He immediately jumps up out of his chair and he tells me, I don't have to stand for this bull****.
I'm going to leave.
I said, go right ahead.
He says, you mean I could just walk out of here?
I said, I'm not holding you back.
Now, inside, I may be sweating, but never let him see you sweat.
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.
Genetic identification, cell tower triangulation, microballistics.
Homicide detectives have a powerful arsenal of high-tech weapons at their disposal.
But today, we're exploring a case that took place in 1988 when none of that was available.
This case was cracked old-school style, with a combination of careful observation, street smarts and sheer luck.
Our guest today is a former homicide detective, Phil Amabile, a colleague of mine back in my law enforcement days at the Broward County Sheriff's Office in Florida.
To refresh our listeners on Florida's geography Broward County lies just north of Miami-Dade and just south of West Palm Beach.
And in the late 1980s, homicide detectives like Phil were busy.
During the 80s, crack and drug dealing and Miami Vice was the norm.
Miami Vice wasn't created in a laboratory.
It was created by real life events.
Howard County was definitely a lot of crime happening.
Sun, fun and guns, I guess, would be the proper way to say it.
Our story begins at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport.
Florida airports don't have their own security force.
Fort Lauderdale falls under the jurisdiction of Broward County Sheriff's Office.
That's why, at around 2 pm on a February Friday afternoon, it was a Broward County deputy patrolling the parking garages the third level who first reported smelling something terrible.
It was coming from a parked 1985 blue Toyota pickup.
And after he called it in, Phil Amabile and his partner responded.
We get notified of what appears to be a foul odor is how it was described.
So we head over there from our office, which at the time wasn't all that far.
The entire parking lot was pretty crowded with cars parked outside.
And the minute you turn the corner onto the designated floor, you immediately smelt the foul odor which my partner and myself knew exactly what it was.
It's a decaying body, a decomposing body.
The deputy had tracked that smell into the blue Toyota pickup truck, one of those ones with the camper on top, which is pretty common in those days.
And it was backed into its parking spot.
We looked down and you could see fluids dripping from the bed of the car.
Right away, we know exactly what that's going to be.
We're able to look inside the vehicle without molesting it or going inside and seeing a large package that is wrapped in visqueen.
For those who don't know, visqueen is a thick, heavy-duty black plastic wrap that comes in long tubes.
You see it used in landscaping all of the time.
It's available at most hardware stores.
At the time there was no telling for sure if the person wrapped in the plastic tied with a rope was male or female.
Wrapped in this visqueen, cocoon almost, being in an enclosed compartment.
The human body, especially in South Florida, is going to decompose very rapidly.
And for the fact that fluids are dripping out, he's been there quite some time.
It's most likely the person was killed somewhere else and then dumped in the back of the pickup truck and then driven here.
There was nothing visible in the cab of the truck to suggest who had abandoned it and its gruesome contents.
But if they caught a flight from the airport, they could be anywhere by now.
Once we contact the medical examiner's office, a decision was made to tow the entire vehicle without entering the vehicle to the medical examiner's office.
But first detectives ran the police to determine who the vehicle belonged to and tried to figure out how long the truck had been there.
One of the first things we obviously did was go down to the ticket booth to park into the garage.
Again, remember, this is 1988.
There were no video cameras available, no computer printouts.
There was a computer that could tell us when the vehicle entered, but that was it.
The data revealed the truck had entered the lot a full 10 days earlier.
In 1988, Fort Lauderdale's International Airport handled as many as 38000 passengers a day, many of whom passed through that lot.
I'm thinking to myself, how the hell did no one discover this up until now?
This body didn't just start smelling.
This has been for a while.
It didn't take long before the information on the owner of the truck came back.
His name, Otis Donald Vaughn, or as he liked to be called, Don Vaughn.
The 40-year-old had been reported missing by his wife 10 days earlier, around the time.
The truck had been left there.
Of course they couldn't know for sure if it was him wrapped up in the back of the truck, but it did seem likely.
