48 Hours - Beverly Hills 911

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Beverly Hills detectives try to figure out how a widow ended up dead below a staircase in her mansion. Erin Moriarty reports. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Beverly Hills 911, what is the address of your emergency? October 10th, 2017, the Beverly Hills Police Department received a 911 call of an unintended death. What's going on there? We found out of unconscious. She's found on the floor by her son and daughter. Violet Yucoby was a 67-year-old widow whose husband had passed a year earlier. She was living in that house alone. It was a nice house.

No one had heard from her that day, which was uncommon. Daniel Yacobi and his sister, Dina Yacobi, to meet at the house. Daniel calls 911. Okay, is she still unconscious? Yes. Yes. Yes, is she breathing? No.

Daniel Kobe is a 36-year-old son of Violet. He was a dentist. How long ago did you last see her? Like, how long has she been like that? Do you know? No, I have no. He's asked by the 911 operator if anyone knows CPR. Do you need me to walk you through it, or does somebody know it?

No, we're both doctors. You're both doctors? Okay. We have... We're dentists. Never mind. He says my sister's doing CPR. Who's doing CPR?

My sister. During that call, it was just a matter of minutes. The first patrol car had arrived at the house. The police are there? Yes. This is Violet's house. Yes, this is it. Do you remember coming here?

Yeah. It was dark, nighttime. I remember walking up the steps and in the door. And no sign of forced entry? No. It's a large entry. doorway, marble floor. There's a large, curving staircase that's to the right. The victim was laying on her back. Initially, they thought that she had fallen over the railing. They just didn't know the cause of death. It wasn't like she'd been stabbed or shot. One of the issues that becomes incredibly relevant to this case is where she's laying, where it is in vicinity to a railing.

I'm looking straight down and her feet are under the staircase. That, to me, She didn't fall over the rail. He was the one who said, this is not sitting well with me. There was very significant abrasion on her jawline in a kind of V-shaped pattern. There was a separate abrasion just below that on her neck. What you're saying is they were suspecting pretty quickly

that she might have been strangled. Certainly it was an option. What did you learn about this family? We learned it was a tight family. It was a tight community. I'm telling you straight to your face, you're not being completely honest with us. That it was not all roses and rainbows in that house. Aaron Moriarty reports Beverly Hills 911. Any unattended death like this, we will get called out to.

Some are clearly more suspicious than others. When Beverly Hills police detective Mark Schwartz got the call about an unintended death at the home of 67-year-old widow Violet Yacobi, he didn't know what he would find. This one gradually got more and more suspicious. It was October 10th, 2017. Violet son Daniel and daughter Dina had told police they found their mother on the marble entryway below the staircase around 7,000. 30 p.m. Responding officers initially suspected it might be a suicide. The information that we got very early on about possibly being depressed and possibly falling

over the railing, those are the things that we showed up with. Her dog had just died. She had canceled her cleaning lady. Violet had just marked the one-year anniversary of her husband's death. But when Detective George Elwell, now retired, arrived at the home, he didn't She didn't think she could have gone over the railing. In this crime scene photo, 48 hours rendered the body as a graphic to show the position. Is that a pretty good description? Yes. And so what am I seeing there?

Where the body was laying at the time I got there. Alwell says that when he looked down from the top of the railing, he was surprised that he couldn't see Violet's feet, which were under the staircase. I'm not an expert in physics, but anything that's going to go over that, that has any kind of weight to it, the momentum's going to take it away from the staircase a little bit. Elwell, an old-school investigator with the background in burglaries, also had an eye for more tactile evidence, like the dust that's still covered much of the staircase railing. Up and down the entire railing, there's dust patterns. but for a person of her stature,

there's absolutely no disturbance on that railing that would have indicated anything had gone over. When he got to the station, he pulled me aside, and he said, we got to write a search warrant. I'm not comfortable with what I'm seeing. Around midnight, the two detectives went to the scene together, and they asked Daniel and Dina to come for a walkthrough. There were no signs of a burglary.

Her wallet was there, her checkbook, cell phone, iPad, anything that would have been stolen was still there. And they soon became more convinced that Violet had not gone over the railing. We had Dina stand next to the railing. I asked her how tall the mother was. She told me. She said she's shorter than me. Violet was about five feet tall and the railing was just over three feet, more than half her heart. height. The railing would come up too high. If she wanted to climb over, the dust would have been completely damaged.

