"Black Widow" Mother-in-Law Sentenced in the Family Trap Murder, a "Hit List" Killer Convicted in Under an Hour, the Boat-Crash Trial

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning, and welcome to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it's Wednesday, June seventeenth, twenty twenty six. Here's where things stand this morning. In Miami, the state has rested its case against fifty six year old George Pino, the father on trial for manslaughter and vessel homicide in the boat crash that killed seventeen year old Lucy Fernandez in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin. A jury is convicted sixty three year old Kevin Lichwick of murdering his neighbor, Carlos Maldonado and hiding the body. And they did it in less than an hour. And in provo Utah, A case we followed from the trial bench to this moment has reached its end. Tracy Griss has been sentenced for plotting the death of her son in law, Matthew Ristelli.

0:54 Three cases, let's get into them. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. All three of today's cases come down to trust and what people do with it once they have it. A teenage girl trusted that the grown up driving the boat would get her home. A man trusted that the neighbor across the hall was just a neighbor and a husband trusted that when his wife and kids asked him to drive out and bring them home, that's what he was driving into. Every one of those people was wrong, and only one of them lived to find out. We started Miami, where the prosecution has now rested in the George Pinot boat trial, and before they did, they put a father on the stand and a medical examiner after him, and between the two of them they told the jury exactly how a seventeen year old ends up dead on the ride home from a birthday party.

1:45 Then we go to Wisconsin, where a man defended himself at his own murder trial, lost an argument with the judge about every other sentence, and gave the jury a confession of sorts in the form of a handwritten to do list. And we close in Utah, where the woman there calling the mastermind, sat silent while her own son in law's brother stood up and called her a demon to her face. If you've been with us the last couple of weeks, you know this one. Biscayne Bay, Miami, Florida, September of twenty twenty two. George Pino takes his wife his daughter and eleven of his daughter's teenage friends out to a sandbar to celebrate her birthday, music, sunshine, a good day, and on the ride home, the boat slams into a channel marker capsizes and seventeen year old Lucy Fernandez, a guest at someone else's party, ends up in the water.

2:37 She doesn't come out alive. A second girl, Caddie, suffered injuries her family has described as permanent and disabling. Pino, now fifty six, is charged with manslaughter and vessel homicide. He's pleaded not guilty, and I want to be clear about that. He is presumed innocent, and this is a jury's call. His attorney, Howard Strebnik, told that jury this was an axe, not a crime. No speed limit in that channel, a route Pino had driven safely many times, and a man who loved Lucy like a daughter and personally dove down to pull her out from under the overturned boat. When Shrebnik described it in his opening, Pino sat in the courtroom and sobbed. That's the defense. Here's what the state spent the last week building. Before they rested.

3:23 They put on a Florida Wildlife investigator who testified that Pino described the crash himself, said he turned to check on the passengers in the back, hit a wave, tried to correct, and struck something on the left side of the boat. Pino told that investigator he'd had two beers. He was cooperative, He signed a consent for him and let them search the boat and the GPS. And here's why the GPS matters. The state put on a boating expert who walked the jury through what those water logged units recorded. The boat went from forty three miles an hour to forty seven heading into that channel. It was on the side of the waterway, and the marker it hit had been painted a bright daglo green, specifically so people could see it. The experts point was simple. A boater has a duty to keep a proper lookout, to run at a safe speed, to use his own eyes and not just his instruments. The state's argument is that Pino did none of those things on a channel he knew by heart, with a boat full of other people's children.

4:24 And then they brought in the medical examiner and the room got very quiet. Doctor David Garavan testified that Lucy's death was a drowning, but he wanted to be more precise than that. He called it complications of drowning because her heart was actually restarted for a time before she ultimately died. He described blunt force injuries to her head, her face, her mouth, her scalp, her neck. None of those injuries would have killed her on their own. But here's the part I haven't been able to put down. He testified that it was very possible Lucy was thrown forward in the crash, knocked unconscious and left unable to get herself out of the water, that she was likely already gone from the fight before the water ever finished the job, and there were no drugs, no alcohol in her system. Whatever the adults on that trip were doing, Lucy wasn't. Because that's the other thread the state pulled all week, the drinking. One of the girls on the boat testified the underage kids were drinking right alongside the adults.

