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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them, Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good evening. In Death on the River, best selling true crime author Diane Fanning recounts a tragic kayak accident that left one man dead and his fiancee arrested for his murder. A dream getaway a real life nightmare. It seemed like the perfect romantic afternoon, a kayaking trip for two on the Hudson River, but it ended in tragedy when beautiful blonde Angelica Graswald called nine one one to report that her fiancee, the handsome and athletic Vincent Viefort, had fallen
into the choppy, frigid waters. Authorities assumed it was an accident, but when the bereft bride to be posted videos of herself doing cartwheels on social media shortly before Vincent's body was found, suspicions of murder rose to the surface. After
hours of questioning, Angelica made several shocking admissions. She said she felt trapped and fed up with Vincent's demanding sexual lifestyle, the night life, the strip clubs, the three ways I wanted him dead, she had said, even though she insisted that she didn't kill him. But as more lurid details emerged, including a two hundred fifty thousand dollars life insurance Paul, We'll see a killer question remained. Did Angelica remove the plug of her fiance's boat and knock away his paddle
as he sank. The book that we're featuring this evening is Death on the River, A Fiance's Dark Secrets and a kayak trip turned Deadly, with my special guest, journalist and author Diane Fanning. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Diane Fanning.
It is a pleasure to be here talking with you again.
Dan, It's an absolute pleasure to have you back on Diana, especially this book. Again. You've done yourself once again with Death on the River. Let's talk about how you came to be the author of Death on the River. What brought you to this story? How did you come to be the author of Death on the River?
Well, it seemed like something that was very different and had a lot of questions to it. Being the nosy person I am, I wanted to find answers, and so I started working on it. I took a trip up to Pipsie and looked at the river, and I tell you, when you stand by the side of that river and look across to Bannerman Island, to me, it looked like a very forbidding instance to travel. And that was when the war was.
Pardon me, the part was cut off.
Sorry. I said that when I looked across there, even though the river was calm at the time, it looked like a very forbidding distance. It's not something I would even think about trying.
Yes, certainly. Well, let's get right to this, because, as you do in the book, you take us right to this incident in April nineteenth, twenty fifteen. So let's talk about Vincent via Ford, a forty six year old nscionce the Angelica Graswald. You write that they set off from their home in Pilkeepsie, New York, on the east side of the Hudson River with a pair of kayaks. Tell us about this planned trip and when it was and tell us more about this as you do, and the beginning of the book.
This is a very beautiful spring day. It was early in the season for kayaking. It's one of those days that was so beautiful that it drove a lot of people into the outside and to enjoying the warmth and brilliance of the sun that day and vincent angels there were no exceptions. Back to kayaks and headed out. They stopped a fast food place and got something to eat, and then they headed south and turned in to a wilderness park kind of area along the river between the
highway and the river worked to plumb point. It's a good spot for setting the kayaks in the water to
travel across. They went across to Bannerman Island, which is a very small island, but it has ruins of what was an arsenal and it looks like a castle and one glorious mansion on the island, and it was a place that many times before she volunteered to work on the gardens there as warm Weather did kayak before they went over to the island, and Angelica had taken along some lingerie and she was trying it on and taking
provocative pictures, and they had a nice afternoon. Towards the end of their trip over there, they tried to take the kayaks around the back of the island, but the island the weather was starting to turn stormy and they couldn't because of the tide, get back there, so instead they went back around and went back onto the island. But then they saw the ominous clouds that were rolling in and the daylight was fading, and they decided that yeah,
maybe they better head on back. Well, the Hudson is a tidal river, so you get a lot of waves on it when the storm turns it up, and it turns very rough, very readily. And they started heading back, and at first Vince thought it was a lot of fun. It was like riding rapids, and they were going back, and suddenly Vince was in full his kayak had taken on water, and was starting to think next thing. He
was in the water. The spring day had been very deceiving because the winners of the Hudson was still very pold, and when he fell in that water without a wet suit on Ermia started to set in almost immediately, and they were in the water. Angelica was still in her kayak, but Vince was losing control of all of his muscles and it was becoming harder and harder for him to breathe, and for some reason, Angelika took his ore his kayak
paddle and fastened the side of her boat. At one point, she said she took it away from him, and then she tried to walk back out of it and say he gave it to her. Whatever the case, she spent one half hour watching Vince's struggle before she called nine to one one, And that is the most damning fact in this case, in my opinion, that she did nothing. If I were out on the water with someone I loved, I most certainly would have done anything to try and save their life. I'd even risk my own to do it.
