DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD-Caitlin Rother

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her ankles tied, and her wrist bound behind her. Jonah's brother Adam claimed to have found Rebecca hanging from by a rope from the second floor balcony on a bedroom door. In black paint were the cryptic words, she saved him? Can you save her? Was this scrawled message a suicide note or a killer's taunt? Rebecca's death came two days after Jonas's six year old son, Max, took a devastating

fall while in Rebecca's care. Authorities deemed Rebecca's death a suicide resulting from her guilt, But who would stage either a suicide or a murder in such a bizarre, elaborate way. Award winning investigative journalist Caitlin Rother we've stunning new details into a personal, yet objective examination of the sensational case.

She explores its many layers, including the civil suit in which a jury found Adam Shackknight responsible for Rebecca's death, and the San Diego County Sheriff's department bombshell decision to re confirm its original findings, telling as it is troubling, this controversial real life mystery is a classic American tragedy that evokes the same haunting fascination as a John beIN Ay,

Ramsay and OJ Simpson cases. The book they were featuring this evening is Death on Ocean Boulevard inside the Coronado Men mentioned case with my special guest journalist and author, Caitlin Rother. Thank you so much for this interview and welcome back to the program. Caitlyn Roster.

It's basically a piece of land that is connected to the mainland only by a you know, a strip of land, and there's a bridge across it, and there's two active military bases there.

to be Arizona, Texas, places like that. So Adam Shacknai, though, is a tugboat captain, and he flew in from Memphis when his nephew Max had that terrible fall from inside the mansion and that was less than forty eight hours before he called nine one one. The night before he woke up and called nine one one. He had flown in around four o'clock and he had dinner with Rebecca and Jonah, and there was really hardly any conversation because they were all very upset about Max because Max was

in the ICU. When Rebecca had found Max, he was not breathing and his heart had stopped. It took him twenty five to thirty minutes to get him back, so

he was in the hospital. Jonah was just having a quick meal and then Rebecca drove him back to the hospital, drove her and Adam back to the mansion and then they you know, drove into the driveway, and Adam told me that he offered to talk to Rebecca about what had happened in case she felt like she wanted to talk because he had flown out to be supportive to the family and she was his brother's girlfriend. But she

didn't want to talk. And according to him, you know, he doesn't drink, and Jonah did doesn't drink, Rebecca didn't drink, didn't do drugs. They're all health nets. But Adam told me that Rebecca said to him, I don't drink, but if I did, tonight would be the night essentially. I don't know if I'm quoting it exactly, but that was in essence what she said. So she went into the main house, according to him, and he went into the

guest house. He called his girlfriend who he'd been seeing for you know, a good twenty years, and she her name's Mary, and so they chatted for a little bit and Adam said he took an ambience, went to sleep. So when he came out the next morning he woke up, he said he'd kind of slept a little fitfully, and he was anxious when he woke up. So he masturbated that morning to porn on his phone. Now he admitted this, volunteered this to police, okay, which you know some people

have wondered why did he do that. Took a shower, came out, and was on his way to ask Rebecca if she wanted to go get some breakfast and coffee. But he came out and he saw what he saw. It was a mannequin or something hanging in the yard. Because you know, Jonah has two teenage kids and he thought, well,

maybe they did something as a gag. As he looked closer, he saw that it was Rebecca hanging there, and she was naked, naked, her hands bound behind her back, her feet tied together, and there was a gagged in her mouth. So's a T shirt that was wrapped around her head several times, on top of the hanging rope and on top of her hair. So women have said, well that right away is strange because if you know, when you're a woman, you have long hair, you don't want a

rope or something on top of your hair. You usually would pull your hair out. Well, So granted, if you're in the kind of shape that the authorities say she was, she was going to commit suicide, maybe she wasn't thinking about that, but that has raised some questions with a lot of women I've talked to. So anyway, he doesn't know whether she's dead or alive. So he says he runs into the kitchen, grabs a knife out of the drawer, and she's too high up, he says, for him to

reach her. So he's got to bring a table over. So there's a wooden table, a three legged table. It's three legged because one of the legs is broken. The leg falls off when he drags it over, and you can actually hear the leg bouncing on the bricks. That that that that you know, as she's as he's dragging the table over, he says, he gets up on the table and stands on the table and pulls her to his against him. He cuts the rope above, takes her you know, in his arms, and lays her down on

the grass. Now this is while he's on the nine to one one call. So you hear all of this on the nine to one one call. You can hear him grunting and cussing and panting. And he doesn't know the address, so he can't send the paramedics to the house without running to the front of the house finding out the address and then telling him the number. And he says, it's where you came to get the kid. Uh, you know yesterday. Well it wasn't yesterday, it was two

days before. And they don't have the same dispatchers working every single day, so they had no idea what he was talking about.