5:28 Lucy's own father described the afternoon as a beautiful gathering with friends, music, and alcohol. That same father, Andres Fernandez, told the jury about the last time he saw his daughter alive. She came over to his boat for sunscreen and a hairtie. She hugged him, and then he and his wife spent that night going hospital to hospital looking for her, and when they finally found her, she was on machines and she died the next day. He told the jury that at some point he and his wife realized their own daughter had become his words, a piece of evidence, a piece of evidence. That's what the system does to a grieving family, even when it's working. Somebody has to say her name and keep saying it. Lucy Fernandez, seventeen years old, a guest. So that's where we are.

6:19 The prosecution has rested. The defense gets its turn now, and we will be watching closely because the central question in that courtroom hasn't changed since day one. The defense isn't arguing Pino wasn't driving. They've conceded he was driving and that he'd been drinking. Their argument is that none of it was his fault, that this was a tragedy not a crime. The jury is going to have to decide where the line is between the two. We'll bring you the defense case as it unfolds now to a new X one out of Waukeshaw, Wisconsin. And this is a strange and dark story, So let me lay it out the way the jury got it. The victim is fifty six year old Carlos Maldonado. He lived in an apartment complex and his neighbor was a sixty three year old man named Kevin Lychwick who liked to go by the name Conrad. In April of twenty twenty four, Carlos Maldonado vanished. His daughter Talisa talked to him on April thirteenth, and after that nothing. She called him, and he did an answer which wasn't like him. They had been close, rebuilding their relationship. She called hospitals, she called homeless shelters.

7:37 She did everything a daughter does when her father drops off the face of the earth, and she got nowhere. Six months later, on October thirtieth, a maintenance worker at that apartment complex found a blue tarp in the woods out behind the building. Under the tarp were the decomposed remains of Carlos Maldonado. He had been shot twice, once in the torso, once in the center of the face. His body had been bound and he'd been lying out in those woods behind the building where he lived for half a year. Here is how the state tied it to the man next door, and I want you to follow the chain, because it's the kind of case where each piece alone might leave you room to wonder, and all of them together leave you none. First, the woods, a neighbor had set up a trail camera back there for a garden. That camera caught Kevin Lichwick walking around the area where the body would later be found, carrying a white trash bag, carrying some kind of tool, and, according to investigators, looking in the windows of the apartment complex as if he were checking to see whether anybody was watching him. This is months before the body turned up. Second, the gun police pulled Lichwick over for speeding. In the trunk of his car was a nineteen thirty nine Luger, an antique German pistol. They test fired it. The ballistics matched the two projectiles recovered from Carlos Maldonado's body. The prosecutor called it the holy grail of evidence. And then the state crime lab went one better. They found Lychwick's

9:08 DNA on the grip of that weapon, and they put the odds of it belonging to someone else at one in a quadrillion. Lychwick's response to all of this was to deny the gun was even his. And third, this is the part that gives the case its name, the notes. When investigators searched Lichwick's apartment, they found handwritten papers describing what he called operations. One of them was titled and I'm not making this up Operation slop Shop. Underneath that heading was Carlos Maldonado's name identified as a threat. A second page indicated that Operation slop Shop had been completed, that the threat had been quote neutralized, and there were other pages listing other operations with other people's names on them.

