True Crime Campfire - Out of Luck: A Murder at the Mansion

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

We all wish we could win the lottery. I mean, who doesn’t love the idea of a life-changing financial windfall? The chance to pursue your real passions, get all your loved ones out of debt, travel, just…not have to worry anymore? But for the tiny percentage of people who actually do win the lottery, against almost impossible odds, the reality often ends up a lot more complicated than they expect. According to the NY Daily News, about 70 percent of lottery winners end up flat broke within 7 years. Worse than that, some believe there’s a curse attached to winning. Take the case of Jeffery Dampier, who won a 20 million dollar jackpot in the 90s, started a popcorn business, and ended up brutally murdered by his sister in law and her boyfriend. And we all remember Abraham Shakespeare from an earlier season of TCC, a man who used his lottery winnings to revitalize his community—until he was manipulated into signing over his fortune, then murdered by a scam artist named DeeDee Moore. These are just two examples of many. It’s one of those “careful what you wish for” things—a lesson the people in this week’s story had to learn the hard way. Join us for a true whodunnit, a twisting, turning story of ambition, deception, secrets and betrayal.Sources:https://www.the-sun.com/news/3890533/lotto-winner-fatally-injected-husband-squandered-cash/#:~:text=Joseph%20Roncaioli%2C%2072%2C%20was%20found,she%20split%20with%20her%20friend.&text=Prosecutors%20told%20his%20trial%20he,retirement%2C%20the%20Toronto%20Star%20reported.https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2011/05/16/md_convicted_of_poisoning_wife_loses_appeal.htmlhttps://www.lottoanalyst.com/lottery-winner-ibi-roncaiolihttp://www.greatesthockeylegends.com/2017/09/legends-of-team-canada-stelio-zupancich.htmlInvestigation Discovery's "Your Number's Up," episode "Cruel Hand of Fate"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. We all wish we could win the lottery. I mean, who doesn't love the idea of a life-changing financial windfall? The chance to pursue your real passions, get all your loved ones out of debt, travel, just not have to worry anymore. But for the tiny percentage of people who actually do win the lottery against almost impossible odds, the reality often ends up a lot more complicated than they expect.

According to the New York Daily News, about 70% of lottery winners end up flat broke within seven years. Worse than that, some believe there's a curse attached to winning. Take the case of Jeffrey Dampier, who won a 20-millar. dollar jackpot in the 90s, started a popcorn business, and ended up brutally murdered by his sister-in-law and her boyfriend. And we all remember Abraham Shakespeare from an earlier season of TCC, a man who used his lottery winnings to revitalize his community, until he was manipulated into signing over his fortune, then murdered by a scam artist named D.D. Moore. These are just two examples of many. It's one of those careful what you wish for things, a lesson that the people

in this week's story had to learn the hard way. This is out of luck. a murder at the mansion. So, campers, for this one, we're in the leafy suburbs of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where in the summer of 2003, the lives of one successful 60-something couple seemed to be going great. Dr. Dr. Joseph Roncaoli was a prominent. an obstetrician gynecologist, who delivered more babies than dominoes does pizzas. And his wife, Eby, was a delight. Generous, bubbly, always elegantly dressed and full of fun. The Ronchioles had built the kind of life that everybody dreams about. They were millionaires.

They lived in a spectacular mansion. They had two grown sons they were proud of, and the doctor was starting to think about retirement. The golden years lay in front of them like a plush red carpet, time to relax and travel, enjoy grandchildren, get into new interests. But it wasn't going to turn out that way. There were secrets hiding in the shadows of the Roncaoli's perfect life, and that life was already unraveling in the darkest possible way. But let's put a pin in that for a minute. Who are Joe and Eby Roncaoli, and how did we get here? Evie wasn't always a millionaire. When she first immigrated to Canada from Hungary in 1968, she came to with not a lot more than the clothes on her back.

