D4VD CHARGED WITH SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES MURDER; TRACEY GRIST TAKES THE STAND

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fisher. Wednesday, April twenty second, twenty twenty six. Let me walk you through this. On Monday, we told you that David Anthony Burke, the twenty one year old pop singer who performs under the stage name spelled D four VD but pronounced David, had been arrested at his Hollywood Hills mansion on suspicion of murder. We told you LAPD, robbery, and homicide. Took him into custody on Friday afternoon. We told you he was being held without bail, and we told you the charges would be formalized this week. That happened yesterday. District Attorney Nathan Hawkman stood at a press conference in Los Angeles and laid out what the State of California is accusing David Anthony Burke of doing to a fourteen year old girl named Celeste Revas Hernandez. First degree murder, continued lude and lascivious acts with a child under the age of fourteen, and mutilation of human remains, three charges and three special circumstances attached to the murder count, any one of which makes him eligible for the death penalty. Then to Utah, where the prosecution in the Tracy Grist case finished calling its witnesses on Monday and rested. The defense got up and called its first witness. They called the defendant, sixty year old Tracy Grist. The woman prosecutor say masterminded a

1:33 plot to lure her son in law to her house and have her son shoot him seven times. Took the stand and told the jury none of it was her idea. Her texts were just ridiculous. The jokes were just jokes. And her son, who was already convicted of this murder and is sitting in prison right now, is lying about her to keep the family's affection. Of course he is. And finally, a story we've never touched on this show, but we're going to today because sometimes a case isn't about what happens in the courtroom. Sometimes it's about what happens to the town afterward. Fairfax, California, affluent Little Maren County enclave, about a half hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Teacher's kid was driving a car full of her friends last day April. Car went off the road into a tree and burst into flames. Four teenage girls died in the fire, the driver survived, got charged with misdemeanor manslaughter, and that's where a normal crime story would end, except then she got on TikTok and the whole town started eating itself. Three stories, a famous twenty one year old charge with killing a child, a grandmother in a Utah courtroom saying she meant none of it, and a Bay Area community they cannot figure out how to grieve four dead teenagers without turning on each other. You're listening to Daily Crime and Justice. Let's go. So here's where we are in the D four VD case. On Friday,

3:04 April seventeenth, LAPD kicked open the gate at David Anthony Burke's rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills and arrested him on suspicion of murder. We covered that on Monday. Over the weekend, the DA's office reviewed everything LAPD had and decided what they could charge him with, And on Monday afternoon, at two thirty six pm Pacific, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hodgman walked up to a podium and filed the formal charges. The lead count is first degree murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez. She was fourteen years old. She had been missing since April twenty third, twenty twenty five. That is the last day anyone saw her alive. Her body was discovered on September eighth, twenty twenty five, decomposing in a black cadaver bag in the trunk of a black Tesla registered to David Anthony Burke. September eighth would have been her fifteenth birthday. He never made it. Alongside first degree murder, Burke is charged with continued lewde and lascivious acts with a child under fourteen, a pattern sex crime count not a single incident, and with mutilating the remains of a human body. That last charge is not metaphorical.

4:18 Celeste's arms and legs had been severed and placed in a second cadaver bag underneath the first one in the trunk of his car. Someone purchased two cadaver bags. Someone made that trip to buy them. That is the level of premeditation we are dealing with. But the part of yesterday's announcement that everyone was waiting for was the special circumstances. In California, a first degree murder charge with a special circumstance attached makes the defendant eligible for either life without parole or the death penalty. It is the only way a state case can put someone on death row. Hochman announced three of them, Special Circumstance number one Lying in Wait.

