Timothy Pasa | Truth About My Murder | FilmRise True Crime | Forensic Files

[gunshot] - When a murder is committed, it's always a race against time to find the truth,
to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer, and to make sure that justice is served.
But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim? I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd
and I've spent my entire career as a forensic pathologist performing nearly 23,000 autopsies,
including on some of the most high profile cases of recent times. I've learned that the dead don't hide the truth,
and they never lie. Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim. From a state-of-the-art laboratory
with groundbreaking technology that uses digitally scanned sample bodies, I'll be investigating a series of intriguing murders
where, from the victim's bodies, I'll be revealing to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.
[camera shutter clicking] [gentle music] Centerville, a small, quiet town in rural Iowa,
the heart of the American Midwest. Serious crime is almost unknown. But in May, 2018, a terrible house fire
shocked this community. Inside, firefighters discovered the badly burnt body of a man.
It looked like a tragic accident, but could it have been something much more sinister?
And could the body tell the story of what had happened? [gentle music] - Centerville is a small, close-knit community
of about 5,000 people. Everybody knows everybody. We know their families, we know their history.
Everybody looks out for one another. That's how it's always been. - Many of the families have been there for many generations.
Community that has a strong agricultural tie. So, most of the families are farmers
who have been farmers for generations. - We have one middle school, one high school
for all the students. They all go to the same school, participate in the same sports.
I was born and raised in Centerville, moved away for a few years. When we started having a family,
we decided to move back just because of the community and how close it was. - [Richard] But at 7:30 AM on Saturday, May 5th, 2018,
Centerville's peaceful life was turned upside down. Barbara Pasa was driving to a soccer tournament
where her children were due to play, but before she got there, she received several shocking phone calls
from her neighbors. Her house was on fire. Barbara rushed back knowing her husband, Tim, was in the house.
- One of the neighbors was driving, leaving his house, saw a fire coming from the Pasa residence.
Two neighbors from across the street went in the front door, looked to the left and saw charring and smoke.
- [Richard] They acted fast and called local firefighters on 911. They arrived within minutes.
[siren blaring] - [Officer] Okay. Centerville 911. Let the fire department know that there is a lot of smoke coming out
of the east side of the house. - When the fire department first got there, they saw black smoke
rolling from the east side of the residence, which is where the master bedroom is located.
They immediately started to extinguish the fire. - [Officer] One [indistinct] en route.
- [Richard] All four of the town's fire trucks arrived. [siren blaring] - There was a lot of smoke.
One of the firefighters that initially went into battle the blaze did suffer from smoke inhalation
and had to be taken to a hospital. - [Officer] Do you know if anybody's home? - [Richard] Neighbors told the police officers on the scene
they thought there were people inside the building. They called in Assistant Chief of Police, Mike Moore.
- I knew the occupants of the residence, so I was just unsure what we were gonna find.
I was initially informed that there may be three bodies inside. I was fearful at that time
that it may be the children involved. - When the firefighters finally managed to get into the master bedroom,
they discovered a terrible sight. [camera shutter clicking] Barbara's husband, Tim Pasa, was found dead on the bed,
and his body had been severely damaged by the fire. The most obvious injuries were the terrible burns
present on Tim Pasa's body. Doctors use something called a rule of nines to estimate the surface area of the body
that's been damaged, and I can demonstrate that on this sample body on the digital autopsy table.
The head counts for 9%, the arms are 9%, the upper chest is nine, the abdomen is nine,
the legs are nine, front and back, and the back of the body is split into nines as well.
And using that estimation, we could work out that 97% of the surface of Tim Pasa's body
was damaged by fire. It's most unusual to find such a high percentage of burns in a house fire.
And the burns on the body are estimated by doctors is first, second or third degree.
First degree burns are like sunburn, just reddening of the skin. Second degree burns have blistering,
as if you touch something hot in the oven. And third degree burns are when the skin is damaged and burnt through
exposing the muscle. In Tim Pasa's case, most of the burns were actually first or second degree,
relatively superficial, but the extent of the burns suggested he wasn't moving, that he was asleep at the time the fire was burning.
It was a tragic end to a family man. - Tim Pasa was a well-liked guy, very well known in the community,
whether it be through involvement with his children's sports, school activities.
He was a member of a band for a long time. Tim was born and raised here, and I believe he lived here all his life.
