Dateline NBC - Betrayal

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

In this Dateline classic, Deede Keller had a loving family, a tight circle of friends and a new man in her life. When she vanished, disturbing clues point investigators to a suspect with a dark secret leading to a case that would provide a twist leaving the courtroom astonished. Josh Mankiewicz reports. Originally aired on NBC on June 7, 2013.

He said Cindy where's my mom and I just instantly knew and I just said Michael call the police I'm on my way. A loving mother. Always there for me. A beloved friend. She was just so easy to like. Vanishes. Something was very very wrong. Was she murdered? Was it for her money? How much money did you have in the bank? I think was over seven figures. Or was it something or someone else? It really threw him for a loop when he found out that my mom had met somebody else. Police had a suspect at a case that was about to take an unbelievable turn. One of the most shocking things I've ever seen in a courtroom.

I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz. Southern California's South Bay. A singularly stunning strand of shoreline with familiar names like Hermosa, Redondo, and Manhattan. We call it the Sandbox. No one thinks that this part of Los Angeles exists, but it does. This seaside playground is lined with beachfront properties worth millions. And nestled among these small beach towns is an oasis called El Segundo. It's Main Street, USA. It's a great place to raise kids.

And in El Segundo in the South Bay more than a decade ago, one of the rainmakers in the real estate business selling those beautiful homes in the sandbox was Julia Keller, known as Dee Dee. She really just embraced everyone that came into her path. Dee Dee's best friends, mortgage executive Cindy Ertman and real estate sales partner Linda Dondero. She was good at her job. I loved working with Dee Dee. Everybody did. She was just so easy to like and always wanted the best for everybody. And her clients were very loyal over the years. Deedee was loyal too, not only to her clients, but as a divorced mom to her children, Mike and Julie.

I remember my mom explaining to me when I was about 10 years old that as you get older, we're probably not going to be as close or, you know, you won't like me quite as much. And it never happened. If anything, we just got closer. But Dee Dee Keller had a heart problem. Not literally. It may have been a little too big. She loved without limits.

And she simply hated to disappoint or let anyone down. She loved dogs so much she literally couldn't say no to another one. She was surrounded by them at home, even in her real estate ads. I always joke that as soon as I graduated college, that's when she started replacing us with dogs. You know, she never stopped being a mom. And she never stopped sort of loving everybody, I guess. No, she never stopped being a mom. And she never stopped sort of loving everybody, I guess. No, she never did. She was ready to be embraced and to embrace you whenever you wanted it. But there was one area of her life in which Dee Dee Keller's honesty and embrace hadn't caught

hold. Your mom was so lucky and life was so easy in so many ways. I mean, she couldn't quite make the man in her life thing come out right. She had a wonderful life, but no, I guess she hadn't found that person. She did have a long-term relationship, but that ended sadly in 1997. Soon after, she met someone new. He was a real estate client named Irwin Howard, a pilot and airline mechanic originally from Bolivia. I remember Dee Dee telling me that she was not going to date anyone else unless they loved, treasured, and adored her. And she did feel loved, treasured, and adored by Irwin.

You know, he treated her like a queen. When Irwin popped the question, Dee Dee said yes. At Dee Dee's bridal shower in March of 1998, Irwin dutifully delivered his fiancée to the surprise party. But the smiles didn't last after the engagement was over and the marriage began. It wasn't more than six months after they were married. She just blurted out that she had married him on the rebound. And was having second thoughts? Apparently so. It was very hard for her to think about ending it because of what it was going to do to him because she knew he loved her. So much, in fact, that the marriage lasted another four years after that conversation. Ultimately, their divorce was amicable. And a year after the

split, in the summer of 2004, Dee Dee seemed to be finding her footing once again. She'd begun dating a well-known South Bay car salesman named Bobby Lowe. That new relationship was going so well that on the evening of Thursday, July 8th, Bobby Lowe took Dee Dee out to dinner at this restaurant to meet his father. I talked to her before her date. Any sign that she was nervous about anything? She was in a happy state when I talked to her and we had made plans to hopefully get together the following night and so I could get the update

on the date. But that conversation never took place. I called her on Friday and she didn't call me back, which was not unusual for Deedee. I called her on Saturday, and she didn't call me back. That was pretty typical. But by Sunday, I started getting concerned. Concerned, too, was daughter Julie. She talked of meeting her mom that same Friday during a layover at LAX, as Julie headed for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

