firefighters arrived to a fully involved house fire.
You can only imagine just what they've gone through and the tragedy that they've suffered.
And you find a piece of evidence, this fire was intentional.
Your natural question is, well, who is that person?
Who has the motivation to do this?
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
Binghamton, New York, is home to one of the state's best universities.
But for those who live there full time, it's also a tight-knit city filled with familiar faces.
And that made the heartbreaking events here even harder to imagine.
A devastating fire that destroyed a community's sense of safety.
The only path to healing was to bring the perpetrator to justice.
It was the job of Broome County Chief Assistant D.A.
Lucas Findley, a job he prepared for his whole life.
My plan was to go into law enforcement, but in a different avenue.
I wanted to become a state trooper, but the New York State Police were in, I believe, an eight-year hiring freeze.
It kind of boxed me in and made me think of other alternatives.
And I decided, hey, maybe I'll go to law school.
And I ended up doing this because it gives you a sense of doing good for your community and keeping people safe.
Lucas Finley clearly took his job with a desire to serve his community, and he is diligent, caring and committed to getting the truth, and that made this case incredibly challenging.
It involved a crime that shattered a family and devastated a neighborhood.
The date was March 17, 2011.
There was a report called in by numerous people in the city of Binghamton that there was a structure fire, a residential fire, in the area of 21 Milford Street in the city of Binghamton here in New York.
It was observed around 3 or 3.30 initially.
911 calls in the middle of the night are uncommon in that part of town, and every emergency worker on duty in those pre-dawn hours was scrambling to get to the area as fast as they could.
There were a total of, I believe, seven members of the family in the structure at the time that the fire occurred.
There was the mother Maureen, her five kids, Jeffrey and his twin brother Jacob, Ariana and her sister Kara, a young boy by the name of Luke.
There was also a guy by the name of Will, who was actually Maureen's ex-husband, that she allowed to stay in an in-law suite.
The Asa family was in immediate and present danger, caught inside a blazing inferno.
But before firefighters even mounted their trucks, potentially life-saving help had already arrived.
The Asa's neighbors were already there, some putting themselves at risk trying to help their friends escape.
Maureen is woken up to yelling outside and she's on the front side of the house on the second floor.
She thinks that there's a fight going on.
She opens her window.
She's seeing a glow come through the window and she realizes that the house is on fire and that the people outside aren't fighting.
They're actually yelling to get the family's attention.
You know, Anastasia, these are really heart-stopping moments.
Just hearing the way Lucas describes this house being completely engulfed in flames literally really just a matter of minutes.
And then to see people risking their own lives, it's just incredible.
And that really is the thing.
People not just watching, putting themselves at risk.
Like, that really shows the very best of not only community, but of humanity.
But despite all of that effort, the fire was spreading incredibly fast.
The fire is now starting to come into the house from the front of the house working its way to the back, and the smoke is getting thick.
Maureen reacted quickly.
Her youngest was sleeping in her room, so she guided him to the hallway, woke up her twins, who were sleeping in the room across from hers, and then all sprinted to the staircase.
Her two daughters were in a third floor bedroom, but the billowing smoke and intense heat made it clear they wouldn't be able to get down to Maureen.
She actually tells her daughters to escape out of a window to the roof of the house.
Once the girls confirmed they could make it out, Maureen gathered her youngest and her twin sons to get them to the second floor balcony.
But that wouldn't be easy.
Both of the boys, Jeffrey and Jacob, suffered from some degree of autism.
And look, obviously there's this broad range of conditions that all can be connected to autism.
Some are milder and some are more severe.
But in this case it definitely made this already harrowing situation more challenging and put these boys at additional risk.
Screams and chaos filled the dark, smoke-laden hallway, making it virtually impossible for Maureen to see who was actually with her until they got to the second floor balcony.
She realizes that Jeffrey's not there with them, and she has no idea where he went.
She starts yelling to her daughters upstairs, who are now on the roof outside of the house.
Is Jeffrey up with you?
There was no answer.
And even if there was, by then the house was completely engulfed in flames.
There was no way back inside.
Hearing this makes us all think about how we would react in that same situation.
Maureen, her youngest and one of the twins, were rescued off the balcony with a ladder, and they also found her ex-husband there waiting.
And incredibly, that ladder was not from an emergency truck.
It was brought there by the ace's neighbors.
Actual firefighters were still minutes away.
Maureen wasted no time directing everyone's attention to the roof where her daughters were still trapped praying Jeffrey, the other twin, was with them.
But there were only two girls stranded and the neighbor's ladder wasn't able to reach them.
The older daughter, Ariana.
She actually makes a decision which is gonna give her sister a better opportunity.
Ariana kind of figures that the gutter's not gonna support both of them, so she just makes a decision and jumps to the deck below her.
