True Crime Campfire - The Secret Life: The Murder of Stefanie Rabinowitz

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

It’s almost impossible to know someone perfectly. Everyone has their private thoughts and hidden moments from their past, and this is usually no problem at all, it’s all just inconsequential things. Usually, but not always. Because some people don’t just have little harmless secrets, they have whole separate lives that the people close to them know nothing about. And the tension between those two lives can have deadly consequences. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets.   Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: Ken Englade, Everybody’s Best Friend Forensic Files, S10E27, “Summer Obsession” https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/05/25/the-double-life-of-craig-rabinowitz-devoted-husband-murder-suspect/de019f6c-5687-434a-9f5f-e96c18f195fb/ 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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. It's almost impossible to know someone perfectly. Everyone has their private thoughts and hidden moments from their past, and this is usually no problem at all.

It's just inconsequential things. Usually, but not always. Because some people don't just have little harmless secrets. They have whole separate lives that the people close to them know nothing about. And the tension between those two lives can have deadly consequences. This is The Secret Life, the murder of Stephanie Rabinowitz. So, campers, for this one, we're in the well-heeled township of Lower Merion on Philadelphia's main line. On Wednesday, April 30, 1997, a little after midnight, 9-1-1-1-1-7,

dispatchers received a frantic call from a guy named Craig Rabinowitz. I have an emergency, Craig said. My wife, something happened to her in the tub. She's in the tub. I can't get her to respond. Please come. The dispatcher asked if Craig knew CPR. Yes, he said, and start using it, the dispatcher said. Ambulance is on the way. It was standard procedure for a police officer to also respond to these calls, and Officer James Driscoll was there before the paramedics. He hurried out of his call. grabbing a portable oxygen tank. Craig Rabinowitz and his wife Stephanie lived in a small but beautiful house on winding way,

a modest place by the standards of Marion, but that's very much a relative statement. This was one of the most affluent communities in the country, and today their home is worth well over a million dollars. Light shone out of the open front door as Officer Driscoll hurried up the driveway, but the screen door was still closed. Driscoll hammered on the doorframe and called out, Police, hello, is anybody there? He heard a weak voice call out, I'm upstairs, and Driscoll rushed in.

In the small bathroom at the top of the stairs, Craig Rabinowitz was kneeling at the half-full bathtub, holding a naked woman in his arms. Her head lulled to one side, and her face was blue. Craig stared at Driscoll, eyes wide. She was so heavy, he said. Between them, they got Stephanie out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor. Driscoll fixed the oxygen mask to her face and started CPR. In another room, an infant started to cry. The baby, Craig said. It's the baby we've woken her up.

This was his and Stephanie's young daughter, Haley. The bathroom was cramped. Driscoll sent Craig away to Haley and continued with the CPR. Three minutes later, the paramedics arrived and took over. They moved Stephanie out into the hallway so they'd have more room to work, but she was unresponsive. We're taking her to Lankanoe, one of the paramedics said. This was Lankanow Medical Center, a hospital less than two miles away.

As they were ready to leave with Stephanie on a gurney, Craig reappeared with Haley screaming in his arms. He seemed panicked. What are they doing? Where are they taking her? To the hospital, Driscoll said. You should go too. Craig left Haley with some neighbors who had come to the door when they saw the ambulance, and at Driscoll's suggestion, Craig quickly changed out of his way. wet clothes. And Driscoll wanted to get a quick report on what had happened before Craig left for the

hospital. Steffy, my wife, was having trouble sleeping, Craig said. She went to take a bath. Where were you, Driscoll said. I was in the master bedroom watching a hockey game. When she didn't come out, I went to check on her and found her in the tub. Her head was underwater. I don't know how it happened. Driscoll asked, you didn't see anything, hear anything? I heard a thump, Craig said. I thought it was the shampoo bottle falling. It always does that. I should have gone to help her when I heard the thump. Was there anyone else in the house, Driscoll said?

No, just me and Steph and the baby. I closed up for the night like I usually do. Locked the doors and then I went upstairs. As Craig finished changing, Driscoll went back to the bathroom to take another look. A couple of things were already bugging him. One was that Stephanie, in addition to her wedding ring, had been wearing a gold watch and a bracelet. on each wrist. That was odd. Most people would take those off before getting in the bathtub.