5:01 Hoakman said, the evidence will show that Celeste was invited to Burke's home in the Hollywood Hills on April twenty third, twenty twenty five. That's the last day anyone saw her alive. She was fourteen, he was twenty. She went to his house and she never came out. Lying in wait in California means the defendant watched, waited, and concealed his purpose before attacking. Hawkman is saying he lured her Special Circumstance number two murder for financial gain. And this is where the theory of the case gets very specific. Hoakman said, and I'm paraphrasing his press conference language, that the evidence will show Burke killed Celeste to maintain his lucrative music career, which she was threatening. I'll translate that a fourteen year old girl walks into the Hollywood mansion of a twenty year old rising pop star with a six figure streaming business, and something happens between them. If she talks his careers over.

6:00 The charge is that he killed her to make sure she couldn't talk. And special circumstance number three, murder of a witness. Holkman said Burt killed Celeste to prevent her from being a witness in an investigation, specifically an investigation into his sexual abuse of her. Think about what that sentence means. The State of California is alleging that there was already an investigation into him having sex with a fourteen year old and that he killed her to shut it down. Any one of those three special circumstances is enough. They charged all three. Holkman said yesterday that the DA's office has not yet decided whether they will actually seek the death penalty. That is a separate determination that comes later in the process. But he made sure everyone in the room understood that the option is on the table. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. California has not executed anyone since two thousand and six. The state has a moratorium on execution. It's extraordinarily unlikely Burke ever sees a needle.

7:03 But the charge is the charge, and it tells you exactly what the DA thinks of the evidence. He has. Hoakman was asked why it took so long. Celeste was found in September, they arrested him in April, seven months. His answer was worth listening to. He said, when you don't have an eyewitness and you don't have a video of the killing, you build the case forensically and digitally. You examine every piece of physical evidence. You talk to cooperative witnesses, you talk to uncooperative witnesses. And we know from court filings earlier this year that at least one of Burke's associates had to be arrested on a material witness warrant for refusing to appear. Hoakman said, his duty is not to quote fuel speculation. It's to deliver justice, and justice takes patience. There's a playbook for this. Build a celebrity case on digital evidence, texts, cell phone tower pings, purchase records social media before you arrest, because the minute you arrest a famous defendant, the lawyers show up, and the money shows up, and the discovery fights begin. The DA wanted this thing airtight before they touched him. One thing we still don't know cause of death, Hokman said yesterday, the Medical Examiner's report remains under court seal. He said he plans to formally request that the seal be lifted.

8:22 We should know soon. The rumors have been flying since September, some of them quite graphic and, according to LAPD, flatly untrue. We'll tell you what the official record says when the official record speaks, not before. Lap D Chief Jim McDonnell also addressed the media yesterday. He said the investigation was driven by one purpose, to secure justice for Celeste Reevas Hernandez and the people who loved her. I want you to hold on to that. Celeste reevaus Hernandez thirteen when her family reported her missing the first time, fourteen when she died, fifteen and a day when they found her body.

9:04 A child, not a tabloid headline, not a true crime thumbnail. A child. Her family has spent seven months burying her in pieces, while a twenty year old singer sold out European tour dates. Burke is scheduled for arraignment in Los Angeles County Superior Court later this week. He remains in custody without bail. Will cover the arraignment when it happens. Nobody was paying attention to her now everybody is okay to provo Utah the Tracy Grist family trap murder trial.

9:45 We introduced you to this case on Monday. Quick recap, so everyone's on the same page. July twelfth, twenty twenty four, forty two year old Matthew Rostelli drives nine hours from California to his mother in law's house in American four d Utah because his wife, Catherine has taken their two young children and gone there and he has been told she's ready to come home. He gets to the house late at night. He walks in his brother in law, Kevin Ellis, shoots him seven times. Seven three shots passed through the body. Four stay inside. Damage to the right and left, lung, heart, diaphragm, liver, stomach spleen, kidney, and ribs.

