The Megyn Kelly Show - "Fraud Week" Highlights, Scott Peterson Case Lead Detective - Megyn's "True Crime" Mega-Episode

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

Megyn Kelly looks back at past "true crime" episodes including "Fraud Week" highlights with Benita Alexander and on the mystery of Ed Shin, and the Scott Peterson case with the lead detective.     Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKelly Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShow Instagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShow Facebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow  Find out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show and today's true crime mega episode. We've got some wild ones for you, including two episodes from our Fraud Week special series of shows, one with Benita Alexander. She's fascinating. A personal story from a longtime NBC news producer, Benita takes us in depth on how how she was fooled by supposedly one of the world's most charming and successful men. Plus, we have the very first time our pal Matt Murphy was on the show to talk about a case

that he prosecuted out in California on the mystery of Ed Shin. And we take a look back at the case of Scott Peterson with the lead detective on that investigation. Enjoy, and we'll see you Monday. We begin with the story of an NBC news producer. who fell in love with a super surgeon, a pioneer, a miracle worker. That surgeon was Dr. Paolo Machirini. The handsome George Clooney lookalike doctor was once the darling of the medical world. He promised incredible developments in regenerative medicine.

He was the first person to transplant synthetic windpipes into patients, while covering Paolo for an NBC special producer Benita Alexander fell for the doctor. But romantic getaways soon turned into a bed of lies. Benita Alexander is here to tell her story. Benita, it's great to meet you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Megan. It's great to be here.

Okay, I've been watching all of it. I watched the Doctor Death thing that originally did this. And then the Netflix special, of course, you did a special on investigative. I mean, like, I'm obsessed with your story. It's just there's so much about it that I find incredibly telling and complex and it raises so many issues. Not to mention the fact that you were a star news producer and I love star news producers. You remind me in so many ways of my own star news producers who I love on my team. And it's one of those things we're like, if this could happen to you, it could happen to anybody.

Not only are you smart and savvy, but you are. are literally in the business of detecting bullshit. And yet, right? So that's, those are some of the things that make it so compelling. So let's start at the beginning for people who are not aware of the story. And even people who are aware are going to be interested to hear you tell it, as I have been so many times. You're an NBC news producer, and you get asked by Meredith Pryor,

who is in NBC, to work on a special based on a doctor that she had read a about, I guess, in a magazine because this guy, Paolo, Machirini, was getting some press at the time for this very innovative thing he was doing in medicine. So take us there. Yeah, we were actually looking at doing a documentary about regenerative medicine, which is this very promising, exciting field where, to boil it down to its most simple terms, we're looking at a future where you make new body parts and organs in the lab. And this has so much potential, right, to eradicate the need for donor organs and all the problems that come with it and just basically go to the go to lab and order a new body part. And so there's a lot of excitement attached to this field. And when we started

looking into it, Dr. Paulo Macarini's name kept coming up. He was considered the pioneer in this field at the forefront of this groundbreaking revolutionary field. And his nickname was a super surgeon. And he worked at the place in Sweden that awards the Nobel Prize in medicine. And so there were tons of accolades, tons of press. I mean, he kind of had this reputation like he walked on water and people were clamoring to work with him. And there was just a lot of excitement surrounding this man. So you decide to do a profile on him along. He's going to get the long form NBC treatment.

And this is in advance of him performing one of these surgeries on a little two-year-old girl, right? And where was she located? So he was about to do one of his transplants on this Korean toddler, beautiful little girl named Hannah, who had tragically been born with no windpipe at all. So she had spent her entire little life in the hospital. She had never left the hospital. And she was going to be the first toddler that had received one of these transplants and also the youngest person in the world. And the first one ever operated on in the U.S. And so that made that case appealing to us.

And then I talked to her family who were just the most beautiful people, her parents, and they had been through so much, you know, trying to save this little girl's life. And they were besides themselves. And they thought that Dr. Paulo MacIrini was the answer to their prayers, basically, the savior. He was going to step in and save the day when nobody else could. And that was the reputation that this man had. And so we decided to focus our story around Hannah and her family and follow her surgery. So you and he have to spend a lot of time together.

As much as the anchor spends some time with the star guest on a piece like that, the producers spend way more time with him. The producers all do, but especially the lead, which you were. And what happened? Like he was, is a good-looking man. He does look a little like George Clooney. He's, is he, I can't remember. He's Italian, yes?

Yeah. Yeah. He's Italian, you got that going for him too. Exactly. He's very charming. He's one of those people that has that quality that when he walks into a room, you know, he turns head. People pay attention to him.

He's got that commanding presence. You know, he's very arrogant, very confident, very self-assured. He speaks five or six different languages. You know, he's Italian. He dressed very well. He's, you know, he's kind of flirtatious with everybody. men and women, and he's got that confident air. And also, on top of that, here he is doing something that literally nobody else in the world was doing. He's rumored to be in contention for a Nobel Prize himself,

and he seemed to be very devoted to giving hope to patients who had no other hope. So there was something very intriguing about him and something very admirable. And so just start with all that. You know, And we had a joke in the office that, oh, you know, he's a George Clooney look alike. He definitely had that appeal. But then when I met him, he seemed to be incredibly caring. We were friends first. We just started talking a lot over, you know, a coffee after a shoot, a dinner after a shoot on long plane rides. We flew Hannah all the way from Korea to Illinois.

I at the time was at a very vulnerable place in my life. I would not realize how vulnerable until much later and how susceptible. that made me, but my ex-husband of our then nine-year-old daughter was tragically dying of brain cancer. And I was sort of holding it together at work, but inside, I think I was crumbling. I was facing the enormity of what this meant for the rest of her life, for our lives, how was I going to cope with this? How was she going to cope with this? You know, all of it. And I started pouring my heart out to him. And he just seemed like such an attentive, caring listener. and that's what kind of blew me away.

It was none of the other stuff. It was the fact that this man seemed to genuinely care about this little girl, my daughter, that he'd never met. And that's what got me. He, in some of these documentaries, they show clips of him with Hannah, the two-year-old girl, and with other patients. And his bedside manner seems impeccable. It's beautiful. Exactly. So I can see how you were fooled.

Yeah. Well, that's, I look at those videos now and I think, you know, damn it, that's exactly the way he was with me. I mean, he appears to be exactly the opposite of what he actually is and what he actually turned out to be. But he just seemed so caring, so genuinely caring and attentive and really, a really good listener. You know, now, of course, I realize he was gathering information to use against me. But at the time, I just thought he was an incredible human being. Oh, that's very interesting. I want to return to that. I haven't heard you covered that in your earlier pieces. There's a lot I want to ask you that I, you know, just watching all of this, I have a lot of questions for you outside of the story that I'm like, I got to know this.

And I got to, okay, gathering information. We got to come back to that. So it moves quickly. And we can spend a minute on the ethical piece. You're not really supposed to date your, no, the subject of your piece. You knew that. Sometimes it happens. It's not great. But, you know, you deal with it when it happened. In this case, it is interesting that it happened because, you know, in retrospect, do you believe he made it happen so that you would be so distracted by him and your blossoming love affair that you would not be paying attention to the medical problems surrounding his supposedly, you know, groundbreaking work? I now believe that I was targeted from day one. You know, he had a plan from day one. and it was not what I thought it was. I thought we were genuinely falling in love, and this man was sweeping me off my feet.

I now believe when I met him in 2013, the world still thought he was the super surgeon. He was a superstar. You know, he was doing this groundbreaking pioneering procedure, you know, getting all sorts of press, all sorts of accolades. Behind the scenes, the whistleblowers were starting to figure out that something was wrong.

Patients were dying. However, at the time, he was still sticking by what he said and has continued to say all along, that whenever you do an experimental procedure, patients do die, which is actually true. You know, you look at heart transplants, lung transplants, anything new, radical and experimental. Patients do die at the beginning. However, you know, what he wasn't telling the world and what nobody knew yet was that he had not done one single one of the preliminary steps that you're supposed to do before. doing an experimental procedure on humans. He had literally skipped everything. And he's standing at press conferences and interviews saying that his patients are doing beautifully well when in fact they were suffering and they were dying slow, horrible deaths. He's lying about the success in papers. So all this is happening. The world does not know this yet, unfortunately. I wish we had. But he had to know, right, that it was going to implode. It was a matter of time. It was just a ticking time bomb. So I think he met me and he thought, okay, here's this successful, smart journalist.

I'm going to make her fall in love with me. And when the shit hits the fan, I'm going to have her in my back pocket, so she's going to protect me. I think that's exactly what he was doing. I think he was using me. Yeah, because you're a top producer, all sorts of awards, Edward R. Murrow and so on. and you're working for one of the top anchors at NBC as well on this piece, Marita Vieira. And you're super smart. So if he can get you to vouch for him in this piece and on an ongoing basis, it's huge.

That's gold. So I can see, yeah, that was my suspicion in watching it because that's one of my big questions all along is why. Why, why, why, why, why, why, why did you do this turn? Exactly. And especially because you were so vulnerable and you were going through this personal family tragedy and your poor daughter. So, okay, so that's our suspicion right now is that it was an intentional latching on. You're supposed to be investigating him. I mean, a producer investigates, but it's not like you're treated like a private detective where you're really expected to unearth any crime attached to the guy. You have to do a reasonable level of research on him. When you were doing that

and also falling in love, were there red flags? You know, did you see that patients had been dying on this, he had this fake trachea that he would put this, synthetic trachea, that he would coat in the patient's own stem cells and put it in their necks as a new trachea to replace one stricken by cancer, or in the case of the little girl Hannah, that was never there, that she'd been born without one. So had you seen any of those red flags or deaths? You know, there was an investigation in Italy, which had nothing to do with the plastic tracheos. and he was put on house arrest and accused of extortion. And that raised some red flags for a minute.

We actually considered putting the story on hold. And in fact, there was a hold in bringing Hannah to Illinois during that time while the FDA investigated. But then the lawyers in Illinois came back. The FDA came back. And everybody said, no, it's fine. He's clear. The charges were dropped. It's, you know, all a misunderstanding.

And so that seemed fine. And if the FDA is endorsing him and, you know, a hospital is still bringing him all the way to Illinois, to do this very radical transplant, that seemed okay. With the patients dying, he was still at the time able to stick by this argument that these patients are pioneers. And whenever you do something experimental, you're learning and people do die. And all of that is valid if you've done everything you're supposed to do. But again, what nobody knew is that he hadn't done everything he was supposed to do. And he was literally using people as human guinea pigs. I mean, it's atrocious. It's beyond awful.

But at the time, you, the patients, even the patients that died, their families were still supporting him. The hospital in Illinois still supported him after Hannah died. The FDA was backing him. Karolinska, for going to say, is the place of the awards a Nobel Prize in Medicine. They're still employing him. They're still endorsing him. They're still backing him.

So there was no reason, you know, really to doubt him. And anytime you're doing something radically new and you're a pioneer, you're going to have critics, of course, right? And he did have critics. But most of the criticism was about the fact that he was running all over the world. And he didn't stick around long after doing the transplants to take care of the patients. And he seemed more like an arrogant surgeon than anything else. There just wasn't there wasn't enough there yet, you know, unfortunately. In hindsight, God, I wish we had known.

but nobody did. Sure, if you had approached and it was like nine out of nine patients have died, NBC would have done a very different, a hard turn away from this guy. I believe that. Exactly. Fully. But I understand medicine and these new procedures do go through, you know, highs and lows when they're first being unleashed. And he was pretty open about that. He was talking about that in a way that sounded credible. Like, hey, you know, these are experimental procedures. I'm not trying to hide that. And I only am really kind of doing it on people who have no, hope who are willing to take this huge risk. And yet what he knew, what they didn't know is, you know, this hasn't been tested.

He didn't do the animal trials. He's done nothing. You are a human guinea pig. You're the first line of experimentation. And there's been no success with it so far. Here he is, this is from bad surgeon on Netflix. And it's footage from an old interview of Paolo talking about this very issue. The more complex surgery is the more higher the chances of,

risk you take. The first liver transplant, the first kidney transplant, the first heart transplant, did they go all well? No. We don't have the magic crystal to show and to look in the future. I think that this is the future. Okay, and we'll get to the specifics unfolding after this. So you're working with him in early 2013 on this NBC news piece and things are starting to unfold. you're spending lots of time together. Over in Europe, it's romantic. And you know, it's not exactly professional, but it's hard.

And I'm sure you're feeling sad over your ex-husband dying and all the things. And then it was, what, June of 2013, you flew to Venice, had an incredibly romantic weekend. By the way, he was very generous. This was not a financial con.

He paid for everything. No, everything. I mean, that's one of the things that distinguishes him and is also so perplexing because most con artists, you look at somebody like the Tinder Swindler or all these other ones that we've heard of, their motive is money, right? They're trying to get money. Money was a non-issue. He was exceedingly generous, you know, over-the-top generous, not just with me and my daughter, my friends, my family,

you know, lavish vacations, everything over the top. He would take 20 people out to dinner and pay for everything, you know, buy the most expensive champagne. I mean, he was just extraordinarily. extravagant and generous. You know, even things like I had a friend that was going through breast cancer and he insisted that we sent her some money for her treatment because she was struggling at the time. Yeah, money was a non-issue. So Christmas 2013, he proposed. Things moved very quickly.

Had the piece aired yet? No, but it was, we were done shooting it. We had been done shooting it for a while. And it's, it's sat for a long time, as, as you know, stories sometimes do before they actually hit the air. And this one sat for a long time. It was, I think, June of 2014 when it finally aired. It might have been April, May. But it was, it sat for a long time, which was frustrating.

I mean, we were in a difficult position. I mean, as you said, I had crossed this invisible, but very important ethical line that you're not supposed to cross in journalism for a very good reason, right? You don't get involved with a source of your story because then, you're, you know, your objectivity could go out the window. And it wasn't like I didn't struggle with that. I did. And I had actually pushed him away for a few months and said, we have to wait. We have to wait until the story is. We can't, we can't be together. But it was just so difficult, especially in the wake of my ex-husband actually passing away. And then I had my own health scare on top of it the same year. And even all my friends and family were just like, are you crazy? This man's nuts

about you. You know, he's madly in love with you. What are you waiting for? But this proposal was a surprise. And that's another, in hindsight, another red flag. It is, things moved very, very quickly, you know. And in the normal trajectory of a relationship, you know, things take time, right? It takes time to fall in love. But as that's one similarity, he does have to other con artists, everything was on the fast track. Everything was moving at rapid fire speed, you know.

He said, I love you very quickly. He was talking about marrying me very quickly. moving in very quickly because he was in a rush. I didn't realize that, right? I just thought it was all very romantic. But so, yeah, and the beauty of the proposal, because this man was so over the top with everything, you know, I'd walk into a hotel room and they'd be every time,

rose petals all over the floor, you know, bouquets everywhere, champagne everywhere. And the proposal was just simple. It was just me and my daughter and Paolo at home at Christmas. And he just handed me a little box without saying any. thing and I had no idea it was coming. But yeah. We actually have a bit of you talking about this in the special Bad Surgeon again. That's the Netflix version of Benita's story. Here it is. Fast forward Christmas 2013. Palo came to stay in New York with me. It was very casual. He cooked a big, elaborate meal. He handed me this little box.

And I opened the box. And it's... this beautiful diamond ring. Oh my gosh. I just, I kind of froze. And then I said to him, is this what I think it is? And he just smiled and he nodded. I just, wow, you know.

I was completely floored. So he was love bombing you. Yeah. I mean, it was a long, slow form of love bombing because we were together almost two years and it never stopped in the two years. in the two years. It wasn't this sort of only love bombing you at the beginning. But the love bombing is very calculated also. Everything about this, I think, was calculated. The love bombing is

designed, you know, you feel like you're in the clouds. You're floating sort of on a cloud of bliss, and it's very intentional because then you don't look at anything else. You don't question anything. You don't, it's designed to sort of put you in a haze and distract you from what's really going on. I wonder, you know, as I watched that, I think, maybe it was just a personal preference. I'm not sure. I feel like if somebody did that to me, like, constantly, because I saw every voiceman was like, my love, my love. I think I'd be like, eh, and it's a no. But would you have said that, too, prior to meeting him?

Yeah, 100%. That's not my style at all. And actually, we did have, you know, it's interesting because not only was it always these consistent, lavish over-the-top gestures, but also he was videotaping everything. all the time. Like the video camera was never not on. And we had arguments about that. I said, you know, number one, I don't need all this. You don't need to do something every time we go on vacation. It's too much. You know, it's kind of embarrassing. You know, everything was a show. And also, why do you have to videotape everything? We don't have to, you know, document every moment, which now is

bizarre. It was sort of like he was documenting his own demise because he left me so much video. Yeah. That's great. Can I ask you why do you think he was doing that? Because you'd think somebody who's, and we'll get into the details of what exactly, you know, we know now about him while he was doing all this. But you think anybody who's doing something somewhat nefarious would not want it all on tape. Which is interesting because now when I talk to women who've been conned by men,

a lot of them talk about the fact that the man would never pose for a photograph with her, right? But this was exactly the opposite. I think it just goes hand in hand with the narcissistic arrogance. I think this man thought he would never get caught. And I think he got a sick thrill out of lying to people and conning people. And I just think it was part of the game. Gosh, it's disturbing, but I think you're right. That's how it feels.

So there comes a day in which he reveals to you that he's got, in addition to this amazing ability to create these, you know, regenerative tracheas that he implants and the people who are suffering, he's got this secret client list and he's got this secret life as VIP surgeon to the most well-known people on earth. And I have to say, I defend you on this piece of the story, I believe coming into it with this amount of press and this amount of, like, medical professionals touting this guy, this would be believable. This is who Barack Obama might quietly see on the side, right? So give us a feel for the number of, you know, celebs he said he was secretly catering to. So it first came up actually right after he proposed, because it was Christmas. And he said he couldn't

stick around for New Year's. And I was not happy about it. And I kept peppering him with questions. Well, you know, where do you have to go? And he kept saying it's an important surgery. It's an important surgery. I'm like, come on. And finally, that's when he said, look, I have to tell you, something. And of course, it was all built up with. I've never told this to anyone before. Even my ex-wife doesn't know about this and blah, blah. And he said, I'm part of a very clandestine secret network of doctors from around the world of all different specialties. And we cater to the world's most important people, famous people, dignitaries, because these people don't want their private medical life, you know, known in public. And he told me that New Year's,

said he was going to take care of Hillary Clinton and that he had been taking care of the Clintons for some time and that he was friends with Bill Clinton. I thought it was ridiculous. And I said, I've never heard of anything like this. This is absurd. However, I called a friend in L.A. who's very connected to a lot of celebrities.

And I just said, look, is this feasible? And she said, Benita, come up. She said, you don't think these people have private personal doctors? Of course they do. They all do. you know, they all have doctors that fly to them privately and, you know, their private jets. They don't want everything made public. So on the one hand, it seemed, yeah.

So on the one hand, it seemed absurd. And on the other, it didn't. And I understand why people who have never sort of been in these circles or don't understand this type of lifestyle would go, come on, that's not true. But I don't think it's so far from the truth, you know. It's not far from the truth. I don't have such a doctor in my life, though I would love one. But I know doctors as friends who get, they get offered $250,000 to fly to Saudi Arabia and help somebody.

If you have enough money, this is how you live and this is how you expect to be taken care of. Right, right. So he, the name sort of dribbled out over time because it was all, you know, so secretive and he wasn't supposed to be telling me. But it ended up being, I mean, all kinds of people. The Emperor of Japan of all people was in there. people in Russia because he had a very, very lucrative multi-million, if not billion-dollar grant in Russia to do clinical trials in Russia. And that was real.

He did have that. Yeah, that was real. Yeah, that was real. And then all kinds of celebrities, you know, the Obamas, the Clintons, the sarcozys from France. I'm trying to even remember who they all were. It was a long list. And people at the Vatican, which will become very instrumental. So you're going to get married, but he can't spend New Year's with you because he's got to go take care of some very important clients.

And these are his secret patients. And then I do not understand this piece of the story. I don't understand. I'll help you. Why did he say, let's get married by the Pope at the Pope's summer residence, the Apostolic Palace of Castle Gandolfo? Why? Why take it there? Well, yeah, this gets unfortunately very simplified, and I understand from an outsider's perspective

why people say, oh, give me a break, you know. She really thought the, sorry, fucking Pope was going to marry her, like who believes that? I get that. But it did not happen like that. It was a very, very slow, meticulous weaving of this very clever lie. It started with he wanted a big Catholic wedding in Italy. And I said, well, how's that going to work? know, we're both divorced, or so I thought. And I'm not even Catholic, you know, and I don't know

much about the Catholic religion, but I don't think Italy lets divorces get married in the Catholic church. And he said, don't worry about it. I'll take care of it all. I was very, very busy at the time. I had a new job at NBC. Meredith had a new talk show, and I was working crazy hours, and he said, look, you're too busy. Let me take over the planning of the wedding. Let me go and find us a priest in Italy that will marry us. And so he spent months actually, supposedly, going to one church after another in Italy trying to find a priest that would marry us. And he would send me pictures of these churches. He would send me long texts, you know, all kinds of stuff. And this went on for months and months and months. And finally, he just said, I can't find a priest

that's willing to marry two divorces. And I said, what are we going to do? do. And he said, you know, I said, maybe we should think of something else. Maybe we should go and get married on a beach. And he said, look, I'm going to go to Rome and call in a favor. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, I'm going to go to the Vatican. Now, as ridiculous as that sounds, he had told me that he had done consulting work at the Vatican, which, again, as absurd as it sounds on the one hand also made sense. This is one of the world's leading cardiothoracic surgeons. This is a man who's rumored to be in contention for the Nobel Prize,

who is doing something that nobody else in the world is doing. He's Italian. Why wouldn't he be called in to consult to the Vatican? And he had told me and many other people that he had helped consult on the previous Pope's healthcare who actually had his tracheot taken out, had a tracheotomy. He did not say that he took care of him directly. He just said that he was called to the Vatican to help.

And I had heard other doctors talking about this. I had seen paperwork talking about the work that Paulo had done at the Vatican. So this was not so ridiculous. And that's when he told me, look, the Pope is one of my clients. He's one of my secret celebrity clients that I'm not allowed to tell anybody. So then he says he's going to the Vatican to ask him for help ostensibly finding us a priest to marry us. And that's when everything went crazy town because he calls him. me after this meeting. This was now October of 2014. And he says, look, I have great news. They've

agreed to help us. They'll find a priest that will, that will marry us. And I said, great. And he said, and there's something else, you know, and it's all so dramatic. He said, sit down and all this nonsense. And he said, Pope Francis actually agreed to marry us himself. And I said, oh, bullshit. I said, the Pope doesn't even marry people. You know, I thought he was playing some kind of game with me, to be honest and I was so pissed off and I actually hung the phone up on him. And I went straight to my desk. I was at work and I literally Googled, does the Pope marry people? But what popped up was one month earlier, September of 2014, the Pope had married 20 couples in the Vatican. And these were all couples that were quote unquote living in sin, you know, that were not had children out of wedlock or

whatever. So the Pope actually can marry people if he wants to. That's the first thing. People think he can't. He can if he wants to. So it took some convincing, you know, it took about three, four days, maybe a week, actually, of Pallo convincing me. And this was also very clever. His argument to me was that because he was a Pope's personal private doctor and because this is this very forward-thinking progressive Pope, that the Pope had been looking for a couple of divorces, that he could use a sort of poster, a poster couple to marry publicly, to make a statement that he was willing to open the doors of the Catholic Church to divorces. And the Pope wanted to do Paulo a favor to thank him for being his

private personal doctor. And we now needed to do the Pope a favor and do this. And so it almost became not about us anymore. It wasn't even about our wedding. Palo made it sound like this was an obligation that by virtue of he wanted to do this for the Pope and by virtue of being his fiance, I had to go along for the ride. And I needed to do this because this was going to, I might not care, because I'm not Catholic, but this would help open the doors of the Catholic Church to, you know, divorces. Put it in that context, it makes sense because this is not just like Joe Schmo, who you met at the Olive Garden, saying that the Pope wants to perform the wedding. Exactly. Well, that's what I always say. It's not like I woke up one day and he went, hey, the Pope's going to marry us. And I went, oh, great, you know, it just didn't happen like that, you know.

No, he had credentials that could potentially make that an actual thing, or at least some of them were real and some of them were fake. But he had been laying the foundation for you to believe all of this, this level of lie for months. Right. So it's not as outlandish as it seems. But what I don't understand. So I understood all that. Like I saw how he got you. What I don't understand is now, with retrospect, can you say, why would he do that? Like, I get why he would woo you and try to reel you in. But why take it to that potentially catastrophic level? It was unnecessary.

Why do you think he did it? Completely. All of it was unnecessary. And it just kept growing and growing. I don't know. I can't get inside the man's head. You know, I'm not an expert. I can't diagnose him.

I believe he's at a minimum, a pathological liar. I think he's probably also a sociopath. And he's an extreme narcissist. And I think people like that don't really have a plan. I think they get a sick rush out of the lie. You know, they get a high out of it, out of getting away with it. And they usually do get away with it, right? And so, and the more they get away with, the more they want to up the ante.

And the bigger, the high. It's like a drug. And so they don't have a plan. They're just kind of putting one foot in front of the other. And it's like a game, you know, and I think they just think somehow that they're going to wiggle the way out of this because usually they do. Yes, because he did not need to propose to you in the first place. You know, you could have rolled along, as you said, it kind of happened soon. He could have just been rolling along in a relationship if he just wanted you to be close and in his corner.

