Anatomy of Murder - John Doe Duffel Bag (Mohamed Gebeli, Isaac Kadare, Rahmatollah Vahidipour)

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Three killings with a mixture of gunshot and stab wounds drive hundreds of detectives to hunt down a serial killer. His home? A creepy abandoned mansion. His trademark? A duffel bag.For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/. Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

How is the perpetrator just fleeing from these scenes? It's like, okay, you can walk into a store and maybe go undetected because you're just walking in as a customer and no one's going to pay attention to you. But now you're shooting somebody. So how is it that the perpetrator is getting in and out of these crime scenes with no one seeing him, just disappearing into the night. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasika Nikolazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.

And this is Anatomy of Murder. In most of the homicides we cover here on AOM, there is a common denominator. Investigators are able to uncover a possible motive to the murder or a reason why the killer decided to take a life. And knowing those critical details can be crucial in IDing a suspect. But then there are those cases that the murder just doesn't make sense whatsoever. For today's case, we spoke with Melissa Carvajal, and I have to give a full disclosure here. She's someone I know very well. I got to know her as a young ADA when she first came to homicide many years ago, and I watched her grow in her skill set, but at the end of the day, she also became a close friend.

Anastika is the best. She made me want to continue in my career at the DA's office. She made me want to have her job. And have my job she did. When I left the Brooklyn DA's office in 2017, Melissa took over not only my office, but my position as well, and that made me happy. Our story begins on July 6th, 2012,

at a shop on Fifth Avenue in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, New York. And if you've been to New York, you've probably been by a shop like this. It was a clothing shop. It's the type that has the mannequins in front, maybe dressed in a men's suit with some high-end women's high-heeled shoes next door on the floor. And across the ceiling is that bold red banner, 50% off. In the back is where you'd often see the store owner,

Mohamed Jebeli, attending to a customer while his television set played in the background. But on that night, after the store had closed, one of Mohamed's friends was walking by and noticed that something was off with the store. And he sees a light on in Jebeli's store. And so he thinks it's kind of odd because Muhammad Jebeli shouldn't have been there so late. Concerned, the man enters the store to find his friend Muhammad on the floor, not breathing, with a gunshot wound to his neck.

Before we get to the crime scene, let's talk a bit about Mohamed Jebeli. He had owned that store for a long time, and he was a fixture in the neighborhood. All the store owners there knew him, just like I'm sure he knew all of them. It was a close-knit area. He was a hardworking, 65-year-old man who had come to this country in hopes of living the American dream. He had been in the country for a long time. He had raised his kids here. He was an immigrant from Egypt. He was a successful businessman who was also close with his family, in particular his son. His family worked with him in the store and he cared for that store and he cared for the family. You know, always every homicide case, you put your head down, you think about the victim and

all those that must have been impacted by the crime. But there's always like an extra something when I hear about someone who came to this country to try to find a better life for themselves, but usually even more for their family. And in the end, they lost their life while they were here. Now it was time for crime scene investigators to get to work. And just based on the location of the homicide, here we have a store, the first theory would obviously be, was this a robbery gone wrong?

Even though the cash register wasn't messed with and it didn't seem that there was, his wallet was still there, we thought it might have just been a robbery that got foiled. Someone went in, attempted to rob him, and either he fought back and they got spooked or they heard a car or they heard some type of noise and it spooked them and they ran out. One of the first steps for investigators is going to be to try to find witnesses or any surveillance footage there might be of the killer. But remember, this is Brooklyn. It's not a quiet residential area with just a couple passing cars or people.

This is a busy commercial area. So to narrow down the who, they needed to focus on the when. When was Muhammad Jebeli gunned down? Investigators did begin to develop the beginnings of a timeline. They knew from looking at phone records that Muhammad had spoken to his

son at 6.15 p.m. And he had a register receipt around the same time, so we knew he had some type of customer. And that was the last time that anybody heard or saw Mr. Jubelli again. So even though his friend found him at closer to 11 o'clock, you know, he could have been killed anywhere between around 6.15 at night to 11 o'clock. There were absolutely known witnesses, so no one knows the exact time of the crime. Nobody heard a gunshot. Nobody saw someone walking in and out of the store. So next, they're going to look for a different type of eyes to look and see if there's any video surveillance, any video evidence of the crime anywhere nearby. But here, that ended up being strike two. You know, we also know that in the beginning of the investigation, several threads or theories emerge.