The other thing was that Driscoll was certain the bathroom floor had been bone dry when he'd first arrived. Craig Rabinowitz was a big, strong-looking dude. It seemed really unlikely that he wasn't able to get his petite little wife out of the bath, but not impossible. It can be incredibly hard to move fully limp human bodies. Thing is, if he tried to lift her out, wouldn't at least some water have splashed out of the tub? None had. Driscoll jotted down these observations in his notebook for a detective to look at later. That detective was Charles Craig, who arrived at the house while Craig Rabinowitz was at the hospital. He looked around. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of forced entry, the back door and windows were all locked. Craig had told Driscoll that he'd run down to open the front

door after calling 911. The detective didn't see any pill-bocked. that might have been used in a suicide attempt, no indication of drug use or drinking beyond a couple of empty beer cans. There were muddy footprints to and from the bathroom from the paramedics and police, but nothing seemed out of place. Nothing struck Detective Craig as suspicious, except that an apparently healthy 29-year-old woman had died in her own home. That's a rare occurrence. Craig and Stephanie had a tight circle of friends. At the hospital, Craig made frantic calls to them, as well as to Stephanie's parents and his own mom. A couple of their friends were dubious at first, because Craig could be a huge drama queen,

and there had been at least one other instance where he had called everyone in the middle of the night about some huge crisis that turned out to be a big bunch of nothing. But it was quickly clear that that wasn't the case here. There had been a terrible accident. Craig was at the hospital with Stephanie, and she might not make it. Right after the first of their friends arrived, three doctors came to Craig to give him the bad news. They'd been unable to revive Stephanie. She was dead. Craig slumped into one of the chairs.

I can't go through this again, he muttered. His father had died of cancer three years before. He buried his face in his hands and started sobbing. sobbing, but not crying. Making the noises. Exactly. When Detective Charles Craig got to the hospital, the doctor who'd pronounced Stephanie dead told him she hadn't seen any indication that this had been anything other than an accidental death. But Stephanie didn't appear to have any contusion or other head wound that she might have gotten from falling in the bathtub. She'd been a healthy 29-year-old. Her death was a mystery, and that meant the county coroner would want to perform

an autopsy. Craig and Stephanie were both Jewish, and Stephanie's parents were fairly conservative in their faith. They didn't like the idea of an autopsy, and would have much preferred to bury Stephanie quickly, as was tradition. But that was a fight for another time. The group escorted Craig home and started preparing to sit Shiva, the week-long period of mourning. There was no kind of suspicious death investigation yet, and certainly no suspicion at all among Craig and Stephanie's friends and family. So when they got back to the house on winding way, they didn't think twice about cleaning up all the mess left by so many people coming in and out. They all felt like their job was to

get Craig through this in one piece. The next morning, Stephanie's family contacted a funeral home, and the funeral home started pressing for her body to be released for a quick burial. But the coroner wasn't having it. A young woman had died for no obvious reason. There had to be an autopsy. The pathologist was Dr. Ian Hood, a New Zealander who was well respected in his field. He found indications of foul play almost immediately. This was no slight on the ER doctors who hadn't seen anything amiss on Stephanie's body. Some signs of violence don't appear until hours after death. This can include patikia, pen to... prick red marks that indicate subcutaneous hemorrhaging, which often appear on victims of strangulation.

Dr. Hood noticed them right away in the corners of Stephanie's eyes, on her eyelids, and on her forehead. There were no surface signs of bruising around her neck, but from inside, Hood found deep bruising in the soft tissue there, just below her jaw. He also found bruises on Stephanie's right knee in the sides of her arms. He thought she might have been strangled to death in the bathtub and banged her leg and arms against the sides as she struggled. You can absolutely see that. Like if you think about where those bruises were, that makes perfect sense that that's what happened. From her stomach contents, Hood was able to estimate that Stephanie had been dead for four or five hours before being officially pronounced as such at the hospital. That meant she'd died between 8.30 and 930 on Tuesday night,

three or four hours before Craig had called 911 for help. And his story about Stephanie taking a bath because she couldn't sleep was a lie. As you can probably tell already, this story is not an intricate who done it. By the afternoon of the day Stephanie had been pronounced dead, investigators were already confident they knew who the killer was, Stephanie's husband Craig. But believing that and proven it are two very different things.

