Horrific Murders at Home | "48 Hours" Full Episodes | Forensic Files

[Music] This wasn't just a crime scene, was it? No, it was not. This one was bad. Two innocent people that were on
their first date had their lives destroyed. For what reason? How well did Leslie Reeves know Chris
Smith first date? Chris was in a band and a singer and they had connected and he
asked her out. The night before Thanksgiving they decided just to meet up and go to the
bar. He lived 65 miles away in a really small farming community. The bar that night was very busy. The
place was packed wallto-wall. Chris and Leslie were talking a lot, laughing, getting along
with everyone around them. She texted me around 10:00 and she said, "Everything's
going okay." She did then text a second text that said, "I feel like something's
a little bit off or something. I'm not sure what she meant." Was that text the last time you heard from Leslie Reeves?
Mhm. Yes, it was. [Music] Did you try texting her in the morning? Mhm. And did she respond? No.
I just started driving towards Farmersville cuz I had the address and called the police department in that
area. Montgomery County Sheriff's Office. This is Jeff. Hi. I'm gravely concerned about my friends. Can someone
do a welfare check? What are you feeling at this point? Nana, a lot of anxiety because I don't know what I'm going to
walk into uh going up there to this house. I pulled up in front of the address and then who came while you're
sitting there? While I'm sitting there, uh who's this uh woman parked? I said, "Well, maybe I'll roll
my window down and talk to her." I asked her if she was checking on Chris. And she said she was checking on her friend.
And that's when I went up to the door. I saw the back door was broken. And then I saw Chris laying there. And
then I ran back to my car and called 911. Nobody's answering the door. And and the back window shattered. And
there's a body. And there's a foot I saw on the floor. I'm only 16. I can't deal with this.
I was in shock. I think sheriff's office. Jeff. Jeff, give me some help. I got one alive and one dead.
I just remember them bringing Chris out on the stretcher to the ambulance. I remember there being a sheet over him.
So, it made me panic a little bit. I got a call from our command center in Springfield.
So, you are the lead crime scene investigator? Yes. Were you really prepared for what you faced when you
walked into that house? I was not. Why would somebody do this to him? Why would they try to hurt my baby? That's
all I kept thinking. He's my baby. Someone hurt him. Going on a first date and they both end up getting shot is
insane. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] On the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day
2021, Nanette Styber sat in her car and watched anxiously as EMTs and Montgomery
County Sheriff's deputies descended on a house in the tiny village of Farmersville, Illinois.
I was quite upset and kind of going crazy in the car. Nette had been unable to reach her
good friend Leslie Reeves. Nanette knew Leslie had gone to that house the night before to go on a
first date with Chris Smith, a man she had met online. She was very excited. She thought, "Oh, this will this might
be um a really good connection." But now Nette was worried. She'd seen Chris get taken away in an ambulance,
but there was no sign of Leslie. I kept hoping, you know, okay, bring Leslie out, please.
Finally, a detective approached and asked Nette for a photo of Leslie. She showed him her phone and he gave her the
horrible news. I'm so sorry to have to tell you this. Your friend has um been murdered, you know, shot. He
said he didn't tell me where, but he did say, "I want you to know that she went very quickly."
EMTs have found Chris barely conscious and unable to say anything about the shooting. They rushed him to the
hospital and deputies searched the house. Later that day, crime scene investigator Josh Eastston of the
Illinois State Police was called to the scene and he began cataloging the mayhem
inside. What do you see when you first approached the door? I noticed the side door of the house, the glass in the door
has been broken out. The refrigerator was pulled away from the wall. The kitchen table was pushed. The the chairs
were knocked over. No weapon was found, leading investigators to suspect that a third person was involved. Een took note
of every detail, including the burnt pizza in the oven. I assume that maybe they were cooking a pizza for the night
and the suspect shows up at the door. They both tried to fight him off and when Chris was shot, Leslie went to the
living room to try to hide. How many times was she shot? She was only shot one time in the head. In the head.
Leslie's body was in the living room while Chris had been found in the kitchen. Een said of the
1,800 crime scenes he had been to, this was one of the most horrific. There was blood everywhere, the cabinets, the
refrigerator, the countertop. There was blood from corner to corner in the kitchen.
Eastston spotted two silver colored bullet casings from a 9 mm gun, one in the kitchen and the other near Leslie's
body. As Eastston processed the scene, detectives began learning about the victims. Chris Smith was a 48-year-old
divorced father who worked for a pool contractor. Chris was a nice guy. He would hang out here frequently, was
friends with most people in town. Everybody knew him. Bartender Dena Lrand says Chris was well known in town as the
guy who grew banana trees and giant pumpkins. I remember one Halloween he donated hundreds of pumpkins for
decorations for any of the kids to paint. He gave back to his community. Did either one of you ever worry about
Chris? No. No. Sharon Castanza is Chris's mother, Ashley Hulcom. his sister. Chris is a
stayhome person that literally would just work in his backyard. Chris lived with a dog named Tiki. And
an EMT told the family that Tiki may have helped Chris make it through the night by huddling with him for the
roughly 12 hours that Chris was bleeding before being rescued. I think Tikki protected Chris. I think she probably
laid right next to him. Chris's close-knit family could not imagine anyone wanting to kill him. It
was like, "No way. How? Why? Like, who?" Yeah. Who would have done that? Investigators had the same questions
about Leslie and learned that she was a divorced mother of two children who lived in Troy, about an hour south of
Farmersville. Although Leslie had a master's degree in engineering, she chose instead to teach
Pilates and to promote self-defense classes for women. Hi, I'm Leslie from All You Studio and Leslie posted this
video to her YouTube channel to advertise one of her classes. Empower yourself against aggression and assault
as we teach you easy to learn self-defense techniques. Power up. Leslie tried to help women in abusive
relationships, but friends say she had her own troubles. Nanette told deputies she was worried about a former
boyfriend, a contractor by the name of Robert Tar known as Bobby. She said, "I am going to completely block Bobby from
email, texts, phone calls. I I have to go no contact." Later that evening, news of Leslie's
murder began circulating and reached another close friend, Amy Steinhower. She had met Tar, a divorced father of
three, and did not have a good impression of him. But you never see someone and think that they can kill my
friend. Amy called the sheriff's office that night to give them Tar's name. By then, detectives had already set out
to find Bobby Tar. While 85 miles to the north, surgeons were fighting to try to
save the life of Chris Smith. A bullet still lodged in his brain. [Music] I just wanted to get there. I just
wanted to get there as fast as I could. After learning that Chris had been shot in the head, his family rushed to the
hospital in Springfield, Illinois, 2 hours from their home, I was on the phone to everyone I could think of cuz I
just needed prayers from everybody. Doctors removed part of Chris's skull and some bullet fragments in his brain
before putting him in a medically induced coma. His family, struggling to piece together what had happened,
learned that he had been out with a woman named Leslie Reeves. Had you ever heard the name Leslie Reeves before? No.
I looked her up and then I tried to reach out to her friends and then I found my best friend Nanette. Nanette
told them the same thing she had told investigators. She suspected Leslie's ex-boyfriend, Bobby
Tar. That night, sheriff's deputies went to Tar's home in Collinsville, an hour south of the crime scene. Authorities
say he never asked why they wanted to talk to him, and he agreed to go to the police station without a lawyer. T
Margaret. Although her friend said the couple had broken up, Tar told investigators that he and Leslie were
still together. You and Leslie have a lot of problems. I would say no worse than any
average couple. It was Leslie that detectives wanted to talk about. I want you to to dig down deep here and be as
honest with me as you can. Okay. Um Leslie is dead. What? Can you help me shed some light on
this? How did she die? She was murdered. What happened? That's why we're here with
you. You help me believe that you're not involved in this. I'm not involved in anything. Investigators asked Tar about
Farmersville, the scene of the crime. You know what Farmersville is? Farmersville.
No, I can't say I do. I've never been there. I've never heard of it. And they asked Tar where he had been the night
before Thanksgiving. I went to a buddy of mine's house. He left and left me some money
out of his shop and I had to go pick it up. The friend lived a short distance from Tar's home. Remember what time you
came back? Yeah, it wasn't that long. um maybe 6:30ish, something like that. Investigators believe the shooting took
place sometime early on Thanksgiving morning after 1:00 a.m. Tar said after he got back, he was home all night. You
can talk to my daughter about me being home. That's exactly what they did. Detectives brought Tar's 17-year-old
daughter, Shelby, to a different room at the police station, and she told them that her father actually left home twice
that night. So, first time he left was roughly 6:30, right? And then he he came home about a half hour later. They said
he had to go back, right? And then it was 9:15ish when he got back home. Yeah. Shelby said he had been gone for more
than 2 hours. And when he got home, he was upset. He gets home, he was crying. He was sobbing. He said he missed
Leslie. Shelby said she went to sleep around 9:30 and was awakened by her father around 2:45 a.m. He started
laundry. He was pacing, walking around, and he was like, "I can't sleep." Detectives went back to Tar and told him
Shelby's story did not match his. Tar then changed his story and said he had gone to his friend's house twice, but
still insisted he was home by 8. As Tar sat at the police station, detectives searched his house and found his phone
and a Glock pistol. Shelby had told them her father had a different gun, but they
didn't find it. It's little. It's like this big. I like the light green, but like the army green. Shelby told
investigators she had seen it the day before Thanksgiving in her father's sock drawer yesterday morning. Actually, I
think it's so soft and it was there. No, it's not. Was there yesterday and gone today? Okay. Bobby Tar sat at the police
station overnight while authorities continued to investigate. They had already learned that his car had been
captured by license plate reader cameras. Just after midnight, the night of the shooting, the cameras were near a
gas station, and investigators discovered that Tar had bought gas there just after midnight. Back at the police
station, they confronted him with a gas station receipt. So, you're a liar? Cuz I don't remember doing it. You don't
remember being out after midnight when you have told us you are 100% positive? The gas station is here in Troy. Yes.
And the murder occurred here in Farmersville. Correct. The gas station was near Tar's home, an hour from the
crime scene. Andrew Affronty is the Montgomery County States attorney. He has donia, a condition that causes
muscle ticks and tremors. So why is it significant? Cuz it So he went out and got some gas. It was significant to us
cuz why would he lie about it? wanted that fuel. What does that prove? Investigators believed it was proof Tar
was lying about his whereabouts that night. They placed him under arrest. You're under arrest for murder.
A fronti says they arrested Tar immediately because they feared Chris's life was in
danger and they hadn't found the murder weapon. if he was out of custody, could he take further steps to dispose of the
evidence? Just one day after Leslie Reeves was killed and Chris Smith was left fighting
for his life, investigators believe they had the man responsible in custody. I'm
Aaron Morardi. Bobby Tar. But in his only media interview, Bobby [ __ ] tells 48 hours they got the wrong guy. There
is so many things untold that will prove my innocence. Bobby Tar charged with the
murder of Leslie Reeves and the attempted murder of Chris Smith is nothing if not unflapable. Did you kill
Leslie Reeves? No. Did you shoot Chris Smith? No. He kept his cool even when confronted with a litany of lies he told
investigators. You told the police you only left the house once. That wasn't true. Correct. You told the
police you had no idea where Farmersville is. That was a lie. Mhm. You lied about getting gas in your car
that night. Mhm. When he spoke with us, Tara admitted he was at Christmas house the night before Thanksgiving, placing
himself at the scene of the crime. He says the night began when he met Leslie at her part-time job at this loft store.
She had said she was going to go meet some friends because one of their friends was playing in a band. and she
asked me if I wanted to go. I said, "Well, you know, I would go, but I have my youngest daughter staying with me for
a week." Tar says that when he declined the invitation, Leslie asked if he would
follow her to Farmersville because her van was unreliable. And so he did. That makes no sense to Leslie's friend Amy
Steinhower. She was terrified of him and rightfully so. Just a few weeks earlier, Amy says
Leslie told her that Tar had shown up while she was on a first date with a different guy. After that incident,
Leslie told Amy she was frightened by Tar and texted Amy. I could be killed by him someday if I don't cut all contact.
So, you're telling me now that this woman who was scared of you, who had actually texted a friend that she
thought you might kill her, asked you to follow her to another man's house? Mhm.
Does that make any sense? No, I understand. Um, so I don't understand that text in general. Why did she think
you might kill her? I don't know. I've got no clue. Tar says Leslie lied to her friends
about their relationship. He insists she asked him to follow her north to Farmersville. So I went with her up
there. I think we arrived there around 7:30. I parked in front of her van in front of his house. That's as far as I
went. I left. I never went back to Farmersville again. If he had an innocent explanation for
why he was in Farmersville, why did he lie to detectives? My daughter, her and Leslie, there was a little bit of
tension between both them. I did not want her to know that I was going to meet Leslie that night. Tar claims that
after he lied to his daughter Shelby about seeing Leslie, he stuck to that lie at the police station because he was
afraid they would tell her. And he never corrected those lies, even when detectives arrested him. Why not just
say, "Look, between you and me, I lied to my daughter, so let me tell you the truth, but let's just not share that
with her." Why wouldn't you do that? I should have done it. He's quick to point out the lack of physical evidence
connecting him to the bloody crime scene. Investigators searched his white Jetta, but did not find any shards of
glass or blood stains. Two tests by the state police were done on my car. Zero blood found in my car. There's zero DNA
of mine at the crime scene. Anything from the crime scene in my car or on me or any of my clothing or my
shoes. Zero. Prosecutor affronty has to concede that point. Was any of Ty's DNA found inside
the house? No. Were any of his fingerprints found inside the house? No. And authorities still had not found the
murder weapon. But a week after the shooting, they got a phone call from Tar's friend, Billy Adams. Adams said T
called him from jail. That call was recorded. What's your day look like today? Cuz I need 10 minutes of your
time. Tar asked Adams to go to his house and look for some deck brackets. I got some special aluminum brackets and that
I need you to get because they're for another job that I didn't tell dad about yet. So, don't say
nothing to him. Instead, Adams contacted the sheriff's office. Deputies suspected
Tar knew the phone call was being recorded and was speaking to his friend in code about something other than deck
brackets. Yeah, get them and get rid of them. They thought that was suspicious, which was
why they went over and searched. Investigators were on their hands and knees in Tar's yard looking for a gun.
Dan Folultz is Tar's defense attorney. They searched that area thoroughly. No gun. You know what? They did find deck
brackets. A few days later, they got another phone call, this time from Tar's brother, asking them to come back to the
house. Tar's family gave deputies a Ziploc bag they said they had found in the same yard that had been searched
just days earlier. Inside a Springfield Hellcat 9 mm pistol and silvercoled ammunition. The Illinois State Police
determined the gun was the murder weapon and the ammunition matched the casings found at the crime scene. We still to
this day don't know how that ended up there specifically in the spot that they searched. Are you saying you were set
up? Someone was framing you? Yes. But if someone was framing Tar, he or she would have to be pretty
detailoriented, the state police say Tar's fingerprint was on the Ziploc bag. He is adamant that he would not have
been dumb enough that he would have carried it all the way back to his home and said, "Hm, where would I put this
gun on my 1 acre lot? I think I'll put it next to the front door." And Tar points out neither his prints nor DNA
were found on the gun itself. Nothing on the firearm. No DNA, no prints of mine on the firearm. What I think what
happened is is that the gun was clicked and then Mr. Tar just missed a spot. That spot was Leslie's DNA, say police
found on the guide rod of the gun. Tar's explanation, the gun wasn't his. It belonged to Leslie. I purchased the
Hellcat and Leslie purchased it from me. As investigators continued to build a case against Bobby Tar, they say he was
hatching a plan to silence the only eyewitness. Did you ask a inmate to shoot Chris Smith?
What do you make of Bobby Tar's story? Chat now with the 48 Hours team on Facebook and
[Music] X. Leslie accompanied me here on several occasions. If there's anyone who knew
what guns Leslie Reeves owned, it's Howard Bolton, her close friend and firearm instructor. When I would hold
classes, she would actually shoot with us. Leslie was becoming a very good shot. Bolton says Leslie had organized a
class called Girls with Guns not long before she was murdered. We put the girls through their paces. They would
move and fire. They would go forward and fire. They would come back and fire. And
Leslie did very, very well at that. Bobby Tar insisted to us that Leslie owned the Hellcat that was used to kill
her, but Howard says he never saw her use it. Leslie never brought a Springfield, let alone a Hellcat, to
class. So then, how did Leslie's DNA get on the guide rod of the murder weapon? Howard believes that Leslie's DNA could
only be on that guide rod if the gun was fired at her at close range. So when he
shot her, wherever it was he shot her would have contaminated that part of the gun. In fact, Howard says Leslie owned a
different gun. Her friends say they wish she had taken it with her the night she
was killed. Had Leslie taken the gun with her, I assure you the outcome would have been different.
Tar declared his innocence, but the case against him could hinge on what Chris Smith, the only survivor, remembers.
Would he be able to identify him? That was the question. As Chris remained in a coma, we were talking to him, singing to
him, and I was always holding his hand. Hallelu. While Chris Smith lay helpless,
authorities say Tar was plotting to silence him forever. A grand jury indicted Tar on
two counts of solicitation of murder. Those charges are based on allegations by an inmate who says Tar paid him
$10,000 to shoot and kill the lead detective. And Chris, did you ask a inmate to shoot Chris Smith? No, ma'am.
And to kill Detective Roach? No, ma'am. Tar says the alleged plot was a lie concocted by a former cellmate. Tar says
he loaned that cellmate $10,000 for his bond and that it had nothing to do with Chris Smith. Were you worried he was
going to testify and point to you as a shooter? No, I was not worried one iota. The truth was that no one knew what
Chris Smith remembered. The first time he regained consciousness was in early January
2022, about 2 months after the shooting. Like eggs. Egg young. Chris's voice was
so weak in those early days. It's already done over there. That is old friend Mark Rearen, a talk show host in
St. Louis. 522 971 FM talk barely recognized Chris on the phone. I could not believe that I was hearing from this
guy and I cried. He cried. Just talking about that moment really brings me chills because I just thought he was
never going to be someone that was in my life ever again. What did Chris tell you? Well, when Chris came on of this, I
was pretty sensitive to ask him about what had happened that night because I think I was a little afraid of even
having those conversations. So, most of the conversations that we had were really focused on, hey, how are you? Are
you going to be okay? After intense physical therapy, he's made incredible strides. He's much stronger than when he
awoke from a coma, but he discovered there are gaps in his memory. What does he remember from that terrible
night? I wish to God I could remember something. I mean, even just a smidgen of something, but I remember nothing. He
remembers nothing of the shooting or Leslie Reeves. I said, "Who the heck's Lesie? I don't know Leslie." You had no
idea. No, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Is Chris the same person who used to come on your show before he was shot? Yeah. I
think at the core, he's still the same guy that I knew. He's still the smartass. He's still the guy that's
going to talk about how good he is and how good he was and how much he could lift weights.
Chris works out at the gym most mornings trying to regain muscle so that someday
he'll be able to walk without assistance. Straight curve. He's even back to being the lead singer
in his rock and roll band. I don't know how he did make it. I don't understand how he did. He's a miracle.