Until we have a positive confirmation, either through fingerprints or dental records, we can't say this is Don Bond's body.
One thing was sure.
The detectives now had a murder case on their hands.
Once we get to the medical examiner's office, we then open up the trunk.
The black package is pulled out.
It's placed on a gurney.
Medical examiner's there.
The visqueen is then cut open and there's the body, later identified as Don Vaughn, lying there.
The body was in an advanced stage of decomposition, but right away, Phil noticed something odd.
What was really, really strange to me on the chest, on the outside of the shirt, there was what I described as a clump.
I couldn't tell you what it was a clump of, but it was a clump.
And it was black, so I asked the crime scene detective, what tells that?
He couldn't tell me.
I said, you know what?
Collect that.
Let's find out what it is.
And while that material was being analyzed, an autopsy confirmed how Don Vaughn had died.
The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide and the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the back of the head, which means he was beaten from behind with an object.
But with what?
It's most likely he was killed somewhere else and then dumped in the back of his own pickup truck and left in the garage with the hope that no one would bother the vehicle for days.
To kick off their investigation, the detectives reached out to their counterparts in Fort Lauderdale.
They wanted more details about the 40-year-old Don.
Apparently, he and his wife spent most of their time on the west coast of Florida near Tampa.
They had a very, very secure marriage.
They were life partners.
They did a lot of things together.
Don Vaughn is semi-retired.
He's a jewelry salesman.
It was gold jewelry, but it wasn't high-end gold jewelry.
And during the 80s and 90s, you know, with the prevalence of discos, everybody had gold chains and gold bracelets.
And so it was a booming business, I'm sure.
It turned out, Don and his wife used to live in Fort Lauderdale and he still had a lot of buyers over on the East Coast.
So on most Mondays he'd head across the state with a typewriter case full of 14-karat gold chains, bracelets and rings.
He'd visit with various clients at pawn shops and flea markets in the Fort Lauderdale area, showing them his goods.
They'd haggle a bit over price, and then he'd leave hopefully with the cash.
At any given time.
If he's coming over from the West Coast, if he's coming to do business, that means he has jewelry with him.
If he's leaving, that means he's going to have cash with him.
And don't forget 1988 cash is the number one form of currency and transaction.
So Don traveled with a lot of money tens of thousands of dollars on him in jewelry and cash, making him a prime target for anyone who knew his business.
It was Don's wife who reported him missing back on Tuesday, February 9th.
The night before, after he was done making his rounds, the two were supposed to meet up at their local bowling lanes just outside Fort Lauderdale for their weekly league game, but he never showed up.
The family were avid bowlers and they bowled in multiple bowling leagues which, if you know anyone who's in a bowling league, it's a very passionate sport.
Don's wife said it was very unlike her husband not to call if he was going to be running late.
But the other guys on their bowling team, Dennis Mosley and Bruce Weiss, hadn't heard from him either.
Dennis was an auto mechanic who didn't know the Vons that well outside of the league but Bruce was a longtime friend of Don's.
The two had managed a business together years earlier.
Bruce ran a local pawn shop and was one of Don's jewelry clients.
He'd actually seen him earlier that same afternoon at his shop, but had no idea where he was now.
The whole next day, while Don's wife stayed home hoping to hear from her husband, Bruce helped organize their friends to conduct a search.
They were looking for his car.
They were looking for whatever they can find to help find Don.
So they were arranging all these search parties.
And I believe they were also starting some kind of for lack of a better word a GoFundMe or a charity drive to drum up some support and some monies to help with the investigation.
Bruce and the others retraced Don's entire sales route, driving all over Broward County, visiting the various shops and dealers he would have seen, but no one knew where he'd gone.
Only then did Don's wife report him missing to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and the police began looking into another possibility that the missing man had gotten into an accident somewhere.
For those that aren't familiar with South Florida, from the east coast of Florida Fort Lauderdale to the west coast of Florida, the Naples area, there is one road that you would have to take, and that is known as Alligator Alley.
