Dateline NBC - Burning Suspicion on Addison Avenue

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

A fatal fire that struck a young couple's Palo Alto home appears to be an accident until investigators took a closer look. Keith Morrison reports. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is everybody out of the house? Yeah, I don't know, but it's on fire. Really strong. The fire in the cottage on Addison Avenue was hungry, devouring almost everything in the bedroom. All right. We'll have fire department on the way. You see smoke coming out of the windows?

It's pouring out of some inside the house. Within minutes, firefighters knocked it down. The smoke clearing, the sooty water running in the streets. And then, as the mop-up began, the word flashed out. like something electric. The house was occupied. Someone didn't get out.

And up through the ashes a mystery flared, like a stubborn ember, glowed and smoldered, and demanded an answer. The inhabitants of the rented cottage, as investigators soon learned, were two young, beautiful people, the sort of glossy and successful types you might expect to see on some reality show.

Their names were Paul Zumott and Jennifer Skipsy. Jennifer an ambitious award-winning real estate agent who lived like a rock star, or so said her buddy, Roy Enderman. You know, she'd be like, I'm knocking him out like Domino's, baby. I just worked out, went to Starbucks, and I'm on my way to a meeting, and it's only 633. So Paul seemed to be just the right kind of guy for Jennifer, said Roy. Because he was an entrepreneur, and he seemed like he was a very driven person. And that's definitely a quality that Jennifer was looking for. Jordanian American Paul Zumont, sleek, attractive, educated, engaging.

Paul owned a local hangout, a cafe where customers could smoke flavored tobacco through water pipes called hookas. The place, and Paul, were popular. Nikisa Gottsab was a fan. He's a good-looking guy. He looks good, he smells good. He presents well. He's witty, he's smart, and he's just, he's affectionate. So, love at first sight?

Well, maybe, said their friends. From the minute that he told me about her, he always talked about how wonderful she is and how she's perfect. He definitely was very charismatic, and he liked to joke around. And money? There was a lot of it around, apparently, too. And Jennifer and Paul, having worked hard to get it, seemed only too happy to spend it.

When Jennifer and Paul first got together, Paul took Jennifer to New York City. And I remember he was like a kid in a candy store, just planning all these elaborate, wonderful things that they were going to do together. They were passionate, these beautiful people. They both had strong personalities. Their love burned hot.

Jennifer was a very strong, independent woman, and she would not accept anyone disrespecting her or even looking at her inappropriately. And she was very strong-willed in that. Me, like I always did, told him you need to be careful, you know, because girls can be evil. So he said, no, she's different. I love her. You know, I already love her. She's great. And so in September of 2009, Paul and Jennifer moved into that charming little cottage on Addison

Avenue here in Palo Alto. time to play house. Paul started to think about marriage. And for Paul's 36th birthday, Jennifer planned a party full of promise. She invited most of his close friends to dishdash one of his favorite restaurants. And I think they had over a dozen people there,

almost 20 people or something. And Jennifer created a cute table setting. She created the perfect party for Paul, cake and everything. In fact, people who were there described the party as almost like a wedding reception. It lasted through the evening, into the wee hours of the morning. And now here it was just the very next evening, and it was gone in ashes. All of it, the excitement, the glamour, the promising future up and smoke along with the house on Addison.

And the person inside. The next day, Jim Skipsy was driving with his parents to a dinner engagement. His phone rang. It was an old friend. He picked it up. I said, Jake, you're going to tell me something bad, aren't you? Just kept repeating your name? Yeah.

He said like three times, I guess so. I said, Jake, hold on, man, I got to pull over. I didn't even want to hear it. I didn't want to hear what he had to tell me. So I gave the phone to my dad. And he told my dad. My dad owned the phone. He just held out his arms and me and my mom just like,

We were all holding each other. He told us Jenny was gone. It was his Jennifer, his daughter, who died in that fire. And now, along with almost unbearable grief, something else started to burn inside Jim. Something searing. It was suspicion. You know, accidents will happen.

