00:09:27.700it's not great, but you deal with it when it happened. In this case, it is interesting that
00:09:34.340it happened because in retrospect, do you believe he made it happen so that you would be so distracted
00:09:41.780by him and your blossoming love affair that you would not be paying attention to the medical
00:09:46.640problems surrounding his supposedly groundbreaking work? I now believe that I was targeted from day
00:09:56.220one. You know, he had a plan from day one and it was not what I thought it was. You know, I thought
00:10:03.340we were genuinely falling in love and this man was sweeping me off my feet. I now believe when I met
00:10:09.140him in 2013, the world still thought he was the super surgeon. He was a superstar. You know, he
00:10:14.920was doing this groundbreaking pioneering procedure, you know, getting all sorts of press, all sorts of
00:10:20.320accolades. Behind the scenes, the whistleblowers were starting to figure out that something was
00:10:27.780wrong. Patients were dying. However, at the time, he was still sticking by what he said
00:10:33.520and has continued to say all along, that whenever you do an experimental procedure,
00:10:38.740patients do die, which is actually true. You know, you look at heart transplants,
00:10:42.660lung transplants, anything new, radical and experimental, patients do die at the beginning.
00:10:48.040However, you know, what he wasn't telling the world and what nobody knew yet was that he had not done one single one of the preliminary steps that you're supposed to do before doing an experimental procedure on humans.
00:11:03.200He had literally skipped everything. And he's standing at press conferences and interviews saying that his patients are doing beautifully well when, in fact, they were suffering and they were dying slow, horrible deaths.
00:11:14.880he's lying about the success in papers so all this is happening the world does not know this
00:11:21.360yet unfortunately I wish we had but he had to know right that it was going to implode it was
00:11:26.980a matter of time it was a it was just a ticking time bomb so I think he met me and he thought
00:11:33.320okay here's this successful smart journalist and I'm going to make her fall in love with me
00:11:38.960and when the shit hits the fan I'm going to have her in my back pocket so she's going to protect
00:11:43.720me. I think that's exactly what he was doing. I think he was using me. Yeah, because you're
00:11:49.060a top producer, all sorts of awards, Edward R. Murrow and so on. And you're working for
00:11:56.680one of the top anchors at NBC as well on this piece, Meredith Vieira. And you're super smart.
00:12:04.400So if he can get you to vouch for him in this piece and on an ongoing basis, it's huge. That's
00:12:10.560gold. So I can see, yeah, that was my suspicion in watching it. Cause that's one of my big
00:12:15.080questions all along is why, why, why, why, why, why did he do this to her? And especially cause
00:12:20.240you were so vulnerable and you were going through this personal family tragedy and your poor
00:12:24.300daughter. So, okay. So that's our suspicion right now is that it was an intentional latching on.
00:12:30.960You're supposed to be investigating him. I mean, a producer investigates, but it's not like you're
00:12:35.480treated like a private detective where you're really expected to unearth any crime attached
00:12:40.880to the guy. You have to do a reasonable level of research on him. When you were doing that and
00:12:46.020also falling in love, were there red flags? You know, did you see that patients had been dying
00:12:51.060on this? You know, he had this fake trachea that he would put into this synthetic trachea that he
00:12:56.600would coat in the patient's own stem cells and put it in their necks as a new trachea to replace
00:13:01.380one's drunken by cancer, or in the case of the little girl, Hannah, that was never there,
00:13:06.400that she'd been born without one. So had you seen any of those red flags or deaths?
00:13:12.200You know, there was an investigation in Italy, which had nothing to do with the plastic tracheas,
00:13:19.160and he was put on house arrest and accused of extortion. And that raised some red flags for
00:13:24.920a minute. We actually considered putting the story on hold. And in fact, there was a hold
00:13:29.000in bringing Hannah to Illinois during that time while the FDA investigated. But then the lawyers
00:13:33.980in Illinois came back, the FDA came back and everybody said, no, it's fine. He's clear. The
00:13:38.460charges were dropped. It's, you know, all a misunderstanding. And so that seemed fine. And
00:13:42.840if the FDA is endorsing him and, you know, a hospital is still bringing him all the way to
00:13:48.580Illinois to do this very radical transplant, that seemed okay. With the patients dying,
00:13:55.380he was still at the time able to stick by this argument that these patients are pioneers and
00:14:01.400whenever you do something experimental you're learning and people do die and all of that is
00:14:07.300valid if you've done everything you're supposed to do but again what nobody knew is that he hadn't
00:14:12.520done everything he was supposed to do and he was literally using people as human guinea pigs i mean
00:14:17.880it's it's atrocious it's all beyond awful but at the time you the patients even the patients of
00:14:24.580that died, their families were still supporting him. The hospital in Illinois still supported
00:14:31.220him after Hannah died. The FDA was backing him. Karolinska, for goodness sakes, the place that
00:14:37.260awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine, they're still employing him. They're still endorsing him. They're
00:14:41.340still backing him. So there was no reason, you know, really to doubt him. And anytime you're
00:14:48.940doing something radically new and you're a pioneer, you're going to have critics, of course, right? And
00:14:53.440he did have critics but most of the criticism was about the fact that he was running all over the
00:14:58.940world and he didn't stick around long after doing the transplants to take care of the patients and
00:15:04.700he seemed more like an arrogant surgeon than anything else um yeah there just wasn't there
00:15:10.960wasn't enough there yet you know unfortunately i i in hindsight god i wish we had known but
00:15:16.240nobody did sure if you had approached and it was like nine out of nine patients have died
00:15:20.800NBC would have done a very different, a hard turn away from this guy. I believe that fully,
00:15:26.520but I understand medicine and these new procedures do go through, you know, highs and lows when
00:15:31.880they're first being unleashed. And he was pretty open about that. He was talking about that in a
00:15:36.240way that sounded credible, like, Hey, you know, these are experimental procedures. I'm not trying
00:15:40.620to hide that. And I only am really kind of doing it on people who have no hope, who are willing to
00:15:47.940take this huge risk. And yet what he knew and what they didn't know is, you know, this hasn't
00:15:54.140been tested. He didn't do the animal trials. He's done nothing. You are a human guinea pig. You're
00:15:58.920the first line of experimentation, and there's been no success with it so far. Here he is.
00:16:04.100This is from Bad Surgeon on Netflix, and it's footage from an old interview of Paolo talking
00:16:10.580about this very issue. The more complex the surgery is, the more higher the chances of risk
00:16:16.400you take the first liver transplant the first kidney transplant the first heart transplant
00:16:22.080did they go all well no we don't have the magic crystal to show in to look in the future
00:17:08.880Yeah, everything. I mean, that's one of the things that distinguishes him. And it's also so perplexing because most con artists, you look at somebody like the Tinder Swindler or all these other ones that we've heard of, their motive is money, right? They're trying to get money. Money was a non-issue. He was exceedingly generous, you know, over the top generous, not just with me and my daughter, my friends, my family, you know, lavish vacations, everything over the top.
00:17:35.160he would take 20 people out to dinner and pay for everything, you know, buy the most expensive
00:17:40.440champagne. I mean, he was just extraordinarily extravagant and generous. You know, even things
00:17:49.220like I had a friend that was going through breast cancer and he insisted that we send her some money
00:17:53.640for her treatment because she was struggling at the time. He, yeah, money was a non-issue.
00:17:58.520mm-hmm so christmas 2013 he proposed things moved very quickly had the piece aired yet
00:18:08.960no but it was we were done shooting it we had been done shooting it for a while and it's it's
00:18:14.880sat for a long time as as you know stories sometimes do before they actually hit the air
00:18:19.820and this one sat for a long time it was i think uh june of 2014 when it finally aired it might
00:18:26.120have been April, May. But it sat for a long time, which was frustrating. I mean, we were in a
00:18:32.360difficult position. I mean, as you said, I had crossed this invisible but very important ethical
00:18:38.700line that you're not supposed to cross in journalism for a very good reason, right? You
00:18:42.240don't get involved with the source of your story because then your objectivity could go out the
00:18:45.720window. And it wasn't like I didn't struggle with that. I did. And I had actually pushed him away
00:18:51.400for a few months and said, we have to wait. We have to wait until the story airs. We can't be
00:18:55.400together. But it was just so difficult, especially in the wake of my ex-husband actually passing
00:19:00.280away. And then I had my own health scare on top of it the same year. And even all my friends and
00:19:07.560family were just like, are you crazy? This man's nuts about you. You know, he's madly in love with
00:19:11.860you. What are you waiting for? But this proposal was a surprise. And that's another, in hindsight,
00:19:19.960another red flag it is things moved very very quickly you know and in the normal trajectory
00:19:26.540trajectory of a relationship you know things take time right it takes time to fall in love but
00:19:31.460as that's one similar similarity he does have to other con artists everything was on the fast track
00:19:37.060everything was moving at rapid fire speed you know he said I love you very quickly he was talking
00:19:42.600about marrying me very quickly moving in very quickly because he was in a rush I didn't realize
00:19:47.700that right I just thought it was all very romantic but um so yeah and the the beauty of the proposal
00:19:53.920because this man was so over the top with everything you know I'd walk into a hotel room
00:19:58.980and they'd be every time rose petals all over the floor you know bouquets everywhere champagne
00:20:04.080everywhere and the proposal was just simple it was just me and my daughter and Paolo at home
00:20:10.020at Christmas and he just handed me a little box without saying anything and I had no idea it was
00:20:16.600coming but yeah we we actually have a bit of you talking about this uh in the in the special
00:20:22.700bad surgeon again that's the netflix version of bonita story here it is fast forward christmas
00:20:28.1802013 paulo came to stay in new york with me it was very casual he cooked a big elaborate meal
00:20:36.640he handed me this little box and i opened the box
00:20:42.900and it's this beautiful diamond ring oh my god i just i i kind of froze
00:20:53.520and then i said to him is this what i think it is and he just smiled and he nodded i said wow
00:21:09.900so he was love bombing you yeah i mean it was a long slow form of love bombing because we were
00:21:20.360together almost two years and it never stopped in the two years it wasn't this sort of only love
00:21:25.940bombing you at the beginning but the love love bombing is very calculated also everything about
00:21:31.640this, I think was calculated. The love bombing is designed, you know, you're, you feel like you're
00:21:36.940in the clouds, you're floating sort of on a cloud of bliss. And it's very intentional because then
00:21:43.040you don't look at anything else. You don't question anything. You don't, it's designed
00:21:47.040to sort of put you in a haze and distract you from what's really going on. I wonder, you know,
00:21:52.740as I watch that, I think maybe it's just personal preference. I'm not sure. I feel like if somebody
00:21:57.420did that to me like constantly because i saw every voicemail was like my love my love i think i'd be
00:22:02.220like and it's a no but would you have said that too prior to meeting him yeah a hundred percent
00:22:09.800that's not my style at all and actually we did have you know it's interesting because not only
00:22:14.940was it always these consistent lavish over-the-top gestures but also he was videotaping
00:22:20.420everything all the time like the video camera was never not on and we had arguments about that i
00:22:26.620said, you know, number one, I don't need all this. You don't need to do something every time we go on
00:22:31.940vacation. It's too much. You know, it's kind of embarrassing. You know, everything was a show.
00:22:37.760And also, why do you have to videotap everything? We don't have to, you know, document every moment,
00:22:43.320which now is bizarre. It was sort of like he was documenting his own demise because he left
00:22:48.320so much video. Yeah. That's it's great. Can I ask you why? Why do you think he was doing that?
00:22:55.740Because you'd think somebody who's, and we'll get into the details of what exactly, you know, we know now about him while he was doing all this.
00:23:01.640But you'd think anybody who's doing something somewhat nefarious would not want it all on tape.
00:23:06.820Which is interesting because now when I talk to women who've been conned by men, a lot of them talk about the fact that the man would never pose for a photograph with her, right?
00:25:03.860And we cater to the world's most important people, famous people, dignitaries, because
00:25:09.760these people don't want their private medical life, you know, known in public.
00:25:14.400And he told me that New Year's that he was going to take care of Hillary Clinton and that he had been taking care of the Clintons for some time and that he was friends with Bill Clinton.
00:25:24.720I thought it was ridiculous. And I said, I've never heard of anything like this. This is absurd.
00:25:31.520However, I did call I called a friend in L.A. who's very connected to a lot of celebrities.
00:25:36.240And I just said, look, you know, is this feasible? You know, and, you know, she said, Benita, come on.
00:25:40.960She said, you don't think these people have private personal doctors?
00:26:10.740I don't have such a doctor in my life, though I would love one. But I know doctors as friends
00:26:16.000who get, they get offered $250,000 to fly to Saudi Arabia and help somebody. If you have
00:26:22.020enough money, this is how you live. And this is how you expect to be taken care of.
00:26:26.600Right. Right. So he, the name sort of dribbled out over time because it was all,
00:26:32.980you know, so secretive and he wasn't supposed to be telling me, but it ended up being,
00:26:38.620um i mean all kinds of people the emperor of japan of all people was in there people in russia
00:26:44.260because he had a very very lucrative multi-million if not billion dollar grant um in russia to do
00:26:51.340clinical trials in russia so he said that was real he did have that yeah that was real yeah
00:26:56.120that was real and then all kinds of celebrities you know the obamas the clintons the sarkozis
00:27:03.280from France. I'm trying to even remember who they all were. It was a long list. And people
00:27:08.520at the Vatican, which will become very instrumental.
00:27:17.980So you're going to get married, but he can't spend New Year's with you because he's got to go take
00:27:21.880care of some very important clients. And these are his secret patients. And then I do not understand
00:27:28.560this piece of the story, I don't understand. Why did he say, let's get married by the Pope
00:27:38.800at the Pope's summer residence, the Apostolic Palace of Castle Gandolfo? Why take it there?
00:27:50.440Well, yeah, this gets unfortunately very simplified. And I understand from an outsider's
00:27:55.500perspective why people say, oh, give me a break. You know, she really thought the, sorry, fucking
00:28:00.040Pope was going to marry her. Like who believes that? I get that. But it did not happen like that.
00:28:04.220It was a very, very slow, meticulous weaving of this very clever lie. It started with,
00:28:12.660he wanted a big Catholic wedding in Italy. And I said, well, how's that going to work? You know,
00:28:17.140we're both divorced or so I thought, and I'm not even Catholic, you know, and I don't know much
00:28:22.240about the Catholic religion, but I don't think Italy lets divorces get married in the Catholic
00:28:26.260church. And he said, don't worry about it. I'll take care of it all. I was very, very busy at the
00:28:32.680time. I had a new job at NBC. Meredith had a new talk show and I was working crazy hours. And he
00:28:38.240said, look, you're too busy. Let me take over the planning of the wedding. Let me go and find us a
00:28:43.440priest in Italy that will marry us. And so he spent months, actually, supposedly going to one
00:28:50.040church after another in Italy trying to find a priest that would marry us. And he would send me
00:28:58.560pictures of these churches. He would send me long texts, you know, all kinds of stuff. And this went
00:29:05.320on for months and months and months. And finally, he just said, I can't find a priest that's willing
00:29:09.840to marry two divorcees. And I said, what are we going to do? And he said, you know, I said, maybe
00:29:18.660we should think of something else. Maybe we should go and get married on a beach. And he said, look,
00:29:22.780I'm going to go to Rome and call in a favor. And I said, what do you mean? And he said,
00:29:28.340I'm going to go to the Vatican. Now, as ridiculous as that sounds, he had told me that he had done
00:29:33.860consulting work at the Vatican, which again, as absurd as it sounds on the one hand also made
00:29:39.240sense. This is one of the world's leading cardiothoracic surgeons. This is a man who's
00:29:45.040rumored to be in contention for the Nobel Prize, who is doing something that nobody else in the
00:29:50.000world is doing. He's Italian. Why wouldn't he be called in to consult at the Vatican? And he had
00:29:55.160told me and many other people that he had helped consult on the previous pope's health care,
00:30:00.480who actually had his trachea taken out, had a tracheotomy. He did not say that he took care
00:30:04.880of him directly. He just said that he was called to the Vatican to help. And I had heard other
00:30:09.800doctors talking about this. I had seen paperwork talking about the work that Paolo had done at the
00:30:16.200Vatican. So this was not so ridiculous. And that's when he told me, look, the Pope is one of my
00:30:23.020clients. He's one of my secret celebrity clients that I'm not allowed to tell anybody. So then he
00:30:28.760says he's going to the Vatican to ask him for help, ostensibly finding us a priest to marry us.
00:30:34.600And that's when everything went crazy town because he calls me after this meeting. This was now October of 2014. And he says, look, I have great news. They've agreed to help us. They'll find a priest that will marry us. And I said, great. And he said, and there's something else, you know, and it's all so dramatic. He said, sit down and all this nonsense. And he said, Pope Francis actually agreed to marry us himself.
00:32:21.840Paolo made it sound like this was an obligation, that by virtue of—he wanted to do this for the Pope, and by virtue of being his fiancée, I had to go along for the ride, and I needed to do this because this was going to—I might not care because I'm not Catholic, but this would help open the doors of the Catholic Church to, you know, divorces.
00:32:40.760Put it in that context, it makes sense because this is not just like Joe Schmoe, who you met at the Olive Garden, saying that the Pope wants to perform the wedding.
00:32:58.800You know, it just didn't happen like that, you know?
00:33:00.940No, he had credentials that could potentially make that an actual thing, or at least some of them were real and some of them were fake.