For her to accidentally fall over was just not reasonable. Raising more questions were the injuries on Violet's face and neck. There was some sort of mark under her chin here. There's unnatural marks on her neck. It also appeared Violet had vomited. And what does that say to you guys? To me, there was a couple of different possibilities. Did she choke?

Was she strangled? During an initial interview with two other detectives, Daniel had also wondered if his mother had been strangled. Let me ask you something, though. I mean, I don't know, I just, can get my head around? Like, I saw bruising everywhere, right? And I saw a bruise right here. So, it looks like she was dreaming.

I at that point had not ruled out this idea that she had hung herself. Yet there were no obvious signs like a rope or a belt near Violet's body. And Violet's family members rejected the idea that she would take her life. Daniel had described seeing her just two days earlier at a family dinner.

And we were sitting right next to each other, to each other and everything was fine. When Detective Schwartz learned that Violet was part of a close-knit Russian Jewish community, where suicide is taboo, it occurred to him that her children might be covering it up. I'm a little more in tune with the Jewish community, so I was thinking how would it be looked at in the... And so you thought maybe the kids might hide? Right, right. Could it be an insurance thing? Could it be a shame thing? Later that day, they talked about oddities they both had observed in Daniel's behavior.

For Elwell, it was during the walkthrough. Daniel's in the foyer, where the body was found, just moving from side to side. He's looking down. He's crouching. He's touching the tile. And it just didn't sit well with me. You didn't think it could just be a grieving son? No. Trying to figure out why his mother ended up on the floor? No.

It was so animated. It was just like watching a episode of Colombo when he would look for evidence. For Schwartz, it was Daniel's demeanor when they met. Daniel was very eager to help. And what's wrong with that? Nothing. But it was like a nervous energy that he had.

But I mean, all along, Daniel Yacobi is being cooperative. Absolutely. Yes. Your concern may be too cooperative. Yes. They had questions about the initial story that Daniel told to other detectives of how he and his sister had come to meet at their mother's house when he learned that no one had heard from Violet. Apparently, they went there because no one had been able to get a hold of her during the day. I called my sister immediately a few times. Daniel calls his sister, and there's some sort of convoluted story about the keys.

Hey, sis, I can't find my keys anywhere. Do you know where? Do you have your keys to the house? So Daniel's telling Dina, meet me at the house. So we meet exactly at the same time. Didn't sit right. And there were conflicting stories about who had performed CPR. On the 911 call, Daniel told the operator his sister was performing CPR. But when talking to detectives, he said he also had done compression. My sister and I, she did more of the mouth-to-mouth I did the impressions.

Did your brother help with the CPR? No. When Detective Schwartz called Dina, she confirmed that Daniel had not done CPR. George and I said there's only one person that doesn't seem to be forthcoming and doesn't seem genuine. They decided they needed to interview Daniel themselves, especially once they learned that Violet had died the night. of Monday, October 9th, nearly 24 hours before she was found. Based off of miss phone calls, contents in her stomach, we're pretty confident right now that it's the night of the night,

that she dies. And detectives want to know where was Daniel? Initially, it's like an unbelievable explosion of horrible news. The nudes of Violet Yacobi's death stunned and saddened her large circle of friends in Beverly Hills, including Galena Blackman. Who would ever kill Violet? Violet and her husband had long been pillars in their community. Perfect couple. He was a very, very solid doctor.

They were very well known. What was important to pilot? Family, her brothers, her husband, her children. She had the mission of making everybody happy, I think. Her son Daniel was a dentist, and her daughter, Dina, worked in physical therapy. They are the American dream. Immigrant family and were able to create a beautiful life in Beverly Hills. From the outside, it is a tight-knit.

successful family, and that's what we saw initially. But detectives began to take a closer look. On Friday, October 13th, nearly three days after Violet's body was found, the deputy medical examiner completed the autopsy. The official cause of death was asphyxia by neck compression. Strangulation? Yes. Her death was being ruled a homicide.

This was now over. a murder investigation. And detectives asked Daniel to come back for another interview. Any interview at this point forward is voluntary. You're not under arrest. So we know that he is saying he had not seen his mother since Sunday. First time he sees his mother is Tuesday when he discovers the body. So we have that full time frame that we're looking at.

They first asked Daniel to go through the events. of Tuesday, October 10th, and the night he and his sister had arrived at Violet's house. We both get there at the same time. He told them he was in a panic when he walked in and saw her on the floor. And I go there and like in utter shock and, you know, like it's my mom, so I'm like hysterical. He said he hugged his mother's body before starting CPR. I grab her a little bit and just, you know, one hug. And then I start doing chest depression.