There's a lot of tragic things that happened to a lot of people in this world. But this was no accident. It didn't have to happen. Well, the deadly fire was burning at his home on Addison Avenue. Paul Zumat was at his hookah lounge just minutes away. Someone called, told him about the fire. He rushed over, but could only pace helplessly back and forth, as firefighters did their job.

Soon after that, he sat down with Palo Altoo Alto Police to try to help sort out what happened. Though, as you can see on the video recording of the meeting, Sat is probably not the best description. Paul was full of nervous energy and frantic questions. At this point, nobody had told him that Jennifer was in that fire. I'm worried about my house. Not even worry about my girlfriend. Why who would cause the fire in?

How do you care about this? I want to just want to tell me about Jennifer right now. I'm not sure that I know any more than you do. My job is just basically to talk to you and find out what exactly you know, because you probably know more than me at this point. No? No. So together, police and Zuma talk. talked about the hours before the fire.

Where had she been? What had she and Paul been doing? Yesterday was my birthday. We went out. Everything's fine, you know. Me and her and all the friends. Who's her? Jennifer.

And that's your girlfriend? Yeah. Paul explained to police that he spent the afternoon at an appointment in San Jose, got back to Palo Alto just in time for his cafe to open for the evening.

I came here and it was traffic and I got to the cafe because that's when they opened, I had to log in into the computers. And as soon as I sat down, I want to smoke, I have the hoka lounge right here. Started smoking. My landlord called me. He said, the house is on fire. I flew in.

I flew in. Screw the red lights and came here. Now I am really frustrated. I'm really confused. I'm really exhausted, and I want to know what happened. I care about the house. It's my Jennifer's safety. I just cannot think anything right now, guys.

Be honest with you. I just cannot think anything. the middle of his conversation with detectives, Paul's phone rang. It was Jennifer's mother, who told him she hadn't seen or heard from her daughter. You can see what happened. Paul fell to pieces. I know, I know. They're not telling me anything. To this point, he told detectives he'd been clinging to the hope that Jennifer might be with her mother, anywhere really, but at home. But she wasn't with her mother, wasn't anywhere. And that's when the officer broke this news.

I'm going to tell you this now, but there's a body in the house. It's been burnt. But we have no way to know what you do that is. And I'm trying to be as sensitive as I possibly can be because I understand that this is your, you know, I don't know that this is Jennifer. We do not. I hope not. Listen, we have not, we have not confirmed who this is, okay.

But it's a really, really odd sense of circumstances, okay? We need to figure out, is this on purpose? Is this an accident? Okay. This is just, unfortunately, this is just the beginning for all of us, okay, to try to answer some questions. Okay? Of course, it had to be Jennifer. And it probably wasn't an accident.

As that news sank in, Paul began to think about who might have wanted to harm Jennifer, and came up with some potentially helpful information, two brothers, Hisham and Tony Ghanma. It already threatened her, said Paul. There had been a confrontation just weeks earlier. So what happened is he called me, three days he's going to kill me, and he spoke in Arabic, and I speak Arabic fluently,

and he spoke to her, so he called the police. Paul said that he and Jennifer had filed restraining orders against both brothers. Now, she was scared from him. She was really scared from him. I'm scared from the guy.

So I didn't know those guys like this. Now, yesterday she walked home, and she said, hey, somebody if I were stuck in me. Had the brothers killed her, two. Police listened, took some notes. And then, just as a precaution, of course, had Paul give them his clothes for forensic testing. Questioned by police, his home destroyed, his girlfriend, dead. Paul Zumad was very nearly in shock, said his friend Nikisa. His mind was that, are they sure

Jennifer's gone? And oh my God, she's never coming back. And as the weeks went by, said Nikisa, Paul was in a kind of daze. The gist of our conversations for the first few weeks were the fact that Jennifer's not coming back. He was completely distraught about the fact that Jennifer was in that fire. Meanwhile, as those same weeks went by, investigators went quietly and steadily about their task, picking through the cinders of the fire

and coming to the conclusion that none of it smelled right, literally. The morning after the fire, On Addison Avenue, the ruins still warm. A yellow lab named Rosie sniffed around what was by then a sealed crime scene. Rosie was trained to identify some of the tools of arson, kerosene, oil, gasoline. Rosie stopped in her tracks. She'd apparently found something. Back then, Chuck Gillingham was a deputy district attorney in Palo Alto.