00:33:08.860but he had been laying the foundation for you to believe all of this, this, this level of lie
00:33:13.720for months. Right. So it's not as outlandish as it seems, but what I don't understand what I,
00:33:21.340so I understood all that. Like I, I saw how he, how he got you. What I don't understand is now
00:33:26.240with retrospect, can you say, why would he do that? Like, I get why he would woo you and try
00:33:33.880to reel you in, but why take it to that potentially catastrophic level? It was unnecessary. Why do you
00:33:43.900think he did it? Complete all of it was unnecessary. And it just kept growing and growing. I don't
00:33:49.560know. I can't get inside the man's head. I'm not an expert. I can't diagnose him. I believe
00:33:55.580he's at a minimum, a pathological liar. I think he's probably also a sociopath and he's an extreme
00:34:03.600narcissist. And I think people like that don't really have a plan. I think they get a sick
00:34:10.440brush out of the lie. They get a high out of it, out of getting away with it. And they usually do
00:34:18.540get away with it. And the more they get away with, the more they want to up the ante and the bigger
00:34:24.900the high, it's like a drug. And so they don't have a plan. They're just kind of putting one foot in
00:34:29.820front of the other. And it's like a game, you know, and I think they just think somehow they're
00:34:33.780going to wiggle their way out of this because usually they do. Yes, because he did not need
00:34:39.040to propose to you in the first place. You know, he could have rolled along, as you said, it kind
00:34:43.300of happened soon. He could have just been rolled, rolling along in a relationship if he just wanted
00:34:47.020you to be close and in his corner. And he certainly didn't need to come up with this.
00:34:51.780We're going to get married, you know, at the Pope's private residence by the Pope himself.
00:34:55.380like all of it was so extraordinary. And I completely agree with every word you said
00:35:01.940about the high they get. And I do think, yes, it's no accident. He chose you as an NBC news
00:35:08.620producer and somebody with access to, you know, power and messaging that could be beneficial to
00:35:13.340him. But I also think your smarts were part of the calculation. He enjoyed that. He liked that.
00:35:19.900Exactly. That's part of the rush. I think they often target smart, intelligent women because that is part of the rush. You know, if I can, if I can pull it over on her, you know, it just, and that also going back to an earlier thing with all the extravagant, elaborate surprises he was doing.
00:35:38.600I always thought that was for me, right?
00:35:40.560You know, the roses, the lavish trips, everything.
00:35:45.480And I now realize it wasn't for me at all.
00:39:47.280team. And the next day, May 14th was the day it all started to come down because you got an email
00:39:55.780from a friend. Tell us. Yeah. And before I tell that, just to back up very quickly, I think
00:40:02.960we had been arguing for a good four months at that point. And one of the things we had been
00:40:08.040arguing about was I had never been to the house in Barcelona. He had flown me and my daughter
00:40:14.540all over the world, all these beautiful trips. But every single time we were supposed to go to
00:40:19.140Barcelona, the trip got canceled at the last minute because he had an emergency surgery.
00:40:23.440This happened three, four times. I think one time I was actually at the airport when the trip got
00:40:28.020canceled. And it was a huge source of contention. I said, you know, I'm not marrying you without
00:40:33.680seeing the house where I'm supposed to be living after the wedding, without my daughter seeing the
00:40:37.840house where she's supposed to be living. I mean, who would do that? Who would marry a man without
00:40:41.280seeing the place where they're going to live. So we had been arguing a lot about that. And there
00:40:47.120were other little things that were starting to nag at me, but not huge red flags. It wasn't like
00:40:52.880somebody was waving a giant flag on a football field saying, alert, alert, con man. But I think
00:40:58.260there were at that point, little things that were nagging at my gut that I was pushing down,
00:41:03.880because I think I didn't want to face the fact that I was starting to realize that something
00:41:08.160was wrong. And then the day after I left NBC, I had a group of girlfriends that took me to a spa
00:41:14.660because they knew what a difficult decision it was for me to leave NBC. And I come out of the spa,
00:41:20.700we'd been in there laughing for hours, we'd put our phones away. And I pull out my phone,
00:41:25.000I'm at the desk paying. And it's an email from a colleague and the subject line just says the Pope.
00:41:30.640And it's a link to an article that says the Pope is going to be in South America
00:41:35.200on the date of our wedding, which was July 11th, 2015. And that the trip had been planned for a
00:41:41.040very long time. The second, I mean, the second I read that article, you know, all those little
00:41:47.300red flags that had been sort of bubbling up that I guess I had been ignoring all exploded.
00:41:53.120And I just felt sick. And I, in that second, I knew. I just thought, you know, this fucker is
00:42:00.840lying to me about everything. This man is lying to me about everything. Everything's a lie. I knew
00:42:04.580it. I didn't have all the evidence. I didn't know by any stretch yet the extent of it, but yeah,
00:42:10.740it was just a moment of, I mean, I almost fell over in the spa. I just felt ill.
00:42:15.480Wow. Were your girlfriends there? Do they remember the moment? Did you share it immediately
00:42:21.480or were you embarrassed? No, they immediately, they just said, Benita, what happened? What's
00:42:27.400the matter? And I could barely talk. And a couple of them came back to my apartment with me. It was
00:42:33.380still early in the morning. And I was just pacing back and forth and trying to figure it out. And
00:42:37.700they were so sweet, because they kept trying to say, well, maybe it's not as bad as you think it
00:42:41.680is. And maybe there's an explanation. And maybe there'll still be a wedding. And you know, you
00:42:46.120never really wanted the Pope to marry you in the first place, which is true. But I kind of knew and
00:42:51.480I called him, of course, immediately, I called him texted him. And of course, he denied everything,
00:42:57.860you know, he immediately said, I don't know, you know, I just found this out myself. And I'm going
00:43:01.640to get to the bottom of it. It's a misunderstanding, you know, blah, blah. But I knew from that moment,
00:43:06.480I knew that he was lying to me. You did. That was it. Yeah. Before and after. Oh, yeah.
00:43:12.280It's almost like, again, I think it was those little red flags. It's sort of been bubbling
00:43:17.820under the surface and I had been uncomfortable for a while, but couldn't quite figure out what
00:43:22.780it was. I mostly attributed it to leaving NBC and to my daughter, but I think it was much deeper
00:43:29.880than that i think at some level i knew you know long before i actually knew and at this point
00:43:35.500you've already sent out the invitations for the wedding and you've said oh yeah oh yeah like we're
00:43:39.380going to the no like you know we are eight weeks out we are eight weeks out from the wedding to
00:43:45.000the day almost because it was yeah may 14th july 15th people had bought plane tickets we had almost
00:43:52.460300 people coming from all over the world my family's from australia we had people coming
00:43:56.520from Australia, from Europe, all over the place. They had spent thousands of dollars on fancy red
00:44:02.540carpet attire and booked hotels and, and everything, you know, this thing was, he had
00:44:08.640taken it that far, you know, this, this, it's ridiculous. But don't you wonder, I'm sure you
00:44:14.340wonder. So it just happened that a friend, uh, you know, who's paying attention to news events,
00:44:20.840like the Pope's schedule, saw this and realized it was BS. But what do you think he would have done?
00:44:26.900What if he hadn't? Yeah. What would he have done? Would he have seen it through and just come up
00:44:31.880with an excuse at the last minute for why it's not the Pope and we're not at the Pope's private
00:44:36.180residence and done it like a fake marriage? You know, the only thing I can think of is,
00:44:42.060because I've asked myself this question so many times, it's one of the big money questions. You
00:44:45.680know, what was his end game? You know, this had to implode. He was literally lying about everything.
00:44:50.540He created an entire fantasy wedding. It turned out he had told me he was divorced. He wasn't even divorced, so he couldn't have legally married me in the first place. So this never could have happened.
00:45:01.360if he had allowed everybody, you know, I mean, 300 people descend in Italy thinking they're
00:45:07.940going to this, you know, lavish wedding. The only thing I can think of is that he would have said
00:45:13.160there's some kind of security threat, right? You know, there's been a death threat on the Pope's
00:45:18.140life or one of the dignitaries or celebrities that were supposed to be coming. We can't,
00:45:21.880it's too dangerous. It's too controversial. We can't have this wedding. But even if he had done
00:45:26.600that, what was he going to do with me? What was he going to do with my daughter? I'm there with
00:45:31.600my bags packed and my wedding dress, and I think I'm moving to Barcelona. I have no idea how the
00:45:36.120hell he thought he was getting out of this. It's like part of me wishes it had played out like
00:45:40.600that just so we could see, just so we could know. Yeah, because- Right, it's true. It's true.
00:45:46.980There was never a wedding scheduled. The Pope had nothing to do with it, and he couldn't marry
00:45:52.440you because he was already married, which again, in retrospect now, the proposal, sending out
00:45:59.360invitations, the recklessness of it, Bonita, right? The recklessness.
00:46:05.580Wow. And of course it would get much worse. I mean, I, and ultimately I'd find out he was
00:46:09.540juggling four families at the same time. Wait, what? I didn't see that. I did not see that in
00:46:14.840the earlier pieces. I know about the one wife because eventually you and your girlfriends,
00:47:18.020Yeah, I see you. Motherfucking fucker, fuck you.
00:47:24.680Yeah, so that was the day you learned not only does he have a wife already, but two young kids, which is what stopped you, I think, from going to the door yourself.
00:47:38.860When I met him, he told me that he had been separated from his Italian wife for a very long time.
00:47:44.740So I knew from the beginning, there's a lot of misunderstanding about this, that he had a wife.
00:47:48.680He had two children who at the time were, I think, 19 and 20, who were actually supposed to be coming to the wedding.
00:47:54.140And he said that they had been living separate lives for many years, which was well documented.
00:47:58.640He lived in Barcelona, had been for years.
00:48:12.780He just told me that they had never gotten divorced because it's Italy and they're Catholic and it's complicated.
00:48:17.420But he told me when he met me that now he finally wanted to get divorced.
00:48:21.180And that was why he proposed, because he said he had filed for divorce and that the divorce was going through.
00:48:26.740So I knew there was that wife. I knew about her. I'd seen pictures of her, everything.
00:48:31.420The woman in Barcelona, when I went to the house in Barcelona, I went there because once I figured out he was lying, I went into hyper investigative mode.
00:48:40.240It's kind of like I woke up out of my love haze, you know, and, you know, woke up and put my journalist hat back on.
00:48:59.740I was trying to figure everything out.
00:49:01.180And for me, the last piece of the puzzle was Barcelona.
00:49:04.680I mean, clearly there was a good reason he had never let me go to that house.
00:49:08.100And so that's why we decided to go there. And it was part sort of a fuck you girl, you know, fun girls trip. And which is why I got this hideous blonde wig, which I didn't really know if I would need, but I wasn't sure what I was going to find in that house.
00:49:23.840So I ordered this cheap blonde wig on Amazon and we went to the house.
00:49:30.060And one funny thing about that is when I put in the address for the house, he had given
00:49:35.000me an address for the house in Barcelona so people could send wedding gifts.
00:49:42.040He didn't even he didn't even give me the right address for the house.
00:49:44.260So he had no idea I was coming and I wanted it to be a surprise attack, so to speak, you
00:49:50.100know, that he and he he claimed he was in Russia, which is why you hear me saying that
00:49:53.660in the video. And at the time, I'm still talking to him, right? So when I first discovered that he
00:49:59.340was lying, I made an almost immediate decision that, okay, this man is never going to tell me
00:50:05.960the truth about everything. I realize now that he's a pathological liar. And I wanted hard,
00:50:12.740indisputable, irrefutable evidence before I confronted him. Because one of the things that
00:50:18.220goes along with this, of course, is gaslighting. These con artists, including Paolo, are very good
00:50:23.680if you question them about muddying the waters and making you think that you're the one who's
00:50:28.780crazy for asking them questions. They're so good at it. It's rapid fire. They have an answer for
00:50:33.040everything. And so I decided I'm not confronting him until I have all my ducks in a row. And I know
00:50:39.740every single lie. I've uncovered everything. And so I had to play kind of a game with him.
00:50:44.280I called off the wedding. And luckily for me, he was being investigated at the time for scientific misconduct. It was sort of the beginning of the revelations about his medical lives. And it was very convenient timing because he was having a very difficult time in Sweden. And I just said, look, you know, there's too much going on right now. Let's just call off the wedding and postpone it.
00:51:05.480and he must have breathed such a sigh of relief when I did that. I got him off the hook,
00:51:09.600but it was also the perfect excuse to cancel the wedding. And that's all I told all our wedding
00:51:14.740guests as well. And so I'm still talking to him, you know, he's, I'm still talking to him,
00:51:19.280still saying, I love you, which killed me and playing along as if we were going to reconvene
00:51:26.000the wedding at some point. So he had no idea I was coming to that house and a, he wasn't in Russia.
00:51:32.440so that was the first thing that pissed me off he had just texted me wait just to clarify so when
00:51:36.660you when we see that video of you and your friends in barcelona he was still under the delusion that
00:51:40.960you were fooled and you guys were still together correct correct okay all right okay keep going
00:51:45.840i mean he had some idea i had been grilling him i had been telling him for a long time that i
00:51:50.880thought he was lying but i still he i think he still thought he had me under his thumb and he
00:51:54.960was going to bring me back around and that the wedding was just being postponed he had no idea
00:51:59.380that I was on to him or that I knew that he was not really divorced, any of that, or that I knew
00:52:06.500everything about the wedding was fake. And I kind of expected to find another woman in that house.
00:52:14.560I wasn't sure if it would be the Italian wife or somebody else. I was prepared for that.
00:52:19.000And my girlfriends and I had, we had been through several different scenarios. You know,
00:52:22.760what if he's there? What if someone else is there? Blah, blah. And the reason I sent them to the
00:52:27.100door without me was I wanted them to sort of do the initial reconnaissance and see what was going
00:52:32.480on before I came down. And if he was there, I had planned, I fully intended to confront him.
00:52:40.140But what happens is he comes to the door. So first of all, he's there. And then I see even
00:52:46.360from I'm sitting in the car at the top of the hill, he can't see me. And I see a woman and two
00:52:51.880young children come out on the veranda of the house. And even from where I am, I can hear them
00:52:57.040calling him dad. And this is a young woman. This is not his Italian wife. I know exactly what his
00:53:01.880Italian wife looks like. So this is when I completely lose it and fall apart because this
00:53:06.820is another family. This is a third family. It's the Italian wife he never divorced. It's me and
00:53:12.320my daughter in New York. And now here in Barcelona, the real reason he never let us come to Barcelona
00:53:17.000is because he's hiding another family here. And it was the children that sent me over the edge.
00:53:23.380I mean, I another woman. OK, at that point, I was prepared for that. But the kids and little kids, they were about five and seven years old. I was wholly unprepared for that. And that's when I lost it. I mean, you see in the video, I just I think I had been investigating for a couple of months at that point. And I had not dealt with any of the heartache, the devastation. And I just fall apart. I just I'm screaming. I'm kicking. I'm wailing. I'm calling him every name under the sun.
00:53:52.620it was just devastating. It was just, I, you know, he just took it so far. It just was
00:54:00.880sort of incomprehensible to me that you had been sitting here, that you let me think I'm moving
00:54:05.980here with my daughter and you plan this whole fake wedding. You let me quit my job. So much
00:54:11.760was at stake. You let me pull my daughter out of her school. You let me give up my entire life.
00:54:17.220And the whole time you're hiding another family here. And the whole time, you know,
00:54:21.820none of this is ever going to happen. Oh my gosh. It's just so devastating.
00:54:27.360It's crazy. It's crazy. I spoke with a friend once whose husband had betrayed her and she did
00:54:35.840what almost every woman does, which is start to obsess over his phone records and anything she
00:54:42.600could get her hands on. Right. Just to know she knew, she knew it was, you know, it was, she knew,
00:54:48.040but she needed the details. She needed the specifics and she needed to know, you know,
00:54:52.620when and how long and how many times. And I said to her, you know, it's, it's almost like
00:54:58.420in the Catholic faith, when somebody dies, they have the wake and you go to the wake. And even
00:55:06.200though many Catholics and non-Catholics especially find it kind of very jarring, what a jarring
00:55:12.100tradition to go and see the dead body. If it's an open casket, you know, what kind of a tradition
00:55:17.140is this? Why would you do this to yourself? And I get that reaction very much, but there is
00:55:24.100something, I don't know if the word's cathartic, if there's something necessary for many people in
00:55:30.180seeing the dead body. It's like the beginning of coming to terms with what's really happened
00:55:37.240and how your life has changed from what you thought it was a day earlier or a couple days
00:55:41.220earlier. And I almost see the behavior you're describing on your part as part of that process
00:55:45.660for you. Like it's got, you've got to make it real for yourself. So acceptance can come
00:55:50.620a hundred percent. And I think that's why the house in Barcelona was the last piece of the
00:55:55.920puzzle for me. I mean, at that point, I already knew that he wasn't divorced. I already knew that,
00:56:01.540you know, he had created this whole fake fantasy wedding. I mean, everything about it, you know,
00:56:07.520every place he said was booked the caterer, the, this, the, that, none of them had ever heard of
00:56:11.600us. I knew that he didn't know a damn one of these dignitaries or celebrities he claimed was coming
00:56:17.480to the wedding or he claimed he was the personal doctor to. He sure as hell was not the Pope's
00:56:23.280personal private doctor. I mean, the Vatican practically laughed at me. But for me, the last
00:56:29.840piece of the puzzle was Barcelona. And that was the thing that just sort of, and that's when I
00:56:34.800can finally confront him. Wait, before we get to conversation, who is the fourth family?
00:56:41.600you see her actually in the netflix special so after um the older woman after um she's she's
00:56:50.720younger she's an apollo she comes in the third episode so after i went public which i i do
00:56:55.960shortly after this she contacted me and it turns out that she and her story is just horrific
00:57:02.040because her son died um he was a patient apollo's he did not have a plastic trachea but he did
00:57:08.800operate on him. Her son dies in Italy. There's an investigation into manslaughter. So Paolo's
00:57:15.080facing manslaughter charges in Italy. So what does he do? He seduces her and basically so that she
00:57:21.360will drop the charges, which she does. And then he gets her pregnant and she has a child that's
00:57:26.760born with him basically right around the time that he's proposing to me. So that's four families that
00:57:32.760I know about. You know, it's the Italian wife he never divorced. It's me and my daughter in New
00:57:37.300york it's the woman and the two kids in the house in barcelona and then this other poor woman in
00:57:42.200italy that he has a child with oh my god it's like in a way you got away easy oh yeah you know
00:57:50.280which is interesting because he really wanted to have a child he was desperate to have a child and
00:57:55.880that would be such a nightmare i'm just so glad that never happened i know so can we talk about
00:58:02.140the confrontation? Because I know that after, hold on, I pulled the email because I know that
00:58:07.120after you canceled the wedding, you emailed him and it reads as follows. I believed you were
00:58:14.800exactly who you presented yourself to be, to me, to my friends and family, to the world.
