Anatomy of Murder - The Package (Ildiko Krajnyak)
Episode Date: September 2, 2025A bomb explodes in a day spa, destroying the building, killing its owner, and seriously injuring others. Would the blast be the work of a terrorist act or something else? Unraveling the mystery became... a puzzle that was solved one piece at a timeView source material and photos for this episode at: anatomyofmurder.com/the-packageCan’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Well, I mean, I described to you some of the chemicals that, you know, I have had in the past,
you know, strontium nitrate and potassium nitrate and some other things.
So as far as making some type of explosive device, did you make one?
No.
Ever?
Never.
Never made an explosive device.
No.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anasiga Nikolaazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of investigation discoveries true conviction.
And this is Anatomy of murder.
When it comes to homicides, an investigator can learn a lot about a killer's intentions by the type of weapon chosen to commit the crime.
A gun, for instance, demonstrates a clear intent to kill.
Poison, premeditation, and bare hands, well, that's often a sign of unadulterated rage.
But the more unorthodox methods of murder, they can test detectives and prosecutors alike
as they try to decipher motives and analyze evidence that they may not have had a lot of experience with.
And in those situations, local law enforcement might just call on experts that have the experience and the resources
to solve even the most perplexing and disturbing crimes.
And I'm talking about the feds.
My name is Anna Martin Salick, and I'm a former federal prosecutor.
I began my career in Washington, D.C. at Maine Justice with the National Security Division
and then transferred out to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, where I prosecuted
and investigated national security matters from counterterrorism and,
espionage to export enforcement and cyber matters.
Ever since joining the Justice Department out of law school, Anna Martin spent her career
investigating terrorist attacks and prosecuting criminals involved in acts of mass destruction
and murder. But in 2018, she led an FBI task force investigating a very different type of case.
The story of this extraordinary crime began in the most ordinary of places, a modest day spa in
Orange County, California, run by a 48-year-old cosmetologist named Ildico Croniac.
Ildico Croniac was a esthetician and small business owner. She operated a day spa in Elisa Viejo,
California, which is a small town in Orange County. And she had immigrated from Hungary in the 1990s
to the U.S. She had come here by herself with very little, and she was an incredible.
diligent worker and entrepreneur.
Ildico's was a classic immigrant success story.
Holding a full-time job selling beauty supplies during the day,
Ildico put herself through cosmetology school at night.
She eventually saved enough money that she was able to open her own day spa,
which had been her dream for many years.
Ildeco was described by her friends as elegant, charming, and incredibly social,
and deeply dedicated to her business and clients.
When we spoke with her friends and family,
people described her as one of those magnetic personalities
that could bring you in.
She was always happy to see you.
She told hilarious stories.
She cared about her clients and her friends.
She was just a really effervescent personality.
On May 15th, 2018, at approximately 1 o'clock in the afternoon, Ildico had just finished treating a mother and her daughter to facials in preparation for the daughter's wedding day.
It was the kind of business Ildico loved, allowing her to be a trusted part of someone's big life event.
As the woman thanked her, Ildico stepped behind the counter to process their payment.
Seconds later, the unthinkable happened. The room exploded.
in a white hot fireball, ripping through the store
and blowing a gaping hole in the front of the two-story commercial building.
The massive blast was followed by an eerie silence, and then chaos.
People from surrounding buildings stumbled into the parking lot
and couldn't quite believe what they were seeing.
Sirens soon filled the air.
The first officers arrived at the scene within minutes of the explosion.
And when they arrived, they saw large plumes of,
white, grayish smoke coming out of the building, they could see that where the day spa had
been located, that that whole side of the building was decimated. The windows were blown out.
The walls had been completely blown apart. And essentially, the entire side, the quadrant of the
building where the explosion occurred was missing and in flames.
First responders looked at the damage and initially thought there must have been a gas main rupture.
They quickly got to work setting up a wide perimeter and evacuating people from the surrounding buildings,
including dozens of children from a daycare center just across the street.
I remember arriving to the command post, and it was full of law enforcement officers.
And what I was struck by was just the amount of devastation.
The fact that this building was completely decimated and the amount of destruction.
As someone who had experience with mass casualty events, Anna looked at the damage and couldn't help but fear the worst.
And I think everyone was shocked that there were surviving victims.
It was incredibly lucky that the two women survived this attack.
Incredibly, the mother and daughter who were inside the spa at the time were still alive.
They had very extensive injuries.
the daughter had second and third degree burns all over her body.
The mother did lose eyesight as a result of the bombing.
