Previously on Anatomy of Murder.
Ma'am, for the record, could you state your name, please?
It's Elsie.
And we're going to be calling who at what phone number?
I'm going to be calling my sister Jackie.
Jackie claimed that two armed masked men came into the house, took her and the three kids and put them in a closet, tied them up.
About an hour and a half later, gunshots ensued.
Mom, from day one, said Jackie killed Carl.
So she says, why don't you divorce him?
She goes, because I won't get the money.
She admits to her and planned it, but she doesn't know who the killers were.
Do you know who did it at all?
Do you know?
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.
The title for today's episode says Part 2, but we want to let you know that if you haven't listened to Part 1, for this one it's okay.
Because, while today's episode does involve the same homicide, but a completely different part of the investigation, with new information angles, twists and turns you won't be able to imagine.
On our last episode, you met Detective Mike Kirby, but you really didn't get to know him.
He has quite an extensive history in law enforcement and you'll likely be surprised to know that's not where he started.
I had been studying filmmaking at the University of San Francisco and I got a job with the San Francisco Police Department to produce training films for him.
You know honestly, it certainly does seem that Mike and I have similar career paths, but in reverse, in a way.
I started out in law enforcement and then ended up in television news and then television production.
For those of you that don't know, although you probably do, Scott is a very detailed guy.
And I think one of the things I learned very early on from watching you is that, while you see one thing on the screen, it's all about the details.
And I kind of look at that as law enforcement work, too.
While it's all supposed to be a cohesive puzzled picture, at the end it's all about the minute pieces that make that picture clear.
Even though his work with the San Francisco Police Department was from behind the lens, it certainly gave him an interesting perspective into police work.
I got a job with a private investigative firm to work undercover on the railroad for almost nine months.
And at the end of that they offered me a position as a police officer with the railroad police, mainly investigating cargo thefts and thefts from the railroads.
During his time with the railroad police, Mike also worked as a plainclothes officer and he was charged with preventing local gangs from get this stealing the train.
Like, actually stealing the train.
This is how they funded a lot of their gang activity was by stealing from the railroad.
Mike then spent the next 23 years of his law enforcement career in the suburbs of Chicago.
I was an original member of the first regional SWAT team in Chicago that was formed.
He then went from patrol to being a detective, to patrol sergeant, to working on a major crime task force, to then a forensic supervisor.
I spent nine years there and worked probably about 111 homicides.
Let that number sink in, 111 homicides.
And it's hard to imagine a job that Mike hasn't done.
And after he retired, it wasn't about taking it easy.
I was only 53 years old, so I still wanted to work.
Just so happened this town of Inverness decided to form their own police department.
The model they were using was hiring retired officers to work full time.
Let's go back to 2011.
Mike was assigned to work the unsolved murder of Carl Gamari, which occurred inside the victim's own home in April of 1979.
Two armed men wearing masks entered through an unlocked back door, tied up Carl's wife Jackie and three of her four children and locked them in the closet.
Now, the two men didn't go in and out.
They actually stayed inside the house.
They sat at their kitchen table the couple's kitchen table smoking and drinking their vodka until now.
Carl returned home from work.
They then took Carl down into the basement, where they shot him six times in the chest with his own gun.
They wore masks to hide their faces, and they wore gloves to prevent any transfer of prints or DNA.
Of course, DNA wasn't really a thing in 1979.
During Jackie's initial interview with the Barrington police, she said that when the intruders came in they took the phone she was on and hung it up.
So they touched the phone.
She said one of them was wearing gloves, but she doesn't remember if the other one did.
But here's where their preparation paid off.
Even though they entered the home brandishing firearms, they knew exactly where Carl kept his own handguns and using those guns to commit the murder and leaving them right next to his body.
So it's not that they were knowledgeable about how to commit a murder.
They were knowledgeable about how to commit this specific murder.
And the original investigation itself of this homicide was so thorough.
But it went cold for a number of reasons.
And here's one of them.
This happened April 30th.
May, Flight 191 American Airlines taking off from O'Hare Airport had an engine fall off and crashed.
All the Cook County detectives got pulled off this case.
They were kind of on their own at the initial stage of it.
You know, it's not uncommon for an investigator to be working a fresh case and an event occur which becomes an all hands on deck event where every resource at the agency is focused in on that one major incident.
And you all may even harken back to the homicide that we featured on AOM.
You know, there was a homicide at this outside extraordinary event.
