Anatomy of Murder - Needle in a Needle Stack - Part 1

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

A woman can’t be found. Would a cloned phone lead to her discovery, proving a ruse, or help catch a killer?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

At that point, trying to find Lisa with no evidence to go by, a lot of people ask me, was that a needle in the haystack? And I say, no, a needle in the haystack is actually easy. You burn the hay and then the needle is what's left. This is a needle in a stack of needles. 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. So today's case takes place in Miramar, Florida, which is a small city west of Fort Lauderdale in Broward County.

And it also happens to be the county where my law enforcement career began. In fact, the detective you're about to meet and I attended the same police academy, but we graduated years apart. Our city is primarily islands. His name is Detective Danny Smith with the Miramar Police Department, and the agency sits in a very diverse area of South Florida. We have a very large Haitian, Jamaican, Trini, Hispanic population. So people say melting pot all the time, but just you name it, we've got it. You know, Florida sits so close to the other Caribbean countries, and very often those communities are represented within South Florida. A large part of our city is a little cheaper to live than some of the surrounding areas. So

you've got guys that come in from outside the country and they'll find themselves a little cheaper to live than some of the surrounding areas. So you've got guys that come in from outside the country and they'll find themselves a little one bedroom or efficiency or something like that. So many times when you come into areas that have different culture subsets, really living in the same place that that culture plays into the way that the community operates, because so many of them have family and friends still back home. And that certainly is the same for the woman we're speaking about today, Lisa Spence. Lisa had just recently moved to the Miramar area.

She had lived in Trinidad. She has a large family. She was from there. Her family was there, her friends, including her teenage daughter, who by all accounts she was extremely close to. And she moved here to the United States for one thing and one thing alone, and that was love. When I first heard that, I thought that that was a big step for her, for her to leave her daughter, who she's really close with, and then moved down to South Florida. She met her soon-to-be boyfriend down in Trinidad, and she wanted to follow him wherever he went.

And he was living and working in Florida, and she moved up to Florida to be with her boyfriend, Paul Edwards. I mean, besides obviously following a loved one to the U.S., I mean, it's all about opportunity. And Lisa Spence was looking for the opportunity for herself here, but she also was looking for the opportunity to send resources back to her home country to bring her family to follow her here.

And that was her dream. And she worked more than one job. She had full-time work at a local convenience store and also at a beauty supply store. But on October 12, 2009, for Lisa, her family and friends, things would take a very dark turn. Lisa had a sister-in-law, Avriel, in Philadelphia who hadn't heard from her in a few days. She reached out to Miramar police with a request. It was for a welfare check. We get the call on October 12th, 2009. She said, hey, my sister-in-law, it's not like her.

We haven't heard from her in a handful of days. And we'd like for you guys to do a welfare check for her. And by the time that she called, Lisa had already been missing for five days. Because remember, she's not with her closest friends, her family, and other than the boyfriend she's living with. It really took everyone a couple of days to say, hey, we're not hearing from her. So we're concerned enough that we're going to call the police because we're not close enough to look. So let's get the police involved, even if it's just a check. I have done many welfare checks in my time and basically dispatch would assign you a call with limited information.

And I got to say, the majority of time, almost 95% of the time, is exactly what it is. The phone's off the hook or they just weren't responding for some other reason, but everything is fine. But there are other times when you walk up to the house and a door is ajar or a window is open, and then you advance your investigation there to determine, is something wrong? A road patrol officer took the report and they spoke with Paul Edwards and just didn't get a good vibe.

Nothing you can necessarily quantify. We asked if he'd be willing to speak to us and kind of give us an idea of what the situation is, what happened when he saw Lisa last. And Paul is very cooperative. He said, no problem. He mentioned that the day of October 7th, Lisa came home from work and told him, I'm leaving you. This isn't working out and we're done. Now, according to Paul, he said it was very amicable.