Angelika didn't. She just sat in that kayak, and then while she was on the phone with nine to one one, she said she couldn't see him anymore, and they told her to start paddling towards the yacht club. There was a boat coming out to rescue her. She started doing that, but when she saw the boat approaching she intentionally overturned her own kayak, and when asked about that later, she said, well, I wanted him to think I had tried to save his life. But when the rescue boat went out, they
brought in Angelica, but they could not find any sign. Okay, the.
Information that you just mentioned the twenty minutes, none of this information is known right away when she calls nine one one, right from the beginning of right from the very beginning, when she calls nine one one, and then this rescue unit comes out. There there are things that
personnel notice immediately. Can you tell us some of those things that they noticed immediately in terms of her demeanor, behavior, and then how slowly or quickly it unravels some of the inconsistencies that she says two different law enforcement.
Officials, one thing that while they were still trying to rescue him and save as well, and she repeatedly said that she had dropped her telephone into the river. But while she was being put on a gurney and be taken toward an ambulance, a police officer there heard a phone ringing in her bag. When he tried to look in her bag, she stopped him. She wouldn't let him look in her bag, and so that was once that
why wouldn't you let the police have that tone? That phone could have located the exact spot where Vince went into the water, but she wouldn't let them know that. And she continued in that behavior after she was taking to the hospital. That same police officer went there and he tried a couple of times to look in her bag, and she kept sitting up suddenly looking at him and asking what he was doing. And it was interfering with
her being treated for hypothermia. Because of her short time in the water, she already had some symptoms of hypothermia. That something that was a bit disturbing, but it didn't really immediately point to her as having done something wrong. Everybody was giving her the benefit of the doubt at first.
Number one, there was a grief issue. Number two, she had just so although right away she was doing suspicious things, everybody wanted to treat her as if she just lost a loved one, and she was treated very gently initially. But when she went down when they were doing the search for events along the river, she showed up not every day, but a lot of the days, and she was not really searching. She was treating it more like a party experience, a social experience, and she was giving
away items belonged to Vince. Now, when you think somebody's just missing, you don't start giving their stuff away. It was very alarming to the people who overheard her, like Vince's sister, something wasn't right, and they started out being supportive of her, but she totally chewed away at their lack of suspicion. The police, on the other hand, weren't
hearing any of these things. And even when she said We're going to have a get together to remember Vince at his favorite restaurant and she invited the police, they didn't go. And the people that were there were disturbed by her behavior. Was around talking to everybody acting happy. The ex wife of Vince was absolutely devastated. She was great,
and it was the difference was stark. People could not understand how his ex wife could be grieving so badly and Angelica with Angelica rather was walking around acting like it was a big event all for her, And so the friends and family were starting to have lots of questions, and Vince's sister even called one of the investigators to express her concerns after Angelica into the cartwheel in her backyard. It wasn't like she was grieving at all.
You introduced some very very fascinating characters. Detective di Quarto, he's a state police investigator that had got a call from Trooper Vidakovich who told him of the missing kayak mission and kayaker and so he had asked Freeman to talk to Angelica. So this is the first person, and you talk about Detective de Quarto and his approach to
Angelica and the questioning. Tell us what her reasoning or the reason for Vincent not having not only a bodysuit in that time of the year, but also a life vest. What's her explanation.
She said, they only brought one with them, and Vince insisted did she wear it, which does sound like something Vince would do, but still it's odd that there was only one. Vince was an experienced kayaker, he knew he should have a life veest. So what happened to that other life. That's a question that will probably never be answered because we can't ask Vince. So she insisted that it was all because of Vince, that he didn't have
a life jacket. All he had was that little flotation device that doubled as a seat cover in the kayak.
You talked about that. The extensive search, an incredible search with professionals and volunteers and friends and family. At some point, helicopters, different county police departments in working in cooperation with each other. But the Hudson River is problematic in them predicting where this body might turn up. And as a result, this search continued for quite a while, didn't.