Thankfully, a neighbor was there and he jumped underneath of her just in time to catch most of her as she fell to the wooden porch, And it was Ariana's heroism that allowed her sister to survive unscathed.
But Ariana herself wasn't as lucky.
She did sustain a hip fracture.
While EMS treated Ariana, Maureen pleaded with the first arriving firefighters, begging them to find her son Jeffrey.
You know, obviously she's incredibly upset.
She's realizing that her son is likely still inside.
And so she's just doing everything that she can as a mother to motivate the fire department to try to get in there and save her son.
But the fire was just so terrible at that point.
They could not get into the structure.
Tragically, Jeffrey Asa lost his life that morning.
Later we would find out that Jeffrey wanted to go out the way that he knew to go out of his house, which was downstairs, and through the front door.
And unfortunately, because of the fire that was going on down there, he never made it to the front door.
They found Jeffrey's body towards the front of the house.
Jeffrey Asa was only 17 years old.
The crushing loss felt by the family would only deepen as fire marshals spoke to the neighbors, hoping to uncover clues as to the cause of the blaze.
We had a few witnesses.
We kind of used those witnesses to one, provide a timeline.
Two, provide some information as to where the fire started.
So there was one woman that lived down the street.
She happened to be outside at about the time the fire was starting.
What the witness saw was critical.
She says that she observes what she believes to be a chair on the porch.
So that was critical evidence to both provide the start of the timeline of the fire as well as the area of origin.
The other neighbors who assisted with the ladder.
They saw the fire as the fire was starting to lip over the roof of the porch, but nothing else at that point was in flame yet.
You know Anasigal, we often talk about how important timelines are in homicide investigations, but they're equally as important in arson investigations, because the origin of the fire, how it begins and how it spreads, is key to finding out critical answers.
And if you have more than one person who is fortunate for investigators to have seen something, putting those pieces together to see where it leads them can prove pivotal.
And here, the matching reports raised many important questions.
That's because more than 90 of accidental fires start inside the home with the misuse of appliances or damaged electrical wiring.
Very few start outside.
And if the witness accounts were right, there was a distinct possibility that the blaze at the Asa home started on the porch and that raised the possibility of arson.
Three fire investigators, including fire marshal at the time, Dan Eggleston.
They arrive on scene and their job is obviously to investigate.
Why did this fire start out here on the porch?
And in most cases, testing would reveal if an accelerant is used.
At the Aces' home, that proved useless.
There was no evidence.
The structure was a complete loss.
The building had to be excavated in order to recover, obviously, Jeffrey's body.
By the end of the day, the building was completely demolished.
There wasn't much testing to be done.
But old-fashioned police work in the form of door-to-door neighborhood canvassing heightened the fire marshal's suspicions.
And what ends up being a pretty big piece of evidence is a woman that lived up the road.
She had walked down with her boyfriend when the fire was occurring, just to kind of see what was going on.
And on her way back to her house, which was on the same street Milford, she notices a pickup truck and the gas cap door was flipped open.
The neighbor may have kept that sighting to herself if it was the only odd thing she noticed, but it wasn't.
As she continues walking back to her apartment, her roommate's car was also tampered with.
The gas cap on her roommate's car, the door was open as well.
She mentioned it to her roommate and her roommate said, no, I didn't leave it like that.
Thankfully she decided to call the police because she felt kind of weird about the fire occurring and then making these observations of the gas cap.
And just being a good observant citizen, you see something, say something, that's what she did.
And, you know, I think, Scott, you know, it is often those little pieces that I love the most.
You know, it's by themselves, maybe interesting or a little odd, but not much more.
But it's only when taken together with other evidence, at least potentially, that they can sometimes be crucial.
But in this case, we're definitely not there yet.
Yeah.
And it's so important, when you're doing canvassing for information, to be able to get that information as soon as possible when the memory is very, very fresh, because that's when those details are likely more powerful.
And here it wasn't just that one witness account, because there was something else that came to light that investigators thought couldn't possibly be mere coincidence.
It turned out the Aces weren't the only family in the neighborhood who had a fire that morning.
There was a second one just around the corner.
And that fire was actually put out by a patrol officer with a fire extinguisher before it could catch the house.
Police checked their logbook and noted that the fire was put out just 25 minutes after the first reports from the Asa home.
Now, the officer with the fire extinguisher was confident of how that fire may have started.
It seemed obvious to him that someone had intentionally set items in the home's recycling bin on fire.
Investigators studied the second fire scene and realized it fortunately was never a real threat.
In fact, it might have gone out on its own.
The concrete structure and the asbestos siding on that house protected it from spreading.
That stood in stark contrast to the highly flammable brown siding at the Asa residence.
The exterior of the building was sided with the old petroleum style shingles.
They're actually referred to by firefighters as gasoline siding.