And he certainly didn't need to come up with this. We're going to get married. None of it. You know, at the Pope's private residence, by the Pope himself. Like, all of it was so extraordinary. And I completely agree with every word you said about the high they get. And I do think, yes, it's no accident. He chose you as an NBC news producer and somebody with access to, you know, power and messaging that could be beneficial to him.

But I also think your smarts were part of the calculation. He enjoyed that. He liked that. Exactly. That's part of the rush. I think they often target smart, intelligent women because that is part of the rush. you know, if I can pull it over on her, you know, it just, and that also, going back to an earlier thing, with all the extravagant, elaborate surprises he was doing, I always thought that was for me,

right? You know, the roses, the lavish trips, the everything. And I now realize it wasn't for me at all, none of it. It was all about feeding his ego, you know, when we went to a hotel and the staff was gushing because, you know, they had helped prepare the room with all the roses and the champagne and women at desks were pulling me aside and saying, you know, does he have a brother? How do I meet somebody like him? And it was all for show. It's all for his ego. It's all about narcissism. None of it had to do with me. Me swooning over him and me being in awe of, you know, the adulation and just adoring him was just feeding his narcissistic ego. Mm-hmm. It's in part, it's a conquest. He said, Andre,

Rea Bacheli was going to sing during the wedding service. I mean, right in line with all these extraordinary attendees. He said that among those who would be attending the wedding would include Mr. Mrs. Obama, Mr. Mrs. Clinton, Sarkozy, Vladimir Putin. I mean, he really, but again, he's got actual connections to all. He is performing these, you know, swing for the fences surgeries in Russia. So it sounds crazy now. We know it is crazy now.

It does. Yeah. She's built it up appropriately. But then here's another big moment. In anticipation of your move to Europe to be his wife, you on May 13th left your job at NBC and notified your daughter's school that she would not be coming back. I know this maybe seems small ball in the grand... But like, he let you quit your job?

He let you pull your daughter out of school? Exactly. Exactly. And it was a very difficult decision for me to make. I mean, I loved my job. You know, I had a very successful career. I never, if you had told me before I met Paulo, that I would give up everything to write off into the sunset with Mr. Charming.

I would have laughed at you, you know? I mean, I'm not that kind of person. I've never been, you know, the kind of woman. You're a news producer. Yeah. It's a bunch of cynical muffos in this business. And that's the only way you can be a good news producer. Exactly.

You know, the Cinderella shit is not for me. So I just, and it's, it was a difficult decision, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I was very cognizant of what my daughter was going through after having lost her dad. And I thought, Paolo, he was never going to replace her dad, but he seemed to be a good man and somebody that would be good for both of us. He promised to take care of both of us for the rest of our lives. And I thought this would be a good new start for us. And so I made this difficult decision to leave my job. And, and even uprooting my daughter, you know,

what children need after something traumatic and tragic like that is, you know, consistency and normalcy. And I was pulling her away from everything that she knew. And he allowed me to do that. He sat in front of my daughter. This still burns me to this day talking about the school he had enrolled her in, in Barcelona and the life she was going to live in Barcelona and on and on and on about this in Barcelona and then in Barcelona.

how the hell you do that to a child who just lost her dad to brain cancer is beyond me. But yeah, he took it to such extreme lengths, you know, and the whole time... But of course, you know, what we know is that at the same time he was doing this, he was killing people. So, you know, just when you get to this point of the story where you're like, how could he? How could he let you give up your amazing career and pull your daughter, who was already having a tough time in the loss of her dad from a school she knew and a life she knew and a friendship network she had, he was killing people. He was recklessly killing

person after person, lying about successes that had never been there. And I'm going to get to that next. But before we leave this lane, so that was May 13th, 2014, that you left NBC. 2015 now. Oh, 2015. Sorry, 2015. And the next day, May 14th was the day it all started to come down, because you got an email from a friend. Tell us. Yeah. And before I tell that, just to back up very quickly, I think we had been arguing for a good four months at that point. And one of the things we had been arguing about was I had never been to the house in Barcelona. He had flown me and my daughter all over the world, all these beautiful trips. But every single time we were supposed to go to Barcelona, the trip got canceled at the last minute because he had an emergency surgery. This happened.

happened three, four times. I think one time I was actually at the airport when the trip got canceled. And it was a huge source of contention. I said, you know, I'm not marrying you without seeing the house where I'm supposed to be living after the wedding without my daughter seeing the house where she's supposed to be living. I mean, who would do that? Who would marry a man without seeing the place where they're going to live? So we had been arguing a lot about that. And there were other little things that were starting to nag at me, but not huge red flags. You know, It wasn't like somebody was waving a giant flag on a football field saying, alert, alert, on man.

But I think there were at that point little things that were nagging at my gut that I was pushing down because I think I didn't want to face the fact that I was starting to realize that something was wrong. And then the day after I left NBC, I had a group of girlfriends that took me to a spa because they knew what a difficult decision it was for me to leave NBC. And I come out of the spa. We'd been in there laughing for hours. we had put our phones away, and I pull out my phone. I'm at the desk paying, and it's an email from a colleague, and the subject line just says the Pope. And it's a link to an article that says the Pope is going to be in South America on the date of our wedding, which was July 11, 2015, and that the trip had been planned for a very long time. The second, I mean, the second I read that article, you know, all those little red flags that had been sort of bubbling up that I guess I had been ignoring all experience.

bloated. And I just felt sick. And I, in that second, I knew. I just thought, you know, this fucker is lying in me about everything. This man is lying in me about everything. Everything's a lie. I knew it. I didn't have all the evidence. I didn't know by any stretch yet the extent of it. But, yeah, it was just a moment of, I mean, I almost fell over in the spa. I just felt ill. Wow. Wow. Were your girlfriends there? Do they remember the moment? Did you share it immediately? Or were, were you embarrassed? No, they immediately, they just said, you know, Benito, what happened? What's the matter? You know, and I could barely talk. And a couple of them came back to my apartment with me. It was still early in the morning. And I was just pacing back and forth and trying to figure it out.

And they were so sweet because they kept trying to say, well, maybe it's not as bad as you think it is. And maybe there's an explanation. And maybe they'll still be a wedding. And, you know, you never really wanted the Pope to marry you in the first place, which is true. But I kind of knew. And I called him, of course, immediately. I called him, texted him. And of course, he denied everything. You know, he immediately said, I don't know, you know, I just found this out myself. And I'm going to get to the bottom of it.

And it's a misunderstanding, you know, blah, blah. But I knew from that moment, I knew that he was lying to me. You did. That was it before and after a moment. It's almost like, again, I think it was those little red flags. It's sort of been bubbling under the surface. And I had been uncomfortable for a while. couldn't quite figure out what it was. I mostly attributed it to leaving NBC and to my daughter,

but I think it was much deeper than that. I think at some level I knew, you know, long before I actually knew. And at this point, you've already sent out the invitations for the wedding. And you've said, it's going to be at the post. Like, we're going on to the post. Like, you've, you know, we are eight weeks out. We are eight weeks out from the wedding to the day almost because it was, yeah, May 14th, July 15th. People had bought plane tickets. We had almost 300 people coming from all over the world. My family's from Australia. We had people coming from Australia, from Europe, all over the place. They had spent thousands of dollars on fancy red carpet attire and booked hotels and everything. You know, this thing was, he had taken it

that far, you know, this, it's ridiculous. But don't you wonder, I'm sure you wonder. So it just happened that a friend, you know, who's paying attention to news events like like the Pope's schedule, saw this and realized it was BS. But what do you think he would have done? What if he hadn't? Yeah. What would he have done? Would he have seen it through and just come up with an excuse with the last minute

for why it's not the Pope and we're not at the Pope's private residence and done like a fake marriage? You know, the only thing I can think of is, because I've asked myself this question so many times. It's one of the big money questions. You know, what was his end game? You know, this had to implode. He was literally lying about everything.

He created an entire fake fantasy wedding. It turned out he had told me he was divorced. He wasn't even divorced. So he couldn't have legally married me in the first place. So this never could have happened. If he had allowed everybody, you know, I mean, 300 people descend in Italy thinking they're going to this, you know, lavish wedding. The only thing I can think of is that he would have said there's some kind of security threat, right?

You know, there's been a death threat on the Pope's life or one of the dignitaries or celebrities that we're supposed to be coming. We can't. It's too dangerous. It's too controversial. We can't have this wedding. But even if he had done that, what was he going to do with me?

What was he going to do with my daughter? You know, I'm there with my bags packed and my wedding dress, and I think I'm moving to Barcelona. I have no idea how the hell he thought he was getting out of this. It's like part of me wishes it had played out like that, just so we could see, just so, you know, just so we could know. Yeah, because. That's true.

It's true. You know, there was never a wedding scheduled. the Pope had nothing to do with it, and he couldn't marry you because he was already married, which again, in retrospect now, the proposal, sending out invitations, the recklessness of it, Bonita, right? The recklessness. Well, and of course it would get much worse. I mean, ultimately, I'd find out he was juggling four families at the same time. Wait, what? I didn't see that. I did not see that in your earlier pieces. I know about the one wife, because eventually you and your girlfriends and I love your girlfriends. I know, I have the best friends. That's a wonderful piece of the story.

But they take you like the best girlfriends would to Barcelona on what would have been your wedding day and you got a fake wig on and the girls go up to his front door, ring the doorbell and he comes down and it turns out, oh, we have this actually, we have this clip. Let's play it so we can watch a bit of it. Okay. Nancy, and Lee just knocked down his door and I saw him come down the steps with his door. asshole he's there, not in fucking Russia. Oh, Paolo, how about? Yes, ass lead. What are you doing here?

We're passing by on Maldi. I'm not sure what's going on, but... Two little kids coming down the stairs. You lying fucking sack of shit. Yeah, I see you. Mother fucking fucker, fuck you. Fucker, fuck you. Yeah, so that was the day you learned. Not only does he have a wife already, but two young kids, which is what stopped you,

I think, from going to the door yourself. When I met him, he told me that he had been separated from his Italian wife for a very long time. So I knew from the beginning, there's a lot of misunderstanding about this, that he had a wife. He had two children who at the time were, I think, 19 and 20, who were actually supposed to be coming to the wedding. And he said that they had been living separate lives for many years, which was well, documented. He lived in Barcelona, had been for years. She lived in Italy. And I mean, I met the man's mother. I spoke to his sister. His sister's, his niece was supposed to be one of our flower girls.

So this was no secret. He just told me that they had never gotten divorced because it's Italy and they're Catholic and it's complicated. But he told me when he met me that now he finally wanted to get divorced. And that was why he proposed because he said he had filed for divorce and that the divorce was going through. So I knew there was that wife. I knew about her. I'd seen pictures of her, everything. The woman in Barcelona, when I went to the house in Barcelona, I went there because once I figured out he was lying, I went into hyper investigative mode. It's kind of like I woke up out of my love haze, you know, and, you know, woke up and put my journalist hat back on. And I just went nuts. I mean, I was investigating. I hired two private investigators, one here in the U.S., one in

Italy. And I mean, my, my bedroom looked like something out of a law and order episode. There were binders everywhere. I was trying to figure everything out. And for me, the last piece of the puzzle was Barcelona. I mean, clearly, there was a good reason. He had never let me go to that house. And so that's why we decided to go there. And it was part sort of a fuck you girl, you know, fun girls trip. And which is why I got this hideous blonde wig, which I didn't really know if I would need, but I wasn't sure what I was going to find in that house. So I ordered this cheap blonde wig on Amazon, and we went to the house. And one funny thing about that is when I put in the address for the house, he had given me an address for the house in Barcelona so people could

send wedding gifts. It was a bogus address. I had to find the right address. He didn't even, he didn't even give me the right address for the house. So he had no idea it was coming. And I wanted it to be a surprise attack, so to speak, you know, that he, and he claimed he was in Russia, which is why you hear me saying that in the video. And at the time, I'm still talking to him, right? So when I first discovered that he was lying, I made an almost immediate decision that, okay, this man is never going to tell me the truth about everything. I realize now that he's a pathological liar. And I wanted hard, indisputable, irrefutable evidence before I confronted him. because one of the things that goes along with us, of course, is gaslighting.

These con artists, including Paolo, are very good if you question them about muddying the waters and making you think that you're the one who's crazy for asking them questions. They're so good at it. It's rapid fire. They have an answer for everything. And so I decided I'm not confronting him until I have all my ducks in a row. And I know every single lie. I've uncovered everything.

And so I had to play kind of a game with him. I called off the wedding, and luckily for me, he was being investigated at the time for scientific misconduct. It was sort of the beginning of the revelations about his medical lies. And it was very convenient timing because he was having a very difficult time in Sweden. And I just said, look, you know, there's too much going on right now. Let's just call off the wedding and postpone it. And he must have breathed such a sigh of relief when I did that. I got him off the hook. But it was also the perfect excuse to cancel the wedding. And that's all I told, our wedding guests as well. And so I'm still talking to him. I'm still talking to him,

still saying I love you, which killed me. And playing along as if we were going to reconvene the wedding at some point. So he had no idea I was coming to that house. And A, he wasn't in Russia. So that was the first thing that pissed me off. He had just texted me that. Wait, just to clarify, so when we see that video of you and your friends in Barcelona, he was still under the delusion that you were fooled and you guys were still together. Correct. Correct. Okay. All right. Okay. Keep going. I mean, he had some idea. I had been grilling him. I had been telling him for a long time that I thought he was lying, but I still, I think he still thought he had me under his thumb and he was going to bring me back around and that the wedding was just being postponed. He had no idea that I was on to him or that I knew that

he was not really divorced any of that, or that I knew everything about the wedding was fake. And And I kind of expected to find another woman in that house. I wasn't sure if it would be the Italian wife or somebody else. I was prepared for that. And my girlfriends and I had, we had been through several different scenarios. You know, what if he's there? What if someone else is there? Blah, blah.

And the reason I sent them to the door without me was I wanted them to sort of do the initial reconnaissance and see what was going on before I came down. And if he was there, I had planned. I fully intended to confront him. But what happens is he comes to the door. So first of all, he's there. And then I see even from, I'm sitting in the car at the top of the hill, he can't see me. And I see a woman and two young children come out on the veranda of the house.

And even from where I am, I can hear them calling him dad. And this is a young woman. This is not his Italian wife. I know exactly what his Italian wife looks like. So this is when I completely lose it and fall apart because this is another family. This is a third family. You know, it's the Italian wife he never divorced. It's me and my daughter in New York.

And now here in Barcelona, the real reason he never let us come to Barcelona is because he's hiding another family here. And it was the children that sent me over the edge. I mean, another woman, okay, at that point I was prepared for that. But the kids and little kids, they were about five and seven years old. I was wholly unprepared for that. And that's when I lost it. I mean, you see in the video, I just, I think I had.

had been investigating for a couple of months at that point and I had not dealt with any of the heartache, the devastation, and I just fall apart. I just, I'm screaming, I'm kicking, I'm wailing, I'm calling him every name under the sun. It was just devastating. He just took it so far. It just was sort of incomprehensible to me that you had been sitting here, that you let me think I'm moving here with my daughter and you plan this whole fake wedding. You let me quit my job. So much was at stake. You let me pull my daughter out of her school. You let me give up my entire life. And the whole time, you're hiding another family here. And the whole time, you know, none of this is ever going to happen. Oh my gosh, it's just so devastating. It's crazy. It's crazy.

I spoke with a friend once whose husband had betrayed her. And she did. did what almost every woman does, which is start to obsess over his phone records and anything she could get her hands on, right? Just to know, she knew. She knew. It was, you know, it was, she knew, but she needed the details. She needed the specifics and she needed know, you know, when and how long and how many times. And I said to her, you know, it's, it's almost like in the Catholic faith, when somebody dies, they have the wake. And you go to the wake. And you go to the wake and even though many Catholics and non-Catholics, especially, find it kind of very jarring. What a jarring tradition to go and see the dead body if it's an open casket?

You know, what kind of a tradition is this? What is it? Why would you do this to yourself? And I get that reaction very much. But there is something, I don't know if the word's cathartic, if there's something necessary for many people in seeing the dead body. It's like the beginning of coming to terms. with what's really happened and how your life has changed from what you thought it was a day earlier, a couple days earlier.

And I almost see the behavior you're describing on your part as part of that process for you. Like, you've got to make it real for yourself so acceptance can come. 100%. And I think that's why the house in Barcelona was the last piece of the puzzle for me. I mean, at that point, I already knew that he wasn't divorced. I already knew that, you know, he had created this whole fake fantasy. wedding. I mean, everything about it, you know, every place he said was booked, the caterer, the this, the that, none of them had ever heard of us. I knew that he didn't know a damn one of these

dignitaries or celebrities he claimed was coming to the wedding or he claimed he was, you know, the personal doctor to. He sure is howl was not the Pope's personal private doctor. I mean, the Vatican practically laughed at me. But for me, the last piece of the puzzle was Barcelona. And that was the thing that just sort of, and that's when I can finally confirm. front at him. Wait, before we get to conversation, who is the fourth family? You see her actually in the Netflix special. So after the older woman, after, she's younger, Anna Paula, she comes in the third episode. So after I went public, which I do shortly after this, she contacted me. And it turns out that she, and her story is just horrific because her son died.

he was a patient of Palos. He did not have a plastic trachea, but he did operate on him. Her son dies in Italy. There's an investigation into manslaughter. So Palos facing manslaughter charges in Italy. So what does he do? He seduces her and basically so that she will drop the charges,

which she does. And then he gets her pregnant. And she has a child that's born with him basically right around the time that he's proposing to me. So that's four families that I know about. You know, it's the Italian wife he never divorced. It's me and my daughter in New York. It's the woman and the two kids in the house in Barcelona. And then this other poor woman in Italy that he has a child with.

Oh, my God. It's like, in a way, you got away easy. Oh, yeah. Which is interesting because he really wanted to have a child. He was desperate to have a child. And that would be such a nightmare. I'm just so glad that it never happened. I know.

So can we talk about the confrontation? because I know that after, hold on, I pulled the email because I know that after you canceled the wedding, you emailed him and it reads as follows, I believed you were exactly who you presented yourself to be, to me, to my friends and family to the world. Congratulations, you charm me and all of us into La La Land. I will never, ever understand how you could have done this to me or to your daughter. Who the hell are you? And what the hell is wrong with you. But this is not the confrontation to which you refer? No, it is. So that was the first part of the confrontation. This was by text, actually. When we left

the house in Barcelona, we went to a place that had Wi-Fi. Keep in mind, he had no idea that I was there. He knew my friends were there. He couldn't get rid of them fast enough. And they told him, hey, look, the wedding got canceled so close to the wedding day. As a lot of people did, we decided to come to Italy anyway on vacation and we just dropped by to bring you a wedding gift. That was their excuse for knocking at the doorbell, which the whole thing was so suspicious, right? Because ostensibly, he and I are still getting married and were still talking and he didn't invite them in. He could not get rid of them fast enough. He just wanted them to leave. But anyway, we get to this restaurant and I write him a text that's literally about this long. I mean, what you read is just

one part of it and called him every name under the sun, named everything that I'm. I knew he was lying about and, you know, just called him a despicable, disgusting human being, told him I hated him and et cetera, et cetera. And I think it took him about 10, 15 minutes to reply. And he wrote back one word. Wow. That's all he said. So unsatisfactory.

Well, I think he was caught, right? What was there to say? Game over. There's nothing to say. He's caught more. I want to see his face and, you know, see his face. see him, I don't know, beg for forgiveness or I want to see him ashamed. I know. The man has no shame or empathy or remorse or any of the other things. But yeah, we're never going to see that.

Was there ever any more contact? Yes. In 20, so what happens right after this is I'm devastated, of course. But almost immediately I had whatever you want to call it, an epiphany or whatever you want to call it, but I thought, oh my God, you know, if he's lying to me like this and creating fake relationships with the Pope and with, you know, celebrities and dignitaries and presidents and creating a whole fake fantasy wedding and allowing people to book tickets and spend money and allowing me to quit my job and quit their jobs and on their schools. Yeah, all of it. If he's doing all of that and will go that far, there's no way. There's no way in hell. He's not also lying in his memory.

and professional life. It can't be. And that thought was so horrifying to me because he has people's lives in his hands. He's doing something revolutionary and groundbreaking and people think the man walks on water. And I thought, shit, you know, I have to tell my story. I have to go public. I have to expose him. I almost felt an obligation to do it. I thought, you know, maybe this happened to me because I know how to do this. You know, if I need to go public, I have to go public. I have to go public. I don't. If I need to tell my story, it's not going to be pretty. It's not going to be fun. But I know what to do.

And I need to do this. The world needs to know who Dr. Paulo Macarini is. And it wasn't vindictive. It wasn't about revenge. It was simply about sounding the warning alarm that, you know, this man is a fraud. This man is a con. He's not who you think he is. And so I very, very quickly connected through a friend with a report.

reporter at Vanity Fair who told me that he could do it, he could do it quickly, which is what I wanted. And so this is July of 2014. And the article came out in January of 2016, my story. July of 15? July of 15. Yeah. January of 2015, January of 2016, the article came out. And then on the heels of me, I did not know this when I went public and when I decided to do the story, but within a week of me, my story coming out in Vanity Fair, a scathing documentary came out in Sweden called The Experiments, which exposed all his medical lies. And it was actually worse than I feared. I mean, watching that documentary was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do because it was so obvious that he blatantly used people as human guinea pigs that he knew, I believe, from the beginning,

that this thing he was transplanting into them would never work. It was a plastic tube that might as well have been a straw. He knew damn well it wasn't going to work, and he did it anyway. And it's just so obvious how reckless this man is and how dangerous he is. And it was the combination of the two things that sort of blew everything up, because now you have these insane, you know, over-the-top, egregious lies in his personal life coupled with this evidence that he's been, lying in the medical arena.

And the two things were what finally blew everything up. That lane of the story well covered in all the pieces I mentioned, as disturbing as your piece is the most disturbing. Oh, it's horrific. It's way worse than what happened to me. I mean, there's just, what happened to me is nothing. But it's a similar pattern. It's a similar pattern if you look at it, right?

In well-meaning, earnest, kind people. Yeah. In some turmoil, trusting him. Just trusting him. Yeah. Trusting him to do right by them, to take care of them, to see them through, you know, the most difficult times of their life, wooed by his bedside manner, which we discussed, and his credentials and all of these institutions around him, vouching for him. Only in their cases, it was a deadly mistake.

And amazingly, there are still some families still believing in him, even after their, loved ones died in his care. And I can only think they have to do that just as a self-protection mechanism. Like they just have to say, we didn't put our loved one in the hands of a madman. You know, we did something smart and we took a calculated risk. And I just, as I see the people in like the Netflix documentary wrestling with, no, it's okay. You know, we're still grateful to him. All I can think is that's something other than acceptance. That's, I believe that too. I think, Paula was very good at convincing the families when patients died, that the patients were pioneers, you know, and they would sort of live in history as pioneers who helped him help pave the way for a better medical future.

And that's a much nicer thing to think than you put your loved one in the hands of a madman who is reckless and dangerous and a murderer. quite frankly, probably a serial killer. And I think for some of these patients, families, you know, who had been so desperate and especially Hannah's family, you know, they thought Pollo was the answer to their prayers. They thought he was their last hope. They believed in him. They put so much into that.

And they sought him out. And I think that's the other thing. A lot of these people found Dr. McIrini on the internet. You know, they did a Google search, and that's how they found him. So, you know, to deal with the death of your loved one, especially a child, and then on top of that, you sought out the person, you know, that probably killed her. I don't, I think that's just too much to wrap your head around. Yep, it would be for me. There's Chris Liles, whose story is heartbreaking, a 30-year-old man, electrical engineer from Maryland, and he was diagnosed with cancer.

but heard of Paolo Makirini. And he did the procedure on Chris. And Chris, like all the others who kept that fake trachea in, died. Here's a bit on him from the piece, Sot 3. We didn't see Paulo that much. He was flying this place. He was flying that place. He had one of his assistants look after Chris.

If it okay, Chris? Yeah. So you try to hold it. Very soon after surgery, Chris Lyes gained an infection in the airway, so he started to cuff enormously hard. This, you know, really, really deep cuff. He got mucus clots in the airways. What also happened was he got an infection in this wound. So he had a quite dramatic post-operative, early post-up.

operative period. But it was a little bit unusual that you get the infection so early on after surgery. And he had a young daughter and he died. And the family continues to stand by Palo. No, actually, no, not anymore. They did initially. Oh. Yeah, they did.

They finally came around and realized, you know, initially they still stood by him. But now no. Now they know. They were in the Netflix beast sounding like. well, you know, Chris, he was terminal, and so it was a risk we decided to take. But that's interesting. Was it after they saw the compilation of stories, you know, that they realized how Chris fit into the story? Or what do you think did it for them?

You know, I think it just takes time. And I think it's the same for any of the people that Dr. McIorini fooled. I mean, we're talking some of the world's most prestigious esteemed institutions, doctors. scientists. I mean, he pulled the wool over so many people's eyes. It's not just me and the other women in his life. It's not just the patients and their families. I mean, so many people. And I think it's a very, very difficult thing, A, to admit that you got fooled. But B, to wrap your head around the fact that this man, who you thought was either the answer to your, your patient, you know, your loved one dying or was, you know, in the case of Carolinskets gets tweeting, bringing you

all kinds of accolades and money and esteem, it's just very difficult to wrap your head around the fact that Dr. Paulo Macarini is not who you thought he was and that he's exactly the opposite of who you thought he was. And I think it just takes time. And that you may have entrusted your loved one to a madman to somebody with zero empathy, who may have been a sociopath. The case out of Russia also disturbing. We've mentioned his contacts there. Beyond. This young ballerina, whose name was Julia. He performed her surgery in 2012. And there's a bit of Palo talking about her in the piece, young, beautiful. She was not terminal. No, she did not need this surgery. And she begged him, actually. They actually had a lottery in Russia because he was looking

for, quote, unquote, healthy patients to try this procedure on. She had been in a car accident, so she had a hole in her throat. She had a tracheotomy, but she could have lived the rest of her life like that. And she begged, she made a video begging Paolo to pick her. And he picked her, tragically. Here's a bit of Paolo talking about her from the Netflix show, Badge Surgeon. This is Julia. When I met Julia, she was not able to play with her child.