But Chris is aware his life is very different from what it once was. So, I'm half the man I used to be, but I'm
trying to get it back as hard as I can. And then my left leg is uh partially paralyzed from my hip to my knee, then
from my knee to my toes, completely paralyzed. So, if there's any neurosurgeons out there, any researchers
out there, please get a hold of me. I'll be your guinea pig. Just make me normal
and give my life back, please. It's tough, isn't it, Chris? It's tough. Doesn't even describe it.
Doesn't even describe it. Chris is resigned to living with part of that hollow point bullet in his brain.
Doctors say it's in a spot that makes it too dangerous to remove. So, that's where you got shot? Yep.
Right here. There's a Yep. You still feel it in my skull? Right there. After decades on his own, Chris had to move
back into his mother's house. I thank my blessings daily that he's here with us.
I just wish that this guy didn't take everything away from him. Chris visits with his loyal dog, Tikki, but no longer
lives with her. And he'd love to see his 12-year-old daughter more often, but he
can't drive, and he's living in St. Louis, almost 2 hours away from his daughter and ex-wife. I miss her. She
was my little pee in the pod. I mean, we did everything together. The trial of Robert Tar was set for
April 2024, but Chris would not be there. He told the prosecutor he was too angry to attend. You didn't think you'd
be able to just sit there. Oh, no. No way. I I know myself. I There's no way. No. But Chris's alleged shooter, Bobby
Tar, will be there. and he said he was eager to tell the jury that he's not a violent man. But on this one night early
morning, did you snap? No, that's not my nature. I don't lose it and snap. Follow along with Chris's remarkable
story at 48 hours.com. [Music] When Bobby Tar went on trial in April 2024, prosecutors told the jury that he
killed Leslie Reeves rather than allow her to live the life she wanted, a life without him. Mr. Tar couldn't deal with
the fact that Leslie was seeing somebody else and he had to go and take care of it.
Andrew Aphrante says Tar secretly followed Leslie to Farmersville early that evening and shortly afterwards his
phone began showing some interesting activity. He had actually searched Chris Smith on his phone. It tried to find his
Facebook profile. Tar headed home and texted his friend Billy Adams. I don't feel like she would drive that far for a
party or go out with a girlfriend. I think it's for a dude. He also searched whether police could track his phone if
he was using a VPN, a virtual private network. He was researching to determine whether
or not that would mask where his location was while he was using the phone. Authorities say around midnight,
Tar left home, stopping at that gas station. And then according to a fronti surveillance videos and cell tower
records show that tar drove back to Farmersville. You believe he intended to kill both Chris and Leslie? I 100%
believe that he went up there with the intent to do serious harm to both of them. With one victim dead and the other
with no memory, it's difficult to say with certainty what happened, but the prosecution argued that sometime after
1:00 a.m., Bobby Tar tried to enter through the back door of Christmas house. Leslie and Chris tried to keep
him out. There was some kind of altercation or struggle, and that's when the glass was
broken. Crime scene investigator Josh Eastston told the jury what he had observed
inside the kitchen. The refrigerator was pulled away from the wall where it appeared it normally was. Prosecutors
believe Leslie was trying to use the refrigerator to block the door. And based on where Chris was shot in his
head, they think he was crouching down to help Leslie. I think that while Chris was crouched
down trying to hold the door shut, Bobby shot through the door and struck Chris.
With Chris incapacitated, Aphrante says Leslie hid in the living room. Tar tracked her down, shot, and killed her.
I strongly believe that he walked in and executed her. Defense attorney Dan Folz
disputes all of that. There is simply no evidence that that's what happened. There's no evidence that Leslie pushed
the refrigerator. There's no fingerprints and blood on the refrigerator of Leslie's. Folult says
evidence of a fight in the kitchen tells a different story. The amount of blood in that kitchen was astonishing. From
looking at that crime scene, do you believe that Christopher Smith had to fight his his asalent in the kitchen? It
would appear to me that there was some significant struggle in that kitchen between him and someone else. And he
says the asalent could not have been Bobby Tar because he would have been covered in blood. They did not identify
a single piece of DNA in his car. They didn't identify a bloody fingerprint. They did not identify anything tying him
to that crime scene. But prosecutors argued the house wasn't bloody when Tar left. They said Chris bled heavily in
the 12 hours it took for help to arrive. And while the prosecution did not have a
lot of forensic evidence linking Tar to the crime scene, a fronti says his phone
activity, his lies to investigators, and the evidence found on the Hellcat all prove his guilt. When you put all of
that together, that's when you get the clear picture of what happened. When it was the defense's turn, Tar says he
wanted to tell his story to the jury, but he chose not to testify. Why didn't you just decide you
were going to talk to the jury and tell this story if in fact you have a story to tell? I should have. I very well
should have. We made a strategic decision because it may have opened the door for a whole lot
of other more damaging evidence to be used uh to cross-examine him. The defense didn't put on any witnesses and
counted on the jury to find reasonable doubt in the lack of physical evidence. After 3 hours, the jury found
Bobby Tar guilty of firstdegree murder and attempted murder. Everyone clapped and Bobby just sat there shaking his
head. Two months later, Tar was back in court for sentencing and this time so was
Chris to tell the judge how the shooting impacted him and his family. Cameras were not allowed in the courtroom.
Lost my house, lost my truck. I've literally lost my life without being killed. Tar also spoke and denied shooting
Leslie and Chris. The judge sentenced him to 85 years. I hope the rest of his time on this earth is hell.
[Music] Leslie Reeves friends are focused on keeping her memory alive. She was a
light of a lot of people's lives. She was always smiling. She was a very good mother.
lived for her kids and was an advocate and champion of women, women's rights, and especially women that were abused.
If it can happen to her, it could happen to anyone. So, we all need to be careful. Chris Smith says he never
expected he'd be a victim of domestic violence and cautions other men to take a hard look at their behavior. If guys,
you feel like that you want you want to hurt a woman, get help. While Chris mourns his old life, he's
writing a book about his experiences and says he's working to make what he calls
poor man's margaritas out of the lemons and limes he's been handed. I've got a doover. Good Lord, give me a doover. Not
many people get a second chance in life. Chris has found love with Michelle Alrech. She's an angel. Loving me and
accepting me the way that I am. He proposed to her on stage. I just asked her if she'd marry me. Guys,
what's the most important lesson out of all of this? Don't ever give up on anything. Ever. No matter how bad things
are, don't ever give up. [Music] As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to
watch. It was called Candyman. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder?
Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Eron
Morardi of 48 hours. And of all the cases I've covered, this is the one that troubles me most. Listen to Murder in
the Orange Grove, the troubled case against Crosley Green. Wherever you get your
[Music] podcasts, there's a saying here in Minnesota, Minnesota nice. And that Minnesota nice only goes so far. And
Heidi Fergus, she went all away. She was genuine and she loved deep. She definitely lived a life of love. That
was the mark that she left. And that's hard to let go. You know, this is a a terrible, terrible
incident. You know, we're hoping to find other physical evidence that might help
us lead us in a direction toward a suspect. The morning of April 25th, 2010, at 6:30 a.m., Heidi Fergus calls
911. Someone's trying to break into my home. She tells the state patrol dispatcher that someone is trying to
break into her house and she's trying to give her address. 1794 Mini Haha Avenue. While she's on
the phone, you can hear a loud noise and the phone goes dead. Well, I don't know where she went there.
Approximately a minute later, Nicholas Fergus calls 911, says that he and his wife have both been shot.
Okay. Are you in St. Paul, sir? St. Paul fire paramedics took Nick out to the ambulance and transported him to
Regent's Hospital. He had been shot in the leg. Heidi was struck in the back as she was trying to flee towards the
kitchen. It was a shotgun blast that killed her right away. The shotgun was laying inside the front door area.
There's a little foyer. Nick gave a brief story. He heard somebody fiddling around with the door
and that he then armed himself with a shotgun and that Nick and the intruder struggled over the shotgun. The
responding officers uh went up and down the block trying to talk to neighbors. I was next door housesitting when the
crime happened. Really, all I heard was kind of this agonizing yell of, "You shot her. You shot me."
It never felt right. The story never made sense to me. He tells investigators that he grabbed a shotgun, loaded it
with two shells, and then proceeded to have Heidi go down the stairs in front of him towards the very door that this
alleged burglar was at. Why you would send the unarmed person down in front of you is beyond me. To me, there were only
two people in that house when Heidi was killed. And they were Nick and Heidi. In order to believe that Nick
killed Heidi, you have to believe that a good man with no history of violence killed the woman that he loved more than
anything in life for no reason. That's what you have to believe. We can't get there.
[Music] [Music] Well, this area of St. Paul where Heidi and Nick Fus lived I would characterize as generally
a quiet neighborhood. Back in 2010, 9 years before she took charge of the Furus case, Detective
Nicole Cypes of the St. Paul Police Department was a patrol cop who worked this neighborhood. Do you remember first
hearing about the Fergus case? I do. Okay. It was early on a Sunday morning. The 911 call was at 6:30. Nick Fergus's
story of a burglar didn't make sense to Cypes. Most people are home at 6:30 on a
Sunday morning, especially in a family neighborhood like that. The last thing that most burglars want to encounter are
people. Did police ever have any luck tracking down the intruder that Nick described? No. You know, I'm looking. I
didn't see anybody come out of that house. Brandon O' Conor was housesitting next door to the Fcuses and taking care
of kittens. I was woken up by the kittens kind of walking around. Some noise caught my attention, so stuck my
head out the window, kind of listen. Brandon says he recalls hearing a muffled argument coming from the
Fergus's house, listening through an open window. That's when I ended up hearing what sounded like gunshots.
Around this time, Brandon said he also heard that voice crying out. Kind of this agonizing yell
of, "You shot her. You shot me. Uh, please, please, no." Something along those lines. And then then it was done.
First responders rushed to the scene. There was nothing they could do for Heidi. She was pronounced dead. Nick was
rushed to the hospital and treated for a gray gunshot wound to his leg. He seemed
not to be sure whether or not Heidi had been killed. Like I said, we'll do our best to find out how how Heidi's doing.
Hours later, Nick was transported to the St. Paul Police Department. Then Nick and I started to have our conversation
in the conference room. Sergeant Jim Gray took Nick's statement. You know, I know this is a very traumatic situation,
okay? and I'm just going to try and ease into it. Okay, so we'll go. Nick said the couple ordered in food the night
before and watched the movie Avatar. They went upstairs to their bedroom around 11:00 p.m. The next morning, Nick
got up around 6:00 a.m. to get a drink of water from the bathroom, go back to sleep, and just kind of fit fullfully
sleep for 10 or 15 minutes. And then I heard the screen door open. kind of let it go for a little while, but then I
started hearing filling with our doororknob. And is Heidi still sleeping then? Yeah. Okay. Like a rock. Nick said
he retrieved his shotgun from the closet. I keep two shells for it just in case things go weird. So when I heard
things this morning, I did load it and then I wake up Heidi. Okay. According to Nick, he told Heidi someone was trying
to break in and to call 911. as she spoke with the dispatcher. Someone's trying to break into my home. They
headed downstairs so they could get out of the house. What address are you at? All right. So, you going first down the
stairs or is she is she behind you or is she in front of you or what? Um, she's in front cuz I'm kind of trying to move
her along quickly. Nick said as they passed by the front door, it burst open. Guy that was there, I think he he
grabbed the barrel. I don't remember exactly what happened, but the gun went off. So my finger slipped onto the
trigger. Nick told Sergeant Gray during the struggle over the weapon. The gun fired.
Striking Heidi, who he said was in the kitchen. Okay. So the guns guns here, chest high. Yep. You and I are like
this. Yeah. And then the gun goes off. Mhm. I I mean I know it hit Heidi. I just I know it did. She was running
away, so it definitely hit her in the back. Hit her in the back. Yeah. I couldn't believe it. I I didn't want
to believe it. It can't be true. That's There's no way. Katina and Marcus Sarzen
mentored Heidi at Calvary Church. I think she's one of those uh people that you can't not like. Everyone liked
Heidi. She genuinely loved people. She was the life of the party. Always finding fun ways to engage people and u
she was very loyal. The couple met at the church and in 2005, Heidi, 20, and Nick, 22, got married. Nick Fergus had a
very warm and engaging personality, always smiling. He carried himself with confidence, and he had high
character, high integrity in the church. That was the reputation he'd built for himself. But just a few hours after
Heidi's death, Sergeant Jim Gray found himself questioning Nick Fergus's account. He couldn't figure out why the
couple would leave the safety of their bedroom. You come upstairs, you know, hate I hate to tell you this, but my
house, you know, I'm justified in killing you if you come break in my house. Yeah. And I guess Nick explained
that the couple had a plan in place. If they were ever in a precarious situation, they would avoid a
confrontation and escape to their car in the garage and get away. If we can save
ourselves, let's let's do that instead of getting into a situation where his story didn't make a lot of sense to me.
Sergeant Gray started probing into their marriage. You guys uh have any problems
or anything like that? Most just the normal stuff like um you know stresses about finances and quality time
and vacations, all that stuff. Yeah. But you guys aren't behind in the bills or anything like that. We have in the bills
um which is a little stressful. In fact, we were planning on moving tomorrow. Um
well, where? Well, we hadn't figured that out yet. We were and and this is a a hard it's a hard place for us. We were
foreclosing or we forclosed on our house. Nick revealed they were behind on their mortgage payments and just 24
hours away from being evicted from their home. Well, that's kind of I mean kind of close notice. It is. And I think the
reason is cuz we're both kind of dealing with the shape of the whole thing. Gray
says his suspicions were raised and minutes later he was struck by the way Nick asked about Heidi. Well, I just
want to know the final answer. The final answer on Heidi. She did make it. I figured that. I mean, is that
typically how someone asks if their loved one or spouse has been killed? Not only is that not typical that that's how
they'd ask it, but they wouldn't wait an hour and 40 minutes into this conversation to ask that question. I've
watched the interview obviously numerous times. And I understand people react to
trauma differently, but this was different than what I'd seen. Anybody that's watched
that interview cannot help but be struck by Nick's demeanor during it. And that demeanor was this was just another day.
This was something he had to get through. Skeptical of Nick's story, Sergeant Gray confronted Nick about what
happened that day. Nick, I you know, part of me wants to ask you this question. Did you have anything to do
with this? No, absolutely not. Okay. Absolutely not. All right. Why is there a party that wants to ask that? Well,
Nick, I'm I'm a police officer. Okay. I got to ask got to ask the tough questions. All right.
After the interview, Nick left the police station. That day, investigators returned to the Fergus home with a
search warrant. Gray says it did not look like anyone was planning to move out the next day. Nothing was packaged
up at all. The closet was still full of clothes. We noticed that there was still
food in the refrigerator. And there was something else that investigators questioned. We didn't see any signs of
forced entry into the house. Based off of the physical evidence at the scene, his version of the incident couldn't be
plausible. What do you think of Nick's story about the intruder? Chat now on Facebook and
X. 107 investigation. 48 hours after Nick Furus said an intruder shot and killed his wife Heidi,
police went back to the crime scene to check out his story. He told us that there was a life and death struggle
inside the house. But Sergeant Gray says the evidence at the crime scene didn't match Nick's account. There was a vase,
uh some receipts, a beer bottle, and none of that was knocked over. So, that kind of raised suspicion to us that if
there was such a struggle, why wasn't any of this stuff knocked over? Sergeant Gray says he examined the front door for
signs of a break-in and did notice some markings, but it wasn't anything new that would lead us to believe that uh
the door had been forced open the day of the murder. In his interview, Nick said
he heard someone fiddling with the front door from upstairs. And like, what are they doing? They just going like this?
Yeah, kind of like that. Yeah, just shaking the knob and shoving the door. That day, Sergeant Gray and his
colleagues did a reenactment. Morning, April 27th, 2010 to determine if they could hear the front door shaking from
the bedroom. We're in the bedroom looking. Sergeant Shackle and Sergeant Wright were upstairs in the bedroom. I'm
at the front door. So, let me know when you guys are ready and I'll I'll try the
knob for 15 seconds. Then we are ready. They could not hear me filling with the door.
Sorry. Sergeant Gray says he also doubted Nick's story about the couple's eviction and a scheduled move the day
after Heidi was shot. There didn't appear to be anything boxed up or packaged up to
go. There were a few empty boxes in the dining room area. There was not a grand stack of boxes or anything for that
matter that would lead us to believe that they were going to pack up all in one day. Meanwhile, Heidi's mentors from
Calvary Church, Marcus and Kina, were learning the details about her death and the eviction. It It just didn't add up.
It just something wasn't right with that story. It seemed so out of the ordinary
that she would be moving and not have notified anyone, not have anything prepared for that because she planned
things out and she liked things to be orderly. On April 30th, 2010, 5 days after her passing, Marcus and Kina
attended Heidi's funeral. Yeah, the atmosphere at the funeral was there was a lot of emotion. At the
funeral, Marcus and Cina say they were struck by Nick's demeanor. I remember going through the receiving line and
shaking his hand. There was no grief showing. It just felt like he lacked emotion.
Marcus says he went as far as asking some of the couple's friends if Nick could have shot his wife. And the answer
I got was no. There's no way that Nick killed Heidi. He loved her. There there's just no way he could have done
that. and I just wasn't so sure about that. From what we gathered during our investigation, Nick and Heidi were in a
loving relationship. There was no problems or issues that anybody saw. Your first impression upon meeting Nick
Furus is no way in the world could he have committed a violent act. The day after the shooting, Nick's
family hired attorney Joe Freriedberg, who advised Nick to stop talking to the police. It didn't take long to realize
that he was being looked at as a suspect. When investigators asked Nick to sit down with their artist to draw a
sketch of the intruder, Freiriededberg advised him not to. They were going to use it as an opportunity to further
interview him. Instead, Nick and his attorney hired their own sketch artist. It was quite
odd that Nick would work with a private sketch artist and brought that drawing to police. That's the original.
And at that point, we were basically told that Nick would not be answering any more questions with regards to our
investigation. Investigators released Nick's sketch to the public, but it didn't generate any
leads. They kept working the case. Nick moved out of their home a few weeks after Heidi's
death. Two months later, he began a friendship with the sister of one of Heidi's best friends, Rachel Sanchez,
who was going through a divorce. At the time, I thought because we shared something traumatic, there was a deep
connection there. because I had come out of something traumatic myself in a relationship. I think Nick seemed to be
handling things well. It felt like he was very grounded. He was with his friends a lot and they were processing
together. So, I think just his his steadiness was an attractive quality. Rachel says the two bonded over their
faith. They began dating in the spring of 2011. At the time, God played a big part in my life. And I think that's
another quality that I saw in him, that he he loved God like I did. One year into their relationship, Nick
proposed. I knew it was coming. We had looked at rings beforehand, so it wasn't really a huge surprise. And a few months
later, the couple married. They started a family. We did have kids pretty quickly. and soon were the parents of
three children. He absolutely loves his kids so much. Andrew and Emily Ericson are friends of Nick. They say for a long
time, Nick didn't talk much about Heidi's murder. It just didn't seem like there was a lot of room for his grief
during that time. But they say when he did talk about it, his story was always the same. What did he tell you? Same
thing he's always told everyone from the first day. same thing he'd tell you today that someone was breaking into the
house and they were going to try to get out and there was an altercation and tragically Heidi was
killed. Investigators still did not believe that story. But 5 years after Heidi's death, with little movement in
the case, they finally got a break. Someone called in a tip. there was somebody that looked exactly like the
sketch and put a name to Nick's sketch. Somebody called said, "I have an experience with this guy. I think I know
who it is." [Music] After five years without a break in Heidi Fergus's murder case, out of the
blue, a tipster called police with a name after seeing this sketch of the suspect. But there was a problem, says
investigator Cypes. He was already in prison on the date of Heidi's death. Nick's second wife, Rachel, says her
husband rarely talked about the case being solved. But I had asked him, "Are you going to put effort into seeing if
you can find the person that did this?" He didn't reach out to anyone as far as I know. I know that from his lawyers, he
was told to just stay silent. Police found it odd Nick never checked in. through four investigators in this case.