She's like, you know what, I might have an appointment that morning, but if I don't, I'll come by, I'll text you, we'll have coffee. So we laid over in Los Angeles. I didn't get a text. It was a little odd, but didn't think much of it. Didi's son, Mike, was beginning to worry after he returned from a business trip to the San Francisco area. When I called her cell phone, the voicemail was full and that had never happened with my mom and she prided herself on being responsive. So you go over to your mom's house. So I went in the back gate and then instantly it was clear that she had not been there for a while. What made that clear? The dog's water dish was bone dry my mom would would die of thirst before her dogs went without

water mike's first call was to cindy and he said cindy where's my mom and i just um i instantly knew in that moment that something had happened i just knew I just said, Michael, call the police. I'm on my way. Where was Dee Dee Keller? Not only was there no water left outside for Dee Dee's beloved dogs, but detectives noticed lots of other things wrong inside the house. Her purse was there, but her wallet was missing. And this was a woman with money, lots of it. How much money did you have in the bank? I think it was over seven figures. Who got that money in the event of her death? The beneficiaries were her two children. On a sun-splashed Sunday in L.A.'s South Bay, clouds were rolling in over one household. It was July 2004. El Segundo real estate agent Julia Keller, known to the world as Dee Dee, was missing.

Dee Dee's son Mike had gone to her home when he hadn't heard from her for three days. The biggest red flag? Dee Dee's beloved dogs left without food or water. What did you think had happened? I didn't know at that point. I just knew that something was very, very wrong. Mike called his mom's best friends,

Linda Dondero and Cindy Ertman. Cindy, who'd last spoken to Dee Dee three days before, as Dee Dee prepared for a date, rushed to the house. You could tell just the dogs had been, you know, running around for days. But the way the TV was on and the way the shades were, I felt like Thursday night had never ended. I felt like Friday morning never came. Cindy immediately phoned Dee Dee's new boyfriend, car salesman Bobby Lowe.

He reported they'd had dinner on Thursday at a local restaurant, then returned to Dee Dee's house for a nightcap. He said she'd had a little bit too much wine, and she laid down on the couch and was kind of starting to fall off to sleep. And so he just said goodnight and let himself out. Anything about what Bobby Lowe said sound in any way suspicious to you? Not at all. The next call to El Segundo police. And soon on the scene, then Detective Sergeant Carlos Mendoza.

This does not happen in El Segundo, especially people that are known as well as Didi is. And what detectives found in their initial search of Didi's home only deepened the mystery. In the kitchen, Didi's purse. Her cell phone still inside, but no wallet. A vodka bottle that police learned was usually kept in the freezer was out on the counter. And in the living room, the TV was on CNN. We discovered that whenever she left the house, she'd always put the TV onto a classical music station. So it would relax the dogs. But it was on CNN when we came

into the house. So Dee Dee was watching CNN, had the dogs there, was having a drink, and then left for some reason. Suggesting kind of the, what, whatever happened, happened in a big hurry. She didn't have time to do her routine that she usually does before she leaves. And it appeared Dee Dee had left in her car. The garage was empty, her silver 1999 Mercedes gone. But strangely, police found the car keys sitting on Dee Dee's patio. We decided to call the L.A. County Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau to come and assist us. And answering that call, veteran detective Jimmy Gates. There was no forced entry whatsoever.

And when we started walking through the house, I noticed several articles that were very valuable. So she let in whoever it was, and it wasn't robbery. Absolutely correct. If she didn't let them in that person let themselves in and they may have had a key gates wondered had dd left in her car with someone she knew and how did her car get taken without its key if you don't have a key is it as easy to steal a car as movies depict it's certainly not a 1999 Mercedes. It's hard to hot wire it. It's just hard to steal it. You almost need a key to gain access to it.

