Anatomy of Murder - Military, Secrets, and Lies
Episode Date: November 11, 2020Murder, suicide and an investigation that spanned over 2,000 miles.For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagr...am: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
Today, we're talking about a case involving a husband and a wife.
And as soon as you hear the beginning of it, you probably will make up your mind about who the killer is.
But there's more to it than you might be guessing.
This case begins on February 9th, 1996.
At 5.45 in the morning, Panama City Police 911 operator gets a desperate call
to the center. The caller identified herself as Monique Tureen and telling the dispatcher that
she found her husband face down in her backyard and he was not breathing. Apparently the victim
of a vicious attack. Listen to the call. 911 wants call is so often exactly where we start because Let me switch it to the ambulance also. Don't hang up whenever they get on there, okay? Hold on.
The 911 call is so often exactly where we start because we want to really live it as much as we can
through whatever evidence we have.
So David Tureen is 42 years old,
is laying face down behind their home in Panama City, Florida,
and he looked like he was involved in a vicious
struggle. And she says she didn't want to turn the body over. All she did was reach down,
touch his back to see whether he was breathing, and then went in and called police.
And hearing that, I'm like, oh, okay, it's the wife. And what I mean by that is we all know that you start, may not end,
but you all start by looking at those closest to the victim.
So as she's talking, I'm sitting here trying to decide, do I believe her or not?
Because the possibilities are this.
It's his wife, and she's calling to report, even though she knows full well or committed the crime herself.
We've all heard about that scenario too many times.
Or he's found first thing in the morning.
Was this a burglar that he stopped who's trying to break into his home?
Was it somebody random?
So you're trying to listen to her words and decide, is she reliable?
Do I believe the cries in her voice? And
I want to know more about Dave. Well, interestingly enough, so did investigators.
The one thing that really stood out was his line of work. He was a major in the rural Canadian Air
Force who was stationed down at Tyndall Air Force Base on a special assignment to the North American Aerospace Defense Command,
or as we always hear, NORAD.
And that is a high-security, top-secret clearance type of job.
So, you know, that absolutely would stand out to investigators.
Is this something to do with international espionage?
And that's definitely an avenue that investigators had to look at.
It's also important not to that investigators had to look at.
It's also important not to get tunnel vision and look at only one possibility.
Investigators need to look at every facet of the victim and learn who he or she was. So let's talk about David Tureen. I had an opportunity to talk to Dave's sister, Pat Tureen,
about her brother. Dave was 14 months younger than I.
So there was never a time in my life
that I can remember him not being in my life
until he was killed.
He was adventuresome.
He did so many things I would never have done.
He would jump off a high diving board.
He loved going on the roller coaster
at the fair or exhibition.
I had my appendix out when I was seven, just before I started grade one.
My parents brought me home from the hospital,
and there was a little bunch of kids in the playground as we drove by,
and then they all left and they all started running after the car.
And then when we pulled into the driveway,
I'm sorry, and Dave was standing there with all these kids,
and he said,
I rounded up all these kids to welcome you home.
And he was six.
That's really what he was like.
That talks to me about the person who was taken so violently from us all.
Dave Tureen was a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force and was stationed at the Tyndale Air Force Base.
His wife, Monique, who was 39 years old,
also worked on the base,
but she was not a member of the military.
Her first job in Florida was working for a local builder.
Dave and Monique met and married in Canada.
She ended up being his boss's secretary here in Winnipeg,
and she introduced herself to him,
and that was how they met.
They're Canadians living in Canada.
He gets a posting down to Florida.
Who wouldn't be thrilled?
Now, he went down there with Monique,
but she had a family before she met Dave.
They were married for four years before he was murdered. It was a second marriage for her.
It was his first marriage. They had a four-year-old murdered. It was a second marriage for her. It was his first marriage.
They had a four-year-old child.
He said, my wife is pregnant.
He was thrilled.
He was thrilled to be a dad.