It was a very emotional moment for me. And they immediately said, this is the right patient. And I still do not believe that a few days ago she couldn't breathe and talk normally. So she's a little bit afraid of you. So please be very sweet. She was paraded out and around like she was one of his success. And as they point out in the piece, it was a lie and indeed she died. Yeah, not only died, but they died horrible deaths.

I mean, this plastic tube that was coated in the patient's own stem cells was literally rotting inside their throats. So Yulia's mother talked about the fact that she smelled horrifically because this thing was rotting. She smelled like rotting fish because this thing was rotting inside her throat. And then they suffocated to death because this thing disintegrated and rotted in their throats. It's not only did they die, but it's, it's like a torturous death. It's awful. And he kept doing it. He kept doing it. Can you speak about the institute?

Can't do it. Is it Carolina? What's it called? In Sweden, that was. Carolinska. Karolinska. Okay. That was principally backing him for a while. He also had the Russian Institute as well. But it seems like those doctors there were, like there are a couple of them who are featured who turned out to be good guys who recognized what he was doing was very wrong and started to blow the whistle on him. Yeah. I think, and what they did was very brave. And as is typical with many whistleblowers, unfortunately, they went through hell. You know, it took them a long time to pull together all the evidence against him and they put their own careers on the line. They were questioned. I mean, some of them were called into the police station. Some of them were threatened with

losing their jobs. Some of them have left Carolyn Skinaw. And they went through hell, but they started realizing slowly that this thing was not working, that the patients were suffering and dying, and that Paula was lying in medical papers, and they're very, very prestigious ones, the New England Journal of Medicine among them, about the results of the transplant. So he's standing at press conference, press conferences talking about how the patients are doing so beautifully well, when in fact behind the scenes they're suffering and they're dying, exactly the opposite of what he was saying. And also he's publishing in these prestigious medical journals saying that, you know,

this thing is working beautifully and he's leaving data out. He's faking data. He's lying about stuff. So they start piecing it all together and they spent some insane number of hours piecing all the parts of the puzzle together. And at first, when they first went to Karolinska, they were shunned. They were shooed away. Carolinska didn't want to hear it.

And I think it just speaks to what happens with somebody who's so cunning and so charming and so manipulative like Dr. Paulo Macarini. It was, he was bringing in so much money to Karolinska. And there was so much promise and hope attached to this man. They were talking about building a whole institution around him. He's getting grants. He's getting published in these prestigious journals. He's operating all around the world.

He's bringing them notoriety. So when somebody first comes to them and says, you know what, this guy's not who you think he is, it was a very, very inconvenient truth. Nobody wanted to hear it. And it's a massive crisis. You go from having the golden boy who's going to make you a fortune and bring you nothing but accolades to having a potential criminal serial killer working for you who's only going to bring you shame and condemnation. Exactly. Which is why I think, initially, people tried to sweep it under the rug because it just nobody wanted to deal with it. But there were a couple of doctors there who just didn't allow that.

Oh, they were tenacious. Yeah, they were tenacious. Those whistleblowers refused to give up. And I've now met them. And they're lovely guys. And we, I really admire what they did and what they went through. But they just refused to give up. And they still do.

You know, like me, they still keep talking about him. and none of us will stop until there's full justice, which we still don't have. Well, that's the question, because I think most people hearing the story at this point are asking, please tell me he's in jail. Is he in jail? There have been some criminal charges, but they haven't gone, nothing nearly to the level of what we would want or what we think he deserves. Can you talk about what's happened to him in the criminal lane? Yes, he finally was in Sweden. They had tried a great. going after him a few years ago. And it is a difficult case to prove because they're experimental

procedures. So to prove that he knew that the patients were going to die, to prove that he did this intentionally is not so easy. So the first time they tried to do it, they gave up. They sort of dropped the charges. Sweden was furious. This is, this whole thing is a giant scandal in Sweden. And it's so embarrassing. I mean, people got fired. People on the Nobel Prize Committee stepped down in shame. And so luckily, another prosecutor came back and said, no, I'm going to try again. And so he was on trial in 2022, and he got convicted of one count of bodily harm. They could only go after him in Sweden for the three patients that were operated on in Sweden, including Christopher Lyles, the U.S. patient. And then he appealed that. And so last year, there was an appeals trial. And I think he was

thinking he was going to get off. Well, instead, the appeals court came back hard and convicted him of three counts of aggravated assault for all of the patients that were operated on Sweden and sentenced him to 30 months behind bars. Of course, he appeals again all the way to the Swedish Supreme Court. But in October, the Supreme Court came back and said, no, we're not taking the case. The conviction stands. That was October. Here we are. Six months later, the man still not behind bars. It's crazy. He managed, this just came out last week, to negotiate with Swedish authorities that he wants to spend his time behind bars in Spain, where he lives, not in Sweden, on house arrest. So he basically wants to sit at his damn house by the pool, sipping cocktails, and that's how he

thinks he's going to serve his 30 months, which is just, I don't even know what word to use. It's so horrific and so unfair to those patients, you know, it's just, That is not justice. So what are the likely, what are the odds that that's going to happen? Pretty high, I think. I think now the Spanish authorities have to, Sweden has basically washed their hands of him and said, no, serve your time in Spain. Spain has to agree to it. So that's more delay without him being behind bars.

And if they agree to it, you know, I think he will. I think he'll have an ankle bracelet and be sitting by his, by his pool. The most important thing is that he's not allowed to do this. to anybody else. Has he lost his medical license? And even if he hasn't, don't you think that the Netflix show, that your documentary, all the work you've been doing along with these doctors from Carolinska have made his reemergence as a physician impossible? Yes. I get asked this all the time. It's a tricky question because there isn't one medical license to Yank. It's not like the U.S. In Europe, it's country by country. So if a country still

allows him to operate in Europe he could in theory. But as you said, his reputation is clearly severely tarnished and, you know, tanked. And he's had a drastic, you know, crash from, from fame and notoriety. So I doubt anybody would want him operating on them. But technically, he still can. He's making a documentary with his side. I can't wait. I'm actually really looking forward to that. I hope you'll come back on after that hits. What on earth do you think that is going to look like? He, because he's not behind bars, he has been doing interviews in Italy in the past months, and he did one, I think it was right before Christmas, and I was on the show. And he was not on,

but his attorney was not on. And he's desperate. And the only thing that he can do at the moment is try to muddy the waters and try to distract attention from his patients. And so he's going after me and Anna Paula, the woman who also went public in the Netflix documentary. And he's just trying to victim shame us, slut shame us, whatever he can, you know, he's just trying to throw dirt, you know, and make up lies about us and muddy the waters and distract attention from the real issue, which is that he killed people. And none of the things he's saying are true, but even if they were, it wouldn't matter. You know, it doesn't matter. You know, what matters is you use people as human guinea pigs.

You broke all kinds of legal and ethical laws and recklessly destroyed people's lives. And you killed people and patients' lives without caring. So nothing else matters. So he's... Have there been massive civil suits against him? Somebody should own his Barcelona home other than Apollo. Right. I know the Turkish family, that Turkish girl. that you see on the Netflix documentary, the one that had something like 200 surgeries.

I mean, her case is so horrific. They've sued him. I don't know the outcome of that yet. We need an American family to sue. We're very good at suing. As you know, that's our forte here in America. I know. One of the American families needs to sue for wrongful death.

And then they will own the home in Barcelona and whatever else he has. That's the true way of punishing somebody like him. It's true. I know. He said to La Nacioni, an Italian publication that wrote up his plan to do a new documentary. He said, the deaths are glorified,

meaning those he caused, but there is no mention of the lives saved. I was crucified in an inhumane way. The history of transplants must be read. The initial phases are always associated with high mortality. But despite this, they continued until they become almost routine operations. As for you, he said, she's the one who always lied.

Okay, so we'll look forward to him filling that out in his, quote, documentary. I do want to talk to you about a couple of things. The thing you lost your train of thought on that we were getting to was contact you've had with him since, wow, since that text. So was it after all these pieces hit that you and he connected? So in 2018, I made. a film for discovery called He Lied About Everything. After the Vanity Fair article, which was just, I was in such a state of post-traumatic stress when that article came out.

And I felt like it didn't fully encompass the whole story or my story. And I wanted to tell it in my own words, which is why I did the documentary. And during the course of making that documentary, I tried to find him. I traveled actually to Russia, to Italy, to several places. I met with some of the families, including Yulio's husband. which was heartbreaking. And I couldn't find him. So finally, I got him on the phone.

And it was such an interesting phone call because I called from a phone that wasn't mine, so he didn't know it was me. And I had to tell him that I was recording him, obviously, for legal reasons. But as soon as I said, I said, hi, Apollo, it's Benita. And immediately his voice, you know, that soft voice, oh, hi, how are you?

And I thought this asshole, he thinks, either he thinks I'm calling to reconcile or he thinks he can get me again. He thinks he can, you know, pull me in again. It was just so disgusting. And then I started, you know, I started firing questions at him. Why did you lie to me? Why did you lie about this? And there was silence. And you could, it was maybe a minute.

And you could almost hear the cogs in his brain turning thinking, okay, I'm being recorded. I think I'm supposed to say, I'm sorry. And so after I shut up, he just says, I'm sorry, it was the lamest, most insincere apology you've ever heard in your life. He sounded like a robot. You know, he didn't mean it. And then I asked him some other question and then he hung up on me. No. Hmm.

Yeah. That's it. That's the moment. That's it. It's over. You got me. Yeah. And I have no need to sing or dance anymore.

Yeah. But of course, now, now that he's, I think even then, I think all of this time, he still thought he was going to get away with it. You know, he still thought somehow he was going to crawl his way out of this and restore his reputation. And so I think this prison sentence and the Supreme Court refusing to take his case was a hard awakening. And that's why he's desperate. And that's why he's doing all this stuff now and calling me a liar, calling Anna Eliah. What else can he do? There's nothing else he can do.

So let's talk about what we can figure out in his psychology and really warning signs for other women because you said at the top, which I wanted to follow up with you on, the thing about I believe he was gathering information to use against me from the start. So interesting. What do you mean?

So one of the things, and I think this is true of most of these guys, most of these con artists. I thought Paula was a very good listener at the beginning, right? Who doesn't love a good listener, especially when you're in a vulnerable place? But what they're doing, if you go back and look at it very carefully, they give you very little information about themselves. And what they're doing is literally gathering information and stockpiling it to use against you.

They study you. They try to figure out everything they can about you so that they can use it against you. and they target you when you're vulnerable. And so this is one of the things I tell women all the time now. If you are vulnerable for any reason, whatever, there's been a death in your family, you lost a job, you just went through a divorce, a breakup, anything, anything that makes you more vulnerable than usual, you have to be hyper vigilant about protecting yourself because this is when these people

target you. Because it's, and it's so basic. But when you're vulnerable, when you're going through something difficult, what do you want? You want somebody to tell you everything's going to be okay. You want somebody to wrap their arms around you and give you a big hug and reassure you. And that's what Paolo was doing. I'm pouring my heart out about my ex-husband is going to die and I don't know how to do this and I don't know how to tell my daughter. And he's listening to me.

He's reassuring me. And at the same time, he's figuring out what my weaknesses are or what my vulnerabilities are. And they turn it around on you. They use it against you. This is a weird reference, but it's almost like a dog in heat, how, you know, the humans walking around the dog have no idea, but every male dog in the neighborhood is at your door like, sociopaths had that sense when a woman is in trouble. Yes. And when she's vulnerable.

I don't know how they develop it. They do. It's a very strong, effective radar. They can find them in a crowded field. They can, they know. And like death in the family. it doesn't have to be like, you're a basket case. It can be like, I just had something really sad happen to me and I'm feeling kind of low.

They have like a homing beacon. Exactly. I call it the vulnerability radar. And so even if you are strong. That applies by the way that applies by the way to anybody. I would, I notice, and I thought about this in hindsight, at a party, for instance, you know, there were certain people, Pollo wouldn't spend a lot of time talking to. And later, and it was.

people didn't know, but later I'd find out that those people didn't like him or that there was something about him that didn't necessarily make them suspicious, but they were turned off by him. And he kind of knows it. He knew who he could play with and who he couldn't. So, yeah, they're highly skilled manipulators and highly skilled at knowing who they can target. I mean, it's, yeah, not unlike any other criminal. They target their prey. For mere mortals to respond to appropriately, to see through, to identify. You know, I've said this to my audience many times, but my husband and I are very different in this lane

because he would be somebody Paula would spend no time with because Doug is very good at, like, sociopath, dar. He just knows immediately when he's met a bad person. And I'm, ironically as the news person, and you'd think it'd be the opposite, but I'm like, no, you're being too hard on him. He's a nice guy. And Doug's always right.

You know, after 16 years of marriage, I finally got to the point where I'm like, if Doug says he's bad, he's bad. He's bad. I should not trust my own instincts on this. But for mere mortals out there dealing with these skilled sociopaths, it's a very uneven playing field.

So you, as a mere mortal, if you don't have Doug's sociopath, Dar, you have to follow the clues that Benita's giving you. Like, you are most vulnerable when something has happened to you, whether you're strong normally or not, you're putting out the scent, that, you know, victim here. You also, I know, you talked about it a little bit. You didn't use the term, but I know you've talked about the fog that these guys can create around you. And I think that'll be

familiar to a lot of people. You feel it. You don't know what it is. You feel the fog. So talk about how they create that and what that is. Well, it's a form of gaslighting, right? So they're master are manipulators and they come into the relationship or the friendship, whatever it is, could even be a business arrangement, quite frankly, with some sort of nefarious intention. They want something from you, whether it's money, whether it's whatever it is. And so they're plotting the whole time. And so they are very prepared. So if you start becoming suspicious, they're very prepared for that.

And they come back at you rapid fire. You know, they have an answer for everything and they shoot you down so fast and they get angry. And they question you, why would you ask me that? And what, you know, and they have evidence. You know, they have all the evidence. And so it's gaslighting. So you start thinking, oh, okay, maybe it's me. You know, maybe I'm wrong.

And it feels like a fog. You know, you just feel, you can't quite figure it out, but you know that you, something doesn't feel right. But they're so convincing and so rapid fire and so determined to shoot you down that you just start thinking, okay, it must be me. And that's why I call it the fog. And it's very intentional. It's very manipulative because, again, it's designed to distract you and sort of muddy the waters and, you know, get you off the scent of something's wrong or whatever it is that you've clued into. And they're very, very good at it. It's cunning. It's the way you feel when you have low blood sugar. Oh, that's so interesting. It's so true. Yeah. That's exactly what it feels like. Yeah.

Your brain's just a little muddled. You're not 100% yourself. You're slightly confused. You're not processing things as quickly as you normally do. Just like there's some separation between the real you and the current you. And they're so good at creating it. They can create it just a million facts that they throw at you. And they're smart. The people who get away with this are very, very smart. So it's not illogical their responses and their manipulations. And that brings me to another thing you said about how you say, you say, oh, he probably would have canceled the wedding, claiming, oh, there's some massive security threat. Or you talked about how he said some trip was canceled because of an emergency. The big excuse for the cancellation or the letdown is also a characteristic of these people. Yeah, I call it the walking catastrophe. So if you're dating somebody or, again, it could be a business relationship. It could be a friendship. and there's one dramatic excuse after the other.

It's always dramatic, right? It's somebody's in the hospital or I'm in the hospital or somebody's dead or something so dramatic that if you question them, let's say you're supposed to go on a date with somebody and they're, oh, you know, my kid got hit by a car. If you then question them and, well, I thought we were going away for the weekend. I thought we were going on a date. You looked like the idiot and the asshole because you're who wouldn't be empathetic and sympathetic in that situation.

And it's very calculated. It's designed, again, to take the focus of what they're not doing or why they're not showing up and make you feel bad. But it's a huge red flag. I mean, if it happens once, okay, that's life, you know, things happen. But if it happens over and over again, these dramatic wild excuses and catastrophes, that's a giant red flag. So looking back on your relationship with Paolo, before Paolo, before. Hopegate. Was there a moment, you know, now in retrospect, was there a moment or two that you can point to where you're like, I want to talk to that girl and say, sweetheart, this is a big deal.

Here's your red flag. Like, run. It's so hard because it's such a slow weaving of the web of lies. You know, it's so meticulous. And again, that fog. So it's happening very gradually. And by the time you realize that you're ensnared in this web, this spider's web, you know, it's too late. It's been going on. I mean, keep in mind we were dating for almost two years. So it's hard for me to pinpoint a moment like that. Clearly, not having been to the house in Barcelona was a huge red flag, but we were arguing about that.

It wasn't as if I didn't question him about that. And there were things about the wedding that I questioned him about. So again, there wasn't one big giant thing that said, you know, wake up because he had the credentials. Everything as nuts as it sound also seemed equally plausible. You know, he, he's very adept at explaining things into sense, into them making sense. So with you, we speculated maybe this was about getting a friend in the media, getting a, getting a beautiful NBC piece and perhaps more or, you know, who knows? because he did encourage you ultimately to quit NBC.

So at that point, but you're still a journalist. You still have connections. And at this point, he may just be seeing it through. But in general, do you think it's just the high that we talked about, like of lying, of fooling someone smart, like a, you know, like a guy who gambles and goes for the high of winning? Is it like that normally? Because I think this happens to people who don't have the kind of power and job that you had.

Yeah. I think it goes back to the narcissism. I've asked experts about this. And I mean, one of the things is people like him don't go into therapy, obviously. So they don't know a lot about these type of people. But one person explained it to me that all the, okay, let's say you were standing on the edge of a cliff and somebody's about to push you off. Think of all the things you'd be feeling, you know, the fear, the anxiety, the trepidation. This person said that it's almost like a part of their brain is,

missing, right? So all those things that we feel, you know, fear, anxiety, remorse, guilt, you know, all the normal things people feel when they're dealing with other human beings or they make a mistake, it's like that part of their brain is blank. They feel nothing. They have no empathy. They have no remorse. They have no guilt. And so therefore, they're always seeking a high, something that sort of jolts their brain into feeling something because it's almost blank. And so the rush and the high of getting away with lying is just fueling them. It's just fueling their ego. It's almost like they need it.

Like they can't exist without it. So now what? Every time I've heard your story, I think, how is she ever going to trust somebody again? How is she going to fall in love again? You're still a young woman. You're beautiful. You're smart. You have to have love in your life at some point.

how's that been and are you up against some major trust issues at this point? So, first of all, I don't think you can go through something like this and not have trust issues. I mean, it would be impossible. I mean, something would be wrong with me if I didn't. And it's taken a while. I mean, this has been, you know, I was 2015. We were supposed to get married. So we're nine years this summer.

And I think I didn't realize it at first. But what, when I first started dating people that were more than, you know, casual. I was choosing people that I knew I wouldn't fall in love with. And I think that was a way of protecting myself because if I, if I wasn't really in love with somebody, then somebody couldn't hurt me, right? So it has taken me a long time, but I am now in a, in fact, I'm sitting in his house right now. I'm in a very serious, very happy, lovely relationship. We've been together for a little over a year now. So that's awesome. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I imagine he's got his challenges. I mean, I feel like if I were dating you and I was your boyfriend,

I'd be like, I'm going to work and you can call me there and you can speak to my boss and you can come by any time. And here is my everything number. I feel like I would feel the need to bend over backward to prove to you everything I'm telling you is true. Yeah. And yeah, I'm lucky because he's very patient and very, very understanding and really, really gets what I've been through. And I have my moments, believe me. I put him through the ringer, but he's really good. And he's very good at immediately sort of quelling any anxiety I have. And yeah, he's just a good guy. And finally.

You know, Benita, I hadn't thought about this word, but I think it's apt. You've been abused. This was an abusive relationship. Yep. Yeah. And there's PTSD that goes along with that. It's trauma. It's, you know, and trauma doesn't go away overnight.

So, and it's something you have. have to be very cognizant of. And there are times when that's really frustrating. You know, sometimes I've even said that to him. I behave a certain way. I'm like, you know, this sucks. You know, I hate that I'm doing this. I hate that I'm acting this way. I'm hate that I feel this way. You know, I don't want to give Pollo that power. And I try very hard not to. It's not like what happens to, you know, women who have been sexually abused, where you take something that's supposed to be absolutely lovely and enjoyable and a source of connection, and turn it into something that's really fraught and complicated for a woman.

It's the ongoing victimization of a woman in this position. And that's how I see what's happening to you, too, as a result of him. I'm delighted that you have a partner. What do you do with your daughter? Like, she must be 21 now? Right? She's 12. Yeah, she'll be 21 in the fall.

Yeah. So how do you talk to her about, I mean, she clearly she's seen it all. but like what are the takeaways? Like what kind of lessons do you impart to your daughter over something like this? So please not repeat mom's mistakes for one thing. And to learn from my mistakes. And I'm very transparent. I've been very, very transparent with her about everything.

And we've always had a very close relationship, maybe closer than we might have just because her dad died. And she's just been the two of us. And she's a strong cookie. She's a smart cookie, you know. That kid is super wise. and no nonsense. I'm not worried about her at all. You know, I think, I think thankfully she, I think she's proud of me and she, you know,

she sees what I've done with us and she's proud of me for speaking up against him and fighting back, but she won't make my mistakes. You know, she has definitely learned. Is she right about this in her college application essay? I certainly hope she used it for some way for good. I know. She does, she prefers not to deal with it. And I appreciate that.

You know, she, she does. deserves to have her own life and her privacy and very adamant about shielding her from this now because, you know, she's this shouldn't be hanging over her for the rest of her life either. At 53 years old, I have to tell you, I'm a big fan of compartmentalization now. I really believe in it. I don't believe what we were trying. We have to talk about everything. The more you can shove it down and ignore it like a good Presbyterian, the better.

That's my husband. I'm Catholic. But anyway, the last thing, how about professionally? Because, like, you didn't go back to NBC, right? What are you doing now? I freelance, but I'm very busy. I'm a showrunner. I'm sure running two different true crime shows at the moment.

Oh, good. And so, yeah, no, I'm busy back to work. I also narrate stuff. And I actually like, I didn't think I would, but I like the freelance life and not being, you know, tied to one job always all the time. So it's good. Everything's good. Yeah. And I'm sure.

Well, if you're investigating murders over an investigative discovery, you're not falling in love with your subject matter. So that's good. I know. That door's been closed. All the best to you. Thank you for telling this story. Hope that the whole process has been cathartic to you. And, you know, at some point, I know you'll probably feel the need to respond to his documentary. But I do hope you can close this door and move on from it. You've got so much to do and so much to live. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice knowing that I'm able to help other women by sharing my story. And that always keeps me going.

But it does, you know, it's reaching the point where, okay, enough. It's time to stop talking about this, you know. And move on with my life. I just want to be happy and move on with my life. I know I and so many others are grateful that you did, that you did tell the story. And you found the guts, even though parts of it, I'm sure, felt humiliating and he didn't want to do it. But good on you. You're the only reason you and those doctors.

He's been held accountable and hopefully more to come. All the best to you. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Wow. So happy to have Benita telling her story and helping others. It was the vacation of a lifetime.

Chris Smith was leaving his successful yet stressful business career behind for the open sea and a chartered yacht. He emailed his family to tell them the news. He would keep them updated for a while, but then nothing. The emails stopped, the calls, no. And no Chris. Our guest, Matt Murphy, has an in-depth knowledge of this particular case. He spent 17 years as a senior judge. deputy district attorney in the Orange County Homicide Unit and successfully prosecuted dozens of

cases, including this one back in 2018. His forthcoming book is called The Book of Murder, a prosecutor's journey through love and death, and it's out in September and available for pre-order right now. That's my kind of book. I'm definitely ordering and reading that. I recommend you do the same. Matt, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. Yeah, happy to have you. And a tip of to you for a life spent in putting bad guys in jail. I love prosecutors. I mean, not all, not universally, but as a rule, the good ones are the best and we need them desperately. So thank you for all that you've done. Okay, so let's go back. Where were you prosecuting a journey during the relevant time frame? So I was in Orange County, California. And Orange County is a little

bit different the way they handle their homicides than almost every other DA is obviously in the United States. It's called a vertical prosecution concept. And what that means is when you come into sexual assault, where I spent four years before I got the homicide or the homicide unit or certain other specialized units, you get assigned a patch of the county. So I had Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Cozumesa, and Irvine. And any murders that happen, you get the call in the middle of the night, you roll out your investigator, you're there at three in the morning signing warrants. So you get in at the very, very beginning. And then it's called vertical because you follow it all the way up through the system.

So on certain cases, you're there, you know, as the crime lab is processing the dead body and in others, you're there like in a missing person capacity, trying to help police solve the mystery. So it's a, it's kind of a unique way of doing it. I think every DA's office in America should do it that way. You get to know the detectives. You get to know all the witnesses. You get a real feel for the case long before you ever stand up in front of a jury and try the thing. So that's where I was.

So at the time you're doing that, there's a guy named Ed Shin in the jurisdiction. And he's been leading an interesting life, a very bright guy, an only child. But he, before he came into your life, had definitely had a couple of questionable pieces of behavior, including with respect to his own parents? Yeah, so Ed Shin, as you can see in the photo, he's, you went to UC San Diego. He's a handsome guy. And on the surface, he was, he was kind of an all-American dude. He had a very beautiful wife.