Despite their serious injuries,
the victims were able to recount for investigators
what had happened in the seconds before the massive explosion.
A mother and daughter had appointments with Ildico that day
at around 11.30 for facials as they were finishing up
about an hour and a half later.
the daughter was standing just a couple feet away from Ildigo who had gone behind her desk.
According to the daughter, there were several packages in cardboard boxes stacked behind the desk.
When the daughter reached into her purse to get her credit card to pay for the services,
she could see Ildico begin to open a package.
And then all of a sudden she heard, she described it as a tinging or a pinging sound.
and then an incredibly forceful amount of pressure,
knocked her off her feet.
The room filled with the white, hot light, as she described it,
and she never saw Ildico again.
The next few seconds were a terrifying blur of smoke, fire, and flying rubble.
Her mother, who was older, was knocked down under the debris.
The daughter screamed for her mother trying to find her.
She was finally able to pick her mother.
up out of the debris
and they actually had to climb
through the now
exposed and blown
out windows and doors
to get out of the building.
They were burned. Their
eardrums were ruptured
and her mother had lost her sight.
It was a miracle
they were still alive.
Sadly, Ildico was not
so lucky. The massive explosion
was centralized directly
in front of her.
and it then completely eviscerated her body.
After hearing the survivor's harrowing account of the blast
and reviewing the initial evidence,
investigators reached a critical conclusion.
This wasn't the result of a gas leak or faulty wiring.
Every fragment and scorch mark pointed to the one undeniable truth.
It was a bomb.
It was very clear that it was a bombing and it was targeted.
And based on that,
FBI deployed to support the Orange County Sheriff's Department, who was the first law enforcement agency on scene.
Any potential mass casualty event like this one is going to attract a huge law enforcement response,
often from multiple agencies and jurisdictions.
But the fact that this may have been a bombing also raised another frightening possibility, terrorism.
This was May 2018.
Our office, two years previously, had handled the,
San Bernardino terrorist attacks. When the bombing occurred on May 15th, our first thought was that
this could potentially be a terrorist act. So FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force deployed, and so did we.
I think we had AUSAs at the command post within about an hour of the bombing.
Now, the task force also knew that if this was an act of terror, the danger might not be over.
Federal and local officers rushed to evacuate and secure the surrounding area just in case of a potential follow-up attack.
The response to the scene was massive.
You had hundreds of law enforcement agents and officers, both from the Orange County Sheriff's Department, from the FBI, from the ATF, from other local police departments responding to the scene.
After they made sure that all civilians were out of the location, they then went through a police department.
very methodical search of the building. First, they did a render safe of the location where
the bomb techs went in and did some initial assessment and looked for other devices.
Thankfully, no other explosive devices were found, but their search of the bomb ravage
building did turn up the remains of the sole fatality of the explosion, Ildico Croniac.
Due the force of the bomb, the deceased victim, her body was horrific.
Her body was ripped apart.
Her midsection and her hands and forearms, the parts of her that were closest to the bomb when it went off, were completely eviscerated.
And the FBI ERT team spent weeks finding her remains in the trees and the bushes outside of the building.
It was an awful scene.
With the news of Eldico's shocking death,
her friends and family were devastated and heartbroken.
And the mystery surrounding the incident
was a source of fear throughout the town
of Alicio Vaheo.
It was very scary to the whole community
to all of Southern California.
As we talked about, we didn't know
if this was a political, a terrorist attack,
what it was.
So there was a lot of media attention in the beginning.
Over the next two weeks,
forensic teams, including the FBI's evidence response team, spent their days combing through
the debris field and analyzing components from the blast site. And the FBI went through literally
inch by inch in grids, searching for anything that could have been part of the bomb, any other
relevant evidence, making sure that all human remains were collected in a humane way
and preserved. And they spent weeks processing the site.
Amongst the recovered evidence were pieces of what appeared to be a 9-volt battery
and wire fragments embedded in the ceiling directly above the detonation point.
Telltell signs that the explosion had likely been triggered by a sophisticated improvised explosive device or IED
that was likely concealed in a cardboard box and specifically designed to detonate upon opening.
Which meant first that this was no accident. It was intentional and ill-de-degroval.
But if the bomb was hidden in mail addressed to Ildico, it also meant something else that she was likely the intended target of the bomb, and investigators were determined to find out why.
In May of 2018, a bomb ripped through a day spot in Southern California,
killing 48-year-old Ildico Croniac instantly.