But when detectives share with Daniel the results of the autopsy, he didn't seem surprised to learn her death had been ruled a homicide. I can tell you that she has liquor marks on her neck. At this point, she was trying. I'm going to go. I knew it. I had a sense of that. They told him based on the levidity patterns, the way the blood settles in the body after death,

that they suspected Violet's body had been moved shortly after she died. She wasn't lying on her back like that for hours at a time and died. She was moved. They also told him they believed he was hiding something. But you're not getting us to the truth. The story of the body is not lining up, Daniel. He continued talking even when he was asked if he was responsible for his mother's death. Was there any animosity between you and your mom?

Do you ever think about killing him? No. Did you kill him? No. God, this is all. My sister. Detectives decided they needed to lock Daniel into his story about where he was the night Violet died.

What did you do Monday night? Driving home. He had been from Stinglewood. He had consistently told them that on that Monday he worked at his dental office in Englewood, about 12 miles from Beverly Hills, and then drove straight home, which was another six miles from Violet's house. Did you stop at the house? No. On Monday.

No. Positive. Yeah. But each time he was asked to describe his drive home, he seemed stymied by the details. What rock do you take to go up? Because I was, I take, sometimes I go to Beverly Hills. So I did go to Beverly Hills. When?

Oh, I'm, but I didn't go through that street. When we started getting his time frame of Monday, that's where he got uncomfortable. At this point, we don't know he wasn't at Englewood, but his description of how he got home, it was so labored for such a simple question, and he could not give a clear answer. But Daniel was adamant when asked if he was at or near his mother's house Monday night

or any point Tuesday before he reported finding the body. The next day, do you ever come into Beverly? until next day? No. So we're not going to find your car or you any time Tuesday? No. Or Monday night? Monday night?

You're sure about this? Yes. We couldn't call him out on the lie, but we knew he was lying. And I knew he was lying during a time frame that was very significant in this case. Whatever he was holding in, it was for a reason. reason. Detective Alwell told Daniel, they suspected he had been alone inside his mother's home before going over with his sister on Tuesday night. I see right through you. I can read you. It's right in there bugging a crap out of you. But Daniel pushed back and said the detectives had it all

wrong. I'm telling you everything I know. You think this is easy for me? My mom just died. There's nobody closer in this world than my mom. Nobody. And there was something else. He had told detectives he had a great relationship with his mom, saying they talked and texted on a regular basis. I text her baby pictures all the time and how are you, blah, blah, blah. But when Detective Schwartz looked at Daniel's phone,

the last photo he had sent his mom was a month earlier. It's been wrong. And it wasn't a picture of his. baby but of his bank account. Will you have financial problems? No. We're just always, like, we're very open about it, you know? At this point, I found that to be significant.

By that Friday, he's our suspect. No, no doubt about it. I think a lot of people, when they hear the name Beverly Hills, they think of movie stars. No, that's not Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills is very, very reachable. You can drive and you see the homes. Moor Stars live in areas where they cannot be reached.

That wasn't the case with Violet Yacobi, says Galena Blackman. She liked to impress. Blackman, a Beverly Hills realtor for more than 36 years, specializes in luxury properties like Violets. Galena was asked to appraise the home while Violet's husband was still alive. At that time, I said, I think it's a time. said, I think it's an $8 million house. When interviewing Violet son Daniel just days following her death on Friday, October 13th,

Detective Schwartz wondered if money was a motive. Who gets the house? I do. How much is that house worth? A lot. Daniel stood to inherit half of the family fortune. Do you mean discussion about the will or the money or where the house is going, anything like that? It's all to me.

It's all to you and to my sister. Detectives now had a murder, a potential motive, and a suspect. But after more than two hours of questioning, they let Daniel go. We can't arrest him. Why not? We don't have the evidence. Dino was ruled out as a suspect. But they needed to shore up their case and dig deeper into Daniel's finances and his relationship.

relationship with his mother. This is not like a business deal gone bad. There's a complexity to that that we had to understand. Daniel, who had grown up in Beverly Hills, was now living near Tony Bel-Air. His wife was also a medical professional, and their baby was five months old. Everything in his life was wonderful. Yeah, good boy. Dean Summers got to know Daniel casually.

