'Paranoid tech' millionaire's murder conviction reversed; Woman found dismembered in freezer

a word of warning this podcast explores graphic and disturbing stories and includes some strong language it therefore may not be suitable for our young listeners or other folks who may find it disturbing hello and welcome to true crime daily the podcast covering high profile and under the radar cases from across the country every week we are recording this on february 3rd 2021 i'm your host anna garcia and our guest today is youtuber stephanie harlow who hosts true crime videos on youtube and has this segment i love the name coffee and crime time she's passionate about crime the history and of course giving a voice to the voiceless welcome stephanie how are you i'm great thank you so much for having me i'm very excited that you're here because um i love your perspective you're you're so passionate about the cases you do so much research you're as you said you're the everyday crime fan right and you want to know more and you have the logical logical questions so let's dive into today's cases yes so we've got an update on a really bizarre murder case of a paranoid tech millionaire bitcoin guy who was making a bomb shelter because he was afraid of nuclear war i know this is a case that you have been following so i can't wait to hear your perspective on this one and i know you've got a lot of details on that one but first a woman has been arrested after her roommate was found dismembered in a sealed freezer in the woods near a national park what is it with chopping up body parts i feel like practically every week we have a new case on someone who's been chopped to bits i don't understand it because it's not as if it really helps to hide the identity usually when somebody or law enforcement finds a dismembered or um beheaded body they're still able to identify that person so it just seems like a lot of gruesome work to go through you have to wonder what the mindset is i feel that there's something that goes on in the process of chopping up the body which is never easy right you know even when you watch movie scenes it's a messy difficult labor-intensive job to take apart a human being so clearly something else is going on and there's a lot of rage i think involved because there are many other ways to try and get rid of a body after you've killed them so let's look at this case on january 21st corey bommely is 59 years old was taken into custody this was a traffic stop in dane county wisconsin now there was a warrant for her arrest she was the the warrant was out of oklahoma for first-degree murder with deliberate intent and desecration of a corpse she is accused of allegedly killing her roommate 53-year-old talina galloway whose remains were found in arkansas so we've got like three states going on here lived in oklahoma murder according to authorities took place in oklahoma body was dumped in a well i guess yes dumped into a freezer and then left in the forest in arkansas and then the suspect moved to wisconsin in the middle of all this so a lot going on there yes she was on the move and in fact going through this case looking at the the extents the extent that she went to cover up the crime and get rid of the body and kind of cover her tracks i found to be almost impressive like she really put some thought into this i think yes stephanie but it's always the you know when they when the plan becomes more elaborate the disappearance plan or the line or the story that's told it all had to do with supposedly that talina was upset because she had gotten a um notification right she was told this is what this is what was told to authorities she found out she had covered she didn't want to go to the hospital never wanted to be intubated there was a facebook posting saying i've got covered i need some time to think about this i can't deal with this right and then she disappears well i think what happened was um corey said talina left went to the doctor thinking she might have coveted because she had symptoms and she got screened and then her doctor obviously didn't have the results right away and he said we'll go home and quarantine just in case because this was what last march am i right so it's or march april so that's just it was she last seen at the very end of march april there's like a three-week window in there where it's very messy allegedly she went to the doctor around this april seventh day when the facebook post went up um so the doctor's not gonna have a results right away he says go home and quarantine she goes home and allegedly tells her roommate and friend corey i'm afraid that if i have covet i'll have to go to the hospital and i'll have to be intubated and obviously that is a valid fear to have that's a scary thing for anybody thinking that you might have covered right on the cusp of it being a thing nobody really knew anything about it or how to protect ourselves from it so these are valid fears but then corey says she just leaves because she doesn't want to go to the hospital and be intimated and that's when she posts this facebook post on april 7th saying i'm you know i'm not feeling you say she when you say she it it's on it's on talina's facebook page but there is question as to who posted it is that correct personally i don't think that she posted it yeah because it was what i think march the end of march when the last person besides corey heard from talina and that was her boss because she worked from home for microsoft so he was the last person or he or she was the last person who spoke to talina besides corey and corey says the last time she saw her was april 7th but she didn't report her missing until the 17th i believe several weeks go by and here's what's very bizarre uh corey makes a big deal of telling police that um she took some things with her like for example she took her phone and took her driver's license however she left her purse and her car in the driveway and corey allegedly told police that she was headed to arkansas and that okay so we're going from oklahoma to arkansas we leave our car in the driveway oh that's right so cory says ride sharing apps that's how she got there yeah but her phone was turned off talina's phone was turned off on the 8th so and and corey said she brought a lot of other random things 700 in cash to be specific two guns i think yeah nine millimeter firearm a 45 caliber firearm her meds and a bottle of alcohol now i don't know if she meant alcohol like rubbing alcohol which somebody might bring if they were afraid of covid or or alcohol like liquor that was a question i had what kind of alcohol was she bringing in this ride sharing app with 700 in cash and two guns yeah none of this i mean when you step back that story seems really incredible and then for people who