In that case, we were talking about the date of 9-11, which was the date of the attacks on the World Trade Center and other targets in the country.
And that's what threw the homicide investigation out of whack and really made it kind of dead end.
But they did a great job.
They did a great canvas, located some really good witnesses.
In our last episode, we learned that the person who orchestrated that murder was Carl's own wife Jackie, who was the mother of their four children.
Her motive for committing the murder?
She was having an affair with someone else, wanted a divorce but did not want to miss out on Carl's money.
Because it's so much worse than even just murder.
You know which is kind of hard to even wrap your head around.
But I'll always come back to the children.
These are kids.
They're in closets.
They are tied up and then they hear the banging.
They were tied up in the closet for hours, not knowing whether the two men were going to come back for them.
We all know who the puppet master was, but we didn't cover who the puppets were, the trigger men.
And that investigation was happening concurrently.
Original investigators did have an early lead.
The men were masked when they entered that home, but not when they left.
They went back out the patio door.
They went down the driveway.
So they went through a vacant lot.
And there was a woman looking out the window doing dishes and saw two guys walking, one carrying like a shopping bag through her property out onto a street.
And she sees the two guys, but she doesn't really think much at all because they're just two guys carrying a shopping bag.
And that's really the only thing that stands out to her at all.
At that location, the state police found a cigarette butt, which was separate from the other ones.
And so now you have that as witness number one.
But there's another person who also is out there.
And this person actually gets a good look at the car these guys get into.
He passed a car, a small car like a Chevy Vega, leaving with two males in it.
And then there was a third witness.
And then we're coming in and they passed the same car.
And she said they were being really weird.
One of them was trying not to make eye contact.
And right there it's like you know.
You're lucky if in a homicide you have anyone that you can identify early on that sees anything of value.
And here you have three different people that can potentially at least hopefully at some point make an ID.
While I'd love to have a tag number from that car, this is still good information to begin your investigation with.
So the question back then and we're talking 2011 was one of these men, Sam Greco, the same police officer, Jackie was having an extramarital affair with.
It was the same person who showed up at the crime scene an hour after the murder.
And by the way, it was Sam who moved into the home a week after the murder.
It was also Sam who married Jackie four months after that murder.
Now, for what it's worth, Sam was a burglary detective during most of his career.
And he worked for a guy named Hanhart, who was a commander.
So now take a moment, all of you, or when you have the time, and just Google the name William Handhart.
His last name is spelled H-A-N-H-A-R-D-T and Chicago.
And then check out the first couple of links.
The thing that kept popping up over and over again is that you keep reading about him as being convicted of running mob-related jewelry theft rings for years.
Yeah, and these were thefts from Holmes.
And remember, he was the commander of a unit overseeing burglaries.
Think about that for a moment.
And Sam was one of his detectives.
In 2001, Hanhard pled guilty to running a theft ring that stole more than 5 million in diamonds and gems in the 80s and 90s.
Now again, of course, there's no proof or anything that says that because of that, that that makes Sam any more responsible for this homicide.
But I think it's pretty interesting because again, a guy within the police department who is running this theft ring.
It isn't just knowing how to solve the crimes but also how to commit them.
And remember, this homicide, it was originally posed to look like a home invasion.
And for investigators in order to go down the Sam Greco path.
The first thing they would have to look at is how would Sam benefit from Carl's death?
And there's two easy reasons.
It's going to be love and money.
While he already may have had Jackie's love, now he gets her with no one else to even deal with swirling around her.
And then the money that they got from Carl came more quickly than you might think.
I think the best way to confirm all of that is to dig into his financial records.
Did they make any new purchases that they can't account for?
Like was there some change in lifestyle that really doesn't make rhyme or reason without some windfall from the crime?
Unfortunately, you know, being so old, nothing was on computers back then.
It's all in boxes and nothing gets transferred.
We were never able to definitively show a money transfer agreement.
And while that was definitely disappointing, their search did not come up with even a small nugget.
Just one day after the murder, Jackie and Sam decided to visit Carl's place of employment, and they met with his boss at the commodities exchange.
And they had a request.
Jackie and Sam wanted all his money out of his account.
Which was about 250000, said he couldn't do it because they have to close out the accounts and she wanted to go through his desk work.
He gave her like 3 000 cash.
Jackie and sam then walked into another local bank wanting to start a brand new checking account.
So i pulled those records and i'm looking through them and i'm back.