9:54 The press has been calling it a hit list, and based on what the jury saw, that is not an un fair word for it. There was more, and it's the small domestic stuff that lands the hardest. After Maldonado disappeared, Lichwick made some shopping trips gloves, scrub pads, masking tape, dish, soap, fabres, trash bags, and then a week later a return trip for bleach. A cadaver dog named Moxie hit on the odor of human remains in multiple spots around that property. Investigators found rope in Lichwick's bedroom consistent with the rope used to bind the body. Now Here's where the trial itself got genuinely unusual. Kevin Lichwick represented himself no lawyer, He fired the one he had, calling him grossly inadequate, and stood up in front of a jury to argue his own murder case. And it went about how you'd expect.

10:46 He told the jury, quote, I am not a killer. He said, the largest warm blooded animal he'd ever killed was a skunk that walked in front of his car. He said he was in poor health, that he was entering the proceedings under protest, that the whole thing was a frame job by corrupt police. Every time he tried to argue the searches were illegal, the prosecutor objected, and the judge, David Moss shut it down because the court had already ruled those searches were valid. At one point, Lichwick refused to even leave his cell to come to his own trial. There's a reason we have a saying about the man who represents himself. And look, I'm not here to mock a sixty three year old man for being out of his depth in a courtroom. But I'm also not going to pretend the jury had a hard job here. He did not testify. He called no witnesses, and after closing arguments, the jury took the case at one minute past two in the afternoon and came back at forty seven minutes past two. Forty six minutes they found Kevin Lichwick guilty of first degree intentional homicide and guilty of hiding a corpse. First degree intentional homicide in Wisconsin carries a mandatory life sentence. His formal sentencing is scheduled for August. So the only real question left is whether he ever sees the outside of a prison again, and the answer is almost certainly no. I keep coming back to Tealsa Maldonado making those phone calls, calling shelters, calling hospitals. Her father was one hundred yards away the whole time, in the woods behind his own apartment, under

12:17 a tarp. Somebody put him there on purpose, wrote it down like a chore, and then went and bought fabrazy. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. Carlos Maldonado deserved better than to be somebody's completed operation. And we close in Provo, Utah with a case. Longtime listeners will remember well the family Trap murder. Back in April, we sat with you through Tracy Griss's trial, including the day she took the stand in her own defense and looked the jury in the eye and said, of the plot to kill her son in law, quote, I would never do that.

12:59 I offered her a safe space to think things through. The jury didn't buy it. They convicted her of murder, criminal conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and domestic violence in the presence of a child. And last Wednesday, she came back into that courtroom to be sentenced. Let me reset this for anyone who missed it, because the setup is the whole story. Tracy Grist's daughter, Catherine, was married to a man named Matthew Rostelli. They lived in California with their two young kids, and the marriage was failing. Catherine wanted out, but she didn't think she'd get custody, and she didn't think she'd be allowed to take the children out of California, So instead of a divorce, the state proved this family built a trap. Matthew was told to drive out to Utah to pick up his wife and kids from Grandma's house.

13:46 He walked through the door of Tracy Grist's home and Catherine's brother, Tracy's son, Kevin Ellis, was waiting inside and shot him to death. Then they staged it as self defense with a knife placed in the dead man's hand, a knife that it turned out had none of the right people's DNA on it. Three people went down for this. Kevin Ellis, the gunman, was convicted and sentenced to consecutive prison terms. At his own sentencing, he admitted he should have said no. Catherine Ristelli, the wife, pleaded guilty, and now Tracy grist sixty one years old, became the third and final defendant to face a judge. She did not speak at her sentencing. She sat there and the people around her did the talking. Matthew's brother, Jonathan Rostelli, stood up and delivered one of the more searing victim statements I've heard read in a courtroom. He said, at Catherine's sentencing, he'd talked about the black widow who trapped his brother in a web of lies, who slowly injected the venom and devoured him. At Kevin's sentencing, he'd talked about brotherhood and betrayal, how matt had welcomed Kevin as a brother and Kevin repaid it by shooting him in the back.