The FBI's JTTF, also known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force,
determined that the homemade IED was hidden in a cardboard box,
like a UPS-style package, designed to detonate when it opened by its intended target.
In other words, this was a deliberate and targeted case of homicide.
which left investigators to wonder who had the motive and the expertise to execute such a devastating and merciless act of murder.
And, you know, Scott, it's not such a wide range of individuals, right?
Because many people can get access to firearms.
Many people can get a knife or the different type of weapons we normally think about and we're thinking about violent crime.
But either to obtain a destructive device like a bomb or even maybe.
maybe know how to build it? I mean, that is a pretty narrow pool of people.
Yeah, there's obviously some level of sophistication here. But when you start to think about
what potential motives that could be, you've got to look at various different things. And one of
them, Manassega, is really where this occurred. You know, this occurred at her business. Is there
a financial motive? Could there be an element of organized crime? You know, was she in financial
trouble and unable to pay a debt back? These are the types of threads you have to pull on to
try to develop some potential modus operandi.
But again, even trying to figure out the why, it really comes down to the who.
I mean, it's so rare that you get them and hear a targeting attack of a person, a woman.
I mean, one thing, it does come down to also thinking about the who, right?
Because given that this was the murder of a woman, well, statistics showed that her killer,
no matter how he chose to commit that crime, is most likely, very likely by the numbers of someone she knew.
And so investigators, before they even get to the why or the specific,
person, they're going to start right there in the place that they normally do in the home.
One of the first people we were looking at was the husband, which is often where these cases start.
Ildico had been married for nearly 20 years and was the mother of a teenage son, but investigators
soon learned that her marriage was not exactly the most traditional.
They did live together, but they had separate lives. So they had separate bedrooms in the house.
She was dating other men.
They were united together with their son in parenting.
They still had family events and dinners, et cetera,
but the romantic part of the marriage had ended.
Ildigo's husband agreed to speak to police
and was forthcoming about the state of their marriage,
including the fact that he was aware
that his wife was beginning to see other men.
It was an unorthodox arrangement,
but one that worked for them
and it allowed them to prioritize co-parenting their teenage son.
He also gave investigators his consent to search his digital devices.
You know, sometimes as an investigator, you just know.
Well, it was pretty clear from both his demeanor and his cooperation that Ildico's husband was not a person of interest in his wife's murder.
However, his mention of Ildico dating other men, well, that did raise the possibility of other suspects.
We then learned that Ildeco was in a on and off, again, relationship with an individual,
named Stephen Beale. He was the one who had called into the Orange County hotline that afternoon,
I think it was around 3 p.m., a few hours after the bombing and said, I'm her business partner,
and I heard there was an explosion. Stephen Beal was a 59-year-old businessman from Long Beach,
which is about an hour's drive north of Elisa Vallejo. And according to Eldico's friends,
Stephen and her were much more than just business partners.
friends and clients knew that she had been in a relationship. Many of them had met Stephen,
and they described a relationship that was very hot and heavy in the beginning. They were both
very into it in love with each other, calling, texting all the time. He had supported her
in opening the spa. He had actually helped her sign the lease, and he had provided her some
cash. As a minor investor in Ildico's spa, he wouldn't have much to gain from the
destruction of the business or the death of his partner. But his romantic history with the victim
certainly made him someone police wanted to talk to, especially when they learned how their romance
had ended. They had a very intense romantic period. But then in around December, January,
six months before the bombing, her friends consistently described that Ildico was trying to
get out of the relationship with Stephen, and that Stephen wasn't taking.
no, that she had really cooled towards him, that she was dating other men, that she was trying
to disentangle herself from Stephen, trying to put some distance in between them, and that
Stephen was still very aggressively pursuing her.
And so soon after he contacted police, investigators decided to contact him right back.
So then officers went to Stephen Beale's residence, which was about an hour.
away in Long Beach. And when they arrived, they saw that there were a bunch of UPS packages being
delivered at Stevens' house. So this is just one day after the bombing. So you have to imagine
investigators were being extra cautious about anything out of the ordinary. Even a stack of boxes
constituted a potential threat. At this point, we knew the description that the bomb went off as
Ildico was opening a cardboard package. So the officers were concerned that maybe there was a bomb in one of
the packages that had arrived at Stevens residents. You really couldn't be too careful. I mean,
it was possible that Stephen Beale could also have been a target or the responding officers.
They made sure that there were no bombs in the packages. He then allowed, he provided consent to enter the home.
So the bomb squad confirmed there were no hidden explosives in any.
any of the boxes. But once inside the house, Beale was about to provide a bombshell of his own.