He had three kids at the time. He's going to Disneyland. He was engaging in weekly Bible study. And he had parents who were very much devoted to him. But he had some sketchy stuff in his past. He got in a big, bitter lawsuit. He tried to buy a magazine, like a collectibles magazine for sports memorabilia, and that went belly up and resulted in a bunch of lawsuits and accusations.

There was a really bizarre incident where he may have faked his own kidnapping, trying to get money out of his dad, but that didn't go anywhere criminally because it was all sort of inner family-wise. but by the time he met Chris, Ed was working in what's called the advertising lead business. So those commercials that you see at like three in the morning, like consolidate your debts or new hair loss treatment or whatever it is, you know, you're old enough that you're probably not rolling home. I'm old enough. I'm older than you. But, you know, those things that when you're young, you come home from a night of partying and you turn it on the TV and it's like those commercials, those are those are advertising leads. And the way that works is, like mesotheloma or whatever, these companies will actually put those ads out and people who call aren't calling the law firm or the hair restoration guys or the debt consolidation guys. They're calling the advertising company who then contracts with the people that actually provide the services. And it's this really weird niche where they base it on the amount of time, how many calls or clicks they get.

and it was largely unregulated by the FCC at the beginning. So it was kind of the Wild West. And it was an area where you could make a tremendous amount of money if he knew how to do it. And so Chris Smith goes, he's in this business working for a totally legitimate company, grows up in Santa Cruz, moves down to Temecula, California. And he meets Ed Shin, who works for another company. They're both late 20s, handsome guys. Chris is living in a nice place in Temecula, but they hit it off. And there's a lot of junkets and boondoggles and these guys go to Vegas a lot.

And Chris was pretty straight. He was more the artistic side. He would do the actual ads. Ed was all business. And with this degree from UC San Diego, he was in a fraternity, again, kind of the All-American kid, they became friends and they decided that they were going to start their own business. So at like, I think they were 31 at the time. They were the same age.

They started a business in Orange County called 800 Exchange where they would set up these advertising campaigns and contract the various providers of this service. These guys made over $12 million in their first year with almost zero overhead. Right. It was an insane amount of money. And they knew how to do it. They're good at it. And they have this very successful business. So Chris moves to Laguna Beach.

And when I went to Los Col in San Diego, I lived in Laguna for my first four years as a DA. So you got a picture of one of the most beautiful places. I don't know if you've ever been there or not. But it's got these little mountains that overlook the ocean. Yes, I have. Yes. Yeah, it's gorgeous, right? So it's a bunch of artists there.

And anyway, he moves there. He's a fanatical surfer like I've been for most of my life. And he actually lived not far away from where my apartment was. And he's got a, he's living the dream, really. He's got this ridiculously successful business. He moves his brother down, who he loved to death, he's very close to his family, moves his brother and his bride and their two kids down from Santa Cruz. And life was going great until it wasn't.

So 12 million in the first year on this business that Chris dreamed up and then Ed and he formed this partnership. and it seems like a partnership made in heaven because Ed's more straight-laced and can handle the business aspects and Chris is the dreamer who can handle the creative aspects and they're each kind of doing what they want.

Though it must be said, Chris always had one foot in the ocean. I mean, he was succeeding at business, but I think it's fair to say his communications with his family made pretty clear. He was always dreaming of doing something else, maybe bartending on a beach someplace. Right.

So pretty much, any hardcore server that you meet has that dream of, you know, sailing off into the sunset, right? I mean, you've, I'm sure you've known servers. I don't know where you're from originally, but I'm from upstate New York, but I have a brother-in-law in California, so I do, I do know some. Yeah, so it's like they all have that. Everybody has that dream of, you know, literally sailing off into the sunset with a surfboard under one arm with a beautiful woman and finding a beach someplace where you can, you know, sort of unplug and go surfing. And Chris would go to Indonesia every year and do these boat charters,

which is something that I've done for the last, right, 25 years. I've got a group of buddies. And you take these trips to Indonesia and every one of them, you want to stay a little bit longer because it's living in the ocean, eating great food, surfing all day, every day. It really is the dream of every surfer. And he talked openly about this to friends and family. He was going to be a professional wakeboarder.

He was always water-oriented, grew up surfing Santa Cruz area. And so now, you know, he's living in Laguna, living, he's driving a range rover that's paid for by the company. He was about to propose to his fiance who was, you know, this kid, and a lot of people think of California, you know, the dream of California, unless California is, you know, it's farmlands and mountains. but for that tiny little sliver of coastline, pretty much from Santa Cruz down to the Mexican border, there are people that really have this idyllic lifestyle. And that was Chris. And he would talk openly about, I can't wait to leave the rat race and sail off into the sunset. And he told a lot of people about his dream of doing that.

Another thing that two guys had in common, as I understand it, was faith. They were both men of faith. Well, Ed was very, Ed Shen was very into church, like I said, Bible study, and he presented, he's got this, you know, this beautiful young wife. He's got these kids. He's going to Disneyland a lot. Social media-wise, he's posting a bunch of photos about, you know, how devoted he was. And in fact, the job that he got into Mecula, the company was called Leadpoint, he met the owner of that company in a Bible study. So, you know, this guy meets Ed Shen and was so impressed with him and his devotion to religion and Christianity. He decided to give him this very almost outsized responsibility in his company. And Ed was doing very well there. And that's really where he learned the lead business and where he met Chris. So Chris also had had some religious leanings, although I don't think he was as devout as Ed was.

But Chris was, he's just this really good, he's a good guy. You know, he loved his family, his parents are still together, devoted to his brother, just very, loved his girlfriend. I'm sorry? I think the brother's Paul. Is that? Paul, yeah. Yeah, he's also just a great guy.

So this is kind of like, when essential, California kid who's Chris Smith. So what happened before Ed Schin formed the partnership? Because as I understand it, he came to the partnership in debt. He owed some money. Well, so great question. So nothing actually, at least they didn't know anything, had happened before they formed a partnership.

But almost right after the ink is dry and they both leave their companies, there was what appeared originally to be an accounting irregularity, which I think is how it was first put, an accounting irregularity with lead point. And what that turned into is the owner got into the books and realized that there was not only a whole bunch of clients that went with Ed, you know, and that's a calm thing, and that sparks more than one to speed out there, but there's also a bunch of missing money. And in fact, the money at the more, the closer they look, the more money they found was missing. And it wound up totaling about $700,000. So right after Chris essentially attaches himself to Ed, there are these financial problems that started arising in Riverside County. So they get in there

and, you know, 100,000 turned into 200,000, turned to three. Pretty soon, this is a substantial amount of money, enough that it attracted the attention of the district attorney's office in Riverside County. There's a criminal investigation. And as you can imagine, a whole slew of lawsuits over this missing money. Meanwhile, Chris is, he's almost learning about this in real time because he worked for a different company when he met Ed. And he signed on for this. He's totally unaware of it. Now all of a sudden there's lawsuits where as partner, he's being named as a codefend and this idealic kind of awesome surfer lifestyle suddenly has this huge injection of stress. And he's not sure, he's not sure, you know, how much, how much of this

is going to drag him down how much his company is liable for it now. And I remember all this money and his brother has moved down. He's invested in the future, bringing his family down. So Chris decides he wants to protect his interests. And essentially what the arrangement was, Chris was the creative guy. So he would work, he'd surf in the mornings and then he'd work late into the night doing the creative end of these advertising campaigns. Ed was the business guy. So Ed actually owned 55% of business. And Chris trusted him. So it was a lot. like, hey, you handle the books, you handle the business side, I'll do all the campaigns together, we'll combine our talents, we'll make money for ourselves and study these other companies.

That was the idea. So now Chris has no access to the books, and he's concerned that this is going to drag him down. He's worried about his reputation. He's worried about all kinds of, like, the professional implications of this. But then he, the criminal case progresses to a point that Ed Sheen actually pleads guilty to embezzling. And he's ordered by a Superior Court judge in Riverside County to pay back $700,000. And he's given five months to do it, okay, which is unusual. And he's, he's allowed to do some custody time on weekends, but he's essentially allowed to remain free so that he can operate his business. But there's a sentence hanging over his head of 16 months in state prison. So he's going to do what that means in California, depending on our crazy legislature, you're going to do at least 50% of that time, and depending on the way it's charged, up to 80%.

So he's looking at at least eight months actual prison time if he does not make good on this restitution order. So there's this big gigantic axe hanging over Ed's head. And Chris knows about this. And he's, you know, the nightmares are, all the lawsuits are a nightmare. for him. And then he's worried that to come up with this money and Ed should have plenty of money because Ed is also controlling the accounts. But Chris starts to worry that maybe he's going to, you know, he doesn't want to, he doesn't want any of his money to go to pay Ed's debt, right? So he hires a lawyer named Ernesto Aldivar, really, really good guy who specializes in business disputes

and they start negotiating his ability to look at the books and to have more control over the money. And he wants to co-sign checks and things like that. And so, So this goes on and on for a few months as they're negotiating this. And all of a sudden, Ernesto gets a, gets an email from Chris saying, hey, Tuesday, June 4th, 2010. Right. At I think it's 610 in the evening. He gets this, this email saying, I've decided to let Ed buy me out of the company.

And essentially begins this, you know, telling friends and family, everybody starts getting these emails saying, hey, I've decided that I'm going to live my dream, I've been talking about it for years, I'm sailing off into this sunset. I met a woman in Las Vegas named Tiffany Taylor, and I've decided to sail to the Galapagos Islands with Tiffany Taylor. And yeah, that's when I became involved pretty soon after that, which is also kind of interesting. Which is a total head snap moment because everyone thought he was in love and even engaged or close to engaged to another woman. And he wasn't, from what his parents said,

the kind of guy who was like, yeah, hot playboy, babe, he wasn't that kind of guy. Right, right. So Ed was really, Ed loved Las Vegas. They do a lot of business junkets for their company out there. Chris was not into the flash. And we actually had a woman that worked for the company named Jennifer Matthews, who, when she testified about Chris,

and she described Chris, she said that he was, when they do these business junkets in Vegas, Chris would go back to his room and go sleep, and Ed would be up until, you know, two and three in the morning doing the Vegas thing, which I'll get into in a bit, I guess. But, yeah, this was a head snap moment because he loved his soon-to-be fiancé. They've been dating for a while. And, you know, he flew his brother down. He's supposed to pick up his brother at the airport.

His brother's flying back into town. and Chris didn't show up. And all of a sudden he gets this email that, hey, man, I've sailed off into the sunset with this beautiful Playboy Centerfold. And, you know, catch you on the flip side, basically. Wow. And the fiancé, too, or about to be fiancé, got dumped via email. Right. Right.

And dumped in the most brutal, harsh way. It was done via email. and it was from an email that was apparently associated with Chris. And it was basically, I don't love you anymore. I've met somebody else. And I'm, you know, we're done. And which was at the end, looking back, it was diabolically clever to do that. Because now she was, first she was devastated, and then she was very angry, as you can sort of imagine.

So, plus she, you know, she had a million conversations with him about his dream of sailing off into the sunset. She just always figured it would be with her. Right. So was it at this point, I would think, like, in my own life, I would think at this point if somebody near and dear to me sent these emails, even knowing that he had a penchant to wander. And, you know, he just had wander lust. I think I'd say, I don't know. I'm not sure. Hindsight's 2020.

But did anybody in the family right away say something's off? So I think right away, everybody was shocked. They were shocked that he would do this. But then when it settled in, they all, you know, they knew about him. They knew about his dream of surfing the world. And they knew about his trips to Indonesia. And, you know, at first it was, everybody was shocked and disappointed that he would do that. but, you know, the first couple of weeks, you know, this was kind of, it was consistent in a way.

Not him leaving everybody in the lurch. They were completely flabbergasted at the way he broke up with Erica, his girlfriend. But, you know, it kind of made sense. Now, what happened was Paul said, hey, you know, after a couple of, and these emails, they're voluminous. You know, they went back and forth. There were emails to his brother. There were emails to his mother, emails to his father separately. So these things were, they were ongoing.

And the, I'm sailing off into the sunset thing turned into, hey, Galapagos were awesome. Now I'm heading down to Tierra del Fuego and I'm going to check out these islands off Argentina. And this was an ongoing narrative. And Paul at one point, literally, I think it was, I think he started with dude. Like, dude, at least show me a photo of you and this new woman, Tiffany Taylor. So he gets a picture of Tiffany Taylor getting out of a swimming pool. And Tiffany Taylor, it is a, you know, what Paul is looking for is, Paul is looking for a photo of the two of them together, like on the boat or, you know,

and what he gets is he gets what looks like a modeling photo of Tiffany Taylor, who's gorgeous, getting out of a swimming pool and a bikini. So that, you know, he asked for a photo and he got, he got a photo, but it wasn't really what he was looking at. for. And so, you know, one month turns into two, turns into three. Now the, his, his mother is starting to worry. And the emails are getting darker and darker. So it starts out with, hey, I'm sailing off in the sunset with a super hot chick. And that turns into, I've been having a lot of thoughts about my childhood. You know, I've got a lot to work through. And then the description

turns into, as the trip continues, it turns into, hey, I'm going to Africa. And I met a guy, and here in Bombay that he's got a sailboat, just met him, but I'm going to get on a sailboat and go up to Algeria. And then he starts talking about going into the Congo to buy a conflict diamond for his brother, which is like it starts out the most awesome trip ever. I'm sailing off to go pursue my dream of surfing. And that turns into I'm having a lot of like feelings about my childhood. And, you know, I've had really dark thoughts.

I've thought about the worst thing and there's these suggestions of suicide. And then it turns into the trip from hell where he's, it's like a mother's worst nightmare where the mother is receiving text messages about getting on a boat with a random dude in Bombay or Mumbai and heading to North Africa on his way to the Congo because he's heard of a place where he can sell gold coins because he had, he had collected crew grants, which is a, you know, it's an international gold, gold coin that you can sell, you know, and he's talking about, he had those. The family knew about that. And he's talking about going, you know, to the Congo by himself with a pocket full of gold coins looking about a conflict on it. It's just, right, like what could possibly go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong. Right. So his mother, um, reached a point where she's so distraught. And this is a really nice family. I mean, these are, you know, um, it's a really nice family. So This is your all-American mom who loves her son to death, who's getting emails like that. And she's literally on Google Earth, like, zooming in on the satellite photos in random villages in the Congo, trying to find a glimpse of her son. And so the dad starts getting suspicious. Then the dad, then the dad sends an email trying to check. You know, I mean, if think about it, if you wanted to make sure this person was really your family, member. There are definitely questions we could all think of that only that family member would know,

you know, something from deep in the childhood, something specific. And so the dad, the dad, did he have a background in law enforcement? Because he, I guess he thought up this, this idea. He did. So I don't know if you're aware of the rivalry between firemen and police officers. I don't know if you're aware of that. They're always making jokes by each other. Anyway, he started as a police officer and then he decided he wanted to be a fireman, which is a betrayal to all police officers, but, you know, he did. He had a background in law enforcement, and he, he essentially, he started getting more and more suspicious. And there's a couple of things going on here. I think that, you know, this went on for almost, almost a year where these emails are coming

into the family. And a lot of people think, you know, how could somebody believe that? But, you know, when you have somebody that you love dearly and you're getting these e-mails, emails that at least demonstrates that they're still alive, the alternative is almost too brutal to think about. So a mother's wish for her son to still be alive is going to get her past a lot of red flags, I think, if that makes sense. So the dad, however, he starts asking questions, and they're almost quizzes. And it was, what lake did you grow up water skiing on was one of the questions and what was the name of our boat? And the response was, dad, it was Kelly Lake, chill out, I'm fine. That was essentially the response, but he doesn't answer what kind of boat it was,

which was actually one of being very significant. So the dad decides he's going to come down to Orange County and he comes down and he meets with Ed Shin. And Ed was one of the last people to see him, to see Chris. So he, you know, Ed, said, you know, Ed, sits down with the dad, and Ed is, he's calm and he's smooth, and he explains, look, we had this ongoing business dispute. It's not a problem. He decided that he wanted to take this trip around the world that everybody in Chris's life had heard about. And he's like, so I decided to buy him out. He insisted that he wanted the money wired to the Cayman's. I can get you all the banking information. That's not a problem. And then he says, you know, but

But essentially you should be aware that I was also with him when he got a fake passport because he wanted to go off the grid. Okay. So he provides all this information to Steve Smith, who's completely hanked up. It doesn't make sense. But then it's almost reassuring to talk to Ed because he's so convincing and he's so smooth and he's so nonplussed by the whole thing. And so yeah.

But that's the question, right? Why would he need a fake passport? He's not under criminal indictment. He's not being investigated. Why wouldn't he just be traveling under his own real passport? Right. So then we, and the answer to that really is, of course, you're right. But RIS was one of those guys that part of his dream was like, I want to unplug from the rat race.

I want to completely distance myself from society. I want to go someplace and just completely, you know, check out for a while. So yes, you're right. you or I take a trip like this. I mean, I go to Indonesia every year. I use my own passport. But for him, it almost made sense. You know, it was, you know, he talked about, you know, Chris talked about his concern about, you know, what, hey, what if the monetary system collapses? That was one of the things that he'd kind of talked about. He was a rational guy. But he, you know, this is part of his, you know, his sort of fantasy of leaving. And so

when you heard fake passport, it struck him as being very odd, but it wasn't 100% unbelievable, if that makes sense. Eventually, the landlord, right, of the facility in which Chris and Ed Sheen ran their business gets involved because they're overdue on rent. They've moved out. Like, Ed Sheen pulled the business and relocated it, but he's in arrears on his old rent. which is irritating to that landlord, which is also another pivotal moment here. Right. So they basically skipped out. So they've got a year lease, and he, you know, nine months later,

soon after Chris left for this trip, supposedly, he had packed up the business and moved to a different location and stiffed the landlord for many months rent. So the landlord, actually one of the other tenants is a private investigator named Joe DeLoo, who's a former officer at Laguna Beach Police, and he makes his living as a PI. So he, the landlord, is essentially complaining to him one day about this tenant and he's got this big empty office space and doesn't know where the guy is, and would Joe be willing to help track him down? And Joe, of course, you know, was happy to do it, and he starts poking around. And he went, and one of the first things he did is he went and he talked to the dad and he got these emails between um between him and chris and he he looked at the question

about the about the boat and the lake and that he saw the answer that it was just um that he just answered with the lake and that struck him as being very odd so he decided to to actually go in and ask for permission to enter the business and it's been abandoned okay so there's um there's no reasonable expectation of privacy if you rent if you rent a business from somebody or you rent a home you you know and you and you abandon it the landlord has a right to go back inside so joe delu walks in and very soon after making entry he sees what appears to be blood on a light switch and he realizes that that's that's something that he doesn't want to mess around so he backs out and calls the sheriff's department now meanwhile what has happened is i've got my jurisdiction

covered Laguna Beach, the family had filed a missing persons report with Laguna. And they brought Ed in. And this thing is on video, Megan, and I'm telling you, I was a DA for 26 years. You see this interview. It is fascinating because Ed Sheen is so convincing. And these two detectives sit down and they're like, hey, family is trying to find their son, what's the deal? and he is almost perfect. He is calm.

He is like he doesn't break a sweat. He describes how that, you know, Chris was always talking about this around the world trip. And he's sitting on a beach someplace. And about halfway through the interview, I'll leave the names of the detectives out. You can just see they relax and they buy it. They believe him. And, you know, it becomes, you know, it's sort of a, that was kind of the end, right? I taught a class at the Sheriff's Academy for young detectives.

And right about the same time, I finish a class and walking out to the parking lot. And I almost get tackled by this very young detective from Laguna Beach named Julia Bowman, who says, you know, I really want to talk to you about this. I'm going to get in trouble if my boss finds out that I've cornered you. But there's something that's all wrong here. And this makes no sense. and I've looked into it and they believe them and I don't. And I went up, I actually got sunburned.

And like you, I'm Irish, right? I think Irish background for you. So you know what that means. Can't be outside. I'm protected. Oh, my God. So she corners me next to my car and I went up talking to her for about 45 minutes and I got the worst sunburn because it was so compelling.

And this is my patch. This is my jurisdiction and this is, that was my job. So try to help police figure this out. but Laguna officially hadn't come to me with an issue. So I've got this junior detective putting this on my radar, and I start, I started looking into it. And I find out right about the same time. San Juan Capistrano is where the business was. So Joe DeLu has just gone in.

That was my colleague, Baham Betai, had that section. So I sit down with Baham, and we have a meeting with Laguna and the sheriff's department. Laguna has almost no murders. But the sheriffs are one of the most Orange County sheriffs, or one of the most professional. professional homicide investigative groups in the country. They deal with enough of them. They're real pros. So we all sit down and we decide, I'm going to prosecute or I'm going to help in the investigation if there's anything ever filed. They are going to handle the investigative part. And we start putting the pieces together. And one of the first things we

learn is there was another junket out to Vegas. And Paul, who is now really worried about his brother, he's still working for the company. And they go out and they are, in this casino. They were staying at, almost everything was at the win or the encore. So two of the nicest hotels in Las Vegas.

And that's where they would do these business junkets. And there's a world known as atmosphere modeling. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. There's a great episode in the show,

Silicon Valley. I think it's either the first or the second episode where they encounter, they go to a Toga party that's thrown by this billionaire, this like tech billionaire,

and they encounter atmosphere models. And basically what it is is you can hire beautiful women to come to your party and talk to all the guys that are socially awkward that you want to have invest or whatever. And they can make a company look super bishing and awesome and all that. And they, Paul looks over and they've got atmosphere models. And there across the room at the business junket for 1-800 exchange is Tiffany Taylor. And he makes a beeline for her. And he's like, hey, aren't you supposed to be traveling the world with my brother? And she looks at him and says, I'm really sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. And that's when the bottom fell out for Paul Smith and

also for the family, because he knows at that point. Meanwhile, Ed is going, no, no, no, dude, it's a different Tiffany Taylor. And he's going, this is the woman in the photo that I got from my brother. And she is, you know, her real name is not Tiffany Taylor. Her real name is Summer Hanson. She was at Playboy Center Full, and she wound up being kind of a hero in this case in a lot of ways. And she's stunning. And Paul is in this, you know, in this casino, his brother's gone. And at that moment, he knew that something horrible had happened. So we then start. So we pulled some sound bites from some of that. I've listened to the 2020. in the Dateline, a bunch of stories on this, too, just over the years.

But this is a piece from NBC Dateline for the moment that the cops went over to that old office. And at the same time, just about that Paul was finding out there's no Tiffany Taylor, they were finding disturbing things inside the office along the lines of what you described. Here it is and sought to. Sargentz Don't Vote and Ray Wirt, Orange County Sheriff's Department. First thing to do, send some texts over to take a good close look around the old 800 exchange office. That's when they started finding more suspicious spots on some ceiling tiles, behind some molding. They pulled up carpet and found dark colored stains on the concrete underneath.

The spots tested positive for human blood. We confirmed that all the blood in the crime scene was in fact Christmas. All of it. All of it. Nobody else was bleeding in there at all. In the end, it was all from one person and it was one person's DNA. And my understanding is they used luminal on the carpet and it lit up like a Christmas tree, which detects the presence of blood. Right. So now all of a sudden, we've gone from a missing person and kind of a mystery to we've clearly got evidence of a homicide.

And that little clip that you just showed, that tiny little droplet on the strip, that's called cast off. So in the world of forensic science, when you have. blood drops on a ceiling, it means that somebody who's ought to have been stabbed multiple times or beaten with a blunt object. And when they fling it back, whether it's a knife or a bat, it tends to fling viscous blood. And there was blood on the strips on the ceiling. So this was this was helter-skelter. And at that point, we knew. And right about the same time, we're also learning that Ed's, you know, Mr. Bible study guy, he was spending hours at the tables in in Vegas. And we start interviewing employees that are telling us that Ed would

gamble all night long with purple chips, which are $500 chips. And, and then we find out that he's spending so much money that he's getting comped. The presidential suite at the Encore Hotel, which is a, just to give you an idea, it's a two-story hotel suite with an elevator on the inside and 24-hour Butler service. It's maybe one of the nicest physical spaces in the entire world. And it is, they're flying him out from Orange County on the on-court jet to go to Vegas. Oh, this is not a good sign. No. So, so when we get back with Ernesto Alivar, the attorney, it became pretty clear that the pressure that Chris was putting on Ed created a huge financial motive here because, you know,

they're not, they have, you know, Ed's married, Chris's about to get engaged, and not dating each other's girlfriends or wives. They're not neighbors with a dispute over offense. They have literally no beef with each other other other than money. And if Ed does not come up with $700,000 within five months, he literally goes to state prison. And he doesn't get a hearing. Why can't he do that if they made $12 million in their first year?

And Ed owns it 55%. It's Viva Las Vegas. Wow. Because when you're a degenerate gambler, he literally blew probably $10 million on the tables of the encore and wind hotels in Las Vegas. That's how you get a presidential suite comp to you. That's how you get the casino jet because you are a high roller. I'm sure you've seen casino.

It's one of my favorite movies. You know, they talk about a whale. And they have that scene where they want to get them back into the casino to, you know, to go lose his money at the tables. That basically was Ed Shen. And he was gambling Chris's money. And as soon as he opens up the books, he knows that Chris is going to bring some sort of court order so that Ed, you know, his accounts are frozen and he's going to go to state prison. That makes sense.