I have a lot of personal memories with Tim. Our children were the same age, so they did a lot of activities together.
We'd sit together a lot of the times at sporting events. - [Richard] The most important thing in Tim's life
was his family. - Barb and Tim had been married for several years. I believe he was 18.
They had two children at the time that were both in high school. She was also from the area and spent her entire life here.
I had known Barb Pasa for probably 30 years. Was actually a friend of the families,
grew up with one of my older sisters. - [Richard] They were a very normal family
in a small town where things like this hardly ever happen. They simply weren't prepared for such a terrible tragedy,
and neither was the rest of the community. Most of its emergency services are volunteers.
- Currently, the Centerville Police Department has 11 full-time officers, and we have three reserve police officers.
Centerville Fire Department, it's a small department and there's three full-time firefighters,
and the rest, it's a volunteer department. - [Richard] Now, they had a fatal fire on their hands.
They had to investigate how the fire started. - We conducted a walkthrough of the residence
shortly after the fire was extinguished, started doing their investigation. - [Richard] As soon as Barbara arrived,
she told the firefighters that Tim was inside. - [Richard] She feared the fire had been caused
by a lit candle she had placed in the master bedroom. - Barb told me that she had lit a candle
that morning before leaving, because the dog had urinated in the bedroom and she was using the candle to cover up the smell.
She advised that she'd set the candle on the nightstand. When fire investigators found the candle,
it was on the floor, next to the bed on its side. On the floor, there was a unburned white spot
that was consistent with the candle being on the floor at the time of the fire, which means that the candle was sitting upright
during the fire. It did not fall from a nightstand, anything like that. - [Richard] And that wasn't the only thing
that Mike and his fire department colleagues thought was odd. - Tim's body was very badly damaged in the fire.
It was, what I would call, inconsistent with the amount of fire damage throughout the room
where the fire took place. The condition of Tim's body initially was suspicious,
but not enough, making us think that anything may be criminal. - [Richard] Mike decided that it was an unusual,
but still an accidental fire. All the emergency services left the scene. There was just one thing left to do,
an autopsy on Tim's body. - Anytime there's a death investigation, an autopsy will be completed.
- The autopsy was performed by the state medical examiner, pathologist Dr. Dennis Klein.
- The cause of death and the manner of death may not be immediately obvious, and the autopsy is the best way to get at these answers.
What was the injury, disease, or poisoning that ultimately led to that person's death.
- Despite the burns, most people die in fires by breathing in noxious gases, and the most important of those is carbon monoxide,
which binds the hemoglobin in the red blood cells and stops them carrying oxygen
so that the blood, when it travels around, can't carry the necessary oxygen to the heart,
or to the brain, and these organs eventually die, and the individual will then die too.
Carbon monoxide is present all around us in our bodies. And if you smoke, you've got about 10% in your bloodstream anyway.
20% will give you headaches and you'll feel unwell, but 30%, you are likely to die.
But what else can we find in the body when we look at this autopsy? When fires are burning,
smoke is inhaled into the lungs. And we can see that here. The lungs themselves may be blackened,
but most importantly, throughout the trachea and the bronchi, there's little particles of black soot deposited
that show someone was alive at the time the fire was burning. But when Dr. Klein did all of these tests,
he had a big surprise. - Despite having burns on the outside of the body, there was not the characteristic findings of soot
in the upper and lower airways which occur when a person breathes in smoke. And then when we did a test
looking at what's called the carboxyhemoglobin saturation, which is the amount of carbon monoxide
that accumulates in the blood, was not elevated. So, these two very key findings were absent
and made me come to the conclusion that Tim did not die of smoke inhalation, and that he was likely dead before the fire had occurred.
- This is very surprising. Generally, a fatality at a fire scene has died as the result of a fire.
I've examined hundreds of fire deaths in my career, and in my experience, less than two in a hundred
were dead before the fire started. Finding a victim who is dead before the fire starts
is always suspicious. This autopsy has turned the investigation on its head. - I realized that this was going to be a difficult
and complex case. And we're conferring with law enforcement officers who attend the autopsy.
I realized that I had more work to do, but I realized they had a lot more work. - In May, 2018,
a small town in Iowa was rocked by a fatal fire. Tim Pasa, a well-known and much loved family man, had died.
It was a tragedy for the whole community. But at the autopsy, Tim's body revealed a horrific surprise.
