Anatomy of Murder - True or False?

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

A shooter ambushes a young father in front of his home. The man in custody confesses, almost too easily. What will investigators find as they press on for the truth?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

What is it with criminal type people? They all think what? How smart they are. Most criminals get caught because they all think, I figured out a way to do this and I'm not going to get caught. They're not going to catch me. 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 story takes us to Florida, a state where I was fortunate enough to start my law enforcement career.

And covering cases there has always been pretty special to me. When you spoke to the investigator in this case, Dan Bates, where did that take your mind about your time when you were serving down there? So when he was talking about some of the investigative techniques and some of the things that they used back in the late 80s, it really felt pretty home to me. Since you were down in Florida for a while, Scott, why don't you lay the landscape of Panama City out of it? So clearly Panama City is in northern Florida on the beach side. And the victim in this case is Ron Stolvol. And he was a 30-year-old ambitious guy. He was recently remarried and had a new baby, worked for UPS, but that wasn't enough for him. He was always so ambitious he wanted to get more for his family, so he's even going to masseuse school at night to really advance his career.

Ron Stolvol was a young man who had his whole life in front of him. He was trying to live that all-American story we always hear about. When this couple met, you know, Ron was waiting tables in a restaurant, and he was a single dad to a young daughter, and Angelica herself was a single mom with a young son. By 1988, they'd been married about three years. But it's their routine that really gets me. He gets up early every morning, between 3 and 3.30 every morning. He goes out to the UPS,

is where he works. And she gets up every morning to fix his lunch. Now that's dedication. I mean, for me, I'm not getting up 3.30 in the morning for too many things. I mean, work is probably about one of the only things I would do that for. Otherwise, I'm not getting up. But for her, she chose to get up every single morning, really in the middle of the night, to make him his lunch. And there's something very sweet in the ordinariness of that also. I mean, that for her was doing something kind for him. And in wanting to do that for him every single day, it speaks to the relationship between them. But on October 6th,

1998, that routine was about to change. And that morning, as she was trying to fix his lunch, she said, where is your lunchbox? And he had not brought it in from the car the day before. And he exited his house to go out in the driveway to get his lunch box out of the car. When he got out into the driveway near his car is when the first shot hit him. Think about the innocence of what was going on. I mean, he goes outside to get his lunchbox, but instead he's met with a bullet, and so she sees him go down. Think about how surreal that moment must have been like for her, how that moment felt like eternity

when she just watched her life change in front of her eyes. When she heard the shot, she looked out, and he was down, like kneeling on the ground. And she stated that he got up to try to get back in the house, which he did. He got back in the house. When he got inside the front door, of course they closed that door, and he leaned back against the door as if to try to keep somebody out if they were going to try to get in.

And at that point, there was an additional three shots fired through the door that struck him in the back. After he was struck in the back, he took a few steps forward. And it's a real small house, and he was there in the hallway. And when he fell forward, he actually fell into the kitchen. Once that happened, the shooter was following him to come in the house. He partially opened the door, and Ron's wife was standing there, and she immediately went against the door

to try to close it to keep this person out. There was a shoving mat on the door, and she actually slid her back down the wall to try to get her feet on the door so she would be a little stronger. And at that point, the shooter actually stuck his hand inside the door. She couldn't see his face or anything at that point and fired, tried to fire one shot at her, but it missed her and hit the wall. And at that point, she, I guess adrenaline took over. She was able to slam that door tight, closed. It's important to talk about the light of that house for a minute

because it is tiny. You know, it's been described as the kitchen is only maybe 15 feet from the front door. And remember, two of their three children were inside. Ron's daughter by his ex-wife, Tina, was at her mom's house for the night with their baby and the son that Angelica had. They are in their bedroom. And based on the size of the house, they're in the bedroom. Based on the size of that house, that bedroom is only maybe 20 or so feet away.

So they are right in the path, potentially, of whatever's about to happen in Angelica. She knows that. Once she was able to slam that door, she jumped up and ran down the hallway to her children because I guess you could call it a mother's instinct. This lady, I truly don't know how she kept it together like she did. I really don't, because with him firing through that door, he is firing directly toward that bedroom. And, of course, the good thing or the bad thing is that Ron was inside that door on the other side of it, and he caught the rounds. If one of those rounds would have missed him, it very easily could have traveled down there and gone through that next door into that bedroom

where those children were. When Dan was telling me that on my phone call with him, I was riveted just the way he was describing it. It's a frightening scene. I mean, it's something you'd see on TV or some horror film.