He gave consent to search his house. I will say the search was very concerning when they arrived
at the house. They found 130 pounds of volatile explosives and explosive precursor chemicals,
the materials that you use to make combustible materials, black powder, etc., the explosive
of charge. They found wires, all of the tools you would need to construct a bomb and a large
quantity of bomb-making materials in Stevens, garage, the pool house, and in the attic.
But incredibly, Beale was adamant that he had a perfectly good explanation.
Stephen was a rocketry enthusiast. He had actually obtained this high-level certification
in building model rockets.
But we're not talking about one of those foot-long model rockets you may have shot
in the air as a kid. I mean, I remember buying and building Estes rockets and igniting them
was more like lighting a piece of fireworks. But in this case, this was so much more.
These were not what Stephen was building. Stephen was building rockets that were the size of houses.
One of his rockets achieved Mach 2 speed. These were massive contraptions that he needed a team
to set off in the deserts. Stephen insisted that chemicals and materials found in his house,
were common among rocketry enthusiasts, and that he didn't possess materials powerful enough
to produce an explosion like the one seen on the news.
Once investigators set foot inside the house, it became clear this was far from an ordinary
search. Spread throughout the living room were over 130 pounds of precursor explosives,
fully mixed charges, electric matches, and wiring rigged to trigger a blast. Beale claimed
it was all intended for his high-powered model rockets and fireworks.
But whether that story held any truth or not,
detectives still collected crucial insights,
details that matched the profile they had built for Eldico's killer.
He had specialized skill and knowledge in mixing explosive powders
and chemical compounds to make a bomb and also the fusing systems required
to make those rockets and fireworks go off at the right time.
there was clearly a link between the explosion and the amount of materials in his house,
his experience and knowledge in building devices that are essentially the same as a bomb.
Police also found several firearms in his house.
Now, they were all legally registered, but again, something police want to consider
when he is being questioned in relation to the murder of his former girlfriend.
He actually, the following day on his own without any request,
or prompting from the sheriff's department showed up at the sheriff's department and
Elisa Viejo.
Which to me is such a BRF or big red flag.
Being cooperative is one thing.
But inserting yourself in an investigation, to me, always feels a bit suspicious.
Real quick, before we start, I just want you're here voluntarily.
You came and drove in on your own.
What was notable to me and others was that he voluntarily sat for many hours.
of interviews, those first two days of the bombing, and yet he provided such little information.
When investigators asked him but the volatile chemicals found in his home, he calmly dismissed it as coincidence.
I don't remember what chemicals are around in the house because I haven't taken them down and looked at them.
I haven't thought of them. I didn't even know where they were.
If there's an oxidizer, I mean, sure, there was some sort of an oxidizer that it was in the bomb that was placed because you'd have to.
And it clearly is possible that I have that oxidizer.
You know, if it was potassium nitrate, potassium nitrate is a specific chemical.
And it's in both places.
That's not a surprise to me.
During the course of the interview, Beale volunteered to help, but was guarded and careful
not to offer police anything that might be incriminating.
Although there was this one bizarre part where he starts describing a screenplay
that he claimed to be writing about, get this, a professional assassin.
Just because I'm taking the life of someone doesn't mean that I'm the murderer
because if I refuse to do it, this person would hire someone else.
So really, I'm just the tool.
All right.
It's going to get done anyway.
The person that hires me that is actually the murder, not me.
Which, given the circumstances of his friend's murder,
seems pretty insensitive at best, and possibly a kind of taunt or perhaps a weird
flex. And there's this part where he seems to be admitting to knowing a little too much about
the crime scene.
Coming back to something you just mentioned, you talked about the size of the package that
she would have had to have opened in order to have done that kind of damage.
Why would you assume it was a package that she opened?
Because it's in the news reports.
Does she open a package?
It said it was a package.
Is that the only way that a package could be, could be, you'd all
I don't know, I suppose you could have the timer in there or a cell phone or something that would, you know, that would trigger it.
It's just package for me means you open it.
I mean, that's my assumption. When I get a package in the mail, I open it.
Other than that, I don't know.
Eventually, Beale also shared some personal details of his and Ildico's past together.
It was very bizarre. He was very calm throughout. He was not emotional. He said that he and Ildico
were in a romantic relationship, that they had been dating for about two years before the bombing.
They met in June of 2016. He described that they had a very intense romantic relationship.
They traveled a lot together. They shared a lot of this.
same interests. He was clearly very smitten and in love with her.