Dean's brother was Daniel's neighbor. neighbor. Daniel lived right next door. He was marketed as the dentist to the stars. First time you met Daniel, what were your impressions? Nice guy. So when you wanted to be friends with? Somebody that I could potentially be friends with, just a nice, normal guy that had his act together. But it may have been just an act, say, investigators. I think resentment was one of the things that we started to learn pretty quick, that he had a lot of resentment towards his parents, that he had to live a certain life and be a certain way. Dean Summers says Daniel had later confided in him about those feelings.

It was the last time Dean saw him, sometime in the year before Violet's death. He was not talkative. He just looked very unhappy. And I said, Daniel, what's wrong? And that's when he says Daniel unloaded a laundry list of complaints. I hate my life, I hate being married, I hate what I'm doing for a living, I hate my mother, I hate my father. Those were his words, and I was just taking it back. He says Daniel complained about how both his parents, his mother in particular, had controlled every aspect of his life, even pushed him into dentistry and marriage.

I asked him, why don't you just break free of it and live your own life? He goes, I can't. I'm not making any money. They basically help support me. He felt he was stuck because he's financially dependent on them. Although Daniel had at one point owned his own practice, he now worked for other dentists. Even though he said he hated his parents, did you get any sense that he might hurt his mother?

Never, never. But according to investigators, after his father died, Daniel's relationship with his mother and access to the family fortune became more complicated. They had received a tip early on from Dr. Elena Spector, who was Violet's sister-in-law at the time. She tells me that Daniel has had an obsession with money and control of the estate for some time, that Violet would confide in her.

Detectives went back and reviewed the video of their interview with Daniel on October 13th. During a period when Daniel was left alone, he had contacted his sister. We leave the interview room, but it's still recording. He says Daniel didn't realize that his sister was with other detectives in another room. Daniel starts sending texts to the sister about, hey, just remember, I was doing CPR too. Daniel wrote, I remember we both doing chest compressions,

one at a time, but both of us, just to keep the story straight. The sister tells the detectives, you know what, he's sending me some weird text, so she calls him. And again, these are being recorded separately, but you can hear it all. What is this about chest compressions?

When Dina called Daniel, she told him that she had done the compression, No, no, no, Danik, I did the chest compressions and you called 911. No, but you called me, I too. No, no, you didn't. Da, da, da, da, da. Daniel, speaking in Russian, insisted he had as well. Daniel is trying to put himself on the body.

Because he's concerned there's DNA on the body? He's concerned there's DNA. That's exactly it. Detectives were convinced that Daniel was likely lying about where he was on Monday on Monday, on October 9th, the night Violet died, but they couldn't prove it until they received his cell phone records the following week. The cell phone records blew his story out of the water. He wasn't in Eaglewood at all. No. On that day.

The phone records placed Daniel in Beverly Hills and not just driving through. And not only that, police had obtained footage from Nest security cameras inside Daniel's house that showed him arriving home around 8 p.m. that night. Later, they saw this man typing at a computer. They were surprised to learn who it was. We didn't know Daniel was bald. And here he is, with his hairpiece at the same computer, 40 minutes after he came home. You don't know what he's typing until we get the results from the computer search from our forensic team. And he does a search of latent fingerprints on human skin. And that's when I knew. It's time. We got to go arrest him.

He killed his mother. And he did it for the money. On my new podcast, on par with Maury Povich, we're getting down to the truth behind the names that you know and love. Unfiltered conversations with legends like Leanne Morgan, Kathy Griffin, Ricky Lake, to find out when they feel the most on par. We're breaking it down with Don Lemon, Aaron Parnas,

Lamani Jones, laughing it up with Josh Johnson, Dan Soder, many more. You know, the results are in. conversations are always on par. So follow and listen to On Par wherever you get your podcasts. I was getting ready to retire. I wanted to be the one to walk up and put the handcuffs on him. On February 12, 2018, four months after launching the investigation into Violet Yacobie's death, Beverly Hills detectives, George Alwell and Mark Schwartz, arrested Daniel Yacobi at home for his mother's murder. What was his reaction? Not shock.

Like he just sunk into himself. And the first thing he asked me, he says, can I get my toupee? Daniel Yacobi was denied bail and would spend more than seven years in jail due to court delays before finally going on trial for murder in July 2025. Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Shane Michael says the evidence shows that Yacobi strangled his mother for financial gain. It's a very personal type of crime. You have to physically squeeze the life out of someone.

