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The Hunt with John Walsh

Fire and Murder. Aired 9-10p ET

Aired July 10, 2016 - 21:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[21:00:23] JOHN WALSH, CNN HOST: Back in 1981, I had the American dream, the beautiful wife, the house in the suburbs and a beautiful 6- year-old son. And one day I went to work, kissed my son good-bye and never saw him again.

In two weeks, I became the parent of a murdered child. And I'll always be the parent of a murdered child. I still have the heartache. I still have the rage. I waited years for justice. I know what it's like to be there waiting for some answers.

And over those years, I learned how to do one thing really well and that's how to catch these bastards and bring them back to justice. I've become a man hunter. I'm out there looking for bad guys.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Every child fears the boogie man. And, unfortunately, their father was their boogie man. That's the sad thing about the whole thing.

JEAN ROUNTREE, ROBERT FISHER'S SISTER: I don't know where he is. I don't know if he's in heaven. I don't know if he's living with his head totally messed up. I don't know if he's dead. That's why if he's alive, I want him found so we can have answers.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

HUGH LOCKERBY, DETECTIVE, SCOTTSDALE PD: April 10th, 2001, at approximately 8:42 in the morning is when we received the 911 call.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

911 OPERATOR: 911 emergency.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's exploding.

911 OPERATOR: Can you see it?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's fire. You bet I can see it.

911 OPERATOR: Were there people inside the house?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, there are. They're probably dead.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

LOCKERBY: It was prime time for the news so you had a lot of news media. But it was a very large scene. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER: You can see huge orange flames and heavy smoke pouring out of the roof.

LORI GREENBECK, MARY FISHER'S FRIEND: My husband called and he said, do you have the TV on? I said, yes. He said that's Mary's house. I said oh, my gosh. She's going to be having a bad day.

ROUNTREE: I got a phone call from my mom. She was saying that she was watching a home on fire on the news, and she knew it was my brother's house. And I said, mom, how do you know it's Robert's house. She said it's his. I can tell by the helicopter shot.

WADE RENCSOK, THE FISHER'S FORMER NEIGHBOR: The house had blown up, burned down. Blown up. I mean, it was gone. That thing had burned to the ground in about 20 minutes, which was weird because it was brick.

T.J. JIRAN, RETIRED RETECTIVE, SCOTTSDALE PD: The fire department had just put the fire out. So I ran down there to the cul-de-sac where Robert's house was. The neighbors were saying that it's a possibility that the family is in the house. So that's why we responded.

As we approached the house, it was just one big hole. We were just doing a walk-through just to kind of get an understanding of what we're dealing with.

And as you walked along, you could see human form destroyed by fire, in a sleeping position. And there were three. Two children and what appeared to be an adult.

LOCKERBY: They were found in their beds.

[21:05:00] JIRAN: I'm not an expert, but usually most fires, somebody awakes.

LOCKERBY: They would have been trying to get out the front door. Trying to get out of the bedrooms. Trying to get out of the structure itself. And there was no evidence of that.

JIRAN: So we immediately believe we had a triple homicide.

LOCKERBY: The children's throats had been slashed. Brittany was age 12 and then Bobby who was age 10. The lacerations to the neck were very deep. They actually went into the vertebrae of the bones. They were so deep.

JIRAN: It was Mary that was in the bedroom.

LOCKERBY: Mary's throat was slashed. She was shot in the back of the head with a .38 revolver.

JIRAN: One person was missing. Robert Fisher, the father of the family, was not in the home. All signs, all evidence pointed to Robert Fisher as being the suspect.

ROUNTREE: I don't want to believe that my brother did this. I'm still hoping that something else happened.

LOCKERBY: Once the investigation started, the fire department found the liquid-based pour pattern that spread down the hallways and into the bedroom, around the beds. The liquid-based accelerant that helped make the fire burn faster and hotter.

There was a broken gas line. A deliberate gas line that had been manipulated and so it was spewing gas into the home.

JIRAN: And he just lit a candle in the hallway.

LOCKERBY: The gas still left in the home. It probably was a good ten hours.

JIRAN: And then after so many hours, the gas got so heavy, it dropped on to the candle.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER: Police are looking for Robert Sr.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE REPORTER: Robert and one of the family vehicles are still missing.