He considered the older boy to be his son.
He referred to them as the big guy and the little guy.
By the time they're down there in Florida,
it really seemed like they're living the dream.
We know that a lot of Canadians love to come to Florida as snowbirds, but to do it and be paid
to be there and to be in a position serving your country must have been an amazing opportunity for
this young family. She was happy to move so far away. It just made it much more difficult for her ex-husband to see her son.
She's a very vengeful person.
The only thing was, he had a year left,
and what he told me when I spoke to him that Christmas,
so this was a month and a half before he was killed,
was that his wife hated the winter.
She did not want to leave Florida.
So on the morning of February 9th, 1996,
Monique woke up at around 4.45 a.m.
She heard Dave's alarm constantly ringing,
like he wasn't waking up.
And that's what made her go into that other room and discover that he wasn't there. And then
when she walked outside and kind of walked the property, then she discovered an ugly, horrible
scene. Where is he at? Do you know what might have happened to him? I don't know.
Do you not think he's breathing?
Oh, God.
Is it what it appears, or is there something else going on?
Because having looked at this case a bit more,
I don't understand how what she is telling the 911 operator,
the first thing she says is that he's laying there motionless.
Because when I've looked at the pictures in this case, the first thing I see is that he's laying there motionless. Because when I've looked at the pictures in this case,
the first thing I see is all the blood.
Are you by yourself?
I've got my two little kids in the house.
Okay, do you need to stay on the phone with me, ma'am,
until the police get there?
I was going to go back and check on them.
Okay, you go ahead and do that.
And if you find out anything else, call me back.
I've got the police in the ambulance headed your way, okay?
Okay.
Okay, ma'am.
Bye-bye.
Now again, we can never put ourself in the shoes of someone who is reacting to something traumatic.
Because I've obviously seen it and you've seen it so many times that people don't act the way we think they're supposed to. And sometimes that's just because of trauma or fear or shell shock. But sometimes there's something more sinister going on. And that's where we as investigators,
prosecutors, whoever it is that's looking at this case, have to be careful not to jump
the gun, so to speak, but really try to look beyond to see, is it what it appears or not?
They canvassed the neighborhood for a witness. They spoke to a local newspaper delivery woman
who said the residence was the starting point of her route. And that was between 4.15 and 4.20 a.m.
And she didn't see anything odd or unusual. So police determined that David encountered his
killer around 2.30 in the morning. And this crime scene, it really spoke to me when I was looking at
it. When I saw his wounds and all the blood and the wounds to his face and his hand, those aren't
the typical wounds that we see when it's husband and wife. It's not a single or multiple gunshots, something from afar.
It isn't a stab wound, something at the heat of the moment that's gone horribly wrong.
It looks more deliberate.
And whether he happened upon someone or someone waited there for him,
it's kind of turning me away from my first thoughts that this is going to be one of those cases, that it's someone real close.
So by the next day, as the investigation was heating up, it was now time for the family to be notified.
My sister in Calgary called me and she said he was shot in the head outside his home.
And I stopped visualizing because I could not see that.
And of course, all I could think of then was I had to get back on the highway and I had to drive into Winnipeg and tell my mother.
You know, when I was talking to Pat, one of the things that she initially told me was she was told in the beginning that he may have been shot. And there was a thought that
went through her head that was almost, it's so incredible to even say this, but almost a relief
in the sense that his pain didn't last. I consoled my mother by telling her that he'd been shot in
the head and therefore likely didn't feel any pain, maybe didn't even know that somebody was going to shoot him.
And then, of course, we found out that that wasn't the case.
So that was pretty terrible.
And I get that completely.
If any one of us was to put ourselves in her shoes,
but we always want to think that it was quick.
Just like if someone dies of natural causes,
you want to hear they died in their sleep rather than from some horrendous long injury. So now when she finds out what actually happened to her brother, and it certainly
wasn't quick. So investigators were unable to recover a murder weapon from the crime scene at
all. When they finalized the autopsy, they determined the cause of death was blunt force
trauma, likely caused, ready for this, by a claw hammer.