He never contacted one of us to ask the status. Was this case ever considered a cold case? It wasn't ever considered a
cold case because prosecutors Rachel Crocker and Elizabeth Lawman joined the investigation in 2015. There just was
not a lot of new information coming in. Heidi's family would check in on her birthday. Is there anything new
development? And there would be new developments when Detective Cypes took over Heidi's case in 2019. Seems her
fresh set of eyes really made a huge difference. It was absolutely critical. I think Cypes definitely restarted
something. Cypes dug deep, reviewing the entire case file, including an examination of a financial timeline she
compiled with the help of the FBI. I had the luxury of looking back on all of these things several years
later. Cypes learned Nick worked at his family's carpet installation business. They were contractors for Home
Depot. Heidi was a clerk at a financial services company in St. Paul. Their combined income was about $70,000 a
year. They seemed like they were on top of all the bills before they bought the house.
But Lawman says the home purchase in 2007 strained the couple's finances and that home was just too much for
them. By the time Heidi died in April of 2010, the couple was deeply in debt. He
had not paid the mortgage in 22 months. In fact, the couple had lost their home to foreclosure and would be forced to
move out. But Cypes discovered Heidi apparently had no idea. After reviewing the couple's texts
and emails, Cypes saw no evidence Nick ever told Heidi they were in financial trouble. There was no communication
between the two of them to indicate that she had any idea the depth of their financial issues.
I was able to determine through the foreclosure and eviction attorneys that there was no paperwork Heidi had signed,
that nobody had ever talked to Heidi. Nobody met Heidi. Heidi didn't go to the eviction hearing on March 8th, 2010. Cy
says Nick and Heidi's family and friends didn't know the couple had to relocate.
And if she was serious about moving, she would have gotten the day off. So, she was planning to go to work. Yes.
Why do you think he kept her in the dark so long? Shame. I believe he was concerned about the shame of what he had
done, how it would look, that he couldn't come clean with her. You know, it had gotten too big at that point.
And when Cypes talked to the couple's friends, she learned why Nick wanted to hide their financial situation.
He was described by his friends as being wise and being the person that they would go to for advice.
Nick Furkus really presented as somebody who had some of those bigger, tougher life questions figured out. What kind of
person do you want to be? What kind of relationship do you want to have with God? What does that tell you as you're
investigating the case and you see someone in that type of personality? It just became easier to see that this was
someone who did not want his friends, his family to know the extent to which he had failed.
CYP says she discovered more of Nick's lies when she learned about a conversation Heidi had with a friend
just the day before she died. Heidi had talked to us about how Nick had told her
that they were victims of identity theft. It was somewhere around $180 to $200,000 worth of identity
theft. Wasn't true. They weren't the victims. This was all untrue. But as Cypes tried to figure out if
there was a connection between Nick's lies and Heidi's death, she learned Nick and Rachel had divorced. I remember very
well when Nikki Cypes came to my door. And that Nick had also kept secrets from her. Did Rachel ever say anything about
why their marriage dissolved? She did. There were financial issues between the two of them. Nick was lying about a lot
of things. This is a story that's happened before and it didn't end well. That terrified
me. Could there actually have been an intruder? After spending 19 months digging deep
into the Fergus case file, reviewing crime scene photos, 911 calls. Do you remember what
he was wearing? And Nick's video interview. She was running away, so he definitely hit her in the back.
Investigator Nicole Cypes had come to one conclusion. What really matters is what happened in that foyer and there
was no third person. You never found anyone else's DNA. No. No DNA evidence, no physical evidence, no sign of a
struggle. To me, there were only two people in that house when Heidi was killed. And they were Nick and Heidi.
As part of the new investigation, Cypes reached out to Nick's second wife, Rachel. What did she know? In 2020, she
came to my door. And I was like, why are you here? And she was like, to talk about Heidi Fergus. At first, Rachel,
then divorced from Nick, says she was reluctant to talk. You're asking for a lot when you get involved in something
like this, and I didn't want to, but I also knew that it was the right thing to do, and it was for truth. Rachel told
Cypes Nick had lied about their finances during their marriage. I found a letter
saying that we hadn't paid our property taxes and that we were going to get evicted in 2020 if we didn't pay them.
And when I saw that, I was like, "Oh no." Like, he was definitely repeating the same things as he did with Heidi
with me. During that time, Rachel says Nick's dishonesty started to make her question whether he had also lied about
Heidi's death. And I said, "We got to sit down and talk." Rachel secretly recorded the conversation on her phone.
Your actions have caused me to just distrust you completely. If there was going to be a confession, I was going to
make sure that I could prove that he said it. And the fact that your lying was so easy for you to do in front
of me over and over and over makes me think that I could murder my wife. That you could lie about something. That I
could murder my wife. Yes. When I listen, I think this silence kills me. He's angry at me. How dare I think those
things? Why aren't you saying you didn't tell me I'm not right? Rachel later shared the recordings with
investigator Cypes. The behavior that he exhibited in his marriage with Rachel was almost duplicative of how he hid
things from Heidi. We cannot let this man be out on the street any longer. For prosecutor
Elizabeth Lawman, the time had come to act. I told Sergeant Cypes, "We're charging him. Let's do it." 11 years
after Heidi was shot to death on May 19th, 2021, a St. Paul police SWAT team arrested Nick Fergus at his house and
charged him with seconddegree murder. A grand jury ultimately indicted Fergus on first and seconddegree murder
charges. Our minds were absolutely blown. Heidi's friends, Marcus and Kina, were relieved. It's hard to to say. I
don't know what emotion you even put to it. It's hard to say excited. I felt grateful. We don't understand. Nick's
friends, Emily and Andrew, you have to believe that a good man with no history of violence killed the woman that he
loved more than anything in life for no reason. That's what you have to believe.
We can't get there. After remaining free on bail for almost two years on January
27th, 2023, Nick Fus went on trial. Prosecutors would not be allowed to call Nick's second wife, Rachel, to
testify or use her tape conversation with Nick. The judge ruled her testimony and the recording had no bearing on the
case. I went into it with an open mind. Natalie Michael served on the jury. Did he appear like a man who would kill his
wife? No, he did not. A lot through the trial. He was putting his head down. When they showed
the photos of the two of them together, you know, he seemed like he really was in love with her. I think Nick was
someone who lived two lives. Prosecutors presented an unusual motive. They told the jurors Nick Fergus staged a burglary
because he was desperate and ashamed. His secrets were about to be revealed to Heidi and everyone else. All of his kind
of cards of lies are about to crumble. He would have been exposed as a complete failure, a liar um to his friends and
community and instead he's a victim. He walks away from this supported by his friends, supported by his family. Nick
had no reason. Nick's lawyers Joe Freedberg and Robert Richmond say that simply makes no sense as a motive. There
was nothing about murdering the woman who everyone agreed he loved that would help his situation. And they say the
state's contention that Heidi didn't know about the couple's finances simply was not true. Nick said she was in on
all of the major decisions. He would say to us that they're making Heidi out to be an imbecile.
At first, I was wondering how she couldn't know about the finances or some of the foreclosure, some of the things
happening. But Natalie Michael says the prosecution's case did not hinge on motive. The prosecution said it really
is. Was there an intruder in the house or was there not an intruder? It was our position that there had been an intruder
exactly the way Nick described to the police on the 911 call. There's something that's broken off and show me
at the scene. The information that Nick gave at the scene is that this intruder came into the house at the hospital. He
just came in and to Sergeant Gray guy that was there. I think he he grabbed the barrel. Nick's lawyers say police
didn't find the intruder's fingerprints or DNA at the scene because as Nick told
investigators in his interview at the hospital, what else can you describe from him? The intruder was wearing
gloves. Gloves. He's wearing gloves. You don't always leave DNA and especially when your hands are covered. So, what am
I looking at here? But prosecutors say there was something else missing from the scene besides fingerprints. This is
a physical model to scale that was created by the FBI. They used this model to show the jurors there was no evidence
of a struggle. I felt that it was very important for us to be able to recreate how small that entryway is. Let's say
the intruder gets in. They have this struggle and they have this life and death struggle right in this area with
nothing disturbed on the table. Exactly. And then Heidi gets shot square in the back in a very clear shot. This
animation created by the FBI shows that the bullet that killed Heidi was most likely shot from shoulder level. The
height at which Heidi is shot fits exactly on Nick's shoulder to aim and to fire.
Nick's attorneys say there was direct evidence that showed there was an intruder. In fact, there were tool marks
in the door which would be consistent with someone wedging a screwdriver between the frame and the door. Attorney
Joe Friedberg says Fergus's next door neighbor, Brandon Okconor, testified he heard a voice. You shot her. You shot
me. Uh, please, please, no. Something along those lines. That means there must have been another person in that house.
Nick was talking to a third person when he said that. But prosecutors say Brandon may have misheard Nick while he
was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher. He is screaming about being shot and he
did that over almost 7 minutes. Okay. Stay on the phone with me. Okay. Nick Fus did not take the stand. After
an 11-day trial, the case went to the jury. If there's anything in this case, there's reasonable doubt. Yeah.
See more evidence from the case at 48 hours.com. [Music] It was a hard fought litigated trial as
the state and Nick Fergus's defense team presented their closing arguments on February 10th, 2023. We had great we
thought circumstantial evidence that what Nick said happened did not happen. Attorneys on both sides were hopeful the
jury would make the right decision. It's not enough if you have a hunch. There was no direct evidence that Nick
murdered his wife. In her closing argument, prosecutor Crocker said Fergus shot Heidi while she
was on the phone with the 911 operator. Someone's trying west. So that call does end with a very very
loud noise and the call goes dead and we believe that that's the gunshot. According to phone records, 65 seconds
passed from that moment until Fergus made his 911 call. Somebody has broken. Crocker reenacted for jurors what she
believed Nick Fergus did before he made that call. I walked over in the courtroom to roughly as far as Heidi
would have been on the ground. Crouched down, turned her over um to check for a pulse to be sure that she was in fact
deceased. Walked back over, picked up the firearm, and demonstrated how he could
shoot himself and call 911. Where is the guy that shot you? At 65 seconds, there
was more than enough time for all of that to happen. To prove their theory, Fergus shot himself in the thigh. They
point to marks left by shotgun pellets at the bottom of the front door. When he shot himself, we believe that
Nick was about um here, which is how you would brace yourself, probably against the door if you're doing it to yourself.
Of his reasonable suspicion, but Fergus' attorneys challenged the 65second time frame. Attorney Robert Richmond says
phone records also show Fergus misdialed two numbers before getting through to 911, making it impossible to shoot
himself. What they reenacted was 65 seconds, which was ignoring the two missiles which happened at 38 seconds.
The fact that we cannot find the intruder is not evidence that there was no intruder. And if anything, because of
the next door neighbor, because of the tool marks, because of the 38 seconds, we feel that the evidence supports that
there was an intruder. This isn't blind belief. Nick's friends Emily and Andrew were convinced the
prosecution failed to prove Fergus was the shooter. We were open to hearing inconsistency of what Nick said, but
that didn't happen. On February 10th, 2023, the jurors got the case and in five hours returned with a verdict. My
last text to Nick was, "It has to be innocent. There's no way that they got to guilty this quickly." We rushed to
the courthouse and we were so wrong. Nick Furkus was found guilty on two counts of murder, premeditated and
intentional. I believe justice was served. Marcus and Kina were in the courtroom when the
verdict was read. Justice may have been slow, but fortunately, the jury got it right. It feels like this is the
beginning of healing. It's the beginning of a of a new chapter. Heidi's mom actually said
that for so many years they had to live with Nick Fergus's narrative and they knew it was wrong, but they just didn't
have another narrative. And to finally be able to have him finally held accountable, it it meant a lot to us.
For Sergeant Cypes, there is still the mystery of what led to the couple's financial problems.
We weren't able to definitively say what the money was spent on. Does that frustrate you greatly? I think it would
help complete the picture for some people. On April 13th, 2023, Nick Fergus was back in court for a sentencing
hearing and to hear victim impact statements. Growing up, Heidi was the quintessential little sister to me.
Heidi's brother, Peter Ericson. Because of the lies we were told as early as the
day after her murder, "It's been virtually impossible to find closure to our grief." Fergus refused to admit
guilt. I do maintain and will maintain to my dying breath my innocence of this crime. My body stands condemned to serve
another man's sentence, but my soul my soul remains free. Judge Leonardo Castro imposed the
maximum sentence. For it is the sense of law and judgment of this court that you
be committed to the commission of corrections for the remainder of your life without the possibility of release.
Good luck to you, sir. Godspeed. My kids are always what I think of first. Fergus's second wife, Rachel.
They lost in this, too, because one day they had a dad that they thought was somebody and the next day he's not that
person anymore. She often thinks about Heidi, too. I like to think I have a connection with
Heidi. She didn't get to have the voice that I have now. And so, I can only hope
that my voice is something she would be proud of. Heidi was a genuine, loving, sincere young woman who wanted
to live life to the fullest. She wouldn't want people to become bitter or angry because of what she had to
experience. I think that Heidi would want people to choose to love regardless of circumstances.
[Music] CBS next Saturday. 48 Hours brings you backtoback episodes all summer long.
Next week, social media clues. Johnny Alteringer would answer a dating app and disappear. She would track his location.
48 hours crime time double feature next Saturday on CBS streaming on Paramount Plus.
[Music] Aaron, this is Florida. Nothing strange [Music] here. The house was beautiful. It was 4,000 square ft. It
had a pool. a garage apartment. It was a great house. The only problem was upstairs.
Some of the rooms were too small and just the functionality did not work for some families. I could understand why
they'd want to renovate it. When did you first meet Shanti and David? Dave just called me on the phone
and asked if I'd come by and take a look at the project. He said that they had done some work. I wasn't at all prepared
for what I saw when I got there. [Music] They had fully disassembled this house to a degree that I'd never seen before.
It was rather astonishing. It was largely wide open. Like you're inside of a giant shoe box.
This house became more than just a project to David Trronis. It was his life. He obsessed on it. This house is
the center point to the story and ultimately led to Shanti's demise. This case all started with a call to 911
placed at approximately 3:51 p.m. on April 24th, 2018 by Dave Tronis. Hello. And David says that he came home and
found Shanti floating in the bathtub. I believe she's not feeding. Did that story make sense? Absolutely
not. Shanti was extensively beaten. It makes me emotional. I feel bad for her family and for her son.
It's upsetting that she won't get that life with him. Clearly Dave Tronis from the very
beginning is a suspect. Absolutely. Dave was asked to go to the station. Thank you. And voluntarily remain there
for hours. Just have a seat there. It'll be a little bit. He did not request counsel. He consented to
swabs, to clippings, to a search of his person. Dave went into that interview with an
agenda. They've never been more love. We were so happy. And he just started getting confronted and confronted and
confronted. I told you she was murdered. Murdered. Someone took her life from her
and there's nothing. You can't even fake it. That's how much you could give it. And it became a war of wills in that
room. I don't have any explanation for her, the severity of her injuries. And didn't David win that war of wills? He
was not broken. Well, Dave didn't confess. Are we boring you? It seems pretty clear
these two detectives, they went into this room, decided that David was a murderer, and then went the extra mile
to try to put a file together to prove such. Did you guys get into an argument? Was she about the house? No.
Is it possible that without this house, Shanti might still be alive? I think that's completely
true. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Delaney Park is a wellestablished neighborhood. It's been around for over
a hundred years. Tara Stevens knows Delaney Park inside and out. She's a realtor who buys and sells homes there.
It's a great place to live, to raise a family. A lot of outside activity, great school system. It's a It's a great
neighborhood. So, Delaney Park is a mile or so from downtown Orlando. Ryan Vesio, a former
prosecutor with the Orlando State Attorney's Office, got to know the area well when he led the investigation into
the death of Shanti Cooper in April 2018. Did Shanti ever indicate to any friends or family that she was afraid of
anyone? No. So, you guys knew each other approximately 5 years this month? Vesio and investigators dug in to learn
all they could about Shanti and her husband David Trz. The couple had been married for
more than a year. Everybody we spoke to about Dave and Dave's background said that he was highly intelligent. It's
what made him successful when he worked in business. How would you describe Shanti?
Shanti Cooper was a hardworking, dedicated mom who cared deeply, deeply about her son. Her son was her world.
Shanti's son, Jackson, was then 8 years old. She shared custody with his father,
Jim Cooper, whom Shanti had divorced in 2013. She launched a lucrative financial
software business and worked out of her home office. How did she meet Dave Tranis? Dave was outside of Minneapolis,
Minnesota at the time. They met over the internet and started exchanging messages
and profiles and that turned into emails. Investigators later found this document
on Shanti's computer that shows just how smitten she was. Dave, I will have to say I think this will be a delicious
detour. Amazing. magnificent life-changing detour. I've had a pep in my step since we started this little
email affair in Minnesota. Dave had just ended a long marriage, but within months of
meeting Shanti online. He moved to Orlando. Dave fell in love with Delaney Park and the house at 218 East Copeland
Drive, a house that came complete with its own gargoyles. We sold it to him for 607500 which was a really really good
deal. How did he pay for it? Cash. Dave put the house in trust for himself and his mother and soon introduced Shanti to
Tara. They seemed very happy. She was a beautiful, very nice person. I enjoyed meeting her. Tara did not feel quite the
same about Dave. Dave's personality changed a little bit after the contract was signed. I just saw a
very different side of him. He was like a a guy or a child who wants to get their way and they don't stop until they
do. You were glad when the deal was over. Absolutely. I was very glad. I didn't get a good feeling from
him. Cindy and Dan Dao are Shanti's relatives by marriage. They didn't like Dave at first, but it wasn't long before
Cindy had a change of heart. I love her. So, I grew to love him. We absolutely adored him. The first time we
had lunch, he walked in and he said, "How lucky am I? I get to have lunch with two of the most beautiful women
that I know." I mean, that's charming. In 2015, Dave and Shanti moved into their new home and attempted to remodel
it with Shanti footing the bill. What did Dave do all day? It's a great question. If you ask Dave, he says that
he worked on the house and worked on the renovations and took care of the property and cleaned the pool.