That's what strangulation is. According to the autopsy report, Violet had patiquia around her eyes and face, the rupturing of small blood vessels, a classic sign of strangulation. There was also very significant abrasion on her jawline. There was a separate abrasion just below that. on her neck.

We're talking about a line around here. Yeah. But at trial, the defense presented a very different theory. The truth is that she wasn't killed, period, full stop, end of story. Dr. Larry Sims is a forensic pathologist and a former medical examiner in Las Vegas, Nevada, who says he has conducted about 10,000 autopsies. You don't believe that Violet Yacobi was murdered? No.

But her son went on trial. for her murder. That is correct. And I testified at that trial. Dr. Sims rejected Violet's official cause of death. There was no evidence that she was strangled, period. None. None.

Dr. Simms says the patiquia were just sunspots, and those marks across Violet's neck, skin folds. What's more, he says, the deputy medical examiner missed injuries that pointed away from strangulation and toward a fall from the second-story landing. This is where the fracture is right here. Violet had a spinal fracture that was not mentioned anywhere in the autopsy report. Are you at all concerned that the autopsy that you were relying on for this prosecution had errors in it? That's a pretty big mistake, isn't it?

Yeah, well, when we talk about errors, I think that was an omission. That wasn't the only omission. The same deputy medical examiner also failed to take note of rib fractures, including several on her back. He didn't testify at trial, and the prosecution tried to address the problem, pointing out that the injuries had been photographed and that none of them contributed to violence death. The medical examiner's office declined a comment for this story. I've handled many homicide cases.

I've never seen an autopsy with so many mistakes. And that was a deeply troubling part for the prosecution to have to explain. Julie Rendellman, a criminal defense attorney and former homicide prosecutor, is a 48-hour consultant who reviewed the case. It left, in a sense, open for an expert on the defense side to kind of jump in and say, these mistakes are so overwhelming. we have to start to question everything about this case. Daniel Yacobi's trial became a battle of experts,

with five doctors testifying about how and why Violet died, including a new deputy medical examiner brought in by prosecutors who agreed with the finding of asphyxia due to neck compression. But Dr. Sins told the jury that he believed Violet's death was instead, caused by a rare mass of blood vessels in her brain stem called an arteriovenous malformation or AVM. This is an arterovenous malformation here that's in the fourth ventricle. This is what you think contributed to Violet's death.

Yes. He says he spotted the problem in this microscopic slide of Violet's brain stem. According to Dr. Sims, the AVM had hemorrhage, causing Violet to. to become disoriented. She's stumbling around and she slammed into the railing before she went over the railing. The defense presented a photo superimposing the abrasion against a star-shaped design on the railing.

Dr. Sim says it's a match. This is a very unusual patterned injury and fits it perfectly. Is this at all possible that Violet could have died because of a medical event and fallen down? For me, no. I went up and down every inch of that railing, and there's absolutely no physical evidence

to show that anything went over that railing. I look at the body. Those are things that are hard evidence that speaks to me. Prosecutor Shane Michael argued that Dr. Sims simply cherry-picked the evidence and disputes his theory about the cause of that odd abrasion. He didn't know the dimensions of the star. If you were to fall and smack your chin on a piece of metal, you would not expect an

abrasion. You'd expect to see bruising. You might see a cut bleeding. And he says Violet had osteopenia, a weakening of the bones. The 67-year-old woman would have had to have been a long. on the floor with her back arched like in a, you know, yoga class, cobra pose to get her chin flush with that. What do you think then caused that V mark on her chin?

Her son's strangling her. The prosecution's radiologists also testified that if Violet had fallen from the railing, he would expect to see more catastrophic injuries. There was no skull fracture. There were no fractures in her arms. There were no fractures in her legs. There was no pelvic fracture. There was nothing on the floor that would be consistent with falling from approximately 13 feet onto a marbled floor.