Was gasoline there? No question at all. It's in her hair. You could smell it. And you could smell it when you walked in. just with your own nose. And in fact, the remnants of the gas can was found next to her right hip.

And so there were still enough remnants of the gas can for us actually to identify the type and make and model of the gas can. Wow, that's like somebody leaving the gun beside the body with their fingerprints all over it or something, isn't it? Well, no fingerprints, obviously, and no physical evidence beyond that. But it was so clear that it was an arson.

Correct. And the arson was not at issue. No, it was cold-blooded murder that was at issue. because Jennifer Siksy did not die in the fire, according to forensic experts, she was dead before the fire started. The method? A particularly intimate form of killing. Death by strangulation. Strangling someone's a very personal killing. That's a very angry killing.

It's not like shooting someone from a long way away, I don't imagine. I mean, you're absolutely touching the person and feeling their life's blood ebb from them. Who could have been so angry? with Jennifer. Paul had told detectives that he and Jennifer had taken out restraining orders against those two brothers, Hisham and Tony Ghanma, both part of his social circle, men whom he considered former friends. There's people after us. What's that mean? They're trying to get us. They trying to harm her, harm me. Who's that? His name is Hisham. That's the guy, okay. The guy that you have the restraining order against? I have a civil restraining against him.

He hit me. He has a restraining against me. And just one night before, after Paul's birth party celebration, Paul told police some guys on the truck tried to follow Jennifer home. She broke her heels and she had somebody was just talking her. And it was fine, I was okay with me. But we had, we had people threatening us in the past. Okay, I don't know what's going on. And I think that's what caused the fire, I believe.

Drinking you? Is it? Somebody was threatening us? Oh, threatened. Okay. So, as Paul Zoom out onto something, detectives went to talk to the brothers, and of course, checked to see where both men were the day of the fire. And there was no doubt they were nowhere near the fire.

They had alibis. At the time of the fire, we know exactly where both of them were. One of the Gondel brothers was in their cafe, and he's on videotape, and the other was at Frize Electronics and Home Depot, about 20 miles away. We have those receipts, and we have videotape from both of those locations. So, once the Gondola brothers were in the clear, the cops did what they always do in cases like this.

in fact, it's practically police work 101. They took a closer look at the victim's boyfriend, Paul. And there was a curious moment in that police interview the day of the fire when Paul admitted he wasn't always the best sort of boyfriend. I mean, I'm a girlfriend who broke up. And thanks to San Jose, Sama to Palau to PD, they put an emergency restraining guard on me in August.

Because she said, Paul threatened me, blah, blah, blah, and I said, no, she came to the cafe, broke the door. Okay. And Mike Effie. But we had these problems with me and hair, but you know what? And I had, they must take balance against the gun. I never touched the girl in my life. You could see the police reports.

Suspicious, sure. But as they asked around among the couple's friends, police learned a few things that put Paul's behavior into context. Maybe he wasn't any more to blame than she was. Their relationship was chaotic. There's no disputing that, absolutely. But he was no more violent in the relationship than, she was, whether it be physically, verbally, emotionally.

As police gathered evidence bit by bit, asking around about Paul, one of them noticed something a little odd. Paul told a friend, also a policeman, by the way, two slightly different stories about his whereabouts the day of the fire. First conversation, Day of the Fire, reported the cop friend. Paul said he wasn't home all day. Then, second conversation next day, Paul said he stopped briefly at home, en route to his hookah cafe. As we say, awed. But people's memories can be tricky. Was that one little difference enough to add up to suspicion of murder? Police apparently thought so, especially once they added that to the rest of what they discovered. Paul was arrested. They charged Paul Zumots with arson and murder, which struck some observers as strange.