The investigators needed to know why Craig had killed his wife. Police and prosecutors were determined to move forward carefully because the murder of a young wife on the main line looked like the kind of case that might blow up in the media. They got to work on a search warrant for the house, and Craig came to the police station at around six to make a formal statement. His story was the same as he told Officer Driscoll at the house, although with more details.

They'd gone upstairs at around 11 p.m., he said. According to the pathologist, Stephanie was already dead by then, but Craig said he sat on the end of the bed watching hockey, while Stephanie, an attorney, thought about what she'd wear to work the next day. then she'd gone to have a bath, and shortly afterward Craig had found her submerged and unresponsive. The pathologist had also suggested to detectives that Stephanie may have been drugged before being moved to the bathtub and strangled, waking up during the attack, but unable to struggle as strongly as she might have otherwise. A talk screen had been ordered, but the results weren't in yet.

The detectives asked if Stephanie had been taking any medication, and Craig said, yeah, they both took an over-the-counter sleep aid, but it didn't work too well. Craig had gotten a prescription for Ambien from his doctor. In fact, he'd filled this prescription on Monday, just one day before Stephanie's death. He'd taken a pill on Monday night, but had fumbled the bottle and spilled some of the others into the toilet. There'd been three left in the bottle, but when he'd checked earlier on Wednesday, it had been empty. He didn't know if Stephanie had taken the pills, but obviously that was what he was suggesting. I mean, who else would have taken him?

pill bottles were one of the things Detective Craig had specifically been looking for when he'd gone to Craig and Stephanie's house and he hadn't seen any. Craig's story stank like a dead flounder. Yeah, don't you hate it when you just fling your pill bottle and some of them land conveniently in the toilet and then the rest just disappear right before your wife dies? Like it happens to me all the time. Very relatable. Happens to everybody. The detectives interviewing him were certain he had not. lost a bunch of pills down the toilet. He'd used them to dose Stephanie without her knowledge. But they weren't quite ready to make Craig aware that they knew Stephanie had been murdered,

so they didn't press the matter for the moment. Craig said, he and Stephanie didn't have any problems. We never had an argument, he said. We never had any problems. We were best friends. They'd hear the same thing from the couple's friends. Nobody thought Craig and Stephanie had any problems. When asked about life insurance, Craig answered readily enough, both he and Stephanie had policies worth about a million and a half dollars, most of which they'd taken out after Haley was born. In plenty of other spousal death cases, those amounts would immediately have set alarm bells ringing,

but they weren't out of line for an apparently wealthy young couple in Marion. The detectives got Craig to repeat that he'd locked up the house before going to bed. When they finally told him that they knew Stephanie had been murdered, the most obvious excuse Craig could use was that someone else had killed her. The investigators wanted it nailed down in writing that the house had been securely locked up. Even though it was less than 24 hours after his wife died, throughout the interview, Craig had been calm, bordering on cold. That was about to change. After Craig Rabinowitz signed his statement, Detective Craig locked eyes with him and said,

We have a little problem. He told him that the autopsy had shown that Stephanie's death was no accident. She'd been murdered, strangled to death in the bathtub. Craig had brought a couple of lawyer friends with him, and all three just gaped silently for a few moments at that. To indicate just how inconceivable it was to their friends that Craig might have hurt Stephanie, the first thing one of the lawyers blurted out was, oh my God, Stephanie strangled herself. The detectives explained that that wasn't really possible. Then Detective Craig asked Rabinowitz straight up, did you strangle Stephanie? Craig went white as a sheet and

his mouth dropped open. The detectives couldn't tell if he was going to speak or puke. Before he could do either, his other lawyer friend said, that's it, don't answer, don't answer anything, which honestly was excellent advice. Oh yeah. Craig was free to leave, but before he did, the detectives told him they'd be arriving at winding way shortly to execute a search warrant. Craig might want to ask his friends and family to get out of there for a little while, but he didn't. When he got home, with the house still full of people, he went straight to the bedroom and shut himself in. He'd sworn his lawyer friends to secrecy on the drive back, so they awkwardly refused to answer any questions. They took this whole vows between bros thing too seriously, didn't even tell their wives.

Guys, your spouse outranks your buddy when it comes. to major news like that. Oh, yeah. With maybe a few extreme, extreme exceptions, like if something is just super embarrassing, like for the friend or whatever, if you tell me something, you need to assume, I'm telling Mr. Whitney, okay?