And for people that are saying, wait, what's a claw hammer?
It's a hammer.
The claw really just means it's the part that pulls the nail out,
so it's shaped a little bit like the claw.
But that is not the most often used murder weapon that I've encountered.
It happens, but not usually.
It's not the gun.
It's not the knife that we see so often.
So was this something that just went horribly wrong?
Or was this someone that just was arming them with something in case they were encountered?
Let me ask you this.
The fact that it was a claw hammer, would that raise the specter for you that that is a very light weapon to wield and that could, could a woman be behind that?
Sure. But I am absolutely of the belief that women can do anything that a man can do. Sorry,
I'm going to go there every time, but can't help myself.
That's not exactly how I meant it, but yes, of course, I don't disagree.
I know.
And I don't mean that personally to you.
But you know how I get because people say that.
By the way, people will say that in the courtroom.
And I know certainly not that's not your thinking, Scott.
But I love when they say that.
It's like, you know what?
Yeah, that's heavy.
But when someone's angry and when someone's determined,
they can wield just about anything and get the job done.
So while it might feel a little bit heavy and it's not like a knife that you'd go and cut, just, you know full well, Scott,
from your years in law enforcement, when your adrenaline gets going, you don't necessarily feel
the weight. But yeah, of course, you look at something like that. Is that the average weapon
that a woman's going to use? Well, no, but I don't think it's the average weapon that a man's going
to use either. And that's what I find so interesting about it when
I'm trying to figure out this case on its face. Let's talk about how the investigation unfolded.
And really, the first place they're going to focus on is Monique, talking to her,
getting information from Monique. At the same time, they do have living family members who can tell them,
hey, how was the marriage? How was their relationship?
Because whatever information that they're getting from the family,
they're going to ask Monique about and see if it jives.
When the police said, is there any reason to suspect
that Monique could have anything to do with this?
My sister sat there with the rest of us and said, no, no, no, no, no.
But, you know, in the family's perspective, I mean, they live thousands of miles away.
So maybe they didn't really know the inner workings of this family.
But it's also maybe not fair for us to jump to the conclusion that this was a problematic marriage.
Yet we have to, to try to get to the truth.
So when investigators began to examine Dave,
they reached into his pocket and found a receipt from Food World. And that receipt was
stamped 2.14 a.m. He went out in the middle of the night to a drugstore. He bought Midol and he
bought some sort of allergy type medication, I gather. So now, Anastasia, we're starting to
develop a timeline here, right? This is the type of evidence that gets me going because it's such a little thing.
I mean, it's a little scrap of paper.
I mean, it's smaller than an index card.
But it is so important in the at least potential clues it gives.
You knew that he was somewhere alive and well at 2.14 a.m.
You know that he was someone not far from the home.
And what great clues that you know what he purchased.
And that certainly speaks to that that was likely for someone in the house.
So now a team is involved in this investigation.
And you'll have one investigator starts questioning the wife.
Was he going out and getting things for you?
Did he ask you if you need something?
And then at the same time, I'm sending another guy
to the food world to determine, is there surveillance video? Did anybody see him there?
Is this a situation where he was jumped when he got back? That is a great launching point for
this investigation. And now the timeline starts to fatten up, right? Now we start to get some meat on the bone.
So investigators really had to continue their parallel investigation. They really need to determine what the relationship was with the wife and if that played into this horrific crime or not,
or really still continue to determine if his job, his work at NORAD,
is this some type of international espionage.
He was very circumspect about talking about his work.
He really, he didn't.
And I thought it was odd that he and my dad didn't talk about his work
when they would be visiting or whatever.
And I asked him once what he did down there, that bunker.
And he just looked at me and he smiled and he said it very kindly.