00:58:21.300Congratulations. You charm me and all of us into la la land. I will never, ever understand how you
00:58:27.240could have done this to me or to your daughter. Who the hell are you and what the hell is wrong
00:58:33.200with you? But this is not the confrontation to which you refer. No, it is. So that was the first
00:58:40.380part of the confrontation. This was by text, actually. When we left the house in Barcelona,
00:58:44.760we went to a place that had Wi-Fi. Keep in mind, he had no idea that I was there. He knew my
00:58:50.620friends were there. He couldn't get rid of them fast enough. And they told him, hey, look, you
00:58:56.120know, we, the wedding got canceled so close to the wedding day. We, as a lot of people did,
00:59:00.780we decided to come to Italy anyway on vacation. And we just dropped by to bring you a wedding
00:59:05.640gift. That was their excuse for knocking at the doorbell, which the whole thing was so suspicious,
00:59:10.280right? Because ostensibly he and I are still getting married and we're still talking and he
00:59:15.020didn't invite them in. He could not get rid of them fast enough. He just wanted them to leave.
00:59:19.780But anyway, we get to this restaurant and I write him a text that's literally about this long. I
00:59:24.860I mean, what you read is just one part of it and called him every name under the sun, named everything that I knew he was lying about.
00:59:32.740And, you know, just called him a despicable, disgusting human being, told him I hated him and et cetera, et cetera.
00:59:40.960And I think it took him about 10, 15 minutes to reply.
01:17:50.500And even if he hasn't, don't you think that the Netflix show, that your documentary, all the work you've been doing along with these doctors from Karolinska have made his reemergence as a physician impossible?
01:18:15.000So if a country still allows him to operate in Europe, he could in theory.
01:18:19.960But as you said, his reputation is clearly severely tarnished and, you know, tanked and his he's had a drastic, you know, crash from from fame and notoriety.
01:18:33.180So I doubt anybody would want him operating on them.
01:19:15.360and try to distract attention from his patients.
01:19:17.580And so he's going after me and Anna Paula, the woman who also went public in the Netflix documentary, and he's just trying to victim shame us, slut shame us, whatever he can.
01:19:28.720You know, he's just trying to throw dirt, you know, and make up lies about us and muddy the waters and distract attention from the real issue, which is that he killed people.
01:19:39.580And none of the things he's saying are true, but even if they were, it wouldn't matter.
01:19:44.960You know, it doesn't matter. You know, what matters is you use people as human guinea pigs. You broke all kinds of legal and ethical laws and recklessly destroyed people's lives. And you killed people and patients' lives without caring. So nothing else matters. So he's-
01:20:07.320there been massive civil suits against him? Somebody should own his Barcelona home other
01:20:11.640than Paulo. I know the Turkish family, that Turkish girl that you see on the Netflix documentary,
01:20:18.200the one that had something like 200 surgeries. I mean, her case is so horrific. They've sued him.
01:20:23.680I don't know the outcome of that yet. We need an American family to sue. We're very good at
01:20:29.760suing. As you know, that's our forte here in America. I know. One of the American families
01:20:34.580needs to sue for wrongful death and then they will own the home in Barcelona and whatever else
01:20:39.420he has. That's the true way of punishing somebody like him. It's true. I know. He said to La Nazione,
01:20:47.100an Italian publication that wrote up his plan to do a new documentary. He said,
01:20:53.360the deaths are glorified, meaning those he caused, but there is no mention of the lives saved.
01:22:21.700So finally, I got him on the phone, and it was such an interesting phone call because I called from a phone that wasn't mine, so he didn't know it was me.
01:22:31.160And I had to tell him that I was recording him, obviously, for legal reasons.
01:22:35.360But as soon as I said, I said, hi, Paolo, it's Benita.
01:22:39.460And immediately, his voice, you know, that soft voice, oh, hi, how are you?
01:22:45.700and I thought this asshole he he thinks either he thinks I'm calling to reconcile or he thinks he
01:22:51.520can get me again he thinks he can you know pull me in again it was just so disgusting and then I
01:22:58.160started I you know I started firing questions at him why did you lie to me why did you lie about
01:23:02.420this and there was silence and you could I it was maybe a minute and you could almost hear the cogs
01:23:08.920in his brain turning thinking okay I'm being recorded I think I'm supposed to say I'm sorry
01:23:13.360and so after I shut up he he just says I'm sorry it was the lamest most insincere apology you've
01:23:21.660ever heard in your life he sounded like a robot you know he didn't mean it and then I asked him
01:23:25.760some other question and then he hung up on me no yeah that's it that's the moment that's it it's
01:23:34.380it's over you got me yeah and i have no need to sing or dance anymore
01:23:40.260yeah but of course now now that he's i think even then i think all of this time he still thought he
01:23:50.140was going to get away with it you know he still thought somehow he was going to crawl his way out
01:23:54.420of this and restore his reputation and so i think this prison sentence and the supreme court refusing
01:24:02.940to take his case was a was a hard awakening and that's why he's desperate and that's why he's
01:24:07.220doing all this stuff now and calling me a liar calling Anna a liar what else can he do you know
01:24:13.000there's nothing else he can do so let's talk about what we can figure out in his psychology
01:24:23.840and really warning signs for other women because you said at the top which I wanted to follow up
01:24:29.920with you on um the thing about i believe he was gathering information to use against me
01:24:37.080from the start so interesting what do you mean so one of the things and i think this is true
01:24:44.800of most of these guys most of these con artists i thought paula was a very good listener at the
01:24:50.900beginning right who who doesn't love a good listener especially when you're in a vulnerable
01:24:54.620place. But what they're doing, if you go back and look at it very carefully, they give you very
01:25:00.180little information about themselves. And what they're doing is literally gathering information
01:25:05.480and stockpiling it to use against you. They study you. They try to figure out everything they can
01:25:12.420about you so that they can use it against you. And they target you when you're vulnerable. And so
01:25:17.600this is one of the things I tell women all the time now. If you are vulnerable for any reason,
01:25:22.540whatever there's been a death in your family you lost a job you just went through a divorce a
01:25:28.340breakup anything anything that makes you more vulnerable than usual you have to be hyper vigilant
01:25:33.580about protecting yourself because this is when these people target you because it's and it's
01:25:39.520it's so basic but when you're vulnerable when you're going through something difficult what
01:25:43.840do you want do you want somebody to tell you everything's going to be okay you want somebody
01:25:47.340to wrap their arms around you and give you a big hug and reassure you and that's what palo was
01:25:52.320doing. He, I'm pouring my heart out about my ex-husband is going to die. And I don't know
01:25:58.100how to do this. And I don't know how to tell my daughter. And he's listening to me. He's
01:26:02.920reassuring me. And at the same time, he's figuring out what my weaknesses are or what my vulnerabilities
01:26:08.440are. And they turn it around on you. They use it against you. This is a weird reference, but it's
01:26:15.520almost like a dog in heat. How, you know, the humans walking around the dog have no idea,
01:26:22.060but every male dog in the neighborhood is at your door. Like sociopaths had that sense when a woman
01:26:29.520is in trouble and when she's vulnerable. I don't know how they develop it. They do. It's a very
01:26:35.440strong, effective radar. They can find them in a crowded field. They can, they know. And like
01:26:41.320death in the family. It doesn't have to be like, you're a basket case. It can be like,
01:26:45.300I just had something really sad happen to me and I'm feeling kind of low. They have like a homing
01:26:49.840beacon. Exactly. I call it the vulnerability radar. Yeah. And so even if that applies by the
01:26:58.260way, that applies by the way to anybody I would, I notice, and I thought about this in hindsight
01:27:03.680at a party, for instance, you know, there were certain people Paula wouldn't spend a lot of time
01:27:08.880talking to and later and it was subtle people didn't know but later I had to find out that
01:27:14.380those people didn't like him or that there was something about him that didn't necessarily make
01:27:19.120them suspicious but they were turned off by him and he he kind of knows it you know he knew who
01:27:24.320he could play with and who he couldn't so I yeah they're highly skilled manipulators and highly
01:27:30.420skilled at knowing who they can target I mean it's yeah not unlike any other criminal they
01:27:36.040target their prey. It's a lot for mere mortals to respond to appropriately, to see through,
01:27:43.440to identify. You know, I've said this to my audience many times, but my husband and I are
01:27:48.060very different in this lane because he would be somebody Paolo would spend no time with because
01:27:52.660Doug is very good at like sociopath dar. He just knows immediately when he's met a bad person.
01:28:01.640And I'm ironically as the news person, and you'd think it'd be the opposite, but I'm like,
01:28:05.380no, you're being too hard on him. He's a nice guy. And Doug's always right. After 16 years of
01:28:13.540marriage, I finally got to the point where I'm like, if Doug says he's bad, he's bad. He's bad.
01:28:18.380I should not trust my own instincts on this. But for mere mortals out there dealing with these
01:28:23.380skilled sociopaths, it's a very uneven playing field. So you, as a mere mortal, if you don't
01:28:30.300have Doug's sociopath dar you have to follow the clues that Benita's giving you like you are most
01:28:37.520vulnerable when something has happened to you yeah whether you're strong normally or not you
01:28:43.920you're putting out the the scent yeah that you know victim here you also I know you talked about
01:28:50.440it a little bit you didn't use the term but I know you've talked about the fog that these guys can
01:28:54.700create around you and I think that'll be familiar to a lot of people you feel it you you don't know
01:28:59.480what it is. You feel the fog. So talk about how they create that and what that is. Well, it's a
01:29:04.760form of gaslighting, right? So they're, they're master manipulators and they come into the
01:29:10.680relationship or the friendship, whatever it is, could be even be a business arrangement, quite
01:29:14.980frankly, with some sort of nefarious intention. They want something from you, whether it's money,
01:29:20.360whether it's whatever it is. And so they're plotting the whole time. And so they are very
01:29:25.180prepared so if you start becoming suspicious they're very prepared for that and they come
01:29:30.840back at you rapid fire you know they have an answer for everything and they shoot you down so
01:29:35.360fast and they get angry and they question you why would you ask me that and well you know and they
01:29:40.700have evidence you know they have all the evidence and so it's gaslighting so you start thinking oh
01:29:45.600okay maybe it's me you know maybe maybe I'm wrong and it feels like a fog you know you just feel
01:29:52.580you can't quite figure it out but you know that you something doesn't feel right but they're so
01:29:58.420convincing and so rapid fire and and so determined to shoot you down that you just start thinking okay
01:30:04.720it must be me and that's why I call it the fog and it's very intentional it's very manipulative
01:30:10.560because again it's designed to distract you and sort of muddy the waters and you know get you
01:30:17.680off the scent of something's wrong or whatever it is that you've clued, clued into. And they're
01:30:23.100very, very good at it. It's cunning. It's the way you feel when you have low blood sugar.
01:30:29.460Oh, that's so interesting. It's so true. Yeah. That's exactly what it feels like. Yeah.
01:30:35.040Your brain's just a little muddled. You're not a hundred percent yourself. You're slightly
01:30:39.420confused. You're not processing things as quickly as you normally do. Just like there's some
01:30:43.860separation between the real you and the current you. And they're so good at creating it. They can
01:30:49.180create it just a million facts that they throw at you. And they're smart. The people who get away
01:30:53.660with this are very, very smart. So it's not, it's not illogical, their responses and their
01:30:58.360manipulations. And that brings me to another thing you said about how you said, oh, he probably would
01:31:06.060have canceled the wedding claiming, oh, there's some massive security threat. Or you talked about
01:31:11.980how he said some trip was canceled because of an emergency. That the big excuse for the
01:31:19.240cancellation or the letdown is also a characteristic of these people. Yeah, I call it the walking
01:31:26.220catastrophe. So if you're if you're dating somebody or again, it could be a business
01:31:31.400relationship. It could be a friendship. And there's one dramatic excuse after the other.
01:31:36.560It's always dramatic, right? It's somebody's in the hospital or I'm in the hospital or
01:31:41.380somebody's dead or something so dramatic that if you if you question them let's say you're supposed
01:31:47.120to go on a date with somebody and they're oh you know my kid got hit by a car if you then question
01:31:52.400them and well I thought we were going away for the weekend I thought we were going on a date
01:31:56.800you look like the idiot and the asshole because you're who wouldn't be empathetic and sympathetic
01:32:01.660in that situation and it's very calculated it's designed again to make you know to take the focus
01:32:08.300of what they're not doing or why they're not showing up and make you feel bad and but it's
01:32:13.640a huge red flag i mean if it happens once okay that's life you know things happen but if it
01:32:18.480happens over and over again these dramatic wild you know excuses and catastrophes that's a giant
01:32:26.440red flag so looking back on your relationship with paolo before pope gate was there a moment
01:32:35.360And, you know, now in retrospect, was there a moment or two that you can point to where you're like, I want to talk to that girl and say, sweetheart, this is a big deal. Here's your red flag. Like, run.
01:32:46.680It's so hard because it's such a slow weaving of the web of lies.
01:33:09.160I mean, keep in mind, we were dating for almost two years.
01:33:11.260So it's hard for me to pinpoint a moment like that.
01:33:16.140Clearly, not having been to the house in Barcelona was a huge red flag, but we were arguing about that.
01:33:21.860It wasn't as if I didn't question him about that.
01:33:24.200And there were things about the wedding that I questioned him about.
01:33:26.260So, again, there wasn't one big giant thing that said, you know, wake up, because he had the credentials.
01:33:36.140Everything, as nuts as it sounds, also seemed equally plausible.
01:33:40.280You know, he he had a he's very adept at explaining things into sense, into them making sense.
01:33:48.680So with you, we speculated maybe this was about getting a friend in the media, getting a getting a beautiful NBC piece and perhaps more or, you know, who knows, because he did encourage you ultimately to quit NBC.
01:34:02.960So at that point, but you're still a journalist, you still have connections.
01:34:05.800And at this point, he may just be seeing it through.
01:34:08.480But in general, do you think it's just the high that we talked about, like of lying, of fooling someone smart, like a guy who gambles and goes for the high of winning?
01:34:35.260And, I mean, one of the things is people like him don't go into therapy, obviously, so they don't know a lot about these type of people.
01:34:41.920But one person explained it to me that all the, okay, let's say you were standing on the edge of a cliff and somebody is about to push you off.
01:34:50.320Think of all the things you'd be feeling, you know, the fear, the anxiety, the trepidation.
01:34:55.660This person said that it's almost like a part of their brain is missing, right?
01:35:00.080So all those things that we feel, you know, fear, anxiety, remorse, guilt, you know, all
01:35:06.720the normal things people feel when they're dealing with other human beings or they make
01:35:10.500a mistake, it's like that part of their brain is blank.
01:43:43.280Where were you prosecuting attorney during the relevant timeframe?
01:43:46.400So I was in Orange County, California, and Orange County is a little bit different the way they handle their homicides than than almost every other DA's office in the United States.
01:43:56.340It's called a vertical prosecution concept.
01:43:59.780And what that means is when you come into sexual assault, where I spent four years before I got the homicide or the homicide unit or certain other specialized units, you get assigned a patch of the county.
01:44:09.920So I had Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Irvine.
01:44:13.980and any murders that happen, you get the call in the middle of the night, you roll out to your
01:44:19.220investigator, you're there at three in the morning signing warrants. So you get in at the very,
01:44:23.660very beginning. And then it's called vertical because you follow it all the way up through
01:44:27.440the system. So on certain cases, you're there, you know, as the crime lab is processing the dead
01:44:34.020body and in others, you're there like in a missing person capacity trying to help police solve the
01:44:40.600mystery. So it's kind of a unique way of doing it. I think every DA's office in America should
01:44:45.800do it that way. You get to know the detectives, you get to know all the witnesses, you get a real
01:44:49.720feel for the case long before you ever stand up in front of a jury and try the thing. So that's
01:44:56.400where I was. So at the time you're doing that, there's a guy named Ed Shin in the jurisdiction,
01:45:04.080And he's been leading an interesting life, a very bright guy, an only child.
01:45:11.520But he, before he came into your life, had definitely had a couple of questionable pieces of behavior, including with respect to his own parents.
01:45:24.000Yeah, so Ed Shin, as you can see in the photo, he went to UC San Diego.
01:45:53.980He tried to buy a magazine, like a collectibles magazine for sports memorabilia.
01:45:58.580And that went belly up and resulted in a bunch of lawsuits and accusations.
01:46:03.280He there was a really bizarre incident where he may have faked his own kidnapping, trying to get money out of his dad.
01:46:12.840But that didn't go anywhere criminally because it was all sort of inner family wise.
01:46:16.500But by the time he met Chris, Ed was working in what's called the advertising lead business.