10:27 That is the medical examiner's list. When police arrive, Kevin is standing over the body with his arms folded. There's a knife in Matthew's hand, Kevin says self defense. The knife is in the wrong hand. Matthew is right handed, the knife is in the left Forensic analysts will later testify the knife was placed there after he was already dead. The knife was purchased online from an Australian manufacturer that no longer sells it. The correspondence with the manufacturer is on Tracy Grist's phone, not Matthew's, not Kevin's, Tracy's. Kevin Ellis has already been convicted. Catherine Ristelli, the wife, has already pleaded guilty and testified against her family. Both are in Utah State Prison. The only remaining defendant is sixty year old grandmother Tracy Grist, who prosecutors say is the ringleader of the whole operation. She's charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and domestic violence in the presence of a child. That's where we left you Monday. Here's what happened Thursday, Friday and Monday in that courtroom, days four and five of the trial. Day four Friday, April seventeenth, the forensic case. The prosecution spent day four putting their forensic and digital evidence in front of the jury and it was devastating. First up, Patrick Zerpoli, a violent crimes and homicide expert. He walked the jury through the three D laser scan of Tracy Grist's living room, something called a Pharaoh scan, which is essentially a full three dimensional

12:00 reconstruction of the scene based on the physics of where Matthew fell, the angle of the entry wounds, and the position of his body when police arrived. Zypolei testified that the knife found in Matthew's hand could not have gotten there during the shooting. If Matthew had been holding the knife when he was shot, the knife would have flown out of his hand as he fell, or would have been underneath him when he hit the floor. Instead, it was loosely placed on top of his fingers. Zirpoli's conclusion the knife was placed in the victim's hand after he was dead. The scene was staged. Then Detective Joseph Nordon of the American Fork Police Department took the stand. He's the lead investigator. He had a lot to say. First, the timeline. The neighbor across the street, Caitlin Laney, heard six to eight gun shots and called nine one one at ten oh nine pm. Tracy Grist did not call nine one one until ten fifteen pm. That is a six minute gap. During those six minutes, Tracy Gris admits she admitted it on the stand on Monday that she checked Matthew for a pulse saw a knife in his hand, went upstairs to tell her daughter Catherine what had just happened, and came back downstairs before finally dialing six minutes. That is a long time to freeze. Next, the air tag.

13:18 Detectives pulled Catherine Rostelli's phone and found texts between her and her family members referencing an Apple AirTag labeled truck. An AirTag was found on Matthew's pickup. It was placed there the day Catherine drove to Utah with the children. In other words, they were tracking him. They knew exactly when he was going to arrive. Next, the knife purchased online Australian manufacturer no longer sold. Correspondence with the manufacturer found on Tracy Gris's phone nothing matching that correspondence on Matthew Rostelli's phone. Tracy bought the knife that was placed in the dead man's hand to sell the self defense story, and then the search hit. This is the part of the case that gives it the media hook. Detective Nordon walked the jury through what Tracy grist had been googling in the weeks before the shooting, and what she was searching for was the Dan Markel case. Dan Markel if you've been living under a rock? Was the FSU law professor murdered in his Tallahassee garage in twenty fourteen in a murder for hire orchestrated by his ex wife's family.

14:28 Gris searched. Catherine Magbanua mcgbanua is the woman who arranged the hit. She searched when is Donna Addelson's next hearing? Donna Addelson is the grandmother who paid for the hit and got convicted last year. She searched where was Donna Addelson arrested? She watched the dateline episode on the Addelsons, and after Matthew was dead, she searched, and I am not making this up for the it's happening meme. She also googled how to get my US passport fast. There's a playbook for this. There's literally a playbook, and she was studying it. Then the prosecution called Tracy's own daughters, not Catherine, the other two Rachel Jorgensen and Tara Lynn Fisher, and they proceeded to gut their mother's defense. From the witness stand. Rachel testified that the family had a nickname for Matthew. They called him Oloff as in the Snowman from Frozen because he was so easy to melt down.

15:27 She testified that her mother joked her word in air quotes, said like that about killing Matthew before. She testified that when she found out Matthew was coming to the house that night, she was on edge. She testified that Catherine had been having affairs in Utah while still married, and she said she personally had no intention of hurting Matthew. Then her sister Taralynn took the stand and the prosecution played a phone call Kevin Ellis calling from jail after his conviction talking to his sister Tara Lynn, and Kevin said on the recording played an open court, I should have said no. I should have said no to what Kevin.

