A YOUNG GIRL PLAYS DEAD TO LIVE THROUGH A SHOOTING THAT DESTROYED HER FAMILY - SHE DESCRIBES HER REMARKABLE STORY OF SURVIVAL IN "48 HOURS: LIVE TO TELL: SOLE SURVIVOR"

SATURDAY, JAN. 3, 2015, 10:00 PM, ET/PT

Robin Doan thought the gunshots she was hearing were part of dream. She was wrong. One of the 15 shots that really rang out in her home in Pampa, Texas, grazed her leg and arm. The others killed were Robin's mother, stepfather and brother. The lone gunman then fled into the night.

Doan, then just 10 years old, played dead before making a chilling call to 911, telling the operator, "There was a shoot-out in my house and I don't know who's dead. And I'm scared half to death." She survived the vicious attack that destroyed her family and recounts that night and her recovery in 48 HOURS: LIVE TO TELL: "Sole Survivor," to be broadcast Saturday, Jan. 3, 2015 (10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

"I was having a nightmare," Doan says, "and I remember hearing gunshots in my dream, but when I woke up it didn't end. The gunshots were actually going off in my house. My mother started screaming. Screaming and screaming."

Anchored by correspondent Erin Moriarty, 48 HOURS: LIVE TO TELL: "Sole Survivor" features Doan's inspiring story of survival and recovery following a night that changed her life forever.

"He turned to my brother's room," says Doan, now 20. "And I just remember gunshots going off and my brother moaning."

Before the night of Sept. 30, 2005, Doan was a typical 10-year-old girl in a hardworking family of farmers. Then, through some random, unexplainable moment of fate, they became the targets of an intruder who enjoyed killing for the thrill of it.

"You ask the question why. And that's the question that sometimes haunts you forever," says former Hemphill County, Texas Sheriff Gary Henderson. "Why? Why this family? Why this day? Why this town? And we may never know."

The immediate investigation turned up few clues, but they wouldn't give up. Doan, remarkable in her ability to recall details in spite of her age and the trauma of having lost her family repeatedly recounted what she heard, and saw. "He shot in my room and missed me." In a videotaped interview, Doan's courage is breathtaking. "And so I had to pretend like I was dead two whole hours."

She was placed in a safe place in case the killer came back to get the lone witness to the horrific crime.

"There was one theory that it was a drug hit that had got the wrong house," says Texas Ranger Jay Foster. "All of the leads were hitting dead ends."

What investigators would later learn was that the gunman who killed Doan's family had killed before, though hundreds of miles away in Missouri. Just a day before Doan's family was attacked, Orlie McCool and his daughter-in-law, Dawn, were killed, and the McCool's Dodge pickup was stolen. Levi King was later found behind the wheel of that same stolen truck by the Border Patrol in El Paso. There, he soon told law enforcement that there were four more bodies in Texas. Law enforcement in El Paso then alerted colleagues in Missouri they had King in custody.

King told law enforcement officers that the feeling he got from killing the McCools was better than the high he'd gotten from any drugs he had ever done. Two weeks later, King told law enforcement about four more murders he committed in Texas.

It was the lead that investigators in Pampa desperately needed to find the person who killed Doan's family. Doan was willing to help by testifying about the night her family was senselessly gunned down while they slept.

"I was going to be sitting in front of a murderer who had killed my loved ones," Doan says. "And to testify - I didn't want to. But I needed to, for my family's sake. I was the only one that got to walk out of that house. They didn't, and they needed a voice."

A deputy sheriff who responded to the home after the shooting, investigators, prosecutors and Robin Doan's friend, Denise Mackie, intimately describe their initial response to the shooting, the investigation, King's trial, and the years since as Doan has continued on with life without her loved ones.

Birthdays, she says, are particularly hard.

"Even my birthday is hard because I don't like celebrating it without them," Doan says. "I just have those days where I want my mommy, or I want my stepdad, or I want my brother, and want things to go back to being normal, and you just can't help but burst out into tears."

LIVE TO TELL is a short-run series from the producers of 48 HOURS delivering first-hand accounts of extraordinary people who refuse to give up when facing death. 48 HOURS: LIVE TO TELL: "Sole Survivor" is produced by Producer Ruth Chenetz. Doreen Schechter, Joan Adelman and Grayce Arlotta-Berner are the editors. Judy Tygard is the series creator and senior producer. Susan Zirinsky is the senior executive producer.

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