Still, police believed there was little chance the two fires were not linked.
A recycling bin fire alongside of a house two blocks over.
Obviously, this is information that was probably bearing on the mind of the investigators as they're assessing the cause of this fire.
And any lingering doubts went up in smoke when Maureen gave police a complete list of what was stored on her porch.
In that area was the family's recycling bin.
The fire investigators starting to put together that this is likely going to be an incendiary fire that originated around the area of the recycling bin, meaning it started by human hand.
The ruling made the Asa home a crime scene.
And even more importantly, it turned Jeffrey Asa's death into a homicide.
Police in Binghamton, New York, were building a case around the theory that a tragic house fire that took the life of 17-year-old Jeffrey Asa was actually a deadly arson.
Based on law enforcement, observation and witness accounts, it seemed more and more clear someone had intentionally set the fire that killed Jeffrey, badly injured his sister and nearly killed the entire family.
In New York, an arson that results in death can be charged as a murder.
And Anasig, I'm sure in New York, as you've practiced here, you've seen this before.
In most states, there are cases that come under what we call the felony murder statutes, right?
Is that you don't intentionally have to have caused the death to be charged with the crime.
There are certain other crimes, whether they are robberies, sexual assaults, and here like an arson that if you commit that act and they are intentional acts, then you are deemed responsible, thus chargeable with anything that results.
And that's basically what the felony murder statute is for.
And that is exactly how you can see it being viewed when it comes to this.
And so here, once it was ruled that this would have been an arson.
Well, that also meant that Jeffrey's mom Maureen, was now demanding accountability.
Whoever had set this fire had killed her son.
Maureen is an incredibly strong person.
She was motivated from day one to do everything that she could to get justice for her son and to find the truth behind what happened.
She stayed incredibly active in the investigation.
Lucas Finley's office was feeling the pressure.
Maureen Asa was truly a special mother and a beloved leader in her community.
The Asa family is a very unique family in that primarily her children are adopted.
Maureen is a great woman that worked in the court system here in our community for a long time, dedicated herself to the community and she dedicated herself to children.
In total, she has nine children, and one is a biological child.
The rest she chose to adopt.
Maureen had always gone to every length to help a child in need.
Jeffrey and his twin brother Jacob, were actually adopted from Russia, actually a region up near Siberia.
And she brought them here to, you know, obviously give them a better life.
The story of how Jeffrey and his brother came to this country and the terrible way he died made the arson investigation front page news in Binghamton.
He was a 17-year-old boy that was just finding his way through life, starting to find the things that he liked doing.
And him and his brother Jacob were incredibly close.
You can only imagine how close they were being born in a different country and coming over here together and kind of going through this process of being raised in America.
It's a unique experience.
And as I indicated, they both were suffering from autism.
So they had some learning disabilities.
That ended up pushing Maureen into deciding to homeschool the two boys.
Homicide detectives now had to consider every possible motive for setting the Asa house on fire.
And that meant the investigation started close to home.
As a police officer or investigator working the case.
Your natural question is who has the motivation to do this?
Who has the desire to do this, maybe as a personal vendetta against the family?
You know, so a lot of the investigation centered around the family.
Even Jeffrey's extended group of brothers and sisters were among those considered.
As you can imagine with such a large, complex family, there was some internal strife amongst family members and you know people that weren't on great terms with each other and some of the older kids that had moved out.
There were thoughts on whether or not anybody inside the family could have done this.
But the discovery of a second fire just around the corner seemed to turn most of those avenues into dead ends.
That's an important factor, because if you're going to look for suspects based on who has a motive to hurt the Asa family, then why would that person set this other random fire?
I think that kind of detracts from the idea that this could have been somebody specifically targeting the Asa family.
And you know Scott, when it's two similar crimes in such close proximity.
Well now it just seems that there's someone out there to set the fire, rather than thinking about where they're setting it.
You know, for me, Anastasia, this opens up so many different possibilities.
And let me just raise two for a moment.
The first fire was between 328 and 330 am, and the Gaylord Street, which is only a short distance away, happened about 15 minutes later.
So was it a serial arsonist just randomly setting fires?
Or was the original target always the ASA home and the second fire was just a distraction for emergency resources or even a distraction for investigators?
So I could kind of see it both ways at the onset of this investigation.
And, of course, investigators.
They have to consider all these various possibilities without getting any sort of tunnel vision.
So they continue to look at the Asa family and they all had alibis that were checked.
And there was definitely time consuming, hard work that went into clearing those ultimately, that were closest to Maureen.
So investigators then turned their attention to their usual suspects.
They looked into the local troublemakers in the area that may be inclined to set fires or had set fires in the area.
But nothing stood out out of the ordinary.
And so in my experience, this is the worst place an investigator could find themselves.
Right.
You you have a case that you desperately want to solve.