But police began to question if the killer targeted Mohammed because of who he was. Mr. Jubeli had a tenant upstairs from his store, and there was a mezuzah that belonged to the neighbor upstairs, but it was the same entryway into Mr. Jubeli's store. So initially we were thinking, oh, maybe this is some type of hate crime that the perpetrator thought that Mr. Jubeli was Jewish. And that is something that, of course, we're always looking at. And especially at a time within these years, we have seen upticks, unfortunately, a different type of bias crimes. That's always something that police and investigators will be particularly

careful to watch, because if it happens once, it just might happen again. But my question would be, were there other indicators that point in that direction? Any threats, any incidents with customers that maybe another customer may have witnessed? Anything that may have been said to the owner based on his ethnicity? I mean, I would really want to dig into that before I'm really ready to put my finger on that being a bias-based crime. And that was going to be the big question that Melissa was going to be tasked with. So at that time, I was the deputy bureau chief in the Homicide Bureau, and every murder that happened in Brooklyn, I was in some way informed of.

So investigators are left with no witnesses, no cameras, really no leads. But the heat was on to get answers for this family, but also for the community at large. But things were about to get much hotter. That was soon going to turn all this into a code red. A month later, on August 2nd, police respond to another homicide at another store. And the similarities between the two cases come into focus.

So then on August 2nd, Isaac Qadari is in his 99-cent store. He was 59 years old, again a family man. His wife and his four children all worked at the store with him. And on that day, he was found shot and killed in his 99-cent store. He's also shot with a.22. There's no surveillance cameras. There's no eyewitnesses. There's no what we call ear witnesses

that even heard a gunshot. But there was something different about this murder from the murder of Muhammad Jebeli. There's bleach poured all over him, and he's covered with some other cardboard boxes on top of him. Now, Anasika, we have talked about a body being covered after a homicide and why that could be significant. When a body's covered, we've both seen it as a telltale sign that the killer knew the victim and had at least some level of guilt.

But it's also often a sign of this, of a rudimentary, simplistic attempt to try to hide the body. None that is ever going to last very long, but just in that panic moment that they almost like here throw something on top of someone, hoping that they won't be as noticeable, at least not as quickly. When you went to the 99 cent store, the entire front was glass. So it appeared to me, and I think it also appeared to the NYPD investigators, that the reason that Mr. Qadari's body was covered was that, so if you were just passing by the store, you would just see like a pile of boxes inside of the aisle. You wouldn't be able to see to Qadari's body underneath them. You may be asking, so what about the bleach? In this case, what I believed is that they were in close contact

and that the perpetrator most likely got blood on his shoes and he most likely used the bleach, which was right there in the aisle on the bottom shelf. So out of convenience to try and get any type of blood off of his shoes, he probably used it in order to clean his shoes. So the police are going to have to go back in time to earlier in Isaac Qadari's day to figure out what exactly it is that they believed happened to see if that can start to put the pieces together to figure out the what, and most importantly right now, the who. In this fresh homicide, investigators sit down with members of Isaac's family to develop that

timeline. They learned that the victim was at the store with his wife and two of his four children. Then his wife and his two children left to go home just before closing to make dinner. When Isaac didn't come home to eat, they were immediately concerned and tried to call him, but there was no answer. And so they immediately knew something was wrong. And you could tell this by their phone records that we got later. As soon as he doesn't come home for dinner, they're calling him and trying to find out why he's delayed. So his time of death is a lot closer to when his family last saw him. I think we had only like an hour difference between when they left him to go home and make dinner and when he was supposed to arrive.

It was about an hour later that Isaac's body was found. There was a man and woman that happened to be walking by and when they saw him, they placed a call to police. And it was soon after that, that his family, the same ones that had been working at the store with him only earlier to go back and make dinner, came back looking for him. And that's when they walked into not only what happened, but an actual bloody

scene. Unlike the murder of Muhammad Chebeli, which was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, this was in Bensonhurst. And here's something about those two neighborhoods. There are a lot of similarities, and people that live there might say, no, no, my neighbor is very different. But certainly on their face are similar. But more importantly, they are close to one another within Brooklyn. But then you start to wonder, okay, similar neighborhoods, nearby, shopkeepers, the method of killing. Both victims were, as you said, Middle Eastern descent, check. Both were shot. Muhammad was stabbed. Isaac's throat was slit. I'd say that's a check too. Police had found shell casings from a.22 caliber weapon at both crime scenes. Those shell casings were sent

off to ballistics for testing. And yes, it came back to a match. These two homicides are connected by the same weapon. The question starts to become, is this the work of a serial killer? So at that point, when the murder weapon was the same, we're thinking we have a serial killer on our hands. And the thing with serial killings is that, first of all, it has to be three. But there is this period of time, it's often called this cooling off period. Well, they're both shot, but now there is the one that has their throats lit. So is it the same person that is kind of upping what they're doing as they're getting more confident?