knew talina either as friends or her family none of this seemed to make sense it was out of character and this is where all the red flags are coming up the story just doesn't make sense it may be elaborate but if it doesn't make sense i feel that sometimes and again you know corey is just charged here but i do believe that sometimes people go so far in trying to be so clever that sometimes the simplest answers you know are are a lot easier you know there's less messing up but when it like gets so detailed and so convoluted you're like what yeah i don't know if you're an office fan but michael scott is always telling dwight keep it simple stupid right so and that's pretty much it i think people see too many of these movies and obviously a good crime movie isn't a good crime movie if there's not some elaborate plot but in real life yes your best bet is is to keep it simple but i think the point was they were in wagoneer county right wagoneer county yes and the police at first they were speaking to corey because she was the only one there this was you know talina's roommate her friend and there was no family who lived in wagoneer county close by so the police are gonna go to to corey because who else are they going to talk to who else was with her every day and knew you know her her day-to-day routine and the family who's not local they're like no no she would never leave she would never not contact us she would never turn her phone off this doesn't seem like her but corey's like well you know she wasn't a bad mental state and so i think at first the police initially were like well maybe this could be but then things started popping up right that that's yes but i i do believe also that police always immediately always the last person to have seen someone who's disappeared under suspicious circumstances to me the car in the driveway when you're in an area that is not urban is very suspicious and women do not leave their purses yes you can take your cell phone in your id but if you're going for a long time and you're going far away that's not logical so i have a feeling that from the very beginning because it's always you always look at the last person and the person closest in that person's life right so that's either going to be a roommate a housemate a lover a best friend they are immediately tops on on the list here so police say that another huge red flag was that apparently this is according to the police telina never saw a doctor that she was never tested for coronavirus for covet 19. and that again leads us back to her family now saying that post on facebook doesn't make sense it doesn't sound like her nothing is making sense and i think if you're the police when you confirm that the person who has disappeared that the mo that the important part of that story is she's freaked out about coronavirus and that she wasn't tested and didn't go to the doctor that's a massive red flag and who's the one person telling you that story well it was corey yeah exactly right she's the one who's got all the details on this so um police also find some troubling evidence they start you know as time goes by they they start looking at the house they obviously look into cory and police uncovered some troubling evidence there in the house that they shared and what's it's not clear what their relationship was if they were just roommates if there were more than that it's really unclear the other thing that's real also unclear at this point the sheriff says still doesn't know what the motive is like what happened you still still don't know that part of why someone is dead so in the backyard police say that they found the charred remains of a mattress that that galloway had recently purchased and it had been torched two days before corey reported her roommate missing okay on its own alone it's kind of bizarre but then if someone is missing it's not right you does this like concern you i live in new york so i'm not you know burning mattresses in my my backyard at any time so it's bizarre for me personally at any time but that wasn't the only thing she had also rearranged all the furniture in their house so it made it appear so it would look less suspicious that the bed wasn't there basically right to make it look like there never was a bed there right right and it made it look like um talina was sleeping in the front bedroom when in fact she'd been occupying the back bedroom and i think once the police get a warrant and get in the house they figure out why that is in my opinion it's never explicitly said but talina was sleeping in the back bedroom and then when they go on the house with the warrant they find blood not only in the garage which is where they found a good amount of blood but they also found blood in that back bedroom where telina was sleeping so maybe she thought well if i make it seem as if she's sleeping in the front bedroom if they do ever come in here they won't go into the bedroom they'll just check the bedroom they thought she was sleeping and you know maybe she was trying to kind of think a couple steps ahead but it didn't work because typically i think a crime scene is processed usually the entire house yes and also this whole idea where she's constantly pointing in an opposite direction almost of the evidence after a while you just know to look in the opposite direction that she's pointing you in because that must be exactly where it is she becomes a little obvious there that's her mo yeah yeah and so police said also that they found some internet searches that corey had done and allegedly she had looked up how to get blood out of concrete and wood that alone is obviously not criminal by any means you can search anything you want but when you start to piece together a case or a story that certainly fits at the narrative here yeah with the garage floor having blood on it she'd painted over the garage floor and she'd painted over the garage floor um after talina went missing so they they probably are putting two and two together she's looking up how to get rid of blood from concrete aka the garage floor she painted over it but they found you know using luminol they found signs that blood had been there and had been attempted to be cleaned away so yeah exactly it's really adding up here and what's amazing is how long it would actually take to actually charge her because there's a lot here that's very suspicious when then police search a storage unit that corey had been renting and they discovered pieces of talina's driver's license all cut up remember she told police that one thing she did take with her despite leaving everything else was the driver's license okay what am i saying she points in that direction and it clearly is going to lead you back to something that that she's allegedly done based on what she's saying