WALSH: This guy did the ultimate narcissistic cold-blooded move. And that was to murder and slit the throats of his wife and his children.

JIRAN: We need to get this guy off the streets now. He's dangerous.

ROUNTREE: Everything that the police look into pins back to Robert.

We found out that there was a darker side to Robert Fisher. He had this Jekyll and Hyde personality, where he actually smeared blood on his body.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:11:13] UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER: Investigators announce that this is now being considered a triple homicide. They are still looking for the father, Robert Fisher.

ROUNTREE: Robert is my older brother, or was my older brother.

We were raised mostly in Tucson, Arizona. As we got into our teenage years, he really started looking after me. We were raise knowing that Jesus is our savior, and Robert always took his faith very seriously. That doesn't mean he didn't do anything wrong in his life, as we all do.

But they were bringing up their children to know the Lord and to love others. And it was very evident, because of how Bobby and Brittany lived.

LOCKERBY: What we learned about Robert Fisher is he worked at the Mayo Clinic as the respiratory tech.

He had previously served in the U.S. Navy. Attempted to try out for the Navy S.E.A.L.S. Failed at that. Eventually, he got work after the Navy in a fire department in Borrego Springs, California.

ROUNTREE: There was a time in high school, he was building something in the middle of the street that caught on fire and it blew up, and he almost went blind because it burnt all his eyelashes and his eyebrows off his face and my neighbor had to rush him to the hospital. That probably started his idea of wanting to be a fireman.

LOCKERBY: We found out that there was a darker side to Robert Fisher.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are you taking pictures of? Turn that thing off. You!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is to show our boys two months old.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What? Leave them alone.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's their first thanksgiving.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bobby.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pretty sharp today. Show them the dress. Turn around. Turn around again. Smile. Smile pretty. OK. Now scream.

UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: Aaah! Stop.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's go get the cubbies.

OK. At ease. At ease. Cut. Cut.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALSH: The real Robert Fisher is the ultimate control freak. Now when he got sick of his wife and his children, they became the worst kind of collateral damage.

ROUNTREE: Robert started hunting as a young adult. He loved being outdoors. That was his home away from home.

JIRAN: When we start interviewing friends that he would go hunting with, that's when we would start getting information that he was aggressive.

LOCKERBY: He killed an elk and he actually smeared blood on his body. Kind of bizarre. And I wouldn't say necessarily normal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We were all sitting there fishing. There was a guy across the lake, and then Robert disappears. And they were all like, where's Robert? And then they looked out to the water, and there he is swimming. He's got a bowing knife in his teeth and he's going towards the other fisherman across the lake. That's who Robert Fisher is.

[21:15:00] ROUNTREE: I would never ever thought that he could do something like this. Main reason because he loved his children. Throughout the years, I knew that there was tension with Robert and Mary for different reasons. Years ago, Mary was at a women's retreat in Prescott, and Robert went to a masseuse and fell into temptation, and he had an affair with this woman.

GREENBECK: Mary did talk about, you know, they were having problems. And that she was willing to forgive him, and that he had to make some changes. And that she, you know, wasn't going to, you know, act in haste and kick him out.

I think faith had the biggest part in her decision to let Robert see if he can work out his demons.

RENCSOK: They screamed constantly. Everybody heard it. You could hear it in the house next door. And you never really heard him, him scream, which is kind of weird. I mean, he had a way about him, but you never heard him scream. You always heard the wife screaming to him, things like you're worthless. I could have done better than you. You know, we should get a divorce. They did not have a happy marriage.

LOCKERBY: We believe that she was eventually going to leave Robert and divorce him, but Robert wasn't going to let that happen.

ROUNTREE: When I was in sixth grade, my parents got divorced. And Robert would have been in beginning of high school. Robert probably took it the hardest out of all of us.

JIRAN: This is a man that always told a couple of his friends that no way would I want my children to go through a divorce like I went. That's just not going to happen.

FISHER: One for the money, two for the show --

JIRAN: he just -- he snapped. I don't understand. And I don't want to try to understand. The only person who knows why he did it is Robert.

You still have to stick with what the evidence is showing you. We figured out a timeline because a neighbor had spoken about possibly hearing them argue. So we're figuring between 9:30 and 10:15 is probably when the murders occurred.