But it wasn't over. The shooter, he went to Ron, who was laying there on the kitchen floor. He had been using that pistol, but now he had that sawed-off shotgun with him. And he put that through the back of Ron's head. And right before he pulled the trigger, he said, this is for her.

Pulled the trigger. Then he left. Now, putting my prosecutor's hat on for a second, I already have so many questions. When that voice says, this is for her, well, now we know, if we didn't already, that this is clearly personal. I mean, this isn't some random person out there taking pop shots at the time. Think about this one. When we got there, a horrible crime scene. The kitchen was a mess.

Anytime you work shooting suicide or murder like this where shotguns have been used, it's not pretty. And I'm also thinking about these two weapons. I mean, for myself, I can only think about one case for sure that I remember that I had someone that used two different weapons. It was a guy by the name of Jimmy Hunter. And actually, if I remember correctly, I think one of them may actually have been a sawed-off shotgun or something similar and semi-automatic. But regardless, I remember having to describe it to the jury as something like out of the Wild West. You used the one and then went to the other. It doesn't happen very often.

Scott, what does that say to you? Absolutely. There's a definition on the use of these two separate weapons. And shotguns make a statement. I mean, this was a targeted attack. And I've covered cases in shotgun attacks where the gunman confessed later on that they wanted to make sure the victims couldn't be laid out in a wake because of the damage that a shotgun would do.

And in this case, Ron was shot at close range in the back of the head, and that is definitely a personal statement. And then just, of course, add on, this is for her. I mean, this is a revenge killing. And who is the her? Is it his current wife, his ex-wife, his daughter, someone else that he knows? The nice thing about it, in any murder, she was there. You had somebody that was there when it happened.

So you immediately, of course, set her down, got her down to the station, and got her story. There is an important point here, Anastasia, which is this. This killer knew that he was after shooting Ron, that he was battling with somebody who was screaming and crying. And he knew a woman was in the house. Yet he chose to murder Ron and then flee, which is not very usual. But look, this assailant clearly didn't want to have any witnesses left behind because we know he took at least one shot at her. And whether he took that shot because he heard her, saw her,

or maybe heard the kids or knew where she ran to or heard her call 911, we don't know. It doesn't matter. But yeah, once investigators had her, what a boon for them. This lady was so shaken up. Oh, it was terrible. She got a glimpse of the person, but not hardly, not too much. Basically an average looking guy, average built, average height, brown hair, pretty average. Really, it wasn't a hell of a lot to go on. She could tell two important facts.

He had dark eyes. He had dark hair. He was wearing a hat. And he probably was in his 20s or so. But the important thing for me in the description, too, is that she didn't recognize the person. So now, for Dan Bates and other investigators, when they're figuring out the who,

that's going to be part of the uphill battle here. Man, after getting her story, we had nothing else. We had nothing. After that 911 call was placed, it only took investigators minutes to arrive. I mean, there was foot patrol in the area, so now they're in the home and everyone's tending first of all to

Ron and Angelica and the children. Think about this one. When we got there, his father was standing outside. I'll never forget that. Standing out there by his truck in the street behind the yellow table. But investigators very quickly met up with Ron Stovall's

father. And one of the first things that he threw out to them was letting them know that there was a custody battle going on, that Ron and his ex-wife Tina were fighting over custody of their young daughter, and that this had been a real messy thing. And, you know, Scott, obviously we know that whenever there's divorce involved too often, it gets very messy. And it's something that investigators need to and do look at right away. Scott, what's your experience with that? I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, you know, those battles are emotional scenarios.

I think it is an important avenue to really dig into determining, you know, especially in custody battles, where motives could lie. So that led us to the ex-wife, Tina, finding out about this child custody case, which is very unusual when the child is given to a father. We all know that. You know, it certainly is not the norm that we're used to hearing that the father is the one with custody, and certainly not back then. And so while any parent that is loving and fit should be able to have that, it did strike me as interesting when I heard it. What about you, Scott?