01:46:22.900so those commercials that you see at like three in the morning like uh consolidate your debts or
01:46:28.480new hair loss treatment or whatever it is you know um you're old enough that you're probably
01:46:33.360not rolling home i'm old enough i'm older than you but um you know those things that when you're
01:46:38.060young you come home from a night of partying and you turn on the tv and it's like those those
01:46:42.280commercials those are those are advertising leads and the way that works is um like mesothelioma
01:46:47.580or whatever. These companies will actually put those ads out and people who call aren't calling
01:46:54.380the law firm or the hair restoration guys or the debt consolidation guys. They're calling the
01:47:00.480advertising company who then contracts with the people that actually provide the services. And
01:47:05.880it's this really weird niche where they base it on the amount of time, how many calls or clicks
01:47:12.860they get. And it was largely unregulated by the FCC at the beginning. So it's kind of the Wild
01:47:18.900West. And it was an area where you could make a tremendous amount of money if you knew how to do
01:47:25.340it. And so Chris Smith goes, he's in this business working for a totally legitimate company,
01:47:32.000grows up in Santa Cruz, moves down to Temecula, California, and he meets Ed Shin, who works for
01:47:37.700another company they're both like late 20s handsome guys chris is living in a nice place
01:47:44.080in temecula but they they hit it off and there's a lot of junkets and boondoggles and these guys
01:47:49.300go to vegas a lot and chris was pretty straight he was like a he was more the artistic side um
01:47:55.400he would do the the actual ads ed was all business and with this degree from uc san diego he was in
01:48:01.480a fraternity again kind of the all-american kid um they became friends and they decided that they
01:48:07.220were going to start their own business. So at like, I think they were 31 at the time. They're
01:48:12.780the same age. They started a business in Orange County called 800 Exchange, where they would set
01:48:17.580up these advertising campaigns and contract the various providers of this service. These guys
01:48:22.400made over $12 million in their first year with almost zero overhead. Right. It was an insane
01:48:30.820amount of money and they knew how to do it. They're good at it. And they have this very
01:48:35.040successful business. So Chris, um, moves to Laguna beach. And when I, I went to law school in San
01:48:41.860Diego, um, I lived in Laguna for my first four years, uh, as a DA. So you got a picture of one
01:48:47.520of the most beautiful places. I don't know if you've ever been there or not, but, um, it's got
01:48:51.420these little mountains that overlook the ocean, you know, it's where Timothy Leary went to. Yeah,
01:48:56.260it's, it's gorgeous. Right. So it's a bunch of artists there. And, um, anyway, he moves there.
01:49:00.500he is uh he's a fanatical surfer um like i've been for most of my life and he actually lived
01:49:07.040not far away from where my apartment was and he's got a um he's living the dream really he's got this
01:49:14.120uh this ridiculously successful business he moves his brother down who he loved to death he's very
01:49:19.680close to his family moves his brother and his bride and and their their two kids down from
01:49:25.220Santa Cruz. And life was going great until it wasn't. So 12 million in the first year on this
01:49:34.540business that Chris dreamed up and then Ed and he formed this partnership. And it seems like a
01:49:39.380partnership made in heaven because Ed's more straight laced and can handle the business
01:49:43.360aspects. And Chris is the dreamer, excuse me, who can handle the creative aspects.
01:49:48.200And they're each kind of doing what they want, though. It must be said, Chris always had one
01:49:53.640foot in the ocean. I mean, he, he was succeeding at business, but I think it's fair to say
01:49:58.800his communications with his family made pretty clear. He was always dreaming of
01:50:02.560doing something else, maybe bartending on a beach someplace.
01:50:06.820Right. So pretty much any hardcore server that you meet, um, has that dream of, um, you know,
01:50:14.040sailing off into the sunset, right? I mean, you've, I'm sure you've known servers. Um,
01:50:18.340I don't know where you're from originally, but I'm from upstate New York, but I have a brother-in-law
01:50:23.000in california so i do i do know some yeah so it's like they all have that they everybody has that
01:50:29.240dream of you know literally sailing off into the sunset with a surfboard under one arm with a
01:50:33.560beautiful woman and um finding a beach someplace where you can you know sort of unplug and go
01:50:38.860surfing and um chris would go to indonesia every year and do these boat charters um which is
01:50:44.340something that i've done for the last probably 25 years i get a group of buddies and you take
01:50:48.800these trips to Indonesia and every one of them, you want to stay a little bit longer because it's
01:50:53.080living in the ocean, eating great food, surfing all day, every day. It really is the dream of
01:50:58.860every surfer. And he talked openly about this to friends and family. He was going to be a
01:51:04.440professional wakeboarder. He was always water oriented, grew up surfing Santa Cruz area.
01:51:12.400And so now, you know, he's living in Laguna, living, he's driving a Range Rover that's paid
01:51:16.720for by the company he was about to propose to his fiancee who was um you know this kid and a lot
01:51:23.340of people think of california you know the the dream of california um less california is uh you
01:51:30.520know it's farmlands and um mountains um but for that tiny little sliver of coastline um pretty
01:51:37.980much from you know santa cruz down to the mexican border there are people that really have this
01:51:43.400idyllic lifestyle. And that was Chris. And he would talk openly about, I can't wait to leave
01:51:48.040the route race and sail off into the sunset. And he told a lot of people about his dream of doing
01:51:52.760that. Another thing the two guys had in common, as I understand it, was faith. They were both men
01:51:58.620of faith. Well, Ed was very, Ed Shen was very into church, like I said, Bible study. And he
01:52:08.020presented. He's got this, you know, this beautiful young wife. He's got these kids. He's going to
01:52:13.920Disneyland a lot. Social media wise, he's posting a bunch of photos about, you know, how devoted he
01:52:21.140was. And in fact, the job that he got in Temecula, the company was called Leadpoint. He met the owner
01:52:29.180of that company in a Bible study. So, you know, this guy meets Ed Shin and was so impressed with
01:52:35.460him and his devotion to religion and Christianity. He decided to give him this very almost outsized
01:52:46.120responsibility in his company. And Ed was doing very well there. And that's really where he learned
01:52:51.400the lead business and where he met Chris. So Chris also had had some religious leanings,
01:52:57.160although I don't think he was as devout as Ed was. But Chris was just Chris was he's just this
01:53:04.020really good he's a good guy you know he loved his family his parents are still together um devoted
01:53:10.720to his brother um just very uh loved his girlfriend i'm sorry i think the brother's paul is that
01:53:18.600paul yeah yeah he's also just a a great guy so you this kind of like um quintessential california
01:53:27.860kid, who's Chris Smith. So what happened before Ed Shin formed the partnership? Because
01:53:34.860as I understand it, he came to the partnership in debt. He owed some money.
01:53:41.240Well, so great question. So nothing actually, or at least they didn't know anything had happened
01:53:48.160before they formed the partnership. But almost right after the ink is dry and they both leave
01:53:53.320their companies. There was what appeared originally to be an accounting irregularity, which I think is
01:53:59.480how I was first put, an accounting irregularity with lead point. And what that turned into is
01:54:05.060the owner got into the books and realized that there was not only a whole bunch of clients that
01:54:11.060went with Ed, you know, and that's a common thing and that sparks more than one dispute out there,
01:54:16.660but there's also a bunch of missing money. And in fact, the money at the more, the closer they
01:54:22.340looked, the more money they found was missing, and it wound up totaling about $700,000. So right
01:54:28.720after Chris essentially attaches himself to Ed, there are these financial problems that started
01:54:34.660arising in Riverside County. So they get in there and, you know, $100,000 turned into $200,000,
01:54:41.760turned into $300,000. Pretty soon, this is a substantial amount of money, enough that it
01:54:45.660attracted the attention of the district attorney's office in Riverside County. There's a criminal
01:54:50.460investigation. And as you can imagine, a whole slew of lawsuits over this missing money. Meanwhile,
01:54:56.220Chris is he's almost learning about this in real time because he worked for a different company
01:55:01.700when he met Ed and he's he signed on for this. He's totally unaware of it. Now, all of a sudden,
01:55:07.480there's lawsuits where as as partner, he's being named as a co-defendant. And this idyllic kind
01:55:13.600of awesome surfer lifestyle suddenly has this huge injection of stress. And he's not sure
01:55:19.400he's not sure you know how much how much of this is going to drag him down how much his company is
01:55:26.040liable for it now and remember all this money and he's his his brother has moved down he's invested
01:55:31.300in the future bringing his family down so chris decides he wants to protect his interests and
01:55:36.960essentially what their arrangement was chris was the creative guy so he would work he'd surf in
01:55:41.580the mornings and then he'd work late into the night doing these the creative end of these
01:55:45.880advertising campaigns. Ed was the business guy. So Ed actually owned 55% of business and Chris
01:55:52.960trusted him. So it was like, hey, you handle the books, you handle the business side. I'll do all
01:55:57.540the campaigns together. We'll combine our talents. We'll make money for ourselves and study these
01:56:02.700other companies. That was the idea. So now Chris has no access to the books and he's concerned
01:56:09.460that this is going to drag him down. He's worried about his reputation. He's worried about all
01:56:15.320kinds of like the professional implications of this. But then he, the criminal case progresses
01:56:21.860to a point that Ed Shin actually pleads guilty to embezzle him. And he's ordered by a superior
01:56:28.380court judge in Riverside County to pay back $700,000. And he's given five months to do it,
01:56:35.300okay, which is unusual. And he's allowed to do some custody time on weekends, but he's essentially
01:56:40.720allowed to remain free so that he can operate his business. But there's a sentence hanging
01:56:48.500over his head of 16 months in state prison. So he's going to do what that means in California,
01:56:53.820depending on our crazy legislature, you're going to do at least 50% of that time. And depending
01:57:00.360on the way it's charged, up to 80%. So he's looking at at least eight months actual prison
01:57:06.100time if he does not make good on this restitution order. So there's this big, gigantic axe hanging
01:57:13.260over Ed's head. And Chris knows about this. And he's, you know, the nightmares are, all the
01:57:19.800lawsuits are a nightmare for him. And then he's worried that to come up with this money, and Ed
01:57:24.680should have plenty of money because Ed is also controlling the accounts. But Chris starts to
01:57:29.680worry that maybe he's going to, you know, he doesn't want any of his money to go to pay Ed's
01:57:35.100debt, right? So he hires a lawyer named Ernesto Aldivar, really, really good guy who specializes
01:57:40.540in business disputes. And they start negotiating his ability to look at the books and to have more
01:57:45.600control over the money. And he wants to co-sign checks and things like that. And so this goes on
01:57:51.300and on for a few months as they're negotiating this. And all of a sudden, Ernesto gets an email
01:57:59.580from chris saying june 4th 2010 friday june 4th 2010 right uh at i think it's 6 10 in the evening
01:58:09.080um he gets this uh this email saying i've decided to let ed buy me out of the company
01:58:13.600and essentially begins um this uh you know telling friends and family everybody starts getting these
01:58:20.780emails saying hey i've decided that i'm gonna i'm gonna live my dream i've been talking about
01:58:24.640it for years i'm sailing off into this sunset i met a woman in las vegas named tiffany taylor
01:58:28.980And I've decided to sail to the Galapagos Islands with Tiffany Taylor. And yeah, that's when I became involved pretty soon after that, which is also kind of interesting.
01:58:40.620Which is a total head snap moment because everyone thought he was in love and even engaged or close to engaged to another woman. And he wasn't, from what his parents said, the kind of guy who was like, yeah, hot playboy, babe. He wasn't that kind of guy.
01:58:58.980Right. Right. So Ed was Ed was really Ed loved Las Vegas. They do a lot of business junkets for their company out there. Chris was not into the flash. And we actually had a woman that worked for the company named Jennifer Matthews, who when she testified about Chris and she just described Chris, she said that he was when they do these business junkets in Vegas, Chris would go back to his room and go to sleep.
01:59:23.460And Ed would be up until, you know, two and three in the morning doing the Vegas thing, which I'll get into in a bit, I guess.
01:59:30.380But, yeah, this was a head snap moment because he loved his soon-to-be fiance.
02:05:18.320And so the dad starts getting suspicious.
02:05:24.140Then the dad sends an email trying to check, you know, I mean, think about it.
02:05:30.620If you wanted to make sure this person was really your family member, there are definitely
02:05:34.540questions we could all think of that only that family member would know, you know, something
02:05:39.240from deep in the childhood, something specific. And so the dad, the dad, did he have a background
02:05:45.520in law enforcement? Cause he, I guess he thought up this, this idea. He did. So I don't know if
02:05:51.220you're aware of the rivalry between firemen and police officers. I don't know if you're aware of
02:05:54.900that. They're always making jokes by each other. Anyway, he started out as a police officer and
02:05:58.840then he decided he wanted to be a fireman, which is a betrayal to all police officers. But, um,
02:06:03.520But, you know, he did. He had a background in law enforcement. And he essentially, he started getting more and more suspicious. And there's a couple of things going on here. I think that, you know, this went on for almost a year where these emails are coming into the family.
02:06:21.340And a lot of people think, you know, how could somebody believe that?
02:06:27.040But, you know, when you when you have somebody that you love dearly and you're getting these emails that at least demonstrates that they're still alive, the the alternative is almost too brutal to think about.
02:06:39.420So you you a mother's wish for her son to still be alive is going to it's going to get her past a lot of red flags, I think, if that makes sense.
02:06:48.260So the dad, however, he starts sending he starts asking questions and they're almost quizzes.
02:06:56.060And it was what what lake did you grow up water skiing on was one of the was one of the questions.
02:07:01.900And what was the name of our boat? And the response was, Dad, it was Kelly Lake.
02:07:07.780Chill out. I'm fine. That was essentially the response.
02:07:11.240But he doesn't answer what kind of boat it was, which was which was actually one of being very significant.
02:07:16.620So the dad decides he's going to come down to to Orange County and he comes down and he meets with Ed Shin.
02:07:24.380And Ed was one of the last people to see him, to see Chris.
02:07:29.320So he, you know, Ed sits down with the dad and Ed is he's calm and he's smooth.
02:07:36.440And he explains, look, we have this ongoing business dispute.
02:07:58.820And then he says, you know, but essentially you should be aware that I was also with him when he got a fake passport because he wanted to go off the grid.
02:08:09.480Okay, so he provides all this information to Steve Smith, who's completely hinked up. It doesn't make sense. But then it's almost reassuring to talk to Ed because he's so convincing, and he's so smooth, and he's so nonplussed by the whole thing.
02:08:25.840And so, yeah. So he. But that's the question. Why would he need a fake passport? He's not under criminal indictment. He's not being investigated. Why wouldn't he just be traveling under his own real passport?
02:08:39.840right so then we and the answer to that really is of course you're right but risk was one of
02:08:47.620those guys that part of his dream was like i want to unplug from the rat race i want to completely
02:08:52.380distance myself from society i want to go someplace and just completely you know check out for a while
02:08:58.920so so yes you're right if you or i take a trip like this i mean i go to indonesia every year i
02:09:04.480use my own passport. But for him, it almost made sense. You know, it was, you know, he had talked
02:09:13.320about, you know, Chris talked about his concern about, you know, hey, what if the monetary system
02:09:18.840collapses? That was one of the things that he kind of talked about. He was a rational guy,
02:09:23.660but he, you know, this is part of his, you know, his sort of fantasy of leaving. And so when he
02:09:29.380heard fake passport, it struck him as being very odd, but it wasn't 100% unbelievable,
02:09:43.220Eventually, the landlord, right, of the facility in which Chris and Ed Shin ran their business
02:09:53.540gets involved because they're overdue on rent. They've moved out, like Ed Shin pulled the
02:10:01.120business and relocated it, but he's in arrears on his old rent, which is irritating to that
02:10:07.220landlord, which is also another pivotal moment here. Right. So he, they basically skipped out.
02:10:14.400So they they they've got a year lease and he, you know, nine months later, soon after Chris left for this trip, supposedly, he had packed up the business and moved to a different location and stiffed the landlord for many months rent.
02:10:31.440So the landlord actually one of the other tenants is a private investigator named Joe DeLue, who's a former officer at Laguna Beach Police, and he makes his living as a as a PI.
02:10:42.320guy so he the landlord is essentially complaining to him one day about this tenant and he's got this
02:10:48.920big empty office space and doesn't know where the guy is and would joe be willing to help track him
02:10:54.300down and joe of course you know was was happy to do it and he starts poking around and he went and
02:11:02.800one of the first things he did is he went he talked to the dad and he got these emails between
02:11:07.440between him and Chris. And he looked at the question about the about the boat and the lake
02:11:15.080and that he saw the answer that it was just that he just answered with the lake. And that struck
02:11:21.700him as being very odd. So he decided to actually go in and ask for permission to enter the business.
02:11:27.560And it's been abandoned. OK, so there's there's no reasonable expectation of privacy. If you rent
02:11:33.140if you rent a business from somebody or you rent a home and you abandon it, the landlord
02:11:39.600has a right to go back inside. So Joe DeLue walks in and very soon after making entry,
02:11:47.040he sees what appears to be blood on a light switch. And he realizes that that's something
02:11:53.080that he doesn't want to mess around. So he backs out and calls the sheriff's department.
02:11:57.400Now, meanwhile, what has happened is I've got my jurisdiction covered Laguna Beach.
02:12:01.960The family had filed a missing persons report with with Laguna and they brought Ed in.
02:12:10.000And this thing is on video, Megan. And I'm telling you, I was a D.A. for 26 years.
02:12:15.600You see this interview. It is it is fascinating because Ed Shin is so convincing.
02:12:21.380And these two detectives sit down and they're like, hey, family is trying to find their their son.
02:12:27.460what's the deal and he he is almost perfect he is calm he is like he doesn't break a sweat
02:12:33.860he describes how that you know chris was always talking about this around the world trip
02:12:37.740and he's sitting on a beach someplace and about halfway through the interview i'll leave the
02:12:42.360names of the detectives out um you can just see they relax and they they buy it they believe him
02:12:48.720and um you know it becomes uh you know it's sort of a that was kind of the end right i taught a
02:12:56.380class at the um sheriff's academy for young detectives and right about the same time i
02:13:02.520finish finish a class i'm walking out to the parking lot and i almost get tackled by this
02:13:07.340very young detective from laguna beach named julia bowman who says you know i i really want
02:13:13.920to talk to you about this um i'm going to get in trouble if my my boss finds out that i've
02:13:18.900cornered you but there's there's something that's all wrong here and this makes no sense and i've
02:13:25.120looked into it and they believe him and I don't. And we, and I wound up, I actually got sunburned
02:13:30.900and like you, I'm, I'm Irish, right? I think Irish background for you. So, you know,
02:13:35.440oh my God. So she corners me next to my car and I went up talking to her for about 45 minutes and
02:13:42.160I got the worst sunburn because it was so compelling. And, and this is my, this is my
02:13:48.500patch. This is my jurisdiction. And this is, that was my job to try to help police figure this out.
02:13:53.480But Laguna officially hadn't come to me with an issue. So I've got this junior detective putting this on my radar. And I start I started looking into it. And I find out right at right about the same time. So San Juan Capistrano is where the business was. So Joe DeLue has just gone in. That was my colleague, Brahim Betai, had that section. So I sit down with Brahim. We have a meeting with Laguna and the sheriff's department.