If your car doesn't have a key, the next stop is a car dealership to have a new one made. But first, Gates and his crew searched the house looking for DeeDee's spare Mercedes key without success. And Gates quickly became convinced of one thing. You thought finding Dee Dee's car was going to be the key to this? That was going to be extremely important. Dee Dee's friends and family printed up posters, and along with law enforcement, launched a massive search. An army of people band band together to try to help

find her, and we broke up into teams, and we mapped everything out in one-mile increments to start to search every parking lot looking for her car. We would ask people, have you seen this woman? Have you seen this car? It was frantic. It was heartbreaking. And it was leading nowhere. At the same time, Detective Gates wondered who might have had a motive to have abducted Deedee from her home. Those most common of motives, love, money, jealousy, are always the ones police hug first like old friends. Deedee made a lot of money being a realtor. She was successful, yes sir. How much money did she have in the bank?

I think it was over seven figures. Seven figures. A lot of murders committed for a lot less than that. Absolutely. Who got that money in the event of her death? The beneficiaries were her two children. And the detective noticed something about the whereabouts of Dee Dee's two children, Mike and Julie, at the time of Dee Dee's disappearance.

They're both out of town at the time that their mother went missing. Why is that significant? Why wouldn't the reverse be more true? I thought that the mother goes missing, and it just so happens that Mike, you know, is gone in San Jose, and Julie's down in a resort. And it's been my experience that sometimes people dissipate stress after they commit a crime in different ways. Some people drink, some people take drugs, and some people leave the area just to dissipate stress. And there was, strangely, one more person who just happened to have been traveling near the time of Dee Dee's disappearance. Her ex-husband, Erwin Howard, had just flown to his home country of Bolivia.

And Irwin was a mechanic who worked for American Airlines in L.A. The common thread in all these trips? Nearby LAX Airport. And so the detective thought, what better place to dump a car? LAX is a big place. Very big place. A lot of parking lots. A lot of parking lots, andX is a big place. Very big place. A lot of parking lots. A lot of parking lots, and it took a few days.

You looked through them all? Every one of them. No Mercedes, and no shortage of persons of interest. A lot of people close to Dee Dee Keller were about to be hugged like old friends. Coming up, Dee Dee's daughter Julie rushes back from vacation to help find her missing mother. It was the most surreal experience. Never suspecting, detectives have questions for her when Dateline continues. In the days after the disappearance of El Segundo realtor Didi Keller,

all of L.A.'s South Bay seemed to be looking for her, and for her missing Mercedes, leading the search, her best friends Cindy and Linda. A lot of times when people disappear, like you get the immediate family working on it and then everybody else is like, well. Not in this town. You're not an army. Dini's daughter Julie rushed back to LA from a trip to Mexico. It was the most surreal experience. Only to be greeted by suspicion. LA Sheriff's Detective Jimmy Gates had discovered that in the event of their mother's death, Julie and her brother Mike stood to inherit more than a million dollars. So he confronted

Dee Dee's kids using one of the oldest tricks in the investigator's handbook. Do you remember an interview that you did with Jimmy Gates? I do. In which he asked you some pretty basic questions like, you know, what's your name? Where do you live? Pretty ordinary stuff. And then all of a sudden he says, do you have anything to do with your mom's disappearance? I think it was more, did you kill your mother?

And you're what, startled or angry? It was a horrible question, but I can understand why it needed to be asked. Detectives asked similar questions of Julie. Next, in attempting to rule out as suspects those closest to Deedee, detectives turned their attention to her ex-husband, Erwin Howard. It turned out that although Deedee and Erwin had been divorced for more than a year at the time of her disappearance, friends told police that she had recently invited him back into her life. About six months earlier, Deedee had been in a car accident, and as she recovered, she needed help with her dogs.

Deedee also apparently felt bad about the pain their divorce had caused Irwin. She called Irwin to help her because that was what he did best, was to help and assist her. So he helped kind of nurse her back to health and take care of the dogs and the house and her. And in taking a hard look at Irwin Howard, the detective found he had a rock-solid alibi. On the night of DeeDee's disappearance, July 8th, Irwin had clocked into work for his job as an airline mechanic at the American Airlines hangar at LAX at 8.30 p.m. He said he worked all night, but it wasn't just Irwin's word. He had to use an electronic key card to get into the hangar. That's a pretty good alibi.