That's just the way it is. It was part of our wedding vows. I promise to always share the hot goss as soon as it drops, right? It's important. When the cops showed up for the search, they were unexpected and unwelcome, receiving frosty glares from mourners who couldn't think of any reason why they should be there.

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Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, an army scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old-school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time. And when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make.

This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s. And man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the Glass Cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dome. Most of what the investigators took away was paperwork, mostly related to Craig's business, CNC supplies, and checkbooks. That meant that the next part of the investigation would be tediously going through papers, or so the investigators thought.

On Thursday, there was a memorial service for Stephanie, and Craig furtively told two of Stephanie's closest friends that the authorities were claiming she'd been strangled, and that they were trying to frame him, for her death. He said the prosecutor wanted a high-profile case so he could run for district attorney. More urgently, Craig told them he needed a good lawyer, which would be expensive. Would they be able to help him? Of course they would. Craig was like family, just as close with them as Stephanie had been. He'd babysat their kids. He'd have checks from them by the end of the day. Do you remember how Stephanie

used to always wear jewelry, he asked them. Her watch. Remember her watch? She always wore her watch, even in the shower. Do you remember? They did not, in fact, remember that. How would they? But they also didn't know yet that Stephanie had still been wearing her jewelry, including her watch when she was found dead in the bathtub. Craig was trying to build some cover story for that Audity. By Saturday, the fact that Stephanie had been murdered had leaked to the newspapers, and although Craig wasn't named as a suspect, you didn't have to read too far between the lines to see what was going on. There's no sign to forced entry. Authorities believed she'd known her killer. Who did that leave? Among their extended friend group, there began to be a few guilty

whispers. What if he actually did it? On Monday, Stephanie was buried. Earlier in the day, prosecutors had decided they already had enough for an arrest. They called Craig's lawyers to tell them, and he agreed to turn himself in right after the funeral. Less than a week after Stephanie's death, Craig was in a cell at Eagleville Prison. By the end of the day, authorities would be even more certain that they'd made the right call in arresting him. Stephanie's million and a half life insurance policy wasn't unusual for wealthy Mary and Yuppies, but that afternoon, investigators learned that a million dollar portion of that had gone into effect just three weeks before her death.

And right after that, they got an anonymous call. Craig, the caller said, was a frequent visitor to a strip club named Delilah's Den. Rabinowitz was there a lot, the caller said, and I mean a lot. He had a thing going with one of the dancers. For a murder investigation, this kind of stuff is like strike in gold. There hadn't been the slightest whiff of Craig being involved in. any kind of affair. But, you know, it was also just a phone call. The detective talked the caller into meeting in the food court of a New Jersey mall. He was convincing. He was dating one of the

dancers at Delilah's, and those ladies talked among themselves about their various clients. Rabinowitz apparently came to Delilah's two or three times a week, in the afternoons when he was supposedly working, and he only had eyes for one of the dancers, a young blonde with the stage name of summer. Their anonymous source described her as Craig's girlfriend. Three detectives went to check out Delilah's the next day. Delilah's was moderately upscale by strip club standards and now shares a strip mall close to the Delaware River with an enterprise car rental place, a remax realtors, and a dry cleaners. Back in 1997, there was a blockbuster video right next door. The glamour was all inside, or at least the colored lights and deafening 80s rock music were.

The detectives visited in the early afternoon. There were just a few guys in there, drinking beer and eating cheeseburgers while they watched a half-naked lady twirl around on a pole. Delilah's Den was a successful club. They're still open today. They operated kind of like a softcore Dave and Busters with their own currency, Delilah's dollars, which customers bought and used instead of cash. But one Delilah's dollar actually cost a dollar $1.15. So when a customer stuck a 20 into the G-string of a pretty young thing, it was actually $23. At the end of the night, the dancers swapped their Delilah's dollar tips for real money, minus that extra 15%, which the club kept.

That's a pretty good racket. If a guy was a good customer, meaning he spent a lot of money and didn't creep anybody out too much, he was given a card granting access to the champagne room, where he could spend some private time with a dancer, as long as he also bought a bottle of champagne. which in 1997 was at least $80, and I bet it's a lot more now. Apparently, they charged $13 for one freaking can of Red Bull, so you can imagine what the champagne runs to.