Tim was dead before the fire started. The police needed extra help, so Iowa State Fire Marshal David Linkletter
came to investigate. David teaches fire investigators to recognize the signs of arson
based on his own extensive experience. - I've been a fire investigator since 2000,
and in that time, I've been on well over 800 fire scenes. I perform fire scene investigations,
and hopefully try to determine how this fire originated, how it spread through that area of origin
and ultimately caused all the damage that it did. - [Richard] Two days after the fire took place,
David and his team started to investigate the fire in the Pasa home. - So, we went down Monday
where they had prepared a search warrant to reenter the property to take a look at the fire scene
and give an assessment of how this fire originated. - Something had troubled the local firefighters
as soon as they arrived. [indistinct chattering] They couldn't hear any smoke detectors beeping.
- Neighbors, witnesses, as well as the officers that responded and the fire department,
at no time did they ever hear any smoke alarms going off in the residence. - Smoke detectors are pretty robust.
They can withstand a lot of damage and still keep working. We discovered a smoke detector
in an unburned portion of the house, outside the kids' bedrooms, where it had been disabled.
There was a door that flipped open for the battery, and that door was open and the battery was exposed,
rendering the smoke detector inoperable. - When we closed the battery door, it worked like it was supposed to do.
- Once we worked our way through the house, we discovered a nine-volt battery on the floor
near the door to the bedroom. Near that area was also a melted smoke detector, and directly above that,
was a line of demarcation where a smoke detector once was, and it had melted and fallen onto the floor.
And we very quickly were speculating that that battery had been removed from the smoke detector
and thrown onto the floor before the fire event. Obviously, the battery just didn't fall
out of that smoke detector. - [Richard] Both smoke detectors in the house had been tampered with.
And that wasn't the only thing that troubled the investigators. They'd been wondering about Barbara Pasa's behavior.
- When she arrived on scene, she asked if she could see Tim. I advised Barb that Tim was in the ambulance,
but that he was in very bad shape due to the fire. I allowed her at that point to go into the ambulance and have a moment with Tim.
It wasn't until a couple minutes later when I reentered the ambulance and she advised me
that she did not want an autopsy completed. - And that, to us, was a pretty serious red flag, you know,
and so, it really provoked a lot of questions. Why does she not want to have an autopsy performed
on her late husband? - [Richard] Barbara later said that the only reason she was opposed to an autopsy
was she didn't want Tim's body anymore cut up. [siren blaring] - Law states that the medical examiner
has authority of that body, and so, even if a family member is opposed to that autopsy,
if a medical examiner feels that it's necessary, an autopsy will be done. Both, a state police detective
and a local police detective actually want to attend the autopsy. That's not a usual situation for a house fire,
so we knew that there was some concern. - Dr. Klein was sure that Tim hadn't died as a result of the fire.
But could he have died as a result of natural causes before the fire started? If I was investigating this,
I'd want to see the medical records. And we know from those records that he had mild hypertension,
and that his heart was slightly enlarged. First, he'd have looked at the heart muscle
to see whether there was any evidence of thickening of the muscle of the heart. The heart has two main pumping chambers,
the left ventricle, which pumps blood around the whole of the body, which is the main powerful pumping chamber,
and that's here. And he noticed that the heart muscle was slightly thickened, but not significantly so.
So, while the heart was slightly enlarged, it wasn't significantly so. The second feature Dr. Klein would've looked at
were the coronary arteries. These are the blood vessels that supply oxygen to the muscle of the heart.
He'd have looked at those to see if there was any evidence of furring up a blockage of those arteries,
and there wasn't any. And so, Dr. Klein was able to conclude that there was no evidence
of significant natural disease with the heart that could have killed Tim Pasa before the fire started.
So, Tim must have died from unnatural causes. Dr. Klein would've looked carefully at the chest.
He found no evidence of any bruising, any fractured ribs, any bullet wounds, or any stab wounds.
Is there any evidence of any injury to the face, the skull, the brain that might indicate blunt trauma?
Then he perhaps had a look at the neck to see whether there was any evidence of strangulation,
evidence that can still be found after body has been burn in the fire. But none of these things were present.
And so, one thing remains: could Tim have been poisoned or drugged? - We ordered an expanded panel,
which is a broad panel of various drugs and poisons. Much to my disappointment, the first toxicology result
that showed what we call therapeutic concentrations of medicines that we knew he was on for his blood pressure,
that would not explain his death. So, we were still left with an uneasy feeling that we had suspicious circumstances.
