Charlie Kirk Case: Judge Tosses Edited Video at Tyler Robinson's Hearing, the "God's Light" Cop-Killing Competency Fight, a Landlord Killer'

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, It's Wednesday, July eighth, and this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher. There's a courtroom in Provo, Utah this week where the most closely watched murder case in the country is being argued. One exhibit at a time. And on the very first day, the very first piece of video the state tried to hand the judge got handed right back to them, not because anybody said it was fake, because somebody had gone in and cleaned it up, zoomed in on the parts they wanted you to see, drew circles around the rest, and the judge stopped and asked a simple question, who did that, when did they do it, and how much did they change?

0:48 And nobody in that. Room could tell him, so out it went. Look, I'm going to be honest with you, that is exactly how a case this size is supposed to be handled, and it almost never is. We'll start there, the Charlie Kirk assassination and the week that finally puts the evidence on the record. Then we go to Florida, where a woman charged with gunning down a sheriff's deputy told the court the spirits made her do it. Her lawyers say she's too ill to stand trial. Prosecutors say a religious delusion is not a legal one, and a judge has to decide which it is. And we'll finish in Washington State, where a man who killed his own landlords, a chiropractor and her husband and then tried to vacuum their blood out of the floor finally heard the one word he spent two years running from forever. Let's get into it.

1:39 We've been with this case since the beginning, so you know the shape of it. September tenth of last year, Utah Valley University in aorum, Charlie Kirk, thirty one years old, co founder of Turning Point USA, a husband and a father of two, is sitting under a tent in a campus courtyard taking questions from a crowd of about three thousand people, and a single shot comes from a rooftop more than one hundred yards away and hits him in the neck. He does not survive it. Three thousand people watched a man get assassinated in the middle of an afternoon. The man accused of firing that shot is Tyler Robinson, now twenty three years old. He turned himself in the day after, once his own family recognized him.

2:23 And I want to be. Precise about where this case actually stands, because it matters. Robinson has not entered a plea, he has not been convicted of anything. What's happening in provo this week is a preliminary hearing, the state putting on just enough evidence to convince Judge Tony Graff that there's probable cause to send this to a full trial. That's a low bar, deliberately, it is not a verdict. Nobody in that courtroom is deciding guilt this week. So here's what happened Monday. The state wanted to show the judge a compilation surveillance footage they say x Robinson around the campus in the days before the shooting. But the version they brought had been edited, enhanced, zoomed, circled.

3:08 Somebody in the prosecutor's office had marked it up to point your eye where they wanted it to go. The defense objected because the people who made those edits weren't being called to the stand to explain what they did, and Judge Graf agreed. He said an altered exhibit becomes a problem once a jury sees it. And he refused to admit it, told the state to come back with the original. Now, the prosecutors will tell you those edits were harmless, just zooming in. To make it easier to see. And maybe that's true, but that's not the point, and the judge knew it. The moment you let one side quietly decide which parts of the evidence get a spotlight and which parts stay in the dark, you've handed them the story. That's not a technicality, that's the whole ballgame.

3:54 And to his credit, Graf overruled almost every other objection the defense threw at him that day. On this one, he held the line. The state did get its witnesses on the first was Chris Bagley, an officer who was working security at the event that day. He testified to what everyone in that courtyard lived through the shot and then, in his words, chaos, thousands of people up and running in every direction. He described going up onto a nearby rooftop afterward and finding a disturbance in the gravel that looked like a sniper's perch, a screwdriver, a shoeprint pressed into the grass, scuff marks, and a clean line of sight from that roof straight down to where Charlie Kirk was sitting. And here's a detail the defense made sure landed.