02:14:18.060Laguna has almost no murders, but the sheriffs are one of the most, Orange County sheriffs
02:14:22.760are one of the most professional homicide investigative groups in the country.
02:14:55.600almost everything was at the Wynn or the Encore.
02:14:57.940So two of the nicest hotels in Las Vegas
02:15:00.140and that's where they would do these business junkets.
02:15:02.860And there's a world known as atmosphere modeling
02:15:06.720and I'm not sure if you're familiar with that.
02:15:08.840There's a great episode in the show, Silicon Valley.
02:15:13.760I think it's either the first or the second episode where they encounter, they go to a toga party that's thrown by this billionaire, this like tech billionaire, and they encounter atmosphere models.
02:15:25.400And basically what it is, is it is you can hire beautiful women to come to your party and talk to all the guys that are socially awkward that you want to have invest or whatever.
02:15:36.060And you can they can, you know, make a company look super bitching and awesome and and all that.
02:15:41.620And and they Paul looks over and they've got they've got atmosphere models.
02:15:47.860And there across the room at the business junket for one eight hundred exchange is Tiffany Taylor.
02:15:54.940And he makes a beeline for her. And he's like, hey, aren't you supposed to be traveling the world with my brother?
02:16:01.440And she looks at him and says, I'm really sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about.
02:16:06.060And that's when the bottom fell out for Paul Smith and also for the family because he knows at that point.
02:16:11.920Meanwhile, Ed is going, no, no, no, dude, it's a different Tiffany Taylor.
02:16:14.540And he's going, this is the woman in the photo that I got from my brother.
02:16:19.600And she is, you know, her real name is not Tiffany Taylor.
02:19:27.700So when we get back with Ernesto Aldivar, the attorney, it became pretty clear that
02:19:34.200The pressure that Chris was putting on Ed created a huge financial motive here because, you know, they're not – they have – you know, Ed's married.
02:20:31.060You know, they talk about a whale and they're, you know, they have that that scene where they want to get him back into the casino to, you know, to to go lose his money at the tables.
02:20:41.920And it was he was gambling Chris's money.
02:20:45.260And as soon as he opens up the books, he knows that Chris is going to Chris is going to bring some sort of court order so that Ed, you know, his accounts are frozen and he's going to go to state prison.
02:21:31.700Like if my husband ever said to me, the Encore Hotel is going to fly us out there on their private jet and we're staying in the presidential suite because of what happened the last time I was there, I'd demand a forensic accounting of every account we have.
02:31:14.260so i've done five no body murders okay i did the hawks case um at a newport the couple that got
02:31:22.060tied to the anchor and thrown overboard did a case called judy blot that nobody's ever heard of
02:31:26.280um and you know when you first start out as a prosecutor you think that you don't know how
02:31:31.400jury's going to react to that and um and when you do a few of them you realize that there there can
02:31:38.680be certain advantages if you don't find the body and one of them is if you have to prove the death
02:31:43.860Normally, you just have the death of a human being is the element.
02:31:47.260So if you have a dead body, that element is satisfied.
02:31:49.600But if you have the ethical and burden of proof obligation to prove that somebody is dead, the way you do that is you put their mom on the stand or their best friend or somebody that tells you how much they love their dog or the grandma who said you'd never miss Christmas.
02:32:10.960You know, and what you're able to do as a prosecutor is the jury will be able to get a sense of who the person was as a human being.
02:32:19.560And my old mentor in homicide, his name is Lou Rosenblum.
02:32:23.320He basically brought me into the unit.
02:32:25.160He's one of the I know you've had mentors over the course of your career.
02:32:28.820I love this man. And he took me in his wing and taught me how to do murders.
02:32:32.360And he had a quote I will never forget about nobodies.
02:32:34.720He said, the jury can always see the soul of your victim reflected in the eyes of those
02:32:42.180So, and that's one that always stuck with me.
02:32:44.540So I don't want to put Ed's BS self-serving story on to prove that Chris Smith is dead.
02:32:53.220I want to be able to prove it other ways.
02:32:55.760And with all of the emails with the Galapagos, the easiest way for me to do that would be
02:33:00.300to call Tiffany Taylor, right? And just have her come in with her passport and say, I've never been
02:33:06.040to the Galapagos Islands. And, but we couldn't find her. And we, I had Vegas Metro going out
02:33:13.880there. We could not track her down. And I don't know if that's because she's, if she's moved and
02:33:19.700she's, she's an atmosphere model, right? Which is weird by itself, right? But it's a legitimate
02:33:24.800business. It's basically your, your live model. And I don't know if she's, I don't know what
02:33:30.020her involvement is in Vegas. I don't know any of this stuff. Like all I know is I need her
02:33:35.200in order to do the no body prosecution. And, um, I'd given up and, uh, I, the case was actually
02:33:43.480going to be pretty difficult the way we had it. And especially given that he told all his friends
02:33:48.000and family about this round the world trip. And, um, and I get a phone call in my office
02:33:53.020And it was Summer Hansen crying, saying, you know, I just found out you guys have been looking for me.
02:34:00.840I've been in Virginia with my parents. I am so sorry. What can I do to help?
02:34:05.060And she she flew in and I was able to put her on the stand with her passport.
02:34:09.340So that's what forced Ed to testify. If Ed, if I hadn't been able to do that, Ed Shin could have relied on his bullshit self-serving interview with with Don and Ray,
02:34:19.840where he came up this cockamamie absurd story um and why how did she disprove the cockamamie
02:34:27.840story just that it showed you you could establish that ed shin was the one sending those emails
02:34:32.040and why would he tell such a lie like how how did how was she the clincher she was the clincher
02:34:37.920because i could prove that chris smith never left the united states because she supposedly went to
02:34:42.340the galapagos islands which means she would have had an entry into her passport because there was
02:34:46.780all the stuff that's if you had that photo of her was that yes stop one that was stop one okay yeah
02:34:53.040i see it right so by her saying i never went it means chris never went which means the emails
02:34:58.460were all fake and we were able to the ip address my expert on that wasn't my favorite i'll leave
02:35:03.580his name out of it but he basically said that the the text messages came that the ip address was
02:35:09.160um from north america so that still leaves a lot of wiggle room for defense so basically
02:35:14.760i wanted to do this as a nobody and i needed her to do it and she stepped up and um i've actually
02:35:21.020kept in touch with her over the years i was so grateful for the way she she she handled that
02:35:25.860um because she wasn't under subpoena she came in voluntarily yeah i just got the playboy model
02:35:30.660with a heart of gold i like that i like that you know what story and and it's and i'm telling you
02:35:36.000i've never i've never asked her um you know how much the seedy vegas underbelly she she saw but
02:35:43.200But but, yeah, she stepped him a huge way.
02:36:40.280No, thank you. As a prosecutor, that's what you want. You want the bad guy on the stand. And if every trial kind of has a moment, you know, where you can point to it and it's like a turning point. That was the turning point of that trial. And his direct, by the way, I mean, this is the thing about the fraudsters, Megan, and I know you've probably encountered this before, when you got a guy who makes his living by fooling people, right?
02:37:06.700But they tend to be really good at that.
02:37:12.400And his mom was sitting right behind me in the front row in the gallery.
02:37:17.260And the jury, we had to have her testify because, again, we got to do it as a nobody because of Summer Hansen.
02:37:24.060And so there, you know, he's on the stand and he gave me that gem.
02:37:27.600And you almost never know exactly what's going to happen when they hit the stand.
02:37:30.880But that was when it's like, wait a minute, dude, you're crying.
02:37:35.200You're trying to show emotion. And you sent a year's worth of emails. You broke up with his soon to be fiance by saying, I don't love you anymore.
02:37:43.440Like one of the most ruthless, heartless, freaking psycho things I saw in 26 years. And there he was on the stand.
02:37:52.480But that's the difference between you. I mean, there are a lot of prosecutors who have a script for their cross, and that's the script that's going to be delivered and they're not going to deviate.
02:38:00.880But to your credit, you were nimble. You saw him try to engender sympathy for him.
02:38:06.620It was so hard for me. And you stuffed it down his craw.
02:38:10.420It's like you were leading this poor mom to believe her son was about to kill himself because of the kind of parent she was.
02:38:16.520Where were your tears then? That is just perfectly done.
02:38:20.040That had to be a good night for you when you went home that evening.
02:38:22.320Thank you. No, that's that's it's the fundamentals of every good cross-examination that you'll hear from any real trial lawyer is you can prepare.
02:38:30.480I mean, I prepared that cross for years and you have to be prepared to, I think the journalism
02:42:37.000And look, as a DA, my plan was I was going to do this for like three years, learn how to try cases and then go make money in some civil firm someplace.
02:42:46.520And the longer you remain a DA, the more interesting it gets.
02:42:51.280And then pretty soon you're doing the serious stuff and then you're doing felonies and you get your own investigator.
02:42:56.040And then, you know, for me, I was 34 years old and I'm doing murder cases and I'm walking through murder scenes.
02:43:01.480And what becomes really addictive for you as a prosecutor, if you're if your career and you're dedicated to it, is you get families like the Smiths.
02:43:12.980And Paul came to me after the verdict. And I will never forget the sensation that his wife was lovely.
02:43:19.200He had such a nice family. And this is a really good guy who loved his brother.
02:43:23.560And imagine how wronged, you know, a person is.
02:43:27.700I mean, death of somebody we love is the worst thing that we can ever experience, right?
02:43:32.260Death because of murder is the worst of the worst.
02:43:35.180But truly, I think the darkest thing we can experience as human beings is if you have somebody you love dearly and they're killed so somebody else can get money and that person gets away with it, it's about as bad as it gets.
02:43:49.680As a DA, especially for moms like Debbie Smith or brothers like Paul, it becomes kind of an addiction.
02:43:58.820And when, you know, when you go through those dark moments of trial and you're not sure of the issues and doubt, Paul came up to me crying right after the verdict.
02:44:16.240And it's it's an incredibly gratifying thing. And like it was for good cops like like Ray and and Don.
02:44:25.980And, you know, we got a really good judge. That's that case was what keeps you doing it because it's a dark, dark profession, as you alluded to.
02:44:35.700I mean, it's you're on the toughest of cases. You see awful things. It's your job to make sure this person who's dangerous doesn't get returned to society. So the stakes could not be higher. This is why most do get in and get out. They can't make a whole career out of it. It's just an enormously stressful way to make a living.
02:44:56.140it is but it is more so than the stress you're absolutely right 100 right um but what is uh
02:45:04.740it's more gratifying than it is um that it is stressful believe it or not for moments like that
02:45:09.900you you kind of i tried 52 murders or 52 cases while i was in the homicide unit um and every
02:45:17.120one of those uh there's a there's a mom you know or or somebody loved every one of those victims
02:45:22.620And you, you know, especially on the hard ones, on the cold cases where you reach back in time where they effectively got away with it until you come in with a new team and dust off the boxes.
02:45:34.420And most people can't understand how important that is to a family member unless, God forbid, you know, you experience it yourself.
02:45:42.060It is holding the person accountable is becomes, for a lot of them, it becomes the center of their entire life.
02:45:49.420And as a prosecutor, you're becoming very important.
02:45:51.720It's the one last thing you can do for your loved one, the one last thing.
02:45:54.660And ideally provide them with some sort of a proper burial, which is why you were pressing him and he did not give up the location of the body.
02:46:04.520And then Camo, my old colleague over at NBC News, went to the jail and interviewed Ed Shin and gave it his best shot.
02:46:14.960I mean, it's very rare to see Keith Morrison fired up.
02:46:18.800This is about as close as you're going to get.
02:46:20.680He was clearly frustrated with this guy who, even once he's in jail for the rest of his life, won't give it up.
02:47:36.060Well, I think that one of the reasons why, and this is something that I hit him up with on the stand,
02:47:40.400it's like, dude, if he hit his head against the desk, there will be a forensic record of that.
02:47:45.760There will be one one skull fracture. And if the body is found, I've always believed he bludgeoned him to death.
02:47:55.160There was a member. There was a bat, a baseball bat. We didn't actually put this in evidence, but there was, you know, he's a sports memorabilia collector.
02:48:02.680And there was one that he used to have in his office that I don't think was ever located.
02:48:05.860I mean, it was like a year later by the time it was searched.
02:48:08.700But if he hit him in the head 10 times to kill him, then there will be – if the body is found, it will reflect that.
02:48:19.800There will be multiple skull fractures inconsistent with him just falling and hitting the desk.
02:48:28.660It was life without possibility of parole.
02:48:30.160So if you get that, what does it matter if it turns out now we can prove that your story is BS? Already the jury has said it was.
02:48:38.740Right, because in the state of California, our legislature does something crazy just about every week on behalf, essentially, of homicide defendants or people serving life sentences.
02:48:53.020They've been after the death penalty for years, but they've openly said that LWAP is next.
02:48:58.960That's life without possibility of parole.
02:49:02.020And I think that he sees it as being into his legal advantage, not to cough it up.
02:49:08.420And because, you know, maybe someone down the line will go, hey, look, it's possible that he hit his head.
02:49:14.120Like you see some crazy stuff in the appellate process in California.
02:49:18.360You know, most of the appellate justices are fine judges, but, you know, with the legislature, you just, there's such an ideological bent to a lot of the things that they're doing that a lot of really bad guys like Ed Shin, you know, the California legislature is kind of their, it's their best hope that they're going to do something that benefits them.
02:49:40.280I mean, in California, unfortunately, we see that all the time these days.
02:49:43.800We have a very activist group of people that have been elected, and they have some ideas about crime and punishment that, in my view, it's just – it's madness.
02:57:40.820Yeah. I was talking to Mark Garagos on the program not long ago. And, you know, he said this about virtually everybody we talked about who he had represented. You know, he's like, I knew him and I can get a sense for whether somebody is capable of this. And I just don't think he was. He wasn't that guy. Now, he also said the same thing about Jussie Smollett, which I don't believe either one. You know, it's sometimes we see what we want to see. But it sounds like you're not disputing that if you just met Scott Peterson on the street, you wouldn't have a creepy vibe. You wouldn't think, oh, something wrong with him.
02:58:11.560Well, no, I don't think he would. And that's the reason that, you know, he would be successful when it comes to, you know, committing a crime like this, because his suspicion level really wouldn't be there.
02:58:20.840It's a situation where you don't, he just doesn't look like a killer, which is a thing that made him in this case so dangerous, because Lacey had no idea that this was coming.
02:58:30.840But he, over the years, you know, you meet a lot of these guys, and there was, I gotta tell you, Megan, there were a lot of guys I met that committed murder, and the murder aside, I kind of liked them.
02:58:39.860And it's really the same thing with Scott.
02:58:41.640He was difficult not to like because he's so charming.
02:58:50.820But to our face, he was always easy to deal with.
02:58:53.500But at the same time, that was a picture for us that painted something different than maybe he expected.
02:59:00.540When we deal with people that are accused of this or we're focusing on them, usually we'll see a little bit of frustration on their part as things go by.
02:59:07.360He didn't have that the entire time we dealt with him.
02:59:09.740And he was always cooperative to a point.
02:59:12.480And then, of course, he would always draw the line in his cooperation because he'd only go so far.
02:59:16.580He'd pull out that attorney card and he'd say, well, I'm going to talk to my attorney about that.
02:59:25.940And whenever she got him on something where he tripped up a bit, you know, like, what do you mean you told Lacey that you were cheating on her and then you continued the affair?
03:00:01.840And again, when dealing with him, he had an enormous amount of emotional control, and that kind of fit in with our departmental psychologist, Phil Trumpeter.
03:00:11.000He told us that this is the fit of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder.
03:00:16.600He wouldn't go so far as to call him a sociopath or a psychopath.
03:00:19.440I mean, you can label your wand on anybody, but in this case, he was just a little bit different than us.
03:00:25.600But if you I don't know if you remember, there was one segment in one of the local reporters from Sacramento where she was asking him questions and this phone was ringing in the background.
03:00:35.260It was back in the kitchen. And the thing that really strikes a lot of people that, you know, we hadn't found Lacey at that time.
03:00:42.120And he tried to continue with the interview and then he goes, hey, you want me to turn that off?
03:00:45.700And he goes back, he finds a phone, he turns it off. Well, that could have been Brokini or me or Grogan calling him and saying, hey, we got Lacey down here at Bakersfield.
03:00:52.360him. But, you know, nothing like that. He didn't want to take the call. He just wanted to continue
03:00:55.140with the interview. So, you know, where's the concern? Where's the urgency on his part? It just
03:00:59.380was absent, at least at that moment. Yeah. And we'll get to what his half-sister said about him
03:01:04.840because she spent a fair amount of time with him, I guess, during those weeks that we were looking
03:01:08.720for Lacey. And she did not walk away with a favorable view of her half-brother, who she
03:01:14.040wrote a whole book about. Okay. So there they are. They're living sort of, they call them an
03:01:18.200all-American couple. You know, she's got the thousand-watt smile. He's obviously a very good
03:01:22.500looking guy. They get pregnant with their first baby after five years of marriage. They've got
03:01:27.460the golden retriever, Mackenzie. She's nearby her mom, who's adoring. And everything's, you know,
03:01:35.060coming up roses, or so it would seem. And then December 24th, we think, well, at least December
03:01:40.78024th is when she was called in as missing. He says he went to fish in the local marina with a 14-foot
03:01:51.960fishing boat he only recently bought that Lacey had never stepped foot in because that's just what
03:01:57.240he does for entertainment. He says some guys would go golfing. I like to fish, so I went fishing.
03:02:01.620And Lacey was going to get together a couple of food items to share with her family later.
03:02:07.040He says he left the house at 930 that morning for his fishing trip.
03:02:12.680And what time does he say he returned home to find No Lacey?
03:02:20.000I'm trying to remember exactly like 330 or 4 or something like that.
03:02:23.460But if you recall, his original claim that he had told everybody is he was going to be golfing that day.