We didn't have a good explanation for his death, so that meant we still had our work cut out for us.
- [Richard] Without clear answers from the autopsy, the pressure was back on the detectives,
and their concerns about Barbara's behavior had been growing. - Barb did not show any emotion.
- [Officer] If you need anything, let me know. Okay? - Whether it was when I was initially speaking with her,
or after seeing Tim's body, there was no emotion shown whatsoever. - Other people throughout the day
expressed that her behavior was just odd for someone that had just lost her husband.
[off-mic chattering] - [Richard] On the day of the fire, Mike noticed Barbara had posted a message about Tim
on Facebook. - I was Facebook friends with her. I saw the post. I believe it said something to the effect of
Tim was a good father, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was just a very strange post for someone to make
that had just tragically lost her husband. - [Richard] In fact, Barbara seemed very keen
to get on with her life as quickly as possible. - Barb, either the day of the incident or the day after,
contacted a local real estate agent advising that she would like to look at houses
to move into. - [Richard] But the biggest surprise came on the night of the fire,
when Barbara's 16-year-old son contacted the police. - He'd reached out that he wanted to speak with me
about what had taken place that day at the residence. He expressed that he had concerns that his mom, Barb,
may have been responsible for Tim's death. - [Richard] It was a shocking claim from a teenager,
especially against his own mother. But he claimed his parents' relationship had been getting steadily worse in the previous months.
- He advised that they had not been getting along for quite a while, that they had recently talked about getting a divorce.
He also advised that his dad had confided in him that he believed Barb had tried to poison him with Benadryl
a couple weeks prior to the incident. He began writing notes of thoughts that came to his head
and provided those notes to me. - [Richard] As the police spoke to more members of the family,
it became clear that life in the Pasa household was much more tense than it appeared from the outside.
- Barbara and Tim, at the time, lived together, but through interviews, we found out that it was more of a divided household.
They were more roommates than husband and wife, and just weren't getting along well at all.
- [Richard] While Mike interviewed friends and family, special agent David Linkletter
conducted a detailed fire investigation. - When we arrive at a fire scene, we're gonna usually take a look
from the area of least damage to greatest damage. We're gonna walk through the house
and just see what was going on during this fire. - [Richard] David soon confirmed
what the local firefighters had suspected. The only place where the fire could have started
was the master bedroom. According to Barbara, it was caused by the candle she had lit
on the morning of the fire. - We evaluated the entire room and we quickly discovered that, you know,
there was more going on than just a candle starting this fire. [off-mic chattering]
The hallmark of fire investigations is really analyzing burn patterns. You know, the burn patterns are gonna tell you
where the fire occurred and where it didn't. And in this case, we all were very concerned
about the top of the bed. There was a very distinct pattern on the headboard and the wall
that indicated there was definitely a fire in that specific area burning for a much longer period of time
than anywhere else in this room, as witnessed by the extreme damage to the headboard
and the clean burn to the wall against it. Usually, the area that burns the longest
is gonna be the area where the fire originated. [camera shutter clicking] - [Richard] But could the candle have played
any part in the fire, as Barbara claimed? - The problem with that was that that candle did not burn vigorously enough
to really catch anything else in that room on fire. It just sort of burned that little area of carpeting
and really did not travel anywhere else. - [Richard] In this position, a lit candle could have caused a lot of damage,
but David could see that it hadn't. - All of the wood underneath that bed, that was right next to where that candle was,
did not catch on fire. There's less damage as you go toward the candle. Burn patterns did not support the theory
that this candle started this fire. It didn't happen. - [Richard] While no fire investigation is simple,
investigators felt they'd found enough evidence to be sure where the fire had really started.
- We were confident the fire originated on the mattress. The damage went from the top,
in other words, the mattress, down, and up and out. - This was obvious that the bed was lit on fire.
- [Richard] That left a big question about Barbara's actions. The investigators were beginning to wonder
whether was trying to mislead them. - You know, why would she point out this candle in this room
with all this damage in it? And how could she point that candle out right away? We really felt,
with all of the damage on the mattress and the little bit of damage that candle did cause,
that that candle was deliberately placed onto the floor, and that fire damage was deliberately caused
in order to direct us, direct investigators in a different way. [soft music] - In Iowa, police were investigating a case of arson
and murder. Tim Pasa was found dead at the scene, but his body had revealed that he had been killed before the fire even started.