4:40 On cross examination, Bagley admitted he'd found an empty pistol holster on the ground after the crowd scattered. He never took custody of it, doesn't know if it was ever fingerprinted. Now that may lead absolutely nowhere, but it's exactly the kind of loose thread a defense team pulls on, and you are going to hear about it again this His second witness was David Hull, the lead investigator from the State Bureau of Investigation. He walked the court through the video from that day, footage taken by a bystander by a turning point videographer by campus cameras. The judge and the attorneys agreed it was too graphic to show the room. It played only on the small monitors at the tables, but the audio filled the courtroom. A gunshot, then screaming Erica Kirk and Charlie's parents, Robert and Catherine, got up and walked out before it played. I don't blame them for a second. Robinson sat there expressionless, the monitor at his own table apparently switched off. As for what ties Robinson to the weapon. Investigators have said DNA consistent with his was found on the trigger of the rifle, on a fired casing, on unfired rounds, and on the towel the rifle was wrapped in. And there's a witness. The state has been building toward Robinson's former roommate, who prosecutors describe as his romantic partner, and who was granted limited immunity in exchange for a recorded statement. That statement is expected to speak to messages the two exchanged, including what investigators call a confession. One of them reads, I had

6:14 enough of his hatred. Some hate camp be negotiated out. There's a playbook for this, and both sides have been running it for months. Back in the spring, a defense filing said the government's own experts couldn't match the bullet recovered from Charlie Kirk's body to the rifle they tied to Robinson that got picked up. A tabloid ran a headline screaming the bullet did not match, and from there the conspiracy machine did what it does, turning an inconclusive lab result into proof that a young man had been framed. What the headline left out was that the same experts also couldn't rule the rifle out. The prosecution spokesman went on a media tour to push back, and in the process crossed the line the judge had drawn, telling reporters there was ample evidence Robinson did it. Two weeks ago, Judge Graff held that prosecutor in contempt for it. The defense asked him to punish the state by taking the death penalty off the table. Graff said no, that would be, in his words, wildly out of proportion. So the death penalty stays. A prosecutor gets a black mark, and the case rolls on. That hearing is happening as you're listening.

7:23 It's scheduled to run all week into Friday, and by the time this reaches you, the state will have resubmitted its video and put more witnesses on the stand. At the end of it, Judge Graft decides one thing, and one thing only. Does this go to trial, not whether Tyler Robinson is guilty, whether there's enough to proceed. We'll bring you what he decides. In Lake County, Florida, there's a hearing going on right now over whether a woman named julie's Olpizzio is even well enough to be put on trial, and before we get into her, I want to say the name of the man. This case is actually about Master Deputy Bradley Michael Lingk, a Lake County Sheriff's deputy who went to a house on a call and did not come home.

8:17 He's the reason there's a case at all, and he should not get lost in the strangeness of what the defense is arguing. Here's what investigators say happened. Back in August of twenty twenty four, A nine to one to one call comes in a woman trespassing on a neighbor's lawn. On the line, the dispatcher can hear her start attacking that family, ranting about sinners. Deputies arrive, and Julie Sulpizzio, fifty years old, calmly tells them her neighbors are involved in something monstrous, that she isn't Julie, that Julie is in heaven, and that they'd needed to trick someone she called Lucy, which investigators learned was her name for Lucifer. When a deputy raised a taser and it lit up, she looked at it, smiled and said, that's God's light and kept walking toward him. What officers didn't know yet was that. According to the affidavit, this was a plan.

9:09 Prosecutors say Julie, her husband Michael, and their two adult daughters had set out to lure those neighbors into the house to kill them. When deputies went inside to check on the rest of the family, Sulpizzio's husband was waiting with a rifle. In the gunfire that followed, Deputy Link was hit, and by the time it was over, Michael Sulpizzio and both daughters, twenty two and twenty three years old, were dead by their own hands. A deputy killed, a family gone. One person walked out of that house alive to be charged, and that's Julie Sulpizzio. She's charged with murdering a law enforcement officer, and the state is seeking the death penalty. But the fight in court this week isn't about whether.

9:51 She did it. It's about whether she's mentally competent to stand trial at all, which is a different question than insanity. Competency is naar can the defendant understand the proceedings and. Help her own lawyers. Two psychologists hired by the defense, doctor Judy Harper and doctor Jennis Castillo, testified that she cannot. They say she shifts identities mid conversation, presenting as Lucifer, as her dead husband, as archangels, and that she has held to one story throughout, that everyone in that house was possessed, and that Lucifer directed the whole thing. One of those doctors testified that when she tried to explain that Sulpizzio could be executed if convicted, Sulpizzio said she wanted the death penalty because, in her words, that's what Satan wants and she had no choice. The prosecution's answer is blunt, and it's a real legal argument, not a cruel one. A religious delusion, they say, is not the same thing as legal incompetence.