And Alligator Alley was one continuous stretch of roadway through the Florida Everglades.
There is nothing out there except a lot of wildlife out there.
Alligators, obviously, bears, deer, Florida panthers.
And a normal trip would take, what, maybe an hour and 25 minutes to get across.
Could he have gotten into a crash?
Did the car veer off into the ditch and so forth?
Hoping to spot his vehicle from the air, Fort Lauderdale police sent helicopters up over Alligator Alley.
But after days of searching, they found no signs of him.
Now, with the discovery of Don's pickup truck and its gruesome contents at the airport, it was clear that there hadn't been any accident.
Don Vaughn had been murdered and all of his cash and more than $100,000 worth of jewelry were gone.
Did someone know more than they were telling?
For Broward County Homicide Detective Phil Amabile.
The first order of business in the investigation into the murder of traveling jewelry salesman Don Vaughn was to get briefed by the Fort Lauderdale police.
The question was, had they been able to identify the last person to see Don alive?
We find out one of the last places he was at that we know of was a pawn shop.
And that was in Fort Lauderdale.
The name of the pawn shop was All Cash Pawn.
I believe I got that information from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department who told me that they went there.
They interviewed the owner who told them that he was there and then he left to do his routes.
So was that pawn shop owner a suspect?
Fort Lauderdale police didn't think so, because the owner was Bruce Weiss, the same friend who'd organized search parties when Don first went missing.
We were told that he was not involved, that Fort Lauderdale detectives had interviewed him and he was not involved.
In fact, one of them said, oh, he's renovating his store.
So you know he's been busy with the renovations in his store and You know he's still going out and helping to try to find him, but he was not involved.
Still, the mention of a recent renovation is a red flag for any detective working a homicide case with these types of circumstances.
I looked at my partner and we said, let's go interview this guy.
We make our way over to All Cash Pawn.
You know, we go in the front door.
It's a typical pawn shop, not uncommon in that part of Florida.
Inside it's arranged almost like a teller at a bank.
There's a lot of security.
The pawnbroker sits behind a glass enclosure with a large drawer that he can open and close manually from his side.
And you can drop off whatever you're pawning, whether it's something like a watch or something like a really large television set.
And then he gives you the cash in return.
To get to that back area, you have to be buzzed in through another door.
And that's where the detective spoke to pawn shop owner Bruce.
We're in the back, which is not a big space, but it's a space.
And it's all these racks of different pawned items, you know, drills and sports equipment and whatever people would pawn at the time.
Right away, Phil noticed that the place had been recently remodeled.
The floor had been tiled over some green carpeting.
I made comment on it.
He goes, yeah, yeah, we're trying to do it.
He goes, it's too heavy to lift the shelves up to get the tile underneath that.
So we decided just to leave it the way it was.
Not a problem.
He also had a very, very large dog in his office.
And for some reason, this dog took a liking to me where, as you know, when you greet a dog, especially if it's a large dog, it wants to smell you.
The detectives informed Bruce about what they'd found at the airport and asked him about the last time he'd seen his friend.
He said, damn, that's a shame.
Well, you know, he was in here.
He showed me his wares.
Bruce had told us that one of his friends had stopped by a guy by the name of Dennis Mosley.
I can't recall if he told me that he bought some stuff from him, but he said that was it.
He packed up his stuff and he left.
And that was the last we saw of him.
According to Bruce's statement, Don left the shop sometime around 415, as did their buddy, Dennis Mosley.
Bruce figured they'd all see each other later for their bowling night.
But Don never showed up.
His wife was frantic with worry.
They'd all spent the whole next day looking for him.
Bruce made clear he wished he could be more helpful, but he had no idea what had happened to Don.
We leave and we continue on with investigation.
We didn't believe Bruce Weiss.
There was something about him that bothered us.
But then the detective got a call from the medical examiner's office about that strange clump on the victim's body.
The clump that was found on the chest turns out to be carpet fibers mixed with dog hair.