It continued, and they it was very difficult because the Hudson is a tidal river, so that means it sort of changes direction.
And so.
When, like with a lot of bodies of water, you can trace the direction of body might go in because you can chart it well, the Hudson can't be charted so well because it could have gone either way. And so they had to keep broadening and broadening it. And they had helicopters, they had people walking along the shoreline, they had sides standing sonar on a boat. I mean, they were doing everything they could try to find his body.
But part of the problem that Vince had with the water was the fact that it was so cold, and that also provided a problem for the search because it isn't with the Hudson River. When it gets so cold, bodies go down to the bottom and they don't come up until the weather it gets a little warmer.
You talk about and including this book that Angelica her former name Angelica Lipska, you provide for us that she was born in Riga, Latvia, and you tell a little bit of the history of its relation with Germany, that of Germany. So let's talk about a little bit about her upbringing and especially the very very interesting and of course relevant former marriage and relationship background on Angelica.
Yeah, she was raised in a pretty big situation of poverty. Her family didn't have much money and not need. It's no goods because they were behind the Iron curtain when Angelica was born, so they were surviving basically. When the iron curtain was lifted, things did get a little bit better as far as the hopefulness returned to the people. And it was when that happened that Angelika was able to start having dreams that she could believe might come through.
And her big dream was to go to the United States. Before the curtain lifted when she was around ten, nobody could count on ever doing that, and once it was up she could dream of that, and when he got old enough, she immediately went and applied for a visa to go to the United States and started looking for a job as a nanny, and she got one with family in New Jersey, and so she went over to
the United States with that job. She hadn't been there really long when this guy came in to repair the furnace and Angelika and he hit it off right away, and before you know it, she was getting married and Sean was taking her away from her from her nanny job. That marriage didn't last very long at all. It was tumultuous from the very beginning. It was too sudden, and
they didn't really know each other. After that relationship ended, she met a man who had Richard Greswold, who had a very prosperous concrete business and it was out of the decorative concrete product available, and she was married to him. And when she got a job at the Frank Eleanor Roosevelt Museum, digitalizing a lot of the records they had stored there. So she was going up to the Presidential Museum and working on making digital stuff that could go online.
And she'd go into there and she would stay during the weekend, then go to her husband on the weekend. Well, by being there, she ended up going to a lot of the different bars in the area on her evenings off, and it was in doing that that she met another guy that she really liked, and she suddenly decided to leave her husband. And she sent a message to this
guy and say, hey, I'm leaving my husband. Well, he was kind of odd that she would inform him of this because as far as he was concerned, she was just an occasional liason. And then, much to his surprise, she comes and knocks on his door and says she's moving in. Well, he was kind of a really laid back guy, so he thought, okay, let's move in. She can move in, no big deal. So that's what happened.
And it was very strange because she kind of thought she should be a kept woman and he objected to that, and he said she's got to get a job, and even went so far as to buy her a car so she could get to work. So we did that, But then they went to this Beatles convention and he had to drink and because of that, he couldn't perform sexually. So as far as Angelica was concerned because he couldn't
do that on that one time. He was unger a man, and she moved into the separate bedroom and then met this other guy who was a photographer, and next thing you know, she's leaving the house she's living in and serving in with this guy's sister. That sister, and he was then kicked out of his sister's house because they
didn't want him bringing other people in. So he and Angelica were living by the river in a tent when her former live in decided he bought this car and he wants the car back, he doesn't want her driving it. They returned it, but then Angelica wanted the cat they had, and he said, you can't take a cat to live in a tent, and she insisted to the point of lagging down in the driveway and refusing to let him leave her to work until he agreed to let her have the cat. So she took the cat. That didn't
last long either. She ended up bringing the cat back because, yeah, living in the tents not a good place to try to deal with a cat. So then after him, I mean, I never could figure out exactly when he faded out out of the scene, but she went to take photographs at a fundraiser event that Vince was tending to and that's where they met, and the two of them kind of hit it off. He had a good job, so that was very promising to her, and she thought she
had somebody else who might take care of her. And Vince was smitten with this exotic, perky woman who spoke with an adorable accent, and before you knew it, he had gotten an apartment that she could move into with him. And his friends were shocked because it wasn't that long that his second marriage ended, and they thought that he was going to stay sinkle for a while time that's what he said he was going to do. He just
wasn't going to have settled down for a while. But Derry was settling down and before long he was proposing to Angelika and they were going to get married. And what really shocked some of his friends was when he said I want to have a child with her, because they knew that was something he'd always said he didn't want to do, so they said he must really be in love.