You have absolutely no leads or physical evidence.
And as a prosecutor, you absolutely dread those conversations, when you have to sit with a mom, with any family member, any loved one, and have to tell well here Maureen, that her son's murder based on the lack of evidence in this case, that it might go cold.
It may sound disturbing, but most agencies simply can't allocate resources to a case with such a low chance of being solved.
And, you know, honestly, we always talk about this.
You always have to go where the evidence takes you.
And sometimes you just have to wait for it to come back.
And it may be a tip from the public or a similar crime that occurs that introduces you to a suspect through that evidence at that scene that may link them together.
And just to be clear here, like no one's saying they did not allocate their own resources, just that they only had so much.
They can only stretch so far.
They only had so many people.
They only had so many dollars.
But again, everything is hitting a wall and giving them nowhere to go.
And here, as Lucas explains, Binghamton PD was one of those departments that was definitely stretched.
The police, they did absolutely everything that they could.
They had a team of investigators that were working on the case and really all that they could do was follow up on leads.
And ultimately, you know, they just never developed probable cause to make an arrest or or really came across anything uh that led to uh, to a potential suspect.
The case may have been cold as far as police were concerned, but Maureen Asa and her family were still hot on the killer's trail.
They refused to let Jeffrey be forgotten.
In fact, it was a tip from one of the brothers that reignited the investigation almost a decade later.
You have years that have gone by and you know there's been a change in the guard at.
The investigator had retired from the department.
And so another investigator.
He gets information from one of the ASAs, one of the boys that they know, a friend that knows, somebody that knows who started the fire.
And it was a shocking revelation, and one, from an investigative standpoint, that almost seemed too good to be true.
And friend of a friend of a friend leads, they're almost never good ones.
You know.
Let me just say detectives are always wary about critical leads that come from someone who's close to the victim, especially if it's a family member.
But to his credit, the detective in this case followed up on that tip.
The investigator talks to Jeffrey's brother, then talks to the friend and then ultimately talks to this Nicole, and she kind of provides an outline as to her connection and relationship over the years with this person, who at this point is a new name and, And so she said that a man that she was friends with for some time had admitted to starting the fire at the Ace's home.
Any new name in a cold case is exciting, especially after a decade with the file on the shelf gathering dust.
It can also sometimes lead to false hope.
You know the family learns that there's a tip and you don't want to be the one who later has to tell them that it went nowhere and that you're back to square one.
And in Lucas's case, it seemed like that might happen.
You got to remember that she didn't go to the police.
They went to her.
So this wasn't something that she was itching to talk about or itching to tell to the police.
They only found her through word of mouth.
Don't get me wrong.
She was very cooperative.
She provided a recount, to the best of her ability, of that conversation that she had with Jeremiah Robb in the days following the fire and the admission that he makes to her.
But from an investigative standpoint, you need to start corroborating what people are telling you.
And I can tell you firsthand, digging into a witness account that's a decade old is never easy.
Even if the people want to help, their stories are riddled with.
I think, or if I remember correctly, those are issues.
So for a prosecutor, fading memories also mean additional challenges.
And since it was a conversation between two people, one of who may have been the assailant, you have to then have a way to back up, in this case, this woman, Nicole's story.
So how are they going to do that?
Well, in this case, the detective did have a pretty solid plan.
And it started with asking his witness just how well she knew the guy who confessed to setting the fire.
She provides kind of background information and context into how they know each other.
They both grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes south of where we are here in New York.
Went to school together.
They also lived near each other, so they were familiar with each other out of school.
Their relationship had blossomed when they met up in Binghamton a few years later.
They start a relationship, they start hanging out and then they're dating for about a year or so.
They then break up and go out of contact for a few years.
The former couple ran into each other again in 2011.
So around the time of the fire, it was regular to go out drinking together.
Just what you do in your 20s.
You go out, you hang out with friends, you drink, you party.
And this is something that they would do at least a few times a month.
And this is great context for a witness.
She has no axe to grind and no motive to bring her story to police.
She didn't even volunteer the information.
So she's clearly only talking because when detectives questioned her she, in this case, appeared to decide to be honest.
So, as a detective, in a case like this, you want to establish a rapport, but you're also anxious to get to the heart of the story.
What did he actually say and when?
How reliable is this woman's memory?
What details give you the confidence that it's the truth?
And finally, Nicole got to the night of the fires.
She had a friend that lived right up the block from the Asas.
She would frequently go to hang out with this friend and have drinks.
And on this night she brought him and they were drinking per usual, hanging out together until the early morning hours.
And she leaves in a cab and he decides to kind of walk home.
Nicole said that was the last time she saw her friend that night.
They spoke about his walk home weeks later.
The next time that they see each other he says I'm mad at the world upset, that others are happy when I'm not.