When you have a serial killer, you're always nervous when is the next time he's going to strike. However, if there's going to be three, it had to start to two. And the police don't want to give whoever did this, the person or people, the opportunity to strike again. Police do decide to reach out to the media to alert the public that there may be danger from a potential serial killer. Tensions were high, especially in the immigrant community here in Brooklyn. So you had a lot more anxiety because now you feel that there's going to be more. There's a pattern here. If we're staying with the theory of a potential serial killer, there are case studies which point towards killers using a common reason or connection to the victims. As an example, color of a victim's hair,

as in the Son of Sam murders. Almost all of David Berkowitz's victims were women with brunette hair, and most of them had a length which was considered to be long. Now, you may know I sat down for a rare interview with Berkowitz in prison several years ago. In fact, I'll post a picture of my Instagram at Weinberger Media to give you a look at that interview. Back to our Brooklyn homicides, how a serial killer may be driven by some commonalities.

Investigators in these murders were looking at one more fact. On the night of each of the killings, the moon was at half moon phase. And that literally meant that people said, well, okay, you could only see half of the moon on both these nights. So was there something about that was making this killer strike?

But you know, here's the thing about serial killers and serial murders in particular. Fortunately, they account for less than 1% of all murders in a given year. But you're always looking at motive because if it is someone who is committing these multiple homicides with a MO or modus operandi, there's going to be something that connects them to the person that's committing it. And so the motives for serial killers are usually sexually based, it's going to be anger, thrill, financial gain, or they're an attention seeker. So here the police, they don't have a lot

to go on, but if they can decipher the motive, it might put them on the track to try to figure out who is responsible. Mr. Gibelli and Mr. Qadari, were they related in some way? Was there any people in their lives that they would have both crossed paths with? You know, they're both business owners. So do they have the same electrician? Do they have the same plumber? Do they have the same person that's doing their payroll? Like, is there any person that is consistent between the two? Over the next few months, investigators continue to knock on doors and hope press attention would bring new leads. It's quiet in September. It's quiet in October.

And then on November 16th, he struck again. Let's turn to somebody else. Ramatulavai Dapur was a 78-year-old shop owner in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He owned a clothing store. He's been working in the same store for like over 50 years. He's from Nassau County. He's again married. He has children.

He has grandchildren. This is a man who had his schedule down pat. Seven days a week, he would take the train from Nassau County to Flatbush to work at his store. And every night, his daughter would pick him up from the same train station at the same time. And that was his routine for 50 years. But on November 16, he was nowhere to be found. In the days leading up to November 16th, New York City had a big snowstorm.

Plows had cleared the roads and the train stations, pushing the snow into mounds. And so that night, like every other night, she goes to pick up her dad from the Long Island Railroad. And so when her dad didn't get off the train and meet her at the exact same spot that he met her at, you know, countless times before, she started circling the block. And she wondered, perhaps he fell trying to walk around that snow,

or was he even confused about where to meet her? So she started to think, oh my God, what if my dad had a heart attack or something, you know, physically went wrong with him and he fell, and now he's like in a mound of snow, you know. So she started driving really slow past all the snow banks. And she's not able to see him because it's dark out. So she's circling, circling. And to the point where as soon as she gets home and she can't find her dad,

she's already hysterical. And she calls the police. Once the Nassau County police officers are beginning to do the missing persons report, obviously there's things that they're going to check. They're going to check potentially where the victim works and what transportation the victim was on and could he have been injured on the way to or from work. And remember that the store was in Nassau County.

It was in Brooklyn, which is part of New York City. So it's NYPD detectives that are actually checking the store and ultimately relayed what was found to his daughter. But I'll always remember the detective told me that when he pulled into the house, he was shocked because there was a cop car there. When the detectives from the NYPD asked, like, why are you there? He was like, you know, the daughter goes to pick him up and he hasn't come home and he's 78. You know, there's a chance that he's just wandering around aimlessly and it's freezing out. And obviously the detectives have to tell both the police officer and then the family that he was murdered at 78 years old in his store. Three store owners shot and killed. Three families mourning the loss of the head of their households.

