Hey, how are you guys?
It's time for the Dateline morning meeting.
I'm covering another sentencing today.
There you are, on the scene.
Our producers are swapping tips and story ideas.
Let's keep track of it.
They're finding traces of blood in his car.
They're finding a knife.
They're finding a receipt for that gorilla mask.
Welcome to Dateline True Crime Weekly.
I'm Andrea Canning.
It's September 18th, and here's what's on our docket.
Three years after a Microsoft employee was gunned down in an alleged murder-for-hire plot, Florida prosecutors released interview tapes and 911 calls never heard by the public before.
He has a little kid in the car.
She was crazy.
In Dateline Roundup I'll take you inside the courtroom for the sentencing in the Crystal Rogers murder trial, dubbed Kentucky's trial of the decade, and the latest on the jailhouse attack of a Massachusetts man accused of murdering his wife.
On Thursday night, Brian Walsh was stabbed in jail.
Plus, sentencing a murder might be more difficult than you think.
NBC News legal analyst and defense attorney Danny Savalos explains why.
But before all that, we're heading to New Jersey, where a man has been behind bars for nearly seven years awaiting trial for the murder of his brother and his brother's entire family.
November 2018.
Just a couple of days before Thanksgiving, firefighters responded to a house fire in the affluent community of Colts Neck, New Jersey.
They found a million-dollar mansion engulfed in flames and the body of 50-year-old Keith Canero, shot dead, on the front lawn.
Inside, his wife and two young children were also found murdered in what appeared to be a targeted attack.
And the tragedy didn't end there.
Earlier that morning, a fire had broken out at Keith's brother's house in nearby Ocean Township.
Paul Canero and his loved ones survived.
But investigators couldn't ignore the question, were the two incidents linked?
They had a surprising answer.
The next day Paul, the surviving brother, was arrested and accused of setting his own house on fire.
And then, days later, a local prosecutor announced additional charges against Paul for the murder of his brother and his brother's family.
We allege that, after murdering the Canero family, the defendant then set fire to the house in an effort to conceal and disguise his earlier committed crimes.
That was nearly seven years ago and Paul Canero still has not faced trial for the alleged quadruple homicide.
He pleaded not guilty and was expected to face a jury earlier this month, but an unexpected move by the New Jersey Supreme Court stopped the trial in its tracks.
Late last week, Paul's defense team said enough was enough.
They went before a judge and demanded his release.
Here to tell us why prosecutors believe Paul allegedly turned on his brother and why the case has taken so long to head to trial is senior reporter for NJcom, Sean Sullivan.
Sean, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Okay, so, Sean, to start, what do we know about these two brothers and their relationship?
Yeah, so Paul was the older brother by about a year.
And, you know, these were not just brothers.
They were business partners who had been in what was essentially a family business for a long time.
Keith had founded a tech company and then had also sort of spun off a side business that involved pest control.
And by all accounts, these two brothers had once been close.
Keith was the best man at Paul's wedding.
Yeah, yeah.
They were, you know, just they lived about 13 miles apart.
And, you know, from outward appearances, there wasn't really anything amiss.
These guys were living the American dream.
Yeah.
And I, Sean, I've been to Colts Neck in New Jersey, a lot of beautiful homes, a lot of horse farms.
Bruce Springsteen's house.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's nice when Bruce Springsteen lives there.
And Keith owned this mansion.
You know, he seemed to have sort of the picture perfect life, right?
Yeah, though it seemed like he was under sort of an enormous amount of stress based on the you know, the stuff that's come out pre-trial.
Yeah.
And so Paul, as far as he goes, was he living as large as Keith?
Not outwardly.
I mean Paul lived in nearby Ocean Township and his house was by no means modest, but it wasn't a mansion.
But he did own three Porsches.
That's a lot.
According to prosecutors, he had allegedly a mistress for whom he was also making car payments on, I think, an Audi.
And so this was a guy who had expensive tastes and may have been dipping into the company till in order to keep up with that.
So Sean, take us to the day of the fires.
So on the night in question we're talking middle of the night keith sends a couple text messages to his brother and says you know uh, there's an issue.
The power's out and keith goes outside to check on it.
Um, and what we know now is that the next morning a neighbor uh sees smoke coming from the house, wanders over and finds keith dead outside.
There's a person laying down.
Where are they laying down?
Oh my God, there's blood here.
According to prosecutors, what Paul had done that evening was he had gotten into one of those Porsches and he drove, you know, the 13 miles from his house over to Colts Neck and cut the power.
And then when Keith came out to inspect it, shot him dead before he then went into the house.
And according to prosecutors, that's when Paul murdered Keith's wife and children too, and set the house on fire.