There was also another thing that would be disturbing later well, one people found out, but there was according to Vincent, a reason for it, even though they weren't married. He decided to put her and name her as a beneficiary on those insurance policies and put her on hisself.
And yeah, and he at his work. When you're not married and you want to get a living partner put on your medical insurance, you have to do a certain number of things to prove the commitment of the relationship, and one of them was to put her on his life insurance policy. And he did that because he it bothered him that she didn't have any healthcare coverage and he wanted her to, so that's what he did. And
it's you know, it's kind of eerie. It's it's almost like said, Okay, if you get somebody on your life insurance policy, don't let them know about it. You know. It's like like a little red flag. Because that is believed was part of her motivation for wanting Vince gone. What was She also complained about what go ahead?
Sorry.
She also complained about the fact that she went to strip clubs. And the fact of the matter was there were others who knew that she had gone to strip clubs with girlfriends before, so it's not like that was something that was alien to her, although she tried to make it sound like it was. And then she talked about threesomes, well, there was never any real clear message from her that the threesomes actually happened, So that leaves
a big question. Were threesomes just a fantasy thing for Evince that he liked to talk about because it didn't seem like they ever actually went through it. And it's so just having a fantasy is not like you're doing anybody wrong. So, you know, a lot of what she said didn't make particular sense, as the attack shoes making on gyms.
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As you're written in the book, Vince has a sort of or bumpy past or or we'll say a history that's not without incident. We'll say, tell us a little bit about Vincent's past and the characteristics of that. But overall, what is the impression from family and friends of Vincent.
Jenson was a really, really nice guy. One of his problems was that he was generous to a fault. He would give people stuff, He.
Would buy drinks for people at bars, he would.
Let him borrow his car. He he was a bit of a spendthrift, but a lot of it was for others, not for himself, and he didn't get into financial trouble and have to file for bankruptcy.
Because of the.
Way he did not watch his money very well. So you know, that was problematic. But it seems like he learned his lesson because in early April twenty fifteen, he gave Angelica an ultimatum. Angelica had planned this wedding where they would go over to Latvia, Mary on the beach there with their family around, and then they would come back to the United States and have a big party in a boat on the Hudson River, celebrating their marriage. And so that's an expensive proposition.
And Angelika hadn't been working for for a long time now, and since said you've got to get a job, you've got to work, and the marriage is off.
He didn't want to get into all that deet again. He didn't want to go down that road.
But Angelinka was a little bit resentful.
Of the fact that he expected her to work.
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the police, the quarto is questioning her. Let's get back to this masterful attempt to try to get this woman to come and tell the truth about what really happened that day in April twenty fifteen. What happens next in this incredible search and case.
Well, it was Saturday, and the police went out to the island and they were searching around the island, going around the edges, making sure the body hadn't ended up there on the island and getting a feel for the place. And Jelika also came there that day and she brought a wreath to put on the water in Vince's memory. When she arrived, the police were talking to her and all there were three of them, there three investigators and
they were all talking to her. And then a little ways into it, it became clear that she was getting uncomfortable because some of the information she wanted to talk about seemed.
To be personal.
So they let her go off with the quarto to talk to him alone. And he was her choice for the one to talk to alone, and she told him that she had removed the plug from the kayak, that she had taken the ring off his paddle which held the two halves of it together, and that you know, she was very unhappy with the relationship and wanted to be free. Well to Quarto realized the significance of what she was saying and wanted to take her back to the barracks, and she agreed to go back there for
further questioning. She went and told the other officers and they all got onto the boat, and Angelica didn't protest, She wasn't handcuffed nothing. She went right on the boat with them, and as they pulled away from the dock, she laid back in the wind and shouted, I'm free. I'm free, which was a kind of odd thing to say, considering the circumstances. But she drove back to the police barracks with the state investigators and went into an interrogation situation.