Then you could start your checks with any number you wanted, so instead of starting with one, you could start with 200, so it looked like you'd already written 200 checks.
Jackie and Sam ordered checks for that new account.
So I'm looking at the first number on the check.
They didn't start with 0001.
Instead, they began with a four-digit number, something like 6522.
That's really a bizarre number.
Mike would soon learn that that four-digit number was the same as Sam Greco's badge number.
Like that is the...
First of all, I can't even get past the it's the next day.
But it's Carl's money, remember.
But now it's Sam's badge number.
Like all I could think about when I was hearing that and reading about that.
It's almost like this victory dance they're doing on Carl's grave.
And it just had just such a horrendous ick factor to me.
From the beginning, this case was fraught with physical evidence issues.
While on the day of the homicide, investigators did collect a treasure trove of potential physical evidence, including 25 cigarette butts that the two shooters smoked while waiting for Carl to come home.
And they also collected the glasses and the vodka bottle that they used to drink while awaiting for his arrival.
But all of the evidence, including several latent prints, were placed in a file located in the basement of the PD.
They were destroyed by two floods the kind of damage that would destroy that type of evidence in an instant.
So if it isn't going to be physical evidence that cracks the case, at least at this point, well then, investigators are going to move on.
And at this point, it really seems like they're going to need someone to say something.
And while Jackie's not doing it, she's not giving much up.
So now again, when he's investigating the case starting in 2011, Detective Kirby decides to pay Sam Greco a visit.
We went out to his house to interview him.
We had a search warrant to get his DNA and his fingerprints.
So we're going to interview him because he wouldn't come down.
And now remember, this homicide happened in 1979.
And at that time, Sam Greco was about 40 years old.
So now he's in his 70s.
He had COP real bad and he was on oxygen.
We're in his living room and we explained to him why we're there.
So we said, you know, we'd like to talk to you about it.
He goes, I'll talk to you.
He goes.
Well, we'd like to record it.
You know, because we have to record these conversations now by the law.
He goes, well, I'll talk to my lawyer.
Of course investigators don't want to continue down the lawyer path because you know really by and large almost any lawyer at that point is going to advise their client to stop speaking and they want to hear what he has to say.
And once again, someone says that they're asking for a lawyer.
It is done not done just for that conversation, but for any conversations down the road, except for some very limited circumstances.
So we go back and forth.
So finally I go, all right, we won't record it.
He goes, fine, I'll talk to you.
And during that interview, what Sam says next is not shocking at all.
So we start talking and he says, yeah, he had an affair with Jackie.
They met, you know, pretty much that stuff was true.
They met at a wedding and we had an affair for a while.
He'd been out to the house.
And now, after a little while, Sam's starting to wriggle a bit, at least according to Detective Kirby.
And then when we started pushing him a little bit about what Jackie had said in the conversation and all this, that's when he just said you know he goes, I can't talk about this anymore.
I don't know what my family would think of me.
And my reply was that you're an honest guy and you finally did the right thing.
Investigators still have a warrant for his fingerprints.
And as they're collecting them, Detective Kirby tries to keep him talking talking about anything at all?
I said, hey, you worked at 15th District, right?
He goes, yeah.
I said, did you know Jimmy Tobin?
Did you know this guy?
He goes, yeah, yeah, I worked with them.
I worked with them.
It's a cop-to-cop, brother-to-brother angle that Detective Kirby is taking.
He wants to get to the truth and he wants Sam to know that somewhere in his statement likely lies the truth.
Sam Greco just needs to trust him.
So we're talking back and forth and And as I'm getting ready to leave, he goes.
Hey, Detective Kirby.
I go, yeah, what?
He goes, keep in touch with me, would you?
I said, sure, Sam.
It works because while he doesn't give him what he's hoping for on the homicide, it does stop him from shutting down and keeping at least an open line of communication from that point forward for quite some time to come.
So every time I called him after that, he would always take my call.
And we would chat on the phone and I'd ask him when he was going to come forward with it.
He'd say, you know what I'm talking about.
So let me put something out there to all of you right now.
As you're listening to this, do you think that Sam was one of the trigger men?
Just to remind you that at the time of the home invasion, Jackie told investigators that she had been on the phone and that the person that she was on the phone with, when they looked at the phone records, ended up being Sam Greco's number.
And remember it's 1979, so it's not like it's his cell phone and he's right outside or even inside the home.