After that, they allege, he headed back to his own house and set that on fire too, with his wife and children inside.
They got out unharmed.
So what do we know, Sean, about his alleged motive?
Prosecutors sort of lay two tracks on this here.
The first is a fairly straightforward kind of cover-up story where Paul had gotten caught by his brother taking money from the company Till.
Specifically, he was in charge of making payments to a trust fund that was related to Keith's life insurance policy, and he was allegedly charged diverting those payments.
The cover-up motive is just that he got caught and he panicked.
The added layer here is this life insurance policy, which Hall was a beneficiary of, but Keith's children and wife were primary beneficiaries.
And so if they all went away, that solved his cover-up problem.
It also gave him a financial windfall.
Basically, the prosecutor's version of events is that he eliminated everybody who was in his way of an insurance payout.
So seven years ago that all this took place.
Why has it taken so long for Paul Canero to go to trial?
It starts with COVID.
You know, the fact that the pandemic made criminal trials impossible for a number of years.
On top of that, New Jersey had a judicial shortage for a number of years.
Still has a judicial shortage.
And so there's literally not enough judges on the bench.
And that has caused delays.
And then it's just the evidence in this trial.
There's the issue of involving security camera at Paul's house and how that was obtained by police.
The judge ruled that that security footage was not going to be admissible.
Prosecutors appealed and actually the Supreme Court took that up.
And so that's now why we see another delay in this case.
Yeah.
So this is, as of now, is delayed until the new year.
Paul's defense team demanded a hearing saying that it's unacceptable that Paul should remain behind bars, since he's been in custody for nearly seven years.
Let's take a listen to what his attorney had to say during this hearing.
It is simply not just to hold someone in jail seven years without having the opportunity to have their case tried.
And the judge's decision, not so good for Paul Canero about remaining behind bars.
Yeah, the judge ruled that he still presented too much of a risk to the public.
And so he is going to remain locked up indefinitely until he gets that trial.
OK, we'll see if it happens in 2026, as expected.
And we will certainly be keeping an eye on if there's any more delays in this.
Thank you, Sean, so much for breaking this down for us.
We appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
Anytime.
Coming up.
Prosecutors release never-before-seen audio and video in an alleged murder-for-hire plot of a Microsoft employee and father of four.
For our next story, we're heading to a quiet stretch of road in Jacksonville Beach, Florida.
In February of 2022, Microsoft employee 33-year-old Jared Breidegen was driving his daughter home when he noticed a tire in the road.
When he got out to move it, a gunman ambushed him.
Bullets flew into the SUV where his two-year-old was buckled into her car seat.
She survived, but Breidegen was declared dead at the scene.
Detectives say they uncovered a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by Bridegan's ex-wife, Shanna Gardner, and her new husband.
Their alleged motive?
An ongoing court battle over Gardner and Bridegan's children.
After their arrest, both Gardner and her husband, Mario Fernandez-Saldana, pleaded not guilty.
Last week, prosecutors released some never-before-seen video and audio from the investigator's case file, including 911 calls from the crime scene.
You might want to get somebody out here because I was 100% gun-shot.
And a bombshell interview with a friend of Breitigan's ex-wife.
He said, you know, I'm in the military.
You know, I've killed people before.
Here to give us the latest on the case, and this new evidence is Dateline producer Mike Nardi, who has been covering this since the beginning.
Welcome back, Mike.
Thanks, Andrea.
So, Mike, remind us who Jared Breitigan was and what happened to him.
Jared was a Microsoft employee and a father of four.
Uh, he shared twins, a boy and a girl with his ex-wife, Shanna Gardner, after a bitter divorce.
Jared later remarried and had two more children with his new wife.
Um, as I said, they had joint custody of the twins with his ex-wife.
And part of the agreement was that on the weeks he didn't have the kids, Jared got to take them out for dinner.
Um And so, in February of 2022, Jared had that dinner with the twins and then dropped them off at Shanna's house.
And he was on his way home with his two-year-old in the back seat when the gunman struck.
Mike.
A year later, police arrested a man named Henry Tennon, who admitted that he was in fact the gunman.
But Tennon was a total stranger to Bright again.
How did the authorities connect him to the case?
They learned Tenon, who was a longtime felon, was actually a former tenant of Mario Fernandez Saldana, who is the new husband of Shanna Gardner, Bridegan's ex-wife.
The biggest clue, the way they were able to find Tenon, was video of a Ford truck in the neighborhood.
And authorities were able to trace that back to Tenon.
Tennant told prosecutors he was hired by Fernandez to carry out the hit.