After all, there had been just that one little inconsistency. And though Paul and Jennifer did fight sometimes, they seemed crazy in love, too. Paul had been shopping for a diamond ring, for heaven's sake. There was a part of Paul that was mourning his girlfriend. And then there was a part of him that was, he didn't understand why he was in custody. And he didn't understand why he couldn't just cry for his girlfriend. and for his life that had just changed 100%. It certainly did.

Paul Zumat was taken to jail to await trial on a charge of murder in the first degree. Big mistake, said Paul Zumont. When I first saw him, all he was really still telling me is, you know, me being in custody, all of this is going to blow over with. They're going to realize I'm not the person who did this. In the days after the fire on that,

Addison Avenue, after Paul Zumad was charged with murder and hauled off to jail, events in Palo Alto seemed to freeze somehow, in confusion and denial from Paul's point of view, and unrequited grief among the people who loved Jennifer. It hurt. It hurt a lot. Unrequited, partly, because for some reason, though he'd been arrested, Paul wasn't entering a plea, which is what this was all about, candlelight vigils outside Paul's Hooka Lounge by Jennifer's friends and family. We decided to stand in front of his establishment every night until he made his plea. Eventually, no surprise, Paul did plead, not guilty. And prosecutor Chuck Gillingham found himself sifting through the records of a two-year romance,

studded with restraining orders, bitter quarrels, scratches, bruises, 911 calls. I mean, these were two people that were makeups and breakups, and she gave verbally as good as she got. After one of their flare-ups, Paul was ordered to attend anger management classes, went to one the day of the fire, in fact. So why did two people who fought so much stay together for so long? There was, it turned out, an audio recording of Jennifer herself.

Killingham got hold of it, listened to her explanation. He wins your heart, so the first couple months, months is amazing, sweeps you off your feet, candles everywhere, flowers, not money items, but just romantic and sweet talking and parading you around and wanting to introduce you to everybody. It gets me loving him and admiring him that he admires me, and then it makes me trust his opinion and what he says about me and thinks about me. So then, as soon as he gets to that point, he flips it and calls me ugly, fat, a gold tigger.

By the way, the person she's talking to? Hisham Ganma. Remember, he's one of the brothers Paul told police he and Jennifer were afraid of, but here she was, confiding in him. Mind you, it's a phone conversation that was recorded a few months before the fire. But then she was not happy about Paul, not at that point anyway. I have pictures of the damage that he did all of my furniture, and he kicked in my car.

Somebody saw him at Starbucks, spit in my face, on my way to work. But things clearly changed after that. Remember, they were all lov-y-dovey. Paul was even talking marriage the night before the fire. And now here he was not much more than a year later on trial for her murder. Listening to prosecutor Chuck Gillingham take the jury inside the last days of Paul's relationship with Jennifer. How did Gillingham do that? Jennifer's cell phone.

Detective discovered, and this was rather curious, that most of her text message history had been deleted, but the messages had not disappeared. The Palo Alto cops managed to find a phone expert all the way across the country in New Hampshire, who had a very deep look into that cell phone and was able to pull up thousands, literally thousands of deleted text messages between Jennifer and Paul in the last few months of her life. And, oh boy. From Jennifer. You're nothing but a selfish, cold-hearted, ungrateful human being scam artist, liar. Furious. That one didn't read like just any old quarrel.

And the timing. Jennifer sent that text to Paul right at the end of the elaborate birthday party she threw for him when she had perhaps 12 hours left to live. In fact, she was so upset about something that she refused to go to the hook allowance. after the party, walked all the way home on a broken heel, texting all the way. Jennifer, good, stay away from me. I just got home. Paul. I'm staying away this time for good. What a way to end my birthday. For Jennifer to walk home alone at night with a broken heel and upset, she had to have been, I don't even know if I've ever even seen her that mad.