At one point during the interview, he even let it slip that he was angry and resentful
about their breakup. He did admit that the relationship had soured. And he said that around a few
months before the bombing that he had learned that she was dating other men. And he confronted
her and was very upset and felt that he had been betrayed and hurt.
According to Beale, this confrontation had started on a trip the couple took to Portugal
an attempt by Beal to rekindle their relationship, which ended up doing just the opposite.
He had confronted her as to whether or not she was dating other men, and she had told
them that she was and that she had been dating an individual in Northern California.
The defendant admitted to being felt very betrayed and angry.
by that.
Because the reality is, if she had come to me and said, you know, I really think that I want
to open up our relationship a little bit.
I don't want to be exclusive.
I want to, you know, date other men.
I wouldn't say, okay.
You know, we ultimately had that discussion.
Okay, that's fine.
We'll do that.
And it was the hiding it that was the, you know, these plans to see.
So by admitting that he felt betrayed, he was basically handing investment, he was basically handing
investigators a potential motive, which to me is either incredibly stupid or another example of
someone with an ego big enough to make him think that he can go toe to toe to with the feds
and just walk away. When he was asked as to why there was so much volume of this material in his
house, he said he didn't really know why it was still there. He hadn't been making rockets
for a long time. He had lost interest. He said after 9-11, he wasn't.
doing fireworks and rocketry anymore. His answers really didn't make sense when you
looked at the amount of materials in the house, particularly in his pool house, which was really
his like workshop. And while some of the jars or the containers of explosives did have some
dust on them, it was also very clear that he had been in and out of there and working in that
face recently.
Investigators were faced with the decision.
They hadn't directly connected him to the crime scene, but they believed it was only a matter
of time.
So at the end of the third interview, he was arrested on probable cause based on two devices
that we found in his residence that appeared to be destructive devices.
They looked like little pipe bombs.
And so he was arrested on possessing an unregistered destructive device, which is a
federal violation. The decision to charge Beal was a calculated risk. They hoped it would buy
them time to gather the evidence they needed to prove that he killed Ildico, and it would also
get a potentially dangerous man off of the street. But show their cards too early, and it just
might give their main suspect the opportunity he needed to get away with murder.
The discovery of bomb-making materials in his home, a suspicious interview,
and a backstory about a breakup, has convinced federal investigators
that Stephen Beale was responsible for the bomb that killed his ex-girlfriend, Ildigo Kroniak.
But could they prove it?
We knew that this awful event had occurred.
We believed it was a targeted killing.
There were signs pointing to Beale.
we found what we believe would have supported a federal charge in his house.
We obviously didn't want any harm to the community to happen from another explosion occurring.
So yes, there was a desire to secure the community.
At the same time, the investigation, it was very early on, and this was a very complicated scene
and, you know, mixture of people and motives that we had to work through.
But unfortunately for the task force, those charges against Beale fell apart
because it turned out that those devices they thought were pipe bombs, they were duds.
We then learned that they were more likely considered sugar bombs
and that the explosive charge was lower than we than it had tested in the field.
So we ended up having to dismiss those charges and the defendant was released.
Prosecutors then embarked on a mission to build an airtight case
before ultimately bringing murder charges.
And so over the following months,
investigators searched for any physical or circumstantial links
between Beale and the explosive device that killed Ildico.
They did chemical testing at the location of the bomb
and determined that the bomb had been made up of a fuel
and a chlorate or per chlorate oxidizer,
and that was confirmed by both chemical testing
and the unique white smoke.
that many of the witnesses had observed.
And at the defendant's residence, he had chloride and perchlorate oxidizers.
So the laboratory testing proved that the explosive mixture used in the bomb
was chemically identical to the substances found at Beale's home.
But of course, he already had a plausible, if dubious explanation,
his love for model rockets.
So they went looking for an even more direct connection,
specifically locating the, quote, seat or origin of the blast itself.
We were able to narrow down to really inches
where we believed the package was when it exploded.
And that allowed us to really hone in on that area.
And what we found was we saw charing below the desk
supporting that that was the location where the bomb had gone off.
And then directly above where the desk had been,
we found embedded in the ceiling, three cells, battery cells that go into a nine-volt battery.
You may be asking, what can you learn from tiny pieces of a generic battery? Turns out a lot.