All left for work every day. Their family likely had concerns, but not this. And moving to the crime scene for a moment, Ramatula's death is a little different than the other murders. First of all, he's shot three times, and then it looks like he's either hit or punched in the face, or maybe he had suffered that injury when he had fallen to the floor. But also the area of the murder is a little bit different. It's on Flatbush Avenue, which is a heavily trafficked area in Brooklyn. I look at it as one of the main commercial arteries that runs through Brooklyn. So now your third victim, Ramitola Vadapur, is killed in a more public area. There is no mass transportation there.

There is an Uber stand that's there. There's people that are always walking up and down Flatbush Avenue. So besides the fact that you now have three innocent men that are killed, you're now really on edge because you're like, the killer is getting more brazen because now he's going from these more quiet communities to a more public area. And now you're thinking, OK, what's going to happen next? Because it's going to happen next. The most significant difference in these cases may, in fact, lead to the biggest break in this case.

This busy area has surveillance cameras. Each and every camera, each frame of videotape would be collected, scrubbed by investigators. And it was a completely arduous process. But, you know, things were a bolder blessing than a curse, because now you have hundreds of hours of video surveillance to go through. So while people are used to hearing that a task force was formed, in this case, it was over 100 detectives big, and there was many other people working in between. So all these detectives, investigators, foot patrol officers, they are canvassing the area trying to retrieve

any and all video footage that there might be from video surveillance. Going to every cab stand, going to all the Uber stands, going to like the MTA to see if buses were passing and there's video surveillance on those buses. You are expanding, you know, much more. You're going, you know, 10 blocks to the left, 10 blocks to the right, 10 blocks north, 10 blocks south to try and find out how is the perpetrator just fleeing from these scenes? Is he jumping on a subway? Is he coming in a vehicle? Is he taking a cab? It's like, okay, you can walk into a store and maybe go undetected because you're just walking in as a customer and no one's going to pay attention to you. But now you're shooting somebody.

So there's a gunshot, which people should hear. And most people run away from a crime scene. So how is it that the perpetrator is getting in and out of these crime scenes with no one seeing him, which is disappearing into the night? You know, if it was just a few tapes, Anastasia, it probably would just be case investigators. But when it's hours upon hours, it is all hands on deck. You know, one of these, you take these boxes, I'll take those. You know, with the newer systems, it's a bit easier now because most of them work off of motion triggers.

But the old systems had to go through every inch of tape. And that is an arduous process. And having sat through, gosh, countless hours myself and seen so many detectives do so much more, just body after body of law enforcement sitting next to one another, just going through hours and hours of tape, just looking for something. This isn't looking for a needle in a haystack. This is looking through a haystack for something. You don't know what it is. There's no eyewitnesses. There's no description. Police are looking for anything, quote unquote, suspicious. But that could be so

many things. You're just watching people walk left to right, left to right, left to right. Unless somebody is like sprinting away, running, you know, your eye has to catch something that just looks suspicious. And, you know, hundreds of detectives were doing that for hundreds of hours. Then two images catch their attention. Could this be the break they were waiting for? So there actually was two people that were running were running away from a different crime. They actually did steal something and they were running away and tossing their jackets, but it had nothing to do with Mr. Vatafor's crime scene.

I could just imagine the deflating feeling that brought. But all of the patients, all of that grunt work would end up paying big dividends. There was a detective who was like, oh, this is interesting. There is a man and he's carrying a duffel bag. A duffel bag. That's pretty significant if you're thinking about potentially evidence of a robbery, things you could have put in there, changing your clothes. Or how about maybe a weapon?

That kind of clicked in his head like, ah, maybe that's how someone is getting the gun in and out of these crime scenes going undetected. Because based on the ballistics, we knew that it was a rifle. No one's walking through the street just like holding a rifle up, you know, like they're in the military. So he saw this person with a duffel bag, you know, light bulb went off like, ah, this is how he's getting this rifle in and out of these stores. He's carrying this large bag. So you have a guy who's acting as we call hinky at that very moment. my eyes are on him. So you could tell it was a white male.

You could tell he had a mustache. You could tell he had on like a long trench coat. They see this person that captures their attention. He's going from store to store. And at one point, they see him with a duffel bag. But then from another video surveillance, he stops. And he starts like scraping something off of the bottom of his sneaker. Like those light posts that are on those cement blocks, that's what he kind of uses to get his foot up. But then all of a sudden it looks like he's scraping something off the bottom of his

shoe. You know, you don't know if it's from an animal or a piece of gum, or in this case, something much more sinister. But what was odd is that he had this duffel bag. He was coming from the vicinity of the Vatafor murder. And you think to yourself, did he have blood on his shoe? Is that what he's wiping off? You know, when you picture a bad guy in a movie and here's this guy sulking on a street with a black trench coat and a black duffel bag walking sort of slowly. He's not running away. He's not fleeing.