What we believe happened was he murdered his children first.

He just lifted their heads and slit their throats deep. And, you know, nobody hears anything.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't know how a father could kill their own children.

ROUNTREE: The way they were killed, nothing can justify that.

JIRAN: It was the F.U. shot to Mary. That's my belief. That's an angry shot and that's when he rigs up everything.

At every stage he was trying to erase his tracks.

Why the fire? Destroy evidence. Hopefully, it destroys the bodies so bad that they'll think he's in there. The problem is, he fired a weapon so a bullet is lodged in Mary's head. The bullet is not going to burn up. We're going to find the bullet. He's not going to cover it all up.

Gas rises and then drops.

[21:20:00] LOCKERBY: We found an ATM photo from Robert Fisher withdrawing money.

JIRAN: The photograph, I believe, at the ATM is like 10:40 at night. You know, he's got the baseball hat on. And you can see Mary's truck behind in the picture. And then Robert Fisher fled the area. He figured he'd get a good ten-hour jump on us, which he did.

ROUNTREE: The only option if he was found alive is that he did do it.

JIRAN: He was armed and dangerous. That was the concern immediately.

LOCKERBY: There were more caves in the area that can go very deep into the mountain. He may be lying and wait for us, and we don't want to have anyone else hurt.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LOCKERBY: Before Robert was found on April 20th, an individual was up in northern Arizona. They located a vehicle that was believed to be Robert Fisher's. Mary Fisher's 4Runner.

We were up there within an hour and a half. It's the Ponderosa Pine Forest. It's campgrounds. Primitive campgrounds.

It's a lot of pine trees. It's rolling mountains of canyons. There's caves up there.

[21:25:30] JIRAN: You just walk through the forest. If you see a hole, pretty much could be cave for his blanket.

LOCKERBY: Next to the truck, there's a dog there. The dog was seen circling the Fisher 4Runner and staying near the vehicle and not going very far off.

JIRAN: It's got porcupine quills in its snout because obviously it's that hungry. So we're thinking he's up there, he's up there in the woods.

LOCKERBY: We had search and rescue from both counties. We had our S.W.A.T. team up there. The caves complicated matters quite a bit. We don't know how deep they go. He may be lying and wait for us and we don't want anyone else hurt.

JIRAN: He was armed and dangerous. That was the concern immediately from day one. S.W.A.T. did grid searches. Search and rescue did grid searches.

LOCKERBY: And we did not find any evidence of Robert Fisher there. You think you caught someone, and you think you're almost there, and they slip away.

JIRAN: We don't know if he got driven out of there. We don't know if he walked out of there. But who would drive him out of there?

LOCKERBY: We believe that he had some sort of alternate means to leave the area without the dog being able to follow him.

JIRAN: I've got a witness that possibly saw him walking up the Young Road. Walking north to Highway 260. Is he living up there in the woods right now? Is he really that survivalist? Who knows what these guys do when they run.

ROUNTREE: If he was found alive, that would give us answers because that would -- the only option if he was found alive was that he did do it.

I can't picture Robert being alive and not contacting us for 14 years. So I have to hold out hope that there's another story out there.

WALSH: Everybody in the criminal justice system believes Robert Fisher planned, executed, literally, not just executed his plan, he executed his family. He slit their throats.

ROUNTREE: Maybe Robert went into those caves and maybe he took his life down there. It would prove that he was showing remorse and regret so we can move forward from there.

Finding if he committed suicide would give us one answer, but it would never answer all the questions that we have.

WALSH: I know one thing. This guy will not get away with this. He has to be held accountable. You can't kill an innocent woman and two beautiful children and still stay at large. He's got to go down right now.

ROUNTREE: If he did this, something drastically went wrong. It wasn't anything that was planned. Something went wrong in my brother's mind to allow him to kill the people who he loved most.

JIRAN: Their minds don't stop like ours do when we get to a certain point where we think that's wrong. Theirs just keeps going. They go past that point of no return.

LOCKERBY: In 2002, Robert Fisher was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. We've tracked leads all over the world on Robert Fisher and, unfortunately, none of them have panned out.