So at one point he says, I don't know. Another point he says, I don't think so, but she she has him, you know, tells him to start doing compressions, and he tells police later that he had already been doing compressions because she says you can count out loud, and he starts out twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine as.

get a proper can't get her lying down properly. So the police come and the paramedics, and the paramedic touches her jaw and it's cool to the touch, and he can tell that rigor mortis has set in, and so he says, you know, never mind, they're not going to do CPR. So rigor mortis is a tricky thing. There's so there's no you know, nobody would give a firm Nobody at the Medical Examiner's office anyway, would give a

firm estimated time of death. So but generally speaking, it had to be at least a couple hours, so you know, different estimates have put her. The last known contact that she had with anybody is on a phone record, and it's her boyfriend Jonah, who calls her from his room. He's staying at a place that's next door to the hospital where the parents get to stay if their kids are in ICEU. And he calls her at twelve fifty am, and Adam calls nine one one at six forty eight am.

So that's the general window of time, although she didn't answer the phone when Jonah called, so we don't know for sure, but that's the last time somebody tried to contact her. The last time anyone actually did talk to her was her sister, who's also named Mary, which made the book hard to write, going back and forth between the Adam's girlfriend and the Rebecca's sister.

rest of the Rebecca's family in Missouri. She came out and they were going to go to the zoo after Max, you know, cleaned his room and what have you, and she took a shower. So Jonah was at the gym and Rebecca was downstairs. This is what she told police later. She said she was going to the bathroom. Essentially in the bathroom downstairs. It says a mansion was like three or four stories high, and there's the bedrooms where Max and her sister were staying, and were one or two

floors up there on different levels. And then there's a chandelier it's hanging from from above. So you know, it's quite a big foyer with a big and a big tall space there. And I've never been inside, so I've only been able to see pictures. I can't describe it perfectly, but that's the best I can do. So anyway, Rebecca's in the bathroom and she hears the dog barking. She's got a waymran I don't even now pronounce this Waymraner fourteen months really big dog, very big enough to apparently

knock an adult over. And Max is only, you know, six, so very boisterous dog, and the dog is barking, and she hears a crash. So she comes out and there's Max lying on the floor at the bottom of a staircase.

And the staircase is one of those ones that kind of dog legs up all the way up to the second floor, and I think that's where the chandelier was hanging on from the ceiling of the second floor, so that's all open in there, and there's this, you know, it's a you know, nineteen oh eight house designed by John D. Spreckles of the Sugar Fortune. So she comes out.

She sees Max lying on the floor surrounded by pieces of this chandelier which has broken and fallen and is lying next to him, and there's a soccer ball and a razor scooter lying the razor scooters lying over one of his shins. So there's lots of different variants, not variants variable, sorry thinking of COVID, A lot of different variables of what could have happened but basically she tells she says, you know, when they ask her and Jonah asks her, and everyone asks her what happened, she says,

I don't know. I didn't see it. I just don't know, and so she thinks, you know, he probably fell from the second story landing up where the bedroom is. So that's what she says, I don't know, he fell from the bedroom. And then they're like, well, well did you see it? How do you know that you know? So this is where things start getting messy because Max's mother, Dina, she doesn't like Rebecca, she doesn't get along with Rebecca,

she doesn't trust Rebecca. She's had lots of conflicts with Rebecca, which has caused a lot of problems and tension in the relationship between Rebecca and Jonah. And so after this happens, Dina is convinced that Rebecca somehow has something to do with this, and so she's complaining to people at the hospital,

to the doctor. But I know that when the police came that first time, there were a number of the same officers who responded to the second nine one one call, so you know, they already had it in their head that she was there when this little boy fell or whatever happened, and they had to rush them to the hospital. So you have that in their minds that they were literally some of the same peace and saw that she was upset. Okay, obviously she was the only adult in

