Forensic Files Season 11, Episode 10 - The Gambler - Full Episode | Forensic Files

gambling has a lot more visibility than it used to it's on the internet it's on prime time
television and it's almost a varsity sport on some college campuses but several young men learned the hard
way that gambling can put your money at risk and sometimes your life [Music] [Applause]
[Music] gambling isn't confined to casinos church bingo and back room card games
anymore now it's everywhere there are poker tournaments on the computer you can play sports wagers
offshore and you can play the daily lottery now run by local governments 28 year old jason mcguigan saw gambling
as a way to have fun and also make a living he dabbled in casino gaming but his real
love was sports handicapping he was known to wager thousands of dollars on a single event
he was not a bookie he had made the offer to quite a few people that if you give me some money i'll sign you up with
a betting service and give you advice he was essentially trying to sell his advice mcguigan had spent some of his
time with his associates and acquaintances boasting about the gambling he almost was starting to
emerge as sort of a wannabe gangster on a warm june afternoon jason's aunt stopped by his apartment to
pick up an old computer she found the back door open inside with the remnants of a
massacre jason mcguigan is laying on his back on the bed with his feet curling over the bed to the floor
mcquiggin had been shot twice with a nine millimeter handgun jason's two friends daniel swanson and
dustin wilson were shot to death in the living room it could have been a professional hit
just because of the way these bullets went into people inside jason's apartment was a receipt
for a nine millimeter glock pistol he had purchased it just a few weeks earlier but the gun wasn't found in the
apartment also missing was the key to jason's bank's safe deposit box investigators believe jason mcguigan was
the intended target and that his two friends sleeping in the living room were simply
in the wrong place at the wrong time it's just totally unexpected he didn't really have any enemies that we knew of
at all so when this happened it was a big surprise to us jason dustin and daniel
they were just normal kids trying to make something out of their life they weren't
bad kids when local news agencies reported the murders a witness came forward with some
revealing information [Music] a few hours before the murders the witness saw three men in a cadillac
escalade shouting obscenities and making inappropriate gestures to an asian man in the car behind them
she remembers it clearly she thought it was a road rage incident and these three
white kids were somehow racially attacking this asian kid the witness identified the three men in
the escalade as jason mcguigan daniel swanson and dustin wilson the three murder victims
in a case that had so many stunning revelations this one ranked right up there with him
police in verona wisconsin were investigating a triple homicide an analysis of the crime scene indicated
that jason mcguigan's two friends were killed first as they slept in the living room
the killer took jason into the bedroom there was some sort of discussion before he too was killed
in a search for suspects police learned that jason mcguigan and his upstairs neighbor todd vincent got into a fight a
week or two before the murder mcguigan had slapped todd todd retaliated by choking jason or throwing jason to the
ground jason reported it to the police it turns out that there wasn't enough of a conflict there that anybody even got
charged todd denied any involvement in the murders gunshot residue tests on his hands were
negative but he said something curious that he didn't hear any gunshots from jason's apartment
ballistic experts say that's not necessarily unusual if they don't expect to hear a gunshot
when they do hear something they'll interpret it some other way next police started to run down the
vehicles parked outside jason's apartment one was jason's cadillac escalade the other was a red toyota
one of two vehicles owned by jason's friend 19 year old mark wu he was from taiwan the son of a wealthy
businessman and an honor student at the university of wisconsin when police tracked him down mark wu was
in new york city and about to board a plane to taiwan to visit his family for the summer vacation
mark said he left one of his two cars in jason's parking lot because it was safer
than parking in the city wu had a residence downtown in madison and parking down there is very difficult
and he had a number of vehicles and so by keeping one out at the jason mcguigan's residence in roanoke i didn't
have to worry about parking tickets on the night of the murders mark wu said he was in his apartment in
madison wisconsin and spent the night alone but mark's cell phone records indicated
he was in verona about 30 miles away from his apartment which is where jason mcguigan lived wu makes a call at 8 16
p.m and it hits the verona tower verizon tests show that any cell phone call that hits tower 165 the verona
tower is basically going to be confined to someone that's within the city limits
of verona he didn't really give a good explanation on why he had lied but the gist of it was that he didn't know
anything about these murders and he just thought that he should have basically an
alibi and mark wu had no history of violence or erratic behavior mark wu was about as unlikely a suspect in a
triple homicide as you're going to get his yearbook entries his classmates former teachers there wasn't really a
sense of of mark wu being a person who'd been in trouble i'd say naive helpless really nice guy
i was laughing out loud when the fbi suggested that he could be in a gang or something