Honestly, Dave, I don't do a lot of gambling, but I know some people who do. And one of them was telling me, you know what they call people the gambling problem. Losers. The ones who go out there and just win, because. because they go out there so infrequently, they don't have a problem. It's the people who go there all a time, and they lose invariably because the odds are against them. Those are the people who have a gambling problem. Right. Yeah, Vegas and all the glitz. I mean, I'm sure most of you of years have been there. I mean, that was not built on winning nights by amateur gamblers. So that's from

people losing money. I can't imagine that. Like if my husband ever said to me, the Encore Hotel is going to fly us out there on their private jet and we're staying in the presidential suite because of what happened the last time I was there, I demand a forensic accounting of every account we have. I mean, it would be horrifying. Oh, well, and it gets worse than that, too, because then we get into, we interview, Ed basically hired a gopher, like a personal assistant who he moved into Chris's apartment that was being paid for by the company. And they, Don and, I mean, watching that clip, I got to tell you, I left the office five years ago. I love those guys. Don and. and Ray, just, I miss them almost every day, you know.

They're such good, such good detectives. And you just see that steely-eyed, you know, with all the crap that the police get today, the vast majority of police officers, in my experience, are really hardworking, honest guys. And Ray and Don, you know, putting this together with them, it's like, it was, it was amazing, watching those guys work. So they go to Chris's, um, apartment and they find this dude Kenny Kraft living there who is

Ed's personal assistant and they get, he's driving around in Chris's range rover. And they, and for me the moment as this is all coming together, I think this was even before we got the blood. I can't remember the exact sequence, but for me

the absolute alarm bell went off when they got into Chris's apartment and he had two surfboards that were there, two custom-made surfboards. And And any surfer knows that if you're taking a surf trip anywhere, you're not leaving your boards behind. So then they did a forensic workup of the Range River, and they found blood in the back of the Ranger River. So that was clearly used to transport.

So we then get into, we get into Ed's phones, and we find out that a couple of nights after Chris went missing, Ed's phone is pinging at this place called Desert Hot Springs, which is a tiny little like dot on a map just north of the Mexican border on the way to Calexico. And Mexico, this is like East County, San Diego, middle and over, right. And it's a general rule when you were commicides in Southern California, if you get a human body out into the Pacific Ocean or you get a human body out into the desert, that body will not be found. If you throw a body in a lake, it's popping up. But if you throw a body in the ocean or you get somebody out in the desert, it's gone. And so we have one cell phone tower, and it's got like, I think it's a 120-mile radius of desert land.

And Ed pinged off that at three in the morning after renting a truck at like U-Haul or something. And he drives off into the desert in the middle of the night in a pickup truck. And so we know where Chris's body is. So now at this point, you decide let's arrest him. But he wasn't going to make it that. easy. It was a bit of a challenge. Well, right. So what happens is, I don't know if you used to watch Get Smart, the old show Get Smart. There's a gag that he'd do over and over again. Right when he gets caught, Max

L. Smart would say, would you believe? Like, okay, I know I said this, but would you believe? And that's what Ed does. Ed was getting on a plane to go to Canada, which was a violation of his probation in Riverside. And also, we're getting pretty close here. And so I'm the decision that, you know, we needed to step up the investigation and basically take him off the plane before he flew out of the country. So we communicated with his probation officer to determine whether or not he had a probation voter, whether he could leave the country without permission and he could not. So Ray and Don arrested him at LAX, and they drive him down, and they have an interview with Ed, and they kind of let him talk for a while and they tell us the

same story that he told the detectives at Laguna Beach, and then he told Steve Smith, the dad, and he basically tells the same tale, and then they confront him with all the information they have. They confront them with, you know, the forensics and everything else that had just been put together. And they, he essentially changes the story to, okay, okay, here's what really happened. Would you believe we got a big argument over money, and he attacked me. He attacked me and we got in this fight and I pushed him down and he hit his head on the corner of the desk. And I didn't know what to do and I panicked. So I got this guy who's a fixer for me in Vegas, who's like a Vegas host that I use. And he hooked me up with this Russian guy who came and took

the body. I have no idea where the body is. So that became his new story. And what's interesting is that in addition to Ed gambling all that money, when we interviewed Kenny Kraft, Ed was also So we had information that he was he was sleeping with hookers two at a time in Vegas and like high, like really high dollar sex workers to the tune of about $5,000 a pop. So he's having sex spending $10,000 with two of these sex workers at a time, which kind of gives you an idea in the presidential suite, like the lifestyle. That'll do it. That'll do it, right? You can go for that pretty quick, I guess. This is why we have an advertiser, Cozy Earth, and their latest pitch has been,

take our sheets with you when you travel. Don't, like, yes, yes. That's how I'm feeling right. Take them. Ed Sheen is a freaking walking commercial for that. I mean, like, yeah, two at a time in Vegas. And the nicest sweet probably in Vegas. And yeah, there's probably some guy like Ed in there with two prostitutes.

It's not good. Wait, let me show you. So he does eventually, and I want to go back to where you are in the story, but just to show the audience. Eventually, you prosecuted Ed Shin, and you got him on the stand, and it was on Cam, which is great. And there's a little bit about, of him, this is from 2020, trying to tell this nonsense story. Here it is, not three. Lunge that in me, lunged at me again. And I think at that point, I thought I had to fight back. I don't know if I threw him or if I shoved him, but somehow I pushed him into this area.

And that's when he fell and he hit the desk. Really hard. Okay. And just because the audience is going to enjoy this, here's a little bit of our guest, Matt Murphy, the prosecutor in the case, grilling Ed Shin on this story and some inconsistencies in it.

Watch, top four. So how is it, Mr. Shend? You didn't have a bruise or you didn't bleed somewhere. Can you explain that for us? I cannot. Okay. There you are. He's on the floor of the office.

He's just sustained a significant physical injury, and you can dial 911, and they can come save him. So if you didn't want him to die, why didn't you could tell 911, Mr. Schen? He's in shock. You didn't dial 911 because you knew that if he died, you got his money. Isn't that true? No. Wow. Okay, so keep going.

Okay, so first of all, that suit that he's wearing is like Joshua Harmonia. It's worth more than my entire closet put together here and in my place. New York. So his luggage that he had off the plane was like, it was, I think it was Louis Vuitton, Louis Vuitton luggage. And I remember they were, they were trying to get it out. I mean, everything, his watches, his jewelry, it just, the guy oozed money. So I look at that. I'm looking at his suit as I'm watching that clip. But so we, yeah, we, no body cases are really interesting. Okay, so we never recovered Chris's romance, which is brutal for the family. But there's two ways you can do a murder case where you have a missing body.

One, since I've got Ed describing how he fell down and hit his head, I can prove that Chris Smith is dead if I play Ed's ridiculous BS. Can I swear on this? No. Yeah, again. Go for it. Okay. All right, so I can say this is the first time public that I've been able to say this,

but it's just, it's such bullshit. He describes this scene where this guy falls down and hits his head, right? Like, and then he, and then he lets him die. And this is, this is the same night, according to him, that we've got this, you know, we've got an attorney saying that everything was coming to a head. And if he can pay the money, he stays out of prison and gets to keep going to Vegas. But if he can't, he's going to, he's going to freaking prison. And like the most fortunate, you know, accidental head wound in history.

and he's not calling the police because he's in shock. And then he actually says he drove him around for a while. And then, Megan, what he does is he describes, we get into it, like, who is the guy that came and got the body? And he's a Russian guy. And he had a flat top and he had blonde hair. And he's wearing a leather jacket. And he describes Dolph Lundgren from Rocky 3. Oh, my God.

It's like, literally, I'm sitting there and listening to it going, I know this guy. This is a villain in a Rocky movie, literally down to the detail. He's channeling that in his head as he's testifying. And I'm taking notes of this. I'm going, this is insane. So I've done five no body murders. Okay, I did the Hawks case at a Newport, the couple that got tied to the anchor and thrown overboard. Did a case help Judy Blot that nobody's ever heard of.

And, you know, when you first start out as a prosecutor, you think that you don't know how jury's going to react to that. And when you do a few of them, you realize that there can be certain advantages if you don't find the body. And one of them is if you have to prove the death. Normally, the death of a human being is the element. So if you have a dead body, that element is satisfied. But if you have the ethical and burden of proof obligation to prove that somebody is dead, the way you do that is you put their mom on the stand. or their best friend or somebody that tells you how much they love their dog or or the grandma who said he'd never miss Christmas.

You know, and what you're able to do as a prosecutor is the jury will be able to get a sense of who the person was as a human being. And my old, I had a mentor in homicide. His name was Lou Rosenblum. He basically brought me into the unit. He's one of the, I know you've had mentors sort of the course of your career. I love this man.

And he took manners when he taught me how to do murder. And he had a quote, I will never forget about nobodies. He said, the jury can always see the soul of your victim reflected in the eyes of those who love them. And that's one that's one that always stuck with me. So I don't want to put Ed's BS self-serving story on to prove that Christmas is dead. I want to be able to prove it other ways. And with all of the emails with the Glock Ghosts, the easiest way for me to do that would be to call Tiffany Taylor. right and just have her come in with her passport and say i've never been to the galapagos islands

and but we couldn't find her and um we i had Vegas metro going out there we could not track her down and i don't know if that's because she's if she's moved i and she's she's an atmosphere model right which is weird by itself right but it's a legitimate business it's basically her you're a live model and i don't know if she's i don't know what her involvement is in Vegas I don't know any of this stuff. Like, all I know is I need her in order to do the no body prosecution. And I'd given up. And the case was actually going to be pretty difficult the way we had it.

And especially given that he told all his friends and family about this around the world trip. And I got a phone call in my office. And it was Summer Hanson crying saying, you know, I just found out you guys have been looking for me. I've been in Virginia with my parents. I am so sorry. What can I do to help? And she flew in and I was able to put her on the stand with her passport. So that's what forced Ed to testify.

If I hadn't been able to do that, Ed Shin could have relied on his bullshit, self-serving interview with Don and Ray, where he came up this cockamamie absurd story. Why? How did she disprove the cockamamie story, just that it showed you could establish that Ed Schenheimie. was the one sending those emails and why would he tell such a lie? Like how, how did, how was she the clincher? She was the clincher because I could prove that Chris Smith never left the United States because she supposedly went to the Galapagos Islands, which means she would have had an entry in her passport because there was all the stuff that to you had that photo of her. Was that? Yeah, stop one. That was step one. Okay. Yeah, I see it. Right. So by her saying, I never went, it means Chris never went,

which means the emails were all fake. And we were able to, I don't. IP address, my expert on that wasn't my favorite. I'll leave his name out of it. But he basically said that the text messages came, that the IP address was from North America. So that still leaves a lot of wiggle room for a defense. So basically, I wanted to do this as a nobody and I needed her to do it. And she stepped up. And I've actually kept in touch with her over the years. I was so grateful for the way she handled that because she wasn't under subpoena. She came in voluntarily. Yeah. I just got the Playboy model with a heart of gold. I like that. I like that twist of the story. And it's telling you, I've never, I've never asked her, you know, how much the CD Vegas underbelly she saw. But, but yeah, she stepped in a huge way. That's what forced Ed to testify. And there was a point in there where he, he starts talking about the emails that he sent. And he's on direct examination. He starts tearing. up. And so he actually starts shedding some... I have this. So he teared up. He teared up and you were not having it. Here's a bit of Matt Murphy's cross-examination on that. Sot five. Tearing up a little bit right now? I'm okay, sir. Were you tearing up when you wrote that

email to Debbie Smith saying their son was committing suicide or suggesting that he was going to do that? Are you tearing up when you did that? Yes. Okay. You were actually at the computer tearing up as you were going to break a mother's heart by essentially blaming her. for the death of her son. That was making you feel sad? It was one of the many emotions I felt, yes. Oh, my gosh. So well done, Matt. No, thank you.

As a prosecutor, that's what you want. You want the bad guy on the stand. And every trial kind of has a moment, you know, where you can point to it. And it's like a turning point. That was the turning point of that trial. And his direct, by the way, I mean, this is the thing about the fraudsters, Megan,

And I know you've probably encountered this before. When you got a guy who makes his living by fooling people, right? They're great at it. They tend to be really good at that. And all you need is one juror. It's a gift. And his mom is sitting right behind me in the front row in the gallery. And the jury, we had to have her testify because, again, we got to do it as a no body because of Summer Hanson.

And so there, you know, he's on the stand and he gave me that gem. And you almost never know exactly what's going to happen. happened when they hit the stand, but that was when it's like, wait a minute, dude, you're, you're crying, you're trying to show emotion, and you sent a year's worth of emails. You broke up with his, soon-to-be-fiancee by saying, I don't love you anymore. Like, one of the most ruthless, freaking psycho things I saw in 26 years, and there he was on the stand. But that's the difference between you, I mean, there are a lot of prosecutors who have a script for their cross, and that's the script that's going to be delivered.

and they're not going to deviate. But to your credit, you were nimble. You saw him try to engender sympathy for him. It was so hard for me and you stuffed it down his craw. It's like you were leading this poor mom to believe her son was about to kill himself because of the kind of parent she was. Where were your tears then? That is just perfectly done. That had to be a good night for you when you went home at that evening. Thank you. No, that's, that's, it's, the, the fundamentals of every good cross-examination that you heard from any real trial lawyer is, you know, can prepare, I mean, I've prepared that cross for years, and you have to be prepared to, I think the journalism term is kill your puppies. Like, you have to be prepared to abandon the story

that you're in love with. If the truth leads you someplace else, you have to do the same thing with, with cross-examination. You have to be able to put aside every note you've made, all your careful preparation when you get a moment like that. You have to, because that's, that's how you win trials, I think. So it's, I think it's, it's just from Hemingway, kill your little darlings. And no one's killing any puppies in this. It's a Kristi Nome thing. You confused us. She likes to kill the puppies.

We don't kill the puppies. Yeah, the last moment in that, you know, I gave him one last chance. I got a, I got a topographical map, and I put it up and I had a marker for him. And we had a search and rescue team out staged during his cross-examination in the desert. And I don't know if you have. have that photo that was actually I don't think I put it on I should have sent this to you there's one where they were out there for two days and they were sitting in the cold and they were they're waiting and what I love about is the cadaver dog that we had was named karma and they're they're all waiting and

it's like okay Ed here you go here's his family here's a Sharpie here's the map do the right thing so they're fans to this family the family of your former partner do the right thing so they can bury their son, tell us where the body is. And he almost looked like he thought about it for a second. And he said, I have no idea where the body is, sir. I have no idea. But we had them out there. And this is kind of, this is sort of funny behind the scenes. But I'm like, I, you know, I asked to take a photo of the station crew. And it was like about a dozen people. And the two Orange County detectives kind of drew the short strata sit out in the desert in the one and a hundred chance that Ed Chin would actually do the right thing. And they just look, I, I, I, I, I,

I asked them to take a photo and they looked, it was like one of those high school football team photos. They're all grim, you know, they're all lined up. Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, you, I'm like, they just look so to Don or Ray. I'm like, guys, they just looked, they look too mean. Can they take another one? And these guys snapped a photo. I wish I had it where they're literally jumping up in the air with big smiles on their face and holding big accents and shovels.

Like, you want us to look happy? Here we are freezing our butts off out here in the middle of nowhere. Some gallows humor there. Oh, my gosh. But yeah, so the jury goes back. And that judge that you saw there is, his name's Greg Prickett. He's retired now. It's one of the finest bench officers I've ever tried a case in front of.

And again, with all the heat that the judicial system, especially the way it's under stress lately where I think a lot of people are losing confidence in it a lot of ways for reasons that I'm sure you're aware of that I won't go into. But that's a really good, fair judge. And his staff was really professional. And the bailiff, this guy, Zane, who I loved, done a million murder trials in front of him. He goes back and I'm kind of arguing with one of the defense lawyers in a not a bad way.

His defense team were excellent attorneys. But this guy Al Stocky, who's been around a long time in Orange County and we're arguing about, you know, some way that the evidence is going to go back. So the way what happens is the jury gets instructed. They go into the deliberation room. And bailiff goes in and, like, gets them all settled and comes out and the, you've got, then the evidence goes in, right? And Al is arguing about, you know, something that he thought should go in in an envelope or something

stupid, not stupid by him, but something unimportant. And so Al and I are kind of mixing it up a tad. And Zane comes out after the jury been back about, you know, 30 minutes just getting settled. And he kind of comes out. He's got this really funny look on his face. And he goes, Al, he goes, I don't think it matters, buddy. He's like, they don't even want to see the exhibits. They're asking for verdict forms already.

So, yeah. You knew that was a good sign. That's, yeah, that's a great sign. And look, as a DA, my plan was I was going to do this for like three years, learning how to try cases and then go make money in some civil firm someplace. And the longer you remain a DA, the more interesting it gets. And then pretty soon you're doing the serious stuff. And then you're doing felonies.

and then you get your own investigator. And then, you know, for me, I was 34 years old and I'm doing murder cases and I'm walking through murder scenes. And what becomes really addictive for you as a prosecutor, if your career and you're dedicated to it, is you get families like the Smiths. And Paul came to me after the verdict. And I will never forget the sensation that his wife was lovely. He had such a nice family.

And this is a really good guy who loved his brother. And imagine that. how wronged, you know, a person is. I mean, death of somebody we love is the worst thing that we can ever experience, right? Death because of murder is the worst of the worst. But truly, I think the darkest thing we can experience as human beings is if you have somebody you love dearly and they're killed so somebody else can get money and that person gets away with it, it's about as bad as it gets.

And as a DA, especially for moms like Debbie Smith or brothers like Paul, it becomes kind of an addiction. And when, you know, when you go through those dark moments of trial and you're not sure in the issues and doubt, Paul came up to me crying right after the verdict and he gave me a hug. And I can still feel like the stubble on his face. And he cried and cried and cried. And it's an incredibly gratis. satisfying thing, and like it was for good cops, like Ray and, and Don, and, you know, we got a really good judge. That's, that case was one where- That keeps you doing it. Because it's a dark, dark profession, as you alluded to. I mean, it's, you're on the toughest of cases. You see awful things. It's your

job to make sure this person who's dangerous doesn't get returned to society, so the stakes could not be higher, this is why most do get in and get out. They can't make a whole career out of it. It's just an enormously stressful way to make a living. It is, but it is more so than the stress. You're absolutely right, 100% right. But what is, it's more gratifying than it is, than it is stressful, believe it or not. For moments like that, you kind of, I tried 52 murders or 52 cases while I was in the homicide unit. And every one of those, there's a mom, you know, or somebody loved every one of those victims. And you, you know, especially on the hard ones, on the cold cases where you reach back in time,

where they effectively got away with it until you come in with a new team and dust off the boxes. And most people can't understand how important that is to a family member unless, God forbid, you know, you experience it yourself. It is holding the person accountable is, becomes, for a lot of them, it becomes the center of their entire life. And it's, as a prosecutor, you become a very important. It's the one last thing you can do for your loved one, the one last thing. And ideally provide them with some sort of a proper burial, which is why you were

pressing him and he did not give up the location of the body. And then, Kamo, my old colleague over at NBC News, went to the jail and interviewed Ed Shin and gave it his best shot. I mean, it's very rare to see Keith Morrison fired up. This is about as close as you're going to get. He was clearly frustrated with this guy who even once he's in jail for the rest of his life won't give it up. Here's a bit of it in SOT 7. You wouldn't reveal either where you put the body personally when you drove that rental truck down to wherever you drove it to.

You won't reveal that. I can't. I don't have that. That's not something that I can do, unfortunately. There are just some secrets that man is willing to give up his life for. All right. So I think we're kind of at an understanding, which is that you know. It's just somewhere that I can't go.

It's right. That you know. I'm sorry. You know, as a journalist, that's, you know, everybody wants. That would be a coup to grow up to unearth to unearth. And I don't give a sweet flying . But that. I don't.

I don't care. I kind of care. Which you do care. The family has a chance to get some closure that they have been begging you for. They don't have closure. They don't know where their child is. And he didn't give it up to him either. And he's never giving it up.

Why? Well, I think that one of the reasons why, and this is something that I hit him up with on the stand, it's like, dude, if he hit his head against the desk, there will be a forensic record of that. There will be one skull fracture. and if the body is found, I've always believed he bludgeoned him to death. There was a member, there was a baseball bat. We didn't actually put this in evidence,

but there was, you know, he's a sports memorabilia collector, and there was one that he used to have in his office that I don't think was ever located in him. I mean, it was like a year later by the time it was searched. But if he hit him in the head 10 times to kill him, then there will be, if the body is found, it will reflect that. There will be multiple skull fractures,

inconsistent with him just falling and hitting the desk. And I think that's why. Why would you care of his serving life in prison? What was the ultimate sentence? It was life without possibility of parole. So if you get that, what does it matter if it turns out, now we can prove that your story is BS. Already the jury has said it was.

Right, because in the state of California, our legislature does something crazy just about every week on behalf essentially of homicide defendants or people serving life sentences. They've been after the death penalty for years. But they've openly said that Elwap is next.

It's life without possibility to parole. They're trying to undo that sentence. What? And I think that he sees it as being into his legal advantage not to cough it up. And because, you know, maybe someone down the line

will go, hey, look, it's possible that he hit his head. Like, you see some crazy stuff in the appellate process in California. Most of the appellate justice are fine judges. But, you know, with the legislature, you just, there's such an ideological bent

to a lot of the things that they're doing that a lot of really bad guys like Ed Shen, you know, the California legislature is kind of their, it's their best hope that they're going to do something that benefits them. And in California, unfortunately, we see that all the time these days. We have a very activist group of people.

that have been elected, and they have some ideas about crime and punishment that, in my view, it's just madness. Yeah, they're dangerous. Guys like Ed Chin. Yeah, it's dangerous. It's absolutely dangerous. With our condolences to the entire family, it's just terrible. And, I mean, they were lovely and all the specials I heard them into.

They sounded so reasonable, so kind, it's so thoughtful. But you eventually did leave the DA's office, and then what? Are you, what are you doing now for a living? Writing, right? We're coming out with a new book. That's exciting. You're welcome to come back on when it hits to promote it. I'm happy to get into some of these other stories.

So I've got a law practice here in California where I'm largely defending police officers. I've got a case right now against where George Gascon is prosecuting one of my clients who is innocent. And I'm, I've got a contract with ABC News. I'm doing a bunch of those 2020s. And by the way, I know Keith, of course, Keith Morrison works for NBC. So my overlords at ABC will probably be mad at me for saying this. But for those of you who have never met the man, he really is one of the nicest people on the planet. And I love seeing him get fired up in that interview with Ed Shin because Keith Morrison is a force for good.

And those guys sat me down. I was so exhausted when the verdict came in. And they wanted to interview me that night. I did my dateline interview that night with him and Josh Mankowitz. But Keith Morrison is wonderful. And honestly, the best thing about NBC easily. Yeah, I well, yes, right. Those guys, they're good guys unlike all the politics and NBC, which I know you know a little bit about.

But the, yeah, so I'm defending police officers. I've got a, that's a large part of my practice. I'm splitting time between L.A. and New York City. I've got a place in New York where I wrote the book and I'm doing a bunch of stuff with a bunch of live TV with people that have moved over to News Nation, learning how to do that a little bit. Oh, is that my friend, Dan Abrams? You're doing that show that he does?

Dan has not happy on his show yet, but Elizabeth Vargas, Ashley Bantfield, and Chris Cuomo have all been kind of rotating me in and like various topics of the day. Oh, that's awesome. I mean, Dan has revived live PD in another forum where he gets, you know, mostly cops on to talk about the arrest. But that's something I'm sure he'd love to have you on. I love that you've found another way to use your many skills, but maybe now you can have a nicer hotel room and you should still travel with the cozy earth sheets because one never knows. But I know it's odd to say to a prosecutor, but I feel the need to say thank you for your service. I really admire what you do and what you've done.

Thank you. Thank you very much. All the best. And we'll see you in September when the book hits. Love it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. And I told you producer, I fanboid out a little bit.

I follow you. I loved your interview. Your thing with Bill Maher, Bill Maher. Oh, yeah. I think everybody in America should watch that. I really do. Thank you. Thank you very much.

I enjoyed it too. It was interesting. I give him credit for coming on because not a lot of these liberals, even if their centrist will come on with somebody like me. But he did. He came into the Lions Den. It was spicy. see. Yeah. And you guys had broad areas of agreement that I think reflect 80% of America. You know, you can disagree on some stuff. But like when it comes to the fundamental values, like it was such a

rational, it restored a little bit of my faith that's being tested daily, especially as I'm dealing with Sorosbeck DA candidates, you know, here in L.A. But yeah, I love that interview. It's where you describe yourself as a political six. I don't know if it was that. That is me to a T. I'm a political six. Yes, welcome. It's fine. Fine. Come on in. The water's fine right here in the rational middle. I love it. Rational middle. What a concept. All the best to you, sir. My guest today is John Bueller, a retired detective for the Modesto, California Police Department.

Almost 20 years ago on Christmas Day, he got a call to help on the case of a mother-to-be who went missing on Christmas Eve 2002. her name was Lacey Peterson. John worked with others in the Modesto PD to find Lacey and the person responsible, her husband, Scott Peterson. John, so great to have you here. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for the invite. Appreciate it. Okay, so let's just start for our listeners who aren't familiar with the case with the story of Scott and Lacey Peterson.

They were living in Modesto, California. How long had they been married at the time she disappeared? Well, right about five years. We've been married about that long, and they'd come up from down in Southern California and moved up to Modesto to be closer to Lacey's mother and her sister and brother. Okay. And were there any reports of marital problems or bad behavior by Scott or any of the stuff you look for once somebody's been convicted of double murder? You say, like, oh, he tortured the neighbor's cat. He did, you know, when he was grown up, things like that. Anything like that with him? Gosh, Megan, nothing at all. I mean, this guy was, he was the guy you want to marry your sister or your daughter. I mean, he just couldn't find any flaws in this guy at all from outward appearances,

you know, immediately when we met him. You know, it took a while before things started to fall into place and we saw that there were another side to him. But from all appearances, you know, he didn't have a criminal record. I mean, everybody liked him. You know, you'd have a barbecue. You want to make sure you invite Scott there because he's going to be part of the fun. So he wasn't that guy who people are like, there's something creepy about him.

