The true story behind Brandy Daniels's murder investigation

Brandy Daniels was a 25-year-old mother found shot inside her car near her family’s driveway in Nashport, Ohio, on May 5, 2014. The scene showed spent shell casings outside the driver’s window and the engine still running, which pointed investigators to a planned attack rather than a robbery.

A re-air of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered revisits the case in the Out There in the Dark episode scheduled on Oxygen at 10:00 pm ET on Thursday, September 11. The hour walks through the steps that led from a dark driveway to two life sentences.

---

Early steps in the Brandy Daniels case

Deputies and detectives gathered phone records, video, and physical evidence, then began interviews across Muskingum County. Early on, attention turned to Daniels’s estranged husband, Josh Daniels, who had moved to Alaska as their marriage broke down. He cooperated at first, and his phone was examined.

Brandy Daniels' car (Image via @DatelineNBC YouTube)

Another name surfaced quickly. A convicted felon, Sirius Underwood, was familiar with the family and had ties to Josh. When questioned, Underwood offered an alibi and later remotely wiped his phone, forcing investigators to rely on carrier data and earlier extractions rather than the device itself. This move slowed progress but did not stop it.

According to the Zanesville Times Recorder, the team also pursued vehicle sightings, tower dumps, and long interview lists across months of work.

---

Building the Brandy Daniels timeline

A small break arrived from a Facebook tip about older robberies. That tip linked Josh Daniels and Underwood to planned thefts in the region, revealing a pattern of joint crimes from 2012 to 2014. The same network of phones tied to those jobs intersected with the night of the shooting.

One prepaid number pinged a sector that covered the driveway at the key time and showed contacts with Josh in the days before the killing. Per the Zanesville Times Recorder, that mapping helped anchor a working theory of planning and surveillance that matched what investigators were seeing.

Then came a simple message. Records showed Josh received a one-word text from Underwood after the shooting that said “done,” a detail later highlighted in local coverage and in court. According to the Daily Jeffersonian, that message was central to the state’s account of coordination.

---

Pleas, sentences, and what the case established

Once the robbery links and phone work were in hand, a cooperating witness described how the two men worked together on past crimes. Investigators also learned that Daniels had tracked his estranged wife’s routines and relayed her schedule. The picture that formed showed a plan that unfolded over weeks and ended at the end of a long country driveway.

Josh Daniels pleaded guilty. (Image via Pexels)

Josh Daniels pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and related felonies and received life in prison with parole eligibility after 28 years. Underwood entered an Alford plea to aggravated murder and other counts and received life with parole eligibility after 38 years.

According to the Zanesville Times Recorder (March 2017) and the Court of Appeals of Ohio decision in State v. Underwood (February 2018), both sentences were affirmed in separate proceedings.

The case record also notes that forensic ballistics tied the shots to the same gun and that nothing was taken from the car. Those facts, along with the phone evidence and the robbery pattern, supported a finding that this was a targeted killing rather than a random act.

Per the Zanesville Times Recorder, the investigation stretched across states, included multiple agencies, and drew on thousands of pages of records before the indictments.

---

Where to watch Brandy Daniels' Dateline episode

The Brandy Daniels case returns to television on Oxygen with Dateline: Secrets Uncovered at 10:00 pm ET. The episode titled Out There in the Dark covers the investigation, from the first 911 calls to the courtroom.

Dateline: Secrets Uncovered - Out There in the Dark is also available for streaming on fuboTV, YouTube TV, and Oxygen.

Dateline NBC cover image (Image via NBC)

Dateline: Secrets Uncovered - Out There in the Dark is an adaptation of an episode from Dateline NBC with the same title and can be streamed on Peacock Premium, Peacock Premium Plus, NBC, The Roku Channel, and Spectrum On Demand.

---