The Becky Bliefnick Case Explained: Family Feud Contestant Kills Wife

Tim Bliefnick was on the show Family Feud, and when he was asked, What is the biggest mistake that you made at your wedding? He says, “Saying I do,” but it is certainly eerie considering what happened later on.

After Becky’s dad received a text from Tim saying that he hadn’t been able to get a hold of her. Becky’s dad drove over to her house to see if she was there, and she was there but not how he expected to find her, because Becky had been shot to death in her bathroom, surrounded by an amount of blood that no person, let alone a father, should have witnessed.

Officers with the Quincy police department as well as the Adam County state’s attorney arrived on the scene, and they instantly started investigating, and it didn’t take them longer to realize that whoever had broken into the house and killed Becky had done so by prying open a window on the second floor.

It looked like they had climbed up on a patio chair to gain access, and tool marks on the window showed that it had been pried open with what they eventually determined was a crowbar. And because there was nothing in the house to suggest that anything was stolen, it was obvious that it was not a robbery gone wrong. Whoever had broken into Becky’s house did so with the intention to kill her; they succeeded, and the scene itself was proof of a violent struggle, one where Becky’s bedroom door was physically kicked in, and it’s at this point during the struggle that investigators believe that Becky had tried to call 911 but she didn’t have a chance. The killer stopped her from doing so, and they believe this because her phone was found pushed behind the door with 91126 typed in, as if the person grabbed it from her hands and accidently typed in those last two numbers before it fell to the ground.

This could not have been a stranger; this is someone who had deep-rooted hate for Becky. Investigators found a partial shoe print, eight shell casings from a nine-millimeter handgun, as well as a bunch of small pieces of plastic surrounding her body.

Now, despite how loud you would expect this attack to be, none of her neighbors heard anything; however, there was a neighbor who had a security camera, and that footage ended up being extremely helpful, and even though it didn’t pick up anything from that night of the murder, it picked up something very interesting from the night before.

At 1.05 am, a person was seen walking down Becky’s driveway towards the back of her house, and that wasn’t the only instance. About a week earlier, on February 14th, Valentine’s Day, the security camera picked up almost the exact same thing, and what’s interesting about this time is that the neighbor was actually awake when she got the notification that someone was detected by the camera, so she actually ended up texting Becky right away, explaining that someone just walked towards the back of her house.

Two additional cameras in the areas captured what appeared to be an individual riding a bike in the direction of Becky’s house just before the person from the neighbor’s security was seen walking down her driveway, and then the cameras captured the same biker riding away from Becky’s house shortly after that person was seen leaving her driveway.

However, for as useful as that footage seemed, there was one big problem: the footage was very low quality, and it is impossible to make out who this person is. The only detail they could figure out was that the bike didn’t have any reflectors on the wheels, but that’s it.

Nobody had no idea who would have done this, but some fingers were pointing towards a person. Sarah, Becky’s sister, had a hunch that that person was Tim, Becky’s soon-to-be ex-husband.

More than a year before Becky Bliefnick’s death, she sent her sister this text:

“If something ever happens to me, please make sure the number one person of interest is Tim, as that is who would do something to me. I’m putting this in writing that I’m fearful he will somehow harm me, come after me, or will try to (sic) something to me that takes me away from the kids or the kids away from me. He has already lied multiple times to paint himself as a victim and me as the perpetrator when it is absolutely the other way around. No, I have not sent this to Mom or Dad as I don’t want them to be out of their minds with worry.”.

Their divorce trial was scheduled for the following week. Coincidence?

Once investigators learned the details about their contentious divorce and upcoming trial and the fact that Tim only lived one mile from her house, they felt strongly that he could have been involved in this. When the investigators first spoke with him, he was at home that night with his sons, who were asleep in their rooms. He also mentioned that Becky had asked him to keep the boys an extra night, which he agreed to.

Now maybe if the boys had been awakened and seen him that night and could testify that he was home at the time of the murder, things would be different, but he admitted that they were asleep. The judge had ordered Tim to return a nine-millimeter handgun that Becky had gifted him during their marriage, and he did not return it because he claimed he didn’t know where it was. Like already mentioned, Becky was killed with a nine-millimeter gun.

A search warrant was executed at Tim’s house, and among the items that were seized was a box full of shell casings that had been found in his basement. You might see where this is going. When the shell casings from Tim’s basement were tested and the shell casings from the scene were tested, investigators learned that 27 of the ones from the basement had been fired from the exact same gun.