JIRAN: I believe he is still alive. Does he possibly got another family by now? Sure.

ROUNTREE: If Robert is alive, I hope that he would turn himself in. Our mom and dad aren't going to live too much longer, and it's the right thing for him to do. We all need him to do that.

[21:30:00] I would want him to think back to how he used to protect me as a sister and that I need him to do that now to protect what we have left in life and to give us answers.

WALSH: Robert Fisher has surgical scars on his lower back. He has ties throughout the southwest, as well as in Florida and New York. If you have seen Robert Fisher or have any information as to his whereabouts, please call 1-866-THE-HUNT, or go online at CNN.com/TheHunt.

We'll pass your tip on to the proper authorities and, if requested, will not reveal your name.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The price of paradise is extreme.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was going to do everything that I can to keep that house.

NICK BARON, SPECIAL AGENT, FBI: I didn't expect anything like that. We basically opened Pandora's Box.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I'm going to explode everything.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:35:00] TRICIA DANO, MORTGAGE ALLIANCE CLIENT: 1999 is when I moved back to Hawaii. My mom and I were going to go back and live there with my grandmother and take care of her full time. Her health was failing and she felt that if she was going to pass, she wanted to be at home right where she belonged.

She lived in Kaimuki. Kaimuki definitely has a lot of families that kind of grew up from back in the day. The house was originally a fixer-upper. All aside the house were red roses. This was an amazing home. It was more than just my grandmother's. It was everybody's house.

When my grandmother fell pretty ill, you know, we fell back behind a few payments. The family made a decision to refinance.

BRANDON SIMPSON, SPECIAL AGENT, FBI: In the early to mid-2000s, the banks were giving out loans with less documentation than they had in the past. Several different groups of individuals figured out ways to exploit these new rules.

We actually heard about different rent-to-own seminars that were around town. And that's when my mom had looked in the newspaper and found an ad for mortgage alliance.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hey, you. There's a mortgage company in town I've got to tell you about.

SIMPSON: John and Julieanne Dimitrion owned a mortgage company called Mortgage Alliance. The Dimitrions were kind of a household name and definitely a household face in Hawaii. They spent more on advertising than probably any other mortgage brokerage in the Honolulu area.

DANO: It seemed like a reputable company. They definitely brought it down to a more family oriented level.

SIMPSON: The pitch that the Dimitrions gave to these individuals was we will have somebody buy your property, but only in name only. You can continue to live there. And we'll fix your credit and a year from now, you will be able to buy that property back. You won't lose it to foreclosure and you can keep your family home.

The Dimitrions would find a straw buyer. Somebody who buys a property when really they have no intention of doing anything in that property other than having it in their name for a fee.

LAURA CRISTO, DANO HOME STRAW BUYER: I met them, you know, through a customer that start coming here to have breakfast and lunch. They explained it to me that it was a short sale. That I wasn't getting involved. The way they were doing the paper work and everything, it was really hard for someone to get it, but I thought these people were good, and they were religious and everything.

The first thing I read, you know, when I came through the door in their office, it says, you know, "With God's help and our help, we will make your dreams come true."

SIMPSON: They definitely used their affiliation with the church as a way to get people to trust them.

CRISTO: I decided to say, OK, I want to help. These people are church people, too. So, yes, I really want to participate and help people, you know.

JOHN WALSH, CNN HOST: The Dimitrions were religious, they were philanthropic, they were members -- upstanding members of the community. Of course, in reality, they were the worst con men.

DANO: My mother called and made an appointment on a day that I was free from work. And that's when we went down to the Mortgage Alliance. And they arrived, I would say, probably about an hour into the meeting.

As soon as John had walked in, I had noticed that he had a really nice tailored suit. It might have been Armani. And when his wife walked in, she had a Louis Vuitton purse, and she had a whole bunch of gold thing goes on, jewellery and whatnot. So I thought, wow, that's some couple there.

SIMPSON: The money and the material items were definitely out for display. They liked other people to see that they had money. Everything from having his and hers Maseratis and literally having pictures taken with $100 bills in their hands.

MYLES BREINER, JULIEANNE'S ATTORNEY: They lived an extravagant lifestyle. There's no question. They made a great deal of money in what they were doing. But at the same time, they felt that God had smiled at them. And they followed their Christian beliefs led them to become successful. They had a relationship with God.