Eby and her family had been through the mill over the past few years, war and dire financial straits, and she was hoping for a new start. It's a scary thing, a leap of faith like that, coming to a country where they don't speak your native language, where you have no guarantee that things will go your way, but she was a brave girl, and she had big dreams. She'd always loved American movies, and she kind of had this image in her head of Canada

as the kind of place where her favorite movies were set. Big, beautiful houses, pretty tree-lined streets, everybody walking around looking like a million bucks. Of course, once she got there and reality set in, it was a little bit of a nasty shock. Life isn't easy for new immigrants like Eby. She had to take odd jobs to get by, the kind of jobs that work you hard and pay you peanuts, shampooing hair, washing dishes. It definitely wasn't Hollywood. And she wasn't having much more luck in the romance department.

She had a couple of relationships that started off, promising, including one with an Italian former footballer named Stelio Zuponcich, but didn't end that way. But then one day, Eby got hurt. Nothing major, just a boo-boo, basically, but it was the kind of thing you need to get treatment for so it doesn't get infected. So she ended up at urgent care, and hello, doctor. The young med student who treated her was a 24-year-old charmer named Joe Roncaoli, and there were major sparks minute one. Eby was a beautiful girl. to one of her good friends, she had kind of a natural glow, and she was easy to talk to and joke around with. And I mean, who doesn't love a handsome, dark-haired soon-to-be doctor?

Uh, yes, please. Now, obviously, Joe knew he wasn't supposed to ask a patient to dinner, but he decided to go ahead and power through that little roadblock, and the rest is pretty much history. For Eby, it was a fairy tale romance to go from washing dishes at a restaurant to marrying a doctor. She felt sure that this was going to catapult her into the kind of of Hollywood lifestyle she'd always wanted. You know, swim in pools, movie stars. But, alas, before long, reality, that soul was harpy came rolling up once again to poop all over Eby's parade.

God, what a bitch, the worst. Actually, it wasn't bad. Joe was working on building his own practice as an OBGYN. And within five years, they had a house and two little boys. But Eby felt somehow unsatisfied. For one thing, their house was just, you know, a normal house. Nothing that would show up on cribs or American greed or anything. Oh, God forbid.

God does forbid it, actually. And for another, she was worried about Joe. His job required him to be around tons of young women all day, every day, from the nurses to the patients. Now, I feel like if I were a gynecologist, it'd be like, you know how Baker's, tell you they start kind of hating the smell of bread after a while, I won't get more specific than that, but Eby felt insecure being at home all day with the kids while Joe went off to work to look at bread.

I mean, their relationship started when she came in to see him as a patient, so I guess I can see why she'd worry, but there's no faster bonar killer than insecure jealousy. So my guess is that it caused some tension. That, plus being home all day with the kids doing housewife stuff, wasn't doing A-B-any favors. It was all decidedly un-Hollywoodie. Yeah. She developed a little daily routine. When she could grab 20 minutes or so to herself, she'd go for a walk in the wealthy Thornhill neighborhood.

Y'all know the kind of neighborhood we mean, right? The kind where you're like, Jesus, how many families live in that monstrosity? At least you do if you're me. Most people are probably more like, oh, my God, look at that gorgeous mansion. I wish I had 27 rooms so I could use one just for wrapping presents. Ooh, and maybe you could have one for unwrapping presents, too. As you can probably tell houses like that just kind of piss me off and make me want to, like, set stuff on fire a little bit, just a little bit. Dang.

Dang, Witt, tell us how you really feel. Now, if you're a camper in your podcast listening room in one of those houses, I promise Whitney won't commit arson. And, by the way, apropos of nothing, did you know we have a Patreon? Like, at the $10,000 and up category, we actually will travel to you and clean your house for you. Just some food for thought. I'm throwing that out there, you know. I'll be your kid's godmother. We'll nanny for you.

We will watch those kids. But Eby was enchanted by these houses. By one house in particular, in fact, a sprawling mansion that fit into her daydream like Cinderella's foot into that slipper. She didn't know how she was going to do it, but Eby was determined that she was going to live there one day. And I mean, look, we get it. For somebody like Eby who grew up in poverty, it's understandable how she might start

to kind of fixate on wealth. Because to her, maybe money felt like safety. And maybe when you've been traumatized by not having enough to survive, you can get into a headspace where no amount ever feels like enough. People get that way about food, about love, about self-esteem. Right, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Eby wanted that mansion and all the fixings to go with it. But as the years passed and Joe established himself as a doctor,

it became clear to her that he was never going to make enough money to buy a house like that. He was doing well, but he wasn't rich. And rich was what it was going to take. for E.B. to achieve her caviar draves. So, E.B. decided to take matters into her own hands. She'd always liked gambling. She liked the le-o-flah, as the Brits say. So, sorry. So, when the kids got old enough to start school and she had time during the day, she started going to the racetrack. She got a huge buzz off it, which should have been a red flag. If you're getting high off placing bets, you need to shut it down right the fuck now or you're going to end up with a problem.