The other doctors testified there was no brain hemorrhage, nor did they say they saw an AVM, including the neuropathologists, who created the very slides Dr. Sims used to form his opinion. The fact that you have dueling medical experts who can't agree on how Violet Yucoby died, doesn't that add up to reasonable doubt? It can. If you can convince the jury to believe that she died of natural causes, then Daniel Yucoby's not guilty of a crime. Prosecutor Shamed Michael used the trail of evidence left by Daniel Yacobi to show that his relationship with his mother had reached a breaking point in October 2017, and that greed for the family fortune

worth an estimated $13 million had fueled his plot to kill Violet. Do you believe that he killed his mother because he wanted his inheritance early? Yes. The defense disputes that. Yacobi was in the process of buying a new dental practice and had recently secured a million

dollar loan. Still, his now ex-wife admitted in court they had lived beyond their means, and Shane Michael pointed to Yacobi's own statements. He was regularly talking about his need for money and need to make more money. A family friend testified that Yacobi had asked him about inheritance tax a couple of weeks before Violet's death. The ideation and thought of killing his mom had been building. The prosecutor also presented a timeline of Yacobi's online searches, going back to August of 2017, that he said revealed Yacobi's plan to murder his mother and stage the scene. He was searching unexplained deaths, death statistics, things like chokeholds, bruises caused

by chokeholds, falling downstairs. He was trying to figure out a way to deflect any suspicion that might be pointing toward him. A particular interest in the prosecution was a YouTube video. This is the rear naked choke. Demonstrating what's known as a rear naked chokehold. They played it at trial. It's certainly the kind of chokehold that could cause abrasions similar to the ones that we saw in the photos of Mrs. Jacoby. The prosecution theorized that Yacobi caused the spinal and rib fractures while choking Violet from behind.

If he's choking her from behind, you assume he's applying as much pressure as he can, if he's lifting her off the ground, if he's got his hip in her back, there are any number of ways that you could apply force to her back. Do you believe that is how Violet Yacobi died that her son actually actually, used his own arm to kill his mother? I do. Yes. And detectives Elwell and Schwartz say, Yacobi's DNA under Violet's fingernails proves it.

Did you notice any kind of scratches on him? We weren't looking. The DNA's under her fingernails for a reason. He's asking about DNA for a reason. He did the research. It was calculated. Detective Schwartz had done some calculations of his own, using data from Daniel's iPhone Facebook account,

and he says it places Daniel at his mother's house at the time he believed she was killed. One of the things that came back in the Facebook records were latitude-longitude coordinates. Schwartz used those coordinates to pull video from the city's closed-circuit cameras and security cameras from Violet's neighbors. We were able to track his movement Through the whole day, and to the next day.

That's Daniel Yucobi's white jaguar in Beverly Hills traffic on October 9th, before the prosecutor describes him stalking his mother's house. He was driving up and down the street at least two or three times. Around four o'clock, Daniel Yacobi's car appeared on the next door neighbor's security footage. A few minutes later, it popped. up again on another home security camera in the alley behind Violet's house. Almost like a shark. He's circling the block and he's going down the alley. He pulls up right around here just behind the residence and for whatever reason he stops and then he slowly

backs up. He never gets out and he's not moving the garbage cans back there. He is in the car, presumably looking into the back of his mother's property. Then he drives away, but Facebook coordinates place him at his mother's house from 6.39 p.m. until 7.48 that night. How he entered the house? Don't know. Don't know if he rang the doorbell. Don't know if he snuck around the side. What the data establishes, according to the prosecution, is that Violet was alive when Daniel arrived, And by the time he left, she was dead.

Afterwards, Yacobi drove straight home. Now we have his nest camera. And almost to the second, you're seeing him walk through the door. Less than 45 minutes after walking in, he was typing in that search for latent fingerprints on human skin. 22 plus hours before his mother's body was located, He was already thinking about what evidence might have been left behind at the scene. It's evidence of consciousness of guilt, says Shane Michael,

and Yacobie would do it again the following morning when he went back to the scene for less than four minutes and then drove back home. At around 1 o'clock, he contacted a financial investor via Skype. If I get a mill, I'd want you to manage it. A million dollars. In six hours before his mother's body is found, his belief was that he was coming into money. In late August 2025, after three weeks of testimony and nearly eight years after Violet's death,

the jury got the case. If they come back not guilty on some level, this guy has gotten away with murder. After deliberating for nearly five and a half hours over two days, the jury was unanimous, guilty of first-degree murder for financial gain. It's a judgment that carries a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole. This broke that family apart. Very sad that it ended that way. I feel for violet and I feel for Daniel.

You feel for Daniel too? I feel for him, yeah. What in the world made him do that? When beloved family patriarch, Gary Ferris went missing, his family looked everywhere on their property until they came across something horrifying. It's a homicide. Absolutely. The blame game in this family went round and round. This is Blood is Thicker, the Ferris Wheel.

I don't see how anyone can look at this story and think they were happy. Binge the full series Blood is Thicker, the Ferris Wheel, on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.