She was asked about her Miranda Wrights. The whole thing was read to her. She signed them away and agreed to talk to them, and she went on and on about her relationship with Vince and how she felt he was too controlling and she wanted to be free, and she wanted him to be gone, and it was just stunning to the police. It was a confession that she
had deliberately caused Vince's death. To her attorney later, it was not a confession, and he said when she asked who's Miranda, that meant she did not understand the Miranda warning. But actually, if you listened to it in context, she was merely asking a historical question, like why is it named after Miranda? What does that mean? So the defense was really clever in trying to make it look like
she had limited understanding of English. But she'd been working in the public and you know, working as a waitress, working as a hostess, working as a bartender, and she never had any communication problems with any of those people. And besides that, she had gone to community college and graduated with honors in English, so obviously language proficiency wasn't
really a problem for her. And the whole thing was portrayed by the defense attorney as an accident, but what she said to the police did not make it sound like an accident at all. It sounded like she very opportunistically took advantage of a deteriorating weather situation and did not come to the aid events. And she actually said he's gone, he's dead, and I'm glad.
You have an incredible amount of exchanges in here amount of exchanges between Decado and other interrogators when there and then there's Sharkess and there's Dequado with different approaches, and she responds to each of these detectors differently. But it's incredible the amount of time that is used utilized to hammer home to try to get to the specifics because it's circumstantial case a certain degree, to try to get her to admit, like you say that, and you're right,
she's on. She says she wanted to be free, she was tired of the demands that he gave upon her. She eventu get her to agree admit that she was mad that the engagement. She wanted to have children, she wanted to get married, and it looks like the marriage was not going to happen. So that's what the police in that interrogation room, over a period of days, we're trying to do till they believe in their minds that securely they had enough information to be able to present
to the prosecutor. And that prosecutor finally filed charges for second degree murder and for manslaughter.
Interestingly, yes, and I think it was in some states you're allowed to include lesser charges in New York State is one of those. So that and that's for the purpose if if the jury has difficulty seeing second.
Degree murder, there's a lesson charge you can.
Fall back on. But could you say the big legal confrontation in this whole case was not a trial. It was the hearing to determine whether or not her statements to the police could be submitted as evidence in a trial. And the sense was fighting against that tooth and nail, and there were five days of testimony on that question, and that was really the pivotal question if they went into a trial. I don't see how the prosecution could have gone forward if they were denied admitting that tape
from the interrogation into the trial. So it was very very important, and it was five very tense days of questioning. In the end, the judge agreed that it could be submitted at trial. And now you had a descent who wasn't sure they would win, and you had a prosecution who had a largely circumstantial case and a kind of vague confession because both sides were not confident in the win. It was then that plea bargaining bargaining started.
I would I would say that what I saw in this, what I read in this as well as that he didn't have a public defender, and at a very very interesting lead. There was a question, and I guess to shock our audience further in that that this insurance claim under New York state law, if there were a murder or a manslaughter, it wasn't clear cut that the person like someone like Angelica would not be available those payout in insurance would not be available to her. It's not
clear cut. And this, and this is an important issue later when we find out that at one point Angelica said that she would not be petitioning or trying to get any of the proceeds from those insurance policies. But that changed tell us about state law in terms of whether it's even possible for someone like Angelica to collect on those insurance policies despite conditions.
Well, it was real clear that you could not if there was a seleny conviction. And so that became a big concern to the attorney because the defense attorney had a document from her where she signed over anything she got from the insurance would automatically go to the defense attorney. And he was saying that it was about a million dollars is what.
Charges were accrued in presenting her case.
So the attorney, more than Angelinka had a vested.
Interest in that life insurance and so he very carefully.
Went to uh, pardon me sorry. You talk about his his approach in this in terms of gaining that money, and we and you as you're writing the book, what we talk about is that Richard Portal and Jeffrey charge Shark, the second attorney, it ended up that they were talking
about a plea bargain. They were talking about a plea bargain at this point when the family of Vincent Via four and all the friends thought that there was going to be this finally, eventually, this going to be this trial of this woman that they thought had admitted to having something to do with everything to do with Vincent viafore dying in those waters that day on the Hudson River.
Tell us a little bit more about this, how it comes to be, other than the pressure from these very very capable lawyers, why this had to end in a plea agreement, and what was that plea agreement.