the house. He was in her care, and this terrible thing happened to this little boy who she loved so much like her own son. She was taking care of him. So when they show up the second time, they already have it in their head that she was the one who called nine to one one, or actually her little sister was the one who called. That she was shouting out to the dispatcher the entire time, and she said

she was giving the little boy CPR. But it's actually written in one of the reports that none of the I think it was a paramedics report that said nobody saw her doing CPR when they arrived, So that has been also an issue of some contention. So basically they have it in their head that she's upset. But there was also a psychologist who was doing a ride along with one of the police on the day of Max's nine one one call, and she later was asked to write AP she said, I didn't you know she was upset.

She was understandably upset this had happened, but she didn't seem depressed. She didn't seem suicidal. So to answer your question, you know, initially Coronado called in the Sheriff's department because they thought it was a suspicious death, and so they called out the homicide team. So the homicide team is the unit that responded. And so when Adam immediately said I got a girl hung herself in the guesthouse, you know, I didn't hear them confronting him really about that, and

I asked questions. You know, this is years later. I should also say that I was not allowed to come to the news conference that they had when they announced that it was a suicide, which was about seven weeks later, because I don't have a press pass anymore in San Diego, because I am not a member of the working media, and even though I write these stories in Fire are more depth than any of the actual working media, they just don't let me come to these They didn't let

me come to the two news conferences they've had during this case, which at the time I thought was pretty strange because I had a previous case. The John Gardner case where you've talked to me before the book Lost Girls. They let me come to that one, but they didn't let me come to this one. So I was suspicious about that too. You know, why wouldn't they let me come and ask questions? So I couldn't hear you know

how they answered that. But years later they basically just said, well, you know, we don't decide somebody's a suspect and then find evidence to fit that scenario. We see where the evidence takes us. Okay, Well, seems like though when you listen to the interviews with the detectives that they did.

I have the whole investigative file here that a source gave me early on and not the Sheriff's department, some other sources, and I could hear, you know, just from how the detectives were talking to other suspects that within a few days they had pretty much decided that Adam was cleared, and so Jonah's whereabouts were pretty much you know, they decided Adam was I'm sorry, they decided Jonah was where he said he was at the place next door is how the Ross McDonald's house, and that Dina who

did not get along with Rebecca and was upset about what happened to Max. That she was at the hospital as well, and it says in the nursing notes that she and Jonah were talking to the doctor at ten thirty eight pm the night before when there was a witness who saw someone who he thought was Dina at the house the night before. It turned out to be her sister, according to the Sheriff's department, and according to

the woman herself, her name is Nina Romano. So there was a lot of suspicion and a lot of it, you know, about Rebecca being involved in Max's fall, and you know, they were immediately suspicious that she had something more to do with it, and maybe that's why she committed suicide, because she felt guilty, not just because he failed, but because maybe she had something to do with it. Now that's never been proven by anybody, but that's just

you know, the moms and the sisters suspicions. So to answer your question, I don't know why they decided that Adam was cleared so soon. He took a light detector test and it was inconclusive and the examiner decided, however, that he was telling the truth. Now, other outside experts have since looked at the same results and said, no, he was being deceptive. So, you know, there's a lot of outside experts who've looked at the evidence in this case and who've looked at, you know, the decisions made

by the sheriff's department, and they just don't agree. But the sheriff's department decided that it was suicide.

was no fingerprints or DNA evidence tying Adam to the scene. Now, so basically, this rope that was she was hanging from, tied around her neck, was actually over the top of this exterior of iron railing along a small balcony on the second floor from the guest room, and that was a guest room where her sister had been saying that she had sent her home the day before because she's like, well, you know, this is not going to be any fun for you. This is not going to be vacation. There's

too much going on. Max's in the hospital. So she sent her home and picked up Adam at the airport in the same trip. So that guest room, though, is where her hanging rope was anchored to the leg of a bed. Okay, And there was a note, a message of some kind that was painted in black paint on the bedroom door, and the one that you read at the beginning she saved him? Can you save her?