[21:40:00] DANO: I was just out of high school, and I figured that my mom had done so much research and, you know, I trusted her, her instincts.

CRISTO: It was a relation of so much trust that this guy built with my family. So I just start initialling and signing. I never really read the papers.

SIMPSON: I had no idea what I was in for.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The money had already been spent.

CRISTO: Like roaches, you know, when you turn the light on, they go like --

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:45:00] SIMPSON: John and Julieanne Dimitrion were the type of people that people at their church and neighbors thought were the greatest people in the world. That was all a fraud. That was -- all of that was fake.

DANO: I thought these people definitely know what they're doing. So we went ahead and signed over the title and thinking that, OK, this is the first step to the rent-to-own process.

Everything went fine for the first several months. And then we actually started getting, people coming by the house, and they had mentioned that they saw the property was either for sale or up for auction again. And I was very confused at the time because we had been making payments towards that. And I wasn't sure why -- you know, what was happening to the money.

CRISTO: A lady from a mortgage company started calling me, you haven't made your payments from the house in Kaimuki. I go like, what house in Kaimuki. I'm not in charge of making the payments for the mortgage of this house.

DANO: Laura called my mother. She assumed that it was my mother and I that weren't making the payments. My mom was rather confused, wondering how she knew us or who she was.

CRISTO: That's when I realized, you know, what kind of scam they were doing, and I decided to call the FBI.

SIMPSON: And as we started to interview some former loan officers of the Dimitrions, they started confirming that John and Julieanne Dimitrion were the most sophisticated people running mortgage fraud schemes in Hawaii at the time.

They did anything and everything to make their fraud go through. They would use backlit tables in order to forge signatures, or using software to adjust an appraisal so that it looked like the house was worth more than it actually was.

When I asked one of the loan officers, how often did those forgeries occur, he said every other loan.

DANO: Two federal agents came to the house. At that point, my heart dropped. They brought some documents themselves, and it definitely did not match up with the documents that we had. The Dimitrions and Mortgage Alliance had taken the equity that was in the house.

SIMPSON: They told the individuals that money was going into an escrow account. But really that money went to a Dimitrion slush fund account.

DANO: My mom asked. So does that mean that we're losing our family home? We're losing our family home, there's no price on that.

CRISTO: The district attorney told me, you know, like, would you be willing to work with the FBI and go wired in there, you know, and get some information. I go, I'd do anything it takes.

SIMPSON: When we had her walking in to John's office space with a small recording device that's concealed on their person.

CRISTO: I saw John Dimitrion and I pointed at him.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CRISTO: Hi, John. Remember me? I was just served yesterday with a foreclosure notice.

JOHN DIMITRION, MORTGAGE ALLIANCE: I have no idea about your loan. Never seen it. Never looked at it.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

CRISTO: And then I go like, John, you scammed me. And then he start kind of like getting all defensive, you know.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

J. DIMITRION: Everything is pretty much hitting the fan right now with pretty much all mortgages. They look clean. Like the file looked really scrubbed spic-and-span clean.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

SIMPSON: She believed early on that his phones were tapped and people were surveilling him.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

J. DIMITRION: The reason why you can't threaten me because I already know the FBI's all over me.

(END AUDIO CLIP) SIMPSON: His paranoia probably helped him to avoid incriminating himself any more than he did. It was a combination of the interviews and reviewing the documents that we obtained enough evidence to proved that they had in fact been the masterminds of a large fraud scheme.

DANO: The hardest thing to do was having to reassure my mom that everything was going to be OK. All she could think about was the house. You know, trying to save the house or get the house back into the family. I cried pretty much every day, you know?

I felt responsible because I made a promise to my grandmother who passed away in my arms I was going to do everything that I can to keep that house.

None of these people, none of them were able to buy their properties back. And of course they couldn't buy their properties back, because now they had to buy their property at $150,000 more than they had sold it. And they couldn't afford it then.

DANO: We either had to come up with that money or we had to, you know, relocate somewhere else. We couldn't even afford at that point to even keep the electricity on.

WALSH: And the next thing you know, the sheriff knocks on the door and says, here's your eviction notice. You're out on the streets. They destroyed a lot of lives. They ruined a lot of lives.