In the 80s, it was extremely rare for a father to get full custody of a child. There would have to have been a reason why a judge would agree that the mother was unfit to have full custody. And I would really be digging into that angle. Ron had primary custody of the child. The reason that he and his wife got divorced, he had caught her running around on him with a guy. And some of what investigators found out about Tina was certainly not the most flattering.

They found out that there'd also been issues between Tina and her daughter. She really pretty much, by accounts, checked out for a while. And it wasn't until her parents, who actually moved from Virginia down to Florida so they could be closer to their granddaughter, that it was with their arrival that Tina really got back into the mix

of more parenting with her child. So all this is kind of swirling around at the time. And so as you might expect, they brought Tina Wright in, and that interview was really very interesting and enlightening for investigators. She was very, very open with us. We ran down everything she told us. It all checked. We had no problems with her. Quoted Dan Bates, she wasn't really very emotional about the fact that her ex-husband had been murdered. She was able to provide, at the time, an alibi of where she was. And then right in the middle of talking to her,

talking about her alibi, talking about sort of the relationship that Ron had with her and when it went bad, the interview was suddenly stopped because Tina's mom had hired a lawyer who came in and requested the interview stop. And obviously that's everyone's right, but investigators are not going to be happy that now they cannot continue to speak to her and get any potential information from her. But what I think what was most important that came out of that interview, there was a good nugget of information that came out of that, was Tina had talked about how one of her ex-boyfriends and Ron, they didn't get along. He actually knew Ron. Once we found out that, that he and Ron had gotten into it one time. It certainly perked up the interest of investigators

enough that they decided to go up there. So they go up there to speak with her ex-boyfriend in Maryland. He was very cooperative, answered all our questions. We did not feel like he was trying to hide anything from us. And as he's focusing on Tina's ex-boyfriend asking him questions, the roommate is really getting his notice. Dark hair, dark eyes, his age. And as he kept looking over at the roommate, whose name is Guy McInvale, he said, you know what? We need to look at him. We looked at him and said, man, you know,

what we do have, he fits it pretty good. And he caught their attention so much that they put his photograph in what we call a photo array, those six photographs that you can picture. And they took those six pictures and they put them right in front of Angelica. We took that picture back down here and Jesus, she picked him.

For Dan Bates, it was boom, game over. But not so fast because, spoiler alert here, he is actually not the killer. So Guy McInville was Tina's ex-boyfriend's roommate. In their Maryland apartment, they were talking to Dan Bates and Christopher Pate about could they have been involved in this crime? Now, Guy McAvelle was also an employee of Ron's former father-in-law. So now we have a little bit of a connection. But there were still so many questions. What would be the theory behind their motive?

Who knows if maybe this guy is just such a hothead that he gets into it with Ron and maybe Ron gets the better of him. And so then instead of doing something himself, he gets his roommate. And while, yeah, that's just a hypothesis at that point, we've both heard crazier things. We have. And certainly a murder for hire is not unheard of, especially in custody battles. You know, and it's like we had to kick it in high gear then with those search warrants. Again, we had, you know, the alibis he's given us, that all had to be checked out. So as it turns out, Guy McInville's alibi was extremely solid. At the place where he worked, he needed a coded passkey to get in the door, and it was also equipped with surveillance videos.

So quickly, Dan Bates and his partner were able to go down to the business and determine that Guy McInville was at work in the time frame the murder occurred, so he was a dead end. You know, we had to make sure we knew in our mind this guy couldn't have done it. He couldn't have done it. You know, if you're listening to this, I can only imagine that you feel like that's a tool so often used to identify the actual assailant or defendant in a particular case. But in this case, yeah, she picked him out, but we are saying point blank, he was not the killer. So what accounts for that?

And based on having done this work for a long time, I do have explanation for that. What about you, Scott? I'd like to hear yours first. I see it as one of two ways, most likely. One, it was just a mistake, just a fluke. It just so happened that the person that they placed in those six array photograph that she picked that person out for no real rhyme or reason. And it was just a mistake based on something she thought that was the guy. Or that maybe she was actually familiar with him when she was dating the ex-boyfriend, that she had met the roommate or seen the roommate. So she was making an accurate

identification, but of someone she was familiar with rather than who actually committed the crime. And obviously that is a big no-no and inaccurate. But those things do happen. But most importantly, investigators figured out that it was inaccurate. This was not the person involved. And they figured it out right away. I look at the conditions of how she saw the suspect and when she saw the suspect. At the moment she saw the suspect, it was an extremely stressful moment. Her husband had just been shot.