But that was the night before. Angry messages buzzing back and forth. Then, as the cell phone revealed, the pair made love during the night. Before Jennifer's morning text messages again turned red-hot angry, the subject seemed to be a debt, she claimed he owed her. Right around 1030, 1045 into 11, roughly 16 in the morning, she is now referring back to those text messages and telling him he better bring a check and don't come back

where she's going to the San Jose Police Department file charges by 3 o'clock that day. And that's the last text message that anyone gets from her. That's the last contact she has ever with anyone. That said Gillingham just before noon is when Paul lost his temper and choked Jennifer to death,

then drove to a gas station, bought a can of gasoline. Later, returned home, torched the house. And somewhere along the way, said the prosecutor, he erased all those angry tech. messages she sent him. Every single one between the defendant and her. Every single one is gone.

Month's worth. And then said Gillingham, Paul used Jennifer's cell phone to send fake text to her friends, so they believe she was still alive. To support that claim, Gillingham introduced an expert witness who testified that texts from Paul's phone and texts from Jennifer's phone were hitting some of the same cell towers all afternoon. So her phone must have been right there with him in his car. Which is why when she missed a meeting with her friend Roy Endemann, the texts he got from her didn't make sense. They weren't a sensible response to the message he'd sent her.

In fact, he got the same text twice. She didn't show up, and her phone was off. And so as soon as I got that repeat text message, I was kind of worried because she wasn't responding to what I was saying. Jennifer was nowhere to be found. Jennifer was dead. Now what prosecutor Gillingham wanted the jury to think about was what happened or didn't happen much later after the fire. Here was the scene, house burning, Paul standing on the street outside watching the fire.

At this point, he supposedly didn't know if Jennifer was inside or outside whether she was alive or dead. But... And in the time that he was there, he made 38 calls and text messages, two of which went to Jennifer. and in neither occasion did he leave Jennifer a message. He left messages for others. He spoke with others. He text messages, for instance, the same friend

multiple times. But in that two-hour period, at no time does he leave that location to look for Jennifer, perhaps, to go to the other side of the blocked-off street? You know, if he called her and texted her once, surely that's enough. I mean, she'll call him back.

Cell phone records actually bear out that he's a person that would call her text her two to 300 times a day when he wasn't around her if he wasn't able to get a hold of her. His silence especially at the crime scene was deafening because there's no text message. I would submit, and I did to the jury, that he stood at that location because he wanted people to see him there. But how could the jury be sure Paul was guilty? Prosecutor Gillingham offered her...

Remember Rosie? The skillful police dog trained to alert to the faintest whiff of accelerant of the sort used in arson fire. She alerted when she smelled some of Paul Zumott's clothes. Suspicious, yes. Though not exactly ironclad evidence. As you'll see, courtesy of Paul's high-profile defense attorney, the man famous for defending Scott Peterson.

His name, Mark Garagos. I've had many a client who I have no doubt was capable of the acts that they were accused of. This is just not one of them. Defense attorney Mark Garragos. Garagos has made a name for himself defending clients in difficult and highly celebrated cases, not the least the Scott Peterson trial. But defending Paul Zumott would present its own set of challenges. Zumont was accused of killing his girlfriend, Jennifer Skipsy,

and then trying to hide that fact by burning the house down. But as the trial began, he'd also been pegged by the prosecution as an abuser, a violent man. An image, Garagos, set out to change. They both were passionate, romantic at times, hot at times, as you would characterize it. I don't think it was a one-way street by any means. For a start, Garago's tried best he could to weed out possible jury members who might have been unduly swayed by angry text messages or stories about Zumont's temper. What jurors do or what you want to get a jury to do is to want to help your client and to kind of walk in the shoes here. Klan. And then when he presented his case, Garago set out to reframe the events after that

infamous party the night before the fire. The party was at a place, and it was for Paul's birthday, and it was planned by Jennifer, and they had maybe 14 to 18 of their close friends that were there, and by all accounts at the party, everything was great. And the argument later, the angry texts. That was just the way Paul and Jennifer always were, said Garagos. His proof? After those angry text message exchanges, here's what happened, as Zumot described in his police interview.

We talked, we smoked hookah, things is fine, we did what we did, you know. We slept in the, I told him gave me two annexes. I think probably she already took one or two before, but she took two more in front of me, and we just went to bed. And I got up at 11. So you got up at the same time? Yes, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you guys made up?