And I was walking around being reckless, slapping gas caps which again, to her didn't mean anything.
Later on, it would become important.
Then came the confession itself.
And then he says, then I see this recycling bin on a porch.
He just had an urge to set fire to it.
So he did.
And he said that it was that fire that killed the boy on the news.
And at this point, she hadn't even heard that there was a fire.
So she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
The veteran detective was stunned.
He asked Nicole for her friend's name and any information about where he was now.
Nicole provided the name of Jeremiah Robb.
And some might think that the case would be solved at this point.
You have a name, a witness and a supposed confession.
But in reality, at this point, you have almost nothing but a suspect and some information.
You have to see if you can corroborate.
You have no evidence.
It's been 10 years since Robb told Nicole the story.
If you confront him now and he says, I have no idea what you're talking about.
How do you prove it?
And so it's interesting, right?
You have this witness that talked about this gas cap, but presumably it wasn't recovered or stored for potential DNA.
So now it's just what someone says they remembered.
And now you have someone who says they remember someone saying they lit the fire, but it's not corroborated.
So do you go and speak to the person right away?
Well, that's risky.
Do you have them set up a call?
Maybe, but there's also downside, Scott, as you could talk to as well.
So it really is a question of what do you do with this?
You definitely have a path forward, but there's still a lot more work to do.
Yeah, controlled calls for law enforcement is a great tool.
I mean, ultimately, you could get right down to the truth.
You can get the right amount of information to connect two dots that were unconnectable until that very moment.
But it also leaves you open to sort of in a way that they'll know that you're onto them, right?
They'll know that it feels fake.
It feels actually set up, which it is.
And they're going to just shut right down.
They're going to leave town.
They're going to call other people in that same circle and say, the police are onto us.
Don't say anything or don't stay around and wait for them to ask you questions.
And so it's a big gamble, but the controlled calls seem like the best chance for police to move this case forward.
Now, Nicole agreed to make the call and to try to get her old friend to confess once again.
The detective turned to the experts for help in executing this high stakes call.
He reaches out to the local FBI field office in Albany, New York.
They put him in touch with the behavioral science division.
And so what they do for law enforcement is they develop a script for these controlled calls.
You know, they have people that study this that are really good at doing this.
But that's where a decade-old case that appeared to be on the verge of being solved quickly stalled.
Ultimately, the FBI declines to provide a script because they felt that there was not enough connection between her and the suspect at the time.
Now it's almost 10 years later to have a natural conversation where you bring up this fire.
There wasn't enough of a continuing relationship or contact between Nicole and Jeremiah to make the phone call not seem overly suspicious.
Everyone agreed that the call might simply tip off the bad guy and perhaps put Nicole herself in danger.
Investigators needed to come up with a new direction, but there would be several more setbacks before they finally got the chance to confront Jeremiah Robb.
The terrifying fire that took the life of Jeffrey Asa now had spent 10 years smoldering in life's rearview mirror.
And it seemed like it might stay there, despite police having the name of the man who may have set the blaze.
Investigators also had a witness who claimed that a man confessed to her.
Still, detectives were no closer to making an arrest than they were on the morning they unearthed Jeffrey Asa's body.
In fact, in March 2020, it seemed like real-world problems were conspiring against the case.
Absolutely.
That's exactly right.
Now you're in the middle of COVID, so you've got departmental restrictions, you've got travel restrictions, you've got all kinds of stuff that you're dealing with.
This being a cold case that really hasn't gone anywhere.
They've got this guy's name, but also the investigator that was now assigned with following up on these leads.
He retires.
Three long years passed, and once again, the ace of file changed hands.
The next thing that happens in the case doesn't occur until March of 2023 now.
The main investigator now that's taking up the case in March of 2023 is the captain of detectives for the Binghamton Police Department.
He was one of the only people in the detective division that was around when this occurred.
So he took it amongst himself to say, hey, listen, enough is enough.
We got to go talk to this guy.
And there sometimes comes a point in stalled investigations where you say, what do we have to lose?
It's been years.
The case isn't getting better.
It is time to take our shot.
And when you look at a case like this one, it seems clear they had long since reached that point.
I mean, I agree.
You know, you could say, let's shake some trees and let's see what falls out.
And Captain Cory, Minor of the Binghamton Police Department, located Jeremiah Robb across state lines, living in Pennsylvania.
It was very common, when you're going across state borders, to enlist local law enforcement on the other side to help you out.
So Captain Minor had a relationship with a detective with the Susquehanna County Pennsylvania District Attorney's Office, John Oliver.
So the captain and one of his sergeants drove to Pennsylvania to meet up with the DA investigator near Jeremiah Robb's home.
And the first thing they did was discuss how to approach their suspect.
It's a small rural community.
So he finds out where Jeremiah was working, and they are ultimately invited to Jeremiah's home in Halstead, Pennsylvania.