She was trying to prevent him from getting in the house. I would say she only got a really good quick look at him, but that was not enough to be able to really get a full identification. So I think when investigators put this six-pack down, like in a lot of different situations, she felt like she knew. She felt like this was the person, opposed to really being able to make a full identification. And as you know, Anasiga, witness testimony and witness identifications, they're really, they're difficult to really nail down. I'm a believer that some people are just better at making identifications than others, just like some of us are better at describing people than others. You know, someone might know that they saw me yesterday, but couldn't even begin to tell you what I was wearing

or maybe even not know too many characteristics about me to describe, but someone else could describe me down to the buttons on my shirt. It's just different skill sets, different innate abilities that some of us have that are better than others. And let's talk about where that left this investigation.

I can only imagine how Dan Bates must have felt with getting that news or realizing that that was the case. I mean, back to square one. If it wasn't down that great path that they felt they were going, if it wasn't the ex-boyfriend, then who possibly could it be? So they have to begin from the beginning. I'm just an old working cop, you know. We've got a mall here.

Saturday nights, we have a problem out there. They hire cops. We walk around in uniform from like 6 till 10 o'clock at night. Every Saturday night, Ron Stolwal's mother and father go to that mall. They go out there and they just walk around. They eat. Just something they did. So every Saturday night,

I had to face him. And it was always, hey, Sergeant Bates, can I talk to you for a minute? Well, what do you want to say? You know, yeah.

And I'll never forget these words that he has always said to me. He said, I just don't understand why you haven't got them. If he said that once to me, he said it 50 times to me. And it got to the point where when I worked that detail, I kept a sharp eye. And if I would see them, I'd go the other way because I knew what I didn't want to face it again. And Scott, I don't know about you, but I can absolutely relate and think about those cases where I had to sit down with family members days, months, sometimes

years, and tell them the same thing that either we just had nothing or maybe we even knew who it was, but we just didn't have the pieces of evidence to ultimately charge someone. And you want to do everything you can for them to lead them to that road to get closure and justice. But also, I get that feeling of wanting to look away because it's just too hard when you can't give them what they so desperately want and need. So I absolutely can relate to what Dan Bates felt every time he saw Ron's parents. The thing that really hurt me more than anything was seeing Ron's parents like that. I'll never forget it. I just don't understand why you can't get them. And there were times Chris and I would go out there to their house in an afternoon,

just go in and sit down with them, talk to them, and try to bring them up to, you know, tell them what we could tell them, you know. And right from the get-go, from the first night, Mr. Stovall said, they're part of this. They are part of this. Meaning Tina and that side of her family. I mean, with all the hard work that investigators do, sometimes you just need a lucky break.

That's it. Just a lucky break. And that leads us now to a second unrelated crime. October 27th is when we get the call from the beach. Beach says they had, they told us they had a home invasion robbery out there on the beach. It was a police department right next to Panama City that reached out to Dan Bates to say, you know, we were serving this search warrant on a robbery suspect. His name was Antonio Perez. Once the beach police got in there, they recovered items,

they recovered a lot of stuff that was taken in this robbery. To our good luck, during their search, they found these guns in the closet. He said, hey, we know enough about your murder, you might be looking for a shotgun and a.357. I said, yeah. I said, hey, we recovered one. This is the kind of lucky break, Anastasia, that I'm talking about. That's when we went out and we immediately got the stuff. So they take the.357 and the shotgun to FDLE's crime lab, Florida Department of Law Enforcement's crime lab, and they process them. Now, all they could determine from the.357 was that the shell cas when the real big break in this case occurred. Because they were able to recover biological evidence at the tip of the barrel of that weapon.

They recovered DNA from Ron Stovall, our victim. And it was a match. And try not to get too graphic here. But just imagine a shotgun blast from just an inch away from the back of the victim's head. Inevitably, you're going to get some transfer of DNA biological material. When you work a murder case and you can get a piece of evidence like that, that's a cherry on top, really. They can come up with all kinds of stories, any kind of story they want to come up with, but they can't get around that DNA. And that's the thing that you hope is going to lead to the game over.