I made up, yeah. Yeah, I made up, and then we have a video. I mean, we video ourselves. I mean, honestly, but I shouldn't be saying that, but that's proved out. I was in the house, her phone, hair video. Do you video?

What do you mean? We have sex, we video. So you had sex last night with her video? Yeah. And sure enough, when police looked at Jennifer's cell phone, there was a video. She and Paul having sex after their fight hours before she was murdered.

so enthusiastically that anybody who watches this is never going to have the impression or take away from that, that this was somebody who was ready to kill her. And as for that cell tower evidence that Prosecutor Gillingham presented, which seemed to show Paul had Jennifer's phone with him and was sending out fake messages in her name? That was nonsense, said Garrow goes. That was one of the pieces of information that was absolutely imploded. We went and got the engineer, the actual engineer, from the carrier to come in and say he looked at the evidence,

and what this guy said was the phone pinging off the same towers was not. It was just merged data from the cell phone. Why is that important? Because, says Garagos, the prosecution's own timeline should have cleared Paul Zumont. It is. Investigators said Jennifer was strangled several hours before the fire started, and it was lit no earlier than about 6.30 p.m. But early in the afternoon, after Paul had left the area, Carragos says,

Jennifer was still alive, sending real, not fake, text messages herself from her phone. By all accounts, she was alive at 117. Okay. And at 117, Paul was not at the house. So, where was Paul? Trying to pick up paperwork at the Palo Alto Police Station. And then at the hookah lounge, where he appears on security. cam footage around 137 p.m.

And from there, says the defense attorney, he headed to his anger management class about 18 miles away. On the way, he stopped at the restaurant depot, seen here on camera around 3.30. So there simply wasn't time in between, said Garagos,

for Paul to go to the cottage, strangle his girlfriend, and douse her body with gasoline. A solid alibi, said Garagos. His client simply couldn't have killed Jennifer. And he couldn't have started the fire. How could he have been in two places at once?

And as for Rosie, the yellow lab, who alerted to a gasoline smell on Zumot's clothes? Garago simply pointed out that those very clothes were submitted to a test on a state-of-the-art equipment of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and firearms. And they showed no evidence of gasoline at all. The ATF chemist has a protocol. And specifically, one of the things the prosecution also didn't tell this jury, which we brought out, was that the ATF also,

put out a protocol that said you never take a dog alert, a single dog alert, and draw a conclusion. And in fact, if the ATF says negative, then you should not allow in the dog alert. So why would people believe the dog over the ATF? Well, I think once again you get into this idea. People have dogs. They kind of ascribe supernatural powers to dogs. I mean, you know, I've got two large dogs. and having been through a couple of cases with dog evidence,

as much as I love my dogs, I'm certainly not going to want to convict somebody and put their liberty at stake based on dog evidence. Still, as he presented his case, Garagos had a problem, and he knew it. What it came down to was the character assassination block of the case. I mean, the first two blocks of this case revolved around the what's so-called scientific evidence,

And that was absolutely destroyed, and then you ended up with the character assassination block. The solution? Paul Zumat himself appears to have demanded it, the chance to defend himself to the jury by testifying. Some courtroom observers believe the defense had already created a reasonable doubt that testifying was, in fact, risky. Especially for Paul, said his friend Nikisa. Knowing Paul the way I know Paul and the way that he could be interpreted, incorrectly. I was very nervous about Paul taking the stand. Risky or not, Paul was determined to tell the jury his side of the story. Defense attorney Mark Garagos had done what he could to poke holes in the prosecution's

murder case against Paul Zumont, arguing that the prosecution had no solid scientific proof or clear evidence Zumont was anywhere near Jennifer when she was strangled when the house was set on fire. And anyway, he asked, if Paul, a town, Jennifer, wouldn't she have put up some kind of fight? Why were there no defensive marks or scratches on Paul Zumott's body? Did the prosecution even have a case? Paul Zumott wasn't going to take any chances. In fact, he was determined to tell the jury his side of the story.