Perhaps it held further secrets. Prime suspect was his wife, Barbara. But what was her motive?
The investigators knew that Tim and Barbara's marriage was in trouble, but they also discovered they had money problems.
- They were living pretty much paycheck to paycheck, and Barb advised that she had an online spending problem.
They were looking at a divorce. Barb was one who kind of liked a status in town and didn't have the money, if they weren't married,
to live the lifestyle she was living. - [Richard] And the family's financial records
revealed a recent change that struck the investigators as particularly significant.
- We discovered that through Barb's employer, they had increased Tim's life insurance up to $200,000
in the last several months, prior to his death. - [Richard] That suggested Barbara had a financial motive
to kill her husband, but the investigators still didn't know how Tim had died. - Without another definitive cause of death,
there's gonna be a lot more work to be done in order to try to identify what drugs and poisonings we need to test for.
I did what a lot of forensic pathologists do, and that is, I pick up the phone and I call experts who can help me take the case further on.
What other possibilities should we be looking at? How do we expand our toxicology testing
in order to try to find what actually happened to Tim and caused his death? And we're also gonna need the help
of law enforcement detectives to also help us in what potential drugs we need to test for.
- At the time of the incident, Barb was a nurse at our local hospital. She worked in the operating room
and assisted with operations. - Which is very important information, because that then opens up medicines
that would not normally be tested for on toxicology screens. - So, a second toxicology screen was performed
for more exotic or unorthodox substances. - And it was that when we received the result back
of propofol. - Propofol is a very powerful anesthetic drug that's very commonly used during surgery in hospital.
It's a drug that very rapidly induces unconsciousness. But it also lowers the blood pressure
and suppresses breathing, so it needs to be administered by a skilled anesthetist.
Propofol is such a potentially dangerous drug that it's even been used in assisted dying cases in Canada
and has been suggested as a drug that could be used for executions in the United States.
But it's a drug that should only be found in cases from a hospital setting. So, the finding of this drug in Tim's body
was a great surprise for the investigators. - In my career, I've never seen this drug in a case.
And we knew that Tim had not had any type of medical procedure in which he received propofol.
- [Richard] So, how had such an unusual drug got into Tim's body? - The most likely answer to that question
is that someone else injected the propofol into his body. - [Richard] Dr. Klein now felt sure
that Tim's death was not natural or accidental. - And that finally left homicide,
in which a person dies at the hands of another, and that fit very well with the circumstances
and my findings at autopsy. - [Richard] Dr. Klein quickly told the detectives about his findings.
- It was bittersweet. It was, now we know what caused the death, but now we know more about the case and what has to happen.
- In all the years I've investigated fires, this is the first case where we've been able to prove
the person was murdered prior to the fire. It really confirmed to us that this fire was more than likely started
to conceal a crime. - [Richard] The investigators were now hunting for a murderer,
and Barbara Pasa was their prime suspect. They needed to find out if she could have stolen a lethal dose of propofol
from the hospital where she worked. - After using propofol, a doctor or a surgeon may not use the entire amount.
It is capable of just being thrown in a trash can. There's no logging that needs to be done.
Barbara had very easy access to propofol. It was her job to clean up those items
used in a surgical room, and she was also in charge of taking the trash from the surgical room to the dumpster.
- [Richard] Tim had been concerned for some time that his wife was trying to poison him.
- Tim had contacted one of his sisters a week or two prior, I believe, had told his sister,
"Oh, by the way, I think Barb tried to poison me." He didn't explain any further.
I believe that was the last text message that was sent. - [Richard] This seemed to corroborate
what Tim's son had revealed about his father's fears, that Barbara was trying to poison him with Benadryl,
an over-the-counter medicine used to treat allergies, such as hay fever. - I think if you were trying to poison someone
with Benadryl, you need a lot of Benadryl. And they would notice the symptoms. So you'd be tired, you'd become very dry.
It's an antihistamine. Maybe Tim was noticing that over time. - [Richard] And the investigators found something else
that might link Barbara to the fire. - The master bathroom, we found a grill lighter
sitting on the countertop next to the sink, which we found a little odd for a grill lighter
to be placed in that area. She told police investigators she used that grill lighter to light the candle that morning
before she left. - [Richard] This grill lighter was a bit over the top to light a candle,
but it would've been the perfect device to set light to the mattress. The police now felt they had enough evidence
to interview Barbara. - We were asking her several tough questions. She knew that we knew something was suspicious
and criminal in nature. The following day, a ambulance call was made from her mother's residence
and was determined that she was suffering from an overdose and she was immediately taken to a hospital in Des Moines.