The plea agreement was reached because there of the uncertainty of a conviction. Prosecutors do not want to let someone totally walk free, and with a jury that is always a risk, and they were uncertain if they could get a conviction on either the second degree murder or the manslaughter, and because of that uncertainty, they worked with the defense to have a plea agreement that would get her at least some time in prison, and they came up with
a lesser homicide charge of negligence and negligent homicide. And unfortunately, with that, it had never gone to court to see if the laws that prevent someone from inheriting insurance money would hold up in a charge to a lesser charged like that, and it was thought that it would, but that apparently was a mistaken thought because she ended up benefiting indirectly from getting life insurance money and didn't go to her attorney. But it did not all go to
the family. They got some of it, but so did Angelica.
I found it interesting, and again I hate to beat up on attorneys because everybody will say, oh, they're just doing their job, but this one was extraordinary and that it at least was allowed for Angelica to make it make people believe, including the family of Vincent's family, that she wouldn't go after that money, and then conveniently that we don't know, as you write, we don't know exactly how much she received. But all of that money went to the lawyers, and like you say, it was a
million dollars worth of defense. And what I read in this as opposed to say a duty counsel representation in this kind of case, regardless of how experienced that lawyer is, that this lawyer for money, in effect for money, basically accomplished something that I think the reader would find incredible and unbelievable. There was no proof of a coerced confession. There was no proof that she couldn't understand English. In fact, she was very fluent in English. There was no proof that.
But these are the best charges that they could lay on her, was his criminal negligence causing the death of this person. But everybody in that court, from every impact statement and even the statements from the judge, clearly this woman was far more guilty than those charges.
Yes, and I think I sometimes I think defense attorneys go too far. I do not have a problem with them trying to convince people that there was a coerce confession, because that's kind of a subjective kind of thing. But he lied about her English, and you know he he lied when he said at the at the at the end of the plea bargain of the thing in the courtroom, he said that Angelica has no intention of going for
that money. And I think that's just what he wanted to say to set things up so everybody would be comfortable with the deal. And it was later that they they submitted the paperwork to go for that money, and I think that was a little sleasy, to be honest. Yeah.
The other thing is that despite warnings and a gag a gag order, both defense attorney and Angelica made public media appearances.
Didn't they sit in Yes, And you know, the defense sort the first time said oh, well, I'm sorry. I mean the gag orders were on the attorneys, they weren't specifically on Angelica. And so when she had a second national appearance schedule to do an interview, but the the attorney wanted to be there like he had been for the first one, but the judge said, no, you can't be there. If she wants to make a statement to the media. We can't take away her first amendment, right,
but you can't be there. We have a gag order. But you know, he did violate once, and I think he would have continued to violate until the judge told him no.
It's interesting to post conviction, what does she maintain again in the media after this sentence, And again she was looking at fifteen and then the families were hopeful fifteen to life, fifteen to the rest of her life, and this was the deal was unfortunately disappointingly fifteen months to four years.
Yes, and she had also got credit for time served, so it ended up that she only spent a couple months in prison. And it was really unfair to the memory of this. It was not justice for his family. And she's going around and saying, oh, she loved him and it was just an accident. You know. It's just annoying after all the things she said to to try to make him look bad and to try to make her look good, and it is, you know, victim time,
and it angers me. None of us are perfect, but none of us deserve to be trashed after we even killed either. But she's protesting her love for him, and it kind of reminds me of that song by Amy V years back that says killing him doesn't make fuff go away.
Yeah, you're right. Also, again, it's not a quest for justice, but people are looking for some kind of recourse from the court's October twenty seventh, twenty seventeen, Vince's family files a wrongful death suit against Angelica and the State Supreme Court Dutchess County. As of now, what does the status of that.
I think that it's all been wrapped up, and it was wrapped up in some sort of agreement. Now insurance money would be divided, and I think the family realized who was kind of feudal because none of the insurance money was ever going to go to Angelica anyway, so she couldn't give it back. Yeah.
Yes, for this book, you as usual, and this is the fourteenth or the fifteenth through crime book that you've written. Fifteenth, Yes, yes, fifteenth. Congratulations. Who are the some of the people that you had access to that I think I can answer this question, but I'm asking you, what are the some of the people, some of the characters that were essential that you had access to to really be able to write this book.