These cells, and they were damaged and charred, one of the bomb texts was able to determine
that on the cells was a tiny little series of numbers and letters. Eventually, and this took several
weeks, we were able to tie those numbers on the battery cells to a shipment nine-volt batteries
from China that were sold in the Southern California area in the two months leading up to the
bombing. That was a key piece of evidence. And since Beale was in Southern California during this
time, it was possible that he had bought that particular battery, but they'd still need a way to be
Sure. And now this is the type of evidentiary findings that just always kept me interested in this
field for all those decades. Through some incredible boots on the ground cop work, we were able to get
CCTV footage of the defendant purchasing a single CVS brand 9 volt battery sold in a one pack
just a few days before the bombing in cash. I mean, that was a huge find. We have this very
unusual brand battery, this specific type, a 9 volt in a one pack, and he's buying it on May 8th,
seven days before the bombing in cash, which we thought was very suspicious.
And just listening to the other side of the argument in my head for a moment, I could hear
the defense attorneys, you know, say people buy batteries all the time.
You know, investigators would need something more, and it comes from the bits of wire recovered
from the ceiling just above the blast?
Correct.
They found what they believed were the wires
that made up the fusing system of the bomb.
They found these, again, unique single-strand,
solid-core copper wires, sheathed and plastic.
They found those right above the seat of the blast in the ceiling,
and they found the same type of wires in the defendant's residence.
And then there was the delivery system itself,
the cardboard box that housed the bomb.
Investigators hoped to find a way
to connect Beale to that box.
So first we had the witness statements which described Ildico opening a cardboard box and of a very odd size.
Her last image of Ildico was Ildico opening this box.
And she described it as a, you know, a standard cardboard shipping box with some shiny tape on top.
But the size really stood out to her.
It was like a shoe box, but narrower and higher.
And when, I think it was the next day that she, when she was still in the hospital,
she was shown a box that measured 12 by 6.
She said, that's the size, that's it, that's the box.
I'm 100% sure.
So from the witness descriptions, we were looking for a very unique size box.
And to prove Beal purchased a similar box before the murder, it was back to the videotape.
In addition to the battery purchase, we linked the defendant to this very unique box size
because we found CCTV footage and receipts showing that he purchased two 12 by six by six boxes
on May 7th, the day before he purchased the battery.
And then we were able to get CCTV footage actually showing him purchasing the boxes from
Staples just a few days before the bombing.
And so if he indeed did build the bomb using the last,
the rocketry chemicals from his house, the battery from CVS, and the cardboard box from
Staples, how did he actually then deliver the bomb? Right before the explosion, Ildico had gone
to Hungary to visit her friends and family. She was gone for about 10 days. She arrived the night
before the bombing. And what we saw on the CCTV footage was Stevens' vehicle driving into
the office park and leaving on at least two occasions while she was gone. We also had
had cell tower evidence, placing him in the area of the day spa.
Which means he could have left the package at the business during one of those visits,
timing it to coincide with her return from her trip to Hungary.
When we did a search of his vehicle, we found keys to the spa in the center console of his
Prius. And so we knew that he had visited the spa while she was away in Hungary on at least two
occasions. And as for how he knew when she would be out of town, well, Beal had already admitted
to police in his prior interview that he had access to her daily schedule.
How did you know she was back in the U.S.? I have access to her schedule? I'm the business
manager for her. Do you get to share a calendar or something? Yes, special programs that she uses.
So with what was becoming a flood of evidence, the FBI and federal prosecutors finally made their move.
A little less than a year after the explosion, Beale was arrested in charge with Ildico's murder.
A grand jury returned an indictment with four charges in relation to the attack,
including the malicious destruction of a building resulting in death and the use of a weapon of mass destruction.
Federal prosecutors were prepared to argue that Beale's jealousy and possessiveness
had escalated into a lethal plot to kill the woman he claimed to love.
and they believed that they finally had the hard evidence to prove it.
In the first trial, the defendant was represented by the federal public defender's office here in Los Angeles.
And they, as is their right and their duty, they challenged us on every single piece of evidence.
And until the really midway through the first trial, we did not know what their defense was going to be.
They had raised several different types of defenses throughout.
pretrial litigation. There was a defense that this wasn't even a bomb. It was a gas explosion or it was
related to her oxygen facial machine. And so we put on a case that could combat any possible defense
that they may raise during the case. But I can tell you from experience that sometimes admitting
every possible piece of evidence an already complex trial can come with risk.