No, and you know, that's kind of the thing that's a little bit unusual about that is nobody really could come up with that. Although a lot of Lacey's friends, then once Amber came forward, and I know you don't want to cover that, but once she came forward, then people when they went away from talking to him as much as they were earlier, they started bringing up facts that were a little bit inconsistent with the All-American boy, but nothing really alarming. It's nothing that you would think of on an individual basis. They're all anecdotal, but when you tallied them up, then they showed a little. a little bit different side to him, a side of a guy who really didn't want to be a dad. And you, I mean, how long have you been a detective for? How long were you doing that?

Well, I did it for 17 years. I was probably 12th year at that time, probably my 12th year. And so I assume you've seen your fair share of homicide cases. Yeah, when I left, I'd been involved in about 140 of them, 26 of which were mine. So, you know, you have those, you have missing people, you have suicides. You know, you deal with family members that are under stress that are dealing with the death or the loss of a loved one. And so you kind of get used to what to expect from people within a certain range of emotion and reactions. Right, right. And you, I assume in that time, you met or dealt with some defendants who you thought, this is a sociopath right here. Like this guy has no emotion, no feeling or empath. for others. Was there ever a defendant like that? Yeah, I can remember a couple of them. One in particular, he did, actually, the worst crime scene I ever went into was done with a knife and a claw hand, no guns involved or anything like that. And the guy who did that murder, he truly was

TV quality evil. He was the guy that, you know, a scriptwriter would, you know, detail out. Even when you looked in his eyes, they were cold. It was like there was nothing behind them. And, you know, Scott doesn't have that look. But obviously with this situation, our belief, is and the jury's belief was that he had that capability. Yeah, I was talking to Mark Garagos on the program not long ago. And, you know, he said this about virtually everybody we talked about who he had represented. You know, he's like, I knew him and I can, I get a sense for whether somebody's capable of this. And I just don't think he was. He wasn't that guy. Now, he also said the same thing about Jussie Smollett, which I don't believe either one. You know, it's sometimes

we see what we want to see. But it sounds like you're not disputing that if you just met Scott Peterson on the street, you wouldn't have a creepy vibe. You wouldn't think, oh, something wrong with him. Well, no, I don't think he wouldn't. And that's the reason that, you know, he would be successful when it comes to, you know, committing a crime like this because his suspicion level really wouldn't be there. It's a situation where you don't, he just doesn't look like a killer, which is a thing that make him in this case so dangerous because Lacey had no idea that

this was coming. But he, over the years, you know, you meet a lot of these guys. And there was, I got to tell you, Megan, there were a lot of guys I met that committed murder. And the murder aside, I kind of liked him. And it's really the same thing with Scott. He was difficult not to like because he's so charming, he's so engaging, he's so polite. And I don't know what he was saying behind our back all the time.

I know some of it wasn't too polite. But to our face, he was always easy to deal with. But at the same time, that was a picture for us that painted something different than maybe he expected. When we deal with people that are accused of this or we're focusing on them, usually we'll see a little bit of frustration on their part as things go by. He didn't have that. The entire time we dealt with something. He was always cooperative to a point. And then, of course, he would always draw the line in his cooperation because he'd only go so far. He'd pull out that attorney card and he'd say, well, I'm going to talk to my attorney about that. So we dealt with that quite a bit with him.

We saw that in some of his public interviews. He gave one to a local reporter. And whenever she got him on something where he tripped up a bit, you know, like, what do you mean? You told Lacey that you were cheating on her and then you continued the affair, why would you do that? And he'd be like, well, the lawyers don't, you know, this is the point at which I can't get into. Anything that was tough, he was like, oh, I'm not allowed to get into that, you know, and, and was really like, let's keep the focus on Lacey. But to me, watching that interview with the local reporter, watching the interview with Diane Sawyer, you walk away thinking, he never comes close to losing his composure. This is a man who's used to wearing this mask. Yeah, I think so. And he, you

Again, when dealing with him, he had an enormous amount of emotional control, and that kind of fit in with our departmental psychologist, Phil Trumpeter. He told us that, you know, this is the fit of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder. He wouldn't go so far as to call him a sociopath or a psychopath. I mean, you could, you know, but he'd label you want on anybody. But in this case, he was just a little bit different than us. But if he, I don't know if you remember, there was one segment in one of the local reporters from Sacramento, where she was asking him questions

and his phone was ringing in the background. It was back in the kitchen. And the thing that really strikes a lot of people, you know, we hadn't found Lacey at that time. And he tried to continue with the interview. And then he goes, hey, you want me to turn that off? And he goes back, he finds a phone, he turns it off. Well, that could have been Rokini or me or Grogan calling him

and saying, we got Lacey down here at Bakersfield. But, you know, nothing like that. He didn't want to take the call. He just wanted to continue with the interview. So, you know, where's the concern? Where's the urgency on his part? It just was absent, at least at that moment. Yeah, and we'll get to what his half-sister said about him, because she spent a fair amount of time with him, I guess, during those weeks that we were looking for Lacey.

And she did not walk away with a favorable view of her half-brother, who she wrote a whole book about. Okay, so there they are. They're living sort of, they call them an all-American couple. You know, she's got the thousand-watt smile. He's obviously a very good-looking guy. They get pregnant with their first baby after five years of marriage. They've got the Golden Retriever, McKenzie. she's nearby her mom who's adoring and everything's, you know, coming up roses or so it would seem.

And then December 24th, we think, well, at least December 24th is when she was called in as missing. He says he went to fish in the local marina with a 14-foot fishing boat. He only recently bought that Lacey had never stepped foot in because that's just what he does for entertainment. He says some guys would go golfing. like to fish, so I went fishing, and Lacey was going to get together a couple of, you know, food items to share with her family later. He says he left the house at 9.30 that morning for his fishing trip. And what time does he say he returned home to find No Lacey? Yeah, it's late afternoon. I'm trying to remember exactly like 3.30 or 4, something like that.

But if you recall, his original claim that he had told everybody is that he was going to be golfing that day. And he told us, of course, that he changed, yeah, he changed his plan to go golfing because it was too cold to golf, but it wasn't too cold to go out in San Francisco Bay, which is certainly not the tropics. I can tell you that. So it, you know, a lot of little things. And this is the point for us is, you know, a premeditated murder is not going to have a witness and it's not going to have a videotape, you know, the luxuries, the things that we all want. And of course, with Scott, you're never going to get a confession. So you have to build that case by, you know, eliminating suspects from suspicion by proving out their alibi and showing that they had no reason

to do the killing. But in Scott's case, although everybody else we dealt with in this case was pretty easy to clear, we couldn't clear him. We would always be conditional about that. So when he decides that he's going to change his plans at the last minute and go fishing instead of golfing because it's too cold to golf, that's a red flag for us. You know, maybe not bright red, but it's certainly a red flag. And then he couldn't remember what kind of bait he used. That's weird. Yeah, there was, I think he was more of a freshwater fisherman than a saltwater fisherman. And so he wasn't sure what lures he had. And I think Al Brokini mentioned that the tackle that he did have in this boat was all freshwater tackle that you would use up in one of the lakes in the sierras or the foothills,

not something that you would use in San Francisco Bay if you were going for like sturgeon or striper or something like that. So, you know, the fishing trip really wasn't much of a fishing trip. It was more of a trip so that, yeah, you mentioned earlier that Lacey and. never set foot in that boat. Well, she had never set foot in that boat alive. She certainly was in the boat after he had killed. Right. So he on the way home from the marina leaves what you guys, you and your partner, believe, because you're, you and the, I'm sorry, forget the, the man you just mentioned was your partner. You were the main two detectives on the case. Well, actually, there were three of us. There were Craig Grogan and then Al Brokini and I. Now, Al started the case

on Christmas Eve when he was notified about the missing. And he, he, He knew that I always liked overtime, but he also knew I had my kids with me on Christmas Eve. So he called me on Christmas Day as I was taking them over to their mom's house. And of course, I was all too happy to jump on some Christmas Day overtime because I think didn't everything going that day anyway. But yeah, Al Brokini, when he first started talking to him, he started gathering a lot of evidence from the beginning. And there goes, you know, your next three years completely devoted to this case. So when Scott Peterson was on the way home from the Marina. He left what

appears to be to, you know, I've said to my audience, I believe Scott did this, so I am on your side. Though open-minded, like, bring it on. If you've got evidence to prove that he didn't do it, let's see it. What appears to be sort of a cover your rear-end voicemail to

his wife, Lacey, and here is how that sounded. This is Soundbite one. Hey, beautiful. I won't be able to get to the Villa Farms to get that basket for Papa. I was hoping you would get this message and go on. out there. I'll see you in a bit, sweet. Love you. Bye. Not unusual for a killer to do something like that.

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, for me, that was one of the first things that Brokini did when I met with him on Christmas Day is I met him at the office and he played that tape for me. And I, of course, the first thing, I said, how long these guys been married? And he said five years. And I thought, I don't know, that seems kind of flowery for, you know, somebody married for five years. It just seems sort of, you know, I mean, just like you said, you know, to me, it was a staged call to take the focus off of him. And it didn't mean, he did it. But I mean, you know this stuff and your viewers know this stuff. How do we start a murder investigation? We start at the victim and we work outward. And who's the first one you check when you've

got a, you know, deceased girl? Well, you're going to look at her boyfriend or her husband. And especially when you've got a pregnant girl that goes dead or goes missing. And I think they had that 2001 study where murder was the vast majority by an overwhelming margin of the cause of death for pregnant girls. And so, oh, yeah, it's just, I, yeah. I thought you'd saw that. You probably did. You got too much going around in your heads. I forgot about it.

I chose to ignore it because it's disturbing. It's very disturbing. And so, you know, but like again, you go back to Scott and it's easier to work a case when you don't despise the guy that you think that. You know, when he's polite to you and he's not saying anything bad about your mother or anything like that. And so you just kind of follow the evidence and like, this is another strike against him. So when Al played that tape for me, I just thought, this just doesn't sound quite right. But I've had other guys like this before that I've dealt with where it didn't seem

right. I remember one in particular, he had no reaction whatsoever to his wife and daughter being missing. And I thought, gosh, this is kind of freaky. And but we were able to clear him right away, not only through a polygraph, but we also verified his alibi. And he was just a cold fish guy. He just didn't have any emotion.

That's something that we should keep in mind as we go through this case over the next two hours is could he just be this? that person, you know, that sort of oddball whose affect is different from what we're used to. And maybe he's not a cold-blooded killer. Maybe he's just got a weird affect. So I have space in my head for that possibility, but there's a lot of evidence against Scott Peterson beyond his affect. Can I ask you this?

One of the things that seems so weird about the case was who kills their wife on Christmas Eve? You know, it's like, if you want to kill your wife, your pregnant wife, like wouldn't you choose a quieter date? Like how cruel, how sadistic, like extra sadistic beyond killing a pregnant mother of your child? Well, you know, that's kind of an interesting, you know, question to ask. But the thing is, is whether you're killing your wife on the Fourth of July or you're killing her on Christmas Eve, I mean, it's still pretty, pretty nasty stuff, you know, to do that. So I think in a situation like this, you can't really apply the common sense. things that we operate on our day-to-day basis and try to put those on somebody who does something

like this because you're going to be disappointed every time because we don't do those things. And so to try and make sense of things that don't make sense, gosh, it's just, you know, you're going to be battling frustration the whole time you're batting that around in your head. So you guys get involved in the case and one of the first things you ask Scott Peterson is, would you take a polygraph for us? Right. Is that standard procedure? And do you usually receive a yes in response to that? Well, yeah, the polygraph. I love the polygraph because it does a variety of different things.

Okay, now, of course, it's not admissible in court. Well, I don't care about that because I'm not using it to go into court with it. But the first thing you do is what's the person's cooperation level when you say the word polygraph? Do they run like a scalded cat away from you? Or do they say, oh, absolutely, I'll take it. And somebody who wants the focus to be on Lacey and wants us to be trying to turn over every rock and log and look under every car and blanket that might be in a park or something like that to try and find her, take the polly, take the focus off of you and let us move on so we're not spending time trying to clear yet. But originally he said yes to the polly on Christmas Eve when Brock asked him. And then on Christmas Day, when we were getting ready to do it, because when Al called me, Al Brokini called me, and we went down there and we started to the office and started talking, and then we went over to Scott's house and that's when I first met him, pleasant,

nonchalant, you know, he greeted us, you know, and it's like he just didn't have any concern. I mean, he walked away. He had something else that he had to tend to. And I just kind of thought, well, gosh, how come you're not asking me 90 questions? Why aren't you, you know, asking me, what are we going to do next? or you're going to get helicopters up, you know, you're going to get a boat patrol. I mean, whatever he wants to come up with.

He didn't have anywhere near the same emotional urgency that Sharon had or any of Lacey's friends or family. And so when we got done meeting with him and chatting with him then, the first thing that I did after that is my neighbor, two doors over, was the senior polygraph examiner for California Department of Justice, and Doug Mansfield. And so I called him, and he usually gets calls from me because I like doing the polygraph. It was a pretty good tool. And I, you know, of course I hate to call him on Christmas Day, but he's always good for things like this. And so he said, yeah, I'll come down. So he came down and with the intention of, you know, putting Scott on the box. And then between the time that Al had asked him the night before, if he'd take the polygraph and then that afternoon when Doug came down to, you know, get him booked up, he apparently had talked to his father.

And Lee had told him, no, don't take it. Now, I'm not sure what Lee's reasons for that is. But, you know, Lee's a successful businessman from San Diego. great. But, you know, that's maybe not the best advice to give your son, not to take the poly when the detectives are trying to clear them so we can start going towards, you know, better suspects than your son. But it is what it is. He did what he did. And I get it. I get it too. What, this is December at this point, 25th, 2002. It was too cold for him to golf. So he went out on the cold water. Was the swimming pool at this, at the Peterson house still open?

Oh gosh, no. You wouldn't be swimming this time of year. So do you remember, was it closed up? Well, I mean, there was water in the pool, but it's way too cold in Northern California to go swim in that time of year. So, yeah, he wouldn't have been swimming in there. And obviously, we checked the pool, no Lacey in there. You know, we checked all over the house. Well, the reason I ask is because his half sister, I guess he had a half sister was given up for adoption and then she came back to the family. And she got to know Scott and their mother, Jackie, well. another sibling, I think. And she would write in the book that she would ultimately publish something

like 33 reasons why he's guilty. So her conclusion is right there. She had a feeling that he was obsessed with his swimming pool at his house and that the way he would go back and take care of it and clean it and so on. Her own theory was he drowned her in that swimming pool. Gosh, I'd never heard that. I didn't read her book. It's an interesting take. I kind of don't agree with that because he would have had the, I mean, they both would have been so good wet and it would have been a gosh, that would have been a violent fight to try and, you know, drown her in the pool. There would have been splashing a noise. And the houses were close together there. The house to the south where his neighbor Karen lived. I mean, that's right there. And I think that would have

potentially attracted too much attention, much easier to carry out of suffocation or strangulation inside the residence itself underneath a pillow or a blanket or whatever you would choose to use. and hopefully that along with the walls of the house would blank out the noise if there was any. Well, what about Zach? Mark Garagos this. And I said, what, you know, why couldn't? Because he's like, there were no forensics at all tying him to the murder, which I think is pretty true. And I said, well, why couldn't he have just suffocated her or strangled her? And he said there would have been secretions, which would have provided, you know, some evidence that a murder had taken place there or something bad had happened to Lacey wherever he did that.

Well, I don't totally agree with that. I mean, Mark's got his take, and I know what side he's on. And I respect him. He's, you know, he's walked the courtroom many, many times. And so I get that. But I see it a little bit differently. There was a whole ton of evidence there. Now, if you take a look at this case and you think in terms of what if Scott didn't know Lacey and we went and processed the house as a crime scene, we would have found a multitude of evidence that would have linked him to the victim. We would have found hair. We would have found fibers from clothes. We would have found. We would have found. maybe lipstick on a glass, all sorts of things, fingerprints all over the house. And one of the things that we did just so that everybody wouldn't think that we were one-sided on this is when we did process the house for evidence of a stranger abduction or intrusion. And there was no forced entry, of course. We had the FBI come down from Sacramento with their evidence response team and had them independent of medicinal PD. They processed the house. And when they did that, of course, I think there was a saying that you attorneys use evidence of absence as absence of evidence.

And there was no evidence that anybody else had come in that house. So when you look at this situation, well, of course there's evidence there. But it's not the type of evidence that you would think of on a movie or something like that because they lived together. They were married. So, of course, you're going to have her stuff there. There was one spot of blood that was on the comforter that probably wouldn't have been there if Lacey was alive. because Lacey was known as a fastidious housekeeper. That blood spot was linked to Scott, of course.

Scott had a cut on his finger. I don't remember which one it was, but one of them, which could be consistent with her scratching him or something like that as he's trying to suffocate her or strangle her in bed. Now, whether or not she would defecate, whether or not she would urinate. I mean, I don't know. It just, it all depends on the,

I don't think you could rule that out. I don't think you could rule it in. And I certainly wouldn't say that the absence of that, those two things would suggest that he couldn't have done it in there. Do you remember, John, whether the bed, for example, had, you know, fresh linens on it? You know, did it look like he had cleaned up at all? Well, the only thing I remember from the bed is there was an indentation on the comforter at the foot of the bed that would be consistent with a human body, lacy size, being on the foot of the bed and then moved from there.

And, you know, I mean, it could have been a variety of different things. Maybe Scott sat there or laid back or something like that. I mean, it doesn't mean that she was there, but it is consistent. And once again, you know, Megan, these cases are built on, you know, circumstantial evidence. And you find a couple of things. And, well, that's kind of interesting. And then it kind of becomes suspicious when you find a few more. And then when you've got, you know, two dozen, now it's kind of compelling.

And that's really how we work these cases. You just follow what you have. You document it. And you look at it, you know, with an eye of experience. and you say, gosh, this is not looking too good for this guy. Well, I get that. There's plenty of stuff that pointed the finger at him. But I'm kind of stuck in the forensics.

Like, as an amateur, have you ever shown, have you ever been to a scene where somebody was strangled or suffocated? And would there necessarily be, you know, urination or something by the person being killed? Like, do you have any idea whether that's true? Not at all. You can't say that there's an absolute on that, that there would be anything like that. And that's the thing with this case. It's not, all the murders that happened to be able to say that everybody who is strangled, everybody who is smothered is going to either defecate or urinate or something like that.

It doesn't really mean it. Of course, you'll remember that there was some laundry that was done by Scott after he got back from his fishing trip. Clothes. Yeah. And anything that he discovered that might have been there. Or maybe if she had left anything on a blanket or a towel, there's no reason he couldn't have taken that with him. and disposed of that with her body up there in San Francisco Bay. So, you know, there's a lot of things.

I remember that he had been mopping. Somebody said he'd been mopping the floor area, and he had said something earlier that Lacey was mopping when he left. Well, the cleaning lady had mopped the house the day before. She had noticed that Lacey was very tired at the time, so she even doubted that Lacey went for a walk. But for Scott to be doing any mopping or cleaning up seemed kind of suspicious. and even one of Lacey's friends, Stacey Boyer, the next night, I think it was the 26th.

She had said something about Scott was doing some vacuuming around the house to take his mind off of what was going on. If I'm stressing about something, the first thing I'm not going to grab is my Hoover. You know, I'm going to do something else. But, you know, that seems kind of funky. And then you probably also remember there was a bunch of rug and a straight path from the bedroom to the side door that goes out to the carport where his truck was back. in unusual. Neighbors had never seen him back the truck in before. Bunched up rug. Scott gave the explanation the dog did it or something like that. Okay, maybe the dog did do it. But also maybe he did it when he was dragging Lacey from the bedroom out to the carport to put her in the truck and then

put the patio umbrellas on top of her that were in a blue tarp. So nobody would see her underneath there. And people saw him drag out the patio umbrellas. Yeah. And even one of the neighbors, she was walking a, I think it was a chocolate lab, a gal named Kristen. And she was eight months pregnant. She was walking by at the time. She greeted Scott that morning. He said, good morning, all right, or something like that. And, you know, he acted just like Scott normally does.

And, you know, nothing suspicious there. But there really would be no reason for anybody to be suspicious of him. Because, again, we weren't looking at somebody that looked like Charles Manson. We're looking at somebody that's more resembling, you know, maybe Ted Bundy or something like that. Yes. I've thought about him many times. He has a lot of the same qualities. I mean, he was a charmer.

There's a reason he was very good looking and there's a reason so many women fell for his fake charm. And he truly was a sociopath. Okay, there's so much more to go over in terms of the investigation, the huge, huge bombshell of Amber Frye, who John interviewed and worked with to get all those tapes, some of which we've heard. So we're going to get into that next. She changed the entire course of the investigation. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. John, so we'll get back to the forensics in one second, including Scott Peterson on tape showing his injured knuckles. and hand. But as you guys were investigating this, the biggest bombshell, I think we would both agree,

is the emergence of Amber Fry, 27-year-old single mom, massage therapist who had started dating him only on November 20th. Now, again, she goes missing. Lacey does December 24th, November 20th. So it's not a long-term affair. But she comes in and can you just walk us through like, what was that like when you first talk to her and you're thinking about Scott Peterson as a suspect, but you don't have him yet. So when you met with her for the first time, what was that like? Well, it was, it was really groundbreaking for us because until, you know, she called, we didn't have anything that we could find in Scott's background and suggested that he was anything less than perfect. I mean, he just, you know, there was just no stain on this guy whatsoever. And we almost kind of lost Amber,

originally, because her original call came in. And she had volunteered to give the, you know, call call taker the Scott Peterson's date of birth of the one that she was dating to see if it matched

up with the one we were investigating and the call taker I guess just couldn't connect the dots on that one and said well I can't give you his date of birth

and then Amber was frustrated she said well I'm not looking for his I got the date of birth of the guy I'm dating if it matches up with the guy you're looking at then I probably got information for your detectives

and so anyway she finally hung up in frustration but the next day she calls in you're lucky she was persistent she calls in and Al Brokini, he's standing at the clerk's desk that is right next to my desk as the clerk is taking Amber's call and she's typing it into the data bank thing that she had on her desk there. And Al's reading this as she's typing and then Al says, is she in the phone right now? And Bev said, yeah, she is.

And so of course, Al grabs the phone and he starts talking to her and he gets some details and he goes so this is pretty cool. So he says, we'll be right down. So he hangs up and he grabs me. We go into the sergeant's office and we said, you know, this is what we've got. And he just says, go. Don't tell anybody. Just go. So Fresno's, you know, 100 miles south.

So we drive down there record time, no lights and siren. And we get there. And Amber's there with the friend that originally introduced her to Scott. And so we interviewed both of them separately. And we got enormous detail from the friend about Scott's behavior at these conventions. I guess there was a convention in Anaheim that they have gone to. And he, of course, was representing himself as being single. And then this, Sean decided that, you know, I got this friend Amber. She's pretty nice. So she, you know,

played Cupid. And then, of course, they met. Well, when we came time to interview Amber, and I think this is kind of true of most girls, she guys have a memory that's spectacular. And she had, for certain things. Yeah, you know, especially everything men do wrong, which, of course, a lot, but different show, different subject. Anyway, so she ends up giving us incredible detail on their dates and what they did. And she, you know, luckily she held down to souvenirs. So she had wine corks and she had tickets and all sorts of things that, you know, would back up what she was doing. And it was almost like she, I think she, you know, she didn't know us. It was almost like she had a concern that we wouldn't believe what she was saying. So she backed

all these things up with, you know, real physical evidence of this stuff. She showed us a gift that he had bought for her daughter, this little Star Globe and some other stuff. And it was, it was just really interesting because now this emerged, you know, this different kind of guy that we really didn't know was there. Certainly we were suspicious, but we had nothing to hang our head on that. So when we left her house, you know, we were hungry. It was mid-afternoon. And so we said, well, you know, we're going to go get a bite to eat. If you guys want to come with, you need to come with us. And so she said, well, hey, do you want to stop by? I know the CVS or Walgreens or something like that.

I remember which one it was because I've got some pictures. And we're thinking, pictures. Yeah, we'd probably be interested in those. So we go to the photo counter there at CVS or Walgreens, and she gives a clean ticket to the gal. And the gal brings out the envelope and they're twin picks. There's two picks of each. And we're looking through these.

And it's a famous picture of Scott and Amber at the holiday soary. I think she's in the red dress. He's in the tucks and everything like that. And we're looking at this and it's like, yeah, this guy's probably telling the truth here. and they were just from a couple of weeks earlier. And, I mean, it was pretty impressive. And I'm sure that, you know, the gal behind the counter had no idea what she had just handed us.

And so anyway, then we went over to radio to buy a little device to hook up to a recorder because we always kept a couple of recorders in the trunk of our cars in case, because we used these many times on cases we'd give them to a victim or a witness and see if they could get the guy to talk to them. And so we retrieved a recorder out of my trunk along with like 10 tapes and some batteries. and then we went to Radio Shack, which was nearby, and Brock bought the connecting unit that would go to her phone, and the recorder itself showed her how to use it.

