Dateline: Noises in the Night - What happened to Emma Jane Walker? Disturbing details of the 2016 incident, revealed 

The Dateline episode Noises In The Night recounts the unfortunate murder of high-school cheerleader Emma Jane Walker. As revealed on the Dateline episode, Emma Jane Walker was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend and Maryville College football player William Riley Gaul.

The incident took place back on November 21, 2016, and since then, William Riley Gaul has been arrested and convicted of murder in the first degree, landing him a fifty-one-year sentence. Despite several attempts to overturn or challenge the judgment, the judiciary has consistently turned down all of Gaul's legal pleas.

Here's everything that you need to know about the tragic murder as covered by Dateline.

Dateline: Emma Jane Walker was murdered by her own ex-boyfriend

As per the Dateline episode, Emma Jane Walker was an honors student, alongside being a high-school cheerleader. She first met her would-be murderer, Gaul, in 2014, and the two soon started dating. Their relationship grew while he was a football player and a junior at Central High School, and she was a freshman student. The relationship soon ran into troubled waters, and Walker's parents had to intervene. According to their testimony, they had tried to stop Walker from seeing Gaul.

Their differences weren't ultimately settled, and thereafter, Walker declared to her friends about two weeks before being murdered that she had finally decided to put a permanent end to her relationship with Gaul.

Dateline: Gaul claimed he was trying to win Walker back

Gaul ended up murdering Walker in cold blood. On the fateful night, he went up to Walker's residence and fired two bullets into her bedroom. Walker lay sleeping and was killed by one of the bullets, which hit her right behind her ear. Her lifeless body was discovered lying in a pool of blood the next morning by her terrified mother.

During the subsequent trial, Gaul and his defense lawyers tried to put up a convoluted case. While they did not deny the fact that Gaul was indeed responsible for the gunshots, they advanced the argument that it was all a part of an abortive plan made by Gaul to win back Walker as his girlfriend. The plan, according to them, involved Gaul staging his own kidnapping and then somehow trying to pose as the one rescuing Walker.

It is needless to say, this phony story didn't hold up well in court. The jury eventually convicted the then nineteen-year-old Gaul of first-degree murder, along with several other smaller charges that included felony murder, stalking, tampering with evidence, reckless endangerment, theft, and possession of a firearm during a dangerous felony.

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The criminal court presided over by Judge Bob McGee sentenced Gaul to a mandatory life sentence starting in September 2018. It was also clarified that he would be eligible for parole only after serving fifty-one years in prison.

Dateline is exclusively available on NBC.

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