Contractors came and went. Demolition went on and on, but the renovation was an expensive failure. By 2018, the main
part of the house was unlivable. Shanti was reduced to working and sleeping above the garage in a small
apartment. Where did Dave sleep? I think he slept downstairs with the dogs. Maybe not all
the time, but I'm pretty sure he was down there. Desperate to resolve the housing
situation, Dave turned to Keith Ary, a local house renovator who also appeared on a reality TV show called Zombie House
Flipping. Neighborhoods are under attack from Zombie Houses. What is Zombie House Flipping? Zombie
House flipping is a house flipping TV show where we take houses that are the worst of the worst.
Is anything broken? I think we have a termite problem. And what we do is bring them back to life. I looked at the
house. I realized that the structure was suspect and uh politely stepped outside.
An engineer discovered the only thing holding up the house was 2 in of stucco. It was rather astonishing. They took
away all the interior dividing walls and basically what was left was a twostory shell. Weren't you tempted to just run
for the hills? Yeah, but at the same time, you rarely come across a challenge that's that
uh that bold. Keith was up for the challenge and began shoring up the interior. And then he got the go-ahad to
use the house in the next season of Zombie House Flipping. This is Zombie House Flipping.
It was midappril 2018 and filming was set to begin in early May. But there was a problem. Getting Dave and Shanti
together to talk in fa in person was proving to be really difficult. Keith went to the house to meet with the
couple one last time to be sure they were on board. And they both said, "Yes, we understand." And then she took off
immediately just and left. I got a sense that she was pissed off at him. Theio said Shanti had been trying for years to
get her name on the trust that owned the house, but Dave never followed through and it seemed like things just sort of
culminated to a boiling point. It was only days before Shanti's murder. She desperately wanted stability in her
life, but was living in a house that was anything but. Her name was not on the deed, and she had already spent a lot of
money on what was essentially Dave's house. Shanti was the bankroll, the sole bankroll to almost a4 million
renovation. What did she get for her $250,000? Well, a lot of headaches and heartaches.
[Music] Thank you. Shortly after Shanti was pronounced dead, Dave Tranis went to Orlando police
headquarters. I'll get here as soon as I can. where he remained without a lawyer for
14 hours. We got to figure this out together. Okay. Of course. He didn't attempt to conceal anything. Richard
Celelesi is Dave's attorney. He gave the law enforcement access to everything that they needed, everything that they
wanted, and he laid himself out there for examination by all. We want to say how sorry we are for your loss. At the
start, detectives Terresa Sprag and Barb Sharp seem sympathetic. Take a minute. Okay, I know this is
super tough. They're very good at building rapport and have a tremendous amount of experience. If you have a
suspect who's willing to talk, you just hit play and sit back and let them go on
and on and on. And that's what Dave does. Dave sticks with his story. He took the dogs to a park in the
afternoon. And after he returned, he found Shanti, still wearing her pajamas, floating in the tub. So, I
could hear the water is running. I see her laying. One of her legs is kind of sticking up and out a little bit, and
it's just extremely awful. Can you tell me what your address is? He tells the detectives that he tried to
perform CPR but couldn't get Shanti to breathe. She was dead when first responders arrived. Dave has a lot to
say and a lot to say to try to convince the detectives that he wasn't involved in his wife's death. I think something
went wrong. Either she slipped or she fell or she blacked out. Why did he agree to sit down and talk to these
detectives without an attorney? Because he had nothing to hide and he didn't think that it would hurt him. But the
veteran detectives began to pick at his story and question how Shanti's bloody cheek and bruised eye came from a slip
in the tub. I don't have any explanation. This is what I found. Somebody who slips and falls doesn't
receive the amount of blunt force trauma to focused areas in the head. Detectives
also had spotted blood on Shanti's bed and suspected that's where she had been killed, but Dave says the blood
likely was from Shanti's period. It did get on the bed spread and it did get on the bed. There was a lot of other
evidence that would be inconsistent with this being blood associated with a menstrual cycle. Detectives also
suspected, and Shanti's autopsy later confirmed, that she was strangled. But Celelesi says as frustrating as it
may have been to authorities, Dave can't explain Shanti's injuries, not because he's lying, but
because he simply doesn't know. He took his best guess based upon what he come to find. He doesn't know what
happened, is the point. The detectives press on for hours, taking turns and peppering Dave with tougher and tougher
questions. Did you two argue? No, absolutely not. Did you fight? Absolutely not. Did you
harm Shanti in any way? Absolutely not. Sharp and Sprag also question his timeline. Dave says that he called 911
about 5 minutes after he found Shanti. You've got to help us understand. But detectives insist that doesn't match
what they found at the house. There's no splashing of water anywhere in the bathroom. The inside of the tub is dry.
Completely dry. And she's damp. She's not even wet. So, you've got to help us. Can you do that?
Everything. They're drawing conclusions based upon observations, and they're moving forth based upon these
assumptions. They try to zero in on a possible motive. Did she catch you with another woman? Did she have a boyfriend?
Did was she about the house? No. But given the sorry state of the house, detectives begin to wonder if that had
something to do with Shanti's murder. I can't imagine how stressful it must have
been. You know, not living in the home you want to live in and it's taken two plus years, 3 years. Um, I'm I'm sick to
death about what happened, but nothing happened today because of there was no animosity between us whatsoever.
And he says Shanti wasn't upset that her name wasn't on the trust that owned the
house. So, we had kind of talked about it and debated it and we finally just said, "It doesn't really matter. Let's
just move forward." Teresa and Barb are tenacious. They don't stop. They're wellversed in interrogation techniques.
You know, we saw the good cop, bad cop. We saw manipulation. Barb Sharp even moves her hand to Dave's knee and adopts
a more subtle tone. It will be okay. We can't help you until you help us. Before Teresa Sprag begins another
attack, she treats you like a landscaper, like the pool boy. Probably because she's bringing in the money. As
the hours tick by, what do you want your mom to think about you? They try anything they can to get him to confess.
Are you religious? You want to pray? This almost became a game of psychological warfare
in that interview room. Dave began the interview by saying how happy he had been with Shanti. But almost 8 hours
into the interrogation, the detectives aren't buying it. And you claim to love that
woman. I would be under the table in a ball if I was in love with that woman and she was dead. I would be
inconsolable. Do you think that he was heenalized because he didn't act the way detectives wanted him to act? Oh, time
time and time again. You know, you fake cried for about seven or eight hours. Say, not one tear came out of your eyes.
Not one. There's a lot of conclusions being drawn off of what they consider to be an odd affect of Mr. Trron. And I
think that that's a dangerous thing to do because we all react to stress differently. We all grieve differently.
Dave even agrees to take a polygraph, but by then it was the middle of the night and investigators couldn't find
anyone to administer it. They had to let him go at the end of the interview. How did they feel about that?
You always want to make the arrest right up front. You do. With Dave Tronis free,
police would have to keep digging for clues. But even they were surprised by what they found. Is it fair to say that
Dave Tronis was living a double life? At least two lives. She didn't slip and fall. It's not a
possibility. Even though detectives were outright accusing Dave Tron of murdering
Shanti, you strangled her. Some of her relatives like Cindy Dao believed him. Are you kidding? I bet my last dollar
that it wasn't him. I thought he was innocent. You honestly did, Cindy. Why? I think it was just the growth of our
relationship and how she adored him. Absolutely adored him and it looked very mutual to everyone. Did she ever express
any concern or fear of Dave? Never. Never. After being questioned by detectives,
Dave headed straight to his home in Delaney Park and that's where Cindy found him. I stood him up and turned him
around and looked at his arms and there was not a scratch on him. There was nothing. Cindy, did you ever ask him
point blank, did you have something to do with the death of Shanti? I did. What did he say?
No. I would not kill the love of my life. Defense attorney Richard Zeleleski says
the problem with this case is that detectives and prosecutors were convinced from the start that Dave
Tranis was Shanti's killer. Zeleleski says the bias of the investigators is clear from the police report. They've
already suggested that they have it figured out like bull in a china shop trying to just make this work at all
costs because they've done nothing to develop other suspects. But Vesio denies that. He says detectives checked out
every possible suspect and got lucky when an important lead fell into their laps. A worker from Club Orlando called
and shared that they knew of Dave Tronis because he was a patron at the club. What is Club Orlando? Club Orlando is a
same-sex bath house. Did Dave have a membership at Club Orlando? Several memberships. Every six months, Dave
renewed his membership. Detectives headed to the club to investigate and found a longtime club
employee who in this police recorded interview says he witnessed Dave having sex at the club. I was just walking
through And I saw David uh he was giving oral sex to this guy. From what everybody who
knew Shanti has said, she would absolutely have not tolerated it, put up with it, endorsed it. It just wouldn't
have happened. There's a significant possibility that Shanti knew all about it. And why do you believe that? Because
none of her family members seem to know anything about it. and and her family members seem to indicate that if Shanti
did know, she'd be upset. And and I appreciate that. But uh what you tell your mom and dad about your sex life and
what you do uh behind closed doors, you know, people are people, adults are adults, and life is messy.
But Vesio wonders if Shanti ultimately did discover Dave's duplicity on the night she was murdered. Had that
revelation made Shanti threaten to turn off the money spigot once and for all, but she would be killed because of a
house? Well, what would somebody do when they were about to lose the most important thing in their
life? Because in April of 2018, the most important thing in Dave's life was that
house. [Music] Dave told Cindy and others that he believed Shanti may have been murdered
by a burglar and the defense claimed that $5,000 in cash was missing from the house. Also missing Shanti's diamond
engagement ring valued at approximately $15,000. That was highly, highly suspicious. The
detectives wanted to get to the bottom of it. Why couldn't it have been exactly as Dave said, that he leaves and someone
breaks into the house, beats her, leaves her there, and Dave comes home. Why doesn't that fit? Well, the lack of
forced entry. This scene did not have any sort of evidence of a struggle. There's thousands of dollars of
valuables that are left in plain sight. A private investigator hired by defense lawyers canvas neighbors asking them
about a particular homeless man who reportedly had been seen around Delaney Park. It was said he resembled the actor
Woody Harrelson. What about the transient that everyone describes who looks a lot like Woody Harelson?
I mean, when you got nothing better, you throw everything against the wall and see if something sticks.
This home is at 218 East Copeland Drive. Detective Teresa Sprag tracked Woody down and recorded this interview. You
see there's a large blue dumpster in the driveway. Have you ever been there? No.
Nothing placed Woody inside Dave and Shanti's home, but Vesio says his interview shows police chased down every
lead, including checking out her ex-husband. Shanti had had a bad divorce. This was not an easy end of the
marriage. Did you look at Jim Cooper? Yes, Mr. Cooper was interviewed and Jim Cooper was eliminated as a suspect very
early on. He had an alibi. On August 29th, 2018, 4 months after Shanti's murder, Dave Tronis was
arrested on a charge of firstdegree murder and held without bail. And how did the two of you react when you heard
that? I wasn't believing it whatsoever. I thought they were just trying to solve
a murder easily. I always had the suspicion. Dave's arrest gave prosecutors another piece of
the puzzle. Shanti's missing engagement ring. The ring is probably one of the most powerful and damning pieces of
evidence in this case. As long as that expensive ring was missing, Dave Tranis could argue that a burglar had murdered
Shanti. But the day he was arrested, police found it among his possessions. We searched the room at his mother's
house where he was living, and lo and behold, we found the rings in his suitcase in his bedroom.
Still, Dave's arrest was not the end of the investigation. It led to a cascading
series of new revelations that surprised even a veteran prosecutor like Ryan Vesio. This was a case that had so many
twists and turns. I would no longer make assumptions of anything. You don't learn this stuff in
law school. [Music] After the arrest of Dave Trz, investigators received a tip that took
them completely by surprise. It led them to Minnesota and back in time to when a
much younger Dave was married to a woman named Carol. Former close friends of Carol told detectives that they believe
Dave may have been poisoning her. As soon as Carol got married to Dave, she started suffering a bunch of unknown
health issues. That made prosecutor Ryan Vesio wonder if Shanti could have been poisoned. In
Shanti's case, she had appendicitis and had to have an appendecttomy. Shanti had
had that emergency appendecttomy eight weeks before her death. Appendicitis and poisoning have similar symptoms and Dave
told detectives that Shanti had digestion problems right up to the day she died. She hasn't found since the
appendecttomy a diet that she can eat regularly and feel good. [Music] Vesio needed more information. So he and
detective Terresa Sprag went to Minnesota in November of 2018 to meet Carol face to face and recorded this
interview. I have issues with chronic pain and immune system issues that are not necessarily definitive.
Carol told Vesio she also struggled with gut issues and that Dave cooked most of
their meals. Has it ever come into your frame of thought that your marriage to David Trronis or him cooking or making
you drinks was making you sick? No. Have you ever thought that any of your issues
related to your health problems was him poisoning you? No. Carol said her health issues continued
even after her divorce from Dave. Yet Vesio says he remains suspicious. It very well could have been a scenario to
where Dave was providing both of them with items that caused them to be ill. We just could
never have real concrete proof of it. Theio wondered if there was another reason Carol seemed to be protecting her
former husband and whether it had anything to do with Dave's finances. We saw thousand pages of bank records
belonging to Dave Tronis. One thing that we noticed was that Dave and Carol still
had a joint bank account together. That account at times contained hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Carol said
she simply had forgotten to take her name off that account. People who are divorcing each other don't leave assets
on the table, and they sure as heck don't leave them together. It's unclear where that money came from.
Vesio believes that Carol, who was not charged with any crime, could be helping Dave manage his money while he's in
jail. I think that Carol is involved in David's finances and has some level of control.
The surprises in the case kept coming. Soon after Shanti's death, detectives had placed a surveillance camera pointed
toward the outside of Dave's house. Detective Sprag was interested to see who was coming and going out of the
house. And that camera ended up actually turning into a pretty valuable piece of
evidence. That camera captured images of private investigators hired by Dave's original law firm coming and going.
Detectives believe that when one of those lawyers, Robert Mandel, realized that the PIs were on camera, he placed a
call to Vesio. I never ever expected that he was going to tell me that he in fact had an item of physical evidence
that he had been holding on to for 11 months. Never would have expected it in a thousand years. And what was that
evidence? They were a set of purported bloody sheets and it literally literally took
my breath away. That defense attorney, Robert Mandal, told Vesio that the defense team had acquired the bloody
sheets from the garage apartment where Shanti was found dead, but had never turned them over to the prosecution.
But Ryan, as shocking as that is, that wasn't the only evidence that later turned up, was it? No. I ended that call
with the defense attorney and said, "Listen, if you have anything else, now is the time to tell
me." And about 10, 12 hours later, the next morning, I got another call from him. And that's when he said, "I have
one other item that I think we have to turn over." That item turned out to be a green cord.
Mandel told Vesio that a private investigator removed it from the house and preserved it in an evidence bag
because Dave was threatening to kill himself. Does that make sense to you? No. Makes zero sense to me.
Why go get the item and then treat it as if it were a piece of evidence? Remember, the autopsy revealed that
Shanti had been strangled and Vesio believed there was a real possibility that the green cord could be the murder
weapon. With the prosecution now in possession of that green cord, tests were conducted
to see if indeed it was the murder weapon used to strangle Shanti. Is there any evidence to indicate that in fact
that cord was used to kill Shanti? Nope. That cord did not have any DNA on it. But the cord wasn't picked up until
weeks after Shanti's death, and authorities believe Dave had plenty of time to clean it. Investigators had
spent months examining all the evidence, leading Vesio to craft his own theory about when Shanti was killed.
We found one single earring was placed on the nightstand. The other earring was in Shanti's ear. And what does that say
to you? That tells me that Shanti was most likely sitting on the side of her bed preparing for bed, taking those
earrings out, and that's when the attack happened. The sheets and bed frame did have Shanti's blood on them, and Shanti
didn't use her phone after 11:30 p.m. The scene was consistent with this attack happening somewhere in the
midnight to 2 3:00 a.m. time period. But David called 911 late in the afternoon,
saying he had just found Shanti floating in the tub. Celelesi says investigators
are jumping to unfair conclusions. A few hours of time off the grid doesn't allow
them to shift the timeline. Prosecutors continued to build their case even as Dave sat behind bars
listening to anyone who had information about Shanti's death. No matter how surprising the source, I met David
Trronis in Three Whiskey. Three Whiskey is a housing unit in the Orlando jail where Edward Gizmandi
shared a cell with Dave Tron. He slept next to me and I slept next to him. After getting out of jail, Gizmandi met
with Vesio and Sprag. He says that he and Dave began talking and bonded over a shared interest in obscure
hallucinogenics, including sapo, a poison derived from a South American frog. He said that you could use sapo to
put in people's salsa, and killed them quietly. Killer salsa might sound ridiculous, but
not so far-fetched when you consider that authorities suspected that David poisoned both his wives.
Gizmandi supplied even more information that if true was truly damning. He says Dave admitted that he and Shanti had a
fight before she died. He just said there there was an app on his phone that there was messages on that she had found
apparently that suggested he was having sex with men and she was going to show everybody. And what did Dave say he did?
He snapped. He said he freaked out and did what? He didn't specifically say that what he did, but that he had killed
his wife. Investigators were unable to corroborate Gizmandi's story about the app. We
didn't have any purchase records of apps and we did not see it on Dave's phone. I've read your statement and at no point
do I see anywhere where you had told them that David actually said, "I killed my wife." But sitting here now, you said
Dave told you I killed my wife. Yes, ma'am. In jail, he said I killed my wife. Word for word is what he told me.
But why wouldn't you tell the state's attorney's office that I did. I told him that he had snapped. That's the word
that I used. I don't remember if she had asked me did he admit to murdering her,
like word for word like that. One of the few things both the prosecution and the defense do agree on
is that neither is sure they can believe Gizmandi. He plead guilty to one count of lewd or lascivious behavior and is
now a registered sex offender and still on probation. This individual certainly has credibility issues.
Zeleleski took over Dave's defense in early 2020 after the original attorneys withdrew from the case.
Raising doubt isn't going to be difficult here. But Shanti's family has no doubt about
what should happen to Dave. He has to be found guilty. He is guilty. Cindy Dao, who once found Dave so
charming, feels very differently about him now. He should be sentenced to death. I want him to remember when he
looks at me. I want him to remember every lie. Every lie. [Music] When Cindy remembers Shanti, her heart
still breaks. She was a happy, giving, kind, fun, loving person who had a mission in
this life and she didn't get to fulfill it. [Music] In a fraction of a second, it changed my
life. Now I'm someone else. No warning, no premonition, nothing. My name is Corey Shaughnessy
and I used to own Gallery Jewelers in Austin, Texas. The thing that made the jewelry
business really fun is selling engagement rings, selling jewelry to people because they're marking special
occasions. Ted kind of had the same passion. He loved colored gemstones. We called ourselves gallery jewelers. It
should have been called Ted's Jewelers because it it really was all about him. March 1st was just a boring
day. He came home from work. We had dinner. I basically rolled over to go to sleep and the next thing I know, one of
the dogs barks. This was early morning hours. Two shooters enter the Shaughnessy home.
