asked the Dutch government to extradite Bob back home and his Dutch lawyers didn't have much hope.

"They said the United States never loses. They always win. Every case, they always win. And I was preparing Bob for the worst," Schneider recalls.

Bob's lawyers argued an international treaty signed by the U.S. protects against double jeopardy and prohibits the Dutch government from sending Bob back to face murder charges a second time. Not only did this court agree, so did the prosecutor.

So Bob beat the odds and won big. The Dutch government refused to extradite him for murder.

Bob might not have to face murder charges but he wasn't about to go free. The Dutch courts finally did agree to extradite him but not before the U.S. agreed to prosecute him only on new charges of passport and tax fraud.

In September 2004, Bob was brought back to the U.S., pleaded guilty to passport and tax fraud, and was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.

The only good news for Bob's daughters, who are now living in California, was that Bob was moved to a nearby prison. To this day, Niki and Ali say they till believe their father is innocent.

"It's just like me and Niki and our dad," says Ali. "That's what we consider our family," Niki adds.

The twins says they still have a strong relationship with their father.

48 Hours' last interview with Bob was from his prison cell in California. With the Dutch court ruling, that he could not be tried for Doris' murder again, Schlesinger asked Bob that one, all-important question one last time.

"Did you hire Roger to kill Doris?" Schlesinger asked.

"No," Bob replied.

Asked if her hired anyone else or had anything to do with her death in a legal sense, Bob said no.

"And you say that now, even though you have that Dutch ruling in your hands?" Schlesinger asked.

"The ruling doesn't make a difference. The truth is only thing that really counts," Bob replied.

While Bob spends his time behind bars, federal prosecutors are likely to spend their time trying to figure out a way around the Dutch court ruling and prosecute him again for Doris' murder. And even Bob's own lawyers are betting they will.

"Your best guess, will Bob Angleton ever be a free man again?" Schlesinger asked Schneider.

"Probably not. If you put the numbers to it…. It's a long shot," Schneider replied.

But Angleton's daughters are still betting that their father will, one day, be free again.

"Do you think he'll be able to come to your weddings?" Schlesinger asked the sister.

"Oh, yeah. He will," Ali said. "I'll put it off for a while. Good excuse not to get married. Put it that way," Niki added.

"There's no way, there's no way I would get married without him there," Niki said. "It will all work out. It will."

Bob Angleton will be released from prison in 2014. The twins will be 30 years old. The U.S. Government says it has found a way to prosecute Angleton for murder after his release from prison. The only way he could avoid that is to leave the country again.