Remember that there were two masked men.
So we know there's at least one other person involved other than Sam, assuming it's him at all.
And the identity of that other man might be connected to Jackie's other boyfriend, Frank DiDia.
Frank DiDia is a cousin of Sam Greco.
We talked earlier about how Detective Mike Kirby and his partner spent days poring through boxes and boxes of files.
I'm reading 10,000 pages of reports.
I get to the last three pages.
They happen upon photos of Sam Greco and two men.
There are three printouts from the DMV one of Sam Greco, one of Frank Dindia and one of Sal Dindia.
And I'm looking at them.
I go, who the hell are these guys?
I said, why are there photos in here?
And why are they with Sam?
We already know.
One potential person is Sam Greco, and either of the two brothers could be one in one makes two.
Is this your murder crew?
So I start doing backgrounds on them and we start talking to people.
And here's another interesting little fact is that after Sam and Jackie got married, they skipped town.
Then soon after that, they came back to Illinois and they ended up buying a bar.
But by 1991, the couple had already split.
Part of the divorce was Jackie got the bar and Sam kept his pension.
So she starts dating this guy named Frank D'Andea.
Frank is Sam's cousin.
So we have Carl the victim, his wife Jackie Sam, who was dating Jackie at the time, and then you have Frank.
And so far, we know he comes into the picture after 1991.
But what about during the time of the murder?
That's definitely a new thread to investigate in this homicide case.
If Frank's involved, how?
Who?
You know, what role would he have played?
Maybe it's really him and it had nothing to do with Sam at all.
Or maybe it's Sam helping because of Frank.
We just don't know.
But again, you have two trigger people that are outstanding.
So could Frank have been one of them?
We do know that Jackie and Frank dated after she divorced Sam.
But when Detective Kirby re-interviewed Jackie's daughter, Becky, new information came to light.
And talking to Becky, she said right after they moved to South Pasadena, Frank Dindia showed up at the house and was there for a couple of days and then left in a new car.
And all I could think about when I think of him pulling out of the driveway in this new car is like now let's follow the money trail.
Mike was definitely onto something, but where would it lead?
I don't think he was sure.
If he has the new car, is it to cover their track so that the other car won't be linked back to them?
Or is it part of the proceeds of having committed the crime?
If he's involved, you also want to know what this car then represents.
We also found out that Frank shortly after that trip back purchased a restaurant in Melrose Park called The Fish House with cash.
You know, we've all seen that TV commercial, but wait, there's more.
That's the first thing that I thought of because the hits keep on coming.
He bought a bar for cash.
He likely insured it for higher than its actual value.
And yep, you guessed it.
And then I know this is going to shock you.
It burned down.
And it's really important to remember the timeline here.
Sam and Jackie buy their bar in 1990.
They divorce in 1991.
That's the same year that now Jackie and Frank start dating.
And in 1994 is when the bar that Sam and Jackie owned burns down.
In our heads, we all say, oh, for more what?
Money?
And if this crime happened, it was motivated by what we're hearing.
What?
Money?
I also start to wonder, you know, if these are the people involved.
Is it more motivated by Sam, or maybe even Frank?
The other photograph uncovered in that file from that day was Frank's brother Sal, possibly the second shooter.
We already know that Frank's financial history makes him suspicious, but here's what they found out about Sal.
When we did DMV checks in the 80s, we found that Sal had a Jaguar, but it was an upgrade.
He had traded in another Jaguar to get this one and we couldn't be able to get any of the VIN number of the original Jaguar he traded in.
Is this a payment for a murder for hire?
But here's the question.
Did Sal have the financial means to purchase these cars?
It always goes back to records.
And that's exactly it, Scott.
You know, if there is no obvious legitimate financial means for that new large purchase, well then, where is it coming from?
And the only thing that, at least, is surfacing to investigators at this point of this extra cash that's floating around, is stemming from Carl's death.
You know, Detective Kirby had more than just a pattern of unusual behavior.
It was a statement from Carl's own daughter Becky, who years later was still struggling with the murder of her father.
The events had really taken its toll.
Late 94, early 95, Becky, who's the oldest daughter, is in the DuPage County Jail.
She's in the day room, and one of the COs calls her, says, hey, Gamari, you know, come here.
So she goes and talks to the CO and then leaves.
An inmate walks up to her and says, hey, your name's Gamari?
And she says, yeah.
She goes, is your dad Carl Gamari?