They quietly move through the home. Ted sits up in bed and he grabbed his gun to go see what it was. I hadn't even
gotten my head back on the pillow, I don't think, before I heard the first gunshot. And then there was a barrage of
gunfire. One of the shooters advances towards the master bedroom where Cory is. I grabbed
my gun. I started shooting back and I ran out of ammo. I just bailed into the closet. Travis County
911. Do you need police or paramedic? I don't know. I'm in the closet. There were shots fired. Help me. Okay. Well,
we're helping you, ma'am. Help me. I s heard this horrible, horrible moaning. And when I came out of the closet and I
saw Ted's legs and I could tell that he was dead. Okay. Oh my god. Take a deep breath. You do an Awesome Cory. Okay. Oh
god. Theodore Shaughnessy was shot dead in his Austin area home by an intruder. Cory Shaughnessy shot back at the
intruder and wasn't hurt. I was under the impression that this was a a robbery that had gone bad. There was nothing
stolen. We weren't finding anybody that had any ill feelings towards either one of them. We didn't have any idea who
committed this murder. Anybody that can do this is a sociopath. It's just absolutely
crazy. I don't even know why. I really don't know why. [Music] [Music] [Music] When Travis County Sheriff's detectives
Paulo and James Moore arrived to investigate a shooting at Ted and Corey Shaughnessy's Austin, Texas home early
on March 2nd, 2018, they first thought it might be a robbery gone wrong. It looked as though there was a home
invasion and a homeowner was killed. Inside the sprawling suburban home, it looked like a
battlefield. 55-year-old Ted Shaughnessy laid dead in a pool of blood near the kitchen table. He was
shot in the head, the back, the thigh, and the buttocks. One of the family's two pet Rottweilers,
Bart, had been shot to death as well. There was broken window glass everywhere. Bullets lodged in the walls,
casings all over the floor. Authorities noticed they were not all the same type.
We had 40 caliber and 380. So that told us that we had two shooters. Corey would tell police she
and Ted kept about 20 guns in the home and said she'd used her 357 revolver to shoot back at the attacker. It was a
hell of gunfire. Investigators had noticed a single wideopen ground floor window around the
side of the house and wondered if the intruders had used it to get in. Somebody took the screen off, set it
next to the window outside. That open window led into an unoccupied bedroom. And there, inside a drawer,
police found what seemed like an unlikely coincidence. There's a 40 caliber gun box in that drawer. It's
missing out of the box. Well, hang on. 40 caliber is one of the caliber that you were just describing. Yes. It meant
that Shaughnessy's empty gun box could have held a pistol that one of the intruders used. and had ejected bullet
casings near the victim. That information gets past me while I'm outside. Outside near Detective Moore, first
responders were looking after Cory Shaughnessy. Cory's hysterical. Cory would tell police she had not seen the
attackers faces, but she did have a hunch about why they'd come. Being a jeweler, you might someday be a target.
When you hear they own a jewelry store, what does that prompt in in in your minds? Automatically a motive. Someone
figuring there was some safe with a bunch of jewelry. Absolutely. Yes, that's right.
Cory broke the news by phone to the Shaughnessy son, Nick, then 19, who lived 2 hours away with his girlfriend,
Jackie, in College Station, Texas. They immediately drove to Austin, arriving about 800 a.m., Nick comes over and he's
he's emotional. He asks me what happened. Nick, Jackie, and Corey all agreed to help the investigation in any
way possible. Cory allowed police to search her phone. And though Nick said he hadn't been in Austin for about a month,
he and Jackie did the same. All three also agreed to answer questions at the station. I'm trying to
think of anything that could be helpful. Our goal was to just try to get as much information as possible. I I
didn't hear anything until the dog started barking and but Cory says the more police questioned her in the coming
days, the more a traumatic situation went from bad to worse. I am trying to get anything I can
to to help. She says they were not treating her like a victim. I was extremely angry at the sheriff's
department. Investigators still weren't sure if the murder was part of a random attack, a jewel heist gone
bad, or whether it was a targeted assassination. They weren't finding any relevant
unidentified prints at the scene, so they had to wonder if their sole surviving victim, Cory
Shaughnessy, was actually a suspect. She's the only person in the house and we have her husband who has been shot to
death. We know that she owns firearms, so it's obviously an option for us. They called her in for a series of
interviews. For the last one, she brought a lawyer who is seated on the left. I didn't know to It's not right.
Somebody killed him. No, it's not. And I want to find them. Me, too. You got a distraught wife. You got a
dead husband. You have to ask about the marriage, don't you? Yes. Ted was the people person. He was the front part of
the story. Investigators learned Corey and Ted had met in the early 80s at a video arcade
in Phoenix. They'd quickly discovered they had a lot in common, including a love of jewelry and eventually of each
other. They married and opened Gallery Jewelers. Everything seemed to be just about perfect.
As the jewelry business grew, Ted and Corey had decided to grow their family, too. In 2000, they adopted Nick at 16
months old from an orphanage in Ukraine. It was just instant love. It was. Yeah.
Instant. Cory says they all bonded even before bringing him home. There were animal
crackers involved. Skillful distribution of animal crackers. Yes. Yes. And by the
time we left, we were a family. She says Ted had a knack for helping people express their love with a sparkle.
Everybody loved Ted. Didn't have any enemies. By the time of the murder, the Shaughnessies were worth millions. But
maybe even more valuable to them, they counted some of their customers as close friends. We were very
happy. For Corey, being a parent was worth its weight in gold. Nicholas had everything a kid could
want. Yes. What was he into? He liked animals and he loved cars, especially fast ones. His father drove
race cars for fun and often took him to the track. He loved putting on Ted's helmet and his racing gloves and and all
of those things. In high school, she says her son found another love. Her name was Jackie Edison. After her
parents' divorce, Jackie had moved from New Jersey to Austin to live with her father. Nick brought her to meet his
parents in 2016. It was an awkward dinner, but Cory says Jackie eventually won them over, and before long, she was
spending so much time in the Shaughnessy's house, they actually let her move in.
Did you settle into a Okay. A serious girlfriend seems to be part of Nick's life and she's okay. I I did. She was
all right. In August of 2017, Nick and Jackie moved out to start a new life in College
Station. She in school, he as a day trader with his parents' financial backing. Ted and Corey would have less than a
year to enjoy their empty nest before that horrible night in March. Police stayed on the scene for
hours trying to process all the evidence. I was actually on call when the murder occurred.
Amy Meredith was an assistant district attorney and says police asked her to come help them process and preserve the
scene. An unusual request. She arrived around 11:00 a.m. and after looking around began to believe, as they did,
that Ted Shaughnessy probably knew who ever had attacked him. This was not a stranger. This was not a stranger
killing. Meredith was sure the home was just too big and too dark for a pair of random
robbers or jewel thief wannabes to find their way around. Maybe even more importantly, there was
nothing stolen. Nothing from that safe. No valuables missing from the rest of the
house. So everything for you pointed to inside job. Yes, without a doubt. [Music]
Cory Shaughnessy's frustration with investigators was growing. Thank you. All right. Well, again, I appreciate you
guys coming in. She says she'd known from the start that she was a suspect in her husband's murder. She says she
needed money for the business in the following weeks, and it didn't help when she tried to cash in his milliondoll
life insurance policy. I was the only beneficiary. That could only mean that they suspected me. Let me just ask, did
you have anything to do with this? Absolutely not. But Amy Meredith says Corey had started raising red flags
immediately after leaving the scene. Within hours of the murder, she reportedly stated there would be no
funeral and inquired about having the house cleaned. We had to make sure that she did not have any involvement.
But Cory wasn't the only member of Ted's family who was raising suspicion. The Shaughnessy son, Nick,
had been more than a 100 miles away at the time of the murder. At the scene that morning, he'd been emotional. But
what struck Detective was one of Nick's first questions. I tell him, "It looks like
somebody came into the home and shot your dad to death." And how did he absorb that news? He asked
me, "Did he suffer?" Was that an odd question? It definitely struck me as odd. Yes. Even more so, police say,
because as the morning wore on, Nick became much less interested in speaking with police than with the reporters who
had started showing up. Nick and Jackie continuously tried to talk to the media.
We asked him to to stop and to stay in the scene. And then Nick did something really odd, says Detective Moore. He
walked directly over to examine that ground floor wide open side window. The room it led to had once been his. Him
going to that side of the house to look specifically at that window, which you can't see from just the front of the
house. So for him to know that that was even involved, he did not have that information. How does he know the entry
point unless he was involved in creating the entry point? Sometimes people will get information from cross talk with
detectives or law enforcement. And so I I didn't automatically get super suspicious, but
it was catching my attention. Something on Nick's phone had caught their attention as well. An app that
gave him access to his parents' alarm. Cory told them the family often chose not to arm the system and that it had
been switched off that night, but authorities noticed something in the account history. There was an activation
for an open window. The time of the window being opened was 4:27 that morning. Following that was glass break
activations. We believe that's when the bullets started breaking the glass in the house. That's when Ted died. That's
when the shots were being fired. Was this important to have? Extremely. Police also saw something that seemed
important in Jackie Edison's behavior. We were going to do gunshot residue tests on their hands. We then separated
them. And at that time, Jackie broke down hysterically. And what' you make of it? That was a major red flag for me. We
knew there was something more to this at that point. A woman officer put your mom
on the phone and then your mom told you what happened? Yeah. She's like someone came in the
house. There was an exchange of gunfire. I believe she fired a shot and then she
ran to the closet. In questioning later that day, Nick and Jackie reminded police
they'd been at their home in College Station when the shooting happened. We both moved to College Station and he
just works from home. A few days later, investigators got a search warrant. Once we get in the
apartment, we're going through it. We're finding ammunition. Though common among gun owners, the
ammunition was the same brand and caliber that was found at the crime scene. And investigators were about to
find proof the couple was keeping secrets. We find a marriage certificate for Nick and Jacqueline. You discovered
that Nick and Jackie were married by searching Nick's apartment. No. In all of the conversation you were having,
they never said that they were married. No. Never. A teenage friend of Nick's named Spencer Patterson. Spencer
Patterson. Who'd been certified as a minister online had married them eight months earlier. Police weren't the only
ones surprised. You and Ted never knew? No. Corey Shaughnessy says Nick and Jackie didn't tell her about their
clandestine marriage until after the murder. And I told him, I said, "This is not, you shouldn't have done this.
You're too young." Trying to be a good mom, she says she promised to help them plan a proper wedding. I said, "You need
to do it the right way." Corey had ample opportunity to make sure it happened because over the next few
days, Nick and Jackie moved back into her house. We were planning the engagement party. We had the guest list.
Jackie was picking out invitations. That's especially chilling because while police initially had looked at all three
for the murder, they now suspected just two. and that Nick and Jackie had also targeted
Corey, but it was still only a working theory. You can't say anything to Corey. No. That that's a hard line to walk. If
you have two people who planned her killing now living with her, are you worried about Cory's safety? Of course.
Of course. But Corey Shaughnessy says what worried her was the possibility authorities were trying to frame her son
who by now was working in his father's place at the jewelry store. There is a set of circumstances that the police are
trying to to to make work in the easiest way that they can. On March 10th, 2018,
she hired her son the best defense attorney she could find. You could have told me aliens landed on the front yard
and I would have believed that before I would have believed that Nicholas and Jackie plan to have us killed.
[Music] Corey Shaughnessy knew police were suspicious of Nick and Jackie, but she
says she had no reason to think they were right. After all, she says, "I don't know. They've been wrong about
her. The last thing that I would ever do would be kill my husband." And I thought, "Well, if they
think I did it, it's not a stretch for them to think Nicholas did it." But the closer police looked, the more
incriminating evidence they seemed to find that Nick and Jackie had planned to have both Shaughnessies killed. While
phone records showed Nick had been more than a 100 miles away at the time of the
murder. They also showed he was lying when he said he hadn't been to Austin for a month. We ultimately see cell
phone usage in Austin on February 28th, which is just Two days before Ted ends up getting killed,
investigators wondered if he had been in town making final preparations, there were text messages on Nick and Jackie's
phones that police say showed a suspicious conversation. How important was the text message that he sent out
February 23, 24, Nick is saying he's working on it? And Jackie's response to the text message was, "Do they want 50k
or not?" and she says, "We can't afford to pay half before." In another exchange, Nick asks her to
withdraw money from her account. Quote, "So if it happens, cash in hand, they do
make this withdrawal." Jackie withdrew $1,000 from the bank just days before the murder. Authorities
suspected it was no coincidence. Then in May of 2018, they talked to the man who had officiated Nick and Jackie's
wedding. That high school friend, Spencer Patterson. Trying to get a hold of Spencer was kind of difficult.
At first, investigators believed Patterson might be a suspect, but when they finally reached him, he proved to
be a critical witness instead. He told them just before the murder, Nick had talked about coming into $8
million with Ted and Corey gone. Nick had put a dollar sign on the lives of his parents. Yes, that's chilling. It
is. Patterson showed them text messages that were even more chilling. There was also
communication between Spencer and Nicholas, but Nicholas was trying to hire him to kill a family. Just walk in
and shoot a family, writes Nick. Steal all their no mask needed cuz they'll all be dead. Spencer didn't want to go along
with it, but Nick still pitched the idea. Police cleared Patterson and on May 29th, 2018, they arrested Nick
Shaughnessy and Jackie Edison for criminal solicitation. Cory couldn't believe it.
I'm still under the assumption that he's being wrongly accused. For months, Corey had stood by Nick, but
she told us when she read the arrest affidavit and saw the evidence, her rocksolid belief in his innocence began
to crumble. I got to where I understood that yes, they were involved in some way. But as a mother, she says she still
couldn't convince herself they'd deliberately tried to kill anyone. I was then hoping that they had maybe gotten
caught up in something in College Station where maybe Nicholas owed someone money or maybe there was some
sort of a strange drug thing or maybe he told the wrong person that we were jewelers.
Confident Nick and Jackie were behind the attack, police hoped some time in jail might make them come clean about
who had actually pulled the trigger. For the moment, though, neither one was talking. The next step was who were the
actual shooters and how do we figure this out? The evidence trail had essentially run cold. So, we kind of hit
a stall point when in early July, 4 months after the murder, Detective Moore decided to review some security video
from Nick and Jackie's porch recorded just 2 days before the attack. I see two individuals show up to his front door.
Moore says he noticed something about one of the men that made him freeze the video. something he was wearing a green
Anderson t-shirt. Window company. A window company. This feels like a break. And it only happens because you isolated
a frame of the video from the security camera. Yeah. He and drove to the window company where their hard work ran into
more good luck. By sheer coincidence, an employes's daughter said she'd actually
met the man in the freeze frame. Apparently, he'd only worked there for a few days, four years earlier, and this
woman still remembered his name. Sergeant, what are the odds of a hit like this on the identity? It was crazy
that we we got that break. His name was Cameron Vosmeck, and he wasn't home that
day, but his wife answered the door and quickly got their attention. I know why you're here. that kid who hired
somebody to to kill his jewelry store parents. Hang on. She doesn't know who you guys are.
You identify yourselves as detectives and she says, "I know why you're here." Yes.
She said a few months earlier a man named Johnny Leon had asked her husband to commit murder for money, but he
turned him down. Police ruled out Vosmeck as a suspect, but Leon turned out to be the other person in the
security video from Nick and Jackie's porch. When they brought him in for questioning,
he told them he was no murderer, but he admitted Nick had tried to hire him. I'm
not going to lie to you. If someone offers you 100K, you're going to think about it. He's luring you into this to
commit murder. Police were convinced that Leon had taken the bait. I'm just telling you, we
know you're involved in this. We know what happened. You know, I'm involved. Absolutely. There's no doubt.
Leon was arrested for a capital murder. And on his phone, police found evidence he may not have acted alone. There was a
flurry of contacts around the time of the killing with a Fort Worth man named Arian Smith.
They also discovered both men had arrest records. In fact, the two had been arrested together for drugs a year
earlier. Detective Moore and I interviewed him. He did admit that he had met Nick. He gave us a lot of good
information. Smith opened up about the details of that night and broke down in the
process. You're the only person showing regret. I don't understand how how could
you kill somebody and not have any emotion about it and you actually killed him. I was just in the situation. I'm
I'm I'm devastated. I cannot sleep at night. Prosecutors were closer than ever to having everything they needed to make
their case. We've got enough now. Let's go to trial. Something Nick Shaughnessy told us he'd
wanted to avoid. Did you pay these two men to go kill your parents? After police arrested the last of their
four suspects, Aryan Smith, Detective Salo says Smith told them he wasn't just there for Ted's murder. Yes, I was
there. He acknowledged firing the fatal shot and then made a stunning request. I
request the death penalty. the death penalty. I killed somebody. I deserve to die. What is that? He also told police
where to find the murder weapon. It was the 40 caliber pistol missing from that box they'd found in Nick's old bedroom.
The 40 caliber gun that killed Ted was Ted's. Yes. For a mother who'd struggled for months
to keep faith in her son, it felt like the last straw. Too much had happened that pointed to Nicholas and Jackie
having involvement. And Corey was horrified to realize she'd spent months sheltering the very people
who'd planned to have Ted and her murdered that night. What a chilling thought. Two people who tried to have
you killed and they're living in your home. Very It's very chilling. I bought all the groceries. I paid all the bills.
I bought her clothing. This is diabolical. Absolutely. They thought they had gotten away with it. Do you Do
you prefer Jackie or Jacqueline or Jackie? But after their arrest, it took just a couple of weeks for Jackie to
blame Nick. Did Nicholas hire somebody to kill his parents? Yeah. And Jackie seemed to know why he'd done
it. She says Nick was in desperate financial straits with a failing day trading business and thousands in
overdue loans, including at least one from Corey. I think his mom gave him $30,000 and she expected money in
return, but he wasn't paying her. After her cooperation, authorities released Jackie on a reduced bond and prosecutor
Amy Meredith resolved to go after Nick for the maximum. We're going to try Nicholas Shaughnessy for capital murder.
At this point, were you prepared to testify against Nick? Yes. Nick Shaughnessy and the two alleged
hitmen were charged with capital murder. But by the spring of 2021, Amy Meredith
had left her job as assistant district attorney. And there was a new DA, Joseé Garza, whose office made the men an
offer, avoid a possible death sentence by pleading guilty to a reduced charge of murder, and served 35 years with the
possibility of parole. Leon and Smith agreed, and Cy wrote to Nick to suggest he do the same.
If I could speak to Ted, I think that would have been his choice. Nick Shaughnessy accepted the deal. He
could be released when he's 36. In the summer of 2023, we visited him in prison near Houston. Did you hire people to go
kill your parents? Yes, Jackie and I participated in multiple aspects to Never mind. Participated in multiple
aspects. Did you pay these two men to go kill your parents? Yes. Nick told us he's sorry for all of it. I know that
I'm here because of those actions. Nick, at the end of the day, are you sorry for
what you did or are you sorry that you got caught? I'm most truly passionately sorry for what I did. And Nick told us
he never would have done it if not for Jackie. It was a very toxic relationship. Although he stood to
inherit his parents' money eventually, he told us he wasn't prepared to wait. Were you at all thinking, "What am I
doing?" Of course, it was always in the back of my head like red flags like, "Stop. Don't go." The back of your head.