16:07 I should have said no when Mom asked me to shoot him. That was the end of day four. By the time the jury went home Friday evening, the prosecution had put up a forensic expert who said the knife was planted, a detective who laid out a digital breadcrumb trail leading directly to the defendant, two of her own daughters saying the family joked about killing the victim, and a recorded jail call where the actual shooter, says he regrets going through with his mother's plan. Day five, Monday, April twentieth, prosecution rest defendant testifies. Monday morning, the prosecution rested its case. The defense made its routine motion for acquittal, the judge denied it, and then, to the surprise of approximately nobody, the defense called its first witness, Tracy Grist herself.

16:59 Here is what she told the jury. She said she and her daughter Katherine had been talking about Catherine's troubled marriage, and she had told Catherine she could come to Utah and take some time to think things through. She offered her quote a safe space. She insisted she did not invite Catherine to Utah to kill her husband. She just wanted to help her daughter. She was then asked about the text, the ones the prosecution had been hammering on for four days. The text where she told Catherine she wanted to strangle Matthew, the jokes about killing him that her other daughter Rachel had confirmed on the stand, and Tracy said, and I want you to really listen to this.

17:39 She said those were just flippant comments. She was frustrated she couldn't be physically there for her daughter, so she would just say things like, hey, I'll drive nine hours and strangle him, because it was ridiculous. That's why she could say it like that, she explained, because it was so obviously ridiculous. She would never actually do that, of course she wouldn't. She was asked about the sushi dinner that Catherine had testified about, the one where Catherine said her mother and her brother Kevin went out together to map out the murder plan. Tracy said no such conversation ever happened. What she said she actually did was ask Kevin if he would please stay home that night so he'd be around the house when Matthew arrived, not to shoot him, just to be around in case Matthew and Catherine wanted to have a conversation in the living room, and in case Matthew was too tired to drive back.

18:34 Tracy said she'd invited Matthew, the man she'd spent weeks texting about strangling, to stay over at her house. She was asked about the moment Matthew walked through the door. She said she was extremely surprised. She said she didn't hear the doorbell, she didn't hear a knock, she didn't expect him to come inside. That is I want to flag this carefully. That is contradicted by the prosecution's own evidence, which showed texts in which Catherine gave Matthew the gatecode and instructed him to come in. Matthew was not a home invader. He was told to walk in. The family's own messages prove it. She was asked if Matthew was threatening when he arrived. She said, quote, he was just kind of jerky. He said, where's Kate. She described a man who was tired, confused and asking where his wife.

19:23 Was not a threat. Her answer undercut her son's entire self defense theory. She said she sent Matthew upstairs to find Catherine, and then she heard the gunshots, and she said she walked to the foot of the stairs and saw Matthew face down. She asked Kevin what happened, and Kevin told her. She says he had a knife. Then the six minute gap, she admitted it. She said she went upstairs to tell her daughter, she came back down and then she called nine one one. She explained this by saying, and this is a direct invocation that on the fighter flight or freeze spectrum. She freezes. She was stunned.

20:04 She was not moving fast. And then we got to the jail call, the one we just played for you from day four, the one where Kevin told his sister, I should have said no. Tracy's explanation that call never happened. Kevin made it up. She accused her own imprisoned son of lying to his family. She said he was trying to shift blame, that he didn't want to lose the quote loving support system of his siblings while he's in jail, so he invented the conversation, the phone call that was recorded by the jail on tape that the jury has now listened to. That call, according to Tracy, simply didn't happen.

20:46 That's not a mistake, that's a choice. The defense is going to rest later this week, then closing arguments, then the jury, and we will be there for all of it. Four dead girls, one TikTok, and the small town that ate itself, the Fairfax crash. Last story, and this is a hard one because this is not a story about a courtroom. This is a story about what happens to a community when a tragedy is too big for it to hold. Fairfax California, about thirty minutes north of the Golden gate Bridge. Population about seven five hundred, Very affluent, very small. Everybody knows everybody. Redwoods hiking trails. The kind of place where the kids go to the same schools and the parents went to those same schools twenty years earlier.