even a question mark, and it's all capital letters. So anyway, so the Sheriff's department, and there was a note on her phone, two notes on her phone that were sort of like they thought, more like journal entries, like when you're angry as somebody and you write a letter to them, but you don't send it. There's one of those which she had apparently written to Jonah. She was upset about how he was taking his kid's side. So not only did she not get along with Dina, she also didn't

get along with the mother of his two teenagers. So he was married already twice and of course so had three kids. Did not get along with the x wives and did not get along with the teenagers either, who she felt were very disrespectful to her. So there was

a lot of conflict in the relationship. She was angry at Jonah, and Jonah later told me that there were there was so much conflict in a relationship that if that had not changed, and it didn't look like it was going to they were in the throes of breaking up at the end of the summer. They'd already talked about that, so the sheriff's department said, look, the relationship was in trouble. Things were bad. She looks really depressed.

She's talked about, you know, feeling hopeless. She was crying all the time, she couldn't sleep, and these were in the notes on her phone, so that was in their mind when they decided it was suicide. Now, the other interesting thing you met you asked about Jonah Well in the first day. They interviewed him twice right away and then a couple days later, and he initially said he didn't think she committed suicide. Her family. The detectives talk to both of two of her older sisters, noahm and Mary,

and they both said she wouldn't have done this. She wouldn't have committed suicide. So there were a number of people that they talked to, including her ex husband. They all said she wouldn't have committed suicide, and yet they still decided that she committed suicide. During these interviews, Jonah initially said he didn't think she committed suicide because it was just not something that she would do. She was

so considerate that she wouldn't have done this. When Max was in the hospital, when Jonah needed support in his mind, he was saying, you know, she's my support system. She just wouldn't have done this. She would have more likely have driven off in a car someplace, you know, and done that, but not like this. So a lot of people were saying no, no, no, But at the same time he was also saying, can you please make a statement because this is really hurting my business. Did you

make a statement that I'm not a suspect? And they kind of were like, well, we can't really, you know, I don't know if we can do that. We'll see what we can do. But so he was putting quite a bit of pressure on the sheriff's department to move this along and to you know, announced that he was not a suspect because he said, you know, it's really hurting his shareholders and blah blah blah. So and that's

literally on tape. So that's partly where those allegations have come from, but a lot of it comes from people just don't understand people in the community and as a how family in particular don't understand how you could call this a suicide under these circumstances, and so they want to find a reason and they think, well, it must be because Joan is rich, and maybe you know, there were you know, there's allegations that have been made. You know,

maybe you know I've had this. I had this woman come up to me in a home depot, a stranger and she's like, you have to prove that somebody, you know, bribed the sheriff and I'm just like.

was a murder. In civil court it's called wrongful death. But you know that that it must be corruption, it must be something else is going on.

There was an issue, however, with the card reader going into the other building wasn't working, and there were certain cameras that weren't working with the route that he went, so there's no nobody saw him going into his room, which some people have raised questions about, but the Sheriff's department was satisfied by looking at the video footage and looking at him in the hallway I think of the other building that they were satisfied that that's where he was.

And his phone records show that he did make this call and it was a voicemail, and they had Rebecca's phone, but unfortunately they could not get into Rebecca's phone. So I'm not sure if it was a newer phone, but they just did not have the technology to get into the phone. So they were never able to listen to that voicemail, partly because it had been deleted. Now we don't know who deleted it. They assumed Rebecca deleted it

because there were no other delete. There were no other voicemails on the phone, and so they being detectives, said, well, this must be a habit of hers to just delete voicemails, and that's why she listened to it and deleted it, because that was the habit that she had. We don't know that though, so so we've never actually heard this voicemail,

but we do know he did call and leave a voicemail. Okay, they didn't really examine the phone because they assumed that it was Rebecca's phone and therefore her fingerprints were going to be on it. They didn't. They didn't look to see if anybody else's fingerprints were on it, which I think they probably should have. So what Jonah said, and what Jonah told the police was that he called her to let her know that he had talked to the doctor.