The color of those carpet fibers?
Green.
As I would often exclaim to my partner, Jesus Christ, we know who it is.
So many of you may be thinking that the next natural step would be to go back and question Bruce.
But the detectives had a different strategy.
As any detective knows, especially if you're working a murder, you know, if you have a great idea who your suspect's going to be, That's the last person you're going to interview.
We actually put together a search warrant because we needed to search that pawn shop in much more detail.
What we wanted to search was we wanted samples of the carpet fibers.
We wanted samples from the dog and we wanted any evidence that a crime was committed therein.
When it comes to searching pawn shops, investigators obviously are aware don't have jewelry and other valuables.
They also likely have guns.
And that put together with a potential suspect who may be starting to feel like the walls are closing in on him.
Things could get pretty dangerous pretty fast.
With the plan now in place, the detectives executed their search warrant on Bruce Weiss's pawn shop.
You're not coming in there like gangbusters.
Plan's going to be, we're going to get him outside of the store.
And we're going to leash the dog if the dog's there.
Because just like our canines, dogs can be a weapon as well.
So we get the dog leashed.
We tell him, listen, we're just being very, very thorough in this investigation.
I'm coming in as being helpful.
This isn't the only place we're searching, but we need to try to gather evidence.
And don't worry, don't worry.
Whatever you do, don't worry.
Because the sheriff's office will put everything back together just like we found it.
You would never even know we were here.
And this search began.
The crime scene.
Techs go in and they love nothing more than to tear apart a place, which they proceed to do.
They gather carpet fibers, you know, and obviously everything's documented through video and photographs.
The decision is made, well, we need to start lifting up this tile.
So the newly set tile that was in there starts getting ripped up.
Once it's ripped up, they then come in there with luminol.
Luminol can be an important forensic tool at a crime scene.
It's a chemical that reacts to the oxidation of enzymes typically found in blood by literally glowing under a black light.
I've been to lots of crime scenes where there was no blood visible to the naked eye.
But when we used luminol, wow, you really can detect it through this important tool.
They spray it.
And lo and behold, there's a ton of blood, blood splatter and big puddles of blood, which would be indicative of someone bleeding profusely from a wound.
They also ripped up the paneling, the newly installed wood paneling on the wall.
And there was blood splatter that was found on the wall.
The techs then took photographs of the stains and collected fiber samples from the carpet and any dog hairs they could find, so that they could then be compared to what was found on and around Don's body.
But they didn't arrest the pawn shop's owner Weiss.
While the investigation is pointing in his direction, as far as the case, it's far from ready to head to court.
We don't know anything here other than we're 99% sure this is where Otis Don Vaughn met his demise.
There's nothing more than that.
So...
The next logical step is to interview the other person that was there.
Bruce had told detectives that their bowling partner, Dennis Mosley, had been at the pawn shop that day too, when Don had stopped in.
So the detectives then decided to track him down.
He was working as a mechanic.
So I go to the mechanic shop and I speak to him.
He's very, very reluctant to speak to me.
And I told him, look, I don't want to speak to you in front of everyone here at your job.
I said, come with me.
I'll drive you to my office.
We'll sit down like gentlemen and I'll bring you right back.
I said, but we're not going to speak here.
So he doesn't want to do that.
And he says, can I drive my own car?
I said, absolutely.
You know, because the goal is to get him in a interrogation room with me.
That's my only goal right now.
How he gets there.
As long as he gets there, I'm not concerned with.
Once back at the station, Phil sat down with Dennis Mosley in an interview room.
You'll often see people that are in an uncomfortable situation.
They'll always lean towards where the escape route is.
Anybody could see that.
Whenever you're sitting in an office with somebody and they need to be out of there for whatever reason, they'll start leaning away.
Because they're sending you signals, they have to get out of that room.
This room would have been set up.
My back would be to the door and his would be behind the table facing me.
Well, he immediately took the chair where his back was to the door.
I wasn't going to move him.