here then there's another storage unit i don't know how many storage units people there's only two but it just seems you have a house and then you have two storage units yeah and in the other storage unit um apparently corey rented this one under a fake name police found two firearms and several hundred rounds of ammunition okay and a trailer tire and a trailer tire which will become much more interesting as we go along then i have a question this is in wait what state is this in again it's oklahoma right oklahoma yes and one of the tr one of the storage units was in i believe a different state one was in edmonton oklahoma that was the one where um the license had been found cut up but then and then she had actually rented that one under her real name but then i believe the other one was in a different muskegee is that in oklahoma um i could that be wisconsin or oklahoma i think it might be wisconsin but are gun laws um much more lacks in oklahoma and wisconsin because there's a lot of guns in this case and a lot of ammo there is but if they were you know legally purchased and she had a license then it would not be an issue right you could be a hunter or you could have a lot of guns legally but it was an issue because she was a past felon right she'd already been convicted of identity theft i believe before any of this had ever happened it doesn't explicitly say when but to be to be a felon and be in possession of this many firearms that would probably be an issue no matter where you are because of her past history which ends up getting her arrested on this probation violation and she does bond out and then that leads to the move to wisconsin so now she's got some legal trouble going on on a separate charge but that is not connected directly to the disappearance of talina galloway well the original one wasn't but this second one because she was arrested before she was arrested for murder she was arrested for using talina's credit card to pay for her lawyer she was arrested for selling you know her things on ebay she also took talina's truck i believe it was and brought it to a scrap yard and she told the people at the scrap yard oh this is you know it's legally my truck it belongs to a family member or a did but it's not worth it for me to sell locally because it's not running really well so i'm just gonna scrap it like give me whatever you can for it and the people of the scrapyard were like i don't know what you're talking about this car runs fine but okay they gave her 200 for it but then later they said they were not going to have any problem selling it locally because it was a fine car and then she was arrested for that you know using talina's credit card and selling her truck pretending that it was hers so she was arrested for that initially i believe in june and then she bonded out and i think at that point i don't let me know if you agree the police are thinking at this point like she's involved but this is all we can get her for right now she's involved with this woman's disappearance right uh selling her personal stuff on ebay to lena's things obviously is very disturbing to talina's family but one could make the argument you know okay well people always react weirdly when people are missing you know i i'm not giving her the benefit of the doubt it's like but people don't always react the way you expect them to was it suspicious absolutely and then using as police say using talina's credit card to pay for her meaning corey's lawyer um attorney fee fifteen hundred dollars that's that's incredible right that's incredible so all these things when you piece them together look incredibly suspicious also sometimes there's a coldness to us like i said you know you never know people react so weirdly but the fact that corey was selling her roommates personal things as opposed to i don't know a saw or you know something that maybe wasn't as personal the fact that the items were more personal gets you back to that whole when someone chops someone up and it takes so long what's brewing right is it is it personal or was it just hey i just need some money an indifference okay you're like you said a callousness a coldness yeah mm-hmm oh right so now we have a laurie arrested on june 6 on these five counts of obstruction of justice two counts of destruction of evidence one count of credit card fraud and one count of larceny that's for all the events that we just described now she also faced four charges of possessing a firearm while registered as a felon that would be the issue she could not legally have had those firearms so because she was the a previously convicted felon as you said in that credit card case involving fraud at this point she moves to madison to a suburb of madison wisconsin to me this is honestly this next part is the most fascinating of the whole case because everything hinges on what's about to happen so on june 8th of 2020 a witness in arkansas contacts the local sheriff's department to say that she's seen this pickup truck that's towing a small trailer and it's driven into this secluded area near a national park and for anyone who you know people are always on top of other people who are trying to illegally camp or park or anything like that so this is a vigilant person and i guess i found her to be very brave really yeah because she said it's the middle of nowhere it's a secluded area she saw something she saw to be suspicious and this woman she was like i'm following this vehicle right to me i would have been like if i see something suspicious who knows what i'm walking into i guess but if you have like ownership of the area if you live there or you use this park you become very protective that's what i mean it's like usually a lot of like fishermen who are out they will always report someone who's fishing illegally if you're a hunter and you see someone hunting illegally it's almost as if you're it's part of your world and you're preserving it and you you have this sense of it's like the nosy neighbor is how i describe it right i i know just in my neighborhood we're always it's like what's going on what is that car i've never seen this you know we're just we're just we're just like that so she wants to know more okay and she says this the activity seems suspicious she detects a foul odor and then said quote that it was a foul smelling thick liquid that had pulled on the floor of the trailer according to the sheriff's deputies so she calls this in and this is what this is what i didn't understand she sees the truck with the trailer drive to the secluded area she walks over finds the vehicle in the trailer nobody's around so she she looks over and she says she smells an odor by the trailer that was the trailer open at this time and that's how she saw inside to see the floor of it this thick