He said, well, you know, I can't actually tell you what I do down there.
I'm sure the conspiracy theorists are thinking maybe he was meeting somebody in the night
who was trading secrets.
I mean, these are the kind of stories that do happen.
And I know for me hearing it as a prosecutor, my radar is up right away.
I mean, he has this high security clearance.
He does work that he has to keep hidden from everyone.
So he's a man who knows how to keep secrets.
So I want to know, was there anything about his work or any of those secrets or maybe
some other secret that he was keeping to himself that his family didn't know about, which led to this. The Winnipeg Sun, sort of like a little tabloid
up here, made much of that. Their headline was something to the effect of,
was Canuck killed for his military secret. And while the police and law enforcement are going down all those roads, his family is
bringing Dave's body back to Canada.
I mean, in fact, it was his wife.
It was Monique that brought her husband home.
And on the day of Dave's funeral, more than just the grief and getting through that day,
the family got this, what can
only be described as an incredibly disturbing phone call from the police, that they needed to
get with them and right away because they just might have a break in this case. The police called
us the morning of the funeral that the Florida police and state attorney would really like to
talk to us.
During Dave's funeral, you have the tears, you have the grief that we all would expect.
But the family also notices that Monique,
they think she's acting strange.
But at the same time, they don't want to jump there.
I mean, she's avoiding them.
They can tell that she is.
Now, keep in mind,
everyone has just been interviewed by the police.
I mean, this is a stressful situation
no matter how you look at it.
So they don't know, is she acting strange
because there's a whirlwind
going on? She is grieving the loss of her husband who's been murdered. She's at his funeral. She's
just had the police at her for hours like they were at everyone else trying to get inside her
relationship. Could she have? Did she? Didn't she? Or is there something more to it?
She was sitting in a chair right in the center of the room, eyes downcast.
And I went over and kissed her.
And I said, are you all right, darling? And she never said anything.
She didn't look at me.
She didn't respond.
Now, at the end of the funeral, Monique
leaves. And that's when the police say that they want to sit down with the family. And when they do,
they drop a bombshell. By that time, Monique had left. She'd gone. A friend had taken her home.
After the funeral, an officer, Canadian officer, came and said, the police are here and they are extremely anxious to speak to the family.
So both families, we went into this little side room
down in the church where the reception was,
and they told us everything that they knew about the case.
They read to the family an 18 or 19-page statement that Monique made when she spoke to the police.
And in that, it wasn't the length of it.
It's what she said.
She said that Dave was a heavy drinker.
He frequented strip clubs.
He had a temper.
I mean, Dave, the man that she talked about, it was a man that none of this family knew.
They told us that she had said he was a very heavy alcoholic.
And we all looked at each other and said, well, we didn't know that.
My mother said he was no alcoholic.
And, of course, I checked that out when I went down there and talked to his colleagues.
And they said he was the first guy in the office in the morning.
There is no way whatsoever that he was not even a heavy drinker, never mind an alcoholic.
I think the investigation took another turn when they determined that Monique's first husband, during that divorce, he was accused, guess what, of the very same thing, being a heavy
drinker and hanging out at strip clubs. So now Monique either had a type, which many people do,
even if it's someone that isn't good for them, or how convenient that now she puts these same negative traits
onto her now dead, murdered husband.
So I don't know where to turn my head right now.
And this officer told us that they had a man,
Ralph Crompton.
By that time, Monique had left.
But her little boy, Daniel, was there.
He put up his hand and he said, what did you say the
man's name was? And he said, Ralph Crompton. And Daniel said, that's my mother's friend.
Ralph Crompton became a suspect in this case based on an anonymous tip that police got.
And basically it said that Monique was responsible for the death of her husband.
And that she was having an affair with a co-worker at the building supply company.
So Ralph Crompton worked along with Monique at the building supply company.
And so was it conceivable that they had a relationship, a secret relationship?
Investigators figured out absolutely.