He's just walking methodically down the street and trying to discard something from the bottom of his feet. And then they went back and they pulled, you know, video surveillance from, again, a wider range from the Isaac Qadari murder. And lo and behold, we see a figure and you can tell he's holding a bag. And so putting those two pieces together, we're like, we have our guy. But also a very important fact is there is a timestamp of when that specific camera caught that image. And obviously the best way to build your movements is to sync potentially other cameras in the area.

Could they get a better look at their target? Perhaps a useful enough look to ID him. So they immediately went to the press and they put his picture out. And what they did was they put out a bunch of pictures. And only in New York fashion, right? They come up with a really great media name for this guy. They called him John Doe Duffelbag. Soon after this media blitz, police received several tips about J.D. Duffelbag, and they came up with a name, Sal Peron.

So the question is, who is Sal Peron and where can police find him? So we do some checks and we see that there's a Sal Peron that lives in Staten Island. So Sal Peron was of Italian descent. He had been married. He had a very tumultuous relationship with his wife. And he had one daughter who he seemed to be estranged from. He had formerly been a successful women's clothing salesman, but his business

was taking a hit. And he now had no money left. He had a prior DWI, so he does have a mugshot. And when they compare his mugshot with the image in the video, they confirm it is the same man. How does Sal Peron know these three men that during the investigation we couldn't tie together at all? So now you have to remember,

the only evidence that we have at this point is we do know that the murder weapon is the same, but we don't have the murder weapon. And we don't have any eyewitnesses. We don't have any earwitnesses. We just have this man with a duffel bag leaving the vicinity of the third crime scene. It's not like we see him walking out of that, of course, door. We don't have anything to go on at that point. One of the things that's odd is that he's from Staten Island and he's killing people in Brooklyn. And here's the thing, even if they have probable cause to arrest, they certainly have the right to detain. Then it's this race to get in front of the grand jury. Do they have enough evidence? We had no forensics at the crime scene other than

that piece of ballistics. We didn't have a fingerprint that we could go on. We didn't have any DNA that was going to be conclusive, like, oh, this is our killer. So once we scoop up Peron, what are we presenting to a grand jury other than our theory that we think there's a rifle in a duffel bag of a man that's walking calmly down the street and then wipes his foot off on a cement pole? Police decide to drive out to Staten Island to do a surveillance on Sal Perron's home. And when they pull up, a lot of big red flags were popping up. He lives in probably the creepiest house in Staten Island. The mansion is in complete disarray. It looks like he started about 150 home improvement projects

and never finished them. You know, looking at photos, it looked like the house on Haunted Hill for me. So when you actually look at this house on a hill, it has no doors, it's all plywood, and he was actually going through the basement because the door was plywooded up. I can almost just picture the tension in the air

as they walked up to just wonder if would he be inside and what else they might find. But at Sal Peron's home, when officers peek through the windows, they see inside. And it looks completely gutted. But what police also obviously noticed, that Sal was nowhere to be found. Police then would turn to digital forensics to try to tie Sal Peron and these three murders.

We do searches to just find out his cell phone to see if maybe we could get cell phone records that would put him at the crime scenes. And they did find one number in particular that Sal called a lot. We find out that he also has a girlfriend, Natasha, who lives in Brooklyn. And you know, Scott, I think this is really interesting, and maybe you can talk a bit to this,

is that, you know, you really have to strategize. Are they just going to tell her, hey, we suspect that he's a serial killer. What can you tell us? Or are they going to play it closer to the vest and just make up, as we've heard in other cases, some kind of nonsense scenario just to get her talking and try to a little more in a clandestine fashion, get the information they're hoping to find? I think it's about reading the room in a sense, right? Reading how Natasha is acting and how she's speaking in a sense, because ultimately, if you start taking a harder line of questioning, she may just shut down.

Investigators went to Natasha's apartment, and she just might be the key to connecting Sal Peron to the murders. And so just picture what they must have been wondering what they were going to find after they knocked on her door. They found someone who was very welcoming. Natasha let him right in. And it was clear to investigators that she was unaware that her boyfriend may be the target of a serial killer investigation. So when Natasha let the police into the apartment, he had a closet there that he kept clothes in. And there were shoes that matched or looked like the shoes

that we saw in the video surveillance. And there was a coat that looked like the coat that we saw in the video surveillance that this individual was wearing. So that was interesting. You couldn't prove that it was the exact coat or the exact shoes because it wasn't anything so defining about them.