smelling or fowl smelling like i i don't i can't tell you a hundred percent because i don't know that fact but it doesn't seem plausible that it would have been open because if it had been open then she could have seen the rest of it unless whoever drove this truck and trailer there opened the trailer took the the refrigerator and talina's body out of it and was disposing of it at that point when this woman approached so the trailer was open and that's how she saw what was inside yes and that could be possible it's interesting that they haven't released this person's name and as part of this investigation as i always say there are always a lot of details that are missing that don't make sense that generally will come out in court as the case progressed progresses now she was very smart because she wrote down the license plate and then she called the sheriff's department and this to me is is the tragedy it's a misstep i'm going to say because or a missed opportunity as well and it would cost the investigation six months of time because of this i was listening to the sheriff's press conference yesterday and he kind of sidestepped whether arkansas dropped the ball here because the call was made and because he was vague on his answer at least in my interpretation of his answer it seemed like the officer or the deputy went out and didn't find anything although i was reading into some of his words the question of whether anybody went out there that's that was just what i what i gathered from yesterday's press conference with this with the sheriff okay so let's continue along on january 14th so we're moving along six months here the same witness the same woman she's walking in the woods again in the same area and this time she finds a white box-like freezer with its lid tape shut and a foul smell coming out of it this poor woman oh she's amazing she's amazing she's gonna have nightmares though at this point she honestly i think the sheriff's department should hire her she so she reports now to the polk county sheriff's department the same place she called six months earlier she calls it in deputies go out and they find human remains inside this freezer and the here's the best part of it this witness wrote down the share wrote down the license plate the first time and she still had it in her notes again yes and where in the world did that license plate lead to telena galloway mm-hmm isn't that in the victim yeah right who's whose remains obviously it goes without saying ended up being in that freezer and that same freezer was reported as being missing from the home of talina and corey and that same freezer was suspected to have been in this trailer that corey lied to police and said she didn't own she said she'd sold this trailer in march but then even you know deputies and witnesses had seen the trailer after she'd sold it i think as as recent as like may and it ended up that she'd stored it at a friend's house and when it was at her friend's house being stored she'd had it plugged into electricity so i believe the police are theorizing that at this point selena's body was inside that freezer which was inside the trailer which was plugged into power so that it would obviously keep her body cold until corey could figure out what to do it after that she then took the trailer from this friend's home and put it in that storage unit the same one where um i believe where the license was found cut up so yeah she's she's doing she's doing a lot she's doing the very most at this point which makes me wonder did she do this alone that was one of my main questions did anybody help her she was what 59 years old i think oh but she's a spry one i was watching her um her um her hearing because she's having a hearing she did she waved extradition so she's going to go from wisconsin to oklahoma and as i'm watching her and her body language um corey's fascinating because everything's virtual now so corey is so she's behind bars and she's got her arms sticking out and kind of hanging out very like old school 1950s i'm in a jailhouse movie like a sort of el capone thing she's really got it she's got a lot of attitude there and her attorney's on everyone's on virtually and the judge is on and she makes it absolutely clear that she is waving a tradition and and she doesn't say a lot but she does say that she wants to get back to oklahoma right away because she wants to deal with these charges so it's like it's almost his life he's a racehorse i'm like i gotta get out of here because i i i gotta deal with a murder charge it was uh and i love the judge because the judge was so polite he's like well i wish you the best of luck he's like i i've seen the evidence i don't know what you think you're gonna do here but good luck to you ma'am i wish you i wish you the best of luck so i move all the furniture in the house like moving furniture from bedrooms taking the bed outside burning it now she's got her trailer at a friend's house like did this friend absolutely have no idea what was going on did someone help her move this furniture around i mean i suppose she could have done i couldn't do it i'm definitely not in the best shape of my life middle of covid you know definitely probably couldn't have moved an entire house of furniture on my own so it does make me wonder if there was somebody else that maybe didn't know what she was doing but had assisted her in these things just because she asked them to you know help me move some furniture around things like that it's possible but also i would say if she indeed did do all of this she had several weeks ahead of everyone she had weeks ahead of the police before before talina was reported so that time is precious you can get a lot done with that time it's one thing if you're trying to hurry and get everything done in 24 hours but if you have a few weeks lead time to do that to haul stuff yeah i i think it is possible i think it is possible and so far authorities have not said whether anyone else is involved and she is the only one charged so the arkansas state medical examiner identified the remains tentatively identified the remains in that freezer as talina galloway and that is when the arrest warrant was issued and she is in transit corey is in transit to oklahoma where she will enter her plea because she didn't have to enter a plea in wisconsin it was just a hearing to extradite her and she's on her way and based on what she said she's she's got a fight in her in the the legal process like for a trial when is corey going to have access to what the prosecution has against her during discovery or does she have that before so there'll be a few phases because she has to be then formally charged in a courtroom and that's when she will hear the charges and they don't necessarily have to pre present any evidence