21:49 That is the world. This story takes place in April of twenty twenty five. A sixteen year old girl named Elsa Laramont Stranchek is driving a Volkswa Antiguan Suv on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard near Woodacre. Elsa is the daughter of a teacher at the local high school. In her car are five of her friends, Olive coren Age fourteen, Sienna Cats fifteen, Joscelyn Josie Osbourne fifteen, Ada Kepley fifteen, and Marley Barkley fourteen. That is six teenage girls in one Volkswagen Suv. The speed limit on that stretch of road is forty miles per hour. According to investigators, Elsa was doing considerably more than that. The car left the road, it struck a tree, and it burst into flames. Olive, Sienna, Josie and Ada died in the fire. Elsa and Marley were pulled out alive with severe injuries. Marin County investigators worked the scene. Here's what they concluded. No alcohol, no drugs.

22:50 The spidometer had frozen at sixty five miles per hour when the flames hit it sixty five in a forty. The proximate causes, according to police, were speeding and an unsafe turning movement. There were no skid marks on the road. The surviving passengers, Elsa and Marley, told investigators that an oncoming car had swerved into their lane and forced them off the road. Police search for that other car. They found nothing, no witnesses, no dashcam footage, no evidence that other car ever existed. In October, Elsa was charged with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter. That is the highest charge California law allows for a sixteen year old driver who caused a fatal crash without intoxication. The maximum possible sentence is one year in juvenile detention. She has pleaded not guilty. And now now is where this case stops being just a horrible accident and becomes a story about what grief does to a small town. Some of the parents blame Elsa Josie Osborne's mother, Christy Batandy's told the San Francisco Chronicle that she does not believe the story about the phantom oncoming car. She said, and I'm paraphrasing. She knew Elsa had to have been driving too fast. Cars don't just burst into flames. She's right, they don't. Other parents do not blame Elsa. Olive Korn's mother, Gail told the Chronicle she believes a reckless driver caused the girls to swerve.

24:19 She said, quote, I feel like someone is responsible for killing the girls, and it's not Elsa. She asked, and this is in the chronicle. Is somebody getting away with murder? Ada Kepley's mother has taken a third path. Linda Kepley said she is worried investigators may have gotten something wrong, but she's also made peace with never knowing exactly what happened. She said, and I think this is the most human thing anyone in the entire story has said. If she was speeding, she's a teenage girl, and kids speed. We're all flawed. Linda Kepley went to see Elsa in the hospital before Elsa was ever charged. She came away believing that Elsa never wanted any of this to happen. That is, three mothers of three dead daughters, three completely different takes on who killed their kids in a town of seven five hundred people where they all know each other. So the lawsuit started flying. Sienna Katz's father sued Elsa, Stranchek and Marin County in February, arguing the county created a dangerous condition on the road by not installing proper guard rails.

25:25 Olive Korn's family sued the county. Josie Osbourne's family sued the county. The lawsuits against the county named the county. Only one of the lawsuits, the cat's lawsuit, names Elsa herself. The attorneys for Elsa and the county deny all of it. A petition circulated to remove Elsa and her mother, the teacher from the high school campus entirely. Elsa's mother went to court and tried to get a restraining order against one of Josie Osborne's close friends, claiming her daughter was being harassed. The judge denied it and then came the TikTok. After Elsa was released from the hospital, she reshared a TikTok video on her account. The video, according to reporting, mocked the sport of wrestling. The video reportedly called wrestling an excuse to touch people. Josie Osborne, one of the four dead girls, loved wrestling. It was her thing, She was known for it, and her friends saw the repost as Elsa directly mocking a dead girl's passion while that girl's family was still planning memorial services. One of Josie's close friends, a young man, sent Elsa and her mother what the court later described as a hurtful message. He was hauled in front of a judge. He told the court he sent the message because he found the TikTok quote exceedingly offensive. He said Josie's spirit and memory was being trampled on, so he typed something angry and hit send.