Eby either didn't know that or didn't care. She loved playing the ponies. She loved buying lotto tickets. It was fun. She'd watch the numbers flash on the TV screen and anytime one matched one of the numbers on her ticket, she'd get that big adrenaline rush. Plus, it was fun to daydream about what she'd do if she won. I actually do love that part myself.

Oh my God, me too. We buy a ticket now and that. and I actually usually forget to even check the numbers, because for me the fun part is just the daydreaming. Like, I know I'm not going to win, right? So the years passed by for Eby and Joe, the kids grew up. At some point, Eby partnered up with her friend Ludmilla and bought a hair salon, which sounds like all kinds of fun. And although she'd never won, she kept on playing the lottery. She and Joe had built a good life together.

They'd raised sons they were proud of. They had a nice home. She had her own business. Joe's practice was going well. people all over Toronto credited him with delivering their babies, and their marriage was still alive and kicking after decades together, even if Eby was still a little insecure in it, trembled by the thought that Joe might have a wandering eye. But Eby had never fully let go of the dreams she'd had when she first set foot on Canadian soil in the 60s. The dream of a wealthy, glamorous, decadent life

still called out to her in her quiet moments. And every week, she bought that lottery ticket. In fact, she and her bestie-slash-business partners started going in together, 50-50, so they could buy a whole mess of tickets and increase their chances. They didn't really expect to win. Nobody ever really expects to win. But then, on a cold day in December 1991, Eby and her friends sat down in front of the TV at the salon to watch the lottery numbers roll across the screen. And as their customers watched in complete astonishment, the numbers lined up. match match match oh my god match when the final number popped up eby and ludmilla shared about a nanoseconds worth of shocked silence and then complete chaos everybody was screaming and jumping up and down nobody could believe what they'd just witnessed the jackpot that day was ten million tax-free dollars and eby and her best friend split it right down the

middle, five million each. In a split second, Eby and Joe's net worth quantum leaped. On the front page of the paper that night, Eby was smiling so hard her face looked like it might break in half. In another picture, she's holding up a glass of champagne, smiling, and wearing a pair of super glam, like oversized sunglasses like a movie star. This was everything she'd ever dreamed of. Eby and Ludmilla promptly shut down the salon and retired. It was time for Ms. Eby to live her best life. But for her, that wasn't all about self-indulgence, not even close. True, the first thing she did was by that spectacular Thornhill mansion she'd been lusting after for years, but right after that, she gave each of her and Joe's sons $800,000 each,

which bought them each a nice house and set them up in business for themselves. She paid for Joe's niece to go to law school. She paid off both her sisters-in-law's houses. She went down to the local Salvation Army and handed out handfuls of $100 bills to people who needed it. It was the kind of thing she dreamed about when she was living in poverty herself decades ago, security for herself, and the chance to help everybody around her. And Eby's friends weren't surprised. As her niece and friend Lori Vona told Investigation Discovery,

Eby knew what it was like to be down and out. She had a very big heart. She was a lovely, lovely lady. According to financial advisor Robert Paglirini, there's a honeymoon phase with lottery winners where they feel like all their problems are solved, and Eby definitely seems to have felt that in the early days of her win. But she might have been a little over-enthusiastic. Within the first six months, she blew through over half her winnings.

But of course, she had a lot to show for it. A gorgeous new dream home, a vacation house, her kids set up for life, beautiful new clothes, and there was still plenty left. Plus, Joe didn't show any interest in retiring from his OBGY in practice. He kept right on working. And before long, now that Eby had retired, she started feeling his absence more than ever before.