and prosecutors sometimes take two approaches one is that they will call a grand jury and they will ask for an indictment and sometimes the reason prosecutors ask for indictments is because it's it it's a sense of them um having an independent body substantiate and support their charges does that make any sense so you don't have to get a grand jury indictment you can just bring charges so it'll be up to the prosecutor to decide if they're going to present some of this evidence to a grand jury and then the person is indicted then there's also a pre-trial hearing and in the pre-trial hearing phase the judge basically has to make a decision is there enough evidence to proceed with going forth with a trial most of the time the pre-trial hearings do the judge generally finds that there's enough evidence at least that there is a suspicion that you could present and in the pre-trial hearing is when you will hear some of the evidence some of the strong evidence but not all of it and then as they're preparing to go to trial and this is the discovery phase you'll hear a lot of delays in court where one side is claiming that they're not getting the information from the other side and again there's a everything is like a process of revealing the case against the person who is accused and this takes years and now during covid i can't tell you how many cases are backed up completely backed up so i have a feeling that we will hear some of the evidence against corey as this progresses through just even the very preliminary charging first appearance all of that we will start to get some of that but if the prosecutor decides and convinces a judge to keep some of it sealed then it will remain sealed i think it's going to be an interesting trial overall yes if it goes to trial it should be very interesting it should be very interesting because i have a feeling she's going to be or is going to be very animated and vocal about well yes her defense now onto a very bizarre case in 2017 a millionaire day trader who had a secret bomb shelter and all these tunnels built under his home in bethesda maryland was sentenced to nine years in prison for the death of a worker who got caught in what prosecutors labeled a death trap the worker was helping to build these secret tunnels for daniel beckwith who was a one-time university electrical engineering student a computer expert a wealthy day trader he was into bitcoin um he was obsessed with the threats from north korea and the possibility of nuclear war i mean this is only one of his obsessions um so he decided to build this secret bunker uh and i i know that you've been following this stephanie so you're going to have a lot of details i'm just going to give a little bit more on this case and then you can you can just chime right in there so so what ended up happening was that he didn't want to according to prosecutors daniel beckwith didn't want to hire a professional contractor to build these secret tunnels because the whole point is their secret and then he would have to tell someone so in in trial testimony because he wanted to keep it secret he hired someone who he had been having some business dealings with he hired 21 year old aseca kafra and he had met kafra because he had invested five thousand dollars in kafra's startup venture okay and that's how he met him and kafra would then work for these really really long stretches in these deep tunnels underneath the house and i mean the way the prosecutors described the the electricity was being run through extension courts from the house into these tunnels it sounds very unsafe and obviously was not permitted and ultimately there was a fire and kafir got trapped and died and so that's what this case was about what responsibility did daniel hold in all of this and as i said you know he he was convicted on on two charges and we're going to get into that but i know you're dying to tell us about daniel and and all of his weirdness and this situation well it's it's a sad story because both both asya and daniel have very interesting backgrounds um really sad daniel beckwit i whenever i do these cases i like to look as far back as i can because i really think somebody's upbringing the way they're raised what they're exposed to in in early childhood especially is going to shape a lot of who they become in their adulthood and daniel had an interesting upbringing his father well his father david he was a trained singer he trained under like this famous french composer he'd performed in musicals and operas he even performed at the white house once um his mother linda had initially studied at columbia law school she'd worked briefly for a government attorney but then she kind of became anti-government so and you see this a lot and i mean myself i completely understand that questioning your government um she she eventually told her son like i think all politicians are just grinding it doesn't matter which side they're on from my experience in washington i've seen horrible things and i don't trust politicians and that's fine but linda kind of took it to a whole other level at one point um and i think it happened when her husband david got diagnosed with parkinson's in 2000 because she would become his obviously full-time caregiver and this is a lot of stress mentally and emotionally for family on top of certain anxieties and idiosyncrasies you already hold and it seemed like linda kind of became a hoarder they were very protective of daniel they didn't let him go outside and play with other kids he was homeschooled from you know all through school he never went to a real school until college he was homeschooled the people in his neighborhood said he into his late teens was not allowed to go trick-or-treating without both of his parents with him um and then the house whoever was a lot allowed inside the house which was not many people because they were very insulated they didn't like to go out and then like people coming in they said it was messy it was like the the home of a hoarder you know there was papers everywhere and books and food half eaten on plates things like that so this is how daniel grew up with a very paranoid and anxious mother a sick father and overprotective overprotected lived in a bubble you know had no outside influences besides what he saw and heard at home which i can only imagine what what it was um so and his mother you know thought he was brilliant he learned to read when he was a toddler so she would just tell everyone you know he's going to do great things he is a genius and so he came to see himself as a genius and i think it's safe to say he was above average intelligence you know i don't know his his uh exact intelligence scores but he was smart he claimed he finished most of most of his high school curriculum by the age