He got in his car. He drove around for an hour. And when he came back, Lisa was gone, and all her belongings were gone. I mean, clearly at that moment, Edwards would deserve all of my attention. I mean, he's willing to talk, and that's great. And then you have to go by a lot of gut, basically. How is he acting? Is he looking directly at you? Is he looking away? Is he nervous? I mean, you need to start to find any discrepancies that may be in his story. And that may become very powerful evidence,

potentially later. Now, mind you, that was the first red flag for us because Lisa doesn't have a car. So the fact that she was able to clear out her entire house, all her belongings, and be gone within an hour was odd to us, to say the least. How realistic would it be for someone to grab all their stuff in an hour and put it in a car and move? I can barely pack up for the weekend or overnight in an hour and put it in a car and move. I can barely pack up for the weekend or overnight in an hour. Now we're talking about all the things that she has for her everyday life. And, you know, someone who doesn't have a car, well, that means one of two things, that either someone came and picked her up,

which means that that person, at the very least, should know where she is. Or if she called a cab or something, there should be some trail that can be followed to find where Lisa Spence is. And this is clearly a fact-finding mission, right, Anastasia? This is what they're gaining information to make a determination of where he stands in this investigation. But for me, all I could think about is, well, wait a second. This is a woman that he is here living with from another country. And whether the relationship ended or not, she's been missing for five days. And he never called the police.

But, you know, when uniformed officers continue to talk to Paul Edwards outside of his home, they notice something that definitely caught their attention, that now upgraded this case from a missing persons case to a homicide case. So what do you all think that maybe they found? Before leaving, they noticed what they thought could potentially be a blood smear on the door jam on the front door. So many people think, oh, great, they see this, what appears to be blood, they can go and get a search warrant, but not so fast. You know, I can certainly tell you when it comes to what appears to be blood, how many times in my career

I've seen that, that all of a sudden it ends up, I kid you not, it ends up being ketchup or something from a Popsicle or something that was dyed red. And imagine the other side of that, Anasiga, that later on, you're working a case where the officer showed up to a home, they saw something, and they go, well, I don't think that's blood. And that turns out to be blood, and they never really took any action. Which also happens so often, unfortunately. You always play it on the safe side, and you say, well, I've identified something. I

don't know what it is, but I'm marking it. And I'm going to tell the experts who are the uniform guys and the forensic crime scene guys to be able to determine, you know, in a scientific way, really, what is this? After seeing that, they got with the homicide unit. So that's when we got involved. You know, we've got a woman who's missing. We've got a boyfriend whose story is kind of, I call it hinky at best, if that's a word we use. So at that point, it's a great reason to bring in, you know, a detective who has the skills

to be able to take that interview to the next level. Initially, the first thing that we have to look at is the person closest to Lisa. We all know that in every profession, every walk of life, there's lots of people that are good. There's some that are not so good. And I can tell you without knowing Detective Smith,

just listening to him as he walks us through this case, you just know, I know that he is someone that I would have been happy to have on any case of mine. Because he took this seriously and he really wanted to get to know who Lisa Spence was. And that meant finding more about her background and her family. You got to reach out to her family. You got to reach out to her sister-in-law in Philadelphia. And you also have to extend those calls down back to Trinidad and Tobago. And that

is exactly where Detective Smith made his first call to. The daughter was obviously beside herself and painted a picture of mom and daughter being very close, almost like best friends. And they spoke often. I think the thing that cinched it for us was on October 19th was her daughter's 18th birthday. And she never got a call from Lisa. I don't see that this so quickly is going to a homicide investigation, right? Is that we know that she's missing, even if something has gone wrong and bad. Unfortunately, we know that people can be abducted. They might be running because they're scared of something. Maybe it does have something to do with this boyfriend,

but maybe things are just wrong between them and she's hiding out. So it seems like what it's clear to me, at least, is that she is not gone in a happy, the relationship ended and I'm just off to the next place. And as a matter of fact, the last time that Lisa Spence was heard from was a conversation with her daughter. She had spoken to her daughter while at work and said, hey, I'm going to be finished work soon and then I'll call you when I get home. And that call never came. So that right there, I think, jumped it up. So the decision was to go back and interview Paul Edwards. But this time, they decided to take a audio recorder with them to capture the conversation with Paul Edwards.