That's not something that generally the employee can influence. That's correct. That's absolutely correct. That left the last person to admit seeing Dee Dee alive, her new boyfriend, car salesman Bobby Lowe. Lowe said he'd left Dee Dee's house between 11 and midnight that night, then gone to the gym the next morning. What possible motive could Bobby Lowe have to want Dee Dee either dead or out of the picture? There was no motive that I could determine whatsoever. And Lowe provided investigators with two important clues. First, he said, while he was at Dee Dee's that night,

her dogs had all started barking at something outside, as if someone were lurking. And the next morning, he discovered someone had keyed the side of his Ford Explorer, leaving a long scratch. Which suggests what, somebody's following them on that date? Absolutely. That's what it meant to me. But Somebody's following them on that date? Absolutely. That's what it meant to me. But who was following Dee Dee and Bobby? Who was that angry? That act of vandalism pointed away from Bobby Lowe. I was an investigator for several years. I've never

known anybody to vandalize their own car. That kind of thinking is what would make it a perfect alibi. Sure, sure. If he's sophisticated enough, but his background indicated that, you know, he was a well-liked guy, kind of successful himself, and didn't have a lot of enemies. And then, even as investigators looked at suspects, came the news that all who knew Dee Dee had at once hoped for and feared. Dee Dee's car had been found, not at LAX, not in LA, but two and a half hours down Interstate 5 in San Diego. That silver Mercedes had been parked in downtown San Diego for days, earning it several parking tickets. When the local PD ran the plate, it came up as belonging to a missing person. And when the trunk was finally opened, there was a body wrapped in sheets,

covered by a blanket, which was itself decorated with dog paws. Dee Dee Keller was no longer missing. Police asked to meet with Dede's family. It was just a wide range of emotions. There was almost some type of relief that they had found her because we were starting to think at that point, how long could this go on? Hardest days of my life.

And one of the hardest days for my children and all of her friends and her family. Dee Dee Keller was dead at age 54. An autopsy showed she'd been asphyxiated. And the clues that were and were not left in her car were about to take this case back in a familiar direction. Coming up, just days before she was murdered, Dee Dee had a visit from a stalker. She said that she was in the shower,

kind of pulled her out of the shower, and they had this huge altercation. He was calling her every name under the sun. On a downtown street in San Diego in July 2004, Dee Dee Keller had finally been found, dead in the trunk of her silver Mercedes. The car had been the subject of a massive search ever since Dee Dee had been discovered missing a week earlier from her home two hours north in El Segundo. Homicide detective Jimmy Gates, who'd always thought finding the car would be the key to finding Dee Dee, now gave the Mercedes a thorough going over.

Fingerprints or DNA in the car? There wasn't one fingerprint either on or in that car, or was there any partial print? Nothing. Didi's or anybody else's? Nobody's. So what does that say? Professional? Well, someone took, went to great lengths to make damn sure that they weren't identified through fingerprints, that's for sure. But the killer did leave a clue in the tape wrapped around Did Dee's body. I had never seen tape like that. It appeared to us to be consistent with red duct tape. That started Gates in one direction.

But he also looked closely at the way Dee Dee's body had been placed in that car. Someone took great care to place her in that car. And that indicated to us that someone cared deeply about her. So part of this says professional, and part of this says somebody that knew her. That's exactly correct. But the suspicions that said professional soon fell away in favor of those that said someone who knew her. Not her children, but someone who would reenter Dee Dee's life in the months before her death.

Her ex-husband, Erwin Howard. Do you ever think of Erwin as violent or dangerous? No. I never suspected that he would do something physical. But detectives soon learned something had changed in Erwin Howard in the months before Dee Dee's murder. Remember, after a car accident in January 2004, Dee Dee had invited Irwin back into her life to help care for her and her dogs. That request had apparently been misinterpreted by Irwin. We know he started wearing his wedding ring again.