of 15 because he was homeschooled so then he started kind of doing his self-education um blowing things up in his yard for chemistry class he had a home lab where he did electrolysis experiments and he electrolysis experiments yes i don't understand the removal of hair that's that's what i thought electrolysis was but that's uh what they say he had he also yeah he also had a very big fear of death right and this i believe comes from being raised by a mother who's like if you go outside you know something bad's gonna happen to you it's bad out there you're better if you stay in here this is commonly seen in in children of parents that do this so in 2010 he enrolled at the university of illinois and this was the first time he was away from his parents and out of the house and everybody in his neighborhood was like oh good for daniel he finally has a chance to live a normal life like we hope this uh this this goes well for him but and he was anxious but then just a few months into being at school his mother is diagnosed with cancer well she was diagnosed with cancer far before this but she had never gone to the doctor because she doesn't trusted actors so just a few months into being at school the paramedics go to his mother's house while he's away they take her out and within two weeks she's dead and then his father starts to decline after this as well health-wise so daniel is just a mess at his mother's funeral everybody said he just looked dazed you know his life's changing overnight and now he sees like well maybe my mom was right bad things happen out in the real world he puts his father back into assisted living he goes back to school but then weird stuff starts happening at his school engineering students are getting these weird emails that don't make any sense they seem like they're coming from professors but it's clearly a hacker one day somebody tried to get into the school and couldn't open the door and it turned out that all of these external locks on the school had been filled with this goo substance blew right they had been glued and it took what i forget almost twenty thousand dollars or over twenty thousand dollars to actually re-enter the school um and and it turns out daniel was was kind of the one who was responsible for this and he did a lot of other things too they go into his dorm room you know they find a bunch of stuff that that implicates him in in these things surprisingly it doesn't seem like he was expelled um he was arrested and you know yeah that's kind of a form i guess of expulsion well he he was not sent to prison he was placed on probation but then back at the school after right weird well i think they wouldn't want him back um is it clear did he absolutely go back to school that's not clear to me um it says he's back in bethesda maryland by yeah i'm not sure whether he actually went back to school i'm not certain of that timeline well the reason he ends up building this bunker eventually because eventually he's not in illinois anymore he's back in bethesda permanently he was afraid of a nuclear attack due to his proximity to washington dc and i i read this book um a while ago it's by robert wallace he's an ex-ci agent he spent 40 years in the cia and i remember something so specifically from the book that says if you live in the dc area and that includes bethesda maryland at any point you're 99 you have a 99 chance of being within walking distance of a spy so i i i don't know if his his fears were completely unfounded obviously there's political volatility always going on you know that's a fear of everybody's at all times that something bad can happen but we don't build bunkers under our houses to well i think i think stephanie you have to look at other things that he did that would suggest why he did build a bunker and that this was really it's just another step in his paranoia and his fear when his mother became ill and you know when you lose a parent you become more vulnerable especially if you've been living in a sheltered environment so he went so far in his college years at this time you know when his when he lost his mom and and he's feeling incredibly vulnerable he takes like his mother's minivan and and he reinforces it with kevlar steel he starts wearing a bulletproof vest himself almost all the time because he's heard that if you or his in it people in his age group are most likely to die from a car accident so so he's very very worried about the world around him and it's obviously a very scary place for him so if you look at this pattern it almost makes sense it's in step with his fear that he would need this bunker and these series of tunnels now um it how he met kafra again is interesting he you know he was kind of living his whole life in you know on the web he he his life existed virtually and he was very well known for his trading and his advice and he had a lot of people who always wanted to hear what he had to say and he was doing well with his training and so kafra had this idea and he needed an angel investor and i'll keep this part of the story i think a little bit short you know he invested the five thousand dollars kafra tried his best to get other investors it never really ended up working but kafra looked at daniel as someone who was not only brilliant but also someone who had access and i think some of this paranoia may have started to rub off so he manages to convince him to help him to build this these tunnels under his home and i didn't get the impression that i felt like because there's all these texts you can see the text that um that ascii is sending he wanted him to invest money in his app which is actually really brilliant i feel so bad for this young man because he had so much promise he was very smart um he actually had a great idea for an app and you know they him and his partner oscar and his partner were trying to get it obviously they they looked up to the silicon valley millionaires multi-billionaires people like that that's what they wanted to do um and they he wanted to invest money but then i i believe something happened and you know he gave him some money so daniel gave him five thousand dollars and then he was like well i would like more and oscar said i'll do anything you know i'll get a part-time job i'll do whatever i have to i'll help you with your bunker and then daniel was like hmm well yes i think that we will we will make that deal so it wasn't um it's sad because oscar was in a vulnerable position where he desperately wanted to to reach his dreams at all costs and like you said as he and daniel spend time together i mean daniel is this strange elusive figure who just like not one of those people like don't call me i'll call you kind of people the first meeting they had was at a hookah bar and he was wearing like a bulletproof