So they started to track his movements, where he was the night of the murder.
So he had left Panama City recently and moved to South Carolina to do construction work there.
But how interesting, Scott, when they looked at what was going on
with him in just those days, whether he was really 435 miles away, what they found out.
You always fly? You don't have an automobile? I drove a rental car up one way because it was a
no-notice trip. Oh, you drove one up from Penemosa? Yeah. It's old. January? Yeah. Oh, okay.
It was a Hertz rental.
Drove rental car up here.
Right.
And that to me, it's always a thing that makes me shake my head.
People think they're so smart when they're, oh, I'm not going to use my car.
I'm going to rent a car.
Well, I don't know.
You live in another state and now you rent a car, when he presumably had a car, right before the murder and then return it afterwards?
You know where my head's going right now.
Ralph had rented a vehicle the weekend of Dave's murder,
which is a window where he was in Panama City, Florida,
because the mileage on the car determined that he had taken a multi-mile drive.
How many miles?
990 miles.
Now, math was never my strong suit, but 435 and 435 isn't that far off.
I think it's on the money.
The car rental agency said that Crompton had said he was driving to Savannah, Georgia to meet his girlfriend and wanted regular South Carolina license plates on the vehicle and not a rental
paper tag. Now, to me, that's a sign that he didn't want to get pulled over. What does that say to you?
When you start to have coincidence upon coincidence, a man who worked in the same
place as Monique, a man who may have been having an affair,
a man who happened to have not told anyone
that he rented a car that could have been driven
just about the same as it would have been taken
to go down there and back.
Well, now those coincidences turn to one thing to me,
and that is evidence, evidence of guilt.
Two other factors I'll add to that, and I'll raise you.
He paid in cash, and the rental agency said they've never seen a car
come back so clean. People that think they are so smart when they are lying or committing crimes,
they usually do things that are not so smart. I mean, so what? You're paying cash. You still
have to give your information, your license, and your things like that. How many times do you get
a car cleaned and washed before you return it?
You don't.
Whenever I return a rental car,
I'm glad I don't have to be the one to clean it out and get it washed.
So that, again, it's these small pieces
that ultimately, to me, keep pointing in the same direction.
So the investigation determined that on the day of the murder,
he was not at work. And they also determined through phone records, he had made two calls to the Air Force base where Monique worked and also a call to her house, which is, of course, where Dave lived as well.
They really had to decide, was this Crompton and Monique or was it Crompton alone?
But what happened next,
no one could have seen coming. Because the day after the police interrogated Ralph Crompton,
his boss goes to the hotel room where he's staying, knocks on the door, and there's no answer.
He just thinks he's not home. But police know that they're outside watching, right? Because they didn't think they had enough to arrest him,
but they want to make sure he doesn't take off
because they think he's their guy.
So they know that he had gone in there and never come out.
So investigators get the manager to open up the room
and Ralph Crompton's inside.
He's in a bathtub.
He's bloody.
And he has a self-inflicted wound to his chest.
Police determined that he was going to be okay.
He was alive when they found him.
If you're innocent of a crime,
you never ever think you're going to be convicted.
You just can't believe
that anyone's going to convict you
of a crime that you didn't do.
So you don't kill yourself.
To me, it was a sign of his guilt.
And I have to say,
I find the attempted suicide,
I always find these so interesting
and I know I'm a cynic in this, but very often people
that unfortunately want to kill themselves by their own hand, they succeed. And here was someone
who had presumably committed this horrible crime, and he knows the police are onto him, or at least
think that it's him, but his wounds aren't even life-threatening.
Now, I have in my hand a statement given by the officer in for the report. He says,
quote, I returned back into the bathroom and asked Mr. Crompton if he was okay.
He stated that he wished that I would tell his wife and his kids that he loved them.
Mr. Crompton then asked the officer what his name was. I advised him that it was Mark.