The audio quality is not great, but we think it's better to let you hear it rather than not. Hey, what's up, man? How you doing? We wanted to come by and talk to you a little bit about Lisa. Would you like to come back to the station so we can talk? Actually, there's a bunch of things that have happened over the course of the last couple of weeks that I'd like to talk to you about in private. You have questions. I have questions, too. Now police are face-to-face with Paul Edwards, and he's being very cooperative. Have you talked to anyone in Lisa's family? I've spoken to her father.

What did her dad have to say? He asked me if I heard anything new. So it's interesting that Paul spoke to Lisa's family because one might think that, well, if he had something to do with her disappearing, that he would be avoiding them rather than speaking to them. So I really see it as one of two possibilities. Either one, she either really just moved, or if she is gone for some other reason, had nothing to do with him,

and that's why he has no problem being in touch with her family. Or two, he's making sure he's in touch with them for cover. We spoke recently about the bank going down. But when investigators are doing these interviews, they aren't just looking for what they say. They're looking for anything. Period. Both detectives also noticed something that was critical. We noticed that he has cuts on his hands. We noticed that he has cuts on his hands.

And we asked him where the cuts came from. And he says that the night that Lisa said that she was going to leave him, there was some sort of an altercation. And Lisa came at him with a knife. And he was cut by Lisa. And one of my initial thoughts is, why didn't you call police? If she attacked you with a knife, why wouldn't you call 911 and let us come out? We'll take care of it. But he seemed blasé about it. So Anastasia Edwards is talking about this potential altercation with a knife. In your experience, is that unusual for someone in that situation, just never to call police or

never report it? There's no easy answer to that because I've seen it so many times all over the map. So let's look at it both ways, right? Clearly now he's giving a very different version than what he had said before, right? It's not just the amicable split that, you know, she rides off into the sunset and he rides around his car and they've just gone their separate ways. Now we know, at least according to him, that there was at least a fight, right? So it's either that there's more to it that he's still not giving or, yeah, you know what? Lots of people don't call the police. You know, sometimes in certain communities there is distrust and with good reason. Or, you know, again, you know, we certainly know that Lisa is from another country. I don't know about Paul Edwards. Is there something about his past that he wouldn't want to notify the

police of his presence? Is he undocumented? Or is it just something that he doesn't want to let them into that part of their life, right? We all know that in domestic violence or just in domestic altercations, I should say, that people don't often call the police because that sense of embarrassment, that something is just spun out of control and they don't want to let the outside world into their own home. I know there was one case from this season we featured on our show, True Conviction on Discovery Plus, where the victim was from Antigua and her family had reservations about interacting with police

because they didn't know how to navigate the criminal justice system. I'm not getting a good vibe from you. I don't know. I'm telling you up front, you're not convincing. You're not convincing. At this point, the investigation

is not paying a pretty picture. And not that I'm pessimistic and I think the worst that she did, but I gotta tell you, in my experience and everything that I know through the investigation right now, I don't think she's alive. So we already know that police have one theory that Paul Edwards is talking about, that he actually was attacked by Lisa Spence, which it may be true. So now they're developing their strategy to sit down with him, maybe to build a potential timeline, not just on her disappearance, but where he may have been. Because remember, there's no crime yet that anyone knows about for sure. All they know is that Lisa Spence is not where she is expected to be and that people can't seem to reach her, right? But so for police, they have to be careful the way that they talk to him

because, again, he is there willingly. He can stop speaking at any time. Everyone has that right to not speak if they don't want to. So it's not going to be confrontational. They're just going to be trying to lock him in because that way, no matter what he says, it is preserved for eternity. We're trying to lock him in to as many pieces of his story as we can. The more suspicious you become of someone, it doesn't become a fact until it is a fact. So

you have to walk a very thin line here to determine that this may actually be someone who's not responsible for the disappearance. This may be someone who's a member of the victim's family. The fact that he's telling us that she packed her stuff and left and he was fine with it bothered me a little bit. I found that weird, just as someone who's been in relationships before. And if you are still invested in that relationship, you usually will fight for it. He got as much information as he could during that interview. And then he did the exact prudent next step. He went to Lisa's family. Remember, her family is not living anywhere close to her.