vest you know underneath his shirt and he was like well you never know what's going to happen so as they're communicating and meeting yeah it's going to rub off on anasta as any kinds of you know extreme sorts of beliefs do when you when you start to think about them and you spend a lot of time with that person so i think he saw this bunker that that daniel was building as something very legitimate and if it helped him to be a part of it and he would actually get get what he wanted at the end then it's like a win-win like i'm helping my new friend and i'm getting what i want out of it but he was actually posting on instagram which i found interesting while he's like in the tunnels digging he's like posting his progress on on instagram which did not really coincide with me for daniel's level of like security like did daniel not know that oscar was posting this on instagram because daniel didn't even want ask yet to know where he lived so he told him i believe that he lived somewhere in virginia made him wear these goggles when he drove him there and then drove like farther than he should have and then just ended up in bethesda right basically yeah so the family actually thought that their son was actually working in virginia because the whole setup of getting him to the tunnels and the pretense here was all that it was in virginia so let's get to the day of the fire um on september 10th of 2017 kafra was working in the tunnels when this accidental electrical fire broke out in the basement above him remember he's under the basement of the house kafra smelled smoke climbed up tried to escape but was overcome by smoke and he had apparently according to prosecutors that because of the hoarding and the clutter it was even more difficult to get out a neighbor noticed the smoke and called but at this point it was too late because kafra had already been overcome the jury convicted daniel beckwith of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the death of 21 year old kafra authorities never accused daniel beckwith of trying to intentionally kill him it was not an issue of what you would call a murder a typical murder instead they argued that kafra had been subjected to such dangerous and haphazard working conditions that essentially daniel caused his death so at beckwith's nearly three hour long sentencing on 2019 in 2019 he was described as you have brilliant obsessive somewhat uncaring you know it appeared in some degree a lack of empathy for others but if you don't have a lot of communication with human beings you may that that may have never been installed that button may have never been installed in you so that kind of leads us all to today and why we're having this conversation because a maryland appeals court has overturned the conviction so beckwit was the conviction on a second degree murder the appeals court has said that there wasn't sufficient evidence to warrant that charge so unlike a straight homicide charge second degree murder includes what is called quote depraved heart and this describes a death that occurs due to an extreme disregard for human life and the argument was the conditions under which he was working daniel had no regard for human life but in this 62 page opinion which was filed last week by a three panel judge this is their analysis they believe that there is a difference between a reckless disregard for human life and extreme disregard for life it does seem like shades or degrees but when you're dealing with charges sometimes that really is the difference is that shade or degree so the judge said that this distinguishes between grossly negligent involuntary manslaughter which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and then the depraved heart second-degree murder is punishable by up to 30 years so what has now happened is that that charge the second degree charge the harsher charge remember he was sentenced to nine years that has now been overturned and kicked out but the manslaughter charge still exists the other thing that the appeals court said that i found really interesting was they said you know the tunnels may have been dangerous but the appeals court said that the prosecution failed to present evidence that they were structurally unsound i was fascinated by that note because to me i'm like um well i suppose one can never assume in a trial but how how were they truly structurally sound i just found that very interesting that they they felt that was part of the weakness in the prosecution's case technically the tunnels were structurally sound okay so like you're not going to go in there and they're not going to cave in on you um but the the issue was with the electricity and uh you know we don't have a lot of time to discuss it today but for anybody who's interested like you should go in and look more into this because there's a lot that happened between when um oscar and daniel met and then this is this horrible day that askia lost his life um lots of messages you can read interactions they they actually did almost kind of become friends so the second degree charge has been overturned the manslaughter charge has been upheld so now daniel is going to be re-sentenced so originally he was sentenced to nine years the new sentence could be anywhere between six months to five years so that's what's going to happen now and and you have to wonder of course for the family of the victim here the possibility that given if the judge decides in this new sentencing hearing the time served the possibility i think is very real that daniel may be getting out of prison very soon based on this change in sentencing so we don't know until he gets into court but i think that's what the next step is going to be with this which makes you again wonder and when you look at cases like this how every little bit is literally held together with a form of legal scaffolding and i cannot imagine that his family is handling this very well i personally don't think that daniel should have ever been charged with a depraved heart murder um i think it was definitely manslaughter the reason i don't like the depraved heart murder is because you don't have to prove intent and and that to me is is an issue because at the end of the day i believe intent matters daniel didn't bring um hid this man down into his tunnels saying i hope you die i don't even think he brought him down there saying i don't care if you die and i think that's what the depraved heart murder charge suggests that daniel sent him down there and was like i don't care what happens to him i don't care if he dies there's witnesses who saw daniel screaming asking his name trying to help him get out like daniel clearly did not want this man to die um did he put him in a position where he did end up dying that wasn't that wasn't safe yes but