We were on the defensive in the first trial. We put over 60 witnesses on.
on the sand. We had thousands of exhibits. We were attempting to sort of show the overwhelming
evidence that we had. But in doing that, I think we lost the ability to focus the jury on
the pieces of evidence that were most compelling. We could feel during the trial that we were
moving in a bad direction. I, like, we knew that we were getting lost in the weeds and defense
counsel was doing a great job of poking any tiny little hole, no matter how irrelevant it was
to the actual bombing, but they were making headway. So we could feel it going wrong,
and we could feel how exhausted the jury was as well. The trial ran for three months over the
summer of 2020, and when both sides arrested their cases, it was still anyone's guess which
way the jury would go. Had prosecutors proven that the heartbroken rocket enthusiasts had made the
bomb that killed Ildicoe, or had the defense created enough reasonable doubt to blow their case
apart?
In Stephen Beale's trial for the murder of Ilverd. In Stephen Beale's trial for the murder of Ildeke,
Colchrnyak, the jury deliberated for nearly two weeks, an unbearably long time.
And those two weeks were awful, because at any moment, you could receive a call,
you're hanging out with your team in the courthouse, waiting, you're waiting for a call
that either there's a verdict or there's a jury note, and the longer and longer it takes,
the worse it's looking.
Finally, Anna and her team received the call from the courthouse deputy to report to the
court in 10 minutes.
Everyone scrambles. We get up there, and then we had learned that they were unable to
reach a verdict on the counts, and a mistrial was declared. And that was devastating.
Faced with a sea of evidence and the defense counterarguments, the jurors were unable to
reach a unanimous verdict. And having had more than one hung jury in my years prosecuting homicides,
I can say that it is a super difficult result for any prosecutor. But here, so much more so in
this case, you had the survivors who had witnessed and also been part of and maimed by this crime
and also for the family of the victim, Ildico.
The hardest moment of the jury returning and unable to return a verdict and a mistrial being
declared was just turning from, you know, you sit at this table in the courtroom and you can't
really see the audience and then turning and seeing her husband, her cousin, all of her family,
members who were there every single day of the trial and looking at them and realizing that we
were going to have to go through it again. That was the worst moment. When you look at the situations
when these happen, and they don't happen very often, but when they do, do you see it as like sort of
a diagnostic moment of how you move forward knowing you're going to retry the case?
It depends. I mean, there's so many different types of them. I've had them that were 11 to 1 in
one of them because the juror kind of fell in love with my defendant. You have them because,
you know, there's some piece of evidence that they aren't getting or that hopefully it's a
then teaching moment when we go back in there and try it again. So again, it's not one size
fits all, but I always look at it. First of all, by the numbers, it does happen to work more often
than not in a prosecutor's favor when we have the opportunity to retry it. But then, as you said,
it's like a teaching moment, hopefully that we figure out how to take that same evidence and just
whether it's put it together differently for the juror or do something that hopefully brings it over the finish line to prove beyond any reasonable doubt the second time around.
And just like in this case, it didn't mean the journey was over.
It meant that the trial would happen again.
Witnesses would have to return to the stand.
Graphic evidence would have to be presented as well.
And Ildico's family would have to sit through another painful recounting of a murder.
And for everyone involved, it really would not be easy.
particularly for the two surviving victims who were physically traumatized by the event, of course,
but psychologically traumatized. And they had had to testify in the first trial. They were both
subject to cross. Again, the public defenders did exactly what they're supposed to do
and zealously representing their clients. But it was brutal and intense and the thought that
they would have to go back on the stand and once again be subjected to cross-examination
when they had just had the unfortunate of witnessing this terrible event was really devastating.
And of course it is always something that prosecutors are considering and thinking through,
but in the end, while incredibly difficult for all the survivors and Ildico's family in particular,
justice must be served and this person must stop being a threat to society.
So for Anna Martin in this case, it was never a question what she would do next.
We would have kept trying this case until either he was acquitted or we got a conviction.
When we started that second trial, we knew that if that did not result in an acquittal or a conviction, that we would go again.
There was no chance of us not pursuing this case.
We didn't dismantle our trial books.
We were like, okay, we're doing it again.
So forging forward a retrial was scheduled for October of 2003, and prosecution redoubled their efforts.
to present a meticulous forensic case to a new jury.
Going into one, I thought there's no way a jury cannot convict on this evidence.
So having been through that experience, I was incredibly scared to go through it again and not to get a conviction.
We spent that whole year retooling our case.
We did a lot of soul searching and discussions with our colleagues and reviewing of the transcripts to figure out what went wrong and where we could.
do, we could do a better job. And really the main difference was just that we put on a much more
narrow case that presented our best evidence and didn't get into the weeds into all of the
additional evidence that we found compelling, but really wasn't necessary to get into.
