After being the sole eyewitness to her mother's brutal murder, 7-year-old Charlie Clayton sat down with investigators just hours later to tell them everything she saw.
"I walked into the residence and just kind of sat down and started talking to Charlie. And we just started a little chat, and I said, 'What did you see?' And she told me that, 'A man was hurting Mommy, and Mommy was yelling 'Run, Charlie, Run,'" Steuben County Sheriff Jim Allard said in an interview with ABC News.
A new "20/20" revisits the murder case of Kelley Clayton, an upstate New York mother who was beaten to death by a masked man in 2015.
Thomas Clayton, Kelley's husband, and his former employee, Michael Beard, were found guilty of orchestrating a murder-for-hire plot. Prosecutors said Clayton hired Beard to carry out a deadly hit on his wife for the sum of $10,000.
When Charlie described the assailant as having eyes like her dad, Allard says he knew he needed to bring in a child forensic investigator to help talk to the girl about what happened. A second police interview took place at the Chemung County Child Advocacy Center.
But if Beard was the perpetrator, why did Charlie tell investigators that the intruder looked like her dad?
"After further interviews of Charlie and further analysis, the person that was in there had a mask on. We're pretty sure that when she says, 'Well, it looks like daddy,' it was more of 'Well, the clothing he had on looked like daddy,'" said Don Lewis, an investigator with the Steuben County Sheriff's Office.
Allard said he observed "no deceit in the statements [Charlie] gave" and believes "it was true in her mind when she told it and as she related it."
"Now the focus shifted from Thomas Clayton doing the crime himself. Now it became a murder for hire," Wetmore said.
Without Beard as a witness, the prosecution relied on cellphone records and geolocation data to make their case against Thomas Clayton.
Custody of Charlie and her younger brother was given to Kelley's sister, Kim Bourgeois, who read a statement from Charlie at Thomas Clayton's sentencing.
"Charlie actually wrote a letter on her own that she loved her mom. She loved her dad, but that her dad was a coward because he made Michael Beard kill Mommy," Bourgeois said.
Thomas Clayton and Michael Beard were each convicted of first- and second-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. Beard's second-degree murder charge was dismissed by a judge on appeal. Clayton denies being involved in the murder of his wife.