03:02:29.840And he told us, of course, that he changed.
03:02:32.040Yeah, he changed his plan to go golfing because it was too cold to golf.
03:02:35.980but it wasn't too cold to go out in san francisco bay which is certainly not the tropics i can tell
03:02:40.800you that so it you know that a lot of little things and this is the point for us is you know
03:02:46.840a premeditated murder is not going to have a witness and it's not going to have a videotape
03:02:51.920you know the luxuries the things that we all want and of course with scott you're never going to get
03:02:55.220a confession so you have to build that case by eliminating suspects from suspicion by proving
03:03:01.440out their alibi and showing that they had no reason to do the killing. But in Scott's case,
03:03:06.540although everybody else we dealt with in this case was pretty easy to clear, we couldn't clear
03:03:11.040him. We would always be conditional about that. So when he decides he's going to change his plans
03:03:16.060at the last minute and go fishing instead of golfing because it's too cold to golf, that's
03:03:20.100a red flag for us. Maybe not bright red, but it's certainly a red flag. And then he couldn't remember
03:03:24.880what kind of bait he used. That's weird. Yeah, there was, I think he was more of a
03:03:31.080freshwater fisherman than a saltwater fisherman. And so he wasn't sure what lures he had. And I
03:03:36.000think Al Brocchini mentioned that the tackle that he did have in this boat was all freshwater
03:03:40.940tackle that you would use up in one of the lakes in the Sierras or the foothills,
03:03:44.700not something that you would use in San Francisco Bay if you were going for like sturgeon or striper
03:03:49.440or something like that. So, you know, the fishing trip really wasn't much of a fishing trip.
03:03:54.040It was more of a trip. So that, yeah, I met you mentioned earlier that Lacey had never set foot in that boat. Well, she had never set foot in that boat alive. She certainly was in the boat after he killed him.
03:04:05.100Right. So he on the way home from the marina leaves what you guys, you and your partner believe, because you're you and I'm sorry, I forget the man you just mentioned was your partner. You were the main two detectives on the case.
03:04:19.220Well, actually, there were three of us.
03:04:20.680There were Craig Grogan and then Al Brocchini and I.
03:04:22.860Now, Al started the case on Christmas Eve when he was notified about the missing.
03:04:27.420And he knew that I always liked overtime, but he also knew I had my kids with me on Christmas Eve.
03:04:32.620So he called me on Christmas Day as I was taking them over to their mom's house.
03:04:36.360And, of course, I was all too happy to jump on some Christmas Day overtime because I didn't have everything going that day anyway.
03:04:42.880But, yeah, Al Brocchini, when he first started talking to him, he started gathering a lot of evidence from the beginning.
03:04:50.600And there goes your next three years completely devoted to this case.
03:04:54.860So when Scott Peterson was on the way home from the marina, he left what appears to be to, you know, I've said to my audience, I believe Scott did this.
03:05:03.040So I am on your side, though, open minded and like bring it on.
03:05:06.320If you've got evidence to prove that he didn't do it, let's see it.
03:05:08.860what appears to be sort of a cover your rear end voicemail to his wife, Lacey.
03:05:37.820That was one of the first things that Brocchini did when I met with him on Christmas Day is I met him at the office and he played that tape for me.
03:05:44.460And, of course, the first thing I said, how long have these guys been married?
03:05:59.600But, I mean, you know this stuff and your viewers know this stuff.
03:06:02.700How do we start a murder investigation?
03:06:04.280We start at the victim and we work outward.
03:06:05.940and who's the first one you check when you've got a you know deceased girl well you're going to look
03:06:10.900at her boyfriend or her husband and especially when you've got a pregnant girl that goes dead
03:06:15.900or goes missing and i think they had that 2001 study where murder was the vast majority by an
03:06:22.220overwhelming margin of the cause of death for pregnant girls and so oh yeah it's just i thought
03:06:29.220you saw that you probably did you said you got too much going around in your head so you forgot
03:06:32.360about it. Or I chose to ignore it because it's disturbing. It's very disturbing. And so,
03:06:38.280you know, but like, again, you go back to Scott and it's easier to work a case when you don't
03:06:44.080despise the guy that you think did, you know, when he's polite to you and he's not saying
03:06:48.180anything bad about your mother or anything like that. And so you just kind of follow the evidence
03:06:52.200and like, this is another strike and strike against him. So when Al played that tape for
03:06:58.180me, I just thought, this just doesn't sound quite right. But I've had other guys like this before
03:07:02.820that I've dealt with where it didn't seem right. I remember one in particular, he had no reaction
03:07:08.620whatsoever to his wife and daughter being missing. And I thought, gosh, this is kind of freaky.
03:07:13.440And but we were able to clear him right away, not only through a polygraph, but we also verified
03:07:17.660his alibi. And he was just a cold fish guy. He just, well, that's, that's a good emotion.
03:07:22.560That's something that we should keep in mind as we go through this case over the next two hours,
03:07:26.360is could he just be that person you know that sort of oddball whose affect is different from
03:07:32.740what we're used to and maybe he's not a cold-blooded killer maybe he's just got a weird
03:07:37.780affect um so i'm i have space in my head for that possibility but there's a lot of evidence against
03:07:44.880scott peterson beyond his affect can i ask you this one of the things that seems so weird about
03:07:50.600the case was, who kills their wife on Christmas Eve? You know, it's like, if you want to kill
03:07:56.320your wife, your pregnant wife, like, wouldn't you choose a quieter date? Like, how cruel,
03:08:03.120how sadistic, like extra sadistic beyond killing a pregnant mother of your child?
03:08:10.520Well, you know, that's kind of an interesting, you know, question to ask. But the thing is,
03:08:16.060is whether you're killing your wife on the 4th of July, or you're killing her on Christmas Eve,
03:08:20.360I mean, it's still pretty, pretty nasty stuff, you know, to do that.
03:08:23.920So I think in a situation like this, you can't really apply the common sense things that we operate on our day to day basis and try to put those on somebody who does something like this, because you're going to be disappointed every time because we don't do those things.
03:08:39.300And so to try and make sense of things that don't make sense, gosh, it's just, you know, you're going to be battling frustration the whole time you're batting that around in your head.
03:08:49.620So you guys get involved in the case. And one of the first things you ask Scott Peterson is, would you take a polygraph for us? Right. Is that standard procedure? And do you usually receive a yes in response to that?
03:09:02.060well yeah the polygraph I love the polygraph because it does a variety of different things
03:09:08.420okay now of course it's not admissible in court well I don't care about that because I'm not
03:09:12.840using it to go into court with it but the the first thing you do is what's the person's
03:09:17.420cooperation level when you say the word polygraph you know do they run like a scalded cat away from
03:09:22.180you or do they say oh absolutely I'll take it you know and somebody who who wants the focus to be
03:09:27.580on Lacey and wants us to be trying to turn over every rock and log and look under every car and
03:09:33.380blanket that might be in a park or something like that to try and find her take the poly take the
03:09:38.300focus off of you and let us move on so we're not spending time trying to clear you but when he
03:09:42.620originally he said yes to the poly on Christmas Eve when Brock asked him and then on Christmas
03:09:48.140day when we were getting ready to do it because when when Al called me Al Brochini called me
03:09:53.660and we went down there and we started to the office and started talking and then we went over
03:09:57.800to Scott's house and that's when I first met him pleasant nonchalant you know he greeted us you
03:10:03.880know and it's like he just didn't have any concern I mean he walked away he had something else that
03:10:08.800he had to attend to and I just kind of thought well gosh how come you're not asking me 90 questions
03:10:13.920why aren't you you know asking me what are we going to do next are you going to get helicopters
03:10:17.440up you know you're going to get a boat patrol I mean whatever he wants to come up with he didn't
03:10:21.160have anywhere near the same emotional urgency that Sharon had or any of Lacey's friends or
03:10:27.400family. And so when we got done meeting with him and chatting with him, then the first thing that
03:10:32.440I did after that is my neighbor two doors over was the senior polygraph examiner for California
03:10:38.900Department of Justice, Doug Mansfield. And so I called him and he usually gets calls from me
03:10:44.960because I like doing the polygraph. It was a pretty good tool. And I, you know, of course,
03:10:49.220I hate to call him on Christmas Day, but he's always good for things like this.
03:10:53.560So he came down and with the intention of, you know, putting Scott on the box.
03:10:57.940And then between the time that Al had asked him the night before, if he'd take the polygraph.
03:11:02.920And then that afternoon, when Doug came down to get him hooked up, he apparently had talked to his father and Lee had told him, no, don't take it.
03:11:10.040Now, I'm not sure what Lee's reasons for that is, but, you know, Lee's a successful businessman from San Diego.
03:11:15.300Great. But, you know, that's maybe not the best advice to give your son, not to take the poly when the detectives are trying to clear him so we can start going towards, you know, better suspects than your son.
03:11:25.320But it is what it is. He did what he did. And I get it.
03:11:29.040I get it, too. What this is December at this point, 25th, 2002.
03:11:35.580It was too cold for him to golf. So he went out on the cold water.
03:11:40.060Was the swimming pool at the at the Peterson house still open?
03:11:45.300oh gosh no you wouldn't be swimming this time of year so do you remember was it closed up
03:11:50.440well i mean there was water in the pool but you know it's way too cold in northern california
03:11:57.180to go swim at that time of year so yeah he wouldn't have been swimming in there and obviously
03:12:01.280we checked the pool no lacy in there you know we you know checked all over the house well the reason
03:12:05.880i ask is because his his half sister i guess he had a half sister was given up for adoption and
03:12:10.480And then she came back to the family and she got to know Scott and their mother, Jackie, well, and another sibling, I think.
03:12:17.020And she would write in the book that she would ultimately publish something like 33 Reasons Why He's Guilty.
03:12:25.440She had a feeling that he was obsessed with his swimming pool at his house and that the way he would go back and take care of it and clean it and so on.
03:12:34.660Her own theory was he drowned her in that swimming pool.
03:12:38.300gosh i'd never heard that i didn't read her book um it's an interesting take i i kind of don't
03:12:44.900agree with that because he would have had the i mean they both would have been soaking wet and it
03:12:48.820would have been a gosh that would have been a violent fight to try and you know drown her in
03:12:53.900the pool there would have been splashing and noise and the houses were close together there
03:12:57.740the house to the south where uh his neighbor karen lived i mean that's right there and um i i think
03:13:04.400that would have potentially attracted too much attention much easier to carry out a suffocation
03:13:08.820or strangulation inside the residence itself underneath a pillow or a blanket or whatever
03:13:13.500you would choose to use and hopefully that along with the walls of the house would blank out the
03:13:19.660noise if there was any well what about mark gara goes this and i said what you know why couldn't
03:13:26.040because he's like there are no forensics at all tying him to the murder which i think is pretty
03:13:29.640true. And I said, well, why couldn't he have just suffocated her or strangled her? And he said there
03:13:35.460would have been secretions, which would have provided, you know, some evidence that a murder
03:13:40.880had taken place there or something bad had happened to Lacey wherever he did that.
03:13:46.100Well, I don't totally agree with that. I mean, Mark's got his take and I know, you know,
03:13:50.120what side he's on and I respect him. He's, you know, he's walked the courtroom many, many times.
03:13:54.880So I get that, but I see it a little bit differently. There was a whole ton of evidence
03:13:58.840there. Now, if you take a look at this case and you think in terms of what if Scott didn't know
03:14:03.460Lacey and we went and processed the house as a crime scene, we would have found a multitude of
03:14:09.520evidence that would have linked him to the victim. We would have found hair. We would have found
03:14:13.200fibers from clothes. We would have found maybe lipstick on a glass, all sorts of things,
03:14:18.760fingerprints all over the house. And one of the things that we did just so that everybody wouldn't
03:14:23.500think that we were one-sided on this is when we did process the house for evidence of a stranger
03:14:29.640in abduction or intrusion, and there was no forced entry, of course, we had the FBI come down from
03:14:34.860Sacramento with their evidence response team and had them independent of the medicinal PD. They
03:14:38.860processed the house. And when they did that, of course, you know, I think there was a saying that
03:14:43.320you attorneys use, evidence of absence is absence of evidence. And there was no evidence that anybody
03:14:49.140else had come in that house so when you when you look at this situation well of course there's
03:14:54.820evidence there but it's not the type of evidence that you would think of on a on a you know movie
03:14:59.940or something like that because they lived together they were married so of course you're going to
03:15:04.200have her stuff there there was one spot of blood that was on the comforter that probably wouldn't
03:15:09.440have been there if lacy was alive because lacy was known as a fastidious housekeeper that blood spot
03:15:15.300was was linked to scott of course scott had a cut on his finger i don't remember which one it was
03:15:21.280but one of them and which could be consistent with her scratching him or something like that
03:15:25.880as he's trying to suffocate her or strangle her in bed now whether or not she would defecate whether
03:15:30.820or not she would urinate i mean i don't know it just said all depends on the i don't think you
03:15:34.960could rule that out i don't think you could rule it in and i certainly wouldn't say that the absence
03:15:38.820of that those two things would suggest that he couldn't have done it in there do you remember
03:15:43.880john whether the bed for example had you know fresh linens on it you know did it look like he
03:15:50.520had cleaned up at all well the only thing i remember from the bed is there was an indentation
03:15:55.500on the comforter at the foot of the bed that would be consistent with a human body lacy size
03:16:01.980being on the foot of the bed and then moved from there and you know i mean it could have been a
03:16:07.760variety of different things maybe scott sat there or laid back or something like that i mean it
03:16:11.400It doesn't mean that she was there, but it is consistent.
03:16:14.080And once again, you know, Megan, these cases are built on, you know, circumstantial evidence.
03:16:19.040And you find a couple of things and, well, that's kind of interesting.
03:16:22.380And then it kind of becomes suspicious when you find a few more.
03:16:25.940And then when you've got, you know, two dozen, now it's kind of compelling.
03:16:28.860And that's really how we work these cases.
03:16:31.160You just follow what you have, you document it, and you look at it, you know, with an eye of experience.
03:16:37.980And you say, gosh, this is not looking too good for this guy.
03:16:40.680And there's plenty of plenty of stuff that pointed the finger at him. But I'm just I'm kind of stuck in the forensics like as a as an amateur. Have you ever show have you ever been to a scene where somebody was was strangled or suffocated? And would there necessarily be, you know, urination or something by the person being killed? Like, do you have any idea whether that's true?
03:17:09.260It's not all the murders that happened to be able to say that everybody who was strangled, everybody who was smothered is going to either defecate or urinate or something like that.
03:17:29.340Yeah. And anything that he discovered that might have been there, or maybe if she had left anything on a blanket or a towel, there's no reason he couldn't have taken that with him and disposed of that with her body up there in San Francisco Bay.
03:17:42.540So, you know, there's a lot of things. I remember that he had been mopping. Somebody said he'd been mopping the floor area. And he had said something earlier that Lacey was mopping when he left.
03:17:54.580Well, the cleaning lady had mopped the house the day before.
03:17:57.900She had noticed that Lacey was very tired at the time.
03:18:00.540So she even doubted that Lacey went for a walk.
03:18:03.140But for Scott to be doing any mopping or cleaning up seemed kind of suspicious.
03:18:06.880And even one of Lacey's friends, Stacey Boyer, the next night, I think it was the 26th, she
03:18:13.880had said something about Scott was doing some vacuuming around the house to take his mind
03:19:43.060OK, there's so much more to go over in terms of the investigation, the huge, huge bombshell of Amber Fry, who John interviewed and worked with to get all those tapes, some of which we've heard.
03:19:54.120So we're going to get into that next. She changed the entire course of the investigation. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
03:20:05.620John, so we'll get back to the forensics in one second, including Scott Peterson on tape showing his injured knuckles and hand.
03:20:11.480But as you guys were investigating this, the biggest bombshell, I think we'd both agree, is the emergence of Amber Fry, 27 year old single mom, massage therapist who had started dating him only on November 20th.
03:20:26.280Now, you know, again, she goes missing. Lacey does December 24th, November 20th.
03:20:30.460So it's not a long term affair, but she comes in.
03:20:34.900And can you just walk us through, like, what was that like when you first talked to her?
03:20:39.400And you're thinking about Scott Peterson as a suspect, but you don't have him yet.
03:20:42.780So when you met with her for the first time, what was that like?
03:20:47.280Well, it was it was really groundbreaking for us because until she called, we didn't have anything that we could find in Scott's background.
03:20:55.080suggested that he was anything less than perfect i mean he just you know there was just no stain on
03:20:59.760this guy whatsoever and we almost kind of lost amber uh originally because her original call
03:21:05.300came in and she had volunteered to give the uh call um call takers uh the scott peterson's uh
03:21:12.500date of birth of the one that she was dating to see if it matched up with the one we were
03:21:16.540investigating and the call taker i guess just couldn't connect the dots on that one and said
03:21:20.460well i can't give you his date of birth and then amber was frustrated she said well i'm not looking
03:21:23.960for his. I got the date of birth of the guy I'm dating. If it matches up with the guy you're
03:21:28.800looking at, then I probably got information for your detectives. And so anyway, she finally hung
03:21:32.940up in frustration. But the next day, she calls in. Yeah, you're lucky she was persistent. She calls
03:21:39.060in and Al Brochini, he's standing at the clerk's desk that is right next to my desk as the clerk
03:21:46.440is taking Amber's call and she's typing it into the databank thing that she had on her desk there.
03:21:52.940And Al's reading this as she's typing.
03:21:55.000And then Al says, is she on the phone right now?
03:23:03.680You know, especially everything men do wrong, which, of course, is a lot.
03:23:07.180But different show, different subject.
03:23:09.200Anyway, so she ends up giving us incredible detail on their dates and what they did.
03:23:15.280And luckily, she held down to souvenirs.
03:23:17.600So she had wine corks and she had tickets and all sorts of things that, you know, would back up what she was doing.
03:23:23.620And it was almost like she I think she she didn't know us.
03:23:26.660It was almost like she had a concern that we wouldn't believe what she was saying.