In March 2023, investigators arrested Fernandez and charged him with first-degree murder, conspiracy and child abuse.
Because remember, Bridegan's young daughter was in the car with him when he was killed.
And they arrested Breitigan's ex-wife Shanna not too long after that.
That's right.
And you know, what we know about Shanna is she was from a respectable Mormon family with a lot of money.
She's been described as a trust fund baby.
And even though Shanna and Jared had a custody arrangement settled, they were constantly going back and forth in court over finances, over the kids' futures and what they should or should not be doing.
So prosecutors believe that Shanna wanted Jared killed so she could get full custody of the kids.
Plus she could also protect the trust fund.
So here we are now, 2025, and the state attorney's office has released a trove of material.
Mike, you don't always see this, right, where state's attorneys release information before trial.
Why do you think they did that?
There's been so much media attention and interest in this case that they had made a decision to start to release documents.
Release evidence.
There's just so much of it that they can't do it all at once.
So they've been slowly over the last several months last year releasing bits and pieces of the case.
So that's sort of where this latest dump came from.
And, as we mentioned, some of that material was a chilling selection of 911 calls from the night of the murder.
That's right.
That's right.
And you know what's interesting about these calls is they paint a picture of what happened in the moments after Jared was killed.
Jacksonville Beach, 911.
I'm pretty sure I just heard three or four gunshots and now there's a bunch of cars that are backed up.
There appears to be, it seems like a lot of confusion from the people who are calling in.
911.
Yes, I'm calling.
There's a guy in the middle of the road on America Avenue.
What's he doing?
He's just laying there.
I'm not sure.
He's having a heart attack or something.
And he has a little kid in the car.
My husband right now is holding her.
She was crying.
Is he conscious?
He's unconscious.
So the dispatchers had to sort of figure out what was going on.
Was it a car accident, a medical emergency, or something much worse?
Yeah, what makes this—the murder is sad enough, but then when you think about such a small child in the car while all of this is happening, it's heartbreaking.
Absolutely.
So the next piece of audio in the materials released by the prosecutor was an interview they conducted with one of Shanna's former friends, a woman named Elizabeth Smith.
She approached investigators after the murder and said she had information.
That's right.
So she told investigators that she and Shanna had met in 2016.
They had actually worked together as teachers.
And they became very close friends.
Smith said Gardner was constantly complaining to her about Jared and about her court fights with him.
She told her things had been getting really heated.
They'd been going to court.
And from what Smith said, Gardner really seemed fed up.
And she told you something along the lines of Mario has a military background.
He said he could get four people and break into his house in the middle of the night and quote take care of him, and no one would ever know.
Is that right?
Yes.
And Shanna said Mario said that in reference to Jared.
Yes.
And when she told you this, you found that very odd.
Yes.
What was her demeanor kind of when she was telling you this?
Very casual.
There was nothing unusual. concerning from her.
I mean, she kind of laughed it off.
This friend also discussed an exchange she had with Mario Fernandez at a dinner party.
Yeah, that's right.
She said he did something that made her very uncomfortable.
He said at some point he kind of looked at you and you caught a stare down.
Yes.
And what did he say?
He said, you know, I'm in the military, you know, I've killed people before.
Just a reminder.
Shanna Gardner and Fernandez have said that they are innocent and have pleaded not guilty.
Have there been any comments, Mike, from the defendants now that these tapes have been released?
Not that we've seen, no.
They are heading to court later this week for a preliminary hearing and we'll be following this case as things move along.
Thanks so much for the updates, Mike.
Thanks for having me, Andrea.
Up next, it's time for Dateline Roundup.
A Massachusetts man accused of murder is attacked behind bars.
And convicted killer and self-proclaimed doomsday prophet, Chad Daybell, is speaking out from death row.
Plus, NBC News legal analyst Danny Savalos on why sentencing murderers isn't always straightforward.
Welcome back.
Joining me for this week's Roundup is Dateline Associate Producer Alex Larray.
Alex, welcome back to the podcast.
Hi.
Thanks for having me.
Alex, for our first story.
We're heading back to the scene of Karen Reed's murder trial, Norfolk Superior Court in Massachusetts, where next month, another trial we've been following is expected to begin in that same courthouse.
In this case, Brian Walsh is accused of killing his wife, Anna.
He has pleaded not guilty.
And Alex, remind us what we know about this case so far.
Sure.
So Anna Walsh was a 39-year-old mother of three, and she was last seen New Year's Day, January 2023.
Her husband, Brian, and colleagues reported her missing.
Police said Brian, who was actually already under house arrest for selling counterfeit Andy Warhol paintings, was initially cooperative, but they did a search of the home and found blood in the basement.