I was going to let him be comfortable and sit where he wanted to sit.
You know Anastasia, we've always talked about the fact, the mindset of going into an interview like this, especially when you want your suspect to be talkative.
It's sort of a psychological game in a sense to make them comfortable, but not too comfortable.
And again, it also goes to remaining in control.
It's why you usually want to speak to a suspect in a precinct or in a controlled environment rather than their own home.
And that goes to the positioning too, right?
But again, you just said it, Scott.
It's about making that person comfortable so that they feel that they're in a position that they want to speak to you.
And I do respect Phil's decision here, because essentially what he wanted to do was okay, he seems to be open to talking, so let's just leave him where he is And hope he opens up.
I sit across from him and we start discussing this case.
And I tell him what happened.
I said, look, I don't know if you know Don.
And he's very defensive.
He's somebody who's never met him before and so forth.
And he just happened to be in the pawn shop at that time visiting Bruce, who he knows.
He knows Bruce from the bowling alley and so forth.
To try to back him down a bit from his defensive posture.
Phil asked Dennis a bit about his background.
He had no significant criminal record, although recently he had been having a tough time thanks to a gambling habit that he spoke of.
And from there, Phil started turning up the heat.
I start hitting him with some cold hard facts about the search warrant, the dog hairs, the missing jewelry, because the jewelry was never recovered.
And we said, look, this was a robbery. and you're involved.
He immediately jumps up out of his chair, and he tells me, I don't have to stand for this bull****.
I said, no, you don't.
He goes, I'm going to leave.
I said, go right ahead.
He says, you mean I could just walk out of here?
I said, I'm not holding you back.
Inside, I may be sweating, but never let him see you sweat.
He says, so what's going to happen next?
I said, this isn't going away.
I said, a man is dead.
I said, We're not walking away from this.
He then did something that hasn't happened too often in my career.
He just sat back down and slouched over.
And I knew I got him.
This is it.
Whenever somebody is giving something up, especially when we're talking murders, because that's a heavy burden that someone's carrying around on their shoulders.
The minute they give it up, it's almost like they become deflated where.
There's a physical change where they just exhale and they've gotten that burden off their shoulders.
So I noticed that change and I'm thinking to myself, here we go.
At the Broward County Sheriff's Office, homicide detective Phil Amabile was on the verge of getting his suspect, Dennis Mosley, to talk.
I asked him, I said, did you or did Bruce plan this?
And once he said Bruce did, I said, I thought so.
I thought you were a good, decent person who got themselves tied up in some.
So now he's not going to leave.
Now I know he's implicated himself. and I give him his Miranda warning.
And I could tell you, it's never easy to stop an interview when you're on the brink of a breakthrough.
But Phil had no choice.
He had to pause right then, right there to Mirandize Mosley.
That meant laying out his rights the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney and everything that comes with it.
Because, without warning anything Dennis said next could be tossed inadmissible game over before it ever began.
You want to make sure that you're doing everything that's going to secure a guilty verdict, because you could solve all the cases you want, but until that judge slams that gavel down and says guilty, you did not do your job.
So Phil next took Mosley through the warnings, hoping it would still lead to further conversation.
I said, this allows me to speak to you if you want.
And I know you want to speak to me because you have a million questions you want to ask me.
And I want to answer your questions.
You know, I've kicked the ball into his court and now he's in control.
And after being given his warnings, Mosley did agree to speak with Phil, and the truth eventually tumbled out.
The long and short of it is He owed Bruce Weiss money from gambling.
And Bruce, who had planned this, recruited Mosley and was gonna wipe away the gambling debt that he owed, which was maybe about five grand.
Five grand's a lot of money, especially in 1988.
Mosley said that Weitz had instructed him to show up at the pawn shop that day, that a man would be coming by with jewelry and cash and that they were going to rob him.
We'll take whatever cash, and I'll give you something extra for your trouble.
I don't know if murder was what was actually planned or just to rob him, but it doesn't make too much sense just to rob him when he would know who everyone was.