And he's showing her how to use it the phone rings, and Brock, he goes, gosh, that Scott's number right there. So she's looking at us like, take the call. And so she took the call, and that was like the first recorded conversation. And it was just very interesting. And this is one thing that I don't understand why this case was so popular with everybody, because we had many other murders that were actually more, to me, more interesting than this one, although this one had, you know, TV quality victim and, you know, responsible in it, you know,

I mean, definitely the made-for-TV, you know, cast on this one other than the detectives, of course. But when it came to this, it was just, gosh, we're here working this thing. Everybody's looking at this, and it's just another, but that's no murder, you know. I mean, it's important to us. It's important to the family, but it was kind of, it was just difficult to believe how it was getting so much attention. And well, you know, it's got all the elements. It's got like these beautiful people, a pregnant mom. Again, like I said, with a thousand-watt smile, the gorgeous affair partner who has been duped.

But in the beginning days, you're wondering, was she duped? We don't know. Were they in on it? Did they both get rid of Lacey, Scott, you know, this gorgeous guy who Lacey seems to have, you know, won the jackpot with, right? Like, it just, he's like, he's got a good job. He's got a seemingly nice family. He's a good looking. He treats her well.

It's like every woman's worst nightmare that this man you meet and fall in love with and marry and get pregnant by turns out to be a sociopath who would murder you in your bed with your. It's like the worst thing you can imagine. So it taps into, I think, a lot of things for a lot of people, but especially women. So can I ask you? Because Amber Fry, we've got that famous, and I'll play it part of it, that. happy New Year call on New Year's Eve that he calls Amber while he's at the vigil for Lacey. But did she start taping him before that? Yeah, she started taping him.

Gosh, I think that was, well, it was right around that same time because it was within a week of the 24th. So it was the recorded call for New Year's Eve. Yeah, that was right after we had met her. Okay. Because we've been scratching identified on him for several days. You know, it's like, gosh, there's nothing wrong with this guy? And, you know, other than his limited cooperation, we're thinking, well, maybe he didn't do it. And, you know, but, you know, we're still, even though we were working him, Craig and L. and I, you know, we weren't the only ones working this case.

There were a lot of other detectives that were working on this. You know, detectives that were clearing out sex registrants and parolees that had violent criminal past that could be good for this and verifying their, alibi and stuff like that. And of course, as you guys, as you paid more attention to this case and it became bigger, anybody that we looked at, you know, they wanted to be away from this thing big time. They did not want to be involved in this. They did not want to be linked to this as being in any way possibly related to Lacey's murders. So the cooperation level that we got from a lot of people that ordinarily probably wouldn't have cooperated with us, probably wouldn't like us because we were cops, was a little bit different this time. And that was one of the good things that the media

brought to us that made things easier in some ways, but in other ways, not so much. Well, it's the reason Amber Fry knew to call you. She saw all the media coverage of this guy who was missing his wife, and she was like, holy, that's my guy. And he had told her that his wife was dead. Yeah, let me do a quick correction for you on that. Actually, she didn't see any the coverage. Amber didn't watch TV, although she would have called us much earlier. She was alerted to Scott by a friend of hers. He was a Fresno cop. And I think his name is name was Richard. I can't remember his last name. But he had, he caught the coverage. And he thought, gosh, that sounds kind of like that girl that, or that guy that Amber's dating. And so he called

Amber. He remembered. I mean, Scott hadn't even been in Amber's life that long. He remembered the description of him or that he would fit it? Well, she was, you know, I mean, you're a, you're a young girl, you're blonde and you're dating Scott Peterson. You're going to flash him around like a nickel plate at 38. And so she's telling all of her friends, you know, hey, look what I've got. And, you know, and I don't blame her. You know, I can see her doing that. So this, you know, this friend of hers, you know, Platonic, he was just a friend. And he caught the, you know, the intense media coverage. And so he called her, he says, he might want to check with those guys up there in Modesto and see if this is the same guy.

Because I can't remember for sure, Megan, if he had told her that he actually lived in Modesto or Sacramento. I know he told somebody at one time that he lived in Sacramento. But anyway, she hadn't seen any of this coverage. And, of course, as you remember, there was great frustration with people in the media because they couldn't get Scott on camera. hardly at all. He was always in the background at the center where they were coordinating the search outside of law enforcement. He talked to several of them, you know, people from the media and he just said, hey, I don't want to be a part of this. This is all about Lacey. This is the fine Lacey. I don't want to be the distraction. And of course, you know, you can interpret that both ways. Maybe he's

sincere about that. Or you can look at it that he didn't want his, you know, face out there because he didn't want Amber to see it or anybody else. So, you know, if you think about how he appeared on the, And I'll just finish us up real quick with you. Yeah. Had there been other affairs besides Amber? Yeah, there'd been at least two that we knew of that were called in. Girls had called us and told us about things. And, you know, I hate to say that.

But, I mean, they are where they are. They're in the record. And, you know, it is what it is. But he lied about that, too. When he gave his interview to, I don't know if it was Diane or if it was Gloria Gomez and the Sacramento affiliate, but he told one or both of them that Amber's the one he ever had an affair with. Yeah, he's, he stretched the truth on a lot of things, a lot of things that he didn't have to stretch the truth on. So it was really difficult, you know, dealing with

him to know where the, you know, the truth ended and the lies started because he, he, he would lie sometimes for no reason on things that were inconsequential. And that was kind of difficult for us to kind of pick through. But it, you know, it was, he just, he was just, he was just, he was just interesting to work, you know, because he was like, well, okay. So Amber Frye, she does put on the wire and she does start recording her calls with him. And the one that I remember just from covering it at the time, I was a very young reporter, was the one.

He's at the vigil for Lacey and Connor with the candles. This is before they found the bodies or know that they're dead. You know, Sharon Rocha, the whole family's there like praying to God that they'll be a citing, a return, a ransom demand, something. And what's Scott doing? He's all smiles and he's on the phone with Amber. And here's a snippet. of that conversation.

And there's here. Are you there? Yes. I'm like near the Eiffel Tower. It's unreal. Yeah.

And he goes on to say the crowds are amazing. The crowds. He's looking at the crowd for his wife's vigil. I mean, it's like that's something wrong. There's obviously

he is a sociopath. That's like no normal person can do that, John. Well, and that kind of falls into why we don't really have any doubts that he did this. Now, yeah, again, it's a premeditated murder. There's no videotape. There's no eyewitness. He's never going to confess. At least I don't expect that he would. He could probably waterboard him. You're not going to get it out of them. But it's one of those things where

when on one hand he's telling us how worried he is and how he wanted to keep his face away from the media coverage because he was afraid that, you know, it would be a distraction or if he was afraid that if Amber came forward, then, you know, we would no longer search for her, which, gosh, we were going to search for her regardless. It doesn't make any difference. if Amber's a part of the equation or not. And so, you know, when he's doing that, you can notice at the vigil, he's got the baseball hat pulled down low.

He's got the collar up on the jacket and everything like that. And, you know, from a distance, you might not even connect them as your boyfriend. If you're Amber and you're cooking spaghetti and you just glance over your shoulder at the TV, which, of course, she didn't do because she didn't watch a lot of TV. Wow. Well, notwithstanding that, Gloria Allred got her hooks into Amber,

and we've seen that show. many times now, and that this was the moment that stunned the world. I remember watching this, thinking, O-M-G, here it is, Amber Frye at the press conference coming forward and telling the truth. Not five. First of all, I met Scott Peterson, November 20th, 2002. Scott told me he was not married. We did have a romantic relationship. I am very sorry for. for Lacey's family and the pain that this has caused them. And I pray for her safe return as well. Now, why did she come out at that point, John,

because she had been working with you guys and she had gotten something like 27 or 29 hours of tape as far as I read. So what led her to go public? Yeah, there was a total of 29 hours of recorded phone calls between the two of them. But what happened with that is, you know, we were going to keep her on ice as long as we could. We didn't want to bring her forward.

You know, we didn't necessarily expect that he was going to tell her that he killed his wife and he wanted to run off to Belgium with her or anything like that. But we were hopeful that we might be able to get something else out of that. So we were going to keep working this for a while. But unfortunately, somehow the inquirer found out about her. And we got a tip that they were going to be running that photo of Amber in the red dress and Scott and the tucks. on the whatever addition it was that came out. I don't know if it came out of Thursday or Friday or whatever that was. Well, of course, you know, out of consideration for both families,

you know, Scott's family down in San Diego and, of course, Sharon and the family in Modesto, we knew that we couldn't, you know, let that happen. And, you know, they'd be in the grocery store line and then they see the inquiry there with this picture and, you know, then they drop their groceries and freaked out. So we knew we were going to have to tell both families about this. So Craig Grogan and Phil Owen went down to San Diego to tell Lee. to tell Lee and Jackie about this. And then, of course, Al and I,

we called Sharon into the office to tell her about it. And she came down there with Ron Gransky. And that was one of the heartbreaking things of the whole case. You can work a lot of murders. But you're touched by these victims. You know, they stay with you. I mean, there's some of them that stay with me even to this day that I still talked to.

But she came down and they knew that there was something up because we didn't generally call them to compare. down to our office. But they came down. It was late afternoon. And they had a scheduled interview with Greta that was going to go on after our meeting. And so she sat down and you could see, you know, they were, you know, anxiety. And so we said, well, hey, you know, we called you down here.

Something's going on. We want to get you in front of it. So they're not surprised by it. And then I had this folder in front of me. It was on the table. And I just opened the folder and split it across. And, you know, Sharon looks at it. And she just, you know, put her head in their hands and said,

why did he have to kill her? I remember that like it was yesterday that she said that. And I think, you know, the family wasn't, you know, none of these families are stupid. And I think they all knew this. They knew it was coming, but they were hoping for that one little chance out of a billion that she would come back alive. And, you know, this kind of, you know, dash those hopes. And it's really sad to see this, you know, to see a family have to go through this. And then, you know, of course, now pick up the pieces and, you know,

hope for the best and the rest of it. Can you guess the guy who did it? Can we ever recover our family number to give them a proper burial and things like that? But that is, that was the moment Sharon realized he was behind this and that Lacey would not be returning. Yeah, I think she had a, you know, she's pretty bright. I got a feeling she had a feeling about this beforehand, but she probably wouldn't even acknowledge it except, you know, deep in her mind. But yeah, this pretty much showed her that. that was a deal. And then, of course, because publicly, they'd been standing with Scott.

There wasn't a public rift between the families until Amber. Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, and you'd expect that. I mean, that's, there was nothing, they didn't have anything concrete. I mean, we look at the thing a little bit different. You know, we're not going to, we don't tell people everything that we know when we're working one of these cases. You can't, you know, because maybe you're wrong, too. And it might, you know, you're not going to disrupt a family in the relationships with your suspicions. You know, you work your suspicions and you gather your evidence to, to prove your case, you know, to present it to a juror. And you don't want them to slip up. I mean, even a well-meaning

family member could slip up and say something to Scott before you're ready for him to know you're working with Amber. And yeah, I understand. That makes perfect sense to me. There's so much more to go. The trial gets started. And Scott's defenders, to this day, point to the lack of forensics. But is that fair? We're going to get into a bit more what the prosecution actually had. And now what the defense is saying, we should take a new look at. Don't go away. There's much, much more to discuss with retired detective John Buehler. And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 11 every weekday at noon east.

And the full video show and clips when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Megan Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple Spotify, Pandora Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast for free. if you leave a comment in the Apple comments, which you can do underneath by subscribing there, I will read it. I have read all 21,000 of them. I find them actually very helpful. People write the most thoughtful things. And I'd love to know what you think about this story and this case.

And by the way, when you're there, you can find our full archives with all of our true crime Christmas shows. Don't go away. John, there was an incredible moment where Peterson sat down with Diane Sawyer of GMA and actually claimed that he, told Lacey about Amber, his affair partner. Here was that moment. Did your wife find out about it? I told my wife in early December. Did it cause a rupture in the marriage? It was not a positive, obviously. It's inappropriate. But it was not something that we weren't dealing with.

A lot of arguing? No. No. No. I can't say that even, you know, she was okay with the idea. But it wasn't anything that would break us apart. There wasn't a lot of anger? No.

Bull. I mean, that's such an obvious pack of lies there. But my question is, why? Why did he feel the need to say he disclosed the affair to Lacey? You know, that remains a mystery to me, but it also plays kind of against his claim about fishing. I'm sure, you know, okay, two weeks later, he's, on Christmas Eve, she's breaking gingerbread cookies, and she's going to say it's okay for him to go fishing, thinking, maybe he's going fishing or maybe he's going down to Fresno again. I mean, I just don't see that. And then, you know, we get a lot of insight into Lacey and what she was about by, you know, her friend Lori and Renee and Stacey and Kim. You know, they tell us a lot of things along with Amy and Brent and, of course, Sharon and Ron.

But when, you know, when we talk to them about things like this, you know, there's no way on this planet that she would be okay with this. You know, she would have tossed him out of a house like a bag of garbage, you know. She wouldn't have put up with that. And she would have told someone. That's what all of her friends said. And any woman knows you've always got at least the one friend. who you tell everything to. You know, you don't want to go blab your private marital problems around,

but something like that, you tell somebody. And it's, I just, I never understood why he felt that lie was necessary, how he felt it was better that she knew. Like, did he think we thought the motive of killing her was she was going to say he was a cheater? No, that's not what we thought. I'm going to pause right there, squeeze in one more quick break out of pay the bills, and then come back and we'll take a deep dive into forensics. Don't go anywhere.

John Bueller stays with us, and I hope you will. will too. John, so what was the final catalyst for the arrest of Scott Peterson? Well, of course, you remember the bodies were discovered in a two-day period in April. And when the first body was discovered, I was just kind of, that might not have anything to do with our case. I really wasn't hopeful that would, you know, be anything to do with what we were dealing with. But then when the second body came up, so you've got a female that doesn't have all the limbs attached and everything, that shows it's been in salt water for three to six months.

And then you have a almost full-term baby that doesn't have the same marine activity on it and looks, you know, essentially normal. You know, that kind of tells you a story of what you got there, especially when they're found so close in proximity to each other and to where Scott was fishing. So when you have that, that pretty much, oh, okay, well, we can figure this one out. And we put together an arrest warrant for Scott based on that information. other information that we had gathered to that point. And it was almost interesting the way this case went for that, you know, four-month period because it seemed like any time we ran out of somewhere, we're getting close to finishing up all the different things we were doing besides Scott,

then all of a sudden something would pop up and it would like fill the tank with gas and we'd have more to go on. And so this was a point before those bodies, you know, showed up. We were just about ready to charge him. But unfortunately, the DA in Stanislaw County, he said, hey, if you don't have a body, I'm not going to give you a filing. Now, we've been working with. this case as a no body homicide from the start. And we were using a protocol that was developed by a prosecutor from Merced County, south of Stanislaw County where we lived. And this case fit everything on all the things that he had on the protocol with you have a victim that doesn't have any prior history of leaving. They've got ties to the community. They don't have any family problems. He didn't

clean up a bank account. They don't all these different things that are going on there. And so she's like the, you know, the victim that you want when it comes to put more. of those cases together. So, of course, when the body showed up, that got everything jumped up into high gear. So arrest warrant was put together. We had a surveillance going on for Scott down in San Diego by agents from Department of Justice, Ernie Lamone and his crew down there because we didn't have enough cops to help out on this. So we used, you know, help from a lot of different agencies, you know, throughout the state. So we drove down to San Diego and we hooked up with those guys and then we were going to make the arrest the next day when the DNA results were going to be released.

Bill Lockyer was the Attorney General in California at the time, and he was going to be in charge of releasing those results to the media and to the public. And the instructions that we got from Judge Beauchain, who gave us the arrest warrant was, I know what you have here, but don't execute this arrest warrant until you get those DNA results if you can. He didn't tell us we couldn't, but he wanted us to wait. until we got those results. And so when we started following Scott that next morning, he was a, I don't know if he was NASCAR quality,

but he was a pretty darn good driver. I mean, high speed, and he could cut lanes and take an off ramp. And, of course, we did drive like that. We'd roll our car or something, and so we'd have to miss them. You know, we'd drive down another off ramp. It was just a big, you know, it was kind of like a comedian of cars driving around. It was ridiculous. So they had a helicopter up.

So luckily, we were able to stay on. him, but even the helicopter lost them at one point. But was he fleeing? Because we all remember, our audience, I think, he had dyed his hair blonde. He had grown a goatee. He had $15,000 of cash on him. He had, I think, did he have a fake driver's license? His brother's idea.

Yeah, okay. He had camping gear. It certainly seemed like he was about to flee, perhaps, across the southern border. Well, you know, we couldn't rule that out. I mean, he knew San Diego well. He grew up down there, and, you know, that's not very far from Mexico. So we didn't know if he thought the cops were after him or if he thought that you guys were after him, you know, trying to, you know, get an interview or, you know, get their hair for us, John. Well, you know, it's funny because on that hair dye thing, he had two versions of that.

He told somebody that he, he dyed his hair because he wanted to be more anonymous. He didn't want to be spotted in public. And then he told us that he got died because he was swimming in a pool with too much chlorine. So he was the thing. Yeah. Every little, every little brunette girl in America knows that. that's not true because we all tried to get our hair dyed that way and it doesn't work. I wish I knew about that.

It was great. It's kind of old. But anyway, so he'd come up with these different versions of things, which were, you know, they're mildly amusing when you're working the case. But it's like, you don't have to lie about this stuff. You know, just tell it straight. It's in his nature. All right.

So, so listen, so I want to move it along. So you affect the arrest. The trial takes place. And what forensic evidence did you have? What was, I know it was circumstantable, as I'm looking and getting ready for this interview, okay, scent sniffing dogs picked up Lacey's scent in the Berkeley Marina four days after she disappeared. Scott's team and Garagos was saying this just the other day, say you cannot rely on that. Dogs fail two out of three of these tests under similar circumstances.

That was a bunch of BS evidence the dogs sent. Your thoughts on the dogs. Well, I know a few dogs in the neighborhood. You know, I feed them some little milkbone treats, but I don't know dogs like canine handlers do. My understanding is dogs have an incredible sense of smell that is multiple times better than humans. You know, I can't disagree with what Garagos is saying because I don't know enough about

that subject to make the call on that. But once again, it was just one of those strands of physical evidence. And if you remember Vincent Bugliosi's book, Helter Skelter, he doesn't. describe the circumstantial case as a series of strands or cables or strands of wires on a cable that become increasingly big and strong. And okay, you can attack the dog. Well, get rid of that little strand, but you still have all the rest of these. And so when you add up all the circumstantial evidence that paints a very compelling picture, it'd almost be like if you had a jigsaw puzzle on your table and you were missing three pieces in the middle, but you'd be pretty sure what the picture

says. And that's what we had here with all the circumstantial evidence. So when it comes to physical evidence. Well, we've got Scott's behavior. We could do a whole show on that. But you've got the absence of intrusion from another person coming in there. You've got the condition of the bodies and where they're found. You've got Scott's behavior when it comes to how he's dealing with everything involving this case, whether it's returning to the scene where the bodies were disposed I think five or six times. And this is consistent with what killers generally do if they have little doubts about whether or not they hit the body enough. So you've got all of those kinds of things. You've got Amber coming in. You've got the absence of anybody else involved in it.

We've got the burglary across the street that we were able to clear those burglars from involvement in this. Ah, let's stop there. That's a big item being pushed by Scott's sister-in-law right now saying there was a burglary in the neighborhood. She thinks that she says that there is proof that it happened. On the morning, Lacey went missing, which she says was definitively 1224 and not 1223, which was something the police had suggested could have been the case. She said, we believe Lacey was killed after she stumbled upon that burglary live. She said a neighbor, Diane Jackson, said she saw three men in a van in front of a home there on December 24th. But then I understand that the two robbers apprehended denied any involvement in the case.

and they were cleared by the cops. Moreover, there was apparently a second person in the neighborhood, maybe, I don't know, maybe it was a woman you mentioned earlier, who was pregnant and walking a dog that day. But you tell me why we shouldn't be putting much stock into the burglary theory, that they nabbed Lacey because she saw them. Well, it's, you know, it's pretty rare that a guy doing a property crime is going to turn into an abductor of a pregnant girl with its walking a dog. I mean, it's if everybody, you know, if Diane Jackson sees a van,

at 1140 in the morning with three guys in it, but she can't even tell us if it's white, tan, or black. It kind of calls into question her, you know, viability as a witness. In addition to that, one of the burglars, a guy named Stephen, he drove that route daily as he was sourcing a narcotic habit, but he was, that would be his route when he went to his girlfriend's house. So on the 24th, he noticed that the house across the street looked like maybe people had left for the holidays. As he went over there on the 25th, he was pretty sure they did. So he broke into the house on the 25th.

And he took a bit of property on the 25th. But there was a safe and some tools and other things that he couldn't take on his bike. So he returns home and he's living in a shed behind his friend Don, who's living with his mother. And he tells Don, hey, there's a safe over there. We need to go back over and get that. So they returned on the 26. And the reason we know that they were there on the 26 is they said they saw the media down the street. when they were in the house and it was a big hoopla and they couldn't figure out what it was because they didn't know.

But it was interesting to them that the media would be out in the street. Well, they're going in and out through the back of the house. So they're, you know, I mean, whether it's Geraldo or Greta or you or anybody else out there, they're not going to see these guys cart in a safe out the back of the house. When they came under suspicion for this burglary, this is one of the things that we run into is cooperation level from people that are doing property crimes. It's very rare that they're cooperating with us. But these two guys, not only, we arrest one of them on an active warrant, they both rolled on their involvement in the Berkeley because by that time they knew what was going on down the street. They wanted to be as far away from this case as humanly possible.

If they could have gotten a flight to Burma, they would have gone. But that wasn't their option. So they begged to take a poly because they knew, and they wanted to share the results of the polygraph, because they knew if they went to jail, which they were going, that they wanted to be able to share that with the other inmates because the other inmates ain't going to take too kindly to two guys. that they think might have killed this woman and her unborn child. So not only did we recover property from that burglary, we recovered nothing of lacies, no jewelry, nothing at all. And we even recovered property from another burglary that wasn't even related. Everybody that these guys had sold or given property to in exchange for drugs turned stuff in.

We even had one guy came in the police lobby and dumped off a bag of property from the burglary and run out before anybody could grab them. Of course, they didn't know what was at the bag until they opened it up. So as far as these guys being involved in this, one of the things that I'm sure you remember is there was a $500,000 reward at the time leading to Lacey's recovery and, you know, locating her and everything like that. Well, in Modesto, when you've got guys that are using meth and, you know, two guys involved in an abduction to try and convince me, I mean, I worked in a different world than maybe some of your viewers, but to try and convince me that one, one role on the other for $500,000, I mean, my gosh, that's that. That's pure Santa Claus. I mean, there's just no way. What about, well, what about this other thing?

Let me, because there's a few things. I kind of jumped ahead there. But Janie, the sister-in-law, Scott Peterson, says there was evidence Lacey was alive on Christmas Eve morning, past the point at which Scott left, which we've established, was around 930. She said there were sightings of Lacey at 945 and 10.30 on Christmas Eve. she said that there are a couple of witnesses who saw the pregnant woman walking her golden retriever around the neighborhood. And what's your response to that? Well, there were two pregnant girls that were pregnant about the same stage as Lacey that walked dogs in the neighborhood. There was one named Michelle who was walking a golden retriever and another one named Kristen that was walking a chocolate lap.

And then there was a third girl, another attractive gal, all three attractive, that easily could have been mistaken. taken for Lacey by somebody in the neighborhood who did not know Lacey. Now, and this is the interesting part is none of these people that came forward and claimed they saw Lacey there actually knew her. They never had a barbecue with her. They'd never been to her house. So it's easy to misplace or misidentify somebody, especially with the coverage going on with the thought of being helpful or maybe the thought that I want to be involved in this. But we couldn't find any evidence that anybody who actually knew Lacey had seen her in the neighborhood at that time. And far as anybody identifying her as walking around there, it could have been an easy mistaken identity

with any of these other three girls. I interviewed two of them. And, you know, if you're looking out the blinds and you don't know who you're looking at, I mean, think about yourself. You know, you're at your home. You see somebody walk by in the morning and then two days later, maybe something comes up. And that might have been the same person. But if you don't know them. Yeah. I don't have that kind of memory. I could never. I would not be able to do that. But let me throw another one at you. There was an allegedly a prisoner confession overheard by an officer named Lieutenant Aponte at Narco Prison in California. The lieutenant phoned in a tip in 2003, claiming he overheard an inmate's conversation about Lacey. Later, this lieutenant Aponte changed his story,

saying, I don't really know what I heard. He was not called as a witness at trial, but this could become a thing, I suppose that if he heard a prisoner confession of some sort. Do you know about this? Yeah, I know about what you said right there, because it was, it apparently wasn't a big enough deal on our radar to have him called as a witness. And again, you know, when you look at Garagos, I mean, he, not only is he a skilled attorney, his staff, I mean, I don't know if you ever talked to any of attorneys on his staff, but he had a bunch of great attorneys that were digging up every single thing they could. I don't think they missed anything. You know, If Aponte would have been something of value, I highly doubt that Mark would not have called him to the stand.

Now, there might have been some tactical legal reasons for that. I don't know. Or maybe some information came up later. And if that's an appeal issue, put him on the stand. Let's hear what he's got to say. You know, I mean, if Scott didn't do this, I don't want him in jail. But I have no doubt so he did it. What about back to the timeline? Apparently, a neighbor testified, seeing the Golden Retriever, McKenzie, inside the Peterson's gated yard, around 10, 15 a.m. Janie, Scott's sister-in-law says the mailman was there. He arrived at 1030 a.m. And said that he didn't believe the dog was there. Or at least he heard no barking, which he would have if the dog had been outside. Because it barked at the mailman every day. She says this proves that Lacey was walking that dog at around 1030, that it was in the yard at 1015. It was gone by 1030. Lacey would have been walking it at that point, and then at some point it returned back to the house just its leash attached.