Yeah. Why not the front of your head? I guess the the the validation or approval
from Jackie. It is hard to know how much Jackie Edison should be blamed or what punishment she deserves. And jurors
won't get to decide. She too got a deal from the office of the new DA for pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit
capital murder by terror threat or other felony. a jail sentence of 120 days and
10 years probation. It's it's astounding. It's absolutely astounding. She began serving her time in June of
2023. It is an outright dismissal of everything that I went through as a victim and it's a dismissal of Ted's
life. Three are doing 35 years. One is doing 120 days. Cory says that's outrageous.
What are your thoughts? I had no involvement once I left the district attorney's office on Jackie's case. Amy
Meredith was working elsewhere before prosecutors offered the plea deals. Cory's feelings aren't lost on her. Do
you understand her rage? I I absolutely understand that she is upset. Cory is so upset that when the new
prosecutors asked her to appear at Jackie's 2023 plea hearing, she refused. Instead, recording this video at home to
be played in court. I'm alive because your plan to have me murdered didn't succeed. You are a
monster. You are evil and everyone needs to know it. You knew what was about to happen and
yet you sat home and did nothing because you wanted it to happen. We wanted to ask Jackie Edison about that and other
things, but she declined our request for an interview. On the day she was released from jail, our producer, Jenna
Jackson, approached her. Hey, Jacqueline. What do you make of Nick Shaughnessy's
apology? See more evidence from the case at 48 [Music] hours.com. Cory and Nick Shaughnessy haven't spoken directly
since his 2018 arrest. When you look in the mirror, do you see evil? My mom stated that me being evil,
I don't see evil in me. And these days, it's safe to say they don't see eye to eye. In fact, there may be only one
thing they do agree on. Jackie is not a victim. This is a 50/50 thing. Most definitely. Did Jacine Edison get away
with murder? Absolutely. On October 17th, 2023, Jackie Edison walked out of an Austin area
jail after serving her 4 month sentence. Hey, Jacqueline. We've been asking for an interview for months. I don't want to
do any interviews. But our producer, Jenna Jackson, had some questions for her anyway. Nick got 35 years. The
hitman got the same. You got 120 days. Are you getting away with murder? No. I think that I think that it's fair.
I think it accurately reflects the level of involvement. Corey and Nick have both told us is that
you were your partner in this murder plot. Yeah, I think Nick is is saying whatever he has to say to
kind of clear his name. Um, and Corey is very much in denial about what really happened. You weren't in on this plot
and Not in didn't get money out to pay the hitman. No, man. Is she innocent? OB, absolutely not. No,
she knew. She knew what he was trying to do. She could have stopped this at any time. I tried to stop him.
But investigators say there is no evidence Jackie ever tried to stop the murder. She's no princess in this. And
according to what Nick told authorities, Jackie had been making plans for spending the Shaughnessy's money. I
found out that Jackie had already picked out the car she was going to buy her mother with the money that they made off
of the murder of you and Ted. Yes. I'm not defending her to by any degree. Though she did eventually help them make
their case against the person they identified as the key culprit. They're both to blame. Who took more action?
It's Nick. You take Nick out of this, you don't have the incident. You take Jackie out. Still happens.
Do you understand Cory's frustration? I do. Absolutely. We empathize with her. But Mo and Salo say Jackie's plea deal
wasn't their call. Our job ended at the arrest, and there's not a single step further that we can take it.
We wanted to ask DA Joseé Garza exactly why Jackie Edison got 120 days after the
other three got 35 years, but he wouldn't agree to an interview. A district attorney spokesperson sent us a
statement saying, quote, "Our office takes acts of violence seriously and is committed to holding people who commit
violent crimes accountable." The statement also said Edison is on 10 years probation and if she violates the
terms, she could face 20 years in prison. Cory Shaughnessy says a full explanation from authorities would have
helped her make sense of something that has always struck her as impossibly wrong. So, no one's ever explained to
you why this enormous disparity in sentence? No, absolutely not. It's a slap in the face to my mother. Now
you're concerned about your mother? Most definitely. True or not, Nick Shaughnessy told us he
hopes someday Corey will agree to speak with him. What would you say to her? I wish I could tell my mom how truly
sorry I am that this is not something I'm proud of and I failed her as a son. It means nothing to me. Do you think he
believes it? What he's saying? I don't know that person. I have no idea who Nicholas Shaughnessy is.
And Corey says there is no point responding to an apology she was never meant to hear. In
my mind, I am supposed to be dead, and so I'm a ghost, and ghosts can't speak. But even after a betrayal no mother
should ever have to see, Corey still can't bring herself to condemn her son altogether. Do you still love your son?
I love the person I knew to be my son before this happened. You love that 8-year-old boy racing cars with his dad?
Yes. She knows that boy is gone forever. And so is the life she and Ted tried to
build around him. Nicholas and Jackie destroyed my entire world. They took my husband. They took memories. They took
my business. They took everything I had that I cared about. But now living out of state under a
different name, Corey is determined to make the most of every day. It'll always be
there. It'll always be a part of who I am, but I've been given life and I need to do something with it.
As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. But did
you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? Listen to Candyman, the true story
behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. You've probably heard of the NCIS from the hit
TV series, but we're about to take you inside its real life work. Listen to 48 hours NCIS early and adree on the 48
hours plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. [Music] You have a prepaid call from Lyall Menendez. My name is Lyall
Mendez. I'm at RJ Donovan State Prison in San Diego, California, and I am here for killing my parents. My brother and I
were convicted together. Firstde murder verdicts for both Eric and Lyall Menendez. Excuse us. And this is a
special report from the Van Ice Courthouse. Both Menendez brothers have been found guilty. How big a deal was
the Menendez case? Well, when you think back, it was huge. The Menendez family was very wealthy. This was Beverly
Hills. Murders just don't typically happen. Kitty was my baby sister. There was a brutal murder.
Everyone from the gardener to the president had a view of what happened. I'm Jackie Lacy. I'm the former elected
district attorney of Los Angeles County. A couple was sitting around watching TV
when their adult sons came in with shotguns and slaughtered them. What did these parents do to deserve them? There
must be a reason. It's just never been a kid of guilt for innocence. It was always about why it happened.
Jose Menendez was the self-made millionaire. It was very driven, very demanding. The prosecution's theory was
they got tired of their lives being micromanaged. They wanted to spend the money the way they wanted to spend the
money. They were buying Rolex watches. They were buying real estate. The way that they acted was not like, "Oh my
goodness, my parents are dead." It was soulless. It was strictly greed from day one. You believe they wanted a portion
of the money. They wanted it all. [Music] My name is Cliff Gardner. I represent Eric and Lyall
Menendez. It's not a complex case. It's a simple case. And they were abused their whole life. My dad had been
molesting me. He raped me. Did you ask him not to? Yes. The brothers were claiming that we
were molested by our father. When we threatened to go public, they threatened to kill us. And so we had to go in and
kill them before they killed us. I thought he was going to kill me that night. I never saw anything in the home.
Never. I have got to think that it was their attorney's ideas that if your only way you're going to save your ass is to
say that you were molested and that's what they did. It's divided the family immensely. I love my cousins. They
shouldn't have gone through what they went through. They're not lying. They were being abused.
As you sit there in prison, there is some news now that could really impact you and your brother's case, right? Yes.
It's pretty just sort of shocking. Former Manudo singer Roy Relo claims he was drugged and raped by Jose Menendez
in the mid 80s. Manudo had just signed with RCA Records where Menendez was a top executive. We now have evidence that
makes absolutely clear that those boys were molested and if those boys were molested, it would have been
manslaughter and they would be out. The judge in this case, if he finds that the new evidence is credible and the
conviction should be vacated, do you think the DA's office would seek a new trial? I think they would spend a lot of
time thinking about it. 34 years of incarceration. You wonder when will there be a fair review of
this? So maybe now. My hope in the case is that they'll finally walk out of prison.
[Music] [Music] Lyall and Eric Mendez have been behind bars in California for more than three
decades for the 1989 killing of their parents, Jose and Kitty Mendez. convicted of firstdegree murder and
sentenced to life in prison. I really can't comment. You say anything at all in a case that captured the nation's
attention and guide me. They had no hope of ever walking free, but new evidence may change that. Eric chose not to speak
with us for this broadcast, but Lyall did. You have a prepaid call from Lyall Mendez. This call and your telephone
number will be monitored and recorded. Hi, Lyall. Can you hear me? Hi. Yeah, I can hear you. What did you think when
you heard about these new claims and evidence? I mean, for me, I just was happy just a burden to be telling what
happened to and just have so much doubt in the public air. The question is not whether the Menendez brothers killed
their parents. They admit that they did. Instead, the focus of the case has long
been why they did it. They insist that they killed out of fear and in self-defense after a lifetime of
physical, emotional, and sexual abuse suffered at the hands of their parents. One of their lawyers, Cliff Gardner,
says the new evidence corroborates those claims and lessens their culpability. If
the judge finds this evidence credible, I think it is sufficient to give them a new trial.
But to understand how we got here, we have to go back to the beginning. The evening of August 20th, 1989, when Lyall
Menendez made this call to 911 from the family's Beverly Hills mansion. Beverly Hills emergency. Yes, please. Uh, what's
the problem? Someone tell my parents. Pardon me? So after officers responded to the scene,
then 21-year-old Lyall and 18-year-old Eric reported that they had arrived home to find their parents shot to death in
the family room. Jackie Lacy was a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles at the time. I think one of the Beverly
Hills detective described it as one of the most brutal crime scene he had ever seen in his life. I've been in this
business for over 33 years and I've heard of very few murders that were more savage than this one was. Jose Mendez, a
former top executive at RCA Records and his wife Kitty had been shot multiple times at close range with a shotgun. It
was an expression of hatred for these two people. And that was the last time I saw her alive. Milton Anderson, Kitty's
older brother, still remembers receiving the news. My brother called me and he said that Kitty and Jose were were dead.
I loved her. Sister Kitty was a very ambitious girl. She was a very beautiful woman.
Kitty and Jose met when they were in college in Illinois. Jose had come to the US from Cuba. They went on to marry
and start a family. Lyall and Eric were their only children. Over the years, with Kitty by his side, Jose excelled in
his career, working for RCA Records, among other major companies. He was going right up the ladder without any
hesitation. At the time of his death, Jose was working for a film studio running their home video division.
Investigators initially suspected that the killings may have been tied to his business dealings. Lyall sort of
indicated, you know, my dad dealt with shady characters. And once you say something like that, detectives are
going to start to look at, okay, what were his business contacts? Family members and investigators wondered
whether it may have been mafia related. At the time, the home video industry was
known for having ties to the mob. Everybody said it was a mob hit because it was so brutal. It It really was like
a scene out of the Godfather movies. Initially, Lyall and Eric Mendez were not even on investigators radar. They
didn't do any gunshot residue test on their hands. They let him go back and get evidence without even thinking,
"Hey, could it have been the kids, but they didn't stay off investigators radar for long. Their behavior in the wake of
the crime eventually drew scrutiny. The brothers appeared to be spending their parents' money, and lots of it. They
were investing in businesses. They acted like they had won the lottery. And their
behavior at their parents' memorial services raised some eyebrows. At the podium, Lyall read a letter from Jose
that was filled with love and pride for his sons. Did you see Lyall get emotional as he was reading that letter?
No. Lyall also made a statement that his father always said, "You can never fill
my shoes." and he jokingly said, "Guess what? I'm wearing my father's shoes today." struck you as
odd that he would say something like that. I was very odd. While all that may have seemed unusual, it wasn't hard
evidence. But then about 6 months later, police got a tip from an unlikely source. the girlfriend of a psychologist
who Lyall and Eric Mendez had been talking to. She told police that the brothers had confessed to the killings
in therapy and there was an audio taped recording of it. But for that confession, who knows whether they would
ever been caught. On March 8th, 1990, after police got their hands on that tape, Lyall Mendez was taken into
custody. Eric Menendez, who was out of the country at the time, surrendered to police days later. Not many Hollywood
murder mysteries ever took a more dramatic turn than police are describing in a couple of savage Beverly Hills
killings. Police say the motive was apparently money, a $14 million inheritance to be shared by the
brothers. But years later, when the case made its way to trial, the brothers would make it
clear that it might not be so simple. In August 20th, 1989, did you and your brother kill your
mother and father? Why did you kill your parents? Cuz we were afraid. [Music] In the summer of 1993, nearly 4 years
after Jose and Kitty Mendez were gunned down in their home, their sons, Lyall and Eric Mendez
went on trial, they face the death penalty. Good afternoon. The only question in this case is why
did these killings occur. Why they were killed is what the focus of all of our evidence will be on. What the defense
was arguing was that since this was a self-defense case, the brothers were deserving of a lesser charge and
punishment. The defense attorneys who tried the case didn't respond to our request for an interview. Cliff Gardner
represents Lyall and Eric Mendez today. They had the defense of imperfect self-defense.
Imperfect self-defense meaning the brothers honestly believe that they had to take action to save their lives even
though it might not seem rational. And if it's honest but unreasonable, you are capable of manslaughter, not of murder.
Both brothers took the stand. Ly Mendez spoke of sexual abuse at the hands of his mother and father. He said his
father began sexually abusing him when he was only 6 years old. He would uh fondle me and he would ask me to do the
same with him. Over time, he said it became worse. He raped me. But while Lyall said his
father stopped sexually abusing him when he was eight, Eric said it never ended for him and that he finally confided in
his older brother days before the crime at age 18. I didn't know what to do at the time, so I figured I'd tell Lyall
and maybe he could help me. He started telling me that one of the reasons he had never told me before was cuz my dad
had always threatened his life. The brothers testified that Lyall soon confronted their parents and that their
mother indicated she knew about the abuse all along. In anger, Lyall said he directed a threat at his father. I told
him that I would tell everybody. Then he said, "We all make choices in life, son. Eric made his. You've made yours."
What did you think was going to happen? I thought we were in danger. I thought he had no He felt he had no choice.
But to what? That he would kill us. The brothers testified that they got into another argument with their parents on
the night of the crime and that they believed their parents were about to kill them to keep the family secret from
coming out. So they said they grabbed shotguns that they had bought two days earlier for protection, went into the
family room, and started shooting their parents. at one point even stopping to reload. And what did you do after you
reloaded? I ran around and shot my mom. The defense may call us next witness. To
bolster their claims of abuse, the defense called to the stand numerous relatives, friends, and acquaintances of
the family who described incidents of physical and emotional abuse that they said they observed. Alan Anderson, Lyall
and Eric's cousin, was one of those witnesses. Growing up, Allan would spend summers at the Menendez home. He had a
lot to say about Jose hitting the kids with the belt. Never had a problem with that. and Kitty. She wouldn't get up to
consult the children. Nothing. While none of the witnesses, including Allan, ever saw Lyall or Eric Mendez being
sexually abused, Allan did recall something that struck him as odd. Jose would tell the boys in the bedroom and
then he would close the door and then he'd take showers with him. He says during that time, Kitty wouldn't let him
go near the room. So, I was not allowed while the boys were alone with Jose with
the door closed in the master bedroom to go down the hall to probably not hear whatever I may hear. Another cousin,
Diane Vandermull, gave similar testimony, and she also recounted a conversation she says she had with Lyall
when he was eight. Um, he proceeded to indicate to me by touching himself uh down and and saying that his dad and
him had been touching each other down there. And what did you do? I went and got Kitty and uh told her what was going
on. And what happened when Kitty came down? She didn't believe me. Andy Cano, yet another cousin, also took the stand
and testified about a conversation he says he had with Eric when Eric was about 13.
He told me his father was massaging his he told me never to reveal it to anybody. Still, prosecutors argued that
even if Lyall and Eric Mendez were abused, it doesn't give them the right to kill. And they pointed out that when
the brothers confessed to that psychologist, they never mentioned abuse or self-defense. Then the timing of
disclosure was convenient. The prosecutors who tried the case didn't respond to our request for an interview.
Former Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacy reviewed portions of the trial at our request. And people do make things up
when their life is on the line. But all these years later, Lyall Mendez maintains they are telling the truth.
And the reason they didn't come forward then was complicated. What was holding you back? Just shame. Just not wanting
it to be public. The pure nature of the crime, however, says Lacy doesn't support the brother's claim that they
acted in self-defense. Prosecutors pointed out that Jose and Kitty were watching TV at the time they were killed
and they weren't armed. In order to get close enough to blow somebody away, you would have been able to see that they
didn't have weapons. Ly Mendez is adamant that he and his brother were in fear for their lives. For me, it was
just dark and confusing and total belief that there was danger. You know, it's fight or flight to a degree. It was
panic. The prosecution argued the evidence proves the killings were premeditated. When the brothers
purchased those shotguns, prosecutors said that they took steps to cover their tracks, like driving to a gun store all
the way in San Diego. San Diego is not a round the corner drive. Last time I checked, it was two
hours sometimes. After they killed their parents, they went around and picked up
the expended shotgun shell casings so that their fingerprints wouldn't be discovered on those shelves. There was a
lot of thought and a lot of deliberation that went into it. They also got rid of
the shotguns, made that 911 call. Who is the person that was shot? My mom and my
dad. and misled the initial investigators. Prosecutors pointed to money as the motive. They said Jose
Mendez told his sons he had removed them from his will and based on their investigation, they suggested that after
the crime, Lyall Mendez attempted to destroy a will on the family computer. Lyle denies doing that and insists money
had nothing to do with what happened. If there was a new will, it was never found. We never had any financial
problems with my parents. Although the brothers were tried together, there were two separate juries deciding their fate.
When deliberations began, they stretched on for weeks before both juries determined they were divided over
whether Lyall and Eric Mendez should be convicted of murder or manslaughter. Therefore, I find that the jury is
hopelessly deadlocked. A mistrial was declared. It was just a devastating result. I
needed it to be over one way or the other, but it was far from over. Prosecutors would try the case again.
They needed a win. The heat was on. [Music] [Music] Nearly two years passed as Lyall and
Eric Mendez sat in jail, awaiting a second trial. Some of their family members, like Alan Anderson, believed
that they were justified in the killings. I know they did what they did because they were in fear of their life.
While others, like Kitty's brother, Milton Anderson, considered them coldblooded killers. I don't believe
that Jose or Kitty would do any of the things that they were accused of. Jose was changing his will and that's when
they went out and bought the shotguns. At the retrial, which began in October 1995, one jury instead of two would hear
the case. No video cameras were allowed in court and a new team of prosecutors would employ a different strategy. The
first trial was okay, there may have been abuse, but we don't allow vigilantes in our society. The second
trial, the prosecution's case, there was no abuse at all. And what made it easier
for prosecutors to argue that, says attorney Cliff Gardner, is the fact that the prosecution raised new and
successful objections to the admission of a large amount of defense evidence. Now, the jury would hear from only some,
not all, of the witnesses who knew the Menendez family and helped corroborate the brother's claims of abuse. The DA
was not going to take another loss. they could not take another loss. The judge who had also presided over the first
trial excluded the testimony on the grounds that it was irrelevant, repetitive, and in some instances
lacking in foundation because this time Lyall Menendez would not take the stand.
