After just 10 hours of deliberating, the jury in the Mark Howerton murder trial sends a note to the judge. There will be no verdict.
JUDGE RAYMOND ANGELINI (reading note): "After careful deliberation and discussion, unfortunately we cannot come to a unanimous decision." Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am declaring a mistrial.
Peter Van Sant: Mistrial. Are you happy? Is that in a way, a victory for you?
John Hunter: Any time that your client doesn't go to prison, it's a victory
Alison Steele (sighs): It was a little bit disheartening. But at the same time, I was mentally prepared for that outcome.
Prosecutors David Lunan and Alessandra Cranshaw were disheartened, too.
Peter Van Sant: Did you feel as though you'd let the family down?
David Lunan: Well, sure.
Alessandra Cranshaw: Yeah.
David Lunan: Absolutely.
But it doesn't end there. The prosecutors plan to retry the case and get busy preparing for round two, starting with the defense star witness, medical examiner Dr. William Anderson.
Alessandra Cranshaw: I was not prepared for Dr. Anderson to testify, uh — to what he testified to.
They'd been stunned by his claims that Cayley had a skull fracture, and her bruising was caused in part by the organ donation process.
Peter Van Sant: So, do you find that this notion that organ harvesting caused these bruises to be absurd?
David Lunan: Absurd. Absurd. In this instance, it's absurd.
While the prosecutors work to address those claims, defense attorney John Hunter files a motion to get the whole case dismissed, based in part on what he says were Jett Birchum's lies.
John Hunter: The knowing use of false evidence by the prosecution undermines our entire faith and confidence in the judicial system. … If that can happen, then there's no point in even having a trial.
Cayley's mom Alison Steele and stepdad Lawrence Baitland sat through the first trial and concluded jurors needed more information about what happened inside Mark Howerton's car.
Peter Van Sant: You became investigators?
Alison Steele: We did.
Lawrence Baitland: I knew we needed to show what happened in that car. … The jury needed to know how it happened.
She's a scientist, he's a NASA engineer. They got to work.
Lawrence Baitland: I spent hours and hours, um, studying autopsy photos, and I really fixated on one of the autopsy photos that showed an impact on Cayley's head, you know, right in front of her ear.
The photo of a small dot above Cayley's right ear. Other photos show deep bruising above Cayley's left ear, like the one described by the medical examiner in the first trial.
ALESSANDRA CRANSHAW: And what is this that we see behind the ear?
DR. SUZANNA DANA: That's a bruise. That's a contusion.
Cayley's parents believe that when taken together, the photos tell a story.
Alison Steele: We believe that of all of the injuries, the blows landed on her … the fatal one occurred when he reached from his driver's seat, hit her in the left ear and drove her head into the window and onto the lock button of the car.
In fact, in a recorded audio interview with police the day Cayley died, Howerton admitted he had previously done just that.
RANGER RAYMOND BENOIST (police interview): Did you ever push Cayley's head up against the window?
MARK HOWERTON: I pushed her, and she hit the window one time. That was over a week ago, yes.
Christy Jack: So, in many respects, it was like, same song, second verse.
They'd need proof to convince a jury. Cayley's parents headed to a used car lot, where Steele posed in a car similar to the Mercedes Howerton drove that night.
Lawrence Baitland: I'd photographed her head in different positions while I'm holding the autopsy images, trying to see if they match up with the door and it's a near perfect match.
Baitland decided to go a step further.
Lawrence Baitland: So, then I loaded this 3D modeling program.
Building a 3D model of Cayley's head.
Lawrence Baitland: … first thing you can do is you can create a solid out of that 3D mesh. And then … you can project an image onto it.
And bringing them closer to having actual proof.
Lawrence Baitland: So this gave me the confidence to go to the next step, which was to seek out the killer's car.
Mark Howerton sold the car in 2018. Baitland tracked down the new owner and bought the car.
Peter Van Sant: What'd you think of that?
David Lunan: Uh, well, this is new. This is, uh, not something I've been, uh, accustomed to hearing, uh, in other cases.
Peter Van Sant: Show me what you believe went down.
Lawrence Baitland: Sure.
Peter Van Sant: Let's go over to the passenger side…
The car Cayley was fatally injured in is sitting in her parent's driveway. Baitland says driving it home was a haunting experience.
Lawrence Baitland: It's torturous. Um, but it's also, you know, she was showing us what happened, you know. She was guiding us to this car.
Peter Van Sant (standing outside of the car): You believe that he struck her. When he did, she came over to this knob, her hit — her head, hit it. Now you notice when you push it down, it doesn't go flush.
Lawrence Baitland: Right. … This will not retract fully, no matter how hard you hit it.
Cayley's parents decided to make a video to demonstrate their theory in court.
Christy Jack: They went and found two actors, a male and a female to dress the parts. They were, um, similar size, similar weight.
Lawrence Baitland: If we did the reconstruction ourselves, it would be considered biased and probably thrown out or at least discredited.
So they hired a private investigator to produce the demonstration. They didn't even look at it in case they were called to testify about it.
The video is simple: showing three angles of what Cayley's parents and their experts believe happened.
Peter Van Sant: Would showing a jury a video like this potentially help the prosecution's case. If it — if it's allowed?
Christy Jack: Jurors are very visual. … It makes it easier for them.
Christy Jack: It shows how it can happen. And it answers a number of the questions that the jury had in the first trial.
Hunter says however Cayley got that dot above her ear, it's all speculation.
John Hunter: It could be from something at the hospital, it could have been from something before she got in Mark's car. … Could it be that that is from a locking thing on the door? I mean, sure. It could also be that a space alien came and put a little, you know, mark on her.
John Hunter: I almost feel like it's not worth discussing because it's so unscientific.
Years go by. Alison worked to pass the Texas Clear Alert Bill. It enables law enforcement to quickly initiate searches when people aged 18 to 64 go missing. In 2021, a district court in Texas denied John Hunter's motion to dismiss the case, ruling there was no evidence of prosecutorial misconduct relating to Jett Birchum's testimony. Hunter appealed that ruling.
Alison Steele: It was horrible, just waiting and not knowing what was gonna happen.
Hunter filed appeals all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.
John Hunter: We lost in every court we could take it to.
And so, more than five years after Cayley's death, a date for a second trial is set. May 23, 2023.
Peter Van Sant: What's at stake here? … Are feelings, are emotions running high?