But we know how close she is with her daughter. Well, she was also close with her brother, Dexter, too. As it turns out, Dexter, Lisa Spence's brother, had heard from her. In my opinion, that was when the case really started to gain momentum. Dexter is telling us that he's received multiple text messages from Lisa. And then the content of the texts are, Paul's a good guy. I miss Paul.

I like Paul. I'm okay. I'll call when things calm down. She says that she's moved to Jacksonville and she's going to be there for a little while. There was mention of say hi to mom, say hi to Serlene. So now both detectives are like, wait a second, maybe this is not what we thought it was from the beginning. Maybe Lisa is alive and well and just needed time away or needed to get some space. I mean, that happens, Anastasia. And I don't know about all of you out there, but I certainly have had

relationships that when they end, I just want to talk to nobody for a little bit. You just need a little bit of headspace. So for all we know, again, detectives don't know Lisa Spence. They're getting to know her from speaking to other people in her life. So maybe it was exactly that. She just took off and didn't want to be found. And maybe they had been wrong about Paul. And Lisa was actually alive and well. Now, remember we talked about some blood that was found on Paul Edwards' front door to his apartment?

As it turns out, it was not human blood. Your instinct is to say, that's our guy. But unfortunately, I've had the ability over years to make that mistake and learn from that mistake and go to trial and have that mistake thrown in my face. So in this particular case, it was, that's probably going to be our guy. He looks good for it. Let's start working it. But I got to keep an open mind. They also reached out to friends as well.

And this is one of the interviews they did. Today's date is October 15, 2009, and the approximate time is 1.38 p.m. I was told that you're friends with Lisa? Yeah. When's the last time you actually spoke to her or saw her? Not this week. Like, yeah, the week before, early in the week, like Tuesday or Wednesday, Monday or Tuesday.

When you spoke to her, what did you guys talk about? We talked about her moving. Oh, she did tell you she was moving? Yes. Why? She told me she wanted to move. So now police had to consider, was Paul telling the truth? Here they had an interview with a witness who did say that Lisa Spence was looking to leave.

Right away, I'm thinking to myself, why was she now deciding that she was going to move away? Why was that? Because they was fighting. Who was they? The boyfriend. Her and the boyfriend. Paul. They used to fight. You know, they had physical fights. Real physical, like, physical, physical fights.

You ever seen her... Marks. You've seen these marks? Yeah. That starts to change things up a bit, because now you start to wonder, well, did she want to move just to get away from him, to keep herself safe? Or has that abuse turned into something now even worse? I used to tell her I was scared of him. When they fight, like, somebody might push somebody down, and, you know, he might not want to kill her,

but he might push her, she might hit her head, you know, and I'm like, you need to separate yourself from him because somebody's going to end up missing. So while investigators had to keep an open mind, Paul begins to look more and more suspicious, and the text messages did not sit well with Lisa's brother. He was adamant, I don't care what you say, they did not come from her. So forgetting everything that these texts were saying to Dexter, Lisa's brother,

he right away looked at these as so odd because here's the thing. Lisa never texts. That wasn't her thing. She would call you if she wanted to speak to you. So the fact that he's receiving handfuls of texts, that was extremely suspicious. And now the investigators have to find out if it's not Lisa, who could it be?

Well, now the ante is really raised that there is something not right going on. So Detective Danny Smith and his partner really need to expand their vision on Paul Edwards, so to speak. They need to really find out about this relationship from other people. After speaking with co-workers and friends that are in the area, everyone would say Paul was overbearing. He didn't let people come over to the house. If she was at work, Paul would go

and just hang out at work and just watch. Let's talk about something that a lot of people are talking about these days, and that is coercive control. You look at not just physical abuse, it is controlling what someone does and where they do it and who they speak to. And that's exactly what it seems like we're playing at here. You're right, Anastasia. And I go back to one of Paul Edwards' original statements when he talked about those injuries, having the information about him being controlling and him actually almost to the point where people told them he stalked her at work. Does it sound like Lisa Spence was the type of person who would