Eric did testify. Why did you decide not to speak? Uh for two reasons. I was just
done after the first trial and I didn't have the attorney that I trusted so much
to ask me these deep personal questions. But Carol Nahara, the only surviving lead prosecutor from the second trial
who declined to speak with us, suggested in a 1996 interview there might have been another reason why Lyall didn't
take the stand. There were things that had been developed since the first trial that would have damaged his credibility
a great deal. Prosecutors said they had new evidence that Lyall had asked a friend and a former girlfriend to
fabricate testimony. Lyall admits to 48 Hours that he did do that, but says he later withdrew those requests.
Because Lyall didn't take the stand, his cousin Diane Vandermolan was prohibited
from testifying about that conversation she says she had with Lyall when he was eight, in which she says Lyall told her
that his father was touching him. The jury did still hear from cousin Andy Cano about that similar conversation he
claimed to have had with a 13-year-old Eric, but the prosecution attacked his credibility. The state's position was
that Andy was a liar. And when cousin Alan Anderson took the stand, prosecutors attacked his credibility,
too, bringing up the fact that Lyall Menendez gave him money after the crime. Anderson says it was to help pay for a
medical procedure. He didn't say anything like, "Well, if I go to court, you know, or no, he it was just straight
up between him and I, him being a nice cousin, knowing I was in financial bind, he knew he had the resources to help
me." At the second trial, prosecutors placed more of a focus on the brutality of the crime, and they painted Jose as a
restrained, loving father, someone incapable of molesting his children. Prosecutors referred to the brother's
defense as the abuse excuse. In the first trial, the defense called more than 50 witnesses. This
time, they called about half. It wasn't that they didn't want to present them. They were not allowed.
The jury deliberated for days and then the verdicts are in in the retrial of Eric and Lyall Mendez.
Guilty of firstdegree murder. I hugged my brother. We cried and I said, "Look, we're going to be okay." I
was not happy at all. At the jury's recommendation, the brothers were sentenced to life in prison without the
possibility of parole. And you believe they deserved that? Oh, what they did to my sister, they should
have gotten a death penalty. Lyall and Eric Mendez were sent to separate prisons. More than two decades
passed. And then around 2020, the case made a surprising resurgence on social media. Following a documentary that
aired on the case in which Eric Menendez repeated his claims of abuse, droves of
people took to Tik Tok and Instagram to express support for him and his brother.
Dr. Judy Hoe is a neurossychologist who specializes in childhood sex abuse trauma. Dr. Ho is also a 48 hours
consultant. We asked her to review the case. I definitely think that our society has just become more
knowledgeable about trauma and the impact of sexual trauma. Dr. Ho says research shows that just because the
brothers delayed reporting abuse, it doesn't mean they made it up. That's all very consistent with people who have
been through trauma and maybe feel like it was even their own fault in some ways
or they're ashamed of the trauma. and there's a lot more self-stigma and shame associated with male victims. She also
says that the abuse the brothers describe could even help explain why the crime was so brutal. It makes sense that
in that moment it's almost like a breakdown. And that's not to make an excuse for anything that they've done,
but it's just to describe the state of mind of this is years and years of abuse where they couldn't act to protect
themselves. And once they pulled the trigger, it was like there was no turning back. But could Lyall and Eric
Menendez have truly been in fear for their lives that night? They're 18 and 21. Why couldn't they leave? Right.
Well, certainly there was a path that they could have taken is to try to get away from the family, but it sounds like
even at that age, they were very much under the control of their father still. I think that often times what people are
not aware of is that trauma completely rewires the brain. They probably did think at one point it was either them or
their parents, that it was a fight orflight conditioning that had come up. Attorney Cliff Gardner believes the case
would be tried differently today. The idea back then was a dads don't molest their children. And if by chance it
happened, these are 18 and 21 year old kids. They're strapping young men. They just leave. And both those I think are
undercut in in what we know today. Still, a better understanding of the effects of sexual abuse and some social
media support would do little on their own to make a difference in the brother's case legally. Instead, what
their defense needed was new evidence. And eventually, that's what it got. Did you or Eric think that another person
would accuse your father of child molestation? I did not. I could not believe it.
[Music] Over the years, Lyall and Eric Menendez appealed their convictions, but were
unsuccessful. It seemed unlikely that they would ever see beyond prison walls. But then new evidence began to
surface. The first piece in the form of a letter. Just kind of out of the blue, one of uh
my father's sister found a letter in storage. Appallet attorney Cliff Gardner says the
letter was written by Eric Mendez to his cousin Andy Cano in December 1988 about 8 months before the crime.
It's not dated, but you were able to get a frame of reference of the timing of it
based on the contents of the letter. Exactly. He talks about the Christmas party. We know the Christmas party that
they put on was in Christmas of 88. He talks about hiring a new tennis coach. There's a number of things in the letter
that allow us to authenticate when it was written. And it's a particular section of the letter that Gardner says
is key. He says, "I've been trying to avoid dad. It's still happening, Andy, but it's
worse for me now. Every night, I stay up thinking he might come in. I'm afraid he's crazy. He's warned me a hundred
times about telling anyone, especially Lyall. No one knew about it a child. It was never presented.
Remember, Andy Cano did testify at both trials. He said that Eric Mendez at age 13 confided in him that his dad had been
touching him. Prosecutors suggested that Cano was lying. He explained to me that these
massages that his father was giving him were beginning to hurt. The letter is significant. Why? Well,
the state's position was that Andy was a liar. Andy was making it up. This shows
that Andy wasn't making it up. It's contemporaneous evidence from Eric to his cousin Andy about what was
happening. But the letter was just the beginning. More evidence has surfaced that Gardner
says further supports Lyall and Eric Menendez's long-standing claims that they were sexually
abused. A man named Roy Relo has come forward claiming that he was sexually abused by Jose Mendez, too. Roy was a
member of the boy band Manudo which was big in the late 70s, mid 80s. They're a sensation in the Spanish-sp
speakaking world and throughout Latin America. Their appeal has caught on big. Menudo originated in Puerto Rico. The
band is best known for producing bigname talent like singer Ricky Martin. [Music]
The idea behind the band was to keep it perpetually young. Few of the performers
remained in the group beyond the age of 16, instead being rotated out for younger talent. It turns out Joseé
Mendez had ties to the group. Jose Mendez was working at RCA at the time and RCA signed Manudo to a recording
contract. Former Manudo member Roy Relo, now 54, was not available for an interview with 48 Hours. But in a sworn
affidavit filed just last year, he claims he went to Jose Menendez's home in the early 80s at the direction of the
band's then manager, Edgardo Diaz. Rella would have been between 14 and 15 years
old at the time. He says he drank a glass of wine, then felt like he had no control over his
body. He says Jose Menendez took him to a room and raped him. Relo first spoke publicly about the
allegations in a documentary. [Music] Rosello also alleges that he was sexually abused by Jose Menendez on two
other occasions. Right before and right after the performance at Radio City Music Hall in New York, I met Roy and he
talked to me about it. It was a difficult conversation for him. It was difficult for me to hear, but I thought
Roy was credible. It can take years for people to recognize what happened, to have the
courage to come forward. When I first heard about it, I I cried. For me, it was very meaningful to
just have things come out that caused people to really realize, okay, at least this part of what it's about is true.
Ly Menendez says he remembers Manudo band members coming over to the family home when they lived in New Jersey
before moving to Beverly Hills. He does not recall Relo specifically. What do you remember about
the Manudo band members going to your home? Only that my father had sort of intimate involvement with that
particular group. They usually would not have too much involvement with groups other than negotiations. But with Manudo
and Edardo Diaz, he traveled with them. He went to their concerts. He stayed in hotels that they stayed at.
Ly Menendez says he didn't think much of it until rumors began surfacing towards
the end of he and his brother's first trial. People in the industry were talking about that maybe something had
happened because there was a sex scandal in the group. Reload with other former Manudo members
have long accused Edgardo Diaz, the band's one-time manager, of sexual abuse. Diaz has always denied the
allegations, and no charges have been filed against him. The Los Angeles Police Department is currently
investigating a specific incident in which Rousel alleges Diaz raped him at this hotel in the 1980s.
But what does this new evidence mean in terms of Lyall and Eric Menendez's case?
The importance of the new evidence, you have to look back and understand what the state's position was at the second
trial. The state's position was that the sexual abuse never happened. And the state's position as to Jose Menendez was
he wasn't the type of person who would molest a young boy. This new evidence takes both those arguments and undercuts
them entirely. Gardner has filed a habius petition asking that his client's convictions be
vacated. The boys were abused as children, they were abused their whole life. And this is a manslaughter case,
not a murder case. It's just that simple. And if they were convicted of manslaughter, they would have received a
much shorter sentence and been out a long time ago. But will a judge buy gardener's
argument? It is very very possible that Jose Mendez was a child molester, but you don't get to murder
him and his wife in cold blood. What do you make of the new evidence? To see a timeline of how the
case unfolded, go to 48our.com. [Music] After attorney Cliff Gardner filed the habius petition in May 2023 asking that
Lyall and Eric Mendez convictions be vacated, it turned into a waiting game for a judge to rule. We asked former DA
Jackie Lacy what she makes of the new evidence. Starting with that letter, the one that appears to have been written by
Eric Mendez to his cousin Andy Cano months before the crime. The interesting thing about the letter is that there are
only two people who can authenticate it. Andy Kano and Eric Menendez. Andy Cano died in 2003 and Lacy points out that he
never mentioned the letter when he testified. You would think when Andy was on the
stand twice, he'd have brought that up and oh yeah, he told me about it recently and here is the letter. The
timing of that letter though, you are able to sort of pin down because you know it was the holidays because he
writes about his Christmas plans. But Natalie, look at it another way. You could include those details and get that
letter together after they were caught. This letter, for all we know, could have
been written by Eric Mendez shortly after the murder given to Kano, and Kano may have gotten cold feet about it and
not submitted it. But Gardner argues the new evidence is sound. He says the reason the letter was not brought up at
trial is likely because Eric Mendez and Andy Cano forgot about it. If you look at the letter, it's not just about what
Jose's been doing. It's about all sorts of other things. It was just one of many
letters that they wrote to each other. There really shouldn't be any doubt about the authenticity of the letter.
And as for Roy Relo, the former Manudo band member, can you discount his claims altogether? No. I think what the judge
has to weigh and consider is is this newly discovered evidence that would have changed the verdict. And Lacy says
she does not believe it would have. They're still stuck with the planning, the cover up, the money that they spent
afterwards. I think that you could argue the sexual abuse occurred. On the other
hand, at the moment, these men are driving down to San Diego, paying for the murder weapons, coming back and
waiting for an opportune time to go in and kill their parents. The molestation is not occurring right then. I do not
believe that at the time they murdered them that they were in danger at that particular minute of being murdered by
those people. I think they hated them. They might have had a good reason to hate them, but we can't condone
vigilanteism. When you calmly and logically look at the facts surrounding the killing, it's a murder. But Gardner
believes the new evidence would have made a difference to the jurors. He says evidence of abuse can mitigate a crime
and that's why prosecutors fought so hard to keep it out of the second trial. Sexual abuse, physical abuse is relevant
to your state of mind. Uh and state of mind is the key in determining whether something's murder or whether
something's manslaughter. What this evidence does is it puts you back in the situation that they were in
with the first trial. that there was corroboration for the abuse. And in the first trial, remember, two juries were
divided over whether the brothers should have been convicted of murder or manslaughter. The court declares a
mistrial. Gardner thinks this new evidence, combined with that of the first trial, rules out murder entirely.
My hope in the case is that the judge will realize that this new evidence is indeed credible and persuasive and he'll
vacate the convictions. If that happens, it would be up to the Los Angeles County
District Attorney's Office whether to retry the case. In a statement, the district attorney's office said it is
investigating the claims made in the habius petition. Alan Anderson wants to see his cousins released. What I would
say to the prosecutor judge would be, please look at all of the evidence. They are speaking the truth. They shouldn't
be in there as long as they've been. But still, Kitty Menendez's brother, Milton
Anderson, feels just the opposite. He says he doesn't believe the new evidence is credible. I don't think it's
evidence. And he wants his nephews to stay put. I think they should die of old age in
prison. I loved my sister and I protected her in life and I will love my sister and protect her in her death. Ly
Mendez says he understands his uncle's pain. Part of my remorse is for the pain that caused people like him. As they
await a judge's decision, Lyall and Eric Mendez, who reside in the same prison since 2018, are focused on
rehabilitation and continuing their education. I connect with other prisoners that have sex abuse histories
and work with them. Both brothers are married to women outside prison. I think it has made a huge difference to have
love and support like that. I try not to be defined by that one night. That's sort of a lifelong
journey. Not to be defined by that one night. [Music] Need more time with 48 Hours? Go deep
behind every true crime episode with firstirhand accounts from 48 Hours Investigations. Were you at all prepared
for what happened in this case? Shock is the word that comes to mind. Get inside
the twists and turns and get in on the case. Listen to Postmortem from 48 Hours, now available wherever you get
your [Music] podcasts. He was brilliant, phenomenally handsome. He was everything that to me
symbolized a future with a capital F. It just clicked. And from that first day, there was never any doubt that we
were meant to [Music] meet. I saw the outline of the gun. He was going to die that night no matter
what. This is a story about two people, John and Anne Bender, who from the outside
world seemed perfect. John Bender was a Wall Street genius and very quickly made
upwards of a half a billion dollars by the time he was in his early 30s. Their whole worlds were each other. And when
they found each other, they really didn't need anything else. We built the house with the idea of it
being our home to our taste. They said, "Let's retreat to Costa Rica to the deepest part of the
rainforest and set up a nature preserve. Not many people are willing or want to live in a house that has no
walls. Our architect said we were nuts. You were happy. I loved it. And John was
happy. Yes. As happy as John could be. What you think is paradise isn't necessarily paradise. John and Ant had
problems that money just couldn't fix. They were living a very inward life. They had cut off the world. He had
decided that the world would be better off without it. There were no lights on. All I knew
is he had a gun and I tried to get it away from him and I couldn't and it went off.
It comes down to basically two people in a room with a gun. I tried to stop him.
It sure looked like this guy was shot in the back of his head while he was sleeping.
I was framed. I was set up to be accused of the death of my husband. [Music] I refuse to give up. I'm I'm just not
going [Music] [Music] [Music] to 48 hours. Paradise lost. [Music] I had accepted the fact that I would
have to live the rest of my life with somewhat of a question mark over my head. Anne Bender has lived under a
cloud of suspicion since 2010 when her husband John was shot to death in the Costa Rican rainforest.
In 2015, she went to prison for murder, but now says total vindication is so close she can taste it. I've been
waiting a long time for this. [Music] It was in 2001 that the Benders moved to this remote corner of Central America to
live an extravagant idyllic dream. In a way, this trip is like going home. It is going home. Home was this. That's
the house. Oh my lord. Called Boraion. rising from the middle of the Costa Rican
rainforest. It was once Anne and John Bender's vision of paradise, the phrase overthe-top doesn't
begin to do this house justice. It's like some bizarre combination of Disneyland, an art museum, and something
you'd really only see in a James Bond movie. [Applause] [Music] Does this strike you as astonishing
every time you're here or are you just totally used to it? I'm used to it by now. It's home. You can see four floors.
There you just saw a bird. Nearly 50,000 square ft. This is your kitchen. Tons of
gleaming granite. Kitchen house has the dining room and the living room is on the other side. and no windows or walls
at all. I think that's one of the things I miss the most is the sounds of the birds. Where is the bathroom? Right
here. We built the house to our taste, which is crazy. John and Anne always had been a bit eccentric from the moment a
friend introduced them in Virginia in 1998. It was love at first sight for both of us. the daughter of an
international banker. She'd grown up all over the world and he was smitten. He proposed after just two weeks. They
married the next year. We both found in each other a future. They shared many interests and one unfortunate problem.
Both struggled with depression, specifically in Anne's case with bipolar mood disorder. I had just been diagnosed
with bipolarity. He could go from being extremely happy to extremely sad very quick. His friend
Pete Delissi says John hated doctors and dealt with his problems mostly in private. He was absolutely a genius.
John Bender had been a math and science wiz in high school, then studied physics
at the University of Pennsylvania. His looks got him work as a male model and his smarts helped him beat the odds at
the local casinos. He had an unusual talent for making money, a talent that blossomed at the Philadelphia Stock
Exchange. In just about 5 minutes, he developed a way of trading options that had never been done before. And within
just a few years, he was one of the top traders. By the time he was 25, I think he had amassed about 80 million. by the
time he was in his early 30s and he set up a hedge fund that was worth five to 600 million.
Ned Zean is a reporter and CBS news consultant. He says that by 1998, Bender was looking for both a safe haven for
his money and a purpose for his life. And that for all his brilliance and his bank balance, he never really fit in
with the Wall Street crowd. He just walks away from it. just walked away. But not without a plan. He and Anne,
both animal lovers, decided to use their fortune to start a refuge for wildlife.
In the dense rainforest of Costa Rica, they found the ideal location, 5,000 pristine acres. They named it
Borakayion after a native plant. I mean, this is as out there as you can get. Setting up a sanctuary for wildlife gave
the Benders a sanctuary, too. An escape to an extravagant private universe of exotic flowers, animals, and
waterfalls. Here, nothing was ordinary, not even the lights in the house. Many were customade of stained glass. How
many lamps are we talking about here? Approximately 400. You just said 400. Yeah. She says Jon thought the lamps
would brighten her outlook on the world. Depression was an immense bond between them. It's a very isolating disease and
people tend to pull away from society. Although construction of the house brought in running water, reliable
electricity, and dozens of jobs to the area, the project and the vendors got a chilly reception. There was definitely a
degree of who are these rich Ringo and who the hell do they think they are coming down and doing all of this?
Then came April 2001. It happened on this mountain road. Anne says armed men in an unmarked car forced
them onto the shoulder. The men claimed to be police but wore no uniforms. I thought it was a kidnapping. One pulled
John from his car and when he protested, this guy had fired the gun between John's legs and held up the gun to
John's head. I was terrified. That's when our entire lives changed. She says an attempted breakin at the
house months later only made things worse. The couple bought guns, hired guards, and turned the refuge into a
virtual fortress. They lived in fear. It makes me very sad to think back on how painful life could be for him. In 2005,
perhaps trying to write the ship, Bender set up a $70 million trust to manage the
refuge and provide for Anne's living expenses, he named this man, attorney Juan Alvarez, to run it. Alvarez was
then a trusted advisor. Later, Anne would point to him as a key figure in the events surrounding J's death.