Investigator Oliver did the talking.
His experience allowed him to extract an invitation without showing much of his hand.
Detective Oliver makes contact with Rob over the phone, and he's at this point intentionally leaving out the other two gentlemen who do actually want to talk with him.
And that's a tactical reason.
They don't want to give him time to think of what to say.
And, in a situation like this, you want to be able to make observations of this individual when they're confronted with specific information.
Almost immediately, it appeared that the investigators' instincts were on point.
Detective Oliver makes contact with Jeremiah, who's home alone introduces the two detectives from Binghamton.
And once he makes that introduction, he became visibly more nervous.
When he mentions Binghamton, he describes Rob going as white as a ghost.
The two Binghamton detectives sat down with Rob at his kitchen table and began to talk.
They kept the conversation as casual as possible.
No tape recorder was present.
They didn't want to risk Rob shutting down before they had the chance to see if he'd open up.
In the back of their mind was the ever nagging thought one false step might be their last for this investigation.
District attorney Lucas Finley described what happened next.
What Captain Miner does is Initially, he's trying to establish a timeline.
And there were certain things that he seemed pretty clear on, but there were also certain aspects of the timeline that he appeared to be intentionally vague on.
When they got to the point where the conversation appeared to be stalling, the detectives switched gears.
Ultimately, they get to the fire and he's confronted with whether he knows anything about this fire that occurred on St.
Patrick's Day on Milford Street in the city of Binghamton.
And ultimately, he said, no, I don't know anything.
I can tell you these are those moments when you have a sense a suspect is lying to you.
But if you don't have any evidence to fall back on, it's walking that tightrope between giving them room to open up or challenging which makes them shut down.
It's easy to get stuck in the middle.
So after about 20 minutes, Captain Miner and Brian Sostowski are like OK, this is going just about as well as we anticipated it would.
And they're going to head back to New York because, quite frankly, they came down there with the expectation of not having this guy confess to killing Jeffrey Asa and starting a fire.
But don't forget that local investigator who had been standing in the background.
And as he watched, he had picked up on some subtle clues.
That's what the most seasoned detectives do.
They listen and wait for a sense of when to move into that conversation.
Detective Oliver is standing off to the side in the kitchen.
He's just watching and listening to kind of what the conversation is occurring at the table.
He's making observations.
He's just picking up on kind of visual cues that he's finding to be interesting.
And to most people, those cues might not seem like much.
But to a veteran investigator like Oliver, they were flashing red lights.
And they had begun to catch his attention the moment they'd walked into Rob's home.
So one of the things that he noticed at the door Rob's making a pot of coffee at the time that They get to the house and he offers the detectives coffee and he says I can't do anything in the morning without my coffee.
I need my coffee to get started every morning.
And for that entire conversation at the table, he doesn't touch the coffee.
He was very slowly stirring the coffee in kind of a manner that made Oliver think he was trying to bide time.
Reading body language is an art, and Rob's movements were telling Oliver a very different story than his words, in particular the way he responded to the end of the interview.
He notices that as soon as the detectives at the table start closing up, There's kind of a sigh of relief that comes across Rob, and he then leans back in his chair.
Up until this point, he was kind of hanging on every word, sitting on the edge.
And so, you know, all of these things in and of themselves don't necessarily mean anything.
But to an experienced detective that's been doing this his whole career.
He's saying to himself I think this guy did it.
So he decides that he's going to step in.
Oliver knew once they left Rob's house, they'd never get back in.
So he loaded up for one last attempt aimed at the area he believed might be Rob's weak spot his conscience.
So he goes over to the table, and one of the things that Detective Oliver picked up on was in his conversation that morning.
He brought up the fact that he is a Christian.
Now he found God, he goes to church a lot.
He seemed to be bringing up his religion unnecessarily.
Um, and you know, that's something that Oliver kind of used to his advantage.
And he's like listen.
The only reason these guys are here is because Nicole said that you said that you did this.
Is Nicole a liar?
If she's a liar, then we can go home because we know that she lies and we don't need to believe what she says.
And his response to that is no, she's not a liar.
In every successful interrogation, there is a moment when the ice cracks.
And this was one of those moments.
But Oliver still had to be careful.
One slip up and Rob could shut down.
He follows up and says, well, if she's not a liar, then she's telling the truth.
Yeah, she is.
One part of being a good Christian is, you know, come clean.
Come clean with God.
You come clean with man.
And that's what we're doing here.
And we just need answers here.
The tone and tenor of Oliver's words were perfect.
And as the investigator had hoped, it was the very thing that broke open the dam.
Based on the testimony of all three of the officers that are there at the time.
Rob just begins to cry and hangs his head.
And then for about 10 minutes provides a narrative of what happened that morning.
A decades-old secret poured out of Rob in fits and sobs.