Irwin wanted back into her life, and sounds to me like on some level, she sort of appreciated that part of him that adored her and wanted to take care of her, even if it's somebody that you're not going to be with anymore. Yes. You think she made that point clear enough to him? No. She was too nice. Always too nice and very trusting. And that may

be why investigators thought Irwin seemed surprised when just two weeks before Dee Dee's murder, Irwin gained access to Dee Dee's computer and found emails referring to a relationship with a new man, Bobby Lowe. And I think it really threw him for a loop when he found out that my mom, you know, had met somebody else. And that's when things started getting scary. Scary because Irwin, detectives learned, had started doing things that pointed to an obsession with Dee Dee. And how did they know that? In one of those only in a small town coincidences, Dee Dee's son Mike lived just down the block from Dee Dee's new boyfriend Bobby Lowe. One night Mike was sitting in his living room when he saw a familiar green Range Rover driving by.

And inside was Irwin. As the evening went on, he continued to drive by the house. You call your mom and say, by the way, Erwin's driving around the block while you're with Bobby Lowe? I didn't. I didn't really put two and two together. But the very next day, now just 10 days before her murder, Dee Dee would call her friend Cindy Ertman in a state of panic. She was crying hysterically. She said that she was in the shower. Erwin came into the house without her knowing, pulled her out of the shower, and they had this huge altercation and that he was calling her every name under the sun. Dee Dee told the same story to her friend Linda Dondera. I said, do you realize that Irwin's behavior is escalating, Dee Dee? And she said, yes.

And you said, call the police. No, I said, have you changed your locks? And she said, no, I'll do it on the way home. And of course she never did. But investigators soon learned that in those conversations with her friends, Dee Dee had left something out. But investigators soon learned that in those conversations with her friends, Dee Dee had left something out, a detail she mentioned only to her daughter, Julie, that during that argument, Erwin Howard had also slapped her.

I said, Mom, you have to call the police. You have to get a restraining order. And then I remember her asking me not to tell Michael and that she was going to handle this. And I remember being torn, like, okay, this is my mom telling me I got it. But also thinking maybe she didn't have it. And a few days later, it was clear Julie was right. The very night her mom went missing, Julie got another phone call, this time from Erwin. I got on the phone and he's like, Jules, Jules, Jules, what is your mom thinking? And I said, Erwin, you know, I really, I don't want to talk about this. I feel like, you know, this is between you and my mom. And he's

like, well, you just need to pray for her soul. And I remember thinking it was a little odd, but then, you know what? I mean, given his, you know, his grasp on the English language, sometimes he'd say some funny things or, you know, get something wrong, but I just remember thinking that was an odd comment. Detective Gates now felt Erwin Howard's motive for killing Dede Keller was clear. But proving Erwin had the means to commit the murder was another matter. And Erwin steadfastly

maintained his innocence to investigators, from the moment he stepped off the plane as he returned from Bolivia after the murder, through the months after, even though he was clearly the prime suspect. And the case against Irwin was not without its problems. It's one thing to stalk someone, quite another to kill them. There was no physical evidence tying Irwin Howard to the crime. And there were those key card records showing him clocking into his job at American Airlines the night of the murder. Still, Detective Gates took the information he had gathered to the L.A. County District Attorney's Office and asked for a warrant. And they declined to file charges. They won't file.

They won't file. Did Jimmy Gates have the wrong man in his sights? Was there ever going to be enough evidence to arrest a killer? Any killer. Coming up. Finally, a break. That's like lightning striking. Twice.

Make that three times. One of the most shocking things I've ever seen in one of my cases in the courtroom. When Dateline continues. Summer had come and gone in L.A.'s South Bay without an arrest in the murder of beloved El Segundo real estate agent D.D. Keller. And as the months dragged on, Detective Jimmy Gates kept pounding the pavement, building what he thought was a strong circumstantial case against Keller's ex-husband, Erwin Howard. But the L.A. County D.A.'s office had so far declined to issue a

warrant for Howard's arrest. DeeDee's son, Michael, wanted answers. There was a long time when Erwin was walking around free. Seemed like decades. It was so frustrating, painful, emotional. Jimmy Gates was feeling all those same things. And soon his hard work started paying off. That unusual red tape found on Dee Dee's body? A specially trained dog found Irwin's scent on it. And detectives found similar tape at Irwin's workplace, that American Airlines hangar at LAX. But what about Irwin's alibi? Computer records showing

him at work in that same hangar the night of Dee Dee's disappearance, and that he'd worked a 10 hour shift. It turned out that the more detectives dug into that alibi, the less solid it seemed. Detective Gates painstakingly dissected the procedures at the hangar, and he found this. Irwin Howard could swipe into work at the employee parking lot, using a key card, then clock in inside the hangar. But he could also leave whenever he wanted, by walking out the large bay doors and catching an employee's shuttle back to the parking lot. There'd be no record of his leaving. Jimmy Gates discovered that on the night of the murder,