So Garagos assigned a female colleague to question Paul. Must have been a strategy, whispered courtroom observers. A way to show the jury that Paul could, in fact, interact well with a woman. But those observers were mistaken, said Garagos. Well, I generally, I don't think direct examination is my strong suit, and I was concentrating on cross-examination of the witnesses. So Paul Zumont looked the jurors in the eye and told them, I did not kill Jennifer Skipsy, did not burn the house. And then he told them, emotions building to a fever pitch, how, despite their roller coaster relationship, he truly loved Jennifer.

His lawyer presented a love letter, in fact, that she'd written to him, and he broke down then, flood of tears. I was so relieved, and I thought, you know, if there was any way this jury thought this man was responsible for this, now they know for sure that he's not, because it's so obvious to me that he's telling the truth. But listening to all of this with his... experienced ear was prosecutor Gillingham.

You must have been rather pleased when you heard he was going to testify. I think that's an understatement. I was very, very pleased. More than that, it was a gift, said Gillingham, an unexpected opportunity. Why? Well, the prosecutor had Paul right where he wanted him

for as long as he wanted him. There were hours of questions, tough questions, baiting questions, questions designed to make Paul crack, and reveal what Gilling him believed to be a controlling personality at a red-hot temper. My plan was to go through how he acted when he was angry and then asked him questions that he couldn't have no good answers for. For instance, why all those text messages are deleted,

and those were questions he could not answer because he had not considered those questions. After three long days in the hot seat, Ball Zumat's testimony was finally over. had he persuaded the jurors that he was innocent? Do you feel he got a little bit chippy or arrogant on the stand? I don't think that he got arrogant, but I think clearly he was tired and he was exasperated. He wanted to tell his story. He was being cut off. But the jurors, once they got the case, said they were determined to look at the evidence,

not just courtroom theater. Everyone was very committed to going over the evidence and discussing each of the witnesses and each of the crucial pieces of evidence. It was really encouraging. And it was crucial they decided to compare very carefully the different timelines claimed by the prosecution and the defense. So we analyzed the timeline for the entire day from his testimony where he said he was

and then other pieces of testimony and evidence to either validate or contradict. The jury took less than 14 hours and came back with a verdict. Guilty. All I remember was I heard, that word guilty, man. It was just like this, this relief, this release of tension.

I was very shocked by the verdict. I think a lot of people were shocked by the verdict. Because, I mean, if you sat through the weeks and weeks of trial, it just, it's inconceivable how they could get to the result that they got you. But to the jurors, the issues about text messages and whether Paul had Jennifer's phone all afternoon wasn't as important as Zumot on. the stand. That's what made the difference. His tears, for example? Sometimes I feel like I'm too cynical, but it was universally held opinion, I think. The entire jury believed that it was a manufactured moment. What was the problem with his testimony? There were two things that struck me. One was when he broke down on a stand. And to me, it didn't seem genuine. And the other portion of

his testimony was when he had the opportunity to tell us where he was and what he was doing, he chose to basically lie to us three times. And we were able to prove that he lied to us by the hard evidence that we had with the phone records and with the video surveillance and those items. And I just, to me, that hurt him very badly. If he hadn't testified, I can't say for sure, but I don't think I could have convicted him. At his sentencing, an angry Paul Zumad again protested his innocence, but he was sent away for 25 to life, for murder, plus eight years for arson. Case closed? Well, not exactly. In 2020, a federal judge granted Zumat a new trial, ruling that prosecutors had presented

false evidence to the jury, while Zumat's defense team provided ineffective counsel. At his retrial, in 2025, Paul Zumott had a new defense team and a different strategy. This time around, he did not take the witness, Dan. But the jury came to the same conclusion as the first one did. He was found guilty again, and sentenced to 30 years to life. After the fire that set this mystery in motion, the Palo Alto Cottage was repaired, new love, perhaps, growing in there. Young, People were still coming to the cafe to socialize and smoke hookah. And Paul, gone. Like the romance that burned too bright before it vanished with its victim in a cloud of smoke.

And I can still hear her voice. I don't see her smile. I know she's here.