[siren blaring] I spoke with Barb and her mother and determined that Barb had taken an overdose of insulin.
Barb was a diabetic. She knew how to regulate her insulin. I would say it was an intentional overdose.
- [Richard] When Barbara was discharged from hospital, Mike was there waiting for her.
[siren blaring] - I think she was surprised to see us outside the hospital when she was released,
but state law says that the medical staff had to advise us when she was being released.
We immediately then placed her under arrest for arson and murder. - When Tim Pasa died in a house fire in May, 2018,
his badly burnt body was still able to reveal the truth about what had happened to him.
He'd been killed by a powerful anesthetic drug called propofol. And then his house was deliberately set on fire.
The prime suspect for both crimes: his wife, Barbara Pasa. Barbara Pasa was charged with first degree murder
and first degree arson nearly two weeks after the fire. It was a big shock for this small town.
- Since I've been with the department since 2002, this was the first murder that we've had in Centerville, Iowa.
- [Richard] From the autopsy evidence, fire analysis, witness testimony, and phone records,
investigators pieced together what really happened on the day Tim Pasa was murdered.
Saturday, May 5th, 2018, by 6:30 AM, the couple's two children had left home to catch the school bus
for their soccer tournament. Barbara told police she followed them in her car at 7:00 AM,
but she had lied. - We'll determine that Barb actually left later than she originally told us.
- [Richard] 7:08 AM, Barbara sent a text to her daughter saying she would be late.
7:20 AM, a neighbor saw Barbara's car still parked in the garage. During this time,
Barbara must have disabled the smoke detectors. - The first smoke detector is very easy to tell,
that with that door being opened, we really believe that that detector was disabled intentionally.
- The one located in the area of the fire was off the wall. The battery was about three feet away
from the smoke detector. - We were confident that that detector also had been disabled.
The battery had been taken out of it prior to the fire. - [Richard] This was also
when Barbara must have injected Tim with propofol. - It was the state's theory that she did poison him
with the propofol and then set the bed on fire in hopes of covering up any evidence.
- We really believe that the candle was deliberately placed on the floor burning
and to set the carpeting on fire, but a separate fire was placed on the mattress
near her husband's deceased body. That fire grew in much more intensity and caused the damage that we had.
- So, the state's stance was Barb used the candle as a distractor or decoy to say that's how the fire started.
- [Richard] Having killed Tim and, she believed, covered her tracks, only then did Barbara leave home.
- Barb left the residence, went to a bank ATM, which also had a camera on it. We were able to secure evidence
to show the timeframe for that, which was around 7:26 AM. - [Richard] 7:30 AM, several neighbors saw smoke
coming from the master bedroom window of the Pasa home. They called 911. Firefighters arrived just three minutes later.
[siren blaring] Neighbors desperately called Barbara, but got no reply. - She had received several missed phone calls,
text messages. She had reported that she was not able to receive those calls. - [Richard] But by tracking the cell phone towers
her mobile connected to as she drove, investigators could show that Barbara deliberately missed at least five phone calls
from neighbors trying to warn her about the fire. - She finally, around 7:50, around 8:00,
responded to missed phone calls and text messages. The thing that was very interesting to me
was that she spoke with the kids, she spoke with other family members, but knowing that Tim was at the residence,
she never once tried to call Tim's phone. - The investigators suggested, that showed Barbara knew Tim was already dead.
The investigators were satisfied Barbara had murdered Tim, and the trial began on September the 17th, 2019.
The autopsy evidence was critical. - Having done a complete autopsy, reviewing his medical records
and learning about all the circumstances surrounding his death, the most compelling
and medically defensible cause of death would be from propofol, because there was really no other good explanation
for his death. We felt very comfortable that this was a homicide. - [Richard] The defense argued
that the level of propofol found in Tim's blood was low, much less than you'd find in a patient
being anesthetized for surgery. But there is a good explanation for this. Propofol is very rapidly absorbed from the bloodstream
into the fattier parts of the body. And there's quite a lot of fat in the human body naturally.