She goes, yeah.
He goes, he was shot and killed in his basement in Inverness, right?
You know, this was a wait, what moment for me.
I mean, this sounds too easy.
A happenstance conversation in jail?
We also have to keep in mind that this was a homicide that was all over the news.
This was the biggest news in this relatively small town.
So very often unfortunately, people start to make up stories or say they know something when they don't necessarily, just to be part of that mix.
So Peg goes, how do you know that?
She goes.
I was at a party with a cousin of Greco's, Sam Greco's, and they were talking about that murder, how they shot him in the basement.
And we're laughing about it.
Do police now have a potential informant who talked directly to Sam Greco?
And would an experienced cop make a simple admission like this?
Here's what happened next.
So Becky gets out of jail in the spring of 95.
She goes to the Barrington police, gives them that information.
But there's a huge problem right now is that by the time Becky is able to even give that information to police well, they can't find the inmate.
And now Mike Kirby is trying to figure who that person is out almost two decades after that.
I go out to DuPage County and I want to get the jail logs for that block for that time period.
You know, when it comes to locating someone based on jail records, an investigator has a really good head start.
You know, you've got addresses, known aliases, booking photos.
All of those will really be helpful.
I mean, it's kind of a roadmap to where someone may be.
So I meet with this major.
He's going to retire in like a month.
So I'm telling him what I need.
He goes, you know what?
He goes, we've changed record systems three times since then.
He goes, I don't think we have that stuff anymore.
I said, that figures.
He goes, well, wait a second.
He gets up, takes me down to this dark part of the jail, into like a dead end hallway, and finds a computer tower, pulls it up, takes it to the IT guy.
He goes, can you fire this up and see if there's jail records on there?
Turns out that's where our records were.
I'm going to have to say this right here.
I am definitely of that school of not throwing away my old computers.
You know, I really wish that I did because I'd love to get rid of extra things.
But I have multiple computers Scott, you know, sitting in a box because you just never know what you're going to need off of them.
All along, I thought you were just a collector of computers.
I mean, I didn't really know that you had a system.
I thought you were just collecting them and displaying them, showing the history of laptops and desktops.
So we get a list.
We narrow it down to 44 inmates that could have possibly been the person.
So we start interviewing them.
We find 31 of them.
We narrow it down to about four.
So we have 44 down to four.
And here comes the test a photo lineup of the inmates to see if Becky can recognize the woman that she saw more than 15 years ago.
We do a photo lineup with Becky, and she picks this one girl out as the girl that talked to her.
Before, it seemed like Mike Kirby didn't have much of a case.
But now he has a potential informant, who she is, and eventually he tracks her down.
Turns out she died of a drug overdose three years ago.
So Mike Kirby's only real hope when it comes to the informant is that he can find out something or someone that can corroborate the information that she told Becky she overheard.
We talked to her husband, ex-husband.
The ex-husband reveals that the informant knew the alleged shooter better than Detective Kirby realized.
In fact, she dated a guy named Frank.
So this information is not going to be useful, at least in the courtroom at all, because there's no way to use it.
Like it's hearsay upon hearsay.
Could they have used it if they actually had the informant, after vetting her believe what she was saying is true?
Sure, because then it's an admission.
But usually you can't use anything overheard or said to someone else at trial unless it meets certain conditions.
So this is basically no witness, no go on to the next thing.
The fact the photos of Frank and Sal were in the files.
The information about the inmate was also in the file.
It seems like all the pieces were in front of Detective Kirby.
It was just a matter of seeing how they all connect and if he can be the one who connects them.
Also in the case reports was another lead.
There's a very colorful private investigator from the Chicagoland area.
And supposedly he had come forward to the Gamari family and told them that he had information that Sam was seen wearing a watch that belonged to Carl.
I got ahold of his daughter, talked to her and she was real cooperative and looked through the files.
And she said, nah, it was really nothing to it.
There was nothing there.
And even when I thought about it, you know, so what if he's wearing Carl's watch?
Because you do know that he soon moves in with Carl's wife and she presumably got all of Carl's belongings.
While I certainly would hope that Jackie would give his keepsakes to their children, you know, we know, that's not always the case.
So I don't know that that was going to take me too far as evidence, even if they had more.
As detectives were looking through more reports, they came across yet another possible informant that might be willing to give a statement.
We had one that said a call came from Detective Washburn from the Chicago Police Department.
He had an informant that had information about an Inverness murder.