In fact, it started to feel like Joe was more married to his work than he was to her. When she complained about the long hours he worked, Joe would just say he needed to build up the business. But, I mean, did he? Number one, he'd already built a successful practice. But number two, they were millionaires now. Why did he feel like he had to keep working? Well, I'll tell you why. In 1997, seven years after Eby's $5 million windfall,

she got a phone call from one of their neighbors at the vacation house. She was like, Eby, sweetheart, I'm so sorry about you and Joe. I had no idea you'd split up. Eby laughed. Well, that's because we haven't. Why would you think we had? The neighbor, probably wishing that a meteor would crash doorhouse and save her from having to finish this conversation, went quiet for a second.

then she said oh eby i'm i'm so sorry joe is up here with another woman there's a whole group of them him and his doctor friends and they've all got their wives or girlfriends with them i just assumed you divorced eby watching her entire marriage flash before her eyes hung up the phone got in her car and hauled ass up to the vacation house and lo and behold there the bastard was see despite joe's frequent assurances that Eby's insecurities were silly and irrational. Our boy had been cheating for years. Worse than that, guess who he was cheating with? His secretary, which in addition to being the most boring cliche thing in the entire

fucking universe, sucked extra hard for Eby because this woman was a friend of hers. Or at least, she thought she was a friend. Right, because obviously what she actually was was a giant hose bag. term. And when Eby showed up at the vacation house to confront him about all this, Joe had the sweet, star-spangled nerve to accuse her of making a scene. A scene? Dear boy, you are lucky I don't set you on fire right here at pool site.

No, shit, right? Most of the shower arguments I have with myself are about unfaithful partners sleeping with their secretaries. Like, I light them up real good. So, of course, with this, the bottom fell out of Eby's world. She'd been afraid of this for years, and he'd always gaslit her about it. Swore up and down that there was nothing going on. She was letting her insecurities run away with her and blah, blah, bullshit, blah.

Now she knew the truth, and it was ugly. She'd lost a friend, and she'd lost all sense of trust in her husband. It must have felt like her whole marriage, or at least the past decade or so, had been a sham. and, like many of us wouldn't, Eby didn't handle it well. She wanted to get back at both of them. On Monday morning, she stormed over to Joe's office and fired the secretary-slash-mistress,

and rather than recognize that she'd made, you know, a not-so-great life choice and take it on the chin, the mistress doubled down. She sued Joe for wrongful termination. Joe's solution to this was to basically hide his assets so she couldn't get at them. He had everything put into Eby's dad. name. Yeah, no campers. Let's just take a second to let that sink in. This man has just

been caught cheating on his wife. The wife, in a fit of anger, fires his mistress. The mistress sues, and his next move is to move all his assets into his pissed-off wife's name. his betrayed wounded to the bone out for bloody vengeance wife's name yep that's the plan okay we were just checking good good plan joe i'm sure that's gonna work out great it's like hiding your stolen money in the bank you just robbed right but i mean in the short term it did seem to work he and his mistress or i assume ex-mistress by this point i don't think she'd suit him if they were still banging. That would be one hell of a court transcript. He and his ex settled the lawsuit and life went on. Joe and Eby stayed together.

Eby's niece Lori said Eby just couldn't picture her life without Joe. She was coming up on 60 and she'd always expected to grow old with the guy. Joe said he was sorry for the affair and I'm sure she wanted to believe him. But Eby was seriously devastated by the betrayal. I don't think Joe realized how much. To me, it seems like Cho thought she was over it, or getting over it anyway, and he went on with his life and career. But in the meantime, Eby started to spiral. Now, y'all remember she always liked to gamble, right? And, I mean, it's not like it hadn't paid off. She won the flippin lottery.

So she started gambling again, this time at casinos. She became infatuated with the slot machines, and what do people often do at casinos? They drink. And the casinos very much encouraged that, because when you get all the, lubed up and uninhibited enough, you're going to spend way more money. After a while, Eby was drinking quite a bit too much, just kind of anesthetizing herself against the pain of Joe's affair. And she wasn't just spending her lottery money.