This is doctor Peterson, the doctor had said to Dina and to Jonah, And that's right around the same time where the nursing notes say that they were talking to the doctor. This is a different doctor. They had talked to this doctor first, and he was very blunt, apparently, and really upset Dina. According to Jonah, she went into kind of hysterics which she denies, but that's a whole other issue. But anyway, the doctor and what the doctor

said is unclear. The doctor can't even really remember. But basically what Jonah said was he said the best scenario was that Max would never walk or talk again, and so Dina didn't want to hear that. Dina didn't have any idea that the injuries were as bad as they were, and she was convinced he was going to recover. I just couldn't hear that, so I guess she got really upset. Jonah went and got another doctor, and that's the doctor who is recorded in the notes that they were talking

to at ten thirty eight. But apparently it was you know, clearly bad news, right, And so Jonah told me that he called Rebecca. I know, I have the records as well, and it said it was sixty two second phone call that he left for her, and he said he was crying, basically just reporting the bad news and not He said he wasn't blaming her, he wasn't angry at her. He was just really upset about getting this news. So we

have no proof of that. We don't know exactly what he said, but that is consistent with what he told the authorities, but he told me he was crying. He didn't tell them that. He told me that Jonah doesn't want to be seen as a weak person and doesn't want people to know he's crying, And we kind of talked about that during the interviews. I spoke with him eight times. Right towards the very end of putting the book together, I thought I was done writing it, and

then I ended up getting a hold of him. Finally I had to redo a huge portion of the book and rewrite it and add new sections right on deadline at the very end. But I felt it was very important to put in things like that because we hadn't heard anything from Jonah before, and there are a lot of allegations that, like we just talked about about him and having undue influence in the sheriff, you know, being you know, somehow in collusion with the the shack Knives

because Jonah had all this money. So I wanted to give them a fair shot to respond to those allegations, which they vehemently denied. But Jonah basically said that the doctor was just you know, really just really want and so we don't know, we don't know, but that's that's what we do know.

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Somebody a forensic pathologist, a famed forensic pathologist Curo Weck tell us about Sir Weck and what's the next step for the Zauhau family was considering that the Sheriff's department still considered this a suicide.

Or it's possible that a reporter from one of the news stations called him and asked for his opinion because they they didn't televise that news conference, and so because I couldn't watch it, I tried, and you know, I couldn't get access to it. They posted it later. They also did not release the autopsy report to the reporters

at that before that news conference. They had to ask for it, I think, and so I know that once they got that, you know, they didn't get a chance to compare what was in the autopsy report with what the Sheriff's detectives said at that news conference, So it looks like it was later that same day that this happened, and it was kind of an over you know, the course of a couple of news cycles within a day.

But sorrow Weck somehow weighed in and he got involved with the house and Anne Bremner, and they ended up on the Doctor Phil Show because they basically Doctor Phil decided to get involved and he helped pay for curo Weck's services. They exhumed Rebecca's body, and this is a big deal too, because you know, there's a house that actually did not want an autopsy in the first place. They wanted you know, they're a very religious family, and

they said, we still have a chance. I think they actually said we still have a chance to save her. And I think that was what they said, which I thought was in an interesting choice of words, but I might be misquoting it. I think that's what they said. But my point was they wanted her body intact, okay, for reasons, religious reasons, and they told Jonah that, but it didn't in the In the end, the Sheriff's Department

sent the body over to the medical Examiner's office. The medical examiner's office never even I notified the family officially that Rebecca was dead, which was another thing that made the how family mistrust the authorities and the Sheriff's department in particular, even though it wasn't the sheriff's department's duty.

The way that they found out that was Rebecca was dead was that Jonah called Rebecca's sister's husband, who was a police officer, because he wanted, you know, he didn't know how to deliver that news and thought it better becoming from a family member. So you know, that's how that went. And HM. So so anyway, there's the house or upset and they were like, no way, no way this.

She never would done it. So after they officially said, after the Sheriff's Department officially said that it was a suicide, an Bremner gun involved, they got through elect involved, they got to conductor film involved, They exhumed the body. He did a second autopsy, but parts of her body were missing.

So he did the best he could and he used the first autopsy report to you know, analyze, and what he said initially was that he thought, you know, there were certain things that looked suspicious enough, and he didn't say it was a murderer. He said he thought it needed to be it needed more investigation because he just thought maybe it should be changed undetermined at least, because he thought it looked more like she had been strangled

because of the injuries in her neck. So if similar to the Jeffrey Epstein case, you know, there are certain parts of your neck that you see or broke or more severely injured when somebody hangs themselves versus when somebody strangles them Okay, so there are certain so you know, in Rebecca's case, she if she threw herself over that balcony, which is what they say, you know, Cyril whacked later was asked to testify for the How To Hear is the Howe family, and they had another expert as well.