According to Mosley, when Don showed up, Weiss buzzed him into the back area and the two started talking behind the front counter.
And that is when Mosley came up from behind holding a heavy pipe.
It turns out that Dennis is the one who strikes him in the back of the head using I believe it was a pipe that they used.
Dennis came up from behind, struck him in the head.
He fell down and that's when he was struck again multiple times and that's where he bled out.
According to Dennis, they take the jewelry, they go through his pockets, they take all the money out, which comes out to about 5000, because he wasn't the first stop of his trip.
They also grabbed his typewriter case full of gold jewelry worth an estimated $100,000.
The autopsy revealed it all.
Don had no defensive wounds, no sign of resistance.
It was a clean ambush.
No threats, no struggle, no plea for his life.
He didn't just lose a fight.
He was never given the chance to be in one.
Mosley continued his story about what happened next.
He said Weitz then sent him next door to a hardware store to buy visqueen and rope, which the detectives were later able to verify with a visit to the store.
Unfortunately, in 1988 there were no video cameras inside the store, but I have a receipt for both of those.
The two then rolled up Don's body in the plastic sheeting and tied it up.
Then they used that large drawer to get him through the glass partition out of the back area and into the front.
They were able to lift him right into the bed of his small Toyota pickup truck.
Mosley was the one who drove the truck to the airport parking lot and left it there, while White stayed behind to begin the nearly impossible task of cleaning up their mess.
He was probably a lot more bloody than he expected it would be.
When anybody gets hit in the head, even a small cut, for some reason you just bleed profusely.
So once he fell on the ground, he just bled out from his head.
And there's no way they're going to clean that up.
So the decision is made, they're going to rip up the carpet and retile.
And they cleaned up pretty well.
But not well enough.
With this confession, Phil had enough to place Mosley under arrest for murder.
But still, it was pretty clear that he wasn't the one behind the plot.
Bruce was the alpha male.
Dennis was the furthest thing from an alpha male.
He was the go-along guy.
He was the sidekick to whatever cowboy star you want to pick.
He was the sidekick.
He only took orders.
Desperate men do desperate things, and he was obviously desperate to get out of his debt.
To catch the puppet master behind this scheme, Phil knew he had to act fast.
I hate to keep harping on this fact, but this is 1988.
I didn't whip out my cell phone.
I probably got to a landline and I paged my partner to call me.
I said, finish up what you're doing now.
Get in here.
I'm going to get this guy transported.
We'll go pick up Bruce.
As fate would have it, that very night, the detectives knew just where their main suspect would be.
It was league night down at the lanes.
We picked him up at the bowling alley and we told him it's very important.
It's very, very important.
We've just had a major breakthrough in the case.
So naturally, he wants to be cooperative as all hell.
And he says, listen, the league's just about to start.
If you let me bowl, can we wait till afterwards?
Now, keep in mind, this guy is involved in a murder.
And he has the two homicide detectives standing in front of him, telling him we just had a major breakthrough in the case.
And he's saying, if you let me bowl, I'll come with you.
We said, no, no, we need you now.
It's real important.
It's real important.
So we were persuasive enough.
He gets in the car with us and we drive him to our office.
Once back at headquarters, they sat down with Weitz for another interview.
We tell him oh listen, by the way Bruce, because we're at our sheriff's office, Because we're here, we are obligated to give you your Miranda warning.
We have to do it so we can speak.
So he's, oh, yeah, I understand.
Oh, I love those words.
I understand.
Everyone understands.
So we give him his rights again in written form.
Get that piece of paper out of the office.
And now we started with him.
This time, the detectives didn't take long to get to the point.
We hit him with the Cole Hart fact.
You know, Dennis is sitting in jail right now.
To which he says, what did he do?
That's not important right now.
We know everything.
We know exactly what happened.
We know about going to Ace Hardware.
We're giving them breadcrumbs.
The detectives built up the reliability of the forensic science, then revealed the evidence they'd obtained.