She was spending Joe's salary, too. And he had no idea, because remember, he'd put all their finances in her name during the lawsuit. And it wasn't just the gambling. Eby also threw in on some investments, and the reason I put that in air quotes is because from the sources we've seen, it sounds like she got scammed at least once, possibly more than once. And then, to help cover her losses, she maxed out her credit and mortgaged both their homes. And of course, she didn't tell Joe about any of it, and apparently he didn't ask.

Y'all cringing yet? Yeah, it was bad. So was this revenge for Joe's affair? I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe it was just a kind of self-destructive behavior, a way to distract herself from her. depression and anxiety. We can do some really ill-advised stuff and we're not in a good headspace. God knows I have. And obviously, you know, we don't know these people, but just from the sources I've seen and the things the people who knew them have said, I get the impression that Joe was just kind of really disconnected as a husband. I don't know if he kept having affairs after the secretary thing ended, but here we have a guy who transfers all the family assets into his wife's

name and then doesn't plug back in at any point to check on things for like years and years. It seems to me like he was just so focused on his work and possibly on his penis's little extracurricular activities that he didn't even notice that his wife was unraveling. Okay, dibs on his penis's little extracurriculars for my folk punk band name. Ooh, or extracurricular penis. I like that one too. Oh, yeah. Anyway, that kind of apathy can be devastating all by itself.

I have a friend who's been through a lot of toxic relationships, and she once told me that hate isn't really the worst thing somebody can feel for you. The worst thing is indifference. And that really resonated with me. I mean, with hate, there's at least some real passion behind it. But with indifference, it's just cold. It's just like this big expressionless glacier of a landscape. It's awful. It's like you don't matter to me.

And I think Eby was feeling that from Joe, and I think she was going out and spending buckets of money to self-medicate a little. She wasn't just spending money, though. Eby had another secret outlet, too, and we're not sure if Joe had any inkling about it at first. She was spending quite a bit of time with another man, a handsome, much younger one, meeting discreetly for dinner and drinks. So now we're fully into middle-aged marital warfare bingo, right? We've got the husband banging his secretary, we've got lots of conspicuous consumption and financial

sneakiness, and now apparently Ms. Eby's got a boy toy. God, y'all get some therapy, please, I am begging you. So this is how the Ron Kayoli's life sort of limped along for the next few years. And then, in 2003, Joe finally decided he'd had enough of delivering babies and it was time to retire. So, like you do, he went to see their financial advisor. He was excited, he told the guy, wanted to shut down the practice, maybe take a trip somewhere warm and beachy. But as he talked, he couldn't help but notice the look on the financial advisor's face, like he was wishing he had a hole to crawl into. What is it, Joe said?

What's wrong? The financial advisor looked sweaty and green. Uh, Mr. Ron Kayole, has Mrs. Ron Kayole? not been keeping you informed about the finances? Oh, man, just imagine that moment. Like, my stomach just clenched thinking about it. You know something's coming that you are not going to like. Just tell me what's going on, Joe said.

The financial advisor handed him some paperwork with a number at the bottom. $200,000. That was all they had left. It should have been at least a couple million, the doctor's life savings from his decades of practice. This was a separate account from the lottery winnings. This was his retirement savings, and it was almost gone, decimated by EB spending and bad investments.

Like, 200 grand sounds like a lot until you realize it's all you got left to live on for the rest of your life. And you could live another 20 to 30 years. I mean, we've talked about this all the time in like murder for hire cases or like murder for insurance money cases. It's like, that's not that much money. Dr. Ron Caholi felt like somebody just hit him with a taser. There goes the Caribbean vacation, bro, and there goes retirement too.

Once he recovered from the initial shock, Joe was livid. He rushed home to Eby and demanded she explain herself, which she didn't, really. She basically told him to fuck off. She was tired and didn't want to talk about it. Joe wasn't having it. He ordered her to give him access to the account where they're keeping her lottery savings. He was entitled to everything that was left, he told her, to replace what she'd squandered. And there should have been about two million left based on what he knew she'd already spent,

the gifts to their sons and whatnot. Eby, probably feeling mammothly pissed off at the fact that this was the only emotion Joe had shown her in years, told him to shove it up his ass and refuse to tell him the account number. So Joe decided to hit her where he knew it would hurt her the most. Her beautiful house, the Thornhill mansion she'd walked past every day when they were younger, daydreaming about what it would be like to live there. That house was part of who Eby was. It was her heart and Joe knew it. I'm going to sell it, he told her.