But neither the trust nor the guards nor the guns stopped the couple's continuing
slide into depression. Anne says John saw a psychiatrist but refused anti-depressants. She however was taking
an enormous amount of medication and by the fall of 2009 says she had all but stopped eating. I was 40 lbs lighter
than I am now. By the next year, they had become prisoners in their own paradise. The natural beauty that
brought them here lost in irrational despair. Anne says John became convinced that every problem, her illness, even
the death of a pet bird was his fault. He became suicidally depressed. The stage was set. He wanted to die.
[Music] I'm sure this seems as real to you today as it did that night. So, what happened?
John brought a gun to bed. It was January 7th, 2010. I opened my eyes and I saw the outline of the trigger of the gun
and he had it pointed at his head at his at himself. Horrified, Anne Bender says
she recognized their 9 mm Ruger pistol. From what I could tell, he was holding it with both hands. And what did you do?
I got up on my knees and reared towards him and I tried to grab the gun. Were you able to get it? No, I was able to
get my hands around his and the gun slipped and it went off. Just minutes later, their security
guard, Oswaldo Aguilar, was first on the scene. She said to me, "I tried to stop him and
I couldn't do it." He told us, "Was there a long struggle?" No. Was it just instant, almost instantaneous? I
remember it as being instantaneous. It couldn't have been any more than two seconds.
When it went off, who was holding it? I don't think anyone was holding it. How does a gun go off when no one's holding
it? I think that it fell. He dropped it. I never touched the gun. And told roughly the same story to the
first responders who arrived here at Borakayan some 2 hours later. But reporter Ned Zean says that their
examination of the scene actually raised more questions than it answered. Why does somebody who's suicidal shoot
himself back here? They said, first of all, that John was left-handed. And how does a left-handed
person lying in bed shoot himself here? Prosecutor Edgar Ramirez has a simple answer. He doesn't.
If somebody wanted to commit suicide, he says the way they do it is here, here, or here. Okay. But if a left-handed
person did fatally shoot himself behind the right ear, the gun presumably would end up on the same side as the bullet
hole. Just to be clear, the gun is on the opposite side from the wound. Yes, the the wound is on this side of John's
head. He's laying on his back. The gun is over there on this side of his bed near his arm. So, you know, that doesn't
look good. There were no lights on. All I knew is he had a gun and I tried to get it away from him and I couldn't and
it went off. But investigators puzzled over the bullet's path entering just below the
right ear and ending up behind the left eye. Odd too was the location of a spent
cartridge found some 13 feet behind the bed. All they thought inconsistent with Ann's story of a struggle. Did you move
anything, touch anything, change anything in that room? The only thing I remember doing is using the
radio, unlocking the elevator, and touching John. But as far as the gun, the shell
casings, I don't remember. I don't remember anything. A pillow near John's head had a tear with gunpowder in it.
Which means the pillow was positioned over his head and the gun was fired, the prosecutor told
us. Within hours, investigators began to think John Bender may have been shot in
his sleep and died where he lay. There were pools of blood on both sides of his body. The earplugs he always wore still
in place. Starting from the fourth floor down, we started looking, says inspector Luis
Aguilar, who led a sweep of the house and quickly discovered something that stopped him cold.
We found a great amount of jewels, precious stones, gems, thousands of them, diamonds, rubies, opals, some on
display, others in suitcases, worth roughly $20 million. When you talk about the jewelry collection, you know, I have
jewelry. I don't think that's what you're talking about. No, no, no. In no way, shape, or form. Investigators
didn't see it as a jewelry collection either. To them, it looked a lot more like a smuggling operation. Do you think
that the fact that when the police got here, they find all these amazing jewels? Do you think that it it
prejudiced them? Um, you know, that so what? Strange doesn't mean that you're a criminal. Ann says the gems were merely
a hobby and an investment and says she did her best to cooperate that night. I was falling to pieces. Within hours of
John's death, after calling her family and Juan Alvarez, the trustee of Bora Kayan, I went into some sort of shock
mode. She was rushed to the hospital emaciated and covered with soores. My understanding is they were giving me a
40% chance of survival for the first two weeks. What was her condition then? Terrible. In what way?
Dehydrated, extremely thin. Her psychiatrist, Carlos Lasano, who Anne authorized to speak with us, met her in
intensive care just hours later. Was she in touch with reality? In and out. Do you think she was even
physically capable of doing what the prosecution alleged? No. Anne could not even hold a
fork when she was here. Anne Bender would remain hospitalized for 7 months under Dr. Lano's
care and under a growing cloud of suspicion. They were beginning to say, "This doesn't look like an accident.
This doesn't look like suicide. This looks like a lot like a murder." And they began looking at her as a suspect.
Did you for one second until it actually happened think that you were going to be
charged? [Music] No. She was skin and bones. I mean, she looked horrid. The Bender's friend, Paul Meyer, visited
Anne in the hospital just days after her arrival. She weighed 84 pounds. She literally looked like someone who had
just walked out of a concentration camp. Sick or not, she already was investigators number one murder suspect.
Police confiscated her clothes and her computer, but it's unclear if they examined Jon's messages or ever saw
these chilling excerpts dated just weeks before he died. I wish I were effing dead. It reads, "I feel so effing
horrible. I want to kill everyone and then myself." A window, Anne says, "On a tormented soul." John was the most
tortured person I've ever met. He had been wanting to kill himself for weeks. She thinks the lawyers Bender trustee
Juan Alvarez hired for her should have used Jon's messages in her defense. They wouldn't comment on strategy. They never
manifested that I was innocent. So their position was, "Oh yeah, she did do this." By not doing anything, they were
making it inevitable that I would be charged. 19 months after Bender died, Anne was
officially charged with murder. Convinced the gems had been smuggled into the country, authorities
later also charged her with possessing contraband. All she is sure just what Juan Alvarez wanted.
Why? To hide the fact she claims that he had siphoned money from the $70 million
Bender Trust. I'm the only person that can stop him or bring scrutiny into what he's done.
In July 2012, with murder charges hanging over her head, Anne Bender took Juan Alvarez to court for fraud. The
suit claimed Alvarez used the Bender Trust as his personal piggy bank, buying horses for his horse farm and paying his
credit card bills. Authorities raided his office and confiscated 135 boxes of documents. The
court then removed Alvarez as trustee investigation. This investigation will go nowhere because the accusations are
bogus, he told us. But whatever Juan Alvarez did or did not do, he did not shoot John Bender. And
prosecutors see Anne's lawsuit as an attempt to distract them from their firm belief that she did. They just didn't
see how that gunshot could have been in that part of his head by suicide. Was this suicide or an accident or
murder? The forensic evidence is so vital in this case. It's incredible. We brought in outside experts to Bora Kion
and asked them to take a look at it. This was the bedroom. This is where John Bender died. In the rarified world of
forensic science, you can see there's a lot of blood on the crime scene. Selma and Richard Eelenboom are
internationally recognized but sometimes controversial experts known for stirring
debate in high-profile cases once thought open and shut like this and this one from the start. They say some Costa
Rican authorities had a preconceived idea that this was murder. The pathology report is very straight from the
beginning. This is a homicide and let's prove it's a homicide. He does look like
he's sleeping. A lot of people who die with their eyes closed look like they're sleeping and they might have been wide
awake when it happened. The prosecutor said, "If you're going to shoot yourself, everyone knows it's here or
it's here or it's here." Well, that's completely unscientific. If that's an example of the logic they used in this
case, then I'm really very worried. They cite other monumental mistakes. Not immediately testing for gunpowder
residue, not fingerprinting the gun, not testing the sheets for blood spatter. What is the most vital thing that they
missed? I think the trajectory. Then you can place the shooter on the scene in relation to the victim. It's like this.
They told us the trajectory, the path the bullet followed was critical to understanding where the gun was when it
was fired and if an or John fired it. Looking at this investigation, how would you grade it? Um, very poor.
In January 2013, a three judge panel acquitted Anne Bender of murder. She was safe, but not for
[Music] long. After her aqu quiddle, Anne Bender hoped for a new start. Hey. Uh-uh. but
never thought of leaving Costa Rica, moving instead to a small apartment. When the trust stopped paying her bills,
friends and family helped. She began dating a new boyfriend, another American, Greg Fischer. She has never
not done what this court system has asked her to do. Never not done what this government has asked her to do. So,
she says she was shocked in May 2014 when the Costa Rican government put her on trial for murder. a second
time. It may seem odd to Americans, but in Costa Rica, there is no double jeopardy rule. So, if a prosecutor
doesn't like a verdict, he can appeal. And if he wins, try the defendant all over again with the same charges, the
same evidence, and the same witnesses. This time there are new judges, but prosecutors repeat their case, arguing
that the evidence from the body, the bullet casing, the entry wound, blood stains, and pillow case prove this was
murder. Defense attorney Fabio Okonot trio is just as insistent it was suicide. In all
homicide, there's a reason. In this case, there's no reason. And in a risky move, he decides there is
nobody better able to make that point than Anne Bender herself. I want to make a statement and make a statement. She
certainly does. I was so happy here when we moved here. She stays on the stand the entire day. He was talking about
suicide every day for at least 4 weeks. It was an issue of getting through every
day. You're you seem to be saying that there was no way to prevent him from attempting suicide.
I tried my hardest. I'm not saying just no way for you. There was no avenue open. No. Period. This was this was
destined to be. He wanted to die. [Music] In his testimony, security guard and first responder Oswaldo Aguilar
describes the scene, but he also raises questions about one of the prosecutor's key assumptions. The main point of
evidence for the prosecution was John was left-handed. The bullet wound is behind the right side of his head.
You're lying in bed. How does a suicidal man possibly end up shooting himself like this? Agular has an answer,
pointing out that though a lefty, John Bender carried his gun on the right side.
But testifying for the prosecution, forensic pathologist Gretchen Flores doesn't care if John Bender was right or
left-handed. She insists suicide is inconceivable. Another person, she says, would have to fire the weapon. Her
conclusion from the blood evidence and the position of the body, John Bender, never saw the shot coming. It's 6 cm
from the midline. At Bora Kayion, our independent forensics experts, Richard and Selma Illanbomb, tested that idea
that John's body never moved. It would explain the blood we find over here, but it doesn't explain the blood over there.
In their view, it had to have moved for the blood to have pulled as it did on both sides of his body. So, his head was
completely different. This was the position of his head when he was shot. The blood pattern analysis support the
hypothesis that there was some sort of fight. They showed us how a struggle could have happened, how An's efforts to
get the gun could make it fire. Well, the vehicle goes like this and he start bleeding, oozing. how John's body then
might have moved and he slowly falls back in this position which accounts for the blood on this side on this side. I
lunged forward towards him with my hands. I fell towards the center of the bed and the gun went off.
The hypothesis that he was shot in the position he was found is not supported by this evidence. Also unlikely, the
Ikeland booms say, is the prosecutor's theory that Anne shot her husband from behind the bed. This trajectory is not
very likely. It doesn't make any sense. No, I mean, just look at me. If if I would shoot him through the head, I
would go like this. And they showed us why they think the odd location of the spent cartridge. Such damning proof,
according to the prosecution, really proves nothing at all. The casing can end up in that
position if the gun is twisted far enough around. Correct. There is no chance she murdered her husband. Ann's
family and friends want to make sure the judges think so too. If I thought Anne had anything to do with this in any way,
shape, or form, I wouldn't be here. But for Ned Zean, the case is no longer clear. So you can see a scenario where
it's an accident. Yes. Where it's suicide and where it might be murder. You can see all these. Yes, I absolutely
can. And I think anybody who sat in that courtroom would probably say the same thing except for maybe Ann and her
attorney. Um because it's any of those make sense. In his closing, prosecutor Ramirez
insists there is only one plausible scenario. Anne Bender shot her husband. Defense attorney Okono Trio pleads for
reason, saying an is not an assassin. Facing a possible 25 years in prison, Anne herself has the last word. I did
not kill John. But even after four years and two trials, she is unprepared for this
verdict. Translation: Guilty of murder. [Music] Her friends and family sit stunned. She is sentenced immediately to
22 years in prison and she is led away. I really don't remember much after that except the police officers surrounding
me. Her boyfriend, Greg Fiser, is devastated. I don't think she's going to live. I don't think she's going to
survive. The reality that I could be here for 22 years. Have I accepted that? I don't
think there's any way that I can. and Maxim. Immediately after being sentenced to 22
years for murder, Anne Bender appealed her conviction. There's no evidence that proves beyond a
reasonable doubt that I killed John. The evidence doesn't exist. We met with her
6 weeks later in prison. I'm still surviving and I refuse to give up. I'm I'm just not going to. And giving up in
this place would be tempting. There are about 50 women per room, three toilets, no hot water, no
privacy, none. Zero. Nada. And no guarantee she won't spend the rest of her life behind
bars. How did you fight back from something like that when in those surroundings? You survive. You do what
you got to do. Then in the winter of 2015, after nine months in prison, a development almost as stunning as Anne's
conviction. She wins her appeal. The court annulls the verdict. She will have to face yet another trial, but she is
released for now. She learns all this from a friendly guard. I said, "You're kidding. I can leave." And she said,
"Yeah, you're free." I fell to the ground completely. I just lost it. But in this story, bad news always seems to
follow the good. And Anne soon learns she is not off the hook. Prosecutors have decided to try her for a third
time. Her third trial begins about 6 months later. And not only is an physically more fragile than ever, she
has suffered a major personal setback. Her boyfriend, Greg Fiser, died of an asthma attack while she was in
prison. But at this trial, there is no shortage of people to lean on. Ann's parents, her best friend, Seline. She's
the best human being that I've ever met. A lot of people that are close to me are
very invested in my my getting out of this. John Bender's old friend, Pete Delissi, has called in legal
reinforcements, too. two lawyers from the UK and two from the US paid by an they'll advise her local attorney and
closely monitor the trial, making sure the judges know they're watching. Anne's biggest challenge may
be just holding herself together in court. In contrast to her dayong testimony in
previous trials, she is on the stand for only two hours. And this time she tries to appeal to the
judges by testifying in Spanish. Once again, telling her story is an emotional ordeal.
[Music] [Music] Prosecutor Edgar Ramirez's approach to this trial is much the same, but he appears to be minus several
key witnesses, including his star, medical examiner Gretchen Flores. She has mysteriously gone missing.
and supporters call it an obvious delaying tactic. It's part of their strategy. They dragged us out as long as
they can so everyone leaves. But this time, team Bender has some star witnesses of its own. So he's lying like
this and put the gun like this. That's what they said. We've come here to uh participate in the truth finding. Selma
and Richard Ikeland bomb highowered and controversial. They investigated the clothing and there was no blood there.
Ann's lawyers hired the Dutch forensic experts after the Illan Bombs completed their independent analysis for 48 hours.
But for the Illan Bombs to testify, the Costa Rican judges must agree to make an exception and
allow new witnesses. Yolanda, we don't know if we can testify or or not. The prosecution
strenuously object. The judges decide that Selma can testify. Here you see the bullet.
Richard cannot. You would say, "Okay, with this gun," but the defense still can use him. He will be allowed to
cross-examine the state's medical examiner. Gretchen Flores finally has resurfaced after two weeks. Richard
Illanbomb's chance to question this witness is an opportunity, but also a big challenge. Flores is as certain as
ever that Anne Bender killed [Music] John. We are not lawyers, so it's it's a new role. Here you have a photo. Costa
Rican law prohibits Americanstyle cross-examination in which lawyers use questions suggesting the answers they
want. So Ann's legal team quickly has to train this Dutch scientist to think like
a Costa Rican attorney. We have absolutely a lot of work to do to help and he'll have to pointedly ask medical
examiner Flores about her experiments without seeming to have an opinion either way. But it seems to me what we
can do is explore what experiments the crown have sorry the prosecution have not done when did you do this you didn't
do this you didn't do this that's fine that is providing information and we're not it's providing information yes
indirect after working all weekend the team is ready now we have to play lawyer games do you
know um if this gun was tested for uh the distance of a missile flame. No, I don't know. Am I allowed to show a
picture? Yes. Go ahead. Richard Ianbomb has to tread carefully and the constraints limit what he can
accomplish. But next, it's Selma's turn. She is a witness. I remember her walking
in and the reaction of the judges, you know, just seeing her cuz she has such an amazing presence in the courtroom.
And as a witness, she can go much further. I see no support for the scenario of a homicide. Her testimony
was amazing. In my opinion, as an expert, all the evidence that is available points clearly in the
direction of a suicide. The prosecutor makes a lastditch effort to strike Selma's testimony from the
record. But for now, the judges decide it can stay. You can't unring the bell. They heard what she said.
It's been three long weeks. At last, they are ready to vote on a verdict. After three trials and nearly
10 years, the judges are looking at me and I hear the words not guilty. Absuela. And that
translates absolved. Absolved. Yeah. [Music] The world believes me. Finally. This time, Anne takes no
chances. As soon as Costa Rican authorities return her passport, she flies home to the US with no intention
of ever going back to Costa Rica, regardless of what zealous prosecutors do. We caught up with her in Washington.
I don't see you flying down to Costa Rica for a fourth trial. I don't see it either.
Not a chance. No. Not so fast. In a jaw-dropping decision months later, a Costa Rican court announces yes, it
intends to try and bend her a fourth time. Her stunned lawyers immediately appeal. But win or lose, it's doubtful
prosecutors actually could try her again. Trials in abstentia are not allowed in Costa Rica. While there is an
extradition treaty in place, legal experts say that after three trials, they would be shocked to see the US
extradite Anne Bender for a [Music] fourth. In fact, Anne seems finally to have put this one-time paradise behind
her. Her past there as haunted as the abandoned, overgrown jungle compound she left behind.
I'll never get back everything that was taken from me. Obviously, I'll never get
back my husband. Now, it's time to go after what can be recovered and find a wife
again. Heat. Heat. [Music]

“48 Hours" reports on cases that depict hidden horrors at home. Watch the YouTube super marathon, which includes "Fatal First Date," "Death at the Front Door: Who Shot Heidi Firkus?," "Home Renovation Homicide," "Shootout at the Shaughnessys'," "The Menendez Brothers’ Fight for Freedom" and "Paradise Lost."

00:00 Fatal First Date 41:38 Death at the Front Door: Who Shot Heidi Firkus? 1:23:28 Home Renovation Homicide 2:03:43 Shootout at the Shaughnessys' 2:45:29 The Menendez Brothers’ Fight for Freedom 3:27:22 Paradise Lost

Crime. Social justice. Impact. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

Leslie Reeves and Chris Smith were shot on their first date; Bobby Tar was arrested for the murder.

Key points

The Horrific Discovery. Nanette Styber learns of her friend Leslie's murder after a frantic search.
Chris Smith's Recovery Journey. Chris Smith awakens from a coma with no memory of the shooting, facing a long road to recovery.
Nick Fergus's Alibi Questioned. Sergeant Jim Gray probes Nick's account of the night Heidi died, raising doubts about his story.
Nick's Arrest. After years of investigation, Nick Fergus is arrested and charged with murder.
Detectives Question Dave. Detectives press Dave with tough questions about Shanti's death, but he maintains his innocence.
Surveillance Camera Evidence. A surveillance camera captures unexpected evidence related to Dave's case.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

There is so many things untold that will prove my innocence.

17:55WatchApr 25, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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