03:23:30.520So she backed all these things up with, you know, real physical evidence of this stuff.
03:23:34.720She showed us a gift that he had bought for her daughter, this little star globe and some other stuff.
03:23:39.800And and it was it was just really interesting because now this this emerged, you know, this different kind of guy that we really didn't know was there.
03:23:49.820And certainly we were suspicious, but we had nothing to hang our head on.
03:23:53.240So when we left her house, you know, we were hungry.
03:23:57.960It was mid-afternoon. And so we said, well, you know, we're going to go get a bite to eat.
03:24:01.580If you guys want to come with you, come with us.
03:24:03.820And so she said, well, hey, would you want to stop by the CVS or Walgreens or something like that?
03:24:08.680I don't remember which one it was because I've got some pictures and we're thinking pictures yeah we'd
03:24:13.860probably be interested in those so we go to the photo counter there at CVS or Walgreens and she
03:24:19.680gives a claim ticket to the gal and the gal brings out the envelope and they're twin pics there's two
03:24:23.560pics of each and we're looking through these and it's a famous picture of Scott and Amber at the
03:24:29.280holiday soiree I think she's in the red dress he's in the tux and everything like that and we're
03:24:33.560looking at this it's like yeah this gal's probably telling the truth here and you know they were just
03:24:37.220from a couple of weeks earlier and it i mean it was pretty impressive and i'm sure that you know
03:24:41.520the gal behind the counter had no idea what she had just handed us and and so anyway then we went
03:24:46.840over to radio to buy a little device to hook up to a recorder because we always kept a couple of
03:24:52.380recorders in the trunk of our cars in case because we use these many times on cases we'd give them to
03:24:56.960a victim or a witness and see if they could get the guy to talk to him and so we retrieved a
03:25:02.280recorder out of my trunk along with like 10 tapes and some batteries and then we went to radio
03:25:07.120shack which was nearby and brock bought the connecting unit that would go to her phone
03:25:11.480and the recorder itself showed her how to use it as he's showing her how to use it the phone rings
03:25:15.760and brock he goes gosh that's scott's number right there so she's looking at us like take take the
03:25:21.420call and so she took the call and that was like the first recorded conversation and and it was
03:25:27.000just um it was just very interesting and this is the one thing that um yeah i i don't understand
03:25:33.020why this case was so popular with everybody because we had many other murders that were
03:25:36.620actually more to me more interesting than this one although this one had you know tv quality
03:25:41.560victim and and you know responsible in it you know that i mean definitely the made for tv you
03:25:46.640know cast on this one other than the detectives of course but when it came to this it was just
03:25:52.000gosh we're here working this thing everybody's looking at this and it's just another modesto
03:25:55.900murder you know i mean it's important to us it's important to the family but it's it was kind of
03:26:00.320it was just difficult to believe how it was getting so much attention and well you know
03:26:05.480it's got all the elements it's got like these beautiful people a pregnant mom again like i
03:26:13.200said with a thousand watt smile the gorgeous affair partner who has been duped but in the
03:26:19.060beginning days you're wondering was she duped we don't know were they in on it did they both
03:26:22.820get rid of lacy scott you know this gorgeous guy who lacy seems to have you know
03:26:28.920won the jackpot with right like it just he's like yeah he's got a good job he's got a seemingly
03:26:34.880nice family. He's good looking. He treats her well. It's like every woman's worst nightmare
03:26:39.800that this man you meet and fall in love with and marry and get pregnant by turns out to be
03:26:46.360a sociopath who would murder you in your bed with your, it's like the worst thing you can imagine.
03:26:53.180So it's, it taps into, I think a lot of things for a lot of people, but especially women.
03:26:58.120So, so can I ask you, cause Amber Fry, we've got that famous and I'll play it,
03:27:02.940part of it, the Happy New Year call on New Year's Eve that he calls Amber while he's at the vigil
03:27:10.220for Lacey. But did she start taping him before that? Yeah, she started taping him. Gosh, I think
03:27:22.780that was. Well, it was right around that same time because it was within a week of the 24th. So it
03:27:30.160was the recorded call for uh new year's eve yeah that was right after we had met her okay because
03:27:37.440we've been scratching him for several days you know it's like gosh is there nothing wrong with
03:27:41.460this guy and you know other than his limited cooperation we're thinking well maybe he didn't
03:27:45.500do it and you know but you know we're still even though we were working him craig and al and i
03:27:51.620you know we weren't the only ones working this case there were a lot of other detectives that
03:27:56.040were working on this, you know, detectives that were clearing out sex registrants and parolees
03:28:00.320that had violent criminal pasts that could be good for this and verifying their alibi and stuff like
03:28:05.660that. And of course, as you guys, as you paid more attention to this case and it became bigger,
03:28:10.600anybody that we looked at, you know, they wanted to be away from this thing big time. They did not
03:28:15.720want to be involved in this. They did not want to be linked to this as being in any way possibly
03:28:20.340related to Lacey's murder. So the cooperation level that we got from a lot of people that
03:28:24.780ordinarily probably wouldn't have cooperated with us probably wouldn't like us because we were cops
03:28:29.160was a little bit different this time and that was one of the good things that the media brought to
03:28:32.960us that made things easier in some ways but in other ways not so much well it's the reason amber
03:28:37.900fry knew to call you she she saw all the media coverage of this guy who's was missing his wife
03:28:42.900and she was like holy that's my guy and he had told her that his wife was dead yeah let me do a
03:28:49.580quick correction for you on that actually she didn't see any of the coverage see amber didn't
03:28:53.420watch TV or she would have called us much earlier. She was alerted to Scott by a friend of hers. He
03:28:59.640was a Fresno cop. And I think his name was Richard. I can't remember his last name, but he
03:29:04.380caught the coverage and he thought, gosh, that sounds kind of like that girl or that guy that
03:29:09.660Amber's dating. And so he called Amber and said- He remembered? I mean, Scott hadn't even been in
03:29:14.180Amber's life that long. He remembered the description of him or that he would fit it?
03:29:18.860Well, she was, you know, I mean, you're a young girl, you're blonde, and you're dating Scott Peterson, you're going to flash him around like a nickel plated 38. And so she's telling all of her friends, you know, hey, look what I've got. And, you know, and I don't blame her, you know, I can see her doing that. So this, you know, this friend of hers, he, you know, platonic, he was just a friend. And he caught the, you know, the intense media coverage. And so he called her, he says, you might want to check with those guys up there in Modesto and see if this is the same guy.
03:29:45.260Because I can't remember for sure, Megan, if he had told her that he actually lived in Modesto or Sacramento.
03:29:50.200I know he told somebody at one time that he lived in Sacramento.
03:29:53.240But anyway, she hadn't seen any of this coverage.
03:29:56.240And, of course, as you remember, there was great frustration with people in the media because they couldn't get Scott on camera hardly at all.
03:30:03.140He was always in the background at the center where they were coordinating the search outside of law enforcement.
03:30:10.120He talked to several people from the media and he just said, hey, I don't want to be a part of this.
03:30:33.740Had there been other affairs besides Amber?
03:30:38.200Yeah, there have been at least two that we knew of that were called in.
03:30:42.260Girls have called us and told us about things.
03:30:44.220And, you know, I hate to say that, but I mean, they are what they are. They're in the record. And, you know, it is what it is. But he lied about that, too, when he gave his interview to I don't know if it was Diane or if it was Gloria Gomez and the Sacramento affiliate.
03:30:58.120But he told one or both of them that Amber's the only one he ever had an affair with.
03:31:01.760yeah he's he he stretched the truth on a lot of things a lot of things that he didn't have
03:31:06.940to stretch the truth on so it was really difficult you know dealing with him to know where the you
03:31:10.740know the truth ended and the lies started because he he would lie sometimes for no reason on things
03:31:16.200that were inconsequential and that was kind of difficult for us to kind of pick through
03:31:19.360but um it you know it was he just he was just he was just interesting to work you know because he
03:31:25.980okay so amber fry uh she does put on the wire and she does start recording her calls with him
03:31:31.960and the the one that i remember just from covering it at the time i was you know a very young reporter
03:31:36.760um was the one he's at the vigil for lacy and connor with the candles this is before they
03:31:43.580found the bodies or know that they're dead you know sharon rocha the whole family's there like
03:31:48.180praying to god that there'll be a sighting a return of ransom demand something and what's
03:31:54.100Scott doing. He's all smiles and he's on the phone with Amber. And here's a snippet of that
03:32:00.740conversation. Yeah. And he goes on to say the crowds are amazing. The crowds. He's looking at
03:32:18.280the crowd for his wife's vigil i mean it's like that's that's something wrong there's obviously
03:32:24.240he is a sociopath that's like no normal person can do that john well and that kind of you know
03:32:29.740falls into why we don't really have any doubts that he did this now yeah again it's a premeditated
03:32:34.660murder there's no videotape there's no eyewitness he's never going to confess at least i don't
03:32:38.220expect that he would he could probably waterboard him you're not going to get it out of him but
03:32:41.600it's one of those things where when when on one hand he's telling us how worried he is and how
03:32:46.180he you know he wanted to keep his face away from the media coverage because he was afraid that you
03:32:51.240know it would be a distraction or if he was afraid that if amber came forward then you know we would
03:32:55.860no longer search for her which yeah gosh we were going to search for her regardless it doesn't make
03:32:59.680any difference if amber's part of the equation or not and so you know when he's doing that you
03:33:05.340notice at the vigil he's got the baseball hat pulled down low he's got the collar up on the
03:33:10.520jacket everything like that and you know you from a distance you might not even connect them as your
03:33:15.380boyfriend if you're amber you know cooking spaghetti and you just glance over your shoulder
03:33:19.320at the tv which of course she didn't do because she didn't watch a lot of tv wow well notwithstanding
03:33:25.420that gloria allred got her hooks into amber and we've seen that show many times now and that this
03:33:32.560was the moment that stunned the world i remember watching this thinking omg here it is amber fry
03:33:40.740at the press conference coming forward and telling the truth, SOT 5.
03:33:45.860First of all, I met Scott Peterson November 20, 2002.
03:34:27.200Yeah, there was a total of 29 hours of recorded phone calls between the two of them.
03:34:31.780But what happened with that is, you know, we were going to keep her on ice as long as we could.
03:34:36.180And we didn't want to bring her forward.
03:34:37.740You know, we didn't necessarily expect that he was going to tell her that he killed his wife and he wanted to run off to Belgium with her or anything like that.
03:34:43.700But we were hopeful that we might be able to get something else out of it.
03:34:46.940So we were going to keep working this for a while.
03:34:49.840But unfortunately, somehow the Inquirer found out about her and we got a tip that they were going to be running that photo of Amber in the red dress and Scott in the tux on the whatever edition it was that came out.
03:35:03.780I don't know if it came out on Thursday or Friday or whatever that was.
03:35:06.040Well, of course, you know, out of consideration for both families, you know, Scott's family down in San Diego, and of course, Sharon and the family in Modesto, we knew that we couldn't, you know, let that happen. And, you know, they'd be in the grocery store line, and then they see the Enquirer there with this picture, and, you know, then they drop their groceries and freak out. So we knew we were going to have to tell both families about this.
03:35:26.160So Craig Grogan and Phil Owen went down to San Diego to tell Lee and Jackie about this.
03:35:33.500And then, of course, Al and I, we called Sharon into the office to tell her about it.
03:35:38.480And, you know, she came down there with Ron Gransky.
03:35:40.980And, you know, and that was one of the heartbreaking things of the whole case.
03:35:44.860You know, you can work a lot of murders and, you know, but you're touched by these victims.
03:35:51.120I mean, there's some of them that stay with me even to this day that I still talk to.
03:35:54.240but it she came down and they knew that there was something up because we didn't generally call them
03:35:59.720to come down to our office um but they came down it was late afternoon and i said they had a they
03:36:05.500had a scheduled interview with uh greta um that was going to go on after our meeting and so she
03:36:12.620sat down and you could see the you know they were you know anxiety and so we said well hey you know
03:36:16.620we called you down here we got something's going on we want to get you in front of it so that you're
03:36:19.940not surprised by it and then I had this folder in front of me it was on the table and I just
03:36:24.160opened the folder and split it across and you know Sharon looks at it and she just you know
03:36:28.400put her head in her hands and said why did he have to kill her and I remember that like it was
03:36:32.720yesterday that she said that and I think you know the family wasn't you know none of these families
03:36:39.200are stupid and I think they all knew this they knew it was coming but they were hoping for that
03:36:45.680one little chance out of a billion that that she would come back alive and you know this kind of
03:36:52.340you know dash those hopes and it's really sad to see this you know to see a family have to go
03:36:56.800through this and then you know of course now pick up the pieces and you know hope for the best and
03:37:00.680the rest of it can you catch the guy who did it and can we ever recover our family number to give
03:37:05.140you know a proper you know burial and things like that but that is that was the moment sharon
03:37:11.120realized he was behind this and that lacy would not be returning yeah i think she had a you know
03:37:20.340she's pretty bright i got a feeling she had a feeling about this beforehand but she probably
03:37:24.980wouldn't even acknowledge it except you know deep in her mind but yeah this pretty much showed her
03:37:29.660that was the deal and then of course because publicly they'd been standing with scott they
03:37:33.820there wasn't a public rift between the families until amber yeah exactly and and you know you'd
03:37:40.600expect that. I mean, that's, you know, there was nothing, they didn't have anything concrete. I
03:37:43.800mean, we look at the thing a little bit different. You know, we're not going to, we don't tell people
03:37:47.720everything that we know when we're working one of these cases. You can't, you know, because maybe
03:37:51.600you're wrong too. And it might, you know, you're not going to disrupt the family and the relationships
03:37:55.060with your suspicions. You know, you work your suspicions and you gather your evidence to
03:37:58.680prove your case, you know, to present it to a jury. And you don't want them to slip up. I mean,
03:38:03.080even a well-meaning family member could slip up and say something to Scott before you're ready
03:38:07.080for him to know you're working with amber and yeah i understand that makes makes perfect sense
03:38:11.840to me um there's so much more to go the trial gets started and scott's defenders to this day
03:38:19.600point to the lack of forensics but is that fair we're going to get it into a bit more um what
03:38:25.080the prosecution actually had and now what the defense is saying uh we should take a new look
03:38:30.560at don't go away there's much much more to discuss with retired detective john buehler
03:38:34.540And don't forget, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
03:38:41.600And the full video show and clips when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly.
03:38:46.880If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free.
03:38:54.860If you leave a comment in the Apple comments, which you can do underneath by subscribing there, I will read it.
03:44:13.380We had a surveillance going on for Scott down in San Diego by agents from Department of Justice, Ernie Lamone and his crew down there, because we didn't have enough cops to help out on this.
03:44:23.700So we used help from a lot of different agencies throughout the state.
03:44:28.040So we drove down to San Diego and we hooked up with those guys.
03:44:32.400And then we were going to make the arrest the next day when the DNA results were going to be released.
03:44:38.820Bill Locker was the attorney general in California at the time, and he was going to be in charge of releasing those results to the media and to the public.
03:44:46.520And the instructions that we got from Judge Beauchene, who gave us the arrest warrant, was, I know what you have here, but don't execute this arrest warrant until you get those DNA results, if you can.
03:44:58.600he didn't tell us we couldn't but he wanted us to wait until we got those results and so when we
03:45:06.300started following scott that next morning he was a i don't know if he was nascar quality but he was
03:45:13.000a pretty darn good driver i mean high speed and he could cut lanes and take an off-ramp and of course
03:45:18.560we we didn't drive like that we'd roll our car or something and so we'd have to miss some you know
03:45:22.580we'd drive down another off-ramp and it was just a big you know it was kind of like a comedian of
03:45:27.920cars driving around. It was ridiculous. So they had a helicopter up. So luckily we were able to
03:45:31.920stay on him, but even the helicopter lost him at one point. But was he fleeing? Because we all
03:45:37.240remember, our audience, I think, he had dyed his hair blonde. He had grown a goatee. He had $15,000
03:45:43.480of cash on him. He had, I think, did he have a fake driver's license? His brother's ID.
03:45:49.840Yeah. Okay. He had camping gear. It certainly seemed like he was about to flee, perhaps across
03:45:55.100the southern border well yeah we couldn't rule that out i mean he knew san diego well he grew
03:46:00.060up down there and you know that's not very far from mexico um we didn't know if he was if he
03:46:04.840thought the cops were after him or if he thought that you guys were after him you know trying to
03:46:08.560you know get an interview or you know dye their hair for us john well you know it's funny because
03:46:15.040on that hair dye thing he had two versions of that he told somebody that he is he dyed his hair
03:46:19.840because he wanted to be more anonymous he didn't want to be spotted in public and then he told us
03:46:23.860it got dyed because he was swimming in a pool with too much chlorine so oh please the thing
03:46:28.560yeah every little every little brunette girl in america knows that's not true because we all tried
03:46:33.580to get our hair dyed that way and it doesn't work yeah i wish i knew about that it's great
03:46:38.440it's kind of old but uh anyway so yeah he'd come up with these different versions of things which
03:46:42.680were you know they're mildly amusing when you're working the case but it's like you don't have to
03:46:47.820lie about this stuff you know just tell it straight it's in his nature all right so so
03:46:52.380listen so i want to move it along so so you affect the arrest the the trial takes place and
03:46:58.120what forensic evidence did you have what was i know it was circumstantable as i'm looking and
03:47:04.320getting ready for this interview okay scent sniffing dogs picked up lacy's scent in the
03:47:09.880berkeley marina four days after she disappeared scott's team and garagos was saying this just
03:47:15.140the other day say you cannot rely on that dogs fail two out of three of these tests under similar
03:47:21.220circumstances. That was a bunch of BS evidence the dogs sent. Your thoughts on the dogs?