26:49 That got him a judge. The TikTok got Elsa a larger platform. Someone should have said something. Someone should have said take the phone away from and the teenager who just killed four of her friends in a car crash. Someone should have said, maybe now, right now, in this exact month, is not the moment to repost a joke about a sport one of them loved. But nobody said anything, or somebody did, and she didn't listen, and now the whole town has a second layer of grievance on top of the first layer. And the first layer was already about as much as any community could carry. Elsa's mother told the Chronicle that her daughter has been the target of sustained harassment, flooded with hurtful messages accusing her of killing her friends. She said, grief is one thing, sustained harassment is another. Marley Barklay's mother, Marley, being the other survivor, says her daughter has been accused of lying to police to cover for Elsa. Four dead, two survivors, every one of them dead or alive, now surrounded by accusation. Marin County District Attorney Lori for Golie said her office's job is not to resolve the public debate. Her job is to ensure the legal process is fair, thorough, and based on evidence. That is exactly what a DA should say, but it's not what the town wants to hear. The town wants someone to say, who killed these four girls?

28:17 And the honest answer, the answer nobody wants, is that we may never know for sure whether there was another car. We may never know if Elsa was just speeding, or if she was distracted, or if she panicked and hit the gas instead of the break. The case will be tried as a misdemeanor. Whatever comes out of it, the families will still disagree about what really happened on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Here's what I'm gonna say about this one, because I think it matters. Four teenage girls are dead. A fifth, the driver is sixteen years old and has been carrying the guilt or the trauma or both of being the one who walked out of the A sixth Marley Barclay is fourteen and has been told by her own community that she's a liar. None of these kids should be navigating this. All of them are, and the adults in this town have completely lost the plot. The TikTok was a choice, not a mistake, a choice. Whoever was supervising a concussed, traumatized sixteen year old's phone access in the weeks after she killed four of her friends should have done better, and the adults piling on the surviving teenagers online they should have done better too. Grief does not give anyone a license to torment a child.

29:36 Even a child who did something terrible. There isn't a verdict in this one yet. The misdemeanor case is still pending. The civil lawsuits will grind on for years. The town is going to keep tearing itself apart until it doesn't. I'm not sure anyone in Fairfax gets a clean ending. I'm not sure anyone deserves one either, because a clean ending would mean pretending this didn't happen. Four girls are dead. That doesn't clean up. That's daily crime Injustice. Wednesday, April twenty second, twenty twenty six. Today we followed a twenty one year old pop singer from an arrest on Friday to a formal murder charge on Monday, to an arraignment later this week with the death penalty on the table and a fourteen year old girl at the center of the case who will not get to see any of it.

30:26 We watched a sixty year old grandmother take the stand in provo, Utah and tell a jury that her texts about strangling her son in law were just ridiculous and her son's jailhouse confession never happened. And we walked through a Bay Area town where four dead teenagers and one TikTok have done damage that a misdemeanor trial is not going to undo. Three stories. Three reminders that the victims Celeste Revas Hernandez, Matthew Rostelli, Olive Coorn, Sienna Cats, Joscelyn Osborne, and Ada Kepley were people, not clicks, not characters. People Tomorrow. We'll be back until then. Take care of each other, and if you're fortunate enough to have your people still with you tonight, call them. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice Do Better. Disclaimer. This episode draws on court records, LAPD and Los Angeles County District Attorney, press statements, reporting from Court TV, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Daily Mail, and AI assisted research. We do our best to get it right, but we are a podcast, not a court room. This is entertainment and commentary, not legal fact. We work from Internet sources, tabloids, and public reporting, and we acknowledge that some of it may turn out to be wrong. When it does, we correct it on air.

31:50 Everything here is our opinion and interpretation of events, offered in the spirit of honest, candid conversation about cases that matter. Defendants discussed in this episode are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.