But there was still going to be more in that apartment for police to find. She had said to the police, oh, he keeps some of his stuff over here. And there was like a couple of plastic bags and then this black duffel bag. Just like one of those moments where you're like, oh my God, this is the duffel bag that we've seen him carry in the video surveillance. So is this the bag they're looking for? You've got a bag in front of you. It's closed. You have to take one more step to determine that answer.

There is nothing exciting and thrilling about waiting for a search warrant. It takes hours to get it done. You could watch paint dry. It would be more interesting sometimes. So they're sitting and they're waiting and thinking that inside this bag just might be the murder weapon that is responsible for not one, but two, but three homicides. And it's not just them. They're in someone's apartment.

Natasha is there with them, too. Natasha was like, open the bag. I want to see what's in there. I want to see what's in there. And they were like, yeah, we have to wait for a warrant. She was like, it's my house. He's keeping it in my house. I want to see what's in there. I want to see what's in there. And they were like, yeah, we have to wait for a warrant. She was like, it's my house. He's keeping it in my house. I want to see what's in there.

And so she was like very annoyed. He was keeping the bag in the house. Police were obviously safeguarding the bag there. On the other side of town, Melissa is anxiously awaiting also to find out what was in that bag because she knew they made a discovery and she was involved in the process,

hoping they would find the murder weapon that would make it possible to charge Sal Peron of these three unprovoked brutal murders. We went to court like 11 p.m. at night and we didn't get the warrant signs because Brooklyn is busy until, you know, after midnight and there were still police in her house. That moment when, you know, you gave the detectives that warrant and they opened it up and it was like, yep, there's a sawed off rifle in here. They opened the bag and inside, a.22 caliber long rifle with a small flashlight taped to the barrel. The stock of the rifle had been cut to fit the bag.

There was a.22 caliber gun. Check. There was fingerprints that came back to Perrone. Check. And DNA on the weapon. And the tests would confirm that Sal Perrone's DNA was found on that very same weapon. Three homicides, one weapon. Checkmate. It is such the moment of, we are right. We may not have him yet, but now we have the evidence to hold him once we get him. I mean, I'm waiting for that Law & Order music to come in. When they find the bag. Dun, dun. Yeah, I mean, clearly, there's the Sam moment. So Sal Peron is arrested, charged, and now he's heading for trial.

And Melissa has lots of different pieces of evidence, but the big two that she's going to walk into that courtroom with are obviously the murder weapon, but she also has Natasha. I felt like Natasha was a very important witness because she kind of explained to the jury who Sal Peron was. Otherwise, the case would have been heavily forensic evidence. She knew about who he was before. She knows who he is now.

She knows about his day-to-day. And she can also identify these items. She knows who owned that duffel bag. She knows who placed that duffel bag with her home and also the jacket and other clothing. So she is connecting directly with the murder weapon and the contents and what Sal Peron was wearing on the night of at least one of those homicides to Sal Peron directly? You know, I do think it's fair to ask this question. Brooklyn's a very small community.

His picture was on the front page of every newspaper in New York City. How would she not know that? How would she not recognize her own boyfriend in that media blitz? So I think it's interesting to think that maybe she was protecting herself and not wanting to be implicated as an accessory to this situation by maybe collecting his things and leaving his things in the house. How difficult, Anasika, is that when judging the viability, in a sense, of your prosecution witness, maybe even your star witness, and that connection of could she have known prior? And I think that's a really fair, good point to make, and one that the defense is certainly, I would expect, likely to try to bring

out. But here's the thing, you know, first of all, it's not a crime to not report something, even if she had knowledge. It is a crime if she is helping him in any way to try to secrete anything. But by all accounts, as investigators and Melissa looked into it, they never had that. And, you know, there are people that don't watch the news and don't read the papers. And I have to raise my hand quietly here and sometimes say I'm one of those on a given week to just be a little out of the loop with too many other things going on. But again, it is the type of thing that I think her presentation on that stand, her credibility, as you question, you know, as a defense attorney rightly would, Scott, is going to be the exact thing that's going to make all the difference here. During her cooperation, she was able to paint a picture of who Sal was prior to these homicides.

So you had this guy with this big house and this family. You know, he's married and he had a daughter. He had a successful business. He had a lot of money when he first met Natasha, money that he freely wanted to show, that he was always walking around with, as she said, like a wad full of cash. I remember she always said, like, when I first started dating him, he had a wad of money and he always had $100 bills. And then as we were dating, it became like ones and singles. Sal seemed to be in a downward spiral and began blaming those who had a better life than he did. Those who had close relationships with their families and their kids, things that he himself did not have. He had lost his family, his home was in disrepair, and now he makes no money.