10:51 People hold all kinds of extreme beliefs and still understand a courtroom. The judge, Brian Welke, has asked both sides to submit proposed orders by July seventeenth, and then he'll rule. Nobody was paying attention to what was building inside that house until a deputy was dead. Now the whole thing turns on what's going on inside one person's mind. Last week, in a courtroom in Olympia, Washington, a man named Timothy Burke found out he'll die in prison, and the two people he took deserved to be named first and named as who they were.

11:31 Karen sixty two years. Old, a chiropractor who ran a practice in that community for years, the kind of person, her family says, brought light into a room, and her husband, Davido, sixty eight. They were, by every account given in that courtroom, two of the kindest people anyone who knew them had ever met. Karen's sisters said her heart sank so deep when police told her the bodies had been found. Karen's oldest son, Justice, stood up and talked about the grandchild they will never meet, the first steps, the first books, the graduation, all of it gone. Burke forty seven, was their tenant. He rented a home on a property the couple owned, and in the fall of twenty twenty three, Davido was in the middle.

12:14 Of evicting him. What Burke did about that is the reason he's now serving two life sentences. He shot them both inside their own home, and then he tried to erase it. When deputies finally went in after Karen missed work, they were hit with the smell of bleach. There were two large bloodstains in the living room and clear signs someone had scrubbed, and in that blood, detectives found the marks of a vacuum cleaner. Somebody had run a vacuum back and forth through the place where these two people bled out. That's the image the headline can't let go of. And I understand why. It tells you everything about how calmly this was cleaned up. He loaded them into the trunk of Karen's own car. Investigators later found her hair and her blood inside it, along with spent shell casings, and drove their bodies out to dense woods near a rental property they owned out by the military base and left them there.

13:07 They weren't found for nearly three weeks, and the person who found them was a child out looking for dirt bike tracks who came across what he thought at first was a Halloween decoration. It was Davado. Karen was nearby in a culvert. Let that sit for a second. A kid found them because Burke didn't even bother to bury them. Now it's sentencing. Burke spoke, and I'll give you what he said because you should hear it, not because it holds up. He claimed the stress made him lose his mind. He said DeVito had called the cops on him for no reason, that he'd overheard Karen talking about tracking his daughter down, and that he'd come to believe these two gentle people.

13:47 Were a threat to him. His lawyers pointed to real pain in his life. Weeks earlier, he had lost his own daughter to a fentanyl overdose, and they described a man clinging to beliefs about Davido that simply weren't real. And here's where I'll be straight with you. Grief is real, Mental illness is real. Plenty of people carry both and never once load their landlords into a car trunk. Whatever was broken in Timothy Burke, it does not move Karen and Davado one inch back toward the living. The court heard all of it, and it did not accept that it excused what he chose to do. The judge, John Skinder, denied any possibility of parole and sent him away for the rest of his life.

14:31 And he said something to Burke I keep coming back to. He told him, you have a gift that Karen and Davido do not have. You have a gift of life. Washington doesn't have a death penalty anymore, so life without parole is the end of the line here, and in this case, that is accountability. The prosecutor's office put it better than I could, honestly. They said that despite how they died, Karen and Daviado's legacy of love, generosity and adventure will ca keep going. That's the part that outlives him. He gets a sell, they get remembered. That's the show for today. If something in here moved you or made you angry, or made you think of somebody who needs to hear it, share this episode, send it to one person.

15:16 That's how this show grows, one forwarded link at a time. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me where you land on these. I read them and I want to know what you think. Wherever else you're listening, A rating and a review help more than you guess. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily crime and justice. Take care of the people around you and do better. A few things before we go. Tyler Robinson has not entered a plea and has not been convicted of anything. This week's hearing only decides whether his case goes to trial, and it was still underway as this episode was produced, so some details may have moved by the time you hear it. Julie Sulpizio is likewise charge charged, not convicted, and the question of her competency remains undecided.

16:05 Everyone accused of a crime is presumed innocent unless and until proven. Guilty in a court of law. Our reporting is drawn from open court proceedings and multiple news outlets, and where those accounts differ, we've tried to say so out loud. This episode discusses suicide and severe mental illness. If you are someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a qualified professional or a local crisis line. You don't have to carry it alone.