And he meant it. The next morning he'd made an appointment with a realtor. Before long, he'd found a new, much smaller house to buy. Once Eby realized Joe was serious about selling the Dreamhouse and understood how mad he was at her, she spiraled down even further. Her drinking got worse. Her mental state got worse. She felt like her world was slowly collapsing around her.

And she wasn't easy to deal with when she got like this. One of her adult sons would later tell a reporter that Eby had a dark side when she drank a lot. She'd get an acid tongue and lash out at people. It's like when she drank enough for that inhibition, to drop away, the perfect facade she worked so hard to maintain would slip, and all the poison she'd been holding in would spill out. So things were, let's call it tense, in the Roncaoli home when July 20th, 2003 rolled around. Joe had made an appointment to meet the realtor for lunch and finalized the papers on the new,

smaller house. Eby came to the lunch meeting, too, and the realtor immediately noticed that something was off. She was a hot mess, clearly devastated about selling. her house and clearly intoxicated. According to Toronto star reporter Sam Pazano, quote, she was acting loopy and she was asking, would you still love me? I love you. Do you still love me? Joe did what spouses tend to do in those situations, apologize to the realtor and ushered Eby home. Hours later, a 911 call came into the local dispatch center. I just found my wife, Joe told them. She's not breathing. I'm a doctor. She wasn't feeling well and I came in to check on her and she's not

breathing. Paramedics arrived to the Roncaole's big gorgeous home to find the doctor's 61-year-old wife, Eby, dead on the sofa. It was strange. She'd clearly been dead for at least a couple of hours, but there wasn't any obvious cause of death. She just looked like she'd fallen asleep and hadn't woken up again. It was sad. I mean, imagine just coming in and finding your wife like that. Eby Roncaoli had been a loving wife, a mother of two grown sons, and a generous, much-loved auntie and friend. People were going to feel this loss terribly. Joe told the paramedics about going out to lunch earlier with their realtor and how they'd left early because Eby hadn't been feeling like herself. When they got home, he said, Eby said she wanted to lie down and rest on the sofa.

He'd covered her up with a blanket and left her to nap, and when he came back downstairs to check on her a couple hours later, she was gone. There was nothing he could do. to bring her back. Now, it was up to the medical examiner to figure out why she had died. Eby's friends and loved ones were shocked. She hadn't mentioned any major health issues, and when the Emmy conducted the autopsy, she discovered that there actually weren't any. Eby Roncaoli had been in really robust health for a 61-year-old lady. She should have lived a good long time. So what killed her? Well, that might have stayed a mystery if it hadn't been for the sharp eyes of coroner Dr. Susan Bellow. As Dr. Bello examined Eby's

body, she spotted first one tiny puncture mark, then another and another. One on her wrist, one on her knee, and one on her foot. Now, for an experienced medical examiner, the first thought is probably going to be drug abuse. Some people will inject the drug in places where the marks are less likely to show to kind of conceal what's going on. Dr. Bello had been informed that Eby drank a lot, that she'd been depressed in the weeks leading up to her death. So she wondered, was this a suicide? Or maybe just an accidental OD. So she sent off some of Eby's blood for toxicology, and when the results came back, they were stunning. There were no recreational drugs in E.B.'s system, but there were scarily high doses of lydicane and bupivocane, local anesthetics. Lidicane is the kind of thing you inject

to numb the area for a minor medical procedure, and bupivocane campers is one of the drugs you use for an epidural during labor and delivery. Now, what was it Dr. Joe did for a living again? O.B.G.Y.N. Hmm. Yeah. That's what I thought. Interesting. Dr. Bello listed E.B.'s cause of death as multi-drug toxicity, in particular, a massive overdose of lydicane.