Police later discovered some Google searches about body decomposition on their six-year-old son's iPad.
Ana's body has never been found.
Ultimately, Brian was charged with first-degree murder, misleading police and improper transport of a human body.
He's pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
Last week, Alex, there was some big news involving Brian Walsh.
That's right.
On Thursday night, Brian Walsh was stabbed in jail.
He was taken to a hospital for an injury that was described as non-life-threatening and superficial.
And he was back in jail by Friday.
In a statement, the Norfolk County Sheriff's Office said the other individual involved in the incident was subdued and a makeshift blunt instrument was recovered.
OK, so Monday there was a status hearing in this case.
And Alex, it actually involved a former detective I interviewed for the Karen Reed case.
His name is Michael Proctor.
He was ultimately fired for misconduct during that investigation, including sending a number of disparaging texts about Karen Reed.
Turns out he was the lead investigator in Brian Walsh's case as well.
So tell us how this is all tying together.
Right so, as you've talked about on the podcast before, there's been a lot of back and forth about what Walsh's defense team can review from Proctor's phone, and there was more of that in the hearing.
The prosecution said that they completed the review of materials and are in conversation with the US.
Attorney's Office following the review.
So it's still unclear exactly what will be turned over to the defense, but there will be another status hearing on September 25th.
Okay, and that trial is expected to begin October 20th.
Up next, we are heading to Idaho, where convicted murderer Chad Daybell is making headlines again.
Alex, remind us quickly who Chad Daybell is.
Yeah, so Chad is the husband of Lori Val Daybell, also known as Mommy Doomsday, who will be very familiar to regular listeners of Dateline.
Chad and Lori were both charged and found guilty in the murders of Lori's kids, JJ and Tylee.
Chad was also found guilty of the murder of his first wife Tammy, while Lori was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.
Lori was sentenced to life in prison and Chad was sentenced to death.
Okay, and our listeners may remember, Lori did that fascinating interview with our own Keith, and now Chad is speaking out from behind bars in his own way.
Yes, Andrea.
Chad Daybell is communicating through a new website called Letters from Chad.
The site says it features writings from Chad, who is currently on death row.
Okay, I'm almost afraid to ask.
What is he writing about?
Yeah.
So in his first letter, Chad thanked people who sent him cards and letters and said that he was writing because he wanted people to hear directly from him saying I am not the man the media has created.
I am not a cult member who should be feared.
I am not a conspirator or a killer.
Daybell expressed sadness over the deaths of Tammy JJ and Tylee and said he would share a more complete story in his appeals process.
He's also shared book and music recommendations in these letters.
Oh, so interesting, Alex.
Thank you, and thank you for bringing us these stories this week.
Yep, absolutely, anytime.
And we've got one more update for you.
It's currently Wednesday and I just got out of court in Bardstown Kentucky, after the final phase of what's been called Kentucky's trial of the decade.
Over 10 years ago, Crystal Rogers' car was found abandoned on the Bluegrass Parkway.
There was no trace of Crystal, and her body has never been found.
Back in July, Brooks Houck, Crystal's ex-boyfriend, was found guilty of her murder and tampering with evidence.
Another man, Joseph Lawson, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and tampering with physical evidence.
Their sentencing took place Wednesday afternoon.
It began with victim impact statements.
Many members of Crystal's family spoke, including two of her daughters.
It was very emotional.
Her sister and her brother and her aunt.
Her mother, Sherry, took the stand and spoke for nearly half an hour.
She addressed Houck, who looked at her as she spoke to him.
Did you ever think of how my daughter felt when you murdered her?
Sherry looked Houck in the eye and said, where is my daughter?
There will be some forgiveness for you if you tell me where my daughter is.
The judge then sentenced Houck to life in prison.
Joseph Lawson was sentenced to 25 years for his role in the crime.
I'll be staying on this story for a future Dateline episode, so stay tuned for that.
Last week on the podcast, we talked about the sentencing of Catherine Rostelli, a Utah mom who pleaded guilty to charges in connection to the 2024 murder of her husband, Matthew.
Catherine gave a brief statement.
I'm so very deeply sorry for the pain that I've caused.
Then the judge handed Catherine her sentence, and it was by no means straightforward.
For conspiring to murder her husband and the murder itself.
Her sentence was one to 15 years in prison.
You heard that right.
In theory, Rustelli could serve as little as one year in prison for committing murder.
It made us wonder how often judges hand out such wide sentencing ranges to convicted killers and what else we don't know about sentencing a murderer.
So we asked NBC News legal analyst and defense attorney Danny Savellos to give us the breakdown.
Thanks for being here, Danny.
Thanks for having me to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is sentencing.