They met with the club's manager in her office, and she told them that Craig Rabinowitz had been visiting Delilah's regularly for about nine months, but since the new year, he'd started coming a lot more often, three or more times every week, arriving for lunch and staying for hours. He was a big spender, usually heading straight for the champagne room and buying a $206 bottle of Periaz-Jouet. He was a big tipper all around.

On every visit, he spent between $300 and $1,000, and that wasn't even counting food and drinks. Later, after they had a chance to go thoroughly through Craig's finances, they'd find out that over that nine months, he'd spent at least $56,000 there. 29,000 of that since the new year. Can you imagine dropping that kind of scratch on like boobs? It's just amazing to me. They asked about Craig's supposed girlfriend, Summer, who turned out to be a 24-year-old named Shannon Reinhert. The club manager didn't know her all that well. She started here four or five years ago as a waitress, then moved up to dancer, she said. She's very popular, one of our headliners. She does a number with a live snake that customers really like. One of the detectives asked, and Rabinowitz had something going with her? The manager shrugged. Who knows? He spent a lot of money on her. She was the only girl he was interested in. Shannon Reiner lived with her five-year-old

son and her mom in a middle-class suburb in Northeastern Philly. She was nervous about talking to the police and asked them to wait until her lawyer arrived. They settled in on brand-new sofas in the living room. This is nice furniture, Detective Craig said. New? Yeah, Summer said, kind of evasively. Actually, it was a gift. Oh, a gift, Detective Craig said. Boyfriend? It was a gift from a friend, Shannon said, making sure they caught the emphasis.

Surprise, surprise, the friend was Craig Rabinowitz, who'd bought the furniture for her as a housewarming gift in January. He'd bought her other gifts, flowers and jewelry, more furniture for Shannon's kid, and tipped her hundreds of dollars every time he saw her at Delilah's. Last time he'd been in the club had been on the previous Monday, the day before Stephanie's death, he'd given Shannon $600. And what did you do for that? One of the detectives asked. The implication was clear.

We just talked, Shannon said. I've never had any kind of sex with Craig. We're just good friends. The investigators would remain dubious about that, especially when they later found evidence of Craig repeatedly paying for hotel rooms close to Delilah's den. But the fact is, it's not that uncommon for rich customers to give thousands of dollars to a dancer just for her company. And as we'll see in a minute, Craig definitely knew other places to find sex workers if he wanted company in those hotels. Shannon told the detectives that the last time she'd actually seen Craig was the previous Friday, which parked up their ears.

That was the day after Stephanie's memorial service, but before her funeral. Craig hadn't come into the club, but had been waiting outside in his car for Shannon to arrive. I got to talk to you, Craig had said. My wife died. I just buried my wife. Shannon started crying and asked who was taking care of the baby. Craig said he had a babysitter taking care of her at home. Shaking now, Shannon leaned into the car and hugged him, but he just sat there. She was the only one doing any crying or showing much emotion at all.

That was the last time she'd spoken with him. In the early 90s, a police lieutenant named Joe Kelly and his wife Jane ran a prostitution ring, with Jane and some other ladies booking clients through various escort services. Shackles and bye-bye babes catered to edgier clients, while the Kellys used executive retreat and J.P. Tiffany's to try and draw in the high rollers. I got to say, I do kind of love J.P. Tiffany's, because I think they just sat down and said, okay, we need something that says money in class and then just smush together. J.P. Morgan and Tiffany's. Nailed it. It's like a teenager's understanding of class.

Craig, anyway, had been an occasional client of J.P. Tiffany's since 1989, which meant he'd used the service both before and after he married Stephanie. Sometimes Jane Kelly had come to the apartment he and Stephanie shared while she was out at work. In 1992, Craig was arrested as a John, but was granted immunity in exchange for testifying against Jane. The Kellys took a plea deal, so Craig never had to testify in front of a jury, but there was still a transcript from a preliminary hearing where Craig detailed his various encounters with sex workers. Somehow, Craig had managed to keep his arrest and testimony completely hidden from Stephanie and

all their friends and family. His secrets wouldn't stay that way for long, though. Craig's bail hearing took place two days after he turned himself in, a this is for Stephanie's murder. His defense team painted the picture that all of Craig and Stephanie's friends thought was accurate. He was a devoted husband in an idyllic loving marriage, a new father with deep ties to the community, including a successful business and a valuable house that he was willing to put up as collateral for his bond.