In large part, the same exact thing that Nicole had reported, he told her back in 2011.
You know, he says that we were drinking somewhere.
He doesn't really remember where it was.
He was just super drunk and he was pissed off at the world and everybody's happy when he's not.
And, you know, he was just walking around being reckless. and slapping the gas caps off of cars.
And that's a critical detail because Lucas already had a witness who had seen those gas caps on the morning of the fire.
And then he says that a recycling bin caught his attention and he just got this urge to kind of light fire to it.
And then he's describing, you know, in detail how he's doing it.
He thinks it was with a lighter.
And it was clear that he was talking about the recycling bin on the Aces porch.
He said that everything was soaked so that it took a long time to catch something on fire.
But he says that, as he's doing that, he's seeing the reflection of these brown shingles off of the side of the house.
The Asa's home had distinctive brown shingles, the same petroleum-based shingles that had exploded into flames, which then took the life of Jeffrey.
The mention of those shingles would be an especially important verification for a prosecutor.
It made it clear that Rob was talking about the Asa home, not the small fire up the street at the home with concrete walls.
Those details were absolutely crucial.
At this point you know Captain Minor and the sergeant, they're saying to themselves well, what do we do now?
He just confessed to it.
The detectives still chose to rely on Rob's willingness to cooperate.
They didn't arrest him in Pennsylvania.
They asked him if he'd come back to Binghamton with them.
They hoped he'd agree to go with them and then they'd have the opportunity to speak with him again, also recording his words.
And Rob agreed.
He's not under arrest.
They don't pat him down.
They don't search him.
They don't handcuff him.
He's not in a cage.
He's sitting in the front seat of the car.
And that's where the recording begins.
So we do have to say that they had a few different conversations with Rob, and this is a portion of one of the conversations that was recorded.
Let me ask you point-to-point.
Did you start the fire?
Yeah.
I started the fire.
I started the fire, yeah.
As the session continued, Rob seemed to realize just how much trouble he was really in.
My take on the recording is the information he's providing gets more restrictive the longer the day draws on.
And that was the impression of the three detectives also that once They provide him the Miranda warnings, even though, to his credit, he's doing the morally right thing.
He's also starting to realize that, well, now what happens?
And he actually asks that.
He's like, listen, guys, I hate to sound like I'm selfish, but what happens to me now?
The response from Captain Minor is, well, what do you think should happen to you?
And he's like, well...
I should probably go to prison.
It's at that point that I think he's starting to realize what the future might look like.
After the interview was over, the detectives agreed to Jeremiah Robb's one request.
He wanted to be the one to tell his wife what had happened.
In the 12 years that had passed, Robb had married and the couple had two young children.
It's terribly sad.
It's tragic for her and her family as well.
She marries this guy and has two young kids with him after the fire is all done and knows nothing about it.
To be told that he started the fire, that killed somebody and that your life, as you know it, is over, has to be just gut-wrenching.
Rob was then placed under arrest for murder.
They asked him if he'd be willing to go back to the scene of the fire to show them some of what he said during the interview.
And he agreed.
They take him down Milford Street and see if there's anything that he recalls.
And once they drive by a house that belongs to a neighbor, he's like.
It looked exactly like that, except it was brown.
And the house he points to is almost identical in every way to the Asa's house that he burned.
And so, with Rob now under arrest, another question loomed large, like how would a jury at a trial react to this felony murder charge?
Right,
The reminder here is that obviously it is not an intentional crime as far as the actual murder itself.
So while that's the law and a jury be asked to follow the law, it's always the question for prosecutors would they be able to?
Twelve years after the murder, police did inform Maureen Asa that a suspect in her son's murder was now in custody.
She wanted to know if he was remorseful.
They told him that they let her know that, yes, he certainly was.
I mean, obviously, we're talking about the death of a child.
You never move on from that.
And, you know, you can forgive, but you don't forget.
And that doesn't mean that you don't want justice.
But would the aces get that in the courtroom?
And that's always part of the underlying pressure prosecutors feel.
Delivering based on the evidence in the law yes, but also knowing how much that accountability means for a victim's family.
There's a very...
Nerve wracking process.
Obviously, you know you've got all the work that you've put into a case, just the amount of time and hours, and then the relationship that you've built with this family, that you know this is the thing in their lives that's defined their life in a way.
This is something that they've been dealing with.
And all of that pressure is put on you.
And this was anything but a slam dunk case.
You don't have physical evidence in this case.
In this case, it is almost all circumstantial.
You know, you have the knowledge of the scene.
You have, you know, the type of house, the color of the house, the layout of the house.
And then you have basically the fact that we know that there were a couple gas caps monkeyed with on the street.
Other than that, there's no physical evidence.
There's no DNA.
There's no fingerprints.
There's none of that.