And Scott had left the house an hour earlier. Now, I will add, the mailman says he doesn't have a very clear recollection of the day. He didn't remember anything out of the ordinary, but that doesn't necessarily clear up the question of whether at 10.30 he delivered the mail and a dog that would normally have been there barking at him wasn't. Yeah, I look at that from a different aspect. Scott and Lacey had gone down to Disneyland in November, and for part of the days that they were down there, she had to be in a wheelchair because she was having so much difficulty walking. Not only her yoga instructor, but of course also her doctor had told her at the tail end of this pregnancy, you just don't need to be out and doing any walking.

The day before, the housekeeper had mentioned that she was exhausted. Sharon had told us that she was exhausted. Sharon did not believe that Lacey had gone walking. And to think this girl that couldn't even move a mop bucket, according to Scott, would go down an uneven grade down to a park with a dog tugging at her when she's unstable on her feet and exhausted from everybody's account. Makes it sound to me like she didn't do that walk. Now, of course, I wasn't there. I can't make that call. But all I can do is I can compare the evidence of information that we received that seems valid and that doesn't really have a stake in this versus Janie's, you know, devotion to family and love.

love for Scott, and I get that. I understand family members are like that, and I applaud her for her tenacity, but I don't believe that Lacey was ever walking that morning with the dog, just based on the other information that we have. So when did he kill her, and what did he do in the moments after? That's where I'm going to pick it up with John Bueller in one minute. Don't go away. So, John, what do you think actually happened inside that house and when? Well, of course, none of us are ever really going to know that other than Scott himself. But my take on it is he probably suffocated her with a pillow or strangled her and then rolled her body up in maybe a sheet or something like that, moved her out to the truck,

put her in the truck, put the umbrellas on top of her so that nobody could really see her in there, drove over to his warehouse, loaded her in the boat, used the tarp on the boat to come, cover the boat. And then, of course, hooked the boat up and drove her up to Berkeley Marina, launched the boat, took her out to Brooks Island and rolled her into the water with four or five of the concrete anchors that we believe he made, is judging from the residue rings of cement powder that was on a flatbed trailer that was in his warehouse, one that would be used to deliver fertilizer or something like that. That's kind of the way I think. And it could be off slightly. I mean, I'd certainly buy Scott some imported ale if he wanted to tell me what really happened, but I don't think he's going to be doing that.

Well, why wouldn't there be any forensics in his truck? Well, why would there, why would there not be? I mean, it's if he's never wrapped up in a something. Well, don't you remember that hair that was found in the players that were in the boat? One hair of lacy's in the players in his boat. But, I mean, couldn't you make the argument? You know, my husband takes our boat out all the time. I'm rarely in it, but if my hair were there, I guess he could say, you know, I get Meg's

hair on me all the time. Right. Yeah, the transfer of that is, you know, is easy. I can see where, you know, where the hair came from in the boat, no problem there. And then, of course, it was concrete residue in the boat that it was consistent with somebody rolling somebody with anchors attached over the side into the water. So, you know, you have that. But as far as any more evidence in this truck. Well, she's in the bed. I can't say that there wouldn't be, but the mere fact that the scent dogs were able to trace her path essentially in the truck as he drove from there down to the south and then turned west and went over towards his warehouse and they followed him over there. They followed the scent from the warehouse out to 132, which is the drive that you go up to San Francisco,

tracing it all the way up to Berkeley Marina. I mean, yeah, Mark Garagos can say that that's invalid and okay i get that that's what he's paid to do that's the side he's on but it's all just additional circumstantial evidence that leads to the fingers pointing at scott but as far as evidence that you would expect if he doesn't harm her to the point where she's leaking blood and he puts her in a position where she's wrapped up or maybe saliva or any kind of purge that comes out of her mouth after death it's not going to get through whatever he's got her wrapped up in you're not going to find anything in the truck especially since he was only in there for what I would estimate to be a short period of time from the house to the warehouse

loaded in the boat and gone. No one would have seen him loading up the boat with her body at the warehouse because your theory is he did that inside the warehouse? Yes. Okay. And so the only way they would have seen her getting loaded into that truck would have been from the house into the truck. But as you said earlier, he had backed the truck all the way up to the house in an unusual

move. Yeah, neighbors noticed that that he, you know, that was first time they'd never seen the truck backed in. And they also noticed that there was a first time that they can recall that the blinds weren't open on the front of the house in the morning to let the morning sun in. That was something that Lacey did all the time. That particular morning, those weren't open, which is really suspicious when you think that if she was home watching Martha, Martha Stewart or something like that, then she wouldn't have opened those blinds. Quick note on the boat, though, there was a cover that went over the aluminum boat. And when Scott found out that we

were doing more digging around, he took that cover and he put it in a shed behind his house underneath a leaking gas can that would put gasoline and a leaf floor or something like that, that kind of two-stroke oil on the boat cover itself. Now, Scott was fastidious about taking care of his property, whether it was his vehicles or the surface of his kitchen table or anything like that. But the thought that he would take a relatively nice boat cover and put a leaky leafblower gas can on top of it for any other reason other than that maybe destroy Lacey's scent seems kind of strange to me. So again, just one more piece of circumstantial evidence and by themselves anecdotal, they don't mean anything before you add those

things up, they become very, very convincing. And this is one of the things that I think a lot of people that don't think he did it are missing is they're not making themselves available to all the individual circumstantial evidence, because you have to ignore just a giant heap of this stuff to believe he didn't do it. Yeah. I applaud Peterson's family for their love for Scott and what they're trying to do, but you're going to have to do something else to convince. We understand their motive. Okay, let's talk about the boat. because Garagos was lamenting that his experiment trying to show a man, Scott's size, throwing a body, a pregnant, an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant woman's body overboard with a bunch of cement anchors that he did that experiment and it showed the boat sinking. We've actually got that, the videotape that he tried to get in that the judge kept out.

Let me ask you about it because as I watch, you know, he does raise an interesting question. Could a man as big as Scott Peterson get a pregnant woman that pregnant overboard with four anchors attached to her without the boat capsizing or sinking? Here's Garagos's clip from his would-be evidence that was denied. And for our listening audience, it shows an exact replica of Scott's 14-foot fishing boat and a man in scuba gear. They're not purporting that it's actually Scott. it's a reenactment, what they say is, and a dummy that is a pregnant woman, and he can't, the boat is sinking. He's basically, he can't get overboard without sinking the back of the boat, is going down, down, down, and under the water. So I get that the prosecution wasn't there when he filmed his experiment.

And that's why the judge said, no, because that didn't give them the chance to object to. The currents weren't the same on the day you did this as they were on December 24th, or who knows how heavy was that dummy. that Mark used. Who knows, right? Like, we don't know because they weren't there. But does he raise some good questions about whether it's possible, you know, given the laws of physics? Well, yeah, of course, he raises good questions on that. And, you know, my whole thought on that is, gosh, if you're going to do that experiment, send us an invite, let us come there and let us, you know, do it with you. I've seen that same tape. It's been a while since I've seen it. Of course, I can't see it on this, you know, device here, the way we're doing this. But I saw it and I thought, gosh,

the guy could have tried a little harder to not let the boat go over. I'm in the belief that it could have been done. I don't think that there's anything unusual about that, but if it's a situation where they only want to show one version of it, that's why it was subjected to. Let's do a scientific study. I mean, it doesn't mean you have to get a physicist there, but let's try it a couple of times.

Maybe get somebody in there that wants to keep the boat from going over. Somebody that doesn't really not on that same side. Well, you have to think if he believed that he could do it without the boat sinking. They tried it five times. and every time it sunk, he would have said, you know what, let's go back and do it. We'll do it tomorrow. Prosecution can come with me, right? There's a reason he didn't, yeah, he didn't round back and say, oh, that's your objection and you're sustaining it, Your Honor? Okay, no problem. We can do it right now. The anchors, you believe he made four cement weights? Because I also read that they found planter pots at

bottom of the water and that they matched, that they were found by divers in the marina and that they, many believe that they were used to weigh down Lacey's body because they match broken pots in his storage unit. Is that not the right anchor? It was those concrete blocks that he made. Well, I never heard about them finding planter pots up there. That's a new one for me. You know, of course, this case had, gosh, I think I got the note here on it, over 43,000, over 43,000 pages of reports. So there were a lot of people that could be nonsense. A lot of us, yeah. But at the same time, I remember the one anchor and one concrete anchor that was in Scott's boat, they didn't even have a rope attached to it. Now, most people I know if they're going to toss an anchor out to pull their

boat, they usually have a rope attached there to. Yeah, it works better. Yeah, generally. But it was one of those things where the cement rings suggest that he made four or five of them, that I believe it was five. And the fact that one, was found, okay, cool. But if you remember, when Lacey was found minus the head, minus the four extremity limbs, that suggests five anchors on her when she goes in. And one of the things that was noted on her condition when she was recovered, again, the forensic pathologist said it appeared that she'd been in the salt water for three to six months, that the limbs had been separated by either surgical precision or they had been weighted and then the weights separated them. And

then that she also had three broken ribs. Well, she talked to her mom the night before, you know, on the 23rd, and she didn't say anything about broken ribs. And Lacey probably would have told somebody if she had broken ribs. And so that also fits with Scott kneeling on top of her, you know, suffocating her or strangling her. And, of course, the way the limbs were separated supports that there were weighted devices, anchors, concrete anchors on each one of the four extremities and maybe around the neck. He was not counting on her torso coming back up.

And that torso had their baby in it for most of its time underwater, right? The forensic pathologist said the umbilical cord was still attached. And I mean, it's so sad. But that Lacey died still pregnant with her unborn son. And they were put to a watery grave. But they came back up. They came back up to tell the tale. And it was first Conner's body and then Lacey's, the remains of it that were found.

And while it wasn't exactly evidence of Scott's involvement, you know, it didn't show whatever a gun shot, like a bullet that was linked to him. It really was the final piece that you needed to bring him to justice. Well, it seemed like it to us. I mean, again, it's all circumstantial. But, you know, there's a lot of murder cases are circumstantial. substantial. You know, that's kind of the way we put them together if you don't have an eyewitness or a videotape. And it's, it was compelling to us. And apparently it was compelling to the jury the first time around. I, you know, I, I wouldn't have any doubts that we would get another

good verdict on a second trial. You wouldn't. You would not. I'm confident in the prosecutors that we have, Beigot and Dave. And then, of course, they'd bring somebody else in because Rick is now a judge. but you know you can bring things up all these years later i believe we have a good case if you get a good jury i think you get a good verdict and if somebody gets on the jury that you know maybe the jury's always a crap shoot as you know you've done this for a while and you just never know what you're going to get with them but well you know you know what else here's the other here's the other element kind of goes back to what we discussed earlier which is there is a part of me and there's probably a part of a lot of people watching this that that wants him

not to have done it, that would like it to have been the burglars or some random sicko on the street, and that it's not possible for what appears to be a loving husband to strangle the mother of his unborn son, a month before that son is going to be born, completely viable baby, and then anchor her, shove her in the back of a truck under a tarp, and tie five concrete blocks to her neck and each limb, hoping, she will stay in that watery grave. But he was so efficient that the torso broke free and that body floated in four months later. It's like I would rather believe some random, creepy boogeyman did it.

You know, there's something about it. That I think might be one of the biggest challenges at the trial, the need to believe that. Well, I think, you know, we all share in that. You know, you look at him and he just doesn't look evil. But evil does exist. And one of the reasons that evil is successful. a lot of times as it comes disguised as, you know, a beautiful man or a beautiful woman. And so you never know what you're going to get with that. But the thing is, you know, people, you want to look at Scott and you want to think, he couldn't have done this. But gosh, he wanted to sell, you know, the house within two weeks of Lacey going missing. He would be sold Lacey's car a month or so after she went missing. He turned the nursery into a storage area. I mean, this is the guy that is wanting his wife to come home. This is the guy who was looking forward to the birth of his son. you know, you're going to have to give me some better evidence of that because I just, I can get past his looks, which are so disarming.

And I can see what actually he did because his actions are speaking evil, even though it's coming out of an attractive package. All right. I'm going to squeeze in a break because up next, we're going to talk about what the sister said he was doing in that same time frame. John just referenced. and another piece of his Diane Soria interview that was very, very telling. More with John Bueller right after this. Stay tuned. The sister. Her name is Amy Bird. And she wrote, John, because she spent a lot of time apparently with Scott in the weeks after the disappearance and before his arrest. And she wrote in her book that he appeared smitten with her, Ann Byrd's, 22-year-old babysitter.

This is while they're looking for Lacey and Connor before the bodies came out. He was smitten with her 22-year-old babysitter. On more than one occasion, he told his sister, Ann Bird, how attractive the sitter was. I mean, this is like the man's, in his world, his version, his wife is missing and so is their baby. How attractive the sitter was. With Lacey's still missing, he plied the sitter with drinks that he called, quote, flirtini's based on peach snobs. and she said he looked like a charming young man without a care in the world. She went on to write, he seemed totally uninterested in any new leads or new information.

He never once shed a single tear for Lacey or Connor the situation. And that two weeks after Lacey's disappearance, he ordered two porn channels on his home TV, and she was a witness to that. I mean, like, that alone would make me convict him. Well, yeah, I mean, and that's just consistent with his behavior. And this is one of the reasons that he, you know, we couldn't discount him because he just didn't show the interest in this case the way he would say on TV. He's waiting for the little guy to come home. He won't even refer to him as Connor.

And he wants Lacey to come home. But when the camera's turned off, then he's just not interested in any of this. And especially when you compare his reaction and the way he dealt with all of this with Sharon and all the other side of, you know, Lacey's family and friends, they were all just urgent going crazy, wanting some solutions and suggestions. So they were, they were always interested in this. And he just wasn't. And this is consistent with what I've seen on other guys that have done similar types of killings. They just, they don't, you know, they don't have that interest in it. I remember Scott's dad said one time, you know, Lee, he mentioned that, you know,

brief doesn't have a playbook. And, you know, maybe it probably doesn't for people that haven't dealt with a lot of families that have suffered a loss. But when you deal with families and friends that have suffered a loss over a period of time, you kind of get a, you know, a data bank of what reactions are from subdued silence to hysterical, you know, punching on the, you know, back of the one who gives them the death death notification, how I remember that. And everything in between.

But when Scott doesn't even move the needle on this, and he isn't asking the questions that you expect and that you get from sincere people, it just fits with what he did. And by itself, it doesn't mean he did it. It just is one more strand that, to me, shows that he did. What kind of a man is flirting with a 22-year-old babysitter offering her flirt teenies and then downloading porn

while his wife and unborn baby are at best for Scott Peterson at that point missing. I mean, it's just so clear that he was involved. Then he goes on with Diane Sawyer. And we talked with Garagos about what a mistake it is for these high-profile defendants to give interviews to the press. You guys must love it. You're in the opposite seat. Then Garagos, who's like, no, you guys are like, go for it. Diane Sawyer's amazing.

She's a great choice. and here is one of the things. Listen to this for the audience at home. Listen to him, refer to Lacey, long before the bodies were found in the past tense. Listen here.

Tell me about the state of your marriage. What kind of marriage was it? God, I mean, the first word comes to mind is glorious. I mean, we took care of each other very well. She was amazing. He is amazing. That's telling. Well, you know, it's interesting because he even referred to Lacey in the past tense twice during Brokini's interview with him on the evening of Christmas Eve.

So even from the start, he was doing that. And, you know, it was, you know, you can't hide that stuff. I mean, he's pretty slick for the most part. But, you know, those things slip out when you're doing it. And no matter how slick you are, you can't be that good. And then there was the interview with Gloria Gomez of Sacramento. And in that, you referenced it earlier in the show, he slips in the fact that he had a cut on his hand. Remind me of OJ.

Remind me very much of OJ, but we know OJ's murder was with a knife. Listen, I'll just let the audience hear it, but I don't think this was by accident. He knew somebody was going to notice it, and he was laying the foundation for what happened. Here it is. It wouldn't surprise you if they found blood in your vehicles. Explain why. Well, take a look at my hands. And you can see cuts here on my knuckles, numerous scars.

I work on farms. I work with machinery. I know I cut my knuckle that day. On what day? On Christmas Eve. Doing what? Reaching in the toolbox of my truck and then into the pocket on the door. I cut out my door.

my knuckle and there's a blood stain on the door on the driver's side door. What did you guys make of that? Well, a pretty good way to explain that away. And, you know, I can't rule out the fact that it's possible he could have cut it that way. But it's also possible that Lacey may have scratched him as he was killing him. And so, you know, those, again, without a witness in a videotape or a confession, you're never really going to know on that. But that was not accidental that he raised that. Well, and that's all for the jury.

You know, the jury, you know, listens to that and then they draw their own conclusions on that. But just the fact that he's volunteering and talking about it, it's almost like he said guilty conscious coming out. And he wants to make sure he gets in front of that with this story. So I can't rule out. What of the toolbox, John? What of the toolbox?

Because one of the things that, one of the evidence rulings was that Garragos's boat video couldn't come in. But as I understand it, there was a ruling that the prosecution introduced showing that he could have fit a body. the size of a pregnant woman in the toolbox of his flatbed truck. Is this familiar to you? No, because it was a pickup. The flatbed was the trailer. But I know we did an experiment and it was submitted to the court where we had a eight-month pregnant clerk in the investigation division at Stanislaw County District Attorney's Office. And we took an overhead photo of her inside the boat

between the seats. Now, the seats go across the width of the boat, and she easily fit in between those two seats. And she was consistent in size with Lacey. So that was one of the things that we did to show that that was possible that she could have easily been hidden in the boat. But I don't even remember if we were able to get that in at trial or not, because it's been too long ago. But, you know, I like Judge DeLugie. I thought he was pretty right down the middle. He gave some good favorable decisions to the defense, and then maybe some that they didn't like. But, you know, I like, but. That's true in every trial, as you know. You know, you get them, you get ones that you like and you get ones that you don't. You're just hoping that the judge is doing it right. Well, and I mean, their big basis for appeal is not necessarily, you know, judicial misconduct. It's the juror misconduct. Juror number seven, who called herself Strawberry Shortcake, did not disclose on her juror questionnaire that she had apparently been the victim of domestic violence while pregnant, which I agreed the defense had a right to know whether it was not. error to, you know, allow whether that was prejudicial enough to throw out a verdict in a case like this is a different story for the listeners and the viewers who don't remember her. We used to call her Pinky at the time. Here she is, along with another juror, celebrating their guilty verdict.

You know, you don't always see the jurors talk in California. In this case, you did. It's a quick snippet of her. Watch. San Quentin's your new home. And it's illegal to kill your wife and child in California. So that's the gal. And I wonder what you think about now this push because he's been, he's had a sentence reduced because of a different juror misconduct issue, not related to this gal. And now in February, we will have a hearing to see whether Scott Peterson gets a new trial on the guilt or innocence phase of the whole thing because she, that juror did not disclose this fact on her questionnaire. Yeah, well, that brings up two points. Number one, I had heard that her.

her lack of coming forward with that information on the juror questionnaire was that she was the victim of a threat from a boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, and she didn't see that as domestic violence. Now, there may be more to it than that, but that's what I had originally heard. The second thing is- That's better for the prosecution than what I just said for sure. Yeah. And then, of course, when it comes to the death penalty thing, I'm not a huge death penalty guy because I think it's been 17 years since California has carried one out.

So to even try somebody on a death penalty seems to be kind of a placebo. They're not going to get the needle. They're probably going to die in custody. I would rather have more flexibility in jury selection without a death penalty case. So maybe you get a good juror that just doesn't want to do a death penalty thing, but they can be fair about it. To me, that's a better way to go because I just, my personal feeling is the death penalty in California is kind of a joke.

Yeah, they're not serious about it. what kind of life does he have now? Like what describe his prison life? Well, San Francisco or San Quentin prison is a very interesting place. It's got an enormously interesting culture and heritage. It's not a very pleasant place. It's it's frightening even to us when you go there when you're a cop and you go into one of the prisons for an interview or whatever you have to do up there. It's it's a scary atmosphere. It's interesting. You talk to the correctional officers and we ask them. You don't. how the hell can you do this, be locked up with these guys all day? And they go, well, how

the hell can you do what you do? At least we know who the players are. And I can see it from both sides. But it's, uh, death row, I think, is a, if I had to be in San Quentin, I'd want to be on death row because I'm not really exposed to that many of the other inmates. And general population in San Quentin can get you hurt pretty quick, especially if they don't like you for killing your wife and your child. So, you know, if, if he, if they do stay with the verdict of guilt and he does get life without parole. We call it L. Lop. And he stays in there. They're going to have to assure his safety by keeping him isolated because he would be a target for other inmates. There's a National Geographic special that was on a couple of years ago that profiled San Quentin and even one of the inmates that

they interviewed, talk specifically about Scott that he would be attacked if he was in general population. Maybe even do it with a pencil. Pretty interesting show to watch if you get a chance to catch that one. Of course, it's not as good as your show, but it's nearly as good. Naturally. But the prison code of justice is so weird. It's like you don't get to San Quentin for being a Boy Scout. But like there are certain lines they won't cross. I guess you're not allowed what? I'm killing your wife. I don't know if that's a problem. But killing your unborn baby. Is that the thing that's going to get him the pencil on the next? Yeah. It's a very interesting. It's a very interesting. It's a violent, but a very interesting culture up there. Any of the state prisons in California are, you know, not everybody gets to go in unless you do something really bad. But it's it's a very interesting culture up there. I don't think. Scott's days are very good. Now, Scott has an enormously impressive emotional control. And so he can, I'm sure he adapts better than I will. And, but it's, it's not, you know, he's not ordering flirtini's up there, you know, he's stuck. And he ain't going anywhere. And they don't smell good. They're noisy. And you're not there with the faculty of Stanford.

So, you know, it's not a very pleasant place to be. What do you think? Because, you know, people debate this all the time in, in our society, because the death penalty is still recognized as constitutional and implemented in certain states. I've heard people who oppose the death penalty say, I oppose it because I think it's too kind. It's too swift that I'd rather see somebody, you know, especially a young man like Scott Peterson. I mean, Sharon Rocha at the hearing just most recently was just saying Lacey would be, I think she said 47 now and Connor would be 18. and it really does give you a flavor for the passage of time and how much they've lost. And Scott Peterson, too, is not getting any younger.

But what a tortuous existence. And I wonder what you think about what would be worse, a death sentence or a life in prison without parole? Well, you know, that's kind of a flip of the coin. I mean, that's, you know, do you have the fish or do you have the steak? I mean, they both are, you know, kind of equal in some ways. I think the anxiety of knowing that the Grim Reaper is coming when you got that death sentence, if they're going to carry it out, would be very difficult to deal with. But again, most people that end up in there don't think the way we do.

So their thought process is probably slightly different. There was some good things recently. There was a guy put to death recently in one of his closing statements before they gave him the needle was he solved another case for him. He did the last minute. He said something about another murder that had been committed and that they, cleared him on that or cleared the case based on what he said. I guess he committed it. So, I mean, for me, if they're not going to carry it out, don't bother with it. Don't cause

additional problems. Don't make the trial longer by having a penalty phase. Just get by with, you know, your life without parole and leave it at that. And then you sit there and you think about it for the rest of your life. The concern also, of course, you know, you put an innocent man to death. I wouldn't want to ever see that. And in this case, you know, you don't have a confession. You don't have an eyewitness and you don't have a videotape. So, you know, there's always that. Well, we have the, we have the fear that, you know, he's good looking, that we live in a celebrity obsessed culture and he is, for better for worse, sort of a celebrity, that the jurors of 2021, or this would be 22, have been completely trained to expect CSI-like investigations where the

proof is always there. And the absence of tight forensics mean you don't have a case, right? that all these things are challenges if this case has to be retried. We didn't even talk about this woman, Evelyn Hernandez, who she was up in San Francisco, and she went missing in May of 2002. Her body washed up in San Francisco Bay in July of 2002. That case considered, I think, unsolved as of a couple years ago, right? So there's so much that the defense could make hay with. Was there a serial killer?

Were they wrong about the burglars? Was there something happening on December 24th? And I just wonder whether we're so obsessed with like armchair detective work in 2021, it would be more of an uphill battle for the prosecution. I'll give you the last word. Well, it probably would be. But again, I have confidence in the prosecutors from Stanislaw County District Attorney's Office. They've got some incredibly bright trial attorneys there.

And so I don't know who they would assign to it the second time around. With it going to trial again, hopefully not. The big thing for me is the torture for the family. for Sharon and the rest of the family, for them to have to go through this again. And even for this to come up for resentencing here in December. What a great time of the year to do that, to just open that wound again. Now, granted, every Christmas is going to be different from before Lacey went missing to now. And I get that.

But then they have to add, you know, salt to the wound by having this thing happen. Now, like they could they have done this in February and put it off a little bit longer? But, you know, that is what it is. And this is what we're dealing with. As far as I'm concerned, I'm close to the case along with Craig and Al. We were in it from the start. And, you know, it is what it is. It was a team effort.

I appreciate you referring to me as one who solved it. I didn't solve it. We worked it together from those of us that were on the core unit investigating it from the beginning to the other detectives that came and helped with us, the other agencies, sheriff's departments, detectives from other agencies, the FBI that helped us out. And our crime analysis did a wonderful job putting things together. And the evidence for clerks, the evidence technicians and everybody that joined in on it, it was a big team effort.

I just hope that if we go to trial again on it and then we get a good jury, they can see right through this stuff. And they see every strand of this circumstantial evidence makes an unbreakable cable and they come back with the right burden. I hope the same. John, thank you so much for your investigatory efforts and for being here to tell us the story. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show, no BS, no agenda, and no fear. Thank you.