raise a knife and attempt to stab him? That doesn't sound like it jives to me. And I think you're right, unless she's doing it to defend herself. Detective Danny Smith and his partner really determined that it was now time to take this investigation to the next level. We were able to get court orders for Lisa's phone and for Paul's phone. You know, Lisa Spence's phone is already involved in this investigation. Wouldn't it be nice to know where that phone was texting from? Wouldn't that be an important part of this investigation? I think so. When we plot Lisa's phone and we plot Paul's phone, we come up and see that they're essentially mirroring each other. The two phones are together. They are pinging off of the same cell phone tower, or at least ones very close to each

other, almost every time that they're being used. When we were able to look at the time of those text messages, the location was not Jacksonville, but it was in Sunny Isles, which is in the Miami area. I mean, that's huge right there. You have a target and you know that target is not being truthful. While they're doing that, you know, investigations don't move with just one thing happening at a time usually. So that wasn't the case here either. Detective Smith and his partners were clearly out there moving on different fronts at the same time.

And so at the same time, they actually went out and spoke to Paul Edwards' mom. And what they found out from her was really pretty interesting. In the meantime, we were able to find out that the week that Lisa was missing, allegedly there were family that were in town for Carnival. So Paul's mom rents a car, Paul's driving it. The CD player doesn't work in the car, so Paul returns the car, and then mom rents another car. He admitted that he was driving that car for about a week. So let's talk about why the information about the two different vehicles

were important to this investigation. You know, if Edwards were to transport a body somewhere, yep, I'm going to go there for a second. If Edwards were going to transport a body somewhere, what better way than not to use your own vehicle, right? He returned the car and we were able to track down that car and we found that the car had been re-rented. So at that point, we get with the rental agency and we find out who has the car, this poor guy had to give up the car right then and there. We found it, we sealed it, towed it over to our secured area in anticipation of a search warrant. Imagine if you were the guy who rented the car after Paul Edwards and you're driving down the road and police pull you over and say, we're confiscating your car because it may have been used in a homicide. I can't ever imagine that happening to me. Poor guy.

He literally has this car that he has paid for. And he's, I don't know, I picture someone standing in the road waiting for their next ride. So again, it's one of those things that unfortunately in police work, other people get caught up. And while they needed that car,

I definitely do. I feel for that guy. That car was impounded and the evidence chain just took another step forward. We located one very small drop of blood. It was in the rear passenger door jamb. Now listen, this is a rental car and we all know that there's lots of people in and out of rental cars. So finding some blood in and of itself, that's not really going to get you anywhere, usually. But here, they already had much more, which is when you put it all together, now that they can go in and get that search

warrant. And where do you see the change here, Anna Seeger, from before to this new blood evidence? Would you sign off on this? From everything that we hear at this point, yes. But it is very intrusive, a search warrant. You are actually going into someone's home or personal domain and going through really every object or at least what's listed on the search warrant or things that are in close proximity. We don't know if there's a crime scene in the city of Miramar. We don't know what happened to Lisa, but we need to go inside that residence and we need to check and make sure that there's no blood, no evidence of foul play, evidence of a struggle.

And when we're in there, I'll be honest, it wasn't a bloody mess. There were small specks of blood here and there that realistically a defense attorney can say, you know what, this is normal blood drops in a normal house. People cut themselves, they bleed, they live there. It's not uncommon. But one spot in the house did stand out to investigators. A small amount of blood under the vanity in the bathroom was in an area that is not commonly conducive to have blood on it, and it had directionality. Let me go sideways for a second and explain how that's looked at. When a drop of blood hits the floor at an angle,

they produce elliptical stains, and that's where the width to length ratio gives the impact angle. So basically, when someone is, say, cuts their hand and they wave their hand, the way the blood falls off the hand against a surface, you can tell what direction that hand was moving in. The main reasons why the blood spatter found under the bathroom vanity is suspicious is because you'd have to wonder why, what would make the blood fly up? And the next thing, they ended up going to speak to a co-worker of Paul Edwards. They were able to gain some evidence that Paul Edwards wasn't talking about. She gets a call from Paul.