But that's basically all that the report said.
It didn't say who the informant was or where they were then or certainly not at this time.
There was really not much that they had, really nothing at all about the informant's identity.
So I tracked down Detective Washburn, who's retired, and talked to him.
And he's just retiring.
He's going?
Yeah, he goes.
It's funny you should mention it because I'm going through all my old files and I'm trying to get rid of stuff that I don't need anymore.
And I go, do you remember this?
He goes, oh, yeah, I remember that.
The informant's first name was Guy, and we're leaving out his last name to protect his identity.
So we got to find Guy, and he really wasn't sure where he lived.
You know, for me, in finding someone like that, I'd be looking at probably DMV records, voter registration records, even potential arrest records.
So we tried everything.
I even went to the point where I went to the secretary of state and sent him a letter saying I was the detective working a cold case.
I'm looking for Guy.
I get a call back from a woman.
He goes, I think that's my uncle.
And he lives, I think, in Palatine.
Palatine is the town next to the Inverness.
Detectives did find Guy.
And let's just say he's a character.
We called the guy.
Hey, we want to talk to you.
He is Joe Pesci.
Hey, what do you want to do?
I want to talk to you.
I ain't coming down there.
We get a subpoena for him.
So we tell him, either go to Grand Jury or come over to the Palatine Police.
So he comes down.
Gold chains and everything.
One of my favorite movies, and I have several, by the way, is Goodfellas.
And I must say, the way Mike describes it, he jumps right off the pages of a script.
And as difficult as he seemed he was going to be.
Once Guy got to the Palatine Police Department he was pretty cooperative.
He goes, well, this is the story.
I dated Patty, who is Sheldon Diaz's wife.
Then we broke up.
And like in 2005, she came to me and said that she was having domestic problems with her husband.
And that on their wedding day, before they got married, he came to her and said listen, they're at the church.
He goes, I have to tell you something.
She goes, what's that?
She goes, I have to let you know that Frank and I killed a guy in Inverness in his basement.
I just want you to know that before you marry me.
So she said, okay, and married him.
I'm a little speechless because it's so Hollywood.
He is the guy.
Again now I'm going to harken back to.
You know, another mobster series, the sopranos, because i almost can picture a character out of there.
Before the wedding, you sit down with what they would call their quote-unquote girl and you tell her what you need to know.
And this guy it was his way of bearing his soul that hey, it's not like i had, you know, a relationship with someone you never knew about, you know years before.
But hey, i just want you to know that i murdered someone and i want us to go in this marriage with basically a clean slate.
I mean, you just can't make this stuff up.
You know there's no marital privilege to this.
And what that means is, when people get married, something that you say to your spouse again to try to keep the sanctity of marriage.
You're supposed to be able to have conversations and confidence.
So we can't use what one spouse says to the other when they're married in a prosecution.
However, this was said before they took their vows.
So if they could find this woman and if she was willing to talk, this could at least potentially be great evidence in court.
This is the kind of homicide puzzle that has a lot of small pieces, but do they add up to a complete picture?
And can Mike take this case across the finish line with what he already has?
So deep into this investigation.
Detective Kirby was juggling so many things and still working on this case as much as he could, even on his own time.
That was the deal I made with the chief when we took this case.
I told him, I said, this is going to take some time.
He goes, okay.
The first six months I worked it, I worked it between calls.
I'd come in on my day off.
Now the chief is giving me more leeway.
So what we're doing is guys are picking up my shifts because we're going out of state to interview people.
You know I'm looking at one of the emails that actually Mike Kirby wrote to our executive producer about the case.
And he's really just talking about the mentality of the work that was done together in an effort for everyone to kind of be in the same lane, trying to see really justice and accountability in this case achieved.
You know, we talked about how many challenges this new investigation had.
During the initial investigation in 1979, several latent fingerprints were lifted from the scene, including from that home telephone.
Almost all of that forensic evidence collected at the home was lost in the police evidence room in a really bad flood.
We originally thought 94 latent prints were missing.
So we think, well, maybe they got latent prints.
The process of lifting or collecting fingerprints off of surfaces usually involves the evaluation of that fingerprint to determine if it is valid or if a full print can be read.
And then the result of that examination usually generates a report, also with photographs.
So we're looking around for those prints and I find a lab report that said these prints were sent to the state police crime lab for examination and no matches were made.
Well, I know that when the state police process stuff like that, they photograph it.