And he was like going door to door, like trying to sell like spools of thread at some point to some of these shop owners that we spoke to. He had this big house that he boasted about. He was in such disrepair. It was like he started all these projects and then he couldn't finish the siding. He couldn't finish the electricity. He couldn't finish the landscaping. You know, now he's estranged from his wife and his daughter. And now he had kind of become this crazy neighborhood story about Crazy Sal who lives in the creepy house. Natasha was giving great insight to investigators and to Melissa to prepare for trial. But here's something to know about Melissa herself. She wanted to be a prosecutor from the time she was very young. You know, I'm of the law and order generation, you know,

Sam Waterstone. And I just felt like he had such an important job. He had an important job for the family members of the victims. You know, I've been fortunate enough to spend some time with Melissa a few months ago when all three of us got together, as you know, Anna Sega. And I was thoroughly impressed with her about her passion like we have for cases and passion for victims. And as they continued to investigate and prepare this mammoth of a case for trial, Melissa learned that Sal did actually have a connection to at least some of his victims. In 2007, he registered a trademark of a line of clothing under his own name. But that never happened. And each week he would visit shops, several in Brooklyn, filled by several generations of family members who had immigrated

to the U.S. Many were successful, and many would turn down Peron's requests to buy from him. You know, Muhammad Jebeli's son was always in the store. He had known and seen Sal Peron. Isaac Qadari worked in the store with his kids, his wife. They had been there every day. So if Sal Peron came to see him prior to committing the murder, he would have seen Isaac working with his wife and his kids. Ramatullah Vadapur had worked in his store for, I mean, decades. And there was still one other thing that puzzled detectives, as well as Melissa. On the night of November 16th, which was the same night Sal Peron allegedly shot Ramatullah,

Sal and Natasha had gone out dancing. We had a video surveillance of him walking in and out of the Knights of Columbus, just happy as can be. So that's not in any way necessarily an alibi, right? Because he clearly could have done the murder before. But it is so hard to wrap your head around how an individual is able to so compartmentalize. They had just committed this brutal, cold-blooded crime and then just go out like nothing happened and go dancing. So every good prosecutor, Adesika, as you know, going into court is always anticipating what is the defense thinking. And of course, as you always say, the defense don't have to put on a case.

But in a sense, you have to anticipate what they may be thinking. And just based on what we're talking about, Sal Peron's state of mind. So you'd have to imagine a mental health question would come up, an evaluation, in a sense, to see whether he was insane when he committed these three murders. So obviously you have somebody that's committing these murders and they're heinous and there seems to be like no good reason. And not that there's good reasons for murdering people, but usually some people have reasons,

even if they're bad reasons. This seemed to be like there was no reason. So you have to think to yourself, is this person insane? And if they're insane, then you have a completely different trajectory of how your trial is going to go. There's competency. You know, is he even fit to stand trial? Is his mental makeup at the time

he's arrested and goes to trial? Is he able to assist in his own defense? And that's a question that has to be grappled with first. I think right from the onset, Judge Marris was like, well, something has to be wrong with this guy, right? That's just even what like the normal person, the lay person is thinking, like, who does this? So he was what's called 730, which is the statute where, you know, there's a mental health assessment done and someone is found whether or not they're competent to stand trial. She believed he was going to be found competent. First, he would be in court and he was participating in the proceedings. And that is something that the doctors that will be examining him are going to look for and that the judge is going to be looked for. He was offering up different alibis, which means he's thinking defense.

And, you know, doctors are going to examine him, see if he's able to understand what's going on around him. And then also even in talking to him about these crimes, does he know what's happening? And all the answers to that ultimately were yes. And that would now get them into the courtroom for a trial. That would be a big victory for Melissa in this case. But it wasn't the end of the mountain she needed to climb. Melissa was going to face another big challenge. Sal Peron wanted to represent himself.

What is that old adage? Anybody that represents themselves has a fool for a client. And that's true. You know, I've had defendants that have represented themselves in various hearings. I don't think I've had them that ultimately went the whole way through a trial. They always change gears at some point.