And these were not drugs you could buy on the street. They weren't recreational. Nobody's buying bupivocaine to shoot up. So what did that spell? Homicide. That's what. And the most likely suspect was Dr. Roncaoleum. Who else would have such easy access to those two drugs? As the investigation into Eby's murder was just beginning to gather steam,

Dr. Joe was discovering some unexpected truths about his late wife's private life. Apparently, he figured that once Eby was dead, his financial problems would be solved. He could get his hands on her leftover lottery millions and retire to the Caribbean or whatever the fuck it was he wanted. Oh, think I hear a sad trombone approaching. Yeah. So Joe knew E.B. had a safety deposit box at the bank, and he'd been assuming all along this is where she'd stashed the leftover lottery winnings. Or at least the paperwork on the bank account where she kept them. But when he got into the box after Eby's death, our boy got a rude awakening. The box was empty, except for some paperwork on one of Eby's failed investments. Wamp, wamp. Oh, and by the way, it was the day after her death. That's how fast he got to that bank. So Joe, furious that he still hasn't figured out where all the leftover lotto money is, went tearing through the house, looking at all Eby's private paperwork, and he found something that knocked him on his ass.

Eby had been lying about her age for their entire relationship. She was eight years older than she said she was. Eight years. That's a big lie. And it made Joe wonder why she'd done it. What was she trying to hide? But Eby's biggest secret was still to come. One afternoon, Joe answered the phone to a polite, young-sounding man asking for Eby. It was the young man she'd been whining and dining. But he wasn't her lover. He was her son. Whoa. Until this moment, Joe wrongful. Kalei had no idea that his wife had been married before she met him to an Italian former football player named Stelio Zuponsich. And she and Stelio had a son. When the marriage broke up,

Eby had made a baffling, heartbreaking choice to leave two-year-old Stelio Jr. with his dad and go on with her life. I don't know why. There's a frustrating lack of information about that part of the story. I don't know if she was just young and immature and not ready to be a mom or the relationship was toxic and she was scared to try and take the kid. I don't know. And without knowing the details, I don't feel like it's my place to judge. What I do know is that it haunted her. I think she was ashamed of it and she felt crushingly guilty, so much so that when she met Joe Roncaoli, she lied to him about her age. and he had no idea she'd been married before.

Stelio Jr. went on to become one of Canada's most celebrated hockey players, but abandoning him tormented Eby. Eventually, she reached out to him and they reconnected. And when Eby won the lottery, it gave her a small way to soothe some of the guilt she'd carried about leaving him. One night over dinner, she handed him a check for $2 million. $2 million of her $5 million win as a no-strings-attached gift and she never told anyone else about it.

Holy shit. So she actually didn't keep much of that lottery win at all, did she? Like each of her and Joe's sons got $800,000. Plus, you know, the niche she put through law school, the sisters, houses she paid off, add this $2 million gift to Steli-O Jr. And you are not left with much. So I guess that's why she started dipping into Joe's retirement

savings to support her gambling habit. Yikes. So, of course, this news was like a bomb going off in Joe's face. All those leftover lotto millions he thought he was going to have once Eby was dead, those didn't exist. All he had left was that $200,000. That's it. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir. Yeah, and worse than that, the police were zeroing in on him as the prime suspect in Eby's murder, and they hauled him in for questioning. According to the Toronto Star, Joe told the investigators that Eby was a compulsive liar. He said if Eby said it was raining outside, you'd have to go outside to make sure it was raining. And he dropped another interesting little firecracker, too, about the way they first met in the

60s. Remember, we told you he met her when she came into his ER for medical treatment. Now, Joe told the detectives, the police brought her in. She was on her way to jail. He thought it was for fraud, he said, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure. He'd been captivated by how beautiful she was, and after she bailed out, he called her up and asked her to dinner. Wow. All righty then.

Now, mind you, the only source we have on that is Eby's murderer, so take it with a huge grain of salt. Ah, yes. It's the, she had it coming because she was kind of a bitch defense. Great. Love to see it. You killed a defenseless woman over money, you insufferable, fucking greedy, cockwamble. Yeah.