And by this point this was years later, like twenty eighteen, that was seven years later. He was then saying that she was murdered, but there were he said, there were four subgalial hemorrhages on her scalps where he thought it she'd been hit over the head with a blunt instrument. And then you know, her neck was not broken and she falling from nine feet nine feet and two inches. He said, you know, why wasn't she decapitated partially or

completely decapitated? And there was another expert who testified who said the same thing. I mean, that's a long way to fall, because normally it's called a long fall. So a short fall for most hangings is like one or two feet, where somebody will you know, hang themselves over a door knob and put the rope over the top of the door and use a sheet or a cord or something, or you know, step off a chair or whatever.

So but that's only one to two feet, and so you'll see different injuries than if you're going to fall nine feet. So so anyway, Sir Wacked when they did the second autopsy, brought these things out and the Sheriff's department just still said, no, no, we're not doing we're not changing anything. So Swacked, you know, he's he's a

renowned guy, gets involved in controversial cases. And by the time he testified in the in the trial in twenty eighteen, I think he was eighty eight years old, and he was still sharp as a whip.

house were really determined. So they went through a number of attorneys they tried to get and they tried to get the Attorney General's office to open up reopen the criminal case. They tried everything. They you know, they worked with Ambremner. Am Bremner was not in California, so she had to team up with some California attorneys because she wasn't licensed to practice here. So you know, they went to a series of teams of attorneys to try to do to get the case reopen. Made a bunch of

allegations nobody was listening. DIA's office didn't listen, Attorney General's office didn't listen. So finally there was a civil suit filed that it was filed in federal court at first, and the federal court said, you know, they didn't have jurisdiction, and initially the allegations were pretty vague. Initially it was Dina Shackney and her sister Nina Romano, and Adam Shacknight. All three of them were named as conspiring and scheming to kill Rebecca the how although they still didn't really

know how they did it. So every eventually the lawsuit was moved into state court and then it was amended, you know, a good four times, if not more. I can't remember if the four times include the federal initial filings, but there were.

look at it until then. But also Nina's insurance company settled with this house against her wishes, and so he dismissed both of them, and so then there was just Adam. So by the time the case finally went to trial, it was just Adam, and it was Adam who killed Rebecca's the house, strangled her, put her over the balcony, and once we got to trial, he changed it yet again.

And now during the trial he said that Adam Shackni sexually assaulted Rebecca with the wooden handle of a knife that was found on the floor in that guest room, next to the bed where the hanging rope was anchored. And he said that came from one of his experts was looking at the photos. And I don't know if

she actually had the knife itself in her hand. I don't think you're allowed touch evidence like that, but she said she saw some whiteish discharge and there was red stain on the metal rivets up to the second rivet, and that she thought that that meant that he stuck that handle inside Rebecca's vagina. Because Rebecca the only source of blood. There was no wound on the body that

was bleeding profusely, but she was having her period. And the curious thing was there were several drops of blood in the hallway as if she were standing there either, you know. They said, well, that's where she was standing having a confrontation with Adam, and then he grabbed her. She screamed for help. A neighbor heard it, because a neighbor reported to the police that she heard a woman crying for help around eleven thirty that night, and she tried to get away. Adam hid her over the head,

tied her up. She tried to free herself by cutting trying to cut the rope with another knife that was on the floor. Also, and this is the same expert who said, if you look at the pattern of fingerprints on the handle or no, especially the blade of that knife facing the other way away from her, as if she were trying to saw her way out of these ropes, except she admitted there was no cut marks on the

rope itself. So these are just theoretical interpretations of the fingerprint of positioning on the blade of the big knife and on the red stain on the rivets of the knife handle, because the medical examiner said she did not have any signs of being sexually assaulted. But they, you know, this is the house, said well, this is a steak knife handle. This is like the size of a tampon. You're not going to have trauma from that. It's not the blade itself, it's the handle. So they're not gonna

it's not gonna cut her. So they basically painted Adam Shacknye as this sexual deviant who was watching her take a shower. And you know, he admitted to watching for in the next morning, and so Keith Greer basically just said he was a perverb he you know, was masturbating the next morning because he was finally you know, basically pleasuring himself with thinking about what he had done to her.

by the way. And then there were certain you know, bruising ligature marks around her neck, and curiously there were two. So that was another question. Why would she have two deep ligature you know, bruising, like linear bruising on her neck. Why not just one if she was just hanging there and there was you know, other abrasions, and there was you know, some other stuff that they found on her body.