So the big question here is, who was this Antonio Perez? He was a bad dude. And he liked to tell people how bad he was. People were really afraid of him. He was a local drug dealer. He was someone who had a girlfriend who worked at a hair salon. In fact, he worked there part-time. So there's a lack of connection for

him to have committed such a heinous crime like this. We brought Perez down to the station. I set him down in the office. I'm on one side of the desk. He's on the other. Just you know how it's done. I just kept wearing him down, I guess. The interview lasted six or seven hours, and, you know, he really didn't give up very much,

but he was pressed. Until Dan Bates mentioned the name Kim Miller, who was Antonio Perez's girlfriend. Perez was a bad guy. But one thing about Perez, he loved Kim Miller. I'm telling you, he loved that gal. As we're going along, we're finding out a little bit more about Kim Miller and him, and he would do anything to protect her. I said, you know what's going to happen to Kim, don't you? I said, we're going to get to the bottom of this. We're going to find out everything that happened. And when we do, we're going to find out who all was involved. And I'm telling you right now, Kim Miller's going to damn penitentiary. She's going away with you.

When they say to Antonio Perez, oh, and your girlfriend, she's going to go with you, that's when all the pieces really start to fall into place. You could have knocked me over with a feather. He looked up at me and said,

what do you want me to tell you? I said, hell, I want you to tell me you killed him. He said, okay, I want you to tell me you killed him. He said, okay, I did it. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. You got to repeat that on tape for me. I said, I didn't even have my tape recorder playing. He said, okay.

Just like that. That's his confession. That's it. But you could just kind of see his shoulders relaxed right after he said it. So you've seen it time after time when you're interviewing these killers. Once they get it off their chest, it's like you can just see that big sigh. Well, Anastasia, the first thing I want to ask you is that when you heard this and you heard someone just come out with it like that, what's your first thoughts? It says to me that this is, it's almost too easy that yes, he did it. All the evidence points to saying that he absolutely, these are his guns. He's most likely the one that pulled the trigger. But the fact that as soon as they mention the girlfriend,

that he quickly says, okay, I did it, and that's that, well, big question remaining is, what is it that he so didn't want investigators to delve into or to keep digging that he was willing to just, out of nowhere, with that one line about the girlfriend, say, yes, I did it, that's it, to hopefully have them say, game over? And that's what investigators wanted to know too.

We knew we still had a lot to do, but we knew how to do it then. We knew exactly how to do it. Scoop Kim Miller up, get her butt down there. That's the way to do it. There still needs to be some connective tissue between the murder and the act of committing the murder. So talking to Kim Miller makes total sense because she could be that connective tissue.

Completely, and not only that, is that we know that she is Antonio Perez's hot button. She was the thing that made him fold so quickly, which means that she is going to give them something of value. However, what she actually gave them, they never saw it coming. It is the type of thing that when you think about how these things happen and how they come about,

you just can't believe it until you hear it. Kim Miller owned a hair salon and tanning studio. And she met Perez one day. And from then on, he wasn't working anywhere. She took him out there to her hair salon. He was shampooing, actually shampooing customers' hair in there, sweeping up and cleaning tanning beds, stuff like that. And it's a damnedest story you'd ever hear in your life, but, you know, we hear strange things.

Ann Trexler, the mother-in-law of our victim in this case, how she felt that Ron Stovall was taking her granddaughter away from her. When these women are getting their hair done, they talk. And the big thing with Ann Trexler was this damn custody battle that her daughter was going through with her ex-husband. Supposedly, Ron had let it be known he was going to Messiah School. And it had been mentioned that when he finished school, he was going to leave Florida, which meant that that child was going to go with him. But grandmother couldn't stand it.

Ann told Kim everything about this. Everything. How much she hated Ron Stovall. I would like to see him just drop off at the end of the earth and die, was one of the statements she made to Kim. I wish I could find a way to get rid of him. Now, Perez could have been working in there. He could have overheard this, but certainly Kim had mentioned it to him. Next thing you know, he says to Kim, tell her for $50,000,

you get rid of him. It's such a head-scratcher to me. It's the type of thing that makes me, you know, rub my forehead and say, what is wrong with people? I mean, this is Tina and Ron's daughter, Ann Trexler's granddaughter, that she doesn't like what's going on in a custody case, so she decides she's going to put a hit,

she's going to have her granddaughter's father murdered, it never ceases to amaze me the lengths that people will go to to get what they want when there are always so many other ways to go about it. So Kim, she drops it on Ann, Ann says, well, I can't afford that kind of money. A few days later, Ann gets in touch with her, says, hey, I can afford $10,000. That's how this whole thing got going.