I'm giving you an education in hair fibers.
I'm telling you how all hair fibers are different.
And animal hair fibers, human hair fibers, men's hair fibers, women's hair fibers.
We can tell through our lab, through advanced testing, where that particular hair came from.
So we can pinpoint it almost like a fingerprint.
Is that true?
No.
Do I make it sound true?
Absolutely.
So I tell him, remember when we came and we took some pieces of hair from your dog?
Bruce, I hate to tell you this, but we found dog hairs and we matched those dog hairs to your dog on Don's body.
Next came the carpet fibers, a match between the ones from his shop and the ones found on the body.
Then the luminol testing results, exposing what the eye couldn't see.
Bit by bit, they laid out all of the evidence and it was stacking up.
But to their disbelief, Bruce had just one reaction.
He's begging us to let him go bowling.
He actually told us, if you let me go bowling, you could stay and watch me so I don't leave.
I will come back and tell you everything.
I swear to God, this guy killed someone that he knew that he was arranging search parties for and organizing fundraising.
He's responsible for the man's murder and he wants us to let him go bowling.
I'm thinking to myself, you better hope there's a bowling alley in the prison you go to.
Needless to say, he didn't go bowling that night.
Weitz didn't try to argue against the evidence, but he did go on to try and blame everything on Dennis Mosley.
It was Mosley's idea to rob Don, and Mosley who went berserk on him, clubbing him repeatedly with a pipe.
Detectives just weren't buying it.
The reason you know when someone's lying is because, no matter what's coming out of their mouth, their body language is telling you a true story.
And that's what you're seeing.
Anyone who does anything often mitigates their involvement.
And they sugarcoat their involvement.
And that was here.
When Phil told Don's wife that the person responsible for her husband's murder was in fact their friend, Bruce Weiss.
The very man who organized those search parties and raised money to help look for him.
She didn't seem shocked at all.
I told her about Bruce and naturally a woman's instinct is I knew he was no good.
I knew something was up, you know, because nobody's a great actor.
Even great actors aren't great actors and you can't fake sincerity.
You can't fake empathy.
I think what really disgusted me in this case is he knew the wife.
He was consoling the wife.
He wanted to be the good guy in this thing, throw everyone off.
It couldn't have been Bruce.
Bruce was organizing the search party.
In the end, Dennis Mosley took the stand and testified for the prosecution at Weitz's murder trial.
And in February of 1989 Bruce Weiss was found guilty of first-degree murder and robbery and ultimately sentenced to life in prison.
Thanks to some great detective work, justice was served in the murder of Don Vaughn, though their friend's betrayal likely haunted his wife for the rest of her life.
For Phil, thinking back to Don's age when he died, still remains a reminder of how precious every day of life truly is.
Don was only 40 years old.
So, you know, he was like right in the middle of living his life.
There's something uniquely chilling about someone who doesn't just take a life, but then has the ability to step into the role of comforter, to console the very people they just shattered.
It's not rage or impulse we're looking at here.
It's calculation.
It's performance.
It's the weaponization of trust.
And that's what stays with you long after the evidence is laid out, long after the verdict is read.
Because the worst kind of betrayal isn't always loud.
It doesn't always look like evil.
Sometimes it's quiet, measured, and delivered with a steady voice and a smile.
It forces us to reckon with something deeply uncomfortable that a human being can be both capable of kindness and cruelty in the same breath.
Don Vaughn was enjoying semi-retirement with his wife.
While he tried to maintain some income by keeping up with his jewelry business a bit, he met a con man, but his earnestness made Don believe Weitz was his friend.
Don was robbed of money and, of course, most importantly, his life.
His wife was robbed of her partner, the man she loved and had planned to live out the rest of their days with.
Don, this AOM community thinks of you today and we hope that your wife has been well cared for, as she was left to live without you.
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 Bruce Kennedy.
Researched by Kate Cooper.
Edited by Ali Sirwa and Philjean Grande.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
Thank you.