But here's what's so challenging about it is that as the prosecutor, you almost have to take on the role of both prosecutor and defense attorney because the jury is going to be so much more watchful for the defendant, making sure that they think they are being treated fairly, even though they are being given everything that's necessary. Almost you need to bend over backwards to make sure they have what they asked for, not once, two, but three times to make sure

there's never going to be that question in the jury's minds. What's the sense of going through like a four-month trial and a three-year investigation, calling 60-something witnesses, and then you get a conviction, and then a year later, appellate court is going to say, this guy didn't get a fair trial because his attorney didn't do enough for him, or he didn't know what he was doing. And so you have to do so much extra work. I remember every single day having a list of witnesses and I would make extra copies of all the DV5s that were relevant for that witness and I would hand them to the defense counsel. So he couldn't say like, oh, I had no idea this witness was being called or I couldn't find the paperwork. I had to call the prison and I had to make sure he got

extra time in the law library and I had to make sure every DVD worked so he could watch all the video surveillance that I was able to watch. I couldn't just say, oh, there's nothing relevant on that video surveillance because maybe it would have been relevant to him. And in the end, doing all of that, he came to me with like a legal size page written of alibi witnesses that said like John Doe at Pizza Place, Jane Doe at, you know, Yarn Store. You had to make sure every step of the way that his rights were protected, which for a prosecutor, it's so much extra work. All you want is there to be a competent defense counsel there to do that work, because now you're taking on the work

of ensuring the trial is fair on both sides. As soon as the trial began, it was very clear to the jury that Sal was erratic. He had multiple outbursts in the courtroom, and he also was making some pretty wild claims. As soon as the jurors came in, he had an outburst. So I think that they saw what we were dealing with, and I wasn't nervous about, you know, there was nothing that he was going to be able to say that was going to undo the evidence in the case. But you just had to, like, curtail it because you didn't want the jurors to say,

oh, you know, something is wrong with him. Like, they shouldn't be going after him when he clearly has some type of mental incompetence. Sal's erotic behavior continued when he actually took the stand. There was confusing rants and saying so many crazy theories. He had the, I have an alibi, I wasn't there. Then he had the, the police framed me, kind of, they didn't do their job. And that all started with the signing of the search warrant that he just focused in on. And then there had been a sketch done of somebody that was a person of interest

that he tried to say, well, that must have been the person that did it. And, you know, that's what you jurors should be focused on. Melissa decided to take a line of action here, and her best course of action was to take no action. I knew as soon as he took the stand, I was not going to question him. He was going to say whatever he had to say. He could have said anybody did it. He could have blamed it on the president, blamed it on his cat. I was not going to ask him any question because I didn't want the jurors for one second to believe that I thought anything he was saying was credible. And I thought that was so interesting. I've never taken that tact. And I sat back because once I thought about it, and I don't

think I would have taken the same tact, I would have had at least a few questions to point out how ridiculous what he was saying was to the jury. I think hers was really smart and clearly very powerful for the jury. I thought it was really ingenious in a sense because I think the jury had recognized that the things that Sal Peron were saying did not make sense. So why give it any more legs? The trial itself dragged on for multiple months. It was exhausting because, you know, you're really like working two jobs. You're in court all day and then you come back to your office and you have to work a second job of preparing for court the next day. Here, she was trying three cases together at the same time.

And it is just, it's not even just physically exhausting, it's mentally exhausting. Because again, she is doing it to hopefully achieve justice for accountability. But she has three families looking at her every day. And she knows this is the only shot to get them what they need in the court. And that is accountability for the person who took so much from each one of them. I had charged him with three counts of murder in the second degree, which would be for each of the individual victims. And they found him guilty on all three counts of murder in the second degree.

Sal Peron was sentenced to 75 years to life. In asking Melissa about why she wanted to become a prosecutor, she said that it was so she could give a voice to the victims. And in this case, that's exactly what she did. I wanted to be a homicide prosecutor, to be there for someone who could no longer, you know, fight for themselves. To get justice for someone who was taken away violently and tragically, and then there was, you know, a mess left behind.

So to me, I always felt like being a homicide prosecutor, I was able to give some peace of mind that at least there was a little bit of justice that was done. You know, in thinking about this case, there's the obvious. It is three men who were fathers and grandfathers. You had Muhammad Kabeli's son who just had rage as he spoke at the sentencing about how could this man have done this and taken his father from him. You had Isaac Qadari's young children who missed their father and never got to grow up with him and just missed so much over those years. You had Ramatul Avadapur, who was almost 80 and been married for 60 plus years. And his wife and his daughter were left with such a hole that in Melissa's words, the daughter was just in remains, shattered.

You know, it is all these families robbed of these moments. Three hardworking families who found a way to thrive. Lives taken by a man who was failing by no fault except his own. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers and Sumit David are executive producers. This episode was produced by Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?