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Isaac Melcher had a good job, three kids, a devoted wife and strong sense of faith.
The family man seemed to have it all — until he confessed to killing his lover’s husband in a brazen plot designed to look like a home invasion.
Melcher strangled Milton Sawyer, a beloved antique dealer, to death in his Elizabeth City, North Carolina, home in August of 2018 as part of a devious plan he’d conceived with Milton’s wife, Angel Sawyer, according to the “Righteous Obsession” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
The pair almost got away it, if Melcher’s youth pastor hadn’t made the agonizing choice to help detectives draw out the chilling confession from a man he’d once viewed as a son.
Who was Milton Sawyer?
In the quaint, riverside community of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, not far from the Outer Banks, Milton was a well-loved figure.
“People always said he should run for mayor,” his son Caleb Sawyer remembered of his happy go lucky dad.
The 55-year-old ran The Treasure Hunter, a quirky downtown store filled with antiques and other collectibles. After putting several relationships behind him, Milton, a father of three, had found love with Angel Sawyer, a mom to four kids of her own.
“He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to be the knight in shining armor,” his friend and former landlord Sam Davis remembered. “She was an attractive lady.”
About six years into their marriage together, Milton still seemed smitten by 45-year-old Angel.
“Every man…deserves a real woman that makes you forget every other woman on the planet….I found mine and she is all that and more…I love you my Angel!” Milton wrote in a Facebook post on July 23, 2018.
The night Milton Sawyer was killed
But less than two weeks later, Milton would be dead after Angel said a masked intruder broke into their home just after midnight on August 2, 2018, bound their hands with duct tape, killed Milton and pistol whipped Angel in the head in a violent burglary.
“She had blood, I believe it was on her right temple, coming down,” Sgt. Jason Wheelbarger, one of the first on the scene, recalled. “She was obviously upset, had been crying, red faced, red eyes. I remember she had the duct tape on her left wrist.”
Wheelbarger — who had run into the couple just hours earlier at a local Italian restaurant and knew Milton — found the 55-year-old facedown on the floor of the couple’s bathroom with his hands duct taped behind his back. He was already dead.
The adjoining bedroom had been ransacked and Angel reported much of her expensive jewelry had been taken in the brazen theft. She seemed devastated to learn that her husband had not survived the attack, openly sobbing at the hospital when she received the news later that morning.
“No. No. No,” she cried.
A shocking confession
In the days that followed, detectives with the Pasquotank County Sheriff’s Office and North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation had to consider whether Milton’s business, which bought gold and jewelry, had made him the target of the deadly robbery.
They tracked down a man with a criminal history of robberies who’d sold Milton a television set in a parking lot just hours before his death, but the man’s family insisted he’d been at home at the time of the attack.
With no forensic evidence left behind at the scene, detectives didn’t have much to go on until they got a call from an unexpected source thousands of miles away.
The call was from Louie Kazemier, an Oregon dairy farmer who’d once volunteered as a youth pastor, mentoring troubled teen boys.
One of his greatest success stories had been a man named Isaac Melcher. Before his eyes, Melcher had transformed from angry teen furious with his often-absent father to a devoted follower of God, who put himself through school to become a physical therapist. Melcher was now a husband and father of three himself and living in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
“If I needed a picture of a life changed I would chose Issac’s life,” Kazemier told Dateline Correspondent Dennis Murphy.
Kazemier told detectives he was surprised just days earlier to get a call from Melcher, who was back in Oregon and wanted to talk to him.
“I couldn’t wait to sit down and talk with him and find out how he was doing with his family and everything else,” Kazemier said.
But as soon as he saw Melcher, he said he had a bad feeling, noting his one time mentee “seemed broken.”
Kazemier was even more shocked when Melcher admitted to killing the husband of one of his physical therapy clients, who he believed was a dangerously jealous man.
“He was convinced that this husband was gonna hurt this lady,” Kazmier recalled, adding that he had wanted to be the “hero.”
After the stunning confession, Melcher returned to North Carolina and Kazmier was forced to make the difficult decision about what to do next.
“I was damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I go to the police, I’m going to hurt the kid I like and I’ve grown to love,” he explained. “If I keep this in me, I don’t know what it would do.”
Ultimately, Kazmier said he knew he needed to do “the right thing” and placed that call to detectives.
Isaac Melcher is recorded confessing to murder
They hopped on a plane to Oregon the next day and convinced Kazmier to make a call to Melcher to discuss the murder so that they could record it and strengthen the case against him.
Kazmier reluctantly agreed and Melcher once again confessed — this time while his wife Darlene was also on the line.
Melcher said he had become obsessed with helping Angel, a woman he’d also been having an affair with, escape her marriage.
“I reached the place where I asked the devil to help me,” he said. “Because I knew that I had to so fully turn my back on God to do this.”
During the call, Melcher said that Angel could be implicated for conspiracy to commit murder, implying that she had helped come up with the plan.
Melcher said that he wouldn’t turn himself in because there was evidence of “premeditation” and he didn’t want to spend his life in prison or sentenced to death, but admitted — as his wife listened in — that if he got away with it, he still hoped to end up with Angel.
“If somehow I don’t get arrested, there is still a desire in my heart to be with Angel… And amazingly enough, Darlene is still willing to walk through this with me,” he said.
Darlene said that she had forgiven her husband for the affair and planned to “be with” him all the way.
Isaac Melcher arrested for murder
Authorities had enough to arrest Melcher for first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
Angel was brought in for questioning the same day and admitted to the affair but insisted she didn’t want Melcher to kill her husband. She claimed he’d threatened to kill her to keep her silent. But detectives didn’t buy her story and arrested her for first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
According to prosecutor Kimberly Pellini, with the recorded confession gave authorities everything they needed to convict Melcher, but the case against Angel wasn’t as airtight.
With the Sawyer family’s blessing, she agreed to give Melcher a deal to testify against Angel in exchange for a lesser sentence. Ultimately he agreed and laid out in court how Angel had manipulated him to believe her husband was dangerous, then helped him plan and orchestrate the crime.
“I argued the arm around his throat may have not been hers but she put it there, like she was the impetus, she was the motivation and she was a participant,” Pellini said.
It took a jury just 20 minutes to convict Angel. She was sentenced to life in prison.
Melcher agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 to 25 years behind bars. His wife Darlene has since divorced him.