And I didn't look closely at the mannequin just to compare exactly, you know, exactly all of the markings because there. The defense was arguing against using this thing at all because they just said it was so prejudicial, and so they fought, and they fought. They fought in pre in limiting motions pre trial, which are basically, you know where we're trying to they try to prevent certain evidence from being presented, and Keith Squer just kept fighting to use

this mannequin. So they they would argue about this before the jury was brought in and he was allowed to use it for his expert who was doing the not tying that a demonstration on the mannequins. But the agreement was you have to cover the entire thing with a white sheet, and all is they can be exposed is just the limb that he's doing the demonstration on. So the ankles were tied together and the wrists were tied together, so he was only allowed to reveal that portion of

the box at one at a time until the closing argument. Again, the defense is fighting, fighting, fighting against letting him use this. But I walked into court that morning and Greer calls me into this little side conference room and I'm like okay. He goes, what do you think should I use it? And I'm like, oh, my god, I can't have this conversation right now. I'm covering this pace. Yeah, so I just said, well, it's very dramatic, and that's all I said,

which was true. And so he was trying to decide whether it would be good dramatic and work with the jury or bad dramatic and not work with the jury.

take the blue surgical robe off as well. But anyway, Jonah was sitting right in front of me and we didn't we had not met each other at that time, but he was literally sitting right in front of me, and I saw him shaking his head. He was just like, I can't believe this is happening kind of thing, and so we talked about that later. I mean, even I gasped. I was just like, I was pretty horrified because it was so lifelike. You could not imagine that that wasn't her.

You know, you couldn't help it. It was very dramatic, and so it worked. You know, the jury did ultimately vote nine to three that it was a murder. So, you know, Jonah was horrified and upset, basically saying he thought that was so disrespectful to the the Holle family and you know, to him and and to Rebecca. But it worked, you know, it did convey what, you know,

what she looked like at that point. And part of the reason he said, he you know, part of the reason he he made use of that was to he his argument was that Adam didn't need the table to cut her down. That you know, was measuring how far her feet were off the ground and how tall she was. He said, look, I can cut right that like this.

I didn't need to get up on a table. It was just to document this whole show that Adam wanted to have on tape of you know, him cutting her down, so that would be all documented that his story of what how things happened. So Adam says, well, I thought she was too high and I needed a table to cut her down. So that's two different stories, but you know, it was it was pretty dramatic.

I really believe she was murdered. But what what we really want is for the Sheriff's Department to reopen the criminal case because we want justice for Rebecca and we you know, we just don't think that the Sheriff's department did a good enough job and they want it reopened. So within a matter of maybe an hour, two hours top, the Sheriff's Department came out right away with the statement saying, no, no,

think about this. This is a criminal justice agency that arrests people and puts them on trial, right, I mean they're not the ones trying them, but they prepare the case for the prosecution and work together to prepare a case to present to a jury, and they want you to respect the jury's verdict. But in this case, they said, we are sticking to our findings. So that did not

play well. And Sheriff Core was in a re election campaign and right away his opponent said, well, you know, if I'm elected, I'm going to reopen this criminal case, because this just isn't right. You know, there's a jury finding, there's obviously something there. This is just pride, you know. And this is one of his lieutenants too, by the way, who's running against the sheriff. So under the political pressure of a reelection campaign, the sheriff decides that he's going

to do a quote review. Now, this is not He makes it very clear though that he is not reopening the criminal case. He is conducting a review of the original investigation and a new team of detectives will take a look at whatever series were presented during the trial. And he says, well, have that done in four months. So this was before the election, but it wasn't. So it was nine months before they finally came out with

their their finding. This is after not reinterviewing anybody, not interviewing anybody new, not using new DNA technology to retest certain items that had insufficient amounts at the time to register, you know, as belonging to anybody in particular. There were some items, several items that had mixed profiles and one of them was not Adam Shakne. Adam Shaknight was ruled out from all DNA and fingerprints okay, but there were some items where Adam was excluded, but there was still

an unknown profile on there that it wasn't Rebecca's. So you know, that was a question that people, Why didn't you retest that? I asked them that too, and they said, well, we just we talked to the crime lab and we determined that it wouldn't have made a difference. Didn't play well with some people though, so yeah, so nine months later they came out again and said still suicide.