Irwin used his keycard to swipe into the parking lot at 8.24 p.m. and again at 10.21 p.m. and for a third time at 1.47 a.m., which completely blew apart his alibi that he'd been at work the whole time. So he would swipe his card to get back in after there was no record of him leaving. Right. By now you're convinced Irwin's the guy. Absolutely. All the witnesses, all the evidence, everything pointed directly at Irwin. And there was one more key piece of evidence. The day after the murder, a witness saw a Mercedes on the street in El Segundo.

She thought it belonged to a friend, so she sped up to catch her. She sees it's not her friend, and she sees a male Hispanic driving the car, and she remembers that license plate. The license plate belonged to the Mercedes owned by D.D. Keller. The man driving? The witness helped a police artist draw a sketch. Who's it look like? It looks like Irwin. The witness was then shown a photo lineup, and she picked out Irwin Howard. That's like lightning striking. Twice.

And then it struck again. Six months after the murder, Jimmy Gates' phone rang. It was Dee Dee's next-door neighbor, who'd been interviewed once and had offered nothing of value. But now, apparently, she was having an attack of conscience. The neighbor now told the detective that she'd seen Irwin on June 30th, the day Irwin had confronted and slapped Dee Dee. She said the conversation lasted 15 or 20 minutes, where he articulates that he was mad enough to strangle her with work gloves.

That's what Dee Dee's neighbor says Erwin said to her? Correct. Why do you think she didn't tell you for six months? I have no idea why a neighbor during a murder investigation just wouldn't simply tell the cops the truth that he wanted to kill her. Armed with that new and threatening statement, Detective Gates was able to get his warrant, and soon Irwin Howard was under arrest for the murder of Dede Keller. Now, the case was in the hands of L.A. County Deputy District Attorney John Lewin.

What made this case different? I love cases where you have a very good idea who the suspect is, but it's a question of kind of putting the evidence together. So circumstantial cases where you have high motive, but you're looking at lots of little facts and seeing, okay, what can you turn this into? It would take three years for the case against Erwin Howard to come to trial. Cameras were not present in the courtroom that day when trial began in the fall of 2008. John Lewin laid out his case in a devastatingly thorough, two-and-a-half-hour-long PowerPoint presentation to the jury. Opening statements are like a check.

I'm writing a check. Jury hears it. And if I do my job right after opening, all they're waiting to see is if there are funds in the bank. In other words, if you deliver during your case what you say you're going to deliver in the opening statement, you'll get a conviction. That's my hope. But never in this prosecutor's wildest dreams did he believe his opening statement would have the effect it did on Erwin Howard and his defense attorney, Andrew Flyer. You hear that opening statement and something changes.

Something changed. After the opening statement, I went back into lockup and I spoke to Erwin. I said, hey, listen, remember how I was speaking about the circumstantial case and it could be powerful? I think there could be some problems now. And his answer was, I need to tell you something. That something would stun D.D. Keller's family and friends and the prosecutor himself. One of the most shocking things I've ever seen in one of my cases in a courtroom. In a Los Angeles courtroom in September 2008, something extraordinary was taking place.

The murder trial of Erwin Howard, expected to last three months, was on the verge of ending in just two days. Prosecutor John Lewin had presented a powerful opening statement. I had seen the defendant during the opening, and I thought maybe, you know, something had gotten to him. And the DA was right, because after the opening, defense attorney Andrew Flyer had spoken with Howard, who then made a stunning admission. For the first time in my career,

I heard a defendant confess to a crime, and I was the first one he told. And until that moment, his defense was, I wasn't there, and I didn't have anything to do with it. Correct. The defense attorney walked into the courtroom and made a statement that caused mouths to fall open. Defense attorney gets up, and he says that you're going to see something that you'll never see in a court ever. And he says, my client killed Dee Dee Keller, but he didn't murder her. What'd that mean? They were basically trying to see if they could get a manslaughter out of it. So Deputy D.A. Lewin asked to speak with Irwin Howard behind closed doors and made an offer, plead guilty to second-degree murder, and be eligible for parole in 15 years.