but police found evidence that wu and mcguigan were both involved in gambling we learned that mark wu
through his family it appears primarily had resources so he had money to burn five days before the murders
mark wu gave jason mcguigan a large sum of money to bet on a professional baseball game
one game in particular was the major league baseball game pittsburgh versus cleveland
that game happened to go 15 innings and lasted about five hours mark wu used his cell phone to call a
sports betting service that night to find out which team won the pitcher takes the sign winds up the
pitch gets in the dirt casts the catcher the runner from third is heading home and
there's the throw safe the game ends in a wild pitch and pittsburgh wins 7-6 i don't believe it
for the second night in a row pittsburgh wins in 15 innings according to friends when mark realized
that he won he couldn't contain his excitement was ecstatic he's screaming he's excited 17 grand i won 17 grand
when mark wu asked jason mcguigan for the seventeen thousand dollars he had won he learned for the first time that
jason never placed the bet jason reacts to that by pulling his newly purchased glock pistol out of his pants
waves it adam and says shut the [ __ ] up there's in fact no bet placed nothing documents that woo had any money
put down jason did not have any money put down so this bet is completely a false bet
why jason didn't place the bet is unclear either he forgot or decided to pocket mark's money instead
regardless this gave mark wu 17 000 reasons to seek revenge investigators now suspected that jason
mcguigan was murdered because of his gambling activities in jason's personal files was evidence
he placed bets through olympic sports an offshore betting agency in the caribbean
he would call in and they would tell you the lines the spreads and what the picks
were on those games and he would then place bets on those gambling agencies set up shop outside
the country to circumvent u.s law enforcement all of his bets throughout his entire
account history with olympic sports were made by telephone olympic sports records all incoming
phone calls and the reason they do that is just in case somebody has an argument over whether or not they
made a bet or did not make a bet they've got some kind of proof to back up what happened
when police listened to the tapes they heard someone else on the phone with jason
okay the voice sounded like jason's friend mark wu and it was clear that wu was also
betting big on sporting events you have jason actually taking over grabbing the phone in some manner because you can
hear the voice change on the tapes you can also hear him in the background telling what to do so you can see that
mcguigan is really sort of the mastermind behind any of this gambling that's going on i'd like
to know who the pitchers are for the baseball game atlantic at new york no atlanta braves
yeah it should be madison club madison glavin yes sir all plays my bet um baseball and he didn't know what he was
doing he didn't know pitcher's names he didn't know team names he didn't understand the odds
he really had no idea what he was doing an investigation into mark wu's finances
revealed a telling piece of information when we began to discover that mark wu had
over a four or five month period drawn more than seventy thousand dollars out of his bank account that mark wu was
telling investigators that he you know at one occasion had dropped fifteen thousand dollars on a single bet
and investigators already knew there was a disagreement about the baseball bat and that mark wu believed
jason owed him 17 000 so it tells us that there's definitely some money issues going on between the
two of them and they're very severe in nature mark gave police permission to search
his apartment they found no bloody clothes or weapons but in the parking lot was the second
vehicle mark wu owned this one was silver like the one seen following jason mcguigan the afternoon before the
murders inside was the owner's manual for a glock nine millimeter pistol like the
one missing from jason's apartment the same caliber weapon used in the murders ballistic expert bill newhouse compared
the shell casings from the murder scene to the ones provided by the manufacturer
when jason purchased the weapon it was clearly printed as having been cartridge casings fired in and it
specified the glock pistol which had been fired in with the serial number and really nice information that we don't
see very often they matched proving that it was jason's own weapon that killed him that's the
only time i've encountered that in 30 some years of doing these kind of cases hoping to find the murder weapon
police searched the garbage dumpster behind mark wu's apartment instead they found a pair of sandals in
a white plastic bag along with some of mark wu's credit card receipts police also checked other dumpsters in a
four block radius they find out specifically where that particular garbage would be dumped
and they dig and they you know do that dirty work that so often is uh the key to solving crime
and they find this gun case we found two halves of a glock gun case um they're more of a plastic nature they
were snapped in half and they were one was tied off in one baggy and one was found independently
to see if the case contained any fingerprints forensic analyst mike riddle used super glue fuming a process
where the chemicals from heated super glue adhere to finger oils you hang it in there with super
glue over a heat source and add a little bit of humidity to it and the fatty acids and the fingerprints
absorb the super glue and harden and set the print riddle saw what he thought might be some