She's in the medical field. And Paul says, hey, can you come downstairs? I want to talk to you real quick. She meets Paul down in the parking lot area of where they both work and immediately looks at Paul's hands and asks him, well, what happened? They're bandaged up. Paul shows the cut, and it was to the point where she said,

you need to go get stitches. That's nasty. Those are bad cuts. Paul said, nah, I'm okay. I was wondering if you can just give me something for the pain. And she counters with, how'd you even do that?

That looks really bad. And Paul's response was, I was cutting chicken, and I cut my hand. There's two big, big things in what just happened there, right? I mean, one is the obvious that he has given a totally different story here than what he said before, right? Paul told us that he got cut from Lisa when Lisa was attempting to attack him with a knife. So why the different stories if at least there's some innocent explanation about what occurred?

But now here's the way that I even like what they found out from this co-worker even more. Is that he basically went to her and asked for pain medication with wounds that she said, hey, that looks pretty bad. Why aren't you going to a doctor or a hospital? So my big question, if I ever had him up on the stand, is why not? Which means that to me, he's really trying to keep this information away from any sort of authority figure. So some of you may be listening to this and saying, well, of course, the next move is you arrest Paul Edwards. And in this case,

remember, we still have no body. They don't even have a crime. And while we say there's lots of lies being told every way you look, well, guess what? That's not a crime. You can lie to the police. It may not be wise and it may get you in trouble down the road, but there's nothing, there's nothing criminal about that. At that point, trying to find Lisa with no evidence to go by, a lot of people ask me, was that a needle in the haystack? And I say, no, a needle in the haystack is actually easy. You burn the hay and then the needle is what's left. This is a needle in a stack of needles. And we had nothing to go by. And so while police definitely believed at that point that unfortunately they thought that Paul Edwards had killed Lisa, they were going to have a very

difficult time at this point even proving a crime. Detective Smith went to lead homicide prosecutor Brian Kavanaugh. Now, he is someone I personally am very familiar with, and I've worked with him in the past. And it's what Brian told the detectives that would take this case to a whole nother level. I'm sitting down and I'm speaking with Brian, and we're just going over everything I have. And I'm trying to organize it and just brainstorm. Brian said, you got to think outside the box. Light the fire. You got it. And they came up with one of the most outlandish but interesting

ideas I've ever heard. Brian said it's been a month and a half. You have no leads, no tips, and you have no body. You have some circumstantial evidence, and you have a lot of suspicion. So you're going to have to figure something out to light the fire. It got all of us thinking and that was when the idea was born to go ahead and clone a phone and make it seem like anything we do on this particular phone is coming from Lisa Spence. What a smart idea. This is why I will always say that this line of work

never gets old, it never gets boring. You see something done differently every single case, and this is the thing in this case. It is the idea of cloning a phone. And yeah, people may say, oh, I've seen them do that on Law & Order, I saw that on CSI. Well, I can tell you, it doesn't happen very often.

This is a great one. So hats off to these detectives to determine that this really was the only next step they could take because they still needed the answer about these text messages that Lisa's brother was getting. Just see that if we clone her phone, what we can kind of shake out of the trees, if you will, if we now send something from her phone to see where we get. I opted to go ahead and do the court order and clone that mobile phone. So by sending this text message, lots of different possibilities can happen. The first one is he can make a move, and it may be a move towards where a body was left,

or it may be a move to meet a new aspect or a new suspect in this case that you need to start looking at. Or he can react by just showing up at the police department saying, hey, Lisa just texted me. I've been telling you the truth all along. See, here's her text. And I really see it as payoff, no matter how it plays out, because you either want to rule him out or keep him in. So the operation was a complete surveillance operation. It was one of the bigger operations that I'd ever put together in 25 years. We had fixed-wing aircraft. We had, I can't even tell you how many unmarked cars, the U.S. Marshals involved. We had, I can't even tell you how many unmarked cars, the U.S. Marshals involved. We had an FBI task force involved.