Before the search warrant was executed, investigators found a bike with no reflectors on the wheels abandoned in a bush less than a half block away from Tim’s house.

On March 13th, 2023, just two weeks after Becky was killed, Tim Bliefnick was arrested in her murder and held without bond. But Tim’s arrest hit the media quick, and it started to gain a lot of traction, and this is the reason why.

In 2019, just years before the murder, Tim was a contestant on the very popular game show Family Feud with his side of the family. One of the viral moments before all this was one of Tim’s answers, when Harvey asked, “What is the biggest mistake that you made at your wedding?” He says, “Honey, I love you, but I’m saying I do,” but investigators don’t think this has anything to do with the case.

On May 23, 2023, three months after the murder, his murder trial began, and for as obvious as it may seem to many of us that Tim is guilty, his defense attorney said that it was dripping in reasonable doubt.

Remember the tiny pieces of plastic found at the scene? They were fragments of reusable ALDI’s shopping bags, which Tim had actually kept stacks of inside his home. The reason they believe they were ripped up and scattered around Becky’s body is because, according to prosecutors, Tim used the bad in an attempt to either one try and trap the shell casings after firing the gun through it or two try to muffle the sounds of the gunshots. either way, though they believed he placed the handgun inside of the bags and fired through them, hence the plastic that had been blown off the bags.

But according to Tim’s defense attorney, she argued that this wasn’t a solid connection. Sure, they had found a stack of the same ALDI’s bag inside his house when they searched it, but she argued that every other household in Quincy had these same bags, but the thing the prosecution was trying to explain was that it wasn’t one small thing that was going to prove Tim did this but rather a combination of things that pointed to his guilt.

Tim’s cell phone search history also was checked, and it pointed fingers towards Tim again. Search history showed searches like “how to open a door with a crowbar,” “how to clean gun powder off your hands,” and “how to make a homemade pistol silencer?”—not”even a little bit subtle. Now the main thing about these searches is that the dates of when these searches were made were not shown, so the defense attorney made an argument that these searches could be made after the murder. But the searches don’t end there. Tim made over 200 searches for a very specific license plate and VIN number, and these searches were date and time stamped, so they know for a fact that these were made as soon as that person was seen leaving Becky’s house on the 14th.

Prosecutors say that they believe they can connect Tim to the person on surveillance because on the night of the 14th, a truck was parked in her driveway, and it was that truck’s license plate and vin number that Tim was searching for more than 200 times, and this truck belonged to a man hat. Becky was dating, but the defense said otherwise. They tried to argue that it was just a coincidence that Tim was looking up that information that time of night, and it just so happened to be shortly after someone was seen stalking around the house.

When investigators searched the house, they recovered 53 spent shell casings, and 27 of them were a match to the eight shell casings found at the scene, meaning the gun that was used to kill Becky was the same gun that was used to fire those 27 bullets out of the 54 that were found inside of Tim’s house, not to mention it was a nine-millimeter handgun. So, all evidence is against Tim, right? Once again, the defense attorney argued; she said that this was subject to human error.

Investigators went through Tim’s phone and found a secret Facebook page by the name of John Smith, and John Smith was looking for a bike with no reflector on it that happened to be identical and abandoned. Tim’s DNA was not found on the bike.

So all this small coincidence when put up, are these all coincidences towards Tim, or does this paint a picture of a man who killed his wife?

Motive behind this. Their divorce trial was only a week away when she was killed, and on top of the fear of losing custody and money, the marital home prosecutors argued that Tim was partially motivated by a concern that Becky was going to expose his father.

Two months after Becky tried to file an order of protection against Tim, she tried to file one against Tim’s father, Ray, who was previously accused of sexually assaulting minors, and despite the fact that he was never charged with anything, Becky was uncomfortable with the idea of her boys spending time with him, and while she wasn’t granted the order of protection, it was ruled that Ray wasn’t allowed to spend time around kids unless another adult was present.

Well, it turns out that Becky was actively gathering witnesses to testify about Tim’s father and was going to present this information at the divorce trial to likely argue that the kids should be in her care full time, and this is what the prosecution argue was one of Tim’s big motives that he didn’t want this information getting out. However, Tim’s lawyer adamantly denies this; she said that not only was the information about the allegations already public knowledge, but it wasn’t like the kids were ever restricted from seeing their grandpa; there just had to be additional adult supervision, but in the end of this, luckily, the jury saw through all of this.

After six days of trial, Bliefnick was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and one count of home invasion.

On August 11, 2023, Tim returned for hearing his sentencing, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.