The prosecutors tore it all to shreds, which was not hard. Craig had used sex workers both before and after his marriage to Stephanie. He'd been spending tens of thousands of dollars at a strip club and was apparently dating one of the dancers behind Stephanie's back. The house on winding way was mortgaged beyond its actual value. There was no equity there and it was worthless as collateral. And as for Craig's business, C&C supplies, investigators hadn't been able to find any evidence that it even existed.

His request for bail depended on his good character. After all this, it wasn't just refused. his defense team withdrew it entirely to avoid a headline-making public hearing that they'd inevitably lose. And this, of course, means he was lying through his teeth to his defense attorneys, which is so dumb. Don't lie to your defense attorney. They can't help you if you're going to do that, you know. Even without the public hearing, the details of Craig's life made their way into the newspapers. Among the couple's friends, those whispered doubts about Craig's possible guilt turned into anger. people started calling the bank to cancel those checks they'd written to support Craig's legal defense.

It seemed clear that the Craig Rabinowitz they thought they knew didn't exist at all. All their sympathy was now with poor Stephanie. Stephanie Newman had been a bright, ambitious, kind of intense kid. She won a national merit scholarship in high school, then went to college at Bryn Mard with the aim of becoming a doctor, but her freshman year revealed a phobia about needles, so she switched from pre-exhaired. pre-med to political science, graduating with honors. After that, she went to law school at Temple University and, again, graduated with honors. Right after passing the bar, she was scooped up by a prestigious Center City law firm to start what promised to be a great career. Throughout most of

those achievements, she had Craig Rabinowitz right by her side. When she was 16, Stephanie had spent the summer at Camp Wahelho near Gettysburg as a counselor in training. She got friendly with a counselor at the neighboring camp for boys, Camp Comet Trails. This was Craig Rabinowitz, a 20-year-old student, a temple. After summer camp was done, they went out for a movie. Then Craig asked her to go to a flyers game with him because nothing sparks true passion quite like the possibility of seeing some Canadian teeth sliding across the ice. Hell yeah. Stephanie said yes, but when the night of the game rolled around, she was ready to ditch. She wasn't sure she wanted to keep seeing Craig, that little voice, little voice was talking. Her mom, Ann, told her, oh no, now you made a commitment. You have to go.

Just probably what a lot of moms would say in that situation, especially back then. Mine would have. So she went. And after that, they were paired up, Craig and Stephanie. Anne encouraged her daughter to date other people before committing to one guy, but got the classic teenager response. Stephanie just rolling her eyes and ignoring her. Seven years after they met, when Stephanie was 23, she She and Craig got married. Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027-bolt and 2026 Equinox EV models.

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Patrick Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Craig seemed like a nice enough guy, but kind of an odd match for the high-achieving Stephanie. He'd coasted indifferently through high school and dropped out at Temple soon after he met her. He devoted a lot more energy to playing first base on the community center softball team than he ever did to work, drifting from one job to another. He was lazy and really just wanted to sit around and watch hockey and baseball.

But like so many dead beats before him, he also had champagne taste. He got his clothes from pricey taste. He bought expensive season tickets for the flyers. And when he and Stephanie got married, with most of their friends still in college, he filled his wedding registry with expensive stuff like Waterford Crystal Sets, Ralph Lauren Tows. I think we registered at Target. We were young and poor and so were our friends. Status was hugely important to Craig. When they went to weddings, he'd get all pouty if they weren't treated as among the most important guests. Because, you know, somebody else's wedding is all about you, Craig. Have you ever heard of a guest zilla? You know, like your bridezilla? He's a guest zilla. For a few years, he told everyone he was working on opening a summer camp for kids, but it went nowhere. It wasn't until 1990, a year after he and Stephanie got married, that he started on a real career, and you need to imagine some air quotes around real there. A real career. He and a friend, also named

named Craig, started C&C vending, a company that distributed latex gloves to health care professionals. The partnership soon disintegrated, and Craig went his own way with a new company, CNC supplies. He explained how it worked to

Anne and Lou Newman, Stephanie's parents, when he asked them to invest a few years later. He bought containers of gloves from Malaysia, shipped them to the port of Philadelphia, and resold them locally. Every container gave them a 33% profit, $11,000.

He just needed some help to cover the cost of buying the gloves. Craig had gotten some initial investment from his friends. There may have originally been some intention to use this money for business, but I'd guess he quickly burned through it on sports tickets and midnight ballerinas. He needed to give his friends some initial return on their investment, so he got more investors to cover that cost. And then more investors still to cover the payments. to that second group.