I promise I'm not trying to make light of the situation, but obviously on the menu at her salon was not just cut and color. It was committing murder. She was able to connect a customer with a killer and be the go-between and was financially paid for that. It was really interesting how quickly the investigation unfolded from there, because now they had this tie to the grandmother and Trexler. So what did they do? They went for some of my favorite type of evidence, phone records, and through those phone records, they found lots of phone calls between Trexler and Kim Miller-husband. And that matched with exactly what Kim Miller said. So they didn't just have to rely on what this woman was telling them. They had the proof by all the records they were quickly able to obtain.

And also, Ann Trexler was the one who had provided the information to the killer of Ron Stolvol's schedule, where he would be, what time he wakes up, what time he leaves his home. So the lying in wait element that helped perpetrate this murder came directly from Ann Trexler. Ann Trexler is just an evil, evil woman. What the hell? How evil can you get? So on February 15th, 2000, prosecutors agreed and charged Ann Trexler in connection with the murder of Ron Stovall. And this is the part that really sort of takes a turn for me in this case where, yes, Kim Miller is important to the prosecution. And yes, Kim Miller is important to be able to connect, you know, Ron Stolvol's murder to Antonio Perez. But in within the deal that she made with prosecutors was an agreement for just five years probation, no jail time. And for me, that's just difficult to wrap my head around. And I think it's difficult for jurors to wrap around too.

And as a prosecutor, I've been in that exact scenario really many times. And it's just sometimes you have to make that deal with the devil to get the job done. But I think it's always very important and jurors can relate to when we lay our cards on the table and say, hey, you know what? You're going to hear from the woman who was the go-between, the one who really helped set this up. And you may not like the deal that was given to her, but hey, blame me, the prosecution. Don't blame the case. Don't take this out on getting justice for Ron Stovall. But here's why, Scott. Sometimes it just has to be done. But for getting Kim Miller's testimony, I don't know where they would have ever gone ultimately with Antonio Perez, because you needed that connection. I mean, she's not going to just get on the witness stand on her own probably, right? And they can't use her statements that she made to law enforcement against Antonio Perez during the trial because that's hearsay, an out-of-court statement, as you know. So they need someone to fill in the pieces.

Like, well, wait, what is the relationship between Antonio Perez and Ron Stovall that he would kill him? Well, there's none. So you need Kim Miller to explain the, well, yeah, I had a client and she is the ex-mother-in-law of Ron Stovall. And this is all about a custody battle. And she really had to admit quite honestly in that courtroom that I took the opportunity of what she said to try to help my boyfriend and in all likelihood herself by garnering this arrangement for the dollars. And yeah, that is an absolutely difficult pill to swallow. A woman who helped orchestrate this murder potentially would get no jail time. I get that completely. I understand the head shaking

that's going on as people hear it. But do you want to let the killer go free to get a little more of a pound of flesh out of her? Isn't it better to get the whole thing to get justice for Ron Stovall's family? I mean, at least as prosecutors, that's a decision we have to make. And sometimes, and I do understand, people don't always agree. Well, there is justice to talk about here. Antonio Perez pled guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison. Anne Trexler was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. Now, Kim Miller did get that five-year probation deal that we spoke about with the prosecutor's office. But that didn't last, Anastasia, because a short time later, she violated that probation and ended up spending 10 years in prison.

And I guess that's some kind of justice in the head. I don't know, but we know what she did. And I guess there's just evil people in this world. That's one thing that people should take away from this. And let's just for a moment maybe end on thinking about this little girl. You know, now a woman. She was left without a father, dead, with a mother who we know there'd been an on-and-off relationship with, her grandmother, who presumably they had a close relationship, gone to jail forever.

She was left, really, to pick up all these pieces, and let's just hope that someday she could or that she's been able to do that here. I'm with you on that. 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.