My memory is that as I was saying this, he's nodding. But this wasn't just about Irwin admitting it to you. He also had to come into court and admit it to everybody. Yes. And Irwin Howard did just that. I do. Surprising, a courtroom filled with Dee Dee's friends and family. Howard, H-O-W-A-R-D.

There was such a sense of relief to think that, oh my gosh, you know, we're going to hear the truth finally and Erwin's going to confess. Lewin guided Erwin through the sequence of events, beginning with why Erwin went over to Dee Dee's house on the night of July 8, 2004. I wanted to talk to her. And what did you want to talk to her about? To apologize for my act on June 30. June 30, 2004, when after discovering she was dating another man, Irwin stormed into Didi's house, confronted her in the shower, tossed emails in her face, and slapped her. On that final night, though, Irwin says he knocked, and Didi, alone after her new boyfriend left, he says let him in.

Hi. Said, please listen to me, please listen to me. At some point, I guess I raised my voice, and the little dog, Rossi, started growling. Irwin said he threw a pillow at the dog, and that angered Dee Dee. She told me, how dare you hurt my dog? And she slapped me. I reached towards her. I grabbed her hand. She started punching me with the other hand on my chest.

I put her hand down. I grabbed her and pulled her towards me. She struggled with we struggled. Irwin said he put Didi in a sort of bear hug. I just kept holding her and telling her, please listen to me, please. I don't want to lose you. I love you. I don't want to lose you.

How tightly were you holding her? I felt her body on limp. I stood there and I thought, God, I've killed her. I've killed her, I've killed her, I've killed her. Irwin said he came back the next evening and put Dee Dee's body in the car. Using a spare key he had for the Mercedes, he started driving and headed for Mexico. But he wondered how he'd driving and headed for Mexico. But he wondered how he'd get back across the border. So he left the car on a street in San Diego and hired an

off-duty taxi to take him back to L.A. Irwin admitted to the murder, but he talked about it in a way that made it seem almost accidental. Yes, he was willing to accept responsibility for the rage and for the anger. He was not willing to accept responsibility that the murder happened intentionally. But despite that, Lewin felt a second-degree murder conviction was the best he could secure. And after Irwin left the stand and took the plea, Dee Dee's friends and family had the chance to speak to him. They offered surprising words of gratitude and forgiveness to a now confessed killer. And we really thank you. And we also will find a better way to forgive.

You did the right thing with the circumstances, and for that I thank you, and I've been appeased. Thank you. Thank you for doing the right thing. I remember thinking that something really special had happened, that although nothing is going to bring my mom back, we got the best possible outcome given the circumstances. It's rare in a murder trial to hear so much of a sort of lack of anger and vitriol toward the defendant.

They're good people. They're not vengeful people. I think they also realized that Dee Dee, in hindsight, had not handled things as best she could have in terms of terminating that relationship. Now flash forward a decade after that extraordinary courtroom scene. To the disbelief of Dee Dee's family, Irwin Howard's sentence of 15 years to life, turned into just 10 years, five months behind bars. By early 2019, Howard was a free man, paroled. Family members say they were blindsided by Howard's early release, but they could do nothing about it since the plea deal barred the family and even detectives from objecting to Howard's parole. Dee Dee's friends and family, their sorrow tinged with regret, now honor Dee Dee by urging other women not to ignore the warning signs of domestic violence. We want Dee Dee's life to count for something, so I just hope people will reach out for help, get support.

I know you don't blame Dee Dee for this, but I know that you also wish that she had been more forthright with the two of you because you would have acted even though she didn't want to. Yes, we would have. There's no question I would have done things differently if I could go back and re-love it. But for Dee Dee's friends, regrets give way to wonderful memories. Today there's a plaque at the local dog park, both remembering and honoring a woman whose big heart wouldn't ever let her turn away astray.

That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.