So there should be photographs of these latent prints somewhere in the lab.
I call down to the lab, and they can't find them.
So I do some researching, and I find that the original lab report is in archives.
So I call the state police.
I have them pull the original and send it to the lab so I can go look at it.
And as I'm looking through this report, I find the prints.
The three prints from the phone that they lifted.
Just hearing that they even found fingerprint records.
I already had to do, like you know, that fist pump like hands up, because that, after all these years, is definitely not the easy feat you might think.
It's not like there's just this beautiful bank of file cabinets in the different labs that keeps them, but it's like decades.
So then the question is once they have these fingerprint records, are they going to further the investigation?
So now we can go get a search warrant for these two guys to see if their prints are on the phone.
And we found the 14 cigarette butts in the debris, but I also found a different cigarette butt.
I sent it back to the lab.
They weren't able to get a DNA profile, but they were able to get a Y chromosome off it.
So now, if we can get DNA from any of our prime suspects that police are targeting, we could have a match.
So we got a search warrant then for Sam, for the one didn't get, for Frank, to get DNA.
So we brought them down, got their prints, got DNA from Frank.
So detectives are able to put together enough information that a search warrant was issued to obtain Frank's fingerprints, but they didn't have enough to get Sal's.
For some reason, we couldn't get a warrant for Sal.
So what we did was we subpoenaed him to the grand jury because we knew he was a smoker.
Then we staked out the garage and when he showed up we followed him to the building and he stopped and had a cigarette outside.
And so we grabbed that to get his DNA.
It's called abandoned property, meaning that the person who leaves that cigarette butt in a public place into a garbage can and moments later they recover it that may contain the target's saliva or touch DNA to test.
The person has no expectation of privacy because they're essentially abandoning it into the trash.
And abandoned property is something we use like it's like bread and butter.
And it's something that happens all the time, you know, that once you abandon it, we can use it.
And the great thing is that if they got a profile off of that, then you get what's called a known sample, that you actually get a search warrant to take a cheek swab from someone and you can get their DNA that way and actually use it in court.
But in this case, investigators actually hit a roadblock when it came to the DNA testing.
When they analyzed it, the lab said there was not enough within that sample for them to do a DNA comparison.
You know, the challenges for Detective Mike Kirby really continued.
And when it came to the fingerprints, none of the fingerprints they had either on file, or for Sal or from Frank, matched the few prints that they had in that envelope that remained.
So the lack of fingerprints being in the home doesn't mean it wasn't Frank or Sal, because the potential was there that they were wearing gloves.
So you wear gloves, you're not leaving latents in the house.
While Detective Kirby and his partner knew that forensically their case had nothing to work with, Frank and Sal didn't know that.
But they did know they were on Mike's radar.
So the next step was to call them individually in to see if they'd be willing to talk.
Sal lawyered up.
He wouldn't talk to us.
Frank talked to us and denied it, denied it.
Until the end of the conversation.
But when we were done, he looked at me and he said, hey, he goes, Detective Kirby.
I go, yeah, he goes, can you do me a favor?
I go, sure, Frank, what do you want?
He goes, when you come to get me, will you call me and I'll just turn myself into you.
When you come get me, will you call me and I'll just turn myself into you?
Now, again, is he just being cocky and saying it that way?
Or is it again like, yeah, ha ha, na na na na boo boo.
Like I did it, but you can't get me now.
But if you do, do it this other way.
Like I would say, it's this tiny little thread of evidence that I would use it as building my pyramid in court.
Perhaps he sees the writing on the wall.
He knows that Carl's wife, Jackie, is already in custody.
And perhaps he now believes it's possible she may flip implicating both Sal and Frank.
Or perhaps this is just him still being a wise guy.
Well, we got Jackie and Custis, the only one we've charged so far.
They won't charge Sam and they won't charge Frank or Sel yet.
What they're hoping is that she would do a proffer, but that didn't work out.
And so now let's just get down to where we are today.
Well, both when it comes to Frank and Sal, neither have ever been charged and neither has Sam.
Now, he passed away some years ago, but everyone remember is innocent until proven guilty.
And until a court of law says differently, we must remember that when it comes to Frank, Sal, Sam.
You know, even if they are the killers, none of them have confessed.
They have never been charged.
But we do want to share two incidents with all of you that are just jaw-dropping.
The neighbors who witnessed the two men leaving the Gamari house didn't just provide investigators with a detailed account.