I'm sure plenty of you recognize this for what it is. A Ponzi scheme. These operations can bring in a lot of money, but they always come with a calamitous expiration date when everything comes crashing down. By 1997, when Stephanie was murdered, Craig was almost a million dollars in debt. And the well of new investors had run dry.

And when Haley had been born the previous year, Stephanie had gone part-time with her law firm. cutting her wages to $33,000 a year. Craig was feeling a lot of pressure. All of it of his own making. But all of that was secret. Our main source for this case was Ken Englade's book Everybody's Best Friend, and he uses pseudonyms for some of Craig and Stephanie's friends. And we're going to use the same names here. The couple were especially close to three ladies, Elaine, Betty, and Jennifer, and their husbands. Craig was very gregarious, and most days would talk to all six of these friends on the phone. Geez, Louis, six involved phone calls every day.

No, thank you. Just thinking about that makes me want to go lie down for a while. How many of you all could do that? Like, I don't know. I guess I'm just too, it's exhausting. Like one long, involved phone call, I'm done for the day. That's too much social interaction. I'm a phone person, though.

I do talk on the phone. You are phone, that's right, yeah. You like to talk on the phone. I used to back in the day, but I don't know. I just have gotten less and less patience for it as I've gotten older. Yeah, I prefer phone calls to texting because it's just so easy to ignore to text. Interesting. Craig's supposed job meant he was at home most of the day, as were the other wives. And he was especially close with them, always available to babysit or chat or go shopping. With the guys, he was very much a bro all sports and beers, and I assume scratching his balls.

With the ladies, he was just a big, chatty gossip. He could also be hard work. Betty and Elaine became close friends and started doing things with just the two of them. Craig hated that and turned into a pouty baby being left out. He'd been friends with Elaine for 10 years, but iced her out for weeks because she dared to have a social life without him. being the center of it. What an exhausting weenie. God. It's so bizarre, I know. But all and all, Craig was well liked by their friends. They sometimes joked about why Stephanie put up with his lazy ass, but they really were just jokes. Craig was always attentive and loving with Stephanie. He made

her happy. Everyone thought the couple had a great marriage, which was why they were so shocked and angry when the truth came out. He'd betrayed Stephanie, betrayed them all. He was a fraud. On Wednesday, one week after Stephanie had been declared dead, authorities conducted a second, more intensive search of the house on winding way. In a drawer in Craig's office, they found a stack of bills, $8,000. This was a simple equation. Murder suspect plus big pile of cash equals flight risk. It was a good thing Craig was already behind bars, and the discovery of the cash made it more likely he was going to stay there.

In the master bedroom closet, Detective Craig noticed a panel in the ceiling, an opening to the attic. He found a step ladder and climbed up, barely managing to get his head into the tiny little attic space. He groped around in the darkness and bingo. He found a paper grocery bag and climbed down and spread the contents all over the bed, calling for the prosecutor to come take a look. There were a few softcore porn mags, playboys and the like, some Delilah's and pawn shop receipts showing that Craig had repeatedly hawked and then bought back some of Stephanie's most expensive jewelry. There were also receipts for flowers, jewelry, and furniture, the gifts Craig had bought for Shannon Reinhert.

But the real prize was a note at the bottom of the bag. It was a handwritten accounting ledger with two columns labeled out and in. Each column had a list of initials with numbers next to them. It would take a forensic accountant to fully piece together the amount of. importance of the note. The initials in the out column represented people Craig owed money to, and the numbers beside them showed the debt and the interest. The end column was the damning part. The initials represented insurance companies, banks, and Stephanie's employers. It was a list of the money Craig would receive if Stephanie died. The note showed that Craig had worked out that if