In other words, keep it simple, at least somewhat give the jury enough, but not so much as to
potentially overwhelm them with too much information. Of course, that's
unless there is some new compelling evidence,
which in this case, there was.
And it came from the form of one of our favorite little pieces of evidence
in an investigation is a recorded jailhouse call.
So we did have recordings of him with his family members and associates throughout both trials.
He said some very disparaging things about Ildico.
He talked very poorly about her.
He did not seem to have any remorse or emotion.
about her death. He told different stories to different people when they would confront him
about some of the evidence that was being reported. So we thought those jail calls were
compelling to show that he was lying and also had very little remorse and some very negative
expressions about the victim. The second trial lasted for four weeks, during which jurors again
heard testimony from the survivors, forensic experts, and law enforcement officers who had worked
the scene. Especially effective was the emotional testimony of the daughter who had escaped
the blast after watching Ildico open the package that killed her. Focusing on Beale's possession
of volatile chemicals, his expertise in explosive making, and his access to both Ildico's schedule
and the spa itself, prosecutors presented a compelling argument of his guilt. This was a
carefully planned, premeditated act of murder, and the fact that it required so much skill
was precisely what made Beale such a dangerous man.
He was incredibly skilled.
I have no doubt that he knew the damage that was potential from this bomb going off.
In the digital media that we went through,
we found lots of videos and images of him mixing chemicals
and making rockets.
And again, a rocket is a bomb.
It's the same components.
He knew it would not only kill Ildico,
but that it could potentially kill anyone else in that area
and destroy the building.
Targeting Ildicoe made him a killer who needed to be held accountable.
His indifference to the lives and safety of anyone else
who may have been caught in the blast,
that made him a threat that needed to be stopped.
I think the jury only deliberated for about four hours.
Everyone scrambles.
Everyone arrives because it was so soon after closings.
A lot of the family was still there,
and the jury returned unanimous verdict on all four counts,
guilty on all forecasts. On January 19th, 2024, the judge sentenced bill to life in federal
prison plus 30 years, citing the cold, calculated nature of the attack. I remember walking back
into sort of the war room where we kept all of the boxes, but it was the first time I sort of felt
the import of what had happened and the loss of this woman and
I had become close with some of her family members and friends, and I remember hugging them
at the end and just feeling like, whoa, I couldn't believe that it had ended and we had gotten
there. And for the first time, I was really able to think about this woman who was no longer
with us and how still in mourning all of her family and friends were having lost her.
The sentencing marked the end of a grueling five-year investigation that required the collaboration
of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force,
Orange County authorities, and multiple federal partners.
But even after achieving a successful result,
Anna Martin can't help but consider the toll
a trial like this takes on everyone who was involved.
I've seen these horrible crime scenes and bodies blown apart
and talk to family members of people who've been killed.
And that is always awful.
And that never goes away.
and those images you see at night.
I think what was so difficult about this case
was the amount of time and energy
that the prosecutors and the agents lived and breathed this case
and the commitment to not letting it go.
From the moment detectives arrived on scene,
they faced a baffling puzzle.
Everything pointed to a premeditated terrorist plot.
Yet, as they methodically pieced together fragments of shredded documents, intercepted phone calls, and fibers matching Ildico's clothing, a different picture emerged.
What began as a potential mass casualty attack slowly unraveled into a singular act of violence.
In the end, Stephen Beale's weapon of choice wasn't meant for the public at large, but for one person.
And investigators realized they weren't stopping at terrorists.
They were unraveling a calculated murder.
And through the first hung jury, Anna Martin and her team demonstrated remarkable resolve,
rebuilding their case piece by piece, and a second jury saw clearly what the first had missed.
In true justice, a path to verdict is rarely a straight line.
It's dug out, refined, and ultimately reaffirmed.
Anna's sentiment is something felt by most homicide prosecutors, detectives,
all the people that work in fields of such violence, loss, and pain. But as tough as it can be,
the cause is necessary, just and also rewarding. Getting justice for the victims and survivors
of violent crime, like Anna and her colleagues did for Ildico and the women so severely
injured by the bomb. It's that end goal that gave her the drive to keep going for all those
hours, months, and years. It's something I've often felt myself. But in the end, there was justice,
at least in the courtroom for the mother and daughter
and also for Ildico Kroniak,
a mother, a businesswoman,
and a friend to so many
who had dedicated her life to making the world
just a little more beautiful,
one person at a time.
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 is executive producer.
This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamonde,
researched by Kate Cooper,
edited by Ali Sirwa,
and Phil John Grande.
I think Chuck would approve.