that is manslaughter um the intent should matter and and so i think they overcharged him to begin with i don't know i think it's such a hot case i don't think that he'll get out with time served i do think the judge will probably you know like you said what's that gonna feel like for the family um but we'll have to wait and see what do you think about the depraved heart murder thing i don't know because you know everyone's actions do matter right everything that you do that leads to a situation which is dangerous i think and this may not be the perfect word but i believe that based on the case as presented that daniel has fault has liability in in this other man's death absolutely so i don't know how much he should serve for that and what the proper penalty for it is but it is a human life and there does appear to have been some disregard for human life based on the circumstances of the death for sure and i i just have an issue with any murder charge that that says well we don't really even care about what what the intent was and this depraved heart murder from what i know of it the charge is kind of almost saying like we don't care about the evidence like we don't care um what if you had intent or not we're just going to kind of assume that you did this maliciously or without a care and that's kind of it's more emotional than evidentiary based but um you know these cases are emotional but at the same time we want to make sure that justice is served fairly in in all situations for the victims and for the people who who are on trial we want to make sure our justice system is fair to everyone so this is our comment section these are the crime stories you all are talking about uh a south carolina couple is arrested for making porn videos on the myrtle beach skywheel ride and in a community pool eric harmon and lori horman both 36 years old have been arrested on a variety of obscenity charges myrtle beach police opened an investigation into indecent exposure on january 12th and they said that they found the videos of course i'm always curious it's like well how'd they find the videos okay police say that police say that in one video the couple is having sex in a gondola you know those you know it's a wheel with a gondola a very typical kind of ride and based on the video that that you can see what's going on there in the gondola through the gondola through the glass in another video the couple is having sex in a community pool over at surfside beach okay so lori harmon faces three counts of indecent exposure two counts of participation in preparation of obscene material i'm always fascinated by the level of these charges in the detail and then malicious injury to personal property i guess they don't want you having sex in their wheel uh eric harmon has been charged with two counts of indecent exposure and one charge of participation of preparation for obscene material okay so the following week the couple gets arrested again because this time the the charges are similar new charges against eric and lori for allegedly having sex in the food lion parking lot so it's almost as if their locations are getting a lot less exotic a lot more pedestrian they're trying and you know food lion and then a bench near the floral lake playground my my concern there might be if it's close to a playground that that's probably you know where they push the limit way too far and then laurie is also accused of filming herself this is this is the kicker filming herself urinating at a baseball field while at the playground okay all right yes jennifer f writes somehow i don't want to use public pools anymore i've always been afraid of public goods and mark v writes she's definitely a keeper jennifer f classy being very kind there jennifer yeah okay well that is our program for this week stephanie it's been a pleasure having you where can people find you find your content i'm on youtube it's just stephanie harlow uh both stephanie and harlow have an e on the end of them and i also have a podcast that comes out every friday it's called crime weekly you can find it wherever you get your podcast i co-host it with uh ex-police officer retired police officer derek lavasser who also was on breaking homicide on the investigation discovery channel and he was a winner of big brother i think season 16 so we co-host that together um every friday and we talk about true crime cases okay so how did you end up getting so fascinated by true crime i'm just curious um not an easy answer i was a very morbid child from very early on i read anne rice vampire books probably way before i should have i think i was eight when i started reading those and you know got into kind of like dark things and always had a i don't know i thought about death a lot but not in a good way not like ooh death but you know as a young child thinking like one day i'm gonna die and i think once again i had that mortality salience like way before i probably should have and then when i went to college i studied psychology and history and you know took a forensic psych course which got me interested in crime write a lot of books which some of them were true crime books and from there i just loved the whole you know aspect of it where these cases are crazier than anything any fiction book or movie you you could read or see but there's also people in them that i don't want to portray as characters um so you you put yourself you find yourself becoming very empathetic and i want everybody to be empathetic when they hear these stories this could be somebody that you love that i'm talking about this isn't a character this isn't a one-dimensional character this is a real person and you know i want people to protect themselves but also be victims advocates and help the families get awareness out if somebody's missing a child or somebody's mother is missing if we come together as community i think we can really make a difference if we're strong and we're solid and we work as one body so that's you know i just i love the true crime community i love how amazing everyone is and and i'm also a writer so i like you know putting these things into stories almost well it was a pleasure having you thank you so much yes good very good to have you nice to meet you uh and you can find me on all social media at energy news anna with 1n so you can find all of our content on spotify apple podcast stitcher google podcast and on youtube you can get updates by subscribing to our newsletter at truecrimedaily.com until next week this is true crime daily the podcast i'm your host dana garcia and as we always say don't do crime you

Channel: True Crime Daily

Views: 164,486

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Id: loGFYl0bYuQ

Length: 61min 11sec (3671 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021