Stephanie died, he could repay all his debts and still have about $600,000 left over. By comparing the amounts Craig owed with testimony from the people he owed them to, the forensic accountant was able to figure out that Craig could only have written this note in early April, two or three weeks before Stephanie's death. Yeah, make sure you keep shit like this, folks, if you're ever going to commit a murder. They'll never look in the attic. You know, they're not going to check there. In the media at the time, and sometimes today, the emphasis on the story was a little askew,

because as soon as they found out about Craig's relationship with Shannon Reinhart, whatever it was, that, of course, became the focus. You know, the tabloid newspapers are going to want to go with the angle that lets them show pictures of a half-naked woman, and in general, the seedier aspects of someone's life are going to get attention. And I get that. I mean, one of the most fascinating things about true crime is the revealing of all these secret lives. But although Craig spent a ridiculous amount of money on Shannon, it was just a small part of his total debt. If he'd gotten away with murder, I'm sure he would have spent plenty more on her, but Shannon really wasn't the central motive for this crime. That was the Ponzi scheme, which had left him buried in debt and was about to blow up his whole life. And now that the prosecution had evidence that Craig had planned Stephanie's murder to get out from under that debt, he was in big trouble. Because of all the local media attention, the trial was moved to Western Pennsylvania, but would not actually take place. Because just before it was due to start, Craig, changed his plea to guilty. This meant he had to explain his decision in court, so Craig,

stuttering and sobbing, sat in the witness box and told everyone how deeply sorry he was and that he just didn't want to cause any more pain to the people who loved Stephanie. He sounded sincere and genuinely distraught. Detective Craig, listening, nodded, thinking, yep, this is how he conned his friends and family out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was a great actor. Rabinowitz's lawyer asked him why he changed his plea. Craig took a deep breath. Two nights ago, while I was asleep in my cell at Westmoreland County, I had a dream, he said. In this dream, he was in his childhood home and he heard Stephanie's voice saying,

Come here, we want to talk to you. He followed her voice to the breakfast room where she was sitting at the table beside Craig's father, who had been dead for four years, and Stephanie's dad, who had died shortly. before the trial was set to begin. Craig, sit down, Stephanie said. We want to talk to you. They put their hands on my hand, Craig told the court, and they said, Craig, it's time to do what's right.

It's time for you to do the right thing. And I hope today, I think today, that I have done the right thing. And that's why I have done this. You know, I'm probably alone on this, but that and they said is really, bugging me? What, they all said it at the same time? Are they in the Borg? That bothered me too. It just doesn't ring true, does it? No. And then he said the same thing like four times in a row. It's time for you to do the right thing. We want to talk to you. Like, he just said it for, like he just said it different ways. He's, he's an idiot. Anyway, we obviously can't know what Craig

Rabinowitz did or didn't dream. But my own opinion is pretty close. to that of the prosecutor, Bruce Castor, who rolled his eyes and muttered, what fucking nonsense. Yeah. What probably happened was that Craig's defense team told him he was almost certain to lose, and he couldn't stomach having to sit in court and have all his dirty laundry aired. The plea didn't gain him anything. First degree murder in Pennsylvania came with a mandatory sentence of life without parole, and that's what he got.

Yeah, I think this little bit of the theory. was about trying to save face with his friends, because that was obviously really important to him, you know, it's like, see, guys, I'm not all bad, I'm doing the right thing. So, you know, make sure you come visit me and put money on my books and send me porn mags. I don't know. What a, what a fucking martyr. Yeah. All the murder cases we cover are, by definition, about a terrible waste of life. And I think this case exemplifies that more than most. A brilliant, beautiful. life was cut short before her 30th birthday, just because her horny schlub of a husband was a loser. Yep.

And their daughter, Haley, lost both her parents before she was even a year old. There's some suggestion that Haley was adopted by other members of Stephanie's family, but that information has understandably been kept private. I hope she's doing well. Yeah, absolutely. As for Craig, I'm sure he's busy charming, all his fellow inmates. Good luck with that, man. Now, before we go, don't forget about our two live shows coming up.

First, we've got summer camp, September 10th through 13th, an amazing four-day festival in Equinunk, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death. We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast's astonishing legends in addition to a roster of awesome stand-up comedians and local bands. Go to Bad Magic Productions.com for more info. and to buy tickets. Then we've got our True Crime Cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8 through the 12th, 2027. If you want to come to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal

podcasts in the world, like case file, no sleep, true crime garage, last podcast on the left, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now, but they're 90% sold out at this point. So if you want to go, make sure you get over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off plus a private meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or you can set up a payment plan and just pay it off over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewave at sea.com slash campfire. 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 campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Riley, Stormy, Brittany, and Avril.

We appreciate y'all 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 more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. The post-shows are so much fun, y'all. They're so much fun. And once you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin, or fridge magnet while supplies last.

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