03:47:28.940Well, I know a few dogs in the neighborhood. You know, I feed them some little milk bone treats,
03:47:34.420but I don't know dogs like canine handlers do. My understanding is dogs have an incredible
03:47:39.860sense of smell that is multiple times better than humans. You know, I can't disagree with
03:47:45.800what Deragos is saying because I don't know enough about that subject to make the call on that. But
03:47:50.000once again, it was just one of those strands of physical evidence. And if you remember Vincent
03:47:54.680Bugliosi's book, Helter Skelter, he described a circumstantial case as a series of strands or
03:48:00.660cables or strands of wires on a cable that become increasingly big and strong. And okay, you can
03:48:05.940attack the dog, well, get rid of that little strand, but you still have all the rest of these.
03:48:10.320And so when you add up all the circumstantial evidence, that paints a very compelling picture.
03:48:15.580It'd almost be like if you had a jigsaw puzzle on your table and you were missing three pieces in the middle, but you'd be pretty sure what the picture says.
03:48:23.280And that's what we had here with all the circumstantial evidence.
03:48:26.020So when it comes to physical evidence, well, we've got Scott's behavior.
03:48:32.040But you've got the absence of intrusion from another person coming in there.
03:48:37.560You've got the condition of the bodies and where they're found.
03:48:40.280You've got Scott's behavior when it comes to how he's dealing with everything involving this case, whether it's returning to the scene where the bodies were disposed, I think, five or six times.
03:48:51.140And this is consistent with what killers generally do if they have little doubts about whether or not they hid the body enough.
03:48:56.860So you've got all of those kinds of things.
03:49:08.360You know, that's that's a big item being pushed by Scott's sister-in-law right now, saying there was a burglary in the neighborhood.
03:49:15.500She thinks that she says that there is proof that it happened on the morning.
03:49:20.700Lacey went missing, which she says was definitively 1224 and not 1223, which was something the police had suggested could have been the case.
03:49:30.780She said, we believe Lacey was killed after she stumbled upon that burglary live.
03:49:36.700She said a neighbor, Diane Jackson, said she saw three men in a van in front of a home there
03:49:43.000on December 24th. But then I understand that the two robbers apprehended, denied any involvement
03:49:51.140in the case, and they were cleared by the cops. Moreover, there was apparently a second person
03:49:56.000in the neighborhood, maybe, I don't know, maybe it was a woman you mentioned earlier,
03:49:59.320who was pregnant and walking a dog that day. But you tell me why we shouldn't be putting
03:50:03.820much stock in the burglary theory, that they nabbed Lacey because she saw them?
03:50:09.680Well, it's pretty rare that a guy doing a property crime is going to turn into an abductor
03:50:15.380of a pregnant girl when it's walking a dog. I mean, if everybody, if Diane Jackson sees a van
03:50:21.480at 1140 in the morning with three guys in it, but she can't even tell us if it's white, tan,
03:50:25.980or black, it kind of calls into question her viability as a witness. In addition to that,
03:50:32.840one of the burglars, a guy named Steven, we rode that route daily as he was sourcing a narcotic
03:50:40.300habit. But that would be his route when he went to his girlfriend's house. So on the 24th,
03:50:45.100he noticed that the house across the street looked like maybe people had left for the holidays.
03:50:50.220As he went over there on the 25th, he was pretty sure they did. So he broke into the house on the
03:50:54.50025th and he took a bit of property on the 25th. But there was a safe and some tools and other
03:50:59.660things that he couldn't take on his bike so he returns home and he's living in a shed behind his
03:51:05.060friend don who's living with his mother and he tells don hey there's a safe over there we need
03:51:10.300to go back over and get that so they return on the 26th and the reason we know that they were
03:51:14.500there on the 26th is they said they saw the media down the street when they were in the house and
03:51:18.840it was a big hoopla and they couldn't figure out what it was because they didn't know but it was
03:51:23.520interesting to them that the media would be out in the street well they're going in and out through
03:51:26.640the back of the house. So they're, you know, I mean, whether it's Geraldo or Greta or you or
03:51:31.080anybody else out there, they're not going to see these guys carting a safe out the back of the
03:51:35.100house. When they came under suspicion for this burglary, this is one of the things that we've
03:51:40.880run into is cooperation level from people that are doing property crimes. It's very rare that
03:51:46.180they cooperate with us. But these two guys, not only did we arrest one of them on an active
03:51:50.720warrant, they both rolled on their involvement in the burglary because by that time they knew
03:51:54.560what was going on down the street. They wanted to be as far away from this case as humanly possible.
03:51:59.920If they could have gotten a flight to Burma, they would have gone. But that wasn't their option. So
03:52:04.360they begged to take a poly because they knew and they wanted to share the results of the polygraph
03:52:09.180because they knew if they went to jail, which they were going, that they wanted to be able to share
03:52:13.080that with the other inmates because the other inmates ain't going to take too kindly to two
03:52:16.720guys that they think might have killed this woman and her unborn child. So not only did we recover
03:52:21.880property from that burglary, we recovered nothing of Lacey's, no jewelry, nothing at all. And we
03:52:28.520even recovered property from another burglary that wasn't even related. Everybody that these guys had
03:52:33.680sold or given property to in exchange for drugs turned stuff in. We even had one guy came in the
03:52:38.240police lobby and dumped off a bag of property from the burglary and run out before anybody could
03:52:43.320grab it. Of course, they didn't know what was in the bag until they opened it up. So as far as these
03:52:48.200guys being involved in this, one of the things that I'm sure you remember is there was a $500,000
03:52:53.440reward at the time leading to Lacey's, you know, recovery and, you know, locating her and everything
03:52:59.260like that. Well, in Modesto, when you've got guys that are using meth, and, you know, two guys
03:53:05.160involved in an abduction to try and convince me, I mean, I worked in a different world than maybe
03:53:10.120some of your viewers, but to try and convince me that one wouldn't roll on the other for $500,000.
03:53:14.700I mean, my gosh, that's that's, you know, pure Santa Claus. I mean, there's just no way.
03:53:19.320What about well, what about this other thing? Let me because there's a few things I kind of I kind of jumped ahead there.
03:53:24.240But there was Jenny, Janie, the sister-in-law of Scott Peterson, says there was evidence Lacey was alive on Christmas Eve morning past the point at which Scott left, which we've established was around 930.
03:53:35.860She said there were sightings of Lacey at 945 and 1030 on Christmas Eve.
03:53:42.500She said that that there are a couple of witnesses who saw the pregnant woman walking her golden retriever around the neighborhood.
03:53:54.900Well, there were two pregnant girls that were pregnant about the same stage as Lacey that walked dogs in the neighborhood.
03:54:00.540There was one named Michelle who was walking a golden retriever and another one named Kristen that was walking a chocolate lap.
03:54:07.080And then there was a third girl, another attractive gal, all three attractive, that easily could have been mistaken for Lacey by somebody in the neighborhood who did not know Lacey.
03:54:15.920Now, and this is the interesting part, is none of these people that came forward and claimed they saw Lacey there actually knew her.
03:58:59.040So, John, what do you think actually happened inside that house and when?
03:59:05.240Well, of course, none of us are ever really going to know that other than Scott himself.
03:59:08.980But my my take on it is he probably suffocated her with a pillow or strangled her and then rolled her body up in maybe a sheet or something like that.
03:59:20.880moved her out to the truck put her in the truck put the umbrellas on top of her so that nobody
03:59:27.580could really see her in there drove over to his warehouse loaded her in the boat used the tarp
03:59:33.400on the boat to cover the boat and then of course hooked the boat up and drove her up to berkeley
03:59:38.980marina launched the boat took her out to brooks island and rolled her into the water with four
03:59:44.620or five of the concrete anchors that we believe he made is judging from the residue rings of
03:59:50.620cement powder that was on a flatbed trailer that was in his warehouse, one that would be used to
03:59:56.580deliver fertilizer or something like that. That's kind of the way I think it. It could be off
04:00:01.560slightly. I mean, I'd certainly buy Scott some imported ale if he wanted to tell me what really
04:00:06.580happened, but I don't think he's going to be doing that. Why wouldn't there be any forensics in his
04:00:11.500truck? Well, why would there not be? I mean, if he's wrapped up in a...
04:00:18.940you know, something. Well, don't you remember that hair that was found in the pliers that were
04:00:23.020in the boat? One hair of Lacey's in the pliers in his boat. But I mean, couldn't you make the
04:00:27.320argument, you know, my husband takes our boat out all the time. Like I'm not, I'm rarely in it, but
04:00:31.880if my hair were there, I guess he could say, you know, I get Meg's hair on me all the time.
04:00:38.240Right. Yeah. The transfer of that is, is, you know, it's easy. I can, I can see where the,
04:00:42.540you know, where the hair came from in the boat, no problem there. And then of course,
04:00:45.380there was concrete residue in the boat that it was consistent with somebody rolling somebody
04:00:49.880with anchors attached over the side into the water. So, you know, you have that. But as far
04:00:55.140as any more evidence in his truck, well, she's in the bed. You know, I can't say that there
04:01:01.460wouldn't be, but the mere fact that the scent dogs were able to trace her path essentially in
04:01:08.960the truck as he drove from there down to the south and then turned west and went over towards
04:01:13.760his warehouse and they followed him over there they followed the scent from the warehouse out
04:01:17.800to 132 which is the drive that you go up to san francisco tracing it all the way up to berkeley
04:01:22.700marina i mean uh yeah mark garagos can say that that's invalid and and okay i get that that's
04:01:29.360what he's paid to do that society's on but it's all just additional circumstantial evidence that
04:01:35.520leads to the fingers pointing at scott but as far as evidence that you would expect if he doesn't
04:01:41.060harm her to the point where she's leaking blood. And he puts her in a position where she's wrapped
04:01:45.840up, where maybe saliva or any kind of purge that comes out of her mouth after death is not going
04:01:50.320to get through whatever he's got her wrapped up in. You're not going to find anything in the
04:01:54.340truck, especially since he was only in there for what I would estimate to be a short period of
04:01:59.240time from the house to the warehouse loaded in the boat and gone. No one would have seen him
04:02:03.560loading up the boat with her body at the warehouse because your theory is he did that inside the
04:02:08.160warehouse yes okay and so the only way they would have seen her getting loaded into that truck would
04:02:13.520have been from the house into the truck but as you said earlier he had backed the truck all the way
04:02:18.400up to the house in an unusual move yeah neighbors noticed that that he you know you that was first
04:02:24.560time they'd ever seen the truck backed in and they also noticed that there was a first time that they
04:02:27.660can recall that the blinds weren't open on the front of the house in the morning they let the
04:02:30.820morning sun in that was something that lacy did all the time that particular morning those weren't
04:02:34.880open, which is really suspicious when you think that if she was home watching Martha
04:02:38.540Stewart or something like that, that she wouldn't have opened those blinds.
04:02:42.140Quick note on the boat, though, that there was a cover that went over the aluminum boat.
04:02:46.060And when Scott found out that we were doing more digging around, he took that cover and
04:02:50.440he put it in a shed behind his house underneath a leaking gas can that would put gasoline
04:02:55.080and leaf floor or something like that, that kind of two-stroke oil on the boat cover itself.
04:03:01.980Now, Scott was fastidious about taking care of his property, whether it was his vehicles or the surface of his kitchen table or anything like that.
04:03:10.180But the thought that he would take a relatively nice boat cover and put a leaky leaf blower gas can on top of it for any other reason other than maybe destroy Lacey's scent seems kind of strange to me.
04:03:21.180So, again, just one more piece of circumstantial evidence.
04:03:23.580And by themselves, anecdotal, they don't mean anything.
04:03:25.840But when you add those things up, they become very, very convincing.
04:03:29.280And this is one of the things that I think a lot of people that don't think he did it are missing is they're not making themselves available to all the individual circumstantial evidence, because you have to ignore just a giant heap of this stuff to believe he didn't do it.
04:03:43.960I applaud Peterson's family for their love for Scott and what they're trying to do, but you're going to have to do something else.
04:03:49.540We understand their motive. Okay, let's talk about the boat because Garagos was lamenting that his experiment trying to show a man Scott's size, throwing a body, a pregnant, an eight and a half month pregnant woman's body overboard with a bunch of cement anchors, that he did that experiment and it showed the boat sinking.
04:04:10.460We've actually got that, the videotape that he tried to get in that the judge kept out.
04:04:15.840Let me ask you about it, because as I watch it, you know, he does raise an interesting question.
04:04:20.140Could a man as big as Scott Peterson get a pregnant woman, that pregnant, overboard with four anchors attached to her without the boat capsizing or sinking?
04:04:29.640Here's Garagos' clip from his would-be evidence that was denied.
04:04:40.460For our listening audience, it shows an exact replica of Scott's 14-foot fishing boat and a man in scuba gear.
04:05:03.500You know, they're not purporting that it's actually Scott.
04:18:49.440Well, a pretty good way to explain that away.
04:18:51.940And, you know, I can't rule out the fact that it's possible he could have cut it that way.
04:18:56.500But it's also possible that Lacey may have scratched him as he was killing him.
04:19:00.360and so you know those again without a witness in a videotape or a confession you're never
04:19:05.780really going to know on that but but that was not accidental that he raised that
04:19:09.560well you know and that's all for the jury you know the jury you know listens to that and they
04:19:15.620draw their own conclusions on that but just the fact that he's volunteering it talking about it
04:19:20.020it's almost like he said guilty conscious coming out and he wants to make sure he gets in front of
04:19:24.660that with this story so what of the toolbox john what of the toolbox because one of the things that
04:19:30.360One of the evidence rulings was that Garagos' boat video couldn't come in.
04:19:34.260But as I understand it, there was a ruling that the prosecution introduced showing that he could have fit a body the size of a pregnant woman in the toolbox of his flatbed truck.
04:19:52.400But I know we did an experiment and it was submitted to the court where we had a eight month pregnant clerk in the investigation division at Stanislaw County District Attorney's Office.
04:20:04.840And we took an overhead photo of her inside the boat between the seats.
04:20:09.140Now, the seats go across the width of the boat and she easily fit in between those two seats and she was consistent in size with Lacey.
04:20:16.820So that was one of the things that we did to show that that was possible, that she could have easily been hidden in the boat.
04:20:22.400But I don't even remember if we were able to get that in at trial or not, because it's been too long ago.
04:20:30.700I thought he was pretty, pretty right down the middle.
04:20:32.860He gave some good, favorable decisions to the defense and then maybe some that they didn't like.
04:20:37.940But that's true in every trial, as you know.
04:20:40.260You know, you get that, you get ones that you like and you get ones that you don't.
04:20:43.280You're just hoping that the judge is doing it right.
04:20:45.580Well, and I mean, their big basis for appeal is not necessarily, you know, judicial misconduct.
04:20:50.500It's juror misconduct. Juror number seven, who called herself Strawberry Shortcake, did not disclose in her juror questionnaire that she had apparently been the victim of domestic violence while pregnant, which I agree the defense had a right to know whether it was enough error to allow whether that was prejudicial enough to throw out a verdict in a case like this is a different story for the listeners and the viewers who don't remember her.
04:21:18.980We used to call her Pinky at the time.
04:21:21.560Here she is, along with another juror, celebrating their guilty verdict.
04:21:26.220You don't always see the jurors talk in California.
04:23:43.180But it's death row, I think, if I had to be in San Quentin, I'd want to be on death row
04:23:48.600because I'm not really exposed to that many of the other inmates.
04:23:51.960And general population in San Quentin can get you hurt pretty quick,
04:23:55.900especially if they don't like you for killing your wife and your child.
04:23:59.040So, you know, if they do stay with the verdict of guilt and he does get, you know, life without parole, we call it L-Lop, and he stays in there, they're going to have to assure his safety by keeping him isolated because he would be a target for other inmates.
04:24:14.540There's a National Geographic special that was on a couple of years ago that profiled San Quentin.
04:24:20.180And even one of the inmates that they interviewed would talk specifically about Scott, that he would be attacked if he was in general population.
04:25:30.120Because, you know, people debate this all the time in our society because the death penalty is still recognized as constitutional and implemented in certain states.
04:25:40.020I've heard I've heard people who oppose the death penalty say I oppose it because I think it's too it's too kind.
04:25:48.320It's too swift that I'd rather see somebody, you know, especially a young man like Scott Peterson.
04:25:54.160I mean, Sharon Rocha at the hearing just most recently was just saying Lacey would be, I think she said, 47 now and Connor would be 18.
04:26:01.800And it really does give you a flavor for the passage of time and how much they've lost.
04:26:06.040And Scott Peterson, too, is not getting any younger.
04:28:34.420but again, I have confidence in the prosecutors
04:28:36.480from Stanislaw County District Attorney's Office.
04:28:38.400They've got some incredibly bright trial attorneys there, and so I don't know who they would assign to it the second time around.
04:28:44.780With it going to trial again, hopefully not.
04:28:47.600The big thing for me is the torture for the family, for Sharon and the rest of the family, for them to have to go through this again, and even for this to come up for resentencing here in December.
04:28:57.060What a great time of the year to do that, to just open that wound again.
04:29:00.700Now, granted, every Christmas is going to be different from before Lacey went missing to now, and I get that.
04:29:07.520But then they have to add, you know, salt to the wound by having this thing happen.
04:29:11.120Now, why couldn't they have done this in February and put it off a little bit longer?
04:29:14.320But, you know, that that is what it is. And this is what we're dealing with.
04:29:18.060As far as I'm concerned, I'm close to the case, along with Craig and Al.
04:29:25.060We were in it from the start. And, you know, it is what it is. It was a team effort.
04:29:29.140I appreciate you referring to me as the one who solved it. I didn't solve it.
04:29:32.480We worked it together from those of us that were on the core unit investigating it from the beginning to the other detectives that came and helped with us, the other agencies, sheriff's departments, detectives from other agencies, the FBI that helped us out on it.
04:29:44.960Our crime analysis did a wonderful job putting things together and the evidence clerks, the evidence technicians and everybody that joined in on it.
04:29:54.000I just hope that if we go to trial again on it, that we get a good jury and they can see right through this stuff and they see every strand of this circumstantial evidence makes an unbreakable cable and they come back with the right verdict.
04:30:06.360I hope the same. John, thank you so much for your investigatory efforts and for being here to tell us the story.
04:30:14.340Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.