This episode contains the testimony of Marc Benayer, 81, who represented himself at his 2007 murder trial in Boca Raton, Florida. After Benayer’s girlfriend Marta Pinto, 44, had broken up with him, he allegedly began stalking and harassing her, claiming she owed him $10,000. Marta, who spoke very little English, worked at an electronics company, and she turned to her bosses, Mark Levy and Jonathan Samuels, for help in getting a restraining order against her elderly suitor.
In 2005, after the Rosh Hashanah service at the Chabad Weltman Synagogue in Boca Raton, Benayer shot Jonathan Samuels, 43, twice in the back. He died nine months later. Mr. Benayer claimed the shooting was an accident, and that Samuels’ death was due to a heart attack. At his trial, the eccentric and irascible Benayer fired his attorney and decided to represent himself. Unsurprisingly, the jury found him guilty. Later, while behind bars, Benayer tried to hire a hitman to kill his former defense attorney along with Mark Levy, a prosecution witness. In reality, the hitman was an undercover Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy.
While Benayer had been diagnosed with dementia, a personality disorder and the early onset of Alzheimer’s, psychiatrists examined him before the trial and declared him competent to represent himself. Others may disagree. Benayer died in prison in August 2015, aged 89.
This episode contains Mr. Benayer’s excruciating cross-examination of his ex- girlfriend Marta’s daughter Henriette, 18, and Marta’s new boyfriend, Martin Fried.
December, 2018. Lisa Jeffrey, 48, of Ocala, Florida, hadn’t been seen for a few days; relatives became concerned and contacted the police. When cops searched the trailer where Lisa lived with her ex-husband, 57-year-old Bo Pete Jeffrey, they found her body, along with a pair of blood-stained boxing gloves, stuffed into garbage bags under his camper bed. Lisa, who had Crohn’s disease, alcoholism and a drug problem, had been beaten to death.
On August 8, 1996, playboy bachelor Lance Herndon, 41, was found bludgeoned to death in his bed at his home in Roswell, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Police claim the killer climbed onto his naked body and straddled him, then beat him in the head and face. The murder weapon was never found.
In January 1992, Aileen Wuornos, a sex worker, stood trial for the murder of 52-year-old Richard Mallory, who’d picked her up when she was hitch-hiking. When she was intially interviewed by police, Wuornos said she shot Mallory because he threatened to rape her. However, at trial, her testimony about the incident was much more graphic and disturbing. At this time, she’d confessed to murdering six men in addition to Mallory, all in self-defense (in fact, Mallory had a prior conviction for sexual abuse, but this fact was not allowed into evidence). To law enforcement and the state’s attorney, Wuornos gave a number of inconsistent versions of events; her attorneys discouraged her from testifying in court, but she insisted on taking the stand. Her account fell apart under close questioning, especially after her longtime girlfriend, Tyria Moore, took a deal and testified against her.
Marvin Heemyer had come to the end of his tether. The welder and muffler repairman had moved to the small town of Granby, Colorado, around 1990. In 1992, he bought 2 acres of land for $42,000 to build a muffler repair shop. He subsequently agreed to sell the land to a man named Cody Docheff, who wanted to build a concrete plant. Around 2001, he became embroiled in an arcane zoning dispute that left him completely unhinged.
Dan Brophy, 63, was a well-known chef and popular teacher at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon. In the morning of June 2, 2018, Dan was gunned down while he was prepping for the day’s work in the school’s kitchen. He had no known enemies. However, Dan and his wife, Nancy, were having serious financial problems and to shore up the couple’s finances, Nancy, a self-published romance novelist, had taken a job selling life insurance. Friends of the couple testified that their marriage was strong and stable; others noted that Nancy was tired of Dan’s hoarding and messiness.
This episode contains testimony from the trial of Andy McCauley for the murder of his girlfriend’s 15-year-old daughter, Riley Crossman. The crime took place in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, a small working-class community blighted by Opiods and other drugs. Riley and her boyfriend, Hayden, always stayed in close contact by text and social media, even “sleeping together” at night on Facetime. On the night of May 7, 2019, at 11:01 p.m., Riley was in bed when something disturbing happened. She sent Hayden a text that said, “Andy’s in my room and I’m scared,” but Hayden had fallen asleep.
This episode contains the long, grueling interrogation of Cat Mellender, 21, the girlfriend of 23-year-old Chandler Halderson. As she testified at trial in January 2022, Cat had always believed that Chandler was a recent college graduate who worked for an insurance company, volunteered as a rescue scuba diver, and was had recently been offered a job in Florida with SpaceX. But when Chandler’s parents, Bart and Krista Halderson, went missing in July 2021, his web of lies came undone.
In November 2007, Adam Kaufman, a prominent Florida real estate salesman, woke to find his wife Lina, 33, draped by the neck, dead, over a magazine rack by the toilet in the couple’s ritzy waterfront home. There was suspicious bruising on Lina’s neck, although the marriage was apparently untroubled. A year-and-a-half later, the Miami-Dade County medical examiner ruled Lina’s death a homicide by mechanical strangulation, and Adam was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The defense argued that a spray tan Lina got the day before may have caused her to pass out and slump over that magazine rack, where she was strangled to death by gravity.