14:56 And now he said he wanted to talk about the room of the poisonous Tree, the demon. Sitting before the court, he told the room that his brother's entire life had been picked apart at trial, while almost nothing was said about Tracy, about what he described as a lifetime of lying, manipulating, stealing, and exploiting the people around her. He even said she'd stolen the couple's wedding gift money on their wedding night. That, he said, is just low. I'm gonna flag something here because we owe it to you to be careful. Those are Jonathan Restelli's words, his characterizations, his allegations, delivered in the rawest moment a family ever faces. I'm relaying them as what was said in that courtroom, not as findings of fact. What the court did find through a jury is that Tracy Griss conspired to have Matthew Rostelli killed.

15:50 That part is settled, and the judge, Roger Griffin, did not mince words about it. He told her, quote, you are clearly the mastermind of a plot that led to your son in law's death, a man who simply thought he was coming to Utah to pick up his wife and children. He called it one of the most senseless crimes he'd seen in more than thirty years in the law. And he said something that I think is the moral center of this whole case, that if a person is so callous as to plot the death of her own son in law simply because her daughter didn't want to deal with the divorce courts, then he had grave concerns about what she'd do to anyone else who ever crossed her. Think about that for a second. The reason there was a body on that floor wasn't money, wasn't passion, wasn't some long feud. It was paperwork. It was the inconvenience of a custody fight. A man died because going through family court was to this family more trouble than arranging an ambush. There's a playbook for getting out of a bad marriage, and it runs through a courthouse, not a living room. So Judge Griffin gave her the maximum on every count, all of it consecutive. One to fifteen years for conspiracy, one to fifteen for obstruction, fifteen years to life for the murder, up to five years on each domestic violence count. And then he said the quiet part out loud, I fully anticipate you will never be released from prison while you are alive. He put a recommendation on the record that she never be considered for parole.

17:21 The final say belongs to the Utah Board of Pardons in Parole, but the judge has made his position about as clear as a judge can. Matthew Ristelli was forty two. He thought he was picking up his kids. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, and on Wednesday in provo, it finally caught up with the last person at that table. Three cases, three rooms, three families that don't get the people back. Lucy Fernandez seventeen, who just wanted a ride home. Carlos Maldonado fifty six, who was one hundred yards from his own front door the whole time his daughter was searching for him. And Matthew Ristelli forty two, who drove across state lines because the people he trusted asked him to say their names. Somebody has to. If this show is part of how you make sense of these cases, do me a favor and bring somebody else into it.

18:17 Tell a friend, share this episode, send it to the person you always end up texting about this stuff. Word of mouth is the whole reason we get to keep doing this and if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me. In the George Pino case, where do you think the line is between a tragedy and a crime, Because that's the exact question that jury is about to wrestle with. And I want to hear how you're calling it. I read them. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily Crime and Justice and until tomorrow, do better. The following is a reminder about the cases discussed in today's episode. In the matter of George Pino, mister Pino has pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and vessel homicide and is presumed innocent. His trial is ongoing. The prosecution has rested its case and the defense has not yet presented its full case. No verdict has been reached. The accounts of the crash, the drinking aboard the vessel, and the cause of death described here come from testimony and arguments presented at trial, which the jury has not yet weighed.

19:18 In the matter of Kevin Lichwick, mister Lychwick was convicted on June eleventh of first degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse in the death of Carlos Maldonado and faces a mandatory life sentence. At a sentencing hearing scheduled for August. He represented himself and maintained his innocence throughout the trial. The age of Carlos Maldonado has been reported as both fifty five and fifty six across different outlets. We have used fifty six in the matter of Tracy Griss. Mis Gris was convicted in April of murder, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and domestic violence in the presence of a child, and was sentenced on June tenth. Statements attributed to the victim's family at same sentencing, including characterizations of mis Grist's personal history and occupation, are allegations and statements made in court by family members, not findings of the court. Parole decisions rest with the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. Daily Crime and Justice is a commentary program. Our reporting is drawn from court proceedings and published news accounts, and where those accounts differ, we have noted it. Nothing here should be taken as legal advice.