players like Gore and Greer. This story you got involved right from the very beginning, you said, because it resonated with so many people in the story went global. Tell us a little bit about how big a story this is and how engaged people are about this issue even today.

of problems. He was diagnosed after we were married, while we were in marriage counseling by our marriage counselor, who did not tell my husband, only told me that she had diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder, which is a huge That was not fun that day. I remember getting hearing that people steal, people act out, you know, with addictive behavior, substance abuse, they lie, they have sex with people,

they do all kinds of stuff. So now my husband was also an alcoholic, and again didn't know that before I married him either. And in the end, you know, he also picked up a bat and threatened wing with it, and that I called nine one one and we were kind of going around the couch. He was trying to get the phone away from me, and I was trying to I was on the phone with the nine one

one dispatcher. I had to call nine one one from my newsroom when I worked at the paper because he was threatening to kill himself over the phone with a gun, and I had to have the police come to the house and they chased him. And it was just like it was a roller coaster marriage. It was. It was just it was hard. So but in the end he drank again. After being in recovery for a year, he relapsed and I just said, I've got to end this relationship. You drink again, And I said, if you did that again,

we're done. And several days later he hung himself in a motel room in Mexico. And the last time I talked to him, you know, he was calling me. I was worried about him. I mean I still cared about him. I still worried about him because he had threatened to commit suicide before. And I said to him, are you do you feel like hurting yourself right now? And he said not right now. And so that was the last

time we talked. And then a few days later he was found and he hung himself over a door with a cord, and I guess he also ingested some glass shards, ground up light bulb or something. I mean, pretty desperate guy, and so I know what he was acting like, and I know he had a lot of problems, and so, you know, I was drawn to this case partly because of what happened with my own life, but also because I you know, I couldn't help but compare the two situations.

And initially, you know, her family said she's never been diagnosed with any mental illness. She wasn't depressed. She was a happy person. She was a strong person.

who said that she she called it. She disappeared one day and didn't show her what show up at work and she called him up crying and said she'd been taken. They've taken me, And he says, where are you. She says, I don't know, and she's like, well, He goes, well look around. She goes, I can't. They've got something over my eyes and she's crying. So basically, she's claiming that she's been kidnapped, and he truly believed that she had

been kidnapped. I mean, he heard fear in her voice, and I thought to myself, Wow, you know, my husband did that same kind of thing to me. He disappeared one night and he wasn't where he was supposed to be. I drove around looking for him. He walked in the house and he claimed that he had been pulled over by the police and you know, taken to the station and strip searched in a cavity search. And I was like,

oh my god, that's terrible. But he was crying, and you know, I'm like, I wanted to believe him, but I knew something weird. So I just started seeing these parallels and I'm not just so I am clear, I'm not taking a position in the book. I'm not taking a position now I am not convinced either way that she commits suicide or that she was murdered, so I have remained objective, which I think is the best thing. Anyway, as an objective journalist doing a book on this case,

I did see some parallels in their behavior. They both were arrested for shoplifting in Phoenix and went through the same diversion program, so there's quite some very strange coincidences there. So anyways, that's part that's why I got drawn to the case, but also because it was such a big case here for everybody. I mean, I have never had this much anticipation for one of my books. People were like, I can't wait for this book. Are you done yet? Are you done yet? So people really wanted to read

this book more than any other book I've ever written. Honestly, it's been kind of it's been nice.

contributing to that mystery. Because I say that after reading this, I'm still just like yourself, no definitive conclusion to be made, but I encourage people to, yeah, go ahead. I just encourage people to pick up Death on Ocean Boulevard because this is one compelling, disturbing, and fascinating story. In case I have to think, I appreciate that for those that might want to find out more about Death on Ocean Boulevard, you have a website people might want to take a

look at. Can you tell us about it before I do.

talk about today too. So absolutely I encourage people to do that, and I hope people will buy the book and write a review, and I would be ever so grateful.

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