He asked where I was from. I stated I was from Panama City, Florida. He then told me that Monique had nothing to do with this and that he was only trying to set her free and that she was a modern
day slave. Wow. And that's where I have to wonder,
is this Ralph and Monique who are having this affair
and the only way they can see is riding off into the sunset
is by killing Dave or affair, no affair.
She is the love of his life
and now he's going to get her any way he can.
So he sees himself as her hero and her savior in all this.
You have to look at this as what is the motive?
What could the motive have been to commit this crime?
And so I'm sure investigators going through all the details
they learned about Monique
and trying to determine how to approach her again
in their interrogation, in their interview,
police have to think about how they're going to re-interview Monique, right?
Because now motive has become a big possibility here.
I thought it was really interesting that after he was arrested and charged,
that Crompton cooperated with police.
And he confessed to the affair, but he downplayed it.
The things that he said about that night,
they really stopped and gave me pause.
He says he was at the house at Monique's request,
and he didn't know that David was home that night.
He was going over to have a fling with Monique,
and Monique sent David out to get rid of him, basically,
so they would have the house to themselves.
And when David got back, there was a struggle.
And his later explanation to the police
was about getting into a scuffle,
and Dave was on top of him,
and then he heard a conk, and he looked up,
and Monique was standing there with a hammer in her hand.
And so he checked his airway and then left and told her to call 911.
Even just hearing that to me, forget my prosecutor hat,
just my person hat, that makes absolutely no sense to me.
We knew it wasn't true.
What he was saying wasn't true.
We knew she was involved.
She said she sent Dave out there
knowing he was going to get beaten up. She said that in her statement. She just said he wasn't
supposed to kill him. But what other reason would there be to send him out there in the middle of
the night for somebody who had driven just for nine hours to what, rough him up a little bit?
What was that going to, I mean, didn't make any sense. What police found out going on beyond the scenes,
that she had a lot to gain with Dave's death.
Let's talk about an insurance policy for $600,000.
That's a motivation.
That's the thing to me.
I don't know what you call it at the carnival
when the person takes the hammer and hits it and it goes up and hits the bell. That's what does thing to me. I don't know what you call it at the carnival when the person takes the hammer and hits it
and it goes up and hits the bell.
That's what does it for me.
But the crime scene was still a bit confusing
because to his story and to her story,
as far as he was concerned,
she was wielding the hammer
and she struck the blow that killed him.
But investigators found no blood on her,
no evidence on her or anything,
and DNA in the rental car came back to Dave.
So we have the connection with Ralph,
but what about Monique?
How are they going to determine
if she really was involved in this murder?
Common sense.
I would look at her lies and if she's lying, why?
Did it make sense that this was one person and one person alone?
Is it coincidence that she had him out in the middle of the night?
Was it coincidence that she had no idea that her husband was no longer in the house for hours before she found him?
Was it a coincidence that she didn't mention all the obvious blood when she called 911?
To me, when I start to pile those up and list them, they only equal that she's lying, and if she's lying, it's to save herself.
When they conducted the autopsy of Dave, they had the numerous blunt trauma wounds, but they also could show that his
hyoid bone had been crushed. That's that bone in your neck. He comes home. He's confronted by
Ralph. And then out of nowhere, you have Monique there too. Ralph being presumably the bigger,
stronger one, maybe takes him from behind and yokes him, if you will, crushes the bone while
she now wields the hammer,
a weapon that at least one wound to the head potentially caused by her. They incapacitate him and whichever one of them then goes off to give him all those wounds
with the hammer, it doesn't really matter.
But it certainly goes towards it being maybe one of them, likely both of them outside.
Well, first of all, it sounds like you have a great summation working there.
I miss it.
I miss being in court and giving them.
But then again, you know, you've always said this, Anastasia,
in for a pound, in for a penny, or in for a penny, in for a pound?
In for a penny, in for a pound.
That's her culpable responsibility there for the crime.
Right. It doesn't matter if she wasn't outside.