They also worked with a sketch artist who produced two composite drawings.
And then I pull up their arrest photos.
One was arrested in 80 and one in 81.
And so I look at their arrest photos and they're very, very, very good.
It's one of the best matches I've ever seen on a composite and a mugshot.
And it's not just Detective Kirby who thinks this is such a clear match.
When Mike Kirby wanted to get a state's attorney assigned to this cold case, he had to put together a presentation to see if they'd take it.
We put together this big briefing.
I got wall board, you know, just all kinds of poster board.
I got all kinds of stuff.
So kind of excited about it.
We get down there and they go, well, come on in there.
And they take us to a room and we open the door and it's a storage room where all the old cases are.
And they move some boxes around.
So we sit on the boxes and this is where I'm doing my briefing.
It's like, okay, they're interested.
So we start the briefing.
And I get to the point where we have these composites that were done by witnesses, two neighbors.
We had some mug shots of this Frank Dindia and his brother Sal from their arrest back in that time period for unrelated stuff.
And we had them next to the composites because they're very similar.
When the supervisor from the unit opens the door and goes, what's going on?
And he looks at the photos and he goes, oh, wow, those match.
He goes, I guess we'll take the case.
And that's how we got the state's attorney on board.
Now you have a prosecutor confirming instantly that he believes it's a match.
That is a great feeling.
But there's more.
There was another incident that happened soon after Jackie was arrested and charged with the murder of her husband.
State's attorney gets a call from an attorney.
He says, listen, I got a client that wants to make a deal on the Inverness murder.
He says he was there, but he said he didn't shoot.
And so they had to kind of wait and they said, hey, we'll get back to you.
So by the time they get back to the lawyer, the lawyer says oh, my client who, by the way, he had not named at this point who that was.
He doesn't want to talk to you.
So it was like, is it game over?
Well, no, not for Mike Kirby.
We got the phone number that they called back.
We traced it to the attorney.
So I went to his building and I pulled their security video.
And in the conversation, he said, I just met with the client yesterday.
So we knew the date.
So I viewed the video.
And who do they see walking into the door?
And lo and behold, Frank Ndia comes walking into the building.
Defense attorneys represent lots of clients.
And yes, that's true.
But when one of your prime suspects happens to be there on that day and happens to be a client of that lawyer that was looking to cut a deal, is that a coincidence?
I doubt it.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
So it's one of those things that it's like reaffirming that they are likely on to the right track.
But how are you going to use that in court?
Whatever that person said, even if it was Frank said to him at that point well, that's attorney-client privilege.
You know, it's really important to look at the vein that this case is going on.
And when I say the vein, it's going in a direction, but we're not there yet yet.
Earlier, we talked about how Detective Kirby started his career in filmmaking.
Well, there's a term called the martini shot, and it's the last set up shot for the day.
While Detective Kirby is doing just that, trying to set up the last shot to finish this lengthy investigation.
Throughout the course of the investigation, we ended up interviewing over 109 people and nine states.
You get a piece from this person which may not on its own mean anything, but now, when we put it with these two other pieces, now we're starting to get a picture.
And maybe it's going to be one of you out there that's going to help to complete this picture.
You know it wasn't so long ago on another Unsolved that we featured that it was AOM listeners that came up with very specific information, in that case about a shoe that is pushing that investigation forward.
So, you know, we're hoping that this is not just a one-off and that it actually can become a trend but, even more than that, that it can help in this particular case.
On our AOM website, we'll be posting the composite sketches of the two men that were fleeing the scene that day of the murder in 1979.
If anyone has information, please contact Chief Bob Haas at the Inverness Police Department.
That number is 847-358-7766.
And you can also email him at ipd at inverness-il.gov.
And thinking about this episode, or actually these episodes.
You know some of you out there I know you don't like the unsolved, because you want that finality.
And I think it's a good way to look at why we profile them.
We all want that finality, but not just because it's the end of the story, but because it is answers and accountability for families and victims out there.
The Kamaris want this case solved, hopefully during their lifetimes, but also imagine what it's like for them just knowing that not everyone has been accountable, including those that shot the bullets into their dad.
But they also know that those triggermen, guys with guns, willing to take lives, are still out there on the loose.
We will be off next week, but you can catch an all-new AOM episode on Tuesday, October 4th.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Forseti Media.
Ashley Flowers and Sumit David are executive producers.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
No!
No!