Sean van Klauss, who was a lifelong friend of Vince, was extremely helpful to me in giving me a lot of information and a lot of just stories about Vince. And another person who is very helpful was his mother, and that I tell those two probably were the biggest help of all in discovering exactly who Vince was. And you know, he was really a good guy. And you know, he wasn't perfect, but he was good to his friends. He had so many friends, it was just unbelievable. From
elementary school on forward. Everywhere he went and he made friends. He was crazy and irreverent, and he did funny dance moves and he brightened everybody up, and he gave his friends good advice. He'd sit down and talk to them art to heart and try to help them, and he just was a good guy.
What's interesting too, you talk about he's such a good guy and in your book is really I think anybody that involved with Vincent would be happy with the depiction of him. But what's interesting and disturbing really is that the media were able to attend this hearing and yet you get a February twenty and eighteen, twenty twenty updated show about Angelica's case and Richard Portel was interviewed the
defense attorney and he talked about the missing gun. So again I don't need to harp on this, but oh, that is interesting that after the fact he's still still trying to cast doubt on his client's guilt, but using such a I don't know, defenseless play.
Yeah, it's the gun. The answer is very simple. The missing gun was still with his ex wife, and so it wasn't really missing. It just wasn't in the house to be shared with Angelsca. And you know he's saying that, you know, that's why the police researching the aten. No, it wasn't. They'd already established where that gun was before
they ever went out on the island. And I'll tell you right now from talking to the investigators, and it's really clear that if they had ever thought that a gun had been used the death of Vents, they would have been out to that island lickety split. They just went back there basically grasping for straws that they could find on that island that could answer the questions they had. But if they thought a gun was involved, that would have been the first place they went.
As a seemingly psychopathic as this person, Angelica is, it is also interesting when you look at everything and the end result that if she were to be a little bit more careful, a little a little smarter about things, we wouldn't know even the three quarters of the truth that we know today, wouldn't we No.
In fact, Dan, if she had put up a semblance of genuine grief and acted like it mattered to her that when Dince was missing, that it mattered to her when when she found out was dead. If she acted just a little bit, no one would have ever thought that there was a problem, that it was anything but an accident. But it was her behavior and the things she said to police that brought the eyes of justice down upon her. She brought that on because she was
carrying the kilt. She knew she'd done wrong by him, and she couldn't even take it.
It was interesting too, she got a photographer, because of course she was interested in photography, and that's how she met some of these people through some of her interests singing, playing guitar, and so anyway, with this she was i saying. She definitely was interested in the attention that she got, and as a result, she said things and did things.
The cartwill in the backyard was one thing, but she took another photo of a Cartwell, again, you say, cartwheels are expressing some kind of joy and kind of the opposite of what you should be feeling. But she also posted a strange photo from this photographer of her paddling at kayak with the Bannerman Island the crime scene in the background. I thought that was one of the most interesting visuals.
That is an eerie picture, you know, it just speaks so much of the danger, and that she would put that up at that time really was disturbing, and she just you know, I don't understand a lot of what she did. And to be honest, it's trying to understand the motivation of a sociopaths.
Is difficult, trying to understand how someone and it can be so consumed by narcissistic feelings.
It is hard to understand. So I guess it's good that I don't understand it, or maybe that would say something ugly about me, But it's still, you know, it's hard to wrap your mind around how a sociopath's mind works. And it's very disturbing and very tragic. You know, Vince should still be around, he should still be with us, He should still be given his mother a hug on Mother's Day, and the fact that he isn't is just tragic.
Yes, well, we certainly do get a very vivid glimpse into the into acial theopathic killer's mind. I want to thank you very much Dan for coming on and talking about Death on the River, a fiance's dark secrets, and a kayak trip turned deadly. For those people that might want to look at other work, we talked about this being your fifteenth through crime book, but twenty six books overall or twenty seven? Is there a website, Facebook page they might take a look at.
A website is Dianfanning dot com and I am Facebook dot com slash Diane Fanning. I have my regular page and I also have a true crime books page.
Thank you, look up absolutely. Thank you very much, Diane. It has been an absolute pleasure talking about Death on the River. You have a great eating and I know we'll be talking to you again real soon.
Thank you, Thank you, Dan Bode, Bye, good night,