At the trial, Rob and his defense team were likely to have a different story.
Lucas had to be ready for anything.
How are they going to use that other fire?
Are they going to try to suggest that it's not an arson and it's an accident?
So initially you're trying to create a story and a theory based on the facts of the case, right that is impervious to all of those avenues of attack.
But from the first moment the case landed on his desk, Lucas had no doubt where the biggest challenge was.
As with every trial, the jury is the key.
Obviously, it's the jury who finds the defendant guilty or not guilty.
And picking the jury and making sure that you have the right people for the right case is just absolutely key.
This is not an intentional murder.
And when we're picking the jury, I'm focusing on that.
And what I wanted to know is If I'm never going to get up here and I'm going to say that this guy intentionally killed somebody, are you able to convict him of murder if that's what the law said he did?
And, as a prosecutor, it's definitely something that gnaws at you every moment you're in the courtroom.
After each witness testifies, you're watching that jury.
Are they getting it?
Do they seem receptive to the evidence?
Or are they showing signs of sympathy for the defendant?
Which that's an understandable human emotion at times, but not allowed to factor that into a verdict.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't sometimes happen.
In this case you've got this guy who is going through a kind of a depressed period of his life, is having some woman issues, kind of a drunk just walking around pissed off at the world and doing stupid stuff and he in the moment says it'd be cool to light this recycling bin on fire and did it and walked away.
Did he intend to kill everybody in the house?
When you see him sitting there, when you see his wife sitting there in the crowd for two weeks and she's crying, and as a juror you've got to take all this in.
And it's hard for the average person to wrap their mind around that conduct being called murder.
But that is just what Lucas and the state of New York were asking this jury to do.
My allegation is that during the course of committing the felony crime of arson, you cause the death of somebody in New York State and we call that felony murder.
And it requires absolutely zero intent.
After an emotional two-week trial, Lucas was certain he had done everything he could.
But would it be enough?
There could be dozens or hundreds of people involved in the investigation, but there's only one of you standing up there arguing your case and arguing for justice.
And no matter how you cut it, at the end of the day, it's on you.
That has to be the most stressful moment of any investigation.
The time spent waiting for the verdict.
The first trial against Raub ended in a mistrial when the jury deadlocked after nearly 20 hours of deliberations.
He was retried again in August of 2025.
Luckily in this case, it didn't take very long.
The jury was back after less than three hours of deliberations.
As a prosecutor, you're always told an early verdict is generally good.
The longer it goes is generally not great for you, but I've had it both ways.
At the end of the day, it's impossible to predict what is going to happen based off of how quick the verdict is.
You're just sitting there waiting for those words to come out of the foreperson's mouth.
As soon as I heard the first guilty, obviously I had kind of an internal relief.
For the Asa family, it was an answer to their plea for justice.
It was guilty on everything which was murder in the second degree and two counts of arson in the first degree.
The one count is for intentionally burning a building and it resulting in the death of Jeffrey Asa.
And then the second count of arson in the first degree was for the serious physical injury caused to his sister Ariana, when she was kind of forced to jump from her roof and broke her hip.
The defendant, Jeremiah.
He just kind of hung his head and put it on the table and just kind of sat there.
Nobody in the crowd made any noises.
Jeremiah Robb was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
And for Lucas Finley, it was the end of a long road.
The satisfaction that you get, knowing that you achieved justice for this family.
It's a great feeling.
Even though Jeffrey died in 2011, his family had to live through many years of unknowns, waiting for a lead, fading confidence, then dealing with reopening of a case and, of course, enduring public speculation.
In the first few moments of this tragedy, Jeffrey's community came together to try to save his family.
And in the end, it was a member of that community the defendant's ex-girlfriend who would step up and do the right thing and help bring Jeffrey and his family the justice they so deserved.
This case is different than many of the homicide cases we cover because there was likely never the intent to kill or even to harm anyone inside the Asa home.
But, as we talked about during the episode, when you commit certain crimes intentionally, like setting that fire, you are responsible for whatever happens as a result.
Jeffrey Asa didn't get a do-over at life.
By 17, he'd likely been through more than most of us will ever have to endure in a lifetime.
He and his brother grew up without parents until Maureen Asa brought them into her home and showed them the love they should have had from the start.
And just when they finally found solid footing, Jeffrey was killed in the fire.
The grief felt by the entire family must have been overwhelming and, I'm sure, especially for his twin.
Jeffrey Asa lost his life because of the rash and selfish behavior of another.
We leave this episode thinking of Jeffrey, the Asa family and Jeffrey's twin, who lost his other half forever.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original.
Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Fresetti Media.
Ashley Flowers is executive producer.
This episode was written and produced by Larry Israel.
Researched by Kate Cooper.
Edited by Maria Passingham and Philjean Grande.
I think Chuck would approve.