[21:50:00] SIMPSON: When we arrested john, he seemed shocked in the sense that he didn't feel like he could be a person that would be arrested.

BREINER: For both of them, it was really a shock. They wanted to explain themselves. From the evidence, in my opinion, it was clear they had broken the law. These loans were fraudulent mortgages. And whatever explanation John or Julieanne was going to proffer was not going to change the fact that they had broken state and federal laws.

SIMPSON: The Dimitrions came forward before a judge and plead guilty to the crimes they had committed.

BREINER: Julieanne could have ended up with little or no jail and John's amount of jail was under two years.

We had over 100 people that came to the court who support them who were well aware of what they were charged with and what they had plead guilty to.

BARON: The judge was there. I was there. My prosecutor was there. And then the entire courtroom was just silent waiting for the Dimitrions to show up.

BREINER: At one point, I believed that they had committed suicide.

BARON: He was willing to do anything to stay out of jail.

DANO: I didn't know what they were capable of. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SIMPSON: Anyone that didn't already know the Dimitrions were a total fraud would have learned that very quickly when they watched their sentencing.

DANO: You know, they were going to finally pay for everything that they had done to so many people.

SIMPSON: They never showed up to their sentencing.

BARON: I was shocked.

BREINER: I've never been in that situation where a client who I'd just spoken to a day or two before did not come to court.

DANO: I think that everybody who took part in it or signed off on the family home was in jail except for the Dimitrions.

SIMPSON: John and Julieanne Dimitrion were the only two people of the circle of Mortgage Alliance that when it came time to pay their due to society, they took off.

In order to make an escape from a place like Hawaii, that's an island 3,000 miles away from anything else, it takes some significant planning. I mean, there's not a lot of ways in and out of this place.

BARON: We found it very strange how two people with no passports, no friends and no money could really leave an island.

It was probably six to eight months from when they didn't show up to their sentencing to when we first got the -- really the best tip we've had so far.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My fellow Americans, I'm here to tell you about the republic. Your Republic for the United States of America.

BARON: This group may have assisted them in fleeing the island.

WALSH: RUSA, the Republic for the United States of America really believes that there needs to be a substitute government that some day will either overthrow or replace the existing democracy that we all function in. God bless them. They're entitled to their own philosophies.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have a national identification card for the Republic for the United States of America to show your support and also offers you protection under the laws of our constitution.

BREINER: It's a certain paranoid belief that government is controlled by some vast conspiracy.

BARON: We believe that John may have actually convinced this group that he was a financial guru. He was able to monetize national resources and that's how they're going to fund the new society that they wanted. This group hatched a plan to smuggle John and Julieanne off the island via private jet.

SIMPSON: They made a very good escape from this place.

BREINER: And have since disappeared.

WALSH: In 2013, RUSA's president Tim Turner was convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to 18 years in prison. RUSA wouldn't speak on camera, but they did sent us a response saying that their group does not advocate fraud or unlawfulness of any type, and is solely dedicated to the ultimate peaceful return of our nation to its original constitutional principles of government.

BREINER: I cannot imagine what either John or Julieanne are doing right now.

DANO: It would definitely be great to find the Dimitrions and make sure that, you know, they answer and pay for not only what they did to our family but all the other families that they had victimized as well.

SIMPSON: They might be able to hide out for many more years to come, but I think what's going to be their undoing is somebody is going to recognize that these people have pitched me on an investment scam, or they've pitched me on a way to make money that just sounded too good to be true. And if that's happened, that might be the Dimitrions.

WALSH: John and Julieanne Dimitrion have ties to the Philippines, Massachusetts and Hawaii. John has also used the alias John De La Cruz. If you've seen John or Julieanne Dimitrion, or have information as to either one's whereabouts, please call 1-866-THE HUNT or go online at CNN.com/TheHunt. We'll pass your tip on to the proper authorities, and, if requested, will not reveal your name.

DANO: My mother passed Mother's Day weekend on 2010. She had the house on her mind until the day she died. After my mom had passed, I realized that, you know, there was no going back after it. There was possibly no way that we can get our family house back, you know. I am not going to ever stop trying. I definitely not going to give up.