A lot of it's underneath the skin of the legs and the arms, but there's also a large amount of fat
inside the abdomen and a big sheet of fat that covers the bowel, called the omentum,
and the drug will have moved from the bloodstream into this fatty tissue, but its damage will already have been done.
Its effect on the brain, its effect on breathing, starving the brain of oxygen and causing death
will have taken place. Because of the redistribution of the drug throughout the body,
it's not a surprise that only a low concentration was found in the blood sample taken at the autopsy.
But that low concentration doesn't mean that he wasn't injected with a fatal dose of the drug.
It had done its damage and then disappeared. In court, Barbara tried other arguments.
She even suggested Tim might have been using propofol as a recreational drug, but it was easy to dismiss this theory.
- If he was someone who would abuse it, the amount of propofol in his system, there would've been a needle still in his arm.
He would've passed away that quickly. There were no needles found in the location of the fire.
- And it would be pretty hard to inject yourself and then start a fire, which appeared at this point to be intentionally set.
- [Richard] But the defense tried to discredit the fire analysis as well. - The defense really challenged me on the candle theory.
They really wanted that candle to be what caused this fire. - The defense was possibly blaming the dog
for tipping over the candle, which caused the fire. - When we take the totality of the situation,
it's very hard to argue that that candle fell off the nightstand and caused that fire.
That candle was deliberately placed onto the floor, and that fire damage was deliberately caused
in order to direct investigators in a different way so that she could conceal killing her husband.
- [Richard] After a week of evidence, the prosecution argued they had proved Barbara's guilt.
Her motive was financial gain, her means was the propofol she stole from her workplace,
and her opportunity occurred that Saturday morning while the children were on a school bus
and she was alone at home with Tim. The jury deliberated for three hours. - The jury came back with a verdict of guilty
on both arson, first degree, and murder, first degree. In the state of Iowa, murder, first degree,
is mandatory life imprisonment; on the arson, it is a 25-year sentence. Barb will spend the rest of her natural life in prison
- [Richard] For a small Midwestern town, discovering that a well-known local nurse
had abused her position of trust to murder her husband was very shocking. - When Barb was finally convicted, it was relief.
It was relief almost for the whole community. You know, I hope it's something I don't have to go through again in my career,
but I'm glad we were able to use all our resources and get answers for the family and for Tim,
but also knowing that things were still gonna be hard. Here we have two children
that had now lost both their parents, one to death and one to prison. So, it was bittersweet on that aspect of it.
- [Richard] The community rallied round as best it could. A fundraising campaign
to help the children replace what they had lost in the fire smashed its original goal,
raising $20,000 for them in less than a week. - The children make me proud. They've moved on.
They had terrific adult lives. They're my kids. They're part of my family as well.
- This was nearly the perfect crime. But bodies never lie. And Tim's body had revealed
that he had been injected with a fatal dose of propofol. If Tim had lived just a few more minutes,
his body would've eliminated all of the propofol that Barbara had injected into him,
and the evidence of his murder would've disappeared. Even more shockingly, propofol is not a pain killer.
Tim could have suffered terrible pain as he burnt to death, and Barbara, as a nurse, must have known that,
and that is what makes this such a terrible crime. [sober music]

Forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd investigates the case of Timothy Pasa. He was killed by his wife Barbara, who drugged him and then set fire to their family home in Centerville, Iowa.

In The Truth About My Murder, Dr. Richard Shepherd showcases a state-of-the-art digital autopsy table featuring digitally scanned sample bodies to investigate a series of intriguing murders where the victims' bodies help reveal the truth behind horrific crimes.

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Brief Summary

Tim Pasa was murdered before a house fire; his wife Barbara was convicted of the crime after evidence revealed foul play.

Key points

A Fatal Fire in Centerville. In May 2018, a house fire in Centerville leads to the tragic death of Tim Pasa, a beloved family man.
The Shocking Autopsy Results. Dr. Klein discovers that Tim Pasa was dead before the fire started, raising suspicions of foul play.
The Investigation Unfolds. Investigators discover evidence suggesting Barbara's involvement in Tim's death and the fire.
The Shocking Discovery. Tim's body revealed he had been injected with propofol before the fire.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

The dead don't hide the truth, and they never lie.

Dr. Richard Shepherd on forensic pathologies

0:32WatchFeb 7, 2026

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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