It doesn't matter if she just set her husband up to go outside
and to be met by Ralph, who she knew was going to kill him.
If she did it for the money, if she knew this was the plan,
it doesn't matter.
And there's also these other things that went on with her.
I mean, there wasn't just
one attempted suicide in this case. There was two. Because you also had that when she's back up there
in Canada, that all of a sudden now, Monique tries to commit suicide, or at least apparently.
After the funeral, she went home and took a bunch of Tylenol, which would not have killed her.
She was supposed to be studying to be a nurse, so she may well have known that.
You're going to blow your liver out, but you're not going to kill yourself.
But Tylenol, especially not when you're expecting a whole slew of family members to come walking in on you within the next hour or so. When someone commits a crime here in the United States and they flee to another
country, especially if it's a country that they have citizenship in, it is often very difficult
for us to get them back. You know, I have a case that I left the office a few years back and someone
was in Australia. The detectives did everything to make sure that he was apprehended. He was there
for years before authorities would let him go.
And the same thing with her.
She remained in Canada for nine years.
We knew that Florida would not give up.
And we knew that eventually Canada would have to honor
its extradition treaty with the United States.
And so people wrap their heads and say, what?
I mean, she was a drive away.
But let me
just explain to everyone out there. Other countries, other jurisdictions often want to know
that they are not sending their citizens to a place that has laws different than their own,
especially when it comes to punishment. And what it really came down to for everything that I could
see here is that Canada wanted to make sure that she would not be exposed potentially to the death penalty.
They didn't have the death penalty, Florida did,
and they were not going to let their citizen be brought back here
to face potential punishment that they did not have in their country.
I wrote letter after letter, and so did members of my family,
to say, send her down there.
And that's a lot of the wrangling that goes on is,
are the laws the same?
And if not, all the battles that go on.
And she fought, she fought hard.
But, you know, as we said, nine years later,
they brought her back and she went to trial.
The United States, it's not, you know,
some third world country where they lop off your head
for stealing a loaf of bread.
She'll get a fair trial. It was awful.
Ralph had gone to trial years before.
He was convicted at trial of first degree murder.
And then all these years later, when finally they were able to bring Monique back,
she went to trial and was convicted of second degree murder.
And she was sentenced to 22 years.
It didn't seem to us to be as big a slam dunk as his was
because there was all kinds of evidence.
You know, his traveling down there and telling lies
and his DNA being found on Dave
and a mingling of DNA in the car that he had rented
and all that stuff.
Hers was much more circumstantial. And I mean,
Compton could have put her away had he decided he was going to testify, but he still had an
appeal pending and decided to play silly beggars and not testify against her.
What was Monique's motive here?
You know, we don't have the definitive.
Was it about the affair?
Was it about the money?
Was it some combination?
Where did that line fall about how they came up with this plan and decided this was the best way out?
Why?
The unfortunate scenario with many families,
you just want to know everything.
You want to know why. You want answers. And you don't always get the answers, even through the trial.
And it's the thing that motivates us to just keep going, whether it is prosecuting them in
the courtroom or trying to get the answers for families by an investigation or even just
talking through these cases right now,
these are people that should be remembered.
We should know who they are
and try to get answers to the why
and if we don't already have them.
As we've said before,
these cases are never closed.
My dad died only about 14 months before Dave.
I consoled myself after my dad died that we still had Dave
because he was very like my dad.
He was just always there for us when there was some family thing.
So, you know, every time there's a wedding or a birth or whatever,
you know, we don't have that male presence in our
life anymore that was part of our family. In this one, luckily, the family got to the who,
they got to the answer. But there's still that question why. But I'm glad that we get at least
to talk it out. And that all of you get to hear a little bit about the person that was taken
and about what led these two
to do what they did.
Tune in next Wednesday
when we'll dissect another new case
on Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is
an AudioChuck original,
a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production.
Sumit David is executive producer.