partial prince and used yellow dye to enhance the image these partial prints were in an unusual
location they were in one of the corners in a curved portion of the gun case partially covered by the
foam rubber that was in there had i not removed the foam rubber i probably would
not have been able to develop these prints using super glue the prince belonged to mark wu
and on the sandals from the garbage dumpster scientists found tiny mist like droplets of blood
i knew that that size was indicative of the application of what i would term a high energy application of force to the
blood source that's consistent with the bullet impact of course dna testing revealed the blood on the
sandals came from the youngest murder victim 17 year old dustin wilson ironically the dumpster should have been
empty the day after the murders but the garbage truck driver didn't pick up that
day we spoke to the garbage collector and he admitted that he often fibs on the document indicating that he did pick
it up when in fact he does not pick it up mark wu was arrested and charged with three counts of first-degree murder
but he would never be convicted [Music] marco's parents flew to the united states from taiwan because they sensed
trouble mark had withdrawn over seventy thousand dollars from his bank account and
wouldn't give his parents an explanation wu had been involved in some sort of money losses
and in their words hadn't been a very good boy and they were taking him back to taiwan to make him sort of a good boy
again prosecutors say mark wu tried to collect the seventeen thousand dollars jason mcguigan owed him
for the baseball bet he wanted to deposit this money into his bank account to placate his parents
but jason didn't place the bet so he refused to pay around 3 p.m on the day of the murders a
witness saw jason mcguigan's friends threaten mark wu angry apparently because wu had been following them
later that night around 8 p.m mark broke into jason's apartment but jason wasn't
there so he stole jason's nine millimeter glock pistol [Music] then call jason asking him
what time he was coming home [Music] mark wu returned to jason's apartment around midnight and jason still wasn't
there instead jason's two friends were in the living room asleep the ones who harassed him a few hours
earlier mark wu killed them to eliminate potential witnesses in doing so he got dustin wilson's blood
on his sandals [Music] jason didn't come home until close to 2 a.m and mark was waiting for him
[Applause] [Music] again mark demanded his 17 thousand dollars but jason didn't have that kind
of money in his apartment in desperation he handed mark the key to his safe deposit box
then mark shot jason with his own gun no one knows what mark did with his bloody clothes and jason's gun
he threw the gun case containing his fingerprints in a garbage can a few blocks from his home
he put his bloody sandals in a garbage bag and tossed them into the dumpster behind his apartment with the
identification provided by his credit card receipts the next morning mark flew to
new york city with his parents they were about to leave for taiwan when police intervened
he's holding a plane ticket to taiwan a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the united
states if mark wu gets to taiwan mark wu never becomes the criminal defendant in this triple
homicide but the day before the trial there was a stunning development mark wu hanged himself in his jail cell
he's about to be essentially humiliated in the public his parents are going to find out what he
did he's 20 years old he's going to prison for the rest of his life he killed these three boys
to try to cover up what he had done with all his parents money then he had to kill himself
again at the last minute to cover up what he had done and not face the truth as a courtesy to the victims families
prosecutors laid out their entire case just as they would have presented it to the jury
and the science left no doubt there would have been a conviction we gave what would have been an opening
statement or a closing statement to these family members and went through the evidence we had so that they knew
we took care of their family members their friends killer that this was the right person there's not somebody else
out there to me they showed that that wu was guilty and it was one of the better things that
they ever could have done for us short of us having an actual trial the dna spatter the shell casings
and the fingerprints are all what really wrap up this case and take it from a circumstantial case to a case that's
proven by forensic evidence [Music] [Music] [Music] you

One warm summer afternoon, the town of Verona, Wisconsin faced its first triple homicide. To solve the case, investigators had to delve into the world of high rollers and offshore betting.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

A gambling dispute leads to a triple homicide and betrayal among friends.

Key points

The Rise of Gambling. Gambling has become more visible and accessible, almost like a sport on campuses.
The Murder of Jason McGuigan. Jason McGuigan was found murdered in his apartment, raising questions about his gambling activities.
The Shocking Revelation. Witnesses linked the murder victims to a road rage incident just hours before their deaths.
Mark Wu's Alibi. Mark Wu claimed he was in Madison, but cell records placed him near the crime scene.
Mark Wu's Suicide. Just before his trial, Mark Wu hanged himself in jail, avoiding public humiliation.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Gambling can put your money at risk.

0:21WatchJan 20, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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