And after like cheating on her for years and years and like being an absentee husband, everything, so yeah. In between trashing his dead wife's name, though, Joe did admit that he gave E.B. some pain medication the night she died. She wasn't feeling well, he said, and he was going to try to draw some blood to test and figure out what was wrong. He gave her a couple of injections, he said, to numb her for the blood draw, but he ended up not being able to find a vein, which is probably the... the only part of this scenario that actually makes sense to me, because doctors tend to suck at that

in my experience. Like, get a nurse to draw your blood any old day. Now, any of y'all in the medical field are shaking your heads right now, I'm sure, because doctors are absolutely not allowed to do this. Like, just because you're a doctor, it doesn't mean you can run medical tests on your loved ones at home or, like, administer drugs to them by injection. Like, what are you going to do? Show up to the lab with two vials of your wife's blood? Ew, no. Yeah, I'm picturing. I'm just like sauntering up to the lost laptex with like lint-covered vials of semi-congealed blood out of his pockets. Like, yo, dudes, you mind taking these babies for a spin?

Exactly. It's like, take her to the doctor, you fucking weirdo, if she's so sick. So anyway, Joe didn't have any explanation for why the level of lydicane and EB's system was so astronomically high, or why he would have given her a drug most commonly used in epidurals for people in the process of squeezing out a baby. And he made another startling admission. Contrary to what he told the 911 dispatcher that he'd left Eby alone to nap and then come back to find her not breathing, he now confessed that while he was poking around on her

trying to find a vein, he suddenly noticed she'd stopped breathing. And he hadn't tried to revive her. A doctor didn't try to revive his dying wife. instead he waited two hours before calling 911 which I just can only assume was because he wanted to make sure she was dead which is just disgusting like you sick prick and of course he didn't say anything to the paramedics about shooting his wife full of lydicane and bupivocaine which I would think would be information they would need

yet now he was trying to claim he was only treating his wife's alleged illness forget about the fact that the autopsy didn't show any Eby's niece later said he didn't want anybody to know what he was doing. He was very sneaky about the whole thing. That makes me believe he'd engineered this. And I completely agree. At the very least, he had to bring those drugs home and a syringe to inject them with. And these are not drugs that the average household just keeps lying around.

But despite this obvious indicator of premeditation, the prosecution weren't confident in their case. They just didn't think they could prove first-degree murder. and prosecutors don't like taking cases they can't win. So they compromised. They took him to trial for manslaughter, meaning they believed he killed his wife but weren't sure whether he meant to or not. Oh, he meant to all right.

He absolutely did. They just didn't think they could prove it. And sometimes some prison time is better than the risk of an acquittal. 75-year-old Dr. Joseph Roncaoli was convicted of manslaughter. in 2008, five years after the death of his wife. The judge sentenced him to seven years in prison. At his sentencing, the judge didn't pull any punches. He said,

This was more an act of murder than manslaughter. Yep. Toronto Star reporter Sam Pazano seems to agree. He told investigation discovery that Joe seemed to have two sides, one lovable and one reptilian, cold, callous, and calculating. Seven years is a pretty piddly-ass sentence for a cold-blooded murder, but six years into it, Joe Roncaoli died in prison.

So it ended up being a life sentence after all. Rip. And Joe and Eby's niece Lori thinks he ended up right where he belonged. She said, I think Dr. Joe felt he was above everybody else. He could give life by delivery. a baby, and he could take a life. That actually sounds exactly like the kind of logic

a narcissist might use to justify murder. Yeah, definitely. It seems like Joe Roncaoli felt entitled to kill Eby. She'd spent all his money, so he deserved to kill her and take the rest of hers.

And as complicated and flawed a person as Eby may have been, there's something kind of satisfying about the thought of him opening that safe deposit box and seeing nothing but paperwork. Eby's revenge. It's almost like an O. Henry story or something. Exactly. Tragic irony.

And I think it's important to remember that E.B. was very well loved by her family. She was somebody who'd overcome a lot of hardship to come to Canada and build a new life for herself. And when she got this amazing financial windfall, she didn't squander at all in herself. She gave almost every penny

of it away. How many of us would do that? So that was a wild one, right campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Camp Fire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Karen, Alec, Dave, Kristen, Stephanie, Melissa, N, and Alicia. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free at least a day early,

sometimes two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com

slash true crime campfire. And for great TCC merch, visit the true crime campfire store at spreadshirt.com.