Sentencing.
Okay.
In most of the cases we see at Dateline, convicted killers receive life sentences or life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Very definitive.
But is that as common as I think, Danny, or not?
No.
The answer to that question is it depends.
It depends on 50 plus different jurisdictions, because all the states and the federal system have vastly different rules when it comes to not only the mandatory minimum and mandatory maximum sentences for a.
Let's talk about Catherine Rustelli, who we mentioned off the top.
She was sentenced on several charges, but what stood out to our team was that she was sentenced to as little as one year in prison on the murder charge, as we mentioned.
Have you heard of anyone actually spending that little time in prison for murder?
Yes, possibly on a homicide.
So you know, in Utah the default position is that murder is first degree, but second degree murder is a lesser kind of homicide.
And the sentencing range is actually one to 15 years.
This always confuses me, Danny.
When I, you know, I've sat through so many sentencings in courtrooms and I hear this range thing and you're trying to figure out what that means.
You know when they say from this number to this number.
Like, well, where does it fall?
Right.
So there are two different kinds of sentencing determinate sentencing, which means the judge announces a specific time, and indeterminate, which means you get a range as part of your sentence.
And it gives a dramatic amount of discretion to a parole board to decide whether or not their sentence should be completed.
But you're right.
Theoretically, her sentence could be as short as one year.
Yeah, she could be let out although statistically it's probably unlikely at least at her first parole board hearing.
And Catherine Rustelli, you know, that was part of a plea deal.
You know, she's pleading guilty to this.
She is expected to testify against her alleged co-conspirators, her mom and her brother, when they head to trial next year.
And as Josh Mankiewicz likes to say, he who squeals gets the deal.
Absolutely.
That is nothing is truer or more correctly said.
Unlikely.
That is why this defendant got the deal of second degree murder, when the facts tended to show at least a deliberate intent to lure and then kill.
But cooperation can get you quite a ways.
And it's not just Utah that has some sentencing on the shorter side.
Texas has something called sudden passion.
I discovered that in a story I was working on about a woman named Frances Hall.
She ran her husband off the road on his motorbike while they were in a chase with his paramour.
And Danny, her defense team argued sudden passion, and she got very little time behind bars.
It was pretty amazing how short her sentence was.
Yeah, it's interesting that we would have a provision that rewards explosive rage syndrome.
But again, you know, legislatures do what they do.
I mean, it's crazy when you think about these cases.
You know if you put everything into a hat the backgrounds of the people, the personalities where they grew up, what state they're in, what the crime was.
I mean, it's like a, you know, like a roulette table almost with so many things spinning around.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's what's always fascinated me about sentencing is that there's probably no area of the law that tries so hard for uniformity.
But the practical reality is no two crimes are exactly the same.
There's always differences.
And when you combine that with the fact that the laws are so different in every state and, by the way, people's ideas about justice are dramatically different from state to state.
Some states are arguably and I hate to use this word crueler or more.
They're more stringent when it comes to punishments.
Wow Danny, thank you so much for always breaking down the tough issues for us and helping us understand.
We appreciate it.
Thank you.
That's it for this episode of Dateline True Crime Weekly.
To get ad-free listening for all our podcasts, subscribe to Dateline Premium.
Make sure to check out Josh's brand new original podcast series.
Deadly Engagement about the murder of a grad student in North Carolina.
Did a love triangle lead to murder?
If we can ever prove who was stalking whom, I think we have our case solved.
You can get the show wherever you listen now.
And coming up this Friday on Dateline, I'm bringing you an all-new episode.
When police found her body, it appeared that 23-year-old Sandra Birchmore had died by suicide.
But her friends and family say there was more to the story.
It didn't add up at all.
Could she actually do that?
Or did somebody have a part in this?
Watch The Betrayal of Sandra Birchmore this Friday at 10, 9 central on NBC.
And one last thing before we go.
I'll be in Nashville with the rest of the Dateline crew on September 28th for the first ever Dateline live event.
There will be onstage panels, audience Q&As, and a VIP reception.
We'd love to see you there.
You can still get tickets at datelinenbc.com forward slash event.
You can also find a link in the episode description.
Thanks for listening.
Dateline True Crime Weekly is produced by Carson Cummins and Katie Ferguson.
Our associate producer is Caroline Casey.
Our senior producer is Liz Brown-Kroloff.
Veronica Mizeka is our digital producer.
Rick Kwan is our sound designer.
Original music by Jesse McGinty.
Bryson Barnes is head of audio production.
Paul Ryan is executive producer.
And Liz Cole is senior executive producer of Dateline.
Thanks, everybody.
Bye.
Bye.