And then we had essentially every detective in our entire detective bureau. They brought in the Broward Sheriff's Office. They had the Miramar Police Department. They had Florida Highway Patrol or FHP. It is like the cavalry has come out when they have one of these operations going. They had so many avenues and so many angles covered on this surveillance. Because they just don't know where they're going. This is not something that is easy to pull off or that happens every day.

Everyone was set up, knew what we were going to do. Everyone had their jobs. Unfortunately, there are so many Lee's Suspenses out there. This is not the type of attention that people normally expect, but it just shows how to Detective Smith and so many law enforcement officers. Lisa Spence is as important as anybody else. And they took the same measures that they would in the most high profile cases. And I just love that, that he was willing to pull out all the stops to find this woman because he really felt that something was very wrong.

So talking with Detective Smith, I kind of pictured members of his team sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out, you know, what are you going to text? And the idea was she's not a texter, and I imagined that there would be a typo. I, in about three seconds, decided I'm just going to text him and say, just wait till I got better. The idea was to get the blood to just drain from his head

and just turn white as a ghost and just start thinking. What is going on? How is this possible? But let's not forget, there is going to be risk involved with this plan. Now, we didn't have Lisa's phone. So if the offender has Lisa's phone in his hand, then we're dead in the water. As risky as the move would be, they weren't sure what the outcome would be until they actually did it. And then it was simply placing that text and getting on the radio and telling everyone

involved the text has been placed, stand by. You know, these are risky operations because not only could a situation occur where someone is armed, you also risk your cover being blown. And then that gives the suspect the idea, hey, I may have been going somewhere that may be valuable to your investigation, but now that I know you're following me, I'm not doing anything. So I had hoped the greatest thing that could happen is the text goes out. Within two minutes, Paul leaves the house, drives directly to where Lisa's body is,

and moves her. But unfortunately, he didn't. The text was out there, and we've got an airplane flying around, and an hour goes by. No movement. Another hour goes by. No movement. And now I'm starting to get movement. Another hour goes by, no movement.

And now I'm starting to get worried. People are sitting in their cars and they're just waiting, twiddling their thumbs. So now I'm starting to get a little bit worried and just, I'm hoping. Really, it was just a lot of hope. But three hours of waiting paid off. Finally, we see Paul Edwards exit his mom's house and jump in his car and start driving. So doing a tail as part of a surveillance is very difficult, especially if it's a single vehicle tail. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've done single tail surveillances and I've lost the car because they were doing multiple U-turns or three-point turns just to see if they were being

tailed. And you have to make a decision. You have to call off the tail if you believe you've been blown, your car has been blown. So in this case, with so many assets on the ground, you can afford with multiple cars, you can afford one car with radio communications with the other cars to turn off naturally. So it seems like the normal flow of traffic. So with the person who's being tailed, seeing that the car they thought was following them is turning away, they'll continue to where they're going only to be picked up by another car they've not seen before. That wouldn't appear to be suspicious to them. Paul starts driving. He goes to Aventura Mall, which is the area where he works. His job is right next to the Aventura Mall.

Paul drives all over the place. He went to a couple different spots. He never got out of the car. I mean, he is driving as if he knows he's being followed. He is doing a lot of those U-turns, those exact three-point turns and switching lanes. And they don't know which way he's going to go, but it does seem that he's on to them. So where is that going to lead? Paul drives back to his mom's house, which is where he was.

And then he sits in there. And he's not moving. I thought about sending another text, but I opted against it. And I just held everyone. And I actually had a time frame in my head. And I said, if he doesn't come out in a certain amount of time, then we're going to go ahead and call it. And sure enough, if he doesn't come out in a certain amount of time, then we're going to go ahead and call it. And sure enough, he left again. So when Paul Edwards decided to leave again, the surveillance is back on.

Several big questions remain. Will this second effort lead investigators to uncovering the truth, lead them to the whereabouts of Lisa Spence, and would they find her dead or perhaps alive? Those answers and much more when you join us next week for part two of our story. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original, a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production. Sumit David is executive producer.